Following My Bliss
Please Don't Follow Me. I'm Following My Bliss
-Anonymous.
***
"Un Garde!"
His eyes slide up the hilt of the blade, into the sparkling eyes of his non-threatening adversary. Gingerly, he takes the blade between his thumb and forefinger and leads the tip away from his throat. "Waverly, your mother has warned you not to play with sharp objects."
The sparkle fades a bit, and guilt pricks away at his conscious. "I'm only practicing. I want to be perfect when Uncle Inigo returns."
He stops work, turning to her thoughtfully. "Has Inigo been teaching you?"
She lifts her chin in a most haughty manner. "He says that I'm a worthier opponent than you ever were."
Wesley laughs aloud. The girl had, what was the word? Nerve, spunk. It was something that he had noticed in Buttercup during some fleeting moments in their long odyssey. Waverly feared less, held no bounds to the proper, ladylike world her mother had been raised in. She was sharp, rude, and sweet. Very much a mixture of his wife and himself.
His eyes darken momentarily. She may not remember it, but he knows that her very existence is a divine miracle. The kind he still isn't sure he wholly believes in. Reality forces him to remember Fezzik's sudden possession, the glowing sword...and his ultimate sacrifice to keep her safe.
Of course, they had to journey back to Florin, find Miracle Max, and bring the gentle giant back to life. Waverly could not survive without him, and, as though every last ray of sunshine had been eclipsed in her universe, she began to fade and withdraw.
But Wesley was then as he is now; fortune's fool. Humperdinck discovered their return, kidnapped his wife and daughter, and tried to have Wesley murdered. Again.
Fortunately, Florin's fair prince remained predictable as ever before, and, though he had to admit that dragging an unconcious giant across miles of heavy terrain was an usually arduous task, even that was no determent to Buttercup's rescue.
They flew once more from Florin, with Buttercup in a most disturbed state. The prince had been going on and on about how their marriage was legal, considering the Man and Wife part had been spoken, and didn't that make Waverly a bastard? Fortunately, the new first mate on the Revenge knew much about the law, and that, if they moved to the grand, lawless New World, the marriage would be invalid.
So they set a course to the east which, thanks to a violent storm, became northwest. When they finally ran aground, it was in a crude, green land called Britannia. The people were unusually cultured, and rather willing to lend the refugees a hand, for their war fleets outstripped Florin's. Any excuse for a parade of iron, Wesley supposed. They allowed him the personal victory of sinking Humperdinck's vessel himself. Watching his pompous head bob until it finally succumbed to the whirling water and sent him to the bottom of the ocean was a most thrilling occurrence. He understood, for once, how Inigo had felt when he bested his six-fingered enemy.
Britannia proved most admiring of Wesley's work, and awarded himself and his family an island off the course of the mainland. After all of these traumatic adventures, Buttercup asked for little more than a legal ceremony to bind the two of them, and a baptismal celebration for Waverly.
The land, which had been deeded jointly to Wesley, Inigo and Fezzik, proved satisfactorily fertile. He and Buttercup settled comfortably into a life of farming.
But that wasn't enough for Inigo.
His Spanish friend had craved a respite from the domestic world he had become part of and, though his tongue had been cleared of its taste for vengeance, he could not remove himself from a longing for adventure. When the Revenge was declared seaworthy by the British Royal Navy, he turned to his family and declared that it was time for him to figure out what the rest of his life would bring.
Fezzik, so he had told Wesley later, agonized over whether or not he should accompany his dearest friend on this latest voyage. It grieved him to part from Waverly, who was now four and sentient enough to miss him more keenly than she had at their first parting. A solution arrived, coming, most surprisingly, from Fezzik's own brain. He would write to Waverly daily, and she would write back, for the entire duration of the voyage.
