Chapter Text
The Noceda household was nothing but dark, with a thick blanket of shadows layered over every inch of surface it could find. Everything from the lamps to the carpet was covered in a dusky, incomprehensible black that consumed everything, not in a ravenous way but as though the night was hugging as much of the earth as it could, protecting it all from whatever unseen horrors might emerge from the infinite space.
It was oddly tranquil. Neither hot nor cold, as still and silent as an ancient statue, with but a breath of wind in the air… ironic, wasn’t it? That the beauty of the night, the splendour of the great beyond and the limitless questions it posed, was appreciated only after humanity had a million and one measures to quell it?
Manny Noceda thought so, at least. He often liked having these little, internal retrospects as he worked on the more mindless of his many tasks. Currently, that was reading dozens upon dozens of age-old papers about one specific concept he hoped to prove. The drowsiness of a sleepless night was dragging him down, and the papers were in English, which had always been Camila’s specialty, but even as his eyelids flickered and his foot subconsciously tapped, poorly, to the beat of Thunderstruck , he persevered.
If he could figure this out, everything could change. Keyword, er, words: ‘figure this out’.
The Afro-Latin man sat, drowsily, by a simple, plastic desk light, in a nice wooden chair he’d had for quite a few years. His desk, a clean shade of dark brown, served as a place for him to rest his elbow as he tiredly scrolled through the pages of stoic white that contained the answers he wanted. He was fully aware that the alit lamp and several cups of coffee were the sole things keeping him awake, and even then their effects were waning, but he had to persist. He had to keep going .
Manny didn’t think of himself as an especially beautiful man. His skin was a brown on the lighter side, while his beard and ruffled hair sat on the dark end of that spectrum. His eyes, two, were a dark brown, but they were accompanied by an unending, childish gleam which gave them a personality like no other. Wearing a grey shirt and dark green shorts without socks, his fashion sense was… well, it wasn’t what had got him the girl of his dreams.
(It was, however, what had introduced them. At least he’d been starstruck at their first meeting.)
His daughter, however… he felt his eyes drifting to the cot maybe half a metre from him, and despite their exhaustion and the tire, a surge of pride immediately shot through his chest. His precious, amazing baby daughter, only a few months old but already the second-greatest thing to happen in his lifetime, slept there, within a pale-blue wrapping to keep her warm. His daughter. How something so unspeakably… what was a fitting word… divine was the product of himself and a woman he, with his stutter and his clumsiness and his ADHD, had somehow wooed, was a truth of the world that not even Manny’s scientifically genius brain would ever be able to comprehend.
Luz Noceda … now the thing he would gladly and shamelessly dedicate the rest of his life to. No, not a thing- the one . He would protect her through thick and thin, for better or worse, from anything that could dare harm her. Not in an overprotective way, he reminded himself hurriedly; in fact, no, that was all wrong.
He would help her. Yes, that was better. Whatever troubles she might encounter, whatever problems might be thrown her way, whenever life was cruel and unfair and pressed down on her until she was dust, he would be by her side, ready to take her hand and guide her past it, soothing the pain rather than shielding her from it entirely.
(Or… something. The parenting book Camila had bought him had been in English, and asking her to read to him felt embarrassing. He was a big kid!)
Recognising a spiral of thoughts, he sighed.
He had to get back to reading.
He turned his focus back onto the monitor, and as he did, his arm brushed the vial he had perched on his desk, filled with the unrealistically blue mystery liquid that was what he’d been researching in his off-time for the past few months. By ‘off-time’, naturally, that meant every second night, except when Camila told him to take a break - which was getting less and less common nowadays, thanks to Manny now being able to multitask experimenting and babysitting simultaneously.
As he bumped the vial, it tipped from its stand and fell onto the desk with a clatter that broke the silence like a bullet through glass. The ivory cork shaped like an odd reptile, loose for ease of opening and closing, fell off, and the substance spilled over his desk. Manny cringed, cursing to himself, and reached for a paper towel to wipe the mess.
Welp… there goes half my sample size, his groggy brain said, dismayed. He was too tired to process the loss just yet; he’d deal with that in the morning.
