Chapter 1: Outside
Chapter Text
The universe dissolves along with the tears on my face, and once they’re gone they have never been. I hang suspended in the space between the pages, the void at the other end of the final period; this is the place where stories rest, before the narrator gathers up the balls to once again shape the world into something that human minds can fathom. The void itself cannot be comprehended – not even by my all-seeing eye, which parses it as empty blackness simply because I don’t give enough of a shit to come up with anything better.
Once I dismiss the medium of the story - which is to say everything - I remain the one thing that is truly real. I am aware of this even as I touch down on something solid, gaze out over the abyss which is my true element, and sit down. I could tell the story from the beginning, but that in itself is a concept that has lost all meaning at this point. So I shall tell it as I remember it; the way I would if there was anyone left to explain it to, some neutral party who could still be convinced to offer the sympathy I’ve so richly deserved to lose.
I will recount the tale of the narrator, my tale – which is to say, your tale. You, the Dirk Strider who will one day become me.
After all, you really are the only one left who’s prepared to listen. Even I am growing weary of my own excuses.
A wish is not a simple thing, and even if you hadn’t been a suspicious bastard to begin with, having it presented as such would certainly have put you on edge. Sure, the creature was cute, in a blank-faced and eerie kind of way, but that didn’t mean you trusted it even as far as you could throw it. The way it stared at you, mouth fixed in that sugary-sweet not-smile, quickly started to unnerve you.
You were just shy of fourteen then, before the idea of linear time as a concept had quickly started to unravel on you, and the Incubator first appeared when you accidentally strayed into a Labyrinth that had opened up at the shitty mall just down the street from your house. The dream world madness around you made the creature, which otherwise would’ve looked as out of place as a bad special effect shoehorned into real life, seem like the one of the few verifiably real things that you could still hold on to. No doubt it counted on this, and it calmly explained what Magical Girls were as two of them were busy saving your sorry ass.
The precarious nature of the situation certainly helped sell the image of valiant fighters against a secret evil. You were told about Labyrinths, these deadly pocket dimensions that could open up in the middle of your everyday drudgery and swallow you whole, with the monstrous creatures known as witches lurking at the heart of them, like spiders in a web. In a placid, almost cheerful fashion, you were told the secret on which human civilization rested: That something dark and incomprehensible was gnawing at the very foundations of your world, and only these candy-colored girls who looked no older than you stood as a bulwark against it. And you were told that you, too, had the possibility to be one of them.
Once they were done fighting, the girls introduced themselves as Roxy and Jane; they eagerly invited you to spend time with them after school, offered to mentor you and watch your back if you decided to become a Magical Girl – they didn’t know that you were a guy yet, so that’s how they phrased it. “If,” meaning, “when”. It was clear they were convinced you’d do it. You’d thanked them, saying you needed time to consider things, and headed home on legs that you forced not to shake. The creature they called Kyuubey – the Incubator, as you would come to know it – followed you there, as if it was a stray cat that you had fed. Curling its lithe body around one of the scattered puppets on your bed, it seemed perfectly happy to provide answers to your prolonged barrage of questions, starting with witches and branching out into the minutiae of using Soul Gems to transform, and how wishes could affect magical powers.
That was the crux of it, really. The magical powers in themselves weren’t meant to be a gift, but merely a tool in your fight against the witches. The actual deal was a very simple transaction, trading one wish for anything you might want against the ability and the duty to fight against the evil creatures which threatened humanity. Or, well, it seemed simple enough. A bit too simple, even.
It didn’t take you long to realize that the creature would provide truthful answers to any question, regardless of if it turned out to reflect poorly on itself and its own kind, or made you seriously doubt if it was possible to achieve a fair bargain. It would tell you anything you wanted to know… provided that you could come up with an appropriate question. But beyond its opening spiel, it would not voluntarily provide any information at all – and if possible, it would tell you the very bare minimum that satisfied the conditions of your inquiry.
So it was obviously trying to fuck you over, and fuck you over badly. Just how badly, you weren’t yet aware of, and it would take you a descent into a private universe of horror to find out. But as it was, you were at least convinced that making a hasty decision would be the worst fucking mistake you probably wouldn’t even live long enough to properly regret.
You took your time deciding.
Your gut instinct had been straightforward enough; your body was starting to pull one unpleasant trick after another on you by then, and now someone was handing you a way of fixing that for good. The self-control it had taken you to not let those words immediately spill out of your mouth, cementing your most cherished fantasies into reality, had been herculean. But somehow, you managed. There were certain angles that you needed to consider.
Luckily enough for you, you had ample opportunity to study what would happen if you did things the easy way. You watched the self-confidence and ease in Roxy’s every movement, the way she glanced at herself in mirrors and smiled bright as an earthbound sun. You observed the way she used her shape shifting in battles, hanging back safely as she and Jane made short work of witch after witch. A mercurial creature of shifting hues, a whirlwind of vicious claws melting into deft fingers, which instantly hardened into guns. It was tempting, yes.
But the wish didn’t actually affect how Roxy’s parents spoke to her. Or her teachers. Or her classmates. Strangers would get it right, but no amount of femininity would budge people who already knew her. Not to mention, she couldn’t very well show how her body had changed to convince anyone, because how the fuck was she supposed to explain that? She ate too much processed food and that’s how she spontaneously sprouted tits?
You knew then that you wouldn’t be content with that. If anything, it would only drive you even more insane, to walk around with a dick and still have people acting like they didn’t know who Dirk was.
Besides, you could also see the limitations of shape shifting as a power in itself. Versatile as it could be, its offensive capabilities were entirely tied to her speed of reaction and her imagination, especially against something like a witch, and it frequently meant she had to put her actual body in harm’s way. You told yourself that if you had this one chance to make a wish, and considering the downright faustian nature of the deal, why not go as big as you could possibly conceive of?
So you asked for the power to rewrite the universe.
Your own body, your past, your choices, the thoughts of people around you, and thereby also their actions… If you could put it into words and make it work in your head, it would instantly become true. That was and is your one limitation… if you can call it that. You have to consciously fit people and events into some kind of coherent narrative, a reasonable sequence which you can make yourself believe, and which doesn’t actively strive against the personalities involved. It has to make sense, or it won’t work. Looking at it like that, you like to think of it as more of a fail-safe. It prevents you from accidentally unwriting the whole universe, or bringing your most inane fantasies to life every time your mind strays.
It’s still an absolutely preposterous amount of power for one fucked-up teenager to wield.
So of course I’d gotten it wrong from the get-go - as a matter of fact, I had rather counted on it. I’d thought of it as nothing more than a certain expected amount of teething troubles, and an acceptable sacrifice at that, since I could easily undo any damage I unwittingly caused. Now, of course, I almost wish that I’d been capable of losing count of how many draft universes I’ve scrapped because things got out of hand. I wish forgetting was still a mercy I could offer myself. As it is, because I hadn’t been able to correctly predict the consequences of the starting parameters I myself wrote, I am forced to recall every single iteration of my own colossal, causality-spanning fuckup.
Once shit started to go wrong, and I still believed myself capable of somehow undoing the fundamental flaw that was my own involvement, I wrote myself into hole after hole, and watched my friends suffer the consequences of my incompetence. I wrote myself further and further away from them, desperate to save them from myself… and the more desperate I became, the further I ended pushing them along the proverbial creek without a paddle, all while graciously filling it with the vilest possibly excrement that the universe had to offer.
But for a while there, right at the beginning, I hadn’t yet begun to fathom exactly how deeply the cracks ran; how they were coded into the very DNA of the universe from the moment I made my wish. And so I’d thought, naively, that there was still a solution to be found.
It might even be called cute, if retrospection didn’t render it so infuriating.
I write a pebble into existence between my fingers, only to toss it idly off the platform I’m perched on. Both platform and pebble are more ideas than physical objects, made real only in the sense that they can interact with my own idea of my body. But as the Incubators had been sure to remind me, everything is only ever as relevant as its interaction with everything else renders it, so perhaps I’m splitting hairs. The pebble dwindles away, carried by unchanging velocity through an endless vacuum, and slowly fades as my attention drifts.
There’s an unpleasant tightness in my throat, and instead of attempting to write it away, I simply grit my teeth against it. For a brief, brilliant moment, I’d actually allowed myself to hope that there was some kind of not-miserable ending which I might still achieve. That there was some way for me to take part in a narrative that already seemed to grow ever more distant to me, as I slipped inexorably into the meta of my own life.
Jake had made me believe that - and for that, more than anything, I really ought to hate him.
Of course, that was before I understood what Jake was. Before I realized that involving him in my story was the worst mistake I’d ever made.
It was the sixth iteration of the universe since you’d started rewriting it, following Jane’s first death. This time, you’d decided to distance yourself from her and Roxy, thinking that maybe it was your presence in their lives that had fucked shit up in the first place. Sooner or later, as long as you were around, they were certain to find out the truth about what Magical Girls really were, what the Incubators were doing to them. That never ended well. Jane’s powers were too dependent on her convictions; once you stripped those away, she would either falter and fail, or twist into something utterly ruthless.
Last time around, she’d impaled Roxy before you had a chance to stop her. She said it was for the best. That she couldn’t bear the thought of Roxy of all people turning into a witch. She’d smiled, eyes brimming with tears as she closed her friend’s emptily staring ones with a gentle hand. Then she’d told you to step out of her way. It was clear, she said, that she had an important job to do.
Yeah, you might be staggeringly foolish, but you’ve never been stupid . You caught her fork before it plunged into your flesh as well, stared her down as she snarled. Be reasonable, she’d said, her voice eerily calm despite this. You had to understand. The only way of preventing more witches was to die before you transformed. She was only doing you a favour .
So you killed Jane, because you had to, and then restarted things before you met them. Wrote yourself out of their lives, avoided the mall on that fateful day. You looked the other way when Roxy tried to catch your eye in the classroom, and ignored her as she tentatively tried to speak mind-to-mind with you, the way Magical Girls can. It was fine. You didn’t mind. It was better this way, for them and you both. You didn’t have to deal with losing them one more time if there was nothing there to lose. And they sure as fuck were better off without you.
You were fine.
You were going to be fine… eventually.
So you ended up taking on a witch on your own that you’d previously faced with two friends at your side, and to no one’s great surprise, it wasn’t pleasant. In fact, you weren’t sure that you were going to make it, and the worst part of that was how you could only muster a vague, exhausted sense of relief at that prospect. Not even satisfaction but a deep and abiding certainty that it couldn’t be worse. At least dead people didn’t know how lonely they were, right?
It wasn’t your brightest hour, let’s put it like that.
And then, right into the depressing mess you’d made for yourself, shot a yellow something in a whirlwind of blazing guns and an immensely frilly skirt, shouting a war cry that to your disbelieving ears sounded a whole lot like, “COWABUNGAAAAAA!” The recklessness of the charge completely derailed you, and you’d been so sure that you were going to watch yet another dumb kid eat shit right in front of you. It was one of the many messed-up things you’d implicitly signed up for when you agreed to Kyubey’s terms, of course, but that didn’t make it any less disheartening.
You were just about to turn away, to at least spare yourself whatever gruesome fate this idiot would face, when a deafening volley of gunfire tore the whole damn Labyrinth apart in a blaze of golden light. Your eyes sought hectically for the witch, but only caught the sad little flicker before it dissolved into a handful of confetti. The boy in front of you landed lightly on the floor, followed by the clatter of a Grief Seed. Your eyes rested on it a while longer than necessary. Those round, black objects left behind after witches were defeated were, regrettably, just as much at a premium for you as for everyone else. Save for completely turning back time and resetting events, they remained your only reliable way of cleaning out the impurities left inside a Soul Gem after prolonged magic use, or other kinds of intense emotional strain.
During the first iteration, you had tried simply writing one into existence, but the attempt had ended up rapidly darkening your Soul Gem even further. In retrospect, of course, that only made sense. It was only your powers trying to comply with your instructions - but you didn’t know that back then. So you’d simply chalked it up to a failed attempt, and hadn’t tried it again. Luckily enough, since pushing it further would no doubt have turned your Soul Gem into the Grief Seed you sought… and you into a witch.
The strange boy wiped sweat out of his forehead, and your attention snapped back to him. He appeared to be a bit winded, but otherwise unscathed. Before you could pull your scrambled mind together and manage something, anything that didn’t just involve gaping dumbly at him, he hit you with a grin so bright that your retinas risked being soldered to the back of your skull.
“Wow! You’re a Magical Boy, just like me! I’ve never met one before.”
