I can feel it
Comin' in the air tonight
In a way, this is my lucky night.
Lina and Amelia respond enthusiastically when I pull out the guitar; they're an unusually good audience. I'm glad: I need to play a little to keep my nerves under control.
Of course, once I've reached a state of relative calm, it seems to take hours before they decide to go to bed. Amelia gives me a concerned glance as she leaves the campfire, but I keep my eyes trained on my fingers, fingers fixed on the guitar-strings, my mind set on the things I have to say later.
Waiting isn't easy. It never has been.
And I've been waiting for this moment
For all of my life
The stars are just beginning to filter through darkness when I see him leap from his usual place in a nearby tree, touching down lightly, his silhouette a sculpted blot against formless blue shadows. My stomach turns, but I can't keep avoiding this.
I put down the guitar; confidence slips out of my hands along with its weight. I feel strangely giddy.
"Xellos," I say.
He turns. Purple half-flashes.
"Yes?" His tone is even, curious.
"I--I want to talk to you for a minute."
A smile curves at me in the dimming twilight.
Can you feel it
Comin' in the air tonight
"Well, well," he says; I hear more than see his smirk. "You aren't usually this sociable, Zelgadis. What's gotten into you all of a sudden?"
Anger rises. I want to blurt it out, to run him through with the words right away--but, no. I hold myself steady, chanting inside my head: Patience. Patience. He should learn this the way I did.
My breathing slows.
"Actually," I say, "a story."
One eyebrow lifts. He listens.
Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
"In a few obscure histories," I begin, amazed at how steady my own voice is, "the writers tell of a mazoku of high standing, one close to the Mother of All Things. She was almost a goddess herself--and still is."
Xellos's face takes on an uninterested look, but his lips tighten. I keep going.
"Before the War of the Gods and Monsters, she had two servants--lieutenants, in a way--both powerful in their own right, and as close to each other as two human brothers. Like many mazoku, and like human children, they believed the world was theirs, to explore or devastate."
I pause, hardly knowing why. He opens his mouth as if to speak, hesitates, then looks away. One hand flutters: Go on.
I've seen your face before, my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
"It happened that, before the dragon races and the monster race officially went to war, the younger of the two mazoku lieutenants kidnapped a Golden Dragon--a priestess-in-training, from a particularly high-ranking clan."
I think of Filia, very briefly, as I always do when I come to this part of the account. She lived through this. She once admitted to me, when I first started to research it, that she knew the clan in question. The girl in question.
"No one knows exactly how long he kept her imprisoned. No one knows exactly where he kept her prisoner." My voice is growing hoarse--from anger, sorrow, sympathy?--and I have to look away from his increasingly blank expression. "All anyone knows for certain is that he--he tortured her. Raped her. Mentally and physically. When she somehow managed to escape, to get back to her family, she couldn't even tell them what had happened--she simply used what little magic she had left to blow herself to pieces."
I close my eyes; rage sears the insides of my eyelids. I force myself to breathe. This should be cathartic, there should be some kind of weight rising from the tight space beneath my breastbone: no such luck. If my sword were at my side, I would kill.
And then, suddenly, calm returns--his voice glides in a low murmur towards me, the tone soft, almost approaching gentle.
"What then?"
Well I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
"Her clan found out somehow--the writings say she haunted them, told them what she could never have said in life--and they demanded retribution of the young lieutenant's master. The Mother of All Things actually intervened to provide a solution: she drained the lieutenant of most of his power, reducing him to a lesser demon, exiling him from his master and brother's presence."
I watch Xellos for a reaction. His shoulders have gone tight, his face tilted up into the hazy, watery starglow, but he says nothing.
I pause for a very long moment. Did my eyes look that blank when I first found out?
So you can wipe out that grin;
I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies
"Funny..."
My voice is alien in my ears. Am I speaking? Is this broken whisper my own?
"...funny, the way coincidence works... although I suppose it wasn't all coincidence, considering his reputation... his power..."
And I can feel it
Comin' in the air tonight
A dam in me breaks. Suddenly I am babbling about sages, about legends, about summoning. The words I've nearly memorized fall to pieces as they leave my mouth; the darkness shatters them. My back bends and now my hands are covering my face. I can't speak anymore. I can't say it.
Well I've been
waiting for this moment
For all my life
A hand takes my cloak, lifts me bodily to my feet. My shoulders tense to struggle, but he's already released me; when I turn to look at him, his face is no longer blank. His eyes are narrowed and nothing is reflected in them.
Fear locks my spine.
"Xellos--"
"Finish the story."
I can feel it
Callin' in the air tonight
"Very few magicians can summon a demon by name," I manage, huskily. "But there was one... powerful, a sage--"
"A blind sage."
