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radioactivepeasant · 2 years ago

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Fic Prompts: Meddling Mar

A warning this chapter for a mention of Dark Warrior Program related violence (because Praxis is just. The worst.) It will be in italics for those who wish to skip it.

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(From last time:)

The king studied him for an uncomfortable moment, then his lips twisted at the corner into a smirk.

"You let me fix that haircut you gave yourself, and I'll call it even."

Jak did not appreciate Daxter's howl of laughter. Or Mar agreeing on his behalf.

Nonetheless, he had nothing to trade, and so he grudgingly agreed to let this bizarre ruler fix his hair the following day. Thankfully, Damas didn’t comment on how absolutely abysmal Jak’s handiwork really was. Instead, he just asked questions about preferred length, and what he wanted his hairline to look like.

"What do you mean hairline? I mean, doesn't it just kind of look like that normally?" Jak asked, a little bewildered.

Damas muttered something under his breath, but his expression was kind when Jak turned around.

"You have options, you know. Look at your brother’s hair. We could do it like that, or you could do a fade-"

"A what?"

"...alright, we're starting at square one, then." Damas stood up. "It's a tapered cut, essentially shaved on the sides and "fading" into the rest of the hair. Give me a minute, I think we're going to need the comb my wife uses."

"You're married?!" Mar demanded with an incredulous expression.

"Yes?" Damas raised an eyebrow. "Am I not allowed to be?"

"Well where is she, then?"

The king pointed to the window in the ward, towards the ocean.

"Fishing. She spends two days a week at sea overnight, barring storms."

"Oh. Like Ollie."

Damas didn't know who Ollie was supposed to be, but the name obviously meant something to the older boys. (Older boys: plural. That was going to take some getting used to, trying to remember that the orange mustelid looking thing was evidently a teenage boy with a very unusual condition.)

"What's she like?" Daxter asked, tiptoeing as if he could see her through the window, "Is she hot?"

He quailed under a stern look from Damas.

"She is to be respected. And while I will settle for a verbal warning for a first time, -- considering you have likely not been subjected to particularly reputable influences in Haven -- she is within her rights not to."

Daxter flattened himself against the bed, ears pinned back against his skull. He mimed zipping his lips closed and covered his mouth with both hands. Jak rolled his eyes at his friend.

"Disreputable influences, huh," he snorted. "That would be "loudmouth KG on every street corner and hour shift" in our case."

"And Torn," Mar chipped in.

There was something unusually bitter about the way Jak answered, "Sure. Torn too."

After an awkward few seconds, Jak added, "You can do the fading thing I guess. I don't care either way."

"You should," Damas grumbled, "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to take care of yourself?"

"Nnnnope."

The boy didn’t sound nearly as concerned about that as he should have.

"Ye gods and little fishes," Damas muttered under his breath.

He needed to come up with some kind of guardian, and soon. If he let these three attempt to survive on their own, his wife would skin him alive.

"Alright then. Fade it is. You make sure that razor is sharpened -- run it on the leather strop. Yes, like that -- I'm getting the comb."

It was a calculated move on his part, leaving Jak with a sharp object. It was a gesture of trust -- or more of a leap of faith. Giving Jak the sense that no one objected to him being able to protect himself, while also showing him vulnerability. If the kid was inclined, he could very well try to slit Damas’s throat. Of course, he hoped Jak wouldn't do that. It wouldn't end well for anyone involved. But maybe he'd find the gesture comforting.

Damas dug around upstairs through his wife's cluttered washroom. As sparse as it was, he was amazed by how much junk Phobos managed to drag in. It was always "I'm gonna make something out of that", but then she hopped from project to project as time allowed, leaving half finished blades and combs and cups all over every available surface -- and even some unavailable surfaces.

By the time he'd actually found the comb, Damas had accidentally knocked over a box of shells in the process of being ground up into paint, dislodged a sketch hanging over the mirror, and gotten pigment dust all over the right side of his head when he'd stood up too quickly and knocked his head on a shelf.

His attempts to hide the evidence were mostly successful, but not enough to keep the little Not-Mar from noticing a streak of gold on his cheekbone and hair. He let out a delighted shriek of laughter and pointed, so of course Jak and Daxter turned and stared too.

