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Chapter Text

Once upon a time – 

Niki is seven years old, or something approximating that, and one of her aunties is reading her a bedtime story.

“...and the prince went to find the forest girl he had fallen in love with,” her Auntie Ashe reads, with her voice drawn as low and as graceful as a violin’s strings. “He rode his horse deep into the forest, through brambles and across rivers and past cliffsides, until the leaves caught in his cap were the same shade of green he remembered from the first time they met – and where she had run to, after they danced. His search ended at the steps of a small cottage in a clearing, and he called out for Briar Rose, opening the door…”

Auntie always draws this part out the longest, like in the old movies that some of Niki’s other guardians hook up to the big projector that sits in the town hall’s spare room, because she knows that Niki knows the story by heart. Curled up warm and cosy in her bed – blinking hard to keep herself awake, no sleeping beauty she is – Niki squeezes her cuddly rabbit to her chest in anticipation.

“But there was no Briar Rose, nor her aunties – instead, there was the evil fairy waiting for him, who let out a triumphant, horrible laugh!”

She lets out a true witch’s cackle, a raspy hiss of a sound. Niki, covers tucked up to her chin, dissolves into giggles. Auntie places the book down in her lap, crossing her arms.

“Don’t you think I’m scary, Niki?” she asks.

“No,” Niki giggles. Auntie scoffs.

“You kids,” she says, all long-suffering, and picks the book up again. “But the fairies found him and freed him from the evil fairy’s trap, arming him with a sword to cut down the liars and cheats of the evil fairy’s army, and a shield to protect him from their tricks. And he set off towards the castle…”

Niki snuggles into her pile of blankets, letting Auntie Ashe’s voice wash over her – and Auntie Ashe always does the best story-voices at bedtime, the best of all her aunties and uncles and guardians – as the prince gallops towards the power, fending off zombies and skeletons and witches alike, and drives his sword into the wicked heart of the evil dragon.

“...when he climbed the tower, hundreds of steps for a hundred years’ curse, he found his Briar Rose dead to the world – asleep. Just as Briar Rose’s godmothers had said, they shared true love’s kiss and she awakened, overjoyed to finally see her love again. And they all lived happily ever after,” Auntie finishes, with a fond smile, “for true love conquers all.”

Usually, this is the part where Niki sighs happily, and gives her Auntie a goodnight kiss on the cheek before the lanterns are dimmed for the night. But tonight, a thought is bothering her.

“Wouldn’t the prince be scared?” she asks, eyes wide.

“Of what, Niki?”

“The dragon.”

Niki is old enough now to hear the stories of expeditions to the End – there aren’t any portals in their town, but she’s heard the stories exchanged by travellers in the bakery at midday. Stories of scales harder to piece than diamond, of fierce, burning breath, and of claws so long and so sharp they put swords to shame – to say nothing of the creature’s horrible, horrible teeth. Niki was quite happy to think of dragons as nothing but a storytime myth, as the villain in her fairytales, something that can be safely tucked away when the book is closed for the night. She does not like the idea that there’s a dragon swimming around in the heart of every home. Of her home.

“He probably was quite afraid, you know,” Auntie reaches down and ruffles Niki’s hair, tawny mop that is it – Niki crinkles up her nose, though she doesn’t reach upwards to fend her off. “But he was very brave. That’s what’s important. Even if he was afraid, he knew he had to do the right thing. And he had his horse with him, and the fairies gave him a sword and shield, and he knew that Briar Rose was waiting. She needed help.”

“She was asleep,” Niki points out.

“For a very long time. How would you feel, if you had to stay in bed all day?” Niki squeals unhappily at the thought, and Auntie laughs. “I thought so. And for some people – even if their mind is awake, they might not know that other parts of them are asleep. Sometimes people don’t know they need you until you’re there to help them, you know?” Auntie tucks the book underneath her arm, and levels Niki with a stern look. “Asleep like you should be, young lady. It’s getting well past your bedtime.”

Niki pouts, and she even whines a bit, but Auntie can’t be convinced – she’s a growing girl, and she needs her rest. By the time the lantern is finally dimmed, she’s just about worn herself out anyhow.

That night, Niki dreams of a downy bed of roses, the smell of iron, and something that she’s quite sure feels like true love’s kiss.

Niki is not born, not the way the princess is – she appears in Perfect one day, just as many of the children do, with nothing but a name and the shirt on her back, and is taken in as one of their own. There is no royal christening, and there are certainly no fairies. But Niki has instilled in her by her aunties and uncles and every guardian an appreciation for beautiful things, for music, and for blood-in-her-mouth, thorny resilience.

Niki is the niece of bakers, of blacksmiths and bricklayers, and she grows up far too sensible to put her trust into fairytales. Princesses and knights in shining armour and evil fairies are things to be left in her childhood, a memory placed on a shelf – occasionally remembered with fondness, but never dwelled upon. The world stretches out ahead of her, made of dirt and stone, and is far more real than any fairytale could be. She grows up, she leaves home, she steps into a newfound kingdom filled with warm, welcoming faces. She stands at one of her best friends’ side with a title that the fairytales would call princess consort, but they, with all of their revolutionary spirit, call First Lady.

Listen well, all of you! he cries from his throne of gunpowder and wreckage, as he dooms their country to an early death.

Niki guards her tower with a diligence unparalleled, right until it burns down around her.

And then – five days after they retake L’Manberg, doused in the shadows of the land’s deepest forest – then is when she meets Captain Puffy.

Niki stands at the fringes of L’Manberg’s redwoods, right where the sturdy leaves and thickets thin out into tall grass, and fidgets with the battleaxe at her side.

The days are long in their new L’Manberg. They have to be – there is simply so much to do. There is so much to rebuild, so much that’s been left to the wreckage. Not that Niki minds an opportunity to keep her mind and her hands busy, after the vast maw of awful that fills her memory from November sixteenth. There are flashes – the glint of a sword on the battlefield, the acrid smell of fireworks hitting her nose, dirt beneath her fingernails, a gleaming spark of red in a cradle of stone. The rest slips through her fingers like ink, leaving her hands trembling when she tries to swim through the pitch for too long. She isn’t sure if she wants to remember more than that. Every time another memory winks into existence, another star inset into the vast, endless expanse – the smell of alcohol in the Camarvan, the withers, Wilbur’s exhausted, listless smile before the battle – she can feel her heart stutter and slow in her chest, as if it doesn’t know what to do with the sheer amount of grief it carries. As if it calcifies.

She can’t even remember those first few days of the afterwards, the early pages, moving through the motions (clear rubble from the paths, replace shattered glass and stone, sit through meetings with the Cabinet, watch the horizon for Wilbur’s return) without a clear mind behind them. It’s like someone has carved the stray hours right out of her memory, just as the TNT carved craters into the rock beneath their home – ripped open the electoral podium, gaping and bare like a war wound. That’s what she keeps telling herself. They’re healing the wounded. Healing their country.

Niki is no medic – in some selfish way she’s glad she was never part of the war effort, because she’s an awful fighter, and by the stars, she’d be a worse healer – but there is a steadiness to rebuilding L’Manberg that thins the tremors in her hands. Planting new pavers end-to-end, hauling bundles of bricks and wood here and there in carts, hefting sandbags to the river’s edge to keep it from bursting its banks and drowning the wildflowers. It’s busy work, and sometimes it’s lonely work, but it’s necessary.

Above all else, it’s a rhythm. After the tumultuous crescendo of the war – after those heady spots of silence in her memory, and the awkward quiet that settles on her countrymens’ shoulders when she asks again about looking for Wilbur, and weeks of being strangled and stifled and suffocated under Schlatt’s bastard excuse for rule, it’s exactly what Niki needs. The wiry strings feel familiar beneath the pads of her fingertips as she pulls recovery and rebuilding and reawakening into a chord, a melody. She sings instead of screaming.

(The nights are quieter than old L’Manberg. There is a notable lack of music in the air, empty of the twang that comes with plucking at a guitar’s strings.

Niki keeps her hands busy, doused in flour and sugar – she cannot fill the silence on her own. She is never large enough to fill the silence. She believes that Quackity knows the guitar, but he has been far too busy as their new Vice President to play, their advisor above all. Niki doesn’t regret a single thing she said to anyone in Manberg, but she would now perhaps correct herself on calling Quackity lazy. She isn’t sure how much Tubbo or Tommy remember from the improvised lessons Wilbur would give over the bonfire, either. She isn’t sure if anyone else knows how to play, or if they simply choose not to.

It’s naive. Even Niki knows that. Before the war, before L’Manberg even fell to Schlatt and his tyranny, she hadn’t heard Wilbur play for weeks – maybe even months. If they don’t find where he’s tucked himself away, hidden between the staves after the great crescendo, she never will again. And still, no one but her wants to look.

Maybe Niki is naive. Let her wear that naivete with pride – that she hopes for something better – but she’s not stupid. Even as she stacks brick upon brick in their new L’Manberg, she knows that there is something lofty and simmering hiding inside her heart, hotter than any bonfire and just as hungry for kindling. Even if she cannot see it, even if no one else can see it, she knows it is there – she can feel its infernal power drive her heart to beat hot and loud in her ears when she stares at the craters for too long, turning her memories of that horrible day to ash and whisking her into the tar when she tries to reach for them like a child to their cradle. It waits with watchful eye and bated breath, slumbering in the meat and sinew of her heart, Niki fears it’ll tear her to shreds as it wakes.)

But there is no time for that. From sunrise to sunset, there is a kingdom to rebuild – and after the sun dips below the horizon, Niki is set on rebuilding her bakery.

Considering it all, her bakery escaped the explosion and withers with only a few scars. The roof stays firm above her head, and only two of her furnaces broke as the TNT shook the earth around them. Less, though, can be said for what is kept in the bakery – because no one cared for the bakery when she was stolen from and imprisoned and pushed around in her own country, let alone after she escaped it – the ice in her icebox wasn’t replaced after their grand, bloody festival, so the eggs have gone off and the butter melted and every fruit she’d hidden away had crumbled into a soft, grey mess.

(Turn the page back to their return to their kingdom, and this is what it will read – after the bang that concludes L’Manberg’s second chapter, Niki wraps thin leather around her shoulders despite the spring air, unsteadily picking her way into the remains of their country. Her fingers wind into the fabric like an anchor, eyes blurring with tears as she blinks away sand and upchurned dirt.

Her heart knows the way to her bakery better than her mind does at this point, a compass set into her chest, an arrow pointed towards her true north. The wooden floorboards are sturdy beneath her feet in a way that stairs carved into stone never were. The chests are spilt across the floor, flour a fine dust coating everything she owns. She makes her way to the icebox, haloed by a long-melted, long-dried puddle of ice, and heaves its lid open. Her favourite strawberries, grown sweet and red and full despite Schlatt’s jackassery with their harvest – they are grey, set upon with mould, depleted and deformed like skulls cracked under angry fists. Her lip wobbles, and her eyes fill with what can’t be tears, not now, not after they’ve won, not after Technoblade’s betrayal and Wilbur – )

So she’s filling the wounds with wild strawberries, of course. No one has eaten well since L’Manberg was overthrown. It’s about time to rid the taste of potatoes and spider’s eyes from their mouths.

Niki tugs her coat closer around her as she surveys the forest’s edge, crinkling her nose at how stuffy and damp she feels. Summer is coming quicker by the day, and Niki is still not used to wearing her netherite chestplate and helmet, but she is in no way brave or stupid enough to leave the obsidian walls without it. The axe hangs warily by her side, taken from Technoblade’s stores. She hopes she won’t need it – not for a quick bout of midnight berry-picking.

Oh, I hope he doesn’t want it back anytime soon, either, she thinks. Technoblade was quite generous to lend them so many things – although if he knew what the plan was, what Wilbur’s plan was, hopefully he wasn’t counting on getting those things back. She tightens her grip on its hilt.

The redwoods look so different under the spell of night – so peaceful and green in the day, but swathed in inky shadow beneath the pale light of the moon. The sweet little birds have all gone to roost, leaving nothing but an eerie whistle in the wind and the sound of Niki’s boots fidgeting upon grass. Better that than the moans of zombies and witches, she supposes. Despite the warm weather, she can feel a chill set itself upon her spine as she stands in the thickets.

For goodness’ sake, it’s just a forest. It is just a forest, one that she knows like the back of her hand, and that’s what she reminds herself – alongside the thought of strawberry blondies, jams, and maybe even a tart – as she strides into the woods with the stubborn snap of twigs beneath her feet.

Everything is stranger at night. The trees cast strange, unnatural shadows across the grassy dirt – jutting out at weird angles, overlapping with their neighbours, the thin leaves scattering moonlight dappled and uneven across the ground. Darkness seeps from cracks in the bark, and from between tree trunks – gaps between them filled with pitch, and the unshakeable feeling between her shoulderblades that something is watching her, something she cannot see. It lands on her back like a weight, pushing her shoulders forward, resting her hands heavily on the hilt of her sword. It’s quiet, too quiet – as if all signs of life have abandoned the place, hidden away in nests and burrows and dens until the sun peers over the horizon again. Like Niki is the insensible one for being here at all.

It’s just a forest. But Niki doesn’t often have to venture into the forest alone.

It was easy enough before Schlatt – Niki could just stick her head out into the clearing to ask if anyone could help her pick berries for the afternoon, and more often than not someone would be falling over themselves to help her (even if it was just to steal a handful of the freshest berries for themself). She’d whiled plenty a perfectly nice afternoon away with Eret at her side, overflowing baskets nestled in the crooks of their arms as they gossiped together. Even Ponk and Punz had offered once, asked what she was up to as she passed the community house– and others would have hated her wandering around with their so-called enemies, but as far as Niki was concerned, the conversation was lovely.

Now when she thinks of Punz, she thinks of the warning grip on her arm at Schlatt’s ridiculous speeches and parties – and Ponk, she remembers the bite of their sword at her neck as she fled the festival grounds for Pogtopia.

Her grasp on the axe’s hilt tightens, the weight falling heavy with her next step into brambles and weeds. If only she were good enough to feel anything but bitterness for the two of them, now – she misses the sweetness of berries on her tongue.

Of course, loneliness can only last for so long.

The flesh upon the back of Niki’s neck prickles, briars beneath her skin – she whips around to meet a pair of ruby-red eyes, staring downward at her from the branches of a tree. Niki’s eyes widen, and with it, so do the spider’s remaining six – a cluster of eight, glowing softly in the darkness – and she curses, tucking her chin to avert her eyes. They only attack if they feel threatened, she recites to herself, silent, they only attack if they – 

It comes too late. She can hear the uneasy squall of the spider from its perch in the treetop, baring its front set of legs at her angrily, and she shifts uneasily back as she draws her axe.

“No, no, no,” Niki mumbles, almost whining, watching the spider crawl down the length of the tree. The weight of the axe is still uncomfortable in her hands.

If the spider is still threatened, it doesn’t show it – it slips down onto the grass with spindly legs, dipping its flexing mandibles to the ground as eight eyes watch her with hunger. Not good, not good – its fangs glisten in the faint moonlight, and Niki swallows back a nervous lump in her throat with another step.

There’s another snap from behind her, but all she steps on is soft grass.

She spins, and there are another two behind her – one scuttling towards her at speed, the other following from the treetops. She lets out a yelp and jerks herself backwards, even as her mind shrieks no, spider, spider’s there, there and hissing at her ferociously. She locks her hands around the axe’s hilt and lunges, driving all of her body’s weight behind the blow, but her aim is off and she’s not used to the weight of netherite, driving the point of the axe downwards into the grass. She jerks her head up, a quick recovery, and comes eye-to-eye with a furious set of eight – and a pair of angry fangs.

She shouts in alarm, swinging the axe in a windmill arc, and this one is too fast and too powerful for the spider to dodge – the axe sinks into the spider’s body, a killing blow, right as another latches onto her back. She screams, and almost drops the stars-damned axe as she twists and throws herself left and right to shake the beast off of her back – she feels one clinging limb wrench itself from her cloak, and then another, and another, until it goes flying, and – 

A set of fangs lunge for her leg.

Niki lets out an almighty shriek, one loud enough even to spook the spider attempting to fix itself to her leg, as pain rushes in – something tears, and she can feel a hot rush of blood stain her jeans as her skin begins to sting. She spares a hasty glance downward. It’s a scratch, just a scrape – just barely missing her. She got lucky. She stumbles onto her left leg, the one that’s still whole, and the weight of her axe propels her towards the spider shying away from the hell of a racket she’s making – somewhere between a swing and a flail, it splits legs from the spider’s body with the force of her fury. The spider bares its fangs in a feral hiss as it skitters away, one that she can hear echoed from the other spider flung from her back.

And then, if she strains her hearing, she can hear answering calls. Her heart drops. No, no – this would be a stupid way to die, she can’t go like this, not after making it for so long –

There’s movement behind her, the rustle of leaves underfoot and the heavy awareness of something she can’t see. They can’t be that close, can they? Niki flinches, jerking away from the movement, clenching and unclenching her hands one-by-one as she resettles her grip on the axe. There’s another squall, and Niki moves on instinct. She lunges, and she remembers Technoblade’s lessons from the ravine too late, letting the cry in her chest build as her axe glitters in a violet arc overhead – 

And watches as the spider collapses under the sword of… someone. A woman Niki doesn’t recognise.

Hands gripping her axe’s hilt, she doesn’t know what to expect. No one is friendly on this server anymore, not even people she once trusted, and part of her expects this stranger to respond in kind – or worse, dart around her on nimble feet and slit her throat before she can shout for help.

She shifts the blade level with the woman’s throat, heart sitting in her own – and as the woman’s eyes flicker upwards, satisfied that the spider is dead, Niki’s tongue promptly sticks itself to the roof of her month.

Stars above. She’s gorgeous.

Curls tumble down her shoulders, split in chestnut brown and snowy white, somehow full and just a bit unkempt in a way that looks so natural despite the spider’s blood dripping from the blade of her sword, and the smears on her gloves and coat. A set of ram’s horns curl in a strong spiral by her head, nestled against a bandanna pushing those curls away from her face – an arrow-straight nose, high cheekbones, rose-pink lips. Dark sunglasses conceal her eyes, despite it being the dead of night, and some part of Niki with entirely too many opinions wonders what her eyes look like beneath them. Warm, sweet? Glittering bright, or deep and dark and dangerous in a way that’s almost enticing?

“Oh, thank the gods,” the handsome stranger is saying. A smile splits across her face – a kind one, absent of cruelty. “I hate those things, there’s nothing worse than being ambushed by a whole pack of them. Hey, are you alright?”

Her eyes flit down to the blade angled towards her throat, and to her credit, her smile only twitches a bit.

“Uhm,” she says. “Are… are we alright?”

The thing is, Technoblade’s voice appears from Niki’s memory – unbidden and, to be honest, a little unwanted, because she respects that the man has his principles but the immediacy of his betrayal does sting slightly, like a papercut left unattended. The thing with you is, you’re always actin’ before you think. And if you let your opponent outthink you, you’ve already been defeated.

The woman smiles at her cautiously, dropping her sword to the ground, raising her hands just high enough to denote surrender. Niki lets go of her breath with a sigh, and embarrassment floods in where adrenaline had fueled her through the fight.

“I’m sorry!” she exclaims right away, stashing her axe by her side and rushing to scoop up the stranger’s sword. She hands it back to the woman, who gives her a relieved kind of smile, tossing it from one hand to the other before sliding it easily back into the stabbard at her waist. Her coat looks rich and heavy, especially for spring – a dark, sturdy fabric, with golden trim and shining buttons down its front. “I was just caught off guard, but thank you, thank you. I… don’t want to know how that would have ended without your help. Thank you.”

The stranger pushes her dark sunglasses up onto her forehead, swapping her smile for a beaming grin. And oh, Niki’s heart skips a beat. “Not a problem. Glad to be of help.”

Niki manages to regain control of her vocal chords, hurriedly flattening them into what feels like neat seams with a swallow-cough. “I don’t think we’ve met,” she says, holding out her hand. “Nihachu. You can call me Niki.”

“Oh, we’ve – I mean, I guess you don’t remember,” the woman says. She smiles, though (brilliant, some part of Niki’s mind comments unbidden, like a light switched on in a dark room) , and takes Niki’s hand. The skin is warm against hers, as if it glows with sunshine. Niki wants to curl up in that warmth. “I’m Puffy. Captain Puffy.”

“Oh!” Niki peers at her, scrutinising her closely. But no, nothing in Puffy’s elegant features or her dark green eyes rings a bell. “Of course. I’m so sorry…”

“No, no, I get it!” Puffy – regrettably – lets go of Niki’s hand, waving her concerns away with a sheepish smile. “I understand. It was… there was a lot happening where I got here, that’s for sure.”

“Of course,” Niki repeats. “I mean, joining the server in the middle of rebuilding, and all. Everyone is so busy.”

“Ah.” Puffy’s smile takes on a slight strain. “No, I came before that. The sixteenth.”

“Oh.”

Even the mention of the day – that day – is cold, plunging into the void-gap sitting in Niki’s memories. Puffy winces.

“Yeah,” she says. “What are you doing out here so late at night, anyway? Mobs run this place after dark. It’s not super safe.”

“Supposed to be picking strawberries for the bakery, although you can guess how much luck I’ve had tonight.” Niki hefts her empty basket for show. “All of the stock I had before the war is out, so…”

“No, of course, I can imagine.” Puffy’s expression twists into a concerned frown. “Can’t you get someone to watch your back for you, though?”

Niki lets out a breath – half-sigh, half tired laughter. “Everyone else would be far too busy to spend their time on it,” she explains. And then, a spark of courage. “Of course, I mean – if you would like to, that is – I could use the extra set of hands… there isn’t exactly much left after the war, but I could repay you with something baked, if you would like. Muffins, breadloaves, croissants…”

“That,” Puffy beams. “Sounds delightful.”

“Oh! Oh, wonderful.” For the first time since the pitch, Niki feels – genuinely feels – like smiling, like she’s light on her feet, like the flowers are blooming and the sun’s coming up right again. Instead of broiling hot, instead of scorching beneath the skin, Niki just feels – warm. Cosy, comfortable, warm.

“Well, if you’ll have me,” Puffy adds, with a roguish wink that Niki immediately adores, “lead the way?”

And then an arrow buries itself in Niki’s leg.

“I can’t help but feel like,” Puffy comments, “there’s a joke to be made here.”

Niki groans. “What do you mean?”

“It’s on the tip of my tongue…” she can’t see Puffy’s face from here, but it certainly sounds like she’s sticking the tip of her tongue between her teeth, as if that will guide her memory any better. “Something about adventurers and arrows, or something. Oh, well.”

Niki leans back on her hands, counting the wooden boards in the ceiling, and sighs.

Her life does, at times, feel like a cosmic, cruel joke.

Have one of her best friends gift her a charming, sweet fox; a reckless fool accidentally kills him, and starts an entire war.

Promise to another friend that she’ll defend him, defend his country, until he can protect her too; they hardly speak until she’s almost executed, and then… and then, well. Everything else.

Find a wonderfully handsome woman in the forest, who is kind and charming and almost heroic with her gleaming sword and armour; immediately get shot in the leg, and rely on this poor, poor woman to drag her back to the Community House to fix up her wounds like a bird that’s fallen out of the nest.

“Y’know, it’s not too bad,” Puffy says – there’s a low, comforting register her voice can slip into, which Niki has only just discovered in the last ten minutes. Bottles clink loudly as she rifles through the Community House chests, certain that there’s healing potions stashed away here somewhere. Niki hopes she’s right. Her leg stings like a bitch. “There’s just a lot of blood, but I think the arrowhead missed anything important. We can pop a healing pot onto it once it’s cleaned and stitched, no worries.”

Niki’s neck is starting to hurt from staring at the ceiling. The alternative, however, is looking at Puffy in the face, and she is far too embarrassed for that.

“I really don’t need healing,” she offers – but Puffy crowds into her vision, expression stern, curls bouncing as she shakes her head.

“No self-sacrificing on my ship,” Puffy declares. “It’s fine. We can always go get some more blaze powder the next time we’re in the Nether. Do you guys have a melon farm anywhere?”

“We’re rebuilding…”

“Well, you’re not gonna rebuild anything with an arrow stuck in your leg.” Puffy plants her arms stubbornly on her hips, with a determined jut to her chin – but she smiles like she knows Niki will let her, and the worst part is that she’s entirely right. A twinkle enters her eye. “We’ll just borrow one from here. I know they’ve got plenty to spare – I bet they wouldn’t miss just one.” And for a moment, Puffy’s face takes on a thoughtful look. “Maybe even a few spares…”

“Hey,” Niki says, a bit tiredly. “I don’t steal. I – I ask, if anything.”

Dream has been so worked up since the war – which one? a voice that sounds suspiciously like Tommy quips – that he is absolutely sure to say no, but it’s quite honestly less about Dream’s response and more about Niki’s own dignity. Even if he is a bully, and a liar, and a bastard waste of walking armour and silver tongue.

Another rivulet of blood runs down her leg, squelching into the space where the straps of her boots meet the denim of her jeans. It’s wet, and uncomfortably warm. Niki grimaces. It’s not like she’s never seen what damage a bow and arrow in the wrong hands (or the right ones, even) can do – she fought for L’Manberg, after all, and even before the end of it all they didn’t get through the battle unscathed – but… thinking about it still makes her stomach turn. It’s unfamiliar, it’s wrong. Part of her wants to let out an unholy scream, and rip the thing out herself – get it out of her, right now, and stem the rush of blood sticking to her skin – and it’s only her barest grip on common sense that’s keeping her from doing exactly that.

Maybe it really is less about Dream’s response – whatever that would be – and less about her dignity, and more about the arrow stuck in her leg.

If I had a full set of armour, she fumes silently, this wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t had all of her things stolen under Schlatt’s administration, and was able to make her own set of armour, it wouldn’t have happened. If someone, anyone besides Puffy – who is kind, and pretty, but is ultimately a stranger – could be bothered to help her, to look out for her, then it wouldn’t have happened. She lets out another long, low breath, exhaling smoke, and wincing as pain lances through the meat of her leg.

Puffy’s right. She’s lucky – she’s not bleeding out, just bleeding, and it doesn’t seem like any tendons or sinew or wires were snapped. But, oh fuck. It hurts.

Puffy sits down beside her, setting her prize down between the two of them – sure enough, a healing potion, glimmering a soft red in the torchlight. She fidgets with her curls, pulling them back with a scrunchie, and Niki takes the opportunity to study her closer. Her eyes aren’t just green, as it turns out – the centre is a deep, dark brown, like the rings of oak – and pale scruff lines her jaw. Sitting this close, Niki can smell the fresh tang of sea salt.

After a moment, Puffy turns back to her with a damp cloth in hand – her curls spring forth from where they’ve been tied at the nape of her neck, like blossoms in spring. Those elegant features dip into a wary frown as she scrutinises Niki’s leg, and wipes away some of the blood that already darkens and clots stickily to the skin around the wound.

Thank the stars she asked Niki to cut away the piece of her jeans while she was looking for a healing pot. Oh, Niki hated it – hating looking at it, quietly mourned her sturdy, reliable work pants – but if Puffy had offered, Niki might have lost a life on the spot.

“We’re gonna have to pull it out,” Puffy informs her. Well, yes. She was expecting that. But still, Niki winces, and her gut roils unhappily.

“Alright,” she says, willing her voice not to shake. Puffy spares her an anxious look, dark eyes dripping with worry, and so Niki makes her most reassuring grin, paired with a thumbs up.

Puffy’s expression drops into something even more concerned.

Niki feels a bit guilty for causing her worry, but Niki also feels like she has an arrow in her leg. She resolves to prioritise her feelings for once, and make it up to Puffy later with something sweet.

“This might hurt a little,” Puffy warns her, watching carefully as Niki nods, solemn, only feeling a little bit of terror. She holds up a hand, unstrapping her gauntlets, and bites down on the piled, loose fabric of her sweater sleeve. Puffy’s brows crease, and before Niki can object she’s rifling through her collection of stolen things, handing her a piece of gauze to bite down on instead.

“Come on,” Puffy says when she hesitates. “They’re not gonna miss a few rags. I promise I won’t dress it with this one.”

Right. They’re not in Pogtopia anymore – they have things to spare, now.

“I know that,” Niki replies, going a bit pink around the ears, and takes the gauze before Puffy can pick her apart further. It isn’t comfortable to hold in her mouth, but at least her hands are free to brace herself against the table.

She watches as Puffy wraps one hand around the arrow, right at the arrowhead’s base – still wearing her white, bloodstained gloves, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. To Puffy’s credit, her hand looks strong and sure against the arrow shaft, and when she braces the other one on Niki’s thigh, it’s a warm and heavy and almost comforting heat – she places it firmly, as if she knows what she’s doing, or is at least confident enough to split the difference. Her fingers flex decidedly against Niki’s leg, and for a moment, Niki thinks she’s seeing stars.

Oh, some part of Niki thinks distantly, half-delirious with some mixture of anticipation and blood loss and pain, that’s nice.

And then with a sharp, fierce tug, the pain rushes in.

A cry punches out of her gut at once – and punch is the right word for it, as if some wild creature has climbed up the rungs of her ribcage to erupt from her throat with a frenzied shout. It hurts. Oh, fuck, it hurts so much. Reality blinks out around her, casting her into a dizzy pit of darkness and pain, lighting up the insides of her eyelids like flowers in colours she couldn’t describe if she tried. Her head feels too heavy, filled with the scent of iron and blood. Her pulse hammers in her chest, in her neck, buried deep into the open wound – thump-thump-thump-thump, heartbeats blurring together as she struggles to hang onto the world around her.

She struggles to take another breath, to fill her lungs, and even the slightest shift of her leg has her grimacing in pain. Curses fall from her lips – she doesn’t pay attention to which, she doesn’t care. The gauze is wet and heavy in her mouth, trampled into a thin line, and she rips it out with a spare hand – heaving in earnest now, letting cool air slide down her throat and into her chest.

“There you go,” she hears Puffy murmur gently. She jerks her eyes open, blinking as her vision adjusts to the torchlight, and takes Puffy in – gently dabbing at the blood dousing her leg, whispering comforting words under her breath. “That’s the worst bit over, okay? You did good. You did real good. We’re just gonna do the stitches now, and you’re all done.”

Niki bites down on her lip, tipping her chin back to stare at the ceiling. She can’t bear to look at the thing. Not before, and not now that it’s gaping, a scarlet burrow into the flesh of her leg, she can’t.

“Hey, Niki,” Puffy says. Niki resists the urge to let out a whine. It hurts. “Talk to me. What’s up?”

Niki sucks a breath in through her teeth. “You don’t have to distract me,” she grits out, “if you need to focus. I’m alright. I’m okay.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve had a lot of practice,” Puffy says. Niki can’t see her expression from here – just the wrinkles and cracks in the ceiling – but her voice sounds patient, soft around its edges.”And besides, I like talking to you.”

“I’m not usually this – this clumsy,” Niki feels the need to defend herself. “I swear, I’m not.”

Puffy hums. “We all have those days, right? Besides. I’ve gotten dumber scrapes for dumber reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was this one time… there was this one time I broke my whole ankle getting off a ship – my ship, even, my own ship! – and, oh gods, that was…” her snickering trails off. “It was… I’m not, uh, sure? When? It must have been a while ago. But, uh – I ab-so- lutely remember stacking it off the boat, I can tell you that. Had to sew my own leathercap for the cast, just to get back out on the water again.”

Niki’s nose wrinkles. “You can’t remember?” she asks.

Puffy is quiet for a moment – not speaking, just making those dim stalling sounds, muted uhm s and ah s.

“It’s not a big deal, really,” she ventures. “I, y’know – I probably just hit my head or something at the same time, knocked all the memories out. Silly, right?”

Niki frowns. Still, though, if Puffy doesn’t want to talk about it, Niki won’t push.

“A bit,” she concedes, and Puffy laughs. “You sail?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Puffy sounds so excited that Niki steals a glance downward – she’s still absorbed in her work, something with a needle and thread that Niki is doing her very best not to pay too much attention to, but there’s another sparkling grin across her face. “You’re looking at Captain Puffy, king of the high seas. Had my own ship and everything.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Puffy confirms. “I had at least three server-wide warrants out for piracy. At least.”

Piracy. Niki has travelled between servers before, even propped up her own little raft to traverse great waters, but she’s only come across pirates in bedtime stories – wild, like sailing storms, driven only by the ocean’s cobalt ebb and flow, and skirmishes on the horizon. Thieves or bastards or folk heroes, depending on the tale being told.

Niki puts her roots down firmly. She has never been the type to be untethered, adrift, at the whims of something as pliant as water. Free, in a way that she cannot picture – not that she feels trapped in L’Manberg, not true L’Manberg, but a freedom apathetic and unbothered to land, to kingdom. It’s as inscrutable as the tides, to her. She tries to imagine the endless salt and seaweed in her nose, ocean spray on her sunwarmed cheeks, the sea breeze ruffling her hair.

“...what’s it like?”

“Never tried it?” Puffy hums. “You look like you have a rogue’s heart.”

