Prompt: Pair one of the supernovas with one of the high-ranking agents of Baroque Works. Describe how they meet, the development of their relationship, in 1000 words or less. May be AU.
(This one is AU, and obviously I didn't stay within the word limit. Yet somehow, I still couldn't manage to write out good development *fail at romance*)
A gloomy scent. Nostalgic arpeggios. Thousand fluttering cries. Without a peurile laugh, of course.
The pentagram began to glow, illuminating the wooden shed and startling a vulture pecking in the dead grass outside. Hawkins shielded his eyes, threw the final portion into the mess, and the old splintered boards creaked and groaned against the pressure of the black magic. As quickly as the screams of the damned arrived, everything went dark once more and the light faded.
Hawkins set down the card he had been gripping in one gloved fist and blinked, adjusting his eyes to the sudden darkness. A slight figure was standing where the pentagram had once been (completely eradicated in the process, it turned out, ruining four painstaking hours of crawling around with a chalk). It turned and faced the magician.
"You called?"
The man inhaled sharply. He hadn't called upon a female demon. They were so unreliable and sneaky. Something must have gone wrong in the procedure.
"Sixty percent chance of failure..." Hawkins muttered to himself. The cards hadn't lied.
The she-demon impatiently tapped her feet, wisps of opaque haze curling around her naked body like cobras. Outside, amorphous shadows began to creep out of the forest.
"Hm." Hawkins nodded. She would have to do. He thrust out a hand and halos of white began to encircle the demon. "Obey."
She laughed. It was hardly a laugh suitable for a creature from the other side. "I see. And what would your command be, master?"
The shadows reached the creaky shed and began to wail, pounding against the windows and groping for a crack in the barrier. Hawkins ignored the cacophony and tightened his grip on the demon.
"Destroy my enemy, and restore what I had been robbed of." Hawkins held up his other arm. It was completely made of dusty yellow straw, braided at the ends to hold iron claws.
"Oh, I don't know." the she-demon said lightly, the binding light illuminating her features. "I think it makes quite a lovely prosthetic."
-X-
Twenty years ago, a bizarre curse swept across the grazing sheep and goats like plague. But no plague turned them into raving beasts, tearing at the flesh of their own shepherds with once gentle teeth and pounding the marrow of their bones into the bloody dirt. They ran to the villages, bleating and screeching as their own skin rotted and fell behind them, leaving a trail of feast for the crows and vultures.
No plague possessed the animals like the curse had. Eyes wild and tongues lashing, they smothered the helpless humans with their mottled, decaying bodies and essentially buried them alive in a pile of moldy hooves and gnashing jaws, victim to the enigmatic curse.
The curse lived as the village died. It stole the life of the country, reaping the sanity of so many. Children ate their own parents, then turned to their siblings. Fathers wore the bloody skins of their sons like cloaks. Comrades ran their swords through each other, spilling familiar blood onto their own hands.
Years passed, and Dark magic flourished in the fields of despair and insanity.
Basil Hawkins was one of the lucky few to escape the grip of the curse. His arm was chewed off by a group of feral children (ironically uninfected) who were searching for any food left in the trash and shit left in the wake of the curse. The nearest material- a pile of straw abandoned by a farmer- was all that could be used.
The others weren't as lucky as him. His friends, neighbours, and family were all gone, turned to flesh-hungry things that perished by their own unsatiable lust for death that drove them to kill themselves.
And so Magician Basil Hawkins arose from the pile of screams and desperation with a deck of cards in his right hand.
-X-
"If your enemy is not material and contains neither mind nor matter, how can I possibly harm it?" the she-demon asked in amusement, sitting against the wall of the shed. The shadows continued to thump against the barricade.
"I leave that to you and the unforgivable Demon arts." Hawkins said, sitting across from her. He lit a candle and the shed was lit up, allowing him to get a good look at the thing he had summoned.
She was remarkably human in features, donning a lovely youthful face and an unmarked body. The only giveaway of her heritage was the sharp blade where her nose should have been, glinting in the candlelight.
"You never even asked for my name, master." she held a hand to her breast, pretending to sound offended.
"I thought demons were nameless." Hawkins said stiffly.
"Oh, not all of them." she shrugged. "I am the Demon of Ohara. Robin."
The formless shadows began to leak inside the shed, moaning in victory. Hawkins stood up. His straw-arm began to rustle. "We must leave."
"Obviously." Robin laughed. A shadow began to inch up her leg and she kicked it off. "You do know how to teleport, yes?"
Hawkins silently held up his left arm, the iron claws clinking against each other.
"Well, then it seems we're in quite a predicament." Robin lightly stepped away from a hissing mass of black nothing that had lunged for her.
