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Grab me by my ankles, I've been flying for too long
I couldn't hide from the thunder in a sky full of song
Hold me down, I'm so tired now
Aim your arrow at the sky
Take me down, I'm too tired now
Leave me where I lie
I thought I was flying but maybe I'm dying tonight
-Florence + the Machine, Sky Full Of Song
When humans are born, they are born with songs playing through their ears.
They say that you are hearing the song of the universe when you hear it. They say that this is the song of people’s souls. The song of a heart desperate to find its other half. They say that once upon a time, the gods reached down and rended one half of the soul from the other, man from woman, each meant to be half of a perfect whole.
(They say that Nimona was born wrong, because she could change shape, because she was neither man nor woman, because when she was a child, Nimona thought that she had heard the song on the air, but all she truly heard was the sound of the town burning, the world ending, as everyone turned on someone that they didn't understand, because it was easier to be afraid than to be curious with an open heart.)
Nimona goes a thousand years before she hears the snatch of song in her ears.
There are less and less soulmates as time goes by. As magic seeps out of the world. As the kingdom loses its memories of the truth of monsters and yet builds its walls to keep them out.
One day, it almost seems as if there are no soulmates at all. As if the magic of soul-song has leeched out of the world entirely.
It has been lifetimes since Nimona has heard the words where you go, I shall go also. There is no me without you, spoken to solidify a soul-song.
And yet—
The world remains stratified. Only nobles can become knights. Only men can love women out in public.
By this point, Nimona knows that there is no part of society that wishes to keep her. That will ever want to have her. She is not a soulmate, she isn’t even an echo; she is the cacophony herself.
And fuck it. Fuck them all. She likes it. Likes being her own person. Likes being the song rather than the echo. The light rather than the shadow.
No matter how much they call her a monster. Call her an abomination. Hate her for the fact that she's a shifter, that she's neither fully boy nor girl, that she's without a song.
The thing is, Nimona never wanted romance in the first place. Never ached for it. Once, before the truth outed, when she dreamed of Gloreth being her soulmate, she never pictured kisses and sex.
She is too sharp for anyone. Despite her ability to shift, to become soft, at her core, she is too many spiky edges. Too much shrapnel.
Who could love a creature like that?
There is no one in this world that will ever understand her. Let Nimona be her own half.
---
The first time Nimona hears the song in person is when Ballister Boldheart kills the very queen that declared that he had the heart of a hero.
At first, she thinks she isn’t hearing it at all.
That what she is hearing is celebration, is mourning, is the sound of a sword cleaving through armor, through an arm, one knight tearing through the arm of another knight so as to stop the Queen from being killed.
But when the one-armed knight turns out to be a villain and she offers to be his sidekick, when he frowns, when he winges, when he shakes her hand—
She can’t ignore it anymore, the way that the song crescendos in her ears, guitar strings, piano strings, every note of Ballister Boldheart's soul rising high and strong in her ears.
Ballister even winces when he hears it, that crash in his ears, because of course she is a shriek, a crash, a cacophony, tearing through him as surely as that sword—
And yet, Nimona jumps for the opportunity. Jumps for the fact that for the first time in a millennium, there is someone that might just end her loneliness. One person who might just understand her.
Because when she finally begs (annoys, because she’s good at what she does) her way into becoming Ballister’s sidekick, they work together to clear Ballister’s name, to gather information from Diego and the Director and all the rest, Nimona comes to understand the parts of Ballister that set him apart.
It’s not just the fact that he’s a commoner, though that is part of it.
Ballister, it is clear, once loved another knight. And maybe still does. Not just any knight, either; the descendant of Gloreth herself. A man.
Back in the days that Nimona was born, that sort of thing would not be acceptable.
In her time, Nimona had found that there were soulmates that are made man of man or woman of woman. The universe doesn’t make mistakes, they all said over those years. It gives you exactly who you need, someone who is the other half of you, whatever form that might take.
But it was so hard to believe them until she met Ballister. Ballister, who is sharp and jagged and jaded by the entire world (and his boyfriend) exposing themselves for being just as prejudiced as the village that birthed her back in the day.
