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It was with the unbarring of a cell door that they found her, unearthed her like an antique sword from a grave. It was to a cry of shock that she woke, limbal rings glowing crimson in the dim light. When she moved, it was awkwardly, slim pale limbs almost seeming to clatter, like a pile knocked over, as she carefully, tentatively, unwound herself from the knot she’d been curled into.

The torch was moved closer, and she froze, eyes wide, the torchlight flickering odd shadows across her mien, dancing across blue-black horns that curved to a goring point before her face. The contrast of warm grey skin, blue-black scales, tangled and matted auburn hair and gleaming vermillion eyes was startling, made more so by the grime that covered her in place of clothes, the old sword she clutched in one hand, and the terrified snarl on her face.

She was - she looked - young, twelve or thirteen, a child, naked and terrified and angry, down in the filth and the dark. There was blood on the blade of the sword, on the hands that clutched it, and in a corner, almost entirely hidden by the shadows, was the looming corpse of a Roegadyn, bloodied and rotting.

When they went to urge her out of the corner, they found chains around her limbs, the cuffs rubbing her skin bleeding and raw. It took a Rogue’s lockpicking to get them off her, and then she was coaxed out of the cell, to join the huddled mass of the slaves freed from the hull of the ship, a Storm Sergeant’s coat wrapped around her. Her hands still held the sword in an iron grip, but she’d smudged some of the dirt and blood off herself. She’d not spoken a word, but grew tenser as the other freed slaves left her a wide berth, her shoulders rising as she heard the whispers of ‘feral’, ‘mad’, and ‘dragonkin’.

It was the last one that made her bear her teeth and snarl at them.

‘Not dragon,’ she growled with a voice hoarse and raw, though it was impossible to tell if her hoarseness was from disuse or screaming. She was silent after that, the whispers halted, and then there were other things to hold their attention.

It had been a week and a half since the slave ship was abandoned by its crew, a week and a half since the Calamity that ended the Sixth Astral Era and started the Seventh Umbral Era. Many of the freed slaves had no homes to go to, but they did have families, friends, guilds, people who could take them in.

But she was alone.

None of the other freed slaves wanted anything to do with her, and it didn’t help that her species was unknown - she was closest to a Miqo’te, with her tail and lack of normal ears. When they asked her name, all they got was a muttered ‘Leda’, but anything else resulted in an ‘I don’t know’ that got sharper and snappier as they kept asking. Her age got a shrug, as did asking about family. Her country of origin netted them a sneer.

Telling her she was in Limsa Lominsa resulted in a hunted sort of confusion and bafflement.

Eventually, a decision had to be made about Leda, the not-dragonkin. She was both too feral and too unknown to be left on her own, particularly considering the visual similarity between her horns and the helmets of high-ranking Garleans. 

But it was a week and a half after the fall of Dalamud, and neither the Maelstrom nor the Yellowjackets had the manpower or energy to spare on a feral child, suspicious or not.

There was a silence, eyes on the girl - Leda - whose knuckles were white on the hilt of the sword, until one of the Rogues - Jacke Swallow, by all appearances next in line for Upright Man of the Guild - sighed and stepped forwards.

‘Stop yer ditherin’, we’ll take her.’

‘You be careful now, Rogue,’ one of the Yellowjacket’s snapped, ‘we don’t need no more of you.’

‘She’s a lass,’ Jacke retorted. ‘I’m nae puttin’ hilts in her daddles ‘til she’s old enou’ tae be a member.’

And that was that. Leda had a place to stay for the next five years until she could join a guild, the Yellowjackets and the Maelstrom kept a sharp eye on her when they could, and growing up was as peaceful as it could be in the start of an Umbral Era.

Chapter Text

‘Jacke, what were you thinking,’ V’kebbe hissed once Leda had holed herself up in one of the store-rooms in the Sisters they usually used for keeping loot they’d bit back before they returned it. Her tail was puffed and her eyes angry little slits. ‘A child! In the guild! Jacke!’

‘None else was going to take her, Stray,’ he whispered back, placing a harsh emphasis on V’kebbe’s byname. ‘You know them, they’d’ve kept her in a cell. None else wanted her. She killed a man, V’kebbe, there was a deadman in her cell and a blade in her daddles, none else wanted aught to do with her.’

‘Y’know there’ll be eyes on us now, Jacke,’ Perimu added, startling the other two. ‘Don’t act surprised, I’m not that hard to miss,’ he added crossly.

