(no subject)
Cruther stood by the door in the shop, smiling smugly at his nemesis and waiting for Drago to acknowledge him.
Drago, who could not have looked more different from the young man with the neat dark hair and the neater dark suit merely continued turning the old weathered pages in the large leather-bound volume on his desk. Cruther cleared his throat loudly, but Drago continued poring over his book.
Frowning at this momentary defeat, Cruther moved forward. "Mr. Drago," he said simply in a loud voice.
Drago stood up and adjusted his spectacles, then took them off to wipe them on his shirt. "Ah, Mr. Cruther!" he said jovially with a friendly smile. "I'm so glad you've arrived. Forgive me--I didn't notice you were there. I am getting on in years, after all, as you have kindly reminded me."
"No need for games, Drago," he said coldly, "I have come because you have failed to vacate the premises. And now I see that your shelves are still filled with this garbage--it looks as though you have not yet begun to prepare to leave."
"My dear Mr. Cruther!" Drago exclaimed, beaming at Cruther, "That is because I have not, and I have no intention of going anywhere."
"You have lost here!" Cruther roared, his cold tone lost and his face flush with emotion. He took a moment to calm himself. "This is over, Drago."
"It is not over," replied Drago, his calm never faltering although his rosy tone left him somewhat. He closed his book and leaned heavily on his cane as he came around the desk. "Although this is the ending. It will be over very soon. That is what you want, isn't it Jonathon? To be over, to end. You don't want to keep doing this. You want calm, you want peace, you want nothing--and I don't mean that there is nothing you desire, I mean that you desire for nothing."
"And you," Cruther snarled, "are nothing but an old buffoon who wants your stories and fantasies to be true. You want there to be monsters around every corner--"
"I don't want it," Drago interrupted in a sad voice, "I merely acknowledge it."
"And that, 'my dear Mr. Drago,' is our problem here, ins't it?"
"One of them, I suppose..." Drago answered, a weakness and exhaustion in his voice rarely heard there. Cruther did not notice.
"You believe that these ghosts and ghouls are real things, and you corrupt the children who come to you. So you aren't a trickster! So you really believe what you say! That doesn't change that you scare the children, that you're a corrupting influence, that you have an influence over them--"
"An influence," Drago said, his voice regaining its strength, "that I earned. If they were so scared of me, why do they come to me? I don't teach the children that there are monsters, Mr. Cruther. The children already know that. Some adults have forgotten, but most of us know it too. We just ignore it, or accept that it can not be changed. I am the exception, Mr. Cruther, not because I believe something--but because of something that I have not forgotten that we all once knew, and because I remember what our fairy tales and other stories told us.
"Please, Mr. Cruther, stop going on about my belief in monsters if you fail to understand it. Nobody has said that goblins and kobolds and boggarts literally infest the world around--although they very well may, I wouldn't know. I have told you that there are monsters. I have told the children the same thing children's stories always have--not that these beasties and brutes exist, but that they can be beaten. That courage can win the day. That any monster can be defeated. That they don't have to accept the monstrous as unchangeable. That they can be a hero, and that there will always be a hero to defend them!"
Drago strode forward with a vigor that he always had to fall back on when his words failed, and which none had ever seen because most of the monsters Drago had slain over the years were no match for his might. Grasping the hilt of his swordcane, he pulled it from its disguised sheath and directed it at Cruther's chest.
"Now then, Mr. Cruther. I believe you should vacate my premises."