#viridescent

Chapter III of Viridescent is out on AO3! 💚 We have new problems arising, a bit of angst and a new development? 👀

Just once I’d like to fall in love with someone who will ruin things before I do. (I already had too many turns.)

-

A/N: AHHH!!! Thanks for the prompt! :D Also, ahhhhh counterclockwise!! When I first read your prompt, I only saw the latin phrase and light/shining/burning has never really been Leanne’s motif, but the softer world 1008 is exactly Leanne! So then the question is, who is the other person who does have the light/shining/burning motif?

My go to girl Tetsuki Kaiza.

But here’s the thing: she does have the light/shining/burning motif, although it’s generally more lightning than fire. And they were vigilante teammates! So, like, that should be an immediate, locked-in answer. But, I don’t know, they just were never romantic in my head. In the completely opposite way of how Joy and Leanne were a surprise to me, I cannot get these Leanne and Tetsuki to be romantic even though there’s all sorts of factors which should suggest they could be.

To be fair, it’s mostly Tetsuki’s fault—for all that she’s my go to for “OC in X fandom,” she’s very judgmental and obstinate and slightly misanthropic besides. It doesn’t help that canonically (or as canonically as an original fiction I haven’t fully written down) they meet as teenage vigilantes in Testuki’s “first life” and she has none of the wisdom that either in-universe experience or multiverse traveling would give her. Leanne is rightfully indignant and put off by Tetsuki’s initial lack of respect and that’s something that haunts their relationship even when time and dimensions may soften things through nostalgia.

Though now that I mention it, maybe that’s the way to go…

Leanne’s journey is essentially a mortal unknowingly turning into a god—that her domain is time just confuses things further—but, at some point (in time ;P) she’ll achieve control over her abilities. In contrast I throw Tetsuki around whatever fandom has taken my fancy and legitimize (in as much as fanfiction can/needs to be legitimized) by saying she is stuck reincarnating through the multiverse and makes a deal with the Space Time Witch from CLAMP’s xxxHolic, trading an unknown amount of time as an agent of fate in order to get back home.

So we have a Time God and an Agent of Destiny/The Multiverse.

And in a way, if we mess around with the verb tenses—which we can because it involves Leanne who is a Time God—it almost has a sort of… “Hey, our first impressions of each other were bad, but let’s try again; not forgetting or disregarding our past, but building something taking it into account… also we are both incredibly powerful people who have seen A Lot and it’s kind of nice to interact with someone who knew me before everything went to shit.”

… now that I’ve said all that, I can’t really justify doing a different take and, anyway, I don’t know who else fits the parameters so well besides Tetsuki. So here we go?

—

Leanne visits rivers when she can, when she’s available and when they exist. She makes do with artificial rivers if she has to, though the concrete walls and precise lines don’t work quite as much as natural ones.

It’s probably the most normal thing about her, nowadays. Humans have been soothed by proximity to bodies of water since humans existed and she, at the very least, began her own existence as a human.

Though lately her propensity for rivers has more to do with philosophy than nature. Obvious metaphors running through her mind. The flow of time and the inability to step in the same river twice, how she can never go back home even with her abilities under control. But even still there is a continuity, a consistency, something that can be relied upon even as everything, including itself, changes.

Also, the negative ions are nice.

She followed a water molecule once, from a river to the ocean through the full water cycle, just to see if she could. She followed it for a full decade and confused a great many people for focusing on them seemingly for no reason until, as all things, it passed. Then when it made its way to an entirely different river, she stopped, struck by a sudden, immediate futility.

Then she went back a decade. Not to regain the time lost—for one, that’s not how her abilities work, she still experiences the passage of time; but also, two, she literally has all the time in the world to waste—just to put as definitive an end to her experiment as she is capable of doing. She could have continued following it until it ceased to exist, if she wanted to. Arguably, she could even follow that water molecule again from the start, but what would be the point? To have the same exact journey? Or, worse, change things slightly just to see where it went this time? Why? It was just a water molecule. She would go mad.

She was already going mad.

Hence, rivers.

… maybe she should find a different meditative object.

Except, as she considers that, a door appears on the opposite bank of the river. A free standing, unattached door in the middle of nowhere.

She goes back five minutes. It is still and, somehow, already there.

She goes forward six million years, the river at the bottom of a canyon and the sun a dying red. The radiation in the air hurts her skin, her lungs. Her eyes burn. Across the canyon, the door still stands, ageless.

She goes back six million years and six minutes, because she can, and the door is there also.

Hm, something new.

-

Tetsuki leaves on a mission from The Shopkeeper—an uncertain but hopeful Watanauki-kun—and six months later returns to a different The Shopkeeper, a Yuuko-san who assesses her with thoughtful, narrowed eyes.