Oh, Niki can feel herself going red. “I wouldn’t say that… I mean, we’ve all scraped a bit to get by, but nothing as, as extravagant as piracy. And besides, I’d definitely feel too guilty to steal for a living.”

“You just haven’t found the right people to steal from,” Puffy says wryly. “It’s… it’s amazing, really. I’ve always known I belong on the water, y’know? Like, it’s on land that I get my sealegs, and on a ship is where I feel my sturdiest.” There’s a mild tug at her leg, and Niki winces as she hears the telltale sound of a potion bottle being uncorked. “You’ve got the whole world in your hands – the sun shining down on you, or the clouds right above. The sky and the sea come together sometimes, I think. It feels more like you’re flying than you’re sailing.” She sighs, fond. “I can just remember this… this sense of wonder. Of adventure. I think I was made for it.”

Niki chances another look downwards, and by the stars, it’s worth it – Puffy’s smile as she reminisces is so open, so endearing, so sweet that she can hardly bear to look away.

A stray, pearl-white curl has escaped its hold, Niki notices, and rests at the crown of her forehead. Briefly, she considers pushing it back into place.

“So why the Dream SMP? Do you know Dream?” Puffy certainly seems familiar enough with him, if she has no problem stealing things from him and his friends. “I didn’t think he was looking to invite new people so soon. Right in the middle of a war, as well…”

Trust Dream to not be committed to their cause. Backstabber, betrayer, enabler – oh, Niki knows that Wilbur didn’t get all that TNT on his own. He doesn’t have the hands for it. Maybe Niki truly doesn’t mind taking a few extra supplies of her own when they leave this place. Maybe, even, she should check if Dream has been keeping her berries from her.

“Well…” Puffy trails off, same as before. “I mean, I know Dream now. I met him a few days ago, had a look around his kingdom – ”

“Eret’s kingdom,” Niki corrects her.

Puffy’s face screws up, confused. “Oh, really? I thought Dream said he owned the land.”

Well. It’s the truth, and yet… “technically, to some degree. But Eret will always be king.”

Puffy raises her eyebrows, and hums thoughtfully. “Cool. They seem really nice as well, honestly – not that I’ve said more than, like hello to them. But no, I didn’t know Dream before coming here.” And then, a bit quietly, she mutters, “I don’t… I don’t think I know him, anyway.”

Niki cannot bear to see that sad look on Puffy's face. “You must meet a lot of people on the sea.”

Puffy graciously takes the bait. “Oh, so many. It’s wild. But at least it means I have friends everywhere, you know? People who I know, who know me, wherever I go. And everyone has such an interesting story! We’re all on our own adventures, and sometimes they cross over a bit, and when they do, that’s awesome.” With one final dab of her cloth, Puffy recorks the healing potion – Niki is still avoiding staring at her wound head-on, but the pain has melted away and the uncomfortable, hot stickiness of blood is gone. “I’d love to hear more about yours, one day.”

Niki giggles. Oh, stars, she sounds like a schoolgirl. “I don’t think it would be anything too interesting, compared to yours.”

“But I’d like to hear it,” Puffy insists. “It’s yours, that’s what makes it interesting.”

And she tucks what’s left of the potion into Niki’s backpack, as if that isn’t the sweetest thing Niki has heard in a while.

“Y’know what,” Puffy says, “if you have the time, I’d really love a tour of the place? I mean, everything here is just so…” she cups her hands in front of her face, and punctuates the movement with some noise that puffs up her cheeks and sounds like stepping on soul sand. “You’re a local, right? I need more people to know.” She smiles again, that warm ray of sunshine. “I need some interesting friends.”

“Oh, of course,” Niki replies. She gently swings her leg, and the pain is down to the slightest twinge, now. The healing potion has worked wonders already. “I’ll have a talk with Tubbo – he’s our president now – and he would be more than happy to show you around.”

“Not knocking the idea, he sounds like a great kid,” Puffy amends, “but – I was thinking, if you’re not too busy, of course – maybe you could show me around?”

Niki’s heart skips a beat in her chest, too busy twirling with glee – “oh!” she says, struck almost wordless with the sudden grin that blooms across her face. “I – yes, I would be more than happy to. That can, um, that can definitely be arranged.”

“Wonderful,” Puffy beams. Does this woman know how powerful her smile is? No wonder she had such a bountiful career in piracy – Niki thinks that if someone smiled like that at her and told her to hand over all of her gold, she would feel quite inclined to do so, just to see that smile again. She folds her knees to her chest, testing the pain, if only to provide some kind of shield against it. “And, you should be good to go – just be gentle on your leg until you can get some sleep.”

“Thank you,” Niki says, heart warm, “thank you, really. For saving me, and fixing me up…”

“Pshh,” Puffy remarks. “Not a problem. Trust me. I do this thing all the time.”

“Well, that really is wonderful of you.”

“Right.” Puffy runs a hand through her curls, her eyes darting to the side for a moment – a quick motion, one that Niki isn’t sure if she was supposed to notice. “Well, can’t forget the most important step.”

Quick as a flash, Puffy steadies herself with a hand on Niki’s calf, and presses a kiss delicately to the space just above the treated wound.

“You gotta kiss it better,” she says, as way of explanation – but there’s a definite pink flush spreading across her cheeks, and when Niki catches her eyes, there’s a cheeky spark there. Oh, Puffy really is just delightful, and Niki is head over heels. Her heart backflips so hard that it almost hurts. “I’m still putting my base up out in the free land, but I’ll see you around L’Manberg, right?”

“Yeah,” Niki says, still breathless. “Yes, I would like that.”

Chapter Text

I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream…

Once the acrid gunpowder in the air subsides, this new country is sunk in roses – flowers spill from freshly-planted grass, from riverbeds, from the windowboxes that frame every new home they build. Niki plants half of them herself, and lets the thin roots wrap around her fingers like precious jewels. Though there is already a promise sitting on Niki’s ring finger, sparkling in flawless diamond.

Briar Rose meets her prince – her knight – in a valley of secrets and wildflowers, shouldered by curious squirrels and songbirds and rabbits. Niki meets hers in a similar place, albeit while shooing away the crowd, because the creatures she knows would be far too pleased with themselves when it comes to sticking their beaks into her business – they have too much of a taste for gossip, and Niki has to swat Fundy away at least twice before he stops teasing her about her new girlfriend. But Puffy is just as charming as any prince, and Niki, for now, is the sweetest ex-First Lady in the land.

It’s easy to fall in love when the flowers are in bloom – when the air is sweet with summer and the smell of roses, and when the weather is always warm.

It just becomes more difficult once the clouds roll in.

Niki wakes to a racket of metal clattering against stone.

She blinks herself into the vague outline of wakefulness, noting absent-mindedly that the bakery is still drenched in the dark – it’s warm, as the nights are towards the end of the year, but the moon is still a crescent barely captured in the gaps between stone and dirt above her. She groans quietly, pressing her face into the softness of her pillow, uncomfortably warm as it is. Sleep is so hard to come by in summer, and she already feels tacky with sweat.

There’s another loud sound, and it’s only then that the reality of the situation dawns on Niki, yanking her from her slumber with a frantic urgency – someone, someone armed, in Niki’s bakery, in the middle of the night. Her heart leaps to her throat as she fumbles her way out of bed, sheets wrapped around her legs like tripwire. Her head swims between sleeping and wakefulness, clinging to its dreaming state even as she tries to stand upright with fingernails bitten down to the quick, forcing Niki to stumble. Weapon, she needs a weapon – they’re all packed away in chests, besides the axe she hands by the entryway – 

“Niki?” a familiar voice calls.

A wave of relief washes over Niki as soon as she hears that voice, so intense that it almost sends her straight back into drowsiness.

Puffy. She doesn’t sound injured or afraid, either – just chipper, for the time of night. Niki forces herself to take a deep breath, and then another. In, damp air filling her chest and dousing the stutter-stop fire starting there, and out, releasing her breath with a sigh. Her fingers flex as she works the frenzy out of them. There is no one unsafe in her bakery. There are no bars upon her window. Her chests are full of wool and diamonds and every berry that ripens under the summer sun. Tonight, her nightmares remain firmly in her realm of sleep.

She ambles over to the entryway – taking her sweet time, now that the alarm has washed off – pushing back the curtain of ivy to reveal Puffy’s excited grin, rocking from her heels to her toes, restless and sparking with energy despite the hour of the night. Oh, how.

“My love,” Niki greets her, voice crackly from sleep, and revels in how Puffy’s grin somehow intensifies, just a little bit. She pauses to rub some sleep from her eyes. “It is… it’s the middle of the night.”

“Mm-hmm,” Puffy confirms.

There is certainly a clever response to Puffy’s enthusiasm, and perhaps if Niki were blessed at birth (or spawn) with such cleverness, she would be able to summon it as quickly as she could her axe. But she wasn’t, common girl that she is, and so instead she blinks blearily at Puffy’s still-slightly-blurry figure in her doorway.

“I was thinking it might be nice to go for a walk,” Puffy explains. “Our own little adventure, y’know? We’ll stay inside the walls, just to avoid the mobs if we can – but an adventure nonetheless, isn’t it?”

“I already know L’Manberg pretty well, Puffy,” Niki points out tiredly, “unless the boys have put up another statue.”

“They haven’t. I have, though.” Puffy looks altogether too pleased with herself, and Niki can help but draw a tired, half-hearted giggle from her chest at the sight of it – she preens happily under the appreciation. Oh, Puffy’s won this one now, they both know it. Niki is far too easy for her to win over. “And besides, everything looks different at night, doesn’t it?”

“Different enough to disrupt my sleep schedule?” Niki’s smile quirks mischievously. “I need my beauty sleep, Puffy.”

“No, you don’t. You’re the most gorgeous thing on the server, and you know that.” Puffy’s tone is almost flippant, and Niki flushes with how obvious she makes it sound – didn’t you know, Niki? “I’ll make it worth your while, won’t I?”

Niki squints at her, tilting her head. “Is this another one of your dates?”

She huffs. “Well, I’m trying to make it one.”

“You spoil me,” Niki tells her with a laugh, and retreats into the bakery – fixing the ivy to its holdback as she rifles through the nearest chest for a change of clothes.

“Come on! Come out in your PJs.”

She splutters out a laugh. “Why?”

“I’m in my PJs.”

Puffy is, in fact, wearing her typical rainbow onesie – though it’s warm enough tonight for her to break out the summer cut, hemmed nicely at the elbows and knees in light, draping fabric. “You always wear that.”

“And I wear it to sleep, too!” Puffy tales a few steps up the rocky incline that cradles the bakery, holding a hand out to Niki. “Come on, Niki.”

Niki huffs out something between a laugh and a beleaguered sigh, shaking her head – stars above, where did she find this crazy, wonderful woman? – and, obligingly, takes Puffy’s hand. Puffy beams, like torchlight in the night, and all at once they’re off – scaling the rocks by the bakery, giggling like idiots as they slip and stumble, never letting go of each other’s hands (even when Niki makes a particularly daring leap to a small outcrop, and half-tugs Puffy across with her with a surprised shout and a shriek of laughter that surely wakes the neighbours).

She’s right – L’Manberg does look different at night. Niki had spent nights upon nights walking around L’Manberg before Schlatt’s tyranny, and the war, and had grown familiar with the shadows cast by each statue and the light thrown by lanterns along their paths. This new L’Manberg, though – product of their recent weeks’ blood, sweat and tears, a tireless effort – is entirely different. The flag doesn’t whistle and snap in the night wind, casting shifting shadows across the pathways (and doesn’t Niki’s heart still sting at that, their flag abandoned), but warm light peeks out from the houses they rebuilt together. No rocketship or little monument to the discs, and Eret’s old house is gone entirely, but fish gather by the docks and peer up at Niki and Puffy as they pass, curious to see what could be making so much noise so early into the morning. Thank the stars, someone has finally taken down the last of the bright scraps of banners and streamers that poor Tubbo had hung up before Schlatt’s festival. Instead, the new podium branches out to every corner of their small country – like a flower blossoming under the sun, petals unfurled – and lanterns hang in red, white and blue like stars fallen from the sky to light their path.

It’s beautiful. What they have built is beautiful, built from their scarred, callused, dirt-dusted hands. They fought wars for this land, this kingdom. They have won wars for it.

But still, something tears at her.

It’s beautiful, but there is so much missing. So much that was unfairly taken from them, spat upon and destroyed. She cannot help but grieve, to swallow hard and keep her eyes to those beautiful, clean-new boards they’ve laid down for the docks, after the old ones were destroyed.

And what else is gone? Their Cabinet in pieces, gutted. Tommy exiled, while she and Fundy were close to abandoning the frantic court for Dry Waters. For all real things’ sake, Niki already has – she hasn’t attended a Cabinet meeting in weeks, uninterested in the Treasury and utterly unimpressed with the lack of input she has, anyway. The roaring engine of bureaucracy and paperwork and politics makes her head ache with snappish impatience, whirring away like one of Tubbo’s machines as it fights to keep them afloat. She’s heard the fights that emerge from the engine room. Somehow, she seemed to have more input as First Lady than Secretary of Treasury.

She thinks of Wilbur, then. She’s not sure where all that power came from to begin with.

Don’t dwell. You can’t dwell on it, not on the Cabinet, not a Ladyship, not Wilbur. You cannot waste your time mourning. Leave that fairytale in the past.

If she digs deep enough, she finds a spark of anger buried there – a flicker in the hearth nurtured from Pogtopia, from Manberg. It flares beyond her typical warmth, the kind that comes from sunsoaked countertops and freshly baked bread. This spark blazes hot enough to burn.

She doesn’t know what to do with it.

So instead she focuses on Puffy, and every delighted gasp that leaves her lips as they pass the pretty lights strung between buildings, and the lanterns. They kneel by the docks, Puffy leaning so far forward that Niki hovers a hand over her back when she’s not looking, just in case she really does tip into the water, whispering greetings to the fish and pointing out those with the brightest fins and tails. Puffy is right – she always seems so confident, so powerful, so self-assured in a way that Niki is almost envious of, but near the water, there’s a whole new part of her that seems to bloom. The sea breeze in her hair and water dripping from her fingertips as she plays with the fishes – this is Puffy in her element. A sea sprite given the legs to walk on land, a siren with a heart of gold and voice of honey.

Puffy is so – so sure-footed, even being so new to their land, even without her memories, while Niki scrambles for purchase. Nothing is where it should be, the buildings and the people alike. The L’Manberg of her memories – of myth, of tales spun in Wilbur’s letters – is gone, and Niki doesn’t know her place in this new world without it.

“What was it like?”

Puffy’s voice interrupts her wild thoughts. She rocks back on her haunches, and almost trips backwards over Niki’s hand – too still and absent-minded to move it from Puffy’s path – with a surprised kind of smile, she wraps Niki’s hand into her own.

“Hm?”

“L’Manberg. Before, y’know…” Puffy lifts their intertwined hands in a toast to it all – the docks, the lanterns, the new houses overseeing it all in oak and spruce. “Before all this. I mean, all this is all I’ve ever known, but it sounds like old L’Manberg was, I don’t know. Something special.”

Niki holds her tongue – what is there to say? It was beautiful. It still is, even if she doesn’t recognise it in the same way she once did. Even if it has aged without her. Isn’t she selfish? Isn’t she selfish to see how far they’ve come since the war, to see the roses that have filled the craters and cry, this isn’t my home?

Puffy’s thumb presses against her knuckles reassuringly – an anchor, in the tangle of thorns and weeds in Niki’s head.

She’s being ridiculous. Of course L’Manberg is her home – she loves L’Manberg, every single one of them, and they love her too. Love, when put against anything, conquers all of it.

“It was special,” she answers, finally. “It is special, I mean, still – just, different.”

Puffy nudges her shoulder. “Like, how?”

“Well, it was a lot smaller, for one,” Niki snorts softly. “I mean, there were fewer of us, to start with. We would have outgrown the walls eventually – they were too small, even for the bakery. And not nearly as well… well-planned, I think. We put things down wherever it suited us.”

“Talk it up, love.”

Niki giggles. “Well, it wasn’t perfect, but it was – it was real. Nowhere near as pretty as this… oh, you should have seen some of the older builds. We used to have this old Whitehouse, and we ran out of stone, so we had to fill it in with dirt and wood before the winter rains came in and washed us all out… I think we spent more time in the Camarvan than we did the Whitehouse, in the end. And you’ve seen the Camarvan. I don’t even think the leaks were any less.” Puffy laughs, and Niki laughs with her. Oh, those old buildings are close to her heart, like her photos from her childhood – too gangly and awkward and smiling too widely, not yet fitting her own body right. They had yet to outgrow their reliance on cobblestone and dirt. “But we built with what we had, you know… and we were so proud of it anyways, even when we knew it all looked a bit terrible.” She folds her knees to her chest, and lets her chin rest upon them. “It was all so new, and so young… we felt young, I think. I did. Young and foolish.”

“Old and wise now, though?” Puffy raises an eyebrow.

“Older,” Niki amends, “and wiser. Still, though. You’re right. It’s a special place.”

“Where men can go and emancipate,” she continues, with a solemn nod. Niki bursts out into a fit of giggles.

“The brutality and the tyranny of their rulers,” she agrees, swallowing her laughter with a cough.

Puffy doesn’t ask anything else, so they sit in peaceful quiet. Niki watches as some seagulls argue over fish swimming too close to the surface, flapping and squawking at each other unhappily.

“I wonder if I ever docked near here,” Puffy wonders – her voice is small, almost a distant thing, just as quiet as it is thoughtful. Niki hums quietly.

“We’ve only been here since winter,” Niki offers. “Not very long, really.” Funny, then, how it still feels like forever – a fraction of time spread beyond its means, like a flower pressed into resin. Forever in bloom.

Well. As long as Niki’s blood is in the dirt of this country – fighting and kicking and screaming for its name – she will consider it hers. That bond outlasts any flower’s lifespan, any curse, any spell.

Puffy tries to laugh – and tries is what Niki says about it, because she knows Puffy’s laughter, free and loud and uninhibited, and this strangled cry isn’t it. Her free hand comes to fidget with the curls at the nape of her neck, winding the coils around her fingers uneasily. “My memory doesn’t really stretch that far back, Niki.”

“Not even a few months?” Niki asks, and immediately regrets it – Puffy’s expression sinks, and Niki’s heart goes with it.

“Nope,” Puffy says, and tries for that awful little laugh again, but she can’t even summon that. “All out at the memory bank. I got… nothing, I guess.”

She says it like it’s a joke, but her bitter smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Niki makes a sympathetic sound.

“It’s fine,” Puffy rushes in to say, her eyes fluttering closed. “I’m used to it, by now. And besides – everyone here is so lovely, and… weird, but nice about it… it almost makes up for it.”

Almost.

“Puffy,” Niki murmurs, squeezing Puffy’s hand. Puffy turns to her, letting her eyes flicker open, and the depth of them – the sadness that lies there, like the blackest part of the sea – is something Niki could almost drown in. “You don’t have to pretend. Not to me.”

“I’m not pretending,” Puffy answers, voice tight. “You guys are all nice. So – so nice. I like being here.”

“Just because you like being here,” Niki chides her gently, “doesn’t mean you can’t miss somewhere else.”

Puffy takes a sharp breath in at that, and her hand goes limp in Niki’s – right away she’s brushing her thumb in a gentle arc across the back of Puffy’s hand, like rubbing warmth into the hands of someone lost at sea. She lets her breath rattle out with a deep, drawn-out sigh, and her eyes settle forlornly on the horizon.

“It feels like the whole world is passing me by,” she murmurs. “Like I’m – I’m trapped, and by the time I find my way back, I’ll be nothing but old bones. And I won’t recognise where I came from anymore.” She pulls aimlessly at another curl. “A hundred years could pass, and I’d still be dreaming of home. It’d only feel like a day.”

Niki untwines her hand from Puffy’s and wraps it around her shoulders – tucks the woman to her side, as if she can warm her valiant heart through her meagre body heat alone. “You’re determined, Puffy. Your – you have a stubborn heart. You’ll find your way home.”

Puffy smiles – but this is not her usual beam of sunlight, not her usual radiant glow. It’s a solemn, sad thing. It breaks Niki’s heart.

“Here,” she says – she stands, brushing stray sawdust from her thighs. “You showed me – all of this, you’ve shown me. Let me show you something too.”

Puffy’s expression relaxes – not quite her usual excitement, missing her sparkling joy, but it’s something and Niki will take that something with both hands – and she lets Niki lead the way.

The climb up the second Whitehouse’s walls has never been particularly easy. It’s a sturdy, straight-backed kind of building, soaring over L’Manberg like its very own guardian of stone. Usually she would worry that someone would spot them, but its lights are dim tonight. Calling them out for what, trespassing, would be largely hypocritical from anyone in the Cabinet, and she was never actually dismissed Secretary of Treasury – but Puffy is as precious as a gift to Niki. She would rather keep her close to her chest, if only because Fundy’s teasing would be insufferable.

Puffy makes it up first, nimble and quick – she’s used to scrambling up masts and mountains, she often explains and only occasionally brags. She stretches a hand out to Niki as she goes, which Niki accepts gratefully, hauling her up the lip of the building to scramble atop its roof.

Niki can manage herself, but after Manberg, after Schlatt, after all of it – the warmth with which Puffy looks back at her, looks out for her, reaching out a hand to make sure she makes it over the incline, pulls a smile to her face. They settle themselves at the edge of the roof, looking out at the blanket of stars and land rolled out before them.

“It’s beautiful,” Puffy murmurs, staring out over the horizon. The reflection of L’Manberg’s light sparkles in her dark eyes, as if stars could be buried there like roses into soil. Soft red and blue shades play across the angles of her face, the length of her nose and her cheekbones, lighting the curls on her forehead and the scruff on her jaw in sweet crimson and royal blue.

She shines, like this.

“Yeah,” Niki replies, watching those dancing lights. “Yeah, it is.”

Puffy turns to her, and a grin tugs at her lips – Niki can’t imagine why, until she remembers how blatantly she’s staring. She flushes red, and Puffy laughs.

The night is perfect for this kind of thing, to idle time away atop the Whitehouse – it’s not quite warm enough to swelter, with a soft sea breeze ruffling her hair, but it isn’t cool enough for goosebumps to prick the flesh of Niki’s arms and legs, either. L’Manberg stretches before them and then some, largely quiet and still in the nighttime, besides the subtle sound of waves washing from the sea into the rivers below. When was the last time L’Manberg was able to sleep so soundly? There are no spies scurrying to and fro, no one sneaking in and out of the country’s borders overnight. There is nothing but the sound of the waves, the occasional cat chasing seagulls along the dock, and Niki.

Beside her, Puffy is quiet – but she rocks back and forth on her heels, a sure sign that she’s enjoying herself.

(Would Niki miss L’Manberg the same way Puffy misses her home, if their roles were reversed?

Yes. Yes, of course she would. There is no world in which she wouldn’t – there is no world where she could just forget.

Once, her photograph sat in the Whitehouse – neatly cut out from the photos she took the day she and Jack joined the country, sparkling in their new uniforms and smiling wide as anything. Now, they sit above the entry hall’s doorway as the Cabinet, with tight smiles and newly-won scars and dirtstains still on their hands after the sixteenth. She is a part of this place. This place is a part of her, their roots tangled together.

And that will never change.)

“What is that?” Puffy asks abruptly.

“Hm?”

“The – the song you’re humming. It’s pretty.”

“Oh!” Niki hadn’t noticed. She feels herself go a bit pink. “It’s an old song that the people who looked after me – my, um, guardians, really – used to sing back in Perfect, when I was little.”

“Perfect?”

“Perfect SMP. I grew up there.”

“Never been.” Puffy’s interested look takes on a particularly roguish shine to it, and she elbows Niki gently. “Sounds like it suits you perfectly, though.”

Niki giggles, despite how lame the joke is. “It was nice.”

“Perfect, I’d think,” Puffy mumbles, and Niki elbows her back for that.

Summer in Perfect was always beautiful. Not too hot, not too cold, a lovely warm-summer climate. The flowers would come in late spring, dotting the town in a rainbow of colour, and everyone was busy running after the harvest or the returns from the mines – and after long days half the town would gather into the hall to talk and dance and play music. She and Bear would hide behind tables and in corners from their guardians, watching the whirling colours of skirts and wraps – pinks and blues and leaf-green, all a brilliant blur. Everything smelt of summer and sawdust, and air would be filled with giddy shouts and music as people danced long into the night. Those were Niki’s favourite nights when she was young. The adults were all too busy having fun to whisk them back to bed, and there was no one to stop her and Bear from carefully imitating every dance until they were just as good as the grown-ups were.

She takes a few steps away from the Whitehouse’s edge, wringing her hands together – Puffy looks over at her, eyes following with curious, rapt attention.

“Do you know how to dance, my love?”

Puffy snorts. “Define dance, maybe.”

Niki counts out her little song’s rhythm in her head. “A waltz?”

“Oh, no.” Puffy’s expression pushes slightly past curiosity, past attention – a new little passion captures her face, and it takes Niki a moment to piece it together as fascination. “Why, do you?”

“You could say that.” She holds a hand out, inviting. “It’s not difficult to learn – it’s easy, very easy, really. I could teach you.”

Puffy smiles, and takes her hand – Niki pulls her close, guiding Puffy’s hand to her shoulder, and placing her own securely on Puffy’s waist. She smiles up at her through her eyelashes, thoroughly enjoying how pink Puffy goes beneath the soft starlight.

“You start by stepping forward, left foot,” and to match her, Niki takes a step back. “And then bring the right foot forward, to the right. Like the corner of a box.”

They almost trip, but they manage.

“Then backwards on your right foot, and bring your left foot back to where you started, and then the right. And you’ve filled the box, that’s it. And we keep going…”

The first few rounds are made with shaky steps, but Puffy gains confidence as they go – and then they’re dancing, truly dancing, even if Puffy is still watching her toes to make sure she doesn’t step on Niki’s.

“This is a lot easier than I thought it would be,” she admits. “I don’t know why I thought it was, like, hard. I’ve learned harder jigs than this.”

“It is, right? I thought the same thing when I learned.” Niki snickers. “I’ll save you the ones we had in Perfect. Those were proper square dances – someone always ended up tripping over their own feet, or someone else’s…”

“Never you, though,” Puffy teases.

“You’re right,” Niki replies – with the sternest expression she can manage, when she feels as blissful as this. “Never me.”

“I never took you for the ballroom type, honestly,” Puffy says. “Where did you learn, then?”

“Before coming here. A friend would take me dancing, sometimes.”

If Puffy has questions, she keeps them close and quiet – which is good, because Niki doesn’t want to be back there right now. She wants to be here, in Puffy’s arms, striking up a song under her breath with gentle humming, smiling every time Puffy lifts her gaze from her careful feet to her eyes.

And she only steps on Niki’s toes a few times, too.

After a few minutes, Niki’s humming melts into whispers – into words – and she starts, in earnest, to sing.

“I know you,” she mumbles, a quiet melody. Puffy takes in a sharp, awed breath. “I walked with you once upon a dream; I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam…”

Niki holds Puffy in her arms, the two of them moving in gentle arcs across the roof, dancing from step to step between the clouds and the stars. Her weight is solid, secure beneath Niki’s hands – she radiates summer-warmth where Niki’s skin presses against hers, letting her fingers trace the neckline of Niki’s blouse and squeezing Niki’s hand whenever they pull off a particularly artful set of steps.

Niki wants to kiss her. She wants to kiss her so, so badly.

But she waits.

They spin out eventually – Niki raises their clasped hands high, and with a duck of her shoulders and a giggle, Puffy darts under her arm in a dramatic twirl that's more flair than proper form.

“...but if I know you, I know what you'll do – you'll love me at once, the way you did once, upon a dream.”

The song comes to an end, and so does their dance – they stand together on the roof, fingers entwined, matching grins across their faces.

"So," Puffy says. "Worth getting you up from your beauty sleep, then?"

"Yes," Niki laughs, "yes, you got me. It is. It is."

Puffy smiles and pulls her close, pressing her forehead against Niki's, barely a breath away.

"That was beautiful," she whispers. "Thank you for teaching me."

Niki wraps her arms around Puffy’s neck, letting them cross at the wrist with a contented sigh. "Of course," she whispers back. "Thank you for dancing with me, my love."

"Always. Always, Niki."

Puffy tucks her knuckle beneath Niki’s chin, tilting her face to the side – and she leans in, all crisp sea salt, and plants a kiss on Niki’s cheek.

It’s a brief moment, but one that has Niki weak at the knees nonetheless. Puffy pulls away, and before Niki can chase her – before she can match Puffy’s kiss with one of her own – she’s stopped to look out across L’Manberg, and the dawn light that spills over the horizon. Niki blinks her daze away, following Puffy’s eyes. The moon hangs low in the sky, a soft blue light glowing beyond the walls and trees – a promise of a new day, waking up all too soon.

Puffy looks out at it all with a hand cupped across her eyes, surveying the dawn light with an expert eye. She casts a glance over to Niki.

“Time to head back to bed, then?” she asks.

“It might be,” Niki admits, catching a yawn in her palm – Puffy scoffs, and Niki kicks her gently in the back of the knees on their way down, but Puffy still offers her a hand as they leap down from a windowsill to the scrubby rocks and grasses on the ground.

And maybe the sun is coming up, rolling dawn across the morning sky. But Niki, with her hand in Puffy’s – still dancing on clouds, still tangled in roses, still young and foolish – might as well be caught in a beautiful, beautiful dream.

Chapter Text

And so the story goes – on the princess’ sixteenth birthday she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel… and die!

L’Manberg, with its naivete and recklessness in spades, doesn’t even make it to sixteen weeks.

What happens to a princess when her kingdom is burnt down to ashes? It’s a difficult question. There is nothing left to lay fealty to – there is no cradle of luxury to retreat from, and no great loyalty to swear before bedtime and at each birthday. There is no land to defend. There are no people to protect. There is only stark, bitter ash, tumbling through her delicate fingers.

What happens to a princess when she burns the place down herself?

Niki is a common girl, the niece of bakers and blacksmiths and bricklayers. She wouldn’t know.

L’Manberg is, at its heart, doomed from the beginning. A country forever swathed in shadow can only grow so tall – even the seed of a rose cannot blossom in darkness, buried in soil poisoned with gunpowder and blood. From its very first breath, brought into the world kicking and screaming, its timely death was inevitable. And take its last breath it does, as Dream and Tommy scream at each other atop the obsidian thicket above.

This sleep will not lift with something as trite as true love’s first kiss – not in a hundred years, not in a thousand. There is no lucky spell any one of them could cast to prevent it. L’Manberg goes down in a blaze of firework and flame, and there is not a single thing that could be done to stop it.

And even if there were, Niki wouldn’t be the one doing it anyway.

Niki staggers into the mouth of her city with all the grace of the walking dead, like a body puppeteered by a witch’s curse. Each footstep falls heavy upon the stone, limp and dull and loud, weighty as sandbags and just as lifeless. Her body is here, in her city, but her heart and her mind are still in L’Manberg – still in what’s left of L’Manberg – and so she lets her feet march her into the city, and tries to block the vision of carnage from her mind.

This is everything she declared that she wanted – everything she knows she wanted. To cauterise the hurt, to shred the memories to ash, to set everything that laid its hands on her alight and let it burn until it becomes nothing more than dust lining the creases in her hands, the crooks of her elbows and knees, coating her tongue. Her eyes have long been opened to the apathy, to the cruelty of L’Manberg, and its existence will fade into nothing but bitter memories of a long-lost dream after she wakes.

But still, still, she feels like she’s walking through a living nightmare.

Wilbur is dead. Wilbur is dead, Wilbur is not real, Wilbur is gone and so is L’Manberg but she saw him, she saw him alive and true and walking through their – his, no one’s anymore – country like a ghost pulled from the rubble that became his coffin. She must be dreaming, she must be somehow still sleeping despite the noise and the heat and the sharp smell of gunpowder and blood and smoke, because Wilbur is gone. She knows that, she knows that, how is he here? How can he be? She saw Tommy and Tubbo and Jack and Quackity all fighting pointlessly at his side, a cluster across the crater – do they know? Do they know he is gone?

Nothing is real. Nothing can be real, and yet, so painfully, it is – the ash and dirt buried beneath her nails, and sweat that sticks her hair to the nape of her neck, the acrid smell of soulsand still pricking at her nose. The booming sound of withers and explosions still ring through her ears, a pitchy hum mixed with a low, terrible rumble, met with the shine of sand melting into glass whenever she buried her chin into her chest with arms wrapped around herself to drown out the sound. Her face feels sticky and awful and wet – slick with sweat, with tears and with blood. Gunpowder and filth tracks down her face, a tacky mess against the pink flush of her cheeks. It was so hot, it’s the middle of summer – the sun beat down on them side-by-side with the TNT and the withers, illuminating every inch of the destruction. And Niki is coming to boil beneath the heat, every wet piece of muscle and tissue and skin writhing with all the ferocity of sparks across a forge floor. Dangerous, she would be warned as a child, don’t get too close, and don’t stare into the bright lights, either.

