Escaflowne still isn't mine. My henchmen are working on that. I know this is moving fast, but you'll notice that the only reason Van does any of the things he does is because Selena reminds him of Hitomi, and the only reason Selena goes along with him is because he reminds her of Folken.
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"Don't tell Allen about this. He wouldn't understand."
The Schezars seemed doomed to a life of repeating cycles by virtue of blood. It began long ago in the line and continued to this day. It was something that could not be explained or combated, a circle of life and death that inevitably wove in everyone close to the unlucky inheritor of the noble lineage and destroyed them, individually. Leon would leave and return, explore and play father, alternately endear and alienate himself to his son. His death and the dissolution of a tenuously connected family was the result.
Allen, though he would never admit to any relation or passing similarity to the father he hated, was the same. All three of the heirs to the Aston throne fell in love with him, and he was their specific downfall, one by one. Every woman he ever loved was fated to die, to love another man, or both. (Princess Elise was the exception: she languished in lieu of either less painful destiny.) His relation to women began with his mother and extended long into his adult life.
Selena, it seemed, had been in kind influenced by the curse afflicting the men of her family, the result of either Allen's interference or the madmen of Zaibach tampering with her natural fate. Selena, it could only be assumed, would follow the same path as her brother, shadowing him unwittingly even through the veil of their separation.
And so the men she loved were doomed to die in maddening passion for her, over her, for the sake or fault of her. Jajuka, Chesta, Gatti, Miguel. The rest of the fifteen with them, all gone, all dead to keep her wretched existence moving. All that life was wasted on her to beget more pain from other men.
She was like him in another way. He worked his way through the Aston clan, and she worked hers through the Fanels, burrowing deep into their minds like a parasite and siphoning of f their every thought and action as a side-effect of her existence.
Selena hardly noticed, didn't know she did it, but there she was and she was beautiful in her dangerous splendor. She seemed deceptively peaceful in white, wafting on the wind, like something that could be caught and tamed. She seemed harmless when she slept, but this was illusion.
Her sleep was restless, all tossing and turning, always on the brink of alertness to put her partner on edge the whole night through. One careless move and he would wake her. One shift of thigh or arm to more comfortable a position, and she might stir. It was impossible to rest with her nearby for fear.
And so Van Fanel sat up, all night long, watching her grapple with the blankets for supremacy. Her eyes fluttered open when he reached to brush some golden strands of hair from her warm cheek, and, vacantly taking in her surrounds until circumstances were deemed fit, those oceans contained in her gaze receded from his reach.
He kissed her pliant, sleepy mouth, eliciting a half-awake sigh.
With her, the wound of Hitomi closed and faded to a distant, itching scar. Selena was the tide, surrounding and beaching him, submerging and teasing in every movement of her delicate hands and the precision of her deadly grasp. Her substance altered in front of his eyes to suit the situation, cordial and cool with the presence of her brother, and in exact opposition when alone in his arms. She was passionate and demanding and concrete, a seductress, a devil in disguise, a succubus with exactly her own desires and needs in mind and nothing to inhibit her from realizing them.
Selena was the moon, waxing and waning in predictable, eternal, diametric cycle. She was a world unto herself that opened, he knew, only to him for the sake of their linked past and future. With pale hands and face, with pits and crevices, and unexplored regions both physical and of the mind, this lunar girl was adequate competition for the Earth that lurked in the night sky.
"You remind me of your brother," she said.
"Let's go inside," he said, hand on her shoulder, urging her to leave behind whatever thing she remembered of the past to return to now, with him.
She consented.
In the darkened corridor, only the light of a dusk heaven illuminating them, she glowed. There was but a moment to reflect on how beautiful she looked before he was against the sill of a window, hands on either side of the gap to keep from loosing himself completely, their mouths locked before that crevasse. She kissed the way he wished he and Hitomi had, with complete abandon and without shame or modesty.
When she deigned to take a breath, he fell against the sturdy safety of the wall, holding her close, burying his eyes and all senses in her neck, her sweat, her hair. "I love you," he whispered, before she kissed him again.