Can't Fight Fate

You're going to give up? After everything you've been through.

Nina had every right to give up; she'd been through hell. No one should have to go through what she went through, so why couldn't she wallow? Everyone wanted her to be some superhero that got up and fixed all the problems, some messiah who saved the day. Maybe she could have been with Grim, but not without him. She wasn't strong enough.

Pathetic. Weak. Nina's alter ego sneered in her head. I was beginning to like you, beginning to think you were better.

She shut the voice out, refusing to be lectured by herself.

Be sad. Let a kingdom fade away because your scars are better than theirs. Your problems are way more important, the voice mocked coolly. Let the part of Grim that lives in you--in your child--die. He dies with you.

The voice struck a chord. It was painful, raw, and uncomfortable as hell.

Grim. He kept her going. Through all the shit, he kept her sane. And he was in so much more pain than her, but he sacrificed himself. Nina knew he had been trying to escape, but she'd fucked that up.

Nina strayed away from assigning the blame to herself, knowing that it would pull her back down. All that mattered now was Grim--keeping him alive anyway she could. If that meant it was his child then that's what she'd do. The baby in her stomach was the most important thing in the world.

The pressure within her released, and a male voice hissed. She came back to herself quickly, like a fire building. She admitted her faults, accepted them, and moved on.

Nina was weak and pathetic. She had valued her own problems over everyone else's. She only agreed to marry Grim because she knew she could escape, knew that she could play whatever card she wanted because death would be her saving grace. Now she didn't have that handicap and couldn't do what she wanted because the past might come back to haunt her.

Grim was in trouble, but instead of thinking about it rationally and using the intelligence her mother had given her, Nina choose to act rashly. She wasn't human anymore; she wasn't the college girl who'd fallen in love with a sexy reaper.

Would Nina have acted differently with Grim--with her heart--if she knew she wasn't going to die?

Yes.

But she couldn't change the past. Nina knew she should have taken everything more seriously, been pragmatic about it all, but dying did funny things to a person.

"She's on fire!" Iris screamed.

Nina turned her head at the sound and found Iris on the far side of the room, shaking fingers to her open mouth, eyes wide. Uri stood next to her, his clothes singed, his hands burned.

She smelled it then. Burning flesh.

Behind the pair was a framed map of the Underworld with drawings of the kingdoms and the landmarks surrounding them. Bloodspurn was written in cursive under a large castle surrounded by hills. Would the next map published even have my kingdom's name?

Nina clenched her fists. "It. Will."

She was the Bloodspurn Queen. She would not let her kingdom perish. No matter the cost to herself.

"I'll be fine."

"The hell you will!" Uri yelled, stomping his foot. "You were out for a week--a fucking week-- and you're just going to get up, act like nothing happened, and demand we save a kingdom?"

"Yes."

He laughed harshly, the sound gritting on Nina's nerves. "Screw you."

Nina exploded from her seat at the dining room table, bowl of porridge sailing across the room and crashing into the wall. She'd been up less than two hours, and she'd worked through a plan to save Grim. They needed allies. They needed to find allies. They found allies, they built an army, they stormed the Castoff Castle, and they saved Grim. Done.

"Got a better idea?" she returned. "One that doesn't involve us sitting here, cowering, while things go to shit."

"It'll get better," he ground out.

"Hasn't."

"If you give it some time--"

"Don't fucking talk to me about time!" she screamed, furious, angry, hurt. She was furious at Uri for calling her plan stupid. Angry at herself for letting a week pass by--one in which she could have lost herself and her child. And hurt about... well, everything. Every breath she took ached because it only reminded her that she didn't know about Grim, if he lived. She was alive when she should have been dead, and he was--

Nina shuddered. Don't think about it, her conscious said. Think about getting him back. Think about how happy you'll be to have him home.

And in order for that to happen they needed to build a home. Take back and restore the one they had, restore the kingdom. Get. Fucking. Allies.

"Nina," Iris whispered fearfully. She was the only one sitting now, and her body shook like a leaf. "Please, hear the prince out."

