Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When she first laid eyes upon her, she was dancing.

Not their usual dance though, no — not that one. But it was dancing in which she felt she should recognize, all superfluous and languid and as though a thousand stars came to possess her, pulling her body this way and that.

She was a celebration.

Then they met.

Just a slight distance across from one another, away from the other walzters, who gazed into each other’s plastic like it was all they ever needed.

Maybe it was.

Ǝna wouldn’t have known. She had a job to do — a series of them, and with all her stopping and gazing and her arm that was waving without her permission they met.

And she had glided over so soundlessly, weaving past the crowds and the sway and the drawl of a rhythm Ǝna couldn’t quite catch. Not that she wanted to. She was working.

"My stars!" Her other half — no, her mirror — no, Ena. An Ena, exclaimed when she got close, her descent coming to stop just a skip before her.

Her gaze roamed all sorts of places, but the place Ǝna remembered them lingering the most was her face. Naturally. She stared too, at the ocean split down the middle with lemon. She looked bright and unusual.

Beautiful, really, but she expertly withheld that fact, tucking it beneath her tongue. Unsure if it was allowed. Unsure if they were.

So she said something else, something professional. It was all she knew, after all.

"Is there… some sort of celebration going on? I’ve never seen so many off duty!"

The other girl paused. Mouth parted with no words to spit. Analyzing her top to bottom, as though desperate to wrap her head around the new approach. Then, she smiled.

"Why, yes fellow Ǝna!" She chirped, and Ǝna swears that smile of hers had a cattish tint tacked on when she fell rigid, her bluff called in the midst of a crowd!

"With the Great Runas newly departed, we’ve decided to express our joy through dance. In their blessings’ wake."

Ǝna’s hand is not her own in the next moment. It’s intertwined with Ena’s more curious sort, eagerly slotted, flesh to bone. The pads of her fingers rubbing along her knuckles like they belonged there, soothing.

She was slacking off.

"Pardon myself, but I’m surprised you’ve never heard! Are you new?"

"No, not new."

"Do you believe?"

"Hah! What’s there to believe in?" Snarked, white, but fear underlining. She felt so comfortable here, despite the waltzers. Despite their size, and their composition, and the other entities trickling in.

Despite the lack of space and how bad she knew she was being — she felt so free, entangled with this girl as she was. With an Ena.

With Ena.

"Nothing, weally and twuly. Bewief is only ‘fow good girls…" She’d whined suddenly, blue. Only for her brighter half, the lemons, to have squeezed back into the fray, and they were moving, then.

"But that does not absolve us from the fun! Come, let us partake."

"O-Oh, no, I must get back to-"

"For a few minutes, then!"

"These are most urgent-"

"A handful of seconds!"

And before she could fight against the lulling push and pull she was already amongst its center, with a palm pressed into the small of her back and a pretty face just inches from her own. Her eyes lidded as Ǝna’s heart widened and the waltzers kept them close.

"Do you know how to dance?"

"Of course I know," she breathed, spinning her around, filling her arms with her lighter than air body. Dipping her down so that her hair spilled in a gracious wave beside her, revealing blue, blue, ocean blue. "Don’t we all?"

"No," Ena breathed back, sadly. Arm splayed behind her. It pushed her body up, allowed her to take the lead, pulling Ǝna so close their torsos touched. Making sparks.

"My dearest friend… she had to teach me how, at first. I had lost myself."

"So you’re a sham?"

She laughed, allowing Ǝna to twirl her. This was not a waltz. Neither cared.

"Yes! A complete and utter failure," she chirped with blue glee. "But I’m picking up the pieces. My pieces. Ours?"

Close again, then far. They could’ve melted in the crowd, had Ena not come with eyes everywhere. She knew just where to tug her. How to pull her in whenever she writhed too far, too hasty. A prison of a precious design.

They were close again. Breathed. With sweat gathered along their temples and causing bangs to cling to skin. Ǝna wasn’t tired.

Ena, just a bit.

"I feel like I’ve done it faster, meeting you."

"You don’t know me."

"I do!" Ena insisted, but Ǝna disagreed. She had to disagree, or else she’d fall harder for this girl. This girl who knew nothing at all.

"You are Ǝna," she started, and paused when Ǝna’s hand ascended onto her hip. Beginning their waltz anew, with their feet slipping past each other and the exhaustion melting away into something light and sweet and, against all the nauseating odds, necessary.

Necessary enough for Ena to have found the rest of her words. Which, in eye for eye fashion, killed her and scattered her remains among all the other partygoers’ feet.

"And you are wonderful."

And she remembered, she remembered, she remembered. She remembered even when her phone descended from the sky, and the vexed croaking of her superior rang in her eyes and stomach.

