DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters except the OCs. Elyon's surrogate mother and natural mother have been arbitrarily renamed because I couldn't remember their actual names.

Another introspective chapter, with bits of angst. I have decided to leave the really angsty and M-rated-for-violence part for next chapter, otherwise it would become too long.

Warnings: mentions of incest.

Flame me all you want, I'm fireproof.

P.S. I know you'r out there because I've been looking at the traffic stats. Review, please. (this does not apply to you, ACompanyofSwans, Mondgeist and anonymous reviewer of chapter 3)


Who would have thought that would be one of the best and yet most complicated summers in her life?
Everything seemed to be falling into place: she was finally getting the hang of ruling, thanks to her extensive readings in the palace library and insightful conversations with advisers, the civil unrest seemed to have quieted, the harvest had been abundant and her brother seemed to have overcome the worst of the crisis.
Throughout the summer, he had spent all of his days working in the garden, repairing past inattentions and making improvements, the desperation almost gone from his eyes and manners, replaced by a renewed self-confidence.
Elyon cherished the peaceful and happy moments she had been able to spend with him, reading on the grass, chatting and joking or simply watching him at work. He had taken the habit of working shirtless (a thing less to wash, he said) and the long hours of hard work under the sun had tanned his skin golden and made muscles ripple on his lean frame.
Sometimes Elyon found it quite difficult to look away and to concentrate on anything else when he was working and it made her feel perverted.
If it had been just a matter of physical attractiveness, it would have been bad enough, but the real problem was that it was not just that. In the few weeks they had together when he was still Prince, he had been cold, arrogant and aloof, but now all of that had been stripped off him, leaving only a person who was in need of affection and reassurance and who could be surprisingly gentle and caring.
He looked upon her as if she was the anchor that kept his whole world from drifting away and Elyon found herself overwhelmed and at the same time strengthened by his need for her.
In her mind, when perverted thoughts overrode common sense, he was not just a nice piece of ass, but also a complex, charming, fragile, lovable person and she desired him for all of those reasons.
She was in a very deep quagmire, but she was confident that she would have self-control enough to never act on those impulses.
She had vowed to keep him safe, to protect him, even if it meant protecting him from her very self.

Autumn arrived. Elyon was almost glad of it, sine it would put an end to part of her torture (colder days meant no more shirtless Phobos), but she had thought of a sunny, dry autumn. That autumn, instead was chilly and rainy and miserable and it curtailed the time Phobos could spend in the gardens.
In a few weeks, it started to tell. He became restless, then apathetic again, spending whole days looking out of the window, waiting for the rain to stop.
Elyon had thought he had put this behind him and didn't know what to do with him now.
She raked her brain, thinking of alternatives. Reading was not enough, it seemed, because it left him too much time to brood. He needed some physical pursuit to distract him, but she couldn't think of anything sensible. She couldn't just send him to the kitchens or to help the servants, it would sound too much like a humiliation.
The answer came to her one morning, while she passed through the bridge overlooking the courtyard where a group of guards had been training. He used to be a squire, she thought, used to train in this very courtyard with our father; maybe this kind of exercise would prove a suitable distraction.
Of course, the courtiers would complain about the degrees of liberty accorded to her brother and question the wisdom of letting him anywhere near a weapon (when she accorded him gardening tools, they had suggested he could try to kill her with those, the paranoids) but this time she had an answer ready for them.
She could cite the example of Prince Aloys, who had been redeemed and became Queen Candice's Champion, she could tell them that she had tamed him enough to consider him inoffensive, she could tell them a lot of bullshit like that, cooking it up in a way that would make her decision seem a show of strength and ruthlessness instead of the act of mercy and care it really was.
She was finally starting to think as a Queen.

