Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fire cupped in Morrigan’s hands blazed higher, lacing warmth across her palms. She winced, and it flickered, only for a moment.

“Be still,” Squall’s voice told her. “Don’t let it command you.”

She flexed her fingers, and focused. The flame, slowly, weaved higher and higher, spiralling towards the ceiling in candescent arcs, enveloping her hands in a crushing wave of heat, crawling up her forearms, gouging into her skin—

She yelped, and jerked backwards on reflex, breathing heavily. All at once, the flame disappeared.

Squall pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned in frustration. “Do you actually care about your training, Miss Crow, or are you just here to waste my time?”

They were in her room at the Deucalion for her scheduled training session. Or, rather, Morrigan was in her room, and Squall was projecting himself unto it via the Gossamer. He’d requested a more, as he put it, “dignified” training space, but there was nowhere else she could think to go that wouldn’t attract attention—it was a Sunday, so she couldn’t exactly find somewhere in Wunsoc without raising questions as to why she’d come in on a weekend.

Also, she liked to play patty cake with her octopus chair to pass the time during Squall’s long-winded lectures. When he wasn’t looking, obviously.

“I’m doing my best,” she protested with a grimace, patting down her forearms to make sure she was undamaged. “It just—“

“—hurts, does it?” he finished for her, looking displeased. “It wouldn’t if you were in control of it. Besides, what’s that thing you kids are always saying?”

“No pain, no gain?”

“Ugh. That one.” He shuddered. “Your generation’s blatant disregard for the conventions of the English language is a mystery that continues to elude me.”

“You don’t have to get upset about it,” Morrigan said tentatively. “It’s only four words.”

“Precisely.” He growled. “There are two clauses; it should have more words. At least a conjunction. Barbarians...”

“Is this still about my training...?” Morrigan asked at length.

Squall heaved a long sigh. “I was under the impression that our session today was over. You seemed all too eager to give up on it, letting go of your fire like that.”

“I said I was doing my best!” she protested.

“And it wasn’t good enough,” he snapped in turn. He pressed his hands together. “Be honest with me. Have you been practicing?”

She couldn’t quite meet his eye. “Sometimes,” she mumbled. “When there’s no one to interrupt. Which... is rare.”

Squall’s mouth hardened into a line. “Well, I’m led to believe this overbearing patron of yours is out of the picture for a while...?”

“He’s out on business for a few weeks,” she muttered. A faint bitterness burned at the back of her tongue, but she swallowed it. “Some mission, or something. It doesn’t matter. He’s not here.”

“That means you’ll have no excuse not to practice,” Squall said breezily, and Morrigan groaned. “In fact, I’ll even set you an exercise. Just to make it simple for you. After all, I do try to be accomodating.”

“Are you calling me a simpleton?” Morrigan asked drily, but Squall chose not to answer. Less likely this was to spare her feelings than it was to save his breath.

“That candle,” he said, “on your bookshelf.” He pointed to it. “Bring it here.”

She did so.

“Once a day,” he told her, “I want you to light this candle, then extinguish it, then change the colour of the wax. That’s your homework.”

“...That’s it?” She raised an eyebrow. “Two of those things are mostly Inferno, and I’m already pretty good at that.”

“You’re incorrect,” he said coldly. “If you’ll recall not five minutes ago...” He waved a hand dismissively. “Regardless. It’s about habit, more than anything, Miss Crow. Being used to the sensation of it. The ability to command Wunder without resistance is one that I guarantee will serve you well.”

Right, she thought to herself. As if promises from the guy who killed all his friends are worth anything.

“You won’t forget, will you?” he asked, in a tone so condescending she wanted to reach through the Gossamer and slap him.

“I’ll remember,” she told him, pressing a forefinger to her temple.

“You had better hope you do.”

And then he was gone.

The rumble of the train tracks underneath filled her ears as Hometrain leisurely shuttled her... well, home. Morrigan sat near the back of the carriage, picking fluff of the sleeve of her sweater.

There was a rustle of pillows as someone sidled up beside her. She didn’t have to glance sideways to figure out who.

He didn’t say anything for a while. Perhaps he was expecting her to ask him what he wanted, first.

She didn’t bite. Hawthorne frowned.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, a defeated tone creeping into his voice at having had to speak first.

Morrigan bristled. “Nothing.”

There was a pause, then Hawthorne sighed. “Now, when you say it all defensive like that...”

His tone had softened, and Morrigan couldn’t help but soften in turn. “I’m fine, Hawthorne,” she said with a little more tact. “But thank you for asking.”

In truth, it’d been... something of a long day. Her not-so-fantastic training session from yesterday had weighed on her most of the morning—she kept worrying if maybe she was doing something wrong, if she wasn’t fulfilling her potential. She was always distantly aware of just how much work she’d have to put in to reclaim a good name for Wundersmiths, but if she couldn’t even harness Inferno without flinching...

And the little candle exercise hadn’t helped, either. She’d kind of given it a crack, that night, right before she’d gone to bed. It had caught alight just fine, but when it came time to actually extinguish it, she’d... struggled. To make a long story short, she’d slept in singed bedsheets that night; and based on how tiny and rickety her bedroom had become by morning, it was clear that the Hotel wasn’t impressed.

Hawthorne clicked his fingers in front of her face, snapping her out of her reverie. She shook herself. “Sorry. Spaced out.”

“I noticed,” Hawthorne said with a little hum of concern. “Now are you gonna tell me what’s really up?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Morrigan insisted. She folded her arms, slinking further down into her seat.

Hawthorne cast a shifty glance back at their Unitmates, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “It’s not about Squall, is it...?”

For a split second, Morrigan’s heart leapt into her throat. He knows, she thought, face tingling with guilt and shame. He knows about the apprenticeship. He knows what I did.

But then she realised he was probably just talking about all her other encounters with Squall, and that there wasn’t actually any reason to suspect he knew anything further. Despite having realised this, that cold, prickling feeling of guilt lingered, like a nasty virus might.

She wrapped her arms even tighter around herself and swallowed. She didn’t even need to say anything for Hawthorne to realise he’d struck a nerve.

“And here I thought you couldn’t get any paler,” he half-chuckled, brows drawing together in concern. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” she said defensively. “Just...”

Blazing heat crawling up her forearm, spilling over her shoulder, swallowing her whole.

The carriage turned about two shades warmer, and she tugged at her shirt collar, growing uncomfortable.

“I’ve got it handled,” she told him eventually, in what she hoped was an assuring tone of voice.

Hawthorne, however, didn’t look convinced. “You don’t look like someone who’s ‘got it handled’.”

She scoffed, lightheartedly, trying to alleviate the tension. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

But her attempt at banter fell short. Hawthorne reached out to plant a hand on her shoulder, and she only barely kept herself from flinching.

Which was not an urge she ever usually found she had. She chewed her lip and tried not to think about it.

“You’ll actually tell me if something’s up, though, yeah?” he asked gently. “No offence, but... you kind of suck at asking for help.”

She thought back to that day in the hospital. Seeing all the hollow Wunimals locked up like they were feral. Being powerless to save them, even to help them at all.

Making a deal with the one person who could.

I hardly think THAT’S true, she thought bitterly. But she didn’t say that, obviously, because where would she even start at explaining it?

“Morrigan.” Hawthorne gave her shoulder a shake. “I’m serious. Promise you’ll tell me if you’re not okay. And promise me you’ve really got it under control, whatever ‘it’ is.”

She glanced up then and, for the first time in their whole conversation, looked him in the face. His sky-blue eyes were searching her, steeped in concern, and his freckles were bunched around his scrunched nose like they always were when he was worried.

For the first decade or so of her life, nobody had ever looked at Morrigan that way. Like they cared what happened to her. Like they cared about her at all.

She couldn’t bring herself to lie to a look like that.

“Sure,” she said at length. “I mean... yeah. I promise.”

And against her better judgement, she tried her best to mean it.

Morrigan sat on the edge of her bed, turning the candle over in her hands.

The wax was a clean, rippled white, exactly as it had been the night prior. One would think the candle had been entirely untouched, were it not for the blackened tip of the wick.

Light it, douse it, change its colour. That was what she was supposed to do. A painfully easy set of instructions.

Last night, she’d bungled it at step two.

Her hands, and the candle, dropped into her lap, and she sighed. Her mind began to wander, as it tended to do so late at night.

The first eleven-odd years of her life had been spent learning not to ask for help. That every problem that befell her was uniquely her own fault, and therefore uniquely her own challenge to solve. She’d become very independent at a very early age, having had it drilled into her that even just wishing she deserved support was nothing short of sinful.

Of course, now, she was surrounded by people who thought very differently of her. Who loved her, for one thing, and would have staunchly disagreed with her father’s take on seeking aid, for another.

She wanted to believe what the latter group had taught her. On good days, she did. But she’d found, in her few years of Nevermoorian life, that there were many old habits that simply died hard, no matter how violently she (or her loved ones) went about trying to kill them.

But... she’d promised Hawthorne.

Barely six hours ago, she’d sworn to her friend—her brother by Wunsoc right—that she’d ask for help if she needed it. And she’d also sworn that she had her situation under control.

It pained her to have to break a promise to someone who really did want the best for her. But it was that, or tell him about the apprenticeship. Let everyone find out she’d partnered with the evilest man alive.

Let everyone think she was doomed to be the monster that history expected her to be.

... She couldn’t tell him. He’d probably pretend to understand, but... he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be able to.

No one would. That was what really stung, some days; no one would understand why she’d done it. If she’d already felt alone, being the first Wundersmith to rise to power in over a hundred years... keeping secrets about it wasn’t helping to lessen that feeling.

But if she couldn’t make good on one half of her promise, she’d just have to work twice as hard to make good on the other.

She looked down, at the candle resting on her thigh.

It was just a candle. An item. A pretty little lump of wax.

But to Squall, perhaps, it was a means of controlling her. Of keeping her under his thumb—or assuring himself she was indebted to him, that she’d no choice but to follow his every command.

But Morrigan knew that wasn’t true. She could make her own damn choices. Starting with this one.

She rose, crossing the room to her bookshelf, and replaced the candle precisely where she’d first found it. Her fingerprints smudged the sides of it, but it was otherwise untouched.

She was aware she was being petty. But a small victory was still a victory, and she was prepared to take whatever she could get.

Squall didn’t control her. No matter how much he was convinced otherwise, she was in total command of herself. She’d promised Hawthorne that much, kind of—and she was determined to keep it that way.

She returned to bed, and let every thought of promises and apprenticeships and independence vanish from her mind. Flickering out of her conscience, there one moment, gone the next.

Just like falling asleep. Or... not quite like that. Briefer, almost. More decisive.

Just like blowing out a candle.

Chapter Text

The air in Sub-Nine was stagnant, and cold—the kind of cold that had teeth, the kind that sunk into you and didn’t like to let go.

