Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's a bad one this time. 

By now, Mori Calliope is well familiar with the process of death, having handled it for centuries on end. Now that she's risen all the way to becoming Death's apprentice, she's tasked with managing all of the more complicated deaths that can't be handled by the average reaper: reincarnation, certain ritual sacrifices, soul-affecting magic, time paradoxes, eldritch reality warping, and so forth. 

Among these complications, one Takanashi Kiara has the dubious distinction of having developed probably the most complex process of them all. Phoenixes in general were an affront to the strictly linear processes of death, considering how fundamentally intertwined with life they were, but Kiara took it to an entirely new level. Somehow, she'd managed to come up with a method to channel her own death throes into a dimensional travel spell, violently ejecting her soul from the dimension she was in and hopefully escaping whatever could keep a phoenix down. From the perspective of the psychopomp, the whole process tended to involve a lot of paperwork and departmental politicking as they tried to figure out who was doing what, not to mention the typically incredibly lethal side effects of a very magically potent soul punching a hole through reality. From the perspective of the phoenix, it was traumatic enough to disrupt the soul momentarily, which generally resulted in some temporary memory loss as she reconstituted herself. 

Thus, when Calli sees that Kiara has just died, she immediately delegates her current tasks to some of her own students and heads over to handle the situation herself. There's always something special that needs to be done when it comes to Kiara, whether that's resolving a dispute about jurisdiction, pulling the souls of her attempted killers out of the phoenix fire, or even repeatedly reaping her as the other universe tries to assert a new set of physical laws on her reassembling body. It'd be a lie to say that she looks forward to it, per se, but it's always a break in the day to day routine it's so easy to fall into.

As soon as she arrives, though, Calli can tell that something's wrong. Usually, the phoenix is almost aggressively chipper, bouncing all over the place even without her memories and getting annoyingly personal with the reaper. This time, though, Kiara is much more subdued. Calli first notices it in her eyes, which are unfocused and staring vacantly at the empty space in front of her, but the more Calli looks the more she sees how her entire body just seems tired, slumped down into her seat like a - like a corpse, really. She looks down at her tablet - the log is vague as always, but there are alarmingly many events logged, all of which could have possibly killed her. The reaper assigned did their job properly, but Calli still can't help but feel a little frustrated at the lack of detail. 

She shakes her head at how wrong the sight of such a dispirited Kiara feels, then materializes in the holding room. The girl in question barely even moves her head in acknowledgement, although her eyes do focus on her. Calli can't quite meet her gaze, though, and she fiddles with her tablet to buy time. All sorts of nasty scenarios start forming in the back of her imagination, but she suppresses them with a barely audible grunt. 

There's somewhat of a procedure to these meetings, one hashed out through hundreds of repetitions, and it's those procedures that she leans on to get started. "How much do you remember?" she asks with professional detachment. It's a little rude, from what little Calli understands of the etiquette of mortals, but Kiara never really seemed to mind. In fact, she seemed to find it endearing, although the reaper could never quite figure out why, and teased her about it frequently. Given that Kiara doesn't have any real memories whenever they meet, she ends up repeating the same dozen jokes, but Calli can't find it in herself to be annoyed. 

"... My name is Takanashi Kiara." Kiara's listless voice breaks up Calli's reminiscing with its insistent wrongness. "I… I'm dead, aren't I?" she asks. 

Calli nods, stowing her tablet away for now and pulling the scythe off of her back. It doesn't feel nearly as comfortable in her hands when killing isn't what she wants to do, but she brandishes it symbolically anyways. "Yes. I'm your reaper, Mori Calliope." 

Too late, she realizes the implication of those words, but Kiara's too out of it to pounce on the verbal slip-up like she normally does. Calli almost wishes she would. "I'm a phoenix, though? Shouldn't I be resurrecting..." Her words are slow and sound almost as if she's trying to convince herself that they're true.

"Yes, but it takes time for your reincarnation cycle to complete. It's also my job to send you back when your soul is ready." Some fairly core memories were disrupted, from the look of things. Calli's never had to explain this much. 

"I see..." Kiara frowns. "I don't remember much else. Just… there was someone important to me, I think."

After a short pause, Calli nods in acknowledgement. "That's fine. There's no need to rush, so you can take as long as you need."

"So, I just wait?" The other girl doesn't look comfortable with that, but she hasn't looked comfortable the entire time. "Um, if you don't mind me asking, where would I be?"

"Here, in the underworld. You can stay here, or - " The way Kiara's eyes twitch makes it very clear that she'd rather be anywhere but here. Or perhaps it's not the location, it's the fact that the very sociable phoenix would be left with only her own thoughts for company. The idea resonates somewhere inside of Calli, bringing up memories of long stretches of time where she was pretty much adrift, and her heart responds before her brain can get a say in the matter. "Or you can come with me, I guess. Immortals have their own section of the Underworld anyways, so, yeah…" Calli trails off, embarrassed, but the way Kiara looks at her with obvious relief makes her feel like it's worth it despite herself. 

Before she can regret making that offer too much, she turns around and pulls her tablet out again. Bringing a recently deceased soul out of the waiting room and into the administrative section of the Underworld is a violation of procedure, but Calli has several millennia of favors built up and phoenixes already break every rule of the place as it is. As long as Kiara doesn't get to meet any dead (well, permanently dead) souls, it should be perfectly fine. She sends a quick message to her sensei about it, tersely detailing her request and the logic behind it. Despite knowing that her reasoning is solid, she's half expecting to be turned down and told to not let her emotions get in the way of her work, but the reply simply contains a single thumbs up emoji, and she lets out an unconscious sigh of relief. 
 
"I'm done. Are you ready?" she asks to the room behind her. 

"Yeah." The phoenix is back on her feet, literally and hopefully metaphorically as well. She's standing a little close and is reaching a hand out to Calli. 

On instinct, Calli's ready with a little bit of banter, some needling about Kiara being that desperate for her hand, but the words die on her lips as she remembers what's going on. "Let's go," she says instead, letting her scythe fade away into the aether. 

She doesn't need to take the hand offered to her to teleport the two of them out, but the gesture will make her feel better. 

Chapter Text

Calli hasn't had any visitors in a long time, and it shows.

The place is… clean enough, she supposes, but there's definitely a bit of a mess around. She doesn't really use it, so it's more a collection of miscellaneous furniture and electronics than a real home. There is a small area in her room where she does have a presence, her desk crowded by a whole host of monitors, but the rest of the building is essentially unchanged from when she moved in. At least, she thinks it's unchanged. Calli hasn't been back in years, after all.

"Is it really okay for me to stay here?" Kiara asks, looking around almost in awe at the perfectly untouched rooms. Maybe she thinks it's fastidiously maintained, instead.

"It would be worse if you were elsewhere. People might come to the wrong conclusion and try to expel you."

"No, not that. Well, yeah, that would be bad, but is it really okay for me to stay at your place? I mean..." Kiara is looking downright nervous at the prospect of staying in Calli's house, which is yet another new face on her. 

"You don't have anywhere else to stay, and I knew that, and I invited you here anyways. It's fine. Besides, I barely stay here." For a split second, Calli wonders where this bashful Kiara was all those other times when she couldn't stop hitting on her. The one she knew would have absolutely leapt at the opportunity to stay at her "beloved wife's" place and made all sorts of inappropriate advances while doing so. Then, the reason behind that resurfaces in her mind, and she curses at herself for even thinking that.

"I - Okay. Thank you, so much, anyways." Kiara bows deeply, and Calli looks at the ceiling until she comes back up.

"Yeah, uh, it's really not a problem for me," she gets out eventually. "There isn't that much to do here, though, so you'll have to find something yourself."

"What do you do, then?"

Calli pauses for a long time. The question is asked innocently enough, but Calli really doesn't like the answer that immediately comes to mind. "I work."

"But like, outside of that?" Kiara's face says that she thinks she knows what's coming next, but doesn't want to believe it.

"I, uh, work." There's a palpable silence as the sentence settles into the room.

"Do you not take breaks? Or like, have a hobby that isn't reaping souls?" Kiara asks, more forcefully this time.

"Death waits for no one." The platitude doesn't seem to placate Kiara, who is now in fact looking indignant at Calli's words. She knows that it's based entirely around concern for her, but the reaper almost physically shrinks back from the phoenix. "... I drink, if that counts?"

That's not the right answer, and Kiara flares up again. "Even if you love your job, you still need time away from it sometimes. If you spend too much of yourself on your work, you'll just burn out! Trust me, I'd - know? Eh? I would?" Her train of thought sputters out, and the anger in her face is replaced with confusion. It's as if she's grasping at something that just barely remains out of reach. Calli's used to seeing her like this, but it's generally not this desperate. 

"Don't push yourself. Your memories will come back in time, and until then it's best to not try and force yourself to remember." It's a piece of advice that Kiara very rarely listens to, and even as she nods in affirmation her eyes are still distant, a sure sign that she's trying to dislodge some more memories of her past. Calli sighs, and returns to the original subject in an effort to stop her. "I do love my work, but I'm also Death's apprentice. I have a lot of duties to uphold, and if I can't no one else can. And I'm not alive, so I don't need to maintain myself in any way."

That seems to get Kiara out of her reverie, at least. "Sure, but mental fatigue still exists!" she says, and Calli can't help but nod along. In her current mode, Kiara has the same energy that some of her past teachers have had, caring yet demanding all the same. "If you make sure to give yourself some time, you can make sure that you're working even better for the rest of the time. Plus, isn't death supposed to be patient?"

"That's - " not what these sayings mean, Calli is about to say, but then she realizes she'd be a hypocrite. "Ugh." She crosses her arms, but can't actually respond to what Kiara's saying, and she knows from long experience that no amount of scowling and grumbling will get her to budge. "You just want me to stay with you, don't you." she mutters instead, just a little too loudly.

