I Dream In Fractures

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I Dream In Fractures
Date of Scene: 14 February 2016
Location: Dark Kingdom
Synopsis: CONTENT WARNING: Pretty much rock bottom on the broken-o-meter. Dark Endymion reacts to Zoisite being punished for his failure to acquire the Crystal key from Jadeite's palace, and Kunzite has no idea what to do with this.
Cast of Characters: Mamoru Chiba, Kunzite


Atrocities are a thing in Beryl's throne room. Sometimes they're a lot more personal than others.

When Zoisite and the Metalia-controlled Endymion had come back from their abortive play for the key from Jadeite's palace, both of them terribly wounded, the being riding Endymion around had deserted Zoisite to go murder a few people for their energy in order to heal the body it occupied, leaving the youngest General to report to the throne room alone.

Then Metalia brought Endymion to the throne room and ditched him, leaving the shell of a prince to witness the tail end of Beryl's torture of Zoisite, of her making an example of him to the rest of her court, to Kunzite.

Zoisite had been minding the lost and empty boy; had seen him gradually progress to the point where he actually possessed object permanence, had felt the prince recognise him late in the night when Zoisite held his hand as he fell asleep. Had known that Endymion finally knew that Zoisite wasn't just a hallucination, was actually real.

The young prince, left scrambling for reality again in the wake of the Metalia-shard's departure, saw and felt Beryl nearly destroy the bright flame of Zoisite; watched in bewildered horror as the other boy fell to the cold floor and teleported out. He was gone, himself, half a second later. Dim and distant, an unending scream sounded in the back of his heart; no matter how hard he tried, even now, he couldn't gather enough coherent fragments of thought to look for Zoisite, couldn't find an anchor.

He knew he had anchors. One of them was Zoisite. The others-- he couldn't name them, couldn't pin down the concept of them long enough to fish for his connections to any of them-- but one had been in place longer, in this life and the last, than the others. Even if he couldn't find that link, couldn't conceive of it, it was there. It was there and it was exposed to his raw pain and panic.

Endymion is on his knees in a corridor deep in the human-built halls of the Dark Kingdom, in the places where the youma don't go, hunched over with his bloody hands knotted in his hair, staring at the floor.



Kunzite has not spoken a word to Zoisite since Beryl had Metallia restore his mind to her service. There was so very little that could conceivably have been worth risking it. Zoisite was not in their Queen's favor; Kunzite still less so. Vastly less so, to gauge by the names and faces and incidents that he encountered or heard mention of daily, and could not recall. She'd had to take so much of the last months from him, he was half surprised she'd bothered.

But she had use for him still, and he obeyed.

And when he came to her court, and saw what she was doing, and to whom -

He could not intervene. He could not try. Doing so would only inspire her further, make Zoisite's situation still worse.

He stayed. There was work he could have been doing, but he left it aside, and stayed.

Saw Endymion arriving, and abandoned.

Saw both of them vanish, one after the other.

Zoisite he could not go after, for the same reason; the less Kunzite associated with him or Nephrite, the safer they were. But Zoisite's work, that he could not tend to ... that he could watch over for a night or two. His own would not wait too long, but he'd had enough success that he could bear a little delay.

The Dark Kingdom's halls are vast and incomprehensible, unmappable. It's impossible that he should by simple random chance come upon the boy's shell in any kind of short time. But the path seems half familiar, as if he'd walked it before, and he knows its twistings and mutations, and knows where it gives way to cut stone and even angles and straight lines.

There's no attempt at secrecy in his approach. No point to it; he doesn't care if any youma mad enough to haunt this part of the place notice him, and he doesn't expect the shell to be capable of it. He only stops six feet or so away, makes an absent survey of the shell (blood in its hair? that'll need maintenance), and takes up a self-imposed watch for a while.

It feels more familiar than he would have expected.

And he feels -- unsettled. When he's not accustomed to feeling anything much at all.



There may be no expectation of that empty prince noticing Kunzite, but expectations are based on knowledge, and when knowledge is incomplete...

(He needed Kunzite, and Kunzite was suddenly there. This sort of thing shouldn't help a crazy boy's perception of reality, but in this place, with them, it does. An anchor. A thing that was a daily and accepted part of his reality in another life, a thing that even recently had been true-- there's solidity there. There are unvoiced and undefined expectations met, even if they're not Kunzite's.)

