HEY! so here it is! the sequel to my fic about Black Star's parents, Olivia & White Star! :) It's not finished yet by any means, so don't expect super fast updates, but I WILL try to ensure long chapters when I do update. this one's a bit short, but i'll probably post ch. 2 in a few days. Also, if ffnet deletes this dang thing the way it did the SE story I tried to post yesterday (FOUR TIMES ughhhh), I'm really fucking sorry. Just an apology in advance, in case. ;) Also, this lovely cover art is by Marsh of Sleep! Thanks Marsh! She also beta'd this for me, so basically she's an angel come to earth.

And yes, you do have to go read Spectrum Beneath (linked to on my main profile) or this will make less than zero sense to you ;) This picks up pretty soon after the end of Spectrum Beneath, so. Enjoy! 3

Chapter One: Unravel

A lifetime's worth of instincts honed through necessity brought Midori awake scant seconds before White Star burst through the ancient door, one cheek still creased from sleep and hair even more wild than usual.

"Liv's gone," he blurted at once, looking beyond agitated. "She's gone, she left!"

"Fucking hell!" Midori leapt to his feet and brushed past White Star into the living room of the abandoned hunting shack they'd broken into a week ago. Sure enough, the ratty old couch she'd been camping out on was empty, blankets askew.

White Star came slouching over to join Midori in staring at the thing, gnawing on one fingernail. He reached down and set a hand on a cushion. "Still warm."

"We could catch up to her, probably. Be a real good trail in this snow." Midori swung around to make sure she'd at least had the goddamn sense to take some supplies, and she had, thank goodness; maybe she wasn't entirely out of her mind. Her backpack was missing from its usual place between his and White Star's, and her green parka wasn't hanging next to the door.

"Maybe." The kid looked quietly enraged, eyeing the empty couch with slit eyes. "I don't think I want to."

Midori ran a hand over his head, absently irritated at the stubble he felt. "Thought you wanted to make your brother proud, draggin' home a witch?" he said nastily.

It was a low blow, an immature attempt to vent some of the frustration and worry that had been building for weeks, and White Star practically hissed at him for it, deservedly. "That's only like half true and you know it!"

Midori grunted, lit their stolen lantern, and held it up to peer out the narrow front window of the cabin. Squinting into the swirling grey night, he could just make out a set of small footprints, already filling in with fresh snow, heading from the porch out into the dark trees. "West," he said. "She's heading for town. Fuck! Her cast ain't even off yet! What the- oh, dammit all!"

White Star, amazingly, scowled harder, coming over and elbowing Midori aside to take a gander of his own at the footprints, pushing his nose against the glass like he might somehow magically divine what the hell Olivia had been thinking, taking off in the middle of the night. After a moment he said quietly, "I guess she thought we'd stop her."

"Yeah," Midori said, pretending such a lack of trust didn't twinge a bit.

Judging by the supremely bratty way White Star started stomping around kicking things, he was feeling the same. "Maybe we're better off. Now we can go home. Like, finally."

"Oh, hell, yeah, because that'll go so swell," Midori chided, snagging one of Olivia's abandoned blankets and wrapping himself up burrito-style as the fierce cold started his old bones to aching; they hadn't dared start a fire, even in this weather, for fear someone would come and investigate. There were far too many places right now flashing Olivia's DWMA student photo all over, the papers and the news. Every person who saw her was one too many, and over the past three months they'd all learned to tell when someone was looking at her too familiarly. It seemed every time they found a good hiding hole to hunker down in, a place where the kids could try and get their heads back on straight, somebody would glimpse her and get that tell-tale, wide-eyed expression, and then they'd be back on the road, running from everybody and everything, the fear constant and bitter until they could hardly bear to close their eyes.

"We've been staying in touch," White Star said uneasily, referring to his brother the way he usually did now, in the abstract, not saying his name. "He said to keep helping her."

"Yeah, 'cause-"

"I know! I know, because he wants a damn witch for the Clan, you don't have to keep rubbing it in!" White Star exploded, kicking over his own boots viciously. "I get it! I fucking helped her on my own, didn't I, you can quit acting like I'm such an asshole!"

Midori heaved a vast sigh and wondered vaguely when the hell he'd gotten so elderly. God, he'd been dreading the day when puberty hit White Star since way back during the terrible twos, and he'd obviously been right to do so. He sent up a silent threat to whatever vengeful spirit controlled the hormones of adolescent assassins and said appeasingly, "I know. Sorry. It's just your damn brother pisses me off sometimes, and I really don't want him getting his hands on her."

"What's the worst thing he can do?" White Star said, snarling and as close to hysteric as he ever got, eyes glinting rabidly yellowish in the lantern light. "Throw her in a haunted forest so she can catch a demon too? The thing's in love with her, she'd probably do great there, better than I did!"

There was a long moment of silence as the kid realized his error, then Midori said slowly, "You said it was gone."

"I- well- it did go, for a while!"

