Blue
A Slayers Fanficlet
By A. Stitt
PART 2
When Lina Inverse is unexpectedly alone, she thinks of strange things. Things one might attribute to a far more sentimental person.
This is particularly likely when her solitude is the result of sudden and unintentional rejection by the hulking blond puppy that she rigorously denies she is in love with.
DENIES!
Damn that Gourry. Damn him for drooling and tripping on his own tongue, following the first dark haired, big-breasted, long-legged woman in this village, out the door, and away from HER. Damn him for not realizing that he belongs to her, in more ways than one, even if she would never admit lowering herself to the standard of an eye-candy mercenary idiot as her lover…a sweet, bumbling, loyal, devoted idiot…
Lina sits outside a restaurant, after stuffing herself to the gills, as the colloquialism goes, on a bench next to a china shop. The settings remind her piercingly of a notable time she was with Gourry, and witnessed an incredible tenderness between two of her closest comrades in arms: Xellos Metallium and Filia Ul Copt. Why she wants to think on the pair of her friends who "made it work" in ways she and Gourry never have, she is not sure…perhaps Lina is a masochist…
Lina doesn't remember the particulars of the campaign, she only remembers a campaign was formed, quite a while ago, to curb one of the Demon Lord Deep Sea Dolphin's erratic, disruptive quests to unleash Shabranigdo—at the expense of her siblings Zelas Metallium and Dynast Grausherra's lives—and Lina and company were called in to assist the defensive strike.
Xellos, one of the most superbly competent mazoku generals in the history of the Red World, led the monster defensive.
He hardly appeared during the campaign except at its close, when Lina, Gourry, and Filia—by then a Knight of Ceiphied and great power in her own right—had cornered Deep Sea Dolphin's general, Riksfalto.
The battlefield was as understated as Xellos's malevolence itself could be—a plain seaside village in the Outerworld. Because Lina and Gourry were ravenous and Filia had acquired high sums of gold coins selling pottery and vases, they took two rooms at the local inn.
Yes, only two.
Lina didn't meet Filia's eyes when the decision was made, and Filia asked Lina if she were sure she didn't want three rooms. The diminutive sorceress murmured something about "trying not to splurge on things anymore."
Gourry had laughed, cluelessly, tossing his thick horse-mane of golden hair. But the way he'd laced an arm around Lina's waist, one wondered how much really evaded his cerebral radar.
Or his…pants.
Or his more tender sentiments. Yes, even Gourry, the medieval Ken Doll, truly had those.
For some reason, Filia hadn't chastised Lina for what the sanctimonious dragoness would ordinarily deem loose female behavior. She had just smiled gently, her aquamarine eyes soft, and let it be. "Purple hair, purple eyes…that idiot had better be alright," the dragoness had muttered cryptically, signing the roster for the innkeeper.
The next morning a loud crash outside roused Filia alone in bed, and Lina and Gourry not so alone in bed. Variously clothed, they had all run to their adjoining windows.
Outside was Xellos locked in a deadly dance with Riksfalto, a large-boned woman with one scarred-shut eye and short tousled green hair, and skintight porpoise-slick blue armor. His plain, wooden, red-tipped staff was somehow overpowering her three-tipped trident sword. Their movements were such beautiful, musical intervals of volcanic fury and poetic grace that Lina almost forgot to go help her comrade.
Filia moved first—stepping out on the window—in just her nightgown, holding just her mace.
Lina would have rather faced Shabranigdo fully reincarnated while submerged in a tank of water than Filia, right that moment, solely judging from the look the dragoness was casting Riksfalto. However…
"STAY," Lina barked, as though to a cherished lapdog, and not a girlfriend and ally in arms. "And CALM the HELL DOWN. If Riksfalto kills you, XELLOS will kill ME." Then she whipped around, her red hair lashing in Gourry's face.
He spat it out and blinked, confused and bewildered.
An inexplicably protective impulse seized Lina. She snarled her preferred and oddly fond nickname for the airheaded warrior, "YOU STAY TOO, JELLYFISH-BRAINS. NO BLONDS ALLOWED ON THE BATTLEFIELD TODAY."
