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 Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 10:53 pm
 Means
In Rhys’s mind, there were a thousand reasons to turn his back on Order and give himself to the Negaverse, and exactly none not to. There was no world in which staying Order was the ideal - not even the one that stuck in his dreams, where he was still Order, where he had hauled Cor Caroli back from darkness.
(Oh, Cor Caroli. So sweet and naive.)
Chaos offered him safety, protection - or, at the very least, a significantly higher chance of survival than Order. He’d died barely moments after Awakening, and would have stayed dead had Aegir not arrived.
He had watched Order attack Order, had seen a Knight of his own planet bleeding out on the ground, an attempted murder by another one of their own.
He had seen, if only briefly and in fragments in dreams, a future where Order was laid low, where the Negaverse had come out on top.
Rhys certainly knew which side of that mess he’d rather be on.
He’d heard from Quartz that the Negaverse could come in and scoop you up whether you wanted it or not - that wasn’t exactly a pleasant prospect. Frankly, he would rather hand himself over with a minimum of muss and fuss, but given the opportunity, something...grander seemed in order.
He had begun to lay the foundations of the plan as soon as he became a Squire, the turning point of his decision to corrupt. Yes, he had survived his little dance with the gryphon youma, but it had been a near thing - if he hadn’t become a Squire when he did, he would have died at the beast’s claws. There was no other way to look at it. Were he to become an officer, that would no longer be an issue - he would no longer look like youma lunch, and he would be able to defend himself. No longer would he fear a hand in his back or his chest ripping his soul out of his body and leaving him dead in an alley. No longer would he fear blade or beastie’s claw - and from what he’d seen, he had little, if anything, to fear from Order.
He would have to set things in order before he went, but there were few things he wanted to do. Some goodbyes to say, and some money to...borrow from his parents, because after all the s**t he’d gone through he was owed a few dollars, as far as he was concerned. He was well aware they still had a private investigator following him, and he was still taking circuitous routes to get in and out of his apartment to avoid it.
It took only a bit of online banking to shift the cash around, and then trips to multiple ATMs to withdraw it in pieces and parts across town. The cash was stuffed into a duffel bag, and then he powered up to Ploutonion and buried it. He would be able to find it later, and live fairly decently.
With means taken care of, all that was left was people.
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Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 12:05 am
Ends There were a few people Rhys felt he owed personal goodbyes to. People who would notice he was missing, but who as far as he knew weren’t Order,and who did not know his identity - who wouldn’t become suspicious that he’d said goodbye and just a few hours later was corrupted.
And there was one person to whom, as far as he was concerned, he owed the full and entire truth. At least, in this.
Alistair had been his best friend since they were children - they had grown up together. He had been Alistair’s first call after Lance had proposed. They talked nearly every day, and if he owed anyone the truth, he owed it to him. Never mind that he had loved Alistair for as long as he knew what love was, but he had given up on that long ago. They weren’t meant to be anything but friends.
He’d texted ahead, to ask if Lance was home - having this conversation in front of his best friend’s fiance did not sound at all pleasant. Fortunately, he wasn’t, and so for the moment Rhys had Alistair’s attention to himself.
They were seated in the living room, on opposite ends of the couch, and Rhys nervously fiddled with his signet ring.
“Alistair, I have something to tell you,” he began. “No. Something to show you.”
“Alright?” Alistair prompted. The brunet would admit to nerves - Rhys had never seemed this serious, and it worried him, in a lot of ways. Rhys was a mess, he knew that, had taken plenty of late-night calls of his best friend freaking out. This was unusual, though.
Rhys stood up and took a breath, and reached into the ether for his delicate pomegranate wand. In a moment, he was replaced by Ploutonion Squire of Saturn, in black and white and purple. Alistair inhaled sharply, and unconsciously called his pen to his hand.
“Rhys -” he began.
“Hear me out,” Ploutonion said, gesturing for him to be silent. “I’m Ploutonion Squire of Saturn, and I’ve been doing this since late March. I almost died my first night as a Knight.”
“Rhys,” Alistair tried again, but the blue-haired man kept talking.
“All of the gang violence in this city is because of people like me. Magical people, who are throwing a war right under everyone’s noses. People are dying and it’s all bullshit, Alistair, and I don’t want to do this anymore. I can’t stay on this side, and if I go over, I’ll be safer, but I’m going to lose myself in the process, and I thought you deserved...”
By that point, Alistair had given up cutting him off. Instead, he pushed himself off the couch.
“Tantalus asteroid power, make up,” he said, and in a flash of lights and ribbons and apple blossoms, Alistair became Tantalus.
