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 Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2016 10:32 am
It had been five years since they'd met and, like the anniversary of his father's death, it was a date he'd never forgotten. Today was the first time, since they broke up, that he'd reached out to her, requested that she come meet him in the park where they'd first met. He was feeling nostalgic, remembering simpler times - days when they'd been young and naive.
Before the reality of war had set across their shoulders, settled into their bones and defined who they were.
It was ironic, he thought, that she'd tried so desperately to keep him bathed in light only to lead him spiraling into darkness. It was fitting, he mused, that she had led him down such a path, intentional or not, because she was her sphere.
Guidance.
The message had been short, delivered through the crystals they'd all received.
[To Alkaid: Meet me in the park at eight, beneath the lamps where we first me. ]
He didn't bother checking, or waiting for a response. He expected her to be there, he knew she would come. Despite themselves, they always came when the other called. It was the nature of them - always gravitating towards each other despite all the ruin it caused.
He'd arrived early, wanting to be the first one there, with a bouquet made up of daffodils, daisies, red daises, gladiolus, lilacs and a single red rose. He'd picked the flowers carefully, expressing everything that should've been.
There, beneath the pale lamp light, General Labyrinthite waited for what remained of the girl he knew he'd follow just about anywhere.
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Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2016 5:14 pm
It wasn't often that Alkaid was summoned. She was a creature that drifted in and out of people's lives, driven by her own goals and the things she wanted to accomplish for her kind before the last of her energy ran dry and left her to wither into nothing. There weren't many that made an effort to keep track of her for that reason alone and even fewer seemed to care what her duties entailed. There was no reason to ask when the end result benefited so few. But there was always one that came back, no matter how much time passed between the days they set eyes on each other. When he called, she answered, and she would always do so. That was how she found herself walking the familiar, winding pathway in the park she had once loved instead of torturing the unwilling captive holed away beneath the fiery, angry sky and her draining star. What he wanted she couldn't have said but she hadn't asked him why or for what purpose he wanted to meet in a place lost to time, a time when they both had been so innocent and full of hope. There was simply the knowledge that he only acted with purpose and that was enough. Each step was counted by the click of her heels and as her feet propelled her forward, the slim figure of the man grew more and more distinct. That was the edge of his cape beneath his hood, and the line of his wide shoulders, and.. Was he holding flowers? She paused just as the light of the street lamp bathed her pale hair in a halo, considering him from the polite distance without a word. The typically impassive face was pulled into a look of curiosity until, at last, the light inside of her fragmented memory clicked on and a quaint, amused smile tugged on the corners of her broken lips. "Today is February 8th, isn't it?" She never kept track of time - but she would never forget that date.
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Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2016 7:20 pm
Their relationship was a unique one, mostly built on the foundation of nostalgia and undying loyalty to an embodiment of chaos, Metallia. Time was a strange concept when related to the pair, existing around them but not quite effecting them and their relationship the same way it did with others. Alkaid brought a different side of Labyrinthite to the surface and he reminded her of human emotions that lay dormant within her.
Outside of his recruits and perhaps Zircon, as the captain was someone he was fond of - well as fond as he could get outside of Alkaid - he only ever called upon the senshi-general.
She would come, he knew. Just like he would always come when she called for him.
"It is," he responded quietly, holding out the bouquet of flowers towards her. "Happy anniversary Alkaid," he told her, a wry grin stretching across his tired face. He was too thin again, sharp cheek bones and jawline even more prominent than usual. He'd stopped eating regularly again because he was too frazzled, too scattered to think of anything but duties and training the beginnings of his team. "I know we're not - " he stopped, words dying on his tongue as he stopped to think about what he might say. "Nostalgia always gets the better of me when it comes to you," he admitted, appearing sheepish beneath the pale lighting.
He reached up with his free hand, pushed his hood back so it gathered around his shoulders. His hair was still that mix of stark pink against black, just like it'd been when they first met. He'd thought of changing it once again but it defined him as much as his weapon did. "Do you remember -- what you promised?"
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 6:56 pm
The grin, even in his hollowed cheeks, brought out a gentle smile on her cracked lips. It was hard to be around him sometimes, to feel herself slipping into someone she didn't even remember - but, at the same time, it always felt like she was waking up from something when those golden eyes met hers. For as long as he was near, she was someone truly invested in helping the people she had made so many sacrifices for. She remembered Alkaid only in times where she had reason to recall ancient memories. "I wouldn't have expected anything less," she heard herself saying, with more feeling than she meant in the words, as she walked forward and closed the distance between them, "it's not every day people walk a road together so long. That means something." Her delicate, cracked fingers closed around the stems with more care than any walking doll had a right to own. She dropped her bright eyes to the splash of colors held in the bouquet and mourned, for just a moment, that she had lost her more delicate senses. What did a rose even smell like? She couldn't recall. She heard his words distantly as she stared down into the colors, letting her mind wander as he spoke. She was listening, though, and she looked back up at him with a sharp glance. For half a breath she was a teenage girl promising a charming young lieutenant that she would show him the universe, and then she saw the memories begin unbidden, flashing like a zoetrope inside her mind. That girl looked back out of Alkaid's bright eyes, holding her free hand gently against her temple. She couldn't even find the words for a moment. "Yes," it was soft, a single word. The hand at her temple dropped and was suspended between them, her silent offer. Her promise.
