Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/571747.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Underage
  Category:
      F/F, F/M
  Fandom:
      Skulduggery_Pleasant_-_Derek_Landy
  Relationship:
      Skulduggery_Pleasant/Valkyrie_Cain, Alison_Edgley/OC, Alison_Edgley/
      Philomena_Random
  Character:
      Nye, OC_-_Character, Valkyrie_Cain, Skulduggery_Pleasant, Philomena
      Random, China_Sorrows
  Additional Tags:
      suicidal_ideations, Profanity, Agender_Character, abusive_dynamics
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-01-24 Words: 2173
****** Atonement ******
by iphis18
Summary
     Alison Edgley is missing, presumed kidnapped by the Nye.
Notes
     Written on the twenty-fourth day of January in the year 2012.
“I’ve changed my mind. Unchain me, please. Now.” There is a hint of panic to
the voice of one Alison Edgley as she struggles against the bonds that are
wrapped solidly and tightly around her limbs. She is slight, even for her
youth, and not very strong, and so she is soon exhausted by her attempts at
escape.
Ann Laqueus gives her a withering stare of contempt. She is one year older than
Alison, and not nearly as well behaved. “I can’t,” she says simply, and she
returns to trimming her nails short whilst humming a pop song and wondering
when the Nye will be back.
---
“My sister has been kidnapped. Query.”
“Yes, she has.” The skeleton angles his head away, as if to insinuate that he
is refusing to meet his partner’s eyes.
“You did not tell me about this until two weeks after the fact. Query.”
“Yes, that is true.”
“You think it was the Nye. Query.”
“I do indeed think it was the Nye.”
“You are feeling particularly fucking suicidal. Query.”
“Look, Valkyrie, we thought we had it under control.”
“My sister was kidnapped by the Nye, and you thought you had it under control?”
Valkyrie Cain is not raising her voice. Much. She is also not slaughtering her
longtime partner.
“We did, and I am sorry.”
“You’d better be, because you are dead. Fucking. Meat.” She pauses. “Unless
you’re going to give me an excuse right now, and it better be damn good.”
“The Grand Mage has told me in no uncertain terms that if we go cavorting off
on another private investigation that we will be summarily keelhauled.”
“And you thought that this was sufficient reason to just let my sister die?”
“There’s not guarantee that she’s already dead, Valkyrie.”
“She’s been kidnapped by the Nye.”
“All the same, and you have to admit, she’s really quite annoying.”
“She’s fourteen. Of course she’s annoying.”
“You weren’t annoying when you were fourteen.”
“I’m guessing you were, though, because you don’t seem to have grown out of it
at all.”
“Where are you going, Valkyrie?”
“To find my sister’s corpse.”
“The Nye has probably mutilated it beyond any recognition by now, you do
realize.”
“Fuck you.”
---
“Please stop. That really hurts.” Despite the almost civil tone to Alison’s
voice, there is a certain amount of alarm in her eyes. She is sweating, and her
breath is labored, heavy. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m scared. So
please. Stop.”
“You don’t mean that, dear.” The Nye, tall and long-limbed and with its eyes
sewn shut, looks a fair bit more feminine than masculine today, with a layer of
light stitching over its wrists and neck that looks almost like ornamentation
and wearing a long, gray coat that covers its ankles.
“I do. Stop it.”
“No.” It pauses for a moment, leaving the needle in Alison’s flesh so that she
wants badly to squirm, wants to thrash around and scream. “Unless, of course,
you’d rather I let my assistant draw your blood. She’s really quite bad at it,
though, so if you’d like to get out of this alive, for a given value of alive,
I really do believe that you should let me finish.”
Alison says nothing, eyes screwed closed tightly. She gasps when the needle is
removed.
“Good girl. Now, for your prize for behaving so well – would you like a room in
which to stay, or would you rather just sleep with Ann? She certainly wouldn’t
mind sharing.”
“I’d like to leave,” whispers Alison, and the Nye looks at her with pity.
“I know you would, dear, but just think of all the good you are doing by
staying. Now, I think it would be best if you were to share with Ann. If it
would make you feel better, I can set up another bed in that room.”
Alison thinks about it while the Nye gently bandages her thigh and spreads
healing salve over her ankles and wrists. “Okay,” she says softly, at length.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” says the Nye. “I appreciate it more than you
can imagine.”
---
“Tell me where it is, China, and I might not set fire to your library.”
China looks carefully at the younger female, lingering over her eyes, and then
she sighs. “The last confirmed sighting was seven years ago, Valkyrie, and that
place has long burnt down.”
“You’re not telling me everything you know.” There’s an accusative spark to her
expression.
“I’m not. Are you sure you want to hear this, Valkyrie?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who Ann Laqueus is?”
“I’m not sure. I know an Ann. She’s in the year above my sister in school.
Alice is always talking about her.”
“There are rumors that she’s one of the Nye’s creations.”
“Oh,” says Valkyrie, looking shocked. “Fuck.”
---
“Aren’t you going to tell me to stop?” There is nothing malicious about Ann as
she thrusts her fingers into Alison, curling them and making the dark-eyed girl
moan.
“No,” breathes she as she exhales, before quickly, shudderingly, inhaling
again. There is a broken quality to her, like she is falling apart – which, she
supposes, she kind of is.
“Why?” Fascination tints Ann’s voice, glints in her eyes.
“I don’t want you to.”
“Oh.” Ann pauses, considering this. “Good,” she says, and then she slither-
slides down the bed to put her face between Alison’s legs.
---
“You killed it.” Ann Laqueus is examining her nails, biting her lips, trying
not to cry. For all her faults, she is loyal in the end to the one who made
her, and the fact that she’s probably going to perish now hasn’t even crossed
her mind.
