"Well… I guess that's why these woods seemed somewhat familiar." The boy standing defiantly before them brought a rush of memories that Lina wasn't sure she wanted. She glanced over at Zelgadis before reluctantly sheathing her sword. After a century or two of searching, prying, reading and guessing, he had become… almost human. Well. On the outside, at least. His once wiry blue hair had been turned more silver, and moved more like hair, although it was still a bit stiff and shinier than it should be, and would break any pair of scissors put to it. Since it seemed a bit silly to enchant a pair of scissors just to cut through his hair, Zelgadis left it pretty much alone. He tried to keep it back from his face in short tail at the nape of his neck, but the shorter lengths near his face would come lose and sweep forward. Lina thought it made him look dashing, really, but wasn't going to tell him that. Zelgadis complained of it daily, although his complaints were usually kept to a glare and a snort. 'At least,' he had said once, in a fit of loquaciousness, 'the wire hair stayed out of the way. THIS is impossible to cut, AND it falls in my eyes all the time.' The rock had disappeared from his skin, but it retained a luminescent, marble-like glow to it, and was so pale it was almost blue; it was also still impervious to normal weapons. They hadn't managed to get much of the demon out, but on the other hand, it only showed in his slit blue eyes, and in the tips of his ever-so-slightly pointed ears. He kept these under his not-quite-black hood most of the time, although it was arguably scarier to see him stalking around like death himself. Lina snorted and turned, her hands in the air.
Zelgadis likewise threw her a look, one that said 'Don't blow anything up'. Lina pretended not to notice, and Zelgadis sighed and raised his hands as well. She hadn't changed at all, although his taste in clothing seemed to have rubbed off on her a little bit. She had finally gotten rid of that (as Zelgadis called it) ridiculous shoulder armor (Speeded along by the fact that it was quite completely destroyed by the same demon that had offed poor Gourry) and she had decided to go all one color—garnet—recently. True to Lina, however, they were all different shades, and all clashed horribly with each other. Even if they hadn't, the garnet looked awful next to her hair. Every time he'd mentioned it, though, she'd found another shade to add to the headache-inducing ensemble, so he's finally given up. "I didn't realize any of them would look so much like Gourry." He said softly, and Lina nodded.
Before them, holding them at swordpoint, was a youth of about ten. This wouldn't have fazed them much, but unfortunately said youth was carrying around the sword of light as though it were any ordinary toy stick. Lina mentally cursed ever giving in and giving it to Shylphiel in the first place. Damn fool thing to do. I could have used it better than Gourry's little midgets. Her guilty conscience (guilty for both getting Gourry killed, then for running around like a madwoman with his head in a sack), helped along by Zelgadis, had forced her to hand it over.
And now it looked like it had been handed down. How long has it been, now? Lina wondered. It was a century or two, at least. The kid looks a lot like Gourry with black hair. And, of course, several years younger. And less dead.
"What do you think you're doing here? This is private land! You can't just waltz in and take things!" The boy was yelling. He didn't look like he was going to stop anytime soon, but Zelgadis was obviously worried that the wrong move could get the kid killed by accident. He was probably right. She sighed and kept her hands in the air, hoping the boy's parents would happen along soon. No way they let a little boy run around with the sword of light. You did stupid things like that, and you didn't have little boys left to hand it down to.
On cue, a Holy shit, it's Shylphiel woman with long black hair came running around the bend, snatching up her son and yanking the sword from his hands. "What did you think you were DOING?" She yelled, shaking him. "This sword is dangerous! You can't run around and play with it like you do the wooden ones! What on earth possessed you to—" She stopped dead when she saw them, dropped the brat, shoved him behind her, and pointed the sword at them again. Lina and Zelgadis groaned and kept their hands in the air. "Who are you? What are you doing here?" So. Apparently not Shylphiel, then.
"They're here to rob us, mom!" The kid piped up from behind Shylphiel's skirts, and the woman's grip on the sword tightened. Zelgadis was sending Lina frantic mental messages to stay put, she was sure, but it looked like any second now papa bear would show up, take the sword, and then they really might be in trouble. She dropped her hands and put them on her hips, cocked her head to the side, and glared at the woman. "We were walking on a PUBLIC road," She snarled. "And your kid jumped us. Shylphiel." It was a wild guess, but apparently she had hit the mark. The woman jumped.
"How… how did you…"
"Put down the sword, you're going to get hurt. The only reason I didn't smack your kid upside the head in the first place was because I was afraid he'd try to kill us and get killed himself by accident." She snorted. "Haven't you heard of us?" She turned to Zel, who had lowered his hands in more what seemed like frustrated defeat than Lina had. "I thought everyone had heard of us."
"If they haven't, it's not through your lack of trying."
