capeandcowllogs | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

WHO: Look at the tags
WHERE: Starting at ~~his~~ ~~her~~ ~~their place~~ the MAC, around town, out of town, the surface of the sun
WHEN: Sometime after this but before this
WARNINGS: no
WHAT: Zelgadis takes some advice.
WORDS: yes

It was afternoon; shining was the sun, cold was the air, and doing nothing in particular was Terra, sitting by a closed window. Her expression and mood were not easy to read, especially turned toward the glass as she was, which at the very least meant she was neither bubbling over with joy nor bawling her eyes out for sorrow. Presently, she felt--well, if you asked her, Terra wouldn't be able to answer, either. Emotions were a complicated subject.

So for now, she was focused halfway between herself and the mundane action of a couple laughing teenagers pretending to be giant robots and chasing pigeons.

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It wasn't completely the way Zelgadis had pictured the place, but was forgivable enough if he could find some kind of alternative. The loud snap of plastic in a brief breeze was a continual reminder that they couldn't just amble on aimlessly for too long...The ice cream would melt.

"Here," he said after a time. Fallen trees were as good as anything, and he could hear water not far away. He shrugged off the bag and sat, leaning down and fishing through it.

Terra still hadn't learned what the hell Zelgadis had in that bag. So while he was rifling through it, Terra went to sit as well, not bothering to hide her curiosity, leaning his way and trying to catch a peek of what was inside.

One carton of chocolate, as Abby had recommended, was slowly thawing, dripping wet because of it. A handful of spoons, individually wrapped, ganked out of the basket they'd been in at that convenience store. They were supposed to be for soup-buyers, but what did he know of that. He pulled one out and held it out for her without looking, one more pressed against the carton as he palmed it to lift it out.

He was treating this a bit more formally than he ought to, but he needed something to focus on to keep from assuming how ridiculous he must've seemed.

Her attention was more on the carton than the spoons, so there was a second's delay before she took it from his offered hand. Sure, Terra recognized what it was he was opening, but ice cream wasn't something she'd ever bothered to try before. Now it seemed she'd have that chance.

It was really no surprise that she was reminded of her birthday, nearly six months ago. Hopefully neither of them would end the week in feathers, she thought, but there was a wonder as to the occasion. Was it his birthday? She'd never asked, and he'd never mentioned it.

Maybe the birthday of a spine in some regards, sure, but not any other birthday of mention. Abby said dessert food could help, and Zelgadis trusted her judgment as a girl who knew what the hell was going on in the world - and also girls. So even if Terra was more than a little strange more often than not, she was still a girl. There had to be a constant he could fall back on, right?

Right?

He sure as hell hoped so, because he wasn't sure how much more self-inflicted awkwardness he could stand anymore.

The carton was set on his lap, thumbnails picking at the lid until it tore enough to open, convenient little tear strip completely unnoticed. He peeled the plastic film off the top, setting it on top of the bag he then set his foot on to keep it from drifting away. He moved the carton in-between them.

"Here."

For once, he'd gotten lucky. Terra had to scoot in closer to actually reach the carton, soup spoon pinched between two knuckles, but she didn't show any obvious signs of wariness or uncertainty. Sure, she was still a little confused about the whole affair—who wouldn't be?—but she wasn't dragging her heels in the ground asking why at every pause still. At least, not yet.

Her scrape of the spoon across the top of the ice cream was a smooth, easy motion for how soft it was getting. Not quite past losing form, or becoming a carton of cream soup, but it wasn't carrying the 'ice' in that title very well. The confection itself was sweet, and good. Better than the cake, she thought.

Spoon hanging in her mouth, Terra looked up at Zelgadis with a mild, amused question to her eyebrows. He wasn't expecting her to eat this whole thing alone, was he?

Zelgadis was unwrapping his own spoon while she took her test taste. He caught her look out of the corner of his eye once he'd balled up the plastic, turning his head.

"Any good?" he asked, not waiting for the answer before picking at it with his own spoon.

It was an "mm," but a positive one, spoon coming out for the clarifying "yeah." She waited for him to get out of the carton before sliding for a second taste. "I've never had it before, but..."

He made a sound in reply, spoon in mouth. Jeez, that's a lot of chocolate...

"Me either," he said. "Never by itself, at least..."

"No?" She gestured a little his way with the spoon when she spoke, once the dessert had been cleared from it. "What did you have it with?"

He had to think about it, rolling his eyes up to recall. He looked back down, expression almost as dry as his reply.

"...Everything, I think. When Lina orders..."

At the mention of Lina, Terra's expression flickered quickly; a flinch of muscles around her eyes, her gaze moving to the side; a tightening around her mouth, and so on, as if with guilt. They did not linger very long, and her face settled into something more like curiosity at the end.

