Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Welcome to the collection of universes that clawed their way out of my head and into the digital realm – or, in simpler terms, welcome to my multiverse. Even when I’m not actively working on fanfiction ideas, my brain has this horrible tendency to look at a new (or old) fandom, and say “Oh, I wonder what this world would look like if _____ happened?” And thus new stories are born.

Some of these ideas may be from years ago or may be something I came up with at the late hours of the night when I should've been either sleeping or doing homework, so be forewarned that these ideas may range anywhere from cracky or confusing to dark and disturbing or anywhere in-between.  Most of these ideas will probably be in the form of stand-alone one-shots or drabbles. However, if I like an idea enough to write multiple chapters, I may do so, and in the event of one idea having multiple chapters, I might also decide to post them as a separate story. Also, if you like a particular story idea and want to see more of it, let me know and I might try to write more of it for you. (The key word here being “might.” No guarantees.)

Now, with no further ado, let’s see what kinds of crazy worlds my brain cooks up when I’m not looking.

Chapter Text

Rain.

Rain was always a miserable thing.  It meant sopping clothes, mud, slipping and sliding and tugging boots out of sticky traps.  Sheltering beneath an awning or ragged umbrella or a damp coat, praying for whatever heavenly dam that’d broken to repair itself.

He gave a shiver, and drew closer to the tall figure beside him.  The downpour had yet to stop, filling the blurry cobblestone streets with shallow puddles, and trickling through the hole in his left sleeve, the one he hadn’t patched up yet.

Why were they here?  There was no need to keep walking like they always did, not in this weather.  They should just hole up in some hotel somewhere, or find shelter with the local carnival or circus, like they always did.  But instead, here they were, amongst a crowd of faceless strangers.

Can’t you at least tell me how much farther?

Not far. Don’t worry, we’ll be nice and dry soon.

We’d better!

A chuckle, a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of sympathetic reassurance, but the smile didn’t seem to reach his eyes.  He looked worried, just like he had for the past few days.

A clattering of wood, the sound of hooves.  The curtains of water suddenly parted before a giant dark shape that came hurtling towards them.  Heads reared, wheels skidded, something hit his back and sent him flying away, into the crowds of shadowy creatures on the side of the street.

Their heads turned towards him, like they always did when he was alone, staring at him, whispering.  He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he didn’t need to.  They always said the same things, anyway.

Mana?  

There was no reply.  The shadows came closer, gathering around him in a large ring.

Go away!  Where’s Mana?  Where is he?!

A faint sound from the street, more murmuring.  A large group of figures had gathered.  Through the forest of ghostly limbs and bodies, he caught a glimpse of a man sprawled on the ground.

A choked cry escaped from his lips, and he quickly surged forward, pushing through the crowd until he finally collapsed onto his knees next to the man.

Don’t cry. . .

Was he crying?  Or was it the rain?

A hand came up, touching his forehead in a familiarly comforting gesture.

Listen . . . find them.  Help them.  Don’t let the Order find you.  And . . .

A sharp pain where the fingers made contact.  The pain expanded quickly into a burning fire that engulfed his entire left eye, the entire left side of his face.

. . . I’m sorry.

In the shadows of an otherwise abandoned warehouse, a thin figure bolted upright with a gasp.  Heaving in great breaths of air, he sent silver eyes spinning across the towers of stacked crates, the piles of canvas, the dirtied windows that sported tiny droplets and long clean trails, courtesy of the rain.

The place was still utterly abandoned, apart from him.  There were no shadowy crowds, and no injured man sprawled on the ground.

The only sound was the rain.

Despite the overcast sky, the town was soon bustling with activity; the streets quickly filling with all manner of folk.  The rich strode purposely forward, heads held high, decorated with outrageous colors and clinking with every step, or rode in their elaborate carriages, looking down their noses at the rest of the masses.  The middle-class merchants and shop owners sported homely garb in duller colors, but still walked without a care in the world.  In contrast, the urchins and beggars hung in the shadows, cloaked in shabby rags, heads hanging low and hands outstretched.

Allen Walker shifted uncomfortably, trying to avoid the odd looks that the rest of the crowd, poor and noble alike, were throwing his way.  He knew that he stood out like a sore thumb - actually, more than a sore thumb - but were the stares really necessary?  He was fairly sure that odder folks had made appearances here.  After all, he was only a 15 year old child.

Admittedly, he was a child with ghostly white hair, a left eye covered in thick pads and bandages, ragged clothes, and sporting a pair of dirty gloves that looked far cleaner than the rest of him.  But still, you’d think some people had some decency not to stare.  Even the men and women walking along the road who had been bred to be polite and composed were gawping openly at him.

He was sorely tempted to snap at them, but that would do no good.  They might call the police on him, like they had in the last town, and he had no desire to repeat that.

He hunched his shoulders and slunk away, slipping from awning to awning with practiced ease.  Normally he would spare a moment to observe the crowds, see who could be trouble and who could serve a purpose later on, but he didn’t have the time or the motivation.

Besides, he needed to get out of town.  He’d run out of money a while back, barely holding on to enough to get him back on the railways again.  His usual sources of income had run dry as well - no sensible man would employ such a strange, frail-looking child, regardless of what job needed doing, and all the pubs and gambling houses had learned quickly that unless you wanted an angry mob rioting inside your establishment, you threw the kid out into the street and locked the doors behind him.

Or hired a guard, but no business would spare that much money just to keep out one child, no matter how troublesome he was.

Really, just how greedy were they?  All they’d have to do was drag some layabout from the street, shove some compensation in his hand, and he’d happily keep anybody away for as long as the compensation was present.  But people didn’t want to give up their hard-earned cash, even if they had extra.  Why not give the money to those who actually needed it?

Allen’s brooding was abruptly cut off by a shout and pounding footsteps.

“It’s the white-haired freak!”

He bolted, cursing his luck.  Of all the times they could’ve turned up --

“Quick, grab him!”

“Don’t let him get away!”

The boy quickly spun to his left, tearing down the street.  Behind him, the thugs’ voices grew louder and more violent as they shoved aside startled passerby in their hurry.  They were huge, hairy, scruffy, and not a little bit intimidating, with the fires of rage burning in their eyes.

He turned around another corner, dodged around another angry group that’d heard the commotion and decided to get in on the action, wove through several thick crowds of passersby, and darted into an alley, where a pile of old wooden crates provided some welcome shelter.  He ducked down and squeezed into an empty container.

He remained there for a long few moments, breathing heavily.  The clamour began to die down as several pairs of feet rushed past him, the shouts disappearing quickly as the men realized their quarry had disappeared.

“Where is he?!”

“Idiots!  You let him get away!”

“Who’re you calling an idiot, you bastard!”

“Stop squabbling and find the damn runt already!”

When the grumbles disappeared into the crowd and sound had more or less reverted to the normal urban buzz, Allen dragged himself from his hiding place and brushed off his coat and gloves.

That had gone better than he’d expected.  The men must’ve been half drunk, to miss such an obvious hiding spot.

Now was probably a good time to get the hell out of here, while they were busy stumbling over their own feet.

Unfortunately, it seemed God had some other ideas.

“Found ‘ya!”

A meaty fist connected with his face, sending him crashing into his former hiding spot.  The crate fell apart under the impact, sending splinters flying.

“Now,” the thug grinned, cracking his knuckles threateningly.  “You owe me some money, brat.  Cough it up!”

Allen shook his head, and the fist came around again, smashing into his gut and driving the breath from him.

“I said, cough it up!”

“I don’t have anything,” he lied.  “Besides, I won it from you fair and -”

A howl of rage and another sudden blow interrupted him.

“Don’t give me that shit!  You cheated!  There’s no other way you could’ve won!”

“I didn’t -”

“SHUT UP!!”

A few minutes later, he stumbled out of the alley, battered and bruised and stripped of what little cash he had left.  He’d hoped the man would forget to check his pockets, but no such luck.  Despite this, within a few minutes he’d managed to reach the train station, and, with a painfully slow running start, hauled himself up into an open car as it passed.

Panting heavily, body aching with every little movement, Allen attempted to relax.  He was relatively safe here, at least until it came time to unload the train, and unless there were other stowaways aboard he had yet to meet, he was alone.  There were no crowds, no accusing stares or whispers, and certainly no ill-humored gamblers to take off his head.

Which was just as well, because his left eye hurt.

Allen carefully worked the sticky materials off of his face, and ran his fingers over the raised scar that marred his face.  There were no new cuts or abrasions, as far as he could tell.  There was no blood, no broken bones beneath the flawed skin.  Apart from some painful swelling, his face was no more deformed now than it had been before.  Good.

He traced the inverted pentagram on his forehead, then quickly reapplied the bandages and leaned back.

What was he supposed to do now?  That had been the last of his money, and with these injuries he had even less hope of employment than before.  Oh, he could last a little while on gambling money, but he didn’t want to rely on it unless absolutely necessary.  After all, if Mana had taught him anything . . .

He shook his head and closed his eyes.  He couldn’t think about it now.  Keep walking forward, don’t dwell in the past.  Think about a way out of this.

He didn’t want to think.  He wanted sleep.  He’d spent half of the night waking up over and over again, thanks to the past that didn’t seem to leave him in peace.

. . . A little nap couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

He settled down amongst the cargo and closed his eyes.

His eye was throbbing.

Around him, the faceless strangers were muttering and crying in alarm, pulling away as the searing pain etched itself into his forehead.  Some lunged forward, reaching out with spindly, shadowy hands.  They grabbed his shoulders, his arms, and he wrenched away from them with a yell.

No!  Stay away!

Mana’s hand fell away from him, fingers tipped in red, and he struggled to blink away the thick trickles of liquid seeping into his vision.

Mana!

There was no answer.  The man’s eyes were closed, a smile on his face.

Wake up!

Another cold touch on his shoulder, and he whipped around, lashing out with a twisted arm.

No!  Stay away from us!

The crowd pulled back as one, frightened whispers rising from every head.  Then, as he watched, they began to disappear, one by one, until he was alone with Mana in the gray, dreary city, the horrible, miserable rain pouring even more heavily from the heavens.  Relieved, he turned around -

Mana was gone.  He had disappeared too.

No . . . no no no!

He looked around frantically, squinting into the shadows and the lights.  He had to be here somewhere, he had to be!  Mana wasn’t gone, he wasn’t!

Mana!

There was no reply.  Only the rain.

MANA!!

There was still no reply.  The city around him seemed to be melting, drips of gray slowly running down the walls, leaving strange puddles on the ground.

A choked sob.  Why . . . ?  Why was this happening?  Why him, why Mana?  What had they done to deserve this?  

WHY?!

A shout to the heavens, to that broken dam high above.

Why was he alone?  It wasn’t fair!

. . . nothing’s ever fair, boy . . .

A voice, not his.  Not a girl’s or a boy’s.  Just a voice, a presence.

Who’s there?!

A murmur, a cold feeling up and down his spine.

. . . all alone . . . ?

No!  I’m not alone!

. . . but you are . . . you are alone . . .

NO!  MANA’S HERE!!

Another whispering sound, behind him.  He turned quickly.  The city behind him was black and white now, the puddles shining, reflections of red ground and white sky and black moon hanging high above.  Candles of cold warm light, red with an icy edge, floated above the street.

. . . Mana’s not here anymore . . .

He is!  I just need to find him!

. . . no . . . he’s not here . . .

But he was, he couldn’t just disappear!  

. . . Mana’s dead . . .

No, he wasn’t!  Mana couldn’t die, he couldn’t!

. . . he’s dead . . . he’s long gone . . .

There was something dark at the other end of the monochrome street, drawing closer.  Closer . . .

Is Mana really . . . dead?  Is he . . . ?

He collapsed onto his knees, holding his throbbing eye in one hand.  Tears there too, dripping down, stinging.

N-no . . . h-he can’t be . . .

The darkness was right in front of him now.  Behind it, the floating candles glowed even brighter.

. . . you’re all alone now . . .

There was something in those shadows, something human-like.  Another faceless stranger, but different.  Shorter.  Flickering.

. . . you’re different . . . they call you a monster . . .

I’M NOT!!  I’M NOT A MONSTER!!

He sprang up, turned to run, to run away from the dreadful words but stopped.

A flickering hand clasped around his wrist.  Small, like his.  A twisted, monstrous hand.

. . . it’s okay . . . because I’m a monster too . . .

He turned around, and saw smi ling yellow eyes.

There was a screeching of brakes, and a sudden jarring as the train began to slow.

Allen bolted to his feet and was already jumping out of the car before he even realized he was moving.  He landed easily, and turned to watch as the engine up ahead put out less and less steam.  There was a station in the distance, faintly visible through the post-rain fog, and a small gathering of heads barely visible past the railing.

His knees were shaking.

His eyes were wet, too, still running.  He rubbed frantically at them, then buried his face in his elbow, to muffle the quiet sobs that threatened to emerge.

The pain was still there.  Even after he’d awoken, he could still feel that horrible misery, worse than anything he’d felt in the past five years.  Ever since that day, when that carriage had stolen everything he had.

Why did it hurt so much . . . ?  The dreams had never been that bad before, never . . . what was different now?  And why?

And that creature in the dream . . . that had never been there, either.  It was new, worryingly so.

He gave one last sniffle, and then quickly wiped the tears away and raised his head to look around.

He stood under a gray sky still, but gray with smoke and coal dust, not clouds.  From his new hilltop vantage-point, he could see multiple smokestacks spewing steam and dark smoke, and a deep hole in the ground, filled with laboring men with huge muscles and covered in dark dust.

Mines and factories . . . no good, he needed to be in better shape before he tried his hand there.

But there was a pub on the corner a little ways away.  And where there was a pub, there was bound to be gambling.

Allen groaned.  He was starting to rely more and more on his cheating skills lately, and considering the most recent repercussions, it was only bound to get him into trouble.

He turned and started down the street in the opposite direction.  If he was going to risk it, he’d go somewhere where the customers were less likely to be drunk and all-too-willing to beat him to a pulp.

Soon he was walking into some kind of residential area, with two-story buildings and tiled roofs.  The walls were shabby and often crumbling in places, with bits of brick missing, and the windows above sported shutters that hung from less than the optimal number of hinges.  There were a couple of shops, but none offering food, so what was the point?  

Still, he found himself scanning the windows regardless and admiring the goods displayed.  He may not be able to afford them, but he could dream.  

One window was full of bright little toys.  A set of wooden blocks, a rocking horse, a little jack-in-the-box sporting a gaudy little clown.  He smiled sadly at that, and started to turn away -

And froze.

There, standing just behind his own reflection, was a familiar dark, twisted, otherworldly figure.

Chapter Text

Dreams are s trange .

This, along with weird or illogical, is one of the only verbs that any one person will agree on accurately describing dreams. There is no real rhyme or reason to them – one moment one may be experiencing paradise, the next they’re running for their lives, far from help or home. One night one might dream up an entire story, with heroes and villains in a great wide world of their own creation, and the next see nothing but flashing colors, or a mish-mash of images that wouldn’t seem too amiss in a poorly edited TubeTube video.

Why dreams are like this is probably one of life’s greatest mysteries, and will probably never have a proper explanation besides the obvious “they’re dreams,” but though humanity may never be able to explain why they happen, many can agree that, sometimes, despite their inherently chaotic nature, a dream will come along that seems more coherent than others – so coherent, in fact, that it seems just as real as the real world...

 In a modest house resting in the hands of an enormous, multi-limbed stone statue, there was a soft whump as a small body flung itself onto a bed. The owner of said body – a young boy with a pudgy build, slightly tanned skin, and wildly curly dark hair – lay spread-eagle on his covers, staring gloomily up at the ceiling.

“Why can’t I do it?” He asked the ceiling panels. Thankfully, there was no answer save the clattering of dishes being put away in the little kitchen area below him. These noises did nothing to satisfy the boy, though, and with a groan of frustration, he sat upright, and pulled up the hem of his yellow pajamas.

On his belly, where one might usually have a belly button, a polished pink gemstone gleamed. That was all it did – gleamed. It didn’t sparkle or glow with some mystic energy, or whisper advice in a soft voice only he could hear, like he kind of wanted it to. It just sat there, reflecting light.

“I don’t get it!” With a frustrated groan, the boy let his shirt drop back down to cover the gem and flopped backwards to continue his one-sided conversation with the ceiling. “Why can’t I use my powers?”

Again, there was no answer, and again he groaned, flinging his hands up into the air. “I mean, c’mon! Mom could use her powers just fine, the Gems told me! She could summon some sort of shield thing that could protect a lot of people, and I have her Gem, right? So why can’t I do it too?!”

Then, a horrible thought occurred to him, and the boy’s next statement, instead of being almost a shout, came out as a doubtful whisper.

“What if… what if I don’t have her powers?”

Again, the ceiling did not answer, but the sounds below him had stopped.

“Steven, you should be sleeping!”

The boy – Steven – made another frustrated noise, his hands flopping back down onto the mattress.

Wood creaked softly as a set of feet, quiet and sure-footed, came up the steps to stop besides him.

“Is everything alright?”

Steven craned his neck up to look at his guardian. “No!” he cried. “I still can’t do any of that cool stuff Mom could do, Pearl!”

The Gem chuckled, a touch anxiously, and crouched down so she was closer to his level. “Oh Steven, don’t worry. You only began your training a couple months ago! I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”

He grunted in response, and with a sigh, Pearl reached out to ruffle his hair with one thin hand.

“I mean it,” she said, firmly. “You’re Rose’s son. I know you can do it. Now, get some sleep. You have more training in the morning!”

 Above him, the sky was blue and nearly cloudless, the sun barely peaking over the top of the Temple statue. Around him was the beach in front of his house. To his left, the Beach City boardwalk, crowded as usual, and the rest of the town itself. He could see the Big Donut, Fryman’s, the Pizzas’ place, and even a glimpse of Funland in the distance, roller coaster zipping along it’s tracks and trailing excited screams.

And in front of him, nearly ankle-deep in water, were the Gems.

Steven beamed, and rushed up to greet them. “Hey guys! What’re you doing? Are you doing super-secret Gem mission stuff?!”

“Nah.” Amethyst shrugged from her place on the ground, unbothered by the saltwater puddle around her. “Just training.”

She didn’t look like she was training, but the sand was scuffed and thrown all over the place, and both Garnet and Pearl had their cool gem weapons out and aimed at one another, so they definitely had been sparring.

“Really?! Can I train too?!”

The three of them exchanged glances.

“I dunno...”

“Please?” Steven begged. “I really want to train, too! I think I almost got Mom’s shield working!”

Amethyst sat up, eyes wide. Garnet and Pearl’s weapons disappeared in flashes of light, the former crossing her arms with a tiny smile on her face, and the latter clapping her hands together in glee, her eyes almost glowing in excitement.

“Really?” Pearl gushed. “Oh, show us, Steven! Please!”

“Yeah bro, go for it!”

Steven beamed delightedly – he’d never seen the three of them so happy before! – and he held out his hand in front of him and concentrated as hard as he could.

C’mon, shield!

A moment passed. Another. Nothing happened.

Steven frowned. “Uh, let me try again. I’ll get it this time!”

He concentrated again, thought as hard as he could until it felt like his forehead was bulging with the effort –

But again, nothing happened.

“Um,” he said.

The Gem’s smiles were slowly beginning to fade. And were those thin wispy clouds overhead starting to darken? They seemed a lot thicker than before, too, almost like rain clouds…

“It’s fine,” he reassured his guardians quickly, grinning even wider. “I’ll get it soon!”

After all, without the shield, they wouldn’t let him join them on missions! And they might need his help someday! He needed to be ready. He would be ready!

He tried again.

Nothing.

He tried again.

Nothing.

His smile was starting to fade now, and, squinting furiously, he tried again.

Nothing. Not even a glow. The Gem’s smiles were completely gone now, and they were just watching intensely, waiting for something, anything to happen.

Come on! Work! A ctivate! Do something!

Still no shield, and the beach around him had gone oddly quiet. The sound of the waves was muted, as if he was hearing it through thick fabric, and the air was completely still. Even the distant sounds of seagulls crying seemed to have disappeared.

It felt almost like that weird calm you sometimes got before a thunderstorm, like everything and everyone had just gone quiet waiting for the rain to come pouring down.

“I-I don’t get it,” Steven stammered. He flailed his hand around desperately, willing his Mom’s shield to appear in all it’s supposedly pink glory. “This is supposed to work! It’s…”

He looked up, and immediately regretted it. The Gems’ faces were one unified front of disappointment.

“H-hey, guys, wh-what’re those looks for? I mean, I can do it! It’s just taking a little while –”

“Steven. Stop.”

Garnet’s voice, while usually not very expressive, was downright emotionless. Steven froze, feeling little drops of sweat start dripping down his forehead.

“W-what?”

“I said stop. There’s no use in trying anymore.”

“B-but I’ve almost got it!”

“Oh, gimme a break!” Amethyst suddenly snarled. She threw her hands up into the air angrily. “What’s the point? You’re never going to get it right!”

The feathery clouds were growing really quickly now, getting darker and puffier, and scurrying across the sky, ominous rumbling echoing in their depths.

“W-what?”

“Let’s face it, Steven,” the purple Gem spat. “You’re never going to be able to use Rose’s shield!”

The boy took a step back, knees beginning to wobble. “Y-yes I am!”

“No,” Garnet said, with absolute certainty. “You are not.”

Pearl took a deep, shuddering breath. The little lights in her eyes were almost gone, but they were still there, weak and watery, and though she wasn’t smiling, she still looked terribly hopeful somehow.

“Just… let him try one more time,” she suggested shakily. “Maybe… maybe he’ll surprise us?”

Amethyst scoffed disbelievingly, and Garnet didn’t react at all for a few moments, but both of them nodded reluctantly, and turned back to the trembling boy.

Everything went silent. The muffled wave noises were gone, the rumbling thunder was gone, the boardwalk crowds were gone, every last little noise was gone. The air around them was darkening, shadows flickering across the sand, pouring out from underneath his feet, from underneath the Gems’ feet.

All he could feel was a horrible, choking fear.

What if I can’t?

It hasn’t worked yet. What if it doesn’t ever work?

Maybe I don’t even have Mom’s powers.

No, I have to! I have her gem!

He sucked in a shaky breath. The pitch black air that came rushing in was wintery cold.

I-I can do this!

He thrust out his arm and, praying on every single donut he’d ever eaten and every cartoon he’d ever watched and every song he’d ever played with his dad, he focused on his hand until his arm went blurry, and he willed the shield into existence.

For a moment, he thought he felt something – something warm, something comforting – rush into his arm, and a surge of excitement followed on it’s heels.

Something’s actually happening!

And then there was a horrible emptiness, cold rushing in to replace the warmth, and nothing happened.

The hope in Pearl’s eyes died.

“I-I…” Steven stuttered.

Amethyst’s snarl, which had softened for a moment, came back even wider and nastier.

“I-I c-can…”

And Garnet…

Garnet’s mouth turned down into a frown.

“I-I c-can s-still –”

“Stop. J-just… just stop.”

He did, turning wide-eyed to the last Gem.

She looked so… so sad.

“It’s no use.” Pearl said, eyes empty. “Why did we ever think you could do what she did? You’re nothing compared to her. Just a human… just like your father…”

“I-I – no! I have her gem! You said I can –”

Steven stopped, because that was when he noticed something wrong.

The two Gems whose eyes were uncovered… their eyes were glowing red.

“Steven,” they both said, and their voices were wrong too, all echoey and scary, and so was Garnet’s, as she joined in. “we’re very disappointed in you.”

Then the wrong wrong wrong voices twisted, merging together into one chilling howl, and three familiar figures disappeared into swirls of black smoke and flashing red eyes and wide glowing mouths full of sharp black teeth, and they loomed threateningly over him, huge and terrifying.

Steven screamed and ran.

No no no, what’s going on? They aren’t the Gems, what happened to the Gems?!

The howls grew louder, closer, and Steven risked a scared, wide-eyed glance over his shoulder only to see the three monsters come rushing after him, faster than he’d ever seen anything move in his life!

“No!” he shouted. “No, stay away from me! Garnet! Amethyst! Pearl!”

Something snatched at one of his ankles, and with another shriek, the boy stumbled over the obstacle, hands struggling frantically to keep him upright.

“Guys! Help!”

Several sharp somethings – claws? Fingers? Knife-fingers? – grabbed for his arm, and Steven wrenched away.

“HELP!!”

And then there was light. A white glow in the distance, growing bigger and brighter by the second. He beelined for it, and, just before one outstretched hand reached it, he heard the howls suddenly turn into pained screeching before falling silent, and a faint musical chord seemed to play, something bright and cheerful.

Then his foot caught on something, and he fell flat on his face.

“Oooowwwww,” Steven whined, rolling over onto his side and holding onto his aching sniffer with both hands. “Oh man, that was a bad landing…”

Then he realized that that was real ground underneath him, and with a gasp, he sprung to his feet.

The inky black nothingness was gone. Instead, he was standing on a pale stone path that looked like it hadn’t been weeded in a really, really long time, grass and small leafy bits sticking up out of every crack. The edges of the path stopped at the edges of actual lawns, short and dappled green and yellow, and in front of him, a stone wall decorated with some sort of tall metal fence and a huge gate stood. Both looked incredibly old, the wall cracked and growing vines, and the gate covered in moss. Behind the gate, the path continued on to a small plaza hidden partially behind several tall, droopy-looking trees.

Above him, the sky swirled with spirals of dark blue and purple, with no moon, stars, or Sun in sight.

Steven gawped for several long moments, eyes wide and his throbbing nose forgotten.

“Whoooaaa,” he breathed.

The sound came out a lot louder than he meant it to, and he jumped, whipping around quickly, just in case the noise had summoned those black smoke monsters right behind him.

Nope. There was nothing there. The path he was standing on continued behind him several feet, and then suddenly ended at the ragged edge of a cliff.

He relaxed. Good. Those monsters were scary, even scarier than some of the monsters he’d seen the Gems fight –

Wait. The Gems! Those things had been the Gems, and then…

“Garnet?!” He shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Amethyst?! Pearl?!”

