Note: The first half of chapter seven. It's not finished, possibly this is even less than half, (the rest is plotted out, thought not written) but I was feeling guilty. Also, it's sad how well I respond to prodding. Never doubt - I will finish this damn story.
Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.
Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.
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Persuasion – chapter seven
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Ryo tried to help him up. Rowen said, "Fuck you," though he didn't mean it so much any more, and that was pretty much the end of that.
Mia watched, with an indoor wind whipping at her hair. She said unsympathetically, "You can get your own self down."
Yuli leaned forward, with his legs crossed beneath him on the kitchen table, asking curiously, "Can you?"
Actually, it hadn't occurred to Rowen yet that he might be unable to get down, and so he hadn't bothered trying. He had lost the threads of his armor's power. He felt mired in air like a shoe in a bog.
"Rowen," said Cye, crouching by his head, which lingered a foot above the floor, "what did you do?"
----
The war had passed. There were no more undead armies out for his blood; nothing left of them but the remnants of summer vacation.
He was finding it difficult to fill the time.
Childhood hobbies seemed too shallow. His books were uninteresting. Science fiction no longer seemed so strange. Instead, he wandered the hallways of Mia's empty house, the wooded yard around the estate, the tranquil lake. Mia had grown up with money, and it had never occurred to her to turn her home into some kind of trophy. It was, above all, comfortable and bright.
The dock rocked beneath his feet. Wet footprints gleamed in the afternoon sun from the metal ladder to the edge of the dock. As he watched, a dripping hand appeared on the metal rail, followed by a slender body, shiny with the touch of the lake.
"Hi," he said to the wet boy. The swimmer looked up, smoothing his hair back against his head as he stood, cocking his head. Water turned his hair the color of polished mahogany.
"Hello, Rowen," he said curiously.
Rowen put his hands into the pockets of his jeans and studied the water pooling at the other boy's feet.
"Cye," he said, the name still feeling strange on his tongue, "do you think it's really over?"
In the shadows cast on the dock, he saw the other boy move reflexively, putting a hand to his chest. "It should be, shouldn't it?" said Cye. "We blew the whole place up. He's dead. There's no one left to fight."
Rowen shrugged. He was surprised to hear a snarl from the normally quiet boy who wore the armor of Torrent.
"Well, I hope it's over!" said Cye. "I'm glad it is."
"Yeah." Rowen watched Cye's feet step towards him with their pale water-wrinkled toes. He felt a cool hand on his shoulder, water seeping through his shirt.
"What is it?"
He looked up into Cye's uncertain face. The boy's other hand held a small cloth bag that hung around his neck at the end of a string, both of which were soaked from their swim.
"Nobody even died," said Rowen.
"That's not a bad thing!"
"I don't think it's bad, just unlikely. Did anybody beside us even notice that the fate of the world was in jeopardy?"
Cye shifted, lifting his hand from Rowen's shoulder. "I don't mind being lucky."
"I do. It... worries me."
"Well," Cye said sharply, "I wouldn't count the casualties just yet."
No answer. Cye lifted his head to watch the pretty house on the hill, painted with the warm shadows of early evening. Inside, a once passionate boy slept like the dead.
It was a miracle Inferno hadn't killed him. The power of that armor was ferocious and volatile and entirely unfamiliar to Rowen, for all that part of its strength had come from him. It was the kind of power that devoured whatever it touched, from mountains to demons to the souls of those who wore it, believing it could be tamed.
Rowen remembered when Wildfire's armor had fallen away, after Talpa died in white fire and the five of them had fallen to earth as streaks of light. He remembered the shock on Sage's face, carrying the suddenly vulnerable boy in his arms. Rowen did not think Sage had yet told anyone else that in the minutes that followed, Ryo's heart had stopped. Twice.
Ludicrously, they had their happy ending. The captives they'd had no time to save had reappeared without injury, memory, or explanation. Everything put neatly back the way it was.
It worried him.
"If he doesn't wake up - will that make you feel more like you've won?"
Quietly, "No."
