acperience: (sion; lolheroes; i)
❛january ([personal profile] acperience) wrote in [community profile] fictionalized2013-06-26 01:41 am

fanfic; rise from the ashes

Title: Rise from the Ashes
Series: The Legend of the Legendary Heroes
Character(s): Zohra, Peria, Pia.
Warnings: Mentions of violence, torture, death, and slight TMI.
Summary: Their motto in life: live however they want to and screw everyone else.
Notes: Themes taken from [livejournal.com profile] 31_days.





Rise from the Ashes




my voice is my weapon of choice.

It’s a bit of a slow realization—that there’s been something a bit off about their days over the past couple of months, a change they can’t quite detect. It feels like they’re doing something differently, but none of them can tell exactly what.

It’s Peria who notices it first.

“We haven’t had any assassins come after us for a while, have we?”

Pia looks up from her cup of tea while Zohra looks up from the map he’s been staring intently at (he’s gotten them horribly lost, and while Peria could easily find their destination for them, Zohra insisted on the chance to redeem himself).

“… You’re right,” Zohra says after a pause, as if counting the months that have gone by since they were last attacked. “It’s been a long time, huh?”

“I suppose they finally realized after all this time,” Pia says, “that they were no match for three geniuses like us. Honestly, it took them long enough.”

Peria looks up to the sky, as birds he can’t see but perceives fly overhead.

“… So we’re finally free, then?”

—If Roland is no longer sending assassins after them. If the shackles that tied them down to their home country have, at least, been released. The three of them have never been worried—not with their skill level—but the idea of finally being, in a way, perfectly normal teenagers is a strange one.

There’s a moment of silence, as Peria watches the sky with blind eyes, Pia finishes her tea, and Zohra flips through the pages of the map before he scoffs, and—

“Idiot. When were we ever not free?”


we fight for the dream.

If there’s one thing the members of the Azure Princess Mercenaries will agree on, it’s that, in spite of the group’s small size and young age, there’s this feeling that permeates the air, that drives them all forward.

When your superiors are half as confident and motivated as Pia, Peria, and Zohra are, it’s a very attractive thing indeed.


you’re going to need a head start.

“Hey, Zohra, remember who beat whom in an instant when they first met?”

“Ah, ah? Hey, stupid brat, remember who worked his ass off to catch up and who slacked off in his training?”

“Eh? I didn’t slack off—you’re just a musclehead who thinks of nothing but fighting. I actually have other things that occupy my brain.”

“I think about other things too, you know!”

“Like what? Ah, you mean how to appeal yourself to Pia—which never works, might I add?”

“You little piece of shit, I’ll kill you for that—aaah!?”

“P-Pia!?”

“Yes, yes, you two. Now, remember who can’t beat whom in a fight even now? I believe there are two answers, actually. So I win, and that’s final.”


losing track of the body count.

If anyone were to ask them if they found it sad that they’d all spent their entire lives fighting as people who never knew what it was like to live peacefully—

Well, Peria might be polite enough not to laugh at you. For Pia and Zohra, it would more likely than not depend on their mood.

Either way, they’d all find it a very silly question with a very simple answer: not at all.

Certainly, it wasn’t the easiest way to live, but as far as they were concerned, a civilian life was hardly easier—any one of them would’ve died had they not joined the military. After all, they’ve realized that it’s the sort of world where, ironically, having an occupation where you’re expected to die along the line is potentially better for your chances of survival than not.

Besides, as any one of them would point out if asked, they are very, very good at what they do, and, no matter how many people they’ve had to kill to live, that’s enough for them to be quite content in life.


no honor, no shame.

Once in a while, they have someone who doubts their political abilities. They all seem too straightforward for politics, too sincere to maneuver their way through the intricacies that come with international affairs, and too, well, obsessed with fighting to care much about diplomacy. And while neither of them would be the first to advocate insincerity, they have to wonder what it is about them that makes people prone to incorrect judgments.

The three prove everyone wrong on no uncertain terms when they negotiate with another country over a dinner party, bringing a few subordinates along as witnesses. Zohra is polite and subservient, if not unnervingly so, Peria refrains from making any teasing remarks, and Pia is a perfect and proper lady, as if all the rumours about the Congenital Magic Abnormality were all lies.

Once the party is over, Zohra rolls his eyes and Peria bursts out laughing (Pia, to her credit, doesn’t divulge in such lame behaviour), before the three of them remind everyone that as headstrong as they may be, they do hail from Roland, where pretending to suck up to nobles is an art one learns to perfect.

And while none of them may like it, of course, they will do whatever it takes to win, thank you very much.


somewhere it’s always time for tea.

When someone asks Pia how she met the other two, she laughs, before telling them about Peria—of her days with Germer and Ryner.

