Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Raven makes a home for herself among another man’s bones.

He is dead. He breathes, and bleeds, but he is dead. He was dead from the moment he was born. He was dead from the moment they chose him. From the moment she chose him. His name is SUBJECT #267, but she calls him Mikhail. 

Together, they are a weapon. She is a creature from the beginning of the universe, and when she was born, Creation looked down and gave her teeth. Creation did not give her love, but she found that herself. She dug through soil and earth and blood, and she built herself out of soft clay and sharp iron around a core of blood. She gave herself a body, and she gave herself a purpose.

She is something incomprehensible. Before there was an empire and apple cores, there was her. The kingdoms of gods rose and fell, and she only watched. She waited. She was accompanied by Creation’s servants, but she was different from them, and they knew it. They were a whisper in the ears of madmen. She was made of stardust and smoke and clay, and she walked the world through shadows.

Occasionally, she ventured down. A soft smile and the glimmer of rubies. She danced with kings and farmers alike. She danced with people. When winter came, she brought hope. She brought food. They never asked where she came from, where the sustenance she brought was grown. They were smarter than that.

Once, she presented a gift to people of the ocean. She did not make it, of course- one of her peers, younger and not yet wise to Pandora’s curse, built it from sapphires and rock. She gave the people of the ocean a gift of survival, and watched as it tore them apart.

So she ran. She ran, and she hid. 

But when the cries of children reached her ears, she gave in. She followed the sound.

When she was born, Creation gave her teeth. When she died, they took away everything else.

They stripped away her heart. They took away her smile and hope and memories of dancing, and they fashioned her into a weapon, and they gave her a friend.

That was their first mistake.

His name was Mikhail, and he was scared. Barely old enough to hold a gun, let alone carry the future of a nation on his back. He was scared, and yet he gave her a home. He had a grandmother. A sister, thousands of years ago. That, she thought, was familiar.

She was his sword. She was nothing without him, not really. They ripped away her old purpose and gave her a new one, and it was to protect him. They gave her a mission, and she completed it.

When he died- properly, this time, she died with him.

She followed him through the depths of Hell, hiding. Waiting. Watching. He stood among gods and men, and he did what he had always been told to do. Mikhail fought. He stole a name, and he fought. In a land of death and blood and screams, he found a home, and he found love.

Her name was Ilektrikíkardiá, but she called herself Cookie. She wasn’t from the beginning of the universe, but she was still old. There was something there, in her smile. Electricity danced around her fingers, and rubies spun around her head. They danced, Cookie and Mikhail and her, even if they didn’t know she was there. She hid, folding herself into his cloak, wrapping herself around his bones, and waited.

You see, when a creature is bound to a person, it generally stays hidden. Waiting, yes, but hidden. If the life of the creature’s host is threatened, then the creature emerges. A weapon.

His life wasn’t exactly threatened, but the fear and adrenaline was the same, and she caught a flash of mud and barbed wire as she screamed.

Mikhail hid. He ran, and he hid in her head, in their cloak, in the shadows. She walked the fields of hell, a shield and a sword. A blade.

His sister found her. Of course she did. Her name from a thousand years ago was Sophrosyne, but she, too, had stolen a new name. She stood as Mikhail’s opposite, yin and yang, black and white, life and death. Eternally opposed. And yet, they were kin. And yet, she cared.

“Are you the creature inside Death?” She asks.

”YES.” She tells her, a thousand voices and one, dancing. She was something else, something more, and she stood in a small wooden room. 

”Oh.” Sophrosyne says, stilted. Her tail twitches, but she takes a deep breath and forges on. “What’s your name? It’s not very polite for me to call you ‘the creature.’”

She casts her memory back to sterilised halls and bloodied hands. “TEST-267 IS MY OFFICIAL NAME.”

“But what do you want to be called?” Mikhail’s sister presses.

“I NEVER REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT THAT.” She admits. It’s true. She has taken on many fake names and masks, cloaks of innocence and songs. She has been a poet, a peasant, a king, a god. She has been everything, and she has been nothing at all. But a name… she does not have that. A weapon does not need a name, after all. She built herself a body, and she built herself a heart, but she did not give herself a name.

