Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Katherine Apollo was a girl who was loved by almost everyone.

She was a good student and a good classmate. But, there was one single secret that no one knew about this girl. She didn't exist.

Not as in that there wasn't an actual corporeal body or anything, there was one, but, rather than Katherine existing as a single individual, she was a mask. She was a mask put on by the organization to hide their existence. But little did they know that secrets couldn't stay secret for long, and soon, everyone would know about them.

But first, let's go back to the beginning.

Well, not the beginning since no one, not even those in the organization, knew when it had started and the biggest theory was that they were like that from birth, so, let's go back to when the first two of them noticed something was… different about them.

Leah was bored, like, really bored. And so, she decided to take her journal and write some shit, so, knowing that no one else would read it, she wrote "hello" and signed it as LeAp. She knew no one would answer, but still found it fun to do. The next few hours were sort of a blur, but she recalled writing in her dairy, but she didn't know what about, not in the moment and definitely not now.

By the time she was fully conscious of herself again, it was already night and the journal was closed, so she decided to open it to see if she had written anything in the past few hours and just forgotten about it.

There was a "Hi!!!!" written on the page, signed by someone named "M.".

The handwriting was different from hers though, way too different. Not only that, but why did she use multiple exclamation marks, not one, multiple. Like, who the hell did that!?

And there was also the matter of the name. So she started researching.

After a few months, a good part of which were heavily blurry at the time and even more now, she finally found something that explained her experiences. Plurality.

It honestly explained a lot, the feeling that she wasn't actually the one to do certain things, the few memory gaps and even the mysterious handwriting that definitely wasn't hers, it all made so much sense now.

Milk has never felt alone in their body.

Even when they were supposedly alone in their room, it always felt like someone else was in the room with them, so when they found "hello" in their journal that was supposed to be private from a certain "LeAp", their first instinct was to respond with a more grammatically acceptable "Hi!!" and signed it by the first letter of their name.

A few days later, back again aware of the body, they found an answer asking about how they found this journal, to which they responded before asking the same question back to LeAp who also answered after a few days.

Their answer?

"Same here, I still don't understand how this could be though, because how come we both have the same journal? Like, what else could we possibly share? A family? A body? - LeAp"

"Don't worry we'll figure it out -M."

And, a few months later LeAp figured it out, plural. But, if there were at least two of them in this body, who's to say there weren't any more in there?

Chapter Text

Leah was so exhausted from pretending to be Katherine. How did Milk even do this? If it was exhausting for her, it probably was even more for them. 

But worse than that? Her head was hurting for some fucking reason, and so, she tried the whole "Mental Communication" thing she and Milk had been trying out ever since they figured out they were a system, well, sort of, neither of them felt like the term fit quite well, but it was the only one they'd been able to find.

"Do you know why our head hurts?" She asked.

"No, I do sort of see a shadowy figure in the headspace though, so maybe that's related in some way to the headache."  Wait, what? A shadowy figure? That… that was weird. Like, like bad weird.

"Can you focus on their appearance?"

"No, I've already tried, the most I've been able to get is green eyes or something." So, a mysterious, green eyed, shadowy figure. Well that certainly was a new development that, given Milk's confused tone, was caused by neither of them.

A few weeks passed and the shadowy figure's appearance went slowly developing more and more. First appeared the more definitively humanoid appearance then the black long hair and wings as ears. Finally the figure revealed she was a girl, sort of, fae didn't go too into detail, about Leah's age, with four sets of wings, the largest behind her back, the second to largest instead of ears, the second to smallest behind faer feet and the smallest beside her hips, faer hair that went all the way to her waist was curly and black, faer eyes round and emerald colored with dilated pupils and her skin tone was naturally tan.

Fae also eventually revealed her name, Sarah.

Honestly, despite Leah's original weariness, she couldn't help but admit that her face felt just a smidge warmer whenever she thought of Sarah.

A year passed, and Leah and Sarah had begun dating, while Milk had realized they were aroace. Everything was mostly calm aside from the anxiety of beig found out.

The next time they split was when they were twelve, almost three years after Sarah split, Leah and Sarah had fallen out of love and broken up amicably, although it still hurt Leah a bit. They had also recently settled for the term organization rather than system as it felt way better.

This time, it was a lot faster than the previous time, and also quite different. For starters they already had an idea of what she looked like before she formed and while there were some differences, she still looked similar to how she was usually drawn.

That was another thing, unlike the rest, she was an introject from a musical named Epic.

Her name was Penelope, and, upon first being found, she was a bit confused about everything other than her name and her origins, well, sort of for the second one. She didn't understand what musical theatre was, but she did recall being born in Sparta and waiting for her husband while ruling Ithaca, though she didn't remember much of what happened in-between yet. She would remember later, but not yet.

No one knew how she had formed, and honestly? They didn't really care. After all, what mattered now was that she was part of the organization.

Chapter Text

“Okay, first day of school, everyone ready?” Asked Leah, receiving a chorus of "Yes"s from the rest of the congregation.

“I'm ready!” She yelled out to Jase once she finished getting dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel.

“Alright, let's go pick up Ozzy and Kai.”

When they were almost reaching Orson's house, Leah was no longer in front, instead the one in control was Sarah.

“Are you okay?” Jase asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” She said.

“If you say so…”

They stopped and Orson was waiting outside for the two of them.

“Hey!” He greeted them.

“Hello!” Jason answered while Sarah stayed quiet.

“Could you be any slower if you tried?” Asked Jason, that being the first thing that Milk heard upon fully reaching the front.

“Kat, Jase, how was Japan?” This question seemed to bring Sarah back to the front though.

