once more with feeling

DISCLAIMER: Yggdra Union, Blaze Union, Yggdra Unison © Sting.

(the border between rising and falling – bad ends, bad ends everywhere)

To say the first attempt goes disastrously is like calling lemons just the littlest bit sour.

He'd had a bad feeling when that researcher appeared out of nowhere as if the gods had placed her on the earth specifically to unravel the fine web of conflict spread across the land; that premonition had only gotten worse when he'd recognized the magic she spun from the fine-barred cage of lies that kept Garlot innocently believing he was human.

But he'd kept silent on the matter even as he knew she'd realized he wasn't human, either. It was the same as with Eater—an understated agreement that if you don't endanger my cover, I won't destroy yours.

Obviously, that had been a mistake.

All of a sudden his footholds were ripped out from under him: Gram Blaze's faith in him was shaken, a precious handful of days escaped his hold as his lifeblood soaked into the streets of Flarewerk, and that meddling, interfering hag rallied everyone she could to stamp out the last flickers of his only hope while all his magic was bent on speeding up the creation of a new vessel. If this had been a chess match, then she'd reached across the board, boldly as you please, and knocked half of his pieces onto the floor before he could realize that she was prepared to break every rule to get her way.

And he couldn't keep hold of his own detached methods with the intricate framework of his plans being systematically snapped thread by thread and his only support base turned against him—not with the state of his true body continuing to deteriorate and his Gran Centurio on the line.

In the end—with everything falling down around him and his temporary shell dying on the spear of the first man he'd ever begun to trust in over a thousand years—all he can do is stare into those cold golden eyes and wonder where in the hell he'd taken that first misstep after all.

(stop. rewind)

In its own way, the second attempt is not much better.

For the longest time, it seems as though everything will turn out all right—for such a reckless charge into territory that most of the army isn't familiar with, they were able to capitalize on the Blessed Papal Army's arrogance and cut through the heart of Fantasinia with deadly accuracy and every one of them alive. The emotion that the battle had wrought swelled within the blade of the Gran Centurio, and all was miraculously well.

Even when Emilia—who was after all the least predictable of the cards in his hand—splintered and lost control in spectacular fashion, the situation was salvaged as well as it possibly could be. The horror and despair has only given him more energy to work with, and the unsettled state of the country that has lost both its king and its princess in one stroke promises to give him so steady a stream of fresh magic that wars with other countries may no longer even be necessary at all. Fantasinia is very proud, after all, and the proud do not react well to being brought suddenly to their knees.

But even with the rest of the army alive and well, even with the Gran Centurio in Aegina's hands and her ears open and trusting to his advice, he could not see their survival as anything other than a loss.

Because even as Aegina herself has come through the trials of the past few weeks tempered and strong, the unthinkable has happened, and Garlot, whose principles have crumbled from beneath him, was left a broken shell of a man, unable to face anything anymore.

"I'm going to be joining Medoute on her journey for a while," he had said with a sacrilege of a smile on his face and all the light gone from his eyes. Even though all that protected the truth was the thinnest gauze of a lie, its release would have no meaning. Garlot was, for all intents and purposes, already dead inside, and that was something Nessiah couldn't mistake.

So in the end he's left feeling as though all that effort meant nothing—nothing at all—as his tools for vengeance are loaded prepared into his hands and the future beyond that vengeance slips quietly away.

(stop. rewind)

Finally, on the third try, circumstances stripped away the heavy leaves that had entrapped the bud of Garlot's heart, and he bloomed.

(Gulcasa probably would not see it that way, but then it was usually only Nessiah who could appreciate the true beauty of a phoenix rearing up from the ashes of its broken world, having been there and done that once before himself)

And beautifully, magnificently, all of the pieces fell right into Nessiah's hands. There were difficulties, but those were methodically overcome in ways that bound them more and more strongly together.

And it took him years to realize the true form of the lovely trap he'd fallen into.

For at the beginning, there was only the big picture to worry about, and yet over those years, that master plan was so eclipsed by the immediate that by the time the chance came to fight for and claim his vengeance, Nessiah was held in place by the realization of how many important things he would have to abandon or destroy to actually do so.

Things like Gulcasa's smile and the place Bronquia had given him amongst the Dragon Generals, like plain everyday talks with Eudy and Zilva and Emilia and Baldus, like teasing Leon and being rewarded with the laughter of the people who'd become a new family to him. Things like holding hands in the dark and dreaming about tomorrow and the next day and a future so distant it almost seemed boundless.

