A sharp knock at the door interrupted their afternoon tea. Elias turned his head, but Chise shot up and was at the door before he could speak.
"Alice!" He heard Chise say in surprise. "Hi, what brings you by?"
Elias stood, allowing Silver to collect their dishes, and followed Chise out into the hall. Ruth padded after him.
"Hey there," Alice said cheerfully, standing on the porch of the Ainsworth residence. She held up a gift bag. "I heard it was your birthday not too long ago. I stopped by to give you this."
Chise stepped back to give her room to enter. "Oh," She said softly. "You didn't have to buy me a gift."
Alice laughed as she stepped inside. "Don't worry, I didn't buy it. It's a hand-me-down. I got a new one, so I thought you like to have this one. It still works great, I just don't need two." She looked up at Elias and chuckled. "That is, if your jailer here is allowing contraband."
"Die," Elias said gruffly.
Alice stepped past him, flipping her hair, and made for the sitting room without invitation. Chise looked at Elias questioningly.
"It's fine," Elias said. "I'll be in the study."
She smiled and nodded, following Alice with Ruth on her heels. The door closed behind them with a snap.
Sighing, he made for the study but stopped when he realized he'd left the book he was reading on the kitchen table and doubled back for it.
He could hear the voices of the two young women muffled through the door and decided not to intrude, but hearing his own name made him stop and lean against the wall, listening. He had a vague sense that perhaps this was a private conversation, but curiosity got the better of him.
"I doubt the bonehead would give you one of these," Alice said haughtily.
"I don't think Elias even knows what it is," Chise said, laughing softly. "He's not too familiar with modern technology; at least, not that I've seen. He doesn't even own a radio or a landline phone."
"I don't know what kind of music you like, but I have pretty eclectic tastes, so I put a mix of everything on there. If there's anything you like particularly, I can replace the songs you don't like with more of the kind you do."
"Thanks, Alice, this is really nice," Chise replied.
"So what did Elias get you for your birthday?"
"He saved my life. That's gift enough for me."
"You mean from the freak?"
"Cartaphilus isn't a freak, Alice. He was just in a lot of pain. Pain can make people do terrible things."
There was a silence, during which time Elias remembered a few terrible things he'd done while he had been in pain. He hadn't recognized it as pain at the time because it wasn't physical; it was inside his chest and stomach and gnawed at him as though trying to eat it's way out of his body.
It wasn't until after he recovered Chise and had a long talk with her that he realized the pain he felt in her absence was emotional. He was experiencing loss, grief, and guilt: three emotions with which he had been previously unfamiliar because he'd never felt them before. He was hoping now that he knew what they were, he'd be able to react better in the future should such feelings arise again, though he dearly hoped that they never would.
He had heard such feelings could cause a person to die. Before, he didn't believe such a thing could be possible, but now he was absolutely certain it was true. If Chise left again never to return, if she were to die, could he survive that? He wasn't sure. And even if he did survive, he would never be the same. One day of rejection was enough to destroy what humanity he possessed and reverted him back to a mindless monster, lost and devastated. If she were gone forever? If he never saw her face or heard her voice again? He feared what he might become.
Chise's soft laughter brought him back to his senses. It was sometimes difficult to catch the undercurrent of a conversation if he couldn't see the faces of those speaking, so he melted into the wall and shimmied under the door to find a shadow within the sitting room to hide in. He caught Silver's disapproving stare as he slipped under, but ignored it.
Alice was sitting in the chair closest to the door and Chise was on the couch with Ruth's head in her lap. There was a small, white, rectangular device with a accompanying cords sitting on the coffee table. This must have been Alice's gift. Chise was right: he had no idea what that was.
"I still can't get over seeing Ainsworth turn into that huge... thing," Alice began again.
Chise didn't respond, and Elias wondered what she was thinking. Her face was impassive.
"I mean, I'd never admit this to anyone but you, but that guy scares me when he goes all beast-mode. Weren't you scared?"
"Yes, I was," Chise said, and Elias felt deep sinking in his gut. Chise always swore he didn't frighten her, but deep down he always felt that he must. How could he not? Could she have been lying? Why? To spare his feelings? She was kind enough to do so, but the thought that he truly did frighten her made him feel... he didn't know. Disappointed? No, that wasn't strong enough. Disheartened? Disconcerted? Some sort of word with the letter D in it.
"I wasn't scared of Elias, though," Chise clarified a second later, and the heaviness Elias felt evaporated. He took a breath, not realizing he hadn't been breathing.
