Summary: Layla is playing the role of legendary soldier-saint Jeanne d'Arc when Sora joins her show. New changes and challenges come to Sora and Layla as they strive to understand Fool's divinations. Saints and queens and dragons and monkeys all must come together by the end of the story! Sora/Layla femslash.

Written Yuletide 2013 for mmmdraco.

It began with a kiss.

The stage was dark, but Layla could sense the fire behind Sora's eyes. She would have heard a pin drop in the susurrating silence, between the whispers of a breeze that rustled between the empty seats like a ghost of music and applause. Sora was smiling, and flung herself into Layla's arms as lightly and naturally as a bird took flight. She was a bird—since Layla had known her she had always flown.

I have always flown with you, Sora.

Sora laughed and cried at the same time, between kisses. "It was too long before this...did I waste a lot of time?"

"Neither of us wasted time." Layla touched the soft, sweet skin of her partner's cheek. Sora. "This is where we begin."

Before it began...

The Spirit of the Stage, the Fool, gazed into the stars.

"More divination?" his friend Sora asked of him. "But I thought that things were going well. The Stage is happy, and I know where my friends and I are going!"

"Layla is born in the Japanese year of the dragon," Fool said. "She is noble, sensitive, and brave. The dragon is right to have high standards. But the dragon can also become trapped by their own pride."

"Layla is amazing," Sora said, as fiercely as if she breathed fire like a European dragon herself, "and I cannot wait to be by her side again!"

"Write to us, Sora!" Rosetta kissed her heartily on each cheek. May Wong rushed up beside them.

"CALL US WHEN YOU GET THERE! KNOWING YOU, SORA, YOU'LL START DOING CIRCUS ROUTINES IN THE AIRPORT AND FORGET ABOUT THE PLANE!" May yelled.

"It feels so strange to do a performance without you," Rosetta said.

"But I know that Mia's Coppélia will be amazing with you," Sora said. May's and Rosetta's partnership made them true stars of the Kaleido Stage and this performance was the right way for them to shine brightly in the chief roles. And she would never really be without her beloved friends for any length of time.

"Take lots of notes," Mia said, "and pass on our messages..." The breeze rushed through Mia's red pigtails as she stood with her hand linked in Anna's. Over the past year, Sora's two first friends at the Stage had begun to date each other.

"ESPECIALLY MINE!" May added.

"And," Anna said, waggling her eyebrows, "bring us presents! I'd like to eat a really big apple."

Sora's friends were fresh in her heart as the plane lifted from Cape Mery: May, Rosetta, Ken, Anna, Mia, Marion, Jonathan, Leon, Yuri, Sarah, Kalos, Mr Kenneth, and of course all the new recruits she was starting to get to know—she knew that Myesha the ribbon dancer would be amazing in the new performance, and the stagehand Alvaro had amazing ideas for the set pieces, and she missed them already— She was looking forward to watching the new amazing show.

Layla. I'm coming to you.

And Layla's image took Sora's thoughts. Each one of Layla's performances more amazing than the last—the Golden Phoenix, the Arabian Nights, the Mystical Act, the Broadway Phoenix, her latest plays—and more amazing beyond that was Layla herself. Any time they were close to each other they began to know their dreams. Even blindfolded Sora would sense Layla's presence and the next move to make to create a performance with her. When Layla last visited Kalos, Sora walked to the harbour with her and they sat for hours in a beachside cafe, talking about everything they had ever shared with each other.

I want you to heat up the stage, Sora.

Sora had not yet had time to read the script for Layla's newest show. She'd jump from any trapeze and know that Layla would be there waiting to catch her. Improvisation when she knew the performers and audience was one of Sora's talents. But here she was on the plane, and she must keep up with Layla. With determination, Sora wrinkled her nose and bent herself over the blue playscript...

"The Monkey," Fool said. "Sora, you were born in the Year of the Monkey...a very good year for a Fool. It is also a good year for people who need to take lots of showers. No, no need to flick me like that! You are inventive, original, agile, able to become skilful, and long-lived."

Sora looked at him. "Then what does that mean for this play, Fool? How can I give a good performance with Layla? Or do you only mean that I act like a monkey?"

"Frequently," Fool said, and smirked.

"Fool...!"

Sora reached forward to grasp him, but instead her fingers snatched at a steward's tie. She apologised profusely as the poor man started to choke.

Sora was absorbed in Cathy Taymour's play. Jeanne, it was called, as if Cathy expected the readers to already know who Jeanne was...and when Sora read the first scene, she understood that the character explained it all.

Jeanne was a maiden from a small quiet town who loved God and her country more than anything else and heard voices in the air. She rode out to save France with a banner and a sword, and risked her life to rescue her people.

