The journey from Wyoming to Ukraine was definitely no walk in the park, pun intended. Ozzie found out that the reason why Mr. and Mrs. Roja insisted on having the wedding in Crimea was because that was the place where their 1300’s Black Death ancestors first set foot and spread their reign of terror. Every member of the Black Death family had to go through the long arduous journey to get there and have their official white wedding done to honour the ancestors who tied the knot there and swore their love to each other before starting off their worldwide epidemic. That was where Mr. and Mrs. Roja got married and where Mr. Roja was married with the rest of the Sisterhood, and this goes the same with Thrax and Ozzie.
Thrax had been a little hesitant about traveling at first because of Ozzie’s condition, what with Ozzie beginning to worsen in his morning sickness about 3 days after they left Klepta’s dog city and the sour mints didn’t seem to work anymore, but Mr. and Mrs. Roja were very insistent on this tradition and Ozzie claimed to be alright despite the fact that he looked like a wreck. Flazen, who was the one who recommended the sour mints to Ozzie in the first place, did try to brew up a sort of herbal medication that might calm it down, but it didn’t seem to last really long. Ambrose, Trixy’s son, who surprisingly had a knack for midwifery despite being a half-Salmonella-half-Black Death virus, deduced that probably because Ozzie was a T4 white blood cell with bodily modification, the symptoms and child development may differ from a usual viral pregnancy.
Towards their 7th day of their travel and 3 hours bunking in a German Shepherd dog belonging to a man who lived in Indianapolis, Ozzie was puking all over the place and not any amount of medication Flazen offered as “old midwives remedy” worked very well. Gertrude had no choice but use her powers that caused one of the symptoms of Yellow Fever, which was to slow down Ozzie’s heartbeat until the cell was put into an almost deep sleep condition to keep him from puking his innards out. Relying on both Thrax and Drix’s strength, they took turns carrying Ozzie on their back as they continued on their journey.
From Indianapolis, they found out that the man, who was a traveling salesman, was going to Saint John, Canada for a business meeting, and lucky for them, he was bringing his dog along. As soon as they reached Saint John, they leapt off the dog and made their way into a stray cat that had a habit of begging at restaurants and hitching rides on trucks, thanks to a very disgruntled mayor of the cat city who had a grudge on humans and refused to let the cat be adopted by them ever again after the cat’s master dumped it when he got bored of it. The mayor agreed to take them as far as Halifax if they promise him to give him a way to get back at the humans.
Both sides fulfilled their end of the bargain, but it wasn’t exactly the way the mayor of the cat city had expected it to be. By then, Thrax decided that Ozzie needed to wake up to eat and regain his strength (and also try their luck and see if the morning sickness phase had passed) so Gertrude reversed the effects off Ozzie. The morning sickness still remained but it wasn’t as bad as it was before, so the sour mints came back in handy, though he still could not stomach anything. The cell saw firsthand how Drix’s theory about infection really worked when he found out about the deal made with Mr. Roja. He tried asking how Mr. Roja was going to fulfill the deal but all the Roja siblings, the twins Rogue and Rodeo included, grinned knowingly and told him to watch and learn, so he did.
Once they were in Halifax, the mayor wasted no time into demanding that they deliver what they promised. Ursula made a knowing gesture to Kurt, who in turn grabbed the mayor by the throat and dragged him into a corner, where loud bloodcurdling screams echoed throughout the office. A loud slam and banging followed as Kurt reappeared again, seeming to adjust his clothes with a sort of satisfied afterglow on his face, and everyone seemed to ignore the occasional banging and screaming for the next few days. Ozzie wanted to ask what the heck was going on but since everyone was being nonchalant about it and since Klepta and the twins gave him a naughty wink (pissing the jealous Thrax off in the process) and told him not to worry about it, Ozzie decided it wise to just go with the flow.