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 8:12 pm
He watched her with interest and while the rest of him appeared sullen his eyes were still bright, full of the mirth she would associate him with. She always reminded him of simpler times, when he'd been young and foolish and in love with girl who lived in a world without light.
Darkness had curled around both of their hearts and eventually, it snuffed out all of the light left in them. It was the nature of them, Alkaid fell first and Labyrinthite - he'd followed the path she'd lit for him. Where she went, it was likely he'd follow.
"You mean something," he said without thinking, unsure of what he'd meant when the words left his lips. She - they - were a complicated mess but he meant it because the blonde would always bring about a part of him that was too easy to forget. "Always have, always will," he said with absolute certainty. Their stories were intertwined ones, after all these years he'd be foolish to think otherwise.
"You've always been my guiding light," he smirked, reaching for her hand and lacing their fingers together. "I figure our five year anniversary is a good enough reason for you to pay up huh?" He winked at her, slivers of the boy he used to be slipping through.
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Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2016 4:49 pm
"I know." She knew she meant something just like she knew that he did too. What it was or why it was had plagued her, once, but now she accepted it as easily as she did the fact that the wind blew. The charge between them simply was and until the cosmos fit to strip her of even that tether, she was done questioning it. He was a weakness and a type of empowerment all at once and that was the only truth she knew. Her fingers laced between his and found hold, rubbing the minute fissures along his skin and watching it intently as it went. Often, she wondered if someone might cut themselves on her edges. Her fingers squeezed around his and she looked back up at his eyes, amused. "Hold on." Her grip tightened around the bouquet, crinkling the waxy paper beneath her grip, until the sound was cut off by the dead of the space between where they were and where they were going. When the world right itself again they were deposited in the half-rock, half-crystal courtyard before her looming, glimmering castle. Overhead, her dying sun filled the sky with brilliant, blood reds and oranges. It put a crimson halo against her pale hair, a crown fitting the senshi of the damned world. She turned her gaze away from the sprawl of dusty, charred sand dunes and settled it back on his face. "Promises are promises."
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Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 2:50 pm
They walked tandem paths, Labyrinthite knew, and there were times when the fearsome general wondered what had happened in lives prior that had brought them together once more, with threads so intertwined and nigh impossible to untangle. It was their nature and, like Alkaid, he had long stopped questioning it.
If the edges of her hand cut into his skin, like the edges of glass, he didn't say.
Her hand, with it's fissures and seeping energy, fit into his the same way it had when they'd been young and together. A wave of bittersweet nostalgia crashed over him. The shift from earth to Alkaid reoriented him while throwing him off balance at the same time.
He'd waited five years for her to bring him here and he had no idea what to expect. Outside of Scholomance and a brief stint on the surrounding, Labyrinthite had never been in space and the experience was, frankly, jarring.
"It's - " he stopped unsure of what he meant to say as his gaze swept across the desolate planet. "Not what I expected but - considering it's yours it's everything I would have thought."
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Posted: Sun May 01, 2016 6:35 pm
A small, amused laugh escaped her lips as she watched him take it all in. Every time she brought a new person to her world, it felt like she was watching a child discover something they had never conceived. She supposed it was much like that for even he, one of the few remaining people who even remembered her as anything but Alkaid, seemed slightly dumbfounded by the sight. "To be fair, Laby, I didn't know what to expect in the beginning either." Her hand tightened a bit around his own as she stepped into motion and headed for the great double doors at the opposite end of the courtyard. There was nothing else to see outside of her castle apart from miles and miles of charred, angry earth. There were bits of her civilization left here and there - but they were little more than the foundations upon which it had all been built. The doors opened without her having to touch them and as they stepped inside, they would also close effortlessly behind them. A distant wavering energy told her that Ida was in her room - and a stronger, more chaotic energy told her that he hadn't moved an inch. "Apart from the castle itself, I'm afraid it's pretty boring. I don't.. have the same trivial needs as.. other people." Her lips faltered as she retracted her urge to say 'humans', as if she no longer belonged to that family.