Sophrosyne leans back, clearly putting effort into keeping her feathers smooth and un-puffed. It’s not working, but she’s trying. She hums thoughtfully.

A thought strikes her like a lightning bolt, and she tilts Mikhail’s head, staring at her with Mikhail’s eyes. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO GIVE ME A NAME?”

Mikhail’s sister takes a step back, wide-eyed, before nodding, schooling her expression into something more determined. There’s a softness to her that reminds her of tough winters, a kindness in her eyes so unlike anything in the laboratories where she died. “Do you want to be associated with Death?” Sophrosyne asks, using the name he stole.

“YES.” She answers firmly, immediately. He is all she has left in this world. She pokes him, questioningly, but he does not respond, retreating further into their cloak. He is still hiding.

“Let me think…” Sophrosyne looks up at the ceiling, tapping one claw against the table, before looking back at her.

“How about Raven?”

Chapter Text

“How do you do it?” Charlie asks. She’s staring at the ground despondently, her knees tucked under her chin. Long blonde hair hides her face like a curtain, and Life gives her a smile, reaching forwards and tucking it behind her ear. 

“Do what?” She asks, shifting to crouch beside her. They’re sitting on June’s bed, using it as a raft. The soft cyan duvet is comfortable, and Charlie sighs, leaning back to lie on it.

”Be all… positive all the time.” She stares up at the ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark stars she stuck there are still clinging on, but their light is dimmer now.

Life hums, moving one wing to sit neatly behind Charlie’s head, blocking out the sharp glow of the bedside lamp. “I don’t know,” she answers after a pause, head tilted thoughtfully. The light carves shadows into her face. “I just… do. There’s a silver lining to everything, you know?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie grumbles. “Some days I don’t think I know anything at all.”

She huffs a laugh. “Yeah, we all have days like that.” Life glances down at the sea beneath them and frowns, moving her tail to settle beside her legs. “Although,” she says thoughtfully, with a tinge of worry, “there’s been a lot of them recently.”

Charlie traces lines between the stars with her eyes, building constellations and casting them aside with a single thought. Power thrums beneath her skin, and she sighs. ”I just- I don’t get it.” 

“Don’t get what?” Life asks, confusion colouring her voice. That’s common, too. 

“Everything.” She gestures at the sky. “The magic. The gods. The sadness. That.” Charlie tilts her head towards the door, where they can hear the faint sound of screaming. The walls in the basement are thinner than concrete has any right to be.

“And this,” she continues, pointing below them. “The… goop.”

Life sighs, peering over the side of the bed. “The goop.” She agrees.

During their conversation, the bed had drifted to the other side of the room, bumping against a bookshelf. One of Life’s wings flies up, stopping the books from tumbling down onto their makeshift raft. “Yeah, not sure what we’re meant to do about that,” she admits. “Normally I’d snap it away, but…”

“Yeah.” Charlie agrees. The chasms beneath Life’s eyes speak for themselves. Whatever’s happening to June has taken its toll on his angels, too. And his room. She rolls over, staring into the goop. It’s the colour of the void, dark and seeping. It seeps into the carpet and it’s seeping into her head. She reaches out one hand, but stops, putting it beside her on the duvet. “D’you think it’ll go away?”

Life stops in her tracks, wing stilling where she’s left it, hovering in the air like a shield. They’re drifting away from the bookshelf now, and the books fall, sinking into the goop. Soberly, Charlie watches Godly Deals for Dummies disappear, swallowed by darkness. “The goop?” She asks, moving her wing down to fold against her back.

“Sure.” The strand of hair Life had tucked away came undone, and it falls over her face, tickling her nose. Charlie sneezes, pushing it away.

“I don’t know.” Life answers, leaning back, as if to rock on her heels. She’s sitting, of course, so that’s impossible, but the intention is still very much there. “I hope so. I’m sure it will. It’ll all go back to normal, soon.”

Charlie props her chin up on her hands, watching the goop. “Normal,” she scoffs. “Right. Yeah.”

