Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

God, she is such a selfish fuck. 

Zero slumps over, exhausted from using the power of her song. 

It’s strange being able to see with two eyes once more. It’s strange having a real left arm again.  It’s strange seeing that accursed flower digging its roots into her dragon. 

To save Mikhail’s life, Zero bound her soul to his, and with her soul comes her curse. She calls it a pact. But the word ‘pact’ implies consent on both sides, so is that really the right term for this? Mikhail didn’t choose to carry the flower with her. Mikhail didn’t choose to die, either. 

She didn’t give him a choice when it came to murdering her sisters or slaughtering thousands of their followers. She never gave him much of a choice to begin with. But he did choose to stay with her, no matter what. He chose to follow her from the very moment she saw him. He let her raise him. He chose to live with her. 

He chose to love her, and all she could give him in return was her abuse and her goddamn flower. Probably the only pure, innocent good she’s ever had in this sad sack of shit she calls a life, and she always hurts him. Now she curses him, too.

Goddamn stupid, worthless, selfish fuck.

Zero doesn’t know what exactly ‘the flame of her life’ is, just that she used it up to bind the pact, and that losing it made her regress back into the body of a small child. While Mikhail rests (thank god he’s fucking breathing, he’s fucking alive, fuck me for doing this to him), she tries to fashion a makeshift dress out of her old clothes because she’d rather not parade around in her birthday suit. She’s vulnerable enough as it is. 

She looks down to inspect her handiwork. It’s haphazard and held together only with a shoulder guard for a belt, but it’ll do the job for now. She leans over a nearby puddle of water to use as a mirror: there, in her newly-regenerated right eye, is inscribed a magic symbol in the shape of a flower. That bullshit botanical disaster continues to mock her, even as its power is torn between her and Mikhail.

Whatever. 

Zero makes her way back to Mikhail and curls into his side, watching any sign of life with rapt attention.

She meant what she said while binding the pact—she truly is glad to have met him, though she’d never let him hear her say that. He is precious to her as the closest thing she has to family. If the world wouldn’t let her die, she’d rather not live without him.

If he never wakes up, she’ll rot with him and be fine with it. 

She’s used to living a tragedy, anyway.

Chapter Text

Mikhail stirs from the worst nap he’s ever had. His head is all poundy and heavy, and the air stinks, and something in him feels really freaking weird but he can’t quite put a finger (claw?) to it.

He tries to shake off the freaky weirdness, but that doesn’t do much except make him even more dizzy. Something feathery tickles on the right side of his face, too. What’s that about?

…And where’s Zero? Is she okay? That spider thingy was really scary! 

Mikhail raises his head off the ground to look for her. 

“…Zero?” he calls, but there’s no immediate ‘what now, dummy?’ that follows, which is deeply concerning. He’s about to prod for her with their mental link when the shrill voice of a little girl yells back at him. 

“Hey!” the little girl calls out, and it sounds a lot like Zero. Mikhail wonders if his mind is still a bit mucked up from the poison. 

“Whatcha doin’, dummy? You gonna sleep all day or what?”

Where is that voice coming from? It prompts Mikhail to look down in his survey of his surroundings after pointlessly searching left and right. 

Oh. It’s Zero! She looks a bit different, like her voice. Did she shrink? Maybe it’s some weird side effect of the poison, since she didn’t seem fazed by it at all during the battle. Or maybe he’s hello—hallurin—hallusintat—imagining things. But Zero looks okay, and that’s all that matters to him. She’s got her hands to her hips and her foot tapping, which means she’s very okay and getting impatient with him.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m up now.”

Mikhail stands up and stretches his wings, and a lot of the ache-y feeling he’s been having loosens up. At his full height, Zero looks even tinier. Whatever the reason for that is, he’ll figure it out later. 
 
“Well, let’s get going, Zero.”

Zero huffs and rolls her eyes, and the familiar look of her annoyance makes Mikhail feel a little better. Like nothing’s changed and everything’s all good.

“Yeah, yeah, dummy. Let’s get outta here.”