No answer.

Where were they? Had something happened to them? Were they hurt?!

Well, there was only one way to find out – and that was to find them.

Putting on an uncharacteristically serious face, Steven started walking.

Steven didn’t walk far. The path to the plaza wasn’t very long, and it was there in the plaza that he stopped for a look around first.

But it didn’t look like there was much of anything there. There was the plaza he’d already seen through the trees, made of the same whitish stone as the path and with just as many plants growing up from between each stone, and at least three times as wide as his house. In the exact center, a huge fountain stood, decorated with carved dolphins, completely dry, and more than a little scummy-looking. A little ways behind the fountain, exactly opposite where he had stopped, two pairs of really fancy stairs, with complex carvings on the banisters and old red carpets on the steps, lead up the side of a small hill to some sort of platform, or maybe another plaza. And at the base of those stairs, right in-between both sets of them, there was a very small staircase leading up to a door. It was tall and arched at the top, like a church door, with shiny handles, and the frame around it was made of the same stone as the plaza and the stairs and covered with climbing vines. At the top of the frame, a tiny window of milky-white glass glowed, as if lit from behind by sunlight.

It might have been pretty – and it was, actually, very pretty, like one of those places the Gems had told him about on one of their missions – but something about it was still making him nervous, and it took him a few moments to realize what.

It was very, very quiet here. Steven was used to the soft-but-always-there hubbub of Beach City’s crowds, or the yelling of enthusiastic crowds at the Beach-Palooza, or the rush of waves and seagull cries on the beach in front of his house. There were almost no sounds here at all – no leaves rustling, no birds or crickets chirping, none of the sounds that nature documentaries had told him a forest should be full of. Just his footsteps.

Remembering the unsettling quiet that had begun to fall just before those black monsters had revealed themselves, Steven shuddered.

Maybe that meant he wasn’t safe yet. But it didn’t seem like there was anything here, so –

“Hoo! Why hello there, Visitor!”

Steven yelped and immediately whipped around pointing what he hoped was a threatening gesture at where he thought the voice had come from.

“W-who’s there?! Stay away! I have, uh,” He checked his hands to see what gesture they were making. “I have finger guns and I’m not afraid to use them!”

“There’s no need for that, young one! I mean you no harm!”

The leaves rustled, and a large brown feathery shape emerged from the leaves and fluttered down to land on the ground in front of him.

It was an owl. He’d seen owls before, on some of the old postcards that his dad had lying around from way back when he was a traveling rock star, so he knew at least somewhat what they looked like, and this was definitely an owl. A huge, fluffy owl nearly the same size as him with a round body and kinda stubby wings and big feathery eyebrow-looking tufts on it’s head, wearing a fancy-looking dark red coat and little glasses with blue lenses.

“And, admirable though it may be that you are taking the initiative to defend yourself, I doubt your finger guns would be of much use,” the bird added ruefully.

Steven gawped for a few moments, then his eyes lit up with stars.

“Wooooaaah, COOL!” The boy abandoned his useless finger guns and lunged forward to get a closer look. “You’re a talking owl! I didn’t know owls could talk! I thought that only happened in movies and books and cartoons and whenever Amethyst turned into an owl, but you don’t have her gem so you’re not her and you’re all big and fluffy –”

Then Steven remembered why he’d walked here and why he’d met the bird in the first place, and cut himself off with a gasp. How could he forget?! “Oh! Mr. Owl, have you seen anybody else here?! I think my friends are in trouble, there were these weird smoke monster things and they shape-shifted into my friends but they weren’t my real friends and they might be hurt and I need to find them a-and –”

The owl flared out his wings in a gesture that, despite being made using wings instead of hands, still managed to come across as calm down, calm down! “Hoo! I’m sure your friends are perfectly fine, my boy! What happens in a Visitor’s dreams cannot harm those in the Waking World!”

Steven stopped, blinking furiously at him. “The Waking World?”

With a sigh, the bird made another gesture, one that he recognized as sit down and listen, and Steven complied, sitting down shakily on the ground and looking at him with wide attentive eyes.

“Yes, Visitor. Welcome,” and the owl gestured at their surroundings with another sweep of his wings, “to the World of Dreams!”

 Mr. Owl (or Owl, as he insisted after the second time Steven called him that) was really, really good at lecturing.

Steven had gotten tons of lectures before, mostly from Pearl but sometimes from Garnet or his dad, and usually after he’d asked a question that needed a really long explanation or after he’d done something that worried them. His dad’s were usually short, simple, and to the point, Garnet’s too, though with her he sometimes needed to ask for clarification or more information, but Pearl’s were usually super long and complicated with tons of information, and she used such long words all the time that he usually had to sheepishly ask her to translate them for him before continuing, and that just made the lectures take forever, because she used those long words a lot.

Owl’s lecture, on the other hand, was somewhere between Pearl’s and his dad’s – mostly to the point, with simple words, but occasionally drifting off to other topics and information before getting himself back on track.

It was really interesting information, though.

When Owl finished speaking, Steven held up one hand and began ticking off the most important-seeming bits of info he’d heard on each finger.

“Soooo this place is the Night Dimension, which is a dream world that people visit while they’re asleep and where all dreams take place. There’s three different places you can go here – Nightopia, where the good dreams are, Nightmare, where the nightmares are, and here, the Dream Gate, which is kinda in between those two places? And you stay here and greet Visitors, who are the dreaming people, and help them get to Nightopia if you can?”

“Quite right, Visitor, well done!”

Steven beamed at the praise, then glanced around the plaza again.

Now that he knew what this place was, the Dream Gate didn’t seem so scary, even if it was still too quiet and too empty. But now that he was no longer worried about looking out for monsters, another thought occurred to him, and he frowned.

“So does that mean you live here by yourself?” He asked. “That must get really lonely…”

The bird blinked, apparently surprised by the question, then chuckled weakly. “Sometimes I wish I did… the things that rascal gets up to!”

He paused, then let out an embarrassed hoot. “I’m sorry, my boy. No, I do not live here alone. Even a solitary creature such as myself cannot do without some company! I have a … companion of sorts, who lives here as well, but they spend so much time exploring Nightopia that they are rarely present, and when they are, they drive me quite insane!” He huffed, feathers puffing up. “They’re childish and very immature. Why, the last time they visited, it was only because they had found a way to turn my feathers spotted. Pink spots, no less! The nerve of them! It took me far too long to remove them!”

Steven giggled, reaching up to pat the top of the bird’s head comfortingly. “Well, at least you don’t get bored!”

Owl visibly deflated. “Well yes, I suppose there is that to consider, but sometimes I would rather be bored than deal with their antics...” His beady eyes drifted sideways to glance in the direction of the other end of the Dream Gate, where the doorway from earlier stood. “Say, Visitor...”

“Call me Steven!”

“Hoo! Steven then. Normally I would wait until my companion returns, but my patience with them is worn rather thin at the moment. Should we perhaps attempt to enter Nightopia? The door does not always open for Visitors, but it cannot hurt to try.”

The boy considered this. Stay here, in this lonely place with a paint-swirly sky, or try to open a door leading to paradise?

Ha, this was an easy one! No-brainer!

“Yes! I wanna see Nightopia!” Springing to his feet, Steven made a beeline for the door, almost tripping over his own feet in his haste. “So what kind of paradise is it? Is it like a beach, or a jungle, or a big castle, or a land of donuts, or –”

Owl followed in his wake, wings fluttering frantically. “I’m afraid I don’t know, my boy. Nightopia changes for every Visitor, creating a new world based upon their hearts and whatever Ideya they may still possess.”

Steven placed his hands flat on the door’s surface, ready to push them open. “What are Ideya?”

A flash of light drew his eyes up to the window at the top of the door. The glass had changed colors, turning from milky white into the image of a black music note on a pink background, and there were little sparkles glinting in the air around it.

“Well I’ll be, you do still have one!” Owl sounded elated. “I wonder which…? The White Ideya, perhaps? Or the Red Ideya?”

Steven looked back at him and repeated his question. “Owl, what are Ideya? Are they super important or something?”

“Yes, yes, they are! Without Ideya, Nightopia would not exist, and a Visitor without Ideya is unable to enter Nightopia at all!” He darted forward to literally hover over Steven’s shoulder. “As for what they are… they are difficult to explain, I’m afraid. You rarely see Ideya, even if they are present, and when they do appear it is but briefly, in a flash of brilliant light… but now is hardly the time! I must admit, I’m rather curious as to what your Nightopia may look like! Shall we?”

Steven grinned, the smile so wide it might as well have split his face in two.

“Okay! Let’s go!”

He pushed open the door, and light and music filled the air.

Chapter Text

In the three years since he’d been instated as the Vongola Neo Primo, Tsuna had learned three very important things.

The first thing was that Hibari and Mukuro were never allowed to team up on missions, ever, unless Vongola was on the brink of being destroyed and there was literally no other choice. Especially not when the two of them were in the mood to cooperate. The last mission the two of them had cooperated on had left Tsuna’s office practically buried beneath mountains of paperwork (complete with damage costs, and he’d never thought he’d see so many zeros in anything to do with his money in his life before that moment), and the small team of unfortunate bystanders that had been sent with them had needed months of therapy.

The second very important thing was that it turned out that paying a ridiculous sum of money to have a team of experts systematically reinforce literally every inch of the Vongola mansion in Palermo, Sicily with layers of Lightning Flames had been the best idea he’d ever had in his life. The shockingly high fee had been completely worth it to just be able to sit back in his office, listen to the sound of violent chaos in the distance, and be secure in the knowledge that said chaos would not result in extensive damage that would need millions of euros out of the Family accounts to be repaired.

And, the third and most important thing of all, the thing that kept Tsuna awake at night, shuddering in his bed with all kinds of horrible possibilities rolling around in his skull, the thing he had nightmares about, was this: never, ever, if you value your life or sanity, let anyone get bored.

The Vongola Family (and their more legal company front, the Vongola Corporation) was filled with all kinds of people. Quiet and shy people, loud and bombastic people, people that got along like two peas in a pod, people that literally got on like a house on fire – the entire group was full to bursting of wildly different personalities of wildly different intensities. When even a small number of those wild personalities got bored… that was when disasters happened, and that was without adding Flames into the equation.

At the very top of the list of people to never ever let bored was, of course, Reborn. The currently six-year-old hitman was a purveyor of general mayhem on his good days, guilty of everything from switching the salt and sugar in the kitchens to stealing Housekeeping’s cleaning supplies and gleefully watching the various maids and servants running around like chickens with their heads cut off looking for them. On his bad days, Reborn was a fedora-wearing menace, all too quick to shoot at people that annoyed him, or to order Leon to eat important papers right before the meeting Tsuna needed them for, or, sometimes, to “disguise” himself with one of his various costumes and trail behind various people in the halls radiating killer intent until they finally blockaded themselves behind locked doors to sob in helpless terror until someone came to forcibly kick down the door.

But the days that Reborn was bored? Those were even worse because those days were when the hitman got creative. Or, even worse than Reborn alone being creative, that was when he tracked down Mukuro and the two of them got creative together, and that thought was enough to keep Tsuna awake until the wee hours of the morning shivering in abject terror.

The second entry on the list of people that must never be allowed to be bored was the entirety of the Allied Science Division.

The Allied Science Division had been an idea that Tsuna had suggested to Nonno a couple of years before his own appointment as the Boss. While the Vongola Family had many an ally, those allies were rarely called upon unless the Family was in dire straights – and, after years of having lessons being drilled into his head via Spartan teaching methods, Tsuna had realized that only being called on in times of strife was bound to put strain on inter-Family relationships.

Then, while listening to one of the Vongola’s resident scientists moaning over a cup of spiked coffee one morning about there being nobody here worth working with, why didn’t I join the Bovino Family, the idea had been sown. Why only limit the Vongola and their allies to their own resources, when it was a simple manner to call together the genius minds of the various Families to work together to create new advancements for everyone? Thus, the Allied Science Division (or ASD) had been born, and now it was possible for the best minds of any Allied family to work together under the same roof.

It had been a good idea. Tsuna knew it had been a good idea. Vongola technology (and the technology they gave to their allies as a result) was ahead of its competition by leaps and bounds now, and that had assured that, in the end, most of the Alliance had little to no problem with Tsuna by the time he took over as Boss. And while the Tsuna of five or six years ago would have still been loudly protesting and doing his damnedest to get out of being a mafia boss, the years between now and then had stripped him of most of his reluctance to run a Family (and on top of that, he wasn’t really a mafia boss anymore, anyway, not since he’d decided to start inching the Vongola out of the shadows and started turning it into the vigilante organization that Primo would have wanted it to be.)

Still, despite the ASD being a good idea on paper, it was a horrendous strain on his nerves in real life, because when the scientists got bored? Well, there were few things worse than a group of mad scientists, technological geniuses, and general nerdy intellectuals with access to Dying Will Flames getting bored, because when they got bored, their inventions became patently dangerous or just plain ridiculous.

Such as right now.

Tsuna, with his arms crossed and face forcibly frozen in his the Boss is very disappointed in you expression, stared at the group of sheepish scientists in front of him.

“So,” he said, almost conversationally, “exactly whose idea was this monstrosity.”

There was shuffling, muttering, petulant whines and excuses and blame being thrown everywhere, and then two figures were finally pushed in front of the crowd of children masquerading as grown adults.

Tsuna groaned as he saw the familiar heads of red and blonde hair. “Shōichi-kun, why? I’d expect something like this from Spanner, not you.”

Beside the redhead, Spanner started chewing on the sucker in his mouth, looking utterly unrepentant and maybe even a little smug. Shōichi’s shoulders hunched, almost bringing his ears level with the collar of his turtleneck.

“Um… in our defense, at least it wasn’t a robot this time?”

Tsuna eyed the technological monstrosity looming behind the group of scientists.

Well, Shōichiwas right – the device was definitely not a robot. There were no limbs, no speakers, no wheels or weapons or laser tracking systems. Instead, the machine was shaped like a large squashed donut, wide enough that the elliptical hole in the center could easily allow three decently tall and broad men to walk through it shoulder to shoulder. The thick frame was festooned with layer upon layer of complex-looking circuitry, and many of the wires flowed familiar shades of green, yellow, orange, indigo, and even hints of violet, the green and yellow darting along the circuits and wires, the indigo and violet confined to a thick ring of flat lights that curved around the entire circumference of the device’s interior, and the orange clinging to the other colors like glue. The entire thing stood upright in the center of one of the smaller rooms that could be shut off from the rest of the laboratory by thick blast doors, the entirety interior of which was reinforced with ridiculous amounts of Lightning flames – so much so, in fact, that the entire room was tinted green through the thick bulletproof windows. Tsuna had once been assured that a small nuclear warhead could be detonated in that room, and all anyone would notice was a faint tremor rocking through the building.

None of this filled Tsuna with confidence. No, all it made him feel was wary, because knowing the Science Division’s propensity for completely ignoring most safety protocols in the heat of the moment of creation, the reason this thing was in the room made to withstand a nuke was that it would probably explode like a nuke.

“Do I want to know what it is, if it isn’t a robot?” He asked, already bracing himself for answers ranging everywhere from body enhancer to cyborg factory to sentient super-computer.

Spanner bit down on his lollipop with a particularly loud crunch, and the Vongola mechanic’s smug expression became more pronounced.

“It’s an inter-dimensional gateway.” He said.

Tsuna gawked at them. Then he reached up and cleaned out one ear with a finger, not quite believing what he’d heard, because what. “I’m sorry, I could have sworn you said an inter-dimensional gateway?”

Shōichiwinced. “He did say that, Tsuna-kun.”

“And by inter-dimensional gateway, you mean...”

“A gateway that leads to another dimension,” Spanner helpfully drawled. “The Ten-Year-Bazooka just shunts you forward ten years in your own personal timeline. This bad-boy will shunt you into an entirely different universe.”

Tsuna kept staring at them incredulously.

“Why,” he said slowly, already dreading the answer, “did you decide it was a good idea to build a portal that leads to another universe?”

Spanner shrugged and uttered three dreaded words:

“We were bored.”

Tsuna groaned loudly, slapping his own forehead with his hand. “You were bored? You didn’t have any other projects that wouldn’t probably blow up in your face or maybe even summon some Lovecraftian god of the abyss that you could work on instead?”

“Hey, we left out the eldritch ritual stuff,” one of the other scientists said from his safe vantage point behind Spanner and Shōichi. “We know better than to push our luck with that!”

Somehow that didn’t make him feel better. At all. And he really just wanted to forget this had ever happened. Unfortunately, he was The Boss, which meant he had a job to do, and right now that job was to figure out exactly how deep a hole these scientists had dug for themselves to claw their way out of.

“Have you already tested it?” He sighed.

“Not yet,” Shōichi ventured nervously. “We were planning on sending someone through with a camera…?”

The Vongola Decimo eyed the probably-dangerous device again. “I should probably just destroy it before you can test it.”

Several scientists immediately lunged between him and their creation, using their bodies as a small crowd of meat shields and crying out in protest.

“Aww, come on, Tsuna,” Spanner wheedled. “Aren’t you curious to see if it works?”

“Not really,” he admitted, “I’m still kinda scared that it’ll summon an eldritch god somehow.”

“It won’t,” Spanner said confidently. “And if it works… well, aren’t you curious to see what kind of world is on the other side?”

The half-Italian hesitated.

On the one hand, he really should just destroy the gateway before they tested it. Just because they claimed no Lovecraftian gods would come crawling through it didn’t mean that one wouldn’t, and even if one didn’t there were all kinds of things that could go wrong. The person they sent through could end up stuck on the other side, they might die in the middle of the trip, or the portal could just plain explode. Honestly, the best case scenario would be that the portal just didn’t work, but considering the ridiculous things the ASD had pulled off before, that best case scenario wasn’t likely.

On the other hand… well, he would admit that he was morbidly curious, now that Spanner had posed his question. Assuming the machine worked, the explorer sent through survived, and the camera sent with them didn’t malfunction somehow, what kind of world could exist on the other side of that portal? A jungle civilization? A planet entirely covered with water? A futuristic society with floating cities and hovercrafts? Or maybe just a world similar to their own, an alternate version of their own Earth, complete with Flames and Mafias, but with a few distinct differences? The possibilities were endless!

… Maybe telling Spanner and Shōichi about his recent obsessive interest in science fiction hadn’t been a good idea. It made him far too easy for them to exploit.

“Alright,” he sighed, finally giving in. “Alright, you can test it. But the instant something starts going catastrophically wrong, you need to stop, okay?”

The scientists’ expressions all turned madly gleeful, and Tsuna quickly interrupted before they could get lost in the reverie of their success. “And you need to send someone through able to defend themselves! I don’t want to lose anybody because you all got overzealous!”

Spanner looked almost insufferably smug. “Way ahead of you, Boss.” He jerked a thumb at one enthusiastic-looking middle-aged man in the crowd without a scientist’s name tag and coat, wearing a bright red shirt with a little yellow symbol on the left breast pocket. “Vincent over there already volunteered to go through. Storm with secondary Sun Flames. Storm will burn away any contaminants he brings back with him, plus anything hostile he stumbles across, and Sun will let him run away fast and heal even faster.”

Tsuna took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay then,” he said, against his better judgment. “Let’s see if this, uh, gateway of yours works, before I change my mind…”

The scientists prepared for the voyage into the unknown in a flurry of motion, excitement setting them abuzz with hyperactive energy. Mechanics and engineers worked feverishly at workstations, performing system checks, flipping switches, and talking in long strings of complicated jargon that made Tsuna’s head ache trying to figure out what they were saying. Spanner and Shōichipoured over the camera that “Vincent” would be taking with him, a tiny, complicated little thing that would attach to one side of the man’s glasses, powered by a tiny battery full of concentrated Sun Flames. The lucky (or possibly unlucky) Storm in question was practically hopping up and down where he stood, obviously impatient and eagerly anticipating his (possibly one-way) trip.

It was this buzz of fevered excitement that a loud cry of “Tsuna-sama!” interrupted, and Tsuna almost winced as Gokudera came racing down the steps of the lab, taking the stairs two at a time in his rush to reach the bottom. The white-haired man then plowed bodily into him and nearly toppled him into an inactive robot nearby, and Tsuna flailed desperately, knowing that if the scientists saw him crash into someone’s hard work then they’d probably help the creator lynch him, and he really didn’t want to be lynched by an angry mob of very creative scientists thank you so very much!

When he miraculously managed to regain his balance, Tsuna gingerly reached up to pat his Right Hand’s shoulder in an awkward greeting, silently thanking any god listening for finally breaking Gokudera of the habit of calling him by his title rather than his name (even if he was stubbornly sticking to formal suffixes.) “Kon’nichiwa, Gokudera-kun. Um, could you get off of me, please?”

“Sorry, Tsuna-sama!” His friend yelped, leaping back like he’d been scorched. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful!”

“No no no, it’s fine, it’s fine!” Tsuna waved his hands frantically, trying to stall the incoming prostration and string of apologies. “What are you doing down here?”

Gokudera sniffed, still looking apologetic and maybe even a little hysterical. “You’re usually back after only a few minutes down here! I thought one of these idiota’s experiments blew you up!”

“Shame on you, Dame-Tsuna,” another familiar voice drawled from the stairwell. “A Boss shouldn’t make his Guardians worry about him.”

Tsuna let out a high-pitched yelp and spun around to find Reborn following Gokudera’s path down the stairs, albeit at a much more leisurely pace. The six-year old hitman’s eyes darted around the room, taking in the excited scientists with no little suspicion – suspicion seemingly mirrored by Leon from where the little chameleon was clinging to the brim of his fedora. Only a few of the scientists actually seemed to notice that the hitman-slash-advisor was there, those few people pausing to give him respectful nods before rushing off to join the others in finishing their preparations.

“S-sorry, Reborn!” Tsuna whimpered. He really hadn’t meant to make any of his Guardians worry!

Reborn rolled his eyes at him, but his lips definitely twitched up into a faint smile before he cast another pointed glance at the chaos around them. “You would have usually shut them down by now, not joined them.”

The statement was spoken more like a question, the small Sun unwilling to actually ask what was going on but curious all the same, and Tsuna flushed and reached up to scratch the back of his head.

“Sorry,” he repeated, shamefaced. “I guess I got caught up in all the excitement…” He glanced over at the window where the inter-dimensional gateway could just barely be seen through it, several people in rubber suits carefully checking over the circuits and flipping a few switches. “They haven’t actually tested this experiment yet, and it’s not something they specifically made to be harmful… so I figured it might be okay to let them test it first, so long as they’re careful?”

Gokudera eyed the window with deep suspicion. “… why is it in the bomb-proof testing room if it’s not supposed to damage anything?”

“Because it might blow up?” Tsuna offered weakly. “Also, that’s the only room available right now that’s airtight, apparently?”

“Why would they need it to be airtight?”

Before the young Boss could give his friend an answer, the sound of a microphone being flipped on and tapped cut through the hubbub around them, and several scientists began looking downright rabid from excitement.

“T-testing.” Shōichi’s voice echoed through the suddenly quiet laboratory, and Tsuna looked around quickly until he found his red-haired friend standing by the window into the testing chamber. “Alright everyone, everything’s ready to test the gate prototype. P-please move to the monitors, and Suns please s-stand by, just in case? We’ll be turning on the gateway in T-minus two minutes…”

There was a mad rush as every adult in the room raced to be the first to claim a seat at a monitor, and Shōichi pushed his way through the remaining loiterers to reach Tsuna and Tsuna’s Guardian and former tutor. The red-head was grinning, halfway between elated and anxious.

“S-Spanner’s doing some last-minute checks on the gate,” he said, flipping the switch on the small microphone clipped to his collar so that his voice was no longer broadcasting. “We’ve got a couple of small monitors we’re going to be watching, n-next to the door if you want to join us? O-oh, hello Gokudera-san, Reborn-san.” These last words were added nervously, Shōichi’s dark green eyes widening at the sight of the newcomers. “S-sorry, I didn’t see you two come in.”

Gokudera snorted, and Reborn raised an eyebrow, but other than that they didn’t react, and Shōichi looked relieved before beginning to babble at Tsuna again, this time more enthusiastically. “We’re sending Vincent in with two cameras, one that should theoretically broadcast live to our monitors and one that will record for normal viewing later, in case the first one doesn’t work. Assuming that the gate doesn’t short out either camera or there isn’t some other form of interference –”

Shōichi kept chattering energetically, for once not stumbling over his words or looking queasy in his excitement, as he lead them to the monitor that he mentioned. Tsuna struggled to keep up with his words – was that something about spacial and temporal disturbances? – nodding and making affirming noises at what seemed to be the right moments to keep his friend happy and talking. Shōichi only stopped when they reached the monitor and he finally registered Tsuna’s confused expression and the slightly irritated looks on the other two listener’s faces, and then he flushed in embarrassment.

“S-sorry… I’m just so excited! If this works this will probably be the most important scientific breakthrough of this century!”

“And this would be…” Reborn said, flatly, clearly unhappy about not being in the loop about what was going on. Tsuna winced at his borderline icy tone of voice, feeling a deep sympathy for Shōichi for being hit with the brunt of it.

The scientist winced, shrinking in on himself and apparently trying to hide his head inside his sweater.

“R-right, you guys don’t know what’s going on.” Shōichi summoned a weaker, more watery smile and gestured to the device on one of the monitors in front of them. “This device is an inter-dimensional gateway. If it works, then t-that means we’ve found a way to travel to other worlds outside our own. O-other universes!”

Reborn’s eyebrows shot up underneath his fedora, and Gokudera gaped at the red-head for a moment, before his eyes lit up like stars.

“Other universes,” the Storm breathed, almost reverentially. “Really?!”

Before the Storm could bombard Shōichi with the no doubt numerous questions he had, the blast door in front of them slid open with a hiss of pressurized air, and Spanner emerged with a grin.

“Vincent’s ready,” he said, giving his fellow scientist a thumbs-up. “He’s set up with an earpiece and an oxygen tank and mask in case any atmosphere on the other end is unbreathable. We got a cable set up too, in case there’s no gravity and we need to pull him back. We’re ready to go.”

