“Nh…?”
Billy was awoken with a kiss, it was sloppy, soft, sleepy and the one who gave it to him nodded back off again almost immediately afterwards. He sat up in his bed and found himself lying next to a beautiful woman.
Large framed, shapely and muscular even for a practitioner. She was naked. He was not. Nothing happened, things just sort of ended up that way.
Dealing with Elena Maddoc was always kind of like that. She was human collection of before and after shots with the key details in between either missing lost to one glorious blackout or having been cut from the film by some over-excited, arthouse, director. An inexplicable and sensual existence.
Rather than her call her a very particular type of person it was better to call her a very particular type of experience. Often choosing to act in the most spectacular of way, She came and went like a storm.
A living hurricane. Shifting the world with her mere presence. Simply blowing people over and often carrying them off in her wake. She was like this even as a child.
Rampaging till she was exhausted. Eating till she was almost sick. Crying, outright bawling when she was sad. Laughing till the soda squirted from her nose, when she was happy. And if she was provoked there would be fire and pain and screaming. All that was her when she was just six.
A right little terror, who didn’t seem to know what the word ‘reasonable’ meant. She was also big on touching. Always hugging, cuddling, kissing, punching, kicking. Constantly flicking a young Billy in the ear and forehead. Especially when she was in high spirits. On paper that would make for a huge pain in the ass. Yet there was always something about her that made it hard to hate her.
She was always trying to get close. She was kind of like a dog that way. If you ran, she’d chase. Magnanimously claiming a person’s personal space just as soon as she’d claimed them for her own.
Which was basically how the current situation had come to be. With her proclaiming that she was tired and then fitfully falling asleep in his bed. The clothes and blankets she’d kicked off while she’d slept, lying in a heap on the floor.
Since she was highly intelligent, one could be sure she almost certainly knew what the word ‘reasonable’ was, she just never saw any reason to apply it to herself. Reasonability, moderation and inhibition were terms she had little use for.
Looking at the girl in his bed, Billy quietly added the word ‘logic’ to his list as well. She was an illogical, impossible individual and the third of his three reasons for coming back to this time and this world. With all of its all complex nonsense and troublesome people.
The girl he remembered her being, was more prideful than a dragon, full of this kind of boundless confidence that could get everyone around her carried away. Whats more she could back up that arrogance with performance.
Beating her iron ranked training instructors while she was just a ‘normal’ human child. Acing tests for subjects she’d barely listened to and books she’d barely glanced at. It was part of the reason that Billy was now currently feeling conflicted.
When he’d come to this world to help his only two friends in all the world he’d only really needed to actively help Edna. She was the one who’d actively been in danger. In his head Elena was supposed to have been fine.
She was skilled, she was smart, she was strong. She could collect friends and allies with ease. Even her enemies grew to have a begrudging respect for. Hell, she’d practically made Billy’s childhood hell and he’d die for her if she asked. She wasn’t supposed to need him till much later on.
Looking at her now, one could almost believe that that wasn’t a mistake. Her green-tinged, honey colored skin flawless, her body fit. Her hair glossy. At the surface, at a glance, she looked the very image of a hedonistic, young heroine.
Full of health. Doing whatever she would. What Billy couldn’t understand was why when he looked just a little bit deeper, paying attention to what her her body and her aether were telling him, he found her dying. Actually that was a lie. He understood completely, his expanded mental capacities, meant that he didn’t have to work very hard to make the connections.
Using her condition and the million little internal scars that he could observe on her body and in the flow of her aether, a story unfolded itself for him. The genre was horror. The details gruesome.
It made Billy want to loose the shades he had hidden in his Uncle’s house. With just a thought he could start a massacre. He wouldn’t though, not after what he’d said yesterday. Not after he’d already showed great restraint by not killing the man when they were face to face.
That would just be ruining things. It’d only serve to grant Billy a short lived satisfaction while hurting Elena in the long run. Adding another indelible scar to her psyche. Adding onto the mountain of griefs and grudges he could see weighing on her soul. Thus Brutus’s life was spared yet again...for her sake and her sake alone.
A more pressing concern was the realization that a large number of the wounds he saw within her body were self-inflicted. It wasn’t self-harm, though there was a fair amount of that as well.
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Seen in the older scars that lay buried beneath the newer tissue. No, what he saw was like what one would see if a machine was being badly abused. A growing accumulation of wear and tear, that would eventually cause the whole system to collapse.
Her neuronal network was fraying and sparking like old wiring. Her cardiovascular system showed signs of stress. He spotted signs of renal failure and smelled rot in her digestive viscera.
She was more fracture than bone at this point. And from what he could he could see, the entirety of her soft tissues was all one big bruise. Medically speaking she shouldn’t have been alive right now. Yet here she was sleeping restfully. Spread out on her side of the bed.
He knew the cause for it and even if he hadn’t known already it wouldn’t have been hard to find out. Like the true protagonist that she was the girl was special, it showed if you simply just looked at her. If you knew how to look you could see it at a glance. The subtle way she was warping the flow of the world.
Though as far as Billy could see Elena was only just barely entering the Saint-Rank, but it was like she’d already skipped to the later stages of Practitioner-hood, for the qualities of her being. The aether loved her, it flowed to her, gathering to her, flowing into her core and spreading throughout her body.
Rather than feeding her cells it was re-constructing them. Filling in the many, many gaps that lay within her being. Rather than possessing magic she ‘was’ magic. Burning so brightly that any attempt to dim her light would simply put her out.