Why does she never listen?

L’Manberg, once upon a time, was real – if only for a sliver of time, the knife-edge between innocence and soulless, inescapable ambition. The country was a hungry beast, one that no one could tame. Not Wilbur, never Schlatt, and not even poor Tubbo, either. It was real, this wild thing, and then it wasn’t – because it was so much easier to lure people in with those beautiful lights and sweet words, to draw foolish lambs in for the slaughter. L’Manberg had been real, and then it had pretended to be real, and now, finally, it is not – it will be nothing but the remnant of an old wives’ tale at best, of myth, of a warning whispered to the selfish and the prideful and the dishonest. All those real things – the Whitehouse, the docks, her bakery – are gone. At her own hands. At her own shaking, ash-coated hands.

Where are the others? She shouldn’t bother thinking it, but she does – high and pitchy even in her own mind, halfway to delirious. Her blood rushes past her ears, a bonfire roar. Niki stumbles past the empty rooms of her city, each one with its little bed and nicely folded bedsheets and a lamp on the bedside table, made to be filled with chatter and laughter and warmth, sitting empty. They’re fools, every last one of them, but the silence claws at her. They’ve been tricked. They’re still asleep. They can not help it. She saw them on the hill’s crest, she saw them with Wilbur – she would have seen it on the comms if someone died. She would have.

No, everyone is in hiding. They’re real, they’re alive, they breathe and talk and wipe the sweat from their brow just like she does, but they’re hiding. Not everyone saw it all coming. Not everyone saw the smoke curdling over their pathetic excuse for a country, leaving them all to choke.

Wilbur was supposed to be dead. And you didn’t know.

Did the others know? Why did they not tell her? Why wouldn’t they?

Niki stumbles to a stop, her boots skidding on stone, right in the thick of the apartments she so painstakingly carved out of the stone.

Because they’re traitors. Because they don’t care, they never cared, they only care about themselves, and surely if they did someone would find her by now with her flint and steel and the ash in her hair and ask her what happened, what happened, Niki – 

The weight of it all sits on her chest – a bulky, uncomfortable thing to carry around – and, impossibly, a giggle presses at her lips.

She can’t help it. Like water thrown onto the coals, a laugh escapes her – it starts quietly, a breathy little laugh that stokes her sore throat and aching chest. It’s stupid. She shouldn’t be laughing. But she is, and the sound swells to a high crescendo – she laughs, and it almost sounds like a scream. The sound drags its claws down the length of her throat, pitches a spear into her gut until she’s bent over with how badly it hurts. It’s a mess. It’s a mess. Does it really matter if she laughs, if nothing is real anymore? Who is going to care? No one does. No one cares about Niki, no one ever did, and isn’t that just hilarious? Isn’t it funny to think about how much Niki cared, cared about all of this, when absolutely no one did in return?

The next bout of laughter sounds like the cry of a feral animal, caught in a trap. Her face prickles uncomfortably, and after a moment, Niki realises tears are slipping down her cheeks again.

No, no. She can’t laugh. Not now. Laughing is not real, to laugh right now would be crazy – nothing is funny – and Niki isn’t crazy. She knows what’s real, and what isn’t. She’s having the best day of her life, this absolute nightmare, and she can tell that part is true because the weight of it all floods her again, fills her nose and mouth and drowns out the laughter with more tears, and with a sickening feeling that makes her stomach twist. Her head spins. Water. She needs water.

Where are the others?

They’re all so stupid, so foolish. Niki couldn’t help them. But maybe, when they’ve flushed the poison from their systems, they’ll come around. We need to take L’Manberg back, they’d all whisper back in the ravine, shoulder-to-shoulder around the world’s shittiest campfire, hoping Wilbur wouldn’t emerge from any of the long, flickering shadows it cast – Wilbur who is gone, who is dead, who is not real – what a joke! What a fucking joke. No one’s let the rest of them in on it.

The kitchen eyes her uneasily as she sheds her armour, each piece of armour clattering to the floor with keening cries. It’s too hot against her skin, still rattling with heat from the fires and the explosions and her burning hands, letting the molten metal pool in her palms. Part of her thinks that if she left them there, sitting close to the skin, they would mold into it – a metal-flesh mess of skin and scales, impenetrable, filling her gut with a sense of revulsion so strong that she bucks the rest off with a jerky shake of her shoulders. She lets it pile up. Why shouldn’t she? There are no rules anymore. Leave a pile of smouldering netherite by her sugar and flour and herbs growing from fist-sized, painted flowerpots – the only one in this fortress who could possibly care is Niki, who doesn’t.

(The bakery is gone, the bakery is gone, this tiny thing buried in stone is all she has left – )

All she has is a pile of armour prised from her skin, a beast beyond recognition. Her back is lighter without the weight of it, but her gut still convulses as she struggles for a cool breath – a dangerous thing when she’s already so dizzy, running so hot that she feels feverish. What would her friends say? What will they say?

She thinks of Jack, diving into the pit with nothing but a sword at his side and rage in his eyes, despite how fucking terribly they all treated him. She thinks of Tubbo watching the destruction around him with wide eyes, and the tree burning, and she thinks of Puffy, her voice small in the crowd – 

Niki?

Oh, Puffy.

Niki remembers seeing her on the fringes of battle, crossbow in hand – barely far enough from the fire and TNT to feel relief – and then plunging into the fray, taking on withers and wolves with nothing more than a sword, a shield, and all the protectiveness of something mighty defending its herd. All those times her heart skipped a beat, thinking of Puffy – now, it seizes with fear.

She has to be alive, she reminds herself. You would know – you would know, you would have to – if she…

The worst part of it all is that no part of Niki was surprised to see her in battle, no matter how hard she could have wished for Puffy to run instead. Puffy never would. Niki knew that she would be in the thick of it, that she would defend this rotten place til her dying breath, because that is what Puffy does. She is kind and caring and brave and stubborn and Niki loves her. Puffy is truth and righteousness wrapped up in glittering armour, a star in the rot. There has never been any paragon – fuck that, there has never been anything, or anyone – as good in this place as Puffy.

And so easily, she could have died. Been snuffed out, dead, gone – just another casualty at L’Manberg’s feet.

What does it mean that Niki – sinking to her ankles in loose soil at the edge of the battlefield, a flint and steel in her hand, incendiary and malefic – couldn’t bear to stare at her for too long? Couldn’t bear for Puffy to look back, and see her there?

(There is no natural predator to the End’s dragon – or any other kind of dragon that exists beyond the far reach of servers, for that matter.

But it hates to be stared at. It hates to be watched.)

Niki’s hands are still shaking. Wicked. That is what it makes her – wicked, terrible, selfish, cowardly. Blinded by something so much better than she is. She stole herself away before the TNT started falling because she knew that Puffy would fight, and she knew that she herself would not, and that neither of their minds could be changed. She didn’t want to hear Puffy’s disappointment. She didn’t want to watch as Puffy’s faith in her dwindled and died as she realised the very same thing that Niki already knew. She didn’t want to see the desperate questions in Puffy’s eyes – the eyes on her back as she fled the wreckage were bad enough. Under a light that shines as brightly as Puffy does, there is nowhere Niki can hide.

Niki? Puffy’s voice calls, horrified, from the battlefield.

To think, once, that light was a comfort.

Now it just casts light onto the ugliest parts of her, the soft pieces of her heart that have curdled and hardened and turned to charcoal in the fire. The thrumming in her veins, the power with which she can feel her pulse in her wrists, her throat, behind her eyes and between her ribs.

Scales shed, she dips her flask into her tin of water for relief. Has the water always been so cold against her skin? She brings the flask to her lips, tipping it back with care (as much as she can muster, while her hands still tremble), and immediately regrets it as the water catches on gunpowder – the pungent taste floods her senses, first at the back of her throat before it coats her teeth and tongue and the flesh of her mouth.

No, no, no – 

It pulls her back immediately – out of the city, head spinning, back to the valley with loose sand and dirt bleeding down its craters and buildings tumbling around her, a heady and deafening din. Niki flinches back, dropping the flask – she can feel it leave her hand, but then it disappears, with no sound of it hitting the ground. Her hands scrabble at her face, her lips. Get it out, get it out! – the taste swishes over her tongue as she coughs, a splutter that hurts all the way down her lungs. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe, because whenever she opens her mouth or takes a breath through her nose, gunpowder coats her insides – sticks to every muscle, lining them all in rough grey and silver like dust lining unused fine china. She’d shatter every piece of it if she could, rip muscle from bone to clear out the pungent smell of it all, and she will, she will – 

With more bravery than she’s shown in hours – in days, in weeks – she wrenches her mouth open, taking the largest breath that she can, bracing herself for the dust that will choke her. It doesn’t come, and water spills from her lips in pathetic rivulets, spit and freshwater and more filth down her chin. She spits it out onto the stone (and then some, before it hits her stomach and pulls her meagre excuse for breakfast up with it), feeling the burn right down her throat to the flare of her nostrils as she struggles to even out her breathing.

Deep breaths, Niki, a voice croons – it’s not hers, it’s pulled from some memory, from Perfect or home or Puffy or anywhere but here – and she pulls in another breath. She blinks hard. Her eyes sting. Her stomach is still heaving, empty. There’s a puddle at her feet, glistening in the low firelight, of spit and water and bile – she stares into it, watching the light shift across the dark, wet stone, watching the edges of her shadow warp strangely in the wavering light.

She feels like screaming and bawling and laughing like an idiot all at once.

The thing is, Niki doesn’t feel weak. She wipes down her chin and her cheeks with a handkerchief, and she doesn’t feel weak. She feels strong, so strong, like her body is running on a power borrowed. It makes her skin itch with growing pains, wishing for the cool kiss of iron, like she’s waiting to shed her skin and have something much bigger and more powerful than she is crawl out of the remains.

Even if she can’t keep down a glass of water.

After a hundred years asleep, Niki is finally freed from the cruelty and the lies of L’Manberg. So why does she feel like she’s swimming through tar? Why does she feel so strange, so distant from herself? Why doesn’t she feel like she’s woken up?

A cry rips itself through the city, and this time, Niki hears it.

“Niki? Niki!”

“Puffy,” Niki breathes, and whips around, eyes scanning every part of the cavern. “Puffy!”

She hears Puffy before she sees her, descending upon the city with the unstoppable racket of netherite on netherite, marching heavy against the hard stone. From the entrance by the beehive nook, Puffy emerges – she stands tall and solid in the firelight, a sword and shield still in hand, her curls tangled and snarled from battle like wild brambles. Her eyes fall onto Niki, glittering just a little bit too brightly in the torchlight, and widen with a gasp that Niki feels more than she hears. Her heart lunges against her ribs, a jerk that she feels deep in the abyss of her chest – like it knows who it belongs to, has seen her, and cannot bear to be parted by something as petty as flesh.

Before Niki can blink, can breathe, can say a word – whatever that word would be, because Niki wouldn’t be able to predict whatever spilled from her mouth – Puffy’s sword and shield have hit the ground, racing towards her with all the intensity of a storm rolling across the horizon. She takes Niki’s face in her hands as soon as she can reach her, and presses her lips against Niki’s.

The kiss is a hard, desperate thing – not the kind Niki has grown used to, as soft and warm as sunlight. This one burns like ice against her skin, a cloying tackiness between Puffy’s hands and her cheeks that doesn’t want to let go. She doesn’t want to let go, now that she has Puffy in her arms. She slips an arm around Puffy’s waist, and Puffy almost collapses into the weight of it – she shifts toward, carding a hand through the sweaty mess of Niki’s hair, stumbling far enough for Niki to take a few steps back to catch an armful of her. She can’t find it in herself to be self-conscious, to think about how filthy she is – all she can think about is Puffy, Puffy’s hand in her hair, Puffy’s lips pressed against hers like she needs the contact to breathe.

She presses her cheek into the curve of Puffy’s wrist, and the kiss deepens with a shift that could be a sigh, perhaps – Niki feels it in the movement of Puffy’s chest against hers, how her body settles in her arms. Her heart beats wildly in her own chest, a noisy staccato. Puffy squeaks against her lips, a muffled noise, and Niki realises that she’s started squeezing Puffy as tightly as she can, all wrapped up together – not thinking, not being sensible, driven by nothing but close to me close to me she’s here she’s real.

She’s real. She’s real, and she’s in Niki’s arms right now, and when she tries to loosen her grip Puffy’s hand in her hair shifts – the awkward angle almost pulls, damnit (does she know what she’s doing to Niki? Could she ever?) and Niki sees stars, and better that than any of the other bright lights scarred against the backs of her eyelids. Good. Good, good, let her feel something, something that keeps her here and not in the fray. It’s demanding, that’s what it is – Niki slots her lips against Puffy’s with a stubbornness unmatched and demands, get me out of this place. Get me out of here, don’t leave me here, make me feel something worth waking for, take my hand and never leave and we’ll go, let me go let me go let me go –

Eventually, Niki’s breath runs short – they both come up for air, panting. She feels a chill land against her cheeks, two hands framing her face, and when she lifts her eyes to meet Puffy’s she’s just looking at her, looking at her in a way that makes Niki want to squirm. Stripped bare beneath her gaze, armour shed and left with nothing but the soft skin beneath. Her fingers drip down Niki’s cheeks, as if she’s checking for cracks in porcelain – and then she blinks twice and she’s everywhere, checking Niki’s wrists, her arms, her collar.

Niki catches Puffy’s roaming hands in hers, entwining their fingers together into an intricate weave – her hands are so cold, does Puffy know that? She squeezes them reassuringly, rubbing warmth back into them as best she can. She has the heat to spare.

“Come on, Puffy,” she murmurs. “Look at me.”

She does, albeit reluctantly – she drops that searching gaze and meets Niki eye-to-eye, even if her eyes keep flickering downwards to check on her.

“I lost track of you, out there,” Puffy admits. “It was too – there was too much going on, it was too loud, and I wasn’t sure if you were still in the middle of it all when the last bombs were going off… where were you?”

It’s not an accusation, but it feels like one. Niki stiffens before she can stop herself, beneath the cool view of Puffy’s watchful eye, and focuses on tracing the divots between Puffy’s knuckles and fingers. One hand comes loose, finds itself a spot beneath her chin – gently, slowly, she raises Niki’s face upward. For the first time in her life, Niki wants to crawl away from those beautiful, hazel eyes. “Where – where were you, Niki?”

Niki swallows. “You saw me, Puffy.”

“I didn’t. I heard Technoblade – ”

“Well, he was right.” Niki takes a deep breath. She needs to get used to announcing this, to being brave and bold and shameless in where her loyalties lie. And where they lie dead. She steps back, letting Puffy’s hands fall away from her, jutting her chin out with pride that she doesn’t quite feel yet. This feeling, whatever it is, burns hotter than pride. “I burnt down the L’Mantree, Puffy. And the bakery. They’re gone, both of them – they’re both nothing but ash now, I swear it, I promise it – because of me. Because I did it. L’Manberg will never hurt anyone ever again.”

Puffy’s expression shifts, like rippling water – sadness, shock, a wanting so strong that it almost pulls Niki to her knees – and Niki, hardened stone that she is, does not let her face change. She knew in her heart that this would happen. Poor, foolish Puffy loves L’Manberg. Loved L’Manberg. She knew this. And with a heart as big as the one Puffy has, Niki supposes that she shouldn’t be surprised – that she knows Puffy wastes her love on things that don’t deserve it.

She doesn’t regret her decision. She never will. But part of her still thinks, I don’t want Puffy to be mad at me.

It’s too late for that, though, isn’t it?

After a long moment, Puffy exhales – there is a river’s worth of feeling in the sound, but the one that Niki picks out of the fray is mournful.

“I figured,” she mutters. “I mean, Technoblade wouldn’t have any reason to lie about that.”

“No,” Niki replies, a bit woodenly. “He wouldn’t.”

For a brief moment, silence reigns.

“You don’t have to protect me, Puffy.”

“I know – ”

“I don’t want – I don’t need your protection, or your guidance, or any of it, you know? You don’t know what’s best for me. I do. L’Manberg – L’Manberg hurt people. It hurt people, and it was dead and rotting and it made us all sick and I’m sorry, I’m sorry that it made you sick too, that it hurt you.” It almost looks like Puffy will argue with that, but Niki squeezes her eyes shut, steels herself, and barrels on. “It’s hurt me too. I’ve been here longer, it’s bled me out far longer than you think, than you know – but it won’t hurt anyone anymore. It never will again, I promise.”

Once, Niki would have longed for that protection. That care. But she’s been burnt too many times, enough that it’s left her fingers singed. She doesn’t need it anymore. She is too harsh for those gentle luxuries.

Puffy, though – she looks like she’s been struck. “Alright,” she says, a wary thing. “Alright – ”

“I love you,” Niki blurts out desperately. No, no, she’s messing this up – like she messes up everything – and Puffy will leave and she’ll be alone again and Niki cannot handle being alone again. Not yet. “I love you, okay? More than I hate L’Manberg. More than – more than I could hate anything, I promise. I promise. I love you.”

“Oh, Niki.” Why does she look so sad? Puffy takes Niki’s cheek in her hand, and after a moment, she presses Niki’s forehead to hers – her skin is still cool to the touch, a few degrees short of refreshing. Instead, it just snakes another shiver down Niki’s spine. “I love you too.”

Niki’s breath leaves her in a sigh that she feels deep in the bottom of her stomach, long and drawn, Puffy’s skin pressed against hers. Solid. Real – Puffy is real, real, real, even if Niki can hardly bear to believe it, in this state. Can hardly believe that she’s here, waltzing into her misery, like a perfect dream. A dream she doesn’t deserve.

“I’ll put some tea on,” Niki mumbles. When they part, Puffy catches Niki’s hand in hers – and this time, Niki leaves it there as long as she can, until they make it to the little alcove of Niki’s kitchen and she is called over to her kettle and stowed-away cache of teabags. Puffy settles into one of the chairs by her small table. Niki hopes she doesn’t notice the wet mark across the floor.

“Are you hurt?”

“Nothing serious.” She hears Puffy grumble disapprovingly, but pays it no heed. “Are you?”

Puffy goes quiet, which is admission enough on its own. Niki leaves the teabag to steep – lavender, for a hell of a day like this – and folds her face into a frown as she looks over at Puffy, who manages to look even more guilty. Guilty about what? Niki thinks. She sits straight in her chair, with better posture than Niki’s likely ever seen from her, fidgeting with the strap of her gauntlet – looking so unlike herself that it sets Niki’s teeth on edge, the sharp canines worrying at her lip.

“One of Techno’s dogs got me,” Puffy admits. Her hand skirts uneasily up her forearm.

“Oh.” Niki’s face screws up sympathetically. “Oh, that doesn’t sound good. Where? You should clean it, just in case it gets you sick.”

“Right. You’re totally right, but, um – I can’t really… reach it.” Puffy shimmies in her seat, and then winces. “It’s uh… I’ll show you actually, I’ll show you.”

She manages to peel her gauntlets off alright, stacking them neatly on the table – it’s only when she reaches the shoulderstraps on the chestplate that she struggles, sucking a pained breath in through her teeth. Niki rushes over, tea abandoned, and sets her fingers over Puffy’s. The right shoulder comes away easily, despite Puffy’s quiet gasps, but the left…

“Oh, my gods. Oh, oh my stars.”

“It’s not that – ”

“Puffy! Hold on, hold on…”

Blood sinks through the plain white of Puffy’s shirt like paint thrown at a canvas – but as soon as Niki peels her armour away the tang of iron hits her nose, and there’s nothing that could mistake the stains for anything but blood. Her shoulder is doused, slick to the touch and ripped down the sleeve, the kind of dark red only seen in wineglasses and in the chambers of a heart. Niki almost drops the chestplate at Puffy’s feet, watching as blood rolls down Puffy’s arm.

“You need – healing,” she stutters. “Healing, healing, I have it somewhere – ”

Puffy calls something after her, but Niki isn’t listening – this ridiculous, foolhardy knight! The first aid kit in Niki’s armoury has been untouched since a few scrapes she got while mining out the place, and there are still healing pots and plenty of bandages and gauze to spare.

Fuck, she thinks, sticking her head back into her kitchen – her new bakery – whatever. Her new hearth, deep underground, and there’s already blood on the floors.

Blood which Puffy is trying to smear away with a boot as Niki approaches. She huffs.

“Don’t. It’ll just stain.”

“Sorry.” Puffy tries for a smile. Shit, Niki had noticed she was a bit paler than usual, but – they’d all come from the fight. Of course Puffy would be pale. Of course, with her soft heart buried under her armour, she would be shaken. “Feel pretty useless just sitting here.”

“There is no such thing as useless when you’re injured,” Niki chides her. With a wince, she catches a torn corner of Puffy’s blouse between two fingers, and carefully pulls it back from the wound. It starts at her shoulder, right at its topside, ripping downward into the skin like a child tearing at paper – a set of three jagged lines. They sluggishly bleed, glistening in the low light of her kitchen torches. Niki, briefly, feels quite sick. She was never supposed to be a medic. “Is that… did one of them bite you?”

“It’d be a lot worse if they did,” Puffy replies. Niki doesn’t even know how she’s still sitting upright – she doesn’t know what worse could possibly be. “Definitely tried it… figured out where I was sniping them from, went for me, tried to grab me with its claws when it missed.”

Fuck. Fuck. Niki had seen the army of wolves descend upon L’Manberg, an ever-shifting wave of white, like choppy foam on the swell – like wild animals to a corpse. She hadn’t even spared a thought for them. Hard to, when the sky is falling in on itself and she held a wildfire in her own two hands.

Technoblade had mentioned once, in Pogtopia, that he liked dogs.

Maybe he’s right. But maybe, he got Puffy hurt. Even indirectly. There has to be someone to blame, and it can’t be Puffy – it can’t be Niki for not watching her back, the way she should have if she weren’t so selfish so cowardly so wicked – 

For a moment, Niki is not in this ravine, but another – she thinks of a fistfight in a pit, her hand over her mouth in terror, and Tommy’s broken nose. It never healed properly. She’s not a medic. She wasn’t. She’s not.

Is he dead? Is Jack? Fundy, or Tubbo, or Wil –

“Niki?”

She blinks, and she is back in her kitchen – her bakery, fuck – standing in front of Puffy with gauze in one hand, and a bloody mess in the other. Somewhere behind her, the kettle is whistling. Puffy’s pushed her blouse around the full length of the wound – blood is starting to catch in her hair, and the scattered scruff on her neck. It’s scragglier than she usually keeps it. She hasn’t had the time – or the care – to shape it, it seems.

“Sorry, sorry.”

“You’re alright.” Puffy lets out a sigh. “There’s a lot to think about.”

That is untrue. It is all quite simple, and the less thinking Niki does about it, the better.

She finds a basin to fill with clean water and some spare handkerchiefs, and drags a chair over beside Puffy’s. The air sits uncomfortable between them, thin and quiet, as if it struggles to fill the space. Niki should ignite it, but when she grasps for words, it all just slips between her fingers. They could be on top of the world, for as much as she struggles to breathe it in, even though they’re deep underground.

She douses a handkerchief with water. She can see Puffy’s blood lining her fingernails – staining her fingertips rose-red, catching in her cuticles and the lines that mark her knuckles and joints – and still, she’s never felt farther away from her.

Eret comes to mind. So do the rest of her friends – traitors, backstabbers, ex-friends, whatever. Is that how she and Puffy’s story will go? Is that how their story will end?

You didn’t betray Puffy, she reminds herself. This was to help her, in the end. L’Manberg will never hurt her – will never make her false promises, will never abandon her, will never let her bleed out until she’s nothing left – now.

Even if Niki has to kill it herself.

“I feel guilty,” Puffy blurts out, sudden. Niki almost drops the rag in her lap. “When the dog bit me, I kind of just – I threw it right off me. Didn’t see if it was okay. I was just in the middle of everything, and – there were withers everywhere, everywhere – and I didn’t have time to check. And the others, I know I shot more than one down. I saw them go down.”

Puffy doesn’t meet her eyes, letting her gaze wander shamefully towards the floor.

“Technoblade has a lot of dogs,” Niki tells her gently.

“I know. But I’m thinking about this dog.” She shivers as Niki dabs at the wound, a chill that shakes her all the way down her shoulders to her wrists. Water runs by the spilt blood, pulling it into intricate, descending patterns as it thins.

“I know,” Niki sighs. To tame a wolf is a double-edged sword – they’re lovely, protective creatures, but she doesn’t think a single dog knows how much its owner mourns it when it dies in battle. Or how much Puffy mourns it, she supposes. “Technoblade trains them for battle, I think. If anything, it would have done him proud out there.”

Puffy doesn’t look reassured – instead, she snorts out a quiet, bitter laugh. The sound is too cynical on Puffy. Too unfitting. “Don’t know what that says about Technoblade.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Niki remedies herself, tampering the brief severity in her tone. “I just mean that, dogs – dogs are loyal. I’m sure as many of them found their way home as they could. And if they didn’t…”

And if they didn’t, what?

The words die on Niki’s tongue. She has been loyal to a home that didn’t care about her, just the same. If anything, Niki has more in common with those dogs than she does with anyone who stood on that crest, hand in hand (with liars and troublemakers and walking ghosts that should have stayed dead), singing my L’Manberg like the words mean anything at all. Like they ever fucking meant a single thing at all.

If Niki is a dog, she’s just glad enough that she didn’t perish on the battlefield – fighting a war that she didn’t even understand. She snapped out of it early enough to save herself, not stupid anymore, not naive. She doesn’t follow with her eyes closed and her nose down. She can no longer be trained, or tricked. Niki is a wild, wild thing, a wolf that’s left the false safety of the kennel and has sworn to never return. She knows these woods, and she will slink back to them as it suits her. Whether that involves burning them to the ground or not, watching the sky light up in sunrise amber and crimson as she does, is yet to be decided.

Maybe that is the problem with places like L’Manberg – they trick you into being loyal. It’s easy to go blind when something bright and fake and beautiful is shoved in front of your eyes, unable to tear your gaze away, unable to see the world around you for what it is. Dark, cold, unkind and disloyal. Maybe it would be better to avoid that trouble in the first place, to lock herself away in her very own dimension. Dream might have barred them from the End, but who cares what he thinks? Niki could, eventually, slay enough Endermen for the eyes she needs. She could collect the blaze powder. She could track down the stronghold, build the portal, leave this place behind and find the dragon’s perch waiting for her. Left with only creatures who cannot speak a word to her, and who wouldn’t want to anyway – who she couldn’t even be tempted to speak to, because she can’t. She could let herself grow too large and mighty to hear a player’s sweet, false words. She would be able to defend herself with horrible teeth and claws, and when it all gets to be too much, fly away.

Niki could do it. She is sure she could, so sure, a certainty that comes with a pain in her chest. She doesn’t have the gentle heart of a princess, or a dog, or even a wolf or a common girl anymore – there is something greater in its place, something that tastes like poison when she lets out a breath. It pushes more blood into her limbs than she knows what to do with, pooling heat into her fingertips and toes, prickling like brambles. She could fly away into a place dark and cold and welcoming, far away from here.

It sounds safe.

It sounds lonely.

“...I think I’d like a dog,” Puffy mutters.

Niki blinks. A reedy line of water is running down her forearm, gathering from the soaked handkerchief in her hand to drip down the curve of her elbow.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Puffy says, a little defensively. “Dogs are cute.”

Niki sighs, and lets the handkerchief fall to the basin.

“Puffy,” she says, in her stern but not unkind tone, “you don’t have to go out and tame your own wolf, look after your own dog, to make up for hurting this one. Especially not because it hurt you.”

“It’s not because of that!” Puffy exclaims. She seems to be doing a better job at convincing herself that her words are true than she is at convincing Niki. “And besides, it was told to! Not of its own choice! That’s the thing with dogs, you can train them – you should train them, and look after them – to be kind. Dogs are kind, at heart. What would you say if it was a person in that position? They just need a better environment, that’s all. Everyone has it in them to be good. Some people just choose not to. Or they have that choice made for them.”

What would you say if it was a person in that position?

“...you can’t let yourself bleed to save someone else, Puffy.”

Everyone has it in them to be good. What a joke.

Puffy’s evasive look settles, with certainty, into a diamond-cut frown. “We can’t not do what’s right, either.”

Niki lets her breath rattle out of her chest – holding the poison on her tongue, lest Puffy be caught in the crossfire – reaching out to cup Puffy’s cheek, cool as iron, flecked with those stray hairs. Puffy, for all her glittering determination, lets her cheek sink into Niki’s hand.

“You’re too good to die for someone else’s sake,” Niki tells her. She needs to know it.

Puffy smiles, forlorn, but she doesn’t have anything to say to that. She goes quiet, taking her thoughts with her, but Niki doesn’t press. After today, it doesn’t feel right to. She dresses Puffy’s shoulder with bandages and a healing potion, quiet, the silence broken only by the chime of water against the basin.

“I think I’ve done the best I can,” she says, finally, tucking Puffy’s blouse over her shoulder. “Keep it – um, keep it still, I guess. Hopefully it won’t scar too badly.”

“You’ve done wonderfully,” Puffy says, catching her hand with a soft squeeze. Her shoulder looks a bit bulkier than normal – Niki is quite sure dressing a wound like that shouldn’t take all the bandages in her kit, but she certainly ended up needing them, and besides, what does she know – but she looks appreciative anyhow. “Thank you, Niki.”

“It’s never a worry,” she murmurs. “You know that.”

Puffy smiles. Part of Niki thinks that she should smile back – soft, tender – but when she tries, her face feels as if it is made of stone. She stands in front of a paragon of good, a shining sword and shield against the blight of evil, and she cannot help but think that there is nothing to smile about, not out there, not here, not anywhere. Not even right in front of her, looking up at her with hopeful eyes and a pound of gauze filling out the span of her shoulders.

Puffy’s hand in hers is as clammy and as cold as the dead’s.

Niki gets onto the busywork of after, now – she takes her basin and rags to the workbench to rinse and wring out. She’ll have to scrape the blood off of the floors too, once Puffy is gone. Quiet washes over them, broken only by the soft sound of sloshing water and the howling in Niki’s head that begs her to break the silence, please, think of something.

She doesn’t, of course. She’s never been brave enough for that.

“Niki?” Puffy mumbles as Niki soaks the spare rags with suds. She can barely hear her quiet voice over the water.

“Yes, Puffy?”

“Can I stay tonight? Please?”

Her voice is so small . When Niki turns she’s curled in on herself, clutching at her wounded arm – nothing like the dauntless, ferocious, brilliant star Niki has known her to be. That Niki knows she is.

Puffy could take on the world, if she wanted. (Which she never would – reckless, foolish sweetheart.)

Now, she just looks tired.

(Well then, something in Niki bitterly sulks, even the kingdom’s fiercest knight isn’t infallible. Even Goodness, running on nothing but blood and breath and a love so true it hurts to look at, can be taken down.)

That’s the problem, Niki supposes. There’s no place for chivalry in a realm like this.

“I – I don’t know if my house got blown up, or what. I don’t know if there’s anything that didn’t get blown up, I haven’t checked it all, but – ” Puffy swallows. “I don’t want to be alone. I want to stay with you.”

Most of the old fairytales suggest that the princess is a tender thing, with soft hands and bleeding hearts. Niki’s hands are calloused, her heart a stone in her chest – and not even the precious type, just the common granite that her new domain is carved from. Some toxic miasma writhes in her lungs whenever she takes a breath. Her kingdom is gone. Her kingdom is dead, and she still smells of the smoke that curled around her – an embrace that pricks her eyes with tears, that catches in the back of her throat – when she burnt it to the ground. If she was ever some kind of princess, she isn’t anymore. She gave up everything that word ever could have meant to her. She thought she would have to give up Puffy, too.

But.

Even Niki, stars-forsaken Niki, cannot bear to say no to Puffy. Not like this.

“Of course,” she whispers, and Puffy’s relief is almost palpable – she sags in her chair, a sigh escaping her, and Niki rushes over to wrap her arms around her. Her hands fist into the back of Puffy’s blouse, pressing her close to her chest, tucking her head beneath Niki’s chin, as if she can hold every part of Puffy in her arms alone. As if she can block the world out – so that the only heartbeat in the world to listen to is Puffy’s, and so Niki’s head stops swimming, drifting, drowning out at sea.

Niki lends her a set of nightthings – originally one of Puffy’s old shirts, worn thin from salt and sun, and that manages to dredge up a small smile as Niki hands it to her. They crawl into Niki’s mess of a bed together, and Niki douses the lantern by her bedside with a puff of air.

They sleep back to back, Puffy’s shoulderblades pressed against hers, legs tangled together like a lost locket and fishing nets. Sleep, maybe, is generous. Niki hears Puffy’s breathing eventually even out into breathy snores, and she stares into the stone wall like it’s keeping something from her.

Everything is so cold. The bed, the sheets, the stone, and Puffy. All of it is too cold, too cold, ice against her feverish skin.

If Niki cannot sleep, why does it feel like she can’t wake up?