"I was scared of the situation. I was afraid to lose Elias or Ruth, or Stella, or you. I was afraid Cartaphilus or Ashen Eye would kill one of you. I was afraid I would fail and I wouldn't be able to fix the damage I had caused. There was a lot fear and anxiety bouncing around in my head, but none of it was because of Elias."
She paused, and a shadow passed across her face, barely discernible, gone in an instant. Elias couldn't say what it meant, but it caused an unpleasant prickling sensation in him.
She took a breath and smiled. "I know who and what Elias is. I know he can take on may forms. None of them scare me. It never has."
"Really?" Alice asked in disbelief. "You're not scared of him? Not at all?"
Suddenly, Chise's voice rose in exasperation. "Why do people have such a hard time believing that?" She asked, throwing up her hands. "Do you know how tired I am of people asking me that, especially him?"
There was a stunned silence. Alice had backed away a little. Ruth even seemed surprised.
Chise sighed and held up her hands placatingly. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. Look, let me tell you a story, alright?"
"Okay," Alice said slowly.
Chise closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "When I was eight, I was sent to an orphanage for girls in a small town outside of Okayama. By that age, I was used to doing things by myself, so I just got on with it. No one took enough notice of me to tell me what to do, so there was no need to ask permission, I just did what I needed to do. It was enough to go on with, and I survived it fairly well." Her eyes went flat with introspection. "I think that's why I'm so bad at letting people help me. I'm so used to being on my own and doing for myself that it just doesn't occur to me to ask for help most of the time. I'm still getting used to that."
"I totally get that," Alice said. "My parents were blitzed out of the minds most of the time, so I was pretty much a street kid. I did whatever I wanted, as long as wasn't hassled too much. A kid alone on the street is pretty much a target for every lowlife looking to take advantage. I learned to use a knife to my advantage pretty early on."
Chise listened sympathetically in silence and waited as if expecting Alice to expand upon her story. Instead, Alice motioned for Chise to continue.
"On my first day of school in the new town, I left the orphanage and walked to school alone. To get there, you had to pass the town center. There was a big ornamental fountain right in the middle, and sitting on it was a huge red creature the size of a double-decker bus. No one else could see it; they passed it by like it wasn't a giant nightmare looming over all of their heads. Oblivious.
"The… thing, whatever it was, was made up of nothing but tentacles, teeth, and eyeballs. Now, I was used to seeing weird things all the time and I'd gotten used to living in a constant state of anxiousness, but this was the biggest, creepiest thing I'd ever seen. It terrified me more than anything else had up to that point. I still have nightmares about it.
"I tried to ignore it, but somehow it realized I could see it and it began to follow me. It followed me to school and sat outside my classroom window, making obscene faces at me. It followed me back to the home and sat outside my bedroom window, licking the glass. It followed me for three months."
"Jesus," Alice said in an undertone.
Chise's face was dark and pained. "It constantly told me it was going to steal me away and drink my blood. It told me all the terrible things it wanted to do to me. It delighted in seeing how scared I was. It told me that as soon as I let my guard down, it would get me, and then it would lash out at me. It's tentacles were apparently covered in barbs, because it left cuts and scratches all over me. I stopped sleeping. I stole a knife and hid it under my pillow. I kept arriving at school and back home covering in cuts and bruises. People thought I was insane and hurting myself. They didn't believe that there was this awful thing hunting me and hurting me. No one listened.
"One night, I was so tired that I couldn't stop myself and I fell asleep. I woke up because I felt a pain in my leg and when I opened my eyes, I realized that thing had managed to get the window open and was dragging me outside by my ankle. My leg was cut wide open and bleeding everywhere. I used the knife to cut at it and it let go and disappeared. The caretakers saw me with a knife in my hand and a huge gash in my leg and assumed I had done it to myself. It was the first and only time I ever threw a real screaming fit. I cried and yelled and shouted and told the caretakers that it would kill me. I told them that if they didn't send me far away, I would run away myself. They thought I had lost mind.
"Did they move you, though?" Alice asked.
"Oh, yes," Chise replied flatly. "To a mental asylum. The doctors there diagnosed me with paranoid depressive schizo-affective disorder with a tendency toward self harm. They deemed me a danger to myself and others and I was kept in a locked room by myself for six months."
"Holy shit," Alice breathed. Elias was equally shocked.
"Yeah." Chise was silent for a moment. "It wasn't as bad as you might think, though. The asylum had iron bars on the window, which I didn't know at the time was keeping the bad things out. It was the first time in my life I didn't see things that other people couldn't. Being alone for once was kind of nice. There was no one telling me how delicious I was. There were no creatures trying to scare me. It was quiet, but it was a peaceful quiet. I thought maybe I was actually crazy and that being at the asylum was making me better. But then they released me, and all the bad things came back. The medicine they gave me didn't help. If anything, it made me feel more crazy.