Billy’s brow creased and he sighed. He hesitated for just a moment more, wondering whether he’d regret what he was about to do.
“Hey, Ell.”
“....Mhm?”
“Ell?”
“What?...What is it?...I’m up.”
“There’s something I need to do, but I need your permission first before I do it.”
She sat up immediately, an odd glint in her eye, her flat expression instantly replaced by a rakish one.
“B-,Billy? You know I thought you’d never ask. At least not so soon….The truth is I feel the same wa-...”
“Nh?….No. Not that...Sorry for the misunderstanding.” said Billy. Waving her words away like it was wafting smoking. Bowing deeply under the force of her gaze.
“Standard medical practice requires client permission so…”
Elena pouted at her young friend, and gave him a flick behind the ear.
“Poo…Okay, fine then...whatever. Do whatever.”
“Huh?” said Billy, slightly lost.
“I trust you implicitly, Will. You know that...So go ahead, do whatever it was you were thinking about while you spent a whole hour ogling me.” said Elena. Still smirking.
“I wasn’t ogling y-...”
Like a doll with its string cut she fell prone, returning to her slumber like she’d never been awake to begin with.
Billy just sighed. Grumbling to himself, the girl could get under his skin like no one else could.
“I definitely wasn’t ogling you...and this definitely isn’t me groping you either.” said Billy. Getting up and straddling her hips. Removing his shirt because it’d be a hindrance for what he was about to do.
With a grunt of pain, he made his chest expand, his bones creaking, his skin tearing as his rib cage popped open. A waterfall of hot steaming blood poured onto the mattress and splattered the walls.
He expected Elena to wake up or at least ask him what the hell he was doing but she didn’t. She just slept through it. He had to adjust his position a bit as the swelling continued.
The bed springs groaning in complaint as he moved around so he could pull the girl into his newly expanded chest cavity. Having to angle her and reangle her because of the boneless languidity with which she slept. Finally engulfing her once he’d succeeded. His ribs closed once he had her inside, a membrane of skin and scale grew over them.
*****
It had been a long time since Billy had actually thought about it, but he sometimes wondered who or what the original Maddoc was. What manner being they had been, to have descendants like Elena, Edna and himself to come about. They weren’t unique by any stretch.
Monde was a world of Oddities and Monsters and Curiosities. Filled with the children and creations of those oddities and monsters and curiosities. A million ticking bombs that somehow miraculously never managed to go of all at once destroy the world. Still Billy couldn’t be blamed if he found himself getting curious about himself and cousins. Especially when it came to Elena and himself.
The two of them were distaff opposites possessing curiously complementary powers. Seven years ago a boy was kidnapped by bandits, two years ago, the boy would die for the very first time. That would be how Billy discovered his own power. His power of incomprehensible luck, fate, karma,...plot armor.
If Elena was a force of nature than Billy was a fact of reality. For whatever reason, somehow, some way, regardless of how badly he was hurt, or how he died, he would always be returned into being.
Though it might take eons to do it, once enough energy was pulled into his being he would become something that could just barely be called a loose immortal. Afterwards, eventually, he’d find himself bounced back onto the right side of the mortal coil.
It was like his whole being was a soul. Eternal. Infinite. He could be reduced, he could smashed, he could be scattered and cast into the tides of cosmic sea, but he was fated to come back again. As immortal as the concepts of light and dark. Existing as a meme, a haunting memory, that would inflict itself upon the worlds till it was brought back again.
On the other hand, there was Elena, she had no such protections, but again he’d believed that she didn’t need it. It wasn’t just the awe of her that he’d felt when they’d been children. Where Billy’s inability to die was a matter of fact, her’s was a matter of opinion.
She was perhaps one of a very small group of beings that could directly argue with reality. She wouldn’t die so long as there was even a little bit of her that still wanted to go on. So long as there was enough energy to sustain her fantasy-like existence. She was a being of will and determination.
Leaning on reality to sustain herself and make the impossible, possible. If Billy was a nightmare that the worlds kept having then she was a like living dream.
If one looked at it from the outside looking in. She was another juggernaut-esque bruiser. Just one of a heroic multitude. Possessing unfathomable potential, genius comprehension and an ability to bounce back from almost anything.
Able to push through any hurdle by merely believing in herself, by merely wanting it. Capable of punching out even gods if she truly set her mind to. Granted that even that was an oversimplification but it was roughly the truth. She was someone with no limits. No limits on what she could do, or what was she was capable of.
She was a legend made flesh. Not a character from a legend, Monde was full of such individuals. She, Elena was like a living story. Her existence surpassing reality, and blending both the objective and subjective.
The costs of drawing from the subjective and doing the impossible was that reality would come down to crush her afterwards. Lifting ten times what her body would allow would mean a thousand times the fatigue.
Yes, she could fight a god, but assuming that she was still just a mortal she’d only be able to do so for, about a second before reality came crashing down again and the power she was wielding erased her reality like the delusion that she was.
Perhaps that was why he’d been hesitant to go and find her, having previously resolved to seek her out only when he thought she’d need him. Only when he thought she’d finally taken on too much. She was too much like a daydream.
To touch her was to changer her, and to change her felt too much like destroying who and what she was. Yet here they were and she’d already said that she trusted him. He couldn’t let her down and knowing that he’d erred already, there was only really one way to atone.