#so the crackling is like hes destabilizing

[time-woods]

tf isthis how you flirt ? ?

(part 6-7/?)

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[too-much-tma-stuff]

Will You Take Care of Her (Part 8)

Previous | Masterpost

TW: descriptions of violence

Danny ran to the tube and before Jason could say anything Danny had punched it, shattering the glass and badly cutting his hand, not that he seemed to notice. Alarms started to blare as Danny dragged the girl out and onto the floor, Jason slammed the door shut before people could rush towards them, jamming it closed. Leaning against the door to make sure it stayed closed as he watched Danny with ‘Ellie’. He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew they needed to save this girl and Danny would need time to do that so Jason could buy some time.  

“No nonono,��� Danny murmured as the girl started to melt, her fingers and feet starting to collapse into some sort of green goo. “Don’t you dare destabilize on me, we’re the only ones left,” Danny nearly snarled, changing back into his ghost form. The transformation was quicker this time and as soon as it was done he lay her down on the floor, pressing his hands against her chest.

It looked like he was about to start doing chest compressions but instead he sent a wave of some sort of crackling green energy through her body. She arched slightly but didn’t otherwise respond, Danny snarled louder and did it again. 

Jason could hear the pounding of feet behind the door as people rushed down to find out what was going on. There was yelling as they tried the door and it wouldn’t open. Jason set his back more firmly against the barrier. Danny hadn’t even noticed the noise yet, too focussed on saving the girl.

“Come on, come onnn,” Danny muttered as he sent a third shock through her and then she gasped and coughed, white rings of light flashed over her body and her hair turned stark white, her clothes turning into some black and white outfit with a P on the chest, and her fingers reformed. She hadn’t opened her eyes but she was alive and Danny looked like he was ready to cry with relief. 

When he looked up his eyes were glowing green in swirling patterns that drew you in and refused to let go. You could see the angry and unnatural flames dancing behind his eyes. “Jason, come take her and then stay out of my way. I’ll clear the path, get her out as soon as you can. I’m bringing this entire place down,” Danny growled, his voice reverberating and echoing. 

Jason nodded and dived away from the door and past Danny, scooping Ellie up as Danny stood up, his hands morphing into long, curved claws not unlike his usual choice of weapon. They glowed with bright green energy that bubbled and warbled unsteadily, nothing like the Timerean’s other than the colour. When the agents managed to force open the door Danny shot immediately, the power ripping through the person right behind the door who went down immediately, gurgling on their own blood as Danny flew forward hot on the heels of his first blast. He roundhouse kicked the next asshole in white into the wall and Jason heard the crunching of stone and bone and he was sure that one was dead as well.

He had never seen Danny fight like this, he never used his powers and Jason could see why as Danny absolutely tore through the bodies blocking the hall outside. There was already blood splattered over the bone white of Danny’s mask, and he didn’t seem inclined to stop.  Up until now Jason had wondered why only he seemed to have episodes of blinding green rage, but it turned out it just took Danny more to get to this point. It was impressive, it was horrifying and bloody, and Jason was mostly disappointed that he wasn’t going to get any kills of his own after seeing what these people had done. But Danny deserved this vengeance and catharsis more. 

Jason followed behind Danny with his gun drawn and Ellie held close to his chest, watching his footing on the blood slick ground. He couldn’t fall behind now, Danny’s blows were shaking the foundations of the building and they needed to get out as quickly as possible. As angry and out of it as Danny was Jason couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t accidentally hurt them while trying to protect them. 

Danny was living up to the name Hyena as the skull that Jason had been sure was a mask opened and powerful bone jaws ripped an agent’s throat out leaving the canines dripping with fresh blood. Hyena shot through the nearest goon opening a bloody hole through their chest. Someone tried to shoot him and Danny snarled as the impact threw his shoulder back and tore a hole through his flesh dripping with a thick green substance. The hole quickly reformed, the same couldn’t be said for the goon when Hyena threw them to the floor and crushed their skull.

Jason got the chance to finish off a few who were still alive on the ground after Danny passed and as soon as he got a clear line to the door he made a break for it, sprinting out with Ellie. Danny was on his heels, defending their back until they were out, or just indulging in as much bloodshed as he could. Jason skidded to a halt a few meters back when he realized Hyena wasn’t behind them and turned just in time to see Danny take off his mask. He opened his mouth, his jaw unhinging as energy gathered on his tongue before a Sound split the night. A shrieking wail that vibrated the very air, and Jason barely managed to not drop Ellie to cover his ears as the concussive blast cracked the walls of the base. 

Jason’s ears were ringing too much to hear the screams he was sure were there as the part of the facility that was above ground collapsed in on itself. Danny’s scream took out… he had no idea how much forest behind the lab as well, well he could see what Danny had been talking about with collateral damage before. Jason shook his head and pulled the detonator out of his pocket, pressing the button, listening to the muffled sounds as, below the ground, the bombs took out whatever was left of the base. The fire from the bombs spread quickly and soon the burning fascility lit the night as Jason and Danny stood in front of it, panting and, in Danny’s case, crying. 

“Red Hood, what happened?” Tim- What the fuck Tim!? When did Tim get here?! Asked. 

Jason glanced around and saw that the entire Teen Titans were there, well, except Impulse who Jason suspected was trying to find non-existent survivors. The best Jason could do was give Robin a helpless little shrug before looking back at Danny. 

“Hyena?” He asked softly, snapping Danny out of his daze he turned towards them. 

He approached and went to rest a hand on the girl's hair before hesitating, noticing his hands were covered in blood. He let out a bitten off whimper and tried to wipe it off on his suit as much as he could before he touched her, stroking her wet hair back from her face. “Oh my Little Star, I’m so sorry,” Danny murmured to her.

“Thank you,” He told Jason softly before taking the girl from his arms, holding her close as he glanced around, spotting their audience. “Robin,” He sighed, some tension releasing from his shoulders which wasn’t really the reaction Jason was expecting. He approached them slowly, changing back into his human form as he went, and thank god Tim had already had dinner with them a few times so he didn’t jump to attacking them. Jason wouldn’t have blamed him, this did not look good, and Danny was covered in blood.

“You,” Hyena said, his gaze drifting to Superboy. “You’re Superboy, you’re the clone right?” He asked, and Superboy glanced at Robin before nodding warily. “She is too,” Danny sighed looking down at her. “Back when I was still a hero my nemesis made her, she’s… my daughter, in every way that matters, my flesh and blood but I… the way I am now I can’t take care of her. I never could really, since I was still just 15 when she was made,” He said with a self deprecating little laugh. “I managed to stabilize her but I can’t keep her.” 

He looked up at them, tear tracks carving their way through the blood on his face. “She goes by Phantasm when in costume. Will you take her? She’s… she’s a good kid, she needs someone better than me. Your team, or if she needs an adult she’d do well with Wonder Woman of Martian Manhunter.” 

Superboy had a determined set to his jaw as he nodded and held out his arms, letting Hyena pass Phantasm over to him. “Thank you,” Hyena sighed, tired and sad. “Tell her her template loves her, and tell her where to find me and she’s welcome to visit. Just warn her what I am now, I was very different when she knew me.” 

“What happened here?” Tim asked again. 

“Remember I mentioned being experimented on by mad scientists?” Danny asked wryly, Tim nodded and Danny simply gestured back at the facility. “I didn’t realize they still had her or I would have burned the place to the ground a long time ago. Here,” He said, fishing a USB out of his pocket and holding it out to Tim. “This has info on the organization, I meant to give it to you eventually anyway.” 

Tim took it and Danny slumped back, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Come visit me soon, and tell me how she’s doing if she doesn’t want to see me. Please? I… really care about her.” 

“Right, okay,” Tim agreed awkwardly. Danny nodded and then turned, walking back over to Jason who lifted his arms, letting Danny walk into them. 

He held Danny close to him and felt a cool wash of invisibility fall over both of them as Danny transformed again and wrapped his arms around Jason’s waist before taking off again. He flew them back to where Jason had left his bike in silence. Once they landed and Danny had transformed again, every time he did it seemed quicker and smoother. Jason drove them home, not caring about the blood that soaked into his back from Danny’s clothes. It wasn’t exactly the first time he’d been covered in blood. 

“You didn’t tell me you had a clone,” He said softly into their shared com when they were about half way home. He’d wanted to wait till Danny was ready to talk about it, especially after such an emotional experience, but he needed to know. 

“I thought she was dead like the rest of my family,” Danny murmured back, pressing his forehead against Jason’s shoulder. “I saw her destabilize myself. I didn’t know they had any way to keep her alive. And I don’t like to talk about the people I’ve lost, it hurts too much, and they’ll still be gone either way.”

“I get that, but we have to talk about it soon now, you know that right?” Jason asked, and felt Danny nod against his shoulder.

“Yes, I know. Tomorrow okay? I’m so tired, and I need a shower.” 

“Ya, we’ll both feel better after a shower and some sleep,” Jason agreed as they arrived back in Crime Alley and headed for the nearest safe house with good water pressure and a bed.

-------

Danny took a while to go to sleep, once they were both clean and in bed he broke down. Jason didn’t know how long he held Danny while he cried softly against his chest, but he didn’t mind, Danny needed it. Finally they both fell asleep, though Jason knew he slept better than Danny.

In the morning Jason woke up before Danny and carefully slid out of bed, dressing and going to pick up breakfast and coffee for them. This wasn’t their main safehouse and didn’t have many groceries or he would have made them breakfast himself. Danny was just starting to stir when he returned with breakfast sandwiches, Danny’s Deathwish coffee, and a normal one for himself.

“Hey Moonlight,” Jason murmured to Danny, putting the food down on the bedside table and leaning down to kiss Danny awake properly. “I brought breakfast,” He said, waiting for Danny to sit himself up groggily before pressing the cup of coffee into his hands. 

“Thank you Boo, you’re so good to me,” Danny sighed as he accepted the coffee with his eyes still half closed. Jason hummed and leaned against Danny’s shoulder as he drank his own coffee and ate his sandwich. Watching as Danny drank about half of his coffee before reaching for the sandwich, by the time he’d finished he looked a little more alive. 

“How are you feeling?” Jason asked softly once they were both finished, bunching up the empty packaging and shoving it back in the bag.

“I’m alright, I’ll be able to talk today, but I’d like to go back to our nest first? I feel safer there,” Danny admitted, giving Jason completely unnecessary puppy-dog eyes, Jason would never have said no. He knew Danny was happiest there, in the nice apartment near the center of their territory, Danny’s haunt, that they had decorated and really made Home.

“Oh course. You get dressed while I throw out the trash and then we can head home,” Jason agreed and Danny nodded. They both slid out of bed and did their assigned tasks before Jason drove them both home. It wasn’t that far, but covered in blood and exhausted as they were last night Jason had wanted to drive through as little of Crime Alley as possible. 

Once they were home Danny collapsed on their couch with a slight groan and Jason went to make them both a cup of tea. He brought them back to the livingroom and put the cups down on the coffee table before nudging Danny to lift his head so Jason could sit down and Danny could rest his head back in Jason’s lap. He combed his fingers through Danny’s hair gently, and waited quietly for Danny to organize his thoughts. 

“I got my powers when I was 14, after I died. It took me a couple months to figure out how to control them, but once I did I went into being a hero pretty much immediately, I called myself Phantom. The same portal that killed me let a bunch of really powerful ghosts through into our world and they started picking fights with me and causing damage, so I protected my town. Even though most of the town seemed to think I was evil too and all ghosts were bad. 

“I had my two best friends, Sam and Tucker, helping me, and then later my big sister Jazz when she found out what I was doing. My parents were incredibly prejudiced against ghost, the GIW got most of their information and weapons from them if that gives you an idea, so we never told them. 

“Then I found out I wasn’t the first like me. When my parents were in college they built a prototype portal and it opened on top of their college best friend Vlad. He wasn’t a true halfa like me, more like a human with ghost powers, maybe 70/30 at best but he got obsessed with me, he’d already been obsessed with my mother so my mother’s son with his powers… He tried to kidnap me, he wanted me to renounce my dad and go live with him, be his perfect son or whatever. When he realized I never would, he started trying to clone me. 

“Enter Ellie, the only halfway stable clone, because ghosts are basically impossible to clone. He sent her to me to gain my trust and betray me. She said she was my cousin at first, and I accepted her right away, before she shot me in the back so Vlad could kidnap me again. He said the only way to stabilize her was… I don’t remember exactly what he said, but whatever it was I basically let him torture me to try and stabalize her. And then once he’d gotten what he wanted he admitted he’d never been planning to save her, he was going to let her and all the other clones die once he had what he needed for a ‘perfect clone’.

“Ellie freed me and we fought him together after that. I knew she was my.. At least my little sister, if not my daughter, I would have tried to care for her, even though I was a kid and my parents were threats to both of us, but she’d been trapped in Vlad’s lab for all her short life. She wanted to be free and to travel, so I let her go and helped her where I could, and when she asked. 

“When my parents eventually found out about me and they… didn’t react well, they denied I was their son and captured me. They would have experimented on me themselves if the GIW hadn’t found out they had me and demanded they ‘hand over the specimen,” Danny paused with a bitter laugh and picked up the cup of tea. “Of course my big sister and my friends were home then too, trying to convince my parents they needed to let me go when the GIW decided the quickest way to get their hands on me would be to just… bomb the house. Of course they were… I didn’t die, but all the humans did.

“While I was still in shock they nabbed me. Vlad and Ellie actually teamed up to try and save me, but they were captured too, and there was no one else to come for us. I thought they’d both been killed during the experimentation as well. I’m sure Vlad was since I saw his body, but I guess they managed to pause Ellie’s destabilization and, you were there when we found her, and saw me restabilize her.” Danny finished and took another sip of his tea.

Jason drank as well, as he processed what was no doubt a very summarized version of a very fucked up string of events skimming over a lot of gory details. “Any other bits of your past that might pop up to cause us trouble?” Jason asked dryly and Danny winced.

“Well, my ex-rogues might, especially now that Em has seen me and knows I’m still around. If they do, I'll deal with it quickly. I was always gentle with them before when I was a hero, now I’d really show them why they shouldn’t mess with me,” Danny said, bearing his teeth in a brief snarl. “Other than that… there’s Dan. He’s an evil future version of me from an alternate future where he destroyed the world, that reality doesn’t exist anymore but thanks to time fuckery he still exists in this reality. I defeated and imprisoned him, but I lost track of the thermos he was trapped in after the explosion. It’s unlikely anyone will release him, but it is possible.”

“Why are heroes' lives always so complicated?” Jason asked rhetorically, rubbing his face with one hand with a soft groan. “Well, now I know so I can be prepared for any of this shit huh?”

“Ya,” Danny agreed sheepishly. “I’m really sorry Jason, you didn’t know how much drama and baggage I came with when we first got together… If you-”

“No, I see where you’re going with that and No. I love you, and it’s not like I have any less baggage, and if anything my baggage hurts you way worse than yours hurts me. I’m not leaving unless you want me to,” Jason said firmly, feeling Danny relax back against his lap.

“And I absolutely do not want you to,” Danny confirmed with a smile. “I love you too.”

“Good. And… I want you to know I’m really proud of you Danny. For facing your trauma last night, and for telling me about what happened to you. You’ve been handling all of this really well, better than I have really. I admire you a lot Cub, you’re too good for me really, but that just makes me want to be better so I can be worthy of you,” Jason said softly, unable to quite make eye contact with his boyfriend, embarrassed by his own emotional vulnerability.

Danny pushed himself up on one elbow and pulled Jason down by the back of his neck to kiss him sweetly. “That means so much Jason, and I feel the same way. The good you do, the way you channel your pain, it inspires me too. In the future where my family was killed and I ended up staying with Vlad instead of you, I destroyed the entire world. I didn’t even conquer it, I just killed… everyone. You keep me grounded, you remind me there is such a thing as an innocent human, and letting you command and channel my violence has kept me sane,” Danny murmured as he curled against Jason’s chest. 

“I guess there’s a reason why ‘you make me better’ is such a relationship cliche huh?” Jason chuckled and Danny laughed before they settled into a comfortable silence as they finished their tea. “Do you think Ellie will like me?”

[randomwriteronline]

(inspired by this post by @byz-was-here)

So maybe he had been a little too brash.

Not the first time Gresh had gotten that yelled at him, though Vastus was usually physically present instead of just in his head.

The point being, his attempt at sneaking into the terrifyingly enormous robot trying to punch the life out of the rickety body Mata Nui was struggling to pilot had been a success, and after what had felt like hours climbing as fast as he could up a relatively narrow tunnel he had at last emerged onto what had appeared to be some kind of island swarmed with bipedal metallic lizards of sorts brandishing spears.

Only one problem left on his plan's path now: he had no idea what the next step of said plan was.

One of the lizards opened its yellow skull into slices, hissing horrendously at him with what seemed like either a weirdly thick tongue or one of those slugs that tasted like rusted copper that they ate in Tajun, and pointed the end of its weapon at him as it crackled menacingly with an immense charge.

The young Glatorian panicked.

Before he could think of responding in any other way he joined his blades and thrusted them forward as hard as he could: a typhoon arose from them in the matter of a second, sweeping within itself the army of armored lizards. They struggled and writhed within the winds in a desperate attempt at freeing themselves from its pull, but could do nothing as their heads were yanked open and the slugs (they had to be slugs, because if those had been tongues it would have been so, so much worse) were almost all torn apart by the centripetal force, those spared from the gruesome fate ending up launched towards the impossibly high sky-like ceiling.

Gresh struggled to undo the destructive phenomenon before he fully lost control of it. As he heaved after at last dividing his weapons, he jolted upright again when a strange sound suddenly stopped not too far away from him. Nobody was around him anymore, and yet the noise was close, so close - almost...

He jerked his head upwards.

The slugs and the lizards had been weird, by all means - they had been what he might have expected from Kiina's idea of life on other planets: properly alien, properly other, properly just comprehensible enough to remind him of vague things that made no sense when presented in that shape and function.

Yet this, for all the ways it should have looked somewhat familiar, might have been the strangest being he'd ever seen in his life.

The humanoid figure clad in silver and red, floating above him thanks to rockets that seemed welded into its shoulders, looked back at him with glowing eyes that clearly mirrored his opinion.

"Now what in Mata Nui's name are you meant to be?" it sputtered at him without meaning to.

Its voice was almost too normal for its mechanical appearance - it still rumbled with melodies only possibly sung by machinery in-between the whistling breaths leaving and entering its frame like steam from a locomotive, but based on the being's looks hearing it pronounce such clear words instead of hisses, clunks, and revving growls was nonetheless quite destabilizing. It carried a weirdly androgynous quality within its deep pitch that made it impossible to understand if whoever had made it could have been envisioning it as female or otherwise, not helped by the martial image its armor projected without really giving its body a distinctively gendered shape. It was armed - the spinning blades it wielded seemed to be fused into one hand, what appeared to be a mini-sized cannon held into the other, and neither resembled any weapon the young Glatorian had ever seen - yet it appeared much more concerned with assessing the situation than attacking.

Gresh, busy as he was having several moments all at once, took in that pile of information and promptly forgot to think about it.

"I KNOW HIM!" he instead shouted way too loudly, pointing a blade at it without really reflecting on how that might have looked. "I KNOW HIM, HE'S A FRIEND!"

The being stumbled back a little in a defensive pose: "Mata Nui?" it asked, incredulous: "You are a friend to the Great Spirit?"

"YES, I KNOW HIM, HE GAVE ME THE WIND THING!" the young Glatorian continued to yell, now smacking together his weapons to better explain what his not particularly stellar choices in lexicon were struggling to convey by themselves before he pointed back at where he'd come from: "HE'S OUTSIDE FIGHTING THE ROBOT AND ALL! I NEED TO HELP HIM!"

"Fighting the what?"

"THE ROBOT! THE HUGE - THE BIG ROBOT, THE BIG ONE, THIS ONE, IT'S HUGE - I NEED TO FIND THE HEAD AND MAYBE KILL IT, HIM, THEM? MAYBE? MAYBE? POSSIBLY? I NEED TO HELP AND IT'S A BIG ROBOT AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO BUT I SHOULD PROBABLY GET TO THE HEAD OF THE ROBOT, THIS ONE, THE ROBOT - THIS ONE, THE HEAD, I NEED TO GET TO THE HEAD!"

He was not making any sense, but in his defense he was probably high on adrenaline.

The floating being gawked at him briefly. In a smooth motion it landed closer to him, looking him up and down with its brilliant pink eyes as it tried to make heads or tails of him without succeeding; Gresh charged at it to try explaining better and distractedly noticed there was flesh within the mechanical limbs.

"HE'S OUTSIDE," he continued just as loud - making the poor thing recoil as it did its best to keep him a little further away before he fried its audio receptors, "HE'S OUTSIDE AND THE PROBLEM IS IN HERE BECAUSE THERE'S A GUY IN THE BRAIN - HIS BROTHER I THINK? - AND IF I GET TO THE BRAIN MAYBE I CAN STAB HIM? MAYBE? PROBABLY? MAYBE? MA--"

"I can hear you," the being grimaced, stern tone imposing some peace and quiet onto the young warrior. "What is your name?"

"GRESH."

"Please quiet down."

"EVERYBODY I KNOW IS CURRENTLY AT THE MERCY OF TWO HUGE ROBOTS RIGHT NOW AND I NEED TO GET TO THE BRAIN OF THIS ONE TO--"

The hand was not as rough as he would have imagined - what with being made of metal and all - and the way it clumsily clamped around his mouth to very quickly and very kindly shut him up reminded him so much of Tarix that his furiously anxious body relaxed all at once, leaving him to look wide eyed into the dark sockets of a crimson helmet housing a pair of miniature yellow stars.

"You were sent by the Great Spirit himself?" the being asked. Despite currently being seconds away from squeezing its cheeks in that annoying way that older siblings tend to do, its tone was quiet with the sort of reverence reserved for gods.

Gresh pulled its palm from his mouth without encountering opposition: "I don't think he knows I'm here," he confessed, "But he's struggling out there, and I want to help him."

His interlocutor mulled over his words thoughtfully.

Its shining eyes took in the young Glatorian's entire frame, the slight change in them muttering its doubts without needing any words - but what could be a creature so strange, made of skin and clad in metal and bone, with a voice laid naked against the absence of its innate mechanical song, holding within such frail hands of flesh and fake phalanxes the same power as a missing brother of Air, talking of things beyond the universe itself, of a battle none knew their god was waging at that very moment, if not a desperate lending hand Mata Nui sent to guide his people in a victory against his cunning usurper?

When at last it looked back into Gresh's beaded pupils, it had taken its decision.

"The enemy is in the brain," it repeated.

The Lebori nodded feverishly: "The head! I think - he should be, right? It's the most important part, all the thoughts and nerves come from it, if you shut down the brain then the whole thing falls down and fails, right?"