"No, no, … no? Wait, maybe I do? Oh, shit, I do - Calliope, I didn't mean to like, pressure you into it or anything, it's just that I really think you should take breaks, just for your own sake. Like, it doesn't have to be now or anything - "

"It's fine, it's fine," Calli says, breaking up her rambling before she can get truly out of hand. Kiara's always been quite the talker, and evidently stays so even under duress. "Honestly, you're being perfectly reasonable, since I was the one who offered. Look, I'll see what I have on my itinerary, and I'll see if I can - uhh… what the fuck?" She trails off, train of thought completely derailed.

Kiara blinks nervously as the silence stretches on, Calli reading and rereading instead of finishing her sentence. "Is something wrong?" 

Wordlessly, Calli flips her tablet around, letting Kiara see it. The phoenix leans in, brow furrowed as she reads. "... Take a break? Is that usually part of an itinerary?"

"No," Calli finally manages to say. "No, it isn't. Much less mine, because there's only one being that could have possibly changed my assignments." She stares down at the tablet in her hand, half-expecting it to vanish into thin air and reveal itself to be some kind of elaborate prank.

Kiara frowns wordlessly as she puzzles through what the flummoxed reaper means. "So, is Death itself giving you a vacation?" she asks.

"I mean, I guess so? Yeah, this is actually happening, isn't it." Given their earlier exchange, Calli can only assume that her sensei knew exactly what they were up to, and had given her pretty much explicit permission to continue instead of doing any number of more Death-like things, like telling her to stop wasting time after already doing a single soul a fairly substantial favor and go handle some other issues. Did that mean they were agreeing with Kiara? The thought rankled Calli more than it should have.

"Then what are you going to do?"

Calli takes a deep breath. She expected headaches to come out of every interaction she had with Takanashi Kiara, but she would have never guessed they would come from her boss. "I'm going to partake in my one hobby."

Chapter Text

"So how does that work, anyways?" Kiara asks.

"What?"

"Your drink."

Calli takes another sip of the liquid in question, enjoying the sensation of it burning as it goes down. "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, how does the drink work on you? Well, I guess I mean I don't know how your body works, either. Like, does it exist, or is it just some kind of projection?"

"Oh, I understand now. You're wondering how I can get drunk?" Kiara nods, eyes both cautious and curious. The reaper takes a quick check around them before continuing just to make sure there aren't any overzealous reapers going to go after Kiara for being technically alive. Since becoming Death's apprentice, Calli only really frequents places on the outskirts of the Underworld, shunning the constant buzz of attention that she'd get closer to the cities. As such, there's no one around at the moment except for the two of them and the bartender, and he's very much not the type to blab, so she feels fine indulging the question.

"The short answer is that it's just reaper poison instead of mortal poison," Calli says. "Like, human alcohol is made out of grains and stuff distilled until they're intoxicating, right? Reaper alcohol is made out of souls instead, cause life is kind of anathema to us."

Kiara blinks, absorbing the information. "Wait, is that a person?" she asks incredulously.

"Part of one." As the phoenix stares at her, Calli belatedly realizes what the issue is. "Ah, it's not like we're just killing people to get smashed. Souls are constantly replenishing and remaking themselves as people change, and the old bits just get ejected - that's what mortal magic is at its core, even. It's only when they're reaped and come here that the soul as a whole kind of crystallizes into a steady state, and we don't touch them at all after that. The excess isn't used for anything else, so might as well use it ourselves."

"Oh," Kiara says, mostly placated but still confused. "But if everyone in the Underworld is like, just their soul, then what are you? And what is this drink?" she says, pointing at her own drink. She's been drinking much less than Calli has, only partly through her first cup while Calli's already gone through a couple glasses of soul wine. Kiara's trepidation is understandable, though, since she's still unsure of the metaphysics of the scenario.

"That should just be orange soda. Or the idea of it, at least. No one knows which one is really true, and the two possibilities are identical to everyone involved, so it doesn't really matter if it's real or not. If I drank it, it'd taste like nothing at all, so I can't really give you a second opinion or anything like that. We're pretty much just pseudo-physical constructs attached to the concept of death, so it's not like orange soda means anything to us." Predictably, Kiara doesn't fully get what she means, so Calli just shrugs. "Don't worry about that, two-thirds of my colleagues don't get it either. It's complicated."

"Hmm… Well, whatever." Kiara takes another sip of her soda, less hesitantly this time. "It's tasty, so it doesn't really matter. I'm just happy that a bar for reapers had orange soda to begin with instead of only weird soul concoctions, I guess." She blinks, an odd expression on her face as she stirs her drink. "Hey, what do I taste like, then?"

Calli nearly spits out an entire mouthful of concentrated soul. "What the - yo, don't make it weird, Ku- Kiara. Kiara." 

Ignoring Calli's slipup, or perhaps seeing it merely as an effect of the drink, Kiara boldly presses forwards. "Wouldn't you be at least a little curious about it?" The phoenix is utterly, maddeningly sincere about the question, as if she was simply asking Calli about her favorite drink. She would much prefer the line to be Kiara's heavy handed flirting instead, because at least that would be understandable.

"Of course not! What the hell is going through your mind?" 

"Come on, I bet I would taste good!" Why did she have an opinion on this already? Calli takes a  huge sip, hoping that the question will be revealed to just be something she misinterpreted in a drunken stupor. That hope is dashed when she opens her eyes and Kiara's still just looking at her, eyes shining. "Hey, if you tell me what I taste like, I'll tell you what orange soda is like. How about that?"

"Look, even ignoring that I have no idea how to do it myself, and that you'd have to be alive because the whole point of death is to be a final stable point for the soul and we can only take excess, you're also a phoenix. Every mote of your soul is fundamentally intertwined with life. It'd be like..." The reaper racked her drunk mind for a poison that Kiara's definitely run into before. "It'd be like going from drinking beer to drinking basilisk poison."

"I see…" Kiara looks far too disappointed for someone being told that, no, they wouldn't be made into a drink. Calli squashes any and all sympathy she may or may not feel for the phoenix on account of it being entirely her fault. "Wait, being around me isn't that bad, right? Like, as we are right now."

"I wouldn't be sitting here drinking if it were."

"You know, that's a good point." Kiara finishes that last of her orange soda. With a satisfied sigh, she puts the empty glass back on the counter. Considering it's just a concept, it probably would refill on its own if Kiara thought it worked that way, but her own mind requires her to be given another drink to accept it as real. Still, it's not as if they're in any rush. "You know what? I guess I am dead, right? Might as well get another one. Hey, um, how do I do that?"

The bartender (who, Calli belatedly realizes, she's also never called anything but bartender even in her own head) ambles over, a glass of not quite real orange soda in his hand. "Just gotta ask," he says in his low, wispy tone. "Here you go."

"Woah, you can talk?" Despite her shock, Kiara accepts the glass from him anyways. She always was good at rolling with the punches, after all.

"Sure can. Just don't, most of the time."

"I mean, like, I didn't even think you had a mouth. Sorry, but I actually thought you were some kind of weird magic construct that served drinks." The phoenix peers at the bartender intently, and Calli finally figures out what Kiara's hung up on. Now that she thinks about it, it's obvious that a sentient bundle of loosely attached crystalline cords arranged almost like a wire frame isn't something Kiara's likely to have come across, even with her dimensional travel. Calli takes the opportunity to mentally kick herself for being stupid.

The bartender imitates a shrug, sending ripples through his body. "I am a weird magic construct, but serving drinks is only my hobby. Everyone down here's in the business of reaping souls - everyone but you, I'd think." His low voice is tinged with amusement at the situation, sounding a little like if wind chimes could laugh at you, and Calli's embarrassment only grows. She ducks out of speaking by taking another swig of her drink, but she can't escape the conversation. 

"Y-yeah. Um, that's not an issue or anything, right?"

"You've got the apprentice of Death herself sitting next to you, you know? If there was an issue, you'd have never gotten this far. Miss Mori doesn't mess around when she's on the job."

"Which is always." Kiara shoots an offended look at Calli, who merely huffs in the opposite direction. She can already hear her lecture on how other reapers clearly are taking time for themselves, and it's giving her a headache. Or maybe that's the alcohol speaking.

"Exactly. Clearly it isn't messing with things too too much. I am curious as to why a phoenix is in the reaper only section of the Underworld, but there's a reason my bar's all the way out here and not in one of the big cities." The bartender gives her a refill too, and she slams down half of it immediately. He's wise enough to not say anything too smug in front of Kiara, but his top loop of crystals shines a little, and she growls to herself again.

"I wouldn't know, but I'll take your word for it!" The two share a laugh at that, and something weird happens to Calli's chest, and she frowns. Maybe she had drank too quickly after all.

The conversation peters down a bit after that one, but Calli can tell it won't be for long. Kiara hates silence with a passion; she can already feel her shifting back and forth, searching for some topic to start a conversation. She resolves herself to enjoy the silence while it lasts.

...

Her hands are already itching to check her tablet. Calli is indeed a stubborn individual, because you have to be to get to where she is, but even she has to admit that Kiara has a point. That being said, she chooses to give the credit to Death instead for directly pushing her away from her work.

She's still trying to figure out how exactly to avoid the conclusion that the phoenix helped her out when the real deal finally speaks her mind. "Hey, um, Miss Mori. I want to thank you again." She sounds serious, so Calli brings her full attention to her.

"You've said that more than enough, I think."