"Oh? And when the hell were you going to tell me it was back, huh?"

"It's not a problem when she's here, okay? It leaves me alone!"

"So what's it doing now?" Midori barked, leaning over and shoving his face close to White Star's.

White Star fidgeted, the anger draining away as fast as it had come, glancing almost sadly at the door. "It's telling me to go get her," he sighed. "It's on the back of the couch, by the way, so don't worry that it's touching you."

"Tell it to take a long walk off a short pier. We'll go after her in the mornin'," Midori decided, taking another reluctant glance out the window as the winds howled. "If she really wants to be found, she'll leave a pretty obvious trail, I think. Anyway, you and I'd be popsicles in ten minutes out there."

"If she wanted to be found, why would she leave in the first place? It's pretty stupid."

Midori glared, scratching beneath his eye patch. "How often has she told us to just leave her and go home, huh? She feels guilty, you moron, even you should be able to figure that out. What people do doesn't always match up with what they're really feelin'."

"Oh." White Star appeared to consider this, then his head whipped around and he lunged at the couch, swinging wildly into thin air. "Shut the hell up, you stupid chicken! Shut up about her!"

"I swear I'll find a priest if I have to," Midori said threateningly at the place White Star was screaming at, feeling rather foolish, as he always did when he said something to their supernatural stowaway.

White Star gave a hideous laugh, eyes still tracking something invisible around and around the room; in that moment he looked so like his brother that Midori's skin prickled. "It says a priest'll be useless," he reported. "It says we'd better go after her or it'll make my life miserable, so obviously I owe Olivia big time."

"It's so helpful when you're sarcastic," Midori said acidly.

"Wha- like you're one to talk!"

"Whatever. Put your earplugs in and go back to sleep, the bird'll be there in the morning, I'm sure." Midori addressed his next words to the place White Star was staring. "Leave him alone! We're going after her in a few hours, once it's light. She won't get far in this mess anyway, and she's not stupid enough to get herself frozen." He hoped, he dearly hoped that her witchy powers would keep her safe, but he also wasn't about to chain the girl up to keep her with them, not if she wanted liberty that badly. If he hadn't sat her down and, in a desperate bid to put some spark back in her, had a long, excessively awkward talk about life and relationships and growing up, he'd have been afraid that she'd go running back to that knife girl and throw herself on Death's dubious mercy, but as it was, well….

"I hope she's got a plan," White Star mumbled as he worked his earplugs in. "I mean, where does she think she's even going?"

"No idea," Midori said, quite truthfully, and with a heavy heart he went back to bed.

It was cold, very cold, but Olivia could still feel her fingertips and toes, so she figured she should still press on. It was slow going, though, slogging through the snow and pushing against the wind, which was fierce even deep within the forest. If it hadn't been for the battered fence posts poking up out of the snow in regular intervals to mark the road, she'd have been lost not five minutes after leaving the cabin.

Had Midori and Nova found out her absence yet? She cringed a little and pulled her hood tighter around her face, squinting as the wind burned her eyes. Midori would be pissed and worried in equal parts, and she didn't know which was worse, because Midori's disappointment had a way of cutting sharper than any knife she'd ever felt. Nova would probably throw a really splendid tantrum and then call her names before demanding they go look for her.

She took another paranoid look over her shoulder, but the scarlet raven was still nowhere to be found. Hopefully it wouldn't bother Nova too much, she'd told it not to, but guilt for leaving him to the thing's merciless taunting was extra weight on her spirit.

"Sorry," she whispered into the cutting wind, and then she put her head down and pushed on, ignoring the ache in her legs.

Her father looked just as she remembered, a very handsome ice sculpture wrapped in a dark grey peacoat and an air of pronounced fury. Olivia could hardly stand to look at him, yet she couldn't look away, so she settled for staring at his glossy shoes, so incongruous in the empty parking lot's pristine snow. His secretary, standing beside him with her pale hair tousled by the wind and looking as if she'd been made to be surrounded by winter, would have been beautiful if not for the cruel twist of her lips, somehow almost more foreboding than even Mr. Deering's scowl.

"You've disappointed me," were his first words to her, and she tried hard to hide her flinch, shoulders lifting defensively.

"I'm sorry," she blurted automatically, and then wondered, aghast at herself, if it were true, because at the time she'd betrayed him, she'd never known anything better than her want to stay with Mira. The idea of making her own choices- of even having choices- had been so seductive, and she'd been so cocooned in the false safety of the DWMA that she'd never felt any real regret at her threats towards him and Cascadia. There had been plenty of fear, though, and right now it was back in full force, though her father appeared to have come alone- well, almost- and unarmed, as he'd promised.

She shivered and shaded her eyes with one hand against the bright noon sun, studying him. "Fine. I'll meet you there," he'd said a week ago, voice crackling into her ear from the battered payphone as she glanced around nervously, making sure Midori and Nova were still busy, and he hadn't lied, though she'd come to meet him more than halfway expecting that she'd never leave again. She'd spent the entire seven days between the phone call and making her nighttime escape in a near-panic, pacing the snowbound cabin and driving the boys to distraction.

