Chapter Text
The campus was eerily silent. The soft taps of her shoes against the cool stone punctuated the humming ring in Yuu’s ears. Tiny flickering flames in the lamps cast creeping shadows along the walls, and Yuu questioned the wisdom of leaving Grim behind in the dorm.
After their adventure in the mine, Grim had collapsed on the only suitable bed in Ramshackle Dorm and immediately fallen asleep. She had left him peacefully snoring and with a sharp warning to the lingering ghosts not to disturb him. She could only imagine Ace and Deuce experienced the same attack of exhaustion. Running through the mines and fighting a monster had taken a lot of energy out of them all.
Yuu should have been well off into dreamland too, but a restless energy had given her a second wind. She had paced through Ramshackle Dorm, noting all the broken furniture and the rooms that needed a deep cleaning. Discovering little dust creatures shaped like bunnies in the dark corners of the dormitory had sent her back to bed for a brief moment, but she had laid staring at the ceiling long enough to know sleep wouldn’t come to her anytime soon.
With little else to keep her occupied, she ventured out of Ramshackle and wandered the campus at random. Crowley was either extremely confident the students wouldn’t wander outside their dorms past curfew or he was extremely negligent when it came to safety because no door Yuu tried had been locked. She walked through the campus courtyard, wandered through the gardens, checked every classroom, and even peeked into some unlabeled buildings on campus.
Still her restlessness marched along a step behind her, and she found herself staring blankly up at the statues of the Great Seven on Main Street. Something about them felt oddly familiar, but before Ace had given her and Grim a brief history lesson, she had never heard of Twisted Wonderland’s historical figures. Her world didn’t have sentient beasts, or fairies, or sea witches, or queens or kings or sorcerers.
At least, she didn’t think her world did.
Yuu sighed. After casting the Thorn Fairy’s regal chin a final glance, she continued her trek down the street. Her journey with no destination led her back to the staircase leading into the main building. She briefly paused to admire the high arches and numerous turrets, but her feet itched to move. Through the hallways, she took her time to admire the uniform size of each stone and read each colorful flyer advertising a school club.
She didn’t realize where her wandering had led her until she stood outside two towering doors. Cut into one was an average sized door, and she pushed against it. It opened without resistance just as all the other doors on campus had. She quietly slipped through the door.
The empty room felt even larger now with no students huddled in every corner. The tall windows allowed the natural light of a full moon to banish the shadows to the far corners of the room. Yuu tried to ignore the few coffins still suspended throughout the room. They were empty...or at least she hoped they were empty. Her skin itched at the thought of students suspended inside them, missing the chance to join the entrance ceremony and cursed to stay trapped the entire school year. She could have been one of those students if Grim hadn’t chosen her coffin to steal a robe.
The quiet gurgling of the translucent green water managed to sooth a bit of her anxiety. She paused to stare into the fountain and found herself lacking a reflection. She waved her hand above the water and noticed that nothing was reflected on the surface. Even the shadows cast by the floating coffins disappeared when they reached the flat surface of the water. Yet, she could feel the eerie sensation of something staring back at her from the endless depths of the green water.
No longer comforted by the burbling fountain, Yuu gave the fountain a wide berth and continued to the main centerpiece of the room. An invisible source, likely magic, held the Dark Mirror suspended above the ground in the same manner as the coffins. It’s dark surface, unlike the water, reflected the room before it.
Yuu paused and stared at her reflection. A tiny pucker between her brow paired with the slight downturn of her thin lips. Unremarkable brown eyes took in the slight upturn of her nose, full cheeks, and sharp chin. A spattering of freckles appeared and disappeared across the bridge of her nose depending on how much she squinted. Shorn dark hair made her skin appear paler than she thought it was, the uneven ends having an unflattering effect on her ears. An oversized school uniform—a spare so graciously loaned to her by Crowley—engulfed her tiny frame and made her feel like a child playing dress up with her father’s suits.
She stared at the reflection and thought, “This is me.” But at the same time, nothing about the girl in the mirror felt like her. She felt like a puppet master guiding the strings of her puppet. At the same time, she felt like the puppet being pulled along and fighting against the sharp tugs pulling her one way when she wanted to go in the opposite direction.