If he could only let go of Gulcasa's hand once, then revenge would finally be within his grasp.

…If he let go of Gulcasa's hand for even a second, then that fantasy of a happy future would pop and vanish like a soap bubble.

He'd never realized until then that the feeling of one's heart tearing in two was more than just a dry figure of speech, but it really was a sensation like that—as though his chest had been wrenched open and someone was trying to pull his beating heart out from beneath his ribs.

That sensation fixed him in place, unable to move, unable to choose—even as the sand in the hourglass ran out. There was a sharp pain, almost anticlimax in comparison to the emotional pain he'd suffered until that time, and then when he awoke—

When he wakes, everything is ruined beyond repair—everyone is dead, and before he can truly marshal himself for the world beyond this truth, he is dying on his own blade, realizing that in the end this, too, is nothing more than failure, no matter how close he came—

(stop. rewind)

The fourth try went a little oddly at the outset.

The battle with the king happened a little earlier than before, and a moment's carelessness—first on Gulcasa's part, then on Nessiah's own—led to his life being used as a shield and shed rashly against Karona's flagstones.

And then when he was wrenched quite rudely back to the waking living world, everything was in complete pandemonium.

The state of chaos was—embarrassing, really. From what he could tell, instead of a simple war between Bronquia and Fantasinia, the entire continental world had imploded in something like a clumsy dogpile of a tavern brawl. All his careful preparations to disable Lombardia, Verlaine, and Embellia had gone to waste, but rather than allying with Fantasinia to crush the Empire as he had feared, they—every country, in fact—were all out for their own personal gain.

He couldn't help but be mildly affronted by it all, and because at the least the Gran Centurio had been charged and was brimming with negative energies, he had an excuse to roll up the long sleeves of his robe, grab those foolish humans by the scruff of their necks, and make them conduct themselves like rational thinking beings. Because honestly.

Meeting Gulcasa on opposite sides of the battlefield had been—distressing. Very much so. (He'd kept his emotions well out of his tactics and taken brutal advantage of Gulcasa's rash nature, but that was only common sense, and didn't reflect his true thoughts in the least. Whatever anyone else might claim.)

Being able to force Gulcasa to come with him after that battle, though—at the least, it… hadn't been unpleasant at all.

And having Gulcasa actually sympathize with his cause, to start to fight at his side willingly—that had been nothing less than a miracle. So much so that Nessiah was almost afraid to think of it that way.

Reuniting the world, consolidating their forces, freeing himself and taking his true power, leaving the world of Ancardia behind—by the time they began to clash with Asgard's forces, he'd finally accepted his luck and stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And that was when Asgard finally unsealed and released his brethren, the other Grim Angels.

…For the first time in a thousand years, Nessiah truly remembered why it was that his race were called the Messengers of Death.

Unable to advance, unable to retreat, he and Gulcasa just fought to their last breath, hand in hand, determined to at least face death united—but in the end, he is pulled one way and Gulcasa the other, arms wrenching and fingers slipping apart, and all he can think is that this time, they'd just gotten so close—

(STOPREWIND)

This time went—well, oddly but fortuitously enough, he would say. So many things happened similarly to the last attempt, after all.

But preoccupied with the greater challenge ahead, he let himself get careless along the way, and fate turned the tables on him in a way that would be almost amusing if the irony didn't set his teeth on edge.

He is thrown to the floor of the fortress with enough force to make his head ring, and he lies there for several moments without attempting to stand, simply listening as Gulcasa's heavy steps toll against the flagstones.

No attempt is made to grab him and force him up, but the intensity of Gulcasa's stare is somehow worse to bear.

"Explain," Gulcasa demands in a low snarl.

Silence.

"…You probably won't believe me."

Silence.

And when he risks a peek, Gulcasa is standing there with arms crossed and eyes blazing, their intensity insufficient to hide their uncharacteristic gloss.

"Try me."

He realizes by now that this will go on until Gulcasa gets the answers he wants (and on some level probably deserves)—he's that kind of stubborn—and so he gathers himself from his sprawl into a slightly more dignified crouch and starts to speak.

He runs over the gods and their war briefly, then illuminates his past as dispassionately as he can manage. He does not look at his audience to gauge their reaction; he merely lays out the facts coldly and plainly.

