Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first years Zora spent on Earth, she was unaware.

Wounded by her rough entry (trying to land with a broken spaceship means injuries ahoy, go figure) and smothered by her quick capture, she was smuggled between hands as an experiment, a strange bit of alien technology or some foreign corpse.

Being owned, traded between hands like a playing card, was infuriating just as much as it was achingly familiar. Her final hand turned, revealing a card overlaid with a red-painted misnamed Leviathan. Ever since her (accidental) awakening, she has been seeking escape. Her people were made from the flesh of space to propagate peace, and the thought of one of these war-mongers using her to create tools of war sends shivers over her body.

It takes just one moment- a woman, attracted to the glimmer of her star-patterned skin glimmering in the false light, pressing a finger against the crack in the glass- before she's free.

Symbiotic relations are her bread and butter, and Zora ran through her new partner's recent memories in order to catch a glimpse of her situation. Yoinking a handful of acceptable social rules for the mammilian species is a given; she's basically a prettier form of grey goo, without any context for the blatant evil surrounding her. Zoerostians, after all, only considered it an acceptable life cycle when the eldest had swallowed a dozen of their own relations' young, which was blatantly unacceptable in other cultures.

And Evil was very culturally defined, even if it felt the same on a soulular level.

Kidnapping. She ran through the memories. Human trafficking. Her new host was stolen, and suspected her use to these 'scientists' would be either sex or unethical experimentation. The memories she tapped as 'proof' for her conclusion were connected to another memory, a small child laughing in one memory compared to the distinct lack of one in the next. A news story of a 'mutant' with his exact shade of green eyes stumbling out of a ruin and falling apart into strips of rotting flesh.

She was terrified.

Zora reached forwards on instinct, brushing comfortingly against her consciousness and making herself known. The symbiotic bond wouldn't fully settle for another half-turn of the planet, thereabouts, and there was ample time to communicate and bond emotionally with her host before then. Maybe even sneak in a few additions- it was the height of torture for her kind to be helpless while the host perished, and the simple energy efficiency of air-breathing hosts meant she might even be able to effect her, just a little. Fire-expulsion and heightened senses, along with a little biological cleanup, wouldn't be remiss.

Her hosts consciousness flinched at the unfamiliar, an instinct that had served her species well, before curiosity allowed her to brush back.

Symbiotic connecting wasn't anything like what popular media would tell you. They bonded down to the soul, twined every bit of themselves into their cells until the only place one ended and another started was on a mental plane. It started emotionally, symbiotes searching for a partner that could accurately match them. Unsurprisingly, much like trying to squeeze a square block in a round hole, bad match-ups ended in injury, usually mental and rarely physical injury for both the symbiote and the host. Having to speak aloud, instead of simply sharing their common knowledge pool, was a sign of a bad match-up, and usually lead to death towards the end. Bonding so deeply required a specific kind of person, a specific kind of symbiote, and trust that few species would share. But these symbiotes were made, woven into liquid starlight, to promote peace, and peace was similarly a rarity in any species that evolved from their lesser forms.

The host part of them brushing against their connected space showed that wonderfully, the places where they were similar- they both preferred feminine pronouns, their love of the young, other little things exchanged with world experience and love, - strung together in the middle ground between them, tying them together to the point the places where they ended and the other began were indistinguishable. The things they shared, shared between them.

The points that weren't- Zora's genetic memory, passed from father or mother to child, the host's distaste for certain foods, Zora's unfamiliarity with tasting in general, due to her perceiving most touch as taste, little memories and things that kept them seperate- those were the barrier between them, the obvious beginning of this-is-me and the touch of this-is-other.

The host brushed against her carefully, as soft a touch as a child petting a sleeping lioness. She sent a calm wave of comfort back, metaphorically spreading her hands apart in invitation to poke and prod. Physically, she was resting in a little useless sack in her host's body, stretching her liquid body along the cells and investigating the regular operations of this strange liquid-sack.

Curiosity tingled across the bond, a feeling of poking something curious to see how it reacts. Memories tingled from behind it, a little fear and apprehension buried under a puddle of hope. She- the host- knew that the 'strange other' of Zora was absolutely not her, and the scientists around her hadn't injected anything, therefore the 'strange other' was the magic glitter space slime she poked and disappeared. She thought of Zora as a tentative ally, hopefully, or at least something or someone that would take revenge on these people for the small child. Images of her turning into something similar to him, except space-colored and much more destructive, drifted across the bridge between their minds.

Zora would have smiled, if she had teeth or muscles or the ability to. The sentiment was there, though, and she sent across their shared space the beginning of her, and now their, people.

Wakening at the feet of Him, the feeling of weaved-before-starlight washing over them like a gentle breeze. Their Lord, Progenitor, King, Creator and God preaching before them of peace. Consuming the war-torn planet under a wave of symbiote-and-flesh, syncing between two species until they were two parts of a combined whole. A space visitor, their God gifting them to other species and learning their customs. Those-who-visited-other-and-became coming back to share news, information drifting across a web of connected minds. Her great-mother, Unshielded-starlight melding for the first time and bringing back enough emotional energy to bud. The birth of Zora's ancestor, the shades of minds touching the solid line of knowledge from the beginning, information streamed through bloodlines of species and cultures and knowledge until each new symbiote was born their own being, sentients in their own rights instead of shades of their God.

Still they kept that touch of other, their first communication. Of Kylar, father of all of those-woven-from-the-skin-and-scales-and-soul-of-the-great-dark-sea.

Zora, the touch-taste of her other hosts, of deep beneath the dirt, from the depths of the sea, into the heights of sky, learning and dancing, all with the same gentle purple glimmer as her great-mother. The broken ship, the whimpers of a host's death, injury from both the sudden landing and the saddening disconnect, and sleeping for many rotations of the planet around its central star.

The host understood the majority of the information, able to know and feel the other of the Touch of Kylar, but couldn't experience the same information and emotions Zora had. Which was understandable, she was liquid starlight and Host was… liquid. Smart liquid, some of these little intricacies were new and unknown to her, but not nearly at the level of liquid starlight.

The distinct disconnect helped. Host knew there were bits she couldn't understand, didn't have the equipment for, and worked around it. Context and inferring helped, and the closest approximation came back shaded with understanding.

And then, wonder of wonders, Host reciprocated. She couldn't remember as far as Zora could, humans not being telepathic, but she shared as far back as she could remember. Being small and tiny, and sitting on grandmother (one-above)'s lap as she told the stories of old. Tales both true and not, with meaning vibrating between the air waves their physiology cleverly let them abuse. It was many host-cycles ago before she had seen/felt any other hosts using such speech methods, and it filled her with fondness.

Host shared experiences, let her taste iced dairy sugar and small seed-bearing fruit that was the color of the lifeblood of this species. The feeling of the distant star's radiation sending happy-smiles through the skin and the feeling of skin-touch-comfort between two sleeping partners. Silly in-jokes coming from generations of language, poets and common folk alike laughing together at another twisting of their endlessly complex form of communication. Host showed her music, the exhilaration of a rhythm pattern overlaid with instruments, the string of a memory connecting to a broken, half-corrupted feeling of resting and growing in a liquid, the only sound the soft boom-boom of blood rushing through the heart-mother.

Zora felt, stretching tendrils of herself outward to press their two consciousnesses together in what Host's memories told was called hug.

Happy drifted across their connection, the feeling of starlight-beneath-skin shining against sunlight-smiles-laughter. Aesthetics weren't Zora's thing, lacking sight in her true form, but she felt this was beautiful.

She shifted in the useless water-carrier, spreading along thin tendrils as she twined herself and her Host together physically. Cells were tweaked, bits of genetic flotsam being brushed away and improvements filling the gaps. The neck was supported, something so weak unacceptable, and filled two sacs at the roof of her mouth with the closest approximation of Darthraxxi venom producers. More akin to the legendary basilisk's venom, acid, than a poison, but too much of a poison to be acid.

The lungs were cleaned, deemed too important to mess with, and a second heart bloomed out from the opposite side of her chest. Her skin gained another layer, this one weaving spider strands of organic carbon compounds into a dermal armor layer beneath her skin. Useless bits were discarded, and replaced with useful things, like venom antibodies and regeneration-promoting bacteria storage sacs.

The Host smiled at the feeling of not-alone-never-alone as Zora stretched beneath her- their skin. It was nothing more than a twitch of lips, and both of them flinched as a sharp metal object stabbed through their skin and Host's consciousness receded from her body with a burst of mental static.

Zora receded, too, when knives cut into their shared skin and unwelcome, unknown hands dug through her body for organs kept just out of their reach. Hidden beneath flesh-colored dermal mesh, Zora hid, and pondered.

When the knife cut through her neck, severing what would be several major arteries and blood vessels, Zora slowed their breathing and blood-flow, silencing their original heart and using herself as a makeshift lung. She knew enough of human bodies, and her human's body, to fake the death those around them wished to perpetuate.

On Zora's third rotation around this planet's sun reached the eve of her fourth, her Host's body was dumped in a mass grave, buried beneath the dirt. As the radiation of the nearest star shined through the earth, Zora coiled in the chest of her host, and felt the settling of their bond lock into place.

When the moon was at its highest place in the sky, Zora broke through the bloodied dirt and pushed their body through the treeline, covered in dried blood and with teeth too sharp to be human, with a mass grave suspiciously lacking in corpses and in a hospital gown far too big for her size.

Her eyes shine a thick, sickly white against the paleness of their body, but none ask questions of the little girl in a bloodied hospital gown. It could be the milky color of her eyes, or the way the black, stardust-colored liquid pools out of the pores of her palms and curls into claws, but they make it to what Host's memory calls an 'acceptable domicile' without native incident.

Against the backdrop of humanity, Zora can clearly smell 'other' amongst their lines. She understands why they do not ask, now. She can feel the fractaled kaleidoscope of dimensions touching this one, overlapping and layering in pockets of their own that are each as individually infinite as this one but to a smaller degree. Eyes and not-eyes drift over the area, watching and drifting in spaces that are and spaces that aren't, waiting and sleeping and coiling amongst the humans in clear favor, and Zora is amused and amazed in equal measure.

It was the constant bombardment of other among the humans that started her crawling claw towards their home world, after all. Where was there to hide for a freak, than among freaks?

Zora sunk beneath their skin, calm and docile with her meal, and settled in to sleep next to the renewed beating of their two hearts, in the shadows of the tree growing through the rotting roof. Something smiles against her back, and Zora mimicks it as a fresh burst of rain slides down the tree and curls against their skin. Tendrils curl along where she leans against it, starswirls blooming into flowers along the edges as she fades into the mental static of her partner.

--

Thirteen years, lonely years with only each other for company, and Zora stares down at the desperate sounding flier with curiosity and a shred of amusement. Their hair is tied up, a low ponytail, and with glasses, it's easy to tell the difference between Zora and Darcea Lewis.

For them, at least. Gods help what other poor fools try.

They've been dodging science classes for years, a mixture of flashbacks- anatomy was the worst- and blatant misinformation turning their mindscape too stormy for coherent thought. Zora was already convinced half of the teachers were being deliberately malignant with their words, because it simply doesn't work like that, and that English was made by a drunk bilgesnipe deepthroating Newtskins. (anthropomorphic newts with a high-quality hallucinogenic secreted from their skin. Shit was bananas.)

They gave it up as a bad deal halfway through the first year, and evaded it with the same ease millennials trying to get their shit together avoid self-care. But a scientist- PhD, not MD,- who just wanted someone to keep her company and/or fed?

Darcea snatched the flier, wrote the contact information down on her hand with a star-patterned ink pen, and walked back towards their dorm with elation singing in her blood. Science credit for being an over glorified assistant? Sign them up!

Chapter Text

The first thing Eris noticed was the burning.

She wasn’t unaccustomed to pain; the burning legion’s fel energies earned the right to be called ‘fire’ in ancient darnassian, and they ran through her veins like lifeblood. This, however, was different. 

“Do not be alarmed, mortal.” The mass of shattered glass, light and Light floated before her. Its words immediately raised her hackles. The shattering of the Well of Eternity was a sore point between elves, demon hunters or not, and it was only the gift given at the defeat of an immense demon Matriarch that she regained her ability to age freely. Calling her ‘mortal’- as though she was one, like the many demonic beasts before her, pressed a button she didn’t even know existed.

It was then she noticed she was frozen, and unable to reach for her blades. This only increased her wariness. Inaction in the face of an enemy meant death, after all, and an immortal demon soul wouldn’t mean shit if her body was caught in the grips of the Dark Beyond. 

She wasn’t even really listening at this point, keeping wary eyes trained in the general direction of the supernova as she waited for something to happen. The burning in her veins, the fel’s own reaction to the magic around her, was a great distraction. 

“I am here now on a mission,” Her elfen ears would have perked up in interest, if she could have moved anything. “I seek the child of light and shadow, a boy destined to end the age of demons.” 

A boy? Her general disgust for light beings increased tenfold. Paladins and Priests already treated Demon Hunters like scum, marching forward with the burning light in hand, ready to annihilate all who stood against the Light. It reminded her too much of the demons they fought, to be frank. And bringing a boy into this war? Eris would rather fall to the burning legion than let this war be fought by a boy. She was already too young, when she joined, and she refused to let any others make the same mistake if there was any other option.

“The one called Illidan Stormrage.” If Eris could, she would have blinked. No. She denied. No, no no no absolutely not. She couldn’t explain her emotions if she honestly tried, but she refused to let this being of pain and suffering on the bodies of all demon hunters within a single stride-length of her lord. Absolutely not.

It honestly didn’t help that directly before this, she was guiding Tyrande to her love, and listening to her talking about it. A hundred, hundred years and he woke just to be by your side again? Wow, I wonder who that reminds me of? And what if you, instead of walking to your husband, walked to his brother, instead? In the cell in which he harnessed his powers, settling them into himself, what if you went to him for comfort instead? What would the world have been, if Illidan’s tragic love story was reciprocated?

This was the point she woke up, hearts beating a tattoo against her chest as she inhaled silently. She grasped blindly, her magic in a massive uproar as arcane settled between her shoulderblades and fel roared in her veins. A book met her grasping fingers, and she pressed it between her chest as she sat up, using the pressure to quiet the inner beast. She nodded to the two healers- she recognized this place, now that her eyes were working again- and immediately stepped away. Khadgar, and her battle-brothers, needed to know about this. Now .

It was only on the steps of the Citadel, when she looked down and read Mount Hyjal and Illidan’s Gift. Her hands tensed to throw it, but she settled for leaving it in her bag as she walked through the massive doorway.

“You live!” Khadgar sounded overjoyed. “Your champions came to me after they failed to rouse you at your order hall. We brought you here and put you in the infirmary. What happened?”

Eris swallowed down the opening rant, and instead leaned on the arcane for calm. Her spider’s web of connections, to her Champions and her Lord, kept her steady as she repeated the supernova’s words.

She didn’t correct him when he mistook Illidan for dead. Just another sacrifice, and veil, to keep demons away from her lord. Elune bless, etc.

Gods, but what she wouldn’t give to be beside him right now, as far away from these insufferable idiots as she could go.

h EA DACHE .

“The pain will subside, champion.” Oh gods please no. “You now carry my mark, and through it I am able to see and feel as you do.” Eris’s thoughts gained a whining tone. Noooooo “Return to be when you are able. We have much to do.”

Please tell me I didn’t pick up a light-guided parasitic STD on my way through the dark beyond. She prayed to gods she did not follow. Please. But Elune abandoned her long ago, and did not answer. Eris’s thoughts turned fondly on the bottle of Moonwine hidden beneath her anvil, and she set out of the Citadel with the foul aftertaste of Light on her mouth, a mix of swordmetal and concentrated sunlight mixed with the rot at the bottom of an ocean. Being able to taste- and thus smell- magic helped her much on her missions for the Illidari. But now, she wished for the ability to turn it off .

As she opened her wings above the floating island, she studied the book once more. ‘ Don’t worry about returning the book, it will return on its own.’ It read on the first page beyond the cover, and Eris didn’t think her thoughts could get even more sarcastic. Oh, great. Now, when I burn it for being obviously false, the ashes will appear over whoever made this’ pillow. The thought pleased her, as did imagining the owner’s face at said ashes.

She didn’t wish Light on any loyal demon hunter. But if she wished to be rid of the foul intruder upon her aura, she needed to finish whatever errand the exploding lightbulb wished her to do in its ‘holy’ name. So she stepped through the archway, nodded to her commanders, and reached out a scaled hand against the massive floating dagger against the wall.

As every other wielder of the light before it, the entire interaction made Eris’ skin crawl, and not because of the fel writhing in her veins. Viewing the birth of any elf was the right of the parents and close friends, a gift upon those around them for their support and friendship. Elflings were rare enough as it is, and without any real knowledge of why it was supposed to be something like an honor to see the birth of one. Something only ever seen by those close to them. It was something sacred, and Eris was far too young to know anything of Illidan’s parents. It was taking the traditions of a thousand years before The Sundering , and crushing them under a stained-glass boot. It was sickening, and Eris hated it just as much as she was curious.

The skyfire required a mission, and her aid, and that was as much of a distraction as anything except excellent alcohol would be. She didn’t even really listen to it, saluting the seventh legion and keeping her eyes on the skyline. It was slow, and calm aboard the skyfire, and Eris settled into a dark corner below deck for a swift nap. If she was quick enough, she might even have dreams instead of nightmares in this fresh hellhole.

When she woke up, everything was exploding.

The battle was a blur. The only things Eris remembered was; parachuting was nothing like gliding with her own two wings, she hated the Ice King even more than before, and she felt like the weight of her inner demons fell off somewhere in between unleasing unholy fel upon those poor, undead souls. She completely ignored the small encampment, leaping atop the massive Pandarian Kite- a gift from a drunkard on the stone paths of stormwind- and fleeing along the wind-trails to Lorlathil.

“What have you done to yourself?” Her greeting was as intelligent as a judgemental shoelace. “You’re more demon than night elf.” Completely ignoring the similarities to her surroundings and demons, she stepped forwards. That night spent asleep was a night with a retarded chandelier trying to dig deeper into her mind, and she refused on principal to suffer it any longer than she had to. The headache was already three times as bad as yesterday’s was. 

“An ancient memory stirs.” Hello to you to, rejected glass sculpture. What long-standing tradition am I to defile today?

It is kind of embarrassing to admit that Eris forgot that Illidan had a brother. It was understandable, due to the both of them denying relations in every sideways and backwards way they could, but still kind of unforgivable. And absolutely nothing could match her relief at completely not seeing either of them. It was something beyond merely rude, after all.

That didn’t mean Eris was comfortable, seeing these things from the point of view of an outsider. Especially not from something so far away from Illidan’s own point of view. Xe’ra was in Eris’ mind, just like all the other Naaru; something to grin and bear but never to respect or listen to. They were much like the void lords, or the titans, unable to step in but willing to judge despite complete unfamiliarity with the system in place.

Tracing their position from the tower in the distance, Eris leapt and de-summoned the kite, spreading her wings for a rough glide as she aimed for the general direction of where she was supposed to go. The best part of a demon hunter, besides knowing someone would always have your back in a fight, was the wings. Which was why she landed directly where she was supposed to be, and not straight on top of a shark or anything. Honest.

The Headache was more bearable now, but Eris didn’t know if that was because she was familiar with entities attempting siege upon her brain or that she had gotten used to the annoying broken lightbulb.

Eris saw the first bit of the situation, and completely shut it out. The great part of being incredibly broken inside, and filling the cracks with bits of demon souls, is that when the world gets too much, dissociation was a demon hunter’s best friend. Especially when she was being forced to witness something so private and uncomfortably familiar. A sister being shunned from her place, while the other is welcomed with open arms? Uncanny, how similar they were.

It swiftly became much too similar to some of her similar missions, when the demon hunters were running low and no one had slept for more than a week. Get in, complete mission, report back, get in, complete mission. Nothing seen or heard on those missions made it back to command, mostly due to lack of sleep but also due to the messiness. No one was unfamiliar with the concept of demons being sentient, except paladins , and it was hard to speak with flashes of rotting children's corpses hung up on strings flashing beneath wary eyelids.

If the previous missions were like a nightmare that simply wouldn't end, this one was worse. Wearing his skin, acting as him… Eris wanted to break down sobbing and also to kill every glass shard in Xera’s body. It wasn’t so much betrayal, as it was a complete and utter defiling of one of Eris’ only gods.  Eris dragged a flagon of ironwine from the depths of her bag, sat down in the middle of the stone sideway, and drank. There were no words to describe the size of her disgust. With a simple questline, this Naaru had completely lived up to every racist muttering Eris had heard in the dark corners of the den. She wanted to throw up and curl into a ball. She wanted to snarl and whimper and whine, because this was the last straw.

Eris only stood to her own two feet and got off of the stone floor when she was drunk enough that she knew from experience she wouldn’t be remembering anything but the bare minimum of this disaster in the morning.

She didn’t even react more than a blank face at Sargeras’ bullshit. Honestly, she was so far done with this experience she could taste the distaste of every other demon hunter on the other side.

Chapter Text

Hel chuckled wetly and then turned over to cough, the rotten smell of fetid determination tainting the air with rust. She could feel it drip down her teeth as she moved back, leaning against the ribcage of the alternate version of her Papyrus.

“Braveheart ? ” She croaked, turning to bury herself into the solid weight of his ribcage. He limply draped his arm around her as she moved into his lap, determination leaking through his vertebrae. She curled, pressing her ribcage to his even as their combined determination leaking through the wounds soaked into their clothes. 

“Brighteye?” He returned, curling his body slowly so that he covered her, his head resting on hers. They were running on borrowed time, determination that wasn’t even theirs fueling them now.

“We deserved a soft epilogue, my love.” She quoted, the massive hole in her head throbbing with the weight of memories just out of reach. She had no idea where the quote came from, but it fit the situation perfectly. Hel relaxed against his ribcage, fisting phalanges into the stained orange fabric of his sweatshirt. “But I don’t regret going out this way.” She admitted, staring into the light of their two souls. They were close, now, if she could see them without focusing.