Kiara shakes her head. "I don't know if I could say it enough, honestly. There's still so much I don't remember, but I know enough to know that something bad happened to me, right? If you'd left me alone and kept on doing important reaper stuff, I would probably still be stewing in that room, stuck in a loop of negative thoughts. Instead I'm having a good time in a bar, drinking orange soda, learning about whatever weird physics the Underworld has, and meeting people I didn't even think could exist." At the oblique mention, the bartender stops sorting bottles in the back to wave a single emerald coil at Kiara, who nods in acknowledgement before continuing. "You had every reason to not help me, right? I'm immortal so I have all the time I could ever need to figure stuff out, and I probably cause you all a bunch of headaches if you have to handle me personally, and you're also insanely busy anyways."

"I wouldn't just leave you there - "

"Right, because you're a good person. So I want to thank you." Kiara interrupts her, and Calli shuts her mouth again. She's really glad right about now that her body isn't real, because otherwise … well, it'd be a bad thing.

Her tablet pulses in its storage dimension, and Calli seizes the opportunity to escape, pulling it out and checking the message. "Sorry, I should take this." It's only been five minutes since she admitted that she had a work problem, and she's already back at it.

Kiara was about to continue on, but immediately shifts to objecting strenuously. "But you're on vacation! Seriously, you need to learn how to take breaks properly."

"I know. I just need to tell everyone else that I'm taking a break. It doesn't exactly happen often." With that, Calli stands up, making purposeful strides to the door (and ignoring any squawks of protest that may or may not have come out of Kiara while doing so). She brings up her tablet, and sighs deeply, flicking through the messages. It's a rather sobering sight - quite a few reapers she's somewhat close to simply didn't believe Death when they said Calli was taking a break, and thus have sent messages asking if something's wrong, or if she's feeling alright. There's apparently even rumors going around that she's gotten in trouble for one stupid thing or another, or maybe that she has a secret assignment completely outside the normal jurisdictions of death. Was it really so difficult to believe that she's just taking a break?

… In retrospect, it absolutely is. As hard as it is to believe, I am taking a short vacation , she writes a dozen times in reply. Thank you for your concern. She exhales, gathering herself, then steps back into the bar, where Kiara has struck up another conversation with the bartender, her half-drunk orange soda forgotten on the counter. 

As soon as she enters, the phoenix abandons her thread of conversation to spin over and wave. "Miss Mori! Is everything handled?"

Calli nods, dropping herself back into her seat. "Yeah. Just a couple people worried about me, that's all."

"They didn't believe that you were taking a break, huh?" The reaper suppresses the urge to cuss her out by returning to her drink, and Kiara takes the ensuing silence as confirmation. "Thought so."

"Oi." Calli glares daggers at her. "Don't you start with me." Intimidating Kiara literally never works, but she keeps on trying anyways. At the very least, she needs to keep her image up in front of the rest of the Underworld.

"I'll start with you as many times as I need to until you start taking better care of yourself." Kiara hmphs, then turns back to the bartender. "Sorry, sorry, where was I?"

"You were talking about how cute my boss's boss's boss is." The bartender is clearly distancing himself from the gushing phoenix with his words, but Calli definitely feels the smugness rolling off of him. She makes a mental note to finally learn his name, if only to do some acts of petty retribution later.

Kiara's eyes light up, and she turns back to the bartender. "Oh yeah! At first I thought she was kinda scary and intense, but she's actually so nice -"

"You know, I'm right here - " Calli tries to get in a word edgewise, but Kiara simply steamrolls through her.

"- and honestly, that contrast in and of itself is really cute, but then it feels like she gets embarrassed about her own actions - "

"Hey, Kiara - " She's raising her voice now, but it doesn't even seem to matter.

"- and that just makes it even better, right? It's like she doesn't want to admit that she's actually really helpful, so she tries to cloak it, but it doesn't quite work, so - "

Finally, she's had enough. "Oi, Kusotori, shut the fuck up!" she yells, and Kiara thankfully does so. Unfortunately, from the look of realization in her eyes, Calli can tell she's just lost the war to win the battle. 

"Kusotori? That means, like, shit bird right? That's my nickname, right?"

Calli ignores her, taking a long, long swig of her drink instead.

She's beaming now. Fuck. "That's me! I just knew you liked me."

Calli sighs, looking decidedly away from Kiara and at the only other thing of note in the otherwise spartan bar, the bartender. Even despite not having much in the way of modular features, he looks like he's never going to fully respect Calli again. "You have an interesting companion there, don't you?"

The reaper looks back at said companion, who even now is rocking back and forth in chair in happiness, clasping her face as if she doesn't quite believe it. "This was a mistake," she grumbles to no one in particular.

The bartender chuckles, wind chimes filling the air. "I, for one, enjoy the extra business," he says. Calli glares at him too, but it does nothing. Maybe she should practice. "Still, though, you have to admit there's something about having company. Not many things are sadder than drinking alone, after all."

She's drank way too many at this point, but she still gets him to refill her glass. Maybe, she thinks to herself. "Enough of that," she says out loud, staring at her drink. Maybe… 

Chapter Text

The atmosphere was a lot more subdued by the time they returned to Calli's place. The drinks and minor social interaction seemed to help out Kiara quite a bit (at only the cost of her dignity), but it wasn't going to magically fix everything and Calli knew that. There was still a giant hole where her memories were, and that itself was just a symptom of some terribly traumatic death, not just physically but emotionally as well. For her part, she was more than a little drunk still, and although her self-control was impeccable the leftover alcohol had gotten her mind stuck on Kiara and their strange relationship, working itself into introspective knots. Thus, the two of them were sitting in Calli's empty shell of a house, Calli slouched into a couch that she vaguely remembered and Kiara shifting back and forth in a chair.

Calli's hands itch for her scythe, to swing and swing and swing until nothing was left in her head but exhaustion. A simpler time, with a straightforward process and a straightforward goal, certainly without any messiness getting in the way. But that wasn't anything but running away, wasn't it? Just hiding behind the endless demands of routine and station, drifting aimlessly through eternity. Letting Kiara flirt with her and then snapping back time after time, safe in a comedy sketch that had calcified a thousand years ago. Did she want anything more than that?

Did she want anything at all?

… There wasn't nearly enough alcohol in her system to want to dig through that particular can of worms. Sighing, Calli shakes her head rather vigorously, the motion drawing Kiara's attention. "Is there something wrong?" she asks.

"No. Just, you know, shaking the alcohol off." And some intrusive thoughts, but she'd never let Kiara know that. 

"You don't get hangovers, do you?"

"Not in the same way that humans do, but it's still poison, you know? It's supposed to make you feel a little shitty afterwards."

"And you enjoy that?" Kiara asks pointedly.

"Well, I enjoy the actual drinking part more than I dislike the aftereffects." 

"What, you like feeling woozy and less inhibited?"

"Yeah? Takes the edge off of - " Well, it took the edge off of her horribly singular lifestyle. Fucking Kusotori, making her think about all this rather than just continuing blissfully unaware. "You know, stuff."

"Hmmmmm." Kiara looks up at Calli's bare white ceiling, stretching out the sound fully as she thought about Calli's words. "I have the strong impression that I don't like drinking, but it's, like, floating around in my head without context. You know?"

"I can imagine." By nature, Calli doesn't forget anything so she can't truly relate, but that also means that she remembers Kiara explaining it to her before. "It'll pass with time."

"Everything does, doesn't it? Everything but us, I suppose." Was Kiara being philosophical, or was she just stating the obvious? She genuinely couldn't tell from her blank expression. Perhaps they were the same thing when it came to eternity.

"Guess that means I'm stuck with you forever, then." Calli doesn't say it with any heat even if she kind of wants to, and Kiara simply smiles. 

"Well, I for one am thankful for that, even if I don't remember the vast majority of that forever," the phoenix says. "I get the feeling that I don't really know what I'd do without you."

"You'd have figured something out, trust me."

"You really think so?"

"Yeah. We meet like, once every fifty years at most. Surely you have better things to be thinking about."

"Ehh …" Kiara trails off again, sounding like she doesn't entirely believe her. Calli's not really sure why. She's fully aware that she's awkward and standoffish even when she's not deliberately cultivating a distant image, and her single minded devotion to her work means that she gets very little practice interacting with people on casual terms. The idea of the sociable, open, and above all lively girl genuinely looking to her for, well, really for anything other than a fun target for teasing just seems inherently wrong. Really, Kiara probably deserves a more suitable companion than Calli, someone who can actually keep up with her. 

Calli stands up abruptly, suddenly no longer able to tolerate either the conversation or the thoughts in her head. "Fuck it. I've got to have something to do somewhere in here, right?" she says, not sure whether she intends her statement to be for Kiara or for herself. She can feel the phoenix's eyes on her as she marches over to a tucked-away closet, and it only magnifies her self-consciousness. There's got to be something that can get their conversation off of this, right?

She finds salvation in the form of a hopelessly tangled set of wires and a rather neglected game console. Somehow, it's gotten so bad that there are fourth dimensional knots in it despite seemingly nothing around to have pulled it out of the third. Even with all her universe hopping Kiara hasn't ever quite broken reality enough to get to one with more dimensions than she already has, so there's a real chance that the wires will pose a bit of a cognitive issue. A little linear algebra and a lot of magic wrangling solves the problem, but Calli makes a note to figure out what else is in that closet. Not that she's hoping for or even expecting any more visitors, but it's always good to clear out these kinds of problems just in case she has to do something like this again.

Calli hurries back to the center of the room with her cargo in tow, still acutely aware of Kiara's gaze. "I knew I had something like this tucked away somewhere," she explains as she hooks the console up. The far wall melts into a silver liquid, which then assembles itself into first a thinly spread lattice and then into a very large screen. 

