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Purple had only taken off her elytra for a few days.
Just a few days. She had to stay in the city, work had to be done to keep her house, and Minecraft currency wouldn't cut it. That would be game smuggling, which was the exact reason her elytra were off. Off and stashed away somewhere safe.
But there was one person, one single person in all of Stick City who she could wear it around. One person, who visited at random and then disappeared otherwise.
One person, who was opening her door as she paced around the living room, keeping her hands anywhere but the raw skin on her back.
"Knock knock," said a rough voice, as familiar to these walls as the voice of their daily occupant. And Purple snapped her head towards it, and dark eyes in a hollow head looked back.
The Dark Lord grinned, all sharp teeth.
"Heya, bug. You look like shit."
Despite her state, Purple laughed. "Yeah, I do. What's the occasion, for you to be here and insulting me right out of the gate?"
Dark slung his satchel off his shoulders, watching the tension shift out and in of hers as she put a hand on her hip, then crossed her arms. "Door, actually, but good try. Well, y'know how it is, sometimes you're on the run from the mafia."
"You, on the run from the mafia?" Her shoulders pressed backwards. Her fingers almost imperceptibly dug into her arms when her wings that weren't there didn't move. "I thought that was me. You'd be more likely to burn them all down for trying."
"It was an example, Purp," he snarked, hanging his satchel up and kicking the door closed.
She rolled her eyes. "So what actually happened?"
"Whaaat? Can't a guy just visit his friend?"
"No, Lord, you have to be here for something. There's no way I of all people could have gained the honor of your companionship," Purple said with a dramatic hand to her head. If she'd gone to school, Dark was sure she'd be a theatre kid.
"Now, don't sell yourself short, princess! Every lord needs a court jester." Purple sputtered.
"Wh- d- Hey!!"
As far as visits from The Dark Lord went, this one was pretty normal. Which was insane to say about a terrorist walking in like he owned the place, but Purple's "normal" had been "repeatedly going to a man she did a poster job for, in order to go into his very illegal Minecraft basement, so she could visit five sticks that lived on a PC of all places for the last year and a half." Befriending the Machine of Destruction may as well have been the most "normal" thing a person like her could do.
Dark had sipped a cup of spicy tea about two hours in, and followed it up with "So where's your elytra?"
Purple knew she'd noticed her scratching at her back. She smirked back anyway. "What, hoping for another race?"
"Only if you can keep up." The Hollowhead jabbed her shoulder with one claw. She chuckled, rubbing at the spot where many little pockmarks had begun accumulating since Dark got comfortable enough with her. "A race is no fun if it's not a challenge."
"Oh, are you saying I can't give you a challenge?" The elytra were fished out of her inventory, right from the spot she always kept them in. Dark's grin got downright feral.
"Are you really willing to test that theory?"
"I've won against you before," Purple reminded her, standing up and equipping the polygonal wings before Dark could bite her tongue too hard. "I'll do it again."
"Bet."
She walked over to Purple's living room window, still open from earlier. "First to the grove and back?"
"You're on."
Purple crouched, elytra flaring as the rapid countdown spewed out of Dark's mouth, and her back didn't itch for the first time in days.
The former Machine shot out the window, the former prince following a split second after. Wings buzzed and power flared, and both knew, before the fishing rod appeared, that this would be a close race.
Purple had been first to the grove by a narrow margin, and her lead only grew with the sharp flip-and-spin maneuver she pulled to turn back. Dark had to stop, turn, and build up speed again— the process only took a second or two, but it was still a second or two that she lost.
With no boosts save for her fireworks, though, Purple found her chance of winning growing slimmer and slimmer. Dark was a brute-force rocket, fire given a stick figure's form, and had no issues with shoulder-chucking her and sending her spiraling for a precious few moments. She nearly had it, was in arm's reach of her window, but Dark was too close and she didn't feel like bruising herself or getting stuck.
So she froze at the last second. And he landed first, skidding to a stop on her floor while she perched in her window frame.
"Ha-HA! Beat THAT, bitch!" He spun and raised his hand for a high-five that Purple returned with just as much energy. Her palms didn't burn anymore, when she touched him.
She was heaving when her feet touched the floor, her elytra settling heavy on her tired shoulders, but a smile was on her face and she couldn't have stuffed it down if she tried.
Her throat ached, though — really badly — so she didn't try to respond, and just gestured to the kitchen.