Chapter Text

Dragon (noun, drag·on):

• A mythical animal usually represented as a monstrous, winged and scaly serpent or saurian with a crested head and enormous claws.

• A violent, combative, or very strict person.

• Something or someone formidable or baneful.

It is never easy to determine what must be done with a princess when her country falls.

Some may have something cerulean and posh in their blood to fall back on, something titled, which makes the whole process go over sweeter – but for those without noble blood, for the nieces of bakers and blacksmiths and bricklayers, there are few places to turn. All she had to her name was her country, after all, and that wealth is surely spent. Others might be able to run off, hand-in-hand, with a queen or a king or whoever else is supposed to be running the show. There are times, though, where a ruler is otherwise indisposed. Or rather, deposed.

Or two of them are already dead, and the third one might as well be.

(Niki and Tubbo were close once. She isn’t the only unlucky soul who looked down at herself one day, with her callused hands and sweat staining a fierce brow, to find herself sudden royalty. Now she doesn’t even know that Underscore is a name that stretches beyond a doomed administration.)

What happens to a princess without a kingdom to call her own?

Isn’t it funny how a story can fall apart and come together all at once?

Oh, forget her despair, forget her misery! Niki has a new purpose, a new drive, something new and shiny and beautiful that she’s never felt so strongly before, a screaming compass set into the meat and bone of her chest. She feels horrible. She feels powerful, and best of all, she knows exactly what to do with all that power. It was given to her for a reason, after all – for something righteous, something true.

For the first time in the last year, Niki knows exactly how to push the pen forward on her story – and that is to destroy selfish, pesky, lying backstabbers with no thought for people’s feelings, no care for people’s hearts, and to crush him under her heel like nothing more than spent ash from the world’s most pathetic pyre.

Tommy, she means. Obviously.

Now, she thinks to herself, stubbornly wrapped around a tree branch. If only the axe would stay where I fucking wanted it to.

The nuke failed? What nuke? Niki has finally let go of her failures, like ribbons on the wind, and casts her eyes towards a brighter future – one that sparkles like guiding torchlight in her hands, that ignites her pathway like sparks from the forge. It sets alight a fire in her that she hasn’t felt since she was foolish enough to devote her life to L’Manberg, and what a fucking joke that was – she has her own purpose now, and she doesn’t need anyone else to tell her what to do. What to think. What to feel.

So, fine. The nuke was maybe a little bit too bright to start off with. It was too bold, too grand, and to be honest. not Niki’s style to begin with. She should have known better. She’s no stupid, naive dog anymore, no doe-eyed ingénue – she’s sharpened herself into something fierce, something vicious, something cleverer than everyone who has ever tried to shove her around by half.

Niki is her own walking wildfire, a creature with claws and teeth that crave the sweet taste of vengeance, destroyer of the L’Mantree, destroyer of her own bakery. Nemesis.

No, Niki needs to retreat to where she’s comfortable. Where she feels safe. And while countries like L’Manberg have spat on her and left her out in the cold, the embrace of the forest (tinderbox that it is, waiting for the match) has never let her down. She sticks her tongue stubbornly between her teeth, holds her breath like poison in her mouth, and tries to ignore the bark scratching her skin as she winds twine from the length of the axe’s handle to the craggy branch of the tree.

The plan is simple. Lure, strike, blood.  The first part is Jack’s responsibility, and the second is hers. The last part – now that, that, is all Tommy’s.

Tommy – fickle, stupid Tommy – demands ownership of everything he lays his eyes on, clutching to debris and junk like a child with a security blanket. He’s obsessed with wars, and discs, and his dumb hotel (which Jack keeps ranting to Niki about, not that she really listens), and the spider that haunts him like the dead haunt the living. She isn’t really sure why it follows at his heel, nipping at his ankles all the while – she had assumed it was tame somehow, given that Tommy is apparently the universe’s favourite, pulling its threads around him to rewrite everything to land in his favour. But apparently it spends just as much time trying to take a bite out of him as it does everyone else, and he still adores the stupid thing.

If she were lucky, maybe that would have done the job. Spider venom is an awful way to die, after all. But Niki doesn’t count on luck anymore, having realised that she’s far from gifted with it (and a bit wary of spiders besides). No, she will kill Tommy herself – she and Jack – so long as she can decipher the fucking plans he’s left her. He writes in spider-scratch.

Yes, the plan should be simple. Jack will lure the spider away from Tommy’s base and into the depths of the woods, counting on Tommy to follow. (“Because no offence, Niki, you did a shit job the last time. I mean, it fucking missed – ”) It should work, because Tommy has a tendency to stick to people like dogshit on their shoes. Niki spies from a safe distance, and when the time is right, pulls a redstone-infused lever – sending her axe from skyborne, wrapped up in the tree like a belated Christmas present, straight into the ground. And, of course, into Tommy. Cleaved half and half.

And if an unruly, selfish teenager is murdered in a forest, with no one there to hear it – well, are Niki and Jack even guilty?

Niki would like to say that the plan is foolproof, if she could. Unfortunately she and Jack said the exact same thing about their idea with the nuke, and it turned out to make fools of the two of them. The word still tastes a bit nasty in her mouth, like it’s gone off and she can’t scrape the sour aftertaste from her tongue. But at least this plan is more hands-on, something with proper and reliable heft, not some distant fireball that Niki barely understands the existence of. Niki’s axe feels comfortable in her hands, she understands it, from the roughly-hewn handle to the sharp of its blade – not something crazy that Tubbo cooked up in his post-presidential exile, something that now asks her to drink shit-tasting potions once fortnightly if she doesn’t want to fall through the floor itself. As long as the twine doesn’t snap and the lever mechanism works, the plan is functional. Foolproof is something that she and Jack can judge in the aftermath.

(They cannot call the plan foolproof, because it isn’t. There are so, so many ways it could go wrong, some worse than others – whether Tommy catches on, staring at them with those wary storm-grey eyes, whether the spider attacks Jack before he makes it to the forest, whether someone like Sam catches them in the act and sends it all crashing down atop their heads. Whether the axe strikes true. There is no such thing as foolproof – there is no such thing as naively hoping things go perfectly anymore, that is not real – and so they take the risk on the chin and pretend that it doesn’t sting.

Jack had suggested a direct ambush, which isn’t foolproof either, but whittles closer to it – or, at least, that’s what he had argued. There’s no way that Tommy can figure them out if he’s already dead and left to rot in the ground before he opens his stupid mouth. Nothing and no one can interrupt them if they move swiftly, make that final blow so quickly that no one sees it coming. Niki knows this forest, damn sure she knows it just as well as Tommy. She could hide herself in the bushes, biding her time between brambles and sap, waiting for the infuriating racket that follows him like thunder. She could watch as that golden head ran past, a beast lying in wait, and raise her axe above her head and swing – 

Jack had suggested it. Makes a damn sight more sense than any of this, he’d said. Not foolproof, because nothing is with them at the helm, but almost. As plain as words scrawled onto a page, ink staining paper like blood soaking into the forest soil, goodnight.

But as much as Jack knows – Niki knows better.

Oh, Jack might have the technical details – exactly how much redstone to use, how it’s strung from tree to tree to make this horrible machine work – but Niki knows her own flesh and bone better. She keeps her secrets like a hoard. She knows the heft it takes for her to drive a blade into something living, something that bleeds the same rose-red as she does – not for mighty, political reasons, the lofty kind that hands above all of them with their heads in the dirt, but for reasons as real as the gnawing hunger in her stomach.

She knows, when face-to-face with golden hair and stormy eyes and insufferable pluckiness, that there is a chance – a chance, small but precious it is, that – 

That the blade will not strike true. Part of her has known it since doomsday. Part of her has known it for even longer. Maybe that is where she and Jack differ – she doesn’t know him well enough to guess, not anymore – but she wouldn’t ever dare tell him. This secret, the sickly, petty thing that it is, stays close to her chest and will never stray.

No. To kill Tommy from a distance is a far better idea – safer, more anonymous, better. Plenty of wild beasts strike at distance for a reason, and they eat their fill just as well as anything else. This time the plan will work, and Niki will never have to think about Tommy or L’Manberg or things better left buried again. There will be no one to look at her with her teeth and claws and, with too much pity in his eyes, tell her that you’re acting just like Wil – )

There’s an old story in Perfect, one that Niki was told when she was younger – though it’s long shelved with the rest of her childhood memories now – about a gutsy, feral child with sun in her hair and roses blooming in her cheeks, who dies at sixteen from her own stupidity and carelessness. When Niki looks down the long kaleidoscope of her memory, each ever-shifting hue shrinking from the radiance of her stubborn glare, it almost seems fitting for the occasion.

She yanks the twine taut, and the axe’s handle pulls flush against the tree branch. Good. The twine is threaded delicately past her canines, a careful weave, to snap it – she saw Fundy do this once, and his teeth may be sharper than hers, but she doesn’t exactly have the hands to spare when she’s already trying to hold an axe and some loose string and herself in a tree.

It tangles in an uncomfortable pool by her molars, and when Niki clamps her teeth down on it, it does absolutely nothing. She pouts around the twine, and jerks her head sideways – nothing. The other way, still nothing, and now there’s a smudge of drool on her chin. Gross.

She spends a few more precious moments biting down on the twine, shaking it back and forth like a dog with its (least) favourite toy, before it whittles down to something snappable. A raven eyes her warily from a neighbouring tree as she splits the string, and she can feel herself going bright red as she ties it off, mumbling vile curses beneath her breath.

Fine. Whatever. The plan is not yet in place. There is still the lever to plant wherever Niki decides to call her home base, still the redstone to set up before the sun dips beneath the horizon, spilling the forest red with crimson light and bl – 

“Niki?”

Niki’s gut jerks violently, and she almost falls right out of the fucking tree.

She’s already embarrassed, so she’ll admit it, she flails – one hand smacks uselessly at the tree trunk as the second manages to find purchase, scrabbling at the bark with her fingernails, swaying dangerously as she inches her way back to balance. It’s only once she’s steadied herself (with a terse, punchy huff) that she looks down to see – 

Puffy, Puffy, staring back up at her. With an inscrutable frown on her face.

All that flushed blood in Niki’s face rushes out, like rivers downhill, breaking white with, with – with something. Not quite fear, but one of its close friends. Oh, no.

Time to act casual, Niki realises, and puffs out her chest like the crook of a tree is exactly where she belongs.

“Oh!” she says, the picture of perfect surprise. “Good afternoon, my love, are you… you, I was just thinking of you! How – how are you. Today.”

“Alright,” Puffy replies. The word is more drawn out than it should be, and she still has that confused little frown on her face – it’s a dangerous one, one that takes those round cheeks and gossamer-curls and sets them as a frame to the gears that turn behind her hazel eyes. Softens the sharpness of her thoughtful gaze, like a sword’s sheath, so that her target never sees her coming.

Niki is always watching Puffy, though. She’s not easily looked away from.

“What are you doing in a tree?” Puffy asks.

“I was just, um…” now’s the time for the lie, Niki, make it count. “Apple picking! I need some apples. To bake with. As I’m sure – as, as I’m sure you know. Perfect day for… an apple tart. Pie. An apple pie.”

She hasn’t touched a baking tin in weeks, not that Puffy needs to know that.

Puffy’s brows furrow, though – a twist of the blade, taking on another degree of sharpness as her eyes flit between Niki, and the axe, and the tree.

“I thought our apples weren’t in season this time of year,” she points out.

“Right,” Niki says, and “yes,” because Puffy is correct – apples on this server won’t ripen for another few months. Shit. Shit, and also fuck. “Just, um – keeping an eye out for some early bloomers.”

“...sure,” Puffy replies, sounding unconvinced. How? Niki put her whole heart into that one. “Hey, uh – can I talk to you?”

Niki takes her sweet time brushing a stray scrap of bark from her leggings before she replies – the wood scrapes against her promise ring, sitting like an iron weight on her finger. Something in her squirms. It’s harder, watching it glitter in the late afternoon light, to fall into her role. To forget herself.

“Always, always.”

“Always?” Puffy presses. Her voice takes on a firm line – not angry, but unyielding. Niki shrinks underneath it, tucking her arms across her chest. It’s like somehow, Puffy can always tell when she’s done something wrong. Or done something terribly right.

Puffy catches herself, letting out a plume of air – Niki chances a look, and watches as Puffy shakes her head gently.

“I just mean, I haven’t seen you around, that’s all. I came past the city a few times…”

Oh, she did. Niki remembers that. She also remembers hiding in the recesses of her library, tucked between two bookshelves, one hand clamped over her nose and mouth and the other trembling in a fist at her side – because she hadn’t slept for three days or showered for five, and she knew she smelled awful, and probably looked worse. Even now, a twinge of self-consciousness tugs at her – her hair hangs lank and flat against her face, limp with grease.

“I’ve been out and about,” she offers quickly, scrambling down the tree. This time, she manages to hop to the ground without any scrapes.

“What is all this?” Puffy asks, confusion lightening her voice. “Is this all for – for what, picking apples?”

“...no?” Niki tries. Yes, that feels right, even though Puffy shoots her a confused look. “It’s for hunting,” she supplies, before Puffy can get any more ideas – “I’ve never been… I always get chased by things in these woods, or lose track of food – and I’m not very good at chasing things down on my own, so, you know, why not have it come to me…?”

Which is not a lie, in some sense. But Puffy still looks skeptical.

“Uh-huh,” she says, eyeing Niki carefully, like one would a feral animal. That kind of look lands weightily in Niki’s stomach – she can’t tell if she feels offended, or gratified (recognised), or something else entirely. “Look, I’ve been talking to Tubbo recently, and he – he told me something that I thought I should ask you about? I’ve been looking for you. For a while, actually.”

You found me, some miserable part of Niki sings.

“Why were you talking to Tubbo?” she asks, defensive. “I didn’t know you were – were close.”

Puffy shrugs. It’s a strange movement, this one – usually something so unbothered and carefree, but now, it just makes her look smaller. “We aren’t. I mean, I guess we aren’t yet. We’re gonna be neighbours, probably.”

“Oh,” she says. It’s barely more than a syllable, but it still seems to weigh more than lead in her mouth.

“I’m thinking of moving into Snowchester.” Puffy fidgets with her jacket sleeve. She’s not looking at Niki. Why won’t she look at Niki? “It’s nice – just, a really cute place out in the snow, and Tubbo mentioned that he’s looking for more people to hang out around there. And, well, I’m looking for somewhere to go, so…”

Shit. Shit, shit.

Snowchester isn’t safe. Or, maybe it is – safe from Niki, not safe for her, casting her out and peering down at her defensively from its parapets as she approaches. The kind of safety that she doesn’t receive an invitation to. The kind that comes with Tubbo’s steely determination built into its spine, the kind that’s war-tempered, and that comes with fortnightly doses of radiation treatment. This isn’t okay, nothing is okay, nothing will be okay as long as Puffy is swept away and taken there – Puffy cannot stay in Snowchester. Snowchester is burnt bridges and Tubbo’s suspicious looks her way and Tommy’s sheer fucking presence haunting the horizon, as stark as a bloodstain in the snow.

Having Tubbo as collateral damage in their plot was bad enough – Niki likes Tubbo, even if his taste in company is terrible. But it’s not like she would ever, ever be able to prise Tommy away from him, not in a way that matters, and so all that time of friendship is for fucking nothing. He doesn’t even understand what he’s done, choosing Tommy’s side in all of this – even as Niki is close to begging, why would you? After Tommy has always treated him so selfishly, never cared for him, destroyed so much of their country when Tubbo was president? Why?

But he did. And so, Niki is not welcome in Snowchester anymore. She swallows the bitter treatment, and tries to keep the perpetual cold from scalding her fingertips.

Niki cannot lose Puffy. She can’t.

( – and why, some wicked thing whispers to her, doesn’t Puffy live with you? Did you never ask? Never wonder?)

“Oh,” she says, as casual as she could possibly be, as if the sky isn’t falling down around her. “That’s really nice.”

“Yeah,” Puffy agrees. “Yeah, well, he was showing me around the place and, we went past this massive crater – it was huge, Niki, deeper than anything I’ve ever seen. Deeper than the withers, so much deeper – ”

Puffy’s face takes on an anxious slant – brows furrowed, eyes skittering nervously – before she says the next part, before she looks Niki in the eyes and says: “it was deeper than L’Manberg, Niki. Like, everything that was left – the hole, everything that got wrecked? It was so much deeper.”

Niki’s mouth feels dry. She swallows, and pretends that she doesn’t see Puffy track the motion with her eyes. Pretends not to notice the worry Puffy wears – worry that, inexplicably, undeservedly, sits there for her.

(And Puffy is right. The crater was deeper than L’Manberg’s. Deep enough to pile in every memory, every regret, every single stupid build twice over and still have room for any other mistakes they felt like tossing onto the pyre.)

“Shit,” Niki mumbles, half-hearted. Oh, she knows that crater, but if she can take the opportunity to voice her thoughts, she might as well do so. Puffy nods, grave.

“He said he’s done with them,” she clarifies quickly.“But he said, I don’t know, but – ”

Puffy stalls. She pauses, and she looks at Niki – a look that runs darker than any midnight sky, deeper than any crater, cautious and cutting and almost afraid.

How could Puffy ever be afraid of me?

Niki’s brow feels damp despite the autumn chill, and the sky is falling down in pieces around her, no no no no – 

“He said that you were there,” Puffy rushes, the words leaving her in a harried breath, “at the test site. That you were there with Tommy, and that the nuke went off wrong or something, and – and it could have gotten you. Both of you.” Her expression warps beyond Niki’s recognition, something she can’t read, can’t parse the meaning of. “Is that – is that true?”

Oh, fuck.

She won’t understand, some wicked voice whispers. She’s better than you, so much better, always has been and always will be – 

“You could,” Niki murmurs, voice quiet – too quiet, cracking open like split lips in the cold as it crests over the rustling of trees that surrounds them. She wets her lips, each word as unsteady as a toddler’s first steps. As a christening. “You could come live with me. In my city.”

Puffy blinks.

“...huh?”

“Instead of finding somewhere to stay, in Snowchester. Just – you could come live with me. If you wanted.” Puffy opens her mouth, and Niki rushes to beat it, heart a-fluttering (is it fear, or is it love?) – “wouldn’t that be nice? There are, there are enough rooms – I mean, we could share, of course, but if you wanted to build. There’s space for you. There’s – there’s always space for you.”

Puffy’s expression sinks, taking on pity like a boat on the open water – and Niki realises too late that she’s already tumbling towards the depths, scrabbling at the surface of the sea for purchase, feeling the salt bloom in her nose and behind her lips. It’s too late.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” she asks – no, she begs, one last-ditch attempt to win her over, to win Puffy’s heart for her own, to hold it in her hands like precious treasure, snatched away from anyone else. “Just you and me?” Just you and me, safe in my heart, with no country or person or creature who could tear it apart…

Puffy doesn’t respond.

The silence lingers between them, makes itself comfortable – Niki flushes with deep, abasing embarrassment.

She feels like she has been stripped bare, skin pulled back to reveal the fleshy, vulnerable pieces beneath – mortification flares beneath her oily cheeks like a spot she can’t stop picking at, a cowlick in her hair that won’t lie flat. It pulls itself around her shoulders like an ill-fitting cloak, too tight, skin pulled taut over roiling humiliation. Like a sore that won’t heal, burning bright red with infection. And Puffy – Puffy can barely meet her eyes.

She hates it. Oh, Niki despises it, that sinking feeling – she swallows, a sticky feeling, and poison goes down with the spit and bile. It burns all the way down her throat as she does, spreading through her arteries and veins and every branch of lymph, until her fingers twitch with the sheer, restless shame of it all.

Puffy bites her lip.

“Niki, I… no, Niki,” she says, voice soft, as if she’s trying to be soothing. As if anything can be done to soften the inevitable blow. “I, I’d love to, I guess – ” lies, Niki thinks, and huffs out an angry breath through her nose, pride stung, one that surprises even herself – “but I’ve already spoken with Tubbo, and… what’s really going on, Niki.” It’s not a question. Puffy doesn’t put the circumstances to Niki, doesn’t ask her for her story – all that she asks Niki for, waiting with wide, round eyes, is: “it’s true, isn’t it?”

(And finally, the ending starts to write itself.)

“It’s… true,” Niki admits. Tubbo is many things, but Niki knows that he is a good kid. He wouldn’t lie. “I was – I mean, I haven’t spent so much time with Tommy in so long, especially after everything… oh, we saw it go off in the distance, but that was all. I can tell you, Puffy – we were lucky, really, Tommy and I were lucky.” Or, at least one of them was.

It’s half the truth, for heaven’s sake, and Niki really does think for a moment that it’s worked – until Puffy frowns, and that puzzling look washes over her again.

“But I thought you weren’t spending any more time around Tommy,” she asks, “like, at all. That’s what you said, before everything – before everything went up, right?”

“I-I did,”Niki concedes with a stammer. “I… I changed my mind.”

Puffy, for all the good that she is, cannot mask the sheer skepticism that slips across her face.

“...you just, changed your mind.”

“Mhm.” There’s a sharp, sudden pain at her side – when Niki spares a glance downward, she opens a rigid fist to reveal half-moon indents of her fingernails biting into the flesh of her palm. She wets her lips, dry and tacky as she grapples with the lies that fall out of them. “I just thought, after – after everything we’ve, um, been through together – ”

“Niki, please.” Puffy looks pained, moreso with every word. It makes Niki hurt too, somewhere deep in her chest, as if the blade sinks further into them both with every stupid excuse, and that makes her feel even worse – some blazeborn cocktail of guilty and sad and angry, bubbling behind her chest. “Please, please – don’t lie to me, okay? Tubbo said that there shouldn’t have been any way that anyone was out there, but – you can tell me, I promise. Just – just tell me, were you there, why were you there?”

Niki swallows, and tries – please, by the stars above, you filthy fucking coward – to speak. 

It’s as if her voice has been extinguished in her very throat.

(Here is how you fight a dragon – you douse the beast in water (blessed if you can, although if it’s built of charcoal and iron slag and brickdust like this one, something as simple as dewy eyes and a pail from the river will do), and watch it simmer.)

Puffy’s eyes widen, taking in the silence with just as much dawning horror as a confession.

(The thing with iron, blessed or otherwise, no matter how much it glitters, is that it only lasts until someone turns up the heat. Sink it into the trueheart of a smithie’s fire, and all of a sudden it becomes that much easier to shape – to warp, to melt down, to let slip through threaded fingers and pool abandoned like spilled blood. Throw any sword into a bed of coals, no matter the title, and it will meet the same fate. It bends, it breaks – and finally, it shatters into nothing more than silver shards and sparks. It takes a talent to craft a proper sword, the true kind, but it only needs a fool with fire on their side to ruin one.

Here is how you ruin a knight – you turn up the heat, and watch the iron start to warp.)

Niki stammers. She spits out the starts of words, tries to string a sentence together that could ward off the hurtling accusation in Puffy’s eyes, snatch that stricken look from freefall – but there is nothing. Niki has never been a good liar, and Puffy, armed with everything righteous, pries that ill-won dishonesty right out of her.

And then there’s no point in crafting the perfect lie after all, because Puffy knows that she has landed on the truth.

“Were you seriously trying to get him blown up by a nuke!?”

Niki shatters.

“He has it coming!” she cries, fingers flexing like claws as they ball themselves back into fists – the flesh of her palms sting as sweat presses into the crescent-scars of her fingernails but Niki doesn’t care, she doesn’t care, she doesn’t care anymore. “H-he’s selfish, and cruel – ” Puffy exclaims wordlessly at that one “ – and he never cares about what anyone else does for him, what anyone else does for themselves. He never cares! ” The words rattle from her chest with a power that sits at the bottom of her lungs like tar, clinging to every word, hardening into obsidian-dark daggers. “So, he – he has it coming. He has it coming.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Puffy retorts. “Are you actually serious, Niki?”

Puffy’s expression is hellfire. And for once, Niki decides not to let it cow her.

“Maybe I am,” she spits, venomous.

“He’s – what the fuck, Niki, he’s a kid.”

“So what?” Niki snaps. “So, so what – Tommy is allowed to go around wrecking things, destroying people’s houses, hurting people – but the rest of us aren’t? What makes him so special? What gives him the right?”

“It d – ”

“Nothing!” Niki swipes the back of her wrist against her brow, coming back sticky with sweat – her skin turns to the touch, damp and clammy. “He has no reason! He has no right! We were supposed to be a community, back in L’Manberg, and he never cared – and he doesn’t now, he doesn’t now.”

“You know what, Niki? You’re right.” Although Puffy’s tone is far too harsh, too sharp, to hail any kind of victory. “It doesn’t. Which makes it really fucking great that he doesn’t do any of that shit, doesn’t it?” The blow stings – she doesn’t get it, she’ll never understand what this feels like – but even as Niki tries to shield herself from her words, Puffy presses forward. “What about Tubbo? I’m guessing you haven’t told him anything about this? Or Fundy?”

“Fundy wouldn’t care,” Niki cuts in. “They’ve always – Tommy has always treated him unfairly – ”

“What about Eret, huh?” Puffy is genuinely fuming now, Niki can see it in the bold, boxy set of her shoulders and matching flames in her eyes – Puffy is never as brilliant, never as furious, as when she’s defending someone else’s honour. “Eret’s done so much for that country, they’ve done so much for those people, including Tommy, and what… what do you think they’re gonna say?”

Niki doesn’t say a word to that – her voice has retreated back into her throat, doused one too many times, timid again.

She hasn’t spoken to Eret in a long time. She doesn’t know what she would say.

“They’d be upset,” Puffy says, voice hard and flinty. “So would a lot of other people, if you ended up killing him – if you hurt yourself, Niki, too! They’d mourn, just like they’d mourn for you, or for me.” She takes a breath, but it doesn’t seem to unsteady her the way it unsteadies Niki. Nothing seems to shake Puffy in the way things do to her, resplendent in her endless conviction. “Death isn’t the answer. Or – not for this. Fucking talk to him, do something – we can, I don’t know, sort this out somehow – but there are so many people you’d hurt, doing this. Too many.”

“...they’d be better off,” Niki mutters, voice small – so quiet that she thinks, for a moment, that Puffy might not hear her. She can’t decide whether that is a good thing before Puffy responds.

“Do you actually believe that?”

Does she? What a – what a fucking joke. “We were there when he burned George’s house down! And the community house! We were there!”

“Did he? Or was that one of Dream’s lies?” Puffy argues. Niki clamps her mouth shut, angry. “You saw them both in that, that fucked-up vault that Dream built – there’s something seriously wrong with how he treats that kid – and we know that he lies. He lied to us on doomsday – ”

“It’s not about Dream! Dream had nothing to do with L’Man – ”

“ – I have zero fucking doubts that he’d lie about Tommy, too. He’d lie about anything, he blew up our home – ”

“It wasn’t our home!”

“Then what was it?” Puffy exclaims, throwing her hands wide. “What is it about? Explain that one to me, Niki, because – I’m not getting it! I’m not!”

I’m not getting it, I’m not getting it!

Of course she isn’t. Of course she isn’t, of course she doesn’t understand, because – 

“It’s about us! The rest of us! About me!” Niki howls. Poison pours over her tongue, scalding her skin with every spat word, more cutting than the finest swords and as sharp as the stupid battleaxe stuck to her tree. “You saw Tommy at, at the festival – he doesn’t care about what anyone thinks, what anyone else feels, he only ever cares about what he can get out of them!  He never cares about people. Not if it isn’t all about him and his toy soldiers and his discs and his toy wars, and oh, what can we do for him! What can we lose, for him! Can’t we all just go and fucking die for his sake! For some stupid place that no one else cares about, which has mistreated everyone – everyone! – but, oh, Tommy says it’s special. So we have to risk our lives for it.” She’s breathing heavily, by the end of it. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, Puffy, and you know it. He needs to be taught a lesson. Someone has to teach him a lesson.”

Niki doesn’t know what to expect. She doesn’t know how Puffy – perfect, knightly, good Puffy – will respond. She doesn’t expect her to soften, her brow furrowing carefully, and somehow out of every ending this is the one that makes Niki feel the worst, worst of all. As if she’s gently pushing the poison that drips from Niki’s lips away, unable to notice it scalding her skin as it does.

“Niki,” she says, voice wary and soft and light as air, “I know things have been… I know things have been hard for you since L’Manberg was destroyed – ”

“No, they haven’t!” Niki rears back, and lets out a laugh – it’s a loud, grating sound, like smashing a guitar into the ground and letting each of her vocal cords snap among the strings. “Puffy, are you kidding? L’Manberg – L’Manberg was nothing but a weight. A weight no one ever noticed, or appreciated, or cared about – because no one cared, no one cared at all. No one in that country cared about anything. L’Manberg was dead, Puffy! Long before anyone blew it up, it was in the ground and it was rotting. It was rotting.”

A pause. Puffy holds it like something fragile.

“...I cared,” she says.

Her voice is so delicate, a thin, pure thread – so good. Precious, rare, flimsy in a way that Puffy never is. Something deep inside Niki shifts, coils under and over itself, ties itself into uncomfortable knots.

The thing about Captain Puffy is – she has always, always, been far too good to Niki to be true.

“That’s – that’s not what I meant.”

“Well, what did you mean?” Puffy asks, voice taut. “I want to be there for you, Niki – I am here for you, I promise, but when it’s this…”

“What,” Niki snaps, “when you can’t nurse me back to health?”

“What?”

“I know your type,” Niki says, putting on her best drawl, taking long, stalking steps towards Puffy – she meets her shoulder-to-shoulder, chin tipped upward defiantly, flaunting her confidence that she doesn’t feel. No, this is something far worse than confidence. “You think you’re so strong, so valiant, that you’re such – that you’re such a hero, looking for some, some damsel in distress.” The roles run together, watercolours spilled across the page – Niki is the damsel and the dragon all at once, shed her fine linens and grown into her harsh scales, and all she can think is that she wants this ridiculous, foolhardy knight out of her tower. “I told you, Puffy, I can fend for myself. I can make my own choices. I – ”

“I’m not going to stand by while you murder an innocent child, Niki!” Puffy snaps back, and Niki reels away, stumbling tracks into the dirt. “The L’Mantree was different, I get it, that was personal – and if that was something you needed to do, that’s fine. But you’re not – you’re not well, this isn’t you – ”

“You don’t even know me!” Niki shrieks. “There’s this – there’s this version of me that exists, it lives only in your head, and it’s not real, Puffy! You think you know that version of me, you think I’m sick – you call me sick - but it’s just, it’s just a cutout! It’s not real! It’s not real, Puffy!”

She doesn’t respond. Frozen, or just patient – Niki rages too hot, burns too brightly, to notice.

“This isn’t me?” she asks, she demands, dripping with power and rage and thick, bleeding sarcasm. “Well, it is. I am. Take it or leave it, Puffy.”

Her words hang between them, lacing the air with acerbic blight, poisoning each ticking second with something toxic and deadly. Niki doesn’t know when the other shoe will drop, when Puffy will flare to life and take her sword and shield in hand and do away with Niki like the beast she is. Part of her craves it. She wants it, to see Puffy’s disappointment, her anger – to be on the end that gifts, for once, instead of the end that receives. She wants to watch the bridge that links them smoulder and burn, to see the red string curdle. All she can feel is the fire in her gut, the acrid taste in her mouth. She watches, waiting for Puffy to retaliate, as the horror and hurt on her face melts away – into an unrecognisable, stubborn resilience.

“So I’ll take it,” she declares, an oath sworn, taking a level step towards Niki – Niki stumbles backward, disbelieving, as Puffy takes her hands in her own. “Niki, I love you.”

Her hands tremble, but Puffy’s grip is firm.

“Puffy, don’t do this – ”

“I know that you’re better than this,” Puffy tells her, unshakeable and unyielding, one knuckle brushing a strand of hair from Niki’s sweat-stained cheek. She feels transfixed. Puffy’s stubborn gaze catches her in the eyes, just like old days, Cupid’s arrow strikes her chest like a hunter with a trembling game bird and she’s stuck – she cannot look away. She’s shaking, an earthquake to Puffy’s solid determination, as Puffy talks and talks and talks. “I know that – that you’re hurting, and that things aren’t the same as what they used to be, but I’m here, Niki. I promise. Even when – even when it hurts you like this.”

Puffy’s hand cups her cheek, and – 

Inferno sets Niki’s blood ablaze, coursing through every vessel and slab of meat that makes up her body, shrivelling every fine thread of artery and vein into a withered nothing. She breaks away from that hunter’s gaze with eyes screwed shut, an unsteady jerk, and with the faintest touch – feather-light, nothing more than a spark landing on the forge’s floor – she feels Puffy’s lips brush the curve of her temple, missing her forehead by the space of fingertips.

It’s ignition, fuel upon the fire – kindling, kindling, kindling. Niki throws Puffy’s hands from hers, thrashing with all the wildness of a feral animal.

“Stop!” she shrieks, and Puffy – bless her, bless her with every gift from the sky and the sea – she backs away, hands hovering like she’s broken something precious. Niki scrubs her hands over her eyes, and fireworks (fireworks, of course) ignite behind them like traitors behind battlelines, swimming with mutinous half-shed tears. “Stop trying to fix me!”

