Chapter Text
Luck's feelings, or the often rumored lack thereof, were about as perpetual as the sky was blue and the grass was green.
Sometimes it's an arguable debate, only seasonally and in passing—most of the time, the singularly faceted mindset was indisputable, lest you were colorblind and couldn't tell the difference between greens and blues, or plainly couldn't see them at all.
It was a simple truth. An unchangeable fact. An immutable law. It was one he was accustomed to, the same way he had familiarized himself with the backs of his palms and the lightning that coursed itself through his veins. These were all three staples of his existence, things that defined him himself; his magic and hands sorely filled in the places his emotions lacked.
So when that unspoken cycle was broken, when the teetering feeling of something else, something more began to linger, he didn't exactly know what to do or think of it. This was unknown territory, a steep, spacious canyon to a realm of which he had never once stepped foot into. Maybe small glances into the depths, yes—but never once had he plunged like he felt he was doomed to now.
Standing on that edge, on that cliff, and staring over at the dark uncertainty below his feet, he found himself feeling what he could best describe as confused.
Like, really confused. Super ultra mega confused. Unspeakably, irreparably, irremediably confused.
He had a dilemma, and he didn't know the right answer.
It wasn't something he could just shake off. Not a simple problem with an even simpler solution. Not something he could solve with a sharp laugh or his own two fists. Not even something he could half-heartedly scour through books in the library for an answer to.
It was a big, tough problem, like the kind you spent an entire thirty minutes of a one hour mathematics test on. But this time, the numbers weren't numbers, and the word problem probably wasn't even words, and Luck never really was all that good at math in the first place.
It was just a problem. In its smallest, most truthful form—a problem. A question that needed an answer. A solution.
Luck didn't have one.
He wracked his brain a dozen times over, but it always came up empty. Scarce. Desolate. There wasn't a basic response to it, no answer that required the bare, blunt logic Luck always relied on.
No, this was so much more than that. It was complicated, a string tied into a dozen knots; woven into a complex pattern he'd no hope of unwinding.
And the source of it? The cause for all the fuss in his brain, all the splices and loops in the thread?
It was that living, beating organ in his chest. The thing that constantly kept thump, thump, thump-ing, including when it was too loud or too bold or too fast, or when Luck swore up and down he wanted it to quit—
His heart.
Or, more broadly, his chest.
Mostly his chest, because the whole area liked to feel all funny sometimes. Fuzzy and strange, vacant but not entirely unfulfilled, like his heart had been torn out and was floating up, up, up into the sky and clouds above. He was left to scramble after the thing, making leaps and bounds to grab hold of it, but that recovery wasn't always necessarily the smoothest.
When his chest most liked to soar like a broken, one-winged albatross riding on a gust of wind was when those dumb, sorta sharp teeth glared at him, lips curved into a bright and large smirk. When stupid, kind of vibrant purple sunglasses caught the sun just right, and obscured the grey-tinted somewhat thin eyes beneath them with a shine. When the familiar flutter of flickering fire appeared across the horizonal line, and Luck couldn't help but let his head perk up and widen his smile for a reason he couldn't be sure of. When the blond lunged himself at his friend the second the base door reopened, throwing them both to the ground, fist sparking wildly with electric blue as he declared he wanted a spar right then and there.
And the second it happens, the mere moment his chest dares to respond to whatever tidbit of praise or lighthearted banter or casual affection he's offered, his limbs move before he even has the chance to think otherwise. Punches, kicks, hits, slaps, zaps, sparks—a dozen little movements, all done in an impulsive nudge that Luck didn't get. Didn't understand. Couldn't even comprehend.
Maybe he should. Maybe he was meant to understand, but didn't, because he was him. It all felt muddy. Run-down and aqueous, like watercolor paints all mixed together. Frequently it was distant, hard to grasp onto; sand running through his fingers, sprinkling downward, scattering and blowing away with the wind.
He'd made brittle amends with it. With the not knowing, and he'd done so when he was still little. It'd always been a problem, always been a fickle issue that Luck just didn't pay attention to; didn't fully care or want to. He preferred busying himself with tasks that did have a kind of sense behind them, that didn't rely on the capricious demands of a heart that apparently didn't work right. Emptiness was a familiarity, was what Luck had come to know, even when others carried a bitter distaste or even fear for it. Feeling anything but hollow was... a new, twisted amenity.
From his earliest memories, Luck's chest had carried that weight; a led that dwelled in his chest and pressed down on his ribs. He'd smiled, not because he definitively felt happy, but because it was what his face chose to express.
He remembers his mother wasn't a very happy person.
Never was, not really.
Sometimes she acted she was, but those moments were fleeting, few and far in-between. Smiles, giggles, and lullabies; hugs, kisses to the forehead, and gentle brushes to his hair. Those were moments Luck cherished the most, tried to stow away in a mental cabinet of "this is what love is like." He'd learned love was a conditional act, and it intensified this burden of wrongness and vacancy when pulled away; it was something to be earned, through independence and winning. Winning, because not only did it make her happy, but it proved him as strong. Special, like she'd told him. Who was to love him if he couldn't be strong? Couldn't win? She'd been the only one capable of it, because he was different. Special.