When she was forced to detangle from the lovely girl who knew maybe more than nothing, and tipped her hat adieu. And her sadness that she fought to bury beneath the light, unlike her words, which clung to every inch of her skin.

"Bless you," Ǝna had told her. "Bless you until there is no corner left untouched."

"Consider me blessed." Ena replied, arms crossed before her stomach. Fingers pinching up the ends of her skirt as she performed a curtsy.

"And! Do have fun." She called after her retreating form, which was slower than it should’ve been. Unhurried and unwilling, which it couldn’t have been. But it was, because, she wanted her arms to be full of her light a little longer.

So Ǝna turned right as she reached the end of the ballroom that didn’t exist. That the waltzers still occupied, although fewer in their numbers. Dedicated to the plastic.

"After you," she spoke, slowly. Too earnest for a salesman. Not bitter enough for cruelty. A cross between her everything, with her hand stretched out to the sky.

"I believe, I may never do so again."

Chapter Text

Ever since then, she was mad as a right march.

Scouring the land, frantic, unbalanced, as she yearned to soak in the faintest breadth of her presence again.

Not that the landscapes made it any easy for her — Ǝna saw her in everything!

In the flecks of clerestory that glimmered beneath her feet. In the winding spirals of cloud cover that never did quite shield her peeling heart.

In her reflections, no matter how indignantly she turned her heel. It was a nightmare come to life.

An endless chase, her hands scrambling evermore for the smallest taste of what it meant to be happy.

That girl… Ena. Ena, as she’d come to find, was light, and love, and the dawn all personified, and through all her antsy fawning these weeks Ǝna had quickly come to hate her for that.

Perhaps that is also why, while so shrouded in the depths of her misery, Froggy approached her with that moronic job.

"Apparently there’s a genuine sum for this one," he’d reasoned, fishing out the crumpled request and placing it into her splayed palm. Ǝna hardly flinched at the fullness, unwrapping the job from its tin. "About… 200 chocolates?"

"You’re kidding." The girl mumbled as she skimmed the script. "Such an amount… clearly, this thing can’t be easy pickings."

"It isn’t." Her colleague confirmed, rolling his arm, as though it hurt carrying around such a scrap. And it was at that moment Ǝna saw it — the tail-end of the fish, the catch, the maybe then in felt print.

'Extermination Mission', scrawled in hefty quarter. And, a little smaller, beneath its thunderous writing, 'weaponry required'.

She saw right there why such a job wasn’t offered to her from the get-go. Her hands were bristled with scarred bumps, memories slotted betwixt her fingers.

"…If you can’t handle it, just give it back. I’ll pawn it off to Glasses, or something."

Yet she barely heard his concern, downed in cottony fuzz as she read those four words again, and again, and again.

Sure, it was terrifying.

She hadn’t held a weapon since newbirth, after all. When novas were still around and the rain ran dry.

However, with the thin photography tapered between text, at the very end of the reaper notice were incredibly similar locations.

Dark and twisted looking… yet no doubt about it, where the angel she danced with stood last.

Ǝna swallows.

Was she so desperate a husk, to go seeking filler? To wield upheaval slugs in the simplest, cruelest hopes she’d be allowed that girl’s wonder?

Surely, this meant her corner of the world was endangered, if there were calls to clean it out.

Surely.

"You shall see it done, my good man."

"Wh-… really? Really, seriously, you’ll take this dumb thing?"

"Oh, Froggy, what have I told you? No venture for kale could ever be logged as 'dumb'. Only tedious!"

She keenly recalls his squint, back then, and pursed lips as she thusly began to revert the request to trash-state, forcing it in her back pocket.

"Then why accept any job?" was mumbled, earnestly perplexed as Ǝna began to strut await. "W-Wait!"

A turn on the heel he received, impatience woven in politely squared shoulders.

"What about… you know."

"My weapon is home. I shall retrieve it and begin as follows."

"You, kept it."

The conversation did not continue any longer. Simply hanging in the sizable space between them, Ǝna’s guilty admission not lost on her briefly forlorn comrade’s face.

She is off not a moment later, with the dawning salt of an ocean’s floor sweeping past her eager being.

"So be it, so be it," her thoughts chirped, white, as she gripped her hand within itself rough enough to yield red. Who cared, anymore?

War was just a phase, the phase of all phases.

Ǝna had a girl to see.

Twenty steps in the intimately hidden terrain was enough to foretell that the time for cheer and merriment were widows of the past, curbed firm into the ground.

Everything around was distorted in color, a miasmic tale of emptiness. Which, on one digitum, made it easier than having paint watch you dry to find the creatures polluting the place.

Yet on the other…

"I can’t believe I met a girl with stars in her eyes in such a slow area. Haven’t any of you ever heard of applying yourselves?"

The creatures, evidently, did not.

