Epilogue
-4-
Brought to the planet by means mostly unknown to the only man left alive who even understood what it was, and left behind in death by the only man who had either been worthy to begin with or had found a way around its esoteric requirement, the hammer Mjolnir had achieved a cult-like status throughout Remnant, given the increasingly ridiculous efforts many had gone to move it. Some had tied it to cargo haulers, grabbed mech lifters, even tried explosives to hollow out the ground underneath it, one had even tried attaching it to an aircraft and flying off with it, and ever more ridiculous attempts, and yet it remained steadfast, the words on its side declaring to all that only the worthy could lift it.
But what was being worthy?
Or, to be more specific, how did it determine worthiness?
Nebo Aldric had spent a long time thinking on this, during his exile. It couldn't read minds, else anyone with enough discipline could trick it by thinking happy, or noble thoughts. Doubly so given that if one had amnesia or their memories wiped, they still couldn't lift the hammer. It couldn't just be a strong spell connected to the man that had cast it, and thus the man himself was the judge - as he didn't exist in this universe to keep it up, and even if he did, some of the strongest mages in its home universe had tried and failed to undo its enchantment.
Aldric, thus, concluded that it must - appropriately, given it was the tool of a god - judge one's soul. This esoteric thing that all living creatures possessed, the weight of which could be used as a proper yard stick for the strength of their character. One could try all the mental or metaphysical tricks they wanted, but their soul would never change - and Mjolnir could always read it, could always see the true depths of their character and thus judge true worthiness.
So the question was obvious:
What if someone's soul was compromised?
Specifically: What if someone - as a completely random example - willingly allowed themselves to be hit multiple times by an individual whose ability was to nullify powers and abilities directly tied to the soul - in effect, nullifying the soul itself.
With nothing to read, with no good or bad in a soul that, though temporarily, was reset to zero, what would the hammer do?
Aldric bet on red: He bet that the hammer would, lacking any other option, assume that the absence of evidence was thus the evidence of absence - be tricked, and judge the individual in question: Worthy.
So Aldric, knowing Adam Taurus' entire plan around their inevitable confrontation would hedge around removing his greatest strength advantage over the Faunus, had gone into the battle with this bet firmly in mind. He allowed himself to be attacked, he allowed himself to be stricken several times by the power of a Silver Eyed Warrior, he allowed the strength that had allowed him - a mere pawn - to war against ancient kings and queens and even briefly establish a pantheon of him, to be stripped away without even a single moment of resistance. It would either work, or he would have to go to plan B - and either option wasn't the worst one imaginable.
So after he gave Taurus and his living weapon their chance to have their fun, after he let himself get beaten and cut and stabbed for a while, he positioned himself to be thrown at the hammer in question, and at a lull in the combat, he made his move.
Aldric pulled the hammer, and it came off of the ground with an almost comical lack of resistance.
Taurus and his Lieutenant didn't know how to react until three lightning bolts struck the ground around Aldric, and the power he felt wash away from him in the silver light of the Lieutenant's eyes, surged back into him - with interest.
He'd known that Taurus would hedge his bets on finding a silver-eyed Faunus to back him up, whenever the time came for them to have their battle. He'd known that he would just nuke Aldric and try to kill him then and there.
So as always: He'd planned.
Aldric lifted the hammer, examining it, face briefly falling from its steely expression to one of morosity, as, for just a moment, he let the implications of what this meant settle.
Once that moment passed however, his expression was of iron once again, the fire returned to his synthetic eyes, and he turned to Taurus and his Lieutenant. Without a word, he thrust the hammer forward - calling lightning and blasting Taurus with it. The leader of the White Fang adapted quickly enough, using the sword he'd treated with the otherworldly metal that Aldric himself had provided to block it, while his Lieutenant charged forward. Aldric killed the lightning and then threw the hammer, and though Taurus tried to block it, the hammer hit his sword and kept going - sending him flying back, his sword ringing as though a thousand church bells were tolling. When the Lieutenant reached him, the silver-eyed faunus tried to hit Aldric with his hastily, sloppily prepared mace - but with both the godly power surging through him, as well as the vibranium and mithril mail he'd wished he'd never wear again, all the Lieutenant succeeded in doing was breaking the mace again without so much as causing Aldric to flinch.
Aldric's response was to lunge forward, backhanding the Lieutenant with his cybernetic hand and enough strength to cause the Lieutenant to spin around. Aldric then wrapped his vibranium arm around the Lieutenant's throat, and planted his organic arm on the back of the man's head - pushing forward. The Lieutenant, recognizing a sleeper hold, tried to fight it - but had no idea Aldric's true intent. The Lieutenant kicked and struggled, but Aldric didn't budge - instead, he called the hammer back with a twitch of his organic hand, a minute stiffening of his fingers, and a single mental command, and it dutifully responded - reversing its course in mid-air and flying right back towards Aldric's waiting hand, as Taurus and, after a moment, the Lieutenant, both watched with growing shock and a small amount of horror.
Nothing was supposed to stop the hammer from returning to Aldric's hand - if it was in the way, the hammer would just go through it.
The Lieutenant's head was no exception.
Though he struggled even harder the closer the Hammer came, he couldn't break Aldric's grip fast enough, and the hammer smashed into the Faunus' face, shattering his aura like glass, and then squishing through the front of his skull, his brains, and then the back of his head, in a violent shower of gore. The Lieutenant didn't even get to twitch, his entire brain having been destroyed, his skull having been obliterated from the jaw up.
Aldric let the Lieutenant fall without ceremony, the gore, graymatter, and bone pouring off of Mjolnir and out of Aldric's hand, falling in puddles around the now dead faunus. Aldric spared the Faunus a single glance, a frown wrinkling his face, before he looked up to Taurus, noticing the Faunus scrambling to his feet and his hand going to his head. Aldric's frown deepened, as he wondered what Taurus might be calling in - but lifting his gaze, he realized what it was: The warship. Taurus' final trump card, he was just going to try and obliterate Aldric with superior firepower. His dead man's hand - his last resort: Just torch everything and run. Throw honor and grudges to the wayside and just throw bombs and bullets at the problem until the problem wasn't even a smear on the ground anymore.
Well, Aldric couldn't have that, now could he?
So - with Taurus still actively communicating with them, and thus able to hear everything, Aldric reared back and threw the hammer again - and it blasted off, hurtling towards the airship like a missile. Taurus momentarily didn't even realize Aldric had done something, until the front of the airship exploded and his ear was filled with the screams of his men. The hammer smashed through the airship like a meteor, gutting it from end to end before blasting out the other side and then returning to Aldric, as its current wielder flicked his hand free of the blood and viscera.
Taurus could only watch, slack-jawed, as the ship fell to the ground, trailing smoke and fire in its wake.
When he turned around, he saw that Aldric was there - and to his credit, he reacted faster than even Aldric had been prepared for, firing his sword out of its sheathe and rapidly cutting up at Aldric's chest, and then down at his shoulder - but though it may be able to cut Vibranium due to it itself being of the same metal, the Mithril was of an even more esoteric make, and thus the blade stuck fast. Taurus' eyes widened underneath his mask, but before he could pull it away, Aldric grabbed at the blade and, without so much as blinking, sent a mental command to a plan he'd set in place long ago:
And the Power Glove nanites he'd planted when the Watchmen had been formed, finally were called to service.
Taurus watched with growing horror, falling back a step, as the blade liquified from the inside out - countless nanoscopic machines eating at the blade, replicating, and expanding outwards until the blade was nothing but a gray, viscuous mass of nanites, and the hollowed out core of the vibranium he'd layered on top of the original katana.
Aldric dropped the hollowed blade to the ground with a clang, and then lifted his hand in front of Taurus' face.
The Bull blinked, and then, recognizing what Aldric was doing, whipped around - just in time to see the hammer dutifully hurtling towards him.
