When the shulk glyphs break Lion is on the mats sparring with Raja. The much larger girl has her in a headlock, and Lion tries to flip her off her. Raja just snorts.
Then all of a sudden this awful searing pain bursts out between her shoulder-blades, radiating out and up her neck to her head. She tears herself out of Raja’s hold and skitters away from her. It’s like something in her is being ripped apart, whiting her mind out with pain. Across from her she fainty registers the sight of Raja’s normally stony-calm face twisted Into a pained snarl, and she just barely has the presence of mind to realize this is the glyph, and think, so the Emperor is finally fucking finished with us.
Then she blacks out.
Waking up is a slow thing. Painful as shit. Her face is pressed into the mats. She's surprised to be waking up at all, though she doesn't have the presence of mind to understand why that is. Her back feels like someone went at it with a sledgehammer and broke all the bones, achy and hot and painful. Blood, thick and lazy, trickles across her back and sticks in her shirt. Briefly she thinks she must’ve gotten hit by something, but that doesn’t make sense because when she turns her head to the side, she can see Raja is down too.
"What...?" she asks, but doesn't know how to finish.
Then she notices the silence. The lightness of it. For the first time in nearly five years there’s no weight in the back of her mind. The buzzing, like a little burning-out streetlight in the back of her head, is finally quiet. She’d hardly noticed it when it was there, except sometimes in the beginning or when she was straining against orders, but now that it’s gone the silence is palpable. It’s a relief, like ice to a burn. Lying on the cool training mats with that quiet lightness in her head, she can almost forget about the aching pain and the blood running down her back.
"The glyph is down," Raja says disbelievingly, echoing Lion's thoughts.
Lion just grins at her. “It’s fucking down,” she whispers, glee leaking into her voice.
Raja pushes herself up, staggering to her feet and putting out a hand for Lion, who takes it. “I think my back is bleeding,” Raja says. “Is yours?”
“Who fucking cares?” Lion responses, still starstruck.
Raja shoots her a look. “It’d be an unfortunate time to die, darlin’.”
“Fine. Lemme see.” Raja pulls her shirt up. Sure enough, pale scars are etched into her back along where the tattoos used to be, inked on in bold lines. They’ve oozed blood from seemingly no wound. It freaks Lion out, is what it does. She grabs a bandana from her coat pocket and wipes the blood away. It doesn’t come back.
“What the fuck,” Lion says, grin still stuck on her face. The pain in her upper back is ebbing. If this is real, Lion doesn’t know what she’ll do.
The emperor is a god, after all. He’s been alive for fucking thousands of years. He can’t be killed – everyone who gets close to him is physically incapable of sticking a knife into him, after all, thanks to the glyph. No one has ever escaped this and made it. And he would never, never let them go.
So, truly, what the fuck.
Shouts from down the hall snap them out of their stunned state. Raja drops her shirt back down, and with a quick glance at each other, they take off down the hall. They’re still barefoot from sparring. The noise is coming from the open door of the dorm rooms, where over half the facility has collected. Everyone looks to be in various states of shock from the glyph, but all are focused on the person in the middle of the room.
“Nobody move, nobody speak.” The Captain snarls, gun in hand. A good one, too, not one of their cheap painted rifles. Something reliable. Efficient. Across from him is Crow, snarling with her feathers all fluffed up and wings half-mantled, shielding the bunks behind her.
Her claws are flexing dangerously, but she's got no gun on her, and neither does Raja or Lion. These past couple of years the kids who’ve been here longer have taken to lugging their rifles around like safety blankets, but they’d left theirs hanging on their bunks to go spar. She regrets it now.
The captain looks, guarded, defensive. Volatile. If Lion squints she thinks maybe she can see fear written into the lines of his body, but the emotion is unrecognizable on him, so she isn’t sure. Besides, he’s got his back to her. One of the girls in her bunks holds a rifle out to her, and Lion pads over to tentatively grab it, quietly so as not to alert the captain to their presence. She thinks if he noticed them now he might actually shoot someone. A couple of rifle muzzles she can already see propped through the bars of the upper bunks or poking out from under blankets, trained on the Captain. Lion is proud, of course, but it’s pretty overshadowed by tension.
Why the hell is he here, anyways? By now he must have noticed he doesn’t control them anymore. (Blood is still sticking to her back. She finds she loves the feeling.) If Lion was him, she would’ve barricaded herself in her fancy private room and called the shuttlers with their pickup truck over to pick her up. Maybe he can’t.
