Wherein our would-be heroes are Doomed from the start.

Wren woke to the feeling of the earth moving beneath her.

The air was stagnant, uneasy cool. Eerily calm. The surface she was laying on was rough, kind of lumpy. Warm, but still. A bad dream? Wren curled in on herself and pressed her eyes closed. In just a few hours she'd wake up again safe in bed, ready to face the world head on.

She jerked awake as the ground shifted under her again. The movement was hesitant, overly careful. Wren put out an arm to catch herself only to be caught and steadied by a familiar set of violet claws. The ground- no- a massive scaled hand cupped her in its grasp.

"Wren," Leonidas, her partner's voice rattled away the last bit of sleep she'd been clinging on to, and the little hope that any of this was a dream.

"Leo?" She stared up at her partner with open bewilderment. How was he in his monster form? And holding her- that was one line he'd never crossed. This couldn't be good. She grasped at her aching head with one hand and propped herself up with the other. What had happened? There'd been a battle. Against who? Her memory was hazy, the more she tried to reach for answers the dizzier she felt. "Where are we?"

Leonidas looked out across the horizon. Only in the pause did Wren understand the true enormity of the silence that stretched out around them. It was a quiet deeper than that of any of the empty battle spaces she was accustomed to. The silhouettes of what could only be Bakugan frozen in the throws of death loomed in the distance. She shivered.

"The Doom Dimension."

"Wh-" Wren tried to push herself to her feet and immediately regretted it. The world spun out from under her, despite Leo's steady hand. She crumpled back into her partner's palm.

Leo's claws tensed. "Careful."

"Dang- damn!" Wren corrected herself, it's not like there was any adults around to care. The small act of rebellion almost beat out the creeping feeling of homesickness. "What happens now? We aren't stuck here-" Wren looked up to try and meet her partner's avoidant gaze. "are we?"

Leonidas closed his eyes and tilted his head, as if listening for something far away. "There was a rift here before. It's how I escaped to Earth..." His voice trailed off.

If it weren't for current circumstances, Wren might have ribbed him for still having a sore spot about, what she saw as his super cool origin story. Instead she sunk against the base of his thumb. "What if it's gone?"

The Bakugan cast her a short glance. He didn't answer, only rose to his feet and continued walking. A palpable dread hung over them both.

Anger and frustration simmered just below the surface of Leonidas's inexpressive facade, though that was not unusual. What was, was its source. He'd failed to defend his partner, dragged her here. He had no one to blame but himself for all of it. He snarled.

He felt Wren watching him. Small as she was in the palm of his hand he could feel her worry, the beginnings of fear. The initial relief he'd felt when she'd woken up had quickly turned to a weight in his chest.

"Leo?" Wren pulled him back from his worrying. He wasn't used to the feeling of worrying. It made him worry that his worrying might be making his Brawler worried.

He clenched his teeth. "Yes?" His voice came out as more irritated than concerned.

Wren looked up at him quietly. She shook her head and settled back again. "Never mind... It's nothing,"

Leonidas eyed her skeptically, but didn't push it. He pushed onward. He couldn't afford to stop for long.

They weren't alone here.

In the distance, he sensed them. Other Bakugan. Denizens of the Doom Dimension or fellow casualties of Masquerade and his recruits it didn't matter. The last thing he needed was unexpected company catching him an arm down, his Brawler in hand.

They steered clear of him. He steered clear of them.

He wouldn't take any chances.

He tucked his wings against his back, kept his head low, and his ears sharp.

He had to get her out of here.

The initial fear of waking up in a hell dimension was quickly wearing out its novelty. Wren was starting to find you could only really cringe back at the sight of another lifeless Bakugan so many times before they start to become part of the scenery. And there were so, so many of them. More than she could name, some she could hardly recognize. Pretty soon she gave up trying to identify them altogether.

As far as entertainment went, her watch was dead- or broken. "Eye Spy" did not seem like it would get very far when your options were something grey, something grey, a "something" that would probably count as disrespecting the dead to even consider as an option in this game, and something a slightly different shade of grey.

Wren groaned and flopped down against the heel of her partner's hand. Who knew a death dimension could be so boring.

Leonidas paused in his step. She had to brace herself as he raised her to eye level, a gesture he must have picked up from when she'd carry him in ball form. He looked at her quizzically.

Wren rolled over on her back, arms outstretched in a dramatic show of defeat. "Isn't there like, anything to do out here?"

The Bakugan blinked. "In the Doom Dimension," not quite a statement, not quite a question.

Wren shrugged.

Leonidas huffed and lowered his hand back to his chest. He returned his attention to the road ahead.

Wren stuck out her tongue.

He wasn't looking.

