Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

George is seventeen when he meets his new team. He’s the standout retention student, mild-mannered and friendly enough to handle any weapon with ease yet unable to resonate with any of them. He’s had five interim partners that have since moved out into the field without him, and George doesn’t like the bitter of resentment under his tongue but, well. It simmers there, quiet, unloved, a salt-solid reminder that he may become a figurative casualty in the DWMA books, the stellar meister that never found a partner. 

Part of it is, of course, functionality; meisters and meisters-in-training participate in physical training, but genetics are genetics, and George just isn’t built for heavy-duty weapons. Take Schlatt, the big-headed rocket launcher who paired with George for three days before moving on to bigger and better things (read: the EAT class with Death’s eldest son , of all people), or Niki. She was one of his longer partnerships, with their five months of tentative double lessons, before a proud girl with a white waterfall of hair and deafeningly blue eyes strode into the lower-level classes, and it was all over from there for George and his sniper rifle friend. But that’s not an excuse for Skeppy, a lighthearted reel of bolas who could be toted around in one hand; nor his brief stint with Ponk, a pity partnership formed temporarily whilst the trainer’s meister, Sam, was undercover in Ilsan; nor Ninja, an older student and iron kunai, who left George bereft two weeks into their partnership and died on a mission not long after.

So - George is learning to tuck his shoulders close to his chest and soften the harsh lines of gritted teeth into a distantly welcoming smile. He’s learning that his strength is to lower his hackles, to show the underside of his belly; he’s learning that without unequivocal kindness and spring’s-breeze attitude, he will never be able to handle the heft of a weapon again.

Which is why when Alyssa and Callahan, all sympathetic faces and gentle hands, herd him into an unused classroom with two unfamiliar students seated inside, George clasps his hands together and beams with a verve he absolutely does not feel.

“Hello there!” he greets cheerily, crossing the room and extending a hand to one of them. “My name is George, he/him. I’m a third-year training meister. You are…?”

The student he offered a hand to studies him with a cautiousness that eases the simmer of George’s worries in a roundabout sort of way (at least he’s not the only wary one in the partnership). They’re dressed in a sleeveless hoodie that would probably make anyone else look like a gym rat but mostly serves to draw George’s eye to the myriad slashes that wind up their freckled arms, and a white mask - porcelain, maybe - with a crude smiley face dangles from their neck by a fraying cord. When they grin gingerly at him and reach out to shake his hand, it delineates the vicious three-pronged scar that rakes across their forehead, their nose, the inner corners of their eyes.

“I’m Dream, he/him. Second-year,” he says, cordially but not uncomfortably so. Beside him, the shorter and more rugged-looking student snorts and nudges Dream with their toe.

“You always act so polite when you meet new people, dude,” they tease, not unkindly, and George feels the briefest splash of envy at the ease with which the two laugh at one another before the unfamiliar student turns to him and hums with a flash of their teeth that’s half a smirk and half a snarl.

“Sapnap, he/him, first-year.” Sapnap’s shorter, with dark hair in buns and a distinct black-and-white motif that reminds George involuntarily of pandas. He holds himself with a casual grace that he seems to share with Dream, and just looking at them, George can tell that they’re both weapons, good ones, and he’s having a hard time gauging whether the swoop in his stomach is anticipatory or anxious. Still, it’s not an unfamiliar feeling, and he swallows it with practiced ease as he asks, “So, what weapons are you two? I’m assuming you already know each other?”

Dream lifts and drops one shoulder as Sapnap snorts again. “Yeah, you could say that,” the latter says flippantly, patting Dream on the back and smirking when Dream shrugs him off. “Dream used to wield me for a bit before the administration got pissy and said we needed a proper meister to resonate with.”

George hesitates. It’s not unheard of for weapons to be able to wield, necessarily, but it is unusual enough that it gives him pause. “So…?”

“I mean, you’re gonna be meistering both of us. We’re kind of a package deal,” Sapnap drawls, dropping back into his seat and cradling his chin in one hand as he watches the emotions cycle rapidly over George’s face with something like amusement in his eyes. “Not really a conventional duo, but you’re stuck with us, Georgie-boy.”

George is regretting getting out of bed. “Well, what weapons are you?” he asks again, feeling not unlike a broken record.

Dream offers him a look of genuine pity. “I’m a battle axe,” he says with a tone edging on apologetic, which - okay. Okay.

“Okay,” replies George blankly. Looks to Sapnap. “And you’re - ”

Sapnap beams victoriously. “A flamethrower.”

“Christ,” George says, faint.

“He won’t be able to pick us up,” says Dream ruefully to Sapnap in a stage whisper, as though George isn’t right there .

“I resent that,” says George, loudly and reproachfully. “I’ll have you know I’m an excellent meister.”

Sapnap eyes him and snorts, not unkindly, “With those twig arms? I doubt it.”

George doesn’t particularly consider himself a competitive person by nature. It’s partly why wielding comes so easily to him; smooth waters means smooth sailing, even if it doesn’t eke out the sudden superhuman strength of being caught in an unnavigable squall. If he’s placid, unflappable, constantly composed, there’s no chance of the splintering pain of an incompatible bond when he wraps his fingers around the handle of a weapon.

Something about Sapnap and his brash, flippant air, though, inexplicably ruffles George’s feathers.

“Do you want to bet on that?” George demands, stalking forward in spite of himself, and allows himself to savor the startled look that flickers over Sapnap’s face at the unexpected boldness. “I think you’re underestimating me a little, here.”

Dream, cautiously, says, “That... that wasn’t a challenge - ”

“Oh, yes, it was.” Sapnap steamrolls right over Dream’s words, the sharklike grin returning to his face with a gleeful vengeance. “Come on, shortstack, bet!”

“Bet!” George snaps back, then has to retreat a few steps as Sapnap liquifies, spills into a braided mess of molten silver, nearly sloshes over George’s shoes in what George is absolutely convinced is meant to be a smirking “fuck-you” before he ricochets like rubber into the approximate size and shape of -

A flamethrower, with pearl-white plating and sleek black accents, tongues of fire mosaicing either side of the barrel. Sapnap’s face peers up through the flames, teeth bared. “Let’s go, bitch!” he crows delightedly.

“Why,” asks Dream despairingly, “do you have to pick a fight with every meister we meet. Is this some sort of ego trip for you, dude?”

George swallows his apprehension sharply - he’s wielded a fucking rocket launcher, of course he can handle a flame-decal wannabe of a similar incendiary device, how different could they possibly be - and kneels to Sapnap’s side. Reality is beginning to crash in like a tidal wave, the realization that the literal reason he keeps himself all neat and boxed in against outbursts is to avoid both the physical and figurative pain of incompatibility. He’s just completely thrown that out the window, and it makes him hesitate, his fingers mere inches from the trigger.

“Pussying out?” Sapnap goads, and George’s dormant competitiveness rears its head once again; he can barely hear Dream’s hand making contact with his face over the roar in his ears as his hand darts out to grab Sapnap. 

He nearly overbalances from how easily the four-foot flamethrower heaves upward in his hands.

It takes barely any effort at all to sling the flamethrower over his shoulder, and like the chime of a bell, the echo of a droplet in a lake, something rings through George, thrums at the point of contact between his hand and Sapnap’s handle, warming him even as the rest of him chills, mesmerized.

A beat of stunned silence. Two.

“...Huh,” says Sapnap, surprise shining in the reflection of the flamethrower’s armor. “This was unexpected.”

“Wow,” whispers George involuntarily, flexing his fingers experimentally on the handle, marvelling at the lack of pain, the lack of distance: just him, and Sapnap, and Dream watching them both with wide eyes. “I… wow.”

George, Sapnap, and Dream are moved into the EAT class within the hour.

[...]

One thing to note about Wilbur Soot: he isn’t really someone who suffers from nightmares. Even his dreams have a dazed, diaphanous quality to them, one step too removed from reality for him to mistake it as such. More often than not, he’ll wake up with only a vague impression of gemlike color before the dregs fade and he’s left a lump in his sheets, waiting for either Phil of Techno to barge in and drag him out to face the big bad world kicking and screaming.

The dream that haunts Wilbur is the only one with sharp edges.

It’s a Sunday night, and Wilbur and his brothers are playing video games, cramped together on the sofa even though there are two other armchairs around them. The living room light is gentle. The rain is a soothing monotony. Tommy is cussing him out. Techno is rolling his eyes. Wilbur is laughing so hard his stomach hurts.

A dazzling arc of lightning lances through the sky, then, and a hungry, thunderous roar echoes from beyond the rattling windowpanes as the wind picks up. They all stop, stare out into the night. A wary silence. Tommy cracks a nervous joke. Techno’s fingers twitch. Wilbur holds his breath.

A dark, writhing shape hurtles through the window, knocks in the wall, shatters the glass. Through the long splinter of a wayward shard, a devastated blue eye.

Wilbur screams.

Looking back on it, Wilbur’s amazed his father made it home in the condition he was in. Phil was frothing at the mouth, half-bestial, snapped feathers skimming the scraped skin of his knuckles and climbing up over his gashed shoulders like a thicket of ivy, his ivory Lines of Sanzu smashing to the floor in a tangled skew. What Wilbur remembers most distinctly is the shatter of Phil’s primaries, the battered and half-unravelled diamonds that spatter his wings buckled. Remembers thinking, almost impersonally, He won’t be able to fly.

It’s been months since the worst night of Wilbur’s life, but Death still hesitates before spreading his wings, still turns in his seat to speak before realizing no one is tagging at his heels where there used to be dozens. The rate of Kishin occurrences has doubled in the wake of what people have started to call Walpurgisnacht as more and more souls corrupt without the weight of Death’s ever-present eyes upon them.

Walpurgisnacht. The Feast of Saint Walpurga. The Witches’ Night. 

Names give things power. Wilbur knows this full well, as a child of Death. It seems wrong to give power to something that broke Phil so thoroughly, that made orphans and widows and childless parents of hundreds of good meisters and weapons. He thinks it might have been unfathomable once - the razing of all fifty of Death’s beloved Scythes - and yet. And yet.

They’re weak right now, the lot of them. Wilbur’s a tad old to be re-entering this cycle of EAT class, but he and Schlatt are still reaming out the creases in their converging storylines and the class that preceded them are pretty much all dead. Thusly, he’s stuck in a schoolroom with something like twenty strangers and six instructors who all know the mortality rate of the average EAT class is between thirty to seventy percent in the twenty years following graduation and the death knell-pressure of becoming the next generation of globe-trotting Kishin slayers. They don’t even have the certainty of Death Scythes that their forerunners had. 

And Wilbur -

Wilbur is the only son of Death who doesn’t have a drop of weapon blood in him, and he’d be able to stomach his future as just a meister if it weren’t for the fact that, even as the first child, he hasn’t inherited his father’s halos. The Lines of Sanzu are his birthright, in all technicality. Phil’s are silver in the right light, crowning him in three perfect ovals and highlighting his golden head, at once everything and nothing like an avenging angel. 

