Birthday drabbles part 7: *EDITED* PART 2
With Noel’s elated yell came screeching and the flapping of large wings above them. Ceithin really hoped they were just birds. He crouched down low again, fighting off the urge to cover his hair with his hands and lifted the hood of his hoodie instead. “Shut up and come on. The sooner we get this fucking bird, the better.”
They crept their way further along, trusting in their inner compasses to guide them -that and the signposts. They would have preferred to keep off of the paths in case some zoo-keeper came to check on the animals, but for obvious reasons they were more willing to take that risk than to find alternate routes.
“This place is fucking creepy at night.” A loud hiss coming from their left seemed to confirm Noel’s statement. “I’m glad we decided not to go visit the monkeys.”
Ceithin was going to correct Noel’s statement and then say something mildly insulting to him, but something else very strange happened and forced both men to panic.
A polyphonic version of the Marseillaise began to play loudly and made both men jump out of their skins, the sound echoing out into the night, shrill and irritating and utterly perfect for giving their position away to anyone who might have been guarding the zoo and/or to any animals which may have been groggy from being woken and hungry for a midnight snack.
When Ceithin realised that it was his phone blasting out the damnable tune he fumbled through his jeans pocket like a teen boy who’d been told by a girl that she’d flash him a boob for a few quid. “Shut up! Shut the hell up!”
“What. The fuck. Is that?” Noel sounded like they’d just stepped into a pit full of dangerous beasts, his voice low and extremely careful.
When Ceithin finally managed to whip out his phone Noel’s eyes bulged. With reflexes to rival a cat on performance enhancing drugs, he ripped it out of Ceithin’s hands and lifted it into the air, ready to throw it down and smash it into tiny little pieces. He barely missed out on his chance as Ceithin recovered quickly and caught his hand, taking his phone back with equal force.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Noel was not done fighting. He pushed against Ceithin and reached out for the phone, trying his best to snatch it away again, the ringtone teasing him mercilessly as he grappled with Ceithin for possession. “Get rid of that thing! It has to be destroyed!” He yelled into the night, yet again forgetting about their need for stealth. “Your phone’s been tainted! It’s been tainted by that poncy wanker’s national anthem. It speaks of revolution! It makes them think they’ve fucking won wars!”
With a hard shove, Ceithin managed to push Noel far away enough from him to actually answer the call. “Hello?”
“Where the hell are you? And where’s Noel? I’m stuck trying to handle the fucking woman repellent on my own.” Zach’s annoyed voice came out loud enough that Noel could hear the conversation too. “I swear, I’m going to fucking leave him in the street if he doesn’t shut up soon! Hey! Get the fuck off my-”
Jared’s drunken slur cut through. “I’m not a fffucking replenant!” He yelled. “All you’re fffucking beer’s toxic. I miss CALIFORNIA! Where the hell’s your fucking sun?!”
Ceithin wasn’t really in the mood to try and deal with the situation. “Go back to Brunel Hall Jared, and get to bed.”
“No! We have to watch Anchorman!”
Before Ceithin could reply Zach had stolen his phone back. “Where are you?”
“The zoo of course.” Noel said loudly, pressing himself against Ceithin so that he could be heard.
Ceithin pushed him away again and gestured around himself to indicate where his personal bubble was. Noel flipped him off.
“You’re what?!” Zach burst into laughter. “I thought you’d just gone to piss! I wasn’t fucking serious! I didn’t think you’d actually be stupid enough to try and steal a penguin!”
Ceithin’s jaw tightened visibly as anger flooded his veins. Zach had spent most of the night insulting him and goading him into doing it. More than anything he was infuriated that Zach hadn’t taken this seriously since there was meant to be a reward for doing it -namely Zach actually paying back some of the mounds of cash that he had borrowed from Ceithin. “Fuck you. You still owe me fifty quid.” He hung up the phone and looked at Noel with a steely determination usually reserved for exams, rugby matches and eating anything which was rated with more than one-and-a-half chilli peppers on its container. “Let’s do this.” He stated and started walking towards the Penguin Cave.