"But you know what the worst part of that story is?" Chise asked Alice, who shook her head. "That tentacle creature was not unique. It stands out in my head because it stalked me for so long, but there have been many monsters like it trying to hurt me my whole life. Some of them succeeded, and some of them weren't even fae. Humans can be just as monstrous as the monsters."
Her eyes were dark, and Alice nodded knowingly. Elias felt disquieted. Chise often talked about her past experiences with fae creatures but was far less open about her experiences with other humans. Elias hadn't thought much about it before, but now he wondered just how much she had suffered at the hands of her own people.
"When I first saw Elias, was I surprised? Yes, of course," Chise admitted. "But I wasn't scared. Compared to that red monstrosity that terrorized me outside of Okayama, Elias was practically cuddly."
Alice snorted at the description. "Cuddly isn't the word I would use to describe Ainsworth."
"You don't know him," Chise blurted out, then bit her lip. Alice smirked at her and narrowed her eyes.
"You have weird taste," Alice said.
"Hey," Ruth retorted, lifting his head off of the couch next to Chise. She patted him down.
"No, she's right," Chise said with a laugh. "But weird isn't the same as wrong."
"I suppose that's true," Alice admitted. She stood up and stretched.
"Leaving already?" Chise asked, a little disappointed.
"Yeah, sorry," Alice said. "Renfred and I are running a new test at the college tomorrow and I gotta be up early. I just wanted to make sure you got your gift. Maybe someday soon I can take you out to lunch, though."
Chise smiled in return. "That sounds nice."
Elias used the distraction of Alice's departure to quickly jump through the shadows to his study. He rematerialized and sat at his desk, attempting to look busy and preoccupied.
He heard a knock at the door.
"Come in," he called.
Chise opened the door and Ruth followed her inside.
Elias attempted to be nonchalant. "How was your visit with Renfred's apprentice?"
"She has a name, Elias," Chise said, her hand on her hips. She wore a frown. "You know, it's rude to eavesdrop on other people's conversations."
Elias sucked in a breath. So she had known he was there. She was becoming very perceptive to him, not always to his benefit.
"My apologies," he said. No point in denying it. "I was curious." He tried changing the subject. "What gift did she give you?"
"Oh." Chise held up the white rectangle. "It's an MP3 player."
"A what?" He asked, baffled.
"A music player," she clarified. The white cord attached to the rectangle branched into two separate cords, at the ends of which sat little round objects. "You select a song you'd like to hear," she said, demonstrating. He saw a small screen flip through song titles. "And then the music plays through the earphones." She held one up for him, but then faltered. "Uhh..."
"Yes?"
"Do you have ears?"
That was an interesting question. Did he? "I am obviously capable of perceiving sound, though I am not sure from where."
She frowned again. "Bend down."
He obliged her, and she held out her fingers next to where he assumed he might have ears were he human, and snapped them. "Is that louder than normal?"
"No, but I think you're on to something. Try again."
After some trial and error, they determined he best perceived sound just behind and slightly above the bone that made up his lower mandible. There was a shadowy hollow there than may have actually been an ear canal. She held an ear bud there and pressed play.
Elias listened for a moment and said, "Ah, I see."
Chise smiled and put the other bud in her ear, and they listened to the song together.
"What a pleasant tune," Elias said as the song ended. "This was a thoughtful gift."
"Yes," Chise agreed. "I like it very much."
Elias straightened as Chise put the music device in her pocket. Chise turned to leave Elias to his work when he stopped her.
"Chise," He began slowly. "Is what you told Alice true? About my monstrous forms never frightening you?"
Chise sighed in frustration. "Again? How many times do I have to say it before you believe me?"
"At one point, you seemed to hesitate. Why?"
Chise was silent, and Elias thought she might deny it. She looked down at the floor. Ruth nudged her hand and gave her a pointed look. She sighed again.
"Look, I want to be as honest with you as I can be," She began. "The truth is, your forms don't scare me. The fact that you used to eat humans doesn't scare me. The fact that you're bigger and stronger and more powerful than me doesn't scare me. The fact that if you wanted to, you could devour me in three bites has never bothered me at all."
"But?"
She paused and sucked in a long, shaky breath. "But you did scare me once. You scare me when you do things you think are rational, when you act in a way that puts others at risk because you want to help me."
"You're referring to what happened with Stella," Elias said.
