Work Text:
Huh. Then maybe it’s like a reflex?
Alinua strangles a laugh as she runs. She can’t afford to make too much noise, and it wouldn’t have come out very happy anyway.
Yes, maybe it’s like a reflex. It wasn’t even hard to figure out, just hard to make herself do. Panic, then let go of control and let Life do the rest, turning her into something that can survive. Drowning? Grow gills. Catch fire? Gain resistance to heat.
Hunted through the woods with spears and swords and Light magic? Hit the dirt on hands and feet and run for your life like an animal.
She’s not sure how long she’s been running for. She knows it wasn’t night yet when she started, and the stars have been out for a while now. Spellbirds catch up occasionally, spurring her on. She can outrun them in a straight line, but there are no straight lines in this forest, and they come from the sides, or even ahead of her. Shadows of dragons pass by overhead at irregular intervals.
She’s been cornered… five, six times, but they haven’t been able to pin her down yet.
At least her speed means the area never runs out of magic. There’s always more to grow obstacles for her pursuers, heal the constant scratches and strains, reinforce her body, or restructure it entirely when her current form isn’t enough to keep her ahead. She stopped growing tired a while back. She’s scared to even guess what sort of change can do that.
The fear is absolute. It’s the only thing left in her mind aside from running, dodging, and changing direction. It’s so strong she barely notices the additional stab of panicked terror every time she lets go of control for a moment to get claws to climb with.
But no, she’s not running out of magic. As long as there’s Life in the dirt, she can still fight, and if anything, the deeper she goes into this jungle of a forest, the denser the Life gets.
No room to think about that. Over a rock, down a slope, she can’t slow down, if she trips she can heal anything that breaks without pausing. Claws again, up a tree, leap over a briar patch—
Pain.
She’s healing the moment the arrow hits, and the pain fades instantly, but it punches her out of the air with enough force to slam her into the briars.
The dirt here thrums with Life, enough she can smell it. Life’s living attention is as heavy, a faint, muffled concern pressing into her from all sides, easily crushing if she let herself focus on it. Thorns dig into her skin and she grits her teeth and gives up control again, tears the arrow from her side and feels her bones rearrange themselves.
Nearly back to normal this time. Stronger skin against the thorns, hands to tuck her hair under the shreds of her clothes to not get tangled. She crawls towards the edge of the briars, ready to run again.
They’re waiting for her. Squads of Paladins, one entire dragon, and that white-haired vessel of the Light Dragon, their Champion, silhouetted against the faint light of pre-dawn.
Already having let go of control for the change, Alinua loses it entirely like she hasn’t since she broke. Briars writhe and twist. The dirt boils. She shrieks, dodges a spear, wrenches her power back under control and backs up until she’s hidden in the shadow of thorns.
“Don’t,” she whimpers through a throat that has changed so many times this night she’s shocked it still carries her voice. “Please don’t. Please. Please.”
“I’m sorry,” says the Champion, sounding like he means it, even as he cuts through after her and his underlings block every other path.
THEY WILL KILL YOU, says Life.
“You hate the thought as much as I do!” Alinua pleads. “There has to be another way!”
“There is no other way,” the Champion says. “Not unless you can guarantee you will stop assisting the Dark Avatar. Not even an innocent life is worth the risk of his return.”
Life does not reply. She doesn’t need to. Alinua knows, if she dies, Life will have to try again. Another three centuries of failure.
“You don’t understand!” She backs up against a tree trunk, hoping for any kind of cover even crouched in the shadows. Another arrow misses her by a hair. “I have the Chimeric Plague!”
“What?”
The Champion stops dead. The rest of them make noises of shock and confusion. Twenty years since the last outbreak, people still know what it means.
“You can’t kill me! If you keep trying, everyone here will die! Or worse! I’m sorry!”
“You’re lying,” he says, though he doesn’t sound so sure this time.
One of the others whimpers, “Sir?” They sound old enough to remember what it was like, the last few times.
Life pushes insistently.
It doesn’t feel like she’s breaking apart, the way it used to. It’s still hers, still acting in ways she understands and can control. It’s just growing so heavy it’s hard to hold back. If she loses it now, the thing she ran from for ten years will happen after all, and it will be her own doing.