‘Aye, Underfoot,’ V’kebbe agreed sourly. ‘They’ll be watching what we do with her. It’s more attention than we need right now.’

‘There’s that,’ Jacke sighed. ‘No-one else’d take her, though.’

‘Aye, Jacke,’ Perimu sighed back, ‘so ye say. But ye may’ve brought us more trouble than we can afford. Ye jus’ be careful Jacke. With yesel’ and with her.’

‘Yer a fine cove, Jacke,’ V’kebbe added, ‘ye jus’ need a better head on them shoulders.’ She brightened, ‘fortunately we’re with ye to provide it.’

‘We’ve got yer back, Jacke,’ Perimu nodded. He paused, then tentatively added, ‘ye do know what they expect us tae do wit’ her?’

‘We’re not their stabbers,’ Jacke snarled, ‘they do their own killin’s in the darkmans, we’re not hired blades.’

‘Weren’t suggestin’ that, Jacke,’ V’kebbe returned dryly. 

‘Was just a thought,’ Perimu said, almost defensive except for the way he seemed utterly relaxed.

Chapter Text

Leda shuffled back further in the corner of the tiny dark room she’d been led to. The accent they spoke with was thick and heavy, and the words were different (-from what? How had she spoken before?-) but she could understand well enough that the conversation she’d heard outside the door terrified her.

“Killings in the dark” and “hired blades” mixed with “what they expect you to do with her” painted a very clear picture, one she didn’t want to associate with Jacke’s friendly blue eyes.

She took a deep breath and let it settle into her chest, a stone in the pit behind her sternum, the knowledge that the people who had taken her in were killers (But then so was she, so was she; that man in her cell was dead, dead, dead, and there was blood on the sword on her clothes on her-) could kill her at any time if they wanted ( so could anyone, so could the people who found her, who asked her questions she couldn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer, so could the slavers who had all left when the narrow strip of sky she could see turned red)

It was easier to just not think about it, so she curled up, tucking her tail around her legs, letting her limbs act as a cage around her, and tried not to think about the people on the other side of the door, tried to pretend that only her room existed, only her in it, no bodies in the corner.

They’d taken the sword.

They’d taken the sword so she was without a blade, all she had were her hands. She’d never tried to use her horns. She wondered if she could gore someone with them.

Leda thought of knives in the dark and blood on her hands and tried not to think about Jacke’s eyes, so blue, so kind, or about the other voices she’d heard, who advised caution, but not death. She tried not to think about standing alone on the deck, surrounded by people in red and yellow uniforms, not one of them willing to deal with her.

Chapter Text

The morning of the fifth day of Leda’s residence in the Dutiful Sisters of the Edelweiss dawned, and V’Kebbe was expecting it to be much the same. Leda would slink out for food, stare around with narrowed eyes when she wasn’t actively avoiding eye contact, huddle in a corner for a while, then slink back into the store-room for hours on end.

She’d been wrestled into a bathroom on day two, and she’d fought until everyone else left, then locked herself in for two hours, emerging scrubbed red raw, almost steaming from the heat of the water, but clean.

The day after that, V’Kebbe had left an old set of her clothes, worn almost see-through, outside the store-room. It hadn’t been nice, she told herself, it was just that Leda had had a Maelstrom coat for clothing and nothing else, and the way it swamped her frame made something wrench in her chest.

Leda was more trouble than she was worth. Already, a Storm Sergeant had knocked on their door seeking his coat back - fortunately after V’Kebbe had donated her old sleeping clothes - and then stayed and asked questions of the girl, questions she didn’t, or couldn’t answer, but prying nonetheless.

But today when she crept out of the storeroom that V’Kebbe had started internally designating as Leda’s, her sharp green eyes caught and held on the thick red bands around the girl’s wrists, skin raw and scabbed, sluggishly bleeding around the patches of blue-black scales over the tender pulsepoint. The Miqo’te’s mouth thinned, eyes narrowing as she fought with herself. One grey-skinned hand came up to scratch at the opposite wrist, sharp nails tearing open the scabs, catching on raw skin, and Leda sucked in a pained breath that made it to V’Kebbe’s sharp ears. Shit.

Now she’d gone and got herself invested; because she wasn’t attached, she wasn’t. She was V’Kebbe the Stray, and she came and went like her namesake, she didn’t get attached, not even to Jacke. That was a filthy lie, and she knew it. In her mind the battle was lost and won.

