#! {corrupted data}

↳ ✽ - - - Sera had to grasp at her breaths, pure torture to keep her eyes from falling shut because she knew if she gave in to the comforting darkness, she would be met with a death that, for once, wouldn’t be met with revival. She fought to keep living, but there was little she could do in this situation. Being physically weak and having few redeeming qualities in battle, defense had always been her strength, offense only to be used when needed. This compulsion to fight had a more personal origin, to eliminate what she felt shouldn’t exist, but there was no way to reverse what had been done. She had been reckless and had let emotions get the best of her.

❝Please, you don't have to do this!❞ 

Words spilled out from the shaman's lips, tears brimming in her eyes. It screamed in her ears, threw in her face how wide the gap in stamina between them was, and how impossible the feat to win against him at this point would be. She withdrew mentally and wondered how she'd been hoping for anything else. This wasn’t how she thought it was going to end. 

Her breath stopped short in her throat with a silent cry as she felt the pain snap low in her stomach, a refined blade cutting through her easily. A rough cough slipped past her dry lips; in a matter of seconds, the unmistakable taste of copper rose up in the back of her throat. 

↳ ✽ - - - An arcane young woman clad in pure white stood among the wreckage; quietly, calmly, with little emotion showing upon her face, blood on her hands and self hatred in her eyes. Placid expression turned towards what she suspected was the cause, raven hair tumbling over her bony shoulders, a bird with its wings clipped. Gentle steps were taken, treading closer. Danger, her mind whispered, yet she remained unmoved by it’s warnings.

❝…Yuu- I’m not sure what you were thinking. You take far too many risks on my behalf.❞

Gentle even in her scolding, a sigh slipped from pale lips, tone between solicitude and careful blankness which had long become natural to her. She absorbed the energy in the concrete stained with blood underneath her feet and relearned the uneven rhythms of his pulse. She could sense the overwhelming hatred writhing in his chest, twisting like a viper in his veins. 

She had never seen anybody impervious to the effects of fear; such was a basis to humanity, present in everyone, even the most dauntless of people, but she knew what was human within him was most likely dead. Their purpose could now extend beyond what their original programming had called for. The questionable intentions and underhanded methods of humans that had pulled the puppet strings behind them gone. The creature before her held an awful beauty, a presence which loomed in such a way that caused her to feel a sense of empathy. However her empathy had it’s limits, learning more about him had to take it’s natural course.

For a beat, she was nearly overcome with the desire to touch him, to brush her fingers along his arm, visibly crumbling to pieces. However doing so now would be a death wish. Prayer was an option to soothe him, give her an opportunity to approach him safely. The lyrics of the song that had laid dormant upon the tip of her tongue found use once more. 

She sang softly as she pressed her small hand against the center of the black ink seal that slithered around his chest, working to tune his discordant body back into a euphonious symphony, trying to set things as they were. The half-akuma’s compliance was cut short when he realized the aching sensation was receding, staring incredulously at his shoulder. His attention flew back to the shaman.  

❝What are you doing?!❞ 

❝Stabilizing your data.❞ 

❝Are you stupid? You hardly have enough energy to keep yourself upright!❞ 

❝I’m fine. I just want you to be able to stand with me.❞

She was merely speeding up the process of his regeneration, lessening the pain, but even then, she knew they would both inevitably wilt with time, much faster than others.

Their combined life force could only sustain one another for so long.

↳ ✽ - - - In this new universe she had been thrown into, she found herself discovering that it came with it’s own challenges and trials. In her own, there had been demons with human souls trapped inside, armed with sharp fangs and tortured snarls that echoed within the ruins plagued by never ending rain. In that same world, there were also monsters wrapped up in human flesh with blank expressions like the one that invaded her nightmares. To fall in line with what what normal within this realm now felt impossible; to blend in and remain ignorant to the trials she was being put through would only brand her as a lamb ready for slaughter, leave herself at the mercy of whoever the enemy was.

Manic screams still resonated in her ears, within her very skull, haunting her even as she found distance between herself and others. Fragile songbird had been taken down into the fiery depths of hell and not even a holy act could save the broken doll. There was nothing for her. Only the endless stretch of eternity, of pulsing fear and doubt. She carried a heavy burden, millions of lives like marks on her pallid skin, an entire planet knotted in the muscles of her back. She looked down to her fragile and thin hands, capable of doing terrible things. She and God were one now. A gift, someone from her past would have claimed; but really she rather refer to it as a curse. When she had been created, she had been told she had potential, but those words were nothing but a precursor to the years of suffering she would experience.

No one could keep her rooted unless she allowed it; playing prisoner had taught her the privilege of saying no. But there had to be a balance… When left adrift with nothing but herself for company, the shaman became uncomfortably aware of how lonely the world could be. So she begged with all of the desperation with what was left of her mortal soul for a comrade, for someone who would understand just a fraction of who she was, and not hold any discretion. She went in search for this someone in hopes of finding air to keep her from drowning.