He remembered, at the end, the clinical way in which he'd accepted his death, trapped in Talpa's body, knowing that if Talpa died, he would die with him. He'd felt heroic and selfless and utterly cold. There had been tears on his face he did not feel when he reached out to Ryo, preparing to argue for his own destruction.
But Talpa was dead and Rowen wasn't and Wildfire almost was. And it was a disconcerting feeling still, to come down from his borrowed bedroom and see his comrades-in-arms whose faces he still had trouble recognizing in the dark. It occurred to him then, once and only in passing, that perhaps he should call his mother and tell her where he was.
"Sorry," Cye apologized. He bent to pick up the towel he'd left on the dock. The string with its cloth pouch was back around his neck, and he was blushing when he dried his face, like none of his dreams of winning this war had involved an emotion other than joy.
Rowen stared at him. He said awkwardly, "It's... okay."
Cye nodded with his back turned. Water drops ran quickly down his back, which looked smooth and sleek like a seal's.
----
"I don't know," said Rowen.
The door closed behind Ryo. The air churned. The dishes had begun to float in the sink. Meanwhile, Rowen wafted in place.
Mia left. Rowen saw her glance back once over Cye's shoulder, pressing the back of her hand to her lips. There was a coffee stain on the elbow of her blouse.
"I know you said your armor was acting up, but..." Cye stared suggestively at the foot-wide gap between Rowen and the floor.
Rowen sighed. Nothing changed. Cye nudged at the empty space.
"Yeah," Rowen said finally. "Yeah."
"How about if I pull you up?" Cye asked, putting a leg to either side of Rowen's waist. He stuck out his hands. Rowen blinked at them; tried to peer past Cye to Ryo and Mia's empty spaces.
"Perhaps I could push as well?" Yuli offered from the table.
"I feel like an idiot," Rowen said to no one, when Yuli was kneeling behind him, putting his hands under his shoulders while Cye pulled optimistically upward. Rowen hung limply between them. He stared at the ceiling and wallowed.
The results were disastrous; the wind which had died down burst furiously outward. It pushed against the people in the room, against the walls and the floor; it rattled the cabinets. Cye ducked his head against the onslaught of air and was forced to let Rowen fall back onto his windy cushion.
"Can't you do anything about this?" said Cye when the wind had died down, bent over him, gripping Rowen's hands at the wrist.
Rowen lifted his head, blinking at Cye as though surprised to see him. He discovered it was extremely awkward to lift one's head when there was, technically, nothing to push against. "No," he said at length. "The armor – it went away."
"Do you have the armor orb?" Yuli asked.
Rowen gave up being cooperative and glared at the boy. Yuli blanched, which was satisfying but not to the extent that Rowen had hoped.
"Oh well," Cye said easily. "I'll just ask Ryo then." He stood with his hands on his knees.
Rowen stared at him, waiting for the punchline. "What?" he said when it didn't come.
"Hm," Cye said, watching him archly, and spun on his heel and left.
"Wow," said Yuli.
"Wait," said Rowen, "I can – " He scrabbled for purchase, the invisible cushion giving treacherously beneath his fingers as his feet shifted uselessly on a frictionless plane. He managed to pull himself to an unsteady sit by yanking boldly on the handle of the nearest cabinet until it fell awkwardly open, but Cye was already gone. The air churned restlessly.
"What does he think he's going to accomplish?" Yuli sounded curious.
"I dunno," Rowen said miserably, clinging to the swinging cabinet door. "Maybe I can escape before he comes back down."
He watched Yuli's eyes travel over him and the conspicuously empty space beneath him, eyebrows raised. "I suppose it's possible."
"You're no help," Rowen hissed, trying to reach for the power that had been following him so closely these past few months. He felt nothing. Not in the least bit supernatural. He realized that he hadn't the first idea where he ought to be reaching to find it. The orb was hanging around his neck as usual, but it felt as divorced from his mental self as the steel-banded watch around his wrist.
"I can't believe you kissed him," Yuli burst out suddenly.
"I believe you mentioned. Thank you for that."
"Have you really been wanting to do that?"
Rowen stared at him, sincerely confused. "What planet are you from? He's walking hotness."
Yuli stiffened. "The not gay planet. I do not like - it's a matter of fucking personal taste okay!"
