Ironic
Or,
The Secret Garden
It was not horribly unusual to see Xellos walking around town when they all stopped for a break. In fact, it wasn't strange to see any of Lina's party somewhere- Zelgadis in the library (or any convenient abandoned ruins nearby); Lina shopping or eating, Amelia sometimes with her; Gourry browsing the local swordsmith's shop. No, it was not unusual that Xellos was walking through Izhevsk, or even that he was buying things along the way. It helped maintain his disguise as human… at least, for people outside of his company, since Lina and the others had figured out that he was a mazoku, although it had taken quite a while for them to arrive at that conclusion.
It was unusual, however, to find that he was carrying flowers with him. Although it was the first truly hot day in spring, there were certainly better ways for him to appear human without purchasing, of all things, flora. Not just any kind, either- Lina, as she followed him through the Izhevsk's mildly crowded streets, could see that he had paid quite a bit for some of the more exotic types.
What is he up to? she thought, trailing after the only part of him that she could see- the top of a deep purple orchid that wove through the crowds. Since when did he like flowers?
As he was nearing the edge of town, he began to glance over his shoulder with increasing frequency, apparently to catch anyone following him. He even doubled back and seemed to head back towards the inn, but quickly turned down an alleyway and headed back out the other side to continue. The further away he went, the thinner the crowds became, and Lina had to duck into side alleys and doorways to avoid being seen. Once he was at the gate leading out, however, he must have been satisfied, and stopped watching in favor of walking faster. She followed him at a safe distance, jogging to be sure she wouldn't lose him, even as he went down the dusty road out of town, the purple orchid in one arm and a basket of other plants slung over the other.
Izhevsk itself was a reasonably sized port city, with larger estates outside of its borders, stretching along the silvery beaches and into the verdant countryside. Xellos seemed to be headed towards the nearest of these estates, Vigne. Alain de Vigne, the current owner of the property, was quite unsurprisingly a wealthy merchant and the proud proprietor of some of the finest Touriga Nacional vineyards around.
Curiouser and curioser…
A high stone wall surrounded the property, and, since de Vigne had a kind of paranoia that only the very rich can possess, he also had it warded with several dozen spells, and Lina surmised that one of them probably would block Xellos' teleportation. An irritating, but effective way of keeping out unwelcome intruders. Usually, though, the only kind of unwelcome intruder that de Vigne would have to worry about was the occasional lush.
The only breaches in the stone wall were for several solid wrought iron gates. The western gate, which Xellos was approaching, opened straight into one of the Touriga Nacional plots. Before it, though, he stopped on the stone walkway and glanced into the trees that lined it, once again paranoid and watching for pursuers. Lina, fortunately, was well hidden in a tree before he had the chance to spot her, and dropped down after he continued.
When he came up to the gate, he set down the basket and shifted the orchid to the other hand, and pulled out a large silver key. He turned it in the lock on the iron gates, and it gently swung open to allow Xellos through. As it began to swing shut and therefore destroy any possibly of finding out exactly what that mazoku was up to, Lina snatched up a good sized stone from the path and threw it. Either from sheer dumb luck or extraordinary skill (depending on whom you ask), the rock landed with reasonable neatness in the doorjamb, and prevented it from closing. Lina privately congratulated herself on a stone well thrown, and then carefully pushed open the gate and followed through.
When she stepped inside, she found herself standing on a flagstone path lined with blossoming cherry trees.
"What the hell?" she said, looking around. This was not a part of de Vigne's estate. The sorceress turned, quickly opened the gate back up, and found herself staring into oblivion.
"Oh shit."
She slammed the gate shut again, now certain that she was not, in fact, where she thought she would be. Apparently, Xellos' silver key wasn't for opening that specific gate- it'd probably fit any lock, now that she thought about it- but was for opening up a specific pocket dimension.
This revelation, and the one she had immediately afterwards that said, 'You're stuck in a pocket dimension with Xellos and no way out', did not inspire much confidence. Regardless, Lina hurried down the path after Xellos, figuring that she would catch up with him soon enough.
As she went, she noticed that the whole place was one magnificently well-cared for garden. Several times the path would branch off into other groves, all of them carefully tended to and quite beautiful.
I wonder whose garden this is? she thought.
She presently caught a glimpse of dark purple, and, since there really wasn't anywhere she could hide to observe, she walked closer to see if it was Xellos or not.
It was Xellos, but he didn't notice her, being too absorbed in his work transplanting the orchid into a bed with several others. Pomegranate trees grew nearby, with strange twisted bark and beautiful red flowers.