And then, when she gets to Zohra:

“Ah, see, he tried to kill me, and then when that didn’t quite work out, he tried to make me tea. A rather ordinary first meeting as far as meetings go, isn’t it?”

She smiles, and then leaves the poor, confused subordinate alone.


revenge is a dish that is best served now.

All three of them have been trained to recognize poison and the slight taste it leaves. While none of them are so paranoid to expect it in their food at all times, it’s something that should always be noted in the back of their mind, especially when in a position of power like this.

Zohra notices it first, and Pia and Peria almost immediately after—but it’s too late to warn the others. One of their allies—who’s been with them from almost the start—collapses, choking up blood. Neither of them waste a moment in leaping to her side, trying to give her the aid they need. Fortunately, they manage to retrieve the antidote, but the woman in question is left comatose for days, with times when they weren’t sure she’d make it.

But her condition stabilizes, and with that, they have one last thing to take care of: the assailant. And they find him: a traitor in their own group.

Perhaps he thought that, as a small group, they would be easy to take down.

And so, who are they to not correct his misassumption?

They force the poisoned food down his throat, and as the poison works its way through his system, bringing the same suffering upon him that he brought upon their ally, he begs. He pleads for them to give him relief—to just kill him already.

Pia ignores him, being the one to decide his fate to begin with, for oh, can she be brutal if she so wishes.

Peria ignores him, used to keeping his cool even under serious circumstances and used to filtering out what he doesn’t need to ‘hear’.

Zohra ignores him, accustomed to this sort of thing from his military training and days with the Hidden Elites.

The traitor dies a slow and painful death. And once he does, and once the rest of the group knows exactly how he died, Pia makes this announcement to them:

“If you’re a traitor to your own country, that’s fine,” she says. “You already likely know that we three are the same. We don’t care where you came from or what you did. Your backgrounds are irrelevant in this organization. As long as you have strength, we will accept you.”

She smiles—a charming smile—before it morphs into a darker smirk.

“But if you double-cross us… Well, if you don’t even succeed in harming anyone, then perhaps we’ll grant you a swift death. We’re very busy people, after all; we don’t have time to waste on inefficient assassins.”

She narrows her eyes.

“And should you actually harm any one of us or our allies… Well, I suppose we might first congratulate you for your success—and then we’ll make you regret that you were ever born.”

Then, she curtsies.

“That is all.”


is my story over if I fall asleep?

It’s been a long time since he was experimented on—long enough that sometimes he almost forgets what it was like to see, to hear, and to actually feel. For all the uses his All Enchantment gives him, he resents it and utterly despises Roland for forcing it on him. He’s no longer sensitive about it as he once was, but when there’s the occasional person who doesn’t seem to understand what the problem is, Peria almost wants to tell them.

How he’s one of the only survivors of the experiment because most of the others went insane and died. How he himself nearly went mad because of the information overload—because he’s perceiving everything within a few miles and it’s far more than the human mind was ever meant to detect and make it stop, makeitstopmakeitstop

Over the years, he’s learned to filter things out. There’s no longer the rush of insanity trying to break into his head, even if his mind still feels a bit too loud at times.

It would make one wonder, then, how he tolerates Pia and Zohra, who are easily two of the loudest and most energetic people he knows. They’re constantly talking, constantly moving—constantly providing new barriers to perceive and more information to overload his mind. One would think that of all people in the world, those two would be the most likely to drive him insane.

It’s the opposite, though. It’s because those two are so vibrant, so impossible to ignore, that Peria is most at ease around them. They give him something to focus on—they anchor him in this world, and into sanity.


songs I’ll never sing.

Pia misses Germer horribly, and Peria realizes it—but he takes her feelings into consideration, and so never brings it up.

(That’s code for: He’s terrified that she’ll beat him up if he says so.)


you no longer rule your body.

He’s spent years thinking of only himself—because his life was more important to him than anyone else’s, and so what reason did he have to ever care about others?

He would prioritize his life above all else.

He would live only for himself.

—At least, that was the idea, but life has a way of never sticking to your plans.

(He kneels down to her, placing a hand on his chest with his head bowed.

“If you’ll have me,” he tells her, “I pledge my life to be yours and yours alone until the day I die.”

And, he thinks, that he would die for this girl is the greatest feeling he’s ever had—)


get back in line.

“But who is the person who can command you, who hates taking orders?”

Zohra laughs. “I’m Love’s Slave.”


Because it’s not so much orders that he hates taking—he just couldn’t stand listening to people he knew didn’t give a damn about his opinion.

But now, he’s finally found the place where he belongs.


your accusations are a joke.

It’s no secret that Zohra and Peria bicker like two children almost every time they meet. They make no attempt to hide it in front of their subordinates, for they have never felt the need to be anything less than what they are—this, Pia knows. After all, she’s the same, and she wouldn’t care about those two idiots nearly as much as she did if they were insincere.