Morrigan bunched up her shoulders and shivered. She wondered if it was simply that no one ever came down here, or if, perhaps, the space had finally acquired a ghost to suit its borderline haunted aesthetic.

She certainly hoped not. If, after all the lengths she’d gone to to hide it from her closest friends, her apprenticeship was uncovered by some random ghoul, she would have probably been quite upset.

She shook herself. She was supposed to be focusing on her training; not on the prospect of supernatural snitches. Besides, if anyone was going to catch her in the middle of a lesson, it was going to be the Basement Nerds.

She was only lucky that Squall had been too busy for a lesson today. The moment she’d arrived, Ravi—the youngest of the Basement Nerds, only a few years older than herself—had all but begged for her to let him watch her practice Masquerade. And if she’d had to, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to think of a reason to say no.

He was presently sat in the corner of the room, observing her every movement with rapt interest. He was even taking notes, scribbling furiously into a journal with a blue, pink, and white striped design on the cover.

Morrigan glared at the desk mirror propped up on the table before her, and tried to channel all her energy into her appearance.

Don’t think of it like you’re changing the way you look, Squall had told her once, when she’d been struggling to keep her disgustingly pink hair from reverting to the midnight-black it rightfully should have been. Think of it like you’re changing the way people look at you.

Morrigan glanced across the room to Ravi, who was looking at her like she was a particularly interesting movie. She scrunched her nose, contemplative.

She turned back to the mirror. Stared herself in the eye. Tried very, very hard to focus.

… Failed.

She leant back in her chair with a groan, her head flopping backwards until she was staring blankly at the ceiling. She’d done this before—never particularly successfully, but at least she’d done it. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t manage it now.

“I’m sorry,” she said, half to Ravi, half to herself.

“Ohh, don’t be,” Ravi said, his voice somewhere between cheerful and sympathetic. “Divine Thing knows I’ve struggled with it too.”

“Sure, but you’re…” Morrigan caught herself just short of calling him ‘normal’, suspecting it might come off as rude. She sighed. “I’m a Wundersmith. I’m not supposed to struggle with this. With any of it.”

“Nonsense,” he told her, not unkindly. “Everyone struggles sometimes. No matter what at. And even if you’re having an off day today—“

Morrigan angled her head to face him, blowing hair from her eyes.

“—I’ve seen you on good days,” he continued, eyes shining with admiration. “And I know my abilities don’t hold a candle to yours.”

Morrigan stiffened.

“I know, I know,” he began, almost automatically. “Sofia always tells me off for saying that—‘comparison is the thief of joy’, hey? But, y’know, I just mean that… you’re so talented, and… um.” He tilted his head, seeming to catch the pensive look on her face. “Are you… okay?”

But Morrigan wasn’t listening. She was too busy thinking about what he’d said—or, not what he’d said, exactly, but the way he’d phrased it.

The thing he’d said about the candle.

And, unrelated to it, the candle—the task from Squall—that she’d elected to ignore.

Maybe that was what was interfering with her ability to concentrate on Masquerade. Maybe by skipping her homework, she’d sabotaged her own Wundrous abilities.

Maybe she should have listened to Squall. Maybe she was always supposed to.

Maybe he knew that. He probably would have, if it were true. God knew he thought so, even if it wasn’t.

Maybe she really was trapped under his thumb.

Maybe she’d made a mistake.

“—Morrigan.” She realised, abruptly, that Ravi had come across to her, and was shaking her gently by the shoulder. She blinked herself out of her thoughts, rubbing wearily at her temples.

“I know I just asked this, but you didn’t say anything, so, uh…” Ravi’s brows knitted together. “ Are you okay?”

“I—uh.” Morrigan’s words caught in her throat, and she swallowed. “Sure. I mean, yes. Yeah. I just… got lost in thought.”

“I figured,” he replied cautiously. “It’s just that you’re shaking…”

“I—huh?”

Morrigan frowned, and looked down at her trembling hands.

She blinked. That’s fine, probably.

She stood up then, rather suddenly, and swept her school bag off the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Ravi said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to upset you, I was just—“

“You’re fine, Ravi,” she interrupted, meaning it. She glanced back to meet his eye, not unaware of the way he was wringing his hands. “I appreciate that you were looking out for me, I just… have somewhere to be.”

‘Somewhere’, more than likely, was deep in the Whingeing Woods until she could get a grip on herself. But he didn’t need to know that, so long as he was convinced she was fine.

He nodded, mollified. “Alright, then. You’ll tell me if you ever need anything, though, yeah? Or Sofia, or Conall, or something. I know it sounds weird, ‘cause you and I don’t really talk much, but… we’re all here for you.”

A pang of guilt struck Morrigan square in the chest. The way he said it made him sound a lot like Hawthorne…

“… I guess the whole Society is, though, right?” he added, immediately ruining it. “That’s kind of the whole point. At least, it… used to be.”

He was right, technically. The Wundrous Society had been founded on supporting up-and-coming Wundersmiths.

But a lot of time had passed since then, and…

“Things are different now,” she said quietly, almost bitterly, more to herself than to Ravi.

She slung her bag over her shoulder and left before he could notice she was trembling again.

Sub-Nine’s chilly air followed her back to the topside of campus, and lingered even as Hometrain rumbled along the tracks.

“You’re acting weird again today,” Hawthorne told her out of the blue, to which she couldn’t help but jump. “See? You’re not normally so easily spooked. And I would know,” he added, matter-of-factly. “I’m very spooky.”

“You are not spooky,” Cadence’s voice told him drily, and Morrigan looked up to realise she’d crossed the carriage to join their conversation. “You wear cat sweaters. In summer.”

“Hey,” he rebuked. “Those cat sweaters are designer.”

Cadence rolled her eyes.

“Seriously, though,” he said, dropping his affable tone. “Anything you wanna tell us?”

Morrigan shook her head mutely. Hawthorne and Cadence exchanged a grimace, apparently unconvinced.

Cadence took a seat on Morrigan’s other side, opposite to Hawthorne. Morrigan squeezed her hands together, acutely aware of their concerned eyes boring into either side of her face.

She pulled her sweater collar over her cheeks and tried to dismiss it.

“Come on, Morrigan,” Hawthorne prompted in a low voice, when she’d made it very clear she wasn’t going to engage on her own. “You know we’d do anything for you.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Morrigan answered, reflexively.

“Name one thing I wouldn’t do for you.”

“Swim with sharks.”

“Really? I ride what are basically sharks with flamethrowers through the actual sky, but you think I draw the line at just regular sharks?” He blinked. “Because you’d be correct. At least dragons tend to like me.”

“I’d swim with sharks,” Cadence offered. “Not for you, though, Morrigan, no offence. Just for fun. They’re actually quite gentle creatures. One time my Gran took me—“

“Your Gran? The same one who chucked you into a volcano?”

“Wh—“ She shot Hawthorne a withering look. “A volcanic spa.”

“I’m not hearing a difference?”

Here we go, Morrigan thought to herself as the two began to bicker. She figured she had a minimum of three minutes before they remembered that she was still sitting between them.

She drew her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead upon them. Hawthorne and Cadence’s voices blurred into static as her mind wandered, retracing her steps for the day.

She had ended up hiding in the Whingeing Woods, after falling so short in her practice session. She’d spent a good few minutes just trying to collect herself, attentively eavesdropping on a pair of trees who were mid-gossip about Unit 918. It hadn’t been a particularly interesting conversation, but it had been something to focus on, at least.

She’d noticed, at one point, that she was still shivering, and resolved to do something about it. She cupped her hands in her lap and shut her eyes, softly humming a familiar tune to herself, expecting fire to spring to life in her hands.

She’d cracked an eye open to glare at her stubbornly unlit fingers. When flexing them didn’t work, she clicked them, then clenched her fists, then clapped her hands together, then drew a forefinger across her palm the way one might strike a match—but nothing had happened. If anything, the air around her had gotten colder. The trees were starting to complain about the noise.

She stood, frustration welling up inside her, clawing at her throat and threatening to spill through her eyes. That was when the Inferno had come—a rush of heat lacing her body like a whip, all at once, all too quickly.

Even thinking about it now… she felt like her skin was starting to burn.

She’d crumpled to the ground, then, with little more than a whimper of surprise. It was Sofia who found her as she was lifting herself from the dirt—Sofia who told her how worried Ravi had been about her, Sofia who walked in step with her as she stumbled out of the woods, Sofia who urged her to reach out for help should she ever need it.

Divine Thing, she was getting sick of hearing that.

All she’d done was grit her teeth and promise to be more careful next time. She, herself, knew what she meant by that—but she made no effort to stop Sofia from reaching her own conclusions.

“—at’s because you’re boring,” Cadence was saying plainly, as Morrigan blinked herself back into the present.

Hawthorne gasped, scandalised. “I am not boring! Morrigan, tell her I’m not boring.”

“You’re—“ Morrigan began on autopilot, but then stopped. The words jammed in her throat, as that lingering sensation of warmth from her memory itched under her skin. She squirmed, growing increasingly uncomfortable, as whatever chill had been bothering her before was replaced with a heat so intense she thought perhaps the train had caught fire.

“Morrigan?” Cadence prodded gently. She reached out to plant a hand on Morrigan’s shoulder, but Morrigan jerked away. She clawed at her shirt collar.

“Don’t—“ She squeezed her eyes shut as her breathing quickened, heat crawling up the backs of her hands, funnelling into her fingertips.

“Morrigan,” Hawthorne said, in a voice so worried it bordered on urgent. “Why don’t you tell us what’s wrong?”

“Wh—why don’t—“ Morrigan clenched her teeth together. The heat had reached her head, and was pressing in on her temples. Her vision began to redden around the edges. “Why d-do I—“

A dull ringing in her ears grew to a whistle, and she clamped her hands around her ears, growling in frustration.

“Why don’t you shut up?” she snapped.

The whistling stopped. The headache faded.

Hawthorne recoiled, stung. Cadence stared at Morrigan as if horrified.

Morrigan blinked a few times, grasping a hand to her chest. It was still so stiflingly warm, and she was feeling less and less able to breathe by the second. By this point, her entire Unit was staring at her, with expressions ranging from confused to concerned to outright shocked.

Why did I say that? She covered her betraying mouth with her hands. Why the hell did I say that?

“I-I’m sorry,” she tried to eke out. “I didn’t…”

One look at Hawthorne’s heartbroken face, and all the strength went out of her at once.

She fled to the bathroom at the end of the carriage and locked herself in for the rest of the ride home. No matter how many biscuits Miss Cheery tried to coax her out with, she refused to even acknowledge the effort—she just curled into a ball under the sink and tried to pretend she didn’t exist.