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Posted: Fri May 13, 2016 8:17 pm
He mused that he shouldn't have expected anything other than the world he saw before him, not when he considered the way Alkaid, the ascendant, looked. It didn't make him wonder what it had looked like before she'd turned it over to their mistress and then he wondered if it bothered him that he would never know.
It did, in that way that somethings just pricked at you like a paper cut. Annoyance flaring at the realization before it faded to a dull ache that would eventually disappear.
It was not worth being upset over something that would never be. Not now. That wasn't the person he was, not anymore. "How do you expect something you weren't supposed to see?" He offered as a counter, striding beside her easily. With them it was never a question of who would lead or who would fall in step. It was an easy give or take, an understanding.
As they walked the general became more aware of the pulse of energy signatures that were not theirs and he stopped, mid-step and gave Alkaid a perplexed look. "Who else is here?" He asked immediately, gaze sweeping across the inside of the castle to no avail. He could feel them and yet - he had no idea where they might be. "I'm hurt that you brought others here besides me." Tanzanite and Metallia aside.
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 1:38 pm
The ascendant stopped a half-step after he did, feeling the tension between their outstretched hands grow and grab her attention. She half-turned to look at him, finding the curiosity in his eyes before he spoke. She could have laughed, too, at the words. "I assure you that you are the only one here out of their own free will," she didn't pause to dissect the idea that he might actually be hurt, that it might not have been one hundred percent a tease to fill the silence. She couldn't be sure and, as with many things in her life lately, she simply opted to ignore it on more than a surface level. The broken woman only faltered as she tried to decide how best to mention whose strong, dark energy that was next to Ida's - few things in this world caused a rift between them. Few things, but Hematite did. "Hematite's crystal is in the far tower," she said, tugging at his hand a little to encourage him to walk with her. She wasn't going to take him there unless he wanted to see it - she didn't even want to talk about it anymore than this. Showing Amphitrite or Ate the fate of her once lover was easier than reminding Labrynthite of the man that she had, ultimately, put before him. Did he blame him for her condition? Or their condition? "The other one is a.. project," now her smile surfaced, light and pleased with herself. This was something she could show him, proudly. "I've been testing the parameters of Transcendant energy. Would you like to meet her?"
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 4:39 pm
By the time she had answered both feet were firmly planted on the floor and the man was no longer moving. There was a tension in his shoulders, lining his body as he waited and then, when she answered his jaw set tightly and he forgot to breathe. Were it not for the tick in his jaw as his teeth clenched together and the sharp inhale of breath then Alkaid might not have noticed the flare of anger that surged through him.
He recognized anger, they were old friends and the name Hematite was something that always enticed it.
Involuntarily he jerked his hand back, away from hers and refused to budge as his mind attempted to process the information she had given him. He had wondered where the dark skinned general had gone, had chosen to ignore that unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he thought about asking but this -
"What does that mean?" He asked, tone sharp like the blade of his scythe. He didn't know if it would cut into the woman who was more doll than person but - they were different. He brought things out in her that she'd thought long dead. "Should've known you'd never let him go."
Labyrinthite sounded disgusted. And disappointed.
Angry.
"Fine, but perhaps it's best if we leave after." Then he could stop thinking of Hematite and what his presence on Alkaid meant. Maybe be less angry. Probably not.
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 5:01 pm
The small smile faltered as his hand pulled abruptly from her own and all of that gentle, childish humor between them was snubbed out instantly. The silent anger rippling through him might as well have been an atomic bomb before her eyes. She saw the change in him as easily as she heard it in the tone of his voice - sharp, piercing, and meant to make her question everything that she had just said to him. Yet the anger pouring out of him didn't remove the feeling between them, only charged it with a negative edge and put it in a spotlight for her to move nervously around. She still missed the way his hand felt in hers and he still hated some part of her for leaving him behind. Laurelite would have laughed to see two of her generals squabbling like teenagers. "Is that really how this is going to be? He's as good as dead, Labyrinthite." Her bright, amber eyes narrowed as they settled on the whiskey-thick gaze staring back at her so pointedly. "This is where he has been the whole time that I've needed you, it changes nothing of what I've said or done or asked of you -" Her voice was getting heated and she realized, through the sound of her own sharp, edged words that she actually felt hurt and had no choice but to stop speaking. Why could this issue not simply die with the man? A hand raised to her chest and her fingers brushed lightly not across her starseed, but where her heart was - where it should have been beating proudly beneath her chest. Maybe it was an issue because he wasn't really dead, simply poised for eternity on the brink of death. "Can you not stop being angry for things I can't change? There's no prize to be had any longer. He is dead, I am dying, and you are.." she sighed, closing her eyes so that she no longer had to see him, so that she could ignore the only subject in the world that still felt close to breaking her heart. "And you are a better General than either of us could have ever known you would become. Is that not enough for you?"