This time it was Noel who was ready to give up and go home. He stood resolutely with his arms crossed. “Fuck that. You’ve jinxed the entire operation.”
Ceithin swivelled around and stared. “What?”
Noel almost lost his nerve, but the darkness lessened the effect of Ceithin’s intimidation since he couldn’t really see the glare he was being given. In fact, all he could really make out was white hair -so he held his conviction. “That- that fucking ring tone. We might as well abandon the whole fucking thing.”
Ceithin sighed, despite not being completely indifferent about superstition himself, he still thought that sometimes Noel’s beliefs bordered on being absolutely ridiculous. “I didn’t put the anthem on, Zach did.” For some reason, Ceithin thought that that statement would help.
Noel shrugged, his arms still crossed. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Stop being such a wimp.” With that he left, determined to carry out his mission, even on his own.
Faced with the possibility of being alone in a zoo at the dead of night Noel caved almost immediately and chased after Ceithin. “You should be fucking grateful that I care enough about your wellbeing that I’m risking mine.”
The two of them followed the windy paths for another few minutes, losing count of where they had turned left and right and getting thoroughly lost. Eventually the somehow managed to find themselves at the wall on the opposite end from where they climbed in, and there, through sheer dumb luck, was exactly what they had been looking for.
“Well, shit. If we’d just climbed in on this fucking side we would have actually ended up inside the penguin area.” Noel seemed thoroughly put out.
They stood in front of the ‘Penguin Cave’ which was actually a medium sized pond with a blue and white ‘ice cave’ -most likely made of plastic- against the wall of the zoo boundary at the back. Separating them from the pond and cave was a low wall and easily jumpable ditch, and then a pebbly shore. It was quite a nice little place and just as Ceithin remembered it from his childhood, although like all things, now that he was bigger, the whole enclosure looked much smaller than it had all those years ago.
“Look at them all!” Noel waved his hand at some of the sleeping birds. “Just look at them! Sleeping there, with their easy little fucking lives. What do they do all day? Waddle and eat fish and swim around and pass eggs to each other! They have no idea what we went through to get here. Little black and white bastards.”
To Ceithin they looked like dark bowling pins.
“And they’re fat! Ha!”
“Is there a reason you’ve been playing a game of one-upmanship with a bunch of animals tonight?”
Noel looked at Ceithin and smiled. “Well you’ve got to. You have to let them know who’s boss. Top of the food chain and all that.”
“Of course.” With that Ceithin stood on the low barrier and hopped onto the gravel, making his way towards the steppingstones of the pond.
“Where are you going?!” Noel hissed, pulling on Ceithin’s navy hoodie.
“What does it look like?” He whispered back equally fiercely. “We didn’t come all this way just to stand and look at them from a distance.” He tugged his arm away. “Come on!”
“No.” once again, Noel was choosing to be stubborn.
“Don’t be so stupid. What happened to your ‘sense of loyalty’ and all that? This is what we came here for.”
“I never said anything about my fucking loyalty. I was talking about yours.” He smirked like he had just made a winning point.
Now Ceithin was getting frustrated. He’d been pulling Noel along the entire operation. “Then why the hell did you volunteer to come with me then?”
Noel didn’t answer and refused to budge, watching and shaking his head in an obstinate ‘no’. “I’m not fucking doing it. No way. Just- no. Not a fucking chance. Not after what happened with the fucking phone. It was a sign.”
Ceithin ignored him and crept closer to a group of sleeping birds.
After a few moments of hesitant movements to follow and then re-crossing his arms as he decided against it, Noel, predictably, gave in. To his own annoyance he knew that no matter how doomed the whole thing was, he simply could not leave Ceithin to complete the mission alone. It just wasn’t cricket. “Alright, fucking fine.” It didn’t mean that he liked it though. “But if we get fucking arrested I’m saying you fucking kidnapped me and forced me into it.” He hopped over the barrier as well and made his way to where Ceithin was now standing: a few feet away from the small group of penguins. The first thing he noticed was the intense smell of fish. “Urgh! That stench is repulsive.”