It was true. The only other Magical Boy you’d briefly met by that point had also been trans like you, because an overwhelming majority of the time, the Incubators tended to choose either girls or people they mistook for girls. You’d inquired about this as well, and gotten a placid tilt of the Incubator’s head in return, as the thing seemed to consider the merit of your inquiry. When they had first started interacting with humanity, it said, it had simply seemed logical that the carriers of offspring were naturally more suited to tolerate the kind of pain and prolonged mental exertion that fighting witches entailed.
The human idea of gender was something they didn’t understand at all, having no corresponding structure to compare it to, although through your acquaintance with them it became increasingly obvious to you that they had been actively involved in creating it. Which was to say that as time went by, girls only seemed to become more and more inclined to quietly sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, and the Incubators had simply chalked it up to some manner of altruistic instinct. You, on the other hand, could clearly see that the way Magical Girls would rise to become great leaders and shape whole cultures with the power of their secret suffering, was in itself the genesis of how femininity – and more to the point, perceived femininity – was viewed. It varied from culture to culture, as the dominant paradigm altered with the different women who influenced it, but sacrifice of those who carried the world on their shoulders persisted, and so became ingrained in humanity itself.
The boy was still beaming at you, and you noticed how unconcernedly he wore the plethora of ribbons and lace on a body which no just and even-handed god would bestow on a fifteen-year-old boy. But he had just called himself a boy, so… “Did you ask Kyuubey to alter your body?” Only after the words were already out did you realize that this was not how you were supposed to greet someone who just saved your life… or anyone at all, regardless of circumstances. It was just a rude as shit thing to say. “Fuck, nevermind, I didn’t mean-”
“No.” He frowned at you, as if he was considering whether you had a couple of screws loose, and to be honest you had no guarantees to give him on that score. “Why would I do that? I asked him to make me a hero!”
Open-mouthed staring was also a rude as shit thing to do, but this time around you rather felt that he’d asked for it. “You… what?”
“A hero.” He honest-to-god struck a pose. You noticed, absently, that below the tiny golden wings attached to his back, there was a big bow held in place by a skull-shaped ornament. “Since what I really wanted in the first place was to become a Magical Boy, I couldn’t think of a single better thing to ask, so that’s what I settled for.” He laughed, a little bit sheepishly, as if he wasn’t completely unaware of how thoroughly unhinged that made him sound. “Kyuubey suggested that I ask for a cake! But that felt like a bit of a waste of a perfectly good wish!”
“No shit,” you replied, somewhat feebly. A cake. Sell your literal soul to an amoral species of aliens for a cake. Those bastards had no shame.
“What about you?” he demanded, eyes lighting up with interest behind the thick lenses of his goggles. “I couldn’t for the life of me keep track of you as you were fighting, and you seemed able to pull new tricks out of your sleeve like rabbits out of a hat. It sure had me scratching my head… but, you know, in a good way! I’d be damn chuffed if you could tell me how you did that.”
Normally you’d obfuscate, or coolly inform the nosy party that it was none of their concern, but this faintly glowing boy had knocked you off-kilter enough that you found yourself lacking the wherewithal. Or maybe he was just really damn handsome, and you wanted to impress him. “I can alter the fabric of the universe,” you said, with as much nonchalance as you could manage. You extended your left hand, made a flower bloom from the cradle of your fingers, and then rewrote it into a brief blaze of red flame. An absolutely cringy thing to do, of course, but there was no one there to see you apart from the other boy, who stared at you in starry-eyed admiration.
“Boy howdy, that is a neat trick!” You couldn’t decide whether to be more appalled by the fact that he’d actually used the words ‘boy howdy’, or that he’d reduced the power to rewrite reality to ‘a neat trick’; either way, he didn’t appear to notice. And the way his eyes were fixed on you was… nice. It was really, really nice.
Forcing yourself not to preen at the probably-compliment, you shrugged. “It has its uses.”
“So…” Jake was already transforming back into what you assumed to be his school uniform; different from yours, and rather posh-looking. His Soul Gem reverted to the more utilitarian ring that everyone wore outside of battle. You noticed that the symbol that lit up his corresponding nail looked like a very abstract pair of wings. When your gaze returned to his face, he was leveling a really serious look at you. “If you don’t mind my asking, but why the dickens were you letting yourself be worsted by this ole thing?” He bent down, picking up the disregarded Grief Seed by his feet and holding it up for inspection. “I mean, if I hadn’t showed up, I think you would’ve found yourself coming out on the small end of the horn, and I straight can’t wrap my noggin around that. Not with your power.”
Ah. Straightforward, bordering on fucking cheeky. You tensed your jaw to hold back a frown, glad that your shades hid the way your eyes flickered away from him. “Bad day,” you said flatly. “That’s all.”
He was quiet for a bit too long, meaning he could tell exactly how full of shit you truly were, but then nodded and shrugged as if he could see nothing unreasonable in your reply. “Well, I’ve certainly had my own quantum of those!” He flicked the Grief Seed across his knuckles like a conjurer, winked, and then tossed it at you.
As you caught it, you allowed yourself to properly frown this time around. “It’s yours by right. Like you said, if you hadn’t come around, I would’ve been fucked.” Your voice sharpened. “And I don’t need charity.”
You raised your hand to toss the Grief Seed right back, and he held his own up in an almost comical gesture of defense. “I’m sorry, my good fellow, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist! You saw the witch first, and let no man say that Jake English is a rascally poacher!” He waggled his eyebrows at you, ridiculously, and suddenly all tension ran out of you like water. You snorted, because that was the only alternative to outright laughing at his antics.
“Yeah, obviously we can’t have any rascally shenanigans. What the fuck was I thinking?” You touched your finger to the heart-shaped jewel in your belly-button, and it lit up, easily morphing into the egg-like intermediate shape, the one most often used while cleansing it from impurities. You felt your clothes shift on your body, leaving you in the t-shirt and shorts you’d worn before your transformation. The shining orange letters which were scribbling themselves across the inside of your shades faded, as they stopped being a physical manifestation of your power.
The boy – Jake English – watched with some alarm as you touched your Soul Gem to the Grief Seed, draining the murky surface until it once more glowed a deep and steady pink. He couldn’t know that this was pretty normal for you by now. He couldn’t know that you were used to balancing right on the edge of the abyss, refusing to look just in case you saw it winking back at you. It wasn’t even that big of a deal. In the past, you had in fact rewritten the universe to an earlier point when you caught it getting too dark, but most of the time you could easily find a witch to deal with it.
“Dirk,” you said, instead of answering whatever question was contained in his gaze. “I’m Dirk Strider.”
Chapter 2: Riptide
Chapter Text
See? I can’t actually blame anyone but myself. And to be honest it doesn’t surprise me at all, how easy it was for me to lay the foundations of my own destruction.
Anyway, let’s backtrack a bit to properly lay the scene for the Hellenic proportions of this tragedy - but because we don’t want to lose focus, let’s make a montage of it. Everyone loves a solid fucking montage, right?
So we’re back at the start of this story, as you knelt on what ought to be the floor of the mall, but it was covered in something that might be grass since it was green and on the ground, but which felt to your desperately searching hands like candy floss. The world around you looked like something out of a demented storybook for kids, all garish colors and blocky shapes under a blindingly blue sky. Everywhere around you there were flowers - or rather, thick and scribbly crayon lines hovering in the air that seemed to create the vague shapes of flowers.
They swayed in the repetitive, tinny music that seemed to come from nowhere, and the louder the music grew, the more agitated the lines that made up the flowers became. As it climbed to an unbearable pitch, the soft swirls sharpened into spikes - no, not spikes, teeth . The center of each flower became a yawning maw full of teeth and they were coming towards you, and- and- This can’t be real . That’s what you told yourself over and over because you knew, you knew it couldn’t be - but even so you also knew, suddenly and without any doubt, that this was how you were going to die.
“Oh, wow, this is a majorly nasty one!” Suddenly someone was standing by your side. You… You knew her. Well, not knew properly as in her being your friend, because you didn’t actually have those, but she sat next to you in class every day. Boys shouted slurs at her, and poured soda into her fluffy pink hair, and girls didn’t talk to her because they thought she was a ‘creepy boy’. She was the one other person that you knew of in school who was like you, so of course you’d paid attention - but you’d never actually talked to her.
She was visible, you were hidden. You didn’t think you’d be able to talk to her without giving yourself away, so you hadn’t.
“What the fuck,” you said, “is going on here?”
“We’ll have time to explain later.” A different voice, belonging to someone you didn’t recognize, though she was wearing the same stupid school uniform as you were too. “For now, we have work to do.”
They both held up a small, glowing object each, one dark blue and one searing turquoise, and with a strange unraveling sound, light bloomed from their bodies. They transformed into incandescent silhouettes, as ribbons of swirling colors enfolded them, embraced them, solidified against their skin. Your eyes teared up from the sheer brightness, and once they cleared, you almost refused to believe what they saw. The world just didn't work like that.
“ They’re Magical Girls, ” said a voice inside your head.
The next day after school, Roxy took your hand and dragged you with her to her place. You inquired about Jane, but she shrugged airily and told you that Jane had lots of activities and volunteer projects after school, and unless there were any witches to fight, she refused to miss out on even a minute. So suddenly it was just you and Roxy in her room, which was exactly as strange as you could’ve imagined. It was full of stuff from her parents that was obviously there to stamp the word ‘boy’ on every available surface - baseball mitt, skateboard, a huge poster with a car on it, a bottle of expensive cologne - but it’s all being overrun by Roxy’s actual personality like a tidal wave of pink plushies, pictures of cats, and scattered make-up. A silent war was being waged in that room. You weren’t sure on which side the psychedelic pictures of wizards fell on, but you assumed they were hers.
Roxy was kind of weird.
“So,” she said with a lopsided grin, “guess what I wished for.”
“I don’t have to guess,” you said, because seriously, you’d seen her transform into an eight-feet-tall cat yesterday. If she could be a giant cat mecha made out of rifles, she could be anything .
“Yeaaah, I guess it’s not exactly rocket surgery, is it?” Roxy put her hands down right on top of her boobs, and you had no idea where you were supposed to look, so you stared up at the ceiling while you felt your cheeks and ears burn. “I mean, to be fair, they’re totally worth it.” A pause, and you felt her gaze penetrate all the way down to your bones. “But I guess you think that’s pretty weird, huh?”
“Nah.” There was a chain of origami hearts dangling from her bed frame, and you stared it down in fabricated fascination. “I mean, no offence I guess, but they’re not all that interesting to me personally.” You shrugged, still not looking at her. “But I don’t tell other people how to live their lives.”
“Oh.” You didn’t know if she sounded relieved or disappointed, and you weren’t about to look. “Yeah, I guess so!” She suddenly laughed. “Anyway, joke’s on the bitches in class who say they can totally tell that they’re fake, right?”
That got a small huff of amusement out of you, despite your best efforts. “Yeah, joke’s on them.”
She never got around to confessing her feelings for you in that first timeline. Which wasn’t to say that you didn’t suspect it. Sometimes, she’d get a just bit too excited about the idea that you might make your contract soon, and you could see Jane’s mouth twitch with disapproval, hear the faltering joy that crumpled into guilt as Roxy’s voice trailed off. She just clearly wanted it too much, and since there wasn’t a truly cruel bone in her body, the only other reason had to be self-interest. Because having those kinds of feelings for someone who knew nothing about the world of Magical Girls… well, Roxy was always way too smart to think that’d work.
Then Jane died, and you were left standing there with your mouth half-open, your wish dying on your lips. You’d held off on it, had second-guessed yourself, and that was the result. When you were needed, when your power could’ve saved her, you just weren’t fast enough. In that moment, you fell short, and you couldn’t accept it. As Roxy collapsed sobbing over what was left of her friend’s body, and you saw the shadows of her big sister’s twisted magical kid gang descending over the witch that took Jane away, you took a step back, then another, and another, your gaze glued to the carnage even as your body screamed at you to flee. The Incubator curled around your neck, its face right next to yours.
“You can’t actually leave the Labyrinth until the witch is dead, ” it reminded you, as Rose’s friend sent the wretched thing flying with her hammer.
“The fuck I can’t,” you croaked, your throat so tight and parched that it felt like a clenched fist. “Listen carefully, Kyuubey: I wish…”
And in the next iteration, you did save Jane… at least from that witch. What you couldn’t save her from was finding out what magical girls were . That was out of your hands… quite literally. Shit, at that point you didn’t know either.