"Yeah, yeah," laughed the terrorist, her friend. "Go drink your stupid, boring liquid."
So Purple went to drink some stupid, boring liquid (water), and pretended not to notice when Dark followed her into the kitchen, seeing as it was almost sunset and he preferred eating when the room was in a red-orange-yellow glow.
It was noodles, tonight. Half a pack that she had left, just sitting in her cupboard and now mixed with a hodgepodge of other things. He had snapped the noodles before throwing them in the pot; she couldn't help but think of Blue's scandalized face.
She hadn't helped, but Dark never liked being accompanied in the kitchen, so Purple had learned by now not to offer.
She also knew that dinnertime often meant Dark would leave soon. And, for some reason, that thought made her still-sore throat close up with something like fear.
The meal went by as usual — they served themselves at the same time, continued chatting over the food (although Purple was quieter than normal), and cleaned their dishes side-by-side in the sink while Dark bitched about something with a waterfront — and so did the minutes after it. But as the bright red Hollowhead swung his satchel back on and grabbed the doorknob, her mouth opened.
"Wait."
And he did. And for a moment, Purple was stunned, unsure why she had done that until she poked at the solid mass of emotion that pressed harder and harder the longer his hand stayed on the doorknob, and realized… she didn't want him to leave.
But that was such a stupid thing to keep him here for.
"Oh my cursors- Nevermind, never mind me, that's such a weird thing to ask. Forget that, you can go now-"
"Purple, this whole situation is weird." She blinked, briefly letting go of her braid to look at the Hollowhead, standing so casually and no longer holding the knob. "I'm the Netscape-renowned terrorist who ruined your life, broke into your house, and stole your medical supplies."
"Okay, you didn't steal them-"
"COERCED YOU INTO GIVING ME THEM, then. My POINT being, nothing you could possibly say right now would be overstepping."
Purple considered this for a moment.
… yeah, she's right.
"… okay. Well, then, could you…" Against her will, she shrunk into herself, pulling at her hair again. What was she doing? She'd taunted the literal Dark Lord just a few hours ago.
"Yeeees?" She urged. Purple swallowed.
"Could you…" Say it. Say it. "… stay here for the night…?"
A few seconds passed. When she finally got the nerve to look up, Dark's eyes were wide and sparkling, her smile slightly open, stunned. As she watched, the corner of her mouth started melting into black, unnatural sludge, but it was wiped away quick enough.
"Sorry, did you just transfer your hallucinations to me? Because I swear you just asked for a sleepover," was what came out of her mouth, all fast and struggling to keep her other accent out of the way. (Purple still wasn't sure if that was her real voice, given how little she preferred speaking in it. But then, they are the same, in that respect. So she doesn't ask.)
"I- Yes, that is… what I am asking," she managed to say. And Dark's smile, constrained by hope, grew across her entire face, and before Purple could react, she was grabbed by the wrist and pulled to her bedroom, faster than she could possibly move on foot. Dark clapped, and it rang in her ears and left her blinking.
"Where are your extra blankets?"
That was the moment Purple knew she was going to walk in one day to find stolen soft things in her apartment.
"You should get a bed frame."
Purple wrapped her blanket around her shoulders and laid down in the opposite direction she usually did, to face Dark. "Oh, yeah? And why's that?"
The Hollowhead's tail flicked in the air. "Mold," he responded. His tail pointed at the edge of her mattress. "Your sweat pools under it 'n makes mold. We ate the wiki page for it once."
"Mhm," she hummed, rolling onto her back to dangle her head off the side, and being very glad that her elytra was still on, because her back stung as she tried. "And, who would carry that back here? Keep in mind, I don't have a car or super strength, and flying is not an option."
"Just bring me with, idiot!! I'll just carry it with you!"
"And do either of us know how to put together a bed frame?" She asked with a shit-eating grin.
Dark stared at her. "… I'm an ENGINEER!!"
"Hang on-" Purple yawned mid-sentence. "I gotta take off my elytra."
"Why?" Her friend kicked his feet in the air, staring judgmentally at the polygonal wings disappearing into her inventory.
"'Cause if I wake up with them on-" She yawned again. Dark huffed. "I might walk out with them on, and that's illegal."
"Can't be illegal if I kill the police."
"Dark."
He barked out laughing, and Purple couldn't help but follow along, burying her face in the pillow.
"So how do you know how a sleepover works?"
