Notes: I saw Lina stand up through the Sword of Light once. There are some more notes after the story, but that needs to be said first.
He's everything you're not, everything you've ever wanted to be, everything you prided yourself on long ago, in the before time, before the light, before the cage. Bright and darting, blithe and unfathomable--you dimly recall what that felt like. You want it. You want it so badly you can taste it sometimes.
You want him. He's everything you're not, everything that repells you. You despise him and you want him, and you know he feels the same. After all, you're the only one he ignores, the only one he carefully avoids. You know your enemies, and you know he's not such a coward as to fear your weapon so, and you've felt his eyes burning your back from behind his feckless, reckless mask.
It's not his body you want; he's not your type. You go more for touchy, spiky, and hair-triggered. It's a preference you share. No, what you want is to secure him, to become him, to...
...open the door and let him in. No one else in the world knocks like that.
"Don't say 'come in' unless you mean it." He smiles like moonbeams; a sweet warranty you know better than to trust.
"Why wouldn't I?" you ask, innocent, innocent.
He opens his pale eyes and smiles again, the smile demons fall before. "Because there will be assimilation, and possession. Didn't you know?"
You return him smile for smile. In danger, at least, you can match him. "Yes," you utter. "I knew that. It's time you came in."
You see a thrill of gratification warm his lusterless eyes, a flutter of intention stir life into his empty smile. He steps into your chamber, and the door quietly shuts. Leaning his weapon against the wall next to yours, he sheds his outermost layer so that dark cloak and armor puddle together on the floor.
"Come here," you say together. You do not laugh, but neither do your smiles falter. You step closer to each other, until you are standing a breath away in the middle of the floor. Naturally, without direction, your hands come together, and clasp. You stand there briefly, in the moment of appraisal that artful battles begin with, and then he lifts one of your hands to his soft, flushed lips and removes your gloves with sharp, delicate teeth. You pull in a shaking breath, and tug the other off with your own.
You feel the pull, as you have a thousand times before, stronger now with proximity. There is no reason now to resist, no foreign eyes on you, and in a moment you are pressed together, your hands pressed around his warm scalp, soothed by the cool fall of his hair. His are locked at your waist, flush against your sides, in the vulnerable place between rib and hip.
There is no nonsense of lip-to-lip. Tonight is the war of light and shadow, and when it is over, there will be only one survivor. You each know that. You contend furiously for the field of his hot mouth. You're winning until, in a desperation measure, he slides his hands to your belt.
You smile against him, and pull back. Being caught at cheating means he's lost, so you guide him to the desk the inn has provided. You haven't sullied its dark surface; haven't had anything to clutter it with until now. You watch his face as you lift him up to sit on it, but there is no surprise. You didn't really expect surprise; both of you are used to being tossed around.
His gloves are easily disposed of, and you occupy yourself with long fingers until he's breathless. Then you sit on the floor, kick your boots off, and free his elegant feet from their triple binds. His skin isn't salty, and you smile. Ever cool and collected, even his distress contained, refined; it would be just like him not to sweat.
He moans as you play him. His teeth are gritted, his face pliantly contorted as he fights the sensation you knead into the pads of his feet and press into the soft places between his toes. Gently, you close your teeth on the high sweep of his graceful arch, and surge up to swallow the hiss he cannot contain.
Now belts are fair game. You seize at his slight waist, and he at yours, fumbling with unfamiliar wrappings, with a heavy buckle. You feel the sag of fabric against your hip as your pants don't quite fall, and tug unsuccessfully at his dull shirt. He smiles, challenging. You meet his squinty eyes with ambition, because you know how to turn his strength to your purpose. Your hand goes to the floor and returns with his boot knife, a sharp and treacherous thing you'd only suspected was there.
You gather together a fistful of the front of his clothing, press the knife against his flat stomach, and marvel. Even bunched together in your large hand the cloth does not cut into his flesh; you have only taken up the slack. You cut through the cloth with a harsh twist of your wrist, and lay the blade against his spare abdomen. Cold metal, hot skin--how does that feel, in this vulnerable place? Searching his face for fear, you see only anticipation. He knows you know this isn't about death, or even pain. He alone has evaluated your intellect without condemning it.
Before you can take advantage, his hands are beneath your pale tunic, swiftly catching every nerve in your chest before snaking around to the back, clenching and clutching over your shoulderblades. The knife tumbles from your fingers, lodges in the floor with dull percussion. He pulls close, closer, crowding you to him, wraps forever legs around your waist and crushes closer still.
You stand and stagger. It isn't that he's heavy, but you can feel him, his warmth and pure breath hard against you, his sublime viciousness, his long toes trying impatiantly to edge your pants away. You'd always known there was passion below his lightsome mask, but knowing is nothing. The feel of him, his smell and resolve, send you reeling, and you end up braced against a wall, the window's dark curtains brushing the side of your face.
He tries ineffectively to force himself through your skin. Eventually, flushed and shaking harder even than you, he loosens his grip and slides down your body. It's a long, slow slide, and he doesn't waste an inch of it, tracing the inside curve of your leg and letting his lips and fingers dance across you on the way down.