"But LINA…"
"NO. Ray wing!" And she soared out the window and right into the fray, murmuring the prologue of a Dragon Slave.
Xellos, sleek purple wolf that he was, slunk past, shoved Lina out of his line of fire. "Don't spoil my killing spree, Lina-kins," he crowed in the middle of tackling Riksfalto, holding up a finger in a ludicrously capable display of nonchalant wittiness.
The sorceress let out an infuriated sputter. "I'M HELPING YOU, MORON! You just interrupted my incantation!"
"That's lovely, Lina," Xellos panted, straddling Riksfalto and aiming his staff to skewer the other mazoku directly in the heart. Obviously he wasn't listening to the sorceress, and thought her assistance pointless. Arrogant prickface. "HOLD STILL, RIKSY! AAAHAHAHA. We've been at this for an hour, I'm bored and I want my morning TEA…"
But then Xellos's maniacal rant aborted abruptly. He grunted, like a child caught eating dessert before his green beans.
All he had done was gaze, for a flickering instant, peripherally at a place over Lina's shoulder.
Now, he dismounted General Riksfalto and offered her a malevolent, if shaky, smile. He held up both hands ingenuously. "Go," he said, and nothing else. His eyes blazed ruby.
The big-boned aquatic demon tossed her algae-hued hair sulkily. Lina thought she actually saw Riksfalto's lower lip jutting out. Riksfalto straddled the place where she had fallen, proudly refusing to wipe her bleeding lip—surely Xellos's handiwork. It dripped grotesquely.
Xellos's expression further soured. "Go. Now." He spoke as if to a mentally challenged toddler.
"What in seven hells are you up to?" Riksfalto rumbled. She flailed her trident-sword in his face once or twice, impotently. In other circumstances, it would have been keenly amusing.
Xellos looked, to Lina's consternation, as if he were about to bodily collapse. But it was not the kind of collapse indicative of a physical weakness, a swoon. Rather it expressed the frustrations of a junkie whose beloved hypodermic needle was just barely out of reach. "You would never comprehend just what, even if I felt like condescending to tell you." He leered. Synthetic nails on chalkboard would be more palatable than that smirk, even through his apparent agony.
"Bastard." But something in his eyes made her comply. She vanished in a fizzling whoosh of black electricity and sea mist.
About four seconds passed before Lina let her incredulous temper get the best of her. "Xellos, what the HELL?" she roared. "You had her! You HAD her!" She nearly tore at her hair.
"Tasty. Very piquant." Xellos was indubitably remarking upon the subtle flavorings of Lina's confusion and rage. He sank down on a cheerfully red town bench. He covered his eyes haphazardly with a long-fingered, pale hand. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, as if, once again, he were controlling a base animal urge with some difficulty.
"What…?" Lina repeated, more delicately. She perched on the arm of the bench.
"Calming down," he explained, in a cordial voice, but his hand was trembling.
"Why?" But by now Lina had already looked for the mysterious conscience-stimulus over her shoulder, and had found Filia Ul Copt watching from the doorway of the inn—watching Riksfalto's near-mutilation with mute, pale horror. The dusty rose of the dragoness's cheeks, upon Xellos's sudden dose of pacifism, was already returning. She was even, quietly, smiling.
"My dear girl," Xellos drawled at Lina, like Errol Flynn or Lucius Malfoy, through his supporting hand.
"Don't be a prig," Lina snarled. "I figured it out. You censor yourself for her. You hide your darker impulses for her. You genuinely consider her feelings." She thought on Gourry, and how something had compelled her to make him stay behind the battle that day, in their hotel room.
She understood. She understood well.
Xellos said nothing. The silence was self-condemnatory. He did have a strange breed of decency, after all. How peculiar.
"She loves you," Lina continued. "She would do anything for you, under all that fussing. That power should appeal to you, Xellos."
"It does…but not in the way you think."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, Lina-kins…"
"Don't call me that."
"Of course, Lina-Kins."
She sighed.