However, when they first began to gather members for their group, one of them had the courage to approach Pia and question it—could two people who argued half as much as those two truly work together on the battlefield? It was no business of his, normally, but their neverending arguments seemed to be a weakness, and that was his business if he were to be following them in battle.

Pia laughed in his face and told him to watch them closely in the next fight.

Without fail, Zohra and Peria start to argue—about what, Pia has learned to stop caring about a long time ago, as they always find a way to disagree over something. It seems that their guards are down, focused more on each other than the fight around them.

—At least, that’s only what it seems like, much to the misfortune of the two enemies who happen to lunge at them. Without missing a beat, Zohra and Peria go for the opposite opponent, as if they’d already made an unspoken agreement as to who gets whom, before Zohra catches a knife meant for Peria and Peria fires a spell at a soldier aiming for Zohra—and then the two immediately resume bickering.

The subordinate from before gapes at them.

(No one’s ever questioned Zohra and Peria’s ability to work together after that battle.)


if you’re willing to be thrilled, this is a hell of a ride.

“And you’re sure he was working with Vois?”

Zohra nods. “Yeah. He was kinda vague on how he ended up there, but he was protecting the guy.”

“Well, I guess it’s not surprising,” Peria says. “Ryner does seem like the sort who would just go to whoever would take care of him.”

“He always was a depressed pushover, wasn’t he?” Pia muses, sharpening her knives. “Well, he’s about to learn very soon why there’s only person in the world he should be serving right now, and that’s me.


some are born mad.

When someone straight up tells them that they’re utterly insane, Pia just laughs.

“We’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Being sane is boring anyway,” Zohra adds.


there’s a bloody pill for everything these days.

“Ah, Zohra, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk to Pia for the next while.”

“Huh? Who are you to tell me what to do?”

Peria shrugs, smiling sheepishly. “It’s not that. It’s just that she, ah, likely won’t be in a good mood for the next few days…”

Zohra blinks. “Wait, why? Hey, did you do something to her—!?”

“Nothing like that! Honestly, why is this suddenly my fault?” Peria sighs. “If I really have to put it bluntly… it’s that time of month for her.”

There’s a long pause in which Peria’s afraid that he’s somehow killed Zohra through words alone, before Zohra suddenly turns red and jumps back like Peria just told him that he saw Pia naked.

W-What!?”

“You learn to keep track of her schedule after the first few years. And, well… please don’t ask how I learned in the first place. It was a rather traumatizing moment for me,” Peria says, grimacing.

Zohra still looks like he’s in shock, with Peria unsure if he even heard anything he just said, before the other boy slowly asks,

“Um… does that mean we should… get her medicine or… stuff?”

Again, Peria shrugs. “She might appreciate it. Or she might beat you up. It’s hard to say.”

The two of them pause, trying to gauge Pia’s reaction to such a thing, before they glance at each other and have a rare moment of male bonding where neither of them have any idea what to do when a girl is on her period.


keep your hair uncut.

“Zohra, is it just me, or have you had that exact same hairstyle for the last ten years?”


what are all these bruises?

The first time Zohra and Peria honestly and truly get along is when, one day, the two of them team up together and actually manage to land a hit on Pia.

(Sure, she repaid them tenfold, before and after, but they’ll take what victories they can, damn it.)


pretend you’re drowning… moan and sigh…

Peria really, really doesn’t think Zohra is emotionally mature enough for sex or even any sort of physical contact when he still apparently can’t handle even the sight of Pia smiling at him prettily.

Maybe he’s still going through puberty?


no, that’s perfect! don’t move an inch!

It’s a bit funny and almost sad, Pia thinks, how she strived to be like Germer. Not that she regrets it, as she still admires the woman, even now, and is thankful for everything she’s done. She still hopes to emulate her—except for in one area.

Pia remembers how Germer could never keep a relationship for more than a few days, how her violent tendencies would scare away all potential suitors—for in the end, it seemed that aggressive women simply weren’t attractive.

She should know, really. It’s never bothered her, for it’s their problem if they don’t like her, but she has more than her fair share of memories of people disliking her attitude. Of her noble foster family abandoning her, because she wasn’t the child they wanted.

And yet somehow, even though Germer should’ve proved it to be impossible—Pia so easily found two people who loved her for exactly the way she was.


I should be home by now

When one of Pia’s dresses rip, both Zohra and Peria leap at the chance to try and fix it.

One day later, her dress possibly in a worse state before, Pia whacks them both on the head and just goes to a tailor.


let us relieve you of your burden.

Pia loves Peria and Zohra. She really does.

—Except for perhaps moments like these where, in the middle of a fight, they begin arguing and apparently forget that there are actual enemies to be fighting rather than each other.