Life sighs, and the bed squeaks as she lies down, flopping like a cat. Charlie keeps staring into the goop. It’s like if a liquid was solid- slimy. Hungry. June’s room has teeth, and so does the sea swallowing it. Maybe, she thinks, it’s still hungry. Maybe the room isn’t enough. Maybe it wants us.

“Normal isn’t exactly a thing, here,” Life tries. “It’s… changing. Chaotic.” Charlie catches her rueful look out of the corner of her eye. “I’m- I’m sorry you’re stuck here. I’m sorry that he…”

“Yeah.” Charlie says bitterly. She can still hear June’s screaming, ringing in her ears. “It’s not your fault. I know.”

“I wish I could do something.” The angel says forlornly, staring into fake glow-in-the-dark space. “I should be able to do something. I just… can’t. I’m sorry.” She clenches her fist around a handful of bedsheets.

”It’s fine.”

”It’s not, though,” Life says. “It’s really not.”

“Nothing we can do about it, though.” Charlie sits up, hair falling over her eyes, and she brushes it away with the back of her hand. The bed bumps into a floating table, and she grabs the lamp atop it, setting it next to her. 

“Doesn’t make it fine.” She argues, but relents. Life reaches out and grabs the lamp, hand glowing softly as the light dims. “I can’t get rid of the goop,” she says apologetically, “but I can do this.”

Charlie frowns at the lamp. “I thought electricity was Cookie’s thing?”

”Not an electric lamp. An old-fashioned one, apparently, with fire. I like them more.” June does too goes unsaid. Neither of them want to compare themselves to him. His bellowing still echoes in the room, the goop singing his anguish for the world to hear. 

She sighs, lying down next to Life, moving her foot away from the lamp. The glow-in-the-dark stars are glowing more now, without the extra light of the lamp. Charlie can see the Blu-Tack holding them up through the plastic, but it’s something. Nothing like the illusion of the sky in Life’s room, but… still. Something.

There’s mold on the roof, Charlie notes. Mold or goop, she can’t tell. They’re in the centre of the Earth, though. Mold probably doesn’t grow here- and, if it did, that would be a miracle and a half. They really needed a miracle right now.

“Oh, Life?”

”Yeah?”

”I think the goop is rising.”

“…what.”

Chapter Text

There was a monster at the door.

Mary stared at it, hand resting on the frame, skirt trailing on the floor. She clutched a basket of herbs to her chest, Daisy clinging to her leg. She looked up at the monster, with impossibly large eyes, and called it father. Her hand twitched. She knew better. 

The monster shimmered as it stalked into the house, like it always did. It gave Daisy a smile, and ruffled her hair with a clawed hand. What large teeth you have, grandmother, Mary thought, as she trailed the monster, one step behind.

She walked the halls as a lamb to the slaughter. The monster watched her from the walls, frozen in strokes of oil, and she lowered her head to the chopping block. She lingered in the house, basket still held tightly in her white-knuckled hands, watching as the monster took a seat by the fireplace. Its eyes were the same colour as Aster’s.

The difference was, the monster was very much alive. 

It smiled a smile with too many teeth, and asked her to fetch him a glass.

When Mary was a child, her pa had taken her out to an apple orchard. She had marvelled at the variety available, at the crispness of the fruit, at the sunset-dipped leaves coating the ground. Clinging to his hand, she had watched as he picked a shining apple from the very top branch, a vibrant red, and passed it to her. Delighted, she had raised it to her mouth, and taken a bite.

The apple was rotten. In surprise, she had dropped it to the ground, and it had landed in the lush grass with a thump. Her father had crouched down and taken it back, weighing it in his hands.

“That’s the problem with apples,” he had said mournfully, turning it around to show her the large bruise forming on the skin where it had hit the ground. “Most of the time, you simply cannot tell if they are rotten until you bite into them.”

She watched the monster warm itself by the fire, and found she agreed.

Hands linked, Mary attended service with the monster by her side. It sat, silent, as the pastor spoke. Cloaked in white, he gave her a soft smile as he passed, pausing and taking her hands. “May God be with you,” he told her.

Mary didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was not God who sat by her side. 