“I do not know you,” The Shopkeeper says, eerily immobile, contrasting with her lounging position on unnecessarily decadent furniture and the softly wafting smoke from her pipe.

Tetsuki shrugs.

“I do not know you yet,” Yuuko-san corrects, continuing to not move.

Tetsuki does not bother to shrug again, instead moving away from the Dimensional Door and taking her usual seat:

Not beside Yuuko-san, though there is space on the divan even despite her sprawl. Not across from Yuuko-san, the way a customer would, the low table a false barrier between mortals and magic. But on the left hand, with her back to the kitchen, facing both the Dimensional Door and the more material entrance to The Shop. Not Watanuki’s place, student and steward, but a guard’s position.

“Ah,” Yuuko-san says in understanding, though there had been no confusion before. “Something is wrong with The Shop then.”

“What?” Tetsuki asks, finally alarmed despite Yuuko-san’s continued impassivity. The Shop exists outside of spacetime. How can something be wrong with it? “No,” Tetsuki protests. “We time travel all the time,” she says, pushing through the inanity of the sentence.

Yuuko-san sits up, movements no less eerie than her stillness. “We’ll need an Auditor.”

“What? No. Explain.”

Yuuko-san does not. With one finger tapping at her chin, she ignores Tetsuki and muses, “Auditors are so rare. And it will have to be one who has never interacted with The Shop before. A closed universe perhaps? But they’re usually so mistrusting. How ever will I get a message to them?”

“What. Are. You. Talking. About.” Tetsuki has never empathized with Watanuki-kun more.

Yuuko-san looks to her, a sly grin splitting her face. “A messenger!” she exclaims, clapping her hands, as if Tetsuki had only arrived just now or performed a convenient trick.

Tetsuki grumbles preemptively. “Fine. Where am I going?” She asks, then reconsiders. “… or to when am I going?”

“Neither!” Yuuko-san enthuses. “To whom are you going,” she corrects, “will be an Auditor.”

Tetsuki grumbles more. “Okay, and who is that?”

Yuuko-san’s grin, if possible, stretches wider.

—

It does not matter when Leanne goes, the door is still there. It also does not matter where she goes, although that is not her immediate purview—if speed is distance over time, then time is just distance over speed—traveling does not prevent the door from following her. Or, rather, from already being there when she appears.

If she is at a river, it is on the other bank. If she is in a city, it is across the street. In an uncrossed plain, it remains a consistent distance from her no matter how much time she spends walking towards it. The door is there and it does not want to be approached, but it also wants her attention.

Should she get a cat?

Leanne is considering ranged options when the door opens.

The figure that walks through is familiar in the same way as memories of learning to ride a bike: a balancing act she struggled with reminiscent of scraped elbows and knees, the scent of blood and metal on pavement, and a pretty nasty concussion.

“Thunderbolt?”

Whatever neutral expression had been on Thunderbolt’s face twists into something of furrowed brows and pursed lips. Clearly, Leanne’s fellow former teenage vigilante recognizes her.

“You,” Thunderbolt says, almost an accusation.

“Me,” Leanne responds, a little giddy all the same. “I thought you died. Or, at least, I saw you die… I think?”

“You’re the Auditor?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Leanne admits, because Thunderbolt already has a low opinion of her that to attempt to save face would make things worse. “But how are you alive? And why is your door following me?”

Thunderbolt presses a hand to her face and sighs. This, too, is painfully familiar. “Of course it’s you,” she says into her hand, exasperated enough that the words carry even to Leanne’s ears. She heaves one last sigh before pulling her hand away. Her expression has changed again: brows a little less furrowed, one side of her mouth curled up, maybe. “Of course it’s you,” she repeats.

Confused and delighted, both at the sensation of confusion and seeing someone really real, Leanne smiles back.

—

“Here’s your problem,” Leanne says to Yuuko-san who is, for once, acting like a professional and not a mirage masquerading as a person.

Tetsuki trails after them because she’s not sure what would be worse: leaving Leanne alone with Yuuko-san or leaving Yuuko-san along with Leanne. Although how Leanne of all people knows what is wrong with The Shop when she didn’t even know what The Shop was before Tetsuki escorted her through the Dimensional Door is just one more annoying mystery to throw on the pile.

Seeing her is like being a teenager again. And not in the usual way she is a teenager again—reincarnated into a new world and burdened by a cosmic purpose which reveals itself with patience and strategic application of lightning powers—but irrationally frustrated and looking for a fight.

