Ten years ago, the Butterfly Knights saved the world. That was the easy part.
A magical girl story.
A magical girl story.
🦋 Team Butterfly Forever 🦋
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🦋 Prologue & Chapter 1: Happily Ever After
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Once upon a time, a girl received a piece of enchanted jewellery from a talking cat. By holding it aloft and saying the magic words, she would enter a cocoon of sound and starlight, and emerge remade into a creature of beauty and power.
She could have been any girl, but this girl's name was Eve.
Eve didn't think she was special. She didn't think she was cool, smart, brave, or pretty, nor confident or clever. In fact, she thought she simply wasn't the kind of girl who got a secret magical destiny, which is of course what every girl with a secret magical destiny thinks.
After making sure the cat didn't have the wrong person, she pushed up her glasses, wrapped the chain around her hand so she wouldn't drop it, and raised it above her head. She said, as clearly as she could around her braces, "For the Kaleidoscope Crown! Transform!"
It took her a second run to pronounce 'kaleidoscope', but she got it.
The world fell away into the embrace of a dizzying storm of magic. In the dancing, ever-changing light, she was clad in raiment and ribbon, silk and steel, pleats and plate. A phantom wind combed through her hair as she spun to the swelling notes of a personal orchestra, weaving herself into the twisting and transforming bolts of cloth. The wings fluttered against her skin, guiding her into a delicate pirouette, until her outstretched hand touched the scabbard of a sword, descending to meet her. Her fingers closed around the handle and she clutched it against her chest.
In a world of light, it was heavy.
When the maelstrom faded, Eve was gone. In her place was a knight, of haunting brilliance and ethereal grace. They may have shared a face and voice and mind, but no one could mistake one for the other. The cat told her that she had become the beautiful Butterfly Ward, a being of such divine elegance that she could walk on blades of grass and leave them unbowed.
She still slipped and fell out her bedroom window, landing in a clatter of steel plate, but she was quick to point out that the grass was no worse for wear.
The cat guided Butterfly Ward through the night, telling her the secrets of the world. He was a messenger from the future, sent by the wise and benevolent Butterfly Queen to ensure Her own ascension and to protect the world from that which might harm it. He explained that Ward was one of Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights, sworn protectors of all that is good and true, and through service and sacrifice, a Heaven on Earth, the Eternal Realm, would be secured.
Butterfly Ward listened very patiently, and then asked why the Butterfly Queen got to be Queen. The cat explained that She was the wisest and most loving person in all the world. Butterfly Ward said she got that part, but then asked how many people voted for her. Well, nobody, said the cat. She was queen, after all, but if there were elections then surely Her Majesty would-
There has to be elections, Butterfly Ward protested. This is America. Are you a terrorist?
Not for the last time, the cat sighed, and rubbed his face with a tiny paw.
Such lightly treasonous inquiries were gracefully put aside by Her Majesty's loyal servant to focus on the mission at hand. Deep in the city, hidden in plain sight, a demonic being was raising a crystal shrine that would attune itself to the suffering and want of the material plane. This would thin the veil between worlds so other, more terrible servants of the Dark Queen could emerge.
Hold on, Butterfly Ward protested. There are two queens? Maybe they could run for election against one another, to make things fair. The cat protested that the Dark Queen was a being of pure malice and spite that would do nothing but bring ruin to the realm and all beyond it. Butterfly Ward said that was a normal part of democracy. In a stroke of dazzling brilliance, the cat suggested that perhaps she might consider striking this blow for justice and peace a ballot in Her Majesty's favour. Butterfly Ward inquired about third parties, but was convinced of the folly of throwing away her vote.
The two arrived at the location of the foul ritual, a desolate husk whose crumbling edifice bore the impression of once-prominent signage, declaring it to have once been the local Tower of Records. Butterfly Ward explained grimly that it once served the community proudly, before being sacked by the fell Kazaa. Such injustices were just a prelude to the current crime, for lurking behind the fading signage was the silhouette of one of the Dark Queen's demonic servants, slipping into the shadows.
At the instruction of Her Majesty's most devoted feline retainer, Butterfly Ward raised her arm, summoning forth her shield, and bravely charged through the doors, the crystal glass shattering with her passage. She demanded the demon present arms and remain silent, a respectable challenge, one met with a swipe of the creature's twisted, ever-changing claws. The razor fingers tore through the shelves of silver discs and scattered off her shield in a hail of sparks, sending Butterfly Ward to crash headfirst through a table.
Stunned by the temerity of this awful creature, that it would dare strike a servant of the Queen, Butterfly Ward reached for her sword, but was unable to free it from her scabbard. The cat explained that the sword was no ordinary blade, but the Razor of Time, whose edge could part worlds, and which would not be drawn except at the crossroads of destiny.
A less principled storyteller would declare that Butterfly Ward accepted this with grace and rose to meet the threat with joy in her heart. The truth, however, is that behind the shield, under the armour, there was a scared girl who had never been in a fight. A monster was looming over her, and the sword that hung heavy on her hip was stuck fast. The creature drove its claws into the shield, and the tiles cracked under her from the weight of the blows.
Butterfly Ward wept. She begged the cat for aid, and begged the creature for mercy. But there was no aid that could be rendered by a cat, and no mercy to be found in the monster. Its fanged maw pressed over the top of her shield, and she shoved it away with all her strength, greater than she knew. It sailed through the air and crashed into the wall, and Butterfly Ward staggered to her feet.
She ran, and did not stop until she was safe in bed.
As many had before her, Eve tried to flee her fate, and as in all those cases, fate would not be deterred. She tried to throw the necklace away, but it always found its way back to her bedside table. She hid it away to forget about it, but always felt it weighing on her neck. No tool in her father's workshop could score it, no fire in her mother's kitchen would melt it.
And all the while, suffering spread as a blight, as the Realm of Shadow intruded on the material. The cause was invisible to mortal eyes, but the effects were manifest, in nightmares, disease, and ill omens. The city took sick around her as demons stalked the streets, draining the vitality of the world.
On the fifth day, she asked the cat if this was her fault for running. The cat shook his head. It was his fault, for not preparing her. She asked to be prepared; she was scared, but she could not stand by while people were hurting. She dried her tears, donned the armour once more, and strode into battle. She braced her shield between the oncoming evil and the people of the city, and though she still feared, and though she sometimes wept, she met each challenge as they came, and with each triumph she stood taller.
Despite the tireless efforts and ceaseless reminders of her feline advisor, she showed the necklace to her most dear companion; to her credit, she withheld its purpose, boasting only of its luster. Isn't it pretty, Kimmy? she asked. That girl stole into her parent's bedroom the next night, and retrieved the necklace's twin from her mother's jewellery box, dotted with rubies. That night, Butterfly Sage joined the fight, entangling evil in the strands of fate, weaving the heartstrings of friend and foe.
New allies joined them. The brilliant Butterfly Spark, mistress of the elements, and the brave Butterfly Heart, of unmatched strength, were recognized in their humble guises and gifted their necklaces. Her Majesty's bodyguard herself, already hardened from years of battle, emerged from the shadows as Butterfly Shine, pledging herself to Butterfly Ward and the cause of justice. Together, they were invincible.
The Shadow Realm sent forth more terrible beasts, but none were as terrible as their Princes. Mortal men pledged to the Dark Queen in exchange for dark power, they slipped easily into positions of power and directed demonic forces to tear apart the city in search of the Butterfly Knights. But the material world had a champion of its own, the mysterious Prince Rose, who crossed sabres with his fell counterparts in aid of the Knights.
As was fated, it was love at first sight for Rose and Ward, their souls finding connection across eternity. When he left her to seek deeper truths in the Lower Realms, she was moved to such despair that she took on the mantle of Shadow Butterfly, and came very close to tearing the world asunder with her grief. It was only the tender and radiantly platonic love of her very close companion Sage that averted disaster, as she was pulled from the brink by friendship's kiss.
For two years, the Butterfly Knights fought back the darkness, and stranger things besides. The future, the past, and the endless void sent forth malefactors and disaster, and they met each in turn with growing power and confidence. Ward's empathy grew into a sixth sense, Sage wove her strings into a bow, Heart bent the crash of thunder to her will, Shine wove illusions so convincing they took on a life of their own, and Spark learned her mastery of the elements extended to the many discovered since the legends were written.
Things got a little out of control after that last one. Perhaps there is a reason that nature does not normally allow fifteen year olds to transmute matter into antimatter at will. There was a period of about a month where villains couldn't even get through their speeches before the air in their lungs was alchemically transformed into substances with names like 'fluoroantimonic acid'. Not to besmirch the wisdom and bravery of Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights, but it was frankly a little unsporting.
It would appear their foes agreed, for the final seasons of their battles were more desperate and cruel than any before. Their enemies discarded any honour they had remaining, holding hostage the people of the land, striking from the shadows, even targeting the family of the Knights. Not even the intervention of the wayward Knights Errant, Butterfly Echo and Butterfly Veil, could spare the city and its defenders, and ground was lost.
As the forces of the enemy grew ever-stronger, the Butterfly Knights undertook a dangerous journey to the future. I need not tell Her Majesty what transpired, except to say that the insight and power She granted in that brief visit stunned and humbled all present, filling them with great resolve for the hardship to come. All, save for their wise advisor of course, were shocked by the revelation that Butterfly Ward was herself destined to become the Butterfly Queen; he knew from the moment he saw her owing to the immaculate radiance already evident in her bearing even then.
Then, on a clear summer day, the Dark Queen put her final plan in motion. She came to the material realm in person, having remade herself with a blade of purest nightmares driven through her heart. She emerged through the great golden gates of the city as the Anathema of Life, a colossal beast whose gaze could still hearts and bring ruin, and her armies poured through the weeping wound in reality. Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights made a brave stand at the gates, and gave a good account. They felled the foul invaders in their hundreds, preserved life as they could and took it as was required, but step by step they were forced back as the very fabric of the world began to unravel.
The Knights Errant perished in a rearguard action, holding their ground while others fled. Butterfly Spark was struck down by the last of the Dark Princes, crashing through the great pyramid in the city's center; Prince Rose bested the man soon after, but was himself struck a lethal blow. Butterfly Sage pushed aside Heart as the Anathema turned its gaze upon her; Heart was gravely wounded, her leg becoming ash in an eyeblink, but such was Sage's indomitable will that she survived seconds longer, blowing away in the wind as Shine held her. As the Dark Queen descended from her throne in the heart of the void, Shine, gravely wounded, gave her final defiant effort, six sharp reports of a mortal weapon, for all others had been expended.
It was then that Butterfly Ward placed her shield in the path of the Anathema's gaze, and it was then, only then, that she drew her sword. With one blow, the Razor of Time severed the stolen Strands of Fate that bound the Anathema to the Dark Queen, with the next, she removed a grasping claw that had sought to grip the world, and with the third, she shattered the void itself, and the Apotheosis faded into nothing.
As the Dark Queen fell to her knees, defeated, Butterfly Ward commanded her to yield. The Dark Queen spurned her mercy and told her to strike true, doubting she could truly be extended a second chance. Ward declared that she could, as any would, if she would take it.
The Dark Queen was silent for some time. Then she said that there could be no second chances, not for one like her, and with a heavy heart, Butterfly Ward brought the sword down, parting the veil between worlds. The Dark Queen was banished back into the shattered lands of the Realm of Shadows, and the world was free.
Then, taking up the broken Strands of Fate, Butterfly Ward rewove them as Sage had taught her, remaking the world to be as it was. She restored to life all who had perished, and mended what she could with the frayed cord. Her Prince Rose joined her in the task, and then her Sage, and many hands made quick work. Not all the damage could be undone, not all wounds could be healed, but much that would have been lost was saved.
As night fell, Butterfly Ward faded away, and there was Eve. She was tired, and scared, but she dried her tears. Her Prince and her Sage were with her. She embraced them, and begged them both to stay with her, that her heart could not bear the cruel choice between them. Both tried to leave for the sake of the other; both chose to stay for Eve.
As they watched the stars come out over the darkened streets of the broken city, as the long summer faded into autumn, Eve was, at last, at peace.
And they lived happily ever after.
"You're pre-approved to feel good about your financial choices!"
You unfolded the page and skimmed over the form letter. Dear Ms. Nakamura, blah blah, minimum payments, you are responsible for, we will pursue collection efforts… you skipped ahead to the bit that mattered at the bottom, hoping very much for a number of digits you could handle.
Ah. Three. Three digits. That was two more digits than you were really hoping for.
It wasn't a disaster, you did have savings, though in reality that was just money you were not shovelling into your student loans so you could feel a little better when you checked the balance of your accounts. It was just another thing you didn't need after a long day of classes and before a long day of job-hunting. Fully aware that if you put the letter back in the envelope, it would disappear from your brain and you'd carry on obliviously until another letter with a bigger number arrived, you clutched the paper, stepped up to the door, and promptly failed to find your keys.
Placing the letter in your teeth, you fished around in your purse, shuffling around the strata of faded receipts, tangled earbuds, dried up Sparkle Beacon pens, and months-old Muni tickets. You did find a key, but it unlocked the Gates of Eternity or… something like that. Maybe the Vault of Dreams? No, that had a combination, you had that written down somewhere…
Dejected, you reached for the doorbell, then stopped. Somewhere in the apartment above, you felt Amara set down the half-filled kettle and pick up her buzzing phone, and you didn't want to interrupt.
"Hello? Yeah, it's Amara. Right, no, I did call earlier, it's about the documentation for the legacy bridge protocols. Yeah, the problem is it doesn't work. No, I know it's one of your listed functions, I'm telling you it's a listed function that doesn't. Okay, talk to your guy. Yeah, I'll be in the office all day. Talk to you then." She hung up the phone with a frown, briefly considered throwing it through the window, then slipped it back into her housecoat pocket.
You let her put the kettle on, then pressed Apartment #2's doorbell lightly to no effect. You gave it another, more forceful jab, and this time the muffled sound of the chime was just audible. The door opened almost instantly, and there was Amara, leaning against the doorframe with one eyebrow raised. Somehow, in her housecoat and with a bit of electrolysis-defying stubble, she still looked unimaginably cool.
"Forget your keys?" she teased. You opened your mouth to protest and the letter fell out of your mouth, fluttering pathetically to the ground between you. "Oh."
"Yeah, we missed a payment or something," you groaned. "And I think I missed my meds today, my brain is goo. The two things may be related. What's a legacy bridge protocol and why are you being called about it?"
"You were evesdropping? It's, uh… well, what it is appears to be a feature that got cancelled without anyone telling their manager. The tea's already on, let's get some caffeine in you if nothing else," she suggested, leaning down to pluck up the paper and sighing. "Fuck. This one's my bad, I think I turned off the automatic payments this month when I switched stuff up for rent."
"Yeah, but you only had to do that because I lost my job…" You sighed and followed her up the narrow, creaky stairs to your apartment, then stopped at your door as Amara padded her housecoat pockets ineffectually.
"Ah. Well, you don't have to feel bad about forgetting your keys, because you're not alone. Could you..?" She made a little motion with her finger, and you dutifully turned around and stepped down a few steps. There was a soft gust of air and a faint floral smell, and then you heard the door unlock from the inside. Amara opened the door, looking sheepish, and gave a dramatic sweep of her hand.
"And you shouldn't feel bad about the job either! You're not personally responsible for the bookstore going out of business," she reminded you. You nodded in reluctant agreement and staggered inside, kicking your shoes off into the undifferentiated pile of footwear on the mat and making a beeline for the ratty couch at the back of the room, stepping carefully around the half-reassembled computer tower Amara continuously assured you she'd finish one of these weeks and successfully avoiding stepping on any poinky little bits this time. You threw your purse and bookbag onto the cushions and collapsed after them, an action which had felt appropriate in the moment but mostly just smushed your glasses into your face.
"I knooooow. It still sucks," you complained, wiggling upright and pulling your phone out of your pocket. You stared a moment at your knockoff phone case, stylized representations of the Butterfly Knights posing together on a background of stars, then turned it over and tapped in your code as the kettle began to whistle. You stared at the menu uselessly through the fresh smudges on your glasses, disappointed by a lack of texts (discounting the one from Nancy Pelosi asking for your money for the midterms). You tapped to send a text, failed to think of something that wouldn't be annoying, and tapped over to your emails to confirm the utter lack of job offers.
You considered getting up to run your glasses under the tap, rationalized that your brain would make them invisible in a few minutes anyway, and began scrolling Instagram pointlessly, which handily consumed the time until Amara set a mug of tea on the coffee table and settled in next to you, a telltale smile on her lips.
"They're making a movie about us," she informed you, clearly waiting for you to have taken a sip, but you were wise to her games and only spilled a little.
"Actually this time? Who is this they, and do you think they can send me a royalty check?" you asked, already knowing the answer. You couldn't exactly go around compromising your secret identity for stuff like that; if there was some rogue Dark Prince or something still hanging around, you had absolutely no illusions that they wouldn't immediately mail you magic anthrax or a very literal glitter bomb.
"No idea. Joss Whedon's involved in some capacity and they've announced a cast," she said. You tapped in a search, already bracing yourself.
"Cool. What's the odds I'm being played by some white lady who- Jennifer Lawrence??!" you exclaimed, nearly dropping your phone.
"Yep."
"I was kidding! Like I know how the transformation works but… it doesn't make you blind, right? How?" You scrolled further and were relieved to see that at least they got Jamie Chung for Butterfly Sage, thus marginally reducing the odds of Kimiyo turning the Warner Brothers lot into a mass casualty event. "Wait, how are they going to do an origin story when they don't know our origins?"
"I guess they're going to make it up. At least it's something to talk about on the team call tonight, right?" Amara commented, sipping her tea and scrolling on her phone. "Aww, it looks like they're going with the alien invasion theory for the storyline."
"It's Wednesday?" you said stupidly. No, it was obviously Wednesday, morning classes, that's why the call was today. You stared across the apartment at your meds, the little white bottle of ritalin resting exactly where you forgot them this morning. Too late to take them now, you had class early tomorrow morning.
"It is. Also, how can you see anything? Gimme," Amara demanded, and you forked your glasses over and blinked as the world suddenly became a lot more blurry.
"My hero," you joked, though you very much meant it. The Amara-shaped blur moved to her computer desk as you held your phone right up against your face, continuing to hold it there until you realized that it was, in fact, the photo that was artfully out of focus. You scrolled on a little and found yourself somewhere in April, which you could tell because your feed was wall-to-wall pictures Kimiyo had taken of the cherry blossoms.
Amara returned with your glasses, and the world snapped into 1080p all at once, which was nearly as disorienting as removing your glasses had been.
"My God, it's full of clutter. How do we live like this?" you remarked, staring around at the now very visible layer of dust that had settled on much of the room. Kimiyo's little art table in particular looked like it had just been discovered in a crypt.
"It's not that bad," Amara said, looking around. "...It is that bad. We should probably pick up sometime this week."
You groaned and stretched, fetching your laptop and succeeding in opening several ongoing assignments without actually making any progress on any of them. You were so very close to being done, being free after five years with two whole degrees to show for it, but the run-up to the finish line was a slog. There were days, mostly unmedicated ones like today, when you questioned why you were doing this; surely the whole point of being Queen was that you didn't have to be qualified. They weren't going to take the crown away because your GPA fell under 3.5 or you couldn't remember how instrumental variable regression worked; if somebody tried that you could wave your hand and go "We tire of this, take him away."
Then again, you still had no idea how or when you'd actually become Butterfly Queen of the Eternal Realm, and you needed to pay rent until then. It was increasingly looking like you were at least going to have to manage the minimum payments until whatever vague future event made you into The Universally Beloved Monarch of Everything Forever; at that point your student loan plan hinged on forgiving all debts upon ascension, followed by a few centuries in some kind of crystal oubliette for the Sallie Mae board of directors.
That last part was a joke, just one you made a little louder every time you got an installment reminder. At this point you were fairly certain the Dark Queen got where she was because the antique IRS was on her about her tithe returns. Maybe her indulgence premiums kept going up for showing ankle at the cathedral. Dear Ms. Your Vile Magnificence, our collection agents have been trying to reach you about overdue chariot payments and we're coming to repossess your horse…
"Are you okay?" Amara asked.
"No…" you admitted, shutting your laptop and flopping back against the couch, trying to sink as deep into the cushions as you could. "I can't focus. I hate forgetting my meds, it's like trying to think uphill. Sometimes I wish I still had that prissy little magic cat telling me what to do."
"You hated that," Amara reminded you.
"Yeah, but I hate this too! I should probably be applying for job stuff but I sort of want to just wait until I graduate so I don't have to open my cover letter with all the times I can't work."
"We have savings, that's not unreasonable," Amara pointed out. "I'm not going to say I can single-handedly pay for everything indefinitely, but at the very least we'll survive until Kimiyo gets back and we're splitting the rent three ways again."
"You're right, but that feels like a lazy excuse," you retorted. You could tell it was a line of thinking you couldn't indulge, simply because it felt so very alluring. Once you started giving yourself excuses like that again, you wouldn't stop.
"First off, you have exams in, what, two weeks? That's as good a reason to stay unemployed a while as I can think of. And secondly… you saved the world once or twice, I think you're entitled to a few lazy excuses."
"I'll sign that on the next rent check," you groaned, then stopped. "Which you handle. And it's online. Okay, you win." You picked yourself up off the couch and made your way to the kitchen, wetting a cloth. If you couldn't focus on your schoolwork and you didn't have it in you to job-hunt, at the very least you could do something about the dust.
You started with Kimiyo's art desk, each swipe of the cloth revealing a much brighter and more saturated surface than you'd remembered and leaving a tangled, dark mess of dust bunnies on the cloth. You tried rinsing it out to little effect, then just dumped it into the sink to soak and grabbed another. The next victim of your cleanliness rampage was the rickety little second-hand table beside the door, where you discovered your forgotten keys, lying in plain sight, the butterfly charm mocking you. You pocketed the keys and began scrubbing, moving aside the pile of forgotten winter gloves, pamphlets, and a dusty rag you surmised had been left there after your previous abortive dusting spree.
You remembered what was lurking behind it all at the same time you uncovered it. A photo, the only photograph you had of everyone, together, in their everyday clothes, taken by a kind bystander in Golden Gate Park with Kimiyo's camera as you all waited for the celestial alignment that would allow you to travel into the future. You were sitting in the middle, blinking behind your glasses, clearly still exhausted from having to get up early. You were wearing that cute green top that unfortunately didn't fit anymore and those ridiculously bulky boots that were fortunately mouldering in the closet at your parent's place.
There was Kimiyo beside you, a black blouse and skinny jeans and boots with way too many buckles, black lipstick and hair that looked like a mess but you knew took her forever to get right. You were holding hands, it was just visible between you in the picture. She'd only gotten prettier.
Beside you both was Andy, perched proudly on the bench. Anyone looking at the picture would probably just think that an outdoor Birman cat had wandered into the shot, but to you the very distinct sapience and accompanying smug aura was visible even in still life. He was posing for the camera and hamming it up, cute little guy.
Brigid was staring directly at the camera with the kind of focus that would be intimidating if you didn't know she was just a little confused on the concept of group photos; her red hair was still long back then, puffed up in wild curls that framed her head all wrong. A book was folded on her lap, the cover not visible in the photo, though you imagined it was something about super-advanced quantum biology or whatever other field she'd decided to master that week.
Riley was unmistakable, and not just because she towered over all of you. A streak of green in her blonde hair, denim vest festooned with pins and patches that turned it into a riot of colour in the little photo. Her girlfriend at the time, Vanessa or something? Was in the shot, having absolutely no idea that she was in the presence of the world's best (and only) team of magical superheroes.
And beside her, fingers extended over Brigid's head, was Esmé. You looked on quickly.
Tracy and Lyra were lurking at the corner of the shot, ever so slightly in shadow, somehow blending in with the background despite Tracy's white suit jacket and Lyra's bright red dress. They'd looked so cool at the time; now they looked like exactly what they were, seventeen year olds who'd stolen several million dollars and were attempting to wear all of it.
And at the very back of the group, looking away from the camera, was Amara. She was distant at the time because of tensions in the group, but it felt appropriate. This was a version of her that should appear in photographs only reluctantly. She still had that grey sports jacket, but whereas now it made her look dashing, in this photo it made her depressingly square, like it was the walls of a prison cell. It didn't help that this was right after she'd cut her hair really short. She still looked good, she looked amazing, but she didn't look happy.
You set the photo down as your phone buzzed in your pocket, your fifteen minute reminder reminding you that in fifteen minutes you'd get a reminder to start the Skype call. You made a few more ineffectual swipes at the dust, set the cloth down on the table, and headed back into the living room. You considered grabbing your laptop and heading to the comfort of bed, but once you were cozy in bed, you might not want to get back up. You went to drink your tea, but it had gone cold.
You spent that time staring at the clock in the corner of your screen as it ticked over, the group chat open. Spark and Sage were already online. You waited patiently, tapping your foot against the leg of the coffee table, then at four o'clock exactly you hit the Call button. Boop-boop, boop-boop, boop-bo-
Brigid was the first to pick up, though she resolved as three blurry, dark stills before her voice came through and the image stabilized. It was midnight in England, though that alone didn't explain the low light levels; it looked like she was lit almost exclusively by the computer screen. She was ghostly pale, dark circles under her eyes, clearly run ragged, but you'd begun to suspect that wasn't all. In the still frames of her jittery connection, her usually intense stare was often unfocused, like she wasn't quite present.
Before you could say hi and maybe bring her back to this realm, Kimiyo picked up. You waited for her image to appear, but after a few seconds of black she hung up and called again. This time you saw her, framed against the window of her apartment. She looked composed and elegant, even through the blurry pixels, but as usual she seemed overdressed for the occasion, like this was a business call.
"Hey you two," you said, injecting as much cheer into your voice as you could. Brigid muttered something the microphone didn't quite pick up, and Kimiyo just nodded politely. "Just waiting on Riley now."
You glanced back down at the group chat and the four offline usernames, taking a deep breath to steady yourself. Then Heart's icon turned green, and Riley joined the call. Her image was crystal-clear and steady, showing her tired smile and the waves of her blonde hair as she awkwardly sat down. The screen shook as her prosthetic leg bumped into the table.
"Hey everyone, sorry I'm late, Finn was crying because I turned on the TV after he handed me the remote, which apparently was the wrong thing to do? Who knows. Also, sorry to start with this, but did you see they're making a movie of us?" she asked. She was smiling, but the exhaustion you'd expect from a mother of two young children was coupled with a nervous energy you hopefully wouldn't. She kept glancing up over the top of the laptop, and you weren't sure if it was because she was keeping an eye on the kids or the door.
"Actually this time?" Kimiyo asked, sounding skeptical.
"So it seems," you confirmed. There was muffled clacking as everyone searched at once, and a few seconds later you just made out Kimiyo mutter something that would probably be admissible as evidence of intent in court. "Yeeeeeeah I know. On the bright side, they cast Spark like, weirdly good, she looks just like Brigid. Wait, shit, let's step back a second. How's everyone doing?"
"Super!" Riley replied automatically.
"Fine," Brigid responded, her voice small. "Just tired. You know, really busy."
