Chapter Text
The inner sanctum of the church was cool and quiet. The only sound was the soft rustle of a nun's habit from the office and running water pattering against tile near the cloister, corridors dark as the light of the stained glass windows never reached this far back into the bowels of the structure. The sound of water stopped and a whoosh of air spilled steam into the hall, a tall and lanky stickman exiting the bathroom while toweling off his lavender hair.
Ruv's face betrayed his exhaustion; he'd been out for three days chasing down another mark and he wanted nothing more than to make a cup of strong tea and sink into bed for a few hours until Sarvente inevitably needed him. She'd long since stopped confronting him when he'd come back to the church covered in blood with his knife in hand and just grumbled something about washing off before he collapsed into bed.
As he clipped his holster back to his belt and hung his towel around his neck a deafening crack broke the peace and made the hairs on his arm stand on end, the once dusty and cool air now smelling of ozone. His knife was in hand and a snarl on his lips as he approached his old room, where voices could be made out.
"Shit, shit, shit! Where the fuck are we?!"
"See, this is why Dad doesn't love you! We aren't supposed to use Mom's powers like this!"
Ruv kicked open the battered door, and held up his knife threateningly.
Two stickchildren stood in the middle of the scorched rug, a girl with braids and lopsided black horns wearing a cleanly-pressed pinafore and knee socks and a boy with a maroon sweater and wavy hair pulled into a low ponytail around nubby little horns to match the girl's. The boy pushed the girl behind him and waved his hands in a wide arc, summoning a glowing pink fractal lined with runes.
"Kids aren't allowed back here," Ruv growled, knife still trained on the kids. As he took in what he was seeing, the fractal winked out and the kids visibly relaxed. The girl tentatively stepped out from behind her companion, wary.
"Daddy?"
Ruv dropped the knife with a clatter. I have a kid?
He vaguely heard the click of heels on hardwood as Sarvente scrambled around the corner, brow furrowed. "What's going on here?"
He wordlessly pointed in the room. She peeped her head in, and then smiled softly.
"Children shouldn't be back here! How did you get here? Who are you?"
The boy straightened his back and puffed out his chest, a cocky grin on his face. "I'm Selever and this is my sister Rasazy. I'm your son!"
He clearly didn't expect Sarv to suddenly burst out laughing. Ruv watched his little face fall, confusion in his blank eyes.
When Sarvente finally got a hold of herself and saw the hurt in their faces, her expression hardened. "Please don't joke like that. Tell me, where are your real parents, little one?"
"But you guys are our parents," he whined, and the little girl's eyes began to shimmer with tears.
"Don't you recognize us, mama?"
Stricken, Sarvente shot a look at Ruv. He shrugged, and picked up the knife to put it back in its holster. She turned back to the children and noticed something in the girl's arms. Earnestly crying now, the girl thrust what she was holding in her arms out, showing a very familiar book, much more worn and tattered than the one currently locked up carefully in her room.
"Look, we have proof!"
Sarvente looked from the book, to the children, and back to the book.
"Ruv," she said evenly, "we have a problem. Let me go change."
The rickety wooden table in their kitchenette just barely seated the three, Ruv with a very strong cup of spiced Russian tea in front of him and his arms crossed over his chest as he regarded his apparent spawn. Rasazy had her eyes glued to the worn floorboards, her black mary-janes kicking back and forth while her brother mirrored him, arms over his chest but with defiance burning in his eyes.
It was clear to him now that the kids resembled him and Sarvente. Their colors matched the adults, Selever having both the pale pink and pale purple of the elder pair split evenly across his face while his sister was like a baby Sarv with the same long hair in a dusty shade of amethyst. Inwardly he cursed. How the FUCK did this happen?
Sarvente finally entered the room, free of her costume and habit and wearing her favorite pink sweater and a pair of shorts with her ever-present tights. Tiredly, she ruffled her bangs and leaned against the kitchen counter; the table would be far too crowded if she sat with them.
"Okay, start from the beginning. Who are you and how did you get here?"
"We already told you, we're your kids," Selever grumbled.
"Bullshit," Ruv grunted, sipping his tea. "We aren't dating, much less making a couple kids."
"Mama said you two were so in love that the demons below gave you both a spark of magic and you made us," Rasazy said quietly.
"You dumbass, they obviously fucked ."
"Language," Ruv snapped. Selever rolled his eyes.
"Mom's not in her costume, we don't have to pretend to be holy children of God anymore."
"Somehow I doubt that we raised you to swear like that," Ruv said, wiping his face with his hand before rubbing his hair. "Even if Sarv isn't in costume…"
"Calm down!"
The three stopped their bickering and turned to stare at Sarvente. Her horns were normally hidden from view, but the stress had them starting to lengthen and poke from her hair as two little nubs of black. She reached into the cabinet behind her and pulled out a bottle of communion wine, which she wrenched the cork out of with her teeth before taking a deep swig. Wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, she scrubbed her face with both hands before speaking.
"How. Did you get. My. Grimoire."
"You gave it to us," Rasazy peeped. "Honestly, I think you were always prepared for possibly having children with your powers. When we started manifesting them you gave us the book so we could learn to control it."