Terrified, just a whisper of that pressure leaks through her composure, and the whole briar patch lights up, thorn vines growing rapidly, writhing, twisting, lashing out at the Paladins as they all scramble backwards, screaming. The Champion takes to the air to escape.
“That’s it!” the dragon roars, and fire licks over the twisting briars. It doesn’t help. The wild Life in them responds and adapts in a dozen different ways, and nothing burns.
“Stop!” the Champion shouts.
The fire stops, leaving vines like glass with burning cores, still growing.
Alinua shuts her power down tight again, pulls the excess Life out of the plants and into the ground, letting them wither and smoulder.
She stands up, slowly, leaning on the twisted tree trunk for support. She knows her eyes must be fully green, edge to edge, knows her birthmark is blazing with light, unmistakeable.
“Not a lie,” she says, begging him to understand. “I can’t lose control again. Please.”
The Champion stares at her like he’s not sure what he’s seeing. His eyes are black and reptilian, almost like Erin’s when he’s possessed, but it doesn’t seem like the Light Dragon is the one in control.
He nods at something. She doesn’t think it’s her.
“Please,” she repeats, almost ignoring the sting of pain hitting the back of her shoulder. She must have changed out of the reinforced skin at some point without even noticing. Compared to everything else she’s been through tonight, a stinging insect is nothing.
But she doesn’t find an insect when she goes to brush it off. She finds a dart with a needle tip.
Her vision swims, and she falls.
Tam will readily admit he hates this entire operation with a passion.
He understands the necessity of it. It’s become abundantly clear that they will not be able to get to the Dark Avatar past the shield of his companions. Removing them one by one is the only way.
He would have hated it even if it was easy, quick, painless. It hasn’t been any of those things. The night has been a torturous chase of a prey that refuses to slow no matter how exhausted or injured, defying any laws of nature in the way.
It’s not even possible to pretend she’s just prey, that she’s anything but a terrified girl, rendered nearly naked by the chase, staring at them like they’re monsters from the dark.
From her perspective, they truly must be. She’s more than justified in being scared.
That’s the worst part. Tam has spent his life since he gained his Lady’s blessing doing good. Protecting people. Helping people. He never called himself a hero, but it never felt wrong to hear it from others.
This is not what heroes do. This is not a stain that will ever go away.
If it’s true that what they’ve been hunting is a natural disaster in mortal skin, threatening to unmake them all if they succeed, that almost feels correct. A hero falling to these depths should lead to disaster. It’s only right.
“Please,” she begs. Not even for her own sake. For theirs.
She glows with a light that sets off something primal in the back of his brain. Her clothes are little more than rags, but her skin is dirty at worst, otherwise completely unblemished, no wounds, no scars, no marks but the Life rune on her shoulder, not even stretch marks from puberty. The plant life between them is twisted into eerie, uncanny shapes.
Sir? one of the Caleds asks telepathically. We can’t risk it, can we? If she’s really…
The plants ate my fire, Aryss complains.
Tam doesn’t know what to do. Dying in a burst of Life itself might only be what he deserves, but he can’t afford to die while the Dark Avatar still lives, and he won’t resign the Caleds to death or worse over his own mistake.
Take heart, my Champion, his Lady says, settling her weight on him. There is always a way.
Another Caled says, Sir? I have sedative darts?
Putting her to sleep as peacefully as possible. Yes, that might work.
Do it. He nods.
“Please,” the girl begs, barely reacting as the dart hits her, even as motes of green erupt from the puncture wound.
For a few seconds, he’s scared it won’t work, that she’ll somehow heal through the sedatives before they take effect, but as she brushes the dart away, she sways, and a moment later she falls unconscious to the ground.
Everyone holds their breaths for a moment, but nothing seems to happen.
“Great, now let me bite her in two,” Aryss says.
“Wait.” Tam cuts his way through the mutated plant life around her. She’s still glowing, shining through the vines.
The patterns of Life magic dance uncannily across her skin where she lies sleeping, green spilling from under her eyelids. He hates the part of his brain that notes automatically how beautiful she is, how perfectly shaped, like she’s never seen a day of illness or injury in her life. At least the primal aversion to the green light helps beat down that instinct. Bad enough he’s going to kill her. He owes her better than ogling.
What is she? he asks his Lady.
