title: rogue
summary: and I just can't relate. [Phantom] character study.
pairings: phantom/cygnus, platonic mercedes/evan and luminous/lania

an: for solitaryloner, request/birthday giftfic omg I promised this such a long time ago I'm sorry soli. uploaded now b/c time zone differences.

Freud was dead. Aran might as well have been dead – she had lost all her memories, and what returned were far too little to make the white-haired warrior the woman she had been all those centuries ago when they had went against the odds to fight the Black Mage.

That really left Mercedes and Luminous as the only other members from the original heroes. Good people – noble, high on their horses and quite saintly when they got their minds down to it. They were 'moral'. They were good role models – they would know how to be 'ethical' and 'humane' and 'right', unlike him.

He decided to study them to see how they dealt with it. And what he found was . . . unsettling.

Mercedes was still the queen of the elves. She still wielded two bow guns with ferocity and speed, tearing down everything and everyone that got in the way of her revenge and will to protect her people from further harm. Her skills and powers had been long since rebuilt back to their former glory, and perhaps had been pushed beyond what her past self was capable of with the wonders of modern technology and discovery.

In the past, though, she had loved someone dearly. She had loved a man with deep intellect, brown hair and thoughtful blue eyes who had been the leader of the Heroes and the master of the last Onyx Dragon. They had been more than lovers – they had been allies; confidents; friends; soul mates.

In the present she loved a boy. But not like how she had loved the man who had given his life for his friend and for the world. The queen of the elves loved the human boy carrying a large portion of the world's weight like he was her very own son. What she saw in him was the child that she and Freud could have – maybe – had in another world, or in another time. She taught him, supported him and did everything she could to both prepare and protect Evan, just like a true mother would do to make sure their child survived the harsh fate presented to them.

She didn't see Evan as a second chance at romance. Rather, she seemed to see it as the beginning of a new life and a new relationship, albeit a platonic one.

Luminous, through the fates and their cruel or ironic intervention, was in a similar situation to the blonde elf – and therefore Phantom himself. Luminous had a girl, young and sweet and innocent who was the very center of his world now when once revenge against the tainted transcendent and ensuring his destruction had been his sole reason for existence.

The light mage didn't like him. Phantom didn't like the light mage either, and their mutual dislike for each other hadn't changed in the centuries spent suspended in time but he couldn't deny that their situations weren't similar.

Luminous had a ward – a girl of this very present time – that he would have given his life to protect no matter what. He was her father, her brother, her guardian angel, her everything. She was his everything, his heart, his reincarnated mentor and star. Because of him, because he had existed the girl in the past had died to protect him once. He would be what the girl wanted him to be, wholeheartedly.

Through methods that were illegal, invasive and rather unethical (although no blood had been shed) Phantom had learned all of this, and it was all so obvious what the stubborn, headstrong, holier-than-thou light mage would do. Luminous had another chance now, and so he wouldn't let it walk away. Now he would protect her, return the favour and by doing so Luminous would never feel that devastating pain again. The girl Lania was his second chance and Luminous wasn't going to screw it up. He would be whatever she wanted him to be. Her happiness would be placed above his own, if not his life.

And Phantom?

Phantom was the crooked hero. The other two were the ones 'doing it right', as per usual – the hero-like Heroes, the ones on the high horses where they were supposed to be. The noble ones, the ones with the 'holier-than-thou' sticks right up their high horse-riding behinds. They had let their ghosts go rest and picked up their lives to move on with the shards and the fragments with their new chances, embracing without regret the future that was their present, so far from what their lives should have been. More importantly, the two of them had been mature enough to not reflect and project their loves exactly as they had been onto the 'replacements'.

And Phantom? What did he see when he observed, analyzed and studied himself? The thief in ostentatious white silks and gold trimmings, the rogue with the fancy mannerisms, the bandit in blue?

Well, he was the rogue, the black sheep, the odd one in the end after all. He was the one who stepped and thrived in the gray, the one that liked to break and bend and twist rules to get his end. He was the one who smiled and lied through his perfect white teeth to get what he wanted, no matter what.

Remember Aria? Remember how she smelt, how she laughed, how she blushed, how she lived?

Remember how she lay dead in the broken wings of a beaten and defeated Shinsoo, cold, unmoving, dead, murdered? How she lay cold and dead under the fall of the rains from the heavens that seemed to mourn her passing just as much as you did? How, even the large white wings of the heavenly bird couldn't do anything to keep the heat leaving the shell that had held her very soul?

He still had the painting of her. He had an eidetic memory – he wouldn't just forget things, and sometimes simply couldn't.

But recently, he was beginning to find that his memories of her smiling face were blurring and shifting slightly. Aria's hair had always been as straight as her strict moral codes; yet he was beginning to see curling gold strands in the depth of memory's portrait where there were supposed to be none. He couldn't help but see a woman's face softened with baby fat not yet gone, knight masters of rainbow colours shining like crown jewels in the bright Ereve sunlight at her sides when Aria had stood alone to face the harsh world.

Shinsoo, the holy bird that was the constant presence around all the empresses of Ereve, did not help matters at all. Rather, she made it worse.

He was beginning to see Cygnus in the places where he once saw Aria when it had been the opposite - when it should have been the opposite. What happened to the countless times when he'd tried oh-so-hard to keep the same mistakes from being made? What happened to seeing Aria in the place of the childish cygnet?

Phantom blamed Shinsoo's temporary death for the slippery slope his mind was sliding down. When the Demon Slayer's brother had murdered the bird, the empress had changed. It was a good event for the allies, he supposed – the Cygnus Knights were no longer quite as useless as they had been to the Alliance – but to him it came in the form of a punch to his emotional state's guts.

How many times had he blamed his protectiveness of her on her similarities to Aria? How many times had he dismissed his enjoying of her company on their shared heritage?

Every single time he'd seen Aria in Cygnus.

But now he saw her as her own person because it was simply impossible to see the gentle-smiled but naïve and all-too mortal Aria in the transcending aura Cygnus wore around herself now. And even then he still felt protective of her, still enjoyed her company just as much as he had before even when she no longer required protection from him, even when her smiles were strained and their times together were always too short. And even then he wanted to stay with her forever and ever.

That had never been a plan of his.

"Please," the tactician of the Cygnus Knights, Neinheart von Rubenstein, had once asked him as he'd been about to board the Lumiere. "Don't break her heart."

And what had his answer been to that sincere plea?

His memory served. "I won't," his past self had answered with confidence and surety, trademark smile plastered on his lips. "She's like a daughter to me."

The change in emotions had never been a part of his plans. In any of his multiple plans. It made him a liar in a place he swore he would be truthful, it made him a disgusting oath-breaker, it made him a-

A lover?

Phantom had only regretted taking the gray path three times in his life. The first was when he had asked Aria to marry him and she had rejected for the sake of her people, because to marry him would have meant to give up being an empress. The second was when Aria had been murdered and he hadn't protected her because he was away stealing a trinket worthless compared to her priceless value. The third was now, when he couldn't be a 'good' person.

Phantom is a thief – he breaks laws, he laughs at rules and the chains of morality have no grip on him. He is a charming gentleman thief, yes, and the general consensus is that those are moral thieves, but if he fancies himself in love with the Empress Cygnus –

Well, he has a very low opinion of himself now.