They are all—every one of them—deathly quiet as he speaks, and that silence stretches out into a great judgmental stillness that stirs up the oldest and worst of memories. And despite his attempts at calmness, that quiet begins to ruthlessly peel the façade back to display the raw nerves underneath.

When he stops to take a breath, Gulcasa cuts in.

"Stand up."

Why, he almost wants to ask out loud, is the sight of me defenseless, the sight of me as your prisoner too hard for that bleeding heart of yours to accept? Even though you're the one that put me on the ground to begin with, even though you yourself acknowledged that we're on opposite lines in this life.

But he stands up.

"Is that it, then?" Some of the hostility in Gulcasa's voice is gone, but his words still come out hard. As if he too has become a magician and he intends to use them as his weapons.

That's not all, of course—but how can he put the rest into words, the confusion and the heartbreak and the missed chances slipping through his fingers one after the other, the card house of his plans collapsing magnificently time and time again until his backups threaten to run out entirely. Faint otherlifely memories of Gulcasa's eyes dimming in death or worse than, specters of failure chasing him through his dreams.

And the simple fact that there is no way of knowing how many more chances there are to use up.

"Yes, I believe that's all the important parts," he says, light sarcasm crisp and dainty in the words.

"Revenge."

"Yes."

"Revenge for something that happened a thousand fucking years ago. Against an entire world filled with people at your level or way stronger."

"Of course it sounds foolish when you put it like that, but I'm perfectly capable of leveling the playing field."

"And that's the reason for all of this."

He raises his head for the first time, snaps around to face Gulcasa directly (where he stands with his hair and clothes rumpled and sweaty, half in and half out of all that ridiculous armor); "You know that's not—"

But he doesn't get the chance to finish that sentence, because Gulcasa closes the distance between them in huge steps one two three and his gauntleted hands grip Nessiah's waist and upper back firmly as he leans in and kisses him with bruising impact.

The kiss is furious and stubborn and many other subtler things Nessiah cannot quite discern right now because oh. Gulcasa caught him while he was about to speak, and he'd trained Gulcasa far too well for him to fail to take advantage of Nessiah's parted lips—and all of his overcomplicated thoughts grind to a halt and crash spectacularly at the way Gulcasa uses his tongue. He's trained this man too well indeed, he thinks blearily, and then all he can do is just sort of sag absently against Gulcasa's encircling arms.

And then Gulcasa pulls back so that they're nose to nose and suddenly they're both gasping to gather the breath they forgot to take. Nessiah is still draped back against Gulcasa's hands, his legs unresponsive, and his brain too badly short-circuited to try to force them to hold his weight.

He tries to search for words instead, but there are none.

Gulcasa sees him trying and glowers—an expression with just a touch of petulance in it, nearly hidden behind the traces of smoldering irritation.

"Nessiah, shut up."

And before he could try to protest being ordered about, Gulcasa leans in again.

This kiss is just a little gentler than the last, and Gulcasa's eyes are half-open this time, a flicker of gold just barely visible from beneath his dark red lashes and all that ridiculous hair in the way, those uneven bangs that fall forward onto Nessiah's faceplate as if to tangle in the spirals of gold that adorn the mask.

And this time, he exerts a little will back, fingers fighting for a grip on Gulcasa's shirtfront as he kisses back with a lack of reluctance that should really shock him but somehow doesn't.

Because—this is it, isn't it; by this point he's realized that this is what keeps him able to fight. To face the impossible battle before him. This is the solid form of the future he's longed for.

Gulcasa pulls back once again, and Nessiah is left struggling for breath for the second time in a bare handful of minutes.

"It's pretty sad when I can tell what you actually want better than you," Gulcasa drawls, his every word sharp with that dry frankness Nessiah's slowly come to helplessly adore. "You need to be more honest."

He tries to speak, but Gulcasa just keeps talking. "This is stupid and you know it's stupid and so do I and so does every damn person in this room. And it's about time you learned that sometimes the best way to win a war is by showing the other side just what you think of them, turning around, and living your goddamn life in spite of all their bile."

Weakly, Nessiah smiles.

"Really, it's quite frustrating. I don't believe I've taken my eyes off you for the entirety of a month, and you suddenly choose the expanse of time I'm gone to develop common sense."

He's close enough to see the blood rise to Gulcasa's cheeks, and can't hold back his shaky-sounding laughter.

"Shut up," Gulcasa says again, but he's smiling as he leans in to land yet another kiss, this one on the tip of Nessiah's nose.

And Nessiah simply laughs, saying nothing more.