Falling from a child's spaceship towards the planet beneath him, Snatcher didn't understand why his core felt stricken. Not at first. Not until he caught himself reaching after the vehicle as it blinked out of existence, travelling on its merry way through space. The gesture was useless, of course, and he and the others who had tried to stop her fell down miserably to the world below. The emptiness of the void above echoed their sorrow, stars twinkling away in the distance, mocking them, impartial to their pain. Blinking, shining, glowing like the trail that had followed her ship, and just as distant and unreachable.

Snatcher curled in on himself. Denial was no stranger to him, but even the shadowy ruler of Subcon couldn't argue the fact that had come to light.

He liked the kid.

Snatcher would deny it out loud, of course. If anyone asked, he was just offended that he'd let something escape his forest so soundly. Not all of that offense was baseless mind you; he was furious, at her and at himself, for the fact that he'd grown fond of her. She had the gall, the audacity, the insulting amount of nerve to trick him into that Best Friends Forever contract, which by all accounts shouldn't have counted, yet it did. Just like her turning him blue with his own potions during their fight. It shouldn't have counted. It shouldn't have counted. Yet it had, it did, and there he was. He liked her. He missed her. He couldn't stop thinking about how much fun it was to try and kill her, or send her out on ridiculously dangerous tasks, or even just watch her explore his forest with all the curiosity and vivacity of a child who knew that death somehow couldn't touch her. He couldn't help but remember how her soul had felt in his claws, twisting and tenacious.

That was all gone, now. Hat Kid was gone. Days passed, weeks flew by, yet all Snatcher had left of her were his slowly fading memories.

Or so he'd thought.

It wasn't long until he found a time rift in his forest. One the girl had overlooked because of the mustache brat breaking into her ship to steal things. Snatcher couldn't abide such a disturbance in his woods and set to righting it, all the while miserably thinking of the long-gone kiddo (because no one could see him here inside the abstract reality of the rift, and so he could pout and pine all he wanted without risk to his reputation). It wasn't difficult for him to correct the time rift. Wasn't hard at all to smash that final orb and to seal the anomaly away. He looked down at the time piece in his claws, and found himself nostalgic for a kid that would never return. There were still other errant time pieces scattered across the planet. It had been her mission to retrieve them, yet if she hadn't come back for them by now, Snatcher doubted that she ever would. The reality of it-

Wait. That was it! Reality!

Snatcher was aware of alternate realities. He'd recognized that he was in one, at Time's End, one he didn't like. He had the ability to manipulate them to some extent, opening and closing and mutating the rules of existence if he played his cards right. After all, he'd sealed one of his former rivals into The Horizon, hadn't he? He'd secured his rule over Subcon by doing so! He wasn't all-powerful, but he was powerful enough, and reality bent to his desires! So why was he still moping about? His existence was missing someone. This reality he was in right now wasn't quite to his liking, that much was obvious. And so, after the Hat Kid left and broke the heart he didn't realize he still had, it was time to make one he DID like.

He had to make sure he knew what he was doing. This was the time to be patient. Time to grow his power, time to study those critical time pieces, the cornerstone of his master plan! With these objects, he would get his favourite, still-living minion back. He'd get his friend back, whether she liked it or not. She would never realize what was happening…

So Snatcher studied it. He studied the time piece he'd gathered, critically inspected it until he understood its abilities, conceptualized its powers. Snatcher re-opened the rift with its respective time piece, made a few new rifts elsewhere. Stabilized some, caused others to collapse, even forged a few time pieces of his own. The powers they held were many and significant. They were able to increase a wielder's abilities! Rewind time itself! No wonder the kiddo had managed to defeat him. No wonder she seemed able to predict his attacks, knew exactly which doors were locked and unlocked in Vanessa's mansion, or flinched all-too-knowingly at the hands reaching for her from the swamp. It wasn't that Snatcher's attacks were easily readable to her! It wasn't pure luck that she knew how to navigate the manor without running into its resident! It wasn't just the smell of the fetid waters that made her regard the swamp with such unease! It was experience! If she could rewind time like the time pieces could, then she'd probably lived through some nasty bumps and bruises, undid her mistakes, and avoided them in future.

No, thought Snatcher. "Living through it" maybe wasn't the right term for it. After all, the time pieces would only rewind time when they were broken. Destroyed. The kid wasn't exactly human, and the technology and magic of the time pieces certainly wasn't of Earth origin either. They were linked. As such, if time rewound when the strange devices were broken, and Hat kid was of the same origin as them… then perhaps the time pieces weren't the only things that reversed time when "broken"? He'd seen the child hurt before and no temporal shenanigans had occurred. But he'd never seen her die before. Had he? Yet maybe she'd died while he was unaware. Multiple times, perhaps. Maybe she was just like her time pieces which, when damaged beyond repair, would rewind time until the damage was fixed, until it had never happened in the first place.