Rowen winked. "Then stop talking like I'm insane for thinking something you don't, eh?"
"Okay, okay, fine." Yuli retreated, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking all of six. Rowen felt a passing moment of guilt.
"You bet its fine," he muttered.
Cye swept around the corner from the back stairs at that moment, regal and subtly full of violence. He came to an intimidating halt at the end of the kitchen counter, and cocked one ankle over the other in a mockery of nonchalance. He spread his hands, one on the counter, the other on the wooden back of a chair.
"Well," he said, voice acid and distinctly green, "he says you're thinking of the wrong person."
Rowen, who had never seen Cye legitimately jealous before, was struck dumb. Yuli saw Cye's mood in Rowen's reaction and wasted no time escaping, standing smoothly to slip from the room in an unusual display of grace and poise.
Rowen said finally, "Did he... uh... did he say who exactly I was thinking of so erroneously?"
"He didn't." Uncertainty passed over Cye's face, then reformed into stoic displeasure. "Not that it matters to me. I have no idea what goes on in your head."
He heard someone coming slowly down the steps. Ryo turned the corner.
"Your advice," Rowen pronounced, clinging to his cabinet door. "IT WAS NOT HELPFUL." At the very least, Ryo's appearance caused Cye to deflate minutely. Though Rowen did not like the way he was so defeated about it.
Ryo, who had been looking mildly tolerant until Rowen spoke, glowered. "Try harder," he suggested.
"Oh, thanks!"
"No," Ryo insisted, and seemed to forget to appear upset. "Really."
Cye stepped to one side, turning towards Ryo curiously. His hand still gripped the chair back and his shoulders were unmistakably rigid under his jacket. Rowen grimaced at the both of them.
"What are you talking about – " he started.
Light flared with sudden warmth beneath his bangs. The winds cut off abruptly; he lost the feeling of invulnerable goose down at his back. Air became as solid as air ought to be, and he dropped to the foot to the floor in an ungainly sprawl, feeling the impact in his tailbone and the heels of his feet. He fell against the half open cabinet, his head banged against the door, he clutched the handle of the cabinet door in one shaky hand. Ryo watched Rowen push himself disoriented to his knees. Then he shook himself out of some kind of stupor and disappeared up the stairs.
Cye gaped. "Well," he said with forced brightness, "that worked!"
----
The wood of the dock was warm against his legs. The boy who wore the Armor of Torrent sat nearby, dangling his feet in the water as he sang to himself.
Rowen didn't know him at all. Only that Cye would die for him and that he would do the same. It was a strangely uncomfortable foundation for a friendship.
Tuesday brought the count up to four days. Four days, or the better part of a week, that Ryo had laid like a corpse in a silent room. Rowen avoided the room when duty didn't drive him to it, finding Ryo's stillness unnerving.
The singing stopped.
"Mia's gone to the grocery store," said Cye. "She says everything's open again. It's like we dreamed up everything except each other."
It wasn't the first time someone had made that observation. Rowen found it less bothersome than the niggling awareness that they had no way of knowing what was going on in the remains of Talpa's dynasty. Armies could be mustering, new tyrants could be rising, and in an hour or two, the sun would still set peacefully over the little lake behind Mia's house.
The sun shone deep orange on the water, silhouetting Torrent's body against the lake with the wind picking at his hair. Rowen lay back with his hands behind his head and asked hesitantly, "What happens now?"
The red headed boy opened his hands, leaving the fingers interwined. Reflected water lights danced on the shadowed inside of his palms from the pale marble resting there. "I want to put this away," he said. "I don't want to need it anymore."
He twisted, sitting side-saddle at the edge of the dock, and lifted his head. Rowen imagined himself through Cye's changing eyes, thinking he would almost look relaxed, stretched out across the dock. He felt uncomfortable and strangely guilty under Cye's gaze. He let his head fall back onto his hands, linked behind his head on the dock.
"Won't you be happy to get rid of it?" asked Cye. "Not to have to fight?"
Rowen said nothing, staring at the clear sky, which was a deep blue in the late afternoon. He found it mesmerizing. His hair was the wrong color entirely.