“It’s not fixing you, Niki, it’s just…” Puffy trails off, and through her clouded vision Niki watches her hesitate, gesturing gently towards Niki. “Not this. Come on, please, come back with me. To Snowchester, or – or your city, it doesn’t matter, I’ll go, just – anywhere. Please.”

Come back. Come back, come back, come back –

All this time, all that has happened, all that has gone wrong – and Puffy still doesn’t understand. Niki’s heart – or what has replaced it – roars in her chest, an almighty beast that bares its fangs and claws for battle.

She’ll never understand.

“You know what?” Niki murmurs – her voice is soft, controlled, like she’s finally caught grasp of the reins. Puffy straightens up, lowering her hands warily. “I’m done. If you can’t support me, Puffy – no, if you cannot just leave me to do what I have to do, what needs to be done – then, I don’t see a need for us to be in a relationship.”

Puffy looks dumbfounded. It’s only after the hit lands – after shock rushes away, pulled out with the tide – that the rest floods in, aghast and distraught and heartbroken.

“...you’re not serious.”

“Aren’t I?” Niki demands. “I don’t want to – to feel unsupported, and judged, and hurt by someone that I cared about. That I thought cared about me.”

“I do care – ”

“Do you? Or do you just want a – a project? You don’t want a person, Puffy. You want something you can make, a – a thing. You don’t want a person. You just want to make a person better – what you think is better. You just want to make a person into you.”

The pity that rests in Puffy’s eyes, taking up residence – nailing down the floorboards, filling the flowerpots, laying down its head upon fluffed pillows and neatly-folded sheets – infuriates her, from the bottom of her smoke-filled lungs to the wildfire she feels burning beneath her skin. She cannot stand it. She cannot bear it. That pity, maybe, would have been suitable for a girl who lived and died too long ago – a girl whose hands were pockmarked with burns from baking tins, not from bonfires – who knew nothing of how bloody and awful war is, who looked for the best in people, who always smelled of sugar and honey. Soft and naive and oh, so stupid. Niki is not that girl anymore. Niki has laid that girl upon the pyre, watched her be betrayed again and again, gasping for air as her throat is slit over and over and over, somehow shocked every time – she has put that girl out of her misery. She has ended that girl’s suffering, and better yet, risen from her ashes. She breathes smoke, ignition driving every nerve, and stars, everything is so fucking cold.

“I don’t think,” Puffy says, voice quiet and taut, “that you’re the woman I fell in love with anymore.”

Oh, Puffy. Dearest, darling, foolish Puffy.

“Oh, really?” Niki retorts. “Well. I don’t think I’m that woman anymore, either.”

Puffy takes the blow well, silent. Brief conflict crosses her face, before she readjusts her jacket over her shoulders – fidgeting with the buttons, drawing out this one, last moment.

“...y’know,” she says, half-turned to leave, “I always thought L’Manberg was our home. Our home. Or – I don’t know, that it could be. I thought that place could be my home with you.”

You thought wrong, Niki thinks, but the match douses itself before the words make their way to her lips – all she can do is let her breath go heavily, feeling the heat rush from her head to her toes.

Puffy leaves, then – a quiet, uneventful departure, like ash landing upon the burnt forest. There is nothing left in her wake. Nothing but the barest outline of her footprints in the grass, Niki staring into the dirt as the final toll for them rings in her ears, loud and unmistakable.

So Puffy is gone.

Quiet, dignified, with her head held high. As if it never mattered. As if Niki never mattered, so easy to cut loose, so easy to cut out – as if her heart doesn’t bleed the way Niki’s does, iron-red spilling from the worryline in her split lips, rolling down the curve of her chin as those traitorous tears gather in the corners of her eyes.

Her heart thuds in her chest, a beast waiting to be set free. To be set loose. She doesn’t hear her breath pick up, barely hears the rushing of blood by her ears – what splits Niki’s silence is nothing less than a howl, a wild noise that erupts from her bleeding lips, splitting the forest silence like the bellowing call of a predator. The sound reaches upwards from the bottom of her lungs, a dying limb crawling up her throat, tipping her head back, letting the tears roll free as she cries out in – in grief, in rage, in regret, who cares!

How could she? she bellows, all wrapped up a wordless roar. How dare she? How dare she – how dare she walk off and disappear, just like everyone else, just like every other person – into the grey mist to join the warm bodies of every other person Niki has cared about, of every other person Niki has ever loved in her miserable fucking life. She screams until her throat burns with it, until she’s truly draconic, she screams until her mouth is raw enough with the sound that it hurts no longer – she rips her axe from the trees above and lets it fly free, twine and her stupid squabbles with it long forgotten, digging into the flesh of the trees that cradle her.

I love you, she wants to scream, as the axe lands again and again with a thud that shakes her useless frame – if she could summon Puffy back, push her dark, dark eyes closed, and spill her heart onto the grass between them. I love you, I love you, why don’t you care? How could you leave me like this?

(Many creatures cannot recognise their own reflection. Niki is one of them.)

Thud. Thud. Thud. The axe lands in a brutal mockery of her own heartbeat, roiling hot and high in the base of her throat. It skips and staggers, just like a real heart would – and it sinks with all the force of a stone dropped into water, just like Niki’s.

It hurts. It hurts, a physical pain that only gets worse with every swing of her axe, and for the life of her Niki cannot comprehend why. Why? Why is it that Puffy gets to hurt her, why does everyone get to hurt her, leave her aching and wanting as she trembles with the strength of her own rage. Her chest aches, unable to contain it all, her heart clawing at its confines with talons sharpened for this very moment – for when it knew she would be left alone, forever, with nothing and no one in the world but herself. No knight to save her. Just Niki, and her impenetrable armour and her claws and her teeth and the poison that spills from her, forever solitary, forever alone.

But no fire can burn forever.

Jack finds her curled up against the base of the tree, arms wrapped around herself, eyeliner carving ugly marks down her cheeks – almost as ugly as the wild slashes that the tree bears, as stark and bright against the old oak as a mangled halo above her head. These marks, about as subtle as the old nuclear warhead, would give away their plan in seconds. But he doesn’t ask, and Niki, she doesn’t say a single word to answer.

What happens to a princess who burns her kingdom down herself?

That, dear reader, is another beast entirely.

This is what we call a dragon.

Chapter Text

And then Niki lived happily ever after.

…you don’t need a knight for your happy ending. You don’t need anything, in fact. You don’t need anyone. You are the heart of the flame, the kindling it engulfs, and the pit it is buried in all at once. You are a solitary beast with nothing but your hoard for company. Silver and stone can never betray you, anyway.

Niki is alone.

Even when stragglers eventually do make their way to her city, slipping into bedrooms and past empty dining tables, she is alone. They are quiet. Their eyes are downcast. They don’t take up space, and they never stay.

Jack can tell when she’s given up on their plan, and can’t be bothered to care about her anymore. Puffy leaves, taking with her the very last of the vibrant light and laughter from the cinders of Niki’s short life, and there is nothing but fingerprints of ash remain in her wake. They frame the edges of Niki’s memories like photographs, staining them black.

Niki is alone.

A dragon is a solitary beast. There is only ever one per realm, and the statement stands true for the underground realm Niki has carved out for herself. A world away from the world. Everything she has ever touched has burned anyway. Kingdom, country, never worked for her. Her friends didn’t stay either. Niki is that solitary beast, with her own land of stone to rule, never again excluded or forgotten about. Niki has always cared too much, and now she  will hoard all that care for herself instead of pouring it into wars and killing (and failing) and fighting. And she will do it alone.

It takes her no more than two months to follow a compass needle into the depths of ice and snow, loitering by a horse's pen, rubbing warmth desperately into her arms as she hovers awkwardly outside Phil and Techno’s cabins.

She has no knight, no countrymen, no crown or king or even a stray, plucky poet by her side. But Phil gives her a furred cloak for the cold, and Techno a whetstone for her axe. Ranboo lets her sit on their floor for hours, their cats spilling out of her lap, even when all she has to offer is companionable silence.

Niki comes to like the Syndicate. She likes them a lot.

Every good story has an interlude. This one goes –

“So you're goin' to a fancy dress party,” Techno muses, “and we're just hoping it's not, like, doubling as a murder mystery waiting to happen.”

"Bad didn't say anything about a murder mystery," Niki gently corrects him, stroking Wobbuffet’s long nose with one hand, holding a mane brush in the other. Snowflakes flutter gently to the ground as the brush runs through her mane – Niki stands as close to her flank as possible to soak up her warmth. Techno crinkles his nose from where he kneels by the torn pen fence, managing to look fairly sceptical around the nails he sticks in his mouth for safekeeping. "It's a banquet, he said. They want to invite people from all over the server."

"Well, I didn't get an invite," Techno mumbles. "That's rude."

"If plus ones were allowed, Techno," Niki offers. "I would invite you."

"Bah," Techno says, flapping a hand in her direction. He fishes a nail from his mouth and lines his hammer up with two criss-crossing bars of the fence. The ensuing thud is loud, but not upsettingly so. "Not my scene. Besides. I’m gonna be honest, I think the mystery comes from how you're goin' to an Egg party and not expecting to end up in an omelette."

"I think, if anything, they would want to avoid omelettes?"

"Yeah, that's why they're making the omelette out of you, not the – okay, you know what? I don't think that makes much sense either. You got me."

Niki giggles. When she first met Techno under a rainbow of fireworks and ash, she had assumed (quite uncharitably, but she had been very upset at the time) that he was standoffish, cold, even cruel. Particularly for someone like her. Underneath the armour and glittering weapons, that same standoffishness just looks like… awkwardness. Shyness, even. Very signaturely Techno.

"Before you go, though," Techno says – when she looks over he's put the nails down, rifling through the many, many pockets of his parka. He isn't built for cold weather, apparently, despite his and Phil's many stories of the snow. He fishes out whatever he's looking for and crosses the pen to offer her his cupped, careful hands, splitting gently open like flower petals as Niki pulls them apart.

Sprawled across his palm sits a fine gold chain – a simple bracelet, gleaming in the cold arctic sunlight, with a sturdy clasp at each end.

"This is the part where you take care of that now," Techno quips, only a little smidge of awkwardness still hawing in his voice. "I, uh – I feel like I'm gonna drop it."

It’s delicate and pretty – a small, interwoven chain, spotted with four flowerlike charms at its axes. They sparkle golden in the cold sunlight. Niki is almost afraid to pick it up, as if it will tarnish and whittle down to nothing in her hands. "Techno, this is too – you don't have to."

"Well, Phil and I have our own," he says, as matter-of-factly as if he’s talking about the weather. The emerald pendant hanging from his ear sparkles in the crisp, frigid sunlight. "And the kid is dripped out already. But you need something too, and well, if you're going to a fancy party ‘n all…"

He trails off for a moment.

"Consider it a late welcome-to-anarchism gift," he finishes weakly. "Welcome to the club, or somethin’."

"I thought the cloaks were supposed to be the gift," Niki presses, fluffing the ruff around her neck from her speckled, ender-eye cloak. She might be teasing him a little bit, and he reddens slightly. "Or your help with Wobbuffet's pen, or the quilt we made the other week – "

"This one is different," Techno declares starkly, setting the record straight. Niki laughs, and takes a chance – she carefully scoops the bracelet up and secures it into a tidy little pocket in her saddlebag.

"Techno," she coos happily. Now liberated from holding the precious thing, Techno staggers back, shaking his hands at her as if he thinks he can ward off her enthusiasm if he tries hard enough.

"Don't get sappy on me," he warns her. "It's just kinda a token of entry. For downstairs."

"Right," she says graciously. "Well, it's lovely. Thank you."

She thinks twice about what she does next – really considers it, weighs up whether it’s a good idea, sits with the fact that it probably isn’t – and, having done all the internal um -ing and uh- ing and maybe-not -ing, she throws her arms around him.

"My hard-won image," Techno whines, standing stock-still as Niki squeezes him in her arms. "I struck fear into the hearts of tyrants. Repentance into autocratic despots. I had a reputation, man."

"And now, you're my – " friend, Niki wants to say.

The word catches in her throat, and Niki becomes so very, very aware of her arms around Techno. He is far too tall and broad to fit in any traditional sense of the word, but he sort of does anyway. And the most striking thing, really, is not Techno at all – it is the soft gentleness that rests in Niki's arms around his body. Pliable. Weak, she would think to herself, but how pushy or brutish is a hug even supposed to be? Even as she sheepishly springs back into the snow, she can feel the softness cling to her. It's as if she can feel gaps peeking out through her brittle scales, flashing small divots of soft skin in the space between, barely wide enough to dig the fingers into until her nails leave red crescent-marks in her flesh.

Niki has not hugged anyone in a long time.

Niki has not had friends in a long time.

Niki retreats to her city that evening – her lair, her lonely hoard – twining gold between her fingers. She doesn’t sleep. She just stares holes into the plain stone wall by her bed, as still as the dead but too restless to really, truly fall into sleep. The only thing tossing and turning is her mind, unsettled by the cool metal that spills across her skin.

A chapter ends, and the pages continue to turn.

To celebrate the princess’ wedding, says the storybook, the king and queen (she is reunited with them, of course, never to burn in the chasm of a dead, empty nation) hold a masquerade that honours the sun who shone down upon the princess for every day of her absence. Every dear friend she has attends. The princess and her knight are showered in gold, silver, precious jewels and song. Blessed by the fairies, they are destined to live happily ever after.

And so the story goes, after the wedding, they are crowned – they will succeed to the throne and will rule over the kingdom in peace and happiness. Close the book, pull up the covers, shut one’s eyes, goodnight.

(Niki is starting to doubt how necessary kingdoms and crowns and royal lineages really are. And also the social construct of the nation-state. But that is neither here nor there.)

Maybe there is a princess out there somewhere, rose-haired and forever smiling, who is living out her happy ending in an endless garden of sunshine and song. Good for her.

Good for her.

But Niki – she is seriously starting to tire of parties.

It’s pretty obvious, actually, that something is very wrong with the Red Banquet. Niki is no stranger to showmanship, to aimless panache, to being a captive audience – but nothing like this. The floor is a smooth, polished hardwood that doesn’t scuff the stilettos of her heels (yes, heels, because wearing shoes no one thinks you can run in counts as its own special kind of decadence in this server). Roses spill from urns that dot the room – red, of course – filling the air with a heady scent of flowers. A fancy table runner spills down the length of the banquet table, and every piece of cutlery shines a bright silver that would put moonlight to shame.

All of the actors Niki has ever known have been the starving artist type – letting their pretty, gilded words outshine the rumbling of their stomachs, as if they could all persist on tricks of light instead of proper food. L’Manberg darned their gold-trimmed coats the same way they darned their socks, after all. But everyone here is dressed in their finest, from Bad’s shadow-black suit to Niki’s own ruby gown and shimmering filigree. Bracelets and cufflinks in silver and gold sparkle beneath the warm glow of shroomlights above, winking to her conspiratorially as they all raise their glasses to toast.

It’s the nicest dinner Niki has ever been to, the nicest dinner Niki has ever been invited to.

But. But.

There’s something here. She can sense it, fine-tuned, used to inevitable disaster by now – there is a kick of iron that lingers beneath the flowers and perfume. A warning that sits in the bottom of her stomach, immovable. And for fuck’s sake, there’s a giant egg sitting in the corner – three times her height if she were to stand on her tiptoes, radiating a soft ruby glow that shimmers amber and crimson under the light. It dwarfs all of them, even Foolish. Staring directly at it makes her head ache.

She can’t help but look at it. How couldn’t she? It shines like the prized jewel of a splendid crown, imposing and resplendent all at once. If the rest of them are all dressed in finery, the Egg is the finery – lacing the ballroom with sprawling red vines, glowing prettily in the warm light provided by the scattered shroomlights and candles, refracting brilliant scarlet across their hands and faces. It shines, as if it knows that it is the main attraction in the ballroom. It almost shimmers. It could be the most beautiful thing Niki has ever seen.

Beware the Egg, chides a soft voice in her head – from months and months ago, the early days, the prologue. A knight stumbling home with holy water in her hair and warnings on her tongue. Don’t touch it, don’t even go near it.

Niki takes a deep breath, twining her fingers between the skirt of her glitzy ballgown – underneath the table, where no one can see it. She is large and terrifying and a beast that has deigned to come down to the level of mere people, not the reverse. She does not look towards the head of the table. She doesn’t look towards the Egg, either. She stares down at her dress, watching the sparkles shimmer underneath those magical lights, counting the quarter-seconds between each beat of her heart.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Niki startles as Bad leans over her shoulder – refilling her wineglass with some dark, red liquid that rolls thickly over the bottle’s rim. Never drink wine offered by fairies, Niki distantly recalls, some long-lost advice from an aunt or an old fantasy book. It’s always a trap.

“It’s… round,” Niki offers generously. If she’s given the wrong answer, Bad doesn’t seem to mind – his smile doesn’t even slip, the picture of a perfect host. “Your base is very nice, Bad. And, um – you built it yourself? The decorations are lovely.”

“Oh, it’s only a little thing!” he exclaims, flapping a hand bashfully. “Anything is possible with the right motivation behind you, Niki. That’s the best piece of advice I can give you.”

He beams at Niki – bright and very unnerving. She watches as he cheerfully swans over to Ponk, balancing little baskets of bread and dishes of oil on her arm, the two of them giggling hysterically as soon as they cross paths. They sound like schoolchildren. Niki would laugh too, if this wasn’t all so strange.

She guiltily eyes the red vines that wind tightly where Ponk’s forearm once was, and bites down on her lip. He doesn’t look bothered by the new limb. She guesses it must have healed – well. She's sure it couldn't have healed well enough on its own, if the Eggpire had to grow him a new arm. But his new forearm is sturdy-looking and strong, balancing a throng of plates with ease.

Should she have asked them to stay in her city longer while they recovered? Should she have asked for their company, instead of letting them wash back out of the caverns and right into the waiting arms of the Egg? And Antfrost – he saved her once from Manberg’s prison cells, and here she is, awkwardly fiddling with her dress to avoid staring at his blood-red eyes. Because she will stare, she knows that much.

The questions crawl their way up from her gut, a heavy weight sitting on her chest. Niki is a solitary beast. Niki is solitary, on purpose, because people have only ever hurt her and weighed her down and held her back, but – 

She hoards her care for herself, alone.

Everything with Tommy was bad enough, she thinks (you saw the vault, another voice echoes, from a fight that Niki has tried her best to forget) – hearing those whispers about his death, laughing loudly and then days later having to stomach the dawning, uncomfortable feeling that maybe the nuke had gone too far, maybe all the stupid schemes she’d put together with Jack were too much, roving her heart with her fingers to find the parts that had grown soft and rotten. Did I let them down, too? Antfrost? Punz, or even Bad? When she had heard Skeppy died – should she have said something? Done something?

What happened to knowing all of her neighbours by name?

She can hear Eret’s laughter ringing from the other end of the banquet table – bell-like, a call, a question. When was the last time she spoke to Eret? Fundy? Even HBomb? Fundy is literally sitting beside her, the two of them drifting towards each other in the crowd like leaves tumbling together in the wind, and she’s still barely spoken to him. Those questions have claws now, savage ones that sink into her sternum and catch her breath before it meets her lungs. She sits here and asks them to herself, lost in her thoughts, and in this crowded room no one has even noticed her silence yet – noticed that she has gone quiet, faded from conversation, lost in her own head. How long has she been alone? How alone is she, in this room full of people? How long can she be alone? It hums in her ears like water spilling downstream – but there is nothing but talking and laughter in this room, a melody which she sits silent through, pinning her tongue between her teeth. She thinks of catching those wild, crimson vines with her canines, crushing them with the sturdy plane of her molars, and struggles to swallow around the feeling – the loneliness. It crushes her. The buzzing between her temples amplifies, a thousand butterflies flapping their wings by her ear, blurring her vision at its edges until all that appears is bloody, vivid red.

“It messes with your head,” Techno advises her as she packs supplies laid out on the Syndicate table into a pack, waggling a finger by his ear meaningfully, “or it tries to, anyway. ‘m guessing you’re lacking voices to talk over it for you – which is probably good for you, honestly, because I’m telling you, they do not stop talkin’ when they wanna be heard – so it’ll be harder.”

Niki hums a quiet affirmative as she tests the weight of her pack, lifting it gently by the straps. Not too heavy. Techno makes his own sort of drawn-out, responding hum back. It’s funny – before joining the Syndicate she wouldn’t have expected his little birdlike mannerisms, how he hovers around her when she lingers in the Arctic, how he shares shiny things like a crow wanting to win your favour. And yet, considering Phil, it all makes perfect sense.

“Listen. D’ya know what the most important thing to remember is, Niki?” he asks her as she buckles her pack closed.

“What is?”

“The Egg is kinda cringe,” he advises her, solemn. Niki giggles. “No, seriously, seriously. Massive L, cringe, you get it. When you’re in there, y’know – remember that.”

A shudder rips up her spine, and she shakes her head profusely – as if she can shake those horrible thoughts right out of it. The room comes back into focus, all rich velvet and amber light.

Fuck. Shit, okay – she already knew everything that the wheedling voice in her head is telling her, already spent hours poring over every miserable thought alone in her city. She can’t dwell on it. Dwelling on it doesn’t help her, dwelling on it doesn’t help anyone, not the Syndicate or Fundy or Eret or HBomb, not anyone else. Not after Techno and Phil and Ranboo had warned her to be careful.

Because they care. Or at the very least – they are cautious of the Egg, and Niki had told them about the rose-scented invitation she received from Bad, and they had cared enough to warn her to take care of herself.

On a purely theoretical level, there’s no reason for the Syndicate to take issue with vegetation – so few plants put their stock into dictatorships, after all, and any that did take the effort to do so would be so stubborn that there would be little point in introducing them to even the most basic anarchist literature. And it’s not like the four of them have time to roam the server for rebellious plants, anyway. They’re all adults, for heaven’s sake, with lives to live and things to get done. (Well, adults and Ranboo, who seems twice as busy as the rest of them.) But just because they haven’t had any qualms yet – just because they haven’t come down upon the crimson vines with the weedwacker of anarchist justice so far – doesn’t mean they aren’t suspicious. Doesn’t mean there isn’t reason to be careful.

Niki sucks in a breath, letting the scent of flower petals and iron hover at the back of her tongue. It’s a little bit too strong to be comfortable, too present in every inhale. Not sickening yet, but more suffocating by the moment. It will choke her if she sits here too long, buried in scarlet, swathed in sickly flowers.

She runs her fingers across the fine chain of her bracelet, letting her breath out in an even exhale. She is dressed in crimson silk like royalty, like she belongs here – gold dripping from her wrist, a gift for her to hoard away. As stellar as armour. It’s a lovely little thing. It’s nice. A thoughtful gift. Niki doesn’t own many precious things that she didn’t make herself anymore. She hasn’t received any nice gifts in a long time.

The metal is still slightly cool to the touch, as if the Arctic cold still clings to it in this stuffy ballroom. Niki feels that chill against her fingertip like salve pressed to a burn. Gold is a clean, noble metal. It protects her from filth and tarnish.

More than that, it's a gift. A gift that, for once, Niki didn't have to fight to earn.

(If she wanted to make herself feel even more ill, she would think – it is like an older, wiser, hardier twin to the daisy chains her friends would wrap round her wrists in L’Manberg. Something for their First Lady, delicate and pretty. Because that is what would come to mind when they thought of First Lady Nihachu, pleasant and kind and feeble, and altogether a bit useless. But, well. The gesture itself would have been sweet.)

(If she wanted to make herself feel entirely sick to her stomach, she would think – It is the exact kind of thing Puffy would have loved to give her.)

Because Puffy, of course, is here too.

Let’s be honest. Niki has come to realise she is not particularly good at being honest – she might be even worse a truth-teller than she is a liar – but she will try now. There is absolutely no way Bad would be able to keep Puffy away from an event as grand as this under the Eggpire’s name, even if he had wanted to. Niki knows this. Puffy is the shining star in iron and silver, a hero, a paragon of virtue and truth. She could not be kept from this fight even if she were dragged kicking and screaming in the opposite direction.

Niki could have chosen not to attend. Maybe Niki should have chosen not to attend, and then she could safely shy away from this particular confrontation – remembering exactly how sour the words in her mouth tasted as she told Puffy to fuck off and leave her alone, how good they felt at the time and how terrible they feel now.

But she didn’t.

And now Puffy sits six seats down from Niki, not that Niki has noticed or is counting – a safe distance, a good thing. Niki had decided as much after making the perfectly normal observation that, after stepping into the ballroom, the two of them were breathing the same air for the first time in months.

And because Niki doesn’t even want to talk to her. So there.

Because when she thinks about Puffy she ties herself up with guilt and regret and a fair amount of self-loathing – because she’s an idiot, the worst kind, the selfish kind – and then anger, and then regret again when she realises how fucking stupid it is for her to be angry. And the cycle continues anew, the story retold, forever and ever, the end.

Puffy, for her part, hasn’t exactly tried to make conversation either. She whirled around the girls earlier in the night, complimenting their dresses with encouraging (high-strung, anxious) shouts – since when is Puffy ever anxious? – and that is all Niki has heard from her. Which is good, because Niki doesn’t want to talk to her. She’ll just sit here and make kind conversation with Hannah and Bad, and see if she can poke Fundy into any of those snarky little comments that always make her laugh.

She won’t stare. Not at the new shadows that sit beneath Puffy’s eyes and the new way she wears her curls and the way her dress clings snugly to her chest, banking artfully over her shoulders. Not at the halo of scarlet light that illuminates her, the sticky flush it leaves on her complexion – all fake, radiating from the Egg, but sitting delicately upon her cheeks as if she’s glowing with it. Bathed in blood-red.

She’s wearing these sheer, maroon gloves. They look cheaply made. Niki can feel the phantom scratch of chiffon against her palms.

Her mouth is dry, she realises. She doesn’t dare take a sip of wine to wet it.

You broke up with her, Niki reminds herself feebly. You were the one who gave her up.

But the heart wants what it wants, doesn’t it?

(And some part of Niki still wants Puffy. Or, at least, wants Puffy to see her, so badly that it makes her dizzy and lightheaded even as she sits at the banquet table – only six seats away, close enough that she could fist her skirt in her hands and march over and demand that Puffy look at her if she wanted. Or maybe that feeling is the Egg again, draping rose-colour across her vision, painting Puffy in the prettiest rubies and garnets.)

She bites her lip and lets the rose petals fall from her vision. They can’t be. She knows that. She knew that – because Niki is formidable and baneful, of course. Puffy is noble in a way that Niki is not. Puffy is fair in a way that Niki is not – Puffy is a knight of virtue and good in a way that Niki maybe hasn’t ever been and most likely will never be. Hannah, sitting across from her, doesn’t know that. Fundy, by her right, doesn’t either. Not truly. Punz and Sam and Ponk don’t know it.

But Puffy does.

Puffy has seen her in all of her draconic glory, has seen her burn as bright as a star, as the heart of the forge’s fire – boiling bloody iron into molten amber that drips between her fingertips, vicious and sharp, leaving rippled burns in their wake. Puffy, soaked in red as if she’s emerged from the bloodiest battlefield, sits at the head of the table like a queen. Niki takes another rattling breath. She’s still staring. She doesn’t have anything to fear from this stupid party. Not a single thing. If anything they should all be afraid of her.

And then – then, god fucking damnit – Puffy looks up.

For all the fire that Niki is, she freezes.

She feels the eye contact in her stomach, an invisible thread between them that yanks itself taut. Puffy’s eyes are deep hazel pools, spotted with garnet red, and Niki sinks into them – ankles, knees, shoulders, gone, leaving her lungs empty of air. Sweat starts to gather along the line of her jaw and at her wrists, sitting above her pulse. Thud, thud, thud-thud-thud.

Puffy, sitting at the head of the banquet table, as if the satin table runner flows into bloody rivers that spill from her gut. The ballroom itself warps and shimmers around her, red mirage twining into her curls, as if it knows inherently that she is the guest of honour – as if it knows she is the one Niki’s eyes are stuck on.

It’s Niki’s mistake. It’s Niki’s fault – because she shouldn’t have been staring, and if she hadn't been staring then Puffy couldn’t pin her so, like a fucking butterfly to a board. It strikes Niki deep in her chest, a sword thrust in her gut. Just the way knights are called to slay all things formidable, all things baneful, all things Niki.

When she tries to blink, her eyelids stick awkwardly and shutter – as if they don't want to look away from Puffy, steeped in a red glow. When she tries to pull a breath in, all she can taste is rust and smoke.

But Puffy doesn’t look away either.

“And stuffed mushroom for Nihachu!” Ponk chirps by Niki’s ear – an arm interrupts her vision, giving her the chance to selfishly tug her eyes away from Puffy and stick them stubbornly to the plate Ponk places in front of her.

The spell breaks. Niki's own reflection stares back at her along the edge of her plate – polished cleanly enough to meet her own grey eyes in, blinking the persistent shimmer from her sight. Finally, she can breathe.

Okay – okay, alright. Niki, simply, is just going to not look at Puffy for the rest of the night. Oh, it might be a challenge, but she's sure she'll manage. And everything will continue to be entirely, absolutely fine – just like it all is at this exact, precious moment.

She settles herself back into her seat, taking stock of the delicate silverware Ponk has left by her table setting. Before her sits a mushroom as round and as large as her fist, cradling a thick, dark filling in its upturned cap. Some kind of chutney, maybe – it glistens just a bit too much for a simple stuffing. Niki pokes at the mixture with her fork, delicately killing as much time as possible, and cringes at the bitter tang of iron that wafts from her plate.

She readjusts her grip on her fork as if it were some kind of trident in battle, and picks up her woefully blunt butter knife – all they had been provided by their generous hosts. With an elegance usually reserved only for souffle, she slices into the meat of the mushroom. The flesh splits easily despite the dullness of the blade, and begins to leak with something viscous, bloody, and red.

Oh, absolutely not.

“Are you enjoying the food?” Hannah chirps, sitting across the banquet table – Niki almost drops her cutlery into her plate, swallowing as Hannah shoots an intent little look down at her hands. Despite, well, everything, Niki still manages to scrape together enough shame to go a little pink in the cheeks. As on-edge as she is, she takes to banquet etiquette with all the elegance of a hen sinking into a pool of lava. Her plate is a poor mirror to Hannah’s, already halfway scraped clean. “I am.”

Wide, sparkling eyes dance from Niki’s face to her full plate and back again with undivided interest. A familiar, slithering weight curls up between her shoulderblades, making its presence as awkwardly and uncomfortably known as Hannah’s eyes on her.

You aren't supposed to look wild animals in the eye – but Hannah is a fairy herself, and maybe she doesn't know that.

Niki fakes a smile, although it feels more like she’s cringing around something sore in her mouth.

“It’s wonderful,” she lies through her teeth. She casts her eyes down to her plate with an especially desperate kind of urgency. There are a few meagre greens on her plate – what could be broccolini and sweet pepper, maybe, even if they shine golden beneath the strange shroomlight glow. Can Niki really, really be sure that they were ever green in the first place? It doesn’t feel like she can be. She isn’t, but she skewers some of it with her fork anyway and raises the shimmering mass to her mouth – she bites down, and tries not to cringe harder as caramel sauce clings to her teeth.

Taking a seat next to Hannah, Ponk also starts to stare.

Niki swallows. “So… so generous,” she manages, “of Ponk, for catering to us.”

She casts a wary glance at Fundy, staring resolutely down at his own plate. Help me out here, she wills, as if she can beam telepathic, deeply desperate thoughts in his direction – but it's Fundy , and so like him, he doesn’t listen.

There’s something that looks like steak on his plate. Is it better for him, knowing that the meat in front of him is meat, no matter where it came from? Niki cannot say she is particularly enjoying the alternative. She isn’t enjoying being stared at, or the clingy sweetness of the basting, or the incessant smell of metal. Her head is starting to ache with it. And still, when she returns her attention to the rest of the table, Ponk is gushing a waterfall of excited words that Niki isn’t listening to – and Hannah, stars damnit, is still staring.

Defeated, Niki fishes the slimmest slice of mushroom she can manage onto her fork and slowly – slowly, wobbling all the way, as if someone might interrupt and save her from her fate – puts it into her mouth. She bites down gingerly.

Whatever it is, it is far chewier than a mushroom ought to be.

“... delighted to have you,” Ponk continues to gush, their hands clasped atop the table. If they’ve noticed Niki’s reticence, they certainly don’t seem to care – this, if anything, is the most excited Niki has seen Ponk be in months. Maybe ever. “We’re putting together a real culinary delight for our guests tonight! Half of those vegetables, y’know, they came from my very own garden.”

“How nice,” Niki winces. She’s still holding a thin piece of mushroom in her mouth, willing herself not to swallow, and how bad is it that she’s abandoned her table manners so quickly at a dinner party? One of Antfrost’s ears twitches, and she finds herself tracking the motion with her eyes – subtle, but telling. Hannah’s smile is almost simpering.