It contrasted sickeningly with her bad days.
The days spent crying, occasionally yelling or snapping. The days where love became a foreign concept altogether. There were no lullabies sang those afternoons, no warm arms wrapped around him. He was left to stand in the nauseating cold, in a nigh infinite silence that her sobs echoed through. Those days were ones Luck would balance his feet just right, raising the rounded balls of his heels, tiptoeing carefully as to ensure the floorboards wouldn't creak beneath him. Sometimes, on especially poor days, fights proved to be for naught; bloodied and bruised, without a nurturing hand to take care of him. Not a smile, not a praise or a murmured validation—just him, the fading rush of adrenaline, and the intimately known aching in his bones.
Her bad days were frequent. More so than her good ones. Luck figured that was okay, because she loved him—or she wanted to, tried to. Her love was making him food in the mornings, but she couldn't always do that because she'd not get out of bed. It was making sure he had clothes he could wear, even if they were a mite too big for his frame and obviously pawned or a hand-me-down. It was loving Luck, taking care of him, when no one else could, because no one else liked a boy who wasn't like everybody else.
Of course there'd been the magic—he had a lot of it. Maybe too much of it. Little hands clamping down on blond locks, heavy breathing and wanting to tear, scratch, turn it off, anything to make the buzzing under his skin stop, to make the discharge of erratic aquamarine sparks across hands and arms quit it, because it felt profuse. Everything was too much, but also not enough; too big and too small; too far and out of reach, yet too close and all-consuming.
But, primarily, there had been him. Just him. Him and his smile, his too-wide eyes—expressions that were otherwise blank, if not for the subconscious curve of his lips.
His mother didn't like that curve much. Didn't like its odd permanence, the never-ending grin that her son wouldn't rid of. His lack of anything but worried her. Stressed her out, as she'd say. She'd cry, and cry, and cry, with fat, massive globs of tears staining soft cheeks, and sometimes Luck would be pulled in real close, held in her arms as she wondered why her son wasn't like other kids. Why he wasn't, and couldn't be normal.
Luck wondered that sometimes, too.
Not a whole lot, but every then and again. Logically, when his mother cried and wailed over his one fatal flaw, he knew he should feel something. Should be upset, or share that same stress, or sob just the same. Maybe that was the reason his mom cried in the first place. She could hit him—a stinging, lingering slap across the face—and demand a reaction, and still, he'd look up at her, face unchanging and eyes blank as ever.
It didn't change, as much as she tried. Broken toys tossed against the imaginary rampart with shouts, favorite objects thrown out or otherwise tarnished, praise and scold separated only by a breath—so many attempts to instigate, to get Luck to feel something, anything; to cry, or to be angry with her, or to show some indication of emotional response.
Not once did it happen, her excessive efforts only proven futile.
He'd just sit in his room, pull his legs to his chest, wrap his arms around himself and nestle his cheek atop his knees. Didn't shed a tear, or blink an eye, just stared at the wall or ceiling, befriending the ghost that was his own apathy. And when she'd cry, he stayed that way.
He hadn't fully understood he was meant to react, to express, to feel. Didn't entirely understand that the fact he didn't was an abnormality and oddity, and people often didn't like the concept of differences, or anything that opposed their own perception of how things are designed to work. He merely accepted that he was different. Special. Not broken, never broken, because breaking meant he couldn't be useful, but Luck was. He was the good luck charm of his mom's life, even if he stressed her out a lot. He could make her smile. Make her happy.
Luck liked making her smile. It made the abyss within his own chest feel just a tad smaller, and good days—the days he made happen—meant good breakfasts and unmatted hair. It meant her getting out of bed, patting his head, reading him fairy tales, or going on a walk together, her hand engulfing his tiny one. It meant love. He made sure to smile just a little bigger on good days.
He kept fighting, too. Wandered into a local tavern more than once, brawled countless adults and won. He kept doing it, time and time again, because that was love. Doing that for her was love. Winning her affection was love. Caring about each other, in their really roundabout way, was love. Fighting made him feel a semblance of something. Filled in the empty space within with throbbing pain and silent promises of love, and supplied an adrenaline rush that made his heart pound rampantly in his chest.
The blond hadn't cared when the eyes of others began to stray away from him, when whispers began to follow him down the halls of school or the stone pathways of Yvon. Not one bit. Partly because why would he? — and primarily because he hadn't needed anyone but his mother. He was content with her, with the love she gave, as much as it came and went. If others grew to be afraid of him and his unchanging face, flinched when he raised a hand or moved a little too fast, he'd try not to mind it; remind himself she's the only one he needs. The only one who could possibly look at him with adoration, the only one who would ever help him, and the rest of the world mattered not.
His world was small, and that was okay.
And then, one day, his world was gone.
Just suddenly, abruptly. No cause, no rhyme or reason; she'd just gone still. Head tilted peacefully to the side, blonde bangs cascading across her face, slumped sitting upward in her favorite chair by the window. It was almost surreal.