"Take us away, demon. I command you." Hawkins ordered, fending off the advancing shadows with an unseen energy.
"Why didn't you ask in the first place?" she teased. Just as they were about to be overcome by the darkness, the two vanished without a sound nor a flash. The shadows groaned in frustration, chewing at the gnarled floorboards.
-X-
It wasn't his choice to turn to the Dark arts. With the curse running amock, lethal and stealthy, it was the only form of salvation he could put faith in.
When Hawkins heard of demons with miraculous abilities to twist reality and bring fiction to nonfiction, he thought surely they were the solution to the curse.
And maybe restore his limb as well.
-X-
"Those shadows. They were the curse in its material form, weren't they?" Robin asked. She had brought them to an abandoned mining town, dust blowing through the wrecked shacks and warehouses like ghosts. Hawkins narrowed his eyes. The she-demon obviously knew more than she let on.
"Yes."
"I see." the she-demon nodded. "Then there's nothing that can be done about it."
Hawkins grabbed her neck, his iron claws digging into her surprisingly soft skin. "No. There is."
"What stake do you have in this world, anyways?" Robin asked. She rested a hand on the weaved straw and it began to burn. Hawkins scowled and jerked away, running his flesh-and-bone hand over the damaged arm to fill in the gaps with fresh straw. "I have no doubt this is the end."
The Magician wordlessly reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a deck of cards. They separated and began to shuffle in mid-air, creating a nonspecific pattern. "There is still chance on our side."
"Our?" Robin tilted her head. "And what if I don't want anything to do with your ruined mortal world?"
Hawkins slowly turned his hard eyes to her, his gaze steady and calculated. "You have no choice. I am your summoner."
"I figured you would use that reason." Robin sighed. There was a muffled explosion at the other side of the town, followed by an inhuman screech. Hawkins gathered all the cards and repocketed them.
"We're being followed."
"No kidding." the she-demon said.
-X-
Magician Basil Hawkins wasn't the Demon of Ohara's first summoner.
His name was Eustass Kidd, one of the first experimenters of the Dark arts when the fad first began to bloom among obscure cults centuries before the curse sprung from nowhere.
But every spell had a single origin (or more, if it was more complicated and involved more than four years at most). Eustass Kidd's intentions were obviously not of peace or simply of a thirst for knowledge. He was a ruthless man, with a love of bloodshed and death.
It wasn't uncommon for cults to occassionally collide, resulting in violent sparks that tore at each others' throats. Eustass Kidd never lost in battle. Never. Except when he finally met his match, a young rookie by the name of Trafalgar Law.
When it was made clear they were both at an equal level of magic, Eustass Kidd turned to the unspeakable of his time and dared to summon a creature from hell to give him more power to destroy his adversary.
The Demon of Ohara gladly helped the fiery-headed magician get rid of Trafalgar Law and his group in the most grotesque and morbid way possible (as was typical in the nature of demons). Something went wrong, however, and the she-demon was unable to contain the flesh-and-mind eating curse and Eustass Kidd fell victim to his own demon's spell.
With no one left to keep her fleeting essence anchored in the mortal world, the demon had no choice but to return to her realm after hastily throwing a makeshift layer over the curse to temporarily halt its growing progress. And with her departure, the curse was left dormant, a ticking time bomb waiting to be activated again.
-X-
Hawkins pulled his cloak tighter around himself and edged away from the fire. They found shelter in a small cave carved out in the side of a sheer cliff-face that had once been used by mountain hermits, evident from the abandoned stone tools scattered about the ground.
"Are you flammable?" the she-demon grinned. Hawkins didn't answer for several minutes, his eyes trained on the fire.
"Tell me what you know about the curse."
Robin flinched, but immediately relaxed. She absentmindedly rubbed the blade on her face with one finger. "I suppose you would have found out sooner or later. I'm curious, how?"
Hawkins produced a single card from his sleeve and spun it around on the tip of his finger. "There are no such things as secrets. Only lies."
"I never denied my association with the curse now, did I?" Robin frowned. She sighed. "The curse is of my own creation. It was born from the order of my previous summoner and my foolish desire to experiment with how far my limits can extend to. I don't know how to destroy it."
"I see." Hawkins nodded.
"Will you kill me now?" Robin asked lightly. "After all, I am the cause of the ravage of this country."
Hawkins looked up. "No."
"Did the cards tell you to allow me to live?" Robin teased.
The Magician spun a cloak from the darkness and handed it to the she-demon. "Wear it. Stop going around naked."
"My last summoner didn't seem to mind." Robin huffed, throwing it around her body.
-X-
Day arrived, yet the sky was still dark. Upon further inspection, the she-demon realized it was not because of the lack of sun; the sky was filled with a thick blanket of coal-eyed birds, silently scouting for any corpses to swoop down upon.