Ceithin stared at the little penguins sleeping with their heads tucked underneath their wings. “It is quite pungent, isn’t it? I didn’t expect that.”
“Do we just steal one?” Noel asked, his face scrunched in disgust. “Where do we put it? We didn’t even bring a bag with us.”
“I don’t know yet. Let me think.”
As Noel waited he took the opportunity to study one of them up close. “Do you know who I feel like right at this precise moment in time?” He asked.
“I don’t care. Shut up for a second and please let me think.”
Upon being snapped at, Noel decided that Ceithin could be unusually moody on drunken expeditions and he made a mental note to not go on another one with him. Especially when he had been forbidden from going to visit the monkeys -which were arguably the most interesting animals in the entire zoo. He answered own question. “Edward Norton in Fight Club. I swear, I’m expecting one of these little fuckers to wake up and tell me to slide.”
He was given a “Keep your voice down” as a response, further confirming his opinion of Ceithin.
With nothing better to do than to keep watching the sleeping penguins and wait, his mind started to replay the scene from Fight Club in his head. He reached out to touch the penguin, wondering if they felt as glossy as they looked. “Just. Slide.” He whispered.
“Look, maybe we shouldn’t actually take one, we might end up harming it, or traumatising it somehow…Well, definitely the latter if Zach has anything to do with it.”
Ceithin’s sudden change of heart upon actually seeing the animals didn’t seem to register with Noel -as he tentatively reached to touch the top of one of the penguins’ head, hypnotised by the rhythmic, rapid breathing of the little animal, he found that he wasn’t nearly in as much control of his own body as he had believed to be, accidentally poking, hard, instead of gently stroking it with his finger.
Ceithin only realised too late what Noel was doing and yelled out for him to stop. “Don’t! You’ll wake them up!”
The second the penguin opened its beady little black eye and lifted up its slightly slimy head, Noel no longer found himself so entranced.
Instead, he felt something wholly unexpected when facing a penguin who was not a character in DC Comics.
Fear.
The little creature scared the fuck out of him. “Uh oh” was all that managed to escape his lips before the penguin let loose in a dark flash of biting, bashing with surprisingly strong wings and screeching loud enough to wake its demonic little friends.
For years later there would be fierce debate on whether it was Ceithin’s yelling which caused the ensuing chaos or Noel’s rough awakening, but one thing was for sure: each man blamed the other.
“Oh my God!” Noel did the best he could to fight them off without hurting the flock which ganged up on him, hell bent in tearing him to shreds. “Arrrrrrgh! They pierce skin with their beaks!” He jerked back like he was spasming as they pecked away at his limbs mercilessly. “Shit! They’re fucking drawing blood! Mother fucking- Get it off of me! I’m being beaten to death by the wings of penguins!”
Between the screeching and their barrage of attacks, Ceithin, being a safe distance away and being completely ignored by the fishy little birds, somehow found the time to pull out his phone and take some photographs.
“GET AWAY!” Noel’s magnanimous yell was all he could do without punting one of them in the face. It seemed to work somewhat and the majority of the animals backed off, leaving Noel with very bruised legs and bloody forearms.
It also attracted attention. Ceithin noticed the flashlights and the sound of approaching footsteps running towards them. “Up the wall NOW! They’re coming!” Without waiting for Noel he ran towards the plastic ice cave and climbed it, hopping from the top to reach the wall’s ledge. He turned around and offered Noel a hand. “Come on you bell end!”
Noel looked at the birds as they stood wearily watching him from less than a few feet away as he limped towards the ice cave. Using Ceithin’s hand as a support he climbed up amid shouts from the zoo keepers to stop.
“Let’s get the fuck out of this fucking place. PENGUINS ARE FUCKING EVIL!”