Tommy’s are white streaks painted right onto his straw-blond hair, broken in the middle, leaving him distinctly lopsided and unmistakably divine.

Techno is just shit icing on the shit cake, a teenage mature reaper with ringed hair indicating his position that Phil just fucking brought home one day like a bird with a shiny trinket. Wilbur’s never asked and Techno’s never said, but he thinks Techno’s past has been ugly, and the Lines have something to do with it, but he’s long figured out without a word that it’s not his place to ask.

And he tries not to be bitter, to be petty. He’s the eldest, isn’t he? He packs Tommy’s lunches, his after-school snacks, makes sure Techno leaves the house with brushed teeth and tamed hair. He’s the one who fusses over Phil when Techno can’t, bullies his father into sleeping once in a blue moon or sitting down to eat with his kids sometimes when he’s not too far to reach in a depressive fugue. He knows, logically, that their family unit, tattered round the edges, couldn’t function with the efficiency it does without him.

But the fact of the matter is: Wilbur’s soft, in a way Techno and Tommy aren’t. He can touch an instrument and coax beauty from it in a week, can sing as sweet as any witch’s spell, can scribe poems that have made Death himself shed tears. When people think of Death’s fighters, they think of Techno, the child of a destroyed clan, the last of his kin and Phil’s irreplaceable right hand, then of Tommy, a scrapper in his own right, a weapon form so loud and keen that he needs not one but two meisters dogging after him to keep him in check. Wilbur, the musician, the bard, the poet, is last. He’s always last.

Another thing to note about Wilbur Soot: he is nothing if not shrewd, if not starved, if not zealous.

And no one who knows him will tell you he isn’t something.

[...]

“I’m getting bad vibes,” Puffy hisses to her weapon the moment she steps into the classroom.

“You’ll get over it,” says Niki knowingly, as serene as always as she surveys their new classmates. She peacefully ignores the sound of Puffy gnashing her teeth.

It’s not a big class, all things considered; just twenty-four, not including the three pairs of trainers who are mingling with the students with easy expressions. There have been bigger groups before, entire slews of keen-eyed meisters and their weapons patrolling the city, getting sent on free-for-alls around the globe for the honor of presenting a Death Scythe to Death himself. The world was safe from madness once, or as safe as it could be.

Danger awaits at every corner, now. Puffy’s not the only student who’s opted for dorm life rather than risk renting out by campus and getting killed by a wandering Kishin looking for a snack. Walpurgisnacht proved without a shred of doubt that none of them are safe, especially not in light of the rising animosity between the coalitions of witches and Death. The Great Old One of Fear that once presided over them is long dead and gone, but sometimes, it feels like they’re just sleeping, lurking just below the crust of the earth or under Puffy’s chairlike a tell-tale heart. 

Puffy isn't afraid of much, but it’s impossible not to be afraid of the Great Old One of Fear itself.

Training to be one of the defenders of the next generation helps, in some ways. Puffy’s not going to pretend to be the most noble person she knows or anything, but in her humble opinion, training in the EAT class voluntarily given what happened a few months ago is pretty damn selfless. Even if she doesn’t exactly like the shifty looks some of her new classmates are levelling at one another, she can appreciate that they’re there at all - though whether they’re going to survive their careers is an entirely different can of worms. 

Take one of the groups of three, for instance. Puffy can tell just from a glance that they’re a fresh matchup, still uncertain of their hands on one another. It’s never a good sign if you can’t tell at a glance which of a triad is the meister. The tallest of the three keeps fiddling with the porcelain mask dangling from their freckled neck, and when they turn, Puffy’s taken aback by the vicious clawing scars down their face. Other students see it, too; she’s not the only one who recoils. The tall one notices them flinching away and flinches away themself. Their partners, both shorter with dark hair, throw blistering glares round and shift closer to their tall friend, and honestly, that’s probably deserved. She offers a weak little wave in half-assed apology. The partner with the black-and-white jacket hisses wordlessly at her. Puffy takes it as her cue to move on.

There doesn’t seem to be much to the other groups in comparison, if she’s being brutally honest. It’s a pretty plain-looking bunch this year: very few scars, very few quirks of physical appearance. It’s Puffy’s first-and-a-half year of the EAT program, she and Niki having joined late and not finished a full course, and she remembers her old class had been a fair bit louder in disposition - Finn, with the pretty eyes and mischievous laugh and fae presentation; Minx, distinctly off-putting at first glance with her crescent horns and abrasive vocabulary. 

The only student that Puffy thinks comes even slightly close is the kid she hears someone calling “Bad,” pale as a ghost, dark horns peeking out under the scarlet rim of their pitch-black hood. They’re sporting comically large, circular glasses that keep sliding down their nose. They’re a witch, if the rumors through the grapevine are to be believed. Death welcomes students of all backgrounds, though Puffy thinks it’s probably partly desperation. The edginess of their appearance is in direct contrast to literally everything else about them; Puffy can’t help the smirk that makes itself cozy on her lips when the kid’s friend - partner, most likely - accidentally knocks into them, and Bad swells with an indignant, “Skeppy, quit being a muffinhead!”

“Well, they should quit being annoying!” Skeppy shoots back, steadying themself on Bad’s arm and gesturing toward another partnership. Puffy follows Skeppy’s pointed finger, finds her brows raising when she gets a proper look at the motley crew making up the other resident group of three.

The tallest of them is instantly recognizable thanks to the neat cuts of white in his straw-blond hair. There’s only one reaper around here with incomplete Lines, and Puffy finds herself staring incredulously at the youngest child of Death, who’s practically being bodily restrained by his two partners as he hollers expletives at Skeppy. The first and only coherent thought that forms in Puffy’s head is a half-pitying, half-scoffing “immature” as she watches the boy - Tommy, if her sources (read: Niki) are correct - spit one last curse that makes her hair stand on end and stalk away, leaving his two partners alone in the middle of the classroom. 

The one with the buzzed head is the first to move: he shakes his head, glances over at his partner, pats him commiseratingly on the shoulder. The smaller doesn’t move. 

It’ll be a miracle if that group lasts long, thinks Puffy with the briefest hint of sympathy, then draws her attention elsewhere.

The short spat between Skeppy and Tommy is shaping up to be the most intense the makeshift meet-and-greet is going to get. There are still five minutes until class technically starts, but everyone seems to be settling in fairly well, finding kindred spirits with empty small talk and an ease that Puffy can’t help but resent a little, considering they might end up dead soon. Still, it doesn’t do anyone good to open a conversation with that particular train of thought - not after Walpurgisnacht. Even Puffy isn’t that tactless. She shelves that thought for a time that isn’t two-til-nine on a Wednesday morning and is just turning to save a seat for herself and Niki by the front row when she catches sight of the tallest person in the room and stops dead in her tracks.

They’re - they’re intimidating, at a glance. Too relaxed for the underlying tension, with an easy smile and shoulders loose as they lean against the far wall, one leg crossed over the other. Their dark hair halos their face, softens it further in combination with the wire-rim glasses and knitted beanie and overlarge jumper. They’d just look like a standard, scholarly kind of person, charmingly pretty in a bookish kind of way, if it weren’t for the sliver of strange, hungry light in their eye that Puffy catches when they shift over to murmur something to the person in the button-down who must be their weapon. It’s a gleam that sets Puffy’s teeth on edge and raises goosebumps on her arms.

“Alright, everyone, find a seat!” announces a trainer from the front of the room, and everyone scrambles - or almost everyone. The kid with the beanie and their partner saunter to the furthest row back, aiming for the seats closest to the emergency exit.

The trainer notices. “Let’s get some hustle, Wil,” he calls, not unkindly, and Puffy startles.

The person Puffy is wary of is Wilbur Soot, Death’s eldest. It simultaneously explains everything and nothing at all. The impression Puffy got of this boy’s father was one of a man who knew suffering and persevered, with a careworn countenance and tired blue eyes. Wilbur has inherited none of his parent’s gentility; despite the tick marks in his school health chart that must mark him dry of weapon blood, light needles off of him oddly, almost cutting in its clarity, and even without the Lines of Sanzu that would crown him the recipient of Death’s power, he’s somehow… strange. Puffy tries to sit as far from Wilbur as possible to keep an eye on him. 

Niki, naturally, makes a beeline for the seats right beside him; she, better than Puffy, knows how dangerous things should be handled.

[...]

Two minutes into their first job together, Schlatt leans in to knock his shoulder against his partner’s and say easily, “So, sweetheart, what’re you aiming for?”

Wilbur doesn’t look up from where he’s got Maps open on his phone, counting out the blocks until they reach their destination, which should have been cordoned off with yellow tape an hour ago. “Be more specific,” he replies, visibly distracted, holding up his phone to compare the digital map against their surroundings. Schlatt can’t help but grin at the bright blue five-minute ETA; there, they’ll find the first step in making a Death Scythe out of him. 

Schlatt leans harder and tsks, “No need to be touchy.” He’s being nosy, and he knows it, but the first son of Death is an enigma he badly wants to unpackage, and he’s a good enough scythe that he’d been allowed first pick of the batch of unpartnered meisters left other than his self-titled exes. He’d seen his opportunity and had taken it. He’s greedy like that, sometimes, hungry for things he probably shouldn’t be. He’s long accepted that he’s selfish, that he’s ambitious, that he always wants something more and something better. Neither of his old partners - skinny, sober George and brash, blustering Quackity - had been worth the time or trouble.

Schlatt can see the glint in his new meister’s eye. He can already tell Wilbur’s gonna be a little different.

Still, you don’t get diamonds without pressure, and a lot of it. “C’mon, buddy, you got a friend in me,” Schlatt teases, eliciting a grunt of irritation from Wilbur as he loops his arm through his partner’s. The movement jostles the phone free of Wilbur’s hand, and it lands with a flat crack on the uneven cobble road.

Wilbur’s experiences with his younger brother probably saves Schlatt’s life then; the meister only gives a gusty sigh and crouches to pick up his phone, tilts it this way and that perfunctorily when they both know the screen is shattered. He turns to shoot Schlatt an unimpressed look. Schlatt hums and flashes him a megawatt smile. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” says Wilbur wearily, though with enough good grace to let Schlatt know he’s not really angry. He pockets the hunk of metal and tucks his hands into his pockets, slackening their pace so that they’re less strolling and more crawling. “Well, as long as we’re talking, and I’m not distracted by my phone. What was your question again?”

Nice. Schlatt juts his chin out toward the ground to hide his pleased little smirk and repeats, “What are you after? What’s your goal with all this?”

“Making you a Death Scythe,” Wilbur replies instantly. There’s not even the barest second of hesitation. 

Schlatt purses his lips into a whistle. “Lofty dreams,” he says. “Color me impressed. But still, that’s pretty broad, don’tcha think?” He pokes at Wilbur’s arm, pleased to find his partner doesn’t shift away in annoyance; if they’re gonna get along, Wilbur’s gonna have to get used to Schlatt being clingy. “C’mon, there must be something else. That’s the standard-issue answer they hand kids through textbooks.” Schlatt narrows his eyes a little. “Any deep dark secrets down there?”

