Chapter Text
Ballister had given everything he was to the kingdom. As a child he had felt powerless as the world around him went to shit. He could have lost his eye when he was barely old enough to remember anything. Instead it healed to a thin little scar.
The streets were an awful place to grow up. The people there didn’t deserve that constant fear and pain that came with just surviving and never living.
But there wasn’t much he could do. He was just a street child. Except… he was good at fighting. He had kept himself alive that long, after all.
So he started going near the knight’s training grounds. Straying closer every visit. And one day, he had vaulted over the fence, with a wooden sword he had snatched from a rich kid at the market a few days earlier. He slammed into a practice dummy, tearing into it with the sword.
He yelled something or other out. Whatever it was, it had gotten the queen’s attention, and even after a dozen adults tackled him to the ground, she heard him out about wanting to be a knight.
And she gave him that chance. He had the chance to be a knight. Even if he was years too late by normal standards. Even if he was a peasant child with no connection to the knights of Gloreth.
And he pushed himself twice as hard as anyone else, because otherwise he’d never make it.
And he found love. Ambrosius. Someone else society tried to define based on where he had come from.
But none of that mattered anymore. It had stopped mattering when his sword had felt off balance and he didn’t take a closer look. He should have looked at it. He had had his sword for over a decade. He knew it as well as he knew his own arm.
How ironic, that he had neither a sword nor an arm now.
He knew what the news reports said of him. But all that mattered was that he knew he hadn’t killed the queen.
He stared down at the metal arm on his workbench. He lifted it, and attached it to his arm, adjusting the sock that prevented chafing on his stump. He pressed a button on the mechanical creation, and it whirred to life. Responding to his motions almost as easily as if it was his own. Not quite. But almost.
He had been practicing for short bursts of time, increasing duration of wear each time, and he finally had got the hang of using it. It was tricky, without being able to actually feel through it. But he could grab and hold on to things without having to look at them, at this point.
Now for the final test, though. He had no idea how the tech would intersect with this. So, of course, he would test and record it.
He leaned forward, shifting onto all fours, and… yeah. One paw was black furred, the other was mechanical.
He stood back up in human form and began to write in a notebook. Speaking to himself as he wrote. “It seems to change shape with my intent. By all accounts it just functions as if it were a body part. This may prove very useful. I’ll have to test how it reacts to various different forms.”
No one knew Ballister was a shapeshifter. Not even Ambrosius, the man he loved. It just… wasn’t safe.
He had tried to find out what he might be, when he was young. Why he was different. All he had found out was that Gloreth’s monster may have had many forms, and he would never be welcome as he was. So he never looked more into it. After all, wouldn’t it be suspicious if the outsider knight was looking into the existence of things that would destroy the kingdom?
In the year or so since being framed, though, Ballister had relaxed. After all, it wasn’t dangerous shapeshifting if no one ever saw, right? And not to mention, it allowed him to go into town in the form of a different person. It kept him from being recognized. That was a good thing!
Of course, with his fascination with science, he had been studying how various things affected his shifting. He still knew very little about it.
He had always been like this. From his earliest memories of surviving on the streets, he had been able to just change, without a second thought to it. It got uncomfortable if he didn’t do it, honestly.
He had no idea if it was genetic, or just some crazy random happenstance, or what. He didn’t even know if he was a human. He just… was.
As he continued to write in his journal, there was a banging at the door of the dilapidated tower he was living in.
He grabbed a broken bottle he had never picked up from where it had fallen on a bad night. He held it like a weapon, ready to face whatever threat may greet him at the door.
Though, a real threat would just burst through, wouldn’t it? So this was strange. Then again what about his situation wasn’t strange?
So he opened the door with his left hand, bottle clutched in the mechanical right.
Nothing was there. That was… strange. He even muttered as much to himself as he closed the door again.
“Hey boss!”
He whirled around quickly, bottle held out as a small bit of threat to whoever was there.
One of the pointed edges came to rest pressed against the nose of the person now inside his shelter.
