Surprise surprise! Myuuzu was in a cooperative mood today. So an extra quick update. Don't expect them to come too fast after this; I'm obligated to finish Fujiwara over in the Hikago fandom before I write ANYTHING else (I wasn't supposed to start yet ANOTHER fic!) although given Myuuzu's apparent case of ADD, I am unable to hold myself to any of my own rules.
Review thanks go to MKawaii, lavender, and Ludacris. Yes, indeed, this is my first Slayer's romance! (First Slayer's fic, actually.) Thanks especially go to lavender for explaining other meanings of the yin-yang (they were incorporated into this chapter!)
Disclaimer: They're not mine.
* * *
Yin and Yang, part 2
* * *
"In the beginning, there was Chaos.
"Everything was good for the first several billion years. The Chaos allowed itself to collapse into stars and planets, separating the night and day, and then allowed the planets to grow and change in their different ways.
"But the Chaos was bored, and perhaps a little lonely, and so She decided allow Life to happen. Life seemed to be a great idea. It provided Her with constant entertainment, and allowed for endless experimentation. But it did not ease the loneliness She felt.
"And so, on several of the worlds She had created, she made sentient creatures. These creatures had the ability to choose and make decisions based on their own will. Chaos was very proud of the idea. She created many variations of this idea, and it proved to be extraordinarily fun. Some of the smarter beings even realized who She was, and they talked and prayed to Her directly.
"Prompted by that development, She set out to create a world with powers nearly as great as She. From Chaos there were borne Four Gods and Four Devils. Each was granted dominion over a dimension on the world. The Gods were given only one mission -- protect the world, and the Devils the simple instruction -- destroy everything.
"Each God and each Devil made their own race of sentient beings, and so the eternal war between the Mazoku and the Ryuuzoku began. Eventually there may be a victor, but the entire war is in vain, for all shall one day sink again into the Sea of Chaos which created them."
* * *
Zelas fingered the extremely rare copy of the first book of the Claire Bible, unable to read it any further again. It bothered her to know that they were only pawns in L-Sama's little game of chess, but the Claire Bible's knowledge still seemed incomplete. Most of the knowledge pertained simply to what the Water Dragon King had thought of the whole situation; that is to say, he had no choice but to accept it as deemed by their God.
Hmph, Zelas snorted. Just as I have no choice to accept it. Shabranigdo had created them from himself, granting them free will so long as their ultimate goal was the destuction of everything. In turn they had created their generals, and their armies of Mazoku, all who sought the total destruction of this world. It wasn't easy. The Ryuuzoku foiled most of their plans, and the stubborn persistance of the world's humans did the rest. It was an eternal struggle, indeed.
But someday they would win. The Mazoku WOULD destroy everything. Eventually. Maybe after another couple of hundred thousand years. After the world had gotten a little more boring. Things were just too interesting at the moment . . .
Zelas took a drag on her cigarrette and sipped a bit of the wine she'd chosen for the day. Her human form was but an illusion, yet it was an illusion complete with all the senses of a normal human being and then some. Part of being evil was indulging in sensory experiences; it was the Ryuuzoku who were supposed to think only morally pure and higher thoughts.
The wine and cigarrettes in particular appealed to her, since they were destructive to a human's body and yet the humans consumed and smoked them anyway. Considering how much wine she drank and how many cigarrettes she went through in a day, a human Zelas would have rotted away from the inside by now.
She sighed and crossed her legs on her comfortable chair, and mentally whisked the Claire Bible manuscript back to its proper place, well hidden away from Xelloss. She twirled one strand of her short blond hair absently. Destroying the knowledge of Zannafir was only one part of his task. The information contained within the Claire Bible regarding their purpose on this world was more than Xelloss needed to know. Considering his overly inquisitive and secretive personality, however, Zelas was pretty sure he already knew and had never bothered to let her know about the fact.
If he did indeed know how futile the struggle was, then it might make her current plan a little easier.
She dropped one elegant hand beside her chair, stroking the wolf that slept at her feet, and called for her servant.
"Xelloss, come here," she said aloud, reinforcing the command with her mind. Within the space of a few moments he appeared, smiling as always, ready to do her bidding.
"Yes, Juuoh-sama?" he asked innocently.
"Have you requested the vase from the dragon girl yet?"
Xelloss nodded. "She said it would be ready in a week."
"What design will be on it?"