Without waiting for an answer Noel and Ceithin dropped onto the other side and did their best to sprint like mad as far away as possible. They only stopped when Noel couldn’t breathe properly anymore.
“Hold on…” He puffed. “…Breather…required.”
Ceithin stopped next to him and bent down to rest his hands on his thighs as he took in heavy breaths. “I… I don’t think they followed us.” He stood up again to assess where they were. The road was mostly full of medium-sized semi detached houses and a few trees along the pavement. It was a residential area with no sign of cars or people. It took him a few seconds, but he recognised it as a street parallel to one of the main roads of Hoxtorn. “You ok?” He said with a frown when he noticed that Noel was holding his hand, blood still dripping out of it.
Noel nodded, still not quite able to speak, but grimaced. “One of those little fuckers bit me.” He said, “And then I made it worse by cutting myself climbing on that stupid ice cave.”
Ceithin reached over with concern and took Noel’s hand into his without asking. Grey eyes analysed the cut quickly. It was surprisingly long and deep and might possibly require a tetanus shot but he decided against mentioning the last part to Noel since he had a tendency of acting like a complete idiot when faced with a potential injection. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
Noel looked up quickly and knew exactly what Ceithin was thinking. “Fuck. No.”
“Noel-”
“No! I told you that fucking ring tone jinxed me! I am not- I’ll repeat that for fucking emphasis- not having any sharp fucking pointy pieces of fucking metal being fucking stabbed into my fucking arm by some overworked, underpaid, completely exhausted A and E nurse who only takes the graveyard shift because she’s bitter, lonely and stab-happy and more than willing to take out her fucking frustrations on a fucking student who was attacked by a fucking penguin! Fuck. No.” He would have found his own rant hilarious if he wasn’t too afraid of being forced into having a tetanus injection or having stitches (he’d had six stitches on his scalp once before from a rugby tackle, but those didn’t count because he had passed out before they’d begun any actual sewing).
“Noel!”
“Fuck.” He paused for effect, the blood oozing from his cut down his forearm without any notice. “No.”
“They’ll probably just give you some tablets and bandages.”
Noel shook his head. “You don’t know that.”
“So what do you intend to do?” Ceithin was running on reserve fuel now and the prospect of having to convince Noel almost made him want to give up and let the stupid man’s hand fall off. But Noel had stood by him through the entire fiasco instead of going home, so he thought he owed him something. “It’ll get infected and-”
“Or it might not!”
“Or,” Ceithin continued over Noel, “it might. Then you’re fucked and you know they’ll just want to shove more needles in you.”
Noel tried to flip him off, failing miserably when then pain in his hand throbbed too much. “Fuck you.” He said as an alternative to the hand gesture. “And it’s still no.”
Three and a half house later and they were lucky enough to have met with a doctor in the Accident and Emergency department. By the end of their wait they were both extremely grateful to have moved out of the waiting room which looked more like a halfway house for crack whores, druggies and gangsters than a room in a hospital.
As the doctor worked Noel was gripping his own leg with his free hand. Ceithin was sure that the force Noel was exerting on his thigh was cutting off circulation to the rest of his leg. His two-toned were not visible since they were shut as tightly as a steel trap, but his teeth were as he grimaced. All in all he reminded Ceithin of a ten year old girl watching a horror movie.
He also noticed that as the doctor sewed the tight little stitches he was doing his obvious best either not to laugh at Noel’s expression or not to throw up at the smell -Ceithin wasn’t sure which. It could well have been both.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor finally ventured, “But why do you smell so badly of fish? What happened?”
Noel’s eyes snapped open, but other than that, he sat completely rigid, obviously in no position to come up with something on the fly. His eyes darted towards Ceithin.
Ceithin sighed before giving the black haired doctor a small, less criminal story. “We were walking by the dumpster of a fish and chip shop.”
“We were walking by the dumpster of a fish and chip shop.” Noel mumbled, mirroring Ceithin’s words.
