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The Meaning of Exile
D.K. Archer
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Disclaimer: Disney has the legal rights to Jumba, Pleakley, and the entire Lilo and Stitch universe. No profit is made from this. The little girls (aka convenient plot devices) at the beginning are not part of that universe.)
Note: Remember the series episode where Lilo and Stitch use the time machine? In the future, Jumba was alive long after everyone else in the family, and indeed the island itself, had passed on. That man's got one hell of a lifespan. This is my idea of the future, based on that information.
Warning: this makes the assumption that Jumba Jookiba and Wendy Pleakley are a couple, which, though canon as far as I can tell, may still be offensive to some people. There is NO romance and NO sex (though the fact it occurs in mentioned) and is not really the central focus of this piece. It is not so much a slash fic as a fic which contains some slash elements. However, if the very acknowledgement of homosexuality offends you, I apologize, and advise that you may not want to read this story.
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"My mom says there's an eccentric' in there." Marcia said, pushing
her bicycle as they drew closer to their homes. The house was an
overgrown darkness fast approaching.
Loana and Tammi, both pushing identical purple bicycles with
identical pink backpacks, frowned.
"What's an eccentric?" Tammi asked.
Marcia snorted. "That's what crazy people are when they get rich.
When you're rich, you can do anything you want, and your not crazy,
you're just eccentric."
"That's stupid." She said. She and Marcia were both from
Californian families, one with short blonde hair and the other with
mousey curls. Loana was the only one who was native, and still her
father was from Texas. It gave her dark hair and skin and a narrow,
Florentine nose.
Marcia gave Tammi a condescending look as the black wall approached
on their left. "Oh, and what do YOU think is in there? Ghosts?"
"No! Don't you ever listen to the stories?" Tammi said. "There's a
big scary mad scientist guy in there. He kidnaps people and turns
them into zombie mutants, my brother told me."
Marcia snorted. "Zombie mutants?"
"Yeah!"
"Who do you know that's been kidnapped!" she challenged. "I'll tell
you; no one!"
"My cat disappeared last month!" Tammi snapped back. "Maybe he got
it!"
"Your cat got ran over and you know it."
The tall grass growing against the base of the wall scraped against
their legs as they passed it. It was a hot, dry day, even for the
summer, and the insects were dancing with the heat.
Loana gave the wall a cockeyed squint. "My grandma says that guy is
related." She said faintly.
Marcia's eyebrows went up. "Since when?!"
"Since ever. Every Christmas she writes a card with "Mr. Jookiba"
on it and makes us sign it. She even made me come with to deliver
it once."
Tammi gave an awed look. "Did you see him? Is he scary?"
"She didn't see him cause she's lying." Marcia snapped.
"I am not!"
"Then what's he look like!"
Loana stared at her bike tire. "I don't know." She said
sulkily. "We just put the letter in the hole in wall and left.
Grandma says I'm not to try and talk to him."
"Why not, if he's really a relative?"
"I dunno." Loana shrugged unhappily. "Grandma doesn't like to talk
about him. She says her mother took her to see him when she was
little and he was all messed up, like deformed. She said she
screamed until her mom took her away."
"Well God, Loana, your grandma is like a thousand years old." Marcia
said. "If she met him as a kid, he's gotta be dead now. NOBODY
lives that long."
"Maybe he's just really really old?" Tammi offered. Then,
secretly. "Does he really have four eyes? My big brother said he
used himself as a guinea pig for an experiment and it turned him
into a monster."
"Yeah, and your brother is a pothead." Marcia retorted. Tammi
winced.
"If there was a guy in town kidnapping people and turning them into
mutant zombies then the police would have arrested him by now."
Loana logicked.
"Unless he fends them off WITH his mutant zombies."
Marcia rolled her eyes. "There's no such thing as mutant zombies!
Look, my mom says there's just a crazy old man in there that's like
a consultant or something for a research company. She says he's
really fat and really sick looking and that's why he doesn't leave
the house."
"...how would she know?" Tammi asked.
Marcia grumbled. "She tried to go there with cookies when her
women's group was doing that bake sale." She admitted.
Tammi was adamant. "I bet it was just a front. He probably puts on
a mask and shows his face every once in a while to throw the town
off. I bet he's in there making some mutants right now!"
Abruptly, Marcia's bike stopped moving. A smile spread out under
her glasses.
"Uh oh." Tammi said.
Marcia grabbed Loana by the backpack. "Lets go find out. If you're
really related to him, you can stop by for a nice family visit and
introduce us all."
"No!" Loana pulled herself loose. "Marcia, I'm not supposed to go
in there! My mother would kill me, and anyway, we got homework!"
"Not so much you can't spend ten minutes looking in on crazy Mr.
Junkiba."
"Jookiba." She corrected.
"Whatever. He's YOUR relative, why are you scared?"
"I'm not scared!" Loana snapped.
"Then climb the gate and introduce us, if you're not a chicken!"
"No!"
Marcia put her hands on her ribs and clucked.
Loana pouted. "If I go will you let me go home?"
"Yup."
When she wanted to, Marcia could manage the most smug, irritating
look in the world, and Loana hated that. She wheeled her bicycle to
the gate and put the kickstand down, though it fell against the wall
anyway. Marcia followed suite, but Tammi stayed standing with her
handlebars in hand, looking nervous. Loana was her best friend, but
there aren't many girls who would risk being turned into a mutant
zombie, even for friendship.
Marcia hauled herself up onto the planks of the gate. "Come on!"
she said.
Loana did. Slowly, they scaled the high gate, and caught hold of
the peak of the hidden wrought iron to pull their heads up over the
top.
The jungle that had been cut away from the rest of the neighborhood
hadn't died here. There were paths beat down from the gate to the
house, but the rest of the yard had risen up in defiance; a tangle
of snarling vines and dying bramble, rampant long-grass and flower
trees squatting down towards the earth. The house itself, for what
they could see of it, looked condemned at a casual glance. It
looked like it had been built cheaply, with a ruined tin roof and
crooked support poles, and a suspiciously elaborate wrap-around
porch. The windows were not glass panes but recessed holes in the
wall, showing something glittering and transparent, but dark
inside. It looked like the plants had destroyed one of the side
walls, and sunlight glinted back at them from the wound, but there
was no way to see it from this angle.
"Hello?" Loana called.
Marcia slapped a hand over her mouth. "What are you, crazy?"
"You said you wanted me to introduce you!" Loana snapped, pushing
Marcia away.
"Ugh, you idiot." She grumbled. "Come on. We gotta get a closer
look."
Not entirely pleased with the idea, Loana straddled the gate and
swung herself to the other side, only descending the rusty iron
partway before dropping to the ground. There was a stone path
somewhere under the mess, and it made her sneakers scrape as Marcia
dragged her aside into the underbrush.
"Shh." Marcia warned. Turning, she ducked beneath the low slung
branches of a strangled tree and gestured Loana to follow, fragments
of skeletonized leaves shaking loose into their hair. Something in
the bushes glinted at them with a sudden intelligent light, but it
was gone just as quickly.
The side of the collapsing house was nearing, hidden under a tangle
of garden plants and condensed native jungle. It glistened in the
light under dead foliage and splintered beams, filthy remnants of
chrome and red paint showing through the façade. The tin roof had
dropped rivulets of rust down the ribs and left a ring of bloody red
around the house.
Marcia struggled through the last snarl of vine and put her face to
the wall. Loana saw a beetle tangled in the back of her hair but
didn't comment, only let Marcia fumble with stubborn vine and strips
of rotten wood as she tried to clear away something of the ruin.
"I KNEW there was something in here." She whispered excitedly, a
metal structural beam making itself apparent as she ripped away
leaves. It pushed up from the dirt like a stunted buttress,
latching onto the metal beast behind the wood façade and pushing the
real wall in. Loana looked behind them warily. She had a feeling
sitting on the back of her neck, like she was being stared at. Her
skin prickled. She might not know all the reasons parents tell
their children to stay away from certain men, but she knew enough to
feel adrenaline swimming around in her gut, fluttering her pulse.
If Mr. Jookiba was here, she didn't want to meet him.
The jungle sent black glints at her; bright, lucid reflections from
an eye. Loana grabbed Marcia by the sleeve.
"Marcia, there's something out there!" she hissed worriedly.
Marcia only glanced at her.
"Who cares? Are you seeing this? Christ, it's like a UFO or
something. Or like a secret military project. They built this
crappy fake house around it to make it look normal!"
"Marcia, lets GO!"
The brush didn't even rustle as a clawed arm slid out, grabbing the
earth and pulling itself forward. Loana slapped both hands over her
mouth in a brilliant effort not to shout as dirty blue fur slid its
way out of the bushes, surrounding two glittering black eyes the
shape of almonds and long, ragged ears. She jerked Marcia's sleeve
urgently and the other girl growled.
