#tonia & ayaks (narvvhal)

[abyssmalice]

drabble: on blade's edge

"Why do you stick to your brother so much?"

You're in the middle of playing with a roll of gauze, coiling and uncoiling it in a mindless game to occupy your time, when someone peers down at you. The question comes from a man about five times your height (it's usually three times) and with a prominent nick of a scar above his left brow.

You blink back, blankly. "Because he's my big brother?" What kind of a question is that?

(A stupid one, a sharper voice says in the back of your head. But you're still too young and polite to voice it - just nine nearing ten years old, much too young indeed.)

He sighs and rubs the back of his neck. "I get that. But, well. It's not like we don't see it either." A pause. "Even when you're with him, you don't really get along. That's what I mean."

And what can you say to that except a small oh and turn to the campfire, staring at it as though the flames will magically create a doable answer for the man. At the very least, you stare at it with a small frown, unsure if you want to say anything else.

Strangers don't really need to know what you're thinking. Even if you've been in this unit with your brother for a couple of months now, you hardly stray from his side. Even as you're pouting and throwing tantrums about how Ayaks needs to stop being a stupid dummy of a dummy that's going to trip on a rock and then go splat! like a dumb dummy that keeps rushing ahead, the moment someone else approaches, you're quickly hiding behind your brother instead.

This isn't any different from those times, you suppose. But curiosity is a strong force, you know this well - the man likely won't leave until you satisfy his curiosity. Or you start screaming, in which case, your brother will immediately dive between the two of you. But that would just cause needless worry (for your brother, you don't care what the others think, frankly), and also someone might end up dead, maybe.

That's really not a good thing. Objectively.

You frown a bit more and stare even harder at the fire. "...He's still my big brother."

The too-tall mister makes a frown of his own and looks on for a moment, in quiet contemplation. Then, "You're too nice to be his little sister."

"Huh?"

He shakes his head. "Nothing." A sigh. "Just realizing you really are his family - both of you have the same insane stubbornness for strange things, I swear."

As much as you want to ask what that's supposed to mean, a small ruckus suddenly breaks out somewhere else in camp, diverting all attention to that. You wonder if your brother is involved.

(Surprisingly, no. Someone just lost a game of cards really badly, apparently.)

.

The Fatui is massive, and its numbers countless. Similarly, the groups dispatched across the world, like little ants, are a scattered mess that can nonetheless be found here and there and anywhere so pleased.

Even so, there's no expectation that they will be found at home. Oh, certainly, there are peacekeeping units and training sites and so on and so forth, not to mention so many administrative services and institutes are operated by the Fatui - but in a way, it could be said that they're just the docile side of the organization, the pleasant front while the military core is stationed elsewhere.

Units like yours are certainly not among the diplomatic ones. Tasked with trivial cleanup and basic intelligence, scattering like worker ants for the queen - simplistic, lowly. Nothing too important to be done, but a necessary cog in the wheel nonetheless.

That said, simply throwing out men into the sea doesn't mean they will automatically know how to swim. It all has to start somewhere, even if only briefly.

"I can't wait to get out of here," someone grumbles behind you, miserably poking at a little pile of snow. "Hopefully I get promoted to a unit in Mondstadt, or something. Sumeru would be nice too - what I wouldn't give to be somewhere warmer..."

"Sumeru?" Someone else snorts. "You do know that could mean being stationed in the bloody desert, right? Sand, dust, the worst heat ever - that's what you want?"

"Hell no, but beats freezing my ass off out here—!"

"And if you all don't shut up and focus, no one is getting promoted anywhere, you sacks of shit," a third person hisses. The voice belongs to the leader of this subgroup, you note - a taciturn lady that just crossed into her twenties, that you've only heard described in complaints about how overly picky and overly diligent she is about everything. What was her name again? Carina? Katerina?

You're pretty sure it started with an 'E' though...

"What even is there to focus on?" the first voice complains, sighing as they looked out into the midnight horizon. "It's the middle of the night in the middle of some Archons-knows-where tundra. The nearest village is miles behind us - who else would be out here, except for us?"