It was a thrilling thought. If some tiny alien child whose age wasn't even in the double-digits could affect time as such, then what could an experienced magical practitioner such as him accomplish?

It turns out, quite a bit.

Snatcher loved that he'd been a lawyer. Loved that he knew how to find and understand and bend the rules to suit his desires. Magic, science, the universe… Everything had rules, and he was very, very good at rules. Loopholes, workarounds, reading the fine print, hashing out details, and distorting all of it to serve his needs. Being a sorcerer was like being a lawyer, but with the laws of magic instead of governance, and his powers were about to rise to a whole new level.

Snatcher experimented with time. Began to realize it was, in a way, a type of dimension all its own. Once he could change and meddle with, just like The Horizon, yet infinitely more powerful. He could warp it to his needs with none the wiser. So that's exactly what Snatcher did. He warped the world, yanked at timelines, skewed reality, fiddled and fumbled and masterfully crafted his corner of the universe to his liking. He got exactly what he wanted. The Hat Kid, existence itself, had returned to the pivotal moment before Time's End would form.

Hat Kid was back. She never realized what had happened.

Snatcher had cleverly used her own brand of powers against her, and done it so well that he may very well be as good at it as she was. Well, almost. Her natural affinity for time made it respond to her a bit better than it did to him, although that mattered little to Snatcher. He wrote up advanced contracts, watched her try and fail at them, and counted how many times she came to a grisly demise.

It was glorious.

Time was a dimension, and now he was well aware of how it functioned. Now, Snatcher KNEW when she died. He could tell when everything was reversed or altered whenever the young explorer was slaughtered and slain. His Death Wish contracts were absolutely diabolical. To Snatcher's cruel delight, the kid wasn't nearly as infallible as he'd first thought. He was far more aware of her struggles. Snatcher was no longer ignorant of time's malleability, no longer oblivious when time was affected by her demise. He boldly taunted her about her failures, and she still didn't clue in on what was happening! He even began to play with time, to further experiment with opening or collapsing unstable time rifts, or corrupt those who'd used the energy of time pieces to fight, all in arenas and alternate dimensions of his own creation, all for his own amusement. He corrupted people, places, events that had happened to her. He corrupted time itself.

He watched, genuine joy hidden beneath his usual nasty smile, as the Hat Kid finally finished another of his special contracts and laid her hands on a purple time piece. He saw the light from his creation reflect in her eyes, saw its sinister glow engulf her form. Saw her smug fascination at the beautiful, twisted object she held.

If he could corrupt time… what else could he corrupt?

The surprisingly competent girl never stood a chance. No matter how many times she undid Time's End, or survived a contract, or shot off into space on her little ship, Snatcher brought his unwitting "Best Friend Forever" back. Back to play his games and die at his hands. Unlike Snatcher, whose experiments with time allowed him full awareness whenever it was affected, Hat Kid never quite seemed to realize the full severity of what was occurring.

He was The Snatcher, and he was aptly named. He'd stolen her time pieces, whisked away her soul, then purloined her control of time itself! He adapted that power to suit his own ends with her none the wiser to his ploy. She was just like her time pieces; she had fallen in his forest, and so she belonged to him. That BFF contract was going to be her unwitting undoing, because forever was a very long time for an undead, eldritch entity such as himself. There was a reason Vanessa had been his perfect pair, his soulmate. Snatcher was greedy. When he found something he wanted, he would keep it, whether or not it should have belonged to him. Hat Kid had wronged him by stealing a piece of his heart! It was only fair that he stole something back from that stubborn, smiling, sneaky little brat! That something just so happened to be her.

It's not like anyone noticed her absence. Her parents were dead, judging by their faded spirits occasionally showing up to check on her. No supervisors or caretakers or even basic law enforcement tried to contact her either, no matter how many times he reset her timeline. Was it kidnapping if she was an unsupervised orphan? Did he even care?

Hat Kid tried to escape from Earth many times to return home. Unbeknownst to her, she would fail every time. Home was not where she thought it was, not anymore. Her home was under Snatcher's thumb. Under his rule, his watchful eye, where he could boisterously deny his fondness of her and drive her away, yet never have to actually worry about losing her. She was his BFF, his favourite minion, his toy to break or praise or dress in silly outfits, his friend, HIS.

She could never get away now, never escape. He would always snatch her back. Her time was his time, now.