"What's your problem?!" she snapped.
At the sound of her voice the animal's head split open in a wide,
toothy snarl, baring yellowed rims and chipped edges. Marcia froze
and very slowly turned her head.
She was the one who screamed.
In a flash of teeth and dirt the animal leaped, landing square on
Loana's chest and pushing her back into the metal wall, pinning her
at a strangling angle. Marcia ran, her sneakers slapping the paving
stones.
Loana was letting go a shrill wail of panic as she tried to shove
the thing away but it was too heavy. Ignoring her efforts and her
cries, it pushed its face into hers and snuffed, investigating the
smell of her hair and her panicked, terrified sweat. She fumbled a
hand into its face to try and maul one of those wet black eyes but
its claws clamped down on both her wrists and pushed them into the
dirt beside her. She snapped her jaw shut over her screech and
tried to breathe. It didn't work.
The blue animal sat on her chest for a long moment, squinting at her
straining face, before it dropped its jaw and made a choking noise,
like a dog trying to speak.
"Llll...hhhhuehh...lll..lii-llllo...?"
Loana gave a sharp cry and turned her head to the side, away from
those teeth. Over the blood in her ears she heard floorboards
wailing under a massive weight as footsteps came out onto the porch.
"626! What are you doing?!" snapped a rough voice, drowning in a
warped Russian accent. He sounded out of breath.
The blue animal grated its vocal chords and began to babble through
its snarling. Somewhere in the garble her brain snatched the word
ohana, but the rest was nonsense.
The unseen voice growled through a wheeze. "Get her out of here!"
The beast snarled. "Naga!"
The boards of the porch shrieked dangerously behind the bushes.
Loana tried a desperate gamble.
"M-m-Mr. Jookiba?" she begged, her voice sounding wavery, terrified,
and truly pathetic. "Mr. Jookiba, help!" All sound from the porch
stopped for a moment, then the boards gave a great, collapsing
shriek and she heard the crash of timbers falling through, a cloud
of dust exploding through the foliage from the collapsed porch. The
voice began to swear, loudly.
The beast that had pinned her abruptly disappeared towards the
house. Loana struggled up to her feet and nearly fled, but a moment
of familial guilt stopped her. Somebody could be really hurt. Even
if all the stories about this place were true (which she was
beginning to suspect was possible, of that blue thing was any
indication) she couldn't leave if Mr. Jookiba was hurt and needed
the ambulance. Warily, Loana snuck past the bushes into the dust
cloud, trying not to cough.
Cursing cheap earth materials, weather, termites, and just about
everything that could possibly contribute to the porch's collapse,
some massive, filthy thing was fighting to his feet in the wreckage,
the little monster pulling him up by his arm somehow. The man was a
shock of obesity. Easily six hundred pounds, he was towering and
wide in structure as well as stomach, masses of crippling fat
exploding from his midsection and hanging in great quivering
hammocks over the belt of his pants. He wasn't wearing a shirt,
just a scrap of a peeling leather vest that looked more like a gun
holster than anything. Though he was covered in a layer of filth,
the skin showing through she at first thought was a giant sunburn,
too dark to be normal, but not even a sunburn could be that bad. He
was the allover color of a drunkard's nose, like every bloodvessel
in his body had exploded below the surface. Loana squeaked and
covered her mouth again.
"S-s-should I c-call the ambulance?" she asked quaveringly, hoping
to God the answer was no so she could run home and pray Mr. Jookiba
didn't call her mother about this. His head swiveled on his
shoulders to stare at her in surprise, his mouth dropped open to
pant through his teeth, and it took Loana's brain a long moment to
register she was being stared at by four bloodshot eyes in his head,
not two.
His tongue was the wrong color.
"Leave, Little Girl." Jookiba wheezed.
Loana didn't need to be told twice. She was over the gate and
running, bicycle forgotten, before she even realized she had turned
to go.
On the inside of the wall, Stitch took a few hesitant, hopeful steps
to follow her, than sat down in the path with his ears slicked back
to his shoulders. Jumba Jookiba picked his way out of the shattered
wood, too soft to even pierce him, and mentally cursed the toll the
unexpected was taking on his heart. He slumped over his long-
disappeared knees and tried to catch his breath.
"She is being Little Girl's girl, eh?" he asked lightly.
Stitch looked at his claws unhappily. Jumba gave a very humorless
chuckle and turned to stare at the collapsed porch. He hadn't
trusted his considerable weight to any part of it for years, but at
the human girl's constant shrieking he'd forgotten for a moment. He
was used to children climbing these walls, and he was equally used
to 626 scaring them away in sudden, sharp burst of human cries that
faded just as fast. He'd thought something must have gone wrong,
for the screams to continue.
He'd been surprised the little girl knew his name...
Pushed into action by his panting, Stitch roused himself and circled
Jumba critically, searching for damages from the collapse. There
were scrapes, only small ones; nothing that looked dangerous. He
could hear Jumba's heart straining to handle the dissipating
adrenaline, the beats louder, more forceful, and the state of it
worried him a little.
Stitch pointed at the stairs and whuffed. Jumba obediently parked
his backside on the reinforced steps, sweat gathering on the top of
his head while his heart failed to slow. He was a few hundred
pounds past Pleasantly Plump" and his heart wasn't going to let him
forget it. Stitch set himself down by the doctor's feet and watched
the dust cloud settle.
"Was never liking that porch anyway." Jumba said dully.
Which was a lie, of course, and Stitch knew it.
His heart stuttered over a particularly nasty patch and Jumba rubbed
his chest dully. Stitch raised his ears in alarm. Jumba could see
his little mind flashing danger warnings.
"You being sure that was one of Little Girl's?" Jumba asked
conversationally (distractingly).
Stitch nodded. His nose was sharp, and the smell of a lineage was
unmistakable.
"Bah, too many children." Jumba dismissed with a wave of his
hand. "Half the island probably their children by now."
"Hrrh..oh-haana." Stitch grated.
Jumba laughed. "Family. Hardly. Family is being gone since Little
Girl's grandchildren started screaming when seeing us. Now we get
card on holiday by sense of propriety."
Grumbling, Stitch put his ear to the Jumba's ample side, listening
to blood move through the veins. The pulse was slowing a little.
It would be some time before he thought it safe to make him get up
and go back inside.
"Oh-hana." Stitch repeated stubbornly. He lay down in a canine
position to wait.
Jumba put his chin on his fist and sighed, his neck hurting a little
from the blood in it. The dust had become a fine filter, and had
turned the leaves of the garden a dirty grey. 626 sulked quietly at
his feet. It had been hard on 626 to become outdated and unwanted
in the human family, probably harder than it had been on Jumba,
since he'd already lost his own, once. Stitch still checked every
invader on their property for signs of Nani or Lilo in their
ancestry, but after Lilo's granddaughter had fallen into hysterics
when introduced for the first time, the following generations had
been carefully separated from Jumba and Stitch.
It had been lonely at first, but Jumba had made friends with
aloneness when he was a little boy; reuniting with it after the
short lives of the humans should have been easy. It was simply
returning to his natural state, like going home, or so he'd have
thought, but there was something different this time around: as a
child, he hadn't known what he was missing. Now he was all too
aware.
In retrospect it probably would had been easier if he had stayed
alone his whole life. If he hadn't cared for anyone, it wouldn't
have hurt when they left again.
It would still be cowardly, though.
And unhappy.
For all his regrets, that little span of time spent with people to
love was not one of them. Except, perhaps, late at night, when he
was alone in the dark, his lungs struggling under his weight. Late
at night the mess in his head came barreling to the forefront and
crashed against the back of his eyes. It writhed there, vomiting in
random order an old girlfriend, a human smile, and his mother's
calloused hands. It superimposed the image of the Little Girl
playing in the garden over Lilo teaching her own children to dance,
finally being washed away by the memory of Lilo, old and hairless,
babbling to herself in a hospital bed while the cancer ate away her
frontal lobes.
He remembered human funerals he'd declined to attend and weddings
he'd been hard pressed to celebrate. He remembered David dying old
and alone when a stroke drowned him in the bathtub. He remembered
those stupid lace curtains he and Pleakley fought about. Pleakley—
...he remembered Pleakley. Invariably, on those sleepless nights, he
remembered Pleakley.
He hated it.
Once the macho posturing and pain and walls had come down, it had
been good with Pleakley, and that made it all the harder to lose.
Jumba had really had to try this time; he'd never tried in
relationships before. He'd always just acted the way he'd been
raised to be; self centered, self reliant, and cruel as fate
whenever the mood struck him. The same reasons some women
gravitated to him were the same reasons they inevitably left, but
Pleakley hadn't fallen in love with his cruelty and his distance;
Pleakley had fallen in love with something else, and for the first
time in his life held him accountable for his actions. No one had
ever cared enough to do that before.
