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rarsneezes) wrote2025-05-04 10:46 pm
YWKON daemon AU (Jade version)
note: the flesh eaters keeping their daemon thing works best in a xc2 au i think (for jin, for nia), and i don't know how it's going to function for other ywkon flesh eaters ((partly because kratos would be, like, this Whole can of worms, if he still had a lloyd's daemon and then met lloyd again several hundred years later, and that scares me))
but that's not the point here. let's get on with the prose.
Citan dies, and,
“Nice work, Jade,” says a bright and airy female voice. “Are you back in the land of the living?
Jade blinks around the blood-haze in his eyes. The world seems to solidify again, too sharply, his new heartbeat too loud in his ears, a pounding he can seem to feel in every inch of his skin. There’s a new splotch of white on his vision, obstructing the bloody mess of Citan’s body.
“Good, because so am I,” the voice continues.
Jade’s vision solidifies properly. He nearly startles at the sight of the corsac fox sitting primly on Citan’s massacred chest, not seeming to care about the blood staining her sooty white pelt. Or that she’s sitting on her human’s dead chest.
“Hyuga,” Jade says, voice tight, head pounding. He feels like he’s going to be sick.
Hyuga shakes her head. “Do not give me that look, Jade, we both know you researched, and you knew this was a possibility,” which is true, but also makes Jade’s mind spin with horror because did that mean Citan was researching, too? To what end? No, it did not matter. All that mattered was Citan’s daemon, still speaking to Jade.
“You should be dead,” Jade snaps at her.
Hyuga tilts her head, eyes sparkling. “And yet, my dear Citan’s heart still beats,” she answers. “So, maybe we should not jump to such hasty conclusions.”
Jade’s spear is in his hand before he is aware of it. The tip meets the fox’s throat.
“I should kill you.”
“And what might that do to you? Now is not the time for experiments, Jade. You might as well see your escape plan through, before something happens to your friends. Unless you murdered me for no reason at all.”
Jade laughs. It’s short, and ugly. He can’t help it.
“All right,” Hyuga allows, her eyes twinkling. “I suppose it was not for ‘no’ reason. But come on.”
She hops up onto Jade’s shoulders; seeing as Jade was still knelt down on the ground and half bent over besides, this is not a hard feat. She weighs almost nothing, maybe two pounds, and balances on his shoulders just as easy as she did on Citan’s.
“Not going to sound the alarm?” Jade laughs at her, as he gets to his feet. He hates that she’s right – that he needs, more than anything, to get out of here, before he deals with her.
“You won, Jade. Fair is fair. Shouldn’t you go check on Mythra?”
“Keep your mouth shut, or I’m stabbing you the moment I get everyone else out.”
-
[myyah scene,]
“I would tell you to stop, but I do want to see if it works,” Hyuga says, as Jade tries to focus on cutting gently, gently into Myyah’s skin so that he might carve out a hole in which to place a shard of Poppi’s discarded core crystal. “I have already learned about one weird scientific feat, today, why not make it two?”
“Stop. Talking.”
“But Elly is missing, you know. What will Myyah do without Elly? I doubt this is going to bring Elly back – she is already Dust.”
Whatever. Just because Jade has the luxury of telling her to shut up without there being any consequences, doesn’t mean she’s going to listen to him. Hyuga is just going to keep talking. So he does his best to stop paying attention.
“But maybe this will make the most solid case for blades having souls, yet. Humans cannot live without their soul, but if you borrow them someone else’s soul, such as that of a blade’s...”
Myyah is bleeding all over his skin, but Jade discarded his gloves the moment he decided he was doing this. It wouldn’t do to save her life just to lose her from an infection because he got Citan’s old blood from his gloves into her wounds.
He doesn’t have a sterile environment, but he’ll make do.
He presses Poppi’s core crystal into Myyah’s chest. There’s a second where Jade and Hyuga both hold their breaths... and then. Myyah jolts upright with a gasp, as if she’d just been sleeping, and was startled awake.
“So blades do have souls, then,” Hyuga muses.
If he weren’t worried about what it would do to himself, Jade would have throttled her.
-
When Hyuga – who had oh-so-politely sat on a chair out of the way while Jade and Mythra had their moment – hops back onto Jade’s shoulders, Mythra startles backwards, going instantly wary.
“What’s she doing here!?”
Silently, Jade points at his chest.
“You’re. Kidding.”
“Come, now, his jokes are better than that,” Hyuga says.
“I don’t get paid enough for this,” says the poor desk clerk, “I don’t get paid enough, and I am not hearing this, and I need the three of you to leave before I change my mind and turn you in anyway, for the love of the Architect above, I am so sick of your drama.”
“Fair enough,” Hyuga says, apparently determined to get the last word.
Jade has too much else on his plate. He lets her have it.
-
While they’re approaching the rendezvous point, Mythra snatches Hyuga off of Jade’s shoulder, holding her by the scruff of her neck. “Does this hurt you?” she asks Jade.
