Confounded Hankering 7
Title: Epilogue
Pairing: ClayB ( Clay Bailey x JB )
Rating: PG
The ClayB . . . ends? Well, maybe this storyline, but here's more to tell and it will continue, don't worry.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7
Master Monk Guan glared up at the edifice that towered over him. He turned to look at the blonde that was mopping sweat from his brow.
“What?!” Clay demanded shortly.
The ancient monk’s mouth tightened. He had been personally training the Dragon of the Earth for a couple of months now. The young man had made great leaps and bounds in his skills both in Tai Chi and using his Earth powers.
His attitude, however, had steadily grown worse.
At the start, Clay had been a calm, hardworking youth that was simply being stubborn about girls. He would train with his fellow Dragons in the morning, then be sent away for private training with Master Monk Guan, who would do his utmost to exhaust the stubbornness out of the big Texan. It had been working quite well at first; Clay had simply been too worn out to think about doing so much as talking back.
However, Clay Bailey was a big boy; the exercise had started catching up with him. He no longer exhausted as easily as he had at first. He started losing the extra layer of fat and putting on muscle. He started keeping up with his tutor.
Guan had changed his focus, started concentrating on Clay’s Earth powers.
The Texan was already better than Guan expected and soaked up the extra tutoring like a sponge.
However, for all his improvements, Clay grew steadily angrier and angrier. He hid it well and Earth elementals had the patience of a rock, but Guan could feel the dark energy lurking.
It had just found an outlet.
Irritated by Clay’s surly attitude, Guan had ordered him to build monuments to his vices. The master teacher had ordered monoliths for Anger, Lust, and Gluttony.
He hadn’t counted on Clay’s skills in carving.
Instead of high stone blocks or stone circles to illustrate his faults, Guan was presented with three twenty foot tall statues of Golden Era Roman quality.
Gluttony was simply a huge table spread with the most delicious looking foods one could imagine. Clay had been put on a diet as well as worked to the point of dropping; so he was probably quite hungry.
Lust was a statue of a beautiful woman; it if that was truly what Clay’s paramour looked like, then it was no wonder he had been tempted. The beauty was naked except for a sheet she held coyly to her chest, but by the look in her agate eyes -- real agate; how deeply had the Earth Dragon delved to find it?-she was going to drop it at any moment and show her charms.
Anger was . . . well, anger was a statue of Clay kicking Guan’s ass.
Master Monk Guan turned towards his reluctant pupil, folding his arms sternly across his chest.
“Clay! Clay!!! A Shen Gong Wu has just gone active!” a voice cried.
Clay and Master Monk Guan looked up to see Dojo coiling towards them with the other three Xiaolin Dragons perched on his back.
“We’ve got Wu to grab, big guy!” Rai called. “Sorry, Master Monk Guan, we’ll bring him right back!”
Clay snorted. Without so much as a backwards glance, the Dragon of the Earth ran for Dojo as he touched down and flung himself aboard.
“Let’s get on outta here!” The big Texan cried, thumping his heels against Dojo’s flanks.
“Hey, ow, watch it!” The temple dragon groused.
Dojo lifted off again and was quickly soaring through the sky towards the newest Shen Gong Wu.
“Oh Clay, you missed my exposition on this new Wu!” Omi said, turning back towards his larger friend with scroll in hand. “It is called the Tesseract Hound and it can find anything you wish! Used with the Golden Tiger Claws, it can--,”
“That’s nice; I don’t care,” Clay stated flatly.
Ignoring the startled looks on his friend’s faces, the big cowboy laid back down on Dojo, pulling his hat down over his eyes and pinning it in place with his hand.
“Wake me up when we get there.”
The other three monks fell silent. Clay had been acting less and less like himself. The big cowboy had grown short and surly over the past two months. He snapped and snarled at least little provocation. Considering it took work to get Clay mad before, the monks weren’t exactly pleased with this new Dragon of the Earth.
“Whatever Master Monk Guan is trying to do, I don’t think it’s working,” Rai muttered.
“Master Monk Guan knows what he is doing!” Omi insisted hotly.
“I don’t know,” Kimiko opined. “Just because Clay has bad taste in women doesn’t mean you should try to put him off of all of them.”
“Why do you say he has bad taste in women? Johnny Betty Pecos has large breasts and a nice-“ Omi’s spectacularly sexist statement was cut off sharply as the pointed toe of a cowboy boot hit him in the ribs hard enough to take the breath from his lungs.