Nina looked up at the woman, and opened her mouth to softly rebuke her. Iris was supposed to be on herself, but she'd seemed to be Uri's better half lately. But a vision hit Nina with all the warning of a semi-truck. The room shifted, replaced by white tiles and chrome doors, before shifting back to polished wood and century's old painting. It did it again, and Nina realized what was happening even before she heard the voice.

"Pull back the sheet."

Her heart started to beat fast in her chest, and Nina cried out, "No!"

The dining room table suddenly became the most important thing, the only piece tethering her to Uri and Iris and the Underworld. But the memory was persistent, forceful. She couldn't fight it.

Damn, she ground out. Thought I was over this. It was her mother's death. She'd never be over it.

The vision clawed at her mind, until suddenly she wasn't gripping the table, but falling. Plummeting through darkness with a flash of light that stopped halfway, burning brightly as it mixed with the darkness at its edges. Her eyes adjusted to a color neither light nor dark, neither gray nor colorful. She couldn't describe it, and it was gone before she could try.

"Ow!" Nina groaned as she landed on her ass. The floor was cold and hard underneath her, and--as she rubbed circles into her lower back--she wore jeans and a sweater. Iris would never have jeans in her home, and Uri preferred her in dominatrix couture. So then how?

Her eyes snapped up and her mouth dropped. "The hell?"

Across from her, standing next to the body of a woman who looked just like her mother, was a girl who looked just like Nina.

She blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the vision didn't go away. It was as if she was part of a camera crew filming a scene, except there was only Nina, her double, and her mother. Nina was watching herself watching her mother. There was no word to describe the turbulent emotions coursing through her body.

"What the fuck happened?" she asked aloud, needing to hear something to make the moment real. The other Nina didn't turn her head, as if she couldn't hear.

ing blue and dead on the metal slab covered by a white sheet. But for once Nina got a good look at herself. She wore a pair of black leggings, brown boots, and an oversized sweatshirt.

Nina smiled sadly. It had been finals week when her mom had been murdered, and she'd just finished her last final of her freshman year. Looks really hadn't mattered all that much. And neither had sleep, if the rat's nest of a bun and raccoon eyes were any indication.

What am I doing here? Nina wondered as she climbed to her feet and tried to talk to herself, well her Other self.

"Nina?" she called out, watching the Other look around the room and then towards their mother.

She can't see me. Nina wondered how that was possible, how any of it was possible. She wasn't dreaming or she would be living it, right?

Angrily scratching her head, she tried to understand what was going on. None of it made sense-- why she kept coming back to this place in time. She didn't want to be there. She had to deal with Yin and Yang and then get to Grim.

"Nina?" she tried again. "I--" she paused for a second, afraid to continue. She remembered this moment, but it was in the past.

Her past and present were colliding--driving her insane, driving her back, driving her forward, driving her toward the truth. Time and Fate, past and present, were all narrowed down to one event: her mother's death.

Moving closer to her mother and her Other, Nina looked at body on the slab. There was no doubt in her mind it was Adrienne, but the face contorted. Changing even as she looked at it. Skin lightened to pale beige, and hair smoothed and styled to a brunette bob.

The dead woman's eyes popped open. Green eyes. Same color as her mother's eyes, but on a different face.

Her gasp was a mix of disbelief and horror, "Detective Darcy?"

A smile curved the woman's lips and Nina flinched, tripping over a lone metal cart as she crashed into the wall. Her head slammed against the bleached white walls, but her vision remained crystal clear. She watched her Other disappear, blink out of existence.

However, the vision of her mother remained alive.

The corpse started to hum as she sat up. The humming grew louder, a telltale beating heart crawling under her skin.

Clothes molded around the detective's naked body as her bare feet swung over the side of the metal slab, and gray socks and black kid boots appeared to cover them. Her lips parted slightly, "... so a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you... " the woman sang softly in her southern drawl.

Nina shook her head, curling herself into the smallest ball she could make. No. No. No. God no! This isn't happening.

"... you are the one... " the woman continued as she walked slowly toward Nina.