Of course, and per usual for Fezzik, there remained a tiny flaw in this, the first plan he had ever conceived without help. It was to be expected, of course, as he did not know how to write yet, and neither did his charge. Inigo found himself patiently teaching his friend the art of the pen by night, as did Wesley and Buttercup with Waverly. Within a month's separation, they were able to write to one another in a most amiable fashion, and Wesley was reminded, absurdly, of his own dire correspondence with Buttercup during their endless separation years before.
As always, life did not run in the smoothest possible course. Six months after the Revenge sailed over the horizon of Britannia, Buttercup informed him that she would, in five months, present him with the son she had wanted for so long. Wesley, petrified for the first time in his life, wrote frantically to Inigo, begging the Spaniard to turn the vessel around. None of the missives reached their destination in time, and Wesley found himself alone, delivering his own son into the world. By some small stroke of luck, this child was not backward, or turned, and the chord was not twisted about its neck. And it was a boy, much to Buttercup's relief, as she planned to never again go through such an ordeal, whom they named Morgan, after a salty captain Wesley had known during his days on the quarter-deck of the Revenge.
He felt some small embarrassment when Inigo and Fezzik returned in a hurry to discover a happy, healthy and well-fed family.
It was just as well; Inigo, it turned out, was not well-suited to a pirate's life. The confining quarters of the ship made his melancholy worse, and, asside from that, he had found what he was looking for on a sojurn home to Arabella. A maiden had been promised to him years before, and, though she was not as willing as she had been as a teenager, Maria followed him to the island, this time to stay. They fought like a couple of old marrieds, made up loudly, and generally gave Wesley and Buttercup a glimpse at what life could be like if they had not been shaped by princess lessons and super-structured codes.
A new bride needed funds, and Inigo, in the midst of one of his afternoon fencing sessions with Wesley, landed upon a solution, quite literally, as Wesley had knocked him to the ground. Perhaps, with Wesley's love of swords, and Inigo's own expertise in the field, they might be able to become exporters of swords! He slowly overcame his intimidation of his father's impressive designs, and eventually the two of them managed to co-create a simple and profitable side-business, which benefited everyone on their little island. It also satisfied Inigo's wanderlust, as it required quarterly voyages to and from the mainland.
Wesley watches his daughter with a wary appreciation. With her long, tangled blonde hair and simple way of dressing, she appears to be a beautiful example of young girlhood. But one of the most beautiful girls in the world? Maybe she fits into the top ten; he blames himself for that. If she would only stop trying to learn the art of the blade and figure out how to cook without poisoning herself...
When he brings up the notion of her marrying, horror crosses her face. When she does speak of wedding, she tilts her head in the familiar way and says, "you know I'm going to marry Shade, daddy."
The idea of having Fezzik as a son-in-law was...to his surprise...not the most hopelessly cocked-up idea he had ever been presented with. But he understood that Waverly's affection would probably change over time; Fezzik is her best friend at nine. Would he be dead ten years from now? Or too old for her fancy?
A whoop echoes across the grass, and Waverly becomes a blur. Her arms are spread wide open, and she's laughing.
Cherish these moments, old man. He thought to himself. One day, she's going to run away from you and into the arms of another man. And he won't be kind enough to return her. He frowns despite himself as the girl is swallowed by the burly arms of his close friend.
A familiar arm wraps itself around his shoulder. "Our family is together again." Buttercup, who must be the tenth or fourteenth-most beautiful woman in the world by now, thanks to the fine lines and wrinkles appearing upon her brow.
"For how long?"
She frowns. "Don't bring such darkness to the day, darling."
"I cannot help it. Time passes, and I cannot stop it."
"But it agrees with us. Does it not?"
He pauses and watches her expression. "I imagine that it does."
"It does." She is confident for once. "Wesley, don't you suppose that it would be wise to allow Waverly to follow her own notions? Soon enough, she'll be introduced to British society, and then..."
He doesn't need to complete her thought. And then she would be gone from them forever, a lady of her own house.
He thinks, smiles, and agrees, to her relief.