A LULLABY FOR GODS chapter 154

THE KISARAGI MIXTAPES (INTERMISSION)

SIDE A: DAMARA MEGIDO

#01: PAPER CROWN by ALEC BENJAMIN

What does a cornered animal do?

Pit against a wall with nowhere else to go and all of its attempts to fight back easily swatted aside, what does it turn to? It hisses, thrashes, throws all caution to the wind as it digs deep into whatever strength and desperation it can muster. Whatever it can push its body to do, it will.

And if this animal were not an animal but a wholly different creature, something with magic? More specifically, magic that seeks out connections, that fosters connections, that pulls on them? If it had its fingers on the pulse of every single one of its prey in its clutches, and each and every one of them were under the threat of slipping away from its grasp? Wouldn’t it hold tighter, use everything in its power to latch onto them, to take advantage of the connections that bind them into the fabric of reality?

Wouldn't it pull them out of the hells their heralds have brought them into and blindly grab, blindly tuck them away to the nearest place its connections can find, anywhere but into the hands of the victors?

Well, yes.

But blind desperation is still blind desperation.

What happens instead is this:

-

Damara Megido arrives outside of Hatsune city in a meteor strike.

The sky rips open in a violent tear, enough to turn the clear blue sky into a mess of green and pink, like a busted screen, and out of the tear comes rocketing a young girl’s body, hurtling down towards the earth terrifyingly fast. Her descent is seen by the city’s inhabitants as she drops from the sky in a streak of bright light, and from the penthouse of the tallest hotel in the city, a god feels the disruption of his universe’s space and watches in horror as he realizes this disruption has a pulse.

Seven teleports just in time before she hits the highway, ripping a portal right where she would have hit and summoning an exit point high up the sky above him. He blinks from the ground to the air, cancels out the friction and gravity and heat on her, and grabs the unconscious girl mid-air. As Prince of Space, he knows she’s still got a pulse, but it’s weak and faltering. There are remnants of psychic energy around her body; she’d been awake when she first entered the atmosphere and tried to protect herself, but passed out somewhere along the way.

“First Guardian, stitch the sky up,” he commands, because he knows that their First Guardian M is listening. He always is. He’s omnipresent and omniscient in all matters of their reality. Besides, as a destroyer, he has no power to mend and heal.

He will deal with M’s anger later. He has a guest to tend to.

-

The last thing Damara knows, before the end of the loop of Meenah laughing at her, at Rufioh admitting that he was cheating on her, at all of her friends so easily brushing aside her anger and her feelings and telling her to get over it, is the sensation of falling. One second, she was reliving one of the worst days of her life, and the next, there’s a violent tug, like her skin is about to be ripped off of her body, and suddenly, she’s falling.

The sky above her is a clear, bright blue, peaceful and lovely, but she can’t even appreciate it, because she’s falling, endlessly, and the ground is nowhere in sight. She’s tumbling through the air without any way to stop, no matter how much she tries to use her telekinesis to hover. Something is just pulling and pulling and pulling, with all of its might, and she can’t quite figure out why. The force of her descent is making her burn up, and so she puts all of her focus into forming a barrier around herself.

She wipes out before she knows what happens next, and when she opens her eyes, she’s finally, finally, stopped falling.

Wherever she is, it’s quiet and comfortable, and it takes her a moment to realize she’s lying down on what must be the softest bed she’s ever been on. The ceiling is so far away, marking the room as luxuriously large, and to her right, there are tall, open windows letting a soft breeze in. The curtains sway with the wind, and as they move, she gets a peek of what looks like trees. It’s daytime out, but it’s not searingly hot.

She must be back on Earth, somehow.

The doors to her left open. She turns her head, sluggishly, watching as two people come in. Both of them have familiar faces, but they look…different. For one, they look older. For another, she’s pretty sure there’s not supposed to be two of this person, and they’re not supposed to have different eye colors.

The first one is the shorter of the two, with long white hair that falls down to their waist. Their eyes should be grey and blue, she knows this, but the person looking at her right now has solid blue eyes, bright and vivid like forget-me-nots. They’re talking with their companion in hushed tones, and as they notice that she’s awake, they pause and smile.

“I know you,” Damara croaks out in her mother tongue, too tired to switch languages.

“I’m sorry, Megido-san. You knew a version of me,”  they say. They approach her bedside, taking a seat on the edge of the mattress. “I’ve been tending to your injuries. May I inspect your physical state?”