"Anyway," he continued smugly, slowly lowering his hand, "it's more that I like that power over Filia because it means I'm important to her. Impactful. Significant. It's not that I crave her for a sense of control or omnipotence… What power I already possess is a sufficient means to my ends, and more than satisfactory to me. No, I want Filia to protest…to have a mind of her own…If she didn't, I'd lose interest, quite frankly. As she is… I return the favor of that power to her…I give her power over me."
"So you like a fighter."
"I like a fighter. Correct. I like a woman who uses what she has."
Lina chose her words carefully. She gazed at Xellos as though a connoisseur appraising an expensive antique, with vaguely stimulated interest. "It's a wonder you and I never…"
"We might have, Lina. But then a pair of strapping, righteous blondes entered our lives. And things went as they were meant to go. I have no regrets, personally."
"Yeah…yeah. Me neither."
As though on cue—and Lina had the sneaking suspicion she had been eavesdropping from the start—Filia sashayed over to the pair of miscreants and parked her curvaceous posterior next to Xellos on the bench. Her cheeks were a little redder than before, confirming Lina's conjecture.
"Honey, you look awful," the dragoness crooned. Gratitude warmed her gesture as she ran her fingers along the back of the mazoku's head, through his silky purple hair. She continued to stroke it until he spoke.
"You should see the other guy," he chirped, with a stupid, self-satisfied grin.
Lina rolled her eyes along with Filia.
"Men," they chimed.
Xellos gave an affronted scoff. "Don't gang up, fairer sex," he quipped.
"Why not? You're practically one of us," Filia purred, and Lina cackled appreciatively.
He scowled. "Well, now that you've given me a nice kick to the scrotum, how about some thanks?"
"Well. I dunno. You're such an overgrown wolf cub."
"And YOU are a lizard with boobs." He looked away, pouting. He was still quaking a bit, and the sweaty sheen had not yet left his skin.
It happened quickly, and it made them look like matching pieces of a puzzle—Filia slid up against Xellos and tucked her head under his chin. She laced her arms around his waist and softly kissed his Adam's Apple. As he shivered a bit more violently, but not necessarily with displeasure, she countered, "I thought my gratitude for you was self-evident." And then she tucked in against him, closing her eyes, the picture of trust and security. "After all, I love you."
Lina gave a low whistle. It was a damned good comeback. And so sweet that it could probably melt anyone shy of Hitler or Satan.
The stupidly doting look on Xellos's face, for a fraction of a second, was almost surreal. It was one of the cutest, funniest things that Lina had ever seen, so she grinned at him, despite knowing that same person to be capable of mass murder.
He corrected himself, reinstating the calculatedly bland smile. "Hm," was all the thousand-year-old priest could think to say. Even that much sounded hoarse with barely constrained happiness.
"No surprises, please, love," Filia mumbled. "It's way too late to get over you."
Xellos's gaze became wry, and distant. "Ah, Filly."
"I mean it."
"You really don't get it," he chuckled. It was a smoky sound, unlike the deranged chicken-clucking he often made when carried away with perverse humor. "The biggest surprise and mystery, which I was discussing with Lina here: You caught me already."
She burrowed into his shirt with a content sigh.
He continued, "Too late indeed. It's the long haul now."
"Too full to move, Lina-kins?"
For a moment Lina thinks she's having an auditory hallucination. That's not good. She's thinking entirely too much about her sociopath demon male friend.
Wait, no. He's actually standing there in front of her—having teleported into her presence sometime during her reverie, arms folded across his black-clad chest. "Hot damn," she remarks of the coincidence, eyebrows soaring.
"Yeah, kinda," Xellos smirks.
Lina cocks her head, impervious to this quip. Something's wrong about Xellos's eternal grin-mask. It's tight and strained. There are no dimples. Lina is well aware of Xellos's dimples. They're criminal because they make him seem like some sort of ridiculously innocent doll. And they're not there anymore. But Lina is far too savvy to outright demand an explanation for the off-centeredness of her company. "Whatcha up to these days, Xellos?" she sighs.