Reuben knew, too. He watched the monster and stood, alone, scared. Aster had known. If, she thought, I had listened to her, would she still be here? She had been ill, they said. Cursed, perhaps. The monster walked out of her room cradling her body in its hands, and Mary made a choice.

In fairy tales, the heroes won. They killed the monster, and they lived happily ever after with their families.

With bloodied hands and unseeing eyes, Mary knew that this story was different. The difference between a sword and poison and a leg of lamb was too great, anyways. 

They buried the monster behind its estate. Its bones rested beneath an apple tree. Hidden by a veil the colour of night, she allowed herself a small smile, taking Linaria’s hand. The halls were empty, now, walked only by ghosts. She counted herself among that number. Really, she was dead the moment the monster died. 

One night, when the silence was too loud, she pulled out a shovel and began to dig. The monster’s casket was empty. Sunlight baked her back. Mary looked up at the night sky, absent of any light, and buried a rotten apple core in her husband’s place.

Mary clothed herself in darkness. She felt like a shadow, most days. A husk of who she used to be. The general store clerk gave her a pitying look as he handed her a week’s supplies, and the people in the church gave her a wide berth, whispering behind her back. 

It was no surprise when they condemned her to death.

A witch, they said. Mercy and Betty, lying through their teeth in an attempt to save their own hides. She tampered with the river, they said. The magistrates doubted their accusations— a widow, in mourning, was an unlikely servant of the devil.

I did not serve Satan, she thought. I killed him.

She marched up to Gallow’s Hill, arm in arm with Martha and Ann and Alice and Mary Parker and Wilmott and Margaret and Samuel, eight firebrands of Hell. Lambs to the slaughter. The lambs, of course, were unaware of what was going to happen to them. But the accused were.

(I petition to your honours not for my own life, for I know I must die and my appointed time is set […] I would humbly beg of you that your honours would be pleased to examine these Affected Persons strictly and keep them apart some time…)

A lamb at the mercy of a butcher’s knife, she looked out at the crowd and saw her daughter’s eyes staring back at her through the face of a monster. 

Those eyes haunted her as she plunged into the water, weighed down by brick and bone. How many of her kin had met their ends at the hand of the monster, voices stolen by the waves? How many of her brothers and sisters and children? Drown, you are innocent. Live, and you are guilty. Her family was innocent, then. So was she. But, perhaps, the monster would make an exception. Bury her under a blanket of stones, proclaimed innocence outweighed by the words of a dead man. 

Surrounded by panicked catfish and wreathed in pickerelweed, she died.

And then she woke up

Chapter Text

Cookie sits in a tower. 

It’s a very nice tower, she’ll give him that. It stretches up towards the clouds, and at night, she can see Otherworld’s shining copper moon, large on the horizon and silhouetting the rest of Ironstrand. Are there people out there? She wonders. Eldritch? Do they know that we’re here? Do they care?

Cookie sits in a tower, and when she falls asleep, she dreams.

It’s a strange dream. It haunts her every time she closes her eyes, and it haunts her when she wakes up. It clings to her like strands of a spiderweb, sticky and unwelcoming. 

It’s a strange dream, and it’s consistent, which is perhaps the weirdest part about the whole affair. Yes, she’s had the same dream before. The nights leading up to Paruko’s disappearance, she had dreamt about being surrounded by a school of fish. For weeks after June died, she woke up with imaginary blood covering her hands.

Yes, she’s had the same dream before. But there’s always been a difference. The dreams of fish were flashes from the future, hindsight tells her. The blood on her hands was a memory. And they changed. The fish shifted between iridescent and silver, never the same, but always circling. June spat different insults at her every time, different words that would spin around and around and around her head. 

This dream is different.

It starts like this:

She’s falling.

Below her, is the void. Above her, is also the void. On her sides– well. You can probably guess. 

The void is disarmingly silent. There’s no wind. No breeze. She falls, alone, in a void of silence. Cotton-candy-lemonade sits on her tongue, fuzzy and sickly sweet. Bile rises in her throat.

She’s falling.

Cookie hides behind a tree and nocks a silver arrow.

