A Very Shy Snail

More Otter Insanity

Part one of the ‘Henry/Martin otter fic o’doom’ can be found here - now for a more angsty bit *evil cackle*

Love Is Not Love Which Alters When it Otteration Finds- Part 2

Henry had been registered as Martin’s next of kin for several months at the time of his death and, in an absence of another emergency contact, the police had called Carolyn. She was in her office, grumbling to herself about ‘useless pilots’ when the phone call came.

Douglas and Arthur were in the portakabin, Arthur tossing a Braeburn and Douglas amusing himself by coming up with increasingly unlikely excuses which Martin might use when he finally arrived, no doubt with his face a shade of red to rival Arthur’s abused apple.

What he was certainly not expecting was for Carolyn to emerge from her office looking like she had just been forced to remarry Gordon. The small smile that had been playing across his lips vanished as he looked at her questioningly. “Douglas, a word. In my office.”

The funeral was a predictably depressing affair and the lump which had formed itself in Douglas’s throat as the coffin containing MJN’s late captain, hat and all, had disappeared behind the curtain to the tune of ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away’ showed no sign of dissipating. Damn.

Arthur, red eyed and inconsolable, had run out mid way through the ceremony. Now he was nowhere to be found and a search party of sorts had been sent out with Douglas at the helm. A horrid thought occurred to him as the group neared the river. Arthur had been upset, yes, but surely he wouldn’t have..?

Thankfully, his morbid thoughts stopped there as he spotted their elusive steward. He was about to call to him when he noticed something extremely peculiar indeed which caused him to enact what would have been an exceedingly comical double take had anyone been around to witness it. Fortunately he was alone with his imaginings, because surely he must be seeing things?

The closer he got, the more certain he was that Douglas Richardson, former ‘sky god’, had finally lost his mind. No matter how many times he blinked and shook his head, the image remained. Arthur, sat on the bank of the river, talking to two otters who were, to all intents and purposes, ‘talking’ back. Absurd!

Skip was brilliant… Skip’s boyfriend was brilliant… they couldn’t be dead! The very thought of not having them around just couldn’t be supported by Arthur’s unrealistically optimistic world-view. He had left part way through the funeral because he hadn’t been able to listen to the lies they’d been saying about Skip having gone to a better place. There was no place better than GERTI!

And his mum had told him that Martin was going to be ‘cremated’. And Arthur had looked that word up on the internet and gathered that that meant ‘really burnt’, like the pizza he had been cooking last week and had forgotten about for a couple of hours. But that was silly; Skip couldn’t fly a plane if he was all black and crispy. And he wouldn’t like for his hat to be like that either!

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. His eternal and all encompassing theory that ‘Douglas would make everything alright in the end’ seemed to have been justified once again. Though how Douglas had managed to turn Skip and Henry into otters was quite beyond him. This was even more brilliant than the time he had managed to land them in that really pretty field after GERTI’s electrics had failed.

When Arthur was little, one of his best friends had fallen out of a tree and hurt his back. He had been really sad about being a bit broken until Arthur had convinced him of all the reasons why wheelchairs were brilliant and they had come up with all sorts of new games that they could play.

This, to his mind, was just like that. It didn’t matter to him that Skip and Henry’s forms had changed. They would always be counted among the most brilliant and really really clever people that Arthur had known and he would always believe in them. Because that’s what friends do.