Insanity Prelude:
A/N: Because where's the fun of liking an angsty prettyboy if you can't mess with his head in the process?
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Albel Nox died on his fifteenth birthday. Why his body resolutely insisted on carrying on without the necessary beatings of his sinful heart, he never quite knew. The fact did and would always remain that he hadn't been good enough. Ergo, there'd been only one possible road for him to follow, one possible option to choose. He had to surrender to the fire, allow it to take him, shape him, and forge anew something that he could copedeallive with.
Before that day, Albel Nox hadn't known what the word surrender meant. Afterwards, he knew it all too well. It was etched in ebony and ivory in the stark corridors of his mind, hung like a plaque where he had to stare it full in the face every day and realize the terrible and powerful truth of his failure.
He fought with himself for a time, until it proved fruitless. There was something driving him, something stronger than he wanted to admit. Something deeper than he wanted to delve. Something that knew him better than he knew himself, but something that was all together less and more a part of him than he'd believed anything could ever be. It was as much a source of fear as it was of comfort.
And so, when he sank into the depths of darkness and realized just how he could shape his life anew, reemerge from the ashes like the mythical phoenix of legend, he seized the opportunity and held it close to his breast and would not let anything, ever, deter him.
All it took was the opening of Pandora's Box, and now everything has changed.
This is our requiem.
-
He'd never needed repentance. His sins were etched across his body like living veins of fire, and he was alive when he should be dead. Surely that was proof enough? But no. No, he needed to know that some part of him, no matter how minuscule, still lived, could still suffer and love and laugh and hate.... And so he went to find solace and company in someone that he thought he despised.
He hadn't yet realized that the only thing he hated was himself.
"Don't think I won't kill you."
But he'd returned, again and again and again until the battered state of his body was no longer palpably registered by his mind. "One day. One day, I'll kill you."
And Duke Vox, commander of the Dragon Brigade and his conquering maelstrom, had laughed.
"This is the mark of your shame."
"I will not wear that."
"Oh?"
He might not have had reason to, but he yet clung to his meager pride. "You are not my master."
The elder man chuckled, dark and sinister and cruel like the crashing of bitter waves against a jagged cliff. "You come, put yourself in my hands, and then you tell me I am 'not your master'? Does it make you feel better, boy? The fact that you continue to put up a fight like you don't appreciate what I do for you?"
You are an implement he wanted to say. Something against which I can hone myself until I'm stronger, strong enough, until I can conquer you, kill you. Painting the world crimson with his blood would come as a crowning achievement, and it was not an opportunity he was like to miss. You will scream as you die.
"Come, my wicked one. Let us see how you fare today."
In the end, he wore the collar. His self-hatred flared as his anger never had, and only one single, potent thought kept him going in those twilight hours when he thought that he would rather die.
One day...
-
In the eyes of the sycophant, the dead have only honor. It's the living that enshroud themselves in sin. If sin was indeed a mantle, it was one he bore without complaint. All the grotesqueries of life and death had left their mark upon him, as with servitude, compliance, and surrender--and yet, he was still standing. He hadn't broken; he hadn't ever given up the last vestiges of his sanity. He continued to fight, even when he wanted to feel the touch, the pain, the agony so near to his soul that it became intrinsic.
He thrived in shadow, and smiled at oblivion and all the while hated the sun that tried to change him back to what he'd once been.
It would fail. Albel Nox knew he was irredeemable. He'd made sure of that.
-
"--I don't want to tell you twice."
He obeyed as if in a dream--a crystal-coated nightmare from which he would never awaken. It wasn't that he was afraid of what was happening to his body, but more of what was becoming of his mind. He smiled with acid viciousness and kissed like candy and did what he was told. His private rebellion could wait. He had patience. He knew that when it snapped, it would snap hard and fast, and no one would see it coming, but now...now he could afford to wait.
What would his father think of him now? Kneeling like a servant in the bedchamber of someone that would break him if offered the chance. Someone whom he needed and whom he hated his dependence upon.
--Insanity Prelude--
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"Are you all right, boy?"
Silent as the grave he remained, unwilling to move, to change, to alter. Alteration would mean breaking tradition, and he didn't want to so much as bend it with his futile attempts. Change would kill him. Change always had. He could only die so many times before death became an all-encompassing creature of rending, tearing, snarling incomprehensibility.
"Boy?" The Count Woltar had always been a meddling fool, or so said Vox. Vox wasn't always right, but he sure as hell wasn't wrong on this account.
"Stay away." He stumbled and lost his balance and might have fallen over had the captain reached out to steady him. He threw off the paltry comfort with raw contempt. "Just...stay away!"
"I know that your father's death was hard on you, but--"
"Shut up, old man. Shut up. Shut UP!"
And thus would the centrifugal force of life would always bring him back to where he started.
Insanity Interlude.
-
"Albel? Is something wrong?"
He sneered at the boy, and it was quick and merciless like fate, and he didn't for a moment consider that his redemption would trail at the heels of that pathetic play on words.
But come it would, and though he might fight the tide, nothing would stop the flood. He wanted to stay the same forever, because anything that differed from his reality was to be strictly kept under lock and key. Anything that challenged his way of life deserved death in all its glory.
"Because...if there was...you could tell me, you know."
Albel looked up, and for one dizzying moment, he knew he looked at his own wicked death. The thought made him smile, jaded and tarnished and almost but not quite real. The boy returned it, hesitant in his insecurity. "Well..." he tried again. "As long as you...you know. Know."
He knew. Oh yes. He knew.
And he thought, as the child walked away to join their comrades around the fire, of all that he had done in his life, and all that he would never do. Of all that would diverge from this point onwards.
You will be my downfall, he promised, sealing his fate with a poison-coated kiss.