Regardless, it doesn't matter. What does matter is he quickly he raises his gun, going to shoot, and one of the frontline fighters leaps out of her bunk and tackles him to the ground. They fight tooth-and-nail style for just a moment until he remembers he’s got a gun, flips on top, and shoots her. He misses. The bullet cracks against the cement floor, denting it.
Then Crow has shaken off her surprise, so she pulls the Captain off their frontliner by the collar, slams him into the side of one of the bunks, and lodges her claws through the skin of his neck. For just one moment it doesn’t look like he’s realized what’s happened, but then his hands fly up to grab at her hand. By then Crow is already ripping, dragging her sharp claws through his throat and then pulling back as the Captain stumbles away from her, clutching at his throat and gasping as bright red blood pours from the wound. Lion takes a step back.
Crow isn’t done. She stalks him into the center of the room and then shoves him down as she claws at his stomach, kneeling over him as she tears through his shirt into the soft skin of his chest. Her face is hard and cold. Focused, but blank, like only one thought is running through her mind. Her hands are stained red, blood dripping from the black feathers on her forearms. They’re stuck up past the knuckles in the mess of gore that is his stomach as she tears his guts out. Lion can’t look away, but out of the corner of her eye she notices a couple of the older kids are making the younger ones look away. That’s probably good, she thinks faintly, and swallows.
Crow is done, now, kneeling over the Captain's spasming body. Blood pools lazily around the two of them, soaking into their clothes. By this point the room is entirely silent, aside from the captain's quiet, rough wheezes. She hadn’t noticed the screaming when it was happening. Now it rings in her ears. Lion feels vaguely useless, just standing there with her gun.
Crow stands up. Turns away. She leaves the Captain on the floor where he lies, twitching as he bleeds. Some of his intestines are sticking out of the gashes through his stomach, Lion notices, stomach turning. Past the missing chunk from his neck, she can see into the darkened hollow of his throat. If she didn’t see worse every time they got sent out on a mission she might puke. As it is, she walks up and shoots him in the head. The shot cracks out like a thunderclap, reverberating off the walls. A couple kids flinch in their bunks. Raja, undeniably the kindest of the three of them, just watches. Lion can’t really tell what she’s thinking. She looks back to Crow.
The girl is splattered with blood, her face twisted and hands balled into fists. She’s meeting no one’s eyes. Blood runs down her hands and off her claws, drops splatting against the dusty concrete floor.
“What? You two just gonna stand there and judge me?” she spits. The girl is twitchy enough that Lion thinks she might get bit if she tries to hug her, but she does anyway. Crow is tense at first but after a moment all but collapses into the hold, bloody claws biting into Lion's back as she clings on.
And then Raja is there, whispering “It’s over, we’re done,” and Lion releases Crow into the larger girl’s arms in favor of turning around to make sure the Captain is already dead. She had just seen his throat get ripped out, but… well, she hears the emperor resurrects, and Lion has always been paranoid around things too good to be true.
Cal is covering the corpse with a blanket, though, keeping it from the eyes of the younger kids. The rest of the room has come alive, now. Folks must’ve been hiding out of sight, because there are a lot more people than she’d thought when she walked in. Or maybe more came running when they heard the gunshot.
Either way, Lion revels in their presences, in the way they’re slowly shaking off their quietness. Some of them crowd around the blanketed corpse, watching the blood stains spread out across the white cloth. Most of them just stare, lost in thought or in the scene they just watched. Some of them are smiling. She doesn’t judge Crow for doing this. If she wasn’t here, Lion would probably have done it herself. She kind of appreciates Crow for doing it so she didn’t have to. She doesn’t judge her crew for their smiles, either, they’ve lost who even knows how many siblings to the captain and his admins. Then again, she finds she doesn’t really like the expression on them, either. But, well. The empire wasn’t trying to raise normal and well adjusted kids. They were trying to raise monsters.
Raja walks up behind her, bumping her shoulder. “You good?”
“Course I’m good. I’m always good,” Lion says reflexively, and leans into Raja’s side. “You?”
Raja just hums. She wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls Lion closer. Crow comes up soundlessly beside them.
Lion’s not sure how they’re ever gonna get all the blood out of their clothes.
