Drabble: The Agelast
Title: The Agelast
Word Count: 485
Rating: G
Characters: Zexion, Ienzo
Spoilers: Possible minor spoilers for BbS
Notes: Written for challenge 252 - Stolen Away, in kh_drabble
The Agelast
Zexion is six feet away from Ienzo with an open book. It's six minutes into sunset and six nights until the end.
Zexion is cloaked in black, with slate hair that hides what might have once been a look of cunning but is now a look of default. The orange glow of dusk turns him pastier and ugly and inhuman. He's clearly out of place on a hot evening in Radiant Garden.
Ienzo barely fills his scientist's coat. With sleeves inches too long and a man's collar that swallows his neck, he looks like a customer thrown haphazardly off the dressmaker's stool. His shoulders are always a little hunched, from the heavy weight of the knowledge in the tomes he staggers to carry back to his reading table.
Ienzo might be reclusive and not a conventional scientist, and he might be an agelast, but he likes Aeleus.
What does that even mean? Agelast, Aeleus asks, when Ienzo tests the word.
An agelast is someone who never laughs, he says.
Ienzo likes Aeleus, because no one listens quite the way Aeleus does.
Aeleus doesn't deny, or try to find a route to a laugh, or confirm or acknowledge. He seems to understand that Ienzo doesn't always want a friend, nor does he want advice. Sometimes, he just wants to talk and expect nothing back, to bypass the disappointment. Sometimes, he wants his low, tiny voice to fall on deaf ears, the way he would whisper to his stuffed bear when it rained hard; and he'd feel better knowing that his problems had been voiced and at the very least, heard.
By now, Ienzo is used to the fleeting pattern that life adopts, of things coming and going. His life is a bit like the library he frequents, with choices and variety that are ultimately all on loan. His parents, security, purpose, the occasions he could lock his arms round Daddy's left leg - they've been returned-or swiped?-or stolen?
He doesn't even smile now. He's been robbed of that too, and it's gone wherever his childhood and his family are; instead, what barely fills the void - these volumes on loan that he doesn't want but keeps - is a gifted mind that isn't quite sound and the fractured, twisted acknowledgement that he'll only keep losing from here on.
-x-
Zexion has never been to Radiant Garden at all, and his Lexicon slams shut. It's perpetual night in the Castle That Never Was.
"Do you gain anything from that?" Lexaeus is quick to suspect and ask. He hasn't seen anything, but Zexion surmises that habits are hard to break, and Ienzo did like Aeleus more than anyone else.
"It's a reminder that I haven't quite lost everything," Zexion says in answer. He still has his memories, and by the way the statement falls on politely deaf ears and Lexaeus opts to say nothing, Zexion also knows there's still Aeleus.
Word Count: 485
Rating: G
Characters: Zexion, Ienzo
Spoilers: Possible minor spoilers for BbS
Notes: Written for challenge 252 - Stolen Away, in kh_drabble
The Agelast
Zexion is six feet away from Ienzo with an open book. It's six minutes into sunset and six nights until the end.
Zexion is cloaked in black, with slate hair that hides what might have once been a look of cunning but is now a look of default. The orange glow of dusk turns him pastier and ugly and inhuman. He's clearly out of place on a hot evening in Radiant Garden.
Ienzo barely fills his scientist's coat. With sleeves inches too long and a man's collar that swallows his neck, he looks like a customer thrown haphazardly off the dressmaker's stool. His shoulders are always a little hunched, from the heavy weight of the knowledge in the tomes he staggers to carry back to his reading table.
Ienzo might be reclusive and not a conventional scientist, and he might be an agelast, but he likes Aeleus.
What does that even mean? Agelast, Aeleus asks, when Ienzo tests the word.
An agelast is someone who never laughs, he says.
Ienzo likes Aeleus, because no one listens quite the way Aeleus does.
Aeleus doesn't deny, or try to find a route to a laugh, or confirm or acknowledge. He seems to understand that Ienzo doesn't always want a friend, nor does he want advice. Sometimes, he just wants to talk and expect nothing back, to bypass the disappointment. Sometimes, he wants his low, tiny voice to fall on deaf ears, the way he would whisper to his stuffed bear when it rained hard; and he'd feel better knowing that his problems had been voiced and at the very least, heard.
By now, Ienzo is used to the fleeting pattern that life adopts, of things coming and going. His life is a bit like the library he frequents, with choices and variety that are ultimately all on loan. His parents, security, purpose, the occasions he could lock his arms round Daddy's left leg - they've been returned-or swiped?-or stolen?
He doesn't even smile now. He's been robbed of that too, and it's gone wherever his childhood and his family are; instead, what barely fills the void - these volumes on loan that he doesn't want but keeps - is a gifted mind that isn't quite sound and the fractured, twisted acknowledgement that he'll only keep losing from here on.
-x-
Zexion has never been to Radiant Garden at all, and his Lexicon slams shut. It's perpetual night in the Castle That Never Was.
"Do you gain anything from that?" Lexaeus is quick to suspect and ask. He hasn't seen anything, but Zexion surmises that habits are hard to break, and Ienzo did like Aeleus more than anyone else.
"It's a reminder that I haven't quite lost everything," Zexion says in answer. He still has his memories, and by the way the statement falls on politely deaf ears and Lexaeus opts to say nothing, Zexion also knows there's still Aeleus.