"Yes," Chise said, still avoiding his eye. "You really scared me then, Elias."
"I know," He replied mournfully. "And I am truly sorry. I did not understand then what I stood to lose. I understand now." He grew thoughtful and said, "When you confronted me, you said you thought I was different. You cried. I didn't understand what you meant."
Chise did look at him then. "The fae treat humans like they're disposable. Like tools to be used until they're no longer valuable and then tossed away. I had thought, because you were part human, that you would value human life more than other fae did. I was… disappointed to learn that I was wrong."
Now it was Elias who failed to meet Chise's eye. He hung his head, feeling guilty. There was another feeling there, one he couldn't put a name to.
"You don't have to love every human out there, Elias. You don't even have to like any of them. But people are not expendable. You can't use them with no regard to how it will effect them or the people in their lives. My life is not worth more than Stella's, or any other human being, just because you care more about me and less about them."
Elias was unsure he understood this. Chise was infinitely more important to him than any other human. He would gladly sacrifice every life on Earth if it meant saving hers, fae and human alike. Was that wrong? He didn't understand how.
"What if you had succeeded?" Chise continued. "What if you had transferred the curse to Stella and she died in my place? Can you imagine how her family would feel if she never came home?"
"I'm afraid I cannot," He replied.
"Don't you remember how you felt when I left you and you didn't know if I'd ever come back?"
"Yes. I felt…" Elias thought for a moment. The pain he felt when she left surfaced again and he struggle to put it into words. Cold was inadequate. So was lonely. It took him several minutes of reflection before he finally decided on a word that felt appropriate: "Broken."
Chise's eyes widened and her lips parted. Whatever she was expecting him to say, it wasn't that. After a moment, though, she got back on track.
"Don't you think that's how her family would have felt? Losing a child is devastating for most parents. If you had gone through with it, you wouldn't only have killed her, but you would have broken her entire family as well. Some people can't live with that kind of loss. My mother couldn't. I barely could. Don't you realize that?"
He hadn't. Elias had not even taken Stella's family into consideration in his single-minded fervor to complete the ritual. His jaws opened in surprise as sudden understanding filled his mind.
"I see," He said in a wondering tone. "I see."
"Do you?" She asked him. She took his face in her hands and made him look her in the eye. "Do you really see?"
"Yes, I believe I do. Loss is a terrible thing to endure. It is not a feeling I would wish upon another." He huffed unhappily. "Is this what it is to empathize?"
Chise nodded.
"This lesson in human behavior was certainly hard-learned." He replied.
"Yes," She agreed. "It's one I wish I had taught you sooner."
Elias sighed. "I am trying, Chise," He said plaintively. "I'm trying to learn, even though it is difficult for me to grasp at times."
"I know you are, Elias. I wouldn't be here otherwise. If I thought you couldn't learn, I'd never be able to stay with you."
"I know." He leaned his long skull against her forehead. "Believe me, I never wish to lose you again. I need you to help me understand so that I can do better. If you are willing to be patient with me, I shall endeavor to try harder."
She sighed and smiled, planting a soft peck on the ridge above his nose. "That's all I can ask for."
"Chise," He said, pulling back to look at her better. "I feel an emotion that I cannot identify. I've felt it since that day when you discovered my plan and ran from me, when you cried and struck me. Can you help me understand?"
"Yes," She replied earnestly. "What does it feel like?"
"Guilt, but stronger. A cold knot in my stomach that makes me anxious and sets my nerves on edge. But at the same time, it makes me sad. Do you know what it might be?"
She considered him, hanging his head like a berated dog and not looking at her.
"I'm not completely sure, but I think it might be… shame."
Elias straightened and looked down at her, processing the information. "Yes," He said quietly. "I believe you're correct. I am ashamed."
"That's good," Chise said encouragingly.
"It is?"
"Yes. It means you truly understand your mistake and are capable of learning from it. That's a good step going forward."
"How do I make this awful feeling go away?" He asked a little desperately. "It is most distressing."
"Maybe you could do something nice for Stella," She offered. "Invite her for tea, or even go with me the next time I visit her family."
Elias nodded. "Both are fine ideas. I will do that."
"Good," She wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him tight. He draped his arms over her shoulders in return, nuzzling her head with his snout, careful not to snag his teeth on her skin.
From the circle of his arms, she looked up at him with her wide, lovely eyes. "Would you like to listen to some music with me?"
"Nothing would please me more," Elias responded. "After, I'd like to hear more about your childhood, if that's all right."
"Sure," She said, taking his hand and leading him back to the sitting room.