Wilbur’s gaze sharpens finer than the edge of a Death Scythe’s blade. Schlatt bites his thumbnail to smother his delighted grin. “So there are .”

“...You’re a little nosy, Schlatt,” Wilbur says finally, slowing to a stop in the middle of the street. His voice isn’t necessarily dangerous, but something in it sets Schlatt on edge. He halts at Wilbur’s elbow and tries to peer into his meister’s face. 

“Am I?” he says innocently, dancing just out of reach. “Sorry about that. Just sayin’, though, y’know? It’s literally so sad if your goal is just. ‘I’m going to dedicate my teenage years to making this dude a Death Scythe, and then I’ll die.’ That’s what I’m hearin’. Surely Death’s son could do a little better.”

Wilbur’s shoulders square and he spins on his heels, and for the first time since they got off the bus, Schlatt’s looking full-on into Wilbur’s face. What he sees makes him bite his tongue to keep the incredibly inappropriate grin from spreading. Wilbur has this habit of softening his face, making himself look somehow unassumingly demure and a little plain; he makes himself gauzy around the edges, even though he towers over most people and has a legend for a father. Schlatt had almost been disappointed when he first met Wilbur. This Wilbur, though - his gaze is locked with Schlatt’s, silently deadly, as his hair runs like a river into his eyes and bleeds down his face, dark, daring his loudmouthed partner to say one wrong thing.

Said loudmouthed partner knows exactly what he’s doing and how to push from here. “I mean, look at Fundy, buddy,” he says with plastic cheer, tapping obnoxiously on the street in his Oxfords. “You remember how he talked about his future? He’s got such a good weapon - he and Ranboo fit like peas in a fuckin’ pod - and when I asked him what he wanted to do, he goes, ‘I want to be happy.’” Schlatt shakes his head just thinking about it. Ranboo, reflected in the flat of his black-and-white katar blade, had nodded sagely as Fundy answered, but all Schlatt really got out of the interaction was a vague derision for the stupidly idealistic response and a pitying glance for the duo after the mission was over. Wilbur had seen it. He knows what Schlatt thought, not that Schlatt made any real effort to disguise his impression of the younger partnership.

“If it helps, I want to be a Death Scythe, too,” he adds encouragingly, just a drop enough of condescension to see Wilbur’s face flinch out of its very careful blankness. “Hell, I’d like that more than anything. Purgin’ the madness from the world would be fan-fuckin’-tastic. But you know what I really want?” He leans in and hisses through his clenched teeth, through a smirk that feels something like victory, “I wanna make history.”

Wilbur isn’t good enough to hide his quiet, surprised little inhale. 

“Come on. Doesn’t everybody want that? I wanna be known. I’m riskin’ my life out there, same as you, same as all the rest of the stupid kids in the DWMA who think they’re making a huge difference in the world when all we’re really doing is killing an ant or two from a whole colony. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a little legacy on the side?” It’s the truth, when you take a microscope to it; Schlatt has always wanted more than he’s got. This is just an extension, and as he articulates it into Wilbur’s brain, carves this irrevocably into both their heads. He knows he’s saying something horribly selfish, and that this could be what makes or breaks this for him. It’s a big risk, given Wilbur could go running straight to daddy and tattle on big bad Schlatt and his almost-treasonous tongue.

“Just to be upfront with you,” Schlatt finishes, leaning back and jamming his hands into the pockets of his crisp dress slacks. All his cards are on the table; Schlatt doesn’t much like playing it this way, but Wilbur’s his best shot at something bigger, something better, and for that to happen, they need to get along like two peas in a fuckin’ pod, too. 

Wilbur’s silent for a long moment, standing still in the middle of the street. Distantly, Schlatt can hear the Kishin they’re supposed to be cornering slobbering messily through the streets. 

“You know what, Schlatt?” Wilbur says suddenly, holding out his hand, palm to the toxin-purple sky, the moon with its hungry Cheshire grin. It’s an unspoken order - “Come here” - and Schlatt feels his face split into a grin as he liquifies, jumps into Wilbur’s hand, molds his handle and trigger mechanism around the fingers of his steel-eyed meister. 

“I think you and I are gonna be one hell of a team,” Wilbur breathes, and Schlatt, the iron-raw taste of Kishin soul welling anticipatory on his tongue, smiles.

[…]

It’s a bigger mission, but then, that’s why three teams have been sent. Bad’s not the biggest fan of the other duo team - Karl, a brass knuckles with a wild grin who “deezed” Bad thirty seconds into meeting him, and Quackity, with a quick tongue and an even quicker wit, who swears like a sailor and fights like one to boot - but he likes the trio well enough. George is a little deadpan, Sapnap a little brusque, Dream a little distant, but they smile readily at Bad’s soft anecdotes, and Dream is a dab hand at tracking Kishins, cocking his head to one side and tasting the air before setting off in a direction with a certainty that everyone else in the group lacks.

“You’re like a police dog,” snarks Skeppy from beside him, and Bad nearly hisses something to him about tact and mean comments, maybe drop him a spell that plays the squeaking of bats on loop and echoes round his ears, but Dream just shakes his head and chuckles.

“Training,” he tells them, leading them down an alleyway that spits them out into the main street of the fully-evacuated hamlet they’ve been sent to. “I’ve been in the Academy system for years. You learn a lot of little tricks from the teachers.”

Bad hums appreciatively. “That’s nice,” he says earnestly, pulling Skeppy along so that they’re walking side-by-side with the weapon. “It’s definitely good to have a leg up in this… branch of study.”

“Hardly a study,” snorts Sapnap, at the same time Quackity jumps on Bad’s words with a triumphant, “You know what else had a leg up last night? Your - ”

“If that sentence ends in ‘mother’ - ”

Dream’s arm shoots out. “Sh!”

Bad snaps his mouth shut, stops short of Dream’s outstretched hand. Everyone halts in place where they were walking, eyes round. Cold sweat breaks out on the back of Bad’s neck.

He doesn’t hear it at first. There’s only the groan of the mid-autumn wind as it slinks through the ramshackle houses lining either side of the road, like a sigh through broken teeth, whistling in the cracked doors. A torn curtain, patterned with rainflowers, flutters in a shattered window. It’s silent save the dread that burbles to life in Bad’s chest.

“Dream,” says George, tense.

“Listen,” Dream murmurs back.

Bad listens.

It grows in volume in the space of two seconds, exponential. One moment it’s the three teams frozen in the walk, flagstones uneven beneath their feet, and the next it’s a shredded wail that tears through Bad’s head with the blind force of a riptide at sea, and he bites back an instinctual spell as he staggers backward, Skeppy swearing a blue streak to his right.

“What the fuck,” begins Quackity, face white under his beanie, but before he can finish his thought, the cramped block of squat cottages to their left bursts in and an entire murder of warped-spine Kishin shamble into the street.

Bad feels goosebumps rise to his skin at the sight of them. The area where he and his parents lived was relatively clean of Kishin, and he was only ever evacuated from his neighborhood once or twice as a child and never really got the opportunity to see them up close; the most detailed he’s ever seen them lately are from textbook passages and Google images. He can tell it was the same for Skeppy and Quackity and Karl, all of whom are wide-eyed at the sight of the unnatural shapes the Kishin’s forms take, all twisted limbs and low-hanging jaws. The trio team, however, looks relatively unfazed, and are already warming up quickly with their gazes trained unwaveringly on the murder: Sapnap, teeth bared into something a tad too sharp to be a grin; George, snapping on his goggles and stretching his neck; Dream, pulling the tie of his mask tight over his face, his terse green eyes, his rasping scar. 

The Kishin leading the pack notices them, swivels its head a deeply disturbing two-hundred degrees to face them, and drops its mouth open to show off its forest of needlepoint teeth. Karl makes a horrified noise.

“Don’t play cute,” Sapnap taunts.

George rolls his eyes, visible even through the tint of his glasses. “Come on,” he tells the weapon, and doesn’t blink an eye as Sapnap guffaws and jumps into his arms in a flash of blinding silver, reforms over George’s shoulder with a crow of “Let’s go!”

There’s no way George can possibly wield a flamethrower and whatever it is Dream is, and Bad’s already turning to the latter to ask what he’s going to do as his partners start to sprint toward the Kishin. The words have scarcely left his mouth when there’s another writhing sheen of silver and Dream follows at his team’s heels, both of his bare forearms bracketed by wickedly curved axe blades. Bad feels his jaw drop.

“You’ll catch flies,” Dream calls after his shoulder lightly. Skeppy reaches over to shut Bad’s mouth for him.

It’s - it’s something, to watch a clearly more-experienced team fight. George and Sapnap, for all that they must be a recent pair-up, work together with an airiness that makes Bad almost self-conscious over how clumsy he can be with Skeppy. The first Kishin they take on is roasted alive in half a second, and the second manages a swipe that George deflects with the armored plating on Sapnap - “Motherfucker!” - before its arms, and then its bandy legs, and finally its torso are swallowed in flame. Dream, for his part, is a whirlwind all on his own, and Bad thinks it’s no wonder that he and Sapnap were allowed to maintain a duo by themselves for so long; Dream neatly bisects his own first Kishin, narrowly avoids being gutted by the second one’s knifelike phalanges, skids to a stop in the street before it with a snarl on his mouth. The blades on his arm waver in image with the intensity of his focus.

It’s Karl’s indignant “Well, are we gonna just sit here and let ‘em show us up?” and Skeppy’s vigorous nod that startles Bad back into the present, a reminder that yes, he, too, is part of this mission, regardless of gap in experience. Skeppy drops his hand into Bad’s without a word and Bad closes his eyes to seek out that tether that the trainers always tell them to find, like throwing a rope back to shore, tying one another together.

Maybe that was meant more literally than Bad had initially expected. Skeppy’s leather cord weighs familiar in the grooves of Bad’s palms. 

“They’ll never know what hit them,” jokes Skeppy, easing some of the nervous energy from Bad with an upbeatness that never ceases to make Bad grateful for his partner. How’s the old adage go? The weapon and the meister are matching sides on the same die?

Bad jumps into the fight.

Terror of first exposure aside, once he’s in the fray, it feels surprisingly like organized chaos, and muscle memory takes over from hours in the gyms and simulation seminars. The bolas are a quick and efficient weapon, and Bad an excellent wielder of them; he ducks under Quackity’s vicious swing at one Kishin to whip Skeppy at the Kishin opposite, and with a single snap, the Kishin crumples. A perfect throw, or as close as one can get. 

“Nice one,” says Skeppy breathlessly once he’s back to twirling between Bad’s fingers, and Bad allows himself the tiniest of smiles.