“And he was attacked by a fox.”
“I was attacked by a fox.”
The doctor thought it best not to ask any more questions.
They crept their way further along, trusting in their inner compasses to guide them -that and the signposts. They would have preferred to keep off of the paths in case some zoo-keeper came to check on the animals, but for obvious reasons they were more willing to take that risk than to find alternate routes.
“This place is fucking creepy at night.” A loud hiss coming from their left seemed to confirm Noel’s statement. “I’m glad we decided not to go visit the monkeys.”
Ceithin was going to correct Noel’s statement and then say something mildly insulting to him, but something else very strange happened and forced both men to panic.
A polyphonic version of the Marseillaise began to play loudly and made both men jump out of their skins, the sound echoing out into the night, shrill and irritating and utterly perfect for giving their position away to anyone who might have been guarding the zoo and/or to any animals which may have been groggy from being woken and hungry for a midnight snack.
When Ceithin realised that it was his phone blasting out the damnable tune he fumbled through his jeans pocket like a teen boy who’d been told by a girl that she’d flash him a boob for a few quid. “Shut up! Shut the hell up!”
“What. The fuck. Is that?” Noel sounded like they’d just stepped into a pit full of dangerous beasts, his voice low and extremely careful.
When Ceithin finally managed to whip out his phone Noel’s eyes bulged. With reflexes to rival a cat on performance enhancing drugs, he ripped it out of Ceithin’s hands and lifted it into the air, ready to throw it down and smash it into tiny little pieces. He barely missed out on his chance as Ceithin recovered quickly and caught his hand, taking his phone back with equal force.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
Noel was not done fighting. He pushed against Ceithin and reached out for the phone, trying his best to snatch it away again, the ringtone teasing him mercilessly as he grappled with Ceithin for possession. “Get rid of that thing! It has to be destroyed!” He yelled into the night, yet again forgetting about their need for stealth. “Your phone’s been tainted! It’s been tainted by that poncy wanker’s national anthem. It speaks of revolution! It makes them think they’ve fucking won wars!”
With a hard shove, Ceithin managed to push Noel far away enough from him to actually answer the call. “Hello?”
“Where the hell are you? And where’s Noel? I’m stuck trying to handle the fucking woman repellent on my own.” Zach’s annoyed voice came out loud enough that Noel could hear the conversation too. “I swear, I’m going to fucking leave him in the street if he doesn’t shut up soon! Hey! Get the fuck off my-”
Jared’s drunken slur cut through. “I’m not a fffucking replenant!” He yelled. “All you’re fffucking beer’s toxic. I miss CALIFORNIA! Where the hell’s your fucking sun?!”
Ceithin wasn’t really in the mood to try and deal with the situation. “Go back to Brunel Hall Jared, and get to bed.”
“No! We have to watch Anchorman!”
Before Ceithin could reply Zach had stolen his phone back. “Where are you?”
“The zoo of course.” Noel said loudly, pressing himself against Ceithin so that he could be heard.
Ceithin pushed him away again and gestured around himself to indicate where his personal bubble was. Noel flipped him off.
“You’re what?!” Zach burst into laughter. “I thought you’d just gone to piss! I wasn’t fucking serious! I didn’t think you’d actually be stupid enough to try and steal a penguin!”
Ceithin’s jaw tightened visibly as anger flooded his veins. Zach had spent most of the night insulting him and goading him into doing it. More than anything he was infuriated that Zach hadn’t taken this seriously since there was meant to be a reward for doing it -namely Zach actually paying back some of the mounds of cash that he had borrowed from Ceithin. “Fuck you. You still owe me fifty quid.” He hung up the phone and looked at Noel with a steely determination usually reserved for exams, rugby matches and eating anything which was rated with more than one-and-a-half chilli peppers on its container. “Let’s do this.” He stated and started walking towards the Penguin Cave.