"What the hell?!" Kiara shouts. "What the fuck did you do?"

"... It's a screen," Calli says matter-of-factly.

"Really?"

"Yeah? Oh." Right, that wasn't just normal. Because her only real interaction with life is when she's ending it, Calli often forgets that the Underworld is a haphazard mismash of developments from every dimension at once. "This stuff is, uh… it's supposed to be either a nanobot swarm,  enchanted mercury, or some combination of the two. I don't remember anymore."

"That's… well, kinda cool, actually, but also very weird. Can I just file this under 'weird reaper shit' and call it a day?"

"More than fair." The screen blinks to life, showing the most generic console booting screen imaginable. Literally - it's specifically designed to universally convey the idea of 'loading content'. "So, what do you want to do?"

Kiara picks up one of the controllers gingerly, peering at it quizzically before deciding that it is just a controller. "Let's just start with something, like, simple?" 

"Sure, I can work with simple," Calli says. "How about something easy to start with?"

"..."

"..."

"I might not have any memories, but I definitely remember not sucking this bad." Kiara laughs sheepishly, averting her eyes from the very prominent Game Over screen. She slouches into the sofa, almost physically deflating.

"I wish I had that excuse," Calli grumbles from next to her. "It really shouldn't be this hard to jump over a couple stupid pits. We're both like ten thousand times older than this game, how is it beating us?" 

"You think we can get out of World 2 this time?" Despite their abject failure, Kiara grins and grips her controller harder, as if the excess force will carry into her improbably acrobatic animal avatar. "I promise not to jump on your head this time, especially near any holes."

"I'll sit right here until we can." Calli is far too invested in this extremely basic platformer for her own good, her competitive nature making an appearance. Embarrassingly, she's leaning forward as she plays, fully engrossed in the game. She'd destroy her own image if any of her subordinates found her like this, but the only thing worse than being a reaper who gets way too into video games is being a reaper who gets way too into video games and still sucks at them. 

Next to her, Kiara seems completely and utterly shameless, making all sorts of excited noises when they make it past an area and screaming in anguish whenever her cat (or Calli's, when she's out of lives) plummets to its untimely demise. She's completely and utterly unrestrained, and Calli is not sure whether to be judgemental or jealous. To be honest, she kind of thought it was a bit Kiara did just to get on her nerves, but it seemed like that just was her personality in general. It probably wasn't a good sign that she would have never known this despite knowing her for so long, and she had to wonder if there were other things she was misinterpreting.

"Wait - shit!" The game rather rudely reminds her that she should only be thinking about the physics of jumping now as her cat undershoots their jump and is burnt to a crisp. "Aaaaaagh..."

"Calli, it's okay, I got this - Gah! Fffffuck!" Kiara immediately falls victim to comedic timing after her declaration, joining Calli in death once more with a loud screech. "I hate this stupid game!" she shouts as they're once again unceremoniously booted back to the start of the level.

"Really?"

"No, I'm not really mad." Kiara pauses, aimlessly fiddling with her controller, and then pouts a little. "Maybe a little though."

Calli stifles a laugh at Kiara's expense before replying. "Ready for another go?" she asks, hopefully not letting her amusement seep into the question.

"Honestly, you should play on your own." Kiara huffs. "And play something you're good at. I want us to be able to beat something."

"Giving up, are you?" Calli raises an eyebrow at that one.

"No! I could beat this game for sure. You're just distracting me, that's all." Kiara

"What? I'm distracting you?"

"Yeah! You're trying to keep quiet, but whenever you mess up you grumble a little bit in frustration and your eyes dart everywhere, as if you're scared someone's watching you mess up. And you physically move when you're trying to avoid an attack. It's really funny, and also cute."

"Oi! Absolutely none of that," she growls. As Kiara beams at her, completely unafraid, Calli resolves to never let anyone else ever see her playing a video game. That being said, the majority of the damage has already been done, since Kiara's the worst person that could know. The thought of the other girl remembering all this when she regains her memories is … Calli can hear her incessant teasing in her head already, and she's about to give the phoenix even more fuel for the fire. 

Regardless, she lets Kiara drop out and closes the game, searching through the database for anything she might be at least decent at. Unfortunately, there's an absolutely insane amount of games, even when she filters down to only the very good ones, and she might be charitably called good at only a miniscule fraction of them. 

Just as she's about to give up and open the cat game again, Kiara points at the screen and points at a specific line. "You should play that one!"

Calli blinks, then squints further. "Phoenix Down?"

"Yeah!"

"... Any reason besides it having phoenix in the name?"

"Absolutely not!" Kiara grins cheekily at her and is met with the strongest eye roll Calli can muster.

In any event, she doesn't have any other better ideas, so she boots the game up. Phoenix Down starts with a cryptic cutscene about some stuff that probably made a lot more sense with a specific phoenix legend in mind, but it's definitely something about resurrection. As soon as the cutscene ends, though, the game just drops her into the world. The only real tutorialization are some marks on the ground going over the basic controls and giving her some weak enemies to practice on. Kiara's totally engrossed, cheering her on as her character backstabs a slow moving zombie, but Calli's not sure if she's into it yet.

Then, three of the zombies show up and pretty much annihilate her.

"Holy hell, that was fast." Kiara laughs as the onscreen phoenix is reborn in a burst of flames, although it sounds about as shocked as Calli feels.

"That killed me? Isn't the first area supposed to be easy?" She really hadn't been expecting to be met with a real challenge three minutes into the game, but even the slow windup of the zombies was overwhelming in multiples and her character was only able to take out one before running out of HP and going down in flames.

"Maybe this is one of those games for, uh, masochists? Whatever that means," Kiara says. "You want to switch games?"

"It's been three minutes," Calli replies. "I'm not gonna give up after one try like some kind of coward."

Kiara looks at her, and grins to herself as if she sees something on her face. "Alright, go ahead." 

And thus begins Calli's struggles with an entirely different phoenix, although this one she's trying to keep alive rather than keep dead. This task is only marginally easier, though, since for an immortal being this phoenix is extremely good at dying. True to theme, she always comes back to life at the last respawn point without any limits, but the developers seemed to have used this as a justification to demand that the player really figure it out before they can get through to the next one. Frustratingly, Calli finds her own impatience getting the better of her multiple times, where she overextends for damage and immediately gets punished or engages too many enemies at once and gets punished for it. Other times, she's overly cautious, letting enemies chip away at her stamina and then health until she finds herself in the middle of nowhere with ten percent HP and no healing left. And then there are just the times where there are hidden traps, or she gets lost and misses a respawn point that would have saved ten minutes of fighting her way back.

Still, though, she finds herself engrossed in the rhythm of offense and defense, of dodging attacks and then counterattacking, of cautiously exploring the very dangerous world she was dropped into. Calli's so into it, she actually almost forgets that Kiara's next to her despite her very loud reactions to everything that's happening, or maybe she just feels less self-conscious about that. The phoenix is even cheering her on, and although it's definitely killed her at least a couple times it's also weirdly… not annoying, Calli supposes. There's not enough brainpower to think about that and about the zombies and skeletons she's slowly chewing her way through, and the latter is the more time-sensitive thing. 

Finally, Calli's able to string together a consistent run and the large skeleton knight at the end of the graveyard falls to the onslaught of sword slashes. Before she's able to stop herself, she lets out a primal scream of victory. "Fuck yeah! Eat that, you piece of shit! Y - errrr." All of a sudden, the fact that Kiara's watching her gets to Calli, and she shuts up as fast as she possibly can.

"Yer? What's that?" Kiara pivots immediately from cheering at her success to laughing at her. She's going to see that smug face in her mind for weeks.

"Not a fucking word." Calli throws her another glare which bounces off just like the first. She really does need to practice after all. Generally her face just is naturally intimidating enough that she tries to lessen the impact rather than intensify it, but it might be a useful anti-Kusotori measure. Still, not even Kiara's teasing could keep her down for too much after that performance, and she finds a smile slipping back onto her face.

"That was really cool, though! I can't believe you kept on the offense even with like 3 health left. You nearly gave me a heart attack when you went for that parry in the end! Er. I guess I don't  have one right now, but you know." Thankfully, Kiara seems just as hyped as Calli feels, so she doesn't continue teasing.

"I get it." Calli says. Mortal languages were all fundamentally rooted in various physical analogies, most of which failed to hold true in the Underworld. "And yeah, that was pretty sick. I was so sure I was gonna die again, but something deep down refused to let me."

"Hell yeah! Phoenixes never die, we just come back stronger!" Kiara does a strange pose, and Calli just ignores it until she sheepishly sits back down. Maybe there was something she was supposed to say there, but to be perfectly honest Calli isn't sure what the right kind of reaction to that would be. 

The screen continues playing a cutscene, although neither of them seem to be paying any attention to it. Calli because she lost track of what was going on like thirty seconds in beyond the overall goal of beating up a bunch of somehow undeath related things, Kiara because she's mostly just looking at her instead of the screen. She's content to ignore it for the time being.

… She's less content than she thought she was, on second thought. "Do you want to play again?" she asks, hoping that's the reason behind Kiara's gaze.

"No, no, I'm good. It's actually really fun to watch other people do stuff."

"Really?"

"Really." Kiara does seem to be enjoying herself, and this is for her benefit in the end, so Calli shrugs and lets it go. She's always been much more of a doer than a watcher, but it's not like she's any kind of authority on leisure activities. Still...

Calli opens her mouth to ask if Kiara likes watching other people do things in general or if she was specifically watching her, but then closes it as soon as she thinks twice. Belatedly, she realizes that she really doesn't want to know the answer to that question and she doesn't want Kiara to think about it either. "Alright, but I think I might be here for a while," Calli says instead, grasping for a topic to shift to. "That was just the first area, and I died so many times." Self-deprecation, the easy conversational escape. 