As much as the idea raises her hackles, she does feel leagues better than when she was burning up. She’s tired, and her limbs are numb, and the sooner she gets moving, the better, so she nods. The person lifts a hand and summons a magic circle with the Doom insignia on it, moving the lines and the marks on the circle until they form what look like a chart.

Damara frowns. The runes on the chart are not an Earth language, it’s Beforan Highblood, specifically fuchsiablood.

“Well, you’re fine, physically, if a little tired,” they say. “A couple days of rest, and you should be alright.”

She nods again, and the person drops their hand and dismisses the magic circle. They turn to the other person, and Damara remembers that there’s someone else here. The guy is just so silent (had she even heard him move?) that he just blends into the background entirely, despite sticking out with the all-black ensemble in a room painted completely white. He has the first person’s familiar face, but his hair is a rat’s nest of black hair, and heavy shadows hang under his eyes. His irises are an eerie, solid gold.

He doesn’t blink as he stares at her.

“Seven, you’re freaking her out,” the first person says.

Seven finally does blink, straightening awkwardly as he’s called out. “Sorry.”

“He found you when you got here,” the first person says. “Any idea why you suddenly crashed here?”

“Where’s here?” Damara asks.

“Ah, right.” The first person looks sheepish. “Well, you’re in my house, currently, and we’re on Kisaragi Island. But this universe is…well, it’s far away from where you should be, Megido-san.”

She figured, when a doppelganger of Sapphrel Angeles suddenly said she knew a version of them, and when there’s two of them wearing the kid’s face but not their eyes. Somehow, the knowledge that she’s as far away from that stupid fucking time loop makes her relax. She shouldn’t; these are strangers; but she’s just so fucking tired, and she’s finally nowhere near Beforus.

Her eyes are drooping as her fatigue and relief catch up to her. The person with blue eyes smiles softly.

“Rest, Megido-san.”

-

The next time she comes to, it’s late in the evening. She has no idea if it’s been days or hours, because there are no clocks here. It’s just a massive empty room that’s clearly made for guests, with it being bare of any decoration.

She swings her legs onto the side of the bed, carefully placing her feet onto the cold, marble floor. These people must be loaded, especially since they wrote in fuchsiatongue - but they were able to converse in her language easily, which, hm. Then again, neither of them looked like trolls, they looked human.

She staggers over to the windows, pulling the curtains aside to stare out, eyes widening at the sight of the stars spread out above her. Clearly, this isn’t Earth, because the stars look much, much closer, and the sky is much much clearer instead of their light-polluted night view. This isn’t Beforus either, because they don’t have the blue aurora dancing above them right now.

The doorknob clicks. Damara whirls around in surprise, psychic energy already lashing out at the intruder in a wave of burgundy red. It bounces off against an energy shield of gold.

Seven stares at her, unblinking again, with a tray of food in his hands. His shield is still up, the surface marbling with energy rippling about.

“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know if you were awake.”

Something is…off with the guy. He stands like a statue, eerily still when all things should be moving, even at rest. His energy barrier doesn’t set off anything in Damara’s senses when it should - though he might be using magic instead of psychic energy - and he doesn’t. Fucking. Blink. Damara doesn’t think the guy is even breathing from how still he holds himself.

It reminds her of the dangerous beasts on Beforus. Ones they barely came across due to their habitats being cordoned off, but when one was spotted near civilization, they never noticed it until it attacked.

“Sorry, Megido-san,” he says. “Can I come in?”

Damara narrows her eyes at him, but nods. He drops his energy barrier and enters the room, his footsteps completely devoid of noise. Damara looks down to see he’s wearing socks and relaxes slightly. Right. The floor is marble, it wouldn’t creak. He’s wearing socks. That’s why he moves so silently.

He sets her food on the table beside her bed, turns and then leaves. She watches as he shuts the door behind him.

Awkward idiot.

The food’s good, at least, way better than the unending hunger in her time loop, even when she was unable to die, and definitely way better than the prison food from S.H.I.E.L.D. containment. She only realizes halfway through, too busy devouring the bowl in her hunger, that it’s a burgundyblood dish. Something these people should definitely not know how to cook.

Then again, that other person with the blue eyes had known her name and said she’d known a version of them. Maybe they knew how to cook something she’d recognize the same way. Something that reminds her of home, but not in the painful way that her friends do; something she associates with comfort and rest despite her turbulent life in Beforus; something intended to soothe…

She lifts a hand to her face when she feels tears running down her face. Huh.