“Together?” He asked, the rumble of his voice sending ripples through her bones.

“Together.” She agreed, curling her legs to straddle his waist. He started to shake with the weight, and she moved back so he could lower himself down to lay on his back, in a more relaxed position. She put her skull right over his ribcage, curling around the mate that had been with her through so much as they waited to die.

The shadowbeasts, their age-long enemies, stood back against the light of their twin souls, growling and snarling like wolves just out of reach of prey. But still they waited, for their enemies were strong enough to dust them even while dying.

Braveheart’s ribcage rumbled with his chuckle as he draped an arm around her, the other limp at his side where it was cracked and dusted down the middle, leaking determination with the rest of his wounds. She lifted her head to rest on his ribcage, the thick scent of determination more of a background noise, now.

“Remember when we first met?” He asked, staring upwards into the colorless white void of mist that made up the sky. “When I asked you if you got that wound falling from heaven-”

“-and I said I got it crawling out of hell?” Helvetica gave a weak burst of laughter, quickly quieting as more determination dripped down her teeth. “Yeah, I remember.”

Braveheart snickered. “If I could be so bold, ” He intoned in a faux-pompous voice, referencing another of their exchanges knocking knock-knock jokes through the fabric of reality. His breathing was harsh, and she could feel it rattle against her chest as his stained smile grew. 

“Ital-allow you.” She completed the joke, wheezing with laughter that was half hysterical as her own red smile grew. “If I said I was font of you-”

“-Good! ‘Cause i'm pretty sure you’re my type- ” Laughter interrupted them, weezy cackles escaping their chests as they fought to keep their final moments happy. Their eye sockets were dark, blind to everything but their own souls and each other.

It trailed off with a happy sigh, leaving only the distant music of clock bells and the harsh wheeze of two broken rib cages fighting for air. She tightened her hold on his chest, nuzzling into the bone with a happy, but strained humm. It crackled with static, harsh and vibrating through reality, and she internally flinched but externally relaxed. She was dying, why would it matter?

Their breaths were quiet, the flood of leaking determination slowing as they ran out of determination-laced marrow to bleed. Their bones were see-through at this point, only barely held together by magic sinew, an inch from dusting as they both shook under their own feeble weight.

“I just wish,” She said wistfully, “we had more time together.”

Reality stopped. Immediately Helvetica regretted everything as she was wrenched to the side, a sharp cry escaping her as her pooled determination was forced back into her still open wounds. Agony laced into her veins in a cruel reflection of how she gained the determination in the first place, and she couldn’t hold in a harsh, static-filled scream. Lack of magic blinded her, even in the already-blind eye, but still she blinked back the harsh wave of static threatening to drown her in order to find her Braveheart.

A sudden stop and she collapsed with a clatter of bone on bone, choking back waves of determination that wanted to escape through her mouth. She blinked open foggy, unfocused eye sockets to meet Braveheart’s similarly affected face, and turned shaking bones to their surroundings. She felt Braveheart use what dregs of magic he had left to support her, and they stared out at the similarly shaped skeletons in shock.

The breach in logic that came from yet another multiverse mashing, along with the near-death and extinction of both of their multiverses, topped with their unhealthy magic use, and the both of them faded into the black before the mystery skeletons could make a sound.

Helvetica/Smooth Papyrus:
HP: 1/133
HP: 1/250

Chapter Text

Helliel, raised as a warrior with Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal, and as an experiment for hojo. After all, they had to test to make sure women could go into ShinRa as soldiers, too. It isn't her fault that she's rather unique.

"May the man be killed in a bloody, painful manner, and his name be forgotten forever." She swore vehemently, fingers twitching to keep from digging into the skin of her elbow, which even now was dotted with sores, hives, and bruises. Because seriously, fuck Hojo.

“Injections again?” Genesis called from where he was lounging on her couch, not looking up from his book. Helliel hummed in agreement as she kicked off her shoes, sitting down next to him on the floor and relaxing against the couch. His hand reached down and ran through her hair, and she turned her head and pressed against it in comfort. The aches in her bones as whatever tainted bullshit Hojo decided to test against his ‘failed’ specimen faded as she focused more on the safety of having one of her best friends nearby to defend her weakened state than the feeling of broken glass in her veins.

“Anything good?” She muttered, eyes closed. She could already feel the heat crawling up her body, the shaking in her legs that grew with every moment. A flick of a page between fingers, and the lack of his hands through her hair.

“First there was ice, frost, and fog.” Genesis read in a low rumble, returning to his petting. “Above, a cold void. Below, a fire. And in between, a demon.”

Helliel hummed, settling more comfortably in her spot next to the couch. 

"Rivers wound between the glaciers, eleven twined into one, the source of all life and the waters all life returns to," Genesis continued, "From the void, where ice met fire, from the waters all life returns to stepped a man, with skin the color of ice and eyes the color of sunset." 

"He was the first." She whispered in time with Genesis's reading, and peered through hooded lids up at him. "Ragnarök?" 

Genesis nodded, sliding his free hand down her body to cup her hip and drag her up to rest on his chest. He could probably feel the shivers running up and down her body, and the heat pressing up between her eyes. He didn't comment, content to run his hands through her short, pink hair and read to her. She curled, tangling their legs together and wrapping her arms around his chest. The silence was appreciated.

"From beneath his arms crawled his sons. From beneath his feet crawled his daughters." He continued, still in that same calm, rumbling tone. "From his blood came the rivers, his bones, the mountains."

She could hear the beating of his heart, and how it mixed with the bass tone of his voice to create a wave of calming, docile white noise. It lulled her, and she found herself drifting on the crests of his tone, and the soft feel of fingers sliding through her hair.

Footsteps echoed through the open door, and reality came back into focus as she cracked open an eye and let it focus lazily onto the moving figure.

"Angeal." She greeted, voice low and cracked with sleep and sickness both. Genesis was asleep below her, an arm circling her hip and a hand tangled in her hair. Fully awake, she could feel the sharp pains of her shoulder blades and the low ache of her organs. 

"Hel." He greeted back, walking closer to lean down and give her a kiss. She tilted her head up to receive it, feeling content. He rubbed a hand down her back, and she flinched.

"Shoulder blades." She bared her teeth in a parody of a smile, tightening her fists in Genesis's shirt. "Hojo." Angeal nodded, deep blue eyes clenched in sympathy and worry.

She felt the moment Genesis decided to stop pretending to sleep. He rubbed gently at the hook of her hip, circling the gentle outcropping of bone tenderly and slowly. He stretched up to greet Angeal himself, taking her along for the ride as a matter of course. Her eyelids drooped, something in her chest loosening as a low rumble echoed from somewhere deep within.

The entire room paused, staring. Helliel blinked, utterly bewildered.

"Did you just purr?" Genesis sounded blankly curious, but she could see the hilarity beginning to creep across his expression. Helliel resigned herself to being the butt of his jokes for the foreseeable future.

"...I guess I did?" Helliel leaned back and pressed a palm to her sternum, still startled.

Angeal snorted from across the room, shaking his head. Helliel giggled, Genesis chuckled, and the three of them were consumed in hilarity.

"Purring? Really? What'll they think of next?" Genesis grinned, cheered. He shuffled back against the arm of the couch, dragging Helliel with him.

"Wings?" Helliel offered, giggling into his chest. 

"If Hollander gives me an extra arm, I am going to revolt." Angeal deadpanned, sending the small group into another round of laughter.

Sephiroth stepped through the doorway, brows arched at the sight of them. Genesis, curled around Helliel and clutching her in his hilarity, Helliel's cackling arching from the cage of his arms, and Angeal's near-silent laughter over the kitchen countertop.

"Hey, Seph!" Helliel cheered once her laughter had ended.

Genesis turned, smiling up at him. "Hey, Seph." He called, fingers creeping towards her sides. Helliel drew up her shirt to cover her mouth as she coughed, jolting off of Genesis's lap as his fingers dug under her ribs.

"Gen you shit!" Helliel giggled, flopped upside down along the side of the couch. And then coughed harshly, into the fabric of her shirt. The spaces between her shoulder blades and spine protested the movement violently.

"Injections again?" Sephiroth asked, stepping forwards to help Hel off the floor. She nodded, pressing a happy smooch to his cheek as he lifted her up by her armpits.

"Yep." She flopped down on the couch next to Genesis, leaning over the other arm of the couch as her back twinged. "Fair warning: the space between your shoulder blades will hurt like Helheim afterwards." 

"The spine?" He asked, taking the space between them on the couch and pulling out his tablet. 

"No; between those." She turned, flopping over to occupy the space on his lap the tablet vacated. She felt the couch shift before warm hands tightened on her shirt, pulling it high. 

"Goddess, that's…" Genesis's voice hissed from her right, fingertips barely brushing the edge of the glass-shard feeling. Angeal's steps came closer, before returning to the kitchen, and Genesis's warm fingertips came back, wet, and cold. She felt a Scan wash through her bones.

Helliel relaxed, boneless, at the cold seeping into her wound. "Thank Gaia." She moaned, something in the wound relaxing. Sephiroth drew a short breath through his teeth.

"Drink more milk." Genesis ordered, "Both of you. And get more sunlight; you'll need the vitamin D." He rubbed gently at the affected areas, and she tensed up at the sharp burst of pain.

"Calcium?" She asked. It sounded unrelated, but she heard vitamin D helped break down calcium for the body to consume.

"Your bones will need the support." Genesis said, unhelpfully vague. Helliel snorted. Damn him and his deliberately unhelpful prophetic bullshit.

"Take your own advice." She drawled, leaning into the cold hand running through her hair. Sephiroth's hands were always cold, no matter how hot Mako made them run. It was especially appreciated, especially when the days in Midgar always ran so hot.

"What do you mean?" Angeal asked from the kitchen island. Genesis settled back on the couch next to Sephiroth, adding his hand to her hair.

She lifted a hand and pointed it to herself. "Project H." She turned it to Genesis. "Project G." She turned it to the kitchen. "Project G." She pointed it up at Sephiroth. "Project S." It dropped back under her head.

"All-natural derivatives of Project J." She grinned humorlessly. "Buckle up boys; you'll be having an extra arm before long."

Genesis broke back down into cackles, Angeal's soft, huff-like laughter joining. Helliel basked in it, grinning.

She opened her eyes to a sea of green.

“Lost pebble, tossed among the stream,”

“Cared and tended, loved and defended,”

“Twelve lights to guide them-”

“Black devil , not the way you seem,”
“Cold roots are not hardened by the frost.”

“Twelve strings to bind them-”

“Beware an enemy who seems to sleep.”

“And in the darkness, bring them home.”

“Your poison will not end the sea of green.”

She was drifting, both a part of and a seperate piece of the river of voices. They whispered, trying to impart their words to anyone listening, but despite their adherence to a shared beat the words were too closely said to hear. In a language too deep and primal to be misunderstood, they sang a chorus. 

She pressed open her lips and caught a mantra, a warning and promise both, dancing between each other in violent cascades, a deadly dance of whirlpools. As she watched, a stray slice of dark, foreign green silenced a few voices in its displeasure.

“I promise I will save you,

When you cannot stay afloat,

And if your tears can fill an ocean,

Then for you I'd be a boat."

It drifted from somewhere deep inside of her, echoing across the waves and looping around her in a tie. It drifted, wrapping protectively around a few sleeping voices. She smiled, baring teeth at the violent voice even as she grinned at the sleeping voices. Growing like a vine around them sounded fabulous, so she did it, sprouting into a massive redwood, roots growing like hands around her protected. Unseen, black sickness crumbled.

"I am sickness, ever-spreading, human-eating." The dark spot snarled, twisting in the eternal dance.

"I am a Planet." The white spot sang, "Sickness-immune, life-supporting."

She bared her teeth, snarling in a grin at that distant, violent voice, and heard something deep in her memory whisper into her head.

"I am the calamity." The violent voice shrieked harshly, deliberately off-tune with the rest of the chorus. "World-ender, eternity-breaker. What will you be then, Dreamer?"

"I am hope." She sang, a clear, high tone at the crest of a verbal rise. It was a challenge, a baring of teeth to a lesser opponent. The dark spot spun, the imprint of thousands of sharp teeth gritting in anger.

A shrill scream split the air.

" You wanna be an American idio-"  

"Mother fucker. " She hissed, blinking open glowing eyes and piercing the interruption with an amber-eyed glare. Around her, the tangle of bodies shifted with simultaneous groans.

Her phone was unrepentant, still spitting that infuriating song into the air. She untangled her arm from the mishmash of bodies and snatched it, accepting the call without checking ID.

By Holy, it's five in the gods damned morning. The fuck do you want? "Greetings. You've reached the dorm of Second-class Helliel, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal. Helliel speaking." She spoke with a monotone. Her entire body ached, her back felt like there were glass shards stuck within the muscle, and the only reason she wasn't literally spitting fire was that her materia was on the desk halfway across the room. The fuck d'y' want, bitch.

"Helliel." A crisp voice greeted from the other side of the phone. "Tseng speaking." Tseng, that was Sephiroth's friend who was a Turk, right? Her memory twinged- something about Veld and Partners and Valentine and not the only one with a living child .

Elf?

Her head twinged.

She opened an extra tab and marked the information down in English anyways. Along with the two strange poems that kept echoing through her head.

Because fuck her life, seriously.

"D'y' need Sephiroth?" She detached from the pile of limpets, voice low as to keep from disturbing them further. It didn't matter; once awake they stayed awake, thanks to such wonderful childhood memories of experimentation and abuse . Still, she could hope.

She was spitting more venom and vitriol than sense at this point; she should be asleep for others' own safety.

"It would be appreciated." Dry as a desert. Polite, to the point, and a sense of humor? Maybe Helliel should get a pet Turk, too.

A gunshot, a neck snapping in twain under the force, red hair splayed like a halo around an unseeing, unfeeling body. A red blindfold, so eerily like her own .

...Then again, maybe not.

"Hold please." She shifted, handing off the phone to Sephiroth and tucking her black blindfold into place across her eyes. The yellow glow, like a flashlight with half the battery, died as it was tucked back against her face.

Genesis shifted, groaning as he rose to his feet. "Shower." He called as he walked out, clad in nothing but his trousers. Angeal was probably out with his Puppy again, doing goddess-knows-what and probably traumatizing wildlife.

She walked over to their kitchen, getting a bowl and pan. She was breaking eggs over the bowl before Sephiroth came back and slapped the phone into her open hand.

"Wutai fell through." He stated, staring into her glowing Amber eyes with his own cat-like green.

" Fuck." The egg shattered in her hand, shell and yolk dripping over her palm. The Wutai Treaty negotiations were the last hope they had of avoiding open war. 

Fifteen years old and they were going to war. Fuck wasn’t harsh enough.

She grabbed a towel, inner fire roaring as she broke open more eggs into the bowl  with probably more vitrol than necessary. The pan sizzled as she poured the eggs onto it.

"Fuck it." She turned back to Sephiroth. "There's nothing we can do but prepare. Where are the packs?" She could scream and cry and writhe against the unfairness of it all later; right now she had shit to take care of.

"Back closet." He turned, already reaching out to grab them by the time she turned back. 

The door to the bathroom opened. "What's going on?" Genesis asked them both, brow raised, a hand on his hip. 

"Wutai fell through." She called back down the hall, dumping the scrambled eggs onto a plate without care. 

Genesis stumbled, a strangled fuck leaving his lips. The towel around his waist fell onto the floor. 

"That's what I said." Helliel could taste the bitter irony on her lips as she flipped off the stove and dumped the pan in the sink. War. How was she supposed to react to that?

Sephiroth dropped the massive dragonskin backpacks down behind her, already searching through the cupboards for nonperishable foods. She joined him, tearing through their stockpile of MRE’s and packing them evenly into the pockets. Genesis sat next to them, tucking their sleeping bags into their rolled pouches, with his pants on.

Helliel remembered making those sleeping bags. She remembered sewing each little detail inside of them and giving them to her best friends as less of a gift and more of a promise. One day we’ll be free , she swore, and sleep under the stars.

She kept packing. 

The sun was peeking through the horizon by the time they finished.

They leaned on each other, backs against their given packs. Genesis's eyes were dark and downturned, not even pretending to read the open book in front of him. Sephiroth was staring at his hands, and none of them moved from the long line of sunlight spearing across their bodies.

Helliel's phone let out a little jingle. She scrolled through the short, rude rant, before closing her phone with a snap. 

"We're being shipped out in the morning." Her voice was curiously hollow. The tiny hope that this was all a trick, bad dream, or hoax died.

Sephiroth, Genesis, Angeal and I are all going to be in Wutai by the end of the week. By the end of the month, one of us may be dead. By the end of the war, we might wish we were.

A wish and regret she never thought to voice circled through her head, and she blushed even as she wondered how she'd word the question.

Start at the beginning. "By next week we'll be in Wutai." She started, "By the week after, we might be dead." She had to swallow after the sentence, her throat clenching. Sephiroth, Genesis, Angeal, one of you might be dead.

"I don't-" Helliel very carefully didn't look at them. "I don't want to die without-" She whispered.

"I love you." She turned her head to both of them. "I love you both so, so much." She reached out and stole their hands, placing them in her lap. She couldn't ask.

Genesis leaned into her, his wet hair sticking to her bare shoulder. "I love you too." He murmured roughly against her skin, making her shiver. Sephiroth mirrored him on her other side, tucking himself into her side as well.

She was the tree again, the thick redwood, tall and proud and unbroken against all force. She felt its roots as her own, the hollows other voices spun through in their own dances as they all stomped a singular beat. She felt the wind reed voices spin against her leaves, crying of freedom and choice and release. There were flowers on her trunk, roots curling around her own. Hyacinths and Birds of Paradise and Gladiolus and White Heather, all made of voices crying out together in a war-song so inspiring and unique she could almost hear it outside her dreams.

“ Do you hear the voices sing?”
“ This is for the Mountains-people and the Glen!”

“Fight to keep this land your own!”

“This is the music of a people-”

“There is no hiding from our light-”

“Who won’t be tricked again!”

“And now hear our battle cry-”

“The ones who lied pay for their crimes.”
“When your whispers pierce the night”

“How much of you can we make die?”

Lifestream , she thought, and then River of Voices . The Green Dream. Every strange archaic term for the plane magic users find in their dreams ran through her head at once, and the Queen Anne’s Lace tangled in her highest branches giggled with her.

Beneath the cover of her roots, three sleeping voices rested, their petals unformed and untouched.

Silence. Side-eyes between comrades, signs and pointing fingers. Rustling of leaves; arranging feet in preparation to burst out of the grove. A split second instant where all sound dies and the only thing you can hear is the drawing of blades from their sheaths.

Brace for impact- and then the only sounds are the sound of steel against steel.

Helliel dodged a wayward blade, tightening her fists and going low as she dug her armored knuckles in her adversary’s stomach, sending him flying with a quick burst of Mako.

Genesis snarled, ducking a sniper’s shot as it exploded behind him, Materia glowing as he twisted the fires around him into a whirlwind that swiftly grew wings. 

Sephiroth was silent, Masamune flashing silver in the slivers of light as he pressed it against enemy blades. His Mako green eyes tracked them through the darkness, cat-thin and unimpressed.

Angeal’s face twisted in a silent snarl, muscles heaving as he sent the Buster Sword through his enemies, marking his blade and himself with the blood he spilled. 

“Genesis.” She stated lowly, trying to keep the horror and fear out of her voice. “Can I talk to you?”

He glanced up from his talk, startled, and quickly shooed off the SOLDIER he was speaking to. “Helliel?” He asked once they were relatively alone. “What’s wrong?”

Helliel grabbed his hand and dragged him into her tent, tears squeezing out of her eyes onto the blindfold from the sharp pain. Quickly she stripped, almost tearing off the upper part of her armor, before baring her back to the nervous man. She hadn’t worn a bra in weeks- it was too painful to. He looked startled, before he noticed the discoloring.

“Oh, Hel.” He traced a bare outline down the line of pain that went all the way down her back, now. “You should’ve told me sooner.” He grabbed her by the hips and quickly situated her in his lap, face down. He unzipped something to her left, and she flinched before he shushed her.

“Okay, Hel?” She nodded against his thigh, tears still seeping out of her eyes. “This’ll hurt a bit. Trust me?” She tightened her hands around his leather jacket, nodding again. 

“‘Infinite in mystery’ My ass ,” He muttered, and Hel could feel a knife settling against the harshest point of pain before he sliced a line down her back. She barely had time to tense before he cut another, and the release of pain was so powerful she lost control of her muscles for a moment.

He prodded at the open wounds, which hurt much less than before, and she could feel him tugging something out of them while she lay there, limp and dizzy with relief. Whatever it was stretched, thick and massive and way too big to come from her measley back wound.

It was only when she felt the two massive limbs mantling around them, salt-and-pepper colored and covered in blood, when she realized what they were.

“Wings?” Her voice was wrecked, but the disbelief shone through clearly. She turned and regarded them, almost too worn out to hope. “I have wings?” They were massive and heavy and stretched muscles her brain was sure shouldn’t belong on a human body, not to mention the massive amount of blood covering them, but they were definitely wings. She reached for them- brain fumbling for a moment whether to move her arm or her wings- and brushed them lightly, feeling the echo of the movement from her wings.

Surging forwards in joy, she leaped and pounced, capturing Genesis’ lips in a kiss. He didn’t complain, rumbling deep in his chest before pushing her gently away.

“ There is no hate, only joy,” She gasped, eyes glowing brightly beneath her blindfold to frame one of her lovers’ faces.”For you are beloved by the goddess, Hero of the dawn, Healer of worlds,” Genesis snorted, even as his molten red eyes softened at her words. 

“That’s my line.” He retorted sarcastically, before squinting his eyes at the blood lining her feathers. He reached a blood-stained red glove of the hand not wrapped possessively around her waist, and brushed gently against the underside of her wings. She shivered at the feeling, wings tucking more to give him more access.