It took an achingly long time for that prickling heat to fade. And when it did, Morrigan felt colder than ever before.

For the second time that day, Morrigan found herself glaring into a mirror.

She’d only narrowly managed to escape her Unit once Hometrain had reached the station platform. She’d sprinted through her own station door, propped a chair against it for good measure, and then hidden in her en suite bathroom, hoping none of the Hotel staff would need her for the next hour or two.

And then she’d just turned to her reflection, trying to assess how much she should hate what she saw.

She couldn’t believe she’d spoken to Hawthorne like that. He hadn’t even done anything to deserve it, and try as she might, she couldn’t muster a single reason that the words had formed in her brain, let alone fallen from her mouth.

She almost felt sick to her stomach, thinking about it. Even more so when she remembered the wounded look on his face.

Morrigan ran the sink tap and splashed some cold water against her face in an attempt to ground herself. When that didn’t work, she went and found Emmett the stuffed rabbit, and held him close to her as she curled up on the comfortingly cool bathroom floor.

She should have never taken the damn apprenticeship.

She didn’t know why, and she didn’t know how, but she was sure that everything that had gone wrong today was somehow Squall’s fault. From her utter failure at Masquerade, to her collapse in the woods, to her outburst in Hometrain—one way or another, they must have been connected to Squall. They just had to be.

At least, she had to hope they were. Because how was she supposed to survive if she had only herself to blame?

How could she prove to be a good Wundersmith—a truly good one, with a good soul—when she couldn’t even be a good friend, or a competent Wundersmith in the first place?

Even if this is Squall’s fault, a small voice told her, you’re the one who chose to work with him. You’re the one who let him get to you.

I did that for the Wunimals, she tried to tell herself, but found she wouldn’t listen.

You have only yourself to blame, the voice said.

You’re a terrible friend.

You’ll never survive in this world.

Your father was right about you.

She bit down on her lip, whimpering as her mind began to oscillate between guilty and anxious and angry and guilty again without so much as a moment to breathe. She stood up, pacing, as her thoughts raced, her mouth ran dry, her stomach churned.

Your father was right about you. Your father was right about you. Your father was right about you.

Morrigan clutched Emmett tighter as her head spun. A dull, low ringing sounded in her ears.

She circled the bathroom like a caged animal as nausea cocooned her. Something like ash burned at the base of her neck.

And then, only semi-consciously, she was pitching over the toilet bowl and emptying her stomach into the water below.

It took her exhausted brain a moment to register what had happened. When it finally did, the only thing she found she could feel was cold horror, turning her skin rigid.

Great, she thought numbly, with an inner voice that was muffled and distant beneath the lingering ringing in her ears. On top of everything else, this is exactly what I needed today.

As the shock faded and she regained control of her body, Morrigan stumbled backwards, wiping her free hand—the one not gripping Emmett like a lifeline—against the back of her mouth. The toilet, kindly and quietly, flushed itself, and the tiles coating the walls gave a distinct rattle.

She wondered what the Hotel was trying to tell her. Maybe it was asking if she was okay.

“Thank you,” she managed eventually. “And… please don’t tell anyone. Not that you really could, I guess…”

The bathroom tiles rattled again, more urgently this time.

“…I’ll be fine,” she told it, hoping she sounded convincing.

She’d either done something right or the Hotel had given up on her, because it fell silent after that.

She pressed Emmet against her chest as she locked eyes with her reflection once more. She tried to read her own expression—to make sense of the pinch of her eyebrows, the pallor in her cheeks—but found it didn’t do her much good.

She did recognise one certain spark in her eyes, though. Once, when she’d been very young, Corvus had taken her to the zoo. She didn’t remember much of it—it had been a publicity venture, and she’d spent most of her time in front of press cameras—but she did remember pressing her face up to the glass of a tiger’s far-too-small enclosure, watching it pace in tight circles, a deep sorrow etched into its permanent scowl.

That tiger had held a fire within it. A desire to be free from the life in which it was trapped.

Something at the back of Morrigan’s throat began to burn. She swallowed it, stubbornly, not unaware of the acrid taste that crept up her tongue.

She needed to get a grip on herself, she decided, tucking Emmett under her arm so she could scrub her hands over the sink, with a ferocity so strong one might suspect she’d stained them with some kind of crime. She needed to put her emotions on a leash, and chain them to the ground.

She wasn’t an idiot, after all. Morrigan learned from her mistakes, and she didn’t intend on literally worrying herself sick twice.

(Part of her wanted to wonder if that was really all there was to it, but she burned that thought to cinders before it could upset her any further.)

She would give it a few days. Climb out of her rut, get her Wunder back under control, and finish the school week as if the start of it had been as smooth as any other.

She would manage. And she would manage by herself. Between her Unit and the Basement Nerds, she’d already attracted enough scrutiny to last her a year.

And between Hawthorne and herself, she’d already dealt enough damage to last her a lifetime, as far as she was concerned.

Besides. She’d spent eleven years sweeping her problems out of other people’s paths. Another few days couldn’t hurt, right?

Chapter Text

The Nevermoor skyline winked itself awake in the early morning, distant windows flickering alight as dawn pinkened the sky.

“Stop.”

Morrigan obeyed, even though she didn’t want to.

Her arms dropped to her sides, her faintly tingling fingers balling into fists. The pitiful few sparks dancing down her palms died all too eagerly, and again she was just a little girl on the rooftop, staring out across a city that was foreign to her.

She was supposed to be so much more than this, by now.

She kicked at a pebble that lay by her feet, hard enough to send it careening over the balustrade. Squall followed it with his eyes until it left his line of sight. One of his brows twitched, momentarily, but his expression was otherwise unchanged.

“…Well?” Morrigan said, prompting. “Are you going to actually teach me something?”

Squall turned narrowed eyes upon her. “Is something quite the matter with you, Miss Crow?”

Her stomach turned at the critical tone in his voice. Sure, she’d had a rough night. Sure, she’d barely slept—not at all aided by her little breakdown in the bathroom. And sure, her entire week—young as it was—had been nothing but one continuous, roiling mess.

She didn’t need to hear that from him, though.

She curled her upper lip at him, and he raised his brows, as if caught between surprised and offended.

“Wasn’t it you, the other day, who accused me of wasting your time?”

He seemed to think for a moment. “It’s entirely possible. I don’t—“

“Then don’t waste mine,” she interrupted icily. “I have school in two hours and better things I could be doing.”

Like sleeping. God, she wanted to go back to bed. She was so tired that her whole body ached, and she feared one nasty gust of wind would send her tumbling in pursuit of her poor pebble victim.

Squall stepped backwards, almost startled. Then, an odd expression crossing his face, he cocked his head to the side.

“You’ve been doing your exercises, haven’t you?”

Morrigan stiffened. Squall didn’t fail to notice, and took a sharp inhale.

“Miss Crow,” he prompted, more urgently. “You didn’t forget, did you? About your candle? Or anything at all?”

“I don’t need your homework,” she growled.

“Am I not your teacher?”

“You’re a last resort at best.”

“I beg your par—no, this is trivial, and we don’t have time for it.” He shook his head, then took a few paces forward, to which Morrigan recoiled. “I need you to understand the importance of this,” he told her, slowly, as if speaking to a child.

She curled her fists in front of her chest defensively, willing a plume of fire to come to her aid and protect her from his withering gaze. But of course, no such fire came, and she was left defenseless, in the icy open air of the Hotel roof.

“I’m not trying to trivialise you,” he said, frowning. “I’m only trying to help you.”

She scoffed. “Oh, is that it? Is that all?”

“I am protecting you from yourself,” he hissed, spreading his hands out to his sides. “Believe me, Miss Crow, I’ve been doing this a great many years longer than you have, and when I give you advice you’d do well t—“

“You think I want your advice?” she spat, with such force that she made herself dizzy. “Why the hell would I take advice from you, of all people?”

“It’s what I did at your age,” he retorted, like that was supposed to help his case. “I took life advice from my peers all the time—“

“Say that again.” She glared at him. “Slowly.”

He glanced sideways, clearly thrown off by her unusually cutting attitude. “I… took… life—?”

“I’m well aware,” she interrupted, strategically, through gritted teeth. “And I’d rather like to avoid doing the same. Now, if you’ve run out of things to say that I care to hear, I think our lesson is over.”

Squall blinked a few times, visibly gobsmacked. “I—you’re the student. You’re in no position to—“

“Leave,” she said firmly. “We have nothing to discuss.”

She wasn’t unaware of how much she sounded like him, at that point. But she was, despite her best efforts, unaware of how she was supposed to feel about that fact.

She turned away, muscles aching from the very movement, hoping that if she just walked away he’d get the hint and piss off. That was when she spotted Jupiter, standing between the doors that led to the stairwell…

…and staring over her shoulder with horror, at the Gossamer projection of Squall that his Witness powers must have allowed him to see.

Morrigan’s entire body seemed to shut down as guilt swallowed her. He wasn’t supposed to be back yet. He wasn’t supposed to be here.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

“Jupiter, don’t,” she managed through her dry mouth. She broke into a run towards him. “I swear, I can ex… plain…”

The world around her blurred and refocused, and she was left dazed, blinking rapidly, trying to make sense of her reality.

Jupiter wasn’t in the doorway anymore.

She sprinted across to it, flinging the doors open and peering down the stairs—but there was no-one upon them, nor any echoing footsteps to indicate the contrary.

Her head spun. He’d been here a second ago; he couldn’t have just disappeared, not in such a short amount of time. And he wouldn’t have just ditched her, anyway, would he have?

She wished she could answer that last question with confidence, but given the nature of the situation…

She whipped her head around to stare at Squall, almost pleadingly, as if hoping he held some kind of answer.

But he only looked as confused as her. “What on earth are you doing?”

“My patron,” she said breathlessly. “He was here just now. You saw him, right?”

If she didn’t know better, she’d say Squall actually looked worried.

“There’s nobody here but us,” he answered, bemused. His voice echoed across the empty rooftop; the sole accompaniment to the sound of Morrigan’s knees and palms hitting concrete, as she collapsed, confused and contrite, into the hauntingly lonely doorway.

“I understand some of you will love this lesson. I also understand some of you will hate it with a passion.” The lecturer was pacing around the room as they spoke, dropping worksheets into students’ laps and checking that everyone had the tools they needed. “I’ll assure you now, these samples were provided to us ethically and prepared in as humane a manner as possible…”

Morrigan glanced down at the centrepiece of the table around which her Unit was seated. She scrunched her nose at it, slightly nauseated, and a quick glance around at her Unitmates revealed that Cadence, Mahir, and Francis felt much the same way. None of them more than Archan, though, who had already had to leave the room entirely, and was thus absent from the group. The only people not visibly discomfited were Hawthorne and Thaddea, who wore identical expressions of morbid curiosity. And the only person not fixated on the task at all was Lam, who was staring at Morrigan in a way that was far from assuring.