‘C’mon, we’ll get that looked at,’ she said, more curt than she meant, striding over to Leda and clasping one strong hand down on a bony shoulder. Leda turned her head so fast her horns bumped against V’Kebbe’s wrist and she jerked her head back almost as swiftly.

‘What? Where?’ she asked the Miqo’te, crimson-ringed eyes wide, her voice quiet and still hoarse, though far less raw than it had been.

‘Arcanist’s Guild. We’ll get your wrists healed up,’ V’Kebbe replied, softening her voice and her grip. When Leda looked about to protest, she continued. ‘It’s not good to be bleeding like that. It’s not far.’ She nudged the girl towards the door, but stopped when she froze up. ‘Hey?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, I can… I…’ Leda stuttered, stopped, breathed, swallowed and continued. ‘It’s fine. Let’s just- go.’

‘If ye say so,’ she replied, dubious, but shrugged and opened the door.

Leda squinted into the bright sunlight reflecting harshly off the white stone and the water below, dazzled and blinded. V’Kebbe felt like hitting herself. Of course it would be too bright, Leda’d been in the Sisters for five days, and it was windowless and dimly lit.

For the most part, the journey went well - but then V’Kebbe was left staring at the busy Hawker’s Alley with Leda pressed as close to her back as she could, trembling slightly.

‘Too many people,’ Leda murmured into her hop, and V’Kebbe felt a bit like screaming. Of course a feral ex-slave child would have problems with people. Her thoughts turned to Leda’s original blood-stained and filthy appearance, her nakedness and vulnerability, the way she clung to the sword, Jacke’s words “she killed a man, V’Kebbe,” and she forcefully wrenched them away from the conclusion they drew.

She wrapped her tail around the girl’s waist, gripped Leda’s hand, and forged the both of them a path through. It was the busyness of noon on a working day, and it was a close crush, but she had sharp elbows and bared teeth, so it only took a bare few minutes to get them through, Leda’s grip crushing on her hand the whole way through.

‘And what brings the Stray with a stray of her own?’ the receptionist asked as they entered.

‘Wrists, Leda,’ V’Kebbe ordered, and the girl offered her wrists up, subdued.

‘A Xaela?’ The receptionist asked, already waving over a guildmember, examining Leda with sharp eyes. ‘Where o where did you find an Au Ra in Eorzea?’

‘None of your business, Murie,’ V’Kebbe snapped, sharp eyes watching the Arcanist cast Physick and Leda’s wrists scabbing over, the scabs flaking away to reveal skin red and sore but not yet scarred.

Chapter Text

‘You’re attached, V’Kebbe,’ Jacke said, a deep fondness welling in his chest. ‘You know you are.’

‘Shut up, Jacke! I’m not, it’s just…’

‘’T’s a’right, Stray, I’ll get ye one o’them finger sandwiches from the Bismark.’

‘Consolation prize or bribery?’ Perimu piped up.

‘Ye cannae talk, Underfoot, I know it was ye who gave her that comb.’

‘We could not have her looking like a ragamuffin!’ he yelped. ‘Nothing more!’

‘Iffn ye say so,’ Jacke replied

Chapter Text

The Upright Man of the Rogue’s Guild had died - ambushed by a pirate crew alongside most of the older members of the Guild, and Jacke was Capt’n now. But that left the minor matter of revenge, and the small issue that half of the Guild was too dead or injured to fight; so all those who could were taking up knives, ears in the shadows and eyes sharp and cruel. The Maelstrom and the Yellowjackets were going to turn a careful blind eye, and the Admiral had been alerted in the tentative way that the Guild did anything with Admiral Merlwyb, with an awareness that they still existed because they were useful.

Everything was ready, organised, planned as much as it could be - except for Leda, standing at the door to the Sisters, the knives Lonwoerd’d given her clutched in her hands, her long red hair bundled out of the way, in the nondescript clothes she’d given with Perimu, crimson-ringed eyes bright with determination.

‘No,’ Jacke said, voice as flat as his face. Her stubborn chin firmed. ‘No, Leda.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, narrow-eyed.

‘Because they would have my head,’ he said, jerking his thumb at V’Kebbe and Perimu on either side of him, then the rest of the guild watching. ‘And because we took ye in on the understanding that ye’d not fight for us ‘til you were old enou’ to choose. An’ if the Admiral finds out, it's all our heads, Leda. Yer fifteen, ye’ve got another three years till ye can join a guild.’

She took a deep breath, puffing up as though to argue, then slumped, gaze dropping as she sheathed her blades.