But then Mikhail feels a pang in Zero’s heart that doesn’t match her attitude—which is weird, because he always could kind of tell how she was feeling through their mental link, but this time it’s very clear, like a fog lifted between them. There are lots of weird things he’s noticing today. Like when Zero climbs up on him afterwards, and she’s a lot lighter than usual. And her arm’s not fake anymore. And he just realized… 

“Zero?”

“What?”

“Where’s your flower?”

Zero goes quiet. She never goes quiet. Not like this, anyway. She’s worried about having to explain something.

(There’s the weird extra-clear mental link again.)

“We’ll… talk about it later, okay? Let’s just go home.”

“Home? As in, the Land of Seas?” Mikhail asks. His previous train of thought about weirdness and worrying is promptly shoved out of his short attention span.

Zero holds onto the handles of his saddle a bit more tightly. 

“No shit, dummy. The crumbling, rotting shack next to the mud where you piss and shit yourself? Home. We’re going home.”

She’s never called that place home before. But Mikhail thinks it fits. It’s where they lived for the longest time. When Mikhail thinks of a place that reminds him of Zero, it’s that little cottage by the sea. 

And wherever Zero is, Mikhail feels at home.

Chapter Text

“Fucking finally! My ass is killing me.”

Zero hops off of Mikhail’s back and struts towards the makeshift shack she’d stewed in for an entire year. Somehow, the place still reeks of Mikhail’s stench, even though they hadn’t set foot in the area since they embarked on their murder road trip. Mikhail collapses in exhaustion behind Zero, splaying his massive body across the ground to cool down. 

“Why’d we… have to take the long way around… going home, Zero? I’m tired, I’m really… really tired,” Mikhail whines.

“Because there’s still an assload of Five’s minions running around the place and I can’t be bothered to deal with them,” Zero says. 

I don’t know how much of a danger we are… or how dangerous the world is to us. We can’t risk it, she thinks to herself.

“Dangerous…?” Mikhail looks up at Zero and replies to her unspoken sentiment.

Zero stops walking and stares at Mikhail, dumbfounded. Mikhail cocks his head to the side equally confused.

What the fuck. Can you hear what I’m THINKING? Zero says in her mind.

Mikhail’s one eye widens but remains unfocused as he continues to catch his breath. 

“Is that a new trick, Zero? Talking without your mouth?”

Zero shakes her head and frowns.

Oookay. Maybe it was a fluke, she thinks.

“What’s a fluke?” Mikhail asks. Zero’s lips purse as her suspicions come to fruition. 

“Ah, shit… look, dummy, I need to explain some real batshit insane things to you later. So stay here, and I’ll…” she stops to look around frantically for an excuse. “I’ll get something to eat while you nap or go piss in the mud or whatever. Got it?”

“Got it,” Mikhail mumbles. 

Zero runs off to the nearby coast, leaving Mikhail behind to rest. Mikhail can hear her grumble something about ‘stupid stubby baby legs’ as she leaves the area. Within minutes of Zero’s leaving, the silence becomes enough to bore him to death. Feeling well-rested enough to shuffle over to the mud pond in front of the cottage, Mikhail takes the opportunity to finally inspect the strangeness in his right eye through his reflection.

A flower grows where his right eye should be. Zero’s flower. And when he realizes this, the mere thought of its presence in his body makes him shiver. He’d wondered, didn’t he? A handful of nights before everything with Two and the disciples happened, he’d wondered what could have happened if it was him with a flower in his eye and not Zero. And now his daydreams have come true. 

He starts to sense it: a terrible presence brews within the flower, whispering nastiness in his ear like a command. Mikhail does not have the energy nor the will to shriek at the revelation. He understands now why Zero had always looked upon the flower with utter disgust.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all… what’s the flower doing in my eye? Why does it feel mean?” Mikhail whimpers. 

