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“The plan is simple. Kill them all, but take the chosen alive.”
Mithos’ words are all but acidic while they drip from his mouth, cauterizing everything they touch. The ravaged city of Ozette is the location of choice for a midnight rendezvous of three cordial traitors; between Zelos, Mithos, and Kratos, its proximity to Altessa’s allowed only a short walk through the woods for the former two, and a ruin for the latter that shrouded Kratos from the prying eyes of his former companions.
‘What a bother,’ Zelos ponders; he twirls a lock of muted crimson hair around slender fingers that spoke of an agile swordsman or a passionate lover. Perhaps those two things were one and the same. ‘I signed up for this for one reason, and it wasn’t murder.’
Even putting aside the fact that killing wasn’t his style in the least, Zelos Wilder had to admit that he was almost growing fond of the band of seven he’d planned to betray from the start. Small sacrifices, he supposed, because he couldn’t justify it any other way.
“Now that we have a plan of action in place, this assembly should be adjourned.” Kratos’ wings spread from his back, the colour of daybreak laying stark contrast to the ebony skyline above.
“The Chosen and I will monitor the group from our respective distances. Kratos, you keep close watch over Welgaia and our operations there.” With a wave of his hand, Mithos dismisses them all.
The quiet overlord and his obedient chosen tiptoe in silence so as not to draw attention to their midnight dance with the devil, as if the devil were anyone but themselves. Zelos juts his head in the direction of his leader and says “Say, in another world, another lifetime, you think these guys could actually win?”
“Who? Lloyd’s group, those idiots under the delusion that they can save the world?” Mithos chuckles under his breath. “They’re naive at best and asinine at worst, if anything at all. What do you think, my faithful chosen?”
If he had a say, his cooperation would ensure that the very title of chosen would not hang heavy over his head any longer. He doesn’t know what he thinks any more than he knows whether Cruxis would succeed at all. Instead, he says five simple words and hopes they are enough to answer the question without giving any tiny hints of uncertainties away.
“I side with the strongest,” he says, and by now, he has ceased to know which side that is.
.
Every time he looked at Lloyd, he felt a twinging in his heartstrings like a harp plucked by the hands of an adept musician (agile fingers, for adept swordsmen or passionate lovers, perhaps). Something sharp, jagged, until Zelos found the twang creating a home at the very base of his throat. When he gazed at the idealist and his endlessly compassionate eyes, he almost felt a different twinge this time— one of regret, because he knew that the day would come where he would turn his back and break all of their ever-too fragile and foolish hearts.
Instead, as Zelos glances at Lloyd out of the corner of his frigid blue eyes, for the first time, he feels like he’s choking, until the moment a wilted rose petal retches itself from his throat, its very edges scraping against his teeth—
‘The hell is this?’ he questions as his brows touch in dazed inquisition, before reality clicks back into place as if it were nothing but a bad dream.
“Zelos, you coming?” Lloyd shouts, until once more, the chosen struggles to breathe. Another petal escapes his lips.
‘Whatever this is, whatever this means, something lives inside me and it’s dying to come out.’ He’d rather be the one to die than let something else take control of him, he thinks, because that’s just who Zelos Wilder is: crude, unrefined, unhinged, and nothing else.
.
The average rose contains between twenty and forty petals, which simple math can deduct as approximately thirty per flower. One doesn’t need to be a genius at math to figure out such a simple equation. However, Zelos Wilder is a genius at math, and the increasing number of petals that fell from his mouth seemed progressively disproportionate to the very number that roses possess in the first place.
He meets with Kratos as often as he can to report his findings back to Welgaia for the sheer reason that his companions would question his sneaking out less than they would of Mithos. They had no idea the beast in repose with hair like sunbeams had claws and teeth that could fight, much less kill.
“They’re looking to make the Ring of the Pact,” Zelos’ words slur as he lifts his wrist to his mouth, attempting to shield a withered petal in vain. Instead, it drifts to the ground, creating a stark red blemish in the stones directly between the two men. Kratos appears unimpressed, which was nothing short of the greatest calamity the chosen could have brought upon the seraphim with a heart of stone.
