The tropes have backed off for a bit, WriterGreenReads. Arya knows enough to turn them to her advantage most of the time, as long as she doesn't get caught by surprise, which will form the foundation of the next few cases.
Also, super sorry about the long gaps between updates. They SHOULD be closing up fairly soon, since I don't have any other projects to get distracted with, and the guilt is rapidly becoming too potent to ignore. In my defense, the lack of reader response makes this seem like less of a priority –there's no motivation, since I get very little reward for all my labor writing the chapters. I mean, I'm still gonna FINISH it, but reviews give me more enthusiasm.
I also started writing Arya's series in 2014 and there is NO WAY I'm going to hit the decade milestone without being at least halfway through this 6-work series. Like, fuck that noise. Uh-uh. I will chuck everything else aside if I have to I will NOT be caught that far behind.
December 30th, 2022
Arya's POV:
Since it seemed like this was going to be a one-night occurrence (ASIE were wrapping up their operations quickly, no survivors of Cosa Nostra), Rex splurged via my money on Don Giovanni rather than any of the Der Ring Cycle, a decision that flew on silver wings right over my head. Rex explained it to me in an appropriately-hushed voice as we made our way through the other opera-goers, feeling vaguely grubby and unpolished in our work clothes next to so many nice suits and dresses. Apparently, Wager's opera cycle took four nights, whereas Don Giovanni only took three hours.
Three hours? I'd hissed to him under the cover of the orchestra tuning up.
Three hours. Rex had replied, looking obscenely happy for a guy who didn't speak the language as I groaned and sank back in my seat in utter despair.
Thankfully, Don Giovanni was in Italian, so that despite the crashing vibrato that soared out over the vast audience, I could, kinda, get who was saying what and even understand most of the words, despite the glaring lack of translations or subtitles. I'd heard of the opera before, in much the same way I vaguely knew about poker, so with the help of that and the pamphlet I was more or less on stable ground as I stumbled along behind the plot.
The opera itself was set in Spain, in the 17th century, and followed the titular nobleman Don Giovanni and his servant, Leporello. Don Giovanni was, not to put too fine a point on it, an absolute fuckboy (the opera called him an "audacious libertine") who loved having sex with women more than anything else. In modern times this was less of a problem, but during the opera's time period, a woman's chastity was equated with her virtue, and losing one's virginity to anyone but one's husband was a horrible dishonor. This cast Don Giovanni firmly as a villain, since he went around seducing women with promises to marry them and then leaving them abandoned and dishonored when he'd gotten what he wanted.
The opera opened with his failed attempt to seduce a noblewoman, Donna Anna, with Leporello standing watch out front. Leporello complained about his job, before Don Giovanni rushed out of the house with a woman clutching onto his sleeve. This was Donna Anna, who had managed to break away from him and rouse the house when she recognized that he was not her fiancé, and was trying to delay him so that he could be captured and punished. She left when her father –simply called the Commendatore– attempted to stop her assaulter, but in a quick duel, Don Giovanni killed the Commendatore and fled.
A series of further slightly-inscrutable shenanigans ensued, in which Don Giovanni continued to attempt seducing women, eventually encountering a former discarded noblewoman by the name of Donna Elvira, who had sworn vengeance against him.
I liked Donna Elvira. She cockblocked Don Giovanni on several occasions throughout the opera, saving a peasant girl, and was the person to help Donna Anna and her fiancé, Don Ottavio, figure out that Don Giovanni had been the one to assault her. Even Leporello, Don Giovanni's servant and a somewhat morally grey character, felt sorry for her, showing her the compiled list of women that Don Giovanni had slept with (over 2,000) and bitterly reproaching his master when Don Giovanni used their similar figures to trick Donna Elvira with a false serenade, pretending to have repented.
In any case, through Donna Elvira and Donna Anna, many of Don Giovanni's sins were revealed at a party, and he fled after attempting to unsuccessfully frame Leporello for all that he'd done. The husband of the peasant girl that Donna Elvira had saved started hunting Don Giovanni with the intent to kill him in the aftermath of said party, but Don Giovanni slipped away by briefly exchanging clothes and identities with Leporello.