After successfully planting the orchid, Xellos stood, brushed the dirt off of his knees, and picked up the basket with the rest of his plants in it.
"Xellos-san, what the hell are you doing?" Lina said. Xellos startled, nearly dropping his basket, and turned.
"Lina-san! My, what a surprise. How did you get in here?" he was smiling as ever, but there was a hint of nervousness to it- of getting caught with one hand in the proverbial cookie-jar, in a way.
"I followed you," she replied, crossing her arms. "Now seriously…"
"Sore wa himistu desu!" he said, tapping his lips with one slightly dirt-smudged finger. He started to walk down the path again, fully knowing that Lina would follow.
"Xellos!" she cried, jogging up next to him. "You can't possibly try to tell me that this isn't weird. You're a mazoku, remember? What's with the flowers?"
He glanced over at her and replied, "Well, it's not all flowers."
She sighed, and rubbed her temples with one hand. "Still…"
"All right, Lina-san, all right," he said with a shrug. "I confess. It's a hobby."
There was a long pause.
"What?"
"It's a hobby, Lina-san. You know, something do to every once-in-a-while? Try getting one sometime," he replied. "And, anyway, I've been alive for…" He paused, and cocked his head slightly, thinking.
"Hmm. What era is it again? Oh, well, never mind. It's been a long time, and, trust me, you'd go quite crazy if you don't have something to do."
"So what's next, then, crochet?" she said with a touch of sarcasm. "Seriously, Xellos. This isn't just a hobby if you had to create a sealed pocket dimension to have it."
Xellos raised one purple eyebrow (there was a smudge of dirt above it, which quite ruined the dramatic effect), and gave her a sidelong glance. "You're being very sharp today, Lina-san. Be sure that you don't cut yourself."
"See! You're being so damned protective of this thing. What, is it illegal or something? And don't give me that look; you're not going to try anything right in the middle of this. I'll blow up your cherry trees if you do."
Xellos sighed, possibly in defeat. "All right, Lina-san, no need to get violent. It's not illegal for me to do this, per se, but… it doesn't exactly project the right sort of image, ne?"
"I guess it would make you look a little bit like a gardening fruitcake."
"Thank you, Lina," he replied in deadpan.
Lina looked around a bit as she followed Xellos (wherever he happened to be headed) through the garden, glancing at some well-tended groves of fruit trees ranging from the common to the very exotic.
"You know… I thought mazoku hated all forms of life," she said. "What's so different about you? Why don't you mind?"
"I wouldn't exactly be fit for my job if I despised everything living, would I?" Xellos replied, stopping briefly to pull up a few dandelions. "Try looking past your nose, Lina-san. If I despised life, utterly loathed anything living, and could not stand positive emotion of any sort, I'd be quite useless, wouldn't I? And, while these things aren't exactly my cup of tea, I have been able to adapt over the years to the point where it isn't so bad, in moderation. However, that Amelia girl…" there was a shudder here, "…she puts my nerves on edge. But, anyway… If I got so distracted by my own hatred for all things good, I wouldn't be able to complete my objectives."
"That being to manipulate us into doing whatever you want."
"Well, I never claimed my intentions were good," he said with a smile. "Now, Lina-san, do you intend to accompany me all day, or do you want to get back to Izhevsk?"
She paused, and looked around a bit. "You know what, Xellos? I think I'll stay for a while."
He seemed to be a bit startled by that. "Ah. Suit yourself, I suppose." So saying, he continued on the path he had chosen. Lina followed, just generally looking around and seeing what was going on in here.
"Where are you going, Xellos-san?"
"You'll see. Be patient."
Lina was not happy with that reply, but didn't push it. She didn't think he'd try to harm her here, not with his precious garden in potential danger. However, she didn't have a long time to meditate on that, since Xellos started to move faster, and the line of cherry trees suddenly ended into open sky.
In the sudden clearing, there were rows of wooden trellises with climbing grape vines draping up and over them, lush with verdant leaves and heavy with ripening fruit. The about half of the rows were laden with grapes the color of garnets, the other half were pale green beneath the abundant leaves. Not far from the wine plots there was a small stone building, presumably a wine cellar, and it was towards this that Xellos headed.
Lina gave the mazoku an incredulous look. "You make wine."
Xellos didn't answer, but entered the stone building, leaving the wooden door open. Lina followed him into the cool interior, to find the walls covered with wine racks, and bottles filling up every slot. Xellos himself had disappeared down a flight of steps that led into a cellar. He returned with two bottles cradled in one arm and two glasses in the other, and a corkscrew hooked onto a finger.
