Year of the Rabbit - Part 3

The lead vehicle of the parade started popping off firecrackers behind it as it passed through the gate. Behind them, people in touques and safety vests followed with fire extinguishers, just in case.   Sable cracked open the sports bottle and pulled an amethyst out of her pocket. She focused on it for a moment to activate its innate powers of poison-cleansing – just in case – and it flashed with twinkling, gold magic. She dropped it into the bottle and replaced the cap, before swallowing a few good pulls. Then she handed the bottle over to Tempest.   Tempest looked at her blankly for a moment. “Oh, right. This is the one without the dye?”   Sable nodded.   Tempest tipped it back and drank, then returned it. Sable popped the lid closed with an encouraging smile. No, nobody was going to collapse from magic drain today.   “Good job, Sable-rah.” Flubb was beaming. “Don’t worry, I brought plenty more!” She pulled at the strap of a backpack she had slung across her shoulder.   Oh, goody. Sable had drunk so much of the shit that the old adage – “it only tastes good when you actually need it” – no longer held true. It was just medicine now, an evil necessity. This was the white stuff, and it was supposed to be cherry, but it tasted to her like sugar, salt, and cough syrup. White cough syrup flavour; truth in advertising. She snickered.   They marched through the Millennium Gate. Sable looked up under the terra-cotta-tiled, angled roofs, and took a moment to appreciate the alternating green and red slats under the awnings, the three red and black mazelike patterns in the panels of the frame, and the surrounding borders in their plethora of geometric rainbow colours with their bright Buddhist panels between cement pillars. They walked through the tallest gate, the one in the center. Passing beneath it felt like passing into a different world, like a portal. New year, new beginning? Sable’s heart lifted with much-needed hope. It is the Year of the Rabbit, after all.   Why on earth this thought would cross her mind after the disaster of the Third Word War, she couldn’t imagine. By all external measures, they were definitely on a downswing. Last year at this time, their economy had been booming and they’d held the Iron Tome. But they’d been ganked in the war; there was no pretending otherwise. Gala's theft of the Tome had nearly cost them everything.   Enough with the gloomy thoughts. All five of her undead children had been resurrected. Their alliance with Meles and Ailurus was stronger than any alliance they’d ever held. Penwall was under construction, Ailurus was getting firmly established in the chunk of land she’d originally ceded to the Missing House, and all the preparations she’d spent so much time and money on prior to the war had proven worthy. The Protectorate was recovering.   Maybe I just feel hopeful because for the first time ever, my family is united.   Tears of relief came to Sable’s eyes at the thought. She blinked them away.   “You okay?” Tempest asked quietly. Glancing over at them, Sable noticed one of the two guardian lion statues that framed the Millennium Gate out of the corner of her eye, just over Tempest’s shoulder. Inexplicably, she was reminded of James.   Sable nodded. “Hard to explain, but yeah, I’m good.”   Speaking of James, he was padding along in front of them, still in tiger form. Sable smiled. The Captain of the Owsla only took his tiger form when he wanted to sleep, to run places in a hurry, or to make an… impression. How she’d ended up with so many big cats in a House of rabbits, she still had no clue, but she was grateful. James was a gift from El-Ahrairah.   She gave the base of his tail an affectionate scritch. “Sorry to take you from your breakfast,” she said. His tail twitched.   Unlike in other parades, the crowd was not roped off. She recalled from her childhood experience that people just moved in and out in front of the parade. It wasn’t the farthest distance for a parade to travel in Vancouver, but it was one of the longest for this reason. About two hours, she was given to understand from her research.   They were giving the dignitaries a wide berth, though. The giant tiger and all the armed soldiers were probably an excellent deterrent. Sable sighed. She was not the sort of monarch who wanted to wave from balconies. She was the Chief Rabbit. She’d always promised herself that if she were ever the one in charge, she wouldn’t be unapproachable.   The assassination attempts had made a liar out of her. She hated it.   “It’s the Queen!” she heard somebody cry, and she did her best to compensate by trying to meet their eyes and waving enthusiastically. Her attempt to make a connection was thwarted by a camera flash going off right in her eyes. She tried to blink the spots away.   The Mayor went over to where the shout had come from and handed out some red envelopes, shaking hands while he did so. The Premier took the other side. Sable glanced around at her escort and wondered if she’d be allowed to get close enough to the crowd to hand hers out at all. She pulled one out of her fanny pack and turned it around in her fingers.   Her attention was diverted by lion dancers moving along the street behind them. She grinned; here was one of the things she’d come specifically to see!   She suddenly remembered a lion dancer at the last parade she’d seen, when she was a small child. The puppeteer manipulating that giant head had come right up to her, winked, and then cocked the head from side to side, those big lion eyes peering at her one at a time as it did so.   She had been a bit frightened of these strange creatures, but when the lion had done that, she’d realized it was a big muppet, and she’d laughed. The dancer had even let her reach out and touch the fluff on its face before whirling away to carry on down the street.   These lion dancers were putting on a big stomping show for a bunch of mostly-Asian schoolchildren. The dancer in behind was waving the cape that formed the lion’s body. They giggled and cheered. Sable felt the grin on her face stretch to the point that it was beginning to hurt.   