This time it was Noel who was ready to give up and go home. He stood resolutely with his arms crossed. “Fuck that. You’ve jinxed the entire operation.”
Ceithin swivelled around and stared. “What?”
Noel almost lost his nerve, but the darkness lessened the effect of Ceithin’s intimidation since he couldn’t really see the glare he was being given. In fact, all he could really make out was white hair -so he held his conviction. “That- that fucking ring tone. We might as well abandon the whole fucking thing.”
Ceithin sighed, despite not being completely indifferent about superstition himself, he still thought that sometimes Noel’s beliefs bordered on being absolutely ridiculous. “I didn’t put the anthem on, Zach did.” For some reason, Ceithin thought that that statement would help.
Noel shrugged, his arms still crossed. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Stop being such a wimp.” With that he left, determined to carry out his mission, even on his own.
Faced with the possibility of being alone in a zoo at the dead of night Noel caved almost immediately and chased after Ceithin. “You should be fucking grateful that I care enough about your wellbeing that I’m risking mine.”
The two of them followed the windy paths for another few minutes, losing count of where they had turned left and right and getting thoroughly lost. Eventually the somehow managed to find themselves at the wall on the opposite end from where they climbed in, and there, through sheer dumb luck, was exactly what they had been looking for.
“Well, shit. If we’d just climbed in on this fucking side we would have actually ended up inside the penguin area.” Noel seemed thoroughly put out.
They stood in front of the ‘Penguin Cave’ which was actually a medium sized pond with a blue and white ‘ice cave’ -most likely made of plastic- against the wall of the zoo boundary at the back. Separating them from the pond and cave was a low wall and easily jumpable ditch, and then a pebbly shore. It was quite a nice little place and just as Ceithin remembered it from his childhood, although like all things, now that he was bigger, the whole enclosure looked much smaller than it had all those years ago.
“Look at them all!” Noel waved his hand at some of the sleeping birds. “Just look at them! Sleeping there, with their easy little fucking lives. What do they do all day? Waddle and eat fish and swim around and pass eggs to each other! They have no idea what we went through to get here. Little black and white bastards.”
To Ceithin they looked like dark bowling pins.
“And they’re fat! Ha!”
“Is there a reason you’ve been playing a game of one-upmanship with a bunch of animals tonight?”
Noel looked at Ceithin and smiled. “Well you’ve got to. You have to let them know who’s boss. Top of the food chain and all that.”
“Of course.” With that Ceithin stood on the low barrier and hopped onto the gravel, making his way towards the steppingstones of the pond.
“Where are you going?!” Noel hissed, pulling on Ceithin’s navy hoodie.
“What does it look like?” He whispered back equally fiercely. “We didn’t come all this way just to stand and look at them from a distance.” He tugged his arm away. “Come on!”
“No.” once again, Noel was choosing to be stubborn.
“Don’t be so stupid. What happened to your ‘sense of loyalty’ and all that? This is what we came here for.”
“I never said anything about my fucking loyalty. I was talking about yours.” He smirked like he had just made a winning point.
Now Ceithin was getting frustrated. He’d been pulling Noel along the entire operation. “Then why the hell did you volunteer to come with me then?”
Noel didn’t answer and refused to budge, watching and shaking his head in an obstinate ‘no’. “I’m not fucking doing it. No way. Just- no. Not a fucking chance. Not after what happened with the fucking phone. It was a sign.”
Ceithin ignored him and crept closer to a group of sleeping birds.
After a few moments of hesitant movements to follow and then re-crossing his arms as he decided against it, Noel, predictably, gave in. To his own annoyance he knew that no matter how doomed the whole thing was, he simply could not leave Ceithin to complete the mission alone. It just wasn’t cricket. “Alright, fucking fine.” It didn’t mean that he liked it though. “But if we get fucking arrested I’m saying you fucking kidnapped me and forced me into it.” He hopped over the barrier as well and made his way to where Ceithin was now standing: a few feet away from the small group of penguins. The first thing he noticed was the intense smell of fish. “Urgh! That stench is repulsive.”