"Oh, we did this shit ALL the time before shit went down. We had, like- separate rooms and four beds, so sometimes we'd go to each other's rooms, you know, dragging our blanekts and stuff, and we'd just hang out in the same room for a few nights. Making nests on the floor and stuff."
"Mhm."
"You ever done a sleepover?"
"Mmno, not really. Wasn't allowed."
"Stupid. So anyway, we'd sometimes bring snacks in there when we had 'em, you don't have any so we'll have to do that next time, but then Cho would be on my shoulder-"
Dark glanced at her— her eyes were closed, but she jerked back awake when she stopped talking. She huffed. (Maybe Purple hadn't noticed the look on her face when she couldn't keep going.)
"And he'd just watch me play something or code or whatever. He always had music playing. Hated the quiet, you know." She glanced at her again. "Weirdest thing, though, I slept a little easier with that music on. I woke up later than usual, too. I mean, a lot of the time I also woke up in my mission, but that's not too terrible, all things considered. He always won."
Again, a look, and… Purple seemed to be asleep. That wasn't her intention, but, well, they'd been talking for a good long while, and Dark was all too aware of people with awful sleep schedules. Creators, why did all two of her friends have trouble sleeping?
Purple shifted and sighed, humming in a way that may have been questioning. Her shoulders pressed back again.
"Right," Dark mumbled. "Well… aside from that, Cho occasionally brought a book in and we'd do dramatic readings of it over firelight." Her nose stung, briefly. She squinted against tears and took a breath. "It took a few tries to do it without burning them… He always got so upset, saying he'd have to return them to the library like that, and I was like, 'why are you even using the library, we're terrorists, we can steal the books,' but he always acted so affronted, so I just dropped it…"
Purple was almost certainly asleep by now. But Dark kept talking anyways, on the off chance she wasn't, on the chance she'd wake up again if she stopped. And besides, it wasn't like this was the first she'd even heard of The Chosen One.
So she kept going. She kept going until her throat was sore, until moonlight stopped shining through the window. Until her friend was settled deeply into her bed, and Dark's words kept getting interrupted by yawns, and she decided to finally quiet down and close her own eyes, mumbling a final goodnight to the stick on the possibly-moldy mattress.
She woke up to the sound of breathing.
Heavy, pained, panicked breathing, and for a moment the room was so dark that she looked to her left and expected to see Chosen with ice crystals on his hand and legs.
What he saw instead was a shape writhing underneath a blanket, arching off the mattress with some terrible desperation. It took a moment for the movement to solidify itself in his vision. It — she — was scratching. Scratching at her back like bug bites littered it.
Dark rushed to try and grab her hands. "Purple- hey, Purple. Wake up, bug. What's going on? You having a- a nightmare?"
Purple looked directly at him. Those were not the eyes of a stick having a nightmare. Those were the eyes of a stick that was horribly, painfully aware.
With one of her trembling hands in his, he put his other hand on her back to-
His train of thought crashed instantly.
What. Was that?
Was something moving under her skin?
She'd been itchy all day. The only reprieve was when she wore her elytra.
Purple threw herself out of bed with such force that Dark stumbled back, and started screaming.
He tripped over his blanket and hit the floor as the screaming became shrieking, unable to move fast enough when it reached a fever pitch, high and clear and horrible and hurting, and her shirt bulged and tore and-
There were many moments where Dark lamented that his body was not as quick as his brain.
This was by far the worst of them.
Ignoring the blood sprayed across his head, his hands, his legs, his chest, he scrambled over to the shaking, gasping girl. She was almost hyperventilating, and that- That was the first thing he needed to fix, right? Or was it the bleeding? Fuck it, he could make sure she was even still awake first.
"Purple? Hey, look at me." He grabbed her head and made it face him, covering her cheeks with blood, fuck, her blood was on his hands again, how does he fix this- "Look at me, bug. I'm gonna help you, but you need to calm down and let me, first. Purple, answer me."
And it was because he was looking directly at her that he saw the moment her eyes fluttered, dimmed, rolled back, and it was because he was already holding her that he caught her the second she would've hit the ground.
CRAP.
Dark learned three things as he was treating his friend.
1: That Purple would not stir for anything. (But her skin was still warm, her heart was still beating, so she was still alive.)
2: That she had lost quite a bit of blood that likely wouldn't be coming out of her carpet, or her bedding. (How much blood could a stick lose before…? She didn't know. She never had to know, before now.)
