#i'd apologize for giving el abandonment issues but i'm not that sorry

[erstwhilesparrow]

for @mcyt-aro-week , based on the Feb 25 prompt Solidarity / Spectrum / Battle !

content warnings: el spends most of this fic covered in blood. it is implied that the coven killed all their competition.

---

It ends like this: Eloise stands in what remains of the arena, crimson and toothsome. Blood clings to her like accusing hands, soaking through her skirts, staining the white and gold of her blouse and cape. She lost count of how many times thunder roiled overhead, how many times lightning crashed to earth like a falling bird, but she has faith in her coven.

Like an answer, she looks up and there’s Cleo, approaching the lip of the crater.

“I ran out of amethyst,” they call, first. They look clumsy and human picking their way down to El, but they’re steady when El leans into them for a hug. “Hi there.”

“I lost track of you guys,” El says, giddy, smell of metal thick enough to chew with her back teeth. “Where’s Scott? And Lauren?”

“They should be on their way,” Cleo murmurs. They push El back by the shoulders to look them over, sweeping and pragmatic, before pulling her in again. “I see you took out some of the competition.”

“Oh!” El says against Cleo’s shoulder. “I got Pris.”

Cleo laughs, loud in her ear. “Did you? Well done!”

“The training paid off.” El grins, even though Cleo can’t see it. “Who’s left?”

Cleo releases them, teeth showing. “Us! The Coven won, El. We’re the only ones left.”

El doesn’t— “Wait, what? We did it?”

Cleo’s beaming smile gets impossibly wider. “We did it!” They take her hand and pull, dragging her through a brief, circling dance, before letting her go, both of them stumbling and giggling.

“We did it!” El echoes. “We— We’re gonna—” She realizes all at once that she’s sticky. Her clothes cling to her; she hadn’t realized— “Gosh, people bleed a lot, don’t they?”

“Even more when they’re not half-magic,” Cleo says, turning. They begin making their way back up, toward less ruined land.

“Do I want to know how you know that?” El asks, following. Now that she’s coming down from the adrenaline rush, all of her feels heavy. The blood doesn’t help. It’s— The inside of her shoes squish, a little. Maybe that’s just the mud. Storms and water and melting ice.

Cleo laughs again, louder than usual.

—

“One of you must win,” Bertha intones, voice resonating like ancient stone fashioned into sound. “There can only be one.”

“So we can’t just declare one of us the winner?” Scott says. “We have to kill each other?” He sounds displeased with the idea in a way that belies the grime — rusty and telling — smeared darkly on his pale hands.

“Would you give up the power of being Supreme to anyone?” Bertha asks.

“Of course not,” El says. “Not just anyone. But it’s us. I don’t—” She pauses, considering. “I’m not even sure I could.”

Nobody tells her she’s wrong, though Lauren fidgets. El still hasn’t had a chance to clean off her clothes, or change.

Cleo raises a finger. “Could we fight you for it, Bertha?”

El almost jolts with surprise at the recklessness. Cleo is, usually, unfathomably methodical, interested in mechanical details and diagrammatic particulars. El tastes her own canines. But there is the matter of how they’re all doing this for something, isn’t there?

“I am not the one you must face,” Bertha says.

Cleo grumbles something, then says, “Well. Scott, we did promise we would help each other.”

There’s this feeling El is intimately familiar with, when she tries to pull too much magic out of herself at once, when it makes something click sideways in the world and send her rocketing through space and illusion. It’s a lot like having a rug pulled out from under you, except the whole world is the rug, and it just keeps pulling, so you have to run to catch up or collapse where you are. Unmoving, she feels it now.

“This isn’t fair,” El says, hearing it petulant in her own ears. The air feels heavy, pressing in on her ears. “We won, we should all get— something!”

“We would, though?” Scott says, soft and puzzled as he turns his head to look at her. “If any of us— I mean, I’d help. You just have to ask, El.”

El presses her lips together. It’s kinder than Scott’s been in front of an audience before. It’s sort of horrible how it doesn’t solve the issue.