I am not sure, she replies. She is almost reminiscent of something I haven’t seen in…
The change is sudden, unprovoked. The ground blazes with green light, the plants come violently alive around the girl, something massive bursts out of the trees directly at Tam.
NO! his lady screams, flooding him with more fear than he has ever felt, pushing him physically out of the way of the mass of plant matter trying to crush him.
He lands in what used to be briars and is now a grasping maw, and has to cut himself free as they wrap around his legs like octopus arms.
RUN! the lady shouts for all to hear.
Aryss rears back and tries to take to the sky, but vines erupt from the ground to snag his leg and an entire tree bends to curl around him, holding him down. The Caleds scream and shout and try to get away.
Tam takes to the air on his own wings, but another mass of plants materialises from the other side, blindsiding him, smacking him out of the air and crushing him to the ground, five heavy logs of writhing vines and ferns and wood weighing him down.
No, NO! That’s IMPOSSIBLE!
They’re arms. Two, the size of large trees, pulling themselves out of the ground. The girl is wrapped in former briars and pulled up like a marionette until she forms the centre of a massive face. A being made of plants and Life, too large to move as it does, holding him down, restraining his people with insulting ease, herding the Caleds into terrified huddles.
The girl opens her mouth, clearly still unconscious, and a voice that is far more than her own speaks.
“
”
It’s the Lady’s truename. Tam has never heard it before, but it can be nothing else.
His Lady shivers against him, asks wordlessly for permission, and he allows it without question. She fills him completely, taking over, giving him some relief, some distance from this.
She opens his mouth and replies.
“
”
Life. This is Life herself, alive and well. How?
The hand pressing Tam down lightens, fingers grabbing him instead, picks him up until he’s eye level with her strange marionette of a face, cradled in her palm.
Do not try to kill my eyes again.
Why is the Lady so scared? Tam is terrified, held by a creature that could tear him apart from the inside out, but it’s made so much worse by his Lady’s waves of fear washing through him.
If I had known she was yours—
Life tightens her grip. They are all mine. Another pair of arms grows from her shoulders, hovering over the Caleds and Aryss. Her anger will destroy them all. They were mine before they were yours. You either forgot or refuse to remember.
You were dead! I had to—
Dead at YOUR WORD!
The hand is not holding him tight enough to hurt, but it hums with green light and he knows to his core she could crush his soul barrier like an egg, and turn him into moss and mould with a thought.
You came to us, Life says in a voice too large for the body it comes from. Vines reach from her back, meeting vines reaching from the trees, until something like a pair of wings tangle her into the canopy. You let us die for your cowardice! And now you wander our corpses and claim it as your duty.
Forgive me. Please.
The Lady is not supposed to beg. She’s not supposed to be scared. This is not what it’s supposed to feel like to be hers.
I do not forgive. I do not forget. I do not die.
“Alinua!”
The grip on Tam loosens suddenly as Life’s attention is drawn away, towards the ground. He twists as best he can to see.
It’s the swordsman, the Dark Avatar’s creature, unnaturally bright against the green, blue eyes shining. Two Caleds try to attack him, lashing out in panic and reflex. He breaks one spear without looking and blocks another half-heartedly with a forearm. His attention is on Life as well.
Child of mine, she says.
The swordsman doesn’t react visibly as she speaks to him. He looks at most mildly surprised to see her here. He wasn’t expressive on the boat either. Perhaps he simply doesn’t have the range of emotion a human does.
He looks up at the living Primordial of Life, incarnated and ready to unmake several dozen people, his expression open and clear as he greets her, “Mother.”
The Caleds trying to attack him freeze dead on the spot. There are gasps. Tam stops breathing. He himself does. His Lady has retreated, leaving him alone in himself. He hates calling what she’s doing ‘hiding’.
The swordsman was never a creature of the Dark. He was Life’s. Always. They’ve made a mistake.
“What will you do with these people?” he asks, so mild, so carefully precise.
They have harmed my eyes greatly. They may do so again. Any reluctance in Life’s voice must be a wishful dream.
Tam wants to tell her no, no, never, they’ll never make the mistake again, not in a thousand years… but he can’t find his voice. He’s shaking. Frozen.
“She hates people dying for her as much as I do,” says the swordsman. “She wouldn’t thank you.”