"I have wings ," She cheered, flapping them lightly in excitement. Genesis chuckled, circling her waist with his arms fondly. 

Genesis stripped, holding his shoulder bare to her gaze. The skin there was red, irritated and inflamed.

"So that's what this looks like from the outside." Helliel hummed, barely tracing the edges of it with a nail. Her wings twitched beneath her skin. "You'll have to walk me through the cut though, alright?"

Genesis's eyes were slightly wide still, panicked. "Helliel, mutation." He sought to remind her. They'd both spent enough time in the labs to notice how some soldiers didn't take to the serum. Tentacles, extra eyes, those were the warning signs of deteriorating.

"Genesis, relax ." Until he started hearing voices telling him to consume she'd keep mum. He kept her secret, after all, even when her back was rotting puss against his pristine prized red leather gloves. "We've seen this before, remember?" He wasn't incoherent, unnecessarily angry, or working under crazy-people logic. He was fine .

(He had to be.)

(Underneath the cover of her roots, a sleeping voice turned up it's deep red petals to her light.)

"They're turning the Mako against us!" First Class Sawblade yelled, falling back from the massive wave of glowing green.

The Temple was absolutely wrecked, walls torn asunder and glowing green leaking from everywhere . Helliel and Genesis were supposed to take it, but came up to destruction and a rising wave of Mako seeking to consume.

"Genesis!" He was frozen. She could feel the fumes burn her skin. She grabbed his arm and dragged in time for Second Class Biter to get sucked into the wave.

They sprinted , the wave of acidic Mako burning at their heels. Helliel saw a stray bit of rock, a shelter and an opening. "Over here!" She almost screamed, ducking low and rolling into the open cave. Genesis pushed himself through the opening for her to tug up to his feet.

For a moment, all they could hear was their own, gasping breaths. Then the trickle of water.

Helliel looked over. There was a pond in the cave, lightly glowing with some kind of light, and completely clear. The strands of light glittered against the cave walls.

"Genesis?" She asked faintly, not sure if she was Mako-poisoned or not. Was the lake singing ?

"I see it too," He whispered, red eyes wide.

" Heal what has been hurt, " It sang softly. " Change the fates' design ," Helliel recognized the song.

She stepped forwards before he could stop her, stripping quickly and sinking into it. Every Mako-induced sore on her body cooled at once, her wings exploding out of her back without her permission when the water cooled that old sore down, too.

" Genesis ," She moaned, " Get in here. " It was cold and calm and every wound and scar she had seemed to relax at once under the water. 

Was this what swimming had felt like? She'd forgotten; for all that she loved it the lack of clean water and common decency had halted her.

Genesis joined her, stripping out of his blackened and mako burned leathers to sink into the cold water. He groaned, rolling his bare shoulders in the water in a way she hadn't been able to when her wings were growing in. 

Pus leaked from their open wounds, healing what the water could reach and calming what the water could not. Helliel gently flapped her wings through the shallow water, blood and god-knows-what between the feathers evaporating like old carrion. 

" Goddess" Genesis groaned, leaning forwards until his nose was touching the water and rotating his shoulders. A straight line of red went down his shoulder to his lower back, skin peeling away from the burgeoning wings. Helliel was disappointed for half a second- she wanted to be the one to peel his wings from his back the first time, just as he did with her- before massive, russet colored wings exploded out of his back, flinging drops of blood up the walls.

Helliel crept forwards through the water, wings mantled, and studied her lovers' wings.

At first glance, it was russet, reddish-brown as Genesis's own hair. But looking deeper, there was white In the mix. Helliel glanced at her own wings for comparison, bringing them closer together, and Genesis's wings were fluffier than her own, as well. The long 'finger' feathers branching out of his wings were shorter and thicker, and there were more of them. Her own were thin and long in comparison. Her wings were pinkish where his was pure white, thinner and longer where his was short and bulky.

Genesis wrapped his hands around her hips, rubbing gently at the outcropping of bone. She turned to him, and immediately began internally screaming. She had forgotten that the both of them were completely bare, and while that wasn't an uncommon thing due to Genesis being the preferred doctor between the lot of them the si tu ation they were in made it different.

She was crouching on a little slab of rock, Genesis between her knees, with her larger wings circling and rubbing lightly against his smaller, bulkier wings. His hands were callused and the feel of them against the jut of her hips made her want to fall on her knees, and it was a debate between which of the four teenagers had a larger sex drive on most days without Helliel going tits out. 

(She had an aching feeling the current winner was going to be Genesis.)

"Genesis," She gasped against his lips, " Please. " She pressed her palm against his chest, moving him back. "Not without Sephiroth." Not without the third cornerstone of their trio. It had been almost a half-year since they'd seen him in the flesh and it still hurt to wake up without him.

"Promise?" He asked, disappointed but not surprised. He curled his fingers around hers and pressed their palms together; their version of a pinkie swear. He was joking; she knew he was joking.

"The night they send us back to him," Helliel promised anyways. 

"Even if the marrow is barren of promises, nothing could forestall my return." He kissed her palm, meeting glowing Amber eyes with his gleaming red.

Chapter Text

Why?

Because there is no way Hobbits could have survived the Fell Winter as weak as they are portrayed. Because Belladonna Took deserved the title of badass. Because I still have no idea where that gap in smaug's scales comes from. Because Bilbo should not be alone in his large house. Because cabbage patch hobbits are my favorite. Because a community of gossiping farmers and farmer's-wives would make the greatest information chain ever, especially so understated as hobbits are. Because the headcanon of hobbits knowing flower language reminded me of the Yamanakas, T and I, and how flower language is a very nice way to poison someone, spread information, and communicate. Because Life isn't Disney, it is harsh and ugly and anything or anyone born of the Wild should be fit to fight in it.

Because each of the Free Races was made to fight something, and Hobbits should be no exception. 

Why, you ask?

Why not.

The first thing you must know is this: Hobbits are not like Men. Neither are they quite like elves, for all as they are similar to dwarves. 

Because Hobbits are small, and quiet and quite obviously fat and soft, and don't they look like small children? They must obviously be weak. But this is not quite true. 

Because when Yavanna saw her husband's children, she seeded the garden with her own. But much like the misconception of Hades and Persephone- where anyone got the idea that death is the thing to fear, I long to know- Yavanna seeded her children, and taught them to go to seed, and taught them of life . 

Life, you see, is not exactly Disney. It is wild, and harsh, and absolutely will kill you . She fashioned her children out of her own wild seeds, and taught them of wildness, and is it any wonder, that they are wild themselves?

Hobbits came into this world like the fae of old; with blood on their tongue and looking like small children, but quite obviously not children. And they came into this world where all others are taller, and larger, than they.

So they cultivated fields, and dug pits deep in the ground, and each family that sprouted from Yavanna's own garden took a pledge. 

They were so low to the ground, thus they faded into shadow. People underestimated them, and they cultivated that mask like they did their fields. They handed each other flowers, a language all their own, and spoke what they heard from the shadows in them.

They were made to bring the darkness into light. Secrets and shadows were their chosen tools, made to sneak and sneak and spread, and the earth sighed with them.

Hobbits, you see, are thieves. Not assassins; blood takes too long to wash out of perfectly good floors, and death only begets more death. No, hobbits are just thieves. What they steal, between families, is what is different.

Because this is a story of dragons and dwarves, I will tell you of two families that are the most important.

Baggins are bankers, and lawyers, and if that does not say exactly what they steal then I refuse to point it out to you. They cultivated a jovial face, calm and sure in political talks, but much like the Goblins in the Wizarding World, you'd never see a Baggins without his Axe. Likewise, the last thing you'd ever see from an angry Baggins is his or her perfectly calm face, and the silvery gleam of their axe. Bungo smiles as he wipes down his great-grandfather's axe of blood, and fondly tells of his exploits as executioner to the little fauntlings, still young and with Yavanna's bloodlust in their eyes.

Tooks, on the other hand, are more blatant thieves. They hone their trade as fauntlings stealing fruits and mushrooms from their neighbors, and then from the farmers, and then when the dark wind blows over them and they march from home to follow it, more blatant things. Belladonna Took boasts the highest honor; of stealing a scale off of a dragon. With her grandmother's kitchen knife gleaming silver in one hand and a whetstone in another, she spins a tale of getting lost underground and happening upon a sleeping dragon, and using that very knife to slice a scale off of his hide.

"For being so deep in the corruption, you see." They smile with too many teeth, and the fauntlings bare theirs back happily.

It is said that Yavanna stole the spark to make a seed from her husband's own forge, and so it was custom to come along for second-helpings with a pocket full of their chosen's finest silver, and not get caught. Bungo Baggins took one look at Belladonna's smile, and brought a pie to second breakfast made from the apples of her own tree. Belladonna eyed the care he showed the little ones, and brought him a stuffed bird full of fluff from his vegetables, shot down from his own garden.

It came to a head when Bungo stole an entire house for his beloved, and she stole all this things to put in it, and they were wed. It was all very romantic, by Hobbit standards.

Three months after their wedding- as is custom- they brought their most sacred treasures together, and from their love sprouted a seed.

Hobbits, you see, are much, much, much too small to carry children safely. Even the most rounded, most fertile lass could not carry safely, and so when Yavanna still held them in her arms, she gave them a gift.

The most beloved of your partner's stolen items (which actually meant 'gifts' translated directly from Hobbitish to Common, both because if you're leaving something so easy to steal out in the open it's obviously not stolen, it's a gift, and because of how they traded them between each other like trinkets. Fascinating!) tied with a braid of both of your hairs, mixed with both of your blood, and buried as a gift to the Green Mother, will sprout as a seed.

Belladonna Took-Baggins took her husband's favored hand-axe, and a crystal skull from one of his broken deals, and knitted them around each other with lengths of her and Bungo's hair. Mixed it with her blood and his, and buried it out in her side of the garden in the shade of her apple tree.

Bungo Baggins-Took buried the Dragon's scale, next to a few apples off of her tree from the very bunch their courtship started, tied with lengths of their hair braided through it like a shield. He spread his blood on the braid and the ground as was tradition, and dug the pit with his own two hands next to the peppers she peppered her acceptance gift with.

And because if this was the same story as you were told before it wouldn't be any fun, when the sprout reached up to the sun with red-golden leaves, there were two instead of the one that fate decreed. 

Bella Baggins and broke the earth to the shaking of the first lemon tree, sinking her teeth into the fruits and snarling with her weapons in hand, as all baby Hobbits do.

For you see, Mahal saw his wife's children, and loved them as he did his own, and if the gift to Yavanna was good enough, he would craft a weapon for them to wield through their banishing of the dark light.

In Bella's hands rested two hand-axes, silver and pure, interlaid with seams of red that ran like blood. 

And so she was defeated with swift hands by her parents, and her red eyes faded back into the soft black of all hobbits, Bella fell asleep in her parents' arms. 

In the years and hardships that followed, as she grew from a young, blood thirsty fauntling into a youngling, when the Fell Winter dragged poisonous fingertips along the land, she kept herself safe, and warm, and whole. 

When the Fell Winter came, and every Hobbit with a foot on the ground snarled with red eyes as one, and Bag End became a resting place for axes and corpses and hobbits alike, she never strayed from their path.

Even when Belladonna fell, with a cast iron skillet in her hands stained with the blood and brain matter of a warg encroaching too close to her territory , with her grandmother's knife in shards and every shard buried in the skull of an orc, they never faltered. When Bungo fell, his Axe in shatters around him and an orc white as the snow that painted their fair land wet with his blood, they stayed together.

Bella Baggins-Took kept her axes in hand at all times, after that, in easy reach of startled palms, hidden behind her carefully crafted apron. She never left home without them, keeping them hidden next to the strawberries of the Thain's garden. 

And she hated, loathed, reviled , the color white. 

(Privately, every other Hobbit in the Shire vehemently agreed .)

Bella has always been a respectable lady hobbit. She tended her garden, cleaned her smial, and only smoked Old Toby pipeweed. And by Hobbit standards, this was very respectable, especially for Baggins hobbits, who lived in the same small corner of the shire as she.

The only thing that wasn't respectable to her relatives was the mask that covered half of her face, supposedly hiding scars from the winter so harsh they named it Fell.

She didn't tell them that she crept through the trees of the farmers' gardens, and always had a pocket full of ill-gotten strawberries on hand for cranky fauntlings. She didn't tell them how her father's hand-axes always returned to her, in the same way her mother's knives did. Bella Baggins-Took was a perfectly respectable lady, whispered her Baggins cousins, completely unaware of the blissful cackles of their distant Took relations. 

She especially didn't tell them that, mere moons after her 33rd birthday, she began to itch in her skin. Everything in the Shire seemed to grow smaller, confining, and even the wide open hidden spots in Bag End couldn't keep her from eyeing the horizon nervously. Her mother's siblings and the grand Thain used to tell her of the itch that set in before the Dark Wind, of how unbearable it'd get before the end, and so Bella prepared.

She took her mother's old travel-cloak, her father's hardy pack, and started filling them with dried meats and fruits. She wiped down her hand-axes, drew a whetstone over them, and folded bindings to fit over her chest. She took clothes, not respectable or fashionable, but hardy and comfortable, and folded them next to the bindings in her pack. Trousers and long pants went next to those, and she tied her sleeping bag to the bottom of the pack.

After that all was prepared, Bella Baggins-Took tied her hair back in a simple crown, tight against her skull, and took outside for a breath of fresh air, and a dusting of old Toby.

She relaxed against her old rocking chair, tapping a quick beat against the wood, and blew out a perfect smoke ring into the sky.

"Good morning, Gandalf." Bella called from the comfortable seat of her chair, blowing out another smoke ring. And if it was purposely blown out towards the meddling old fool's face, well. 

The tall, man-looking wizard startled almost unnoticeably, before tilting the brim of his hat at her. His storm gray eyes twinkled from beneath the brim of his hat, and Bella Baggins resigned herself to his pointless, unending waffle.

"What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"

"I'm greeting you, Gandalf." She drew out the words as though scolding a particularly dense relative. The itch rustled beneath her skin, and she shivered as she sat back in the chair. "Good morning." Another smoke ring towards his face. Serves him right; not even going to Belladonna's funeral.

Her Baggins relatives would have been shaking in their boots, seeing her with such awful manners. Baggins craft a loving persona of strict boringness, so intricate is it's weave that some Baggins are born boring and stiff-arsed. Why, Aunt Lorabella would have skinned her behind!

Thankfully, it was far too early in the morning for any of that nonsense. She only just got done collecting the last of the dried meat in her pantry, and sent off the letters to the Thain. Bella Baggins was ready for the quest, ready to leave the Shire, ready to crawl out of her skin . Damn that itch.

Gandalf's fluffy gray caterpillars that rested over his eyes rose in incredulity and a drop of humor. "To think, being good morninged by Bungo Baggins's only daughter on her front porch." He shook his head, missing Bella rolling her eyes at him. “Twice.”

"If you're here to set off another fireworks display," she bit back the 'old man' caught behind her teeth, "then you're here for the Thain. Down the road and to the left." 

Gandalf chuckled. "Not at all. Much as the fauntlings do enjoy my shows, I'm here for a rather more dire reason." Bella tongued the end of the pipe stuck in her mouth, curious dispite herself.

"Indeed?" She questioned, the itch fluttering like the scales under her skin. 

The itch in her blood shifted, like the instant before a lightning strike, and Bella grit her teeth against the sensation. “You see, I'm looking for someone to share an adventure with."

Bella shifted in her seat, the Amber eye beneath her mask slitting curiously. "Tell me more."

Bella snorted smoke in the comfort of her smial, trusting in the hidden rabbit-holes in the ceiling to vent it through the chimney without suspicion. That wizard! Tricking her into hosting thirteen guests at a table, when she could barely cook for one ! She about poisoned herself on the last attempt, and Hobbits were immune to poison !

At least her pantry was full. It had been, ever since the Fell Winter. Just in case she needed to buckle down the battalion once again. Let them sample from that, then. It would be the last meal they'd have in a while, she was sure.

Her tea was warm, and the story-scroll was comforting as she lost herself in it's pages. A strange dragon, she was, hoarding people and songs and books . But long nights spent at her father's knee researching dragons in tales and tomes and everything in between weren't to be shaken off easily, and she still felt fondness for the stories they told.

A heavy hand knocked at her door, and she sighed into the tea. That'll be the guests, then. She stood slowly, stretching carefully until she felt cracks along her spine, and stepped towards the door.

"Coming!" She called, brushing a palm over the mask at her waist and attaching it swiftly to the side of her face until all that was left of her wyrm blood was the Maker's mark drawn in scales down her cheek, of the outline curve of a half-hammer cutting through her eye and tainting it a predator's Amber. Hidden beneath the mask, a dragon's eye slitted. 

She opened the door, glad for the darkness of night as it hid her from nosy relatives. The dwarf at the doorway was expected, and she stepped back to allow him in.

"Bella Baggins, at your service." She nodded to the dwarf, before gesturing to Bag End. "Be welcome here, and make yourselves at home." 

The dwarf grunted. "Dwalin, at yours." He narrowed his eyes at the mask over her face,

Chapter Text

You: Must I?

Lord Voldemort: You have your orders.

You: But no one's been in that section of the Between before- there could very well be nothing!

Lord Voldemort: A notable increase in determination is not 'nothing', much less the visible chafing signs. You have your orders. Am I clear, Scout?

You: Crystal, Commander Marvolo Thomas. In Thoth's name.

Lord Voldemort: In Athena's name.

Cera sighed, pressing the screen of the phone against her face in place of a similarly placed wall. The warning was clear enough, and punishment for disobeying apparent. But could the bastard not keep showing their ranks in her face?! Was it beyond his ability to call her by name once in a millenia? 

Of course not, she scoffed internally, pushing off the ground and onto her feet. Scouts don't get names. Especially those life-blood bound. Like it was her fault she'd been born into the bloodline she was. Walker Between by blood, and a bastard to boot, Voldemort would probably be holding her measley Scout title over her into eternity. And, thanks to her-and his- bloodlines, it would likely be eternity.

She stretched, popping a few bones in her back, before slipping her phone in her pocket and making carefully forwards, the only light being the soft glow coming from her chest. The Between was big, and empty, and dark, but that's okay. It had its own charm.

The soft glow of her chest highlighted the blue wheels under her feet, crescent moons and spiked suns disappearing behind her as the magic that anchored them faded. She hummed into the silence, hearing it echo back at her from a broken, twisted maw. 

She turned that way, stretching out a palm as soon as the twisted figure came into focus.

"Hoo, hoo," she cooed at it, petting along its ragged edges and smiling at the dragon-like face within. The fate of those Forgotten was always a sad one; previous Walkers Between without an anchor, someone to remember their existence once they died. They faded and melted, becoming a part of the void that once housed them, the very fabric of their souls used to fix the tears they made.

Walkers Between could remember themselves , of course, but as the days went by and then weeks and years until every second stretches an eternity, it became harder and harder to fight the pull. Cerafel stroked the little dragon's head with her gloved hand, pulling back and scolding it gently when the smooth slide of the dragon's body began to suck .

Because you can escape from the void, if someone takes your place. But you never feel the same, or whole, again.

Pressing a palm to her chest, Cerafel nodded and hummed a goodbye to the Forgotten as she walked back along her way. Focusing on red, the thick life blood of human magic, Determination. And then simply walking.

Because the Between has no special landmarks, walkers Between must simply think of where they wish to go, and walk. The 'farther' it was, the longer it took. 

The influx of determination was the 'farthest' of all. 'Farther' than the estimated entry point of mages to the Empty World, even. Which was suspect, because holding anything up in the Between costs magic, especially magic detectors of any sort, which meant Voldemort had to have an interest in this dimension. Especially if he was setting detectors- and mages to hold them up- that 'far'. 

For a man whose bloodline was mainly blood magics and sacrifice, with a smattering of mages specializing only in magics using blood as a baseline, was… interesting. He liked to claim blood could do anything, with his Ruby eyes gleaming, but there were limits to all kinds of magics. And if she had to put up with his smug ass for an eternity, you bet your right eye she'd have something in her back pocket to slip up her sleeve.

And into his neck . She joked morbidly. But, no, that Ace of Spades was unlikely to happen. His death at her hands would likely mean her eternal torture at the hands of the Shepards, but a girl can dream , can't she?

Her jokes stumbled to a stop as her right eye flickered on in abject distress. Because holy shit , there is a difference between 'minor increase in determination' and 'this looks like Jack Slash decided to take up finger-painting'. The edge of the dimension she could feel brushing the tips of her reaching magic was so brain achingly red against the backdrop of black it gave her a headache at first sight. It was so covered in Determination magics, it was leaking like a bad oil painting left out in the rain.

"Ow. What the fuck." She wanted to slam Thomas Marvolo into a wall. And maybe into a tombstone. "Minor increase in determination my ass !" She roared, covering her eyes with her palms as though blocking the medium would stop her mage-sight. No luck.

It was at this point she wished she had the authority to shove Thomas Marvolo's orders up his ass .

"Well." She psyched herself up. "Let's go." She pressed forwards, brain stinging as she cut through the void like Moses through the ocean.

And it was exactly as unpleasant as she expected. The Determination stuck like water to more water, coiling and grouping around her like one of her own barriers but made by a green mage. Her Heart jumped, almost vibrating with the influx of energy as she mentally threw her hands up and fucking ran through that shit , barriers flying as she struggled to bleed off the extra energy before she exploded.

She broke into the new dimension with a scream, magic bursting off of her in a wave as she went with her second affinity on instinct, the first decision when entering a dimension with physical rules to check them . Like a bat's screech, she flung that determination energy out to sense abnormalities . Because the last time there was a build up of any kind of magic in a dimension to cause it actually leaking into the void , she stepped into a hell dimension on accident and almost got her ass ate. And this one? She just about exploded .

"Holy fuck." She panted, sore down to her channels as she drew the rest of her magic back towards her core to pool. She pressed her palms to her knees, shaking slightly. Lord Voldemort's about to owe me a name after this. She thought to herself hysterically, three inches from just collapsing onto the grass.