“Do you know what these flowers mean, Chosen one?” Kratos articulates each word soundly between lips that hardly move. Zelos adopts the same ever-so-sly half-smile that half of Tethe’alla knew him for, but shakes his head without a hint of emotion.
“Hanahaki Disease,” Kratos says, drawing out each word like a blade from its sheath, “an illness born of unrequited love. I duly request that you proceed carefully, Chosen.”
Zelos laughs, hardly more than a breathy chuckle at first that nearly turns to a genuine roar. “Me? Love? You’ve got the wrong guy, man—” another petal of rose-red falls from his open mouth. “I’ve never been in love, and I never will be.”
Kratos turns to leave, giving a final glance over his frigid shoulder. “Then I suggest you try to find an answer you will accept instead before the disease devours you alive.”
If he had to count, it must have been twelve rose petals by now. Working under the assumption that there are thirty in total, he was nearly halfway there.
.
When everyone descends upon the Sybak library, each moment his companions research Colette’s sickness he instead spends scouring any books he can find of ancient maladies for the words Hanahaki Disease. Kratos’ cursory diagnosis can only be wrong, he hopes.
A disease of unrequited love, indeed, in which one’s desires take asylum in their throat in the form of a rose that wilts and sheds its petals, until the sufferer either has their feelings returned or the flower suffocates them entirely. The only cures are surgery, which removes the feelings in tow, or for the love to become reciprocated, otherwise the lungs become filled with petals, leading to sure demise.
Zelos has always considered asphyxiation the worst way to die.
He considers the tracheostomy in earnest, as where these feelings came from and who they were for are nothing short of beyond him. What was the loss of a surgical procedure to cure him from the amorous curse of a name he couldn’t even speak?
By now, Zelos had grown to simply keeping his mouth shut, only to chew each fragment of the rose that took home in his throat into tiny, floral pellets and spit them from his mouth, undetectable to everyone around him. At least that way, it was far less obvious than the full petals that drifted from his lips. By now, Kratos had been the only one to notice his increasingly worsening condition— even Mithos, master of manipulation with a self-professed eye for every excruciating detail around him, had failed to detect a single shard that wilted in his presence.
Lloyd hadn’t noticed the petals, but he noticed that Zelos had become awfully quiet these last few days; an astute detection of such a subtle change, for someone who had yet to even wonder where Zelos went every night after the sun went down.
“Hey, Zelos, everything all right?” Lloyd asks, and Zelos dares not open his mouth for fear of expelling the rosebud resting on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he chews it between his teeth quietly enough that it is of little consequence.
“‘Course, bud. Just peachy.” There was no reason for him to notice something like that, much less point it out. Perhaps the eternal optimist was more observant than Zelos gave him credit for. Finally, he asks “Why?”, always the everlasting question when Lloyd crossed his mind.
Another petal brushes against his tongue.
“Ah, I mean. You’ve got such a big personality, it’s just different when you’re not… well, being you.” What a perceptive assumption. Perhaps betraying them would prove more difficult than Zelos had initially imagined.
He didn’t have the faintest clue what to say in return; instead, he could only take note of the flicker he felt in his chest that both warmed and ignited his heart like a subtle flame.
“Y’know, not sure if Colette has told you, Lloyd, bud, but even us chosen have our down days.”
By now, it was beginning to feel as though his mouth were stuffed full of cotton, and the last thing he wanted was to expel each spitball of unrequited love onto the ground in the middle of a pleasant, congenial conversation.
“Well, I want you to know you can talk to me, Zelos. We’re friends, and I care about you.” Lloyd smiles, and the fire in Zelos’ chest only burns brighter. That alone should have been the tipping point; as much as he prided himself on being a master of deception, much like none other than Mithos Yggdrasill himself, there were still some glaring realities he was completely blind to— the prime example being that Zelos Wilder knew nothing of love.
Instead, he stands and leaves for fear of repressed flowers flowing from his mouth like a waterfall of broken hearts.
By the time he steps outside the Academy, the sight is certainly one to behold: clumps of crumpled, wilted flowers tumbling faintly from his lips, marking the ground below in metaphor of love lost.
