Agents' Imbalance

"Agents' Imbalance" is a BOTGD 2 oneshot written on February 12, 2021.
== Summary ==
== Full Text ==
Trips to the Jaw were kept to a minimum ever since the Rebellion took their residence there. Akkey and Liam had begun experimenting semi-regularly with his newfound ability, but other than that one instance where she went to him–it was perfect timing, truly, seeing Yun and Nala’s spar–, she would ask him to come to Yrus instead, to the cove. Tonight, however, she had a different purpose for visiting. A question that nagged her at the back of her mind for the past few weeks.
A portal stretched open in a place towards the far north of the old god’s bones, where the stronghold was the thickest and most isolated from people other than the scheduled entries. It was well into the night, not a cloud to be seen, swathing the landscape in light.
“I swear to Hel, you’re getting more and more difficult to find.” Akkey grumbled, one boot planting firmly into the bare ground, her arms crossed as she regarded the tall, lean figure that stood underneath a lone tree, perfectly in the guardtowers’ blind spot and hidden from sight.
“Language,” Juro turned to give her his usual crooked grin. His scarf fluttered at both the motion and the wind that decided to blow in that moment. He returned her gaze properly, “Is that how you speak about your divine mother?”
“Oh, shut up.” 
He let out an annoying chuckle, before sombering slightly. Particularly since they were on the topic of maternal figures. He asked quietly, “How’d that day go? The 13th…” Her mother’s death anniversary and her original birthday was extremely recent after all.
She was slow to reply, but when she did, there was cautious satisfaction in her voice, “…better than usual, actually. Shadowing’s been helping a lot, I think.” Her eyes were cast to the side when she said that, always a little iffy on the subject.
A leaf crunched as his foot shifted, amber eyes watching her carefully, “That’s good to hear.”
“Yeah…”
Their gazes met once again, locked between colleagues that could’ve been friends, but there were too many layers to uncover, a gap between them that couldn’t meet. Physically, Akkey was older, but Juro had an ancient aura around him that seemed to keep people at a big, unreachable distance from him, despite both of them entertaining their childish side more often than average. Two powerful agents contracted under Helheim.
The wind blew again, and her long dark hair and his light fringe moved in simultaneous waves. There was a shift in energy as Akkey opened her mouth in careful question, finally deciding to break the silence, “Why are you here, Juro? Is there something wrong?”
The Bookkeeper raised his brows, smile pleasant on his handsome face despite being in shadow, “…merely enjoying a moment of solitude to myself before returning inside. What’s with the sudden interview?” His tone was low to match her caution.
She shook her head, “No. You know what I mean. Why are you here? Now?” She raised her wrist slightly to motion towards the Jaw, and Juro followed the movement with his eyes. The quiet tension between them remained.
“The battle against the Conclave was progressing. I needed to witness it for the Library.”
“By risking life and limb to save Yun?”
The mutual apprehension tangibly heightened when she asked that, and the wind dropped with it in contrast. Juro blinked. His face remained unchanged, lazy grin and calm regard towards her, but Akkey knew she had hit something. That was why she came here in the first place.
“…no.” His reply was even.
“I saw you, Juro.” She wasn’t letting it go. Unlike their last conversation as agents, when she finally understood timelines and alternate souls, and broached the topic of his neutrality. She let it slide then, but the inconsistency and sheer strangeness of it wouldn’t let her this time.
There was an effort to keep himself steady now. She didn’t miss it, as his smile became stiff. Her ears picked up on something, although she couldn’t put a pin on what it was exactly. 
She continued anyway, “I felt your portal. You intentionally opened Virion beside the construct, that was no accident. The sword. The stun. You screamed…” She pressed forward with a step, and Juro involuntarily reacted, taking his own backwards. 
“When the construct was finally defeated, you were right beside me. I know what you were up to–I was doing the exact same thing. Every decision you made leading up to that point was for the purpose of rescuing the time jumper, even ignoring Stonegit, who was just as fucked up as Yun was.” 
His breath was shallow as his cadence faltered, "I didn't…”
“No help, no harm. For twenty years, you keep preaching that obnoxious mantra to me. Neutrality, and whatnot,” she jabbed a finger in the air, pointing towards the construct that peeked over the canines, “None of that was neutral.”
The sound became clearer. It was metal against metal, linking then pulling at intervals, like they were adjusting and positioning themselves. Juro was becoming visibly agitated, and Akkey could tell he wanted to teleport away. She understood. She would have as well, if it were the past. That’s why she had to be quick.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it. For fucking once you helped without me having to beg for it with a story. But you don’t get to break your oath, your Bookkeeper code, something that I know for a fact that you follow with every will and breath you have, so much so that you would let innocents die before your eyes–” Akkey grit her teeth at the memory from their old days, but she pushed it away, and went on, “–and then now that suddenly doesn’t matter because Yun was trapped?”
