Sebastian once told him after Father died that death was like going home.

A lot of good that did to clear up Zelos's misconceptions.

What did home even mean? The vernacular was frustratingly subjective. If home was supposed to be seen in the cold winding halls of the manor he'd grown up padding around—or in the blank steel of Mother's oil painted eyes—then just maybe he'd be the first angel condemned to Hell. It burned in his gut how much he felt like the image of her in his memories now. The way he sat where she once sat, staring out at the rocks that marked Her and His place in the garden (a good gap between the grave stones as if to say, even in death, they never loved one another) and the conveniently empty spot ready for Zelos once his use ran out.

Going home sucked. Death better not be like going home. He'd been home for years, he didn't want to further patter along on this road after death.

But, then again, fearing the possibility made a lot less sense than living in the mansion now. Immortal hell… Could anything really beat what he'd seen so far? Tinges of red snow toyed along the edges of his memories and kissed the ever-repeating sonata of Mother's voice humming, "You should never have been born," in his head before she dropped dead to the Earth.

I'm trying to alleviate that, Mother. Just give me a minute and you'll see.

"Master Zelos."

Sebastian's soft voice would have been otherwise unannounced had the butler not held a tiny tray in his hands. It clinked against the bottom of a single, empty glass and two bottles of unmarked substances as Sebastian tottered across the polished estate's floor. Unmarked bottles simply because branding them would further incriminate Sebastian's assistance in this well-organized euthanasia and Zelos actually didn't want that. There remained at least one piece of himself that hadn't rot; Like the sturdy stem of a browned and stinking apple core. Besides, labeling was a bit of overkill.

He snorted at the pun in his head. Wasn't that the point?

"What'll happen? No going home stuff this time," Zelos quickly reminded Sebastian. "Honestly, think it'll burn? Poison sounds like it would burn."

He'd never know though. Every time an attempted poisoning had been made on his life he was simply told later, after the food taster was long done seizing up and falling off the edges of their conniptions. Zelos went to their funerals and used them as placeholders to remind himself just how many people died so he could live. Before he ever picked up a sword, he'd killed a dozen servants.

Sebastian was silent, but Zelos hadn't exactly expected a rapid-fire response to his question in the first place. The poor guy had Stockholm Syndrome—had been slipping away into corners to wipe his eyes when he caught Zelos in the midst of anything even slightly melancholy. He waited as Sebastian tried to be tasteful, professional, and kind, but it was doubtful that Sebastian knew anything about poison or how painful the effects were on a regular human's body, let alone how they'd feel in a chosen's holy vessel.

"It will be painless," Sebastian finally answered and Zelos smiled out the window. What did painless matter? People who kill themselves don't care about pain going out, just snuffing out the pain after staying in the game for too long.

"How bold of you to say." Zelos twisted his body around from Mother's place by the window. A chill came over him like the ghost of her had left him. He laughed, because laughing was easy and contagious and he couldn't stand that sad, old dog look on Sebastian's face anymore, and slipped up to Sebastian's side to examine the tray up close.

A tall wine glass, a bottle of the dark wine it would hold and then a smaller bottle, dwarfed by the other two items by size but not importance. "Looks like a baby's bottle, yeah?" Zelos picked up the poison in its delicate container and held it to the light where it sludged from the movement, toxic enough in sight that Zelos would almost swear he didn't need to drink it. But he knew better. Sebastian rocked from resting his body weight on his left leg over to his right, an uncharacteristic show of uneasiness.

"The aftermath will be better than this," Sebastian suddenly admitted.

Zelos grinned and set the bottle back upon the tray.

"Out of turn for a servant to say, Sebastian. You know, once I'm gone I doubt anybody'll want you. I've tainted you with my free thought, you poor old man."

"I had no intention of moving on to another noble."

He took the tray from his oldest (only) friend and stepped over to Mother's spot. "Complete the circle," he murmured to himself.

"Pardon, sir?" Sebastian's voice was a hum in the back of the room, a presence Zelos had just assumed would float away with the poison now in his hand.