The blast door slid shut behind him, and Tsuna leaned forward, watching the monitor in front of him with wide eyes. Inside the room, Vincent stood in a nondescript plain grey coat that covered up his shirt, and, save for the oxygen mask and tank, and the cable around his waist, he looked like your everyday, average pedestrian wandering the streets of Palermo. The man glanced up at the camera, probably guessing there was someone watching on the other end, gave it a thumbs-up in a near mirror image of Spanner’s own seconds before, clearly grinning like a loon behind his mask.

Shōichi grinned right back, though the man couldn’t see him, he reached up to flick on his microphone again. “Alright, everyone – we’re ready! L-let’s see if this thing works! T-turning on the gate in T-minus thirty… twenty-nine…”

Tsuna held his breath as Shōichi counted down, watching the screen without blinking, muscles tensed in preparation to react to anything that might come out of the portal. Beside him, Gokudera did the same as he did, only he was practically vibrating in his seat. Even Reborn seemed reluctantly interested in what was going on, dark orbs fixated on the screen as the seconds passed by one after another.

“… two… one!”

There was a faint click, and subtle whirring filled the sudden deathly quiet.

For a moment, it seemed as if nothing was happening, save for a few circuits on the gate lighting up. Tsuna suddenly felt illogically disappointed, shoulders sagging, and glanced sideways at Shōichi and Spanner, the former of which was biting his nails and the latter popping another sucker into his mouth with a frown.

Then – a note, high and pure and strangely eerie, the sound rippling gently through the air, followed by other notes in higher and lower pitches, a jumbled melody. And as the series of notes played, glowing shapes began to appear in the space between the gate’s frame. Sharp, geometric shapes, almost like shards of glass, that started off in an unnatural shade of white before deepening in color along the edges, indigo and violet and hints of orange seeping in. The shapes compressed inwards, rings of lighter color scrawling themselves across their surfaces in concentric rings as they fused together, and the centermost circle of color slowly changed shape, it’s interior hollowing out until, with one last eerie note, the gate finally stopped shifting.

The hollowed-out shape in the center now displayed a simple but recognizable letter – an “I.” Or, maybe, the Roman numeral for one.

“Alright, Vincent,” Spanner said, after a moment of breathless silence. “Whenever you’re ready. We’re with you all the way. And…” He paused, then glanced over at Tsuna, raising an eyebrow. Guessing easily what Spanner was silently asking him, the young Boss nodded, and Spanner nodded back. “One more thing.”

He held out his microphone to Tsuna, and the young boss leaned forward with a frown.

“Vincent,” he said, watching as the man on-screen stood to attention at the sound of his voice. “Come back alive. That’s my order to you as your Decimo.”

Vincent nodded once, then visibly took in a shuddering breath, and strode forward. One step. Two steps. Three. Four. And then he was gone, disappearing into the glowing surface of the gate with only the cable trailing behind him to show he had ever been there, and Spanner reached over to flick on the other monitor.

For a small eternity, all there was on the screen and in the speakers was static, but, after some fiddling with a dial on the side of the probably-customized monitor and some more fiddling with what seemed to be some cobbled-together remote with some of the same circuitry as the gateway, the static finally cleared.

“We have visual and audio,” Spanner announced, and there were some cheers from the rest of the scientists. Tsuna barely paid his words any attention, eyes fixed on the screen.

Vincent was on the ground but picking himself up with a grumble, one hand briefly coming into view to adjust his glasses. The man turned his head to take in his surroundings, revealing that he was standing in a narrow and downright filthy alleyway. The stonework of the otherwise bare walls was stained with years of grime, as was the ground when he looked down and took in some of the detritus he was standing on, the only clean-looking places being where several concentric rings and a roman numeral “I” had appeared centered underneath him. There were some grimy clothes and crates around the man, but other than the basic filth, the alley was more or less empty, without a single person in sight. There was, however, the distant sound of what sounded like a relatively crowded street nearby, the soft hubbub of voices and many, many pairs of feet walking on a hard surface.

The man let out a huff that the camera barely picked up on, then one hand came up to the side of his head, presumably to his earpiece. “Shōichi, Spanner, I’m in. Can you hear me?”

“We hear you loud and clear. What’s the atmosphere like over there?”

Vincent made a displeased sound. “God, there’s so much static, I can barely hear you.” Apparently, though, he’d managed to get the gist of what Spanner had asked because he pulled off his oxygen mask and took in a deep breath which quickly dissolved into noises of disgust.

“Oh my fucking god, my nose.”

“What’s wrong? Is the air there breathable?”

“I can breath, it’s just at the air here literally smells like shit. And soot. And urine, I think.” Vincent made another disgusted sound. “Did I get dumped into a slum or something?”

“You won’t be able to find out by standing there, idiota,” Gokudera broke in, practically snatching the microphone away from Shōichi in his impatience. Shōichi yanked it back with a yelp and a feeble, pleading look, before turning his attention back to the matter at hand.

“U-um, Gokudera-kun is right, unfortunately. H-How about you clip the oxygen tank to the cable, so we can pull it back through?”

Vincent did so with a grunt, and Spanner rose to his feet and opened the test chamber doors again, walking forward to grab the cable and drag the tank. It seemed to take surprisingly little effort on his part, and the tank on Vincent’s screen was pulled out of sight and disappeared in a brief flash of geometric-shaped lights.

“Still there, then,” the explorer muttered. “The gate turn invisible when it’s not being used? Handy.” He stood up straighter, cloth rustling as he presumably adjusted his jacket to cover his brightly-colored shirt a bit better, briefly scuffed his plain black shoes against the ground, and then straightened up and walked forward, following the sounds of people out of the alleyway.

He emerged, after several seconds, into a cobbled street that was only slightly less cramped and filthy than the alleyway. Cobble and wooden buildings loomed over him like dingy cliff faces, grimy windows covered in ragged cloth and shutters. The street was dark – no streetlamps to be seen – but somewhat crowded, dozens of people just as shabby and dirty as the street scurrying about at various speeds. Small, gaunt children in shabby clothes and filthy overcoats lingered at the corner of the street, some without shoes, most of them with callouses on their hands that suggested a lifetime of hard, grueling work. The adults were just as shabby as the children, curled up in corners or slinking along in the shadows or barely glimpsed working inside grubby glass windows – the men dressed in shabby shirts and pants, some with suspenders, some barely more than rags held together with string, and women in tattered dresses in equally bad shape.

Every person that Vincent passed on the street gave him suspicious looks as he walked by, from presumed urchins to an old woman stitching up holes in a pile of rags that was probably some sort of clothes. Even though the man’s black coat was close enough to the style of the overcoats around him, and his shoes were similar enough to the ones that the people around him were wearing to pass muster, it was very, very clear that the impoverished slum-goers (for this was clearly a slum) could tell he didn’t belong there.

Probably because of the glasses, and the camera attached to them, Tsuna tentatively concluded, noticing that most glances seemed to catch on the camera’s lens. So far, he hadn’t seen a single wire of technology around save for what had been pulled back through the gate. Was there even any technology at all in that world?

“Can you see if you can find a clue of where you are?” Shōichi asked.

Vincent looked around, obviously not willing to seemingly talk to thin air in the middle of a semi-crowded slum but scanning for clues nonetheless. He walked further down the street, noting landmarks under his breath so he knew where the gate was when he needed to return, and the street slowly began to get wider. He eventually passed by some signs – some sort of clothing store, though not a particularly sanitary-looking one – written in English, and some small carts covered in bits of cloth to shield what little goods they had from the elements. The people still lingering around seemed to be mostly talking in English as well, the words recognizable except for the occasional slang word that Tsuna didn’t understand.

A clattering of hooves and wheels sounded ahead, and Vincent side-stepped to one side as a cart was dragged past by a sickly-looking mule.

Carriages. Tsuna mused. This world definitely isn’t as advanced as ours is.

Finally, Vincent spotted some sort of stand and made a beeline for it, picking his way around the slowly dwindling crowds.

“Think this is somewhere in the UK,” the man muttered, so quietly the speakers barely picked up on his words. “People around here sure as hell sound British.”

He reached the stand and, after giving the suspicious salesman a polite nod, picked up a newspaper and paid the man several coins that he really had no business having (Tsuna could only assume that he’d picked someone’s pocket, and ignored the sour feeling that created in his gut.) Then he walked away, sequestering himself in a corner where he could keep an eye on the crowds as he brought the newspaper up for both him and the camera to see.

“The Sunday Times,” Reborn mused, and Tsuna almost jumped out of his seat with a yelp. He’d been so focused on the world on the other side of the screen that he’d almost forgotten his former tutor was there!

“K-know what that is?” He asked, meekly.

The hitman gave him an unimpressed look, the dark look in his eyes threatening that special kind of mayhem that only Reborn could create, and the young Boss flinched and muttered apologies. However, mercifully (or maybe just because he wanted to see Tsuna sweat, which honestly seemed more likely), Reborn apparently decided to postpone whatever punishment he was concocting to get back at his student for forgetting the Sun was there.

“The Sunday Times is a British newspaper, based in London,” he explained with deceptive pleasantness. “It’s a sister paper to The Times, and it’s been in circulation since 1821. Assuming the history in this other world is similar to hours, and using the context clues from the environment we’re seeing here, that means that we are currently seeing London in the early nineteenth century. Specifically,” he pointed at the screen, drawing Tsuna’s attention to the date on the newspaper, “in 1839. The universe we’re seeing right now is at least a century and a half behind ours.”

“Fascinating,” Shōichi breathed. “I-If our world is in the twenty-first century, but this other world is still living through the nineteenth, then does that mean that this other world is younger than ours? Or does time run more slowly there?”

“Sorry to interrupt, Irie sir,” Vincent muttered on the screen, “but I think you need to see this.”

The observers all glanced back at the screen to see the man tapping a finger next to one of the articles in the paper.

M ass Disappearances Continue: Police Still Unsuccessful in Finding Culprit

“People have been disappearing en masse for a couple years now, according to the paper,” Vincent murmured. “No murders, just people vanishing. They leave their possessions behind – clothes, food, books, everything – and sometimes entire families will vanish on the same night. People will hear screams sometimes, but by the time anyone gets there, there’s no evidence of a fight or a struggle. It’s like… they just stopped existing.”

Tsuna felt a chill run down his spine.

“I don’t think anything like that happened in London in our world,” Gokudera growled, eyes narrowing. “I think there were a few epidemics, but not disappearances. Right?” He looked at Reborn for confirmation and looked satisfied when the hitman nodded.

“Something unique to this world, then,” Spanner noted flatly. “If people are disappearing without any apparent reason, then what’s causing it?”

“Don’t know,” Vincent muttered callously, folding up the newspaper and stuffing it into a pocket, “and don’t care. Should I come back? We don’t know if there’s a time limit for how long the gate will stay open.”

“P-probably a good idea,” Shōichi agreed weakly. “We know the gate works, so we can always test that some later. Maybe work on those contact-lens cameras that Jenn suggested…? And send a small team through instead of one person…” He decided into thoughtful mutterings that Spanner quickly joined in, the two scientists already hashing out future plans for otherworldly exploration. Gokudera started piping up with suggestions as well, but Tsuna kept his eyes on the screen, watching as Vincent slowly walked back the way he’d come, sticking to the shadows to avoid the quickly dwindling crowds. A light drizzle was starting to fall, dusting the street with a thin layer of moisture and sending most people still lingering outside scurrying for shelter under shabby awnings and thin blankets. Within a few minutes, Vincent was one of the only people left on the street, and the wider cobblestone road had begun to compress back into the cramped side-street and alleyways he’d first arrived in.

Then, barely a few streets away from where the gate had appeared, Vincent paused stared down one of the many alleys leading off the street. Tsuna frowned, and then silently gestured for Shōichi to pass him his microphone, and the red-head did so, still busy talking technological details with the other two genii crowded in next to him.

“Vincent? Is something wrong?”

The man turned and slunk towards the alley mouth. “I thought I saw something. Out of the corner of my eye. Not sure what.”

He approached the dark opening, pausing at the threshold of street and back alley before continuing on, carefully placing one foot in front of the other so that his footsteps were utterly silent. Tsuna held his breath, watching the screen unblinkingly as the man moved, eyes peeled for any threats he might see through the camera lens.

At first, nothing seemed wrong. But, as Vincent rounded a corner, there was the distant sound of voices – one older, one younger, talking quietly, and for some reason, the younger of those two voices made Tsuna’s Hyper Intuition prickle insistently at the back of his skull.

“Vincent, be careful,” he hissed urgently. Spanner, Shōichi and Gokudera all paused in their enthusiastic conversation at his tone of voice, but Tsuna barely noticed, his attention focused solely on the screen as the explorer paused, nodded, and then slowed his pace to a crawl. When the man came to a corner, beyond which the voices were still speaking, he stopped, and slowly leaned forward to peek around the bend.

Two figures loitered in the alley beyond his vantage point. One, an older woman with a hunched back, was crouching down to talk to the second, a tiny girl in ratty clothes with greasy shoulder-length hair in a pair of braids and the dullest brown eyes that Tsuna had ever seen on anything that wasn’t a cadaver. The elder seemed concerned, speaking to the little girl gently and holding out a hand as if to help her to her feet, but, for whatever reason, the child was unresponsive, just staring blankly at her.

“There’s something wrong with that girl,” Gokudera muttered by Tsuna’s shoulder. “With her eyes.”

Tsuna nodded wordlessly. The girl’s stare was just… wrong somehow. Unnaturally blank and emotionless, as if she just didn’t know how to emote.

And then the incessant prickling of his Intuition suddenly twisted into a blaring siren, and he jolted in his seat.

“Vincent,” he said, even more urgently than before, “Vincent, you need to get out of there, right now.”

Vincent jolted in surprise, but before he could do more than that, the little girl finally, finally moved. Her head tilted ever-so-slowly to one side, eyes fixed on the old woman in front of her – and then she exploded.

Exploded was really the only word Tsuna felt comfortable with using for what he was seeing, even if it technically wasn’t correct. He lived in the same house as Smoking Bomb Hayato, for Kami’s sake, he knew exactly what explosions looked like. But… perhaps the same way to describe what was going on was that it was like something inside the little girl had exploded, and the shockwaves were making her body expand and contort and twist, inflating and just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Her face twisted, stretching at the edges as dull grey metal emerged from her skin and it’s hue changing into a deathly pallor. Black cylinders pierced through the metal, and then the remaining skin peeled away, revealing a bloated, simultaneously organic and inorganic-looking shape made entirely of an unknown alloy, and the skin simply flopped down to hang beneath the monstrosity like the string of some horrifying balloon.

The monster – because there was no way that thing had been an actual little girl, there was just no way – creaked ominously, and one of the black cylinders swiveled to point itself at the old woman.

Then there was a boom, and a cloud of dust flew up around it and the old woman. Vincent cursed colorfully, ducking back around the corner to avoid the worst of any debris that might fly his way.

When the dust cleared, the man slowly leaned back around the corner again (displaying an excellent example of the non-existent self-preservation instincts also possessed by the entire Allied Science Division), and Tsuna actually felt like cursing, because there was what was clearly an enormous bullet lodged in the old woman’s stomach, blood slowly beginning to leak out from around it to drip on the ground. The woman was shaking violently, eyes wide in shock, black pentacle markings slowly crawling up her face from her neck in quick succession of one another.

Then the old woman was suddenly nothing but dust, a cloud of it floating gently to the ground and flying up from her empty clothes, and the monster turned towards a frozen Vincent.

“Vincent!” Tsuna yelled. “Vincent, get out of there, now!”

Vincent cursed, finally snapping out of the shocked stupor he’d apparently fallen into, and bolted. He raced back the way he’d come, barely dodging another cannon-ball sized bullet as it exploded against the wall less than a meter away from his head. The thing exploded into purple mist, and Vincent lunged forward with increased desperation, breaking free of the alley to burst out onto the street, turning quickly towards the alley hosting the gate. There was an ominous screeching of moving metal behind him, and Tsuna surged to his feet, blood rushing from his face as his Intuition screamed at him.

“It’s going to follow him through the gate!” He breathed. “Spanner, open the door, I need to get in there now!”

“Are you kidding?!” A random scientist said, appearing in a rush of white lab coat at his shoulder from elsewhere in the laboratory. “That thing turned that old lady to dust! We can’t let our Decimo face that thing head on!”

“It’s coming through the gate!” Tsuna roared. “If I don’t go in there, that thing’s going to follow him into the laboratory and then we might all be dead!”

“Gokudera, restrain your Boss.”

Tsuna yelped as his Right Hand suddenly threw his arms around his torso, bodily lifting the small Japanese man into the air. “Gokudera, let me go!”

Movement and Tsuna looked down with wild, glowing eyes to find Reborn rising from his seat, Leon scrambling down the hitman’s arm and shifting into a familiar bright green pistol in his grip.

“Calm down, Dame-Tsuna,” the Sun said coldly. “The Vongola can’t afford to lose its Decimo.”

“But -!”

His tutor shut him up with a glare. “You’re not expendable, Tsunayoshi. However,” he pointedly cocked his pistol, “you have someone you can order to take care of that creature for you.”

Tsuna hesitated, and heard, on the other side of the blast door, the sound of someone tumbling to the floor, and Vincent’s voice yelling.

“Go!” He yelped, immediately and without thinking. Reborn tipped his hat and then darted through the opening blast door, bright yellow energy already collecting at the tip of the barrel of the Leon-gun.

An ominous creaking of metal filled the air, and Tsuna’s eyes darted back to the first screen. He watched in rising panic as the horrible metal thing slowly began to emerge from the gate. First black metal cylinders (cannons he thought hysterically), then a bulge of curved metal and the horrifying pale face of a little girl’s corpse. The cannons slowly swiveled towards the frozen Vincent – and the small figure that placed itself between the man and the monster, gun raised and flaring like a sunburst.

Then Reborn’s Chaos Shot screamed through the air like a ballistic missile, tearing through metal with a horrendous screeching sound and sending the creature reeling back. Bits of metal, smoking and leaking violet smoke, crashed to the ground as the thing wobbled dangerously in the air.

Then the room filled with bursts of yellow light, and Reborn’s next Chaos Shot tore the damn thing to shreds. Within moments there was nothing left of the monster but scraps of metal smoking on the ground, disturbingly organic-looking twists of metal plating and innards, and the remnants of a mask-like face, nothing more than a tiny mouth stretched in a silent scream. The rest of the creature listed back through the gate and the glowing shapes abruptly shut off as someone finally, finally, turned off the portal.

An eerie, breathless hush fell over the lab as the smoke slowly dispersed. Then Reborn scoffed quietly, and Leon shifted back into lizard form to settle on his wrist, and that broke the spell. Gokudera finally dropped Tsuna back to the ground, and the young Boss wrenched open the blast doors all the way and scurried to Vincent’s side.

“Are you alright? Did you get hit?”

The man shook his head, eyes wide and shell-shocked. Still, Tsuna called for a couple of Suns over the microphone and ordered a couple of Storms in to deal with the monster’s remains before any of that probably-poisonous purple smoke could leak into the lab. Then, once personnel were scurrying around, a stunned Vincent was removed, and Tsuna managed a weakly relieved thank you at Reborn, he took a deep breath and turned slowly towards the redhead and the blonde hovering just behind him with wide eyes.

“Spanner,” he said flatly. “Shōichi. Next time you build a gateway to another universe, please don’t build a gate to one with monsters living in it.”

Chapter Text

The first time Red (Freak, Devil’s Child, Monster, Demon) ever remembered seeing the creature, it was in the inky shadows of a dark circus tent.

It had been the day that the street rat had been “taken in” (sold to, like an animal) by Cosimo and the ringmaster, since those miserable bastards of the church with all their holier-than-thou bible-thumping and their spider-web lies of shelter and food and salvation (so much for the holy clergy, the men of God) had handed him over to the piece of shit that ran the whole rotten outfit for a few coins and patted themselves on the back as he was dragged away by his useless arm. He’d fought tooth and nail, biting fingers that came too close to his mouth and tearing those stupid oh so fancy clothes, but in the end into the circus he’d been dragged, leashed like a dog, and put to work despite his every effort to avoid it.

His first glimpse of the creature had been an insignificant one. A flash of something in the corner of his eye that he’d been too pissed to pay attention to. Even so, when all he cared about was raging against the man who’d bought him, he’d still seen the tiny figure watching from the shadows, swathed in black so dark that it seemed to suck in the light around it and leave nothing behind but shadows. Then the drunken hellspawn that was Cosimo had come bumbling into the tent, drunk off his arse, and the figure had been gracelessly shoved out of his mind in favor of the stinking oaf that was clearly a bigger threat.

Red had dismissed the figure as nothing more than one of the other pet freaks of the shithole he’d ended up in, at first. For the first few months, those first few months where he was struggling to lug boxes bigger than himself, or being tossed out on his behind into the freezing cold winter air accompanied by laughter colder than the snow whirling around him, or getting beaten by Cosimo while the other circus folk just watched, not willing to risk their oh-so-wonderful lives protecting the demon brat, he hadn’t given a damn about the tiny shape in the dark. He was too busy trying to survive, and so what few times he saw the midget watching him were put out of mind in favor of his newest slave labor, or his newest attempt to hack a glob of spit out into Cosimo’s food, or patching his injuries up in private where no one else would see his twisted arm.

But, once the months had passed by and the circus had moved on, once he’d had enough time to figure out the dos and don’ts, once he’d learned all the little tricks to avoiding the worst beatings and who would turn a blind eye if he slacked off, once he’d noticed there was never a tiny light-sucking figure in any of the acts, he’d started realizing that there was something shady going on. And the next time he’d caught the shadowy form watching him, ignored by all the people around it, instead of going back to lugging a huge crate that smelled like it was full of shit he’d stopped in his tracks and stared back, grey eyes narrowed to slits.

He’d never actually gotten a good look at the watcher before then. It was just as small as he was, buried in indeterminate black fabric that stopped him from seeing exactly what it was – midget or a kid just as young or younger as he was – but what he could see underneath the black, black and more black was nothing but bandages. Ragged strips of cloth, too clean to have been fished out of a gutter like his own stained rags had been but clearly used often, wrapped so thickly around the possible midget’s head that he couldn’t even see its face. Hell, he could barely tell that he-she-it even had a face – there were just too many fucking bandages everywhere. Not a scrap of skin to be seen, no wisps of hair, no eyes – all he could see were the faint dips of what might have been eye sockets, the protruding shape of a nose softened by layers of cloth, and what could have either been an odd dimple in the cloth near the chin or a mouth.

Just because he couldn’t see anything like eyes didn’t mean that Red didn’t know how to tell when some son of a bitch was staring at him, though, and that shit was fucking creepy.

“The hell’re you looking at?” Red demanded, snarling.

All the midget did was tilt its small head to one side, and then, suddenly, it fucking vanished. Just gone, poof, like one of the stupid magicians the circus had hired last week with their fancy smoke tricks and trapdoors, but without the smoke. And, when Red stomped over to where the figure had been and hit the floor a few times to check, no trapdoors.

Just a blackened scorch mark, in the shape of a ring around where the miniature prick had been standing.

“What the actual fuck?” Red said, out loud. And then there was shouting and stomping feet, and the street rat turned circus slave grimaced and prepared himself for yet another drunken beating.

Red didn’t see the disappearing midget for a long time after that – and was, frankly, glad that he hadn’t. Devil’s child, monster, whatever the people on the streets or in the circus called him, he knew that whatever freaky shit he’d seen that night when the freaky midget had disappeared wasn’t something he wanted to get mixed up in. A ghoul, a ghost, a demon – hell, for all he knew the runt could be God Himself, finally getting his laughs in watching a demon child get beaten to a pulp up close and personal. He didn’t fucking care. He’d be happy never seeing the goddamn thing again and going back to getting his arse handed to him by the Shit-Faced Clown every day. Every street rat knew that there was more out there that most of those pish-posh nobles never saw (too busy looking down their own damn noses) – it was hard to miss, with the monsters on the streets. When someone in mourning started acting weird, started acting like a puppet having its strings pulled, that was the signal for every waif to get the hell outta dodge or end up a dust pile on the ground, and anyone who stuck around never came back alive. The less he had to deal with that shady bullshit, the better, especially when he already had that glowing green thing embedded in his hand that he was pretty damn sure was the reason his arm was fucked up and why everyone and their mother hated his guts.

But, because God was a son of a bitch who had it out for him, it just wasn’t that simple. Because the disappearing midget started turning up again in all the places that Red really didn’t want to see it turn up in. Two weeks after the runt had disappeared seemingly into nowhere, he spotted it in the shadows again when the dog he was trying to drag into the animal tent went crazy, yipping and whining and barking and almost strangling itself on its leash trying to get away, and Red had looked up and accidentally made eye-contact with the creepy bandaged face he really would have rather forgotten. And after that, it felt like he was starting to see it everywhere. In the shadows of the big tent, in the animal tent, in the carts (he swore he saw it under one of the carts once, but there was no way in hell he was crawling under there just to see if it was), standing in the middle of the packed dirt of the circus after the shitheads that “owned” him had gotten busy drinking and catcalling inside and out of the cold. It was never gone for long. It always appeared somewhere near him when he wasn’t looking, and then Red would feel his heart try to stop every time he looked up and saw whatever the hell that thing was watching him again.

And the worst part? Nobody else ever seemed to see it.

Oh, Red knew he wasn’t going crazy yet. Cosimo had definitely noticed the scorch mark on the floor when the thing had first disappeared in front of him, and taken out his rage on him for it, blaming the street rat while buried in the bottle just like he always did, and the Shit-Faced Clown wasn’t the only one, either. Everyone walking through the tent had seen it too, so Red knew that he wasn’t seeing things yet. But no matter who walked by, regardless of how sober they were or not, ever fucking saw the midget. And he didn’t know why. Sure a lot of the people in this steaming pile of manure they called a circus got drunk, but they weren’t drunk all the time, and there was no way for them to miss the creepily staring runt that barely looked like it had a face. And yet, every damn time, the thing was overlooked like it wasn’t there. Red was pretty damn sure that he was literally the only person that knew it was there, and by the time the seventh month after being sold had come around, he was completely sure of it.