Endymion doesn't bother looking, or even properly getting up, before he launches himself at Kunzite and attaches there, arms around his chest, burying his face in the man's jacket. He trembles, short uncontrolled bursts of it, and clings tightly.



This is not, granted, a thing that is entirely alien to Kunzite's memory.

The problem is that it usually comes attached to someone with brighter hair and a rather lighter build.

Defense is considered and discarded in an instant, a calculation far away indeed from the conscious mind; Kunzite takes a step back under the impact, more to dissipate a bit of it than out of actual necessity, and bends his head to stare down at the limpet he's suddenly acquired. He'd have been less surprised if some of the stonework unfolded itself and came alive; that happens occasionally, although generally it introduces itself by trying to consume rather than merely to attach.

Not so much a shell, then. Perhaps that's why Zoisite didn't get bored.

His right hand, after a moment more, comes up to rest on the boy's dark hair.



The hand on his hair garners its own reaction: the physical reassurance, the confirmation that this is okay to do, that this won't hurt right away, that he won't be forced to stop-- the trembling stills, mostly. Endymion doesn't make a sound. He stays there, holds tighter still; Kunzite's jacket is damp, now, where his face hides.

(Any other reason Zoisite might not have gotten bored is, of course, unthinkable. Literally.)

There's such a desperation, there's such anguish, fear and worry-- but it's, where is it coming from? They're not Kunzite's emotions. And the boy's face hadn't changed, it was still the blank, expressionless mask when Kunzite found him kneeling on the floor, staring at nothing. Still the empty dull red eyes.

So he's not so much a shell, if he's clinging like this. But they're feelings, palpable, real.



Kunzite doesn't question that he can feel these things. Cannot question it. They are accepted without investigation, without movement. His hand rests in the boy's hair, that's all; he stands still while he's clung to and wept upon, no more.

"He's not dead," he says aloud after a little. "She didn't kill him. He's still potentially useful. He'll recover." Given time, which is increasingly in short supply. Given a fair chance. Which is eternally even less likely.



With the words, Endymion pulls back a little bit; he looks at Kunzite, and he has the sharply turned frown and crumpled chin, the stinging red eyes, of someone who's trying very hard to stop crying. His eyes are-- there's something in them he's trying to hide, doesn't want to hide, has to hide, doesn't want to hide from Kunzite, has to hide from Kunzite.

Ultimately doesn't.

He knows Zoisite isn't dead.

After a half-second of this, Endymion moves abortively-- maybe to step away, maybe to try to say something, his body language suggests it-- and he stalls, then can't hold on any more. He sobs once, hiding his face in Kunzite's jacket again, arms curled up against his own chest.



Someone who's trying to stop crying is someone who understands that crying is not something he's supposed to be doing.

Feeling. Understanding. Knowledge. Pattern recognition.

What has Zoisite been doing to this thing? This prop of Beryl's, this costume for something else --

-- this --

-- he knows Zoisite isn't dead.

There's that hint of the world about to drop away, and Kunzite averts his attention from that knowledge, refuses to analyze it. Refuses to think about it, or to acknowledge it too closely.

(But part of it takes a place in the back of his mind, fact replacing speculation, and he does not question why.)

"This is too public a place for that," Kunzite says quietly aloud, and doesn't dislodge the boy. Only leans down, idly cautious of the boy's head as he does, and picks him up off of the floor, pulls him up into his arms. He doesn't think about how he knows which direction to go in, either. That he does seem to know is enough.



There's no resistance to being picked up, and the boy's light enough, tall as he is. (Another thing Kunzite can't find familiar, can't.)

The place he carries Endymion to isn't terribly far; the boy haunts the same corridors, always, the places around the room he chose as his when he first made a choice here. So it's that room, not much of a walk away. The door opens of its own accord; the room is as it's been the past couple of months, even if Kunzite doesn't remember it. Spacious enough, spartan, furnished with all mod cons but an ugly antique wooden desk, possessed of a twin bed in one corner next to a neglected bookcase, containing a painstakingly clean whiteboard with well-used erasers.

