Disclaimer: The Kid Icarus series belongs to Nintendo. This is not for profit and the darkness of my writing is slightly less subtle than their games.

Notes: I was originally going to make this a one-shot/longshot fic, but decided that dividing my basic ideas into chapters might give me a little more freedom to play with details. I find that in fanfiction-ville, longshots can drive people away – those readers that are more comfortable reading in small doses. This also gives me time and space to think upon the many elements I wish to include in the narrative. I decided to try giving the chapters really long titles just to be weird and to contrast with the single-word title of the story as a whole.

The idea behind this is the "Morality Pet" – a TV Tropes term defined as a character that serves to temper another, stronger or more forceful character and help them to keep their heart / do the right thing when they otherwise might act unethically ("I will do the right thing for your sake"). This story is meant to explore the idea of Pit being a morality pet for Palutena.

Minor update: When I first posted this chapter, I forgot to spell-check it. There were only a few errors, but they have been corrected now. Enjoy the edit.

PITIFUL

Chapter 1: Lay Your Sacrifice on the Altar and Stain the Light with Blood

The doors to the old Light Shrine burst open in a cloud of dust. They hadn't been opened in several years and it took the forceful shoulder of the strongest man in the world to haw them loose. The old priest that had once kept this place had died years ago and no one was found to take his place. The shrine had fallen into further disrepair after the Great War. No one in the town that the little temple overlooked was particularly inclined to making prayers and offerings to the Goddess Palutena anymore, for they remembered well when the once-trusted patron of Humanity had lost her mind and had become their enemy.

That was exactly why the strong man was here, breaking in. Magnus was just passing through the town on the plain, a place he had been to before, hired to fight to reclaim human-territory on behalf of the town's citizens. Times were peaceful now, more than they had been in decades. It would seem that the Goddess of Light had seen fit to bless everyone in the area again. Sunshine was plentiful, learning and inspiration were on the increase and crops were abundant. The survivors that had reclaimed their city, however, had not forgotten. Suspicion was given to any messengers of the gods – including the one that Magnus was holding.

"What are we doing here?" the boy asked. "My laurels…I dropped my crown."

"Hold tight, Angel-Face," the warrior said. "I'm doin' all I can for ya. If we go back right now, the townsfolk 'ill just finish the job. Maybe your goddess will hear ya if you're in one of her shrines."

Magnus laid the injured angel upon the altar in the back of the shrine. Back in the old days when it was used regularly, the Goddess of Light was given offerings of grain and wine-grapes upon it. Fruits and vegetables were considered the proper sacrifices – Palutena had never been given slaughtered animals, nor people. Blood-sacrifice of animals was common for many gods. Human-sacrifice was the domain of only a few – such as Palutena's counterpart, Medusa. The Goddess of Light was thought to honor warriors on the battlefields, but would have been offended by an innocent human form bleeding out on her altar. Of course, there was a person bleeding on this shrine-altar now, but the context was different.

Magnus turned to go, grabbing the hilt of the enormous sword strapped to his back. "Don't go," Pit requested.

"I gotta," Magnus said. "We were followed. I can hear the folk all in a mob headed here. I'll fight 'em off. Maybe your goddess will extract ya from the altar. That's what I'm thinkin'. That's why I brought ya here."

"You could have taken me to a hot spring."

"Not with that wound. That one guy stuck ya with a special blade. I don't think a little spa-time is gonna be enough. Besides, the baths are all the way on the other side of town. Just hang on and… pray or somethin'."

Pit lay on the altar like a prone sacrificial virgin. The pain in his stomach came in waves. He was covered with bruises and tender places where he'd been hit and had a few shallow cuts on his arms, legs and wings, but the serious injury was the gut-wound. Magnus had said something about the sword he'd been stricken with being a "holy blade," a particularly powerful kind of sword made from a metal that was rumored to be able to kill immortals. He wasn't afraid. He'd been finished off before – his boss had always brought him back. It was the silence in his mind that was driving him crazy with worry. Pit had lost his crown. It was the token by which Lady Palutena spoke to him and viewed his world from her place in the heavens.