But that’s okay. She doesn't mind that he's romantically inclined to someone else and she's not.
Nimona doesn’t need her soulmate to love her in that way. As a matter of fact, she kinda hates the idea of having a soulmate in that way. Never once in the past thousand years has her desire to kiss people changed at all.
To punch dickheads? Sure. To get revenge on those who harm people? Also yes.
To kiss people? To have sex? Not so much.
No, the fact that Nimona hates is that the knight he loves is their enemy. The one who sliced off his arm.
Ballister knows what it’s like to be betrayed by the same blood that betrayed Nimona. He knows what it’s like to be betrayed by the person that he trusted most in the world.
And for awhile there, she thinks that maybe, just maybe, he gets her.
When they dance. When they listen to music. When they plot and they plan and he takes care of the arrow in her leg like it’s something that actually matters, because he sees her as a person, a people, instead of a creature.
Ballister, it turns out, has a heart that is too soft, a heart that bleeds a guitar’s strings, all life, all tenderness, and he’s not as much of a murderer as she’d anticipated or wanted.
But while she has absolutely no compunctions about knocking people unconscious and causing explosions, she thinks that she doesn’t mind the fact that her boss—her soulmate, the other half of her soul’s song—has sad, soft brown eyes that are too weak.
It’s nice, that he has a soft underside to his heart. That he hasn’t had to sharpen and jade himself all the way through like she did. That while he is half-made of metal, his heart is flesh—the opposite of her, who is ever-changing flesh but with a heart that feels more stone than not most days.
Maybe that’s why the universe made them a matched set. Why the world decided two halves of one soul in two bodies. Him human, her something very much not, something half-girl, half-everything-else.
But that’s okay. He might ask her to be normal, but the more he gets to know her, the more he comes to accept her. Or, at least, understand her.
Ballister of all people understands the importance of change. The importance of becoming more than what other people expect you to be based on the way that you were born.
The importance of breaking stuff.
And for the first time in forever, the first time in a thousand years, Nimona allows herself the audacity of hope. Of believing that the song that she hears is a song that can sing through her veins and last.
---
But when Ballister finds out the story about her and Gloreth, he—
He leaves.
And she’d thought—
She’d thought—
Her true nature has always been a mystery to everyone, even herself. All she knows is shifting, changing, becoming someone different, someone new, and yet being hated the entire time.
Once everyone sees you as a villain, that’s all you truly are.
But for a moment, there, she’d thought that Ballister saw something in her that no one else had.
Nimona has always known that no one would love her, that she didn’t even have a soulmate, but when she did find him—
Nimona knows what it’s like to shift. To bleed. To run. To shift from girl to boy to girl and everything in between.
But to crack open. To splinter. To become more stomach than creature. To become more maw, more ache, than soul.
Nimona’s existence has always been a battlefield. Has always been a war that she has been trying to fight to survive as herself, not as someone else’s monster.
But when the little girl is terrified of her, same as Gloreth was convinced to be, same as Ballister is heralded to be—
Nimona never was a monster before. She never truly was the creature that Gloreth was said to have defeated.
But in this moment, with Ballister gone, with her soulmate missing, with her completely alone in a way that she was always afraid that she would be—
The universe has torn open a wound between her ribs, and naught but shadow bleeds through in the wake of the knife.
---
When he comes to her, she is not Nimona anymore. She is the Great Black Monster, the very legend that he was raised and shaped to fight. A creature that is beyond a creature, all-consuming shadow, no pink left.
There is no song left.
There is only the monster that they created. The shadows, falling through the city, the night sky devouring, the ache of a little girl-who-was-not-a-girl itching to be released from within a skin that didn't fit.
Except, when Ballister touches her, when he drops his blade, when he stops her from killing herself, when he looks up at her, sad, soft brown eyes—
A sound emerges from inside of the Monster’s chest. A grieving keen. A sound that breaks the laws of physics with its wail.
Ballister Boldheart takes in a deep breath, and some spot of pink burning bright deep inside of the Monster wonders—
Can you hear me?
Do you see me?
Am I a monster to you?
Or—
Do you finally hear my song?
