#cholericchimera

"I've got you." - cholericchimera

Send “I’ve got you” to help my muse clean blood off themselves. 

Rezo has been unnaturally still since he cornered Riksfalto outside of Philionel’s bedchambers, and demanded she abide by a warrior’s honor code of temporary retreat.  Retreat, that the mourning might bury their dead. 

What was left of him.

The Sage has silently endured incessant personal and professional stress for many months now.  But it’s a struggle too great even for him to conceal his anguish.  Not only because Phil had become a close personal friend, but also....

Zelgadis enters the room--and fuck, fuck, of course, right now, when he cannot shield a soul from his pain, it has to be the one person for whom Rezo has tried to be flawless, in abject terror of falling back into dangerous old habits.  The Red Priest curses the gods who do not, do not, DO NOT have his trust.  And he does so audibly, a hiss of “shit” between his teeth, lips tightening into a thin line. He jolts even then, sampling something disgustingly ferrous on his lips. 

It dawns on him then, he hasn’t changed his garments. He hasn’t even washed his hands.  He’s still sitting at his desk, in his bloodied night clothes.  Blood . . . is there blood on his face?  How savage must he look, a healer baptized by the viscera of the person he could not save.  

    “I’m sor . . . !”   He can’t even get those three syllables out before his voice breaks, and he must swallow, and wait for the weakness to pass.  

Zelgadis cuts across him and simply says, “I’ve got you,” and he feels roughened stone hands take his own and quietly, diligently, kindly scrub off the blood of the man who would have been his grandson’s father-in-law, and it is too much, it is too much, too much, for Rezo, that they are here, at this juncture in both their lives, when his child would be burdened by this grief, because Rezo once again was weak, or stupid, or slow. 

I n s u f f i c i e n t , WORTHLESS old man! 

For the first time since he came to Seyruun, Rezo weeps in front of Zelgadis. Not a little bit. Not a tear or two.  A broken, rib-crushing, cannot-breathe-between-the-sobs kind of weeping.  He covers his mouth with a closed fist, and he cries some more, while a vein presses out against his pale forehead, while tears and snot run in an ugly torrent down his face.  He has never been less dignified, or more human.  

      “I . . . . w-wanted, I wanted . . . ! So MUCH  . . . . to be of USE to you, I . . . .wanted to save him for you, f-for HER, but especially for you, I . . . . please . . . believe me, I tried, I TRIED . . . . to save him!  You had a proper parent, you finally . . . . !  I’m sorry, I’m . . . SO sorry, I’m sorry . . . !” 

Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP--!!!! 

Rezo bites down on his closed fist, and shivers once, violently, and shuts the fuck up, like he ought to.  The hand that Zelgadis has already cleaned scrubs down his face, as though to literally erase visible evidence of his devastation.  His features are blank again.

     “That was . . . inconvenient for you, forgive me.”  

His voice is dead. 

    “I’m sure Amelia needs you more right now.”  

Send a symbol: ✏  for my muse to teach yours another language.

Rezo brushes cookie crumbs from an impromptu snack off his fingers and his robes, and lifts his lavender-haired, blue-eyed little twin, in blue onesie pajamas sporting frolicking hedgehogs, back onto his lap.  

      “Alright, m’love, where were we?”  

Zelgadis is six, but no one can convince the Sage that his grandson isn’t the smartest child ever to be made flesh upon this earth.  Moreover, the boy’s curiosity is nearly as voracious as Rezo’s, and he asks “why” at least five times an hour, with an endearing faith in his grandfather’s willingness to answer to the best of his seemingly limitless knowledge. And Zelgadis asked how many elvish dialects there are within the mazoku barrier. 

 Actually, he said, ‘grandpa, are there more funny ways the elves talk?’, but Rezo just knows it’s proof positive that the boy is an ingenious linguist in training. The coolest, handsomest, brightest, best kid, empirically proven.

  So here they are, with the authoritative text on elvish dialects over the past thousand years. 

The book is fatter than Zelgadis is tall. 

No matter! They’ve stuck to a specific word: Zelgadis’s favorite color, “blue,” in each dialect.  The child has decided that after this, they will learn “sword,” and after that, “magic.”  

And after that, “red,” which made Rezo’s whole insides glow. 

Rezo snorts; his mask of serenity breaks altogether and gives way to a rare expression of delighted amusement.  

      “Well, likewise!” he chortles, and then squints, recognizing it’s not a joke. “OH, ooooh, I see, forgive me, you mean with respect to your knighthood.  Which is, I must say, the most deserved of honors.” 

He can’t help the presumption of proudly beaming.

     “I’m sure you excel at your duties.”  