He started talking to her, anyway. "Lady Palutena?" He asked the air, "Can you hear me? I'm kind of… in need of a little help. Time's a bit of a factor here…"

The pain was dulling and he could feel pins and needles in his extremities. There was a familiar feeling of being drained, of what happened when wounds were too much. Everything had happened swiftly and without his expectation. Pit had come to the town to check up on its restoration. He felt bad about what his de-souled body had done to this specific place during the time when the Chaos Kin had both him and Lady Palutena in its grasp. The worst thing about it was knowing that the ordeal really had been all his fault. If he'd not invaded the Lunar Sanctum on his mission to take out Viridi's weapons-manufacturing division, the Chaos Kin never would have escaped into the world. Lady Palutena had tried to tell him not to feel bad about it – that those his body had killed had only been killed by his body, not him. Viridi, of course, could be counted on for honesty. She'd reminded Pit that he had freed the cosmic evil that she and her butler, Arlon, had been holding prisoner. As Pit saw it, even though he did not have blood on his hands on purpose, the stain was still there.

So, the innocent criminal had tried to make it right in a small way by coming here to help the people rebuild their lives after the war was over. Surely, they'd known that he had quelled the Chaos Kin and had defeated Hades. The people here did know – but what he hadn't counted on was how little they cared. He was treated as a threat. Almost all of the adults in the town had set upon him as soon as he'd arrived, full of his good intentions. Pit had held back in his fighting, reluctant to kill humans, at least not without a direct order to do so – for they were the domain of his goddess - that which she protected and he was charged to protect – not to harm. On the whole, he liked humans, too. Pit had injured many people trying to get them to listen to him and then trying to escape, but refrained from landing any lethal blows. According to Magnus, who had arrived and immediately started helping him as soon as he'd seen what was going on, that was the reason he'd been hurt. Magnus, for his part, refrained from lethal moves, but was a less compassionate fighter. He'd crippled several young men.

They'd just about cleared a way for Pit to get to some high ground and to call for an extraction when the young town guardsman with the "immortal-killing sword" rushed him. Magnus had grabbed him and fled. His laurels had fallen from his head somewhere along the way.

Pit let his muscles relax. He could hear Magnus' heavy footfalls outside. "Lady Palutena, I'll find my way back to you…" he whispered. "I promise."

Magnus burst through the doors of the shrine again and quickly shut them behind him. He held up an object triumphantly. "Hey, kid, I got yer crown."

The man was met with silence and stillness. "Angel-Face?" he asked, approaching the altar. "Pit?"

Pit lay with his eyes open by slivers, as blue as they ever were, but soulless. Magnus felt the boy's neck and sighed. He ran his large fingers over his eyes and closed them and then gently put the laurel-crown on his head. "Hope we cross paths again real soon, kid," he said, but a sinking feeling in his heart told him that this finishing-off was for good this time.

A light shone down through the shrine's ceiling, defying normal physics. The body of Pit was lifted up in it before vanishing, leaving behind only some patches of blood on the altar and a few feathers. Magnus left by the back door, carrying his sword, hoping not to be followed by all the people whom he'd beat up – and those willing and able to slay an angel.

"What's wrong with the captain? Why isn't he comin' back?"

Palutena glared with impatience at the centurion archer who'd asked the question. Nearly her entire army was gathered in the throne room of her palace, watching her as she held their dear Captain Pit close, trying to will life back into him.

"He usually comes back right away when he gets finished," the same centurion commented.

"I know that!" Palutena snapped. "I know that," she said desperately, "I'm trying. I can't… I can't feel his soul anywhere!"

"You're crying, my goddess." Another centurion this time, one of the strongarms.

"Leave. All of you. Now!"

In a flurry of head-wing feathers and golden armor, the centurions scattered, leaving the Goddess of Light alone with the limp and pale body of their guard-captain. His skin was chalk-white and cold and his lips were blue. The fatal wound in his middle had not healed, despite all efforts. Palutena knew that the wound had come from a grievous weapon – a godslaying – and angel-slaying kind of weapon, forged of the rarest of metals. Dyntos would know more than she did… but he'd told her of this kind of metal once. It was the kind of substance that could cause an immortal creature to die – permanently. He'd been charged by the gods to try to find all traces of it upon the earth and to destroy or to denature it, but not even he had ever been able to be sure that all of the deposits of it had been wiped out. Of course, some of the stuff was said to reside beneath mountains that held endangered species of plants and insects, which put any destructive efforts at odds with Viridi's designs.

"Come on, Pit!" Palutena pleaded, rubbing the angel's body and kissing breath into his lungs. "Come back to me. Please…please…"

"He's gone," said the voice of a black-clad figure entering the throne room. "I can feel it."

"Pittoo…"

"Now is not the time to be calling me by that stupid nickname," Dark Pit protested. "Pit is…"

"You can feel his soul?" Palutena asked.

