Quote:
Immediately follows Breaking Point.
"Your minute's up," Eion reminded Aelius lazily as his gaze traced standing veins in his own wrist. They cascaded down his arm in pale blue, raised as small hills, a light dew of sweat covering their skin. He turned his hand to view his nails next -- rose tipped with white, still young and suspended on the cusp of boyhood. Almost a woman's features. "Go make me some tea."
As his arm fell to the sheets, he shot his subordinate a commanding look. Beyond the furl of unruly, curling hair, he saw the sum total of damage done by Schörl's regimen. Four hours stretched to five still weren't enough to account for the day's moving, thinking, learning, pacing, doing, fighting. Much more difficult Aelius' life was made in exchange for dollars sunk into his investment. And as he stretched that red line further and further about his own neck, weaving his meticulous noose, making the bed that he wanted unmade only months ago, he succumbed quite slowly to his meager minutes of sleep. Three hundred at best, except for the times when Faustite delighted in rousing him early. Aelius ensured that he deserved it.
Now Aelius served maintenance of a different sort while Eion searched the hollow in his own head. He couldn't find where his feeling went in the midst of it all, lost somewhere beyond pillows and sheets and breaths. He wondered if he'd yet find it again, or it that connection was lost to callus and keloid. To Schörl's doing. To Sinope's.
Thin arms stretched overhead and formed a loose halo around his hair. Late afternoon's tired gaze peered in slats over milk-white skin. One arm seized one wrist, feeling for those blue hills. For that push against his fingertips. "Red rooibos this time. With milk. No honey."
Oh how he wanted to just roll over and sleep. The pillow cradled his head just right and the exertion had left his body relaxed. Not to mention the sheets against bare skin and the feel of the mattress. Slumber beckoned him to her sweet embrace.
But an all too familiar voice broke that little spell and Aelius had to muffle a groan in the pillow. As demanding as ever Eion made sure that Aelius was unable to fully melt into the luxury that an afternoon nap would be. No, instead, he was practically being kicked out of bed, still sweaty and relishing the physical contact he hadn’t realized he needed to badly to make tea.
One foot, then the other. The soles were finally well healed, scarred and calloused from their abuse a few months prior. The marred skin served a reminder to the yoke he now wore and that worked as strong motivation to not complain and instead push himself from the bed, sheets slipping from his bare body as he moved to follow command.
This was a typical thing. One minute of rest before off to do something else. To cater to his Captain's whims and needs. In all senses. It didn’t help that it confused Aelius on several levels.
The tea kettle, usually stored in an upper cabinet, was withdrawn, filled, and placed on the stove. Staring at the silver piece of cookery, Helio found his mind wandering to...well...something in particular. Something that had added to the confusion and curiosity of his relationship with his Captain. Teeth met bottom lip to chew carefully as he moved silently to the same cabinet the kettle had been in to withdraw two mismatching mugs. A little sifting around and he managed to find the particular tea that Eion had requested and set the small canister of the loose leaf on the counter before padding back to the bedroom.
“The kettle is on.” A whistling would be warning enough when it was ready for tea steeping.
“Why did you call me Rowan?” The question came out abruptly as he walked over to grab his discarded briefs. “I have to admit that had been...surprising.” To say the least
Where Aelius roused, Eion dozed. He found a light, dreamless, dewy sleep that rested its thin touch over his eyes. Somewhere beyond, his subordinate banged about in the kitchen, but the sound was distant and domestic. Cars passed beyond the window as a background comfort -- as assurance that the world hadn't yet dropped dead. They still shared in the collective stupefaction of society.
But Aelius's voice wicked away the dew as soon as he opened mouth to question. Schörl's many warnings for maintaining control repeated ad nauseam in the seconds following: never answer their questions, direct the conversation, keep them unbalanced. For a time, he followed that advice as closely as his embittered heart would allow. But he often let Aelius steal away their conversations in exchange for Eion nursing his hurt, and soon that rotted away into indifference -- sometimes into disdain.