"An ancient symbol called a yin-yang, Juuoh-sama."
Zelas nearly dropped her cigarette holder. How entirely appropriate! She quickly regained her composure, and drawled, "Oh, REALLY. And you do know what that symbol means, right?"
"It represents the ancient struggle between Mazoku and Ryuuzoku." Xelloss looked rather smug at his own knowledge.
Zelas nodded, giving him a metaphorical pat on the head. "But there is also an older, more ancient meaning, however. The eternal struggle between light and dark is only part of the war; the yin-yang is also meant to remind us that something at its greatest intensity can easily turn to its opposite. The dark can be so dark it is a light in itself. The light can be so bright that it blinds, leading to eternal darkness."
Xelloss stood like an attentive schoolboy. Zelas sighed. Just because she had made him didn't mean she knew what was going on in his mind. She was powerful, but not omnipotent. She'd have to spell it out for him.
"And a hatred can be so intense that it is a sort of love."
"Love, Juuoh-sama?" Xelloss winced at the very word.
Good! Finally, that got a reaction. "Oh yes. Love and hate are two sides to the same coin. No; perhaps they are even on the same side of the coin, like the yin-yang shows, since the truest opposite of both hate and love is the absence of an emotion. If everyone was calm and serene and peaceful all the time, we'd starve. Apathy for life is as bad for us as a zest for it."
Her priest was looking decidedly nauseated by the whole conversation. Zelas smiled a wicked little grin to herself as she felt the revulsion at the very idea radiating from him.
"Is that all you wanted to tell me, Juuoh-sama?" he asked, looking quite eager to get away lest she continue the line of conversation and weaken him even more.
"Nope. Go off, go torment the dragan a bit or something. You're looking absolutely peaked."
He gave her a final look, as if to say, now whose fault is that? and then disappeared with a snap of his fingers.
When he was gone, Zelas stood up restlessly and walked across her chamber, to where a very small collection of human artifacts had grown. There was a nice oil painting of a wolf on black velvet, several pretty teacups, and a small carving of a wolf done in wood. She touched the carving thoughtfully, and wondered where she should put her vase when she acquired it.
They say that the Mazoku looked upon the humans as humans looked upon the ants. Yet many a human child has, at some point, kept an ant farm. Their lives were short enough to be meaningless compared to those of the Mazoku, and yet the Mazoku wore their bodies as illusions, enjoyed the same carnal pleasures as they did (more or less), and relied on them for nourishment.
Yet Zelas would never had permitted it had it happened with a human. But a dragon . . . now that was a different story. Keep you friends close; keep your enemies closer, that sort of thing. And truthfully, the curious part of her wanted to let it all progress on its own, just to see how things would turn out. It was certainly going to be entertaining.
"I can see why L-sama keeps us around, after all," Zelas said with a grin to herself. "And I'm really not so different."
* * *
Xelloss had to play with four different people before he felt like himself again. Fortunately, those four people tended to travel together all the time as it was, and so it was easy to prank around with them. One false treasure map with a certain chimerical cure spell marked as part of the treasure, and the result was instant confusion, aggravation, anger, hostility, and panic. Ah, no one cooked up an emotional meal quite as tasty as Lina Inverse and her gang, which was why he hung around with them so much.
Once he was feeling better, he dropped onto a riverbank and played a game of Sink (throw mud on something until it sinks, quite a popular Mazoku game) while he pondered his master's words. A hatred so powerful it turned into love? He imagined the two snaking halves of the yin-yang, and shuddered. The very idea revolted him and went against his sense of being. Hatred was hatred. Love was love. In the yin-yang they were separate . . .
Yet each one contained a small part of the other.
Xelloss was not smiling then.
"What is Juuoh-sama up to, anyway?"
To cheer himself up, Xelloss decided to visit Filia for dessert.
* * *
With trembling hands, Filia removed the earthenware vase from the kiln where she had fired it, and checked it to make sure that the molding had come out all right. It made soft pinging sounds as it cooled in the outside air. Ahh, yes, all was well. The bud vase would actually be about a third smaller than this model, because porcelain shrank as it was fired, but it would be transulscent and watertight, unlike the opaque and porous earthenware model.
She carefully set the hot plate containing the vase onto a stone table, and removed the oven mitts from her hands.
Jillas came out of the store then, running frantically across the small side yard towards her. "Filia-onee-sama!" he cried. "The Mazoku is here again!"