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I see you, Nimona,” Ballister says, “I know you. I hear you. And you are not alone.”
I hear you.
I hear you.
And the Great Black Monster collapses into the child that was tucked inside of it all along. The soul that was singing through all of the attempts on her life.
Her song echoes, lonely, aching, on the verge of death—
And Ballister catches her.
For the first time in Nimona’s life, she finds herself caught, not by the force of gravity dragging her downward, but rather by the arms of the one person that understands her.
---
But it’s not enough.
---
The Director aims the cannon at the city, and Nimona knows how this story goes.
At least, she knows how it goes when she's the one writing it.
It's time to rewrite the story.
It's time for Nimona to fly.
Because at the end of the day, she became a monster because the world made her one.
But she's going to become a hero because she says so, and watch the world raise up a ghost where it once tossed down a monster.
---
So the world explodes. The Great Black Monster vanishes.
And Nimona should go with it, except—
Some tiny, small piece of her remains, smaller than she’s ever been before, because she can’t hold onto anything larger, but also because there is someone out there that has a soul-song that echoes hers, someone who cares, and that person has another life outside of her, she knows that now, she has always known that, but just to know that he is there—
It's enough.
---
She goes by herself to recover.
Whatever soul song is echoing through her, it isn’t about romance. It isn’t about this. And she doesn’t want it to be.
But Ballister?
Ballister has his romance. He has his knight boyfriend, who it turns out isn't a complete dipshit.
And she isn’t the biggest fan of Ambrosius, but he did do his best to help them out. To save Ballister. So she has to give them their chance. She has to be happy for them.
That's what being half of someone's soul is about, right? Wanting them to have their happy ending?
She thinks so, at least.
Except—
Recovery isn't an easy thing. It isn't something you can really do on your own when you have dissipated to nothing more than a bug.
(And yes, Nimona is aware of the fact that the kingdom has considered a pest for so long, but this is—this is different.)
For a few months, this is how she exists: barely shifting. More blob than person. The smallest of creatures, a pink beetle with a shimmering carapace, scuttling, echoing, the scratching skitter of her limbs against the wooden floor the only song that any soulmate might hear.
When she falls, her wings do stretch out to catch her—though most days she isn’t strong enough to try to actually fly up. To push against the force of gravity, too strong a force of nature to be fought against.
But she’s alive. She’s exhausted, and she’s aching, but she’s alive, and that’s something.
---
And then—
The door finally opens.
Ballister, despite having the world at his feet, despite finally having the boyfriend and the life that he's wanted, in a world finally open to true possibility and not just the system that built it, is here. At the lair that they shared.
And she is still a beetle. A beetle so small she can’t even talk. A beetle so small that song should be impossible, and yet—
And yet he finds her, small and glittering on the floor, more pink than shadow.
And he cups her between his hands, holding him tender and close, and ends up nursing her back to health, with honey and milk and medicine and pellets of nutrition that satiate both animal and human form alike, because Nimona is sure that her insides are some sort of medical marvel and who knows what sort of food is going to keep her healthy and going?
But when she tries to speak, her voice is just a warble, and he runs a hand over her scales, over her fur, and tells her, “Take your time, kid,” even though she’s not a kid, even though she’s centuries older than him. “I’ll be here the whole time.”
Nimona doesn’t know why. She’s been independent her entire life. She’s never relied on anyone else to take care of her. Before now, she wouldn’t say she even knew how.
But right now, Ballister is taking care of her. Is nursing her back to health. And she is healing. Her tissues are knitting themselves back together. Her body is stitching itself back into health, little by little, ache by ache, scar by scar.
Nimona wants to ask is Ambrosius worried about you? She wants to ask why are you taking all this time to take care of me?
But he touches her beetle-wings with the sort of gentleness and care that no one else could ever master, and something inside of her shudders as she hears a song echoing through her ears, guitar playing, piano plinking through the air, a cascade of notes strung together in a quiet, gentle caress, and it’s not hard to let some part of her settle away from the ache. Not hard to let herself finally be held.
She starts to grow, again. To change. To slip just a bit between scale and fur and skin, insides twisting and moving, and for anyone else, that would be disturbing, would put stress on the system, would ruin them, but each shift makes her feel a little bit more like herself.