“Ah, Hanahaki Disease,” a familiar voice speaks, hovering only few paces from the edge of his shoulder. “And here, I believed it to be rare in this day and age.”
Zelos glances up from the ground, halfway keeled over and clutching his throat. “Ah, Professor Raine, the cool beauty! Apologies, but I don’t know a single thing about this disease you speak of.”
“I think you do, Zelos. I believe there was a reason you skimmed through volumes of medicine and botany while we were looking at documents from the ancient war.”
He droops his brows, returning to stand on two feet and brushing away rose petals, the same way he tried to brush away any vulnerability Raine could have seen. If there’s one, single thing Zelos is at all times, it’s composed, whether above or below the mask he wore like a second skin. “Can’t have Hanahaki if I’m not in love.”
“I would reconsider that belief, Chosen, considering the disease is life-threatening.” Reaching, she picks a pale, wilted petal from the ground and examines it as though a scurrying surgeon performing a vivisection with haste.
Pfft. “Who could I possibly have unrequited love for, anyway? ‘Cause sorry, babe, you’re a knockout, but I can tell ya right now it’s not you.” Beyond that, the possibilities of Kratos or Mithos were laughable at best.
“The simplest way to deduce that is to think back to the person who crossed your mind before the flowers were cast from your lips.”
“I was talking to Lloyd. No way that can be right.” Zelos frowns, an air of scorn cast further as his disdained lips curl into a scowl. “Professor, you wanna take a look at my neck for me? See if there’s anything we can see?”
“I’m a scholar, Chosen, not a doctor.” Yet still, she obliges, running the frigid tips of her fingers along the veins in his neck.
“What are the chances you could get rid of it for me? These feelings are next to useless to me anyway.”
Raine’s brows dip downwards as she gazes down his throat. “I’m not a surgeon, either.” He shuts his mouth and wears a face of dismay to match her own.
“So, what now then, my smart, sparkling beauty?” Funny how these empty teases roll off the tongue far easier than the word ‘love’ ever did.
The half-elf, forever the academic, wise beyond her years, folds her arms across her chest; she displays as little emotion as she would ever have allowed a research subject to witness. After all, despite the coquettes that flick from his tongue, the chosen and Raine were hardly more than acquaintances.
“I suggest that you examine your feelings for Lloyd and proceed with caution.”
“Ha! Even if it were Lloyd—” and it is, as much as he wishes it weren’t, but he can’t deny it much longer, “—he still wouldn’t know love if it kicked him in the teeth.”
Raine’s heels tick against the mesh of stonework below in tune with Zelos’ hastening heartbeat. “Hanahaki Disease, Chosen. Now, it’s up to you to figure out the rest, as you know as well as I do what will happen if you don’t.”
A single petal, this time the shade of blush, escapes his lips at the sudden thought of pressing them against Lloyd’s own— at this point, there were no other answers as to who could make Zelos Wilder, of all people, feel an emotion as cursed as love.
The quick slam of library doors leaves Zelos alone once more, and he chews the petals that multiply in his mouth, sucking the floral taste away before spitting them to the ground.
‘Well, if you are what you eat then you are what you spit. I guess that makes me beautiful, deadly, and pathetic all at the same time.’
.
Ice was better than snow but only the same way a needle was better than a knife. The way the cold pricked Zelos’ skin sent shivers down his spine in all the wrong ways, bringing him back to that snowy Meltokio day that plays again and again in his head, like a broken tape that only repeats the same thirty seconds over and over.
He’d only seen snow once since that fateful day he saw, felt, and smelled his mother’s blood for the first and last time. Instead, he’d spent that same day sitting inside with cancelled plans and all the curtains drawn. The entire continent of Flanoir made his very skin crawl in a multitude of ways, and every single one made him want to crawl out of it entirely.
Most of all, the way the petals that escaped his lips and stained the snow red made him want to disappear.
“Hey, Zelos, you all right?” Lloyd asks, taking careful note of every time Zelos flinched at the snowflakes on his skin. He counted every single wince with diligence, but even the rising number of every detail of Zelos that caught Lloyd's attention were not enough to stop the flowers from wilting under the chosen’s tongue.