“Why don’t ya’ll shut up about my taste in women?” Clay inquired in what was not quite a snarl.
The other Dragons - three by title and one by species - obediantly shut up and wondered what the hell Master Monk Guan had done to break their quiet, sweet friend.
~~~~~
“We have triumphed over everyone, dear friend!”
“Da! Now both the Xiaolin monks AND Chase Young will have to-“
“Kick your collective ass?” Raimundo challenged.
Tubbimura and Vlad both looked up from the small dog-shaped statue before them. The Tesseract Hound Shen Gong Wu rested on the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. Dojo circled around the ancient stone work once, and then the Xiaolin dragons leapt down while their guardian dragon shrank down and slipped into Raimundo’s shirt.
“Hands off the Wu!” Kimiko cried.
“That goes for you losers, too!”
Tubbimura, Vlad, and the Xiaolin monks looked up to see Chase Young balanced on top of a monolith, Jack Spicer taunting the other challengers from safely behind his betrothed’s back.
“Nyaa! You suck! Now that Chase is here nobody stands a chance!” The albino mocked.
No one really took notice of Clay suddenly straightening up and looking around. He didn’t see the person he expected to and he took a few steps back to peer around some of the trilithons. In doing so, he placed a hand against a massive, upright stone decorated in ancient spirals.
He was not prepared for the sudden jolt of power that surged up his arm and exploded in the back of his skull. Power -- ancient, endless, limitless -- seemed to fill him from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair. He could feel. He could feel everything; the push of the grass from his body, the hammer of earthquakes against the stones of his bones, the tickle of roots questing through his flesh.
Clay had felt a glimmer of this from time to time, when he meditated, but this . . . for what seemed like an eternity, there ceased to be‘Clay’ and what remained was only a small fraction of Earth, animated through magic and spirituality and the carnal acts of fertility eighteen years ago.
The Dragon of the Earth raised his hand and stared at it as though he had never seen it before; noting with interest how the minerals in his bones interwove tightly. What a beautiful, tiny miracle. He wondered if he could make them harder. He concentrated slightly and when he felt the bones firm up inside of his body, he felt a tiny smile quirk his lips, which seemed like a mere five hundred miles away.
No one may have noticed Clay looking around, but the sudden surge of power attracted attention. Jack paused from trading barbs with the monks, Tubbimura and Vlad to look up at his lover and noticed Chase staring at the Dragon of the Earth. Jack followed his gaze.
“Why does Clay look so totally stoned?” Jack asked.
Chase smirked.
“A most fortuitous choice of words, Jack-Pet. I believe the Dragon of the Earth is tapping into the ancient power of Stonehenge.”
“And . . .that’s . . . good?” Jack guessed.
“That remains to be seen. Given the heavy-handed training tactics Guan has been hammering into the youth’s head, I have high hopes the power will temp Bailey to turning on his comrades. This all hinges on -“
“Hey.” Clay had let his hand slip from the upright stone and was giving another slow, thorough look to the surrounding countryside. Only Chase felt him searching with senses other than the normal five. “Where’s my woman?”
The monks blinked.
Vlad and Tubbimura blinked.
Chase’s smirk deepened.
“You don’t have a woman!” Kimiko hissed, turning red. “Try to sound a little more like a caveman, why don’t you? Baka gaijin. . .”
“Now’s not the time to be thinking about . . .” Raimundo trailed off. Clay was glaring down at both of them with a look in his eyes that was very . . . . . un-Clay-like. The Brazilian’s oft-ignored survival instincts were telling him that any of the words he was about to use to describe the contents of JB’s panties would not be well received.
“You mean . . . JB?” Jack asked. The albino seemed to think about something very hard for a long moment. “Shit! We haven’t seen her since we used her to catch that unicorn!” he yelped.
“Unicorn?” Omi echoed. “Why would you need-“
“To catch a unicorn requires the presence of a virgin maiden,” Chase announced coolly. “Someone pure . . . untainted by the touch of a man.”
“Tainted by insanity was apparently okay,” Jack muttered under his breath.
“SHE’S a virgin?!” Kimiko squawked. “No way! I don’t care what she said-“
“Taming a unicorn is the ultimate test of purity, Dragon of Fire,” Chase announced. “Could you pass such a test?”
Clay swayed. His memory was apparently playing tricks on him, because he was remembering his sassy, dusky skinned Johnny Betty, but it was mixed in with vague memories of her in a long white robe, crowned with flowers and gold and laid across the Altar Stone waiting for him to couple with her while their followers worshipped the act of conception.