He looked over his shoulder, flashed his best smile, and said, "Go and take a walk, man." He turned his attention to the drinks, poured the poison first and then the wine like he was mixing party drinks instead of a toxicology report that would send even the high scholars of Sybak reeling in impress. The actions were smooth and Zelos couldn't help the beam of pride in his gut of how good he was at arranging his own death, at giving everybody what they wanted. "Wouldn't want you getting blamed for my poor decision making, now, would we?"

Sebastian shifted again before taking a jaunty step forward, the motion surprising himself judging by the sudden widening of his eyes. "If it is all the same to you, Master Zelos, I would prefer to be here."

"Where did all this insubordination come from?" Zelos taunted.

"My boss is… Resigning," Sebastian managed the statement with a dry, twisted humor. Definitely no noble would want him now. Too much Wilder in him. "I have more confidence in my words to him."

Zelos patted his shoulder, just an intended one-two pat, but Sebastian's hand reached up and clung tight until eye-contact was made. A sick, intense stare that finally broke Zelos's smile in half as the tears budded and fell from Sebastian's old eyes.

"You are a good man," Sebastian assured him.

"It was never about being a good man." Zelos clawed his hand away from Sebastian's grasp and reached for the wine glass. It settled along his palm and cooled the burning edges where Sebastian's mawkishness tore into him. "It was about being a good chosen. And I just…" Why was that mask still there? Admit it, you coward. "I just can't do it."

"Nobody ever could."

Zelos glared out the window at Her and Him. Mother and Father. Cold figures of parenting in his life, no better than the farmers raising cattle to be lead to slaughter. Groom and pet one day only to eat the next day. So much of them in himself that he would do it for them since they weren't around to finish the job. The poison settled, congealed, and the tar separated into clear accentuation akin to a guillotine axe sharpened and positioned by him. For him.

He lifted the glass, tipped it back and forth for Sebastian to see, and then smiled. Sebastian's composure fully broke then and his face crumpled into an ugly mess of wrinkles and agony.

And all Zelos could say in the face of his pain was, "Whatever."

His toast only finished when he shoved it forcefully towards the image out the window far beyond the stones of his parent's tombs towards the omnipresent tower. The reason he had to do this in the first place. He toasted that tower and then tipped the wine glass back, chugged it in three gulps, and chunked it at the window.

The hole that broke through the glass lined up perfectly with the Tower of Salvation and it gleamed even when the poison jumped, burning, down the muscles of Zelos's throat and into the crevices of his guts. It sent him tumbling down into the floor and crumpled, seizing, into the ivory of the floor. A separate part of him that suffered thought about how it was a nice room—much better than a son—and he congratulated his mother on her taste in interior decoration. The other part of him, that suffered in the fire of his self-inflicted toxicity, noted that the cruxis crystal around his neck clanged into the floor in a perfect 4/4 rhythm that became further musically punctuated by the gasps of Sebastian and his old clawing, shaking, fingers. Trying to keep him up. Trying to keep him… Something. Not alive. Surely not alive.

More hands now. Some old, some young, some dainty, some strong. They poked into his body, into his mouth so he might wretch up the poison. The smell of candles resonated—probably priests realizing too late what his plan was. Sebastian cried loudly, too loud for an old man. Stop crying… Stop crying…

Zelos passed out and the poison rumbled inside of him, a now physical manifestation of the sickness leaking from his mind. Vomit clung to the cruxis crystal stationed around his neck. It matched the color of the cuffs placed on Sebastian almost perfectly.

Mother would have been proud of the coordination.

Zelos woke periodically to the choppy arguments whispered and hissed in the hallway outside of his bedroom. Familiar voices made unfamiliar when outside of a church setting. Usually soft-spoken and in the midst of mild mannered prayers to the goddess, they cursed him now. Cursed the weak vessel.

"He is unworthy of a chosen!"

Yeah, buddy. He knew.

