Work Text:
She awakes to the world through a wish of protection.
The first thing she sees is a boy with an expression of wonder, and the warmth in her body lets her know immediately that she’s going to love him forever, his gentle wants what brought her dormant form to life.
Despite his evident excitement, the kid collects himself rather quickly, and introduces himself formally as Darius Deamonne, before putting his palms together facing the sky to make a perch for her.
Her first flight is a simple one, from the table she’s laying on to loving hands. A flight she will want to take forever.
Darius promises right there and then that he will always take good care of her, and she believes him. But he has the same desire to be a shelter for his friends, this is the most intimate truth he currently harbors in his heart, and so she decides at the same moment that she’ll be the one to take care of him.
She gets introduced to Darius’ family that same day, but it’s not until the next in which she gets to see the little witches the boy surrounds himself with.
“Asphalia as in asphalt?” A disheveled boy with brown hair asks after her name has been announced proudly by Darius with a dramatic twist of a hand.
Her birdling squawks and huffs, offended on her behalf, and while that’s sweet of him, she doesn’t truly mind. Asphalt is strong. She wants to be strong. She hasn’t been alive for too long, but she knows that she will try with everything she has to be the solid foundation keeping her witchlet safe until he can extend his wings and soar on his own.
She makes good on that promise as much as she can, nagging Darius whenever he gets too caught up in his studies and forgets to eat, and offering wise advice whenever his mischiefs start to cross a line into dangerous territory should his terrifying Principal were to find out.
She’s patient. Darius isn’t.
This doesn’t bother her.
He’s much too young to have to learn to stay quiet and still, and even as she sees him grow up and start to mature a little forcefully through each hard-learned lesson, through each heartbreak, she nurtures the brilliant sparkle of him. The world might be trying to smother his light, but he’s much too radiant for her to let that happen without a fight.
It distresses her that she can’t accompany him to his training at the castle, but despite the tense and hesitant way in which his mentor regards her every time he sees her, she knows she can trust him with her birdling, so she lets him go pursue his dreams even if they are making him start to put her aside.
She’s patient. Darius is learning to be.
They’ll be able to meet in the middle eventually.
School and training open the way to more loneliness, but also a job that most witches and demons on the Isles are jealous of, and she couldn’t be more proud of her witch than she is the first day he comes home bearing a white cloak and an Abominations Coven clasp on it.
Time passes.
At some point, Darius realizes just how little time they’ve spent together ever since he started reaching out for bigger things, the kind that was always destined for him. He claims that he will make it up to her by helping her groom her gloppy feathers on the free day he has the next week, just like he used to do diligently every week for the first few years since she became his loyal companion.
She wants to tell him that it’s not necessary, she’s here to protect him and care for him, and with how gifted and hard-working as he is, she doesn’t want him to miss out on any opportunities because of her.
But the truth is that she misses him, her brilliant boy that has grown into a far more reserved young man, his smiles not coming as often, but feeling much more like the sun after winter because of it.
So she croaks an agreement and they settle for a day in which Darius will come home a little earlier, make a small event of them pampering each other. She’s looking forward to it.
The day never comes.
Darius comes home three days late, dodging his mothers’ questions about where has he been and their scoldings about how he should have told them if he was planning to stay at the castle for that long.
Her brilliant witch comes home three days late, and she can’t quite tell if his light has finally been smothered or if it’s about to burst into something explosive and dangerous. His hair, alive in a way no one else’s is, reveals a thunderous state of his emotions that she inquires about.
He doesn’t answer her.
Instead, he takes her with him and takes her deep into the forest, entrusting her into the care of the Bat Queen through numerous pleads.
She doesn’t know if it hurts more when he turns his back on her, barely saying goodbye and certainly not looking at her, or when the moonlight shines through the top of the trees and shines on the tear tracks over his cheeks.
Her witchlet is heartbroken and she can’t do anything to stop him from flinging himself out of the nest and putting a thorny barrier around his love, unable to bear another instance of it shattering.
She can’t reach out. She’s heartbroken too.
She has always tried to take care of what’s hers.
The cracked palismen that gather into the Bat Queen’s protections aren’t quite that, but as the years pass, they’re as much her family as she can hope to have one, and so she takes them under her wing too, looking out for them as she used to do with someone else before.
She doesn’t say it, but every day she flies a little bit farther away from their cave, close to the path that her boy took that night, hoping to at least get to see him again one of these days.
She always returns with her hopes slightly more crushed, but knowing she will try the next day again.
She doesn’t say it, but looking at the knowing sad eyes of her protector, she doesn’t feel like much of one herself anymore.
She doesn’t say it, she simply continues caring for the most youthful of them.
The days are pleasant. The days are boring.
She misses her light.
The sounds of a scuffle in the middle of the woods, just a little sideways from the usual path she takes, break the monotony of routine and cause her enough curiosity for her to go take a look.
She finds a demon wrestling with a dread boar, and while it doesn’t seem like they’re hurting it, it also doesn’t seem like they’re losing, the loud cackles tugging at her heart at the memory of mischief from someone who was, at the time, as small as them.