She proposed her solution to him that very evening, over supper.
It had rained for the past three days, hard and heavy, shrouding the world in grey and he looked more haunted than ever, even if he was trying to keep up a cheerful façade for her. His grey-blue eyes were surrounded by dark circles and his face was drawn and pale, the summer tan already gone, but he still looked beautiful to her.
"You look forlorn." she said, setting down her cup.
He tried to smile. "I'm sorry, Elyon. – he replied quietly – I have too much time to think, these days. It makes me melancholy, but it will pass. Do not trouble yourself with this."
"How would you like to train with the guards?" she blurted, quickly.
Phobos looks flabbergasted. "Excuse me?" he asked.
Elyon sighed. "You said you used to train as a kid, so I thought you may like it and since the garden is impracticable most days…" she trailed off. "But if you do not like, just forget about it." she hurriedly added.
Phobos scrutinised her for a long moment. "Do you really think that it is a good idea? What about the courtiers?" he asked.
"I've managed to convince the damn courtiers that it is a very good idea. Now they are thoroughly convinced that I've tamed you for good." she said smugly.
Phobos grimaced at the thought and stood up, circling around the table and positioning himself at the back of her chair, hands on her shoulders. "You've put some thought into this, haven't you? Are you not worried that I may try to harm you, Elyon?" he whispered in her ear, leaning over her, his voice menacing, his breath playing on her skin. Elyon shuddered, but not in fear.
"I do not think you would harm me, now. Would you?" she retorted breathlessly, hoping that he didn't notice the effect he was having on her.
His hands left her shoulders and he knelt beside her chair, looking at her with an odd intensity. "I should yearn to, - he replied in a low, tight voice and Elyon felt her heart tremble – you're the reason why I've lost everything, but you have given me so much in return… I can't hurt you, Elyon, no more than I can fly or make it stop raining."
Elyon remained silent and Phobos continued his train of thoughts. "I am ever amazed about how much you care for me, even after all I've done to you and to Meridian." he said.
"Oh, but it is nothing…" Elyon tried to chime in, but he silenced her with a finger on her lips and she couldn't speak at all, couldn't anything but focus on the slight pressure and on his voice.
"It is not "nothing", Elyon, it is everything, everything I would have hoped for if I had known I could hope. – he said – It's what I had been yearning when I was young and what I'd forsworn as a useless weakness when I understood I couldn't have it. It is all of this and more, because it is undeserved. Your love is not "nothing" to me, Elyon." His voice held so much feeling that her heart tightened in her chest.
"It is not "nothing" to me either, not for real." she confessed in a whisper, blushing. He smiled, smiled for real, not just to ease her worries, and Elyon felt her mind fog over.
When she came back in control of her actions, she had already grabbed him by the lapels of his tunic and pulled him towards her, leaning over to meet him halfway, faces almost touching, but she still managed to avoid the irreparable by turning her head and ended up kissing his cheek instead of his lips. "Oh hell, what was I thinking I was doing?" she asked herself, hiding her beetroot red blush by laying her head on his shoulder.
Phobos froze for a second, then put his arms around her and held her close, kissing the top of her head, a tender, brotherly gesture that made her feel ten times more horrible, especially as her body responded in wholly inappropriate ways to his scent and the feel of his arms around her.
After a few seconds, Phobos released her and scrambled to his feet, staring at the flames in the fireplace.
Elyon gazed at the floor and sipped a bit of water in an effort to regain a bit of control.
"So, - she said finally, to break the awkward silence – what about my proposal?"
Phobos turned his gaze towards her. "I would be glad to join the guards in their training." he said quietly, with a faint smile.

When he was younger, until his father's demise, Phobos used to train swordplay every day for hours, as squires, even those that had no chance of ever becoming knights, like him, were supposed to do. He had been quite good and roughing up other squires had been the outlet for his anger towards the world.
Later, after usurping his mother's throne, he always made sure he had a bit of time every week to spar with Cedric or Frost, just to keep the habit and because it was fun, but in the last six months his training had managed to rust and now, more often than not, the guards gave him a hell of a beating, but, at least, when he was training he couldn't think.
When he rested, however, dark thoughts assailed him, making him fear the scant hours between the ending of the training and the arrival of Elyon
Fortunately, he was too exhausted to dream, most nights.
Memories of his father haunted him, now that he was walking again the way of the warrior, and made him wish there had been a way to save him.
Maybe, if he had asked his mother to let him go with him in exile, he wouldn't have jumped, he would have found a reason to keep going, as he had now, and if he had done that, his mother will still be alive, maybe, Elyon wouldn't have suffered and Meridian wouldn't have been ruled by a dictator for sixteen years, but he had been too full of desire for revenge to think that maybe he could salvage what was left of the only person who had truly cared for him before Elyon.
He had tried to rule as his mother had, at first, but the civil war had changed everything and since he couldn't be loved, not even by his mother, let alone his subjects, he had decided he would be feared. He had ruled with an iron grip, deriving little pleasure in it, wary of complots, rebellions and of the return of his kidnapped sister, no doubt turned against him by Adhara and all of this for what?
Just to spite his mother?
He had only managed to demonstrate what she had foretold: that a male sorcerer would inevitably turn to evil.
Phobos suspected that the consequences of his decisions would influence Meridian for years to come and not positively.
And then there was the issue of Elyon.
That night, when she proposed that he trained with the guards, he had thought that she was going to kiss him, after he had blurted out his feelings for her. For a split second, it had looked like their lips were going to meet and he hadn't pulled away, he hadn't turned his face. He had yielded, unresisting, to her.
He had wanted her to kiss him, wanted it so fiercely that his whole body had felt on fire and had felt horribly disappointed when it turned out that her was only a sisterly kiss on the cheek.
He wanted to kiss his innocent little sister and he was such a perverted coward that he couldn't even do it and get on with it, but had to think that she was initiating it, that it was her bad, her fault her perversion.
He knew it was wrong, so very wrong that words almost couldn't describe it, but he couldn't help but keep on thinking of that near miss and, when he was about to sleep, sometimes his mind ran on unsanctioned paths, imagining what would have happened if it had not been a near miss.
Alone in his bed, he fantasized of the taste of her lips, of the heat of her body against his, of her hands holding him close and of darker, dirtier things, things that left him yearning and made him feel so low that worms wouldn't want to acknowledge him.
She must have noticed that something was amiss, that much filth can't leave no marks on a person, because she had drastically reduced the casual touching he had learned to appreciate and any form of physical nearness with him.
If he couldn't rein himself in, it would not be long before she banished him completely from her presence and this was something he couldn't abide.
He needed her, needed her love and care to survive.
He, that had made an art of living isolated, of being distant, needed her so badly that he thought he couldn't live without her comforting presence. Wasn't it exquisitely ironic?
Truly, the masters of Kandrakar had meted out to him the perfect punishment.
Surely Mother would be looking down on him with her usual disgust and a smug smile, now.


I hope the formatting is better, this time...

Next chapter, next weekend, will contain, violence, death and attempted suicide and the rating will definitely go up to M.