A flash of understanding passed through the being's unmoving features: "Metru Nui!" it exclaimed as if remembering something.

"Yes! I think! Probably. If it's in the head then probably."

"We're a long way from there, but we could..." it ran a few quick calculations, producing a sound much like fat sizzling on a slab of lava-heated rock: "How long can Mata Nui last in his condition?"

"From what I've figured out of him I think he'll try to hold on until he's pummelled into scrap."

"Then we should try to be quicker than that."

Without much more preamble the being grabbed Gresh like a sack of flour, hefted him up in the air (he noticed only then how significantly shorter compared to it he was), secured his arms around its neck and shoulders with a practiced ease as the rockets of its armor shifted in a seamless manner to accomodate his passenger and provide the added firepower needed for carrying two people through the air, and got ready for take off as the poor kid scrambled to wrap around it before getting blasted off.

"Huh," it noted with genuine surprise, briefly forgetting their situation: "You're lighter than a Matoran. Are you missing any parts?"

"I'm eating plenty!" Gresh bit back.

A second later he was flying on the back of a mechanical creature with muscle peeking through the gaps of its armor, and the adrenaline washed away his coherent thoughts again.

-

Teridax felt miserable.

He supposed having an entire forty-thousand-feet tall body worth of various cells and microbes and the such viciously, actively and purposefully fighting against his consciousness would have had that sort of effect on just about anyone.

The gigantic robot piloted by a false god trying with all of its dwindling might to kick his jaw in also wasn't helping.

The second problem, however, could be dealt with by punching it into a sobbing heap of mangled rusted limbs begging for mercy with enough determination and brute force; the first one could not.

It required concentration - a very valuable asset currently being used to counter Mata Nui in his ugly runt of a spare frame he'd found in the first trash can of this horrid planet, thus distracting him from unleashing a strong enough counterattack across his organism to stop the squirming little pests from rebelling against him.

So yes, he was cross enough already.

And now he was getting a migraine.

He wondered briefly if fighting someone his own size (or, well... almost his own size, he nearly chuckled out loud to himself as he took a moment to bask once more of the not insignificant height difference between them) wasn't a waste of time. After all, Mata Nui had mentioned something about the safety of those insignificant beasts hurriedly scuttling away from their scuffle: certainly he would have been quite distraught if a careless swipe of his colossal hand caused a couple thousand casualties - maybe enough to be easily toppled and overpowered as he despaired over the loss of so many useless ants...

He raised his palm in the direction of their bothersome scampering, doing his best to place at least some of his power into it as his headache slowly worsened to a nearly unbearable degree.

How much of an increase in gravity would have been needed to flatten them all at once?

They were so small... Maybe just...

"JUNGLE SQUIRREL!" a voice that was not his screamed in his head.

What?

What the fuck?

What was that?

A strong wind arose, but not across Bara Magna.

In the span of a moment Teridax found himself ripped away from the middle of a titanic fight back in his blasted gaseous form as it was slammed and spread into a fog against one of the walls of the Core Processor. Disoriented, bleary, furious beyond belief, he came to his senses just in time to see rushing amongst the machinery Tahu, Takanuva, and - and a short, green, Toa-like, weirdly organic thing that sprinted directly into the control panel of the Great Spirit Robot which had once housed the synthetic soul of Mata Nui.

-

As incomprehensibly terrifying as a pair of colossi duking it out in the middle of the desert was, their size and loudness at the very least allowed much smaller beings to see and hear everything they were doing so that they could make an attempt to move as far away from their hellish battle as possible.

It hadn't been a pretty spectacle so far (few fights like these were), but it had given them more time to move out of harm's way than they would have expected. The escape was going incredibly smoothly, too, which was never how these sorts of things tended to go: neither Zesk nor Vorox had dared coming anywhere near the commotion, which had managed to scare off Bone Hunters and Skrall as well - even as easy a prey as the Agori were at the moment, scattering half directionless into an unclear part of the desert, they were not worth the risk of accidentally getting stepped on by who knows how many tonnes of metal.

The biggest causes of concern other than avoiding collateral damage were thus reduced to two: making sure everybody was accounted for as they left, and whether or not Mata Nui was winning.

Ackar, to the dismay of his blood pressure, was having serious trouble juggling his attention between them.

Tarix yanked him back to attention by his prosthetic arm, causing the Tapyri to hiss in pain: "What's the point of asking me questions if you don't listen to my answer?!"

"I'm sorry," he growled back, "A friend of mine is fighting for his life right now, Great Beings forbid I'm a little worried for him!"

"So are we!"

"I don't see you trying to dodge the fists of a giant robot right now!"

"Because I'm trying to get the slow walkers out of its space so they won't have to dodge its colossal debris!"

"As entertaining as your yelling is, I think we have bigger slugs to fry," Gelu interrupted them in a flat tone. Head caught in the crook of the Koniri's elbow, Berix squirmed and pushed as he desperately tried to regain the sweet taste of freedom only to get squeezed a little tighter. "Somebody tried to go back to the crux of the struggle."

The other two Glatorian abandoned all tension between them to give the young Gaquri a suffering disappointed look, filled with the kind of tiredness that only an adopted father and the kindly man who puts out carved pumpkins for the mangy were-possum creature that skitters around the edges of his property to feed off of every now and then could muster; coherently, Berix replied with an inarticulate mumbling whine too low in volume and high in pitch to be intelligible that was meant to be an apology.

He was very lucky Kiina was not present, or she would have screamed his scales off.

Evidently he wasn't that lucky, because Kiina materialized on her chariot seconds later with Vastus in tow.

"Most of the oldest, youngest and motion-impared are already being moved on vehicles to a safer cave system a few Lebori knew," she informed the small group urgently as the other dismounted from the back of her ride with a worried look on his face.

Getting no answer, she searched their faces for an inkling of what they were thinking and landed squarely on her younger brother's: the immediate rage that took over her features made him scramble harder to evade Gelu's grip and her inevitable wrath all at once, eventually ending up falling right on his ass in the sand when the Koniri let go without warning.

"YOU." Kiina thundered while he scuttled away behind the other Glatorian: "WHAT IN PLUDE DID YOU DO NOW?!"

"Nothing!" he shrieked back, clinging to the white armored leg even as it tried to shake him off. "Gresh and I thought we could have helped if we got in maybe, you know, since it's a machine and so I could have messed up its wiring or something like that so it could have fallen over and the height advantage could have--"

"Wait - wait, Gresh?" Tarix paled. He turned to his wife: "He was with you, right? With you two, further down?"

Vastus replied with an equally terrified face: "I thought he was down here with you," he replied softly as horror built into his voice, "He insisted in covering our backs, he promised he wouldn't have done anything stupid..."

Ackar sunk his fingers into his eyelids with a groan, Kiina following suit in a nearly identical fashion.

The kids needed a hobby.

Any hobby.

Just as long as it kept them away from pulling shit like this.

If they got him back in one piece, they were going to beat his ass.

An ear-piercing sound that was far too close to a pained lament shook them out of their collective mixture of fear, worry and well-deserved rage, rattling the sky alongside with them.

"Fuckin' Quartz Peaks!" Gelu exclaimed.

His eyes were fixed on the gargantuan figure stumbling back into the dunes on suddenly unsteady legs, leaning forward as it clutched its head in anguish and curled upon itself to stave off the pain clearly rippling through it - shoulders so low that they were almost at the same height as the prototype robot's, which instead stood tall despite the strain placed upon it.

Had Mata Nui dealt a decisive blow as they weren't looking?

But the collision should have caused something akin to a sonic boom, and the mechanical body's stance was just as surprised at the change in its opponent's demeanor as the spectators of their fight...

Then suddenly, the Great Spirit Robot spoke as it had done before.

"My head hurts," it said, with a strangled voice that was not the one that had taunted its adversary so mercilessly until now.

The fraction of a second passed.

A green bolt shot through the golden sand in the fight's direction.

Berix tried to follow, but Tarix latched onto him like a lifeline.

"GRESH!" Vastus shouted as he ran as hard as he could, and Ackar realized his heart was beating far too loud in his ears.

He turned to the other Glatorian, skin pasty and spent like that of a dead body: "Tarix, Gelu, you keep everybody going, as far as you can," he ordered. For a second he was struck by a gross sense of familiarity that almost cut off his breath; some part of him grabbed the resurfacing memories of the Core War and beat them back into the hole he'd buried them until he could almost feel the blood on his knuckles. "Get to those caves, make sure nobody is left behind, keep them all in place until you're certain the coast is clear. Berix, don't move from either of them. Kiina, you're with me, I can't run that fast. Are we good?"

All four nodded, and the chariot's engine revved urgently as he jumped upon its rickety frame.

"You'll better get my nephew back, Tapyri," his once enemy hollered before they could speed off into the desert, with a tone closer to a plea than a threat or a joke.

"Who do you take me for, Gaquri?" Ackar shouted right back: "He's my nephew too!"

Tarix watched him and Kiina drive off as fast as the vehicle allowed; only when they caught up with his wife, still shouting for the young Glatorian as though he could hear that feeble cry from that far away, and scooped the veteran Lebori up with them, did he turn away and rush to take care of the last few stragglers.

-

The prototype creaked pitifully as its enormous hands found the massive elbows of the Great Spirit Robot and struggled to sustain them alongside with everything else that was already putting a strain on its faulty frame.

"Gresh?" Mata Nui whispered, searching for his former body's eyes. "My friend, is that you?"

Through the massive fingers peeked at last a large, glowing iris: upon its dark orange color, so similar to red, laid a whitish beaded line - an attempt at replicating the peculiar shape of a Lebori's pupil on a surface not meant to have any.

"This is too tall," the Great Spirit Robot groaned quietly in a still boyish voice, optics hiding away again before the sense of vertigo became too much.

A tremor overtook its massive frame, threatening to destabilize the prototype robot alongside with it; Mata Nui held onto him a little steadier as he tried desperately to figure out how in the name of the lonely endless vastness of the known and unknown universe the young Glatorian had managed to get himself inside the control panel of the Core Processor of all places.

Even ignoring the fact that he should have gone for the Manual Override Computer instead of putting himself through the immense strain of piloting such a colossal body (although in his defense he may have not known how to operate it or how to recognize it or where to find it - hazy memories of it reminded him that the Great Beings really had placed it horrendously, goodness gracious, so perhaps he had a little too much faith in how effectively Gresh could have located it in the first place), knowing that a physical body was currently governing the Great Spirit Robot was absolutely baffling.

Was this possibility planned? Had anybody considered that one day a bodied being could have needed to take the helm? Were there proper safety measures in place for such a happenstance? Did anybody even stop to consider if it was possible? Did a few dozen thousands years old kid just physically brute force his way into a contraption designed to house immaterial beings and make it work? And hold on, how on Aqua Magna had he shoved Teridax out of it? And actually, now that he thought about it, how in the name of himself had he entered the Robot and gotten all the way to the Core Processor apparently completely on his own?

"How did you do this?" he only asked in the end.

"I went in - in the robot, and there was - we went in the brain, in the, the brain, and we - I threw - Bota Magna sanctissima mentula libera me a malo my body hurts so bad--"

He leaned forward into Mata Nui's embrace, enormous body moaning in pain as long fevers crawled over him.

It must have been an internal infection - it must have meant that those within, the inhabitants he had so carelessly allowed to rot in their own bloodshed, had been fighting back against Teridax.

Had he not been preoccupied with being puzzled out of his wits and helping his friend not succumb to the fever of a lifetime, the former Great Spirit could have been overwhelmed by pride for about an hour, cried himself into unconsciousness for a couple more, spent another pair feeling really bad about them putting so much effort into it when he had ignored them for so long, and experienced a sudden spike in the need to beat the tar out of his fated brother's mask harder than he already had been for a few good minutes.

Fortunately, his mind was fully focused on a variety of other things.

Trying his best to pull Gresh into his arms so that he could better offer him support, he steeled his groaning rusted body and spoke to distract him from the pain: "You are in the Core Processor right now?"

"I - I think, so, yes, I think- I think-"

"You removed Teridax from the controls?"

"I threw - with, with the winds, I yanked him out, 'cause he's - weird, he's weird smoke and all - my legs, my legs--"

"You are not alone with him, are you? Is there someone else in the Core Processor?"

"There- yes, there's Ta, Tahu and Tahu- Taka-Takanuuu, va, Takanuva? Tahu and T-Takanuva, they're - they helped, me, get here, and, and - they're here, they're here too, they'll - I'm in, in safe hands - aren't I?"

Mata Nui's grip around him was wonderfully comforting, and for a moment he felt as though his anguish was a little more bearable: "Safe hands indeed," he heard him speak, voice laden with a wondrous pride that set him at ease: "They are as brave and reckless as you are - and I'm certain they will be able to do the impossible and stave off Teridax, just as you did."

The praise cooled the violent temperature in the young Glatorian's momentary gargantuan body, and as he held onto the otherworlder he at last found the strength to overcome the nausea and pull himself up: despite the terrible aches lighting its every inch on fire, the Great Spirit Robot stood tall once more.

An idea struck Mata Nui as he looked at its orange eyes.

His destiny had been meant to be shared by two bodies and minds of equal strength - but he was stuck in a frame too weak, and the mental strain the task would have put on Gresh risked being too much for him to sustain; and yet, if he had already gotten half of the work done in this rickety thing, and if he continued to maintain his efforts steady as his duty demanded of him, the much larger robot would have expended much less energy, keeping the Glatorian's frail mind and frame safe...

"Gresh," he murmured softly: "How are you feeling?"

"Nauseous," his friend replied truthfully, "But I can - I can manage, I can - it's, not as bad as the- the Skrall in Tajun. I can manage, I can help. I want to help. I want to help."

"I am afraid what I could ask of you might be beyond what you should allow for your safety's sake."

To see such a massive creature of metal tremble fiercely as it did its best to bear its anguish was a frightening spectacle, terrible, unnatural; but Gresh held that heavy body tall and straightened its back as best as he could, and his voice was as steady as they came: "I'll bet I've handled worse."

"Worse than pulling two moons into a planet?"

No answer.

"The robot is equipped to do so without having to physically grasp the satellites."

Gresh wheezed - either in relief, or because something in the Voya Nui area had just exploded hard enough to give him a chance to experience appendicitis again: "Ah," his voice rattled out of him, "Alright. Yes, I can do that, that's feasible."

-

For a striking, minuscule second, it felt a little like a deja-vù.

Nothing was the same - not the location, overflowing with unrecognizable machinery; not the fight, much wilder and cruel in its coreography than a slightly more dangerous game of kohlii than usual; not the spectators, who weren't exactly spectating as Tahu was desperately trying to keep his Hau's shields functional around the three of them while not going blind and Gresh was kneeling completely unresponsive if not catatonic in the sunken spot he had jumped into; not even his opponent, nor himself, although they were still virtually the same beings.

But for a striking, minuscule second, it felt like nothing had changed at all from that confrontation beneath Kini Nui.

Teridax lunged at him with its disgustingly rotten green cloud of a body open like a gaping maw seeking to devour the Toa of Light whole; the gaseous particles scattered briefly as Takanuva swung his spear through them, the arch drawn by the weapon's trajectory producing a blade of light.

The Makuta recomposed himself behind his back in a matter of seconds, spreading to cover the entire wall with his essence. There were no eyes in that clutter of loosely held together atoms, but the Toa could feel them stab right through his armor.

He'd almost been less frightening when he'd had a body.

"I HAVE GROWN TIRED OF YOU!" Teridax's voice boomed through the cramped space, bouncing off of the surrounding machinery with the harshness of a sledgehammer: "THE TIME FOR GAMES IS OVER, LITTLE TOA! I HAVE WELL EXHAUSTED WHATEVER PATIENCE I ONCE MAY HAVE HAD FOR DEALING WITH YOU MISERABLE VERMINS!"

"Sounds like a you problem," Takanuva mumbled in reply through gritted teeth.

The wall of shadow toppled towards him with a long, shrieking whistle, like a faraway bomb on the way to the ground: Tahu had two seconds to shield his eyes before his younger brother's body burst with a blinding flare that would have no doubt brought a weaker being to their knees, but only repelled Teridax back into the corners of the room, divided but not broken, ready to slither back into a plume of horrid olive smoke.

How long was this going to go on for? Keeping his Hau active was slowly starting to wear him down, and in the time Takanuva had been struggling against the Makuta it seemed that absolutely nothing had changed from their predicament.

He would have loved to leap to his aid, but his feet were already singing and nearly melting the metal floor from the stress: if he wanted to get them all safely out of here, fighting wasn't an option.

A strange sound, like a strangled whimpered grunt, prompted him to try his luck and open his eyes again.

Gresh was shaking.

As he still kneeled deadeyed and unresponsive within the pod sunken into the ground, his entire body had suddenly started shivering harshly, spasming as though he was being electrocuted - but nothing appeared to be coming from the walls to provoke such a reaction.

Tahu hurriedly lowered himself towards the strange being while Takanuva continued fending off Teridax: "Gresh!" he called out, reaching for him: "What's wrong?"

His hands found themselves stopped in their tracks by an invisible force just above the being. He tried again, pushing as hard as he could in an attempt to make it through the thick air to no avail as his muscles strained but found no gain all the same. Was this what was affecting the green armored creature? Or had it been like this from the moment he'd jumped in? Then it should have protected Teridax when he'd been swirling within it too, but he'd been blown out of it... Could elemental attacks bypass this invisible barrier?

While the Toa thought furiously how to get him out of there without hurting him, Gresh slowly pulled his head back to look out of his shallow prison with small, jolting motions; he began raising his arms upwards at the same agonizing pace, straining for the open exit just above him.

The struggle tore a strangled whine out of his throat. Takanuva staggered at the sound, and the distraction nearly allowed Teridax to rush through his chest and tear his heartlight away with him - only sending the Toa of Light careening back when the gaseous mass instead collided with the shield Tahu reinforced just in time, saving him from shapeless jaws aching to tear him apart.

"FOOLISH INSECTS!" the Makuta snarled as vicious as a Rahi Nui, "YOU CANNOT STOP ME! YOU CANNOT CHANGE MY DESTINY!"

"It was never your destiny!" Takanuva growled right back: the shadows in the room shifted according to his desire, rendering Teridax heavy enough for him to be hit in full by a blade of light too quick for him to avoid. "You usurped Mata Nui and acted like it was always meant to be!"

Pained hisses turned into a harsh laugh: "DON'T PRETEND YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENS AROUND YOU, LITTLE TOA," Teridax mocked him, twisting into a tornado that threatened to rip the whole room to shreds. "THERE ARE THINGS THAT WILL LAY BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION FOREVER - AND ONCE THAT THING YOU'VE BROUGHT ALONG WITH YOU COLLAPSES FROM A STRUGGLE IT WAS NEVER MEANT TO FACE, NOTHING WILL KEEP ME FROM TAKING MY RIGHTFUL PLACE AS THE EMBODIMENT OF THIS UNIVERSE AGAIN!"

The young Toa could have said something quippy, or sarcastic, a good line to at least go down with the satisfaction of a glorious comeback; as he was not planning on dying, Takanuva just roared and blasted the brightest light bomb he'd ever made in his face.

Unaware of the immense luminescence above him, Gresh's fingers finally clawed at the edges of the control panel.

Tahu snaked his own hand under the thin fleshy phalanxes as soon as the explosion of light dimmed, elated to discover the force field waning enough in that area to let him actually interact with the other being and immediately trying to leverage him up - although it was easier said than done, considering how little he had to work with.

Maybe it was a stupid move, after Teridax had so blatantly claimed that Gresh was the only thing standing between him and complete control over the universe, but he had his reasons: for one, it certainly wouldn't have been the first time he'd pulled this sort of thing, so whatever reserves he might have had about the situation had likely already been obliterated into fine mist; secondly, he was not going to let a sapient being die between convulsions like this, especially not an emissary and friend of the Great Spirit; and finally, if that ancient talking cloud that was the Makuta thought he or Takanuva wouldn't have jumped in the Control Panel to take over from the poor organic thing even at the cost of sacrificing themselves to keep his gaseous ass from doing any more damage to the entire known world, he was sorely mistaken.

Gresh shook harder in his grasp, but did not budge an inch.

The Toa of Fire willed himself coolheaded as he gritted his teeth: "Come on, come on, don't give up on me..."

A blast of light turned his vision spotty for a few moments, Takanuva's pained groan reaching him only moments later. The shield must have gotten weaker - he turned his focus back on his Hau in full, but the flare of its power flowing once again around his younger brother filled his limbs with molten lead as exhaustion settled into him and suddenly pulling Gresh out felt akin to getting his arms ripped off.

Had using the Vahi been this excruciating, or was he just easily fatigued when forced to balance his attention between two things? Gali would have never had this kind of problem.

Then again, she would not have had a Mask of Shielding either; so he would grit his teeth and bear it, and succeed even if it killed him.

Maybe it was this desperate burst of bravado, maybe it was Takanuva scattering Teridax across the corners of the room again before the Makuta could even get close to him, maybe it was Mata Nui, wherever he was, managing to perceive their thoughts and lending them a blessing of his own: but at last, somehow, inhaling in a horrendously loud gasp, Gresh clutched Tahu's hands tight and tore through the forces keeping him down as he lurched upright on his feet, nearly slamming right in the metallic chest while struggling still against his yet to be quelled tremors.

Before the Toa of Fire could say anything the organic creature was feverishly crawling out of the sunken trap, pushing him to the floor alongside himself and cawing with a panicked voice: "Down! Down!"

Takanuva turned to check on them. His opponent wasted no time ramming into the force shield around him, nearly slamming him into the opposite wall had Tahu not almost dislocated his arm to catch him in time and pull him under himself to protect him.

"I HAVE TOLD YOU, LITTLE TOA!" Teridax howled victoriously as he spread his form to completely sorround the now three overwhelmed beings curled on the pavement, powerless to stop him: "YOUR IDIOTIC RESISTANCE IS MEANINGLESS! YOU CANNOT CHANGE MY DESTINY!"

He dove back into the control panel with a horrifying laugh, filling its every crevice, at last returning to the so very maddeningly empowering feeling of a gigantic body once more regained, subjugated, under his utter control.

Before he even had access to his eyes again he could recognize the fever of rebellion burning through his limbs, the rusted hands holding fast onto his chestplate, the sound of straining machinery now on its last sputtering forces: at last his immense irises burned bright with a vermillion hue, facing the crude prototype features of his brother's furrowed momentary face in the battle he had been so rudely interrupted from finishing.

But just as he was about to taunt him, Mata Nui pushed with all his strength, and his sluggish reflexes did not let him react in time.

-

Vastus screamed.

He screamed until he felt his chest shrivel and implode.