"Well, I think you're doing great! Or at least you're having fun, which is the important part. I mean, your boss put you on vacation, right? You could treat this like your job!" Kiara follows something that maybe was pretty smart with something that is very dumb, as is her way.

"I spent a thousand years training for my job. Actually, I'm not even done learning yet." Granted, if all she wanted to do was to swing her scythe around like any old reaper, she was vastly overqualified, but she had bigger ambitions than that. "I'm not sure if that would help relax."

"Well, then at least you're making really good pace, right?" Kiara grins at her own joke, and Calli finds herself smiling a little too despite herself. She is enjoying herself, despite how awkward she feels in front of Kiara.

She's finally made it to what seems to be a hub world in the game, and therefore can start improving her character a bit. Unfortunately, the game has way too many stats to be puzzling through and the horribly cryptic descriptions within don't help either. She's so confused, she asks the literal amnesiac for help with piecing together everything, but Kiara simply tells her to put all her ashes into pyromancy because it's "on brand", which Calli rejects for "being stupid".

"Why did you choose to become Death's apprentice, anyways?" Kiara asks, following up from the conversation before. "I mean, assuming you had a choice in the matter. If you didn't I don't think you'd have stuck it out for a thousand years."

Calli doesn't respond for a bit, still trying to choose what to do. After letting the question hang for a couple minutes, she finally gives up and levels up the most generic bonus she could find on the page, stamina regeneration. Her character is enveloped in a short lived burst of flame as she incorporates the ashes back into her body, and Calli idly wonders if Kiara could do that. "Yeah, I had a choice. Actually, there's somewhat of a competition for the spot, and I was the one who eventually came out on top," she eventually replies. "Technically I could still lose the position, but that's not going to happen."

"Right, right." Kiara nods, gesturing at her to go on. "I wouldn't want to be the poor soul who thought they could beat you."

"As long as it's reaping and not playing games, sure," Calli says sardonically before returning to a more serious mode. "As for why, well, I've never been the type to go through half-measures. This job is what I was made for, literally, so I poured everything I could into it, and Death chose me because of that. It's too important to warrant anything less."

"What you were made for, huh." Kiara's quiet for a good bit, so Calli takes the opportunity to exit the hub world, going back to the last boss arena but this time with a key for the next area. She's only half paying attention to the game at best, but it feels like it helps keep things from getting too heavy and gives her an excuse to take her time while answering. "What about me, then?" she finally asks.

"Hmm?"

"I mean, do I have any kind of grand purpose like that?" Kiara asked, staring out past the screen into nothing. "I've been getting bits and pieces back, of what I was doing and feeling, but there's nothing as firm as that."

"Nothing like that is written into your soul," Calli says. "Mortals aren't tied to anything except themselves, and even though you can't die phoenixes aren't an exception. Any purpose you find comes from you alone."

"Kinda scary," Kiara says. Calli's never thought about it before, but it does make sense. Her entire existence is structured around a singular purpose, after all. What would she be like without that? "So we have to figure it out for ourselves, huh. You said I had better things to think about, right?"

"To be honest, I hadn't imagined you as particularly lacking for direction," Calli confesses, slashing away at some more skeletons on autopilot. She's a little lost herself, but there are enemies leading up to a large climb, so she figures she may as well go there. "You definitely seemed like you knew what you were doing most of the time you were down here, memories or not." She omits the part where the majority of their interactions were Kiara hitting on her, since that doesn't seem particularly helpful.

"What was I like, then?"

A lot of rude things come to Calli's mind instinctually, but she swallows them all. She can tell them to the Kiara actually responsible for that instead, once her memories are back. "Very… open." she says instead, struggling for the right words to describe Kiara to herself. "We didn't meet that often in the grand scheme of things, but every time you did you talked a lot about, uh, everything? Whether you remembered me or not, you always struck up a conversation, and if I ever had anything on my mind you wanted to hear it." Calli pauses for a bit, before admitting, "If it weren't for you I probably would go for decades without talking to anyone outside of strictly work related things. I didn't always appreciate that, but I think it helped me out a bit."

Kiara's silent at that, watching Calli fight on the edge of the cliff as she digests the information. Was that enough? It doesn't feel like enough, but there's enough of a lull for Calli to make some progress up the path, although she's distracted by her thoughts and therefore sloppy. Both of them wince as Calli takes a stray shot which then knocks her off of the cliff down onto the landing before, then Kiara gasps and Calli stares blankly as her still falling character is further bounced off of a zombie's shield into the abyss below. She's too shocked to even cuss out the game.

"... I didn't do anything like that, did I?" Kiara finally breaks the silence with a quip.

"You've definitely died in some really embarrassing ways, but I don't think you've ever crossed the line into 'us playing video games' territory yet," Calli replies with a hint of humor in her voice that she can't quite quash. "Nowadays it tends to be a lot more dramatic. And you can fly, I think."

"Dramatic, huh?"

The reaper thinks about a list of fatal injuries a mile long. "Oh yeah. You tended to get involved in really dangerous stuff from time to time. It's not a sure bet, but you probably have something you think is worth fighting for."

Kiara frowns, mulling over Calli's words. "So was I like, a hero?"

"Perhaps. Death doesn't judge, but… it would fit. It's obvious that you care a lot about helping other people." Calli pauses for a moment, feeling that the conversation is way too serious for her horrible gaming skills. "Who knows, maybe this game is about you after all. There aren't that many phoenixes around anymore."

"I guess it could be." She was joking, but Kiara seems to be taking the suggestion seriously. "Actually, that castle you can see in the distance looks… Eh, forget it."  "You sure?" Calli looks at Kiara's troubled face, but doesn't really know how to respond. For her troubles, she gets killed by a skeleton archer but not much more.  

"Yeah." The two of them are silent as the on-screen phoenix begins to hack her way up the mountain once more. The more Calli tries to talk, the more she appreciates how truly difficult spontaneous talking is, and how easy Kiara makes it look. Somehow, the phoenix is able to push through any awkwardness and just keep talking even without the aid of some video game to keep a common thread. 

Now that she's absorbed in her own thoughts again, Calli finds that she doesn't know how to pull Kiara back out of them. Words seem to be a little counterproductive right now and everything else she can think of is even worse, so she just turns back to the screen, shooting concerned looks at Kiara every so often when there's a lull in the action. It feels like there should be something she should be doing, but at the same time she has no idea what that is.

In the end, she just has to trust that Kiara will be okay left to her own devices for a bit. Calli's under no delusions that she'll be able to solve anything for her even if Kiara were to lay out everything crossing her mind. She just now realized that she herself had problems, after all, or rather she's just admitting it now. Kiara is nothing if not resilient, though, and she has eternity to figure things out. Calli really can't imagine that anything could truly keep her down. It's just… she really doesn't like seeing people hurting, that's all. She'll do the best she can to help out, and if that means just sitting there and providing a distraction, well, Calli's not about to back down just because it's awkward as hell.

"I think I might be here for a bit while I try to at least beat this area," she says instead of revealing any of that, because she doesn't really know how to say it and definitely doesn't want to admit it. "Do you mind?"

"Nah, go ahead." Calli's not quite sure if Kiara picked up on the second layer of her question, but her face calms down a bit, as if she's realized something. "Phoenixes don't give up so easy, you know?" she says, and Calli realizes that Kiara fully believes it. It's a small thing, but the reaper does feel a lot better after hearing the solidity in her voice.

"Alright," she says, "I'm going to climb this fucking mountain."

Kiara laughs at that, loud and clear. "Hell yeah! That's the spirit." And try as she might, Calli can't deny that she's enjoying herself.

Chapter Text

Apprentice Calliope. How are things?

There’s always sort of a mundane terror to this kind of question coming from your boss, especially if they were not known for their gregariousness. Considering Calli’s boss was capital D Death, end of all things, it was perhaps a little more justified. Generally speaking you did not sit down for a nice chat with your impending demise, even if Calli wasn’t exactly mortal herself. Calli has a certain temptation to ignore the message, using her (forced) vacation as a pretext, but she ultimately decides against it. Hiding from a reaper never tended to go well. But what did they want from her?

Figuring she should start with the major change, Calli starts typing a response. Well enough, I suppose. Takanashi and I went drinking, and then we played some games together. She seems to have appreciated the gesture, and her mood has improved. Her memories may take some time to return fully, but I believe she is stable enough for me to return to my post.

While she waits for Death’s response, she glances over at the amnesiac phoenix, who was currently watching some nature show now that Calli had put Phoenix Down on hold. Considering the narration was in a language that Kiara had never come into contact with, it wasn’t certain how much she was learning, but at the very least she was relaxing. Kiara looks over at her and smiles somewhat weakly, and Calli can’t help but frown at the unnatural sight. Still, though, she quickly schools her face into a neutral expression and nods back in acknowledgement.

Death had replied to her message, and she frowns more as she read it. You do not need to. Your duties are being handled by your subordinates and myself, and will remain so for the near future. Take as much time as you need with Takanashi Kiara.

Is all this time on one soul necessary, even if she is immortal? Surely there are more valuable things for me to be doing. Calli is confused and more than a little indignant, to put it lightly, but she keeps her tone as respectful as she could. She feels insulted that Death apparently felt that just hanging out with Kiara was more important than the job she’d spent thousands of years training for.

In fact, it might be the most valuable thing to be doing. The dead have all the time in the world to acclimate to their situation, after all. Only the phoenix will return to the world of the living to further grow, and thus her time may be more valuable than the others.

Before Calli can type out a response to that, another message appeared. Additionally, I am not concerned with just one soul, but with two. You could also use this opportunity. As important as it is, there is more to existence than just performing your duty.