The Ophiotaurus takes a bite out of a patch of bramble.

She levels the arrow at its neck. Power thrums beneath her skin, and guilt presses at the back of her skull. Guilt, yes, but not regret. There’s a difference, the dream reminds her.

The Ophiotaurus takes another bite out of the brambles.

My friend is dead, she thinks. She’s thought this before. In the dream, her thoughts run on a minecart through a haunted house. Scripted. Fake. The actors have done this before. The kids are terrified and the adults are bored. Everybody wants to go home. Fake blood drip drip drips onto the floor, and some underpaid teenager scrubs it away with a mop.

My friend is dead, but I’m going to fix it, she thinks.

The Ophiotaurus raises its head, and looks at her with gold-green-cyan eyes. It opens its mouth, and it says: are you sure?

She’s falling.

She splits a mango open with her hands.

Life blinks at her as juice spills over her fingers, coating them in gold. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry, I didn’t know you could do that.”

She shrugs, and raises the mango to her mouth. They sit in an oven in a house of pomegranate seeds. The witch waits at the door. They’re waiting to die. They’re falling. “Oh, wait- sorry, do you want some? Do you have any more?”

“No,” Life says, apologetically, and Cookie mouths the word alongside her. She looks down, Death’s cloak hiding her face. She closes her eyes for a second, Cookie knows. She steels herself the exact same way every night, and during the day, too. Her days and nights aren’t so different, after all. She’s falling either way. “Goat only threw one mango at me. Which, weird, but that’s Goat for you.”

Yeah, I know, she’s meant to say, but she doesn’t. Instead, she says: “are you scared?”

Life stiffens where she sits beside her. 

“Excuse me?” Life doesn’t say, because Life wouldn’t say that, even trapped in a tower under a copper moon. 

“I know who you are,” Cookie says, instead of sorry, I don’t know what came over me. “I’m not scared. Are you?”

She’s falling.

One day, when she was younger and the same age she is now, the love of her life walked into Hell and never came back.

This isn’t new. It’s an old story. He walked into Hell and never came back, and she moved on with her life, except she didn’t, and that was a lie. 

How many loves of my life can there be? She thinks, thought, dreamed, dreams. The answer is, apparently, a lot by human standards, and barely any by god standards. She was always toeing the line between the two, though, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Except it does matter, and that was a lie, too.

She stands at the entrance to Hell and breathes, just for a moment. Cotton-candy-lemonade sits in her throat. Power thrums under her skin. Grief sits in the back of her mind. 

“I know who you are. I’m not scared. And I,” she says, “am going to fix this.”

Hell looks at her with eyes the colour of mango juice, and Hell says: are you sure?

Cookie tilts her head.

”Yes.”

She sways at the edge of a thousand futures. A thousand happy futures, where there was only ever one love of her life and he came back, and the cotton-candy-lemonade was still sweet.

”Do better,” she says.

She stands before Judgement and makes her case, words practiced in the moment and practiced now. She was desperate, then. Now, she’s falling. Cookie eyes the mechanisms of the universe.

“Do better,” she says. 

She rules over a world slowly destroying itself. Her friends have come to save her, and they have come to kill her, and they cannot do both. Her kingdom is dying, and they offer her their hands.

”DO BETTER.”

She sits in a tower. Somewhere, a child is waiting. Somewhere, the love of her life is walking into the mouth of Hell. Somewhere, she’s someone else.

“DO! BETTER!”

She wakes up on the side of a mountain.

She pauses. Blinks. Her coat is bundled up around her, and the view is obscured by a swirling blizzard. There’s something warm in her hands, and something sticky covering her arms.

”This isn’t my memory,” she tells the sky.

“NO,” says the sky-Ophiotaurus-Hell. “IT’S MINE.”

She hits the ground.

Cookie wakes up.

I’m going to fix this, he thinks.

And he stands up, and walks out into a tower, and he ignores the mango juice staining his sleeves.

Chapter Text

She’s back.