Eion filled the silence with a light, caustic chuckle. "Because that was your name once." Looking down to admire Aelius's lukewarm troubles felt unnecessary; Eion saw quite enough of his near-constant discomfited expression.
"My job is to know you, Aelius. All of you. Everything you were. Everything you are. Everything you will be." Slowly his legs slid upward into a bend, perpendicular to his trunk. Apart, they formed a curtain with sheets and bedding still hung taut between bony knees. He reserved for himself a modicum of privacy against his subordinate's constant prying.
A brow rose as he slipped on the undergarment. “Really?” Skepticism leaked into his voice. “I am well aware my name before Aelius, but it seems extremely odd that you would choose to use it when you did considering the heat of the moment.” Of course, for all he knew, all of this was a well calculated ruse on Faustite’s end and everything was nothing more than another lesson to be learned. Another way to unhinge Aelius more and make him more compliant.
But, seeing as Eion was willing to at least respond to his question, Aelius decided to continue on pressing his luck. “So up until now I’ve been Aelius? And now, this one random time I am Rowan?” He shook his head. “That seems unlikely. I am certainly no expert at this but I am not really sure I believe your story. It feels too...perfect.” He shrugged as he stood beside the bed. It was a test to his own physical and mental prowess to not sit back down on that mattress. He knew all too well what he’d want if he did.
Of course, if he was told to he would. Seeing Eion there relaxed and draped in the sheets was an arousing scene in more ways than one.
"I didn't give you a story." Down came one of his hands, fingers spread, and he held it outward to intersect the thin slats of afternoon sun. Eion watched the way dust motes flickered in and out of existence to his eyes. He watched as his bare stomach was dappled with light, robust and gold. "You asked why. I told you why. I called you Rowan because your name was Rowan.
"You never learned how to ask questions."
Brilliant slats lit on the pale of his wrist. They washed pallor into his skin, gave him away as the subterranean dweller that he was. Outlined him as the pretty thing that never fit in this house. He looked to Rowan, then, and found tanned skin and adult muscle filling him out to match with the room. At least one of them had reason to be there.
Eion sucked a deep breath through his nose. "Yes and yes. You'll get nowhere asking these questions. Use your brain." Reluctantly, Eion sat up on propped elbows, locked into place and angled backward from his body. Thick curls tumbled into place about his neck and back. "Observe: I called you Rowan. Think: what could that mean? Postulate: this isn't the first time we had sex." Eion offered a blithe shrug, single-shouldered, with a cusping brow. He could take it for humor if he wanted.
Eion appeared so calm, so nonchalant about the whole situation that it took Aelius a moment to realize what was being insinuated. What was, quite possibly, being revealed. Immediately eyes widened slightly. Leaning forward with hands sinking into the bed, he gave Eion a heavy look.
“You can’t…” He stopped, rose up from his position and ran a hand through his head. “No, I’d remember if I ever had sex with you. Don’t let this go to your head or anything, but you’re rather unforgettable.” Which was the truth. With such a demanding presence and his want to take command of everything they did, it would be impossible to forget such a bed partner. Eion was experienced well beyond what his young looks would make one think at first glance.
Besides, the only other person Aelius had sex with was with Elex and it took him and Elex some time to get to such a point. The other young man had not been anywhere need as domineering in the bedroom pursuits as Eion.
He began a small pacing habit as he moved from the bed to the door and back again. “To add more to that, if I did forget you then the next thing to ask is ‘what else have I forgotten?’ And ‘why did I forget?’” That there was a possibility there were missing holes in his memory was distressing. How far did they go? Where there more important parts of his life missing? How long would they be gone? Forever? Temporarily? It just didn’t make sense. As he continued his small pace he moved a hand to a hip as the other rubbed gently at his face, down the back of his neck before eventually moving to its own hip placeholder.
Pursing his lips, Eion rolled his eyes. You take everything so literally. How boring.