I had thought you would be against it.

Compassion and empathy are not hindrances to a reaper, they are boons. If you are to take up my title, you must also understand the terrible weight of its obligation. In my eyes, you standing up for Takanashi Kiara shows that you are capable of being my successor. If this lets you develop these skills, then it will let you work better in the long run.

Calli rhythmically drums her fingers against the wall, frowning. I understand, she eventually typed.

No, you do not. But that is also fine. In any event, you may proceed as you see fit in this endeavor. I would offer advice, but I am too far removed from life to truly empathize, so I suspect it will be more valuable for you to act without it. Oh, one last thing. I will send you a Visitor Pass so that the more enthusiastic reapers do not get ahead of themselves.

Did we have those? Calli asks.

We do now. And Death signed off, leaving Calli with only a phoenix and a headache. 

“You don’t have any work or anything, do you?”

Calli sighs deeply at the question. Kiara was giving her the perfect opportunity to just leave her to her own devices, and she just couldn’t take it because she was on vacation . “No. I should, but my boss put me on forced leave.” 

“… Do reapers get time off?” 

“Not at all! We’re supposed to be, you know, timeless entities of death. We don’t need it, or at least, we’re not supposed to…” Calli trails off, frustration seeping into her voice no matter how hard she tries to suppress it. “Sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“No,, it’s alright.” Kiara says, now fully turning to Calli and away from the show. “I’d like to hear about it. I get the feeling that I did a lot of talking before, and you’re doing me a big favor anyways, so yeah.”

There is another pause while the reaper contemplates how much she was willing to tell Kiara, considering it was directly related to her. There was a part of Calli that wants to just completely avoid the topic, actually, but it just didn’t feel right. Death is honest by its very nature, and Calli knows she needs to follow suit. “They’re giving me time off because they think it’s important for my development. Er, they being my boss, Death.”

"Right, Capital D Death," Kiara nods.

"Yeah. I just… I’ve been training for millenia just to get here, right? And I didn’t need to take any breaks or like soul searching or whatever. Honestly, if I had known that I'd need to do this sort of stuff, it would have been fine, but for it to get sprung on me now is tough, right?" The words spill out of her quickly, and Calli immediately tries to backpedal a little bit, because it really wasn't that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things. "But, like, it is a break, so I shouldn't be really complaining about it much. Just a little frustrating, that's all."

"Nah, nah, I get it! I think, anyways. A little hard to tell since I can’t remember it all. But no, it’s fine to feel frustrated with that sort of stuff. Even if you know that’s not what they mean, it still kind of feels like they’re getting on your case, right?” 

“I…” Actually, Kiara was right. She did feel like Death was getting on her case. Considering how little she had to work with, that was pretty impressive - not that she was going to tell her that she was right. “Yeah. Yeah, that might be it.”

“I feel like I’ve dealt with this stuff before,” Kiara muses for a bit before cutting herself off. “Wait, no, you should finish first before I get into that.”

“No no no, you’re good, you’re fine! I didn’t have that much to say, just that. You can go ahead.” Calli also didn’t want to make Kiara deal with her issues - or, well, she didn't want anyone else to deal with her issues, and Kiara just happened to be the one who was here.

“Alright, if you say so,” the phoenix says, although she looks a little skeptical of Calli. Was she really so easy to read? “But yeah, I do feel like I’ve been in this same kind of scenario before. It’s like… even if it isn’t necessarily true, hearing that kind of thing always feels like an attack. Your teacher, master, Death or whatever, they aren’t the type to be backhanded or manipulative or anything, right?”

“Yeah,” Calli replies immediately. 

“Then you shouldn’t worry about it so much. If they meant to discipline you, they would have. If you’ve been working for so long and never heard about it, it might even be something that they only require for like, more advanced people. Or something like that.” 

It wasn’t ironclad logic or anything, but neither was her own unspoken anxiety, and hearing it out of Kiara’s mouth did inexplicably make her feel better.  “You know, that does actually help,” she admits with a bit of a huff. “Thank you.” 

“Yeah.” Kiara gives her a subdued smile, ignoring Calli’s indignation completely. “We’re all in this together, I think. Well, not this as in anything specific but, just… this… existing. No wonder I keep forgetting things if my memory has to stretch that long - wait. Huh! I think this is helping if I keep on remembering things. Or maybe it just takes time. Anyways, together, right?”

Calli actually laughs at that. Perhaps she really did need a break after all, damnit. “If just sitting around and talking is getting the job done, I guess that isn’t so hard.” 

“That’s the spirit! Actually, do you want to tell me about your job a little? I was having an okay time with this nature program or whatever, but I have no idea what they’re talking about,” Kiara says a little sheepishly, gesturing at the documentary that was still in Frajenkamist and not in any language Kiara spoke.

“You know? Why the hell not. I’m not exactly working right now, but I do have a lot of stories. So back when I was a little reaper in training…”

As soon as she starts telling stories about her past, the time just starts flying by. It’s actually kind of worrying how easy it was, truth be told, but Kiara turns out to be a good listener and amusing conversation partner even when amnesiac. Plus, Calli didn’t really have anyone to talk about any of this before, so she gets to get in some complaining too. It wasn’t as embarrassing as she thought to go over some of her more self-inflicted issues as well - although with a start, she realizes that Kiara’s still gonna remember this when she gets her memories back and returns to her normal clingy state. … Well, that’s a problem for future Calli.

And as she does, she can practically see Kiara’s soul reassembling. The reaper carefully keeps away from phoenix-related anecdotes so as to not jostle anything too hastily, but the more she talks about her past the more random bits and pieces come back to Kiara, and even when she’s not saying anything her eyes keep lighting up in recognition, and she seems more animated than before. It’s actually kind of gratifying to see, although Calli hopes she’s not developing a habit. 

But there’s only so many stories she can tell before their conversation shifts back to harder to talk about things. “What do people do here besides work?” Kiara asks, and Calli honestly has no idea. Apart from her colleagues, she has very little interaction with the Underworld at large. Most of her very long existence has been taken up by the gargantuan task of becoming the heir apparent to Death itself, to the point where one of her closest non-work acquaintances is the bartender working at the bar she gets smashed at once a month. 

Of course, there’s no point beating around the bush, so Calli comes clean and admits it. “I don’t really know. There’s demons and devils and the like as well as reapers, but I mostly keep to my job.”

“What about before you had your job?”

“I didn’t really… exist in a meaningful sense?” Calli frowns, trying to figure out the best way to explain the metaphysics of the scenario. “By the time I was a distinct being, I had already been doing this for a while. That’s just kind of what being a reaper entails.”

“I kinda thought that you might have like, sent in a job application or something,” Kiara admits. “Not that that makes sense really, but it would have been funny. Being made for the role… That’s kind of cool, but also a little sad.

“Sad?”

Kiara nods. “Like, what about the things you want to do, rather than the things you were assigned to do? Now that you’re your own person and whatnot.”

Calli’s kind of upset that Kiara cottoned on so fast to the dilemma she’d been facing for a bit. “I dunno,” she says. “I’ve never really thought about it.” It’s a lie, but only barely. She's basically just scratched the surface, after all.

“Then you should go looking for it, right?” Kiara said, leaning forward as she did. It was almost an offensively simple solution, made even worse by the fact that Calli hadn’t figured that out at all. “There’s gotta be something that people do around here for themselves. Like… Glowy-magical-rocks-san had a store despite being a reaper. You could do something like that too, right?”

“… I suppose?” Calli said, although she had a feeling she knew where this was going.

“Yeah! And you’ve been here all this time, and you haven’t ever seen anyone but reapers? We should go do that! See some stuff!” Kiara revealed her true intentions with that, but damn it all she still made a good point. 

Still, though, she has to deflate her sails just a little bit. “You know living souls aren’t allowed into Hell at all, right? At least not without a guilty verdict.”

Kiara winces at that, stopped entirely in her tracks. “Oh… Well, that’s fine, but you should still go yourself, okay? It’s still worth it.” The look of palpable disappointment is really funny on the one hand, but on the other hand Calli does feel a little bad. Thankfully, she’s got a way to fix this. 

Calli gives a smug little smile, and Kiara’s look of sadness morphs into one of confusion. “Well, I would go alone, but…”

“Yo, dude, since when did they make visitor passes to Hell?” J-chad asked.

Calli sighed. “I asked Death the same thing myself.” Kiara grinned, proudly displaying the lanyard on her chest as if it were completely and totally normal. “It’s a new thing, obviously.”

“No kidding.” J-chad shook her head incredulously, but she seemed pretty amused by the whole scenario. “So what’s up? Why’d the boss make an entire new rule for you, miss phoenix?” The demon asks curiously. 

“I dunno!” Kiara said cheerfully. “But it’s kinda great, isn’t it? Anyways, I’m Takanashi Kiara, and I’ve forgotten most of the rest of what I am! Nice to meet you.”

“Huh. That’s a new one… Ah, whatever, Calli’ll take care of things, I think. Can't tell you my real name cause of the whole demon true names thing, but you can call me J-chad. Calli’s an old friend of mine - we worked together way back and hit it off.” She shakes Kiara’s hand vigorously, and even though Kiara is basically just her soul it still looks like she’s getting yanked around. But J-chad has that effect on most people, incorporeal ghosts or otherwise.

To her credit, though, Kiara is completely unphased by the rough handshake even as her arm wisps in and out of corporeality from the force. “Yeah, she’s been -“

“ - Aiding her as my duties entail,” Calli interjects. She gets the feeling that if Kiara explains, J-chad will get the wrong idea of the situation. “Her death was very irregular, which is why she’s here instead of reincarnating like normal. Something messed up her soul big time.”