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 5:56 pm
There was a lot he could say. Too much that he wanted to say and so much that would still go unsaid. In many ways, the pink-and-black haired man knew he was being unfair and yet, at the same time, they'd never dealt with the fall out and the crumbling of their relationship. Labyrinthite and Alkaid had come back together because they understood each other the way others didn't.
But that didn't mean that lingering animosity did not exist because Labyrinthite was still human, muted and dulled as his emotional spectrum was, even if Alkaid was not.
"He would be better off dead," he snapped. He didn't mean it in the sense that he wished for Hematite to be buried six feet under but in the sense that if he was as good as dead then it would be better to just be dead. There were worse fates than death and to the general dressed in card suits, being stuck in a crystal was akin to being turned into a youma or even a half-youma.
"Yet you've kept him in this in between because you couldn't bear to let him die. Typical. Unsurprising." His tone got drier the more he spoke. "Have you only needed me because he couldn't help you?" The mere thought repulsed him. She had always picked the man with the thick dreadlocks over him, what would change if he came out of the crystal?
Would their easy trust dissolve?
Alkaid only came second to Metallia but Labyrinthite - Chase - would always come third to Alkaid. It stung in ways he never expected and he shook his head at her, stepped back and let his nails dig into his palms. "You don't get to say that. It was never about you being a prize - Dammit Kaia you never understood." He didn't know if he thought she ever would.
"If you don't want to deal with it then we'll store it on a shelf like we always do. Show me this prisoner of yours and then let's leave."
I'm done.
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 6:28 pm
The woman standing before the General wanted to be angry. Anger had never been easy for her, even as a human - she had never handled it well or been able to express it without hurting herself or hurting someone close to her. Now, as someone not quite a person, she didn't find the strain of it any easier to bear. But Labyrinthite, Chase, expressed it as always, burning with a vibrant fire that had never dulled in him despite his own slip of humanity. Even when he tried to hide beneath the Stoicism, there was a biting tone in his voice that reminded her of the last time they had looked into each other's eyes as lovers. She had turned and walked away, and he had let her go.. "You're right, I don't understand why you still hold onto this. Even if he were still breathing, neither of you will ever get anything you want from me." The flare of emotion in her was dying, buried down beneath the years of emptiness she had begun to embrace. Keeping her heart and soul alive and so near the surface was costly and she now realized he was not the exception to this - he was the reason she needed to remember it. Their easy trust was broken so quickly with just the mention of a name and she felt herself wondering how he had ever managed to be so calm in her presence if this grudge still lurked so readily beneath the surface. The fight in her was gone, defeated beneath his accusations. Maybe he was right, maybe she would never understand. "For what it's worth," she was turning, heading toward the staircase that would lead them to the west wing, "he turned his back on me, in the end. I never came for you, then, because I didn't want you to think I just needed you to pick up my pieces in his absence." But he was blaming her for it, now, when she had spent so long purposefully carrying her burden alone. The accusation sent a dull ache through her core, buried down beneath the blankness she wore so easily. She wasn't waiting for him to follow her, but walking ahead with the expectation that he would keep up if he wanted to see who she had holed away. This visit had turned into something more painful than she was used to processing and she found herself regretting having kept the promise, regretting letting him put a foot in a place as sacred to her as Metallia herself. This was her world, her safe zone. "If you would begrudge my last attempts to keep my life from slipping through my fingers, perhaps it is best we make this visit a quick one." Her words felt mechanical and her feet moved without concentration, taking her in a graceful glide up the first few steps.
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Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 6:44 pm
He scoffed at her.
It was an involuntary reaction that came with the lick of his lips and his hand pulling through pink and black strands of hair. The other one slotted it against his hip and he looked like he was struggling to reign himself in. Only Alkaid could make him unravel so quickly.
"You don't get it," he hissed between teeth. The hardest part was that Labyrinthite didn't know how to make her understand because words were failing him like they always did when they argued.
If it were anyone else -
It did not matter, this was Alkaid.
"I don't know why it would surprise you. He never had the dedication you did." He didn't comment on what else she said though. Too many old wounds being split open once again. Despite either of their attempts, their history could not be easily buried. The soil never had time to harden, set in the grave of their entwined pasts.
"It's not my job to keep you together," he spat even as he followed behind, keeping distance he normally wouldn't because he didn't trust himself to keep from grabbing her and making her deal with things that should've been long forgotten. Letting her bring him home was a mistake, as obvious as the chaotic pulse of energy that he paid more attention to than he would ever admit.
Of course he was there and Labyrinthite had been foolish to think the ascendant would ever let the man go.
"But yes, let's go meet your newest toy before you grow bored of her."
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