He was also completely and utterly sure that whatever the midget was, it wasn’t human – he hadn’t seen it eat, or sleep, and once it appeared it barely ever moved. No human could stay that still for so long, not without being a corpse.

God damn it all. Red just wanted the ghoul-ghost-whatever to leave him alone. Those metal monsters on the streets were bad enough, weren’t they? Why send even more unnatural shit his way?! What was the point, oh Lord Almighty?!

The point was apparently to make his life as shitty as possible, because one day, a few days after the seven-month mark, the thing had apparently decided that just watching sinisterly in the background wasn’t enough, because when Red was standing up from feeding the dog of the crazy clown that had recently joined the circus, he nearly came face-to-face with the damn thing.

(He did not shriek. No matter how many times Cross would try to wheedle the details out of him in the future, the boy who had been Red would forever deny shrieking like a girl and falling back on his rump when that bandaged face appeared only a little over a meter away from him.)

“What the hell?!” Red squawked. The dog – Allen, if he was remembering the mutt’s name right – barked in alarm. “Get away from me!”

A gauze-covered head slanted to one side, just like the first time he’d spat words at the creature, and then the runt simply seemed to sink down to the ground and settle there, the black fabric of what Red could finally identify as a cloak pooling around it. After several more moments of waiting for some witch’s curse or demonic hellfire to strike him down, only for nothing to happen but more creepy staring, Red slowly crab-walked backward away from the thing, watching it suspiciously until he could rise to his feet.

“What do you want from me?!” He hissed, trying not to show just how frightened out of his wits he was.

More creepy staring. Then, the creature’s head dropped from trying to make some sort of eye contact with him, and focused on one hand – the hand he went to every pain to keep hidden, always wrapped up in as many layers of fabric as he could, the demon arm that had ruined his lot in life.

“Why hide it?”

Red felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising. The thing could talk? And God, what a fucked up voice, raspy and quiet like the creature could barely pull air into its lungs and as cold and emotionless as the ice on the ground. Just listening to it (and barely seeing the bandages over where the creature’s mouth should have been move – apparently there was a face under the bandages) gave him the shivers.

And then the thing’s words registered, and he bristled (does it know? He’d kept the arm wrapped the entire time he’d been at the circus, not even the other freaks knew what it looked like, how could it know?!), using his good arm to tuck the other out of sight. “None of your damn business!” he hissed. “It’s none of your god-damn business!”

A discordant hum was his only response, and after another moment of stillness, Red began to back away. He took one step after another, not daring to take his eyes off the creature – the unnatural, corpse-still creature that didn’t even seem to be breathing, Red could see every one of his own breaths but not a single cloud of white from the creature’s face. It wasn’t breathing, and it was asking about his arm, the same arm that had gotten him sold to the circus in the first place, and he didn’t know why.

Then there was a distant shout – the Shit-Faced Clown again – and that snapped Red out of his horrified reverie. He ran, fleeing with Allen the dog hot on his heels, the animal whimpering like the Devil himself were chasing them, and for all Red knew, that was exactly what the midget was.

That night, Red used a piece of string to tie together two bits of metal he’d found on the ground while setting up the tents into the shape of a cross, and then, for the first time in a year, he prayed to a God that probably wouldn’t listen to him.

Oh our Lord thou are in Heaven , please, I didn’t ask for any of this. Please make that thing leave me alone, please don’t let it do whatever it is it means to do with me. I’ve already been tainted by the Devil once, and once was too much . Please don’t let it happen again.

But since God still wanted to make him miserable, he wasn’t at all surprised to see the possible devil still lingering in the shadows the next morning.

That encounter, it seemed, had been some sort of turning point, an encouragement for the little devil, because, after that, the creature stopped keeping its distance. Whenever he was alone and not in the box he called a bed, whenever he was the only human being working alone in the animal tent or moving boxes or doing Cosimo’s dirty work for him, he would look up at some point and find the midget loitering barely a meter or two away from him, black cloak pooling around it like a puddle of shadow and its featureless face staring at him.

The first time it did this, Red had squawked again, and bolted for the other side of the animal tent, abandoning the box he’d been trying to drag with him. The second time, he did the same thing again. And the third. And the fourth. (This, too, would be another thing that the boy that would become Allen would forever deny doing.) Each time, the creature would leave him alone for a time, but then it would turn up again, right there, right in his goddamn face, and just… sit there. Not doing anything. It didn’t even talk after that first time, it’d just rest there in perfect silence until Red finally noticed it was there. And when Red said perfect silence, he meant perfect. He’d spent years on the streets before ending up the circus and had figured out early on how to tell when some son of a bitch was sneaking up on him, but he was always caught off guard whenever he found the shadowy figure in front of him. There was never a rustle of cloth, footsteps, or louder than normal breaths to alert him – the creature was literally like a ghost, flickering into existence without him noticing up until he looked up and got a face full of bandaged ghoul.

For the first few weeks, he was terrified out of his wits. He kept his makeshift little cross in his pocket at all times, and would even brandish the thing like a weapon whenever the creature got too close. Unfortunately, this did nothing – the thing didn’t so much as twitch – which only made him even more terrified. He’d snarl and spit like a cornered animal until he managed to get his legs working again and retreat, and then go and have a breakdown and hope really, really hard that the thing wasn’t actually the Devil, because if it was then he was screwed.

But weeks passed, and nothing happened. The ghoul never spat out heathen words or demonic chants, never tried to get him to agree to some shady deal that needed paying in souls, never sprouted horns or wings or tried to tempt him into sin. Hell, the creature didn’t even speak after that first time! It just… sat there, like some macabre sculpture, only its head moving whenever it watched him as he worked or fled.

It made Red nervous. And when Red got nervous, he got snappish.

The first time he cussed at the creature was only a month after it’d started following him more closely. The words had slipped out before he could stop them, and the creature had finally reacted, visibly twitching at the expletives (a word he’d heard Allen’s crazy owner Mana say and liked the sound of). The sudden motion, the sudden change in routine, had terrified him more than any of the stalking had (oh god what was it going to do was it going to kill him he was going to die die die why did he say that?!) and he’d stumbled over his own feet in an effort to get away before whatever hellish retribution it was certainly planning could take effect.

Only there had been no hellish retribution. And when Red cussed at it a second time, a week or so later when he’d actually caught it in the act of appearing in front of him, all he’d gotten was another twitch, and then the creature had somehow managed to ignore him while still being its normal creepy-little-shit self. And after that, it simply didn’t react to any foul words of his at all.

That… had never happened before. With anyone. When Red cursed at someone, they at least cursed back, at most hit him and tried to beat him to death for “disrespecting his betters.” They’d never just ignored him before, and that made him nervous. If the creature wasn’t going to hit him or cuss right back at him, then what would it do?

Nothing. That was what it would do. Days passed, and the creature did nothing. No matter what kind of foul words he spat at it, no matter how many times he snarled at it, it did nothing.

For almost a month after that, Red was sure that the creature was just biding its time, waiting for him to let his guard down.

But then he met Mana, and the circus was attacked the day after, and then he didn’t know what to think of the creature.

The boy who became Mana’s Allen would remember that attack for years after it had happened. Even when some memories had been blocked by trauma, even when he pretended not to remember his early years and put a smile on his face instead that could fool the best of them, he wouldn’t forget that cold Christmas night. He would remember Mana reaching out to him, him, the boy with the Devil’s arm, offering to let him come with him. He would remember the monsters, dozens of them descending from the sky like the bringers of the apocalypse, killing everything in their path, clowns and animals and the shitty ringmaster and Cosimo (it seemed there were some miracles in the world after all). He’d remember the dust on the wind.

And he’d remember that when he was stumbling over his feet in his haste to get away, eyes wide as one of the monsters bore down on him and Mana, cornered in an alley nearby with no way to get away, a tiny figure appearing between them and the monster. A tiny black-swathed figure that didn’t so much as glance back at them, just spoke one word:

“Run.”

Mana would react before Red-Allen did, scooping the boy up in his arms and bolting from the alley. In a few minutes, he would squirm and shout for the crazy old clown to put him down – but in that moment, all he had eyes for as Mana fled was the spook that had been haunting him for the better part of a year glowing with unearthly green flames and then utterly destroying the monster that had nearly killed him, and all the monsters that came after it.

Why did it do that?

The question would haunt him even after the ghoul returned to watch him from the shadows as he followed Mana from circus to circus, even as Mana taught him all the tricks of being a clown, taught him how to count the money he earned from his performances, taught him manners that the man claimed he was sorely missing. Why had the creature that he’d been so utterly certain had been some sort of devil defended him from another of the Devil’s own work? Why had it defended him, the tiny demon child? Had it just been defending Mana, and Red-Allen had just been a happy coincidence?

For once, he wanted to talk to the creature. He wanted to ask why, but it seemed that for as long as Mana nearby, he wouldn’t be able to. The ghoul had returned to old habits, watching Red-Allen from a distance as he and Mana went about their days, and any time Red-Allen tried to approach it, it vanished, just like that first time, leaving nothing but a scorch mark behind. And he didn’t want to leave Mana just to talk to the spook that had saved them. Mana was too good to be true, a beacon of warmth and laughter and crazy all wrapped up in the package of a whiteface clown, and he didn’t trust that the coot wouldn’t disappear forever if he were to walk away now, even for a moment.

But finally, one day, after months of trotting along after the man that had saved him from a life of loneliness and cruelty on the streets, as he was waiting anxiously under an awning for Mana to return from job seeking, with no-one else in view on the street, he saw the creature lingering in the shadows across the cobbled road from him, and finally decided he couldn’t wait anymore.

The creature didn’t disappear when he approached. The boy wasn’t sure if he should be happy about that or not.

“Why’d you save us?” He whispered when he got close enough for only the ghoul to hear him. “Why’d you help me ‘n Mana?”

Silence, for a long moment, and Red-Allen fidgeted, eyes narrowed and body braced for a blow (even after months of kindness from Mana, he couldn’t quite shake off the old instincts yet. That would come later.) But, instead of being hit by a fist or by that bright green fire he had seen the creature using, the creature simply… watched him. And then, finally, just as he growled and turned away, sure it wasn’t going to answer, it spoke.

“I didn’t mean to save Mana.”

Red-Allen froze, and then whipped around to stare at the creature… only for it to have vanished without a trace once more.

Those words would haunt Red-Allen for years, just like the memory of a streak of green fire sending monsters crashing down to earth. He’d lie awake at night, with more questions than answers, wondering why.

He wouldn’t get an answer while Mana was alive.

The next clear memory of the creature was Allen’s. Not Red-Allen, Mana’s boy, not Red, the urchin with the demon arm on the streets. Just Allen, Mana’s Allen, the Allen he would have wanted him to be before a carriage in the wrong place had ripped him out of his life.

He remembered the graveyard. He remembered the fat man that appeared behind Mana’s grave to lean over it and smile at him with that too-wide grin, both otherworldly and strangely comforting – a clown in a long coat and a top hat, just like Mana. He remembered the clown’s words, his offer, and how in his desperation he slipped into idiocy and took it, crying out to the heavens for Mana to come back come back don’t leave me alone!

He remembered the metal skeleton slicing a bloody line up one side of his face, Mana cursing him, Mana cursing him, the boy he’d taken in off the streets, and his demon arm suddenly coming alive, growing into an amalgamation of plates and metal and one bright green glowing cross, the same color as the flames of the little devil he hadn’t seen since Mana had died. He remembered Mana dying a second time – I love you, Allen – and collapsing to the ground, shocked and horrified and oh god no how could he do this? How could he have done this to Mana?

And then the fat clown that had brought Mana back to kill him was looming over him, the unnatural grin much wider than before and twisted in nasty ways at the edges, golden eyes behind the giant’s glasses sharp and cruel.

“Well, that certainly didn’t go as planned~ Who would have thought his little brat would be an accomadator~?”

Allen couldn’t move. He was lying on the ground staring at the mangled remains of the metal skeleton that had once been Mana, staring over the arm that had done it, the devil’s arm that had just taken everything from him again. Staring at the fat clown’s feet as he stepped in front of him, crouching down and reaching out to grab his hand in a harsh grip, so strong that it felt like he was about to crush every bone in his wrist.

“I suppose I’ll just have to destroy this, now won’t I~? I can’t have another ex-or-cist going up against me~”

And then, green. Not his arm, but a flash of acidic fire that lashed out like a whip and sent the fat clown flying back. And a voice, unfamiliar but familiar all the same, quiet and raspy like there wasn’t enough air in its lungs but too emotional, too angry to belong to the tiny devil that had been following him.

“If you think we’ll let you destroy another of the Creator’s weapons, Earl, then you’re sorely mistaken.”

Green everywhere. Fire roaring. And, amongst the chaos and shouts and sounds of crumbling stone (Mana’s left miraculously untouched, Allen would learn later and thank God for), a small bandaged hand – a hand much smaller than his, now that he’d had three years of better food and growing under his belt – came to rest on top of the glowing green cross that had taken Mana away again. Through blurry eyes, he saw tall figures darting through the air, leaving trails of roaring emerald flames in their wake, chasing the fat clown that had given him false hope only to take it away again, figures in black coats and bandages – and in front of him, the tiny cloaked being that had been following him silently for years, fingers glowing with sharp light.

And heard one word, a word he hadn’t heard from that familiar emotionless voice since the circus had gone down in smoke and turned to dust on the wind.

“Run.”

And run he did. He stood up and ran, leaving what was left of his old life, and Mana, behind.

Chapter Text

It began, as many of her obsessions had, by stumbling across something new in the Dump.

Stumbling across new and fascinating things (literally) in the Dump was something that unfortunately happened quite frequently. Alphys was far from being the most coordinated monster, and it was unfortunately very common for her clawed feet to suddenly snag on something under the water she was slogging through, thus reuniting her with her people, aka a pile of garbage, by sending her pitching forward face-first into the trash. It had happened so regularly that Haptsablook – Mettaton now – had even started placing bets with her before every trip on how long it would take for her to stumble and fall.

It had been a long, long time since Mettaton had joined her in her search for human treasures. Alphys didn’t begrudge him for it in the slightest – she knew exactly how much work Mettaton was putting into his budding fame, mostly because he always complained about it when it was time for his routine maintenance checks – but she had to admit, she missed those little snide comments the formerly unbodied ghost would make. Then again, if Mettaton were here, then that meant she wouldn’t be poking at garbage with Undyne, looking for a new anime to introduce to her… um, friend. Who was unfairly cool, with all that incredible confidence in her own self-worth, the flaming red hair, the gold eye, the sharp-toothed smile that spawned butterflies in her stomach, the rippling scaly muscles that made Alphys want to drool like an anime girl at her crush…

Yeah, in retrospect she was really glad Mettaton wasn’t here right now. If he was, he’d never let her live this down. Ever.

Still, it was more than a little mortifying to trip over something under the water and end up slamming face-first into a box with a girly shriek in front of Undyne.

“Whoa, you okay there Alph?”

“Y-yeah-!” Alphys managed to squeak. She peeled herself off the huge wooden crate she’d crashed into, blushing furiously and trying to retract her head like a turtle into her lab coat. Oh God, she’d just made a total fool of herself! In front of Undyne! “J-just, um… I just tripped!”

Undyne snorted as she waded over, one yellow eye squinting at the much smaller saurian monster in something that Alphys hoped was concern. “Man, that box sure put a dent on you. Need some candy?”

“N-no, it’s okay, I have some on m-me already!” Alphys spluttered (as the image of the fish-woman feeding her a piece of candy made her blush grow even brighter, oh please stop that brain). She hurriedly fished a brightly colored little package out of one of her many pockets, unwrapped it, and stuffed it in her mouth, only feeling the slightest twinge of relief past her embarrassment as her face stopped aching.

“Whatever,” Undyne shrugged. She slogged up to the box and rapped on its wooden surface loudly. “What’s in this thing, anyway? It didn’t even budge.”

Glad for anything to distract her from her utter screw-up, Alphys also turned her attention to the box, adjusting her glasses nervously. The wooden object, easily big enough to hold several of Alphys with room left over for some of her smaller recent inventions, indeed hadn’t so much as shuddered when she’d introduced her snout to it. Which, considering that the box (more of a crate, really) was made out of wood, and should therefore be floating rather than be weighed down so heavily, meant that it had something truly massive inside of it.

A tiny, tiny spark of curiosity alit under the humiliation.

“H-how about we find out?” She suggested shyly, and nearly had a heart attack when Undyne shot her a huge grin and a thumbs-up before grabbing the crate’s lid in blue-scaled hands and bodily tearing the planks of wood free, hoisting it above her head with a triumphant NGAH!

W-well, she thought dazedly. I g-guess I don’t need that c-crowbar anymore. Then, before her brain could rebel with another worshipful image of Undyne glowing on the inside of her eyelids, Alphys quickly puttered over to the side of the crate with a high-pitched stutter of thanks, then stood up on her toes to peer into the depths of the container.

What was in the depths of the container, as it turns out, was metal. Lots and lots, practically a whole scrap pile’s worth of it, all in odd shades of umber and dull brownish-yellow, which was very unusual for metal and immediately had Alphys wondering what alloys had gone into it.

“Ugh, just more trash,” Undyne scoffed, tossing aside the wooden planks still in her hands. Alphys, still more curious than anything else, reached out to grab what looked like a gear from the top of the faintly golden-hued mess –

A strange machine of browned and yellowed metal, walls of wooden planks closing in around her, a mechanical pump akin to the world’s strangest heart pumping ink through glass pipes like veins, air thick with the stench of ink ink ink ink turn on the machine –

– and a spark of black light jumped from the gear to her fingertips, sending a shock that felt like a million volts of electricity rushing through her body. Alphys shrieked and stumbled back, beady eyes wide behind her glasses.

“Alphys?!”

The yellow monster stood there, staring wide-eyed at the crate and, for once, very much unaware of Undyne’s closeness.

That was magic. That was magic. She’d recognize the feeling of it anywhere – she’d grown up surrounded by it, by the magic of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of monsters radiating it every second of their lives. It fit the entire Underground like a second skin, covering every stationary surface and filling the air with the clean, pure feeling of all those souls holding on to every ounce of hope they could grasp.

But something about this magic was so very, very different. It felt… if she had to put it into words, it felt slimy. And those images – the machine, walls of wooden planks the exact same color as the boards that someone had built this crate with, the glass pipes full of black ink – what was this? She’d never heard of magic doing something like this without direction, and there was no-one around but her and Undyne! If the magic didn’t come from them, and there were no other monsters around to be manipulating it… where had it come from?

Then her eyes drifted up to the cave ceiling, and her brain, still buzzing painfully with the force of that powerful shock to her system, finally offered up an answer so ludicrous that she couldn’t help but think it had to be true.

If no monsters are responsible for it… then that means a human is.

“HEY, EARTH TO ALPHYS!!!”

The saurian monster was abruptly snapped out of her daze with a shriek as Undyne’s voice roared right in her earhole. “Ow!” She yelped, clapping a hand to each side of her skull. “U-Undyne!”

The fish-woman gave her a Look somewhere between concerned and exasperated. “You got lost in your own head there, Alph.”

“R-right,” she stuttered. “S-sorry. I-it’s just –” She sucked in a breath, and a slow, wondering smile spread across her face – wondering despite the slightest feeling of unease still left over from that spark of black. “Undyne, this has magic in it. A-and there’s no monsters but us around, and it wasn’t here a couple d-days ago so it had to have come d-down from the surface recently. W-which means, that i-if there’s magic in it…”

Undyne sucked in a breath and turned her head to look at the crate so fast she probably should have been suffering from whiplash.

“Which means that a human put magic in that shit,” she breathed, and a wide toothy grin spread across her face. “That’s so COOL!! What do you think this stuff is for? Is it old armor from one of those swordswomen?”

“I t-think it’s a machine,” Alphys said slowly, stepping forward. Her fingers hesitated, waiting for a painful shock once more as they approached the gear. Then, when nothing happened, she carefully closed little clawed digits around it, lifting it out of the rest of the scrap. The metal was oddly cold to the touch, even for metal that might have been here for a week or more – Waterfall wasn’t this cold. Maybe it was winter on the surface? “I – there were images, and one of them was a machine made of metal like this, and glass pipes.” She leaned forward to peer into the box, and quickly located something that looked like either very polished metal or possibly black-stained glass. “I d-don’t know what it’s for, but… Undyne, there’s magic in it. We haven’t heard about a human mage in g-generations, and then this falls in here… why would a mage drop something through the Barrier like this?”

“Who cares!” Undyne crowed, grabbing her by the shoulders and spinning her around, ignoring the other monster’s surprised squeal. “It’s a magic machine made by a human! We need to tell the King about this! C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” She grabbed Alphys and hoisted her over her head.

“H-hey, wait!” Alphys shrieked. “L-let’s at least move it to the lab, p-please! W-what if s-someone tries to take it while w-we’re gone?!”

With an excited whoop, Undyne grabbed the crate with her other hand and hoisted it up over her head too, and took off running.

(Inside the crate, hidden beneath golden scrap, gears, and pipes, the contents of a smashed glass tank that was much too large to be able to fit into the box without some serious defiance of physics sloshed, and black liquid splashed over a crumpled paper that had been hastily stuffed in with the scrap. The scribbled words were quickly covered in ink, and if Alphys or Undyne had been able to read te note, they would have been much less enthusiastic in moving the machine from the dump.

Whatever you do, a desperate hand beseeched them, now never to be read again, do not rebuild this machine.)

Chapter Text

When Henry had first entered the old studio that he and his old friend had worked in, and found that somehow Joey Drew had transformed the place into a dungeon crawl, complete with real monsters, his first reaction had been to turn around and leave. He’d had enough of monster eradication for one lifetime, thanks – he’d worked for the Joja Corporation for years, had been one of their best monster hunters, and he’d only just recently managed to retire!

Unfortunately, Joey had decided to be an ass and had somehow locked the door behind him. Henry wasn’t sure how. Regardless of how he did it, it meant his “friend” had essentially only given him one choice – to press on. And that was something Henry had always been good at – it was how he’d lasted as long as he had working for the soul-crushing Joja Corporation, after all.

He had honestly considered bashing the front door down to leave regardless of his remaining nostalgia for his old workplace when he finally turned on the machine, and he saw unfamiliar runes flickering in the air and sinking into the pipes that adorned the walls. He’d already known there was something magical going on when he’d stumbled across that corpse of Boris the Wolf, of course, but…

Henry may not have been a wizard himself, but he’d worked with them often enough while clearing out caves and forests to know that whatever runes those had been? Were not natural. They’d been black and almost malevolent as they’d twisted in the air, obviously meant to do something nefarious despite the fact he was sure he’d seen the old Junic rune for creation in there somewhere, which was normally considered a “good” spell.

With that in mind, Henry was nowhere near as surprised as he could have been to have an honest-to-God living Bendy jump at him when he went to investigate the Ink Machine once more. He had been shocked, of course, because one of your cartoon characters coming to life was in no way normal, and he’d thought (hoped, silently, in the confines of his mind) that Joey had stopped at Boris and maybe the inky blob creatures he’d been forced to deal with on the way. But in hindsight, no, he wasn’t at all surprised. Joey had always loved that little cartoon devil more than any other character they created – and evidently, that fondness hadn’t ever really gone away. Why else would so many of those damn creepy moving cutouts have been there?

He may not have been surprised at Joey attempting to create Bendy, and certainly wasn’t surprised he’d succeeded considering, well, Boris, but he sure as hell hadn’t expected how twisted the little devil darlin’ had turned out. Far too tall, skeletal, gushing ink like a fountain, that familiar grin tense and vibrating, limbs twisted and deformed…

He had run then. Later, after falling unconscious on the ritual circle below and stumbling across one of the cutouts near Sammy’s alters to the demon, Henry hadn’t been able to bring himself to be frightened, just resigned… and maybe a little worried.

“What did Joey do to you, little guy?” Had been his words to that cutout. And he liked to think that, just maybe, when he encountered the would be “little” devil darlin’ after nearly being sacrificed to him by Sammy, the creature was just a little less aggressive in chasing him than he could have been.

Wishful thinking, he supposed.

The rest of the studio was, somehow, even worse than the upper floors. The music department, even if it had been engulfed in a labyrinth that definitely hadn’t existed when he’d left thirty years ago, had at least still been recognizable… and Sammy had at least recognized that he wasn’t human anymore, even if he’d gone around trying to fix it in a way that would have given his former self a heart attack.

He wasn’t so lucky with everywhere else. The rest of the studio was, somehow, even more labyrinthian than the upper floors had been. Joey, he couldn’t help but think bitterly somewhere in the middle of fetch-quests for an angel, had really gone all out in creating his little dungeon crawl. Too bad he couldn’t put this much effort into being a decent human being – the least he could have done was warn Henry about what he’d find in here! Literally the only good thing he’d found down here had been Boris…

And speaking of the fetch-quests for an angel… oh god. Alice.

Alice had been another one of his creations. The foil to Bendy, the mischievous if sometimes timid little imp. Moral and confident, always trying to do the right thing, and quick to become fed up with her little rival’s mischief. Henry knew there had been vague plans for Alice to become Bendy’s love interest in the cartoon as well, though thankfully the studio had gone under before that could ever happen.

Nothing of that little angel had seemed to remain of the… the monster he’d found on level nine. Not at first. Gone were the morals, the up-righteousness. Instead, there had been only an obsessiveness over her own appearance that was almost the opposite of the easy confidence Alice had had in herself in the show, and a vicious lack of mercy for those beings that wandered the halls. She hadn’t even looked like Alice Angel, not really. She’d been recognizable, but too… human, save for the outfit and the single pie-cut eye that seemed so very jarring on a humanlike face. And she’d looked and sounded so much like Susie, her original voice actress…

And then, in the elevator, he’d heard her whisper in the familiar breathy, airy voice that she had in the cartoons. “Dreams come true, Susie, dreams come true.”