"Great. Just what I needed." Filia checked the vase to make sure it was secure on the stone table, and started stomping towards the house. "Jillas-san, thanks for telling me. Can you heat up the kiln? We'll be firing the porcelain in two days."
Jillas stood there panting for a moment. "No problem, onee-sama," he said, his hands on his knees. He did not like the Mazoku very much, and especially despised the fact that the Mazoku alternately infuriated and saddened his mistress.
He watched her go inside, and sent a little prayer to whatever gods may be for her wellbeing.
* * *
Xelloss grinned when he saw her enter.
He'd already helped himself to tea (she had made a very strong concoction today, for some reason) and was sitting on her kitchen counter, sipping it delicately, savoring the taste of the warm liquid across his projected body. Far more nourishing to him was the waves of annoyance she radiated upon seem in her kitchen.
"Get off the counter. Trash doesn't belong there," she snarled, and primly started gathering the tea things in her hands from the table where she'd set them earlier. "If you're going to stay for tea like you wanted, let's at least go in the sitting room like civilized people."
Ah, a lovely taste, like ambrosia. Nothing else satisfied him quite like Filia's emotions.
In a flash, Xelloss was in the sitting on her plump, overstuffed couch, demurely sipping his tea and delighting in the annoyed expression on her face as she slammed the tea set down on her coffee table.
"You should be more polite around guests," he scolded, smiling as he basked in her glow.
"I AM polite toward invited guests," she complained, and sat on the other end of the couch, far away from him. She sipped her own tea, frowning as she tasted how strong it was.
"But I am invited, aren't I Filia-chan? Tell me you honestly don't want my company, and I'll leave."
One of the main reasons that he loved to pick on her, specifically, was that she always started lying around this point. He couldn't exactly tell when a human was speaking truth, but he could sense their emotions, and Filia always panicked a little when she lied.
"I don't want you here, kitchen trash," she said, staring at her teacup, unable to face him.
"I said honestly, Filia-chan. If you can't be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with me?"
She glared at him then, her blue eyes blinking with unshed tears. "There's no reason I should be honest with you."
"Lying doesn't become a pure, moral, ethical little dragon," he pointed out. "Then again, that hasn't stopped your kind in the past. Right until the end the fire dragon's leader tried to lie to you, all in the name of protecting the peace of the world."
She fumed in silence, and Xelloss realized he'd crossed some sort of line as tears of anger spilled down on her cheeks. He glanced over at the small egg containing the baby Valteria, which still had years of incubation under its adopted mother's loving care before it hatched.
"We stooped to any measures to achieve our objectives," Filia whispered, more to herself than to Xelloss. "We even turned our love for the world into a hatred of anything we feared."
Love can turn into hatred . . . and hatred into love.
The emotions she gave off then weren't quite what Xelloss had been expecting. She smiled suddenly, and Xelloss let go of the emotional link before the impact of her change in mood affected him too much.
"That's right, Xelloss. I can't be like my ancestors. I have to LOVE, not HATE!"
Xelloss winced. His lovely dessert was apparently going to taste bad on the way up.
Filia set her teacup down.
"I'll start with you then, Mazoku kitchen trash." She took a deep breath. "I don't hate you."
Xelloss flinched as if she had physically struck him.
"Aw, c'mon Filia-chan, you know you hate me still. You're lying to yourself again."
She shook her head. "No. You asked for the truth, and I just gave it to you. I don't hate you, despite all the things you've done to my ancestors and to me."
Xelloss was turning green at her words. He tried to gain the upper hand again. "So that means you LIKE me, Filia-chan?" he asked, trying to put the teasing note in his voice but failing because his projected body was hurting a little too much.
"I wouldn't go that far, Xelloss." She grabbed the nearest mace and thwacked him on the head, giving him a much needed dose of pain, even if it was his own. "I still wish you'd leave me alone and let me get over -- er, get on with my life. But I refuse to fall into the cycle of hate any more."
"You're killing me here, Filia-chan," he whined, and decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. He started to crawl across the couch, determined to restore her to her normal state of anger. A nice Filia was almost as frightening as a nice Zelas.
"W-what are you doing?" she asked, startled, as he reached over and grabbed her legs, swinging them onto the couch in the blink of an eye. He leaned over her and pinned her down with the last of his strength, then felt a surge of power return as she reacted with first confusion and then anger. "Pervert namagomi!" she screeched when his face was inches from hers.