After a minute or so of this, they continued past, and the head dancer lifted up that giant, shiny gold lion head two or three times, reaching towards a cabbage dangling from a Chinese street sign. The crowd raised its voice like a single creature crying, “Ooooohhhhh!” and “Aaaahhhhhh!” with each ascent.   On the third rise, the lion’s mouth opened and closed up around the cabbage, just like Cookie Monster eating a giant cookie. It pulled the cabbage down from the sign, and they continued on their way.   “What’s with the cabbage?” Tempest asked. “Or… do you know?”   Sable turned to her sibling with a smile. “In this case, I actually do know. At least, sort of. It goes back to the days of the tongs. Tongs weren’t really criminal gangs, by the way; or at least, most of them weren’t. Many still exist, actually. They call them 'benevolent societies' now. They’re fraternal orders – like the Elks and the Eagles. And they looked after their members because most of them weren’t allowed to bring their families over, which was essential for social support in China. In fact, Canada’s immigration policy at the time only let Chinese men come over – so they could work on the railroad, you see.” Her mouth twisted in response to this old racist bullshit as she explained it.   “Anyway, I saw a tong boarding house when I was in Barkerville. It was a Canadian National Historic site. They had this enormous wok in the communal kitchen on the lower floor… never mind, I guess that’s a tangent. But anyway, the cabbages used to contain money for the tongs, because different tongs would sponsor different lion dancer troupes. And that was how they got paid. Sometimes it was protection money, yes, but mostly, it was just to make sure the money went to the community, where it was supposed to, instead of being bled off by greedy white power structures. Nowadays, most of these lion puppets are operated by kung fu schools and the like, and the cabbages still contain donations.”   “Huh,” Tempest said thoughtfully. “Wow, that’s neat! Really interesting, actually.”   “I should take you up to Barkerville sometime. It was great inspiration for the Wyrd West books. We could explore together and then maybe sit down and write.” She thought of the tiny Chinatown section of Barkerville then; the beautifully preserved gold rush era buildings, and how it, too, was separated from the white half of the town by a similar, if much less elaborate, gate.   “Sounds like fun,” Tempest agreed.   “It’s the Bunny Queen!” cried one of the schoolchildren, pointing at her. Her classmates started bouncing up and down excitedly. Oh, they can’t be any older than eight, and they’re probably even younger than that, she realized, and she was grinning again. She waved at them, and this time, no sudden flash prevented her from seeing them wave back.   Now’s my chance. She headed towards them with a red envelope in hand. The Owsla took a second to realize what she was doing and they followed her, but that gave her a moment to pass the envelope into the hands of the child who’d pointed her out.   She reached into the fanny pack and pulled out a few more to hand out randomly. Most of them ended up in the hands of smiling parents. They bowed, many of them responding in Chinese that Sable didn’t understand. She smiled back.   “Can I touch your ears?” a little boy asked quietly.   Sable looked down. He was an adorable child of maybe six or seven, and he had the biggest black eyes, wide with wonder.   Kitoypoy stretched an arm out in their direction to put some distance between them, ever the diligent bodyguard.   “Kim, that’s rude,” the teacher admonished him. “This is the Queen. You can’t just touch her ears.”   “Mommy says it’s good luck,” he insisted.   Sable grinned. “These are just costume ears,” she explained. “Did you mean these, or the real ones?”   “The real ones,” he said immediately.   “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty,” the teacher said hastily. “He’s just very curious, he means no–”   “Sure,” said Sable. “One moment.” She took off the cheap costume shop rabbit ears that had somehow, through some weird twist of fate, become part of her official regalia.   “Oh, bless you,” Flubb said, beaming. “I can take those for you if you like, Sable-rah.”   “Thanks, Flubb.” Sable handed her the ears, with their checkered pink interiors and fake fur and plastic headband. Flubb took them with all the solemnity of receiving the Crown Jewels.   Well, in a way, I suppose that’s exactly what they are, now.   Kitoypoy’s mouth moved, but no sound came out, and he stood at parade rest, somewhat at a loss.   I haven’t done this since I was a teenager, Sable realized. Hoping she still remembered how, she focused inward for a moment and shifted only her ears.   There was a tickling sensation that migrated from the sides of her head to the top of it. She almost giggled as her hair rearranged itself to make way for the long lagomorph ears that budded from either side of the place where she parted her long, brown hair.   For a fraction of a second, she was completely deaf. Then the timbre and volume of the sound around her changed. The ambience of the crowd sounded like it was coming from a lower point than before – but of course, that was just because her ears were now higher up. Everything also got a lot louder.   “Oooooh,” the children breathed.   Sable smiled. Yes, I really am a wererabbit. Yes, it’s true. She felt one of her foot-long hare’s ears twitch automatically towards a loud drummer further ahead in the parade, while the other tried to listen to the nearby crowd and the bagpipes. Her hair was probably all over the place by now. She combed her fingers through it around the crown of her head to smooth it out.   “That’s soooo cool,” a girl in Kim’s class opined.   Sable bent down and let her ears flop down over the sides of her head. The fur on the ear tips brushed the epaulets of her Lapin pink trenchcoat. “That ought to put those in reach,” she said.   