Niki kicks herself as soon as the thought crosses her mind, watching Hannah carry on a merry conversation about garden care with Ponk. Hannah has always been nothing but sweet to her – she still remembers Hannah’s first week on the server, waking up to roses in her letterbox despite how horrible they all were after doomsday. Niki should be nicer. She should bite her tongue, shine gold again, be cordial. Even horrible beasts are cordial in fairytales.

Wariness tugs at her gut. But she’s trying to be better.

For a brief moment, another lilac thought crosses her mind – I miss Techno, I miss Phil. I miss Ranboo. I wish they were here too.

And then she’s even more confused with herself. This is her fight, flesh in her mouth and blood on her tongue. These are her former friends. The invitation was written to her and her alone, and she walked into the maw of whatever beast this is without anyone at her side. Niki is solitary, independent, and doesn’t rely on anyone anymore.

She fidgets with her cutlery, and her thumb brushes against the bracelet on her wrist. After crawling out of the burrow of her city, after following a compass’ point north just to find someone who wanted her there, can she really act like that is still true?

No. Not really.

Niki… does have friends now. Again.

Even if they aren’t here. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

She looks up from her plate and watches as Ponk rambles on in Hannah’s direction – the mushroom (or whatever it is) lies untouched on their plate, glistening like jewels in the light.

The part of Niki that hums sadly at the person rambling across the table from her is an old, dead thing – the girl on the pyre, thinned down to ash. Softer, sweeter, kinder. This Niki is wrapped in an embrace of glass-diamonds that freckle her dress, donning red silk and thicker skin, tough scales – but that girl, she quietly misses Ponk’s cheerful, overconfident swagger.

Ponk betrayed her. Ponk chased her out of Manberg, a sword to her back and blood in her wake. Ponk was nothing but a worthless left hand to Schlatt, clucking and fussing over a tyrant who didn’t deserve it. Nemesis can hate more than one person – she always has. She hates tyrants and liars and backstabbers and fake friends, and this room is full of them. She was so angry, and she will never ever say she wasn’t right to be – wasn’t right to be furious, bellowing, enraged, but – 

Ponk had picked strawberries with her once. Ponk brought her a birthday present. Ponk spent weeks in her city, feverish with infection, tending to her own arm as it healed from bleeding and bitter to raw and red and finally clean.

To think, offers that quiet, snarky part of her, that she was the one who found Mushroom for you.

They were friends. She cannot say they weren’t, even if it would be easier – so much easier, it was easier – to pretend, to wrap herself up in unfeeling charcoal and pretend that she never even cared for her. But she did. Once, Niki would clean the stump of her arm in the mornings and listen to her chatter mildly as she brewed lemon tea for the two of them in the afternoons. And then Ponk left, and Niki hadn’t felt like brewing tea anymore at all.

She still doesn’t when she stays in her city. When she’s in the Arctic, Phil can wheedle a mug into her hands – if only to ward off the cold. But always sharp, robust flavours. Never lemon. Not the way Ponk insisted that she brew it.

She had picked berries with Punz once, too. Antfrost freed her from a cell in Manberg, and now he slinks down the end of the banquet table with ruby eyes she doesn’t recognise. She and Fundy were thick as thieves, thicker than blood, and even though he flocks to her side instinctively, they aren’t the same anymore. And maybe Niki was never close with Bad, but he was always polite and kind to her, the way he was to everyone. Not this extravagant, embellished farce.

And Puffy.

The fire flickers in her chest, familiar – once delicately stoked, now singing of an incoming blaze with every crackle and whistle of wavering flame. A wildfire, hungrily snapping up the stray bracken and twigs left in its way. It is ravenous, just as she is. It hungers. It aches, as if starved – and Niki knows starvation. She knows the taste of the flame. She knows what it is like to have that fire sit on her tongue, to taste charcoal, to be engulfed by the fire in turn.

She is wicked and horrible, the temper of a beast with twice its appetite – she is powerful, she is Nemesis. Let them burn loud. Let them be afraid. Let them, let them, let them – it’s good for nothing else.

Niki shouldn’t forget. Niki is alone.

(Techno had once warned her about letting her fire shine too brightly – warned her that she burns in a world that wants to snuff her out, that she’ll swallow herself up, take herself down with the world that she tries to burn around her.

But Techno isn’t here right now.)

Niki swallows, picking at the stickiness in her teeth with her tongue. The fire splutters indignantly in her chest.

“Everyone!” Bad suddenly cries, standing at the head of the table, perfectly opposed to Puffy – right next to Niki, actually, who almost drops her fork in surprise. He claps his hands, star-white smile cutting through the darkness of his hood. Niki’s nose wrinkles. “Before we move onto our… other festivities,” which is not a turn of phrase Niki enjoys in the slightest, “the Eggpire invites you all to enjoy the dancefloor – which has been so generously provided to us for tonight’s banquet.”

There’s a smattering of applause from the banquet table – Ponk and Antfrost mostly, though Punz offers a few slow, staccato claps – which Niki awkwardly echoes. Fundy harrumphs beside her.

“Please,” Bad continues, arm spread as wide as a raven’s wing, “find a partner, and we’ll move to the dancefloor!”

Oh. Niki shoots a discrete glance over to Fundy, but his arm has already been snatched up by Hannah – she smiles at him, all eager eyes and pearly teeth, and he lets himself be dragged off with a pout. When Niki turns back to the table Eret has already paired off gleefully with Foolish and Antfrost with Punz, slyly staring at the others. Ponk stands by a small stage, pointedly brandishing a violin in Sam’s direction with one hand – having already woven a bow into the tendrils of their prosthetic.

Discomfort curdles in Niki’s gut. She’s the only one that’s unpartnered now – besides Sam, although given the nasty looks Ponk is shooting his way and the apprehensive way he’s edging away from the dancefloor, she’s not entirely sure if she wants to go there at all. Her hands clench into fists by her side, nails digging into the flesh of her palm. She’s the only one on her own. Maybe she can hide away from the dance. Maybe she can gather up enough courage to ask Sam, and hope Ponk isn’t too upset with her. Maybe she – 

There’s a gentle touch at her shoulder.

Niki already knows who it is, even before she turns around. Not just because the others are paired up already, not just because she’s alone in a room full of people. Even as she tries so fucking hard to pretend that she’s not there. Deep in her heart, Niki thinks that she could be in the middle of a raging crowd, a tangle of voices and limbs, and she would still know exactly whose hand taps her shoulder – but even so, she stills when she turns to find Puffy standing there.

Her breath hitches.

They aren’t supposed to be so close. They aren’t supposed to touch. She isn’t even supposed to look at Puffy, but now she’s transfixed – taking in the ruby light that lines each tangled thread of scruff on her jaw, the thin eyeliner that sits atop her eyelids, the alarm that sings in her glittering eyes. So dark – green and brown and everything that this place is not, stubborn and hardy roots against a sea of crimson. An anchor to flowers and forests and I know you, once upon a dream…

With panic in her eyes and a forced kind of nonchalance in her voice, one gloved hand lifted as an offering, Puffy asks Niki – “care for a dance?”

No, Niki thinks. Niki does not care for a dance. Niki does not want to be here, she doesn’t want to talk to Puffy, and she certainly does not want to take Puffy’s hand and find out for herself what exactly that chiffon feels like against her skin. Isn’t it funny how you only come to these conclusions when they’re right in front of you? All her agonising before, all of her I would if I wanted to, now she knows her answer – she does not want to talk to Puffy. Not a word. She doesn’t want to walk into the fire again.

The moment drags, Puffy’s hand hovering forlornly between them. The lines that frame her eyes deepen, her smile taking on more strain as she waits for Niki’s response.

(And if I know you, I know what you’ll do…)

Oh, but Niki knows Puffy.

She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t think she could bear to, actually. But she takes Puffy’s hand, folding it into her own, and totters out to the dancefloor like she’s forgotten how to walk on her own two feet.

Her knees are wobbly and weak, as if she can’t trust them to carry the weight of her. Her mouth is too dry. Her stomach still feels a bit average from the banquet, although she thinks she’ll be able to keep her dinner down with enough stubbornness, which is slightly reassuring. She silently places a hand on Puffy’s waist – it hovers for a moment, sticky and awkward, before Niki’s mind hisses at her to get over herself and it lands with a bit more force than necessary – as Puffy lays hers on Niki’s bare shoulder.

Niki was right. The chiffon is scratchy and coarse, seams slightly puckered between the wells of Puffy’s long fingers, catching against the rough scar tissue that marks Niki’s shoulder.

It’s familiar. If nothing else – bathed in red, almost trembling with how mortified she feels, drowning in the hundred days lost between them and still somehow clinging to Puffy’s hand like driftwood – it’s familiar.

Puffy still remembers the steps Niki taught her, floating backwards into a waltz without a moment’s hesitation. The two of them whirl across the dancefloor as if a day hasn’t passed since L’Manberg – since Puffy hoisted Niki to the roof of the Whitehouse, since Niki held Puffy’s hand in hers and walked her through each step, awkward and stumbling, with the memory of a lullaby on her breath. It would be too easy to sink back to then, when things were simple. Or at least simpler. But it’s all different, shifted a few inches to the left. They dance, polite and practised with three fingers’ width between Niki’s chest and Puffy’s – a short distance that might as well feel like a trench dug between them for as distant as Puffy feels now. Niki has outgrown those sweet memories, shed them from her heart and left them behind. Her hands would be too tough and leatherworn to cradle Puffy’s cheek in hers, too clawed and wild to cross one-wrist-over-the-other around Puffy’s shoulders. She is not standing atop the crown jewel of a kingdom on life support, but in the winding entrails of a strange, bloody creature. And she and Puffy are no more.

She wonders if Puffy feels the same way.

She wonders if, maybe, Niki is still Puffy’s first choice in a room like this. Maybe Puffy tapped her on the shoulder because out of all of these people, old friends and acquaintances and just people who were good once – people who have never hurt the kind and valiant, like Puffy – she chose Niki.

Or maybe that means nothing at all. Life isn’t a fairytale. Life is grit and gunpowder and burning until you go up in flames, or until something puts you out.

Puffy’s waist is warm beneath Niki’s hand, the georgette of her dress smooth and rich to the touch – a steady heat, the glow of midsummer, sunlight scattering across the sea. The whorls of her hair sway like ivy as they gently turn, tumbling down her shoulders, casting a clean, unassuming scent of cheap shampoo and perfume. Something light and floral. Niki watches her throat bob as she swallows, eyes shiftily darting around them.

“Have they gotten to you yet?” Puffy whispers under her breath, as they whirl into another eddying spin.

Niki’s breath catches in her throat, and she blinks rapidly as she tries to summon it back. Holding Puffy in her arms is already tipping her over the edge – now she has to talk to her? Seriously? She wets her bottom lip unhappily.

“Gotten to me?”

“Locked you up. Made you eat anything strange, or – I don’t know, done anything to you. Anything to do with that Egg.”

“Besides that dinner?” Niki scoffs quietly. “No.”

Puffy looks briefly aghast. “Did you eat it?”

“Hardly,” Niki admits, dipping her chin downward. Yes, she’s certain it’s poison. Yes, she still feels a little guilty over not finishing her plate. “Don’t – don’t tell them that.”

Puffy laughs. It’s quiet, restrained, but still a squalling little giggle – like the far shriek of a gull. “I won’t. I’d, um – I’d ask you not to either, but Bad was already watching me like a hawk.” Puffy has always been confident, even roguish, but something leaden in her tone tells Niki she means business. Niki thinks of Bad standing at the head of the banquet table, overseeing their idle conversation with empty eyes, and something inside of her withers with concern. “He hasn’t been messing with you either, right? He’s a talker, but – you can’t trust him. Not right now.”

Niki shakes her head. Bad has barely exchanged more than a few polite words with her, most of which were contained in her dinner invitation – he’s courteous, always courteous, but he clearly has something else on his mind tonight.

Puffy bites her lip, nodding anxiously. Her eyes shift again, wandering.

Maybe Puffy is what he has on his mind.

Jealousy strikes Niki right between the chambers of her ribs, just as surprising as it is uncomfortable. She swallows awkwardly, as if she can will the feeling down with nothing more than spit and a bit of stubbornness, but all that seems to do is rile it up more – all too aware of the weight of Puffy’s hand on her shoulder, the scalding touch of her fingers against Niki’s skin, so unmistakably there even through thin chiffon gloves. Her skin sings where they touch – Puffy’s hand on her shoulder, hers on Puffy’s waist, their fingers interlaced as they idly spin. Puffy pulls her closer as they whisper, until she can feel the shallow puff of her breath against her bottom lip.

“I’ve been talking with Hannah all night, mostly,” Niki murmurs. That floral scent clings to every breath she takes now, inescapable and maddening. She tries not to spend too much time looking up into Puffy’s eyes. That, in fact – particularly given how prettily her eyeliner draws sharp, dramatic blades from the corners of her eyes – is a recipe for surefire disaster. “And Fundy. They make for good company.”

“Right,” Puffy agrees, quick. “And – Hannah seems okay, right? Not, uh… overwhelmed?”

Niki’s brows furrow. Strike, swallow… wallow in her miserable envy. “No?”

“I mean,” Puffy clears her throat quietly. “If she’s been… I don’t know. She hasn’t – she hasn’t tried anything strange, has she?”

Niki almost stops still, right in the middle of the dancefloor. Dumbfounded, she blinks a few times to let the question wash over her.

…no, still struggling to sink in – floating atop the surface of her mind, a floundering mess of tried anything? With me?

“...what?” she manages.

Puffy isn’t even looking at her – her gaze is fixed over Niki’s shoulder, distant. “I just – no, it’s stupid. She’s been fine, she’s good, I just – I thought for a second…”

Puffy trails off, and Niki squeezes her hand encouragingly without thinking – a gesture left over from a different time, a different place, somewhere far from here and forever unattainable. It’s so automatic, so domestic that Niki almost rips her hand from Puffy’s in reflex, as if she’s taken another bloody blow to her gut. It feels like she could breathe around the wound that isn’t there and feel the healing skin stretch and tear and snap. She doesn’t.

“I just saw you guys were getting a bit – chummy. Before we came in.” Puffy’s voice trails reedy and high. “I mean, I trust her – of course I trust her, but – maybe she’s just nervous? I’m nervous, I mean – ”

Wait. Wait.

“Were you jealous?” Niki interrupts her.

Puffy flushes. Red, red, red.

“Uh, n – no,” she stammers, a little bit too loudly. She clears her throat, as if she can cut the sentence off one way and derail it towards another – Niki peers over to see Bad watching them, eyes glowing in bright slits beneath his hood, turned towards them like searchlights. An unwelcome shiver rips down her shoulders. “Uh, no. I’m just – keeping tabs on people. Here. Because. Because of the Egg, so…”

“Of course,” Niki says, graciously giving Puffy the space to swallow her embarrassment. That struck feeling in her chest flutters cheerfully, and she has to hushedly scold it before it starts lighting up all the charcoal and ash that lines her lungs and bone. Of course Puffy is concerned. She’s been thinking about the Egg for so long. “Well, Hannah has been nothing but kind to me. I promise.”

“Yeah,” Puffy agrees. She sounds a bit reticent. “Of course.”

“Nowhere near as kind as you,” Niki amends, and quietly delights in the rose-red glow that clings to Puffy’s cheeks – she can feel the faint warmth of Puffy’s flush against her own skin. That fluttering in Niki’s chest roars with excitement, with giddiness, with a glee that is one part possessive and one part boundless joy.

Puffy likes her. Puffy likes her. Isn’t it strange to be someone worth coveting? Even now. Even after all of this, all of them, every fairytale ending gone wrong.

(A snippet of song can travel far on the right winds, landing serendipitous in the back of Niki’s mind – humming you’ll love me at once, the way you did once – )

She whirls Puffy into a spin – her skirt swirls like the petals of a flower in springtime – and when Puffy comes back in Niki whisks her close to her chest, close enough to whisper without being overheard, barely a sliver of space between them. She can feel Puffy’s surprised exhale against the skin of her collarbone, the brush of Puffy’s bodice against her dress, as she resettles her hand securely on Puffy’s waist.

“Are you alright?” Niki whispers. “Everything seems so – so strange, and – ”

“Bad has something planned,” Puffy whispers back, each word tumbling out urgently – one after the other. She clamps her mouth shut as soon as the warning escapes her, avoiding Niki’s eyes. “I can’t – I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Puffy,” Niki admonishes her, but Puffy bites down on her scarlet lip and gets that stubborn, foolhardy look on her face – the one that says she won’t budge for anything, not hell or high water.

“I can’t,” she mutters, with an air of finality. Niki swallows uncertainly.

“Look,” she says, even though she would really, absolutely rather not – in fact, there’s probably nothing she could possibly want less, but part of being brave is doing the frightening things, isn't it? Fuck, it’s so much easier to be terrifying than terrified. “If – if this is about what happened between us, back then – ”

“It’s not,” Puffy shuts her down.

“Then what is it,” Niki presses. “I know there’s something wrong here, Puffy. Do you really not think I can tell? I’m not blind, I’m not stupid, I can – ”

“I can’t trust you,” Puffy hisses back.

Niki’s words fall to ash in her mouth, stolen and silent, as her heart sinks into her stomach. A guilty look steals over Puffy’s face.

“It’s not – it’s not just you,” she mutters. “It’s not us. I promise. But, the Egg – it ruins everything, Niki. Everyone. It feels like everyone I fucking know. It ruins them.”

Ponk. Antfrost. Punz. Skeppy. Even Bad. Niki has lost so many friends, and to be honest, more than one of them was her fault – but Puffy has lost just as many. Has had just as many taken away from her.

(Briefly, pressure spikes between her temples. But Niki is far too wrapped up in Puffy to notice it.)

And Niki – she let herself be one of them.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs weakly. Her lips feel numb, unaccustomed to the soft shapes of those words in her mouth.

It’s not, honestly. It’s really not. Puffy looks like she knows it, too. She’s always been able to see right through Niki, past the smears of flour and dirt and gunpowder and blood – see her right down to her core, strip back her layers and pull out what’s true. There’s some kind of clarity in Puffy, sea glass – whether it’s her open-heartedness, her cleverness, or her years of adventure on the open water – that has always made Puffy able to see Niki more clearly than Niki has been able to see Puffy. Or herself, even. In a world of people who didn't know Niki – who didn't care about Niki – Puffy did.

(...until Techno. And Phil, and Ranboo of course. And HBomb, and Ponk, and Fundy and Eret. And more people whose names have been thoroughly cast from the fairytale, scored out, never to be spoken aloud again.)

And – yes. Niki is more grounded than most people. But she hasn’t felt truly, properly grounded in a long time. Even now, it barely feels like her tiptoes are brushing the ground. Maybe it has been too easy to hang those large, fairytale stories onto Puffy’s robust frame. And yes, Niki can begrudgingly concede – maybe, when everything was so turbulent and awful, it was too easy for Niki to pretend that Puffy was perfect and that when they were together they were perfect.

But Niki had been hurting. She had wanted something nice so badly. And she just liked Puffy so, so much.

Puffy’s hand leaves hers – a knuckle is tucked beneath Niki’s chin, gently tipping her face upwards. Puffy’s eyes meet hers, searching and intent and like fire and sea all at once, flame and smoke and sea spray and the fine line that rests between burning heat and freezing chill. Red stars dance in their depths, mirroring the lights that dot the ballroom. They’re still beautiful.

“Who are you, Niki?”

Niki’s brow creases. “What do you mean?”

They’ve stopped moving, she realises. She’s given the lead away. The two of them stand in the middle of the polished ballroom floor, hardwood smooth and cool beneath their feet, the only ones still – as if the server itself has stopped moving around them, frozen each mote of dust like starlight and silenced each ripple of music before it can reach them. Tucked away in their own little pocket of the world.

“I want to trust you,” Puffy whispers, “but every time I do, something happens and – I can’t. I don’t want this to be more pretend.”

Puffy’s hand unfolds, fingertips tracing the curve of Niki’s jaw. She deflates with a weary breath, curls spilling over her shoulders, hiding her face from view.

“I don’t want it to take you too.”

Her heart pauses its thundering stammer in her chest. And for once – for once – upon her lifetime, Niki understands Captain Puffy.

When you are lonely, it is easy to only think of yourself. A starving creature is never living at its best. Niki knows this by heart – which is why she memorises things like how many cups of flour and yeast are needed to feed six hungry countrymen, and at least a week's worth of different ways to make plain potatoes taste like something that isn't infighting and sheer boredom. This is just as true when the creature in question is starved of love as when it is starved of bread and butter. Niki knows this too, because she was starved of both. And she has spent so fucking long unable to think of anything but herself. There was nothing else for her to think about, empty and mewling with hunger. All she had to chew on was her fury, her grief – making herself sick on it.

But what about Puffy – noble, good, oh-so- perfect Puffy? Her friends? Her fight, her cause?

Puffy, who doesn’t have a family name. Or a homeland. Puffy, who was spat up from the sea and washed ashore in the midst of a dead nation walking. Who tried her best to make a home out of that foul, rotting corpse. Whose friends are all here, but different – strange and mean. Puffy, whose ex-girlfriend broke up with her in a really cruel way, come to think of it, snapping at the heels of anyone who dared to threaten her hoard of misery and shit memories and awful revenge plots.

Puffy, who is good and valiant and courageous and anxious and scared. That is the feeling that has been dripping from Puffy all night, and the feeling that Niki hasn’t dared to name because it just doesn’t sit right on Puffy’s shoulders. Puffy is scared. She is alone, just like Niki, and this deep beneath the ground she doesn’t smell of her usual salt tang and seaweed – she’s doused in crimson and cloying florals with the rest of them. Puffy, who doesn’t even want to be here. Puffy, who is only here because it’s the right thing to do. Not because it’s where she wants to be.

Niki’s heart sets ablaze, a feeling she has not felt for so long – possessive, protective, as fierce as a dragon with its hoard and a knight (a princess) sworn to her people. It is fire and soft sunlight all at once. When she looks at Puffy her chest fills with warmth, and her gut fills with raging, righteous wildfire.

Niki – once-terrible, once-wicked – is familiar with this kind of inferno. Maybe even more than Puffy is.

“Should we talk?” she rushes. Demands, really.

“Talk?” Puffy looks startled. “Niki, I don’t think this is the time – ”

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out before Puffy can finish her sentence. Her eyebrows raise in surprise. You said we might not be safe here, didn’t you? Let me spill out the truth, just in case. Let me win your favour. Let me champion your good graces, let me be your hero for once. I was good at that, once. She can’t manage to spit the rest of those words out, stuck in the back of her throat. She doesn’t even know how many lives Puffy has left to spare – shit, she doesn’t even know. She blusters with all the unruly power of bonfire in her heels and her shimmering gown, clutching Puffy’s forearms in desperation. “I – I hurt you. I’m sorry. I wasn’t – I’m trying – ”

Puffy’s expression softens. “Niki…”

“I missed you,” she professes.

“I missed you too,” Puffy responds, immediate, words tumbling over each other quicker than her woven code of nerves and sinew could stop them – running to the door after a long and lonely night. Niki takes a hopeful breath. It catches behind her sternum, glowing warmly where Puffy’s hand comes to rest above her chest. She feels molten, beyond reproach and something soft and gooey all at once, radiating red-amber with a determined flame that, for once, doesn’t burn her.

“So let me help you,” Niki murmurs, catching Puffy’s gaze from behind those lowered eyelashes. She takes Puffy’s wrist and pulls her hand from her chest, an exhale. “Let me help you, Puffy.”

It’s hard, when she is so warm and rose-kissed and red, for Niki to remember her role – to remember to be formidable, baneful, draconic and alone. It is hard for her to forget Puffy and fairytales and dancing under the moonlight, chest-to-chest, fingers interlaced like the server’s strongest weave.

Her head still hums, swimming with the soft vibration of a guitar’s strings behind her eyes. But Puffy takes her hands as she meets Niki’s gaze – fresh hazel on cool grey, overturning every piece of stone and charcoal that sit there with delicate hands, as if they had never known the rough calluses formed by clinging to swords and steel. The hum dissipates, fading into nothing but seafoam that breaks with the tide.

Whatever Puffy finds in the depths, she is content with. Her sigh whistles against Niki’s collarbone, sticky and warm.

“I can’t tell you any more,” she explains, breath bated, “because I don’t – I don’t know any more, to be honest.” She looks pained. Niki hums encouragingly, and Puffy rushes to reassure her. “We have a plan, I guess. But I want – I just want everyone to be safe. I don’t think this place is safe…”

Her voice trails off. Niki cannot help but unpick her taut expression – the tension in the slope of her brows, the full violets pressed beneath her eyes, the thin wrinkles that line the space between her eyelids like linen thrown astray, the ravaged soreness of her bottom lip. Part of Niki knows that she is staring again. But the rest of her takes Puffy in, every wartorn part of her, and worries about her. Her daring, foolish, sweetheart knight.

And that consuming piece of Niki – she doesn’t even notice that she’s started calling Puffy her knight, all over again.

“It’s not,” she agrees. “But – there isn’t anything we can do about it, is there.”

It isn’t a question. Puffy sags.

“No.”

“But,” Niki says, “we can dance.”

So, they do.

Together they glide, hand-in-hand, steps as clean and graceful as a careful spar. Niki leads, resting her hand securely against the curve of Puffy’s waist. Puffy steps back delicately, and Niki follows. She feels weightless, aloft on wing – as if the polished floor could crumble to clouds beneath her and she could keep dancing, floating above them like rain and light.

There’s a slight pressure on Niki’s shoulder, Puffy’s hand guiding her sidewards – Niki laughs as Puffy spins her beneath an arm, dainty and effortless in a way they were never going to be while whirling around the rough concrete roof of the Whitehouse, her skirts swishing by her calves in flashes of ruby red. She lets herself go, twirling atop her heels as she loses grip of Puffy’s waist, her hand, ‘til nothing but their fingers twine gently between them. The music is gone, Niki realises. All she can hear is the clack of her heels against the floor, and slight-silent murmurs around them.

Puffy doesn’t whisk her back into her arms – instead she bows, curls spilling over her shoulders, and presses a kiss to Niki’s knuckles.

The touch is feather-light, barely more than a brush of Puffy’s lips against Niki’s skin. But still, she freezes – lymph and blood and nerve filling with fire, code overloading, tide breaking on the shore. It’s too much. The memories are too much, the perfect fairytale is too much. Puffy, beautiful, is too much. All of this, too much – the tug of her dress against her skin, the pinch of her heels, the dozens of eyes sinking claws into her, the petal-like touch of Puffy’s skin against hers. That horrible feeling floods her again (not quite shame, although just as uncomfortable). She cannot look at Puffy – her bowed head, her crown of curls.

So instead, she looks up – casts a glance around as if to ask is everyone seeing this? even though she’s well aware they are, and her eyes land on Bad. Staring. With a glass in hand, drained to barely a mouthful left, his tail flicking back and forth with an energy that, generously, she could only describe as restless.

Being stared at makes Niki wither. But Bad is not staring at her. She doesn’t cower from that. He’s staring at Puffy.

Sharp-set. Ravenous. He can’t take his eyes off of her.

That possessiveness, it bucks in Niki’s chest like a wild animal. I don’t think this place is safe, Puffy’s voice whispers in her mind, blood spilling from her gut like the scarlet red of the banquet table runner stretching from Puffy’s seat to Bad’s. Every warning about the Egg that she gave, every scuffle Puffy landed herself in. And now, they sit in the belly of the beast. It doesn’t make Niki uneasy anymore. She doesn’t shy from it. She looks back at Bad, absorbing his predatory gaze, and feels rage.

Here is what some people forget about Niki (here is what sometimes Niki forgets about Niki) – she is sweet. She is friendly, she is kind, she is selfless and shares her things. Sometimes she is angry, she grieves, and she gets selfish. She burns a country down with her, barricading the doors as best she can just in case anyone thought they would escape her wrath without getting burned too. Sometimes she struggles to keep a level head. They all do.

What they all forget is that Niki is not just sweet, not just angry – these are not costumes she takes on and off, swaps one for the other. She is not a delicate princess or a dragon or a niece of bakers and bricklayers. She is all of these things at once.

Once upon a time, Niki was the last person left in L’Manberg – first L’Manberg, spring’s L’Manberg, not what L’Manberg became. She fought for that country with every drop of her blood, sweat and tears. Being imprisoned could not stop her. Having all of her things taken away from her and rotted and destroyed could not stop her. Hiding from Schlatt’s shadow, scurrying from build to build to avoid being seen, or else face the consequences of his attention – that couldn’t fucking stop her, even when she was terrified for her life. She didn’t give up on protecting her L’Manberg, alone and unarmed, until she was dragged from it – kicking and screaming – into the depths of the ravine. L’Manberg is dead, but Niki loved it once. Niki kept its fire burning, and only snuffed that fire out with her own two hands when it threatened to engulf them all.

And that? That was Niki with nothing more than blunt teeth and fingernails bitten down to the quick. This is Niki armed with thicker skin and netherite and a fury three times too big for her body, full with energy and life. This is Niki who walked through the fire and came out stronger than when she walked in.

This is Niki in love, actually. This is Niki, who will kill if she has to.

This is Niki who has killed for worse reasons than this, to be honest. Or at least tried to. Don’t give her a good reason to try – maybe she’ll actually get it this time.

Puffy rises, and Niki tries to catch her hands – to pull her close to her chest, tuck her away from that horrible stare – but she steps away before Niki can, leaving a polite distance between them. Niki blinks away that fairytale daze and feels heavier than ever.

“Thank you,” Puffy whispers.

And just like that, Niki watches helplessly as Puffy steps back into the fray. She casts another wary glance at Bad, flinty and vigilant, before her eyes land on Puffy again.

She watches Puffy fall out of that dream, sweet and soft. She watches the line of Puffy’s shoulders harden into a defensive arch, her fingers curling into wretched, unsettling fists like talons. As if she is trying to look bigger than herself.

She sees the fraught looks that Puffy shoots towards Ponk and Antfrost – her friends, who she would always gush to Niki about – and to Bad, a glare of unfeeling, amber fire. She watches the stormclouds roll in, take up residence in the bags beneath Puffy’s eyes and the wary rock of her gait.

She watches Puffy become something else entirely.

(A wild animal cannot recognise its reflection.)

Niki sees it all. She has seen it in her own body, her eyes, her hands and her temperament and her gait, of course.

But – 

– there is nothing she can do as lava cascades from the ceiling.

“Thank you for coming, everyone!” Bad announces through a thicket of giggles that he just can’t seem to fight back. “And, uh… prepare to die.”

Confusion flits through the crowd, chased by chaos, as everyone notices in one shared, horrible moment the lava that falls around them and the flash of swords and steel – panicked shouts, murmurs, demanding answers from the smug members of the Eggpire that swarm them. Niki exclaims in shock as she shies away from the lava pooling at the edges of the ballroom, closing in on them like a pack of ravenous animals. There’s hands on her arms and bodies brushing against hers as they huddle, as if they were all one living, breathing, frightened being.

Heat radiates from the walls and the mass of the crowd, roiling against the skin of Niki’s back – tacking her hair to the nape of her neck with sweat, gathering in the crooks of her elbows and the breathspace between her bodice and her ribcage, running down her cheeks like tears. It’s too hot, part of her stammers. Her mind is nothing but a livewire, sparking in alarm as the Eggpire closes in on them all, like shepherds shoving their herd into the wolf’s open maw. It clings to the small, stupid thing that she knows, even in the face of complete fucking chaos – that it’s too hot, and she’s scared. She’s too small. Her skin is too small, barely stretching over her stubby little fingers and weak legs. She wants to shirk it off. She wants to tip her chin back and scream until the earth shakes with the sound and her throat rubs itself raw, for her skin to split open and reveal powerful wings and claws and teeth the size of swords that snap and slash and get them all away from her.

(But that was all a bit of a daydream, wasn't it.)

(Deep down, she might have always known that – because Niki is a terrible liar, but never to herself. A way to make all that loneliness seem like a blessing, a boon, the best thing that had ever happened to her.

She certainly feels lonely now. All she can do is wrap her arms around herself, gagging at how her hands almost slip with sweat.)

“There’s no way out!” Fundy shouts from the edge of the pack, flinching away from a tongue of flame. Niki rushes over, crashing against his side. There’s not really anything else she can do. Puffy shouts down Bad, striding onto the banquet table with untouchable, iron confidence – until Niki hears her shriek in shock, and she realises that they really, truly, are done for.

Hannah’s a traitor. The TNT that Sam boasts about does nothing except send a shudder down Niki’s spine. Bad drags them all to the towering form of the Egg as it watches them writhe and squabble and scream, as if it were lying in wait – all of them like disobedient animals on a lead, tugged by their necks to the slaughter. Antfrost raises his sword towards the empty sky, despite Puffy’s cries, and Foolish’s blood spills down the glowing steps like sparkling ichor – Niki clutches Fundy’s sleeve like an anchor as he screams.