"Let Seles do it," he heard once, but that wasn't quite right. Chosen was as chosen does. The very qualification was in the title. You can't choose a new chosen. What a weird paradox.

Fuck, his chest hurt.

Finally easing out of the darkness, an involuntary groan slipped out of his throat. Reflexes demanded he open his eyes, but a thick layer of mucus swathed around his eyelashes and clung to his lids. He probably looked really good. Maybe he couldn't die because he was already in hell. He snorted at the hilarity, but the noise came out sounding like the grunt of a dying hog.

Yeah, he was in hell alright.

"I think he's awake." A boy, timid in an uncomfortable way, announced from the end of the bed. Zelos had the image of an idling kid hanging out, keeping watch, witnessing the slime of inactivity appear on his usually pristine body, and felt his stomach bottom out. Nobody had ever told him living through a suicide attempt would be so embarrassing.

Palms slid up and under his body to raise him into a sitting position. Despite his best efforts, Zelos's head lolled sideways and into the nook of whoever got stuck coddling his sick body. The breath of the nursemaid cut off when hair touched flesh—male skin that stunk of the woods and swordplay. Zelos noted clothes made of something body-hugging that clung to tight, taunt muscles. It turned what should have been a soft, human body into something hard and statuesque. The man who held him felt like the personification of the manor. Zelos groaned when his stomach flipped at the thought.

The breath eased back into even beats as the man shifted underneath Zelos to reach outwards away from the two of them. He eased back, careful not to hurt Zelos, and then the hand that had previously rested against the small of Zelos's back skated upwards and tugged the chosen's head away from the neck he had nestled against.

"He… is awake, right?" Such an amount of uncertainty in the boy's voice—as though Zelos would have had to be completely unconscious to resort to such a state of physical malleability.

"More so than he has been in the past few days," the man beneath Zelos spoke. His voice was deep—strong—stoic and dark. Zelos suddenly remembered the catacombs of his father's voice and ached.

He shuddered involuntarily at the sudden cold, wet cloth that doted upon his eyelids. The speaker wiped at the mucus, freeing Zelos of the snotty glue that fastened his gaze shut. As soon as the cloth slipped away, he fluttered his eyes open into half-centimeter slits, only to be blinded by the white illumination of the lamp shining at his bedside.

His retinas felt weighed by pain medication, muscle relaxants, and far too much energy went into the sole practice of being able to focus. Before he could really rake in all the new things in his bedroom with any clarity, he saw colors: red, black, purple, and pink. They jostled in and out of focus and he could only assume the others in the room watched in silence, awed by the chosen one being such a fucking stupid looking dunce.

There were three strangers surrounding his bed. A boy in red, a man in purple, and a woman who stood in the back corner, who looked like she wanted to be as far away as possible from him—Sheena. It was Sheena.

And Sheena was not a stranger. Sheena was that sweet girl he'd known for many years. That Mizuho spit-fire who kicked and punched at anybody who dared oppress her. Sheena, the girl he taunted and prodded because of her verbal pyromaniac tendencies. The girl with a physique that could kill hearts as well as bodies. Strong, fast, beautiful Sheena that was all of those things in a way that many other women could not attest to being. The teenage assassin. The closest thing he had ever had to a friend.

She caught him staring, read his confusion, and crossed her arms tight over her chest. Her brown eyes snapped over to the wall and she turned her body away from him.

The sight of her faded out and his weak head rolled on his weak shoulders to try and angle a look at the man holding him up, the one in a nauseating amount of purple. As he shuffled and squirmed he unmistakably looked like the resident kingdom fool but he needed to figure out who this guy was. The man made no move to make the attempt easier on him and Zelos soon groaned and gave up, exhausted and chest heaving. Who cared what he looked like? Not Zelos, no siree.

(Did Seles feel like this during her attacks? Did even moving her little head cause exhaustion? His heart suddenly hurt again...)

"Are you feeling better?"