In the end, Pia deals with the rest of their opponents by herself and debates the pros and cons of ditching them there while they bicker.

Honestly, men.


I could appease your secret fears.

None of them really want to think about what might happen if any of them dies—an all too real possibility for fighters like them, who practically live next door to death itself.

None of them bring it up, and they all decide on their own that they simply won’t worry. If there’s anyone in the world who’ll cheat death, it’s them.

They’re strong, after all. They wouldn’t be with one another otherwise.


you’ll know it’s me.

They make the worst fugitives and they know it, when Pia has azure hair that she doesn’t bother to dye, Peria has his eyes closed all the time, and Zohra’s in uniform just about all the time except when Pia and Peria drag him into normal clothing.

Though they suppose that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they can still beat up any assassin who comes their way.


the ashes underneath your nails.

It might come as a surprise that when an overly-insistent man harasses Pia, neither Zohra nor Peria react. The fact of the matter is that they don’t have time to, because in the next instant, the man is on the ground and Pia is holding a knife to his crotch, smiling at him with the face of an angel.


this isn’t personal.

“… Zohra Rom.”

Zohra turns around, blinking in surprise as he recognizes the assassin.

“Hey, it’s you. We worked together on a mission once, right? Long time—”

“Die!”

The assassin lunges at him with a dagger. Zohra, with a bored expression, simply grabs his arm and breaks it, before tossing the larger man to the ground.

“—no see. Now, I can send you back to Roland with your pride still intact, or if you really insist, I can send you back with it in pieces. Which do you prefer?”

“Can’t we just leave him there?” Pia complains. “The café’s going to be closing soon, Zohra!”


supply and demand.

“Would either of you two mind explaining why we’re in constant need of knives? It couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that you two keep throwing them at each other, could it?”


there’s always one door you forget to knock.

It was so easy for them to really only think of themselves for years. They travelled the world freely, doing whatever they wished, only having to concern themselves over the occasional assassin or the state of affairs in the next country they were going to visit.

Somewhere along the way, they learned of the Goddesses and Priests—they learned of the curse that has taken its hold over the world, and monsters hide in places they aren’t looking. Fairy tales don’t seem like fairy tales anymore, and they can’t dismiss myths as myths. Anything can be true, and anything can be false.

Most importantly of all, there’s a darkness lurking in this world that they’d taken for granted, and even though it sometimes feels so far away, they realize the truth.

That one day, this will catch up with them.

And with that in mind, they act.


at least I’m breathing.

It’s terrifying at first, as Peria and Pia flee Roland. They’re only six, and while it sometimes feels like they’re far older than that, it still feels a tad too young to be Taboo Breakers—to be fugitives forever exiled from their country.

They move as fast as they can, bypassing security without a sound. Roland believes that they died, that Ryner killed them, but they know. It’s only a matter of time before their survival is revealed, and all they can do is hope that Ryner and Germer won’t pay the price for it.

Still, even as they brave the world they’ve never known, all ties cut and nowhere left to go—at least they have each other, they think, and at least they’re alive.


start another story, tell it as you go.

Zohra doesn’t have the luxury of stealth when he flees, as Roland’s been expecting it for quite some time. The army practically shows up at his doorstep, as Zohra checks over his weapons. They’re clean now, but he knows that by the time the night is done, they’ll be soaked with blood.

Not his own, preferably.

He twirls a knife in his hand, before grinning.

“Well then, time to go on a little trip~♪”

(Only this one, he knows, will be much more permanent.)


if I’ve no one to fight, how do I know who I am?

They’ve shed blood and tears, climbed from corpses, fought tooth and nail to survive—they’ve seen the darkest sides of humanity, and more than enough to make the average person give up on everything.

It’s just as well that the three of them are far, far from average.

Pia stands on the rocks, as waves crash beneath her feet, with her arms spread wide and the wind blowing across her face and through her hair. Peria and Zohra stand behind her, watching the sunrise.

They’ve seen the worst of the world, and yet—

Ah, Pia thinks, isn’t the world beautiful?

And so, she wants it for herself. All that is beautiful in life—she wants to take everything for her own. Thus, as cruel and ugly as the world is, she knows it to still be beautiful, and so she wants it.

(Either way, she will never let it fall in the hands of the Goddesses.)

“Peria, Zohra,” she suddenly says, as the two shift behind her.

“What is it?”

She turns to them, smiling. It’s a lovely, dangerous smile that they’ve undoubtedly come to recognize.

“I’m thinking about conquering the world. You'll help me, right?”

And it must sound silly to anyone else—a joke at best and a naïve fantasy of teenagers at worst.

—But, to be frank, none of them care for naïve fantasies, and so what else is there left to do but turn it into a reality?

(Because they’re free, they’re fighters. Because no one can ever tell them what to do, and they’ll get what they want out of this ugly, beautiful world—)

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