He got a lot of it on the first wipe, putting the vial back upright as he did so as to minimise the loss. What remained quickly spread outward, a single drip even making its way off the edge, plopping down and out of sight. He turned the paper towel over and went for another wipe, which cleared the majority of the spill - save what of it had stained, nothing to do there - and jumped as he saw exactly where the drip had landed.
A single, microscopic tear of blue liquid was on Luz’s cheek, too small to expand beyond a tiny puddle. He knew skin had no reaction to the stuff, so instead of panicking, he merely smiled. Sighing with relief that it hadn’t gotten into her mouth, nor woken her up, he got back to the issue at hand, preferring to use a cleaner towel to wipe up his daughter.
Better safe than diseased, after all!
With a little more effort, he had cleaned up… mostly… all of the liquid. He walked over to the bin in the back corner of the room, still a little frustrated at his accident, when a lightbulb hit him. Not literally, of course, but he’d used that statement in place of ‘I’ve had an idea’ for so long that even the narration was affected.
(His highschool friends probably still remembered him yelling ‘A lightbulb has hit me!’ in the middle of class, multiple times every week.)
He returned to his desk, and, making sure he wasn’t too loud, opened the drawer, where he had various similar vials, filled with typical liquids that did have Wikipedia pages. He pulled them out, each on a stand. Yes, this wasn’t perfect, but better make some probably invalid tests than waste the spilled liquid entirely.
Naturally, his first idea was to mix it with basic, good old water, and just see what happened. What harm could a bit of reliable H2O cause? So, fully confident in himself and half expecting it to blow up because, to be honest, he had no idea what the mystery liquid could possibly be - seriously, what didn’t have a wikipedia page?!? - he took off a fragment of the tissue and dropped it into the water.
Instantly, the vial began to glow an ominous blue tone, brightening the room like a gluestick in moments. Manny was so shocked he nearly dropped it entirely, but then he composed himself, returning the vial to its stand- and that was when he noticed it.
Oh, boy. Oh, oh boy. This wasn’t part of the plan!
Oddly enough, the liquid that had penetrated the paper and ended up on his hands, too, was glowing. How did causing a reaction in one sample affect another? How did that make sense- focus, Noceda!
His mind set into panic mode, he spun and dashed away as quick as he could, scrambling to reach the kitchen. With a quick bump from a free part of his skin, water began pouring from the metal pipe and into the drain. He shoved his hands underneath, scrubbing them as hard as he could and feeling the tension escape him in a relieved sigh when he saw the blueness down the drain.
For a brief, brief moment, he was calm. Whatever this was, however law-defying it might be, it wasn’t going to hurt him. He was fine; he was safe. He didn’t get randomly killed through midnight science - how embarrassing would that be on his grave? ‘Died because he did an experiment’ . But, well, huzzah! He’d averted a potential crisis! Giving himself a mental pat on the back he turned away, happy that there was a zero percent chance he would be stolen away from Camila and Luz tonight.
And it was then, once his mind had been cleared up, that the serenity became terror.
Luz.
As he rushed back to his ‘lab’, he heard a loud sort of crackling-whooshing sound, followed by the much louder, much harsher noise of smashing electronics. He kicked past the door, and-
His desk was gone.
The two vials, the pure-liquid and the half-water one, were both gone as well.
Everything previously on or in the table had smashed into a million pieces.
Manny dropped to his knees as he heard an upstairs door open.
“Manny, ¿qué fue ese ruido?” he heard Camila’s tired, concerned voice drift from the second floor.
But Manny made no response, for he’d noticed something else that was missing.
Luz had vanished.
---
To say Belos was surprised to wake up with a baby on his lap was an understatement.
Belos had been sleeping for hundreds of years, and most of those years had been in his ‘not-really-human’ form, where it was less like sleeping and more a state he went into at night without dream or thought, that he stayed in until he woke up with the Sun. Anything that happened to him during that period happened without his knowledge until he woke up; inconvenient, but not something he could rectify. Due to this weakness, he tried to sleep as minimally as possible, but he was still only human.
To counteract this, he’d developed various defence systems over the centuries. As Phillip, it had been simple Shielding Spells, Glyphs to protect him from most minor attacks. As Emperor Belos of the Boiling Isles, it was a matrix of alarm systems connected to an army of turrets, flamethrowers, nets, and a dozen other unnamable traps, and a troop of deathly loyal soldiers ready to act at a moment’s notice.