It had been the first time in his life that the good in a
relationship had outweighed the bad, and they sure as hell had their
bad. There had been arguments and separations and fights, most of
them Jumba's own fault, and sometimes outright abuse; it had not
been without reason that Jumba's first wife walked out on him, after
all. Jumba could be fiery and violent or helpless and negligent in
turns. Pleakley had put up with his mercurial moods and answered
them with his own, and somewhere in the middle things had worked out.
But the bad times came knocking, as they always do.
Jumba had been upstairs working when the communicator beeped, and a
very ragged looking Pixley had asked to talk to her brother.
Pleakley had been washing dishes downstairs at the time (He'd
stubbornly refused Jumba's offer to build a dishwasher in their
kitchen) and had taken the call in rubber gloves with a kerchief on
his head. Pixley said their mother had died of some sort of massive
cerebral incident, Jumba couldn't quite remember what, but that it
had taken her out so quickly there hadn't been any time to suffer.
The estate was going to unpaid debts, Bertley was moving in with
her, and there wasn't time for a funeral, oh no, she was busy, so
horribly busy. She'd sounded shakey.
Pleakley had finished the call with a straight face, and resumed
washing the dishes. Jumba had picked up a clean towel and began
drying them, waiting for something, for the news to clear all
Pleakley's circuits, perhaps. Something didn't come until every one
of the dishes was clean and in the drying rack, the sink was
drained, the trap was emptied, and Pleakley stowed his rubber gloves
beneath the sink. Then the Plorginarian started to cry.
Pleakley cried about a lot of things, of course, but this had been
different; this had been something violent and inconsolable,
something Jumba couldn't make go away with a well chosen word and a
hug. It was frightening.
It only got worse.
By this time, Lilo was in Jr. High, and Nani was pregnant with her
first child (married, of course; she and David. The humans
beginning their own family again was the reason Jumba and Pleakley
had moved out in the first place.) It had taken the humans a few
days of nobody coming to see them to get curious enough to come
check. An uncomfortably large Nani had found Pleakley watching
television in the dark, not paying the least bit of attention to
what was on it. Jumba had been hiding on the back porch, so
uncomfortable with Pleakley's silent, dead-eyed misery that he
couldn't stand being in the room with it.
Nani shouted at him for his neglect, even hit him a few times when
she found him. She knew terribly well what it meant for a phone
call to take away your loved ones, and Pleakley NEEDED him now, what
the hell was he doing ignoring him? Pleakley had dragged himself to
the back porch and stared at them both blankly, leaning on the
doorposts while he asked what the shouting was about. Nani left in
a huff without another word.
The next day Jumba dragged Pleakley down to the beach, handed him a
notebook and pencil, and had him write his mother a letter. He'd
just sat there staring at the page for a long time, then slowly
began to scrawl, a pencil not a tool well suited for Plorginarian
script, but the idea got across. Pleakley filled up nearly a dozen
pages and spent all too much of the afternoon crying from it. Jumba
wrote his own note to Pleakley's mother, then set them both down on
the sand and built a small fire. He knew Pleakley was sneaking a
look at what he'd written, but he'd meant him to. Pleakley chuckled
a little at the rash comments he'd made.
They'd burned the letters and thrown the cinders out to sea. Then
sat and watched night fall.
Pleakley hadn't gotten better all at once, but it helped push away
the frightened distance, and with someone to lean on he could cope.
He didn't come quite back to himself until Nani's daughter was
born. Jumba didn't see the appeal of children at that age, when
they were wrinkled and ugly and screaming, but Pleakley was more
than happy to babysit when she let him. He took care of the child,
and he built up the garden, and Jumba was content to watch him do
it. It was a peaceful time. It was easy.
....
Then it was over....
He'd known something was wrong with Pleakley long before he admitted
it. He'd known Plorginarians don't live very long, not compared to
his own species, but after all this time the information stuck
somewhere to the side of his skull and refused to make contact with
his brain. Besides, Pleakley should have had another twenty years,
twenty at least. He was only what the humans would have called "mid
life".
.......Pleakley had started to lose weight. He'd never been exactly
meaty to begin with, but after a week or two of nerves Pleakley went
on with his daily routine as though blithely unaware of the fact,
and maybe that façade of normalcy had lulled Jumba's brain into
believing it really was alright. He'd started sleeping too long and
letting the garden go to weed, and when he caught him vomiting blood
behind the house he'd forced him to sit through an examination.
It hadn't taken a genius to translate the computer readouts.
(Terminal
Terminal
Terminal
Terminal
Terminal—)
Pleakley's body wasn't perfectly suited to earth, there were
chemical compounds it couldn't break down as fast as humans do. It
tried, but over years and years it began to back up in his system,
poisoning him.
(terminal)
It was a compatibility automatically tested for when a species
colonizes another planet, but Pleakley hadn't been sent here to
colonize, he'd only been sent on a mission. He had not been
intended for long term exposure.
(terminal)
If it had been caught early it could have been filtered out before
major tissue damage began. Before organ failure. Before living rot.
(terminal)
If Pleakley had--
(terminal)
If Pleakley had told him—
(terminal...)
if...
if...
if...
(terminal)
..........
..............
(He hadn't known.)
(Pleakley hadn't known.)
.........................................
His condition began to deteriorate rapidly after that. Pleakley
became bedridden in only a week, hot with fever and blood purge as
his body tried to get rid of the toxins. Jumba, unable to deal with
anyone else's pain but his own, told the rest of the family Pleakley
wasn't around because he was sick'. He just had a cold, nothing to
worry about, really, he'd be up and about again in no time. He
wasn't stupid enough to believe it himself. He didn't think Stitch
and David were, either, but no one called his bluff.
The girls picked flowers and brought them over to the house. They
looked like Technicolor vultures sitting over his bed, their shapes
lost in the darkened room, their ribbons tripping down over the
shelf like claws. Pleakley looked so small in that massive bed
alone. He thought Lilo understood, when she saw him, that this was
not a simple cold, though Nani's daughter was so beautifully
oblivious. She climbed onto the mattress and laughingly tried to
poke him awake with a viciousness even Jumba would be hard pressed
to master. Nani retrieved her before Jumba had to.
After that everyone began to brace themselves, it seemed. In human
movies Jumba had seen this was always the time everyone came
together, had heartfelt talks with the dying, and smoothed
everything over so neatly that when the real event occurred it was
some sort of uplifting, magical moment. It never really happened
that way. Jumba could feel the walls going up, self defense coming
to the forefront now that danger had approached him. In Pleakley's
rare moments of lucidity there were no heartfelt confessions, no
melodrama, just light conversation and long, painful pauses. He
distanced himself artfully.
It didn't hurt as much as giving in. After all, he was the one who
had to survive, not Pleakley.
One morning, after a night of raging fever, thickening blood, and
blindness that left him groping for help in an empty room, Pleakley
simply got up and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. He looked
like hell. He wasn't cold, he wasn't hungry, he said he wasn't even
in pain, and Jumba stood in the door utterly dumbfounded. Pleakley
made hotcakes and made Jumba sit down to eat them, his regular
fussing self.
Jumba knew the loud and oblivious voice of Hope was wrong. Pleakley
wasn't getting better. Pleakley COULDN'T get better. Pleakley's
insides consisted of black sludge rot and fragments of organs that
had stubbornly not died yet. Logic screamed at him that Hope was
wrong.
Hope's presence hurt more than its absence.
He had no idea what was going on in Pleakley's head, or if its
processes were even sensible at this point, but Pleakley insisted on
cleaning house and going out to weed the garden; Jumba had let
everything fall to ruins. Nani's daughter saw him out there tugging
at vines and tackled him with a bright squeal. She thought he was
alright. Nani and David were more cautious. They brought lunch
over, and watched Pleakley with wary expressions while they ate,
very much aware that if Pleakley was indeed recovering he should be
ravenous, not politely refusing food.
David offered to stay the night but Pleakley turned him out.
Pleakley seemed to have other plans. They involved cooking an
elaborate dinner, eating it by firelight on the backporch, and
dragging Jumba to the bedroom for an attempted seduction by a man
who had no body left to seduce with.
Jumba was crying by the time they were finished. Pleakley lay on
his chest and whispered. "It's okay. It's okay..."
He fell asleep.
(terminal)
(terminal)
(terminal)
......
.............
The next morning, Pleakley was dead in his arms.
....
....
....David came by on his lunch break to see how they were doing.
Jumba was sitting on the front porch, mindlessly botching up the
circuitry on his latest feat of Evil Geniusing' and not caring.
David hadn't even needed to go inside to understand what had
happened. He'd simply called his boss, told him there was a family
emergency, and waited there on the porch with him until Nani got
home, five hours later.