He turns away from the mud pond, hoping that the flower would go away if he didn’t see it for himself. But it’s still there. It’s getting very itchy. Will it feel better if he scratches it against the rocks? He tries, but the flower makes him itch even more in retaliation. He tries again, rubbing his face against the rough surface of the nearby boulders, to the point that some of his scales chafe away from the friction. It’s still not enough. The flower remains freshly bloomed while the skin beneath Mikhail’s scales reddens in irritation. It’s like it’s mocking him. 

Tears of frustration prick his eyes. For a moment, Mikhail considers if slamming into the rocks would work. However, as he raises his neck to whip into the cliff side, he hears it: the sound of Zero’s voice ringing in his head.

Cut it out! You’re only going to make it worse. 

The flower reacts to her voice by assaulting Mikhail’s eye socket with a stabbing pain. Mikhail screeches a guttural roar and does what he was intending to do; the cliff face shudders at the force of his head crashing into it from the side.

I said quit it, you big dummy! Zero’s panicked thoughts interject the misery of Mikhail’s own.

Try as he may, the flower continues to taunt his futile efforts to relieve himself of the pain. Mikhail blindly rams into the rocks and trees in the feral hope that a stronger force would pulverize the flower in his eye. His thrashing echoes throughout the coastline like a wail.

A foreign fear buries itself into Mikhail’s heart, piercing through the cloud of his aggravation. 

Stop doing that! Goes Zero’s desperate plea. You’re just hurting yourself.

It passes through Mikhail’s mind unheard. Instead, the murmuring of the flower infects his thoughts like a disease. It makes him itch for relief from the irritation; it tempts him with promises of comfort if he’d leave the world to die. Wouldn’t that be nice? If there’s no world, then there won’t be any more pain or suffering. Why doesn’t he just let go, and let the rage take root and blossom? 

…Please stop, Mikhail.

The mention of his name alarms him, catching his attention. A pang of deep, crushing guilt that isn’t his own follows. Both snap him out of his self-inflicted rampage, but fail to stop the spilling of his tears.

“Zero? What's going on?” Mikhail cries.

Yeah. It’s me, she says. It’s gonna be alright, I promise. I’ll make it alright. 

“It hurts, Zero, It hurts really bad. I don’t know what’s happening anymore.”

It takes Zero some time to think of a reply. Mikhail can feel the tension building up in her head as his own.

You died. You left me alone again. I… didn’t want to accept that.

The flower in Mikhail’s eye twitches. He feels the urge to scratch at it again.

Our souls are tied together in a pact now. If one of us dies, so does the other. And apparently our thoughts and feelings are tied together in the same way. We—no, I can’t hide anything from you anymore. 

She ran away for a bit, not because she actually needed to find food, but because she couldn’t look him in the eye while confessing her sin. He can tell. He understands why he can tell, now. Her newfound honesty, voluntary or otherwise, perturbs and comforts him in equal measure.

Zero’s thoughts finish quietly like vespers:

I’m sorry.

Chapter Text

Zero doesn’t do feelings. They never did much for her except make her life worse than it already was, so she threw them in the trash a long time ago. The hell is she supposed to do now that she’s forced to share them with Mikhail?

(Is it forced if it was her choice to begin with?)

(I dunno, Zero.)

Case in point.

She did come back from her excuse to avoid said feelings with actual food, at least. Clams, crabs and fish of all shapes and sizes roast over a bonfire Mikhail helped to set up. He’s still incredibly upset, naturally, and she can’t handle it because she has to go through it too. He feels so lost, so scared, so uncomfortable, and it sinks in at that moment that despite being a massive dragon, he is just a child. She is now, too, and that’s even more disturbing to her.

She’s Zero; when has she ever not been upset? But it’s also his upset on top of hers, and that makes her feel guilty, which only adds to the upset even more, and it just keeps going in an eternal loop of misery.

Zero grumbles. Snapping herself out of her rumination for a moment, she realizes that she’d let the food roast for too long. Some of the mussels are already burnt to a crisp. God fucking damn it. Irritation and disappointment mingle twice in her head (his head). She hates wasting food. He likes his food rotten, not charred. They put out the fire and give up before the rest of their haul carbonizes. Oh, fuck it. Gosh darn it. The one upside is that both of them are used to eating inedible shit. Inedible stuff.