“Yeah,” he says in sharp response— sharp enough to perform his own tracheostomy, if he so chose. “Guess I just don’t like the cold much.”
“I can see that. If you want, I’ll give you my coat. What do you think?” All Lloyd’s gentle offer did was make more of the roses in Zelos’ mouth threaten to expel over the ice in shades of red. Instead, he turns his head away, spitting petals into his hand and then gripping them out of sight.
He balls his hand into a fist, crunching them between his fingers. “Don’t worry about me, bud.”
He should have said yes, and Goddess, he wanted to, but considering the fire raging in his chest, it turned out he didn’t like the heat any more than he liked the cold. Instead, he tosses the petals behind him and they fall to the ground like snowflakes, never to be seen again.
.
Kratos’ all-seeing gaze stares through Zelos as if he were made of glass; perhaps, then, the flower stuck in his throat would finally become visible for all to see. He figured by now it had to be multiple flowers, or maybe they were proliferating in his throat by the day, as the petals had far exceeded even forty and that was a godforsaken fact. By now he’d rather dissect himself with a rusty scalpel than carry on with these damn roses and the flutter in his stomach every time he spoke to Lloyd.
Funny, it was, as that was exactly who Kratos had come to speak with his fellow traitor of, for he knew of Zelos’ foreordained fate and Lloyd’s gentle heart.
“It would be unwise to cause my son any undue harm,” he says, and the chosen can’t tell if his voice contained malice or simply exasperation. Kratos, forever a mystery as each clause droned on the same as it ever did, even despite speaking of his only son.
“Yeah? You think?” a piercing laugh escapes Zelos’ mouth to match his cutting grin. “I’m not supposed to cause Lloyd any harm, but he can just go ahead and suffocate me to death?”
A quick ‘hmph’ leaves his mouth, sharp enough to do the damned dissection Zelos craved in a matter of seconds. “My apologies, Chosen, but his life possesses far more value than yours.”
“Funny you say that, Kratos,” one petal after another grinds beneath his teeth before he spits each one to the ground, just like spitting blood after a kick to the ribs. “For once, we agree.”
.
When this illness asphyxiates me, lay my bones in the Garden of Eden
so I may live on among the pleasure I once dreamed of experiencing on my own.
.
Tomorrow was the very day they were to climb the Tower of Salvation to retrieve the last of the materials to cure Colette’s sickness— one day closer to everyone finding out about Zelos’ traitorous ways, in the same way it was another moment that drew nearer to his illness spreading to the lungs. At this point, he didn’t know which one he dreaded more, but he was stuck far too deep to escape either.
“Back at the Temple of Ice, you flinched at every snowflake that touched your skin.” Lloyd Irving, so bright in few regards, yet horrifically clueless in so many others. Zelos wonders by now if he’s noticed the flowers he spits from his mouth, chewed into the tiniest blossoms possible in hopes of rendering them undetectable. Had Lloyd noticed by now, by any chance at all, there couldn’t be a way he’d put two-and-two together to decode that he was the cause.
“Already told you, Lloyd, I don’t like the cold.” He figures there isn’t a chance in hell of any feelings being reciprocated; if anything, he’s waiting to die with a heart as frigid as the snow he so despised.
Lloyd furrows his brows, long since seated next to the chosen at Altessa’s oak table. “If you don’t mind me asking, though, why is that?”
Zelos laughs, if a short succession of sharp exhales could even be called such. “One day I’ll tell you, but I promise you’ll cry, bud.” As he thinks of all the things he could and eventually would say to bring Lloyd to tears, Zelos must excuse himself and step outside to spew his very own funeral procession of rose-red petals from his lips.
.
Zelos knew Welgaia like the back of his hand by now, but to lead the party to their exact destination all on his own would seem nothing short of suspicious. He had to continue to seem harmless, only to show his claws when least expected: such is the Zelos Wilder way, of course.
‘Split up and look for information’, they had decided as a group, the perfect way for Zelos to reconvene with the enemy— enemy, ally, friend, it was all the same to him when everything was a game that he played alone.