Someone must have called Pleakley's family that night. Jumba
didn't. He was asleep on the couch, the Dick Van Dyke Show playing
in mute black and white on the television screen, when Pixley and
Bertley showed up on his doorstep. Pixley was angry. Jumba was
angrier. Nani was the one who came and diffused it all by dragging
them away for the night.
Events progressed with or without Jumba's consent or participation.
He didn't remember the humans trying to convince Pixley Pleakley to
let the funeral be held on Earth. He didn't remember Lilo dragging
out the photographs to prove their claim; he'd been there, and he'd
been awake, but some very vital part of him was not paying attention.
(Pleakley was )
(terminal)
Then somehow they were building the pyre.
The sun was sitting at a heavy angle, and it felt like it might be
sunset. The sky was turning red. Jumba was standing by the jagged
stones that formed the tidepools, a weightless thing wrapped in bed
linens in his arms, and feeling like he hadn't ever slept. The
beach was blocked on all sides (a favor from Cobra Bubbles, he'd
learn eventually) and a squared mound of green wood was rising on
the sand.
"You can put him down now." Pixley was insisting softly. Jumba
did. The mound continued rising up around him.
David was there with a tiki torch. Nani held her daughter. Lilo
stood by with a boy Jumba had never seen and Stitch was somewhere
near his feet, waiting. The plorginarians fidgeted the green wood
so it covered the shroud completely and Pixley started talking. He
didn't know what she said.
They burned him.
The ritual lasted the whole night, and the rest of it was wordless.
They watched the flames, then they watched the embers, then they
watched nothing. Nani's daughter cried herself to sleep on her
mother's lap early, and Lilo stayed with her boy. Stitch, for some
reason, stayed with Jumba. He'd felt the heat of his fur against
his leg as night breezes came through and began to lift away
fragments of Pleakley.
The sun came up.
An exhausted Pixley had put her hands in the ashes. "An end to
tears." She said solemnly, swiping the ash across Lilo's cheeks. It
was to be only happy times, now, only fond memories. When they
looked back on Pleakley after this night not a tear was to be shed
lest it dishonor the memory of ash on their faces.
Nani took it with tired, blackened eyes; it wasn't a human ritual,
but it was the only one they had. David allowed it solemnly, and
their daughter fidgeted in her sleep as Pixley painted ash over the
bridge of her reddened nose. Stitch was dusted under his eyes.
They didn't try to smudge Jumba. Pixley was scared of him.
Besides, he hadn't cried.
Jumba didn't remember getting back to the house, or climbing onto
the sofa and going to sleep, the television turned on behind closed
blinds to give a light play across the ceiling. But he did know
that he woke up there, stiff, cramped, and numb. He hurt but it was
a drugged hurt, like a dentist's drill after the anesthetic set in;
it was more knowing he should be in pain than anything. He couldn't
go back to that room, with the bed stripped down for a death
shroud. He couldn't see Pleakley's disguises' lined up in the open
closet.
Sometimes, he could barely breathe.
The humans brought him food, heavy foods like casseroles and turkey
and bread, and he didn't have to cook for some days. David brought
six packs of beer now and then. But after the girls drifted away
and Lilo forgot him entirely, Stitch came over every morning, and
sat on the back of the sofa quietly while Jumba watched daytime
soaps with the volume turned up. He hated daytime soaps.
David was the one who finally cracked the man. Jumba had settled in
for a month of silent apathy before the human came over with two
cases of cheap beer weighing his arms down. He sat with Jumba at
the kitchen table and didn't have to encourage him to drink; Jumba
took care of that part all by himself, downing can after can while
he complained sporadically about television and the state of the
living room. Jumba's bulk was massive and his liquor consumption
was bigger, so David did not even try to match him, just sat there
calmly as he waited for something to happen.
Before he was too drunk to stand, Jumba made a casual comment about
having to learn to do the dishes, and something snapped under the
liquor. He'd started crying, harsh, dangerous sobs of a man who
doesn't do this sort of thing. David just let him, and drank his
beer.
Breaking let things get better. Eventually. The humans started
making a point to include him in everything, some weird, misplaced
familial guilt driving them from behind. It was a long time before
he could even attempt to sleep on his bed again--
(his, singular)
--instead of on the sofa. It took his several tries to sleep the
night.
Things drifted after that; he was unfocused, and time seemed to skip
by at any pace. Nani had more children. Lilo moved out. Families
grew and multiplied and eventually began to die off.
Nani went first.
David wouldn't follow her for a long, long time.
The passing of generations shifted focus back to normal life.
Aliens were once again imaginary, there were no such things as
mutants, and Lilo's daughter came back from Honolulu to present the
family with her little girl. The child started screaming the moment
it saw Jumba and his four eyes. That seemed to seal it; he was no
longer a part of this family.
When Lilo died, Stitch found himself in much the same predicament.
He was a little too strange, a little too abnormal, and if time does
nothing else it filters out the extraordinary. He spent a few weeks
living in Lilo's granddaughter's apartment, exiled to a cardboard
box in the laundry room, before dragging himself to Jumba's house
with his ears on the ground and the antiquated Scrump in a
pillowcase. Sometimes, Jumba still caught him holding it.
With Lilo's death, the government stipend that funded Jumba's
existence disappeared. Cobra Bubbles was long dead and so was his
work, and one month the checks simply stopped coming. Jumba started
submitting scientific material to private companies, nothing
advanced, just a step up from what the humans were doing on their
own. He refused to meet with them but they wanted his work badly
enough they hired him anyway, despite his behavior (the story of his
life). They sent money, Jumba reciprocated every now and then with
a gadget or computer program, and home delivery took over the rest
of life's essentials.
The city bled out. Lilo's house was demolished to make way for a
newer building, in better condition, and Jumba built a wall around
his property to keep it out. The garden had long since gone feral.
Stitch followed it. Jumba, feeling somehow more surreal than he
ever had, spent his days in sedentary consumption, watching
television, and writing rude letters to scientific journals.
His existence had become a neighborhood spook story.
The sole variation of his days had come once, several years ago,
when his ex wife called him on the communicator. Her son had gone
away to college and she didn't know what to do with herself, so she
might as well start catching up on old acquaintances. Jumba had
stared blankly at the screen, like he was looking into another
world, and he thought just maybe he was. His life was too long ago,
especially his Kweltekwaanian life. That anything he knew back then
should still be the same, when everything here was so different?
The woman was apparently strongly affected by the sight of her
exiled ex husband, a few hundred pounds and a few dozen heartbreaks
worse for wear, bursting into tears. She came immediately.
The Jadwiga he'd known never cared about anyone, but when she came
through the door and saw him sitting there, he could see that she
pitied him immediately. It was humiliating. What was worse was
that he needed her, that she was the only one for such a very long
time with arms big enough to hold him, and he'd needed her to do it.
Jadwiga called the Federation Council and appealed to them to
rescind their ruling. Let Jumba come back home to Kweltekwaan,
she'd said. He's learned his lesson. He won't do it again.
However, while enough time had passed for the Earth to forget about
him, it wasn't nearly enough time for the galaxy. Her requests were
denied.
Jadwiga decided she could stay there, instead.
Jumba needed somebody, that much was obvious, and with her son gone
was there a better project? Jumba kept her busy. There was a house
that needed made livable, a garden that needed tamed, and a man that
needed shaken out of his pit. She dove into it with so much
enthusiasm, anyone could see it wouldn't last. And it didn't.
Jadwiga was looking to play a quick game of house to distract
herself, and Jumba was not capable of playing. It had been too long
since he'd felt anything but dead.
It became obvious after a month or two that Jumba was not going to
snap out of it because of a cooked breakfast every morning and a
clean and tidy living room. Jadwiga lost interest. And, after a
few half hearted attempts to make him angry, she left quietly and
without a note.
Just like the first time.
The house went back to shambles. The garden went back to weed.
Jumba went back to eating.
"So this is what it is being like to outlive yourself." Jumba said
dully, staring into the dust covered leaves.
On the steps of the collapsed porch, 626 was beginning to fall
asleep. He pushed an eye open and regarded Jumba blankly.
"Never mind." Jumba said.
626 sighed and sat up, stretching his spine until it popped. He put
one wide ear against Jumba's side and listened for a few moments.
th-thump...th-thump...th-thump...th-thump...
"Heart slow." He announced, like a doctor making a diagnosis, though
it was a bit of an overstatement. Jumba's heart was never quite
slow, anymore. Jumba patted him mindlessly on the head.
"I'm going back in." he said, and started to stand; quite an effort,
at his size. "Watch for little girls, no?"
"Ih."
Stitch wiggled over to the middle of the steps, lay down, and
listened. The door creaked shut behind him and he heard Jumba's
footsteps making their slow and laborious way to the sofa.
The television clicked on.
Sighing, Stitch grumbled to himself, closed his eyes, and slept.