“Rhys, I know,” he said, but he was walking forward, reaching for his best friend’s hand, as the Squire fell silent and stared, in something like awe, at his friend remade into a Dark Mirror Senshi. “I’ve been fighting the same war for two years, on...the other side, sort of.” He took a breath. “I’m Super Sailor Tantalus, of the Dark Mirror - and Rhys, you can’t.” He wrapped both his hands around one of Ploutonion’s, squeezing and staring up at him. “The Negaverse is terrible. We used to be their allies, but they turned on us - they make terrible people of good men, they’ll take everything good in you and bury it under so much chaos you can barely breathe. Rhys, please, reconsider.”
Under pleading from Alistair, Rhys’s resolve wavered. But no - he couldn’t do this, he couldn’t stay, not even knowing Alistair wasn’t happy.
“I can’t, Ali, I’ve tried - I tried to be Order, and it nearly killed me more times than I can count. I have to do this, I’ll be better - happier, as an officer.” He stared at the ground, and swallowed. “It’s safer. And we can fight together - someday we would have been on opposite sides, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that, and neither do you,” Alistair protested. “Maybe if you stay, things will change, you’ll get stronger and you won’t need the Negaverse.”
“And maybe if I stay the Negaverse will take me anyway. I’ve seen what happens to the ones who resist. It’s not pretty.” He remembered Quartz, broken and angry and practically pleading with him not to corrupt, to stay away from the Negaverse - exactly the same way Alistair was. “Besides, you’re Chaos too.”
“Not the same Chaos!” Alistair protested fiercely. “I’m not like them, I’m not broken like their Senshi are. I’m a Dark Mirror, and they turned on us first. They kidnapped one of ours not too long ago, because her girlfriend was going up against them. After everything they’ve done to us, it’s a hell of a thing that there’s even what little alliance we do have. I almost died at the hands of one of their Senshi, once. We’re not the same.”
That gave Rhys pause. The idea of Alistair, deadatan agent’s hand because of the bizarre state of the alliance between the Negaverse and the Mirror, made him angry.
“Then I’ll protect you. When I’m one of them, I’ll have authority - I can keep you, and anyone you care about, safe.” He said.
The offer, Alistair had to admit, was tempting. An ally in the Negaverse he could rely on. Someone he would never have to fear would betray him, because Rhys was Rhys, there was no way…
“Is there nothing I can do to talk you out of this?” He asked. “Nothing I can say?” Alistair’s voice was pleading, pathetically so. Rhys broke eye contact, and slid his hand away, and turned.
Yes, there was one thing, but… “The only thing I want from you, you can’t give. And it would be wrong of me to ask.” Not when Alistair was engaged and happy. He couldn’t ruin that with his own selfish wants.
“What is it? Rhys, please,” Alistair begged.
Rhys grit his teeth and spun back around, placing his hands on either side of Alistair’s face. He drew the shorter man in for a long, passionate kiss, the type of kiss he dreamed about. Or it would have been, if Alistair hadn’t been frozen the entire time. Rhys puleld back and turned, and started for the door.
“Wait!” Alistar said, and he paused, for a moment. “How long?”
“Longer than you want to know,” Rhys said, and then he shut the door, and he was gone.
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Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:39 pm
Yet Here's a Spot Perhaps, Ashanite mused, this whole "corrupt into the Negaverse" thing had been less well-advised than he'd thought. His experience with Order hadn't exactly been pleasant, but he had hoped changing sides would lead to a bit less "being attacked for no reason other than what uniform he wore."
(That he had been draining energy when the Senshi pursuing him had decided to attack him, he carefully overlooked in his mental assessment of the situation. Really, it was wholly unreasonable either way; it wasn't as if he intended to kill, just to take a little that his target would eventually get back anyway. Honestly.)
He might've found the man's outfit laughable, were he not currently in legitimate fear for his life - male Senshi always seemed to get the most ridiculous things. This one's sailor shirt over rather tight-looking shorts was no exception.
Except the man, who had dramatically introduced himself as Sailor Tuchanka when he was posturing and threatening, was anything but funny. He was taller and bulkier than Ashanite by about four inches and perhaps fifty pounds, and he was determined, he had made clear, to kill any and all "Negaverse cockroaches" he came across.
Never mind if they were lost little ex-Knights just looking to be shepherded home.
The Captain had cornered himself in an alley, and was desperately looking for a way up and out when he turned to see his pursuer in the alley entrance.
"Bloody marvelous," Ashanite grumbled to himself, and he brought his arms up in front of himself, blades in hand, as a defensive measure.