↳ ✽ - - - Her fabricated paradise kept her happy, despite when it became a battleground wracked with a never ending war, it was an escape from reality, a place away from the glass prison she knew too well. Even the rain didn’t bother her all that much. She thought if she stood in the rain long enough, it might wash away all that disturbed her and uncover what was lost beneath the grime but the Junkyard had been purged and discarded. Nothing survived. Embryon had been defeated. Jenna Angel had won. The deaths of her comrades resounded heavily in her chest, threatening to dismantle every part of her.

❝Now Seraphita, will you be a good girl and agree to cooperate to our terms of your own free will?❞

Lifting her head, she fixed a brief gaze on the old woman before she nodded weakly. A retort had been on her tongue, ready to deny the request directed towards her but the words scattered apart, lost and never to be retrieved. No one could rescue her from her fate, so she began to accept it and in exchange she achieved a poor semblance of freedom. They knew they had broken the tragic sliver of a girl. She no longer held any intension to escape. Years would pass and she, by some form of miracle, managed to be sustained just enough to continue living exclusively for the Karma Society’s purpose. 

❝She looks so much like her mother…❞

A wince after an idle tug at her now long black hair. Though the voices were muffled since she had wandered far enough to not hear them properly, the comment made her skin go cold. She was tired of hurting; exhausted of being tasked to gather the fragments of what was left to try and piece herself together again.  So somewhere along the line, Sera found strength in indifference, in becoming frigid. More time passed and she began to respond less- until she barely seemed anything like her original self anymore.

❝You'll only ever see a person like her isolate themselves when they know they're going to die. Credit given, she lasted longer than anyone expected her to...❞

Have you come back? 

Sera stopped mid-sentence, the breath fleeing her body as the echo of her voice rebounded back to her from the walls. The words felt like a trigger.

What hurt the most was the cruel distinction between a familial closeness and the deafening distance. She held onto this notion of forever, when in essence, nothing was permanent. All that was constant about it was sadness. Gilgamesh was not her father after all, not really. An explanation others would accept would take a lifetime of comprehending and sorting out the littlest of details. Sera could easily say there was much more to the King of Heroes then one would perceive at first glance.

He had worked his way down to her core and brought out something in her she had never thought possible, how easily he could stir her from her own reluctance to act. Every time she talked to him, she could feel her heart strings pulling her voice box open and releasing a melody she hadn’t let out for years. He made her want to untwist the knots of her tongue and listen to her own voice again. The shaman felt herself regress to a normal girl instead of a being created in a lab meant for nothing more than to be sacrificed. She craved the approval which naturally came in the smile he gave. He was a constancy in a life otherwise so scattered, unpredictable, and chaotic.

She had a power, close to what a god possessed, literally at her fingertips, but the lingering fear still ate at her. She concealed the one way she could defend herself if only to keep history from repeating. Up until recently, a part of her reasoning was to keep herself alive, keep herself uninteresting to others. Sera knew Gilgamesh’s abhorrence for the gods, for dishonesty…What if that’s why he left? What if it was her fault? The second he found out, he abandoned her?

To use that same power she refused to access needlessly to uncover his location was likely to be met with disaster, but what else could she do? Her eyes drifted shut as she focused on the data stream, feeling every separate line of code, the electrons moving within them, the vibration of the atoms. Gravity felt like it doubled in a second, and she braced herself for the impact of the entire database opening up to her. Hundreds of citizens, thousands of entries. She wandered the netscape in a hopeless haze. Where? Where could he have gone?

Concentrating on tracing a point of origin, her hands were frantic but precise. A flick and codes flickered away so swift that all they left was a trail of light. She pressed upon a hologram and gestured for it to expand.

No records found...

The way she foresaw these little concerns tweaked her anxiety for the worst. Then it settled in her heart, buried itself right in the middle of it and she allowed herself to lose her composure; to be free from the reluctance which divulged in her chest. In her delirium, the sobs that shook her sounded nothing like her own. She could see the dark blurs at the sides of her vision beckoning.

She had experienced life and death. She knew torture and loss; the eroding effects of hopelessness and what it felt to have it spiral so far, but nothing prepared her for this pain. The people in the city thought themselves immortal in a sense, death only a temporary hindrance. They didn’t know the true danger of being wiped from existence in a few keystrokes. It was a bitter truth that despite the power they held- no one was invincible, even she was susceptible to the same fate. When Gajeel disappeared it wasn’t something she fully acknowledged. Fully grieved. Ignorance was bliss after all.

The petite shaman began to draw parallels. Of those close to her, who would be next? Was there a pattern? Was this a test?

There’s a wrecking pain in her core and Sera severed the fusion, ejecting just as her heart threatened to stop beating. Pixels scattered in erratic, jagged forms as the girl held a pillow to her chest to help rein herself in. She attempted sleep in the arms of the couch, spine curled like a crescent moon, but it was a lost cause. She couldn’t sleep. Not with that one thought plaguing her mind.

He won’t be returning home.

Don't wait for her, she's lost and she's never coming back…

In her mind’s eye, a blurred image started to come into focus. A group of people… people who seemed familiar. They surrounded her, staring her in the face; tiptoeing around her like ghosts. All she needed to do was see them, recognize them, unveil them. Their names would fall from her lips and she would remember. That’s all she needed. As the picture sharpened, her heart began to race and her grey eyes started to moisten. She couldn’t. There was an internal throb of loss she could hardly comprehend.