Ackar wrapped his prosthetic arm around his back, pressing him against the chariot with all his might because he knew full well that if he had let go the Lebori would have let himself fall off into the sand, but looked just as pale as the dead while they both watched the Great Spirit Robot slump forward into the smaller titan's hold.

"He's fine!" Kiina barked while she struggled to regain control of the chariot after swerving too hard, covered in cold sweat and gripping the wheel so hard the scales of her knuckles were creaking. "He's fine! Mata Nui wouldn't just--!"

"He must have gotten him out before that," the Tapyri agreed much more softly, "He wouldn't have let him come to harm."

Vastus heard them both only faintly. His eyes were stuck on the enormous body with a hole in the back of its head that just moments ago had been speaking with his nephew's voice.

"Your friend better pray to the Great Beings Gresh hasn't come to harm," he hissed, feathers raised and bristling with furious premature grief, pupils constricted so tight it hurt, as he watched the rusted colossus lay its enormous bretheren to the ground slowly, carefully: "Because no fucking robot the size of a mountain will keep me from dismantling him with my bare hands if it's the last thing I do in my miserable life."

-

Takanuva blinked. Then he blinked again two more times, just to make sure his eyes were open, as the red shield faded away.

He flexed his fingers in the dark, trying his luck against the shadows sorrounding the three of them to create a little mote of light... Which formed instantaneously, without encountering any trouble or opposition whatsoever.

A good sign. Puzzling, but pretty good.

He turned his head to look around, feeling Tahu's protective hold around him weaken to allow him to properly take in the room and search for... For what? He wasn't really sure. He felt a little dizzy.

Little seemed to have changed in the wake of Teridax returning in control and the subsequent earth-rending rattle that had overtaken the whole chamber for a terrifying second. The walls were still standing, and with them all their machinery as well; everything was however eerily dark and silent, the hushed buzzes now absent, the faint gleams that all together had made up the room's lightsource snuffed out. Even the small chasm the Makuta had disappeared into was unusually quiet and dim.

"Are you both alright?" his brother asked, still so concerned that he hadn't had the time to catch his breath.

"Yeah," Takanuva replied distractedly: "Yeah, I'm fine. Gresh?"

Faceplanted on the floor and making no movement whatsoever, the organic being responded with a grunt that could have been considered affirmative. Tahu carefully lifted his head to check on him a little better while his younger sibling continued to look around, convinced something was off: beaded pupils struggled to peek through heavy eyelids fighting to stay open.

The Toa of Fire turned the poor thing face up, hoping he could be a bit more comfortable: "You look like you got in a fight with a Rahi Nui," he grimaced.

Gresh's mouth twitched spasmodically for a moment or two: "Drippin'," he mumbled back at him.

"What?"

"Sumfin's drippin'," he slurred again, and craned his neck in mild discomfort as he whined: "Oh, tha's so annoyin'..."

"Where do you hear dripping of all things?" Takanuva argued.

"Wha'y' mean, can'y' hear i'? 's loud 's all Plude..."

"In all fairness Takanuva is not known for being too keen in that sense," Tahu said, completely ignoring the pointed look the Toa of Light immediately shot him, "But I can't hear anything either."

"D'y' go' ears full of w'rms? 's blowin' my head op'n, 's righ' 'here!..." the young being bemoaned as he struggled to raise his weak unstable hand to point somewhere right next to them - in fact, bringing their attention back to the shallow chamber that had housed him mere seconds ago.

The small mote of light illuminated what appeared to be a slowly growing puddle of sickly greenish liquid slowly expanding across the metal floor, half caught in the depressions left by Tahu's smoldering feet where they had nearly melted the pavement. A drop landed into it at that moment with a sad little splash: both Toa followed its path in reverse to find its source up, up, on the ceiling...

... Until their gazes sat on a wide wet stain splattered across metallic panels, likely the product of a gas condensed far too high, of a color concerningly similar to antidermis.

Just to be safe, they slowly crawled away from the puddle.

You could never trust Teridax to consistently stay dead, after all.

They picked themselves up in a sudden hurry to leave. When Gresh remained unmoving on the floor, only twitching and groaning at the stray droplets that sometimes fell, Takanuva eyed him with a little bit of worry: "Are you ok? Do you need help?"

"Gimme a sec'nd," the other replied through gritted teeth.

He shifted his feet enough to pull his knees up, only to have them fall to the side rather bonelessly moments later; he opted for turning around so he could be on all fours, achieving getting on his stomach only when the Toa of Fire gave him a hand as though he were a turtle laying on its shell, and while he did manage to push his torso off the ground with his arms his head very stubbornly refused to raise, blocking him in a very stupid pose. The larger beings very kindly elected to slip their hands under his armpits to lift him despite his mumbled insistences that he could do it himself: the second he was put on his feet his legs decided to crumble like a melting cheesecake, and before he knew it he was cooped up nice and safe in Takanuva's surprisingly big arms as his golden sphere was replaced by a warmer ball of fire, courtesy of Tahu.

"Wow, you're light," the younger Toa noted.

"Right?" his brother agreed. "He weighs less than you did."

"Wait, really?"

"Well, y're re'lly whi'e," Gresh grumbled, offended. His head was lolling back towards the ground in a way that clearly strained his neck, but no matter how hard he tried he could not lift it. He gargled defeatedly: "M'helme's 'oo heavy..."

"Ah - hold on," he heard as he was jostled a little while the other two began walking out of the room and into the tunnel that would once again lead them into the open air.

A kind if clumsy hand carefully went to sustain his nape, lifting his head along with the heavy armor sitting upon it. It took a couple trials, but the helmet did come off eventually: the poor thing's olive green face poofed to almost twice its size as he groaned in relief, and Takanuva watched with awe by the warm light of his brother's flames as the thin feathers adhered back against the skull to reveal features surprisingly flat instead of concave - thin nostrils above a thin mouth adorned with thin ivory teeth, and lashes like a moth's antennas hanging for dear life on tired eyelids, and small ears covered in reddish plumes twitching slightly, and patches of greyish tawny skin between gaps in the down dotted with scars.

The Toa of Light stared, fascinated. Gresh stared right back, so dazed that he barely realized he was conscious.

Takanuva leaned down to his face and told him plainly: "You look even weirder up close."

The other curled up his nose: "An' how d'y'look under tha' mask?"

"Like this, of course," the Toa replied as he briefly lifted the Avohkii.

Gresh huffed a little frightened "Hoo!" and poofed his feathers out right away with eyes blown wide open, thoroughly spooked: "Oh, y'p'ple're ghas'ly."

Takanuva would have objected more vocally if a known voice hadn't rung out at that moment, calling for him and Tahu.

The Toa of Fire enlarged the sphere of flames in his hand while sprinting forward, responding to the cries in tone: soon enough natural light was streaming into the tunnel, allowing the three beings inside it to clearly see Nuparu and Hewkii clambering as fast as their amphibious feet allowed towards them.

"How are things up there?" Tahu asked them immediately as soon as they stopped mere bio before him to catch their breaths: "Is everybody safe? Teridax should be neutralized for now, but we felt some kind of--"

"Sky's broken," Nuparu interrupted him.

The older Toa blinked, shook his head, and sputtered: "What?"

"There's a HUGE HOLE in it!" Hewkii continued whilst flailing his arms wildly in his Earth brother's stead, as he was noticeably more athletic and not currently in the process of being forced to reshape his lungs into something that could actually hold oxygen again: "It was on top of us and then it SHIFTED and went to the horizon and the sea just - pshwoooosh, just fell out of it, all of it - ok, maybe not all of it, but there's- it's- there are Rahi CHOKING on AIR because the sea is just, THAT little, there's THAT little sea in the sea right now, because it- because it FELL OUT. OF THE HOLE IN THE SKY. AND - and there is, there's stuff outside of the hole! There's a sky! A second sky!"

"A what?"

"It looks like the sky on Mata Nui and Voya Nui but maybe I'm imagining things because I'm still reeling, but then there's - sand! There's SAND, there's MOUNTAINS, there's--"

"Hold on," Takanuva piped up, looking as flabbergasted as his older brother, "Hold on, the hole - how, how did that happen?"

"WE JUST DON'T KNOW!!"

"Something might've," Nuparu interjected again, taking a big breath before he could go on: "Scraped it off. Some water - real water, not protodermis - fell onto us when the hole appeared, so a portion of it could have been knocked off or crushed or-"

Gresh chose that moment to give exactly two singular squeaky laughs. He sounded like he was having the most baller time of his life.

"Smack'im with a big rock," he gargled, "Now tha's a classic."

All eyes turned to him.

For a very long second, no words came to anybody.

Then Nuparu said, with the voice of a genuinely intrigued Archivist unfortunately dragging along a rich tapestry of concerning implications: "What is that?"

"We're not archiving him," Takanuva shot him down instantly.

"Yes, but what is he?"

"His name is Gresh and he's in no condition to answer right now."

"Why is that?"

"He's barely keeping awake!"

"So?"

"Not the time for this!" Tahu interrupted them exasperated, launching himself forward to get out and figure out what in Karzhani was happening out there, because while there's a big hole in the sky was a perfectly comprehensible string of words with a meaning behind it there was no way he had processed even just a single one of them in a way that made sense.

-

She would have been much more relieved to see her older Fire brother emerge from the barely still standing buildings relatively unscathed from whatever challenge he'd just gone through (she had actually only vaguely heard of him needing to go under the colosseum alongside Takanuva without knowing what exactly they were meant to do there, but she considered her guess to be a very educated one because quite frankly there was always a challenge of some sort wherever a Toa had to go) had she not currently been wrestling with a skull-splitting migraine caused by the incessant shouting coming from Pridak's now beached fleet as their ships were left at the mercy of Ehlek's enormous water-dwelling Rahi, which were contorting madly in a desperate attempt to get back under what little ocean was left for them to breathe in.

The panicking army was very lucky Gali had been her example for how a Toa should behave, because had she been more closely exposed to, say, Nokama Hordika instead, they would have all been washed out of the enormous hole in the horizon by now.

That little piece of tangible cosmic horror was also certainly not helping her current state of mind.

Back fins outstretched to slow her descent, Hahli glided down from her observation point to land right into her brother's arms, slamming her whole weight on his chest hard enough to make him stagger. The impact tore a loud 'oof' out of him, but he managed to hug her upright without either of them toppling over in the end.

"Glad to see you," she sighed.

Tahu placed her down on her feet, looking her over for injuries: "Are you alright?"

"No," Hahli groaned. Her brain pulsed painfully as if to underline her statement, and she grimaced. "But I'll live. What about you? And Takanuva? Is he alright? What did you two--"

"Teridax has been disabled for now," he just told her, very cautiously wording himself in order not to jinx it.

He then turned towards the enormous hole in reality - bathed not in an impenetrable darkness but in sunlight, looking back at him with the sight of an enormous desert which seemed in some parts to be slowly receding under a quiet wave of something - and stood quiet before it for a moment.

At last he raised an exhausted arm to point at the whole incomprehensible debacle and asked: "What in the Makuta is going on with that?"

His little sister made a pained sound, like the saddest Hapaka howl: "Wouldn't we all like to know..."

"Alright, let's go for simpler questions first," Tahu conceded for the sake of their mental health. "How's the city, is the damage widespread? Any casualties? Everybody accounted for? The Hagah, Gali, Kongu, Jaller, where are they? Are they alright?"

"Pouks, Iruini and Gali are helping the Turaga look after the wounded, but they've already said that things look to be much less worse than they could be, thankfully," she replied: "Kualus, Gaaki, Norik, Kongu and I are keeping watch on the shores to keep any more of the Barraki's forces from trying their luck against us, and some of the Matoran are cleaning wrecks and disassembling the Rahkshi and Exo-Toa since they stopped attacking - Nuparu was helping too but he and Hewkii went to warn you, right? And a piece of-" (she gestured upwards, loosely indicating the spot where the hole in the sky had been, too tired to refer to it out loud) "-Fell in the Ko-Metru area, so Jaller and Bomonga went to see how bad the damage is and what they can do about it."

Her brother nodded, relieved: "Good work, all of you," he reassured her with a few good pats on her back.

Hahli allowed the gentle pressure to push her towards him, laying her head on his shoulder to let herself enjoy the respite lent by his warm hold around her.

"I'm so tired," she wheezed.

Tahu nuzzled her forehead sympathetically: "We're gonna take a break eventually," he sighed. "Sooner that later, hopefully. Possibly."

They whined in tandem at the thought.

That sweet prospect of rest seemed farther and farther each day.

A holler in their direction snapped them out of their momentary miserable exhaustion: Takanuva was rushing over to them (Nuparu's thin form disappearing back towards the city behind him, likely to continue cleaning up the streets with Hewkii), arms tight around his chest and a look of pure relief at the sight of his sister and former fellow chronicler.

He was glad to lean into her hug, talking far too quickly for her to register any of his words properly; he stopped only when she squeezed him tight, tearing a strange pained grunt out of him.

"Right, sorry, forgot you were there," he mumbled apologetically. Hahli gave him a weird look, about to ask what he meant by that, but his attention had already shifted, magnetized by the hole in the horizon with its puzzling world beyond it: he tilted his head down towards his own chest just a little without ever tearing his eyes from the strange panorama, and whispered: "Is that were you come from?"

A small movement and another mumble - "May'e," said with a slurring tone typical of someone who's just woken up and is still squinting at the light, "Bi' 'oo green, I fink," - brought her eyes lower down from his silver mask.

She blinked once, twice, thrice. The strange olive green being laid limply in Takanuva's arms, looking on the verge of passing out with a sonorous snore right there and then.

How had she not noticed something like that?

Were her senses dimming?

She had no time to be relieved about being proven wrong moments later, when a long shadow creeped in through the sky's chasm.

The strangest kind of silence erupted from Metru Nui and its surroundings - the quiet of held back screams, of barely contained terror being muzzled tight before it had the chance to bark at the threat much larger than itself with its tail between its legs, desperate to intimidate what intimidated it.

It was enormous: it fell slowy, outside, away from the universe, but the impact rattled the entire world nonetheless. Patches of brownish red (was it rust?) clung to the colossal segments across what seemed like a shoulder, a neck, the beginning of a head. A long, wheezing exhale abandoned the titan, its size turning it into a terrifying sound, and the whole frame hissed in agony as it grew impossibly taught while its metallic components grinded against one another with bloodcurdling shrieks.

It was a short, impossibly quick moment.

A second, really, nothing more.

It felt incorrect - like looking through the water without a Kaukau to shield your eyes, everything around you fuzzy and indistinct.

But for a second, for just one single second, it was...

Hahli stopped breathing.

"Matoro?"

And then the second passed, and the body stopped its whistling lament and laid limp, and the fleeting sensation was gone.

"Fuck," the being in Takanuva's baffled hold murmured, quiet voice devoid of any underlying mechanical song deafening in the silence: "Tha's concernin'."

-

The ground was covered in something, some watery thing, that turned the slowly less and less sandy terrain into a sopping marsh. Vastus speeded through it with surprising agility for someone with his age and a chunk of lower spine missing, although by the standards of a Lebori who'd lived his entire early life in a swampy grove as he was his form was severely lacking - a hundred millenia without any possibility to practice will do that to you.

Ackar was shouting for him above the chariot's waning engine, trying to tell him to wait as he dismounted from the vehicle only to find himself stuck between going after him to make sure he didn't do anything rash and following Kiina to make sure she didn't do anything rash.

Vastus barely heard him anyways. He was still screaming for Gresh.

Idiot rookie that he was - couldn't he have stayed put for once? Stuck close to Tarix as he said he would? Not thrown himself into yet another stupid plan? Now he was starting to sound like Gelu - useless heroics and all that. But Gelu had a point sometimes.

Maybe they should have never indulged him. Maybe they should have never played along with his prattlings about being fully grown when he couldn't even drink yet without melting his liver into goo. Maybe they should have never gotten attached. Maybe they should have never allowed him to become a Glatorian and just left him to tend to the Thornax bushes in Tesara.

Great Beings, his heart was going to collapse.

The robot's colossal head had been laid so that the gaping wound on its nape would almost touch the ground. Liquid still sputtered out of the skull's jagged edges in rivulets: it was silvery in color, like the material making up the gargantuan body it dripped out of, and pooled in a wide shallow pond just underneath the wreckage.

The overwhelming grey hue covering the whole scene did not make the spectacle of a split open skull less gruesome.

It did, however, make it much easier to spot the bright red head of a humanoid figure as it flew right over the cranial cliffs - and with it, the familiar green shape held tight against its front.

Vastus barely registered the movement of his own limbs. In a second he was standing ankle deep in the silvery pond, Venom Talon in hand ready to strike, eyes trained onto the startled creature floating a few feet in the air while holding Gresh tighter in its grip; the young Glatorian's orange eyes opened blearily, heavy, tired, and his arm dangled in his direction in a manner that could have been a purposeful greeting or simply an unintentional motion.

"PUT HIM DOWN!" the Lebori barked furiously.

Either frightened or not understanding him, the being strengthened its metal grasp.

"PUT HIM DOWN BEFORE I PLUCK YOU OUT OF THE SKY, YOU-!"

"Ai aun'ie," his nephew spoke at that moment, craning his neck out of the crook of his captor's shoulder. His head lolled to the side without any strength, helmet nowhere in sight: his feathers were flat, relaxed, but looked spent as though he was fighting through an illness, and his pupils struggled to adapt to the light or focus on anything even as he turned to his captor with a noticeable struggle, mumbling something barely coherent.

Worry overtook Vastus's mind completely: "I SAID PUT HIM DOWN!" he screamed, teeth bared, thin plumage vibrating, arm pulled back as he aimed straight for the crimson helm-

He found his whole body seized tight in an iron grip.

Ackar wrestled him still as carefully as he could, doing his best to keep him from hurling the Talon while not pulling any moves that could have caused the Lebori's back prosthesis to painfully malfuction or become misaligned: "For the love of Certavus, calm down!" he hissed as he almost lifted his fellow Glatorian off the ground, "If he drops from that height he'll break in half!"

"HE'LL HAVE A HEAP OF SCRAP METAL TO LAND ON IN A MOMENT!" the Lebori snarled back.

"And how's that supposed to cushion him?"

He would have bitten into his friends's prosthetic hand hard enough to dent it if his overly keen senses hadn't picked up the heavy splash of something landing less than gracefully into the pond just a few feet before them.

The being raised a hand in either a defense or a peace offering when Vastus whipped his head around to glare at it, gently pushing Gresh's head to lay on its shoulder. The boy blinked, clearly tired out of his mind as he was adjusted in the metal arms to be a little more snug, and mumbled in his aunt's direction another incomprehensible string of words with a little loopy smile.

If that damned chunk of metal didn't let go of him immediately he was going to--

"He's alright," the thing said.

It had a noisy voice, melodious in the cacophonic manner a heavy factory machine might be. Vastus shook his head briefly with a hiss, feeling the sound slither into his ears like a worm.

"He's alright," it repeated softly. "He's not hurt."

"So you can understand when I talk?" the Lebori growled: "Or is it just what you want to hear?"

"Don't aggravate it," Ackar hissed.

Vastus elbowed him as best as he could, syllables leaving his mouth with a dangerous whistling tone: "I told you to put my nephew down. Immediately."

"He cannot stand right now," the thing replied.

"You said he was fine!"

"He's not hurt. He's just exhausted."

"He's fain, aun'ie," Gresh managed to slur loud enough all of a sudden; with immense effort he raised an arm and managed to bonelessly slap his hand across his captor's face/helmet. "He's a fren' - 's name's 'ahu 'n's go' rrrocke's 'n' a big shiel' 'n' fire 'n' s'uff..."

The way the Tapyri's weight shifted away from Vastus's back cued him on the fact that something, for him, had clicked: "You're a Toa, aren't you?" he asked suddenly.

Topaz eyes fixed on him.

"That's what you are, right?" Ackar insisted as he pulled the other Glatorian upright with himself: "A Toa."

"What in Plude is a 'Toa'?" the Lebori snapped quietly.

"One of Mata Nui's. One of his people. He said something about you once, I remember that, compared our swordsmanship - a good warrior, aren't you?"

'ahu (if that was the being's name) nodded slowly.

Ackar breathed a sigh of relief.

"He's good," he reassured Vastus under his breath. He'd almost completely let go of him, keeping a vice grip only on the Venom Talon to stop him from making any brash maneuvers. "He's alright. Gresh is in good hands."

"Doesn't mean I trust them to hold him," Vastus hissed. His breaths were still heavy, still irregular with worry.

His friend nodded, understanding completely, and raised a peaceful hand in the air: "We're on the same side," he told the strange creature: "We're friends of Mata Nui. Gresh went into that robot, right? Mata Nui's old body?"

The strange being froze for only a second, looking absolutely taken aback, as though he hadn't known he'd been residing into a titanic mechanical humunculus until now: "Yes," he replied finally, a little stunted while he tried to focus back on the question at hand: "Yes, he - I helped him reach the... Brain."

"And he moved the whole thing from there?"

"Yes, I... I think so, yes. We've kept him safe, but it's tired him out."

"Alright. Alright, thank you - thank you so much," and his voice cracked a little bit, "For looking out for him, and keeping him safe, thank you. Vastus can take it from here, he'll take care of him."

'ahu shifted his glowing gaze onto the Lebori, then down to Gresh as if asking for his permission, or maybe his opinion.

(Vastus would begrudgingly admit that threatening to skewer the poor thing out of the air with a scythe had not been the friendliest or most trustworthy way he could have presented himself, but fuck you, that was his nephew and he'd been trained by Bara Magna to expect things to generally want to kill you in some manner sooner or later.)

The young Glatorian mumbled something barely intelligible - some kind of reassurance, accompanied by another boneless swat of his hand on the back of the red helm that was probably meant to be a comforting pat to cement his words.

It took only half a step forward, holding him a little further: before anybody else present could blink Gresh had been taken from the metal arms and was resting his head in the crux of his aunt's neck, the liquid at their feet splashing as the older Lebori rushed away with him, towards the chariot, as fast as he could.

"You complete idiot," he hissed the whole way long, "You total and utter dumbass, you stupid damn kid, what in Plude was your plan? You promised you wouldn't have pulled anything, anything! How old do you think you are? Do I have to start watching you like a toddler who can't be trusted to be left alone now? I thought you were all grown! Responsible! Had some sense knocked into you after the first few missing phalanxes!"

"Wen' well," was all he had to say for himself.

"Pro Certavi amore - as soon as you're all better I'll round up every Glatorian available and we'll all kick your ass into next year."

"Wen' well!..."

He didn't react when his head collided the slightest bit with the vehicle's frame while he was sat in it. Vastus checked his eyes feverishly and found them still focused: he wasn't in shock, which was a relief. He preened the spot that had been hit, thin teeth filing through the feathers as both an apology and a nervous urge to do anything that could make him feel better.

A detail struck him: "Where's your helmet?"

Gresh blinked: "Oh, fuck," he mumbled absentmindedly, "Forgo't'ge' it back from 'akanu'a..."

"And what's that?"

"He's a fren'... 's re'ly whi'e 'n' brigh'... 'n'all..."

His eyelids were so heavy, his body so tired. A nap wouldn't have hurt, especially while his aunt preened him... It had been so long, hadn't it? The last time he'd gotten fussed over like this, when had it been? Maybe he would have remembered better after a short rest. That sounded like a good idea.

He felt Vastus's nails scratch his nape in an annoying manner: "Don't fall asleep," he was telling him with barely concealed panic, "Don't fall asleep, stay with me."

Gresh barely managed to squirm a little: "Am fain," he mumbled with a hissing yawn, "Jus' a bi' tir'd..."

"Look," the older Lebori insisted, pointing to the flourishing mountains, to the savanna slowly coming crawling to life, taking a bit of the planet back from the sprawling dunes: "Look, plants are coming back, the plants from before the Shattering - remember we taught you some of them? We showed you, with drawings and everything else? Do you see any you recognize?"

"Am tir'd, aun'ie..."

"Just try - look out and tell me which ones you recognize. There, that one, I know you know it, which one is it? Do you remember that?"

In some way, he must have realized he was worried he wouldn't wake up again if he fell asleep; so he turned his exhausted gaze to the receding desertification, focusing as hard as he could to some kind of bush in the distance the other Glatorian was directing his attention towards, fighting to stay awake so that his aunt would not have to worry after being forced to endure such a scare.

"Gitalis?"

A soft, nervous chuckle: "Way off the mark."

"Am tir'd!..."

"Come on, try again, I know you remember it."

"Hm... 's... 's a iunpre?"

"Correct, good kid." Vastus nuzzled the side of his head and kept searching for any bleeding wounds. "And what's that next to it?"

-

The optic gave in with a few swift stomps, shattering into large chunks of glassy material that were broken into smaller pieces when Kiina landed on them from above, in a manner that would have easily gotten her feet punctured and mashed into bloody clumps had she not been wearing armor.

Her graceless entrance ended up denting some of the machinery in the robot's head - not that she gave a damn about it, as it didn't look like it was ever going to be good for anything other than harvesting scrap (Berix was going to have a field day with this thing), and most importantly she was a woman too focused on her mission to think of trivial things like the integrity of a shitty gundam's internal parts.

She looked around the control room frantically, desperate to spot that tell-tale golden yellow color somewhere, anywhere in-between the rust and the dissipating vapors.

"Mata Nui!" she called out, "Mata Nui! Where are you?"

A suffering groan had her whip her head around fast enough to almost sprain her neck: fallen on the back of the robot's head, half slipped under a machine threatening to topple over it and only held back by a net of hastily grown vines, laid a dusty mask, its features carved out of a humanoid figure standing with arms outstretched.

She hurled herself towards it, grabbing it and pulling it away from the precarious spot in an instant before it ended up damaged. No body laid behind it - but the otherworlder couldn't possibly be far from it, could he?...

The mask shook in her grasp with an anguished sound horrendously close to Mata Nui's voice.

"You're here!" she cried out. Her moment of elation fell immediately: "Fuck, you're in here," and she flicked her finger at the side of the artefact with increasing panic, "How do I get you out of this thing?"

"Don't hit it," her friend struggled to wheeze, "It's dangerous-!"

A flashing memory of Click turning into a shield had her drop the item onto her lap as though it were scalding; she picked it right back up in an instant, completely ignoring her friend's pleading warnings - she wasn't undergoing any painful metamorphosis at the moment anyways, right? - in order to focus on a solution.

This would have been much easier if she could have thought clearly.

Which she was struggling to do.

Due to the panic.

Mata Nui needed a body, she mumbled to herself, a body, a body - where could she have found a body? The robot was not an option, and she could not see anything she could have used to successfully assemble a frame to the best of her not particularly experienced abilities; she could have worn the mask herself, maybe, but aside from not being keen on the idea of having her limbs taken over by anybody else she had the nagging feeling it would have only worsened the other's worries between the prospect of mind controlling a friend and possibly mutating her.

A second after her thoughts returned to the item's transformative abilities, the solution to the nearly unsolvable riddle jumped to the forefront of her mind.

Sand.

She needed to leave this rickety thing. Now.

Kiina looked up: the broken optic was far too high up compared to where she was, with no option to use any of the toppled machinery to reach up to it properly, and the only things she would have been able to grab onto in order to leverage herself out were unstable pieces of broken glass. Not getting out the way she came in, alright, got it. Plan two set itself into motion as she sprang back up on her feet and ran through the only exit, a hole in the upturned pavement.

If where she had entered was the head of the robot, then the tunnel she was hurrying through must have been its neck, which was usually much easier to break through than it was to do through a skull, so the situation was improving already.

There must have been a grate or a ventilation shaft somewhere, right? Something easy to punch one's way through, looking outside? She wrecked her brain to find memories of something that would have had a similar layout and equipment to the inside of the robot, a building made solely with mechanical work in mind, but what she came up with was awfully muddled and helped roughly as much as a hearty spoonful of Thornax stew would have, which is to say not in the slightest.

Frustrated with herself as she was, she barely realized the floor beneath her left leg disappeared until her teeth nearly bit off her tongue as her jaw collided with the metal walls.

She looked back to find that, in her unconscious stomping caused by the antsiness overtaking her, she had serendipitously hit a weak plate which had collapsed into the much more crowded and much more damaged space between the interior and exterior shells of the gargantuan machine: from where she had collected herself to get her limb out of the hole, she could see parse slivers of natural light streaming in from what might have been punctures through the hull.

So Kiina did the sensible thing to do while holding a dangerous incomprehensible alien artefact currently housing her weakened friend's consciousness: she hurtled her way into the opening with the grace of a cannon ball, smashing into the weakest portion of the metal by pure chance and crashing out of the giant ominid subsequently almost dislocating an arm.

She groaned.

A pained wheeze dragged her attention back to her hands, and with great terror she found them empty.

The mask glowed faintly only a little away from her, barely out of her reach: sand was pooling under it, pushing it upward in the vague shape of a head emerging from beneath the earth at a terribly slow pace, as though it was not so much forming a body from scratch but tearing one through the solid surface with a great deal of struggle.

Digits of dimmed gold pulled an entire hand out along with them all the way up to the wrist; the Gaquri grabbed the palm hastily, to yank the rest of the arm out, but the frail limb instead fragmented and shattered in her grip.

A choked sob accompanied the sand slipping through her fingers. She hissed.

"Sorry," her voice slithered out of her mouth in a whisper while she adjusted herself closer to the artificial face still whining in pain. Her hands laid under the nape, sustaining it: "Alright, let's take it slow, take it slow - there you go, easy does it..."

She wondered if it had been such an anguish the first time, too. As she moved to hold the back of a newly formed arm, watching as a knee arose from the dirt with a strained gasp and feeling the way the unstable skin gained a tentative solidity much weaker than the carapace had been against her scales, she wondered if to grow a body all on your own (to be born, all on one's own?) was as traumatic an experience as it looked.

Finally her friend dragged a long gasp through his mouth as he shook in her loose embrace, and his eyes shined in their sockets.

The Gaquri carefully sat him up as he breathed harshly: "There you are - easy now, easy! You just made this, relax. Plude, you're wheezing like a waterboarded Skopio... How are you feeling?"

"Never," Mata Nui coughed instead, "Never touch the- the mask - it was dangerous- you could have--"

"But I didn't." she cut him off sternly. "How are you?"

His head lolled to the side: "Gresh?" he asked.

"He's got Vastus and Ackar looking for him, how are you?"

"Why... Why are you here? You were - were supposed to--"

"We heard Gresh. How-"

"--To be safe - away, from--"

"Everybody else is fine! Now quit avoiding the question and answer me, how are you?"

Mata Nui folded on himself for a second, prompting Kiina to hold onto his shoulders in the very real fear that he would shatter into a trillion particles in case he barely gazed the ground. She felt him lean pliantly into her hold as she pulled him back with all the caution in the world until the back of his neck was laying on her arm: his frantic inhales slowed down across a few dozen seconds or so, timing themselves on the much louder ones the Glatorian was training him to follow.

At last he seemed fairly stable. His body had a mostly clear shape, completely divided from the normal sand beneath it, and the erratic rising-falling rhythm of his chest had calmed down.

His head turned to face the prototype robot; Kiina turned with him.

Such an elaborate load of junk it was, even to a less experienced eye like her own. And yet it had been home for one hundred thousand years, although dismantled and rusted, and it had done what the Great Beings had judged it unfit for: under Mata Nui's control, it had undone the Shattering.

Maybe Berix had a point, scavenging for trash in the hopes to make something worthwhile out of it.

A rueful sigh distracted her from her musings: "I am... Afraid..." Mata Nui mumbled quietly, apologetic, "I cannot - be true, to the promise I've... I've made, in exchange for your help."

Kiina blinked.

"Huh?"

"The robot," he explained, "The Great..."

"The other one?"

"Yes... It was - I am afraid it was the only means through which - with, which - I could have accompanied you, on other planets. As I had promised you... When you..."

Oh!

Oh.

She had completely forgotten about that.

Her tongue clicked loudly against her teeth as she slipped an arm under her friend's and started helping him back on his feet: "Well, I can't say I'm not disappointed," she started, though her tone was humorous enough to tear a breathy chuckle from the other. "Because I will not lie, I am. Just a bit. But I guess I'll take a pal not being dead, and everybody being fine. And a more livable planet too, I guess. I could start touring this one before expanding my horizons, that sounds good."

"That is - a wondrous idea, my friend," the otherworlder convened. He leaned heavily on her as she sustained him while they walked, though he was so light that she was all but unhindered by him.

She smiled sharply at him with a small nudge: "You're welcome to come along, you know. I bet you'd like to."

A soft laugh: "I would... Thank you..."

"And you can start telling me about the worlds you've visited! So I'll be prepared from when we actually get there. Which will be right after you've gotten some shuteye."

He groaned, almost pained: "Please, no more of that..."

"Oh no, you're gonna get as much sleep as we can stuff into you," the Gaquri threatened: "And I mean real, actual, deep sleep for once, not that half-resting-half-awake meditation thing you do. Great Beings know you need it."

"It is not - necessary..."

"Don't give me that! You can barely stand as you are!"

"I do not--" Mata Nui's argument was interrupted by a sudden creak in his knee, which caused Kiina to stop in her tracks and hold him a little tighter before he toppled over. Her pointed glare dared him to speak further on the matter - which incredibly, after a moment to catch his breath, he did: "Is there a chance that I might... Be able to bribe you?"

She gave an incredulous laugh: "Bribing me? You?" she howled, and her exaggerated reaction tore a giggle from the fallen god. "Did Metus rub a scale off on you after he slithered away or is it just the Skrall mentality getting to you?"

"You are right, it was awfully uncouth."

"Well, don't just take that back, I'm curious now! I wanna know what your offering was!"

Her friend leaned a hand on the prototype's head to catch his breath, winded as he was from their steady if limping gait back to the chariot. They were still a long way from it, but considering his fatigued state they were all in all making good progress.

"A universe," he replied at last. "To visit."

"To visit?" she repeated. He nodded. Oh, he was going delirious then. "Like it's nearby? As in, just around the corner?"

Mata Nui smiled: his eyes curled into tired half moons, offering her their soft, gentle glow so alike the one the former Bota and Aqua Magna had bathed her cold nights of stargazing in for the worst part of her life, wishing she could be anywhere that wasn't that damned ocean of sand.

He pushed through his exhaustion to make a few more steps with her, just enough for the head of the Great Spirit Robot to come into view, and pointed to it - past the jagged edges, somewhere far, far inside of it.

"The Matoran's - my own," he murmured.

Kiina stared at the enormous hole in the metallic skull.

For a long time, she said nothing.

Only looking, listening distantly to the faint sounds rising from it (were they shouts, were those words she could hear? Strange accents speaking familiar dialects?), wondering if a body could really be large enough to hold an entire piece of cosmos.

Finding she really, really wanted to know.

A whisper joined her musings, sheepish, almost embarrassed: "It is a small one, perhaps... But a universe nonetheless."

She hummed thoughtfully: "I'll think about it," she conceded in the end, only making a half hearted attempt at hiding her cautious excitement. "After you've taken a nap."

The other groaned.

It made her snort.

Her name reached them with a holler.

Ackar had always had a quirk of running with his head pushed as far down and forward as his body physically allowed it to go, which tended to make him look like he was charging directly into the first person he saw to headbutt his way through their ribcage like a sandray so horribly hungry it forgot it had teeth.

He was mildly aware of this unfortunate resemblance due to several people outside of the arena letting him know by either looking very scared as he approached or screaming at him to slow down with genuine terror in their voices; so he wasn't really offended when the Gaquri automatically threw her free arm in front of herself and Mata Nui as though she was protecting the both of them from some particularly vicious beast.

"WOAH there!" she shrieked like she was trying to calm down a frightened Sand Stalker, "He's frailer than glass right now, you're gonna shatter him into a million pieces!"

She kept a good eye on him as his gait stuttered and slowed in an attempt to regain control of his legs, ready to whisk Mata Nui to safety before the foolish thing ran up to meet the Tapyri head on and got bodied into a heap of sand, but the veteran Glatorian managed to grasp his friend's hand gently enough to press it to his forehead (an expression of fondness common in his tribe that he'd often given Kiina, too) without breaking a single cell off of it.

"So good to see you," he breathed. A wry smile stretched across his face as the other squeezed his palm back: "How are you?"

"Absolutely exhausted and denying it as hard as he can," the Gaquri answered before Mata Nui could try to lie about it: "He's really bad at hiding it, too."

A quiet groan: "That is not true."

"You needed two whole breaths to say that."

"My friend, please..."

Unluckily for him, Ackar betrayed his hope to avoid being sentenced to sleep as he slipped an arm under his shoulder to sustain him as well: "I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Kiina on this one," he murmured, patting his chest comfortingly. "Let's get you somewhere nice and quiet before you collapse on us."

The fallen god craned his neck with a whimper, but could not fight either of them as they dragged him along despite his lack of collaboration - whether on purpose or not, it was hard to tell.

"Where's Vastus?" Kiina asked.

"Back at the chariot, probably - taking care of Gresh."

"Gresh," their friend perked up with worry: "Is he...?"

"Ever more tired than you, but otherwise unscathed," the Tapyri was quick to reassure them.

Hearing that, the Gaquri squinted her eyes angrily, scales almost turning cobalt from a mixture of emotions she was very unsure she could properly put a name to: "I'm gonna kick his ass," she settled for hissing between gritted teeth.

A tremor under her palm distracted her: Mata Nui had started shaking in their grasp, head almost abandoned to itself as it hung low, a terribly quiet litany falling out of his mouth in an inconsolably guilty cadence - I shouldn't have asked, I shouldn't have asked that of him, I shouldn't have, I shouldn't, I shouldn't have asked, I shouldn't have asked, I shouldn't have asked...

Both his friends had to tighten their hold him before his spiraling led him to the ground. His shoulders were starting to shed themselves into sand, and Kiina felt with horror her hand sink into his chest when she tried to push him upright.

Ackar leaned a little closer, doing his best to speak soothingly: "Easy, easy - he's alright, I told you, he'll be fine."

"He's a tough kid!" his fellow Glatorian added, "He can handle it!"

She turned to her friend so he could emphasize her statement only to see him glance away, as though he'd just gotten an idea. She followed his gaze, and...

The thing was looking in her direction, but not at her.

It seemed shocked.

She was surprised she could even tell, what with the lack of pupils and eyebrows and a general face, but the whole of its appearance came off as oddly expressive.

It stood frozen in place a few meters from them, similar to a prey animal when a predator passes close by it.

Perfectly still.

Like a robot.

"Don't you wanna see who brought him over?" she heard Ackar say a little louder: "I think that could be a pleasant surprise for you."

Kiina shifted her eyes back on him like he was insane.

But he wasn't talking to her, of course; and he wasn't checking for her reaction, of course.

She followed the trajectory of his eyes until she found Mata Nui's: they stared ahead, into glowing yellow irises, appearing to gain a brightness of their own the longer they looked.

"Oh."

-

It hit him.

He had no idea if they'd ever imagined him.

He certainly couldn't remember if he had, at the very least when it came to distinctive, clear examples. On the island, despite having a guideline with the stone Vakama used in his tales, the most he'd ever managed to conjure was a bright floating Hau which could have been transparent or golden or red; in Karda Nui, even with the newfound knowledge of the Makuta species, he had many times in his musings given him an appearance similar to Teridax - to his first mangled, chaotic form, befitting of an impossibly vast being uncaring for those beneath him; and if he dug into the memories he liked the least, into the days of his first birth, of his first life, amidst the frustration and tension, the most he could find was the thought of a vaguely humanoid shape, large and splendent and undefined, towering above everything.

He'd never asked his siblings or the Matoran or the Turaga if they had their own vision on how the Great Spirit looked. He reasoned they must have; inexplicably, though, no being had ever made a single comment on the matter, and nobody seemed to have ever mentioned such a strangeness before him.

So it was surreal - to stand before Mata Nui.

(He had no idea why or how he knew. He just did. It was an absolute certainty buried somewhere within him, like the tip of an arrow lodged into a lung. He could have recognized the Great Spirit in any shape it would have taken, be it familiar or not. He did not know why. He just knew.)

The Great Spirit was looking back at him.

He was...

He was a small thing.

A creature like any other, roughly as tall as him, in a battered armor dim with dust, having to be held aloft by two other beings before his legs gave out from under him.

His mere presence seemed to cut off his ability to breathe.

Mata Nui smiled radiantly.

"Tahu," he called.

He had a soft, sweet voice.

Tahu stiffened.

What was he supposed to do? There had to be something, some kind of code of conduct for these cases - for standing before your god. Was there a formula, a specific sentence he was supposed to pronounce? A pledge, a plea, a promise? Was he supposed to kneel, to lay at his feet, to lower his gaze, was he supposed to meet him head on with a Toa salute? Was he supposed to move at all?

He did nothing as the Great Spirit struggled to approach.

He stood, glancing desperately at Ackar and at the other being (China, or Kena, he recalled the older warrior shouting as soon as he'd caught a glimpse of a body coming into view - the watery blue of the armor reminded him of his sisters, but he couldn't be sure) as if to ask them for help. Neither answered; he wondered if they knew what to do themselves, or if they even understood who exactly they were helping walk towards him.

Would they even know that? They came from beyond the universe. They likely had no idea that the terribly frail thing in their hands was divine in nature.

Were they the Great Beings?

Anxiety constricted him. He almost wanted to cry.

Mata Nui reached out to him. Then he stopped, retracting his hand not in disgust but with a strange fear; he looked the Toa in the eyes with a strange sheepish air about him as his fingers twitched, almost too shy to ask what was on his mind.

Finally, very carefully, he placed his fingertips against the chin of Tahu's mask, as if to cradle it.

They were pleasantly warm. And dusty. Like slowly cooling ash.

He smiled wider.

A quiet sound left him all of a sudden, and his limbs started trembling harshly as his armor began falling apart into a thousand particles; without thinking, the Toa grasped his wrists tightly and sent a wave of blistering heat through the whole body for barely the fraction of a second, so quick that Ackar and his friend barely had time to hiss at the sudden surge of temperature. He felt the arms in his palms creak: they'd been crystallized into glass.

Before he could choke in horror at his impulsivity, his hands were being held between near transparent fingers.

"Thank you," Mata Nui breathed with something akin to a chuckle - was that embarrassment in his voice? He replied to Tahu's wide eyes with a look of pure apologetic fondness: "Oh... Oh, forgive me, I did not mean to frighten you. I just... I am so very excited to meet you!"

His gentle grip tightened around the Toa's palms.

Something thrummed across his body, a quick steady beat. Tahu felt it reverberate through him.

He was definitely supposed to do something. Should he have kneeled? Maybe he should have kneeled, and laid his head low, and stopped looking so directly at the incarnation of their universe. But the Great Spirit was holding his gaze and smiling and readjusting his grip on protodermis hands and he could not move an inch no matter how hard he tried, mind drawing up blanks, at once awed to be faced with such reverence from a god and baffled by the knowledge that said god was so impossibly frail that a mere emotion could tear him asunder like that.

He realized he was staring in silence again.

He should have done something.

Anything.

What was he supposed to do?

"You were not made like this, were you?" Mata Nui asked. It was not a reprimand or an insult, only an inquiry born of genuine curiosity. He sounded like he was sleeptalking, in a way.

Tahu shook his head, and gentle eyes tilted a little.

"No, I imagined," the god continued almost to himself; he squeezed his palms again. "I have seen you like this, once, I believe... Somewhere deep in the bog of a dream... I remember you barely, before that - forgive me... It has been so long... You have changed!... Such a wonderful thing!..."

Was it?

The Toa struggled to think. The crystalline touch intimidated him into silence much like too high praises can embarrass a child quiet.

"How are you?" his god asked. "How are your siblings? The Matoran? I did not think... I assumed it would have been tough enough to not let... Metru Nui..."

"We're," Tahu choked. His throat whirred, clacked, struggled against itself and spat out stunted words: "Safe. We are. All of us."

Mata Nui breathed a heavy sigh of relief; it made something physically click into place in the Toa's body, and he felt like his mechanisms were working smoothly all at once again.

He lowered his head immediately, shifting his gaze down to the fingers wrapped around him.

The glass was so soft around his hands.

His god's voice passed through him like a dream - vaguely, in a haze, he realized he'd leaned closer, apprehension once more thrumming through his frame: "My chosen... Are they...? I could not... I barely know... They came to be..."

His chosen? Tahu snapped out of his torpor: "The Turaga are safe," he answered just as hushedly, ashamed to have been distracted.

Mata Nui's tired eyes regained fervor for a second.

"Turaga," he repeated.

A wheezed laugh left him, elated beyond words - Turaga!, it seemed to exclaim. The poor souls he had picked so hastily, with such little time and such a hard task ahead of them, Turaga! He raised Tahu's hands to what might have been his mouth as if to kiss it, holding back just moments before it could touch his mask - moments before the Toa could melt the ground beneath his feet from the surprise as his heartlight flashed madly.

He smiled wonderfully, reaching out to cup the adaptive Hau's cheek in his palm: "You bring me such splendid news!"

Breathing was hard again.

Not because he couldn't do it. He could breathe! He could breathe very well. Perhaps too much. Far too much. So much that his lungs were starting to hurt.

Ackar seemed to notice that. He met his eyes long enough to read his incomprehensible swirl of emotions, and though amused by the childish panic in them he blessedly pulled the Great Spirit a little back as gently as he could with his other friend's help.