"Tuchanka Shockwave!" The Senshi declared, and a powerful blast of energy shot across the distance between them. There was nowhere to dodge, and it knocked Ashanite hard into the alley wall, driving the breath from his lungs and leaving him barely able to keep on his feet. Pain radiated from his back outward, and he thought he might well have some damaged ribs from the crush of force between magic and rather immovable wall.
When his vision cleared, he had just enough time to register that the Senshi was practically on top of him before there was a very thick, muscly bicep against his throat. He choked and brought a hand up to struggle, but the weight pressing back against him was not particularly moveable.
"I'm gonna squish you like the ******** vermin you are," the Senshi growled.
"Get off!" Ashanite gasped. "I'm not your enemy!"
What he'd meant to do, when he brought his dagger up and around and lashed out at the Senshi's throat, was to scare him, graze his throat and maybe his arm, get him to back off from pain or surprise or the touch of his weapon’s toxic enchantment.
He didn't realize he'd misjudged distance and force until he felt his blade bite deeper into flesh, and a warm spurt of blood that spattered his hand and his arm and his face.
It had its intended effect - the Senshi did stagger back, clutching his throat and staring at Ashanite in obvious shock.
Ashanite was frozen in place, unable to move. No one ever really described how long it took to bleed out. Nearly a full minute before the Senshi finally went limp on the ground.
The Captain felt bile rising in his throat, and he bolted, nearly slipping in the blood puddle (that he'd created, he'd done this, he'd murdered someone, and not with a gentle pull of a starseed where they fell asleep and never woke up, like he almost had. No, with a knife to the throat and a bleeding wound that took a full minute to claim his victim's life.)
He ran until he couldn't, until he found another alley and collapsed and forced himself not to be sick but he did cry, for the first time he could remember, wet desperate sobs.
He had known he was selling his soul. He had forgotten what that meant.
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Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:40 am
Hell is Murky
Upon returning to his apartment after Tuchanka's unfortunate death, Damian deals with Shale - in all the wrong ways, apparently.
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Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2015 12:43 am
Wash Your Hands, Get Out The Stains Damian remained in the same position, seated under the water, for quite some time after Shale stormed out of the apartment. It was easier to shut himself down then to try to actually deal with everything going on around him.
But he couldn’t sit there forever, he knew that. He uncurled from his seated position, and then reached over and turned the water up to nearly scalding hot. It was stupid and pointless and it would probably just make him hurt worse later, but right then it drew him back to reality. Inasmuch as he could be.
He didn’t want to admit how much Shale’s words bit, but they had. And Shale certainly wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t give a s**t if this war killed him. The very nature of his deception meant that he had few allies, and when it inevitably was revealed, he would lose those he did have. There were few people to care if he ended up a corpse in an alleyway.
“You’ve done nothing to prove you’re worth caring about,” Shale had said. No, no he hadn’t, he had done exactly the opposite. Even if no one knew - even if no one could know, he had done nothing to be worth anything to anyone.
He had repaid the kindness of Aegir and Month Blonc and Methone by giving himself to the Chaos Aegir had sought to save him from.
He had done nothing to warrant whatever faith Laurelite had put in him - his few encounters with Order had ended poorly. The Eternal with the strange aura had nearly killed him; Scholomance had not at all taken to his tale of woe. There was no one else. He might as well just give up the whole damn charade, because it was practically pointless. He was wasting his time and everyone else’s; he apparently had all the charisma of a dead fish, if reactions so far were to be believed.
But it wasn’t as if he brought anything else to the table - he was a pathetic fighter, and he should have died a thousand times already. All he had done was survive, by luck and by circumstance, over and over. That was his only skill. One better given to someone who would make better use of it.
It had been nearly three months since his corruption. Three months, and he had naught to show for it but bruises and beatings and a borderline comical failure to do anything useful. The one time he actually managed to do something, he ended up a guilt-ridden mess. How much more worthless and pathetic could he possibly get?
He was, in truth, less than worthless - he was a burden.On the Negaverse, because he was horrifically incompetent, could barely even drain energy, which was practically child’s play. But no, God forbid he be capable of anything at all. On Shale, because whatever living situation he’d been in before had to be preferable to dealing with someone he so clearly despised. And why did that feel especially terrible? Why was it that his roommate’s disapproval, in specific and particular, cut so damn deep? What had Shale Blackwell been to him before he corrupted?
He hated that his brain kept circling around that particular drain. It didn’t matter, it would never matter, because those memories were gone forever.