She knows she’s tired, she knows she’s just been through a neverending hell that she might have overreacted to, but why the hell is she crying? Sure, it was a day that never seemed to end but never seemed to change, and she’d lost track of how long it’d gone on for, but she’s been tormented by the knowledge that none of her friends would ever help or care when it mattered for years. She’s been dead for years. Being stuck in a time loop shouldn’t rattle her this much, to the point where being given something that reminds her of good things makes her body cry.

She doesn’t even feel upset. In fact, she’s not sure she feels anything at all, other than wariness for where she is.

So why the hell is she sitting on the floor, crying?

-

She sleeps for much longer than expected. She thought she’d slept off most of her lethargy earlier, but after she crawls into bed after the meal (leaving the tray outside the room), she knocks out for several hours before she wakes in the morning again. On her bedside table is a note saying that the closet has been stocked with clothes and that she’s free to use the bathroom. There’s food in the kitchen if she wants, and she only needs to holler if she needs any help.

She takes the invitation to scrub all the grime and soot from herself, staying far too long in the bathtub and sitting in the warm water. The clothes in the closet are a mismatch of too big for her and just right, making it obvious that it was a hurried restocking, but she finds herself a comfortable dress to slip on. She walks into the hallway carefully, gaze darting about as she inspects where she is. To her right is the staircase, and she descends down to a massive hall with an ornate carpet and a chandelier above her.

Yeah, these people were definitely loaded. They definitely had a fuchsiablood in their ancestry.

The place is way too fucking big, though. She takes too many wrong turns, ending up in a big room with a piano, what looks like a study, another room with a huge TV mounted to a wall, another room filled with fucking swords, and a library. She ends up going back to the hall every time, just so she doesn’t get swallowed up by the house. How fucking hard is it to find a fucking kitchen around here?

Whatever. She can do it. She remembers which houseplants are by which doorways and finds a sunroom, a room filled with video game consoles, a war room, a ballroom, and a dining hall. No kitchen. Where the fuck is the kitchen?

She finds her way back to the hall and sees Seven lacing up his shoes by the front door. He’s got a backpack slung over his shoulder, and he pauses immediately as soon as she steps through the doorway. Damara similarly freezes. How the fuck can this guy automatically sense when someone else is nearby? It’s unnatural. Even if he’s godtier like the other guy had been, it’s just off-putting. Like an inescapable eye aware of everything she’s doing.

He resumes lacing up his sneakers, standing. “Have you had breakfast yet, Megido-san?”

“No,” she says, staying right where she is by the doorway.

“Ah.” He looks up at the house. “Did you get lost in the house?”

“...is that a common thing that happens?”

“To new visitors, yes. This house is…unnecessarily huge.” He doesn’t do anything to indicate he’s bashful or sheepish of the fact. His tonal delivery doesn’t change either, flat and unaffected. He just stands there and talks like a robot, or some badly-coded NPC, staring at her creepily. “Would you like me to show you, Megido-san?”

She’s about to say no, but her stomach rumbles right on cue. She puts a hand on her middle in embarrassment. “Yes,” she grits out.

Seven nods, kicks off his shoes, and leads her down the hall. She frowns and glances back towards the front door where he’s left his sneakers.

“Why didn’t you just walk with those?” she asks.

“Ni…nee-san? Nii-san? Ah. One will kill me,” he says, like that’s a good explanation. “No shoes allowed in the house.”

“They’re not here.”

“I know. But they’ll know, somehow. They’ll kill me and revive me, and then kill me again.”

He says it all without any change to his expression or tone that Damara has to look at him with bafflement. She can’t tell if he’s serious or joking, or just fucking stupid.

“I’m their younger brother,” he says. “They’ll do it somehow."

He leads her to a doorway she’d missed earlier, because it was under the fucking stairs, and welcomes her into the kitchen, which is just as huge as the other rooms in the house. There’s a rice cooker that’s still plugged in and set to Keep Warm, and Seven goes to the fridge to take out stored leftovers, bringing them to the stove to heat them up.

It’s another burgundyblood dish. Damara frowns as he brings it over to her, reheated, and serves up a bowl of rice with it.

“Ah, do you hate this dish, Megido-san?” he asks.

“No.” She looks up to meet his (heavy, unbearable) gaze, willing herself to meet it head on and not cower away. “But why this?”

Seven blinks, finally. "I thought the familiarity would be comforting."

That’s…nice, but terribly naive. There’s also the fact that he’s likely human, so where the hell does he know this dish?