And then there was Anah, of course. She looked a tiny bit distressed by the animal’s misfortune, but she more than anything looked bored. Morrigan suspected she had experience with this type of classroom activity; at any rate, she’d offered to be the one doing the actual procedure while the rest of the table watched, an offer that the rest of 919 had quite unhesitatingly accepted.

“Now,” the lecturer said, clapping their hands together. “You’ve all got your instruction booklets, your diagrams, and—if you’ve been paying attention—plenty of my waffling on, all at your disposal. If you’re feeling brave, you may crack open your rats.”

She wished they’d stop describing it like that. She kept envisioning a group of vampires circled around a barbecue, digging rats out of cooler boxes and tossing them to each other, wrenching open their rat lids and draining their rat contents before crushing their empty rat shells beneath their vampire boots.

She blinked, and shook herself, feeling only the slightest bit woozy. She had a task she was supposed to be focusing on.

She scanned the room quickly. Only a few of the groups had made a start—919 included, Anah was nothing if not efficient—but most of them were just kind of standing there looking unsettled by the very prospect of the task. She spotted Heloise a few tables over, surrounded by her own Unit, prodding at their subject with the wrong end of a scalpel, laughing hysterically in true Heloise fashion.

Morrigan pressed her mouth into a line and tried to focus on her own Unit. But then every time she did, she’d catch Hawthorne or Cadence quickly looking away from her, and her heart would sink.

She hadn’t worked up the courage to broach that issue, yet. She wanted so badly to apologise, but she didn’t know where to begin—she still had yet to figure out why she’d snapped at him like that, much less how to go about amending it. She’d spent all of that morning’s Hometrain hiding at the back of the carriage again.

She almost went as if to make eye contact with Hawthorne, but then she remembered the promise she’d made to herself after her episode last night. She’d get her emotions under control, and she’d do it without anyone’s help. She shouldn’t have even been thinking of troubling him until she’d gotten her own messy affairs in order, and god knew she was far from that.

She squared her shoulders and glared at the table, hoping she’d get through the rest of the lesson without the need for any more introspection.

And that worked. For all of five minutes.

Then she remembered her hallucination of Jupiter, and her whole body locked up again.

It was perhaps some true miracle of the cosmos that she’d managed to make the worst decision possible at every crucial turn in her life. She didn’t have to accept Squall’s apprenticeship, but she chose to anyway. She could have told Jupiter about it, begged him to help her, but she’d chosen to keep it to herself. Every choice she’d made in her whole life had been the wrong one, and she could barely stand to think about it before guilt paralysed her.

All she could think about was the betrayed look on Jupiter’s face. It hadn’t even been real, but that didn’t make her any less aware of how far from redemption she’d strayed.

Maybe her family had been right. Maybe she was cursed; cursed to always turn her sails to the wrong wind, tilting her ship in the world’s mountainous waves until she’d tossed all her passengers overboard.

She suspected there was a tear in one of her sails, and she’d gotten to the point where she was searching for lifeboats. A sharp chill ran through her as she felt the ocean spray douse her from head to toe, and then she became aware of someone calling her name.

“Morrigan,” Anah was saying, while Mahir clicked his fingers in front of her face to get her attention. “Forceps, please?”

“Oh, uh. Yeah. Here.”

She lifted the tool with shaking fingers and held it out to Anah. Anah glanced at the tremor in Morrigan’s hands, then up at the facial expression she was so desperately trying to keep blank.

Very slowly, almost accusatorially, Anah took the forceps from Morrigan. Morrigan released a slow sigh of something that wasn’t quite relief, but felt a bit like it.

It was then that Mahir, gently, nudged her shoulder with his. “Arch’s probably still sitting out in the hall. I can walk you to the door, if you need to step out…”

Morrigan clasped her hands together in a vain effort to keep them still. “I’m fine,” she told him, through her teeth.

She didn’t dare to look at him. She didn’t want to know if he believed her or not.

She was just so tired of lying to people. It seemed to be the only thing she did these days. She wasn’t sure she could remember the last time she’d even been honest with herself. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference anymore.

Looking down at her twitching wrists, willing herself to believe that everything was perfectly normal… wasn’t helping, exactly.

She heard, again, that voice in the back of her mind—the same one that had spoken to her when she’d locked herself in her bathroom.

You’re a terrible person. You can’t do anything right. All you do is hurt people.

Your father was right about y—

She clamped a hand to her mouth as bile rose in her chest. She screwed her eyes shut—no way in hell was she going down that rabbit hole again. Especially not here. Not now. Not in front of all the people she was supposed to be stronger than.

You’re supposed to be a Wundersmith, she told herself, not kindly. You’re supposed to be better than this. This isn’t good enough.

“You need to get a hold of yourself,” Corvus’ voice muttered into her ear, and she whipped around, failing to suppress a faint yelp.

Her eyes scanned the room in search of him for far too long; until her distracted brain finally caught up, and realised how much of an idiot she’d just made of herself.

Across the room, Heloise was caught in a fit of hysterics, clutching her stomach in laughter as tears rolled down her face.

“Ohhh, that’s rich,” she purred between gulps for air. “The big bad Wundersmith can’t stomach a science class, can she?”

A wave of giggles rippled through the room, and Morrigan’s face burned. She made as if to stand, and Thaddea immediately leapt out of her own seat to plant a hand on Morrigan’s chest.

“Don’t stoop to her level, that’s exactly what she wants,” the redhead said, warningly. “I’ll deal with her later. Don’t give her the satisfaction of winning now.”

Morrigan looked her Unitmate in the face, trying to restrain her jagged breathing. She could see two clear paths branching from this moment—one wherein she stormed out of the room and became the campus laughingstock for the indefinite future, and another where she took the high road and let Heloise embarrass herself instead.

Thaddea was right. There was clearly a better option.

Unfortunately, Morrigan was a terrible decision maker.

“I don’t need to hear this,” she growled, shouldering the much taller girl out of the way as she rose to her feet. She was intensely aware of every pair of eyes in the room fixed on her; she couldn’t shake the feeling that even the rats were watching to see what she did next.

She grabbed her bag in a huff and made a trot for the door, head bowed. She expected students to whisper as she passed them—to make snide comments, to scowl at her, to point, to jeer, to laugh.

She expected to be ridiculed every step she made.

She didn’t expect her knees to buckle before she took even one.

Before she could so much as brace for impact, there were at least three pairs of hands grabbing her by the upper arms, pulling her back to her feet. For a moment suspended in time, she was slack in their grip, world blurring around her as every muscle in her body turned to ice. And then she was dumped back into her seat, rather unceremoniously, and her entire Unit was gathering around her and there were far too many faces in her field of vision and a lot of people were shouting.

She folded her hands over her eyes, panting, head pounding, stomach twisting in knots. Now more than ever, she needed to get out of this room—

But she was boxed in. Too many people crowded around her, all competing to be seen and heard—

—Anah—stripping her messied latex gloves off—“what’s going on here?”—trotting around to Morrigan’s side of the table, looking more like a professional than a friend—

—Thaddea, Mahir, and Francis, jerking their hands away from her forearm—Thaddea wincing as if in pain—“How are you that warm? I barely touched you—“

—Heloise, several tables away, absolutely inconsolable with laughter—

—Cadence and Hawthorne, across the table, talking in hushed whispers—

—Lam, still fixing her with that same damn stare—

—and all at once the light and noise and motion in the room was far too much and everything came crashing down like a breaking wave, ready to swallow her into the deep and eternal ocean below.

She didn’t even do it on purpose. She just let out this growl, like an animal pinned down by a predator, and flung her hands out to her sides, wishing everyone would just shut up.

She hadn’t meant to make it so, but she’d done it anyway. A pulse of golden light shot out from beneath her feet, knocking everyone within a ten foot radius backwards, lifting some people off their feet and sending them flying over nearby tables. A great whoosh filled the brief silence, and when the sound of the world returned it was filled with quite a lot of shouting and screaming and a few instances of remarkably vulgar language.

The doing of it had been completely unintentional. It was a reflex, an instinct—perhaps nothing she’d’ve consciously chosen to do, in her right mind. But the fact of it was that she’d done it.

And it had felt really, intoxicatingly good. Only for a moment—like she’d just pushed a boulder to the top of a hill and was watching it roll all the way back down to the bottom. She’d made no progress at all, but for that one moment in time, the boulder was out of her hands, and she could actually breathe.

She should have seen the repercussions of her actions immediately. Should have stopped dead in her tracks, should have apologised until her mouth ached from the shape of the word ‘sorry’. But her fight or flight instinct wasn’t finished with her yet.

In the wake of her outburst, she saw an opening. The path to the door was littered with bodies, people only just managing to prop themselves up from where they’d landed—but it was a path nonetheless.

She didn’t stop to think, or to gather her things before she left. She just ran for the door, not even hearing the way her Unit cried out after her.

Only once she’d slammed the closet door shut behind her did Morrigan finally seem to realise what she’d just done. Only then did she start to panic.

The door didn’t lock from the inside, so she barred it in using just about anything she could find—brooms, plastic buckets, boxes of cleaning supplies—before pressing herself in a corner between two metal shelves and making herself as small as possible, praying no one would think to look for her in a place like this.

“There you are,” someone said, and she froze with dread before realising it was only Squall—a realisation that swapped her dread for a kind of smothered anger that she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with.

“I’ve been looking for you for hours,” Squall said, accusatory, as if she’d somehow hidden herself from him on purpose (which she knew she hadn’t, because if she knew how to do such a thing, she would have been doing it all the time). “Your little… what is this, a pet project? A piece of theatre? Whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, it’s really quite strongly interfering with the Gossamer. I’m not even certain how long—“

His form flickered, then, and Morrigan looked him in the eye for the first time since he’d arrived to find he actually looked… nervous…?

“I need to explain something to you, but I don’t have much time, so I need you to listen,” he began hurriedly.

“I thought I told you not to waste my time,” she tried drily, but he apparently wasn’t having any of it.

“Shut up,” he hissed. “This isn’t a game. You need to listen to me.”

“And what if I d-don’t?” she argued, stumbling as a shiver wracked her—which seemed to alarm Squall by no small amount. “What’ll you do, fire me as your apprentice? Maybe you should. All it’s done is ruin me.”

He was ignoring her. “It’s more advanced than I thought,” he was muttering, seemingly more to himself than to Morrigan. “Miss Crow, you need to realise, so much more than your apprenticeship is at stake here.”

“What else, then? Your dignity?”

“Your life.”

Ice ran through her veins. He’s just saying that to scare you, she wanted to believe.

But the grave look on his face said otherwise.

At any rate, it worked in shutting her up. She figured she may as well hear what he had to say, even if it all turned out to be bullcrap.