That boy again. He wasn't so much a boy as he was a teenager. He stood at the edge of the foot of the bed, 5'8" with a bit of a lift from his boots and 5'10" with the height of his electric shock high hair. He wore enough red to double as a suicidal bull-fighter, but the red only managed to distract momentarily from the uncomfortable looking belts that wrapped around the kid—four on each side of his body, strapping him in as if he honestly believe the bullshit metaphor of life being a roller-coaster and, thus, felt the need to be seat-belted in for the ride.

"Are you sure he's okay?" The boy turned his gaze from Zelos to the mystery man at his side. "He's not exactly responsive…"

The man beside Zelos relaxed every time the boy spoke and Zelos wondered what their relationship was. Judging by the tightness of both the mens' outfits, he hypothesized that maybe they had first crossed paths while shopping at the same grotesque store.

"I am not okay," Zelos finally spoke.

He immediately regretted it. A voice like sandpaper and a throat like sand, as if his larynx had rotted from the inside out. How much of the poison had they made him retch onto the floor? That part of his memory was black and hazy; he couldn't quite be sure of what had been done. He decided he hated it anyway, indiscriminately, and felt much better for it.

The boy's eyes snapped back to Zelos in a slight panic. Ah, the fear of mortality.

"Do you want me to get the doctor—?"

"What for, huh? Prolong my sad, little life? Tell me what you really want with me, kid, because absolutely nothing you can do is going to help me short of piercing me in the fucking heart." He paused for effect, let the words seep so nobody got the wise idea of combating him. Then he continued, the husk in his voice now a useful tool for the dramatics he craved. "Are we clear? If we're not, I'm more than happy to illustrate the preferred technique on you."

There was no doubt in Zelos's mind that these people were there by order of the church or the king and that they were hanging out for a sight of the Chosen of Tethe'alla, not the unchosen son Zelos Wilder. That meant a lot of different things but, on the whole, it meant that they couldn't hurt him, wouldn't hurt him, and he could say whatever he wanted.

The boy gaped, his expression reading something like shell-shocked. He didn't speak, but the man under Zelos tensed something fierce.

"Acting like you care about me. 'Do you need a doctor?' Don't make me laugh. If you cared, you'd've let me die. Killed me in my bed. How long have you been standing around my bed, ya idle-brained brat? Huh?"

His voice growled, animalistic, and it hurt so much to speak but the boy took it and Zelos couldn't stop. Couldn't pause for fear of leaking. Leaking tears, leaking humanity, leaking something. Poison. Poison. Spit it out.

"How long have you been waiting so you can drag me up and throw me to the lions? Force me to fulfill my birth-right for people who hate me? For people who have done nothing for me!" Don't stop, not even for that crack in the words, not even for the hole opening under his chest. Morph into a cobra, spit the venom and scream. "You want me to shift and change for them? I'd sooner just be dead."

"You're quite fond of the idea of dying, chosen one. If you truly believe this mission will kill you, you might as well die for others and have some amount of charitable substance added to your reputation. It perhaps could make up for the rancid life you felt compelled to live up until this point."

The man underneath him slid out from under Zelos as he spoke and Zelos toppled backwards onto the bed without his crutch, losing sight of the mortified boy for the intricate ceiling above him. Smart move, diplomatic move. The man knew better than to take this wretch seriously. He was just a shell. A harmless, snake skin. No poison there.

Zelos turned his head as best he could to glare up at the man in purple, but his features were blocked off by the outfit and the style of the man himself, as though everything about him was made to spite Zelos. Purple's hair hung over almost all of his face in spouts. More buckles—maybe the two were brothers—wrapped around Purple's body, as if there was any chance in hell that suit was going to come off just short of being sliced off with a high-precision laser cutter. But, putting his outfit aside, and looking into the one eye he could see, Zelos knew that this man was not a rock. His emotions could be clawed out and exploited just like the boy's had been.

"I'd rather die by my own prerogative than to fight for people who never even thought of fighting for me."

"Fight for the rich, the second in command to the kingdom? I'm sure they didn't think much of your woesome high privilege."