She had felt that way since she woke to find Grim staring down at her with his iridescent blue eyes. Since falling out of that coffin, she had been a toddler taking her first steps and angrily huffing when someone took her hand to stop her from falling. She put on a good show, but she couldn’t tell up from down or red from blue. Everything was being thrown at her at once.
She couldn’t even remember her own name. Crowley had been speaking so quickly when they first met, constantly referring to her as “you,” so when he finally stopped to question her identity, she could only stutter out, “You?”
The name stuck, but Yuu had added a double u to the name when she filled out the paperwork Crowley gave her. Yuu looked more aesthetically pleasing to her than You. The name was progressively sounding more and more natural on her tongue each time she introduced herself though.
Everything before she woke up in the coffin, which she fondly nicknamed “Pre-Mortem,” was nothing but darkness. She could remember all the unimportant things: reading, writing, basic arithmetic, fire burned, and staring into the sun will blind her. When she attempted to remember anything beyond the basics though, it was like trying to look through a fogged window on a night with no moon. She thought she saw a vague resemblance in the statues of the Great Seven, but everything she knew about them was their history in this world. It was the same way she felt walking through the halls of the school, thinking school clubs were normal but the ghostly staff in the cafeteria didn’t quite sound right. Did she attend a college similar to Night Raven? Were there not ghosts on the staff there? Was that one of those normal, not-normal things like using coffins as a form of transportation?
She was being tugged in so many directions that she was starting to question her own sanity.
Yuu tapped the surface of the Dark Mirror. The cool surface felt like any other normal mirror, but she clearly remembered the flat face speaking beneath the surface. Her fingers traced the beveled edges of the mirror. “Mirror, Mirror, on the wall...”
There was more to the rhyme, she could feel it like all the other vague trails of thought, but her tongue had lost the ability to translate the vague memory. The inky blankness beneath the mirror began to broil with a green fire. Yuu stepped back as the same pale face surfaced from the depths of the mirror.
It frowned at her but didn’t speak. Its vacant black eyes stared at her like the depths of a black void. A chill pimpled the skin on her arms, and she pulled the oversized jacket tighter around her. When the face continued to silently stare, Yuu felt a flare of impatience thaw her sudden chill. Her sleeve flapped around her wrist as she waved at the mirror. “Are you going to say anything?”
The Dark Mirror’s frown deepened. “You summoned me.”
The short retort was spoken in the same flat tone it had used when Crowley summoned it. For something that stayed floating in one room, it sounded impatient to return to...wherever it was floating faces in mirrors went. The mirror was supposedly her portal home, so Yuu could only think to ask, “Can you take me home now?”
The Dark Mirror’s frown somehow deepened further, the corners of its mouth nearly touching the line of its disembodied jaw. “Your soul has no world to return to.”
“What does that mean?” The Dark Mirror repeated itself word-for-word. Agitation bled into Yuu’s tone. “Is my world gone? Did it get destroyed somehow? Why did I wake up in a coffin? Why am I here?”
The disembodied face silently floated under the surface of the mirror, green flames licking at its chin. Yuu swallowed her frustrated growl. She flattened a hand against her sternum. “Am I supposed to just stay here and shoot the breeze until my world magically reappears?”
She wasn’t expecting an answer, so she was surprised when the rumbling voice responded. “Your soul is now bound to this world. What you do is of your own discretion. You cannot be returned to your world.”
The face faded into the darkness. The green flames were snuffed out by an enchanted wind. Yuu stood staring at her own reflection again.
A part of her rejected the Dark Mirror’s words. Crowley was adamant on sending her home. At least he had been the night of the entrance ceremony. She wasn’t too sure now after he had acted so surprised they had gone to the mines and found those magestones to avoid expulsion. She had the impression that he was more air-headed than their initial meeting had alluded, floating from one scenario to another on the winds of whim.
To accept that she had nowhere else to go...she couldn’t fully wrap her mind around the idea. True, she had no memory of where she was even meant to be, but it was more of the concept than anything else. Everyone enrolled in Night Raven College was here on a temporary basis. They knew they would return home during the breaks where their families would be waiting for them.
Yuu had nothing. Not a face to assign the role of “mom” or “dad.” Not a childhood home where childhood memories would inspire nostalgia. She didn’t know if she had any siblings, any friends, any pets. She didn’t even have a name to take from her Pre-Mortem-then to her Post-Mortem-now.