Kim reached out and stroked the length of her ear, from almost the base to the ear-tip. “They’re soft,” he breathed.   “Bunny fur is pretty soft,” Sable agreed.   The kids needed no more encouragement. Soon, every single one of them had to pet her ears. She tried to keep them still, and she tried not to giggle, but those little hands were very tickly! A few times, she just couldn’t help it, and the children laughed.   Sable closed her eyes. Her ears were so rarely touched. She didn’t even have any memories of her mother licking her ears, as many wererabbits did, because her parents had not been wererabbits.   Oh, how frightened she’d been with her first shapeshift! She’d been– what? Ten, eleven, maybe? Dabbling with one of the literomancy books her grandmother had left her, which she had been expressly forbidden to do at that age, and then all of a sudden – poof! She was a little black jackrabbit, and she had no idea how to shift back!   She’d hidden under her bed, deep in the darkest shadow, knowing she could never let her parents know, and it was most of the day gone before she’d calmed down enough to make the shift back. She’d whacked her head pretty good on her white oak bed frame, too, when the change had finally come, and it was loud enough that her mother came in to see what had happened.   Why, she’d been fully an adult the first time those ears were ever touched, hadn’t she? Erin had been the first one to stroke them. They were in that basement suite up by the Safeway, after they’d moved out of the condo to get away from the pettiness of her ex, and she’d wanted a nap after work, but she wanted to hear when Erin came home from training.   But either she’d been more tired than she’d thought, or she’d felt truly safe for the first time she could remember – maybe both – and she hadn’t heard him come in. She woke with hands gently running over those long, sensitive ears, drawing them back behind her head.   Some instinct in her responded to it in her half-awake state, the ultimate ASMR experience, and shivers of delight ran through her whole body – all six pounds of it – from the tips of those almost ridiculously-long, now snow-white hare’s ears, to the tip of her cottontail.   Then she’d thought, Wait, who’s touching my ears? And before she knew it, she was under their thrift-store-special couch with its hideous orange flowered upholstery, shivering in a different way.   But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know Erin was a Meles, and Erin knew she was a Lapin, and they both knew what that meant. He’d coaxed her out from under the couch, and from then on, whenever he came home from training or from a posting, he would spend several minutes, maybe even a few hours, holding her in his lap and stroking the length of her ears.   Mostly, she would sleep.   The only other time anyone had ever touched her ears had been when her babies were still small enough to nurse. Sometimes they would lick them, almost by accident, as they made their earliest attempts at social grooming.   Oh yes, and Tempest had licked them once, when she’d first been introduced to the Beach Reality.   This was… new.   “We have to continue on, ma’am,” said the Premier to her discretely, hovering just above her head. He either sensed, or had discerned, that she didn’t need it to be terribly loud, either. “The parade is moving on without us.” He spoke louder then, this time to the children. “Who wants a piece of candy? Just one now.”   This distracted the kids enough that she was able to extricate herself – reluctantly, she had to admit. She waved again and started to move on.   “Thank you, Your Royal Majesty!” chorused the children in a singsong voice, obviously coached by the teacher. Her grin was hurting her face again.   Tempest was grinning at her. “That looks like it was fun.”   “It really was,” Sable sighed. “You should have let them pet your ears, too.”   “Nah.” Tempest’s grin disappeared, and they closed up like a fan. “My ears are covered in scars. Nobody wants to feel that.”   Sable’s heart twinged in sympathy for her sibling. “You might be surprised,” she said in a gentle voice. “Kids sometimes react strangely to Erin’s arm and leg at first, but they think both are pretty cool if they get a chance to check them out. If you let them investigate, it normalizes it for them. And then maybe someone else with scars doesn’t get an odd reaction later.”   Tempest chewed on that. “You might be right, sis,” they said at last. “But what do I tell them if they ask what happened?”   “The truth,” Sable shrugged. “Tell them you were in a horrible accident when you were a teenager.” She put a hand on her sibling’s strong arm and gave it an encouraging squeeze.   Okay; it was a bit more complicated than that, and Sable knew it. But that was good enough for a seven- or eight-year-old. I asked the Void to destroy me because I felt I’d gotten the only person who’d ever shown me kindness killed was something that could wait until they were much older.   If they ever chose to share that information with the public.   Sable had been chewing on that, too. The International Criminal Court was firm about protecting the identities of victims – victims, how she hated that word, they were survivors – but that was mostly to prevent people from being harmed by those who had power over them.   Their family’s position was somewhat different. Perhaps they should be using their position and their privilege to advocate for other survivors of torture and genocide elsewhere in the world. Perhaps they had a duty.   On the other hand, so little of their lives was private, now. Surely they had a right to privacy in their pain?   Again with the gloomy thoughts, Sable. This is not the time. You made a bunch of children really happy just now. Velma says you need to let yourself enjoy happy moments, and you need to work on being in the present. Take what you can get.   “There were stars in them!” Kim’s voice rang out indignantly as they carried on. “I saw them!”   Sable chuckled.