#horsemen

Strife would always be the first to knock down your door, feigning crushing, world-ending boredom as an excuse to hound his Favourite.

War, never one to impose too quickly lest he come across as undignified, would arrive at a later hour, perhaps using the peace of your living room to drag a whetstone over Chaoseater’s blade, grumbling about how the light in your home is required for the sacred task, now that daylight has faded.

And Death is as changeable as the weather, not unlike a fickle, self-sufficient cat who comes and goes as he pleases and stays for exactly as long as he’d like, and not a second more. You’ve simply learned to let him, confident that for as unpredictable as he tries to be, he never seems to stay away for more than a week at a time before he pops over just to ‘check in.’

In contrast, you can count on one hand how many times Fury has been in your home. For Strife and Death, you’ve had to start a tally but you’re fairly sure they’ve both accrued the same number of visits, with War following hot on their heels.

Which is why you’re still reeling in shock, not only from being shoved back into your home through the front door by a masked assailant who’d been waiting behind it for you to emerge, but also the totally unexpected emergence of a howling, murderous blur of black armour and gnashing teeth that comes roaring from the darkness of your study too rapidly for you to discern its identity.

The thick, gloved hand around your neck is there and gone in three seconds flat, and the stranger’s growled demand for the location of your rations has barely passed his lips before a colossal shape crashes into him and uses the momentum to lift him straight off his feet, slamming him into the adjacent wall with a sickening ‘CRUNCH!’ that sends plaster splintering outwards for several inches like a spiderweb of broken paint and stucco.

You’re on the ground before you can even realise you’ve been dropped, scrambling fruitlessly backwards in the cramped space of your entryway as if the wall behind you might allow you to pass through it instead of continuously pressing yourself further and further into it.

Straddled on either side of you like a pair of bristling obelisks are two armoured legs – much longer than legs have any right to be – and notably more slender than War’s, Death’s or Strife’s.

In the space between the knees, you can see a pair of feet hanging at least half a metre off the ground, faded trainers kicking and squeaking with feverish desperation against the wall.

“GET-! Get the hell off’a me-! OW - Shit! Stop!”

The man’s voice, once gruff and menacing, has raised by several octaves. Which might have been funnier if the sudden shriek, followed by a rush of blood cascading to the floor with a dull, wet splatter didn’t immediately sober you from your shock.

In an instant, you wrench your head up, eyes running over a sleek set of ink-black armour to a literal mane of fire sitting at the apex of a bridling neck.

No way…

“F-Fury!?” you stammer out in disbelief.

The Horseman – confoundingly and inexplicably here – has her back to you, looking twice her usual size in the meagre hallway and doubly menacing from your angle down on the floor. Her long hair is aflame, quite literally, with the help of the corresponding Hollow, and it dances around her head like wildfire blown about by some unseen wind, striking forwards at its prey before rearing back in a manner that reminds you of agitated serpents.

You can’t see the man’s face, hidden as he is behind Fury’s bulk, but another strangled wail born from terror and agony spurs you clumsily up to your feet.

Without thinking, without considering the potential consequences, you lunge forwards on an instinct to avert a disaster, and wrap your hands around Fury’s bicep from behind, bleating out a frantic, “DON’T!”

The muscles beneath your fingers solidify as you attempt to wrench her arm back and away from your would-be-burglar’s throat, finding it utterly immoveable, like trying to get a wall of six-inch concrete to bend.

“... Y/n?” Fury’s voice grinds out your name inquiringly as if she’s confused by your interference.

But what you’ve glimpsed around her side, what you’ve seen in between flashes of swinging shadows cast by your light fixture overhead, fills you with a cold, awful dread and drops panic straight into your stomach, leaden as a brick.

How could you not interfere?

Shoving aside the bombshell that Fury has come to your defence, you try to inject as much authority into your tone as you can manage. Which isn't very much at all. And moments later, you’re projecting it out at an aggressive, all-powerful Horseman of the Apocalypse.