"Resignation," he croons, cupping a hand to his chin, as though a restaurant critic chewing the first morsel of the house's signature dish while the whole waiting staff crowds around the table. He renders his verdict with a little coo. "Not a typical negative sentiment I taste on you, my dear."
"Not a 'typical negative sentiment' I can actually SEE on YOUR FACE either, Xellos," Lina shoots back, unperturbed. She turns her head towards the china shop, with an unholy surge of glee at the thought of how nice it might be to destroy its guts: vases, teacups, planters, and other fragile, perfect, dainty things…
The monster bypasses her retort entirely, letting out a hoot. "And there's the stomping, vindictive energy I usually feel…"
"Gourry's…not here. He…met someone."
"So I gathered. So I understand." A darkness pitches Xellos's bubbly tenor down to a simmering, resentful baritone.
Her garnet eyes flash to his face. "Oh, I get it. Where's 'Filly,' Xel?"
His lip curls. "Touché." His eyes are firmly squeezed shut—closing her off.
"So you were dumped too. Wow, so was Amelia. What a week. Venus must be in retrograde or some weird-ass thing…"
"Actually it was sort of mutual. And I know that. Zelgadiss is actually the…other man…for Filia."
"WHAT?" Lina hoists herself to her feet, gesticulating dramatically, and nearly taking out the eyes of several passing peasant pedestrians. Xellos smiles at them congenially and waves as they continue, bewildered. Lina keeps braying, unconcerned, "That's…not natural, somehow. Amelia actually made a charter club for rock-people rights. She actually goes around going 'golems are people too.' She's selected names for her babies with Zelgadiss. And a part of him actually LIKES all that. You can't think this will last, Xellos. Come on, chin up…I told you countless times before, getting in fights is like a bizarre ritual for you and Filia. My gods, you're so in love it almost hurts my teeth to watch you two sometimes…"
"Believe what you want, Lina. I don't care…"
"Sure you don't. You look thin, Xellos."
"Why is everyone saying that?" The bridge of the mazoku's nose wrinkles. He draws his black cloak tighter over his mandarin-necked cream tunic, peevishly.
"Because it's true."
"Hmm." Evasive Xellos. Like wind itself. He opens his eyes, hopping up on one foot, his clothes limply swaying from side to side, adopting the appearance of a drunk flamingo, or a very happy monkey. Only Xellos is capable of looking so playfully absurd at certain times, and so fiercely menacing at others. Lina wonders if this is one thing that Filia fell in love with.
"Do you still get to see Val?" she persists. "I know you…got really close to the kid…"
For the third time, he completely ignores her delving questions. For the third time, there are no dimples when he smiles. "I know what you were thinking when you looked at that china shop." He giggles that giggle that Lina thinks taps directly into the Sea of Chaos itself—a high, erratic, cold series of notes. Frantic, unforgiving, and a little insane.
She chooses to ignore the chills that it inspires in her even now, after years of knowing him. "Oh? What was I thinking, Xellos?"
"You wanted to go in there and fuck it up. All of it. All the pretty little things…AHAHAHA…eeehehehe…"
She blinks. "Wow. Coarse language from you."
"I'm angry, Lina. I want to demonstrate that anger." He cracks his knuckles, removing his cloak in a single graceful flourish.
No kidding, the sorceress muses, watching that smile grow ever tighter on Xellos's face, but no less empty. "Okay then. Let's go wreck a china shop." She is surprised to hear herself the calmer, clearer-headed, more cerebral of the pair of them. What a strange role reversal. The whole world is piercingly clear and distant as she follows him into the ceramics shop's front room. She and Xellos have been left behind by their "strapping pair of altruistic blonds"…and suddenly it becomes obvious to Lina why it is a ceramics shop, of all places, that he is so eager to destroy.
It is ceramics that Filia is fondest of making.
Filia.
Xellos, the master of artifice and diplomacy, strides right past the prune-like old lady at the front desk. He lifts a finger and waves as if to a far-off band of comrades. A blinding red light pierces a whole wall of teapots, which shatter in devastated shards. Xellos giggles, shoulders shaking manically, eyes open and crimson-hued. "This is fun," he whispers in a deranged, quivering voice. Whether he is hilarious or horrifying to the observer is up for grabs—per typical, with Xellos.
