Author's Note: This piece was written for Kazuraba-Kouta's End of Gaim Tokusatsu Songfic Giveaway. The song used for scene breaks is "Bare Grace Misery" by Nightwish; it works far too well for Zed, including the verses that I didn't use in this. It can be found on YouTube at: watch?v=ZQCglx5b7Ig
Talking to the Light
Sweet boy come in
I am the dark side of you
Die for my sins
Like the one once did
There are no stars in the sky outside his palace, but Zed goes for a stroll every night anyway, his eyes always turned upward.
Baron Nemo had tried to forbid it, the first two times that Zed did this. He had been worried about assassins—as though anything here can hurt Zed. As though anything anywhere can hurt him—him, the Emperor of Darkness, the incarnation of empty blackness.
There was an assassination attempt the second night. Zed killed the unfortunate creature with a backhand gesture. He is not certain if it was a legitimate attempt on his life, orchestrated by Madam Noir or by one of those loyal to Grita, or a cautionary warning from Baron Nemo. Either way, the creature died and Baron Nemo stopped fussing over Zed's choice of nighttime activities.
He wasn't one of mine. Grita's voice inside him is soft, barely discernible, but he hears her easily during these quiet walks. I didn't send him. I don't know if Mother did.
"He could have been acting on your behalf but not on your orders. You encouraged a strange kind of loyalty among several in the household." Zed lays his right hand atop his chest as he talks, over the shimmering, shivering firefly warmth of Grita's spirit.
Grita gives him no reply, sinking back into herself, and he sighs and continues on his walk.
"Strange that we call it night when there's really no difference here." Zed has his hands in his pockets now, all his attention focused on the empty sky. "There's only darkness. Only everlasting night. So why do we still act as though there is day and night—still eat three meals during one half of the day and sleep during the other? Why are we so desperate to mimic the humans we're destroying?"
Why are you so desperate to see light again? Grita's soft question, unexpected, gives a jerky awkwardness to Zed's step. Why do you study the sky here when you know where the light you're looking for is?
"I don't know." Zed swallows, continuing onward. "I think that maybe it was him—them—but I'm not sure. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it will happen again."
He will kill you. Grita's voice is the barest whisper, but there is so much hope in it that it burns, a tiny flame inside him even through the darkness of her hatred and fear.
For a moment he stands still, one hand to his heart again, reveling in the feeling. It fades too quickly, though, and when it does he sighs and moves on. "He will try. He will come and he will try, just as you tried, and I will welcome him. I will toy with him. I will finally find the darkness that can contain those little fireflies, and they, like you, will all become a part of me."
Grita doesn't respond, sinking into brooding silence again.
Zed continues on, but his eyes study the ground he walks on now, the ash-black grass that gleams like glass and fractures like dreams beneath his feet.
He will kill the ToQgers, and like Grita they will live within him, shedding light into the unfillable blackness that is his very essence.
Cinnamon bed
For your unashamed appetite
A figurante
This dance will hurt like hell
You cannot break them.
A stab of agony rips Zed from his uneasy slumber, and he curls tight around himself—around the flaming point of light that he devoured, around Grita's soul suddenly flush with light even stronger than the light of love he so happily cultivated in her eyes.
The agony fades away, and he slowly uncurls, lying naked in a bed that exudes ostentation from its intricately-carved wooden frame to the hanging draperies in shades of gray and black. Was it Noir or Nemo who chose it? He could see either deciding that this was the proper abode of an Emperor in sleep—or an Empress, when Noir dreamed of Grita taking to this bed alone—and he had seen little need to change it, since the mattress was comfortable enough.
The two things he added to the room were a mobile hanging in the center of the draperies and a night-light outside to provide enough illumination to make it dazzle. He reaches up towards the mobile now, watching the silver stars and moon glimmer with fragments of reflected light.
"I can break all of them." He watches the shadow cast by his hand as it falls on each piece of the mobile in turn—the moon, the star, the planet, the comet, the sun. "I've stripped four of them of their essence before. Zaram belongs to me—you can't escape being a Shadow, no matter what Right and his toys wish to believe. It's who we are—how we were created. We are darkness. We are nothingness. We can reach for the light but we can never actually own it, because it rejects us. Burns us. Destroys us."
I could. I did. Grita's simple words are accompanied by another stab in his chest, and Zed smiles as he caresses the spot above where it hurts.
"You have firefly points of light in your darkness, even more beautiful for the risk that they'll gutter and go out." Zed considers her, this being that he devoured—that he shaped and molded at risk to himself, because he loved the light that shone in her eyes. Where did it come from, that unconditional love and devotion? How did she find it amidst the darkness that raised her? "But I don't. Light burns me. Light kills me, faster and more brutally than it ever drained you. I am the ultimate embodiment of what it means to be a Shadow."
But not the only Shadow—not the one who gets to define Shadows and what we can do. There is a firmness to her words that Zed had rarely heard when she was alive, a certainty that she gained only as she died for a man who betrayed her.
As Zed had betrayed her, continues to betray her by using her spirit like this, but he is not capable of guilt. He can feed off it, swim in it, revel in it, but he cannot feel guilt, because to feel guilt is to feel love and affection and responsibility.
You've never tried. Such scathing scorn, anger and rage, and he sighs as the dark emotions cover the light that he wants to feel. The light hurts you, and so you excuse yourself for your actions. But he'll make you understand—they will. Because they're not just tag-alongs, extras to be used to get to Right. The least of them is worth more than you will ever be.