“Don’t kill him!” And then, because it always works when you need to get Strife to listen… “Please?!”

The talons of her raised gauntlet are clamped like a beartrap around the intruder’s throat, and what little skin you can see hidden beneath his balaclava is rapidly turning a deathly shade of blue. Her other hand hovers down near his side, fingers curled into claws that glisten at their tips. There are five, ragged streaks torn from his shirt near the stomach and…

Well, at least I know where the blood came from.

In an alarming snap of motion, Fury whips her head around to aim a look at you over her shoulder, zeroing in on the hands that are still clinging to her arm.

You almost wish she hadn’t, wish you’d never opened your big mouth to try and stop her from disembowelling a man in your entryway.

You’ve never been less sure about your standing with a Horseman than you are right now.

Fury’s eyes, white as fresh-cut paper, sit wide and savage within the confines of her black facial tattoos, gleaming with the sharpened focus of a predator. Lips painted darker than dried blood are peeled back to expose her teeth, and for the first time, you notice that she – like War – boasts a daunting pair of canines.

A predator indeed. And here you are, stepping between her and her prey.

Now what, genius?

Without warning, the man dangling haplessly from her grasp begins to squirm again with vigour, lashing a fist out at the Horseman’s face…

... And clocking her squarely on the jaw.

You could swear a genuine tinge of green rises onto your cheeks.

Fury’s head doesn’t move beyond the barest inch, yet the man’s closed fist bounces back towards him like he’s just struck solid rock.

“GAH!-RRGH! FUU-!” he gargles on the obstruction tightening around his throat, holding his quivering hand up in front of unfocused eyes and whimpering at the freshly disjointed angles of his knuckles.

With bated breath, you wait to see how she’ll respond to the blow, whether she uses her Hollow to burn the flesh from his bones, her whip to slice his head clean off his shoulders or her hands to crush his skull like wet cardboard.  

To the Horseman’s credit, and your growing apprehension, she does nothing of the sort, merely continues to stare down at you with her lips curled and her eyes flashing viciously, daring you to speak.

Ignoring the punch it is then, arguably the most devastating blow she could have returned fire with, you realise later.

But this staring… You don’t like that much at all.

When Death stares at you, the look is usually admonishing, sometimes unimpressed and always fondly perplexed.

Fury’s stare sends fingers of ice walking up and down the length of your spine.

Truth be told, right now, and in every other instance you’ve interacted with her, you never know what to expect.

She’s several millennia younger than Death, far less affection-starved than Strife, and nowhere near as bound by a code of honour as War.

She’s an enigma, one you doubt you’ll ever be allowed to figure out. And that makes her all the more terrifying. Fear of the unknown and all that.

Still, Death might call it a learning opportunity; that Fury stands as a constant reminder to you of what the Horsemen are, of what they can become at the drop of a hat – something that can be boiled down into one, simple word.

Dangerous.

Things certainly feel dangerous right now.

She keeps flicking her gaze between your face and the hands around her bicep. The fact that they haven’t yet been severed from your wrists is a miracle in itself.

“Please,” you try again, giving her arm an experimental tug and getting nowhere, “He’s just a thief! Don’t kill him…”

In response, the Horseman cocks her fiery head to one side and squints down at you like you’ve just asked her the most befuddling riddle known to man.

And then she says something that neatly obliterates every single thing you thought you knew about the cantankerous Nephilim.

“He was going to hurt you,” she seethes between her teeth, twisting her attention over to the man fast as a whip-crack, causing him to flinch and wheeze out a broken sound through his trembling lips. Then, she’s turning back to you, her expression incomprehensibly softer than it was before, eyebrows dipped and furrowed, lips falling down to conceal her teeth. “What was I meant to do?”

There’s still blood pooling underneath the intruder, but you can’t stop yourself from going still at her question, wondering if you’d heard correctly.

The unignorable protectiveness of the sentiment staggers you, and you almost let go of her, eyes blown wide as saucers.

