Halos On Evergreens
DISCLAIMER: Blaze Union © Sting. I just wish an ending like this actually existed.
(the ashes of what you once were – when did I start running? you took me by the hand)
It is funny, in a sour and wry sort of way. He had always imagined that the breaking of those hated shackles would widen the scope of the world, remove the frame of bars through which he'd always viewed his surroundings. But in the end, it's done much the opposite.
In the beginning, he sleeps a good twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. The sole waking hour is a study in vague aches and extreme frustration. He can barely move of his own accord, cannot walk, cannot speak. He had only ever considered the length of the decades in the crushing boredom and anxiety and exhaustion, never in what it must mean for the flesh he had been only distantly tethered to.
Atrophy. Malnutrition. Necrosis. The words wash over him when he is awake and sometimes in his dreams. For a thousand years, the vessel that had once been called Aries had been starving and wasting away and even beginning to rot alive, unable to die. He is grateful to the Yumel, to the months of intense study that allowed him to twist the magic of his own bonds to his own purposes, to the momentary soul-splitting pain of losing each eye and the dull ache and horror that had lingered afterward. Without that time, he would surely have gone insane from having to live through it all.
He is glad for the lack of mirrors in the room that has become his. He still maintains vestiges of his old vanity; it would have taken more than scarred eyelids hiding empty sockets to uproot it completely. The first glimpses he'd had of his body, and the view he has of his own limbs from where he lies in the bed, are almost more than he can stand. He is skin stretched over the barest amount of flesh, draped over brittle bones, with large discolored patches here and there where the tissue had begun to die.
Simply the fact that his soul survived the transition between his healthy transmigrated body and this macabre house of cards is a small miracle. Pamela and Eudy and Baretreenu can be thanked for it; so can the countless healers and doctors who made doubly sure that this pitiful shell wouldn't give out on him as soon as the Chains of Conviction were cut. They are hard at work still; between long expanses of dreaming he wakes in different positions he has been laid in (to prevent bedsores) with different bandages and poultices wrapped wherever he is falling apart the fastest.
In his dreams, he is the ghost inhabiting the Gran Centurio, and his hours are filled with Fantasinia. With the courts who by some miracle aren't running the country, with Ordene, who despite his good-natured naïveté has a tight rein on his kingdom now that Alanjame is gone, with his wife and youngest daughter and occasionally with his two elder children. It is quite a spectacle, watching all of Castle Paltina forget how to handle itself over a pair of fifteen-year-old girls.
Princess Yggdra is like a puppy trailing after them, adoring and eager to please, and day by day and week by week, new bonds begin to forge in place of the empty space where old ones should have flourished. Luciana and Aegina are not sure how to behave around their father and mother, but their parents make sure they want for nothing whenever they stay, and Yggdra draws them into castle life with her antics. Aegina practices with the royal swordswomen, and the castle staff has been taught with a steady series of rigged buckets, wire traps, broken windows and ruined clothes not to run foul of Luciana.
Luciana and Aegina are well aware, as is everyone else, that their home is in Bronquia, but Nessiah has the feeling that they have discovered it isn't a bad thing to have a family across country borders. Gulcasa or whoever it was who decided that they needed to forge bonds with the rest of the Artwaltzes must be pleased.
When he is awake, he is surrounded by fussing doctors and healers and mages—at first. Slowly, the bandages begin to thin out and he begins to look more like a survivor of a torture camp than a skeleton with skin painted on, and he is allowed to sit up in bed rather than being made to lie still in one odd pose or another.
He cannot remain awake for very long. As the weeks and months pass by, he is able to maintain his senses for two hours and then three and then four, but his health is the frailest it has ever been and his body has a way of cutting his consciousness out from under him for the sake of its own preservation.
Still, he is rarely alone when he is awake, whatever mad hour it is. If the healers and doctors are not swarming around him, then Gulcasa is usually there; if not him, then mayhap Emilia or the twins or Eater or Siskier, and sometimes even Jenon.
He does not really understand why they congregate around this room. A bedbound patient is not in the least interesting, and they should know and understand by now that he is not going to suddenly worsen and die when they are not looking.
He wakes, once, to a hand in his and the soft sound of voices coming from the terrace. The magic around his body shifts so that he may see, and through the gauze of the curtains, he discerns two men standing there, leaning against the railing—both dressed plainly, one with long scarlet hair falling down his back unbound and the other with black hair cut softly just above his shoulders.
He turns. The hand in his belongs to Eater. She is sitting in a chair at his bedside, her attention on a book in her lap; as always, she is wearing some ridiculous assemblage of ruffles and frills that will be hastily traded for something plainer come twilight.