As she reached Nina's side, the voice changed, became lighter, more feminine, laced with a power Nina knew all too well, "... only you beneath the moon and under the sun... "

Awareness flared in Nina's body as the woman knelt in front of her and ran a cool finger down her cheek. It was only then that Nina realized the puzzle had never been finished. No. She'd worked the wrong puzzle, one that was in another room of another house on another planet.

What she thought she'd known all along was nothing.

Blind. That's what she'd been and still was.

All the pieces were in her mind just waiting. And slowly, it all made sense.

"Night," Nina bit off the words as she looked up through eyes filled with tears, "and Day."

Yin and Yang, her conscience whispered almost sadly.

Nina bit her tongue and forced her nails to cut deep into her palm. She needed the pain. It made it real--made everything real and painful and the brutal dose of reality she needed.

"Mother and Father," she spat.

Yin smiled at her in a motherly way that made Nina's skin crawl. "We always wanted to tell you. Always wanted you to know. We left clues. Names. Hoping you would look, find, know. It pained us to keep who we were from you--what you are from yourself."

"You. Are. Not. My. Mother."

They were tricksters, manipulators. If putting on the skin of her dead mother would get Nina to follow the goddess, she had no doubt Yin would do it.

"You broke your ankle when you were ten, remember that?" the goddess murmured as she settled back on her haunches. "I told you it was fine and made you walk on it. Do you know why I did that?"

It was an illusion, or she was still laying in Iris's bed. None of this was real. It couldn't be.

Yin smiled gently, playing up the mother card. "I didn't realize I'd locked your powers away so well that you would heal like a human. But you did. Ate like a human, slept, and reasoned like one. You even carried the taint of oncoming death like them."

She grimaced. "It was exactly what we wanted, but with a downside we didn't expect. You saw us as mortal. We weren't. Not then, not now.

'We made a promise not to tell you--your father and I. But... I wanted you to know. That's why I sang Night and Day, hoping you would figure it out. That way when you did discover what you were it wouldn't be so traumatic."

The room was spinning, melting like chocolate on a hot day. It reminded Nina of the characters on That '70s Show doing drugs and spiraling into psychedelic moods. But even in the mind-tearing fear of her fracturing reality, she had to know. "Why?"

Why here? Why now? Why any of it? Why did she care what Nina thought? Why did they want her to know, but refuse to say? What was the end game for the gods?

Nina could deny the truth. Yet still it sat like thick medicine on her tongue. Yin was her mother. Adrienne had never died, and Nina knew her father--Loukas... Yang... whatever the fuck his name was--never killed her. It would have been better if he had.

"Drops and ripples." Yin rose to her feet. She was Power, not blood or bone. The swirling illusion of a morgue shattered and they were suddenly in Nina's childhood home.

Nina blinked and found herself on her worn couch, hands folded in her lap while Yin paced in front of her, sidestepping the coffee table each time she turned. "I was the catalyst. The uniter between you and Grim; the dissension between you and your father. How else would you have convinced a reaper you were human? Or persuaded him to trust you if you both had not experienced loss?"

Yin spared Nina a look that she would have thought was pain, but she doubted the gods felt that emotion. "I chose the morgue because that was the downpour. Every ripple for you started right there. My death is your most powerful memory. It's also the weakest part of you. Your humanity clings to it, which was why you had the panic attacks. The power inside of you--our power--couldn't comprehend my death, so it continued to go back to try and rectify it. But you couldn't, because the power was locked away. I'm sorry you had to go through that cycle."

"You're my mother. Adrienne." Nina needed to hear the goddess say it out loud, from the lioness's mouth.

The goddess searched Nina's face as if she was looking for something. "I am many--"

"No." Nina pushed herself up from the couch and the room seemed to expand like a balloon. "This is not one of those times. No non-answer, or long-ass cryptic diatribe."

The room continued to expand, but Yin held her tongue. When Nina thought the room would explode, the goddess spoke, "Yes. I am your mother. Adrienne is one name out of many."

The room seemed to take a deep breath in, denying the laws of physics before blowing it out and blowing up everything with it. The couch fractured, broke, and flew out in a cloud of fabric, wood, and cotton. The coffee table split down the middle before pushing away from the floor and a hair-breadth past Yin's face. The floor tore wide as if the chasm to hell was supposed to be under the golden-beige carpeted floor boards.

