WARNINGS: Borderline Lolicon (underage female x older male), slight mentions of violence, necromancy, experimental piece.
Attempt at dollshipping. For Melissa, though she probably will never read it.
Recoil
It's the real thing; the safety's off.
She knows better than to ask his name.
"I won't tell you who I am," she had said. "I don't want to know who you are, either."
"And why's that?" he had asked.
"Because it makes it easier for us to think of each other as people, and not victims of fate."
And once more, she had caused him to fall silent.
She sits in front of the fire, with a stranger, a man nearly twice her age, sharing her meal with him. Two lost souls in the desert, and they both know it. It's rare to find company in these times, and though he's grown cold and solid, he enjoys it while he can. She's not as tainted, but she knows she soon will be, and he knows just as well, but while she clings to a shred of her innocence, he lets her.
She shows him the broken doll. A memento of her sisters, she says. She tells him of the mother who wanted to save her children from slavery and marked their throats, the mother who went insane at the beauty of life and strangled her children one by one until she ran away for her life.
It has been years, and she still speaks about it in third person.
She speaks of her sisters with fondness, laughs about running around unlike girls should, fighting with brooms as swords. She tells him of the merchant's son who once put the ribbon in her hair and said he would marry her. She ran away without saying goodbye.
He tells her of Kul Elna, of the fearless cat that pounced on him when he was a child, of his father's Friday night ritual of taking him and his cousins to the marketplace to watch the fire-eaters and stare at the moon. He loves the moon, but to him, the stars give him absolution.
And for one night, it's not about necromancy. She's not whoring her magic on the streets for people who can't appreciate it, just to get a bite to eat. And for him, it's not about stealing for a living or even for the thrill of it. Even though they both hate him, it isn't about the damn Pharaoh. It's about something deeper, and he can feel it and she can feel it.
The stars give him absolution, he says.
For tonight, it's about appreciating the dark energy, and she shows him the full extent of her power, free of charge. She sits in the sand and draws a huge circle, taking the time to perfect the symbols with her fingers; and once the masterpiece is finished, she chants out words he cannot understand and the spirits come out in an exodus and ravage the desert. It takes his Diabound a solid ten minutes to defeat them.
"You're tainted, child," he says bitterly.
Her golden eyes narrow. "I know."
And they watch the moon in silence, until she hands him a ribbon and asks him to tie her hair. And he does, fingers fumbling because he's never done this before, slipping through silk and straight black hair she swears she'll shave off once she fulfills her promise to her sisters.
She smiles and says she'll think of him instead of the merchant's son, and half-jokes that she would be lucky to marry him. He falls silent once again, thinking about his fleeting life and the blood on his hands, and how he's never even considered love. How it's a waste of time, how power and revenge are all that fuel him. Except, once things are in order, it might be nice for a little constant companionship.
He tells her not to get her hopes up and that he will be gone by sunrise, though she already knows this very well. And she kisses him quiet. His eyes widen in surprise, but he does not resist, and leans into it. And in that moment it doesn't matter that she's barely fourteen, because he'd made his first kill long before then; doesn't matter that they barely know each other; doesn't matter that tomorrow he will be returning to his way of vengeance and she will display her powers for those who don't understand. Nothing matters except hands around waists and fingers tangled in hair and nervous tongues and the stars above them absolving them. And it means a lot more to her than it does to him, but it's still something.
She tastes like death, he notices.
She asks him not to forget her, because it's the only way she'll transcend death.
"Do you fear death?" he asks her.
"I am obsessed with it," she replies.
He tells her to forget him, and he is gone by sunrise.
Five thousand years later they reunite, and he knows it, brushing fingertips that aren't his own across the card. She's older, darker, and part of him mourns her lost innocence, though part of him is pleased that they have reached the same level. He sees her hair is gone, but she still has the doll and golden eyes. She's set to kill. She's no longer the Lolita from the desert, but an instrument, a victim of fate. She's changed, but then again, so has he.
A feral smile creeps upon his face, a smile that doesn't belong to him, as he relishes the fact that her dark magic, beyond powerful at this point, is his alone. He's always been the possessive type.
"Hello, Dark Necrofear," he says. It's not her name, but it's the only one he knows her by.
She knows better than to ask for his name, but even if she did, he wouldn't have told her. He doesn't remember it.
A/N: I've never watched memory arc, so my knowledge of TKB is reduced to Wikipedia and fanfics. Also, I've always wanted to write Lolicon (though I admit, 14 isn't exactly prepubescent, but I don't have the stomach to write anything Pedobear-approved. Also, in Nabokov's novel, Lolita is 12), just to try it out. I wouldn't put TKB in a normal het relationship, he's too damaged. I don't know why, but I wanted to bring out the humanity in both of them. It was an experimental piece.
It took me a lot of guts to post this. I left you warnings in bold at the beginning. No flames please
Edit: This was written as a oneshot. Then my muses assaulted me. I made it into a chapter story a week later. I guess just consider this an introduction?