“So… what’ll make you feel better, dummy?” Zero asks, curling into herself. She decides that she’s not hungry. He is, but now isn’t in the mood to eat.

Mikhail slumps his head onto the ground, just barely missing the mud he loved to roll around in. He absently gnaws on a toasted fish head hanging out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes are glassy with unshed tears. She feels a lump in her throat, too.

“Nothing. Nothing’s ever gonna be okay anymore.”

“Hey. Don’t say that. It’s, uh, everything’s new for us. We’ll learn how to deal with it, okay? Trust me.”

“But Zero, it huuuuuurts. And it’s itchy. And it makes me wanna—”

She puts a hand to his snout.

“I know. I’m sorry you have to go through it. But we’re stuck together now, if it’ll help.”

“But what about everyone else? Dito and Octa and Decadus and Cent are gone. Everyone’s gone. It’s so lonely now. I miss them.”

Zero doesn’t know what to say to that.

“There are… some things that we can’t change, alright? And we just have to deal with their bullshit.”

“But you changed the thing with me, Zero. Why can’t you change the other things?”

“That’s different.”

They eat their shitty little meal in silence. Mikhail raises a claw to scratch at the flower. What part of ‘don’t fucking scratch it or it will get worse’ didn’t you understand, dummy? Sorry, Zero. Why did she do this to them? Oh, right. The crippling loneliness.

Mikhail stares at her, straight through her, through the roughness and misery and verbal abuse.

“Aw, I guess you’re right, Zero. We just gotta learn how to deal with it, together!”

That makes her feel better.

“There’s the dummy I know.”

“And you know what, Zero?”

That doesn’t. She knows what he’s going to say next and she hates it.

(Mikhail just giggles in their minds.)

“Yeah?”

“I think it won’t be so bad after all.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Weeeeell, there’s gotta be only one reason why we’re like this now.”

A pause. Zero rips out a lump of coal that used to be a clam from its shell to chew on it.

“Don’t say it.”

“Nope! I’m gonna say it!”

“Mikhail, please, shut up.”

“Nuh-uh! You’re just saying that! And now I know for sure!”

“Ughhhhhhhhhhh.”

Mikhail gets up to prance circles around Zero, shaking the ground with his massive weight with every hop and skip. This is when Zero gives up on chewing the lump of coal and spits it out.

“You were gonna miss me! And it would’ve made you really sad. That means you care lots and lots about me, Zero!”

“Stop repeating things.”

“And that means…”

“Come on, don’t fucking say it, I’ve got a reputation to maintain!”

“You really, really love me! Yay!”

It’s such a shame she isn’t big enough to carry her own sword anymore. It would be nice to stab an overgrown lizard in the hide to cleanse her soul of all the mushiness.

Mikhail just puts his head to Zero in the closest approximation to a cuddle he could muster.

“Aw, don’t be like that, Zero. I love you too!”

Zero sighs and gives in. There’s no point in posturing around him anymore, not when their souls are bound so tightly like this. He stinks, but he’s warm. She can appreciate that.

She turns to contemplate the flower blooming in Mikhail’s eye. Will this be enough to stop its rampage, she wonders? Or does it have the power to turn even a dragon mad with its designs for destruction?

Her sisters are dead; that’s the good part. If anything happens, the most they’ll have to do is kill themselves, maybe. If she dies, so does he, after all. It’ll be easier to kill a child than an immortal goddess of song. She hopes their pact is enough to override the flower’s revival abilities.

…Her sisters are dead. They were the only ones holding the continent together.

You think about a lot of complicated stuff, Zero.

Yeah, she does. There’s too much that can go wrong right now, that she can’t control.

So we just gotta do what you told me. We deal with whatever happens together.

Right. And right now, all there is to do is to live life one day at a time until something happens.

(He really does stink, holy fuck. They’ll start with that, first.)