“She does dress like whore,” Vlad opined.
The Russian didn’t get to add any details to that, because a truck hit him in the chest.
Or at least, that’s what it felt like.
Clay posed in the place where Vlad had stood; one hand outstretched in the Buddha Palm stance.
Vlad flew backwards and slammed into an upright stone hard enough to make it wobble. Searing pain lanced through his chest and breathing became a difficult chore. The Russian’s heart slammed against ribs that were surely broken as if looking for an escape route.
“Don’t slander my woman!” Clay yelled.
At least, that’s what he meant to yell. What came out was a garbled mess of English, Chinese and the language of the ancient Celts.
“Hooooooo-kay,” Jack breathed slowly. “Do we really need this Wu?”
Chase chuckled deep in his throat.
“I may want it eventually, but for the moment I think I will let the monks have it.”
“Then we can leave crazy cowpoke to go loco?” Jack asked.
“In a moment; I want to watch this,” the dragon lord chuckled.
Tubbimura lunged for the Tesseract Hound.
“Stop him!” Omi yelped.
Clay lifted a hand. A bright flash lit up the night, followed by a deafening crack of thunder. Tubbimura face planted into the dirt, coming up to smack against the Altar Stone. The Tesseract Hound wobbled from the blow, then tipped over the edge of the Altar Stone and dropped into the Dragon of Water’s waiting hands.
“Nice one, Clay!” Rai cried. “I didn’t even know you had the Eye of Dashi!”
“He . . . doesn’t,” Kimiko whispered. “I have it.”
The Japanese girl produced the aforementioned Shen Gong Wu.
“I wondered how long it would take him to figure out how to do that,” Jack murmured, still hanging on Chase. “Lightning strikes from the ground up, after all.”
“Just so, Jack-Pet,” Chase observed.
Clay remained standing with one arm outstretched. He swayed from time to time, but suddenly seemed to come to a conclusion. He looked up at Chase and Jack.
“Where’s my woman?”
Jack ‘meeped’ and slithered around to the far side of Chase. The dragon lord merely smirked.
“We do not know where your woman is, Dragon of the Earth,” the Heylin lord answered smoothly. “She fled from us, heartbroken. Useful for taming unicorns though it may be, she was tiring of her virginity. She thought that she had found a man worthy of giving it to, but your inattention changed her mind. Isn’t that right, Jack-Pet?”
“Huh? Oh. Oh yeah, crying like a bitch and uh . . . whining about her horniness and, um . . . carrying a dildo catalog?” Jack offered.
Chase gave his lover an exasperated look.
“What? Like I know what sexually frustrated girls do!” Jack hissed.
Clay grunted, sat down hard on the ground, and fainted.
The monks, Chase and Jack stared down at the unconscious warrior.
“Well, that was fun,” Jack declared. “Can we go home now?”
~~~~~
It would be wrong to say that Clay dreamed. What passed through his sleeping mind were images of history long past; the ceremonies of druids, the power and majesty of his chosen element and the tangled thoughts of a teenage boy.
Master Monk Guan said he was wrong for wanting to have sex.
But unimpeded, sex was an act of creation.
To create life was not an evil act.
Many societies considered it something sacred.
Like all things humans did, it could be perverted, twisted beyond its basic intention. But if a man held himself with honor, treated his woman - or man, whatever the case may be - with honor and held himself to love and care for her and the children they created, there was nothing wrong with sex.
Now obviously, you wouldn’t want to conceive a child every time you had sex; the financial considerations alone would be daunting. You wouldn’t be able to lavish every child with the attention and care they deserved if you had twenty of them. Also, the world was getting overpopulated. Birth control was the simplest way to limit the number of children born.
So sex went from an act of creation to an act of love. This was still a beautiful and wonderful thing. Clay really didn’t see why he had to ignore a beautiful woman who obviously held her sexual rights in equally high regard because Guan was a cockblocker.
He had to find her and tell her he was sorry and that he still cared for her. Maybe, if he were supremely lucky, JB would have it in her heart to give him a second chance. If the powers that oversaw such things believed in forgiveness, he would have his honorable woman after all. He had to see to these things.
Right after he left the Temple.
He couldn’t stay there anymore. The personal opinions of Master Fung and Master Monk Guan may have already cost him one chance to find love and start a family. How many more opportunities would they rob him of simply because they didn’t approve?