Ah, the judgement of teenagers. Just what everyone needs.

"Phobos booby-traps her bathroom, I swear," Damas sighed. "At least there were no snapping turtles in the sink this time."

"This time?!" Daxter echoed, alarmed. He fell back onto Mar's pillow. "Eesh. Jak used to do that too, til we got the dog."

Mar stiffened in something akin to panic. "Chopper! Where's Chopper? Did they take her too?"

"Calm down, squirt." Daxter patted Mar's knee. "I left her with Tess. She's gonna be fat and spoiled when we get her back, but Tess won't let anyone hurt her."

Mar relaxed. "Oh. I remember her, she's good."

Daxter grinned. "See? I know what I'm talkin' about." He elbowed their little brother. "Hey hey, maybe Spike King should put some of that glitter on Jak, since he's already having a spa day, huh?"

"Shut up, Dax," Jak huffed.

Jak would never have expected a haircut to be soothing -- embarrassingly.

Nobody was yanking through his tangles, complaining loudly about how "unmanageable" it was. No one was sloshing burning plant extracts into his hair, untwisting his coils into stiff, "good" hair. And somehow, Jak wasn't afraid.

The Baron’s prison had never bothered to cut their victims' hair; they hosed prisoners off to avoid vermin and wash away blood and that was the extent of it. But the Baron still had a habit of yanking prisoners around by the head on his few "inspections".

Especially Jak.

The worst had been a moment when they'd thrown him into the blood-soaked "training course", with the few other surviving members of the experiment. When Jak had refused to salute the Baron. A day when he'd been brave enough to spit in Praxis's face. Enraged, the Baron had hauled him bodily from the ground, hard enough to rip a couple of hairs from his head. He'd flung Jak headlong into the half-cover brick wall for his insolence. It had knocked out one of his canines on impact.

He still hadn't saluted.

Jak was glad they'd never figured out that his first dark transformation had completely regrown his missing tooth. He had absolutely no doubt that the experiments would've taken horrifying new turns if they'd learned about the regeneration. Jak's muscles twitched in a suppressed shudder.

Less than a second later, Damas quickly withdrew his hand.

"What is it?" he asked, "Did I hurt you?"

How had he known that had been a reaction? Even Daxter had trouble telling what was a fear reaction and what was just a spasm.

"Muscle spasm," Jak lied, "Sorry. It happens sometimes."

"....uh-huh."

Damas didn’t sound like he was completely convinced, but he didn't say anything more about it. He rinsed his comb in a bowl of water and continued easing through Jak's hair, gathering it up with a clip on the top of his head. Once or twice he sat back and made thoughtful humming sounds.

"Well, young man, now we find out how well you sharpened that razor." Damas held a hand out, just waiting.

Jak held his breath.

And handed him the blade.

"Well done. I'll be quick," Damas murmured. He trimmed and shaved in careful motions, pausing whenever the castaway tensed up. "This won't take as long as your brother’s hair did-"

Then he whispered, "-and clearly I won't have to bribe you to sit still like I had to with him."

After pausing to imagine the strange king trying to comb a squirming, thrashing Mar's hair, Jak scoffed and grinned.

"Yeah, that sounds about right."

They descended into silence, and Mar lost interest after a minute or two. He slid off his bed and began boldly rifling through Damas’s bag before the man reached back and caught his wrist.

"Excuse you!" Damas scolded, "What do you think you're doing?"

Mar shrugged. "Looking for the peg game."

"So ask, barbarian!" Damas gently pushed Mar away. "Pick a pocket like that in the city and you'll bring more trouble down on your head than it's worth. No more of that, understand?"

The little boy scowled. "Your hands were busy! Asking makes people mad at you for bothering them, anyway. What are you scolding me for?"

Wolves. They were raised by wolves. For a moment, Damas felt like he was dealing with one of Mar’s tantrums.

He stared at the little boy incredulously and leaned forward.

"Ask. First. We aren't mind readers. And this isn’t Haven."

Mar's frown deepened. "Fine. Can I have the peg game?"

"I didn't bring it today," Damas answered, "But you may get the green canvas bag out and play Pathway if you like."