She raised a hand and just pushed the bottle down and out of her face. She was just a girl. Pink hair, with the sides shaved. Two pieces that rested in front of her pierced ears the longest out of all her hair, the rest pretty short. She wore a tank top and a skirt, with a scalemail shirt and shorts underneath. She grinned up at him, and her teeth were just a bit too sharp.
“I’m here for the job!”
He blinked, and she was hanging from a chain dangling from the ceiling.
“What job? There isn’t-“
“It’s all in my resume!” She held a bunch of papers in his face.
He tossed the bottle aside and took the papers. As he flipped through them, interest pricked at the back of his mind.
They were all just childish drawings. Pink animals, attacking knights and presumably killing them.
“Oh there’s me-“ he frowned. The cartoon of him was riding a pink rhinoceros, that had several knights skewered on its horn. “Riding a rhinoceros… do the knights really have to be a human kebab?”
“It’s great, right?” The girl grinned.
“Listen- listen I don’t need a little girl hanging around here while I’m trying to survive.”
“Little girls?” She frowned, and leaned against a spinning sawblade- oh. Well, it wasn’t spinning now. Apparently that fun fact that they’d carve through wood and metal but would be stopped by a hotdog or human limb was true.
“Yeah. You’re what… ten?” Okay, yes it was a lowball estimate, he could admit that. But still, she shouldn’t be there. Even if he had a suspicion that she wasn’t what she seemed.
She gave him a glare.
“Okay. More than ten, whatever.”
“Not a lot of kids in your life, huh?”
“That’s a good thing! Children shouldn’t be in a tower that could collapse at any moment!”
“And you should?” She raised an eyebrow. “Anyways I’m here because of the job.”
“What job!” He exclaimed. He looked around, and she was gone. What…
“Up here.” She was laying in the bed of a dissembled car hanging from the ceiling- this had been an abandoned workshop, left to collect dust long before he had come along. “I’m gonna be your sidekick!”
“I don’t need a-“
“Every villain needs a sidekick.” She hopped down from where she was a bit too fluidly, landing on a table. “So what’s the plan? Mount an attack on the castle? Or should we lay low? Wait until they forget about you killing the queen, then when they’ve forgotten your existence we’ll rise like a fiery phoenix from the ashes! Overthrow the government!”
She flung a plate he had been eating off of and it shattered against the wall, as she hopped down to the floor, took a step forward, then leaned back, letting gravity pull her down to sit on the edge of the table, legs crossed. “Or we could just… talk.” Her expression was a bit softer then. Her smile a bit smaller.
And she was up again, stuffing towards him and looking up to look him in the eyes, a small challenge. Smile still small. “Point is, whatever your dark heart desires, boss. Your sidekick has arrived-“
She glanced over his shoulder and her expression shifted into excitement, and she was off, forgetting her speech. “Woah!!!! Sick murder wall!”
He followed after her. “It’s not a murder wall, it’s- it’s an innocence wall, if anything.”
“Innocence wall? So you… aren’t gonna murder this guy with the punchable face circled in red with frowny faces around him?”
“No- but he would deserve maybe being punched. That’s Todd. He was always quite cruel. But I’m not- I’m not going to kill him.”
She frowned, and her eyes caught the light in a way that reflected… pieces were definitely fitting together.
“So you’re not a murderer?”
“Are you… dissapointed?”
She sat down into a spinny chair and spun around once. “I mean… maybe a little.”
Ballister sighed. “Listen. I still need to talk to… someone. I don’t want to go against the institute. I just want to prove my innocence.” He turned and started walking away.
“Who? The guy who cut off your arm?”
He froze.
“SERIOUSLY? Gah, you’re hopeless aren’t you. Fine! Go! See if I care?”
“I am going, actually.” He grabbed his cloak. “To talk. Please leave my hideout.”
“Fine, fine. Good luck getting arrested!”
He gave a wry smile at that. “They could never make a prison that could hold me.”