Pacifist♡Crush

      “I suppose that depends upon which me you mean.  I believe there have been several, as there are for anyone living.”  Rezo rumbles a chuckle.  “Sounds evasive, doesn’t it?  But I’m actually trying to be honest.  I miss the me that was kind without ulterior motive.  The me who healed a child’s pet kitten suffering from kidney failure, which got me no closer to seeing.  The me who did good things just because I didn’t want the people I healed to know how it felt to be me.  He did exist, you know, that me. For a long time, actually.  Oh, isn’t it awful, Ame?  Doing so many things right, and one, one thing wrong, and that one thing was such a terrible thing that it alone defines you in perpetuity?” 

He clicks his tongue. 

      “Ah, there I go.  In any case, the sun is warm.”

He pauses.  He licks his lips, and balks visibly.

     “What … . does it look like? Out here, in the gardens?” 

Pale cheeks darken, only slightly. 

There is also the fresh understanding that she will never really know what she is doing. That even Rezo, in all his infinite wisdom, can’t particularly do much else besides take his days one at a time as all the rest do. And hope, and wonder, and most especially regret.

She does not mind knowing him in this way. It is certainly not something Zelgadis could hear, but that is no fault of his. Amelia has always been the mediating force between parties nearly irreconcilable. It is a quality her father praises. It is a strength her kingdom needs.

Amelia folds her hands in the lap of her summer dress and lifts her chin to survey the gardens, looking at them in a way she never quite has before.

“If you’ve ever taken a bubble bath,” she starts slowly, eyes glossing over the sprays of blossoms choking every hedge and dripping from vine-crested lattice. “Or felt a bunch of grapes. It’s that sort of... abundance. Some of the flowers are white, like... like ice, or red like velvet. Blue like sugarcane melting on your tongue. The sunlight gleams behind the petals, outlining them in a, well... a glow, like sitting in the shade, but your feet are in the sun. The hedges are like great big walls, green like--like beeswax, and gemstones.”

Send ✘ and a question and my muse must tell the truth (2/10).

Rezo’s first impulse is to say “no one still living,” but then with serious contemplation, it occurs to him that’s no longer true. 

      “The girl he’s in love with.  Amelia.  Oh, she’s extraordinary, and she doesn’t know it.  So compassionate, still so hopeful, so courageous and caring–for caring IS a form of courage–even after repeated betrayal and loss.  She reminds me so much of him, when he was younger.  They’re soul mates. They just don’t know it yet.  He can protect her softness, and she can give him back what  … well, what I stole.  She can make him happy, which is my ultimate objective, and so, she is very important to me.”  

Typical Rezo didn’t surrender to fate for an excruciating interval.  He cast an amplified Resurrection, a series of hybridized shamanistic spells he’d designed to clot bleeding,  some desperate black magic, even half of a holy magical incantation, and then when magic did not work, he fell back on biology, and he beat on the corpse’s chest, and tried mouth-to-mouth, and finally realized not enough of Philionel was left to salvage.  And when there was nothing left to do, he wept. He has just called the time of death, and left the room to compose himself.  The blood of, in every way, his granddaughter-in-law’s, father, still cakes his fingers.  She is still inside the bedchamber, wailing in his grandson’s arms, wailing for her father to move, to breathe.  Inconsolable.  A humanitarian and a parent better than Rezo, for all his fame, could ever be, is gone forever. 

And the murderer dares sully the sacrament of mourning with her presence, twisting the words of a saccharine platitude into something snidely taunting. 

Rezo’s face is drawn with fury, and he visibly trembles. But he does not rise to the bait. He speaks in a voice hoarse with restrained tears.  

      “You expect me to do something ill-advised, and leave those two children in that room even further without the counsel of an elder? Sorry, demon.  I can’t, and I won’t, oblige you.”  

His lip curls, like something stinks and he’s too polite to point it out.

Rezo restrains himself (barely) from loudly proclaiming “fuckin’ amen, sister,” or something similarly profane.  Wearily, he rolls a smile Amelia’s way, and, with it, scoots her his entire (large) glass of wine.  Yes, it’s red wine, and yes, as ever, he finds it patently hilarious that he has no idea what red even means, yet people continue gifting him red things. 

     “People speak such platitudes in an attempt to help,” he sighs, “but always end up placing undue pressure upon the recipient, to somehow respond ‘the right way’ to trauma.  Darling, there’s no ‘right’ way for you to mourn.  Alright?  I work in a grief-heavy field, and the way people grieve runs the gamut.  Whatever brings you lasting comfort, so long as it’s no infringement on the rights of others, go that route.  And if your subjects are watching, maybe they’ll pull their adulating heads out of their asses and recognize you’re human.”  

credit .

Zelgadis takes an intuitive step back but, as Rezo moves to comfort Amelia, reluctantly removes his hand from the hilt of his sword. He isn’t certain what he feels, not for lack of clarity but for the fact that many, many things are happening to him at once.

There is rage, oh yes–and fear, and confusion, and that little disastrous cold flash in the chest that comes with trauma, the smell of wet stone and the ache of hardened skin, that feeling for which there is no name.

He pities Amelia in her bedraggled, undignified state of despair, and he wants to comfort her but doesn’t know how–Rezo’s doing so only serves to make him angrier, and he knows that some of that is directed at Amelia.

How could you? he thinks, and he wants to tell her, but he knows better. Disgust roils him. How could she stand to be touched by those bloodstained hands? How could she trust enough to let him into the King’s bedchambers? Indignance overtakes him; it is misplaced anger disguised as righteousness, as he is a Knight of this kingdom, and her foolishness is bound to get a flag set at half-mast.

He knows he is wrong about all of this, and he swallows.

“I am,” he answers coolly, though most certainly not with the air of an affectionate grandson updating his grandfather on his life achievements. “I don’t know whether you expected less. But I can see you’re very busy attending to the King’s needs. Don’t let me keep you.”

Permanent, she thinks, dreadfully. She has learned to not be too optimistic about these things.

“Mister Zelgadis,” she protests as he turns to leave, the nurturer and lover in her desperate to comfort him, to explain. “Mister Zelgadis, wait--”

“Who comes?” interrupts the King from his bedside, clearly upset at this interjection. He says it again, insistently: “Who comes?”

Amelia looks torn, hovering between the doorway and her grandfather’s bed. “It’s Mister Zelgadis, grandpapa--please rest, it’s only my friend--”

“Huh…”  Why did this feel all so strange?  It was just a task, all the same as so many other things.

Find and destroy the copies of the Claire Bible.  Offer Lina Inverse’s life in exchange for Valgaav’s service.  And most recently, ensure that the ruler of Seyruun could be controlled by the Mazoku race.

It was just another job which he had to do, as there was no way Prince Philionel would ever sway to him.  He’d certainly sooner die!  And so he would.  Phil would die, and Xellos would remain to offer false comforts to the mourning princess.

But that phase of the plan wasn’t yet here.

“Mister Xellos,” she admonished, looking up to the sky. “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep. What if someday you get in trouble for being too nice?”

“Oho, come now!  Don’t sell yourself so short Miss Amelia!”  Ah yes, the deceptively cheerful tone of voice was back in full force.  Honestly, he loved it.  He loved how easy it was to trick humans with just the slightest change in demeanor!

From a venomous monster to a passive jester in a split second- truly it was a talent of his.

Rezo, a man last time he checked, swallows back a chuckle; he’s flattered to be thought the exception to the frustrated young woman with whom he chats.  

Zelgadis certainly won’t be anywhere near.