“Yep yep, special circumstances and all that. I gotta say, though, this seems a lot nicer than the usual stuff you have to do.”

“It’s been… a change of pace, that’s for sure,” Calli admits. “Usually my assignments suck a lot more.”

“I’ll say,” Kiara laughs. “This one doesn’t have any, uh, whatchamacallits… magical singularities, right?”

“You told her about all that crap?” J-chad raises an eyebrow behind her shades. “Last I heard you still hated anything to do with cantaloupes.”

“Look, that was a long time - well, I mean, we have met before, so it isn’t that weird to talk about it. This is just the first time she’s down in here, cause yknow.” Calli says almost to herself rather than to her friend. Kiara is surely catching on to how Calli’s being evasive, but she doesn’t correct her at all. But why is she being dodgy in the first place? It feels like something she should do, but at the same time she can’t find a valid reason as to why.

“Heh, fair enough. I mean, I knew something was up when Calli asked to meet up, since she’s not exactly the type for social calls. You should be flattered, Kiara, you’ve apparently hit it big in the underworld.” The demon flips her a thumbs-up.

“Yeah, people have been really nice to me for sure,” Kiara noted, then turned to wave at a passerby. The devil didn't respond at first, but when the phoenix called out, they noticed the three people looking at them, did a double take, and then scurried away. "Except for them, I guess," Kiara says, nonplussed.

"They're probably scared of us," Calli admits. 

"But why? You're so nice, and J-chad seems cool. I don't see any reason to be afraid." 

Calli gives their little group a once over. She is the apprentice to the ruler of the entire Underworld, running quite a big chunk of the mortal coil and personally responsible for the most intricate and most gruesome deaths. It's not helped by the fact that she's wearing her reaping outfit, both because this is technically part of her job and because she doesn't really have much else in the way of outfits. J-chad cuts an even more imposing figure than Calli does, being both taller and more strongly built, and the poor devil has probably seen her in action at least a couple times over their life. Hell’s enforcers are a pretty scary group, even if J-chad’s not on the clock at the moment. Lastly, Kiara might not have been as threatening as the other two in her current state, but the sheer fact that a phoenix is strolling around in Hell and isn’t dead is already strange enough that Cali can’t blame anyone for just not wanting anything to do with the whole scenario. “I can think of a couple of reasons,” she says understatedly.

“Might think we’re on official business or something,” J-chad says. “People don’t like to get in the way of the reapers, and for good reason.” 

“Maybe it’s the lanyard,” Kiara suggests. Calli stares at her, and Kiara’s face remains blank - that is, until she starts laughing, unable to control herself anymore. “Look, when you first showed it to me you were all smug, but every other time you took it out you looked like you had the worst headache,” she gets out after her laughter subsides into mild giggling. “Feels like it might have some cursed power.” 

“Oi.”

“Wait, Calli was acting coy about it?” J-chad’s smile starts growing in worrying fashion. “Tell me more.” 

“Well, you see-“

“OI! Absolutely none of that,” Calli growls, and the two stop - although Kiara’s face is still flush with laughter. Damned Kusotori. 

“Alright, alright, your secret is safe with me!” Kiara salutes with far too much enthusiasm. J-chad breaks out into a grin, and Calli lets out a long suffering sigh. She’s grateful to J-chad for agreeing to show them around, but that doesn’t stop her from maybe regretting introducing the two.

“Yeah, let’s do some sightseeing already. I finally have an excuse to drag Calli around to have some actual fun, after all, so we’d better take it.” Okay, yeah, she definitely regretted it.

Chapter Text

“And here’s the Lake of Fire! The… what do mortals call it now, flows into it.”

“The River Phlegethon.”

“Yeah, that one. Actually a pretty good swimming spot if you’re fireproof enough to handle it. That seems like it’d be up your alley, right?”

“Oh, probably! The heat, not the swimming. I’m… actually not sure if I can swim yet. I probably could at some point, but it sounds dangerous!”

“Well, yknow, can’t really die in Hell. But it definitely could be unpleasant, and then the deathguard would have to fish you out… yeah, maybe if you come back with your memories.”

“Yeah, I’ll hold you to that! That sounds like a great day.”

Kiara and J-chad had hit it off really well - maybe even too well, although Calli didn’t know if that was possible. Nonetheless, it still felt pretty awkward for her to be on the sidelines while they laughed and joked with each other, unsure of how to join in or whether she should in the first place. She’d never thought that she needed to be good at communicating with anyone outside of her job, but evidently she was mistaken. 

“Actually, Calli,” Kiara was speaking to her now, and Calli tried to shake off her thoughts and focus on the here and now. J-chad was showing Hell to her, not just Kiara, so she had to give it the attention it deserved. “Wouldn’t that be kinda cool to do even if we didn’t swim? We could all hang out at a beach part, or maybe there’d be some kinda hot springs part to it?” There was obvious pleading in her voice, so Calli tried her best to push past her immediate rejection of the idea.

“Not much sand out here, but the whole thing is kinda hot springy, and there’s a bathhouse… somewhere along the whole thing.” J-chad gestured out at the flaming coastline. “Almost done with what I had planned, so if you want we could check it out.”

“I’m not sure…” Calli says after a bit. She honestly can’t figure out why she’s so reluctant to go on this trip, but she is. 

“That’s fair, I guess,” Kiara says, although she sounds disappointed again. This time Calli doesn’t have a lanyard to assuage her, it’s just her own instinctual reaction. “But just the two of us could go, right? I think going alone would be impossible even with the visitor pass thing, but J-chad could vouch for me.”

J-chad contemplates the offer for a bit, then nods. “That sounds good to me. It’s been a longass time since I’ve been there, but I recall it being pretty comfy. But, uh, Calli, is it really alright for you to be leaving? She is your charge, right? You’re the expert here, but this seems like pretty uncharted territory to me.” J-chad scratches her head in puzzlement, ponytail threatening to catch on fire.

“Hmm, you might have a point…” Calli pauses to consider it. J-chad’s definitely right. None of this has ever been done before, or even anything close. That being said, as Death’s apprentice she has the power to decide what’s allowed here, especially since she did get their tacit permission to handle the whole Kiara situation the way she saw fit. 

So what does she think about the situation? First, she has to figure out exactly why she doesn’t want to go. The more Calli thinks about it, the more it seems that she just… wouldn’t fit into that kind of an environment. Hot springs are where some kind of socialization and relaxation happens, Calli vaguely understands, and neither of those really fit her. Kiara and J-chad, sure, but Calli? She gets the feeling she’d be lost. It’s probably better off to just leave the two of them alone.

… But now Calli doesn’t feel quite right about that, either. This time her unease feels even more nebulous than before, where she had at least some reasoning to work with. Now she just feels like she shouldn’t let this happen, like something will go wrong. But what? It’s just going to be Kiara seeing the Underworld with the friend she introduced specifically so she could show Kiara the Underworld. It doesn’t make any sense. This is what she planned, isn’t it? Then why does Calli still feel that she needs to go with them? 

But then realization dawns upon her: she’s uneasy because she isn’t the type to leave things unfinished. Takanashi Kiara has been her responsibility since she reached out a hand to her, and even though she could delegate that duty to someone else it wouldn’t be right to just completely wash her hands of the matter. She trusts J-chad, but any number of things could possibly go poorly anyways. So she has to be there, no matter what. Something still feels like it’s not quite right with that explanation, but she can’t sit around and think forever (even if she wanted to, which she kind of doesn’t).

“Actually, I think I will join you,” Calli says after her long pause. Hopefully it wasn’t too awkward. “If that’s alright with you.”

“Hell yeah! Er, pun not intended.” Kiara’s eyes practically light up. She’s really happy to hear that, isn’t she? 

“Yep, that sounds good to me. Not everyone would listen to me at first, I think, but they all know who you are. It’ll make things easier,” J-chad says, and Calli’s wondering why she didn’t think about that. For some reason, her logic for not wanting to go is seeming flimsier and flimsier. She also feels a lot better about the whole scenario now that she’s going to be there too, which is surprising. It still sounds awkward, but it feels better than the alternative.

“Um, right. Let’s go, then?” Calli asks. The other two nod, one very happy and one with a hint of friendly exasperation. The reaper really feels like she’s missing something here, but there’s no time to think about it - they have a hot spring to go to.

The hot springs attendant is just as surprised as Calli expects, and honestly she’s a little grateful. Kiara is too good at rolling with the punches and J-chad is no slouch, either, so Calli’s been wondering if she was the only one at all who thought it was weird. But she’s a professional and leads them to a little bubbling pond of lava for the three of them. 

“Um,” Kiara asks as she surveys the place. There’s a distinct tinge of embarrassment to her voice. “Is there like, a place where I can have some privacy here? Although I don’t even know if I can or should change, so…” 

“I think there’s a changing room over there,” J-chad points out. “Do you want to go first?” 

“Um, yes. Thank you,” Kiara says, and she scurries into the aforementioned room. 

“Why’s she being so shy about this?” Calli asks.

J-chad looks at her, then pulls her shades down and gives her a harder look. Calli doesn’t like how incredulous she’s being. “I thought it would be kinda obvious.” 

“She knows that I’ve reaped her countless times before. There’s nothing about her body I don’t know about.”

“… Yeah, but that was while you were on the job, and being at a hot spring is a lot different than that.” 

“I don’t follow.”

J-chad sighs a little bit, and Calli feels like she’s failed some kind of a test. “I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as you aren’t gonna question it to her face.”

“Well, yeah,” Calli replies, “I just thought it was a little weird.” Kiara’s thrown herself at Calli quite a few times; the reaper would have thought that she would have no issues with it. Maybe it was because she didn’t have any memories at the moment? That would explain it, probably.