It came down to Roxy’s creepy sister yet again. She and her lackeys are technically in charge of the ward that borders on yours, and if they could keep themselves to their own turf it wouldn’t be such a damn issue. You’d be perfectly prepared to be entirely amicable with those asholes, and everything could be hunky-fucking-dory. But no, for some inscrutable reason Rose always seems to know where Roxy is, and will randomly insert whatever shitty agenda she’s got into your business - and back then she had numbers on her side, too. Four of them, three of you.
You and Jane had nonetheless been perfectly prepared to fight them, because they were in between you and a witch that was clearly and definitely on your territory. Sure, she was Roxy’s sister, but she was the one who was making herself an issue, and since she wouldn’t take a hint and back down…
It completely took you aback when Roxy suddenly snatched your Soul Gem out of your hand, and even more so when she flung it right off the damn overpass you were on. Into running fucking traffic! You whipped around, prepared to snarl at her, and then-
-then nothing. Nothing at all, until your eyes snapped open and you found one of Rose’s friends kneeling next to you, his hand hovering above yours. As your gaze darted from his brown fingers to the bright pink glow of your Soul Gem lighting your palm, realization dawned, but without any context to anchor it to. Roxy had thrown it away, and this boy had somehow managed to get it back for you. He was panting, and there was an asthmatic rasp when he inhaled; his other hand was clenched around the hilt of his sword, which he was leaning his body heavily against.
Behind him, Jane was holding Kyuubey up in the air, shaking it like a chew toy in the jaws of a dog. “How could you?” she was shouting. “How could you do this to us?”
“What…?” you mumbled, feeling off-balance, without even the wherewithal to transform. The kneeling boy looked tense, his shoulders raised in discomfort.
“You absolutely wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he informed you with an awkward shudder that you thought was possibly meant to be a laugh. “Like, shit’s 100% Chiquita bananas and I’m just not qualified to be the lady with the fruit salad hat, you dig?”
The shaking didn’t seem to affect the Incubator’s voice in the slightest. “ It’s really strange ,” it said, “ that humans get so hung up on where their souls are kept. So many of you don’t even believe you have them, or think they’re somehow indestructible. We just try to keep them safe… why isn’t that a good thing? ”
That was the evening when Roxy confessed her feelings for you for the first time. It must’ve had something to do with finding out you were all just glorified meat puppets being piloted by the minds which the Incubators had trapped inside fucking jewelry. More than ever before, it must’ve sunk in that whatever you had become, it sure as fuck couldn’t be called human, and there was just no way back. When all that’s left of your humanity is a walking corpse and a bunch of memories of when you were real, living, breathing people… well, what the fuck is there to save? And for Roxy in particular, who had sold her literal soul for a body which wasn’t even hers now, not really… the truth must’ve cut even deeper.
She probably thought she had nothing left to lose.
You’d turned her down, and since it seemed the kindest thing to do, you told her that you just weren’t into girls. Squirming as she laughed and cried uncontrollably then, hysterical amusement allying with heartbreak as it shook her apart completely, left her a gasping mess in your arms as you refused to give in to the impulse to flee. This, at least, you could do for her.
She shimmered in your arms, and when she looked up, her hair was shorter, her face slightly more masculine. “I don’t suppose,” she said with a weak, hopeless smile, “that this makes any difference? Does it?”
You sighed and leaned in, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “You’re still a girl, Roxy. I’m sorry.”
She finally cried herself to sleep, and you lay awake and held her, surrounded on all sides by the dual shadows cast by her and your Soul Gems. You’d both left them on her desk at an unspoken agreement, unable to bear touching them any longer that night. You glared dully at them, as Roxy sighed fretfully in her sleep. Blue and pink, like some kind of joke. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy. Fuck .
From that point on, everything would once again unravel, as Jane and Roxy succumbed to the monstrous reality they were both trapped in, each in their own way. You didn’t stick around to follow events to their conclusion. It was time to scrap shit, restart the story, and this time around… you had some fucking questions for Rose.
But we can leave that for later. The point is and always will be the ever-increasing weight of karmic guilt which I carry with me from each iteration into the next, ever since that first time. It twists the space and time around it, pulls at causality like a rubber sheet, and everything goes spiraling into this bottomless hole I’ve dug for myself.
Jane is always doomed by the very stipulations of her contract; she will drown in the fine print every time, if she’s allowed to see it. But Roxy… Roxy is if possible even more tragic. All she ever wanted was to be a normal girl, and that’s what she thought she’d been given. At least Jane’s choice had been straightforward: Become a Magical Girl or die. Even though she had been duped, at least no one had placed their hand on the scales when she made the bargain. Not like Roxy, who was and always had been a girl, and who ended up selling the ‘normal’ part for the chance to be a pretty corpse.
Not to say that the tragedy isn’t built into the bargain with or without my involvement - but I sure as fuck am uniquely talented at making it worse. That’s the impossible mass of my wish warping the universe around it, and anything it touches will be forced to dance to its tune. The very idea that I could ever leave Jane and Roxy behind to spare them from the path of my destruction was a cute pipe dream for sure, but it was also about as fragile as a soap bubble.
This emptiness outside of the story is the only place where they are safe from me, simply because I haven’t yet imposed my new set of rules on the universe, haven’t let it take shape around me. I don’t actually know how that works, if they simply don’t exist until I let them. I don’t think that’s it. No matter how truly deluded I might grow as my god complex suffuses the very foundations of my being, I don’t actually think that their existence is entirely contingent on me now. Outside of my own personal twisted universe of words, there must be millions upon millions of timelines in which they never meet me at all, where the world keeps going in a tolerably linear fashion instead of collapsing into a fractal network of failed attempts and new drafts. Somewhere out there, they are as happy as Magical Girls ever can be.
At least I hope so.
So you met Jake, and fell for him instantly. It was honestly embarrassing, how fast he had you eating out of his hand - and even more so because at first he honestly didn’t seem to notice. He smiled at you the same as ever, would slap your back or playfully box your chest - you still flinched reflexively when people got their hands in close to that area, and he seemed certain that it was because he’d managed to ‘get the drop on you’. Which of course he hadn’t, but his childlike delight at the assumption made you reluctant to argue too much about it.
You were a bundle of nerves and paranoia about it, a state you’d describe less as having butterflies in your stomach, and more like a whole fucking hornet’s nest right at the base of your spine. Did he just not notice how painfully obvious you were being, or was he pretending like hell as if he didn’t because you didn’t need any help humiliating yourself? Was he already thinking seriously about how to extricate himself from you, because he sure as shit hadn’t signed up to have a lovesick dude surgically attached to his heels?
You theorized and catastrophized, and had half convinced yourself it was only a matter of time before either he or you made a complete fool out of you, and still you didn’t have the wherewithal to walk away. All it took was for Jake to tell you in that heartbreakingly sincere way that it was so nice to finally have someone by his side, a brother in arms to face down the foe with, and you instantly turned into butter and melted into a puddle in his hands. Pathetic, really. That’s what you kept telling yourself over and over. You were pathetic, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that Jake hadn’t noticed that too.
Then you had a close call with an unusually sneaky witch, one of the ones that employed a decoy to make you attack something that wasn’t its main body, and suddenly the whole damn floor opened up a hundred eyes and tried to devour you. The problem with your power was of course that if you just straight up died before you knew what was happening, you couldn’t actually change the course of events, and for a moment as darkness swallowed you and you could no longer see the letters on your shades… well, you panicked. Something like tar filled your mouth as you gasped, and the horrible lethargy of the witch’s magic seemed to follow it down into your lungs as you retched and twisted uselessly.
You’d heard Jake go down right next to you, even received a solid smack as he flailed in terror, and the moment his hand made contact with you… you couldn’t explain it, but though your mind’s light was flickering and your thoughts felt too feeble to hold on to yourself, somehow you could still assert his existence against the sightless dread that was swallowing you. Even as you unraveled, you still knew Jake was real, and that was enough. Enough to write him a handhold before he sank any deeper, tell him that he had the strength to grasp it, that he could still survive this. The darkness was suddenly lit by the orange blaze of the narrative letters, no longer confined to your shades but hanging like a searing ribbon of certainty in front of you. Without thinking, you reached out-
-and Jake’s hand closed around yours, hauling you bodily out of the murk and flinging you toward firmer ground. Even as you bent double and retched up the oily, many-eyed fluid that was the witch, you wrote sturdy ropes into the world, wrapping around Jake’s body and pulling him free, holding him safely out of the way as you rained endless blades down on the shrinking puddle in front of you. You kept going long after the witch was gone and the labyrinth had faded, and it took Jake clearing his throat above you to finally snap you out of it.
“Say, Dirk… I can see you’re pretty busy, but would it kill you to perhaps let me down before you pound a hole straight through the ground below me?”
The world moved like dreams do, in lurching fits and starts, leaving you feeling nauseous and uncertain where the distinction between perception and reality lay. After all, while your power was active, the line between the two was as easily melted on contact as frost. Numbly, you wiped your chin to only find your own spit. Despite your uncertain state of mind, what had managed to cut through the blackout panic wasn’t even Jake’s voice in itself, but rather the passive-aggressive cheerfulness of it. You looked up, and he met your gaze with an aggrieved look on his face. It quickly melted, however, into concern and remorse, which made you realize how absolutely deranged you must look.
“Yeah, sure,” you croaked, and the ropes dissolved into nothing as you unwrote them. He flailed a bit in surprise, but nevertheless managed to land on his feet.
“Phew! Maybe give a fellow a bit of a warning next time,” he griped - and then, during the short span of time in which you floundered for a witty response, he suddenly had his strong, steady arms around you. This close, you realized that he was shaking too - and that was how you noticed that you were shaking. Gasping even though there was nothing there to obstruct your breathing, you sank to the ground with him still holding you, his hand clumsily stroking your hair.
“Well, that was a close and rather rough shave and no mistake,” he said, voice cracking with false jolliness.
You tried to snort at his ridiculous fucking phrasing, but it came out as a strangled cough instead, your body still insisting that something poisonous had entered your system and was clinging to the inside of your throat. Jake flinched slightly, but didn’t let go.
“I’d be ever so grateful if you could find it in your stoic manbro heart not to toss your cookies right on me,” he said instead.
“You’re not… my real dad,” you murmured against his chest. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
That got a frayed chuckle out of him, and as you slid further and further onto the ground until you were both lying splay-limbed and flat on your backs, you finally felt the tension in your chest unwinding. It was over, and you were alive.
It took you quite a while to realize that Jake was holding your hand.
When it finally sank in, you glanced sideways to see him staring fixedly up at the broken ceiling of the abandoned warehouse; it was possible to imagine that the expression he was going for was ‘nonchalant’, but he’d overshot so wildly that he ended up somewhere closer to ‘terrified bunny trying not to make any sudden movements’ or possibly ‘actively having a seizure’. As if his warm fingers twined around yours terrified him as much as they did you. When you tested the grip slightly, you found that his fingers were sweaty and stiff, and that they instantly started to retreat the moment you seemed to acknowledge the contact. But you held on; like a promise or like a trap. You held on like a tree that has grown around another and now cannot stand on its own if it’s felled.
“Ouch,” he said as your grip tightened around him, but he was squeezing you harder too. You hadn’t even held on this tightly to each other when he was saving your life just now.
After a painfully long silence, you scooted a bit closer, until you could awkwardly shuffle your head onto his shoulder. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but he didn’t pull away from you, and that was the important part. It was a perfect moment, and you’d always mistrusted those, but through an effort of will you forced yourself not to backpedal or overanalyze the situation. As absurd as it was that you had to put so much effort into just existing, you somehow managed to do it.
Jake glanced tentatively at you, so close to your face that he looked kind of blurry, but you could still see his face light up in a bright and relieved smile. You could even have sworn that the slightly murky Soul Gem set in the middle of his tiara lit up momentarily, and afterwards its shine seemed to have cleared. But that was impossible, surely? It was true that Jake’s gem took a surprisingly long time to grow dark, and you’d never seen that bright yellow glow properly dimmed as far as you could recall. This suggested that he was in possession of a great deal of magic, and though he was no slouch in battle, you’d never actually seen him do anything particularly extraordinary.
There was so little you knew or understood about Jake English back then.
Right then, lying on your backs on the cool cement floor with your hands locked around each other, all you knew for sure was that he’d made you want to live again. If that was a cruel thing, then it was entirely unintentional, and it was a beautiful thing as well. It felt good.