"There's the Filia I know," he said, and grinned as she struggled beneath him. Much better.
"Stop it! Let me go!"
"You hurt me very much just a moment ago," he growled. "Never tell me that you don't hate me again. I want your hatred. I live for it. Your anger, your rightious indignation --" Xelloss realized he was saying too much, but he was still a bit disoriented from the dose of happiness she'd given him moments before. He needed to feed a bit.
What would cause more confusion and chaos right about now? Oh, of course.
"I don't know wha--" Filia began to complain, and Xelloss interrupted her with a kiss, just a gentle one, on her lips. Her eyes widened and she stared at him, but did not pull away.
"Silly dragon," he said against her mouth, and grinned smugly at her.
A cloud passed over her face, and Xelloss was suddenly hit with a great wave of her sadness. He was startled; he had expected anger, not depression from his actions.
"Let me go," she asked again in a whisper, and for some reason Xelloss complied, scooting back partly to his side of the couch.
She studied him intently for a moment, still sprawled out against the plump cushions, her chest heaving against the contraints of the working bodice she wore, as if she were a small animal caught in a hunter's trap.
Finally she spoke. "If not hating you is considered, to me, a sin, is that all right?"
"What?"
She bowed her head. "If I don't hate something, but I hate the fact that I don't hate it . . . does it work for you?"
"You're not making any sense, Filia-chan," he said, anticipating her frustration. Having her sad and trembling like that was almost a sensory overload to him, and he wanted to change her emotions back to simple, predictable anger.
This time it worked. She threw a pillow at him. "Never mind, kitchen trash. Just go. Please. And don't come back until the vase is done. I don't want to see you again."
Ah! Back to lying. "I'll be here for tea tomorrow then. Same time?"
"I said go away!"
"I'll take that as a yes. Good bye, Filia-chan," he said with a wink. "Thanks for the tea -- and the dessert."
He dissolved, and smirked with satisfaction as the beginnings of her enraged scream reached his ears.
He rematerialized back on Wolf Pack Island, on one of the comfortable trees he spent most of his free time in, and pondered her words.
"If she hates the fact that she doesn't hate me . . . does it mean she really DOES like me?"
* * *
End part 2
* * *
Must sleep . . . *yawns*
Review thanks go to MKawaii, lavender, and Ludacris. Yes, indeed, this is my first Slayer's romance! (First Slayer's fic, actually.) Thanks especially go to lavender for explaining other meanings of the yin-yang (they were incorporated into this chapter!)
Disclaimer: They're not mine.
* * *
Yin and Yang, part 2
* * *
"In the beginning, there was Chaos.
"Everything was good for the first several billion years. The Chaos allowed itself to collapse into stars and planets, separating the night and day, and then allowed the planets to grow and change in their different ways.
"But the Chaos was bored, and perhaps a little lonely, and so She decided allow Life to happen. Life seemed to be a great idea. It provided Her with constant entertainment, and allowed for endless experimentation. But it did not ease the loneliness She felt.
"And so, on several of the worlds She had created, she made sentient creatures. These creatures had the ability to choose and make decisions based on their own will. Chaos was very proud of the idea. She created many variations of this idea, and it proved to be extraordinarily fun. Some of the smarter beings even realized who She was, and they talked and prayed to Her directly.
"Prompted by that development, She set out to create a world with powers nearly as great as She. From Chaos there were borne Four Gods and Four Devils. Each was granted dominion over a dimension on the world. The Gods were given only one mission -- protect the world, and the Devils the simple instruction -- destroy everything.
"Each God and each Devil made their own race of sentient beings, and so the eternal war between the Mazoku and the Ryuuzoku began. Eventually there may be a victor, but the entire war is in vain, for all shall one day sink again into the Sea of Chaos which created them."
* * *
Zelas fingered the extremely rare copy of the first book of the Claire Bible, unable to read it any further again. It bothered her to know that they were only pawns in L-Sama's little game of chess, but the Claire Bible's knowledge still seemed incomplete. Most of the knowledge pertained simply to what the Water Dragon King had thought of the whole situation; that is to say, he had no choice but to accept it as deemed by their God.
