Welcome to Gaia! ::

The moon crawled its way across the sky, hiding its embarrassment in naked, clawing trees. Faustite first looked to it, then to eir replacement watch -- a sordid knock-off of an antique wind-up timepiece -- and found that Gevaudan's impending arrival went from punctual to late to predictably uncertain. What a hope it was to expect the man again when he faced two eternals with every reason to begrudge him. Him, a fighter of many years who already lost. His life was built on figments, with so much akin to the Mirror's beginning: they were each weaned on falsehoods until they only had the other fabricated persons in their lives to cling to longingly.

The watch snapped shut and pocketed, Faustite started back down the trail. Frozen twigs crunched their hollow assurances that the woodlands slept, that no one else crossed these paths at this frozen hour. Eir senses confirmed much of the same -- the area was as empty as the bleak, black sky. The general marched further.

Down the winding path he went. The dirt trail swung long around an S-shaped side of a rolling mountain, its treachery visible just over the side of a beaten metal guardrail. Beyond and below, trees staggered their way down the hill with crooks in their trunks keeping them perpendicular, their branches out and their cores as stock straight as middle-class yoga practitioners. That path wound around and down, spiraling out, bearing over a fair mile what would be two blocks of straight path, circling and circling, bearing west, and Faustite felt that warmth so violently opposed to eir own, that seethe, that loathsome acidic burn that fattened itself on devouring reason --

And there, after trudging a lantern through the woods, came familiar mutters. The sound of dejection ey recognized first, followed by the sound of Gevaudan's voice. What promise. Faustite kept silent until ey reached conversational distance from that beaten companion. Eir silence held for twenty long seconds.

Faustite waited, fever gaze trained on Gevaudan, breath slow to vent smoke. He held so much chance in his hands, such potent possibility. Faustite doubted he would see it in himself, drunk and dejected as he looked. Wasted in each sense. What a sour taste for company. "You look like a broken man."

"You had spirit despite all that wear and tear." The general approached, eir eternal cast coloring boots and pants and hands and finally face in forged sunrise. Twin to the patch was a milky, unseeing stare, torn and rent in all the ways an animal would maul unrelentingly, now fettering the wretched wisp that called itself Gevaudan. Faustite turned, attentive to eir own limitations, and sat with pipes braced haltingly against bark. Bits broken off rattled down their smokestained, cylindrical recesses.

"Look, you who never
asked for this: it’s the bearing
that hurts. Not the losing. It’s the carrying
on."

That eye was forfeit. The power Gevaudan possessed, peering out over the lands brazenly, was now an invitation to kill him -- to end that carrying on. To give up the hardest fight on account of all that was lost, and Gevaudan was rich in things lost. Memory, family, relevance, sanctity of his own body. Pity wasn't the right word, but it was the first one to come to mind. But pity was a human sentiment, not one granted to youma. Solidarity, perhaps; they had more in common now. More than a man or a senshi or even another Negaverse agent could share with Faustite.

Reaching out, the general commandeered both of Gevaudan's slim hands, cupped in hot black and brought near the furnace. The bottle was pried away, scented, sampled. Swill for how it tasted, yet it crackled mercilessly and flared as soon as it touched what passed for gut these days.

"Did they spare you like that?" What stared out at em showed no sense of recognition. A milky farce. "What a try to waste a soldier."

Faustite watched that so human reaction to pain rip too-small hands away from the glass-enclosed cage. Toren, he said. Half a name. Half was all they needed to narrow their smokestained net. Toren must've gone to the hospital after the Dark Mirror left him for dead. Concerned samaritans would call ambulances to the sound of a building collapsing; Toren would have no choice.

Queue surgeries. Queue physical therapy. Queue rehabilitation. Toren would be faced with that foreign new life, so distant from the one he remembered. He would purchase all manner of mobility devices, assisted living installations, helpful hand rails. Maybe a seeing-eye dog. Queue a long trail of insurance reimbursements. But adrenaline would wear thin and what's left of this wretched boy, this once-officer, would realize that hopeful denial that he faced a temporary trial was a figment. Positive prognosis would sour, youthful doctors studying under curmudgeonly realists would turn their outcomes toward permanence. Recovering with sight became recovering with splotchy color became not recovering at all. Queue depression.