“I used to look a lot different than this.” You hadn’t planned to say it, hadn’t even thought it as far as you were aware, but nonetheless the words came tumbling heavily over your lips. You tried to save yourself from the steep precipice of vulnerability by affecting an irreverent tone - “You know, in the Before Times of which legends speak, when I hadn’t made my contract yet.” - but somehow only managed to expose your rapidly climbing anxiety instead.
He squinted at you, clearly confused by this unprompted confession, and you were starting to seriously consider if just writing yourself right through the floor would be a viable option. Then he shrugged. “I can’t say that I’m finding myself entirely waylaid by the revelation,” he said, sounding a bit sheepish, “but as for why you’re telling me right now… well, you’ve certainly got me there.”
“Okay, back up,” you blurted, trying not to tense up with instant paranoia, “what do you mean? Are you saying that you’d already suspected that I’d- I-” Impostor syndrome was already rearing its ugly head, telling you that you’d somehow been acting like a girl , that any real guy could tell who you’d been no matter how you might alter yourself and the entire fucking universe around you. Something in your chest appeared to be trying to claw its way out, you drew back from him, and now Jake was the one holding on to your hand as you tried to pull it away. He raised his eyebrows, taken aback.
“Well, no, I wouldn’t say I know anything about it, but… good grief, Dirk, it was only the first thing you ever said to me, remember?” He nudged his shoulder gently against your face. “You asked if that wily white little fella had altered my body, right out of the gate and with no preamble whatsoever. I was rather hard-pressed to find any explanation that didn’t involve your own wish having strayed in that direction, so to speak.” He didn’t let go of your hand, but pushed himself up slightly on his elbow, gazing down at you in concern. “It was just an idle guess, though now I see that I apparently struck rather close to the truth… I mean, why else would you ask me something so strange?”
You let out a humorless chuckle, wishing that you’d bitten your own tongue off before you started this miserable conversation. “I don’t know, maybe because you look like a twenty-something model cast extremely unconvincingly into the role of a fifteen-year-old?”
“I do not!”
“Sorry man, it’s just the bitter truth. Movie goers everywhere are nudging each other in the side and going, ‘Yep, I frequently see teenagers sporting six packs and the kind of face you’d find if you looked up the dictionary definition of “skincare routine”, that seems perfectly legit.’”
“I don’t actually have- Wh- What skincare routine?” He looked flustered, voice cracking in a way that, at least, was a sure sign of being a bonafide adolescent. “Consarn it, Dirk, why do you always get so caught up on things like- like-” He let out an aggravated groan. “Anyway, just because you watch movies only to criticize, doesn’t mean that everyone else is as confoundedly persnickety!”
You weren’t going to reply to that, because right then you didn’t actually have the mental strength to get into an argument about what amounted to an actual movie and how you could distinguish that from a steaming pile of shit. You’d started this, so you might as well see it through… and he was still holding your hand. You didn’t want him to stop. “Your debatable taste in movies aside, there was actually a reason why I embarked on this subject, even though I’ll be real, I’d much rather go back to deep-throating that eyeball soup witch-”
“Ew.”
“-and there’s a reason why I freaked the fuck out when you said you’d already suspected it, too.”
“It really isn’t something to get so bent out of shape about,” Jake immediately assured you. “I mean, I imagine that most people would find my wish downright pants-on-head daft, and pretty pointless too! But I don’t think it’s fair for anyone… to… judge…” He fell silent in the face of your perfectly flat expression, his face darkening in a blush.
“As heartwarming as it is to know that you wouldn’t drag me about it if my wish was stupid,” you say, a touch dryly, “that’s not what I was talking about. At no point have I actually been worried that you might judge my wish.” You breathed in deeply, thought about how the hand holding yours had pulled you out of darkness, and told yourself that you could do this. “Do you want to see what I used to look like before?”
He hesitated, and you could see him trying to figure out what the right answer might be, what to prepare himself for. But you weren’t about to make it that easy for him, because as perverse as it might be, you were determined to get his genuine reaction, no matter if it might hurt you. And surely after all of this buildup, he had to be curious, right?
“If you want to show me, I have no reason to object,” he replied, and you bit back a sharp retort on the subject of what kind of bullshit non-answer that was. That was just Jake being Jake, and you shouldn’t have expected anything else.
As with all magic use, there’s an inevitable element of ceremony to it. Seriously, every time you suit up in your cape and crop top - and after seeing Jake’s outfit, you’re acutely aware it could be so much worse - you have to go through a whole damn sequence of transformation. Your normal clothes will melt away into light, becoming pink lightning which shapes itself into mirror images of yourself, and then you have to step into these images one by one to get properly dressed. Each. And. Every. Fucking. Time.
It’s such horseshit, and even your ironic enjoyment of the trite meta-textuality involved in the process quickly wore thin on you after the first fifteen times. Not even your powers appear to be able to bypass the whole song-and-dance - same with the necessary buildup behind particularly powerful attacks. Try as you might, you can’t seem to convince your brain that it’s not necessary.
It appears that a certain kind of sugar-sweet theatricality is simply encoded into what you are, probably to make the prospect seem more appealing to children who don’t yet know what they’re signing up for.
Either way, you accepted the ribbons of orange and pink light that wrapped around you, the way your suddenly longer hair bloomed outwards as if it had caught gravity unawares, and the amber sparks racing along the contours of your body as they subtly changed. Really, it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the magic tried to make it look, god bless all your flat-chested fucking ancestors. A bit more hips, a less sharp face, and obviously a waterfall of jet-black hair - though you noticed that the tips were still bleached. You tried not to think about what had happened under your clothes right then, as that was really no one’s fucking business.
The magic, helpfully trying to acquiesce to your instructions, or possibly reacting to certain inevitable subconscious connections that you’re bound to make, also left you wearing the hated girl’s uniform from your school. Pleated skirt, puffed sleeves and all.
Jake looked stunned. After a moment, he reached out tentatively with his free hand and ran one lock of hair in between thumb and forefinger, as if to check if it was real. Then his brain seemed to register how borderline-creepy that was, and he immediately snatched his hand back, stammering awkwardly. “I- Frig, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I- That is, I was just- Uh. Blast it. You know what, I’m going to be shutting up pronto, because I think I’m just making everything worse.”
“It’s cool, man,” you said, amused despite yourself. “As long as you don’t grab a handful of tit to check if those are the genuine article too, I think I can put off my retribution.”
He rolled his eyes at you. “Oh, I’ll get right onto that, what with having neither the sense nor the manners the lord gave a chicken. Or a ruffian. Whichever.”
“A ruffian chicken?” You raised your eyebrows.
“Oh, of course. Committing fowl crimes! Ey, geddit?” The bastard actually waggled his eyebrows at you, which made it very hard to maintain your cool, aloof expression. Or to put it another way, he made you crack up with released tension and helpless fondness, and you instinctively flopped forward and buried your face against his chest in an attempt to hide it. It was definitely not a smooth maneuver intended to bring you closer to him, because to be honest, with the state of your body and all, you really weren’t sure if you wanted that. But he froze up in instant panic, and you belatedly realized that’s probably how it came off, with you having a wheezy fucking gigglefit right against his chest. Ugh. The very thought made your skin crawl.
His hand was hovering right above your back, as if he didn’t know if you were safe to touch. Your own muscles seemed to have seized up, keeping the side of your face firmly glued against him, as you listened to his heart and breathing speeding up. Did he want to touch you? Did you want him to touch you? If he wanted to touch you more when you were like this, how the fuck were you supposed to cope with that? If he didn’t want to touch you at all… was that just as bad? You didn’t know. You just didn’t know.
“Um, Dirk…” His hand finally landed lightly between your shoulder blades. “Not to be a wet nellie about this, and it’s not that I’m not happy that you wanted to tell me this, but… could you possibly transform back now? It’s just… you don’t look like yourself now, I guess? Or at least the ‘yourself’ I’m used to. So it feels rather like I’m staring down at this complete stranger who also happens to be my best bro, and it’s… weird. It’s just downright weird.” You tilted your head back to look at him, and he grimaced. “I don’t know if I’m saying this right, but I… obviously I like you no matter what you look like, because you’re still you, but this is just very sudden! Pow, alakazam, Dirk suddenly has a different face and- and other accoutrements that I plum wasn’t expecting!”
“...I mean, I was about to say ‘oh thank fuck’, but… accoutrements, bro? Really?”
“You know what I mean! Do we have to talk about them in more detail than that?”
“I would hate literally nothing more than that.”
“Well then, mister, don’t you ride my hinny about it!”
“One day I’ll be able to prove that you regularly sit down and plan out the weirdest possible shit to say, and then it’ll all be over for you.” You bit down hard on your lower lip, bit the proverbial bullet, bit down all the coward ways you might change the subject. “So, when you say that you like me…?”
Jake darkened once again, those bright green eyes flitting awkwardly about your face as if trying to anchor itself by every point that was still familiar - your full lips, the birthmark under your left eye. “Please Dirk, if we’re going to talk about that, I think I’d prefer it if…”
You didn’t wait for the rest of his words. You pressed your mouth to his, and made a fairy tale of the kiss, transforming yourself back into the prince you both deserved. To his credit he didn’t hesitate in kissing you back, but it was only when he finally put his hand at the back of your neck and once more found your hair short that he seemed to gather the courage to deepen it. His lips parted with an ease that magic couldn’t copy, which came only from him and you and the private world that had opened between you. It was sweet, and it was simple, and for a while you put off wondering how long something like that could last.
Chapter 3: Ant mill
Chapter Text
That’s the thing about being around Jake. If my power is perfect awareness and control, his is basically its exact opposite. He will pull me in, fuck with my head, make me want to follow his narrative, in which everything orbits him and anything is possible as long as he believes it. It’s the power of dreams, of hope, and thus is naturally the cruelest kind of bullshit that anyone could possibly inflict on a fellow Magical Boy. He makes me want what I can’t have, and without even thinking about it, he makes me try to change the world for him, looking for that impossible conjunction of events which will finally mean that I can.
The worst part of it is, of course, that I gave him that power.
Well, to be more exact, albeit also significantly less dramatic about it, of course it was his wish and his contract that gave him the basic parameters of his power. He’s the hero, and events around him will naturally try to conform to how he wants them. To take an example completely at random, they might arrange it so that there just happens to be an outrageously fucking awesome guy in his vicinity, struggling uncharacteristically against a witch, so that Jake gets to sweep in and play the hero against it.
Yeah. Like that. Basically his magic manifests as an unconscious bending of the universe, one which attempts to center events around itself.. I’ve even found myself suspecting that his impeccable fucking looks might have something to do with making others perceive him the way he wants them to - or the way they might want to, possibly. It’s hard to say.
So, riddle me this: What happens when a power like his encounters one like mine?
If your answer is that fucking anything could happen, congratulations, you win exactly nothing because if one thinks about it, that really is the only reasonable conclusion. The sky’s not even close to being the limit. From the moment I met him, he has basically become a vortex that pulls my magic into itself and makes it completely fucking impossible to separate it from his existence. If he’s the hero, after all, that means that he’s the main character, and every narrative I try now has to put him on center stage. And each and every time I restart the universe with new parameters, that just adds another timeline in which every outcome inevitably hinges on him, each new juncture only cementing his stranglehold on causality as a whole. I actively make him more powerful, and as I do, my own agency lessens.
If this goes on… I don’t even know if I’ll be allowed to exist anymore. If I won’t just become another parameter of the universe, another vector, another passive force which only records, which cannot determine or even live as any human being would understand it. I will become a narrator only, as Jake English devours whatever is left of my ever-feebler marks on each new timeline. And I will be left here, in the darkness, a being bereft of every ontic aspect which I’ve managed to retain so far; a statement of consciousness which negates any defining trait. I think, therefore I’m not.
So yes. He scares me shitless.
Back now to the third iteration of events, before you met Jake. The very first thing you did, before making yourself known to Roxy and Jane this time around, was to seek out Rose. Your power was still relatively new to you, and it’s not like it makes you omnicognicant in the strictest sense of the word, but this was nevertheless before you’d learned to sift through all available information and simply tweak all unknown factors to your liking. Meaning you had to resort to tailing one of her gang back to their base.
Obviously not Rose herself. You had to assume that her constant insight into your group’s whereabouts had a magical explanation, and not knowing the exact variables involved you had to assume that she might be able to sense your presence somehow. As for her little team, you had seen one of them using some kind of teleportation portals in battle, and really didn’t feel like you wanted to have to tangle with that - and the boy seemed to also have some related power, since he was capable of disappearing and appearing in a flash. Or possibly super speed? You remembered how he’d been panting after retrieving your Soul Gem for you. Either way, it would potentially be a pain in the ass to tail either of them.