So she pulled her knees up to her chest and watched him as he explained.

“This shouldn’t be new to you,” he said in an urgent tone. “In fact, we’ve been over this very thing before. If you don’t use your Wunder to its full potential, it will burn you from the inside out.” He sighed. “But since it is apparent that analogy hasn’t sunk in, allow me to try a different angle.”

He pressed his palms together, as if willing the Divine Thing to grant him patience.

“You, Miss Crow, are a child full of potential. You are so laden with it that you appear burdened by it, sometimes.”

She couldn’t deny that much. She wasn’t sure she could count on one hand anymore all the sleepless nights she’d had over the heavy responsibilities that lay upon her.

“And for a pitifully long time, the people around you failed to realise that potential. Your own blood family dismissed you, shunned you, treated you like an expense. Even now, the Wundrous Society undermines you, twists your abilities for their own gain, and not for the sake of what you can do.”

Morrigan didn’t fail to note the bitterness in his voice at that last point, nor the way his jaw twitched as he spoke it.

“Doesn’t that just kill you?” he said, voice tight with anger and some other strange cocktail of emotions Morrigan couldn’t quite place. “I’m sure you’ve felt wronged by it plenty of times in your short life, correct?”

She wanted to deny it—to deny him the satisfaction of being right. But with all her father had done to her, she knew she couldn’t.

“Wouldn’t you do anything to prove you’re so much more than they took you for? That you’re capable; that you’re better than them, stronger than them? That you can give them a tour de force, not just a pretty face?”

Again, she couldn’t deny it. She’d spent too many nights secretly imagining herself, twenty-odd years from now, swooping into Crow Manor and flaunting everything she’d become in the face of her good-for-nothing excuse of a father. She craved to see the look on his face from learning she was alive, much less that she had become one the most powerful people to exist—if not the most powerful person, singular, depending on how far she could make it by then.

“Of course,” Squall continued, taking her pensive silence as a yes. “That much is only reasonable.” He cleared his throat. “Now imagine—insofar as you can stretch the mind to accomodate such a metaphor—that Wunder, that marvellous energy that makes and unmakes all that you truly are, is alive. That it thinks and feels for itself, that it possesses wants and desires not unlike you or I.”

He took a breath. “Now suppose wunder’s only goal is to serve you as its smith. But you decline to.”

A weight settled into Morrigan’s stomach as she started to see where this whole soapbox speech was going.

“Wunder craves to be used by its smith in much the same way a cursed little girl craves to be loved by her father,” Squall said, softly and slowly, to which Morrigan clasped her hands behind her neck and bit down on her lip, trying not to let him see her discomfort. “So when you—the smith—choose to neglect it, you can expect to see it grow upset. And you can expect to see it react accordingly. In fact,” he said, kneeling to meet her eye level, “you’re seeing that already. Aren’t you?”

She tried to hide from his gaze, but found she had nowhere to go.

“Do you understand me now?” He wrung his hands together. “The exercise had nothing to do with your skill. Perhaps you could do to train them further, but that’s its own issue. I was only trying to feed your Wunder—to keep it from getting too hungry,” he said, emphatically, “before it ate you alive.”

Ice pricked her skin. She refused to look at him, not straight on.

He’d, apparently, reached the end of his sermon. A heavy few moments passed in the tiny space of the janitor’s closet, as Squall flickered in and out of existence and Morrigan tried very hard to determine if she existed at all.

Her world felt so distant. Her ears were ringing.

“I’ve tried,” she said, softly, breaking the long silence. “Using Wunder. It hasn’t worked.”

Squall sucked in a breath. He took a few moments to formulate a response.

“Have you ever seen,” he began at length, “the tide go out at a beach?”

“I’ve never been to a beach.”

“Fair point, nor have I. But you’ve seen photographs, haven’t you?”

She nodded.

“Picture your wunder as the tide. Receding from the land, further every moment, ebbing towards the horizon until you’d scarcely know it had ever been at your feet in the first place.”

She blinked a few times, because she knew exactly where this analogy was going. Having been blamed for a lifetime’s worth of catastrophes in her early years, Morrigan had become well acquainted with the signs and symptoms of all manner of disasters, natural or not.

“I’d suggest you find some high ground,” Squall concluded, simply. “I’d rather hate to see you be swept away. It’d be a waste of your talents, and, more importantly, all my efforts in honing them.”

… Your efforts?

Morrigan looked sideways at him—at his face that was impossible to read in the dim lighting of the space, bar the slight, telltale twitch of his jaw.

“Your efforts?” she muttered, aloud, to which he seemed surprised.

Of course. She should have known he’d never actually cared about her. It was all about him—what she could do for him, what she was worth to him, how he could use her to his advantage.

Could she trust any of that long-winded lecture he’d just gone on? Or was that just another of his means of trapping her? Of making her dependent on him?

“I told you,” she said forcefully, “to leave.”

“Miss Crow.” He rose, slightly, giving her a withering glare that bordered on threatening. “I would listen to me, if I were you.”

“Well, unfortunately, I’ll never be you,” she growled. “I’ll always just be the apprentice, right? The backup plan at best.”

“That’s not what this is about,” he said, frustration tightening his voice. “I’m telling you—no, I’m ordering you to listen to me.”

“Or what,” she spat through her teeth.

He took a half step backwards, affronted.

“This must really be new for you, right?” She crawled out of her hiding space, then rose to her feet, so as to stand as close to his level as she could. “To have someone not be terrified of you, for once. Doesn’t that—how’d you put it earlier? Doesn’t that just kill you?”

“You are being irrational,” Squall said, raising his voice a notch. “You know this can only end so well.”

She almost grinned. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“Morrigan.” He made as if to grab at her arm, but his hand fell through, and he grasped at the empty space, agitated. “I’ll say this only once: you are making a terrible decision.”

“Good!” she shouted, her husky voice bouncing right back from within the too-close walls. “Then everything’s exactly as its always been!”

The ringing in her ears grew louder. Pulsating nausea knocked her vision askew, but she didn’t succumb to it.

“Now, I won’t ask again,” she hissed. “Leave.”

She expected some kind of barely witty remark, or power trip, or anything at all. But all he did was stand there, unmoving.

So she took matters into her own hands.

She recalled pushing everyone away in the classroom, not twenty minutes before. An exhilarating headrush flooded her, and she swayed on her feet, clenching her fists at her sides.

The temperature of the air dropped to below freezing, and she thought for a stomach-turning moment that she’d done something wrong. But then her hands began to tingle, and glow, and ache, and burn.

Light flooded the tiny room, so bright she gave herself a headache in seconds.

Squall raised his arms in front of himself defensively, suddenly, as if without even meaning to. “Wait,” he said, eyes widening. “Don’t—“

But she didn’t care.

An ethereal, indescribable sensation gripped her, one of strength and power and total control. Her skin prickled as if ablaze.

She swung her burning fists at the space he might have been, and with a blinding flash and ear-splitting bang, he was there no longer.

The suffocating heat of the janitor’s closet died without a whimper. The sensation left her, but its imprint remained.

And immediately, Morrigan craved its sweet taste more than anything else she’d ever wanted before.

“You ought to watch your step around here,” Heloise crowed, while the rest of her cronies jeered along. “Wouldn’t want to faint onto the train tracks, would we?”

Hot anger flashed through Morrigan in an instant. But she just kept walking, didn’t look back. Didn’t act on her impulses.

Not from lack of wanting to. More like lack of inspiration.

Though she was caught up enough in her irritation that she only heard the stampede of footfalls by the time it had reached her. When it did, the accompanying voices were so eager to be heard that they all blurred together, and she only barely managed to pick out the individual pieces.

“—been looking everywhere for you—“

“—hell have you been all day—?”

“—absolutely worried sick—“

“—out of your mind—?”

“—in the name of the Divine Thing was that about—?”

“—could have seriously hurt someone—“

“—thought you’d seriously hurt yourself—“

“—guys.” Morrigan stopped walking, raising a hand to halt the rest of her Unit in their tracks. “One at a time.”

A beat passed in uncertain silence.

“We all thought something had happened to you,” Mahir ventured, when no one else seemed to want to. “Are you—“

“I’m fine,” she said briskly. “I didn’t sleep well last night, and it snuck up on me. That’s all.”

She turned to face her Unit, only to catch them all in the middle of sharing a collective disbelieving glance. Anah looked the least of all convinced.

Morrigan didn’t neglect to notice the first aid kit she had clutched in her hands like a briefcase.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked, idly.

“Borrowed it,” Anah answered plainly. “So I can examine you, but we’ll make it to the train first, so y—“

“I don’t want to be examined,” Morrigan interjected, bristling.

“And I don’t want to ask again,” Anah said, intensely.

Morrigan had been a lot of things that day. But she wouldn’t refrain from admitting that ‘a little afraid of Anah’ was one of those things. Her doctor voice was kind of hypnotising, in a terrifying way. Morrigan wondered if perhaps Cadence had taught her some tricks in that regard.

She glanced, unconsciously, at Cadence, then quickly looked away again.

“Trust me,” Anah said more reassuringly, patting the front of the kit. “This thing has everything we’ll need to make things easy. Tools, trinkets, lollipops if you get stressed, tranquilliser gun if you get really stressed…”

“I want a lollipop,” Hawthorne said, forlornly.

“I want a tranquilliser gun,” Thaddea said, acutely insulted by the fact that she didn’t.

“…Like, to own, or to have used on you…?” Mahir asked, confused.

Inwardly, Morrigan breathed a sigh of relief as the ensuing banter kicked up among the group. For just a moment, their focus on her relented, and she could breathe.

Good timing, too, as a strong wave of nausea struck her, almost tipping her off balance. The air, too, turned frigid around her—though that was hardly a sensation she was unaccustomed to by now.

So, of course, it was a perfect time for Heloise to make herself known again.

She and her snickering posse were, evidently, so hell-bent on making Morrigan’s life miserable that they’d actually run ahead to cut her off before she reached her station platform. A few of them were visibly out of breath from doing so—one of them was actually doubled over, swatting away the lifting hand that the adjacent lackey offered them.

Heloise, leading the pack, folded her arms and smirked.

“Well, well, well,” she purred. “If it isn’t little miss weak stomach.”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow. “Creative.”

“I have to say, I’m surprised,” Heloise continued, ignoring her. “Wimping out over a class like that is something you have to be pretty empathetic to do. And I wouldn’t have taken your kind as human enough to do it.”

Morrigan tried very, very hard not to wince, but she’d have been lying if she said that one didn’t sting.

“Besides. You probably eat rats for breakfast, or something.”

“Can you stop,” she said flatly, while Heloise’s goons giggled amongst themselves.

