Everything was black. Nothing but complete, suffocating darkness.
Then, little by little, a blinding light crept in from somewhere far away and swallowed everything whole.
"Congratulations, Lady Artoria. She's a healthy boy." A voice said.
A pause, then another voice, softer and closer.
"He looks just like the family head."
A woman lay against white sheets that had turned red beneath her. She held a baby against her chest, surrounded by maids standing at careful distances and one middle-aged woman who carried herself with the quiet authority of a doctor. The room was warm and still, the kind of stillness that follows something enormous.
The woman holding the baby had violet hair that spilled across the pillow behind her and eyes the colour of deep red wine, their pupils narrowed to thin slits. Her face was the kind of face that made people stop and stare without knowing why, sculpted and severe and breathtaking all at once, like something carved rather than born.
She moved her trembling hands and caressed the baby's face, her fingers barely touching his cheek as though she was afraid he might break.
"My son..." she whispered, and she smiled, and when she did, two sharp fangs caught the light.
She brought her fingers together and gently pinched the baby's cheek, trying to coax some sound out of him, some sign that he was fully here.
The baby opened his eyes.
They were golden, the pupils slit just like hers, and they moved immediately and instinctively to her face as though searching for something familiar in an unfamiliar world.
The moment she saw the colour of his eyes, her heart did two things at once. It warmed and it cooled, swelling with something close to joy while something else, something careful and afraid, settled quietly beneath it.
One of the maids inhaled sharply. "Gods, he is an Origin—" She caught herself mid-sentence and pressed her hand over her own mouth, then bowed her head low. "Please forgive me, my Lady."
"It is fine," Artoria said, her voice calm but carrying the kind of weight that made everyone in the room stand a little straighter. "As long as no one outside this room knows about it."
She looked back down at the baby, and her brow drew together slightly.
"Why is he not crying?"
The question sat in the air. It was a reasonable one. Every baby cried the moment it entered the world, as though outraged by the arrival. Her baby had not made a single sound, and the silence where crying should have been made Artoria's already pale face go a shade paler.
"Try slapping him gently," the doctor said, steady and practiced.
Artoria raised her hand and was just about to do it when the baby suddenly opened his mouth wide and let out a cry that filled the entire room.
"Wahhh! Waaahhh!"
"Oh." She blinked. "He is crying now." Her voice broke slightly at the end, relief rushing through it, and then she smiled, wide and unguarded.
She pulled him closer and held him against her chest.
—
Outside, the rest of the world continued on as it always did.
Inside this room, something irreversible had just begun.
Johnny had not expected to wake up at all.
The last thing he remembered was the explosion. The classroom. The bag sitting in the middle of the floor. The beep. Elizabeth's name tearing itself out of his throat as everything went white and then went dark and then went nothing.
He had assumed that was the end.
But then he woke up, and he was here, and here was wrong in every way imaginable. His body was wrong. His arms were wrong. He could not move properly. He could not speak. He could not even hold his own head up, because the body he was in was small, impossibly small, and new in a way that made no sense unless the impossible was somehow true.
He was in a baby's body.
The thought landed like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward in every direction.
The first thing he had noticed was the woman holding him. Purple hair. Red eyes, with pupils that were not round the way human pupils were. Her face was flushed and damp with sweat and she looked exhausted in the specific way that came from something physical and enormous, but even through all of that she was looking at him with an expression he recognised without needing words for it.
Where am I? he thought wildly. What is happening? Where is Elizabeth?
He could not ask. He had no voice yet, no real one, nothing that could carry what was spinning through his head into something another person could understand.
He heard the woman ask why he was not crying. He felt her prepare to turn him over.
And then it hit him.
He had promised. He had stood in the school corridor and crouched down and made a pinky promise with his little sister that he would pick her up at one in the afternoon and take her to the ice cream shop. He had promised his mother, standing at the door with her one arm and her unseeing eyes, that he would always protect Elizabeth.
He had run. He had tried. He had not been fast enough.
The bomb had gone off with both of them still inside the room.
Johnny started crying.