Lina senses the control seeping from his form, and, consequently, senses the safety seeping from a ten-mile vicinity. It is rare for Xellos to abandon his cerebral nature. When he does, he abandons it fully, and the results are cataclysmic on each of the handful of occasions.
"Lady," Lina bellows at the woman at the front desk, a woman wearing a frilly pink dress and saccharine cameo brooch at her neck, whose mouth is shaped in a comical and protesting "O." "HEY! I said, LADY! Just take my word for it, and GET OUT FAST."
She flings her entire coinpurse at the woman in compensation, silently cursing ten generations of Xellos's family—never mind that this is logistically impossible to do—for losing her a month of looting in order to have a temper tantrum at his ex girlfriend in absentia.
"Play with me, Lina!" Xellos shrieks, doing a back-flip onto the counter. His maneuver, and the glowing redness of his eyes, cause the old shopkeeper to flee the place as swiftly as she can. He doesn't wait for her to clear the place before he casts a Blast Bomb—an immensely potent fire spell invented by Lei Magnus—at the adjacent wall of teacups. "AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA…"
"Oh, whatever, Xel," Lina grumbles, emerging from behind the counter after the sizzling hot winds of black magic have dissolved. "Seems like my contribution is pointless if you're gonna be so…theatrical."
He trumpets another cackle, rearing back like a man with a long invisible whip, prepared to take out the remainder of the shop wall.
Lina rolls her eyes at the completely demolished left half of the shop. The mauled potsherds of countless wares crunch under her feet as she steps towards her friend and his perennially schizophrenic antics. She casts a half-hearted fireball right at the smallest and most delicate pink bone-china cup on the shelf.
And Xellos wakes up. "N-NO! Not THAT ONE!"
He teleports in front of the fireball, taking full impact, and wrapping his arms around that teacup, protecting it like a baby.
"…Xellos?" Lina balks.
"No, just…keep going. Just not this one, is all." He clears his throat, straightening, still holding the teacup between his palms. Calm, collected, detached again, even though his hands are shaking the slightest bit.
Absurd. Why should he care if SHE would want it? Why should it concern him now?
Lina and the china shop fade into the background.
And Filia.
Filia.
Filia floods everything again. Like always.
He remembers the first time he touched her skin, and realized just how soft and malleable it really was. How it thrilled him in ways that a thousand-year-old man should not have found possible. How it was like taking that little wooden rake through the Zen garden, the creamy, milky, willfully parting sands of the Zen garden, making fine imprints with his fingers along the flesh of her arms, her hips, her stomach, below her stomach, before she let out a keening, bleating sound and went stiff, and then limp—and then he apologized, he actually apologized, for making marks on her skin like that, for hurting her at all.
A mazoku apologized for causing pain.
That was how much he loved her.
But then she had told him it was not pain that had caused her to cry out, and she trained his hands back on her peachy, slightly sweaty flesh, and commanded more. And then she yelped again, delighted yet embarrassed, and covered her face with her soft little hands.
He remembers that it caused him to laugh, and to nestle reassuringly against her when her face reddened. And he remembers quite clearly that he obliged her wishes, when she was less flustered, and ready to resume their activities.
He remembers Filia marveling at it all the next morning, cozy, secure, and satisfied, calling him the gentlest and most considerate lover a girl could hope for. Lazily wrapping her arms around his neck and demanding that he never leave her. He supposes that was the moment he first envisioned the blueness of her soul, with her sweet, healing arms like water around his neck, coiled around his feral, windy spirit, like the rain that comes with the tornado.
"Xellos. Hey, dumbass." A very different woman's voice pierces this reverie—and Xellos realizes that he has been standing dazed and gawking in the middle of the destroyed China shop, gazing at the bone China cup that he rescued from Lina's fireball, for the past ten minutes.
The monster hadn't known himself capable of bashfulness as keen as Filia's on the night that he first made love to his dragoness. But all of a sudden, he feels a similar sort of nakedness. "I…yes, Lina-kins?" He clears his throat. Veiled by his merciful purple hair, his ears burn.