Wren pressed her mouth closed. He wasn't looking. There was something she needed to check. She folded her legs against her chest and riffled through her pack. She found her school supplies, some snacks, and an already half empty water bottle. She frowned. She didn't know how long they'd been here already. There was no sun or moon. Just an ambient, sourceless light that cast shadows at confusing angles. How far could these supplies even last her? What was it? A few weeks without food, three days without water?

That couldn't be right. She hazarded a glance back towards her partner. The Bakugan's attention was drawn somewhere on the horizon. She bit her tongue and zipped the bag closed.

She wasn't hungry anyways.

Leonidas didn't know how far or long he'd been walking. It might have been hours. It could have been days.

There was a pull. A kind of magnetism that tugged at him. It put him on edge, made him itch to bolt towards it, to spread his wings and take to the air.

He gritted his teeth. Flying was out of the question. He was painfully aware of how tall he stood at full height alone. The idea of being even more exposed than they already were was hardly appealing. He knew, he could take a fall, his partner could not.

He consciously shifted his tucked arm against his chest.

Since she'd settled in, his Brawler had been unusually quiet. He couldn't decide if that was better or worse than her hounding him with questions that he could not reasonably answer.

When she wasn't quietly watching along, Wren was dipping in and out of sleep. Sometimes he gleaned the impression that she was dreaming of home, other times she curled up and mumbled to herself. He nudged her awake the first few times he caught her shivering. She pushed him away, assured him she was fine.

"Just bad dreams," she promised. "You can wake me up when we get there."

He squinted, but reluctantly agreed. He had the uneasy feeling she was hiding something from him. He couldn't pin down what. He wrote it off as just her usual reluctance discussing her nightmares.

He shook his head and carried on.

He walked,

and walked,

and walked.

Wren was fast asleep again by the time they made it to the place it had all began.

Leonidas knew he'd found it when that homing pull within him at last drew skywards.

The place of his birth.

On the surface, it looked no different from the rest of the long forsaken dimension. Nothing more than a graveyard. The rift was gone, but signs of it lingered in the air, like ozone after a lightning strike. It had to have been here. Leonidas rose to his full height, testing the air. He scanned the sky for something, anything.

Some fissure, some spider-silk thin crack to pry open.

Nothing.

The beginnings of a roar built in his chest.

Nothing.

It leveled off to a low growl.

Nothing...

He slammed his free fist hard against a nearby outcropping.

Trapped.

Damn it. He snarled.

They were trapped.

Alone, why hadn't he faced the Doom Dimension alone? Why couldn't he have accepted his fate with some amount of grace? Instead he fought tooth and nail, refused to give in. He'd drawn out the battle just for that bastard to find an opportunity to take a shot at Wren.

His claws curled defensively around his Brawler.

He'd tried to play the hero, and it'd just doomed them both.

Wren shivered and curled closer into the palm of his hand. His face fell. He didn't want to wake her. He'd wait. It could wait. There was no hurry. Not anymore. He huffed.

The air stirred.

His eyes narrowed. They weren't alone.

The presence of another - another Bakugan brushed against his own. It pressed a simple message into this mind, like a stranger passing a note into the palm of one's hand: an image of himself in the sights of a drawn bow. With it, came a singular command. "Dodge."

There was no time to question it. Leonidas boosted himself to the left.

The arrow, a shaft of pure light, grazed him on the right.

He landed with a spin, dug his hind claws into the ground.

A strong wind buffeted him from the left just as he moved to cup the hand holding Wren to his chest.

He froze.

It was empty.

No-

Panic. He spun in place, raked his eyes over the ground. He couldn't have dropped her. He knew. He'd been careful. He crouched down, hand still clutched to his chest. It was hardly a defensible position, but it didn't matter now. He had to be sure.

No body, no blood. It was almost a relief, but, there was absolutely no sign of her.

Not here- if not here then- As if to answer his question the wind whipped up around him, tugging at his flared wings in an almost playful gesture.

He looked up.

A figure in green, wrapped in wind hovered high above the battlefield. Their arms were folded against their chest as if cradling- no, not "as if" they were holding-

Leo's eyes went wide. Relief first, then rage. Wren. His control, if he'd had any left to begin with, was crushed more thoroughly than a soda can teleported suddenly to the center of a black hole. Lightning shot down his spine and crackled between his teeth.

He roared.

Author's Note:

Yeah they're probably fine.

I did admittedly realize that there's a Ren later in the series (I never watched past New Vestrioa as a kid and am currently working on rewatching the sub for Season 1) but by then I was kind of a sucker for the name. That's what I get for not looking it up first I guess.

Wren's full name is Renge (pronounced Ren-gay) Wilson. But she mostly goes by Wren.

Not much in the ways of character descriptions here for her, but she's a scruffy kind of kid.

Timeline-wise, this'd be happening somewhere between Leonidas's origin story reveal in the game and the Battle Brawlers' trip to the Doom Dimension.