It will be amazing! Sora thought. She imagined the circus acts. Jeanne rode to war but refused to kill. Jeanne prayed to the airy voices that allowed her to be captured and betrayed by her own king, and held to her faith until death. Jeanne would be purity, soaring above the stage like a maiden of fire. Sora imagined Layla's phoenix as Jeanne for a beginning, and then changed around the action lines in her head so that it would be different.

"My voices do not deceive me, I..."

And perhaps, Sora thought, Jeanne was also blind because she saw nothing but the ideals that compelled her.

"Sora." Expression flashed across Layla's face like sunlight on water, her golden hair catching the light. She was calm and elegant like always, her hairstyle sheared into a stylish pageboy. Sora rushed to her very inelegantly—like a monkey, perhaps, she thought. "I'm glad to see you," Layla said.

"It's amazing to see you!" Sora babbled. Layla didn't seem to mind the close hug Sora gave her. "Let's heat up the stage together again. Everything from Kaleido Stage is amazing too at the moment—I will tell you all the news and you tell me yours—and it's especially amazing to be with you. I did not know I missed you so much until now!"

"It's been seven months and two weeks," Layla said, always precise. "You will stay with me again, unless Kalos has made other arrangements...? Well, then, Macquarie will take your trunk. You must want to freshen up after your trip."

Sora felt her cheeks were blushing a flaming red. She must smell amazingly horrible! How could she have thoughtlessly rushed up to Layla in this state? "Yes," she said, and sat quietly in the back of Layla's limousine.

"If I am in the grace of God, may he keep me there; if I am not, may he place me there," Jeanne d'Arc defended herself, stepping through the traps of her opponents.

Her judges wished to burn her as an unbeliever but she stood for her faith. She begged for a cross at the last and a friendly soldier from the other side gave her a pair of sticks to hold together.

"Render to the Maid who is sent by God the keys of the towns you have taken! King Charles shall be crowned in France, for God has willed it so!" Jeanne raised her white standard and all the soldiers around her cheered.

"How dare you torture a helpless man!" Jeanne cried, and held a dying prisoner on the enemy's side in her lap. She gave him water but he was dead, and countless others in the field were also dead men.

"A woman will doom France and a woman will save France," cried a voice that Sora could not tell to be either male or female. "One woman on one side of the coin from the other, a saint and a queen, their destinies intertwined forever." It was a wailing strange voice from a hundred miles away, and Sora thought that Fool was another voice going around and around in her head and telling her that that he knew her future already and that the future could be changed and that all the voices were real and true and must not be ignored if she wanted to save everyone—

Sora shook her head and doused her face with cold water to wake up properly. Bizarre scenes still danced in her mind: Cathy had written in the play that she wasn't going to limit herself to a historical setting, but instead they were going to create a magical, surreal image from all of time. About a girl who heard voices in her head...

"Sora, lead an army to become the Queen of America," Fool said. She laughed uneasily. "The Spirit of the Stage is not about conquering. But it can be about competition," he said.

I wonder if Jeanne really heard voices? I hear voices and so does Layla! Sora thought. The Maid was not insane, because the notes at the end of the play say that she really achieved the things she announced. She rushed to get ready for Layla and make an amazing show.

"So I see you once more. The Stage is not done with me," Layla said to Fool. She leapt elegantly from her practice beam.

"I'm here with Sora," Fool answered. "Either you will succeed brilliantly, or fail completely."

"That should always be true," Layla said. "Glory cannot exist without risk."

Fool gave a petulant sigh. "There is more under heaven and earth than even I can know, Horatio. I see a vast pit of disaster awaiting you, and cannot see quite what it is."

"Do you truly think that makes me afraid?" Layla said. She drew her perfect composure around her like an expensive gown, and even as the Spirit of the Stage—who had seen ten thousand and uncountably more stars—Fool had to respect her poise.

The training stage was set with asymmetrical bars and trapezes, clustered as if tongues of flame licked the area. Sora did not know anyone here beside Layla and Macquarie. She'd heard that Julie and Charlotte had contracts to dance in a touring circus this summer. Many people were already here but she could not see Layla yet.

"Sora Naegino?" a young black man with a very handsome face asked her. He smiled like a ray of melting sunlight. "It is you, isn't it? I've never seen anything like your performance in the Lady Murasaki show last year! And I was in the audience for your Phoenix. Make the autograph out to Eugene, Eugene Jameson..."

He seemed happy. Sora returned his smile. Then there were more voices and people around her, welcoming her to this show—she wished she was better at catching every name. "Hello, Clarrie, hello, Farnie...Farnice, sorry! It's amazing to meet you all!" Sora was still talking to the group when a sudden hush fell over them all. She stopped halfway through a sentence, wondering what the matter was.

An old woman with a knotted ebony cane had tapped it on the ground, from the other side of the room where she sat on one of a small cluster of chairs. A light sparkled in her deepset beetle-black eyes. She said: "Sora, waste no more time. Be ready."