It’s all Sergei can think about. She’s back. His mother’s back. She was gone, and now she’s back, and everything is going to be okay again. He clutches the plushie she gave him to his chest, glittering a bright green and gold, embroidered with far too many sequins for the average person. But she gave her to him. Mama gave her to him, and he is keeping her, and no he didn’t name her Koko, thank you for asking. It looks cooler, with Ks instead of Cs, he thinks.

He’s holding Koko to his chest, one floppy wing dangling down towards the floor, and the glow of the portal reflected in her bead eyes. It has to be a portal. It swirls like one, shining yellow and pink and blue. She told him fairytales, sometimes. The thing in front of him looks like it’s ripped straight from the pages of a book. It’s a portal, and there’s something on the other side. 

Sergei picks up on the voices first. Familiar and unfamiliar both, one louder and deeper, one softer. Home, the voices are saying. Home. Let’s go home. And then there’s shapes, one tall, with twisted antlers and wings, and one smaller, points of its crown reaching towards the sky.

His aunts step through first.

Life and Dove look the same, but he blinks, and suddenly they don’t. Threads of gold make their way through Aunt Life’s wings like spools of yarn, and Aunt Dove’s hold on her weapon (he’s not quite sure what it’s called, but it looks awesome) is tighter than it used to be, whenever she came to visit. The dark circles under Life’s eyes are darker, but the overjoyed smile she gives him is the same.

Behind him, Sergei feels Telos shift in surprise, and Goat shouts loudly, a noise that normally has him reaching to cover his ears. He’s frozen still, now, like the sculptures he sometimes makes.

There’s a pause, a moment where his soaring joy tilts, ready to dive, as nobody else comes through. And then, everyone does.

There’s an orange bird lady, and a floating blue guy, and a man in a blue coat with frazzled hair, and so many more people he can’t remember the names of, charging out of the portal. They rush past him, aiming for the dormitories, or the people waiting there, or the couch. Mostly the couch. They scream, and cheer, and crash into each other, and they’re back.

And there she is.

His Mama is different. He knows this instinctively, tracing the lines on her face with his eyes. Her glow is dimmer, her hair shorter, her sweater worn and falling apart. But she’s here. She’s here.

She stares at him, and drops to her knees, arms already spread out wide as Sergei crashes into her. He buries his head in her shoulder, tears soaking her clothes as he lets out a keening wail, joining the cacophony of noise. Mama’s grip around him tightens as Koko falls to the floor, forgotten in the wake of her return.

“I’m sorry,” she says, quiet and loud. “I’m sorry.”

Feathers brush his neck as Life joins the hug, wrapping her wings around them, forming a cocoon. Sergei can feel frost creeping over them, spreading out from his fingertips, and the chill creeps down his spine. It’s a familiar feeling.

There’s a shift, and Aunt Life’s wings are gone, and Mama is looking up at someone. He doesn’t move, face still buried in her sweater, red and orange creeping in at the edge of his eyelids.

Mama muttered something Sergei was definitely not meant to hear, and then she shifted, and her warmth was gone.

Cold crept up his arms as he turned, watching her rise to meet Telos’ eyes. She held herself differently, now. Confident. Weary. Sergei didn’t know what war did to people, not yet, but he knew she had changed. 

He tore his eyes away from her, scanning the room. Everyone was talking. Lightning and his creations stood in a corner, and Luchine and Maelys were circling each other. Their names came to mind easily, now, but the noise was drowning most other things out. It filled his head, crackling like static or fractured ice. 

Sergei took a step back, then another, eyes flicking to where Mama stood, staring at Telos. He could hear fragments of their conversation, the latter’s biting tone and his Mama’s resigned one. That, at least, was familiar— the exiled god had a penchant for starting arguments, and Mama had a habit of being on the receiving end.

He took another step back, gaze darting around the room. The noise grew louder, voices fighting with each other to overpower the others. His fingers were covered with frost, the ice slowly growing thicker. Something was rising in his throat, like phantom fingers choking him with fear.

He turns and shoots out of the room.

His feet pound on the floor as he tears down the hallway, swinging around the corner and coming to a stop in his room. Mama’s room. Blindly, he reaches for Koko, but she’s gone. He left her behind. He left her behind.