"That's the problem."

"Say what you will," the man wasn't moved, "but nothing changes the fact that you are required, by title of the chosen, to fulfill this quest."

"Oh yeah." Zelos laughed. "Restore the world of mana. Get everybody nice and happy and living off the fat of the land while I fly away to heaven—become an angel." His chest hurt. Talking hurt so much. "I have always known what this called for. I don't have to do anything—"

"Kratos. Lloyd. Go wait outside."

Zelos had wondered how long Sheena could stomach his tirade. Purple turned and gazed at Sheena for what seemed like ages before he finally relented, nodded, and headed out of the room. Another pair of boots slurred in a drag of feet over carpet as the boy trailed after him.

Sheena walked up slow and sat beside Zelos on the bed with great care. Her hand eased under him and she gently hoisted him upwards so he could see her face once more. His chest bumped and shuddered with the movement and they sat in the moment of his wheezing for a long while, her just looking while he sacrificed full gasps to hold back tears. She already thought so low of him, he didn't need to water any more of her disappointment. There was no need to grow a garden with her pity.

"W-what are you doing here, Sheena?" His voice broke.

Sheena fiddled with the edge of her rose-colored sash quietly, turned her gaze to the wall and whispered, "You idiot."

"What?"

"You're an idiot. How could you…" Her eyes were wet. "How could you try to do what you did?"

Shock curled his lips into a smile. "Not up for mourning just yet?"

"You're so selfish. You can make so many people happy, but you would rather throw it away for your pride. Just like your father."

Okay, that had hurt, he'd admit it. His father's suicide was not something people talked about, at least not in front of him. He liked it that way. Zelos knew he'd always be associated with his father—they certainly looked enough alike to warrant a comparison or too—but he didn't have to hear about it. Sheena didn't seem to have many cards to play at the moment though if she was prodding at web-covered daddy issues.

"I won't die for people who hate me. I refuse."

"Then do it for me." Sheena leaned over and grabbed his wrist, and, wow, Zelos couldn't remember the last time he touched a woman outside of flirting, let alone the last time a woman had initiated the contact.

"Assuming I'd die for you?" Zelos turned his head away to the opposite side of the room.

"I'm not assuming." Confidence exuding from her voice in a way that was actually pretty insulting. Zelos had never thought of dying for anyone, let alone Sheena, and, while he might have done some reckless things on her behalf, it certainly had nothing to do with her personally. Just another means to an end.

But she had instances to back it up where his reckless nature had won and beaten the odds and they'd been catapulted out of sticky situations by his pure lack of self-preservation. Things that could most definitely be categorized as self-sacrificing if one didn't know better.

She was still talking, still trying to get him to live the rest of his life so he could die for her. "I would do it for you."

He looked at her then, really looked. Ample breasts pushed up against her knees in that common show of good genes and terrible posture. Her hand clung to his hand still, a grip as tight as the pursed line of her lips. He almost thought he saw himself in those young, hurt eyes of hers, but then he remembered Sheena was not selfish, could never be selfish like he was, and that one thing separated them like leagues of oceans. There was nothing of him in her, not really.

"Please, Zelos. People are dying because of this. You can fix it. Don't you want to fix it?" The tears were starting up again. "I know you think you're just dying for a bunch of faceless people, but you just can't think like that. It'll ruin you."

"So I should lie to myself." This conversation was getting exhausting. Couldn't he sleep again? (Amidst a chorus in the hallways crooning in tandem with the memory of his mother that haunted his nightmare? Dreaming about his worthlessness? Maybe not…)

"I'm not asking that. I'm just asking you to see it differently." Her words clipped with her rising temper. She was getting tired of the conversation too.

"Same thing," he murmured.

Her hand tightened. He winced. "How can you say that? How can you sit here and do this to me—to everybody else? How can you justify this? This is—it's—it's—"

"Selfish? That's what I've heard." He let out a soft laugh, wish it had more bite but didn't wish it enough to really rile up the energy to make it sting. "Whatever you call me, I've heard it before. I'm not going on the journey. No name you think of will make me. I won't go."

