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Sissela doesn’t know how or why Magnus got fond of her, but now and then, he would pass her an extra smelt fish that they looted from Lenox’s camp, or drape his coat over her when he’s on night watch and he thinks she’s asleep. She didn’t anticipate it at all, especially not from him - not even Mr. Shoichi is this nice. Maybe it’s because he found out that she’s in constant pain and that he thinks being able to bear it all 24/7 is manly or something?
Maybe she activated his paternal instinc- nevermind, too weird. At least he didn’t change too much. He still split up their alliance whenever it got down to the final four people in a trial, and he still tried to win if it became just the two of them left. In some twisted way, though, he tried to make it quick when it’s her, instead of relishing in his strength when it’s other people.
Then they caught a lucky break, and she found out that she got a new uncle. Or at least, something like that.
It happened like this: one day when Lumia Island was wrecked by a slew of storms - the worst of anything Sissela’s been through or even heard of from the news - she and Magnus, and some other subjects, finally got off the island. Their bracelets malfunctioned after the research center was hit too hard one too many times by a tidal wave, or so as a frantic JP shouted out when Magnus held him by the collar to ask how he got his off. Then Magnus and Sissela destroyed their own bracelets and left JP gibbering in fear as they ran towards the beach to find some way of escape.
Sissela doesn’t know much about the others - if they even knew that they had the chance to escape, or if they attempted to, or if they were successful. She and Magnus managed to do so by hijacking a ride on a boat that Barbara somehow half-assed out of her scrap gun parts. It was just her, Sissela, Magnus, and Shoichi, who wouldn’t stop kissing Barbara’s ass until he convinced her to make a detour and then politely jumped ship somewhere near the coast of Japan and gave the rest of them a fucking break.
Fucking finally, Magnus had grumbled, and the only thing that didn’t stop Sissela from nodding along was the visible disappointment on Barbara’s face and the fact that Sissela didn’t want her to reclaim the boat’s parts out of spite after they reached Germany.
She figured that she could try to fill in the void Shoichi left. She also convinced Magnus to do it here and there - he should at least recognize the importance of getting home over his ego, right? And then it all turned out for naught when Magnus scrambled for words one evening and said something about how Barbara’s ship repair skills were manly. Because the boat was barely bigger than each of their own rooms on the island, Sissela witnessed how Barbara’s expression distorted into a mix of confusion, distaste, and pity before telling Magnus that he could shut up instead of acting more of a fool than he usually was.
Magnus still draped his coat over Sissela when he thought she was sleeping, and would give her the extra fish he caught when Barbara wasn’t looking. One day, he just gave her his coat, saying it was getting too hot.
“In early March?” She asked.
“If a man says it’s hot, it’s hot.”
So she just said thank you and used it as a makeshift mattress and blanket ever since.
It was a couple of weeks on the boat till they made it to Germany, which was pretty impressive considering that their boat was originally a wreck on the island’s beach. Even more impressive was how the three of them didn’t permanently maim each other, and that they managed to stay relatively well-fed by fishing with Barbara’s harpoon gun.
On the German coast, they wordlessly agreed for a small break before they would part ways. They all washed off the build up of grime and sweat in the showers on the beach, and Magnus mugged someone, taught Sissela how to mug people, and bought her ice cream afterwards. When the two had come back, Barbara had a change of clothes and some money for all of them and said something about how generous she was to provide for the less fortunate.
Sissela really wanted to fight her then, and so did Magnus, but she didn’t want to risk fighting on a beach full of civilians, so she just accepted the gifts and Barbara’s goodbye in the form of brusque instructions on maintaining and navigating the boat. Then from there, Sissela told Magnus that she wanted to go to America and not back to the hospital, and he just shrugged and let her tag along. They sailed on the boat till they washed ashore somewhere in America. Then they mugged some more people to keep them afloat while looking for Magnus’s old friends. They must have been good friends for him to track them down across the continent.
She told him so when he was breaking into an ATM.
“They’re underlings,” Magnus said.
“Okay.” She said, with a face full of doubt. Was Magnus cool enough to have lackeys?
Magnus grumbled. “Get that smart look off your face, grab the cash.”
It took a little while, and during the search, Magnus got weirder. He gave her a hundred dollars and told her to “go buy something or something”.
“Girls your age like shopping,” he explained.
“What?” She said, and bought an orange coat that resembled Magnus’s old one the most. And then to pay him back, she mugged some rich man with a fat wallet and bought Magnus a set of brass knuckles.
When they finally tracked down his old biker gang, Sissela got a bit starry-eyed as he arranged a meeting with the current group leader, much to the open hostility of his old ex-friends. Magnus controlled this many people? And none of them could tell him what to do? To the point where even though almost all of them hated him, none of them could do anything about it? So cool.
When she told him that, Magnus puffed up to almost twice his size and ruffled her hair. Her scalp was as painfully sensitive as always, but it felt nice, emotionally.
Then he met the new leader of his group and negotiated officially passing on the position in exchange for enough money for the two of them to get back on track of normal life. They didn’t even think of intimidating her after Magnus glared at them, not that she couldn’t have fought them all if they tried jumping her as leverage against Magnus. She almost wished they had, just so she could cow them into submission with Unshackled.
They were walking out of Magnus’s ex-headquarters when she asked, “What happens next?”
“Shit.”
She waited for a longer response, but Magnus didn’t elaborate. “What sort of shit?”
“Normal shit that doesn’t have people after us.”
Sissela mulled on that for a while, until they were halfway back to their motel for the night.
“...There’s an ‘us’?”
“What the fuck? Yes, dipshit. The hell do you think that negotiation was for?”
They walked in awkward silence for a while. Sissela eyed a steakhouse diner across the street, and her stomach growled.
“We’re getting steak for dinner.”
She glanced at him to see if he saw her looking at the restaurant, but his face didn’t betray anything.
“Okay.”