Being a witch amongst Kishin doesn’t exactly hurt, either. The four or so of them left don’t look at him first because under the stench of human mundanity and weapon soul he smells like a magic that abandoned the Kishin long ago, so whilst they’re distracted by the bigger threats, Bad breaks the back of another Kishin with Skeppy, augmented by a quick charm that mutes the world around it. 

Karl whoops from behind him, and Bad turns in time to see the husk of the creature collapse into shadow and a cherry-red soul pop out. From further away, Dream watches, arms loose and hands in his pockets, as George burns the last Kishin alive.

It’s over, just like that. It barely took five minutes.

“Bon appétit,” Quackity tells his partner fondly, and Karl sticks his tongue out at him before gulping down the two souls so fast Bad’s amazed he doesn’t choke on them. Skeppy chews on his a little thoughtfully, but they’re gone in a blink, and there’s a color to Skeppy’s cheeks that wasn’t there before. Bad’s reminded of the lengthy footnote in a book he read as a kid that informed him imperiously that weapons can metabolize normal food just fine, and that eating Kishin souls merely boosts their health, like a vitamin. The knowledge rolls around in Bad’s head as he watches Karl and Skeppy knock shoulders together.

Sapnap strides over, one soul toted in each hand, grinning. “Nice job, team,” he says, popping one into his mouth. George cringes at the morbid sound of Kishin soul being crushed between his partner’s teeth. “That was a pretty good workout.”

“You guys were fuckin’ amazing,” Quackity blurts, eyes shining. Sapnap immediately flushes and bends under the compliment, stammering something out and explaining his moves as Karl nods along intently. Bad finds himself tuning it out as his eyes fall on Dream, following up George, a little quiet, his expression a little drawn.

His mask hasn’t left his face.

“...Dream?” asks Bad, a touch tentative, as Dream stops a step or two away from the group, maintaining a small distance that feels miles wide. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” He raises his hands, lets a spark dance around them. “I can - I know a pretty basic healing incantation - ”

Dream shakes his head forcefully, and Bad bites his lip to stem his flow of words. He watches, concerned, as the weapon shifts his weight gingerly from one foot to the other, crosses his arms and tucks them close to his stomach so that his shoulders hunch, sets his jaw.

“...I’m okay,” he says after a long pause. He works his jaw, then adds, “Just kinda jittery. It’s different when you fight on your own, you know?”

Nerves, then; it’s a surprise, coming from someone who fought as efficiently and brilliantly as Dream did solo, but Bad accepts it with a nod and reassuring smile, reaching out to pat Dream on the shoulder. Dream sighs and scrubs a hand absentmindedly over the bandages he has rolled around the length of his forearms.

Dream’s thumb skims the gloved skin of his wrist, pulls back a fraction of the cloth. Bad freezes.

“Guys, we have to call up Death. Let’s get a move on,” hollers Karl, snapping Bad out of it. Dream’s already trotting off, letting Sapnap throw an arm over his shoulders with a boxed smile, pulling the tie of his mask tighter; Quackity has dragged Karl over to the only house with an unbroken window and is painstakingly writing into the fogged glass. Skeppy’s looking over his shoulder at Bad, his eyebrows raised, the frost on his jaw stark blue in the weak light. 

It’s dark, the moon climbing high. Bad shakes himself and jogs to Skeppy’s side, twines their arms together and ignores Skeppy’s groan with a laugh, listens to Quackity report to a mildly dishevelled but very much congratulatory Death.

It’s dark. Bad was seeing things in the gloom, is all.

Nobody’s veins can be that black.

[...]

“You’re doing great, guys,” says Eret encouragingly, pushing zir hair from zir eyes. Beside zie, HBomb is pantomiming deep breaths, accentuating the exaggerated movements with his arms.

“You’re the biggest fucking liar,” Tommy snarls back from where he’s been dropped to the hard-packed earth, his hair a blond-and-white smudge in the flat of his blades. Tubbo’s standing a few feet away, lips pressed together; Jack, nursing a thick burn in the center of his palm and the pads of his fingers, is inclined to agree.

Resonance is key in any meister-weapon pairing. It’s the first thing any blooded child learns, probably even before they’re taught how to read. It’s how they test preparedness once partnerships are ready to advance to the EAT level - if you can’t resonate with your partner, you’re as good as screwed.

Jack has no idea how he and Tommy and Tubbo made it into the EAT class, honestly. He’s about ninety percent sure they’re the only group in there that can’t resonate at the drop of a hat, not like George and his gaggle of weapons or Wilbur and his smug bazooka, and it says a lot that Death had to personally request two of the trainers advise them separately. Tommy had thrown a fit when he realized what was going on, calling it an embarrassment, accusing his father of underestimating him. Jack’s still convinced it was a good call, but Tommy pretty much always gets his way, and it was a surprise (a nasty one for their weapon) to see Eret and HBomb at their dorm that morning, Eret with zir arms crossed easily and HBomb with a hand on his hip, both smiling.

“Can you explain it again?” asks Tubbo, expression intent, and Jack bites his lip as Tommy rolls his eyes in the hard reflection of the sun. Tubbo’s always been the most patient when it comes to shit like this, always works the hardest to make their group strong, and it’s not that Jack doesn’t appreciate it, but he feels like a right wanker when he doesn’t jump on an opportunity to improve right away the way the other meister does, or when he walks into Tubbo trying new methods of meditation to tap into his own soul wavelength, or when Tubbo hefts up Tommy with stupid ease and both their eyes gleam. 

Jack and Tommy can’t do that, not yet, which is why Eret and HBomb are here. Honestly, it feels like Death is wasting his time. 

HBomb clears his throat, and Jack jolts back to attention to see the trainer hold out his hand to his partner. “It’s about reaching in,” he explains slowly, as Eret cracks zir neck and places zir hand in his, “and finding the tether between one another.” HBomb leans away as Eret melts down into a ribbon of silver and reforms in his hand as an intricate sweeping hilt and a crown-spiked pommel and a long, slender blade. As soon as the rapier’s form solidifies, it shimmers again with the strength of the oncoming resonance, its image breaking up as though in intense heat, and a gale gusts from beneath HBomb’s shoes. A lash of wind slaps Jack full in the face and he yelps, backing up a step involuntarily.

“Pussy,” says Tommy mulishly.

Jack feels his ears go red. “Fuck off, man,” he snaps back, lowering his arms to watch, eyes watering from the pressure, as HBomb raises Eret in his hand, blade pointed downward.

“You have to understand,” shouts HBomb over the sound of branches snapping, as if that makes it any clearer. Tubbo nods anyway, watching as the trainers brace themselves, eyes and auras aglow, the crown that is Eret’s signature winding around HBomb’s head in incorporeal sigil. The silver light they throw off is reflected back in Tubbo’s eyes, pressing shadows into the hollows of his cheeks and throat. Jack can see, in stark relief, when Tubbo’s expression flinches into something that he can’t read in the split second it flickers across his face.

Resonance, as Eret and HBomb’s souls sing. Jack can’t hear it properly - no one can, save the resonating partners themselves - but it’s strong enough that the trilling note echoes out over the autumn-brittle forest floor and the weapon and meister connect. The whiplike wind that chases the note knocks Jack to his arse entirely. His face flashes hot and he’s already anticipating Tommy’s heckling, is scrambling up with a snappy rebuttal hanging off of his lips, but as the light dies down Tommy hops to his feet, fanned shuriken blades falling away in the sweep of his human arm. The early-afternoon glow catches on the stripes in Tommy’s hair as he jams his hands into his cargo pockets and mutters, “Whatever. This was a fuckin’ waste of time. I’m going home.”

This fuckin’ kid. Jack’s opening his mouth to yell at Tommy’s slouched, retreating back for the fourth goddamn time today already, fed up to here, when a hand thumps onto his shoulder.

“Leave him alone for now,” advises HBomb when Jack whirls to glare at him. His eyes are sympathetic, at least, even though he’s still got his fingers interlaced with Eret’s, almost taunting in its blunt and blatant irony. Despite the circumstantial concern, both their expressions have an underlying ease; neither of them are too worried about the disaster trio, clearly. Jack wants to scream.

“Let’s go.” Tubbo’s voice, quiet, as he dusts imaginary dirt off of his joggers and trudges after their weapon. Jack wants to shake him, too. This isn’t really a problem for Tubbo and Tommy, because they’re childhood friends; Tommy used to bend over backwards for Tubbo and Tubbo’d do the same for him. The gap has suddenly yawned wider between the two in the wake of the partner assignments, though, and if the guys who grew up together having issues, Jack’s as good as fucked. He still doesn’t get why Death had to match the three of them up like this, because it’s a fucking disaster, and it’s getting awkward trying and failing to navigate the seeming minefield sowed around the two whilst trying to wrangle Tommy into bloody listening to him for once.

Eret’s eyes gleam brighter briefly behind zir shades as zie observes him. He can feel the pressure building up behind his eyelids, can feel the fuming giving way to something a little too close to home. “Jack,” zie begins, tone painfully careful.

“For the record,” he says abruptly, cutting off his trainer and not finding it within himself to care, “I should have known it would go like this.” Something bruisingly bitter spikes in his stomach, and he can’t help how resolutely acrid he sounds as he spits, “But well, statistically, one of us isn’t gonna make it, so,” and then storms off before either of his stupid, stupidly optimistic trainers can reprimand him for the morbidness.

[…]

It’s not that Tommy doesn’t understand. He likes to think he understands really well, actually, given that it’s his dad on the line and nearly fifty family friends that he’d known for years whose graves he visits every weekend. He attended every funeral in that crisp black suit he hates so much, even the early ones right after Walpurgisnacht when Phil was still wavering on the brink of death in a private hospital for critically-injured weapons and meisters two blocks down from the DWMA. Sometimes, Tommy and Wilbur and Techno would be the only ones there. A few of the Death Scythes had no family - some by choice, others by circumstance. Plenty of weapons and meisters come from long bloodlines of DWMA graduates, and those families tend to be the ones with missing seats at awards ceremonies.

Tommy knows how sacrifices work, like this. What is demanded of him as a weapon. In common speech, meister-weapon teams are denoted by the name of the meister. The headmaster of the DWMA, Death themself, has always traditionally been a meister. Tommy’s young, but he’s good; he knows he’s good, he was trained by Death Scythes, on the knee of not one but two reapers, spends a decent chunk of his time reaching out to brush his fingers over the tell-tale souls of the meisters around him.

Only one has ever been brave enough to reach back.

“You gotta be nicer to him, big man.” Tubbo’s voice, lightly chiding, from behind him. Tommy doesn’t turn from his perch on the cliffside, one knee tucked up to his chin. The sun is seeping orange onto the treetops, spilt juice. No use crying over it.