"Give the boy some room," he murmured: "He's gonna get a heart attack at this rate."

But Mata Nui kept his hand on Tahu's mask, and refused to let go of his palms.

That blinding glimmer had already dropped from his eyes, and he looked exhausted, somehow even more so than he already had; he leaned forward, reaching for the Toa still despite the small distance between them.

"I am sorry," he spoke. His fingers curled around the red protodermis. "I am sorry - I should have... I am sorry," he repeated. He sounded weak, and quiet, and honest. "I am sorry... If I had been... If I had not... You have endured for me so much - if I had paid close attention... If I had not been so careless," he creaked. A long crack split open the god's arm with a horrid sound. "You would not have suffered... You would not... I am sorry - I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry..."

His knee buckled under his weight, cracked, and shattered his leg across the ground.

Ackar and Kena scrambled to hold him aloft, words of concern muddling together: a gentle yank nearly ripped half his chest off, and the arm holding onto the Toa's mask turned opaque as hairline cracks burst from within it before it too began falling apart.

Almost numbly, Tahu realized the other crystalline hand was still clutched around his own in a tender grip, the rest of its limb laying broken in the sand.

He felt himself kneel on the ground with hands outstretched on what remained of the crumbling body: if heated up enough the glass would have melted again, filling in the cracks by itself, wouldn't it? He would have been able to fix it all, to put him back together in the span of seconds, minutes, maybe. He would have managed to fix him.

But what if he just destabilized him more? Maybe instead of breaking he would have started melting. Maybe the hot temperature would have triggered the vitrification of the sand beneath him too, and he would have fused with it and become indistinguishable from the rest of it, worsening his condition as he could no longer be separated from it.

Or maybe it simply wouldn't have done anything. He had already started falling apart Tahu had done anything, and his accidental fix had now grown obsolete. Maybe it was just too much. Maybe he just couldn't hold onto himself.

"I am sorry," Mata Nui whispered. Somehow, his quiet voice cancelled out all other sounds. Somehow, his remaining hand was still holding onto the adaptive Hau. "I am sorry - none of this should have... If I had been... More attentive... None of this should have happened... I am sorry, I am sorry..."

Tahu looked up to his face again.

The peculiar pattern of the Ignika met his eyes.

He had not even recognized it. He had not even registered that what he had been staring at was the Mask of Life. He had known so deeply that the being before him was Mata Nui that, in the petrifying surprise that had taken over him, the artefact on the god's face had looked no different than a common powerless Kanohi.

Couldn't it fix him, then? Couldn't it mutate him? If it could build itself a body it could certainly make one for him too, couldn't it? Why wasn't it working? It had plenty of material to choose from - why wasn't it doing anything?

Mata Nui's eyes were flickering.

He stared directly at Tahu as though it was the only thing keeping him together.

"I am sorry," he begged. "I am sorry, for everything, everything - I am sorry... You should not have... I should not have allowed... Such terrible things... To befall you... Any of you... I should not have... If I had been... I should have been... I am sorry... I am sorry - I am sorry... I am sorry... I am sorry... I am sorry... I am sorry..."

Tahu stared back.

This was a god.

A being for whom countless had lost their lives.

Begging, broken and brittle, with a voice barely above a breath and a trembling hand on his cheek, for the forgiveness of his own universe.

Ackar's voice broke through the haze around him: "You need to rest."

Mata Nui twisted his neck harshly: a long crack slithered around it, and the Toa rushed to grab it before it tore away from the torso already on the brink of shattering.

"No!" his deity sobbed. He could feel the clear throat quake with each phoneme under his protodermis digits, broken edges ringing as they scratched against one another: if he were to press even just slightly more forcefully, he would reduce it to a heap of minuscule fragments. "No, no, please, no, no--"

Kiina grasped the Ignika gently in her hands, allowing the straining pieces of anatomy to fall in favor of protecting the one thing actually containing the delirious entity: "It's for your own good!" she argued back at him, but her voice was soft, desperate, trying her best to pull a friend back from the hole he was sinking into as he kept squirming. "Pushing yourself like this is going to kill you - listen to us, damn it!"

The glass chest creaked as it spasmed erratically in the pantomime of frantic breathing (so set he was on living, on being real and present) and an agonizing whimper left the divine wreckage.

The eyes fixed on Tahu's were blue, flickering terribly.

He felt the fingers crack against the cheek of his Hau as they curled around it.

"I am sorry," his god cried so quietly, "I am sorry, I am sorry - no more, no more, no more sleep, please, no more, no more... I am sorry, I am sorry - Tahu... Tahu... I am sorry... Please..."

A hand of protodermis grasped what little was left of a body and laid it down on the sand, carefully, gently, so it would not break. Its twin wrapped around the crystalline palm as it struggled to keep from fracturing and held it - as gently as it had been held by it.

The Toa breathed.

His lungs filled slowly trough the gaps in his armor.

Then, just as slowly, they deflated.

He kept breathing, hands enveloping what little remained of his god's own fragile one.

Mata Nui heaved, and heaved, and slowed down, until his labored inhales matched his protector's own, until the light of his eyes drooped and struggled to glimmer in resignation.

Tahu spoke as quietly as he could, his entire being turning the words into a hushed mechanical symphony: "We can wait still."

"I am sorry," Mata Nui insisted.

"We can wait still," his guard repeated.

"I am sorry... I am sorry..."

"We can wait still. Until you are safe."

"I promise... I promise... I am sorry..."

"We can wait. Rest now."

"I want to see you... I promise..."

"Until you are safe. Rest now."

"I promise... I promise..."

"Rest now."

"I promise..."

"Rest."

Mata Nui shook again.

Then he calmed.

His hand curled around Tahu's and shattered gently over his fingers.

"Alright," he conceded at last, reassured.

His head crumbled in his friends' gentle hands, his empty sockets lost their waning glow, and lulled by the warrior who was fated to awake him he allowed his endlessly fatigued spirit to slip into sleep once more.

-

His entire body hurt.

Not as badly as when he first woke up, but it still hurt.

It was like every single muscle had decided to file a complaint against his brain and set his nerves on fire in an attempt to get the message relayed much more quickly.

He turned on his side with a hiss to try and keep sleeping it off, but he was fully awake by now.

"Oh," he heard - he wasn't sure he could tell voices apart in this state, but that sounded like Gelu. "Sand mite's awake. Watch him a moment, won't you? I've got to get someone."

Some kind of machine made a rockus near the leg of the bed.

A quiet cacophony of noises caused an uncomfortable shiver to wreck through him. Ah, damn it - he shook his head harshly once or twice, gritting his teeth as his neck immediately flared up: deciding he didn't want to be stuck in a losing battle, he grumbled and blearily opened an eye.

The little thing with glowing lime lights in the sockets of its metal green face jumped a bit and retreated away from him at that.

It seemed to be standing on a stool.

He stared at it for a moment.

"Hi," he said hoarsely.

The little thing blinked once or twice with a clicking sound: "Hi!" came at last the reply, face unchanged: "My name's Tamaru."

Oh, he knew that kind of noisy, industrial-sounding, confusingly androginous voice. This must have been... A baby Toa. Or a Toa kid. Or something of that sort.

"Gresh," he introduced himself.

Tamaru nodded, looked him over, fidgeted, and then asked with no shortage of curious embarrassment: "Wayby, what are you?"

"Lebori," he answered. He managed to point back at... Him? Her? Them? It? Xe? Ti? He didn't know how to approach the subject with a mostly metallic alien, so he was going to go with 'ti' for now. All Agori kids were 'ti' at that height. "Toa?"

The being laughed with a tinny sound: "No, no! I'm too bugsmall to be a Toahero. I'm a Matoran. How are you wellfeeling?"

"Bad," he replied honestly.

"Oh. Eversorry."

"I mean," Gresh shrugged: "Could be worse. But not good."

Ti hummed deep in thought, as though ruminating on his words: "Makes sense," ti decided in the end, "You've been sleeping for two days. You must have been bonetired."

"Huh."

Two whole days, asleep.

Yeah, made sense. He'd been absolutely exhausted.

How must Mata Nui be holding up then, he wondered?

He hoped he was fine.

The Matoran turned tir attention to his face again, leaning closer but not daring to graze him: "Are those feathers?"

"Hm-hm."

"Can I handtouch?"

Sure, why not? Kids from other tribes used to ask to do that all the time, this wasn't any different. He gave ti a very weak ok gesture and submitted himself to the inevitable poking and prodding.

That turned out to have been a very good idea, as Tamaru was not only much more gentle and cautious while combing through his thin plumage than any brash Gaquri or Tapyri or Koniri brat he'd ever met, doing tir best not to pull any plumes or feathers out, but also, despite being the farthest thing from a Lebori, exercised a level of so highly specific care towards it that would have probably won ti an honorary place in his tribe.

He leaned his head into lir touch and bristled his feathers comfortably, driving a giggle out of ti.

The Matoran cooed at him, and he cooed back without thinking.

Great Beings, he missed being preened by his aunt.

"You're good," he mumbled.

"Heh heh! I turntame Gukko birds," Tamaru explained proudly, pushing tir chest out a bit. "I have lots of experience."

He could tell.

Wait, birds?

They had birds? In Mata Nui's old body?

His train of thought was interrupted when the Matoran hastily pulled tir hand away as if caught doing something ti shouldn't; before he could protest a new weight settled on the foot bed, and a scaled hand snuck under him to pull him up a little, just enough so that the Gaquri could see his face.

Tarix looked him over in complete silence, checking him up and down at least twice. Finally he pulled him into his arms and squeezed him gently as he pressed his nose into the reddish feathers denoting his young age sticking out of his head.

Gresh did not fight it. He snuggled into his uncle's hold despite the long scales scratching at him, sighing in relief.

Lebori teeth were good at cleaning plumage in a way that no other tribe could vaunt - namely by being thinner than what was usual for Agori, catching loose feathers painlessly without getting them stuck in place and having to pluck them out with their hands afterwards. By contrast, for example, Gaquri teeth were just a little too large the closer the crown was to the gums and retained much more humidity around them, causing the soft barbs to grossly stick to the enamel and the shaft to lodge itself between them, allowing for a generally less than pleasant experience.

Tarix had lost the will to give a damn about how disgusting it sometimes felt during his and Vastus's courting, and so he did his best to preen his nephew for a minute or two, just to reassure him of his presence, to offer him comfort after what had no doubt been a harrowing ordeal. The kid's weight against him melted the worries that had plagued him for the past two days into slush.

He pulled away at last once he found himself satisfied with his work. He cupped the young Glatorian's face in his hands with a sigh, and told him: "We're gonna kick your ass."

Gresh groaned: "Oh, come on!"

"Don't give me that, you little bastard," his uncle hushed him with the fondest tone he'd ever used as he nuzzled his cheek again: "You scared the ever-living crap out of us, we didn't have a single pair of clean pants between five Glatorian for a day and a half."

He felt the rookie squirm and wriggle to get out of his hug: "But it worked! And I'm fine!"

"Passing out stone cold on your aunt is called 'being fine', now?"

"So what! I've woken up now!"

"I can hear that," Tarix grinned. He smacked a kiss on the kid's forehead, getting a little 'blegh' back. "And now that we're all relieved we'll wait until you're all better, and then we'll kick your ass."

The Lebori shook his feathers at him at maximum pique, hissing to scare him off with no success whatsoever.

Tamaru snorted.

He stuck his tongue out at ti too.

Then something large and blue slid into the room like a fury, so fast that its inertia sent it right against the wall with a loud BANG that spooked the Matoran off tir stool with a tremendous clatter.

"YOU!!"

Tarix curled around Gresh to better help him hide.

Kiina circumvented the issue this posed by crawling on her fellow Gaquri's back like some sort of gargoyle, reaching over his protective stance, grabbing the back of the camisole the rookie was wearing, and frantically starting to pull it back and forth as though it were her victim of choice's shoulders.

"I'M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!" she yelled: "ARE YOU STUPID?! ARE YOU POSSESSED?! DID A SPIKED WORM HIDE AWAY IN YOUR BRAIN?! YOU COULD HAVE GOTTEN SQUASHED TO BITS! AND YOU BROUGHT MY LITTLE BROTHER ALONG TOO!"

"It was Berix's idea," the Lebori tried to rebuke.

"No it wasn't," his traitorous uncle replied.

"NO IT FUCKING WASN'T!!"

-

Hahli looked upon the silent giant and waited.

What for?

She laid her head in her palms, not knowing how to answer herself.

The protodermis was cooling beneath her. She let her legs dangle for the jagged edge of the Great Spirit Robot's broken skull, swaying with the wind coming down the mountain as evening crept closer with its orange hues in a manner similar to how it used to do on Mata Nui; Metru Nui looked so small, so far below, but she could not focus on it at the moment.

Her saddened gaze remained fixed on the unmoving prototype, studying its features in silence.

It wasn't as frightening as its larger brethren. The Great Spirit Robot had a face that looked right out of a nightmare: it was long and rough, with long lines digging deep all the way down to its chin, stuck in a barely open-mouthed grimace which gave the impression that a rumbling voice was meant to come out of it at any moment, delivering righteous fury and reprimands and orders.

The prototype's skull was stouter, almost oval or round in shape. It had eyes and cheeks - or what appeared to be cheeks or cheek guards, at least - and nothing else. A long segmented line ran across the height of its face; flat crests emerged from the top of its head.

The sum of its pieces ended up resembling a Kanohi much more closely than an Agori visage.

She looked at its broken optic, at its rusted fingers.

Waiting for a light to shine through the gaping darkness within the shell, for the joints between the phalanxes to twitch and scratch at the ground under them as it grumbled to life.

Waiting for it to speak to her with a soft, booming, deep voice.

To turn its head and call out to her.

To say, Hahli?

Is that you?

"Hahli!"

She turned. Takanuva's mask peeked from the edge of the robot's head as he held tight onto the protodermis, evidently having been scaling his way up to her; Kopeke, sitting tight on his shoulders, waved at her in his stead.

His sister laughed, hurrying over and grabbing his hands to help him up: "Hey there! What is this, a Chroniclers' reunion?"

"It could be," her Light brother grinned. He sighed in relief as soon as his feet were once again resting on more or less even ground. "We saw you sitting there and thought we'd come up to say hi."

"Is that so? You just happened to be walking around these parts?"

Her friend did not reply, flustered.

The wrecks rested far away from the camps promising to one day become New Atero, much too far for the pair to just casually come across them while struck by the desire for an evening stroll.

No, it couldn't be a coincidence: they had a specific reason to be here. Just like her.

Hahli huffed playfully and helped Kopeke down from her brother's shoulders: "Alright, come on," she gestured back towards the edge of the enormous wound, inviting them both to sit down with her as she returned to her spot. "Spill it. What are you two investigating?"

The Matoran settled next to her in no time, used enough to vertiginous heights to remain completely unbothered before the void beneath their feet; Takanuva stalled a little more, fidgeting with his hands for a moment: "It's nothing," he shrugged in the end as he very deliberately took his seat as well.

"It's not nothing." Kopeke rebuked.

"Yes it is."

"It's not."

"It's..." the argument died in the Toa's throat. He took a deep breath; Hahli watched him turn to the rusting robot with a forlorn look that perfectly replicated her own emotions. "It's something Tahu said."

She followed his gaze.

The prototype still had not moved.

Maybe it would now that there were three of them.

Or maybe not.

Who knew.

"About Mata Nui?" she asked softly.

He nodded.

"What was it?"

"He said that... Well, he told me that when he saw him, you know, he just looked like any other being. Like a Glatorian. The kind you'd forget after catching a glimpse of them in a crowd. But at the same time there was just this..." he clenched his hands close to his heartlight, almost as if to grasp it within them: "This feeling - this certainty, that what he was looking at was the real Great Spirit, and he couldn't have mistaken him for anybody else even if he'd tried. Like there was something deep in his soul telling him."

Hahli did not reply.

"I think... I think I felt that too." Takanuva continued. His eyes were fixed on the prototype. "When I looked at it, on Metru Nui."

Her fins twitched lightly.

A mellow wind passed through, gently leading the sand to crash against the limbs of protodermis like waves of a calm sea, further dulling the darkened rust that covered the dead colossi laying side by side as it stuck upon it, wearing them down impercetibly.

She heard Takanuva adjust his seat.

"Nobody else did. I mean, nobody really looked at it except for us and some Matoran - aside from the Barraki armies, but- you get what I meant. But I think the Nuva might... I think they'd all feel that."

Then he grew silent again.

His sister did not add onto his hypothesis, and kept quiet.

She was still looking at the robot.

Still waiting for it to turn its head towards them.

Still waiting for it to call out to them with a familiar voice.

Kopeke's silence was comforting. It drowned out their own uncomfortable quiet naturally, in a manner hard to explain: but knowing he sat next to them, hands on his lap, looking out to the sprawling landscape before them, just listening, brought them respite from their too loud thoughts.

Takanuva turned towards her, prompting her to face him.

"Did you feel that, too?"

She gripped the jagged skull under her and did not answer.

He waited.

His voice came out of him awfully small: "You said something," he whispered, sounding embarrassed: "When you saw the robot. But I didn't hear it well because you said it very quietly and I was sort of too distracted to pay attention."

Hahli sucked in a breath to speak.

She couldn't.

She turned her eyes down, to the city slowly being abandoned below them, and swung her legs harder to desperately try and find something, anything, that could have worked as a response.

What was she supposed to say? That she thought she was going crazy? That nothing had happened? That she didn't know?

That she'd seen a ghost?

The barbarian hurried deeper in her seaweed hut, crawling hastily into her bed and hiding her Kaukau under her arms, wanting to forget everything again, to wake up and find that nothing had changed, that she was still just a flaxmaker who never spoke and seldom left her village, who did her duty diligently and went to sleep not knowing there were friends outside of her gate waiting to die.

Kopeke sat next to her. He did not touch her. His silence laid a soothing hand on her burning brain.

"Do you know when - when a part of your head is muddled?" she asked. Getting each word though the knot strangling her throat was a painful struggle. "When it's... When it's all murky, and confused, and swirling too slowly and bubbling, and you can't understand what's happening in it?"

Her brother nodded.

She passed her hands over her Faxon: "It was just a second," (she sounded guilty, and she had no idea why) "Just a second - just a moment, so quick I'm not even sure I understood anything I was thinking... And it was so hazy, and unclear, and unfocused, and I - I don't know why, I'm not sure but it felt like--"

Something in her neck swerved from the strain: an unfortunate gear shrieked as it tried to turn where it shouldn't, interrupting her with a short-lived mechanical cough. Two hands of different sizes were quick to pat her back to dislodge the misbehaving piece back into its rightful place.

With a final harsh exhale, Hahli spat out: "--For a moment, it felt like Matoro."

Her arms shook as though she'd puked her soul into the void.

The robot remained still.

Unmoving, unchanging.

Rusted and broken and dead.

What good was staring at it?

It was never going to be him.

Nothing was ever going to be him.

No one was ever going to be him.

She'd been here for hours yesterday, and that feeling hadn't repeated.

She'd been here for hours today, and that feeling hadn't repeated.

She couldn't stop hoping that maybe, if she looked at it long enough, it would feel like him again.

"Do you think he's him?" Takanuva asked with a breath.

Hahli faced him.

It was like looking in a mirror.

"Mata Nui," he repeated. "Do you think he's him?"

Did she?

It would have been nice. It would have been relieving. To know that this whole time, they'd been fighting for a friend. For someone they loved. For someone who loved them. It would have been nice, because then they would have everything back. They would have their paradise back: their island home, their friends, their family. As if nothing had ever changed. As if nothing had ever happened. It would have been nice, because none of them would have died then.

But what about before that? When the Great Spirit refused to look at them? When it neglected and endangered them? Could that have been him? And if it hadn't been him, then who had died with him? Who had he usurped and doomed to fade into non-existence in much the same way as Teridax had usurped Mata Nui? Who had they been fighting for before the Mask of Life chose its vessel?

"I don't know," Hahli replied. "I just don't know."

Her brother leaned his head on her shoulder.

His weight anchored her to reality, dissipating her swirling thoughts.

Kopeke looked, silent, at the massive robotic body.

Krahka came to his mind.

He had seen her - he had traveled with her, with Tahu and Johmak and Onua, and Lariska and Guardian. She had looked exactly like he'd expected, so like nothing he could have thought of at all: but he'd still recognized the sharp grin that spread too wide, the voice that was neither a hiss nor a growl nor a chirp and yet resembled all those sounds, the frighteningly clever eyes that Vakama's narrations had described in such vivid unspoken detail.

She had been every bit the legendary Rahi lurking within the Metru Nui archives, so cunning and terrible that even the Rahkshi fleed from her.

And yet, while he'd looked at her wreck chaos upon Daxia's surface with Onua, something incredible had happened.

No matter what beast she turned into, she looked just like a Toa.

Something about her, about her shifting anatomy, her erratic fighting style, her voice heckling back at Onua when he shouted above the rockus at her, her strange glee - she had seemed like a wild mixture of the Turaga's selves, as though a little bit of each had gotten stuck in her shapeless form and molded alongside her ever changing body, made hers, until she was an equal of what they had once been.

Until she was, indisputably, one of them.

He remembered how Turaga Onewa had sat next to Vakama as he'd recounted their first proper battle against the Horde. He had claimed he was staying to make sure the firespitter told the tale right, but had kept completely quiet the whole story through.

He had caught how he'd clenched his hand during the last struggle between the Tahtorak and the Zivon, his eyes shut tight, as though he were bracing himself for a devastating blow - and how he'd let his fingers rest, dejected, resigned, when the shapeshifter disappeared into darkness.

Maybe she is a Rahi who discovered a little Toa inside.

Kopeke mulled over Pouks' words.

He wondered if Mata Nui liked Rahi.

If he found them intruguing in a manner very different from the detached scientific approach of Onu-Metru archivists.

If he would have talked to tamed ones when they clamored at him, or even repeated their own chatterings back at them to try and communicate with them more accurately.

He wondered if Mata Nui had a good singing voice.

If he would have been shy about it, or instead enjoyed bellowing out hymns and songs to his heartlight's content.

If he would have had such a powerful control over it that he could go from humming a lullabye to declaring a dirge to grinning along a festive chant in mere seconds.

He sighed.

His little body reclined against the cool protodermis as he scuttled closer to his once fellow Chroniclers. Night had fallen: clusters of stars crawled across the dark sky like an infinity of beetles.

His quiet thoughts enveloped the Toa.

He felt them lay down with him, a little calmer, a little more at peace.

In another hour or so a small group of worried Matoran, Turaga and Toa would finally catch a glimpse of Takanuva's glow and start screaming at them to come down, chastising them for disappearing like that without giving them any notice as soon as the three of them were in manhandling reach.

But until then they laid with the empty robot, paying it no mind, breathing in asynchrony under a universe vaster than they could have ever imagined.

