Chapter Text
The morning arrived the way all mornings did for Meliodas. It was without ceremony, without weight, without any acknowledgment of what the day intended to take from him. No thoughts. Just movement.
He was awake by seven. Dressed by seven-fifteen. Breakfast was eaten at seven-thirty and the door closed behind him at seven-forty-five, leaving him to walk the familiar path to Liones High in the pale quiet before the rest of the world fully woke. It was a routine that asked nothing of him and gave nothing back. Which was, he had come to understand, the point. The less he had to think, the less he felt. The less he felt, the easier it was to keep moving.
For any other fifteen-year-old, calling the first day of sophomore year “life-changing” would be embarrassingly dramatic. Meliodas had never had the luxury of exaggeration. Not about that.
Today, he would lose himself.
The thought arrived flatly, as most of his thoughts did. Not as a fear, not as grief, but as fact. The Signing was tonight. And whatever version of Meliodas existed right now, walking up the stone steps of the school with his bag hanging low off one shoulder and his eyes fixed somewhere past the ground, would not be the version that walked away. The story had always been there, waiting, written long before he was born by people who had never met him and would never have to live as him. It simply needed his name to begin.
He was supposed to be the villain.
He had always known this. He had been told so since before he could understand what the word meant. But knowing something and arriving at it were, he was learning, entirely different things.
The doors groaned as he pushed them open. Grabbing attention.
The shift was immediate. Something in the air changed when he entered a room, a tension that moved like electricity through a wire, subtle and dangerous, felt before it was seen. His magic type was distinct in the way a thunderstorm was distinct: unmistakable, and not the kind of thing people wanted to be caught near. Heads turned. Eyes followed.
He had three minutes before his first class. He used approximately one of them before the shoving started.
Three boys- he knew their faces well enough by now to have stopped bothering to learn their names- caught him before he was halfway down the hall. One grabbed the back of his shirt and drove him into a locker with enough force that the metal rang.
“Did you think a new year meant anything?”
The one in front spoke like he was explaining something simple. Condescending. Smug.
“You’re still what you are. Your father’s son. Your brother’s blood.”
He reached into his jacket pocket.
“Especially after tonight.”
The switchblade caught the hallway light as it opened. Silver. Clean. It was not the first time Meliodas had seen it.
He didn’t flinch. He was aware, in some detached and clinical way, that this should have frightened him. He watched the boy’s face instead, saw the frustration tightening around his eyes when he found nothing to react to. No struggle. No plea. Just Meliodas, breathing evenly, eyes in the middle distance, body held still in someone else’s grip. The boy’s lips pressed into a firm line. He was getting angrier for every second nothing new happened.
“Maybe I should just deal with you now… Before you sign. Before you turn into whatever your brother became.”
Estarossa.
His mind filled in the name like a whisper. A sigh in the back of his mind. Air leaving something squeezed tight.
Meliodas said nothing.
The blade moved anyway- once across his left forearm, twice, then the same on his right. Even, deliberate, strokes. He held himself very still through it, the way he had learned to hold himself still through a great many things. The pain was sharp and immediate and then it was background noise.
The grip released. The group stepped back, already losing interest.
“I’ll let you live.”
The boy said, folding the blade closed. His tone was easy. As if he truly had made a decision. Could have made a different one at any point.
“The princess and her prince will be more than enough to handle you. And watching that?”
He smiled. It was not kind. But it was definitely pleased.
“Will be way more entertaining than this.”
Then they were gone, swept along by the current of students moving through the hall, as if the last ninety seconds had not happened at all.
Meliodas stayed where he was.
The bell was screaming somewhere overhead, but he didn’t move. The shaking had started the way it always started, not from pain but from the words, from the image they left behind of his brother on the day everything went wrong, the count of people hurt and killed scrolling through his mind like figures on a ledger. He pressed his back flat against the locker and breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth and tried very hard not to finish the thought.
You won’t feel any of it, after tonight. That’s the mercy of it. The story will carry you. You won’t be responsible for what the story requires — you’ll simply be what you were always supposed to be. What you were built to be.
The thought was familiar enough to be almost comforting. Almost.
His stomach didn’t settle the way it usually did when he let himself believe it. Something sat wrong beneath his ribs, heavy and unnamed, and it stayed there even as the shaking faded and he carefully rolled both sleeves down over his arms and picked his bag up from the floor.
He was five minutes late to his first class.
The door announced him before he could announce himself.
Mr. Cusack looked up from the front of the room with the particular expression he reserved for Meliodas, not rage, exactly, but something more studied than that. Satisfaction, perhaps. The quiet pleasure of a man who has always suspected the worst of someone and is never given reason to revise the opinion.
“How generous of you to join us.”
He addressed the room, not Meliodas. His eyes never met the boy’s.
“I suppose when you’re signing tonight, regular punctuality starts to feel beneath you.”