Hmph, Zelas snorted. Just as I have no choice to accept it. Shabranigdo had created them from himself, granting them free will so long as their ultimate goal was the destuction of everything. In turn they had created their generals, and their armies of Mazoku, all who sought the total destruction of this world. It wasn't easy. The Ryuuzoku foiled most of their plans, and the stubborn persistance of the world's humans did the rest. It was an eternal struggle, indeed.
But someday they would win. The Mazoku WOULD destroy everything. Eventually. Maybe after another couple of hundred thousand years. After the world had gotten a little more boring. Things were just too interesting at the moment . . .
Zelas took a drag on her cigarrette and sipped a bit of the wine she'd chosen for the day. Her human form was but an illusion, yet it was an illusion complete with all the senses of a normal human being and then some. Part of being evil was indulging in sensory experiences; it was the Ryuuzoku who were supposed to think only morally pure and higher thoughts.
The wine and cigarrettes in particular appealed to her, since they were destructive to a human's body and yet the humans consumed and smoked them anyway. Considering how much wine she drank and how many cigarrettes she went through in a day, a human Zelas would have rotted away from the inside by now.
She sighed and crossed her legs on her comfortable chair, and mentally whisked the Claire Bible manuscript back to its proper place, well hidden away from Xelloss. She twirled one strand of her short blond hair absently. Destroying the knowledge of Zannafir was only one part of his task. The information contained within the Claire Bible regarding their purpose on this world was more than Xelloss needed to know. Considering his overly inquisitive and secretive personality, however, Zelas was pretty sure he already knew and had never bothered to let her know about the fact.
If he did indeed know how futile the struggle was, then it might make her current plan a little easier.
She dropped one elegant hand beside her chair, stroking the wolf that slept at her feet, and called for her servant.
"Xelloss, come here," she said aloud, reinforcing the command with her mind. Within the space of a few moments he appeared, smiling as always, ready to do her bidding.
"Yes, Juuoh-sama?" he asked innocently.
"Have you requested the vase from the dragon girl yet?"
Xelloss nodded. "She said it would be ready in a week."
"What design will be on it?"
"An ancient symbol called a yin-yang, Juuoh-sama."
Zelas nearly dropped her cigarette holder. How entirely appropriate! She quickly regained her composure, and drawled, "Oh, REALLY. And you do know what that symbol means, right?"
"It represents the ancient struggle between Mazoku and Ryuuzoku." Xelloss looked rather smug at his own knowledge.
Zelas nodded, giving him a metaphorical pat on the head. "But there is also an older, more ancient meaning, however. The eternal struggle between light and dark is only part of the war; the yin-yang is also meant to remind us that something at its greatest intensity can easily turn to its opposite. The dark can be so dark it is a light in itself. The light can be so bright that it blinds, leading to eternal darkness."
Xelloss stood like an attentive schoolboy. Zelas sighed. Just because she had made him didn't mean she knew what was going on in his mind. She was powerful, but not omnipotent. She'd have to spell it out for him.
"And a hatred can be so intense that it is a sort of love."
"Love, Juuoh-sama?" Xelloss winced at the very word.
Good! Finally, that got a reaction. "Oh yes. Love and hate are two sides to the same coin. No; perhaps they are even on the same side of the coin, like the yin-yang shows, since the truest opposite of both hate and love is the absence of an emotion. If everyone was calm and serene and peaceful all the time, we'd starve. Apathy for life is as bad for us as a zest for it."
Her priest was looking decidedly nauseated by the whole conversation. Zelas smiled a wicked little grin to herself as she felt the revulsion at the very idea radiating from him.
"Is that all you wanted to tell me, Juuoh-sama?" he asked, looking quite eager to get away lest she continue the line of conversation and weaken him even more.
"Nope. Go off, go torment the dragan a bit or something. You're looking absolutely peaked."
He gave her a final look, as if to say, now whose fault is that? and then disappeared with a snap of his fingers.
When he was gone, Zelas stood up restlessly and walked across her chamber, to where a very small collection of human artifacts had grown. There was a nice oil painting of a wolf on black velvet, several pretty teacups, and a small carving of a wolf done in wood. She touched the carving thoughtfully, and wondered where she should put her vase when she acquired it.
They say that the Mazoku looked upon the humans as humans looked upon the ants. Yet many a human child has, at some point, kept an ant farm. Their lives were short enough to be meaningless compared to those of the Mazoku, and yet the Mazoku wore their bodies as illusions, enjoyed the same carnal pleasures as they did (more or less), and relied on them for nourishment.