His hand had come up to his chest. Akkey saw it tremble once as the space behind him bent out of invisibility and into Virion’s physical form. Its wings were raised slightly, bristling. Juro shook his head, almost desperately, “It does matter!” 
“Then why did you save him? I was right there for Stones! I could have helped him for you, and you fully know that! I don’t go by your dumb rule! What is so special about this kid that you would do that?”
Akkey was less upset and concerned now, and just more confused as she thought out loud, albeit aggressively, “He’s… he’s… we barely know him! Sure, he told us about the Conclave in the first place. And now he’s here to fight Frigga, don’t get me wrong, I‘m grateful, I’m hopeful, I’ll be supporting him any way I can, but other than him and Milae having the same soul, he’s noth–” 
Wait… she stopped short upon the realization.
Her head swiveled to look at him, “…Milae.”
Juro jolted at the name, “Don’t…” Virion flapped its wings threateningly, hovering slightly off ground between both agents. The air from the movement blew outwards, and the wind picked up, hair and clothing beginning to flutter wildly.
“It’s because he’s Milae, isn’t it?” Akkey pressed. She eyed the golem with caution, but she was certain now, “You knew that from the beginning. With Milae… you are super–” her hands waved slightly panicked as she tried to settle on a word, “–I don’t know, weird about him.” 
She paced as she put two and two together, the breeze turning into a gale with her, “I thought I was imagining things. It may not be by a lot, but I know you better than a lot of people on Aidorin. You don’t stick around one person for very long other than me, and that’s only because of work. It gets in your way.”
“But you did that favour for him, with Frigga, and ever since then I saw you with him more often. Like–like a curious kid. Following him around. You went to the Fallfeast and–” She squinted. The festival was a little hazy, she was drunk, but even then… “–every time I think back to seeing you there you were with him, talking, laughing. And here… after the mass teleportations. He was worried about you. He stayed by your side.” 
“Akkey, please–” It was unmistakable now. It was the scrape of chains that filled the air, coming from nowhere yet also everywhere. A raucous cry came from the golem, training all six of its eyes in anger towards the nix. But Akkey didn’t stop, instead her brow creased further in her need for an explanation.
“You like him. Not like Dario does, no, but you–Jin Juro, Agent of Helheim, Bookkeeper of Neutrality… are no longer neutral. You’re attached to Yun Milae. A friend.”
The rush of air, clinking chains, and animal screeching that had continued to build in waves over the conversation suddenly ceased, like the world had stopped to take a breath, going completely white like it was covered in snow. Then like a dam, it broke into a torrent of magic, the golem bending out of its form in streaks of grey-blue and white, twisting in the space between them as Hel’s given magic surged above, before collecting, shrinking, and drawing itself into Juro’s staff that had appeared in his grasp.
The Bookkeeper held the stick in both hands like a sword, in a form with which Akkey was familiar, but only from him, as it morphed into what looked like a mirage of a different weapon, the base staff still in his grip but giving an illusion of a long, sharp, slightly curved blade with dancing cranes engraved into it, and a simple, squarish hilt peppered with golden flecks in the black canvas. 
He was right up at Akkey in a sudden burst of speed before she could blink, and she only managed to throw up an elemental blade of her own right on time. Weapon clashed with weapon in an explosion of energy and ice as Juro bore down on her, using his height and raw power to make up for his lack of comparable combat skills. Akkey grunted at the effort to keep herself upright as the pressure from above increased. Virion’s grey-blue and white energy pulsed once, casting Juro’s face half in shadow and half in light. It was a dull amber that stared back at her, lifeless and lacking his usual spirit, his face blank.
It sent a shiver up her spine.
A portal opened below her and she slipped through, causing Juro to lose his balance as she appeared behind him, arms raised high, ready to slash downwards in an attack from above. But he turned at the nick of time, meeting her blade of ice in a wide arc up. Again, magic collided.
The surge of Hel supplemented power blew their hair back violently, whipping Akkey’s dark locks wildly in the air. An olden, intrusive memory of another swordswoman Juro knew that looked like her crossed his mind in barely an instant, but it was enough to intensify the sound of scraping chains. 
They were locked in the struggle for another breath, before Akkey twisted her grip and sent out two shards flying from her makeshift weapon. They caught the Bookkeeper on the shoulder, slicing skin in quick succession. The pain shifted his grip and both blades slipped, and they pushed off each other in the momentary lapse, increasing the distance between them once again as power levels continued to rise, sending forceful gales in opposite, outward directions.
“Juro!” Akkey called out in agitation. This was a Juro she had never, ever seen in her life. They had sparred many a time, absolutely, but he always approached it with humour, amusement, a teasing grin pulling at his face. But this… this was nothing.