Tubbo’s soul, when Tommy hazards a sidelong glance at it, is just as robin’s-egg blue as it was the day they met. It reminds Tommy just a tad of Phil’s eyes before, and Tommy jerks his head back to his knee with a sharp exhale that Tubbo definitely picks up on. His partner doesn’t say a word, though - just grunts and settles into a criss-cross applesauce beside Tommy, hands in his lap. Distantly, Tommy registers that Tubbo’s falling into a distinct, methodical breathing pattern: meditation. If someone had told Tommy two years ago that his best friend would voluntarily meditate, he would have kicked them in the balls and laughed. Tubbo was lively, effervescent, on par in capability to sow chaos as Tommy, sometimes even more so. They were the demonic duo of the local kindergarten, a headache to catch and an even bigger one to teach. Tommy used to dream about being Tubbo’s weapon.

Whatever. Things grow. People change. Age has wrinkled the perfection of a tapestry Tommy wove with baby-fat hands, smeared away the idealistic luster of it. Tommy needs to take up the mantle of Death Scythe if only to ease the pressure on Techno, and instead of putting Tommy on some kind of fast track, his father saddled him with two meisters. 

Two fucking meisters.

Tommy can feel his ears going red just mulling it over. Double-weapon and meister groups aren’t unheard of, are growing in frequency, but double-meister groups are practically nonexistent. Tommy fumes just to consider what this means his father’s trying to say about Tommy’s level of skill. What? Is it because he’s too young? Too quick to act? Too hotheaded, too stubborn, too much of all these things? Two meisters means twice the shackles on the rate at which Tommy can evolve, especially since he can’t even fucking resonate with one. In the kindest way possible, Jack needs to just be put on another team where he’ll suit the weapon better; Tommy doesn’t even know if Jack’s a good meister or not because they’re so incompatible Tommy burns Jack’s hand whenever his center handle rests in the middle of Jack’s palm. He must be, to have been promoted to the EAT class, but given the setup of this team…

Tubbo, at least, is a bright spot in all of this. Ever since the beginning they’ve been able to resonate with zero hangups, and Tubbo’s a damn good meister, applying himself to his studies without a word of complaint, researching his own techniques and developing theories on them. Tommy thinks that this is what genius looks like. Tubbo’s resolute. When Tommy runs, Tubbo does, too. They’re so in tune they can finish one another’s sentences. They’ve never let each other down. They never will.

“Tommy.” Tubbo’s peering at him through the bangs that curl into his eyes. He needs a trim, pronto; the entire upper half of his face is obscured by a thick curtain of dark hair. “Promise you’ll try to be nicer to Jack? It can’t be easy, y’know, seeing as we’ve got the whole resonance thing going on.”

Tommy groans for show. Phil’s feather-encrusted face wavers behind his eyelids. Walpurgisnacht took everything from them.

He turns to stick his tongue out at Tubbo, scoffs, “Sure, whatever.” The blue soul wavers, too. It looks like a little toy soldier. 

Tommy lowers his gaze.

[...]

“This was a stupid idea,” Dream grumbles, letting Sapnap massage his shoulders and fuss over his hair as they stroll to the main quad. Or - Sapnap is strolling. Dream’s more dragging his feet. “He’s a Death Scythe. He’s the only Death Scythe, in fact. Why’d I let Quackity and Karl talk me into this.”

Sapnap shrugs, annoyingly cheery for someone whose best friend is about to get beaten into lasagna. “Well, they started a betting pool in my year,” he says matter-of-factly, “and Quackity doesn’t want to lose the fifty bucks he put on your win, so you better make it good, dude.” 

“That’s Quackity’s problem,” chimes in George, trailing after them and inspecting his nails, keeping his voice lightly bored. “If he didn’t want to lose his allowance, he wouldn’t’ve betted on Dream here,” he says, and then he dances away from Sapnap’s swat with a cackle. He’s a far cry from the stiff, cautious guy that greeted them both a month ago; Dream’s getting used to a snarky third-year with too many white hairs and a pegboard right next to his mirror that lists every deadline for the next two months’ worth of classes, and it’s… weird. To get fond a person like that, when Dream’s stuck like glue to brash, emotional Sapnap for the past few years.

The paved flagstone underfoot gives way to polished granite, the dormitory greenery to the cobbled DWMA walls, and Dream sucks in a sharp breath when he catches sight of the tall, silent figure across the courtyard. 

“Hey,” greets Death Scythe Technoblade, striped white, boar skull fanned over his face, completely deadpan.

“...Hey,” echoes Dream, forcing his shoulders to untense.

Karl ended up choosing the quad as the setting for the duel because it was in the center of the DWMA and relatively safe from outside prying eyes. It was mostly an excuse for every student to ditch class and come watch, because like it or not, Dream’s made a name for himself even just training in the gyms. Dream spots more than the requisite one faculty member who’s supposed to supervise any student duels as he looks around for Quackity and Karl. Eret’s there, expression inscrutable, but so are Alyssa and Callahan, the former with an expectant smile on her face and the latter slung across her arm, anticipatory eyes visible in the glare of his spearhead.

Already Dream can feel the pre-battle jitters coming on, flooding him with nervous energy; it’s only pride that keeps him from calling the duel off right then and there. He thinks his partners pick up on it, because Sapnap’s pat on the arm is significantly gentler than his previous ones were, and before George drags the flamethrower off, he tells Dream seriously, “You’ll be great,” and throws in an awkward little thumbs-up. 

They’re more comforting than they think they are.

“So.” Technoblade clears his throat, and Dream’s head whips back around. The Death Scythe is warming up shortly, twisting his wrists, loosening his legs; he allows Dream the courtesy of thirty seconds of warm-up, too, then says, with an indication of the head, “Shall we?”

They circle one another for a long, prowling moment. Already Dream can tell this is going to be a difficult fight; neither of them are the type to jump the gun. Technoblade’s completely at ease. There’s an imbalance, too: Dream doesn’t know all of the Death Scythe’s weapon forms, whereas Technoblade definitely knows Dream’s. He’s aware that the Death Scythe usually defaults to a tomahawk, but Dream’s also seen him as thinner blades, like some kind of sword, and given that he must have at least two or three other weapon forms, Dream’s not loving his chances.

They’re quiet for too long. The crowd of students is getting restless; Dream can distinctly hear Quackity booing from a second-story window. This is a showcase, just as much as it is a private duel, since both of them are too well-known for their combat skill.

Well. If a show is what they want.

Dream slants his weight just so, enough to seem insolent coupled with the easy smirk that he lets rise to his face, and the energy of the onlookers shifts with him as he calls, “Well, c’mon then, Death Scythe. Sure you’re not too scared to make the first move?”

Technoblade’s expression is obscured behind the skull as Dream’s is behind his mask, but he’s spent enough time being told he’s unreadable to know what someone’s saying without saying it out loud. Technoblade is - not startled, exactly, but surprised by the abrupt shift in character. Good, thinks Dream, allows himself a split second of a real grin before he sinks low and dives.

Technoblade, to his credit, doesn’t even blink. Dream’s axe head rams with a clang into his forearm, and Dream has barely enough time to register the fact that it’s not flesh before Techno brings down his other arm, similarly armored - gauntlets, thinks Dream with an aborted curse, dancing backward to avoid getting his mask clipped off. With fucking knives on them. Life is unfair.

Technoblade hums. Dream grits his teeth, forces the corners of his lips to lift in something like a smile, and winds up to swing again with the audience’s roar of appreciation.

The problem is, Dream’s combative style is geared very specifically to Kishin. He’s used to opponents that are three times taller and dumber than he is, used to fighting using all his energy for twenty hair-raising minutes with the intent to kill, so Technoblade is very likely the worst opponent he could be matched up against. The Death Scythe is quiet, cool, calculative, with a keen eye for Dream’s many slip-ups and the breadth of skill to act on those openings. Dream realizes he’s severely outmatched at the same time he realizes that his first plan of action - taunting - isn’t making a dent in Technoblade’s unruffled demeanor. This realization is accompanied by an unwelcome soul-wavelength crossbow bolt skimming past his arm.

Dream swears and swerves around it a half-second too late, and a lash of red flies from his shoulder amidst the onlookers’ shrieks - first blood. The bolt hits the brick wall behind him and dissipates without a trace, leaving only an ominous spray of crimson on the white paint, and Technoblade’s arm is silver, ribboning away from the shape of a crossbow into - 

Dream only has the time to think to himself, very eloquently, Fuck, before the sword comes crashing down where he’d been standing.

It’s single-edged, slightly curved - identifying weapons with a glance is more George’s area of expertise, but Dream isn’t half bad himself, and he’d guess either a sabre or falchion, some type of similar backsword. They’re lighter than broadswords, built for swinging and ease of movement, and because of its longer reach, Dream is at a huge disadvantage. Two of the four weapon forms Dream knows Technoblade has are long-range, and one of them is defensive, and all Dream has are his wits and axe and -

Not that.

Better to take it closer, then, risks be damned, because Dream isn’t anything if not competitive to a fault. If he goes close-quarters, Technoblade can only really retaliate with the gauntlets and his own axes. Dream nods to himself, takes a deep breath for courage, and circles in for the kill.

Technoblade clearly wasn’t expecting this kind of bold play from someone who talked big then got the shit kicked out of him, and Dream draws blood for the first time with his huge, dangerously open swing at the reaper’s body. He manages a decent slice across his chest. He thinks he can hear Karl, probably, cheering his head off, and he has a brief thrill of victory before reality slams back in in the form of Technoblade’s bladed gauntlet down onto his temple.

Dream looks up. Through the blood that streams from his hairline he can make out Technoblade’s hand, curled into a fist, hurtling toward him. He immediately braces his bladed arms before his face in a block, waits for either a yell of pain or for Technoblade to pull the punch and move back. 

Technoblade does neither of these things.

Something blisters blindingly white into his vision, coupled by an earth-shattering bang , and Dream reels backward involuntarily with a cry, ducking so he’s low to the ground in an effort to minimize strikable surface area as his ears ring. A fucking stun grenade. Technoblade can flash-bang his opponents with his own body, and Dream’s going to lose. He can’t open his damn eyes like this, and he knows even if he does that the sear of the pseudo-explosion would be emblazoned into the backs of his eyelids. This is way past an inconvenience, and it’s only thanks to a keen ear and his ever-eddying paranoia that he manages to to skirt out of the way of a whistling blade that slams down where he was collapsed just moments prior.

The pulsing glare in his vision and the tolling bell in his hearing are fading, which is a relief - he can make out who he thinks is Sapnap screaming what might be encouragement - but even then, he’s pretty much scuffed this. Underestimating Technoblade, or at least not considering the possible range of Technoblade’s weapon forms, was the biggest mistake he could have made in that moment.

He won’t be making another.

Dream dives over the sweep of Technoblade’s backsword and skids into the corner with a snarl. He steels himself, pushing a hand to his hair as if to check its tail when he’s really twisting a nail into the cord of his mask, making sure it’s secured tightly over his face. They’re seconds almost too precious to waste - Technoblade is already rushing him again, crossbow locked and loaded on his arm - but it’s worth the leaden certainty that fills his mouth as he braces himself against the wall behind him and croons something songlike to the thing that simmers hungrily in his lungs.

