a/n:
this was a oneshot, and then naio came along with her lovely detailed comment on ao3 and i had to write more. this is now a two-chapter oneshot, i suppose! (i'm posting this a week late to ffn because it's been very hectic, and also this archive is so cumbersome, ugh)
rating bumped up to T for themes of mental illness.
As Xelloss followed the girl and her magic down the tunnel, stumbling occasionally, he couldn't shake the feeling of familiarity.
He's had dreams like this before, or something as close to dreams as someone who never slept could get. They were fantasies, very convincing, realistic and involved illusions in which he was able to break his bonds somehow and crawl out of his prison.
He both loved and hated those visions - they were a break from the monotony of the black and the quiet, at least. But early on, he believed them every time, becoming elated and letting his bloodlust mount with every step he took toward freedom, toward reclaiming his purpose. The further along the fantasy got, the more crushing it felt once it ended and he found himself in the dark and cold again, both his spirit and his carefully made human flesh tied firmly to the mountain's stone bowels, with no one to hurt and no one to even hear him rage within its depths.
In his thousands of years of existence, Xelloss has never been prone to whimsical fantasizing. He wondered sometimes if the visions were sent by the gods to torment him further, to keep him occupied while he wasted away slowly. But if that wasn't the case, then it could be a sign of his mind deteriorating, and that thought terrified him. As mazoku, he was a mind, vicious, powerful and determined, unburdened by flesh - if his mind was lost, what would remain?
Then again, maybe he wasn't mazoku. His flesh wouldn't let him go no matter how many times he had tried to break free, pinning him down as surely as the enchanted collar and chain did. He felt defeated and small - maybe he was a human or some other insignificant animal?
Or maybe he wasn't anything at all. Perhaps his existence had always been the dark and the cold and nothing else except hunger, and what he thought were memories were just earlier, more fanciful delusions; in which case, he cursed his own imagination for plaguing him like this. It would've been better to be mindless and unfeeling.
Someone else liberating him was a fresh new twist to the fantasy, though. What little curiosity he had left was piqued, so he was willing to keep indulging it until the inevitable end.
Xelloss followed the girl - followed Lina, and even though he couldn't feel his own limbs, he could feel what she hid inside her. It drew him in and forced him to make step after step, just to keep up, just to keep tasting it. She had been so generous earlier that he almost drowned in it, overwhelmed, and yet, he was still hungry for more.
He hasn't felt so lucid and so alive in a while.
"I've been thinking about what I should do with you," Lina told him, her voice a bit muffled because she was chewing at the same time.
They weren't in the caves anymore, Xelloss realized with some confusion. A campfire crackled between them, releasing its heat in steady waves, and the air was rich with the scent of cooking and of burning wood. Leaves whispered in the night breeze over their heads, dark tree trunks stretched tall into the bottomless sky above their small clearing.
"Have you now," he answered, and he must've taken too long to react, because Lina was giving him that look again.
"Yeah," she said, still squinting at him in suspicion. "I don't have an ID, and neither do you. We're gonna get arrested for sure if we set foot in town with you dressed like this." She took another bite of her unidentified meal, and then added, giving him a critical look-over, "You look like a vagrant, man."
"Do I?"
Xelloss looked down and found himself sitting cross-legged on the grass, mirroring her pose. His clothes, baggy and mousy in color, hung off his form unattractively, stretched and torn in places. It was actual, physical fabric, and there was something odd about that, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what exactly. He frowned, clenching a fist in his shirt, and then he heard the girl's voice again:
"Hey, I'm gonna make tea. You want some?"
He opened his mouth to answer, but when he looked up, Lina was asleep on a bedroll in the same spot she had been sitting before. There was a new taste in his mouth, rich and herbal and vaguely familiar; his hands were closed around a large metal mug, the liquid inside already cold. Was time always going to behave so oddly for him from now on, he wondered, setting the mug on the ground carefully and flopping onto his back.
Still, he decided that he rather liked this dream. With his head pillowed on his arms, Xelloss stared into the sky thoughtlessly, listening to the life sleeping across the fire from him, and then to other life rustling and thumping through the forest around them. And yet, not a single night prowler dared approach, even though the campfire no doubt advertised their presence loud and clear from quite a distance.
When the sky began greying, and the stars winked out one by one, he heard another sound, much more exciting than the rest. He turned his head to see that the fire had died, and Lina had faced away from him sometime during the night, curled up into a ball where she slept. Her slight shoulders were shaking under the blanket.
This… was different from what she had offered him so freely before, but just as sweet. His spirit ached and swelled, almost distorting his flesh along with it. There was another tiny, wet sob, and then he couldn't stay away, had to be as close as possible, to brush the cold nightmare sweat off her brow and inhale the scent of it on her skin.
He couldn't even remember how he got to his feet. Lina whimpered in her sleep, shifting away from him uneasily, on the verge of opening her eyes. To keep her from waking up for a little while longer, he touched his fingers to her temple with a few whispered words, then curled his long body around her smaller frame on the bedroll and closed his eyes. He could feel her trembling, racked with sobs, and the hunger pangs racking his own shell subsided slowly. Real, physical warmth seeped through her clothes and into him. His mind cleared a bit more, little by little, and he wondered idly what visions did her mind serve up to make her weep like this, choking on tears and gnashing her teeth furiously.
Before it could become overwhelming again, Xelloss began whispering something reassuring into her ear, stroking her hair gently - all things he vaguely remembered humans found soothing. It didn't take long before Lina quieted down, taking a few deep, gulping breaths.
"Gourry," she muttered softly, then hiccuped. Her hand was clutching his sleeve in a white-knuckled grip.
Looking at her pale, tear-streaked face in the near dark, Xelloss wondered just how much time had passed while he was down below. (Maybe a shift from one second to the next would reveal that he still was down below, not having moved an inch, surrounded by inky black and quiet. Could time move forward if nothing ever made a sound?) Keeping track of it was largely a human concept, anyway.
Lina seemed knowledgeable in Black Magic, and she claimed to know him, too, despite looking rather young - what else did she know? And how much of it would she reveal when asked the right questions?
Slowly, proper dawn set in and returned color to her bright red hair. He had to untangle himself from her and get his wits about him if he were to get in her good graces. When he sat up and removed his sleeve from Lina's grip carefully, she sighed and muttered that unfamiliar name again, disappointment clear in her voice.
With a quirk to his lips, Xelloss pushed himself off the bedroll and set about reviving the campfire. If he was good at anything, it was getting what he wanted, and for now, what he wanted were answers.
a/n:
if i worded any of this in a way that came off as sexual and/or vampiric, rest assured that it was intentional, ohoho. thank you for reading!
to Bj-Lydia - thank you for your lovely review! one of the reasons why i settled on letting this be a oneshot is that trauma response is tricky even in humans, and i'm not sure i could tackle that in a longer story. it's even harder to tell how a non-human character would be affected, both in the short and long run. but it's very encouraging to know that people would be interested if i ever figure out how to continue this 3
