Legend of Ransera

...continued from So...

Well, fuck.

Aurin froze, eyes lost in a thousand-yard stare. In his mind, he relived their meeting and then many high and low points in their friendship. That first few hours had been a template of sorts, though it didn't always start with Arry pushing a boundary — then the boundary of personal property. It did usually end in a fight. Usually, Aurin became vicious. Now, perhaps, he was trying to break that cycle.

A hundred hurtful things came to mind to say. He wouldn't need his trick to make Arry feel worse than garbage. And he was angry or, at least, anger was part of his reaction to the situation. Why did Arry want more than he could give? Why wasn't what he gave enough? He didn't ask for much. At least, he didn't think he did. Did he think he was in love with Aurin? As if that were possible. Did he think they were going to get married and move into a bigger house and adopt pets and children together?

And Aurin would admit to being a shitty person, but he had tried to be up front with that. With Arry it was always don't say what you want and then wait until he started getting catty to find out what had flown up his skirts this time. It was like he thrived on dramatic displays, as if he wanted to live on a theatrical stage. But Aurin didn't want to. He wanted his spartan safehouse with bars on the window and a lock on the door. He wanted to bullshit with people in the Cabaret and then set that role aside and go back to the darkness.

Arry's words were cutting, but he didn't flinch. Maybe it was all in his head. Sometimes he thought he was properly mad.

"All right," he said finally, his voice devoid of emotion. His eyes fell to the pie Arry hadn't wanted and he began to dig in.

The bad man ate his food in silence for a while because he didn't know what to think, what to say, or what to do. Whatever had tugged at him in Antiris, he had tried to follow through on. He offered escape and refuge. It took Arry a while to take him up on it, but he had given him that. Arry wanted a life on the stage, and he helped him get that, even now encouraging him toward grander stages if that was his ambition.

He ate his food because maybe if he swallowed enough, the ache at the back of his throat would go down, too. When it became clear that wasn't going to work, he set his fork down. He looked up. His eyes were a little bit haunted, a little bit hollow. And he still didn't know how to proceed, but he had to do something.

Of course, he had warned him. In the end, it didn't matter. He tried to show him that he cared with actions, with words of encouragement. Romance wasn't really a thing he felt; not with Arry, not with Torin, not with anyone. Perhaps parts of him were absent or atrophied.

"You do what you have to do to be happy," he said, his voice strained. "I'll stand by what I said."

It wasn't what Arry wanted to hear, but then Arry hadn't really articulated what he wanted. It had taken the appearance of someone else on the scene to rile him up, someone who wasn't going to replace him, at least as far as Aurin was concerned. But he didn't know how to communicate that clearly, it seemed. They were apples and oranges insofar as he saw things.

Arry knew him too well. It was like going to the theater. If one sat too close, it ruined the illusion.

"I don't want to be free of you," he said quickly. There was a hint of exasperation, or perhaps it was desperation masquerading as exasperation. He looked up, then down at his food again.

"I don't really do happy... but it sounds like you might get there someday. I hope so."

Aurin didn't really know how that all worked. His parents hadn't been happy. His childhood hadn't been happy. There was no real understanding of this nirvana stories and songs talked about, no blueprint or map. But other people seemed to find it given the right circumstances. They found a job they liked, a person they loved, or some sort of order for their lives and it just seemed to happen. He had seen it. A courtesan would marry and their life would change into something they wanted it to look like more than it already did. He had never felt that way about a person. The closest hint of that had been poisoned, weaponized against him, a long time ago and far away from here. He had come what felt like a million miles to try to keep himself, but all he could do was try.

He was self-aware enough to know, to have known even when they first met, that saving Arry from Antiris was, on some level, an attempt to save himself from what he had survived. It had seemed as though Arry still had a chance at some kind of normalcy. Perhaps not, but that had always been his hope. He wasn't good at talking about it, obviously. But he had offered a foundation to build on, support, and such. Perhaps, like a father, his goal had been for Arry to thrive and move on, to survive him.

"I thought everything was all right."

Aurin listened, of course. He ate his food for something to do, for something to focus on while he listened. It wasn't so much that he was worried he would be overwhelmed in public, but rather that negative feelings would transmute into anger and he would unleash that upon Arry. But as he listened, he was mesmerized. It wasn't that he was weak-willed, but perhaps because he trusted the elf more than just about anyone else in the world. Perhaps because he was listening to what Arry said, hoping he would offer words that led to a return to their status quo that it circumvented his critical mind.

Arry was right. Had he ever actually tried to be happy? He had only allowed himself a diet of crumbs in order to protect himself from disappointment and harm. Everything he tried to do, nothing seemed to turn out right. He was even cocking up his grand rescue of poor Arry of Antiris.

He took Arry's hand. Closing his eyes, he brought it up to his cheek and just held it there for a moment while he inhaled gently through his nose and felt some of his tensions release.

"I've tried to make Kalzasi better for you than Antiris was," he murmured. "I'm not much of a white knight, but I've tried to be a rung on your ladder. I just wanted to give you some space and time and opportunities so you could start writing your own future without worrying about where your next meal was coming from. I..."

Aurin opened his eyes. They shone. But whatever latent sense his rune gave him told him that something was off, and when he looked more closely, he could see Arry arrayed in power. He blinked, freezing.

"What...?"

The ginger's mind wanted to go back to the moment before when Arry's voice took on a lulling timbre and painted a world more perfect than this one, where he was Arry's hero instead of the man who had groomed him for the sex trade, where there were no jealousies because they were content where they stood with each other, where he was more than the collected weight of his sins. But another part of his mind struggled to stay in the stark reality where his care was insufficient, where Arry was jealous, and where his wrist had bloomed with grasping tentacles like some creature from the depth of the seas wrought in the aether.

Aurin closed his eyes. Hooding one of his senses allowed him to focus on the arcane one.

"A trick?" he asked, faltering. His voice was off-kilter with a seed of bitterness that had not yet taken root, but would. His eyes opened, and for a moment, before his walls came back up, his hurt was naked. "You're... You would use a trick on me? Now? Like this?"

He had Arry's wrist in his hand still, and his grip tightened, bringing it down so he could fumble at his cuff to find the rune that had to be behind the little star of power that had blazed there. It might occur to him later that this was a similar picture to their first meeting when he caught the urchin nearly grown to manhood picking his pocket, only this time, it wasn't Aurin using the trick to reach in and pull out secrets to manipulate him into stillness.

It didn't occur to him yet that perhaps the pattern of their relationship had been encapsulated in that first meeting and they were just playing out variations of it now.