Heloise crouched, as if to meet Morrigan’s eye level—which was clearly meant to be nothing if not insulting, given that Morrigan wasn’t that much shorter than her.

She tucked a lock of green hair behind her ear, and smiled placidly. “Now why,” she asked in a thickly sweet voice, “would I ever do that?”

Maybe because I saved your life that one time, Morrigan thought, hot anger bubbling in the pit of her stomach.

Meeting the older girl in the eye, Morrigan wanted so badly to hit her. To punch her square in that smug grin of hers, to pull at that vomit-green hair until it came free from her head…

To do something. Anything, for the illusion of being in control.

But then she remembered what Squall had told her earlier.

“You are being irrational,” he’d growled, looking upon her with contempt. “You know this can only end so well.”

And, with those words echoing in her clouded mind, Morrigan did something that surprised herself:

Listened to him.

She brushed past Heloise, taking deep breaths, feeling the anger seep out of her senses, taking its poison with it.

And she’d only just started to walk away—the first truly good choice she might have made that week—when Heloise made her crucial mistake.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten you, either,” she said airily, giving Morrigan pause, then stopping in her tracks entirely when she realised she wasn’t the one being addressed.

She spun on her heels to see Anah, cowering slightly, as Heloise and her gang honed in on her.

“You were having the time of your life in that class, weren’t you?” She paused, as if expecting an answer.

“Not really,” Anah answered shakily and at significant length. “It was kind of boring. I’ve done all this before—“

“Right, right,” Heloise said, nodding. “Because you do that all the time, right? That’s your idea of fun?”

“Back off,” Thaddea growled warningly.

Heloise laughed. “Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t make you any different from the rest of your lot here.”

She gestured to the Unit as a whole. Morrigan’s breath caught in her throat, despite her best efforts to dislodge it.

“Brothers and sisters of the Great Wundersmith,” she said grandiosely. “Is it any wonder you’re all freaks?”

Morrigan clenched her fists. Bit down on her lip, hard.

This can only end so well. This can only end so well. This can only end so well. This can only…

Oh, fuck it.

Morrigan had never really understood what people meant when they said they saw red. But in that moment, she understood all too clearly.

She whipped forward, grabbing Heloise by her shirt collar, glaring her dead in the eye.

“Apologise,” she practically whispered, voice clipped and strained with anger.

Heloise chuckled, slightly nervously. “Or what?”

“Find out.”

Lam grew pale. “Don’t.”

“Morrigan,” Anah said, quietly. “Let her go. I don’t need you to protect me from her.”

“Yeah, Morrigan,” Heloise said, wrestling back some of her short-killed cockiness. “Ratlover here can handle hersel—“

With a flick of Morrigan’s wrist, the older girl was flung against the nearest station wall, body meeting the brick with an alarming crack.

A chorus of sharp gasps rang all through the station. Morrigan should have been satisfied with that.

But something was returning to her. A now-familiar searing heat to wash away the black ice at her heart, a glittering sensation of absolute power, of control over herself and her life, of a force unstoppable, waiting to be unleashed.

She hesitated a moment, on some threshold she wasn’t entirely sure she could define. I shouldn’t do this. This isn’t who I want to be. What I want to do with my talents.

But unfortunately, it was what her talents had decided that they wanted to do with her.

And so she held one arm out towards Heloise, just before gravity could bring her down from where she’d met the wall. And the Wunder pinned her there.

Not humanely. Not even humanly.

It was little more than hot air at first. But then the embers came, swirling around each other like ballerinas in a poorly rehearsed performance, breaking their legs for all their audience to see. Heloise whimpered under the intensity of the blast, coming at her strong enough to keep her from falling from where Morrigan had thrown her.

Morrigan wanted to feel bad, but she wasn’t sure she was capable of it. Certainly, she wasn’t in control anymore.

The embers, shortly, grew to wisps, and the wisps grew the plumes, and the plumes grew to tendrils, shooting out hotter and hotter and faster and faster with every passing second. Morrigan was aware of shouting, but she paid it little heed; she was more focused on Heloise, on the way she winced and writhed under the pressure.

She recalled, so long ago now, hearing just one note of the Angel Israfel’s song. Feeling as she was now, Morrigan could have been hearing Israfel’s whole damn symphony.

Someone—several someones—started grabbing at her arms, but she didn’t budge.

The flames grew brighter, the light starting to burn fuzzy stains in Morrigan’s vision. Radiating heat began to lace against her own face as the blast continued, and she soon felt sweat creep down her forehead. Heloise was definitely crying, now; she was pawing at the snaking fire as far as her restrained limbs would allow her, gasping for air through lungs being crushed by pressure alone, not to mention the smoke obscuring them.

Morrigan kept expecting to come down from her mania. But the release of all her pent-up Wunder only felt better by the second, and she found herself less and less inclined to stop.

The persistent chill following her the past few days began to melt away as the flames crawled up her arm, making as if to devour the both of them—Wundersmith and victim alike.

She became only slightly aware of her Unitmates as they all violently shook her, clamouring to be heard through the constant whoosh of flames and the ringing in her ears.

“—Morrigan, stop it—!“

“—please, this isn’t—!”

“—you’re going to hurt someone—“

“—that’s enough—!”

“—oh, shit—“

“—Morrigan, you’re killing her!”

Heloise clawed at the streaming fire, screaming in incoherent agony. And for the briefest fraction of a moment, her face flickered into Morrigan’s, contorted in the same twisted mask of fear and pain but resembling her own features, right down to the black eyes and crooked nose. Morrigan could dream it were herself she was incinerating, and she’d feel scarcely different than she did already.

Just as in the classroom earlier, the light and noise around her grew to a peak, to something greater than she was capable of processing. But she couldn’t escape her transfixation, and all she could to was turn the heat up even higher, in the hopes that she’d ruin herself enough to make it all go away.

Hands were grabbing at her hard enough to bruise. But she couldn’t be stopped, despite how much she was realising she wanted to.

She became aware that she was bleeding, red liquid seeping through the cracks in her palm and undersides of her fingernails. It dripped down her wrist, soaking her sweater sleeve, falling in fat droplets to meet the pavement in odd spatters. Something warm and slow dripped down her head, too, but she couldn’t identify exactly from where.

The inferno sputtered, only momentarily. Her vision blurred around the edges. She swayed on her feet.

She thought, just maybe, she was finally regaining control. Until she became aware of a stinging in the back of her neck.

She dropped her hand and turned her head. Behind her, where she’d just averted her gaze, there was a thud, then silence.

Anah stood a safe several metres away, tranquilliser gun in white-knuckled hand, chest heaving like she was trying not to throw up.

Morrigan looked back at Heloise to find her alive, scrambling upright, stumbling to safety, sobbing all the way.

She had just enough time to feel relieved before the combined tranquilliser dart and adrenaline crash kicked in, and she lost consciousness entirely.

Chapter Text

Hushed voices brought Morrigan out of the darkness. Her foggy brain couldn’t identify their sources, at first, but she was at least lucid enough to pick out some of the words.

“—can’t leave her unsupervised. Not after a stunt like that—“

“—I’ll supervise her, then. Isn’t that my job?”

“You’re well aware that’s not what we mean, sir. She’s dangerous.”

With a jolt, Morrigan realised the obvious: they were talking about her.

The second voice dropped an octave. “She’s not dangerous.”

The first voice sighed. “Right. What do you call this, then? Possession?” Their tone turned mocking. “A curse?”

“She is not cursed,” the second voice growled, with an insistent force Morrigan couldn’t quite place the cause for… yet.

“Because she’s dangerous,” the first voice repeated, voice strained with the impatience they were trying to withhold.

“By what metric?”

“Mate, by what metric do you think?” Their voice fell to a whisper, so tentative that Morrigan only barely made it out. “She put another student into intensive care.”

With another, vastly more unpleasant jolt, Morrigan’s memory began to piece itself together, and she realised who they were talking about.

Heloise, she thought, immediately choking back guilt. Oh, god. I hope she’s okay.

The second voice sucked in a breath. “I’m not unaware of that. I just mean to say we should wait for her to wake up before—“

“—not everyone has your patience, sir.” The first voice faltered, as if fearful to deliver whatever news they bore. “Haven’t you heard what people are saying?”

“…What are people saying?” the second voice asked sternly.

“There’s a big lot that’s real upset by this whole ordeal. They’re talking about safeguards—“

“Absolutely not,” the second voice snarled, as if on instinct. “I cut a mission short for this. I’d like to at least see her before it comes to that.”

With a final, paralysing jolt, Morrigan realised who the second voice belonged to. As the last of most of her senses returned to her, as she woke up slowly and painfully in a bed that was not her own, she realised exactly who was waiting for her the next room over.

She took a moment, first, to make sure he was real, because she wasn’t sure she could trust herself enough to believe it. But there was no flicker in reality. No vast misalignment in her perception, insofar as she could tell.

And she’d recognise Jupiter North’s voice anywhere.

“I am her patron,” he was saying, ice dripping from his voice. “Nay—I am her parent. Her guardian in legal, social, and moral right. I would like to see my daughter.”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” the first voice—belonging to no-one Morrigan knew—said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I wish I could help you, but this is a security issue now, and no-one’s allowed in there until the issue is contained. No matter how safe you think you are.”

Contained, Morrigan echoed to herself, biting back tears. Like I’m some kind of animal, escaped from a zoo. I suppose I may as well be, right? For all this place has done to me.

For all I’ve done to myself, this week.

She could hear voices raising outside, along with some sounds of scuffling, as if someone was being restrained. She only hoped Jupiter didn’t go and do anything idiotic.

Which she realised was hypocritical. But whatever.

“I’m supposed to be in a meeting right now,” drawled a voice by her bedside, and she startled. “Now all of my employees think Mr. Jones has a hangover. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“Squall,” she muttered, glaring at him. “What are you doing here?”

She kept her voice low, her lips mostly unmoving, not unaware there might be security cameras watching her talk to the apparently empty air. Hence it was all the more frustrating to have to watch him prance around the ward, enunciating each word with clean, clipped precision, as if he’d rehearsed.

She was tempted to ask if he’d been in theatre in his youth, but she suspected now wasn’t the time.

“I’m here,” he said simply, “to verify that you’re still alive.”

Unfortunately, I am, Morrigan wanted to say, but she let him continue.

“And to gloat,” he admitted offhandedly. “I’m not often one for clichés, but… I did tell you so.”

She wanted, reflexively, to bite back at him. To cook up some wry remark, to effectively communicate that she didn’t want him here.

But she was too caught up in realising just how right he’d been. And in remembering everything she’d done, everything she could have prevented if she’d only stopped and listened to him for once.

Cold horror crept across her entire body, numbing her fingers, burning her cheeks.

Panic gripped her. Her throat constricted.

Squall eyed her warily, seeming to catch the shift in her demeanour. “Whatever you’re about to do, I implore you to think through it first.”

