Disclaimer: Slayers (c) Hajime Kanzaka & Co. I just play with their characters.
Summary: Time passes, the world changes, and two individuals seem to be stuck with each other without really knowing the reason (X/F).
Illustration: http:// www. deviantart. com/deviation/50736985/
- - - - - - -
Back then, both demons and dragons believed that their end could only be brought about by a third war, with both parties killing each other off until there was noone left but the humans. But in the end, what pushed them over the border of existence wasn't war, but time.
Nobody knew exactly where it had begun, but Filia suspected it all started with Lina Inverse breaking the mazoku lord's magical barrier around her continent, causing the magical focus to vanish and to diffuse all over the world. After this, everything gradually changed. Lina had been the greatest sorceress – and one of the last great ones – to have lived, and in only a couple of hundred years after her death, the magic in the world began to fade.
The dragons, even the intelligent and cultured tribes, were the first to vanish. But where their disappearance had resulted in a demon uprising only centuries earlier, the mazoku in their weakened state kept quiet. As the magic in humans died, their knowledge about magic got lost as well. And while the great dragon temples were used as quarries for human dwellings, the demons suffered from the human's new affinity to technology, which was based on physical laws and didn't rely on magical chaos energy. The lesser demons were driven to extinction after only a few decades, the greater demons vanished into different dimensions, went into a dormant state and eventually faded into nothing.
Some 3000 years after Lina Inverse's death, there were only a handful of ancient beings left in the world, and she, Filia, was one of them.
- - - - - - -
Filia didn't know why she hadn't perished like all the others. Val had given her a purpose for a couple of hundred years after Lina's death. But even after he was long grown-up, she kept on going, even while everything and everyone she'd ever known just stopped and disappeared forever. She became a wanderer, blending in with the humans, and moving every 20 years so that nobody would notice her never-changing age. But in the end, the pain of seeing everyone she tried to connect with die in so little time was too great. She removed herself from human contact for several hundred years, and, failing to find any sane "immortal" like her, went into total isolation.
This was when she should have died. Insanity caught up to her, and after eternities of screaming at Cepheid and lying motionlessly on the bare floor in some cave, not eating, not drinking, not thinking, she just waited for death.
This was when he showed up for the first time in forever.
"Will this be the end of you now, too?"
Filia opened her dull, blue eyes and stared right through him, as if her eyes had already dismissed the idea that he could possibly be standing right there, looking down on her with his unchanged violet eyes and a blank expression. She couldn't believe that he could really still be alive after all this time, that he'd actually come to her in her dying hour. But she also knew that he'd have to be real, because there was no way she'd spend her last clear thought on some filthy… annoying…. demon scum… who'd never bothered to show up even once after they parted three millennia ago, when Lina Inverse was still alive.
And suddenly, the fire was back.
- - - - - - -
It wasn't that they stayed together, or even just regularly met, just for the sake of having an immortal companion in this crazy world ruled and defined by humans, which seemed to jump from witch persecutions to electricity in the blink of an eye.
But the knowledge that he was out there somewhere, that she wasn't alone, that he remembered what she held dearest – and the fact that she couldn't possibly give up and die before that scumbag mazoku did – gave her enough strength to live through the next decade.
- - - - - - -
"What about you?", she'd ask him later, despite herself. "How do you stand it?"
"It?"
"Life. Eternity. The loneliness. Everything. Doesn't it drive you crazy?"
"I guess demons are just different."
- - - - - - -
Filia found him again, another millennia later, in a cave in one of the last secluded areas on the world, during a terrible blizzard. He was huddled there on the floor, shivering and constantly warping his form, mumbling gibberish about his master leaving him alone in this world he didn't understand anymore. This time she was the one to pull him back on his feet.
- - - - - - -
He returned the favour only one hundred years later, after Filia finally found Valgarv's dragon skeleton.
"I'm leading two to one.", he grinned at her. "It's your turn again, next time I lose it."
"Will you promise me something?", Filia asked. "Don't save me next time."
Xellos didn't answer to her request. But Filia never fell into despair again after that, either.
- - - - - - -
"I miss the old times."