"Then you tell me," he responded with a slow c**k of his head. "Why would I know your old name? Why would I use it here? Now?" Aelius steadfastly ignored all hints on actual cognition. Where he reacted with an animal's instinct and feeling, Eion ever pushed for self-awareness and sentience. But Aelius made a habit of snubbing that -- such antics earned him seventy lashes with the cane and potentially many more in their time apart. In short, Aelius would never be a thinker. A shock troop -- cannon fodder to save his betters, perhaps. I wonder if you and Chrysocolla get on well.
But Aelius prattled on, pretending to use his brain. "Mmm," Eion muttered boredly. Brows lofted in equally-unimpressed disdainfulness. "Sounds troubling, doesn't it." Why he only now realized that there were holes in his memory startled Eion -- how could he be so blind to spiderwebbed sigils and the gaps between? -- but it harkened to a cold numbness settling in his chest. A dull, dreary drum beat where once feeling laid claim. He knew what it meant to distrust memory.
But Eion was not Elex. He guarded his empathy fiercely against this intruder, this poor facsimile of Rowan, this failure of a soldier. "Schörl told you in your first debriefing that corruption shatters memory. You knew to expect losses. Don't act like this is a surprise." Fingernails drummed on the bed as the youth looked elsewhere -- to a wall, to a lamp, to the space where a painting should hang. It didn't matter so long as it wasn't at Aelius' dumbfounded face.
“This is the first time it’s really been so obvious.” He stated matter-of-factly as he turned away and walked back towards the door before turning around again. “I had actually forgotten she mentioned memory loss. I can’t say I was in the best of states when that conversation occurred.” Admittance to his poor mental state when he was first corrupted was an easier thing to talk about now that he wasn’t bordering on falling back into that place. A solid foundation had been created with the aid of those around him; Eion being number one of those supporting beings.
“I never expected to have someone linked to my old life so…” A hand gestured to the young man still lounging within the sheets. “Close to me. I’ve been trying to disassociate myself with my past and here you are telling me you’re someone from that life and…” A sigh.
“How did you know me?” He questioned, his body leaning against the frame of the door with arms crossed across his chest. Attempting to appear relaxed was off put by the tenseness in his shoulders and the strict attention he gave Eion in anticipation of an answer he wasn’t sure he’d even get.
"It doesn't matter," Eion answered. His legs fell to their sides and he leveled a stare at his subordinate. "Who I was doesn't matter. How I knew you doesn't matter. You are now Aelius. You are now my subordinate. I am now your commanding officer. These are the relationships dominating your life -- not the spectres you want to chase around Facebook." His gaze lingered for a moment longer, studious over the consternation in Aelius' face, before it broke away.
The kettle whistled. He looked only to ensure that Aelius would fetch it.
If only you moved past this fixation. This obsession. What so drew you to Rowan's life? Was it the money? Was it the family? Was it Elex? Slowly Eion roused himself upright and slipped from the bed to ferret for cast-off obligations. First came the need for decency, then warmth. Backwards it was, he knew, compared to baser places where posthumans dwelt. You're buried in a routine that I haven't broken yet. The babe clutched to the coffin. We'll fix it in time. Burn the rest. Give you a better teat for succor.
His own shirt lost to the austerity of the room, Eion poached one of Aelius' red button-ups and swathed the material over narrow shoulders. The shirt hung over him like an overlarge pall, eating away at his frame. He padded into the kitchen wearing little more than that.
An arm pressed against the doorframe as he scanned about, foot tapping and free hand eternally shifting about against his hip. "If you want to waste your time on this hunt, then make me a report. Do your research. Find what you can. Draft a five-page paper on your findings. Tell me in your conclusion if you still thought it was important."
As expected. Eion skirted around actually answering a question and sating the curiosity that burned within him. Why Aelius thought that this time may be different was naive of him. In fact, he mentally chastised himself for that bit of hope that dared to rear its ugly head. The wailing of the kettle broke the spell-like state the man was in as he stood staring at Eion.
He pushed away from the frame, turning to head back to the kitchen leaving Eion to find his modesty.
Like a well-oiled machine, Aelius padded to the stove and flipped the dial off on the burner before removing the kettle. The steaming liquid was carefully poured into two mis-matching mugs before placed onto a cool burner to cool. Popping the lid to the tea canister he deposited the leaves into their individual steepers before dropping both into a mug to do their work.