He yelped in fright, but found himself spared - as Aldric lunged forward, bringing his other hand around Taurus' head and catching the hammer by its hilt, inches from the Faunus' face. He then grabbed at Taurus' shoulder and spun him around, shaking his head. Taurus gasped, falling back a step, but when Aldric shoved the hammer into his chest and Taurus instinctively wrapped his arms around it, Aldric let go.
It dropped to the ground as though it weighed a million pounds - and took Taurus with it, shattering his aura, flattening his arms against the ground and crushing the bones inside into powder.
Taurus could only scream, he screamed so loud his voice cracked. He tried to pull his arms out from underneath the hammer, but it wouldn't budge - not until Aldric leaned down and picked it back up.
His arms broken from the elbows down, blood leaking out of his sleeves from the broken skin - and some of the larger shards of bone even sticking out - Taurus scrambled upwards and fell back a step, expression now one of rage hiding terror. His arms swung limply, somehow in even more pain than when they'd been pinned to the ground, blood leaking out from the broken and already swelling skin.
Aldric didn't let up - he threw the hammer again, this time at Taurus' leg, and destroying it just as thoroughly as he had his arms, and causing him to fall to the ground, in so much pain and with so many broken limbs that he couldn't even crawl away. Aldric walked towards him, looming over him - the sun above casting his face in such deep shadow that Taurus couldn't even read his expression - all he could see was Aldric breaking eye contact with the faunus to regard the hammer, and then, after a moment, turning back to the Faunus, lifting the hammer and letting it rest right over Taurus' head.
Taurus knew that Aldric not dropping it immediately was him giving Taurus to say his last words.
But Taurus wouldn't give him the satisfaction - they both knew what this was: Settling a grudge. Taurus had done everything he could, but even back when the enemy had been Salem, he'd only barely registered as a major piece in their game, and only then because the man above him had effectively promoted him out of convenience. Had it not been for Aldric, he'd have been a pawn - and as important as a pawn was, they were still the pieces that went first. The pieces sacrificed and discarded first. Taurus had tried, and failed - he knew that now.
He'd failed the moment he'd let Aldric pick the battlefield.
Maybe it was a delusion of grandeur, maybe it was arrogance, or over-confidence, that had led him down the path he'd taken, Taurus didn't know. He didn't care. All he cared about was that even for one brief, blissful moment, he'd not only tasted power, but he'd elevated his people faster in less than ten years than others had needed decades to even come close to. He'd reaped centuries of vengeance in two years - and he knew he could have won this battle, were it not for that one mistake. He'd taken the fight to the people who thought his were animals.
Maybe Aldric thought the same thing.
Maybe he didn't.
It didn't matter - Taurus decided that his last act, even if only witnessed by the uncaring thing above him that had been given the dubious 'honor' of being declared the sole human on a world of alien Men, would be to roar in defiance. If he were going to be called an animal, treated an animal, then he would die like one:
He roared in defiance - refusing to bow before the Human above him, and for as long as Aldric lived, he would remember that. For everyone he'd fought, for every giant he'd slain and every hurdle he'd passed, for every person he'd convinced to turn to his side, he would have to remember that Adam Taurus had refused him.
That thought - that spiteful, misplaced pride - was what filled his mind as Aldric dropped the hammer.
I Am the Answer
She had it.
Rosemary Ashmore had everything she needed - she had two sides to this story, the sympathetic side from Pyrrha Nikos, and the critical side from Yang Xiao Long. She'd even gotten a bonus in the form of her own life being put in danger from that mute woman, and, depending on how today would go, he might even have the 'big twist,' if she could tease out of him a confirmation on Srebro's child! She had recordings of all of them - sans Neo - and now?
She knew where he was.
Neo's boss had been right - once Yang got to ranting, once she got to their last encounter, she'd been willing to tell Rosemary Ashmore where he was. The extra alcohol Ashmore had contributed to the deal had certainly helped.
There was just one problem:
She didn't know how to operate a bullhead - even one on auto-pilot, and she didn't have nearly the kinds of money she'd need to hire a private passage out that far into the middle of nowhere.
So, the best she could do, was chart an incredibly roundabout course that would eventually drop her off in the general area of his ranch. First a shotgun and some shells - she was going into the wildlands, and even in this day and age, going unarmed was suicidal. Then some provisions, food, and water, for when she finally left civilization entirely. Some maps, both physical and downloaded onto her scroll, and several backup power supplies for her drone and her scroll. After her preparations were finished, she booked as cheap a ticket as she could get to Argus, then a boat ride to some bumble-hick nowhere village that apparently had a decent trading port, then a horse-drawn carriage - an actual horse-drawn carriage! In this day and age! - to a village further inland. Then she had to pay a retired Huntsman to guide her even further north to 'the last settlement before the edge of the world,' which apparently had gone so long without coming up with a name for itself that the people who knew it just called it 'nowhere.' Then after a day in nowhere to prepare, she had to do the rest of it by foot.
It took her two weeks of walking, checking her map, and scouting the area with her drone. A good percentage of that was spent avoiding Grimm, but after those two weeks?
She found it.
Or, rather, her drone did - but it led her to the ranch all the same.
It looked just like how Nikos and Xiao Long had described it - this rustic, wooden ranch, a thatched roof with glass plates reflecting the sun above, a huge fence encircling the entire 'property,' and crops and the like growing out back.
Her heart beating in her chest, Ashmore wondered what the man would be like himself. Pyrrha had described this tortured soul that had done the correct thing at the expense of the right thing. Yang Xiao Long had described this sociopath that either never had, or had lost, the value of human life - and even Neo's boss had simply called him a dangerous and powerful man. But who was he really? Was he any of those things? Was he all of them?
Approaching the door, she knew she would find out today - and tomorrow, she'd be everything she'd ever wanted to be.
She just had to take that step.
She knocked on the door, loud and hard enough to make it rattle, and then quickly hit the button on her scroll to begin recording.
There were several moments of silence - she knew someone was inside, she could feel the footsteps through the floor, but it took Aldric several minutes, and one more knock on the door, to answer.
He was shorter than she expected - she had a couple inches on him. The way everyone had talked about him, she'd expected this towering six-foot demigod, but instead he was barely five and half feet. Half of his face was just as burned as Xiao Long and Nikos had described, though it had faded a bit with the time in between it occurring and now - still clearly scarred and burned, still with deep, vein-like scars stretching down the left side of his face and down underneath the collar of his gray shirt, while the other half of his face appeared as though someone had done their best to split it in two - the scar running down from his temple, over his eye, and to his chin, had thinned and filled over the years, but it would never fade, appearing less like a great bisecting fissure and now more like a small groove. Less a reminder, and more a memory. There was even the small layer of curdled skin on his chin, where both Nikos and Xiao Long had claimed the latter had punched him under Haven.
Though his eyes were certainly not what had been described to her - both Nikos and Xiao Long had agreed in that his eyes had this deadened quality to them, but the ones she was looking at had a fire in them. Not a raging inferno, but a solid flame - a heat that could temper steel, and this heat, this intensity, was pointed right at Ashmore.
She found her words stolen from her - Aldric wasn't doing anything. He wasn't looming over her, or flexing his muscles, he didn't have a weapon on him or a murderous intent, he wasn't shouting or telling her to leave, or anything. He was just glaring at her, and that alone was enough to steal all the confidence she'd worked up to meet him.
And he just kept glaring at her - not saying a word, and causing her to realize that this would only end with her backing down and running away, or breaking the silence.
And she wouldn't back down - this was too big. If it wasn't her, then someone else would.
So she cleared her throat, "you're Nebo Aldric."
"And you're perceptive." He grunted, his voice also not matching what Nikos and Xiao Long had described - in their last encounters with him they'd gone on at length of this hollow, echoey shell of a voice, that seemed to just rattle out of his chest, but what he had here was one that had regained its vigor.
Eyes briefly darting over his shoulder, she wondered if she might not be able to divine the reason for that.
Looking back at him, she said, "my name is Rosemary Ashmore."
Silence.
Of course he wouldn't know her.
No one did.
But she would fix that.