Around two and a half hours into the opera, Don Giovanni and Leporello found themselves in what I was pretty sure was a graveyard –at the very least, they were in front of a memorial, since there was a giant statue of the Commendatore on the stage. Don Giovanni made fun of Leporello, since while he was disguised as Leporello he had seduced several of Leporello's… girlfriends or mistresses, I wasn't sure, and when Leporello moved to attack him, the statue spoke in a ghostly voice, warning Don Giovanni that his last laugh would be before the dawn. Naturally, this part of the opera sharpened my interest and had me sitting forward in my seat, where I had been slouched back for the past half-hour.
After they both dismissed the voice (Don Giovanni more dismissive than his nervous manservant), Leporello was forced by his master to read the carving on the monument, which turned out to be a dire warning. To the best of my fuzzy Italian and the vibrating acoustics, the base of the statue read I wait here for revenge against the scoundrel who killed me. Don Giovanni, who was apparently never one to take a warning, scoffed and mockingly invited the statue to dinner through Leporello: the statue then shocked them both by nodding in agreement.
At said dinner, Donna Elvira desperately approached Don Giovanni one last time, hoping to get him to change his ways –Don Giovanni, staying true to type, made fun of her heartfelt pleas and praised women and wine enthusiastically, calling them the glory of humanity. Donna Elvira fled rather than shanking him (which disappointed me), and then screamed offstage. Leporello was sent to investigate, and came back shaking and stammering as both me and Rex straightened up in our seats, sensing Don Giovanni's end like sharks sensing blood in the water.
Turns out, the opera ended with the statue of the Commendatore coming into Don Giovanni's dining room as Leporello hid: Don Giovanni, with admittedly impressive calm, offered the statue a place at his table, since it had been invited to eat with him –although the statue refused due to something about eating heavenly food. It then proposed a counter-offer: though the words were clear (and, in fact, bellowed out amidst the deep thrumming of base chords) it took me a few seconds to parse the meaning. Don Giovanni had invited the statue to dinner, and so, it was his (which he the statue meant was a bit unclear to me) duty to return the favor.
In plain speech, the statue of the dead Commendatore was inviting its murderer to dine with it at its home.
Don Giovanni, in a truly brazen display of not reading the room, agreed, and shook on it with the statue. Upon grasping the statue's hand, however, he was overcome with supernatural chills, and the statue offered him one last chance to repent. Adamantly refusing and yanking his hand away, Don Giovanni then collapsed as a chorus of what seemed to be demons started up, eagerly damning him to eternal torment as they crept in from all corners of the wings. Don Giovanni thrashed dramatically from the midst of them as they swarmed the center of the stage –singing all the while, naturally– until there was a mighty crescendo and they all fell through a trapdoor, which was presumably intended to be the demons dragging Don Giovanni down to Hell.
With that, the opera was nearly over, and Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, and the peasant husband and wife came to the dining room in search of Don Giovanni, and a trembling Leporello crept out from under the table to inform them of what had went down. Satisfied with that outcome, everyone began wrapping up their narratives: Donna Anna and Don Ottavio planned to marry after her year of mourning was over, the peasants would go home for dinner, Donna Elvira would go to a convent to cleanse herself of the shame of Don Giovanni, and Leporello would go to a tavern to search for a better master.
"Most productions cut that last scene." Rex explained to me as we were disgorged out onto the pavement with the rest of the crowd, flooding away from the opulent theater now that the opera had ended. He was almost bouncing in place, giddy beyond words at the spectacle we had witnessed as he clutched his playbill to his chest like a groupie with a signed magazine.
"Why?" I asked, baffled. "I mean, they just end it on him being dragged down?"
"Pretty much. I mean, the whole opera is meant to be a moral lesson, so with him punished, the lesson's kinda over."