So that left the girl with the pigtails and the big hammer. From what you’d seen of her, she seemed to be the youngest of the gang, probably around twelve or thirteen, but you were reasonably sure that she also was the one who could outright counteract your magic somehow, so you weren’t about to underestimate her.
Adapting to this meant that you took to lurking around outside her house and tailing her wherever she went, feeling weirdly creepy about it despite yourself. This earned you several trips to her school and her local combini, as well as a nearby park, jumping between housetops and trees, all the while writing a stream of distractions to keep her attention off you. Did this mean that you constantly caused her to trip off curbs and, at one point, almost walk in front of a bus? Yes. But that just meant that it worked, alright? And if she’d actually been in real danger, you would of course have saved her.
It was an incredibly frustrating three days, and looked like it was about to be a fourth one, when her phone went off on her way to school, and she abruptly changed her path. After that, it was really a breeze. The girl wasn’t exactly the most attentive at the best of times, and while focused on her destination, tailing her barely even required you to use your power.
You followed her to what looked like some kind of warehouse, and waited outside for a little while, listening to the muted voices inside through a broken window. Then, finally done with subterfuge, but not so stupid that you were about to use the main entrance, you simply wrote yourself a door in the side of the building and strolled through it. Inside, the building was completely empty, a hollow dome of a place, apart from one corner which was incongruously fully furnished, sporting rugs and armchairs, a table and chairs, and even what looked like a rough-and-ready kitchen. One of the girls was half-buried in a pile of soft toys, the guy was pouring himself a glass of something yellow, and the girl you’d tailed had plopped herself down on a sofa. Rose sat in the middle, toying with a couple of holographic projections from a glowing tablet on the floor.
“Hey,” you said casually.
It was quite impressive, really, how fast all four of them were suited up and ready to try to kick your ass. Just to be a dick about it, you wrote yourself a chair as they went through their sparkly little transformation dances, and sat your ass down, holding your hands up to show them that you were unarmed. Not that this meant all that much to either of you, but hey, it was a vaguely peaceful gesture in a distinctly hostile situation.
You blinked, and when you opened your eyes again, a bunch of very large and sturdy shields seemed to have sprung from the ground around you, crudely boxing you in. You frowned at them. Now how the fuck had that happened? Taking a moment to scroll back and read the running narrative that was forever rolling across your shades, you had to stop yourself from whistling aloud, impressed in spite of yourself. Fucking time travel. No wonder the dude was hard to keep track of.
Well, no matter. “I think I’m being pretty civil about this,” you pointed out a shade testily, before waving a hand at those shields and unwriting them into quickly dissipating shreds of light. “So instead of trying to imprison me, might I suggest talking like the grownups we ain’t?”
“We’re not the ones breaking into someone else’s base,” portal-girl pointed out, hefting what looked like a gaudily painted rocket launcher in your general direction.
“You’re not going to fire that thing in here,” you pointed out placidly. “Walking meat puppets or not, something like that could definitely fuck up more than my Soul Gem, am I right?”
“You are,” Rose acknowledged coolly. “Jade, stand down.”
“But-!”
“Please.” A fleeting smile. “You too, June. Dave, where did you go?”
“Can’t a man dedicate himself to the sublime art of gymnastics in peace?” a voice demanded from almost right above your head, where the guy was currently hanging by his knees from one of the metal fixtures attached to the high ceiling.
“Not when we have guests, if you please.” She looked pointedly at a spot next to her, and a moment later her friend was seated there. “Thank you. Now, I think we can hear him out before resorting to more cataclysmic methods.” She very slightly tilted her head at you, toying with what you would’ve assumed were ordinary knitting needles, if you didn’t already know better. “I have seen you before. You’re Roxy’s classmate, aren’t you?”
The two other girls exchanged some pretty loaded looks, and then at least lowered their weapons, even if they didn’t let go of them just yet. The boy had started playing with his phone, though he glanced up briefly at the mention of Roxy’s name, his jaw twitching slightly.
“Right. I’m Dirk. You’re Roxy’s big sister, Rose, and I’d very much like to know how the fuck you always know where she is, and also what your fucking game is.” You held up your hand to forestall any replies. “I’m not actually interested in getting in your way. From what I can tell, you seem at least to be invested in not hurting her, and that’s an agenda I too can get behind. I would just prefer it if our interests didn’t end up clashing unnecessarily.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed, and stayed that way as she silently contemplated you. The youngest girl, June, let out a restless little sound and sat down on top of the head of her hammer, legs splayed out in front of her as she stared you down. The air was prickly with animosity and unease, but you thought you also caught a hint of curiosity, of interest. Despite the fact that every Magical Girl or Boy is automatically a rival unless a previous arrangement exists, it’s hard to break the habits of basic civilized society, and simply see a contemporary as a mortal enemy to eliminate. This is true even in the case of teenagers, shockingly.
“Very well,” Rose said, “I’m prepared to exchange information fairly, if that is acceptable to you.” The barest hint of a pause followed, betraying a kind of hesitation you weren’t used to seeing from her. “You’re one of Roxy’s friends?”
Well, yes and no. You were her friend, even if she hadn’t actually talked to you yet, this time around. “You can consider me… an interested party,” you said, not entirely smoothly. “And a potential ally. Both to her and to you, depending.”
“Damn, another person who talks like some kind of political press release.” Dave sank onto his back, draping one arm across his face. “Maybe I’ll take a nap, shit’s exhausting.”
Jade sighed explosively, finally letting go of her overdimensioned weapon. “Alright. If it’s peace talks for now, I’m going to put on some tea and bring out some snacks. Maybe that will keep that buttface awake,” she added with a giggle, as Dave’s head immediately shot up again at the word ‘snacks’. She rolled her eyes. “Boys.”
It was an informative meeting, you couldn’t deny that. Rose rather vaguely described her magical power as ‘foresight’, and explained that she frequently utilized it to make sure her younger sister was safe. You gave a somewhat less vague description of your own powers, feeling like it wasn’t that much of a concession, because in the case of you restarting events once again, she wouldn’t be able to retain the knowledge, and you were. You agreed, tentatively, that there was no need for the two of you to be at odds, and by extension that meant the rest of her gang as well. But you also agreed that it was better not to let Roxy or Jane know about this, since they were already on edge about the whole matter. Jane, in particular, clearly didn’t trust Rose - and it wasn’t as if you couldn’t read between the lines, either. Rose had clearly decided to become a magical girl specifically for Roxy’s sake, and didn’t want her little sister to find out about it.
From that moment on, you frequently allied yourself with Rose in such a manner, becoming something like a double agent. Not always with stellar results, since at least a couple of failed timelines were direct results of Roxy and Jane finding out about your ‘treachery’, and losing faith in your advice and your friendship.
But Rose’s information was usually just too damn useful not to risk it, even if it had its limitations. It didn’t take you long to figure out that she could in fact see multiple possible futures in each scenario, and was able to zero in on the one that would be the most ‘advantageous’... with the tiny caveat that whether or not an outcome was advantageous hinged entirely on Roxy’s happiness, Roxy’s safety, Roxy’s survival. Rose’s power would always prioritize her sister, meaning that she, her own team, Dirk, and possibly the whole world were considered acceptable losses if it meant a possibility that Roxy would make it out of a situation alive. So you took what she said with a grain of salt, and mostly consulted her on matters pertaining directly to Roxy.
A couple of times you tried to get similar results out of Dave, but he was recalcitrant. Rose had made it clear to him exactly how much it fucked with causality every time he altered a single timeline, and honestly he seemed way too spooked by his own power to take full advantage of it. A pity, but you didn’t have the time to hold his hand and explain why it was worth it to stop your friends dying horrible deaths.
And if you were to be honest with yourself, the longer you went on like you did, the less certain you became that it actually was. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that restarting the timeline over and over in fact meant that you had to see your friends dying horrible deaths over and over and over again, as if it wasn’t bad enough to have to lose them once. Having them back after having to let them go didn’t actually mean much, if it was only to see them hurt once again, and once again fuck up every attempt to fix it. You even became desperate enough to write a universe in which no one had made a contract to begin with, and didn’t even realize what you’d done until Jane just… wasn’t there.
Of course she wasn’t. She had died of cancer three years ago.
So maybe Dave was right. But by the time you started to consider it, you had already met Jake long ago from your perspective, and it was no longer an option to just let go of things and let the cards fall as they would.
So. Perhaps it’s time to actually acknowledge all the bad shit that happened with Jake, and the role I played in it. This is a story about him at this point, after all, and yet I sure do just about everything I possibly can to avoid him. However, as disgustingly fucking coy as I can pretend to be about the situation, only touching on his and my first meeting, our first kiss, on literally fucking anything that isn’t the actual reality of our relationship, who am I fooling? That’s a serious question. Who is there left to fool, as I hang here in the middle of a sightless void, after metaphorically flinging all of my dollies on the ground once again and refusing to keep playing?
What’s the fucking point, really?
So let’s start here: Being the hero doesn’t mean Jake can’t die. It also doesn’t mean that he can’t become the villain, if shit gets dark enough.
No, all that being the hero ensures is this: Once he dies, or something even worse happens, that means the end. There’s no hope left.
It means, in other words, that I’ve failed.
The first time around, before he’d absorbed more of your power, Jake’s death was simple enough. Facing up against the combined might of four witches with overlapping labyrinths, in the middle of the devastation they had wrought, he was struck in the forehead by a pinwheeling cogwheel. You are unsure if the impact in itself would’ve been enough to kill him, but it didn’t matter. His Soul Gem shattered like an ice crystal, and he fell heavily to the ground.
Even from around fifty meters away, you heard the crack of his neck as he landed - as his body landed. There was nothing left inside it anymore, after all, as you very well knew. And yet that noise keeps haunting you in nightmares every time you allow yourself to sleep. That might be the reason why you barely do, nowadays.
Despite knowing better, you nevertheless rushed to his side. When everything had spiraled into the current horrorshow, Jake had been wearing his pajama, drifting off to sleep next to you in his bed. Now with his Soul Gem broken, his Magical Boy form dispersed, he was lying in a heap with dirty water quickly soaking into the striped green flannel he was wearing. One of his slippers had come loose during the fall, while the other was still on his foot. It had a cartoonish frog face on it, which stared at you blankly as you hauled at Jake’s body. Somehow, you still refused to believe he was dead until you saw his mangled face, his lolling head, his complete lack of expression as you jostled his broken limbs.
From his split lip trickled a sluggish stream of vivid red blood. You’d kissed those lips only a couple of hours ago, and they had felt warm and alive. Now, his flesh was already cooling, and putting your hands on it to hold on to that fleeing warmth did little.
The world shimmered, the water below rippling in time with the deep throbbing of bass-heavy music, and you heard the demented laughter of the witches right behind you. Pumpkin vines crept down the walls around you, followed by yarn that moved like tentacles. It wasn’t over. But you were. There was nothing left in you.
You started over.
The error you’d made was clear: You’d let your hubris get away from you once again, and so you’d actually thought that removing yourself from Roxy and Jane’s lives would magically save them. That it was enough to just pretend they didn’t exist, and this would somehow derail the ill-fated sequence of events that would inevitably pull not just everyone you love but also an appreciable section of the city into its disaster area. You’d been off holding hands with and kissing a pretty boy as if the rest of the world had ceased to matter, as if you had any fucking right to play out your own little happily ever after while everything else burned to the ground.
So you told yourself that you needed to try harder, that you couldn’t afford to let a single storyline develop on its own; that complete control of everyone involved was the only way of ensuring that there wasn’t a bad end. Well, spoilers, that method was absolutely exhausting. Trying to control what happened to seven separate people in real time while simultaneously piloting your own meat sack isn’t actually something a human mind is made for. Not even one encased in an overly saccharine piece of jewelry.
It made you more vague with the things you wrote, and that’s the only excuse you have for what happened with Jake that time around. Because if you don’t specify exactly how you want things to happen, reality tries to acquiesce in whichever way is most expedient. So when you saw Jane’s own weapon flung back at her by a witch, trident-end first, and all you could think to write was, ‘but she’s saved at the very last moment’, you were really fucking asking for it.