She continued, "I'm a... Photojournalist. I have my own -"
"If you're trying to sell a magazine subscription, I applaud your tenacity, but I only read tabloids and clickbait articles - and you won't believe the reasons why. Unless you're going to tell me how to launder money, in which case I'll buy a few dozen so you'll never tell anyone." He interrupted her, "I know why you're here. You know why you're here. Let's drop the pretext." He turned around and stalked inside.
Ashmore blinked, "you're - you'll let me talk to you?"
"I've done absolutely everything I set out to do, up to and including dealing with Adam Taurus." Aldric called back, as she rushed inside and shut the door behind her. "I am firmly in let the world happen to me territory. You're the first person that wasn't Yang, Pyrrha, or..." He caught himself, sitting down at his kitchen table. "Someone else, that's made it out here. The first person to walk here. Whatever you believe in, be it gods singular or plural, fate and destiny, or just dumb luck, you were the one who made it, so that means you're Remnant's representative to me. You're the world happening to me - so that means you get to make the choice for Remnant." He said, as she sat down across the table from him. "But I have one rule." He said, lifting his cybernetic hand. "You're pulling a Rorschach here. You're unravelling a worldwide conspiracy for I don't care why. You need to understand the consequences of it." He said, pointing right at her. "You. Everyone you know. Everyone you care about. Every single damn one of them will be put under the most intense scrutiny of your entire life. The candy bar they stole when they were five will be found and shoved in your faces.
"Then, you'll be implicating some of the most powerful and well respected people on the planet in a conspiracy to lie to everyone alive. You'll be revealing to the public the secrets the universe doesn't know about. There will be consequences. Social disorder, societal upheaval, riots - hell, wars may break out. People will lose faith in their heroes, in their leaders - and that will inevitably lead to the kinds of negative emotions the Grimm feed on. They may do naturally what Salem had to force them to do artificially." He explained, "Attempts will probably be made on your life." He said bluntly, "people who think you're a liar will say things about you that you can't imagine. People who think you're the messiah will do the same thing from the opposite direction.
"The world as you know it will change." He finished, "there are things that are better off not being known, but after Adam, there's only two people alive who could get me to pick up my sword again..." He looked off into the distance and sighed. "And one of them's genuinely made a job of convincing me I won't have to." He murmured, wistfully.
Ashmore gulped, "what do you mean?" She asked, but he shook his head. "And... You're really just going to let me tell everyone?" She asked, "from what I've heard you don't have any problem doing what's necessary to protect what you care about... Why won't you just kill me?" She had to ask.
"Because a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts." Aldric responded, "that quote comes from my world -"
"- so the Terrans really are from another world?" She interrupted.
Aldric rolled his eyes, "don't tell me you're one of those people." He groaned.
"Well - it is far fetched, you know?"
"You live in a world that's been under assault by demons who don't follow any known physics or biology models, with people who have superpowers they source from their souls, and you've figured out enough of my story to hunt me down in the middle of nowhere, and you think space aliens are far-fetched." Aldric deadpanned.
"Can you tell me about Earth?" She dodged.
"Yes."
"Will you?"
"No."
"Can you..." She grasped, "comment on Myrtle Lake's fate?"
"No."
"Oh... Uh -" She tried to recover at that, "um... Okay - Pyrrha Nikos and Ruby Rose theorize that Goud Etiolate was close to who you were before you came to Remnant, that it's even who you wanted to be. Can you tell me about that?"
"They're correct. Goud Etiolate was who I want to be - a hero. A man who makes the right decision. Who lives to the ideals and philosophies he preaches. Who lives up to what his shield represented." He said, "as to if he's close to who I was before Remnant, before all this? I honestly couldn't say. Even before it was all done, that felt like a lifetime ago. Now going on almost ten years I can't even remember who I used to be. So maybe Goud was the last vestiges of little Nebo clawing its way to the surface and trying to push me onto a better path, or maybe it was just me paying respect to the good influences in my life before I killed them all and dedicated to the anti-heroic ones."
Ashmore blinked - she actually hadn't expected him to answer that!
Clearing her throat, she said, "Yang Xiao Long told me in your last encounter, you said you would have done everything the same way if you had a chance to redo it... It's been years since then, have you changed your answer?" She asked.
"Only in so much that I've pathed out other ways I could have done it - the problem in that is that none of them are guaranteed to work, whereas replicating everything I did would be. Plain and simple - ensure all the same variables are executed in all the same ways and you achieve all the same results." Aldric responded, "in the scenario you're providing me, I've been sent back in time - popping right back in my body, post-crash, with all of the knowledge I have now. My choices would then either be take a big risk on one of those other paths, or get a guaranteed victory by doing it all over again. I would do the latter for its guarantee - and yes, that means I would end every single life and make every single choice exactly as I did this time." Aldric said, with such lack of hesitation that Ashmore could tell he'd spent many a night thinking on this exact question. "Because what you're stepping into is chaos theory. Change one detail, and everything else falls apart. Step on an ant and monkeys rule the future. For all I know, the one life I decide to spare could have such a ripple effect that I never come up with how to save Ruby, or I don't have the self control to not freak the fuck out at Salem's shit tests.
"I've absolutely considered perfect-world scenarios. Hundreds of them. I've played out every single one of them in my head and corrected every error until all of them were perfect. I know the best possible one that would effectively let me jump from the beginning to the end in less than a week and with an absolute minimum casualties, but it's irrelevant." He said, "what I did worked. Plain and simple. So, all else equal, if I were sent back to do the whole thing over again, I would. The only way that answer changes is if I get to cherry-pick the conditions of this reboot."
Ashmore gulped, "could you please just entertain me? Why not explain your 'perfect' scenario, at least?" She asked, eyes wide and locked onto his half-lidded mechanical orbs.
Aldric regarded her for a long moment, before finally sighing. "Let's say I go back. Let's say that my consciousness doesn't get sent back to where I was at that moment, but instead I go back - as I am right now. All my power, all my strength, all my wit and intelligence, and most importantly, my knowledge. My plan is simple: I put on the Gauntlet, and go meet then-Ozpin. I kill him, and substitute Cinder's soul for his - acquiring the Soul Stone, which none of the Relics can replicate. With that stone, I could then harvest ninety nine percent of my own soul to acquire the Reality Stone - the second of two stones I cannot replicate with the Relics. Because Ozpin's soul is immortal, it won't run out of fuel. Because I know for a fact that one can harvest parts of a soul and still achieve a desired result - see Aldric Black - I can continually drain my own proverbial tank every time I need to use the Reality Stone, and leave just enough that I don't die or turn into a Grimm -"
"A what?!"
"A senzu bean would allow me to go right back to full." He continued, ignoring her. "Since my power is directly tied to my aura and not separate from it, and I've proven that Senzu Beans can refill someone's aura. With those two stones, I can skip the process of hunting down the Maidens, because I can just use the Reality stone to nullify the requirement for them to open the vaults hiding the other Relics. I get the Relic of Knowledge, and now possess the Time, Reality, and Soul Stones. The Time Stone leads me to the Relic of Choice, the Mind Stone. From there getting Destruction and Creation - Power and Space - is child's play - I could literally stop time and do it in an instant if I really wanted.
"Any enemies that pop up during that time could be dealt with, with just one stone and creative use." He said, "but once it's all done..." He snapped his fingers. "And only one person died... And he'll come back anyway, provided I release his soul from the gem." He explained, "lesser altruistic versions of the same general idea would nix me harvesting my own soul and going after those of the Maidens - whose souls too would provide unlimited fuel - or the other Masters that survived the plane crash. It's highly likely I would go that route as it would guarantee my own personal survival in such a case as the plan goes awry and I need to improvise. But all versions wouldn't even have a bodycount of ten for the benefit of billions now, and countless trillions later - and in case Remnant doesn't have a way of conceptualizing the number trillion, imagine one fucking thousand Remnants filled with just as many people as you have now."
"I don't understand what you mean by you turning into a Grimm?"