Behind layers of consternation and annoyance, the redheaded sorceress's face conveys some measure of friendly concern. "…Are you okay? Cause I mean…wow."
"Why?" he snaps, instantly regretting the childish tone. He cradles the teacup against his chest in one hand. With the other hand, he scratches at his eyes, which do not feel right, somehow.
"Your eyes are…open. And…they're…" She doesn't finish the sentence.
Xellos's eyes close like steel traps. He now has a sneaking suspicion what else Lina was going to say about them. He is grateful that humans cannot taste emotions as his race can, or Lina would be dining on his horror fit to burst. "Hm," is all he relinquishes out loud.
"Hm indeed," Lina retorts, mirroring his facial expression of the single raised eyebrow.
Xellos looks at his only companion with a beating heart and body in months mutely—seeing through his closed eyes, as mazoku, without a real beating heart and body, can.
She is not nearly as beautiful as Filia. Lina is what most men would call "cute." She has a child's features—fresh, unrefined, charming, but not classically proportioned. Her lips are too thin, her eyes too large, her forehead too high. Her body is too thin, harsh almost—nothing to embrace or caress hangs on her bones. She is brassy and obnoxious, and impetuous, and rude, and greedy, and self-serving, and she has not a drop of maternal instinct or sanctimony. She is wheedling, and cajoling, and riotously fun. She is mercenary and fiercely independent, and even a little bitchy.
One would think LINA is the one meant to be Xellos's soul mate.
But…
Somehow she doesn't fit. Somehow, though Xellos is intensely fond of Lina, the novelty wears out. Lina's companionship is a snack machine where Filia's is a dependable, sustaining four-course dinner.
Perhaps it is the fact that Lina anticipates Xellos too much, and fails to react, fails to appreciate. The bemusedly arched eyebrow is all he can expect of her upon his zaniest or most malicious antics. She is too much like him—they are two people looking out at a radiant constellation in a night sky from the same perspective…and after a while, discussing, and experiencing, the same perspective becomes patently dull.
With Filia…it is like they are standing back to back, holding hands, opposite sides of the same position, gazing up at very different constellations, or very different views of the same constellation…always with something new and exciting and even upsetting to experience together. And still, back to back, still pushing up against each other in support. And always able to turn around to say…
Three certain words.
Oh seven hells. Oh triple shits and double damn. And crap muffins. All there is right now is the snack machine, and not that four-course dinner.
But…Lina has Filia's fire, and Filia's stomping domination, and Filia is not here right now. Filia is with Zelgadiss. Filia has left and gone away and made Xellos starve himself to death.
Emptiness can be surprisingly filling. Xellos feels gorged. And for the first time in his life he acts on impulse. Desperation.
He grabs at Lina. Lunges. With no prelude. He seizes her too-thin, childlike arms—no fleshiness at all, he muses even as he gropes—in long, serpentine, iron-firm fingers, and in one predatory, sleek maneuver, he is on top of her, straddling her like a baseball umpire.
"Oh, screw them all, Linnikins." Why the hell is his voice shaking so much? "Let's just do it. We've been flirting with each other for years. We've felled two dark lords…well alright, I didn't have much to do with Fibrizo since he kinda was employing me, but Darkstar was bigger than Fibrizo…together, and we're such an evenly matched pair of cynical bastards with an agreement that principles and loyalty don't enter into our relationship….Why don't I make an inferno out of one of your fireballs, eh?" And where is the teacup? Did he drop it somewhere? Did he put it down safely? Oh who cares…
Lina doesn't move. Her face is obstructed by fiery red, untidy bangs. "Xellos." Her voice, however, conveys everything that needs to be expressed. Flat, harsh, contained. "Get. Off."
Xellos blurts it out, a tasteless retort, without characteristic forethought. "You couldn't stop me if I didn't want to stop. I'm practically omnipotent, Lina."
"You don't rape."
"Don't I?"
"No. Gods, you DO smell good…but no…"
"How do you know?" But his smile is wobbling, fading, dying. It never did show dimples, the sole visible difference between one of his "real" smiles and one of his dangerously convincing facades. His pelvis releases pressure on her hips already.