Rezo was up all night with a consumptive child, a little girl, no older than six, who was so far gone that Recoveries were too weak and Resurrections too abrasive.  In the end, she didn’t make it, and he was reminded, swiftly and potently, that over a hundred years of obsessive study is not enough to change the course of fate, when it wants to claim an innocent life. 

Or keep a person trapped in an ailment: forever. 

So it’s with less than the usual grace, far less than the usual patience, that he bypasses sleep and heads straight to the Seyruun laboratory, only to find Zelgadis there, ripe and ready for a fight, launching these words at the most conveniently justifiable target.   

Rezo has no clue in hell what crucial need he’s failed to meet this time, but at last, after months and months of diligent guilt, he defends himself.  

       “I’m afraid I can’t think of an alternative, Zelgadis, when you never want me near you!” he snaps.  He doesn’t have to raise his voice; there’s viciousness enough to convey his frustration.  

Ah, shit. 

He collapses into a seat at the laboratory table.  He lifts a finger. 

     “Before you storm off again, give me thirty seconds.  Go to my desk, open the bottom right drawer.”

He awaits the tell-tale sound of metal hinges being scraped open. Within the drawer he indicates, is simultaneously the ugliest and the cutest Pepto-Bismol pink teddy bear. Zelgadis will recognize it from the demolished laboratory in Sairaag. 

The words cause the Red Priest to completely freeze. 

Rezo didn’t expect this question so soon.  Not that Zelgadis hasn’t surely been wanting to ask it since the day the Sage arrived in Seyruun; rather the fact that his grandson asks this point-blank is evidence he earnestly seeks an answer.  Which, in turn, is evidence that he might be willing to change his demeanor toward Rezo if the answer is satisfactory.

He has the presence of mind to encourage such candor, with a small warm smile.

      “Put it this way.  In the end, I wasn’t strong enough to resist Shabranigdu’s influence.  But he is gone now.  There’s only me.  I can speak for myself now.  And I will choose to put you first, Zelgadis, regardless of what that entails.  Beyond that, you must decide for yourself.  I won’t force a conclusion that flatters me.”  

It’s The Red Disaster’s Birthday!

He’s on his way to request an audience with the princess, and thank her with her thoughtfulness, when his hand brushes a larger, stiffer piece of paper.  He frowns, truly puzzled, and picks up the card.

     “ … ah,” he exclaims, a little breathlessly.  Now that was unanticipated. 

He chuckles; Amelia probably coerced Zelgadis with pontifications on justice and compassion.  Now he has a second kindness for which to thank her. One, in truth, of many she’s shown.  

He reads the note three separate times, to make sure he’s not missed a single syllable or linguistic nuance.  The greeting is typically sparse and formal and it makes something inside him swell with affection.  It’s so very familiar. 

He musters courage out of inexplicable dread, for what in the world could Zelgadis have procured, to give him?  

But Rezo, Great Sage and arch-genius extraordinaire, folds the card and sticks it into a pocket of his tunic, and blows a raspberry.  Loudly. And a second time.  

Right. One o’clock, the hour is already near at hand.  Get going, birthday boy. 

     “  … yes.” 

What defense does he have, or what elaboration?  His grandson has summarized the situation aptly indeed.  And in truth, it’s difficult to tell if that statement’s an indictment or a pardon.  

Today Rezo isn’t so resilient to Zelgadis’s interrogations and challenges.  So he doesn’t make the effort to seem as though he has that strength.  Everything about his body language is passive, acquiescent.  He sinks into a seat, and folds his hands in his lap, with a vague and lost facial expression.  

    “Yes,” he repeats, a bit more firmly.  

He knows he should be trying harder to engage with his grown-up boy whenever Zelgadis finds the graciousness to speak to him.  But he’s run dry of wisdom.  

Rezo assumes his grandson refers to the familiar (mostly) benign chaos of his laboratory, and the fact that the two of them were happy itinerants long before Eris, Zolf, Rodimus and the others joined them.  Long before Rezo was famous enough to own several mansions, it was the many odd loamy scents of his potions, the bubbling of test tubes and the clinking of glass instruments against petri dishes, that the child Zelgadis considered home.  That, and a good children’s book about heroic knights, read at bedtime in his grandfather’s charismatic voice.  And a blue teddy bear that never materialized.

A blue teddy bear. 

Rezo balks.  He thinks of the pink teddy bear he has hidden in one of the drawers at the Seyruun laboratory, the one he never gifted Zelgadis, because Rezo was too embarrassed by his blindness-induced mistake.  

Should he?  

No. Not yet. Patience. 

Instead he gently shrugs and pulls out the chair beside him. 

     “No need to miss it.  Sit with me. Let’s just talk for a while.”  

A pause without response, and he musters an indulgent chuckle.

    “My boy, there’s little I can do to you.  There are guards at every door, and this city is warded out the wazoo, as they say, from dark magic.  I have no insidious plot.”