"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to."
"But... I do?" She tilted her head, Aldric's words bouncing off of her.
Aldric regarded her, then said, bluntly, "Grimm are creatures that don't have souls. If you leave a human biologically alive, but take their soul, you get a Human Grimm. And trust me, Rosemary Ashmore - it's fucking terrifying."
Ashmore wanted to press, but she heard the weight in his words, and wisely chose to change the subject. "Neither Pyrrha Nikos or Yang Xiao Long were able to explain how you did what you did... And you're talking about stones, and relics... Can you explain?"
"Magic is what you think it is. Literally - it works on belief. Perception is reality. I equate the Relics of the Brother Gods - and yes they exist, no I won't tell you what if anything I did to them - with four of six specific objects of infinite power from my own world's fictions and mythologies. I can loophole my way to the final two, and when I combine all six of them, I'm literally omnipotent. My will be done."
"And that's what you did?"
"Yes. I was God - big G. All powerful, all knowing, all present. I cut the connection between Earth and Remnant, fixed the Towers, killed Salem, and reduced the breeding rate of the Grimm."
"Why didn't you just kill all the Grimm?"
"Some tests shouldn't be cheated on."
"Can you elaborate?"
"If one just cheated their way to victory, they would be deprived of the lessons they may have learned had they struggled and fought, the correct way. If I killed all the Grimm and eliminated them entirely, no lesson would be learned, except that God exists and he'll solve our problems for us if we let it get bad enough."
"Okay... Let's go back a bit: Can you tell me about why you did what you did?"
Aldric nodded, though spent a moment behind shut eyes as he steeled himself. "The most important part is that I made every decision, aware of its gravity and weight. I didn't have a bad home life, I did it all of my own volition. I did it because we had an opportunity to get someone on the inside that we may never get again. So I took it." He said, "and I stepped away because I did what I set out to do. If I stayed in the game, if I kept using my power to influence things, then I would become Salem - and as much as I agreed with her conclusions, I disagreed with her intentions."
"And what were those?"
"She believed the only way for the Human race to unite was by force or by fear. I agree with that. But I disagree that it should be done in the first place. If we can't learn to stop killing each other, and we die out, then that's fine. That quote I mentioned earlier - it was spoken by one machine to another, over the topic of the fragility of the Human race. The one who said it argued that it's a given we'll destroy ourselves one day, but that's okay. Life's impermanence is what makes it beautiful. Life's frailty is what makes every accomplishment a triumph, and a work of art. Salem wanted to take that away - she wanted to take away our ability to triumph over ourselves and earn the survival she sought. To go back a bit, she wanted to cheat her way to victory, and deprive us of the lessons we may have learned. I feel it's better to let Humanity decide its own fate - even if extinction through stupidity is that fate.
"So when I killed Salem, I did it to put Humanity back in the driver's seat. I did it because I realized that she wasn't a threat to our survival, she was a threat to the very idea of Humanity. If she did that, everything she wanted to preserve or see accomplished would be altered and tainted irreparably. For the third time, it's like cheating your way to victory - it's robbed of its significance. I gave Humanity back the power to choose what it would do, and then I stepped back, lest I be tempted to take her role.
"So if you do this..." He indicated her, bringing everything back full circle. "And if it causes mass chaos and the Remnant equivalent to nuclear war, or the Grimm take advantage and attack, if nations rise and fall, and we all can't stop it, then that's on you. You made that choice - you are effectively all of Humanity right now and your decision will dictate the direction of your species' history."
Ashmore gulped, "but... Pyrrha told me you fought to save Humanity." She prodded.
"I did, and I did." Said Aldric, "to save it from someone that wanted to take our ability to choose away. Who would rather we survive perpetually in fear, on our knees, than run the risk of dying on our feet."
"But you did come back to fight Adam Taurus." She pointed out.
"Because I made him."
"What do you mean?"
"If I hadn't involved Adam in my fight, the way I had, he would have kept burning on all cylinders and just burned himself out. He would have militarized the White Fang too early, lost the faith of his own men, and gotten killed, eventually. But because Cinder pissed him off, I was able to use that anger and secure his alliance. We worked on a strategy, and he executed that strategy to his dying day - playing the reformed hero for his entire race. But he told me from day one that he intended to go to war, and even if I wasn't from Remnant, he would consider me, specifically, Human... And because I was the reason he was a threat in the first place, and because Ruby asked me to help her, I did it. I came back and did what I did."
"Can you - can you explain that?" She asked, "I saw the whole thing, recorded all of it, but I can't even begin to understand it."
Aldric leaned back into his chair, settling in as he said, "I learned a lesson - the last one to learn, actually... From someone that the mere concept of which has consistently stolen sleep from me. Suffice to say, this... Thing, didn't fight people - it just killed. Used its powers to stop hearts, close airways, that kind of stuff. And I knew that as strong as I was... Adam would plan around my powers, and turn the fight from one of strength, to one of skill, which I would lose. So I would have to outplay him - I would have to just. Kill. The Batman.
"Adam's worst mistake was in letting me pick the battlefield. He got his silver-eyed friend to zap me, I picked up the hammer and went to work."
"Why didn't you kill him, though?" Ashmore asked, the sight of the hammer that had smashed through Taurus and Null in minutes, falling right next to his head, burned into her mind.
"Because he would've been martyred if I did." Aldric responded. "Better to break him, and then get him arrested, so the world can see him be tried and disavowed. An empire assaulted from the outside, killed by its enemies, that can survive the attack, or come back from the dead, but one infiltrated from within? That loses faith in and falls apart by itself? That dies and stays dead. People will dissect Adam Taurus for decades to come - centuries - and take what works, the good ideas, change them until they're unrecognizable except for their core elements, and then implement them slowly, where he did as fast as he could."
"But that's not all you did." Ashmore said, more as a statement than a question. "Barely a day later everyone was talking about how the allied forces and the White Fang were both obliterated that same night. It had to have been you - especially since that hammer was left there."
Aldric nodded, "also me, and I would recommend you check that last fact. When I couldn't hold the hammer anymore, I had Ruby zap me so I could go back and hide it in a more secure location, next to an equally powerful weapon of equally divine design." He said, "but back to the point, I didn't know how long I would have with the hammer, but I knew I would have enough time to do something stupid. So I used it to take me to Mistral, and I just started fighting. I beat, I hurt, and I even killed, everyone - on all sides. Because you should understand that most of those Faunus were just caught up in the furor - I'd be willing to bet a good percentage of them were conscripts. They weren't fighting out of hate, but desperation. So I wasn't going to just kill them to enforce the status quo - no, I killed the Mistralis, the Atlesians, Valeans and Vacuoans too. Human and Faunus, I killed them all in enough numbers that everyone would have to feel it - like the fucking wrath of God." He said, "I reset everyone to zero and hurt them all so bad that they couldn't fight anymore. That they would have to retreat if only to figure out what in the high-holy-hell hit them so hard. That they'd need time to recover - time during which news of Adam's defeat and imprisonment would reach them.
"The stubborn would keep fighting, but the reasonable, or the demoralized, would be willing to listen to the folks that would inevitably come in waving the white flag." Aldric finished.
Ashmore scoffed, leaning back into her chair, "Aldric you're a hero! You've ended so many systemic - apocalyptic, even - wars that we should be venerating you! Why are you living out here in the middle of nowhere?" She asked, "and Pyrrha even mentioned she'd heard that Adam Taurus had said something about you moving to Atlas - finding a -"
"Thin ice." Was Aldric's interjection, his expression rapidly turning from its normal neutrality to cold, contained, harnessed fury, and then back. "I'm answering questions about what I did. Everything before and after that is information you don't need."
Ashmore blinked, seeing for a moment a fire in Aldric's eyes that transformed him from this frail, weak, broken man, to a titan - one moment he was this tiny creature whose significance had passed, who was dwarfed by the guest in his own home, and the next he was a giant, taking up all available space and looking for all the world like a wayward twitch of his brow could kill the interloper sitting across from him. It passed like a whiff of smoke, and the man broken and repaired by isolation was back, leaning back in his chair with a tired sigh. She realized suddenly that the question of Ecru and Srebro couldn't be asked - he would refuse to answer even in the negative.