Shylphiel lowered the sword a bit, but kept the child behind her, and didn't drop the defense stance. She actually looked like she had a good idea of what she was doing, which surprised Lina. Zelgadis edged a little closer to his traveling companion. "Don't get someone killed because you're jealous of this woman's many-times-great grandmother." He hissed out of the side of his mouth. Lina bristled.
"I was not jealous!" She shrieked, smacking the chimera upside the head. She would have kicked him for good measure, but he caught her foot and she was reduced to the schoolyard-hopping-chicken stance, which did nothing for her pride. "Why the hell would I be jealous of that whiney, almost useless—"
"That is the jealously talking, right there."
"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU."
Before she could, however, Shylphiel's blazing sword smashed into the ground between them, forcing both of them to dodge. Lina spun to scream at her to stop playing around, but had to duck before she got her mouth open. Zelgadis, who had snuck up from behind, got an impromptu haircut as he was slightly slow to dodge. Lina hissed between her teeth, cast a quick levitate, and hovered just out of Shylphiel's reach. "What the hell do you think you are doing?" She yelled as Zelgadis joined her. "You could be killed, running around attacking people like that! I've killed things scarier than you at breakfast this morning, and all you special sword is going to do is make it difficult to stop you without hurting you."
"We've worked hard for what we have!" The girl screamed up at them, ready to attack the second they got in range. "You have no idea what real work is! You just want to come in here and steal everything so you don't have to lift a stupid finger for yourselves! I'm not going to let you!"
"WE WERE WALKING ON A PUBLIC ROAD!!!" Lina shrieked, looking as though she were about to tear out her hair at any moment. "In broad daylight, with our weapons sheathed, when your imbecile of a brat came running up with a sword he doesn't even know how to use and tried to get himself killed! You don't even know who we are!"
"I don't care who you are, and if you weren't floating around out of my reach you'd be dead already!" Came the reply, and Lina's face turned bright red. Zelgadis would have laid a warning hand on her shoulder, but he was a bit worried that it would get bitten off if he tried. He attempted reason.
"We can just fly down the road and not even worry about it. We can—"
"And you're a couple of cowards, hovering up there and not getting into a real fight!"
"We're WHAT?" Lina screamed shrilly, And Zelgadis was forced to put her in a headlock until she calmed down. As Lina was beating on his arm and struggling to no avail, Zelgadis tried to reason calmly with Shylphiel.
"Look. We weren't going to steal anything from anyone." He lied through his teeth, not ready to explain the vast difference Lina put between stealing from thieves and real stealing. "We were walking down the road, minding our own business, when your son thought we must be brigands and attacked us."
"And as I'm sure you have noticed, he's not dead," Lina managed, though her face was turning a bit blue. Having used up her remaining air, she settled for merely gagging threateningly.
"As my partner has deftly put it," Zelgadis continued calmly, "He's not dead. We had plenty of time to hurt him before you got here, and we didn't, even though he attacked first. This should at least give us the benefit of the doubt." He loosed his grip on Lina long enough for her to take a deep breath, but tightened again as soon as she opened her mouth again to yell. "I don't even know why the boy thought we were going to steal anything, anyway."
"No one comes down this road with nice clothes and weapons unless they plan to take things!" The boy yelled from behind his mother. Lina angrily turned more blue at him. She was now beginning to rival Zelgadis in his stony heyday. He eased up long enough for her to catch her breath, but unfortunately let her get her wits back enough to elbow him in the stomach. With a soft 'oof', he buckled over and dipped a bit in the sky.
Shylphiel looked ready to leap up and slice him through the gut, but she held off. After a pause, she put the sword away and turned to her son. "You really didn't have any more reason than that?" She asked softly. The youth cringed.
"The last bandits looked like them. And the ones before that."
"Looks are not something to judge people on, young man! What if I had killed them?"
"What if we had killed you!?" Lina shrieked. Zelgadis restrained her, dodging another blow to the gut.
"Wait until your father hears about this! He will be extremely angry with you!" Shylphiel ignored Lina and began leading her son away, presumably back to their house. Lina bristled, and Zelgadis tightened his grip.
"We don't even get an apology?" Lina's voice hit just the right note to make Zelgadis feel as though his eardrums had just crystallized and shattered, and he dropped the redhead in favor of cradling his damaged ears. "You swing an enchanted sword at us a few times and give Zelgadis the worst haircut he's ever had in his life, then just turn around and ignore us? I should—"
"Shylphiel! Are you alright?" Lina looked further up the road and completely forgot what she had been saying. Zelgadis leaned over and shut her mouth for her, earning him another glare.