And it was then he’d known. This might have sounded and looked like Susie playing at Alice Angel, but… suddenly, he knew it wasn’t that simple.

“Alice,” he’d called through her door after that particular fetch-quest, desperate for answers, for anything that could shed light onto the horrors in this place, far greater than any abandoned mine or deep wood he’d helped clear. “What the hell happened to you? What did Joey do?”

He hadn’t received an answer. Not then. But, somehow, her words as she’d ordered him down to level fourteen had seemed… softer. A little more uncertain. And, after the elevator had fallen down, down, down into the abyss, when he was wavering in and out of consciousness as Boris tried to wake him and he’d seen the angel reaching out to take him, and…

She’d hesitated.

When Henry came to, he’d found Boris still there with him, ears perked up and doggy face utterly relieved. And, when he’d pulled himself upright and brushed himself off, and checked the wolf for injuries, Boris had held out something for him. A note signed not with an actual signature, but a tiny doodle of a halo.

Joey was always far too good at hurting people, and not good enough at regretting what he’s done.

Henry had known for a while that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong here. It had begun as a creeping feeling of dread upon finding the dead Boris on the top floor. The feeling had grown when Bendy had first appeared, and when he’d nearly been sacrificed by Sammy – Sammy, who hadn’t recognized him. Sammy, who’d become a figure made out of ink and had been so crazy he’d give an illusionist who’d downed too much alcohol a run for his money. The feeling had grown that much stronger when he’d first stumbled across the mangled forms of the Butcher gang, with too many mouths, too few eyes, too many stitches, missing limbs and twisted almost beyond recognition, and had grown yet again when he’d first seen Alice.

The angel’s note was barely a drop in the ocean compared to everything else up to this point, and yet it was almost a confirmation of what he’d silently begun to fear – that Joey creating these horrid and yet suffering creatures hadn’t been an accident.

There was no way to confirm it without looking for an answer, which meant putting off his escape for a while longer. But something had told Henry that this was far more important than escaping with his life, and so he descended deeper into the Studio, searching for anything, anything that would give him a clue to just what was going on.

It wasn’t until he opened a door with one of the sigils that seemed to repel Bendy on it to find jars full of inky organs on the shelves, and audio recordings by Joey, that he realized he may have bitten off more than he could chew.

Because he’d found answers, all right. And he didn’t like them one bit.

“The abominations coming out of the Machine are as far from perfect as anything can get! I don’t understand – I performed the ritual perfectly, even gave them souls! Why aren’t they coming out right anymore?”

“I need to find a way to fix them… I refuse to have these things wandering around the studio any longer… there must be something I’m missing.”

“The only ones that ever came out perfect were the original three… Boris, Alice, and Bendy. Is there something different about the three of them that makes them on-model ?”

“Sorry, Boris my good wolf, but don’t you see? I need to find out how you stayed so perfect while everything else the machine is spitting out comes out so flawed! Now, stay still for this cut… or do you want me to use Alice or Bendy for this instead?”

Henry had thrown up after hearing those recordings. Because… oh God, Joey, how could you?

That talk of giving them souls – he’d sacrificed his employees to the Machine, hadn’t he? Sammy, and Alice having Susie’s voice beyond just the airy voice she was supposed to have been given… that wasn’t a coincidence. And the Boris that had been on the upper floor… that had been the original Boris. That had been the one that Joey had cut open. While he was awake. And he hadn’t sounded the least bit upset, even when he threatened the poor wolf with the wellbeing of his fellow cartoons.

Too good at hurting people, he thought after he’d almost recovered, pale and shaking as his Boris rubbed his back to try to comfort him, and not good enough at regretting.

What kind of twisted man had his “old friend” become?

So distracted by his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed the pulsing tendrils of ink spreading across the walls and floor until Boris had shaken him frantically and jarred him out of his horrified stupor. And by then, it had been far too late to run. The hallway he’d wandered down was a dead end, there were no Little Miracle Stations to hide in, and there was no time to backtrack… because what precious time he’d had he could have used to flee had been already used up, and Bendy was already there.

Henry had only a moment to realize this before the demon attacked, malformed and mismatched hands snapping around his throat like a bear trap as he was slammed into a wall. Boris had run – no matter how guilty the wolf looked when they reunited, he couldn’t begrudge him for it, and would tell him so later – and left Henry to the infuriated demon’s non-existent mercy.

He hadn’t been able to breathe. He had been suffocating. In a blind panic, Henry had scrabbled uselessly first at the hands choking him, then tried to shove the demon off of him to no avail.

Then his hands had found something he had thought was some other deformation in the demon’s chest, a strangely soft raised line up the middle of the ribs with elongated little bumps crisscrossing it, and, desperate for air and not coherent enough to realize what it was he’d found, he’d curled one hand into a fist and punched it as hard as he could. Some monsters had a weak spot, a chink in their armor, – he could only hope that Bendy was the same.

And he hadn’t been wrong, per se, but he hadn’t expected his fist to break right through the demon’s ribcage. That was honestly what he thought had happened, in that brief moment where the demon had frozen, going almost comically still, and Henry still didn’t have enough air in his lungs for him to think clearly. His fist had broken through inky skin and into a hollow cavity inside Bendy’s body, a cavity positively filled with ink, and there were two somethings on either side of his fist that seemed to expand and contract in time with the demon’s heaving chest.

Then Bendy had shrieked, the most horrible sound he’d heard yet from the monster, and Henry had found himself sliding to the ground, free, coughing and hacking as he sucked in air too fast and the demon disappeared into one of his ink portals. Fleeing.

He hadn’t realized exactly what had happened until he’d had a moment to rest, to recover, and then opened his eyes again to find himself looking at one of the organ jars, one that held a preserved inky heart inside of it. Then what had happened finally caught up to him, and Henry ended up choking on his own bile again.

He hadn’t somehow punched through the demon’s ribcage. He wasn’t that strong, and he had no way of enhancing himself to make himself that strong. Henry hadn’t punched through the demon’s ribs, he’d punched through an already existing wound. A still open wound that had been clumsily stitched shut, a deep wound right down the center of the demon’s chest. Those objects he’d felt moving in time with Bendy’s breathing had been the demon’s lungs. And where his fist had ended up, right between those lungs and in a pool of blood-like ink, was an empty space where Bendy’s heart should have been.

Henry only knew of two people that had ever cut something open to remove organs like that in this God-forsaken studio. The first was Alice, and she was too frightened of the demon and his “tainted ink” to have done it.

Which meant that the person that had cut Bendy open and removed his heart had been none other than Joey Drew himself.

That horrifying discovery of what Joey had done, of how even the Ink Demon himself hadn’t been safe from his depravity… completely changed Henry’s priorities.

Before, he’d been desperate to get out, maybe break down the door to the Studio and call his old employers at Joja-Corp and tell them what was down here. Even if the company usually charged people out of the nose for their monster eradication services, and refused to help when they weren’t paid, this was something that even they couldn’t ignore – a huge monster population right smack in the middle of the big city, one that nobody had even known had existed? That was a danger to the neighborhoods around the studio. People could get hurt.

Now that he’d found evidence of what Joey had been doing down here… Henry couldn’t even bring himself to think about calling the eradication squads anymore. Yes, the ink monsters were dangerous, yes Alice had been killing people, yes Bendy was the most dangerous creature in this entire place and had tried to kill him many times, but…

Henry found himself wondering just how much of the viciousness and the blood-thirst he’d seen had been naturally present, and how much of it was because of what his old boss had done. If he’d ever been at the mercy of a man like the one Joey had seemingly become… he could easily imagine going down the same road that the creatures in the studio seemed to have done. And he could all too easily imagine not only the blood-thirst, the anger, but also the fear.

How afraid are they, under all that murderous rage, that Joey will come back? And how scared are they of me, Joey’s old best friend?

In the face of all that, it was hard not to want to put something to rights. But Henry didn’t know how or what, and the only way to find out… would be to keep wandering.

And so he did. He explored every floor, every nook, and cranny. He bashed down doors to get into old offices and closest. He grabbed every audio log he found to listen to later as closely as he dared, trying to glean something from the voices of the past that could help. All while avoiding the ink monsters – the monsters that had once been people, people he knew, oh God, why did you do it, Joey – and keeping a nervous ear out for Bendy.

Only it seemed the demon was staying far, far away from him now. Henry wasn’t sure what to think of that.

It wasn’t until he found yet another one of Wally’s tapes – poor Wally, he could only hope the kid had gotten out instead of ending up yet another ink monster in this place – that he finally had an inkling of where to start looking.

“Get this, Joey’s gone and started drawing these weird symbol things on doors all over the studio! I don’t know what they are, but they’ve probably got something to do with the Machine – I mean, everything he does revolves around that damn thing at this point! Heck, he’s even gone and put one up on his office door!”

Joey’s office door. Joey’s office. And if that symbol Wally was talking about was what he thought it was…

He might have just gotten the lead he was looking for.

It had taken some convincing to get Boris to agree to show him where Joey’s office was now, since he hadn’t seen it on the first floor, and somehow he wasn’t surprised when the wolf started to lead him down instead of up. The deeper into the studio they descended, the more Boris began to quake and shudder, jumping at shadows, ears drooping and head constantly moving, trying to find dangers before they could find him.

Then they stumbled across Alice in what would have been an amusement park, had Joey’s plans ever taken off.

“I see you haven’t left yet, Henry,” she said bitterly.

Henry had stared at the angel for a long moment, at her oddly human proportions and her awkwardness when moving – something he’d only vaguely noticed before and never thought important, but suddenly… suddenly he had to ask.

“I know what Joey did to the original Boris,” he whispered. “And… to Bendy. What did he do to you?”

Alice had fallen silent. And one hand had traveled up to her ruined, empty eye socket.

“He put Susie into my ink,” she whispered. “And he tried to take my eyes.” She laughed, just as bitter as when she’d first spoken. “He didn’t finish the job. Bendy found him before he could take anything else.”

“You’re calling him Bendy, now?”

“No,” Alice snapped. “He was Bendy. That abomination isn’t him anymore!”

Henry thought of the demon freezing, of him screaming and fleeing when he realized Henry’s hand was in his chest. He thought of how he hadn’t seen so much as a single telltale inky tendril on the walls since then, how the demon seemed to have… vanished.

The Bendy in the cartoons always did like to hide when he was scared.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,” he said, very quietly. Then, glancing back at Boris, he stepped forward, putting himself between the wolf and the angel, just in case. “I’m trying to get to Joey’s office. I’m hoping… that maybe there’s something in there that can help undo some of what he’s done.”

Alice stiffened, her single remaining eye widening. It was an odd thing to see, a cartoonish eye growing so large on an otherwise human face.

“You’re… going to undo what he did?”

Funny. For all Alice had become a bit of a psychopath, he could still feel sympathy for her. And sorrow, that she felt she couldn’t trust him at his word.

Just like when Boris had run, he didn’t blame her, not one bit. He didn’t know what Joey had painted himself as before he’d started experimenting on the cartoons he’d brought to life, but they’d probably thought they could trust him and anybody he called a friend.

How shaken had their faith in people become, after what had happened to them?

“I’m going to try,” he corrected her quietly. He stepped forward and held out a hand – carefully, slowly, not wanting to spook her. “Do you want to help?”

After a long, uncertain moment, fraught with unsaid words – how can I trust you? How do I know you’re not going to do what he did? – she reached out and slipped her hand into his.

“Don’t make me regret this, Henry.”

And all Henry could do was smile sadly, and nod.

I’ll try not to.

Joey’s office was buried in the back of a twisting labyrinth of other offices, maze-like halls, and deformed Butcher Gang members. It was tricky maneuvering around the monsters with two larger, human-sized toons sticking so close to him – Boris for safety, Alice probably because she didn’t trust him yet – but he managed it, and soon, he had found himself standing in front of the door, staring at the sigil marking it. Despite everything, it seemed, Joey’s ego had still been at full blast, even when everything was falling apart around him – the star on the door, and the words hanging above it displayed that clearly.

“He always did think of himself like he was the star of the show,” Henry muttered.

“Hurry up,” Alice snapped back, her voice slipping into Susie’s normal cadence rather than her own. “I don’t want those Butcher Gang things to find me out here!”

Henry took a deep breath, nodded, and then pushed open the door with an ominous creak.

It was like stepping directly into the past, instead of an abandoned office in a monster-ridden studio. For a moment, Henry felt like he was thirty years younger, with new storyboards and drawings in hand and waiting impatiently for Joey to hang up his expensive dial-up phone. Then he was back in the present, and he stepped into the room.

“I don’t know what we’re looking for in here,” he cautioned the two toons with him. “For all I know, there’ll be nothing here at all.”

Alice just snorted and started poking around the shelves.

Henry had started with the shelves on the other side of the room with her – and, finding nothing, soon found himself moving on to Joey’s desk. Like he’d told Alice, he didn’t know what he was looking for, not really – anything that could give him a clue what to do next.

It was while he was searching underneath the desk, desperate to find something and not have this be for naught, that he found a switch on the underside of the desk, and, after making sure his traveling partners knew what he’d found, he’d thrown it.

With a creak, one of Joey’s far-too-magnificent bookshelves swung out like a door, revealing a small room beyond. Or perhaps a cubbyhole would be more accurate – there was barely enough room to stand in that nook, let alone walk in. And in that nook, on yet more shelves, was what looked to be a pair of jars hastily wrapped in cloth, and another audio log.

“I don’t know what to do next,” the recording said when Henry flicked it on. “I’ve tried everything I can think of to figure out what went wrong. None of the copies of the characters are coming out right, no matter how many souls I put into the machine. I tried to bring the Butcher Gang to life the other day, and they came out nothing better than mindless beasts!

“There’s only one thing left I haven’t tried… I’ve removed Boris’s organs for study, and Bendy stopped me from taking more than an eye from Alice… I think it’s time I move on to the little devil himself.”

Slowly, cautiously, Henry reached for the smaller of the two jars and began to unwrap it. Inside of the glass container, preserved by some sort of liquid like every other organ jar he’d seen before it, was a glassy black orb with a triangular notch carved into one side.

He heard Alice suck in a breath behind her. “That’s… that’s my eye.”

Suddenly Henry had an awful feeling that he knew what was in the other jar.

As if moving through molasses, he carefully handed Alice her eye back (she cupped it in her hands reverentially, tentatively, as if it was going to disappear), and then reached for the other jar. It vibrated under his fingertips when they touched it, and when he whipped off the fabric, he found exactly what he’d desperately hoped he wouldn’t find.

Suspended in the other jar, smaller than any other he’d seen in this ink-stained hellhole and still beating, was a tiny inky heart.

And Henry had no doubt in his mind just whose it was.

When they were safely out of sight and hearing of the mangled Butcher Gang monsters roaming the halls, Alice put her eye back in. It was shockingly easy, though he supposed he should have expected it to be so. Real or no, human-looking or no, Alice was a cartoon. All that really needed to be done was for her to pop the orb back into its socket, and then it worked perfectly fine.

While Alice was elated that her eye had been returned, Henry was less so. Oh, he was happy he’d been able to finally help someone in this wretched place, but his mood had taken a steep nose-dive ever since finding the little heart in its jar.

The very same jar he now held in his hands, watching the black organ beat with his own heart heavy in his chest.

Popping in an eye was one thing. Putting a heart back… well, considering what had happened the last time one of his hands had been anywhere near Bendy’s chest, he didn’t think the demon would let him help put it back the same way Alice had with her eye.

And just when he’d thought he might be able to help the little devil, too…

… No, Henry decided finally. He couldn’t just give up now.

He had to try.

“Alice,” he whispered, looking her in the eyes. “Do you know… where I might be able to find Bendy?”

The Ink Demon’s lair was at the very bottom of the studio – which, thankfully, was only a couple of floors below them – and apparently also where the chains suspending the Ink Machine were anchored. Somehow, Henry couldn’t say he was surprised. It was just the way his luck was going.

It had taken next to no time to reach the place, too, though they’d needed to find a way to open the door in the film vault before moving on. Alice hadn’t been too happy about helping Bendy, but all Henry had really needed to do to convince her was hold up the little beating heart in its jar, give her a look, and say that if she’d suffered so much only having an eye removed, then what would not having a heart do to someone, and she’d grumpily agreed to help. Good to know she still had a shred of her morals left, at least.

When they’d reached the shore of the inky sea that lingered between them and their destination, the melted skin around Alice’s eye had begun to heal, and he’d swear she’d started to shrink. And, upon seeing the black lake between them and their destination, and how Alice and Boris had both flinched away from the edge… Henry knew he had to go on alone.

Now, in the entrance hall to the steampunk-esque lair, watching the door creep open, Henry couldn’t help but notice that the heart in the jar had started beating much faster than it had been before. And it kept beating faster as he walked forward, even faster as he turned the corner and saw a makeshift chair up ahead… until suddenly, it stopped just as he stepped up to the middle of the room and stared at the enormous chain links hanging from the throne.

There was a tape recorder on the chair. It looked like someone had taken claws to it. And for good reason, as it turned out, because it was another of Joey’s recordings that played when he hit the button.

Henry could feel nothing but fury when he finished listening.

How dare he! He expected Henry to dance to his tune after seeing so much, seeing what Joey had done to the toons? He expected Henry to end them as if they were nothing more than actual monsters to exterminate?!

Henry decided, in that moment of rage, that he would rather die than do what Joey wanted of him ever again. And he made this clear, he decided later, when he grabbed the “End” tape and smashed it into smithereens on the ground, even if at the time he’d thought there was no-one there to see it.

Then a sharp sound, something somewhere between a growl, a gurgling death rattle, and someone gargling glass shards, drew his attention to something he’d thought was just a deep shadow on the far side of the room.

It wasn’t a shadow. It was Bendy, curled up and almost flattened against the wall, as far away from him as the demon could feasibly get. And somehow, despite his eyes not being visible behind the curtains of ink, Henry had the impression that the giant toon was staring wide-eyed at him.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

Bendy’s shoulders raised like hackles.

Henry carefully edged around the chair – or maybe it was a throne, considering its size, though Henry was trying hard not to think too much about the chains dangling from the thing and what those meant for Bendy – and approached slowly, one step at a time. The demon’s growling grew in volume and in desperation until it was closer to a keening cry than a growl, and it was then that Henry stopped, well out of arm’s reach – for him. Bendy could probably reach him if he tried.

The sudden silence as the demon realized he wasn’t coming any closer seemed somehow louder than the keening had been.

“Easy, buddy,” he whispered. Cautiously, he crouched down and placed the jar and its delicate cargo on the ground. Within the curved glass, Bendy’s heart was starting to beat faster again, and the demon’s head tilted to follow the motion even as the rest of him went very still. “I’m not going to hurt you again. I’m just returning something that Joey shouldn’t have taken from you in the first place.”

A low sound hissed out of Bendy’s permanent grin, skeptical and distrusting.

“I mean it, Bendy,” he said, still speaking softly. He stood up and stepped back, giving the giant toon a sad smile. “Joey shouldn’t have done what he did. I might not have been here to stop him… but I can at least put some of the things he did wrong to right.”

He turned and left the room, leaving the jar behind. He paused to listen just after turning a corner into the wider expanse of Bendy’s lair. For almost a minute, there was nothing. Then he heard a slow shift of movement, and the sound of claws scraping against glass.

Henry didn’t stick around after that. Considering that Alice had just popped her eye back in, he didn’t really want a reason to think about what Bendy would do to put his own missing piece back. He just hoped that the demon knew how to fix himself, and Henry didn’t need to get involved more than he already had. So, instead of thinking about what was going on in the room behind him, he explored the cavernous metal halls of the demon’s lair. The place was remarkably barren, for a “lair”; save for a large room full of giant Bendy plushes that looked like someone large and inky had been using them as a bed, there was nothing but metal walls and floors and ink pipes to be seen.

Henry did eventually find a set of stairs hidden behind a wall panel in one of the smaller caverns of the place, though, a set of stairs just barely big enough for something of Bendy’s size to squeeze themselves into. And when he ascended it, he found himself on not another level to the place, like he was half expecting, but the roof of the structure… and in front of the Ink Machine.

He couldn’t help but stop and stare at the machine, the miracle of nature that Joey had created… and then apparently deemed not good enough. He hadn’t been able to get a good look at the thing when he’d turned it on, everything had gone to hell too fast – God, it felt so long ago now, how long had he been here? – but now that it was before him…

Well, the machine looked like it was suffering, just like the creatures it had created. Ugly black runes, like the ones that he’d sometimes seem in the ink and flowing through the pipes, pulsed like a ragged heartbeat across the metal surface. It looked… sickly. Wrong in a way he couldn’t quite articulate, but was still very real despite that.

“So Joey messed this up too, huh?” He chuckled bitterly to himself. “Can’t ever do it by half, can you, Joey?”

He stepped forward, walking right up to the side of the machine. (He barely noticed the Bendy cutout there, though it did strike him as odd that there was one up here.) He hesitated, eyeing the pulsing runes for a long moment. Then he laid a hand on the metal.

It thrummed against his skin, the metal charged with energy. But, just like the runes, there was a wrongness to it he didn’t know how to describe, something that went so deep into the metal it almost felt like part of it. Henry sighed and closed his eyes, shaking his head.

“Idiot,” he muttered. “What did you think was going to happen? I don’t know a thing about magic… I couldn’t fix this if I tried.”

He pulled his hand back, opening his eyes with a frown – and started.

The runes nearest to his hand… had turned gold.

Shocked, Henry placed his hand back on the metal, and watched as the fading color brightened once more, currents of gold swirling out from under his hand and into the markings, black turning to yellow, something lifeless and wrong becoming… bright.

He’d… seen something like this before. Once. He’d been teamed up with two wizards by his employers, both young and upcoming fellows who had very different views on how their magic should be used. One had been the calm sort of man you wanted on a team, the other hotheaded and convinced that his way was the right way and no-one else’s. And when the first had cast a spell with runes, Henry had been given the dubious pleasure of watching the hotheaded one try to subvert the other’s magic with his own, forcing it into the runes and changing their color while trying to take control of the spell.

It had worked, for all of five seconds. Then the spell had blown up in his face. It hadn’t been a pretty sight.

So why was… why was Henry affecting Joey’s runes like this? He wasn’t a wizard. He’d never had a lick of talent for any kind of magic, despite trying every branch he’d heard of when he was but a little boy with too-big ears. Whereas Joey had had magic practically coming out of his pores from the moment he’d met the man… well, magic and the usual bull that was Joey being Joey.

Henry experimented. He touched different runes, only to find he had the same effect on all of them. He walked around to the other side of the machine. He switched hands. He even (after looking around to make sure he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself) planted his face against the metal, to see if that would change anything.

The runes reacted the same every time, gold subverting the black and glowing brilliantly until the physical contact stopped, and then the sick darkness seeped back in.

“Why is this happening?” he whispered.

Movement, behind him. Henry turned his head, still trying to puzzle out what was going on, to find Bendy had appeared at the top of the stairwell – and the man took a moment to study his creation for distress or injuries… or any sign that Bendy was still feeling murderous and wanting to, say, push him off the edge of the lair and into the inky sea below.

No injuries, at least. If anything, the demon already looked… healthier than Henry remembered. He seemed a little less skeletal, the curtains of ink sloughing off of him much thinner, more like trickles than waterfalls. It meant that Henry was actually seeing more solid “skin” than liquid ink at this point, which also meant he got an unfortunately good view of the livid-looking wound on the demon’s chest, and just how far down the ribs it traveled. Had Joey meant to cut Bendy completely open, only to stop partway down?

The demon didn’t look too murderous, either, though he definitely seemed wary, or maybe suspicious, if the way he was keeping his distance was any indication. Henry decided to take what he could get.

“Hey, buddy.” Quiet, calm, and soothing was probably the best way to go for now. No need to startle the big guy. “Don’t suppose you know what’s going on with this?”

He brushed his hand over the runes again, turning then gold once more. The demon’s response, after a few moments, was a low, wary sound that, in much the same way many of Boris’s gestures seemed to be able to convey more meaning they should be able to, managed to come across as something akin to I don’t know what you mean?

“I don’t know a whole lot about magic, but I know that runes don’t generally change color unless some new kind of magic is traveling through them, and trying to overcome what’s already there,” Henry explained patiently. “Thing is, though, I don’t have a lick of magic in me, so I don’t know why I’m making them change color.”

That earned him the most expressive expression he’d ever earned from the demon – a look of incredulous deep suspicion that, if he had to put into words, would have said who do you think you’re trying to fool?  Henry was actually sort of impressed – it had to be hard to convey that sort of emotion without moving your mouth or using your eyes.

“Look,” he said, patiently. “I know you don’t trust me. Honestly, considering what little I know happened to you, it’s actually pretty reasonable that you don’t. I wouldn’t trust any other friend of Joey’s at this point, either. But this is one thing you can trust me on – I’ve never been able to use magic in my life.”

The sound that came in response to those words sounded a bit like it had been a snort before a whole mouthful of ink had gotten involved and turned it into a splort. Henry frowned, and removed his hand from the machine again.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Bendy,” he murmured. “It’s the truth. I’ve never had a spark of magic in me since the day I was born. Closest thing I ever got to doing anything magic was when I first started drawing you.”

Another snort, though Henry would like to think that this one came out a little less aggressive than the last one. Then he heard the tell-tale lopsided drag of the demon’s footsteps coming towards him, and tried not to stiffen. After all, Bendy hadn’t outright attacked him yet. Unless the demon actually went for his throat, it was only fair to give him the benefit of the doubt, right?

Well, while Bendy didn’t go for his throat, he definitely went for the wrist. Henry winced as he felt one of the toon’s clawed fingers scrape over his wrist, drawing blood. With the demon practically looming over him, it made him feel like he’d been cornered, and suddenly he was a lot more nervous than he’d been before. Was Bendy going to continue their twisted game of cat and mouse now, right when he’d thought that maybe he’d fixed something?

But as it turned out, no. While Henry was clutching his wrist to staunch the bleeding, the red-tipped claw that had opened the wound in the first place pressed a smear of red against one of the runes, and Henry watched as it turned gold again… without him having to touch it at all.

