His hands touched my face, the warm feeling of his fingertips brushing against my skin. "(Y/n), are you awake?" He was saying. Was it something happening, a dream or... a memory?

The hazy image of his face flickered in and out of focus, the room I was in having nothing but faint light to illuminate it so I couldn't make out his face. I knew him so well. I... "I'll let you sleep a little longer, okay?"

I reached up to catch his hand before he could move away, but—

My eyes flickered open, seeing the dark room I was in. This was much different than the place I'd just been. I looked about me, my body feeling stiff and my head aching. The room looked like a medical room, standard tools like needles, scalpels and heart monitor machines arranged, but also odd-looking machines that seemed to fit in but also be out of place.

I went to move my hand, and then realized I couldn't; it was being held down by a fabric straps connected to the... chair I was in? It was a checkup chair, like the ones they had in a dentist's office.

I sat up the most I could, realizing that it wasn't that much. My head pounded. I heard a door open behind me, and my heart began to speed up. "(Y/n), (Y/n)... Don't be alarmed." A woman's soft voice said. There was slight movement on the chair, as if pressure had been added to it to make it shift. I felt fingertips touched my cheek and I turned my head to see the woman.

She was the same nurse that I'd seen in the infirmary in the DWMA weeks ago. I felt panic set in as I realized just who she was. All the talking between my friends about her. The snake witch.

"Medusa..." I said, more frightened than angry at the moment. It was all I could manage.

She smiled at me. "Sorry about the whole kidnapping thing. I really like you and Mari."

"Where is she?" I said through clenched teeth, fear for my friend hot in my chest.

She smiled, not saying anything for a moment. "She's busy right now. Her and I have some history, and right now she's catching up with the others." I got the sense she didn't mean over tea or anything. She leaned in, touching my forehead with her hand. My skin was hot and my whole body was drenched with sweat. I had to have had a fever. "She's caused me quite a bit of trouble in the past."

"What do you want with me? Us?" I asked, my voice breathy. I found it hard to muster the strength for words. What was wrong with me?

Medusa smiled. "I don't feel the need to explain about Mari, but you," she said, brushing my hair back away from my forehead. Her fingertips were icy. "I simply want to see what happens when you break." She said.

Something washed over me, an icy dark feeling filling my whole body, moving up from my feet towards my chest, causing my throat to close up, and then eventually reaching my head. My head exploded with pain and I let out a muffled scream, knowing Medusa would probably just enjoy it all the more if I showed any sign of pain.

Memories, just like the odd ones from before, filled my head. Too many. Feeling like multiple lifetimes cramming into my brain. I thought I might seize because of it all, my body writhing unwillingly on the medical chair.

All at once, it was quiet.

I was somewhere else, not in a memory or anything like the way that I'd relived some of them before. No. Real life. I must've passed out from the pain. I touched my temple, the ache of what had happened fresh there with all—and I mean far too many—memories. I knew that I knew them. They were all mine. My friends were there. Sometimes one was missing, gone, changed, or there might be someone else. A woman in her twenties, blonde, smiling, a girl next to her that looked like her daughter. Angelica. Angelica. I watched the woman grow old, happy, I watched her die young. I saw her daughter get married, I was the maid of honor, I saw her dead—ripped apart—in the halls of the DWMA.

There was another girl, Asuka. Mari had loved her in one set of memories, she didn't exist in another. I saw a man, Atsuki, and he was like an older brother to me. In one set of memories, he married the woman Angelica. In another, a different woman Rei. In one, he drank too much, it ending his life.

And then the way I was changed. I was a weapon. I was a meister. I was human in one line, and then in the next I was a Keshin, killing for the sake of it before I was stopped to become like what Ashura had been, a monster. In one set, I got married, in another I moved away from Death City and didn't come back. They all ended in a haze, moments that seemed—must've been—vital missing. At the end of what I could only call lifetime, there was a blank space. I could remember pain, that much clear.

I held my head, not understanding everything. They were all my memories. Mine. It was all jumbled, my brain slowly fixing it all into time lines and categories, or trying to. There was only one thing that was consistent in all of the memories, through me becoming a death scythe in one lifetime and getting cancer in another...

Mari.

I looked up as the door to room—more of a cell with a single bed in it—opened. I saw the giant man from earlier, Free, standing there. He held Mari up by her arm, her body limp. He threw her into the room and the door slammed shut.

I scrambled to the blue-haired girl as she coughed, her whole body shaking. From laying down she didn't look too hurt, as far as I could tell. "Mari... Mari!" I said, reaching down to her and taking her shoulders. She shuddered, flinching, and I turned her over.

The air left my lungs a little as I saw the front of her. Medusa had done something terrible, that was clear. There was blood tracing down her face from her hairline, like something had hit her. Her black eyes were... gone, replaced by more normal looking eyes, blue, and completely bloodshot. Dark red and purple circles lined under her eyes, her left cheek slightly split, bleeding. I could see tiny cuts along her neck and arms, leading under her shirt. I realized something deeper was wrong. Her eyes, her blood. It was like a normal human, not the black blood, like the boy Crona had.