"When I annoyed you for breakfast and you swung a mace at me?"
"Yes, I VERY definitely miss the mace part."
- - - - - - -
When was the last time I changed into my dragon form?, Filia mused as she let her gaze wander along the night skyline of the city. I can't even remember. I wonder if I can still do it at all.
In retrospective, Filia couldn't say exactly when the sky bar in one of the city's highest skyscrapers had become their annual meeting place.
It was probably…
- - - - - - -
The first time the mazoku had suddenly phased in on the other side of her table (she'd never figure out how he did that without any of the humans catching on to him), she'd been surprised, and tense. The last time they had met had been 20 years ago, and when they'd parted, it hadn't been on the best of terms – even for their standards.
"What is it?", she had asked, and, when he would just stare at her, she'd added "If you start anything in here, I'll have your head, you miserable slimebag. This is my favourite restaurant."
And then he had smiled, a genuine, slow smile that had made her heart skip for a moment.
"My dear Filia.", he had said. "With you being so delightfully nasty towards me, I wouldn't want to destroy this moment for anything."
"How is it that even after ten thousands of years, you're still the same weirdo?", she'd snapped, rolling her eyes at him.
"How is it that even after ten thousands of years, you're still the same immature little dragon?", he'd retorted, and then they had both paused…
Because this is how you remember me, and if I'm not what you remember, I am nothing at all.
- - - - - - -
From that time on, they met in that sky restaurant every year. Filia would go there regularly, at least once a month, and part of her would always hope that he'd drop by as well. But though he never, ever missed their anniversary, he'd never show himself more often than that.
"It's because you're precious.", explained Xellos one evening, and Filia wanted to scream out in frustration about the fact that the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her had to come from the creature she detested on natural principle.
"You anchor me to the past. But if I always see you like this, in this present world, I might forget how you were in the past, and then I might forget the past completely."
"You sprout a lot of bullshit, like usual.", Filia said dryly. "Are you on drugs, or didn't you quite recover from your metal breakdown in that cave after all?"
"You didn't say those nasty words back in the day, priestess." His tone was almost accusingly.
"Stop bringing up the past, you stupid demon. Why can't you let go?", she snapped, and grew even angrier when he chuckled at her outburst. Those he knew well.
"But you can't let go either, right? Else you wouldn't wait desperately for me here, year after year."
Filia groaned, burying her head in her hands.
Then, after a pause,
"What is this, Xellos? Why are we still here, like this? Just the two of us? Is this some sick joke?"
"I don't know. Maybe, when he died, your stingy elder cursed us to annoy each other throughout all eternity."
"Doesn't sound entirely impossible.", Filia smiled despite herself.
"Well, I hope he has the time of his life, then.", Xellos grinned. "Laughing at how we cling to each other while hating each other's guts."
"Do you hate me, Xellos?", Filia asked suddenly.
"Naw." He shrugged lightly. "You could be pretty stuck-up and annoying back then, but I don't think I ever really hated you." He flashed her a toothy grin. "You'd hardly be alive now if I had seriously hated you at any point."
"Hm. Well, I know I hated you. Lots."
"I know."
"Not anymore, though."
"I know."
"Jerk."
- - - - - - -
"Good evening, dear Filia. Will you do me a favour?", Xellos asked upon entering the restaurant in his usual fashion, one year later.
"What?", Filia asked instead of a greeting, suspicion in her eyes.
"Let's do something else than just dinner this year. Will you let me take you somewhere nice?"
She rolled her eyes. "Xellos, where DO you get those horrible pick up lines?"
"Television, dearest Filia, television. Let's be off, then…" And before she could protest, he'd touched her arm, and an almost forgotten tingle of magic shot through her body. Black magic, no less. She couldn't help but gasp when they arrived… wherever they were.
"If you do that again, I'll stomp you into the ground with the weight of a 20- ton dragon", Filia glowered.
"That was precisely what I was going to ask you to do."
"Stomp you?"
"Change. Be a dragon. Fly."
Filia was taken aback. "Look, Xellos, the last time I changed was…. ages ago!"