Sergei throws himself onto his bed, burrowing under the covers with a cry. Tears swell at the corner of his eyes, threatening to spill out, and he scrubs them away with a closed fist. He squeezes his eyes shut, pressure building in his throat. No. He’s not going to cry. Not now. He’s meant to be happy. Everything’s meant to be perfect. It’s meant to go back to normal. His family is home.

But it’s not perfect. It’s not. And he doesn’t know why.

Chapter Text

Nine had led Glitch along almost too easily. It’s funny how gullible he was, really. There was something aching inside him, searching for a friend in a strange world of graves, and a friendly kid in the exact same situation was exactly what he needed. All Nine had to do was offer him the knife, and Glitch would stab himself.

He didn’t feel guilty. Glitch was going to learn, one way or another. The world isn’t fair. You can’t trust everyone. Paige and Star needed to learn that, too. He dangled his ticket out of the hell they made in their faces, and they didn’t even try to get it back. They just stared.

The amulet safely around his neck, Nine walked through the streets and thought.

He had found a yellow raincoat, far too small for him but good enough for his needs. The hood was pulled over his head, hiding the damning evidence the spell had given him, and he had stuffed his tail into his pants. As long as nobody looked too closely, he would be fine. 

He didn’t feel guilty. He didn’t. He was never friends with any of them. He was using them. It was clear as day, to anyone with half a brain cell. Ohhhhh, Cookie, I’m so confused and innocent, please tell me all your security details! How did that even work? Seriously. He was barely trying. 

Nine weaved through the crowd with ease, searching. This wasn’t his home, that much was clear. The air was unfamiliar, the people different, the architecture… mostly the same, actually, but that was beside the point. Okay, he thought. What’s my plan? Try and warp over there? Get a plane or something? Are planes still a thing? Yeah, planes are still a thing. Three years. That’s not much. Barely anything’s changed. Well, lockdown’s over, I guess, but—

He slammed into a stranger.

The stranger looked at him as he stumbled back, blinking. “Oh shit, sorry.” 

“Watch where you’re going, mate!” They snapped, glaring at him. “Take those fucking AirPods out and keep your eyes on the street!” The stranger reached out, grabbing his hood and pulling it off, and Nine winced, excuses rising to lips. He felt one of his ears twitch, and internally cursed the stupid spell, why am I a LEMUR if I had to be an animal I could have at least been a cool one—

They gasped, before staring at him once again, too intently for his liking. “…you’re coming with me.” The stranger decided, seizing his arm and beginning to drag him towards an alleyway. Nine yelped, twisting as he tried to escape their vice-like grip, (probably) fake nails digging into his skin. 

What? He thought, slightly bemused, slightly terrified. Did I just get kidnapped? Again? “Hey- ow!”

The stranger dragged him past a door labeled Staff Only and down a flight of stairs, still latched into his arm. Nine let himself be dragged, confusion overpowering his fear. He blinked at the dingy room the stranger had shoved him into, and huffed a laugh. “Another basement? What is it with me getting kidnapped and shoved into basements?”

They gasped, letting go of him as the door slammed shut. “So you DO know about it!”

Nine stared at them as they walked away. “Wh- know about what? What is ‘it’? Who even are you? What is this place?”

The stranger pulled a cord above their head, turning a singular lightbulb on. It illuminated the room, revealing a massive floor-to-ceiling corkboard covering one wall, dotted with red string.

He kept staring.

“They’ve been calling us crazy.” They said, and Nine swore he could see the spit frothing in their mouth. “But you know about the anomaly, don’t you?”

“…ohhhhh, what the fuck.”

He didn’t feel guilty.

He didn’t. 

He had kept repeating that to himself, engraving the words into his brain. But god, it was hard to be happy right now. Gods. Whatever.

Nine’s back is to the two people he— well. The two people he turned his back on. He would call it poetic, if he was more of a sap and less pissed off. Chain dug into his skin, binding him to the gods he had tried to escape from. 

He stared at the sterile white floor, looking into his own eyes as he tuned back into Paige and Cookie’s argument. The entire room smelt of chlorine, and he wrinkled his nose.

