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Some things, such as chewing, sneezing, and the distasteful specifics of very-personal-grooming, come on instinct as a human, or rather they do when Diaval doesn’t allow himself to think on the immediate particulars. It’s not difficult, really; ravens are by nature quite distractible, and he’s as subject to the characteristic in one form as the other. Some things do defy it, though, and Diaval realizes, as the first days with his new mistress pass, that in some ways, she is at even more of a disadvantage than he is. He, at least, had his relatives-and-associates to teach him how to interact with others on that purely social basis. He’s not quite certain if Maleficent ever did, at least in the active, conscious sense, and he’s more than a bit afraid to ask… She has the more convenient and self-serving basics down, yes, but on the finer level, the level of the necessary and chronic occasion-appropriate dances and rituals…
The skills just aren’t there.
He knows it’s unreasonable to expect more. She’s not a raven. She’s not human. She’s a faerie, and one with a rather … Mm… Self-defining; he’ll go with self-defining… Nature at that, but still. Diaval does wonder on occasion, usually when she’s in the middle of gleefully re-defining his own beautiful self, just who it was who didn’t teach her that it’s really, really rude to just…
Project your personal views on self-improvement on others like she does. Like she does on him.
The raven does prefer to believe (if only out of self-preservation at the prospect of the self-inflicted life-long association) that she’s lacking in essential cross-cultural social education rather than just plain sadistic, but the fact remains. It hurts when she transforms him. It hurts a lot. And alright, yes, he gets that she’s none too fond of humans, and male humans in particular, and she’s undoubtedly projecting on her personal issues there, but it’s not as if he’s actually human, and really not as if she hadn’t had the power to turn him into a female like her if she’d wanted to. She could have if she’d really wanted to, but some things do come on instinct when Diaval doesn’t think on them, and human-associated psychological understanding is one of those things.
She’s changed him into a man, he gradually comes to realize, and is constantly changing him afterwards, as a reflection of the fact that she’d like to go back and change the one who’d taken her wings. On every level, but starting (quite understandably) with the singularly and immediately demeaning. Diaval can’t help but think that his new mistress’ mental health (and his physical) might better be served if she would just provide him, and by proxy, Stefan, with the means to change himself, but that, he reflects as he pulls himself painfully to his feet yet again, is not going to happen anytime soon. She’d have to trust him to make the right decisions there, the decisions that would automatically benefit her, and well.
It’s as plain as the wings no longer gracing her back that she’s not quite there yet.
Whatever you need, he’d declared. Whatever you need.
Right now, she needs to work through her pain, and vast as it is, and as she was so absolutely crudely and brutally assaulted in her unwitting sleep, she needs a present and conscious target. A male target. One subject to her present and conscious efforts to go back and change her betrayer’s nature at whim. Painfully.
These understandings don’t come to Diaval all at once, of course. He pieces them together, mostly as an exercise in ongoing contrasts. When she’s awake, she’s a snide, cold, merciless and perpetually grumpy bitch. When she’s sleeping, when she inflicts pain on him in his sleep, she’s not projecting on her hatred and grief over Stefan, she’s just trying to go back herself. To herself, as she was before she ever met the one who betrayed her. At night, in the nest...In a way, it’s her place to escape from him. He’s not there, he’s never there; it’s just Maleficent and her wings. So as much as it hurts, Diaval doesn’t take the pain personally. And she heals him. She always heals him, and as he’s never awake for that bit, and the injuries she inflicts on him shouldn’t allow for sleep at all, he understands this too…
For every night that Maleficent tears at him in her sleep, in her pain, in her urgent, frantic, mindless need, there must be a moment between them where she wakes up, realizes what she’s done, and, in a conscious and deliberate moment between them, acknowledges what she’s done and does heal him, before helping him along into oblivion.
It’s not the pain that helps her, he realizes. It’s the waking to the pain, to the blood and the horror, and to the choice - and ability - to heal her wings, as Diaval is her wings now, and then to send him gently back, without the most terrible and immediate memories of what had been done to him, and by projection, her.
It doesn’t make the days any easier. By day… Well. He serves her, unhesitatingly and dutifully, but as there was nothing there that was ever said that he had to be gracious about it, he feels perfectly entitled to sulk resentfully and actively on the particulars. On her interpretation of her bloody needs. If she gets enjoyment out of his discomfort… Well, then. He gets enjoyment out of the chronic opportunity to so effectively and melodramatically respond.
It gets him through. It amuses her, more often than not. And over time, it becomes a ritual. A dance, of sorts, between them, and in the dance, their grounded flight, they slowly, slowly, begin to redefine themselves and each other.