The Meaning of Exile
D.K. Archer
---
Disclaimer: Disney has the legal rights to Jumba, Pleakley, and the entire Lilo and Stitch universe. No profit is made from this. The little girls (aka convenient plot devices) at the beginning are not part of that universe.)
Note: Remember the series episode where Lilo and Stitch use the time machine? In the future, Jumba was alive long after everyone else in the family, and indeed the island itself, had passed on. That man's got one hell of a lifespan. This is my idea of the future, based on that information.
Warning: this makes the assumption that Jumba Jookiba and Wendy Pleakley are a couple, which, though canon as far as I can tell, may still be offensive to some people. There is NO romance and NO sex (though the fact it occurs in mentioned) and is not really the central focus of this piece. It is not so much a slash fic as a fic which contains some slash elements. However, if the very acknowledgement of homosexuality offends you, I apologize, and advise that you may not want to read this story.
---
"My mom says there's an eccentric' in there." Marcia said, pushing
her bicycle as they drew closer to their homes. The house was an
overgrown darkness fast approaching.
Loana and Tammi, both pushing identical purple bicycles with
identical pink backpacks, frowned.
"What's an eccentric?" Tammi asked.
Marcia snorted. "That's what crazy people are when they get rich.
When you're rich, you can do anything you want, and your not crazy,
you're just eccentric."
"That's stupid." She said. She and Marcia were both from
Californian families, one with short blonde hair and the other with
mousey curls. Loana was the only one who was native, and still her
father was from Texas. It gave her dark hair and skin and a narrow,
Florentine nose.
Marcia gave Tammi a condescending look as the black wall approached
on their left. "Oh, and what do YOU think is in there? Ghosts?"
"No! Don't you ever listen to the stories?" Tammi said. "There's a
big scary mad scientist guy in there. He kidnaps people and turns
them into zombie mutants, my brother told me."
Marcia snorted. "Zombie mutants?"
"Yeah!"
"Who do you know that's been kidnapped!" she challenged. "I'll tell
you; no one!"
"My cat disappeared last month!" Tammi snapped back. "Maybe he got
it!"
"Your cat got ran over and you know it."
The tall grass growing against the base of the wall scraped against
their legs as they passed it. It was a hot, dry day, even for the
summer, and the insects were dancing with the heat.
Loana gave the wall a cockeyed squint. "My grandma says that guy is
related." She said faintly.
Marcia's eyebrows went up. "Since when?!"
"Since ever. Every Christmas she writes a card with "Mr. Jookiba"
on it and makes us sign it. She even made me come with to deliver
it once."
Tammi gave an awed look. "Did you see him? Is he scary?"
"She didn't see him cause she's lying." Marcia snapped.
"I am not!"
"Then what's he look like!"
Loana stared at her bike tire. "I don't know." She said
sulkily. "We just put the letter in the hole in wall and left.
Grandma says I'm not to try and talk to him."
"Why not, if he's really a relative?"
"I dunno." Loana shrugged unhappily. "Grandma doesn't like to talk
about him. She says her mother took her to see him when she was
little and he was all messed up, like deformed. She said she
screamed until her mom took her away."
"Well God, Loana, your grandma is like a thousand years old." Marcia
said. "If she met him as a kid, he's gotta be dead now. NOBODY
lives that long."
"Maybe he's just really really old?" Tammi offered. Then,
secretly. "Does he really have four eyes? My big brother said he
used himself as a guinea pig for an experiment and it turned him
into a monster."
"Yeah, and your brother is a pothead." Marcia retorted. Tammi
winced.
"If there was a guy in town kidnapping people and turning them into
mutant zombies then the police would have arrested him by now."
Loana logicked.
"Unless he fends them off WITH his mutant zombies."
Marcia rolled her eyes. "There's no such thing as mutant zombies!
Look, my mom says there's just a crazy old man in there that's like
a consultant or something for a research company. She says he's
really fat and really sick looking and that's why he doesn't leave
the house."
"...how would she know?" Tammi asked.
Marcia grumbled. "She tried to go there with cookies when her
women's group was doing that bake sale." She admitted.
Tammi was adamant. "I bet it was just a front. He probably puts on
a mask and shows his face every once in a while to throw the town
off. I bet he's in there making some mutants right now!"
Abruptly, Marcia's bike stopped moving. A smile spread out under
her glasses.
"Uh oh." Tammi said.
Marcia grabbed Loana by the backpack. "Lets go find out. If you're
really related to him, you can stop by for a nice family visit and
introduce us all."
"No!" Loana pulled herself loose. "Marcia, I'm not supposed to go
in there! My mother would kill me, and anyway, we got homework!"
"Not so much you can't spend ten minutes looking in on crazy Mr.
Junkiba."
"Jookiba." She corrected.
"Whatever. He's YOUR relative, why are you scared?"
"I'm not scared!" Loana snapped.
"Then climb the gate and introduce us, if you're not a chicken!"
"No!"
Marcia put her hands on her ribs and clucked.
Loana pouted. "If I go will you let me go home?"
"Yup."
When she wanted to, Marcia could manage the most smug, irritating
look in the world, and Loana hated that. She wheeled her bicycle to
the gate and put the kickstand down, though it fell against the wall
anyway. Marcia followed suite, but Tammi stayed standing with her
handlebars in hand, looking nervous. Loana was her best friend, but
there aren't many girls who would risk being turned into a mutant
zombie, even for friendship.
Marcia hauled herself up onto the planks of the gate. "Come on!"
she said.
Loana did. Slowly, they scaled the high gate, and caught hold of
the peak of the hidden wrought iron to pull their heads up over the
top.
The jungle that had been cut away from the rest of the neighborhood
hadn't died here. There were paths beat down from the gate to the
house, but the rest of the yard had risen up in defiance; a tangle
of snarling vines and dying bramble, rampant long-grass and flower
trees squatting down towards the earth. The house itself, for what
they could see of it, looked condemned at a casual glance. It
looked like it had been built cheaply, with a ruined tin roof and
crooked support poles, and a suspiciously elaborate wrap-around
porch. The windows were not glass panes but recessed holes in the
wall, showing something glittering and transparent, but dark
inside. It looked like the plants had destroyed one of the side
walls, and sunlight glinted back at them from the wound, but there
was no way to see it from this angle.
"Hello?" Loana called.
Marcia slapped a hand over her mouth. "What are you, crazy?"
"You said you wanted me to introduce you!" Loana snapped, pushing
Marcia away.
"Ugh, you idiot." She grumbled. "Come on. We gotta get a closer
look."
Not entirely pleased with the idea, Loana straddled the gate and
swung herself to the other side, only descending the rusty iron
partway before dropping to the ground. There was a stone path
somewhere under the mess, and it made her sneakers scrape as Marcia
dragged her aside into the underbrush.
"Shh." Marcia warned. Turning, she ducked beneath the low slung
branches of a strangled tree and gestured Loana to follow, fragments
of skeletonized leaves shaking loose into their hair. Something in
the bushes glinted at them with a sudden intelligent light, but it
was gone just as quickly.
The side of the collapsing house was nearing, hidden under a tangle
of garden plants and condensed native jungle. It glistened in the
light under dead foliage and splintered beams, filthy remnants of
chrome and red paint showing through the façade. The tin roof had
dropped rivulets of rust down the ribs and left a ring of bloody red
around the house.
Marcia struggled through the last snarl of vine and put her face to
the wall. Loana saw a beetle tangled in the back of her hair but
didn't comment, only let Marcia fumble with stubborn vine and strips
of rotten wood as she tried to clear away something of the ruin.
"I KNEW there was something in here." She whispered excitedly, a
metal structural beam making itself apparent as she ripped away
leaves. It pushed up from the dirt like a stunted buttress,
latching onto the metal beast behind the wood façade and pushing the
real wall in. Loana looked behind them warily. She had a feeling
sitting on the back of her neck, like she was being stared at. Her
skin prickled. She might not know all the reasons parents tell
their children to stay away from certain men, but she knew enough to
feel adrenaline swimming around in her gut, fluttering her pulse.
If Mr. Jookiba was here, she didn't want to meet him.
The jungle sent black glints at her; bright, lucid reflections from
an eye. Loana grabbed Marcia by the sleeve.
"Marcia, there's something out there!" she hissed worriedly.
Marcia only glanced at her.
"Who cares? Are you seeing this? Christ, it's like a UFO or
something. Or like a secret military project. They built this
crappy fake house around it to make it look normal!"
"Marcia, lets GO!"
The brush didn't even rustle as a clawed arm slid out, grabbing the
earth and pulling itself forward. Loana slapped both hands over her
mouth in a brilliant effort not to shout as dirty blue fur slid its
way out of the bushes, surrounding two glittering black eyes the
shape of almonds and long, ragged ears. She jerked Marcia's sleeve
urgently and the other girl growled.