Leanne looks back at her, mid explanation to Yuuko-san, and smiles when their eyes meet. Tetsuki tries not to instinctually glare in response and probably ends up looking confused or concerned instead given the way her smile widens.

“The Shop is designed to be independent of spacetime, but it still requires a sentient lodestone in order to function,” Leanne is saying, when Tetsuki pays attention. “Obviously it’s supposed to be The Shopkeeper,” Leanne says, with a nod to Yuuko-san who nods back magnanimously, “but it looks like it has its wires crossed, so to speak, and is trying to connect to Thunderbolt instead.”

Yuuko-san blinks, a coy glance sent in Tetsuki’s direction. “Thunderbolt?” she asks.

Leanne, perhaps sensing her mistake, corrects herself. “Oh, uh, I mean. Tetsuki,” she stammers. “We used to be, uh, teammates—”

Tetsuki rolls her eyes. “She knows.”

“Ah, right, sorry.” Leanne says, grimacing at herself before falling silent.

Tetsuki digs within herself for the nonexistent modicum of patience she has for Leanne, has reallocate some from a different well instead. “She’s wondering why you called me by my callsign instead of my name,” she explains, a poor attempt at reassurance.

It works well enough. Or, at least, Leanne is generous enough to let it work, she brightens a bit. “Oh, well, it’s just,” she shrugs, “how I knew you.”

Because they were teammates first and only, not friends. Tetsuki hadn’t let Leanne know her otherwise.

—

The fix is quick, especially for someone who already controls time. The Shop, like Leanne, has a chronological flow internally consistent even as it exists separated from spacetime. However, without its own sentience, it would collapse under the sheer cosmological pressure from the multiverse and cease to exist. Or maybe exist everywhere but no longer be a single entity? That one she’s not too sure of.

Regardless, The Shop is designed with a corresponding Shopkeeper in mind. While Leanne similarly isn’t sure of how succession is meant to go, something got mixed up between Shopkeepers and in an almost instinct to survive, The Shop must have latched onto Thunderbolt as a makeshift lodestone. Which would have been fine by itself. However, there’s a reason why The Shopkeepers are not meant to leave The Shop: with its makeshift lodestone going out and traveling the multiverse, The Shop also fluctuated—a ship using a rowboat as a lighthouse.

Recalibrating The Shop was simple enough, bidding Yuuko-san goodbye and following Thunderbolt back through the Dimensional Door, only to walk right back through the Dimensional Door and meet a flustered Watanuki-kun and an unblinking Doumeki. Connecting The Shop to Watanuki-kun did not require blood or wards or magical script, just a willing soul and determination.

No wonder it latched onto Thunderbolt in its moment of need.

“It was nice to see you again,” Leanne says, a little honest and a lot surprised by it; even teenage torment becomes a fond memory with enough time and other trauma.

Thunderbolt, straightforward as ever, does not lie and say the same. But perhaps in her age, she’s learned some form of manners because instead she says, “It is… good… to know that you…” She struggles to find an end to that sentence.

Leanne, amused, takes pity on her. “… didn’t end up betraying everyone and joining Bastian?”

Thunderbolt glares, a quick twist of her mouth, a wrinkle between her brows. This has always come easy to her whenever Leanne has been around. “You’ve changed,” she says, because that at least does not require a positive opinion.

Leanne smiles. “I’d hope so.”

Thunderbolt’s glare does not let up. Rather, it bores into Leanne’s face, searching. Searching for what? She doesn’t know.

After a small eternity of this, Thunderbolt looks away and sighs. “Maybe next time you can say the same of me,” she says, begrudging and shamed.

Delighted, Leanne smiles wider. “Next time?”

Thunderbolt narrows her eyes. “I said what I said,” she says, before opening the Dimensional Door.

“Until next time then,” Leanne says, stepping through the door. “You know where to find me.”

“And when,” Thunderbolt says, a threat, a promise.

Leanne could not be happier.

—

A/N: This was a little harder than I thought, and not really a romance so much as a pre-romance maybe one day inching its way towards a romance, but it was interesting to mash, essentially, epilogue versions of Leanne and Tetsuki when they only ever knew each other as part of each others’ prologue.

Thanks for your patience, anon, and thank you again for the prompt! :D

I went ahead and got a cover page made for my BNHA fanfic, Viridescent! Thanks so much to @destiny-hoodie for being kind enough to take up my commission! He’s so talented and I’m super grateful to him for taking his time to make such an awesome art piece! I’m definitely gonna send him another commission before too long, if he’s got the time! Go check him out, he’s awesome! 

Here are the links to Viridescent if you wanna check it out! 

Fanfiction.net link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12659220/1/Viridescent

Ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12823773/chapters/29276988