As far as she knew, Zelgadis had no idea as to how Terra met her end, and she wasn't in any hurry to enlighten him.

"How did you two meet?"

"She set my subordinate on fire," he said matter-of-factly. "Then stole the item I was trying to get first. So I had to hunt her down to try and steal it back. It got weird from there."

"... She set your subordinate on fire," she repeated, face blank and voice level, "and it got weird after that?"

Zelgadis made a sound, almost a laugh, smirking. "Yeah. Pretty much."

It wasn't an expression she saw often, and it was contagious; a smile started cracking at her mouth, too. "Then what happened?" she prodded, obviously interested in the makings of a story.

"Mh," he grunted, spoon in his mouth at the time. It scraped against the line where the inside of his mouth became the golem hide on the outside. "Then I tried to get her to give me what she'd stolen. She wouldn't. And things got out of hand with Rezo..."

Zelgadis stuck the spoon into the remaining ice cream and let it sit there like something speared. "When all was said and done, she killed a fragment of our world's demon lord. Almost single-handedly."

Though the weather was still chill, and they weren't sitting in direct sunlight, the ice cream was beginning to lose shape; the vertical spoon slowly began to tilt to the side, like some scaled-down leaning tower. Giving the container a momentarily glance, Terra ran her fingers over the side of the box. The "ice" was mumbled, but the crystallizing ca-crunch was like twigs snapping underfoot.

It wasn't frozen solid, but it'd stave off melting for a while yet. "A fragment?" she asked at last, scraping another spoonful. "How does that work?"

Zelgadis gawked a little, uncertain of what she'd just done until ice clicked. Oh. It threw off his train of thought only for a moment; he decided to leave the spoon where it was for a little bit, folding his hands and leaning them on his knees.

"Shabranigdo was split into seven pieces a thousand years ago," he said. "During the War of the Monster's Fall. The pieces were scattered throughout the world, and one fragment found its way into humans. Blind humans. So this piece of the demon god passed through generations of the blind until Rezo. Once his eyes opened..."

Terra kept her spoon in her mouth, watching Zelgadis's face as he spoke. She remembered hearing the name Rezo before, but for the life of her she couldn't pin where, or when. Engrossed as that, she didn't interject into the story.

The strange beginnings of a parallel between his world and hers struck her as unusual, but she kept her tongue for the moment. Instead, she nodded, hoping he'd continue.

He glanced back to find her urging him on, so there was little else to do...Well, besides scooping up his spoon and using food as a decent excuse to stop talking for a little while and collect his thoughts on the matter.

"Shabranigdo was released when his eyes opened. Most of us got out before it started making a big move..." But not everyone. Rodimus. Zolf. He took a heavy breath. "And when we went back to take him on, Lina used Gourry's sword...cast the Giga Slave. It destroyed him - one-seventh of him, at least. That's one-seventh that he'll never get back."

He shrugged. "And that was that."

Giga Slave was a phrase Terra remembered, and with it things began to fall into place. Where she'd heard the name Rezo before, and what all these other things meant, for they had been the bulk of Zelgadis's nightmare when they had been trapped in the realm of the dragon's dream. She remembered people who had disappeared into nothing, how panicked Zelgadis himself had been, and all the rest.

Somber, Terra withdrew the spoon from her mouth, but not to eat more dessert. "She's a lot more powerful than she looks." Of course, Terra had already known this, having witnessed Zelgadis's nightmare and in her own fight against the girl. "I'm a little envious."

Zelgadis made a sound, a kind of schyeah in response, nodding his head slowly, smirking crookedly. "It's a little unfair," he agreed. "But I don't think I want that power. She didn't realize what she was messing with back then...nobody did."

She nodded with a quiet hum. "Nothing's meant for power like that." Her tone was absent, eyes not focused on Zelgadis; she traced nonsense patterns into the chocolate with the tip of her spoon. "At least in my world... magic was wiped out in humans a thousand years ago, and the beings that still possessed it sealed themselves away. It wasn't until after I was born, when the Empire invaded and captured whoever they could... that ordinary humans could get that sort of power..."

There wasn't much of an emotional connection to her story; much less than one would expect. But Terra and emotions on the whole were never tightly interlinked, and this was not something she possessed her own memory of. It was all second-hand. Her pause was short, and ended in a shrug and another bite of dessert. "I'm the strongest 'human' magic-user in my world, but I don't compare to her."

"It might be for the best," he offered, not completely sold, himself. What little he knew of Terra's dismal world didn't give him cause or reason to throw any firm assumptions this way or that. "I mean, if anyone was touting Lina's power around to be captured and abused...Right?"