She gulped, but before she could speak, Aldric got to his feet.
"Listen - it's getting late." He nodded to the window, and Ashmore saw that, somehow, hours had passed - the sky was casting orange light through the window, the sun was setting, night approaching. "Give me a minute to clean up one of my guest rooms, you can stay here, and I'll find a way to get you home tomorrow, if we finish tonight." He said, before walking off, vanishing deeper into his home.
Ashmore's, "wait - why do you have a guest roomifyoulivealone?" Went ignored.
Left to her own devices with a huff, Ashmore turned back to the table, and, after a moment, picked herself up and activated the camera on her scroll. She quickly glanced behind her, but seeing that Aldric wasn't going to come back anytime soon, she started taking pictures of everything she saw. From the rustic kitchen, to the fields of beans and greens in the backyard, to the television with the bizarre image of a bearded man with knives sticking out of his wrists frozen upon it, paused.
Underneath the television, something caught her eye - a plaque, holding the very gun that Yang Xiao Long had mentioned. The 'Super Boomstick.' She approached and took a picture of it, as well as the computer systems that were hooked up to the Terran - and, apparently, alien - television. What caught her attention however, what made her jaw drop, was that behind the plaque with the gun, was a leather-bound book, with the words 'For the Record' written in rough pen on its surface.
Both Nikos and Xiao Long had mentioned Aldric's tendency to write everything down in a journal - and, snatching the book off of the mantle of the fireplace, she flipped through it, and found to her delight a goldmine. The entire story - in Aldric's own words!
Oh he has to let me keep this - I'll do anything, this will make my story! She thought, practically salivating as she shut the book and turned to the table.
Or rather, she would have.
Had something not caught her eye - the edge of her vision, registering just as she completed her about-face.
Blinking, she turned back to the fireplace, and saw, next to the Record, was a photo.
The only photo on the mantle.
It took her a moment to process it, and when she did, it filled her with a sudden existential dread.
This, was simultaneously, the worst, and best, decision of her life.
Cinder Fall had put it off - for several long months she'd used as an excuse to herself that she'd had to go over every possible permutation of what she was about to do. It wasn't a lie, either - she went over every single fact, theory, and answer she could come up with to explain both the context, and her end-decision. She had hundreds of mock arguments with a phantom to come up with thousands of possible responses.
Especially since she knew that the underlying truth of the matter was something that, while understood between the two of them, couldn't be said, not out loud.
Aldric had been omnipotent. With that gauntlet, he - in his own words - was God. He knew everything. The past, present, and future - all of it, for that brief moment of time, had been his domain, and as such his every minute action and decision during that time had been made with that literal infinite understanding - nothing had been unintentional. Everything had a purpose, everything had a plan.
Including telling her about some of Aldric and his Cinder's interactions, the exact circumstances and ways surrounding her having been merged with this timeline, and that there were reason beyond just being a check and balance for his bringing her back. The entity that had briefly taken the place of Aldric had practically spelled it all out without saying it.
As he was wont to do.
Initially, when it had just been her and she'd made good on her promise to just wander, find a village somewhere, and settle down, she'd only ever really put thought into his more cryptic words and musings. Like about how 'some tests shouldn't be cheated on' and how she was convinced he was either letting her believe that he hadn't killed the Brother Gods, or that he was outright telling her he really hadn't.
But as time went on, as some months passed, and certain facts of life were suddenly missing, she realized that she'd been focusing on the wrong things.
Aldric always had a plan.
Especially when he was 'Big-G-God.'
Now, a little under a year after the final battle in Salem's domain, Cinder couldn't put off what she had to do, any longer.
She had found his ranch easily enough - she bet correctly that wherever he settled down, he would connect it in some way to his bunker, and she'd been right: He'd built some kind of gigantic hyper-loop, with a single-car train that had taken a couple hours to summon from his new home to his bunker, and then had taken a couple more hours to ride back. After she'd arrived, she'd had to do a little problem solving, before finding out that the exit from the hyper-loop was hidden - disguised as a regular wall, which she'd figured out only after opening the door and finding a hologram so realistic she'd flinched, expecting to walk into a wall.
When she didn't, she then found an elevator, that took her from the bottom of the cavern he'd dug, to the top landing platform. She was startled when she physically felt her powers vanish at the top of the elevator, and almost panicked that she'd been made, but then she realized - this was supposed to be Aldric's home. His 'fortress of solitude.' Of course he'd find some way to nullify magic - he'd already made one staff that could absorb it, so there was probably an anti-magic field generator he had running somewhere. After calming herself down, she looked around and found a ladder leading up to a hatch, that she opened and climbed through.
She would admit, she was kind of amused that Aldric put the entrance to his escape tunnel in his bathroom. Once she stepped out and closed the hatch, leaving a wooden floor so seamlessly smooth that even though she'd just stepped through the hatch, she couldn't see where it was, she found herself standing in front of the door that would let her out, briefly paralyzed by anxiety, but forced to move on out of duty. What she had to present to him would, somehow, be more important than the goal he'd charged himself with three years ago, after his plane crashed.
So, she opened the door, quietly letting it swing outwards.
She was greeted by the sounds of combat, of fire and explosions, of steel rending flesh and a bow's string twanging, though given how quiet it was, she was pretty sure it was coming from a television. Turning to her left and walking out of a long hallway, and into a wide living room, she found she was right: He was watching a movie. There was a an ashen man with an axe chopping at the maw of a dragon greater than the Wyvern she had so briefly commanded, a lifetime ago. She could see Aldric from the shoulders up, both his metal and his flesh hand were covered in dirt, and the shirt appeared grayed with sweat. An intoxicating scent filled the air - and it drew her eyes to her right, where she saw a spartan kitchen, at which a pot of freshly-made pasta and a plate of garlic bread was there, waiting for him to either store, or continue eating.
She gulped, and knocked on the wall.
Aldric jumped, whipping around and giving her her first look at him since their encounter at Salem's castle - he looked much the same, with the scar on his eye and his chin that he'd acquired, but also with a bevy of burns on the left side of his face, no-doubt consequences of 'The Big One.' His face shifted into a look of raw surprise, shock, and then, fury, when he saw his mortal enemy, regardless of her redemption, standing in his hallway, unannounced, without him having even noticed her. He made the reasonable decision - and lunged forward to his fireplace, where she saw he'd hung a shotgun.
He ripped it off of its mount and immediately swung it around to her, screaming, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?!" He gestured at her with his gun, "get down! Get on your knees! Show me your hands!" He yelled, "who's with you?! Where's Ozma?! How'd you get in here?!"
She acquiesced, knowing what would happen when she did: It would cause the coat she'd stolen from another timeline to part around her midsection, and would immediately reveal to him the reason for her being here.
He didn't disappoint - the second her core was revealed to him, he blinked, the gun fell limp, and he said, "oh fuck no." As she could see all the pieces falling into place in his mind.
"I need your help, Aldric." She said, hands raised.
"Fuck... Fuck - fuck!" He tossed the gun away, it landing in the corner of the room with a clatter of metal on wood.
Cinder got back to her feet, and as Aldric started pacing, she slowly approached the couch.
"Are you fucking insane?!" Aldric's voice thundered through his home. "Am I fucking insane?!" He hollered, hands dug into his hair as he paced back and forth in his living room. "What the hell was I thinking?! Omnipotence my ass - FUCK!" He punched the wall, scuffing some of the flesh from his knuckles.
Coming to rest on his worn couch, Cinder just watched him pace, having expected this reaction - to both the news, and her proposition. "Aldric, please - I -"
"Lady, I know what you're going to ask, and I want you to take a good long look. You know me well enough to literally guess your way through the contingencies I'd literally built to be nonsensical without a fucking answer key! I am not capable of what you're going to ask me!" He raved, "do you really want to know the end result of that? It'd be me but worse!"
