This Is My Home (All I Ever Wanted)

Summary: Sepira had seen what was to come and knew how it would end. The Arcobaleno, on the other hand...

Author's Notes: This is the story I mentioned ages ago, where Harry becomes the Sky Arcobaleno. Not one hundred percent yet if it will be a reverse harem or not, but the thought is still there.

[~][~][~]

Sepira had seen her end long before it came to be.

Despite being a member of a long-lived race (too long-lived, she'd found herself musing in her more melancholy moments, reflecting on the actions, past and present, of her people), she had known that the moment she alone took the weight of the Sky upon her shoulders, she would die.

It was her fate.

Not that she hadn't tried to subvert her fate; she was not noble and self-sacrificing enough to just accept her death. She had tried so hard to steer her people from the path they were walking, from the path that would see them become little more than myth and their very civilization lost to the waves that had once protected them.

Oh, she had tried!

And she had failed.

(In that goal, at least.)

.

Some escaped the destruction, those who'd believed her when she'd warned of the consequences of trying to leap the gap between Immortal and Divine. But they were so few, barely three hundred where before they had been thousands, and though she had managed to take the Stones from their resting place in the Temple, she knew that, cut off from their home and its energies, her people would not survive.

And one by one, over a period of decades, her people died. Those with the weakest resonations and fewest bonds went first, the only evidence of their existence the sliver of power left behind in their half-mortal descendants.

As her people grew ever more scarce, she found other ways to support the Stones, ways to ease the strain placed on her people. In the years immediately after the Fall, she would likely have never considered what she did now, but the distance of time and the suffering of her people made the choice almost comically easy.

She found humans that could act as a secondary source of power for the Stones; better, she found humans that would. And she grew… Fond of them, found them fascinating.

The Elders, had they not perished with the City, would probably cast her out for her 'irreverent' actions regarding the artifacts her civilization had dedicated themselves to protecting.

.

In spite of her attempts, her people became little more than legend anyway, their numbers diminishing until there were only seven left, including herself, to bear the burden.

The Strongest Seven, the Mist-bearer had said cynically, wearily.

She could only smile bittersweetly.

.

Not even the strongest survived the stress of supporting their resonating element alone for long.

Within decades, it was only her and the Mist.

Soon, she thought to herself, soon there would only be the Mist.

.

When the time came, when the Stones were split even further than they had been before and forged into new shapes, Sepira gifted one set to an up-and-coming vigilante group.

One set, she kept for herself and began a family of her own with the mortals, as she had seen so long ago. Her blood line was still needed, after all, to watch over the world.

The third set, the most dangerous set, she entrusted to the Mist, now calling himself Kawahira, to guard and administer as he saw fit.

.

She was not surprised he returned within a day to leave the Sky Stone once more in her keeping.

It had always been her fate to die as an Arcobaleno, after all.

.

Sepira held the Sky for as long as she could, drawing upon her soul's resonation until there was nothing left to give but her life.

Then she gave that too.

And when her physical form shattered, leaving her little more than a shadow of a memory to wander the Earth she had given her life to protect, she wore a smile on her face.

She was the beginning, the First in a cycle of suffering and pain that would last for generations.

But to have a beginning meant having an ending, and Sepira had seen the End of the Curse long before it would come to be.

As Sepira was the first, she would be the last.

[~][~][~]

It had been years since the Arcobaleno system had been created, since Sepira had held the Sky long enough for her daughter to grow and begin a family of her own, and thus provide a bloodline that more often than not continued the tradition of its founder and took up the mantle of Sky Arcobaleno.

It was the same with the latest set of Arcobaleno. Sepira's descendant, Luce, had been chosen to hold the Sky Pacifier, and though she also chose to take on the infant form of the curse in order to slow her oncoming death, it was not enough.

Kawahira was… Disappointed.

The strength of Sepira's line was failing. Where his old friend had once held the Sky for a century, the Skies after her could barely manage half that. Even those who descended directly from her were failing to measure up to her strength, could only hold the pacifier for two decades, maybe three, before they died.