Not because of the discomfort of being a newborn, not because he was cold or hungry or startled. He cried because the weight of what he had failed to do came crashing down on him all at once and he had no other way to carry it.
"I'm a failure!" he screamed, or tried to. What came out was a formless wail, just sound, meaningless to everyone in the room except the boy producing it. His tiny hands clenched. His whole body shook with it.
The woman who had been about to turn him over stopped. She pulled him back in and held him close and looked at his face with wide, startled eyes.
Johnny kept crying.
He cried until the door to the room opened.
The man who stepped through it did not knock. He did not need to. The moment he crossed the threshold the air in the room changed, thickened, pressed down on everything inside it. Both maids went rigid. The doctor's spine straightened involuntarily. No one spoke until they had bowed their heads.
"We greet the family head, and we give you our congratulations." They said it together, perfectly, like something rehearsed.
The man acknowledged them with a single glance and moved past them without slowing. He walked to the side of the bed and stopped there.
"Here," Artoria said, already lifting the baby toward him. "Take your son and see for yourself that I did not lie."
The man took the baby carefully, adjusting his large hands to support the small weight with a practiced certainty.
Johnny's crying stopped the moment he looked up at the man's face.
He could not have explained why. It was not a comforting face. The man was tall and carried himself in a way that took up more space than his body strictly required. His hair was short and golden, and his beard was trimmed close and neat. His skin was pale, not the pale of someone who avoided the sun but the pale of marble or of winter, the kind that looked cold to the touch. His eyes were gold with their pupil slit just like his, a shade lighter than his hair, and when they looked down at Johnny they did not soften the way Artoria's had.
But something happened in those eyes.
They glowed.
Just slightly, just for a moment, a warmth rising in the gold like embers catching air. And at the same time something moved in Johnny's chest, a feeling that had no name in any language he had ever spoken, something like recognition, like the pull of a door swinging open inside him.
What is this? he thought, staring up at the man.
Then the glow faded and the man looked back at Artoria.
"You did not lie indeed," he said. His voice was low and even and carried the same quality as the rest of him, like something that had existed a very long time. "Your divinations never fail. He was born an Original."
He leaned down and pressed a kiss to Artoria's forehead. She closed her eyes and smiled.
Then he straightened. "It is good news for us," he said, "but it is not good news for everyone. There are those who would not welcome it. Because of that, I will need to seal his bloodline until he awakens, or until his grandfather returns."
Artoria's expression shifted immediately. "Sealing his bloodline will make him weak, Vlad. He will not survive without it. You already know how dangerous it is inside this family."
Vlad was quiet for a moment. He looked down at the baby in his arms. Johnny looked back at him.
"I know," Vlad said at last. "But I have no other choice. As a pureblood he carries immense strength even without it, enough to hold his own for now. He needs to be strong if he is going to survive in this family." He paused, and something shifted in his face, just slightly. "But I will make sure to protect him. He is our son."
Artoria pressed her lips together. Then she nodded. "Okay. I trust you, my husband."
Vlad shifted Johnny carefully in one arm and raised his free hand. He extended one finger and pressed it gently to Johnny's forehead.
The point of contact glowed red.
Johnny felt something move inside him, deep and fundamental, like a door being shut in a room he had not known was open. Something that had been loose and boundless drew inward and went still and locked. He could not describe it. He only knew that it was gone now, whatever it had been.
When the red light faded, his eyes were no longer golden.
They were red. The same red as Artoria's.
The heaviness came over him fast, pulling at him the way sleep pulls at someone who has been awake far too long. His eyelids dropped. He did not fight it.
"There. Done." Vlad's voice was quiet now. His jaw was tight. "I hope you will forgive me for this, my son. It is for your own good."
He held Johnny for one more moment before turning and handing him back to Artoria. Then he looked at her.
"Have you thought of a name?"
She received the baby and looked down at his small sleeping face, at the red eyes now closed, at the features that had come from both of them and from something older than either.
"Yes," she said, and she smiled the way people smile when something has been decided long before the moment they say it out loud.
"His name is going to be Arthur."