bairnsidhe

“So,” began Tamati, leaning on the fence post.  His rough hands were encased in thick canvass gloves, and his belt was loaded with trowels, spades, hand-rakes, blade-edged scoops, and hori-hori knives.  “Where do you want me?”

“Um,” Dacia said, pushing dark hair out of her face with the back of a dirty hand.  “You do realize I asked you to come help me garden, not bury my ex, right?”

“You’re my friend, taku tuahine,” Tamati said, walking over and pulling back her hair into a sweat band printed in brown and tan with lizards and snakes.  “That means when you call and ask me if you can borrow a shovel, I don’t ask why, I come dressed to dig.  Now where do you want me?”

“Um, over there,” Dacia said, pointing to the dry patch by the stone border wall.  “It’s way too hard for me to get anything into, but I wanted to plant these flowering thyme at the edge of Zita’s herb garden.  They’re drought resistant.”

“Why do I feel like you memorized that phrase, Tuahine?”

“I did,” she admitted, smiling up at her large former minion.  She was proud he’d gone on to bigger things, but she missed his dry sense of humor.  “I’m not the plant person, I like darkness.  Zita likes them, and I like that she cooks with them.”

“Look at you, settling down and finding a wife who cooks,” Tamati teased as he placed his hands on the dirt she wanted turned up.  His voice bounced strangely, like he was in a cave, and he began singing his haka for moving the earth.  She’d asked him once, he said it was a song about Rangahore, the third wife of Tane, who gave birth to a stone, and all the people who came from that stone.  She’d looked it up once, and the myth didn’t have anything about people from the stone, but rocks treated him like family, so she figured it was sort of like how Faustus never mentioned the devil you deal with having a fondness for vanilla ice cream and sleeping on top of a microwave.

“We’re not married,” she told him as he stood, and handed over the basket of plants.  “We’re just dating.  Besides, five fights would break out at the reception if we did.”

“Oh?”

“Shit,” Dacia hissed wincing.  She hadn’t meant to out Zita.  She knew how hard her girlfriend worked to keep the two sides separate.  “Um… how much to forget I said anything?”

“Tuahine,” Tamati said sternly, “if someone would fight at your wedding, I want to know why, because all I can think is your many very dangerous friends wouldn’t like your woman.  I’m not letting you stay in another bad relationship.  I saw what Shelly did to you.”

“Zita’s not abusive!” Dacia gasped.  “She’s the least horrible person ever!  She’s sickeningly nice and kind and she rescues kittens from trees and helps old ladies cross the street.  It’s freakish, but it’s not abusive.”

“Tuahine,” Tamati responded, reaching for her, only to be tackled by a flying blur of white.

“Don’t you touch her, Tunnel Vision!” Quest declared loudly, hands on her hips.  Tamati was flat on his back, which Dacia could have told her was never where you wanted him when fighting.  She saw the huge, destructive fight play out in her head, the months of patching Zita back together after the collateral damage was cleaned up, the awkward revelations, all of it.  Not worth it, she decided.

“No!” she shouted.  “Get your technologically enabled ass down here this instant and apologize to my guest.”

“What?” Quest said, tilting her head.

“What?” Tamati said, sitting up to look at Quest landing and Dacia glaring.

“Tamati, meet Zita,” Dacia said.  “Zita, Tamati.  I like you both, so play nice, and no hitting in the garden.  There’s a boom-room in the basement if you have to.”

“Tuahine, she’s a superhera,” Tamati said at the exact same time Quest blurted “but he’s a supervillain!”

“Honey, so am I,” Daica told her girlfriend.  “You knew that when you asked me out the first time, awkward and badly worded though it was.  You knew that when you asked me to move in.  You knew that last night when you bribed me not to rob a bank with a date night.  Why is it strange to you that I know other villains?”

“Wait, what?” Tamati said again, blinking.  “So you two are… you know, about each other?”

“Eh, we make it work,” Quest said, tapping her privacy watch and erasing any recordings of the past few minutes before hitting another button and letting her super suit fade back into a jogging outfit.  “Hi, I’m Zita, and I think we got off on the wrong foot.  If you aren’t here to attack my girlfriend in the sunlight, would you like to stay for dinner?  Mi Abuela made a few coolers worth of tamales, tacos, and burritos for my nephew’s ballgame, but it was canceled due to mutagens, and I’m the family metabolism, so we have homemade Mexican tonight.”

“Sounds good,” Tamati said.  “I used to work for Dacia, and if you’re not abusing her or trying to change her, I’d love a tamale.”

“I’d prefer she stop taking stupid risks,” Zita said with a dry look at Dacia, “but other than that, I wouldn’t change her for the world.”

“I feel a great disturbance in the Force,” Dacia muttered and helped her former minion up out of the hole his body had made.  “At least there’s room now for roses.”

<^>

Tamati (Tunnel Vision) is a Maori tribal member who has geokinesis.  He attributes his powers to being descended from one of the unsuccessful marriages of Tane, the Maori creation god.  He used to work as Dacia’s minion, but graduated from her version of journeyman-villain-school and went on to have his own successful career being REALLY ANNOYING to people who try to make money despoiling nature.  He still considers her to be a friend closer than family, and it shows in his name for her.  Tuahine means “sister”, but the usual inalienable possessive for birth-kin is “toku” and he uses the alienable possessive because she chooses to remain his family, and he doesn’t take that for granted.

Here he is preparing for a demonstration haka at the Polynesian Cultural Center, his day-job: