Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Eighty-nine and two days.

Arianna wakes up screaming, in a body she doesn’t recognise.

She lurches upwards, only to find herself staring at her own dead body.

And Phillip exhuming it.

She screams again.

She raises shaky hands to claw at him, only to find that her fingers are no longer gnarled with age, and the white scar on her knuckle that faded into a distant memory is pink and grinning at her.

She lunges at Phillip, only to fall straight through a veil of mist and into…

The same graveyard?

She doesn’t remember anything else, but she wakes up in the looking glass laying on Phillip’s workbench and realises that she’s stumbled into her own Hell.

Fourteen.

The witch raises her hand towards them, grotesque callouses bulging at the joints of her gnarled fingers. She points somewhere in the distance, to an old cabin belonging to a man who ate his wife and wore her skin. Before he was burned at the stake, he charged out, naked, screaming and dripping with blood.

And Caleb, the fool, grips his brother’s hand and follows, kicking into a run and he screams something about her not getting away with this.

She does get away with it.

Oh God, she does.

Eighty-nine-and-a-half.

She stays awake through red days that blend into red nights, and she’s utterly incapable of tuning out Phillip’s mechanical hum, the march of war, the march of things she could not have stopped—do you miss me Phillip do you miss me Phillip do you miss me Phillip do you miss me (I miss you).

She counts strands of her own hair to forget razed villages, children limping off with missing limbs.

Arianna stitches herself back together every time, no matter what happens and no matter who thinks they can wound her—she’s Elizabat Clawthorne’s bastard and it’ll do good for the world to remember that—but inside of here, in Phillip’s hand, the mask shatters for good and she’s never been so happy to stop pretending.

Twenty-one.

“They’re—” sputters Caleb, throwing open the door and barricading it with his body, “Those freaks are coming!”

Arianna rolls her eyes, and Phillip notices how the gold bleeds from them. And when she speaks, her voice is echoing across the small cabin.

“You know,” she grins, “This village is made of wood, three centuries dead, to be precise. Fortunately, I know how to remind it that it used to be alive, and how very thirsty it as after all these years.”

Caleb manages to look terrified as screaming starts from the outside, as well as the sound of quick, startling movements, and there’s two faint rings of green around Arianna’s wrists. And the screaming doesn’t stop.

“I find it,” Arianna says as she reaches out with strong, green wines from her sides, “Very rude of these so-called liberators that they think they can match me. There’s a whole, and may I add, very rude legend about me having made a deal with titan for powers unseen by anyone before me. Very funny of idiots who can’t catch a single cursed beast to think they can go up against that.”

The screaming is now more discordant and much more disturbing.

Arianna raises one lax hand towards the door.

“Let’s get out of here.”

She suddenly closes her hand into a fist. With a crunch, the screaming abruptly stops.

Despite it being the middle of the day, the light streaming through the cracks in their tightly drawn curtains vanish.

Twenty-seven.

“I need your nerd brain advice, Phillip.”

“Arianna, it’s three in the morning.”

Arianna, sitting crouched on the ledge of Phillip’s window after snapping off a lock he had to have known was no match for her, rolls her eyes. “Well,” she says, “I’d expected you to be up because you’re a freak who’s always up at night and I think you’re just trying to make me feel weird about something that totally isn’t. Anyways, even if it was weird, this is an emergency. You better not sleep naked—”

And Phillip sputters delightfully at that.

She tosses a book onto the bed, and then herself, gracelessly pushing herself to sit against the headboard, her shoulder pressing against Phillip’s. She cracks her wrist to the side, and a small ball of light settled atop her middle finger as she held it above the book, using her free hand to open it.

“You see,” she starts, “I had this theory that I could help Caleb by connecting my magic to his and sharing it, and I wanted to make something that would outlast me if I was an idiot and got myself killed doing idiot things—”

“How drunk are you?”

Arianna glares at Phillip’s mirthful grin in the half-light. “Two bottles,” she confessed as his eyes went wide.

“Two whole ones?”

“Ye-p,” Arianna answers, popping the p and ignoring the misery that’d led her there. The point was, the room had been on fire and invisible smoke slinking up to choke her and she couldn’t hold onto Caleb, so she slipped downstairs and emptied their liquor cabinet.

She’d promised that she’d try to be better, and she was trying. She was trying so hard. But sometimes, not even all the best promises could put you back together, and you just needed to last the night. And with the pleasant buzz of alcohol drowning out the suffocating silence, she’d managed to think clearly for the first time in a year.

(She ignored the nagging thought that she’d been sober for a year. She could do this. She could be better. She was getting better. This wasn’t a slip-up, because Caleb would never know. This was just her letting out necessary steam.)

“Anyways, that’s not important, alcohol just makes me have better ideas and forget shitty things that happened long enough to actually act on the ideas, so fuck that. Anyways, look, here’s a sketch of what I was thinking and how it would work, look, it draws power from the bile sac and then through a spell of equivalent exchange or transfer—”

“Sends it someplace else!” Phillip excitedly finished for her, the whites of his eyes catching the light and forgetting about why they don’t speak anymore. And Arianna, drowning in her own excitement, is all-too willing to forget, too.

So, she lets him get out a pen and paper. Then:

“Yeah,” Arianna continues, “I was talking to the neighbour who thought that it was horrifically dangerous because if you fully drain a witch, you kill the witch but c’mon, give the Isles’ youngest scholar of wild magic a little more credit, huh?”

She tuts, her hands on her hips as she wiggles on the bed. Phillip groans, smacks his forehead with his palm, and Arianna giggles.

“Gross,” he says, but there’s no venom in his voice, “You’re shaking your bed with your gyrations.”

Arianna sputters. Gyrations?! Seriously? How did he ever expect her to take him seriously again? She laughs again, and Phillip sighs, but she can still hear the fondness bleeding through, if hilariously reluctantly. Maybe there’s still something to save in there, even when he’s not groggy and she’s not drunk.

“Back on track,” he instructs, and it’s Arianna’s turn to groan.

“Does your theory have a name?”

She nods excitedly, flipping the page to her methods and trials.

“Sigils.”

Ninety.

Phillip showed up at her shop about a year about Arianna vanished for good.

Six months ago, Dell thought, we would have punched up his face. Ellie might even have cast a spell, thrown some fire, uncaring of the new furniture. Someone would’ve certainly thrown a punch. Someone would’ve shouted.

Arianna made doing shit like that seem like the reasonable reaction.

Now, though? Now, Phillip stood there, the tiny man somehow big and awkward and ungainly in her tiny backstreets emporium and Ellie slinked at the back, leaning against the wall with her shoulders slumped in dull resentment and Dell stood between the two, thinking: oh, but I am so fucking tired.

“I wanted to—we have never been friends, you and I,” Phillip said, Phillip tried, “But I wanted to offer my sympathy. I knew her, too… and she—”

Nobody said anything. Ellie quirked her brow—a shadow of her former self—and challenged him to say anything. He took it, but not how Dell thought either of them would have expected. Phillip knew, oh, of course, he’d have fucking known. For a whole year, no one had been fucking up his shit. For a whole year, none of his settlements were set on fire.

How stupid it’d been of them, looking back, to assume he wouldn’t have known.

He knew everything about Arianna. He knew more about Arianna than they did. And yes, Dell resented him for it. His mother had refused to tell him much of Arianna’s past, even of her own shared childhood with Arianna, but Dell knew it hadn’t been a kind one. To either of the sisters.

And he knew that they used to be three.

That the man who enslaved a city wasn’t smart enough to put two (Arianna being a stubborn bitch who would never retire willingly from causing trouble, even if she’d slowed down in the past years, even if she’d—no—Arianna being a stubborn bitch who would never let him get away with shit) and two (him getting away with shit) together to get four (Arianna Clawthorne is dead).

“She was a good woman. She was powerful in every aspect; she shaped the century. I understand loss,” he’d continued awkwardly, and Dell had suddenly had enough of it. If Phillip understood loss, he’d never have stepped foot inside. He’d have left them alone, left them to pick up the pieces and figure out who the fuck they were without the best person in their lives. With her suddenly being gone. Dead. Never coming back. No more tricks up her sleeve.

He ignored that Arianna had been eighty-nine. That eighty-nine was sixty-one more years than his mother ever thought she’d get. His grandmother had lived to one-twenty-one.

Phillip didn’t understand loss. Phillip wanted to rub salt in the wound. Phillip wanted to prove that he’d finally won.

If he understood, he wouldn’t have been in their space, talking like he had the right to say anything about the woman who’d spent her life in tatters because of him, trying to protect her family from him. That was one thing Ellie did tell him: no matter what, no matter how hard it was to understand Arianna’s choices, she did it for them.

The woman who would be absolutely devastated to know that she’d failed, that he could stride in without consequence, and that he was supposedly understanding her loss.

He didn’t understand a damn thing about her.

He wouldn’t have been in their space, talking like he had the right to say anything about the woman who’d put him in prison. The woman that would be absolutely devastated to know that he was out and about, supposedly understanding her loss.

(Arianna had only been a steady presence in Dell’s life at the end of hers. And Ellie never wanted to talk about her. Phillip absolutely knows Arianna better than Dell ever will, but he refuses to admit that. That would be letting Phillip win.)

(When did Dell care about letting Phillip win?)

But maybe, just maybe, Phillip understood enough about her. Maybe he’d waited just long enough for the improbable, primary-coloured enthusiasm that Arianna had given them to fade out into nothing but slate grey. Maybe he knew that even a month ago, Ellie would have punched him and Dell would have thrown fire at him and Ellie would probably have ended up killing him, because she was still Arianna’s sister, in every sense of the word.

“Mom,” he said, “I need you in my office.” Which sure, it just meant leaving the front lobby—the place was fucking tiny—and closing the door. Phillip could see them through the door. It was disrespectful and maybe, sure, they were about to get killed for disrespecting Phillip, but he just couldn’t.

And with how quickly Ellie followed him, she couldn’t either.

She stood with her back to the door. She wasn’t crying. In another life with another sister, she might have been crying. Dell didn’t know. Dell didn’t know if he was supposed to cry. She’d just been his aunt, but his childhood was coloured by sanitised stories of her. She’d been a steady presence, not in body, but in concept.

His mother’s grief had ebbed and flowed, for the brother she’d lost and the sister, too. Arianna might have been alive for sixty-one years longer than she was meant to, but Dell got the assumption from his mother that she didn’t think Arianna had done any living during that.

“Is he still there?” she asked.

He didn’t understand a damn thing about her.

“Yeah,” Dell replied, “No, wait. He’s leaving. He’s walking out.”

He’d left a cheque. A handsome cheque. Almost as high as the pay Arianna used to garner as a bounty hunter. He wondered if it meant anything.

It would’ve been nice to be in a position to refuse the money. Tear it up, burn it, something—anything other than taking it. But they were three months behind on rent, and they only had paying clients half of the time.

Dell ended up being the one cashing it.

And he didn’t think about how he’d hadn’t even argued with Phillip’s statement of Arianna shaping the century. She’d deserved better. She’d deserved so, so much better.

Still, he hadn’t lied.

And that was the nature of grief, mourning, hindsight and all her perfect agonies.  

Twenty-five.

She’s leaning against the door, grinning ear-to-ear, as Ellie hoists her first child onto her hip.

“She’s beautiful,” Arianna says, and she means it.

The light is streaming through her stained-glass windows, mosaics of her life and love washing her in colour and light, and she’s beckoning her sister into her home and she’s allowing herself to breathe with her whole chest, because somehow—she’s made it.

“So are you,” laughs her sister, and she raises the little boy—Adrian, for her and it made her cry worse than the babe when she first heard it—towards his aunt, and Arianna closes the distance, catches him in her arms, settling him against her chest and slowly, subconsciously, starting to sway.

It hits her suddenly and without any warning: the thought that this could be hers, too. A dazzling haze of love, of dare she say, maternal instinct. She has a husband, and she sees Ezra’s smile in Adrian, the slope of his nose, and she thinks that Caleb would look so beautiful in their child.

Yes, she thinks, she’s loved for eight summers, and she wants them all. She wants to dance in the early morning and evening lights with her husband, and a son who is just as charming as him.

Twenty-five.

“Please,” Phillip begs, “Please hear me out.”

“What is there to listen to?” Caleb growls, pushing himself out of the chair, “The ramblings of a madman? Arianna is my wife,” he shifts to a hiss, clutching his side, “And she is your friend, too. Whether you try to convince yourself otherwise, she is.”

She’s not.

Caleb is barely his brother and watching him sway on his feet without reaching out sets something alight in Phillip, but not enough to change the course of them. Arianna is not his friend, because she’s steaming with sin, she’s a burning church in the middle of the rain, and he’s still not entirely convinced that she’s not the witch who stranded them here in the first place.

Maybe she saw Caleb from a distance and decided to claim him.

To bewitch him.

“Brother,” he tries, “We’re blood. At least listen to me.”

“No.”

Fifty.

There’s nothing she can say that makes this better. So, she doesn’t.

Instead, she rests her hand against her sister’s shoulder, and watches as Dell lowers his father into the grave. And she knows that Ezra has no interest in hearing her out, but under her breath, she apologises. The man in the ground is long gone, bled to death from a nick to the thigh in the woods; she knows he can’t hear her.

Still, on the same breath as her apology, she swears.

He only survived this long by pure luck, but it doesn’t mean that the death wasn’t jarring.

She looks at him, and smells smoke. And she hates herself a little for it.

She remembers sitting cross-legged on the floor of the healer’s waiting room twenty-three years ago, her sister clutching onto her, and Arianna’s hair tangled in the buttons of Ellie’s coat.

Ezra was her friend, first and foremost, whether the child he always thought to be his own truly was. And standing there, in front of his grave, the cold biting at her face and her tears refusing to fall, Arianna misses her friend.

???

Girls ought to be seen and not heard. Sean’s words echo against her skin as she spills blood, as she dances around bodies, as she catches men’s eyes, even before her hips delve into valleys.

It’s past midnight, and it’s long past anyone caring, but he’s snuck into her room all the same, hair tied up and a single piece of fabric tied low on his waist standing between him and impropriety. She laughs at the sight, turning over in the bed and letting him know that she still sleeps topless. He grins, because he’s never given a fuck about propriety and dives under her waves.

It’s past midnight, and there’s one left to care, and he’s snuck into her room all the same, his hair unwound and dressed only in an open nightrobe and shorts because he’s never cared what she thought about him. “Do you really think that human boy is more interesting than me?” he hisses close to her ear.

She holds her head underwater.

Thinks about something else.

His lips are sweet like honey, but all she can taste is a sharp medical bite, bile settling in the back of her throat and the inherent bitterness in goodbye. She doesn’t want to keep kissing him, but she does so anyways, leaning down and tangling her hands through his hair, longer than hers, now.

The olive oil’s slick between her fingers as she forces it through thick strands; she imagines just taking the knife gifted to her and slicing all her hair off. The thought brings a secret smile to her face, and she keeps carding her hands through the knots without flinching at the pain when she pulls.

Caleb is frivolous. Caleb is reckless. Caleb doesn’t know jack and fuck about the ways of the world. Caleb is annoying and stupid and a tease and forces her to confront things about herself that she’d much rather leave buried, but Caleb is also the only being she knows who’s painfully, brightly alive amongst the dust.

She doesn’t agree with him on Phillip, not at first, maybe not ever, but she stands with him—not out of her love for chaos, even if that’s what the world says and she’s okay with that, but because of her terrible choice to believe that they could be better, that he’ll remember and love her when his own name is gilded amongst the greats.

The hem of her skirt is awash with grass stains as she stumbles through the tent, never even making it properly in the door, Caleb rolling her onto her back and asking her to open her eyes for him, that he’s got a surprise for her. His breath smells of beer, and she’s sure hers does, too.

She’s running barefoot on the grass, honey dripping from her fingers.

She remembers how her mother meticulously cleaned. Remembers how she dunked her hands in warm water, scrubbing dirt out from underneath her fingernails. She remembers how she sabotages the things she loves the most, how it rained when everything turned, lightning bisecting the sky. The tips of her knives are very, very sharp and her head is very, very loud and there’s so much dirt dunk deep beneath her skin that she’d like to expose—

She can’t go back she can’t go back she can’t go back she can’t go back she can’t go back.

Eight.

Auntie Arianna’s holding onto the table so tightly that her knuckles pale, and her coat thrown across the table.

“You slaughter your own girlhood at the tender age of fourteen,” she says to herself through strangled whispers, white knuckles against brown wood, “And you don't even get to cry or look away.”

Her eyes are closed, and her chest is quaking, like the earth outside.

“Instead, you just harden your stare, straighten your spine and all the while, silently, mourn something you'll never get back.”

She releases her grip on the table, her hands balling into fists and her nails digging into her palms.

“You’re strong. Stay strong.”

Dell ducks back upstairs to his bedroom.

Ninety-six.

Arianna has Phillip in her hands, feeling his throat bob against her palm. He’s struggling, struggling so pitifully, so weakly, but she’s compressing his windpipe satisfyingly slowly, painfully, torturously. She knows what it feels like to have your breath stolen by smoke and time, and now she gets to see herself reflected in his wide eyes.

Her mind shrieks: Caleb!

You monster! You monster! You monster! I fucking trusted you! I remember drinking with you and stumbling through the door, barely making it past the kitchen! I don’t know how to think about you without ripping my heart into a thousand pieces!

Fuck you!

She is rage and devastation incarnate, the consequences of his actions are written in the lines of her eternal face. Phillip will die, he will die, and so will his lies, be it by her hand or that of fate’s.

“Rain fire!” he yells through strangled gasps.

Arianna doesn’t care, she’s another cog in the war machine, she’s just another body between Phillip and world domination but she’s going to make it one good fight for it. She pushes at him harder; she remembers her father, she remembers pulling his heart out in the darkness of the bedroom he shared with her drugged mother, and she wonders if she can do the same to Phillip.

Years ago, it would be a question of whether she could stomach it. Now, it’s merely a question of skill, of muscle memory.

She wonders if she can hold his shrivelled, oil-stained heart in the palm of her hand and crush it while her gaze doesn’t leave his dead eyes.

“Not the troops, you idiot, Kikimora! The girl!”

She’s not a girl. She’s not a woman. She’s not a mother or a crone. She’s a goddess, no, a god. And she wants Phillip to know. She wants him to know that she doesn’t care if she dies, too. That she might even prefer it. There’s no one left for her here—she’s failed again and again and again and again and she’s spinning, dazzling and dizzying and she focuses on the heart being tethering her to live and thinks:

Arianna does not care if she dies, as long as she gets to drag this bastard to the depths of his Hell with her. If so, she would face her destiny with a smile, and link their arms together as she accompanied him down the halls to the fiery consequences of his actions. Arianna wasn’t afraid of flame anymore.

She’d only ever feared it because of what it could do to her love. That’d happened. That ship had sailed.

A strike, larger than her, falls through the sky. She’s suddenly pulling, his heart feels so close, she can feel the beats, she can taste the blood singing against her lips, but she can’t and there’s not enough time and she will fail, and the bastard will live, and he will have survived her—

And then a blue flash fills her vision. For just a second, she thinks it is Caleb, coming back for her and she does not remember how, but she wraps her arms around him, and the blue speaks of a safety she’s forgotten the feeling of, and a home she never got to know long enough.

But the metal makes her jolt backwards and she stares up at the Golden Guard—he looks like Pyre, from the way he holds himself, but speaks like Creed and realisation floods her.

Not Caleb, but so close that she both aches and seethes.

The eyes are what sets them apart, always. She doesn’t need to crack the mask in two to know that they are pink to Caleb’s all-encompassing blue and the thought makes her flinch. The Golden Guard tilts his head like a bored granary cat, studying her and dropping her feet so Arianna stands. She looks around the battlefield.

Phillip.

“Don’t,” the Golden Guard looks at her, “We need you to wipe out the groups of troops. Other witches can take down Belos.”

Arianna wants to scream that he doesn’t understand; that he will never understand; that he draws breath because she failed and she’s not going to be able to pull her back from the allure of madness if she doesn’t get to see Phillip’s eyes, milky-white and so unmissably dead, and know that it was caused by her own hand.

And Caleb is dead and he’s not “lucky” enough to come back like her. The good die young, she thinks, but the rest of us have work on Monday.

“Look,” the Golden Guard says, and she imagines it’s Pyre, “I get it.” He turns, briefly, and blasts a handful of Phillip’s coven scouts that were creeping towards them. “You want to get revenge. But revenge isn’t going to prevent these things from killing everyone else. It’s not going to stop the draining spell, and you know it. You know it better than anyone else.”

A couple more scouts die at his dazzling blue power, and Arianna wishes so badly, just for a moment, that her brother was behind her, that he was here to tell her that she was doing the right thing for the first time in her life. Except, he wouldn’t say that. He always believed in her too much.

The Golden Guard’s mask looks her straight in the eye, and she crumples under it. “Can I, not we, rely on you to do what we need you to do? You know how it feels to suffer at his hand. I’m willing to trust you.”

Arianna takes a breath before answering. “I don’t know anyone who is strong enough to beat him.”

She’s not necessarily talking about physical strength. She thinks, if anyone would be able to understand her now, it would be Pyre.

He rolls his shoulders, and she imagines he’s smiling Caleb’s smile and for some reason, it doesn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. “I do. The Owl Lady does. I talked to her earlier—she has a plan. But we need the coast to be clear when the time comes, alright?”

Arianna exhales. Nods.

She launches herself into the sky and looks down at the battlefield from above and thinks about sitting on the Knee and she feels the rage strumming under her skin, and she breathes and releases. And her magic listens to her cries and it feels natural and it’s hers and it always will be.

She knows it’s a hallucination before Philly pries her eyelids open, but it’s a good one and she whines and begs to be allowed to succumb.

Fourteen.

“Arianna!” screams her father. “Nail him! Nail the bastard!”

She’s standing in front of her uncle, an unholy amalgamation of feathers, mud and pained screeches, her spear sticking out from his arching back.

She turns to plead with him, but the only thing that answers her is steeled determination and him raising his own spear, and she sees a fist as she throws her body around, effortlessly dodging a wounded, desperate strie from the only man who’s never beaten her—

With a breath, she’s leaping into the air, grabbing her father’s thrown spear, igniting it with the brush of her deft fingers and sparking across the cavern, feeling the flames licking her skin as she fizzes in and out of reality, a blur of golden light—before she slams into his side and twists.

She drives the tip further inside of him, before unsheathing her knife from her hip and slashing it through the bellowing beast, jerking it upwards as she exposes his blackened insides—rotten to the fucking core, hisses her father and Arianna keeps cutting until she thinks she could climb inside and disappear from her filthy work.

Of course, she doesn’t. Instead, she steps back, covered in blood, and he doesn’t even look proud, from where he’s cowering behind a rock.

Two hundred.

“If my child needed protection from a fucker like that man,” she snarled, “I’d sooner gut him.”

He was sitting on the edge of the world, watching the sky swallow the sea.

Phillip chuckled, ran a hand through his hair. “Nothing cuts like a mother,” he agreed, gazing out at the shimmering boiling sea in front of him. He kicked another rock into it, watched it sizzle into nothing on the surface, right next to her hair. 

Arianna crossed her arms next to his reflection.

“That’s me saying that I wouldn’t give you shit for killing him, you know,” she supplied, as if Phillip hadn’t known Arianna Clawthorne for the better part of two hundred years, and her how she drew a thin line between wrath and mercy, how it always simmered under the surface.

How, if she had it her way, there would be blood on his lips by now.

“If you did it,” she bargained, “In the moonlight, by the water, I would be there with you.”

“I doubt that would win me any favours with the locals, Arianna.”

Arianna sighed. The Collector rested his arm against her shoulder, and Arianna swatted at it, before ducking under their touch, and facing them instead.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she growled, reminding Phillip of the time she’d ripped a man limb from limb for pushing Caleb around while he’d been excitedly talking about their newest iteration of the portal. It’s both a welcome memory, and a nightmare—because Caleb’s not here anymore.

Arianna went back to sitting cross-legged in the reflection, and Phillip’s heart clenched

“It’s just,” she plays with the strand of hair she always pulls when she’s anxious, “He shouldn’t get away with it. Regardless of whether you’re just going to kill him, and I know you are, because they’re not sons to you. They’re sons to me, and they always will be—”

Phillip scoffed.

“Fuck you, dude,” Arianna continued, “But you should at least defend your property, shouldn’t you? Imagine what would happen if your enemies learned how easy it was to take down your right-hand man, and,” she mock-gasped, “Without there even being any consequences!”

“You just want me to brutally maim a rapist, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. I will take immense satisfaction, and I’ll scream for a week if you don’t make it real bloody and greasy.”

“How can it be both bloody and greasy? You’re making it sound like two different things.”

“Cerebrospinal fluid.”

“Nasty.”

“But true.”

???

She’s never been anyone’s demure maiden, sitting and waiting for a fucking prince to save her whenever he finally pleases. She’s picked herself up, tended her own wounds and she’s killed her own monsters. She’s lying flat on the ground, staring up at the sky and she hopes that fucking idiot Caleb knows what she did to save his people.

He’s a terrible man. And she knows it. But he’s all she has left. His hands roll against her shoulders, and she bites down the urge to throw up all over the floor, right in the middle of the throne room where only he could be horrified. She would be the startling thing. He could be the scared one.

Arianna’s stolen clothes make her skin look washed out, and she readjusts her coat holding everything together.

She’s standing in front of the mirror, willing herself not to scream so loud that everything shatters into nothing, willing herself to stop looking at her own destruction—because all she sees is a girl dripping with blood and ash. She fists the fabric of her black pants, looks down, clicks the heels of her shoes together. The blood from years ago bleeds through her skin and stains her white shirt a glimmering gold.

She met a sailor, with his own ship and promise in his eyes. On the first night they spent together, he dug his fingers into her thighs, claiming her with his lips, trying to be her saviour, licking her clean with well-spun lies. The waves curled tall around his ship, and when the ship cracked in two, he laid in the waters, begging the Titan to let him drown as she rescued herself from the make-believe breathed to life in silk sheets.

He was never seen again, and she’s still wandering the beach, running down it, sand curling against her toes.

Two-hundred-and-forty-six.

“I never asked you,” Phillip ambled, Arianna’s hands in his hair, his head against the hollow of her chest that hadn’t drawn breath for over a hundred years, “What did you name your ship? I only managed to parse that Arianna Clawthorne had taken to the seas. And I was still terrified enough of you to not be interested in changing that.”

Arianna chuckled, and he could feel it rumble in her chest.

“That’s because I didn’t sail under Clawthorne. I thought that would make me too easy a kill for some of my father’s old contacts and I’m just not interested in that son of a bitch being the one to nail me. No one in Bonesborough knew where I slinked off to. And that was also to keep you off my fucking back.”

She tsked. “I’m perfectly satisfied with dying by pneumonia, thank you very much.”

Her nails are scratching against his scalp and maybe it’s because she’s there, maybe he’s drunk, maybe it’s been a long fucking day and it’s going to be a hard night, but he shoots his fist in the air and loudly announces, “Fuck yes! Fuck that guy!” and Arianna giggles.

“Yes,” she says, throat thick with mirth and something he doesn’t dare name, tugging at the half-braid, her touch feather-light against the mutilated ears he knows disgusts her, “He sucked a lot. I don’t regret killing him. Although, I do regret naming my ship The Heretic.”

“The Heretic,” he laughed to himself, “Of course. Of course, that’s so you. I missed you, I—”

He’d raised his hand towards her face, making grabbing motions for her chin, but she seized him at the wrist, and with the same icy expression that’d taken her father to the grave, answered him, “You’re drunk. And you didn’t care about me.”

Her grip was shakier than it’d ever been in life, and when she spoke, it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than intimidate him. The thought was terrifying and something foreign inside of him wrenched itself shut at her words.

“You’re drunk and you never loved me. Or him. You only ever loved yourself.”

“And you don’t miss me. You miss the idea of me because you can control me.”

???

Sometimes, there’s others. With her, when she’s there. The men she’d commanded on the ocean, the men she’d sent to their deaths—self-destruction—even Caleb, and at first, she thinks he’s finally returned to her. That all this fighting has culminated, and the rain’s stopped and Caleb’s there, with red cheeks.

But it’s never complete. They’re only fragments of a rapidly disintegrating mind; being. Ellie’s love that outlived her, Henry glowing with the kind of radiance you only had at seventeen, Ezra’s patience with her, Dell dancing on top of her toes, Jocelyn from the last expedition, Jane from the first.

And Arianna, Arianna-who-was, Arianna-who-would-be, Arianna walking into the lighthouse and finding what might have been the corpse of her husband caused by her own hand, what would live in her memory forever, and Arianna, who had let her leave, out of kindness or sorrow or hatred, and who was there at the end, the beginning, and the end. Was it the end?

Regardless, there, Arianna stood, fractured in two, looking over her shoulder, silhouetted against the sun.

Whatever had started this, it was something unlike anything she’d ever known, anything she’d ever read about, anything she’d ever comprehended or illicitly attempted. When it entered her mind, it made her into it. It broke them all down and kept bits, remnants, echoes, to make itself stronger.

Recognisable now but more jarring from the resemblance.

Arianna thought of the bear and wondered if what remained would keep her voice, if it would taste her on the tip of its tongue.

Twenty-two.

Arianna’s hand is on Phillip’s shoulder and he tries not to jump as she drops down next to him.

“Sit,” she orders, pushing him down, “Sit down, Phillip. Talk to me.”

Phillip frowns and he doesn’t mean to, but he notices how Arianna’s eyes crinkle at the edges and time’s already caressed her face and—

“Talk to me.”

He doesn’t even know where to begin, but Arianna’s crumpled in front of him and he sees himself in her, and he sees the hand reaching towards him, sees Henry Clawthorne’s terrified eyes when he realised what Phillip was doing to him, and he sees the lips that kissed his brother’s and for a brief moment, he knows why Caleb strayed from God.

He doesn’t desire his brother’s girlfriend, but she takes his tears and holds them in her own eyes, glimmering with unshed strength and her hands on his shoulders don’t burn like everyone who’s not Caleb’s do.

“I hurt him.”

He doesn’t know what he expects her to say, but he doesn’t expect her to simply nod, not moving to leave at the bluntness of his confession. After a breath, she answers, “That,” she says, “You absolutely did do. I’m not going to try and protect you from the fact that the reason that the blood’s on the floor because of you, and you alone, because I don’t think you need to be protected from that fact.”

Flapjack tugs a lock of hair out of her braid, but she doesn’t seem to notice until he starts chirping and she swats her hand at him. “Hey,” she chides, “Asshole. Little turd. There’s nothing I can do to make you less frantic and that’s not because I haven’t tried.”

She takes a moment to look away from Phillip and glare hilariously at Flapjack. And even funnier, at least to Phillip, who’s trying not to snicker at the sight, is that Flapjack somehow glares back, his little feathery brow knotted as Arianna continues, “I’ve already tried to be nice to you. And you pecked me.”

She claims her hair from Flapjack with a playful scoff, tucks it behind her ear.

“So, of course I’m not going to give you attention because you’re being an asshole that doesn’t want help and I can’t deal with two of those at once. Go harass the echo mice or Titan help me, mama’s going to have a new decoration on her hat.”

Phillip chuckles against his will, but the way Arianna’s face erupts with golden light banishes any lingering grey clouds of guilt.

I’m sorry is what he wants to say. Sorry for what? Sorry for everything. He’s sorry to Caleb for getting them stranded here, he’s sorry for hurting him, he’s sorry for what he’s become. Sorry to Arianna for being here, for taking up her time, for what’s going to happen to her because of him. Sorry that she exists, and that she’ll always be a hand reaching up from Hell, grasping the clouds of Heaven.

But he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, Flapjack flitters away with very human annoyance and Arianna rolls her eyes as she scuttles next to him, their hips clinking together like bar glasses on better nights and Arianna’s hand finds his, their shoulders bumping together.

She strokes the pads of her thin fingers across his bruised knuckles, wincing as she feels the heat of his skin, but Phillip doesn’t flinch. Phillip doesn’t feel it, and even as Arianna looks worried at him, like he’s supposed to react.

Regardless of whether he should, she chooses not to press him on it.

She leans her head against his shoulder and exhales. Slowly, Phillip watches her unfurl her legs from where she’s jammed them against her chest, one knee over the other, and Flapjack settling atop it with a small chirp. Arianna breathes in, and speaks:  

“I dated someone after Caleb,” she starts, “Or, I tried to. I learned, after about six months, that I was the other woman. I walked into his place to pick up my cloak that I’d forgotten and saw someone who looked exactly like me lying on the couch.”

Phillip almost wants to spit out a laugh. “Exactly like you?” he asks instead, a chortle resting on the edge of his lips. Arianna shrugs against him.

“Looked enough like me that we both took a double take. Red hair, hers was naturally straight, I think. Lucky bastard.”

“I thought you liked your hair?” he asks.

Arianna shrugs again, plays with a loose strand. “I like it,” she tries, “But it’s a lot of work. And my mother never liked it. Always asked why I didn’t have Ellie’s great hair. It’s so glossy and straight and it’s such horseshit, because I’m sure that she does something to it and I just haven’t figured it out yet.”

She runs a hand through her own locks.

“But the point is, I… I was staring at the obvious evidence that I hadn’t become better. And she looked just like me. I couldn’t even have given a fuck about which one of us was the other girl. I didn’t want to know if I was his diamond, or his pearl. I just wanted to run away because I’d fucked up, again.”

???

She’d slayed the monsters, drawn up the spells, sent men into a mystery and waited and waited and waited when nothing had happened and none of them ever returned. She’d lived a life before, and after. She’d looked into Caleb’s eyes and known what he had been longing for long before they spoke it aloud. Self-destruction.

That’s what she told the Collector, so long ago, now. That’d been what she was longing for, too. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have come here. She wouldn’t have been brought here. She wouldn’t have stayed here.

Now, she looked at someone else. Someone made of those fragments and echoes.

She wasn’t Arianna anymore, but Arianna was part of her, now, Monik, Catherine and Ellie and Ezra and Dell and Phillip and Caleb. Some more alive in her than others.

Arianna was someone she could hold close to her heart; if what was inside of her still could be called a heart, that is. Phillip was a nick in the blood vessel, a hand around her throat, arm around her waist, the only reason her heart was still beating, still knew the song, the steps, the dance of life.

He would also be the one to stop it.

“You aren’t Phillip,” she said, “Are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

She remembered, again, how Phillip had ducked her answers when she interviewed him at the kitchen table, when she begged for him to be a brother again; she can’t remember whether that happened in her kitchen, or in a golden palace or someplace where it’s both.

One moment, she’s sitting with her hands clasped against the wooden dining table she’d topped his brother on the night before, the next, she’s kneeling in front of a throne, a knife up her sleeve next to her beating heart.

This man was neither woman’s memory, was both, blurred over one another like a rubber stamp that’d been pressed to paper twice.

“Are you Arianna?”

She didn’t know how to answer him. She didn’t know if she wanted to. She was, in some fundamental way, Arianna. But she was also more. And also nothing at all. All at once.

She held him and felt them move through her.

Three-hundred-and-thirty.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Phillip says, grinning like a man who knew he wasn’t wrong because he’d witnessed the atrocity with his own two, very unfortunate eyes, “But don’t you use wood glue to make your hair stand on end like that?”