3: The things that had caused the spray were wings.
Purple had real, honest-to-creators wings. They were small and ratty, covered in sticky yellow fur that did nothing to conceal the meat below, but put together, they were bigger than things her back should have held.
And it showed. Oh, great code, it showed, in the torn skin and fractured bones. She was probably lucky they were just fractured.
But Dark swallowed past the taste of blood she'd never had to smell up close, and continued cleaning the wounds as best she could.
Purple was treated, but limp on the floor, and Dark wasn't sure if she could move her any more without making something worse.
So she resolved to just stand guard, to sit and watch over her until she woke up.
The sun had risen. With it, Dark could see that the wings were bigger than she'd thought. Or maybe they had just grown in the few hours since their emergence. That was possible. Her research said so.
They were drying, and gray fuzz was emerging from between the choking lines of blood.
Dark, after judging that things couldn't go too badly if she was careful with touching them, went to get more wet wipes.
Purple's shirt was unsalvageable.
That was just a fact.
So Dark sliced it cleanly off of her, intending to throw it away, and then got stuck with her hand on Purple's back, feeling her breathe for a long, long minute. Her claws traced the muscles, the amateurishly-wrapped bandages, and she didn't notice her chest — her mission statement — start to burn until she was already trying to fit her claws beneath the wraps, to dig at the raw wounds below.
She wrenched her hand away and got to her feet, pretending the opportunity for destruction didn't rattle her so much.
Dark didn't really get hungry, but Purple did. Cons of being a normal stick, he supposed. And she had said something, once, about meat making her feel better after a lost fight— something about the severity of the injuries.
So, he did the logical thing and ordered burgers. Not to her house, of course, she would try to kill him if he did that. (Whether she would succeed was a different matter.) No, he had them sent to the Diamond Dust Railway Station. Which wasn't that far from Purple's house, really, not if he ran.
He couldn't leave her for too long, though. What if she woke up and he wasn't there? She might think he decided she was too much trouble.
He'd just have to fly, then.
With one final glance at the girl on the floor (now with a sort-of clean pillow under her head), he leapt out her bedroom window and shot off towards the station. It was faster than jumping five flights of stairs and trying to get off the ground floor.
He stood there in the train station for 15 minutes because he got there too early.
Thank code for the hoodies Chosen made him get.
Finally, Dark floated back into Purple's house, with a warm bag of four burgers and too many fries in his arms.
A few more hours passed before Purple woke up. The burgers remained practically untouched. He hadn't wanted to eat without her. So, really, all the touching he did was just to keep them warm— he'd even managed to arrange them in a way that would most efficiently trap the heat.
And he took a few fries. Sue him.
But, other than that, he kept a hawk's eye on his friend, who hadn't so much as shifted in her sleep since he moved her wings himself.
Until they lifted on their own.
The first thing Purple did, still only half-awake, was take a shower. Which was reasonable, because although Dark had done all she could, there were some things that just couldn't be reached without a deep clean.
(She did not offer to help take off the bandages after telling her they were there. It would only have ended in those warbles and coos turning into screams.)
In the meantime, she made sure that the floor where Purple was laying was clean enough for her not to cringe at it when she came back.
The haunted look on her face was not something Dark ever wanted to see on her friend.
"Hey, bug," she called. By Purple's wince, her attempt at being gentle didn't come off well. "You doing okay? All that blood come off?"
Her eyes flicked up. It took a moment for her to see Dark's face, though. That was okay. She could be patient, when the state of things called for it.
When her fingers clenched around the wet wing in her hands, she made eye contact again. Her mouth moved, but she coughed out some high noise first.
"… the bandages need rewrapping," Purple whispered, hardly audible.
"Oh! Right, yeah, hang on- Uh, there are burgers in there, if you want 'em." The Hollowhead scrambled back to the first-aid kit, flinging her tail towards the takeout bag (now on the windowsill).
When she turned back around, the newly-awakened avian was sitting with her back to her bed, munching on a single fry.
Good enough.
Dark had been allowed to leave and deliver the bloody clothes and sheets to a laundromat only after she'd also had a burger and a pack of fries. Purple was weirdly insistent on that, even blocking her exit with her wings.
(They moved unnaturally, for wings; they moved just like Purple's elytra. All at once and stiff. Dark laughed to herself about it, but wouldn't tell her why.)
When she came back, though, she heard the peeping before getting in arm's reach of the door.
