Comedia: Empty Shell

By Althea SaDiablo

Disclaimer: Nope, I still don't own Slayers. Sorry.

Influences: somewhat by Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey. From my favorite trilogy by her, the Books of the Last Herald-Mage. But how did humor manage to creep it's way in here? I'm not quite sure, but that type of thing's kind of from the books of David Eddings, which at one point I read closely and religiously. They remain fantastic books.

Filia came back to herself when she realized that the scream echoing off the stone walls was hers. It continued in horrible loneliness well after the noise had died in her throat, then finally faded in the corners of the high ceiling. She noted, distractedly, that she was shaking, as she struggled to grasp the sheer horror of the destruction she had just been vehicle and witness to. She felt very, very weak.

The rustle of cloth and the soft sound of slippered feet on stone floor grounded her once again. She looked up to see the dragons filing from the room in a procession of white-and-gold robes. Not one of them looked at her. Filia swallowed hard and summoned up enough strength to manage a slow walk towards where Xellos had been a short eternity before. The fact that he was still there took a moment to register on her abused senses.

He lay on the cold rock in the spot where he had stood, stripped of staff and clothing. His body was folded in on itself in a fetal curl, and his normally orderly hair lay ragged and disheveled on the smooth floor. There was something terribly defenseless in the curve of his spine, in the leanness of a pale, whipcord frame mercilessly bared to the harshness of stone.

She thought he was dead until she picked out the slightest of movements, the shallowest rise and fall of the skin over his ribs.

"He's finished."

The words, unnaturally loud in the stillness of the cavern, made Filia jump. She could feel her own heartbeat in her ears as the Elder walked past her and contemptuously prodded Xellos' still form with his staff.

"What?" her own voice grated past the raw thickness of her throat, and sounded strange to her own ears.

"Finished. Destroyed." The Elder didn't look at her, either. "His mind no longer exists, his being is shattered. His power is demolished. The only thing left of him is this, the physical shell he once created." Filia could see the Elder's face twist into a grim smile of triumph. "The destroyer has been destroyed. Justice is served."

She didn't even have the energy to gape at him. "You . . . you used me . . ."

"To put an end to one of the worst threats the race of the gods have ever faced, yes."

"How . . . how could you . . ." the words sounded dead to her own ears, leeched of energy.

"Simple." The Elder turned away from the unconscious body. "You abandoned your god and your race, Filia Ul Copt. We have no more responsibility to you."

She was too tired and numb to feel the hurt of his words, too raw from the power they had forced through her mind to come to her own defense. "What will you do with him now?"

"Nothing."

That surprised her. "Nothing?"

"His mind, his power, his very being are no more. There's no need to dirty our hands with his blood, as well. He will probably never regain consciousness. He'll die here, where he's fallen."

"You're so cold . . ." she whispered.

"Who is the cold one? Who walked away from her own people? Consider your own actions before you dare to judge ours." He walked past her, then paused. "Leave him, Filia. He doesn't deserve your pity, and he's already dead."

She stood there for a long moment after the Elder left, then moved to crouch beside the fallen priest. She put a hesitant hand on his shoulder and quickly jerked away- his skin was ice cold.

She stayed, hunched over by the demon's body, and thought about the Elder's words.

"Never," she whispered, past the hoarseness of her throat, and teleported herself and the unconscious demon home.

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"Mama?" Val's voice snapped her back to herself when she would have gladly collapsed to the wooden floor of her room. "Mama, what's wrong? Where did you go? What happened?"

He nearly knocked her over when he threw his arms around her, and she gathered him in close, taking comfort in the small, warm body. "Oh, Val, I'm so glad to see you . . ."

"Mama, where did you go? What happened . . ." he looked up at her with wide, earnest yellow eyes. "What happened to Xellos?"

"Xellos is . . . sick," she said. How could she explain? "Listen, Val, I need you to help me, okay? I need you to get me those extra blankets from upstairs."

"'course!" the young dragon gave her a worried look and ran out of the room. Eager to please, as always. Filia sighed and turned back to the unconscious demon, still tightly curled in on himself. She ignored her embarrassment as she tried to get him to straighten out, but he didn't seem inclined to cooperate. His skin had a bluish cast to it, and shivers racked his long limbs, even coiled up tightly as he was. She realized, now that she could get a better look at him, that he was cradling something to his chest, as if trying to protect it. But even tired, she was still strong, and much more determined than the unconscious mazoku.

When she finally pried the thing out of his hands he went abruptly limp, his muscles letting go of their tension all at once. She recognized it by its size and dull red gleam as the ball from his staff, but it was blackened, and a wide crack split it down the center, with hairline fractures spread from it over the rest of the surface. There was no trace of the wood that it had been set in, nothing to explain why it remained when the rest of Xellos' possessions had been destroyed . . . along with his mind.

She put it aside when Val returned, and together they managed to get Xellos tucked into Filia's own bed. Filia sighed as she tiredly sent her son to his own room, ignoring his insistent questions. She had no good answers for him, or for herself. She would deal with what to do next . . . later. Tomorrow. Now she was exhausted, and every time she looked at the too-still body tucked into her bed, she shuddered away.