It would have been nice.

If Mata Nui had a little bit of Matoro in him.

[byeuijoo]

what is love? 𐀔 asakura jo

genre : pure fluff ⋆ warnings : absolutely none ⋆ wc : 0,8k

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ ୨ ✩ ୧

« what is love? » he asked you quietly, his face bathed in the moonlight passing through your window. jo was currently slumped against your mattress, his ebony hair spread carelessly on your pillow while you were lying next to him, belly against the bed, chin resting against the palm of your hand. a smile took place on your lips at the sound of his question, his soft voice destabilizing the quiet silence that had previously occupied the room.

pretending to think, without your eyes ever leaving his, your index finger pressed against his pale skin, tracing the curve of his jaw to his chin with your fingertip. « love is.. » you began to say, the sound of your voice echoing in his head like the most bewitching of melodies, « love is your voice. »

he didn't seem to understand, looking for the slightest innuendo in your words to find any clue as to the meaning of your sentence. but jo didn't have time to think as you spoke again, « just hearing your voice can give me butterflies in the stomach. » — you wanted to explain things as you felt them, so you continued your confession, bringing your index finger up to trace the outline of his eyes delicately.

« love is your eyes, » you declared, as he watched you with as much adoration as possible, and this simple little thing caused your heart to miss a beat, « the way you look at things is unique, the gleam in your eyes always makes me feel like i'm even more precious than the biggest diamond. »

jo could swear he'd never enjoyed listening to someone talk so much. he loved that little crackle in your low voice, the way words roll off your tongue like poetry. you were like a sweet dream he didn't want to wake up from. it's thanks to the way you talk that he started to take an interest in you — your voice was the sweetest and most captivating among the whole class. he watched you change position : your right hand previously scattered over his face, now resting against his chest. for the left hand, you moved it delicately so that your fingers intertwined with jo's, suddenly stopping his delicate caresses on your cheek.

« love is your hands, » you resumed, pulling his hand to your lips to place a warm kiss against its back, « when they touch or intertwine with mine, a gentle warmth can't help but permeate my whole being. they are reassuring and comforting, like the ultimate cuddle you need during hard times. »

jo didn't know how you made him love you even more than he already did. nor did he know how his heart managed to beat so fast in his chest. much less how you could refrain from commenting on his flushed cheeks.

« and finally, love is your lips. » you continued, in the most sincere voice in the world, bringing your hand up until your fingers lightly brushed his lower lip. your smile was even sweeter, your eyes filled with stars, and you breathed joy, which filled him with happiness. « jo, every time you smile.. oh gosh, i swear the ground caves in on me. i've never felt my heart race so fast. » you explained, and he could hear your smile in your words. you were so pretty, you were the prettiest in his eyes. no one had ever shake him up as much as you — and he wouldn't lose the love that bound you together for anything in the world.

« love is you, asakura jo, » you end up saying, your voice growing weaker, as if you were sharing the most confidential of secrets with him, « your whole being makes me discover a little more every day what love means. »

unlike you, jo wasn't good with words. but instead of talking, he could act, even if it took him all the courage in the world to do so. then, after a moment's thought, the boy sat up, his warm hands caressing your face in the most delicate of ways. it was as if your cheeks were caught between two cotton fields, and in front of you, the most radiant, comforting and warmest of summer suns appeared. his smile filled the light that was missing from your night, shaking your whole being, giving your heart uncontrollable palpitations. you knew jo was the answer to all your questions about love — and this was confirmed once again when he placed the most unforgettable kiss on your lips.

« i love you, » he murmured against your mouth just as your fingers grasped his sweatshirt, « i love you more than words can ever describe. »

and he was right : because no words could describe the love you meant to each other.

⠀

reblogs & feedbacks are highly appreciated !

taglist ౨ৎ @wtfhyuck @yuma-is-mine

[chaoticallyfragmentary]

Nanami X Reader

This honestly wrote itself. Takes place years after the Shibuya arc. What if Nanami didn’t die there and finally got to own a bookstore somewhere in the  countryside? 

It was strange, how one little word could destabilize months of peace. Nanami wasn’t new to it, the sharp inward stab that struck at the oddest of times, set off by the most trivial of things- his reflection in a glass window (he’s taken off all mirrors at his house), a glimpse of trains, the sound of too many people- cold, vacant terror unfurling in the hollow of his bones.

He was better, so much better than the one who’d been in a state of constant, hair trigger alert, resentful energy thrumming in his veins, alive and poised to strike. Sure, certain nights, when the ever-present ache in his joints and the guilt became too much to bear, he wishes he’d died on that day. He’d never been aware of baring his teeth before, but now he could feel it in the painful grimace twisting and stretching his lips. He’d steamrolled over the shock and the trauma of dying and being brought back to life.

Nanami’s panic curdled in the pit of his stomach, anxiety spreading, cold tendrils crawling through his chest. The stiffness in his posture easing slightly as you hum under your breath, rearranging this month’s bestsellers at the entrance to the Parchment. You think you’re doing a pretty decent job, until you turn and notice Nanami staring out into the distance with a maddeningly blank expression. “Nanami” your voice is barely a sputter of breath over the crackle of the old radio. “I’m okay,” he whispers, taking in a short choppy breath. It’s like he’s spent years building himself up, piece by piece, to become a person again. A real, functional person and now, it hurt to breathe.

Your hand slots into place with his and his chest stutters on an inhale, a comforting pulse against his palm. “Better?” you ask, and something shifts in the air. His breaths start becoming even and he leans slightly into you. His grip turns from bruising to gentle now, your head resting on his shoulder as he presses his face into your hair, hand resting in the curve of your neck. His chest panged, something reverberating off his ribs. Nanami wants to tell you he loves you, for you to know that he loves you with his every breath.

But he can’t seem to get the words out. The confession is lodged in his throat. He wants to say it, he looks at you and thinks I love you as loudly as he can, practically begging the words to crawl out of his throat without choking on them.

So, he lifts his hand carefully to cup your jaw, your face turning up into the kiss that is barely there, just a touch of lips and thinks, I love you. He looks at you, magic made life and thinks I love you. His voice is soft, so soft when he says, “I’m okay.” Warmth dropped from his chest to his stomach, hot tendrils crawling outward as a bright grin overtakes your face, positively glowing. Overwhelming fondness crashes over him, dunking him under.

“Take me home,” he says, his voice low and quiet, somewhere between a request and an imperative.  He hears your breath catch in your throat, the thought lighting your marrow on fire. He laughs, a quiet little thing that coasts through you, winding around every bone in your body, settling in your stomach. A lovely, joyous sensation.

“Can I?” your voice comes out hoarse, nowhere near as sure as you wanted it to be. It is stripped raw, pulling at the ragged edges of your soul.

“Of course.”

[ellekhen]

Hand, Hearth, and Home

Chapter 57 - The Lost

Chapter Summary: The battle to defend Halsin's portal begins.

Pairing(s): Astarion x Male Tav (Main); Past OC x Male Tav Rating: Explicit Length: 296K+ words; Chapters 57/?? (Master Post)

Excerpt below:

And that is when Church realizes their fatal mistake.

He feels the itch at the back of his neck before he turns — horrified — to see the massive, writhing dark shadow rising from the water behind the portal.

“Oh fuck,” he utters, extending a hand far too late.

With its many arms and hands, the horrible, shadowy rat king from the aqueduct grasps hold of the portal, stretching and tearing into it with a deafening, discordant roar.

“Vulridir…!” the duergar souls moan in chorus. “Vulridir… vulridir…!”

“LET GO!” Church cries out, not caring about the black smoke that pours out of his mouth as he launches himself towards the portal, attempting to command the shadows once again away from it. “LET—!”

A dozen shadowy arms claw into the portal at once — pulling it apart as it thrums frantically, deafeningly.

“HALSIN!” Church screams, reaching towards the portal and his friend still searching somewhere inside. 

The portal roars as it destabilizes, collapsing in on itself in a split second until all Church’s hand brushes against is a pinprick of sizzling light — 

— and then it closes around nothing but air.

The shadow wraiths dissipate in an instant, and except for the crunching of the beach under foot, the crackling of flames, and the fluttering of shadow-cursed wings…

The world goes quiet.

The portal is gone — sealing Halsin away into the Shadowfell. 

Forever.

—

A chorus of dismayed shouts and frantic orders breaks the stunned silence. Even Jaheira seems at a loss as she stares wide-eyed at where the portal once was.

But Church can’t hear any of them.

No… NO! Is all he hears in his own mind, chanting in rhythm with the slow, hard thud of his heartbeat.

“Halsin!” Karlach cries out, her voice hoarse and despondent.

“Good gods,” Astarion utters in shock. “Just like that?”

“That’s… it,” Wyll’s voice breaks. “We failed him. He’s dead.”

The shadow-cursed beings and dark creatures all around them had stopped in the instant the portal disappeared. The incorporeal enemies had dispersed, and the corporeal had stumbled back into the woods and water. But the ravens, on the other hand…

They fill the trees. They stand upon the ground and rocky ledges. They circle silently in the air.

Somehow Church knows that with their pale, glowing eyes, they are all watching him with rapt attention. 

The shadow within him laughs hysterically. 

Everyone. Everyone you ever cared about—!

“—NO!” Church thunders, reaching towards the empty air where the portal once stood. 

“My child!” the Mother shouts frantically into his mind. “What are you doing? STOP!”

“Church!” Tavi calls out desperately, the astral prism vibrating and burning in the tiefling’s pocket. “No—no!”

Church has never done this before, and yet it feels so natural to him as he draws the endless shadows of this cursed land into himself. His heart pounds like a drum as he feels the power burn through his veins, electrify his brain, and chant in his ears. 

The ravens begin to caw around them in a hellish, cacophonous symphony.

He feels the eyes of the living and the dead watching from the darkness and the moonlight. Amid the calls of his allies and the caws of the ravens, he swears he can hear the Raven Queen herself laughing gaily in the distance. 

He hears his mother’s continuous, desperate pleading for him to, “STOP! STOP!”

“What are you doing?” Astarion yowls from afar, clambering down from his position with the other archers. 

“Halsin’s not dead!” Church shouts over the din. “I’m not leaving him behind! I won’t allow it!”

“No—NO! Don’t leave me! Don’t—!”

Church sighs deeply. 

Sorry, mother, he tells her. 

It’s clear what he must do. It’s so obvious what he was always meant to do. 

Church lets the shadow magic take over him, willfully casting away his mother’s protection like a heavy cloak. 

He embraces the shadows, and they pour into him hungrily as he channels their magic through both of his blackened, sharp-taloned hands — tearing the fabric of space and time apart. 

In just a few seconds, a thrumming, unstable portal hangs before him in mid-air. It’s an ugly thing compared to the one Halsin summoned with Silvanus’ guidance, but between his haphazard portal’s ragged edges Church can see the same colorless, barren land Halsin had stepped into before. 

A storm of shadows swirls around him, but Church feels calm. 

He feels focused.

He turns to his friends, his eyes inky black and mouth smoking as he speaks. 

“I’m going to find him,” he declares in a distorted, resonant voice, reaching into his pocket. “Don’t follow me — stay here and fight back the shadows if they return.”

“Church!” Tavi begins to speak as the warlock tosses the artefact back into the hands of a bewildered, anguished Shadowheart. “No — stay here! Don’t—!”

“I’m sorry Tav,” Church thinks ruefully. “I guess we all have to play the hero at some point, don’t we? Take care of the others for me. Please.”

“We can defeat the Absolute without lifting the Shadow Curse!” Tavi’s voice is desperate as he pleads with him. “Halsin is lost! I can’t lose you too. CHURCH—!”

But the warlock pays him no more heed. 

Instead, he seeks out Astarion’s familiar, frantic mind, trying to soothe it in vain. 

“For what it’s worth,” he tells the elf, his heart full of regret. “It was really nice to be yours.”

He turns and forces himself through the portal before anyone else can try to stop him. 

Start from the beginning!

[elevatorladylady]

Critical Reread - ACOFAS Chapter 6

Join me on a reread of A Court of Frost and Starlight

Chapter 6 - Morrigan

“There was no light in this place. There never had been. Even the evergreen garlands, holly wreaths, and crackling birchwood fires in honor of the Solstice couldn’t pierce the eternal darkness that dwelled in the Hewn City. It was not the sort of darkness that Mor had come to love in Velaris, the sort of darkness that was as much a part of R/hys as his blood. It was the darkness of rotting things, of decay. The smothering darkness that withered all life.”

It’s unconscionable for R/hysand to allow the entire city to be subjected to these living conditions and what we assume is brutality from those in power.

“Another person she’d one day kill. If F/eyre and R/hys didn’t do it first. It didn’t matter what Tamlin had done in the war, if he’d brought Beron and the human forces with him. If he’d played Hybern. It was another day, another female lying on the ground, that Mor would not forget, could not forgive.”

I’m gonna try to be brief here. F/eyre (will) and Tamlin lock up their loved ones for “their own good”. Both are wrong, but if we don’t want to kill F/eyre for doing it, then maybe Tamlin doesn’t deserve the consequence of death either. Tamlin has also already dealt with a lot of consequences for the way he treated F/eyre. He lost his fiance and best friend to the Night Court’s advantage and his entire court was destabilized. He also done a lot to be a good political ally and hasn’t been a bother to them since the HL’s meetings.

Also Mor will prove she only gives a shit if people she likes have their agency taken from them. 

“Save for her initial order to the Steward, she had not spoken a word. Contributed to this meeting. Stepped up. She could see that in Keir’s eyes. The satisfaction. Say something. Think of something to say. To strip him down to nothing.”

Does Mor actually do anything when she oversees the Court of Nightmares? What is the point of subjecting her to interactions with them if she’s not actually doing anything there? 

“Truth is your gift. Truth is your curse.”

Absolutely meaningless. She has so many secrets, and you’d think if she actually had some kind of gift/curse for truth, she would actually struggle with being able to keep so many things from people.

[enaelyork]

BLEU - WIP [New version] Thrawn x F! OC

ISB agent - Undercover - Forbidden Love - Tarkin's daughter - Past love, new passion - Lover to ennemie to lover - DNI +18

— You will accompany her.

— No.

My tongue was faster than my mind and, for once, in perfect harmony with it. Yularen, for his part, is clearly not satisfied with my answer and, from where I am standing, I can see his mustache twitching in annoyance. I might feel guilty for standing up to my direct boss like that, but I'm too busy trying to get out of the mess he's put me in. He's going to have to put up with my whims.

— There's no way he's coming with me. - Why ?

Because it's him.

Because I was madly in love with this man and I am no longer so convinced that I buried my feelings with my old life.

Maybe also because he asked me not to marry Erwin, that I did it anyway before his eyes and that the expression he had then still haunts me years later? A whole bunch of excellent reasons that I don't see myself sharing with my boss, even less so when the person concerned is right there, in front of me.

— Because a marine has no place in an undercover mission.

I am pitiful. I think as I listen to my absurd argument. It fits anywhere. A guy like him, who manages to rise this high in the military hierarchy in just a few years can go wherever he wants. He knows it, in fact he doesn't even glance at me when he decides to answer me.

— It's not for you to judge.

We kissed five years ago. I can still feel his hands on my skin and his warm voice asking me not to get married. The same voice that rebuffs me with a coldness that could convince anyone that he has never touched me in his life and that he has as much interest in me as in a Bantha. Impassive, stiff as a pole firmly planted in the ground, his feet firmly anchored to the ground like the good soldier that he is, he analyzes the slightest of our reactions like the good little soldier that he is.

Nothing has changed in him. It's horrible.

They say that people change over time. And that's what I hoped for with him. I hoped that time would make him less fascinating, less unbearable and seductive, that he would become a little more stupid and uninteresting. But all this time has brought me is exactly the same man as before, plus the white admiralty uniform.

What a f*ck*ng scam.

—With all due respect, Grand Admiral, this is between my superior and me. — I thought I was your superior now. — Not when we are in the ISB offices.

There is so much electricity in the air that we are close to a storm. Around us crackles such tension that we could easily power a holovid network just by staring into each other's eyes. No matter how much I avoid his eyes, everything brings me back to them again and again, and that has the gift of making me particularly nervous. This is the effect it has always had on me, to destabilize me, to convince me that all my certainties are false. As long as he sees it, as long as Yularen understands that my collaboration with Thrawn must stop now before I commit murder, or worse.

— Jar'kani expects me to be alone for the transaction. I continue calmly. I would have a hard time justifying the presence of a person he has never seen at my side.

—He could be your husband.

It's official, he's stupid.

I don't know how much time passes between the moment Yularen issues his ready-made solution and the moment I catch my breath. I want to scream, to crush this man that I admire so much in my hands by asking him where he could have stored his clairvoyance and his brain.

—Are you kidding? I embellish my remark with a look of distress which remains unanswered.

—Do I look like one?

—There is a problem in your plan: I am already married.

—We all know that.

His voice makes my blood run cold. It has this acidic vibration that pins me to the spot, throws my heart into the crusher and suffocates my soul in a gloomy vault. It's worse than a death sentence, worse than a reprimand.

It is reality.

I am married. I am not married to him.

His expression cracks for a quarter of a second, time for my eyes to detect the regrets he hides behind his coldness. This all drives me crazy. This life, these memories that come back to me like slaps in the face as soon as I have the misfortune of looking at it, of hearing it, of feeling it. Everything he represents, everything I will never have.

—Don’t look at me like that, Leny. Let's be pragmatic. Jar’Kani knows you’re married, so there’s nothing wrong with making introductions. — And for what reason ? Eh ? Since when is taking your partner to illegal art trafficking a good idea?

— You're only showing him more. You prove to him that he can trust everything and your close circle. He will understand that you are not doing this alone, that it is a family affair. You have

— The argument is valid. They both want me dead.

— No, he’s not.

[kornstreifs-storys]

AoR, Chapter 3, Prelude

A strange Pokemon walked across a clearing in an alien looking forest. Gray, orange and purple leafs crackled in the breeze and the sky above was a sea of stars, even though it seemed to be daytime. At the very least the clearing was illuminated like you expect on a nice summer day. Wispy incorporeal beings rushed past the Pokemon as it continued it’s walk through the strangely beautiful landscape.

This strange place was part of the extensive forests of the Ethereal and the Pokemon in question was an Ethereon, one of the few living beings capable of crossing over into the Ethereal without dying in the process. The wispy spirits didn’t seem to mind the living intruder in their realm, still the Ethereon knew someone followed her.

The Pokemon looked behind them and sighed. “I know you’re there.” she said, “please come out already.” She was annoyed by her pursuer, why couldn’t they just come out and talk to her if they wanted something so bad. There was movement in the underbrush and then finally a big Meowscarada stepped onto the clearing, though it had the color of dead leafs and multiple holes in the leafs on it’s back. It was Zero, the first Reaper and technically her boss.

The Ethereon smiled slightly, “Well?” she asked, “What’s so important that you came to see me yourself?” Zero looked at her with a skeptical gaze, “I thought you’d be more scared to face me, I know what you and your partner did.” Now she was nervous, “You’re referring to what happened with Seraphore, right.” Zero nodded, “You know my stance on bringing anyone back from the dead.” he said.

The Ethereon nodded, “I know, but you couldn’t seriously expect me to interfere in this matter. That Pokemon, she …” Zero interrupted her, “I’m aware. I already gave Seraphore an earful about this, just don’t do it again. It’s against the cycle and with Anima currently missing we can’t risk destabilizing the world any further.” She bowed her head in agreement.

Zero sighed, “Well that aside, I didn’t come here to scold you. I actually need you to do something for me.” The Ethereon perked up, she knew that Zero would never come here just to yell at her, so she had expected her to have a job for her, but what could that be that she couldn’t just do herself? Zero sat down, “It’s about Azazels Champion,” she began to explain, “Seraphore received a prophecy and he is an Important part, it seems.”

The Ethereon understood, “You want me to look for him? I thought he disappeared just like the other humans.” “Many Pokemon think that,” Zero replied, “but he is still alive that much I know. Though I heard he’s no longer a human, so keep that in mind,” The Ethereon bowed, she knew why he wanted her to look for the Champion. With Anima gone Zero was the acting god of death, he couldn’t neglect his duties for long.

“I see,” she said, “Do you have any clues on where to look for him?” Zero nodded and grabbed a bag they carried, “I managed to gather that he seems to be hiding in a divine sanctuary, which would make sense since that’s part of his patrons domain.” they gave the Ethereon the bag, “I’ve prepared a map with all known rifts in Hisui, as that’s were he was supposedly last seen.”

The Ethereon grabbed the bag and with a bit of difficulty managed to shoulder it. “Thanks, was that all or is there more I should know.” Zero shook her head, “That’s all I know about the champion.” she said, “Just one more thing. The one Seraphore revived is also looking for the last Human, if you find them before them I want you to guide them to him. … It could be crucial for the prophecy.”

The Ethereon paused, “But…, how am I meant to find them? You know I searched for her for a long time but we never managed to cross paths.” she cloud feel tears creeping up. It had been so long. Zero interrupted her thoughts, “She is supposed to be dead and currently lives on the time of another. You are a reaper yourself, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding her if you want.”

Then Zero got up and before the Ethereon could say another word he had vanished into thin air. She gazed upon the spot were he had been, stunned. She felt ecstatic, she could do it, finally she could see her child again. She turned around to head for the next Spirit Vortex to take her back to the material. There was a lot of work to be done.

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

Start / previous / next (Cover ch. 3)

And were back. I decided to give each chapter a little prelude from now on. It'll be posted before the cover of the chapter and so the chapters name is not jet disclosed.

I'll post the cover here in a few days so stay tuned.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed todays update. We get to meet some new faces, though is one of the charakter really new?

Well you'll find out soon enough. See you next time.

[not-that-dillinger]

Debbie nodded. He would have suggested the opposite, since Ark was less likely to destabilize the spot further, but he saw her logic, and they didn't have time to argue since the user was still pursuing them.

He jumped, landing perfectly on the spot. Rock underneath him crackled. Not wanting to trap Ark with the rectified user, Debbie picked the next spot, and jumped again. This one, like Ark said, was much more stable, and it looked like everything after was even more so.

"That one won't hold for long," Debbie called back. "Move quickly, but I'll try to catch you if things go wrong."

[From "Send me ⚓️ for our muses to be shipwrecked together"

...Not sure who should approach who, and this got really long, so leaving it at this...

—@not-that-dillinger]

Ultimately, how Ed ended up on the Grid was trivial. An anomaly he noticed, and couldn't stop thinking about, and, on a whim, went to go investigate.

It didn't take him long to find Flynn's creepy basement lab. It took him less time to find the digital world (he was without a doubt inside the computer, because that was most certainly the digitization laser he shot himself with).

It took them even less time to find him.