Going through the motions was relaxing. It was something he knew he could do. But, a cool, steady voice broke the almost pleasant silence that Aelius found himself in. Turning to lean against the counter he sighed heavily. “I wouldn’t know where to even start.” He commented. “And to be honest, going down that path…” He ran a hand through his hair.
“I can’t explain why it’s important to me. Or, if it really is.” Pause. “Important I mean.” He shook his head and turned back to the tea steeping behind him. Gazing into one of the mugs he watched the swirls of darkened water as they rose from the balls. “It’s more like I am trying to find that missing puzzle piece to connect me to my past to this new life I now have.” A wry smile. “Amazing how I got what I wanted but am now looking back to what I had. Perhaps this is why ‘leaving the nest’ is supposed to feel like.”
“But, if you order it, I will do the research.”
Eion closed his eyes for a moment. Water poured, guzzled into the glass with its throaty sighs, and hissed afterward with its petty irreverences. With it came Aelius's perpetual disappointments as he splayed them over the counter. He imagined their respective fogs were one in the same -- the water's boiling heat and his subordinate's hefty sigh.
"Leaving the nest is breaking your legs. It's throwing away all the benefits you were given in the name of freedom. I wonder if you begrudge it -- that freedom. I did at first." Eion's nails curled hard against the doorframe, digging their war trenches into polished wood. "And you did too. Most don't try to die when they're ejected from their nests. Most put effort into a few flaps before they give up. But independence isn't for everyone." His shrug was sharp, bitter. "Some of us quite like our shackles, Aelius." You do, he thought with a hawkish look.
"All this introspection must be hard." He looked to the nails that now bit into wood. He wondered, then, if they would leave behind their half-moon coffins for all the words unsaid. He hoped they would. Coffins were, at their barest, a show of reverence.
Eion sighed through his nose. "Don't bother with that assignment. You lack the qualities for Intelligence. But we haven't found your strengths yet -- where, oh where did they go." His voice tapered off into acrid silence.
“I think of myself more as dragged from the nest, but in the end it’s all the same. I just needed to find wings I didn’t even know I had. Now it’s more like I am giving them their first real flaps.” He shrugged and began to tend to the tea. “I supposed we all oppose change to some extent. Some of us more than others.” The clinking of the metal steeping balls followed his statement as he gave the two items a quick stir before pulling them from the water, giving them a chance to drip a few more drops back into the mug, before depositing both into the sink to take care of later. “You seem to have adjusted well to that freedom. Thriving, even.”
Knowing all too well how Eion preferred his tea, Helio tended to each mug separately before finally turning to hand off one of the mugs to the dark haired boy enveloped in a buttoned shirt that was quite obviously Aelius’s. It brought a small smile to his lips. “I wonder that myself.” He remarked. “I am not even sure if I know myself anymore.” So much had changed. Everything that he thought had defined him was gone and it felt like he was grasping at nothing but empty air at times.
“That red suits you. Though I think you need to fire your tailor.”
'Thriving, even.'
Eion cracked a wry smile. "Thriving. You make a steep call."
He shifted, sidling around Aelius to reach his tea. The heat of the mug seeped into his fingers as a reminder of his pending return to duty. Eion hummed around his first sip -- fragrant notes of bruising, of rust, of age. He tasted the sweetness that came with that age; a sweetness that only matured with abuse. He wondered, briefly, if he would find himself in tea later. Perhaps after another year of the Negaverse, of Schörl, of Aelius. of all the sour challenges that faced him with impunity. And Aelius, too, would find those challenges. Would he continue to fold so easily? Or would he discover that rare note of hope in the bottom of the cup?
"You don't know yourself," Eion said. His head tipped to the side curiously in his appraisal. Black eyes fell on the contours of Aelius's chest where clavicles faded into robust strength. Down they tapered, past the burgeoning plane of his chest to the rolling valley at the edge of his ribs. "You haven't had the time to know yourself. I made sure of that." Another sip, another approving look at the results of months-long training.