"I don't like fighting with it," Cye added. "I don't like that I have it so I can fight. Like I drew the short straw to do a job I'm not suited for." His voice rang out more strongly, echoing across the water, "I can't imagine anything in life that hurts more than killing to survive. Winning that competition is living in a way that makes me feel less alive."
The sound fell away. Rowen frowned. "The battles that we fought would have been inevitable with or without the armor," he said reasonably. "The difference is that the armor gives me – gives us - the strength to fight. And..." He found himself staring at a fragment of cloud.
Above him, blue vastness stretched away from him in all directions, unreachable and yet within his grasp, as though he were on the edge of falling into it. Even indoors, the unimaginable size of it was a niggling itch at the back of his thoughts. It was a heady feeling. The feeling of a strange, otherwordly armor.
"It's something I need," he concluded. "To feel the sky."
"Oh. Yes," said Cye, stilted, like he was being pricked by his own words. "I can see how that works."
Rowen turned to stare at him.
"Using the Armor of Torrent makes me feel like an alien," the other boy explained quietly. "Like I don't belong someplace breathing air."
Cye slapped with palms together around the armor orb with a snap. Rowen was already jerking up, pushing at the rough wood and staring at the boy with the strange eyes like Cye had handed Rowen something dangerous.
Rowen opened his mouth and said nothing. Cye kicked at the lakewater. A blush was spreading across his cheeks, bridging his nose, and he was rolling his eyes shyly.
"Sorry," he said. "I don't really think I'm a fish, you know."
"You don't like it?" Rowen asked. "Really?"
"Well - "
"Can't you - can't you breathe underwater? And I thought there was a whale - "
"Oh. Oh, well, there is. But. Under there." Cye gestured helplessly at the lake, which was neither ocean nor salt water and had no whales.
"Do you think if you took me along, I could breathe it to?"
Cye stared at him, startled. "I have absolutely no idea. I mean, if you were wearing the full armor, I don't think you'd need to take a breath for a very, very long time - "
"But that's holding your breath. That's not breathing water. What is that like? Do you breath it out again like air? It doesn't seem like the armor forms gills for you, since you don't have them when you come back up." He eyed Cye's neck suspiciously. The other boy appeared faintly nervous at the scrutiny. He opened his mouth, but Rowen was off again, "If you can breath underwater, can you speak? Normally, the sound waves have to travel between media after leaving your mouth and the transmitted wave has a very low amplitude, even though sound travels well under water. But if you were really breathing water, would your vocal cords work just as well? It seems unlikely, I suppose, but then again, it doesn't make any more sense to be breathing water..."
He trailed off. Cye was watching him with round eyes in the aftermath of the longest nonnecessary speech he had ever heard out of Rowen's mouth. Rowen blushed to match him. "Ah. That is... there's no reason you have to like it if you don't want to."
Cye blinked. Rowen lay back again on the deck and stared at the sky, feeling his face burn.
"Will we have dinner late, do you think?" the other boy asked finally.
"If Mia isn't back yet."
"Maybe Ryo will wake up to eat," Cye said, blithely contradicting his previous morbid insinuations. Rowen suddenly suspected that Cye's kindness concealed an impressively dark and catastrophic imagination.
"Maybe," Rowen agreed uncomfortably.
"Well, he has to wake up sometime, doesn't he?"
And Rowen said carefully, remembering things Cye had said, "Does he?"
Cye's face in the afternoon light was warm and rosy and decidedly miserable. It hadn't taken him very long to cherish the people Rowen still saw as strangers. He knew that his own nervousness had more to do with the idea that someone might die than that Ryo might die. Rowen admired this as a skill Cye possessed and he did not, and steadfastly refused to admit that he also didn't think it was very sensible.
He didn't mean for that to sound as callous as it did, which was why he had not spoken the thought aloud, not even to Sage, who, being most like himself, was the easiest to talk to. He liked Ryo, he did. He just didn't know him.
Cye looked at him in confusion when Rowen stood and stuck out his hand. "We'll never know unless we try, huh? Better try and wake him up now, or he'll never have time to get dressed first."