"What's your problem?!" she snapped.
At the sound of her voice the animal's head split open in a wide,
toothy snarl, baring yellowed rims and chipped edges. Marcia froze
and very slowly turned her head.
She was the one who screamed.
In a flash of teeth and dirt the animal leaped, landing square on
Loana's chest and pushing her back into the metal wall, pinning her
at a strangling angle. Marcia ran, her sneakers slapping the paving
stones.
Loana was letting go a shrill wail of panic as she tried to shove
the thing away but it was too heavy. Ignoring her efforts and her
cries, it pushed its face into hers and snuffed, investigating the
smell of her hair and her panicked, terrified sweat. She fumbled a
hand into its face to try and maul one of those wet black eyes but
its claws clamped down on both her wrists and pushed them into the
dirt beside her. She snapped her jaw shut over her screech and
tried to breathe. It didn't work.
The blue animal sat on her chest for a long moment, squinting at her
straining face, before it dropped its jaw and made a choking noise,
like a dog trying to speak.
"Llll...hhhhuehh...lll..lii-llllo...?"
Loana gave a sharp cry and turned her head to the side, away from
those teeth. Over the blood in her ears she heard floorboards
wailing under a massive weight as footsteps came out onto the porch.
"626! What are you doing?!" snapped a rough voice, drowning in a
warped Russian accent. He sounded out of breath.
The blue animal grated its vocal chords and began to babble through
its snarling. Somewhere in the garble her brain snatched the word
ohana, but the rest was nonsense.
The unseen voice growled through a wheeze. "Get her out of here!"
The beast snarled. "Naga!"
The boards of the porch shrieked dangerously behind the bushes.
Loana tried a desperate gamble.
"M-m-Mr. Jookiba?" she begged, her voice sounding wavery, terrified,
and truly pathetic. "Mr. Jookiba, help!" All sound from the porch
stopped for a moment, then the boards gave a great, collapsing
shriek and she heard the crash of timbers falling through, a cloud
of dust exploding through the foliage from the collapsed porch. The
voice began to swear, loudly.
The beast that had pinned her abruptly disappeared towards the
house. Loana struggled up to her feet and nearly fled, but a moment
of familial guilt stopped her. Somebody could be really hurt. Even
if all the stories about this place were true (which she was
beginning to suspect was possible, of that blue thing was any
indication) she couldn't leave if Mr. Jookiba was hurt and needed
the ambulance. Warily, Loana snuck past the bushes into the dust
cloud, trying not to cough.
Cursing cheap earth materials, weather, termites, and just about
everything that could possibly contribute to the porch's collapse,
some massive, filthy thing was fighting to his feet in the wreckage,
the little monster pulling him up by his arm somehow. The man was a
shock of obesity. Easily six hundred pounds, he was towering and
wide in structure as well as stomach, masses of crippling fat
exploding from his midsection and hanging in great quivering
hammocks over the belt of his pants. He wasn't wearing a shirt,
just a scrap of a peeling leather vest that looked more like a gun
holster than anything. Though he was covered in a layer of filth,
the skin showing through she at first thought was a giant sunburn,
too dark to be normal, but not even a sunburn could be that bad. He
was the allover color of a drunkard's nose, like every bloodvessel
in his body had exploded below the surface. Loana squeaked and
covered her mouth again.
"S-s-should I c-call the ambulance?" she asked quaveringly, hoping
to God the answer was no so she could run home and pray Mr. Jookiba
didn't call her mother about this. His head swiveled on his
shoulders to stare at her in surprise, his mouth dropped open to
pant through his teeth, and it took Loana's brain a long moment to
register she was being stared at by four bloodshot eyes in his head,
not two.
His tongue was the wrong color.
"Leave, Little Girl." Jookiba wheezed.
Loana didn't need to be told twice. She was over the gate and
running, bicycle forgotten, before she even realized she had turned
to go.
On the inside of the wall, Stitch took a few hesitant, hopeful steps
to follow her, than sat down in the path with his ears slicked back
to his shoulders. Jumba Jookiba picked his way out of the shattered
wood, too soft to even pierce him, and mentally cursed the toll the
unexpected was taking on his heart. He slumped over his long-
disappeared knees and tried to catch his breath.
"She is being Little Girl's girl, eh?" he asked lightly.
Stitch looked at his claws unhappily. Jumba gave a very humorless
chuckle and turned to stare at the collapsed porch. He hadn't
trusted his considerable weight to any part of it for years, but at
the human girl's constant shrieking he'd forgotten for a moment. He
was used to children climbing these walls, and he was equally used
to 626 scaring them away in sudden, sharp burst of human cries that
faded just as fast. He'd thought something must have gone wrong,
for the screams to continue.
He'd been surprised the little girl knew his name...
Pushed into action by his panting, Stitch roused himself and circled
Jumba critically, searching for damages from the collapse. There
were scrapes, only small ones; nothing that looked dangerous. He
could hear Jumba's heart straining to handle the dissipating
adrenaline, the beats louder, more forceful, and the state of it
worried him a little.
Stitch pointed at the stairs and whuffed. Jumba obediently parked
his backside on the reinforced steps, sweat gathering on the top of
his head while his heart failed to slow. He was a few hundred
pounds past Pleasantly Plump" and his heart wasn't going to let him
forget it. Stitch set himself down by the doctor's feet and watched
the dust cloud settle.
"Was never liking that porch anyway." Jumba said dully.
Which was a lie, of course, and Stitch knew it.
His heart stuttered over a particularly nasty patch and Jumba rubbed
his chest dully. Stitch raised his ears in alarm. Jumba could see
his little mind flashing danger warnings.
"You being sure that was one of Little Girl's?" Jumba asked
conversationally (distractingly).
Stitch nodded. His nose was sharp, and the smell of a lineage was
unmistakable.
"Bah, too many children." Jumba dismissed with a wave of his
hand. "Half the island probably their children by now."
"Hrrh..oh-haana." Stitch grated.
Jumba laughed. "Family. Hardly. Family is being gone since Little
Girl's grandchildren started screaming when seeing us. Now we get
card on holiday by sense of propriety."
Grumbling, Stitch put his ear to the Jumba's ample side, listening
to blood move through the veins. The pulse was slowing a little.
It would be some time before he thought it safe to make him get up
and go back inside.
"Oh-hana." Stitch repeated stubbornly. He lay down in a canine
position to wait.
Jumba put his chin on his fist and sighed, his neck hurting a little
from the blood in it. The dust had become a fine filter, and had
turned the leaves of the garden a dirty grey. 626 sulked quietly at
his feet. It had been hard on 626 to become outdated and unwanted
in the human family, probably harder than it had been on Jumba,
since he'd already lost his own, once. Stitch still checked every
invader on their property for signs of Nani or Lilo in their
ancestry, but after Lilo's granddaughter had fallen into hysterics
when introduced for the first time, the following generations had
been carefully separated from Jumba and Stitch.
It had been lonely at first, but Jumba had made friends with
aloneness when he was a little boy; reuniting with it after the
short lives of the humans should have been easy. It was simply
returning to his natural state, like going home, or so he'd have
thought, but there was something different this time around: as a
child, he hadn't known what he was missing. Now he was all too
aware.
In retrospect it probably would had been easier if he had stayed
alone his whole life. If he hadn't cared for anyone, it wouldn't
have hurt when they left again.
It would still be cowardly, though.
And unhappy.
For all his regrets, that little span of time spent with people to
love was not one of them. Except, perhaps, late at night, when he
was alone in the dark, his lungs struggling under his weight. Late
at night the mess in his head came barreling to the forefront and
crashed against the back of his eyes. It writhed there, vomiting in
random order an old girlfriend, a human smile, and his mother's
calloused hands. It superimposed the image of the Little Girl
playing in the garden over Lilo teaching her own children to dance,
finally being washed away by the memory of Lilo, old and hairless,
babbling to herself in a hospital bed while the cancer ate away her
frontal lobes.
He remembered human funerals he'd declined to attend and weddings
he'd been hard pressed to celebrate. He remembered David dying old
and alone when a stroke drowned him in the bathtub. He remembered
those stupid lace curtains he and Pleakley fought about. Pleakley—
...he remembered Pleakley. Invariably, on those sleepless nights, he
remembered Pleakley.
He hated it.
Once the macho posturing and pain and walls had come down, it had
been good with Pleakley, and that made it all the harder to lose.
Jumba had really had to try this time; he'd never tried in
relationships before. He'd always just acted the way he'd been
raised to be; self centered, self reliant, and cruel as fate
whenever the mood struck him. The same reasons some women
gravitated to him were the same reasons they inevitably left, but
Pleakley hadn't fallen in love with his cruelty and his distance;
Pleakley had fallen in love with something else, and for the first
time in his life held him accountable for his actions. No one had
ever cared enough to do that before.