"I'm doing well. Less busy than you Brigid, but it's nice," Kimiyo said, her words sounding carefully measured.
"I'm glad," you said, and tried to mean it.
"Will Amara be joining us?" Kimiyo asked, and you glanced over the top of the screen. Amara was at her computer, typing furiously at something, her tea forgotten.
"She's working. Unlike me; I'm still unemployed, so that's less than great, and exams are looming, but I think I've got this. I know it's not as big a deal as Brigid's PHD, but I'm really excited to finally be done accruing student debt and start accruing interest. How is the dissertation going, anyway?"
Brigid kept staring off into nothing for a few seconds, and as usual you weren't sure if it was the connection or her. But it seemed to land, as she blinked and nodded.
"G-good, I'm almost done. I'm just waiting for lab time for, um, to run a few numbers and then I think I'm ready to go," she said, pushing her curls out of her eyes. As the video held on a frame, you couldn't help but notice how pale she was, more than usual, and the dark marks on the back of her hand.
"Still? How long's the waiting list, it feels like it's been weeks," Riley commented. Brigid looked away from the camera, lips pursed, then shrugged.
"Processing time is in high demand, you know, I-I'm lucky I get any time at all. And I have so much to do for Professor Bennett, you know. Busy." You felt distinctly like this conversation had happened before, beat by beat, but you didn't want to press. That wasn't what these calls were for, and she seemed so delicate.
"I mean, I'm still not sure what computational neuroscience even is, other than complicated, so I'm not surprised it's taking this long," you said lightly, gently nudging the topic along. "What about you, Kimiyo? I kinda hope none of your courses are too interesting."
You weren't exactly sure why Kimiyo had decided to sign up for another round of literature classes when she'd only get two months into them, but she'd apparently gotten some inheritance over there that meant she could just throw millions of yen around on stuff like that (which was less impressive than it sounded, but was still thousands of dollars).
"Nothing particularly thrilling, no, but I'm enjoying it," she said. You groaned inwardly; why did she treat every call like she was trying to avoid incriminating herself?
"Anything in particular?" you pressed lightly, and she shrugged.
"I've been enjoying the study of linked verse poetry we're doing right now. I'd read one of my favourites, but, well, it wouldn't exactly mean much to any of you," she said dismissively.
"I mean, it'd still be cool, I might recognize a word or two?" you offered, but she just smiled. She does have the right to remain silent, you supposed. "Fair enough. Anything cool in your life, Riley?"
"Yes! We have a vacation this week!" Riley announced, sounding genuinely excited for once. You breathed a sigh of relief; at least it wasn't the All Evasion Hour. It was something to work with. "Grant got a week off work, we're all heading down to that lakeside cottage I told you about, remember the pictures?"
"That did look lovely," Kimiyo agreed. "It reminds me of that campsite we rented in senior year." As best you could recall, it wasn't much like that camp at all; this was just Kimiyo bringing up an outing that had very conspicuously included her then-girlfriend.
"Any cool plans there, neat stuff?" you inquired, trying to smooth it over before Riley had a chance to use the words 'gay phase'. Riley opened her mouth to speak, paused, then shrugged.
"I mean, there's a lake? I'm not sure, I'm sure it'll be fun," she concluded. Nevermind then. She glanced off-screen at something, then looked back quickly. "Shit. Gotta go, nice chatting!"
Her image blinked out and she went offline within seconds, and the call was left in an awkward silence.
"... it sort of sounds like her vacation is going to be more of the same, just at a lakeside cottage," Brigid observed quietly.
"I somehow doubt Grant is going to be more hands-on due to the proximity of water, yes," Kimiyo agreed darkly.
"I mean, hey, it's something," you said wearily. "I know it's… hard sometimes, having her on the call, but I don't want to lose her too." You glanced at one of the offline accounts involuntarily. Kimiyo nodded.
"I just wish she'd wake the hell up."
"Yeah…" Brigid agreed, then yawned, the sound distorted into static by the connection. "I'm really tired, is it okay if I hang up early too? I have class tomorrow…"
"I thought Thursdays was tutoring?" Kimiyo asked. Brigid shrugged.
"Yeah. That's what I meant, um…" She trailed off, shifting in the picture as she moved her hands up to the trackpad.
"Hey, let's end the call properly at least," you reminded her, and she nodded.
"Of course. Three…"
"Two…" Kimiyo supplied, slightly delay.
"One…" Normally somebody else would do it, but it had to be you.
"Team Butterfly Forever!"
They both hung up, and you just stared at their icons for a few long moments before sighing. Amara was there instantly, nudging you over and sitting.
"Rough?" she asked, and you shrugged and crumpled against her a little. Not for the first time after a team call, you felt like you were going to cry, and you clamped down on it with everything you had. Crying wasn't going to solve anything, it never did.
"I just… I dunno. I just hope stuff gets better," you said uselessly. There was a boop from your laptop; Kimiyo had sent you a message. "I miss them a lot. Especially Kimiyo."
"Yeah. I miss her too. That her?" Amara asked.
"I think she wants to do, you know… a one on one call," you said, feeling your face heat up. Amara grinned.
"Well, you need some cheering up, so go have fun. I'll put on tea, should I wait until after you're done to bring it to you?" she asked as you scooped your laptop up and headed for the bedroom.
"Babe, just bring it in. Hell, say hi for a change! I can't imagine she'll mind," you instructed, folding the laptop under your arm. Honestly, Amara was too considerate for her own good; the three of you had shared a bed for three years, this was hardly the most scandalous thing that had occurred between them.
Your apartment wasn't exactly large, but it felt especially cozy in the bedroom; you suspected that whatever builders had erected it at some nebulous point in the past had figured there'd be a twin bed in the corner, presumably next to the clothes line, spinning wheel, and gaggle of soot-stained orphans that would have come with the building at the time. By some magic you still weren't entirely versed in, the three of you had managed to fold a king-size mattress like a taco and fit it through the narrow door. You weren't sure that was a feat that could be replicated, so if you ever moved, the landlord would need to knock a wall down.
You threw yourself onto the bed, bounced slightly more than expected, just managed to avoid tumbling off the side, and somehow never let go of the laptop at any point in the proceedings. You cleared a place among the pillows and opened the laptop back up, clicking into the private chat with Kimiyo and typing a quick 'here' in the chat.
Boop-bo-
You answered the call as fast as you could, and there was Kimiyo. She hadn't moved an inch, but she looked completely different, resting her head on her hand, her smile sharp and genuine. Just the change in poise had turned her uncomfortable-looking secretary getup into the garb of a delightfully intimidating business lady.
"Hey sweetie," she said, her voice like honey even through the fuzzy connection.
"Hey! Um… so, with your Green Card cutoff coming up, this is probably going to be the last of these, huh?" you asked, not able to conceal how excited you were about that. She glanced aside, just for a moment, then nodded.
"Probably, yes. Next time it'll be in person, and you've made me so many promises since I left, haven't you?" she pointed out, drawing out those last words. Yeah you had, and she had made a fair few promises of her own that you were very looking forward to seeing fulfilled.
"God, yeah. I've really missed you," you confessed, sighing as the feelings welled up in your chest. "I've been a mess, Kimmy. It's…" Fuck, this was supposed to be Sexy Call, but feelings were intruding and you didn't know how to stop them. "Brigid's getting worse, you can see it, and Riley…"
She held up a finger, and you stopped, hands perched on the trackpad.
"I know. I don't know what to do either, but you've been trying. I…" She took a deep breath, breaking eye contact. "It won't do to dwell, you're doing as much as you can. It can't be helped."
You didn't know how to tell her that this, this distance, emotional as much as physical, was one of the things that was hurting too.
"My whole thing is helping anyway," you pointed out, and that brought a smile to her face.
"I know. It's infuriatingly endearing of you, but somebody needs to give you a break, as you can't seem to take one on your own," she said, then, with a slow and deliberate motion, she pointed her finger on the screen, and made a little figure eight motion. You felt soft cord brush against your wrists, then snap tight around your wrists, the gesture responsible playing out on screen a moment later as Kimiyo snapped her hand into a fist.
"... okay," you agreed readily, which brought a huge, goofy grin to Kimiyo's face.
"Oh my God you are hopeless. I love you so much," she said, shaking her head in mock disappointment. "How is that all…" She hooked her finger in a 'come hither' motion. "... it…" She pulled it back, and you felt a gentle tug on the cord, just enough to tighten the ropes a bit. "... takes?"
"I… I… Honestly, I think fighting all those monsters with, like, vines and wires and stuff did something to my brain," you confessed yet again, blushing furiously. Getting tied up with your own metaphorical heartstrings made it very hard not to blurt out whatever dumb shit came into your head.
"You know, that happened to all of us a bunch, but this is just you," she pointed out, gesturing upward and pulling the cord with it until your arms were behind your head.
"I-I mean, do we know that for sure? I bet Tracy's a huge rope bunny," you joked, breathing heavily. She paused.
"You know, I can see that actually," she said, sounding like she was genuinely thinking about it. "Now then, Butterfly Ward, there's nobody here to save you this time. You're all mine."
You let yourself relax as you felt new cords slip under the cuffs of your jeans, sliding slowly up your legs as Kimiyo moved her fingers.
"Oh noooo, somebody save me…" you gasped playfully, shivering in anticipation.
There was a quick knock on the door, the sound of the latch, and footsteps behind you.
"Never fear, Butterfly Ward, I'm here to bring you tea and leave you to your fate. Hi Kimiyo!" Amara said brightly, setting the cup down on the bedside table. "Bye Kimiyo!"
She walked off, and you laughed, shaking your head.
"Helpful as always. Right, where were we?" you asked, glancing up at the screen. Kimiyo looked… off. Her face danced through the shadow of several unreadable emotions, then she sighed.
"Hey, I just saw the time. I need to go, I'll see you soon, okay?" She said. "Love you."
"Love-" you responded, then the call ended. Kimiyo snapped the laptop closed and sat back, staring intensely at it, angry at something. You, Amara, herself? The feelings were too muddled for even you to read.
You came back to yourself as the ropes around your wrists frayed and came apart into nothing, the scraps disappearing as they fell away. You sat up slowly, wiping your eyes, holding in the tears. What the hell was going on?
You stayed in the room for a few long minutes, not wanting to give Amara the impression she'd ruined anything. You spent that time wistfully scrolling your old messages to her to see if you could piece together anything. There wasn't much to go on, but that was her alright; she'd opened up a lot over the last few years, with you at least, but the longer she was gone the more closed off she seemed. Hell, you used to know where she was exactly at all times, you evesdropped on her conversations without meaning to, and now it was just that, little unreadable flashes.
You closed the laptop up and headed back into the living room, curling up next to Amara on the couch. You tried to bury yourself against her chest and just forget about everything, but everything was too much to keep out of your head.
"Hey, dummy," she said affectionately. "It's gonna be okay. Just like a week or two and she's back, right?" You nodded against her chest.
"Yeah. She's gotta come back." If she didn't, she couldn't; she'd lose her residency if she stayed more than a year, and it had been forty-nine very long weeks since she'd left for her grandfather's funeral. She was only supposed to be there for three weeks or so, which had at the time felt like it was going to be an eternity, but three weeks became a month, became three months, and now it didn't even sound like she was talking to any of her family anymore but she was still there.
You understood she was grieving; you'd only met her granddad one time, when you were thirteen and had joined her for her annual summer trip, but he was warm and funny even if Kimiyo had to translate everything he said. You'd been sad to hear it and you barely knew him; it clearly hit her hard.
But there was a part of you genuinely terrified that the cutoff date would come and go, she'd still be there for reasons she wouldn't tell you, and that would be that.
"We'll meet her at the airport. We'll get flowers," Amara assured you.
"Of course you'd think of that," you teased weakly.
"Hey, I still have my supplier's number. Unless he's gone out of business without me," she said. "Okay, I'm officially declaring today a wash. Your only responsibility for the rest of the evening is to decide what to watch."
You stared at the TV, wracking your brain.
"... did you remember to TiVo that new thing with John Oliver? I wanna see if it's any good. I liked him on the Daily Show," you asked.
Amara began to fiddle with the remote as you leaned back and stared out the window, catching a glimpse of dusk over the rooftops, people and cars rolling past the duplex, a cat making its way along the top of the neighbour's fence. The last rays of light painted the multicoloured homes in the district's namesake hues, and you did your best to just breathe.
She could have been any girl, but this girl's name was Eve.
Eve didn't think she was special. She didn't think she was cool, smart, brave, or pretty, nor confident or clever. In fact, she thought she simply wasn't the kind of girl who got a secret magical destiny, which is of course what every girl with a secret magical destiny thinks.
After making sure the cat didn't have the wrong person, she pushed up her glasses, wrapped the chain around her hand so she wouldn't drop it, and raised it above her head. She said, as clearly as she could around her braces, "For the Kaleidoscope Crown! Transform!"
It took her a second run to pronounce 'kaleidoscope', but she got it.
The world fell away into the embrace of a dizzying storm of magic. In the dancing, ever-changing light, she was clad in raiment and ribbon, silk and steel, pleats and plate. A phantom wind combed through her hair as she spun to the swelling notes of a personal orchestra, weaving herself into the twisting and transforming bolts of cloth. The wings fluttered against her skin, guiding her into a delicate pirouette, until her outstretched hand touched the scabbard of a sword, descending to meet her. Her fingers closed around the handle and she clutched it against her chest.
In a world of light, it was heavy.
When the maelstrom faded, Eve was gone. In her place was a knight, of haunting brilliance and ethereal grace. They may have shared a face and voice and mind, but no one could mistake one for the other. The cat told her that she had become the beautiful Butterfly Ward, a being of such divine elegance that she could walk on blades of grass and leave them unbowed.
She still slipped and fell out her bedroom window, landing in a clatter of steel plate, but she was quick to point out that the grass was no worse for wear.
The cat guided Butterfly Ward through the night, telling her the secrets of the world. He was a messenger from the future, sent by the wise and benevolent Butterfly Queen to ensure Her own ascension and to protect the world from that which might harm it. He explained that Ward was one of Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights, sworn protectors of all that is good and true, and through service and sacrifice, a Heaven on Earth, the Eternal Realm, would be secured.
Butterfly Ward listened very patiently, and then asked why the Butterfly Queen got to be Queen. The cat explained that She was the wisest and most loving person in all the world. Butterfly Ward said she got that part, but then asked how many people voted for her. Well, nobody, said the cat. She was queen, after all, but if there were elections then surely Her Majesty would-
There has to be elections, Butterfly Ward protested. This is America. Are you a terrorist?
Not for the last time, the cat sighed, and rubbed his face with a tiny paw.
Such lightly treasonous inquiries were gracefully put aside by Her Majesty's loyal servant to focus on the mission at hand. Deep in the city, hidden in plain sight, a demonic being was raising a crystal shrine that would attune itself to the suffering and want of the material plane. This would thin the veil between worlds so other, more terrible servants of the Dark Queen could emerge.
Hold on, Butterfly Ward protested. There are two queens? Maybe they could run for election against one another, to make things fair. The cat protested that the Dark Queen was a being of pure malice and spite that would do nothing but bring ruin to the realm and all beyond it. Butterfly Ward said that was a normal part of democracy. In a stroke of dazzling brilliance, the cat suggested that perhaps she might consider striking this blow for justice and peace a ballot in Her Majesty's favour. Butterfly Ward inquired about third parties, but was convinced of the folly of throwing away her vote.
The two arrived at the location of the foul ritual, a desolate husk whose crumbling edifice bore the impression of once-prominent signage, declaring it to have once been the local Tower of Records. Butterfly Ward explained grimly that it once served the community proudly, before being sacked by the fell Kazaa. Such injustices were just a prelude to the current crime, for lurking behind the fading signage was the silhouette of one of the Dark Queen's demonic servants, slipping into the shadows.
At the instruction of Her Majesty's most devoted feline retainer, Butterfly Ward raised her arm, summoning forth her shield, and bravely charged through the doors, the crystal glass shattering with her passage. She demanded the demon present arms and remain silent, a respectable challenge, one met with a swipe of the creature's twisted, ever-changing claws. The razor fingers tore through the shelves of silver discs and scattered off her shield in a hail of sparks, sending Butterfly Ward to crash headfirst through a table.
Stunned by the temerity of this awful creature, that it would dare strike a servant of the Queen, Butterfly Ward reached for her sword, but was unable to free it from her scabbard. The cat explained that the sword was no ordinary blade, but the Razor of Time, whose edge could part worlds, and which would not be drawn except at the crossroads of destiny.
A less principled storyteller would declare that Butterfly Ward accepted this with grace and rose to meet the threat with joy in her heart. The truth, however, is that behind the shield, under the armour, there was a scared girl who had never been in a fight. A monster was looming over her, and the sword that hung heavy on her hip was stuck fast. The creature drove its claws into the shield, and the tiles cracked under her from the weight of the blows.
Butterfly Ward wept. She begged the cat for aid, and begged the creature for mercy. But there was no aid that could be rendered by a cat, and no mercy to be found in the monster. Its fanged maw pressed over the top of her shield, and she shoved it away with all her strength, greater than she knew. It sailed through the air and crashed into the wall, and Butterfly Ward staggered to her feet.
She ran, and did not stop until she was safe in bed.
As many had before her, Eve tried to flee her fate, and as in all those cases, fate would not be deterred. She tried to throw the necklace away, but it always found its way back to her bedside table. She hid it away to forget about it, but always felt it weighing on her neck. No tool in her father's workshop could score it, no fire in her mother's kitchen would melt it.
And all the while, suffering spread as a blight, as the Realm of Shadow intruded on the material. The cause was invisible to mortal eyes, but the effects were manifest, in nightmares, disease, and ill omens. The city took sick around her as demons stalked the streets, draining the vitality of the world.
On the fifth day, she asked the cat if this was her fault for running. The cat shook his head. It was his fault, for not preparing her. She asked to be prepared; she was scared, but she could not stand by while people were hurting. She dried her tears, donned the armour once more, and strode into battle. She braced her shield between the oncoming evil and the people of the city, and though she still feared, and though she sometimes wept, she met each challenge as they came, and with each triumph she stood taller.
Despite the tireless efforts and ceaseless reminders of her feline advisor, she showed the necklace to her most dear companion; to her credit, she withheld its purpose, boasting only of its luster. Isn't it pretty, Kimmy? she asked. That girl stole into her parent's bedroom the next night, and retrieved the necklace's twin from her mother's jewellery box, dotted with rubies. That night, Butterfly Sage joined the fight, entangling evil in the strands of fate, weaving the heartstrings of friend and foe.
New allies joined them. The brilliant Butterfly Spark, mistress of the elements, and the brave Butterfly Heart, of unmatched strength, were recognized in their humble guises and gifted their necklaces. Her Majesty's bodyguard herself, already hardened from years of battle, emerged from the shadows as Butterfly Shine, pledging herself to Butterfly Ward and the cause of justice. Together, they were invincible.
The Shadow Realm sent forth more terrible beasts, but none were as terrible as their Princes. Mortal men pledged to the Dark Queen in exchange for dark power, they slipped easily into positions of power and directed demonic forces to tear apart the city in search of the Butterfly Knights. But the material world had a champion of its own, the mysterious Prince Rose, who crossed sabres with his fell counterparts in aid of the Knights.
As was fated, it was love at first sight for Rose and Ward, their souls finding connection across eternity. When he left her to seek deeper truths in the Lower Realms, she was moved to such despair that she took on the mantle of Shadow Butterfly, and came very close to tearing the world asunder with her grief. It was only the tender and radiantly platonic love of her very close companion Sage that averted disaster, as she was pulled from the brink by friendship's kiss.
For two years, the Butterfly Knights fought back the darkness, and stranger things besides. The future, the past, and the endless void sent forth malefactors and disaster, and they met each in turn with growing power and confidence. Ward's empathy grew into a sixth sense, Sage wove her strings into a bow, Heart bent the crash of thunder to her will, Shine wove illusions so convincing they took on a life of their own, and Spark learned her mastery of the elements extended to the many discovered since the legends were written.
Things got a little out of control after that last one. Perhaps there is a reason that nature does not normally allow fifteen year olds to transmute matter into antimatter at will. There was a period of about a month where villains couldn't even get through their speeches before the air in their lungs was alchemically transformed into substances with names like 'fluoroantimonic acid'. Not to besmirch the wisdom and bravery of Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights, but it was frankly a little unsporting.
It would appear their foes agreed, for the final seasons of their battles were more desperate and cruel than any before. Their enemies discarded any honour they had remaining, holding hostage the people of the land, striking from the shadows, even targeting the family of the Knights. Not even the intervention of the wayward Knights Errant, Butterfly Echo and Butterfly Veil, could spare the city and its defenders, and ground was lost.
As the forces of the enemy grew ever-stronger, the Butterfly Knights undertook a dangerous journey to the future. I need not tell Her Majesty what transpired, except to say that the insight and power She granted in that brief visit stunned and humbled all present, filling them with great resolve for the hardship to come. All, save for their wise advisor of course, were shocked by the revelation that Butterfly Ward was herself destined to become the Butterfly Queen; he knew from the moment he saw her owing to the immaculate radiance already evident in her bearing even then.
Then, on a clear summer day, the Dark Queen put her final plan in motion. She came to the material realm in person, having remade herself with a blade of purest nightmares driven through her heart. She emerged through the great golden gates of the city as the Anathema of Life, a colossal beast whose gaze could still hearts and bring ruin, and her armies poured through the weeping wound in reality. Her Majesty's Butterfly Knights made a brave stand at the gates, and gave a good account. They felled the foul invaders in their hundreds, preserved life as they could and took it as was required, but step by step they were forced back as the very fabric of the world began to unravel.
The Knights Errant perished in a rearguard action, holding their ground while others fled. Butterfly Spark was struck down by the last of the Dark Princes, crashing through the great pyramid in the city's center; Prince Rose bested the man soon after, but was himself struck a lethal blow. Butterfly Sage pushed aside Heart as the Anathema turned its gaze upon her; Heart was gravely wounded, her leg becoming ash in an eyeblink, but such was Sage's indomitable will that she survived seconds longer, blowing away in the wind as Shine held her. As the Dark Queen descended from her throne in the heart of the void, Shine, gravely wounded, gave her final defiant effort, six sharp reports of a mortal weapon, for all others had been expended.
It was then that Butterfly Ward placed her shield in the path of the Anathema's gaze, and it was then, only then, that she drew her sword. With one blow, the Razor of Time severed the stolen Strands of Fate that bound the Anathema to the Dark Queen, with the next, she removed a grasping claw that had sought to grip the world, and with the third, she shattered the void itself, and the Apotheosis faded into nothing.
As the Dark Queen fell to her knees, defeated, Butterfly Ward commanded her to yield. The Dark Queen spurned her mercy and told her to strike true, doubting she could truly be extended a second chance. Ward declared that she could, as any would, if she would take it.
The Dark Queen was silent for some time. Then she said that there could be no second chances, not for one like her, and with a heavy heart, Butterfly Ward brought the sword down, parting the veil between worlds. The Dark Queen was banished back into the shattered lands of the Realm of Shadows, and the world was free.
Then, taking up the broken Strands of Fate, Butterfly Ward rewove them as Sage had taught her, remaking the world to be as it was. She restored to life all who had perished, and mended what she could with the frayed cord. Her Prince Rose joined her in the task, and then her Sage, and many hands made quick work. Not all the damage could be undone, not all wounds could be healed, but much that would have been lost was saved.
As night fell, Butterfly Ward faded away, and there was Eve. She was tired, and scared, but she dried her tears. Her Prince and her Sage were with her. She embraced them, and begged them both to stay with her, that her heart could not bear the cruel choice between them. Both tried to leave for the sake of the other; both chose to stay for Eve.
As they watched the stars come out over the darkened streets of the broken city, as the long summer faded into autumn, Eve was, at last, at peace.
And they lived happily ever after.
Chapter One - Happily Ever After
After one or two tries getting your blunt fingernails under the edge of the glued flap, and succeeding only in tearing a small portion, you managed to get the envelope open and pull out the folded sheet inside. The Bank of America logo was perched next to the words Important Notice, which never accompanied anything good. Would it kill the bank to send you the occasional "Good job at the money!" letter?"You're pre-approved to feel good about your financial choices!"
You unfolded the page and skimmed over the form letter. Dear Ms. Nakamura, blah blah, minimum payments, you are responsible for, we will pursue collection efforts… you skipped ahead to the bit that mattered at the bottom, hoping very much for a number of digits you could handle.
Ah. Three. Three digits. That was two more digits than you were really hoping for.
It wasn't a disaster, you did have savings, though in reality that was just money you were not shovelling into your student loans so you could feel a little better when you checked the balance of your accounts. It was just another thing you didn't need after a long day of classes and before a long day of job-hunting. Fully aware that if you put the letter back in the envelope, it would disappear from your brain and you'd carry on obliviously until another letter with a bigger number arrived, you clutched the paper, stepped up to the door, and promptly failed to find your keys.
Placing the letter in your teeth, you fished around in your purse, shuffling around the strata of faded receipts, tangled earbuds, dried up Sparkle Beacon pens, and months-old Muni tickets. You did find a key, but it unlocked the Gates of Eternity or… something like that. Maybe the Vault of Dreams? No, that had a combination, you had that written down somewhere…
Dejected, you reached for the doorbell, then stopped. Somewhere in the apartment above, you felt Amara set down the half-filled kettle and pick up her buzzing phone, and you didn't want to interrupt.
"Hello? Yeah, it's Amara. Right, no, I did call earlier, it's about the documentation for the legacy bridge protocols. Yeah, the problem is it doesn't work. No, I know it's one of your listed functions, I'm telling you it's a listed function that doesn't. Okay, talk to your guy. Yeah, I'll be in the office all day. Talk to you then." She hung up the phone with a frown, briefly considered throwing it through the window, then slipped it back into her housecoat pocket.
You let her put the kettle on, then pressed Apartment #2's doorbell lightly to no effect. You gave it another, more forceful jab, and this time the muffled sound of the chime was just audible. The door opened almost instantly, and there was Amara, leaning against the doorframe with one eyebrow raised. Somehow, in her housecoat and with a bit of electrolysis-defying stubble, she still looked unimaginably cool.
"Forget your keys?" she teased. You opened your mouth to protest and the letter fell out of your mouth, fluttering pathetically to the ground between you. "Oh."
"Yeah, we missed a payment or something," you groaned. "And I think I missed my meds today, my brain is goo. The two things may be related. What's a legacy bridge protocol and why are you being called about it?"
"You were evesdropping? It's, uh… well, what it is appears to be a feature that got cancelled without anyone telling their manager. The tea's already on, let's get some caffeine in you if nothing else," she suggested, leaning down to pluck up the paper and sighing. "Fuck. This one's my bad, I think I turned off the automatic payments this month when I switched stuff up for rent."
"Yeah, but you only had to do that because I lost my job…" You sighed and followed her up the narrow, creaky stairs to your apartment, then stopped at your door as Amara padded her housecoat pockets ineffectually.
"Ah. Well, you don't have to feel bad about forgetting your keys, because you're not alone. Could you..?" She made a little motion with her finger, and you dutifully turned around and stepped down a few steps. There was a soft gust of air and a faint floral smell, and then you heard the door unlock from the inside. Amara opened the door, looking sheepish, and gave a dramatic sweep of her hand.