The water began to feel precariously close to actually blistering his skin, and he shut the shower off roughly, with far more aggression than a mere appliance merited. It was natural habit to reach down and pull hair out of the drain, even though he wasn’t entirely sure he felt like handing out courtesy right then - but then again, there was no reason to piss Shale off even more.
A thick clump of hair (matted, he realized, with blood - disgusting, how damn much had Tuchanka bled?) was deposited in the trash, and then he rinsed his hands in the sink, all the while trying to focus on anything but what Shale had said. The ache of his unfortunate collection of bruises made for a good distraction, all things considered. At least they would heal quickly, as had been his experience, but it was still frustrating - the pain he could handle, but large marks on his skin were a disruptor of his income. People didn’t pay to see him beaten - or at least, his current clientele didn’t.
He grabbed a towel and dried off, but didn’t bother even starting in on his hair - too much of it, energy in all the wrong directions to deal with that. Fingers curled around the two necklace chains sitting on the sink, and he let out an angry, frustrated hiss, and stormed out of the bathroom. At least there was an easy target for his aggression - the bloodstains on the carpet would need to be scrubbed out. He scooped up and discarded his blood-soaked shirt in the kitchen trashcan, got together cleaning supplies, and started in. His aching shoulders and back protested, but damn it he didn’t care, it was just another set of aches and pains anyway and he could handle those, damn it. Because if he was thinking about getting bloodstains out of carpet he wasn’t thinking about anything else.
But even that didn’t last forever. Normally he would have been reasonably proud of doing that, but -- no, still too much angry nervous energy, still too much desire to not think about anything, to not drown under the weight of his own uselessness.
It wasn’t too late, and he wasn’t dead yet. In the space of an easy breath and a brief thought, Damian became Ashanite again, and he strode to his own bedroom - door left ajar, window rapidly slammed open. Their apartment was on the third floor, a risky but not deadly drop for a Negaverse Captain.
So he climbed onto the fire escape, and vaulted over the edge, and stormed off into the night.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 12:17 am
Liar's Bounty
Ashanite, with a little help from a Mauvian named Soyala, makes himself a very special trinket.
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Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 12:21 am
Don't Take This Sinner From Me Even though his conversation with Shale had yielded some answers, Damian did not at all feel like any of his confusion had been dissipated. It had simply shifted targets - from wondering why Shale had bothered looking for information on him to wondering why Shale cared enough to want him to do well. It was not an easy thing for him to accept, on the face, because he had been so utterly and wholly certain that Shale was at best tolerating his presence out of loyalty to the Negaverse and a desire to avoid angering Laurelite. He had absorbed so fully the idea that Shale could not give less of a ******** about him, that at best he would find Damian’s death a relief, a removal of a burden, that it was hard to adjust even with new knowledge. Certainly he knew Xenotime was interested in his progress, but that was because he was a project, something for her to build and mold and make into something better. And because he played exactly the devotedly submissive Captain that she wanted him to be. So she cared, yes, but she cared about her creation and, he suspected, how it reflected on her. Not overmuch about him.
But Shale had gone out of his way - not much, perhaps, but still - to find out information on the man he used to be. He wondered, briefly, if or how much Shale would have willingly shared of what he learned. Perhaps nothing, perhaps he might have helped fill in some of the vast gap in Damian’s memory with things Mont Blonc had shared. But either way, Shale had demonstrated that for some reason, he cared about Damian’s - Ashanite’s - positive progress as an officer. He was invested enough in Dami’s success or failure (with Victoria? In general? Both?) to go out and try, in his way, to help. To want to be able to contribute.
To want to be able to say positive things about a man he had previously dismissed out of hand. Damian wasn’t sure what he had done to earn that, other than taking initiative, but somewhere in among the confusion was a bubble of warmth that he really ought to squish, except he didn’t want to.
Shale cared.
Perhaps he shouldn’t be placing so much value on it - caring that he made himself into a good officer was very different from caring about him as a person. He knew that well enough - knew, or at least strongly suspected, that in some ways this was likely conditional. If he failed with Victoria, it wouldn’t matter if he had otherwise softened Shale towards him, because failure would prove he still wasn’t worth caring about.
And yet he did value it - even that little bit mattered to him intensely, almost painfully. Which was ridiculous. Pathetic. Sad, desperate. A dozen other things. He knew it, knew that it made him weak and ridiculous. He couldn’t help himself. Shale had perhaps not been kind or gentle with him, but had definitely treated him far better than he deserved. Had even helped him, when he had been desperate and broken and cracking down the middle, until Damian himself had pushed too hard and made him give up. And even after that, even after his little display with Mont Blonc on the train, which had been foolish and overdramatic even if it had won him an in with the Squire who had so far been a bountiful source of information, Shale had continued to give him latitude - perhaps a surprising amount.
