One evening, Right returns to his room looking exceptionally pleased with himself. He draws Zett out of the closet to sit cross legged on the floor in the middle of the room. It's dark out, and Zett asks Right why he hasn't bothered to turn on any of the lights in the room. Zett can see perfectly but Right tends to stub his toe on things, and his vocabulary of curse words is deeply lacking which makes listening to him swear predictable and boring. Right smiles conspiratorially and pulls out the flashlight he's been keeping in one hand concealed behind his back.
The flashlight is heavy and ancient seeming to the young boy. The case scratched and dinged and the paint is chipping away in places. Normally it's kept under the kitchen sink, for when the pipes there leak and Right's grandpa has to tighten them pipes are fine right now though and Right doesn't think anyone will miss it, so he borrows it without worry, even knowing that it isn't likely to be returned any time soon.
Clicking on the flashlight, Right sweeps the beam over the room dramatically before letting it shine on one wall. He shows Zett how to make shadow puppets play over the surface of the wall, sometimes holding the light between his ankles so that he can use both hands.
Zett is instantly fascinated, and watches the ducks that right make quack silently on the wall with rapt attention.
The whole concept is new to him. No one on the shadow line has ever suggested such a thing it seems. There is a Puppet Shadow amongst the Shadow Line ranks, certainly, but he deals with marionettes. The idea of using natural shadows to create something so simple, so innocent - such a thing has never occurred to the shadows.
The duck changes suddenly into a dog, and then a snake and Zett cannot help but give a little gasp of excitement.
"There's more?" he asks, his voice breathless and tinged with something approaching awe.
"Sure!"
Right is glad that Zett likes the shadow puppets. He hadn't anticipated that Zett would be so enchanted by them. Usually it takes a little more time to get Zett into things like this but Zett is clearly enthralled by the play of light and shadow. Right feels a little swell of pride at having been the one to show it to him.
Right sets the flashlight on the floor and holds out his hands expectantly. Zett stares at them quizzically, unsure of what Right wants.
"Your hands," Right helpfully elaborates when it becomes clear that Zett isn't going to figure it out on his own anytime soon. It's not that Zett's slow or anything, Right Knows. Zett is probably at least as observant as Hikari, and infinitely more cunning. It's just that he doesn't always understand what it is that he sees. Living in the deep darkness has left him clueless about the simplest, everyday things. He simply doesn't recognize things because he's never encountered them before. It might be because of Zett's status as emperor, but things like casual physical contact make up a portion of this foreign territory. It seems to Right as though Zett had never been touched by anyone who didn't have ulterior motives.
A big part of it must be in trust, Right supposes. Touching makes you vulnerable, and vulnerable must be a very dangerous thing to be when you're an emperor. Right wouldn't be altogether surprised if assassination attempts were fairly common on the Shadow Line. Hell, Schwartz, Noire, and even Gritta have tried to Kill Zett - And those are just the ones Right knows about. Worse, if he's being honest with himself, the Rainbow Line hasn't been any better. The ToQgers spent almost a year trying to destroy him at every opportunity, and they very nearly succeeded in the end.
Right still has to be careful when he wakes Zett up from a deep sleep, having learned the hard way to exercise a little extra caution in waking the Emperor of Darkness. Waking suddenly to the sensation of someone's hand on his shoulder, Zett's first instinct was to lash out. Luckily, the first morning after he arrived he'd been too weak to lash out with darkness. Startled awake and cornered in the back of Right's closet, his reaction was one of self defense. Barely coherent, Zett's reaction had been to grab Right's arm and wrench with all his strength. He finds himself upside down, against the closest wall, looking up into wild eyes. If he'd been at full strength, Right doesn't doubt that he'd have gone through a wall. As it is, Zett nearly breaks Right's arm.
Zett holds out his hands and Right takes them in his own. He folds Zett's fingers into a fist and straightens his pinky and index fingers. Finally he adjusts the position of his thumbs.
"There," he exclaims, "Try it!" Right snatches up the flashlight and holds it between them, pointing at the wall. Zett cautiously moves his hands into the beam of the flashlight. Experimentally, he begins to imitate the motions he saw Right make, figuring out how to make the shadow image open its mouth and turn its head from side to side. Right nods approvingly as Zett's snake slithers along the bottom of the wall and makes and adds his own. Soon the two snakes are racing all over the wall together, occasionally pausing to let out exaggerated hisses. Eventually on a whim, Right changes his snake to a bunny rabbit and makes it hop over to Zett's snake. This may have been a miscalculation, as the snake abruptly rears and strikes, swallowing the rabbit. Right is so startled he nearly lets out a yelp, but manages to swallow it, mindful of attracting his mother when he's supposed to be in bed sleeping.
"That was mean," Right whispers, just a little petulantly. Zett hums in response, but distractedly, which means he didn't really listen to what Right says. Right is about to repeat himself, and maybe elbow Zett if he keeps ignoring him because he doesn't appreciate it. He opens his mouth to say so, but then he sees the look on Zett's face and thinks better of it.
Zett's gaze is intently tracking the play of shadows over the wall and he is smiling - and more genuinely than Right has seen since the day they first met. It's so unlike the cocky smirks and the shark-like grins he wears in battle, and dazzling compared to the fleeting, hesitant smiles of surprised happiness that Right has sometimes caught sight of since the Shadow Line fell. This smile so open and unguarded that the sight of it makes Right's breath catch.
But it is what he sees when he follows Zett's intent gaze back to the wall that makes him forget to breathe for a moment.
He had missed it at first, in his surprise, but suddenly Right realizes that things are not as they seem. Right's arm still hangs in front of the flashlight, but there is no bunny shadow on the wall. Zett's snake shadow is still slithering around, but somehow it looks very full, the lump from its meal clearly visible.
"Zett…. Where is my... bunny?" Right asks haltingly, struggling to process the discrepancy between what his brain is expecting and what his eyes are seeing.
"My snake ate it." The response comes flatly, as though its obvious - and it is, in a way. The "duh" at the end is unspoken, but clearly implied.
And then Zett performs a complicated roll of his wrist and the shadows shift. Right cannot say exactly what has changed about them, but now they are alive. The snake shadow doesn't look altogether different than it did before, but its movements become impossibly fluid. Zett's elbow and wrist should cause discernible kinks in the shape of its body but there's no sign of the joints in the long, rippling form. The snake still moves precisely along with Zett's arm, but he is no longer casting it, he's conducting it.
"How are you doing that?" Right asks and it's his turn to be ecstatic.
"Ordering shadows about is my birthright," Zett answers, and his voice resonates strangely with equal parts of both pride and self-effacing humor.
Right watches, transfixed as Zett moves his second arm into the light and gives birth to a second shadow. It becomes first a beetle, then a cricket, and finally a dragonfly that buzzes and zips across the wall, strangely absent of the trailing shadow of an arm. The snake draws itself up and becomes a brontosaurus briefly. The dinosaur stomps across the lower margins of the light before bending elegantly into a crane with long, brittle looking legs. A moment later he dragonfly zips over and merges with the crane's silhouette to become its unfurling wings.
"Zett… They're beautiful," says Right, and he means it probably as much as anything he's ever said in his young life. Zett remains silent, intent on puppeting the shadows, but his smile broadens almost imperceptibly as he flutters his interlocked hands to make the crane take flight.
As the Emperor of Darkness Zett was only ever had one real purpose: To consume. But the two boys sit in the semi-darkness, captivated by what could only be described as an act of creation. The importance of the moment is not lost on either of them.