Her magic ping! 'ed against a couple of things, coming back, while the rest of it faded gently into the background magics. The broken edges of a barrier caught her attention- Her ancestors' work?-, along with a couple more worrying things.

Tears in space-time with something violently red- a determination soul, what the fuck - being used as a fulcrum to rewind motherfucking time itself?!?! No wonder this dimension was bleeding red, it probably required it in order to stay in place . And, y'know, not careen into some distant twisted hellscape only whispered about in horror stories. And Warhammer 40k. 

Gods, the last time some massive magical fuck-up of this magnitude was recorded some poor asshole brought Worm into being. Not to mention the various bleeding hellscapes littering the interdimensional ocean. People get caught and turned over to the Shepards for this shit! People get thrown into the Between for this shit!

Why the fuck was Thomas Marvolo interested in it? And not, y'know, using his ' all powerful blood magicks ' to set that shit on fire ?

Cerafel Myst sat her ass down on the grassy hilltop in front of her, panting. Well, this was a clusterfuck. She should be reporting this right now. But the Commander called her to check it out, he said 'small increase in determination', which means he knows this dimension is a side-step away from total annihilation, and isn't doing shit about it. Also , he sent her here for a reason, something important to him. Not to kill her; his ass would be bound in four seconds flat if he dared even sideways plan the death of the last natural Voidwalker. 

And a pure determination soul alone would probably cause most of the council to sprong wood so hard they knock their Shepards off the table, much less one so intricately weaved in with time magics . And he has to know that, nothing else causes such fine leakage as a Pure Soul, not even thousands of mages practicing only one kind of soul magic for centuries. Which means he's got a personal interest in this universe. Enough to almost kill a Walker Between to scout it.

What in the Nine . Cera wondered, would cause the Sociopathic King to take an interest?  

I guess that's what I'm scouting for. Cera answered herself unhappily, pulling a long cloak out of her inventory and drawing it around her shoulders. Inconspicuous it was not, but it kept people from asking about her face and kept the sun out of her easily sunburned, pale skin. 

Abusing the laws of reality does have its perks. She admitted to herself, keeping cool under the dark fabric. As well as walking through the world like a videogame character.

She slid a little down the hill, careful not to step on any sharp rocks or trip on tree roots, carefully making her way downhill towards the buildings in the distance. Civilization was always a good bet, when scouting. It allowed her to get a good baseline for 'normal', in this universe.

(if she sees one collar on someone not wearing it because ironic dark culture, or questionable fashion choices, she's ditching. Fuck Shepards, fuck Thomas Marvolo, she is not dealing with another BDSM universe. It's too hard to keep cover when choking on air.) 

The Mages society was just barely touching on some sci-fi movie shit, technology wise, but it fluctuated the farther away from the core you got. Mages come in all shapes and sizes, after all, and no one wants to end a newborn bloodline. Even if they come from 'hunga dunga dunga' tribal levels of technology.

Coming up to it, it seemed like a solid level five. On the edge of space-faring, but not quite there yet. Otherwise she'd see some iridium on those rich people walking down the cooled molten pathway. And magic wasn't centralized here, or else mythril and that other, rarer metal with the hard to pronounce name would be more prevalent.

She got a few side-eyes for the long cloak, but people pretty much left her alone. Which was fine with her: it allowed her to scope out the socially friendly topics of this age. Let me tell you; you will never mistake simple chat for anything else ever again when you hear someone say, with a straight face, in public, 'They call me Red Rose because I'm a masochist.' and everyone just… accepts that, without question, like it's normal. Not even in a sexual situation, but a breakfast conversation.

Fuck no; thankfully this world was much more vanilla and closer to her own birth world than that absolute nightmare. (I don't care how much you like it, Moray Myst. That dimension is a social hellscape and I'm never going back.)

That was about the time the first monster entered her vision. Cool as a cucumber, she studied it without changing her facial expressions, and then ducked into the nearest alleyway, mid-dial. 

"Moray." Cerafel was begging. "You're still the main TMS professor, right?" 

"Good morning to you too." Moray yawned in a thousand aching voices, all echoing shades of exhaustion. "But yeah, I am the main Monster Studies professor. I am a monster after all. Why?" 

"Please please please tell me you can message me a basic rundown." Cera pleaded.

"Well- yeah? I can? But you know all this is theoretical. I'm the only monster here, in this World Array at least. Why do you need it?" Moray asked, curious.

"Well, you might be wrong. About the only one in this Array thing, at least." How else can you explain a six foot walking goat. "And I need information. Bare bones please; you know how information changes between these things." Universes could have werewolf curses in one, wolf-men in another, and shapeshifters in the next. Who knows how monsters could have developed differently? 

Moray paused for a solid five seconds. Cera pulled the phone away from her ear in preparation. The most unholy, high-pitched screech left the phone, piercing through the air like a tornado siren on repeat, so invasive and echoing and inhuman and awful Cera swore a cat exploded into a red puddle down the street.

Used to Moray's shenanigans, Cera waited it out, wetting her lips and tasting purple.

" You found a monster ?! What's their name, what do they look like, I need everything! " Another, quieter screech left the phone, leaving a brief aftertaste of iron and almonds. " Where are you ?!"

"Scouting. Under Lord Voldemort's orders." Cera ran a hand through her pale hair. "You know how he is. And I didn't 'find' them- they were walking down the street, completely normal, with their Hearts out and everything." Which was the strangest thing of all, really. Hearts are the core of a person, and even Moray Myst kept hers tucked deep. "That's the weird part- everyone here has their Hearts out, here. Or at least visible ." 

Which was awkward. Mage-sight was a blessing, when you wanted to sneak information from people without them knowing, but with this even walking down the street it was like they were throwing information at her. It was overwhelming, and awful, and she knew why some of the mage guys from Level Four dimensions averted their eyes when at a shirtless beach, now.

"That's weird." Moray agreed in her thousand voices. Cera could almost see her multitude of tentacles swishing behind her. "Speaking of, what does old Moldy want with this one?"

"I have no idea." Cerafel Myst ran her gloved palms through her hair, dislodging the hood on accident. "I walk up, and it's blood red. Leaking it, even. And you know how you taught me that thing?" Mages don't usually share knowledge between each other, but Moray trusted Cera. And Vibration magics were the deep sea horror monater's specialty. "Immensely useful. I had to bleed a lot of it off before it stained."

"By every library in existence, you almost Burst?!" Moray was well and truly panicked now. Cera was old blood. Abandoned old blood, but old none-the-less. And the last of her bloodline, to boot. Power was underestimating it, really.

"I know right? He told me he only reported a minor increase- but if that's minor I'm not a shield major." Cera grumbled sourly. "I'm still sore from that. And stuck." Downsides of almost exploding off of an overload of your own magic: if you do it again in the next three years, you will die. No exceptions. 

Benefits: Cerafel had the distinct pleasure of being one of the only long-term Scouts due to her freedom of movement. She didn't have to rush in order to keep the portal open, after all, if she was the portal. Which meant she had the freedom to just be , for a while, before whatever she was looking for came looking for her.

Another plus to being an ace in the Walking game; it means whatever universe you're in is really, really into getting rid of you. Thankfully not violently, just passively shooing you away. Which means whatever you're looking for, the universe will basically throw at you to get you to leave.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, a girl woke up from something she wished was a dream.

She stretched, spindly pale limbs reaching out into the distance as she straightened her fallen body and blinked limp eyelids. She seized, breath stuttering as she saw, unseen, her glimpse of the abyss.

You poor, poor soul. The shadow of an eternity-colored tendril, reaching to brush against her cheek. Never look into the abyss, lovely. It always reaches back.

She remembered it as vividly as she remembered every sordid scar on her soul. Staring defiantly into the distance, an ocean black onset with blinking red-yellow eyes as she crouched over the bodies of her fallen friends, and then a cheerful tilt of an eyelid and a distant rumbling of amusement. It came, then, an ocean of something indescribable cascading against her soul, every stretch mark and scar across her being shivering as the cold covered it.

Twisting, being remade, and then deposited into a body that both did and didn’t fit her. Strange and too long and something just half a shade from human, paler than moonlight, and clawed. She looked down at her palms, felt along her face, for the black and gold that splattered across her body like a painting. Thin fingers stroked the rough not-quite leather of her feet, and she held in a whimper.

She stretched, craning her neck as she glanced around, and froze as her eyes fell across her fallen friends.

Once upon a time a girl with everything to lose lost it, and lost herself in turn.

There are many ways to break someone. Twist them, turn them, make them doubt their own perceptions until they couldn’t tell left from right. Slander them, splatter them in soul-raking verbal claws as you dug into their very sense of self. Straight up murdering someone is far from the only way to kill them, or for someone to die.

She remembered the warning, blaring across the intercoms. She remembered the door closing, the creak and look of black metal shining in the dim lighting. She remembered the world turning too light, and then too dark, something collapsing against her side and then a feeling of wet warmth as she caught it on instinct.

But Madison’s the only one on that side. She thought blankly. Only her and Arol on my back side, for that matter.

Another flash of too-bright light in the enclosed space, and then the screams started, as something boney and small fell against her back with a wet choke.

It was about that time Anna decided to get even.

Oh endless gods, with ages longer than mortal memory, She prayed, digging one of her many scissors out of her bag. Let this sacrifice be worth the lives of mine shadow-friends. The sharp snap of the two sides separating was therapeutic for the raging Old God worshipper, but nothing felt better than digging the sharp end of the definitely not safety scissor under his ribcage and hopefully into his heart.

The other one, stabbing through his eye into his head, cleared all doubt.  

Or, at least, She ripped the scissor out of his head and pointed it against herself. Let us be guided to happy afterlives.

Her home life wasn’t ideal; she was a pacifist with a healer’s heart sent into a world that wanted to work her to the bone. She’d been waiting for a chance like this for a long time, to die doing something worthwhile instead of being forced to drag her empty carcass through life unendingly. She had been dying by inches, day by day in a world that stole everything from her and gave nothing. Death would’ve been a respute, and dying a miracle. Nothing like this though, with a cost too great.

In the grips of despair, she decided that it was much more heroic to die with her friends then to live, alone.

Anna closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and plunged the sharp tip into her jugular.

In the moments before her breaths grew short, when the sharp wheezes of liquid-filled breathing holes sealed over, she could almost hear a deep, ancient voice.

[The Deal is Struck. So Mote it Be.]

_____

Anna stretched a clawed foot forwards, pressing a single toe against the humanoid hyena’s foot. Her dew claw flexed against the resistance, trying to find something to steady herself on before she stopped it manually, and scratched her bone claws gently against the Minotaur's furry back in the same motion she did to her dog.

Beside her, the wispy silhouette flexed in their sleep, and Anna ran a gentle rough palm over the ink-colored skin. Her fingers were skinny and sharp, looking more like the inner segments of a skeleton rather than a human hand, but she hoped the intent was communicated as the same. One of these was Madison and the other was Arol, after all. She really didn’t relish explaining why they were suddenly very not human.

The very thought sent a shiver down her spine. But they deserved to know, and as much as she wished to run and hide, she would never lie to them. She ran her new fingers through the fluffy hood that seemed to be melded to her flesh, calming herself counting the seconds until they awoke.

Chapter Text

Dying isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. No pearly gates, or giant black fiery spikes greeted me as I sunk under. Only a fierce, frightening pressure that made me panic and a sudden explosion of noise that made me scream for the world to be quiet.

I died. And then I didn’t. I won’t bore you with my death. I won’t bore you with my birth, either. You’ve probably read thousands of these stories, being something between liquid jello and an uncontrollable blob of flesh made of jelly beans wouldn’t surprise you. Needless to say; thank the gods for dissociation and compartmentalizing.

Reincarnation was a surprise, I’ll admit. I was an optimistic nihilist; hoping for gods or some other kind of higher power, but expecting an empty void. I didn’t really expect to be reborn, especially not into something of a different universe, and absolutely not into this family, in this time.

It took me about six months of baby-flailing and being generally useless until my eyes were sharp enough to see what was going on around me without needing baby prescription goggles or something. Honestly my eyesight wasn’t much better, but it was enough to tell colors and differ between blobs, and I was used to seeing through shitty eyesight. Those four months don’t matter; what I discovered is .

I was born, a barely-functioning blob of liquid slime, into the Uchiha clan. Yep, wow. It’s one of those stories. Feel free to lob this book into the nearest trash can/dumpster. I won’t blame you if you even set it on fire.

But wait; there’s more! I was born into the Uchiha clan, during the Warring Clans Era. Bet you haven’t seen one of those before, huh?

...I’m a bit bitter, if you haven’t noticed. There's a good reason for that. I was born into the Uchiha clan, but not only that, as the main family’s only daughter. Yes, that makes Madara my older brother. No, I won’t kill him to prevent his bullshittery. Not only was it the death of Izuna that fucked him over, it was also the rest of the Uchiha clan, his family, generally pushing him away like assholes. It was a little bit devious of me to expect him to replace Izuna with me, especially with how… well, I’ll get to that, but having a little living sibling that’s always on your side should get him through his depression. Not only that, but he’s my big brother . I’ve never had a big brother before, and that makes him mine.

Back to bitterness. I was extremely salty because despite being the only main line female not dead, they won’t let me fucking fight. Somewhere between my four years of age, the old biddies decided I was too fragile to go out on the front lines like the rest of my family and instead had the dubious honor of sitting around drinking tea. So, yeah. While my two big brothers were out being kick-ass and taking names, I was stuck making quilts and learning manners and how to be a proper lady . Again, let me reiterate, a main line Uchiha female , directly related to the heir , is not going to learn how to fight.

Fuck that. If these old biddies won’t let me go out be a ranged chakra-tank, that’s fine, I’d suck at it anyways. But if you won’t even teach me something like senbon, or anatomy, or fucking archery, I’m going to sneak off to do it myself. Blacksmithing, chakra control, anything .

I bared my teeth in a smile as one of the ‘proper women’ of the clan walked by, gossiping about how rebellious Madara is, will he make a good heir with this streak of completely blowing off his abusive father? Sweet baby mushrooms, but I wanted to trip every single one of these people and then fling them into the ocean. With how heavy the dresses they force me to wear are, I wouldn’t be surprised if they immediately sunk to the bottom and drowned. (Yay, Ophelia!)

Madara is mine. He is my immediate family, and despite both him not really spending time with me (y’know, war ‘n’ all) and how he’s going to turn out in the future, he is my big brother, and the strongest in the clan. These old fuddie-duddies probably have never fought in their lives, and it’s only through the sacrifice of their brothers and fathers and fighting sisters that they haven’t been killed. They know nothing about fighting, or war, or anything, and as such their opinion was wanted about as much as fresh turd.

I bared my teeth in a smile and hoped the old ladies could see the absolute murder I was shooting out of my eyes as another “Honorable Grandmother” gracefully walked forwards to smile condescendingly at me.

“It’s getting late.” Oh thank fuck , freedom . “It is time to go back inside. Come, Honored Granddaughter. The main house is this way.” Oh no no thank you . Immediately I pumped my legs into a sprint, dodging old ladies and slowly gaining momentum until the entirely too heavy dress’s weight fell off of my shoulders and onto my legs. I picked up the trailing train, hiked up my skirts, and fled like the devil itself was on my tails towards the back of the main house.

Wall walking was easy, as long as you had both chakra and something like an example. My example changed depending on the thing I was walking on, but with the wood that made up our main house, spider hair climbing was the way to go, compounded with ant climbing to make up for the weight. 50 pounds of dress is no joke, and despite having done this as long as I’d gone to the gods forsaken classes, I still placed my hands on the wood and clung with them, as well, dropping the heavy train. I shuffled the fabrics out of the way of my legs, channeled chakra to my hands, and crawled up the building like a Gecko. My window wasn’t that high, but I was four years old and short and needed to get into my room so that I could fling off this heavy dress, the alarmed shouts of the honorable baa-sama far behind me.

Now that I was outside, I noticed the sun going down. I slipped in through the window, flinging off extra fabric until I was bare and could slip on one of my brothers’ stolen shirts.

...Hey, it’s not like they’re going to miss one turtleneck. Also, it’s comfortable as fuck, and smells like woodsmoke and home. Also, they’re out fighting Senju and should be back tomorrow, so I don’t have to worry about getting caught until then. Father certainly doesn’t care about me, much less what I could get up to at night. Well, not yet.

I straightened the turtleneck happily, patting dark red cloth and reveling in the softness before I climbed back up on my bed and climbed onto the window frame. There was something happening at the front of the house that I could hear all the way towards the back, and that was a perfect distraction. I leapt from the window frame, curling from the impact to duck into a roll and sprinted out of the backyard into the woods, towards the Naka river.

...Well, what I think is the Naka river. It’s a river, and in Uchiha territory, which is pretty much all I know about the Naka. Anyways, it is a familiar landmark and it is incredibly hard to get lost in a forest when you’re at a familiar landmark and can get home from there

Chapter Text

“What did they do to you?” Abigale wondered, cradling the gaunt form of what the scientists called the ‘Winter Soldier’ to her broad reptilian chest. He was shivering, his skin a light blue where he was extremely cold and a yellowish pallor that reminded her of when she hadn’t gone outside in too long and was about to get incredibly sick from it. The metal cuffs around her wrists cluttered uselessly against themselves and his metal arm, the broken links tying them together limp and apart where she had torn them out to get free, and there were still red marks and open wounds where bullets had torn scales from her skin.

The scales were a reminder, constantly, of what the immoral HYDRA scientists had done to her. Filled with a cocktail of poisons and refuse, the doctors watched as though waiting for a punchline as they stared down at her body, writhing against the restraints like a wild animal. It was their surprise, then, when her skin began to bleed from her pores and scales sprouted in weak spots, two massive horns sprouting behind her ears and a massive maw expanding excruciatingly from her jaw.

Pain fed into anger, and the first thing she did was rip through the restraints and rip through the nearest scientist’s throat. Cathartic at the time, and even after the base was far behind her (collapsed with a well placed burst of flames) she couldn’t bring herself to regret it. She knew, from listening to the scientists, that she was the only one on base being tested on besides someone called ‘Winter Soldier’. All the others died early in the injection process, and the only reason she was still there was that the scientists could access her and him easier with them close together. She survived the first dose of serum where all six others died (in her arms) and they wanted to tear her open to understand why. After her body had given her the information they needed, her death was the last piece to their play needed to carry out their orders. And what was a final party without a little entertainment? Kill her, pack up the information, and send it off with them to their superiors for a raise and hopefully some free cocktails.

Abigale was sure they wanted her to go out with a bang- literally- but her desperate escape stalled their hands. Her problem was the other element in this equation; the Winter Soldier.

She had heard of them from the scientists. Being at the bottom of the grape vine means scientists don’t shut their mouths around ‘mindless experiments’. An array of ‘assets’ for the good of HYDRA, super soldiers going forwards as a mix between collectables and toys for whatever the highest ranked superior wanted done. Kill a corporate enemy? Sure. Make the death of your own child look like a suicide for money to fund your research? Certainly. Stick their ass in the air and take it raw? Well, Abigale certainly knew the answer to that.

It was a whim that made her take him with her, some kind of intelligence in ice blue eyes. Something on the edges of her consciousness told her to take him with her, and here she was, loading him in the back seat of an SUV she hadn’t seen anywhere but in spy movies. She took care to make sure her claws didn’t scratch him or his gear as she arranged him in the back seat, content and comforted for the first time in what must be years as the smell of burning building drifted on the wind. She turned the key in the ignition and began to drive, backing out of the parking spot in front of the burning building and driving merrily away.

    The first rule , Abigale remembered, to pulling off a crime of any kind , which burning down a HYDRA building and collapsing it with everyone inside certainly was, was to be calm, and be yourself. Because if you sprint away from a scene- that’s evidence of guilt. But if you walk away, calmly, people start to doubt if you’re part of the crime at all. Which was why she was going five miles below the speed limit, and not just immediately zooming past like a speedrunner on steroids.

The hysterical laughter bubbling in the back of her throat wouldn’t be silenced, and the massive reptilian cape shook in the uncomfortable plastic car seat as she laughed quietly with all of her lungs, the two little ones hiccuping in joy and little tiny bursts of flame escaping her lips as she fought the urge to crow her successful escape to the skies.

“ I’m free. ” The first words to exit her large reptilian maw, and they were a couple of quiet words. Tears traced down her face, and she thanked paranoid people for the darkened windows as the massive used-to-be-human experiment burst into happy tears. Crying with four lungs was a bit of an exercise in juggling muscle memory and her actual biology, but she got into it so much she was openly sobbing by the next right turn.

    It might have been a few seconds. It could have been a few minutes. But Abigale got herself together enough to scan her surroundings, seeing massive fields of prarie and trees as far as her enhanced eyes can see and sweet little ice cream cakes where in the nine hells is she?

    Abigale was a city girl. As a kid it was her dream to get into the NYPD, and she grew up side-by-side to the massive skyscrapers reaching towards the sky in her hometown. Farmland was only vaguely familiar to her, something to be seen on road trips or movie theatres.

    Now, surrounded by the wilderness, Abigale was glad her mom forced her into girl scouts as a child. ‘ Cops need wilderness survival skills ,’ my ass.

    Okay, she thought to herself, scanning the landscape. I’ve got shelter, Which is one thing a car is good for, especially a massive child kidnapping black van like this one, the next thing is to gather information. Even tiny roadside towns have a library somewhere, or at least some place nearby in which she can put her long nights of scrabbling through the internet to good use. Also; truck stops are great places to get food in bulk. Money is kind of an issue, until she can use that big brain of hers and her big brother’s hacking skills to setup an offshore account with all HYDRA’s funds on it. Not easy, and it’d take her a day in which it’d take Antonio thirty minutes tops, but she could do it.

Next step; unknown. She wanted to find and burn every single HYDRA base to the ground, but considering she had only ever seen one that was honestly not possible. Her hacking skills were sub-par, mostly aimed towards getting money because that is what her big brother taught her, and he died doing it. She did not have the ability to cut through decades of garbage and firewalls to find HYDRA like an online spider. Her ability was geared towards moneygrabbing, and it was sup-par at best.

