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 Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:15 pm
It was rare for Eles to approach him so seriously. Solemnly sometimes. But this sort of serious, with its near silent, hidden desperation trying to creep in? Extremely rare. And so, perhaps, it would do to start at the beginning.
“One night, a couple years ago, the order senshi and knights decided to raid and blow up a bank.” Very simple right? “I suppose the Negaverse had some interest in it, because they showed up, an army of agents, corrupted senshi, and youma, led by General King Faustite. Myself and a friend were nearby, watching it all from a distance.” For once, Lete and Hybris were truly as innocent as they liked to claim. “He fought with an eternal, and I suppose planned to corrupt her. She turned into a princess instead.”
There was a shudder of a laugh for that, low in his throat. “It was horrible, Lete and I ran away under the fire of arrows, chased by both youma and spectral hounds. That’s where I got those little scars on my a**.” A bit of a sulk, now.
“And that was the first time I saw him. It was so chaotic and again, a bank had literally exploded. I hadn’t realized he’d seen us there, until the next time I saw him.” Malory let those hands keep him in place, pin him to the moment and its requisite honestly, but his eyes started sliding away, pick out small details in the dark.
“I felt a general appear in the distance, and then saw a light and knew.” Tipping his head against the pillow, he sighed before going on. “It was the kind of fear that makes a person feel very, very young. Like the closet door starting to open in the dark.”
He lifted his hands, placing them absently against the phantom in his ribs and feeling immediately more relaxed for it. “I ran. He caught me by the hair, then punched me in the kidney. It was,” he assured Eles, “extremely mean of him. His hands were hot, much hotter than I understood at first. And he started interrogating me about the bank. I was mostly honest, but he didn’t believe me.” The sulk over this was very clear.
“My hair burned off in his hand, and I was free to run, to call for help, and after giving a little chase, he let me go.” A small shrug, “I had nightmares for awhile after, there were other things happening at the time that made the fear worse. But the fantasies didn’t take long to replace them. I was scared until I wasn’t. Or at least until I was also a little thrilled by him.”
Feeling increasingly restless, he started bothering Eles with his foot, “The next time I saw him, he wanted to talk to one of the leaders of the Dark Mirror. I was still a little scared,” he admitted. “But he was normal. Like nothing had happened. Just seemed…grumpy. He had a sneering little mouth for Prince Remarque, but spoke through his youma instead of out loud. But he was clearly there for business, nothing personal.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:16 pm
Is this me? He asked himself while his attention searched his boy for some sign of seriousness. Malory knew how to lie and he knew how to tell the truth, and Eles suspected the only difference between them was in what Malory wanted to portray. It wasn't whether or not he was lying, it was whether or not he wanted to be believed. A lie and the truth weren't any different from each other, really. There was one reality and there was the next.
He was Eles in this reality. But was he Faustite in the last one? For that, he had to listen. And watch. And feel the manner in which Malory slowly grew restless in his hands, like a retelling wasn't enough to keep him interested. He wasn't one to retread old experiences unless they truly meant something, unless they left an impression worth savoring, and even at that, some of those memories had to be broken down and rearranged into their next iteration. Another reality.
Faustite was scary until he wasn't. Faustite ruined Hybris's hair until he didn't. Faustite's hands were too hot until they weren't.
Eles's gaze fell from midnight eyes, down his perfectly delicate nose, past his full lips. Past swell and hollow of throat, the catch of collar bones. Caught along one until he reached that bony crown on the edge of his shoulder, until his gaze lit on pale fingers that showed the beginnings of calluses. Did Malory retread those experiences with others after he revised them? Watching his thumb coast along ivory skin, he asked himself until he could come up with a convincing answer. Seldom did Malory every look back, only forward. And when he did deign to look at the tracks he left behind, it was only for those moments that he wanted to savor.
Until they weren't. Oh, Eles mouthed in quiet, reverent epiphany.
"Spare me one last question, and be very, very careful about how you answer it." This time, his hands found the ones so tucked at Malory's sides, chasing down the phantom signature of the boy he'd dragged home earlier in the summer. Back when the storms were at their thickest. Back before their infinite beautiful days.
"If I'm Faustite," he began, his attention locked on his boy's ever pleasant features. "And that's how we met, then you've no reason to like me. No reason to forgive and open your home to me. If I burnt your beautiful hair," he shifted slow, with a dash of regret and a smattering of winces, as he pressed Malory against the pillows and rested his weight on his own elbows. "If I became your resentful fantasy, then wouldn't it be better to get revenge?
"Wouldn't it be better…" A pause as his lips brushed fleeting against his boy's chin. "If we died together and you redrafted our lives like wishes writ across paper lanterns? Were you the reason I touched that Dark Star?"
Even as his ribs ached terribly for how he leaned over the boy, he shifted enough to press his mouth to the delicate shell of an ear. Spoken into it was unmitigated devotion: "Stall and we'll start counting your teeth."
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:16 pm
Malory’s focus and interest resurfaced as Eles began to cage him in with a menace that was slow, dark, and sweet. Much more ready to give him a clinging, choking death than a crushed in face, no matter the threats spoken into the intimacy of their bed. His boy wasn’t wrong to be suspicious, he had been from the start. There just wasn’t much care for whether Malory had ill intentions or not.
And things had aligned for them just so, hadn’t they? Eles so clean a slate and Malory so welcoming a solution to a multitude of immediate problems. Wouldn’t it be tidy, if it was all his plan, all under his control? Gazing into those glinting, wishing well eyes, Malory admitted, apology clear in his voice, “No. But It’d make such a good story if I had.”
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:16 pm
All he could breathe was a sigh buried into hair as black as the curtain behind the stars. "Damn," he admitted into that darkness. Then the nagging, building pain took over from his splintered ribs and Eles had to return to the side lest he choose a slow suffocation.
"Then that note you wrote to Albite…? The one I couldn't read?"
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:17 pm
Reaching over, he took his boy’s hand, finally lacing them firmly together. “I gave him some pleasantries, told him you’d lost your memories, but they were trickling back. To wait until you wanted to meet him. And that he shouldn’t expect you to be the same person he’d lost, that you shouldn’t feel you needed to be someone other than yourself. And that he’s still invited to the wedding”
And now it was his turn, to meet Eles’s gaze with a firmly serious one of his own. “You told me that whatever memories come back, they don’t invalidate or overwrite the person you are now. I took you at your word, and when I became relatively sure of who you used to be, I held onto those words and nothing changed.”
He paused, then smiled, a little impish in the darkness, “How many conspiracies about me have you come up with?”
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Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2025 6:17 pm
All that surety leaked out of him, a popped balloon filled with both gratitude and suspicion. All gone, mixed into the air and diluted to nothing. Spent words.
Smiling back wasn't something Eles could resist, really. He supposed he wouldn't have to, being that Malory was far from acting the diabolical mastermind in a scheme to rewrite and retrain his very own General King. Even if Eles was far from that. Even if he was Faustite.
"Not that many," he replied. "But you have to admit — that one was really good. Good enough that you'd wish it was truth." And if Malory didn't, then Eles would wish it for both of them.
What was said back then was nevertheless true. Even for the barest flashes of instinct, that certainty at the back of his mind that his hands were once painted in darkness, those facts — or suppositions — did not undo who he was now. He still met Malory in a graveyard, still puked on his chest, still agreed to marry him. Whatever flecks of his old life came back to him, they didn't burst through him like a tree branch through a wayward paper lantern.
Maybe all that fire from his old self carried those wishes into being. Magic was real, after all.
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