“I trust your loyalty to Cruxis, Chosen,” Kratos says with heavy eyes behind closed doors. Clearly, the seraphim trusted his loyalty to them more than even Zelos did. Today, however, he would make that fact known for the very first time, spitting the words like the chewed-up balls of unrequited love that leave his mouth.
“Wouldn’t be so sure of that,” the chosen speaks, apathy wrung thick through each syllable. “I don’t trust anything about myself anymore.”
Kratos, ever-composed, now draws his sword and turns his eyes to daggers to match. Within moments, Zelos finds the tip of the other man’s blade resting directly above his Cruxis crystal. “Then you will take this as a warning to stay away from Lloyd and do as you’re told.”
Chuckling, Zelos pushes the blade away with the tip of his slender finger. “You’re threatening me, Kratos?” Crimson red drips to the ground with each subtle movement, piercing through his glove and drawing blood. “You’re forgetting that you’re the one who taught me everything I know.”
The seraphim sheaths his sword once more, allowing a split second of strained vexation to show through his mask— one that nearly matched the very facade Zelos wore over his own heart. “I taught you everything you know, save for sincerity and self-respect.”
The chosen turns to leave, smirking a one-sided grin all the way. “Yeah, because you wouldn’t know those things if they decked you in the mouth.”
As Zelos walks through Welgaia’s winding hallways, he runs his fingers along the newfound tear in his glove and a trail of wilted petals follows in his wake.
.
“So Kratos is my father.” The emotion in Lloyd’s voice is impossible to place, ranging from nauseated to reeking of wrath with each and every letter spoken. Zelos sits by his side, having known of the skeleton rotting in the closet long before being spoken into existence, much less to Lloyd, of all people. Thankfully for Zelos, he could fake it just as Kratos could— perhaps the two of them weren’t so different after all.
“Zelos, did you see any of this coming?” Lloyd asks, musing through feelings of anger and betrayal; Zelos can only feel a sharp, steady drop in his stomach and an incineration in his heart knowing soon, he will be the cause of those very same feelings, and now, he didn’t want to be.
He counts the moments down to the second where he will bring Colette to meet her destiny, and every one only makes his heart ache more.
“Nah. Guess I didn’t see it coming. Sorry, bud.” The cruellest lies are the white lies that dance across one’s vision in plain sight, much like snowflakes or the seeds of dandelions— even the thought of flowers made him feel ill in the same way snow always did. With every word, he hides another petal between his teeth, and he counts the petals the same way he counts the minutes, wondering in silence which will kill him first.
.
Everyone thought Flanoir was beautiful, but Zelos was not everyone. By now, he hardly even considered himself a person to begin with, and the more he started to align himself with what he had always considered the ‘weaker side’, the stronger those feelings became. Regardless of which side he chose, the fate of a traitor is always that of disloyalty.
That night, he met Lloyd on the balcony and couldn’t help but wonder why him, of all people— why Lloyd chose him on that fateful snowy night was beyond the scope of Zelos’ comprehension, and beyond that, why his heart chose Lloyd, of all people, was equally confounding. All he knew for sure was that the closer he got to the gentle idealist in any wall at all, the more he thought about all the ways he could press their lips together and make him happy.
Maybe Zelos had it in him to be more than just a traitor after all.
“I told you I’d tell you why I hate the cold one day, didn’t I?” Zelos says with words as gentle as slender fingers caressing his neck. A tone wholly unfamiliar to Lloyd, at least coming from Zelos.
“Yeah, you did, and you said it would make me cry.” Lloyd's callback makes Zelos chew a single petal that had lifted itself to the very tip of his tongue, ready to let the tiny ball of fate expel from his mouth.
“Let me give you all the gory details, then,” he says with a sorrowful grin. He tells Lloyd of the death of his mother all the blood on his hands, the failed chosen system and the two flawed people who brought him into existence without love— all the things he hates about himself, down to and including that he should never
have
been
born.
Vulnerability had never felt so terrifying, but even beyond that, it had never felt so good.
