It's dark, dark, dark, like a void, and all his ears and all his eyes have left him. Long gone. Good-bye!—no, bad bye. Judal has never had a good bye in his entire wild life, except for those that were followed by the sweet release of death (sweet release for him, death for the other unlucky bastard.) But alas, no more of that either!
Judal has no ears to whisper in anymore, that's the telling thing. Nobody dares to listen—his words aren't words so much as fatal desert-crawlers slipping off a desperate tongue, venom seeping between clenched teeth. They turn away like his words have sinister power, and maybe they did, once. Rather, his knowledge is the issue.
Nobody listens, but Judal knows just as well as Aladdin, as well as anyone the rukh has ever lent itself to. He thinks he might even know better, when it comes to things like death and ruin. In most cases, there's no end, it doesn't stop, it loops. It loops, and sometimes it comes right back to him. Contrarily, it's not as pleasant as they think.
He never spared much thought to it, but he supposes there was always some small awareness, a murmur, a twinkling at the side of his vision, a brush of warm energies in cold places. His family had been there all along. The thought makes him just-nearly-mad with carefully veiled shame, quaking anger. His innocent family, revealed only in happy nightmares, had seen for themselves every foul atrocity of war executed at Judal's ecstatic fingertips.
In their world, there's no such thing as 'death,' not really. His understanding is visceral but beyond rudimentary—there's the great flow, an everlasting cycle, a home and a peace. His arrogant mistake had been seeing it only as a source of power. More than power, it was glorious, esteemed, precious life.
His family was waiting, in a sense, and they were sickeningly happy in those forms, enough that Judal didn't have to feel a damn thing for their sake. They were joy and he was self-satisfied misery. He didn't belong to them anymore, if he had ever. He didn't even belong to the great flow anymore. The rukh which had marked and loved him from birth slipped through his hands like sand in a sieve. He was barren and undeserving and he was going nowhere, returning nowhere, and
he was very, very afraid.
Every loose spirit went to that great big glorious home. But, in life, Judal had fought and fussed and decayed so much that there was no home for him anywhere. He'd broken off. The substance of his soul was not vigor, not the energy of creation. Judal was destruction and he didn't know how not to be. There was no sick, lurching thrill in something as dull as home.
But lacking one at the hour of his death was cause enough for pitiful thoughts. And he knew his death was imminent, soon. Too soon but not soon enough. For not having a home, Judal had already built up an exceptional stock of things to lose. His empire, his caretakers, the witches and the wizards who made him what he was. It only took one war to strip them all away, and the obvious finale was the tenuous remnant of his tainted life. They'd wipe him out like the last stain.
All this time playing a great game, and Judal didn't know how to lose. It was too surreal a feeling, death bearing upon his shoulders this way. He might actually begin to understand his victims. He had, at least, made it somewhat quick for them… sometimes, if he was feeling arbitrary mercy that day…
Executions, though? On so thorough and so hating a scale? What chance of mercy lay there?
Missing his wand was like missing security. Missing security was like missing his advantage. There wasn't much else to miss. In the hours before death, there wasn't much else to consider. Terrified as he was, there was little to gain in amnesty—there wasn't much else to live for. He didn't even want the mercy. Exile was pointless. Pointless, pointless, pointless.
He heard footsteps. A single set. He knew them too well.
For her to come down unattended like that, they really must underestimate him in his state—or they overestimate his attachment and his goodness. Those proportions are impossible! Or maybe they're right. Judal just turned his back.
His position was so:
Judal himself was kept on one of the isles off of Sindria's coast, as far removed from paradise as he could get without thinking of the tantalizing possibilities of destroying it. The cell was admittedly nice, guarded by charming men who absolutely couldn't stand a chance against him if he was at full strength. But he was wounded pretty badly, almost to the verge of death before being yanked back.
He didn't have anything to channel magic with, which might not have been so much of a problem if not for the wounds and the way the rukh had chosen to flow against him. Even in a prison, so close to Sindria it seemed like there wasn't much black rukh around at all—it made the air stifling.
Al-Sarmen was obliterated, his Kou Empire was falling apart without that woman at its center; most of his king candidates had been defeated—ah, except for two. The ladies. Their betrayal was somewhat expected. From a pacifist like Hakuei, absolutely. From a fighter like Kougyoku, not so much.
"Um," she said. "I…"
"Um," Judal derided her. "What? Use your words." He threw his hands up, still not facing her, planted in his seat on the ground like a petulant child. No, not quite right—he was a carnage crow with his talons on the shelf, something wild but feckless. When they looked at him, he saw disgust and fury, which he was more than fine with, sure. But there was also mockery and pity, and those were things he could not accept.
