Chapter Text
Wren woke to the feeling of the earth moving beneath her.
The air was stagnant, uneasily cool, eerily calm. The surface she was lying on was rough and kind of lumpy. Warm, but still. A bad dream? Wren curled in on herself and pressed her eyes closed. In just a few hours she’d wake up again safe in bed, ready to face the world head on.
She jerked awake as the ground shifted again. The movement was hesitant, almost overly careful. Wren put out an arm to catch herself, only to be caught and steadied by a familiar set of violet claws. The ground—no—a massive, scaled hand cupped her in its grasp.
“Wren,” Leonidas, her partner’s voice rattled away the last bit of sleep she’d been clinging on to, and the little hope that any of this was a dream.
“Leo?” She stared up at him with open bewilderment. How was he in his monster form? And holding her—that was one line he’d never crossed. This couldn’t be good. She grasped at her aching head with one hand and propped herself up with the other. What had happened? There’d been a battle. Against who? Her memory was hazy. The more she tried to reach for answers, the dizzier she felt. She shook her head. “Where are we?”
Leonidas looked out across the horizon. Only in the pause did Wren understand the true enormity of the silence that stretched out around them. The world was blanketed by a quiet deeper than any found in the battle spaces she was accustomed to. The silhouettes of what could only be Bakugan frozen in the throes of death loomed in the distance.
She shivered.
“The Doom Dimension.”
“Wh—” Wren tried to push herself to her feet and immediately regretted it. The world spun out from under her, despite her partner’s steady hand. She crumpled back into his palm.
Leonidas’s claws tensed. “Careful.”
“Dang— Damn!” Wren corrected herself, it wasn’t like there were any adults around to care. The small act of rebellion almost beat out the creeping feeling of homesickness. “What happens now? We aren’t stuck here”—Wren tried to meet her partner’s avoidant gaze—“are we?”
Leonidas closed his eyes and tilted his head, as if listening for something far away. “There was a rift here before. It’s how I escaped to Earth…” His voice trailed off.
Under different circumstances, Wren might have ribbed him for still having a sore spot about what she saw as his super cool origin story. Instead, she sank against the base of his thumb. “What if it’s gone?”
The Bakugan cast her a short glance. He didn’t answer. He rose to his feet and started walking. A palpable dread hung over them both.
Anger and frustration simmered just below the surface of Leonidas’s inexpressive facade, though that was not unusual. What was, was its source. He’d failed to defend his partner, dragged her here. He had no one to blame but himself. He snarled.
Leonidas could feel Wren watching him. As small as she was in the palm of his hand, he could sense her worry, the beginnings of fear. The initial relief he’d felt when she’d woken up had quickly turned to a weight in his chest.
“Leo?” Wren pulled him back from his worrying. He wasn’t used to worrying. It made him worry that his worrying might be making his Brawler worried.
He clenched his teeth. “Yes?” His voice came across as more irritated than concerned.
Wren looked up at him quietly. She shook her head and settled back again. “Never mind… It’s nothing.”
Leonidas eyed her skeptically but didn’t push it. He moved on. He couldn’t afford to stop for long.
They weren’t alone here.
In the distance, he sensed them: other Bakugan. Whether denizens of the Doom Dimension or fellow casualties of Masquerade and his recruits, it didn’t matter. The last thing he needed was for unexpected company to catch him an arm down, his Brawler in hand. For now, they steered clear of him. He steered clear of them.
He wouldn’t take any chances.
He kept his head low and his ears sharp.
He had to get her out of here.
The initial fear of waking up in a hell dimension had quickly worn out its novelty. It turned out you could only really cringe back at the sight of another lifeless Bakugan so many times before they started to become part of the scenery. And there were so, so many of them—more than Wren could name, some she could hardly recognize. Pretty soon, she gave up trying to identify them altogether.
As far as entertainment went, her watch was dead—or broken. “I Spy” didn’t seem like it would get very far when your options were something gray, something gray, a “something” that would probably count as disrespecting the dead to even consider as an option in this game, and something a slightly different shade of gray.
Wren groaned and flopped down against the heel of her partner’s hand. Who knew a death dimension could be so boring?
Leonidas came to a halt. Wren braced herself as he raised her to eye level, a gesture he must have picked up from when she’d carry him around in ball form. He looked at her quizzically.
Wren rolled over on her back, arms outstretched in a dramatic show of defeat. “Isn’t there, like, anything to do out here?”
The Bakugan blinked. “In the Doom Dimension.” Not quite a statement, not quite a question.
Wren shrugged.