...When Dream was ten, his neighborhood was assailed by a small collective of witches. He doesn’t know who they were, nor what they wanted; all he has to remember from that day are two graves in the DWMA veteran cemetery, scars to last him a lifetime, and something sibilant that slumbers in his veins, stampedes his blood through his heart, boils up tarlike and unyielding and black as the scales off a Kishin’s back.

All he has to do is call for it.

Dream’s voice resolves into a trilling little melody.

The black blood in every scar on his face rears its ugly head.

And the blades on Dream’s arms seethe with renewed cruelty, and the pivot of his foot propels him with an unnatural speed, and just before the head of the axe buries itself six inches deep into the jaw of Technoblade’s boar skull and takes off three teeth, Dream’s jet-black focus keys in on the infinitesimal widening of the Death Scythe’s dark eyes.

Later, in the infirmary, Death tells Dream, “You’re very good.”

Dream can’t actually respond verbally, since Nurse Sally expressly forbade him from talking more than he has to and aggravating his thoroughly bruised vocal cords. He shrugs and averts his gaze, an attempt to avoid Death’s searching, patient eyes. It’s not hard - Death looks the same up close as he did from a distance, somewhat weatherbeaten and more like a convalescent than a Great Old One. You’d think Death would be at least somewhat physically intimidating. 

Death swivels from where he’s sat by the window, extricates a hand from the folds of his heavy green sleeves and places it on the sill. He takes a moment to gaze out into the courtyard below, face unreadable, the amber light glancing off of the silvery halos of Sanzu ringing the back of his head, and Dream tries not to look too apprehensive about whatever it is the headmaster of the DWMA is about to say to him. 

“Would you be interested in becoming a Death Scythe shortly, Dream?”

...A Death Scythe.

The dream of every weapon, and every meister that wields them. A chance to do something good and permanent at the right hand of Death himself, to save little kids with families like his from the same fate. A way to be remembered not only as one of the youngest Death Scythes to operate in the field but also one of the first to be recruited without the requisite minimum three years of EAT training. This is a chance that comes only once in a lifetime.

Dread crashes over Dream in a tidal wave, nearly suffocates him in his cot. He closes his eyes and holds his breath and very deliberately counts to ten.

“Dream?” When he dares to look up, Death’s eyes are as blue as the sky and all too gentle. Dream hesitates to call the Great Old One of Equivalence a pushover - he can’t, not when he’s read the textbook chapters detailing the hundreds of thousands of battles Death has emerged victorious from without a scratch on his feathers - but watching the reaper wait patiently for Dream’s response, Dream could’ve been fooled.

It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t change his answer. “Thanks,” he rasps, his heart on the back of his tongue, “but no thanks. No offense.”

[...]

“Good to see you all.” The bristle feathers limning Phil’s eyes crinkle as he smiles, ineffable. “Please, have a seat.”

The small crowd of students called into the headmaster’s office all throw one another uneasy looks, and Techno nearly laughs, restrains himself at the last second at the reproachful look Phil shoots him. In his defense, it’s very funny - there’s something in the fact that Phil called in possibly the most dysfunctional teams in the current EAT class to execute this particular mission that feels like a joke. Harsh, perhaps, but only one look at the way the group housing Techno’s so-called “archrival” shuffles closer within themselves, or the way the trio with Death’s youngest son exchanges baleful mutters before turning their attentions to their principal, or the way the only two-member team present looks upon Death with irreverent, unreadable eyes, and Techno can’t help the snort that escapes him despite his best efforts.

Phil sighs, which is admittedly warranted. “Techno,” he says, almost a reprimand, and Techno shrugs, shifting his arms to cross them under his cloak. “Leave them alone, mate. This is important.”

“Still think you should just send me and have it over with.”

“The experience is valuable, as I’m sure you know.” Phil flutters his wings once and turns back in his seat to gesture the students to sit down in the myriad colorful sofas in the office, and it’s enough to give Techno an eyeful of his meister’s ravaged left wing, sections of primaries stripped of their eaves, brittle and brutally scarred against the forest-green of Phil’s clothes. Techno knows that matching scars rake over the stretch of Phil’s back, scrape at his legs, and from the wince on Wilbur and Tommy’s faces, he knows they’re looking at the slit that traces out their father’s throat. 

Techno closes his eyes. He knows exactly why Phil’s not sending him.

“So.” Phil clears his throat, and immediately, every gaze snaps to him. “I’ve called you all here because we have a problem - a pretty fuckin’ big one - and I think you guys are the best teams we have, if not at least the most technically skilled.”

A tense silence. Techno peels open one eye to see George and Sapnap and Schlatt sat straight up in interest, Tubbo with his brows furrowed. None of them look particularly surprised at the whole “best teams we have” bit, though Jack looks like he has half a mind to laugh, not that Techno blames him. Good to see the guy has some self-awareness.

Phil continues, when no one else speaks up. “We’ve discovered a witch enclave downtown.” A sharp inhale from the little congregation, and Phil’s face softens. “Not dangerous, necessarily, but we do need to investigate, given…” His expression softens further, from kind to faraway, a familiar veneer glassing over his eyes, and Techno’s taken a step from the wall to coax his partner back to life when Phil startles and forges on, without a single inflection in tone, “given the, ah, current state of… witch-DWMA relations.”

“...So, reconnaissance, basically, is what you’re saying?” asks Wilbur, following the pause that tails Phil’s words. His tone is flat, vaguely uninvolved; Techno hates to say it, but he’s not gotten fond of the person Wilbur is metamorphosing into, a little cruel in the way he regards his peers, his family, his position in the world. Techno’d have to be blind not to see the probing glint in his meister’s son’s eye. That rocket launcher partner of his might be making the cageyness worse, but if that’s the case, it seems as though it’s reciprocal; the weapon - Schlatt, maybe - is just as smugly searching as his partner. They suit one another, that’s not the problem, but Techno’s semi-concern is that they suit one another a little too well. 

“Yeah, big man, that’s exactly what he’s saying. Losing brain cells from being too old, are we?” Tommy sneers in a voice that’s just this side of too sharp to be a lighthearted jab. Wilbur’s expression chills. Dream’s team collectively winces, visibly uncomfortable.

The Lines wreathing Phil’s head clink as he adjusts his wings ever so slightly to lift around his shoulders.

“Tommy,” he says, light.

Tommy’s ears redden; he throws himself back into the sofa with a huff and a derisive, “Whatever you say, Headmaster,” and ignores the way both of his partners flinch from the look that passes over Phil’s face for the briefest of heartbeats. Techno can’t see it from his angle, but the way that Tubbo’s unfaltering expression crumbles a little says enough.

Just a short while ago, this would have been unthinkable. The board games from family game nights collect dust under the unmade bed in Tommy’s old room, and Wilbur’s guitar remains neglected on its stand, B-string still empty from where it was snapped when Wilbur played it last. It’s only been a few months since Tommy and Wilbur stopped eating with Phil and Techno at the dinner table, but the gap is unbridgeable, given both turned away of their own volitions. The apartment they shared sits hollow and hungry, the balcony still collapsed inward and plugged with cardboard and duct tape; Tommy and Wilbur have long marked their territory in the dorms. Phil practically lives in the Academy now, haunted by a slew of ghosts with double-edged smiles and warm hands, and wherever Phil goes, Techno will follow. 

“...HBomb, Alyssa, and Sam will be around to your dorms later to hand out packets with the info we’ve got as of right now. Any questions?” Phil meticulously tucks his wings back, that neutral smile of his affixed unwaveringly to his face. He doesn’t make a habit of losing face, Techno’s partner. Death is a symbol just as much as he is a metaphorical weapon. Silence underlines his question.

“Okay. Dismissed.”

Tommy’s the first to sail out of the room, sullen; Tubbo’s shoulders are hiked close to his ears as he follows, with Jack trailing after them like a lost puppy. Wilbur stands, cracks his neck, and offers Schlatt a hand up; the latter grins and grips the proffered hand with perhaps a little more verve than strictly necessary. Dream walks out without having once made eye contact with Phil, and his meister and weapon partner follow, looking as though they’ve been set adrift at sea. 

Phil’s lips thin, picking up on Techno’s unspoken question. With a certainty that sharpens the steel in his voice: “It’ll work out.”

Techno grunts.

Well. He’s not the school psychologist. It’s not his job to parse out the interpersonal hang-ups of EAT groups. If Phil thinks everything will be under control, then everything will be under control.

[...]

Everything has spiralled out of control.

Tubbo’s not sure who gave them away. In hindsight, it was probably Tommy, but that’s an injustice to what Tommy can be like when circumstances are dire; as it stands, no one’s sure how they got into this situation, and in Tubbo’s opinion, it hardly matters. The important thing is that they’re here now, and their job is to get out of it. (Tubbo’s job is to get Tommy out of it.)

It was supposed to be easy, is the thing. A quick mission, by all counts; get in, spy a little, try to locate the headquarters of the whole operation, snoop a bit if they could to get their hands on some extra info for Death to pore over, and get the fuck out. They managed the “get in” and “spy a little” points on the agenda, but creeping through a side street, Tommy announced at the top of his lungs, “This is boring as shit,” and turned the corner straight into a person with the longest hair Tubbo’s ever seen and the janky, physics-defying hat of an unmistakable witch. Tommy had screeched. Jack had yelled some profanity. 

Tubbo lunged between them and knocked the person out cold with a swift punch to the jaw.

After that, the situation devolved into a free-for-all. The groups have long been split up after a small horde of five or six witches spotted them and gave chase, recognizing the insignias sewn into the badges clasped around their arms (the triple-striped pair of wings denoting Death). Tubbo lost track of Wilbur and Schlatt almost ten minutes ago when they seemingly deliberately split off from him and Dream’s team with an exhilarated whoop, drawing two witches with them. The three that remain have stayed hot on Tubbo’s heels, even as Sapnap periodically turns to spit literal fire at them to keep them at bay. 

They’re undeniably at a disadvantage. To retreat or call on Death now would be both failure and an invitation for the witches to assign blame, regardless of how deserved it actually is. The houses that line the streets have long been boarded up; planks cling for dear life by a nail or two on the wooden frames, abandoned for years. The witches’ nest is probably the sleek mansion and its black-thorned gardens sprawling over the untouched wreckages of entire blocks’ worth of homes.

As if reading Tubbo’s racing thoughts, Sapnap hisses another sputtering tongue of flame at the seething witches and calls hoarsely, “We can’t go back! They’ll follow us to the fuckin’ Academy at this rate!”

“Shit’s sake - Tommy,” moans Jack, reaching over to thump Tommy on the shoulder as he runs. “Why’d you give us away, man?”

Tommy practically snaps at Jack’s hand. “The fuck was I supposed to do? Just let them slash your face open?! Big man, I made a call.” A shift in tone, a diversion - “Tubbo’s not bitching about it, you know?”