She'd never heard that sound before.
The Dark Lord slammed the door open and lit a firebomb in her hand. "WHO'S IN HERE!?" If Purple sounded so upset, something had to be wrong. There had to be some sort of threat, something that had set her off, some-
Purple was right there. Unharmed. Standing by the couch, wrapped in her own wings. Wings that looked substantially worse in the 20 or so minutes he'd been gone.
He clamped his fist around the firebomb. It went off with a harmless pop.
"Shit, man, I thought-"
He didn't get to finish his sentence. It was kind of hard when a living battering ram of a stick slammed directly into his ribs. Ow.
Dark moved to push her off of him, but the high shriek that erupted between them stopped him in his tracks.
Don't go!!
It had taken an abnormally long time to both realize there was a translation for that and retrieve it. A total of 3.8 seconds, to be exact. 3.795, if he was being pedantic about it. And in the meantime, Purple continued whistling.
"Why? Why did you go? Don't go! Stay, please!!"
Avianspeak. Of course. She'd complained of her throat hurting yesterday. He had brushed it off, telling her to stop yapping so much, then, but no, her vocal cords must have literally been rearranging themselves in preparation for this. For her wings.
He ran the very tips of his claws down one of them (code, Purple almost sobbed, when did Purple ever-?) and tried to speak through the scorching heat in her lungs.
"You let me. You said you'd be okay, I-" A shaky attempt at a breath. Purple's arms tightened; it cut off. "I won't leave again, 'kay-?" Again, the claws down her wing. Gray fuzz caught in them; what little was left, anyway. Some of it fell to the ground— some stayed stuck on his hand. Had she been plucking it-?
She warbled. It was nothing but pathetic.
She is weak. She is small. She could not dare stand up to me, and she knows it.
His other hand raised. Do it. Fire crackled and popped over his palm. Kill her.
He pressed it gently to her back.
The burning wasn't entirely his scar. But he had also been fighting back his mission statement this whole time, the itch in his code to destroy, destroy, destroy. It wasn't easy to push back down, not with his friend practically lending herself to it, but, with a slight pressure on the wraps beneath her shirt, he did so anyway.
Purple would not be destroyed. Not now, not ever. Not again.
"C'mon, couch time, bug," she murmured. "Let's practice that voice a little, creators know I need it, ha."
When she looked up at her (up, because Purple was small, why was she so small?), it was with the biggest, bluest, wobbliest eyes she'd ever seen— they'd look more appropriate on a begging puppy, and for a moment Dark was worried that she'd really, really messed something up by leaving. Not only that, but she'd have to do it again to go get the laundry when it was done.
"Stay?" Purple warbled, and fuck, how could she deny her? The girl who gave and gave and gave for her and asked next to nothing in return save for her own life and compensation for the supplies Dark used?
If it were anyone else, she would not have stayed.
(If it were Chosen, she might have.)
But she owed a debt to this stick. (At least, that was what she told herself. That was what she planned to tell anyone who found out.) So she nodded, and nudged her towards the couch.
"Yeah, I'll stay."
Dark very quickly learned that she was atrocious at mimicking most bird calls. Purple kept laughing at her for it.
Her solution to this, obviously, was to record a bunch of Purple's sounds and use them instead. How Chosen had flawlessly made such noises, she'll never know. The guy's avian-obsessed phase hadn't even lasted that long.
Purple kept making a sound that supposedly meant Dark was part of her flock. She recorded it, but didn't return it. Surely it was just because Dark was the first person there when she got her wings.
Surely that was it. The way she pressed her wings into her claws didn't mean she'd want her around permanently once the haze of instincts waned.
The way Dark followed the movement wherever Purple wanted her hand to go didn't mean she'd stick around for good.
Letting her lounge on her with pupils blown wide was just a way to stop her from screaming.
This was just until she considered her debt repaid.
Dark had to remind herself of that.
He was The Dark Lord, the terrorist who had ruined her life and killed her mother.
Who would trust someone like that?
… maybe the mission statement had shaken him more than he thought.
Dark didn't know how Purple was doing such a perfect impression of his Virabots, but he'd figured out why; it was his name. She made that clear enough just by pointing at him.
That was an even weirder feeling than the one he'd gotten when she asked for a sleepover. He wasn't opposed to either of them, though.
But she was very disappointed that he couldn't do the same for her.
… hang on a minute.