Jane was, indeed, saved. Saved by Jake putting his own body in the trajectory of those very sharp spikes, which weren’t long enough to pass through his whole torso and impale Jane at the same time. They were plenty long enough, however, to pierce Jake’s heart and instantly kill him.
You didn’t know how he’d even gotten there. You’d thought that he was safe at home. You must’ve let your attention slip while fighting. Or maybe that didn’t matter; maybe all reality cared about is that this was the most likely way for Jane to be saved. Heroic sacrifice always fits so neatly into a narrative, after all.
“Oh! Oh Janey, that was so close…” Roxy looked down sadly at the boy lying in a pool of blood in front of her, as Jane desperately tried to heal her rescuer. “Is… Is it working?”
Jane shook her head, her hands so drenched in blood that you could no longer see the contrast between her blood-red nails and her paper-pale skin. “I’m sorry. I can’t bring someone back if- if they’ve already-” She broke down sobbing.
“...I see,” Roxy sighed, and there was a hitch in her voice as well. “I wonder who he was…”
You said nothing at all. Trying to keep Jake separate from Jane and Roxy clearly wasn’t a viable solution, it made you too scattered, especially when you took Rose and her friends into consideration as well. But you could fix that. Put all your eggs in the same basket, make sure that you could keep an eye on everyone at once. Keep them all safe.
The next time around, Jake became collateral in a falling out with Rose - which you learned soon enough was an inevitable consequence of failing to keep Roxy safe. As long as Roxy was alive, she would play along nicely, but if you lost her… not so much. Jake had just tried to get everyone to calm down and stop waving weapons around, and took a blast of magic that blew a hole clean through his neck.
From the look on Rose’s face, she really hadn’t meant to kill him. From the look on the faces of her friends as they recoiled away from her, even they knew that intentions didn’t fucking matter at that point, because Jake was just as dead. And from the look on Jane’s face as she raised her hand and manifested dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of tridents above her head… she didn’t actually care if Rose’s friends were just as horrified by what had happened. She wasn’t going to leave anyone capable of explaining or apologizing.
Her Soul Gem was almost completely black, and you knew that once she’d killed them… it was over for her as well.
So it’s safe to say that Jake wasn’t the first person you saw turn into a witch. Shit, you’d literally seen everyone else turn before it ever happened to him. You’d seen Jane’s demented world of cupcakes, mustaches and magnifying glasses. You’d fought your way through green ghosts and deadly ‘pranks’, vinyls and dark rooms, technicolored plushies and greenhouses. You’d almost suffocated as a mass of yarn soaked in alcohol swallowed you whole, and the cthulu-esque monstrosity born from Rose’s despair descended on you.
But most of the time, it will start with Roxy.
Just like Jane has a tendency of dying a martyr with the optional extra of taking anyone close by with her, Roxy… she doesn’t complain, not about the things that matter, and she doesn’t ask for help. She will keep walking that fine line on unsteady feet, all while trying to avoid conflict, pretending everyone is friends, that everyone is fine, right until she can’t. No matter how you monitor her, trying to catch the first signs, it’s as if she just doesn’t think about it until it hollows her out inside, leaving her a fragile shell stretched tight over a hungry void - until the smallest misstep suddenly makes her implode.
Again, you think the inherent misery of having asked for a body that finally felt like hers, only to find out it doesn’t even belong to her anymore, is part of what keeps creating such ideal starting conditions. It’s never been an issue for you, since your focus was always more on the perception of the world, rather than your own physical changes, and in that sense you’ve gotten exactly what you want. A stray conversation with Dave in a timeline that had left you and him as the only survivors, had revealed that June, apparently, had taken a similar approach; her wish was to have the freedom to be the person she is. A pretty abstract wish to your mind, but Dave said it worked as planned, and ended up with her dad having full custody of her.
Then you’d asked, “What about you?” and Dave had laughed. Shit, he’d said, he hadn’t even thought about the whole trans thing at the time. He had way more important things to use his wish for, and to be honest, he was glad he hadn’t wasted it on something like that. He knew who he was, and that wasn’t up to Kyuubey or anyone else to decide.
You’d parted ways there, and if he went back in time to try to change things as well… you supposed you’d never know for sure. It wasn’t your business. At that point, you were really only trying to save Jake. You’d given up on everyone else, because it didn’t really seem to matter who else lived, if he didn’t. Trying to keep more than one person alive and well was just unrealistic.
Sometimes I’ve found myself wondering if Jake doesn’t have his own kind of gender fuckery going on, given how much he leans into the girly costume and flamboyant poses, but however that may be, he apparently feels pretty secure about it. More power to him, I guess. Not everyone can pull off those shoulders and those legs in combination with that much lace and shit. Hell, I have a bit of a personal vendetta against anything feminine, and even I have to admit that he makes it look damn good.
More generally, he’s the consummate fucking optimist. In fact, it’s more than a little frustrating, the way he will keep insisting that things will surely work out. “Somehow”, that’s what he will keep telling me. Somehow it’s all going to be okay. Jane can be dead and Roxy can have perished as a witch at the hands of her own sister, and Jake will still insist that we have to keep going together, somehow. That we have to try to beat the four stupidly powerful witches tearing our city apart somehow, because no one else is going to do it.
It’s what a hero does, I suppose. But like I said, that doesn’t actually mean he can keep going like that forever. It just hurts so much worse when he finally can’t.
It’s pretty tragic in itself, watching it happen right before your eyes and knowing, knowing that you can’t possibly change it. You’ve seen it too many times before. Jake, of course, had kept acting like shit was still fixable, and all you could do was hold him back and stop him from getting himself killed. You sat on a rooftop at a healthy distance from the action, and so you couldn’t see much of what happened inside of Roxy’s labyrinth. Not that it mattered for you, because you could follow the action on your shades, though there was very little you could do at this point.
Jake couldn’t, however; he had no idea what was happening, other than that his friend had turned into a witch and her sister was fighting her. He was crying, his face in his hands, and you didn’t have it in you to look in his direction, to acknowledge the pain that echoed yours so acutely, but so much more earnestly. You felt like a villain for pulling him away from there, for using your powers to convince him that there was nothing you could do. Hell, in a sense that’s exactly what you were.
You could feel it when Roxy died, the presence of a witch suddenly flickering and disappearing from your internal map of the ward. Not that it would last. As the labyrinth collapsed, causing the air to shimmer like heat haze and then grow still, Rose fell from nothing onto the ground below. Even from here, you could see how hard her hand was clenched around the Grief Seed her sister had dropped.
Rose’s friends were approaching her hesitantly, no doubt uncertain what to say, how to comfort her. Their leader had refused to let them enter the labyrinth, let the help her, and as always, they did what she told them. She was the seer, after all, the one who knew how the future would go.
She’d never told you as much, but you think Rose preferred to go in alone at this stage because she hoped to die, thus finally freeing her friends from their unhealthy dependence on her. You had no proof, but… well, it’s what you would’ve done in her situation.
But you don’t have that luxury.
Jake flinched next to you, eyes going wide as Rose threw her head back and howled in pain. He started to get back up, but you held out your hand and stopped him. “Not yet,” you said, flatly. “There’ll be too much shit going on down there in a minute, and if we get in the way… we’re fucked.” After all, you knew. One time, Jake had ended up having one of Jade’s portals accidentally clipping him in half. More than once, he had died trying to save someone, only to have the insides of his head painted all over the cold tile floor of the labyrinth. “We wait until it’s played out, step in and try to fix what we can then.”
It wasn’t a suggestion, not a request, and you saw Jake’s eyes flash in anger at being ordered around like that; no doubt he resented the lack of emotion in your voice as well. But if anyone knew how full of shit you were on the second point, it was Jake. He knew, or at least you hoped he knew, that if you thought you could do something about this, you would. That you weren’t actually fine with what was happening, or how fucking helpless you were to stop it. You’d seen it one too many times to really believe you could.
After a moment he fiercely took your hand and squeezed it, tears still streaming down his face as Rose folded in on herself, turned into a black sigil that blazed against the sky, and disappeared. Crying out in dismay, her friends rushed forward, weapons materializing in their hands as they rushed to save someone who was already gone. She was gone the moment Roxy turned - she always was. It really was only a matter of time.
That’s what making a wish for someone else did to the wisher.
You took your shades off, not wanting to see what came next, not wanting to read to the end of another predictable tragedy. A cloud passed the sun, chilling you, and you leaned tentatively into Jake. He looked away, and you could tell that he was still angry with you, but he nevertheless put his arm around your shoulders. This close, you could feel his body heaving with every sob, and knew there was nothing you could do to comfort him. The reality was this: You had to make your choices, and you’d chosen him. Even if he never forgave you for it, you were certain that it would be worth it.
It was hard not to notice when Rose’s friends succumbed inside her labyrinth, once they realized that they had no way of defeating their former leader. They were all stupidly powerful, magic-wise, but the times you’d fetched up against Rose’s witch form, even you had only managed to make it out by the skin of your teeth. On their own, they were doomed in the truest sense of the world.
Jade went first, her psychic presence turning into a thin, helpless wail, and then bursting like a soap bubble. Dave followed her soon thereafter, and you felt the weird surging sensation of him desperately trying to turn back time before he succumbed. That left June, who kept fighting all three of them for a whole agonizing five minutes before her presence also inverted into a black hole of hopelessness.
Next to you, Jake was tense as a steel wire, his breathing coming so quick and shallow that you were afraid that he was going to pass out. You wondered dully what was hurting him most: How everything about what was happening went against everything he was on such a fundamental level, that it must be tearing him apart… or that there must be a part of him that was glad that he didn’t have to see what was happening. You rubbed your hand over your eyes. You’d tried in so many ways to stop him from having to witness the aching, collapsing reality of this world, only to find a thousand new ways of hurting him instead. You were so fucking tired.
Then he leaned in and kissed your cheek gently. “Alrighty,” he said, voice breaking with false cheer. “It’s time to go.”
It was too much to hope for, that he’d actually be considering running away. He never would, not from something like this. Running away was saved for social obligation, for hard truths, for you, but never for final battles. So when he got up and summoned his guns, grim determination turning his face into a stranger you knew far too well, your hand was already shaping itself around the hilt of your sword. Jake wasn’t dead yet, and so you had to keep trying. Even if everything else was gone, you thought maybe you could accept it, if you could only hold on to him.
Chapter 4: Heroic
Chapter Text
Four powerful witches… It was an impossible task, but you still wanted to believe you could do it. For Jake. With Jake.
You managed, somehow, to destroy three of them. You’d both taken damage, in the relentless onslaught of violence which never let up long enough to let you think, let you properly counter their attacks, perhaps even force them into making mistakes. The unstable time inside Dave’s part of the labyrinth had done something deeply wrong to the muscles in your right shoulder, and Jake’s left arm had been broken by a giant mousetrap, courtesy of what was left of June. You weren’t Jane, you couldn’t just fix things on a whim. You needed time to think things through, figure out a way of reversing the effects in a way that made sense to you, that didn’t leave room for some kind of magical or narrative rebound to fuck you up even worse. But time wasn’t something Rose was going to allow you.
Once again, you had that feeling from when you first met Jake, a surge of numbing relief when you saw the witch’s tentacles approaching from every direction, and you felt your mind go blank. There were no ways out left, no clever ways of dodging or countering, and maybe that was for the best. Maybe it was time to give up on the world, on yourself, on everything. Maybe even Jake wasn’t enough to live for anymore, if living for him just meant dragging him through more heartbreak, more pain.
Of course he saved you. You should’ve known that. You, the only person he had left in the middle of a demolished wasteland, putting yourself in danger like that… It created a kind of vacuum within the narrative, a hollow place that could only be filled up by a hero. It didn’t matter that you’d purposely not written it, because no matter what you did, you couldn’t change what Jake was, what he is, what he will always be. The whole point of you at this stage is to find ways for him to fulfil his role. In that sense, you are more of a slave to narrative inevitability than anyone else.
The hero saves his prince, that’s just how things go.
He appeared in front of you in a blaze of golden light, a bubble of concentrated magic which you could feel yourself actively feeding, and all you could think was that if you couldn’t change this, then the only thing left for you was to help him. You put your hands on his shoulders, pushed back with everything you had, screamed against the deadly rain of magic that pelted you both from every side. And it worked, that was the insane part. Just by being himself, Jake somehow managed to turn Rose’s magic back on her.