"And you shouldn't feel bad about the job either! You're not personally responsible for the bookstore going out of business," she reminded you. You nodded in reluctant agreement and staggered inside, kicking your shoes off into the undifferentiated pile of footwear on the mat and making a beeline for the ratty couch at the back of the room, stepping carefully around the half-reassembled computer tower Amara continuously assured you she'd finish one of these weeks and successfully avoiding stepping on any poinky little bits this time. You threw your purse and bookbag onto the cushions and collapsed after them, an action which had felt appropriate in the moment but mostly just smushed your glasses into your face.
"I knooooow. It still sucks," you complained, wiggling upright and pulling your phone out of your pocket. You stared a moment at your knockoff phone case, stylized representations of the Butterfly Knights posing together on a background of stars, then turned it over and tapped in your code as the kettle began to whistle. You stared at the menu uselessly through the fresh smudges on your glasses, disappointed by a lack of texts (discounting the one from Nancy Pelosi asking for your money for the midterms). You tapped to send a text, failed to think of something that wouldn't be annoying, and tapped over to your emails to confirm the utter lack of job offers.
You considered getting up to run your glasses under the tap, rationalized that your brain would make them invisible in a few minutes anyway, and began scrolling Instagram pointlessly, which handily consumed the time until Amara set a mug of tea on the coffee table and settled in next to you, a telltale smile on her lips.
"They're making a movie about us," she informed you, clearly waiting for you to have taken a sip, but you were wise to her games and only spilled a little.
"Actually this time? Who is this they, and do you think they can send me a royalty check?" you asked, already knowing the answer. You couldn't exactly go around compromising your secret identity for stuff like that; if there was some rogue Dark Prince or something still hanging around, you had absolutely no illusions that they wouldn't immediately mail you magic anthrax or a very literal glitter bomb.
"No idea. Joss Whedon's involved in some capacity and they've announced a cast," she said. You tapped in a search, already bracing yourself.
"Cool. What's the odds I'm being played by some white lady who- Jennifer Lawrence??!" you exclaimed, nearly dropping your phone.
"Yep."
"I was kidding! Like I know how the transformation works but… it doesn't make you blind, right? How?" You scrolled further and were relieved to see that at least they got Jamie Chung for Butterfly Sage, thus marginally reducing the odds of Kimiyo turning the Warner Brothers lot into a mass casualty event. "Wait, how are they going to do an origin story when they don't know our origins?"
"I guess they're going to make it up. At least it's something to talk about on the team call tonight, right?" Amara commented, sipping her tea and scrolling on her phone. "Aww, it looks like they're going with the alien invasion theory for the storyline."
"It's Wednesday?" you said stupidly. No, it was obviously Wednesday, morning classes, that's why the call was today. You stared across the apartment at your meds, the little white bottle of ritalin resting exactly where you forgot them this morning. Too late to take them now, you had class early tomorrow morning.
"It is. Also, how can you see anything? Gimme," Amara demanded, and you forked your glasses over and blinked as the world suddenly became a lot more blurry.
"My hero," you joked, though you very much meant it. The Amara-shaped blur moved to her computer desk as you held your phone right up against your face, continuing to hold it there until you realized that it was, in fact, the photo that was artfully out of focus. You scrolled on a little and found yourself somewhere in April, which you could tell because your feed was wall-to-wall pictures Kimiyo had taken of the cherry blossoms.
Amara returned with your glasses, and the world snapped into 1080p all at once, which was nearly as disorienting as removing your glasses had been.
"My God, it's full of clutter. How do we live like this?" you remarked, staring around at the now very visible layer of dust that had settled on much of the room. Kimiyo's little art table in particular looked like it had just been discovered in a crypt.
"It's not that bad," Amara said, looking around. "...It is that bad. We should probably pick up sometime this week."
You groaned and stretched, fetching your laptop and succeeding in opening several ongoing assignments without actually making any progress on any of them. You were so very close to being done, being free after five years with two whole degrees to show for it, but the run-up to the finish line was a slog. There were days, mostly unmedicated ones like today, when you questioned why you were doing this; surely the whole point of being Queen was that you didn't have to be qualified. They weren't going to take the crown away because your GPA fell under 3.5 or you couldn't remember how instrumental variable regression worked; if somebody tried that you could wave your hand and go "We tire of this, take him away."
Then again, you still had no idea how or when you'd actually become Butterfly Queen of the Eternal Realm, and you needed to pay rent until then. It was increasingly looking like you were at least going to have to manage the minimum payments until whatever vague future event made you into The Universally Beloved Monarch of Everything Forever; at that point your student loan plan hinged on forgiving all debts upon ascension, followed by a few centuries in some kind of crystal oubliette for the Sallie Mae board of directors.
That last part was a joke, just one you made a little louder every time you got an installment reminder. At this point you were fairly certain the Dark Queen got where she was because the antique IRS was on her about her tithe returns. Maybe her indulgence premiums kept going up for showing ankle at the cathedral. Dear Ms. Your Vile Magnificence, our collection agents have been trying to reach you about overdue chariot payments and we're coming to repossess your horse…
"Are you okay?" Amara asked.
"No…" you admitted, shutting your laptop and flopping back against the couch, trying to sink as deep into the cushions as you could. "I can't focus. I hate forgetting my meds, it's like trying to think uphill. Sometimes I wish I still had that prissy little magic cat telling me what to do."
"You hated that," Amara reminded you.
"Yeah, but I hate this too! I should probably be applying for job stuff but I sort of want to just wait until I graduate so I don't have to open my cover letter with all the times I can't work."
"We have savings, that's not unreasonable," Amara pointed out. "I'm not going to say I can single-handedly pay for everything indefinitely, but at the very least we'll survive until Kimiyo gets back and we're splitting the rent three ways again."
"You're right, but that feels like a lazy excuse," you retorted. You could tell it was a line of thinking you couldn't indulge, simply because it felt so very alluring. Once you started giving yourself excuses like that again, you wouldn't stop.
"First off, you have exams in, what, two weeks? That's as good a reason to stay unemployed a while as I can think of. And secondly… you saved the world once or twice, I think you're entitled to a few lazy excuses."
"I'll sign that on the next rent check," you groaned, then stopped. "Which you handle. And it's online. Okay, you win." You picked yourself up off the couch and made your way to the kitchen, wetting a cloth. If you couldn't focus on your schoolwork and you didn't have it in you to job-hunt, at the very least you could do something about the dust.
You started with Kimiyo's art desk, each swipe of the cloth revealing a much brighter and more saturated surface than you'd remembered and leaving a tangled, dark mess of dust bunnies on the cloth. You tried rinsing it out to little effect, then just dumped it into the sink to soak and grabbed another. The next victim of your cleanliness rampage was the rickety little second-hand table beside the door, where you discovered your forgotten keys, lying in plain sight, the butterfly charm mocking you. You pocketed the keys and began scrubbing, moving aside the pile of forgotten winter gloves, pamphlets, and a dusty rag you surmised had been left there after your previous abortive dusting spree.
You remembered what was lurking behind it all at the same time you uncovered it. A photo, the only photograph you had of everyone, together, in their everyday clothes, taken by a kind bystander in Golden Gate Park with Kimiyo's camera as you all waited for the celestial alignment that would allow you to travel into the future. You were sitting in the middle, blinking behind your glasses, clearly still exhausted from having to get up early. You were wearing that cute green top that unfortunately didn't fit anymore and those ridiculously bulky boots that were fortunately mouldering in the closet at your parent's place.
There was Kimiyo beside you, a black blouse and skinny jeans and boots with way too many buckles, black lipstick and hair that looked like a mess but you knew took her forever to get right. You were holding hands, it was just visible between you in the picture. She'd only gotten prettier.
Beside you both was Andy, perched proudly on the bench. Anyone looking at the picture would probably just think that an outdoor Birman cat had wandered into the shot, but to you the very distinct sapience and accompanying smug aura was visible even in still life. He was posing for the camera and hamming it up, cute little guy.
Brigid was staring directly at the camera with the kind of focus that would be intimidating if you didn't know she was just a little confused on the concept of group photos; her red hair was still long back then, puffed up in wild curls that framed her head all wrong. A book was folded on her lap, the cover not visible in the photo, though you imagined it was something about super-advanced quantum biology or whatever other field she'd decided to master that week.
Riley was unmistakable, and not just because she towered over all of you. A streak of green in her blonde hair, denim vest festooned with pins and patches that turned it into a riot of colour in the little photo. Her girlfriend at the time, Vanessa or something? Was in the shot, having absolutely no idea that she was in the presence of the world's best (and only) team of magical superheroes.
And beside her, fingers extended over Brigid's head, was Esmé. You looked on quickly.
Tracy and Lyra were lurking at the corner of the shot, ever so slightly in shadow, somehow blending in with the background despite Tracy's white suit jacket and Lyra's bright red dress. They'd looked so cool at the time; now they looked like exactly what they were, seventeen year olds who'd stolen several million dollars and were attempting to wear all of it.
And at the very back of the group, looking away from the camera, was Amara. She was distant at the time because of tensions in the group, but it felt appropriate. This was a version of her that should appear in photographs only reluctantly. She still had that grey sports jacket, but whereas now it made her look dashing, in this photo it made her depressingly square, like it was the walls of a prison cell. It didn't help that this was right after she'd cut her hair really short. She still looked good, she looked amazing, but she didn't look happy.
You set the photo down as your phone buzzed in your pocket, your fifteen minute reminder reminding you that in fifteen minutes you'd get a reminder to start the Skype call. You made a few more ineffectual swipes at the dust, set the cloth down on the table, and headed back into the living room. You considered grabbing your laptop and heading to the comfort of bed, but once you were cozy in bed, you might not want to get back up. You went to drink your tea, but it had gone cold.
You spent that time staring at the clock in the corner of your screen as it ticked over, the group chat open. Spark and Sage were already online. You waited patiently, tapping your foot against the leg of the coffee table, then at four o'clock exactly you hit the Call button. Boop-boop, boop-boop, boop-bo-
Brigid was the first to pick up, though she resolved as three blurry, dark stills before her voice came through and the image stabilized. It was midnight in England, though that alone didn't explain the low light levels; it looked like she was lit almost exclusively by the computer screen. She was ghostly pale, dark circles under her eyes, clearly run ragged, but you'd begun to suspect that wasn't all. In the still frames of her jittery connection, her usually intense stare was often unfocused, like she wasn't quite present.
Before you could say hi and maybe bring her back to this realm, Kimiyo picked up. You waited for her image to appear, but after a few seconds of black she hung up and called again. This time you saw her, framed against the window of her apartment. She looked composed and elegant, even through the blurry pixels, but as usual she seemed overdressed for the occasion, like this was a business call.
"Hey you two," you said, injecting as much cheer into your voice as you could. Brigid muttered something the microphone didn't quite pick up, and Kimiyo just nodded politely. "Just waiting on Riley now."
You glanced back down at the group chat and the four offline usernames, taking a deep breath to steady yourself. Then Heart's icon turned green, and Riley joined the call. Her image was crystal-clear and steady, showing her tired smile and the waves of her blonde hair as she awkwardly sat down. The screen shook as her prosthetic leg bumped into the table.
"Hey everyone, sorry I'm late, Finn was crying because I turned on the TV after he handed me the remote, which apparently was the wrong thing to do? Who knows. Also, sorry to start with this, but did you see they're making a movie of us?" she asked. She was smiling, but the exhaustion you'd expect from a mother of two young children was coupled with a nervous energy you hopefully wouldn't. She kept glancing up over the top of the laptop, and you weren't sure if it was because she was keeping an eye on the kids or the door.
"Actually this time?" Kimiyo asked, sounding skeptical.
"So it seems," you confirmed. There was muffled clacking as everyone searched at once, and a few seconds later you just made out Kimiyo mutter something that would probably be admissible as evidence of intent in court. "Yeeeeeeah I know. On the bright side, they cast Spark like, weirdly good, she looks just like Brigid. Wait, shit, let's step back a second. How's everyone doing?"
"Super!" Riley replied automatically.
"Fine," Brigid responded, her voice small. "Just tired. You know, really busy."
"I'm doing well. Less busy than you Brigid, but it's nice," Kimiyo said, her words sounding carefully measured.
"I'm glad," you said, and tried to mean it.
"Will Amara be joining us?" Kimiyo asked, and you glanced over the top of the screen. Amara was at her computer, typing furiously at something, her tea forgotten.
"She's working. Unlike me; I'm still unemployed, so that's less than great, and exams are looming, but I think I've got this. I know it's not as big a deal as Brigid's PHD, but I'm really excited to finally be done accruing student debt and start accruing interest. How is the dissertation going, anyway?"
Brigid kept staring off into nothing for a few seconds, and as usual you weren't sure if it was the connection or her. But it seemed to land, as she blinked and nodded.
"G-good, I'm almost done. I'm just waiting for lab time for, um, to run a few numbers and then I think I'm ready to go," she said, pushing her curls out of her eyes. As the video held on a frame, you couldn't help but notice how pale she was, more than usual, and the dark marks on the back of her hand.
"Still? How long's the waiting list, it feels like it's been weeks," Riley commented. Brigid looked away from the camera, lips pursed, then shrugged.
"Processing time is in high demand, you know, I-I'm lucky I get any time at all. And I have so much to do for Professor Bennett, you know. Busy." You felt distinctly like this conversation had happened before, beat by beat, but you didn't want to press. That wasn't what these calls were for, and she seemed so delicate.
"I mean, I'm still not sure what computational neuroscience even is, other than complicated, so I'm not surprised it's taking this long," you said lightly, gently nudging the topic along. "What about you, Kimiyo? I kinda hope none of your courses are too interesting."
You weren't exactly sure why Kimiyo had decided to sign up for another round of literature classes when she'd only get two months into them, but she'd apparently gotten some inheritance over there that meant she could just throw millions of yen around on stuff like that (which was less impressive than it sounded, but was still thousands of dollars).
"Nothing particularly thrilling, no, but I'm enjoying it," she said. You groaned inwardly; why did she treat every call like she was trying to avoid incriminating herself?
"Anything in particular?" you pressed lightly, and she shrugged.
"I've been enjoying the study of linked verse poetry we're doing right now. I'd read one of my favourites, but, well, it wouldn't exactly mean much to any of you," she said dismissively.
"I mean, it'd still be cool, I might recognize a word or two?" you offered, but she just smiled. She does have the right to remain silent, you supposed. "Fair enough. Anything cool in your life, Riley?"
"Yes! We have a vacation this week!" Riley announced, sounding genuinely excited for once. You breathed a sigh of relief; at least it wasn't the All Evasion Hour. It was something to work with. "Grant got a week off work, we're all heading down to that lakeside cottage I told you about, remember the pictures?"
"That did look lovely," Kimiyo agreed. "It reminds me of that campsite we rented in senior year." As best you could recall, it wasn't much like that camp at all; this was just Kimiyo bringing up an outing that had very conspicuously included her then-girlfriend.
"Any cool plans there, neat stuff?" you inquired, trying to smooth it over before Riley had a chance to use the words 'gay phase'. Riley opened her mouth to speak, paused, then shrugged.
"I mean, there's a lake? I'm not sure, I'm sure it'll be fun," she concluded. Nevermind then. She glanced off-screen at something, then looked back quickly. "Shit. Gotta go, nice chatting!"
Her image blinked out and she went offline within seconds, and the call was left in an awkward silence.
"... it sort of sounds like her vacation is going to be more of the same, just at a lakeside cottage," Brigid observed quietly.
"I somehow doubt Grant is going to be more hands-on due to the proximity of water, yes," Kimiyo agreed darkly.
"I mean, hey, it's something," you said wearily. "I know it's… hard sometimes, having her on the call, but I don't want to lose her too." You glanced at one of the offline accounts involuntarily. Kimiyo nodded.
"I just wish she'd wake the hell up."
"Yeah…" Brigid agreed, then yawned, the sound distorted into static by the connection. "I'm really tired, is it okay if I hang up early too? I have class tomorrow…"
"I thought Thursdays was tutoring?" Kimiyo asked. Brigid shrugged.
"Yeah. That's what I meant, um…" She trailed off, shifting in the picture as she moved her hands up to the trackpad.
"Hey, let's end the call properly at least," you reminded her, and she nodded.
"Of course. Three…"
"Two…" Kimiyo supplied, slightly delay.
"One…" Normally somebody else would do it, but it had to be you.
"Team Butterfly Forever!"
They both hung up, and you just stared at their icons for a few long moments before sighing. Amara was there instantly, nudging you over and sitting.
"Rough?" she asked, and you shrugged and crumpled against her a little. Not for the first time after a team call, you felt like you were going to cry, and you clamped down on it with everything you had. Crying wasn't going to solve anything, it never did.
"I just… I dunno. I just hope stuff gets better," you said uselessly. There was a boop from your laptop; Kimiyo had sent you a message. "I miss them a lot. Especially Kimiyo."
"Yeah. I miss her too. That her?" Amara asked.
"I think she wants to do, you know… a one on one call," you said, feeling your face heat up. Amara grinned.
"Well, you need some cheering up, so go have fun. I'll put on tea, should I wait until after you're done to bring it to you?" she asked as you scooped your laptop up and headed for the bedroom.
"Babe, just bring it in. Hell, say hi for a change! I can't imagine she'll mind," you instructed, folding the laptop under your arm. Honestly, Amara was too considerate for her own good; the three of you had shared a bed for three years, this was hardly the most scandalous thing that had occurred between them.
Your apartment wasn't exactly large, but it felt especially cozy in the bedroom; you suspected that whatever builders had erected it at some nebulous point in the past had figured there'd be a twin bed in the corner, presumably next to the clothes line, spinning wheel, and gaggle of soot-stained orphans that would have come with the building at the time. By some magic you still weren't entirely versed in, the three of you had managed to fold a king-size mattress like a taco and fit it through the narrow door. You weren't sure that was a feat that could be replicated, so if you ever moved, the landlord would need to knock a wall down.
You threw yourself onto the bed, bounced slightly more than expected, just managed to avoid tumbling off the side, and somehow never let go of the laptop at any point in the proceedings. You cleared a place among the pillows and opened the laptop back up, clicking into the private chat with Kimiyo and typing a quick 'here' in the chat.
Boop-bo-
You answered the call as fast as you could, and there was Kimiyo. She hadn't moved an inch, but she looked completely different, resting her head on her hand, her smile sharp and genuine. Just the change in poise had turned her uncomfortable-looking secretary getup into the garb of a delightfully intimidating business lady.
"Hey sweetie," she said, her voice like honey even through the fuzzy connection.
"Hey! Um… so, with your Green Card cutoff coming up, this is probably going to be the last of these, huh?" you asked, not able to conceal how excited you were about that. She glanced aside, just for a moment, then nodded.
"Probably, yes. Next time it'll be in person, and you've made me so many promises since I left, haven't you?" she pointed out, drawing out those last words. Yeah you had, and she had made a fair few promises of her own that you were very looking forward to seeing fulfilled.
"God, yeah. I've really missed you," you confessed, sighing as the feelings welled up in your chest. "I've been a mess, Kimmy. It's…" Fuck, this was supposed to be Sexy Call, but feelings were intruding and you didn't know how to stop them. "Brigid's getting worse, you can see it, and Riley…"
She held up a finger, and you stopped, hands perched on the trackpad.
"I know. I don't know what to do either, but you've been trying. I…" She took a deep breath, breaking eye contact. "It won't do to dwell, you're doing as much as you can. It can't be helped."
You didn't know how to tell her that this, this distance, emotional as much as physical, was one of the things that was hurting too.
"My whole thing is helping anyway," you pointed out, and that brought a smile to her face.
"I know. It's infuriatingly endearing of you, but somebody needs to give you a break, as you can't seem to take one on your own," she said, then, with a slow and deliberate motion, she pointed her finger on the screen, and made a little figure eight motion. You felt soft cord brush against your wrists, then snap tight around your wrists, the gesture responsible playing out on screen a moment later as Kimiyo snapped her hand into a fist.
"... okay," you agreed readily, which brought a huge, goofy grin to Kimiyo's face.
"Oh my God you are hopeless. I love you so much," she said, shaking her head in mock disappointment. "How is that all…" She hooked her finger in a 'come hither' motion. "... it…" She pulled it back, and you felt a gentle tug on the cord, just enough to tighten the ropes a bit. "... takes?"
"I… I… Honestly, I think fighting all those monsters with, like, vines and wires and stuff did something to my brain," you confessed yet again, blushing furiously. Getting tied up with your own metaphorical heartstrings made it very hard not to blurt out whatever dumb shit came into your head.
"You know, that happened to all of us a bunch, but this is just you," she pointed out, gesturing upward and pulling the cord with it until your arms were behind your head.
"I-I mean, do we know that for sure? I bet Tracy's a huge rope bunny," you joked, breathing heavily. She paused.
"You know, I can see that actually," she said, sounding like she was genuinely thinking about it. "Now then, Butterfly Ward, there's nobody here to save you this time. You're all mine."
You let yourself relax as you felt new cords slip under the cuffs of your jeans, sliding slowly up your legs as Kimiyo moved her fingers.
"Oh noooo, somebody save me…" you gasped playfully, shivering in anticipation.
There was a quick knock on the door, the sound of the latch, and footsteps behind you.
"Never fear, Butterfly Ward, I'm here to bring you tea and leave you to your fate. Hi Kimiyo!" Amara said brightly, setting the cup down on the bedside table. "Bye Kimiyo!"
She walked off, and you laughed, shaking your head.
"Helpful as always. Right, where were we?" you asked, glancing up at the screen. Kimiyo looked… off. Her face danced through the shadow of several unreadable emotions, then she sighed.
"Hey, I just saw the time. I need to go, I'll see you soon, okay?" She said. "Love you."
"Love-" you responded, then the call ended. Kimiyo snapped the laptop closed and sat back, staring intensely at it, angry at something. You, Amara, herself? The feelings were too muddled for even you to read.
You came back to yourself as the ropes around your wrists frayed and came apart into nothing, the scraps disappearing as they fell away. You sat up slowly, wiping your eyes, holding in the tears. What the hell was going on?
You stayed in the room for a few long minutes, not wanting to give Amara the impression she'd ruined anything. You spent that time wistfully scrolling your old messages to her to see if you could piece together anything. There wasn't much to go on, but that was her alright; she'd opened up a lot over the last few years, with you at least, but the longer she was gone the more closed off she seemed. Hell, you used to know where she was exactly at all times, you evesdropped on her conversations without meaning to, and now it was just that, little unreadable flashes.
You closed the laptop up and headed back into the living room, curling up next to Amara on the couch. You tried to bury yourself against her chest and just forget about everything, but everything was too much to keep out of your head.
"Hey, dummy," she said affectionately. "It's gonna be okay. Just like a week or two and she's back, right?" You nodded against her chest.
"Yeah. She's gotta come back." If she didn't, she couldn't; she'd lose her residency if she stayed more than a year, and it had been forty-nine very long weeks since she'd left for her grandfather's funeral. She was only supposed to be there for three weeks or so, which had at the time felt like it was going to be an eternity, but three weeks became a month, became three months, and now it didn't even sound like she was talking to any of her family anymore but she was still there.
You understood she was grieving; you'd only met her granddad one time, when you were thirteen and had joined her for her annual summer trip, but he was warm and funny even if Kimiyo had to translate everything he said. You'd been sad to hear it and you barely knew him; it clearly hit her hard.
But there was a part of you genuinely terrified that the cutoff date would come and go, she'd still be there for reasons she wouldn't tell you, and that would be that.
"We'll meet her at the airport. We'll get flowers," Amara assured you.
"Of course you'd think of that," you teased weakly.
"Hey, I still have my supplier's number. Unless he's gone out of business without me," she said. "Okay, I'm officially declaring today a wash. Your only responsibility for the rest of the evening is to decide what to watch."
You stared at the TV, wracking your brain.
"... did you remember to TiVo that new thing with John Oliver? I wanna see if it's any good. I liked him on the Daily Show," you asked.
Amara began to fiddle with the remote as you leaned back and stared out the window, catching a glimpse of dusk over the rooftops, people and cars rolling past the duplex, a cat making its way along the top of the neighbour's fence. The last rays of light painted the multicoloured homes in the district's namesake hues, and you did your best to just breathe.
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September 10th, 2004 + 🦋 Chapter 2 - The Cat Returns (Part 1)
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Content Warning: Implied danger of sexual assault.
September 10th, 2004
Butterfly Ward stepped gingerly across her suburban street, shadows dancing against the pavement as the night insects scattered away from her approach. She wasn't supposed to be out this late, and it wasn't just demons she was scared of.She knew she wasn't alone; the cat was watching her, somewhere, blending into the background. He'd volunteered to stick close to her side, but she'd asked if he could defend himself any better than a normal cat could, and as he couldn't, she insisted he hang back.
It was difficult not to be self-conscious in the outfit. She looked ridiculous, she knew it, the exact middle ground between cartoon princess and fantasy knight, but the part that was worse was the part where she resented her own resentment. The dress was cute as hell! The glasses made her look smart and stylish, the amber gems complemented its dark blue and white elegantly, yet it felt and looked strangely practical.
The armour plates were polished like a mirror; if she held up her gauntleted hand to the light, she could just see herself reflected on the cuff, around the gem. The cat had said that the costume didn't have a mask because it didn't need one; the magic would disguise her so thoroughly her own mother wouldn't recognize her. She didn't expect that same magic to also work on her. The girl in the reflection was not Eve. She shared every single feature, expression, and habit, and yet they were completely different. Butterfly Ward saw Butterfly Ward in the reflection; Eve barely crossed her mind.
A car rolled passed, slowly, and somebody yelled something from the window; the words were indistinct but the cruelty behind them was not. She made an angry gesture with her gauntleted fist back.
She wasn't out to fight a particular evil today; she was starting small. Walk around the block, Butterfly Ward, grow comfortable with your new form, look for what might be wrong. Practice seeing what was out of place. Unfortunately the evil in question was going to be some kind of horrid demons, not just jerks in crappy cars.
She reached Wawona Street, cutting down the street and staring at the strange, gated building recessed among the trees there. It certainly looked spooky; its positioning down the hill managed to make it look like it was lurking, all dark grey wood and boarded-up windows, the flat roof covered in leaves and detritus from the surrounding trees just visible through the lights opposite.
But… it was just some kind of city utility building or something. It had been here forever, certainly since before her family moved here. She forced herself to move on, crossing 19th Avenue into the grove and onward down the unlit path.
The dark didn't look as dark to her as it should; the shadows softer, painted in blues and purples instead of unforgiving black. She hadn't really noticed it on the road, it only really occurred to her as she trod along the path toward the small playground inside. There were people there, a trio of boys, and she recognized one of them even in the dark and from such a distance; he was an older student, she'd caught glimpses of him once or twice in the halls of Lowell over the last two weeks. The other two she didn't; maybe she hadn't seen them, or maybe they went to ALHS instead.
They were drinking.