"With your aura to strengthen my own energy, the curse should be easy to eradicate." Hawkins broke the eerie silence in the cave. He was arranging the cards again, occassionally mumbling to himself. "I have a small fraction of the counter-spell prepared."
"Good. Because it found us." Robin pointed to shadows creeping up into the cave, countless voices whispering in the air.
"Sixty percent chance of success..." Hawkins muttered, not alarmed in the least bit.
"Isn't that enough?" Robin threw out her arm and the shadows halted for a few seconds, hissing in discomfort before slowly advancing once more.
"And a forty percent chance of death."
"I'll take that chance." the she-demon leaped back and let out an unearthly screech that echoed off the damp cave walls. The shadows wavered slightly and backed off barely an inch. Hawkins scowled and shook his head vigorously.
"Can't you give this any thought before throwing random spells everywhere?" Hawkins tucked his straw-arm behind his back and set to scribbling on the stone floor with a piece of chalk.
"I find improvisation to be so much more interesting." Robin closed her eyes and the cloak fluttered. Hawkins glanced up for a split second to see hundreds of twisted limbs sprouting from the cave surface, absorbing the shadows with their palms. As each one did so, the flesh rotted and became putrid in moments until the arm withered into a blackened stalk.
"Any time would be good now, master." Robin winced as each arm disintegrated, quickly replacing each lost one with a fresh limb. "They're already weakening."
"It's incredibly demanding of precise measurements. Hurrying would most likely result in an error which could result in disastrous consequences." Hawkins calmly said, carefully shading in part of the pattern he had sketched on the cave floor.
"At least you're careful." Robin laughed, clearly in pain from taking in so much of the curse. A shadow managed to creep up her leg, slowly eating away at her skin.
"Fifty percent."
"Done yet?" the she-demon reached down and tore off her afflicted leg with one hand with a wet rip. She fell back against the cave wall, bleeding profusely. "I'm running out of ideas."
"Sixty."
"Of what? Chance of death? I'd find that likely." Robin hissed in discomfort as she regenerated her missing leg, bone and muscle and nerves weaving around each other.
"Thirty."
The shadows began to whisper more insistently, driven mad by the presence of both its creator and an untouched human.
"Eighty." Hawkins threw aside the chalk and spoke a single word. The pattern on the stone began to glow harshly. At the same time, a grainy light was drawn from the demon nearby to add to the illuminating glare.
"About time." Robin smiled, shielding her eyes.
And just like that, the shadows vanished along with the chalk lines. No extra flash, no scream of defeat, nothing. Hawkins sighed and wiped a bead of sweat away from his forehead.
"It's done."
"That was anticlimactic." Robin frowned. "Hardly worth the trouble if you ask me."
Hawkins glared at her.
"Have a sense of humor." the she-demon laughed.
-X-
Outside the cave, the sky of birds began to disperse as they sensed the disappearance of the force that provided their food, allowing sunlight to fall upon the corpse-ridden land for the first time in years. Survivors cautiously emerged from their shelters and slowly began to clean up the mess, dragging unidentifiable bodies to the rivers.
-X-
"Fix it." Hawkins held out his left arm, the iron claws scraping against the wooden table. They discovered a little house outside the forest, still in excellent condition yet uninhabited.
"I thought you'd forgotten about that." the she-demon ran a slender hand over it and the straw melted into flesh. Hawkins flexed his fingers and nodded in satisfaction.
"You always look so gloomy." Robin commented, playing with a spark of fire in her palm. "You should lighten up. Everything's alright now."
"I have no stake in this world any longer. My old life is dead."
"Then just start anew." Robin shrugged. "The curse is gone, you have your arm back, and there's no danger..." She trailed off and sighed. "I suppose it's time for me to return, then."
"No. You're staying with me." Hawkins said, still examining his renewed arm. The she-demon smiled.
"The cards told you to?" she guessed.
Hawkins shook his head. "No. I sent the curse to another realm."
"Figures."
-X-
In the end, the duo of a lost Magician and a female demon triumphed over a darkness that had been created by a foolish attempt at retribution in a remarkably easy manner. The practicing of Dark arts dwindled until magic was completely banned (which didn't stop many from horsing around) and the sky was clear once more. The other realm that Hawkins sent the curse to wasn't so lucky, seeing as Hawkins technically meant a trans-dimensional chant as opposed to a counter-spell to the curse.
Robin learned how to wear human clothes and Hawkins still didn't smile. It was a strange relationship, somewhere on the borderline of apprenticeship and love.
Then again, Hawkins was a stoic man and his she-demon's blade was very sharp.
So everyone was happy, sort of.