"Would you say you're more of a red or a white kind of person, Lina-san?"
"Does it matter?" she asked, shrugging. "I'll try 'em both."
He smiled, "Yes, I thought as much."
So saying, they both went outside and sat in the shade of the outermost trees, a little way from the vineyard. It was worth the small walk for the shade and the scenery. There was very little more relaxing than a glass of good wine underneath a blossoming cherry tree.
There was a small 'pop!' as Xellos pulled the cork out of the bottle of white wine. He poured two glasses and handed one to Lina, while setting the rest of the bottle on the grass. He toasted, briefly, to her health (since it'd be a bit unnecessary to toast to his own), and they took the first drink.
It was, of course, very good wine; it tasted like a golden summer's day.
Lina picked the bottle up from its position, and peered at the dark purple label closely. On it, there was a little hand-drawn picture of a cloud, with Sora written underneath in a heavy gothic hand. Beneath that was the date of bottling, in Roman numerals. After a few moments, she was able to figure out exactly what date it was.
"Xellos-san, is this right?" she pointed to the number. "Because this is-…"
He looked closely at the label. "Yes, it's correct. That one's from two hundred and thirty years ago. All the ones in the cellar have been aging for at least a hundred and fifty."
"This stuff should've spoiled years ago, Xellos-san."
"Ah, not if you ferment it right," he said, raising his half-full glass in a kind of salute. "I've got a bottle that's six hundred and counting. I'm saving that one for a very special occasion."
"What, are you waiting for total world domination?" she said, her tone sarcastic.
"No, no, nothing that dramatic. Just something worth getting drunk over."
The sorceress sighed deeply. It figured.
"All right, Xellos-san, I'll bite. When're you going to feel like celebrating?"
"Give that wine another fifty years and you'll really have something to celebrate," he said, taking a sip from his glass. "It'll be sweeter than a baby dragon and be able to kill one at twenty paces!"
"Only you would be happy about that."
"Of course, Lina-san! Everyone knows it'd take enough alcohol to poison a small country to get me tipsy, so dangerous alcohol toxicities mean nothing," he said, draining the rest of his glass and refilling it afterwards. "But that's beside the point."
"There was a point to this conversation?"
"No, but I just figured it was the right time to say that." He leaned over with the bottle and filled her glass again. The bottle was getting low.
They sat in silence for a bit, drinking wine older than most people lived. Somehow, Lina got the feeling that there should be something ironic in that, but wasn't exactly sure what it was. They split the last bit of wine that was left in the bottle, and then went straight on to the next one.
"I'm more of a red wine person than a white," Xellos said, pouring a wine the color of garnets into her glass. "It took me years to get this recipe right, but I think this has to be some of the best stuff I've made."
Lina watched the label as he poured; white against the dark purple glass of the bottle. The same gothic script was on this one as well, and a little drawing of a star and moon, with the name Dorwinion in sable ink. The date it was bottled was somewhere around three hundred years previous.
Its taste was like midnight, with suggestions of raspberry and vanilla, hints of shadows and starlight. Only after three hundred years under a demon's care could a taste like that be made; no mortal hand could bottle the night and filter its flavor into the fruit of the vine. No human could couple shadow with vanilla and crimson fruit into wine, or snatch starlight to instill into his drinks. The flavor played like reflections, almost elusive and teasing in taste.
The subtle phantoms of midnight settled over the garden; the breeze stirred with gentle hints of vanilla, with raspberry tangs. The myriad stars were overhead in strange constellations, silver pinpricks in a velvet black sky. There was a brilliant streak, like a thread of sudden silver slashed across a sable cloth, which soon dashed out of sight and into darkness. Somewhere, a star, perhaps, had fallen...
Then, like a memory long since past, with the haze of a half-remembered dream, the sunlight filtered down through the specters of night, running down with the last of the wine, until all that was left was the mingling taste of shadows and stars, and even that soon disappeared. The sorceress and the mazoku were still sitting beneath the cherry trees, in the daylight of a locked-up world, empty glasses in hand and an empty bottle between them.
"That was… very good wine."
"I should hope so," Xellos set his glass carefully down in the grass. "That was the last bottle. I don't have any more of it."
Lina leaned back on her hands, looking upwards; puffy clouds wandered lazily across the azure sky. "You can just make more, can't you? Three hundred years is a bit of a wait, sure, but you've got time."