She paused, considering what to do. Perhaps it would be best to duck off the path or turn around, it's what she'd have done if she'd been stupid enough to come out here in any other circumstance… but she wasn't Eve, scared and fragile and human. She was Butterfly Ward, she was a knight, a superhero. How could she save the world if her night patrol got stopped by some seventeen year old boys?
Squaring her shoulders, she walked on down the path, doing her best to ignore them. She just had to walk on past them, just to the trees on the other side of the park, and she'd turn back out onto the road and nearly be there. She just had to ignore them whispering, them laughing.
"Halloweens not for a month, retard!" one of the boys called.
"Shut up, Jake, Jesus," another retorted. "You'll scare her off."
"Hey, come hang out! We got beer!" another called. What would a superhero do in this situation? Say something like, not now citizen, the city of San Francisco needs me!, right?
She couldn't quite manage that, so she sped up a bit instead, power-walking down the path. She had a mission, that was fine. She was ignoring distractions.
She wasn't looking, but she could hear one of them moving toward her. Hear the sound of his sneakers flicking through the dry grass, his breathing, the fabric of his clothes with each motion.
"Hey, come on. I don't think I've seen you around, you go to ALH?" he said. In her peripheral vision, she saw him reach out toward her wrist.
She snapped her hand away faster and more forcefully than she had intended, and the boy stumbled off balance, cutting in front of her. He was tall, much taller, feathered dirty blond hair, in a bright red Blink-182 t-shirt and torn jeans. He stumbled up in front of her and smiled, trying to play off his near-faceplant and look cool. It was the one from her school.
"You're a freshman, right? At Lowell?" he asked; there wasn't malice in his eyes, but there also wasn't any understanding of how vulnerable Butterfly Ward was feeling, why he might be coming off as intimidating. His friends were moving and something in her brain was screaming that they were coming to cut off her escape. "What is that, some kinda movie thing? Is that real metal?"
She took a step back and raised her arm defensively, and the small disc on her forearm twisted and unfolded into a shimmering, interlocking brass shield, shaped like a pair of butterfly wings. The boy's shocked face was still visible through a round loophole at the top, but it was strange. Blurry.
She was crying.
"Leave me alone!" she yelled, backing away. Backing into another one, recoiling, stuck in the middle as the voices got closer and the world seemed to collapse in on itself. They should have backed away, or stopped, or anything other than laugh and get closer.
"What the hell are you doing out here?"
"Come on, sit, calm down. Jesus."
"Guys, we're freaking her out."
"Shut up, dude, stop being a fag."
"She's crying though-"
"Jesus Christ, Eric, get her a fucking drink."
"Why are you crying? We're just-"
There was a rustle of fabric, a gust of wind, and the sound of metal whistled through the air. Butterfly Ward lowered her shield to see the boy closest with wide eyes, trembling, with a gleaming line of silver metal at his throat.
"Back away. All of you," the newcomer said. His voice was clear and level, deep and resonant, and it belonged to a man that had appeared among the three in an eyeblink. Illuminated only by the sodium light of the park building, Ward could still make out the long white cloak, the trim lavender coat and white sash, the white masquerade mask in stark contrast to the dark skin underneath and the curls of long, dark hair spilling over the side. His white-gloved hand held an ornate sabre, its layered basket hilt the shape of rose petals, perfectly steady, its razor's edge an inch from skin. "Now."
Two of them rushed to comply, one of them tripping over his feet and falling off the path into the dry, dusty grass, the can in his pocket rupturing and hissing from the fall. The one in the red shirt, the one from her school, though, filled with the idiot bravado of youth and alcohol, laughed, reaching into his pocket and flipping open a slim cell phone.
"Fuck off, dude, who the hell do-"
There was a whistle and a flash. The top half of the boy's phone clattered to the dirt, and the front of his tight-fitting t-shirt parted like paper torn on a perforated line, exposing a window of pale, intact skin under it.
"Now," the newcomer repeated, and the boy fled. The newcomer waited until they were out of sight, eyes scanning the park, and only when they were gone did he reach down a hand to Butterfly Ward. "My apologies, miss."
"... n-not at all. Who are you?" Butterfly Ward asked, blinking away tears as her eyes flicking to the hilt of the sword. The man's face twitched, just a moment, and then he released her hand and stepped well back, hands raised in front of him and well away from his sword.
"Just a stranger," he said. "I'll stay away, but you should know; you don't have to be scared of guys like that. You're stronger than that."
"I didn't want to hurt them either," she stammered, looking down to dust herself off. "I'm Butterfly Ward, who-"
She looked up, and he was gone. There was nothing but the wind, distant footsteps, and a single white rose pedal fluttering to the dirt.
Chapter 2 - The Cat Returns
You didn't remember your dreams; sleep was just an abyss you fell into, and then typically stayed in past any number of alarms you set yourself. You'd found that somewhat disappointing, honestly; shouldn't a magic princess get prophetic dreams, dramatic remote viewing, or visions of a past life? Or even, like, dramatic war movie flashbacks to the fucked up stuff?But no, Riley got the omens, Kimiyo would see things unfold through the connections, Amara saw her past life as the First Prince, and apparently everyone got at least some nightmares, though it was nothing like what Esmé had faced.
You got snippets of your partners' dreams sometimes, on the rare occasions they were asleep and you weren't. The first thing you'd ever seen through your ESP was a snippet of one of Kimiyo's dreams at a sleepover when you were… what, nine, ten? But it didn't happen often; Amara was a night owl and Kimiyo was a morning person, but you weren't really that great at either end of the day. Honestly, you were still working on the middle bit.
On the upside, insomnia was never a problem, which was a very adaptive trait when sharing a bed with people who suffered from it. No warm milk or melatonin or Benadryl for you, the vodka didn't make a difference one way or another; you'd just zone out for a second and bam, express train straight to the pleasant nothingness of Sleepytown USA. Next stop, sometime past noon tomorrow (if only you didn't have class).
This pleasant journey was derailed much too early. Your phone lit up, and you'd slid off your pillow such that it was right in your face. As a result, it flashbanged you with the bright white butterfly on your lock screen and a buzz against your nose. You winced and pawed at it ineffectually, holding it up to try and read it as you blinked. Kimiyo had uploaded something on Instagram, and your phone had seen fit to notify you of this at 2:13am just because you'd told it to.
You tapped the app and took a look; you were already awake, might as well. It was the view out of her apartment window at sunset, the sky was a clear, dark blue backdrop, the lights of the city not yet drowning it out. Painted in shades of orange and pink against it was the skyline, Tokyo tower in the middle. You ran her comment under it through Google translate, which spat out something about watercolours that didn't quite parse, and you were too sleepy to figure it out. Pretty, though.
You rolled over and nestled yourself against Amara's shoulder, craving the warmth and closeness. The glow of the sodium lights outside, diffused through the translucent veil of the curtains over your bed, was just enough to pick out the shape of her face in soft, warm light, tracing her profile against the negative space created by her dark skin and the shadowed wall. You just lay there and stared, lost in it. You'd heard people talk about how love faded with time, but in moments like this there was still a giddy swell in your chest and you felt fourteen and hopeless all over again. You shut your eyes and relaxed happily against her, shifting to maximize how much of your skin touched hers, and just melted into the moment.
There was still someone missing, but soon she'd be back, as more than notifications on your phone.
The moment stretched out, on and on, until it was elsewhere. Amara always had the exact same dream, night after night, like a movie playing on a loop. You'd pieced it together over the years; it was memories, the life of the First Prince brutally cut down and edited, but they weren't quite right, not actually what happened. It was like there were stage actors in her subconscious, reading out the script on barebones sets. You didn't know much about history, but you knew what you were seeing didn't hang together right, the props and costumes dreamlike reconstructions of lost-long originals.
While your ESP would normally show you people's dreams from their perspective, for hers you were just in the audience. This was a throne room, that much was clear. White marble, colourful tapestries, jade and gold, a deep green carpet. The world outside the windows was a flat, empty grey.
Amara was kneeling at the edge of the room, not herself; other than sharing a similar complexion, this Prince looked very little like her. She, and the assembled crowd, were watching the center of the room, where a familiar woman was standing with her hands outstretched over a crucible. The hot metal inside shrieked and boiled, becoming, slowly, a thing, not dead metal but not alive by any measure either. A demon. The first demon, forged from years stolen from the mortal realm, from lives cut short.
The creature finally rose and stood, the metal cooling. It was horrid, somehow industrial and insectoid at once, a body of chrome chitin. It sank to a knee in front of its Queen, the impact resonating against the stone floor. The Prince looked away.
There was a sound above you, a groan of the window on its hinges, and a gust of cool sea air that shook you back to your senses. You pulled one of the assorted blankets strewn across the bed up to your shoulders, grabbing blindly to find one you could move without exposing your feet, and were just settling back in when you heard something rattle against the screen. Weakly, you looked up, rubbing sleep from your eyes to see the dark silhouette of a cat with its front claws caught against the metal mesh, pulling in a panic.
"Awww. Hold still kitty, lemme help. How'd you get up here?" you muttered, sitting up and gently reaching out to try and guide the poor little thing free.
"Not easily, Your Highness, I'll tell you that!" the cat replied. You stopped, squinting against the dark, but backlit all you saw was a vague kitty-shaped blob.
"... Andy?" you asked.
"Yes, Your Highness. How many other talking cats do you know? Now, if I could beg your assistance, I'm… well, I do seem to be stuck fast," the cat complained, tugging again against the screen. Amara shifted in her sleep as you helped guide the claws out of the screen by feel, lifting with your thumb. "Ow, ow, that stings!"
"It'd be easier if you weren't pulling, you silly thing. I would have thought you'd be smarter than this," you chided in a whisper, guiding the final claw free. "There."
"Very good, Your Highness," Andy replied, perching on the windowsill and trying to pose himself back into some semblance of dignity. "Now, if you could please let me in?"
You pinched the little metal release latch at the bottom of the screen and pulled it up; it only went a few inches, but it was sufficient for Andy to smoothly duck under and hop onto your bed lightly, looking around in the dark. You reached to the bedside table for your glasses, realized they'd fallen, and leaned over to pad your hand against the floor in the dark for them.
"There you are… Right. Andy, where the hell have you been? It's been like… I haven't seen you in eight years!" you said, pushing your glasses on, but Andy was too busy scanning the room.
"My word, Your Highness, you live like this?" he said, turning around, the streetlights reflecting in his eyes. Amara shifted upright slightly, glancing over to you.
"Thehellsgoingon?" she muttered, the words all slurring together.
"Ahem, nevermind that. I have a very important report to deliver in my duties as your advisor. If you could get the light?" Andy said, sitting politely on the edge of the bed.
"... sorry babe," you whispered to Amara, then you reached out of bed, leaving the warm confines of the blanket to hit the light.
"Ah! Shit! Why!" Amara cried, at roughly the same time Andy clamped a tiny paw over his eyes.
"My Goddess, Eve, I didn't know you weren't decent! Where's your nightwear?" he asked, looking away. You swept your eyes across the room.
"Uh… well, I can see my pyjama pants over there, and I think that's the top I was wearing?" you guessed, then shook your head. "If it's making you uncomfortable, I'll put a shirt on, but like… you're a cat, why do you care?"
"Even so-!"
You rolled out of bed and selected a shirt at random from those strewn about the bed; it was one of Amara's, but that was fine. Better, honestly. Amara sat up, the sheet falling away, and you heard a tiny kitty gasp.
"Goddess, man, what are those?"
"Uuuh…" Amara glanced down. "So, some stuff has happened."
"I'll say! It might even be connected, perhaps disrupting prophecy… Eve, do you have a lead on this already?" Andy asked. You blinked, shuffling back into bed.
"What?"
"I don't know the specifics, but I assume some kind of curse-" Andy began, and Amara burst into laughter.
"No, there's no curse… okay, formal reintroductions. Amara, this is Androcles the talking cat. Andy-"
"Wait, that's what Andy's short for?" Amara said, holding out a hand. Andy looked away politely and stuck his paw out to shake.
"It's a perfectly suitable name," Andy replied, as Amara wiggled his paw up and down.
"Well, nice to meet you, Androcles. Do I need to explain what being trans is?"
"Ah! No, I'm well versed. Charmed," Andy replied, withdrawing his paw and then licking it fastidiously. "Mlem. I do feel somewhat embarrassed, but in my defense, given what we've all been through, the mundane explanation seemed more outlandish. In any case-!"
You held up a hand.
"No no, hang on. Andy, where the hell have you been? When you said you were taking care of some things, I assumed that meant, like… ducking into the future to hand a report in to future me and coming right back." The cat nodded.
"That is the first thing I did, yes! But after dispatching the letter there were… well, certain other tasks I had to attend to in preparation of your eventual ascension, you understand. Everything was well in hand, so I thought I'd leave you in peace and go take care of business, Your Highness," Andy reported, then looked down. "I do apologize for disturbing your happily ever after like this, I had intended to never bother you again…"
"... what?" you replied, a sinking feeling in your chest. "Andy, we were worried sick about you!"
"Y-your Highness, I..?" Andy stammered, clearly at a loss. "You always seemed so resentful of me, not for nothing of course, I did drive you quite hard. I… once my duty was complete, I thought…"
"Oh God, Andy, no!" you replied, cradling your forehead in your hands. "Christ, no. I was a kid under a lot of stress and I put that on you, but I couldn't have gotten through it without you. I'm sorry, I missed you. Even the little lectures."
Andy straightened up a little, a look of pride on his tiny face.
"W-well. I… I missed you too, Your Highness. And… if it makes you feel better, then…" He raised a little kitty paw to his chest, posing. "My God, Eve, sharing a bed out of wedlock? If the court knew, it would be such a scandal! I've overlooked your indiscretions in the past, but this is unbefitting of a Princess!"
"I think magic soulmates is kinda like being married," Amara offered, and Andy theatrically threw up his nose.
"You would think that," he sniffed. "What's stopped you from putting a ring on Her Highness' finger?"
"Uh, well, for a good few years after the paperwork went through, Proposition 8," Amara said sheepishly. "And, well…"
"We figure we'll get married after I'm crowned so we can have a giant stupid marriage in a castle," you interjected. "Also, what the hell kind of Queen am I that my court would care one way or another?"
"... ah, well, Your Highness, I did not mean to presume… which is to say, I… it's probably fine," Andy stammered, ears flat and wincing in that strange combination of cat and human expressions he did. "Never mind, there's… I am here on Knight business."
"Right, yes," you agreed, gesturing for him to continue. He puffed himself up, coughed theatrically into a paw, then stared into your eyes.
"The Dark Queen has returned, and the world is in peril. We must rally the Butterfly Knights."
"Oh," you said, staring blankly at the cat. Then you flopped back against the pillow. "Couldn't you have lead with that?"
🦋
You told Andy to go wait in the kitchen while the two of you threw on clothes, then gathered around the counter with tea (and a saucer of milk) to discuss the details.
The early warning system Andy had set up with the Knights Errant back in the day, the one that had detected the ritual to create the Anathema of Life, had alerted him; he'd checked the old instrumentation Brigid had built, and discovered a reading growing steadily stronger. He'd spent a precious week double-checking before coming to San Francisco to tell you in person. His assessment was that the ritual had been restarted sometime in the last year, and while unsteady and far slower than before, it was growing in strength.
"How soon?" Amara asked, and the cat looked uncertain.
"I can't say. There have been spikes of magical energy at random, I presume connected to events in the material world and agents we haven't spotted, then long periods of stability or even decline. At the earliest, two weeks is possible, on average perhaps eight months, but-"
"We can't gamble. We have to deal with it as soon as possible," Amara summarized. Andy nodded.
"Precisely. What I am presuming is happening is that we didn't manage to clear all of the focuses the Enemy had established during their last incursion, and for the last eight years they have been building up charge on mundane misery and, perhaps, a handful of leftover agents, human or demon. The Dark Queen managed to gain access somehow, and is channeling it once again."
"Will it be the same thing? Fifty foot tall scary lady made out of nothing?" you inquired.
"I don't think so. The energy source is too small and unstable. But it's sufficient if what she wants is just revenge. She might not be able to end the world with it, but she could end San Francisco, and then potentially use the energy of doing so to carve a path back into the material realm and reforge an army," Andy said grimly. "It would be a crude, dangerous, and unreliable plan, but it might be all she has."
"Do we know it's the Dark Queen herself, and not… I dunno, an underling? Or somebody new?" you asked quietly. Strangely, you hoped it wasn't, that it was something else, somebody else. The alternative was too sad.
"... it has to be her. The Shadow Realm only has one inhabitant now, and the energy originates from there. The only way in or out that remains rests in Butterfly Ward's scabbard," Andy confirmed. "Yes, there's a chance it might be something completely different, we have our share of unsolved mysteries, but this is nothing like the mirror traps or our alien friends."
You stared down at your tea, a cold guilt washing over you. Amara and Andy were still talking, something about the logistics and the Dark Princes, but none of it was registering with you. It was like you were there again, standing over the defeated Queen, clutching the stump of her wrist, the utter despair on her face.
"Eve?" Amara asked finally. "Eve, are you okay?"
"Has… has she hurt anyone yet? Since coming back?" you asked quietly.
"We don't know, Your Highness," Andy said.
If she had, that was on you. You had your chance to prevent it, eight years ago. You had the gleaming edge of the Razor against her throat, her blood was already bright red across the silver. You could have just… pressed. One half-inch forward, and you'd still be in bed now.
But it still didn't feel right. You still felt you did the right thing then, but you knew what you had to do now.
"Okay. Okay, I can do this. It's just her, yeah? I'll go tonight," you said, pushing yourself away from the counter. You reached to your neck and hooked your thumb around the golden chain. "I'll go now, and I'll end this."
She'd cried. She wanted to end the world, she'd wanted nothing but death and destruction, to rule over the ashes, she had brought a weapon to your city that had killed tens of thousands, but she'd cried, and you couldn't do it. You'd destroyed any number of her constructs, and they'd fought to the end, snarling and roaring as their sophisticated disguises came apart to reveal the things inside. You'd killed two of her Princes yourself and watched a dozen others die at the hands of your friends. They'd mocked you, laughed, maybe panicked as their plans came apart and justice came for them at last, and they'd died.
But it had always been a fight. A battle where the only way to protect people was to stop them and the only way you had to stop them was with the edge of your shield or the knuckles of your gauntlets. You'd never had somebody at your mercy. You'd never faced somebody looking up at you and seeing death.
"Y-your Highness, please," Andy protested. "We don't have enough information, and you are too important to risk-"
Why did it have to be you?
Amara could have done it; she said it wasn't easy, but sometimes it was the merciful thing. Kimiyo could have; she'd choked the life from a helpless Prince Thornheart, slowly, and said the only thing she'd felt was satisfaction. Though given he was the creepy one with the magic mind control mirror, you felt she got a pass for that one.
Brigid said she never felt bad about stopping people trying to end the world. Riley probably wouldn't have given the Queen time to yield in the first place. Hell, Esmé once shot a dying collaborator in the throat while the rest of you debated what to do, like it was nothing. "Wait guys, I figured it out!" Bang. "Let's go to Swensen's!"
But none of them had been there. It was you, and you couldn't do it. You didn't know if you could do it now.
"There's no risk. I've beaten her before, I just need to finish the job," you concluded, closing your hand around the golden charm. But then, in a moment, a flash, Amara was there, her hand clamped around yours.
"Hey, dummy. It's not about if you could do it alone; you don't have to," she reminded you. "And besides, you're not exactly at the top of your game right now."
She wasn't wrong; the days when you could jump buildings and lift cars even untransformed were long behind you, fading as the group went their separate ways. Even your ESP was nothing compared to back then, the days when it felt like you could feel the city breathing.
"And you are?" you deflected, and she shrugged.
"Hey, I didn't say that. I kept in okay shape, but toward the end there I was more of a cheerleader than anything, once everyone was throwing around the really scary stuff," she said. "But I've still got my sword, costume still fits, and I can still teleport. There's advantages to not relying on magic."
"Sorry, you can teleport, but you're not reliant on magic?" Andy scoffed.
"Nono, it's just a trick! She taught me how," you said. "It's, uh, you just gotta step kinda…" You shifted your weight slightly and didn't move an inch. "Guys, I can't do it if you're watching."
"It's true, you can't," Amara confirmed. Andy nodded, clearly skeptical.
"I see. Regardless, she's right, you should not, and cannot, do it alone," he declared, stalking to the end of the counter. "The Queen may have been able to build new demons, or have allies we don't know about. The Knights are strongest together and always have been; it's imperative you act as a unit."
You leaned back against the wall, letting the necklace drop from your hand. Obviously, what were you thinking, going off alone? You couldn't do anything alone, if you didn't have your friends to save you you'd be nothing. The moment things got hard, you'd panic, start crying, and then it'd be over.
But this… this was a reason to get everyone back together after years of drifting apart. A crisis that would remind them all who they were, who you were to each other, it would be like old times. It was a chance to make things right. Or at least, as right as you could.
"Okay, yeah. We gotta get… everyone. We'll need the Knights Errant too, but, uh, we don't know where they are. They dropped out of contact about five years ago, just… ghosted us out of nowhere," you explained. Andy nodded.
"That does seem like them. Not to worry, Your Highness! I have a sense for these things, it's how I found you, after all. Give me a few days and I should be able to narrow down the location of our wayward Knights," Andy said brightly.
"Good. Get on it, right away," you instructed, glancing at the clock and doing the time zone math while fishing your phone out. "Brigid's tutoring right now and she'll have her phone off." You tapped your contacts and the phone buzzed twice. Kimiyo finished her brushstroke, cleaned her brush, and picked up.
"Eve? I'm surprised you're awake, what time is it over there?" she asked, a smile on her face.
"Late. Sorry, something big's come up, you're going to need to come home early. Andy turned back up, the Dark Queen's returned. We gotta stop her. How fast can you get a flight back?," you explained in a rush.
Kimiyo stared dead ahead, holding her phone awkwardly, her mouth half-open but unable to find a sound. She looked around the room, at the half-finished watercolour in front of her, her photo now rendered in beautiful pastels, pink and teal and deep blues.
"Kimmy?" you asked, and she pulled the phone away from her ear, stared at your name, and hung up. She dropped the phone from shaking hands, pulling inward, and then you couldn't see her anymore.
You lowered the phone, an awful, heavy feeling on your back. You breathed, slowly, aware you were being stared at. You couldn't cry, people needed you.
"She's not okay, something's wrong," you said, thinking it over. You called again, and she didn't pick up, she wasn't even in the room. You breathed, weighing your savings, the time, remembering the look on her face. "Okay, okay. I'm going to go, right now."
"Go?" Andy asked, as you stalked over to the living room, wincing as you stepped on a screw from the half-built computer.
"To get her," you said, opening your laptop and waiting for it to wake up. "Andy, do you have any more information for us?"
"I've told you all I know, Your Highness," he said solemnly.
"Thank you. Go find Tracy and Lyra, report back the moment you have them," you said, not even looking as you searched flights. You winced at the cost; there wasn't any way you could do this for less than a thousand dollars, so you just sucked it up and booked a direct flight. "Amara, get my bag, I need my credit card and passport."
Amara threw you your purse, then opened the back door. You caught the sight of the little off-white cat gliding toward it over the top of the laptop.
"Andy!" you called, looking over your laptop at the cat. "Hey, uh, come back this time, okay?"
"... Of course, Your Highness. Good luck," the cat said, bowing low with a little paw up, and then he bound off into the night.
"You too," you said quietly, as Amara shut the door and came to sit with you.
"What do I do?" she asked quietly as you punched in your number.
"Pack me a bag, enough stuff for, uh, three nights, bring it all down to the car and make sure it starts. You're going to drop me off at 8, that'll give me time in case something weird happens in security. You call Brigid at 9, uh, 9:15, and you call until she picks up, she'll be out of her afternoon class… I think?" Your memory of her class schedule was shaky, not helped by the fact that what she said it was didn't always make sense.
"Should I call Riley now?" she asked, and you tried to think that through, your finger hovering over the button to order your tickets, the price lock-in timer ticking down.
"No. Fuck, no, she's going to her stupid cabin with her stupid… okay." You took a deep breath. "Actually, this is better. After I get Kimiyo and we get Brigid on a plane, we'll go next week, all of us together. Show up at her house when whatshisfuck's at work and she can't… wiggle." You pressed order and let out a breath. That was the most money you'd spent in a while, and you'd need to get back. "Tickets booked, take off's at 11:40. This is happening."
You let out a sigh and flopped back against the couch, breathing hard.
"We have five hours. I need my pills, I'm going to… uh, fuck, I'm…" you stumbled, grasping for something.
"You're going to slow down. You've got a plan and a long day ahead," Amara said, offering you the pill bottle and a glass of water. You'd barely noticed her move. "Maybe get some rest and wait on the pills until you leave?"
"If I go to sleep, I'll stay asleep," you said bitterly, leaning forward again and wrestling open the bottle. "I'll figure out my route from the airport to Kimiyo's place, and if she's really mad at me, I'll find a hotel with vacancies nearby so I know where to go. Maybe two, so I have a backup."
"That seems reasonable. Are you okay?"
"I don't know. I don't know how Kimmy's going to feel, I'm… I don't know if she'll come with me, I just gotta go. And I don't really expect much from Riley, it's too complicated, but Brigid might-"
"That's not what I asked. How's Eve doing?" Amara repeated. You paused, thinking about your breathing. Breathing okay. Muscles in back tense. Weight on chest from suppressed panic. All distantly familiar.
"I'm okay," you said, then stopped. "Well, low-key freaking out, actually. I… I dunno how we're supposed to do this without Esmé. She'd have known what to do, she always knew what to do," you mumbled, staring at the screen. She'd have nodded and smiled and launched into a plan, and it might not even be the best plan but she'd go for it and you'd all go with her.
"You seem to know what you're doing now?" Amara offered. It felt weak.
"I dunno. Okay. Okay, I'll find those hotels, write an email to my professors, and then… and then I'm going to play Animal Crossing a bit and that's okay because I've done everything I can?" you asked anxiously, looking at her face to see if you got the right answer. Fingerguns said yes!
Amara headed to your room as you located a couple places that wouldn't cost what little savings you had remaining, then you shut your laptop with finality and reached across the coffee table for the WiiU controller. You passed over your phone doing so, and you stopped, grabbing it. You shouldn't call her again, but you could text her. What could you say? You were scared that maybe she thought this was a trick, you lying to get her to come home.
You picked it up, trying to figure out what to write, what to explain, how much to say. Trying not to feel hurt, even though it hurt so much. Crying never helped.
"heads up"
"omw"
"♥️"
"omw"
"♥️"
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🦋 Chapter 2 - The Cat Returns (Part 2)
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Content Warning: Discussion of underage drinking, hallucinations, death and suicide
You hadn't been on an airplane since… 2003? Really? That didn't sound right, but no, it was just road trips. Everyone could chip in for gas money and you'd take Riley's crappy used van and it was off to LA or Disneyland or Butte Lake (heh) and you'd all laugh and sing along with the radio and you'd fall asleep on Kimiyo's shoulder in the back seat as the road went on and on…
It just seemed wrong because you'd gone to airports a lot. Kimiyo went overseas once a year like clockwork, leaving just after your birthday and arriving back the second-to-last Saturday in July and you'd meet her at the airport every time. And you'd seen off Brigid when she left, and Amara flew for work a few times a year, so you'd been to SFO plenty of times, just not through security.