Queue fatalism. He hadn't lost enough of the right things to cope with what he lost. He was damaged goods. Unsalvageable. As impossible to love as before, made worse with every extra demand made by his vanished sight. He was a drain on others. A pity case. A ball and chain unable to pay back what it cost in time, energy and empathy. Queue self-harm.

Queue quick snatches of pain to distract. Queue hands over a youma's fire. Gevaudan's hands. Toren's hands. Check every Toren for burn marks on delicate digits.

"How human of you to return to familiarities. Being a soldier, having sight. Naysaying what the future holds by what you know as a human. By what society knows." Faustite shifted, shoulder pressed into tree as the general turned fully on Gevaudan. Eir legs arranged as sharp angles with one metal boot pressed flush to the opposite knee. "I thought like you when my eyes turned black. I thought I was over because I couldn't go home, because I couldn't be saved anymore. Elex Yorke died and the boy who took his body was doomed to eat people and hate what he became.

"We like to be so wrong about ourselves." Faustite shut blazing eyes, listened for a few scanty seconds to the whip of wind through trees, to chill stiffening branches with gentle, orderly prods. Out here, a man could freeze to death. Queue resignation.

Reignited, that blazing gaze settled on sightless eyes. "You forget the first tenet this war taught you. You saw that fire in my gut when I met you again as a general. It cost me a liver, a spleen, a stomach, small and large intestines, two kidneys, and more. It cost me what it takes for a man to live, more than modern medicine could spare to save me. But where doctors fail us both, magic doesn't." Faustite waited for such declarations to penetrate the knight's depressive mire. It was a truth so readily denied by the many who live it daily -- a paradox that so often impeded them as it did Gevaudan.

How staunchly human it was to hear Gevaudan ask Faustite if ey wanted that flame to devour em. How poignantly, poetically solicitous of shared identity. Of meaningful connection. But Faustite wasn't Elex anymore. To be consumed was an act of passive surrender -- a perfectly human choice.

"I devoured that fire."

Faustite watched realization dawn on his face, spreading like sun over a mountain range. How habitual it became for even seasoned veterans of this magical war to forget the constraints natively unbound by it, even when looking upon victims of that unbound truth, at the perpetrators of it. How simple it was to disown that truth for a more mundane one -- a truth of banker's hours, home-cooked dinners, familial meetups, holidays, social calls, taxes, government regulations, human rights. For those whose uniforms melted away whenever convenience called, that was their staple reality: an organized, constructed, convenient life. The life that once succored Elex Yorke. Queue a slanted smile.

"I youmafied by starseed eating when I was a Lieutenant." Bad habit, ey should say, but ey felt no disdain over it now. "A reptilian half-youma was changed after a bite. The others -- some kind of 'merge'.

"Their commonality: they were each agents before becoming half-youma." Faustite looked pointedly at Gevaudan's uniform. A cowardly waste it was, wrapped in so many failures. So many bitter contentions souring the life he wanted to have with a husband. So many hopes left to wither and rot on the vine, all wrapped sardonically in an ostentatious maroon bow. What a dreadful waste.

He asked about fundamentals -- about a life beyond that life, cased in anecdotals from that same violet-winged soul who exposed a thousand-year-old curse. Gevaudan couched that question in frustrations he presumably had with human life. Challenges to maintaining a dualistic identity: all the ways the war hampered him in daily routines by bodily injury or secrets. Gevaudan, this wretched, venerable veteran, he suffered a great setback in both sides by losing his sight. Faustite could only imagine walking sticks and disability paperwork and seeing-eye dogs. Colloquialisms like I see and look here. Extra expenses in shuttles and drivers and home nurses. Eirs would be paid for by privilege of the Yorke family, but Gevaudan likely lacked such resources as a fabricated identity.

What a subversion, a fake person hiding in the skin of a real person. A life only partly remembered. Queue impending introductions to Heliodor. Chrysocolla too, perhaps, as a warning.

"Human life is a sorrow." Idle hands sought clasps to the glass corset. One by one by one they pried free, like opened manacles, like thoughts unbound. Then those hands found rung after rung after rung, those false false ribs, those untrue ribs, girding the flame for so much care for untempered skin. "Removed from it, I see how people clamor to be led. How they look to gods. How they invent automation as their collective master. How they create wants when there's nothing left to need. I was like that once -- wanting something to lead me. The stars or a parent or a manager or a god. Something or someone to move my body in ways that made meaning. I craved it, that loaded word." Absolvo te, she said, and spit in eir mouth. "Youmafied, I found a new master. I am that master.