Her clothes were on loan; her dorm was on loan. Hell, even her school enrollment was on loan with the stipulation of Grim’s behavior and grades. Everything could be snatched from beneath her feet at Crowley’s whim, and she’d be left outside with nothing and nobody.
A hollow ache in Yuu's chest made her gasp. Her mind couldn’t associate a memory to the pain, but her body reflexively reacted. The pain wracked her chest, and her eyes burned. She winced at the feeling and slipped a hand beneath her jacket to claw at her collarbone.
It was the sharpest emotion she had felt since awakening. Stronger than determination, confusion, or anger. It made her almost feel pathetic. Was the concept of being alone seriously so traumatic that it made her want to double-over and vomit? For the first time since Grim’s fire ran her out of that coffin, Yuu felt relief for having amnesia. She would have been rolling on the ground from teenage angst otherwise.
“Fine,” Yuu grumbled, “if I'm stuck here then I might as well make the best of it. Even without magic, it’s not like I'm totally without resources. And as long as Crowley thinks it’s temporary, he shouldn’t get all in a twist over finances. If push comes to shove, he was willing to have us work to pay off everything...”
Yuu paused, her hand still instinctively rubbing her chest. Another worry niggled at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t pin it down. It was something she had noticed the night of the entrance ceremony but dealing with Grim had become the main priority. Since then, she had been running around the campus with Ace and Deuce trying to keep themselves from being expelled. Not to mention adjusting to the first day of classes with subjects that she would have had no experience with even if she had memories.
It had something to do with the students, she determined. She mentally flipped through the things that had made her pause. There was the magic part, for sure, but she barely batted an eye at that now. The animal ears and tails had made her shove her hands in her pockets to keep from reflexively stroking a fluffy tail. There were a few students she had stared at longer than was considered polite because she had a difficult time deciding if they were boys or...
Realization hit her so hard in the sternum that she actually choked on her spit. There were no girls. She hadn’t heard it explicitly stated, but Night Raven College had to be an all-boys school. There were no separated bathrooms, no separated dorms, no gender-specific uniforms. She hadn’t run into a single girl on the campus; there wasn’t even a woman on the staff.
She was the only girl in the midst of hundreds of male students.
For a moment, it felt like the floor shifted beneath her feet, attributing to the nausea that curled up her esophagus. Crowley had made a big deal out of accepting Grim into the school, repeatedly mentioning how gracious he was for allowing Grim to be the first monster student in Night Raven’s history. He had said the same about Yuu, but only when referencing her lack of magic. He hadn’t said anything about Yuu’s gender.
So he didn’t know, Yuu concluded. The floor somewhat stabilized beneath her. Crowley hadn’t paid enough attention to her to realize the truth. The ceremonial robes she had woken up in were as baggy as the uniform he had given her after the ceremony. It helped that she was a bit of a late bloomer in certain areas too. Ace and Deuce were only a few inches taller than her, so the difference in height was barely noticeable. Her voice wasn’t as deep as theirs, but she didn’t sound like she had been sucking on a helium balloon either.
So the logical step moving forward was to keep the whole thing under wraps. She didn’t need to run the risk of Crowley deciding she had to go because of her gender. She was already on a thin ledge with having no magic and appearing without prior notice. The only point in her favor at the moment was delivering that magestone, and it could be argued that Ace, Deuce, and Grim did most of the work. She had just helped form the plan and encouraged them from the sidelines.
If she had nowhere to return to, then she would make the most of where she was. That meant not being expelled. No bringing further attention to herself. She would move under the radar and cobble together a plan for when the end of the school year reared its ugly head.
She could do all of that...maybe. She shook her head and headed towards the door. No maybe about it—she had to do it. As long as she kept Grim in line, classes would be a breeze.
When her head finally met a pillow, she could only stare at the ceiling. Grim softly snored beside her, muttering about tuna cans and tasty stones. The restlessness that had her wandering the campus was gone, but her mind bounced around with a new sense of urgency.
“Your soul is now bound to this world,” the Dark Mirror had said. “What you do is of your own discretion. You cannot be returned to your world.”
Grim’s tail draped across her face before whipping away just as suddenly. His dreams sent him scooting down the bed in search of tuna. Yuu scratched his back, and he arched up into her hand with a pleased sigh. He settled back down in the curve of her bent knees.
What exactly was a magicless girl with no memories supposed to do surrounded by guys who could whip out magic pens and singe off her eyebrows at any moment?