“But he… he…!” Try again. “He didn’t hurt me,” you choke without stumbling this time, ignoring the twinge in the back of your shoulders from where your spine had been rammed into the wall, “And I don’t think he was going to! He’s just after rations! So, you don’t need to kill him!”

The sole of a trainer glances harmlessly off Fury’s thigh.

Again, it goes ignored. Again, she narrows her eyes at you, probably trying to figure out why you’re talking such nonsense.

“Look.” Sweating, resisting the urge to scrape wobbly fingers through your hair, you take a breath, banking as much air in your lungs as will fit.

It doesn’t help to steady you.

“I’m not telling you to let him go unpunished. We can take him to Usiel at the precinct. They can decide what to do with him there.”

Sparing the man your fiercest glare, which must pale comically in comparison to what Fury has been subjecting him to, you add, “Can’t exactly have a ration thief running loose in the city. Things are tight enough as it is.”

------------------

To make a long story short, against every conceivable odd the Universe has to offer, Fury actually listens to you.

To make a short story long, she doesn’t just drop the wannabe thief off at the precinct and be done with it.

She comes back. To your home, stepping heavily over the still-open threshold to find you knelt on the ground almost exactly where she left you, only this time with a bucket of ruddy water at your side and a sponge clutched delicately between your fingertips, strange, yellow gloves covering your arms up to the elbow.

You pause to glance up at her as she enters, once again intimidated into shrinking back under the weight of her piercing stare.

You can tell exactly which of Death’s traits she picked up on in her youth.

At least her flame hollow has died down and left her hair in its default state, no longer at risk of setting your wooden picture frames alight.

Still, for some reason, you can’t help but notice that she’s stopped to stare at you for a little longer than might be considered polite or normal. Her jaw is clamped shut tight, yet you can see it working, like she’s chewing on words and trying to get a taste for them before they come out of her mouth.

With a skittish flip of your stomach, it strikes you that she’s waiting for something. For one of you to speak most likely.

Maybe because she thinks she ought to, maybe out of some sense of duty to resolve the night in a conclusive manner. Either way, she never did strike you as a natural conversationalist, too impatient, too restless, and not in the way Strife gets when you stop paying attention to him for more than five minutes in a row.

Besides, with the way she’s standing frozen in the entrance of your home, shoulders squared and one leg slanted backwards, only halfway inside, you realise that just her being here is a monumental step. And that if you attempt to push her any further out of her comfort zone by launching into a long-winded lecture about why it’s not okay to nearly gut someone all over your freshly restored carpet, you run the risk of undoing whatever progress has bizarrely occurred here today.

So, blindly kneading out red-tinted water from the sponge back into the bucket, you offer her mercy in the form of a tiny nod, a steady smile, and settle for a concise but heartfelt, “Thank you, Fury.” And nothing more.

The only show of surprise comes in the form of a blink. Then, with a curt nod of her own, she’s stalking past you again and disappearing back into the shadowed doorway leading to your study, heels thudding purposefully against your carpet.

That too is a conundrum you try to fathom for the duration of your clean-up.

What on Earth was she doing back there in the first place?

You had no idea she was even in your house… And come to think of it, doesn’t that just raise a dozen more questions. Such as, how did she get in? How many times has she been at home without you realising it? What’s in there that could catch her attention?

Why, there’s nothing inside except a rickety desk with a computer that still doesn’t work, an armchair, and a dusty bookcase half-filled with books that you’ve been salvaging from the ruins of the City…

Perhaps she just likes it for the peace and quiet.

Sparing the doorway an exasperated glance, you resolve to leave her be… For the most part.

Later, just before you head up to start getting ready for bed, you hesitate outside the crack in the door and softly clear your throat, calling through, “I’m making tea, if you want anything?”

Silence is the only answer you receive, and you imagine your ethereal guest must have slipped away without you noticing. Again.

Giving up, you start to turn back towards the kitchen. Only then does a disgruntled voice drift out between the gap of the threshold and chase you into the hall.