Ceithin stared at the little penguins sleeping with their heads tucked underneath their wings. “It is quite pungent, isn’t it? I didn’t expect that.”
“Do we just steal one?” Noel asked, his face scrunched in disgust. “Where do we put it? We didn’t even bring a bag with us.”
“I don’t know yet. Let me think.”
As Noel waited he took the opportunity to study one of them up close. “Do you know who I feel like right at this precise moment in time?” He asked.
“I don’t care. Shut up for a second and please let me think.”
Upon being snapped at, Noel decided that Ceithin could be unusually moody on drunken expeditions and he made a mental note to not go on another one with him. Especially when he had been forbidden from going to visit the monkeys -which were arguably the most interesting animals in the entire zoo. He answered own question. “Edward Norton in Fight Club. I swear, I’m expecting one of these little fuckers to wake up and tell me to slide.”
He was given a “Keep your voice down” as a response, further confirming his opinion of Ceithin.
With nothing better to do than to keep watching the sleeping penguins and wait, his mind started to replay the scene from Fight Club in his head. He reached out to touch the penguin, wondering if they felt as glossy as they looked. “Just. Slide.” He whispered.
“Look, maybe we shouldn’t actually take one, we might end up harming it, or traumatising it somehow…Well, definitely the latter if Zach has anything to do with it.”
Ceithin’s sudden change of heart upon actually seeing the animals didn’t seem to register with Noel -as he tentatively reached to touch the top of one of the penguins’ head, hypnotised by the rhythmic, rapid breathing of the little animal, he found that he wasn’t nearly in as much control of his own body as he had believed to be, accidentally poking, hard, instead of gently stroking it with his finger.
Ceithin only realised too late what Noel was doing and yelled out for him to stop. “Don’t! You’ll wake them up!”
The second the penguin opened its beady little black eye and lifted up its slightly slimy head, Noel no longer found himself so entranced.
Instead, he felt something wholly unexpected when facing a penguin who was not a character in DC Comics.
Fear.
The little creature scared the fuck out of him. “Uh oh” was all that managed to escape his lips before the penguin let loose in a dark flash of biting, bashing with surprisingly strong wings and screeching loud enough to wake its demonic little friends.
For years later there would be fierce debate on whether it was Ceithin’s yelling which caused the ensuing chaos or Noel’s rough awakening, but one thing was for sure: each man blamed the other.
“Oh my God!” Noel did the best he could to fight them off without hurting the flock which ganged up on him, hell bent in tearing him to shreds. “Arrrrrrgh! They pierce skin with their beaks!” He jerked back like he was spasming as they pecked away at his limbs mercilessly. “Shit! They’re fucking drawing blood! Mother fucking- Get it off of me! I’m being beaten to death by the wings of penguins!”
Between the screeching and their barrage of attacks, Ceithin, being a safe distance away and being completely ignored by the fishy little birds, somehow found the time to pull out his phone and take some photographs.
“GET AWAY!” Noel’s magnanimous yell was all he could do without punting one of them in the face. It seemed to work somewhat and the majority of the animals backed off, leaving Noel with very bruised legs and bloody forearms.
It also attracted attention. Ceithin noticed the flashlights and the sound of approaching footsteps running towards them. “Up the wall NOW! They’re coming!” Without waiting for Noel he ran towards the plastic ice cave and climbed it, hopping from the top to reach the wall’s ledge. He turned around and offered Noel a hand. “Come on you bell end!”
Noel looked at the birds as they stood wearily watching him from less than a few feet away as he limped towards the ice cave. Using Ceithin’s hand as a support he climbed up amid shouts from the zoo keepers to stop.
“Let’s get the fuck out of this fucking place. PENGUINS ARE FUCKING EVIL!”
Without waiting for an answer Noel and Ceithin dropped onto the other side and did their best to sprint like mad as far away as possible. They only stopped when Noel couldn’t breathe properly anymore.