And even that was stretching it. Luce had held on until her daughter was a teenager. But her daughter…

He gave her daughter a decade before she would die.

He needed a solution.

[~][~][~]

They'd thought Aria had received the pacifier after her mother's death. Certainly, there'd been no rumors denying it and none of the Arcobaleno had known any differently.

Until that day.

.

The connection between the Arcobaleno had always been distant, especially after the Fated Day, when they had followed Luce so happily to the top of the mountain and had been forced to take on infant forms.

You couldn't expect much when you gathered the strongest users of each Element and threw them together and told them to bond, even if you tossed a Sky to try and bring harmony to the group.

So on any given day, the Arcobaleno were aware of the other elements on a peripheral level. The Sky, even less so.

The still knew - still felt - when the Sky died, though.

.

In various areas of the world, the Elements of the Arcobaleno paused in the midst of going about their daily lives. No matter how much distance there was between them, both on the physical and metaphysical level, it was still possible for them to reach out to one or all through the connection in the pacifiers.

And just now, for a moment, for a very long moment, the Arcobaleno felt the Sky reach out to them. Sky flames circled them curiously, practically embraced their own flames, wistful and longing. The Sky flames lingered, seeming to study them, before fading away.

Minutes passed.

The Arcobaleno began to put the odd occurrence out of mind.

And that was when it happened.

.

Without warning, there was a flare of Sky flames - desperate, determined, mournful - that scorched through the connection.

And then nothing.

The flames were extinguished. Dead.

Then, they were dying. They had to be.

They couldn't draw breath, it was as if they were being smothered, crushed beneath the weight of the world as the very ground beneath their feet - their feet, were they standing? They couldn't remember - thrashed and gasped and struggled, like an animal in the midst of its death throes.

Then, pain, unimaginable pain as they'd never felt before, like fire flowing through their veins. Flames, they realized, it was their flames. Their flames being forcibly wrenched from them by the object around their necks, the pacifiers flickering erratically as they greedily, desperately, drank in the flames in a futile attempt to fill the void left behind by the Sky's death.

And the Arcobaleno could do nothing, drowning in pain, in the sounds of millions of souls writhing and crying out in fear, in anguish, because the world was dying, they were dying, there was nothing but death, death and darkness and was this all there was, was this how they were going to go, was this the end, is the curse about to take them -

Numbness. No pain, no burning, no gasping for breath. There was only the lingering chill of death, clinging to their bones.

.

The feeling of death faded.

The pacifiers, the world, shifted back into balance as the Sky once again accepted the worst of the Curse. For a moment, a very short moment, they felt the Sky again, flames slipping through them and bringing their own back into Harmony.

Then the Sky withdrew, still there but distant and out of reach once more.

.

The experience sent them scrambling.

The Arcobaleno converged on the Giglio Nero house to check on Aria and her family. And that was when they learned she had never received the Sky Pacifier, that when she had reached to take from her mother's hand, Checkerface had appeared.

"He took the Pacifier from my mother and said he'd found a better Sky to carry it," Aria explained.

"Did he give any hints as to who he was giving it to?" Reborn asked, the other elements nodding in agreement at his question. Though they were each of them leery of Skies, the Arcobaleno did not like not knowing who their Sky was or where they were. They may not know the Sky and may not get along with each other all the time (most of the time) but they were still Arcobaleno, still a family in their own way, and one of them wasn't here, wasn't even known to them.

"No," Aria answered, expression growing grim. "But mother did. It was another female sky and.. She was so young."

"What do you mean?"

"When Checkerface took the Pacifier and told us he had a better Sky, she told him that 'she'll die before she's even eighteen.' It's been seven years now; at best, he gave the pacifier to a ten year old."

[~][~][~]

Oh, hello there. It's been a bit, hasn't it? Sorry about that, my dears.

For those who find themselves wondering, I do plan to update both 'How We Met Your Mother' and 'Amaranthine' soon. It's just a matter of me getting my crap together and posting.