“It deserved it! What was it thinking, kidnapping my sister? Didn’t it know
that it was crossing me with that?”
“She gave herself up willingly, Cain. She said she wanted to undo some of the
damage you’ve done.” There’s a bitter, mocking cast to Ann’s voice now, and she
is looking Valkyrie straight in the eyes.
“What damage?” There is a brittle snap to her tone, and she knows the answer
before she seeks it.
“You killed me.” Light and sing-song and almost breathless, Ann is smiling.
“You thought I was possessed, and you killed me. You didn’t realize this at the
time, but you did. You killed a lot of people, Valkyrie, and you never once
thought to stop and mourn them, because you had more important things to do.
That’s okay, of course. Needs of the many and all that. Thing is, Alison didn’t
want that, and she thought she’d contribute in the best way she can.”
“By running to a monster?”
“By raising the dead.”
“She isn’t a Necromancer. She’s being silly if she thinks she can.” Valkyrie is
blinking.
“Think, Valkyrie. What happened with the Grotesquery?”
“It came back.”
“Why?”
“Because of an evil, evil man and a stupid, stupid cult.”
“Because you’re of Ancient blood, Valkyrie. That is why.”
---
Valkyrie Cain feels her whole world fall away from her as she watches the face
of her sister as the younger girl sees the Nye. She feels herself vanishing as
she looks at the betrayal in Alison’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she knows that the words are not enough, will never
be enough. Alison is clinging to Ann now, and she is crying.
“We know,” states the walking corpse levelly, and she brings her lover out of
the room, leaving Valkyrie alone.
---
It has been months, and Valkyrie has not healed well. She is uneven, rough,
caustic and blunt, and at the same time, she never seems to live in the moment.
Skulduggery notices, and he tries not to broach the subject. She nearly gets
him killed, and he does.
Those in places of authority begin to get involved, and she knows from the
first moment that she should try and avert their gazes, because she is finished
once they get their hooks and barbs under her skin. She doesn’t, though, and
that is testimony to her state of mind.
Prison is cold, and she feels like she has become nothing as she rots there.
---
When she gets out, the first thing she learns is that her parents are dead.
Alison is the one who has come to greet her, and she has grown old and worn –
not in flesh, but in spirit. She wears now the clothing of a healer.
“I kill people for a living.” That is the second thing that Alison says, and
the words hang unhappily in the air. “Those that are too old or too weak or too
tired to be saved. I make that judgment every day, and I am haunted by it. They
thank me for it, and still it haunts me.”
“I know.” Valkyrie’s voice is soft. “I know.”
“How did you ever survive it?” There is so, so much of the child in Alison now
as she looks at her sister, the woman that she wants so badly to admire and
cannot bring herself to.
“I forgot them for as long as I could, because there was always more that had
to be done. I was lucky, in that way, or maybe just easily distracted.”
“That can’t be healthy.”
“It wasn’t.” Their silence rings. “How did things turn out with Ann, in the
end?”
“She died.” Alison smiles grimly. “The Nye was the only one who was ever really
good enough to save her. We tried, trust me. We went all over the world looking
for someone who could help. There was no one. I killed her in the end, and she
said that it was a mercy. She was my first.”
“The first one you killed, or the first one you fell for?”
“I forgot how blunt you were.” Alison is looking away. “She was both, and she
was more. She was everything to me, and I’d like to think that, had things
worked out differently, I would have become something to her as well.”
“You were.” Valkyrie clears her throat, looking unfocused. “I saw the look on
her face when she was with you. You were a lot to her.”
“Really?” There’s a dull edge to Alison’s voice. “Thank you for that, then. I
appreciate it.
Valkyrie moves in to embrace her sister, but she is pushed away.
---
Alison returns home, and she sees the face of Ann, immortalized in the pictures
she has framed so carefully, kept in her house, and she breaks down. She weeps
and she cries and she tries to tear herself apart, to reduce herself into
nothing, because that is what she feel like she is.
It horrifies her and it hurts her that her attempts are unsuccessful, but of
course they are, because of everything that she is, and so she lies on her bed
and she feels her tears drying and she feels her blood oozing away from a
myriad places on her limbs and from her breasts and her stomach and her torso
and her face, and she wishes that she were just bloodless, that she had nothing
of the Ancient inside her, because then, finally then, she might get some
peace.
The next day, she forces herself to clean herself up, and she hates herself.
She tidies her house, leaves it in beautiful order. She then goes and makes her
peace with Valkyrie, speaking calmly her words of forgiveness. They are raw,
unrehearsed, but she means every one of them.
She is on the way to her clinic, running through every question she asks in her
mind—why can’t you fight? Is there nothing left? What more can you do? Will you
hurt others with this?—when she meets the woman with the worn eyes.
“Who are you?” she asks, and her voice sounds thin, and her expression is
shocked, because suddenly she can feel her heart beating too quickly.
“My name is Philomena,” the woman says simply, and Alison knows that she will
not die. Not today.
---
She continues to live her life by taking those of others, and now she begins to
do so without contrition, because she knows, finally, what it is to be one of
them. She saves some, as she ever did, and she is comforted by the fact that
she would have saved them anyway. Without guilt, she removes those who can
remain no longer.
In the fullness of time, she begins to see her sister again, when Valkyrie is
out with Skulduggery and they are working too, living their lives by
restraining those of others. She still cannot admire her sister, but she
respects her now, and that is enough for her.
She still hasn’t forgotten Ann, and she probably never will, but she’s going to
give things with Philomena a chance. It’s important to her.
She sleeps easily now, because she bears no more regrets – none of her own, and
none of those around her. Finally, she has stopped living to mend what her
sister has broken.
Finally, she is her own person.
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