Diaval honestly wonders on occasion why the crippled faerie did save his life. He was the one, after all, who offered her his services. She didn’t demand it. She simply came across him, a poor winged creature as innocent as she’d been, tortured and dying at the hands-and-dog of a human (there’s projection there too; Stefan is a filthy flea-bitten cur if he’d ever met one; a dog’s a dog’s a dog, and no amount of grooming or polish or etiquette lessons or declarations of native or earned majesty will ever ever change that) and been driven by impulse and/or instinct, to preserve him. He’d seen it in her eyes, the first moment they’d looked at each other- she’d been startled and wary and there were definite undertones of hells-shiny-bells-what-have-I-done-what -do-i-do/say-now - but her fingers hadn’t flicked to change him back, then, on instinct or otherwise. She’d just… stared at him. Up and down, quite blatantly really, and he hadn’t blushed then, and it takes quite a few years for him to process the implications through learned (if purely theoretical) context on his research expeditions, but when he finally does - process, that is - he cackles himself breathless.
She’d looked intrigued. Speculative. Startled, even. And given that she’d only had the like view of one other human male aside from his oh-so-beautifully-translated self…
Stefan had had to resort to pilfering to gain his socially acceptable sceptre. Diaval’s Mistress had risen in her pain and agony, burned and bloody and screaming, and even as she rose… She’d crafted her own. Alright, maybe it wasn’t quite socially acceptable by human tradition, but there was no doubt it made an impression. And that she knew how to make an impression with it.
A big impression. A big, shiny, really, really really permanent impression, in both the memory and otherwise. And then she’d invited Stefan to his knees and suggested that he beg for her to withdraw the impression she’d just made with it, and she might have qualified the curse in other people’s eyes, but really: true love’s kiss? On the babe’s sixteenth birthday?
That wasn’t qualifying; oh no. That had been driving it, and the power of her bigger, shinier, and not-coincidentally self-made sceptre, home . And she’d done it even as she permitted another man, a man of her creation, a man with wings and therefore better-than, superior-to - to perch on it. As she stroked him. Fondly, while he, as her talons sank in an in his mute and intimate and carefully masked agony, was helping her fly in the only way she had left to her.
Yes, it takes him a bit to process the implications of that speculative, startled look. Diaval finally manages it, though, that night after the christening. He finishes bathing, cackling all the while, and cackles through his meal of evening mouse, and cackles while Maleficent changes him back to a raven, and is still cackling as they settle into their nest.
“I’m so glad you had such a very enjoyable day, Diaval,” his mistress drawls. “Truly I am. But you may stop now, at least in terms of your active appreciation? It’s annoying me.’
His round black eyes gleam at her, but he subsides, with one final hiccup of a chortled caw… She settles on her side, facing him, as is her habit. It was not about intimacy, or trust, quite the opposite he knows, and reaches out and most atypically, at least as pertains to their present location and her conscious state, strokes his wing with one finger. He tilts his head at her, under the pressure, inquiringly. She withdraws.
“Honestly, the chit should be grateful that the party was cut short,” she says, more than obviously of Stefan's new Queen. “I noted the reception tables on the way out. Bowls of blacknuts everywhere. He never could resist them, and they certainly never agreed with him; it’s likely why he grew up to look so consistently stuffed and strained. Never mind that dress. Utterly hideous. It suited her perfectly. Poor babe, with parents like that, there’s no hope for her. She’s just going to be an utter little beastie of a thing. They’ll be grateful I cursed her, really. They’ll never have to suffer through her sniveling for the fact that no man will ever be able to look at her without being sick, once she reaches the appropriate age.’’ Her fangs glint at him. Diaval is momentarily distracted; in the dim light, the glint does make them very shiny indeed, but only for a moment. He offers a soft, agreeable croak.
“Mm,” she agrees. “I noted that too. His servants obviously take utterly no pride in him, or there wouldn’t have been nearly so many smudges on the crown. And I noticed a few threads hanging from his hem too. I would criticize his staffing," (Diaval cackles again and that, but only once and very briefly before hastily stifling it) "but it was just so very obviously their statement.”
She lapses into silence. Diaval ruffles his impeccable feathers lightly, bracing himself as her breathing slows and softens in the close darkness around them. It will be a bad night, he knows. A very bad night. After all that… She’ll need to fly.
He closes his eyes, breathing slowly, as in her sleep, she reaches out…
And opens them again, to the light of the sunrise streaming down over him. He shifts, puzzled, looking around. He is alone. He eases up, hopping out onto the morning air, and looks around. His mistress is nowhere in sight.
She slept through? How is that possible? After all that?
He stretches his wings. They are as perfect and impeccable as they’ve ever been, no residual aches or pains or strains. At first, he’s utterly elated - she slept through, she slept through, maybe she’s finally beginning to… And then, acute understanding on what had actually happened, what must have actually happened, diverts him away from the distracting, tantalizing shine of hope, and nearly smacks him right out of the tree.
When Maleficent returns through the wood, down by the stream, Diaval is waiting for her. He caws at her imperiously. Furiously. She eyes him, but flicks her fingers.
Intoama…
“Don’t do it again,” he grits, even as he transforms. “Don’t even think on doin’ it again. If you do… I’ll leave.”
Maleficent stares at him, genuinely taken aback.
“What,” she says haughtily as she gathers herself. “Are you prattling on about now?”
And Diaval is so incensed that he throws caution to the winds, and just says it. Straight out.