A silent moment passes where the only creature drawing breath is the girl hanging limp in the centre of Life’s face. No one dares hope. No one dares speak.
Then Life says, I have caused her more harm already than can easily be undone. I understand. Very well.
She lowers Tam to the ground, and he collapses in a heap, unable to make his limbs cooperate. At least one of the Caleds starts crying.
The swordsman steps closer, until his feet are bare inches from Tam’s head, still ignoring everything and everyone but Life.
“Is she okay?” he asks.
Ignoring everyone but Life and the girl who is her eyes, more precisely.
I will not let her come to injury.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Another pause. The green light is slowly fading, the pressure of pure danger is lessening.
Life says, Pain and fear leave scars I cannot heal. Will you care for her?
“Yes.”
The plant limbs begin to dissolve. Vines snap and hang limp from trees. The girl is lowered gently into the swordsman’s waiting arms, and then Life is gone, drained back into the soil.
The swordsman shifts his new burden to ensure she rests comfortably, and turns to leave without a word.
“Wait!” Tam calls out, finding his voice, pushing himself shakily to his knees. The swordsman doesn’t pause, but he has to ask. “Why… Why are you assisting the Dark Avatar?”
He doesn’t stop walking, but he does turn his head just enough to answer over his shoulder, “Because Erin doesn’t deserve to die.”
Like it’s simple.
Like the potential end of the world isn’t a factor. Like the risk to everything and everyone doesn’t matter, weighed against a single human life.
His Lady is still hiding, and Tam shakes and shakes.
Kendal waits until he’s completely sure he’s out of view of the Paladins before he stops.
He feels cold. Disconnected from the body.
Alinua is still asleep in his arms. Her clothes are in tatters, not enough to cover her, and he puts her down on the softest patch of moss he can find and pulls his shirt off to put on her.
The aftershocks of a night’s worth of anxiety and fear are washing through him, forming swirling eddies around the intense relief at having found her. The rage is incandescent, freezing and intense, white-hot needles he’ll have to pluck from his skin one by one. If they had killed her, he’s not sure what he would have done.
She’s unharmed, now. Judging by the shreds of cloth he pulls off her, she would’ve been dead a dozen times over if she was anyone but herself. Physical traces of violence have never been a thing for her.
If this feeling is anything like what she feels when she has to heal him, he owes her a million more apologies.
“—ndal?” she says, so quiet he barely hears her.
He wraps his arms around her nearly on instinct. “I’m here. I have you.”
It takes her too long to blink her way back to consciousness. He holds her the whole time and hopes it’s enough to let her feel safe.
“Everyone okay?” she whispers.
“Yes. They were only chasing you.” Guilt and shame war for place of honour in the back of his throat. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”
“But you found me.” She’s slowly sitting up, leaning heavily on him, pulling the shirt around herself. “What… I think they sedated me. What happened? Did I hurt anyone?”
“No one was hurt,” he assures her. “Life intervened when you fell unconscious. She scared them, but I don’t think she did anything worse.”
Alinua nods, relaxing against him.
For a while, he just sits there with her in his arms, content to stay like this for hours, days, as long as he has her.
“I sort of remember it this time,” she says. “But it’s… weird. Not my memories, and hers don’t really fit in something as small as me. I think she has to abstract them on purpose for me to understand.”
Vash’s memories sometimes make Kendal wish for senses he’s never had, or miss the ability to think on a scale he’ll never be capable of.
“That might be for the better,” he says.
“Maybe,” she says, sounding dubious. Then she frowns and pulls back to give him a strange look. “‘Mother’?”
Right. It caught him wildly off guard to be addressed the way Life did. He had no idea what to think about it, except…
“It felt right,” he says. “Like a piece slotting into place. I can only exist because of what you did, and she must have been guiding your hand at least a little.” He pauses. “I also didn’t want to argue with her.”
Alinua sighs, dropping her head on his shoulder. “Does that make me your mom’s employee?”
He’s probably supposed to laugh. “I liked best friend better. Let’s stick to that.”
She snorts, body shaking with laughter, and then all of a sudden she’s crying. Loud, gasping sobs tear through her body head to toe. She clings to him white-knuckled, nails making divots in his skin.
She’s alive, and she’s here, and he will hold her for as long as she needs.