"No!" Purple shrieked as soon as he brought it up, a day later after planning how exactly he was going to do this in a dozen different ways.
"Purp, I ain't gonna lie to you, I'm NOT qualified for this. I'd damn well love to be, but reality's a bitch, so I'm not, yet. There are people that are, though."
She glared at him, chittering angry, lonely noises. Dark sighed.
"I could go with you. I just don't think you'd want me knowing where your guys live." At that, she went quiet. Her wings puffed up, but pressed in tight to her shoulders. They even fluttered- no, buzzed.
"… Don't care," she finally squawked. "Come with me. Stay with me. The whole flock needs to stay together. Please."
He grimaced. Purple was really not in her right mind if she was claiming not to care about him being seen.
Though, judging by her eyes, she'd been lost to her feathers for a good long while now. Dark hadn't really done any looking into how long that half-aware state of hers would stick around.
"It's one or the other, 'kay? You either get one of me or a ton of the others. Understand?"
Purple's face tightened. "No," she said again, ducking her head and grabbing onto his shirt. He huffed, even while putting his own hand over hers. "All or nothing."
"Well I don't think you'd want nothing, bug. Fuckin'- c'mere."
She didn't resist when he pulled her back into a hug.
They'd compromised by texting the group chat she had been completely ignoring for two days. Dark did her best to sound like her, which basically just meant she stopped shoving down the prissy, royal words that always wanted to come out of her mouth. Something about being named The Dark Lord, she guessed.
It worked in their favor this time, though.
Five other members of her Discoded chat were online, and easily fooled, while Dark practically wrestled the words — well, birdsong — out of her throat to translate into text.
One user, named pokebombrednblu, noticed something was off about her messages. She made the excuse that she was simply a little unwell. It technically wasn't a lie, and it worked, even if they all stayed a little suspicious. But, again, they hadn't heard from her for two days, so they were willing to believe the words on the screen.
Now came the (emotionally) difficult part.
Dark would always admit that she wanted to know where Purple's friends/found family lived. She had admitted it, many times, and Purple had laughed, shoved her, and said no.
So this was not exactly the way she wanted to learn.
But, here she was, carrying the avian above the trees on powers that were shaky and unreliable on the best of days while being pointed towards her "King's" house.
(Although, in chirps, she had called him "dad." Not father, dad. The distinction, Dark had learned, was very important when it came to her.)
(Weird, though, to consider the man that burned her chest and killed her as a dad. Dark didn't consider The Second Coming to be her brother. Not like Chosen was, anyway.)
If all had gone well, her friends would be waiting at that house, and this supposed "king" would be ready for her. She had gleefully allowed Dark to translate things to him the second she saw his Discoded icon, having sent a single message asking after her wellbeing.
The man responded quickly when she started sending messages. That, at least, may have been a good sign.
They landed (maybe less smoothly than Dark had hoped) behind the tree trunks nearest to where Purple had indicated. Dark grimaced — how could anyone live that close to other people in homes that similar? — but urged her outwards anyway. This was better for her. Those people were better for her. He would only destroy her instinct drive.
Besides, it was almost sunset.
Clearly, she didn't want to go alone. Clearly, she wanted him to come with.
He refused. He told her he would be nearly. He told her that everyone who was waiting for her would keep her safe.
He did not add that they would keep her safe from him.
He knew, all too well actually, how people reacted when infamous Netscape terrorist The Dark Lord showed up out of nowhere. Purple was the one remaining exception.
So all he did was watch as she stumbled up to the door and knocked, as it swung open and she was suddenly accosted by three people all at once, all with their arms around her, none of whom had been the tall orange man who opened the door. The red one noticed her wings first, followed closely by the green and orange ones, and then the blue one dragged her past the doorway and he couldn't see much of anything, anymore.
He did see, though, the much brighter orange kid that darted past as the door was closing. The orange Hollowhead.
That kid paused at the window. It turned. It looked.
The Dark Lord was not a coward. But The Dark Lord hid anyway, because he knew what that kid could do. The burn on his chest pulsed like a heartbeat. Like a reminder.
Purple had not said she was friends with a Hollowhead. Purple had not said she was friends with The Second Coming.
He dragged in a breath. At least, out of everyone, it would keep her alive. The rest were supposed to be dead, after all. But they weren't.
Dark shook away the memory of children younger than him dying on that cliffside. He said he would stay nearby. He would not run.
Not even if he really, really wanted to.
His flock needed him.