When the rebellion comes, Lion's people try to hold down the fort. The rebels - or Lion supposes they ain’t the rebels anymore, they’re the ones in charge - shoot the last couple of admins execution style in the floor of the entrance hall on the floor that - if you know what to look for - you can still see the blood stains that no amount of mopping would completely get rid of. Lion and Crow watch from the rafters. It’s cathartic.
The rebellion wants to move them out of the desert. Put them in some barracks connected to the old palace back in the city. It’s dangerous, they say, like they haven’t been surviving for five years already. Like they haven’t fucking noticed. Lion doubts any of these assholes have ever even killed a beast. Lion is suppressing the urge to snap and shout I know, you patronizing fucks, I’ve torn their warm fucking guts out with my bare hands and then eaten them. We’ve trained eight-year-olds to spot and kill the bastards faster than you’ll ever be able to, you-
Instead she smiles. Sure, of course, she says. Just don’t separate us, please and thank you. They tell her that it would be a whole lot more convenient if they separated them, and Raja has to physically hold Crow back as Lion pleads their case. They fight and succeed to not be split up, and Dimitri is chosen as their supervisor. None of them are too hot on that idea, as they’ve long since settled on the belief that the man is a coward, but Lion supposes a coward is better than a monster.
Even with all the changes, they do much better than they ever did when the Emperor and the Captain were alive, even with the uncertainty. At least until the rebellion takes away their guns.
Lion can see why they did it. Some of them might be actual little kids, but they’re trained soldiers, and they’ve got experience. No amount of convincing Lion does will convince the more protective of their lot to quit sending death glares at the rebellion members every time they’re forced to interact. They’d glare at any unfamiliar adult - the only one they tolerate is Dimitri, and only tentatively - but obviously the rebellion doesn’t understand that, so they feel threatened. So no guns.
Crow once kneecapped a superior for murdering one of their own, so maybe it’s not a terrible idea.
The problem is that they use their guns to hunt, and even under the rebellion they’re still getting the same fucking all-in-one ration bars only edible to omnivores and they are still hungry. The new base they get moved to is basically a part of the palace in the city. On one side, it still borders the desert. On the other is the city.
She’s been trying to think up other ways to get food. Obviously it’s a city, there’s food everywhere, but not one of them has ever had a credit card, or really any other type of money. As for stealing, she doubts they could get their hands on enough to feed all their carnivores.
And of course the desert is right there, free and for the taking, but Lion's got no gun. She can't get at it. Fuck. They should've hidden some guns when the rebellion came around to confiscate them. They'd all gotten so used to the shulk glyph that they'd blindly followed the given order, forgetting that their body wouldn't follow it for them if they failed to comply anymore.
In the end they make no decision. It’s three days with basically nothing to eat, the leftover stores going to the younger kids. Three days of arguing with the other pesudo-leader carnivores (plus Raja, of course), all trying to convince each other to either ask the rebellion for food (a loser move), ask Dimitri to ask for them (unreliable), steal it themselves (unlikely), or sit here and starve to death as they come up with other options. Lion, personally, is arguing for the loser move.
“It can’t fucking hurt,” she tells Crow. Partially a lie. To Crow it must sound like a full lie, because the argument continues.
Later at night, she lays at the bottom of a dogpile, curled up at Raja’s side with the foot of a snoring eight-year-old stuck in her face. She thinks the lining of her stomach might be beginning to cannibalize itself. She’s fucking starving, but not quite enough to want to eat one of the stupid grey ration bars. Then she’d just puke again. There is one other solution to this problem.
Carefully, she extracts herself from the pile, slipping her shoes on and padding quietly to the door. It’s still early. Well, 10 P.M., but she’s seen how late those rebellion bastards work, so the leader’s probably still up at her desk. Logically, 10 at night should be the worst time to try something like this. If you’re asking for something from someone over you, you need to do it politely and at an unobtrusive time. Ten is an obtrusive time.
Still, she’s hungry, and none of them are getting any less hungry. She runs her hand through her buzz-cut and straightens her jacket and walks down to command. Lion knocks on the door. Apparently she was right to think they’d still be working, ‘cause she gets a distracted come in in response.
“Hi!” Lion says faux-cheerfully, arms crossed behind her back. The rebellion leader looks back at her, rightfully wary looking. Yeah, she should be fucking afraid.