He would go home and tell his family how much he loved and appreciated them, then go look for his sweet JB.
Yes; that was a good, solid plan.
Clay sighed and opened his eyes.
“Stonehenge?” Guan was saying.
“Yes!” Omi cried. “He was speaking strangely and made lightning strike without the Eye of Dashi!”
“Hmmmm, Stonehenge is a powerful magical formation long associated with Earth; I would believe Clay simply plugged into too much power. His inexperienced body couldn’t handle it,” Guan said.
“It was really freaky,” Kimiko said. “He wasn’t acting like himself at all.”
“The thoughts of a thousand druid kings were running through his head,” the master monk sighed. “Hopefully he won’t be too damaged.”
Clay groaned, sitting up gingerly. He was back in the clearing that he’d been training in when the other Dragons had picked him up.
“Hey! He’s awake!” Rai cried. “Are you still you, buddy?”
Clay rubbed his face gingerly, still feeling a bit tingly from the power overload.
“Yeah . . . yeah, I’m me,” the big cowboy sighed.
He looked around the clearing. Something was different. It took him a minute to come up with it, because there were a thousand voices of heathen kings whispering in the back of his head. They murmured for food, justice, aid, mercy, the comfort of their women-
Their women.
Shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t there be a statue of a woman around here? A large statue with agate eyes; he had made it himself! All there were here were three very large piles of scree.
Scree?
Clay clambered forward to the middle pile and searched through the heap of gravel. This wasn’t . . . it couldn’t be . . .
An agate eye peered coyly up at him from the back of a shattered stone.
“You . . . you broke it . . .” the Dragon of the Earth said in a tiny voice. “You broke my statue of Johnny Betty.”
“Yes. We must look past our vices and-“
Guan didn’t say anything after that, because a hammer blow that could have shattered a tree trunk hit him square in the jaw and sent him flying.
The other monks gasped.
“That’s it! That is the last fuckin’ straw!” Clay bellowed. “I had all of this shit I can stand and I can’t stands no more!”
“You just punched out Master Monk Gaun!” Rai squeaked. “He’s gonna be so pissed!”
“I don’t give a shit!” The Dragon of Earth roared. “I’m done with this! Done; ya hear me?!”
Clay tore off his apprentice sash and threw it on the ground.
“I’m goin’-“
Where Clay was going would remain unknown, for Master Monk Guan returned with a flurry of blows that swiftly brought Clay to his knees.
“I see our lessons of obedience and humility have been in vain!” The monk snapped. “I shall have to teach them to you again!”
Clay picked himself up off of the ground, giving a little shiver at the pain from Guan’s blows. It had been a while since anyone had hit him hard enough to actually hurt him.
“You ain’t teachin’ me anything else,” Clay growled. “I’m done with trainin’, I’m done with the Xiaolin, an’ I’m done with YOU!”
“Clay . . .” Omi said weakly. “No . . .”
The two Dragons of the Earth came together in another flurry of blows. Clay was young and strong and angry, but he simply didn’t have the experience to best a 1,500 year old master. Before long, he was flung back under another strike that would have killed another man.
“Your training has only begun, young Dragon!” Guan declared. “Once this rebellious attitude is purged from you, then the real training can begin!”
As the master monk started forward once more, Clay executed a sweep kick through one of the piles of shattered rock and threw up a cloud of dust and gravel. Guan kept on the attack, eyes squinted shut against the smokescreen. He saw the shape of Clay Bailey looming up through the dust and struck.
His knuckles cracked off of granite.
A Clay Bailey statue shook from the force of the blow. The real Clay was staggering upright again, clutching his stomach.
“Nice work for something done so quickly,” Guan said. “It still won’t-“
Guan cut off sharply as the Clay statue gave a sidekick that flung the much older man backwards.
“H-how did he-“ Kimiko began. She stared at the granite Clay, seeing glowing blue where it’s eyes should have been. “CLAY MADE A ROCK CREATURE?!”
“Yeah; yeah, I reckon I did,” Clay drawled. “If’n Wuya could do it, why can’t I?”
Guan found his feet again, staring at the statue that had been brought to life - or at least brought to animation - by the power of the young Dragon of Earth.
“This is evil magic, Clay,” he hissed. “You must put this aside and turn back to the way of Xiaolin!”
“I animate a statue t’ keep from gettin’ pasted an’ suddenly I’m Chase Young Jr?” Clay sneered. “Naw. Don’t think so; I’m done. Adios, goodbye!”