“No,” he answers, deeply, deeply thankful that it doesn’t. He wouldn’t be able to survive if Hyuga had become his daemon, in every shape that meant. He would have simply apologized to Mythra, left her with Galea, and then gone somewhere far away to stab first Hyuga then himself in the skull.
Apparently Mythra is reading his thoughts, because she says: “If we kill her, I want to do it.”
“That – I suppose – is – would you stop shaking me!?”
“Nope!”
“- fair! The least she deserves, Jade –“
“You just think it’d be funny if her killing you killed me.”
“Well, that would be fair, too, would it not? You have already killed her—”
Hyuga cuts off with a yelp which hurts Jade’s ears and nothing more. He can’t even guess what Mythra did to her, because he wasn’t looking, and he couldn’t feel any corresponding link between himself and Hyuga’s body – again, which he is deeply, deeply grateful for.
“We’ll deal with her later,” Jade says.
“Yeah, yeah,” Mythra agrees, and shoves Hyuga under her arm to carry like a sports ball.
-
“Oh, boy,” says Sera, Klaus’ brilliant macaw daemon, when she sees Hyuga.
“Why do you have such rotten luck!?” Galea demands, nearly wailing. Her silver-furred lioness daemon, Medea, rubs comfortingly against her legs.
“We’re not talking about it,” Jade says. “She’s not talking.”
“Sensible,” Alvis says.
And then Flynn pulls up with the truck.
-
scrap 1: sock drawer
[whatever, other scraps, because I don’t want ot lose them; timeskip, Jade and Hyuga alone, though Hyuga saying this in a truck full of people is kind of compelling I just don’t feel like writing all that shit.]
“Note in the sock drawer, very clever,” Hyuga says. “You were right – what reason would we have to rifle through your things? And we were always lazy. If our range had been wider, Citan might have sent me to do it... except, a fox has no hands for with which to open drawers...” She holds up a paw in a human estimation of a shrug, a laugh.
“So by making sure I moved them myself...” Jade says, starting a question he already suspected the answer to – but he must admit that he was appreciating the option to learn the truth.
“Why would you care about your things, if you were not hiding something?” Hyuga agrees. She had no power over him, so Hyuga was more than happy to give away cards, to openly reminisce about the old times, as if it were just an elaborate game they were playing, and not Jade scrabbling tooth and nail for survival. He wonders, not for the first time, if that fox ever wrapped her teeth around his throat and simply bit down.
“The wads of cash alone were reason enough,” Jade says.
“Too true,” Hyuga agrees, “but we had to check every drawer, to be certain. And your unfolded socks...”
Jade sighs.
“Did you know?” Hyuga asks, in a tone more like she’s going to tell him anyway. “Lifetimes of yours ago – we were traveling. I don’t remember the exact details, but I know that you saw Citan’s unpaired socks in his bag.”
“He didn’t pair his socks?!” Jade is outraged. Jade is furious that he cares at all.
“...And you had a reaction much like that, yes,” Hyuga laughs. “He said that what did it matter if every sock was identical, and you said no sane man left socks unmatched. Which means, well, when we saw that sock drawer...”
Jade puts his face in his hands.
“Dead giveaway.”
“Quite.”
“That’s not fair. I can’t have remembered.”
“Why should we have played fair, Jade? After all the jobs you had cost us, after all the knowledge you had sabotaged... I have to admit, now, that you have a soul. But that did not make you any less of a tool. A broken tool must be fixed—”
Jade gets up and leaves the room, closing and locking the door behind him so she cannot get out.
There is no point harming her physically. He doesn’t want to stoop to that level, anyway.
But being too far from her pains her more than it pains him. So.
scrap 2: memory chip
I forgot / don't have any concerte ideas for the scene but i am thinking about Hyuga squinting at mythra and going. "right. so you do have some kind of way to remember. some kind of memory chip. if i was not a soul without a body tied to the blade who murdered my body, i would, in fact, stop you all in your tracks and tell you to cough that up. but no one is going to pay me any money anymore, and my social standing is in shambles, so!"
-
Hyuga voice, strongly, so you do remember, then.
Mythra voice haha uh
Notes
- Blades don’t have daemons. That’s the Whole Point.
- I put a lot of, perhaps unnecessary, thought about what Citan’s daemon would be. I decided on a fox both because of the Western connotations of being clever tricksters, and because when I was poking around Chinese mythology about fox spirits, I found this quote: “Such beings are able to know things at more than a thousand miles' distance; they can poison men by sorcery, or possess and bewilder them, so that they lose their memory and knowledge” and well. That was that sold.
- But then I had to pick a KIND of fox. And there’s so many fucking kinds of foxes. So I narrowed it down to the kind of foxes you might find in China. And I was between red fox (too family oriented) and the Corsac, and decided that Corsac was the answer. Solitary, opportunistic, etc. ALSO!!!! They are generally the size of a housecat, which is perfect considering I wanted an animal that could climb up onto Jade’s shoulders, whether he wanted that or not.