I hummed without words, not necessarily agreeing. I mean, sure, Rex was right, the lesson of the opera was definitely a warning against wanton debauchery, but I didn't like how the abridged version more or left everyone else's fates a mystery. It didn't feel tied-up, that way.
Still, who was I, a mere baffled teenager dragged along behind her partner, to dictate opera conventions. I hadn't hated the night as much as I expected to –oh, sure, I definitely would've liked the opera more if there were subtitles and also not as many scenes of swearing vengeance for twenty minutes without actually doing anything– but I hadn't been battling sleep the whole time, or clamping my hands over my ears at the sounds grating against my eardrums. It could've been a whole lot worse, considering my prior impressions of opera as being "that thing where people sing loudly and without enunciation in a foreign language for two hours straight."
As we swept along through the busy streets back to our hotel, I resisted the urge to finger my Colt, which was strapped on underneath my jacket. Modern clothing was nice in a lot of ways, but it also made it somewhat difficult to disguise the outline of one's weapon. Back when I was in the world of Black Butler, voluminous skirts meant it was almost possible to hide a modern machine gun beneath my dress, never mind a pistol and a few knives, and I never had a bit of trouble with customs or people on the street giving me weird looks.
Well, they did give me weird looks whenever I slipped with my admittedly amateur impression of Victorian mannerisms, but as someone whose nearest experience with that historical period came from pop media, I felt that that was not my fault.
In any case, my paranoia was somewhat bolstered by the fact that we had just taken down a notorious gang, so it was good to be on guard. While being paranoid for other reasons was something that I was still working on dialing back, I at least had a reason for keeping my hand near my holster this time, as we entered the decorative area around the hotel parking lot and saw the bright gleam of its windows up ahead.
I took several deep breaths.
You are not under threat of extradimensional enemies. You are safe. You are secure. You are armed. Everything is fine.
Someone touched my shoulder, and where ordinarily I would spasmed and possibly even drawn on them, some… feeling let me know that it was Rex, and I only looked over with a much sharper movement than such a light touch warranted. My partner, awkward and yet helpful person that he was, grimaced at me worriedly.
"Are you… doing okay?"
Pausing before I answered, I pinched and rubbed the bridge of my nose, repeating the affirmations the DWMA therapist had told me a few more times for good measure.
"Yeah." I said after a few moments, muffled slightly against my own hand. "Just…"
My ribs expanded and shrank as I heaved in a huge sigh.
"Dealing with some aftereffects of the stuff that happened before I came here." I said, meaning the DWMA rather than Italy. "It's fine. I'm just needlessly jumpy."
"Well, you know…" Rex began, trailing off a little before he continued. "If something does attack us, you're not on your own. You've got me, a Weapon partner that's eaten six souls!"
I stared at him as he bravely clenched his fist and grinned at me, then huffed a little, my lips curling as I let out another slow breath.
"…yeah. Yeah." My shoulders straightened a little as I thought of that. "It has been six souls, hasn't it?"
Granted, when you considered that we needed one hundred souls before I could even properly begin, that seemed like a tiny trickle in the ocean, but… but six was almost ten, and we only needed to get ten souls 10 times before we got everything we needed. In a way, our progress was very impressive, even if we didn't have that big of a kill count yet.
Rex and I entered the hotel and went to bed that night in a decidedly more cheerful frame of mind.
***Time Skip***
Paperwork stamped, bad guys eradicated, and ride scheduled, we boarded our plane back to Nevada with all the rest of the meisters later the next day, bereft of our hard-bitten instructor. In his words, if we needed a guide back to our own damn city, we weren't worth the paper our passports were printed on, and I kinda had to agree.
Since this was meant to be an overnight flight on a plane very similar to the one we had used to get in, most of the others were settling in to sleep. And to be fair, Rex and I weren't much different, already with our seats cranked back to their most horizontal level and the airline pillows stuffed under our heads.