It wasn't as bad as you feared; the line seemed long, but went quickly. You didn't much care for the new scanning machines, and you definitely didn't care for the fact you had to take the butterfly necklace off and put it in a tray along with your shoes. The fact that fate wouldn't let you lose it wasn't the point; you literally couldn't remember the last time you'd taken it off, and it felt wrong that you'd done so now. Like you'd reset a clock, or lost your high score.
A lot had changed, but every Butterfly Knight was still wearing their necklace. Kimiyo hid it subtly under her clothes, but it was there. Brigid would cling to it like a lifeline when she went out of focus. Riley had abandoned every other part of who she used to be, but you still saw the chain around her neck on the calls. You couldn't imagine otherwise.
You collapsed onto one of the seats at Gate A1, popped your earbuds in, and started on your backlog of Welcome to Nightvale, trying to fight the anxiety rising in your chest. It didn't feel real, a trip like this was something you were supposed to plan weeks and months in advance, you didn't just up and decide to travel across the Pacific. Wired from your meds and tired from the early wake-up, you stared at the ceiling and felt your thoughts spiralling away from you.
There were so many ways this could go wrong, and the one weighing heaviest on your mind as you anxiously wrapped your earbud cords around your fingers was that Kimiyo might just slam the door in your face. Maybe this was her trying to break up in a way that wouldn't hurt (which wasn't working), and all you showing up would do is trigger a fight. Were you really travelling halfway around the world so you could break down crying in the hallway outside your now-ex-girlfriend's door?
And that's putting aside the fact that if she did do that and you left with nothing but debt, you then had to go home and fight the Dark Queen and save the world. No biggie, you'd just fight Her Royal Floofiness (how did she get her hair to do that) without her! It's not like the Dark Queen is well known for her weird love of mind control powers that definitely hadn't had any long-term effects on your psychological development. It's not like Kimiyo was the only Butterfly Knight that was immune to all that. Super fair, extremely balanced.
You always used to complain that it wasn't fair you had to be a teenager and a superhero at the same time. Turns out it wasn't much more fair being a superhero and an adult.
Amara texted you just past nine, and twice more over the next two hours. Nothing from Brigid, she'd probably fallen asleep right after tutoring. Nothing from Kimiyo either, no matter how long you stared. You glanced repeatedly at the gate agents, worried you were coming off like a crazy person as you tapped your foot and stared at the screen and mummified your thumb with the earbud cord. Making eye contact with the blonde girl at the ticket scanny thing was probably a mistake; it wasn't like she could make the plane take off faster.
A few minutes of cycling through and staring at all the unchanging text chats later, you were shaken out of your spiral by a voice talking directly to you, saying a lot of words you didn't understand. You glanced up at the smiling face of a JAL employee, presumably some kind of supervisor, looking at you with the sort of professional worry one might employ when there's a crazy lady on the edge of tears at his gate. Presumably assuming you were nervous about going home rather than nervous about leaving it.
Face flushed and right back to being thirteen on your last trip, you had to sheepishly admit your Japanese proficiency extended to being able to introduce yourself and asking where the bathroom was. The man nodded, speaking in clear, if somewhat stilted, English.
"Are you travelling alone?" he asked. You nodded. "I know it can be nerve-wracking. Are you alright?"
You glanced reflexively at your phone, then nodded quickly.
"Yeah, sorry, just… long day? I… booked at four AM, kinda last minute emergency type stuff…" you rambled uselessly, trailing off. This guy definitely does not want to know your life story, idiot!
He indicated your boarding pass, and you offered it apologetically. He scanned it quickly, then handed it back.
"Ah, you're in luck, Miss Nakamura. Go talk to Susan at the gate; your seat is eligible to be upgraded to Premium Economy on this flight. A few less things to worry about, if nothing else?"
You sputtered your way through a kind of useless combination of thanks, apologies, and humble insistence that it was fine, really, blather that continued unabated at the desk and carried you all the way back to your original chair with a brand-new boarding pass in hand.
Pre-boarding (not you), Priority boarding, Group 3. That was you now! Suck it, Group 5! 19 E… One of the middle seats among four. USB port, funky multi-country power outlet, wifi? The future was now. There was also a cheap little blanket, a menu, and in a little plastic bag, a pair of slippers.
Airplane slippers! Nobody told you they gave you slippers when you went flying. There were also some earphones, a separate set of yellow earplugs, and a… blindfold? Why would… Sleep mask! That made more sense.
The flight attendants walked everyone through the technically complex procedure of putting on a seatbelt in two languages; you mostly spent that time daydreaming irresponsibly about the weirdly hot dude in the crumpled business suit in the seat across the aisle from yours (he was already dead asleep but was muttering along with the instructions). Then you were pressed back gently into your seat by the acceleration and you were up and off.
Once the seatbelt sign switched off, you grabbed your laptop and tried to use this new-fangled wi-ed fi, but it appeared the future sucked because while you could connect to the Gogo network, it didn't seem to Gogo onto the internet very well. Skype wouldn't log in and Firefox wouldn't load, so your dreams of Netflix were dashed. You closed your laptop and poked at the in-flight entertainment options a while, gave up, and just settled back into your seat and closed your eyes.
In ten hours you'd see Kimiyo again. Ten hours. After a year of waiting, ten hours felt like both an eternity and an instant. She hadn't responded to your texts before you'd left, and now that you were in the air you wouldn't see if she did until you touched down. The nightmare possibility that she might have told you to stay away and you wouldn't know until you were at her metaphorical door weighed heavily.
Once again, you found yourself wondering how the hell this had happened, all of this. Even when things were getting bad with the other girls, you and Kimiyo were close, everything was good, she was probably doing the best out of all of you. It wasn't like you'd fought or argued or were growing apart, the morning she'd left she'd clung to both you and Amara right up until you reached the security line.
Something had changed, after her grandfather's funeral. She wouldn't say what, she wouldn't talk about anything. She just said she was staying a while because something came up, and then she got distant. Colder. Stopped calling Amara separately, stopped calling you as often. It was only three months later that you found out she wasn't talking to her parents anymore, something you learned from them.
Not that they'd given any more details either. Inability to talk about literally anything was apparently an Okamoto family tradition. "Oh, you know how she is!" Apparently you didn't!
If she just didn't love you anymore… you couldn't say it was fine, because the thought made you want to cry, but it'd be something. A clear, concrete fact that would make sense. The thing that made it hurt was it was plainly obvious how much she did love you, you didn't need ESP to sense it, she needed you as badly as you needed her and you could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes even through the lag and low bitrates. Something was keeping her away, and it hurt she wouldn't tell you what.
It didn't help anything to dwell, but it was hard not to. There was nothing else to do, just stuck with your thoughts between the middle-aged couple on one side and the absolutely ancient old lady snoozing on the other. In ten hours you'd be at Kimiyo's apartment or meeting her at a train station or something, begging her to come back with you. To save the world, and more importantly, save your relationship.
Yes, The World, you meant in that order. Last time you had a breakup, you got so emo about it you nearly tore the fabric of space and time asunder in your grief. The universe better get its shit together, that's all you were saying; you'd think misfortune would steer clear of the sort of people who could become Shadow Butterflies.
You poked the in-flight entertainment stream yet again, contemplated finally watching Frozen instead of just watching that one song on youtube over and over, decided singing along in the plane would be frowned upon, and just started cycling through the shows on the Japanese language half. You randomly hit play on a movie about skiing without reading the description based entirely on the excellent choice of hat from the girl in the poster, and then proceeded to not watch it as your thoughts tangled up again.
How was this happening again? You'd saved the world once already, you'd think that would be all anyone could ask of you. Maybe Kimiyo was just doing the smart thing by ducking out of this one; it was hard enough the first time. If you thought there was anyone else in the world that could do it, you'd have gone right back to bed.
She had more reason than most to want to duck out; she'd died last time. You'd undone that, she said she couldn't actually remember it happening, but that was the sort of thing that would probably put anyone off of superheroing. Actually, thinking about that… you suddenly weren't sure you wanted her to go. What if it happened again and you couldn't put it right again?
You turned the idea over and over in your head, the magnitude of it spreading. You were so excited to get the Knights back together, and sure they'd once again spring into action like they always did, but maybe none of them were up for this.
You unwrapped the cord from your fingers, trying to force your thoughts back in order. You tried to watch the movie; you'd basically missed the first few minutes and you didn't know who anyone was, but that was fine. Friends were out skiing in the height of 1980s snowsuit fashion. There was a meet-cute as the Lead Boy pulled the Lead Girl, the one in the white snowsuit from the poster, out of a snowbank. The girl got unsteadily back on her skis, made it about ten more feet down the hill, and fell right back over.
Finally, a character you could relate to. It was so nice to have representation.
You watched on, as best you could, as RomCom Shenanigans and ski tricks unfolded, but focusing was difficult. You were a sucker for this kind of movie, even one from before you were born; in better times it'd be good movie night fare with Amara. Right now, though, for what felt like the first time in your life, a cheesy romance came off as annoyingly saccharine and trivial.
That probably wasn't a good sign.
You didn't want to dwell on Kimiyo, but that just brought your thoughts to your other friends. All of them were hurting, which made the little pity-party you were having at ten thousand feet feel particularly indulgent. It was hard not to feel like you'd gotten off easy by comparison; you still had all your limbs, for one thing.
You'd tried to fix it, you really did, but the frayed ends of the string were coming apart in your hands and you didn't have enough to do it and save everyone who needed to be saved. Riley had said she wasn't bitter about it, she said it over and over, but it had crushed her. All the teams she wanted to try out for, all the trophies she was destined to win, it was all replaced with countless hours of physical therapy and pain. She couldn't even be proud of how she got the injury; instead of the heroic Knight that held a street alone for two hours, she was just another helpless girl left wounded in the wake of the Whatever It Was.
The Riley that used to stride tall through the halls, out and proud and daring anyone to say anything, was now limping along on a clumsy prosthetic. She tried to put on a brave face, kept training and practicing, she swore up and down that one of these days she'd be back to normal, then she went to college, dropped out of contact for a year, and came back with a ring on her finger and a different surname and a kid.
It wasn't as dramatic, but you suspected that maybe Brigid didn't make it through much better. You'd had broken limbs and broken ribs and flare-ups of pain in your back and shoulders despite the fact you weren't even 24 yet; you were supernaturally tough when you were transformed, but not invincible. Brigid had gotten hit, a lot, she was their priority, and didn't have your armour and shield to take the brunt of it. While Brigid had always been spacy, prone to drifting off into her thoughts, in retrospect that had gotten a lot worse in the years afterward. She was tired a lot, would need to have things repeated to her, sometimes it felt like she'd forgotten where she was, but at the time you'd just put it down to the fact she was up all night reading again, the nerd.
You should have gotten her help after she collapsed the second time, if not the first. But she said it was just low blood sugar, that she forgot to eat again. Haha, isn't that just like her?
You twisted up the flimsy airplane headphone cord in your hands again as your thoughts began to dwell on Esmé. You'd wondered at first how you were supposed to do this without her, but if she were still here, asking her to go might be the cruelest thing you could do.
For the year after the battle, the Knights always talked about it as going back to normal, back to a time before you were running around at night having life or death battles, back to being regular people. It only really sunk in after she disappeared that maybe that wasn't something Esmé could actually do; she'd been doing this for years before any of you, which had made her seem cool and experienced when you were fourteen and now made you impossibly sad. She was twelve when she started. What normal did she have to go back to?
None of you got away from this trauma-free, but Esmé was the only one whose flashbacks posed a danger to the people around her. Team Butterfly was big on sleepovers, in no small part because of the nightmares, which was how you kept finding yourself back there, not in your dreams but actually, physically, woven into Esmé's illusionary hallucinations as she involuntarily transformed the room into that last battlefield.
You'd done what you could, but it wasn't much. You were kids. By your last year of high school she was barely hanging on; she was jumpy, defensive, she snapped at people over nothing and got suspended repeatedly. You found out she was bringing her pistol to school in her bag because she didn't feel safe without it. In March, she showed up at your door, kicked out because her mum had finally caught on to how much she'd drunk out of her liquor cabinet. She spent the next month rotating between the houses of the rest of the team for 'sleepovers' as you all lied to your increasingly concerned parents.
A month before graduation, almost exactly six years ago, she had a bad flashback at Riley's place. Mrs. Carter had been pulled in too, and had gotten hurt. Esmé apologized, said she was going home to finally talk to her mom, and then she was gone. No note, no trace, no goodbyes. Gone.
The cheap plastic of the headphone cable cracked and snapped around the wire, and the movie became even less comprehensible as the sound became a stuttering and murky echo.
You never found out what happened. It wasn't surprising. If she'd run away, nobody would find her, and otherwise… You personally suspected she had gone to the bridge and jumped. Probably at night, probably with a weight so she wouldn't leave a trace. You used to hope you were wrong, but now you just hoped it was quick.
Life had gone on. Team Butterfly had one last hurrah as a group, a road trip to LA to see all the places Esmé had promised to show you from her hometown. You'd started at USF, Amara came back from New York with her degree and you'd moved in together with her and Kimiyo, time didn't stop for grief. You did your best, instituting the weekly call, but Tracy and Lyra had dropped out almost immediately. Brigid and Riley were mentally checked out. Team Butterfly was just you and Kimmy, like when you started, and then she left too.
You'd spent the last four years just wanting to break down and scream. This wasn't how it was supposed to go! You'd seen the future, you'd seen the Crystal Palace, the Kaleidoscope Throne, the marble round table whose seven chairs were set with each of your gemstones. Were they just for show, empty places set in honour of long-lost friends?
You were shaken out of your despair by one of the attendants, who was indicating to the old lady like 'is she okay?' All you could do was shrug and hope so. The reason for this interruption was revealed moments later as lunch arrived, and with it a hot towel and the blessed, wonderful relief of the drink cart.
You used to say that food was the best solution to misery, but that was before you met food's seductive mistress booze. A totally-noon-appropriate glass of Chivas Regal in hand and shockingly good egg fried rice rapidly making its way from tray to mouth genuinely did make things better; you settled back, questioned why exactly the workplace Christmas function unfolding on-screen included a girl in a Playboy Bunny tuxedo number, and laughed probably too loudly at the suspenders-bowtie-and-jeans combo on the glasses guy.
Somehow, as you ate, the world didn't seem quite so dark anymore, it didn't feel hopeless. Hard? Yes. Awful? Obviously. Completely unfair to you, paragon of love and truth that you were? Absolutely, but such was your beneficence you would forgive the world for making you work for your happy ending. That's what you did, why you fought, right? Hope was your business. How did you ever give in to such awful thoughts?
The answer occurred to you as you fumbled with the funny little pyramid of transparent plastic containing the salad dressing.
Breakfast. You had forgotten to eat breakfast.
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Names For Those Who Need A Guide
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
If it helps, here's everyone's names and corresponding magical girl identities. And full name reveal for a bunch of characters gasp!
Butterfly Knights
- Eve Nakamura (Butterfly Ward)
- Okamoto Kimiyo (Butterfly Sage)
- Brigid Aisling O'Connell (Butterfly Spark)
- Riley Bailey, née Carter (Butterfly Heart)
- Esmeralda "Esmé" Castillo (Butterfly Shine)
Knights Errant
- Tracy Sinclaire (Butterfly Echo)
- Lyra Moreau (Butterfly Veil)
Allies
- Amara Stewart (Prince/ss Rose) (No you don't get to know her deadname)
- Androcles "Andy" the Magical Talking Cat
Intermission 1 🦋 September 28th, 2004
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
A single set of footsteps echoed in the dark, empty mall, a steady tap-tap of expensive shoes against well-worn tile. In the middle of the hall, the woman who had stood unmoving behind the large new kiosk turned slowly, her eyes fixed with unnatural focus on the source of the sound.
From the shadow, lit by the silver of moonlight emerging from the skylight, a man emerged. He was tall, finely dressed in a suit and tie, his hair cropped short and with a single silver earring.
"Umbra IV, report," he said. The woman snapped a fist to her chest and bowed.
"Yes, my Prince. Over four hundred devices were distributed today. Young adult humans appear skeptical of the contract's generous terms, but adolescents and older humans are easy sells and do not ask questions," the woman reported. "We will need more devices."
"Very good, Umbra IV. More will be arriving with the morning. To quicken distribution, the Queen has authorized the deployment of another. This is Lamenta II; it is a more sophisticated model, and you are now subordinate to it," the man snapped. Behind him, a shape loomed, just briefly, but it shrank and changed as it approached the light until all that remained was a young woman with hair in an elaborate braided bun and a plethora of plastic jewellery around her neck.
"Reporting, my Prince. What do you order?"
The man turned to address the newcomer, then stopped. His eyes shifted, scanning the dark, a smile crossing his face.
"Clever bitch…"
"STOP!" a voice ran out. He and his servants turned, and there, perched on the railing like a balance bar, was a familiar figure in white and blue, the moonlight's silver redoubled against armour plate. "Cell phones are a miracle technology that connect friends and family no matter where they are! To corrupt them to foul schemes is an act of profound injustice! It's evil! It's wrong! It's un-American!"
She stepped off the balcony, landing on the tile so lightly she didn't make a sound. The bronze buckler on her arm unfolded like elegant origami, butterfly wings fluttering into a tall tower shield that seemed to glow with a golden light.
"I am the beautiful defender of the people of this beautiful city, and I will not stand to see it harmed! Now is your last chance to surrender!" she declared her arm outstretched, the shield weighing nothing to her.
The man laughed.
"You again. This won't be like last time, Butterfly Ward; my Queen has been quiet generous. Umbra IV, Lamenta II… kill her."
The two woman's gaze snapped to her with unnatural speed, and they moved. Umbra leapt over the kiosk and landed heavily, heavy footfalls tearing up the tile, while Lamenta simply launched herself with full force. Butterfly Ward planted the shield into the ground and shoved, timed exactly right to meet her attacker. The woman recoiled off and rolled against the ground even as Umbra skidded past to flank her.
Ward pivoted on her armoured heel, tearing apart the flooring as she brought the shield around with a heavy thump and a shower of blue sparks. Umbra span away onto all fours, her head snapping up to expose the hideous ruin made of her youthful face. The skin and muscle was torn away to expose a metallic, inhuman skull under it, the surface unworked and raw, eye glowing with teal fire. It hissed and scrambled forward again, fingers distorting into lengthening blades.
Ward's gauntleted fist came down in an overhand punch that drove it headfirst into the ground, then she slammed the lower edge of the shield into its neck a moment later. There was a snap.
"Jesus," the man exclaimed with a wince. The girl jerked the shield from the shattered remains of the demon; molten lead dripped onto the floor. She locked eyes with the man and began to advance, trailing motes of amber light and flowing, diaphanous ribbon.
Then Lamenta came back in like a thunderbolt, tackling Ward to the ground. The blow had torn loose the disguise on the top of its forehead to expose the brassy crystalline structure under it and the insectoid compound eyes lurking in its sockets. It raised back its fist and drove it down into Ward's face, rebounding her head off the floor and vapourizing the false flesh on its knuckles.
"Bright Star Aura!" Ward called, her body suddenly flaring gold. The demon shrieked and recoiled, what was left of its disguise burning away wherever the light touched, sloughing off and dripping like melting wax. The light faded just as quickly, but it gave time for Ward to stand and wipe the blood away from her nose. She was panting, and sounded like she was choking back tears.
"W-wow, this one can hit," she admitted, squaring herself up. "O-oh God, come on. Let's go, let's fucking go…"
Lamenta II lashed out, an inhumanly long arm whipping around Ward's shield and pulling her forward. As she stumbled, its other arm came forward, tipped with a blade, and plunged for her chest; she deflected with her gauntlet, but not far enough to avoid it cutting deep into her arm. A kick to her leg sent her down to a knee, and she looked up groggy into the pitiless eyes of the demon looming over her.
"Finish this," the man ordered, and Ward gave a bloodied smile.
"B-Bright Star Aura," she stammered, and wrapped the creature's waist in a hug. It screamed, not like a person but like escaping steam, hot iron plunged into water, flailing and pushing and unable to escape. It simply came apart in the middle, and Butterfly Ward was left doubled over, its red-hot remains flowing off the shimmering golden halo as she breathed heavily.
"Okay… okay… I got this… I got this…" she muttered, pushing herself back to her feet. She was crying, face screwed up from pain, blood dripping from the cut on her shield arm, but she stood. "It's over, Prince Thornheart."
"It is," the man said, stepping forward. He reached into his suit and drew something forth, something that glinted in the light. "You are magnificent, you know that? We weren't expecting this kind of resistance from the mortal world, especially not from one so lovely."
Butterfly Ward shivered. This dude was like, what, forty? She squared up behind the shield, watching him approach through the loophole, her other hand closing around her sword. Maybe this was the time it was truly needed.
"I could use someone like you," the man said, and then he held out a mirror in his hand. Eve caught sight of herself, cowering behind the shield, caught sight of a wide eye staring through the loophole, and then she could see nothing else, vision locked. "Lower your guard, Butterfly Ward."
"No," she said firmly, as the shield fell away.
"Hand off your sword, Butterfly Ward."
"N-no," she said, as the hilt slipped from her fingers and her hand fell loose to her side.
"On your knees, Butterfly Ward."
"... no…" She fell, head bowed, and the man approached and reached out.
Then something caught his arm. Something pulled, and he stumbled, the mirror dropping away. Butterfly Ward gave a weak sob and collapsed to her side, grasping ineffectually at the floor as the man turned.
"Disgusting old man! Take your hands off her!" a voice called.
"Fuck off, another one?" the man exclaimed. He gripped his tie and pulled it loose, and the suit went with it with a ripple of fabric, exposing a suit of dark steel armour, a flowing cape of turquoise and gold, and a crown of iron. He drew a long falchion smoothly with one hand, the other still gripping the mirror. "The one from LA, I presume."
There, standing atop the food court sign was a new figure. She wore a long red skirt and white vest, her arms and shoulders protected with lacquered crimson steel that gleamed in the moonlight. She stepped forward and walked down through the air, a string appearing in mid-air and drawn tight to form a staircase that vanished as soon as she walked on.
"Aren't you going to give your little speech?" the man mocked.
"Hikari no ito," she replied, drawing her hand into a fist. Instantly, a dozen spectral ropes looped around the man, constricting as she squeezed her fist tighter. The armour cracked and crumpled against the force of it. She pulled her fist downward, and Prince Thornheart crashed heavily to his knees. "Not so fun, is it?"
The man twisted and found his leverage, and his sword passed through the strings in an instant. The girl gasped and staggered, her hand opening involuntarily as the threads fell away, then she drew herself up again and cast her arm out. The sword parted the strings with ease, and then the Prince was standing before her, the mirror raised to her face.
"What is your name, girl?" he demanded.
"Butterfly Sage."
"On your knees, Butterfly Sage," the man snarled.
"No," she replied. She grabbed his wrist and drove her elbow into his armoured breastplate, and there was a bang as the metal deformed around the impact. The Prince was blown backward, feet digging furrows in the ground until he stopped. He glanced down at his mirror, then back.
"Next time, Butterfly Knights," he spat, and then he turned and was gone. The mall now was silent, echoing only with the sizzling sound of molten metal and Butterfly Ward's pained, sobbing breaths.
Butterfly Sage walked over to her and leaned down, turning her over and inspecting the wound. With a twirl of her finger, threads wove through the cut on her arm, stitching it closed, then she reached out a hand. Butterfly Ward took it, wiping her other gauntlet across her cheeks to dry her tears.
"T-thank you," she said, sniffling. "What was that? It felt so awful…"
"Butterfly Ward," Sage said sternly. "Go home."
"W-what?" she said, blinking behind her glasses.
"Whatever that was, you're too weak to stand up to it. You're terrified, you're crying, you obviously don't want to be here," she said. Her voice was stern, but there was concern there. "I'll take it from here."
She turned, her footsteps silent as she walked away.
"Wait!" Ward called. "I… can't we work together? Everything's easier with a friend."
The girl paused, clearly thinking about it. Something about the words resonated with her.
"Tomorrow night, meet me at Oracle Park. There's something wrong there; I can see it in the strings," she instructed.
"Okay. Thank you!" Ward called out. Butterfly Sage ducked through the doors of the mall, and she was gone.
Butterfly Ward staggered toward the opposite door, where a tiny off-white cat bound out from his hiding place just inside the Limited Too.
"Oh thank the Goddess, Ward, I was terrified," Andy said, glancing down the hall.
"Did you know she was going to show up? Butterfly Sage?" Ward asked. The tiny cat shook his head.
"Hadn't the foggiest, but twas a good thing. Come now, Butterfly Ward, chin up! You did well, though I daresay you could learn a thing or two from that Sage."
"I hope so," Butterfly Ward muttered, glancing through the door. "Oh, cops again. Let's go to the roof. And… yeah. You sure I can't tell anyone about any of this?"
"Positive, Butterfly Ward, the secret is what protects you and those who care for you," Andy instructed as they made their way up the stairs.
"That sucks. I bet Kimmy would love to know about Butterfly Sage." Ward paused on the stairs, frowning. "Hey Andy, who's the one from LA Prince Thornheart mentioned? Is that her?"
"I don't know, Butterfly Ward. There is much it seems I haven't been told," he said. "Now, be a dear and pick me up, and do hold on tight when you jump. I may always land on my feet, but from a certain height that is a somewhat academic distinction."
From the shadow, lit by the silver of moonlight emerging from the skylight, a man emerged. He was tall, finely dressed in a suit and tie, his hair cropped short and with a single silver earring.
"Umbra IV, report," he said. The woman snapped a fist to her chest and bowed.
"Yes, my Prince. Over four hundred devices were distributed today. Young adult humans appear skeptical of the contract's generous terms, but adolescents and older humans are easy sells and do not ask questions," the woman reported. "We will need more devices."
"Very good, Umbra IV. More will be arriving with the morning. To quicken distribution, the Queen has authorized the deployment of another. This is Lamenta II; it is a more sophisticated model, and you are now subordinate to it," the man snapped. Behind him, a shape loomed, just briefly, but it shrank and changed as it approached the light until all that remained was a young woman with hair in an elaborate braided bun and a plethora of plastic jewellery around her neck.
"Reporting, my Prince. What do you order?"
The man turned to address the newcomer, then stopped. His eyes shifted, scanning the dark, a smile crossing his face.
"Clever bitch…"
"STOP!" a voice ran out. He and his servants turned, and there, perched on the railing like a balance bar, was a familiar figure in white and blue, the moonlight's silver redoubled against armour plate. "Cell phones are a miracle technology that connect friends and family no matter where they are! To corrupt them to foul schemes is an act of profound injustice! It's evil! It's wrong! It's un-American!"
She stepped off the balcony, landing on the tile so lightly she didn't make a sound. The bronze buckler on her arm unfolded like elegant origami, butterfly wings fluttering into a tall tower shield that seemed to glow with a golden light.
"I am the beautiful defender of the people of this beautiful city, and I will not stand to see it harmed! Now is your last chance to surrender!" she declared her arm outstretched, the shield weighing nothing to her.
The man laughed.