The Eggpire laughs. Niki’s eyes are fixed to Antfrost’s blade, the blood that carves its way down from the fuller to where its point hangs an inch above the ground – dripping onto the stairs, rain to a river. Perhaps an anchor is right. Niki could be drowning. Swallowed up in red, red, red.

“Okay,” Bad croons. Hannah steps towards the crowd, decked out in a shimmering sword and shield, still pink as a spring rose and glowering at them with vicious coal-eyes. They are cold, unfeeling – as if she is nothing more than the right hand to the Egg that almost pulses with glee behind her, silhouetting her lithe form in bloody crimson. “Who should we do next, what do you think? Maybe Sam, maybe George?”

“Sam would be a good sacrifice,” Antfrost remarks, now leaning on his sword.

“He would be. He did try to blow up the Egg just now.”

Bad’s calculating gaze sweeps over them all, one at a time – Niki feels the moment his eyes land on her, insatiable and empty and just as dead as Hannah’s are. She tightens her grasp on Fundy’s arm.

And then, for a moment – both blissful and horrible – Niki is no longer here. She is no longer buried in the depths of the ballroom, surrounded by miles and miles of netherrack, maybe further from the surface than she has ever been before and realising abruptly that these lungs and this heart will never taste fresh air again. Warmth doesn’t radiate from the lava that surrounds them, but a soft glow above. She isn’t wearing her best dress, dressed in her old overalls and spring sweater instead. She almost imagines that she can smell newly-cut grass and wildflowers in the back of her throat – along with the sour tang of cigarettes and alcohol, and ash, and a terrible, terrible smell that reminds Niki of burnt meat.

It’s dim in the ballroom – lit only by elegant candles and shroomlights. It’s as if the Whitehouse podium stands in front of her, blocking out the light of the sun.

“Maybe Fundy?” Bad suggests, and her heart leaps in alarm. But it’s not until he gasps, almost salivating, that Niki’s gut seizes in terror – that her grip tightens until Fundy cries out in pain, even through his suit jacket. It’s not until then that the ballroom swims back into view, bloodsoaked. “Or we could kill Niki – ”

“Bad!”

Bad almost drops his sword. Quackity, somehow, emerges from some hidden passageway in the ceiling – he hollers out to Bad and the others, grinding the mayhem to a halt with a glittering sword in hand and his just-so-patronising attitude – Niki has seen him try to intimidate people before on many occasions, although she’ll give him this, he’s gotten better at it – 

And then, as if the stars delivered him themselves, Techno is here.

Fear ripples through the Eggpire like a stone thrown into water. Fundy hoots beside her, and a smile tugs at Niki’s lips – not a smile, no, wilder than that. An ecstatic snarl of delight. Wolves descend into the ballroom and with them comes Techno, cutting an intimidating figure in netherite and thick furs, and stars above Niki could just run over and throw her arms around him – sink into that fur cloak as if it were the warmest quilt on her bed back home. Terror drips down her bones, from her shoulders to the length of her legs, wrung out with adrenaline – and it’s telling that she’s worn out enough to not even feel that self-conscious for acknowledging just how badly she wants a hug from someone who cares right now. But Techno is, admittedly, a little occupied with chasing down Bad and Punz through a bramble patch of vines and scarlet growths, so she just beams to herself like a feral thing and makes a break for the exit Quackity ushers them all towards.

She barely crosses the threshold before a high, curdling scream hits her ears – Puffy’s voice is unmistakable, even shrill and loud, and Niki throws a helpless glance over her shoulder as she flees in her heels. But before her eyes can even land on Puffy, she knows it isn’t for her. It’s not a shriek of terror. No, Puffy’s voice erupts in pure, righteous rage – and Niki watches as first blood gushes from the meat of Antfrost’s neck.

She keeps running.

They all spill into the secret passageway that Quackity has found, chased by the clash of metal on metal and the man behind them yelling to go, go, go – finally the netherrack whittles down to plain stone, then gravel, then grass that gently gives way beneath her feet. Niki clambers upward into the night sky, doubling over to catch her breath as the others disperse across the open plain. Distantly, she can taste salt in the air.

Niki has not been so delighted to breathe in a very, very long time.

Some of them go home, skittering off into the night. Others talk quietly, tending to shallow cuts and mild burns. Niki stands on her own, hands braced against her thighs, enjoying every sweet breath of fresh air as her heart lets its rabbit-thump pace dwindle to something that doesn’t make her feel like it isn't going to beat its way right out of her chest. Her skin stings with sweat and scrapes from vines reaching for her as she ran, tearing at her hair and arms. Finally, the fighting party returns – Purpled first, looking utterly disinterested in the blood that stains his hoodie, then Techno, then Quackity.

Then Puffy.

Niki watches bent-double as Puffy staggers from the mouth of the cave, steps slow. Her sword hangs loosely from her right hand. It’s bloody. The blade shines, rustlike, even under the dim glow of the stars – each thick rivulet of blood catching droplets of white starlight.

Puffy stumbles to a stop, swaying on her heels like a lost boat – unsure if it should dock, rocking like stray currents and rips and eddies that spin beneath the water, unsettled. She looks up into the sky, eyes wide, blinking dewily as if she’s never seen the sparkling stars and moon before. Her expression is vacant, lips just-parted. Absent in mind. As if some protective shell has cracked around her (the thin shield between whispering they would never betray me and the cold, solid truth, a shield Niki is far too familiar with), that now lays in pieces at her feet. And so here she stands – fresh and confused and like she has never seen this world before. This world, ugly as it is. As if the fabric of it all has been pulled out from underneath her feet, leaving her to stumble and fall, and all she has to show for it is bruised knees and bruised feelings.

“Foolish,” Puffy murmurs blankly.

But Foolish isn’t with them. He didn’t spill from that secret passageway with the rest of them. Niki watched as Antfrost split his throat open, blood pouring down his shirt, glittering like tiny stars were caught in the syrupy dark. He would have respawned back at his home – if it were his last life his body wouldn’t have disappeared into code and ether, it would have just slumped over itself on the stairs, cold and still – but for as distraught as Puffy looks, he could have been dead thrice over.

Niki’s gut curdles.

It isn’t fair for something so awful to happen. Not to Foolish, not to Puffy. Neither of them did anything to possibly deserve it. It’s not fair, thunders a voice between her temples. Did Bad know this was going to happen? All of it? Some sick, stupid, horrible power play – Niki thinks back to the ravenous hunger in his eyes as Puffy’s hands fell from her own, as white as glaring sunlight, the glee that stirred into them as he watched the guests cower under lavalight. Somehow, despite having bent herself in two to catch her breath, Niki finds herself unable to keep her heart from pounding in her chest like flint against stone, her breath punching out of her nostrils in staccato bursts.

It’s not fair. It’s never fair. Nothing fair ever happens, not on this server, not to those who deserve it. No matter how much they all fight, no matter what they all kill, no matter what they burn to the ground – nothing ever seems to get better. It all only ever seems to get worse.

A chunk of loose hair falls into Niki’s face, whorled and tangled – she runs a hand through it, rough against her scalp, and startles as something tears the skin of her palm open.

It takes a moment to fish the vine from her hair, woven delicately against her scalp as if it’s been sewn in there instead of haphazardly broken off like a twig in her flight. It barely stretches from the base of her palm to her second knuckle, splintered and torn at its wider end, tapering into a coarse, leafy point at the other. Blood swells in her palm, only enough to line the shallow scrape, positively glowing next to the deep ruby of the vine’s tendrils. The pressure behind Niki’s eyes swells, like the tug of a knee-high wave that threatens to trip her into the salty breakwater. Her heart thuds. She can almost feel the ribbons of blood that twine so delicately between her muscle and bone, waxing into fat wads of iron at her wrists.

Such a small, fragile thing. A precious thing. Almost as fine and intricately woven as the golden bracelet that it sits above, circling her wrist.

And then Niki lets the vine fall through her fingers and stomps on it with her heel, grinding the leafy matter into the dirt.

The endless pressure thrums beneath her skin, from the thinness of her eyelids down to her wrists and knuckles and the heels of her hands. She stares at the dishevelled remains of the vine, crushed and dirtied as it sits in the mud, leaves bent sadly like limbs snapped out of shape. She stares at it for a long second, in fact, for something that is not particularly interesting to look at.

It’s right about one thing. It’s not fair. None of this is. Niki is more than used to things not being fair.

But Puffy.

The vindictiveness that swells inside Niki just… falls away, like a cloak that she’s let sink to the ground. It replaces itself with something gilded, something gold – something familiar, even if Niki has only seen the others wear it, something that she hasn’t let herself fall into in months and months – that skitters across her skin like stubborn butterfly wings. It is feather-light and forged tough as steel all at once, swathing her skin, warming her bare shoulders and forearms. It blossoms – the urge to pull Puffy into her arms and bury her head in the comforting solidness of Puffy’s shoulder. To feel the shift of Puffy’s chest against hers with every breath, secure in the knowledge that she is whole and there and breathing at all. To not let go of her. To comb the blood and sweat from her curls. To stop this from ever happening again. To protect her.

Niki straightens up, shakily smoothing her dress down with sweaty hands, and wets her lip – but before she can call out to Puffy, the woman staggers heavily towards the gaping maw of the forest, casting shadows long and deep enough to swallow her whole. She takes one wobbling step, then another, then breaks into a run. Niki cries out after her, but she’s too far away to hear – there is nothing but the distant sound of bushes loudly rustling and tree branches snapping in her wake.

Or maybe Puffy did hear her. Either way, she is not coming back.

Niki deflates, her shoulders slumping helplessly. Her hands fall to rest awkwardly against her dress again, unsure of where to place them. She couldn’t reach Puffy, couldn’t help her one bit. All she could do was watch, and watch, and watch – watch as Puffy sat so steadfastly and proud at the head of the banquet table, as Foolish was murdered, as the outline of Puffy’s figure disappeared into the night.

A quiet, reedy sigh squeezes its way out of her lungs. Oh, Puffy.

“So,” Techno remarks, coming up by Niki’s shoulder. To her credit, she only jumps a little – quickly re-gathering her balance as her heels press unevenly into the muddy grass, tucking her wild hair behind her ears. It is entirely unfair that such a tall, hefty guy, especially one currently draped in netherite and diamonds, can move about so quietly. “The fancy dress party really was a murder mystery waitin’ to happen.”

Niki sighs again in greeting, although this sound is lighter than the last. She's exhausted, but Techno’s presence still makes her feel less dead on her feet. More secure. “And here I thought you weren’t invited. I would have asked Ponk to save you some dinner if I thought you were coming.”

“I don't reckon Bad is gonna want to invite me anywhere for a long time, but,” Techno shrugs. “I'm used to bein’ unpopular. Besides. Parties I get invited to are so not my problem. It's the parties I keep gettin’ dragged into that always seem to go, eh, not so good for me.”

“You do tend to find that,” Niki offers agreeably. They pointedly do not talk about festivals, or executions.

Though, Niki concedes quietly – Techno might, even after Manberg, have more experience than herself in that arena. She's had two more near-misses than she would like, but at least she's never made it to the executioner's cage. Not like Techno has. Or Tubbo.

Or Foolish.

The conversation lulls – that's the thing with Techno, silence is just as comfortable as idle chatter – leaving Niki to stare out into the forest depths that pulled Puffy in, swallowed by the night.

She’s tired, all the way down to the bone. Every drop of adrenaline that had flooded her back in the ballroom – the slow-blooming tension, all the way to blind panic – has melted away from her, as if it could drip, drip, drip down the lengths of her fingers and her nose. If she was better, a real kind of fighter – a real kind of knight – maybe she could find some way to wick the exhaustion from her heavy muscles, drop the fatigue that hangs around her neck like a weight, and run off after Puffy into the dark. Go find her. But as it is, she can barely keep herself upright. All Niki wants, in this moment, is to fall into her bed for the next day –  even the next three days, if she can find the time for it – and sleep.

“Where are you staying, anyway?” Techno asks. “City?”

Niki shrugs. “It's home,” she says, which isn't answering the question.

She pretends that she doesn't notice Techno staring at her, well, face – Techno is not the biggest fan of eye contact, but his gaze tends to drift over a person's shoulder instead of locking onto some more harmless facial feature, the way Ranboo does it. He isn’t one to stare for no reason. She self-consciously brushes a hand against her cheek, and hisses quietly as it stings in reply – her knuckle comes back brushed thinly with red. Must be another scratch from the vines.

“Hm,” Techno says – dawdling. That's what he's doing, the Blood God – dawdling, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot. He fiddles with how his sword sits in the scabbard at his belt. “How is the city thing goin’, then?”

“Well. I’ve had quite a few people around since the summer.” Had being the operative word in that sentence – there are none left now. Niki waves a hand, and tries to make the motion look nonchalant. “They come and go. Mostly go. You would know how it is around here.”

“Yeah,” Techno remarks. More awkward shuffling. He’s good at many things, but not segues, Techno is. Not wading through conversations that veer towards a shade a bit too emotionally intimate for his comfort, either. Not that Niki is complaining, because if she has to talk about how empty the city that awaits her slumber is, she thinks she really might crumple up and cry in frustration. “Well. I guess it made for a pretty excitin’ party, all things considered. The blatant betrayal caught a few folks off guard, by the sounds of things.”

“What,” Niki teases, grateful for the change in conversation, “even the great Blood God, critiquer of party invitations, didn't see it coming?”

“Ranboo was the one who had an issue with the invites,” Techno corrects her – which is true, they had told them all that the paper was cheaply made and the kerning on the letters was tacky – “but some of them, nah. There were a few surprises.”

“Hannah, I think,” she says. Whatever plan Puffy had put together with Hannah, well – that all fell to shit the second Puffy needed her.

“Wasn't expectin’ that one,” he agrees. “She seemed cool. Listen, I can respect anyone who answers to a higher call than the government of man ‘n all, but… giant Egg? Ooh. That sucks.”

Niki wonders what could have convinced Hannah to change sides. The Egg can't be good for nature, after all – she's seen how its vines choke out the dandelions and poppies that spring up around the Prime Path. So it must have offered her something else. Something better. Something that felt far, far more important than a few flowers.

Something that Hannah had been starved of, maybe. Something that she couldn't say no to.

“I don't think… I don't think it's as difficult to turn,” she muses, “as we thought it might be.”

Techno looks at her carefully.

“Yup,” he says warily, and that is the end of that. “Look. Whatever the Egg was planning tonight, it was probably more than just killing one guy… even one god-guy, so – it’s probably not entirely safe to stick it out on your own while those losers are still on the prowl.” His eyes shift to somewhere behind her. “Phil has a spare room, so.”

Niki crosses her arms – clutches them, really, her hands warm against the chill of the night air. “Is Phil innkeeping, now? I guess he must be looking for a career change, if you’re selling off his rooms.”

“Bah,” Techno remarks, and rolls his eyes. “It’s Phil, he won’t care. And I actually like you, so you don’t count anyway.” Despite, well, everything, Niki smiles. “Chat has like, sixty different opinions on what they think the Eggpire’s up to now, and all of them are yelling at me. But they do all think it’s a good idea for you to come with. They did a poll and everything, so – they’ll yell at me for hours if you don’t, is what I’m saying.”

“If you’re offering, Techno,” Niki murmurs, “I think I will take you up on that.”

For as difficult as Techno can be to read sometimes, Niki thinks that he looks just a little bit pleased. “Sleepover pog,” he announces – flatly, but not unhappily.

“Sleepover pog,” Niki echoes, and yawns deeply enough that she feels her jaw click. She winces. “Yeah, I think it’s bedtime.”

“You got it,” he agrees.

Techno whistles, but there’s no flood of snowy fur that rushes to meet him. Just the answering bark of one wolf-dog, just one, ambling towards them through the shrubby grass. This dog, Niki can't help but notice, isn't exactly snowy anymore either – their fur is stained a dappled maroon, and an iron tang hits her nose as they plop down on their butt in front of Techno, tail shivering as if they can't decide whether they want to wag it or not. Blood runs through their fur, clumping and matting stickily under the moonlight.

The dog’s eyes flicker over to her eagerly as they await their next order, nose quivering with curiosity. They edge towards her, just slightly, and Niki startles back – more from the sickly, bloody smell that wafts her way than anything else – and Techno tuts them admonishingly.

“C’mon, Tyche,” he scolds them, though he doesn't sound particularly stern. “Your social skills are, like, worse than mine.”

Tyche just wags their tail.

“Don't worry about her,” Techno adds to Niki, “she’s a friendly one.” He pauses, waving his hand in a so-so motion. “I mean. If you're lucky. She kinda plays favourites.”

Niki has already done a lot of brave things tonight, so – what's one more for the pile, she thinks. She drops slowly down to her haunches, a hand outstretched, and lets the dog give her an investigation of snuffles.

It tickles.

Despite everything, Niki giggles – Tyche pushes her muzzle eagerly into Niki's palms as she obediently sets to scritching her behind the ears, shoving her large head into Niki's arms as if Niki could scoop her up and carry her home. Her fur is quilt-soft beneath the smattering of sweat and blood, and she has quite strong opinions about making sure Niki runs her fingers through all of it as she pets her, rewarding a particularly solid pet with little licks to Niki’s cheeks and ears. Niki's fingertips brush against a lovingly handwoven collar as she tries to avoid a lolling tongue – unmistakable in its craftsmanship, sturdy but not tough beneath her hands.

“She’s the only one that made it out,” Techno mutters, more to himself than to Niki. There’s a desolate note in his voice – quiet, buried deep inside his flat tone, but it’s there. Wrapped between the words, like it’s a secret that he has to hide away.

(All at once, Niki feels very guilty for the unkind things she had thought about Techno and his wolf army.)

She sinks her arms into the thick fur of the dog sitting happily in front of her, taking turns to pet her heartily on her side and rub warmth into the base of her ears. Blood is starting to tack from her fur onto Niki's arms, probably spotting her dress. It’ll stain. In this moment, though, she really cannot bring herself to care.

She sits back on her heels as Tyche paws absently at the blood staining her muzzle, and watches a tiny reflection of herself stare back through those dark, dark eyes.

“I guess we're both lucky,” she tells the two of them.

Somewhere else, a knight nurses her charred, ravaged heart. There is blood in her hair, in the webbing between her fingers, in the pinks of her eyes. It lines every crevice and cranny in the rolling slopes of her skin, her muscle, her bone – it is everywhere. It won't come out. No matter how hard she scrubs it away with these soft, useless hands.

These soft, useless hands that tore Antfrost in two. And by Neptune, if she got her fucking hands on Bad, she’d more than happily do it again. She’d relish the opportunity. That, Puffy thinks – that would be her own cheerful little memory to hoard away. A goal, a target, a piece of sparkling gold. A lighthouse to aim her wrath towards. Forget a sword, forget a shield, she’ll tear him to pieces with nothing more than her very own hands if she has to. Her heart hardens – tougher than steel, than diamonds. Fireproof. She will make sure, she swears, that Bad and Antfrost and Hannah and the rest of them burn for what they did. What they did to Foolish. What they did to her. She, too, is tired. Tired of everyone’s shit. Tired of fighting back tears over Foolish, replaying the exact moment Antfrost’s blade pierces his chest and he crumples in her head, over and over again.

(A larger part of her is terrified. Terrified that she let Foolish die. Terrified that if she slips, if she fails, it might happen again. And again, and again, and again – however many times it takes to really, truly, kill a god.)

Here is how you ruin a knight – you turn up the heat, and watch her fall apart.

That noble knight, the one that believed in hope and home and friends and so much more useless bullshit – cardinal red whispers in her waiting ear, because no matter how much blood was spilled tonight, it is still hungry.

Restless, Puffy finally falls asleep.

The pages keep turning. Bad apologises, and so do the rest of them. Puffy’s friends might forget her birthday, but the Egg certainly did not – and it has a special gift for her, an offering that’s all about celebrating Puffy. It will be so wonderful, as Puffy plunges blind and feet-first into the scarlet abyss, that she might shout that she must be dreaming. She isn’t, though. She is wide, wide awake.

In a sense.

Once upon a time, Niki was a princess in a beautiful kingdom. The one girl in a playground-nation full of boys – she was precious, and sweet, and less listened to than she would have liked. But the kingdom was hers, and she was her kingdom’s. Nothing could ever go wrong.

That kingdom fell to rot, so Niki burnt it down herself. And she kept burning – her heart, her gut, her throat alight with flame – for a very long time. Even after putting the fire down, she was different. Burnt and sharper than before. She couldn’t run on fiery rage forever, but she knew now that she could handle the heat.

And then her once-beloved knight, angry and afraid, was driven into the dark.

Niki never, never saw her again. Sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

The end.

Once upon a time, Niki finally awakens – after tossing and turning for endless hours, uneasy even in her sleep, tucked away in Phil's spare room.

With her quilt still slung warmly around her shoulders, she marches up to Technoblade’s cabin to demand that he teach her how to take up her sword and fight.

Chapter Text

It always ends with true love’s kiss, in the fairytales.

“What even makes it true love’s kiss?” Niki asks, a little older than seven-or-something-approximating-that.

It’s not bedtime, so Auntie Ashe doesn’t mind Niki’s questions. Instead, she – quite confidently – hands Niki a carton of eggs to crack into the mixing bowl. Niki takes them dutifully, running a fingertip over the egg’s speckled shells as Auntie hums in thought.

“True love isn’t… exactly like the stories,” she hazards. (Barely avoiding the phrase not real, because, well – that is somewhat the truth, but probably not something to say outright when young ears are intently listening. If true love has a definition outside the storybooks, it is certainly a complicated one.)

Niki nods sagely in understanding as she cracks the first egg against the counter. Some shell falls to the floor, not that she is really paying attention – the runny whites and yolk still tip easily into the bowl.

“Because the stories end then,” she remarks. “And the prince or the princess is there to save the day.”

“That would be it,” Auntie agrees – slightly relieved that Niki still has a child’s imagination, perhaps, and is easily distracted by sugar and flour. “They come along to save the day.”

“Uh oh,” remarks Techno, apropos of nothing.

It’s a quiet day in the Arctic, clear-skied but unseasonably brisk for spring, so Techno’s comment isn’t too concerning. The Syndicate meeting of the morning wrapped up almost an hour ago, but no one is quite ready to face the biting snow outside yet, so the four of them simply lazy around the meeting table as friends instead of co-anarchists – Ranboo is studiously mending a tear in one of their suit jackets, Phil whittles something not-yet-identifiable with a jackknife, and Techno sifts through months’ worth of mail. Niki has been polishing her axe for the last half hour, and if her hand doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall off when she’s done, she thinks that she’ll take up embroidering some summer wildflowers onto the cuffs of a coat she left lying around Techno’s cabin the last time they sparred together. The season are turning, after all, even if it feels like summer is dragging its feet as it crawls into the Arctic.

She keeps on polishing, unbothered. Letters often involve people, and people often involve Techno saying uh oh, so she isn’t exactly worried.

Phil, though – he peers over at Techno, resting his chunk of wood in his lap, suspiciously eyeing the envelope that Techno is currently handling like a child caught with the last biscuit from the biscuit tin.

“What’s that, mate?” he asks.

“A little overdue paperwork,” Techno replies, sounding meek. Niki and Ranboo both perk up curiously, subtly turning a listening ear each in Techno’s direction as he folds the letter over. Or, well – Ranboo’s ears are quite a bit larger than Niki’s, fluttery and winglike, but Techno doesn’t notice them regardless. “You ever get a comm from someone, and you see it, and you’re like – oh, I should answer that, totally, but it’s not really a great time right now – and then you leave it, and you kinda, uh… just forget about it?”

“All the time,” Ranboo reassures him.

“Well, that, but on paper.”

“Old-fashioned way to do things,” Phil comments, in a tone that makes it sound like he anticipates a few details being left out of Techno’s description. Niki silently agrees, because this is, like, a customary Techno conversational-evasional manoeuvre.

“Yeah, well. I’m sure it’s fine.” Techno gives the letter another brief onceover. “So as it turns out, Puffy was askin’ about the Syndicate awhile ago. Joining in maybe. Wonder what happened with that.”

Niki’s head shoots up so fast, the whiplash hits her almost as swiftly as Techno’s words can sink in.

“Puffy?” she asks. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Phil place down his knife and rest his forehead in his hand. “I – she did? When?”

“Uh,” Techno wisely provides. Phil reaches over the table, swiping the letter from him – Techno makes a sound of complaint, but does absolutely nothing to retrieve it.

“Techno,” he says, squinting at the letterhead. “Mate, this is old.”

“How old,” Niki demands, dropping her axe onto the table (someone mumbles a distracted hey at the clatter) and marching up to phil with an expectant hand outstretched. Fortunately, Phil knows well enough not to waste time with her – he lets the letter go easily, and Niki’s eyes skim over Puffy’s message. Her handwriting is as round and as even as ever – it’s hers, without a shadow of a doubt. Niki has read love notes written in the very same shape. It’s just as Puffy as her fingertips. “Techno, this – this is from months ago!”

I’m leaving for the new world for now, it reads. I’ve learnt that everyone has an agenda on this server, and that you can’t trust anyone.

Niki didn’t even know there was a new world out there. She’s never even considered it. Her world, since she stepped onto this server, has only ever stretched to the bounds of its realm-end – she knew her kingdom (her territory) like the back of her hand, every mangled build and blemish and deep, sprawling scar. It has always belonged to her, and she has always belonged to it. That is what made it her home. She’s lit it aflame, torn buildings down, left deep and blood-speckled scratches down her skin – but she has never once been tempted to just… walk off of the page, no matter how many terrible things were scrawled into it.

Niki hasn’t even seen Puffy since the banquet. And now she’s leaving, she’s gone.

In her mind’s eye, Puffy is swallowed by the tar-dark of night as she flees from the banquet – after Foolish – and the question of why would Puffy want to leave dies on her tongue before she even bothers asking it. It is replaced, instead, with – where is Puffy now?

“She could have left already,” Techno says. Niki startles slightly at the sound of his voice, and shoots him a severe look – he flinches, hands raising in surrender, as Phil hums thoughtfully. Quite frankly, if Niki is going to be honest, he does not seem nearly as unsettled as Niki feels that he should be.

“I didn’t think it was that easy to leave this place,” he muses.

“I need to check on her,” Niki declares. She grabs her axe from the table, slotting it neatly across her shoulderblades. She’ll need armour. A bow, for certain, and arrows to match – spare knives, potions. The thoughts flow together easily, picking up pace as they tumble downstream, crashing into white foam onto sharp, terrible rocks. “I need – I need to talk to her – ”

A cool hand on her forearm stops her flight, and Phil comes into view. She wriggles unhappily, not that it makes a difference.”

“Phil,” she demands, fixing him with a stubborn look. “Let me go.”

“Niki, mate – I’m sure she’s fine. It’s an old letter. She might already be gone.” Niki wilts, and Phil looks apologetic. She can almost forgive him for it. “I'm not saying she is, you just need to set your expectations.”

“She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.” Not to Niki. “Not – not if she was able to. She might not be okay.”

“Wouldn’t she?”

No. Maybe before the banquet Niki could have doubted, because if their positions were reversed Niki – coward she was – might not do the same. But after? After they danced together and everything was the same, and she saw how Puffy looked at her (looked through her, every piece) and Puffy kissed her again? No. Niki knows it as well as she knows her own heartbeat.

“She wouldn’t,” she insists. “It’s – Phil, it’s Puffy.”

It’s a terrible explanation, really. Phil hardly even knows Puffy, not how Niki does – he doesn’t know how loyal she is, that she would never leave somewhere she called home unless something was dragging her away from it. That she wouldn’t leave people who still needed her help behind. That Puffy would be sailing blind into this new world she writes about, leaving more forgotten memories in her wake, and Niki knows that she would hate that. She would hate it so, so much. Even in a world where Puffy did hate Niki, or Antfrost, or Bad, or anyone – she would hate leaving them all behind more.

Phil doesn’t let go of her arm, but his grip loosens. Niki forces herself to hold still, keeps herself from jerking her arm away, and he nods.

“I know,” he answers simply. Techno swans past the two of them, having donned his furs at some point in the conversation, shadowed by Ranboo – there’s a cluster of netherite bundled in their arms, chestpieces and pauldrons and gauntlets. Niki blinks, but the sparkle of metal catching the light does not fade. “We’re just not gonna let you go off on your own.”

“Duh,” Techno adds, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Ranboo nods in agreement.

“And if it is the Egg, like Puffy was worried about,” Phil continues, “we – all four of us – are gonna smash that fucking thing against the wall. Yeah?”

Niki flushes.

“Oh,” she says dumbly. “Yeah.”

Because come to think of it – which, she does think of it, as she helps Phil strap his rerebrace against his arm – it kind of is the most obvious thing in the world.

//

The sun has only just started to sink beneath the rolling hilltops as they finally dismount from their horses, dark shadows pooling like thick, still water in every dip and valley. Niki whispers a few quick, calm words to Wobbuffet as leads are tied to posts and potions are retrieved from saddlebags – they set down some torches, and some strongly-worded signs regarding how very much these horses are loved by their riders, thank you, so we’ll mind you not to bother them during the night. The four of them scramble up the hillside as a perfect diamond, leaving more torches and muddy footprints as a path trailing behind them, weapons drawn and shields at the ready.

Puffy’s house rises over the hill crest, wreathed in a wicked crown of scarlet vines.

(So Niki was right, in the end. All she feels as reward is a deep, horrible pit of dread forming in her stomach.)

Crimson vines blot out the silhouette of Puffy’s house, a twisted lighthouse that stands against the rolling fog of doom-grey sky – an open wound, cut into the landscape and staining twilight a brilliant red. The blood spills into the grass beneath their feet. First small tendrils, weaving deftly between blades of grass, thin as veins. But the closer they get, the wider they grow – as veins tend to, leading back to the heart – sinking into the dirt like the gnarled roots of a tree, sapping air and colour and life. Niki flinches as the first fistful of dull, dead strands snap loudly beneath her boot, bled dry. That’s all she can hear, really – the sound of grass crushed beneath their feet as they walk, the occasional swear under Phil’s breath as dirt and scrubby grass is swallowed and swallowed by vine underfoot. No wind-whistle, no birdsong. No distant, chattering voices. It’s as if everything in the vicinity has just… fallen asleep.

Or has been killed.

“Just when ya think government might actually try redistributing your share of stuff into something that, like, benefits the community,” Techno remarks, digging the toe of his boot beneath a weedy little vine. It pulls free of the dirt with a stubborn tug. “Nah, man. Vine pit.”

“Vine pit,” Phil echoes, laughing quietly. Ranboo audibly swallows – Niki glances over at them to see their eyes are still locked onto the thicket looming over the horizon, unyielding. Gently, she knocks the plane of her shield against theirs.

The shield lands with a shallow thud against Ranboo’s, just enough to blink them out of their terrified daze. They shoot her a mildly relieved, well – not a smile, not even close. And it’s not even a very relieved expression under normal circumstances. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and they look appreciative anyway, which is what is really important.

By the time they reach Puffy’s front door, they’re practically swimming in vines – small ones that curl by their feet like worms, large ones as thick as Niki’s thigh. There are so many of them, choking the entrance to the base and sprawling from what must have once been windows, bundled like window planters that cascade in long, red fingers down the stone walls. The sound they make when torn into with axe and sword is horrible, stark and harsh – like snapping sticks with bare hands – and Niki flinches uncomfortably as the largest ones crack, and crack, and crack like her spine after sleeping on stones.

The door is long warped, judging by the state of the wood and the wine-red tendrils that emerge from the thin space between door and frame, and gives easily under a particularly stubborn kick. The door falls inward with an almighty crash, and the four of them cross the threshold – Niki leads. That part isn’t even a question at this point, not really.

The large, sweeping room is a mess – not the organised chaos that Puffy always favoured, but as if the entire build had been lifted in the palm of a giant hand, and shaken as hard as a stubborn child with a snowglobe. Chests lining the walls yawn open with half of their belongings spilled onto the floor, marked with scuffs and scratches despite the dust that hangs in the air like snowflakes. A struggle, maybe – Niki’s heart kicks painfully in her chest.  Crimson vines snake through all of it, waiting to trip them all as they split up to figure out what the hell exactly happened here, blotting out the last rays of sun and rising starlight from the large windows.

It smells like metal. All of it, suffocatingly so. Every breath tastes like iron dripping down Niki’s throat.

Cautiously, she nudges a piled heap of vines in the middle of the room with the toe of her boot – it’s as thick as her torso, if not thicker, like a long, scarlet slug stretched out across the ground. The vines don’t give way under her boot like normal plants would, rigid and tough. Niki screws her mouth up apprehensively, and kneels to investigate more thoroughly.

It’s strange. The shape is – familiar, in some sense, even if Niki can’t quite put her finger on why. When she looks around the room, this isn’t the only one here, either. More lumps dot the floor, scattered in some random formation, as if they were absent-mindedly dropped there to slump in between a criss-crossed carpet of vines underfoot. One by a window, shattered, now filled to bursting with ruby sprouts. Another two in the corner of the room that Phil is poking around in, what might have once been an armoury. A fourth by the door, and another by the line of open chests. Did the Egg ever make newer, smaller copies of itself before? Did it ever grow anything but vines? Niki doesn’t remember – but she doesn’t remember much from those days, anyway. Maybe Techno will know. Maybe Phil.