"That's the point," the lady (Irina? Elaine? What was it) sharply retorts, briefly glancing at the icy field through her spyglasses. "We're supposed to keep watch for people who wouldn't be out here because - guess what - no one would, unless they had something strange in mind."

"There's no way someone would actually come out here though..."

"If you want to be technical, we're out here."

"Bah," they start grumbling again. "Only on orders. Otherwise, this place would be deader than a corpse. I bet the other guys have figured the same and are getting some actual sleep over us."

"Unlikely," the leader comments, "they specifically separated from us to be the strike squad. So they better not be asleep on their feet, or that defeats the whole point of dividing ourselves into a watch group and an ambush group."

"How the hell are you not asleep on your feet, sheesh."

"Come on, enough complaining." A small chuckle, coming from the second voice that had piped up earlier. There's a soft sound, as they swing a friendly arm over the other. "You don't see the little one complaining about anything, do you? It doesn't look good if a kid is dealing with it just fine but we adults aren't."

There's a short but insufferable sigh as they seem to try and push the arm off them. "She doesn't count. Her and her brother both. Complete weirdos at best, little demons at worst—"

You see a spark in the distance. A faint flick of light and iron, like the sparks that come from trying to light a fire. And the place you spot it at -

Ekaterina rises to her feet immediately, just as an explosion rocks the tundra below. You don't bother waiting for any orders or instructions, hopping over the snowy boundary that was being used for cover and as a blockade, rushing between the sparse trees and heading downhill.

You keep your gaze centered squarely ahead, lips pressing into a tighter and tighter line as smoke begins to cover the skies. The explosion fans a large, uncontrollable fire that lights itself into unearthly shades of blue and violet against the rising smoke. Every step closer to the source, an agonizingly slow creep forward, makes something prickle against your skin - something cold and inherently malicious.

There will always be those that oppose our existence, if not all that simply stands against them, your mentor once recounted as she showed you a book with hand-drawn pictures. The words, too, were handwritten, a small but neat font of descriptions that would mostly escape your too-young mind. They go by many names, are led by many powers, pursing many goals that nonetheless come down to destruction. And as of now—yes, I believe they call themselves the Abyss Order.

Of all the things to show up on what would otherwise be a small, routine mission.

But no point in grumbling about your lot. You've always had a bad hand of some kind; it's annoyingly familiar to simply focus your mind on the priorities at hand, that being determining the exact state of things and locating your brother.

The latter is not hard at all, not with the way you hear absolute carnage and sense the flow of Hydro as you reach the field proper. You weave around a few fallen bodies and things on fire that are about your height - let's not think about what those must be, considering there should be absolutely nothing out here except ice - finding your brother standing at the head of a group up ahead, the rest on their knees or leaning fearfully against their weapons.

"Ayaks!" you call, just as something shoots a ball of fire at him. His head whips to look at you, surprise and a little something else on his face - you don't get the time to discern it as you pull a large shard of Cryo from the air and hurl it at the incoming fireball, the resulting clash cancelling both out into a scattering flurry of bright blue sparks.

"Tonia! You're not supposed to be—"

"Don't care," you say hurriedly, running to his side. One hand instinctively grips his arm, the other conjuring a spear from the ice, and your eyes quickly scan over his form. Aside from a few scorched patches on his uniform, you don't see anything concerning. But still, "Big brother, are you okay?"

There's no hesitation. "I'm fine," he answers firmly, gently trying to push you away, behind him. "Just get back and let me handle this."

Right on cue, a rifthound rushes in from the air just above. You immediately split from your brother, the wolf ultimately slashing at empty space. There's a split-second where it tries to reorient itself and relocate its chosen prey, twisting in an unnatural curve more appropriate for snakes than a four-legged animal, before it shoots towards you.

Hardly a problem though. You step to the side, weapon angled to slash a smooth ribbon through the wolf as mindlessly runs into the bladed edge. It's not perfectly effortless - the force which it tries to barrel at you with means the opposing force of your spear against it has to be stronger, firmer, and the result feels a lot like trying to cut through a particularly solid block of butter that was chilled too long.