They were slow and grimy and melded easily with the dust of this place. As one stumbles a little too close into her space, Ǝna is quick to shoot them dead.

"…Whatever." She sniffs, moving as an ace and already forcing another round into the chamber. "Whatever, whatever!"

The crowd falls at her feet.

She keeps walking after, eyes feverish, and sweat gathering on the back of her neck. Of course, even here, old habits died hard.

She scours ceaselessly, knocking down the eldritch totems as she goes, the breath of a gun in her arms familiar. Simple.

She doesn’t care to think of that, though. Now not, through paradise’s gate, as unsightly as it now was.

What should she even do, here? Call out her name? Will that the obnoxiously warren Bang! Boom! Crash! of her destruction alert the perched bird?

Heavens, what if Ǝna’s scared her off? Had her scurry further into the dark with the unfamiliarity of it all?

There’s another, more obvious question interwoven with that one with a bigger, more likely answer that she doesn’t spit. Hardly even conjures.

She wanders deeper in.

Oh, if Moony could see her now!

Traversing as she did, weaving through the planes as though they were nothing but glass slipping through her fingers.

All the shadows that beckoned her, she was expertly avoiding. Although, that was with her eyes closed.

It’s all with her eyes closed, and her hands above them, as she skipped and frolicked through the scalding meadow. Twirling whenever her senses called for it, toes barely grazing the ground as she blew past, perhaps faster than the means called for.

This bet, Ena knew, was stupid. They were all stupid, but Moony told her that’s what made them up in the first place, so like the last dozen, she liked this one.

"Frolic to the end of the world through Apocalypse. Eyes closed. Make it back in one piece."

It was as simple as baking, which Ena was not good at. But was informed was very easy, and thus, the analogy stuck.

Even as the ungodly would whisper sometimes too close to her frame, or she’d feel something slimy curl around her ankle, she was determined to keep her stride unbroken.

A light in the dark, she pranced, until her thighs began to ache and her fingers stuck with sweat.

For some reason, more than ever, she felt incredibly alone.

Upon her return, she’d have to ask Moony where that fit on the normalcy timescale.

As Ena ducks beneath a protruding hand that slips through the ends of her midnight hair, a weapon in these cases, she makes a note to herself never to forget.

It’s on the backwards trip that she’s caught, poor Ena, poor herself!

Yanked by unnecessary force, and thus clamoring to the ground unnecessarily rough. Mistakes upon mistakes, her third coming from her cry, which leaves without fanfare as her backside hits the floor.

"This was… supposed to be the easier part…" She agonizes openly, gazing up at the crowd she’d attracted. Oh, wait, crowd? A real and true crowd?

It was not one of honor, that’s for sure. Made up of the totems, and their mouths agape with mindlessness. Drooling with deadly intent, and promises of further pain in their veins.

Ena blinks at them all and their identical faces, ice cold fear she doesn’t know how to chase off in her veins.

She didn’t consider the possibility of being caught. Did the bet mention the consequences?

"U-Um, if I may. I seem to have fallen, and you all have blocked my path." She begins slowly, attempting to mimic calm. Alas at the ends, her voice picks up speed, fear bleeding off the ends in blips of static.

"If… one of you could help me up? Direct me home? Oh, though, you probably don’t know my address!"

Ena is met with silence.

Despite their unsubtle desires for her flesh on their tongues, and their shadowy forms wafting with the moon’s intent stare, they make not a word. Merely taking her in.

It is here that Ena realizes she is going to die. However the count was before that, not particularly mattering, as death was always unpleasant.

Oh, how awful! What a dismal scene!

Tears begin to break from her curated face, as her hand, shivering at her side, can only muster to take in a palmful of hair. The other, too, scrounging up a flimsy shield from the dread of the night.

"So be it," she mutters, blue, adherence in her tone. "Just ‘don take too long…"

For what, she isn’t sure, all scatterbrained as she feels. In all honesty, they could gather as many seconds as needed. Ena is generous like that.

And frightened, too, born anew in a more sudden tilt, as a thick blast erupts in the sky and forces a totem dead.

Then two.

Then… well, she’s lost count, left to gaze starstruck as the audience dissipates in thin veils of smoke around her.

Ena coughs a little as some worms its way into her lungs, shuddering as the sounds reach their high and then crescendo into deep, thick nothingness.

This should be her chance to run, the finicky, still blue voice she owns tells herself, urging her plastered bones to move if only an inch.

Ena hardly makes a quarter of that, frozen yet again when more noise, gentle and hesitant begin to drip through the night. In her woeful, shriveled direction, no less, and how rude it’d be to run from a body!

So against her muddled yet brightly lit common sense, Ena remains, still gripping her hair, and watching as color fills her vision.

She tilts her head up.

Ǝna.

"Y-You’re…"

"Thank you ever so kindly!"