Sheena's hand whipped away so fast that it could have made a spark had one of them been made of wood. But that burn didn't hurt nearly as much as the slap to his cheek that rolled him completely onto his side. With a swift motion, she pushed herself up and out of the chair before storming out of the room. Emotional leverage hired by the church, that was all Sheena was. Just a pawn.

The joke was on them. Just because Sheena was his only friend didn't make her that good of a friend.

Zelos was a lot of things. Cowardly, childish, shallow, and tainted to list only a few. But he was not stupid. A lot of verbal abuse could be taken, used, but the one lie he used that he could never believe was that he was less than intelligent. He knew how people worked and he watched them as they lied and laughed and he knew that those who opposed normality were labeled stupid only because people, by nature, could not accept differences in their herd. Some part of him saw the appeal. Maybe the stupid thing was not to blend in. There was really no intelligent reasoning behind the idea of being different if the flock is so heavily evolved. But, in the end, Zelos had yet to see an instance where an individual rose up and fought a collective weighed by traditions they didn't understand in which the individual had been the idiotic one in the equation.

But that individual always lost.

The door opened again, swift. It might have slammed up against the wall if it hadn't been for Kratos's hand still tightly clenching the doorknob. A quick jerk sent the door shutting promptly behind him. Maybe he could relay the message to the church that heart-to-hearts were far less effective in swaying opinions when they came from abhorrently dressed strangers.

"You again," Zelos groaned.

"I didn't have much confidence that Sheena could change your mind. You are very stubborn." Kratos took a seat where Sheena had been sitting, his posture rigid like he had a stick shoved straight up his ass that stretched to the base of his cerebral cortex. "We have to try though. Some people have a change of heart."

Zelos wanted to roll his eyes but decided to settle on a heavy-lidded glare.

"If you do not undergo this journey, we will kill your sister."

It would be a lie to say Zelos didn't appreciate the lack of bullshitting dialogue that typically led up to that level of threat. Although it definitely did prickle like a hit from a cactus to know that Kratos could say it with such conviction and, fuck him and his stupid hair and his ugly fucking outfit, arrogance.

"If you so much as look at Seles, I will rip your heart out." Adrenaline was a hell of a conversation helper.

"You are weak now. Can you confidently assure your sister's safety while you sit here and rot with your self-afflicted wounds?" Kratos lifted himself up from the chair as if to say the conversation was coming to a close. Funny, since Zelos still had a hell of a lot to tell this prime grade piece of horse's ass.

"Don't get up like we're done talking," Zelos snarled.

"I know your answer."

His voice was still so even. Zelos wanted nothing more to punch him in his stupid face.

But… it was either him or Seles. He was going to die anyway, but she didn't have to, right? … Right?

Damn the predictability. He should have known they'd use her against him. They always did.

"If I agree and I hear of anything happening to her," he began to warn, but Kratos only lifted his hand and said, "Agreeing to the journey guarantees her safety."

"Sebastian too," Zelos suddenly remembered. "If I do this, Sebastian gets to live his life, carefree. You give him money. A house. A fun, easy life."

"Are you in the position to be negotiating with me?" There was something like amusement in Kratos's voice. Maybe even pride.

"Agree or I don't do it." A clear lie. If any situation called for Sebastian versus Seles, Zelos would pick Seles every single time.

"A sick sister and an old man for company," Kratos mused, "Odd, given your reputation."

Zelos sunk into the bed and shut his eyes. "I'm an odd guy."

"Indeed." A shuffle as Kratos turned to leave the room. "I will see to your requests, chosen one. Recover swiftly and then we will go on the journey to regenerate the world."

When Kratos was gone, Zelos sunk into the covers, grabbed his pillow, and attempted to bury himself deep into the fabric until his lungs felt ready to burst from suffocation. He fell asleep before he could die.

Typical.