"So you must have been itching to stretch your wings for a while."
"And the reason I didn't is because I don't want to attract attention. There are humans everywhere."
"Not here."
"And where there are not humans, there are cameras and satellites and god knows what-"
"Filia. I've been scouting out this place since last year. It is perfectly safe."
Filia gave up and observed her surroundings for the first time since Xellos had brought them here. They were in a desert. It wasn't one of the postcard deserts with the pretty yellow sand dunes, but a barren scenery of sharp rocks and grey dust for thousands of miles. A moon larger than she had ever seen illuminated the wasteland. Truly, if there was a place on earth left that wasn't under human surveillance, then this would have to be it.
Not bothering to ask why Xellos would search for places without any human around whatsoever, Filia took a step forward. The icy night breeze cut mercilessly through her thin clothing, but at the same time, it seemed to beckon her to follow. She slowly raised her hands to her chest, but hesitated.
"I'm… I'm afraid. I don't know if I can still change. What if I forgot how?"
"Only one way to find out. Or do you want me to annoy you so much until you pop out your wings in rage?"
"You're getting there, Xellos.", Filia growled. She remembered when she had trouble controlling her human form well enough to hide her tail, and when the slightest provocation would trigger her dragon form to emerge. Hot anger surging through every fiber of her being, roaring fire building up inside her…
In an explosion of gold and light, Filia's true form manifested itself after hundreds of years of hiding. Pure adrenalin surged through her body, and she flapped her wings excitedly. Now that she had changed she realized how much she'd missed it. This was her true self.
"I did it, Xellos. I really did it!" And she took off into the air, doing the craziest stunts she hadn't done since she was a small hatchling, laughing like crazy and shooting laser breaths from her mouth. It was exhilarating.
- - - - - - -
"The truth is, I thought about how much I wanted to kill you right there.", said Xellos matter-of-factly, when she asked him later. The young Filia would have gasped in righteous outrage, but the old Filia had almost been expecting this. "Not because you're you. Because you were a dragon, and you were alive. I wanted to kill a dragon like that. It would have given me the rush of my life."
He chuckled and added: "But actually, because you WERE you, I couldn't kill you. I'm cruel, but not stupid, and more than anything, I'm an egoist. If you're dead, sooner or later I'll go back into that cave and die as well."
Filia sat next to him on the largest rock in the vicinity, still light-headed from her flying. Despite wanting to rip Xellos' head off for fantasizing about killing her, she also felt grateful. If it weren't for him, she might have never changed ever again.
"Why don't we do it like this, then?", she mused. "You kill me, and then you go and rot somewhere. I'd watch your pitiful death from the afterlife, and that would make us even, somehow at least. And then we'd be both dead and this whole strange thing would be over."
"That's stupid.", said Xellos so bluntly that Filia had to laugh.
"Why?"
"I don't feel like dying right now. And I still have a mission to return this world to the Sea of Chaos."
"Big deal. Whatever your old pantheon is up to these days, plunging the world back into the Sea of Chaos can't be their wish if they left only you behind to do it."
"I'll have you know that I was a very efficient servant to Lord Beastmaster in her time."
"So tell me, which sorceress are you going to tempt into summoning the apocalypse in this time and age, o great efficient servant?"
"I might just find someone with the latent potential somewhere."
"Good luck searching. I'll fly over to the moon in the meantime, maybe some species of dragon is in hiding there and just waits for someone to lead them back here and kick some demon ass."
"Oh, I'd be ever so grateful if you brought me some pretty moon dragons to slaughter. Keep them coming."
"Sure, and while you're busy with the slaughtering, I'll raise a school of white magic somewhere and blast your scrawny ass into the next life with my army of priests."
"When did my ass become subject of this discussion?"
"… Idiot."
Maybe, in another ten thousand years, the world would be ready for another age of magic. Maybe, thought Filia, Xellos and her would still be there then, waiting, ready kick the first pebbles into motion that might then become a landslide. Maybe it would become another age of conflict. Maybe it would be something else altogether. Maybe deciding what was to come was the very reason the two of them were still here.
They'd have to live, and see.
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