Our First Fall (Melizabeth)

29. Picnic

We've been here a week and already I've fallen in love with the place. Everyone walked around with their noses in books or daydreaming. I didn't think a single person truly noticed me. I liked it this way, it was my first taste of people not gawking, or fussing from my birth status. Meliodas marveled too, as no one gave a third look to our mixed racial coupling. After the first shock of it, people just shrugged and didn't seem to care. We found joy in the little things. Buying food at the market was a magic affair, summoning it from their underground stores. I simply had to bring a list and my basket would be full.

Here, my gems paid for whatever we needed as Demon coins meant nothing and surprisingly Meliodas didn't seem to mind. I flushed, thinking of his praise yesterday. He'd told me I thrived in every environment I was thrown in, that I adapted easily. Reviewing where I've been, I could see his point but to me it didn't seem as grand as he implied.

I walked through the streets, the square I passed had a lecturer holding up a book as he explained his findings, taking questions from the kids listening. The language here was very harsh, but everyone I've spoken too had responded in my tongue. I looked for Merlin but she only came to the square when it was something that interested her and it must not have today. I walked on.

Meliodas knew Merlin, they met a few years back when the Demon King had needed business done with her father. This town was hidden and neutral in the war all in a pursuit to keep themselves out of it. That benefited Merlin greatly. We've become friends, mostly due to her ailing father needing daily doses of my healing to return to his normal mental state. Foolishly, he had gone to Purgatory and seeing what he had been reduced to made me appreciate Meliodas having returned sane so much more. He'd been run through and volatile but whole. Merlin wasn't sure why her father had gone, research she guessed but I felt she was too young to be the primary carer the way she was.

"Elizabeth!" I heard her yell as if thinking of her had summoned Merlin and I turned to see her yellow dress flailing about her in her rush with a box tucked under her arm. "Meliodas is looking for you!" Her dark hair was chopped around her neck and her ears pinkened as she spotted others looking over at us. "Sorry, I'm on my way to get Juju berries. Daddy said we could make cobbler tonight." She paused, stark for a moment, "if he remembers, after your treatment."

Her smile faded, eyes misting and I touched the girl's hair. I wished I could make it better for her. She'd lost her mother so young, and her father was fading. I couldn't bring him back and I was afraid these glimpses of who he used to be wasn't making it better but prolonging the suffering. But, I'd do it for as long as she wanted, because she needed all the loving moments she could get.

"I'm heading back now," I told her. "Want to join us for a picnic?" I'd gotten the idea earlier when we'd been granted passage rights in and out of the dimensional distortion around the city. My answer to Yesmeralda's 'living forever' conundrum had made her contemplative but appreciative enough to grant us boons. Meliodas had even been allowed in the library of the ancients, which was great as Merlin had just recently started going herself.

"No. I don't want to get between the two of you." Merlin giggled, and I smiled as she ran on, looking over her shoulder to say. "I'll see you both tonight!"

With a little more pep to my step, I walked toward our little hut. I passed a few more streets when a house a few blocks up went 'boom' and smoke poured from the windows and chimney. The door opened and out came a very apologetic man followed by streams of the smog. People didn't stop. "Another failed one?" Someone called out. "Eh, but that's when you learn the most." The soot-covered man called back.

I smiled. Belialuin had its quirks, but it's untouched by the war. This was what peace would look like. No troops roamed the streets, no call to arms and no broken, sobbing families. Or... I guess there were but not from killing one another, which made it different to me.