And Cye managed a grin. "Huh," Rowen said again, turning quickly because he was obviously not blushing again.
As they were walking back to the house, Cye tucked his hands beneath his elbows and looked towards the sky. "You love it, of course," he said, and Rowen almost didn't hear him. "Who wouldn't want to fly?"
----
Rowen carried a glass of water cautiously out of the kitchen, as though the air in there couldn't be trusted not to sweep him up again at a moments notice. The windows showed early morning sunlight. Rowen eyed the snowscape narrowly, distrusting the seductive peace of the sun on the snow and the ice of the winter lake. He was not entirely certain he had made the right choice hustling Cye out of the house last night. Or in deciding not to venture upstairs. The couch was not as comfortable as he remembered it being once upon a time in high school.
He looked up as Mia walked sleepily down the front stairs.
"Oh, hello, Rowen," she said in the middle of a yawn.
"Hello," he said carefully.
At his cautious tone, she seemed to freeze in mirror of his wary posture, a suspicious frown coming to her face and seeming to remember, in thrilling narrative, the events of the previous night. She sighed, all-suffering, and paused to study him, her hand on the banister and without any real anger in her gaze, as though at a child who simply didn't understand.
At that instant, the doorbell rang.
Rowen hesitated, watching Mia. For her part, she shrugged, tossing up a hand in a gesture of "Oh well, what can you do?" and walked down the stairs and past him towards the front door.
He heard her greet someone and Sage answer in return. Rowen wondered what sort of epic retelling he'd be in for if he hung around, and made for the sitting room instead, his back stiffening when he heard Cye's voice join the polite buzz of speech at the front entrance.
Rowen hurried forward to collapse into a richly upholstered love seat, feeling distinctly the part of some lady awaiting the audience of a suitor. (How embarrassing, but too late to retreat.) Cye, sure enough, wandered in shortly, lingering at the other side of the coffee table, backed by another couch and a wide, bright window, watching Rowen expressionlessly.
"How did you do it?" Cye said eventually.
Rowen shrugged without looking up, knowing his clueless seemed affected (It was). He regretted now that he had not tossed out a few useless explanations last night. With the crisis in the kitchen now averted, it was distinctly awkward to be under Cye's scrutiny, a prisoner of the awareness that the man watching him was the one he'd spent the last week avoiding desperately.
"Don't ask me," said Rowen, waving at hand at the stairs, down which Ryo had not yet descended this morning. "Ryo's the one that punched me."
Cye snorted, but otherwise gave no comment about Rowen's role in provoking that particular assault. "I suppose," he said instead, " that there's no doubt now. Your armor is certainly acting up, isn't it?"
Rowen blinked owlishly. Cye sounded unexpectedly... guilty. "Yeah," he said carefully. "I told you that."
"Yes. I know," he said in such a precise, stilted voice that Rowen glanced up in confusion.
"I... Yes? It has been? I don't know why. But it has. Definitely."
"Rowen," Cye said bluntly, though he spoke almost at the level of a whisper, with a glance to the door where Rowen could no longer hear Sage and Mia conversing. "You said it felt like rape."
Rowen flushed with embarrassment at the word. He had not been prepared for how… silly it sounded to compare something that had happened to him to something so dire and – yes – so indecent. Like discussing sex with one's parents. But – and he did a quick reassessment of his conclusions just to be sure – it was accurate. Feeling the armor reacting so vigorously to Cye's nearness and Cye's touch had been at the threshold of something quite that terrifying.
He cleared his throat, closing his fingers tightly around the water glass. "...yes," he admitted cautiously.
Cye paled. He got out, breathlessly, "What does that make me?"
"What, a rapist?" Rowen asked, looking up sharply, surprised out of his blush. He got no response at all, except Cye looked like he might vomit. "Cye, you can't be serious- !"
Cye obviously was, swaying above a burgundy flower-patterned armchair.
"Oh." Rowen tried again. "Look, it wasn't like that at all... Well, no, I mean it was. I had a good time. It just felt coerced."
Cye's expression crumpled. "Oh god," he said and ran his hands over his face.
"...that didn't help at all did it."
