Chapter Text
“Ah, hi there! What’s up?” a blonde girl turns around in her leather spinny chair, an impulse purchase that her comrades insist fits her perfectly. An unfortunately angled beam of August morning sunlight reflects off the glass surface of her golden pocket watch, resting atop of her plaid brown skirt, and falls directly into the visitor’s eye. They squint while delivering some news to her, both of them quickly falling back into an old routine.
“Wait, what do you mean ‘a new case’? I’m retired, you know that, stupid!” she teases.
They explain a little further.
“...A kouhai, huh? Well, I guess if I have to,” her and the visitor both giggle at her faux-reluctance. It’s not a secret that she always loved her job, not between these two at least. “Let’s see here…” She pulls her magnifying glass from her coat pocket (still handy, still spick and still span long after its last proper use) to read the document carefully. The true extent of her expression obscured by a hat tilted downwards, she nods slowly as the words silently make their way onto her lips.
“How interesting,” the girl declares, “I think I know just what to do!”
Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame sits patiently on a chair in the Myth house’s hallway. She had wondered what Ame meant on the phone since she didn’t remember a “waiting room” anywhere the last time she was here, but yeah, she was indeed ‘waiting’ in a ‘room’. It’s funny she thinks, how she was told to go to a detective over something silly like… well whatever this was. That said, it was Amelia. Can’t get much better life advice than from a time traveller, especially one as accomplished as her. Elizabeth’s admiration for Hololive’s time-travelling detective has always been very high, but it’s grown immensely since she started at the company herself. Despite not interacting too often, Amelia Watson is who she thinks of when she hears the word ‘senpai.’
That senpai’s muffled voice beyond the door marked with a cute smiley face next to the name AME pull Elizabeth from her thoughts.
“Hnnngh… gotcha! Ewww, so dusty…” Followed by, “Huh? Wait, shit–!” and a shrill yelp.
Liz covers her ears at the bangs and crashes which follow, but quickly recovers from her shock and stands up. She knocks clearly thrice and speaks through the door, “Amelia!? Are you alright? Can I come in?”
“Yeahhh, I’m just–” She starts, but Elizabeth is unwilling to wait for more. Taking that as permission enough, she pushes the door open with a loud grunt and a shocking amount of force (not enough to damage it, of course. Her elegance has reached such heights that she can perform inelegance elegantly.) She enters Amelia’s office, surprised by the lack of visible human life anywhere nearby. “Back here!” Ame’s hand emerges from behind a large desk in the corner of the office, drawing Liz around its opening.
She sees someone now. Surrounded by a mess of broken glass, cardboard boxes, debris and dust is a girl who looks to have a case of late afternoon bedhead. Her coat, skirt, and limbs are splayed, unmoving, in a hard to parse pose on the carpeted floor. Elizabeth tries to make eye contact, but finds a slanted alabaster deerstalker in the way. Never one to take roadblocks lying down, she crouches to adjust the hat on Amelia’s head and meet seafoam-magenta eyes looking up into her own. With a confident smile, Elizabeth holds her hand out.
Amelia, still kind of in shock, takes a while to even realise what’s going on. Once she does, her eyes quickly snap between looking at Liz’s brave face and outstretched hand. “Uhhh,” she pauses and shakes her head to clear her mind, “Sorry I kinda just… completely blanked there? Felt like a complete system restart,” she laughs, bashfully.
“Don’t worry in the slightest,” Elizabeth reassures strongly, “just take my hand and we’ll get you cleaned up, good?”
Still in a bit of a daze, Amelia takes a few seconds to process that sentence before taking another look at Liz’s (surely tired by now) arm. “Huh? Oh, right!” She smiles while being pulled up by her kouhai… not a great way to start the meeting, but she’s sure she can recover from here. She has a plan after all.
“Haah, thank you very much… Alright, my dear ‘lizabeth! What's the case you have for me today? It better be too important you know, I have things to do~”
Elizabeth meekly points out, “Erm, sorry, but shouldn’t we clean up first? I can help, no worries, I just don’t want you stepping on any broken glass. Besides, this stuff looks precious,” she nods at the piles of photo frames and trinkets spilling out of cardboard boxes on the floor.
“Ah– No, not at all! I mean, yes, it is precious, and yes, I should clean it up, but you don’t need to do anything at all, please, take a seat!” Amelia gestures in the direction of the chair across from her desk. She knows how obvious her clearly panicked demeanor is, and she’s doing all she can to re-adjust swiftly.