She herself fell asleep in a chair, without even taking off her boots.

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Morning light pried relentlessly through her closed eyelids, bringing her away from troubled, restless dreams that even exhaustion hadn't been enough to prevent. She felt awful, stiff and sore, and her tongue felt like sandpaper against the dry roof of her mouth. Her mind was still cloudy from the reluctant retreat of sleep. Stiffly, she lifted her head and rubbed the sand from her eyes.

Xellos was there, so still that she almost didn't think he was breathing. His skin had lost the blue tint of cold, buried as he was beneath heavy winter blankets, but he was still overly pale. His face looked drawn and quiet, and deep shadows had imprinted themselves beneath his eyes.

Filia used the hard chair she'd spent the night in to pull herself to her feet, staggering a little as pins and needles shot up her legs. She closed her eyes and waited for her body to adjust to the shift in altitude. She felt dirty and grimy, and she wanted nothing more than a hot bath, but she knew she had to do something about Xellos. She steeled herself and brushed aside his bangs to lay a hand against his forehead. No fever, the first mercy in what had to be in the running for the most horrible 24-hours of her life. He was so quiet . . . she shivered as she remembered the single-minded destruction of his being, and banished the memories as best she could. First things first. If all that was left of him was a physical shell, then he would need food, and water.

She paused in the doorway of Val's room to check on him. He was sprawled across his bed with the loose-limbed abandon unique to children, his bright hair spread over the pillow in a rough halo. His dreams, at least, were untroubled, and his sleep easy. She took what comfort in it she could, and stumbled downstairs.

First things first. There was no way she could open the shop today- she felt like death lightly warmed over herself, and had an unconscious man who only barely qualified as alive to care for. She left a brief note of apology on the door and then stood dumbly in the door of her small kitchen, unable for a moment to think of what to do.

Liquids. Soup, it would have to be.

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She set the steaming bowl on her bedside table and wondered how she was going to do this. His eyes were still closed, and the rise and fall of his chest, if shallow, was steady. His hair, normally perfectly neat, was tangled against the pillow. She took him by the shoulders and lifted him, propping him up at an angle and supporting him with another cushion. He didn't respond, even when she tilted his head back and pried his mouth open enough to spoon the soup into him.

The dragon frowned. He wasn't swallowing. She managed to catch the thin line of soup dripping out of one corner of his mouth with a handkerchief, then tilted his head farther back and tried again. This time she made sure the thin liquid was all the way in the back of his mouth, then rubbed his throat to start the reflex motion of swallowing. Once the first spoonful was down, he began to do so on his own.

Finally, she put the empty soup bowl aside to stare at the unconscious demon who lay so still, his face as pale as the linen pillow. She steeled herself and, whispering a brief word to focus her abilities, reached inside his slumbering mind-

-and pulled her consciousness out again, shaking. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. In fact, she would have thought he wasn't there at all, if it weren't for the proof of his overly vulnerable body lying unconscious before her. No astral body met her probing, no massive, shifting darkness seething just below the fabric of the visible world.

Val wandered in, then, all wide, sleepy golden eyes and mussed hair. "Mama?"

She managed a smile for him, her true pride. "Morning, dear . . ."

He climbed up on her lap and peered at Xellos' quiet, composed features. "Why hasn't he woken up yet?" he asked, with all the simplicity of the young.

"I don't know," Filia said, putting an arm over the energetic young dragon to keep him from climbing onto the bed in his eagerness to examine its occupant. "But we're going to be taking care of him for a while, all right?"

"Okay!" Val was not about to object to such an interesting proposal, but his attention rapidly shifted. "What's for breakfast?"

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Xellos didn't move until the next day.

Val had fallen asleep with the suddenness reserved for animals and children, curled up at the foot of the bed. Filia herself was seated in the chair she'd pulled up to the bedside, staring blankly into nothing. Her body ached- she'd spent the previous night in the very same chair, and pillows had done nothing to make it more comfortable. And she'd kept waking up from strange dreams, over and over- and he was in all of them, a thousand flashes and visions, the chaos of his mind, his memories, and the terrible, burning fire that flashed through the deep, dark center of it.

His breathing caught, for a moment, and since it was the only sound in the room it snapped Filia out of her tired trance, and brought her eyes swiftly to his face. And then his eyes opened, slowly, and her fingers closed hard on the material of her skirt.

His eyes were open, but entirely empty of what they had once held- the malicious light that could so easily fade to amusement, and to unreadable secret. It was gone, and left only a wide amethyst gaze, no longer mazoku, but also lacking in anything she could identify as human. She didn't even see him blink- it was as if he'd forgotten how.

After a moment she reached out and turned his face towards her. His eyes closed then, and opened, and slowly focused on her face.

"Xellos?" she spoke his name as a question, her voice hushed.

And then she was certain that he was gone, truly gone, and this fragile shell of a body was all that was left. Of course she had known that, had told herself that, she had felt it as the dragons had destroyed him, looked where his mind and being should have been with her magic. Felt the jagged edge of the mental bridge that had once spanned their minds, and now led to nothing. But she had never quite believed it.