He weighed another scourge on his tongue. It sat in residual sweetness, in the cradle of boiled honey. Finally he swallowed it. "If my clothes don't fit, then take them off." Nails sang out their attentive impatience as they paced around his mug.
What do you think you should know? Again his attention traveled upward, though unseeingly. What should you know about me? About your old self? How much would you want to know? And how much would be ruined by knowing? I've met men made of stronger stuff than you. Men who survived worse. If you break when dragged from your nest, then the Negaverse has no place for you. We have to reinforce you; I doubt that path rests with the past.
“I suppose not.” After all, every waking moment of each day had been spent doing work of some sort whether it be physical or mental. Not to mention that lack of sleep didn’t nurture the sort of mental ability to think beyond what was necessary, most of the time.
“Anyway, you’re certainly thriving in this atmosphere better than I was. Have been…” am? Or maybe I am doing better than I think? Those roving eyes made Aelius wonder just how much he changed and if it was in the direction that his superior wanted him to go. Did I get pushed from one nest to another?
A challenge issued and Aelius couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face as he held the mug of tea. The dark liquid, touched with just a bit of sugar, was to his precise taste but he’d yet to sip the bold beverage. Instead, he let the warmth of the mug seep into his hands as a hip supported himself against the counter. “Hmmmm….and ruin that look you have going on right now?” He questioned. “Somehow, even in my oversized shirt, you manage to look put together.”
Finally the hot liquid reached lips and he sipped it gingerly. Eyes didn’t leave Eion’s smaller frame. Strange how it feels like I’ve done this before in some way. Elex?
A pang of regret of a relationship lost that, to Aelius, had barely had a chance to begin. Elex, was a puzzle piece that still was missing its spot in the overall picture, but Aelius wasn’t sure if it was a piece that needed to find it’s home anymore. Perhaps Eion is right. What will the past do for me now with where I am at?
“Besides, I may prefer to rip it off of you and I much rather like that shirt.” Not to mention I don’t own an exhaustible plethora of them anymore.
"Hard to do worse than suicide, isn't it?" Eion left the comment to stew.
Eion shot Aelius a knowing look after Aelius commented on his shirt. "You'll start catching flies." Another sip and he wondered if enough slip bade him any cognizance. Likely not; he fared poorly enough at his own corruption that Eion doubted he had the two-step process to wrangle references. Especially with Schörl; the reason alone was enough to bar the green general's reading list. She was herself a step removed from Eion's charge regardless.
"That's enough." Aelius stirred ashes better left to simmer. "You have work to do. Books to read. Combat practices to study. Quotas to finish." However slight for all your boredom.
Eion checked his pocket watch for the time given; ten minutes to the devil's hour. Unfortunate, but long enough to finish tea. "I'll head out soon." He drained as much as he could of his glass before it scalded his mouth raw and left his tongue rubbered. He winced lightly; never would he get used to that.
A visible wince at the comment and a nod in agreement. Nothing else needed to be said. Aelius was past that point but the wound was still raw and healing. The ability to look back on that night and take it as a lesson learned without the shame was not quite there. So, taking the comment, acknowledging it, and letting it go without a word was the best he could do for now.
And Eion, as smooth as ever, created that opening to ease the tension that Aelius was feeling. “Maybe I like the extra protein?” The remark was Aelius’s way of trying to relax. “You’re right though.” The thought of the books sitting waiting for him almost made him groan, but the repercussions weren’t worth that little display.
A flash of something somewhat familiar was clutched in Eion’s hand. Aelius hadn’t been paying enough attention to get a good look at the watch before it was stored away. “Considering how much I like that shirt, we should probably find your own. As much as I enjoy seeing you like that, strolling around anywhere else dressed that way may be frowned upon.” Another sip of his tea, the contents well beyond too hot for him to chug like Eion had done, he opted to place it on the counter to cool further beyond just sipping. “I think I may have seen it in some of the tangled blankets on the floor.”
kolina