"Be quiet." The hissed words are accompanied by an inward pouring of his power, and Grita's voice is lost in screams of agony as he cages her more strongly.
She understands nothing.
He is what he must be. He gives the light more chances, more agency than anyone else would because it fascinates him.
Because it's beautiful.
Because he enjoyed, briefly, walking with Right onto rides, a silver star balloon clutched tight in his hand.
But he will destroy Right, break him down until Right shines only for Zed.
And the others... the others are simply dancers for them to trade as they work their way toward each other, the darkness and the star that will burn so much brighter when torn out of the shining day.
Oh bare grace misery
Just a child without a fairy tale am I
Dark but so lovely
A Little Match Girl freezing in the snow
Grita is silent for days after that, her spirit barely flickering within him. At first Zed isn't concerned—the dead cannot die, and he trusts too much in her strength of will to think she will truly just fade away.
One day turns into two turns into three, and finally Zed breaks the silence during his nightly walk.
"Grita?"
At first there is nothing; then there is a feeling of mild irritation, and with that flash of annoyance Zed knows that he isn't going to lose his firefly.
Leave me alone. Grita's voice is petulant, a child's demanding drone.
Zed smiles, because they both know that is impossible. She is within him now, and he cannot leave her alone any more than she could ignore the darkness flowing through her when she devoured him.
You're a monster. Grita's frustrated anger increases as Zed laughs silently at the supposed insult.
"Of course I am. I'm the Emperor of Darkness." He is the boy who was raised to rule all of darkness—the boy who embodies darkness, as other, more blessed children are supposed to embody light.
Right is more than just light. More than just a... a vessel. Grita claws helplessly at the walls of her prison. More than a story that you can tell yourself, a dream of light giving itself freely to the darkness.
Zed finds his steps frozen again as Grita's quiet voice whispers of things she shouldn't know.
I'm inside you, Zed, just as you were within me. The smug satisfaction in Grita's voice propels Zed's legs forward.
He will not let her know that it frightens him, how deeply his little firefly has pried into him.
I know that you dream of holding light some day.
An image, taken from his deepest, most private dreams, of him enveloping Right in his darkness and Right smiling flashes before his eyes.
I know that you dream of a sky full of stars.
Another image, and she knows, somehow she knows that he is the sky and the stars are his, his little pinpricks of light, his shining people to toy with as he will.
I know that you dream dreams you don't even have words for.
An image of a circle, the ToQgers hands in hand, and they take Zaram's hand as well, they destroy darkness with a light that he doesn't understand, and—
I know that you're doing everything you can to tease him over to you.
Right, captured, and it was glorious to have him for even a few hours; Right, standing defiant before yet another Shadow; Right, so confused and disbelieving as Zed claimed that Right was the first light he ever saw—
"That was true." Zed snarls out the words, and his hands are coated in darkness, dripping it, but he knows no way to fight back against this attack. "I think they were."
A pity they showed you something you can never understand.
That is the last thing Grita says, but Zed can still feel her clearly, burning stronger than a firefly deep in his chest.
He sleeps uneasily that night, but he likes the burning better than the silence, so he doesn't reprimand her again.
Love lying, enticing
(Bare grace misery)
Crowning the moment
(Bare grace misery)
This is what I am
Bare grace for the end of days
You really just can't win.
Grita initiates the contact, after Right and his team have once again destroyed one of Zed's subjects.
"Oh?" Zed smiles as he directs the question to the spark that will always be his, in a way that humans with their wedding promises can never truly understand.
Because you want to own and control what can't be owned. There is a calm to Grita's voice that there isn't always, a stalwart certainty that intrigues Zed.
"Can't I control it?" He smiles, turning his gaze to the starless night and imagining what it would look like with his own beautiful shining pinpricks of brilliance hung there. "I have you, don't I?"
No. Still Grita's voice has that utter calm underlying it. You've overpowered me for now, but you don't control me.
"Everyone controls you, little star." Zed whispers the words as he strokes his hand down his chest. "Your mother controlled you; the general controlled you; and now I have you."
You've overpowered me, but you don't control me. An emotion that Zed can't name, a flaming point of hope and pride and certainty, explodes through the calm. Schwartz doesn't control me. I gave him my love and my devotion; he couldn't earn it or control it.
"It still resulted in the same thing—in you injured and weak and losing everything."
No. He can practically see her, smiling down at him from the night sky. I never had anything until I made that choice—made all the choices that led me there. I chose, Zed, don't you see? I chose, and I was willing to sacrifice myself.
"For nothing. For a man I killed as soon as you were mine." They are cruel words, but there isn't cruelty behind them. He is too curious to be truly cruel, and that takes the sting from them.
For myself. Grita turns from him, and he knows that she is seeing something he cannot, shining wisps of light that are just beyond his reach. I was capable of that sacrifice, despite what I was born as. Would you be capable of it, Zed? Would you be capable of love rather than obsession, giving of yourself instead of demanding from others?
"I am the Emperor of Darkness." He snarls out the words. "I'm capable of anything I wish."
She doesn't respond, fading away, walling herself off from him as much as she can.
She doesn't need to respond, because they both know that what he said is a lie.
He is the Emperor of Darkness.
He is fascinated by the light.
And he will never, ever truly have it, no matter how many games he plays with Right and the other ToQgers.
Sighing, Zed continues on his path.
What else is there for the Emperor of Darkness to do, after all?