"That one's hard!" Mar complained with a frustrated grunt. Nonetheless, he pulled out the bag and undid the drawstring to unfold it into a game board.

Jak raised his brows and studied the nondescript grid on the mat. "How does this work?"

Daxter shuffled a stack of battered cardboard squares with lines on them and separated them from several tiny figures.

"You start at a corner and put down tiles to make a road. Can't cross another line or go off the board or you're out."

"You have to trap other travelers in loops or send them off the mat," Mar added.

He pouted.

"Daxter always wins."

This, Jak was shortly to discover, was not an exaggeration. At their warden/potential new boss person's encouragement, Jak picked up a token and joined the game, only to find himself cornered within three turns. Daxter wasn't even that good at the game; Jak and Mar were simply too impulsive to consider strategy on something that wasn't life or death. (And even when things were life or death, they were still reckless.) Now and then Damas made an observation or suggestion, but for the most part he focused on Jak’s hair.

After getting his token run off the board for the seventh time, Jak was getting frustrated. Still, he was too stubborn to admit defeat -- especially in front of someone he was probably going to end up working for. (It was the only way he could think of to pay off whatever their medical care had cost, anyway.)

He was about to demand another rematch when he heard the razor drop into the bowl with a soft splash.

Damas thumped him on the shoulder in a kind of rough, playful gesture and stood to shake hair clippings onto the floor. There was more of it than Jak had expected.

"You're done. Look in this and tell me what you think."

He handed Jak a small, scratched mirror, no bigger than his fist.

Jak stared into the glass and a stranger stared back at him.

The face in the mirror looked softer, rounder. More like Mar than he'd ever believed possible. He was still pale, but it almost looked like the dark circles under his eyes were fading away.

With one finger, Jak traced the sharp, neat, line delineating his forehead from his hair. It would take some getting used to. But he liked how the sides of his head looked.

"Oh," he said softly.

"Oh?" Damas repeated, "Is that good or bad?"

"Good, I think." Jak ran his fingertips through gold coils -- the green was starkly obvious at his temples now -- and idly twisted a longer strand around one finger. "I look..."

I look like someone cares about stuff like my hair. Never had that before.

"It's new," he settled on.

"Better than before, at least," the king said. He shook the last stray hairs from his tunic.

Someone cleared their throat from behind them, and both Jak and Damas turned to find one of the monks a few feet away at the door. She looked faintly perturbed by something -- Jak wondered if seeing a king doing menial tasks was normal or not here -- but waited to be acknowledged. Immediately, Damas gathered up the comb and razor and left their alcove.

"Strip your bedding after the noon rest," he ordered, a little distractedly, "You'll be moving to Alma's building tonight, so your beds need to be ready for new patients."

Then he hurried to the corridor to speak with the monk.

"Ruth, yes? What is it?"

The woman glanced over his shoulder at the boys, and the lines around her mouth deepened. "Word from the medical records keepers, sire."

She fidgeted with the hem of her sleeve, clearly uncomfortable. "It's about the young exiles."

Damas ignored the foreboding whisper in the back of his mind and held his customary facade of stoic thoughtfulness. "Already? I was under the impression that the cheek swabs wouldn't yield results for another two weeks."

A muscle twitched in Ruth's ghostly white cheek. "Tam sent me to inform you that their gene samples are causing some trouble in the system. He requires four extra days to ensure that there has been no contamination of the samples during transfer. In the meantime, he had a question regarding the childrens' fingerprint records. There is an anomaly we are unable to account for, despite it being completely impossible."

"What kind of anomaly?"

Despite the heat of the afternoon, Damas felt a chill across the back of his neck when the monk answered him.

"The younger boy's fingerprints are fully identical to the elder one's, down to the last line. In all ways save the size, they are the prints of the same person."

#jak and daxter #meddling mar au #jak and daxter mar #jak and daxter au #dadmas #king damas #tw violence #the game is based on one i played at a work conference #i can't remember the real name of it #Phobos is going to come home and be like WHO MOVED MY STUFF #spoilers: Mar is IMMEDIATELY going to tattle on Damas to her #free day thursday #fic prompts #writing prompts

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