Welcome to Gaia! ::

That … sounded on brand for what he’d expect out of Elliot, at least, if he expected Elliot to have the ability to yank on people’s actual life energy and hand it over to some evil cosmos being.

What was he kidding? In his character or not, it was still an obscene set of thoughts. How the hell did they get there? “So you didn’t drain most people to unconsciousness who didn’t deserve it. Fine.” Where was he going with that statement? He was in a mix between granting he would do the same in that position and wanting to drill into it further and twist that knife so hard Elliot would ask him to stop.

“None of the others asked to be drained, though.”

There it was. That was where he was going.

“Is skimming off the tops of people for your evil overlady or whatever the ******** appropriate? Whether it didn’t harm them in the long run or not, does that really follow the mantra?” Zebulon counted it on his fingers–one, two, three–and followed that with each one as it was relevant, “Safe, sane, and consensual.”

Safe, fine, he guessed.

Consensual? Eh.

Sane? Not really. The ******** even was the Metallia the Velencians had at least seemed concerned about. Why did Elliot stick around and assist her energy hoard?

They were going to lose energy primarily because Elliot got them into bed, and that didn’t quite miss his notice. Even if they were to lose energy from jumping into bed with someone not Elliot, Elliot was theoretically the only option that’d take that energy and use it toward something else, and he didn’t even ask.

Not that he would have gotten much anywhere by asking. A civilian would think Elliot out of his mind. A fellow agent would grow angry at being taken advantage of. Another member of Order like him might have killed him.

There was a part of Zebulon that thought hungrily of doing that. It would just take one swipe of the knife.

Just one.

It wouldn’t be fair. Elliot was answering his questions. Elliot was showing some signs of regret.

Zebulon wanted to kiss Elliot as much as he wanted to kill him, and wasn’t that the truest sign of love?

“Why were you more concerned with appearances of the bare minimum then getting the ******** out of the servitude of a mysterious energy?” Zebulon tried to bury the desperateness under his twang. “It’s never been like you to break the mantra. It’s part of why we all flow so easily.” It was part of the why for so many of their relationships.

“How many times did you do that, truly?”

Zebulon’s immediate, “I knew you ******** knew,” was followed by a long period of silence as he turned over the number in his mind. Four thousand. There was no getting around that number, not really.

And then another seven hundred, additionally.

“Kept track that closely that you have that seven in there too, huh? Not even an approximation?” It was as impressive as it was terrifying. How had he affected that many people in their city? How had he managed to do all of this under their noses? How had he not ******** noticed that it was Elliot that was the problem?

Perhaps he had no chance to with the way he had disappeared.

“And still no starseeds, yeah?” He snorted. “And not your congregation? Seems like such an easy source. Probably why they recruited your a**l retentive a**.”

What did he want Elliot to say?

It was a hard question. He wanted Elliot to say something that would make this all easier, ultimately, a jk of the worst variety after they had nearly killed him not even twelve hours ago. But that was an impossible want. In its place, what did he want Elliot to say? What did he want him to do? Grovel and beg for forgiveness? Act like he was the priest and make Elliot confess all his sins? Drill him further on the whys the Negaverse had wanted him and why he even bought into it? Make Elliot figure out if draining from those people during intimate interactions was a violation of their usual mantra?

He didn’t know if there was a correct answer here, and perhaps that was the biggest problem. There was no good way to approach this, nothing that was clean and easy and would feel fully satisfying to any party involved.

Zebulon knew that even Tobias had to be upset with him with the way he was willing to put a chair and a… cabinet? Dresser? Between Elliot and getting to leave.

“Don’t know. Can’t really take back what you did, right? Can’t rewind the draining of me, the year-long ghosting to the point where even forgiving Toby thought you might have basically dumped us, the years-long unexplainable behaviour. Hell,” Zebulon snorted, “we’re not exactly closed in that way, but you’re at least supposed to ******** ask before you do,” he gestured at the air, before realizing, wryly, that Elliot probably couldn’t even really make out what he was ******** hell.

“There’s a lot to makeup, Ellie.”

He wouldn’t admit that the purification was a good start to it, not quite yet. He needed to see Elliot leave before he really believed it.

Zebulon snorted hard at the reference to Father Castaneda.

After all of this, they still had the same brain cell.

His brows lifted when Elliot confirmed he never desired to stay away, but he didn’t know how to explain himself or the medications– “Well, Ellie, this is quite the way to find out you didn’t ask, but,” his brows knit, “what we wanted was you, Elliot. Don’t just want you around for things like that.”

Not that he didn’t want–

Anyway.

“It all cleared up, right?” Zebulon cleared his throat. “The meds worked, I mean?” … And ********, now he was concerned of all things.

Maybe he should just go get him the a** cushion.

“Numbers game, yes,” by g-d how many people had he slept with in the process– best not to think about that either at this point, “but still. Uh,” was this a proper thing to express considering the fact that he was keeping Elliot captive in the bathroom out of fear he was going to kill his other husbands and himself? “Glad it cleared up, in any case, and that the tests are clean.”

Not just because he could get Elliot back between the sheets. As they had both expressed earlier, they weren’t trying to be sexy at the moment. It was hard to be with the heavy air that hung over the house like the remnants of an explosion spreading out, leaving particulates in its wake and orange skies above.

He came to his feet.

“Be right back.”

He went to the living room, where Tobias was still asleep on the couch, and moved to the well-worn loveseat. It wasn’t much, but the larger throw pillow on the love seat itself should make the tiles feel a bit less like a crime to his a**. He didn’t need to be cruel to him, in any case.

… And it’d be easier to hand this off without the chair in the way.

Without removing the dresser that blocked the door from opening terribly much more, he shimmied the chair out from under the doorknob and tossed the throw pillow in the gap it created before sitting back down.

Zebulon still kept watching, but the chair didn’t return.

“Might help your a** a bit. Father Castaneda is not cruel in his assigned penance.”

Was that a joke?

“My mercy truly knows no bounds.” And for a moment, it felt more like a normal day, one where they weren’t talking to and viewing each other through a barely-there crack in a door that was no longer blocked by a chair.

But Elliot could stay there for now, at least until he was ready to purify. Zebulon didn’t want to let him out of his sight, and watching him had stopped being friendly or romantic outside of their teenage years.

… Though perhaps there was an easy penance that he could tack onto the end.

“You said you wanted out, right?” The anti-priest shifted his gaze from Elliot to the chair that sat nearby. “You got a contact? Knight rings let me write to anyone I have the name of.”

The penance could be his immediate exit. He’d think of more later, he was sure.