Although he gathers himself to speak, she turns up to look at him and smiles.
"Why are you here?" His voice is soft, almost hoarse; his larynx is slowly becoming accustomed to producing sound again, but still shows signs of its long disuse.
She wants to know what he means by the words, and he explains how nonsensical it all is. Her response is another smile.
"Nessiah, the people here—myself among them—we all care for you. We want to be here if you wake; why, we don't want to leave you bored if you wake alone. And just because you're in no danger of dying doesn't mean you'll stop being worried over. You're like the rest of us now; all you have is this single life. It has to be taken care of."
Maybe the reality hasn't sunken in yet. Eater's words make logical sense to him, but he still feels somehow divorced from them; he is too used to placing no value on the physical, on the here and now. He tells her so.
Eater moves her chair closer to the bed with a quiet scraping noise. Her long black hair sways, and wafts the scent of pine and flowers.
"Nessiah, what do you think of humans?"
The question is sudden, but he answers; she likely has a point to this. "They're cyclical creatures. As fleeting as insects. There is good in them and bad both; they tend not to learn from their mistakes. I don't think of them as lesser beings, the way that some do. Much of their faults come from their short lifespan; it isn't something they can help. But I don't see much merit in them, aside from the potential they can hold."
"I think that humans are interesting," Eater says. "Human lives are very much centered on the present day and the immediate future. They don't look too far behind themselves, nor do they look far enough ahead. But they treasure and make full use of the freedom they have been gifted with.
"You've always been looking ahead at what lies at the end of the road, and never at the given moment. I think… that it would do you good to take a look at things now the way that they do. Aside from your abilities, you're very much like a human now, after all."
Nessiah has no reply to make to that. Eater closes her book and hides her smile behind girlishly crooked fingers, a childish gesture that belies her actual age.
"My… haven't you thought yet of what you're going to do from here on, Nessiah?"
He looks down at himself. "…I haven't had the time, or the energy. But I'm not sure. I know that this body hasn't aged at all, despite how it's deteriorated; I'll have the rest of its natural life to spend here. I don't know how long that may be. All I know is that I will stay with the people here."
He has no loyalty to Bronquia, no sense of obligation to humanity. This world has never meant anything in particular to him; it was merely the stage he had been given to gather his strength for revenge. It had been no more than his chessboard then; now that he has turned away from that path, it is empty.
Ancardia is not his home. Gram Blaze is.
He cares nothing for the land, the towns, the faceless folk going about their daily drudgeries within those towns—it is these people who are important. Gulcasa, who placed value on his life, and still does—the only mortal who ever cared enough about him to shed tears for him. Somewhere along the line, Gulcasa stopped being a chess piece; his honest feelings became something that Nessiah wants to answer with honesty of his own.
He does not say this to Eater. She is wise enough to understand what it is he feels.
"You and I are more suited to living in the human worlds than in Asgard," she tells him quietly, and gives his hand a gentle squeeze. Her soft fingers tighten around his wasted ones, careful to only curl around the brittle bones and not exert undue pressure on them. "Choice. Possibility. The balance between order and chaos… we would be lost in the demon worlds; Asgard trained us to expect some things from life that don't exist there. But the freedom in these worlds… that's something that people like us need to survive."
He nods once in agreement, keeping the movement small to prevent the wavering of his long hair from weighing him down. Her words feel true; even if he is still too caught up in recovery and lost in adapting to live by them now, he is not immutable. They are something he will think about later, when he has the chance.
Because he is not sure how best to communicate this, he holds her hand back, tightening his fingers with all the strength he can bear to use. In his infirmity, the actual force he exerts is a pale thing.
There is a great rattle and a shift of fabric, and Nessiah and Eater allow their hands to part as the two Emperors, past and present, walk into the room.
Gulcasa crosses the room in great strides, sitting on the empty edge of Nessiah's mattress. His hair has started to grow even longer as the months have passed, and in particular his bangs seem to be getting unmanageable, curling up at his temple in a cowlick that was not there when he still called himself Garlot. His amber-colored eyes are as clear as ever, and are beginning to take on a kind of wisdom. That sweet and idealistic boy is becoming a man; Nessiah feels something much like pride but with an edge of hurt to it that he does not recognize.
The Emperor says nothing, but he reaches up and touches Nessiah's cheek, gently tucking his long hair behind his ear. Even the pads of his fingers are heavy with calluses, velveteen against Nessiah's still-healing skin.
"I see Sleeping Beauty has finally awakened."
