Right. Yes.

This is my first fan fiction for a very long time. So first, thank you to all the people who have read my stories, commented on them, favourited them, favourited me and then watched me and so on. It was really sweet of you. You made me remember, even if very slowly, that I used to like writing and that I had a passion for Skulduggery Pleasant.

And so I wrote.

And I failed.

And I waited for about six months.

And wrote almost the entire story in one evening. For you guys. Thank you.

I just have two requests, though. One is that I would love some recommendations for a title. And the second is that I would love some feedback on this style of writing. Is it too over the top? Or does its extravagance work? I would love to know. Many thanks.

Let me give you the background to this story.

There was a battle. Everyone was fighting, everywhere. Blood became rain. And Valkyrie ended it. She became the magic of the Ancients and wielded every type of magic there was for a short but beautiful day. She landed in front of Skulduggery afterwards, glowing, with the deaths of the scum to the wicked of the world on her hands and held Skulduggery. He grew back his flesh and back into a man. She stopped glowing, though they never did, too happy to stop shining. But it fell apart; on her journey she'd been killed and was kept alive only by her magic, her necromancy. She imploded, taking Skulduggery with her, except she didn't. He just returned to being skeletal, but she died. She hated him for that. Her mind was warping as the magic spiralled out. Her baby was born, looking like Skulduggery. Her life disappeared into a Skulduggery-shaped hole.

And the story begins.

Chapter 1

Valkyrie felt another bone in her break as she picked up her baby Jane. She straightened up sharply, like a thumb from clicked fingers, holding her child tighter, eyes watering and staring into her baby's hair. She saw lots of little strands of brown tangling in her eyelashes and becoming damp. It smelled like vanilla and baby powder and soap. She massaged the freshly snapped rib, each piece of bone now embedded in her flesh until whenever. She squeezed her child tighter, buckling into a chair as the baby kicked her rib, unwilling to be treated like a pillow. They cried.

The night was still shedding the skin of the day and vein-like strings of sunlight bled across the sky. Clouds buckled as the day split and broke away over the horizon, the newly cast skin wilting and aging. Valkyrie's face looked older, despite the thousand of creases in the clouds, their pallor, their travels, despite how she had not aged since she looked twenty.

The little flat they lived in had a little balcony, and this little balcony had a little view of the estate below, where the air even seemed under-funded and in need of repair. The stagnancy of the night never left the fifteenth floor and Valkyrie stood in it every night, quite still and quite dead. She had no pulse, no breath. She was quite, quite dead, an old fad of the magical world, just 'resting' as they said, but in reality only resting on the walls in which she and her daughter lived.

Skulduggery walked into the estate's courtyard. They stood and watched each other.

"I broke another rib today, Skulduggery," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"It hurts like hell."

"I'm sorry."

"It's no worse than the rest, of course; all those slipped vertebrae and my pulled muscles and cuts and bruises." She waited. "But they're nothing like you, you in my head."

He spoke quietly. "How did it happen?"

"Like I know, Skulduggery, like I know. It's just wear and tear. I'm just wear and tear."

"I'm sorry."

Neither of them grew cold as the night hatched.

"How are you coping?" Skulduggery asked.

"Jane."

"How is she?"

"No, Skulduggery." She turned back to the door and moved inside.

"She's my child too, Valkyrie. She's not just yours." Valkyrie didn't come back out. Skulduggery kept pushing, holding his finger longer in the flame than ever before. "She'll find out who I am. We're written into magical history. You can't run." Valkyrie still didn't come out. "She'll ask about me, one day. She'll want to find me."

At that, Valkyrie ran back outside and leant over the balcony, leant so far she had to wrap shadows around her wrist and attach them to the wall so she wouldn't fall, her head whipping back with the force, the sickening scrunch of vertebrae sliding over each other clear in the night. "And that's exactly why I don't want you in her life, Skulduggery. You're trouble. Everyone told me, told me to go, told me to leave whilst I could. And I didn't, because you seemed worth it. Well look at me now. Was this," she loosened the shadows to wave at her corpse, "worth it?"

"Valkyrie, I'm so sor-"

"It was worth it, Skulduggery. That's the real reason. You're too good to be real, too good to have. You should have danger signs all over you. You should be mummified in yellow and black hazard tape. You make people like you. And then we do stupid, stupid things."

"I never wanted this."

"I did such stupid things for you. Things like giving up everything I knew for you. I can't see my parents. I can't see my friends. I can't do what I love. I have nothing to go back to. I gave you my life and I've got nothing left. I've just got Jane and Jane is mine."

"Valkyrie, I never stop wishing it was me, you've got to believe me."

"You take those risks to save the world, Skulduggery, because people can die for you. I just haven't had the common decency bury myself yet. Now let me pretend to sleep until Jane gets up. Stop coming back here, Skulduggery."

The final slips of the day's cocoon fell from the sky and Skulduggery was talking to a dark balcony, a toothless grin in the night.

More chapters pending.