However, with our return to Death City, we'd also have to return to dealing with Blackstar and Maka and all the others, and I was coming to the reluctant conclusion that we would have to deal with them, if only a little, tiny bit. My knowledge (and memory) of canon events was just too fuzzy, even with my notes. I knew that Kid's duel with Blackstar and Soul came right after Stein got hired, but after that… I wasn't sure if Tsubaki's death battle with her brother was next, or Crona's first encounter with Maka and Soul.
One of these events was more troubling than the other –after Soul had gotten hurt, the DWMA had instituted a policy that everyone had to work in two-partner teams on extracurricular missions for quite some time. Rex and I were barely functional on our own: adding two other people into the mix did not exactly seem appealing. Of course, since I didn't want to stand out, there was no way I could try and wiggle around that safety rule, and there was no way in hell I would pause our Kishin-slaying until the rule went out of effect.
Problem was, I couldn't exactly rely on the school's gossip mill to tell me these things. Or, well, I could, but that would give me the news at a delayed or, at best, real-time rate. If I wanted to get my affairs in order and give myself the advantages that I quite frankly desperately needed, I had to anticipate canon, not sprint along behind it. Anticipating canon meant no longer resisting Blackstar's overtures of friendship, because if I got pulled into his friend circle, then I would be given advance warning through context clues about what major event was coming up on the horizon.
I am not giving into the shounen friendship trope. I thought stubbornly, glaring up at the airplane ceiling above myself with a defiant frown. I am not.
I rolled over on my seat-bed to look at Rex.
"You awake?" I asked softly, not wanting to disturb the others around us. Rex, who looked strangely different without his usual hat, glasses, and hair clips, rolled over to meet me, blinking in an expectant if somewhat nearsighted way.
"Yeah." he replied, a little facetiously. "What's up?"
"You know how we kinda… um, excused ourselves about hanging with Maka and Blackstar this weekend?"
"You mean lied."
"We excused ourselves." I stressed, and then took a deep breath. "Anyways, it's kinda been bugging me, so I figured… ah, I dunno, I mean… we could… try to be friends with them more?"
I ended my tentative statement, smiling like my teeth hurt. Rex blinked at me owlishly.
"You wanna be friends with other meisters." he said, as though clarifying.
"I feel bad about continuously dodging Blackstar's overtures of friendship and feel like we should bite the bullet and get over with it already." I corrected him. No way was I going to try and social-network with the whole of the DWMA, especially when they had such shitty opinions about my partner. "I mean, he's not that bad of a guy, and I feel like kind of a dick always putting him off."
Rex nodded a few times, rolling his lip.
"Well, it's nice to see you becoming less of a hermit." he said, and rolled over as I stared indignantly at his back.
"Excuse me? Rex, I am not a hermit." I hissed at him. My partner did not respond. "Oi! I know you can hear me, there's no way you went to sleep that fast! Rex!"
He breathed louder in a faux-sleeping rhythm, apparently committed to his act.
"Tch. Whatever. I'm a very friendly person." I told him, seizing my thin airline blanket and pulling it over my shoulders as I pointedly rolled in the other direction, putting my back to him. "I am so friendly. I'm great at getting to know people. I have tons of people in my social group."
Rex's breath faltered slightly behind me in an almost-wheeze that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
I scowled in the opposite direction, snuggling fiercer into my blanket. Whatever. I'd show him. I'd been holding back up until now, trying to distance myself from the canon characters around me –no longer. I mean, obviously I'd still try to hold back a little, keep myself from becoming fully embedded as one of the main cast, but my days of avoiding Blackstar and the other main characters like a plague were over.
This resolution lasted me all the way back across the Atlantic, to our weird airline breakfast and our touchdown in Death City, and it even followed me through our disembarking and finding our baggage to claim. It was tested when Rex straightened beside me, and I followed his gaze across the crowded terminal, only to blanch as we saw a determined Blackstar shoving his way through the crowd towards us, an apologetic Tsubaki excusing herself to jolted people in his wake.