Sora took her place on the training set, her heart full of the fire of Cathy's play. And now she saw Layla here at last. Sora took flight, hoping to bring the look of wondrous amazement to Layla's eyes, that look she knew from the Mystical Act and the Act of the Angel. Sora's goal was to give the audience an amazing show!

Layla joined her. Sora saw what she was doing and flew to meet her. They were fighting like they had done in their first play together, the Arabian Nights and the pirate and the urchin's duel on a burning boat.

Burning... Fire fuels this play, and then ends it in great tragedy! Sora thought. She rose in the air as if she flew on tongues of flame. She lost herself in Layla's shining blue eyes before her.

If Jeanne...wanted to save the ones she loved!

Sora balanced like a soldier on the highest point in the set. She'd leapt high enough for her fingertips to brush the ceiling, searching for something beyond.

She looked at Layla then, and what she saw made her heart rise.

"Read for us," the old woman with the cane said. She had walked to stand close to them and held a script in her left hand. She looks like Mr Kenneth, Sora thought, although it wasn't a physical resemblance—it was something about her voice and her stance. "Sora, get down from there.

"Kalos was correct. You have muscles," the woman added. She'd raised her cane slightly and Sora jumped, wondering if she was going to be hit over the back of her calves. "Page twelve, fourth line, Jeanne."

"I do not know the least of riding a horse or tilting with a lance. How can I go to the Dauphin and lead men to battle? But my land cries for mercy. If it is the will of God I must go." Sora sorted the image in her head: saint or human girl? Jeanne had not yet fallen, she was at the beginning with her voices. In the beginning Jeanne was guided by hope and ideals, the way when Sora once came with her parents to see Alice in Wonderland at the Kaleido Stage. "Give me a horse, give me men's garb, and I'll go to the Dauphin."

"If I am to fall or to die or be wounded today I know no more than any other soldier." Jeanne knew what she risked, but her voices were with her. The will to save what she loved drove her much more than any fear, Sora thought. "I fear nothing but treachery. We march at dawn to free our capital!"

"Turn forward," the woman advised.

Sora knew that this was now the last section—the final act, when Jeanne was betrayed from within and it seemed as if her voices had left her, or stopped helping her. "The only way to be free is to try. Even captured and alone—I am not alone." And then Jeanne leapt from a sixty-foot tower to try and escape, because she was told that the enemy soldiers were even killing children. She fell—Sora remembered Layla and her shoulder, remembered Leon reaching for a trapeze bar that was not there. There was bewilderment in the words Cathy had written, Jeanne's voices uncertain if they were the truth or not...

"I do not want to die in the fire. I do not want to feel flame licking my feet and face. But if my country has a martyr to fight for... God! Messire, please grant me your grace."

Jeanne stared at something beyond herself, a beautiful dream she strove for, her eyes seeking through the dark and her body tensed as if she would fly away the next moment.

"My voices say that in three months I will be free, but they do not explain how," Jeanne said, trying her best to give trust to the heaven she hoped for.

"Tramp, tramp," Jeanne whispered, "after my death they will come. Within seven years my country will win a great victory." There was a cross, Jeanne was looking at a simple wooden cross made from two splinters placed together. "Jesus."

Sora had once changed the Little Mermaid's story to have a happy ending, but Jeanne died in fire because it was history. Although Sora knew that Cathy didn't enjoy keeping only to history... She would think about it later. She was finished reading the last lines of Cathy's amazing writing. She looked into Layla's eyes again, coming back to be Sora again rather than part of Cathy's play, Layla's amazing eyes drawn to the performance.

"Idealism," the woman with the stick said. "Innocence." She gave a quick, sharp look to the person to her right, a middle-aged African-American woman with polished brown hair like the curls of a bronze statue. "Hortensia?" Sora did not think it was, precisely, a question.

"We searched for a star," Hortensia said. "The part is a saint, for a unique actor. A core of fire and a youthful heart, energetic, with enough courage and determination..."

Layla looked at Sora. "Mrs Karunungan is the primary sponsor," she said. "Hortensia Virgil is one of the business associates, and Louise de Conte is a historical consultant."

"A miraculous dreamer," the pale woman on Hortensia's left said. She looked as if her dress was for a fashion show or a harlequin costume, all black and white in clean, clear squares. "Purity and joy, matchless and unexampled." Her dark eyes raked Sora's face. "We have not been introduced, Miss Naegino. I am Madame de Conte."

Their conversation was odd and cryptic. Sora flew down to stand beside Layla, where she felt she belonged.

"Eyfridur," the first woman said, speaking to a blonde European woman who looked like either a Viking or a Valkyrie with her hawklike face and loose hair, "do you agree with my decision?"

"She is the director," Layla told Sora softly. "Eyfridur Gudrun."

"This is exactly what we want," Eyfridur said. "Sora, you will play the role of Jeanne."