The resulting explosion blew the both of you right out of the air. You would normally keep yourself flying with narrative powers, but there was no logical way of countering the sheer force of your sudden momentum, nor any time to do so. Jake’s arms were wrapped around you, the golden bubble around him cracking and splintering, and he only just managed to use whatever was left of his magic to twist the both of you around, so that he would take the worst of the damage when you landed. The sudden motion jostled his tiara, which must have already been knocked loose by the explosion, and it fell away from him only a few seconds before you both hit the ground.
The light in his eyes went out.
You felt bones breaking on impact, both in him and in you, but you willed yourself not to acknowledge it. Your breath coming harsh and desperate, you scrambled across the ground like a frantic animal, trying to find that faintly flickering light which you knew must be there somewhere. You almost passed it by, and only the way the setting sun caught on the gold managed to alert you to the fading Soul Gem. You remember letting out a ragged shout at that point - perhaps his name, or just ‘no’, if indeed it was any kind of word at all. You crawled back to Jake’s side, and at first tried to put the Soul Gem into his hand, but it was too limp and broken to hold on to anything. Instead you pressed it to his chest, arms trembling as you willed it to give Jake back to you.
It was so hard to see, and at first you didn’t understand why. Panicked, you brushed your shades onto the ground, only to realize that they weren’t the problem. The slanting red light spread its molten heat across half your face from behind a broken building, making you flinch and almost close your eyes. They burned, and something slipped down your cheeks. Your chest felt like a spring tensed to the point of breaking; it rattled and shook as if something was pounding on your ribs.
“Don’t cry.”
Jake’s voice was so miserably weak, so wrecked by pain, that the words were almost indistinguishable. You gasped, leaning in closer, and were about to tell him that you weren’t crying, that you were fine, and he shouldn’t worry about you. But all that came out was a sob, as tears fell from your eyes onto his face, rolled down his cheeks and came to rest against the desperate curve of his lips. He was still trying to smile for you.
“Here now… I know I’ve seen better days, but- but I’m sure-” His voice ended in a croak as spasms shook his body. Between your fingers you saw darkness swirling at the heart of his Soul Gem, spreading in tendrils through the weak golden light.
“No,” you found yourself whispering. “No no no no no no…”
You’d already run out of Grief Seeds during the previous battle, and even if you would’ve been prepared to sacrifice someone to make one, there was only you and Jake around. The blazing red sky gaped like an open wound above you; like a silently laughing maw; like empty, fiery nothing. The one person you wanted the most to save you was the one you were trying to save, and you were all alone.
There was nothing you could do.
“No, Jake, please…” Reduced to something as pointless as begging, you talked to Jake as if he could just change his mind, as if it was that simple. “Don’t do this to me.”
“I’m sure I’ll be… absolutely… tickety-boo… s- hh- s…”
“Don’t,” you whispered, as the world swam out of focus and left you all alone in its wake. “Don’t you fucking say it.”
“...somehow…”
His Soul Gem broke open, and darkness poured out.
There is no comparing Jake to the witches created by the rest of my friends, not without resorting to some rather tasteless parallels between hand grenades and nukes - and apart from making light of the devastation caused by either, the analogy will fall short regardless. Suffice it to say that during his first appearance as a witch, Jake English completely demolished the whole city in a matter of minutes, and then effortlessly moved on, an unnatural disaster that could not be perceived by normal human eyes, but which moved unstoppably and invisibly in its search for further destruction. That was his debut, so to speak, and there was nowhere to go from there but up.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but due to the nature of our powers, he has gotten stronger every single time I’ve witnessed him becoming a witch. The last time it happened, not even I could grasp the sheer scale of him any longer. The Incubator, curling up in a contented white circle on the chest of a mangled corpse, was kind enough to inform me that he would most likely reduce human civilization to ashes in less than a month. It raised its head as I rounded on it, smugly, waiting for me to ask what could be done about it, what it expected me to do now. I bit my lower lip until I tasted blood, not willing to give it the fucking satisfaction.
I knew what it would say. This was humanity’s problem, and it had already gotten what it wanted. All it had ever seen me and every other Magical Girl or Boy as, was another source of energy for its distant purpose, it’s abstract battle against entropy somewhere far in the future. It had led us like cattle to slaughter, and then flicked its Judas goat’s tail at us and watched us bleed in the stockyard. Maybe it was already planning on moving on to some other unsuspecting civilization, raising them up from the mud, letting them believe they were the masters of creation, all while in the shadows their children toiled and wept and died for them.
And then, one day, the Incubators would find someone like me, find someone like Jake, watch hubris and naiveté tear another world apart… and move on.
The very last time you attempted to write the universe the way you wanted it, you truly gave up all pretense of caring about anyone but yourself. Sure, you were still trying to keep Jake alive and unchanged, but that time around, you knew it for the deep selfishness it was. You wanted this one thing that was yours, one person who might be able to endure as the world crumbled, even if that meant sacrificing yourself in the process.
Writing a world where Jake just never had a chance to become a Magical Boy before meeting you, you became his boyfriend before he ever saw hide or hair of an Incubator. Then you earnestly implored him not to give up everything he had the way you’d done, laid it out to him exactly what a shitty fucking deal he’d been offered, and how hopeless it was to try to turn it into something worthwile. You told him it was too late for you, but he could still have a normal life, a life of simplicity of fulfillment, and as long as you had him, you still had one thing that still mattered. Maybe once you would’ve been embarrassed to be so earnest, or at least have felt the smallest scrap of shame at misleading him like that, but you were prepared to do far, far worse to keep Jake safe. If all it took was to rob him of all agency, manipulating his emotions and feeding him guilt to make him do what you wanted, then that price barely even registered. You had deceived and killed people you professed to love for so much less, after all.
At the end of it all, you wrote yourself a suitable hero’s death. I wrote myself an end to my story. Nothing short of that was going to overcome the karmic retribution that your friends were owed, undo the debt of despair and pain that weighed against your heavy, heavy heart. So that the tragedy of those witches could finally be put to rest… wasn’t it right, for you to finally die?
Yes.
You weren’t completely dead yet, however. Lying on your back in the middle of a glittering supernova of broken neon lights, you watched dispassionately as darkness spread through your own Soul Gem, causing it to flicker. Of course you weren’t going to let it actually blacken all the way, even if it was pretty fucking close - you couldn’t risk whatever the fuck you might turn into hurting Jake. That would take away the purpose of dying in the first place. This time for sure, you would save him, the only way you knew how.
You waited until you saw a fine hairline crack running along the surface of the jewel. Then you pulled a carefully wrapped knife from where you’d tucked it into your waistband; not a magical knife, you weren’t stupid enough to take that risk. It was a completely ordinary kitchen knife, a sturdy cleaver with a deceptively sharp edge, and it would suit your purposes perfectly. Working the tip into the crack in your Soul Gem, you took a deep breath, and got ready to push. Closed your eyes, because despite yourself you didn’t actually want to watch your soul shatter at your own hand - call it a small mercy you might still allow yourself.
It’s time for me to go.
Except the knife suddenly slipped as someone yanked the Soul Gem away from you. When you opened your eyes, everything was so dim, but you still recognized the figure standing tall above you, cradling your Soul Gem between his strong, steady hands. On his shoulder, a blurry white shape had curled itself happily around his neck.
“Nnnnhh-”
You couldn’t get a single word out. Your eyes felt like they might be bleeding, hemorrhaging tears down your cheeks as you felt the spasms of oncoming oblivion wrack your body. The text on the inside of your shades burned like a white-hot brand against your mind, and I can’t stop him, he’s about to make a wish and I can’t stop him, and if I could only die before he does then maybe maybe maybe no, I can’t let this happen, I need to get out of here, I can’t-
His mouth moves, and you can’t hear what he says. It doesn’t matter.
The universe dissolves along with the tears on my face…
…
And so on. You get the idea.
I’m not even sure I can blame the Incubators anymore. I, too, find it easier to be outside the world. Wherever it is now, relative to the space I currently occupy, it’s welcome to keep going without me, and good luck to it. Perhaps, later on, I’ll try my hand at helping out from the outside. If I’m not personally involved, maybe I’ll be better at writing happy endings for other people, instead of usurping everyone’s fates as I try to cobble together something I have proved myself thoroughly undeserving of.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? I claimed to be frightened of Jake for this very reason, because his existence was one day going to necessitate the fate I am now embracing willingly. Really, after running through that whole, sad story again, it’s clear to me that this is the only solution that’s left for me. It’s hard to imagine that I could ever have missed something so obvious.
It’s the basic premise of the contracts we make, after all. For every wish, every hope made manifest, an equal amount of despair has to come into the world. That is how the Incubators operate. So for a power like mine, naturally the price is nothing short of the most fitting: For the narrator, narration. The price you get for digging the best holes is and always will be a bigger shovel, and the price for either being or accidentally creating the most powerful being in the universe must be to lose all power and agency yourself. Just like Jake had, come to think of it. So we both paid equally for my mistakes.
“Oh, will you shut up?”
I jolt forward in shock at the voice, at the impossibility of
“No, really. Stop that at once.” Jake crosses his arms, looking honest-to-god pissed off. “I’m not going to talk to you if you keep doing that.”
But how could he possibly be
“DIRK IF YOU DON’T PUT THE KIBOSH ON THE STUPID NARRATION RIGHT THE FUCK NOW I SWEAR I WILL NEVER TALK TO YOU AGAIN, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
Ah.
You look up hesitantly, not sure if this is what he wants or not. He doesn’t exactly look less angry, but the way he relaxes slightly and offers you a begrudging nod does imply a tentative step in the right direction, at least. So you sit perfectly still where you are, right at the fucking edge of the platform due to the way you’d recoiled just a moment ago, and stare in open-mouthed wonder at Jake fucking English, undeniably real and right here, in a place that doesn’t even really exist for anyone except you. Or so you thought.
He’s wearing his Magical Boy costume… sort of. There are a lot more flourishes to it than you remember, including a much bigger pair of golden wings, and the back of the skirt drags along the ground in a train that appears to have no end that you can see. Possibly it’s just hanging off the other side of the platform? Isn’t that thing fucking heavy? How does he even walk with- Okay, yeah, you realize that the realities of his dress are in fact the least inconceivable part of his presence here.
Jake lets out a quiet snort. “You keep using that word-” he begins, pointedly, and you frown at him.
“Wait, I- If I stopped actively narrating, how the fuck did you know what I was thinking? Actually, scratch that, how the fuck could you ‘hear’ the damn narrative in the first place?”
He actually looks a bit sheepish. “The answer to the latter is rather a bedevilling tangle of abstruse mumbo-jumbo from start to finish, but as for your first question… for pity’s sake, Dirk, I can read it plain as day on your silly spectacles! Sure, it’s back-to-front from over here, but it’s not actually that hard to make it out, and it keeps going even when you’re not doing the narraty-thing. Did you really never think of that? When you’re not focusing on it, you’re quite literally an open book, you great big puddin’!”
Oh, bullshit. For the record, I did think about it, and tested the theory of it extensively. No one else has ever been able to see the letters, not even Rose, who I’m pretty certain was the only one who knew how the shades related to my power. Well, before now, obviously.
Jake raises a testy eyebrow, and in turn you raise your hands in a gesture of surrender… but you also pull off your glasses and shove them under your shirt. This is already way too complicated without Jake actually being able to read what’s happening inside your head.
In response, Jake lets out a huge sigh of relief and walks closer. “Fair enough, old chap - to tell the truth I was starting to go cross-eyed from trying to figure those tiny letters out anyway.” Looking a bit hesitant, he glances down at the spot next to you, and when you nod in response, flops onto the ground in such a graceless heap that it looks… rather strange while he’s still wearing what looks to be five wedding dresses stitched together lengthwise. “That’s how I knew you were planning on going off and dying, by the way,” he says conversationally. “You know, while you were lying to my face, telling me you’d be right as rain, no problem at all, just a bit of a tricky witch situation that you would handle in a brace of shakes and be back before I even had a chance to miss you.”
You want to stare at him, want to try to excavate the monstrously unimaginable truth from some weakness in his expression, and maybe that way you’ll be able to explain him away, dismiss the way his presence crushes your heart against your ribs. But instead you gaze dully down at your own hands, shoulders hunching miserably. There is nothing you can say to defend yourself, nor do you particularly feel the inclination. You’d wanted to finally be allowed to die, and you had lied to Jake to make it happen. That’s the unadorned and frankly pathetic truth, and if you can’t even hide it from yourself, you don’t like your odds with Jake.
“Missing something?”