Everyone lounged around for a while during those few days in the cat’s city—explaining to those who asked that they were taking over temporarily while the mayor called in sick—while still in Halifax, and soon enough, another bloodcurdling scream was heard somewhere downstairs and some sort of a struggle went on. The Roja family seemed to take it in stride as they went downstairs to inspect the sounds. Ozzie finally knew what the reason of Kurt’s actions towards the mayor and the occasional banging and screaming was, and was lucky he hadn’t had anything to eat and that his puking episodes had subsided a little. Apparently Kurt had raped and knocked up—or in this case, infected—the mayor and kept him locked up in the broom closet of the office until the spawn he planted in him matured. The mayor, or what’s left of him, was now dead, sprawled on the floor with his belly exploded inside-out. Thrax had to cover Ozzie’s eyes to stop him from looking anymore and getting sick again. Right beside the mayor’s body, was a Rabies spawn the size of a full grown toddler looking up at them not in fear or confusion, but in expectation.
“Congratulations, Kurt,” Ursula grinned as she picked up the baby spawn and handed it to Kurt. “Looks like you got a son.”
“Cool,” Kurt replied as he took the spawn from her hands. He then told the spawn briefly who he was and what his purpose in this cat city was. Surprisingly the spawn took it by stride and nodded in acknowledgement, as if he was born with the innate ability to know what he should do. Before they left the cat city, Kurt left the spawn on the mayor’s seat, gave him a peck on his forehead and named him Puck. He wished him luck and told him to make him proud, in which the spawn just smiled and waved goodbye as if it was the most natural thing to do, totally void of parental dependency.
“Well, at least the mayor got his wish,” Hershey, Flazen’s son, commented. “He wanted to get back at the humans, now he’s doing it through his son, spreading Rabies.”
“Is that…Is that what will happen to me…?” Ozzie whimpered as he moved from Thrax’s hand covering his eyes and hid his face on Thrax’s chest as they left cat city, his body shaking like a leaf after what he had just seen.
“No, no, of course not, baby,” Thrax comforted him, rubbing his back. “You are a modified cell. It won’t happen to you. I will not let this happen to you.”
“If you were a normal white blood cell like you used to, you might…” Drix replied worriedly but was met with Thrax’s death glare.
“Not helping, cold pill.”
From that cat city, they leapt into many other animals until they stumbled into another dog that was owned by a narcotics officer stationed in Halifax Stanfield International Airport in charge of sniffing out drugs in passengers’ luggage. Lucky for them, one of the airlines in the airport has direct flights to Saint John’s in Newfoundland where it would bring them closer to their main destination. From there, they leapt onto a teddy bear that belonged to a child who was together with her parents visiting relatives at Saint John’s, Newfoundland, and hitched their free flight.
Along the way, they came across the rest of the extended Black Death family who also made the long journey to Crimea to attend the wedding after getting the message from Mr. Roja through means no one will ever know. They ran into Cox and his family in Saint John’s when they were trying to hitch a ride on a seagull, saving them the hassle of having to worry about delaying the wedding once they reached Crimea because of possible disagreements with Cox’s wife Majah (who was assigned by the heads of the Roja household) who designed Ozzie and Thrax’s wedding outfits. The future newlyweds were not allowed to find out how their wedding clothes look like, and they knew if they found out they had no say over it anyway, so they relied on the fact that Majah was a reasonably talented tailor and designer to make a compromising outfit for their big day.
On their way to Ireland on the seagull—no doubt whoever ran the bird city was bullied by someone from the Roja family to steer the bird towards that direction—Ozzie’s morning sickness had finally stopped, much to Thrax’s relief. He no longer had to rely on Gertrude’s power to sleep off the nausea, but it was replaced with something fairly inconvenient as well. Ozzie just somehow woke up one morning with an almost uncontrollable hunger. It was more or less related to cravings, but super-sized to the point where he wanted to eat almost anything and everything, and by the time they got to London, where they met another Black Death relative there in a squirrel’s body, he had exhausted almost all the food supply that they had. The only relief that the family, and Thrax who was worried sick about Ozzie’s condition, got from this was that no matter how much he ate, he wasn’t gaining an ounce, probably more towards the relief of Majah because of her task at hand on the wedding outfits.