Shale had trusted him, when he said he wanted to corrupt Victoria, when he said he didn’t want to purify. Had trusted him in spite of Damian’s act, which painted him as exactly the kind of person who would flee straight for purification if given half a chance, and extended interaction with a member of a Princess’s team was a bit more than half a chance. For someone who was genuinely as disaffected as Daman made himself out to be, it would have been a wide-open door to freedom. And yet Shale had decided to accept his explanations, to give him the chance to prove that he was sincere. Had even decided to actually invest himself in the operation’s success.
It was silly for him to try and quantify why he felt the way he did, especially since Damian was fairly certain some of the tangled thicket of emotions he felt surrounding Shale Blackwell came from the ache of familiarity in his chest, some echoed whisper of memory sacrificed so that Ploutonion could be reborn as Ashanite. That was, in its way, frustrating, because it would make explaining how he felt incredibly complicated if it ever came to that.
He would, of course, never have to explain if no one ever knew. Because even if Shale cared, he did not care the way Damian wished he would, the Brit was sure enough of that. He could wish and want until the end of time, but it wouldn’t make a difference. Best to just shove it down, and accept whatever scraps he might get.
He had nearly slipped, speaking to Mont Blonc - when he had been challenged on why he was defending Umber (as much as Mont Blonc had “challenged”; the man was far too gentle for his own good) he had come very close to letting something out about how he felt. Which would have been a thousand kinds of idiotic; it would have risked tripping over his ruse with Mont Blonc, it would have further risked that Mont Blonc had that tidbit of information to pass. And surely he would have, with a friend under threat. That, he thought, would not have been the ideal way for Shale to find out. The ideal, of course, would be for him to never find out at all, but given his druthers about how…That would not be it. Ever.
Perhaps someday he would actually pull himself together enough to confess, but that felt wholly unlikely. In a simple risk/reward scale, it was a massive risk with, as far as he could see, no likely reward. Shale was not at all likely to look at him that way, ever, and confessing to feelings that had what felt like a less than zero chance of being reciprocated would be a fine way to destroy whatever tentative understanding they might have begun to reach. Better to shove it down, pretend it didn’t exist, because ultimately how he felt did not matter. It was all hopeless anyway.
Damian would admit, if it came to it, to admiring Shale immensely. His dedication, his certainty, his unwavering intensity - all of those were traits Damian wished he could find in himself, but he knew they did not exist. Shale was honest, and yet still tactical and clever. He was a good officer and, for all his coldness, as far as Damian was concerned - a good man. A better man than Damian would ever be. Because he was still Damian Howe, a cobbled-together, poorly constructed facade for the officer Ashanite, who pretended to still be, at his core, the Knight Ploutonion, who was, in truth, long gone. Damian was a shoddy pile of masks concealing a core that barely existed. It would be impossible for Shale to return his feelings, because to feel that way about someone, there had to be a person there to care for. So really, it was all ultimately hopeless.
He was wasting his time worrying about this, because it was a tangled thicket of emotions that were, ultimately, not going to get him anywhere. And yet, wasting his time or not, he couldn’t stop churning it over.
Because whether he thought about it or not, whether he acknowledged it or not, his utter desperation for Shale’s approval was symptomatic of something far deeper, far more emotional. No matter how much he wanted it not to be related to something like that. No matter how much he did not want to feel, he did, and he could not make it stop.
So he could admit it to himself, quietly, privately, where no one else would know, and then lock it up in a box, because to pretend that he was at all deserving of having it reciprocated - or that there was a snowball’s chance in hell that it was or ever would be - would be to delude himself to an utterly incredible degree.
But he loved Shale Blackwell, regardless of all that. Regardless of sense or logic or anything else, he did.
God, what he wouldn’t give to go back to when he had been able to categorize this as sexual frustration, as lust, and nothing else. That had been far simpler to deal with, to ignore. This...this was going to eat him up from the inside out.
But he would have to live with it, because what other choice did he have? It wasn’t as if he could stop feeling.
Nobody ever needed to know.
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Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2015 12:30 am
Tracks
Giving Shale his old wallet leads to interesting revelations about the man Damian used to be.
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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 5:30 pm
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Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2017 7:54 pm
Cheating Destiny
Ashanite recruits a new Lieutenant, scooping them out of Knighthood.
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:24 am
My OId Friend
Ashanite has an encounter with Whisler, and decides to end their little dance.
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Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2021 8:01 pm
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Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:17 pm
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Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2022 7:41 pm
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Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2022 1:08 am
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