The class laughed. Someone threw a balled-up piece of paper that bounced off the side of Meliodas’s head. He didn’t look up.
“Sit down, demon. We’ll discuss your tardiness after class.”
He sat. More things were thrown. He ignored them all and fixed his eyes on the surface of his desk, and waited for the period to begin in earnest.
“Today we discuss The Signing. Specifically: why it matters. Not simply that it matters- any of you could recite that much from memory- but why.”
He paused, scanning the room.
“I’ll take a few answers before I give you mine. Anyone?”
A girl near the front raised her hand and explained what her mother had told her- that freshman year was preparation, that the Signing marked the point at which roles became real, that the years after were meant for learning to live inside them.
Mr. Cusack nodded.
“She’s right. But that still doesn’t answer the fundamental question.”
No one else offered anything. Meliodas watched the grain of the desk.
“Fine. Let me show you.”
He straightened, and when he spoke, his voice took on the cadence of something rehearsed. Not because the story was false but because it was very old, and had been told many times before.
“Long ago, there was no order. Good would rise for a century and then collapse in a season. Evil would burn everything to the ground and then exhaust itself against the ash. The two forces rose and fell against each other without rhythm, without end- and between those extremes, people suffered. When good reigned unchallenged for too long, complacency set in. Advancements stopped. Skills were lost. People forgot how to survive hardship because hardship had become theoretical. That forgetting was always what allowed evil to rise again, hungrier than before, and the cycle would begin once more.”
The room was hushed. It was hard to tell if it was from engagement, or simply the wash of a familiar recital, waiting for its end.
“A council of magic users saw this and understood what was needed. Not peace. Not victory. Balance. They created the Book of Fate, and they bound every soul they could reach to it — bound their stories, their roles, their purposes. Evil would destroy; good would repair. The tension between them would be permanent, intentional, and controlled. When someone with a bound story had children, the story passed down. If a bloodline ended without an heir, that story faded from the book entirely. And the more stories that faded… the more unbalanced things became. If the scales tipped too far in either direction, the book would begin to collapse. And without the book, the world would return to the chaos that made it necessary in the first place.”
Meliodas stared at the desk. He had heard this story in various forms his entire life. He had never found it comforting back then, and he did not find it comforting now.
The bell cut across whatever questions were forming. Mr. Cusack outlined the day’s adjusted schedule- power level measurements in the gym before Signing to compare with levels after, then Dr. Hendrickson for biology, then an early lunch, then assembly- and the class moved toward the door in a single restless wave.
The wave stopped.
The door at the far end of the hallway had opened, and Elizabeth Liones stood in the frame of it.
She was an hour late. She was met with applause.
Meliodas heard it before he saw it- the swell of voices shifting from movement noise to something warmer, more deliberate. People called her name. People offered to carry her bag. Someone said she was flawless. Someone else agreed. The crowd that had parted to let him through the way people parted for something they didn’t want to touch now pressed eagerly toward her, competing for the privilege of being noticed.
He watched for exactly one moment before he looked away.
The sting in his chest was difficult to name. He had tried before and given up. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly- or if it was, it was a broken kind, the kind that understood its own futility too clearly to sustain itself. It was something quieter. The specific loneliness of watching a room full of people love someone, and understanding, with perfect clarity, why that room would never extend the same toward you. Not because of anything you had done, but because of what you were going to do. What you had been written to do before you were born.
Of course they love her. Of course they fear you. This is how it’s supposed to work. The only thing that’s wrong is that you still care about the difference.
He turned and walked to his next class before he was late a second time.
000
The cafeteria was loud in the way school cafeterias were always loud- a wall of overlapping conversations and scraping chairs and laughter that assumed it had the right to take up space. Meliodas moved through it quietly, tray in hand, and found his usual table in the corner by the bathroom. Unoccupied, as always, on account of its broken leg and its proximity to something nobody wanted to smell during a meal.
He sat down and looked at what he had: mashed Jack-beans, kraken meat, and a small cup of apple pudding from the siren-sweets shop. A celebration, presumably, for the occasion. He started with the pudding. It would go down easy, and the smooth texture was one of the few things he could actually feel on his tongue anymore.
He didn’t get further than three bites before someone sat down across from him.
He looked up.
Elizabeth Liones settled into the seat with the same easy grace she brought to everything. Behind her, the cafeteria performed its distress in real time.
“Princess! You don’t have to sit there-”
“Come sit with us instead!”
“Why would you-”
She waved it off without looking at them. Her eyes were on Meliodas. He couldn’t read her expression. Which was odd. There normally wasn’t a lot of diversity in the expressions directed his way. Certainly nothing new.
“Hello.”
Her voice was sweet in the way it always was. Syrupy, with a lilt he couldn’t replicate if he tried. Every word had that same cadence. Not that he’d spent time noticing.
He had not prepared for this. He put the spoon down.
“…Hello.”