"I disagree, Aldric." Cinder urged, quietly. "You may not believe it but you are a good man. Neither of us would trust the other with this on our own, just as much as we wouldn't trust ourselves to do this on our own... It would have to be the both of us -"
"Oh fan-tucking-fastic!"
Cinder continued on, "With a balancing element, you'd be perfect for... That." She'd been preparing for months and she could still barely say it out loud. "If anyone, I am not. At least you had a code - a character that led you to do the wrong things for the right reasons. I required so much to go wrong for me to go right that it was an unrepeatable miracle - something that we proved!"
"No! No!" Aldric called out, pointing at the raven-haired Quad-Maiden with a knife hand. "You proved it! I didn't do shit! I told you specifically not to try to interfere with Cinder - this Cinder - ah, present - FUCK!" He screamed again, shaking his head back and forth, hair wildly bobbing about, face red from the blood pumping through it, an expression of rage born from frustration painting it. "I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT! You did it anyway! I didn't do shit! For all I know George's plan would have worked out better than what I'd managed to scrap together! But you interfered and I had to assemble the fucking Infinity Stones! Then I became God, and then Godric did - he - he let this happen!" Gesticulated madly, practically frothing at the mouth.
She wanted to say that, technically, it was him and his Cinder, that it was an accident to begin with, and that 'Godric' as he'd called him, had specifically taken actions to ensure it happened anyways - but she knew that wouldn't help things.
"What other option is there, Aldric?" Cinder asked, looking up at him as he stopped his pacing. "As you said, I know you. You wouldn't trust me on my own, and I wouldn't trust you on your own. If not us together, then who? Who could we trust with something this important? Who could we trust to do the job right and without attracting the attention of people neither of us would want involved?" She asked. "Can you even think of one name?"
"Fuck!" Aldric cursed, pacing again.
"Neither of us would even want to pass this burden onto someone else, Aldric, for we cannot trust each other and there is not even one name we can think of to take it on. But if it was us - if we took on this task, then we could ensure the job was done right. We would balance each other out, and all the things one doesn't trust in the other, could be counteracted." She argued, "you know I'm right, Aldric, just as you know that neither I, nor you, would want to abandon this."
"But we'd have to go back to society to do it, Cinder! Not some podunk village, not some ranch in the middle of nowhere, we'd need an actual city, a Kingdom, and its resources, infrastructure, and support structure, to do it right! That puts us on Ozma's radar! And if he finds this?! What the fuck will he do!? And that's not even addressing the fact that we're going to have to answer a lot of questions - not maybe, Cinder! Inevitably!" He added, with another knife hand. "Mommy, why don't you and Daddy have rings? Daddy, why do you and Mommy sleep in separate rooms? Daddy, where'd the scars come from? Mommy, do you and Daddy love each other?"
"What alternative -"
"THERE FUCKING ISN'T ONE!" Aldric screamed at the top of his lungs, whirling around, grabbing the television on the wall and ripping it off, cursing as he hurled it across the room. "Fuck!" He cursed, falling against the wall and sliding down to the floor, his hand going to his hair and his eyes squeezing shut. "Fuck." He gasped, "what the hell did he do?" He whispered, as Cinder pushed herself to her feet, and approached him.
She knelt in front of him, one hand going to his shoulder, the other cradling the evidence of some very poor decisions her alternate self had made, and that he'd been forced to go along with: A swollen stomach, and something very important inside it.
"We have to Aldric." She said, to the silently weeping man. "For the first time in our lives, the right choice is too the correct one."
"Fuck."
A baby.
"Fuck!" He breathed.
Why hadn't he expected this? His Cinder obviously hadn't thought of what she was doing - once she'd killed Ruby and let the high of her victory take over, there hadn't been any time or even consideration for second thoughts. Then after that, with the precedent set and with him unable to say no, she'd effectively thrown herself at him whenever she was bored.
He really should have seen this coming.
Not Solidus - but his Cinder. If he hadn't considered his Cinder then there was no way he would have considered Solidus.
Everything lined up perfectly - he should have seen it coming! Cinder did to him what she did, and the obvious happened. Then Godric took Solidus' soul, stitched back together Cinder's body, and merged Solidus to this timeline with that body - and by returning it to life, he did the same to the fetus.
But that wasn't what Aldric focused on.
No, what caused him to lose all his steam, to break down in front of his mortal enemy, wasn't the weight of what had just been dropped on him, but rather the realization that he'd unwittingly killed his own child, and had felt good about it.
He'd thought he'd made at least a little progress in between Pyrrha and now, but this? This took everything he'd done and broke it worse than before. He wanted to throw up - and his entire body shivered at the feeling of Cinder's hand on his shoulder.
He genuinely didn't know if he would have rather Godric just leave well enough alone, but even that fell apart. It was in his name - while he'd worn that gauntlet, he'd been God. Godric knew what he was doing, and he knew everything that would happen. He knew that doing what he did would result in Solidus carrying Cinder's pregnancy to term. He knew that Solidus - now Cinder - wouldn't trust herself to raise a baby on her own. He knew that Aldric wouldn't trust himself to raise a baby on his own. He knew that the both of them absolutely wouldn't trust the other to raise a baby without their influence or protection. He knew that neither of them would be able to think of even a single person who they would trust to simultaneously do the job right, and never be found by Ozma or any of his allies.
So he knew what the baby's parents would do, because he'd set it all up and used his literally infinite knowledge and wisdom to find that one in infinite paths that would result in the ending he wanted. He'd ensured that Aldric wouldn't expect Pyrrha's visit as soon as it was, and as such the idea of companionship - someone to help him through what he was doing, to help fix him, build him back up, would be fresh in his mind; but so too did Godric know that Aldric would conclude that none of the people he'd wronged would be suitable to the job. Aldric couldn't bring himself to hurt them even if on accident, and thus would never allow them to stay and help him.
So he forced Aldric's hand, and gave him a companion that probably needed as much help as he did, and something for the two of them to do together, to work on and shape. A task to focus their minds, and a source of the gold necessary to mend their broken selves.
It was stupid beyond measure - a baby was the literal worst solution to a broken person or a broken relationship.
But that was Godric's brilliance: In merely being what he was, he knew that Aldric and Cinder both would automatically realize and conclude that he'd seen all the ways it could gone out, had been satisfied with the result, and allowed it to play it out anyways. This would give them the confidence to try, and the open-mindedness necessary to heal, and to teach and learn from each other - as well as the child.
Even after Salem, Aldric was still playing himself and the world like puppets on strings.
But if he was going to do this, he had to do it right.
So he and Cinder defined terms. Cinder may have some kind of emotional attachment to Aldric, but Aldric didn't reciprocate. Even with their best efforts the baby would eventually notice this, and though children being born into neutral marriages wasn't impossible to work with - see any of the ancient monarchies and even modern arranged marriages on Earth - it would by no means be easy, so they had to prepare for that. Just as important was that they couldn't raise the kid in isolation - they deserved friends, a proper education, and all the opportunities of modern life. They had to choose where they would live, come up with their identities, jobs, the whole nine yards.
They chose Atlas - both because living right under Ironwood's nose would follow Aldric's proven philosophy of how to hide a secret, and because Mistral and Vacuo's education systems or culture weren't up to what they would want for the kid. Vale was a perfect middleground, but even Aldric with his tendencies wasn't crazy enough to live right under Ozma's nose - especially given that he was certain Ozma would sense him and get worried enough to pay him a visit, whereupon he would find Cinder and the baby, and the delicate balance of power he believed Godric had crafted would be irrevocably shifted in Aldric's favor. Conflict would be inevitable. Better for them to at least try at the chance of raising the baby in secret, of teaching them right from wrong and how to responsibly use the power they would inevitably inherit from the Master and Quad-Maiden.
