Jake Addams May 20th,20xx

I woke up to an ache in my wrists and the sight of a beat-up Cai across me. His hair was a mess and had become even harder to look at than usual. Sections of it had retained their signature golden fluffiness but other parts had been matted down by what I was forced to accept as blood. His forehead had a giant wound in the center, being a smashed-up mess. Welts and bruises littered his skin and harsh metal chains and dark black vines wrapped him up like a puppet. I was forced to remember him fighting the witches in an attempt to rescue me, instead of just running away on his own.

His shackles looked different from mine, being sturdier and duller. They seemed to suck up all the natural light in the room. He seemed to wilt with each second and his wings were ripped up into shreds. They attempted to knit themselves back together but it was a slow and apparently agonizing process. In addition to the shackles, he was also trapped by a bunch of vines that wrapped around every individual limb and glowed with a bright golden light. It seemed to be taking what little energy he had left.

“Cai! Cai! Wake up!”

I tried to calm my panic and tried to quietly wake him up but I ended up more yelling at him than whispering. The one eye that wasn’t bruised twitched in response to the sudden loud noise and he let out a low groan before opening his eyes as widely as he could without breaking the skin. The worst part about all of this though, as awful as I was to notice, was that the punk still managed to be pretty. It did little for me personally but I couldn’t deny the semblance to his current appearance and the character design of a ‘tragic prince’ that Alice had once upon a time taken a liking to.

I couldn't help but chuckle at my pathetic attempt to divert my attention from the current situation and quickly gave it up. It took a certain strength to dismiss the present to focus on inane details.

“JA- Krion! Are you okay? Did they hurt you? How are you feeling?”

Being asked all of this by someone who was clearly in worse shape than I was made me feel guilty and I tried my best to dismiss the few injuries I had sustained. I had been hurt, but it was nothing in comparison to him.

“How can you even ask that as you are, Are you okay? Or no that’s a stupid question, how are you holding up?”

Before he could answer the doors to the dungeon slammed open and a youthful woman dressed in different textures and shades of red strode in. Her hair was just as red as her eyes and her scarlet lips curled attractively even as they held a wicked smile.

“Well, well. If it isn’t the little half-breed Prince. I hope you won’t take these humble quarters to mean I’m any less pleased to meet you.”

Cai’s already beat-up face twisted into a scornful smile that put the woman’s to shame.

“I wish I could say the same but I don’t tell lies to those I don’t care about.”

A red eyebrow twitched and her smile faltered for half a moment but just as quickly she grabbed the sides of her already short dress and dipped into a sarcastic curtesy, flashing her eyelashes and putting another hand to her chest to fake modestly.

“How noble. My name is Rubella but I’d be flattered if you called me Ruby.”

“I’d really rather not be on the first-name basis with a knockoff. But I wouldn’t mind you calling me Your highness, your royal highness works too. It’s a bit of a mouthful though.”

The banter was strained and painful to listen to. Cai’s voice was hoarse and aggressive as he spoke while Rubella’s was tinny and mocking. Feeling a bit meaner than usual I could only describe it as a female jack-box.

A male with a silver horn protruding from his forehead strode into the room and bowed to Rubella. Aside from the horn in his forehead the first thing that I noticed about him was the two white silver stripes running through his jet black hair, the second was his intense orange eyes which were just a shade off red, and the final but most impactful was how much he resembled Finn, and once I thought about it, Cai.

It wasn’t a comparison I would have made if I had seen them independently, but seeing them together loosened a mental knot and the difficult truth began to reveal itself to me.

The face, the stature, how familiar he acted with me. They were so similar that I was ashamed to not have put it together before.

The name should have been my biggest clue.

Cai. The name of the prince that had put himself in danger to come to save me, and the name of one of the ‘voices’ in Finn’s head.

“Finn’s gonna be mad at me… or maybe not, after all, he doesn't even know I can come out yet. But don't you think it's unfair? He lets Cai out all the time but I have to stay inside his head! and he even made the rule that we can’t forcibly take over so it’s doubly unfair! it’s only because he passed out I was even able to come out and I had to fight with that Fairy prick to actually come out.”

The antagonized voice seemed to echo in my ears and almost managed to overwrite the conversation in front of me. Almost.

But that didn’t make sense. Finn was human. He rarely talked about it but he had a childhood in the human world. His parents had also been well-established members of society. I tried my best to deny all connections of my best friend with this cocky fairy that had kicked me into a wall, broken my spine and wiped my memory after healing me.

I really tried, but somehow my suspicions refused to die and even began to thrive. I forced myself to put it aside and pay attention to the scene in front of me.

