Kratos/Zelos for Satanic Mechanic!
This turned out far more dark than I originally intended, but I've been meaning to write a big Kratos/Zelos/Lloyd one-shot for some time, and writing this just made me think about it. sniff One day...
Father Figure
Zelos never really knew his father. Zelos had never really been his father's son... but the man had a daughter who just so happened to be Zelos's sister, and yet the man had abandoned him - the next Chosen. Maybe he had wanted Seles to be Chosen, too. Maybe he just hated Zelos for no other reason than his own existance - just as his mother had. Zelos thought about that too much - about how much he shouldn't exist, and how he would rather he didn't.
Kratos' role in his life had simply been an opprotunity for Zelos... an opprotunity for him to make himself feel better... as well as a chance to have an older man fill a role in his life. The mercenary came to be a teacher and show Zelos the ropes and teach him to take care of himself. Zelos would make a show of not paying attention just to relay perfect quotes of all of the man's information back to him later, to show off how much he'd learned. To show off how great he was... but Kratos would never fall for that. Of course he wouldn't.
Zelos never really knew how to live in the first place. His position his life had been turned to something staggering after his mother died. Even after that, he continued to stagger - simply doing so in circles around others until it looked like he moved with grace. In truth, Zelos was clumsy and everything was a show once again. A show of strength, a show of fearlessness. A show of carlessness. A show of what he knew.
And when the opprotunity arrived wherein it became a threat that Kratos - just like everyone else who had ever been important in his life - was going to leave, Zelos was desperate, and he did what he knew. Tangled together by satin and limbs, Zelos did what he could to tell the mercenary that Zelos wanted him to stay.
But Kratos left anyway, leaving Zelos feeling alone once more and surrounded by his own powerlessness. His life had always been so painfully dominated by women that maybe all he'd needed was a father figure after all.
Many years later, he couldn't decide if he hated Lloyd for actually having Kratos, or if he should hate Kratos for being in a more justifyable position in which to care for Lloyd. In the end, he chose the latter... and as he sat under the balcony of Flanoir listening to them speak after being rejected by Lloyd himself, Zelos decided that he wasn't worth it after all... and neither was anything else.