Kougyoku pitied the angry, brooding carnage crow with all her heart. She always had.
Maybe that's why he was so mean to her. And why he could never cut her off no matter how annoying—
"I just came to visit you," she grumbled, moving closer to the bars. Judal didn't turn, but he half expected to see her in Sindrian green. Traitor. Traitor. He couldn't believe it, but the thought was hurting. Judal had dealt with traitors his entire life. But in the form of his princess, it hurt.
It hurt really bad.
"Don't." he said, staring hard at the wall. He was feeling more and more disadvantaged with each passing second. He wanted her to leave and not come back. The air stunk of regression. "This isn't a 'visit,' how dumb can you get?"
"Are you really in a position to be making fun of me?" That wasn't anger, that was exasperation. He shrunk in on himself, crossing his arms.
"What are you gonna do, kill me? I'm always in a position to be making fun of you."
"You're not better than me!"
"Hey now, when did I say that? I can be fair! I lose! You win. Go away."
"I didn't come all this way just to hear that." He heard a screech and flinched, then realized it was Kougyoku pulling up a chair next to the bars. Ah. So she intended to stay a while. He began to turn his face, but stopped himself to stare straight ahead again. "And before you say anything, no one sent me. Ka Kobun's not even here. I had… to sneak out."
Judal knotted his hands in his pantscloth, a memory spurring at the fringe of his thoughts.
"The window trick?" he asked softly. He taught her that.
"Yes." She sounded sad, then. The exhilaration of escaping palace walls had probably worn off with age—she could do what she wanted in almost every capacity now. But for some reason, the idle conversation grounded him a bit. He turned himself around, barely able to see Kougyoku in the dim light of dark morning. She was rustling through something.
"I brought you peaches," she said, and Judal felt a little embarrassed that she'd even think to do that. She really was a stupid girl, or at least, she clung to her delusions of friendship with onerous tenacity.
"Oh, save it." He leaned over, settling his cheek on an upheld hand as he stared long and hard at her. "I'd rather you fuck off—what are the chances of that?"
With all-encompassing calm—not a shudder out of place—Kougyoku folded her hands in her lap, offering a wan smile. It caught him off guard, but he didn't speak straight away. In any case, he couldn't.
"You don't look so good, Judal-chan."
Her voice was… quivering? He'd heard this before. He'd caused it, in some cases. And he'd always taken some sick pleasure in it. There was a superficial annoyance—she kept dodging confrontation and supplanting it with concern—but moreover, he was curious. Her shaking voice made him feel sadness, too.
The entire situation was maddening. If it was inevitable, he should be killed straight away rather than suffer through bumbling last minute regrets. He always thought—no, he never thought about his own death. On the promise of his status as a magi and the assurance of an entire empire, he'd thought he'd just… live forever, and never worry about a thing.
He drew in on himself a little more.
Kougyoku and he shared a fixation on beauty and style and good looks, to some degree. To be seen in some other state was bringing him the most immediate and burning shame yet. As a response, he rolled his shoulders back and faced her head on and didn't care. Apathy came so smoothly. He sneered at her. "You couldn't have expected me to after all that. Can we skip the pleasantries, as you often insisted?"
She rolled her shoulders back too.
"I actually came with good news—"
"Good news for me or for you—ah, I got it!" He pounded his fist in his palm with a smile. "There's a wedding! Sinbad decided you were so lovely a traitor that he finally decided that he wanted to marry you—or, no, was it Aladdin's boy? That Balbadd prince?" He couldn't call him pathetic anymore, but at least he could pretend not to care for even the name. On the battlefield, Balbadd's third prince had fought with such intrepid vigor, it was hard to believe he was the same small fry Judal first remembered.
"Stop trying to make me angry," Kougyoku snapped, and he knew that unique frustration and hurt were absolutely boiling under her soft skin. He used to love that. But he was tired, and now he hurt her not for the sake of his amusement but because he saw little else to do but cling to old routines. It just steered him more towards the edge.
"Why?" he asked, a leer, a challenge flare. She couldn't stand his haughtiness around her. She glared. She rattled the cage bars like she was the desperate captive.
"Because I'm trying to help you, you idiot!"
And in a way, she supposed she was. He took in the sight of her miserable red face, the savage swipes at her tear-pricked eyes, that ridiculous pitiful sniffling. For the first time either of them could remember, he didn't laugh.
Maybe a two shot? I'll go back to writing JuKou stories that aren't all ANGST AND SADNESS after this one I swear. Lately the art output has been so friggin adorable!