By the time they reached Belgium (stocking up food for Ozzie along the way) from London via traveling by a swallow, Ozzie’s hunger was so severe he started view anything within his proximity as food. In fact, it was so bad that when Thrax offered to feed Ozzie one day, he suddenly bit onto the virus’ wrist and wouldn’t let go. Ozzie couldn’t understand it either. His rational mind knew that this wasn’t edible, but his lust for food told him to just chomp it off. To prevent Ozzie from making everyone his next course of meal, Trixy suggested that he be kept in a room under lock and key and provide him food at a safe distance from him, and since food and money was limited, they resorted to kidnapping and killing germs and bacteria-s in the neighbourhood, then fed them to Ozzie by dumping their bodies into the room to let him feast on them. In the beginning Ozzie was very objecting towards this. In his line of work, he killed them but never had he eaten them. Thrax had no choice but to use his power as a Master over him and ordered him to eat them, blindfolding him so that he did not have to look at what he was eating to make him feel better. As much as he wanted to disobey him, Ozzie knew he would balk over the urge to feed, so in his tears soaking through the blindfold, he devoured them all one by one, desperate to ease the fire of hunger in him. In the end, they stayed the longest time in Belgium to ride off Ozzie’s hunger, which lasted about almost a month.
After one month, Ozzie no longer needed to constantly fill his gut all the time. Somehow, he had calmed down so much after the month-long feasting that his mind was up in the clouds all the time, as if he had an overdose of sedatives. Ambrose examined him and found out that because Ozzie had consumed so much food in the last month, his body is trying to keep up with digesting and absorbing everything into his system, and the only way to do that was to slow down his motor skills by creating a euphoric sensation in his brain, sending him to cloud nine. Again, Ozzie had to be carried around by Thrax or Drix as they carried on their way, but at least Thrax didn’t have to worry that Ozzie would suddenly die in his sleep due the slow heartbeat rate because of Gertrude’s power.
From Belgium, they leapt onto numerous rats, meeting up with relatives and gathering them along the way, through the underground sewage lines that connected to Berlin, Germany. By then, Ozzie slowly returned back to his normal usual self and was fit enough to walk on his own two feet, much to the relief of Thrax, Drix and the Roja family members who liked him. As usual he was fawned, scrutinized and pampered all at the same time by whoever relatives they came across and gathered throughout the journey. They brought along wedding gifts as well for the future newlyweds, in which Mr. and Mrs. Roja advised them to hold onto them first and pass it on once they were officially doing the wedding ceremony. Like the Roja family, most of the relatives were bigamists, having a number of wives and numerous children on tow, and the twins had admit that even they had a hard time trying to keep up with who’s who in the Black Death family. Some of the relatives, especially the children, who genuinely liked him were much more clingy than others and would hog Ozzie till no end about every single detail of his background, and Thrax literally had to beat them off with a stick to get rid of them. He didn’t mind his baby being the center of attention but when it got to the point where he didn’t have enough alone time with his beloved cell, that was the last straw.
Speaking of which, the Roja family was getting more and more attached to Ozzie, some of them more than the others, especially the siblings. The mothers, even Andie and Marushka who was skeptical of him, treated him like he was their own son as they babied him like a mother hen would to her chicks about his pregnant condition, although most of the time, their methods did not agree with each other. Klepta would get together with him every chance he got, not caring whether Thrax was around or not, and the twins Rouge and Rodeo were practically inseparable with him unless under the threat of death by Ozzie’s husband-to-be. Khora and Kincaid flirted with him whenever possible, and Hershey would always want to pull up Ozzie’s shirt so that he could see the baby spawn, while Nooka, who aspires to be a designer just like Majah, would present Ozzie with tons of dinner clothes designs and ask him which one he liked to wear during the wedding reception night. Even the siblings who did not like him at first slowly warmed up to him. Ambrose had shown hints of concern in his tone whenever he diagnosed Ozzie and at one point, when Ozzie was having his crazy-ass appetite, allowed himself to be bitten by Ozzie when Thrax tried to blindfold him so that he could make him eat whatever corpse was given to him. Edison helped catch him when he almost missed a step and fell when they were leaping onto another rat, only to find that he had held the cell in his arms longer than he should, causing him to blush, the possessive Thrax to growl at him with a vengeance as he snatched the awkward cell away from him and the jealous twins to pounce on him.