Eventually, Kiara comes out wrapped in a towel. She’s flushing a little bit still, looking a lot more bashful then Calli thinks is normal. “Umm…”

“You can just go into the lava. The towels here are enchanted, so they won’t melt or soak or anything,” Calli says. She might not get Kiara’s sudden embarrassment, but it’s none of her business anyways. 

“Right, right…” Kiara gingerly dips a toe into the lava, but Calli can tell that it’s not the heat that she’s worried about. “Umm…”

“Here, Calli, let’s get undressed, alright?” J-chad says, ushering her away. Calli lets herself be pulled into the room without any fuss, which presumably gives Kiara the space to get into the pool by herself. Despite how unwieldy her outfit is, the enchantments on it let her strip down in less than a minute - but then she hangs back for a bit, aware that perhaps she should give Kiara some time. J-chad comes out in her own towel, then nods at Calli in acknowledgement as they come back into the springs.

When they get there Kiara’s already soaking in the lava, looking a lot more comfortable now that there’s a bubbling layer of molten material in between her body and the eyes of the other two. “It’s really nice in here!” she calls out with a wave. 

“Oh yeah, it’s great isn’t it?” J-chad says as she slips into the pool. Calli follows in after a short pause on the other end of the hot springs, forming a little triangle with the three of them. It is kind of nice, actually, the warm lava really getting into some areas of her body that she doesn’t really remember existing. Maybe she needs to keep her physical form in a bit of a better shape, especially since she’s pretty sure shoulder bones aren’t supposed to do that in an alive body. She stretches out really wide, trying to wring out the soreness now that she realizes that it’s there.

“Um, so.” Kiara asks. She’s carefully not looking at Calli’s location for some reason. “Why do you look like a human?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like…” Kiara seems to be having a rough time explaining herself. “You’re Death for everyone, not just humans, and you weren’t born or anything. So why do you look like that? Not that, um, you look bad or anything.”

“Well, I like how it looks, and it helps people get more used to being dead if they see that their reaper is a person too.” Calli’s words are probably a little jumbled because she’s still trying to work out the soreness in her body, so she isn’t paying full attention to them. “I figured you’d like it better if I looked like a human rather than as an abstract incarnation of death.”

“I, uh, I see…” And now Kiara’s awkward again. Damn, Calli must be doing something wrong here. If only she could figure out what…

“Calli has good taste, doesn’t she?” J-chad nods approvingly. “Even if she barely uses it. I was quite pleasantly surprised to find out she was actually calling me for social reasons, actually. Usually she’s just all work all the time… This is technically work, sure, but there’s no reaping at all, just chilling.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I need to take more breaks, I don’t need to hear it from both of you…” Calli said, sinking further and further into the lava and sighing in half relief, half exasperation. It was a lot harder to disagree when she was submerged in the warm lava, body making all sorts of unpleasant physical twinges of discomfort. If anything, it made it clearer that she was probably running her physical forms too harshly. 

“Both of you, eh?” J-chad says, looking over at Kiara. 

“… Yeah, I talked to her a little about it,” Kiara says hesitantly. 

“Nice, nice! You can be my compatriot in getting Calli to actually do stuff for fun sometimes. I’ve been trying for so long, but maybe she’ll listen to you more.” 

“Really?”

“Yeah! I mean, Calli, we’ve known each other ever since, let’s see…” 

“It was like, eight hundred years ago. You brought me around Hell and we beat up a bunch of demons who were getting bored and started fighting the management.”

“Wait, that was the fuckin Crimson Rebellion, wasn’t it?. You’re understating it a little .” J-chad laughs, clapping her on the back. “Yeah, I thought we knew each other before that, but you’re the one plugged into Death I guess, makes sense that you’d know better. But damn, lemme tell you, Calli was a sight to see out there. Most of the reapers they send out to solve problems in hell need a good bit of help with the job, but she just tore through ‘em like paper.”

“It really wasn’t that big of a deal, honestly,” Calli elaborates to Kiara. “The wars all have fancy names like that, but for the demons it’s just what they do for fun.”

“But Ornias has been doing it for millenia, and then a single reaper comes in and sends his ass packing! Look, we were having a big ol drawn out fracas with battle lines and espionage and tactics and all that, but just the two of us were enough to get the point across immediately. It was sick! Wait, where was I…” J-chad shook herself out of the memories, giving Calli a little time to feel embarrassed about the praise she was getting. “Oh yeah. But ever since then, we’ve been working together, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of her going on a break. I kept pestering her, but the most she’d do is go get drinks with me. But I think if we team up, we can maybe get her to actually take some time for herself.”

“You know?” Kiara says, smiling a little more and finally seeming to get comfortable. “That sounds good to me. Calli, get ready, we’re gonna drag you off to go… do… uh, girl stuff! Wait, what girl stuff is there in hell?”

“I don’t know what you mean by girl stuff,” J-chad admits. “I’m Underworld born and raised, and there’s way too many different surfaces to keep anything straight about ‘em all. Maybe once you get your memories back, you’ll be able to drag her around for…  whatever that means, yourself.”

“I’ll have a better idea once I do, but we can still see what I can remember right now.” Kiara starts muttering to herself. “Shopping, restaurants, dueling, cafes, monster hunting, hiking…”

“You should be able to do all of those things here,” Calli says. Some of them seem a little off, but she doesn’t know that much about mortal pastimes either. “But I’m afraid that if you get back your memories, you probably won’t be able to stay down here that much longer. Phoenixes are life incarnate, after all, and that fundamentally conflicts with being here.”

“Well, then clearly you should go topside and meet up with her then, Calli.”

Calli blinks once, then shakes out her head, and then blinks again. “… What.”

“If she can’t hang out down here with you, then you should go hang out up there with her,” J-chad says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world for a phoenix and a reaper to just go out for a date. 

“Wait, but, no. Why would I - no, that’s not it, I’m not saying it’s because of you in particular, Kiara, it’s just, um, that would be a lot of effort to go through just for that. Going to the world of the living is really expensive, I mean.” Thankfully Kiara doesn’t seem too offended at her misspeaking, but Calli was still beating herself up for it a little. Fuck, she was stupid.

“Yeah, but how many obols have you saved up? I bet you could swim in ‘em if you really wanted to.” Calli thought about her bank account with a somewhat silly number of zeros, and declined to comment. “It’ll be good for you, I think! Kiara also deserves some quality time with you with her memories, right?”

“Well…” Calli wasn’t really going to just come out and say it, but she did just genuinely enjoy this Kiara’s company a lot more. Having to constantly ignore Kiara’s flirting attempts was pretty annoying, especially when that was pretty much all of the interactions that they did. Why the phoenix thought that hitting on her was the best use of their five minutes a century she didn’t know, but now that she’d stopped it certainly made a lot more sense why people seemed to flock to her. Even when at her lowest, she did an admirable job of getting you to put out your best effort… Calli shook her head, trying to get something concrete to respond with together.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I totally get -“

Calli cuts off Kiara’s apologetic response right then and there. “Honestly, that sounds like a good idea. I’ll look into it.”

“W-wait! What?! Hold on, really?” Kiara stammers out, completely taken off guard.

“Yes.”

“Calli, uh, you don’t have to do this for my sake, alright? I’ve, uh, gotten the picture pretty well of what I was like beforehand. Seriously, I’ll be fine.”

“I’m realizing that I haven’t given you a fair shake,” Calli says. “It makes sense to be distant normally because reapers only see most people for very short periods of time, but phoenixes are definitely an exception. It’d be good to be… more familiar with each other, I guess.” She trails off awkwardly, not knowing how to continue without phrasing it too weirdly. “Or something like that.”

“I… Calli…” The reaper isn’t sure if Kiara is happy or not, but it seems like there’s a lot of emotions going through her head right now. Calli’s starting to panic a little, if she’s honest with herself.

“… Kiara, are you alright? Um, sorry, did I say something wrong?

J-chad wades over, giving the phoenix a good look. “Hmm, she looks okay to me... You feel alright, Kiara?”

“Yeah. Yeah… yeah… I’m, just… yeah, I’m fine,” Kiara stammers out. “Just… that was really nice, and I wasn’t expecting that.”

“It’s not really being nice, it’s just, you know, not being rude anymore. I think. Look, just give it some thought, right?” Calli sighs. Being more accomodating is really difficult.

Kiara’s refusing to meet her eyes, looking down in her direction at the lava - but as she does so, she jerks back up, face going even redder and looking away. Is there something wrong with her body? She doesn’t use it all that much, so something might have gone wrong. Maybe she should ask… not now, though, it seems that Kiara is a little overwhelmed. 

J-chad laughs about something, but Calli’s not sure what she’s finding so funny. “Damn, Calli, you really are a little different now, huh? Good on you.” She offers a fist bump, and Calli returns it still a little confused. “Tell me about it once you have your little date, I’ve always wanted to go back topside.”

“Date?” She doesn’t understand what J-chad means. She thinks it has something to do with short time frames, but her knowledge of mortal time scales is very lacking. She looks over at Kiara to gauge if she knows more, but Kiara’s still flushing, so Calli shrugs and lets it go. J-chad always had a better grasp on mortal slang and the like; maybe she should research it some more.

The conversation mostly trails out, Calli feeling a little awkward as she tries to figure out what she missed, Kiara looking like she’s just working herself back up to talk again, and J-chad just lying back and enjoying the hot springs. It is definitely nice, that much is for sure, but once again, she’s a little confused as to what’s going on. That being said, the warm feelings she’s getting aren’t entirely from the sensation of the lava, and she decides that whatever happened here, it was probably fine.