“Oh. Blood?” He asked. “It’s because of the blood?”

Bendy aggressively jabbed the bloodied finger at him.

“My blood?” Henry asked, brows furrowing in confusion. “That… that doesn’t make any sense. Why would my blood be important here? It’s not like Joey used it to paint the runes. Besides, I said I don’t have magic. Why would any blood at all make a difference?”

The demon huffed, obviously frustrated, and maybe a little angry now. He jabbed his finger at Henry again, even more aggressively, practically digging the claw into his chest.

“Why would my blood make any difference?” Henry corrected himself again with a frown. “Sorry, buddy, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me here.”

This time the frustration came out as a dangerous-sounding, rattling growl, and the claw did dig into his chest, drawing blood once more. Henry winced and leaned back even as the demon leaned forward, putting emphasis on the gesture.

“ C-crea-tor.”

It took him several seconds too long for Henry to realize that it had been Bendy that had uttered that word, and not some other ink monster that had crawled its way out of the Ink Machine’s spout. The demon’s voice was mangled beyond belief, the word coming out more like it was made of shards of glass gouging into Bendy’s throat than actual syllables, with that last “r” transforming into a horrid wet hacking sound partway through. It sounded painful, and it looked like it was painful too, if the way Bendy immediately drew back to hunch over and try not to curl into a ball was any indication.

Then the word itself actually registered.

Creator.

It might have not seemed so important, Henry couldn’t help but think, if he hadn’t felt the odd gravitas behind the word. If the black runes on the Ink Machine felt wrong, then this word felt right, something twisting and golden in the air. He could practically feel the power the demon put behind the word as it echoed around them.

Wait. No, word wasn’t quite right. He sucked in a breath as one of many scrawled messages on the walls flashed before his eyes: The Creator Lied to Us.

“Creator” wasn’t just a word. It was a title. And Bendy had called him Creator.

“I thought… Joey was the one who built the machine, who brought you to life in the first place. Why are you calling me the…”

Only it did make sense, in a matter of speaking. Once he thought about it. Joey had certainly loved the characters – but he hadn’t loved them the same way that Henry had. Joey’s love of the characters, Henry realized now, had been based on their popularity, which ones drew in more money to spend on ever-larger projects or line Joey’s pockets with. And clearly, Joey had never loved them enough to stop and consider hmm maybe dissecting them isn’t a good idea, otherwise the original Boris would still be alive, and Alice and Bendy would have never become what they were now.

But Henry? Henry had poured heart and soul into his little trio. He’d loved those characters not because they earned him money, but because he cared about the then fictional lives he was illustrating. They’d never just been lines on a paper for him, not like they had been for Joey.

And… that hadn’t really changed even when he’d ended up in this hellhole, had it? Even with Bendy huge and monstrous, with Alice having become a psychopath, and Boris far too meek to be the strong but silent character he’d been meant to be, they were still his characters. He’d never been able to bring himself to hate any of them.

And even though Henry didn’t have a spark of magic to his name, even he knew that while the main power of a spell was in the words and in the magic, intent was important as well. You couldn’t curse someone unless you wanted them to hurt. You couldn’t heal unless you wanted to make the injuries better.

Joey had wanted the toons, or at least Bendy, dead. He at least feared them, if not outright hated them. Henry didn’t. He wanted to save them. And he’d bet anything, now that he’d had time to think, that that was why the runes were letting him, a magickless old man, subvert them with just a touch.

“Bendy… what would happen if I managed to subvert Joey’s magic in the runes? Do you know?”

The demon, still wheezing a little from his horrible coughing fit, shook his head. Henry tipped his head back to look up at the Machine, frowning.

The black runes were in the ink as well as on the machine. Henry had seen them for himself – and actually, come to think of it, if that ink was still flowing through the machine, it was possible that those very runes in the ink were what were causing his gold to fade.

That didn’t help matters much from his current viewpoint, though. Unless…

Henry swallowed. Then took a step forward, grabbed a gear, and started hoisting himself up the side of the machine.

The tank at the top of the Ink Machine, where ink from all over the studio was pumped through, was massive, especially from close up. Still, it wasn’t nearly enough to hold all the ink in the studio at once, so even as Henry, after several minutes of climbing and then trying to figure out how to uncover it, finally managed to pull aside the metal lid, the black liquid below bubbled and frothed as pumps forced them in and out through pipes. The sound from this close up was positively thunderous as well, like the world’s loudest and most self-contained waterfall.

The interior of the tank was also coated, not with ink as he had thought, but more of those diseased black runes, so many of them he could barely tell some of them apart.

Henry frowned down at the frothing black below him, not sure where to go from here. He’d had a vague idea to try when he’d started on his way up here – that idea had been to stick his hand in the ink and see what happened. But with those runes there, he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. For all he knew, Joey had foreseen this happening and had made sure there were safety measures on the inside of the tank so that nobody would be able to subvert his magic like Henry intended to.

Henry could feel a heavy, intense gaze burning into the back of his skull from below, though, and he still needed to try something. Even if it was risky… he couldn’t risk that doing nothing would be the worst mistake he could ever make.

Testing the runes inside of the machine revealed that they too changed to gold when his hand made contact. Hopefully that meant they’d be relatively safe. Henry tentatively leaned down, holding onto one of the few dry patches on the edge of the tank to anchor himself, and reached out.

The instant that his hand touched the whirling, frothing waves of black liquid, three things happened at once.

The first was that every little rune of magic he hadn’t been able to see before in the ink lit up like a yellow firework, starting at where his fingers brushed the surface and spreading outwards like turbulent ripples.

The second was that, unseen by Henry through the clouded glass, Bendy stiffened as golden runes appeared around him as well as ink full of newly uncorrupted power began to pump out through the studio.

And the third… well, the third was a far less pleasant thing to occur, for one Henry Stein, though later he’d find himself wondering if doing it any other way would have had the same undeniably successful results.

The Ink Machine, suddenly under pressure it wasn’t meant to handle from two different sources of power – the magic that had created it, and the power that was not magic but had claim to it – shuddered and bucked on its chains like a horse as magical corruption was sloughed off of it.

Henry, old man that he was, couldn’t hold on tight enough to the edge to keep himself from falling down down down into the ink.

And with that, the studio filled with golden light.

Chapter Text

Have you ever wondered just how it is that nature, that reality itself, functions?

It is not a question that can be asked casually. While some might muse upon the nature of the cosmos, on the cycles that perpetuate the biomes of the natural world or even on the forces at work on a molecular level, the whole of reality itself is a daunting thing to think on, and for good reason. It is insurmountable, infinite, so large as to defy the comprehension of mortals and sometimes even the gods they worship. It is constantly changing and shifting, moving to the steps some dance or to the beat of some song unseen and unheard by the individuals, worlds, universes, even entire multiverses caught up in it. As such, it is not something to be mused upon lightly and so most beings, one way or another, decide it is simply not worth the trouble contemplating – and it is just as well, for it is in the nature of all sentient beings to one day meddle in things that are perhaps best left alone.

But, for all that most of reality perpetuates itself without assistance, there are forces within it that are governed, not by nature, not by time or infinity itself, but by much more finite beings. Beings that despite their relative newness in the infinite, never-beginning and never-ending existence of Everything, have much power and influence over those forces of nature that help govern the lives of “lesser” beings. Mortals, those ascending, gods themselves… these beings have power over many.

These beings, these individuals of great power that have never been matched save by reality itself… they are known as the Powers that Be. Those who rule over and embody the things that direct mortal and godly lives alike – once gods themselves, but now something so much greater. And amongst them, amongst the ranks of beings such as Time, Luck, Evolution, and Destiny, there is the one who begins this tale, the one known as Fate.

In the beginning of the multiverse in which this story unfolds, there was but a single universe. One singular world, adrift in the sea of emptiness known as the Void, which despite its loneliness held strong. Unlike other worlds, who often relied upon their multitudes of alternate worlds to buffer them, to hold the Void at bay for them and protect them, this one speck in the middle of infinity had no such need for alternate worlds. Unlike others to rise from the Void, it buffered itself against the endless hunger of infinity, constantly cycling through timelines again and again and again and thus negating the damage endlessly caused by that empty ocean all on its own. Without interference, this world could have persisted perhaps to the end of time itself, forever holding its own in the Void even as its inhabitants were locked in an endless repeat of the same days, months, and years.

But then, amidst the ranks of the Powers that Be came Fate. Fate who, upon seeing this singular world adrift in the nothingness between already existing multiverses, saw not something that should be left to its own devices, but something to be built upon. She saw potential in this lonely little world, a world of monsters locked underground and men dwelling upon the surface, and thought it a shame that such a universe had not expanded upon itself. And so, peering into the world, she selected the being she saw with the most potential for creativity, and from the ashes of already dying worlds elsewhere in the cosmos she sculpted the first true god of the multiverse to come; the Creator, the color-splattered skeleton known as Ink. Setting her child loose upon the emptiness around this lonely little world, she watched as her creation painted new worlds, alternate universes that should not have existed in the first place – so many unique, creative worlds that soon her entire attention was focused upon this infant, unnatural multiverse, all her fascination held by it – and soon, all her affection held by the being she had created to make it.

Fate did not mean harm to any, at first. Curiosity is hardly an evil thing, after all. But, just as curiosity can lead to the death of a cat, so too can the curiosity of the Powers that Be lead them to creating something that ultimately is doomed to fail if left alone.

As said before, infinity itself has laws that must be followed, laws that integrate themselves into every multiverse. Individual worlds such as the one Fate had stumbled across were meant to be the lonely little things that they were, for that was how reality itself had dictated. Self-sustaining worlds without a multiverse would last forever against the Void – and as such, the variations of such a world brought to life by the Creator would also never perish. And no matter the multiverse, there is never such a thing as infinite capacity. One world can only ever produce so many alternates of itself before the oldest of them eventually fade, and are consumed by the Void. With those worlds’ deaths, room for more worlds is made, and so the multiverse continues. It is a natural cycle, perpetuated by existence itself… but by creating a multiverse that should not have existed, by sculpting a Creator who could create worlds that forever held strong against the Void, Fate went against those natural laws and thus sowed the seeds of a forever flawed cycle.

Fate did not realize her folly, at first. For all she had meant no harm, her relative newness as one of the Powers that Be had made her proud, haughty, convinced she could do no wrong. What was a common problem amongst gods, the folly of hubris, had only been exasperated by Fate’s ascension into something far greater – and so it would be almost too late for her multiverse before she finally noticed its self-destruction approaching. In creating her little Creator and this leading to the formation of immortal worlds that the Void could not touch, Fate had essentially created a metaphysical cancer in the body of reality, an ever-expanding web of worlds that caused reality itself to begin to bend in ways that were most unnatural to that region. And just like any body attempting to fight off an invader, reality thus became inflamed. In Fate’s new multiverse, worlds were slowly forced together as reality attempted to preemptively fix the damage being done to it by herding them towards their own self-destruction.

And when she realized what was happening, when the first tiny group of worlds self-destructed and their painted codes scattered into the ever-hungering black, her hubris suffered a great blow. Infuriated by reality’s apparent need to thwart her, at its need to begin tearing down the worlds her created child loved so much, she searched for a means to allow her child’s multiverse to persist – and, when she could not find a way to do so that went against the indifferent cosmos, she chose to do so using a means that that indifference would not fight against. If there were too many worlds stemming from one singular one, and her child wished to continue creating, then the solution was simple – create a Destroyer to counteract the Creator, an artificial source of death for worlds meant to be immortal.

If Fate had done so without any real ire to the being she was to form, then perhaps this story would have been much different. But Fate, enraged by the cosmos rejecting her wishes and the wishes of her favored child, had much ire against the being she felt she was being forced to create. And so, whereas her Creator had been made with love and watched from afar with great affection, Fate had no love for the future Destroyer. She refused to create a counterpart to Ink with the same attention she had given him – and so, when she found a Sans in one outlying world in her multiverse that had the potential to be a Destroyer, she was merciless. She tore his world to shreds, every last monster and human, every last mountain and sea turned to ashes. From those ashes she created the realm that would eventually be called the Anti-Void, a realm of white nothingness with no land, no beings to see and only the thundering echoes of her own Voice to be heard.

It was into this endless white that she dropped that Sans with the potential to Destroy, and in that white that she tore his code apart and pieced it back together. The monster’s very code was altered, the potential that she had seen in him forced to grow like a weed. From him she ripped his mortality, his monsterhood, even his magic, and replaced it with what she saw as abominable versions of themselves, and all the time she did, the echoes of her Voice screamed as individual voices in the being’s head until his Mind had been ripped apart. And only when she was finished driving him insane were her strings wrapped around him like those of a puppet, and the suffering Destroyer, the outcode with no home and no family, the being soon to only be known as Error, was set upon the multiverse at large.

It was a cursed existence that Error was to lead, centuries spent alone with only his own madness and the voices that were a part of Fate’s Will for company as the rest of the multiverse learned to fear and hate him. But even as Fate and the Creator hated him more and more, and many followed their lead without ever knowing the truth of his importance, of his role, of his very existence… there was one being that never followed suit. A being that Fate ignored, thinking her powerless and unimportant in the face of running her multiverse the way she wished it to be run.

But there is not a single Power that is unimportant, and Destiny would not sit idle while her favored child remained Fate’s mindless puppet.

The Powers that Be were not inherently cruel beings. Just like any other sentient life in the cosmos, they all had the potential to be cruel and kind both. But, upon seeing how Fate treated the Destroyer of her artificial multiverse, Destiny could not help but think that Fate had far more cruelty to her than kindness. What reason was there to make a monster suffer so?

Fate was not the only Power that had watched as this new multiverse had grown and developed. Destiny was always in Fate’s shadow wherever she went, and it was far too easy to go unnoticed. Of the two, Fate had always been the strongest – she commanded, demanded that lives play out the way she wished, that worlds last for as long as she insisted they last, and it was not uncommon for the rules of reality to defy her and send her into a fury that would not abide for centuries. With such a nature, Destiny often had no choice but to stand by as her “sibling” went about manipulating entire multiverses and the lives therein, only able to watch as the other Power’s victims were slowly but surely subsumed into her web. It was only when those very strings snaring them were cut that she could assist those she wished to, only then that she could catch those falling souls on butterfly wings and gently bear them down a new path where they could forge their own fate, their own destiny, with as little interference from her as possible.

Normally, she would have laid idle even as Fate continued along her chosen path of cruelty. For all she was kinder than her “sister,” Destiny saw no reason to interfere with mortal lives unless they fell from Fate’s grasp. But never before had Fate taken one of her fellow Powers’ favored and twisted them so, forced them into a life they did not want simply on a whim and then made them suffer. And it was Destiny’s favored that she had taken, Destiny’s favored that was being tortured and driven into lonely insanity to become a mindless plaything. She had watched over Error’s world almost since the moment of its creation, intrigued by just how different it was from the other worlds. The Sans that Error had once been, in particular, had been someone she would gladly watch over for all eternity, if it were possible – a Sans who, instead of following the script of his world, had tried to change it, had tried to alter the very code of his world to make it better for all the monsters that lived alongside him. He had been a reality bender, a being who manipulated the very code of the cosmos in an attempt to help his world forge his own destiny, and had at least partially succeeded.

That had, unfortunately, likely been what had drawn Fate to him in the first place. And likely why she had altered him as she had. Before then, only the knowledge that Error’s world was one of Ink’s creations had stayed Fate’s hand – but upon needing a Destroyer, that had been the only excuse she’d needed to twist something she did not approve of to her own whims. And now Error was alone, an outcode in a multiverse that hated him.

There had to be something she could do. Her “sibling” may have been stronger than her, but Destiny was far from powerless herself. There had to be something she could do to loosen those strings, and make it possible for Error to break himself free. She refused to believe that such a thing was impossible.

But what could that something be? What could Destiny do, when she could not even so much as touch one of those strings without Fate knowing, and tightening her hold so that her “sibling” could not “steal” from her again? It was on this question that Destiny ruminated for centuries as she watched. She watched as the multiverse grew and shrank, as the Creator grew angrier and angrier at her Destroyer (Fate had not even bothered to tell Ink what Error was, had never told him of the Balance that now must be upheld – and to think that once she’d thought that Fate still had lines she would not cross) and his creations followed suit, drawn to follow in their Creator’s footsteps by his divinity like moths to a flame.

And then, then… she finally found her answer, in a single world that sent ripples across the cosmos and drew Fate’s ire like a beacon on a dark night upon the moment of its creation. A world, Destiny found, to have housed two gods not unlike the Destroyer and the Creator themselves – gods that upheld a new balance that had surged into existence, yet another balance that Fate had no wish to exist in her multiverse, the balance of Life and Death. And when some of Fate’s attention turned towards those infant gods that Ink had created and that Fate clearly hadn’t wanted to be created, the strings on Error grew slack. And, in a moment of inspiration, Destiny reached out and delicately, carefully, snapped a small bundle of strings… and Fate had not noticed.

It was then that Destiny finally had the beginnings of a plan take root in her Mind, as she retreated to avoid Fate’s notice and watched as Error shivered in reaction to the strings breaking. If Fate’s attention being drawn elsewhere would allow Destiny to forcibly break the other Power’s machinations… then all Destiny had to do was make absolutely certain that there were always being beyond Fate’s control in the multiverse to distract her.

After that, Destiny spent almost as much time out in the multiverse as she did watching over Error. She searched high and low through various worlds, worlds of all kinds, looking for monsters and humans alike who were attempting to forge their own destiny and just needed one minuscule nudge to begin on their path, and thus distract Fate from her Destroyer. These individuals, however, were few and far between – most worlds that Ink had created, though not precisely happy with their lot in life, were not precisely unhappy either, and Fate still had a firm hold on them – and those few that she did not have a firm grasp on would still willingly follow Ink’s lead regardless, trailing after the allure of his divinity with no care as to the harm caused to the Creator’s “enemy.” Those few wanting to change their destinies – those in worlds where monsters or humans suffered anything from famine to never-ending wars to endless no mercy runs – often had nowhere to go should they attempt to escape their fates, because one way or another they had nowhere to go but back to their own worlds, where they had to play to what Ink and Fate had deemed to be their timeline else something worse happen to them.

This made Destiny’s plan more than a little difficult, because although she could have forcibly nudged some of those monsters into a position where their lives could start to be rewritten, doing so would have alerted Fate to her scheming. Which meant she could feasibly be waiting entire centuries for mortals to drift just close enough to her influence for her to reach them without Fate realizing she had a hand in their divergence.

Destiny was fully prepared to do so, if needed, but thankfully, it would turn out that such a long wait would be unnecessary – because, completely by accident mind you, she would find a being with just enough willpower to pull themselves to that brink of Fate and Destiny, and just enough power to begin a widespread butterfly effect across the multiverse and lead so many just shy of that precipice over it. A single demigod in a small world ruled over by the dual forces of positive and negative emotion, who, fed up with the abuse from the villagers that should have revered him and his brother’s naivety, plucked the very apples he was supposed to be guarding from their tree and in consuming them, corrupted himself and became something new. That one act pushed the former guardian onto Destiny’s radar, right onto that precipice, and she jumped at the chance to guide yet another down a new path and distract Fate, and thus the demigod known as Nightmare was freed from her “sibling’s” machinations.

Destiny did not realize just how big of a hurricane this metaphorical butterfly would cause until she saw the corrupted demigod proceed to tear across the entire Multiverse on a warpath. Peaceful worlds slain, the monsters and humans of violent worlds recruited to his cause, an entire small army’s worth of the unfortunate, the disgruntled, the murderers and cannibals and restless ghosts – it sent ripples across the entire branching system of worlds like none she’d ever seen before, even when Reapertale had first been created. A single being freed from Fate had led to a flood of others, and Fate was so livid that she had almost forgotten Error in her fury. And, in the midst of that chaos as Fate furiously tried to regain control of the “evil” monsters going after her child’s “peaceful” worlds and send them back where they had come from, Destiny quickly snipped string after string, one tiny bundle at a time, until finally the haze of madness that had once pervaded Error’s entire body began to fade, she caught her first glimpses of his Will finally resurfacing, and nearly wept in relief at the sight.

Yet, for all Fate’s hold over him was weakening, Error was still in no state to try to break her strings on his own yet. His memories of his former life were gone. His Mind, though no longer in thrall, was heavily scarred and would probably never fully heal, and his Will was still so incredibly fragile that Destiny feared it might break at the slightest push in the wrong direction. With his mind and soul in such tatters, it was no surprise to her that he chose to continue following Fate’s commands. Even as the war continued to distract Fate as new players were freed from her grasp, and Destiny broke more strings, Error continued doing his duty, and other than now fighting to keep his own mind and ignore the Voices that Fate used to discipline him through cruelty, he did not attempt to fight back.

The problem, Destiny realized after a time, was no longer that Fate was too strong for Error to fight back against, but simply that he didn’t have the motivation to fight The entire multiverse still loathed and feared him, after all, so what was the point of trying to change if all they would ever do was attack him over and over again whenever he so much as appeared in a ten-mile radius of them? Then, of course, there was the whole balance of Creation and Destruction to uphold… and unlike Ink, Error was very much aware of what might happen to the multiverse should he stop destroying. It was a vicious cycle, and unless something else were to happen to make Error decide to try to make a break for freedom, he would forever perpetuate it because he saw no other way.

Fortunately, Destiny no longer had to actively search for a solution at this point. In any other version of her child’s multiverse, perhaps, she might have had to wait centuries more before something presented itself to solve her problems. But in this case, the beginning of the solution came when a Sans – a Sans that shared a body with a Chara, one of the scapegoats of the multiverse, a Sans and a Chara that tore through the already war-torn multiverse in an effort to gather the codes that might just bring their destroyed world back to life – stumbled across Error while fleeing from an enraged Creator. And her child, who might have once destroyed the skeleton at Fate’s prompting, instead chose to spare him, and, in a moment of selflessness that was becoming heartbreakingly common in Destiny’s mind, put himself between Cross and Ink long enough for the former to escape.

The tiny flap of a butterfly’s wings, that was, and it quickly grew to a gale when Cross, later recruited by Nightmare as a part of his “gang,” mentioned Error’s actions, and caught the demigod’s attention. And the gale did not in the least subside when Nightmare decided to confront her child about his actions – instead, it only got stronger as the demigod quickly realized there was something going on, and continued to chase after the ever-agitated Error until finally, finally, he learned the truth that Ink was ignorant of and that had become Error’s entire life… and that, it seemed, was the tipping point to finally start Error down the path he needed to travel down in order to free himself, and for him to actually start breaking some of Fate’s strings on his own.

Unfortunately, despite her heart becoming so much lighter than it had been before at the sight of Error being slowly but surely accepted by Nightmare’s gang (and forcibly adopted into it via kidnapping, which she couldn’t help but notice seemed to be a common thing to occur whenever Nightmare was involved), Destiny knew that the struggle was far from over, and that now the most critical part of her plan was approaching. She’d had centuries to think this over, as her schemes had slowly borne fruit, and she had realized, long ago, that just as the Sanses of the murderous, “evil” worlds had needed a way to escape from their universes in order to escape the vicious cycles that were their fates, so too would Error need a way to escape his multiverse and leave Fate in the dust. And so, sure now that Error could hold his ground against Fate’s influence for at least a while on his own, Destiny quickly set off into the space between multiverses in an attempt to find somewhere – a multiverse, even a single world – where her “sibling” could not reach him.

The Powers that Be, despite being the most powerful sentient beings in existence, were not all-knowing, nor all powerful. If they had been, then they would not have been limited to being the embodiment of a single thing like fate or destiny, and would instead have been a manifestation of everything all at once. Their limited power was something that Destiny was gambling heavily on, that somewhere, somehow, there would be a world where Fate’s influence was nonexistent or, barring that, at least so weak that she would not easily be able to track Error down.

This was easier said than done. For all that Fate was not all-powerful, there wasn’t a single world that Destiny had found yet in her immortal life that her “sister” did not influence somehow, and in enough quantities that Error would likely not have long at all to heal before being caught up in the spiteful being’s web once more. And caught up in the web he would be, if she could not find him sanctuary. Destiny knew Fate, better than many other Powers that Be knew one another – when her Destroyer disappeared and the multiverse he helped maintain began to fail, Fate would drop everything to search for him, and she refused to let that happen.

And so Destiny searched. She searched, and searched. She scoured every world she could find, be it one a part of a multiverse or one that floated alone in the void as the original timeline of Fate’s multiverse had once done. Some worlds were unstable, their codes so fragile that a single new factor might just send them spiraling into oblivion. Some worlds were barely holding onto life, frozen moments away from falling into ruin and thus into the ever-hungry Void. Some worlds shone so bright with Fate’s influence that they looked, in the strange vision one possessed when traveling between parts of reality, like glowing orbs of light, smothered in her strings.

The more she searched, the more Destiny realized that finding a world for Error to take shelter in long enough to heal was becoming more and more unlikely – in fact, it was starting to seem impossible. But that would not be, she refused to accept that was how it would be, and so, even as she checked repeatedly on Error and watched as, one by one, he managed to snip yet more and more of Fate’s strings on his own, she scoured the cosmos. As her desperation grew, she even went so far as to ask the other Powers that Be if they could possibly shield Error from Fate… only to find none willing. Luck and Time were indifferent, and all other beings she asked that could possibly shield Error were far too frightened of Fate’s wrath to ever agree to what she was suggesting.

Time was running out as more and more of Fate’s strings were cut, and Destiny realized, her heart sinking again, that one way or another, it was starting to seem that Error would be returning to Fate’s web one way or another.

It was when she was returning from one of her searches of the infinite once more metaphorically empty-handed when she saw something… strange. Glimpsed at only a distance, a most unusual distortion of the Void… and the tell-tale light of a world glinting, partially hidden, in its midst.

