Stephanie Edgley was a Good Girl. She never really set out to be one, of course, because girls who connive and conspire to be seen as Good are very often, in fact, Bad, or at the very least Shallow. Stephanie didn't, though, and so she rested as Good. Certainly, she wasn't perfect, but no one is. She never killed, never stole, never destroyed, and she was Virtuous.

She went to Mass every Sunday, and she spoke the penances like she meant them. She said the Rosary every night, whether there was anyone there to hear or not. She never managed to read the bible from cover to cover, but she made several valiant attempts.

Valkyrie Cain, on the other hand, is, if not necessarily a Bad Girl, definitely not a Good one, and it takes some considerable stretching of the truth to make her seem like anything but a sinner destined for Hell. She cheats, she lies, she uses and she abuses, drawing everything and everyone about her into a twisted little game of hatred. She has broken every moral she has ever had, and she no longer cares for religion.

In the end, though, she thinks that she might even be a better person as she is now. She has erred, but she has learnt. She has fallen by the wayside, but she is returning to it, and she has become strong. There is only one thing that keeps dragging her down.

Skulduggery Pleasant is a good person. Generally. Kind of. He's absolutely raving mad, of course, and he's manipulative and a liar and too honest and unnervingly contradictory, but he's still something of a good person. There's the spark of one in him, at the very least.

He is definitely not a Good Person, though, if only for one thing and one thing alone. Everyone he encounters, he corrupts.

They meet for the first time on a gray day. Her eyes are vacant and his are nonexistent. She is still Stephanie Edgley, and she mistrusts him. She is a Good Girl, and Good Girls do not speak with Dubious Individuals, and he was at least a slightly Dubious Individual, in the same way that cats, if they happen to be scratching your eyes out, are at least slightly alive. She becomes curious, though, and those stirrings are the beginnings of Valkyrie Cain.

The sun is bright at the reading of the will, and Stephanie Edgley is on the wane as she listens to the Dubious Individual with the velvet voice speak. Still, she is mostly there, a shell around the quickly growing Valkyrie Cain, and she manages to keep herself together, keep herself Good, for the most part, even though she is being eaten away at by her curiosity.

They meet once more on a windy night, the Good Girl and the Dubious Man. Stephanie is forever lost, and from her ashes rises Valkyrie.

Valkyrie Cain is a Bad Girl. She thinks herself all the better for it.

A/N: Kind of a response to those gorgeous people who seem to think that there is something somehow immoral about a pairing of two consenting fictional adults. Incidentally, those people are the reason why I like this pairing - they somehow manage to make it seem almost as fun as a homosexual ship.

~Mademise Morte, January 21, 2012.