“Maybe if I shock the cuffs?” Paige had been saying, shifting where she sat.

“You’re in them, too,” Cookie said dryly. “You can’t. Your power is cut off as well.”

“We can try.”

”Again, no powers. Nine’s the only one they didn’t bother putting in dampeners, for obvious reasons.”

“Okay, how can we use that to our advantage?”

”We can’t. Unless Nine has some superpowers he’s neglected to inform us of?”

“Nope. I don’t have any powers, du- Paige,” Nine muttered, still staring at the floor. He bit back the insult that rose to his lips, tail bristling where it was pressed up between himself and the goddess in question. 

“I’m trying to be resourceful,” Paige complained. There was a faint scratching sound as Cookie did… something, before letting out a sigh.

“Well, I can’t do shit, unless being in the basement gives you magical powers or whatever.” He grumbled, looking up and squinting at the wall. Bright, shining white. Of course. 

“No, not unless you make a deal with a deity,” Cookie said. “Which, unfortunately, means our best bet is to wait for the angels to realise we’ve been gone for too long.” 

Nine let out a strangled sigh, rolling his eyes on instinct. “Oh, yeah,” he deadpanned, trying to twist his head to glare at her. “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a deity here right now? Wow. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

“Neither of us have enough power for a deal,” Paige said ruefully. “Do we? Do we have enough power?”

Cookie shifted. “I’d totally make a deal with you, but my power has been dampened. I can’t do shit in terms of magic until I’m out of the cuffs.” Nine felt more than saw her look down. “…please can the Pantheon not forget about me please please please…”

Nine decidedly ignored that last part— seriously, this was the all-powerful leader of a bunch of magical people, this was just getting sad—, focusing on the first bit of Cookie’s statement. “Are deals also affected by that, though?” He asked. “The dampeners, I mean.”

“Yep.”

Paige muttered something in Greek.

“The dealmaking process generally involves a handshake thing where my hand gets all glowy and powerful and shit.” Cookie explained, moving as if to gesture in the air, stopped by the chains. She, too, muttered something in Greek, probably in response.

“Have you tried?” Nine wheedled, moving to stare at Paige. “Sure, it generally has a handshake, but does it have to?”

“Nine has a point,” Paige said, eyes suspiciously shiny. Nine squinted at her. Was she crying? Sure, they were trapped in a room with all possessions and powers taken away, about to be experimented on and probably killed, but he felt that was an overreaction. He ignored the tears slowly forming in the corners of his eyes.

He still couldn’t see her, but Nine could picture Cookie’s disbelieving look. “Why would we trust you with power?” She asked. “You’ve proven you’ll betray us for your own gain.”

Nine flinched, because she was right. He did, and he would do it again, he knows. He has no loyalty to the hell he was trapped in. He certainly has no loyalty towards Cookie. The Theorists betrayed him— and yeah, he totally should have seen that coming, something something karma—, and his family is probably gone, so who does he have left?

“You don’t have to trust me.” He tried. “But it might be the only way to get out of here.”

Cookie was screaming something at the agents outside, and they were screaming back, and their combined screams echoed in his ears as Paige looked up, not quite meeting his eyes, but not quite avoiding them, either.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Nine,” she said quietly, as if she was trying to build up courage. “I trust you, Nine.” Her voice was like the eye of a hurricane, soft and unsteady in the middle of a whirlwind of noise.

You shouldn’t, he thought. He didn’t feel guilty, because they needed to learn not to trust people blindly, but she hadn’t learnt anything. Nine had literally led her to her death, and she was offering him her hand.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” Nine said suddenly, regretting the words as soon as he said them.

Paige blinked, uncertainty abandoned in favour of puzzlement. “Why would I get hurt?” She asked. “I have no existing deals, there would be little strain.”

He shrugged as best he could, still tied up. “If you’re sure.”

“Cookie made deals much younger than I am,” Paige said. She was trying to convince herself more than him, he was sure.

Nine wriggled to the side, hiding himself behind Cookie, who was still bellowing insults at the agents. “Are you sure, Paige?”

She held out her hand. “Positive.” She said firmly.

He sighed.

”I’m ready.”