He'd cried for what felt like the first time, and a part of him couldn't pick up on why he was. His chest ached, and the hole in it turned painful, wretched with agony, like a knife had been directly lodged into his heart. It was an insatiable longing, an unfillable sinkhole, but even it felt distant, like this sensation could dissipate at a moment's notice.
When it did eventually fade, he felt emptier than he had once before. He didn't stop fighting, moving, not for a waking moment, because he came to crave the pounding of his chest; allowed it to drown out that suffocating emptiness. He came to need the challenge, the battle, and the consequential pain, and he didn't even protest against it. They were addictive sensations, and he took a sense of solace in the reminders that he was alive and capable of feeling. It was the only way he found a connection between the overbearing physical and the hollow internal.
So, why?
Why did his heart now race the same way it did after a battle to the death, just because his best friend gave him a grin? Why were things beginning to bubble up within, threatening to fistfight the void that was his own perception of the word 'feelings'? Why was the instinctual, perpetual reaction of smiling and laughing singeing itself at the edges?
Why now, after years of instigation and missing fragments, were things starting to reach him in breaths and spurts?
It didn't make sense.
It hadn't made sense when tears burned in his eyes, traveled down his face, and the worry—the nonsensical thing that was worry—that he'd done bad and would be left or rejected consumed him. Didn't make sense when his body lit up with a fuzzy feeling the moment Asta declared him a friend, a sparkle he'd lost long ago reigniting in the pit. Didn't make sense when his face started growing warm with bountiful laughter, when his eyes crinkled with a genuine amusement, when his cheeks and ears burned while his heart did an awkward flutter, all because Magna'd wrapped his arm around his shoulder.
He didn't know what it was.
It wasn't pain, wasn't rushing adrenaline, wasn't a sore bruise. It was just a feeling.
A feeling.
A distant one, hard to decipher and make heads or tails of, but a feeling. One that went beyond plainly physical. One that festered itself directly in his heart, not just his chest or his face.
But what was it? Why was it so complicated? So unearthed and unfounded?
It was still the same dilemma. Still the same uncertainty. The distance between himself and the concept of emotions remained unchanged, except now they were there. It was as if they were just out of reach, fingertips ghosting over the unidentifiable puddled mess.
Luck just couldn't find the definitions for them; couldn't identify them, or discern the differences between most of them.
So, with the same old smile that'd grown a tad worn around the edges, he sighed. Turquoise eyes watched lightning dance across the back of his palm, held firmly in above him, and he sank into the feeling of the duvet below him. He focused on the undeniably real and uncomplicated sensory; the stillness of the air, the soft fabric of his tunic, the comforter of the bed, the familiarity of all the various kinds of mana that weaved itself through-out the base.
He closed his hand—slowly, carefully—and the electricity diffused, fizzled out with little sound. He moved to sit up, then dangled his legs over the end of the bed, tapped his heel thrice against the wooden frame. The stillness and the quiet thud against his foot grounded him, reminded him this was reality, and he relished in that sensation momentarily.
It was confusing, that's for sure.
He could spend all day thinking, running the same memories in his head over and over, and ponder the thousands of possibilities and explanations in his head. He could just wonder, over and over, why he was the way he is and what he was experiencing. He could recite the names and faces of every person in his life, and speculate why it was they expressed so many emotions; why they felt them fully, and why he did not.
But Luck wasn't one for thinking so much. He already felt fried enough, like his brain didn't want to fully grasp at the seams of what was. He needn't dwell on the past, or ask questions that just made his head too noisy and loud.
He stood with a bounce, stretched out his back, rocked his head from side-to-side to unstiffen his neck. He shifted weight from one foot from another, kicked them both a few times, shook his arms about; readied himself for another day of fighting, fun, and facetious banter that led to loud laughter.
The problem wouldn't just go away in his ignorance. They never did, as much as he tried to will them to. But it was something he could push behind him, just temporarily, and let exist in the background. He'd let his search for the answer take second priority behind getting through the day, because that's what was needed of him—and was also what he found a heck of a lot more entertaining.
Besides, if he went to the direct source of his troubles, maybe it'd give him some trace of an idea of what these feelings were. Even just the thought of seeing them, seeing him, made the light, feathery thing appear in his upper torso, right beneath his robe.
It was warm, and a part of him—the part that wasn't so inherently confused by the meaning of it—wanted to just leap off the cliff and let it consume him entirely.
Though, for now, he'd dance across the edge between. He'd watch from the sideline as it grew more, lingered longer, and he'd learn to maybe accept it. Maybe, when that day came, he'd figure out what it meant. Maybe he'd find the words to explain what it was.
Luck pushed open the door to his room, stepped out into the hallway, heard the distant loud chatter of his squadmates. He smiled.
For now, it didn't have a precise definition; no conclusive answer, no solution to it. He didn't know why he smiled at the sound, didn't know why it made him feel like he was so close levitating.
But, for now, he'd wear that grin regardless. He'd run down that hall, toss himself into the conversation with ease, and he'd let that feeling dwell in his chest; unrecognizable and unnamed.
It didn't matter if he didn't yet know the reason behind it—he'd just smile anyways.