After stopping at Berlin for a while catching up on old times with relatives and meeting up new ones along the way, they decided to leap into a stray dog (conquering and controlling the dog city at the same time) and hitch a ride on trains that took routes that led towards the direction of Warszawa, Poland. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during that journey, but once they reached Warszawa and went looking for a convenient animal to get them to the nearest airport, Ozzie started having minor cramps in his middle that were on and off and often lasted for about half an hour at most. Another diagnostic from Ambrose revealed that Ozzie’s spawn was slowly growing but since it was a cell-hybrid spawn and that Ozzie was a partially infected cell, Ozzie was much more sensitive and felt the growth much more than a regular pregnant cell or virus. Whenever that happens, Thrax would carry him throughout the rest of the journey or cradle him in his arms, helping him to ride out the pains with whispers of comfort and reassurance. Majah took note that she would have to do some changes on Ozzie’s wedding outfit later on.
They managed to get to the airport through a janitor who works there and latched themselves on a woman’s synthetic fur coat when the janitor crossed paths with her. The woman, lucky for them, was flying to Lvov, Ukraine, which was another step closer to their main destination. Once they got off Lvov, they again hitched from rat to rat through underground sewages and finally onto a dog belonging to a teenage boy who was doing a sort of road trip to Odessa with his friends. By then, Ozzie’s cramps stopped coming so frequently and everyone could see a fair baby bump on his middle. When he lifted his shirt to see (or whenever Hershey tries to do it), he could see the spawn gotten just a bit bigger, about the size of three extra large donuts with extra fillings stacked together in width that Ozzie’s chief liked to order for his snacks. Thrax really had to guard his cell from any of his siblings or his cousins who would even think of wanting to run their grubby hands on either Ozzie or his child inside him, growling and flashing out his killer claw to warn them off. The elders of the family just watched this all in amusement.
“Baby Thrax seems to really be overprotective over little Jones, isn’t he?” one of the relatives commented as he grinned at the way Thrax held onto Ozzie close as the cell, who was sitting on his lap, tried to convince the virus that Khora and Kincaid were not going to jump him.
“It’s instinct for him,” Mr. Roja replied casually. “Only with little Jones, it seemed to have increase threefold.”
“He must really love little Jones very much,” Gertrude said with a small smile.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Roja replied. “Perhaps there is something special about little Jones in which we are all feeling it as well, or perhaps he had finally found the one person he wished to spend the rest of his life with. I have a feeling he will keep that up indefinitely.”
Finally, from Odessa, they jumped off the dog to land on a few rats that were getting into a cargo ship that was heading towards Crimea. After sailing for almost 6 hours, they have finally reached Crimea and hitched a ride on a few seagulls that perched just right on Swallow’s Nest, the building being the highlight of Crimea. There, they were greeted by a very old virus riding on an albino rat who seemed to be related to the Common Cold rather than Black Death. Kurt, Klepta’s youngest brother, explained to Ozzie that he was the one who helped the Black Death ancestors to get on board Crimea and officiated their wedding, thus he was awarded this rat city and was made the Black Death’s family’s official marriage priest. The old virus—Father Macross was his name—invited everyone to come into rat city where the rest of the Black Death family were already waiting for their arrival, save a few who could not come because of the impossible distance they were from Ukraine. They all stayed in the hotel near the brain centre and Father Macross directed Ozzie and Thrax to their designated rooms, stating that all preparations will be done and completed in a week’s time and that they need not to worry and let the elders do all the work. Also, according to tradition, they should not meet before the wedding day, thus the separate rooms.
“Aren’t we a little too superstitious here, Father?” Thrax complained, not wanting to be apart from his beloved cell.
“It’s a tradition honoured by your ancestors for centuries,” Father Macross replied. “Besides, better be safe than sorry, right?”