It had been the first time in his life that the good in a
relationship had outweighed the bad, and they sure as hell had their
bad. There had been arguments and separations and fights, most of
them Jumba's own fault, and sometimes outright abuse; it had not
been without reason that Jumba's first wife walked out on him, after
all. Jumba could be fiery and violent or helpless and negligent in
turns. Pleakley had put up with his mercurial moods and answered
them with his own, and somewhere in the middle things had worked out.
But the bad times came knocking, as they always do.
Jumba had been upstairs working when the communicator beeped, and a
very ragged looking Pixley had asked to talk to her brother.
Pleakley had been washing dishes downstairs at the time (He'd
stubbornly refused Jumba's offer to build a dishwasher in their
kitchen) and had taken the call in rubber gloves with a kerchief on
his head. Pixley said their mother had died of some sort of massive
cerebral incident, Jumba couldn't quite remember what, but that it
had taken her out so quickly there hadn't been any time to suffer.
The estate was going to unpaid debts, Bertley was moving in with
her, and there wasn't time for a funeral, oh no, she was busy, so
horribly busy. She'd sounded shakey.
Pleakley had finished the call with a straight face, and resumed
washing the dishes. Jumba had picked up a clean towel and began
drying them, waiting for something, for the news to clear all
Pleakley's circuits, perhaps. Something didn't come until every one
of the dishes was clean and in the drying rack, the sink was
drained, the trap was emptied, and Pleakley stowed his rubber gloves
beneath the sink. Then the Plorginarian started to cry.
Pleakley cried about a lot of things, of course, but this had been
different; this had been something violent and inconsolable,
something Jumba couldn't make go away with a well chosen word and a
hug. It was frightening.
It only got worse.
By this time, Lilo was in Jr. High, and Nani was pregnant with her
first child (married, of course; she and David. The humans
beginning their own family again was the reason Jumba and Pleakley
had moved out in the first place.) It had taken the humans a few
days of nobody coming to see them to get curious enough to come
check. An uncomfortably large Nani had found Pleakley watching
television in the dark, not paying the least bit of attention to
what was on it. Jumba had been hiding on the back porch, so
uncomfortable with Pleakley's silent, dead-eyed misery that he
couldn't stand being in the room with it.
Nani shouted at him for his neglect, even hit him a few times when
she found him. She knew terribly well what it meant for a phone
call to take away your loved ones, and Pleakley NEEDED him now, what
the hell was he doing ignoring him? Pleakley had dragged himself to
the back porch and stared at them both blankly, leaning on the
doorposts while he asked what the shouting was about. Nani left in
a huff without another word.
The next day Jumba dragged Pleakley down to the beach, handed him a
notebook and pencil, and had him write his mother a letter. He'd
just sat there staring at the page for a long time, then slowly
began to scrawl, a pencil not a tool well suited for Plorginarian
script, but the idea got across. Pleakley filled up nearly a dozen
pages and spent all too much of the afternoon crying from it. Jumba
wrote his own note to Pleakley's mother, then set them both down on
the sand and built a small fire. He knew Pleakley was sneaking a
look at what he'd written, but he'd meant him to. Pleakley chuckled
a little at the rash comments he'd made.
They'd burned the letters and thrown the cinders out to sea. Then
sat and watched night fall.
Pleakley hadn't gotten better all at once, but it helped push away
the frightened distance, and with someone to lean on he could cope.
He didn't come quite back to himself until Nani's daughter was
born. Jumba didn't see the appeal of children at that age, when
they were wrinkled and ugly and screaming, but Pleakley was more
than happy to babysit when she let him. He took care of the child,
and he built up the garden, and Jumba was content to watch him do
it. It was a peaceful time. It was easy.
....
Then it was over....
He'd known something was wrong with Pleakley long before he admitted
it. He'd known Plorginarians don't live very long, not compared to
his own species, but after all this time the information stuck
somewhere to the side of his skull and refused to make contact with
his brain. Besides, Pleakley should have had another twenty years,
twenty at least. He was only what the humans would have called "mid
life".
.......Pleakley had started to lose weight. He'd never been exactly
meaty to begin with, but after a week or two of nerves Pleakley went
on with his daily routine as though blithely unaware of the fact,
and maybe that façade of normalcy had lulled Jumba's brain into
believing it really was alright. He'd started sleeping too long and
letting the garden go to weed, and when he caught him vomiting blood
behind the house he'd forced him to sit through an examination.
It hadn't taken a genius to translate the computer readouts.
(Terminal
Terminal
Terminal
Terminal
Terminal—)
Pleakley's body wasn't perfectly suited to earth, there were
chemical compounds it couldn't break down as fast as humans do. It
tried, but over years and years it began to back up in his system,
poisoning him.
(terminal)
It was a compatibility automatically tested for when a species
colonizes another planet, but Pleakley hadn't been sent here to
colonize, he'd only been sent on a mission. He had not been
intended for long term exposure.
(terminal)
If it had been caught early it could have been filtered out before
major tissue damage began. Before organ failure. Before living rot.
(terminal)
If Pleakley had--
(terminal)
If Pleakley had told him—
(terminal...)
if...
if...
if...
(terminal)
..........
..............
(He hadn't known.)
(Pleakley hadn't known.)
.........................................
His condition began to deteriorate rapidly after that. Pleakley
became bedridden in only a week, hot with fever and blood purge as
his body tried to get rid of the toxins. Jumba, unable to deal with
anyone else's pain but his own, told the rest of the family Pleakley
wasn't around because he was sick'. He just had a cold, nothing to
worry about, really, he'd be up and about again in no time. He
wasn't stupid enough to believe it himself. He didn't think Stitch
and David were, either, but no one called his bluff.
The girls picked flowers and brought them over to the house. They
looked like Technicolor vultures sitting over his bed, their shapes
lost in the darkened room, their ribbons tripping down over the
shelf like claws. Pleakley looked so small in that massive bed
alone. He thought Lilo understood, when she saw him, that this was
not a simple cold, though Nani's daughter was so beautifully
oblivious. She climbed onto the mattress and laughingly tried to
poke him awake with a viciousness even Jumba would be hard pressed
to master. Nani retrieved her before Jumba had to.
After that everyone began to brace themselves, it seemed. In human
movies Jumba had seen this was always the time everyone came
together, had heartfelt talks with the dying, and smoothed
everything over so neatly that when the real event occurred it was
some sort of uplifting, magical moment. It never really happened
that way. Jumba could feel the walls going up, self defense coming
to the forefront now that danger had approached him. In Pleakley's
rare moments of lucidity there were no heartfelt confessions, no
melodrama, just light conversation and long, painful pauses. He
distanced himself artfully.
It didn't hurt as much as giving in. After all, he was the one who
had to survive, not Pleakley.
One morning, after a night of raging fever, thickening blood, and
blindness that left him groping for help in an empty room, Pleakley
simply got up and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. He looked
like hell. He wasn't cold, he wasn't hungry, he said he wasn't even
in pain, and Jumba stood in the door utterly dumbfounded. Pleakley
made hotcakes and made Jumba sit down to eat them, his regular
fussing self.
Jumba knew the loud and oblivious voice of Hope was wrong. Pleakley
wasn't getting better. Pleakley COULDN'T get better. Pleakley's
insides consisted of black sludge rot and fragments of organs that
had stubbornly not died yet. Logic screamed at him that Hope was
wrong.
Hope's presence hurt more than its absence.
He had no idea what was going on in Pleakley's head, or if its
processes were even sensible at this point, but Pleakley insisted on
cleaning house and going out to weed the garden; Jumba had let
everything fall to ruins. Nani's daughter saw him out there tugging
at vines and tackled him with a bright squeal. She thought he was
alright. Nani and David were more cautious. They brought lunch
over, and watched Pleakley with wary expressions while they ate,
very much aware that if Pleakley was indeed recovering he should be
ravenous, not politely refusing food.
David offered to stay the night but Pleakley turned him out.
Pleakley seemed to have other plans. They involved cooking an
elaborate dinner, eating it by firelight on the backporch, and
dragging Jumba to the bedroom for an attempted seduction by a man
who had no body left to seduce with.
Jumba was crying by the time they were finished. Pleakley lay on
his chest and whispered. "It's okay. It's okay..."
He fell asleep.
(terminal)
(terminal)
(terminal)
......
.............
The next morning, Pleakley was dead in his arms.
....
....
....David came by on his lunch break to see how they were doing.
Jumba was sitting on the front porch, mindlessly botching up the
circuitry on his latest feat of Evil Geniusing' and not caring.
David hadn't even needed to go inside to understand what had
happened. He'd simply called his boss, told him there was a family
emergency, and waited there on the porch with him until Nani got
home, five hours later.