‘What if ye get hurt?’ she muttered. Jacke huffed a laugh.

‘We’ll get hurt, lass, but we’re not goin’ tae die on ye anytime soon,’ he told her, and she looked at him, her eyes dull red inside the vivid limbal rings, his eyes blue and warm and honest in a way that she knew was half-false.

‘Ye can’t promise that,’ she snapped, her voice going sharp and crisp in the way that it had been before she picked up the Lominsan brogue. ‘You cannot promise me that you will not die.’

‘We’ll have his back, lass,’ Perimu assured, but she turned her teary, accusing eyes on him too.

‘I don’t want you to die either!’ she half-yelled, half-sobbed, ‘Any of you!’

She fled, the door to the room hat had once been a storeroom slamming shut behind her. Perimu started forwards, but V’Kebbe held him back.

‘Leave her. She’s only young. We’ll come back to her and it will be fine. Let’s just go,’ she said, nodding her head at Jacke.

He returned the nod, and they all spilled out of the doors to the Sisters, slipping into the shadows and scattering on their way to Lower La Noscea.

There was a vicious, bloody fight ahead, and they couldn’t afford to be distracted by the girl they left behind, to wait in the dimness of the empty halls of the Sisters.

Chapter Text

Leda waited for bells in the Sisters, curled up in her room, pressed into the corner. She’d long since had a proper bed in there, in one corner with a proper light on the bedside table and a sea-chest for her clothes, but the corner felt safer - her spine pressed into the seam of the walls, clutching the sword to her chest.

What would she do if they didn’t come back? Where would she go? Would the Yellowjackets take her, or was she a Maelstrom problem? And… what would she do without Jacke, or V’Kebbe, or Perimu?

It had been two years since she’d been fished out from the depths of the slave ship, two years since she’d stood in a circle of people who didn’t want her but didn’t want to let her go, two years since Jacke had taken her in to the Guild and… they were hers now, in the way that a Rogue allowed themself to have people. They were her friends, her care-takers, her family, and she’d kill for them, die for them. But they wouldn’t let her. She was stuck here, at the Sisters, whilst they went out to fight and maybe die without her.

It was the waiting, the endless hours in the half-dark that was the worst thing, the not knowing if the doors would open on the guild returning hale and whole, or just one of them, injured and dying, or on a Yellowjacket telling her they were all dead and that she was to be taken away, or not at all. The last ached, the thought that they would all die or leave and forget about her, alone in the dark, that she would never know.

She breathed, pressing her knees into the sockets of her eyes, curled in on herself, she breathed and she waited.

Chapter Text

Perimu shoved open the doors to the Sisters, leading V’Kebbe and Jacke to a bench, the former limping whilst supporting a pale-faced Jacke whose hands were clutched to his side, stemming the blood seeping sluggishly from his wound. Lonwoerd had one hand clamped over his ruined eye socket, and Perimu himself, though his ribs were broken, was the most uninjured of them all. A handful of other guildmembers followed them in, spreading out and slumping onto anything that remotely resembled a chair.

V’Kebbe was halfway through stitching up the gash in Jacke’s side when he straightened, hissing against the pain, and called out.

‘Leda! Where is she?’ he called, and there was an assortment of pained noises as various people tried and failed to jump to their feet.

With a sigh, Perimu levered himself up, slumping over to Leda’s room, and heaving open the door. He huffed a laugh at what he saw, and a fond smile touched his lips.

‘Asleep,’ he announced, and pushed the door to, leaving it open just a crack.

Leda woke slowly to the sound of hushed voices and quiet movements. She blinked sleep-blurred eyes, and stretched idly as she tried to focus. Her limbs knocked into the walls, and she jerked as she remembered - she’d fallen asleep on the floor, waiting for them to return - but more important than the pins-and-needles shooting up her legs was the noise outside, familiar voices, familiar noises.

Stumbling a little as she got to her feet, head aching and face sore from crying, she paused at the door, pushing it open and taking in the sight of the guild, spread out, wounded, but alive, and the relief that rushed through her almost made her fall over. They were home, they were safe. She was safe.

They were not whole, though, Lonwoerd’s ruined eye socket caught her gaze, and Jacke was shirtless, pale and bandaged. No-one had lost a limb though, not for lack of trying, and they were all home - they had all returned to her.

Somehow she ended up with her head against a crate, pressed up against Jacke’s leg, V’Kebbe’s hand combing through her hair, tears trailing down her face. The smell of blood was thick in the air and heavy on her tongue, but the scent of death was absent, the sour aftertaste in the back of her throat that had always heralded loss notably not there.