She barely heard him. “I did that,” she whispered, almost unable to believe it. “I hurt someone.”

“Mm.” Squall clasped his hands behind his back. “If you’d been an ounce more intelligent about it, I might have been proud of you for that.”

She nearly gagged. “I don’t want you to be proud of me.”

“But that’s part of your training,” he said plainly. “That’s part of being a Wundersmith.”

“Then I don’t want to be a Wundersmith!” she cried, not caring who heard her.

And as the words spilled from her mouth, she was confronted with just how much they tasted like the truth.

She sat up in her white-sheeted bed, breath coming shaky and fast. Being a Wundersmith had ruined her life. It had corrupted her morals, pushed away all her friends, very nearly killed someone whose biggest crime was just kind of being a dick.

And now there was no way to take back the land she’d razed.

She had to start over, she concluded, as the corners of her vision clouded. She had to get out—go somewhere far away from here, where she could never again hurt any of the people she’d made the mistake of caring about.

She flung herself out of bed, ripping the IV out of her arm. It stung, but the adrenaline pumping through her body silenced it.

Squall took a step forward, exasperation preemptively crossing his face. “I swear to whatever gods may be watching,” he said through gritted teeth, “if you run away from yourself one more time—“

Panic overwhelmed her. Wunder—all too eager, without even having to be asked—flooded her veins.

She imagined the place where she wanted to be. Imagined pulling her body apart, thread by thread, and stitching it back together in that place, unmaking the copy of herself that existed in the hospital room and remaking it somewhere else entirely.

Her skin tingled, violently, like a limb regaining blood supply.

With a click of her fingers, and a frustrated groan from Squall, she disappeared from the ward.

When she reappeared, she was standing in the middle of her bedroom at the Hotel. It didn’t seem particularly happy to see her—her bed immediately launched a pillow at her, almost accusatorially.

But she didn’t stop to justify herself to it. She had things to be getting on with.

A life to leave behind.

Morrigan’s every mortal possession was strewn about the room as she tried to stuff the bare essentials into a backpack with violently shaking hands.

The door to her bathroom kept swinging itself open and shut, creaking emphatically, like the room was trying to tell her something. But whatever that was, she wasn’t hearing it.

She was too busy hearing something else. A few somethings else, rather.

“You’re a freak,” Jack’s voice snarled in her ear. She waved his apparition away, pretending she was growing tired of this whole routine. Pretending she didn’t actually care, as if that would make her traitorous mind mend its ways.

But she was still only pretending. Because even knowing they were products of her own disillusionment, their words still held a truth to them. A truth she didn’t particularly like to confront.

She kept having to pause to collect herself between gasps for air.

She had no idea what she was going to do with herself, after this. All she knew was that she was too much of a hazard to stay where she was. She didn’t strictly want to run away, but she also didn’t want to hurt anyone, and it was turning out she couldn’t not have either.

“You aren’t fit for society,” Cadence’s mirage sneered. Morrigan tossed a black sweater at it, and it disappeared.

She’d made her choice. She didn’t like it—that much should have been apparent from the way she was hyperventilating—but she’d made it nonetheless.

Her progress, however, was far from rapid. The Wunder she’d summoned for her teleportation trick had stuck around, hungry for more, and a constant heat prickled just beneath her skin. It was suffocating to such an extent that every time she moved too quickly, she made herself dizzy—an unfortunate predicament, because the panic pounding through her body scarcely allowed her to sit still.

On two distinct occasions, she had to stop what she was doing and go upheave the contents of her stomach in the bathroom. The first instance resulted from a combination of stress and disgust at herself over what she’d done. The second, she had to presume the same, but… she wasn’t quite so sure.

Jupiter’s illusion had appeared several times. Not once had it spoken a word, and that was perhaps the most torturous thing it could have done at all.

She wasn’t sure whether or not she wished Jupiter was actually there with her. On the one hand, she wasn’t exactly keen on having to explain herself—she wasn’t even sure she’d be able to if pressed. But on the other hand, it would have been really nice to be able to relax in front of someone. Even if only for a moment, right before the consequences of her actions caught up to her for good.

She recalled Jupiter having asked her a certain question years ago.

“Do you want to live?”

Folded up on her bedroom floor, cradling a backpack in her lap, Morrigan was beginning to realise just how many kinds of answers there were for a question like that. The trick was deciding which answer was hers.

Namely, whether she was more concerned with living or surviving. Whether she deserved any of either.

She sat, now, in front of her half packed bag, gripping the open zipper with white knuckles.

What’s the point? she caught herself wondering. Why go anywhere if all I’ll do once I get there is hurt the people I find?

Her breath caught in a throat that prickled with tears. She collapsed onto her bag, fingers quivering, shoulders heaving as she broke out into high-pitched sobs.

She lifted her head eventually, and looked around the room. Every surface swam through the water in her eyes—or perhaps that was her distant nausea, distorting her perception. She didn’t really care to tell.

She blinked to clear her vision, and that was when her eyes landed on her bookshelf. More importantly, that which sat upon it.

The candle. White, rippled wax, standing proud and pristine among the room’s disarray. Totally oblivious to all the mayhem and carnage it had unwittingly been the catalyst of.

She sprang to her feet, head spinning, and crept towards it. She took it, delicately, between her fingers, running her thumbs over the unblemished surface.

And then she turned and hurled it at the wall so hard it shattered.

She watched the splinters of it hit the floor with a satisfying chorus of thumps. She tilted her head at the heap of wax fragments, and considered doing it again. Weaving the pieces of the candle back into a whole, only to ruin it, again and again, the way it refused to stop ruining her.

Her fingers itched with the wanting to—springing from herself or the Wunder surrounding her, she couldn’t quite tell. But it didn’t matter, because she was interrupted before she got the chance.

The pounding at her station door began suddenly, and was so loud it blocked out all of the noise in Morrigan’s head, if only for the briefest moment. She sprung back, startled, and waited to see if it would come again.

There was a heavy pause. Then the door burst open, and her Unit came rushing in.

Morrigan recoiled, freezing with fear. Thoughts began to race through her mind, barely sticking around long enough to be processed before being replaced by something else.

Are they real? Are they really here?

What are they doing here? What do they want from me?

What are they going to do to me?

What am I going to do to them?

What if I do something to them?

What if something happens?

Why are they here? Why don’t they go away?

Why are they putting themselves at risk?

Why do they think I’m worth that risk?

Why do they trust me enough to take it?

Why are they moving towards me?

Why are they—

They came up in pairs on either side of her, grabbing her by the arms and wrenching her towards her bed. Their grip was solid enough to confirm that they did, in fact, exist, answering about one out of a quadrillion questions cycling through Morrigan’s overactive mind.

She tried to pick one such question out as her Unit hoisted her onto the bed and held her there. One stuck, eventually:

“How did you get in here?”

The most insubstantial query she could have picked from her lot. But one that got an answer, at least.

“Thaddea kicked the door in,” Mahir said gently. Morrigan wasn’t sure whether to appreciate his patient tone or take it as condescending.

“I’d’ve liked to,” Thaddea interjected grumpily.

Mahir looked confused. “Didn’t you? It opened so forcefully, I thought…”

“I was going to. But the moment I went to, it just opened itself. Like it kicked itself in, or something.”

The bathroom door sprang open, then slammed itself shut with a remarkably self-satisfied air.

“You guys can let go of her,” Anah said calmly. “I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”

The members of 919 released their collective grip on her arms, officially depositing her onto the bed. She sat up, wincing, rubbing at the finger marks that she could feel beginning to bruise beneath the thick sleeves of her jumper.

“You’re not going to run away,” Arch asked cautiously, “are you?”

“Don’t be daft.” Thaddea folded her arms. “She trusts us. Right?”

“If she wanted to leave, she would have done so already,” Anah said, sensibly.

“I’ll let you know,” muttered Lam.

Cadence and Hawthorne had been awfully quiet throughout this whole process. Francis had also not spoken, but he didn’t say much to Morrigan on a good day, so that was a lesser point of concern.

She resisted the urge to glance at her two best—(or once-best)—friends, instead glaring intently at the wall to one side—to the space just below the window, where the city skyline sat just outside of her field of vision, as if to taunt her.

“I’d like to make a few things clear, first,” Anah said, her professional voice trembling only slightly as she met Morrigan in the eye. “First: I am so, so sorry for tranquillising you. I wish I hadn’t had to, but… it was the only thing any of us could think to do. I’ve obviously never seen a case like yours before, and I… panicked.”

I understand the feeling, Morrigan thought.

“I’m really, truly sorry,” Anah echoed profusely. “But it was the only way to help you; and believe me, you do need help. Whatever’s going on, I know you can’t be in control of it. And I can’t stand by while people’s lives are in danger.”

“Like Heloise’s,” Morrigan said. There was no emotion to the statement—no inflection of a positive or negative kind. She wasn’t keeping her voice blank on purpose, it just turned out that way.

“Sure. Like Heloise. But also like yourself,” Anah added urgently, taking a step closer to the foot of the bed.

“I was never in any danger.”

“That’s not true,” Anah said, slowly, softly, like she wasn’t sure if Morrigan already knew that or not. “The state you were in at the train station—if we hadn’t stepped in, both of you could have…”

She trailed off, growing visibly uncomfortable. But Morrigan was more than able to fill in the blanks.

“Why bother?” she asked flatly.

“Believe it or not, I care about what happens to you, too, Morrigan. We all do. That’s ‘why bother’.”

Morrigan chuckled drily. “Well, now you’re just lying to me.”

Anah looked lost. “…Meaning?”

“Don’t you get it? Most of you have hated me since day one, just because I’m a Wundersmith.”

A chorus of protests kicked up around her bedside.

“—not to mention you two,” she added, heat rising in her chest as she finally stole a glance at Hawthorne and Cadence. “Who’ve been having a grand old time hating me all week.”

The pair were stunned into a silence for a moment. Hawthorne, eventually, was the first to speak.

“…You think we hate you?” he asked, squeakily, as if he didn’t believe it.

“I yelled at you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why shouldn’t you?”

“Because you’re human,” Cadence butted, an intensity blazing behind her eyes. “Humans make mistakes. You can’t hate someone just because they got pissed one time in their life. And because, more importantly,” she added, “we were too busy being worried out of our minds about you to possibly be angry at you.”

Morrigan stumbled at that.

“We spent every hour keeping an eye on you,” Hawthorne said. “Well, not every hour, obviously, but… y’know. You were acting so weird, and we wanted to help you, but you were so defensive and we didn’t wanna make it worse…”

“So much for that,” she said bitterly, heat crawling up into her mouth. “You should have realised, there’s no point trying to stop things from getting worse. I destroy everything I touch.”

There was a beat of shocked silence.