---
Eventually, Nimona is able to shift to a form more able to speak.
“Why’d you come here?” she asks, and her voice is a rasp, because this is the longest she’s ever gone without speaking.
But Ballister doesn’t even hesitate. “Because I needed to make sure that you were okay. Because we’re friends, right?”
The word friends could be such a casual term to anyone else, but Nimona hasn’t had a friend in a thousand years. She has been so lonely, for so long, and she knows that Ballister has too.
"What about your boyfriend? Isn't he worried?"
But Ballister doesn't even blink. "Ambrosius understands that there is no me without you.”
It is an echo of words spoken so long ago as to not possibly be on accident, except there's no way that Ballister could ever know the significance of what he's saying.
(And yet, in some ways, doesn't that make it even more significant? Doesn't that make it even greater a decision? That he makes such a promise not out of obligation to the standards of the universe, but just because he wants to? Because he cares about her?)
Nimona swallows. “What do you know about soulmates?” she asks, because she knows that the tales still exist. Tales of Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers who would go to the Underworld for each other just to avoid one dying.
Nimona doesn’t want a lover. All she wants is someone she can trust. Someone who would follow her, and she would follow them, into hell itself, into the depths of the end of the world, and that’s what Ballister did with the Great Black Monster. He entered the end of the world for her.
“That they used to fill the world,” Ballister says, “With the sound of song.” He almost sounds wistful at that, and for so long Nimona couldn’t imagine a world where she would ever crave to hear a melody, but now that she has met Ballister, now that she knows him, now that she can hear the plink of the notes that follow him around—“They say that it was supposed to be about love—"
“You don’t sound like jazz, if you’re worried.”
The words pop out before Nimona can stop them, too harsh, too blunt, but she doesn’t know how to lie about the song that she's been dreaming of since she was a kid, since she was a little girl who wasn't a little girl, a creature who didn't know how to be anything more than the shadows that everyone assumed her to be.
Ballister freezes, and the air feels ripped from Nimona’s lungs.
She curls up tight in his arms, a hamster, a lizard, an ache—
For so long, she has not cared about rejection. She has made her life on rejecting the world before it could reject her and hurt her again.
But when it comes to Ballister—he is her best friend. The person who understands her most in the world. The person who cares.
“I know you have Ambrosius,” she says, voice quiet in a way that she's not used to. She's used to being the loudest sound in every room, the ringing clash of sense against sense, the source of chaos—not the source of quiet. “But that’s not what I—”
“I can care about two people, y’know,” Ballister says, and it feels as if her lungs have been inflated as he reaches forward and pulls her into a hug. “And you’re right—I heard a song when I met you. I don't care that they told you to stay in the shadows. They told me to stay in the gutter. I understand you, Nimona. I get you. I love you, too, kid."
There’s something eager in Nimona that wants to know: “What do I sound like?”
It’s a question that she’s been wanting to ask for a thousand years.
“I wasn’t sure what I was hearing at first, but a bit like punk music. But also- a single piano melody as well, sometimes, on the air. A soft, quiet voice singing. Almost...soothing. Peaceful. Both of these songs are you, Nimona. You're so many things, so much chaos, and all of them are beautiful. You're a good kid, Nimona, no matter what the world has told you."
To Ballister, Nimona isn’t a monster—she’s a kid. A kid, who is half-kid, half-everything else.
But he’s not just okay with her being the everything else—he loves her for it.
Nimona thinks about playing in the grass with Gloreth. About sharing apples. About thinking that she heard a song when Gloreth cheered at her shifting. About how terrifying it was for her best friend to turn on her.
But where Gloreth didn't come back, never admitted she'd been wrong to be afraid—Ballister was there for Nimona in her worst moment. Was there for her when the world thought she was a monster—just as she was for him.
He stayed then, and he's staying now.
"Y'know, you might be worth putting up with that knight of yours," Nimona says.
And Ballister laughs. "As long as you can break stuff?" he asks.
Nimona grins. The system needs an overhaul, doesn't it? "As long as you're there breaking things with me."