Soltier waits for Nessiah to half-turn before patting his shoulder. The gesture is very light, but in a completely different way from Gulcasa's touch; while Gulcasa is mindful of Nessiah's frailty in his every movement, there is no hesitation in the former Emperor's hand. From what Nessiah has seen of the man, Soltier moves with a lifetime of precisely regulating his own strength, so much so that it is instinctual. He has registered Nessiah as "breakable" and his body adjusts accordingly.
The difference in their actions merely comes from the difference in the way they came by their strength, and the days before they had power. Soltier knows what it is to break things without intending to do so; Gulcasa knows what it is to be hurt by others. The parallels considered, they are amusingly similar men.
And so Nessiah smiles, tilting his chin up slightly as if to connect his line of sight with Soltier's.
"Your jokes are even worse than Byff's. I'm well aware what a fright I look."
The smirk on Soltier's lips becomes a slight grin, and he inclines his head briefly. "This would be the proper place for a line about the relative importance of inner beauty," he says at length, "but that's not for me to deliver—Lapis is angry enough with me about paperwork already. You're too slow on the draw, redhead."
Gulcasa closes his eyes and turns his nose up in response. "You shut up."
Nessiah can't help but giggle. "An excellent display of wit, if I may say so, Your Majesty."
"You too. What does a man have to do for a little respect around here?"
The only reply Gulcasa will get is more laughter, but it isn't unkind. The room has a very comfortable atmosphere, and no one here would think to violate that.
The door opens. Siskier stands framed in it, holding a plate in one hand. There are coin-shaped slices of yellow fruit upon it, which is more than enough to garner Nessiah's interest although he is not particularly hungry.
"Oh, so you were awake? Then that's good timing, you should eat something."
While she is shooing Gulcasa and Eater and Soltier out of the way and trying to find a place to put the plate that's within easy reach for him, Nessiah smiles.
"Actually… there's a favor I've been meaning to ask of you, Siskier."
Four pairs of eyes settle on him, intensely curious. "Sure, if I can. What do you need?"
With far more effort than he would ever admit he's expending, Nessiah lifts his hand to brush his fingers lightly through his hair, the dull gold river down his back that pools in eddies on the mattress behind him. "I want to cut this. It's far too heavy, and I don't feel quite myself with it this long." And as meticulously as his body is being cared for, his hair is still rather ragged; it would be healthier to crop it short.
His guests continue staring for a moment, and then Siskier starts to smile back at him.
"Okay. Yeah, okay. You do look a little bit too girly with your hair this long, I guess. Too much like the twins. When you've eaten this, I'll go get some scissors and we'll do something about it for you."
It has been a long time.
Sitting upright in a chair feels alien to him—that's how long it's been. Nessiah does not know how long exactly he's been bedridden—all that sleep has a way of making the hours and the days and the months blur together. It may be getting close to a whole year.
He can speak; he can move, but not much. For all the magical power that has returned to him, his muscles have atrophied almost to nothing, and his legs are too wasted for him to put any real weight on them, let alone walk. It is going to take at least another year or two for him to recover enough to live normally. And at that point—well, there will still be much more recovering to do.
There's also the fact that Nessiah isn't quite sure what "living normally" means. The only reason he might return to Kred would be to retrieve his materials and the vast store of books he left there when he departed with Gram Blaze. That place was somewhere to while away the empty years, not a home.
It ceased to have any value other than as a storehouse on the day that Emilia had come to ask him how to find her brother.
He does not know what he is going to do from here. All his life, he has worked for revenge; now that he has decided against it—not given up; it was a decision made with will, not a simple turning away—the future ahead of him is a blank.
…What Eater was suggesting to him earlier was probably that the sea of zero ahead of him is something that should give him hope, not despair. Asgard believes him to be dead. There is no one who will come to interfere with the life he leads from this day forward. There is no one to tell him what to do but himself.
Siskier lifts up his hair with one arm, and draws an old white bedsheet around his body.
"How short do you want it? Like you used to have it?"
Nessiah smiles absently. "Just cut all that length away for now."
Soltier has left, and Eater has returned to her book, probably still paying a little attention to them—if she really wanted to read, she should have left for somewhere more quiet. Gulcasa is on the other side of the room, watching silently.
"Okay, then here we go."
The cold metal of the shears draws close to Nessiah's skin as Siskier lifts up as much hair as she can in one hand. He pulls in a breath, feels it held in his lungs—and there is the sound of the blades closing.
What feels like a great weight falls away. He exhales. Siskier shifts her grip to the next overly-long hank of hair; the freshly-cut ends just brush against Nessiah's shoulder, tickling, almost touching his skin but not quite.
Nessiah sits up a little straighter against the back of the chair.