“Right,” Anah said at length. “You’re clearly not in your right state of mind, so I guess we’re definitely doing this.”

Morrigan’s stomach lurched. “Doing what?”

“Your medical examination,” Anah answered. “Nothing intensive, don’t worry. Just the basic vitals. Some psychiatri—“

“I’m not your lab rat,” Morrigan said with a scowl.

“It’s here or the hospital,” she said plainly. “And I feel like you’ve already made your choice therein.”

“…And some other choices, by the looks of it,” Cadence said, sparing a moment to properly scan the upended room, eyes landing on the backpack that had been left open on the floor. “What exactly were you planning on—?”

“None of you should be here,” Morrigan interrupted firmly. “You know I’m not safe to be around.”

“I will be the judge of that,” Anah rebutted.

Morrigan leapt off the side of the bed to take a pace towards Anah.

“You will do no such—“

She’d stood up too fast.

She crumpled, and her Unit had to catch her before she met the ground, just as they had in the classroom. They hoisted her back onto her bed, despite her protests—and this time, they didn’t move their hands away from her arms. At the very least, Hawthorne and Francis kept her pinned down on one side, while Thaddea and Mahir held her down on the other.

She writhed, to little avail. Lam stood back, drumming her fingers against her chin. Cadence and Arch stood either side of Lam, watching as Anah procured her medical kit.

Morrigan kept squirming, even though she knew all she was doing was wasting her energy.

“You realise there’s nothing wrong with me, right?” Her hands buzzed. “Aside from the obvious.”

“That remains to be seen,” Anah said, only half paying attention. She withdrew from her kit an infrared thermometer, and, wasting no time, aimed it at Morrigan’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

“I’m a monster,” Morrigan enunciated, world warping around her as Anah held the thermometer to her head. “I’m dangerous. I’m delusional. I shouldn’t be allowed to live. I should be dead as we speak.”

Hawthorne’s grip on her tightened, as if he were growing upset. The thermometer chirped, and Anah pulled it towards herself to read it.

She blinked at the display. Frowned. Shook the machine. Smacked the side of it once, twice. Then aimed it at Francis, who happened to be the closest alternative target.

He stood there dutifully, if a little confused, until the machine beeped again. Anah glanced at the result, and her frown only deepened. She pointed it at Morrigan again.

“You know I always thought I was cursed, as a kid?” Morrigan said, her words blurring together. “Maybe I was right. Maybe this is exactly what I get. For being here when the world thought I wouldn’t be. This is the universe course correcting itself.” She giggled, her own voice sounding muffled and foreign to her ears. “This is how it was always meant to be. I—hah! I should be dead!”

“That’s not true,” Cadence interjected softly. The machine beeped again, and Anah pulled away to read it.

“Of all the times for this thing to have a tantrum…” She sighed, and stuffed it back into the kit, before fishing around and withdrawing a more traditional type of thermometer—still a digital one, but of the oral variety, a set of them neatly packaged in a vivid pink box. Anah wrenched one free of the box and popped it into Morrigan’s mouth without so much as a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’.

Morrigan found herself chewing on it subconsciously, out of boredom more than anything else.

“Under your tongue,” Anah scolded, to which Morrigan promptly complied. She was less inclined to admit it now, but she was still a little afraid of Anah’s Nurse Voice.

When it was done, Anah took it, bringing it close to her face so as to better read the results. Morrigan saw her face twist in confusion, then drop, then blanch entirely.

“What’s it say?”

“98.6,” Anah said slowly.

Morrigan chuckled. “Of course. The exact baseline, right? Didn’t I tell you.” She grinned lopsidedly. “There’s nothing here to play doctor with. Just me and my stupid choices, reaping the stupid consequences of my stupid—“

“Morrigan,” Anah interrupted, in a voice both urgent and deeply upset. “This isn’t…”

She squinted at the little display. Grabbed the box, turned it over in her hands. Looked back up at Morrigan, fresh horror in her eyes.

“This is in Celsius.”

Morrigan blinked.

“You were almost right,” she continued softly. “You should be dead, logically. And I don’t know how you’re not.”

Hawthorne was the first to think to press a hand to Morrigan’s forehead. He withdrew it as soon as he placed it, reflexively grimacing, letting out a short whimper of pain.

“No wonder you can barely stand,” Anah choked out. “This is not human.”

Morrigan could have shot back with something about how of course, she wasn’t human, she was Wundersmith, something far above and/or below human—

But she was truly at a loss for words. And there was about to be another matter to deal with, regardless.

Lam’s head whipped towards the door first, and shortly thereafter was when the voices came into earshot for everyone else. They were hurried, muffled through the Hotel walls—but one had a particular cadence that Morrigan recognised all too well.

The door to the hallway flung open before anyone even appeared in it. A few seconds later, a familiar amalgamation of tangled ginger hair and electric blue eyes literally skidded into view, grabbing the side of the doorframe to stop himself before momentum carried him past the room entirely.

His eyes flickered around wildly, before locking onto Morrigan’s. His entire body froze at the sight of her. Behind him, a collection of other Hotel staff came barreling into view, peering over his shoulders to see what was going on.

Morrigan was too fixated on Jupiter to pay them much attention. She’d missed him. She didn’t want to talk to him. She wanted to talk to him more than anything in the whole world. She wanted to keep him safe. She wanted him to make her feel safe. She wanted him to leave. She wanted him to stay.

She just started crying. And when Jupiter rushed over, and wrapped her in his arms, it felt so much better than any Wundrous outburst could have.

She’d forgotten how blissful it was to be loved.

Morrigan was half-awake, holding her breath, pretending not to overhear Jupiter and Miss Cheery’s hushed conversation through the curtain that circled her hospital bed.

“There’s still a push for the safeguard,” Miss Cheery said, solemnly. “Some people are just so heartless… don’t they get she’s just a girl, too?”

Jupiter sighed wearily. “You’d think an elite, prestigious Society would be less inclined to house such a large populace of numpties, but apparently you’d be wrong.”

There was a pause. “What are you going to do?”

“What I’ve always promised to do,” he answered. “Protect her. Numpties be damned.”

She bit back a prickle of tears. After everything, he still cared about her. Still wanted to see to it that she’d be okay.

She was surprised, perhaps, by how much that surprised her.

Shortly thereafter, Miss Cheery was escorted out of the ward. But Jupiter must have pulled some strings since last time, because he wasn’t made to leave with her.

He pulled the curtain aside, slowly, and stepped through it. Morrigan looked sideways at him as he crouched by her bedside.

His searching eyes met hers. When he didn’t say anything, Morrigan filled the silence with a creaky voice.

“Is Heloise okay?”

He released a long breath through his teeth, and Morrigan’s heart sank.

“She’s fine,” he said hurriedly, apparently noting the stricken look on her face. “She’s doing well, actually. I went to see her yesterday, out of good faith.”

Morrigan stiffened. “Did she say anything? About…?”

“Well. You understand that a young woman like Heloise always has lots to say about everything.” He wrinkled his nose. “Not much of it bears repeating. But honestly, it’s not her I’d be worrying about.”

“Then who?”

“Baz. He’s properly on the warpath.” Jupiter rolled his eyes. “Not that I expected anything less from that spectacle of a man.”

She managed a tiny snicker at that, and the corner of Jupiter’s mouth twitched upwards.

“Don’t worry yourself about all that,” he told her assuringly. “I’ve put up with plenty of Baz’s nonsense. Believe me, I’m more than equipped to sort him out.”

Their exchange lapped into silence. An awkward moment hung in the air.

“So,” Jupiter tried, voice dropping to a husk. “Would you… like to talk about it? Y’know, about…” He gestured at her vaguely.

She looked away, breath trembling in her chest.

A huge part of her really did want to. If only to lessen herself of the knowing of it, to allow someone else to help her lift the burden. She didn’t even care if she had to tell him about the apprenticeship, so long as it meant she could give up the arduous act.

But she was so exhausted. And she had no idea where to even begin.

She shook her head mutely. Not now, she thought distantly. Not yet.

Jupiter took one of her hands between his, pressing a thumb to her knuckles. Morrigan braced herself for the double-down—for him to insist she say something, give him something to work with.

“Okay,” he said, surprising her. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She very nearly burst out into tears again. Jupiter evidently noticed, propping himself up to sit on the side of the mattress, reaching out to cup her cheek in one hand.

“Whatever you need,” he said, so meaningfully that Morrigan almost couldn’t process it. “I told you I’d look out for you, didn’t I? And I don’t like breaking promises.”

He spent the next little while fussing over her to the point of being mildly overbearing, but Morrigan certainly didn’t elect to complain. He distracted her from her pains with anecdotes from the Hotel, he fetched her water routinely and made sure she drank it, he pressed a damp washcloth to her forehead when she grew flushed, he wrapped her up in a hug when she shivered.

“It’ll be okay,” he told her soothingly, as she buried her face in his shoulder. “I’ll see to that. That’s what family does, after all.”

She thought back to her biological family. To her father, who only cared about her insofar as he cared if she lived or died—because he was always waiting for the latter.

And she remembered the way Squall had picked up on that. How he’d said it was not dissimilar to the way she’d rejected her own nature, neglecting her talents the way Corvus had neglected her.

She looked past Jupiter’s shoulder to stare at her tingling hands. She flexed her fingers, curiously, as if only noticing she had them for the first time.

“I suppose it is,” she said at length. And then, “thank you.”

“Whatever for?”

Divine Thing, where do I begin?

“For being my family.”

Jupiter released her briefly, planting his hands on her shoulders and looking her in the eye. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”

Warmth glowed in Morrigan’s chest.

“I need to ask you a favour, though,” he said, a stern hint creeping into his voice. “If I promise to look out for you—and believe me, I will—can you promise me something in return?”

Morrigan raised an eyebrow as anxiety arrested her. “What’s that?”

“Never, ever scare me like that again,” he answered intensely. “I’m an old man, Moggers, my fragile heart can’t take it.”

She barked a laugh at that. It was just like him to say something so important in such a stupid way.

But she had to give him credit for it, because it was pretty effective.

She thought for a moment, only to realise she’d already made her decision.

“I promise,” she vowed, meaning it for the first time in days, and meaning it so much that her heart ached.

A relieved grin cracked across his face, and he swept her up in another bone-crushing hug, as if scared she’d drift away the moment he let go.

She locked her arms around him, then looked up to see Squall lurking in the corner of the room, watching this exchange with forced neutrality.

He glanced, wordlessly, from Morrigan, to Jupiter, then back again. She expected him to say something, to offer some snide comment or cutting remark.

But he didn’t. All he did was nod, as if in approval, and then he was gone without a trace.

Morrigan could have stayed like that forever, held in the arms of someone who truly saw her, knowing that she was loved.

But if she couldn’t have forever, just this moment would do.