“I think you have a right to live just like everybody else does, Zelos.” The tiny petal the chosen had ground between his teeth falls from his mouth all on its own, and by now he couldn’t care less whether it’d been detected or simply tumbled in the same secrecy he shrouded the rest of his disease in.
Zelos watches as the spitball of a rose lands against the ground, a tiny, crimson blemish against the pure white snow. “Hate to say it, but you don’t even know me, bud.”
“I want to, though. You’re a mystery, Zelos, and I wish you weren’t.” What kind words Lloyd speaks, and Zelos’ heart only aches knowing that no matter what, tomorrow, he would stand before them as an enemy. In short succession, his chest fills with butterflies the moment he realizes that doesn’t have to stop him from one final night of honesty.
Instead, Zelos laughs a true, hearty smile from his pale lips as their clumsy hands brush against each other. “Ah, now, Lloyd. Don’t say stuff that you’ll regret.” Tonight, the snow didn’t remind him of death, and that very same twang in his heartstrings that he tried his hardest to push down didn’t terrify him.
“No, I’m serious! Somehow, I just feel like I’m drawn to you. It’s like I want to learn as much as I can.” Such a simple sentence to warm a heart as cold as Zelos’, who does little more than retrieve a simple gem from his pocket and place it in Lloyd’s hand.
“Here. Take it. A symbol of my trust. You could use it more than I can.” The bright red gem sparkles in the moonlight, allowing the pale luminescence to cast a soft glow over Lloyd’s features. ‘Even if I don’t deserve that trust, even if I never did,’ he thinks to himself in silence, and yet, since the last petal that fell from his lips, not a single one had tumbled after.
That night, their lips grazed whether by mistake or something greater, just the way Zelos had been daydreaming about for longer than he would readily admit. The next morning, before the light of day graces the city of ice, he steps outside and expels a final true, crimson rose in full bloom from the back of his throat onto the snow, and Lloyd wakes up lonely.
.
There are approximately 1845 seconds before he stands as a traitor before the people he had grown to call friends. They had boarded their Rheairds, ready to take Mithos on in what they had only assumed to be the final battle; he thinks of their reaction to the half-elf’s betrayal and the drop in his stomach only grows stronger. As it turns out, his heart was far from as cold as the snow and ice he so despised.
1079 seconds, and each one that passes feels like the prick of a needle reaching to the bone. He longs to feel the warmth of Lloyd’s hand against his own for one last time before its grip begins to resonate doubt for the rest of its days. Trust is nothing short of a difficult thing to build and an easy thing to break.
562 seconds, and his stomach has fallen into the endless abyss where it stays put in his abdomen but still feels as though it never stops dropping.
25, 15, 10, 9…
“Hey, Colette, why don’t you come over here for a sec?”
An easy compliance, from both his fellow chosen and the congenial traitor himself. While he stands baring his sword across Colette’s chest with Pronyma at his side, he no longer coughs up petals, but the look in Lloyd’s eyes as Zelos fulfilled his foreordained duty was far more suffocating than any botanical disease he could possibly imagine.
What a sick joke this all is.
What a sick joke he is.
.
‘There’s no making up for what I’ve done,’ he thought— the least he could do was to release everyone from their traps and find the Aionis, wherever it may be. He was intimately familiar with the gem of sorts, having ground it beneath his teeth in the same way as the roses that ceased to fall from his lips now. Both of them made him feel sick in different ways, with Aionis leaving his veins ablaze and Hanahaki spilling to his lungs and heart—
Today, he was not here to ingest the tiny rock at Cruxis’ orders to mould him into the perfect chosen. Instead, if he were to ever look upon Lloyd’s face with anything other than regret, he must retrieve it to create the Eternal Ring.
‘It must be somewhere,’ he muses; as it turns out, he hardly knew Cruxis’ headquarters as well as he thought.
“What do you think you're doing, Chosen?” Kratos’ voice was painted with the same shade of disdain as always, but this time, it was tinted red with pure irritation as well.
If he was going to commit to a side, it was now or never; unfortunately, the side he picked left Kratos, the man who trained him in the fine art of swordplay, the man who fed him Aionis to learn to fight, and the father of the boy he loved, none other than his enemy.