"Pit is not here."

"Do you know where he is? Go on, use your mysterious twin-powers, you know, the kind that let you two pull battle-speeches out of her skirt-clad hindquarters together."

"Pit's… gone," Dark Pit said, holding his hands out and shrugging. Distress shone in his brown-red eyes. "I really don't know where he is… or if he is."

"Do you feel alright, Pittoo- um- Dark Pit?"

"So far? Yes. I don't feel like I'm fading away or anything, if that's what you mean. This isn't like what happened with the Chaos Kin. I just feel… an emptiness. That's the only way I can describe it. I don't feel right, but I don't feel dead, either. I guess I still get to exist even though the idiot got himself killed."

"Don't call him an idiot!" Lady Palutena countered, a restrained fury flaring up in her features.

"He was my twin. I can call him whatever I want."

Dark Pit exited the palace hall, leaving Palutena to hold Pit's remains and weep. She was too stunned to do much of anything else. When she'd decided that it was going to take a special degree of dedication on her part to find his soul, she took Pit's body out to her garden and laid him upon a bed of flowers. She went to the center island of Skyworld and used her power to erect a shrine of stone with a stone sarcophagus. – Cremation was the more common funerary rite of the humans below, but if a goddess was to reunite the body and soul of one of their servants, they'd need at least some of the body to remain, dry bones at the very least. Being slain by an immortal-killing sword was not a favorable situation.

If a true, whole-cloth reincarnation was in order, there was the risk of Pit losing all his memories. In that case – would Pit still be Pit?

Before holding any kind of funeral or ceremony, Palutena had some business to attend to. She willed herself down to the surface-world, to the town that had killed her angel and to the shrine where he had died.

Magnus was traveling a mountain road when it happened. He looked down at the town he'd fled and saw an explosion of pure white light. It nearly blinded him, but he'd squinted his eyes closed on instinct and missed the worst of the onslaught.

Some people thought of "light" in regards to an elemental power, to be something for wusses, or else "all healing," an "only good" kind of power. Nothing could be further from the truth when light met certain standards. Light was a creative force in the universe – nurturing plants and serving as a guide to all beings with working eyes. Light warmed the skin and brought young plants up out of the ground. Light nurtured growth and knowledge. It could destroy, too. Light faded ink and letters in books. Beautiful paintings created by "enlightened" individuals never lasted too many years in direct light. Too much light could destroy the very plants light served to nurture. Light, in particular quantities and with specific properties, didn't warm the skin so much as it could melt the skin off bones.

The town that had slain an angel became irradiated in a matter of seconds.

The killer died. So did his wife and children. So did every innocent young, elderly and infirm person. One young man in the town had decided to take the upkeep of the old Light Shrine upon himself and to revive the worship of the Goddess of Light. He respected her angels and had not known of what had gone on in town earlier this day, for he was ensconced in the city's library. He was destroyed by the very light that he loved, without warning.

The town vanished. The buildings remained, but the fields were scorched. Outlines in grotesque white scars were burned into the stones of the street and of the walls.

The goddess stood, snapping her fingers and smiling slyly.

The sound of feathers rubbing together in a strained flight caught her attention. Dark Pit landed behind Palutena as she stood, surveying the damage wrought by herself as a wrathful god. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

"How did you get down here, Pittoo?"

"Viridi helped me. What are you doing? What is this?"

"Pit has been avenged," Palutena said matter-of-factly. "These people will never be able to hurt one of my beloved servants ever again."

"What. Have. You. Done?" Dark Pit demanded. "This… this isn't like you! It isn't like you at all! Pit… Pit wouldn't have wanted this! Have you lost your mind?"

Palutena looked down. "I… I think I have. It's kind of a rush, though, acting as a god ought. I have given the wicked judgment."

"What are you saying? Palutena… Earth to Palutena! You're acting just like you did when you were under the influence of the Chaos Kin!"

The Goddess Palutena looked around herself. The fields were undone. The people were gone. Her eyes caught the scorch-scars in the stones. "It is just one town," she whispered. "The town that killed Pit."

"But he didn't kill anyone!" Dark Pit shouted. "Do you think he'd be willing to serve you if he saw you like this? Wake up!"

"It is the in the domain of gods to pass judgment…" the goddess said half-heartedly, like she was trying to convince herself that her outburst of rage was justified and failing at it. "I…I need to go home."

She left and Dark Pit followed.