"You again. This won't be like last time, Butterfly Ward; my Queen has been quiet generous. Umbra IV, Lamenta II… kill her."
The two woman's gaze snapped to her with unnatural speed, and they moved. Umbra leapt over the kiosk and landed heavily, heavy footfalls tearing up the tile, while Lamenta simply launched herself with full force. Butterfly Ward planted the shield into the ground and shoved, timed exactly right to meet her attacker. The woman recoiled off and rolled against the ground even as Umbra skidded past to flank her.
Ward pivoted on her armoured heel, tearing apart the flooring as she brought the shield around with a heavy thump and a shower of blue sparks. Umbra span away onto all fours, her head snapping up to expose the hideous ruin made of her youthful face. The skin and muscle was torn away to expose a metallic, inhuman skull under it, the surface unworked and raw, eye glowing with teal fire. It hissed and scrambled forward again, fingers distorting into lengthening blades.
Ward's gauntleted fist came down in an overhand punch that drove it headfirst into the ground, then she slammed the lower edge of the shield into its neck a moment later. There was a snap.
"Jesus," the man exclaimed with a wince. The girl jerked the shield from the shattered remains of the demon; molten lead dripped onto the floor. She locked eyes with the man and began to advance, trailing motes of amber light and flowing, diaphanous ribbon.
Then Lamenta came back in like a thunderbolt, tackling Ward to the ground. The blow had torn loose the disguise on the top of its forehead to expose the brassy crystalline structure under it and the insectoid compound eyes lurking in its sockets. It raised back its fist and drove it down into Ward's face, rebounding her head off the floor and vapourizing the false flesh on its knuckles.
"Bright Star Aura!" Ward called, her body suddenly flaring gold. The demon shrieked and recoiled, what was left of its disguise burning away wherever the light touched, sloughing off and dripping like melting wax. The light faded just as quickly, but it gave time for Ward to stand and wipe the blood away from her nose. She was panting, and sounded like she was choking back tears.
"W-wow, this one can hit," she admitted, squaring herself up. "O-oh God, come on. Let's go, let's fucking go…"
Lamenta II lashed out, an inhumanly long arm whipping around Ward's shield and pulling her forward. As she stumbled, its other arm came forward, tipped with a blade, and plunged for her chest; she deflected with her gauntlet, but not far enough to avoid it cutting deep into her arm. A kick to her leg sent her down to a knee, and she looked up groggy into the pitiless eyes of the demon looming over her.
"Finish this," the man ordered, and Ward gave a bloodied smile.
"B-Bright Star Aura," she stammered, and wrapped the creature's waist in a hug. It screamed, not like a person but like escaping steam, hot iron plunged into water, flailing and pushing and unable to escape. It simply came apart in the middle, and Butterfly Ward was left doubled over, its red-hot remains flowing off the shimmering golden halo as she breathed heavily.
"Okay… okay… I got this… I got this…" she muttered, pushing herself back to her feet. She was crying, face screwed up from pain, blood dripping from the cut on her shield arm, but she stood. "It's over, Prince Thornheart."
"It is," the man said, stepping forward. He reached into his suit and drew something forth, something that glinted in the light. "You are magnificent, you know that? We weren't expecting this kind of resistance from the mortal world, especially not from one so lovely."
Butterfly Ward shivered. This dude was like, what, forty? She squared up behind the shield, watching him approach through the loophole, her other hand closing around her sword. Maybe this was the time it was truly needed.
"I could use someone like you," the man said, and then he held out a mirror in his hand. Eve caught sight of herself, cowering behind the shield, caught sight of a wide eye staring through the loophole, and then she could see nothing else, vision locked. "Lower your guard, Butterfly Ward."
"No," she said firmly, as the shield fell away.
"Hand off your sword, Butterfly Ward."
"N-no," she said, as the hilt slipped from her fingers and her hand fell loose to her side.
"On your knees, Butterfly Ward."
"... no…" She fell, head bowed, and the man approached and reached out.
Then something caught his arm. Something pulled, and he stumbled, the mirror dropping away. Butterfly Ward gave a weak sob and collapsed to her side, grasping ineffectually at the floor as the man turned.
"Disgusting old man! Take your hands off her!" a voice called.
"Fuck off, another one?" the man exclaimed. He gripped his tie and pulled it loose, and the suit went with it with a ripple of fabric, exposing a suit of dark steel armour, a flowing cape of turquoise and gold, and a crown of iron. He drew a long falchion smoothly with one hand, the other still gripping the mirror. "The one from LA, I presume."
There, standing atop the food court sign was a new figure. She wore a long red skirt and white vest, her arms and shoulders protected with lacquered crimson steel that gleamed in the moonlight. She stepped forward and walked down through the air, a string appearing in mid-air and drawn tight to form a staircase that vanished as soon as she walked on.
"Aren't you going to give your little speech?" the man mocked.
"Hikari no ito," she replied, drawing her hand into a fist. Instantly, a dozen spectral ropes looped around the man, constricting as she squeezed her fist tighter. The armour cracked and crumpled against the force of it. She pulled her fist downward, and Prince Thornheart crashed heavily to his knees. "Not so fun, is it?"
The man twisted and found his leverage, and his sword passed through the strings in an instant. The girl gasped and staggered, her hand opening involuntarily as the threads fell away, then she drew herself up again and cast her arm out. The sword parted the strings with ease, and then the Prince was standing before her, the mirror raised to her face.
"What is your name, girl?" he demanded.
"Butterfly Sage."
"On your knees, Butterfly Sage," the man snarled.
"No," she replied. She grabbed his wrist and drove her elbow into his armoured breastplate, and there was a bang as the metal deformed around the impact. The Prince was blown backward, feet digging furrows in the ground until he stopped. He glanced down at his mirror, then back.
"Next time, Butterfly Knights," he spat, and then he turned and was gone. The mall now was silent, echoing only with the sizzling sound of molten metal and Butterfly Ward's pained, sobbing breaths.
Butterfly Sage walked over to her and leaned down, turning her over and inspecting the wound. With a twirl of her finger, threads wove through the cut on her arm, stitching it closed, then she reached out a hand. Butterfly Ward took it, wiping her other gauntlet across her cheeks to dry her tears.
"T-thank you," she said, sniffling. "What was that? It felt so awful…"
"Butterfly Ward," Sage said sternly. "Go home."
"W-what?" she said, blinking behind her glasses.
"Whatever that was, you're too weak to stand up to it. You're terrified, you're crying, you obviously don't want to be here," she said. Her voice was stern, but there was concern there. "I'll take it from here."
She turned, her footsteps silent as she walked away.
"Wait!" Ward called. "I… can't we work together? Everything's easier with a friend."
The girl paused, clearly thinking about it. Something about the words resonated with her.
"Tomorrow night, meet me at Oracle Park. There's something wrong there; I can see it in the strings," she instructed.
"Okay. Thank you!" Ward called out. Butterfly Sage ducked through the doors of the mall, and she was gone.
Butterfly Ward staggered toward the opposite door, where a tiny off-white cat bound out from his hiding place just inside the Limited Too.
"Oh thank the Goddess, Ward, I was terrified," Andy said, glancing down the hall.
"Did you know she was going to show up? Butterfly Sage?" Ward asked. The tiny cat shook his head.
"Hadn't the foggiest, but twas a good thing. Come now, Butterfly Ward, chin up! You did well, though I daresay you could learn a thing or two from that Sage."
"I hope so," Butterfly Ward muttered, glancing through the door. "Oh, cops again. Let's go to the roof. And… yeah. You sure I can't tell anyone about any of this?"
"Positive, Butterfly Ward, the secret is what protects you and those who care for you," Andy instructed as they made their way up the stairs.
"That sucks. I bet Kimmy would love to know about Butterfly Sage." Ward paused on the stairs, frowning. "Hey Andy, who's the one from LA Prince Thornheart mentioned? Is that her?"
"I don't know, Butterfly Ward. There is much it seems I haven't been told," he said. "Now, be a dear and pick me up, and do hold on tight when you jump. I may always land on my feet, but from a certain height that is a somewhat academic distinction."
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Story Background & Butterfly Rampart
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
oh real quick, i wanna give a huge shout-out to @Karlito. back when we were testing my old magical girl RPG 5 Across the Heart, he regularly played a character called Butterfly Rampant, whose armoured dress and tower shield basically defined the game's tank archetype, and which stuck in my head super hard. Eve and Butterfly Ward owes a lot to that character.
Additional fun fact: This is actually the second incarnation of this project! The first, which was just called Happily Ever After, written on my phone purely for my own gratification, was actually a light-hearted parody?
Proto-Eve was Butterfly Knight, living with Princess Rose in her unironic happily ever after when the Dark Queen returned. It was much sillier, like them having to take a cursed train to hell to confront her and ending up running into one of their old demon opponents (who went back to evil school for her evil degree after world conquest fell through). There was a subplot about how Hell was getting gentrified.
The entirety of the actual Team Butterfly Forever emerged from one scene where proto-Eve, training for the fight, blows up at the cat about how she never wanted to do any of this, which included her listing all the awful things she and her absent friends experienced as magical girls. "Emily lost an arm! Like gone forever!"
This ended up being, to me, way more compelling. the original basically gave excuses for why the team couldn't go along because it was a limited scope short story; i found myself thinking the tale of going and talking them all into coming back for one last job way more compelling, and that developed into this story about the difficulties of adult friendships and what it's like being woven into lives that are out of anyone's control.
I wrote a lot of stuff on my phone last year as the stress mounted; Buried in Steel also had series of prototypes (its earliest version was a rookie and a veteran stuck alone inside an NBC protected tank after the Federation carpet-nuked their planet, and I ended up becoming increasingly interested in the "stuck in the tank" part over the "and there was only one crew compartment!" romance angle). it's cool getting to develop these ideas properly
also, do not write novels on your phone. i fucked my shoulder up doing it lol.
Additional fun fact: This is actually the second incarnation of this project! The first, which was just called Happily Ever After, written on my phone purely for my own gratification, was actually a light-hearted parody?
Proto-Eve was Butterfly Knight, living with Princess Rose in her unironic happily ever after when the Dark Queen returned. It was much sillier, like them having to take a cursed train to hell to confront her and ending up running into one of their old demon opponents (who went back to evil school for her evil degree after world conquest fell through). There was a subplot about how Hell was getting gentrified.
The entirety of the actual Team Butterfly Forever emerged from one scene where proto-Eve, training for the fight, blows up at the cat about how she never wanted to do any of this, which included her listing all the awful things she and her absent friends experienced as magical girls. "Emily lost an arm! Like gone forever!"
This ended up being, to me, way more compelling. the original basically gave excuses for why the team couldn't go along because it was a limited scope short story; i found myself thinking the tale of going and talking them all into coming back for one last job way more compelling, and that developed into this story about the difficulties of adult friendships and what it's like being woven into lives that are out of anyone's control.
I wrote a lot of stuff on my phone last year as the stress mounted; Buried in Steel also had series of prototypes (its earliest version was a rookie and a veteran stuck alone inside an NBC protected tank after the Federation carpet-nuked their planet, and I ended up becoming increasingly interested in the "stuck in the tank" part over the "and there was only one crew compartment!" romance angle). it's cool getting to develop these ideas properly
also, do not write novels on your phone. i fucked my shoulder up doing it lol.
🦋 Chapter 3 - At Home in Limbo (Part 1)
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Chapter 3 - At Home in Limbo
It was surprisingly easy to sleep on a plane. Admittedly, you'd found you had a knack for sleeping just about anywhere or any time; if anything you had the opposite problem. But after dinner, and with the aid of a plastic cup of complementary souchu, you snuggled up in the little blanket with your airplane slippers on and you were out like a light.You didn't dream, at least not in a way you could remember, but the lingering sense of nostalgia chased you into wakefulness This was brought about with some external effort from the man seated beside you, apparently at the behest of a flight attendant; it seemed like you were landing soon, and you had some paperwork to do.
Groggy, you folded down the little tray table and filled in the two little cards. You had to list the address you were going to stay at, and that gave you pause; you fished out your phone to try and scroll back through the Skype logs to the address she told you, but of course you didn't have a connection and the wi-fi didn't work. Finally, you gave up and listed one of the hotels from your notes, which you'd at least had the foresight to write down properly formatted. "Purpose of visit" wasn't easy either; you should have just checked Tourism, but your anxious honesty won out.
At least the customs form was easy, given you'd accidently left all your illegal drugs, agricultural products, and commercial samples at home. Oh well, next time!
You dozed off again the moment you were finished, and awoke to the jolt of the wheels hitting tarmac. In a daze, you rose with the other passengers, grabbed your bag out of the overhead compartment, and just remembered to grab your shoes of the ground before shuffling out. You were hoping for a spot to pause and switch them for your slippers, but everything was moving rather quickly and nobody was slowing down, which meant you kind of ended up standing in line at passport control still holding your shoes.
They were, of course, the first thing the passport control officer noticed. He cocked an eyebrow at the as you fished around in your purse and pockets for your passport and forms, then scanned over them.
"Purpose of visit, other?" the man inquired, looking over the sheet You nodded.
"Yeeeah. Um, I'm visiting a, um, a friend. Checking in on her," you explained, poorly.
"I see. For five days?" You'd penciled in a longer estimate, just in case. He typed something into the computer.
"We might leave before then," you said, and he stopped typing.
"Do you have a return ticket?" he asked pointedly. Shit.
"No, but I have the money set aside for one?" you explained hastily. He nodded.
"Is your friend a Japanese citizen?" the man asked. You opened your mouth to answer and then found yourself not quite able to remember how that worked. You dimly remembered Kimiyo saying something about how she'd have to give up her Japanese citizenship for an American one, but she still had a Green Card, and something about her 21st birthday…
"Um, she has a Japanese passport?" you offered. That at least you remembered, the bright red booklet clutched tight in her hand when she'd left.
You got grilled with a few more questions, and then had a photo and fingerprints taken; you weren't sure if that was a universal thing or if it was because you were so terrible at answering questions. But you were let through into the brightly lit airport, and you finally found a table, sat down, and got to change out of your slippers. A lady with a little kid stared at you from the next table over as you did so.
That done, you leaned back over the chair and stared up at the ceiling. That sucked. You had a new Queen of the World priority; no more passport control. They should just stamp your hand or something.
You pulled out your phone and clicked off airplane mode, and after a few seconds received a barrage of texts from multiple sources. You ignored the AT&T one (probably trying to get you to upgrade your plan) to check the ones from your friends.
Brigid had sent "what's going on" and nothing else about eight hours ago. You didn't have to deal with that yourself, though, because Amara was on it; she sent a flurry of texts explaining that she'd finally called Brigid and had been met with long stretches of unsettling silence and the claim that she was 'too busy' to save the world. No contact since. Fuck.
You couldn't deal with that now. You had just one more text, from Kimiyo, which must have been sent just minutes after you put your phone in airplane mode.
"♥️"
At least she knew you were coming.
You spent a few minutes checking your emails, then double-checked your route on Google Maps a few times. Keisei Narita to Daimon Station, Toei Ōedo to Azuba-Juban station, then you wandered around until you saw the building from Streetview. Easy!
Frustratingly, presumably due to Travel, your credit card was declined at the ticket desk, so you had to find an ATM and pay five dollars to remove your own money, albeit transmuted into a stack of brown ¥5000 bills by some kind of Bank Alchemy. The fact you now fully understood that bank alchemy and the inner workings of international currency exchange markets didn't make it any less alchemy-y; most of your conclusions from your 9/10ths of an economics degree came back around to money being stupid and fake. It wasn't going to stop you from minting giant gold coins with your face on it, but still.
You had just sat down on the train and were midway through googling "who's the lady on the 5000 yen bill" when you got yet another text from AT&T, and you made the extremely fortunate mistake of opening this one.
AT&T FREE MSG: Eve, your current roaming data usage is 31MB.
With a slowly creeping sense of dread, you scrolled up past the half-dozen ignored messages from the last hour.
AT&T FREE MSG: Welcome to Japan! Your International Data Plan rate is $20.08/MB. Texts are $0.50, Phone $2.50 per minute. For details, att.com/wirelessinternational.
You felt a kind of cold chill come over you that you usually associated with serious injury. In a daze, you opened settings, turned on airplane mode, turned off your phone just in case, and stuck it as deep into the lower strata of your purse as you could get it.
Cool.
You sat back and tried to will yourself into a state of perfect calm. What was done was done; despair wouldn't help anything. You had a job to do, and nothing you could do now would make anything better. Once this was managed, you could contact the phone company and your bank and get this sorted, and in the worst case this just bit into savings you still had, however fast they might be dwindling. Last thing you needed was to break down in tears on the train.
You got your breathing under control and tried to focus on something else, on the city roll by out the window. The scale of it seemed unimaginable; it wasn't like the monolithic core of San Francisco, Sacramento's grid, or the endless sprawl of LA; it felt like somebody had taken the transitional zone between suburb and skyscrapers and just stretched it out into eternity. Every time you felt like you'd passed through the densest part of the city, it started building up again, like the landscape outside was being played in a loop.
Your previous trip to Japan had been when you were 13. You were visiting Kimiyo's place just after school had ended for the summer, you stayed for dinner as you often did, and you offhandedly mentioned how much you were going to miss her when she left and how much you were dreading it. Presumably, her parents had talked to your parents and some kind of arrangement was made, and you were invited along that year, and it was without a doubt the best month of your life.
The city you'd seen then was three days doing tourist stuff in Kyoto, which in retrospect was a bit like learning about life in the United States by heading to Disneyland and studying Main Street USA. You really hadn't seen much of it, though, and only in a tourist-y sort of way, looking at big castles and old shrines and museums. You mostly remember taking pictures of Old Stuff while Kimiyo translated various signs as best she could for you, though she needed a lot of help with the kanji in turn.
This was nothing like that. Once you crossed the river, the density started to feel almost artificial somehow, like the city was a drawing by somebody who had mistaken complexity for realism and just kept putting in more signs, bike paths, and wires wherever there was negative space on all the rectangles. It, in fact, looked exactly like the cities Kimiyo used to draw from her How to Draw Manga books, a fact that did something funny to your brain.
Your July in Japan had mostly been spent at Kimiyo's grandfather's house and in the surrounding town. It was a tiny middle-of-nowhere place which had felt timeless probably because it was largely forgotten, a town clinging to life by its fingertips. To you at the time, that just meant it was filled with amazing curiosities, funny little shops, and the old arcade you and Kimiyo spent whole afternoons filled with games you'd never seen before or since.
The house itself had been incredible too, old and traditional and sprawling. You knew your memory probably made it look bigger than it was, but it still had to be pretty big; the two of you had slept in a little side building which had been converted into a guest room. That had been special too; neither of you really understood back then quite what it was, but the duration and the surreal unreality of a foreign locale had made it different, not just another sleepover. Your first halting, awkward kiss had been in the dark room, lying on the floor; you'd asked her to grab your glasses and she'd put them on your face for you and just sort of leaned in.
Brain overwhelmed with not-yet-understood feelings of sublime happiness, you'd said "That was weird." In retrospect, those three words were a magical spell which had transported both of you to the back of the closet for the next two years.
The train pulled in at Diamon Station after what seemed like an eternity, a low grey subway station whose signage fortunately had enough English for you to find your way. Unfortunately, it was also some kind of maze, and there was something of a crowd. You took the escalator toward what you thought was the Toei Ōedo line, followed another sign that seemed to be pointing the way, passed through what in retrospect was an exit gate, and then you were standing on the street nestled between glass skyscrapers and construction cranes.
You stood there on the sidewalk, right in the middle of everyone, for what must have been a minute or two, just sort of staring up at it. Internally, you were fighting a battle between the reality that you could probably just turn around and pay closer attention to the signs, and the growing fuzzy jetlag feelings battling your ritalin for dominance and winning.
You remembered enough from the map to know you were close. If you could find Tokyo Tower you could figure it out from there. You couldn't see it from where you were, but there were an awful lot of buildings in the way, and you had a solution to that.
You crossed the street and walked on through the narrow midrises, glancing down the tight alleys until you found one wide enough that you didn't think you'd get stuck. Glancing around to make sure nobody was paying too much attention, you ducked inside and walked down the strange, dark hallway until there was a niche between two support pillars you could hide behind. Carefully hanging your travel bag from a power meter, you undid the latch on your necklace, and held the tiny gold butterfly in your palm. Even in the darkened alley, the amber stones seemed to glimmer with a light of their own.
You took a deep breath, glanced one last time down the alley to be sure, then thrust your hand in the air.
"For the Kaleidoscope Crown! Transform!"
The world didn't so much fade as it was drowned out by light that came from everywhere, swirling like bubbles in a liquid, like falling glass. You were lifted off your feet, not propelled but floating, untethered by gravity. You closed your eyes, but the light remained.
It didn't feel like putting on armour. It was like falling into silk bedsheets, like sinking into a warm bath, your motions guided by a gentle force that suggested more than compelled, and you felt so comfortable in that cocoon of love and light that you moved without resistance. The dress assembled itself bolt by bolt, thread dancing and leaping over one another down seams, laces elegantly knotting themselves, ribbons pulling taut. Even the steel plate fell into place gently, around your chest and shoulders and hips, each piece weighing nothing, moving smoothly, the buckles snapping and tightening until they fit perfectly. The gauntlets could have been made of satin and you'd not be able to tell the difference.
As your hair brushed and styled itself, as a delicate pair of round, brass spectacles replaced your plastic frames, you felt that gentle pull of fluttering wings guiding your hand out in front of you. Your fingers found the sword, and it felt heavy. As you always used to do, you kept your hand open as long as you could, wanting to stay just one more safe moment in this private place, where there was no pain, no exhaustion, no missed bills or roaming charges.
You drew the sword to your chest, cradled it, and it pulled you down like an anchor. Out of this place, away from the orchestra, out of the light.
The you that set back down in the dark alleyway was not the one who had left it. You shared a perspective, yes, memories and opinions and loves and sorrows, but Eve was still there, in the light. Safe.
Your name is Butterfly Ward, and you are her shield.
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a pathetic record of anxious failure
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
no update today, i'm heading off to play An RPGs, but i want to show off something that's pretty silly and should show you how disproportionately seriously i'm taking this extremely stupid thing
see this?
that's not the wordcount of Team Butterfly Forever's draft
that's the wordcount of the synopsis and character profile document. which isn't my research file *or* the file where i figured out a timeline of their old adventures *or* my random notes file. in it is not just a complete plot breakdown scene by scene, but complete character profiles for every named character that will appear, including education, everywhere they've lived, work history, family histories that are usually several generations deep, and fashion notes.
to be clear; this isn't me bragging. it's me apologizing for how long the updates take. i know its a frivolous, stupid, and shallow story that doesn't deserve this, but i don't normally write things set in the modern day with stuff i can be outright wrong about, so i basically have to stop and do research every other sentence. i know its activtely making the work worse because i keep having these pathetic little details intrude when the narrative should be more focused, but i'm doing my best. hopefully once i get the first draft in front of a proper editor it can be made more readable.
if you can tolerate this bullshit, update tomorrow or monday. my apologies for how short they are; if i don't post what i have when i have it, i'll stop writing.
see this?
that's not the wordcount of Team Butterfly Forever's draft
that's the wordcount of the synopsis and character profile document. which isn't my research file *or* the file where i figured out a timeline of their old adventures *or* my random notes file. in it is not just a complete plot breakdown scene by scene, but complete character profiles for every named character that will appear, including education, everywhere they've lived, work history, family histories that are usually several generations deep, and fashion notes.
to be clear; this isn't me bragging. it's me apologizing for how long the updates take. i know its a frivolous, stupid, and shallow story that doesn't deserve this, but i don't normally write things set in the modern day with stuff i can be outright wrong about, so i basically have to stop and do research every other sentence. i know its activtely making the work worse because i keep having these pathetic little details intrude when the narrative should be more focused, but i'm doing my best. hopefully once i get the first draft in front of a proper editor it can be made more readable.
if you can tolerate this bullshit, update tomorrow or monday. my apologies for how short they are; if i don't post what i have when i have it, i'll stop writing.
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Flashback - September 10th, 2004
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Heads up: This part has been edited into the story at the beginning of Chapter 2, so the second threadmark, as I've solidified onto a chapter/flashback/chapter pattern for the book. If you've already read it in your first read through, nothing about it is different here.
Also, content warning for implied threat of sexual assault.
Also, content warning for implied threat of sexual assault.
September 10th, 2004
Butterfly Ward stepped gingerly across her suburban street, shadows dancing against the pavement as the night insects scattered away from her approach. She wasn't supposed to be out this late, and it wasn't just demons she was scared of.She knew she wasn't alone; the cat was watching her, somewhere, blending into the background. He'd volunteered to stick close to her side, but she'd asked if he could defend himself any better than a normal cat could, and as he couldn't, she insisted he hang back.
It was difficult not to be self-conscious in the outfit. She looked ridiculous, she knew it, the exact middle ground between cartoon princess and fantasy knight, but the part that was worse was the part where she resented her own resentment. The dress was cute as hell! The glasses made her look smart and stylish, the amber gems complemented its dark blue and white elegantly, yet it felt and looked strangely practical.
The armour plates were polished like a mirror; if she held up her gauntleted hand to the light, she could just see herself reflected on the cuff, around the gem. The cat had said that the costume didn't have a mask because it didn't need one; the magic would disguise her so thoroughly her own mother wouldn't recognize her. She didn't expect that same magic to also work on her. The girl in the reflection was not Eve. She shared every single feature, expression, and habit, and yet they were completely different. Butterfly Ward saw Butterfly Ward in the reflection; Eve barely crossed her mind.
A car rolled passed, slowly, and somebody yelled something from the window; the words were indistinct but the cruelty behind them was not. She made an angry gesture with her gauntleted fist back.
She wasn't out to fight a particular evil today; she was starting small. Walk around the block, Butterfly Ward, grow comfortable with your new form, look for what might be wrong. Practice seeing what was out of place. Unfortunately the evil in question was going to be some kind of horrid demons, not just jerks in crappy cars.
She reached Wawona Street, cutting down the street and staring at the strange, gated building recessed among the trees there. It certainly looked spooky; its positioning down the hill managed to make it look like it was lurking, all dark grey wood and boarded-up windows, the flat roof covered in leaves and detritus from the surrounding trees just visible through the lights opposite.
But… it was just some kind of city utility building or something. It had been here forever, certainly since before her family moved here. She forced herself to move on, crossing 19th Avenue into the grove and onward down the unlit path.
The dark didn't look as dark to her as it should; the shadows softer, painted in blues and purples instead of unforgiving black. She hadn't really noticed it on the road, it only really occurred to her as she trod along the path toward the small playground inside. There were people there, a trio of boys, and she recognized one of them even in the dark and from such a distance; he was an older student, she'd caught glimpses of him once or twice in the halls of Lowell over the last two weeks. The other two she didn't; maybe she hadn't seen them, or maybe they went to ALHS instead.
They were drinking.
She paused, considering what to do. Perhaps it would be best to duck off the path or turn around, it's what she'd have done if she'd been stupid enough to come out here in any other circumstance… but she wasn't Eve, scared and fragile and human. She was Butterfly Ward, she was a knight, a superhero. How could she save the world if her night patrol got stopped by some seventeen year old boys?