“I’d be okay with giving it to Scott,” Lauren says. “You helped me a bunch already.”

“And I’m out of amethyst,” Cleo says, “so I’d lose anyway.”

El doesn’t think that’s true, but Cleo is careful with their estimations for someone who has time at their fingertips. She thinks Bertha’s waiting for her to say something.

Once, late at night, she and Cleo were a long way out from Kairos, on a cliffside overlooking the ocean, tracking planetary movements ahead of an incoming storm. It wasn’t the sort of thing either of them usually went for, but the stars have their miserable little fingers in every kind of magic, so it became necessary, from time to time.

I lost something, Cleo said, when El asked what they’d do with the power. Or… maybe someone. Someone very dear to me. I’d like to it, or them, back.

Oh, El said. Well now I’m going to feel silly saying mine. You and Scott both, huh?

Cleo smiled, vague and distant. El saw it as clearly as if it were real: some thread around their heart, pulling them away from here. All that magic, shrinking away to a fading glimmer on the horizon some future day.

“Well,” El says. She presses her thumb against the points of her teeth. Something salty on her tongue. “If you’ll be sticking around to help us all.”

—

El likes to think that Scott’s quiet laugh when she curls up next to him has gotten less condescending over time. Once, during the slow-waking hours around dawn, she leaned into him and he rested his cheek against her head. Adjusted slightly, as if to kiss her hair. Maybe he did. She had her eyes closed, pretending to sleep until she wasn’t pretending anymore.

El curls up to him now and he allows it for all of two seconds before nudging her back. Hurt for no good reason, she asks, “What are you going to do with it?” She gestures at the crown that he’s taken off, that he’s now turning around and around in his hands.

It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to handle it now, turned loose on the world by herself. Cleo’s training did pay off. El can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the witching world’s best and say truthfully that she earned her spot there. It’s just— Should she have tried harder to cement that bond with Lauren before Lauren left?

“I’m going to—” Scott pauses and takes an audible breath. El’s fairly certain he doesn’t need to at this point, that he does it just for dramatic effect, and feels a warmth that is quickly replaced by cold, pre-emptive absence. “Cleo needs a ritual done.”

“I do,” Cleo agrees mildly. They’re stirring their tea. “Somehow, what I’m asking for is smaller than what Scott’s asking for.”

Scott and Cleo laugh. El is cold and warm and cold.

“I would help you first even if it wasn’t,” Scott says.

“Oh, don’t start lying to me now,” Cleo says.

There’s a name that sits in the back of Scott’s throat that he doesn’t ever say, but El knows it’s there, and if she knows it’s there, then Cleo knows it’s there. And Cleo doesn’t care — doesn’t need to care — if that name pulls on Scott like a leash or a noose. They all showed up to this competition for a reason.

We have an understanding, me and Scott. Cleo told her that once, sipping from their cup of tea just like they are now.

“What about you, El?” Scott asks.

“What about me?” she murmurs. “Oh, um. I don’t know. I— Honestly, didn’t think I’d get this far!”

Scott’s expression goes amused. “Off on your own adventures, then?”

“I mean.” El wonders if it would be okay to go over to Cleo’s couch, to try bumping her shoulder against theirs. “Would you guys be— staying?”

Cleo shrugs. El is, despite herself, stung all over again. She’d thought — and it���s sort of stupid in retrospect — they were… similar, somehow. That Scott was the odd one out for having ever had all the pretty, picture-book fantasies. El supposes that what it really was was that being in love looks different on a time witch.

“I’d want to go home,” Scott says, not quite soft but not quite with his usual confidence either.

“Not the one you built here,” El says, knowing the answer and in knowing not having the heart to make it a real question.

“Probably not,” Scott says. “It was— I’ll probably take some stuff with me? But it was supposed to be temporary anyway.”

Was it? El aches. Was it always meant to be temporary?

“Okay,” she says. “When you’re done, can you give me the crown?”