But you manage it, and it takes less than a blink to look ahead and find your brother plunging a pair of watery swords right into the ground, piercing through the heads of a rifthound each, and using the momentum to push himself forward in a large leap.

More abyssal creatures spawn in his path, but he just runs them through with his swords like they're nothing at all. A part of you feels a little—just a little—awed at how easy he makes it look.

The rest of you keenly notes he's not doing a very good job of actually dealing with them all. He cuts down the wolves and birds and vipers and whatever else that deigns to appear in harsh, harried movements, but nothing thorough - the objective is just to get them out of his way, not to get rid of them.

Not the smartest decision to be making. Violet miasma erupts from some of the undealt corpses, stitching together the major wounds - though not all of them - leaving tattered, Frankenstein messes that are nonetheless coherent enough to continue the fight despite being in half-dismembered states.

For some reason, it kind of irritates you, somewhere. Why is he being so sloppy, especially in a fight like this?

You'll have to figure that out another time.

As you're resigning to being your brother's one-man cleanup crew, another explosion rocks the area. The shockwave of energy would be more than enough to knock of a person off their feet, and in fact, you do quickly catch the remaining members of the contingent getting blown off to the side. But even if they hadn't, they would have immediately collapsed from the wave of sheer malice that follows.

It's a dark, sickening feeling - the decidedly not-human part of you, silver roots and the instrument of all existence, is practically screeching in disdain at being so closely exposed to such dangerous energies. You ignore your instincts telling you to get out, the urge to avoid becoming tainted in some fashion, and look for where it's all coming from.

There, somewhere in the middle up ahead - you find a spiraling fury of blue fire, unfurling within the seconds into something more humanoid but no more human than anything else that's appeared so far. A garland of white fire circles around its head like a bad excuse for a halo, the stars of the abyssal cosmos flickering in the jagged crevice of space that crackles right behind it.

Armored like a knight, you still perceive a pair of thin, sharp lights in its helm that could be considered eyes. It tilts its head down to observe the battlefield - a cold, raging arena of malformed monsters and fallen bodies, human or otherwise. And two people who haven't fallen just yet.

This is either a passably acceptable or really bad situation to be in, depending on perspective.

Ayaks finally catches up to you, planting himself squarely between you and the new arrival, something grim beginning to line his face. You feel your own face vaguely mirror his expression, a hard tension coiling around your shoulders as you consider next moves. Two against one logically sounds fine, and you're decently confident enough that even if it were a one-on-one battle, you would make it through just fine.

Except your brother is here too, and knowing him, he's going to make that one-versus-one happen between himself instead. From your own observations, ever since leaving the dark depths, he's been overly eager to insert himself into difficult situations - mostly moments between you and whoever thought to bother you for whatever reason, but he certainly hasn't shied away from risky challenges like fighting ten people at once all by himself.

Such confidence. Arrogance, you can hear your mentor softly chiding, as she told you bedtime stories of heroes and martyrs who won on paper and lost in reality. It's going to kill him some day.

It will kill him, right here and now, and you quickly try to pull him back as you move forward, dispersing your weapon simultaneously - you grasp the dispersing Cryo before it fully vanishes into the environment, along with a handful of other latent energies—at a time like this, doesn't matter what element, anything and everything will do—to pull up a barrier just as the abyssal commander waves an arm to send swords and shooting stars of Electro towards the two of you.

It's a bright, catastrophic clash when they all collide, numerous conflicting reactions. Even so, for a moment, it all seems doable - the barrier holds well, you're not completely straining yourself to maintain it, your brother is safe.

You hear a sharp cracking sound.

The stars are suddenly ablaze, an abnormal blue-tinged Pyro, and the attacks break through in a loud, violent burst - you barely have the time to blink before you feel something too hot and pain pain pain slamming right into your chest, throwing you far back and onto the ground.

Somewhere along the way, you must have crashed your head into something, because the world becomes a dark, hazy swirl of colors, lights and nothing all at once - you barely have the sense to move after you hit the ground, unfocused eyes still trying to keep stock of the fight.