"This one here," she said bitterly, shooting a glare at her brother, "likes messing with time instead of sticking to simply summoning spirits and imps like a sane person."
Ruv huffed. "How did you get here then?"
"I was practicing," said Selever sheepishly. "I was in our room drawing out a Greater Circle of Temporal Manipulation-"
"Even though Mom SAID never to do that!"
"SHUT UP! I was only going to go back a couple of hours to see if I could! I've never jumped more than a few seconds or minutes before…"
"And I came in the room," Rasazy interrupted, "and saw what he was doing and tried to stop him. You always explicitly said that messing with time wasn't something we should be doing until we were much older. He never listens!"
"What Mom and Dad don't know won't hurt them," Selever pouted.
"No, but it can hurt us!"
"IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FINE IF YOU HADN'T SCUFFED THE CIRCLE WHEN I WAS EMPOWERING IT!!"
"Enough!"
Dust shook from the rafters and sloshed the tea in Ruv's cup. Rarely did Sarv raise her voice, but it was clear that the kids knew to quiet down when she did. She lowered her hands, and crossed her arms.
"That's enough, the both of you. Selever shouldn't be messing with time, but you young lady should know that when a circle is being empowered it's dangerous to interrupt or something horribly wrong can happen!" She slumped back against the countertop.
"Now, instead of going back an hour or two you've gone back years, possibly even decades! And without knowing which runes Rasazy might have disrupted or how Selever's energy was disrupted doing the empowerment, it's possible we might not be able to send you back to the point you disappeared from for a very long time."
"What's going to happen to us," Selever asked, a tremble in his voice. Ruv drank deeply from his cup and darted his eyes to Sarv. She was looking at him, worrying her lip. He put down the tea and looked back at the two children.
"You'll have to stay here until Sarv can figure out how to send you back. And hope you coming back here didn't completely fuck up the timeline."
He thudded his head against the table. "I'm too fucking tired for this shit. Sarv, you mind…?"
She waved him off. "Go to bed. I'll be in after I get these two settled. What did you do with the body?"
"What didn't I do with the body?"
Sarv made a horrified face and the kids stared at him in surprise. His brain took a moment to catch up with what he said.
"Shit, that came out more sexual than I intended. I disposed of the body respectfully."
Everyone visibly relaxed. "Oh, well good then. Go to sleep," Sarv laughed, relieved. He stood, dumped his cup in the sink, and loped back out to the cloister hall. Sarvente turned back to the children.
"We don't have enough money to renovate Ruv's old room yet, which I assume will be your room in the future. So you'll have to sleep somewhere else in the cloister. We have a sitting room with a couch, you'll need to share but it'll work until we can find something more permanent."
"Where does Daddy sleep then, if there isn't another room?"
"Oh, Ruv shares with me," Sarvente said brightly, walking them out to the sitting area and leaving to grab some blankets from the donation box. Selever snorted.
"Not dating my -"
"Shut up Sel." Rasazy crossed her arms. "If they say they aren't dating yet then they aren't. Mom and Dad don't lie to us."
"Yes, because the 'made us with magic' thing totally was the truth," he snarked. "Only babies would believe that - OW!"
He rubbed his arm where his sister had just punched him. She glared at him, fists down at her sides. "This is all your fault! You're supposed to be the older one but you're the one who always gets us in trouble! Grow up!"
"Rasazy!"
They turned. Sarvente stood with two blankets draped over one arm, her hands perched on her hips and frowning at them in disappointment. "You two need to stop fighting. Arguing and pointing fingers aren't going to fix this mess! Do you always fight like this? Is this how we raised you two?"
"No ma'am," both children mumbled, properly chastised. Her expression softened.
"Look," she soothed, "it's been a long night. Everyone is tired. How about we set you two up on the couch and in the morning we can take a look at what we can control and fix instead of focusing on what we can't, sound good?"
"Can you tell us a story?"
Sarvente smiled. "Of course I can, Rasazy."
Both siblings curled up on opposite ends of the couch, and she covered them with the wool blankets she'd pulled before settling down on the ground, sitting on her knees. "What kind of story would you like?"
"Any story," Selever mumbled around a yawn. Rasazy murmured in agreement. Sarvente took a moment to think.
" There once was a lonely demon girl, who waited centuries to make a friend…"
As she gently closed the bedroom door behind herself, Sarv sighed and padded over to the bed. Ruv was laying back, eyes closed and arms pillowed behind his head. When she lifted the comforter to lay down, he cracked open his good eye.
"Kids settled?"
"As much as they can be," she replied, rolling over to face him. "Wanted a story. Made something up."
"You know what you want to do yet?"
"No."
They both fell quiet, the sound of their breathing the only noise in the room.
"I'm sorry I drank in front of you and the kids. I know it's out of character for me to -"
"It's okay. It's been a weird night. You up-front drinking from the bottle isn't the craziest thing to happen tonight."
"I'm still sorry."
The moon whirled in its slow arc across the sky. The church settled its old bones into the foundation. Two little stickchildren dreamed. Ruv and Sarv's breathing slowed and synched. Ruv turned towards Sarvente in slumber like a plant grows towards the light of the sun, and his arms wrapped around her. Everything was once again cool and quiet.