But Niki – she settles back onto her haunches, staring at the growth by her feet. Eyelike whorls in its bark stare back at her.

And then, they blink.

Niki startles backward, feet scrambling beneath her, but not quickly enough to escape the hand – the hand, she watches in horror – that tears forward to grab her by the wrist. She lets out an alarmed shout, jerking her wrist back, but whatever has a hold of her is strong despite its…

Its pale, human skin.

Movement flickers in the corner of her eye, ruby red. Those clusters scattered around the room convulse nauseatingly, vines twisting and untwisting, crashing open beneath the shallow starlight as bodies – no, not bodies, people – are hatched from each one. Phil swears, Techno shouts, and the screech of metal drawn from its scabbard sings through the air. One tug of her wrist, nothing. The fingers around it barely budge. Niki’s heart thrums a panic in her throat, and she digs her heels into a woven net of angry scarlet. The second doesn’t free her either, but jerks an index and thumb out of place, which might just barely be enough – Niki frantically throws her weight backwards as the hand that bruises her wrist is followed by an arm, a shoulder, a face. She yanks her wrist free with a sudden, frightened howl, drawing her axe as the figure rises on uncomfortably steady feet.

Scarlet eyes. A bright, bloody scarlet – and scarlet around his throat, down his arms, staining his white sweatshirt like blood dripping down the length of a sword. Punz.

Niki throws a frantic look around, as if it will fend off the nausea rapidly flooding her stomach as Punz’s cold, garnet gaze lands on her, but no – there, by Techno, Hannah raises glittering netherite in a furious, crimson arc above her head. Ponk lumbers forwards them by his vantage point at the poor. Antfrost, Seepeekay, more rising. Not all of them with faces and names – some are barely-humanoid constructs of writhing vines, with four legs or two heads or long, vicious fingers that reach out to swipe at them, moving as if they wade underwater instead of walking on land.

Can the Egg even do that? Since when? Since when could it just, just – grab people, wave them around like nothing more than puppets? Like – 

Like they’ve been possessed. Just like the banquet, with Bad’s horrible smile and Hannah’s dead, dead eyes.

Nothing should be able to do that. But the Egg can.

Niki swallows the bone-deep terror at that thought – of being puppeted, controlled, brought violently and viscerally to heel – setting her jaw against the nausea, wrapping her fingers securely around her axe. She will not feel sick (she cannot feel sick), because to be sick right now would be a distraction. A distraction she cannot afford. She swims through the horrible revulsion of seeing so many familiar faces puppeteered like corpses, somehow more dead than they ever were at the banquet or when they ran around the server ruby-eyed – maybe dead for real, maybe dead and never-coming-back – because she cannot think about that right now. She has to fight.

Punz has her on the back foot, but only briefly. He is quick on his feet, but in this state – both dragged along by and tripping over scarlet vibes – Niki is quicker. She weaves away from him on light feet, keeping an eye out for the others. Techno isn’t hard to find, hollering challenges to undead constructs and player-puppets alike, leaving a garden of shorn vines in his wake. Niki dashes for him. She’s still no PvPer on her own, but support – she can do that, she can do that well, and so she will.

She ducks and dodges the length of Ponk’s newly-constructed arm, and splits some construct in two with the full weight of her axe – chasing its long arc with a carefully-balanced spin, letting the momentum carry her to catch another shambling body in the calf as it approaches her. For every body they cut down, another two rise – weaker, maybe, but not in numbers. And maybe she can’t speak for the others, but for her friends – Ponk and Punz and Hannah – she doesn’t strike to kill. They do. She dodges another attack from on high, and her chin jerks up at the sound of a sword clattering loudly to the ground. She locks eyes with a pair of slitted red, and Antfrost – unarmed, but claws wickedly bared – yowls as he lunges for her throat.

She dodges his weight but not the slash of his claws, nicking her chin with a set of stinging scratches. Niki curses, resettling her grip on her axe, but Antfrost is fast and nimble and grabs her before she can swing it towards him. He pushes forward, and Niki trips backward over a raised vine.

She feels guilty before she can even will her arms to move. But still, she lashes out blindly with her axe – please don’t hit anything too important, please don’t knock him down permanently, part of her prays – as she lands hard on her back, crying out as her shield almost pulls her shoulder from its socket with its dead, useless weight on her arm.

Antfrost looms over her for all of four seconds, watching her struggle to catch her breath with the bated anticipation of a predator waiting for the kill – an arrow squarely pierces his shoulder, almost knocking him off of his feet. He tosses a fierce hiss over his shoulder, ripping the arrow from his flesh with no more than a flinch (even though you’re not supposed to do that, even Niki knows). That hiss transforms into a horrible snarl as he whips around, tail lashing. Niki rolls backward, scrambling for her axe, and catches sight of Ranboo – perfectly poised and as focussed as she’s ever seen him, only twenty paces from them, holding his bow ready to fire another shot into Antfrost’s back. Antfrosts scowls, slinking out of his range to dart towards an utterly unconcerned Techno.

“Thanks, Ranboo!” she calls out. They nod, terse. They’re in the zone. Relief sits in Niki’s chest like a warm salve – when Ranboo is in the zone, it is very difficult to shake them out of it, which is all the better for a fight like this. No time to dwell, though, as she dodges a vine that flings itself wildly for her throat.

Duck, weave, slash, duck again. It’s like a vicious dance – pirouetting away from danger, always light on her feet, keeping herself from stumbling heavy and losing her footing. Niki’s no fighter, never has been, but dancing is something she’s good at. She can learn the steps, she can keep up with the strigendo tempo, and she’s practised swinging her axe around for hours in the snow by now. She darts forward to slash down more rising vines, dodges the ping of an arrow whizzing by her head, watches as Techno bodily tosses something – a player or not, she can’t tell – into the wall. It barely even feels like they’re making a dent. Everything she cuts down regrows just as quickly, grabbing at her ankles and arms. Niki jerks herself out of their reach, propelled backwards by sheer momentum, and – 

She sees it – 

There’s a gap in the wall.

No, gap doesn’t describe it well enough – a crack that stretches up the wall’s length like an arm outstretched, a wide, dark space peering at Niki from its base. It’s a tunnel, encircled with a ring of rose-red vines, practically beckoning her to walk into it.

Some fine, invisible thread pulls taut between Niki and the tunnel, tugging at her like fishing twine. A tunnel could be an escape route. A tunnel could be Puffy’s escape route.

Niki weaves her way through the tangles of battle to the tunnel’s mouth, running a gloved hand over the crumbling dust and dirt that lines its walls – a burnt rust colour, speckled with a bright vermillion that could be crushed netherwart. Warmth radiates through the thin leather of her glove as she reaches out into the darkness, swallowing her hand whole, painting dappled shadows across the dips and valleys between her fingertips.

She needs a flint and steel. Or a match. Not that she has any.

Niki casts a wary look over her shoulder, back at the battle – still raging happily in her absence to that silent, unspoken tempo, the band playing on.

She takes one cautious step into the darkness, letting the dirt crunch quietly beneath her boot. The shadows spill over her like pitch, a pond in the middle of a moonless night. She takes another. Another, then – 

The dirt beneath her feet crumbles into nothingness – just disappears, gives way entirely, gone – and Niki tumbles forward with a cry, half-falling, half-sliding against the rough walls of the cavern, down down down. Her axe falls from her grasp as she scrabbles at loose dirt and stone, fingernails scraped and split open as her hands skid helplessly against the sheer face. She can’t get a grip on anything to slow her fall. It all just falls apart between her fingers, until –

Thud.

That’s the sound of Niki falling straight on her ass, basically – her unsteady guess at sturdy footing holding in on itself like a tower of playing cards, rolling over a wobbly ankle until she falls right over. Her axe clatters to the newly-discovered ground beside her, announcing its presence with the metallic racket of netherite on stone. Her hair is falling loose from where it’s been tied out of her face, an entire chunk of it dangling uncomfortably by her left ear, and her fingertips sting like a bitch. Niki groans – through her scraped hands, her twisted ankle, the throbbing pain in her tailbone – and reaches back to tuck her hair back into place.

She uncorks a healing pot from the pouch strapped to her gater, taking a careful swig before she even bothers trying to stand. The pain washes away, leaving a warm glow resting from her weary shoulders to her scraped fingertips to her stiff, tired feet.

Niki hauls herself upward, surveilling where she’s fallen – it’s dark, mostly, besides a small sliver-view of the room above. She can only really see stolen corners of window and wall, and she’s far enough down that her neck aches unhappily when she tries to peer any further. It smells earthy down here, but… strange. Heavier, somehow, in a sense that feels more wet than her city or other underground mines she’s spent time in. Not quite like springwater, which isn’t too uncommon near her city, which is sharp with minerals – this, instead, smells as if someone had bottled fresh rain and flooded the small space with it. Dirt and crushed rock and other, mealy things muddy together beneath her feet, sticking to the soles of her boots when she lifts her foot. When she turns around, the tunnel – because it’s still going, she realises, even broken, staring down another gaping maw into the earth – continues behind her, trickling on down… somewhere.

She could build her way back up. She could go back to the others, and wait until they’ve cleared the vines.

But if this is where the tunnel leads – if Puffy might have built this in her escape…

“Guys?” Niki shouts upward. Oh, she hopes they can hear her. She places a block of dirt down and scrambles up a step. “Guys? There’s a tunnel – it’s broken. I fell.”

She can see the crown of someone’s head pop over the edge of the pit, silhouetted – an actual crown, now that she squints, and a bone-white mask. A vine swerves towards Techno as he peers down at her, but he catches and crushes it in one nonchalant hand before it can even bother him.

“You good?” he asks.

“Not hurt,” she calls back. “But there’s something down here. I have to go.”

She can’t see Techno’s expression change from where she stands, but she can sense it happen. “Niki, that doesn’t seem like a great idea.”

“Probably not,” she admits, “but I can’t wait, not if – Techno, Techno, behind you – ”

A writhing, scarlet body flails a too-long arm towards Techno – but there’s Phil, descending like a falcon with its prey, digging his sword into the meat of its shoulder until it slumps lifelessly out of view. Techno turns. There must be more in its wake, because Niki sees the sparkle of netherite in his hands, and then nothing at all.

“We’ll be right down!” Phil calls, chirpy even in the middle of battle.

But Niki cannot wait. She won’t wait – the mission isn’t the same for her. It isn’t just get rid of the Egg, get out, not for her. Well, if they do destroy the Egg, then everyone upstairs will stop fighting and all of Niki’s friends – all of them – will be okay, and they can bring everyone home. But that isn’t why she’s here. That isn’t why she came. Niki is here for her own reasons, which she thinks Phil understands every time he prays, and well, maybe Ranboo and Techno understand in their own ways too.

Get Puffy, get rid of the Egg, get out.

So she descends.

That thin sliver of twilight disappears behind her as she steps into the newly-revealed tunnel, unable to reach its feeble fingers into the darkness. The netherrack glows like inset gems under the flame, precious things – rubies, garnets, spinel and tourmaline. But even that only lasts for so long. When she starts off, the tunnel’s fit is narrow around her shoulders – but she walks, and she walks, and the walls widen and each jewel-sparkle flares out into quiet shadow. The tunnel tumbles further downward, dappled and uneven under her feet. She reaches out a hand to balance herself against the wall, and she almost misses it.

The downward slope meets her feet more smoothly this time around, and instead of falling, she shuffles up to the lip of a sheer, tumbling drop. Ruby light casts itself onto the topsides of her boots – lining the laces, glinting off of the buckles in brilliant flashes of red. She already kind of knows what she she will find here, before she truly crosses the threshold.She feels out the downward slope of her path better this time, shuffling in tiny motions up to the lip of a sheer, tumbling drop at the tunnel’s mouth. Red light casts itself across the top of her boots, lining the laces and illuminating the metallic buckles with flares of bright scarlet light.Niki is in the Egg's chamber.

It sits in the centre of the room, flecked with iron and obsidian – taking up centre stage, unmistakably the Egg’s chamber, vines sprawling out from beneath its round shape in endless twists and tangles. The spiralling tendrils weave into each other, over and under, a dizzying tapestry thrown across the floor and climbing up the walls. There's another one of those awful, player-sized lumps in the corner – and there, right beneath the Egg, another slightly larger one. It just… sits there, lifeless, like a clump of dirt in an uneven road. But it really isn't. She knows that it isn't.

It’s dangerous – she knows it’s dangerous – but Niki thinks of who might be missing from the battle upstairs, the battle she can still hear distantly if she listens very, very closely. She doesn't kneel, not quite, but she stands far closer to that horrible lump than she should, and looks down at its blank, strangled face. The lump doesn’t move at all.

When a player loses a life on this server, they respawn – their physical form falters, blood and flesh and bone, and then the code does too, splintering into nothingness. But instead, this lump – this body – it just sits at her feet, as loyal as a dog.

A terrible lurching sound rips through the air, startling Niki out of her stupor.

Niki whips her axe upward to defend herself, but nothing lunges at her – instead, another tangle of vines come to smother the tunnel that she crept in from, weaving under-over one another until she cannot even see a sliver of the shadows that sit beyond it, let alone the gap she fell in from. The vines are as thick as her arm, and woven together, who even knows how thick the barrier keeping her from her escape is. The hairs on her forearms prick up as a persistent kind of anxiety clouds her mind, looking at those vines, stubborn and still moving. There’s no way out, no escape. She’ll have to hack her way out.

The vines, unbothered by her fear, keep shifting – wriggling and gliding together like snakes, tying themselves into knots, so unnatural looking. Just like those bodies it would summon above, lurching from left to right on unsteady false limbs, long and unwieldy as spiderlegs. It moves like an upsettingly large spider, one horribly bent leg after the other, crawling down a waterspout. From the ceiling, then, descends – 

Puffy.

She wears her usual frock coat, with her gorgeous curls – now dull and frayed, split at the ends like rope – falling down her shoulders in knotted clumps. There’s a kind of weight to how she stands atop a throne of scarlet vines, straight and tall, but as if something heavy sits square at her back. Those vines crawl up her boots, weave between her fingers and wrap around her chest and throat and horns, held as snug as an embrace. There’s red on her hands, her coat, her face – splotchy leaves and swirling vines, leaving stubborn tracks from the base of her throat to her jaw.

Her arms open as her gaze lands upon Niki, looking down at her like something small. Niki, without even thinking about it – without so much as noticing, limbs leaden, as if they were impossible to lift with willpower alien – lets the blade of her axe tip helplessly towards the ground.

Puffy’s eyes are a brilliant, Crimson red.

She moves like a wild predator, lithe and smooth as she steps towards her on rising steps formed from vines. Some distant part of Niki is aware that she should back away, should raise her axe, do something. But there is something so horrible, so fixing about those crimson eyes that rivets Niki right down to the code of her core – something primordial, something that just gleefully sings wrong, wrong, wrong. Heat rolls off of Puffy’s form, like the radiance of a forge, warming Niki’s cheeks like summer sunlight. The furred collar of her cloak chokes her under the heat, sitting heavy around her neck. Vines stretch behind Puffy like massive wings, framing her – brushing the corners of the room, wrapping themselves around the walls, curling around Niki’s feet like snakes as she steps down to Niki’s level. This room, this place – it is nothing but an extension of her, existing only as she (the Egg) sees fit. Sweat beads in the corner tucked between Niki’s chin and her neck, and her fingertips tingle with damp heat as she struggles to hold onto her axe.

As if she’s going to do anything with it.

“How nice of you to join us for the celebrations,” Puffy greets her. But her voice – it is deeper than Niki has ever heard it, in some way that goes behind simple things like pitch or timbre. There is more to it. More of it. More that Niki cannot hear with her ears, but feels in the roiling dread in her stomach. The lure dangling above the anglerfish’s toothy maw – this mirage of Puffy, it is dangling her in front of Niki. “It was my birthday, you know. No one remembered.”

“It was.” Niki wets her lips. Somehow, the small motion does not exactly steel her. “August 18th, wasn’t it.”

“See! You remembered,” says the woman in front of her, welcoming smile stretching into a delighted grin. She claps her hands cheerfully. “Not difficult at all, is it.”

“What did you do with Puffy?” Niki demands. She doesn’t raise her axe to threaten this woman, because she knows that she can’t – she cannot lift the blade to her, even if this isn’t Puffy, even if this cannot be Puffy. Even as the delight she wears falls to some kind of confusion, some kind of offence, and then to a sad little pout as she stares at Niki’s armour and pathetic attempt at a battle stance.

“...Niki, it’s me,” she tries. She sounds plaintive, and Niki briefly squeezes her eyes closed against it. She doesn’t fall for these tricks anymore. “I know I look a little different, but – people change, that’s all! It’s still me.”

“No. No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” The woman tilts her head, and that pleading little look slips right off of her face. “We can go back and forth like this for a while, actually. It’s fun. You next, yeah?”

“I know Puffy,” Niki bites out. “You aren’t her. You’re just – just wearing her skin.”

“But it suits me so well,” she sings, letting her hands delicately trail up her torso, past her ruffled collar, like petals drifting just-so in a summer breeze. Her impressed smile is so sweet, it’s almost sickly. But then she drops into that unimpressed sulk again, and it almost makes her look like the woman she’s pretending to be. “Oh, come on. Don’t be miserable. I thought you loved me, Niki. Aren’t you happy for me?”

That’s not what Niki told her, the last time she said anything to Puffy about love. It was screaming and begging and horrible, cruel words shouted in her own voice, it was watching Puffy’s face fall and her shoulders slump as she walked away. But somehow, that doesn’t matter. Puffy – whatever this thing pretending to be Puffy is – knows anyway, because Puffy knows Niki better than almost anyone else in the world. Even when she’s a fake.

“Silver of moonlight in her hair, lips that shame the red, red rose,” she croons as her vines deposit her onto the ground, a scarce few steps from Niki. She takes them with a smooth little bounce in her step, as if she dances to music Niki cannot hear. “Well, I’m happy for me. Sucks that you can’t find it in yourself to feel the same way.”

“Puffy wouldn’t want this.”

“Who says I wouldn’t?” She’s fierce now – retorts in a snappish tone, blowing smoke. “All of my friends are here. They aren’t fighting anymore – not each other. I have a home. The Egg is my home, no matter where I go, and it’ll always be with me, Niki. I’ll never be lost again.”

Niki’s stomach sinks into her gut. Puffy isn’t right, she isn’t. Those are all lies the Egg has told her, insincere and fake. Niki knows it as clearly as she can see the scarlet thrum swallowing Puffy’s irises, the coals that smoulder red-hot between rings of hazel-green, blotting them out.

But fuck, they’re convincing lies.

“I know you, Puffy,” she repeats. She takes a step forward, and Puffy does not step back to counter it. “We’ve – we’ve known each other for so long. Longer than the Egg has known you.” Lie, maybe. We were in love, once – in a beautiful dream, she doesn’t say, because she’s worried that might be a lie too. Puffy seems angry enough with her words besides.

“You didn’t even come to my birthday!” she shouts – heat buffets from her form anew, like kindling tossed into an open, flaring bonfire. “You didn’t bring me a git!”

“I – Puffy, I wasn’t even invited to your birthday! This is just – you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing, you want to be angry! You think I would do that on purpose?” It’s silly, it’s stupid, but Puffy seems upset anyway and Niki hardly feels any better, with that facsimile of hurt buried in the anger on her face. Can she even call it fake? Does it matter? She didn’t bring Puffy a gift, she didn’t even know Puffy had gone, she didn’t even know Puffy needed her. If it isn’t wrong, does it matter that it’s fake at all? “Come with me, Puffy. We’ll go up outside – ”

“I don’t want to go outside,” Puffy snaps, her glare scalding. “I’m perfectly comfortable here.”

The vines embracing the room pulse and flutter with her breath. TNT didn’t even damage the Egg, despite how Sam tried. They cut all of those vines down, and they just kept growing back. Glowing scarlet lines the walls – the Egg doesn’t even seem any less powerful than it had in the winter, awoken from its hibernation, rested and hungry.

Niki bites out, “sometimes we have to do things that are not comfortable.”

“Why? To make you happy? I already am.” Puffy tilts her head, and the vines that decorate her horns dangle like flowers. It is a motion more curious than threatening, which for all the heat in the room, sends a chill down Niki’s spine – like a drip of ice water, carving a horrible thin line down the length of her back. “Are you happy, Niki? Really?”

Silence answers Puffy’s question.

The quiet presses down on her shoulders. Niki can hardly hear her own breath anymore, to be honest. Shouldn’t she be able to hear the skirmish above, even distantly – the clash of metal on metal, shouting and chaos? She can’t. She cannot hear a thing outside of this room, Puffy’s voice. And her arms are starting to tire of holding her axe.

“Yes,” Niki replies, oh-so-convincingly. She was never the orator that so many of her friends once were, though. She could only ever speak from her heart. And in this moment, her heart feels weak – stuttering in her chest to a weak and unsteady rhythm, beating against the pressure of being buried underground in cardinal crimson.

“Without me,” Puffy elaborates. Niki does not have a response to that, and so, she doesn’t try to make one up. The predator stalks towards her, with those smooth, lithe movements – circling her, Niki realises, as Puffy continues her venomous stride past her. “Without all of the people you hurt – everyone that you pushed away. You made them hate you, and now what do you have to show for yourself?”

All Niki can hear is the feeble flutter of her own heartbeat, pressure that rings high in her ears, and Puffy’s voice – overpowering, a whisper that ricochets through her head at full volume, a thousand words overlapping each other at once. The sounds swim, as if her head is thrust underwater, until all she can hear is the sound of Puffy’s voice rushing against her ears. There is nothing, and there is everything, and there is Puffy.

“Do you think your prince will save you?” Puffy asks. It sounds less like a question, and more that Niki is being mocked – there’s a ghostly sting in her chest, because Puffy would never make fun of her like that, but here they are and here she is, smiling at Niki in a way that couldn’t be any less friendly if it tried. The feeling is distant, though. Buried. Heat hovers at Niki's shoulder, pressing down on it with burning hands, but without her sight Niki cannot tell if Puffy is actually touching her at all. She could be. She might not be. It all might just be a trick in her head, another lie by the Egg. “Here’s a secret – it was easy, Niki, to come when the Egg asked me to. Really easy. The Egg cared about me.”

“It killed Foolish,” Niki murmurs.

Because that is the truth. The memory is far away, pale through mist and haze, but there – along with Puffy’s tears. Hot breath hits her neck with a furious huff, one that Niki turns towards. Anger flits across the face of the Puffy that stands here, and pain. 

“It cares about me,” she repeats, firmer than before. “It said sorry. I accept people’s apologies. I was lost, I didn’t have anyone, I couldn’t trust anyone – but the Egg, it gave me the power to defend myself. To be myself.” Those twisting vines flex behind Puffy’s form in a splendid arch, like wings stretching from her spine, large enough to brush the ceiling and every wall. “It can help everyone. Do you think your friends up there would tell it to go away, if it could offer them what they really wanted? You think they don’t have some pretty good reasons to say yes? Do you think that you don’t?”

There’s no point in responding, Niki realises, because Puffy will keep talking anyway. And Puffy has always been able to talk her into almost anything.

Almost.

“You’re sad,” Puffy says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She hasn't moved from where she stood when Niki turned to her, evidently looking over her shoulder – she's barely a step away, close enough that Niki has to tilt her chin up to look her in the eyes. A thick line of sweat swells at Niki’s temple. Puffy is as warm as a furnace, a forge. “I know that. I know you’re grieving, and I – I wish you weren’t, there’s no reason for it! We could let the years just roll by… a hundred years, even, it would just feel like a day. We would be free to go wherever we want.” Her hands raise, palms upturned. For a brief moment Niki thinks that those hands will land on her shoulders, her forearms, her chest, but Puffy doesn’t so much as brush her skin with the edge of a finger. She just gestures, grand. “These are happy thoughts, right? Just think them with me. We could be together forever – us, and everyone, and the Egg. You’d never be alone again, Niki. Never.”

And Niki does not want to be alone anymore.

That sounds nice. Having company, not being stuck on her own the way she is down here, trapped in this tiny too-small can’t-breathe pocket of stone and endless crimson that chokes the air from her lungs. Her and Puffy-not-Puffy, but not just them – Puffy whose voice is so compelling, so convincing, whispering a hundred sweet nothings into Niki’s ear even as they stand here in tense, uncomfortable silence. Those voices whisper choose, choose, choose, and Niki doesn’t want to disappoint them. And Puffy is, finally, so close. Close enough to touch. Close enough to hold.

But this place is terrible, and the endless red is starting to hurt her eyes, and Niki doesn’t even want to be here.

There’s no bracelet safely worn around her risk – it isn’t safe to wear such precious things in combat, not fixed next to her charm-heart on her sleeve, because even good luck is no match for common sense. But nonetheless, Niki feels a fingertip of Arctic cold press into the heartbeat-bundle of flesh, cool even against the onslaught of heat. A reminder.

“That isn’t true,” Niki says – rolling the words around in her mouth as she says them, letting them stay gentle, even as Puffy rears back in a fiery rage. Volcanic heat buffets her cheeks. They feel sticky with taffy, locked at the corners of her jaw, trying desperately to keep the words safely inside of Niki. She blinks it all away – the heat, the pressure, the incessant whispering which, all of a sudden, doesn’t sound like Puffy’s voice at all. “Puffy – the Puffy I know – she would never say that. She would not give up. Not like you.” She lifts her gaze to meet Puffy’s, not-Puffy’s, whoever – and scarlet rage rushes to meet her. But Niki is used to being brave. “You say I’m lonely. I don’t think that’s right. You’re hurting, Puffy. That’s how the Egg got in.”

Puffy snarls, teeth sharp, spit sparkling in carmine. “I – ”

“Its promises are empty,” Niki presses on. Let this be a lesson to the swindler using Puffy’s own mouth to talk over her. Niki knows something that the real Puffy never would. “Not because it gave you a single thing. Not a single fucking thing.”

“Shut up!”

“I’m right!” Niki declares, stamping her foot against the netherrack. “I have my friends, Puffy, and so do you, up there – you just need to snap out of it – ”

“And what will you do?” Puffy demands. Her curls flare out around her, and so do the vines. They hover at her shoulder, waiting like hungry, sharp-beaked ravens for the words that rip Niki apart. Niki is reminded, oddly, of an animal fluffing its fur to look bigger. A lizard desperately fanning its frills. “Are you gonna fight me? Strike me down, with that big axe of yours? Do you really think you’re gonna do that?”

Puffy gestures to the axe that hangs limp in Niki’s fingers.

“The others all tried, and guess where they are? Imprisoned. For their own good.” Puffy leans in – no, she looms over Niki, with the help of her heeled boots and the vines that brush against Niki’s calves and her back. She stumbles forward. The feeling burns even through her armour, scalding to the touch. They are nose to nose now, cool grey on Crimson red – just the way one isn’t supposed to share into wild animal eyes, so close and so furious – and Niki can feel the angry, hot puffs of her breath against her lower lip. “The Egg has so much to offer you, Niki. I’m serious, so – I’ll ask you again. To stay, or else.”

You can’t trust anyone, wrote Puffy.

So I’ll ask you again to stay, says… Puffy.

She wants to call this version of Puffy an imitation, a fake, a false flower grown to lure her in – and maybe, in some sense, that is what Puffy is now – but Puffy has always worn her heart on her sleeve, bleeding between layers of iron and netherite and arming coat. Her ridiculous, foolhardy knight.

Puffy has always, always longed for people. And she has been so alone here, for who-even-fucking-knows how long – buried in a tomb of earth and stone and sickly red, twisted up in the Egg's roots, strangled and dead.

Niki cannot see the stars from here. She cannot see any one thing. She can only see the dull, red light reflected in Puffy's eyes, blotting out tree rings of hazel. Burning them to cinders. Only crimson, only scarlet, only red.

Oh, Puffy.

“You’re wrong,” Niki lands on, words said simply, letting the silence roll between them. Puffy’s face twitches. She half-expects her to interrupt her, but she doesn’t. “You’re wrong about a lot of things, Puffy. I do have a gift for you, you know. For – for your birthday.”

Somehow, out of everything, this is what catches Puffy off-guard. Despite – or because of – the garnet red that lines her face, she looks curious.

“...you do?” she asks. She sounds almost hopeful. Inquisitive. Like a child, all tucked up in bed, waiting to hear how this story ends.

“Yeah, I do.”

Niki steals a glance downward, blinking away the glitter of her armour as she dismisses her axe, and swallows thickly.

She thinks of her bakery, and of the cloak around her shoulders with the fur tacking itself to her neck, and of a whetstone for her axe and a quilt for her bed and pen fences – she thinks of Phil and Techno and Ranboo, so close and yet so far away. She thinks of righteousness, and truth, and all of the good things that always triumphed over evil in bedtime stories. She thinks of warm sunlight spilling over the horizon at dawn. How it shimmers like a golden bracelet threaded across the hills, a precious reminder that fresh tomorrow is breaching the darkness of night.

All of these lovely things that Niki has hoarded away – she spends one long moment mulling over them, holding them warmly in her memory.

Gifts are powerful things, really.

“Happy birthday, Puffy,” she whispers.

Niki steps forward, tip-toed, and takes Puffy’s jaw in her hands. Gentle enough that Puffy could pull away if she wanted, but firm enough to signal that Niki is not going anywhere. She tilts Puffy’s face downward – millimetre by millimetre, a slow descent – until she finds herself square with the hallow-space between Puffy’s eyebrows, and presses a kiss to Puffy’s forehead.

Puffy stills.

Her skin burns beneath Niki’s lips – like kissing a star’s dazzling core, thrumming violet and rose-pink, cataclysmic and endless even with eyes fluttered shut. Inferno crackles and snaps in her ears, amber glows behind her eyelids, her heart taps frenetic in her chest to keep time. A million roses bloom, burn and wither. It feels like her skin against Puffy’s – her fingertips grasping Puffy’s jaw, her lips against her forehead – are molten glow, blurring at the edges.

But Niki clings to her anyway. Even as thunder fills her head, much more visceral and real than any petty, seductive hum, a tantrum thrown by an old god. The vines beneath her feet buckle. She stumbles, an arm thrown over Puffy’s shoulder, a hand sinking into her thick curls, oily and lank between her fingers. But she doesn’t let go. Her lips jostle Puffy’s forehead, and Puffy doesn’t even seem to care – Niki pulls her close, tucking her chin over Puffy’s shoulder, and Puffy lets her.

Niki is ablaze.

She radiates in supernova, drawn to Puffy by perfect gravity, even as her world shakes itself apart around her. Eyes screw shut against falling stone and take the amber with it, washing brilliant, sickly vermillion in its place. Her hair sticks to her temples with sweat, carving a fine line down her cheek, tucked askew beneath her chin. With her ear pressed to the column of Puffy’s throat, she can hear her heartbeat as loud as beating drums, percussion without melody. She is here, she is real, she is in Niki’s arms and Niki swears that she is never letting go, not as long as Puffy lets her – not again, not again, not again. She is solid and real, pressed against Niki’s body, and her skin twitches so wonderfully against Niki’s cheek with every beautiful heartbeat.

A horrible warmth grows at Niki’s back – tempestuous and angry, jealous, maleficent. There is movement somewhere in this wreckage of space, a horrible snap of vines cracking and regrowing themselves in seconds.

But she doesn’t want to let go. She presses herself further into Puffy, skin flush, her ear pressed steadfast to the dip between her neck and her shoulder – weaving her fingers through her curls like a fishing net at sea.

And because of that, she hears the small, scratchy sound at the back of Puffy’s throat.

It reminds her of wolves crying at dawn. It reminds her of leaves falling to the ground in autumn. It reminds her of Fungi and of Mushroom, all those summer mornings where they woke up from long, sunsoaked naps on her windowsill.

Puffy’s shoulder shifts underneath her cheek, and a hand grazes the small of her back.

She almost can’t hear Puffy’s voice under the deafening roar of tantrum-thunder, thick and muzzy with sleep, when she asks, “...Niki?”

The ground is shaking and Niki is shaking and Puffy is shaking with her when she pulls back, grasping Puffy’s upper arms like a lifeline – rich, dark brown stares down at her, flickers down to their unsteady feet and upwards to baulk at something past Niki’s shoulder. Even as crimson light basks upon her cheeks, her eyes are clear, perfect sinks of hazel.

Niki cannot help it. Exhausted, weak, but still – she smiles.

There are a million questions in Puffy’s eyes – but they bleed away, replaced with stubborn resolve, swift and sure. Resolve that Niki recognises like her own face in a mirror. She brushes a stray, withered vine from Puffy’s horns – Puffy catches her hand, and crushes the vine between their fingers intertwined.

The world of this small chamber erupts into Crimson chaos. Two iron-clad stars – knights in armour, dragons fighting for what’s theirs, princesses that cling to true love with torn fingernails and bruised, bloody knuckles – erupt with it.

Finally, the princess – the knight, the dragon – wakes up.

Because, in the end, true love conquers all.