The second our eyes met, Blackstar jumped up and waved his arm frantically, like he was signaling a taxi. Disregarding every law of decency, politeness, and volume, he filled his lungs and shouted across the space to us, his voice booming out over the mutters of the vast crowd in the terminal.
"YO! GUYS! SOUL GOT HURT ON A MISSION IN ITALY!"
Balls.
Pleading, digging our heels in, and downright shouting were all likewise futile.
Resistance, in general, was futile.
Blackstar zoomed through the streets like a demented hurricane, dragging me and Rex behind him as we kicked up a rising cloud of dust in our wake and Tsubaki ran like a champion sprinter behind all three of us. He did not stop, he did not slow, he did not cease until the hard cobblestones and bumpy, jagged stairs gave way to the smooth floors of the DWMA and he thunderously kicked open a door beneath a sign that read DISPENSARY. I, having abandoned dignity somewhere around when we'd gotten into the school proper and I realized our destination, had been digging furrows in the ground with my nails, and whimpered in mute despair as we were both summarily dragged into the lion's den.
"SOUL! SOUL! ARE YOU OKAY?!"
Good news, Medusa wasn't there.
Bad news, as soon as Blackstar dropped me and Rex on the floor –including our luggage– he leaped upon the comatose Soul, straddling his hospital bed, and grabbed Soul by the shoulders, starting to shake the unconscious Weapon up and down like a ragdoll as he screamed in his face.
"ITS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT! BLACKSTAR IS HERE FOR YOU NOW!"
Blackstar's fingers dug deep into the delicate folds of skin around Soul's eyes, stretching his eyelids painfully up and over his unseeing gaze.
"OPEN YOUR EYES!"
Receiving no response, obviously, Blackstar went back to thrashing Soul's limp body around on the bed, like if he just shook him hard enough Soul would wake up.
"ONE LOOK AT MY BIG HANDSOME FACE AND YOU'LL BE CURED FOR SURE!"
"Blackstar no!" Maka screamed from the sidelines, horrified. She put an end to Blackstar's medical malpractice with a hefty textbook, slamming it into Blackstar's skull with such force that I saw blood spurting up from his skull as he was knocked aside –landing, coincidentally, in another hospital bed with a thunderous crash as he was reduced to the same state as Soul.
"Sorry about that, Maka…" Tsubaki sighed, as Rex and I picked ourselves up from the floor. Maka, sans her usual black trench coat but otherwise suited and booted in her normal outside-school getup, did not respond to Tsubaki's apology, her unusually heavy gaze fixed on her partner in his bed as her bangs hung over her face. "Maka…?"
With a few quick scrubs of her sleeve across her eyes, hiding any tears that may or may not have ever been present, Maka looked up and smiled sheepishly at us all. She blinked, a little, as she saw me and Rex helping ourselves to our feet.
"Uh, what are you two doing here…?"
"I'd love to know." I grumbled, rubbing where the side of my skull had bounced against concrete on our swift and painful ride here. Then, because I wasn't an absolute monster even if every fiber of my being was screaming to get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible before she showed up, I popped a bright smile onto my face. "Still, we heard what happened to you guys en route. It takes a lotta guts for the two of you to be able to come out of that alive."
My piece said, my hand locked around Rex's elbow, starting to tug him backwards.
"Anyways, Blackstar dragged us here from the airport, so we need to go unpack our stuff right now." I said, straining for politeness when I wanted to break the sound barrier running. Rex gave me a confused look, no doubt seeing the inherent contradiction between my words earlier and my actions now, but I wanted to get the fuck out of dodge before-
"Oh my goodness. What happened to the door?"
Fuck.
I locked up. Then, knowing better than to give anyone a hint that I was anything but startled, I forced a neutral expression onto my face and turned.