All he knew was that one moment he was standing in a dusty arcade, the next... he was still standing in the arcade, except as if it existed in a different dimension. In a different world.

And then two... programs? in glowing orange suits approached him, arrested him (for what, he wasn't certain), and put him on one of those ships from Flynn's game that he was never allowed to play as a kid. Space Paranoids, if he remembered correctly.

In any case, they put him on the ship, with several other programs. He'd already had a stressful day (thanks, Mackey), and was barely keeping it together when one of the other programs mentioned that they were all going to 'derezz.' Ed wasn't certain what that word meant, but from the context, he was convinced the guards were taking them to their deaths.

He was claustrophobic from the number of people programs on the ship, and he may have shot himself with a high-powered laser, but he certainly didn't want to die.

He couldn't breathe, he could barely form a thought from how his mind was reeling.

And then suddenly Ed could feel the lines code that made up the ship, and their restraints that held his feet in place. He had no idea what he did, but the next moment, their restraints were gone.

The woman next to him instantly attacked the guards with a staff he had no idea where she got it from. The ship descended into chaos as the other programs joined in the melee, and then in altitude when one of the programs destroyed the ship's pilot with the disc on their back.

Ed didn't have a disc, or a staff, and he certainly didn't know anything about piloting... anything, really, but nobody had yet realized that their ship was about to crash. So he carefully skirted the edge of their cabin to the controls.

A joystick. Really Flynn? Murder on his wrist. Joy of joys.

Ed... tried to keep them flying, but he had never been good at video games, and he really didn't have time to do much but pull up and lessen the impact when they crashed into the mountainside.

The next thing he knew, he was face down in the snowy, barren wasteland outside the city. When he rolled over to see his surroundings, the recognizer was a fair distance away (he see it clearly: blessedly, his glasses weren't broken in the crash). He must have been thrown out one of the broken windows in the crash. His ears rang, and Ed was certain he was both bleeding and concussed.

There was someone else lying in the snow, thankfully a distance away, but Ed had no idea what happened to the rest of the programs on the ship.

He knew he should get moving, in case any of the guards survived, but Ed needed a moment to recover before he attempted anything else.

((Ooooh, awesome, thank you so very much!))

Living on the Grid was hazardous nowadays, especially for a Renegade. Ark specialized in causing trouble for the Occupation, but knew that it was going to catch up with her one of these cycles.

She had been pulling another one of her self-assigned missions, when the sky had lit up in a way she hadn't seen in countless cycles.

A User was rezzing into the Grid.

Unfortunately, the beam of light distracted her long enough for the Occupation to catch up to her.

Badly outnumbered, Ark decided to save her strength for better odds.

She was loaded into a Recognizer, along with quite a few other programs.

A short time later, someone was loaded in next to her, someone with strange clothes she had never seen before. Was he the User? Or just a program with a quirky style? Was odd fashion a good enough reason for him to be arrested?

As she analyzed him, all of a sudden, him, her, and everyone else was free.

She took advantage of the surprise and chaos, and immediately leapt into action. Fortunately, they hadn't searched her too well in the confusion over the beacon, so her staff had remained with her.

Bolstered by the knowledge that there was likely a User among them, she fought hard, joined in by all the other prisoners on the ship.

The battle didn't last long before everything exploded.

Ark was flung out of the Recognizer and away from it, falling into the snow.

She wasn't out long, the cold stinging and bringing her back conscious, her circuits coming back online.

Using her staff to help, she pulled herself up and started looking around for any survivors.

She saw someone in the snow and started making her way towards them, using her staff as a walking stick while she still got her bearings.

[bleuhisteria]

Deus Ex Machina|| Aizawa x Reader Chapter 10

In the crucible of training, bonds are forged, weaknesses are exposed, and the path to true coordination begins.

__

As breakfast came to an end, Aizawa offered to help clean up the dining table, and Elena and I settled in the living room. I sat on the floor while she took a seat on the couch, carefully brushing my hair as my mom had requested.

While Elena worked on my hair, my thoughts drifted back to my dad's words. He had a point about maintaining the integrity of the sports festival. However, Aizawa and I had to make use of every advantage we had. In the midst of these contemplations, I realized that I had overlooked a crucial detail: look for someone who possessed recordings of the previous sports festivals. And to think, it was none other than my own mother who had the entire collection. How convenient...

"All right! Let's get to training, you two!" my dad's voice rang out, snapping me out of my thoughts just as Elena finished brushing my hair.

I walked over to join my dad, feeling a sense of guilt as I stood next to Aizawa. My head hung low as I muttered my apologies to him, "Sorry for being late... I stayed up for a while last night..." I confessed, my guilt lingering despite my belief that I was doing it for his sake.

"It's fine," I heard him say in his usual monotonous tone, brushing off my concerns. "I enjoyed the food anyway," he added, attempting to lighten the mood.

Lifting up my head, I managed to give him a small smile. We reached the training grounds, and I wondered if it would be another one-on-one spar with Aizawa. I glanced at him, ready to ask the question, but my dad beat me to it.

"Since I left so abruptly yesterday, I wasn't able to train both of you. But I'm sure (N/N) here managed to extract some useful information from you, Aizawa-kun," Dad said, turning to Aizawa, who nodded in response.

He continued, "I mostly train (N/N) in unarmed combat, and the same will go for you. I'd like to see how well you do against me," Dad said with a smile. Then he turned to me and gave me an order, "(N/N), stand to the side and watch."

I nodded, realizing that I should have brought my pen and paper to take notes. Sighing to myself, I prepared to observe the training session and make mental notes instead.

The two of them stood across from each other, ready to begin. My dad broke the ice by asking a question, "How long have you been training, Aizawa?" he inquired, dropping the honorifics.

Aizawa assumed a combat stance, his expression serious. "Since junior high," he responded.

My dad let out a chuckle, his confidence evident. "Then I hope those years of training pay off in this fight," he declared, his words carrying a hint of challenge, aiming to stoke some aggression in Aizawa.

Aizawa remained calm, muttering, "So do I, sir."

"(N/N), tell us when to start," my dad called out to me. I nodded in acknowledgment.

They both maintained their focused stances, awaiting my signal. As my eyes briefly met with Aizawa's, a surge of warmth spread across my cheeks. I quickly shook off the distraction, slapping my cheeks lightly to regain my focus. This was not the time to let my thoughts wander.

Taking a deep breath, I mustered my confidence and announced, "Start!"

As the fight between my dad and Aizawa unfolded, the air crackled with tension. Their movements were lightning-fast, showcasing their exceptional combat skills.

My dad initiated the first offensive move, lunging forward with a powerful straight punch aimed at Aizawa's midsection. Aizawa swiftly sidestepped, evading the attack with graceful footwork. Seizing the opportunity, he countered with a swift low kick, aiming to destabilize my dad's balance. However, my dad anticipated the move, pivoting on his planted foot and redirecting the force of the kick, using it to execute a spinning backfist that narrowly missed Aizawa's jaw.

Aizawa, undeterred, retaliated with a series of lightning-quick strikes. He launched a barrage of punches and kicks, aiming to overwhelm my dad with speed and precision. My dad's years of experience shone through as he expertly parried and blocked the incoming strikes, demonstrating his superior defensive skills.

In a fluid motion, my dad launched a powerful roundhouse kick towards Aizawa's torso. Aizawa responded with a well-timed sidestep, narrowly avoiding the full impact of the strike. Sensing an opening, he countered with a swift elbow strike, aiming for my dad's exposed flank. However, my dad swiftly twisted his body, deflecting the blow with his forearm while simultaneously delivering a powerful knee strike towards Aizawa's midsection.

The fight continued with a mesmerizing exchange of strikes, blocks, and counters. Aizawa utilized his agility and flexibility, smoothly evading my dad's attacks and launching calculated counterattacks. My dad, on the other hand, showcased his impeccable timing and precision, capitalizing on any opening he could find.

Their movements were a blur as they seamlessly transitioned between offensive and defensive maneuvers.

As the fight between my dad and Aizawa intensified, it became apparent that my dad's experience and skill were giving him the upper hand. Aizawa, although putting up a valiant fight, was still relatively young and lacked the same level of expertise.

My dad's calculated strikes and impeccable timing gradually wore down Aizawa's defenses. He expertly dodged and parried Aizawa's attacks, countering with precision and power. Aizawa fought back with determination, utilizing his agility and quick reflexes, but it wasn't enough to overcome my dad's years of training.

Aizawa's movements started to lose their sharpness as fatigue set in. His breathing grew heavier, and his once swift strikes became sluggish. My dad took advantage of the opening, landing a well-placed strike that sent Aizawa stumbling backward.

Despite his efforts, Aizawa struggled to regain his footing, visibly fatigued and overwhelmed. He fought with resilience, refusing to back down, but ultimately, my dad's experience and superior technique proved too much for him to overcome at this stage in his training.

With one final decisive move, my dad landed a powerful blow, knocking Aizawa to the ground. The impact reverberated through the training grounds, signaling the end of the fight. Aizawa lay there, momentarily stunned and defeated.

My dad reached out his hand, offering it to Aizawa as a sign of respect and recognition for his efforts. "You fought well, kid. You just need more experience dealing with real opponents," he remarked.

Aizawa accepted the helping hand, pulling himself up with a mixture of exhaustion and weariness etched on his face. The physical and mental strain of the fight was evident.

Curiosity filled my dad's eyes as he addressed Aizawa, "I assume you don't have much experience in combat against actual people, am I right?"

Aizawa nodded silently, affirming my dad's assumption.

Letting out a sigh, my dad spoke with a tinge of empathy, "It showed in our bout. You need more practice fighting against living opponents. Understanding their thoughts and anticipating their moves is crucial in a battle, and that's not something you can fully grasp by fighting robots and dummies alone." He then turned his attention to me, beckoning me to take the stage. "(N/N), it's your turn!" he called out, temporarily benching Aizawa.

Aizawa seemed to take the advice to heart as we exchanged places. He positioned himself on the sidelines, observing quietly. I walked toward my dad, ready to face the challenge ahead. He looked back at Aizawa and said, "Let us know when to begin," to which Aizawa quietly nodded in response.

As we faced each other, our stances firm and focused, Aizawa's voice resonated through the training grounds, "Start!" his shout signaling the beginning of our fight.

Having a deep understanding of my dad's fighting style, I recognized some of his vulnerabilities, making us somewhat evenly matched. With this knowledge in mind, I initiated the bout by launching the first punch, knowing that I possessed greater speed than him.

The fight between my dad and me was intense and fast-paced. I attacked with a flurry of punches, using my speed advantage. But my dad's reflexes were sharp, and he blocked and countered most of my strikes.

His fighting style blended martial arts and power, making it challenging for me to land hits. I had to rely on evasive maneuvers to dodge his attacks. Sometimes, I managed to land a few strikes on his guard.

We moved swiftly across the training grounds, exchanging blows. My dad's experience gave him the upper hand, as he anticipated my moves and countered effectively. I fought by adapting my strategy to find weaknesses.

As the fight went on, we both grew tired. Sweat dripped down our faces. In the end, my dad's experience and strength won out. He landed a decisive strike, and I stumbled back.

Breathing heavily, I looked at my dad with a mix of exhaustion and respect. He offered a hand to help me up, and I accepted, acknowledging his victory.

__

Later on, as (Y/N) and Aizawa sat on the ground, (Y/N)'s dad took the opportunity to lecture them about their fighting styles and areas that needed improvement.

"Aizawa, I noticed that you hesitate to attack even when there are clear openings. Anticipating your opponent's moves is crucial in combat," he advised, his arms crossed.

Aizawa nodded in acknowledgement. "I understand, sir. It's something I need to work on."

Turning to (Y/N), her dad fixed his gaze on her, his expression stern. "And (N/N), while your ability to identify my weak points and react accordingly is commendable, you rely too heavily on your speed, which drains your stamina. You need to find a balance between speed and strategy," he scolded.

Feeling dejected, (Y/N) nodded in acknowledgment of her father's critique. "Yes, sir. I'll work on that."

Trying to lighten the mood, (Y/N)'s dad laughed and placed a hand on her head, offering words of encouragement. "Don't worry, sweetie. With enough training, you'll reach my level."

Just as they began to regain their focus, Aizawa spoke up, addressing (Y/N)'s dad with a respectful tone. "(Y/N)'s dad, may I ask you something?"

"Call me (F/N). But yes, what do you want to know?" (Y/N)'s dad replied, retracting his hand from her head and adopting a curious expression.

Aizawa hesitated for a moment before asking the question that surprised both (Y/N) and her dad. "Are you a hero by chance?"

Caught off guard, (Y/N)'s dad laughed awkwardly, trying to downplay the inquiry. "What makes you think that?"

"Your combat ability... it's just... never mind... forget I said anything," Aizawa responded, realizing that assuming (Y/N)'s dad was a hero might have been presumptuous.

(Y/N) breathed a sigh of relief, her panic subsiding. She glanced at Aizawa, appreciating his discretion. However, her dad, seizing the moment, proposed something unexpected.

"Now that that's cleared up, why don't we all fight at once? You two against me," he suggested with a mischievous grin, sparking a renewed sense of excitement in the training session.

Aizawa turned to (Y/N), a hint of concern on his face. "Two against one?" he questioned, seeking reassurance.

(Y/N)'s dad nodded in affirmation, elaborating on his idea. "Since you're both planning to work together in the sports festival, it's important to develop your teamwork and compatibility in combat. This will be a valuable opportunity to enhance your coordination and learn how to synchronize your attacks," he explained, capturing (Y/N)'s full attention.

Excitement bubbled up within her, and she eagerly agreed. "R-right! The more we understand each other's movements, the better we can coordinate our strategies and take advantage of openings," she exclaimed, her voice filled with enthusiasm.

"Exactly," (Y/N)'s dad affirmed, pleased with her response. "It's important to understand each other's fighting styles and synchronize your moves effectively. This will be a great opportunity for both of you to improve your teamwork."

Aizawa seemed to consider the idea, his initial hesitation fading. "Alright, let's give it a try," he agreed, displaying a newfound determination.

With everyone on board, (Y/N)'s dad gestured for them to take their positions. "Remember, this isn't just about overpowering me. Focus on coordination, communication, and exploiting openings. Are you ready?"

(Y/N) and Aizawa exchanged a determined look before nodding in unison. "Y-yes, sir!" "Yes, sir!"

"Then let's begin!" (Y/N)'s dad declared, and the intense three-way battle commenced.

As (Y/N) and Aizawa launched their coordinated assault, their movements initially appeared synchronized. They moved with a shared purpose, their attacks blending seamlessly as if they had practiced them countless times before. However, as the battle unfolded, subtle cracks in their coordination began to surface.

There were moments when their timing faltered, causing their attacks to clash instead of harmonize. (Y/N) would throw a punch while Aizawa attempted a sweeping kick, resulting in their limbs colliding and disrupting the flow of their offense. They had not yet developed the instinctive understanding of each other's movements necessary for flawless coordination.

Furthermore, their communication fell short in critical situations. They struggled to convey their intentions effectively, leading to misinterpretations and missteps. (Y/N) would anticipate Aizawa's actions incorrectly, leaving her momentarily vulnerable, while Aizawa would hesitate in his decision-making, unsure of when to follow up on (Y/N)'s attacks.

These lapses in coordination created openings that (Y/N)'s dad astutely capitalized on. He exploited their hesitations and misfires, countering their attacks with swift and calculated maneuvers. Their lack of seamless coordination left them susceptible to his experienced and strategic counterattacks.

With each misstep, frustration and disappointment crept into (Y/N) and Aizawa's expressions. They knew they had the potential to be a formidable team, but their lack of synergy hindered their progress.

Despite their efforts, the battle ended prematurely, leaving them with a sense of unfinished business.

Panting heavily, (Y/N) and Aizawa exchanged glances, both realizing their lack of coordination in the battle.

Noticing their expression, (Y/N)'s dad chimed in, "See that? It's important to know your partner's weakness in order to cover them with your own strengths. Since you two have only known each other for a couple of days, it's safe to assume you don't know anything about each other."

He continued, "The more two people understand each other, the better their coordination becomes. Try to work on understanding each other first before anything else," he advised, a smile on his face as though the fight hadn't worn him down at all.

Still panting, Aizawa placed his hands on his knees and asked, "How exactly do we do that?"

A mischievous grin formed on (Y/N)'s dad's face as he replied, "I'm glad you asked!"

[rcksmith]

Mine — Kaz Brekker

(photo not mine)

Requests: “9 from the fluff prompts with Kaz brekker please? It could be where they're keeping it a secret and it slips out? Thanks”

“Could you possibly do a kaz brekker and reader imagine where they are both like in their mid twenties. Number 9 from the fluff prompts “So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend?" "No, that girl is my wife”, I could just imagine him with the smuggest grin saying it. Your a very good writer and thank you if you decide to write this.”

“Could I get a kaz brekker x reader secret relationship with fluff prompts 5, 7, 12, and 14 please?”

Fluff prompts:

5. ”Don’t smile at me like that. You know it drives me crazy.”

7. “I feel like i cant breathe when i’m around you.”

9. “So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend?!" "No, that girl is my wife!”

12. “I’m not jealous! Its just...you’re mine!”

14. “I don’t like to pretend we’re not together.”

Couple: Kaz Brekker/ Fem!Reader

Warnings: swearing, mention of fights, mention of post-traumatic stress, fluff too.

Word count: 2k.

A/N: Thank you💖 I hope you guys like. I changed some details a little, hope you don't mind

Normal Rules. Smut Rules.

English is not my first language, so I so sorry if have a mistake.

Requests are open. Love you❤️

— — — —

Fissure. That's what mercenaries, thieves, assassins and his enemies were looking for. A fissure to drive Kaz Brekker to ruin. Burn his empire, wood for wood, until there is nothing left but funeral ashes swept away by the winter wind. Even the most infinitesimal fissure would ensure that his enemies infiltrate, like hungry parasites, into the heart of the dungeon of his deepest secrets. Swallowing, absorbing, any hint of what could do the infamous the Bastard of the Barrel down to his own knees.

And Kaz Brekker feared that if they looked into the most secluded corner of his dungeons, where it was reserved to hide the greatest truths of his soul, they would find the one only thing to beg on his knees for would be something he would do without hesitation.

You.

You were like the last summer solstice in a world ruled by darkness, cold and empty. Which he kept in a chest locked with seven chains.

If he had to describe you with the five senses, Brekker would remind that, when he was in the bitter cold of the ocean, clutching the stiffness of dead and putrefying flesh like a lifeboat, a ray of sunshine, warm as the summer, it opened up through the thunderclouds and came down to his face, warming that spot of skin like a kiss from the sun.

And it would be with that memory that he would describe you.

Kaz Brekker shouldn't have fallen in love with you. He was the person who most understood the disastrous consequences if he let himself get carried away by the way his heart sped up whenever he saw you. If he allowed herself to taste the way all of your heat radiated into his body and made him feel alive. But he fell in love.

Everything was all too much. The feeling of life every time you said his name, like a devotion, something religious, lyrical. The sweetness in your eyes, the warm voice. Everything had been too much.

And what should he do? Tell you he missed you every time you went on a mission? Saying that he were jealous and envy of Jesper because the man managed to make you laugh with a silly joke and hug you tight, something Kaz still hadn't been able to do? Tell you it was almost religious the way he venerated your smile? Of course not. Because all these things would have been sensible, and Kaz couldn't do anything sensible around you.

Because when he saw life offering him, with such joy, the one thing that had been denied him all his life, and that he swore never to crave, his first impulse was anger. Stupid, irrational anger.

So, for the first few moments, his entire reaction to you had been cold, distant, almost avoidant. Because the way his whole body shook in hot spasms when, in that summery tone, you called his name, it was too much for Kaz to handle.

“Kaz!” You call, one night.

He heard your voice from across the crow club, and had to close his eyes tightly at the way his heart leapt in his chest.

"Hey, hey." You appeared beside him, your cheeks chased away by coral red, the happy smile and the sparkle in your eyes as someone who have the path to true happiness. "Jessy said you were wanting to find a new way to invade that bank."

Oh perfect. In the same way his body exalted when he heard the sound of your name and your lips, hearing you call Jesper by that infernal nickname had a much more destabilizing effect. And fierce.

Kaz raised an eyebrow at you, in a nonchalant gesture but inviting you to keep talking.

“I happen to know of an underground path.” For an instant, the pride in your smile made Kaz want to smile too. “You and I can put together a map today and we'll be right tomorrow to go.”

That was one of the times Kaz should have made some dry, disinterested, trivial comment, something that made you not want to spend time with him, something that made you turn around and walk away. He should have turned around and left. He had done this over a thousand times with other people and knew it to be one of the best outings.

Still, the acid comment didn't come and he couldn't turn his back on you.

So, like the idiot he became whenever it came to you, Kaz couldn't help but spend an hour in your company. Even if it resulted in him lying in bed at the end of the day, alone and feeling the guilt gnawing at him more and more.

So, before he even knew it, Kaz was already in his office with you, listening to you chatter about things he knew he should have been paying attention to. But the way the crackling of the fire flames in the fireplace flashed across your face was a distraction of unimaginable proportions.

“Jessy and I…”

“You want to stop.” He found himself saying before he even realized it. “That nickname is already exasperating me.”

“Why? Jealousy?” You joked, oblivious to the truth.

Kaz looked at you like your comment was the most pathetic thing he'd ever heard. He wanted to screaming: ‘I’m not jealous! Its just...you’re mine!.’ But he didn't. Instead, the words that came out were:

“No. It's childish and immature, and it doesn't fit with...”

"What if I call you ‘Darling’?” You rested your chin on both palms of your hand, your elbows resting on his desk in his office.

Kaz's heart skipped a beat.

“That way you won't be jealous of Jessy's nickname and…”

“It's not jealousy!” He countered, and too late realized that he didn't disagree in the first instance about the nickname, but about the green color that emanated from his body.

And you didn't let that go either.

Your eyes took on a caustic gleam that you quickly hid, turning to the map on the table and going back to drawing the paths. “Okay, Darling.”

After that night, Kaz's self-control began to crumble.

He gave you death glares whenever you called him that nickname, but he never dared contradict or scold you. Much less deny it. The truth was, the core of his soul wanted this. He wanted every part of your caress warm as summer. He wanted to appreciate how perfect you looked when you called him that way. As if that nickname was born just to be used between you.

Something unique.

Over time, his body's physical reactions began to be stronger, coercive and overwhelming. Kaz felt dry, burning, and you soothed and inflamed him at the same time. You were the breath of peace, and also a glass of hot brandy.

And everything that he once felt dead, frozen or putrefying, slowly began to blossom, reborn and shine.

"Darling." You said, going behind the chair Kaz was sitting in, submerged in the Krisha security system sheets in front of he. “You've been there for hours.”