"A conversation we had several years ago." Now Lina is a little breathless, because Xellos IS gorgeous, and Xellos IS smothering her with his incredible firm body and his scent of spices and sweets and rain…and Gourry IS with another girl right now. "When you told me that power held no significance to you for its own sake. When you said that mattering to someone as you do to Filia is what had REAL significance to you. You don't want to break a living thing just for the fun of it. You're not that evil. You don't fool me, Xellos. You don't fool me. And you sure as hell don't fool HER."
"Don't TALK…" Xellos turns away, violet hair lashing like silk curtains… "Don't TALK ABOUT HER…" Inexplicably he giggles, flinging up his arms, already relinquishing control of Lina, if he ever had it in the first place. "Not HER."
"WHY NOT?" Lina roars, a lioness in battle, paradoxically, a friend pointing a crucial truth out to another hurting friend. She stabs the almighty demon in the chest, causing his head to snap back in her direction. "Isn't SHE the reason why you're doing stupid pointless SHIT like blowing up ceramics shops and not eating and HITTING ON ME ON THE REBOUND? Isn't SHE the reason why you do or DON'T do ANYTHIN--"
"And what are YOU doing if not accepting my attentions?" Xellos pounces again, leering at the young sorceress. The desolate, tight little smile without dimples looms on his face. "I mean, after all, you ARE alone, just like me. Gourry DID give up on you…for a woman with a softer voice…larger breasts…"
And then he kisses her—forcefully, coldly, and without feeling—on the mouth. And he thinks on how thin her mouth is. How unpouting. How unlike Filia's. And it depresses him.
"Now THAT is MEAN." Lina murmurs around his lips. She plants a snow-booted foot in Xellos's groin and shoves. Hard.
Men of any species react similarly to this attack.
Several excruciating, panting seconds later, flat on his back on the dusty ceramics shop floor, Xellos yelps out something that sounds like an apology, fingers spasming at sides. His face is puce colored.
Lina is standing over him looking remarkably satisfied. "Eh, that's okay. You didn't mean any of it. I could tell."
"But I really am sorry." Xellos pops open an eye, around a grimace. "I don't know why I did it. Any of it." His eyes grow shifty as he hoists himself up to his knees, and then his feet. "Don't tell anyone I actually apologized. I have a wicked reputation to maintain. But why I did any of this today, I don't know…"
"I do."
"You…do?"
"Xellos. Buddy…"
"Buddy?" He stops abruptly in the middle of massaging his unusually pale temples, his neat pageboy bangs all in wild, oddly sweet disarray.
"Yes. Yes you are. I know we pretend we're not actual friends, you'd 'gladly kill me if the Beastmaster said to,' blah blah, we're just what, 'traveling allies,' or some shit like that, but really. Come on. Have a cider with me." Lina slides her arm through the mazoku's.
Xellos blinks numbly. For once he is speechless. His amethyst cat-eyes are bewildered. "I, er…"
"Shut up, old man. Old geezer. Aw, heh….Gourry's the one who noticed you're so OLD. Haha look at you flinch. OLD OLD OLD. One foot in front of the other. We'll get our menfolk back. Er, our manfolk and womanfolk back." And for once the human is the one who sees, and the monster the one who is blind, as she leads him out of the ravaged ceramics shop and towards the nearest warmly-lit tavern.
"Jeez, Lina. Don't call me old…"
"Whatever, senior citizen…C'mon, Naga's waiting for me."
"Just a moment." Xellos Slips out of Lina's companionable grasp. "I need to…go get something that I left on the astral plane." His hand goes to his neck.
She casts him a speculative glance.
"No, seriously. Something…well, it's something Val made me ages ago. Oh, don't look at me like that. STOP! I said I had an evil reputation to maintain, damn it. I'll be right with you, Linnykins. Order me something." And he vanishes, ears under his hair burning again.
Lina cackles fondly at the empty space from which Xellos has teleported. "Wow," she bellows, hands on hips. "The World Peace cause needs more Filias!"