- Hyuga is what Citan’s birth name was before he changed it, in Xenogears. I’m not sure if there is lore about why he changed it, by the way. [looks it up] JUST BECAUSE HE WAS GOING UNDER COVER? LMAO??? AND HIS WIFE AND CHILD DIDN’T CHANGE THEIR NAMES AT ALL??? Well whatever. rather than trying to come up with a new name, Hyuga it is. I was very close to giving Hyuga a Chinese (or Chinese sounding) name, though... a thought I might reconsider.
- It turns out Hiuga, written with the same kanji as Hyuga (日向), CAN be a given name for a girl, so, I was like, alright, that’s enough reason I need to double down, actually
- Elly is short for Ellehayym. Elly was a lovebird. You know. The birds that famously waste away when their partner dies.
- Sera is short for Seraphina, I think, though I could be tempted easily into changing the name of Klaus’ daemon. Anyway I think he definitely would be an obnoxious, flashy, ornery bird. I think I was first imagining a cockatiel, but a macaw is way flashier, so,
- (his macaw is DEFINTITELY not red; green maybe? Blue? probably blue)
- tangentially. man. knowing that there is a daemon named “Zohariel” in HDM text itself is so tempting to make that Klaus’ daemons name, I can’t even begin to tell you, HOWEVER, I do feel a little weird scooping up that bit of hebrew for fun, even if xenogears and xenosaga are ALL OVER that shit
- Initially Galea’s daemon was named Rose, and was out of the scene by hiding in Galea’s scarf because I didn’t have the time to spend MORE HOURS on researching animals to assign daemons, but Aera liked the idea of a big cat who is social and family oriented, so, lion it is,? probably???
- i also nearly named her daemon Galateia (her japanese name), called teia for short, but decided fuck it, i'll just go with medea, who cares, i keep rotating that as one of galea's many fake names she goes by, her daemon can have that name in this one
- it would be REALLY funny if she had a red fox, though, even though I think a red fox might be more family oriented than Galea actually is? But something about the fox that forms tight family groups + is really good at adapting to new environments (to the point of being an invasive species, especially in Australia) is kind of. It’s not NOT Galea. The kind of thing I might revisit, idk,
- (red foxes come in several other colors; an arctic fox is a kind of red fox, etc,)
- Oh, Anna probably had a wolverine, lol. that’s as far as I got.
---
Bonus Scene: Midori
“Excuse me for a second,” says Midori, as she ducks into the classroom. “I have those papers you asked for—”
Poking his head out of her shirt collar, Vert squeaks in alarm. “Mom??”
“Oh, fuck,” comes the airy voice of her father’s daemon.
Midori’s head whips around in the direction of Vert’s attention. Sure enough, Hyuga sits at... Jade’s feet? Citan is nowhere to be found.
It all makes terrible sense all at once. Her mother told her that it looked like someone had stolen Citan’s heart, after all.
Midori and Jade lock eyes for a terrible second. Then Midori breaks and turns her nose towards Vert.
“Not our business,” she says to him, and starts walking. [“Absolutely none of our business.”]
She leaves the classroom. She leaves Jade alone.
-
Notes
- Vert for green, yeah, I think that’s fun. Also Vert as in the french word, so it’s pronounced without the final t. not a hill I’ll die on, but one I still am fond of
- Vert is a hamster. How did I get here?
1) hamsters are anxious creatures, and small, which is what I wanted, and where I started
2) I thought it would be funny (evil) (sad) if Midori’s daemon was a creature that corsac foxes preyed on. Guess what! Hamster is on that list.
3) I could have given her a jerboa instead (just because they’re SUCH a creature!!!) but the fact that hamsters are specifically known for getting stressed out if they live with other hamsters... um... yeah that’s kind of what Midori’s psychic ability does, huh. creature that gets stressed out near other creatures, perhaps fatally
- in theory Jade might seek Midori out later, but otherwise, it’s so funny if it’s Midori skip%.... ngl....
Lia bonus
- “who the fuck is Lia” oh right. um so [twirling my hair] what if Jade and Galea had a daughter together... inspired by both “maybe Lloyd isn’t the ONLY blade hybrid kid” and a dream I had, literally. Sometimes an OC comes to you in your dreams, and you’re like, shit, okay, you’re here now,
- I’ve written chapter 1 of the fic about her and that's it, and that chapter is mostly about Galea and her pregnancy. BUT. you can have other Lia info in this post, here,
- I have also imagined this meeting Midori scene with Lia here because fuck it why not Lia can be there for their funny college stint, and Lia thoughts are , courtesy of Aer ,
1) Jade who wants Hyuga to have nothing to do with Lia but Hyuga and Galea both like THAT’S A BAD IDEA, BAD FOR HER DEVELOPMENT, for her father’s “daemon” to just, be there but also completely ignore her
aera voice: the convo re lia / hyuga and jade voice immediately that's not my daemon and hyuga voice in the most patient + patronizing way possible yes jade but a baby does not understand the nuances of flesh eaters
2) the thing about Jade and Hyuga is I think with the power imbalance of the Citan/Jade dynamic removed, they could become something like friends. Unfortunately (??)
3) anyway re: Midori specifically. Tfw your father’s daemon is way more affectionate with Jade’s daughter than she ever was with you or your daemon...