Their preparations and the logistical legwork was lessened by the Atlesian Garden. Using Mercury's Glass fortune, they were able to convert it to a good sum of money as well as fake identification papers. They found themselves an unassuming home, chose unassuming names, and secured unassuming jobs.
Then, the baby came.
Aldric named her Ashley.
Cinder almost stabbed him for it.
For a time, it was good. Not easy - not by a long shot - but good. Cinder and Aldric were just able to balance out each other's negative traits and were able to teach the baby, turned toddler, turned kid, right from wrong. Every day was a challenge, but they rose to it as they always had, and with the same zeal they had approached that which they had once charged themselves with. They learned as much from each other and the child as the child learned from them. During summers they would go to Aldric's ranch, and eventually Ashley was old enough for school, old enough to begin getting her own friends. Aldric never really warmed up to Cinder - not in the way she wanted, but that didn't mean he remained cold, and suspicious. He'd thawed out, he viewed her as a human, and not an enemy - or at least, she genuinely thought he did. It wasn't impossible it was an act, both for her sake and Ashley's, she knew it wasn't beyond Aldric to play a role like that to get her guard down, but she didn't want to believe it. He'd barely made it two years the first time, and with how long he was going this time, how easy it seemed to come to him as time went on, she just couldn't bring herself to conclude that it was an act.
There had been a hiccup with Yang - but Cinder had managed to escape to the bunker without Yang's noticing her. She'd genuinely thought Aldric wouldn't survive the day, and had dreaded having to figure it all out on her own, so soon after they'd started. She dreaded the decisions she would have to make as she tucked the infant Ashley in under the bunker, set the AI to watch over her, and returned to the ranch to bury Aldric. That Aldric had survived had blown Cinder's expectations away, and the smile on his face (after he'd healed it with one of the beans) when he hugged the not-even-year old Ashley that day had told Cinder that maybe everything would work out.
The time had been much better than Aldric ever honestly thought it would be. Six years of peace and quiet after Yang, of common household needs and problems. No world-shaking revelations, no universe-altering opponents, no titanic problems to solve, just 'what will we have for dinner tonight?' and 'keep those shrinking-things on the top shelf, or better yet, shrunken down and hidden in the dresser.' Hell, even moving to Atlas had done wonders for him - being around people and technology, even if they were a little stoic and Spartan, given their martial society. Were it not for the blatant sci-fi tech and the robots walking around, it almost would have felt like home. Plus it gave him a slightly easier time keeping tabs on the usual suspects - and the occasional surprise when he'd see a familiar face on television.
It was good! And with what he got to do every day, it actually helped him sleep at night. Sometimes - rare as it was - he even went a day without thinking about his 'crusade' in his late teens, as he was instead focused on his housemates and doing right by them, while they in turn - wittingly or otherwise - did the world by him.
So of course it had to end, and of course it had to end the way it did.
He kept it on his person at all times - the phone whose number Ruby Rose had. He never really felt the weight until Adam Taurus started featuring more and more prominently on the news.
Sometimes he successfully fooled himself into thinking the world could take care of itself, and solve that problem without him.
Other times, he failed miserably - and one of those times was when, after two years of fighting, the news had broken that the White Fang had successfully breached Mistral's defenses, and fighting was now actively occurring in the kingdom itself. That White Fang soldiers - or terrorists, depending on one's preferred nomenclature - were infiltrating and bombing the other kingdoms, softening them up. He knew the call was inevitable.
And he hadn't been disappointed.
One day, on the way home from his simple, honest, warehouse job, an alien phone vibrated in his pocket.
It physically hurt him to open the phone and bring it to his ear.
The silence on the other end was deafening - it drowned out the city-street he stood on, until finally:
"Aldric?" Came a voice more womanly than he remembered it being, but just as on-the-verge of tears.
He, in a voice that went from his practiced lively joviality to a dead rumble as though he hadn't spent nearly seven years in perfect peace, responded, "I'm here, Ruby."
"Oh Aldric - I'm sorry!" Ruby Cried, "I'm so sorry!"
"It's okay Ruby." Aldric assured her, even though his face, set in stone and devoid of expression, appearing to age decades in seconds, said the opposite. "It's okay."
"I'm sorry!" She sobbed again, "but - it's - it's bad, Aldric! Mistral - they're -"
"They're either going to fall, or burn to the ground in the fighting." And then the Grimm, no matter their slowed breeding, would pick apart what was left.
Four kingdoms would become three, may become even less when the world was done trashing Menagerie in vengeance.
"I'm so sorry." She hiccupped, "but - we need your help. We need to end this before it gets worse, and - and you're the only one he'll abandon the front line for." She rambled.
"I'll do it, Ruby." Aldric rumbled, something tickling at the edge of his radar.
Two Faunus, their eyes locked on the back of his head.
What wonderful timing.
"Hammerfall. Go there in three days, pick him up, claim credit." He said, his hand twitching - and their windpipes closing.
With an ease that killed him just as it killed them.
"They'll fall apart after what I do."
"Wha - Aldric -"
"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to, Ruby." Aldric said, snapping the phone shut, and the Faunus' necks.
Two Pym Disks, and their corpses were so small that the smell of his lighting them on fire and turning them to ash didn't even reach his nose.
He'd long since taken Aldric Black's 'just kill the Batman' to heart.
But what it meant - what it said was coming - was what had him sitting in the dark of his home after his return. Of course he'd kept tabs on Adam Taurus - he'd have been stupid not to - so of course he knew when Adam had declared his race war and starting his march to Mistral. All of Atlas had been abuzz when fully half of the fleet had been mobilized to assist Mistral. He knew that with every day that passed, with every day he saw on the television that Pyrrha, or Ruby, or their teams, were in some big publicized fight against the White Fang, and they failed to turn the tide, that he either might get the phone call, or that Adam would play his hand.
Of course they both happened in the same day. The Universe had six years of backlog to work through, and Adam had been a debt he'd been to cowardly to just pay forward.
He knew it was a problem he could just solve if he wanted, but there were other variables to consider. Specifically, the people he lived with.
One of them could take care of herself, of that he had no doubt.
But the other?
He couldn't. The entire reason Aldric had stuck around the way he had was because of the other one, he had a duty to that one, to the little one.
To Ashley.
As the years had grown on, as the both of them had grown up, as they learned from each other and even from her, they almost became comfortable with the idea of one or the other maybe being prepared to take the job on themselves.
But they still had to prepare for the worst case scenario.
They had to prepare for the eventuality that Aldric would be brought back into the game to fight Adam Taurus.
They would have to hide her. They would have to hide her in a way that she could never be found. Cinder would have to go to ground, and Aldric would have to pay the piper. Best case: He would kill Taurus, the war would end, he'd get away with it, and he could pick up Cinder and Ashley and they could return to their lives, the however-long gap in Ashley's memory and her presence in school could be explained as a bad fever and a family emergency, respectively.
But worst case?
Worst case was he killed Taurus and ended the war - and pissed off a lot of people doing it.
People that would come for him.
Ozma with them.
Aldric would be forced to fight again, Cinder would be tracked down and forced to fight as well, and what happened would happen - but the important part, was Ashley.
She had to be hidden - she had to stay out of the light and out of everyone's awareness.
But Aldric couldn't bring himself to let the child think her parents had abandoned her.
So he'd have to take drastic measures.
And wipe the memory of his own child.
He loved her too much to do anything else. Ignorance would, in this case, be the best solution - especially as her powers could absolutely be explained in the event of Cinder's death. Ozma would confuse her for a Maiden - he would even believe that the four souls had, thanks to Cinder having stolen and merged them, had not broken apart upon her death, but rather remained as one, new, whole, soul, and gone to Ashley. This could even explain why a second Maiden could still pop up and keep Ashley's identity hidden - as there were, for a time, two Cinders. Two Quad-Maidens.
He prayed it would only be temporary - that a month would pass, maybe two, while he hid at his Ranch and waited for the world to come show him the bill. He hoped that Ozma would make the right conclusion and the right decision and know that Aldric's return was solely contingent upon Adam Taurus, and thus would know that provoking him further was unnecessary. If he did that, Aldric could undo what he did to Ashley, and everything would be right.