“Healin’ me up on the sly is one thing,” he says bluntly. “Helpin’ me sleep another. But you have no right, no right, no matter who you are and who I’m not, to take my memories. They’re mine, understand? Mine. You can have anythin’, anythin’ you need from me, but those.. Those are mine. And they weren’t part of the deal. The body’s one thing. My mind’s another. Do. Not. Do. It. Again."
“I gave you your mind, bird!"
“And I’m not returnin' it,” he retorts. “Some things, when you give them… You're just goin’ to have to resign yourself that you won’t get them back.”
The aback turns, just for a moment, to genuine flummox. She recovers almost immediately, of course, but…
“Ungrateful, filthy crow,” she spits and raises her hand. He is on her in a moment, and she howls - actually howls - as he grabs it ad snaps it viciously in his teeth. He fairly bounces off the tree, and picks himself up, glaring. She glares right back, blood dripping over her talons. Diaval breathes hard, in fury and agitation… And falls to his knees, face in his hands as he weeps wretchedly: raspy, hoarse cawing sobs, bereft and empty. Across the glade, Maleficent is suddenly silent.
Eventually he calms a bit. She is sitting beside him, on a rock, a few feet away, watching him. Her fingers are smooth and unblemished. Her features are brittle and remote.
“Don’t do it again,” he says hoarsely, wiping at his face. “Please, Mistress. Please. Just… Don’t do it again. I need them.”
“And if I need you to forget?”
“You don’t,” he says. “It won’t erase what happened. What happens. And all that will be left…"
She watches him closely. Remotely.
“All that will be left,” he says painfully. “Is you. Alone. I promised I’d be there, see, Mistress? I promised to serve you. And by takin’ my memories of…" He braces himself again. "Of what happens between us... Not the healin' again, but of what happens... You’re makin’ me betray you with it. You’re makin’ it - my betrayal of you - inevitable, if only in your own mind. We both need to be there. Can’t serve… If there’s no one to serve, see?"
“You need to serve me? Are you truly that wretched and base a creature, Diaval?"
“You didn’t hear me beggin’ for it, did you? And you didn’t command it either. I offered,” he says defiantly. “I offered. And I’ll keep offerin’. All my life. I won’t go back on it. I know I just said I’d leave, but I won’t. But a gift’s only good if it’s not thrown away, Mistress. I’m not throwin’ away the life you gave me, am I? That you offered me? I’m careful, with your wings.’
It hangs between them. She says nothing. He rises, stiffly.
“Go on, then,” he says, bracing himself. She flicks. He morphs, back to his beautiful self. She watches as he flies off.
He stays away, all day, but he returns just before dusk. She is sitting in her tree, brushing her hair. She watches as he flies in, coming to perch silently beside her.
“Got the sulks out of your system, then?” she inquires coolly. “Because if I wanted a sniveling worm as a servant, I would have one, you may trust me on that.”
Diaval rolls his round beady eyes at her. She flicks. He morphs into a man, sitting beside her on the thick branch.
“You have,” she sneers at him. “Not one ounce of natural gratitude in your soul. Don’t expect me to try to be nice again. It obviously serves no good, in any instance."
“Nice is one thing,” he says. “Manners are another. Manners are what you use, for your information, when you’re not naturally nice, and yet don’t want your fingers bitten for your natural inclinations.”
“So noted. Go bathe. You smell like human. Other humans. Where have you been?”
“I went back to the castle. Very gratifyin’ mornin'-after-the-night before there, if I do say so. Weepin’, wailin’, gnashin’... And it doesn’t look like he’ll be livin’ happily ever after any time soon, either."
“Oh? How’s that?"
“She’s kicked him out of their nest,” the raven informs his mistress with dour relish. “Permanently. He’s makin’ arrangements to send the babe away for safekeeping, which means she’s not losin’ her in sixteen years, she’s losin’ her now. I’d feel sorry for her, but she’s takin’ it out on the servants. Very bad practice, that. Does away with my sympathy right there.”
“Well, well,” Maleficent muses, ignoring that. “What an unfortunate development.”
“It’s probably just as well,” he concedes. “For her. This way, she won’t have to think on blacknut shells in the bed. Though that bein’ said, I saw him in the baths once, and she never would have had to worry on bein’ stuffed and strained there herself, anyway, for his undue appetites between the sheets.’
She gives him an austere side-look - the look that says quite clearly and plainly ‘I have no idea what you’re talking on, if it’s some sort of raven joke, let’s just pretend that I have context so we’re neither of us embarrassed for the fact of my lack there’ - but it cuts itself off halfway into full development.. Her expression as understanding dawns is quite possibly the funniest thing he’s ever seen. Diaval cackles madly, throwing his head back and cawing with it. Never in his life, he thinks, has he ever seen someone quite so stuffed and strained as they try to stifle their own startled cackles.
Intoaraven, his mistress says, in an obvious attempt to recover herself. He shifts obligingly, wincing as he straightens.
“Go bathe,” Maleficent orders again, imperiously. “And don’t dawdle, or you’ll be sleeping out in the rain.”
And Diaval settles himself with one final chortled chirrup, rubs his head briefly against her uninjured fingers, and soars off, obligingly, into the perfectly clear and cloudless sunset.