She accepts her outstretched hand with little fanfare, and whether through muscle memory or excitement, Ǝna pulls her up.

She hops onto her feet, mooncrested and excited. Glowing in the wreath of the night, a smile on her face amidst the paleness of her expression.

"I was for sure certain that would be my end, see? Not that it’d be my first. Believe me, I’ve experience!"

"What…" Ǝna’s throat is dry. She’d found her, the angel, the source of all her pain and pleasure. So simple in these fields of death, who now regarded her so simply.

So casual.

"What were you… doing out here?"

"Oh, a bet, my dear! To last, to put it simply. One I… ah, was pretty close to losing." Ena giggles, and then pausing to relinquish her hair. A stress tactic, perhaps? The poor thing was startled out of her mind.

It makes Ena more frustrated with her, and less. A billion feelings slipping through the rings of her ribcage, all working their way to the top.

None win out, her exhale forcing them to grind out in resignation. Because, well, what else could she say?

What would be appropriate?

In a mirror show of fate, one of her hands end up in Ena’s. Familiarly enough.

"What is that strange object, might I ask? An instrument for play?"

"Um, I-… n-no, not play. I work, Ena. I always do."

"You… remember my name?"

For some reason, Ǝna is blushing. Covered head to toe in the greenish-blue-red barcoded blood of her enemies, her hair tousled about… and yet her face chooses now to take heat, so emboldened by that fact, knelt to the angel’s body.

"I… could never forget my waltzer. We met beneath a sun of specialty."

(My. My. Only hers.)

"Oh, gosh, I…" Ena is smiling. A pretty, bashful little sight, writhing in place with slow-built joy. "I hadn’t forgotten you, either. Ever! Every second apart, I-"

The girl then pauses, as though realizing the magnitude of her confession. Red, in her own way, gazing down at the rubble.

She then parts her mouth to speak, again, another sight twisted in familiarity, but her name is breaking out again into the air, and it is not from Ǝna’s lips.

Her head turns towards the sound, but Ǝna sees nothing. And then her gaze is back, apologetic, gentle.

"…Moony, my friend. She is the bet-holder."

"The one who taught you dance."

"You remember that, too?"

Ǝna squeezes her hand weakly, a helpless nod aching her shoulders. "Down to your final word."

Ena’s eyes become too much for her to face, somehow, despite how often she’d dream of them. So endlessly kind and lilted and easy to set alight. Like that day, like this night, a girl of fairy dusted enchantment.

Another call shatters the slow building tenderness, and Ǝna almost has half a mind to have the lesser moon join the discarded totems. It would be easy.

One flick of the trigger, and Ena would be none the wiser.

After all this search, it’s almost worth it, the thought. The grandeur. Just one, little, eensy weensy,

Lack of breath, apparently, because in even shorter fashion Ena’s lips are on hers until they’re not, and her hand is slipping from her crimson knuckles.

"For saving me! And your search. And the dance. And, well, everything that came after!" The girl laughs as she melts into shadow, galloping into the thicket, skirt billowing with invisible wind.

"I’ve dreamt of you! And in pieces, this night. Meet me again sometime, will you?"

Ǝna’s so red, it’s hard to see. To breathe. Yet she scrambles past the lightweight on her tongue to scream at the figure, which pauses in her glowing descent.

"W-Where?! In which sect of the dream! Which room with the printer!!"

Ena thinks, ankles locked, tilting her head this way and that.

Her smile returns full force once decided, the sting of lemon as sweet as it briefly had tasted, brighter than blood.

"Here! I quite like this place. It is where we had each other first, and second. Let us make a third."

A third.

Their third.

The charm, and fifth step, ready to be claimed at their heels. Ǝna nods, dazed, the exhaustion of pull-back and release slowly catching up to her in waves.

"Okay," she whispers, and somehow, despite the distance, the trench in where their hearts sat, Ena hears her. "S-Sure, sure! I’ll… see you then!"

The angel nods in response, and begins to retreat once more.

It allows for Ǝna’s inevitable surprise when she stops again, just inches from the lesser moon, which seemed to be lightly scolding her form.

Even moreso when she shifts to blow kisses off the balls of her palms, that smile of hers taking unimaginable heights, the faintest dust of playful pink on her cheeks.

Then she’s gone.

And Ǝna, alone in a field of corpses, can only stand to count the amount of times she’s fallen in love tonight.

She counts 6 to add to her final score, and begins to stumble back in her own reaches of the night.

A phone rings.

She drowns it out with laughter.

So soft and cashmere it sort of makes her sick. But it just keeps coming, this laughter, and the emptiness of her gun. And the blood sinking beneath her clothes, nudging at her flesh.

And the sugar on her lips, which she pauses if only to trace.

Ǝna’s in love with an angel.

What would God think?