“Do you really think we will let you leave?” Guan asked.
“You ain’t got much of a choice,” the big cowboy stated. “’Cause, ya see; I got th’ Golden Tiger Claws.”
Clay produced the aforementioned Shen Gong Wu, tore a hole through space-time and disappeared into it.
The rock creature abruptly stopped moving and fell over with a ‘clunk!’
~~~~
The other Xiaolin Dragons knew how much Clay missed his home in Texas, so they assumed that’s where he would go first. They all leapt aboard Dojo, Master Monk Guan included, and flew as fast as they could go to the Bailey ranch.
As it turned out, Clay wasn’t there.
The big cowboy returned to the Xiaolin Temple to gather his things, first. He packed up his belongings and helped himself to a few of the Shen Gong Wu; not a lot of them, mostly the ones no one else used, like the Lasso Boa Boa and the Fist of Tebigong. He kept the Golden Tiger Claws and found that the Tesseract Hound was in the vault, too. Apparently the others had stopped by the Temple and secured the Wu before dumping him back with Guan.
Master Fung had come out to see him as he was slinging the old travelling chest with all his stuff in it over one shoulder. Clay and the teaching monk had spoken briefly, with the younger man thanking the older for all that he had been taught, but being honest with the feeling that the Temple was simply not the place for him to spend the rest of his life. If the Xiaolin should ever need someone to help battle the forces of darkness, he would be glad to lend a hand.
They embraced, and Clay activated the Golden Tiger Claws once again.
He still didn’t return to Texas.
Instead, he went to the Land of Nowhere and called in on Chase Young and Jack Spicer. He explained his newly-former monk status and asked if they had any idea where JB might have gone.
They didn’t, but Chase Young was so pleased to hear that Clay had quit the Temple that he invited the Texan to stay for dinner.
Clay Bailey was raised to be polite and accept hospitality when at all possible, so he agreed to dine with the dragon lord and his affianced. He questioned Jack about Johnny Betty during the meal, trying to find out anything he could.
Jack knew precious little about his former bodyguard.
Johnny Betty was super-strong, super-quick and had obviously tangled with Xiaolin Dragon level opponents before. She liked most kinds of food and only turned up her nose at liver. Her favorite color was robin’s egg blue and her favorite stone was turquoise. Every time she escorted Jack to a shopping center in China, she picked up a new piece of turquoise jewelry. She never finished high school, but she was fairly intelligent and was learning a few words of Chinese. She was a dog person. Her family had raised sheep and cows when she was young. She didn’t trust dolphins and hated the Amish.
While Jack gave him a few bits and pieces, he didn’t really provide Clay with anything solid to go on.
After dinner was over, Clay snuck back to the Temple vault and got the Tesseract Hound; it was looking like he would need it.
After such an overly full day, Clay Bailey finally used the Golden Tiger Claws to return to his home in Texas.
The monks had gotten fed up waiting for him and left not an hour before.
The reunion of the Bailey family was an affectionate affair; Clay’s mother had latched onto him and held him for about ten minutes straight. Once Clay started complaining of his back hurting from hunching over she released him. Funny; he’d never had to bend over to hug his Mama before . . .
His Daddy had tackled him and hugged and wrestled with him until Clay had laughingly picked his father up and set him in his armchair. He’d never been able to overpower his father either, but . . .
Even Jesse had come out of her sullen shell to give him a hug.
The family had dinner hours before, but his Mama offered to make him something. Clay begged off, saying he had already eaten, but he’d love a hot bath. He climbed upstairs and folded himself into the tub and geez; it was a lot shorter than he remembered. In the end he had gone with a blistering hot shower and changed into some of his old clothes - tighter than he remembered, but they still fit - and rejoined his family for pie and coffee.
They talked of all the things that had gone on while he’d been in China and he told them of his adventures with the Xiaolin monks. They spoke of the future and being home. Clay told them about Johnny Betty and how he planned to find her and apologize and hope like hell she’d consent to being his woman.
That bit of news had surprised his parents. They started to protest his age and the fact that he knew so little about JB, but something about the quiet confidence Clay radiated made them hesitate to forbid that he go look for her.
In the end, he let them know that he would go searching for her in the morning and retired to his old bedroom to sleep a deep, dreamless sleep in his own bed.
Maybe, if the gods smiled on him, Johnny Betty would sleep beside him soon.
The End.