His hold on the sword became slack for a moment, letting it almost touch the ground as he trained his gaze towards her. Red began soaking the torn fabric on his shoulder as he bled, but it was short lived. Light shone from the wounds, magic pouring from it but in blues and golds instead, until it stitched the cuts close. The dark splotches of blood stopped growing.
Akkey started at the display of energy, uncertain if it was controlled or not. It definitely didn’t look intentional, but the colours and the power from it were familiar… and it wasn’t Hel’s.
“That’s yours,” she breathed, almost nervously, as she recognized it only due to recent events, “That’s from before, you used that on Yun. After the construct…” He lifted his head, and his face was finally illuminated properly by the moon, still completely void of emotion. The scars on his jaw caught light and seemed to glow unnervingly, casting a strange, unrecognizable aura on the blonde man.
Akkey clenched her fist as she approached him again, gradually picking up speed, unable to quell the annoyance in her at his refusal to give any type of straight answers,  “You said you didn’t have any! Since when did you have your own magic? Has it always been like that? Why have you never used it before?!”
Juro predictably had no reply. Instead, his enforced weapon slipped into the belt of his pants and out the side, mimicking a sheathed sword, his stance widening as his right hand hovered above the handle, eyes watching Akkey’s approach quickly closing the distance, waiting for the perfect moment. 
It came in a flash of silver and a water tendril, shooting out in a dangerously fast streak of light when Akkey threw her left arm forward like she would a ball, but much quicker and much more easily missed. But Juro met it head on. His staff unsheathed at lightning speed, swifter than any sword movement Akkey had seen before, and cleanly knocked her attack away.
But Helheim agents would as agents always would, as both twisted in a second attack hidden behind their first. Akkey threw her right arm up at the exact same point and time that Juro swept his sword arm around and willed his golem to open at the end of his weapon.
Portal collided against portal.
The characteristic hums turned into a high pitched, ear grinding whine, two frequencies twisting, looping, turning into one, then booming into a massive roar, deafening with the sound of chains that continued to scrape against the back of their heads. Agents strained as gravity and dimension warred against each other in immense tension, churning, curling, each unwilling to give in, contracting smaller and smaller into a disc as it pushed into the other, surging and fighting in a nauseating twist of magic. It crawled against skin and bone and muscle, bending, warping, pulling space and water unnaturally to its extremes in their struggle for power, building higher and stronger and bigger over the other in suffocating layers–until it could no longer hold itself in.
It exploded.
The pressure that contained it fractured, an eruption of energy flooding from between them. There was an outpour of light and colour many meters high into the darkened sky, splashing against each other then cascading with a perfect split in the middle– blues and golds towards Juro, purples and bluey-greens to Akkey. It was bright, blindingly so, as it shattered the landscape and blew them apart, sending them flying fast and far, bouncing and rolling painfully against the cold, hard ground as the air was knocked out of them, bruising and scratching their skin.
Akkey cried out as she landed heavily on her side, covering her head while the force of the detonation of energy kept her down, a cacophony of chaotic magic that gushed across the flats of the Scrublands and crashed against the side of the Jaw like a wave of ocean water on the shoreline, but immediately dissipating upon impact. It was many seconds before it died down, the wind calming itself and the overwhelming light finally fading back into darkness, leaving only the moon and stars behind. 
The sounds of the sudden short battle disappeared, and she got to her feet painfully, cautiously observing her surroundings as it cleared, searching for her colleague. Juro was nowhere to be seen at first, but finally she saw him in the far distance, his prone figure on the ground.
Shit–! “Juro!” She immediately appeared a few feet away from him, running as quickly as her thin legs would take her.
But she couldn’t reach him before Virion burst from the weapon he used, which had fallen out of his grip and returned to its mundane pen form when the impact rendered him unconscious. It rose to its twelve foot form and surged forward in a blur of feathers, catching her torso and arms cleanly underneath one talon and dragging her into the ground, dirt piling up around her as its weight had her completely trapped. 
“Gah!” She grunted as her back hit soil once again. Virion bent its head down, six beady eyes glaring into hers as his wings bristled in anger at the provocation the nix had brought onto its master.
“V-Vir…. Let her go…” a rough voice strained to make itself heard from behind the golem as it screeched its vexation over her head. Virion twisted its long neck around to regard its master questioningly, as Juro stirred, carefully picking himself up. It bristled again in disagreement for a few seconds, but relented soon after, lifting its leg off her and sweeping its wings to land beside him, helping him up to a sitting position. He shook his head, a tiny smirk slowly creeping its way back onto his face, “I was the one who attacked first…”
Virion could only croon in dissatisfaction, nudging him to lean against it as he caught his breath. The Bookkeeper obliged, without the energy to put up a fight, as he turned inwards for some introspective examination.