The crowd interpreted this as rudeness. Someone muttered that he wasn’t even using her title. Someone else called him a freak. He felt heat crawl up the back of his neck and tried to find the appropriate thing to say- something that would correct the mistake without making it worse- and couldn’t.
“I mean… your highness. Sorry. I don’t-”
“Don’t worry about honorifics.”
Her voice was smooth, unhurried. She didn’t sound offended in the slightest. Her expression didn’t change. There was a small smile on her lips. Barely there. It would be more noticeable if it wasn’t.
“Such things would be strange, given what you’re going to be.”
She folded her hands on the table, leaned forward slightly, posture still precise. She looked ready to propose a business deal.
“I came to thank you.”
He stared at her.
“Thank me.”
It left him as something flat. No inflection to make it seem like a question. The idea was so absurd, he honestly couldn’t really picture it as a question. As anything to probe at. It was just… wrong.
“For being what you are. For being what you’re destined to be.”
Her voice held genuine warmth, as though she were delivering a compliment.
“Without a villain, there’s no story for a hero. Without you, my role is incomplete. So I wanted to acknowledge that. Even someone like you deserves to know that what they do matters.”
The crowd around them murmured appreciatively. How merciful. How kind. Our future queen.
Meliodas was very still. There was a rush in his ears. The first sign of the something burrowed underneath his skin.
The anger came the way it always came- not as heat but as pressure, something building against the inside of his ribs, looking for the seam where it could escape. Words were already forming. Words about what it meant to thank someone for the worst thing that would ever happen to them. Words about what it cost to be the balance she benefited from. Words about the fact that she had walked into a room an hour late and been celebrated, and he had walked in five minutes late after being cut open in the hallway and been punished, and she did not see and would never be asked to see the difference between those two things.
Don’t. It doesn’t matter. None of what you feel matters. After tonight you won’t feel it anyway.
He swallowed all of it. It went down heavy. He didn’t feel like eating anymore. Had no space for it.
When he spoke, his voice had nothing in it. The words were what he figured he should say, in a moment like this.
“Thank you for your consideration, princess. I’m honored to do my part.”
Her smile twitched into something slightly bigger, and she stood. Her hands smoothed out her dress skirt, getting rid of imaginary wrinkles or crumbs. It seemed compulsive.
“No need for such things. I look forward to seeing you at the ceremony. Goodbye, Meliodas.”
She left. The crowd that had gathered around her pulled away with her like a tide.
Meliodas looked down at his hands. There were small crescents in his palms from his fingernails. He hadn’t noticed making them.
He sat there for a while. He didn’t finish eating.
000
The noise from the crowd reached backstage before anything else did.
Meliodas stood in the wings with the other students set to sign, listening to the sound of hundreds of people gathered beyond the curtain. Family members, mostly. People who had come to watch the torch pass. There were cheers whenever someone’s name was announced, brief and celebratory, punctuating the low roar of anticipation like stones thrown into water.
No one had come for him.
His father was gone- sealed away years ago in his final confrontation with the forces of good, the story he’d inherited concluded at last. His brothers: Estarossa, the elder, detained after what happened at his own Signing, the day that had given every bully in this school their favorite piece of ammunition against Meliodas. And Zeldris… Zeldris had simply left. One month after Estarossa’s ceremony, there had been an empty bedroom and no explanation, and Meliodas had not seen him since he was eight years old.
He was fifteen now. He had not told anyone how much he still thought about that.
You were never meant to live the life you’ve been living. It was never yours. The book will correct it- correct you- into what you were always supposed to be. Your father’s legacy. Your brother’s path. The version of you the story was written for. That version won’t stand here feeling like this. That version won’t feel anything at all.
He had always found comfort in that, before. The promise of numbness as mercy.
He wasn’t sure, standing here now, whether he still believed it. Maybe he never had, and was tired of pretending otherwise.
One of the teachers moved through the wings, organizing the order of students. The ceremony was about to begin. Meliodas watched the curtain from where he stood- the way the light bled through the edges of it, gold and warm from the stage- and tried to name what he was feeling. He hadn’t been taught words for most of what he felt. He had been taught that feelings were temporary, that the story would resolve them, that any discomfort he carried now was simply the weight of a role not yet inhabited.
But what if inhabiting it didn’t resolve anything? What if the version of himself that walked off the stage tonight was not a fixed version, but a broken one- broken in the same way his brother had broken, beyond any repair?
It doesn’t matter what you want. The book doesn’t ask. Sign, and become what you were written to be. Don’t, and the balance suffers. Other people suffer. You already know this. You’ve always known this.
He did know this.
He also knew that knowing something and being at peace with it were entirely different things, and that no amount of being told so had ever managed to collapse the distance between them.
The teacher called his name. He was being organized.
He took a breath- slow, deliberate, the kind that was less about oxygen and more about reminding himself that he was still, for a few more minutes, exactly who he had always been- and stepped toward the stage.