Tubbo is not, in fact, bitching about it, if only because Dream and his partners look very uncomfortable. “What’s done is done and all that. Sapnap, you’re right, what’s your plan?”

Sapnap startles. “My - bro, I don’t know! Let’s just - let’s just fuckin’ get to a corner or town square or something and fight them or something!”

George somehow sighs despite being very breathless from sprinting for ten minutes straight. “That’s your solution to everything, nimrod,” he says, mockingly scathing, but Tubbo’s already picked up on Sapnap’s train of thought.

“No, Sapnap’s right,” he muses, shifting out of the way for Sapnap to spit another bout of flame behind them. “They could easily tail us back to the Academy if we try to escape, it’s not a good idea. If I had to guess, their main… hub or whatever is that big house, like twenty streets back. We’re far enough away that they won’t be able to, like, notify the others? Like, maybe we can get out of this without - ” Tubbo yelps and dances out of the way of one witch’s spat spell, a huge gecko tumbling from her hands into the street, its legs flailing. Completely ineffective, still alarming. “ - Fuck! Without alerting the rest of the witches here!”

“It’s too late for that, little boy,” hisses a different witch than Gecko, disturbingly pastel-colored even down to the blood that spatters her neck from where she’d actually managed to bite Jack when he tried to push her away. Her hair bounces in rigorous curls around her round, dollish face. She’s holding… an oversized lollipop. It’s big enough to be a bludgeoning weapon, to be fair, but the effect is largely ruined by her Candyland aesthetic. “We’re gonna make quick work of you and your little partners, and go running straight back to - ”

“Don’t say her name!” The last witch, much older than the other two, with a lumpy nose and Halloween-shop witch look, thumps Candy on the back in irritation. “Names have power, as you well know, you fool!”

Tubbo bites his tongue. He needs to bring this confrontation to at least some kind of standstill, because right now, the dynamic is skewed in favor of the hunters, the witches. He’s turning his head to ask George something when he catches Dream’s eye as the other swivels, his arms shimmering silver like a mirage. For the briefest second, they maintain eye contact - Tubbo raises his eyebrow in wordless question - Are we turning this into a fight? - and in response, Dream pulls his mask down over his face from where it was nested in his curls and nods.

Tubbo veers off into an overgrown parking lot and herds everyone behind him; Dream brakes sharply at the corner and slams a blade-gilt leg into Gecko’s stomach when she heedlessly rounds the turn. She shrieks in pain as she’s propelled back several feet. Candy and Halloween, spotting Dream jumping their friend, try to catch Dream off-guard with a double spell - Candy winds up for a swing with her lollipop bat, and Halloween raises a hand with a shiny orb in it. Glass, and something glowing within the flask.

Dream dashes backward into George’s waiting hands as the attacks come hailing down where he’d been standing, and Tubbo winces at the resounding crash. The way that both witches wait for the smoke to clear gives him some hope, though. Any talented fighter would have taken advantage of the temporary smokescreen to attempt a surprise attack, at the very least to rattle their opponent; these forgo the chance to jumpscare them in favor of bickering loudly. 

“You should have pulled your punch when you saw me going for it!” 

“Well, excuse me for being the stronger fighter! I knew you couldn’t do it! Now look at them! There’s not a scratch on any of them!”

Gecko lumbers up, clutching her midriff with a scowl; Dream curses lowly under his mask when he sees he hasn’t drawn blood. “Hit her with the flat of my blade instead of the sharp end,” he mutters, disgruntled, and George offers him a pat on the handle and a commiserating, “Cheer up, Dream, you’ll get another chance.”

“Like hell they will!” Gecko’s pissed. She lunges without warning at George, who shrieks and swings. It’s a sloppy attack at best, but it gets the job done: Gecko jumps back to avoid Dream with a curse and crouches once she gets space between them, her round black eyes fixed unblinkingly on Dream’s masked face in the gleam of his axe head. 

“Tubbo,” yelps Jack, and Tubbo wrenches his attention back to Candy and Halloween, who’ve managed to reach some sort of consensus in their shouting match and have turned to rush them. The dichotomy of color scheme is distinctly disconcerting.

“Tubbo!”

“Right, yeah, sorry!” Tubbo shakes his head out of his weird idle headspace and reaches for Tommy’s hand, anticipating the way Tommy jerks it away at first with a tangled mess of emotions warring over his face. As always, it smooths over after a second, gives way to eager determination. He’s the one who clasps their hands together and whoops, “Let’s go!” as he melts silver around Tubbo’s fingers.

Despite his height in weapon form, Tommy isn’t that heavy; the oversized shuriken is built for aerodynamicity, and so it’s easy work on Tubbo’s part to draw Tommy up as a shield when Candy whacks at him with the lollipop. She leans all her weight into her hammer with a scowl, searching Tubbo’s face; he breaks the hold by slicing down with Tommy. Candy, clearly caught off guard, loses her foothold and stumbles backward with a snarl of frustration. Jack swears from Tubbo’s right, and when he looks up, he spots Halloween cackling as she hurls down another glowing liquid with a howled spell in a language he can’t decipher. Jack jumps away before the liquid can do anything, but the asphalt underfoot corrodes where the glass burst, and Tubbo bites his lip as he turns his attention back to Candy. There’s no way Jack can fight Halloween alone, especially not without a weapon; Tubbo has backup knives hung by the loops in his belt, but his hands are occupied, and - 

Sapnap zips by, fire on his breath. “Mind if I borrow these?” he asks, barely waiting for Tubbo’s preoccupied nod; he snatches up the knives, hollers, “Yo, Jack, heads up!” and tosses them, sheathes and all, to the meister. Jack fumbles but manages to catch one and strip it of the leather and narrows his eyes into the sky, where Halloween has summoned up a broom and is surfing it with a smirk. 

“Look alive, big man,” Tommy urges, eyes bright in the fan of his blades, and Tubbo fully disengages from Jack and Sapnap to keep his gaze on Candy. Jack’s a great knife-thrower, just always forgets to keep knives on him, and Tubbo’s watched Sapnap’s demonstrations enough to know he doesn’t have to worry about a thing when it comes to the flamethrower. 

“You’re an annoyance, little boy,” Candy spits, slinging her lollipop over her shoulder and working her jaw. “What are you and your little Death’s weapon friends here for, hmm? Trying to do a little spying?” She wilts her tone into a saccharine, cutesy cant. “Gonna report us to big, bad Death?”

Tubbo says nothing. He taps the point of one of Tommy’s blades into the ground, just to make sure Tommy doesn’t say shit, either. Tommy huffs in mock offense, peering out at Candy with careful eyes, and Tubbo shrugs; Tommy’s not stupid, but he can get hotheaded and say things he doesn’t mean, and giving away the reason they’re here now would spell disaster for Death and his single Death Scythe. Better to put off any large-scale conflict for later than have to face the reality of a desperately underprepared DWMA and the normal human souls under the protection of its wings. 

Candy growls. “So be it,” she says, throwing a handful of glitter to her feet and chanting something in a lilting voice. A cloud of pastel smoke rises between them. Tubbo adjusts his grip and waits for the inevitable charge.

It’s not a long fight; it can’t be. Death will be waiting for a report, and the sun’s sinking past the rundown rooftops, and the witches back at the mansion will surely be getting suspicious at the prolonged absence of the three witches fighting them here, let alone the two others that had tailed Wilbur and Schlatt. Tubbo hardly has the presence of mind to spare concern for Tommy’s brother - his job is rooted in the present, with every clash of Tommy and alternately Candy’s lollipop and her broomstick. It’s a miracle none of the three witches think to speed away with their preferred modes of transportation, especially since none of the weapons and meisters fighting them have the mobility to follow, but it seems they’re deeply concerned with finishing the fight in a definitive victory. 

Tubbo will die before he lets the witches serve Tommy’s soul on a platter.

So he fights with renewed vigor, his teeth gritted; he distantly registers the metallic sound of blade against blade to his left, George and Dream against Gecko, and Halloween shrieking as both Sapnap and Jack use her as target practice, but his top priority is putting Candy out of commission, and fast. Tubbo can do fast. 

Tommy must pick up on the sharp shift in concentration, because his expression perks up when Tubbo adjusts his grip on his handle. “Changing it up?” he asks, deceptively light, as Candy leaps back and stares at them once more analyzing. 

Tubbo nods, murmuring so his lips barely move: “Let’s resonate. Boomerang.”

Tommy lights up.

Closing his eyes to concentrate, a habit that his trainers have been begging him to drop, would be a fool’s errand; Candy would pick up on it and immediately try for a lethal blow. Tubbo instead takes a long breath in, long breath out; Tommy, ever intuitive, picks it up and matches his breaths with him. Reaches out, the way HBomb and Eret had told them to do. Had told Jack to do.

The instant before their soul wavelengths intertwine, Tubbo’s mind streaks with sympathy for Jack.

The moment ends, and with the roaring pulse of energy that’s a dead giveaway of a soul resonance, Tommy and Tubbo’s souls bellow, a cacophony that resolves itself into a vivid melody only they can make out. Tubbo never figured out why it was that souls default to music in their meeting, and never bothered to ask; it is how it is, and it is, as always, the most beautiful thing Tubbo’s ever heard, too intricate for mere human hands to compose and too complex to ever replicate. It is over body, over mind, greater than anything conceivable with the firing of neurons in a cluster of grey matter. It’s fundamental. It’s sound.

Tommy whoops on the edge of Tubbo’s periphery, halfway between the outside world and the space shared between them incorporeally when they resonate. " Let’s do this, Tubbo!" he yells, exhilarated, and the shuriken in Tubbo’s hand bursts to life in a whir of silvery wind, blisteringly bright as a star.

Tubbo lets go.

Candy staggers back as Tommy flies from Tubbo’s hand, faster than she’s seen him move; she bares her teeth, a show of bravado, and slams her lollipop down when he weaves around her in a blur of blades, but all she manages to do is skim his afterimage and get her vessel of blunt force trauma stuck in the asphalt. She pulls at it futilely as Tommy winds around her to fly into the street behind the parking lot, and when she sees him go, she barks out a startled, triumphant laugh. “Are you stupid?” she gasps out, pausing the extrication of her weapon to point at Tubbo, glowing and empty-handed before her. “Did you seriously miss me? If this is the extent of the DWMA’s little foot soldiers, I’ll be amazed if you even make it to - ”

The crack of an object crashing into flesh.

Candy’s words freeze in her mouth. Ever-so-slowly, her eyes roll back into her head, and she drops without a sound into the ground, the lollipop still stuck behind her, her limbs sprawled every which way, her curls springing free of her glossy beret. A few jewelled beads from what is presumably a snapped bracelet roll from her wrist into the gutter.

Tommy straightens up over her, shaking out his hair and brushing debris off of his shoulders, still with a leftover gleam of light caught beneath his skin. “Knocked her the fuck out with the flat wide side of the shuriken,” he says, then, with a hint of admiration, “Quick thinking.”