Squaring her shoulders, she walked on down the path, doing her best to ignore them. She just had to walk on past them, just to the trees on the other side of the park, and she'd turn back out onto the road and nearly be there. She just had to ignore them whispering, them laughing.
"Halloweens not for a month, retard!" one of the boys called.
"Shut up, Jake, Jesus," another retorted. "You'll scare her off."
"Hey, come hang out! We got beer!" another called. What would a superhero do in this situation? Say something like, not now citizen, the city of San Francisco needs me!, right?
She couldn't quite manage that, so she sped up a bit instead, power-walking down the path. She had a mission, that was fine. She was ignoring distractions.
She wasn't looking, but she could hear one of them moving toward her. Hear the sound of his sneakers flicking through the dry grass, his breathing, the fabric of his clothes with each motion.
"Hey, come on. I don't think I've seen you around, you go to ALH?" he said. In her peripheral vision, she saw him reach out toward her wrist.
She snapped her hand away faster and more forcefully than she had intended, and the boy stumbled off balance, cutting in front of her. He was tall, much taller, feathered dirty blond hair, in a bright red Blink-182 t-shirt and torn jeans. He stumbled up in front of her and smiled, trying to play off his near-faceplant and look cool. It was the one from her school.
"You're a freshman, right? At Lowell?" he asked; there wasn't malice in his eyes, but there also wasn't any understanding of how vulnerable Butterfly Ward was feeling, why he might be coming off as intimidating. His friends were moving and something in her brain was screaming that they were coming to cut off her escape. "What is that, some kinda movie thing? Is that real metal?"
She took a step back and raised her arm defensively, and the small disc on her forearm twisted and unfolded into a shimmering, interlocking brass shield, shaped like a pair of butterfly wings. The boy's shocked face was still visible through a round loophole at the top, but it was strange. Blurry.
She was crying.
"Leave me alone!" she yelled, backing away. Backing into another one, recoiling, stuck in the middle as the voices got closer and the world seemed to collapse in on itself. They should have backed away, or stopped, or anything other than laugh and get closer.
"What the hell are you doing out here?"
"Come on, sit, calm down. Jesus."
"Guys, we're freaking her out."
"Shut up, dude, stop being a fag."
"She's crying though-"
"Jesus Christ, Eric, get her a fucking drink."
"Why are you crying? We're just-"
There was a rustle of fabric, a gust of wind, and the sound of metal whistled through the air. Butterfly Ward lowered her shield to see the boy closest with wide eyes, trembling, with a gleaming line of silver metal at his throat.
"Back away. All of you," the newcomer said. His voice was clear and level, deep and resonant, and it belonged to a man that had appeared among the three in an eyeblink. Illuminated only by the sodium light of the park building, Ward could still make out the long white cloak, the trim lavender coat and white sash, the white masquerade mask in stark contrast to the dark skin underneath and the curls of long, dark hair spilling over the side. His white-gloved hand held an ornate sabre, its layered basket hilt the shape of rose petals, perfectly steady, its razor's edge an inch from skin. "Now."
Two of them rushed to comply, one of them tripping over his feet and falling off the path into the dry, dusty grass, the can in his pocket rupturing and hissing from the fall. The one in the red shirt, the one from her school, though, filled with the idiot bravado of youth and alcohol, laughed, reaching into his pocket and flipping open a slim cell phone.
"Fuck off, dude, who the hell do-"
There was a whistle and a flash. The top half of the boy's phone clattered to the dirt, and the front of his tight-fitting t-shirt parted like paper torn on a perforated line, exposing a window of pale, intact skin under it.
"Now," the newcomer repeated, and the boy fled. The newcomer waited until they were out of sight, eyes scanning the park, and only when they were gone did he reach down a hand to Butterfly Ward. "My apologies, miss."
"... n-not at all. Who are you?" Butterfly Ward asked, blinking away tears as her eyes flicking to the hilt of the sword. The man's face twitched, just a moment, and then he released her hand and stepped well back, hands raised in front of him and well away from his sword.
"Just a stranger," he said. "I'll stay away, but you should know; you don't have to be scared of guys like that. You're stronger than that."
"I didn't want to hurt them either," she stammered, looking down to dust herself off. "I'm Butterfly Ward, who-"
She looked up, and he was gone. There was nothing but the wind, distant footsteps, and a single white rose pedal fluttering to the dirt.
🦋 Chapter 3 - At Home in Limbo (Part 2)
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
You scooped your bag onto your shoulder and glanced up, briefly, at the building stretching above you. Then you jumped, clearing a dozen feet and pushing lightly up and off the wall a dozen more. It wasn't forceful, you didn't need force; you were light as a feather, mass and gravity suggestions. Making your way up the buildings was no more difficult than walking down the street, the wind in your hair, cool air over your skin.
At the apex of your last jump, as you broke out into the sunlight, you flipped upright again. You let the pull of gravity draw you down again, landing atop the building with the neat footwork of a gymnast. You opened your eyes, breathing out, smiling.
There, over the sea of buildings, was the spire of the red and white tower. Between you and the next set of buildings was an eight-lane road. A big jump even for you.
You raced for the rail, stepped up onto it, and jumped. A bit more forcefully this time, the paint on the steel railing scraped away by your heeled sabaton, and then you were hanging in the air, high above the streets, weightless. Behind you, trailing dancing, shimmering light, was a mirage of orange and black wings.
You landed and rolled on the rooftop opposite, up on your feet, sprinting again. Up and over, feet barely grazing the tiles, the slightest force able to send your feather-light form racing on faster and faster. You laughed as a cluster of air conditioning fans blew you up onto a higher roof like a leaf on a breeze, as you raced up the sloped side of a tall hotel and slid down the other side, throwing yourself across the road. Ascending higher still as you raced up the inner corner of an L-shaped building, racing along and over the ductwork, touching the next building with just a single step before rocketing up and onto a raised beam holding a facade at the top of the next tower.
You'd never done this somewhere else, somewhere so different. The closely packed blocky buildings and their tangles of ductwork, on and on unbroken, was a novel playground, and it had been years since you'd been out like this, racing the wind, free.
Being Butterfly Ward had brought you so much pain. But it had also brought you this, and you could never begrudge that.
You kept the tower to your right, your north, moving along the edge of the highway. Your destination was just ahead, a straight shot, just past where the road forked; you could see it. You raced along the uneven rooftops and jumped up, crossing over toward a dark grey monolith with delightfully climbable looking balconies, up and up floor after floor until the roof. Another skyscraper, this one with a circular top, loomed just ahead, and you threw yourself across the impossible distance between them, falling short but stepping up the corner balconies like a staircase.
You saw her as you were descending the other side. She was perched atop a radio aerial atop a blocky office building, standing tall and bold and beautiful, the bow held down and her fingers on the string. The wash of emotions almost made you stumble as you landed, your knees weak, face warm, barely able to form the sound of her name.
"Butterfly Sage," you said, in barely more than a whisper. She nodded.
"Butterfly Ward," she acknowledged, nodding. She stepped out off the post, descending the rapidly reweaving staircase that formed itself in the air ahead of every step, her hand still on her bow and her eyes locked with yours. She looked different then when you last saw her; the loose black top and red skirt were frayed, the surface of the lacquered armour cracked like shattered porcelain. The dark makeup around her eyes was thick and roughly-applied, and her hair blew loose in the wind.
You expected her to say something else, but she didn't. She just stood there, eyes scanning the horizon, guarded, defensive. She had an arrow notched, and despite yourself you recoiled, your shield fluttering into shape on your arm. Her eyes snapped to yours and the string was drawn back, just an inch, and instinctively, you put your shield up and centred her in the loophole.
Her hand trembled as she drew the bow back.
"I…" she started, her face contorted with emotion, but then she finished her draw, the twisting strands forming the arrow coming to a sharp point. She was pulling her head away, torn between not wanting to look and an inability to avoid it. You'd come close, circling each other, close enough you bet she could put that arrow through your loophole. close enough it still might not stop you in time.
But she didn't want to be here. You could see it. She was scared, confused, she didn't understand what was happening any more than you. She didn't come here to threaten you, nor you her, but… all she knew was the enemy was back, and Butterfly Ward was here, and she knew more than anyone how easily friends could be subverted.
You don't know when she stopped trusting you, but you also knew you had to start trusting her.
You lowered your shield, letting it fold away, and stood up straight, the arrow pointed at your heart. She was breathing hard, eyes watering, and with great effort, she relaxed the bowstring, then let it fall from her grip. It dissolved back into frayed scraps before it hit the floor, and she collapsed to her knees after it.
You were at her side in an instant, arms around her, face pressed to hers as you held her as tight as you could. After a moment, you felt her arms around you in turn, nestling her head against your cheek, smearing a hot tear between you. You weren't sure which of you it had belonged to, but it felt right to share it.
"Why are you here?" she muttered against your ear.
"I told you I was coming," you reminded her, and she shook her head.
"I mean, you. Transformed," she said. "I felt it in the strings, I thought… her forces were already here, or-"
"Oh." You sighed. Right. "No, I just got lost. This was faster."
"... what?" she breathed. You winced.
"I got confused by all the signs at the train station, you know?"
She pulled back from the hug, staring at you.
"Ward, there's English on them. There's arrows," she said softly. You nodded sheepishly, a gauntleted hand going to the back of your neck as you broke into a guilty smile.
"I know," you admitted with a shrug. "I'm not very good at reading that either, I think."
The laughter overtook her slowly, starting her in her chest as a vibration that seemed to roll through her body. She threw her arms around your neck for support, bowed over by the force of it, unable to contain it.
She looked up into your eyes, smiling warmly, shaking her head in mock disappointment.
"I missed you so much," she said, then leaned in. Her soft lips met yours, and you just about melted into her arms, leaning back involuntarily in an invitation for her to catch you. God, how had you gone so long without this?
"Me too," you muttered against her lips. She pulled back, still grinning.
"You can be such an idiot sometimes," she said warmly. That was high praise; it meant you'd done something foolish for all the right reasons.
"Okay, but in my defence, I forgot about roaming charges, so I couldn't look up directions on my phone, so-"
Before you could finish, she pulled you in for another kiss, with something akin to desperation. Your fingers dug into the fabric at her back, hanging on for dear life, dragging the collar down to expose the pale skin of her neck. You leaned in, grazing your teeth greedily along the curve to her shoulder, even as her hands fumbled against your sides.
"Not fair, all the buckles…" she complained, giving up and pushing you down by your shoulders. You let yourself fall into your back, overjoyed as she straddled you and leaned in, her top falling open to-
There was a very pronounced electronic click-whirrrrr from somewhere behind her, and you both stopped dead. You glanced past Sage to see a young, wide-eyed woman in a suit standing in front of the rooftop door. She had an unlit cigarette in one hand and a bright yellow flip phone held out in the other. Staring.
Not knowing what else to do, you waved. The shutter sound played again, and a dark look went over Sage's face.
"Don't hurt her," you reminded her.
"I won't!" she assured you, swirling a finger casually in the air. Behind her, the woman stumbled as the wrist holding her phone was suddenly wrapped in string. "I'm just going to get her to delete it."
"Tell her we'll take a proper selfie with her if she does!" you insisted, watching as the hapless office lady pulled against the immovable cord. Butterfly Sage sighed, fixed her top, and stood up, saying something rapid-fire. You caught maybe three words in the entire conversation between them as you sat up and smoothed out your skirt.
The strings fell away from the woman's wrist, and Sage waved you over with a begrudging expression to take up position with the office lady and smile for the camera. She raced back inside, her cigarette forgotten, and you glanced out over the side of the building.
"We should go somewhere quieter, before she gets her friends," you suggested eagerly, then paused. "Um… but maybe not your apartment."
"Why not?" she asked. You took a deep breath to steel yourself; this would be a serious sacrifice.
"Because… Sage, we really need to talk. About the last year, about… so much." You took a deep breath, then leaned against her shoulder. "…and if we go somewhere with that much privacy, um…" You trailed off wiith the clink of your armoured fingers as blush overtook your face. She smiled.
"We wouldn't do much talking, huh?" she summarized. You nodded, glad she'd spared you the need to spell it out. "That's fair. And… yeah."
You put a hand on her shoulder, trying to get her attention, so she could see you smiling. You were hurt, really hurt, you were maybe even a little mad, but you couldn't show that. It was hard, putting your feeling aside that way, but if you started crying, she'd just do whatever it took to make you stop, and you had to be better than that.
"Yeah. Here, I think I know a spot. Private, but not too private."
The sun was beginning to sink down out of the sky when the two of you sat; you'd maybe got distracted, taken the long way. You'd settled at the top of one of the supporting arches on Tokyo Tower, maybe three stories off the ground, kicking your feet out in the evening breeze. The tower's position on a hill meant the view from the west facing arch let you see through the wall of tall apartments into an area of smaller buildings, walled in again by more highrises.
"Where do you live, exactly?" you asked, and Butterfly Sage pointed out into the mass of buildings.
"You can't quite see it, but see the building with the green roof?" she asked. You leaned over to follow the path of her finger, squinting at the buildings on the far side of the highway. The sun was beginning to intrude on your view, but the light had never bothered you, not in this form.
"... nope."
"To the left of the big building with the curved side, there?" she elaborated.
"... don't see that either."
"Really? It's just to the right and down from the big octagonal building, right in front of the road," she continued. You spotted that building, at least, jutting out from the tiny blocks around it and casting a long shadow across the buildings. You followed her instructions from there, squinting across the distance.
"Okay, I see it now!"
"Between those two, little white building," she concluded proudly. "It's very nice."
"Cool! And where's this school you've been going to?" you asked excitedly.
"Oh, that's behind us, on the far side of the palace," she said. You turned and walked along the beam until you could see past the spine of the tower; gazing past the dark splotch of the trees around the palace. "You probably can't see it from here, but it's only about half an hour by train."
"Wow," you said uselessly. "That's pretty much the same as my trip to USF, neat!"
"But you're just going a couple blocks over," she said. You paused, trying to work out the distance, glancing back and forth and comparing it to the views you'd had above Sunset District. You held out a thumb and used the method Esmé taught you, measuring building by building in one direction, then the other, alternating eyes and measuring the jump.
"Well, it looks like about four klicks to the palace, and it's about four miles to school in a straight line, so it's the same distance, I think?" you guessed. Sage frowned, took a deep breath, and shook her head.
"Ward, a kilometer is less than a mile," she said, sounding like she was regretting every syllable.
"Right, so how many kilometers is a klick?" you asked, remeasuring just to be sure.
"... you said you wanted to talk?" Ward offered, and you gave up on your estimations and sat back down, taking her hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze.
"Yeah, we really gotta. I…" You choked back your feelings, trying to focus on what was important. "I know it's not easy, but I need you to… talk to me. Tell me what's going on. You promised, remember?"
She stared out over the cityscape, biting her lip, her free hand twisting up in the shimmering fabric of her skirt. Butterfly Sage was a lot of things; a paragon of self-control and self-discipline, a fearless Knight, driven and beautiful. But she wasn't much for sharing.
It took her a long time before she could talk.
"I can't tell you everything, I... not yet," she began. It was very, very hard not to snap and demand she at least tell you anything.
"It's okay," you assured her, and her hand balled into a fist.
"It's not. Ward, I… Some stuff happened. It's… I'm sorry," she managed, then she stopped. She slipped her hand from your grip, sat up straight, and breathed. Eyes closed, moving her hands in time. Three breaths. "Some… some things came up at the funeral. Really, I… I had to come visit my aunt and get answers. That's why I said I was staying an extra week, okay?"
You nodded, laying your hand out in your lap as an invitation. She took another deep breath.
"I… I can't go into it. I need…" she trailed off. "I'm sorry."
You sighed. That… really wasn't good enough, and it hurt that it wasn't, because she was trying. You weren't sure why this was so hard for her; you had the opposite problem, you had to learn slowly and painfully not to overshare. You always figured it was just as hard in the other direction, but that excuse was wearing thinner and thinner.
She used to be better at this.
"Which aunt was this?" you asked, probing for any information at all.
"Aunt Keiko," Sage said. "The one you met."
"Oh! The scary lady," you said without thinking. Sage let out the saddest little laugh you thought you'd ever heard. "Sorry, that's just how I remember her!"
She'd been very stern, extremely strict about not letting either of you out of her sight, and had been very short with both of you, which had stood out a lot compared to the cheerful, laid-back Grampa Okamoto. You probably carried a bit of resentment in no small part because she kept coming and 'checking in' on the two of you at night, which had probably contributed somewhat to the two of you hitting the snooze button on your gay awakening.
"... well, she's very nice. She gave me a place to stay while I thought things over," Sage explained. You watched her face closely, watching her eyes flick back and forth as she thought hard about something. You saw the moment she shifted gears, redirecting the conversation to something she could handle, though away from what you weren't sure. "Remember before I left in 2010, I had to do all that paperwork?"
"Yeah, something about your birthday?" It was hard not to remember; you'd just moved in together at the time, and she'd spent a few evenings with copies of the printout and a laptop for reference, painstakingly redoing her work over and over to get all the characters right. "I can't remember exactly why."
"I didn't tell you," she admitted. "You can't have dual citizenship after 21. A green card's kind of a grey area. The form was me affirming my citizenship, and promising to renounce any others."
"Oh. But… wait, you don't have any other citizenship, that's why you have a green card," you pointed out.
"As I said, a bit of a grey area. And, uh… next year I have to renew that, and it's… delicate. If I get in trouble, if Team Butterfly stuff comes out, if we… get married…" She paused at that last one, sighing. "Eventually somebody's going to send me a letter. Some bureaucrat who doesn't know a thing about me is going to ask me to choose who I am, and I'll have to answer."
You looked away, out over the cityscape. You didn't know how to respond; it wasn't something you'd ever thought about. Every branch of your family had been in America for generations. The closest ties you had was your grandma Hama (Grandhama, to be formal), and when you'd asked her about Japan as a little kid, she'd said it was crowded and poor and everything had burnt down, bad enough she'd lied about her age and got married to a GI to get out. She'd usually then joke that if they tried to send her back she'd nail her feet to the floor, ha!
But it was very abstract to you; the closest it had come to real was researching the time a grandfather you'd never met had spent in an internment camp for a class project. And even that hadn't made you feel any less American; in fact, you were pretty sure being angry about the way America had treated your ancestors was just about the most American thing you could be.
The sun was starting to descend low now, dipping behind clouds, painting the sky in pink and orange as it dove for the horizon. The wind was getting colder.
"So you were trying to figure out your answer?" you guessed finally, turning to look at her. She nodded, slowly, not meeting your eyes. "Did you?"
She nodded again, slowly, reluctantly. Oh.
"Okay," you said finally, your voice small.
"That's why I stayed, went to school here, as long as I could. I'd stay if it weren't for you," she said. "I didn't know how to… explain any of this. I was scared I'd tell you and you'd freak out."
"So you didn't, and just let me freak out on my own," you said, the words escaping before you could stop them.
"I'm sorry," she replied. "I… I kept putting it off, settling on an answer, telling myself I just needed one more week to think about it."
"And if you stayed just a few weeks longer, you wouldn't even have to make the choice. Somebody behind a desk would make it for you," you summarized.
"I'm an idiot," she said, and you took her hand again, squeezing tight.
"Yeah. You are," you said sadly. "Do you still love me?"
"Yes," she replied. This was instant, unhesitating, something she could share. "Every time we called, I-"
She paused as somebody shouted below, and you glanced down to see a little black and white police car parked under the tower, alongside a small collection of gawking spectators. How long had they been there?
One of the two cops raised a bullhorn and yelled something about staying put, and something about…
"...Lift car?" you asked Sage.
"Yeah, like a cherrypicker. They think we're stuck," she said, then stood up to project her voice. The two had a conversation that was surprisingly followable even with your extremely limited Japanese. Something like:
We're okay! You still have to get down! It's fine really! Something about… cosplayers? We're not cosplayers! What? I said-
"-fuck this," Sage muttered, then jumped. There was a collective gasp and screams from below, before she landed deftly on an invisible string and raised her hands out. Ta-dah!
There was a stunned silence from below, and conversation you couldn't hear between some of the officers. You did catch somebody saying something about American superheroes. One of them handed the metaphone to another, who stepped up in front of the small crowd.
"What'd he say?" you asked. Something about children.
"He says we should still get down, we're setting a bad example for kids," Butterfly Sage explained, walking the staircase of strings back to your perch.
"Oh, yeah, he's right though," you admitted. "Kids do look up to us." Literally, you were three stories up.
"Kids in San Francisco looked up to us. Like ten years ago. These kids probably don't even know about us," Sage retorted.
"That little girl has a Butterfly Heart backpack," you pointed out triumphantly. "See, we are a bad example! What if she tries to climb up here and be like her heroes?"
"... who the hell is selling those backpacks and why aren't we getting paid," Sage muttered, giving you a hand to help you up. "I… I'm sorry, Ward. I get if you can't forgive me, I really do."
You glanced down at the crowd, then back to her. She looked like you felt, and you knew she'd never get over crying in front of a crowd.
"Hey. Take me to your place," you said, smiling. You weren't exactly sure what you were planning, not really, but this had been hard for you and for her, and it was promising to get harder. But she needed comfort, and you did too, and as frustrating and hurtful as this was, you did love her so, so much. If she was ending things, then you were going to get through this breakup together.
"You sure?" she asked. "After everything?"
"I"m sure."
If she could put this off for a year, you could put it off for a night.
Two kiicks of night-time cityscape, whatever that was, disappeared under your racing feet. It had always been difficult to stay sad like this, sailing through the air, just one or two steps carrying you a hundred meters across the city.
Sage grabbed your hand and redirected you toward a building, a balcony nine stories up, and you threaded the needle perfectly, landing and stepped down lightly off the railing. She leaned over the edge, still holding your hand, and you joined her, staring down into the street below.
"Wow. This is like, fancy-fancy," you said, scanning the buildings below. "You got a balcony and everything."
"Yeah," she said, looking nervous. "So, I, uh… the place is a bit…"
You reached up and clutched your necklace, taking a deep, steadying breath and closing your eyes. The weight seemed to return to the world as the armour fell away, vanishing around you with a soft shimmer. When you opened your eyes, Sage was gone; there was Kimiyo, in person, for the first time in a year, and your heart soared all over again. She was wearing that stiff, strangely formal outfit she'd settled on, a grey blouse and black skirt cut severe and angular, long hair in a half-updo, secured in a little double loop. Nothing like how she used to present herself, yet just as beautiful.
"Kimmy, your standards for what a mess is are inhuman," you retorted, turning to the door. Kimiyo shrugged apologetically and reached for the door, sliding it open and quickly removing her shoes before stepping inside. You stopped yourself just at the threshold and did the same, gleefully retrieving your airplane slippers from your backpack and sliding them on. Prepared!
Kimiyo stalked across the room and hit the light, and a dull light began to build in the compact fluorescents on the ceiling, slowly revealing her room. You recognized this room from her calls, and in fact, there was her laptop on a tiny little desk. Strung across the ceiling were strings with watercolours hung up to dry. There was a chair.
And nothing else.
"Wow. This place is… way bigger than I imagined," you admitted, looking around. Kimiyo said the place was small, but it didn't feel small. With nothing in it, it felt bigger than home, and those two doors looked like they led into bedrooms. "Wait, you didn't tell me you had roommates?"
"I don't," she said, sounding confused.
"... how much do you pay for rent?" you followed up.
"I… don't. My Aunt is letting me stay here," she admitted. "She owns the place."
"Oh, it's a condo. That's handy," you said.
"... no, like, she owns the building," Kimiyo clarified.
Oh.
Kimiyo's family were always 'rich', but her dad was, like, a super big deal computer engineer guy, so it really wasn't surprising that she had a fancy big house in Forest Hill with cool cars and a pool and all the new game consoles. But it had, over the years, dawned on you that Kimiyo's family had real money even before her dad took a job in Silicon Valley.
Kimiyo would just say her family owned 'a construction company', and for many years you'd taken that to mean it the way Riley's husband Grant owned 'a construction company' of five full-time workers and a rotating cast of contractors, all of whom Riley silently loathed. It… might be bigger than that.
Your best guess for why she was gone so long had been some kind of wacky inheritance drama, and honestly, if she stood to inherit a kabillion yen from her kindly old grandfather, all was instantly forgiven.
"Well, uh, rent went up again back home, so like… I get it," you joked weakly, looking around the place. It did not look like somewhere a person had lived for a year, there was nothing. The little kitchen area had a drying rack with one plate, one bowl, and one glass. An umbrella, hat, and coat were hung in an otherwise empty closet by the door when you and Kimiyo dropped your shoes off. "Okay, speaking of renting, if you did have to pay rent-"
"90,000 yen a month," she said. You paused in the hall as you thought about that, trying to remember what you paid for the 5000 yen bills as Kimiyo pulled out her phone and tapped something in. "About eight-fifty."
"FUCK OFF," you snapped. "Oh my god! No."
"I know."
"We're paying 28 hundred now and it's gonna go up more," you cried, feeling like you were hyperventilating. You had to lean against the wall for support. "Oh God, how do I move here? I could, like, relatives-"
"Not how it works," Kimiyo countered. Right, otherwise she wouldn't be in this situation.
"Marry me?" you asked.
"Can't," Kimiyo said simply. Fair, you were about to break up.
"Fuck! I… completely understand wanting to stay here, Jesus," you said, cradling your head in your hands. Eight fifty… your mom charged you more rent than that.
"As I said, if it weren't for you, I'd stay," she said sadly.
"No shit. If they tried to send me back, I'd nail my feet to the floor," you recited without thinking, barely aware what she was saying. Eight-fifty. A month. In San Francisco that wouldn't get you a coffin.
You followed her dumbly as she slid open one of the doors to what must be her bedroom, and that's when it really hit you. There was a closet in the corner, open, but empty. Her travel suitcase was sitting atop a low table with her bedding on the lower shelf, her clothes folded neatly inside it. The airline tag was still hanging off the handle.
This didn't look like the home of somebody who planned to stay. This was somebody who woke up every morning ready to sleep in another bed tomorrow. Somebody who was telling herself every night here would be her last.
"Kimmy?" you said quietly. She turned from the suitcase; she was getting out and unspooling her power cable to plug in her phone.
"Yes?"
You thought about it. Unsure what to ask, unsure what the point of asking even was. You felt so torn, none of this felt real. You were prepared for her to slam the door in your face, and you were prepared for her to apologize and explain everything and to tear the clothes off each other in a whirlwind of passion. You weren't prepared for awkward, and in retrospect that was stupid. What else would it be?
She carefully resumed unwinding the cable, and laid her phone down on the table, still clearly expecting you to say something. You finally found the words.
"I still love you too," you said finally.
You regretted saying it almost immediately. You did love her, so, so much, but you knew the thing a good person would do, a hero would do, the thing Butterfly Ward would do, is let the person they love go so they could be happy. That's what love is, right? Giving without expectation, wanting somebody else to be happy more? Anything else was just selfishness.
What would saying that accomplish except make her feel even worse? Wasn't this hard enough for her?
"I'm sorry," you added. She shook her head, smiling.