“Oh of course not darling, it’s really no problem at all.” Instead of sitting down as asked, Elizabeth lays a hand on the detective’s shoulder. "Let's talk while we clean, how about that?”
The detective finally deflates and lets herself breathe out. “Yeah, sounds good,” she smiles, “Thank you, Liz.”
The taller woman kneels on one knee and begins to pick up loose glass shards from the carpet floor, safety her top priority at the moment. “Well detective, I'll start by asking how much you know about the relationship Advent and Justice have?”
“Trust me, I've heard all about it. You're supposed to be their enemies, pursuers of justice to their inherently criminal existence, but you're practically best friends with them! Or I guess with one of them it’s even more than that, am I right?” Ame teases.
Elizabeth sputters out, “N-No, not necessarily!” She’s quite aware of her flame’s kindling, but what can she do? “I just… Justice isn’t heartless, not in the abstract nor when referring to us as its enforcers. It’s only natural I care about the humanity of how my– …how my former prisoners are treated.”
“Hm…” Amelia pauses to mull something over, so lost in thought she almost appears frozen in time.
After enough time passes for the air to become somewhat tense, Elizabeth wonders out loud, “Is everything–”
“So that’s it?” Amelia raises an eyebrow at the dame beside her, a faint line on her forehead signalling towards a sudden offensive aura.
“How do you mean?”
“You came here to justify to someone in this room that you’re ‘not so bad’ for wanting to catch and imprison people you claim to care for? Or otherwise, you don’t want to be blamed for caring about people whose lives and liberty you should be completely opposed to?” All at once, the detective bares her teeth.
“Wh– Hey, you don’t understand! I’m not…!” Elizabeth tries to answer, only to find that she can’t. Why can’t she?
The room swells with silence so heavy Amelia’s posture noticeably droops. Elizabeth remains tense.
Amelia finally speaks up, “...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean all that. I can get a bit… “heated” about cases sometimes,” she chuckles to herself, “Ina always says it must be the Ancient Ones playing a trick on me.”
“Is it?” Elizabeth asks with an air of curiosity like it might be a genuine question.
“Oh, no, they couldn’t do something like that.” Amelia answers awkwardly.
“Well, all is forgiven,” Liz offers a strong smile, “Plus, truthfully, you only said what I’ve been struggling so hard to find words for. I came to you because I want your help to figure it out, Amelia.”
Elizabeth pauses and squints, her eyes drifting to the right of the detective’s and towards something just past her on the floor. “Uh, but that aside– what the frigg is happening in that photo?”
“Pardon?” Ame’s taken aback by the sudden tone shift, until she twists her body around to see, “Oh, this one!” She perks up, grasping it so delightedly it almost seems like she can’t tell the severe cracks in the frame, “This is from our one year anniversary, it’s in the original Smol Timeline Lobby – oh, well, not the anniversary of us being a romantic thing of course, that happened a couple months after this: just of us being a group, y’know? Like, a year since I started investigating them. Argh, I’m not explaining it great, huh…” Amelia looks hopefully into Elizabeth’s eyes for any sign of understanding, “I mean, you get the idea though, riiight~?”
Instead, Elizabeth stares right back, in utter, wordless bafflement.
Amelia frowns. “...I’m taking that as a no?”
“No, no, I got the anniversary stuff, not to worry. But I– May I ask what a ‘Smol Timeline Lobby’ is?”
“Ohhhhh, that’s what you wanted to know?” At that, Amelia grins, “Well let’s see… I think it’d be insufficient to just tell you about it, so we’re taking a trip. You have no choice in it.”
Elizabeth’s eyebrows meet at an upwards angle and the corners of her mouth fall, her entire face stretched in alarm. “...What does that mean?” She asks slowly with a shake, while her eyes follow Amelia’s right hand as it reaches down to the golden pocket watch that’d been resting on her skirt this whole time and picks it up.
“All for the case, my lady,” Amelia chuckles.
Suddenly, the ground opens up beneath them and the roof warps every which way. Splotches of colours she can’t distinguish or even perceive pierce directly through Elizabeth’s skin at an impossible rate, and she swears, looking down (at least, what she thinks is down,) that she can see a shape start to form resembling the idea of someone she’s sure she knows. She can’t focus her eyes in the slightest to really tell: with the soft, yet relentless sensations warping and wearing away at every exposed part of her body and the unworldly sounds attacking her eardrums, focusing anything at all is outright unconscionable.
“First time, huh?” a blasé voice jokes.