She could not stop then, not right away, for she had spent too long away and needed to check upon Error once more, but once she had done (and winced at the new injuries her child had obtained from his latest battle with Ink, though she found it heartening to see that the makeshift gaggle of friends and allies Nightmare had introduced him to were doing their best to help him patch himself up in more ways than one), she returned to that place in space and time that she had fixed in her memory, to see if what she had glimpsed was merely a hallucination of the beyond… and found that it was not. There was, indeed, a small, lonely glow mostly concealed in the wave-like, nebula-like curls of the Void that hovered about it. If it had not been for the angle she had seen it at, she might never have noticed it at all, so well was it concealed.

Curious, hopeful, and apprehensive all at once, Destiny slowly approached the tiny light.

It was a world. Smaller than most she had seen, so small that if worlds could only be viewed on some cosmic microscope it would have been so small as to be nearly invisible. No multiverse, no sign of timeline loops that could allow it to persist so close to the Void… and, to her shock, the faintest gleam of influence from Fate she had ever seen in all the worlds she’d scouted.

Could this be the world I was looking for? Could this be a place Error could call sanctuary?

It was with growing hope that Destiny ignored her wariness of the Void, and reached out towards the world, preparing to send a trickle of power through its borders to see what lay underneath.

And it was with shock, and what would have been a startled scream had her current form been capable of making true sounds, that she reeled back when something that should not have happened, something she had never seen happen in her long, long life, happened.

The Void – the mindless hungering force that even Fate herself, with all her hubris, feared, the force that had no Power that controlled it – moved.

It moved.

The Void was not meant to move.

And yet from the endless black, the aimless drifting of emptiness, there was movement as tendrils moved, blocking the light from distant worlds like vast clouds of vantablack covering a night sky. They lashed at her, halting her hands and her power in their tracks, and Destiny watched in mounting horrified fascination as in that blackness, eight great eyes opened, white slits in the Void bigger than she was that glowed with an energy that was not magic, nor any other energy she had ever seen – and yet bore a strange, eldritch similarity to every one of them at once.

She did not belong here.

It was not a thought from her head that thought as such, for all it presented itself as one of hers. Rather, it was a strange, foreign feeling as if the thought had been planted directly into her mind, and the realization that whatever unnatural being she was facing could do as such to one of the Powers that Be had her heat beating frantically in her chest.

What… what are you?

Around the eight great white glows, hundreds, nay, thousands, millions, of tiny white dots began to flicker into existence, two at a time. More pairs of eyes, she realized with a nervous swallow. More pairs of eyes than she had ever seen on a living being in her entire life, all narrowed to slits and watching her. It was not the gaze of a fellow Power upon her, but rather the gaze of something so much larger and vaster than she that it felt as if it were a tidal wave looming over her head, and about to engulf her.

The tendrils that had halted her hands tightened, and Destiny shivered.

She was not allowed to touch their world.

Slowly, shuddering at the unnatural words in her mind that were not quite hers, she did indeed retract her hands, and her power both. Clearly whatever being she was facing had no wish to allow her close to that tiny speck floating unharmed in the embrace of the Void – and she had no wish to provoke this creature, not when it could very easily devour her.

She repeated her question, and watched uneasily as the eyes narrowed… and the tendrils started to retreat.

She already knew what they were. She knew them by name. They were the Void.

The Void. The Void, which was supposed to be mindless, empty, and endless hunger that devoured worlds for no reason, just did. This being, this being that was so alien to her and yet so clearly aware… was the embodiment of the Void itself.

Her kind was not welcome here. The Powers that Be were not welcome here. She would leave, now.

The blackness began to seep away, feathering off into nothingness at the edges, and suddenly, a myriad of thoughts ran through her Mind at such speed she could barely keep track of them.

The Void was not mindless.

It was sentient.

It was protecting this world from beings like her, so similar and yet so clearly different from this alien creature before her.

It was protecting a world where Fate’s influence was minimal, where it clearly had been for some time.

It was guarding a world that Fate barely paid attention to.

A world where Error might be able to find sanctuary.

Wait!

The eyes, which had disappeared as the Void retreated, opened once more, narrow white slits shining in the nothingness, and Destiny swallowed as the intentness of its predatory gaze landed upon her again.

Wait. Please.

The eyes widened a fraction, and the vast darkness shifted, like black blood spreading in water. She thought she heard the echoes of worlds long gone, their last distant wails and screams and sirens as they fell into the nothingness to be devoured.

As much as Destiny wanted to flee, as much as she was frightened out of her wits… she couldn’t give up yet.

Please, she repeated, desperation coloring her voice alongside her terror, do you know of any world where one might be able to hide a god?

Why was she asking them? Why was she not asking one of her own kind?

Destiny took a deep, trembling breath – or what amounted to one, when her body was more an illusion than physical.

Because this god is my child. And one of my own kind is the one making him suffer.

Multitudes of smaller eyes opened even as the larger ones narrowed, and Destiny continued, the words spewing forth as her metaphysical nerves only became more shaken.

He is a forced god. A broken god forced into divinity, whose Mind and Will have been shattered and will never be the same again even if he starts to put himself back together.

More eyes. And now… something she would almost describe as ghostly, a not-sound in the emptiness, as if many tiny voices were whispering. There was something else, too, a glint of blue amongst the colorless white, a shade of blue almost the same color as Error’s strings and the ever-lasting dried tears beneath his sockets. But there was no reply, and more words spilled out in her desperation.

Fate was the one who changed him. Forced him to become what he is now. He has no memories of who he once was before he was a god. She broke him, twisted him, forced him to become something he did not wish to be. He is a sacrifice to her whims, a necessary one to keep her own child’s multiverse functioning. And he is suffering for it.

More eyes. More whispering. She took a shuddering non-breath.

Please.

Silence, save for the whispers. There were blue glints of light at the edges of some of the endless eyes now, tiny motes shaped like dreamcatchers. And there were voices whispering ever-louder, in languages she could barely comprehend the meanings of. But, to her ears… those voices sounded like they were arguing.

She will show them this god.

Destiny swallowed, and closed her eyes. She could see Error’s battered form before her as if he was physically present, every discolored bone and glitch and scar, every detail right down to the ever-present defeat in his eyes. She sculpted the image of him with her hands, forcing her power into light and hues, and when she opened them once more a perfect image of her beaten down, suffering child was cupped in her hands like a precious heirloom.

And something in the darkness… changed. The intentness of focus was back, and the eyes shifted closer, as if to bring the image in her palms into sharper focus. Those eyes were blank, but she could feel their focus on her, traveling from her form to the tiny illusion of the Destroyer in her grasp… taking in every inch of him and the red strings that drifted even about the image.

She will tell them what this god is the god of.

Destiny bit her lip.

Destruction.

Another flicker of blue. And then… then…

The Void knows of a world her god of destruction can hide within.

Destiny almost sighed with relief, but the next not-quite words stopped her in her tracks.

But the Void will not let her god into this world without conditions.

She swallowed nervously again. What kind of conditions?

Flickers. Bits of color almost like… the afterimages of afterimages, if she were to put descriptors to them. Almost as if she was almost glimpsing ghosts in the dark, but never quite seeing them. Blue again, but now also flickers of red, motes like dreamcatchers floating and then disappearing, devoured by the nothingness.

The Void’s world is too ruled by Fate. She will not find it again , but her strings remain.

And this time, she saw genuine images, floating in the surface of the being before her like reflections in water. Glimpses of small masked figures falling, piles of their masklike faces like mountains, all cracked and empty. A living figure unlike the ones falling, wandering aimlessly in an ashen wasteland with a lancelike weapon thrown over their tiny shoulder. A towering giant with a horned white mask, trapped in chains, empty eyes suddenly glowing with spiteful orange as it thrashed. A strange pillbug like creature with a mask worn like a helmet upon their head. A small horned figure in a faded red cloak, standing watch on a cliff overlooking faded grey ruins and the distant glow of a nearly dead town. The interior of a dark tent, lit by red fire, a horned being with tired scarlet eyes bowing and a tiny winged creature with a similar face fluttering about him on tendril-like wings.

Many in the Void’s world are trapped. They cannot break the strings themselves. Destiny’s child must break their strings for them.

Destiny closed her eyes. Took a moment to shake off the images in her mind. And thought.

Would this hurt my child?

When she opened her eyes again, the reflections were gone, and the eyes were still watching her. Though, strangely… she didn’t feel as frightened of them as before.

The Void will not hurt her child. She knows they will keep their word.

And Destiny… smiled. It was strained, uncertain, still fearful in the face of a being that she thought shouldn’t have possibly existed, but despite that it was also the first genuinely hopeful smile she had smiled in a long, long time.

My child to help yours. I cannot guarantee he will do so immediately, but I know my child. One way or another, he will break Fate’s strings in your world. Even if he might do so in a way you do not expect.

The Void shifted, the white eyes coming closer and closer. It seemed to grow larger as it came, too large for it to have been truly as close as it had looked to her, but she looked into the eyes regardless, squaring her shoulders and refusing to let her body shake as it wished to. Then, from the darkness, something that almost felt like plated fingers, thin and chitinous, wrapped around her still-cupped hands, holding them and the illusion of Error therein in a loose grip.

She will not visit her child once he is there.

Destiny stifled the pang of heartbreak at the thought, and dipped her head in a shallow bow.

As you wish.

Then she and the Void have an agreement.

Black fingers curled out of the darkness, landing with surprising gentleness upon the top of the illusionary Error’s battered skull.

When the god of destruction’s strings are finally broken… he will truly be free.

Chapter Text

The Island of Hybras, Limbo

There was something… strange, about Limbo.

It had begun as a subtle itching in the back of his mind, and a prickling along the back of his neck, when Artemis, Holly, Qwan and No. 1 had landed in the volcanic crater in Hybras. He had paid the sensation very little attention, at first, dismissing it as a byproduct of the newly stolen magic swirling through his system – and it was unimportant regardless, in the face of the nearly impossible odds of returning Hybras to Earth, and a bloodthirsty horde of demons climbing up the slope to meet them.

But the sensation had persisted, even as he first used his newly acquired magic, a tiny supernova of blue alighting upon his fingertip, and even as the demons had charged and time surged. It was there in the back of his mind, a distant awareness of something different in the fabric of the world as he traversed ash and stone and bolts of magic, and carefully kept the count as time stopped and started and rewound around them. It was there as Holly died, slain by Abbot’s blade and fading away alone on the ground. It was there as the demon dealt with the two warlocks, helpless in their magic circle, and Artemis traipsed to Holly’s side, grasping her Neutrino and waiting for time to rewind once again.

When he shot through the present and into the past, taking Abbot down before he could kill the elf lying at his feet, the feeling had not only persisted, it had expanded as the world flexed and splintered around the paradox he’d created. For a single endless moment, Artemis could see into another dimension, one of yellow haze and red earth that shifted and pulsed and writhed like a living thing. Even through a gap in the fabric of dimensions the stench of it was horrible, like a thousand rotting things mixed with the sharp tang of acid, and he hadn’t been able to suppress a shiver as countless orbs had opened to stare at him.

Even when the moment had passed, and the window to another reality had closed, he could not be rid of the feeling of those thousands of eyes on his back, a chill rippling down his spine and refusing to disappear. It was as if the very magic he’d stolen had frozen, turned to ice in his body and activated some unknown circuit in his primitive hindbrain that had some quiet, hidden part of him chanting in terror something is wrong, something is wrong, something is very wrong.

But there had been no time to worry about that glimpse of alien skies. Not with Hybras disappearing around them, and Holly once again alive, and the count – an hour per second for a count of forty, a deceleration to thirty minutes per second for a count of eighteen, a slight jump backward in time, one minute per second back for a count of two – repeating endlessly, warning him that their time was running out. They could not afford to be held back by his own baseless fear of something dimensions away, something that could not change what was happening now. And so he had squared his shoulders and endured, assisting Holly in dragging Abbot’s unconscious form across the ashen ground to position him within the circle, before taking his place in it himself.

After that, the ritual took all his concentration. There was no time to think about terror when thousands of lives were on the line, including his own. Rings of magic, a dome of swirling blue, and the feeling of interwoven minds and thoughts left no room for it either, chasing away everything outside their tiny piece of the universe.

Let your time call to you, and reel you in.

Blue rings of magic pulsed, a shock wave of power spreading across Hybras as the island turned transparent and slowly vanished into golden sparks. For a brief moment, there was only a circle of magic floating aimlessly in the rippling red space of Limbo, and Holly’s hand in his, and her words – I remember. You saved me. Then they too were gone, and there was only time, and space, and the tunnel, thousands of minds, and the distant metaphysical light of the twenty-first century beckoning.

That should have been it. In any other time or place, perhaps, that would have been it. Hybras would have been safely returned, three years off target but intact, the demons re-integrated safely into fairy society as their old home sunk underneath the waves off the shore of Ireland, and Artemis returned to his parents and a pair of younger siblings a decade younger than him.

But this was not that time, nor that place. For though it was true the dimension he’d glimpsed on Hybras was far removed from the island and its inhabitants, the time tunnel was not Hybras.

There was something here.

The thought rippled through hundreds of minds, all suddenly aware of something at the fringes of their consciousness. It felt, at a first metaphorical glance, like a distant shadow of the swirling blue currents of their passage, something twisting and slippery and not quite capable of being grasped. But as the light of their time drew nearer, so too did the new presence, what was once nothing more than a flicker at the edge of their collective minds expanding, growing, swelling until it loomed over them all, fetid tendrils of something Other reaching for them.

Artemis had perhaps one moment to recognize the foulness of the presence surrounding them as the same scent that had imprinted itself into his brain during his paradoxical rescue of Holly. Then -

Grasping, tearing, shredding -

The twinkling lights of a hundred minds at the edges of the tunnel suddenly winked out, and chaos tore through the collective.

What was that?! Artemis was uncertain of whose thought it was – it could have been Holly, Qwan, No. 1, or even one of the many other demons with them – but it spread like a virus through the web of shared perception. Most of those in the time tunnel were not warlocks, but they had no need for magic here. Even the most mundane of creatures would be able to tell that whatever this was, it did not belong. It was colossal, a storm of disaster and rot and eldritch thoughts and snapping mouths and thousands of eyes staring into his soul, planets breaking apart, shapeless gore creeping across the ground and veins and flesh growing from it like trees, tentacles reaching towards the sky and tearing apart stone and crust and mantle –

Artemis!

Endless skies and the void of space never-ending red scattering on currents of dark matter and lives snuffed out nothing but endless rage and hate and a distant figure glowing like a star bearing down on him –

Blue twisted into spears and struck. Dark mires were pierced, an unearthly not-scream of RAGEHATELOATHING echoing through his cognizance, the alien memories interrupted – oh god, those hadn't been his thoughts –

Artemis! Hold on!

Blue chains wrapped around him, warm and comforting compared to the eerie cold terror that had surrounded him, and numbly, his mind still going through a mantra of not my thoughts, not my thoughts, he did as he was told.

Qwan, what the hell was that?!

Holly again, her mind wrapped itself around his, a protective barrier against the world that bristled and snapped even as it soothed. He could still make out the dark past it – it was simply too large to block out entirely. But he could think, something he’d never once thought he could take for granted and yet somehow he was realizing he’d done exactly that. He – he hadn’t been able to think. It was like he’d been trapped in an endless loop of memories and eldritch thoughts, his mind simply becoming a part of a whole and all his knowledge and experience stripped from him in a storm of something so much more vast than he was –

I don’t know. The old warlock’s thoughts felt shaken, grim, horrified, and he focused on the demon’s words – anything but remembering that horrible unnatural existence that had been his mind in those eternally long moments. There’s a reason that the dimensional displacement of Hybras was meant as a last resort back then – the space between dimensions has no real boundaries, it’s everywhere and nowhere at once -

No time for a lecture, brainiac – what can we do?! It – it grabbed Artemis, he couldn’t answer, I could barely feel him at all – how do we kill this thing?!

We can’t. We can’t fight something like this, Holly. Not the way we are now.

Something splintered, hundreds of voices screaming in panic as more minds disappeared, torn apart –

Not torn apart. There was no word to describe what that sensation was, but it was so much worse than the visceral images of bodies torn to pieces the action conjured. A collective shudder ran through them at the realization, fear hopping from human to elf to warlocks to demons.

That fear finally fully brought him back to the present – Artemis refused to be caught like that again, not now, not ever.

If we cannot fight it, he broadcasted, his mental voice sounding strangely frail even to him, then we retreat somewhere beyond its reach.

A flicker of realization, and a feeling like a slow, hopeful smile from No. 1 and Qweffor. Oh, oh, of course – we’ve never felt something like this in our reality, so if we can get out of the tunnel-!

A tsunami, a hurricane, a typhoon – RAGEHATELOATHING/BILLIONSOFLIVESSNUFFEDOUT/TRAPPEDESCAPEWILLESCAPEDENIAL – and Artemis was left floundering once more. This time, however, he was able to recognize the invasive stream of consciousness for what it was, and with a heave that left his mind aching, he wrenched himself free of it, dragging several helpless demons that had gotten caught in the surge out with him.

No time, he croaked. Hurry! Holly, place! Remember –

An image of a bay he vaguely recognized off the shore of Ireland, slightly unfocused at the edges of the memory but becoming clearer as the three demon warlocks poured magic into a barrier surrounding them – a blue bastion against endless animosity. Artemis steeled himself, reeled in those instinctive flares of terror – it was colossal, massive, a living apocalypse, an ender of worlds, how could they hope to fare against it – and then peered beyond the blue.

Head towards the light. The light was almost impossible to see, but he could still sense it – a distant warmth in the rapidly degenerating darkness beyond their tiny sanctuary, stark and brilliant against the endless hatred waiting for them. The feeling of the tunnel outside Qwan, Qweffor, and No. 1’s barrier was almost akin to a bog, a metaphysical stench of rot and decay and the wailing of countless dead eating at him – but with the barrier in place, it was almost manageable.

Focus on that, Artemis told himself. Focus on navigation, on the twenty-first century, everything you left behind – focus on that and pull. Because they could not afford to let the twenty-first century pull them to it, not with something straight from the nightmares of Lovecraft himself at their doorstep – no, that would not be fast enough.

But to pull meant to reach past the barrier, and Artemis did not trust his own mind nearly as much as he had when they’d left Hybras. All it would take was one stumble, one wrong thought, and he’d be devoured, lost in an endless sea of eldritch atrophy and hatred –

Familiar blue wrapped around him. A thought – focus, Mud Boy. Artemis grabbed that familiarity, the comfort of it, wrapped it about himself like armor and felt the invasive thoughts retreat.

Thank you, Holly.

Anchored by his friend’s determination and magic, he reached for the light.

Mother. Father. Artemis gritted his teeth against the bombardment of otherworldly emotions and apocalyptic images and kept his focus on what made the twenty-first century home – people. Butler. Juliet. Foaly. Mulch.

The light seemed so far away, and the darkness, the disastercatastropheapocalypseruin, was closing in –

No. Focus. The people you left behind. The people you WILL see again. Father in the hospital, missing a leg but alive. Mother, teary-eyed and smiling, free of madness. Butler, steadfast and enduring, like a mountain.

It was like wading through mud – mud that kept sticking to his legs and trying to suck him down and drown him. But Holly’s anchor kept him ironically afloat, and the light – warmth, life, escape – was growing nearer, and nearer, and nearer –

WATERTURNINGTOBLOODCOUNTLESSFIGURESFLOATINGDEADINPOOLSOFACIDDISSOLVINGWORLDSTURNINGTODUSTANDRUBBLESUNSGOINGOUT –

His anchor reeled him back from the edge, and if Artemis had currently had teeth with which to grin, he would have done so, with no humor to it whatsoever and body shaking in leftover terror. Ah – that’s something I do recognize. It’s threatening me.

Which means I was right. If we reach our own time –

NEVER-ENDINGLONELINESSUNTILTHEENDOFTIME –

A chill ran down his metaphorical spine. That had not felt like a threat, something that could very well never come to pass. That had felt like a promise.

Don’t listen to it, Artemis! Holly, strangely distant but audible, understandable, and that was what mattered. Hurry! We don’t have –

An unearthly wail, hundreds of demons’ minds screaming in terror and pain, and then more glimmering lights were gone, abducted, devoured through a hole in the blue walls set up against infinity. Magic flickered, faltered, and Artemis poured his own stolen power into it, shoring up cracks and splintering gaps and bolstering their fortress.

Running out of time. And the creature knew that – the countless apocalypses raging around him and the eyes blinking amongst cracked stone and asteroid fields that were once planets had a distinctly spiteful, pleased feel to them, with a strange edge to the emotions that made his thoughts ache. The darkness was closing in, the light of their time slowly disappearing behind moving tendrils and something that beat like a heart even as it stared down at him, endless, unfathomable –

But Artemis had not gotten to where he was today to give up, even in the face of odds like this. He was Artemis Fowl the Second. He would not give in.

You may be greater than all of us, abomination. He gathered a spear of blue before him, drawing on memories of magic tearing into the darkness and harnessing it for himself. But you should not underestimate me!

The spear flew, and while his aim was abysmal in the physical world, here aim was reliant upon your strength of will and your determination, and Artemis would not die here. The projectile hit dead center on the pulsing mass between him and home, and the otherworldly shriek as the blockage was rent in two throbbed through the collective minds behind him with the force of a billion supernovas. He felt several minds snap, torn free from their moorings and sent adrift, never to be seen again – and the light was right in front of him.

I win, Ruin, he thought, and pulled.

Warmth, life, the familiar smell of salt on the breeze, physical sensation returning. A glimpse of blue water, glittering with displaced light, a distant green shore – volcanic rock materializing slowly in waves of blue. Minds disconnected from the collective – properly, this time, the way they were meant to, returning to physical forms, demons popping into existence on solid stone looking frantic, bewildered, relieved. The remnants of a bomb, all but vaporized by its own explosive force. A familiar elfin figure, and three less familiar but recognizable demonic forms building themselves up out of blue light.

For a moment, everything was fine. They had escaped. They were home. He felt a smile spreading across his face, met Holly’s eyes –

The world splintered.

ALONEUNTILTHEENDOFTIME/CERTAINTY/RAGEHATE/TINYSHAPEHURTLINGTHROUGHTHEDARKNESSTIMERUINEDSHATTERING –

He couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. The world was gone, and he was alone, darkness with its strangling grip raging at him –

FREEDOMBECKONINGDENIALHATEWILLNOTBETRAPPEDAGAINSEETHINGEYESTENTACLESGRABBINGANDTEARING –

No – no, he refused, he couldn’t – his thoughts weren’t his own where was he how –

HATELOATHINGNOHOPENEVERHURTALONEFORALLETERNITY –

No magic. Holly – !

Nothing. Alone. He was alone – god no, please – he could still see the light, the warmth, his home, it was right there –

NOHOPECOLDDEATHANDENDLESSNESS HELPESSSPITE -

No – NO, I REFUSE –!

The light was fading. It was getting farther away, and the endless void of the apocalypse was dragging him down – he couldn’t escape, he was dying –

The light moved. Shifted. Reached out, shimmering hands of iridescent consciousness grabbing a frantic, struggling mind and holding.

Denial. Artemis stared, wild-eyed, into a face like a star, featureless and ghostly and alien, and yet – strangely familiar. Reassurance. Will-not-abandon-you-little-one.

/RAGE!!!

And then everything was washed away in the tide.

Chapter Text

Something was wrong, tonight.

Most animatronics weren’t quite sensitive enough to pick up on it. The STAFF bots still rolled about the Pizzaplex obliviously completing their tasks for the night, unaware of the feeling in the air. But some, for all that Fazbear Entertainment claimed they were nothing more than advanced computers that emulated emotions, were more than sentient enough to pick up on the same subtle things that flesh-and-blood things could. With more difficulty, perhaps, their metal components made it harder to feel the physical signs of unease that an animal’s instincts could, but that didn’t change the fact that they could sense it. Their code WAS their instincts, and so oddities and moments of fear translated to strings of it sweeping through their systems in a constant buzz of unease.

This night, before the wrong wrong wrong truly hit, was a quiet and peaceful one, by Pizzaplex standards. There were no intruders, no mysterious break-ins where the doors seemed to open completely on their own with no one on the other side, very few STAFF-bot malfunctions, and thus a serious lack of any of them being torn apart by an irate patroling bot. The Glamrocks were patrolling the halls just as they normally did – Freddy and Roxy both chatting as they wandered around the main Atrium, Monty stomping through his golf course, Chica sneaking down into the kitchens to try to sneak a bag full of garbage only to turn around and freeze when she saw a familiar pair of red eyes in the doorway before the Daycare Attendant swung off elsewhere, up into the rafters… yes. This was a normal enough night, for the Pizzaplex.

And then the world shattered, scattered, and pieced itself back together in the span of a single moment, and dread flooded the halls as six powerful CPUs found their code jittering in agitation. Freddy dropped the lost toy he’d been about to store in his chest cavity, and Roxy looked about wildly, eyes letting her see through the walls around her but finding nothing. Monty froze in the middle of absently twirling a golf club in one hand, before hurling it behind the desk where it belonged and leaping towards the entrance to the atrium. Chica squawked and her handful of garbage dropped to the ground as she quickly scurried out into the hall. In the West Arcade, DJ Music Man, unable to leave his stage, ordered his little minis to begin searching the vents and everywhere those vents could reach.

And high above all of them, flying through the rafters on their cable, the Daycare Attendant froze, head spinning like a wheel of fortune as they reoriented themselves after a shock assaulted their systems.  Then they too began to hunt.

For nearly an hour the animatronics searched, and for the entire hour, unease ruled the Pizzaplex. The STAFF-bots still did their work diligently, not caring about whatever had just happened, but the stars of the show, the DJ, and the caretaker all searched frantically, knowing something was wrong, but not WHAT. And between some, messages raced at the speed of light, updates and worry both being passed along to each other without a single word spoken out loud.

Glamrock Freddy: Roxy, anything in the race track?

Roxanne Wolf: Nothing, still scanning the walls, though – I’ll find whatever this was, easy-peasy.

Montgomery Gator: Suuuure you will.

Roxanne Wolf: Shut up, gator.

Glamrock Chica: Nothing near the kitchens, I’m heading back to the main atrium too – which side are you on, Monty? I’ll check the other side.