By the time he hits the floor, he's kneeling on your feet and the floor and your vanished nether garments, and looking unbearably pleased with himself again. He cups you lightly in his hands, and smooths his soft cheek along your length. Nothing has ever felt more right, not even the undiluted surge of perfection as your weapon answers your call and your will. Your hands end up twitching and twined in the curtains as he kisses you over, up and along and below.
Your attempt to inveigle your way into his mouth is an utter failure. He merely grins, and begins to flit over you with his strong, ardent tongue, with a light scrape of smooth, deft teeth here and there, now and then, pressing a knuckle to your base as you strive harder for entry, denying you release.
You curse him bitterly: aren't you crying out loudly enough? You should have known that his cruelty in any victory, no matter how minor, would exceed yours a hundredfold. What else did you expect from him? What else did you want?
He smiles at your furious despair and gnaws daintily at your very tip, almost inside you. You thrust forward in a final, involontary, hopeless attempt to muscle your way in, and scream until your heart rises from you to smash and splinter against the ceiling. Only when your lungs are empty and your throat is raw and the flood of pounding, unendurable, exquisite sensation has faded to a lapping tangle of hard pressure about his ruthless, merciful knuckle do you collapse against the wall and the curtains, panting and whimpering. You are overcome by his artful power: he has kept you from falling, kept you shattering on the edge, with the mere touch of a finger.
It is some comfort to find, as you look down, that he is little better off. His sharp cheeks are hectic with arousal, perfect teeth clenched white on darkened lips. His shirt is gone, and temptation strains from his unnaturally smooth chest. Even his flat eyes, which gulp light and cannot glitter, are deep and fixed, dark and shivering with expectancy. His slim hands are clenching and white between his legs, a few inches away from danger. This tenuous self control and unexpected generosity strike you somewhere soft: it is your move.
Endurance itself, he waits. With some difficulty, you untangle your trembling hands from the curtains and reach down to him. "It's time." Your voice shakes as you speak, no more than a low rasp. He does not smile now, but his face lights with a solemn happiness that makes your breath catch.
Your lips come together again, sweet and clinging. There is no battling now, only reassurance and fleeting comfort. Your mouths vibrate with each other's voiced need and yearning thirst. "Time," he says into you with a breath of laughter, and spins in your arms, coming down from his toes. His warm shoulders are pressed flat against your chest, and his glossy head has lolled back to rest on your collarbone. "Yes. A long time."
You let your hands drift down his back, down his sides, slipping below the common, matte black fabric, taking him in hand, front and back. He gasps sharply as your hands dance. It's a sound you've never heard his light, sweetly vacant voice make, and you move your hands, trying to get it back. "Has it been? Since when?"
He laughs again, a strained sound, and you feel his muscles clench beneath your fingers. "Don't you remember?"
"Not usually," you say mildly, and begin to work your broad, calloused finger's way into him. You had not expected human satin, human heat.
He tries to relax, to hold still, not to shove back against you. You squeeze a little with your other hand to give him something else to focus on. He convulses, but after the initial shock is still. Looking down, you can see him biting his lip hard, and his hands anchor themselves on your wrist. "How long since your birth?" he pants. "How long have you wandered?"
You shrug against his back, saying, "Long time," and work another finger in, past the rings and the tension.
A high pitched whine escapes him, and he shifts restlessly against you. It's in his voice as he shudders, "How long--since--Zanaffar--Swordsman? How long--since the teeth--and the claws?"
You don't answer him. You have no memory for dates; and why is he still verbal, anyway? You crane your neck and capture his mouth again instead. You're close, now, closer than ever, and your nearness is only tantalizing. You pull your hands from him, instead, heedless of his desolate, abandoned cry, and turn you both around, pressing him up off the floor, against the curtained window. His hands clutch the soft fabric, and his cheek shines pale against it. It gapes under his hand, showing a grey midnight. The half-moon is a silver bow, the arrow-head star glittering brightly through a gap in the thick cloud-cover a finger's breadth away.
You hold him up with one strong arm, and ease his remaining clothing away with the other. It slithers away from him to become a pool of blackness on the floor. "A thousand years?" he asks, detached in a breathless sort of way, his eyes fixed on the moon. "A thousand and twelve?"
"Something like that," you agree distantly, letting your hand settle supportively between his legs. They're not sculpted, but smooth and sturdy, and the tight thigh muscles are trembling. You let go your arm, and run your freed hand soothingly down his back. You are holding him up with one hand, and you could drop four fingers. He nearly floats, a barren husk.
"My, my," he teases dreamily, still gazing at the sky. His voice is steady, his body is not. "You're a really, really old man, aren't you?."
"Still, I look pretty young for a one thousand twelve year old man," you agree with a solemn grin, wrapping your arm around his waist and curling your hand around a vulnerable hip. He might have responded, to you or to the click and scrape you vaguely hear, but it's then that you push inside him.