Medusa was a striking woman, with a heart-shaped face possessed of two perfectly-plucked eyebrows, a firm mouth, and slanted, catlike yellow eyes framed by two long strands of rich blonde hair. These two strands spiraled around each other in a short braid on her chest –braided right when she was a witch and braided to the left when she was "disguised" as a nurse, if I remembered the manga correctly. The rest of her hair was short and spiky, cut to chin-length, and currently in her nurse disguise, she wore a long white labcoat over her high-collared black dress.
I resisted the urge to bury a scalpel in one of those calm, quizzical eyes as Medusa subtly raised a brow at me and Rex. I did not fantasize about the shower of gore and screaming, startled pain before Medusa lashed out on impulse, revealing to everyone that she was a Witch. I absolutely did not scowl at the woman who had ruined Crona's life as I so dearly longed to do.
"Blackstar broke in." I said truthfully, and eased up on my vise-like and probably painful grip on Rex's elbow as he exhaled in relief. "Anyways, Rex and I-" I almost faltered as I exposed our names, but it wasn't like Medusa couldn't find that easily enough in the school records if she cared to look. "-we'll be going, now."
Trying to edge around her and step over Maka's dad (who was clinging onto her leg like the horny bastard that he was) without making it obvious that I was scooting around her like she was a poisonous snake took some doing, but Rex and I stepped over the dragging Death Scythe and hurried out the door without any incident. Part of me wanted to collapse against the wall and sigh in relief, but I didn't want to relax anywhere near that woman.
Rex remained thankfully silent as we power-walked our way out of the school, and it was only when we got to the courtyard that I sighed and slumped, almost collapsing under the sheer relief of not being anywhere near Medusa. God, my legs were shaking. I'd dealt with demons and Grim Reapers (of a decidedly different stamp than Lord Death) and immortal nation-avatars, but facing down Medusa was somehow so much worse.
Maybe it was the cold calculation swimming beneath her calm, mild gaze: the knowledge that she was sizing me up like prey she might or might not devour, a chess piece she might or might not use, and there was fuck-all I could do about it. Even if I killed her, I wouldn't be able to stop that moment of silent, clinical evaluation.
"…Arya?" Rex asked tentatively as I sat on the front step of the dais, shuffling his feet a little from where he stood behind me. His hand slowly came to rest on the back of my neck, and I shamelessly leaned into that brief, light comfort. "Are you okay?"
No, no the fuck I am not. I thought but didn't say, struggling through the jelly-like feeling shaking in my body and my own nervous tension to find an excuse. It was hard to untangle my tongue.
"I don't like her." I managed at last, trying to quell my shakes. "The nurse. I really don't like her."
"Doctor Medusa?" Rex asked, sounding blank. As well he should, Medusa had managed to fly under the radar flawlessly for a very, very long time. "Why not?"
A dozen vitriol-laden words spun on my tongue, a thousand accusations for her crimes, but I choked them down.
"I just don't." I said shortly, and took a deep breath. "Okay? I'd like to not be anywhere near her."
Rex stared at me for a long moment, his eyes slightly narrowed. I didn't meet his gaze, because I didn't want him to try and read anything there. Resonant we were not, but there was still a sort of… synergy, that was starting to build between us. I noticed that I was beginning to have a feel for what was going on in regard to him a lot, like some kind of single-person intuition.
Well, if I had my way with it, he wouldn't be using that same connection to sense my probably very-palpable unease and fear.
"Anyway," I said, taking a deep breath and straightening up. "We really do need to go back home and unpack. And then, um… maybe we could make a pie or something?"
Rex stared at me like I was crazy. I pointed back into the school.
"For Maka and Soul." I clarified. "Well, mostly Maka, since I don't think Soul's gonna be in a condition to eat it for a while…"
"Do you even know how to make pie?" Rex sighed after a few moments, his shoulders slumping in defeat.
"There's a lot of things you don't know about me, Rexy-boy." I said, slinging an arm companionably over his shoulders and using it to subtly tug him down the stairs with me. "I'm actually halfway decent at homemade meals."
And thus, step one of my master plan to ingratiate ourselves with the main cast took its first crawling step forward.
9.53 PM, USA Central Time
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