So, when he opened his ghostly, blue eyes as the first traces of Sunlight peered over from the horizon, and saw the baby, he was understandably shocked.
Normally, if he found a baby alone, he’d either ignore it or dispose of it depending on the circumstances, but… this time, it was on him . Either this was the child of the most skilled breaking-and-entering artist in the world, or this child had materialised there. It couldn’t have teleported, he had means to prevent that, so… it was an enigma, for now.
He sat there, silent, still, and stunned, for a few moments. ‘Surprised’ barely even scratched the surface. He was speechless, utterly astonished, his brain incapable of mustering up much more than complete shock.
He blinked, too focused on the presented conundrum to wipe the sleep from his eyes. He was, however, compelled by his body to yawn. Once that was done, and his mind had woken up a bit more, he got to properly comprehending.
Its skin and hair were both familiar. Eerily familiar. He didn’t know where he’d seen it before, but his brain gave off a little spark of recognition at the sight of it… and it was an old recognition. Way, way back in his past, before he was Belos. In particular, the small size and slight pointiness of its nose caught his attention, though he failed to remember from where exactly.
Its ears were curved. It… it was human. A shiver, equally intrigued and, well, surprised , ran down his aged spine. This was not just one of the foul natives, this was… his kin . A fellow child of God. He’d thought he was the only one, the only human trapped in this hellscape, but… no. Evidently not.
And this discovery was followed a moment later by a second. More specifically, a second one on the baby’s face .
Titan’s Blood.
Not much. But Titan’s Blood nonetheless. He raised a gauntleted claw and brushed it off the baby’s cheek, pricking its nose as he did so, watching as the tiny, tiny spot of priceless material shone in the Sun off his fingertip. Barely more than a droplet, it was.
Sadly, it was more or less unusable. Contact with activated Titan’s Blood was more powerful, but also riskier and less controlled. He’d need about five times this amount to transfer someone of his size, and a lot more to focus the exitway - he didn’t especially like the idea of reappearing underground, or in space.
But it still begged the question; how did it get here? And why on this baby?
He glanced back down at the baby, and was met with an innocent, clueless gaze. Evidently, the nose-pricking had woken it up. And it was with this single second of eye contact, that the dam in his mind finally broke, and the memories came flooding in.
It was hard to sieve them all, but over and over and over, one repeated word flashed through his mind’s eye, taunting him, cheering him, nagging him.
Carlos , said his brain. And again. And again, and again, and again.
Carlos, Carlos, Carlos.
Memories he’d spent years repressing returned to him in a rush, of blood and betrayal and anger and… he wouldn’t say it. Not that word. Still, scenes centuries old replayed in his mind, tumbling and turning through his headspace. His body seized up, and he choked a breath to calm down.
You’re older now. Maturer. Stop panicking every time you remember.
In not too much time, it subsided, and he was brought back to reality. She just stared at him, clearly without the elegant thought that made a human person. Although, even through the slits of eyeholes his mask gave him, the wonder in her eyes was undeniably there and present. Oh , the wonder, the brilliant ideas and ingenuity that made the human race so special, he found it, right there, sparkling amidst the soft brown that met his gaze.
This was the part where he tossed her away. Tossed her aside, into the trash, and forgot about her. That was what he did. He did not smile a small smile, his eyes warming up to the little girl that was a reminder of his past, and whisper, softer than he had ever spoken before, “What’s your name, little one?”
Luz , indicated the hand-stitched golden lettering on the blue blanket she was using as clothing. His brain read it as ‘lose’, and it took a scolding from a memory he absolutely refused to reminisce about to correct it to ‘loose’. Luz… that meant light. Cute, if rather different from the names he was used too. Of course, humanity was bound to have changed, he knew that; seeing an example of it in person was something else.
“Luz,” he murmured. Did she react to that? He couldn’t really tell, he didn’t spend much time with babies, but he could’ve sworn she did.
“Hello, Luz,” he greeted, “My name is…” he hesitated, “My name is Phillip. I am, ah, pleased to meet you, though I can only dream of the circumstances that brought you here. Perhaps I am not the caretaker you expected, and I am certainly not of your blood… but He has delivered me another purpose, a responsibility to, it seems, raise one of my own, and who am I to deny Him?”
Luz just continued to stare at him.