"Mari, what did she do to you?"

She shook her head, her lip trembling. I lowered my vision, using my meister eyes to see her soul. Still it's odd, shifting multi-color shades; human, witch, Keshin egg. But why were her eyes and blood different?

"She took it. What she made." Mari was saying, her throat clearly raw from the way she sounded. "The black blood." She said. She grabbed my hand, her now red blood smearing on my fingers. "A while ago, she did something to me, like what she did to Crona, and I had black blood." She said, her bloodshot eyes wide, her pupils tiny. "She made me into this thing, and now," she said, "it's gone. She took it away again."

There was something odd behind Mari's words, like she had almost wanted the black blood gone. "What did she do to you?" I repeated, knowing there was more just by looking at her.

Mari was silent, her lip quivering as her eyes tried to focus on me. "I don't... she..." she said, seeming to desperately search for the words. Her eyes filled with frightened tears. I pulled her farther into my arms, holding her. "Did she... hurt you?" Mari asked.

I stiffened a little. Mari felt it. She clutched to me. "She..." I started, not quite sure. "I have all these memories. I know they're mine, I know they are, but it's like... I lived all of them, but there's so many lifetimes worth I can't make sense of it." I looked back down to Mari, and saw her eyes knew something. "Mari..." I said, my voice soft and trembling now. "What did she do to me?"

Mari clutched my shirt, looking into my eyes. "(Y/n), there's something I've needed to tell you. Since I found you in this lifetime," she said, her breaths weaker.

"This lifetime?" I asked, my stomach sinking slowly.

She nodded, breathing in. "I've been changing everything, using my magic. It's not even a tenth of what it was after everything I've done." She said.

"But you're so powerful..." I said.

She shook her head. "You don't understand." She pressed on. "The first lifetime, when I met you, something... bad happened. It was all my fault. All our friends. They got killed. It was... I..." she was saying. "I wanted to fix all of it. Make it better. So I used my magic and..." she was choking up. "...I changed the timeline. Reset it. I don't know how I did it. It almost killed me." She said. "I reset everything. Everyone was back. Alive. Just like the clock had been set back a year. You came to the DWMA and everything happened the same way. Almost."

Everything was whirring around me, all the memories flashing in front of my eyes. "What do you mean "almost"? And why is there more?"

She drew in a breath, looking into my eyes. "The second timeline. You became a death scythe. Everything was perfect. And then a witch came to power. Her magic centralized around making people insane. She drove you off the edge. You started killing people." She said. "I reset it all. Four years back now." She covered her face with her hands. "I kept on resetting it, not caring about what it started doing to me. My magic slowly depleted, but the worst was seeing everything replay over and over and not work no matter how hard I tried to make it right." She was shaking. "Something would happen to you, something would happen to someone else you loved. It would throw everything off and something terrible would happen and I'd reset it. Everyone would be like they were. I'd reset it back six months. One year. Four decades." Her hands bawled into fists. "Over and over and over and over..."

There was a moment of silence, filling the room and making my skin crawl. She removed her hands from her face, her eyes looking up at me, her pupils large and dilated now. "I've lived through forty-seven of your lifetimes. Collectively four hundred and ninety-six years. I found you in every single timeline. I tried to make everything go perfect. Make it so you'd marry the boy you loved. Got the job you wanted. To make up for everything that I'd done in the first life, and for all the things I'd done in the others." Her face contorted. "But every single time it would all go wrong. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried it didn't matter."

Quiet filled the room again. My hands rested on her, and I could feel her heart pounding. She'd done all this for me. Lived extra decades and centuries. I could feel tears going down my face. I leaned down, pulling her to me. She wrapped her arms around my neck, crying into my neck.

"This time when I reset it, things were so different. You weren't even at the Academy. I panicked. I thought something went horribly wrong. I looked for you and looked for you." She said. "Finally, I found you. I told Stein everything. I did in all the timelines. We got to where you were being held. Used a cover up story about destroying the lab. Everyone bought it."

I nodded. "Mari..."

She shook her head. "And now everything's gone wrong. Medusa made you remember it all. But—" she said, her words cutting off. "I can't reset it. I can't do it. Even though I have all this magic, if I do it, it'll kill me, for real this time. My minds become too brittle. Weak." She pulled away from me, and I saw the pure exhaustion on her face. "(Y/n). I'm so tired."

I nodded, crying. "Mari. Everything is all fine." She started to say something, but I shook my head. "I'll get through this. We'll get through this." She closed her mouth, nodding. I hugged her. "Thank you for everything." I didn't know what to say. What do you say to someone who's given their life for you? Do you get them flowers? "We're getting out of here. Everything will be fine." I said.

She nodded, hiding her face in my shoulder and sobbing, her whole body shaking with it. I could tell something heavy had been lifted from her shoulders. Maybe it was the heaviest thing someone could have; guilt.

...........

what a twist o-O