“What do you think I’m doing, old man?” he smirks; “Just finally choosing my loyalties, ‘s all.”
“Don’t be foolish, Zelos.” The seraphim draws his sword, slow and piercing with little warning, much as the moment their eyes lock at last.
Zelos’ smirk only grows as he grabs the hilt of his blade with haste. “Heh. I can always tell when I’ve gotten under your skin when you call me by my name.”
The moment their swords clash, Zelos realizes that this time, they duel not as ‘master’ and ‘student’, but two opposing forces, both unstoppable in their own right.
“Your disease—” Kratos speaks between the clanging of blades. “Should this mean what I think it does, I may have to kill you after all.”
A harsh grunt escapes the chosen’s throat, narrowly blocking a lightning-fast slash of a sabre. “No idea what you’re talking about, man.”
Kratos pauses, and as such, his former pupil does in perfect synchronicity, just as he was taught.
“Not a single rose has been cast from your lips. The only explanation is that your feelings have become reciprocated.”
Zelos’ eyes widen, only to find Kratos’ sword resting on the side of his neck. “I already gave you a warning about toying with Lloyd, did I not?”
A nimble skirt to the side and Zelos guards once more, but a tiny, bloodied mark remains where Kratos’ blade once lay. “Me? You couldn’t even tell him he was your son!” Zelos shouts, chuckling between each swing of his blade.
“And you caused undue harm by shattering his heart.”
The chosen charges toward Kratos with force, before finding himself with his own sword resting against the seraphim’s chest. He smirks, because in this position, he has all but won and conquered none other than the man who taught him the art of battle. “I guess we’re not so different then, eh?”
Kratos lets out a sharp ‘hmph’ and sheaths his sword. He says nothing, because there is nothing further to be said— instead, Zelos returns his blade to his side and walks away, searching for redemption in the form of a single, sparkling Aoinis ore.
.
It was nothing short of a miracle that Lloyd invited, even welcomed Zelos back into his arms at the speed he did; too fast, perhaps, but Zelos had not the heart or energy or reason to push him away. Betrayal is betrayal no matter how brutally analyzed, but Zelos helped them, he saved them, and maybe he could make-believe that was his plan from the start.
Still, somehow, in Lloyd’s tender embrace he eased his self-sabotage, because even if he didn’t believe in himself, someone did who loved him in return. Within Heimdall’s walls they are shielded from harm’s way, and Zelos’ tongue tastes like the only person he’s ever loved— tonight alone, he finds himself with arms entangled in Lloyd’s tracing butterfly kisses on his cheeks. For just one night, everything is perfect for the first fragile snapshot in his tragic life, and they loved each other in the silence between them.
“Hey, Zelos?” Lloyd breathes a warm pant against the other boy’s skin; maybe the heat wasn’t so bad after all.
Zelos smiles a grin that would leave an imprint on his face for the rest of his days. “What is it, babe?”
“After this, let’s go on a journey together, just you and me.”
He feels like he’s choking again, but this time, it’s not in direct causation from a flower blooming at this base of his throat. This time, it was from being tongue-tied in all the right ways, before an ever-clumsy “Yes” escaped his lips, just like one of the rose petals he once thought would take his life.
“And hey, Lloyd?” he asks, pulling his other half ever tighter before Lloyd exhales a hasty “Yeah?” in response.
“I hope you know, I love you.” For words that carried the weight of his entire aching heart, speaking them into existence was like nothing but gravity being lifted from his shoulders at last. He feels Lloyd’s smile against his bare skin, and this entire moment could have been created in the image of perfection.
“I—” Lloyd pauses before tasting the salt on Zelos’ lips.
“I love you too, Zelos,” he finally says, and before the world came crashing down tomorrow, there was simply one night of endless love. The chosen stares in the baby-pink morning sky, the colour of roses, and he doesn’t feel ill; everything in his body is warm like glow summer on his cheeks, and he never once thought he could feel this way or even think for a moment that he deserved to. His still-beating heart swells with hope, and he draws his glassy gaze back to the other person who’d ever thawed his insides back to lukewarm.
In Lloyd’s eyes, he found Eden.