Gourry (at least, his name was probably Gourry) came jogging up the bend, looking 23 again, blond hair tied back and wearing…Lina paused mid-thought. He was wearing an apron? No armor at all. Whereas Shylphiel had a hastily-donned breastplate. Lina looked again at Shylphiel. The breastplate looked like it fit, and was even perhaps made for her. She glanced at Zelgadis, who seemed to have noticed it even as she had, and was glancing back at her. She took a deep breath, shook her head, and muttered "they must be pretty inbred if after all this time they're married to eachother and look that much like their ancestors." Zelgadis choked.
"Jealousy, right there," he managed. Lina scowled.
"Hey, look! We have visitors! Hi there!" Gourry's doppelganger, unaware that his character was being savaged, smiled and held out a hand. Lina and Zelgadis looked at it until he let it drop, grin never wavering. "Where are you folks from? What are you headed to? Any news?" He scratched the back of his head. "We're pretty far out into the country, we haven't heard much of the news. How is the princess doing? How are prices in town? We're likely to have enough harvest to sell some this year—are we likely to make much of a profit?" He was getting nervous, and babbling. Lina had been staring at him for the entirety of the conversation, and Zelgadis had been looking at her with what passed for concern on his otherwise impassive face. Neither of them seemed to be listening to him at all. "In…in fact, we, uh…we have enough that we won't be put back having you in for a meal?" He said tentatively, as his wife gasped in muted denial. "Maybe you would feel more comfortable after a bit of rest?"
Zelgadis wasn't quite sure what to do. Two centuries had not been enough to figure out Lina Inverse, although he had gotten better at dodging. It's odd, he often thought, that when I first met her, I thought she was crazy. Then I got to know her more, and thought it was guile and intelligence. Then I think she's crazy again. He'd finally given up trying to guess when she was going to blow, and limited himself to figuring out how to calm her down as fast as possible. It was as much a goal as anything, and he flattered himself to think he was staving off his own insanity with it rather well. Unfortunately, he only had Lina to compare himself to most days, and he admitted that was likely to skew his thinking.
She had been doing better with him, he thought. He was more likely to stick around, being ageless and relatively bullet-proof, and she'd let herself get used to that. Unfortunately, he shared a certain otherworldness with her after so much time, and it didn't do as much towards making her more human as the group once had. She seemed happier, but not necessarily more sane. Zelgadis had finally decided she needed, painful as it may be to go through it time and time again, the friendships she couldn't help but make with people like the blonde grinning stupidly in front of them.
Okay. Stop. That's the jealousy talking.
The only way to keep Lina sane was to let her connect herself to people like Gourry over and over again. Girls weren't adventuring as much that century, so more often than not it was a young man that joined their little group. It made Zelgadis feel like an estranged husband and the father of a teenage daughter in turns, depending on how young the guy was. First there was Gourry, then there was Jordan, then Steven, then… He'd like to say he'd lost count, but then he would have been lying. He wasn't exactly…in love with Lina, he was sure. Pretty sure. But after so long being the only one who stayed, and the only one who could really understand her (or so he told himself on nights when he found himself in danger of sulking), he'd come to think of her as part of himself, almost.
If Lina noticed his unhealthy attachment, and she likely did, she didn't mention it. After all, she likely felt the same way about him. They had been pretty close BG (Zelgadis had never called it Before Gourry out loud, though it remained in his head), but afterwards they had come to view themselves more or less as a single entity.
An entity that is going to drag itself down the dark well of crazy that the Dragons finally took if we're not careful. Gourry had been the one to stick around the longest, it seemed—mostly the boys, and they all started to look like little boys to Zelgadis, died sooner or ran off before Lina could get quite as attached to them as she had to Gourry. There had been no more scenes involving severed heads, anyway, but Zelgadis wasn't sure if that was because of Lina's willpower, the short-term attachments, or thanks to him. He liked to think it was him.
"Sure, we'd like that." He said politely, and Gourry visibly relaxed, although the rest of his family was quivering with unspoken refusal. They all turned around and headed in the direction Gourry and Shylphiel had presumably made their home.
He knew it was time she got to dealing with people again. He knew it likely wasn't healthy to be reminded of Gourry so heavily, but she would be even worse after seeing him again and then leaving without even talking with him. He didn't think he could take her sighing and staring at the fire for much longer after the last kid. Alec, Zelgadis fairly spat the name, the last one, had really taken a turn on Lina. He was the most recent, and Zelgadis had finally gotten rid of the punk by deftly applying a blunt instrument to his head. Rather solidly, and several times. In his calmer moments Zelgadis knew he was going more violently insane, more disturbingly round the bend than Lina had, because he retained his reason and clarity when he lost his senses. He tried to tell himself that Alec had deserved it for the hoops he'd made her jump through, for the mental abuse she'd had to take at his hands, but it was no more than she had done to others.
