Eye of the Dragon? More like, Eye of Desperation.
That raven is bonkers, probably from being frozen for twenty years.
He shrugged and rounded the corner to his own street. He tried to forget about it, half-expecting (and half-hoping) Mal would probably do the same. She had her whims, but they never seemed to last. That was the good thing about Mal; she would get all worked up about something, but totally drop it the next day. They got along because Jay had learned to just ride out the storm.
When he finally made his way through the last of the puzzle of stolen locks, chains, and deadbolts that guarded his own house (thieves being the most paranoid about burglary), he pushed the rotting wooden door open with a creak and crept inside.
One foot at a time. Shift your body weight as you step. Stick close to the wall….
“Jay? Is that you?”
Crap.
His father was still awake, cooking eggs, his faithful parrot, Iago, on his shoulder. Was Jafar worried about his only son being out so late? Was he worried about where he’d been, or who he’d been with, or why he hadn’t come home until now?
Nah. His father had only one thing on his mind, and Jay knew exactly what it was.
“What’s tonight’s haul?” Jafar asked greedily, as he set his plate of food down on the kitchen table, next to a pile of rusty coins that passed for currency on the island. The table was where Jafar practiced his favorite hobby: counting his money. There was a good-sized pyramid of coins on the table, but Jay knew it wouldn’t satisfy Jafar’s greed.
Nothing did.
“Nice pajamas.” Jay smirked. The trick with his father was to keep moving, to stay on your toes, and above all else, to avoid answering the question, because none of the answers were ever right. When you couldn’t win, you shouldn’t give in and play. That was just setting yourself up for disaster.
I mean, my dad’s best friend is a parrot.
Enough said.
“Nice pajamas!” Iago squawked. “Nice pajamas!”
Jafar was wearing a faded bathrobe over saggy pajamas with little lamps printed all over them. If twenty years of being frozen could turn a raven cuckoo, twenty years of life among the lost had done just as much to diminish the former Grand Vizier of Agrabah’s infamy, along with his grandeur and panache (at least, that was how his father thought of it). Gone were the sumptuous silks and plush velvet jackets, replaced by a uniform of ratty velour sweat suits and sweat-stained undershirts that smelled a little too strongly of their shop’s marketplace stand, which was located, rather unfortunately and quite directly across from the horse stalls.
The sleek black beard was now raggedy and gray, and there was the aforementioned gut. Iago had taken to calling him “the sultan,” since Jafar now resembled his old adversary in size; although, in all fairness, Iago himself looked like he was on a daily cracker binge.
In return, Jafar called his feathered pal things that were unrepeatable by any standard, even a parrot’s.
Jay hated his father’s pajamas: they were a sign of how far their once royalty-adjacent family had fallen. The flannel was worn so thin in places you could see Jafar’s belly roll beneath it. Jay tried not to look too closely, even now, in the shadows of the early morning light.
His father ignored the pajama insults. He’d heard them all before. He wolfed down his midnight snack with relish without offering Jay a bite. “Come on, come on, get on with it. What’d we get? Let’s have a look.”
Jay eyed his carpet roll at the end of the room, beyond the table—but he also knew there was no way of getting past his father now. He reluctantly unpacked his pockets. “Broken glass slipper, got it from one of the step-granddaughters. With some glue, we could get a good price for it.” The cracked, heel-less slipper shattered into a pile of glass shards the moment it hit the table. Jafar raised an eyebrow.
“Um, superglue?” Jay kept going. “One of Lucifer’s collars, Rick Ratcliffe’s pistol keychain—and look, a real glass eye!” It was covered in lint. “It’s only a little used. I got it from one of the pirates.” He held it up to his own eye and peered through the glass—then jerked it away, wrinkling his nose and fannin
g his face with his hand. “Why don’t pirates ever bathe? Hello, it’s called a shower. It’s not like they’re even out at sea anymore.” With that, he rolled the eyeball across the table to his father.
Iago squawked curiously while Jay waited for the inevitable.
Jafar waved a dismissive hand over the items and sighed. “Garbage.”
“Garbage!” Iago shrieked. “Garbage!”
“But that’s all there is on this island,” Jay argued, leaning against the kitchen sink. “This is the Isle of the Lost, the Isle of the Leftovers, remember?”
His father frowned. “You went to the De Vil place, and you didn’t score a fur coat? What were you doing in there all night? Slobbering over Maleficent’s girl?”
Jay rolled his eyes. “For the ten-thousandth time, no. And it’s not like I was the one locked in the coat closet.” As he said it, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of that.
“You need to try harder! What about that princess? The one who’s just come out of the castle?”