That left her with a question, though, one she had been avoiding, as she had avoided facing the emptiness behind those purple eyes.

What now?

He was still looking at her, and she could see herself in the clear purple of them. "You're gone. You're really gone . . ." she whispered. She could feel wetness pricking in her own eyes, and willed it away.

Enough. She had to deal with things as they were now, or else she could not force herself to continue. "Xellos, it's me, it's Filia. You're at my home, above my shop . . ."

There was no response to her words, but she kept talking, to fill the silence of the room if nothing else. She reached out and gently lifted one of his hands, opening and closing it, opening and closing, until he did it himself. He turned his head now to look, watched his own fingers move as if he was not quite aware that they were his.

Her voice caught for a moment, but she continued with the other hand, then curved his once-clever fingers around the bowl and spoon she had brought. It took him a few tries, but finally he was spooning soup into his own mouth, and swallowing it, and she could sit back and watch him , and let her tired words trail away into nothing.

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She returned from the village the next day with a bundle of clothing for her new houseguest. Val had taken to the game she'd made of taking care of Xellos with great enthusiasm, and had managed to get the former demon not only to drink on his own but to eat something a bit more substantial than soup. She was willing to guess that the boy had shared some of his secret stash of sweets. Undoubtedly Val was a bit of a bad influence-

She stopped there, as she realized what she had to do, what duty she had appointed for herself and for her son. They would need to rebuild Xellos' shattered mind from the very bottom, replace all the instincts and connections that were so fundamental to living things . . . The sheer magnitude of the task staggered her.

Despair dragged at the edges of her thoughts, but she stifled it and entered her home with new resolve. She had to do it, had to keep him alive and make him whole, because the broken creature she had brought out of that cave had been broken through her . . .

She had Val help her to guide his arms into the sleeves of the simple, oversized linen shirt she'd found, and pulled it over his dark, tangled hair, then faced the greater challenge of trying to get him to stand up. Val found her efforts hilariously funny, and wasn't much help as he kept collapsing into giggling heaps on the floor- generally in inconvenient locations. Xellos himself apparently had no idea of what she was trying to do, and finally ended up on the floor himself as a result of an unwise yank, which managed to overbalance her, as well.

All three of them ended up in a pile, then, and looking from the blank, puzzled look on Xellos' face to her son, convulsing with laughter, she couldn't help but join him. Because it was all just too staggeringly unreal, somehow, and yet it had happened just the same. And then, of course, Val required tickling, until he managed to squirm away from her. He retreated to the underside of the bed to glare at her comically with accusing hawk-yellow eyes as she recovered her composure enough to straighten up Xellos' tangle of leg and get him sitting on the edge of the bed again.

This time, with Val helpfully holding onto both Xellos' ankles, she managed to get him standing straight, swaying slightly on his bare feet and watching her out of his strange and empty purple eyes. He looked somewhat more than mildly ridiculous with his hair in dissaray and long limbs sticking out of the oversized shirt she'd found for him, and she had to stifle her laughter all over again.

Then, of course, like the mischievous dragon he was, Val shifted his grip and pulled with all the strength of a troublesome and determined four-year old, and sent Xellos from his rather precarious standing position into Filia, and both of them tumbling to the floor again.

It took her most of the rest of the day to teach Xellos how to walk.

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One thing that she could say about the whole mess, though, was that Xellos was a fast learner. She only had to show him how to do things once, and then he would never forget. They'd managed to get through solid food, and drinking, and walking, and stairs- which had been rather painful, not to mention physically, mentally, and magically exhausting. She'd never cast so many healing spells in a single day, that she could remember, not even way back in the past when she'd traveled with a certain chaos-spreading sorceress and her motley band of companions.

She was infinitely glad for Val's help, and made sure he had plenty of incentives to continue this particular little game. It kept him very busy, and somewhat out of trouble- and it also saved Filia from having to teach Xellos a lot of things she really didn't want to teach him. Like how one used a bathroom, for instance. And how one got into the bath. And how to put on certain clothing items that people wore that weren't oversized linen shirts. Val, a complete and total four-year-old, found all of this really funny, and of course used the situation to his advantage to gain things like extra cookies and longer stories and chances to play in the mud.

It took them a long and exhausting week, but finally Xellos was functioning. In fact, he was sitting at the table and eating, with a knife and a fork and passable table manners- somewhere between Filia's, which were practically impeccable, and Val's, which were certainly not. And she could smile as she looked back over the past week, in triumph over the progress she'd made-

And that stopped her. This was improvement, that he could walk and keep himself clean and eat. That he could perform basic human functions- and she was happy about it?

She went back to her memories- of a cultured and constantly amused monster who sat calmly across from her and smiled as if he knew everything that was going on . . . as if he knew it, and understood it, and was waiting patiently for her to catch up with him and figure it out. Of a man who was always in control, always knowing and rarely surprised, and always watching her, following her with strange, mysterious and deep slanted eyes-

She jumped as what appeared to be a clump of potatoes went flying past her nose, and glanced startled across the table. Sure enough, Val was teaching Xellos how to use his spoon as a catapult.