“And no blood.” Tubbo flaps away the last of the vicious adrenaline that he knows he siphoned secondhand from Tommy during the resonance, strolls over to toe at Candy’s limp body. “Maybe a concussion?” 

“Probably. I mean, hardly a problem. We got her out of the way.” Tommy rolls his shoulders. “What do we do now?”

“Wait, I think.” Tubbo leans into his heels, eyes trained on Halloween as a combination of a spout of flame from Sapnap and a well-timed knife from Jack unbalance her and she shrieks as she slips from her broom, crashes to the ground below. It wasn’t that high of a fall, but when Sapnap jogs over to check, she’s out cold, too.

Tubbo doesn’t have enough ego to tell himself that the witches weren’t cannon fodder. They were indisputably weaker ones. Probably minions of stronger witches, if the collective suspected in this area was as big as Death estimated. That means there are enough of them, with a wide range of strength, to form a hierarchy. This could get dicey in the near future. 

Tubbo chews his nails absentmindedly as Jack trudges over awkwardly, nothing but five sheathes left in his white-knuckled hands, mind caught up in visions of future wars. Sapnap pauses on his way over to Tubbo’s group, his gaze trained over Tubbo’s shoulder.

Tubbo’d almost forgotten about George and Dream.

In Tubbo’s defense, the pair seem to be getting on very well. Gecko is sputtering expletives with her - Tubbo squints, is that a fucking gecko-shaped sword - sword held aloft in her hand as George swings at her over and over. The gap in skill is obvious, even without technical knowledge of the intricacies of melee combat; Gecko keeps fumbling, doesn’t go for the few openings George makes when he prepares for a stronger swing. George, on the other hand, keeps pressing, a relentless onslaught, and honestly, it’s kinda anticlimactic by the point Gecko is cowering and George’s lips are moving and that tell-tale burst of knifelike wind whips from his clothes. 

Gecko squeaks out what sounds like a plea as George takes one running step closer, then two, a full sprint with Dream wound up behind him, and -

It’s like watching a car crash on the telly, all in slow motion for an expert to review and explain and criticize. On the last possible step George falters, his legs failing him, and at the same moment the resonance snaps, like a halo being broken in the fall. The sustained note breaks in its harmony, jarring and disjointed, and Tubbo claps his hands to his ears before he even realizes he’s doing it as the sibilant melody screeches to a halt and Dream clatters to the ground, the stylized blue-green eye at the join between head and handle obscured by the shadow that Gecko casts when she spots the opportunity and for the first time since the fight began seizes it, leaping onto her broom, gasping with maniacal laughter.

“You’re all fucking idiots,” she wheezes, crossing her legs on her broom, far out of range. She’s turning, facing the mansion, the mansion, and Tubbo’s turning to reach for Tommy but neither of them have practiced enough to resonate again that fast, the boost both of them would need to reliably kick out Gecko’s broom from under her, and Sapnap is running to George, who looks fine, if bewildered, and Dream is -

It takes Tubbo a few seconds to identify him, looming over Gecko on her broom. She’s frozen, staring up at him, the laughter stuck in her open mouth, her eyes all but bulging from her skull. 

The sun seeps with a sigh under the roofs, the sky still an early lilac before the stark violet of late night. Dream’s entire face is too cast in shadow to see, but even then, his face seems… somehow black.

Everything is frozen.

Gecko and Dream swing at the same time, Gecko with a wail of surprise and Dream silent, but the sound of flesh being rent by metal is unmistakable; Tubbo watches, vaguely horrified, as the near-bisected halves of what used to be Gecko topple from the broom, and Dream lands heavily on the ground on all fours, the sword Gecko had used buried up the hilt in his side. He moves drunkenly, every step a graceless list, but Tubbo can see the glinting pinpricks of his eyes roving as they land on some point over Tubbo’s shoulder.

Tommy barely has the time to scream a warning before something smashes into the back of Tubbo’s head.

He’s knocked over in the space of an instant, flat onto his stomach and the rungs of his ribs. His ears are ringing so loudly he can barely think, not that he’d want to with the beginnings of a white-noise headache pressurizing the insides of his skull. He thinks someone’s grabbed his shoulder and is turning him; he cringes into their stomach, cracks his eyes a sliver.

The evening sky blurs into incoherence amidst the frames of Tommy’s flyaway hair and a corner of Sapnap’s buns, but even so, Tubbo can make out the moment Candy, curls all awhirl, topples with a spray of blood; Halloween is falling from Dream’s hand, and a soft glow emerges from both their bodies.

Witch souls, Tubbo’s muddled brain supplies very helpfully, accompanied by a spike of pain in the back of his head. He’s harvested them.

Silence.

Dream collapses, strings cut, the souls suspended around him like will-o’-wisps, unreachable, blood spurting from the sword impaling him, too dark to see in the weak light. George cries out. Sapnap bolts to his feet.

Tubbo, fumbling for Jack and Tommy’s hands, passes the hell out.

[...]

“Hello there.”

Wilbur clutches his partner’s arm, panting. Schlatt’s barely conscious, his head rolled onto Wilbur’s shoulder, blood splotched over his leg and the left of his chest. One of the witches, who could fucking summon miniature winged golems, did a number on him. Sweat breaks out cold on the back of Wilbur’s neck; this is the worst possible scenario.

He’d been trying to loop around to meet back up with the rest of the recon group. The decision to split off was definitely spur-of-the-moment and a bad call in hindsight, but Wilbur thought - well.

Two witch souls. They managed it, if with blood on their hands and on their faces, but they managed it.

And now.

They’re not cornered. Wilbur’s at full liberty to make a run for it, not that he’d make it. The person in the full-length cloak of bright red, cast almost fullow in shadow by the walls of the alley save the smutch of oak-brown that is their mouth and chin, is undeniably a witch.

Fuck, Wilbur’s so screwed.

It’s not like he can run and leave Schlatt. That would be what a coward does, and besides, Wilbur’s almost fond of the meddling, acrid-witted weapon. At the same time, though, he can’t exactly fight without Schlatt, and at the rate the rocket launcher’s losing blood, there’s no way he’ll last longer than ten to fifteen minutes.

At this point, the solution is simple: Wilbur’s charm.

“Hello!” It’s hard to act casual when there’s a bleeding person slumped half into your arms, but Wilbur’s made do with less and with worse. “Sorry about all this, ma’am. Me and my friend were taking a walk in the forest around these parts, minding our own business, but when we popped out, some people just jumped us! My friend here’s fairly hurt, so I’m gonna head on home, don’t mind us, please - ”

“You,” says the witch in red, “are Death’s child.”

Wilbur’s heart leaps into his throat. Still, he carries on, not even blinking. “Well, where’d you get that notion? Ma’am, I promise you, me and my roommate were just passing by when a bunch of people just attacked us - for no reason, mind you! And my friend really ought to see a doctor - ”

“Wilbur Soot. Do not play the fool with me.”

Wilbur clamps his mouth shut so fast his teeth click, all his hackles rising. Schlatt groans lowly. Wilbur tightens his arm around him.

“...Who are you,” he says, dropping the facade and his voice, lowering his brows to sharpen his gaze. “How the fuck do you know my name.”

“Death’s eldest. Dark hair,” the witch pauses, then adds frankly, “unbroken by the Lines.”

Wilbur can’t help the way he flinches. It’s the truth, plain and simple, but that doesn’t mean age has sapped the sting from it. The witch observes this, the line of her mouth slack and just this side of uninterested, not so much cruel as it is unwondering. She doesn’t care why.

The smallest shift in stance, then, as she rearranges her cloak to move her hands into visibility. They’re surprisingly large, sturdy, for a witch of her stature. She doesn’t move them as she talks, still as a statue.

“You deserve better,” she says, completely offhand. Wilbur ogles her.

“Excuse me?” Something about the witch’s inquisitive, deductive voice puts him off. “What the fuck are you on about?” He flexes his hand on Schlatt’s arm, shrugs Schlatt onto his shoulder better so the weapon doesn’t slip or Wilbur doesn’t accidentally dislocate the arm he’s using to leverage him into his side.

The red witch looks at him. “Meister child.” There’s no soft edges to her words, but they’re not ragged, either. “Your father is preoccupied with his Death Scythe, and soon, he will be preoccupied by your weapon brother. He who inherited the Lines.” She doesn’t even give him time to snap at her for the pointed comment, never changing the pace at which she speaks, slow and steady and unrelenting. “You deserve better, meister child. Death’s gaze does not fall upon the undeserving. You can deserve.”

Wilbur’s mouth is dry as bone, dry as the coarse dirt Nurse Sally had offered him to cast over the coffins of his father’s beloved Death Scythes months ago. He’d still been seventeen, and one of the funerals had been empty save him and Techno and Tommy and a saber’s girlfriend, both of them twenty-eight, with an apartment in the city. She had fallen to her knees before the four-winged tombstone of her future wife, a grief so poignant she couldn’t even make a sound, silent agony. Techno’s eyes were faraway. Tommy was clutching the beautiful white lilies he’d packaged himself, string and crinkling paper.

Wilbur, heart breaking in his chest, had nonetheless thought, furtive, guilty, that he wished he had the power at least to make the same decision as every one of the Death Scythes sleeping away under the dirt.

A childish whimsy, recalled by a deep-rooted desire Wilbur can’t explain away. The older he gets, the more he wants, no matter how stupid or inane it is. Something compelling in the witch’s eyes had brought that memory to life; it felt like she knew exactly what she was offering, and that he knew the answer. Still, he doesn’t respond, just watches the witch through lowered lashes, clutching Schlatt closer. The latter attempts to stir, wincing, a long way yet from consciousness. The witch doesn’t move.

“If you call, I will come,” she says, as if she hasn’t uprooted the very foundations of Wilbur’s beliefs. “The soul of the weapon and the meister do not vary so much as you think they do. Lesser witches could not offer you a place at your father’s side.” A glint of teeth, gone in a blink. “I can.”

Wilbur is no coward. He knows if he ran away now, he might not survive, but it would give Schlatt a running start. They can’t be that far away from the others, not when Wilbur could hear the clang of blades clashing as he blew up one of the witches with one pull of the trigger. There’s an easy way to say no to this.

He is also nothing if not shrewd. If not starved. If not zealous.

His footsteps echo down the empty streets, hollow, as he drags his unconscious partner down the main avenue. There’s nothing to be afraid of, right now. “How can I call you?”

“You,” says the witch, somehow gentle, “may call me the Crimson.”

Fifty miles away, Death sits in his room as his Death Scythe tends gingerly to his wings, a job that was once the job of many. Twenty miles away, an apartment with a balcony caved in waits with bated breath. One mile away, six children sit, surrounded by three purple souls, desperately tying knots around their wounded by the light of death.

And at the epicenter of the beginning of the end, dark hair unbroken by the Lines and something ugly bubbling in his chest, Death’s eldest son makes a wordless pact with a witch.