“It’s OK, Thrax,” Ozzie said. “After the wedding we’ll have plenty of time to be together.”
Thrax looked quietly at the cell and gave him a peck on the forehead before leaving to his designated room, not saying another word.
Ozzie wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved that Thrax didn’t make a fuss about it or feel lonely.
--:--
“Hey, baby.”
“Th…Thrax, what are you doing here?”
Thrax didn’t reply as he quickly but quietly went into Ozzie’s room and shut the door behind him. Ozzie backed away a little to make way for him but cringed when he smelt alcohol on his breath and clothes.
“Were you drinking?”
“A little,” Thrax admitted as he sat on the bed, massaging his temples and sighing almost in relief. “The guys heard of us being separated before the wedding day, and decided that I should celebrate some stupid bachelor’s night with them. They friggin’ dragged me unwillingly down to the nearest pub to drink the night away, claiming to celebrate my last day as a bachelor. Your cold pill friend was also forced to join them as well since he was close friends with you, but he settled for coke instead of alcohol.”
“Good ol’ little health conscious cherry boy,” Ozzie chuckled as he sat beside him, offering him a glass of juice to wash off the alcohol breath.
“The runt had the time of his life though. He was like going all ‘Alright everyone, let’s par-tay’,” Thrax imitated Klepta’s voice sarcastically, “and those crazy-ass twins were asking me if I had any last words before I officially tie the knot and surrender my single life freedom, like it’s some kind of a life sentence to me. What the fuck are they trying to imply?”
Ozzie shrugged, grinning to his beloved, although deep down inside he knew that probably they said that to spite him because of their attachment towards him.
“I managed to slip out of the party when they were singing and dancing along with the band on the pub stage and flirting over the bar top and pole dancers over there. I kinda left your cold pill friend alone there, but I don’t care. I wanted to see you. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s bad luck to meet the bride before the wedding. You are my mate, and I have every right to see you,” Thrax pulled Ozzie close to his chest, “I missed you, and our baby.”
“We missed you too,” Ozzie said as he hugged him back. “Three days without seeing you is giving me cabin fever.”
“Three days? Has it been that long? So how’s the baby doing?”
“It’s fine. The Sisterhood is taking rather good care of me. Just last night, the ladies celebrated my bachelorette party,” Ozzie chuckled at Thrax’s incredulous expression, “Yes, I know, it’s cheesy, but they said since I am the ‘bride’, I should be considered the bachelorette. They bombarded me with girl talk and asked me how we met and all that, wanting all the details. In fact, they’ve gone as far as asking about our sex life, which is not exactly what I want to disclose. We celebrated it at the hotel café and, don’t worry, I didn’t drink.”
“Good, because I wouldn’t want anything to happen to our little pet here,” Thrax said as he traced his finger along the little baby bump. “Are you still getting cramps?”
Ozzie shook his head, “Surprisingly, they’ve stopped now, and I can somehow feel it move inside of me earlier than I’ve expected. I guess Ambrose was right about it being different than a normal pregnancy.”
Thrax purred and made Ozzie lay on the bed before lifting the shirt to see the growing spawn. The features were still indistinctive, but he could see a pair of what looked like eyes forming at the part where the face was supposed to be, and they were shut really tight. He purred again as he nuzzled at the baby bump, whispering sweet nothings to it and wishing that it will grow up strong and healthy. He then leaned close to Ozzie’s face and licked the cell’s cheek. Ozzie could tell from experience what that meant.
“Th…Thrax, no, w-w-we shouldn’t…” Ozzie tried to push him away, although one side of him told him to shut the hell up and let it happen.
“C’mon, baby, I know you want it,” Thrax whispered as he nibbled at Ozzie’s neck. “I missed you.”
“Y…Yeah, b-b-but we’ve got plenty of time together anyway after the wedding. What’s the rush?”
“Don’t you miss me, baby?”
“Of course I miss you, but…”
“Don’t forget who you belong to, baby.”
Those words soon turned Ozzie on and threw everything rational out of the window.
“Yes, Master. I’m yours. I’m all yours.”
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