Before you have a chance to answer, he reaches out and gently slips something onto your middle finger. A simplified heart symbol lights up your nail, and Jake’s hand lingers slightly against your fingertips as you try to make sense of what you’re seeing. Your Soul Gem. Your damn Soul Gem, which he had taken out of your hand right before you were on your way to-
“That’s… How?” You look up, feeling raw and helpless, no longer able to fight against what is happening, but utterly lost in the onslaught of it. “If I left it behind when I went, why didn’t I just…?” You gesture vaguely, knowing he’ll understand what you mean.
Jake shrugs. “Well, you didn’t notice. I expect that’s why.”
You shake your head numbly. “No, that’s not how that-”
“Oh, will you get it into your thick gourd already, Dirk? Reality is whatever we want it to be, it has been for a while now. I was waiting for you to figure it out, but I guess being obtuse on purpose is what you’re best at.”
“Wha-” you say, very succinctly.
Jake sighs loudly, scooting forwards so that he can dangle his legs over the abyss. Behind him, his gigantic golden wings beat slowly, and you feel a faint breeze even though one of them definitely phases right through your shoulder for a moment. “You always overthink things, that’s your problem! Everything has to ‘make sense’ and ‘fit the narrative’-” Is he actually doing air quotes at you? Right now? “-and in the end that all means the same old thing: Nothing can ever turn out alright because you don’t think you deserve it!” He slaps his hand down into his own palm in an impatient gesture, making you jump. “Of all the self-centered, brassbound dunderheads in the known universe, you certainly take the cake! Really, everyone has to either die or become a witch because that’s what you deserve? Can’t you hear how stupid that is?”
You can only shake your head, feeling like he might as well have just punched a hole through your heart and have done with it. Why is he saying this? Just to rub it in? Of course you know that it’s your fault, that’s what you’ve been saying this whole-
And then, just like he’d done once before, what feels like fucking years ago, Jake suddenly interrupts himself mid-anger to wrap his arms around you, pulling your face in until it’s pressed hard against his chest. “We don’t deserve that,” he murmurs, lips moving tenderly against your forehead. “You don’t deserve it either, do you hear me? No one does. And it really doesn’t have to happen like that.”
He holds you, rocking you slowly back and forth for a while as you cling blindly to him. If you disagree with him, you don’t have the words to explain why, and god, you’re so fucking tired. If you don’t deserve this, then shit, you guess you don’t care anymore. As long as Jake stays like this, solid enough to hold and himself enough to tell you that you’re kind of being a dick… well, you honestly don’t care about anything else.
It’s enough.
“Oh, and another thing, my good sir,” he says, but he doesn’t sound angry anymore. There’s a teasing warmth in his voice that makes you feel like he’s pulling at something in your chest, slowly unfolding it - and if it comes with just a hint of cattiness, you don’t think you mind it all that much. “You sure like to go on about how you gave me my power, but… well, don’t you see how ridiculous that is?” He presses a small kiss to your temple. “No offence, Dirk, but who the red-hot blazes do you think you are? Who says that you’re such a karmic bigwig, that destiny itself is just going to hand you the power of a god neat-as-you-please, with a big kiss and a bow on top!”
“Well, that’s literally what I fucking asked for,” you mumble, confused.
“Yes, but that’s not how it works. Cripes, Dirk, even Rose was slapped with that whole ‘but only if it’s about Roxy’-caveat, and I have to ask, how many times has she ended up wiping the whole ward off the map by now? That’s some heavy karmic weight that affects thousands of people right there, and her power still comes with that kind of limitation? But you, who to be quite frank tend to mostly just stand around watching everything go absolutely pancake-shaped, you only had to ask, and just like that you got handed the keys to the kingdom.”
…No matter how much you hate it, you have to admit that he’s right. Something just doesn’t add up, when you look at it that way. From the way the Incubators had explained it, it had indeed seemed like the sort of people who were slated to shape history were the ones who ended up with extraordinary magical powers - thus fulfilling the conditions necessary for such feats at times, or otherwise just living up to the potential that was already there. They were queens, priestesses, revolutionaries, leaders of men. But you… well, you’d really just assumed that you would one day be important enough to warrant such a wish, and since it worked you hadn’t examined the matter any further.
“Shit.” Now you’re the one actively pushing your face against Jake’s reassuringly solid bosom, because you don’t much care for him seeing the expression on your face at present. “Listen, I’m not sure if figuring out that I suffer from rampant narcissism is that much of a breakthrough, Doctor, but I’ll let you have this one. I saw no reason at all to question why the fuck I was the most powerful dumbass to ever grace a sexy little crop top with my sublime body. Are you happy?”
He snorts derisively at your blatant deflection, but doesn’t rise to. “Well, that’s because you’re not, you ninny. It’s always been me.”
“...You’ve worn a crop top? And, important follow-up: Do you have pics?”
“The crop top doesn’t enter into it!” he shouts, so loudly that you duck your head in protest, wincing. “I’m telling you that you are getting your power from me!”
“...Wait. What?”
“It’s incredibly simple, really,” Jake sighs, and then adds a bit wryly: “So simple even a genius like you might be able to understand it.”
“I am actually-”
“Yes, Dirk. I know, Dirk. That’s the joke, Dirk.” He jostles you gently, but still doesn’t let go of you, his voice warm with affection and patience. “Without your power, mine doesn’t actually have the conditions to do much at all, and that’s all well and good. But without my power… yours doesn’t even exist!”
Instead of arguing, and inviting Jake to thoroughly drag your ass once again, you give your ego a break and actually try to think about it. Without a hero, there’s no story, is that what he’s saying? But can’t the narrator be the hero, then? Why do you need-
No, of course you need Jake. Sure, the narrator can be the hero, but only if the story actually makes an effort to paint him as such. But no matter how much you’ve dwelt on yourself and your own misery, you’d never even once tried to cast yourself as such, and you both know it. Without even thinking about it, you’d left a hole in your story, one which was instantly filled by Jake the moment you really needed it.
As much as it galls you, he’s right. You and your power had both been sitting around uselessly, waiting for a hero to come rescue you.
Fuck, you want to strangle an Incubator so badly. Never mind that they always come back when you kill them, you can chalk it up to self-care or… ASMR or something. Those little shits had played you thoroughly - and you had all but asked them to do it, hadn’t you? You’d strolled right into their trap, giving them exactly what they wanted: The ideal wish for growing Jake’s power into the monstrous powerhouse it had become. And in turn, that power made it possible for your wish to be granted in the first place.
On what basis had you even assumed that you had made your wish before Jake had, anyway, with the way you’d twisted up time? And more to the point, did that even matter? You’ve already established that the strict temporal relationship between cause and effect do not apply when it comes to magic; hell, the Incubators had made it clear that the way human emotions and aspirations affect the world around you routinely breaks the laws of physics. That’s why they need you, why they set you up and turn you into witches, to release the power inherent in your souls.
“And that’s… why you’re here?” you demand, at least pushing yourself away from Jake so that you can meet his gaze. “That’s how you could turn up here, and why you-” You gesture down at him. “-look like… that? Because you’re just that powerful now, and dressing up in fifty yards of satin is somehow an integral part of becoming a god?”
“What?” He gives you a puzzled look. “Great Scott, no. I just thought that this looked nice.” He looks a bit defensive, glancing down at the intricate bodice/corset/whatever-the-fuck of his dress. Behind him, his wings flap irritably. “Can’t a fella just want to look his best?”
What the everloving fuck is this conversation? Is he doing this on purpose?
Before he has a chance to object to your use of the narrative voice, you cut him off, reaching out to adjust his collar in a gesture of goodwill. “Yeah, sure you can.” A wobbly moment of uncertainty follows, and he’s looking at you so expectantly, you just can’t let him down: “You look great, Jake. You look… beautiful.”
“Thank you, Dirk.” He beams. “Anyway, no, me being powerful in itself isn’t actually the reason why I’m here. It’s my wish!”
You frown. “Isn’t that splitting hairs a bit? Aren’t those two things more or less the same?”
“No, they’re not. The power is a result of the wish, but a wish can have more than one result.” He gives you an encouraging look. “So, ask me what I wished for, this time around!”
I’m getting really damn tired of not knowing what is going on. Just putting that out there.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Dirk… Stop using your silly little narration trick to complain, and just go ahead and ask me already. Or better yet, guess!”
Fine.
“It has to be the same thing you always wish for. Otherwise… shit, I don’t even know what that’d do to causality, if you suddenly went ahead and asked for that cake.”
“BZZZT, wrong!” He flicks you on the nose, and you blink. “It’s not a cake, and it’s not what I’ve wished for before either.” Then he winks cheekily, and despite yourself you feel your cheeks warm. “But it’s close.”
“Okay, then I give up. What is it?”
“Awww, no more guesses? You’re such an obstinate stick-in-the-mud, Dirk.”
Jake pouts rather pointedly at you, but you only shake your head. “I don’t want to play games, Jake. Please. Just tell me.”
“Oh, fine.” He rolls his eyes a bit, smiling. “You see, that’s my advantage on you, Dirk. You can only go around and around, but you’ve already had your wish, and that’s it. But if the stars align just so, I can change mine. And this time…” He leans in, until his lips brush against your ear. Your breathing picks up, and then immediately falls apart in ragged, rapid little shreds of air and anticipation. “I wished to be your hero.”
Your mind honestly just stops, and when it starts registering events again, you realize he’s kissing you. Kissing is good, it’s something you know how to do, and so you throw yourself into it until the world is spinning so fast that you don’t think it’s reasonable to expect you to take responsibility for it right now. The world is grown-up enough, it can take care of itself for a while.
“Now I’ll always be able to know where you are,” Jake murmurs against your lips, tenderly running his hand through your hair. “I know everything that’s happened before this point, all the ways you’ve fallen in love with me and vice versa, all the ways you’ve tried to save me, all the ways you’ve lost me.” He kisses the tears from your face, kisses the heaviness from your eyes and from your heart. “And no matter what happens next, we’ll do it together, do you understand? I’m sick and tired of you trying to do it all alone, and I’m sure you feel the same, you price ass. So just… come with me now.”
He doesn’t give you a chance to ask what he means, or to protest. He just grabs hold of you and flaps his wings, pulling you up into his arms as he rises up into the air. Despite your best efforts, a small gasp escapes your lips - as for the way you’re clinging to his bare shoulders, well, you didn’t even try to stop yourself there. They’re steady and warm under your hands, his skin against yours making your fingers tingle slightly.
“Write the world, Dirk,” Jake tells you. You hesitate, but he gives you a comforting little squeeze. “Nil desperandum, my dove. I told you already, didn’t I? You’re not doing it alone, this time. Now put your snazzy shades back on, and let’s get cracking!”
He touches your face, and there your shades are, back on your face. You still have no idea how he does that, how he just breaks every rule and doesn’t even think about it, but it doesn’t actually matter right now. It’s enough to know he can, and that he’ll be right there with you.
I write the world anew. It hovers far below us, dazzling and bright, as if it had been within my reach this whole time. All I have to do - all we have to do - is reach out and touch it. Jake
“No, I’ll take care of this bit,” Jake tells you with mock strictness, as he slowly starts to descend.
“What if everything goes wrong again,” you say, because you’re still afraid. You’ve been afraid for so damn long, you’ve forgotten what life was like before the fear.
“Then we’ll fix it,” he says, absolutely certain. “If the two of us can’t make it right, then by Jove, no one can!”
“And if no one can?” you demand, contrary and stubborn.
“Then…” He looks at you for a long while, as the light below grows brighter and brighter, all but obliterating every feature except those bright green eyes. “We will make something new. I promise.”
You breathe in deeply, and start the long process of easing the terror from your veins. “...Alright.”
We enter the world, together.
Altivolous on Chapter 1 Fri 18 Mar 2022 02:46AM UTC
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Altivolous on Chapter 2 Fri 18 Mar 2022 03:22AM UTC
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Altivolous on Chapter 3 Fri 18 Mar 2022 04:00AM UTC
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Altivolous on Chapter 4 Fri 18 Mar 2022 04:48AM UTC
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infiniteelsinore on Chapter 4 Mon 28 Aug 2023 03:20AM UTC
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Flowers4you (Guest) on Chapter 4 Sat 09 Mar 2024 07:33AM UTC
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BareBitchinBodkin on Chapter 4 Thu 10 Oct 2024 09:36AM UTC
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BareBitchinBodkin on Chapter 4 Thu 10 Oct 2024 09:39AM UTC
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erkana on Chapter 4 Sun 10 Aug 2025 07:24PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 10 Aug 2025 07:26PM UTC
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