“Oh my god, it was so great!” She squealed, “We were in Tokyo for most of it, but we also visited Osaka, and I picked up some super cute clothes and stuff for my room, which I need to show you! Also the landscapes are so gorgeous, I actually drew them, something else I need to show you, and-” Fae continued talking for a bit until Kai asked Ozzy about his summer.

After theatre practice, Sarah, accompanied by Jase, went back home.

They were chattering back and forth when Sarah heard them talk.

“I know we've talked about this before,” Milk started, “but I kinda want to tell someone…”

“Maybe we could tell our customers on Etsy? Actually no, someone we know might find it and we can't let anyone we know i-r-l find out.”

“It is true that telling someone might help, though,” Penelope said, “I remember reading somewhere that finding community helps, can't remember where though.”

“Wait!”  Sarah yelled internally, “What if we like… made a blog or something like that and entered like a webring or something.”

“Do you even have any knowledge of programming?”

“No but… still! It can't hurt to try!”

“Fine…” Leah conceded.

Chapter Text

Milk sighed over the hassle that web coding was.

They had all agreed that Milk should be the one to code it as they were the one who wanted other people to know, something Milk was starting to regret only because of this.

The page was turning out quite well though. It has a pretty pastel green background with electric blue details and black text which had varying weights depending on what type of text it was.

Pushing a few braids away from the organization's face (they had no idea why Sarah liked this style so much as they very much preferred cornrows, but whatever), they continued watching the tutorial until something suddenly clicked.

This wasn't much different from editing an AO3 fic from the HTML view, was it? Sure, the CSS tutorials would still be necessary if they wanted to add more stuff, and they would need help for some other HTML things, but this would definitely be a lot easier now with that realization.

With that in mind, they got to work, copying tags from the organization's fics as they worked to style the text.

Once Milk was done with the main page, they let out a laugh at having finished the first page before they copied the page into their neocities, which had a name decided between the four of them.

“Hello!”  Leah greeted them.

“Hey,” They said in a voice low enough that no one would hear them, “What happened?”

“Do you want me to take over for the other pages?”

“No, I'm fine. Thanks for offering, though.” To be honest, once you knew what you were doing, website development was kinda fun.

“Okay. Bye!”

With that, Milk headed to sleep, not noticing one key thing until the morning...

They left their neocities editing page open for anyone who entered their room to see.

To say that Jason was confused would be an understatement.

Look, he didn't mean to snoop when he came upstairs to call his sister for dinner, but seeing her computer on made him curious to say the least.

But what the hell was "Apollo's Organization"? And why did Kate have access to its website?

Well, that's something he'd have to ask her about.

Fuck, was it even safe for her to have a website without their parents knowing?

Whatever, he went downstairs and told his parents about Katherine being asleep, not uttering a word about the website. Not yet at least.

When Milk woke up, they immediately checked their computer and noticed that: one, they had left their neocities open, and two, the post-it on the organization's wall telling them about the food there was on the fridge.

Well that's certainly bad, they thought, hopefully no-one in this house found out…

Sensing their distress, Leah spoke up.

“Are you okay? Do you need me to front?”

“No, I'm fine,” they answered, “Just, uh- forgot to close the neocities tab and worried about someone else having seen.”

“Alright. I'll warn the others just in case.”

“Kate, can we talk?” Jase asked, startling Sarah.

Chapter Text

“Kate, we need to talk.”

Jason wasn't expecting those words to startle his sister, but they did nonetheless.

“Uh, what about?” She asked cautiously. Why?

“I'll tell you in a bit, can you come with me to the store?” It was probably best to do this outside of their home.

“Sure…” Kate said, frowning and reluctantly after a few seconds.

“Great! We can talk on the way!” There was no sugarcoating this, Jason was worried for his little sister, what if she'd gotten involved with a cult or something!? Only one way to find out, he guessed.

Once they were in the car, Katherine spoke up.

“So… what did you wanna talk about?”

“What is Apollo's Organization?” He blurted out.

“Oh, uh-” He noticed she didn't seem to want to talk about it, but he wanted- no needed to know his sister was safe, “How do I say this?.. Well… what I'm about to say will probably sound a bit shocking, uh can you promise me that it won't change much between us?”

“Uh-” 

“Please…”

“Alright, I mean unless it's that you're secretly a serial killer or something, which I doubt.”

“Hell no! No, um, have you heard of a thing called plurality?”

“Have you heard of a thing called plurality?” Sarah asked, nervous and already anticipating rejection despite Jason's promise, and it was clear that the others were anticipating it too, especially Leah.

“Can't say I have, sorry,” Jase said, “Could you explain it to me? I'm kinda curious about it now…”

“Well, it's the state of having at least two entities sharing a single body,” Fae explained, “Um, this group is usually referred to as a system, but we very much prefer the term organization… also, these entities are usually called headmates or system members.”

Jason stopped at a red light.

“Okay, alright, so, it's just your organization's personal website then?”

“Pretty much, why?”

“Just to be clear, and look, I support you all, but I need to know, do our dads know about this?”

“No, please don't tell them…”

“Alright, I won't, but maybe delete the website, it's not safe for you guys to have it without any responsible adults knowing and we both know I'm neither responsible nor an adult.”

“We'll think about it…”

“Anyways, can I get an introduction to everyone sometime soon?”

“Sure, by the way, I'm Sarah, nice to, you know, properly meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Sarah.” Just as Jase said that, the light turned red and three seconds later they continued on their journey, which was pretty silent afterwards.

Kai was scrolling through Instagram when he came across a post featuring Kate and Jase's address and a link to a website, calling the owner all kinds of names, so of course, he took a few screenshots and then reported the post, after which, he sent the first screenshot to Jase, so he could also report the post.