He'd killed people before, and often, but he had never actually murdered anyone. He hoped it was because of who Alec was, not what he was, that had made Zelgadis lose it that night. He tried not to think whether he would do it without the excuses. This new one had a family. He hoped they could leave without Lina trying to take him with them.
Lina was walking behind Gourry and Shylphiel, who were currently arguing while trying not to seem like they were arguing. She was fairly sure that Shylphiel felt bad for attacking them with no reason, and was trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible to assuage her pride. Gourry, who had never been as stupid as he acted, seemed to have upped his intelligence a bit over the generations—he knew what had happened, and was trying to right that wrong by at least feeding them.
He's sulking again. Behind her, Zelgadis was falling into another of his black moods. I bet he's thinking about Alec. Ah, Alec. Alec had been nice enough at first, hearing about them through whatever wanted poster had been around at the time and wanting to join in for the adventure. She had let herself care about him, forgetting that there were two reasons not to let yourself care for people: the first, because they were gone too quick. She'd resigned herself to that, and had let herself get used to it. After all, she'd had cats when she was younger, even though they weren't as long lived as humans. She was used to friendship, companionship, that was only for a little while.
The other reason, however, was that sometimes they were jerks. She'd forgotten about that. Alec had shredded the little part of sanity he gave her, and she was seriously near the breaking point when Zelgadis had killed him.
He thought, or more likely just hoped, that she didn't know. That she thought Alec had just finally run off. Alec had been a prick, and had probably done a grand total of nothing his whole life. Zelgadis had a lot of very good reasons for getting rid of Alec, although perhaps doing it so... so permanently had been a bit far. But she had also heard what he'd said right before Zel's eyes went red and the blood had started flying. It had been overkill, it had been kind of crazy, but it hadn't been the kind of nuts she had gone the first time.
She'd killed far more people when she lost her mind for real, the first time, before she set rules for herself to follow, strange as they were. It had been so easy to think of people as temporary that time, too easy to just take and do what she wanted, knowing that they would be long dead and gone next time she was in town. After recovering her scattered senses, she'd set rules. No stealing from people who had earned what they had. No killing anyone innocent, no matter how annoying they were.
If he just scared himself back into line with this outburst, if he could jump back from the ledge he had leaned over, Zelgadis would be fine, and better for it. Unfortunately, learning from mistakes was not what Zelgadis was good at. Running mistakes over and over again in his head, obsessing over mistakes, making bigger mistakes while concentrating on what a wretch he was, that's what Zelgadis was good at. And so, going a little crazy was making him go a lot crazy.
Zelgadis was going nuts slower than she had, but perhaps that was worse. She had ripped a swath through the landscape for a while, smacked herself back to her senses, and since had only peeked around the bend a few times. Zelgadis seemed to be edging closer and closer off the edge, and she wasn't sure by the time he really went over that he would be able to pull himself back. Sooner or later she might have to kill him, and that was going to kill her.
Other than the scene with Alec, he was perfectly rational. He hadn't gutted the little bugger with the sword even though they'd been the ones attacked. He was the calm one, and he kept her from overreacting, something she was all too likely to do. She was noticing an odd twitchiness in him the last few decades, though. He would get edgy around anyone she got too close to, which was in all fairness perfectly normal. She probably would have done the same a few centuries ago. When you found one person who wouldn't disappear in the blink of an eye, you tended to cling.
What wasn't healthy was bashing people's heads in with a rock, she admitted. He wasn't going to let it go, either, which could be a good thing, or a bad thing. She was really worried it would be a bad thing.
If we stay too long, she admitted silently, there's a chance one of these people could end up dead.
Gourry turned around to smile at her, and she nearly lost what she was thinking about. She definitely tripped, and looked around to make sure no one had noticed. Neither of the two ahead did, but Zelgadis had been watching. She saw his eyes narrow at Gourry for a split second before returning to his normal stone man routine.
Maybe…maybe he just thinks it's strange that Gourry is the same yet so different, Lina thought desperately. Maybe it's nothing.
And yet, throughout lunch, and the stupidly accepted invitation to stay the night, Zelgadis' moments of narrowed eyes only got more and more common. She was stupid, reckless, impetuous to say yes—she should have refused for their sakes. But one look at Gourry's face had undone her. When he asked her to stay the night, She had said yes without even thinking, and Zelgadis nearly broke the tabletop he'd been gripping. He'd looked down at it in surprise, carefully let go of it, and then stuck to her like a burr the rest of the night, making sure he was always just a hair closer than Gourry. Gourry luckily noticed, which his first incarnation never would have done, and kept his distance, but Zelgadis was getting edgier by the minute. Lina was thankful when they finally split ways to go bed.