"It's okay. It's going to be okay," she said, moving to your side. "Hey, look at me. I'm so sorry, but I'm here. It's going be okay, I'll make it up to yo-"
You kissed her again. It was selfish and stupid and desperate, but she was right there and you needed her so badly. It wasn't fair to have a last night together without knowing that's what it was; you could, at least, have this.
She leaned against it immediately, pressed against you, gripping the straps of your travel backpack and pulling you against her. As fiercely desperate as you and far more focused, pulling the bag off your arms, grabbing at the front of your shirt, her lips never leaving yours. Her hands snaked around your back-
"New bra, front clasp," you managed.
-to your front, the plastic clasp giving a little snap. Then she wiggled out of your arms, grinning madly as she stared. Then she shook her head, as if freeing herself from a trance, and leaned down to pulled out her futon and the mat and, with shaking hands.
"Not to besmirch cultural whatsits…" you said, breathing hard. "-but this seems way less conducive to this than just, like, a bed." Without looking, she pointed a finger at you and swirled, the ropes looping around your wrists individually and pulling them out in front of you before politely tying themselves into a knot.
"Quiet," she said, laying out the duvet.
"Yes ma'am," you responded, face hot and smiling widely. She placed the last pillow, then the ropes untied themselves with a little swish of her finger… only for the improvised cuffs to pull you forward onto the mattress with an irresistible force. They pulled all the way up over your head and twisted around one another, forcing you to turn onto your back.
She was kneeling beside you, retying your wrists together with a little figure eight motion, looking at you the way a spider probably looked at a fly in her web.
"I seem to recall a lot of promises you made over the last year, Butterfly Ward," she said, grinning. You suddenly fully turned around on the stupid secretary getup, evil businesslady was really doing it for you. "Isn't that right?"
"There's… there's a blindfold in my bag," you told her. Looking pleasantly surprised, she unzipped it and drew out the little sleep mask, still in its plastic bag. "Perks of Premium Economy, right?"
"Oh! I'm glad you remembered my advice," she said, tearing the bag open. Haha, yes, you definitely remembered whatever advice that had been. "Now where were we?"
"Something about how you'll never get away with this?" you suggested, basking in her joy as she looped the mask over your head. You didn't want this to end, you wanted anything else, but if this was it, then you should indulge.
"Honestly, I didn't think I would," she said. Then the world went dark as she pulled down the mask, and you felt the heat of her lips against your neck.
At the apex of your last jump, as you broke out into the sunlight, you flipped upright again. You let the pull of gravity draw you down again, landing atop the building with the neat footwork of a gymnast. You opened your eyes, breathing out, smiling.
There, over the sea of buildings, was the spire of the red and white tower. Between you and the next set of buildings was an eight-lane road. A big jump even for you.
You raced for the rail, stepped up onto it, and jumped. A bit more forcefully this time, the paint on the steel railing scraped away by your heeled sabaton, and then you were hanging in the air, high above the streets, weightless. Behind you, trailing dancing, shimmering light, was a mirage of orange and black wings.
You landed and rolled on the rooftop opposite, up on your feet, sprinting again. Up and over, feet barely grazing the tiles, the slightest force able to send your feather-light form racing on faster and faster. You laughed as a cluster of air conditioning fans blew you up onto a higher roof like a leaf on a breeze, as you raced up the sloped side of a tall hotel and slid down the other side, throwing yourself across the road. Ascending higher still as you raced up the inner corner of an L-shaped building, racing along and over the ductwork, touching the next building with just a single step before rocketing up and onto a raised beam holding a facade at the top of the next tower.
You'd never done this somewhere else, somewhere so different. The closely packed blocky buildings and their tangles of ductwork, on and on unbroken, was a novel playground, and it had been years since you'd been out like this, racing the wind, free.
Being Butterfly Ward had brought you so much pain. But it had also brought you this, and you could never begrudge that.
You kept the tower to your right, your north, moving along the edge of the highway. Your destination was just ahead, a straight shot, just past where the road forked; you could see it. You raced along the uneven rooftops and jumped up, crossing over toward a dark grey monolith with delightfully climbable looking balconies, up and up floor after floor until the roof. Another skyscraper, this one with a circular top, loomed just ahead, and you threw yourself across the impossible distance between them, falling short but stepping up the corner balconies like a staircase.
You saw her as you were descending the other side. She was perched atop a radio aerial atop a blocky office building, standing tall and bold and beautiful, the bow held down and her fingers on the string. The wash of emotions almost made you stumble as you landed, your knees weak, face warm, barely able to form the sound of her name.
"Butterfly Sage," you said, in barely more than a whisper. She nodded.
"Butterfly Ward," she acknowledged, nodding. She stepped out off the post, descending the rapidly reweaving staircase that formed itself in the air ahead of every step, her hand still on her bow and her eyes locked with yours. She looked different then when you last saw her; the loose black top and red skirt were frayed, the surface of the lacquered armour cracked like shattered porcelain. The dark makeup around her eyes was thick and roughly-applied, and her hair blew loose in the wind.
You expected her to say something else, but she didn't. She just stood there, eyes scanning the horizon, guarded, defensive. She had an arrow notched, and despite yourself you recoiled, your shield fluttering into shape on your arm. Her eyes snapped to yours and the string was drawn back, just an inch, and instinctively, you put your shield up and centred her in the loophole.
Her hand trembled as she drew the bow back.
"I…" she started, her face contorted with emotion, but then she finished her draw, the twisting strands forming the arrow coming to a sharp point. She was pulling her head away, torn between not wanting to look and an inability to avoid it. You'd come close, circling each other, close enough you bet she could put that arrow through your loophole. close enough it still might not stop you in time.
But she didn't want to be here. You could see it. She was scared, confused, she didn't understand what was happening any more than you. She didn't come here to threaten you, nor you her, but… all she knew was the enemy was back, and Butterfly Ward was here, and she knew more than anyone how easily friends could be subverted.
You don't know when she stopped trusting you, but you also knew you had to start trusting her.
You lowered your shield, letting it fold away, and stood up straight, the arrow pointed at your heart. She was breathing hard, eyes watering, and with great effort, she relaxed the bowstring, then let it fall from her grip. It dissolved back into frayed scraps before it hit the floor, and she collapsed to her knees after it.
You were at her side in an instant, arms around her, face pressed to hers as you held her as tight as you could. After a moment, you felt her arms around you in turn, nestling her head against your cheek, smearing a hot tear between you. You weren't sure which of you it had belonged to, but it felt right to share it.
"Why are you here?" she muttered against your ear.
"I told you I was coming," you reminded her, and she shook her head.
"I mean, you. Transformed," she said. "I felt it in the strings, I thought… her forces were already here, or-"
"Oh." You sighed. Right. "No, I just got lost. This was faster."
"... what?" she breathed. You winced.
"I got confused by all the signs at the train station, you know?"
She pulled back from the hug, staring at you.
"Ward, there's English on them. There's arrows," she said softly. You nodded sheepishly, a gauntleted hand going to the back of your neck as you broke into a guilty smile.
"I know," you admitted with a shrug. "I'm not very good at reading that either, I think."
The laughter overtook her slowly, starting her in her chest as a vibration that seemed to roll through her body. She threw her arms around your neck for support, bowed over by the force of it, unable to contain it.
She looked up into your eyes, smiling warmly, shaking her head in mock disappointment.
"I missed you so much," she said, then leaned in. Her soft lips met yours, and you just about melted into her arms, leaning back involuntarily in an invitation for her to catch you. God, how had you gone so long without this?
"Me too," you muttered against her lips. She pulled back, still grinning.
"You can be such an idiot sometimes," she said warmly. That was high praise; it meant you'd done something foolish for all the right reasons.
"Okay, but in my defence, I forgot about roaming charges, so I couldn't look up directions on my phone, so-"
Before you could finish, she pulled you in for another kiss, with something akin to desperation. Your fingers dug into the fabric at her back, hanging on for dear life, dragging the collar down to expose the pale skin of her neck. You leaned in, grazing your teeth greedily along the curve to her shoulder, even as her hands fumbled against your sides.
"Not fair, all the buckles…" she complained, giving up and pushing you down by your shoulders. You let yourself fall into your back, overjoyed as she straddled you and leaned in, her top falling open to-
There was a very pronounced electronic click-whirrrrr from somewhere behind her, and you both stopped dead. You glanced past Sage to see a young, wide-eyed woman in a suit standing in front of the rooftop door. She had an unlit cigarette in one hand and a bright yellow flip phone held out in the other. Staring.
Not knowing what else to do, you waved. The shutter sound played again, and a dark look went over Sage's face.
"Don't hurt her," you reminded her.
"I won't!" she assured you, swirling a finger casually in the air. Behind her, the woman stumbled as the wrist holding her phone was suddenly wrapped in string. "I'm just going to get her to delete it."
"Tell her we'll take a proper selfie with her if she does!" you insisted, watching as the hapless office lady pulled against the immovable cord. Butterfly Sage sighed, fixed her top, and stood up, saying something rapid-fire. You caught maybe three words in the entire conversation between them as you sat up and smoothed out your skirt.
The strings fell away from the woman's wrist, and Sage waved you over with a begrudging expression to take up position with the office lady and smile for the camera. She raced back inside, her cigarette forgotten, and you glanced out over the side of the building.
"We should go somewhere quieter, before she gets her friends," you suggested eagerly, then paused. "Um… but maybe not your apartment."
"Why not?" she asked. You took a deep breath to steel yourself; this would be a serious sacrifice.
"Because… Sage, we really need to talk. About the last year, about… so much." You took a deep breath, then leaned against her shoulder. "…and if we go somewhere with that much privacy, um…" You trailed off wiith the clink of your armoured fingers as blush overtook your face. She smiled.
"We wouldn't do much talking, huh?" she summarized. You nodded, glad she'd spared you the need to spell it out. "That's fair. And… yeah."
You put a hand on her shoulder, trying to get her attention, so she could see you smiling. You were hurt, really hurt, you were maybe even a little mad, but you couldn't show that. It was hard, putting your feeling aside that way, but if you started crying, she'd just do whatever it took to make you stop, and you had to be better than that.
"Yeah. Here, I think I know a spot. Private, but not too private."
🦋
The sun was beginning to sink down out of the sky when the two of you sat; you'd maybe got distracted, taken the long way. You'd settled at the top of one of the supporting arches on Tokyo Tower, maybe three stories off the ground, kicking your feet out in the evening breeze. The tower's position on a hill meant the view from the west facing arch let you see through the wall of tall apartments into an area of smaller buildings, walled in again by more highrises.
"Where do you live, exactly?" you asked, and Butterfly Sage pointed out into the mass of buildings.
"You can't quite see it, but see the building with the green roof?" she asked. You leaned over to follow the path of her finger, squinting at the buildings on the far side of the highway. The sun was beginning to intrude on your view, but the light had never bothered you, not in this form.
"... nope."
"To the left of the big building with the curved side, there?" she elaborated.
"... don't see that either."
"Really? It's just to the right and down from the big octagonal building, right in front of the road," she continued. You spotted that building, at least, jutting out from the tiny blocks around it and casting a long shadow across the buildings. You followed her instructions from there, squinting across the distance.
"Okay, I see it now!"
"Between those two, little white building," she concluded proudly. "It's very nice."
"Cool! And where's this school you've been going to?" you asked excitedly.
"Oh, that's behind us, on the far side of the palace," she said. You turned and walked along the beam until you could see past the spine of the tower; gazing past the dark splotch of the trees around the palace. "You probably can't see it from here, but it's only about half an hour by train."
"Wow," you said uselessly. "That's pretty much the same as my trip to USF, neat!"
"But you're just going a couple blocks over," she said. You paused, trying to work out the distance, glancing back and forth and comparing it to the views you'd had above Sunset District. You held out a thumb and used the method Esmé taught you, measuring building by building in one direction, then the other, alternating eyes and measuring the jump.
"Well, it looks like about four klicks to the palace, and it's about four miles to school in a straight line, so it's the same distance, I think?" you guessed. Sage frowned, took a deep breath, and shook her head.
"Ward, a kilometer is less than a mile," she said, sounding like she was regretting every syllable.
"Right, so how many kilometers is a klick?" you asked, remeasuring just to be sure.
"... you said you wanted to talk?" Ward offered, and you gave up on your estimations and sat back down, taking her hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze.
"Yeah, we really gotta. I…" You choked back your feelings, trying to focus on what was important. "I know it's not easy, but I need you to… talk to me. Tell me what's going on. You promised, remember?"
She stared out over the cityscape, biting her lip, her free hand twisting up in the shimmering fabric of her skirt. Butterfly Sage was a lot of things; a paragon of self-control and self-discipline, a fearless Knight, driven and beautiful. But she wasn't much for sharing.
It took her a long time before she could talk.
"I can't tell you everything, I... not yet," she began. It was very, very hard not to snap and demand she at least tell you anything.
"It's okay," you assured her, and her hand balled into a fist.
"It's not. Ward, I… Some stuff happened. It's… I'm sorry," she managed, then she stopped. She slipped her hand from your grip, sat up straight, and breathed. Eyes closed, moving her hands in time. Three breaths. "Some… some things came up at the funeral. Really, I… I had to come visit my aunt and get answers. That's why I said I was staying an extra week, okay?"
You nodded, laying your hand out in your lap as an invitation. She took another deep breath.
"I… I can't go into it. I need…" she trailed off. "I'm sorry."
You sighed. That… really wasn't good enough, and it hurt that it wasn't, because she was trying. You weren't sure why this was so hard for her; you had the opposite problem, you had to learn slowly and painfully not to overshare. You always figured it was just as hard in the other direction, but that excuse was wearing thinner and thinner.
She used to be better at this.
"Which aunt was this?" you asked, probing for any information at all.
"Aunt Keiko," Sage said. "The one you met."
"Oh! The scary lady," you said without thinking. Sage let out the saddest little laugh you thought you'd ever heard. "Sorry, that's just how I remember her!"
She'd been very stern, extremely strict about not letting either of you out of her sight, and had been very short with both of you, which had stood out a lot compared to the cheerful, laid-back Grampa Okamoto. You probably carried a bit of resentment in no small part because she kept coming and 'checking in' on the two of you at night, which had probably contributed somewhat to the two of you hitting the snooze button on your gay awakening.
"... well, she's very nice. She gave me a place to stay while I thought things over," Sage explained. You watched her face closely, watching her eyes flick back and forth as she thought hard about something. You saw the moment she shifted gears, redirecting the conversation to something she could handle, though away from what you weren't sure. "Remember before I left in 2010, I had to do all that paperwork?"
"Yeah, something about your birthday?" It was hard not to remember; you'd just moved in together at the time, and she'd spent a few evenings with copies of the printout and a laptop for reference, painstakingly redoing her work over and over to get all the characters right. "I can't remember exactly why."
"I didn't tell you," she admitted. "You can't have dual citizenship after 21. A green card's kind of a grey area. The form was me affirming my citizenship, and promising to renounce any others."
"Oh. But… wait, you don't have any other citizenship, that's why you have a green card," you pointed out.
"As I said, a bit of a grey area. And, uh… next year I have to renew that, and it's… delicate. If I get in trouble, if Team Butterfly stuff comes out, if we… get married…" She paused at that last one, sighing. "Eventually somebody's going to send me a letter. Some bureaucrat who doesn't know a thing about me is going to ask me to choose who I am, and I'll have to answer."
You looked away, out over the cityscape. You didn't know how to respond; it wasn't something you'd ever thought about. Every branch of your family had been in America for generations. The closest ties you had was your grandma Hama (Grandhama, to be formal), and when you'd asked her about Japan as a little kid, she'd said it was crowded and poor and everything had burnt down, bad enough she'd lied about her age and got married to a GI to get out. She'd usually then joke that if they tried to send her back she'd nail her feet to the floor, ha!
But it was very abstract to you; the closest it had come to real was researching the time a grandfather you'd never met had spent in an internment camp for a class project. And even that hadn't made you feel any less American; in fact, you were pretty sure being angry about the way America had treated your ancestors was just about the most American thing you could be.
The sun was starting to descend low now, dipping behind clouds, painting the sky in pink and orange as it dove for the horizon. The wind was getting colder.
"So you were trying to figure out your answer?" you guessed finally, turning to look at her. She nodded, slowly, not meeting your eyes. "Did you?"
She nodded again, slowly, reluctantly. Oh.
"Okay," you said finally, your voice small.
"That's why I stayed, went to school here, as long as I could. I'd stay if it weren't for you," she said. "I didn't know how to… explain any of this. I was scared I'd tell you and you'd freak out."
"So you didn't, and just let me freak out on my own," you said, the words escaping before you could stop them.
"I'm sorry," she replied. "I… I kept putting it off, settling on an answer, telling myself I just needed one more week to think about it."
"And if you stayed just a few weeks longer, you wouldn't even have to make the choice. Somebody behind a desk would make it for you," you summarized.
"I'm an idiot," she said, and you took her hand again, squeezing tight.
"Yeah. You are," you said sadly. "Do you still love me?"
"Yes," she replied. This was instant, unhesitating, something she could share. "Every time we called, I-"
She paused as somebody shouted below, and you glanced down to see a little black and white police car parked under the tower, alongside a small collection of gawking spectators. How long had they been there?
One of the two cops raised a bullhorn and yelled something about staying put, and something about…
"...Lift car?" you asked Sage.
"Yeah, like a cherrypicker. They think we're stuck," she said, then stood up to project her voice. The two had a conversation that was surprisingly followable even with your extremely limited Japanese. Something like:
We're okay! You still have to get down! It's fine really! Something about… cosplayers? We're not cosplayers! What? I said-
"-fuck this," Sage muttered, then jumped. There was a collective gasp and screams from below, before she landed deftly on an invisible string and raised her hands out. Ta-dah!
There was a stunned silence from below, and conversation you couldn't hear between some of the officers. You did catch somebody saying something about American superheroes. One of them handed the metaphone to another, who stepped up in front of the small crowd.
"What'd he say?" you asked. Something about children.
"He says we should still get down, we're setting a bad example for kids," Butterfly Sage explained, walking the staircase of strings back to your perch.
"Oh, yeah, he's right though," you admitted. "Kids do look up to us." Literally, you were three stories up.
"Kids in San Francisco looked up to us. Like ten years ago. These kids probably don't even know about us," Sage retorted.
"That little girl has a Butterfly Heart backpack," you pointed out triumphantly. "See, we are a bad example! What if she tries to climb up here and be like her heroes?"
"... who the hell is selling those backpacks and why aren't we getting paid," Sage muttered, giving you a hand to help you up. "I… I'm sorry, Ward. I get if you can't forgive me, I really do."
You glanced down at the crowd, then back to her. She looked like you felt, and you knew she'd never get over crying in front of a crowd.
"Hey. Take me to your place," you said, smiling. You weren't exactly sure what you were planning, not really, but this had been hard for you and for her, and it was promising to get harder. But she needed comfort, and you did too, and as frustrating and hurtful as this was, you did love her so, so much. If she was ending things, then you were going to get through this breakup together.
"You sure?" she asked. "After everything?"
"I"m sure."
If she could put this off for a year, you could put it off for a night.
🦋
Two kiicks of night-time cityscape, whatever that was, disappeared under your racing feet. It had always been difficult to stay sad like this, sailing through the air, just one or two steps carrying you a hundred meters across the city.
Sage grabbed your hand and redirected you toward a building, a balcony nine stories up, and you threaded the needle perfectly, landing and stepped down lightly off the railing. She leaned over the edge, still holding your hand, and you joined her, staring down into the street below.
"Wow. This is like, fancy-fancy," you said, scanning the buildings below. "You got a balcony and everything."
"Yeah," she said, looking nervous. "So, I, uh… the place is a bit…"
You reached up and clutched your necklace, taking a deep, steadying breath and closing your eyes. The weight seemed to return to the world as the armour fell away, vanishing around you with a soft shimmer. When you opened your eyes, Sage was gone; there was Kimiyo, in person, for the first time in a year, and your heart soared all over again. She was wearing that stiff, strangely formal outfit she'd settled on, a grey blouse and black skirt cut severe and angular, long hair in a half-updo, secured in a little double loop. Nothing like how she used to present herself, yet just as beautiful.
"Kimmy, your standards for what a mess is are inhuman," you retorted, turning to the door. Kimiyo shrugged apologetically and reached for the door, sliding it open and quickly removing her shoes before stepping inside. You stopped yourself just at the threshold and did the same, gleefully retrieving your airplane slippers from your backpack and sliding them on. Prepared!
Kimiyo stalked across the room and hit the light, and a dull light began to build in the compact fluorescents on the ceiling, slowly revealing her room. You recognized this room from her calls, and in fact, there was her laptop on a tiny little desk. Strung across the ceiling were strings with watercolours hung up to dry. There was a chair.
And nothing else.
"Wow. This place is… way bigger than I imagined," you admitted, looking around. Kimiyo said the place was small, but it didn't feel small. With nothing in it, it felt bigger than home, and those two doors looked like they led into bedrooms. "Wait, you didn't tell me you had roommates?"
"I don't," she said, sounding confused.
"... how much do you pay for rent?" you followed up.
"I… don't. My Aunt is letting me stay here," she admitted. "She owns the place."
"Oh, it's a condo. That's handy," you said.
"... no, like, she owns the building," Kimiyo clarified.
Oh.
Kimiyo's family were always 'rich', but her dad was, like, a super big deal computer engineer guy, so it really wasn't surprising that she had a fancy big house in Forest Hill with cool cars and a pool and all the new game consoles. But it had, over the years, dawned on you that Kimiyo's family had real money even before her dad took a job in Silicon Valley.
Kimiyo would just say her family owned 'a construction company', and for many years you'd taken that to mean it the way Riley's husband Grant owned 'a construction company' of five full-time workers and a rotating cast of contractors, all of whom Riley silently loathed. It… might be bigger than that.
Your best guess for why she was gone so long had been some kind of wacky inheritance drama, and honestly, if she stood to inherit a kabillion yen from her kindly old grandfather, all was instantly forgiven.
"Well, uh, rent went up again back home, so like… I get it," you joked weakly, looking around the place. It did not look like somewhere a person had lived for a year, there was nothing. The little kitchen area had a drying rack with one plate, one bowl, and one glass. An umbrella, hat, and coat were hung in an otherwise empty closet by the door when you and Kimiyo dropped your shoes off. "Okay, speaking of renting, if you did have to pay rent-"
"90,000 yen a month," she said. You paused in the hall as you thought about that, trying to remember what you paid for the 5000 yen bills as Kimiyo pulled out her phone and tapped something in. "About eight-fifty."
"FUCK OFF," you snapped. "Oh my god! No."
"I know."
"We're paying 28 hundred now and it's gonna go up more," you cried, feeling like you were hyperventilating. You had to lean against the wall for support. "Oh God, how do I move here? I could, like, relatives-"
"Not how it works," Kimiyo countered. Right, otherwise she wouldn't be in this situation.
"Marry me?" you asked.
"Can't," Kimiyo said simply. Fair, you were about to break up.
"Fuck! I… completely understand wanting to stay here, Jesus," you said, cradling your head in your hands. Eight fifty… your mom charged you more rent than that.
"As I said, if it weren't for you, I'd stay," she said sadly.
"No shit. If they tried to send me back, I'd nail my feet to the floor," you recited without thinking, barely aware what she was saying. Eight-fifty. A month. In San Francisco that wouldn't get you a coffin.
You followed her dumbly as she slid open one of the doors to what must be her bedroom, and that's when it really hit you. There was a closet in the corner, open, but empty. Her travel suitcase was sitting atop a low table with her bedding on the lower shelf, her clothes folded neatly inside it. The airline tag was still hanging off the handle.
This didn't look like the home of somebody who planned to stay. This was somebody who woke up every morning ready to sleep in another bed tomorrow. Somebody who was telling herself every night here would be her last.
"Kimmy?" you said quietly. She turned from the suitcase; she was getting out and unspooling her power cable to plug in her phone.
"Yes?"
You thought about it. Unsure what to ask, unsure what the point of asking even was. You felt so torn, none of this felt real. You were prepared for her to slam the door in your face, and you were prepared for her to apologize and explain everything and to tear the clothes off each other in a whirlwind of passion. You weren't prepared for awkward, and in retrospect that was stupid. What else would it be?
She carefully resumed unwinding the cable, and laid her phone down on the table, still clearly expecting you to say something. You finally found the words.
"I still love you too," you said finally.
You regretted saying it almost immediately. You did love her, so, so much, but you knew the thing a good person would do, a hero would do, the thing Butterfly Ward would do, is let the person they love go so they could be happy. That's what love is, right? Giving without expectation, wanting somebody else to be happy more? Anything else was just selfishness.
What would saying that accomplish except make her feel even worse? Wasn't this hard enough for her?
"I'm sorry," you added. She shook her head, smiling.
"It's okay. It's going to be okay," she said, moving to your side. "Hey, look at me. I'm so sorry, but I'm here. It's going be okay, I'll make it up to yo-"
You kissed her again. It was selfish and stupid and desperate, but she was right there and you needed her so badly. It wasn't fair to have a last night together without knowing that's what it was; you could, at least, have this.
She leaned against it immediately, pressed against you, gripping the straps of your travel backpack and pulling you against her. As fiercely desperate as you and far more focused, pulling the bag off your arms, grabbing at the front of your shirt, her lips never leaving yours. Her hands snaked around your back-
"New bra, front clasp," you managed.
-to your front, the plastic clasp giving a little snap. Then she wiggled out of your arms, grinning madly as she stared. Then she shook her head, as if freeing herself from a trance, and leaned down to pulled out her futon and the mat and, with shaking hands.
"Not to besmirch cultural whatsits…" you said, breathing hard. "-but this seems way less conducive to this than just, like, a bed." Without looking, she pointed a finger at you and swirled, the ropes looping around your wrists individually and pulling them out in front of you before politely tying themselves into a knot.
"Quiet," she said, laying out the duvet.
"Yes ma'am," you responded, face hot and smiling widely. She placed the last pillow, then the ropes untied themselves with a little swish of her finger… only for the improvised cuffs to pull you forward onto the mattress with an irresistible force. They pulled all the way up over your head and twisted around one another, forcing you to turn onto your back.
She was kneeling beside you, retying your wrists together with a little figure eight motion, looking at you the way a spider probably looked at a fly in her web.
"I seem to recall a lot of promises you made over the last year, Butterfly Ward," she said, grinning. You suddenly fully turned around on the stupid secretary getup, evil businesslady was really doing it for you. "Isn't that right?"
"There's… there's a blindfold in my bag," you told her. Looking pleasantly surprised, she unzipped it and drew out the little sleep mask, still in its plastic bag. "Perks of Premium Economy, right?"
"Oh! I'm glad you remembered my advice," she said, tearing the bag open. Haha, yes, you definitely remembered whatever advice that had been. "Now where were we?"
"Something about how you'll never get away with this?" you suggested, basking in her joy as she looped the mask over your head. You didn't want this to end, you wanted anything else, but if this was it, then you should indulge.
"Honestly, I didn't think I would," she said. Then the world went dark as she pulled down the mask, and you felt the heat of her lips against your neck.
Special thanks to @Adastra for beta reading some parts of this update.
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