Arianna squawks and swats at her hair, but of course, Phillip remembers her as the aesthetically challenged asshole that she’s always been, so as soon as she manages to smooth down a cowlick that she intentionally styled three hundred years ago, it pops back up and Arianna snarls.

“Funny man.”

Phillip tuts. “And you better never forget it.”

Arianna whacks him on the shoulder. “I know I won’t,” she answers with a shit-eating grin that mirrors his, “Because the therapy would be way too expensive for me to ever recover from you if I even managed to escape this titan-forsaken hole.”

“Funny witch.”

“And you better never forget it.”

Thirty-one.

She did it on purpose.

She could have dodged Blue Fang’s strike, and she didn’t, because in the swing of him, she saw Caleb’s smiling face and she smelled the dirt of the ships and arching pain in her hips and she wanted was to sway with him under the lanterns of the human realm, a scarf tied around her hair, hiding her heritage, making her someone he could love.

There’s no her without him, and she knows it, standing in the street, a disgraced queen returning without her crown, barely able to haul herself up to take another breath of air that doesn’t claim her as its own anymore.

So, she did it on purpose.

She could have struck back. She might not have her magic, but that hadn’t stopped her from being a wanted woman for the past three years.

She could have driven her knife through his jaw and twisted. She could have swept his legs, ended atop him and clawed out his eyes. She didn’t, and there’s an absence of cause or excuse. Simply, the long, unbroken line of her strength had been fraying for a long time—and in that split-second, it finally cracked, and resistance was pointless.

She was falling without caution, and she never expected Phillip to catch her.

But he did.

And now, she was standing in the ashes and hating herself for almost giving in.

It’d sounded good.

It’d sounded like something that could bloom in her chest and she saw the desperation blossoming behind Phillip’s gaze and recognised it as her own, despite the fact that he was the author of it.

If anyone would know, it would be her. If anyone would know that it’s perfectly possible to mourn something you yourself had destroyed, it would be her. And so, she almost said yes.

And shaking in her own hallway, covered in her own blood and one she didn’t want to claim, just like the air didn’t want her—

She wept.

Three-hundred-and-eighty.

Arianna reminded him of Kikimora; they were both cats with genocide in their eyes.

Sadly, Arianna really, really didn’t like Kikimora. Currently, he was trying his best to keep a straight face while Kikimora delivered her report, and right behind her, was Arianna, miming everything she said, and managing to be a more engaging speaker than Kiki could ever dream of.

Fifty.

“You know,” grinned Elizabat, blood crusting her quivering bottom lip, “I always thought that you would kill me, bitch.”

Arianna huffed, rolling her eyes. “You don’t deserve that kind of effort,” she answered back, venom dripping from her tongue and burning the ground she stood on, “Father was a monster. You? You were an accessory. A pretty pendant for him to wear when he wanted to pretend to be good. You were nothing but a prize to be won, and for that, I pity you.”

She flicked her hair over her shoulder. “And so,” she surmised, “For you, a long life would be the greatest suffering. Of watching your children live on without you, and without the need and desperation of you—”

“You did not live on.”

Arianna laughs loudly, sharply, her teeth clicking together as she sits down on the stool pulled next to the bed her mother is going to die in. “Oh,” she answered, “But I fucking did. And you hated it. You hated it so much. I never relied on you and it drove you insane. And neither did Ellie, and I fucking know that if Henry stayed here, he would have been greater than all of us combined, because the dead are always gilded in our memory, aren’t they?”

And Arianna was ready to push herself up, walk away, slam the door and never speak to her mother again. But of course, Elizabat had to have the last laugh. Always.

“Well, it’s such a pity that the humans managed to ruin you so deeply, Arianna. After all, I was the one to lure them here in the first place.”

Thou shalt not kill.

She pads through the house, knife dangling from her slack hand.

Thou shalt not kill.

The foolish boy opens the door with a flick of his hand, blue-ringed, as he lays on the bed, chest and throat wide open.

Thou shalt not kill.

It was never glorious victory.
It was never a poetic hurt.
It was just red, staining my hands.
Red, red that I couldn’t wash off, for as long as I lived.

Four hundred.

“I know I won’t last long in… this condition. But I will return home.”

“What if the world has changed? It’s been a long time.”

“It won’t have.”

“You sound awfully sure.”

“Things don’t change like that.”

“You’ve changed.”

“You’ve adopted foreign magic that’s now killing you.”

“I did what I had to do.”

“So did I. Or, at least I thought I did. When I did it. But I turned out to be wrong.”

“I’m not going to hold a weird little cremation ceremony for myself like you did.”

“Ha, you’re missing out, old friend. Really missing out.”

“I miss who you used to be, Phil.”

“I really do.”

“I miss the Arianna I feared.”

“I don’t miss her.”

Four hundred and then some.

Their power meets, red sparking against gold, burning her skin as she holds him off. She ducks under him, blocking his artificial staff with her own, spinning it in an arc around her body before breaking it hold, both staffs clattering to the ground.

Far from his reach. Far from hers, too. But she doesn’t need it.

She slams her foot, draws a circle under his feet and grins when stone peppers his extending limbs, grey slate dancing against gold gauntlets. The sharp of his cheek is illuminated by her power as she holds it against his skin.

“Goddamn right,” she breathes, “You should be scared of me.”

I’m in control.