"But partial youmafication presents different challenges in exchange for its simpler life. Some in fighting your body, others in fighting the vestigial societal constraints in your mind. All the automatic responses that make -- made -- you human." But you regain mystery. Wonderment. Faustite straightened, the flames of eir declaration still heating eir gaze. Still etching ivory command into the childhood of eir face.

Eir intonations grew sterner, rasped as they were at that same conversational volume -- a piano compelling response. "If you want to outgrow your humanity, if you want your sight without all the trappings of humanity, I will help you find that path -- but I have conditions."

Faustite brandished a single finger, and with each statement another drew up from eir black hand. "You must accept my guidance. You must rejoin Metallia. We must start tonight.

"Speak your choice, Former Agent Wolframite."

"Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris."* The words fell like habit. Like hymn recited to meaninglessness. In it were a variety of promises beyond the literal -- that Gevaudan would assuredly have a companion that experienced his same flavor of dolor, that Gevaudan was not seeking company by virtue of avoiding it, that leaving behind his company, this last person who attended him through uncountable miseries, was an act of leaving behind misery. Hidden each was in the quiet meaninglessness of latin in the modern day, of quotes extolled where they were long since translated and given over to english. But the solitude of that share was its own romance to em. It tasted like a dream. A victory struck in an undeclared battle.

Queue reward.

"This bottle is your experience." Faustite showcased the partially-drunk bottle against emself. Wicked fire licked and curled its light into it, as if tasting it, as if savoring all that Gevaudan suffered in the well-earned years of wearing Order. All the hours spent agonizing over old wrongs, over an eye lost and a vengeance empty. Over so poetically, poignantly proving old maxims.

"This glove is your defection." With deft hands Faustite removed a glove from Gevaudan, each pinched fingernail picking away at empty seams as to remove it from the hand without once disturbing undoubtedly numb skin. Faustite held steady the older man's hand at the wrist with a pointer and thumb. Once fingers were sufficiently loosened, Faustite tugged the material off in a smooth motion. This, ey soon secured via stopper to the knight's drink. It hung limp like a surrendered flag.

"With my help, you can weaponize both. Everything you survived. Everything you are yet to survive." Closer ey drew the bottle, the glove, until soft cloth caught Faustite's fever-pitched solar plexus. Contagion confirmed, Faustite held the molotov outward for eir ill-fated foe-c**-friend to recognize.

A steady blow guttered the flame. "The past is both retribution and reward now that it has been endured. And it is right that we stand in its ruin, among all this longing and decay. Send your message, wallow a moment. Tell me when you finish.

"Lex talionis left you blind for your crimes. Absolvo te, Gevaudan, as another did for me."**

*Latin for 'It is a comfort to the unfortunate to have had companions in woe.'
**Latin for 'I absolve you' and reference to this RP.

Faustite waited, mute. Much needed planning while Gevaudan, now Toren, struggled with texting out his final message. Escorting him back into the Negaverse demanded its own explanation -- assurances for the highest heads that he would not further defect. That he would stay or die by Negaverse ideals, and those assurances must likewise come from the one vouching for him. The one taking a chance.

They would solicit proof that Faustite had a plan to detain their new acquisition. That he wouldn't again run off to wound the previously wounded and chase his vengeance across the sky. While Gevaudan sat discouraged next to em, resigned to death unless rescued back into Negaverse folds, that said nothing of long-term assurance. Nursed to better health, he might again attack the Mirror Court. They would deserve it, Faustite knew. Eradicating the Court saved the Negaverse's resources from a competitor. But what Gevaudan could use in vengeance's stead was discipline.

And Faustite knew but one person to look to for disciplinary training. Cool resignation flickered in eir face and core. Better that we retrain you well.

The first order was corruption. Reach Negaspace, call for a sovereign, ply Wolframite's return in terms of mistakes learned and loyalty reignited. Vouch his experience, his tactical prowess, his longevity in this stalemate of a war. Offer the history in his head. Offer to reform him, to cauterize his ability to turn traitor by erasing some of that humanity. Offer the blood of stars.

Faustite finalized plans as Toren declared his readiness. Silently the general received him, with little care taken of the blisters. Ey rose and directed Toren to follow. A last glance was spared to the bottle -- queue sentiment.

The air stilled around them, then they winked out like a nightmare before morning.