Perhaps a bit taller. Nostalgia isn’t good to make her recall the exact details.
She lands on a branch nearby to take a better look; they seem beast-like in appearance, but judging by the circles of magic, they have to be one of the kind of demons that are more closely related to witches than others.
Not much more is in for her to stay, but before she can depart, she realizes that she wasn’t as stealthy as she thought, at the same time that thin pupils settle on her.
A hunter. Of course. But not a bad intentioned one, she adventures to think, going by the inquisitive tilt of their head.
She squawks softly in greeting.
“ You remind me a lot of a friend of mine, ” the little demon says then. She knows they weren’t able to understand her, so it surprises her that they chose to speak anyway. “ He would like you .”
It’s not a promise to bring anyone, and Bat Queen wouldn’t like anyone coming too close anyway, but it still makes a strange kind of excitement make itself present in her chest.
She likes the other palismen, but she always loved her witchlet the most, and didn’t mind looking after his friends. It’s strange to have grown used to not seeing any of them. It’s been years but sometimes it feels like seconds.
She’s patient. But there’s no one there for whom she still has to be.
So she asks. And the demon doesn’t understand her, but they smile amusedly anyway, mouth full of sharp fangs.
“ His name is Darius. He always has goo on him, like you .”
The sound that comes out of her beak is full of sorrow, and while the little demon doesn’t, can’t understand her words, there’s recognition in their eyes now.
“ You know him .”
She lets out another soft cry, as good of an affirmation as any.
The demon doesn’t look joyful anymore. It’s like watching her witchlet grow up all over again. It breaks her heart.
“ I don’t think he can’t come, ” They look saddened at the notion, and she wonders if her witchlet has found someone else who’ll look after him, or if he’s looking after others without stopping to let himself be cared for too. “ I’m sorry ”
The demon leaves.
She goes back to the cave.
Darius comes back for her.
He has changed so much, the mischievous boy she loved so much dead and buried deep under years of grief.
He has a controlled posture, despite his still exuberant hand gestures, but she can still see the tiredness in his shoulders, the sorrow in his eyes.
It takes so long to convince Bat Queen to let her go; she isn’t even sure how much she wants to go herself.
But her witchlet isn’t alone. By his side, there’s a little demon full of wonder and a child scarred by the world. Her Darius holds onto them like he’s going to collapse if he doesn’t, but also like he wishes to spare them all the pain in the world.
That’s what ends up convincing her.
He’s been worn down by the world, closed off and wary, but he’s still looking out for others like he promised he would a lifetime ago.
She’s welcome into a family full of broken pieces with open arms.
Darius promises that he won’t let any of them be harmed again.
She feels herself being reborn through the same vow of protection that brought her to life in the first place.
There’s a much too familiar anguish in the small witch’s eyes when he looks at her.
It’s the same look the palismen who had lost their witches to the fateful nature of mortality always had. Having that look directed at her tells her all she needs to know.
He cries the first time she nags him to eat, his guardians absent at work and him too focused on his homework to remember he should’ve had lunch hours ago.
If she could have, she would have cried too.
The scene is too familiar, for both of them.
When they look at each other, there’s understanding.
She doesn’t complain when her feathers end up covered in tears.
Time passes, as it always does.
She starts finally trusting that this new state of things might be here to stay.
Her wounds might have run deeper than she had suspected at first.
Darius lets her mother him again. She gets to reclaim her purpose, and she feels joy every time she convinces him to work a little less, to sleep a little more. To remember he’s not still in the world only to care for others but for himself as well.
She’s patient. He’s almost always patient, though it has never come naturally for him and it still doesn’t, but he has learned that getting frustrated at himself because of it doesn’t help matters.
She thinks that he learned that one by teaching it to his kid.
Funny how one never stops learning from their birdlings.
Her witchlet is flying, soaring, and thriving with new life breathed into his everything.
She thinks that if he wanted to go, this time she would watch him with a chest full of fondness, knowing she has done everything she can for him, and he no longer needs her.
She couldn’t be there when he did, but she won’t let that burden her; it wouldn’t do to blame herself or him for things they cannot change. They both have learned this.
But he doesn’t let go ever again.
He doesn’t need her, but he reaches out for her every time.
And she sees him open up again.
And she sees him become that boy full of wonder once more.
Her mischievous birdling that can fly on his own, but chooses not to.
He never goes a week again without helping her groom her feathers.
The little sapling still has nightmares, even after years. They won’t fully go away, she knows.
She doesn’t mind comforting him when he needs and she’s able to, or calling for her birdling when she isn’t enough to bring him back. She doesn’t take offense to that. She’ll be their solid ground, but that’s not all that’s needed for life to thrive, and so she watches her boy come in the room and soothe his kid with practiced motions.
It takes a while for it to work.
She’s patient. He is too.
An hour later, Darius is holding his sleeping kid as if he were still as small as when she met him, as if he wanted to shelter him from all the wrongs of the world.
“I’m always going to be here to protect you,” Her birdling murmurs into his boy’s hair.
Asphalia’s feathers flutter when she squawks softly with delight.
With a vow of protection, she’s reborn.