I wake up swinging.
Something connects with my fist—wood, maybe, furniture—and then I'm rolling off whatever surface I was lying on, scrambling for a weapon that isn't there. My Beretta. Where's my Beretta? The room spins around me, dim and unfamiliar, and my ribs scream their displeasure at being vertical without proper consultation.
A man stands near the door with his hands raised in a gesture that's probably meant to be calming. Orange hair swept over one eye, heavy eyeliner, white coat with red lining. He looks like a circus escaped and he's the only survivor.
"Easy there, Chibi. You've had quite the beauty sleep."
My hand finds a wrench on a nearby workbench. I throw it at his head.
He ducks—barely—and it clatters against the wall behind him. "Charming. Is that how you greet everyone who saves your life, or am I just lucky?"
"Where is he?" The words come out hoarse, scraped raw from a throat that hasn't spoken in—how long? "Where's Monarch?"
The man's expression shifts, something calculating behind the theatrical surprise. "I don't know who that is, sweetheart. Care to enlighten me, or should I start guessing?"
"My pilot. My—" I stumble against the workbench, head pounding, trying to piece together fragments of memory that don't want to fit. The wake. The ejection. His seat not firing. "He was—we were—"
"Alone." The man's voice softens, just slightly. "You were alone when I found you. Two days ago, unconscious in the Forever Forest, bleeding from about six different places and muttering names in your sleep."
Two days.
I've been unconscious for two days.
Monarch has been fighting by himself for two days.
The wrench must have had siblings, because I'm reaching for another weapon before conscious thought catches up. This time the man moves faster, catching my wrist with surprising gentleness.
"Enough of that. Your pistol is over there—" he nods toward a table where my Beretta sits, slide locked back on an empty magazine "—and before you ask, yes, I unloaded it. You already tried to shoot my coat rack on day one. The coat rack didn't deserve that."
I stare at the empty gun in confusion. "The coat rack."
"Twice. Very committed to killing it." He releases my wrist, stepping back with exaggerated care. "Now, would you like some water, or should we continue the assault-the-rescuer portion of our evening?"
Before I can respond, someone else enters the room.
She's small—petite, lithe, moving with a dancer's grace that makes my combat instincts sit up and pay attention. Her eyes shift color as she looks at me, a kaleidoscope effect that should be impossible. She doesn't speak. Instead, she pulls out a phone, types rapidly, and holds up the screen. [ARE YOU GOING TO STAB HIM? l:< ]
I blink at the message. At her. At the orange-haired man who seems entirely unbothered by the question.
"I'm... still deciding."
She types again. [I WON'T TELL ANYONE. ♡]
There's something about the absolute non-sequitur of it—the blunt questions, the unexpected kindness packaged in text messages—that cracks through my panic in a way the man's theatrical reassurances couldn't. My shoulders drop half an inch.
"Wait what?"
The small woman nods once, decisively, and disappears back through the door.
"That's Neo," the man says, watching me with renewed interest. "I'm Roman, by the way. And you are?"
"Pres-," I say automatically, then catch myself. That's not—that was a nickname for me and over the years it had become my identity, but for now I may as well forgo my callsign. "Robin. My name is Robin."
Roman's visible eyebrow rises. "Robin. Lovely. And would you like to tell me, Robin, why you were bleeding out in the middle of Grimm territory with an empty pistol and no Aura?"
"Eh... I don't know?" I try to consider how to recount what happened to Monty and I. "My- Monarch and I were fighting over Presidia when the Federation dropped a Cordium bomb bigger than any I had ever seen before? The next thing I know... we were chewed up in some weird portal and spit out near where you found me."
"Fascinating." He doesn't sound fascinated, but his eyes held a weird curiosity. "And the Grimm? First time encounter, based on your shooting technique?"
"The what?"
"The black monsters you emptied your magazine into. Creatures of Grimm. Soulless beasts drawn to negative emotion." He's watching me carefully now, that theatrical mask slipping to reveal something sharper underneath. "Common knowledge on Remnant."
Remnant. Is that what this place is called?
I push myself upright, fighting the room's insistence on spinning. My body still feels wrong—too small, too light, proportions I haven't inhabited since I was a teenager. I look down at my hands. Smaller. Less scarred.
"I need a mirror."
Roman produces one from somewhere—pocket mirror, silver, ornate—and hands it over without comment.
The face staring back at me is the same one I saw in the pool. Young. Maybe fourteen, fifteen at most. The scar through my left eyebrow is gone, the lines around my eyes completely absent. I look like a child wearing dog tags she stole from a stranger.
"I used to be twenty-three," I hear myself say.
Roman's expression flickers. Disbelief, confusion, something that might be concern. "That's... quite the claim."
"I know what I was." My voice cracks. "I know who I was."
Neo returns with a bowl of ice cream—strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla swirled together. She sets it on the workbench beside me, types on her phone, and holds it up. [YOU'RE NOT LYING D;]
Not a question. A statement. Something about me genuinely unsettles her, and for some reason, that makes me feel less insane.
I thought startles me as I reach into for my tattered flightsuit next to my Berretta- an action that made the other two initially tense, as I scavange my pockets and find what I was looking for.
A photo. Just one.
Monarch and me, standing beside Hitman One after a mission that should have killed us both. He's laughing in the photo—actually laughing, that rare unguarded expression that transformed his usually serious face into something warm and real. I'm grinning beside him, younger than I am now but older than I appear... I think I was twenty one at the time, my arm around his shoulders like I had any right to touch him so casually.
"Your parents?" Roman asks, leaning closer to see the screen.
He's misread it. Misread us. The man standing beside twenty-one-year-old me, and the child holding the photo now—he thinks—
The dam breaks.
I don't decide to cry. The grief simply overtakes me, a wave I've been holding back since I watched the wake swallow the aircraft whole. My knees hit the floor. My hands shake so badly I nearly drop the photo, and I clutch it to my chest like it's the only thing keeping me tethered to a world that no longer exists.
Monarch is dead. He died two days ago, and I've been unconscious while his body was consumed by flames, and I'm trapped in a child's body on a planet with a broken moon and demon wolves, and he should be here. He should be right behind me. He always was. He always—
"Monty," I sob, the name tearing out of me. "Monty, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"
Roman stands frozen near the doorway, his theatrical confidence utterly absent, a man who clearly has no idea what to do with a grieving child who claims she used to be a woman. Neo watches from the shadows with uncharacteristic seriousness, her multi-colored eyes fixed on me with something that might be recognition.
I cry until there's nothing left. Until my voice gives out and my eyes burn dry and the ice cream melts forgotten on the workbench.
Monarch is gone.
I am here.
I don't know how to be anyone else without him.