All you manage to discern is Ayaks shouting something that sounds like your name, and the distant, swimming shape of his back facing you - soon enough, his silhouette bleeds into the rest of the world, into the blackness, and the thoughts cease there.

.

"Big sister, I don't know what to do."

"That is understandable," your mentor voices through the pale flower. "People can have many sides to themselves, but we only come to learn and accept those many different parts as we grow up. Though, even then, even as adults, we might not be able to accept some things regardless."

You lightly grab a clump of snow, pressing it into your palm. Some of it automatically melts - but in the arctic clime of Snezhnaya, it mostly remains a clump, just more tightly packed together.

"I don't like it," you quietly admit, a little petulant.

"You don't have to."

"I don't like it," you repeat, a little more firmly, a little harshly. "Why does big brother have to be like this? We're not in the Abyss anymore. He doesn't have to be so— so, like this. I thought maybe it was just hard for him to go back to stuff from before, but. I don't think that's it anymore. I don't think he even wants to! I don't like it, big sister."

"...Sometimes, some things just remain." A pause. "After all, you and I are no different from him, in a way. Changed by what we've experienced in the deepest dark - by what we've gained."

"All he's got now is him being weird and always trying to fight things. Liking to fight things."

"I cannot say for certain why he enjoys it so. But, little one, isn't it nice that he's enjoying himself?"

"Nice? How is this nice?"

"Well," a careful tone, "is your brother happy these days?"

You grumble under your breath. "He's always happy in a big fight."

"Then, I believe that is the most important part here. That he is happy with his life."

"But if he keeps fighting all these big fights, what if he gets into a really big one? A big, really bad one!" The snow in your hand catches fire, for a second. You don't notice, and it flickers into faint burn marks and evaporating droplets in the next. "There's no point in being happy if he's not alive to be happy!"

Tosha doesn't respond right away. The silence of the woods presses down for a quaint moment, overtaking the air as the petals of the leyline bloom sway ever so slightly against a cold, passing breeze. It makes you feel like the only person in the entire world; you had ventured out here exactly for this solitude, for no one—much less your brother, even less so for the other Fatui—to overhear this talk.

"...Niashka," she eventually speaks, "while I don't quite believe that statement, I think - will you not have a little more faith in your brother?

"I am sure, without a doubt, he will not fall as easily as you fear he might."

.

Thunder rumbles, distantly.

It takes more effort than you'd like. It would be lying to say at least half of you isn't content to just remain as is, in the pleasant quiet of unconsciousness. But your body gradually wakes you up anyway, the thunder echoing louder and louder until it streaks through the limbo of mindlessness, and you're unable to sink back to it anymore.

Blearily, you blink your eyes open, feeling a stiff numbness running through you. Lights and colors, blurry at first, curve and clash up ahead. Violet and blue, the twinkling stars of the abyssal cosmos -

Slowly, your eyes open wider. The colors clear into bolts of Electro and cutting waves of Hydro, swiftly pursuing an armored opponent, its blazing halo beginning to flicker and gutter out as the onslaught continues, heavy and relentless. The stars that you caught don't belong the commander, now on the defensive—they belong to someone else, stitched into a cape meant for heroism.

What...? It takes a couple of minutes as you try to get up from the ground, the numbness flaring into sharp pain and aches as you try to move. You heft your weight, somewhat unpleasantly, onto your arms and elbows as you pull your upper body into a somewhat-risen position.

Just as you do so, the caped person sends a simultaneous ambush of torrents and lightning. The commander immediately moves to dodge - and that's when its opponent also disappears, teleports, and cleanly stabs a double-edged spear right into the core of the abyssal being.

There's a moment of still nothing, before it violently shudders and for a second, makes an ear-deafening, garbled shriek before disintegrating into dust and violet static. Your head spins painfully as you endure the screaming - you could almost fall back into unconsciousness just from that.

But you can't. Right now, that fight - you didn't see him. Where is your brother?

You focus on that thought, gripping it with a death-defying viciousness. You manage to get yourself into a proper seated position before the caped person seems to notice your presence, teleporting to your side in an instant.