But if Ozma couldn't leave well enough alone? If he made the right call and listened to the right advice and took out Aldric for the threat he was clearly showing he still presented?
Ashley had to be protected.
She had to stay hidden.
And, as he sat in the dark of his home, waiting on Cinder and his daughter to return from school. He came up with one plan that, just maybe, would reach a satisfactory conclusion, in the event he died and he couldn't reinsert himself into their lives. He heard the door to his house open. Aldric grunted, and pushed himself to his feet, as the sound of laughter and of light switches flipping graced his senses.
He turned around and left his living room, reaching the front door and finding greeting the newcomers, steeling his heart for what was to come.
He wasn't ready.
He never thought it would break his heart to see Cinder Fall cry.
She tried - she tried to argue, but she couldn't. She never won - she had never won, not in a battle of wits. Not against him.
She acquiesced, and Aldric left to prepare.
To make right the last thing he'd left wrong in this world, besides Adam Taurus.
Ecru Lemarac lived a quiet life, the polar opposite of what she'd envisioned for herself in her late-teens. She'd thought she'd be a rockstar Huntress, Beacon graduate, journeying around the world, slaying Grimm, getting the guys and the girls, helping people, all that. She thought she'd have three lifelong friends that would be with her every single step of the way - hell, if she were to be honest with herself, she kinda hoped one of them might have stuck around in a less friendly fashion, though she admitted it was probably just a schoolgirl crush. Especially since the lady in question just up and left when they all needed her most.
But, as her friend had once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
First her team leader died, heroically sacrificing himself to try and either stall or stop the woman that served the woman who had unleashed chaos all over Remnant.
Then - well, she'd already mentioned what happened afterwards. One of her friends, her allies who were supposed to always have her back, through thick and thin, had just up and left, displaying on no uncertain terms that any feelings were one-sided, any friendship, purely pragmatic.
Then she herself had nearly gone and died trying to recover her team leader's body, and since she, unlike him, didn't have a sugar mama willing to pay her medical bills, plus with how bad shape Vale was in, she didn't get combat-rated cybernetic implants to counter her literally crippling injuries. Oh, she was nursed back to health alright - but she never fully recovered. She couldn't fight anymore.
At least, for all that had happened, she did at least have one friend stick with her.
Srebro had gone on to minor fame and fortune, and she had practically taken on Ecru's medical and education bills on her own. That Ecru was even able to walk now, let alone get her quaint little job that let her have her cozy little house on Patch, was thanks to the only friend that had stuck around. Was thanks to the chronically nicest woman on Remnant.
But, that didn't mean Ecru didn't long for those dreams she'd once had, especially now - what with Adam Taurus' White Fang declaring war on the entire world. She wished she could be out there with Srebro, evacuating the villages between the Fang and Mistral, clearing out Grimm for mass-transit ships. Instead, she was at home, on a little island, working on computers.
She pushed the morose thoughts away as she always did, entering her house and patting on her legs.
"Oh Blue! Mommy's home!" She called out, as she slid her coat off of her stiff shoulders and onto her coatrack. Right next to it was her Lovely Lady, and she thanked Srebro every chance she could for finding it for her - even if she could never really use it again as anything but a cane, just having it back in her hands every day brought a comfort to the cripple that she couldn't fully describe.
Her dog came plodding through the house, face wide with its canine smile and tail wagging. She smiled back and knelt down to pet him, rubbing his golden-haired head and his flank.
When she looked up, she noticed, in her kitchen, something sitting on her table. She couldn't quite tell what it was, but it was big - bigger than anything she could think that she'd left on it, so, after pulling herself back upright, with her Lovely Lady helping her pick up her pace, she limped to her kitchen to get a better look at it - and her heart skipped a beat.
At the crossbow she hadn't seen in almost ten years.
"No..." She whispered, lifting her eyes from the Tosser and looking around the room. "Myrtle?" She said, as Blue trodded by her, back in the direction he'd come from. "Myrtle?" She called out again, following Blue in the direction of her living room.
She saw, however, not Myrtle, but someone else, someone whose face was hidden - he stood with his back to her, his eyes scanning over her mantlepiece, looking at the small collection of pictures she'd gathered over the years. Most of them were from recent years, of her and Srebro, some were of her time at Beacon, and others were random pictures of her and her work friends.
"Not quite." Rumbled the man, who stowed his hands in the overcoat that shrouded his figure in obscurity.
Ecru blinked, and then - with a practiced motion she could never forget or fail, not matter how badly her body had been mangled - twisted the handle of the bat in her hands, and it dutifully shifted into its ranged form. She racked the slide of the shotgun, and said, "and who are you?"
He looked over his left shoulder, displaying a heavily burned face that, despite clear time to heal, hadn't faded, and wouldn't fade, with age. "Someone..." He said, turning to face her. "Asking for help... But who doesn't deserve it." He faced her fully, and Ecru needed a moment, scrutinizing both halves of the man's heavily scarred face, before she realized that, underneath the scars and age, she recognized this man!
Her gun fell limply from her dark hands, as Blue happily approached him and rubbed his head on the man's leg - making his desires clear.
"Hey Ecru." Said a dead man come to life. "It's been too long." Said Goud Etiolate.
Ashmore fell back a step, staring at a picture of Nebo Aldric, Cinder Fall, and a little girl, barely six or seven years old, with jet black hair, a thin face, and iron eyes.
Everything fell into place.
Aldric was telling her everything because he didn't intend to let her leave.
Of course he didn't - why would he just tell all of his secrets to someone and let her walk away!?
She'd tracked him down - she, the only person on all of Remnant who had put all the pieces together, and likely the only one who would! If he killed her, there was no evidence to his still being alive, to all that he'd done. He wasn't granting her her career - he was granting her closure before he killed her! He killed as easily as he breathed to protect what he considered important - and his life? That child?! Of course he'd kill for it, of course he'd kill some no-name journalist who'd seen too much!
Eyes darting down to the journal in her hands, and then the gun on the wall, she snatched it up and cracked open the barrel - she found it was loaded, and when she snapped it shut and spun around, she yelped - there he was, standing there with a dull frown on his face.
"Lady -"
She shot him. Both barrels, and then she dropped the gun and pulled out hers, keeping it trained on him as he landed on the other side of the room, hit his fridge, and slid to the ground, groaning, leaving a scarlet trail on the metal behind him.
"- are you... Fuckin'... Kidding?" He grunted, his expression a mixture of pain and disappointment, as he pushed himself to his feet, chest full of holes and leaking blood. "I wasn't -" She fired again as she wrestled with the entrance to his home - though this shot ricocheted harmlessly off of his arm.
She just saw him retrieve a bean from the counter as she opened the door and fled into the night, running as though her life depended on it.
And she thought it was.
She had no idea she was mistaken, she had no idea he hadn't told a single lie that night. She had no idea that there remained only two people in the world that could make him kill, or even hurt, again - one of whom had spent six years making a case as to why he wouldn't have to, and the other?
The other, it seemed, may soon be invoked.
Maybe. He thought, watching her disappear into the woods. Maybe I could avoid it... How easy would it be to just kill her? No one would find the body. No one would know where she went - except Pyrrha and Yang, it seems. I could find her in a minute and bury her so far underneath the earth she'd reach its mantle. And maybe avoid the fallout, maybe survive these next months and retrieve his child and her mother.
But no.
He'd drawn his line once, and now he would again - damn the consequences.
She wasn't Ozma, and she wasn't Cinder.
He wouldn't kill her.
As she failed to know this, as she judged him - with some accuracy, if bad timing - and gave in to fear, as she ran away to survive and tell her story - his story - she also, finally, failed to hear his parting words.
"If I could start again... A million miles away..." He hummed, turning back inside. "I would keep myself... I would find..."
He shut the door, and let her run.
"A way."