The interruption shocks me, but it's a relief. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
Well I've been waiting for this moment
For all my life
"Rezo knew about the whole incident. And he knew that even a demoted member of the monster race could still possess power... or, rather, capacity. Knowledge combined with potential. And, in the end, potential was what he needed... what his experiments revolved around..."
Suddenly I notice he's looking at me. His eyes are shards of void in the dark, like mirror blackened in a fire. He seems thinner somehow, smaller.
Well I remember
I remember, don't worry--
How could I ever forget?
"When I first started following you," he says softly, "I sensed something... of course, I was under orders to follow Lina closely, and then the whole business with the Claire Bible came up, so I couldn't investigate. But I knew there was a reason... his trace completely vanished from the Astral Plane several years ago, did you know? I couldn't contact him; neither of us knew what L-Sama would have done to either of us had we disobeyed her order... but I watched him. Tracked him. And then he just disappeared."
He shoots me a pointed glance. "Now that I come to think of it, how old are you, Zelgadis? Twenty? My brother vanished almost eighteen years ago. As if he'd been sealed away somewhere."
It's the first time
The last time
We ever met
I remember the laboratory. Rezo kept much from me when I was a child; the first time he ever let me in was after the curse, though I never knew why. Maybe the part of him that wasn't consumed by evil wanted me to figure out how to unravel the spell. And maybe he wanted me to see, as I did one day, the twisted mass of slag and molten metal in the middle of a runic circle, the half-obscured sigil carved into the floor that burned my hand, all that remained of what had once been a demon's cage.
"Rezo didn't wait because he wanted to know what the demon could tell him about mazoku power," I murmur, "and how it could help him cure his eyes. And, even if he didn't get the information he needed, he still had one of the key components of his Chimera..."
Silence settles around us, a cloud of low dark fog. Xellos turns his face towards the dying campfire; his eyes fall into shadow.
But I know the reason
Why you keep your silence up
Though you don't believe
"How long have you known?" he asks.
I swallow hard and turn my back.
"A few weeks," I say. "Rezo dropped a couple of hints when I was too young to catch them, and then when I started following up possible leads on the cure, I had to research mazoku history."
"You haven't... been aware of him?"
"I..." Some impulse rises to the fore in my mind; I can't lie to him. "Yes. My nightmares... he's always there. He can't interfere with my thoughts much when I'm awake, but he has to have negative energy to feed from... so he uses my dreams... he gets into my goddamn dreams, Xellos..."
I choke.
The hurt doesn't show
But the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you and me
Suddenly there is warmth, there is weight. He's leaning on me, his face pressed between my shoulderblades.
The human soul cringes, rejects, screams to pull away... and yet something a little deeper than the stone, hovering between skin and spirit, leans into the touch.
Mazoku don't love. They don't miss. But the pain they feed from, the loss, the agony, the anger, it warps them, it bonds them, it keeps them together. These two have not shared pain in a long time.
I can feel it
Comin' in the air tonight
"Brother," he says.
That tears it. I start violently, pushing him away from me.
Well I've been waiting for this moment
For all my life
No. Not yours. I didn't ask for this. I never wanted your blood. I have all the family I need--Gourry and Lina and Amelia, even Filia. They're enough. I'm not your brother.
Yes I am.
I can feel it
In the air tonight
I stand paralysed.
That voice. His voice. The one that laughs across all my nightmares. The inside of my forehead burns with an image: black hair with the dark sheen of copper, cruel indigo eyes, a hungry smile.
I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate hard. In a few seconds he fades back into my veins, nothing more than a sudden surge of power.
And I've been waiting for this moment
For all my life
"You need my help," Xellos says.
When I look at him, he's smiling.
"If you're cured, he'll be released from your body. So it follows that finding a way to release him is your cure. Correct?"
I can feel it
Comin' in the air tonight
There have been so many false leads, so many close calls. This is the only thing that makes sense. And perhaps the only thing that will let me sleep.
"You're his brother," I say. "You know him better than any history. I won't ask you to do anything, but if you don't help me--"
"I never said I wouldn't."
Well I've been waiting for this moment
For all my life...
He steps toward me; one gloved hand hovers an inch from my shoulder.
"He is my brother, and you contain him, so to speak. He wasn't meant to be mortal; you weren't meant to be anything but human. This--" his fingertips brush the hollow of my shoulder, indicating the stone beneath the cloak-- "is a transgression against both of us."
"Then--then you'll help?"
His hand comes to rest beside my heart. I don't flinch.
"That's a secret," he says.
We stand like that for a long time, eyes trained on the dimming image of each other's faces, with nothing but the dark wide road of the future before us.