Gods, if you didn't feel like you were one second away from hurling your dinner out of your mouth, you would have made the first move and tried to bind it or something, some form of basic insurance before it can do anything to you—

"Tonia?" Its floating feet touch the earth, before it—he—kneels, a clawed hand uncertainly reaching out to you, "are you alright? Does it hurt anywhere? Don't move if it does—"

You stare up at the one-eyed face. "...Big brother?"

It takes a moment, as if he's tentatively considering something, before nodding. "It's me. I know - we can talk about it later. Your injuries come first, okay?"

Something about his words just incite another bout of irritation. Though you don't make that twinge of annoyance apparent on your face, you certainly don't heed his words to not aggravate anything, forcing yourself onto your feet with several heavy hisses and your brother—after a helpless second of trying to convince you otherwise—just supporting you with a hand to your back.

Even then, you can feel the way your legs are shaking, ready to buckle at any moment. The world is edging towards a terrifying sense of vertigo, but you just bite the inside of your mouth, hard enough to taste blood, and keep your eyes focused on what's in front of you.

At your height, and with him kneeling, you're still nowhere near at eye-level without needing to look up. You need to reach up to simply fist your hands into the fabric of the thin scarf wrapped around what looks like a collar of coarse fur, not unalike the coats of rifthounds.

Decidedly abyssal. You frown deeply at him.

"...What did you do?" you start, swallowing down an urge to cough. "Big brother, this." A pause, as your concussed brain scrambles for words. "You can't just. You can't. This—a price. There's something, to, to..."

While it sounds like unfortunate nonsense even to you, Ayaks seems to get what you're trying to say. His other hand pats your head, absurdly gentle compared to the utter brutality of his strength in this strange form. "It's alright. I'm still learning to use it - but it won't kill me, I promise."

You wholeheartedly do not believe that. Promises, especially from him, seem more and more flimsy by the day - mere words, mere things to toss around. Even though you know for a fact that he does mean it, that he cares far too much and is serious about such declarations. You just can't find it in yourself to have faith.

("I am sure, without a doubt, he will not fall as easily as you fear he might."

"How would you know that, big sister?"

"I do not. But that is exactly why you must have faith. If you do not believe in him, then who else will? Tell me - in the most dire, most important moment, when even you cannot bear any love for him, can you say that you will abandon him?")

"...Pinky promise?" you mutter.

He chuckles. "If I break it, you can throw me on the ice."

You will do far, far more than that, if it comes down to it. But considering how badly things always seem to develop in your life, you're just going to have to accept the hands and cards you get, regardless of what they are.

A sigh leaves you—a quiet and tired and long thing, like a ghost heaving itself out of your body—as you quietly resign to the terrible tendencies of your fate once more. And - you will attribute this to the messy cocktail of pain and exhaustion and the concussion, later - on random impulse, you extend your arms out and try to pull your brother into a hug.

Your arms don't quite fully reach around his head, and the result is more you leaning your full weight against him - but he returns it in a heartbeat, as much as he can when your small form can only swim in the large gap between his arms.

"At least - Yaksha's okay," you mumble against his fluffy collar.

"Niashka—" A pause, before he makes a soft sound, something bemused and fond in one. "I should be the one saying that."

"No, me," you thoughtlessly reply. "Because, I said... I promised..."

Perhaps knowing the fight is properly over now, your mind tries to coax you back into oblivion. Your eyes begin to droop shut again.

You fall asleep in a warm hug.

[abyssmalice]

tonia’s relationship with ayaks in one sentence:

[abyssmalice]

(t............. tag dump before i zzzz-)

[abyssmalice]

(tentative fun content tags for tonis and childes because my brain said so)

smol

tonia & aias (adversaryss) | (i am a stranger ; we are all strange);

tonia & ayaks (narvvhal) | (buried alive in the coffin of who we used to be);

tol

tonia ft aias (adversaryss) | (remember the rain ; near and far beloved);

tonia ft ayaks (narvvhal) | (’til welcomed home to gentle sea);

*(still not sure on the tol toni ones which is why its tentative but...... wwwww)