The initial attack was a haze to him, in similar fashion to the incident with Sylar’s body. The barrage of questions as Akkey had gotten closer and closer to the truth placed an intense amount of pressure on him, and her realization regarding Milae finally voiced things he had been denying, ignoring, finding loopholes around, and it escalated into that uncontrolled surge of emotion, forcing him to turn all senses off and let body take autonomy. ‘Friend’ echoed unwillingly in his mind and he threw it aside in a panic, hurriedly bringing his attention to the seal instead.
It was dangerous for a while there, but it seemed intact, starting with the Modern Bookkeeper first, his direct opposite yet the closest copy there could be that wasn’t an offshoot from his timeline. Lines to several broken and jittered timelines had unfortunately snapped a little early, snuffing out their Bookkeepers’ lives, but frayed threads like those were due for fracturing soon. Every time his seal was threatened, especially as of late, they were the first to go, to keep all other unbroken, stable threads unharmed. It would have ended much more disastrously if this happened to anybody other than Akkey. It was a close call.
He sighed in relief to find everything still in place, then slowly turned his head to face her, who was sitting up with great care, feeling where she would expectedly be sore in the morning. She groaned and cleared her head, “What the fuck, Juro…”
Green locked with amber, and it was a tumultuous range of emotions, anger, shock, confusion, and concern–but it was all one sided. Juro’s break in character was expectedly temporary. His mask had returned, with a lopsided grin and a raised brow, and Akkey let out a long, annoyed exhale at that, “My confusion is valid, alright, if I have to work with you until one of us dies–probably me–and you’ve begun acting like this, with magic of your own, then I deserve some sort of explanation–”
“My answer hasn’t changed, Akkey…” he interrupted. His cadence was even once more as he referred to their conversation up in the rafters, “My Helheim contract, the Library and the Bookkeepers, my neutrality… I still won’t explain. Even if you ask.”
She felt a wave of unexplainable sadness wash over her when he said that. The light in his eyes went empty for a moment, a deep loneliness crossing in them, resigned to his fate of solitude and silent suffering. 
Resigned? To describe it like that was slightly incorrect, but she couldn’t place it as accurately as she would like to. Intensely dependent… Unhealthily so…
Her brow creased in further worry, “Juro–”
He shook his head, wincing slightly as pain flared up down his back, yet firm in interrupting her thought, “There’s a disturbance on the timelines right now, and my involvement in the battle was in the interest of that. Hence why I’m here, why I appeared near the construct.” That was only half the truth, and both were highly aware. That’s why Juro said it almost forcefully, unarguably the end of that conversation. 
It was several moments of stubborn egos that played tug of war, but she huffed in eventual surrender. Still, not before Akkey added a final thought, “Fine. I’m sorry for prying. I won’t ask anymore,” The slight insult at being kept in the dark remained, but only temporarily as she softened, regarding him with care and worry that was almost motherly, if the nix were even capable of instincts in that vein.
“But suppressing it and running away like this will only bring you greater pain later on, and you’ll end up regretting it,” she said. They both knew she spoke from some experience, “There is no comfort in living like this, faltering, wavering, walking the neutral line. You’ll hurt a lot more people than you want to.”
Her eyes bore into his this time, and he took it, unchanging, two souls who end up finding each other sometime, somehow, across timelines, in a ripple of cause and effect. 
The moment was interrupted with a shout from above, and they broke their gaze to see several guards and their dragons flying towards them, as they had noticed the explosion of power from their positions. Their fight wasn’t exactly subtle, no matter how short.
“Ah shit,” Akkey cursed, feeling the familiar wash of meek regret at the constant consequences of her impulsive actions. There was barely any physical damage, thankfully, but it was light and sound that definitely was not inconspicuous, “Lila might kill us…”
“And this is where I take my leave,” Juro cracked a wider, cheekier grin, the previous tension forgotten, “The Commander will have my head before yours.” Virion immediately swirled into a portal for a place Akkey knew she couldn’t follow.
“Hey! You bastard–!” she whirled around in indignation as the Bookkeeper escaped, “Don’t you fucking dare run!”
She stomped up to him, standing taller than where he sat, when his smirk lessened slightly as his tone became serious, “I am not. I think I might have some more information about Frigga, but I have to research a little more. If anyone asks… I’ll be at the Library,” he tilted his chin up to meet her eyes again. Akkey paused, then nodded in understanding, “Alright.”
It was another heartbeat before he split his face into that exasperating smile once more, and fell backwards into the open portal, “See you later, Chief.” He disappeared from sight as the dragons landed behind Akkey, who was massaging a temple in annoyance, left to deal with the aftermath by herself.