“Hold on…” He puffed. “…Breather…required.”
Ceithin stopped next to him and bent down to rest his hands on his thighs as he took in heavy breaths. “I… I don’t think they followed us.” He stood up again to assess where they were. The road was mostly full of medium-sized semi detached houses and a few trees along the pavement. It was a residential area with no sign of cars or people. It took him a few seconds, but he recognised it as a street parallel to one of the main roads of Hoxtorn. “You ok?” He said with a frown when he noticed that Noel was holding his hand, blood still dripping out of it.
Noel nodded, still not quite able to speak, but grimaced. “One of those little fuckers bit me.” He said, “And then I made it worse by cutting myself climbing on that stupid ice cave.”
Ceithin reached over with concern and took Noel’s hand into his without asking. Grey eyes analysed the cut quickly. It was surprisingly long and deep and might possibly require a tetanus shot but he decided against mentioning the last part to Noel since he had a tendency of acting like a complete idiot when faced with a potential injection. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
Noel looked up quickly and knew exactly what Ceithin was thinking. “Fuck. No.”
“Noel-”
“No! I told you that fucking ring tone jinxed me! I am not- I’ll repeat that for fucking emphasis- not having any sharp fucking pointy pieces of fucking metal being fucking stabbed into my fucking arm by some overworked, underpaid, completely exhausted A and E nurse who only takes the graveyard shift because she’s bitter, lonely and stab-happy and more than willing to take out her fucking frustrations on a fucking student who was attacked by a fucking penguin! Fuck. No.” He would have found his own rant hilarious if he wasn’t too afraid of being forced into having a tetanus injection or having stitches (he’d had six stitches on his scalp once before from a rugby tackle, but those didn’t count because he had passed out before they’d begun any actual sewing).
“Noel!”
“Fuck.” He paused for effect, the blood oozing from his cut down his forearm without any notice. “No.”
“They’ll probably just give you some tablets and bandages.”
Noel shook his head. “You don’t know that.”
“So what do you intend to do?” Ceithin was running on reserve fuel now and the prospect of having to convince Noel almost made him want to give up and let the stupid man’s hand fall off. But Noel had stood by him through the entire fiasco instead of going home, so he thought he owed him something. “It’ll get infected and-”
“Or it might not!”
“Or,” Ceithin continued over Noel, “it might. Then you’re fucked and you know they’ll just want to shove more needles in you.”
Noel tried to flip him off, failing miserably when then pain in his hand throbbed too much. “Fuck you.” He said as an alternative to the hand gesture. “And it’s still no.”
Three and a half house later and they were lucky enough to have met with a doctor in the Accident and Emergency department. By the end of their wait they were both extremely grateful to have moved out of the waiting room which looked more like a halfway house for crack whores, druggies and gangsters than a room in a hospital.
As the doctor worked Noel was gripping his own leg with his free hand. Ceithin was sure that the force Noel was exerting on his thigh was cutting off circulation to the rest of his leg. His two-toned were not visible since they were shut as tightly as a steel trap, but his teeth were as he grimaced. All in all he reminded Ceithin of a ten year old girl watching a horror movie.
He also noticed that as the doctor sewed the tight little stitches he was doing his obvious best either not to laugh at Noel’s expression or not to throw up at the smell -Ceithin wasn’t sure which. It could well have been both.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor finally ventured, “But why do you smell so badly of fish? What happened?”
Noel’s eyes snapped open, but other than that, he sat completely rigid, obviously in no position to come up with something on the fly. His eyes darted towards Ceithin.
Ceithin sighed before giving the black haired doctor a small, less criminal story. “We were walking by the dumpster of a fish and chip shop.”
“We were walking by the dumpster of a fish and chip shop.” Noel mumbled, mirroring Ceithin’s words.
“And he was attacked by a fox.”
“I was attacked by a fox.”
The doctor thought it best not to ask any more questions.