So, She thought to herself, pulling into a tiny glass building that looked 50 years younger than every building in the nearby radius and read Library on the front. Internet, news, information, shelter, money, food. Then, whatever comes next. She still had the sickly guy comfortably tucked in the backseat of her car, after all.

This is how it started

Chapter Text

“Names.” she muttered blankly, eyes wide and at the floor. “They should’ve HAD NAMES! ” she buried her fist into a solid foot of metal, panting harshly as her heart sought to beat right out of her chest. She collapsed to her knees, tears running down her face as she reached a shaky hand to smooth out a hollow in the decaying skull. So small , the back of her head whispered, broken. Too small.

“You should’ve hah-had a name. ” Akane sobbed in a whisper, uncaring of the tears running down her face as she reached out to sooth the murdered child, curling the other, bleeding fist to her chest.

“I’m sorry. I’m so s-ho, so sorry.” She chanted, over and over and over again as though it could bring back the dead. And once her tears were dry, and her heart was aching like a throbbing wound, she scooped up the tiny skeleton and walked out the door, up the wall, and into the open air.

It was raining outside.

“You didn’t deserve this.” Akane whispered to the body as she stared up at the sky, letting the rain wash away her dried tears.

She moved from the entrance, further into the forest of death, and sat the body down. Her hands were small, but the mud was slick and easy. She dug in.

“I don’t know the burial rights for this culture.” She told the tiny, so small and tiny and y- Stop.

Staring blankly ahead, she continued. “But in my old culture, you need a name to be buried with rights. You--” Her voice broke and she fought to stay still and not break into renewed sobs. “You, don’t-- have a name. So I’m going to give you one.”

“I'm going with gender neutral, because you’re-- you’re too-- young --” Her body heaved, and she shook. “--for me to know your gender. So.” She straightened. “Alexander. Precious, sweet Alexander. It means Protector --” She said the word in the strange, japanese-like language the world of Naruto held. “--and it was the name of so many amazing, beautiful people.” She thought of Alexander, the conqueror. Alexander, the seer. Yes, this child deserved the strong name.

Her nails hit something solid. She made a hand sign, and a shadow fell over her and the skeleton of the child. A pair of hands, identical to her own, reached down to help her dig.

She needed to keep working. Focus on something else. If she paid too much attention to what she was doing, she’d start crying and never stop. Something in her would break irreparably, and she would shatter.

(the grave was so small, the bones --)

A handful of shadows fell over her, and she looked up to see her shadow clone hold a hand sign, sympathetic dark look on her face. Hands joined her own, a tiny army of a little girl given confirmation that her entire life was a lie.

By the time they were done, the sky was dark, and fifty-eight tiny graves had joined Alexander’s own. Names passed through her mind as they dispelled themselves, Jamie and Dawn and Discord and the feeling of tiny, so tiny, bones pressing into her soft skin. She was covered head-to-toe in dirt and mud, and the rain had far stopped. She reached a scabbed hand against her arm, a tiny red notebook settling in her palm as she pulled out a pen and began to write.

Alexander
John
Hadrian
Sarah

On and on and on. And at the end of the page, in blood red letters, was a large, blocky CONFIRMED.

Covered in dried mud that flaked off as she moved, Akane walked carefully back towards the village, only focussed on keeping her feet in front of her and her breaths steady. It must have been a terror, seeing a half-grown child covered in caked mud and dried blood, eyes wide and empty of life as she stared at nothing. She felt empty and hollow, like a void had overtaken her heart.

Left, Right. Left, Right. Almost there. Almost home.

( Nowhere is home now . A voice in her head whispered. She didn’t fight it.)

(it was right.)

Familiar footsteps. Her focus automatically moved towards the sounds, blue eyes flickering towards where Kiba was running forwards.

“Akane!” He smiled. His eyes traced her form, and his smile faded. He slowed. She slowed in turn, emotions cracking across her form like whiplash.

Akane allowed herself to study his form in turn.

( Safe her instincts screamed. Safe-home-mine- pack .)

“Akane?” He asked, nostrils flaring in search of a scent. He stopped in front of her. Her eyes stayed trained on his face, idly tracing the shape of his jaw. “You okay?”

He felt like fire. Like woodsmoke and tree branches and paw pads.

( Safe-home-pack-home. Safe-home-pack-home .)

Something shifted, changed, cascaded in her mind, a tiny insignificant thing sliding to the side. (into place.)

( Trust .)

Akane cracked. She collapsed against Kiba’s chest in a dry sob, clinging to his front with legs wrapped around his waist like a monkey. His hand encircled her waist on instinct, supporting her weight as kikaichu-

( wind-black-symbiosis-safe-home )

-crawled across her bare skin, checking for wounds and drinking in the flaring yin chakra released with her distress.

The void in her heart shattered, writhing like a living thing as it drew open wounds in her heart. She joined it, cutting deeper so the poison of the beast could not settle and create a weak spot.

She was safe, here. She could grieve for those forgotten children.

She cried uncontrollably, burying her face in Kiba’s fluffy jacket and tightening her grip around his waist. Children. Just children. Never to grow or smile or have families ever again. She wailed.

She tightened her chakra around her home , curling around them in a want of comfort. Kurenai-

(Fire-disguise-fox- home , and she weeps because what-is-home and because-they-can’t and an aching poison of betrayal that makes the black beast inside her howl .)

-steps forward, Shino a silent sentinel behind her as she presses a supporting palm against Akane’s shoulder.

Vibrations against Kiba’s chest; he’s talking, but Akane can’t hear anything over the writhing monster casting scores against her heart. Her tears are spent- her eyes throb with the lack of water. She’s still crying, though. She can’t seem to stop, spinning all her aches and pains into wracking sobs that shake her entire body.

Movement, wind-speed-move. Shunshin.

Mildew, wood, musk and the underlying scent of water-in-human-form hit her nostrils as they flared. Akane’s apartment.

Chapter Text

limbs, but still she lunged, racing through the trees like she belonged there. The rain was weighing her down, her thick but short shirt almost exponentially heavier with the weight of the water, and her sweatpants were almost glued to the slick flesh of her legs, the water running off of her blood red.

She heaved silently, the breaths hissing out of her lips in puffs whisper-thin as she stopped suddenly, tucking herself to a tree. A shadow, a flash of bright and something purple passed through her peripheral vision, silent as the grave, and Akemi flared, four chakra clones coming into being beside her and launching off of the tree. One was slower than the others, and was mercilessly cut down, a black pole sticking through the tree behind where the clone once was.

Below, Akemi winced as the phantom pain washed over her, using the resurgence of her chakra to push herself farther, the treeline almost at her sights. Another clone popped; a pipe through the head, this time. She raced faster, clearing the treeline with a leap before she started enhancing her footfalls with chakra.

Akemi sent a prayer of thanks to her child self and her reckless training as she cleared the clearing, going almost full speed towards Konoha on the ground as another two clones popped, one stopping to genjutsu and another to guard, both pinned like glass butterflies by a spike of black pipe through their chests. Genjutsu was useless against this enemy, then. With the obvious dojutsu, Akemi didn’t want to assume.

Her entire body burned, chakra exhaustion making its opinion known as she scraped as much chakra as she could from her surroundings, cycling it through a seal on her shoulder and pouring it into her coils. Being half-Uzumaki, chakra exhaustion was something between a fairytale and a pipe dream for her, but just in case the nature transformation seal was inked onto her shoulder. Akemi Umino was never so happy and proud of her own paranoia, as well as her parents’ own sealing methods, using the burst of nature chakra to fling herself forwards through her sprint. Another clone popped at the treeline, and yet another popped across the clearing. Two separate bodies. She would have to think about that later.

Her coils burned like a fire-burn covered in ice, protesting any and all movement, but she pushed through. She had to get to Konoha before something stopped her permanently. The Three-tail in her stomach shifted, and she almost reached a hand to support it before rejecting the motion, supporting the bleeding three-tails with nothing but a rudimentary seal and her own chakra coils.

Calm focus washed over her like a battle-haze, and as the last of her clones popped, she formed a hand-seal. Her thoughts raced, faster than she ever remembered them being, and she used the increased focus to send chakra forwards in a hooked whip, catching a tree and launching herself forwards. Behind her, the tree exploded with the pressure of tailed-beast chakra on top of her Uzumaki own pressing down upon it.

The ground buckled beneath the force she was using to land, but she curled her body and twisted into the force, using the extra burst of speed to keep moving forwards.

Nature chakra was sucked into the seal, mixing with her own until they were indistinguishable and released it in a burst, launching forwards on quicksilver legs, dodging a reaching pale hand. Three more clones burst besides her, Kawarimi shedding illusionary leaves as they switched between each other as one burst forwards from the far right. Above them, Akemi synchronized her chakra with the surrounding energy, sprinting unseen and unheard as well as unfelt as the rush of air and sun dried the blood and rain on her skin.

Her clones popped, all three at once speared by black pipe, and she almost stumbled as the onslaught of memories shattered her concentration. She burst from the second treeline, stumbling slightly through the air as she launched herself forwards on the old roads paved by moving merchants. Behind her, three clones held their ground, a fourth dashing off in a straight line towards Konoha. Akemi took a right on the road, a map unfolding in her mind as she traced where she would need to go to reach Konoha from here.

A merchant caravan started with wide eyes as the small ninja passed them all by with nary a breeze or brush of wind, only two extra henged passengers the sign of her passing. She ignored them as she whipped by, pushing from and shattering a tree in her rush to turn a left along the road. Behind her, a pipe speared her running clone, and Akemi used the burst of chakra as incentive to move herself faster.

Three hours later, a battered and bruised blonde Uzumaki burst into the clearing in front of the two gate guards, stumbled through her landing, failed, tripped over her own injuries, and collapsed in a dead faint.

Akemi kept quiet as she faded into consciousness, prodding gently with her chakra at her surroundings before turning her focus inward.

Isonbu? She called into the mental void. You there?

She waited for a response. Much like the turtles he so resembles, Isonbu is sometimes quite slow .

.. .Hmmmmm . A low growl of greeting. Tired, but alive and more importantly here with her , safe.

Tension she didn’t know was there released, and internally Akemi breathed a sigh of relief.

You alright? Akemi prodded gently at his chakra with her own. Fire-Ice against ancient winding river cutting a path through a continent .  Isonbu growled, flicking her chakra away with a great grumble. Her chakra tensed slightly, coiling in place as anxiety flashed through worn-out coils. Isonbu? Her inner voice was more urgent, her pokes less gentle. Isonbu slapped her away, but it was more like an exhausted parent slapping away annoying pokes of a younger child than anything coherent.

Akemi’s chakra hardened in determination as she dove into the seal, blinking blind eyes into the depths of the dark sea. She kicked off, swimming her mental body over towards where Isonbu was, hidden down in an underwater cave system that more resembled the smaller naga-infested seas of Azeroth than anything.

Of course it was, that was the way she designed it.

Akemi pulled herself from the water into the sandy floor of the cave, brushing imaginary sand off of her clothes as she crept forwards into the depths of the seal.

“Isonbu!”  Her mental voice echoed through the cave, the lights under the water drawing shapes on the cave’s roof. A shape rumbled and shifted at the back of the cave system, the low growl at the back of her mind much more violent than before.

Chapter Text

This is an orochimaru mixture; so long being in the void gave Kaia freaky chakra. Jironbu is like a kind-of hollow (mask is organically grown, void body, regeneration) kind of Venom (liquid-like black tendrils, mimicing humans but failing in an eldrich horror way) and common Jironbu (threads under skin, replacing inner body workings, sewing shut holes in body and wire-like sharp only harmed by chakra blades or very good blades)

Back, before the child of prophecy was conceived, before the hidden villages were anything more than a glimmer of potential in someone’s eye, the spirit and mortal world were intertwined.

It is said, that the first Senju was a wandering samurai that fell in love with a dryad. Nature spirits, or trees and lakes and leaves alike decorate their history and legends like a tapestry wreathed in green, and the Senju, as long as their clan lived, never forgot this.

Don’t wander too far from the tree. Was a common saying mothers said to their children, because like fruit trees the Senju had many. Set down your roots was said to young men old enough to leave the place they were born in without repercussions. As the spirit-blood was bred out of the Senju, the simple rules spirits used fell out of order. Still, any young man wandering too far from home felt a chill, as though he was not meant to be there. Any Senju wandering too far from the place they were born felt restless, as though they never belonged there. And any Senju too far from their family, their home, their roots , felt an undercurrent of discontent with their life.

Those who could touch the trees- much like young Hashirama- felt this only more so. Wandering too far from any tree roots made them sick, and the need to connect , to be with people gave them charisma unmatched and friendships untouched by death.

Much like those nature spirits bound before, those with water’s lifeblood roaring through their veins could never abandon their clan. Flexibility and intelligence unmatched, with a fury only comparing to a tsunami and a temper to match, the children of the waters encompased those water symbolized perfectly. Tobirama, with his albino birth, could never be blessed by a nature spirit without help from another, and his brother never knew, and so could not help. Water blessed him instead, the power to sense any water in a long range, water itself enhancing his ability to sense.

Kakuzu grew up an orphan, the lowest of the low, without family to help him. But, unknown to him, he was half the Fuma clan’s child, and the Fuma could trace their lineage back from the spirits’ days to spiders. It is said the Fuma’s first child was not human, but a Drider, a bizarre amalgamation of a human chest encompassed by spiders’ exoskeleton, a human upper half and a spiders’ bottom. The spirits’ blood is weak, but still the Fuma manipulate the webs and strings from their forefathers. This could be why Kakuzu’s jironbu is so strong and all-encompassing, the blood of his forefathers settling in his own without problems.

When Orochimaru used their blood and cells, mixed them to create a child on a whim, a burst of sentiment he could not squash quick enough, he did not expect it to work. The city of Ame was wet and cold and prone to infections, and his human experimentation was more often to failing here, where sickness was common among the populus despite their so-called god sending his “blessings” down. He waved off the woman he implanted the egg into, already forgetting about the child that would surely die within the month and the consequences of his actions.

Nine months later, in the dry corners of Konoha’s borders, this unnamed but so very brave woman gave birth to a healthy baby, with yellow-green eyes, skin darkened in a permanent tan, and hair black as night. Two pale black marks darted like ash-painted scars across her cheeks, and a sharp squint enhanced the ash black wings decorating her eyelids. Clan markings, a blessing of water. A patrol, wary and suspicious from the ending of the war, found them three weeks later and brought them in, a tiny sickly civilian woman carrying a scarily familiar obviously clan child.

The poisonous chakra of the Kyuubi attack was too much for her, however, and her tiny body broke down under the stress. She was buried outside of Konoha, another nameless shinobi giving her life for her village without proper burial. Her child was passed on to the orphanage, the medics patting down the child carefully for signs of infection and of which clan she was from. Neither they, nor the nameless shinobi patrolman, could figure which clan she was from, and despite confessing a startling familiarity of her markings. (“As though I know them from somewhere,” The nameless shinobi scratched his head, and through the window directly behind the head of the medic he was talking to, a scrap of metal on Tobirama’s face caught the sun to flash directly into his eyes.)

The orphanage matron waved off the strange child, too many things already for her to do and not enough time to do them. Danzo-sama wanted another shipment of brats , and if her little Masaki-chan couldn’t be more than dust in the wind, unnoticed and uncared for, then neither would they.

(“Kaia,” Her sake-loosened tongue mangled the name, but the little blank-faced 10 year old nodded and disappeared down the hall to place her with the other children. He would leave to be one of those in the ‘shipment’, and the unnamed orphan shinobi would never be seen again.)

Chapter Text

Eris rubbed her back against the rough bark of the fel-touched tree, the glowing green abomination cracking and splintering with the force of the pressure. A slick, wet tearing sound echoed across the empty plains of the planet, a dark purple reptilian-looking piece of thick, armor-like skin dropped onto the ground next to it, the insides of it still wet with fluids.

Eris sighed in relief, basking in the release of pressure, before carefully collecting the freed dragon-scale plate and turning away towards where she sensed was the nearest camp. Despite what she, and most of her brothers and sisters-in-arms wished, the Burning Legion stopped for nobody.

Not even a Black Dragon.

(Not that they knew that.)

Rubbing the now freed area where the scale plate used to be, Eris mourned that she couldn’t just do that, but all over her body, all at once. There were reasons not to, of course. Mostly that the new area usually took a bit of time to harden and become armor and demons were a thing and also mindlessly hostile, but also mostly because doing so so suddenly would leave her with an excess of dragon scales and scale-plates. Which her fellows would then question. Again.

Shaking that train of thought off as she entered the camp, demon-hide satchel glistening in the fel light, a wave of green glowing eyes following her steps as she came to what she privately referred to as her spot. A pair of fel-enchanted blades rested at her sides, her own, self-crafted weapons against the burning legion. They were cracked and chipped almost to the point the silverish gleam of the metal was overrun by the dark and light green of dried and fresh fel-corrupted blood, but they were hers, her partners until the ends of time.

( Or, She thought, side-eyeing a particularly large crack, until they break into pieces. )

Resting them against her sides in an easy to reach place, she laid on her stomach, her wings stretching away from her as she basked in the newest victory against the demon lord and soaked up sunlight. Wrapping her arms under her breasts as support, and to not crush them under her weight, she dozed. Halfway into the hazy corridors of sleep, but still aware of her surroundings.

The sun slowly peeled away from her wings, her brethren, at least, those who were not staying up on watch for tonight, curling up against her beastly form in substitution for their lord’s. And finally, she fell.

“ -Your cause DIES WITH HIM! ” A clanking of chains, the glow of green that signaled the accursed fel, and a Demon Lord, the first they’d ever defeated together.

“ NO! ” She shouted, but it wasn’t her speaking. It was more as though she was a spectator in her own skin.

A leap that threw her over her lord to land in front of him, and using the weight of her movement to bury her weapon in the stone, horrible chains bouncing off her weapons and then a sharp smack that threw her into the broken pillar Illidan had just vacated.

The force of the sudden stop rang throughout her body with pain, and she relaxed slightly in agony, before the face of the Demon Lord they were sent to destroy was suddenly in front of her, his tusks to her either side, trapping her in place.

Her teeth bared in warning, even as she tensed for death, the foul creature drew in a breath through his nose and stared at her in fascination.

“ You smell more of Demon than Hunter. ” The accursed lord cackled with a smirk. “ You would serve us well. ”

“Never.” She promised, staring above to watch as the shadow of Illidan drew his glaives through the Demon Lord’s chest, vanquishing him in a burst of fel energy and foul-smelling smoke.

Illidan uncurled his wings from where they surrounded him, studying the empty pillared tower, cured of its previous fel energies.

Lightning flashed down on the destroyed tower, sending a crackle of thunder to flash against Lord Illidan’s wings. He spread them, turning his body to face his alive demon hunters.

“The Legion will know of this victory.” He promised in a low growl. “And they will fear you, my Illidari.”

“Now, You Are Prepared !”

She startled, tensing in preparation for an attack that would never come as her dream threw her violently back into reality. The malcontent whinings of her brothers and sisters reminded her of where she was, and she relaxed into the puppy-pile that, over time, had become what every demon hunter slept to.

Except she was almost always the bottom of the pile, but she was awake now, not going to sleep soon, and the underneath of her back was itchy, again, and she needed to scratch it off , now .

Slowly, gently, like a bit of live prey trying to get away from a sleeping predator, she extracted herself from the pile of sleeping predators, the scratching under her backplate forcing her forwards even as her brothers and sisters whined with her absence.

She found the perfect spot- a hook on the edge of the destroyed tower that probably once housed tortured prisoners now would be used to lift her aching plate away from her body. Far enough away that those watching would not see her, and close enough that she could still see the camp. She frowned a bit, because that sounded like the perfect ambush spot, and she resolved to destroy the still intact ward that shielded her bretheren’s eyes from this spot after she got rid of the maddening plate.

Carefully, she maneuvered her back so that the edge of the sharp hook dug under the plate but did not pierce the skin underneath, and launched herself down and away, with another wet tear. Boneless in relief from the absence of that damnable plate, she turned her head from where she laid in the sand to regard the dark purple plate hanging from the hook. Twisting comfortably onto the sandy ground, she purred silently at the feeling of the newer plate hardening where the old one fell, and the final, happy lack of that damnedable ich .

“So.” A growled voice was suddenly above her, and she spun her body to land on her feet, claws drawn and teeth bared, wings flared in a threat as the unknown assailant watched from above her.

But it was only Lord Illidan, and a bit of her relaxed at the sight of him, even as the rest of her tensed in uncertainty. She backed away at the tensing of his muscles, making room as he burst upwards with one mighty flap of his wings and landed in front of her, large goat-like legs dipped as they supported his weight, his wings relaxing at his sides.

“This is what you are.” He continued as if the pause between his words never existed, carefully neutral. “A Black Dragon.” He indicated the dark purple of the scale now clutched between his fingers with a dip of his horns, and Eris shuffled internally in embarrassment.

Outwardly, she was calm. “Indeed, my Lord.” She intoned calmly in confirmation, a slight dip of her own horns in agreement, even if she did not yet back down.

(Internally, she was screaming .)

He raised an eyebrow at her ‘My Lord’, still stalking around her like a predator teasing his prey. And she felt like prey, under the heavy gaze of his green-glowing eyes.

“Why have you come, Black Dragon?” Her Lord enquired, only allowing the faintest bit of emotion to reach his voice, as though this question was unimportant and obvious as whether or not they would fight the Burning Legion. Of which the answer was obvious.

“To fight the Burning Legion.” She answered his question honestly. If he felt any surprise, he did not show it, but he did stop and turn to her, arms crossed and eyebrow raised in question.