Yet Zelas would never had permitted it had it happened with a human. But a dragon . . . now that was a different story. Keep you friends close; keep your enemies closer, that sort of thing. And truthfully, the curious part of her wanted to let it all progress on its own, just to see how things would turn out. It was certainly going to be entertaining.
"I can see why L-sama keeps us around, after all," Zelas said with a grin to herself. "And I'm really not so different."
* * *
Xelloss had to play with four different people before he felt like himself again. Fortunately, those four people tended to travel together all the time as it was, and so it was easy to prank around with them. One false treasure map with a certain chimerical cure spell marked as part of the treasure, and the result was instant confusion, aggravation, anger, hostility, and panic. Ah, no one cooked up an emotional meal quite as tasty as Lina Inverse and her gang, which was why he hung around with them so much.
Once he was feeling better, he dropped onto a riverbank and played a game of Sink (throw mud on something until it sinks, quite a popular Mazoku game) while he pondered his master's words. A hatred so powerful it turned into love? He imagined the two snaking halves of the yin-yang, and shuddered. The very idea revolted him and went against his sense of being. Hatred was hatred. Love was love. In the yin-yang they were separate . . .
Yet each one contained a small part of the other.
Xelloss was not smiling then.
"What is Juuoh-sama up to, anyway?"
To cheer himself up, Xelloss decided to visit Filia for dessert.
* * *
With trembling hands, Filia removed the earthenware vase from the kiln where she had fired it, and checked it to make sure that the molding had come out all right. It made soft pinging sounds as it cooled in the outside air. Ahh, yes, all was well. The bud vase would actually be about a third smaller than this model, because porcelain shrank as it was fired, but it would be transulscent and watertight, unlike the opaque and porous earthenware model.
She carefully set the hot plate containing the vase onto a stone table, and removed the oven mitts from her hands.
Jillas came out of the store then, running frantically across the small side yard towards her. "Filia-onee-sama!" he cried. "The Mazoku is here again!"
"Great. Just what I needed." Filia checked the vase to make sure it was secure on the stone table, and started stomping towards the house. "Jillas-san, thanks for telling me. Can you heat up the kiln? We'll be firing the porcelain in two days."
Jillas stood there panting for a moment. "No problem, onee-sama," he said, his hands on his knees. He did not like the Mazoku very much, and especially despised the fact that the Mazoku alternately infuriated and saddened his mistress.
He watched her go inside, and sent a little prayer to whatever gods may be for her wellbeing.
* * *
Xelloss grinned when he saw her enter.
He'd already helped himself to tea (she had made a very strong concoction today, for some reason) and was sitting on her kitchen counter, sipping it delicately, savoring the taste of the warm liquid across his projected body. Far more nourishing to him was the waves of annoyance she radiated upon seem in her kitchen.
"Get off the counter. Trash doesn't belong there," she snarled, and primly started gathering the tea things in her hands from the table where she'd set them earlier. "If you're going to stay for tea like you wanted, let's at least go in the sitting room like civilized people."
Ah, a lovely taste, like ambrosia. Nothing else satisfied him quite like Filia's emotions.
In a flash, Xelloss was in the sitting on her plump, overstuffed couch, demurely sipping his tea and delighting in the annoyed expression on her face as she slammed the tea set down on her coffee table.
"You should be more polite around guests," he scolded, smiling as he basked in her glow.
"I AM polite toward invited guests," she complained, and sat on the other end of the couch, far away from him. She sipped her own tea, frowning as she tasted how strong it was.
"But I am invited, aren't I Filia-chan? Tell me you honestly don't want my company, and I'll leave."
One of the main reasons that he loved to pick on her, specifically, was that she always started lying around this point. He couldn't exactly tell when a human was speaking truth, but he could sense their emotions, and Filia always panicked a little when she lied.
"I don't want you here, kitchen trash," she said, staring at her teacup, unable to face him.
"I said honestly, Filia-chan. If you can't be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with me?"
She glared at him then, her blue eyes blinking with unshed tears. "There's no reason I should be honest with you."
"Lying doesn't become a pure, moral, ethical little dragon," he pointed out. "Then again, that hasn't stopped your kind in the past. Right until the end the fire dragon's leader tried to lie to you, all in the name of protecting the peace of the world."