Montgomery Gator: At the entrance to Bonnie Bowl right now, start across from me.

Glamrock Chica: Got it.

Glamrock Chica: … I don’t like this, guys.

Glamrock Freddy: Neither do I, Chica, neither do I.

Montgomery Gator: What the f#$% even WAS that? My code’s been doing weird crap lately but not THAT.

Roxanne Wolf: Language. And h%ll if I know. Felt like static to me, just rolling over my outer chassis.

Montgomery Gator: Language, mutt.

Roxanne Wolf: I said shut up.

Glamrock Chica: Felt a bit like indigestion to me! But yeah, static too. Is something wrong with one of our shared systems?

DJ Music Man: All systems are green in the West Arcade. We felt static here too.

Glamrock Freddy: Probably not any of our shared systems, then, the DJ has different protocols… perhaps some kind of break-in?

Roxanne Wolf: Think the Daycare freak wouldn’t be searching with us if it was a break-in. It’s connected to the security cameras, right? If there was a break-in it’d show up on camera and the poor fool would be taken care of already.

Glamrock Chica: I really wish you wouldn’t call them a freak, Roxy.

Roxanne Wolf: And I wish those little kids didn’t get slime on me this morning, your point?

Glamrock Freddy: Everyone, please, calm down – I’m not sure what’s going on right now, but arguing isn’t going to help matters. Keep each other updated, and let someone know as soon as you find ANYTHING, alright?

Roxanne Wolf: Yes, DAD. It’d be easier if the freak hadn’t turned out the lights…

Glamrock Chica: On it Freddy!

Montgomery Gator: We KNOW, Freddy.

DJ Music Man: We will keep an eye out here.

Even as the main entertainers communicated with each other, there was another animatronic that didn’t bother sending messages, that simply kept tabs on what was going on as the Pizzaplex flew by underneath them as they scanned security footage for discrepancies. Fazbear Entertainment may have skimped out on the cameras themselves – the footage was jittery and there was rarely sound to go with them – but they hadn’t skimped out on the systems connected to them. No matter where they went in the Pizzaplex, security footage could be accessed from anywhere else, and the Daycare Attendant could keep tabs on all of them at once with near instinctive ease – once they’d even been able to pursue an intruder across the ‘Plex with camera footage alone, not their own built-in senses.

But today, there was nothing, nothing, nothing, and Moon was getting frustrated. He’d already visited the breakers to turn off the lights across the Pizzaplex, allowing him to go anywhere he needed to save for the few still-lit important areas, and he’d already begun an agitated patrol of everywhere the Glamrocks weren’t searching, sweeping from place to place with near-silent whirring of machinery. He was SURE there was an intruder of some kind – this kind of widespread effect smacked of the main systems being tampered with, and it’d happened before during previous break-ins. But no, there was nothing, nothing, nothing. He could see the entire Pizzaplex and not a single door had opened on its own or by human hands today, at least not ones not supposed to be there. The only human in the entire building was Vanessa, who was in Parts and Service – since the lights there stayed on the woman hadn’t even seemed to notice there was anything amiss, too busy doing something on the computers.

Well, if she didn’t notice a break-in, Moon wasn’t going to tell her about it. She was supposed to be doing her JOB, and if this got her fired then GOOD RIDDANCE. He had a feeling she’d be fine, though – he wasn’t sure what her relationship with management was but she’d gotten away with many things that other security guards never had, and this would probably be no different. If only he could report her…

No matter. He could do her job for her if needed. And it might be needed. He was SURE it was needed. His systems were buzzing, and irritation bubbling, fingers curling into claws as he swung from place to place in search of anything off – if there wasn’t an intruder to deal with tonight then one way or another he’d be taking SOMETHING apart. But something in their CPU was buzzing with absolute certainty that there was something going on, and so the Daycare Attendant searched, ignoring the messages passing to and fro as the Glamrocks and the DJ updated one another on their lack of results, rasping out words designed to frighten, or at least get a reaction, from jittery humans.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he sing-songed menacingly. Red optics glared into the dark, searching for heat signatures, fingerprints, anything – and found nothing. He growled lowly, and as a STAFF-bot wheeled around the corner with a broom he dropped down and dug fingers into its shoulder joint, ripping off its arm and tossing the useless hunk of metal aside. The bot righted itself and kept rolling, uncaring of having just been damaged, but Moon felt a little better having gotten to maim something, even if it wasn’t something that would scream as he did it.

“ I know you’re there. Stop playing hide and seek and come OUT. ”

Still nothing, and so the Daycare Attendant kept searching, searching, searching. Camera feeds rushed past at the speed of sound, processed by lightning-quick programming, a constant up-to-date train of images without sound. The atrium had been fully searched, now, with nothing to show for it, and the Glamrocks were moving uneasily into the dark halls to continue their search – at least THEY were doing their jobs. Scurrying sounds in a vent over their head suggested that the DJ had sent out his Mini-Men to begin searching as well – one clapped its symbols at him from the other side of a grate as he swung by, a brief greeting before he heard it hurrying on.

Minutes passed. Minutes, and there was still NOTHING. Moon’s frustration was giving way to furious BLOODLUST now, and several unfortunate STAFF-bots in his path were maimed to soothe it, to no avail. He’d passed by the wolf, once, and she’d watched him uneasily as he’d passed by overhead, her eyes able to pick him up in the dark and obviously noticing his frustration. Unfortunate that he couldn’t attack the Glamrocks without provocation… she’d always hated him, and the feeling was mutual. But attacking one of the PRECIOUS stars of the Pizzaplex would get him decommissioned and turned into scrap. Pity, pity, pity…

And then finally, finally… as he was crawling through the maintenance tunnels to head to Parts and Service, finally ready to tear into Vanessa (metaphorically, unfortunately) and get her to start DOING HER JOB… something caught his attention.

Help…

Moon froze, one hand still outstretched to dig into his next handhold, and in their shared CPU, he felt the dormant code that was Sun start to stir.

Please… help…

The voice had no gender, no source – there was nobody speaking nearby, the only communication he’d been monitoring being the messages between the other animatronics as they scoured the facility. And yet he heard it all the same, felt his memory storing the sound for later analysis even as he swiveled his head, trying to pinpoint the source. Sun was definitely awake now, his code bubbling anxiously as he too tried to pinpoint the sound – their CPU was aching at the strain of having two AI active at once, even if their endoskeleton was still Moon’s until the lights went on again. But Moon ignored the strain, ignored how their systems were already slowly beginning to overheat – he focused on the voice, still spinning his head as he tried to locate it.

Please… help him …

Sun’s code prodded him, ten times as anxious as before, and Moon stopped his head mid-spin with a click.

“Who?” He rasped out loud.

For a moment, there was nothing, but the animatronic sat still, and waited, anticipation heavy in the air.

Then their machinery whirred into life unprompted, and distressed static flickered through their CPU as something, an image, a location, was forcibly downloaded into their head. There was a clang – Moon realized, after a few precious nanoseconds of getting his bearings again, that it was him that had made the noise, falling from the wall and hitting the ground hard enough to dent a few metal plates.

Sitting bright and defined in their memory storage, an image of an innocuous closet door blinked innocently at them, despite not having been there nanoseconds before. And his map of the Pizzaplex now had a red dot marked on it, in a closet that was almost directly above his current location. A closet that, when he accessed the security systems to double-check, was currently locked.

Hurry, the voice whispered. Moon, disoriented, head still spinning (metaphorically this time) quickly righted himself and raced through the tunnels. They emerged from the dark underbelly of the Pizzaplex at record speed, his cord snapped up with an impatient hand as it descended – he didn’t bother connecting it, using it to swing into the hall heading towards his destination before latching onto the wall to keep going. The closet door came into view –

And that was when they saw the puddle of red seeping out from underneath it.

Please…

A human might have mistaken the red for paint, if only for a moment – but not the Daycare Attendant. Their thermal imaging turned on, and the puddle was warm still, and on the other side of that door, the faintest hint of ragged breathing could be heard. Moon practically slammed into the ground at the speed he was moving, using his connection to the security system to unlock the door and wrenching it open all at the same time.

He barely caught the bloody figure that had been propped up against the other side, a figure that immediately exploded into strange blurry glitches that he could FEEL buzzing across his fingers as soon as he touched it. Ignoring the red staining their hands, Moon turned the figure over, and nearly short-circuited.

The thing in his hands was a skeleton. No nose, blank red sockets leaking red from various cracks around the edges and from the edges themselves, a SPINE instead of a neck – he could see the top of a sternum and collar bones underneath the creature’s torn, bloodstained shirt. And yet it was breathing, it was moving, twitching in his hands, it could emote – its brows were furrowed, its yellowed teeth gritted, and sockets squeezed shut in pain and distress. What the F$CK.

Please. Still stunned, Moon inclined his head, listening… the voice was louder, now, a bit more distinct. And now, he could tell that it was vaguely female, and it was pleading. Desperate. Please help him.

For a moment, the animatronic didn’t move, staring down at the impossibility in his hands, the thing whimpering oh-so weakly in his hold. Vulnerable. The world seemed to hold its breath.

Then Moon, carefully, scooped the creature up, holding it close as he took off sprinting for the closest first aid station. The breath was released in a sigh of relief.

Daycare Attendant Moon : Medical supplies needed at Daycare first aid.

Glamrock Chica: ???

Roxanne Wolf: Damn, there WAS a break-in.

Roxanne Wolf: Wait.

Roxanne Wolf: Medical supplies, freak?

Daycare Attendant Moon: Shut up and get me more medical supplies.

Montgomery Gator: Holy f#$% did the clown just –

Glamrock Freddy: Later, Monty. How much do you need, Daycare Attendant?

Daycare Attendant Moon: As much as you four can carry.

Montgomery Gator: What?

Daycare Attendant Moon: NOW, you oversized handbag.

Roxanne Wolf: ASDgjdshgjdsghs

Glamrock Freddy: I’m on my way, Attendant. I wasn’t sure what you needed, but I grabbed a little of everything.

Glamrock Chica: Raiding the first aid station by the kitchen right now, someone packed a LOT of bandages into this thing.

Montgomery Gator: Got some burn cream and band-aids. Why the h%ll was there burn cream in my golf course?

Roxanne Wolf: Language, handbag. Got bandages and plastic for splints at my race track. What do you need?

Daycare Attendant Moon: All of it.

Daycare Attendant Moon: Get it here NOW.

Freddy was the first to reach the Daycare. It was still dark here, save for dim stars lit up in the ceiling and walls – just enough light to see by but no more. The enormous robot bear was worried, his expression as concerned as it was possible for it to get with his limited ability to emote – the Daycare Attendant rarely spoke in their shared messages, and the few times it did, it was in short, clipped, robotic sentences, with no wasted words. For it to immediately contact them for medical supplies, rather than word of an intruder being taken care of, was concerning. The agitation it had displayed at the delay, and the amount of medical supplies it had demanded was even more so. (It had never INSULTED any of them before. It made him wonder -) So, the bear was buzzing with agitation as he arrived, as many supplies as he’d been able to fit into his stomach hatch barely weighing him down and making him wonder if he’d found enough.

“Daycare Attendant?” He called out. He’d barely gotten the words out before he got a notification for a new message and opened the chat again.

Daycare Attendant Moon : First aid station.

That was more akin to what he was used to from the attendant, but he couldn’t ignore the impression of impatience from those three words, nor get the previous agitation out of mind. Without pause he was racing to the location, security protocols allowing him to run despite the closeness to the Daycare. The clang of his feet seemed awfully loud to him… it was so quiet, here.

Then he heard the ragged breathing, the quiet whirring of machinery around the corner, the quiet humming of an eerie lullaby that he barely remembered having heard before, back when the Pizzaplex still offered Fazbear Sleepovers in the daycare. He practically skidded around the corner, hatch already opening as he approached the first aid station, and then froze in shock and no little horror. And confusion. Much confusion.

The Daycare Attendant, stained in red from its chest down to its waist, and sat cross-legged on the ground with a skeletal figure wheezing in its lap, snapped its head up to look at him. Then, with an agitated clicking and whirring, it held out a bloodied hand.

“Disinfectant,” it rasped. “NOW.”

Still shocked, eyes on the impossible figure in the robot’s (his fellow animatronic’s?) lap, Freddy finished approaching, hatch opening and letting the Attendant swipe wipes and disinfectant out of his chest and quickly getting to work, beginning to wipe away the red stains all over the creature’s skull. The ragged breathing turned into a whimper, the skull’s brow furrowing in pain and distress, and Freddy started as visual distortions scattered across the creature’s body, some creeping up the attendant’s arms before flickering out.

“What on earth?” He whispered. The Attendant didn’t so much as glance at him, utterly focused on cleaning the creature, and as blood was wiped away he watched black… skin? Bone? Be exposed. There were cracks and marks in the substance, whatever it may be – some were thin, barely visible red lines or blotches – one, in particular, reminded him of broken glass, cracks spreading out from a central entry point like a spiderweb just above one eye socket. But others were great, gaping wounds in the creature’s bones, wide and deep, and THOSE marks were bleeding as any laceration would, and in great quantities. One, in particular, had nearly cleaved the poor creature’s head in two, starting at one of its sockets and going all the way to the back of the head – he could see nothing but a dull red glow in there, the same color as the blood trickling from it.

“Hands.” The Attendant said flatly, startling the bear out of his horrified trance. “Work on them.” He looked down at the creature’s hands, wincing in sympathy when he saw they were just as battered and bloody as the skull, and, hesitantly, he lowered himself down onto his knees and retrieved some wipes and disinfectant for himself. The creature flinched as he gently took one hand in his – he could feel something like a pulse, a rush of prickling static in erratic rhythm, against his sensors, and the distortions flickered into life across its fingers, darting up his own with an odd, fuzzy sensation.

“What happened?” He asked softly. Gingerly, he began to dab at the red-stained bones, watching as, this time, red and yellow emerged along with black – the creature’s fingers were a gradient, the palm of their hands just as black as its skull while its fingers had more color. Then he made a noise of distress as some of the creatures’ outer covering flaked away with the blood, though thankfully it didn’t seem to hurt the creature any more than it was already hurting – there was no change in the wheezing, straining breaths, or the visual distortions.

“Don’t know,” the Attendant rasped. Their hand swiped for his chest cavity again, snatching bandages – Freddy thanked his luck that there had been gauze in the closet he’d found, they’d need so much of it. “Found him in a closet. The door was locked.”

“He was locked in a closet?” Freddy hadn’t thought he could get more horrified, but he’d just been proven wrong. “How long -?”

“Long enough. STAFF-bots cleaning up the puddle there now.”

This poor thing had been sitting in a closet bleeding out. Potentially for several minutes, maybe for far longer, long enough that there was a puddle of blood to clean up. Animatronics couldn’t get sick, but Freddy felt like he might be experiencing something like nausea right now.

“And there was no sign of whoever did this to him?” He rolled up the sleeve of the creature’s coat – just as torn and battered as the rest of him, he noted – and couldn’t stop the distressed noise at the sight of yet more wounds– the bones here definitely resembled anatomical drawings he’d downloaded, but much thicker, stockier, more akin to an arm in thickness than the framework for one. The ulna had been almost snapped clean off, hanging on by a thread of red tissue he could only assume was some sort of marrow, and the texture of the bone was bubbly and coarse, like it had been burned, or perhaps melted.

The Attendant actually growled at this. “No,” they snapped, their first clenching – then quickly loosening again as the creature shuddered and more glitches began to emerge around the point of contact. More of the bone flaked off as the hand was removed, and though the animatronic didn’t exactly wince, the stiffness of normally flexible joints suggested some kind of distress at the sight. At this point the entire skull had at least been wiped clean – there were blue markings under the eye sockets, blue tear streaks standing out against the darker colors around it. In fact, Freddy thought they might be glowing faintly, but he wasn’t sure – they were sitting directly under a dim light, so perhaps it was merely much more reflective than the rest of the creature’s bones.

“No intruders. No open doors to the outside. The only human in the facility is Vanessa.” the Attendant continued, more quietly. “No footsteps. No residual heat signatures. No fingerprints, not even on him.” Their head clicked rapidly to one side, then the other. “No blood trail. No rulebreakers to find, but doubt he can move on his own.”

Which meant, Freddy realized, that someone had locked this poor creature in a closet, left him there, and left the Pizzaplex completely undetected.

This sour realization was quickly interrupted by the sound of metal footsteps approaching at speed, and Roxy skidded around the corner not unlike how Freddy had done earlier. And just like him, she skidded to a halt, eyes wide in shock, before she quickly shook herself off and stomped over, opening her own chest hatch, much smaller than Freddy’s, to pull out her load of supplies.

“Here, freak. Stuff for splints and bandages. Now, what the #$%@?”

“Quiet,” the Attendant snapped. Visual distortions crackled particularly harshly for a moment, the creature flinching away from the attendant’s hands and a whine of pain escaping him, and the Attendant turned away from Roxy to look back down at him, head turning almost a whole ninety degrees before they began to hum the same eerie lullaby that Freddy had heard them humming earlier. It didn’t seem to help the skeleton’s anxiety any… Freddy realized he’d been getting gradually tenser and was horrified to realize that might mean the creature was still conscious despite his agony. Though HOW conscious was debatable, since he’d barely reacted to anything so far.

Roxy, tellingly, didn’t roll her eyes like she usually would at the Attendant telling her to be quiet, which went to show just how badly she was shaken right now. “What the #%#?” She repeated, quietly but with feeling. “I’m not malfunctioning, am I?”

“Debatable.”

Had that been sass from the Attendant? Freddy was very sure, now, that he’d been horribly misjudging their sentience – he’d have to apologize for that later, once this crisis was taken care of.

“Can you give me something for a splint please, Roxy?” He asked before she could snap back at the Attendant. “And can you check for other broken bones?”

With a grumble, she did as he asked, kneeling down on his other side and actually wincing at the sight of the snapped ulna Freddy was very carefully cleaning now. She wordlessly handed him a thin, sturdy length of plastic, and Freddy gingerly used it to realign the snapped bone and began wrapping bandages around it to make a splint.

“What the h$ll,” she muttered, mostly to herself, as she rolled up the creature’s other sleeve. “They’re missing bits of bone on this side, what the h*ll, it’s like something bit chunks out of it.” She bunched up a wad of bandages and pressed it into, presumably, one of the spots missing something to stem the bleeding. The skeleton jerked, and the sound that escaped from his mouth had Freddy almost reeling back because it was filled with static, not unlike a distressed or malfunctioning animatronic’s. When he glanced over at Roxy, she looked just as disturbed as he felt.

Then the creature started coughing, hacking hard enough his entire body was shaking. With noises of alarm, the two Glamrocks and the Attendant helped the creature lean over, and they all watched as he half coughed, half vomited more blood out onto the floor.

“Oh dear,” Freddy murmured weakly. Roxy made a grossed-out sound. The Attendant didn’t so much as twitch, but they were just as tense as the other two, slowly rubbing a circle in the creature’s back as the skeleton just kept vomiting out more and more blood.

The sound of more footsteps approaching came in the middle of a particularly nasty retch, and there were twin alarmed noises behind Freddy – a squawk from Chica, and the beep of a censored curse from Monty. Then all four of the Glamrocks were there, crammed into the same space.

“What the f#$%,” Monty growled, like a broken record. “What the f#$%, what the F#$^-”

“Quiet,” the Attendant hissed lowly. They twitched, finally, as more distortions rippled up their arms where they were in contact with the poor creature.

“How are they still alive?” Chica whispered, sounding sickened. “There’s – that’s so much blood -”

“I’m going to beat whoever did this to a pulp,” Monty growled. “They’re DEAD MEAT.”

“QUIET,” the Attendant repeated, more irritably. “Supplies, NOW.”

“Why didn’t you kill the f#%#ers that did this?” Monty demanded, ignoring the order for quiet.

“Couldn’t find them. Now be QUIET.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t find them -!”

“Monty, we need to get them taken care of first, come ON -”

The rising tension only seemed to grow with every passing second, Monty becoming more and more agitated and the others following suit. And so, it was no surprise that none of them seemed to notice the glitches growing more and more agitated, the way that the skeletal figure was starting to twitch, the way that his fingers began to curl as if about to claw them, and the way the marks beneath his eyes began to glow. They didn’t see the error signs popping up in the creature’s eye sockets as he finally fully came back into consciousness, instead of the dazed state he’d been in before, or how he twitched at every heated word passing by over his head.

The Attendant felt something, just for a moment, like a buzz of electricity washing over their whole body – but that was the only warning before blue strings exploded into existence, lashing out in every direction, and with a desperate, glitching SCREAM the skeleton wrapped them around the arguing animatronics and HEAVED. Monty went flying with a surprised roar, smashing into a nearby wall. Chica squawked as she was thrown into another in the opposite direction. Freddy and Roxy yelped as they were slammed into the floor and pinned there by cocoons of blue.

The Attendant managed to leap away, their agility and the sensation of energy crawling through their metal letting them spring straight up to avoid the strings, now clinging to the ceiling to stay out of range. All eyes, now turning to the subject of their concern, found the skeleton slowly pushing himself upright, trying to rise onto his feet. Somehow, despite the state of his body, he managed it, ribcage heaving and blood still oozing from his mouth.

One eye socket was still blank red, now glitching heavily, but the other – there was a glow in there now, that hadn’t been there before. A yellow ring, surrounding another of blue with a white center, flicked about wildly – it reminded Freddy of their own eyes in the dark. He barely seemed to register the animatronics, despite his grip on the blue strings holding most of them in place, and the air was thick with something that was felt down to their wires, in every circuit, like a thunderstorm had rolled in and they were all standing at the epicenter of a lightning strike.

The strings began to tighten. Freddy felt, to his alarm, his chassis start to creak under the pressure.

That was when the lights turned on. The sudden illumination had the skeleton yelping, the sound pitching halfway through like microphone feedback, and the strings loosening – and then a blur of yellow hit the ground, and the Attendant, sun rays still extending after their shift to Day Mode, began to babble.

“No no no friend, calm down, you’re safe! Safe safe safe, but you’re hurt, hurt REALLY bad, shouldn’t be standing, no no no! You’ll make it worse, you’ve got so many cuts and broken bones, we’re just trying to help, friend!”

Startled, the skeleton jerked back, that single eyelight flickering up to stare at the animatronic’s now bright yellow face, the permanent grin, the sun-rays twitching and flapping around it in agitation. A flicker of confusion crossed his face, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing.

“Moon found you! Badly hurt, very badly hurt, so much blood – couldn’t leave you there, no no! Brought you here, just wanted to help, got bandages and disinfectant, please sit down friend!” The Attendant continued pleading, their body language now screaming worry whereas before it had been subdued. “Safe here, safe, PROMISE, pinky promise! Didn’t mean to scare you! Just upset, upset someone got hurt and we didn’t catch the person who did it in time, PLEASE let us help, you’re going to bleed out!”

The skeleton swayed slowly, still looking confused – but, Freddy noticed with relief, the strings were loosening, the dangerous creaking no longer sending alarms ringing through his system. The babble, against all odds, seemed to be helping – that glowing eye shifted, darting to the pinned animatronics, then back up to the Attendant (“Moon,” Freddy made note of them saying. Was that what they called themselves? Or was it a name for their night mode?) but he looked more confused than ever, now. And the swaying was starting to get worse, oh dear.

The Attendant noticed, too, of course – they reached out towards him, though still didn’t touch, still vibrating with anxiety even as the skeleton jerked back, eyeing them a bit more warily as their hands stopped inches from him. “PLEASE sit down, friend, you look like you’re going to keel over! And that’d be bad, bad, bad, will hurt you more! Don’t know if we even have enough bandages NOW, might not have enough if you break anything else!”

For a moment, the skeleton didn’t seem to register those words, still staring at the Attendant with a wary and downright baffled look. It might have been humorous, under other circumstances. But finally, finally, after a long few moments, the skeleton responded, his voice stuttering like audio from a lagging disk.

“ D-d-d0 n’t t 0 uch me ag- g-g ain.”

Freddy winced at the voice, and the skeleton’s eye flickered briefly in his direction, the strings tightening. Thankfully, before they could tighten enough to make him creak again, the Attendant, who had paused at the being’s words, started talking again, distracting him.

“Gotta get bandages on you, BUT! Can find gloves, or wrap up our hands! Would that be okay?  Don't wanna scare you, no no, but we NEED to patch you up!”

The skeleton stared at them for another moment. But he was starting to sway more and more, whatever equivalent to adrenaline he had seeming to fade, and the glitches were getting worse and worse now, flickering around broken fingers and injuries. His eyelight seemed to be flickering – or was that a blink, of some kind? And then, after a long, pregnant moment with nothing but the sounds of anxious whirring and ragged breathing, he nodded, and the strings unwound, vanishing into thin air like morning mist.

The Attendant almost couldn’t catch the creature in time when he collapsed, and Freddy noted that they had been careful to grab the creature somewhere where his clothes were covering his battered bones, even as he hurriedly righted himself and went to help Roxy get up. Chica managed to get up on her own, and Monty struggled to right himself without help before she went to help him. And the whole time, as the Glamrocks slowly re-situated themselves, still shocked by the sudden turn of events, the Attendant slowly lowered the creature the rest of the way back down to the ground, sitting down with their gangly legs folding under them, still careful not to touch bare bone, still babbling.

“Okay, we’ll find gloves before we keep patching you up friend, or wrap up our hands! Didn’t realize you didn’t like being touched, wouldn’t have done it if we’d known, we’ll be better about that, cross my heart! Don’t fall asleep again friend, don’t know if you can get concussions but it’s bad bad BAD to fall asleep with a really bad one, and we can see into your SKULL, friend -!”

But apparently, the creature wasn’t listening, because, expression still faintly baffled, his socket went dark again and he slowly pitched forward, the Attendant forced to catch him by the shoulders and then gingerly lowering his head to rest on one of their padded legs.

For a moment, there was nothing but quiet, and the calmer but still ragged breathing of the unconscious skeleton.

Then –

“What the f$%# just happened?” Roxy wheezed. The Attendant’s head whipped around a full 180 degrees to look at her.

“Language!”