You both cry out, a long, keening wail. If you thought before that he felt good to your fingers, it's nothing to the way he feels now, wrapped sleek and tight around you. You have a fleeting wish, though, that your positions were reversed, for he has doubled over around your hand, pushing into you and presenting. You begin to rock and press slowly forward, hissing and groaning as more and more of you disappears into him. He whimpers and moans and twists, lurches up, tries to swallow you, tongue and all, his hands clutching spasmodically at the drapes. One manages to release them, and twines into your long hair.
It is exactly when you give the final, burying thrust, as, rigid against you, he screams to wake the Dragon, that you feel something cool, fist-sized, and flat settle itself against your back with a thump. There is no pain, but you hear the window shatter, feel the cold air on your bare skin. You're as close as it's possible to be, now, and it's still not enough, but oh, it's good. You break away from his mouth to look behind you, noting with satisfaction and glazed tunnel-vision the ecstatic distortion of his elegant features.
There she is, braced against the opened door. The girl you are devoted to, the girl he adores, looking too virginal for breath in the white pyjamas provided by the inn. Her flaming hair tumbles loosely down her shoulders and back, and her fierce, innocent face is wet and drawn with betrayal.
You whisper her name, and then he coughs, dry and harsh. You turn back to look at him again, and your eyes widen at what you had mistaken for rapture. Your sword's insubstantial blade is blazing brightly from his chest. You were in no danger, for the sword cuts everything but humanity. Its light dies, for no one holds its hilt, and it falls from your back with a clatter to the floor, but he begins to flicker at the edges.
You howl his name and pull him close. "No," you whisper hopelessly, a useless denial.
He smiles, and the edges of his body begin to blur into a pale nothing. Slowly, he sinks into you as you clutch him. "You knew we would end in one, alone," he says, his voice thick with pain.
"Why?" you demand. You wanted to be one, to become him, but not like that! Did you? And yet, your horror fades into the weepingly comforting solace of an inescapable rightness.
"Ah, now," he smiles tightly in the moment before he melts into you entirely. "that is... a mystery."
Your arms are empty, and your eyes are too full with the past to see your favorite girl slide to the floor, hugging herself with brimming eyes. You remember a forest, and a battle. A chimerical suit of elf-armor gone sentient and slightly mad, which had been set against an army of mazoku, trolls, and demonic wolves, and turned on its makers when there was no one left to fight.
You remember your apprentice, with slightly erratic memory and slightly erratic aim, who cast a slightly erratic Elemekia Lance at the Zanaffar armor, and hit you with it as you struck. You remember the armor's astral body fixing its astral teeth in you, as you sank your bright blade into it, killing it, and talons ripping at your back as the alpha female of the pack, a true and high demon, took on lovely human form and tore at you, pressed her perfect red lips to your wounds and sipped, then turned her head and spat out your blood, you thought, into something held in her lovely hand. You remember the imperfect Ra Tilt your apprentice hit her with, and the way she laughed as she vanished, holding in one hand an exquisite golden cage containing a swirling cone of black wind.
You took very little physical damage from that fight, but you were never quite the same afterwards.
Now you open your eyes, and see the light shimmer cleanly across the lock of golden hair that falls across your eyes. You're aching, unfulfilled, weak and exhausted, and your pants are halfway across the room, but for the first time in centuries you feel like yourself, really yourself. The dim cloud has passed from your mind and your eyes, reflected in the window, are quickened, bright, and shining. You need no longer grope through cotton for the answers to the simplest questions, such as that of your identity.
You know exactly who you are. You are a golden ripple on the Sea of Chaos. You are Gouriki Gabrielf, the Swordsman of Light.
This will doubtless disappoint the little princess, but you never really wanted to be the Blade of Justice anyway.
You tug your blue tunic down self-consciously and go over to the girl you have always watched over, picking up your leggings on the way and struggling into them. You're amazed that she hasn't already screamed perversion and fireballed you into next week, and there's no sense in tempting fate. "Hey, Lina," you say, dropping a large hand onto her shoulder. "Are you all right?"
"I heard screaming from your room," she explains belatedly, speaking into her knees. "I thought Xellos--did I kill him?"
Yes. No. You smile ruefully, and tilt her head up to drop a casual kiss on her cheek, watching with amused affection as the color automatically rises to meet your lips. "You sent him home, that's all. Don't worry about him anymore."
"He didn't possess you or anything, did he? It would be just like that coward."
"Don't worry, Lina," you smile, touching her cheek tenderly. "I'm still Gourry."
"Are you two--"
"You don't have to worry about him anymore," you repeat.
"Okay," she wavers. In the morning she'll be well and strong and explosive again, but what she's seen tonight would shake anybody, most especially a sixteen-year-old girl.
"Hey," you say brightly, "why don't you let me put my boots on, and we can see if the kitchens are still open?"
She glares balefully at you, and scrubs a sleeve over her red and reddened eyes. "Even I know better than to think this is the right time for a snack, yoghurt-brains!"
You shrug, and grin, "Why not? It's strange, but all of a sudden I have this terrible craving for ice cream."
Before you leave, you pick up your cloak from the floor and settle it over your shoulders. It's a bit short, but the night is cold. And besides, blue may set off golden hair, but black brings out the purple in your eyes.
[End]