Chapter Text

Leda’s eighteenth birthday was a day she’d looked forward to ever since she’d taken her first step out of the hull of the slave ship. She was an adult, legally permitted to join a Guild properly, to take up a craft or a blade, to leave Limsa or become a proper citizen as she wished. 

The very first chance she got in the morning of the day she’d claimed as hers - the anniversary of the day Jacke had spoken for her and taken her in - she planted herself before Jacke and stared him down. He’d raised an amused eyebrow at her.

‘I want to join, Jacke,’ she said, ‘I’m eighteen now, I can.’

V’Kebbe had come up behind her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head - the sort of idle affection that still made Leda blush to the roots of her hair, and V’Kebbe too, when she realised - smoothing back her curls.

‘Aye, ye can,’ the Miqo’te said with a toothy smile. ‘An’ ye’ll be the youngest member o’ the Guild in it’s whole history.’

‘Ah,’ Jacke said, and Leda narrowed her eyes at him. 

‘Ah?’ she echoed incredulously. He sighed.

‘Yer as bene as any mort with stabbers in yer fambles,’ he said, and she jerked her chin up at him, ‘but if you want to learn that pigsticker of yon, ye’d best go to Ul’Dah and the bloodsands.’

“That pigsticker” was the sword that still had its own space in her room, the same sword with which she had been unearthed from the tiny cell in the hull of the slave ship. Lonwoerd’d given her knives, and Perimu and V’kebbe had taught her how to use them, but that sword had sat in its own corner. The blade had long since been cleaned, but there was still blood ground into the leather-wrapped hilt. Some days Leda couldn’t even look at it, too vividly reminded of large hands and hot breath, but other days, she clutched it close and revelled in the strength she’d regained that she could force the blade through bone now.

‘But it’s Ul’Dah,’ she said, faintly. 

‘Aye, an’ yer a damber mort now, Leda, I can hardly call ye a lass anymore. Ye’ll be a’right,’ Perimu soothed.

‘Must I?’ she asked, soft-voiced and wide-eyed, head tilted in a way that made her horns look less like sharp weapons. V’kebbe stuck a hand out to swat the back of her head, and Leda ducked with a huff of laughter, then dropped the act. ‘Do I have to go?’

‘Nay, love,’ V’kebbe assured, running her hands through Leda’s curls. ‘But t’will be bene for ye. Ye can stay, if ye will. Ye’ll be a Rogue no matter what ye choose.’

Leda swallowed, and nodded.

‘I’ll go,’ she agreed quietly. 

‘An’ ye can come back,’ Perimu added.

‘Always, lass. Yer one o’ us by now,’ Jacke said.

Limsa, by now, was used to Leda; her slim, dark-scaled figure was a common sight, even as hidden as she was away in the Dutiful Sisters. She ran messages often, haggled in Hawker’s Alley, met with the Guilds, sat in the Arcanist’s Guild and listened to their lectures. She didn’t get so much as a second glance as she trotted down to the ferry docks at the far end of Hawker’s Alley, too much an engrained part of Post-Calamity Limsa Lominsa.

The ferry to Vesper Bay had only just docked, and Leda bought herself a ticket with money she’d slipped from the pockets of her last Guild-sanctioned mark; a trader who’d been trying to cheat the thalassocracy out of her docking fees. 

She sat on deck, as the ferry readied to cast off, unwilling to go below deck, to see the slanting sunlight through narrow portholes. She didn’t want to be reminded of the farthest back her memories went, those days in the hull of the slave ship, watching the sky light up red, waiting to die.

The wind picked up as they left the protected embrace of Limsa Lominsa’s port, and Leda tucked herself against the gunwale where the sun warmed her skin and seeped through her scales. Before she’d left Limsa, she’d got V’kebbe to cut her hair, and she revelled in the sense-memory now, gentle claws carding through her hair and scraping lightly across her scalp. Her long auburn curls were shorn away, leaving a bare ilm of length.

She’d fallen asleep, coiled in the sun, and the noise of docking in Vesper Bay roused her, dragged her from her doze with careless claws. Leda wandered off the ship, passed her papers, few as they were, to the ticketer, then took them back and went wandering. It was a tiny port town, not big enough for its own aetheryte, but big enough to have a square surrounded by stalls. Traders and merchants mingled, and Leda hurried to the easternmost gate to try to hitch a ride on a merchant’s carriage.