So here they were, father and daughter, standing across from each other outside an empty, boarded-up mall in a city two hours north of the cabin where she'd abandoned her comrades, and all the aggrieved, passionate speeches she'd prepared and practiced religiously, over and over again, flew right out of her head. "Well?" he said at last.

Olivia took a very deep breath, scouring her lungs clean with the bitter cold, and decided dizzily that she might as well air her most important grievance first. "You had my friend shot," she said slowly. Faintly she wondered what the hell was wrong with her life, that she should be here, saying such a phrase to her father. Now that she'd seen normal, she could, for the first time, recognize dysfunction.

He tilted his head a little, one eyebrow going up in familiar contempt. She realized with mild shock that he was beginning to get crow's feet; it seemed so wrong, for a man like him to have wrinkles shaped from smiling. "Oh? You finally made a friend, then? I suppose that a good father would congratulate you."

Now she did flinch in earnest, taking a step back as his words pierced her. All the times he'd ended their discussions with, 'I love you' flashed through her mind, and she felt rather sick. "You, you tried to kill me too," she said, but it came out more pleading than she would have liked. "All I wanted was a normal life!"

"But you're not normal," he said cruelly. "And beyond that, you're mine. Did you honestly think a silly little girl could blackmail Cascadia? Better people than you have tried and died. You knew exactly what you were doing. Besides, you can't say I didn't warn you."

"Warn me? You never warned me," she said dumbly. "You didn't even answer. You just hired hitmen!"

"Hmm. Well, it appears that my letter was never passed onto you, then. I wrote you and told you that you would have one chance to stop your ridiculous threats, and when you didn't reply, well-" He shrugged uncaringly, flattening down his hair with one hand as a particularly fierce gust of wind whipped past them.

Olivia considered that as calmly as she could manage, but as hard as she tried, she couldn't come up with a reason for Midori to keep a letter like that from her. "You're lying."

"No," Mr. Deering said serenely, voice very at odds with his irritated frown. "But then, you lied to me, so perhaps we're even."

"I didn't-"

"Pretending that you'd found your mother!" his secretary cut in, leaning forward viciously. "When I ate her soul the day you were born!"

"Astrid!" Olivia's father said sharply, and she subsided instantly, but her hungry gaze never left Olivia.

Everything tilted, and Olivia shook her head hard, orangish strands of dyed hair tangling around her face. She swayed like a rotten tree in a storm. Her mother, oh, how many nights had she lain awake, guiltily weaving elaborate fantasies of their loving reunion, of all the things they would say and do when they finally met, how sad her mother would be for having left her, and now it was all gone in a heartbeat. He'd said it so casually, so uncaringly.

"You- oh, god, you killed my mother," she stammered, hands over her mouth in horror. "And then you kept me, like a, like a lab rat, all these years, experimenting on me! And you didn't even tell me I'm a witch!" He opened his mouth as if to reply, but Olivia couldn't stop her furious words anymore than she could stop the shimmering scales from creeping up her cheeks. "How could you! Did you think you could just control me for my whole life? That's it, isn't it, I'm not even a- a person to you! I'm just something else you can make money off! I hate you!"

He smiled softly, watching with clear interest as she struggled to tamp down her powers as they burned bright and angry in her chest. "So why did you call me?" he said, completely ignoring her outburst.

She clenched her jaw and said furiously, "I wanted to talk! I wanted to explain!"

"Ah, good. So you'll come back, then. I'm glad all this ridiculousness is done and over with," he said dismissively, already turning to head back to his black SUV, parked in the very farthest corner of the lot.

"No," she said immediately, panicked. "No! I'm not going back there!" It didn't matter now that she'd intended to resume her old life and pretend that the agonizing months just past had never happened.

Mr. Deering paused, glancing at her sideways, and something in the expression set off all the alarms in her head. "Oh?" he said silkily, and then she knew for certain that she was in trouble. "That's too bad. I invested a lot of time and money into you. I do hate it when a project fails." He held out a hand to Astrid, and with an acidic hiss and a flush of white light, there was a shining sword in his palm and a gleam like she'd never seen his black eyes. She let loose the reins on her power immediately, like she hadn't dared do since she'd pulled Mira from beneath the DWMA dorms, gasping and shaking as madness and fury swept through her blood like the tides.

"Poor halfbreed," said Astrid, sounding very far away. "Do you really think you can stop us?"

"I'll do more than stop you," Olivia screamed over the whistling wind, black talons digging into her palms. "I'll kill you both for what you did to me!"

Did she mean it? She didn't know, even now, even with her tears burning angry trails down her face, but when her father and his secretary laughed, she wanted to mean it. She fell into a combat stance, cursing herself for being naive enough to keep her word and come unarmed, and then a strange glint caught her eye from atop the empty mall.