“When Azshara made her deal with the Burning Legion, the flights were torn into parts. I doubt most of us will ever recover.” She started to explain, “And then, Azeroth, the very planet below us, screamed out in agony as the Well of Eternity sank below the waves. I- the whole flight felt that. It tore at us like the demon does now, dragging some of us to dive to the deep to try to heal a wound that would not stop screaming. ” She shivered at an echo of the feeling of the planet- practically her own mother, screaming and crying at a wound that wouldn’t heal, no matter how she tried.

“In the deep, if the drowning did not kill them or were rescued before they did, they came back changed. Purple where the most of us were brown, they called themselves twilight . And with them came the Old Gods, stories made real as they closed at our sanities and deepest fears in an effort to escape themselves.” She drew her clawed hands to her chest in an effort to block out the pain of an emotional wound that, to her surprise, never actually healed. She waited for the tears to stop, staring at the sandy ground, before she continued.

“Our father was the first turned, dragging most of the flight with him.” She said, bitterly. “The ones not already being turned into slaves for the Demons, or those escaping North to never be seen again in the misty frozen waves, were turned. With or without their consent.” She turned her eyes- now free from her bindings due to the corrosive nature of her tears- to meet his, glowing through his makeshift cover.

“I wanted to fight that. I wanted to fight those who dared make a mark on our planet, I wanted to fight, and I needed to, before-” Her voice broke and she didn’t finish. Before I was turned, too.

“No one would fight.” She said, as though her interrupted words never existed. “None would stand. They were all happy to stay in their dens and wait to be turned. ” She snarled, fists clenching where they now rested at her sides. “None but you.”

“And so, I followed.” She finished, wary.

A tense silence stretched between them, two of those twisted by demonic energies, one an elf of high stature and another a dragon playing at being a warrior. Eris did not falter, staring into his eyes even as the seconds ticked on and her muscles started to protest.

“Why do you hide your form, Black Dragon?” Illidan finally asked, indicating the dark purple scale.

“Because, Lord Illidan,” Eris explained, tense. “I wished to fight equally amongst my brothers, without being known of by the Burning Legion.” She dragged her gaze back to the ground and stared at the sandy ground, unseeing. “After all, a Fel-corrupted Dragon? There would be no greater prize.” Her wings fell limp behind her in mourning.

“Fel-corrupted?” Lord Illidan prompted, his eyebrow again raised.

“Those of the Black Flight take power from the earth- from the ground beneath them. However, this ground-” She stomped a clawed foot in example, the earth shattering under her feet to show glowing, blistering fel. “Is corrupted by the unholy energies of the fel.”

She turned back to look at him. “I’m made of as much fel as you are, now.” Which is why she looks about as beast like, too. And why the others keep piling up on her during naptime.

“What of your True Form?” Lord Illidan asked, relaxing imperceptibly at a familiar topic; forbidden, unknown knowledge.

“This form is a bit… uncomfortable.” She admitted, which was an understatement. “I still long to change, stretch out my wings and take to the sky.” If there was anything for which she envied Illidan for, (of which there were many) it would be that he could fly with his wings, while she was chained to the ground.

“But again.” She wrenched her thoughts away from that saddening path. “If word got out, I would be hunted to the rest of my days, even by my brothers.”

A hand came down on her shoulder, making her flinch before she realized it was non hostile. She looked up into green glowing eyes and idly wondered what their true color once was.

“Peace, Black Dragon. You are still welcome here as one of my Illidari.” He rumbled, rubbing small, soothing circles into her back with his thumb. She relaxed at that, almost boneless with relief. A slight, broken with misuse rumble echoed from her chest at being so close to Illidan, and he raised an eyebrow, visibly storing that away for later.

“However, later I would like information on these ‘Old Gods’.” He rumbled curiously, turning away towards camp, his hooves purposely smudging the rune that kept that spot hidden from prying eyes. “And, maybe later, to see your true form.”

===================================================================

(Eris waited until she couldn't hear his footsteps, before she collapsed bonelessly against the sand, hearts beating a samba against her chest and injecting liquid adrenaline into her veins. She took a careful breath, then another, calming her aching and frightened body even as her mind basked in relief and awe.

He did not exile me. I am still of his flight . A small bit of her mind crowed in joy, and she was struck with the desire to scream it into the Void and keep it close to her chest in turns, bubbling sunlight exploding against her chest as the joy of that uncontrolled thought burst against her mind.

She brushed it away, unwilling to think too deeply on the thought, before rolling herself onto clawed feet, wings outward and spread for balance. She brushed dust off of her back, shaking the rest off of her wings in an echo of her previous brethren, and began the march back to camp.

Her dragon scale was Illidan's, now, (and didnt that just make old forgotten instincts perk up in interest,) and despite her natural Paranoia, she trusted Illidan's judgement. Her brothers and sisters were waiting, and absolutely nothing in her memories was more comfortable than falling asleep smothered in warriors that would fight to the death if anything woke them up before they decided to wake up. Whether it be wind or demons, they would duel it to the death.

She carefully maneuvered herself, dodging pointy elfen elbows and sensitive ears as she settled at the bottom of the pile on her front, an arm splayed over Illidan's bicep and a tail wrapped around his cloven hoof.

A great part of her settled its bristling at the touch, natural wariness fading away at the safety of being surrounded by familiar familial warriors.

‘Tis a good time for a nap. She decided as she let the adrenalin crash get ahead of her, and was drowning in black.

Chapter Text

-Only imply Chaos. Never outright personalize Chaos. Like how Nico summoning his Horde sounds like the beating of a war drum or a heart, how Percy smiles but his eyes are always a little too knowing his knife always in reach, how Thalia dodges on instinct and without malice.

Yes, Percy/Nyx will bloodbend. 

Perseus is Nyx was lord of the greatest sea was cut in half by Poseidon for the grant threat of being not under the gods control, Part of him is still in Tartarus, awakens when Perceus is banished and meets his other half.

Nico is Erebus was chained down to become Thanatos by Hades, split in two part banished to tartarus part locked into the reincarnation cycle, Nico is banished to Tartarus and meets his other half.

Thalia is Aether was free until Zeus struck her down broke her wings forced her and while she was still sobbing split her in half, banished half to tartarus part in reincarnation, meets other half down there.

(Nyx; Takeshi Yamamoto, Erebus; Hyliian’s Harry Potter Death, Aether; ???.)

Hades controls the Underworld. Sons of his can't raise the dead; the only reason he can raise skeletons is that the skeleton has earth connotations, but they're constructs. Nico/Erebus, on the other hand, can raise entire bodies from the dead, reanimating them on a leash for a purpose. And while Skeletal dead fight as Zombies, these Damned Dead fight with passion .

No wonder Hades kept Nico under lock and key. He’s a Ghost King.

Erebus hates Hades, yes. And it’s with a Primordial ’s hate. Because Hades was one of those who split Aether and Nyx in half, and beyond that, Hades chained Erebus, not only to himself, but to a name not his own . Thanatos is not Erebus, and answering to that name must have burned to the proverbial bone . Beyond that- Hades chained death itself. Part of the reason Hades has a domain in death- Not afterlives, not the underworld, but death - is because he chained Erebus to himself, and stole it.  

Erebus- and thus, Nico, who is more connected to the death part of his father than seen since Adolf Hitler ,- hates Hades.

The timeline states that it is an entire year that passes on the above world when Kronos is defeated and the Son of Neptune begins. Which leaves a fuckton of leeway, due to interdimensional time warp shenanigans.

Erebus holds domain over the dead. Angry dead, weeping dead, have you ever wondered why the ghosts seem so calm in the underworld? That’s because Erebus rules over the emotive dead. Hate, anger, betrayal, and Nico is the Ghost King .

They end up in a sort of six minds three bodies situation because Erebus isn't Nico anymore, and neither are they Erebus really, or Thanatos. Nico is Nico and Erebus is Erebus. Erebus simply has more experience in the domain of death, and can thusly guide Nico. NYX is the god of the largest ocean. He can guide Percy. Percy is not a primordial, and neither is Nico or Thalia. In the separation of their powers they have become distinct from each other. This doesn't mean they have none of the powers, because they do, such as having tougher skin, and a tighter domain over their individual powers, but I refuse to make this a overpowered cliche trash sort of thing.

Erebus is deadpan, with a dry, deathly sort of humor.

Nyx is more fluid, and his humor is more teasing and laughing. He also has no self-control whatsoever.

Aether is flighty. 

(Erebus calls Nico 'Little shell, Moral shell. Nyx calls Percy "Host, gracious host." Aether calls Thalia 'Little bird, broken bird,')

Erebus’s weapon; Scythe (Wrathbone)

Nyx’s weapon; Knife (Cold Iron/Starshade)

Aether’s weapon; Spear (Solinium/Some other star/light/air pun)

Outline; The first day of their banishment after Kronos’s destruction but before Son of Neptune . Percy Thalia and Nico are there in the throne room, Luke does not do the heroic suicide because his soul is dead and his body is going the same way, the first going being the Styx shell which is slowly evaporating and with it, Kronos. Kronos pulls them with him into the pit as punishment. 

Percy finds the scythe unwieldy, but familiar. Nico wields the Scythe easily when it is dropped to his feet during the battle. Thalia’s bow breaks shielding Percy from death, and in the final moment all three of them burst forwards and bury their weapons into Kronos. Arrow ( spear , something in her whispers), Scythe ( place your arms like so, my shell, ), and Annabeth’s knife ( once more are we gifted our weapon in death. ). Kronos drags them down with him in his final moments, and the chapter ends.

They awaken, Nico first, and figure out that fuck, theyre in Tartarus. They discover that the air is toxic to them, creating painful boils on their skin and that the air is thin but breathable, but they can heal themselves from the boils with the waters from Phlegathon (Thanks, Nico.). (Nico blushes, Percy is clueless.) They keep walking, hoping to find a way out. (They find the field of reforming monsters, they have to defeat the Minotaur again. Percy is an old hat at knives, for some reason that Thalia questions but Percy shrugs at. Picking up some stuff from fighting with Annabeth?) They run, because more monsters approach, (a monster previously defeated by Thalia gives them the hint they need; they smell like Demigod.) and find themselves at a swamp. A roar splits the air and they get ready for battle.

"Drakon." Percy reached for his pocket on instinct, left hand tightening around his knife and right hand grasping for a pen that wasn't there .

But it didn't make sense.

Riptide always comes back.

Water- not seawater, but close - lapped at his ankles as the wave of scales breached tide and made for vulnerable shoreline.

Red, yellow, blue, and those same hateful eyes.

And this time he didn't have anything to protect them with. His armored shell was gone .

Not nothing . Toeing the water lapping at his feet, Percy eyed the incoming scaley missile, judged the distance, and pushed back .

A wave pushed back, fending off immense, snapping teeth.

“ Fuck! ” Thalia spit, climbing to her feet, knuckles white over the spear in her hands. 

Nico full-body flinched, eyes wide as he watched the serpent's head sink back below the water.

Something foreign and fierce slips between his lips in a whisper as she drags him closer up the shore, away from the waterline.

Percy's ADHD brain really wants to ask what language that was; no time. He can feel the movement of water under the water, something dense and old and snarly wrenching for control the son of the Sea God refuses to give.

It’s a Drakon, and they fight it. The sound of the roar makes Percy reach for Riptide, but it isn’t there. No time; they battle. They all get injured before big anti-ares comes and finishes the Drakon off. Thalia stands over the fallen forms of her friends, weak and barely standing, Nico barely conscious and Percy not conscious, and faints before she can do more. She wakes up first; Anti-Ares explains he’s been fighting the Drakon daily for over 500 years, which is what everything is made of. She eats something that isn’t out of the bottles of Phlegethon water they’ve managed to scrounge up, and instantly falls in love with it. It might as well have been nectar and ambrosia, for how she appreciates it. She eats slowly because street-child logic, Nico wakes up, (She’s fond of him, honestly. A mention of how he looks kind of cute with bedhead.) and she explains what's up. (“Slow down, Bonehead!” Thalia laughed as Nico practically inhaled the rest of her soup, the new scar over his lip pink and fresh.) Nico agrees to help Anti-Ares with daily chores and such, supply him stories and knowledge in exchange for shelter. Nico tells Thalia of his dreams, and how they are full of despair, but he can’t quite see what they contain; he just knows flashes.

Percy wakes up, gets explained things, Thalia asks why he has Annabeth’s knife while he’s playing with it (A flash of celestial bronze catches her eye; Annabeth’s knife darted between his hands in a nervous gesture she wasn’t used to seeing on him. What was Seaweed-brain doing with Annabeth's knife?). Percy freezes; Annabeth is dead. She got poisoned and gave him her knife as a last gift sort of thing. Thalia breaks down and sobs, and Percy joins her. Nico joins them as well, not nearly as familiar with Annabeth but fond of her. Anti-Ares interrupts them, there's chores to do and no time for crying.

(In the aboveworld, Annabeth searches for them. Because she is not dead, Percy thought she was though and mourns.)

They do chores, come back boneless and panting, but Anti-Ares offers them advice to make it easier on them, idly as though not noticing. They collapse into bed, and at night come the nightmares. After three nights of Percy dead and Thalia raped and slaughtered, Nico climbs into bed with them, and Thalia admits thinking the same. Percy agreed. And they sleep easier together. More chores, more advice to make it easier, telling Anti-Ares stories, and waking up to the Drakon’s scream, each dreaming of something different. (Green flames, Nico admits with a tremor in his palms. The Dark Sea, Percy explains, voice shaking. Flying, Thalia whispers with a shiver.)

It’s around two months (how do they keep time in the pit?) before Anti-Ares kicks them out, but the time used was enough. The air is easier to breathe, and they are calloused and scared with earned strength. Anti-Ares “kicks them out” as in there are waves of monsters coming, he’ll cover them, leave before all are overwhelmed. They rush out, eyes hard from death (and something else) and get into fights along the way, of course. They sleep in turns at “night”, eyes wary and weapons ready. (“Why keep the scythe? It’s his ,” Percy asks without malice one night. Nico spins the shaft in his hand and rested it against his side, leaning over. “I don’t know,” He admitted. “It feels right.” Percy nodded without complaint, idly stroking the knife at his side. Thalia stirred beside Nico, and he reached out and stroked her hair on instinct, quieting her soft cries.) Thalia knows they know that Artemis’s blessing has faded on Thalia, just as Percy knows they know that the Styx’s water has faded from him. 

Hyperion awakens, hunting for them with a crowd of monsters. They run, right into an empty, massive dark fortress. (

“This way!” Nico called, dragging the other two through the twisting pathway of dimly lit corridors as behind them, Hyperion’s cries grew choked. 

“How do you know where we’re going?!” Thalia asked from beside him, staff glowing with divine light. Nico didn’t answer, stopping suddenly before an open doorway. 

“Nico?” Percy asked, worried when he didn’t answer.

“Do you guys hear that?” He muttered to them, tilting his head as though listening for something only he could hear.) He steps through the doors with them, the two shutting the doors behind him. (Green fire raises from the braisers, and Nico freezes in the middle of the room as a bone crown is brought into the light, raised on a dias and pillow like a medieval gift. 

“Do you guys see this?” He asks faintly, turning to the side without removing his eyes from the bone crown.

“Yeah,” Thalia’s electric blue eyes are also pinned to the crown on the pillow, hand not moving from her staff. “I do.”

Percy’s green eyes are faintly curious as he tilts his head, blade in its sheath. “It feels like yours.” Percy muses aloud, “Like it belongs to you.” Like the scythe , he thinks but doesn’t say.

Nico stepped forwards carefully, pinned by the thousands of empty skulls making up the pillars in the palace, careful to watch for any tricks or traps. He feels but doesn’t see Thalia take up point behind him, her eyes on the door as it flexes from Hyperion’s blows. Percy follows just beside him, flicking the knife in a nervous rhythm as Nico steps up to the raised dias.

His fingers wrap around the crown of bone, something in him reaching and aching and wanting . The crown feels right on his head, like how long heavy clothes feel right on his frame and how his scythe feels right by his side. 

For the first time since Bianca’s death, since leaving the Lotus Eaters, since his first time drawing blood, for the first time in his life Nico feels whole . 

He breathes out, something immense and heavy and rattling like chains falling off of his frame and disappearing into dust. He looks to Percy ( brother-love, heart of mine- ) and the flicking of the knife, ( how it used to annoy us, my mortal shell- ) and then to Thalia ( sister-love, heart of mine- ) and the tensing of her fingers around her spear. ( Wrong. Why does my starlight not wield her spear- )

He flexes his fingers, twisting the Scythe in his grip ( My scythe, what delicious irony ), and as he breathes, the fortress breathes with him. The halls are filled with sudden, eerie light, as every torch and fireplace lights at once, the rattling of cackling skeletons echoing through the air. ( Fondness. I remember them all.)

Hyperion raises his shoulder, tensing as he rocks forwards to rush the door, completely unprepared when it opens in the instant before he reaches it. 

It is almost comically easy to knock the head off of his shoulders with the sharp edge of the scythe, to wave his fingers and fling the dust somewhere far away, out of reach.

“Nico?” Percy asks, worried. Nico rolled his shoulders, tilting his head to the side just to feel the vertebrae in his spine crack. The shadow of wings raise themselves behind him, a weight at his back  and a familiar cracking grin at his ear before it fades. When he turns, his dark grey eyes, almost black, flash a killing sort of green. 

“It’s still me.” Nico met Percy’s beautiful sea-blue eyes, breath calm and easy in the poisonous air. “Just a little… extra.” (Something in the back of his mind cackles, voice dry and harsh with bitter irony.) 

“The crown used to belong to the owner of the castle,” He explained, seeing their worry grow. “Erebus, Primordial of the damned.” Nico met Thalia’s eyes as green fire glinted off of his scythe, and watched as she covered her mouth in shock. “I think,” He hesitated; skeletal fingers tightened almost painfully around his shoulders. “I think that, before , I used to be him.”

“Used to be him?” Percy asked, wondering.

“ Before? ” Thalia asked, almost at the same time.

Nico swiped a palm over his face, sighing deeply in a way he hadn’t been able to before, thinness of the air almost absent. He leaned on his scythe, sorting his thoughts. ( We have all the time in the world, my shell. The other half of the Primordial they used to be whispered, his voice like the last breath of a soldier rattling through the holes in his lungs.)

Nico sighed, breathed, and looked up to stare them in the eye. “It’s a long story.” He tilted his head towards Thalia. “She knows some of it.”

Percy turned, and Nico slid to the ground, placing his scythe on his lap. Invisible to everyone but him, Erebus ran skeletal fingers through Nico’s wispy black hair. ( The releasing of weight is but a weight in itself, my shell. He murmured, brushing calm-warm/cold-safe against Nico’s comparatively small orb of warm-empty-calm-quiet for a comforting instant before withdrawing back to his vigil.) 

“It’s safe here.” Nico said defensively, when Percy and Thalia eyeballed him for sitting down in ‘enemy territory’. “I can feel everything, dead or alive, in the palace. We’re alone.” Cold breath brushed against his warm ears, and he mentally conceded to Erebus. ( Alone as we’ve ever been, he whispered with a gravedirt-roughened voice that was only half his. Erebus chuckled, brushing a loose hair out of his face. As we’ve ever been, my shell. The other half of a Primordial muttered back fondly.)

Percy was the first to sit down beside him, sea-blue eyes wide and trusting. Thalia sat next, wary and quiet and tense as a bowstring. 

“I’ve been dreaming. Not- not about, about camp or anything.” Nico stuttered, brushing a hand through his hair. His eyes traced invisible tracks on the bone-brick walls, searching for the words to use.

“ Dreaming. ” Percy nodded, understanding, and there was something about the way he said that, that brought up images, of seeing death and bones, feeling chains all the way around his back, clipping around the thin, skeletal wings he could no longer use.

“ Dreaming. ” Nico agreed, “About a man- being a man- and his life.” ( And his death, Erebus whispered softly against his cheek.)

“About- about-” Okay, this isn’t working. Nico changed tracks. “Once upon a time there was a Primordial named Erebus. But before he was a Primordial, he was a man who loved his siblings. Once upon a time there was a Primordial named Erebus, and one day when his brother and sister took up arms against their father, who wished them to kill each other, he followed. Once upon a time there were three siblings named Aether, Nyx, and Erebus, and they killed their father, absorbing his powers and imprisoned his rotting corpse in the deepest, darkest place they could find.” Nico paused, tears rising in his eyes.

“Once upon a time, there was a man called Erebus, and one day, he had to watch as his siblings were murdered and torn in two, had to watch as their bodies and bones were defiled by their great-grandchildren.” His breath rattled in his chest, and for a moment he couldn’t tell where the pieces of Nico began and the shade of Erebus ended. “Once upon a time a man who loved his siblings more than anything was brought down and chained to serve one of those who had forced his siblings to fade, and every morning he stared into the mirror, looking into dark eyes of a face that wasn’t his , and he mourned.” He could barely breathe as tears ran down his cheeks, leaning into Percy’s embrace and sobbing into his chest.

The pain in his chest- their chests- razed across them like a poisoned blade. Nico was not an unfamiliar stranger to hate. Hate was the dark shadow that lingered on the edges of everything he was. Hatred was in the depths of the shades he called, the echo of what-once-was stripped so that mourning souls could shift into what-could-be. The dead didn’t feel; but sometimes Nico tasted the edges of betrayal, betrayer, and in that last moment before steel sunk into flesh, Nico remembered. And now, barely touching the edges of an old, aching wound upon the very depths of who he was, Nico grasped bare edges of we, and hated. 

When he could finally speak without hiccups interrupting his words, he looked into those blue eyes, and whispered. “Once upon a time, a Primordial in chains who embodied death was stabbed in the back by an agent of his child, and in Tartarus, the other half of the Primordial, locked away in the human reincarnation system, walked into his Fortress.” Words escaped his grasp, and so he buried himself in seawater-smelling chest and tried to ignore the ache in his chest that wasn’t just from talking about Erebus’s siblings.

( Love is cruel, my mortal shell. Erebus muttered, drawing their cloak closer around themself, the ghost of spindly limbs wrapped tight around their body in comfort. Even crueler than death. )

Thalia, at his back, wrapped warm arms around them both, tucking her head on the shoulder Percy wasn’t occupying. Nico, pulled tight against both of their chests, almost in their laps, sobbed as quietly as he could, something coiling through his ribcage to spread its wings against his heart.