“How do you know how to cook it?”

“Oh. One of the people who raised me was a Burgundyblood,” he says. “She taught me some things.”

That explains the language and the food, then. Damara grabs the bowl of rice and the chopsticks.

“So,” she says. “Who the hell are you guys and what is this place, anyway?”

-

They’re Sburb players. They’d finished their game a while ago, and this universe was their realm to rule. Kisaragi was the afterlife where One ruled over, while the living world was under Seven and Three’s jurisdiction, though they didn’t do a lot of ruling aside from settling disputes and making sure things didn’t get too out of hand, since they were all for free will and all that good bullshit. That’s why Damara couldn’t sense his energy, it really was magic.

And apparently, she wasn’t the only one who was here. Strider had landed on the island several weeks ago, but his landing was a little kinder since he was godtier and healed, while Seven had to break Damara’s fall and rush her to One to be healed. He’s currently staying with Seven’s older brother Three, on the other side of the island.

“Do you want to see him?” Seven asks.

She’s not particularly enthused about finding him. She doesn’t really have a lot of attachment to Strider, since he was at best a travelling companion and at worse, an insufferable irritation with self-esteem problems so severe it wasn’t even funny. Besides, she knows where he is. She’ll go find him later, once she’s asked everything she wants to ask Seven. The guy is way too trusting, way too open with his answers. That, or he thinks he has nothing to hide, or has nothing she can use against him, which is just insulting. She might not be godtier, but she’s still a powerful psychic.

“Where’s One now?” she asks.

“Talking to our First Guardian, I think.”

That gets her attention. A world in contact with their First Guardian directly, and he wasn’t a piece of shit like Doc Scratch had been to her descendant’s world? Curious.

“You’re in contact with your First Guardian?” she asks.

He nods. “We always have been,” he says. “He’s…not very happy that people from outside the universe have been falling in.”

She can’t fault the Guardian for that. She’s already seen what that’s done to the human universe she was in last time. It got her shit like the Heir of Blood and whatever the fuck else was happening there. Speaking of, what the fuck happened with that, anyway? She has no idea how long it’s been since she’d been taken away from that universe, is that place still standing?

Then again, she…doesn’t really care. It’s hard to, when she has no attachment to the place. She didn’t ask to be dropped onto Earth, and she certainly didn’t ask to be thrust into some cosmic chess game between two assholes with god complexes. Her afterlife might have sucked, having to be stuck in the same place as her shithead friends, but at least she could mostly be alone, and whenever they did bother her, she could just squick them out.

The other kids she met were nice, and her descendant, from what she remembers of their interactions in dream bubbles, was peppy and polite enough. When she was in the midst of the Heirs’ big game and the chaos of the apocalypse happening around them, the only thing she had been focused on was survival; just because she’d already died once didn’t mean she was excited to do it again.

But she was, for a lack of a better word, drifting. She hadn’t seen any of her friends, but she wasn’t - still isn’t sure if she could call them friends anymore. Sure, she might have been a little too sensitive during their fallout, but the memory of it all still hurts, to be told to get over things like she wasn’t upset and hurting at not being heard for the umpteenth time.

Disconnected in several universes and now she was in a new one. What was it going to throw at her this time?

“Megido-san?”

She blinks. Not the time to space out. She’s in a stranger’s house with a creepy god who had the stare of a sickly Victorian child.

“What’s your First Guardian going to do?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Seven says. “He might be the First Guardian, but we’re still this universe’s gods. He defers to us. One especially isn’t someone to push around very easily.”

So One is the backbone of the group. Seven is clearly too friendly, if he’s sitting in a kitchen and talking with her so casually, barely even putting up any verbal walls. Damara still hasn’t met Three, so she can’t judge him yet, but at least she knows who to string around and who to avoid.

Damara pushes her empty plate away and mutters a word of thanks. Seven takes the dishes to the sink and washes them up. His back is to her. It would be so easy to attack him, to break his spine and paralyze him, even if it won’t stick with him being godtier. Is that it? Has his conditional immortality made him soft? Has being this universe’s highest power made him compliant? It must be.

“Ah, Megido-san, we have ice cream in the fridge,” he says, as wipes his hands. Damara raises an eyebrow. “The kids brought it in the other day and we haven’t had the chance to finish it off. Do you want some?”

Yeah, it’s definitely the power and immortality. Going unchallenged for so long must have made this guy lower his guard at everything.

Damara’s not saying no to ice cream, though.