Someone must have called Pleakley's family that night. Jumba
didn't. He was asleep on the couch, the Dick Van Dyke Show playing
in mute black and white on the television screen, when Pixley and
Bertley showed up on his doorstep. Pixley was angry. Jumba was
angrier. Nani was the one who came and diffused it all by dragging
them away for the night.
Events progressed with or without Jumba's consent or participation.
He didn't remember the humans trying to convince Pixley Pleakley to
let the funeral be held on Earth. He didn't remember Lilo dragging
out the photographs to prove their claim; he'd been there, and he'd
been awake, but some very vital part of him was not paying attention.
(Pleakley was )
(terminal)
Then somehow they were building the pyre.
The sun was sitting at a heavy angle, and it felt like it might be
sunset. The sky was turning red. Jumba was standing by the jagged
stones that formed the tidepools, a weightless thing wrapped in bed
linens in his arms, and feeling like he hadn't ever slept. The
beach was blocked on all sides (a favor from Cobra Bubbles, he'd
learn eventually) and a squared mound of green wood was rising on
the sand.
"You can put him down now." Pixley was insisting softly. Jumba
did. The mound continued rising up around him.
David was there with a tiki torch. Nani held her daughter. Lilo
stood by with a boy Jumba had never seen and Stitch was somewhere
near his feet, waiting. The plorginarians fidgeted the green wood
so it covered the shroud completely and Pixley started talking. He
didn't know what she said.
They burned him.
The ritual lasted the whole night, and the rest of it was wordless.
They watched the flames, then they watched the embers, then they
watched nothing. Nani's daughter cried herself to sleep on her
mother's lap early, and Lilo stayed with her boy. Stitch, for some
reason, stayed with Jumba. He'd felt the heat of his fur against
his leg as night breezes came through and began to lift away
fragments of Pleakley.
The sun came up.
An exhausted Pixley had put her hands in the ashes. "An end to
tears." She said solemnly, swiping the ash across Lilo's cheeks. It
was to be only happy times, now, only fond memories. When they
looked back on Pleakley after this night not a tear was to be shed
lest it dishonor the memory of ash on their faces.
Nani took it with tired, blackened eyes; it wasn't a human ritual,
but it was the only one they had. David allowed it solemnly, and
their daughter fidgeted in her sleep as Pixley painted ash over the
bridge of her reddened nose. Stitch was dusted under his eyes.
They didn't try to smudge Jumba. Pixley was scared of him.
Besides, he hadn't cried.
Jumba didn't remember getting back to the house, or climbing onto
the sofa and going to sleep, the television turned on behind closed
blinds to give a light play across the ceiling. But he did know
that he woke up there, stiff, cramped, and numb. He hurt but it was
a drugged hurt, like a dentist's drill after the anesthetic set in;
it was more knowing he should be in pain than anything. He couldn't
go back to that room, with the bed stripped down for a death
shroud. He couldn't see Pleakley's disguises' lined up in the open
closet.
Sometimes, he could barely breathe.
The humans brought him food, heavy foods like casseroles and turkey
and bread, and he didn't have to cook for some days. David brought
six packs of beer now and then. But after the girls drifted away
and Lilo forgot him entirely, Stitch came over every morning, and
sat on the back of the sofa quietly while Jumba watched daytime
soaps with the volume turned up. He hated daytime soaps.
David was the one who finally cracked the man. Jumba had settled in
for a month of silent apathy before the human came over with two
cases of cheap beer weighing his arms down. He sat with Jumba at
the kitchen table and didn't have to encourage him to drink; Jumba
took care of that part all by himself, downing can after can while
he complained sporadically about television and the state of the
living room. Jumba's bulk was massive and his liquor consumption
was bigger, so David did not even try to match him, just sat there
calmly as he waited for something to happen.
Before he was too drunk to stand, Jumba made a casual comment about
having to learn to do the dishes, and something snapped under the
liquor. He'd started crying, harsh, dangerous sobs of a man who
doesn't do this sort of thing. David just let him, and drank his
beer.
Breaking let things get better. Eventually. The humans started
making a point to include him in everything, some weird, misplaced
familial guilt driving them from behind. It was a long time before
he could even attempt to sleep on his bed again--
(his, singular)
--instead of on the sofa. It took his several tries to sleep the
night.
Things drifted after that; he was unfocused, and time seemed to skip
by at any pace. Nani had more children. Lilo moved out. Families
grew and multiplied and eventually began to die off.
Nani went first.
David wouldn't follow her for a long, long time.
The passing of generations shifted focus back to normal life.
Aliens were once again imaginary, there were no such things as
mutants, and Lilo's daughter came back from Honolulu to present the
family with her little girl. The child started screaming the moment
it saw Jumba and his four eyes. That seemed to seal it; he was no
longer a part of this family.
When Lilo died, Stitch found himself in much the same predicament.
He was a little too strange, a little too abnormal, and if time does
nothing else it filters out the extraordinary. He spent a few weeks
living in Lilo's granddaughter's apartment, exiled to a cardboard
box in the laundry room, before dragging himself to Jumba's house
with his ears on the ground and the antiquated Scrump in a
pillowcase. Sometimes, Jumba still caught him holding it.
With Lilo's death, the government stipend that funded Jumba's
existence disappeared. Cobra Bubbles was long dead and so was his
work, and one month the checks simply stopped coming. Jumba started
submitting scientific material to private companies, nothing
advanced, just a step up from what the humans were doing on their
own. He refused to meet with them but they wanted his work badly
enough they hired him anyway, despite his behavior (the story of his
life). They sent money, Jumba reciprocated every now and then with
a gadget or computer program, and home delivery took over the rest
of life's essentials.
The city bled out. Lilo's house was demolished to make way for a
newer building, in better condition, and Jumba built a wall around
his property to keep it out. The garden had long since gone feral.
Stitch followed it. Jumba, feeling somehow more surreal than he
ever had, spent his days in sedentary consumption, watching
television, and writing rude letters to scientific journals.
His existence had become a neighborhood spook story.
The sole variation of his days had come once, several years ago,
when his ex wife called him on the communicator. Her son had gone
away to college and she didn't know what to do with herself, so she
might as well start catching up on old acquaintances. Jumba had
stared blankly at the screen, like he was looking into another
world, and he thought just maybe he was. His life was too long ago,
especially his Kweltekwaanian life. That anything he knew back then
should still be the same, when everything here was so different?
The woman was apparently strongly affected by the sight of her
exiled ex husband, a few hundred pounds and a few dozen heartbreaks
worse for wear, bursting into tears. She came immediately.
The Jadwiga he'd known never cared about anyone, but when she came
through the door and saw him sitting there, he could see that she
pitied him immediately. It was humiliating. What was worse was
that he needed her, that she was the only one for such a very long
time with arms big enough to hold him, and he'd needed her to do it.
Jadwiga called the Federation Council and appealed to them to
rescind their ruling. Let Jumba come back home to Kweltekwaan,
she'd said. He's learned his lesson. He won't do it again.
However, while enough time had passed for the Earth to forget about
him, it wasn't nearly enough time for the galaxy. Her requests were
denied.
Jadwiga decided she could stay there, instead.
Jumba needed somebody, that much was obvious, and with her son gone
was there a better project? Jumba kept her busy. There was a house
that needed made livable, a garden that needed tamed, and a man that
needed shaken out of his pit. She dove into it with so much
enthusiasm, anyone could see it wouldn't last. And it didn't.
Jadwiga was looking to play a quick game of house to distract
herself, and Jumba was not capable of playing. It had been too long
since he'd felt anything but dead.
It became obvious after a month or two that Jumba was not going to
snap out of it because of a cooked breakfast every morning and a
clean and tidy living room. Jadwiga lost interest. And, after a
few half hearted attempts to make him angry, she left quietly and
without a note.
Just like the first time.
The house went back to shambles. The garden went back to weed.
Jumba went back to eating.
"So this is what it is being like to outlive yourself." Jumba said
dully, staring into the dust covered leaves.
On the steps of the collapsed porch, 626 was beginning to fall
asleep. He pushed an eye open and regarded Jumba blankly.
"Never mind." Jumba said.
626 sighed and sat up, stretching his spine until it popped. He put
one wide ear against Jumba's side and listened for a few moments.
th-thump...th-thump...th-thump...th-thump...
"Heart slow." He announced, like a doctor making a diagnosis, though
it was a bit of an overstatement. Jumba's heart was never quite
slow, anymore. Jumba patted him mindlessly on the head.
"I'm going back in." he said, and started to stand; quite an effort,
at his size. "Watch for little girls, no?"
"Ih."
Stitch wiggled over to the middle of the steps, lay down, and
listened. The door creaked shut behind him and he heard Jumba's
footsteps making their slow and laborious way to the sofa.
The television clicked on.
Sighing, Stitch grumbled to himself, closed his eyes, and slept.