"Where is my father--Loukas?" Nina asked frostily as the world began to remake itself yet again.

This time they were back on the porch, a doorway leading to a horrifyingly ironic laboratory on her left and a field lined with bay leaf bushes and magnolia trees on her right.

"Here," a masculine voice Nina had heard her entire life said behind her.

"You killed me."

Yang placed a hand over his heart as if a knife had been thrown there. Regret flashed across his face, and his eyes watered, "I'm sorry, Nina. I never wanted to hurt my little--"

"Why did you do it?" She didn't need their regret, pity, or sorrow. Calm. She was very calm.

Yin spoke, "You're special. I knew from the moment I had you, that you were the one."

"The one for what?" Nina asked, irritated. The knowledge that they planned everything before she was born was like a stray leaf in the storm of their lies. It didn't even warrant a mournful tear or angry shout of denial.

"The one to save the Underworld, and in turn the Human world." Yin reached a hand out to Nina's slightly distended stomach. "The one who can bear the first reaper child and survive."

There it was, the biggie. Yin talked about her death being the downpour, but she was wrong.

This moment, when Nina discovered that everything the gods did narrowed down to an unborn child growing inside of her, was the end of her calm.

Nina stumbled back until she hit one of the deck's posts, and slowly slid down to the floor with her hands over her head, nails digging into her scalp.

"Why me?"

What else was there to say?

Yin had basically told her that she was some weird pregnant superhero who was supposed to save the world through the miracle of childbirth. Weird, strange, crazy, insane, all those words paled in comparison to what Nina had stepped in--or rather been born into. And I thought Buffy had it rough.

Emotions flashed quicker than shooting stars across Yin's face, and the goddess's appearance changed once again. She morphed for a few seconds, a bear, a lion, a puma, before she molded back into her human skin--Adrienne's skin with Detective Darcy's eyes and eyes that belonged on other faces from Nina's past.

How many forms did this creature take to get what she wanted? Nina wondered.

Anyone she had to, her conscience responded.

"I know it's hard to understand, but this was never solely about you or me or your father. It was never about your love, your life, or your death. It is so much more than those things. This has been in the works--"

Nina's head snapped up, her eyes sparking with fury, pain, and emotions she couldn't even begin to identify. "Don't try to lessen the impact of my death, or my life. You two stole everything from me. My sense of security--my sense of self! Don't try to justify what you've done."

Yin reached out and took Nina's hands in her own, locking them tight when her daughter tried to pull away. "I know you hate us right now. Had we raised you as one of us, a god, you would not feel this way. What we did to you was... unfair to your humanity."

"Unfair?" Nina ripped her hands out of Yin's grasp and scrambled to her feet. She placed her hands behind her back and dug her nails into the wooden post. "This isn't a fucking game of win or lose. THIS IS MY LIFE!"

Their manipulations tore at her, peeling back old wounds. Not old. They'd never been old. Festering, swollen, hot wounds that disturbed her day and night. Visions of her mother on the slab and her father with the knife plagued her. But even worse than that, good memories pushed at the bad. Nina wanted so desperately to remember how it used to be. As a child, a teenager. Her parents looked after her, took care of her. They'd raised her to see the other side, to at least try to understand the why before she judged. Now she knew why.

She was sure she could forgive them, because deep down she desperately wanted to.

When she was fourteen and being bullied, Adrienne had taken Nina aside and forced her to see the bully as a person. There was a reason Joshua was being mean, a reason he picked on her. Joshua had lost his parents, and lived with his mother's sister and her abusive boyfriend. He was mean because he hurt. But the minute Nina knew that, the minute she could understand the why, all the scars and bruises faded. And somehow they'd become friends.

When Nina had lost her mother, she'd have given anything to have her back. Now she did. And all those feelings, all those lessons, came back. Yes, her mother had screwed up, but everyone screwed up. Her heart had been in the right place. She wanted to protect reapers, save the world. How noble could a person get?

That's why Nina knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if they apologized sincerely and promised to never do it again, she would forgive them.