She fumed in silence, and Xelloss realized he'd crossed some sort of line as tears of anger spilled down on her cheeks. He glanced over at the small egg containing the baby Valteria, which still had years of incubation under its adopted mother's loving care before it hatched.
"We stooped to any measures to achieve our objectives," Filia whispered, more to herself than to Xelloss. "We even turned our love for the world into a hatred of anything we feared."
Love can turn into hatred . . . and hatred into love.
The emotions she gave off then weren't quite what Xelloss had been expecting. She smiled suddenly, and Xelloss let go of the emotional link before the impact of her change in mood affected him too much.
"That's right, Xelloss. I can't be like my ancestors. I have to LOVE, not HATE!"
Xelloss winced. His lovely dessert was apparently going to taste bad on the way up.
Filia set her teacup down.
"I'll start with you then, Mazoku kitchen trash." She took a deep breath. "I don't hate you."
Xelloss flinched as if she had physically struck him.
"Aw, c'mon Filia-chan, you know you hate me still. You're lying to yourself again."
She shook her head. "No. You asked for the truth, and I just gave it to you. I don't hate you, despite all the things you've done to my ancestors and to me."
Xelloss was turning green at her words. He tried to gain the upper hand again. "So that means you LIKE me, Filia-chan?" he asked, trying to put the teasing note in his voice but failing because his projected body was hurting a little too much.
"I wouldn't go that far, Xelloss." She grabbed the nearest mace and thwacked him on the head, giving him a much needed dose of pain, even if it was his own. "I still wish you'd leave me alone and let me get over -- er, get on with my life. But I refuse to fall into the cycle of hate any more."
"You're killing me here, Filia-chan," he whined, and decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. He started to crawl across the couch, determined to restore her to her normal state of anger. A nice Filia was almost as frightening as a nice Zelas.
"W-what are you doing?" she asked, startled, as he reached over and grabbed her legs, swinging them onto the couch in the blink of an eye. He leaned over her and pinned her down with the last of his strength, then felt a surge of power return as she reacted with first confusion and then anger. "Pervert namagomi!" she screeched when his face was inches from hers.
"There's the Filia I know," he said, and grinned as she struggled beneath him. Much better.
"Stop it! Let me go!"
"You hurt me very much just a moment ago," he growled. "Never tell me that you don't hate me again. I want your hatred. I live for it. Your anger, your rightious indignation --" Xelloss realized he was saying too much, but he was still a bit disoriented from the dose of happiness she'd given him moments before. He needed to feed a bit.
What would cause more confusion and chaos right about now? Oh, of course.
"I don't know wha--" Filia began to complain, and Xelloss interrupted her with a kiss, just a gentle one, on her lips. Her eyes widened and she stared at him, but did not pull away.
"Silly dragon," he said against her mouth, and grinned smugly at her.
A cloud passed over her face, and Xelloss was suddenly hit with a great wave of her sadness. He was startled; he had expected anger, not depression from his actions.
"Let me go," she asked again in a whisper, and for some reason Xelloss complied, scooting back partly to his side of the couch.
She studied him intently for a moment, still sprawled out against the plump cushions, her chest heaving against the contraints of the working bodice she wore, as if she were a small animal caught in a hunter's trap.
Finally she spoke. "If not hating you is considered, to me, a sin, is that all right?"
"What?"
She bowed her head. "If I don't hate something, but I hate the fact that I don't hate it . . . does it work for you?"
"You're not making any sense, Filia-chan," he said, anticipating her frustration. Having her sad and trembling like that was almost a sensory overload to him, and he wanted to change her emotions back to simple, predictable anger.
This time it worked. She threw a pillow at him. "Never mind, kitchen trash. Just go. Please. And don't come back until the vase is done. I don't want to see you again."
Ah! Back to lying. "I'll be here for tea tomorrow then. Same time?"
"I said go away!"
"I'll take that as a yes. Good bye, Filia-chan," he said with a wink. "Thanks for the tea -- and the dessert."
He dissolved, and smirked with satisfaction as the beginnings of her enraged scream reached his ears.
He rematerialized back on Wolf Pack Island, on one of the comfortable trees he spent most of his free time in, and pondered her words.
"If she hates the fact that she doesn't hate me . . . does it mean she really DOES like me?"
* * *
End part 2
* * *
Must sleep . . . *yawns*