"Coerced is not a word I like to be associated with what we did, Rowen," Cye said faintly, from behind his hands.
Rowen set down his drink, reaching across the coffee table. "Sit down, sit down."
Something cold rose was rising in his gut and Rowen knew it for shock and a disoriented helplessness. He had no idea, honestly, what he had expected, only that it was not this. And having not expected it, he did not know, offhand, how to deflect it.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he contemplated kissing Cye. It might put this strange guilt to rest. It might distract him.
But when he touched Cye's wrist, he felt Cye pull his hand subtly away, out of touch. Cye had given over to caution then. Handling himself like a hot pan that might burn someone at an indiscreet touch.
And frankly, Rowen hadn't been lying. That sick, terrifying feeling of being out of control hadn't gone away because he'd consented in the end. He just hadn't blamed Cye. He'd thought Cye had nothing to do with it actually. And he'd assumed Cye would come to the same conclusions. He should know that this wasn't about him. Rowen didn't want him to be so upset.
He'd said all this in some form or another a week ago in Cye's apartment.
"It wasn't you," he repeated. Cye said nothing.
The guilt on Cye's face, however, that was new. Which at the time, Rowen had believed to be encouraging, but which he know understood had been due to the fact that, at the time, Cye hadn't believed a word Rowen had said about his armor. Which grated, and suddenly felt a lot more like a betrayal.
As if Rowen was merely in denial! Ridiculous, how could he be in denial and realizing he loved Ryo at the same time? But then, Cye apparently hadn't believed anything he'd said about Ryo either. Or hadn't understood it.
Cye had dropped his hands from his face. He nodded numbly and with complete insincerity. He looked drawn rather than sick. Rowen shifted back in his seat uncomfortably.
In retrospect, maybe it was unrealistic to expect Cye to feel no attachment to the relationship. After all, he hadn't been coerced into it. Maybe he'd even... (now Rowen felt a certain embarrassment on Cye's behalf for being duped) thought of it as a romance.
It was difficult, to say the least, to sort out feeling indifferent in one moment and horribly betrayed in the next (he remembered the terror of an iron band around his heart). It seemed to suggest there was a lie hiding somewhere among the conclusions he'd told himself he'd reached.
Cye repeated his misplaced apology. Rowen listened with a wince on his face but couldn't shake the inner satisfaction that said coldly You should have believed me.
"...is there... can I do anything?" Cye said at last. Drawing himself up to a resemblance of composure.
Rowen rested his forehead in one hand, tracing patterns in the condensation on his water glass with the other hand. "No," he said wearily. "I'm fine. I'm not helpless. I ended it, didn't I? It's over. Forget it."
"I don't think..." A sigh. "Alright." Cye touched a hand to his freckled cheek, his eyes traveling across the room distractedly. They had gone a murky, unpleasant color, as Rowen watched, wondering again at the mystery of Cye's alien eyes.
Footsteps warned them of an impending audience. Rowen straightened, his eyes on the doorway, trying to wipe any embarrassment off his face. The attempt was made less successful by the embarrassing fact that Cye seemed disinclined to make any such attempt.
Mia soon appeared with Sage so obviously in tow, that Rowen knew that Mia had led him here deliberately and that Sage had come to Mia's house specifically to see Rowen. The delay between Cye's arrival in the sitting room and Sage's suggested that Mia had arranged a period of time for Cye to speak to Rowen alone and undisturbed. Apparently that time was now up.
Rowen didn't know whether to be grateful or annoyed, and if so, for which part – the privacy or its abrupt end. Perhaps both.
"Rowen," Sage started, and then stopped, clearly taken aback by Cye's apparent misery. Rowen squirmed, unaccustomed to Sage showing so much on his face. When had that happened? How had he missed it?
He realized Mia had not brought Sage up to date on the night's events. Now for that, Rowen was grateful. Until he realized that for some reason, he felt obligated not to hide anything from Sage anymore and that, if Mia hadn't told him, Rowen would have to do that job himself.
Oh, fuck complicated life, Rowen thought and stood up, pointedly ignoring Cye. "Hi, Sage," he said as completely casual as he could manage. "What's up?"