"No, I can't make it again," he said (and was there some hint of sadness there?). "To grow the vines that made it takes a thousand years, and another hundred to ripen the fruit; the vines produce only one harvest, enough to make, after all's said and done, two bottles of wine. After their labors come to fruition, the vines die without seeding.
Those planted from seeds with bear only seeds; those planted from a cutting from the roots of another will produce fruit, but the vine it was cut from will beget nothing. I obtained the last cuttings well over a millennia ago. There are no more seeds from this kind, and, now, nothing left to take from." He turned to Lina, and there was stoicism in his face, "You have tasted a vintage that has only before been drunk by kings, and hereafter shall be tasted by no one."
"What about the one you've been saving?"
He smiled widely at this. "That kind? Lina-san, even I have not had the privilege to sample that kind of wine, and I have tried many, many things in my lifetime. There are few wines like any made from Dorwinion grapes, but anyone who can afford to drink the wine I'm saving would use something like Dorwinion for cooking."
Lina raised an eyebrow, not so much from being impressed as from being amused at the mazoku's enthusiasm. Apparently he had more hobbies than just gardening.
"Make sure you tell me when you open it, okay?"
For a moment, she thought he'd retort with something scathing, but found that he actually smiled in a way that, on anyone else, she would've called gently to reply.
"I'll bring it one day. It's a poor wine to drink alone."
She paused. Xellos was acting particularly un-Xellos-like, especially when she didn't expect it. Strange.
"What's gotten into you?" she asked, leaning forwards again to look him directly in the face. "You've been acting weird since I've gotten here."
"I usually don't have company while I'm here, Lina-san," he replied. "And just having a place like this suggests that even I have strange moods some times. There only tends to be no one around to see them."
"So… what's gotten into you?" she stretched her shoulders languidly.
He smiled rather ruefully at that. "Too much thought, actually. Remember that- too much thought will give you a whole new set of problems. Doubly so when you think about the future."
At that, she leaned back on the grass. Her mind was getting the pleasant fuzzy feeling that anyone would get after splitting two bottles of good wine, especially someone of her petite size.
"Is that so?" she said, a little sleepily. She felt a bit like she was floating.
"It is," Xellos replied, resting his chin on his hand. "One of these days, after a millennium or so, I'm going to start forgetting things."
"Everybody forgets stuff…" she said, closing her eyes. The sunlight above played a mix of color behind her eyelids.
"I've lived so long…" he said, his eyes closed in thought, "and I forget what happens because there's not enough room in my head to keep it all. Someday I'll forget this garden, and everything inside here will die and wither and be gone, because its memory was long since past... so long-lived that it became too elusive to hold on to. Someday I'll forget today, and yesterday, as though… as though my mind's a black space that will never be filled by remembered days… It won't be so long until I will be forgetting you as well, Lina-san. I'll forget Zelgadis-san, Gourry-san, that Amelia girl, all lost beyond any distant hope of retrieval; then missing for so long that I don't even notice the empty space left by their absence…"
"I usually don't speak so freely about things like this… but it is a little unnerving, to have bits of yourself just break off and fade. I do not want to lose everything that has happened to me. How long will it take before I am forgetting myself, Lina-san? Am I not yet so steeped in darkness that I can't go further? What even is further… oblivion, maybe… like sleeping, but starker… but what dreams, what nightmares may come? What a thing to think of… And what happens to a person once they forget who they are? Could I even forget, one day, that I exist? What happens then? …Will it matter by then…? Perhaps by then it won't… maybe I won't even exist long enough to forget existence… how ironic is that? Existing so long as to forget existing?" He laughed darkly, without amusement. "Ironic." He turned towards Lina, and found that she was fast asleep.
He smiled.
All's well, then, that's seemingly well in the end.
…
Lina awoke to a brilliant white ceiling and the sounds of a busy marketplace. Sunlight played across the powder-blue bed sheets, as elusive as the half-remembered dreams in her head. There was something about Xellos, and cherry trees, and something hazy about the taste of midnight.
The name Dorwinion briefly whispered through her mind, and then was gone.
But the day was bright, and she could hear the arguing of her friends from downstairs, where they had already gotten a table for breakfast- Zelgadis' dour voice drifted up from below the floorboards, with a bright reply in a tone that was unmistakably Xellos'.
There was still so much that had to be done…
and she had not forgotten.
Author's Note: I do not own Xellos, nor do I own Slayers. They both belong to Kanzaka, a far greater artist than I.
I also have a thing for putting Xellos into somewhat un-Xellos-y situations... but I do love it so.