Out of the back rooms comes her partner. She’s a chronically suspicious-looking human, or at least near human. She positions herself defensively behind the winged one.
“…Hi,” the winged leader says in response, leaning away from her.
Lion gets straight to the point. “We need food. “
There’s a pause. “You get ration bars.”
Lion hums, expression still pleasant. “They’re synthetic plant matter, mostly, and a third of us are carnivores.” She leaves the woman to put the pieces together.
“What've you been eating so far?”
Lion briefly considers responding with something along the lines of The fuck does it matter to you? before remembering these are not her people and she’s being polite.
“The demons. Least until you took our guns away,” she says, not quite managing to keep the aggressiveness out of her smile.
“That’s not…” The leader furrows her eyebrows. “You can't do that.”
“We’ve been doing that,” Lion corrects. This would probably be what the Captain referred to as acting above your station, but she’s not dead yet, so she’ll be a little rude.
“They're cursed beings, though. I... they're rotting. Aren't they infectious?"
Lion shrugs. "We've been eating them for years. We ain’t dead yet.” Her own deadness is Lion’s usual measure of the safety of an activity. “I mean, we aren’t doing any research on long term effects or anything, but-”
“They’re just not edible, though.” She says it like she’s trying to explain that to Lion.
“There was a kid back at the beginning who accidentally killed himself self-cannibalizing, if you’d rather we try that--”
“Jesus fucking christ,” the second one interrupts.
Lion takes a breath. “Sorry, “ she says.
The winged one pinches the bridge of her nose, feathers all ruffled like Crow’s get when she’s upset. “It’s been four days since we confiscated the weapons.” Lion doesn’t respond to that. The woman just stares at her, before relenting. “We’ll get you food. It might be a little while, though. Not getting much advance warning here.”
“That’s fine. We don’t much feel the hunger anymore,” Lion lies, and like an idiot she dismisses herself because she’s still kinda pissed off. Nobody calls after her, though, so she figures she’s fine, and walks back to where she’s sure she’s about to get yelled at for going off and talking to the leader without backup.
“A little while” in rebellion terms is apparently no longer than a day. The promised food comes in the form of a suspicious crate. When they open it up, ten of them standing around watching like vultures in a dead tree, bars of food nearly identical to the ration bars are revealed.
Lion picks one up. Peels off the crinkly standard-issue wrapper, which is white and unmarked aside from a number in the corner. It looks identical to the normal ones, except maybe it’s slightly darker. Just one dense brick of greyish food-like material. Very slightly wet.
Lion is deeply suspicious. Ten pairs of eyes watch her as she takes a bite, body preparing to reject the food. She considers. It's got the slight tang of blood, spongey and indistinctly meaty. …Huh. This might be the best thing she's put in her mouth since she got sent to juvie, Lion decides. Yeah. Yeah. If anyone tries to make her eat a beast ever again she'll riot.
"Mmphs good,” she says through her chewing, and then the dam breaks. The vultures hop down from their perches, passing the rations around and calling the others in to join them. They fucking eat.
The barracks they’ve been moved into must’ve held some fancy-ass soldiers, ‘cause the setup here is pretty spacy. Eight beds a bunkroom. With the way this whole place has gotten cramped in the wake of the rebellion, though, they’re cramming in more like 16, dragging in extra mattresses to lay out on the floor.
Unsurprisingly, by nighttime most of them are on the floor in a dogpile. On desert missions, a dogpile is survival, especially in winter when the temperatures drop down dangerously low. Here it’s just habit.
Lion feels the best she has in a long, long while. Her back is sticking to the green-plastic mattress, ‘cause the A/C is broken and it’s getting into summer, but she’s got a full belly and is pressed up against Raja’s back. There’s a five-year-old sprawled across her legs and Crow’s arm laid over her face. Around her are the slow, rise-and-fall breaths of sleeping kids. The lit-up grey sky of the city at night shines through the window even through the curtain, casting a misty sort of light across the room. She feels the heartbeats beating against her, warm bodies, and listens to the quiet humming of the fan above their heads. It doesn’t remind her at all of the glyph, Lion finds. She presses closer to Raja.
There are so many people who should be here with them right now. So many bodies slowly rotting in the desert, or buried under heavy sand. Still. There are so many of them who've survived.
Maybe it’s naive, but she thinks maybe everything’s gonna be okay.
Lion drifts.