He ignored you, though his body was all too aware of yours behind him, the way your breath hit the top of his ear, how your heat hit his back like a high summer breeze. Kaz swallowed hard, ordering his eyes to stay on the pages.

“What are you reading?”

Your voice rang out from the top of his head, and Kaz felt his heart race into a cardiac arrhythmia the second your hands went to the back of the chair and your face tilted, chin hovering millimeters from his shoulder, your nose almost brushing his cheek.

Fucking Saints! You were hot! It was as if you had sun bathed, swam in the flames of fire, and been born into the summer.

Kaz lost his breath. His sanity. His soul.

“Do not do this.” His voice was no more than a whisper.

You looked at him, the furs not touching but breath hitting each other's cheeks. Kaz followed your gaze, and suddenly the world subtly turned hot. Pulsing and muffled.

“What?” You whispered, your heart so fast.

This was the time for Kaz to use the touche in a very valid argument. To make you move away as fast as you approached. To nip in the bud any path this interaction between you could take. He should have said about the touch. But he didn't remember. Kaz didn't remember his limitation, his traumas, his demons.

In that second, of insanity and magic, you couldn't do that just because…

"I feel like I cant breathe when I'm around you." He said.

After that day, Kaz realized that life no longer made sense without having you by his side to share it. Money didn't have the same value anymore if you weren't there, the robberies didn't make sense anymore if he couldn't tell you how it was at the end of the day, or have you by his side to fight.

Very quickly, Kaz Brekker realized that he had lost the battle against his own feelings. Loving you was inevitable. And having you close to him was made as essential as breathing. That's when things between the two of you developed faster, more solid, more right. The weeks turned to months, the months to years, and your relationship fortified as gloriously as the hilt of a sword.

Kaz still had very difficult moments with touching, days when a single brush of fur was unbearable and the mention of a kiss was impossible. But you stayed there. Firm and unshakable. Giving your summer smiles,your warm winks, and his nickname that had the power to soothe every nerve in Kaz's body.

However, the more Kaz understand that he was need you to he still live, the deeper he hid any trace of public affection for you. Any clue that could sparked the theory in someone that you were the reason, for Brekker, for the sun rose every morning. He couldn't bear the thought of losing you. Never.

Kaz Brekker became very aware that his soul was harnessed to yours. And there was nothing in the world that would take you away from he. Not while he lived, and even seven feet from land, Kaz would still find a way to fight for you.

It was a logical decision when he said you two should get married. Kaz was still trying to maintain his serene posture as his soul burned in a fire too eager and excited to make official anything that said you were his. That he had finally managed to have that ray of sunshine in the midst of the atrocious ocean. You, unlike him, exhaled your happiness in excited squeals, little jumps of joy and a passionate, quick kiss on the man in front of you.

And Kaz understood, as perfectly as the sky are blue, that he would do anything, for the rest of his life, to be worthy of that overwhelming happiness that sparkled in yours smiles.

“Don’t smile at me like that. You know it drives me crazy.” He said, feeling himself smile because your happiness for the wedding was exorbitant.

And you, like the little tease you were who loved to make him piss off, smiled even more and hugged him. He love you. Unconditionally.

But, just like the ocean waves, Kaz and you have had your ups and downs. He wasn't a man who had a lot of patience, and you weren't the most obedient, calm woman in the world. You found him exasperating and he found you as stubborn as a door.

"I already said you can't do that!" And there he was, once again, lecturing you because you showed too much affection, in his mind, for him in a public situation.

And, as Kaz fucking Brekker liked to point out, ‘all walls have eyes and ears’.

"We've been together for six years, Kaz!" You tried to keep your blood calm, but you weren't a person to put up with sermons. “Is this going to be our life? Living as if we have the same connection as a boss and an employee?!”

“And what do you want, Y/n?!” He placed both hands on his office desk, looking at you from the other side “Want us to have a party and tell everyone?! Or do you prefer to hang a red target on your chest?!”

"I did not say that!" You were starting to get really angry. “I'm not asking for a billboard saying we're married and you know it! The only thing I'm saying is that you let me choose to sit next to you, take your hand, or tell you I love you when any of us go off on a dangerous mission!"

Kaz shook his head, impassable, his gaze flashing with anger. How did you not realize he was trying to save you?! Save everything you two built, your lives! And all this for what? Walking hand in hand on the street? It was ridiculous!

“This is indisputable!”

“Kaz…”

“I said no!” He slapped his hands on the table.

A less brave woman would have cringed. But not you.

“I don’t like to pretend we’re not together!”

“And I don't like a fucking girl who complains all the fucking time about something I do to save her! But it feels like I've been put up with it for six years, doesn't it?!”

The words hit you like a slap. Crackling, burning and electrifying. You felt yourself holding your breath and your shoulders instinctively tightening back. The room was silent. Loaded with tension, as if lightning had just hit the ground.

You looked at Kaz in amazement. And he pursed his lips when he realized what he'd said.

“Put up with? And you call me ‘fucking girl’ ?” You repeated, your voice low, serious and in a mixture of hurt and outrage. “Good to know.”

You turned your back, walking out of the office and slamming the door behind you hard, making the thud reverberate through the corridors of Kaz's soul.

"Y/n!" He called you, striding to the door "Y/n!"

But when Kaz pulled the doorknob and took a few steps down the hall, it wasn't you he bumped into. It was Nina, trying to hide, in a very terrible way, her curious and shocked expression. In female hands she carried a small stack of documents, probably something important that Kaz needed to check.

He had to check that out. But his eyes, restless and quick, wandered the great hall of the crow club below, watching your figure pass between the bodies, advancing towards the exit.

"Sooo…" Nina started, even though the attention wasn't on her. "Couple fights, right?"

But Kaz didn't think before nodding, trying to get past Nina to catch up with you. But of course the girl wasn't going to let Brekker get away with it that quickly. She was betting with Inej how long you two would pretend to have nothing. And now she was going to get the truth!

"So you're saying that girl is your girlfriend?" The smile of shock and excitement was wide open on her face.

Kaz muttered a curse, gently pushing the girl aside and moving towards the stairs, aiming to catch up with you. But not before answering:

"No, that girl is my wife!"

[pugwitharug]

I’m sorry about not feeling well with college :(

I’m currently going through a lot of big changes too, and it’s been so chaotic and destabilizing whsjsksksk but I hope you can find something that brings some comfort and stability through that <33

I have a fluffy rec!! How about building a blanket fort with Felix in his study? Him and mc cuddling and Stella just jumps on the fort ahsjsjsj I miss him so much-

I hope you feel better about things!!! Huge changes like that can be really scary and just feel like the end of days honestly.

*offers to give you head pats*

- coffee anon

*gasp* I have a named anon this is the best day of my life

Thank you for the kind words! I know that in the end it'll be alright but for now it's just...a lot. I will always take head pats. And I love this req omg it's so damn cute I love it I love you

GN Reader, you are deep in the field of fluffs you have no escape, Stella Is A Homewrecker, I miss them so much awayahauehah

You know this man has blankets galore. He has a whole separate trunk filled with all the blankets he has. They're all velvet and silk and dark and cozy and wonderful

When you suggest the idea of a blanket fort, he's a little surprised to be honest, but he's definitely up for it!

You grab some of his chairs and put them in a corner of his room as he grabs his blankets and pillows. You drape the biggest over the chairs and help him cover the floor so it's a comfy little cave :3

You're ready to go in but Felix stops you, heading over to his desk and opening a small drawer. You know that's where he keeps his taxidermy kit, but he waves his hand over it and the kit seems to wobble and fade away to reveal a bunch of snacks

You smile and tease him a little for making so much effort to hide his strange snacks. He blushes and says you don't have to eat them if you don't want to as he crawls into the fort

You wrap your arms around him and kiss his cheek. Even if he does have weird snacks, you still love him. That earns you a signature Felix Squeak as he turns around to hug you back, hiding his face in your shoulder

Everything is perfect. You have your boyfriend in your arms, the fireplace nearby crackles warmly, soft blankets and pillows surround you. You and Felix start to doze off.....

Until you feel a blanket covering you and something heavy falling on the both of you

You two didn't notice but Stella was on the edge of one of the chairs, watching a particularly interesting speck of dust. When it fell on the ceiling, she decided to hone her kitty instincts and pounce--of course, on the wrong spot

Felix jolts awake with a yelp and throws the now ruined ceiling blanket off, Stella struggling to get to her feet with him thrashing around. He curses and calls her a demon as she runs away, but not before taking his package of pickled blueberries

Felix tries to chase after her but trips on the many blankets underneath him, and you can't help but laugh. He frowns and asks why you're laughing, and you tell him this is exactly what you want: to be with him, even if your stupid activity is ruined by an even stupider cat. To watch him just be...Felix, your amazing partner in crime

You think you can see a tear building up in his eyes as he sighs and snuggles into you again. He doesn't understand why you love him so much, but he'll take it

Even if he doesn't know it yet, he loves you too

[mutable-manifestation]

The premise, to me, screams "Dani was his first go at making the clone a baby to start with, and seeing baby Dani hit the paternal instincts (and maybe even Family Obsession) so hard it jumpstarted his redemption arc.

Just a few weeks of caring for Dani in has him apologizing to Danny and asking to start over - something Danny reluctantly grants. Alongside a laundry list of demands - like regular updates about Dani & how she's doing & milestones and stuff. Because like. It's his clone actually, thanks very much. A little baby clone twin sister, separated by years.

Vlad never moves to Amity Park, preferring to keep a healthy headstart distance between himself and Jack and Maddie. Physically at least.

Now that he has a half-ghost child, he actually puts some energy into dulling their crazy, rather than egging them on in attempt to one-up Danny by making them inconvenience him for whatever reason.

He has to be subtle, of course, expressing an interest in getting Involved in paranormal studies again.

Of course, it doesn't even take much effort to be subtle. He just has to push for actual science. Like. "Perhaps it would be best to refocus efforts on observational study given the difficulty of catching specimens?"

Then it's just a matter of going over the data and pointing out all the ways in which it seems that dead people really are still just people.

Vlad's a convincing guy when he's not being unbearable, and with Dani dulling the edges of his loneliness his compliments to Maddie are much rarer and tend to be far less creepy.

He's even been nice to Jack! Without visibly gritting his teeth and relying on the man's obliviousness to carry them through.

So things are going well.

Except that Dani keeps trying to destabilize.

It is by the grace of duplicates alone that Vlad gets any sleep - it's not that her episodes are frequent but they're irregular. Vlad won't be able to rest if she's unwatched until he manages to put a stop to the issue.

He moves to one of his hotels in Gotham the day she first destabilizes - it's the city with second-highest level of ambient ecto after Amity Park, which should help Dani and allow him to keep his "just-in-case" head start for running from Jack and Maddie.

Thankfully it's not a month after Dani's creation that Danny meets Frostbite, and the yeti agreed to take a look at her as soon as he can bring her (and there might've been some Big Emotions from the yetis about "something-something-mirror of the Great One" but Danny is Not Mentioning That)

So now Vlad finds himself, 2 hours before the planned visit at the Far Frozen, standing beside Daniel and staring at an empty crib.

"Uh, maybe one of your duplicates went to give her a bottle?"

"Daniel," Vlad begins, voice deadly calm. "I only went to lock everything up. I was gone for 2 minutes. There are no duplicates."

~~~

Bruce and Damian are in the batmobile heading back to the batcave, baby held carefully in Damian's lap, the rest of the family teasing him about inheriting Bruce's bad habits, when, with a crackle of harsh static, every electronic device in Gotham - including their secure, isolated comms channels - lights up with the face and/or voice of Vlad Masters.

"Hello, citizens of Gotham, my name is Vlad Masters and I would like to start off by apologizing for interrupting your evening, to whatever extent the interruption may take. You see, I have a message for Batman and Robin."

The sun has long since set, but the sky brightens considerably as almost everyone in the city wakes up, flicking on lights and either anxiously wondering what new disaster was about to go down or exasperatedly unplugging devices and removing batteries.

For their part, Batman and Robin sit in silence, destination unchanged but listening carefully in the off-chance of a confession - or any other information they can work with to learn yet more. Instead-

"While you managed to loop quite a few cameras, you did not get them all. It was incredibly easy to uncover who it was that Stole My Daughter!" On a passing screen, they could see the way his face, as well as his voice, transformed into a snarl at the last bit.

The man had surprisingly long canines, and the various bats quickly added "Vampire" and "Meta" to their mental roulette wheels of "what could be the deal with Vlad Masters."

Another screen further ahead showed how he forcibly smoothed his expression into a mere icy scowl.

"It has been precisely 15 minutes since you first broke into my home, so I will give you 15 more - exactly 15 more - to return her to me."

And then he steps back, and a glowing meta in a black-and-white hazmat suit appears out of thin air to float beside him, picking up seamlessly where he'd left off.

"Or else the GIW will get a long, hard look at what their lives would be like if I really was a menace to them."

His Lazarus-green eyes go brighter, and he raises a Lazarus-green-glowing hand to point at the camera. Then there is a flash, and the broadcast stops.

# Dcu x Dp 193

Batman and Robin had broken into Vlad Masters Hotel because they found something that was extremely similar to Lazarus water as Damian looks around he ends up in the bed room where he finds a crib that has a sleeping baby in it underneath the crib he finds injections filled with Lazarus water and comes to the conclusion that he is experimenting on this baby. Damian decides that he needs to take her when he leave.

After creating Dani Vlads decided not to age her up and raise her himself. Vlad is using ecto injection keep her stable until he find a permanent solution.

[redrobin-detective]

thoughts on halfas I guess

Vlad Due to the nature of his accident, Vlad took a long time to come into his powers and really isn’t all that powerful at a basic level. What he has going for him is a stable human form and lots of time/training. Vlad stated that he spent “years” in the hospital from his ectoacne. I submit that he didn’t become half-ghost right away, instead sweating and suffering through ectoplasm contamination for like 2-3 years as it very slowly converted and eventually stabilized him as a halfa. Like going through that alone? Your friends not visiting you and going off and getting married without you? No wonder he’s bitter. His ghostly obsession is with control and power after going years without it. He actually generally forgot about the Fentons for a long time, very out of sight, out of mind. Only when he got the notice about the reunion did his obsession with latched onto them, determined to rewrite past wrongs and have power over those who hurt him (maddie as his forced lover and jack dead). This desire mostly switched over to controlling danny once he knew about him.

It took him a long while to get a grip on his powers once he stabilized, even simple ghostly tricks took a while to master. His desire to master them was helped/contributed to his obsession with power and control. Even the most basic of ghostly abilities took Vlad months if not years to get a handle on. It was also a struggle bc there really wasn’t any ghosts he could ask. Not just because of his pride being unwilling to ask for help (tho that did play a part) but also without a stable portal there’s not much access to the Zone/ghosts in general. He had to rely on natural portals opening and then somehow find his way back. He once got lost and was gone for 7 months real time. On the flipside, as a consequence of his powers building slowly with minimal ecto-contamination, Vlad is a very stable halfa. It would take a lot to kill him from either human or ghostly threats. His fire core is strong, steady but it never burns hot enough to hurt him. He constantly feels feverish (100-102F/38-39C) but its never enough to actively be a threat to his living body.

Danny Oh boy, where do I start with Danno? I stated above that Vlad took a long time with his powers and is a moderately powerful but stable halfa? Danny is the exact opposite. Homeboy but his ass deep-fried in ectoplasm, an intense jolt that immediately bonded ectoplasm to him skipping the majority of the ecto-contamination period Vlad suffered through while also ‘charging’ him. While it still took time to gain control of his powers, he had the power and ability to use them straight away. Vlad was secretly shocked to learn Danny had only had his powers a few months when they met. It took him years to reach that level of power/proficiency. He is, at his baseline, an incredibly powerful ghost both because of his halfa status but by the nature of how he got his powers. Like in a year he defeated ghosts far older and more experienced than him. It scares a lot of them though they won’t admit to it. 

Vlad especially is worried that Danny is a shooting star, burning so brightly early on that he’ll burn and fade quickly. That future is very possible if he keeps pushing his powers as hard as he does throughout the series. If he doesn’t start slowing down by the time he finishes his adolescence then his human half will just give out. All that is basically a roundabout way of saying that Danny, as compared to Vlad, is a very unstable halfa. Too much power, relatively weak human body that cant quite contain all the energy while under constant stress. He’s more powerful naturally but he walks a very fine line, if he leans too far into one of his halves (overexerting himself as Fenton or Phantom) he could destabilize. It’s one reason that Vlad’s Danny clones had a hard time surviving, his ectosignature is incredibly tenuous and unstable and can only maintain under very certain circumstances.

Danny’s instability is both improved and worsened by the maturation of his ice core. On the one hand, it helps stabilize his ghost form by concentrating his ectoenergy within his body. It gives him greater control of his powers meaning he doesn’t have to exert himself quite so much. On the other hand, the natural consequences of his ice core really are stressful to Dan’s human body. While his body was completely changed and adapted to being made half-ghost it still has human needs and thus can’t be, like, completely frozen. Danny’s body is constantly at war with itself, Phantom trying to cool the body down to subzero temperatures for the health of its core while Fenton tries to keep the body somewhat warm for basic human purposes. He levels out somewhere around 93-95F/34-35C which is still hypothermic for normal people but he tolerates it. As Phantom, when he’s using his ice, there’s a mental thermometer in his head telling him when he needs to stop and warm up a bit. A bad fever or intense heat would be deadly to him as well. Basically Danny needs to learn to self regulate his powers, to not overuse them and respect his physical limits or he won’t make it to adulthood.

Danielle So Dani, taking cues from the sections above to talk about her. Gonna start by straight up saying that Dani isn’t human or really technically alive in a traditional sense. She is, however, a new type of ghost that closely mimics life. She has the advantage of having a true consciousness like a human, an ability to think and change outside of obsession and while she does ‘breathe’, ‘sleep’ and ‘eat’ her body doesn’t truly require it if it comes down to it. Downside is she isn’t like really alive alive and doesn’t have a real living body which makes her more prone to destabilizing (this will be an issue her whole life, the Fentons are constantly giving her injections and such to keep her together) and also doesn’t have human advantages like a living body to stabilize her or the ability to phase through ghost objects.

I spent a good long while saying that Danny himself is unstable and all of Vlad’s clones destabilized because of it. So what made Danielle different? Vlad combined some of his own core to hers in an experimental attempt to stop his clones from melting at the drop of a hat. It worked as Dani was the most stable of all the others but Vlad could sense his own energy in her, knew her core was not a true copy of Danny’s so he ceased that line of experimentation. As Dani develops and matures, more bits of Vlad pop up in her. She wakes up with fangs one day, sometimes Vlad’s control/power obsession bleeds into her and she develops a fire core, like him. Her core really upsets her, thinking she’s like him. Danny helps her work through it, saying her core doesn’t define her, that she’s not Vlad or Danny but her own person. They make a deadly combo, the fire and ice Phantom cousins, his hair misting like freshly fallen snow while hers crackles like a flame. They just gotta watch that they don’t freeze/overheat the other.

[originskey]

Day One: Haunting

CHALLENGE: Part of the depths of Fibonacci has been fenced off from the rest of the ward, with a human ranch appearing seemingly overnight. A fearsome, familiar, “monster” has appeared, and residents are missing. You wake to find yourself at the ranch, embedded with an Exsphere yourself, fully human. Destabilize the human ranch and escape the facility within one week or face Exsphere removal. Warning - attempts to accomplish this alone will likely end in failure. The style is THREAD or DRABBLE.

What IS that thing?! Shit--move it!

Its shambling moves into a run; thundering talons ripping into the concrete like clay. Only one of them has the time to scream; his companion soon didn’t have a throat to scream from. One powerful swipe from its gangly limbs, and the man was nothing more than a pile of flesh on the ground. The snap of the other miscreant’s gun went unnoticed by the monster, and its bullets hardly phased the abomination before him.

In a fate similar to the other human unfortunate enough to cross its path, the screams soon met with a stomach-turning squelch, like ripping a piece of meat open with bare hands...

ḩ̶̟͇͙̻͐̊ ̸͚̐̂̽̀ụ̸̦̺͗͋͆̕͝͠͝ ̴̨̝̹̝͚̼̯̉̈́͆́͝r̴̗̞̖̄̆̑̚ ̵̻̗̫̣̘͔̦͊͐̽̿̀͗̈́͗̚t̸̞̪͖͙͉͖̹̲̚ ̷̓̎͆̔̏̽̇̈́̈̚ͅŝ̴̲͍̯͙̳̕ͅ ̸̢̠͍̞̮̭̯̱̈́̓̃͌̚͘.̸̡̧̻͔͔͖̀̾͋͛̽͂̉̕̕͠ͅ ̶̨̛̯̩̫̳̮͖̫̀͑̀̑͠.̶̢̻̖͖̱̹͔̒͛̈́̃͘͝ͅ ̶͖̠̿̔̕.̷̢͈̤̲͐͌̽͌̑͘ͅ

...And then nothing. Into the shadows of the slums, it shuffles back...

- - - - - - -

Another guard falls to the floor, doubled over, as Kratos keeps moving. Hands bound, equipment gone, nothing but an Experiment’s uniform with his number tag crudely stitched into the fabric. He turns that corner sharply, staring down three more running rapidly toward him.

Alarms were sounding, gates were slamming, barriers of crackling energy went to cut off any more movement from the escapee.

Eventually the man ran out of places to run. On instinct, he tried to conjure his wings, only to find his feet still on the floor.

When they caught up to him, the blood on the sterile tile of the ranch matched his own. He could only take on so many people, and six was his limit. His skull met the ground with a crack.

By this time, I usually wake up.

One eye shut, but he didn’t need to sight to tell he was being lifted. They’d grabbed a fistful of his hair, after all--something like that is hard to ignore.

“And this is why we have weekly training.” “I didn’t think he’d have the balls to overpower the ones bringin’ him in!” “Well now we know better, don’t we.”

He feels himself tossed into arms that kept no gentle hold on him whatsoever.

“That ought’a be enough encouragement to keep him docile until the week ends.” “Keep his phone?” “Yes. And if anyone contacts him, give them the run-around.” “Yes, captain.”

Among the cackling, one of them lifts up his face by grabbing his cheeks. It’s not the same man that ruined his life--he could never forget a face like Kvar’s. But the resemblance was uncanny.

“I hope you didn’t think it’d be that easy, Aurion. Your people made these places impossible to escape, after all. It’s only fair.”

The satisfaction of spitting blood on him wasn’t worth the strong kick in the stomach.

“Put him away in the celebrity’s cell. The others should know what happens if they try escaping.”

Try as he might to grasp at his consciousness, it leaves him not long after, and he’s not even awake enough to feel his body thrown against the walls of a metal-bar wall, in view of everyone else in that containment cell.

...So why am I not waking up this time?