“I won’t ask you if you’re an idiot since the evidence speaks for itself but I do have to ask what you think you'll achieve by doing this. You can’t kill me unless you want to trigger the full wrath of the Fairy and goblin kingdoms, and the most your magic can do is restrain me. Even then you still had to capture my Aide so you could use him as a hostage. What happens if I decide I don’t value him as much as I value myself?”

He spoke mockingly and kept steady eye-contact with the increasingly agitated witch. Her tattoos swirled and a knife formed in her hands like solidified ink, then just as astonishingly, she plunged it into his already torn wing, and wriggled it to make the injury bigger. The skin on the wings wriggled around the wound, attempting the heal the wound but they were already overtaxed as they were.

To his credit, he didn’t scream and gritted his teeth, forcing a wretched grin through the pain. I could have sworn I saw the horned man behind Rubella twitch and scowl at the sight, but it was gone quicker than I could confirm it. Cai continued through gritted teeth, obviously intending on making the witch as angry as possible.

“I see you’ve managed to capture a few goblins to work for you or wait. You just aren’t as good as your predecessor, are you? These goblins aren’t working with you. You couldn’t convince them to join you, so you settled on capturing a few and brainwashing them. Not only are you a knock off fairy, but you’re even inferior to your own kind. Looks like the witches aren’t too picky about those that lead them.”

She materialized another knife and plunged it into his wing again, this time into one of the few untorn places, sickly sweet smile completely gone.

“Why don’t you shut your pretty little mouth, your royal highness. Wouldn’t want you to get too hurt before you can sign the agreement for fairies to hand over the spring court to us witches.”

“And why would I do that?”

She flipped her hair, back to her sickly sweet façade and sidled up to Cai, who continuously bled golden blood, drop by drop despite the many injuries he sported. Each drop trailed from his forehead, down his face, down his torso, past his feet and onto the floor. A flower would begin to bloom from each droplet, but the horned man, who I assumed was a goblin, casually squashed each blossom underfoot before they could bloom.

“Isn't it because you fell madly in love with a witch and decided to spearhead the union of the two races? As a symbol of sincerity, you decided to hand over the Spring court.”

Cai barked out a laugh, course and incredulous,

“And I suppose that witch would be you? Over my dead body, Knockoff.”

She twitched at the name he kept calling her and another knife materialized in her hand, this time she plunged it into his calf and kept pushing until I could hear it connect with the wall behind him.

“Now now dear, we’ll have a long future together won't we? Isn’t it better to start getting along now?”

Cai tilted his head back and with all the resentment I was sure he currently held, spat in her face. It was so childish and so unexpected that Rubella was stunned. She stumbled backwards by two whole steps and then frantically began to wipe the saliva off her face, smudging her makeup in the process. The more she rubbed at her face the more of it came off and a completely different face soon revealed itself. In fact, if it hadn’t belonged to this psychopath I might even have considered her pretty if not a bit plain.

“You! How can you still use magic?!”

He let out a genuine laugh and the pleasant sound filled the dreary room.

“If you want to convince anyone that I fell in love with someone that kidnapped me then they should at least be better looking by me shouldn’t they? or at least they shouldn’t be stupid enough to depend on such a simple illusion in front of a royal.”

She covered her face with both hands and called for the goblin with a trembling voice, that showed how hard she tried to keep her composure and not stab Cai to death.

“Ion!”

Cai’s eyes flashed at the name and he stared at the Goblin with a renewed gaze. Did he know him?

The goblin stepped up at Rubella’s shriek and stood at attention.

“Stay here and make sure our guest is as comfortable as possible. We don't want him feeling too homesick would we?”

She pressed a knife into his hands and strode out of the room, or she tried.

“Careful not to break a limb old hag! I hear healing gets more and more difficult with age!”

She didn’t look a day over twenty-five but the way she reacted made it hard to believe that was her real age. Rubella froze for so long that I expected her to go absolutely ballistic when she turned around but instead she turned around with a big albeit manic smile and pointed to the vines that held him in place.

The tightened so much that they indented his flesh, not that he had a lot of it left, and their glow intensified so brightly that it became hard to look at. She strode back to him, illusion spell back in place and reached out a hand to his face, giving it a gentle stroke.

“Such a pretty face, it's really too bad that you have such a nasty personality”

Her long nails drifted down from his face to his neck, slowly tracing each vein from the top to the base. Her hands lingered around an uncomfortably familiar locket and in a single movement yanked it off his neck.

An inhuman scream escaped Cai as he managed to break a single-arm free of the vines and grabbed her by the hair. She screamed in horror as she saw the mass of hair in his hands but not from pain.

It was a wig.

As the vines recaptured his arms and tightened enough to make him drop the wig onto the ground the patchy scalped Rubella looked at him like she wished for nothing less than to dismember him, limb from limb.

Cai on the other hand looked insulted. Like she had let him down in the worst way possible.

“You really are an old hag aren’t you?”