Leonidas huffed and lowered his hand back to his chest, turning his attention back to the road ahead.
Wren stuck out her tongue.
He wasn’t looking.
She pressed her mouth shut.
He wasn’t looking.
There was something she needed to check.
Wren folded her legs against her chest and riffled through her pack. There were her school supplies, some snacks, and an already half-empty water bottle. She frowned. She didn’t know how long they’d been here already. There was no sun or moon—just an ambient, sourceless light that cast shadows at confusing angles.
How far would these supplies even last her? What was it? A few weeks without food, three days without water? That couldn’t be right.
She hazarded a glance back towards her partner. Leonidas’s focus was trained on the horizon. Wren bit her tongue and zipped the bag closed.
She wasn’t hungry anyway.
Leonidas didn’t know how far or long he’d been walking. It might have been hours. It could have been days.
There was a pull—a kind of magnetism that tugged at him. It put him on edge, made him itch to bolt towards it. To spread his wings and take to the air.
He gritted his teeth. Flying was out of the question. He was painfully aware of how tall he was at his standing height alone. The idea of being even more exposed than they were already was hardly appealing. He knew he could take a fall. His partner could not.
He consciously shifted his arm against his chest.
Since she’d settled in, Wren had been unusually quiet. He couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than her hounding him with questions that he couldn’t reasonably answer.
When she wasn’t quietly watching along, Wren was dipping in and out of sleep. Sometimes he gleaned the impression that she was dreaming of home, other times she curled up and mumbled to herself. He nudged her awake the first few times he caught her shivering. She pushed him away, assuring him she was fine.
“Just bad dreams,” she promised. “You can wake me up when we get there.”
Leonidas squinted, but reluctantly agreed. He had the uneasy feeling she was hiding something from him, though he wasn’t sure what. He wrote it off as her usual reluctance when it came to discussing her nightmares.
He shook his head and carried on.
He walked,
and walked,
and walked.
Leonidas knew he’d found what he was looking for when the homing pull within him at last drew skywards.
Wren was fast asleep again by the time they made it to the place it had all began.
The place of his birth.
On the surface, it looked no different from the rest of the long-forsaken dimension—nothing more than a graveyard. Leonidas rose to his full height, testing the air. The rift was gone, but signs of it lingered, like ozone after a lightning strike. It had to have been here.
His eyes scanned the sky overhead, looking for some means of escape.
Nothing.
Some fissure or spider-silk thin crack to pry open.
Nothing.
The beginnings of a roar built in his chest.
Nothing…
It leveled off to a low growl.
He slammed his free fist hard against a nearby outcropping.
Damn it.
Trapped.
They were trapped.
He snarled.
Alone, why hadn’t he faced the Doom Dimension alone? Why couldn’t he have accepted his fate with some amount of grace? Instead, he fought tooth and nail, refused to give in. He’d drawn out the battle just for that bastard to find an opportunity to take a shot at Wren.
His claws curled defensively around his Brawler.
He’d tried to play the hero, and it’d just doomed them both.
Wren shivered and curled closer into the palm of his hand. His shoulders fell. He didn’t want to wake her. It could wait. There was no hurry. Not anymore. He huffed.
Somewhere nearby, the air stirred.
His eyes narrowed.
They weren’t alone.
The presence of another—another Bakugan—brushed against his own. It pressed a simple message into his mind, like a stranger passing a note into the palm of one’s hand: an image of himself in the sights of a drawn bow. With it came a singular command. “Dodge.”
There was no time to question it. Leonidas boosted himself to the left.
The arrow, a shaft of pure light, grazed him on the right.
He landed with a spin, digging his hind claws into the ground.
A strong wind buffeted him from the side as he moved to cup the hand holding Wren to his chest.
He froze.
His palm was empty.
No—
Panic. He spun in place, raked his eyes over the ground. He couldn’t have dropped her. He’d been careful. Leonidas crouched down, hand still clutched to his chest. It was hardly a defensible position, but it didn’t matter now. He had to be sure.
Nothing. No body, no blood. It was almost a relief, but, there was absolutely no sign of her.
Not here— If not here then— As if to answer his question, the wind whipped up around him, tugging at his wings in an almost playful gesture.
Leonidas looked up.
A figure in green, wrapped in wind, hovered high above the battlefield. Their arms were folded against their chest as if cradling— No, not “as if” they were holding—
Leonidas’s eyes went wide. First relief—Wren—then rage. What little control he had left was crushed more thoroughly than a tin can teleported to the center of a black hole. Lightning shot down his spine and crackled between his teeth.
He roared.