(In the back of his mind, Erebus purred, something ancient and infinite brushing tattered, broken webs of power against their soul. He bit his tongue, and felt something that tasted like stardust build up at the back of his throat.)

“So,” Percy started, quietly. “You were Erebus?”

Nico nodded against Percy’s neck. “Once.” He muttered into his pale neck. 

Erebus sighs, the sound of dust blowing on a graveyard’s wind, every shattered wound, every sharp slice of his psyche on display, before he tucks it back in the darkness. 

They leave before more than a month passes, monsters overwhelming and sending them off with a jeer at the demi-primordial. Percy admits to remembering being called Nyx, asks nico if Erebus knows anything. Nico confesses his love for them on accident, tries to escape, is trapped by Percy pinning him and kissing him. Percy and Thalia love him too, they say. Percy fell in love with him after watching him stand over them in protection, Thalia fell in love with him after watching him with Percy, and Percy and Thalia fell in love with a friendly spar. 

Nico wants Thalia to be Aether and Percy to be Nyx, the hope chokes him at night. He can’t prove it, though. They’re chased to Nyx’s castle by the other titan, finding a shadow crown that feels right on Percy just like the bone crown feels right on Nico. (“Erebus?” Percy muttered against his lips, peering into gray eyes with his dark, ocean blue. ( Brother-heart, holder of my love. How I’ve missed you could not be compressed into words, lovely.) 

“Nyx,” Nico’s eyelashes fluttered as he stroked the back of Percy’s neck, reaching and twisting himself into cold-black-endless like he’d always been there. ( Brother-heart, what a handsome shell you possess. I’ve missed you too, idiot. )

( Bonehead. ) ) Percy kills the other titan with a flick of his wrist, knife burying into its neck. snatching the titan’s spear out of the air and banishing the dust before it has a chance to regenerate. He passes the spear to Thalia ( It feels right, Percy shrugs, the shadow hiding behind his eyes laughing.) and rest in the Space-themed castle. Percy finds he doesn’t need to eat and that his skin is hardened; Nico explains similarly, as though it hasn’t been obvious in their fights. They spend a month in the castle, Percy growing stronger and sinking more into the innocently sarcastic thrill-seeker that was Nyx.

Thalia feels left out of the god-club, as all she dreams of is her worst fear. She runs off while they’re sleeping, feeling useless and powerless, accidentally finding Aether’s temple. She puts on the crown and sleeps, dreaming of Aether’s final moments, sending her to connect with her sibling-loves, seeking comfort. They come to her star-themed temple and sob in each others’ arms, happy just to be together. Finally when they awaken, they discuss their dreams, comfort Nico (who had to watch them die, watch them be torn, watch them fade into Tartarus,), comfort Aether (Zeus raped her, and they swear revenge.) and then find their way talking about the gods. Because thinking about it, Luke wasn’t wrong, but Kronos was. The gods really do not seem to care about their kids, and rules are not the half of it. They spend a year in her temple, she doesn't need to eat and the monsters avoid them for fear of angering the Primordials. 

They decide to visit Anti-Ares, and share stories and do chores. Anti Ares warns them when meeting them; someone killed Thanatos and now the doors of death are open. Nico/Erebus/Thanatos is offended  (Bitch i held that shit together with spite and the splintered bones of my lovers and you shit on it with your hubris.) but also relieved, because they can escape. They can leave. They’re afraid to; it’s been a year and no one has tried to rescue them. They feel abandoned. They stay, the three (Fortress, Castle, and Mausoleum,) combine into one giant building, (Their children have faded; cry about that for a bit.) and finally they find the Hermes altar and send a message.

We’re still alive

Tartarus holds us

Hope is best held at the Hearth

Nico, Percy, & Thalia

Prophecy (?):

Children of the three

Awaken and be free

Three crowns to claim

Monsters break

Thanatos’s chains

Olympus to break or remain

Detailed explanation; Nyx is the eldest, Aether the middle-child, and Erebus the youngest. In the way of gods, Incest existed between them. They killed Chaos the same way they killed Kronos; Chaos had an army, they disagreed, all three stabbed him through. They banished Chaos's corpse to the deepest depths (Secretly-Not-Yet-Tartarus) and everything was fine. Until the gods attacked because Zeus was jelly, cut them in half, and banished half to Tartarus and the other half to the human reincarnation cycle. Erebus loves his siblings with all the force of a youngest that doesn't have to worry about potential defects in their children if they have sex. Erebus's half that was not in the reincarnation cycle was bound to Hades and renamed Thanatos. Thanatos is not happy about any of this shit; his loves and reasons for living and being sane are gone. Well, thankfully, one of Gaia's minions stabs Thanatos through, releasing him with death to join the rest of him. Of course, the bit of not-quite-human soul in Nico and the not-quite-primordial that is Erebus/Thanatos have edges that don't exactly fit anymore. So Nico is Nico and Erebus is Erebus; separate. Same for the rest of them, except Nyx was drowned (and fears water) and Aether was raped before she was killed by Zeus. (scared of heights; her wings were ripped off and she fell to her death). Their powers are their own, though; Nico gets a boost, Percy gets a boost, and Thalia gets a boost, but none of them magically start sprouting wings or some shit. Time doesn't work right in Tartarus. Probably the remnants of Chaos being a massive shit. But Chaos is completely Dead, without any chance of revival, and Tartarus only has the bare pieces of Chaos.

Also; Nico Percy and Thalia have got some Trauma, due to their deaths and the realization that gods are Gods, not human. Read the one Princess of the Sea fanfiction to get part of the picture; most gods are embodiments of the ideas/people/places they represent. Lightning is an imbalance of Electrons; Zeus is imbalanced, ect. Also have trauma due to the fact that a; they think Annabeth is dead and b; they think the gods want them down in Tartarus, due to them being down there for about a year+ before they rescue themselves. Aboveground it's not quite a year, and when they escape they get to the roman camp ect ect, but its still some Trauma they have to work through. Will they still work with the gods afterwards? I have no idea, honestly. The plot bunny escaped from me the moment it was written. But I hope others have fun with it. 

Chapter Text

Sasuke didn't get any meaningful character development and I am mad.

Sasuke is an asshole, an absolute wreck of a human being who only makes sense if you consider that the Naruto Author (instead of raiding area 51 let's raid his house and replace all his food with plastic dinosaurs) was waffling back and forth about whether or not he would be a villain or not.

Does this sound familiar? If you've played world of Warcraft, let me put this in better words.

Think of an asshole. A guy who you remember being both villain and Ally. A guy who was part of a team, betrayed that team for both power and to kill the person he stole that power from. Fucking hell, they even both have the same Powerful Eyes ™

Can't think of anyone? Fuck you, ITS ILLIDAN STORMRAGE. Illidan STORMRAGE, the asshole who people really like but recognize that he's an asshole. This boy got character development - he's the same kind of entitled asshole who thought he should have everything (because of his eyes, wow the parallels ) and betrayed shit. You fucking fight his dumb ass as a boss in the Blasted Lands, and fight with him on the shores of the Legion!

This man is rotten, his choices disgusting, and I wouldn't agree with a breath he took. And I love him! His choices are understandable, his mistakes made up for, he died in the end of Legion and I fucking cried! He was caught by Xe'ra and my ass was cheering when he blew that bitch apart! He's a broken bitch of a man, and I love him to pieces .

Why couldn't Sasuke have had that kind of development? Kishimoto, watch your ass, cause we're coming for it (with plastic dinosaurs).

On a separate note, here's a sort of thing someone might base said character development on. It kind of grew away from me, sorry.

The eye of thy brother is eternal.

Sasuke fought the urge to dig and tear into his eye sockets, half in pragmatism and half in disgust. It would be a bitter revenge, almost no revenge really, and if he wanted to kill Itachi later he'd need every advantage.

But why kill him? The part that came with the influx of memory asked.

Because if I don't, he'll kill everything I love again. The parts that stayed answered truthfully.

And all for these damned eyes. Maybe the Nidaime was right; Uchiha are cursed.

Photographic memory and trauma! The parts of before , when Anna was still their name protested. There is a reason humans are not supposed to have perfect memories, most of them involving sanity , and the Uchiha eyeball side-step meant that most Uchiha don't . Imagine seeing every high-stakes battle, every stressful situation, in high definition with no degrading of memory.

Fuck, the parts of them that were Sasuke didn't have to imagine; he could still see every pool of blood made by Itachi's kunai.

That part of them flinched away from it, traumatic and awful, but Anna dug her heels in and studied every instance, grim.

It was horrible, wholesale murder, and Anna hated every second, but she comforted the parts of Sasuke with whispers.

This is how he fights. This is how he moves, how he sees things. Ideas flashed between them. Genjutsu, spaces where his guard was down where theirs wasn't. Slowly, the part of them that made up Sasuke turned to the images, and studied them .

He still flinched at every slash, but his eyes were grim and not scared as he studied the limits of their older brother's body. He focused on what he could do, what he could change, instead of what had been.

These people are dead. Anna murmured silently. You can't change that. You'll miss them; you'll mourn them. But to force the both of you to live through your life by killing their killer?

Sasuke flinched, sore. But it was the good sore, of stretching used muscles before a run. It burned, but faded, healed.

He will die. It is a certainty; all things die. Living- and she meant living , here, not surviving- is better.

Her memories rushed forth- " Wouldn't you like to wake up one morning, and feel nothing about him? To wake up one morning, and not care? You need to love someone, trust someone, to hate them. Forgiving them doesn't mean they don't owe you something for your pain; it is you, saying that nothing they could give is enough, and dropping it .

The wall built up between Sasuke and his emotions, the sobs he was trying so hard to bury beneath a smooth exterior, burst forth like a wave through a dam. Anna's own issues, for a single moment, sang between them, every scar and faded line on display, before she wrapped the faded bits of herself around the cracked whole that was them , and mourned.

Sasuke didn't blink when he woke up; just breathed, in that slow, calm manner that he remembered using in his last life. Below him, the metallic sound of heating and cooling systems rumbled through tiny vents, a fan gently waving through the air above him.

The air smelled stuffy and sterile, with a hint of some kind of chemical mixture he could only identify by scent and not by name. It was unfamiliar.

He still ached, emotionally, but it was a soft enough and familiar enough feeling he felt comfortable packing it away behind protective walls.

There was no shifting of cloth, no breathing to signal someone else's presence, so Sasuke blinked his eyes open and sat up slowly.

White was the first thing that caught his eye, followed by hospital and window.

The next thing he saw was the Hokage Mountain, which relaxed the nerves which were screaming about how the massacre would be a great cover for some other village to steal some Uchiha kids. He relaxed outwardly, gripping on his old life's familiar paranoia like a feral dog on a leash, and made a mental note to ask about funeral arrangements. And to see if he could identify and burn every single body, matching them to his memory of their deaths. It wouldn't do for some upstart to think the Uchiha bloodline was easy, would it?

Sasuke breathed quietly, and kept still. The bare scraps of Anna told of a quiet, almost electrical buzzing, humming instinct in the back of her mind that sang keep moving and never stop, stop means death . Anna, as his past life, had it, and Sasuke, as his current life, inherited it. He was used to it, even, comfortable with it where it was uncommon in his clan. It hummed in the back of his mind, constantly forcing him forward.

Here, in a blank, white hospital room, with nothing interesting and only the silence and something that was like a scent but came from nowhere in his mouth or noise that tasted like stillness and death, Sasuke tilted his head back and pulled a tune from Anna's hoarded playlist.

"Legend has it," The pitch was wrong, lower it and clear his throat a little.

"Legend has it that the moss grows on , the north side of the trees." His voice was smooth, deep and dark, and different than Anna's. Still, the song flowed well, and it was better than curling up and shaking because of the not-smell. His tongue stumbled over the English, but it was similar enough to one of the cyphers he'd made in the past that he managed to twist his tongue the same way Anna did, in that razor-quick tap to cheek that made her wit so quick.

"Legend has it when the rains come down , all the worms come up to breathe." He wiped his face on the sheets, scratching at it with his nails to get the crusted nasty off. Must've cried in his sleep; whatever. Crying is not a weakness, especially here in dubiously safe territory.

"Legend has it when the sun beams down, all the plants, they eat them with their leaves." His voice was quiet, not pitched high enough to carry, only high enough to distract himself. He expected to be seen to immediately, being that a massive amount of people died and he's the only survivor, and the fact that he wasn't itched under her skin and rustled his paranoia.

"Legend has it that the world spins round on an axis of 23°." There were other not-scents other than death in the hospital, something like wild-dog-fur mixed with ozone and ashtray . Something else smelled like tree and mint but without any identifier on the tree bit that said it was a pine or oak or ash. There was something like snake but also something just off of egg coming off of the medical equipment around him, and it sickened him something close to what the still/death/dying did.

"But have you heard the story of the rabbit and the moon," Sasuke curled his legs in a criss-cross position, unfamiliar to his body but familiar to his memory, and stretched forwards to curl the blankets closer to himself in a makeshift nest.

"Or the cow that hopped the planets while straddling a spoon," He tucked the pillow behind his head and curled sideways into the nest. The sunlight reached far enough to brush his legs, and so he shifted to catch the mass of it with his bare back.

"Or she who leapt up mountains, while whistling up a tune, And swapped her songs with swallows, while riding on a broom." He hummed, tucking his arms closer to his chest and curling more comfortably. It'd be better if he had something to cuddle, but he'd settle for himself.

"Well we can all learn things both many and a-few, From that old hunched woman who lived inside a shoe, Or the girl that sang all day and by night she ate tear soup." Under the blankets, with his eyes closed, the not-smells were lesser, and he was grateful for it. "Or, the man who drank too much and he got the brewers' droop."

"Come listen up all ye fair maids to how the moral goes, Nobody knew and nobody knows." How does genjutsu work? Does it affect the world I perceive or affect my perception of the world? Anna gave praise to god-killing abominations for fear their gaze would turn on her. Her memories and his eyes would go a long way.

"How the pobble was robbed of his twice five toes," She drew body horror and Eldritch monsters for fun, studied the veil between reality and dream, and was able to lucid dream at birth. Genjutsu would be fun . "Or how the dong came to own a luminous nose,"

"Or how the jumblies went to sea in a sieve that they rowed," She always had been unable to stay away from punching people face-to-face, though, which she seemed to pass on to him. Still. "And came to shore by the chankly bore, where the bong trees grow,"

"Where the jabberwocky's small green tentacles do flow," Imagining Itachi flinching away from the image of a massive tentacled beast made of something not quite liquid and not solid, with too many judgemental eyes and teeth and mouths, filled him with fondness. Punching people has its place; scaring the absolute shit out of them has its. "And the quangle wangle plays, in the rain and the snow."

"But have you heard the story of the rabbit in the moon or the cow who hopped the planets while straddling a spoon," His voice was stronger, not quite loud but enough that someone on the window could hear, if anyone was out the window. "Or she, who leapt up mountains, while whistling up a tune, And swapped her songs with swallows, while riding on a broom."

"Well we can all learn things both many and a-few," Sasuke flexed his fingers; a book would be nice, about now. "From that old hunched woman who lived inside a shoe, Or the girl that sang all day and by night she ate tear soup,"

"Or, the man who drank too much and got the brewers' droop." Sasuke's voice slipped sideways into drowsy, as he rubbed his cheek onto the pillow. He yawned, shifted, and drifted.

Even drifting, he was still awake enough that when the door slammed open, he moved .

The sheet went one way- towards the unknown- and he went the other, rolling off the bed, bracing his fall with his forearms and shuffling underneath. No weapons, but no need. His breathing was silent, as he flexed his chakra into wakefulness. Anna knew magic, knew chakra, like the back of her hand. She studied magic systems and what was chakra, than a magic system?

The unknown squeaked- female, past puberty,- and the not-smell of cherries went with her. Sasuke stayed silent, his breathing the same even if it felt like his blood was made of adrenaline.

"Sorry!" The same voice squeaked. "Didn't know you were awake, I'll just-" His sheets shuffled as she discarded them, and the door closed behind her. Sasuke breathed a sigh of relief internally, feeling a sort of flexing in his chest and a kind of sunshiney-yellow happiness that was coming from the edges of Anna. She was laughing.

He shuffled out from underneath the bed and rose on careful knees. Anna had low iron, which meant rising slowly was a must , and Sasuke had no idea how long he'd been in the hospital. Long enough to need to use the restroom, not long enough for them to hook up a catheter.

He glanced around- obviously, the cherry not-smelling nurse was going to get someone, probably someone important, and he didn't want to be in the bathroom when they came in the door. But he'd like to know where the bathroom is .

To the left from his bed, he found. Which matched up with the bare, vague memories of the hospital Anna volunteered at. Bathrooms are right next to the beds in the same room, if only so the nurses have somewhere to put the box piss. Some people can't control their bladders and end up in the hospital, which means less diaper and more plastic baby toilet . And plastic toilets can't flush.

Thus, box piss.

The door opened, this time less violently, and the Hokage walked in, along with a man with very spiky black hair and dark eyes, as well as a blonde haired blue eyed tall thin man. Sasuke felt a soft wave of discontent, but it passed.

( I used to have those features, Anna whispered quietly, almost silently.)

"Hokage-sama." Sasuke bowed formally, even as it felt like his skin was trying to phase through his other skin. He knew what they'd ask, and he'd been expecting it, but talking about the death of everyone he knew …

After they left, Sasuke allowed his teeth to clench and fists to ball up in rage. How dare they. How dare they imply his attitude dishonours his clan. How dare they imply that he's pretending, false, lying. And how dare they be right .

The Uchiha have always been deadpan, unfeeling to outsiders. Their emotions run so closely to their chakra that to appear anything but unfeeling in a world that eats the weak , is weakness . If Sasuke acted kind, or happy, or like the child he is , there would be discontent. Acting like the assholes who didn't fight back when they died meant little to him would… Sasuke didn't have the words, but it would be bad .

His decision tightened like a noose around him, the snarling, twisting dislike of both Anna and Sasuke tightening around his chest. Sasuke and Anna both valued freedom of choice above all else, and that Sasuke had to pretend to be something he wasn't to appease civilians rankled something fierce.

( I won't! Sasuke-that-was-Anna whimpered, snarled, whined.)

( I have to. Sasuke-that-is sighed.)

Sasuke met his angry red eyes in the mirror, bringing that hopeless rage to bear, and reached .

Mirrors are halfway places. Anna remembered, like shores, which is why Spirits appear there, and why people can fight spirits there .

Sasuke held an open hand to the mirror, knuckles curled on cold glass, and remembered.

He remembered long, straight, blonde hair, a short, squashy jawline, and ice blue eyes. He remembered freedom, remembered she, being she, and chakra pooled along his fingertips.

A hand in his own, Sasuke kept his eyes closed, Orpheus tingling across their link like a warning, and pulled .

Halfway out, a long, limber limb used to long swim laps helped him along, and the sweet tang of ocean-water-blood entered the air.

Her bare feet schlapped against the cool tile, and finally Sasuke opened his eyes, and met the icy blue of his past life.

Multiple Personality Disorder, She pointed out through the string that connected them, amused and curious.

We've done stranger things during a mental break, Sasuke pointed out, cool as a cucumber even as he flexed his mind to encircle the space where Anna's presence had faded. Calm, in control, and balanced.

Anna tilted her head, conceding Sasuke's point. They had done weirder things on the tail-end of a mental break. Actually physically separating the memories and feelings of a past life into a separate identity by using life-magic was impressive, but not the worst thing. Or most surprising.

We made an Eldritch monstrosity out of ourself, once . Sasuke reminded her when she went into deep, amused silence.

Anna conceded the point, again, and used her other hand to grip his. We can be free, this way. She reminded him, something giddy rising from her chest to burst out in mischievous fireworks.

Yes , Sasuke agreed. I'll be the depressed loner, and you …

Will be the bright, innocent civilian. Anna finished. Scholar, do you think? The question was innocent. Mischievously so.

Sasuke was reluctantly amused. Do what you want to do . He waved her off, settling back down on the bed as she drifted off, the not-smell of saltwater, metal, and honey following her as she shunshinned away.

Sasuke clicked his tongue as he stared up at the deserted Uchiha district.

"It's too empty." Where are the corpses? Can I get the empty space rented out? Fuck, I need to clean everything. Who was here before me?

He turned to the nearest chakra signature- that's what those smells are- and blinked at the stylized animal mask.

Fuck it, if all else fails, ask . "Have they all been properly buried?" He demanded. It was important; ghosts are no funny business, and with this much violent death they're almost a certainty . "Has the area been cleansed?" If not, rowan and red thread, and lots and lots of candles and eggshells. And sage.

The masked man whose distinct undertone was something between ozone and canine froze for a moment, before nodding to both questions.

Sasuke relaxed his shoulders, loosening his clenched fingers. "Thank you," slipped out of his mouth without thought, some ingrained instinct halfway between Anna and Sasuke reminding him that no one has to do anything they don't want to and that the masked man could have ignored him, or run.

The masked man inclined his head, stepping back and fading into visibly nothing, as though Sasuke couldn't track half the village based on how their chakra smelled .

He gave the masked man a sidelong, amused look, before walking back into the first house he saw.

It was completely bare. He studied the walls and their lack of brown splatter-paint, the floors and their lack of both corpses and furniture, and walked right back out.

He stared, unamused, at the masked man until he stepped back out of the shadows.

"Where's the furniture?" He asked, and caught the scroll tossed into his hands. Storage scroll. Right.

"Thank you," He walked back into the house and carefully drew chakra along the edges.

A massive black couch almost knocked him over the head.

He threw the scroll at the other masked person, who smelled more like tree and mint . He bared his teeth at the whole situation.

"Can you set up the furniture in the other houses, please." He stated levelly. "I'm hoping to rent these houses out to others." Like Orphans, or retired Shinobi, or whoever. Which he can't do when there's no furniture. And he can't exactly mess with massive, heavy shit such as furniture in his tiny, eight-year-old body.

He clenched his fists, wishing fiercely for the ability to set incorporeal ideas on fire .

In the edges of his vision, something moved .

His head flew towards the corner, where a tiny shadow smelling like blood and cold skittered. Creeping slowly with cupped palms, crouched, Sasuke relaxed.

"Cleansed, my ass." He was reluctantly amused. "You ate all the ghosts, didn't you?" He stood with the tiny grave-eater cradled in his arms, sucking on the tiny thread of chakra he forced through his fingers.

Tinier than Anna's experience with Grave-Eaters, which were massive, glutinous monstrosities gorging themselves on human misery and flesh, the little one had a mask shaped like the upper half of a deer skull carved out of wood, if the deer muse had three eyes on one side and one eye on the other, as well as long, sharp horns more suited to a Demon than a Grave-Eater spirit. She- she felt like a she- was shaped like a buff, healthy Wendigo (which Anna knew there were none ) with strong, muscled humanoid arms and short, sickly looking anthropomorphic rabbit legs.

Sasuke rubbed a finger against the short, dark fuzz, feeling the rough but healthy hairs. Anna had little experience with Grave-Eaters - hearing about them was enough- but enough to know the little one was young by less than a year, and very, very full.

Cradling the new little one in his arms, Sasuke sat on the couch and fed it some more of his Chakra.

"Yuni." He said softly to the tiny thing gnawing on his finger like a fangless snake. "Your name is Yuni." Which is important, because Names are important . Especially to things without true corporal form, like Yuni.

Sasuke sighed, setting the little one against his neck, in reach of one of his chakra vents for her to gnaw on. With Yuni- and her tiny claws, aw, adorable - carefully attached to his shoulder, Sasuke began going through his stretches. A mixture of Anna's yoga and his Mother's regime, Sasuke felt like his muscles had changed into Jell-O. But he could do a handstand, and his Mother's katas, and a little run, without collapsing in exhaustion.

With water breaks , he reminded himself, going into the kitchen and cupping his hands. Hydrate or die-drate. And then back to the grind.

Rubbing sore muscles, Sasuke sat on the couch and spread a scroll.

An hour of pretentious, prideful drivel, Sasuke had to stop and breathe.

The problem is , he theorized later to Anna, while looking over the books and scrolls of the Uchiha Library, that people don't want to know how these things work- just to know they do work, and to do them.

Mmm. Anna tilted her head in agreement. It's the difference between a cook and a chef.

Sasuke nodded, even as Anna explained. A cook has his recipes, but a chef knows his ingredients. It's just the matter of deciding whether or not you're a cook or a chef.

Sasuke thought about that. Being a cook in this context was just figuring out how to do Justus, and a lot of them. It would be quicker than learning all the intricacies of how the magic system of this world works, at least.

But he'd always be weaker than someone who knows chakra, knows jutsu, knows every little weakness and intricacy . Which just would not fly .

So, he peeled open the scroll again, and looked for patterns .

Anna smiled mockingly at him from her spot on the other side of the couch, before turning to her own scroll- something Fuinjutsu? Sealing? Something- and marking down notes in English in the notebook. She shrugged at his look.

"We have more blank notebooks than actual books , now." Her accent was barely there, but it was there. And weird. Was that like how he sounded speaking English? "Yes. Kind of." She waffled her palm back and forth in a so-so motion. "Now shush, I'm taking notes ."

"You're doodling; don't deny it." He went back to his paper anyways, petting his tiny little fluffy leech attached to his neck vent with its tiny little maw.

Anna snorted and turned a page. "With this? Same thing." She marked something down on the notebook and eyed his curious look. "It's not exactly Sealing for Beginners, but the little bits I do get are interesting."

Sasuke sent a burst of fond amusement down their link, and didn't speak.

"Apparently? It's not exactly like writing." She tapped the end of the brush in her hands against the scroll. "It's more like drawing, or story writing. Symbolism." Anna paused for a moment, before turning to Sasuke with a wide grin. "Symbolism." She repeated, as if he didn't hear it the first time.

Sasuke rolled his eyes and readjusted Yuni on his shoulder. She had stopped her mouthing at his chakra vents, and started to let out tiny snore-purrs.

"Yeah, yeah, you killjoy." Anna snorted and sent him an amused look. "Get back to your stretches." She ordered teasingly.

He sent her a look , but obediently set Yuni on the curve of her collarbone on his way back out the door. Yuni shifted on Anna's shoulder until she was comfortable, right over the sunshine smelling chakra vent. The prideful idiocy from his own clan was starting to give him a headache, anyways, and the only pattern he found seemed to be centered around the disturbing worship of their own eyes. Which; gross.

Useful, but gross.

He went through his stretches again, cycling information through his mind as he did. As much as it disgusted him- the eye of thy brother is eternal ,- no information is useless. And having confirmation that his eyes are pretty useful is… something. Definitely not a plus; it was pretty much only the awakening of his past life that let him keep his sanity from just seeing through those eyes once . Awakening them for himself… would definitely be something bad. Especially since they seemed to be tailored to individual Uchiha bloodlines within the clan, as well as the situation, disposition of the Uchiha in question, and sanity levels.

Considering the only thing that kept Anna away from a mental hospital was her very secretive friends, iron-clad public mask, and judicial use of self-therapy. Even then, sometimes she slipped. Creating an Eldritch Abomination is one example; revealing that the only thing that kept her from skinning her friends to be able to see the innards is the ties they had to her sanity in a sleep-deprived sick state is another.

Sasuke was even worse; be built his life around pleasing his brother, his brother who killed the rest of his clan. And then he had a mental break, gave himself Multiple Personality Disorder, and made a physical clone of his other personality so that he would have some social interaction. It was pretty much only pure spite and Anna that kept him from flinging himself so far off the edge he becomes the shadows on the other side.

Ergo; the Amaterasu/Tsukuyomi bloodline that had ruled over the Uchiha for decades was about as certain for Sasuke as whether or not a coin will land on its corners. It could happen, it's just unlikely as fuck unless it's done on purpose. Then again, most Uchiha aren't exactly sane to begin with.

Cooling down from his workout, Sasuke fought the urge to bare his teeth in a grin. He needed to save the effort for keeping his muscles steady, and the irony of there being another unknown on top of all of this bullshit was just priceless. Then again; Anna was used to unknowns. She knew the best way to keep the burning, hungering curiosity at bay, and it was thankfully one of the few things that survived the memory-sieve of reincarnation.

Can’t remember books, but can remember coping mechanisms. And if Sasuke was more grateful for that than Anna was, well, it was just another example of how Sasuke and Anna were separate. Anna wanted to remember the books she read, and used them as an indication of time. Sasuke cared more for the solid information than the intricacies, and knowing how to calm down and cover up the signs just before a meltdown was more important to him than trying to piece together the plotline of a book series that he didn't even read .

Breathing steady and slow, feeling the burn of oxygen starvation tingling along his body, Sasuke walked back inside the house he claimed as his own, and sat on the couch that tilted just off of center.

“I can feel your frustration from here.” Anna commented, one hand petting Yuni and the other curled around a brush. Her eyes stayed on her notebook open on the seat next to her, the book she was taking notes from splayed across her lap.

“Sharingan are unlocked by emotion.” He commented in a still voice, calm and sweet like the honey that lures flies to their deaths. “And we don’t fit in the framework.” That said, he buried his head back into the pillow and fought the urge to scream. Familiar was the burning, snarling thing that cried why can’t reality fall into a framework? Why can’t the world match up to how I expect?

“Because reality is more broad, and our information too small, to fit in any kind of frame we could build.” Anna commented offhand, merciless. “And, beyond that, too gray to fit in black and white.” She capped the brush and placed it in the center of her notebook, turning to face him eye-to-eye. “It’s an unknown; that’s fine. We know two things; that you can have the Sharingan, and that you will .” She was unimpressed. “Trauma comes like raindrops on those who chose to be soldiers .” She said the word in english, bitter on her tongue. She stood, and he felt her approach. “You will have the Sharingan. That we do not know which one is something we can cross when you get there.” She placed Yuni on his back, and drew a blanket over his shoulders.

“Nap. I’ll watch over you.” Anna offered, knowing how both physical and mental problems took a toll on energy. It was getting darker, anyways, and he had school in the morning.

Sasuke flapped a hand in thanks, something cool and thankful sliding through his mind that he didn’t touch, and sank into the abyss.

“Team Seven is Uchiha Sasuke, Uzumaki Naruto, and Sakura Haruno. Team Eight is…” Iruka continued, but Sasuke wasn’t listening. He was busy fighting the urge to bury his face into the desk in front of him. Or maybe just turn to Anna and ask her the preferred sealing method to fling himself into the sun, or relocate to the bottom of the sea.

Can’t, The ghostly mirage of Anna shrugged from where she was sitting on his desk. Too much math. And where coping mechanisms and songs survived the shift, math was of the few that only barely made it. And, despite being mostly symbolism in the right places, Seal-making involved a lot of math. As such, teleportation was beyond her, as was messing with time.

The Fan girl and the Idiot. Sasuke kept his face flat and mild, despite how much he wanted to physically combust. Either into rage or into pieces. Please let our teacher be worth it.

Staring into a masked face, Sasuke felt nothing but mild and calm on the outside. On the inside, Sasuke was mentally kicking cardboard boxes around the room in rage, only sheer spite keeping it off his face.

Anna was cackling so hard that all that left her mouth was little hiccups, face red and hands clutching her chest. If she actually had lungs she'd probably be having an asthma attack.

"My first impression of you is; I hate you." The single visible grey eye looked about as dead inside as Sasuke felt.

The feeling is mutual. Sasuke stared into that eye and willed the man behind it to see how much Sasuke would prefer to be literally anywhere else . Including the bottom of the ocean, the surface of the sun, and actual hell .

Asshole , Anna added gleefully. She thought Naruto's prank was funny . The guy who smelled like something between Canine and Lightning , Anna found even funnier.

Weird masked guy , Sasuke remembered, who watched me almost be sat on by a couch. Anna made a weird cackle-snort and wheezed so loud on the inhale that she made a noise that sounded like something a frog who had been smoking for twenty years would make while dying.

Weird guy met each of their individual eyes, before turning and staring into the middle distance like he was in The Office.

"Meet me on the rooftop in five minutes." Fwoosh . He vanished in a shunshin. Sasuke blinked at the space his teacher no longer occupied, and walked out before the two of them could drag him into one of their arguments. Maybe a mask would be a good idea, Sasuke thought, covering his mouth and nose until he reached the outside. Idiot smells like hot pepper asshole . Which meant incredibly cinnamon-y .

Squinting out at the sunny day, Sasuke ignored Anna’s breathless cackles and turned to walk up the wall. His hands in his sweatshirt pockets, Sasuke wished that he didn’t have to play the loyal loner, and instead could go back to his house and curl up with a book. And Yuni. And Anna. So far the only good thing he could say about his teacher is that he’s recognizable.

Asshole! Anna interjected happily, laughter fading into soft, content wheezes. Sasuke blinked, and pretended like his past-life-turned-alter hadn’t even breathed. Instead, he eyed the corner of the roof, weighed whether it would be better to just go home instead of doing any of this bullshit, and shrugged. His rough, calloused hands caught the corner, and he pulled the rest of himself up.

I have no idea what's going on here, the characters are writing themselves, I was going to have an OC replace Sakura but that didn't happen and now the OC is Sasuke's Sharingan powers, help.

Anna was supposed to be a cheery thing, all smiles and sunshine, but she grew self awareness even without the details of Naruto in her head. She also grew a psychology major, somehow, as well as emotional stability. where did this come from.

Sasuke was supposed to remember his past life in swatches, little things to use to kill his brother, not grow another personality out of the trauma. He was supposed to embrace his pride, but somehow managed to make a shadow clone based on pagan shit and beliefs and use it as a sounding board.

Anna managed to learn Seals, gods help us all.

And where did Yuni come from?!

The rest if my notes are as follows;

Are monsters born or created? I think both, because sometimes someone with a heart of gold is born into a world made of blood, ash, tears, where her autumn shine is tainted by the blood of men she had to kill to keep those few close. And sometimes someone with a silver heart wakes up in chains, and screams, because those few loved ones are gone, and as their silver heart turns black they realize that they care for no one, and will kill everyone to cover the hole in their heart left by those few loved ones’ departure.

I would curdle the ocean, bathe the world in radiation, death-knells, and the bones of Innocents if only to keep my loved ones safe.

Anna gets bear summons somehow. 

Chapter Text

I'll be the Phoenix (if you be the flame)

(Or- it's gotten to the point that corruption has reached the roots of Pro-Hero Japan. They control the media, the internet, and it's illegal to speak out against pro-heroes.

Sensei is dead- but that doesn't mean Shigaraki Tomura forgot what he fought for. Todoroki Touya sleeps, but Dabi, wearing his face, knows what his younger self would have wanted. 

In the ruins of his apartment, the man who just saw Endeavor kill his daughters grits his teeth as the bodies begin to reform and rise, the previously quirkless man cradling his newly-triggered wife to his chest as she absorbs into his skin.

Endeavor's sister watches with tears in her eyes as the echo of their father grows in his son, and something in her breaks.

This world needs a hero- but who will save them, with All-Might, the only negating influence on heroes, dead or missing?

One thing is for certain; nobody will save them. They'll have to save themselves.)

Or- what if All-Might and Sensei died? What if, in their first battle, they both perished? Were blown to dust? 

Or- (the villains and the heroes should work together, outline only) no one wanted but I decided to write.

Outline:

Japan lives in fear of her heroes, the normal people simply going through life watch them with a wary eye. Within the next twenty years this will change- either the heroes will get tired of the fear or the people will get tired of how heroes can get away with anything. But Izuku can't trust that, not when his mother comes home from her job with new burn scars every week, when she collapses on the couch because they can barely afford his room and had to sell her bed. He hates it, hates everything about it, and so when he tapes down his knuckles and zips up his black and gold All-Might hoodie, staring into a face covered in starburst scars, he knows he isn't doing the right thing. But what is the right thing when everything is wrong?

Dabi knows he shouldn't be doing this- he's a villain. But that doesn't make him a monster, and the part of him that still answers to Touya, who is used to coming into locked rooms to clean up his father's messes finds comfort in searching the smoke and ash. When he finds a father covering his two daughters under the rubble, he takes them to his apartment on instinct. He fights himself, of course, because what kind of villain is he if he rescues these people like he does? 

(When heroes make these wounded, when they go unquestioned into the darkness, shouldn't villains also change? When those you trust to watch your back stab you in it, you should trust those that stab your back to watch it. They can't kill you if you're already dead, after all.)

The father wakes up- his new name is Sidesnipe, and his new quirk is to shoot anything no matter the obstacles or turns the ammunition has to make to do so. His wife- and Dabi recognizes her, isn't that the Nomu that escaped?- introduces herself as Void, and the daughters introduce themselves as Shade (melt into shadows, skin-cloak made of what looked almost like obsidian dragonscale) and Shadowshield (can control cloak, cloak is now a hammerspace)

They agree to join the league of villains, almost happy to. Dabi can see why- if the heroes are like this, screaming "no casualties" with three skeletal Ash heaps behind the pictures, he would've joined their enemies in a heartbeat too.

(He can't say he's surprised, though, this is everything he always fought against. Even if he wished in the depths of his black heart that this wouldn't be the case.)

Harmony- harmony is her name now, she refuses to be related to that murderer- stumbles to her hands and knees through the debris, hurling with golden fire leaking through her fingertips. She's heard of this- quirks that "hide" until something suitable traumatic happens, 'triggering' them. But she's been quirkless her whole life, and the sudden burst of new information on top of new instincts right after watching Enji just vaporize those two girls, carbonizing them down to the bone , and everything is too overwhelming and harsh and she curls into a ball and silently sobs.

The girls are okay, and she follows their rescuer (something vaguely familiar about his features, but she shrugs it off.) all the way to the League of Villains' hideout, volunteering herself almost on the spot, the central block of herself holding together as she builds everything around this is not right.

(Sorry, Enji, I swore I'd never become a vigilante when my quirk came in and we were children. But then again, you swore never to become a villain , and here we are.

Harmony and Dabi meet, Harmony offers herself to the LoV as a healer- not able to do much, but knows first aid works as a doctor and can help clear scars, root out infection, and her instincts are impeccable.

Dabi asks for an example (sassy emo), and Harmony is angry enough that it unlocks something in her Sky Flames.

"You're hiding something. Something as important as a Name." Her eyes glint molten gold, as she squints at Dabi.

Shigaraki frowns, serious as he can be with a hand on his face. Being a villain was complicated. 

It used to be- not fun and games, but playing a video game villain was supposed to be something silly. Get the heroes to shape up, before Sensei could knock them all down.

But sensei died, and All-Might died, and everything had gone to shit. The government was corrupt, completely garbage letting heroes do anything they want, and it’s pretty ironic that the villains are about to be the real heroes.

Izuku doesn't care that Bakugou tells him to kill himself and get a quirk in his next life. He's got shit to do- his second showing as the vigilante Acedia approaches, and something crawls up his spine as he stares in the mirror. But it doesn't matter- he needs the money bounties give him to keep his mom afloat. The creep he's going after is small potatoes, so it won't matter.

When, at the police station, someone creeps up behind him and snaps his neck, and he has to watch from blank eyes as the hero who killed him gets both of their bounty money as the hero dumps his body in the back. He goes home, confused and a little cold, and his apartment he shares with his mother is gone- a pile of Ash and bones. He tugs something through his chest and green flames envelope his body, bones rising from the ash along with one he knows is his mother's.

He cracks- but knows what to do. He goes to Bakugou, despite their fight between each other he never thought Bakugou could deny him when Inko is dead. Bakugou sends Izuku away, though, and Izuku goes straight to Harmony's house calling her 'aunty' and crying, she's shocked and packing up to move (where?) And is surprised to see him but supports him and promises to take care of him, explaining about endeavor and the league of villains.

Izuku connects endeavor burning apartments to his mother's death and boom, this is his transition from hero straight to villain.

Toxic is his name now. Deku is dead, long live Toxic.

Dabi Harmony and Izuku, Izuku showing his immense memory and hero knowledge by handing over every bit of information he can remember of all heroes- Eraserhead to Present Mic. Dabi sighing because his dad ruined someone else, fuck here's more evidence to kill Endeavor! Harmony gritting her teeth and going to Kurogiri with a proposal- turn his bar into a Bar, she'll sing, they can disguise themselves as hero supporting bar owners, and the pros won't know because Sidesnipe and Harmony aren't 'official'  LoV members. Kurogiri says they can't man a bar alone and Harmony squints a bit, something in her tugging for her attention and she focuses and there's two of her suddenly.

In two separate bedrooms, two boys cry with bruises all over their body, burns on one's skin and knife slashes on the other. In the same instant, they swear that they will leave when the morning comes, but unlike the last times they've sworn to leave, this time the others have gone too far. With a kitten's limp body in Shinsou Hitoshi's backpack, and the burnt body of a puppy in Todoroki Shouto's, they set off into a dark world uncertain of purpose, but sure that anything would be better than staying.

Izuku finding them in a back alley of the bar together, inviting them inside into his room. They have running warm water here, he cheers, and he has extra clothes. Dabi ruffles Izuku's hair as he passes by, not seeing how Shouto's eyes blow wide. Shade grabs a juice box from Dabi's bar, not noticing Shinsou, but him noticing her. They know they're safe. ( The purple-haired girl, hands wide, blocking the bullies' view of him as he crouches over a cat.)

Shouto and Dabi interaction, Shouto's love of Izuku, Sidesnipe seeing his daughter's friend and swearing to protect him. The League's reactions to being essentially an underground rebellion network, Shouto being taught Dabi's fire. Shouto and Dabi are both gay reveal. To be fair; Harmony is gay, Kurogiri has no interest, Shiragaki is unknown but probably bi, and Sidesnipe lives with his wife in his skin.

Izuku's notebook: Shinsou, name Headlock, Shouto, name Skyfire, Izuku, name Toxic, and his sketches. After all, he is still going to be a hero, just a hero not employed by the government! His friends' reactions to his quirk, that being 'hey I have a dead thing can u reanimate it???' and Izuku going sure fam!!! No probs!!! And now Shinsou and Shouto have dog+cat palls :))!!

Harmony's drinks have a sort of empty effect, like the suggestive state of hypnotism, to her music. Dabi's drinks have a low-key calming effect. Kurogiri ponders upon the changes of his bar, and how they got here, while in the background Shigaraki Tomura plots and plans.

"I had a dream about a burning house," Harmony sang to the empty bar, eyes distant and lidded, the lights making her eyes shine like tears. "You were stuck inside, I couldn't get you out." Harmony with the kids, Dabi with the kids, Harmony and Dabi as friends. Harmony's reveal after the song.

There's a fire running through her body, the heat licking through her ribcage, curling into her skin like a lover. It twists from her ears like steam, white and slow. It dances on the back of her neck, circling her head like a crown, and it isn't passion or love or embarrassment but burns just as hot. It comes from her stomach to coil through her spine, circling each individual rib as it escapes into the air. It tucks itself against her lungs, sliding through her throat to exit through her mouth.

She runs cold, the tips of her fingers freezing even in warm weather, but the feeling of heat climbing through her bones makes her want to suck it all beneath her skin and burn from the inside out. To boil until her skin is red and steaming from the heat.

__

Toxic snarled, pressing his gloved hand to the bloody wound on his right eye as he brought the other up as though conducting a symphony.

"Because it's a beautiful day," He answered, green leaking through his fingers in a sickly flame. "The birds are singing, flowers are blooming," he flexed his left hand, a hazy apparition emitting from the skin. "On days like these, monsters like you…"

" Should be rotting in the ground ."

His hand slammed down, a wave of bones slammed up with a wave of green flame, blocking the heroes from his sight. He rolled his shoulders, before turning to Harmony.

Izuku's handle is AllRise on Discord