Endymion is still withdrawn, curled in on himself, curled against Kunzite. He's hiding his face with his hands, now, since the angle is too awkward for what he'd been doing. Every sound is stifled, but some of them come with the involuntary jerks associated with suppressed sobs.



They accumulate things half at random, the people - mostly-people - that live here. Whatever lasts. Whatever survives. It's no wonder that Nephrite and Jadeite (who are so focused on things in their differing ways) prefer the surface world, that even Zoisite keeps his garden elsewhere. Kunzite has always been the only one among them who prefers the Dark Kingdom, not for its promise, but for its own sake.

He does not know why that idle thought should hurt, and that is another in the vast host of things he does not try to discern the reasons for.

Instead, he settles Endymion in that twin bed, folds himself down to sit on the edge of it so that the boy can still reach him. Does not try to unmask his face. The door has probably closed of its own accord, but there's more than one degree of privacy.



Contact is stubbornly, desperately maintained. When Kunzite sits at the edge of the bed, Endymion-- now (at some point?) lacking the armor, only the navy blue and pale and gold patterned jacket and trousers, the boots-- leans into him heavily. He'd let Kunzite see a fraction of what he hides, but in his eyes; now that they're in here, still not safe but at least safe from potential passers-by, potential sources for the rumor mill, he takes down another wall. The degree of additional privacy's discarded and he looks at Kunzite again, purely miserable. There's not enough--

It's not safe enough to--

He can't put himself together. It's something Kunzite can watch happening on his face, behind his eyes. Again and again, he starts to collect pieces to communicate, and again and again, they fall through nerveless fingers. The impulse to use mathematics for it isn't there, like it was with Nephrite. There's nothing. And he's so afraid. And he's so worried.

The frustration is thick enough and indefinable enough that it's shading quickly toward despair.



Zoisite's project. That's all. The boy's irrelevant, otherwise; an empty thing, meaningless, not one of them.

Zoisite is one of them. And Kunzite's losing him. Not the way he lost Jadeite to the Senshi, but to Beryl's wrath, one failure at a time. She's blaming the wrong person. Zoisite is Kunzite's students; Zoisite's failures are ultimately his. And he can't intervene. He can't place himself between them, has no credit to place against Zoisite's losses, can't deflect the punishment back onto himself.

He can find a way to give Nephrite and Zoisite credit for enough of a success to buy time; he knows what it would take, he can see how to arrange it. But that's no more than he owes them already. He can't do anything to redeem his own failure tonight. There is nothing pretty enough in the world for that.

But he can take up Zoisite's project for a few hours, and perhaps give it a little of the structure that Zoisite himself doesn't have to give.

His hand takes the boy's, as if to catch the things sliding through his fingers. He secures the boy against him with an arm. The boy emanates feelings; very well. Kunzite doesn't have feelings to offer in return, per se. But he focuses on being what he is. Focused, and solid, and calm. Something the boy can lean on for a little as much as he's doing physically. Something that can accept worry and frustration, bleed them away, dissipate them harmlessly.

Zoisite's given him a lot of practice in that over the years.



There. There's his anchor. And with the arm around him, with the hand taking his, there's the implicit invitation--

Endymion is not empty.

There was the evidence before, the pattern recognition, what Zoisite has been doing with his project; there are the feelings he projects--

The boy moves his hand, turning it in Kunzite's and pushing the man's sleeve up a little, fingertips inching up to touch above the glove. Skin to skin. Safe. Something that can't be overheard, something Kunzite can understand, might allow himself to understand.

Knowledge. Perception. The half-rebuilt remnants of a system for processing and categorizing and utilizing: he was terrifyingly intelligent.

Awareness, as scattered and fractured as it is.

First and foremost, front and center, pain: Zoisite's. An image, a replay, of the part he saw with his eyes. The memory of the sensation of that pain hitting him as soon as his rider left him; the uncomfortable awareness of how much Zoisite still hurts, and the immense inadequacy resulting from the inability to help him.

In its background, either context or extraneous irrelevance to the primary concern, his own pain, physical and emotional. Loss. Loneliness, assuaged by Zoisite's consistent presence, by Nephrite's understanding. Affection, immense and wordless, associated with each of them, including the one who's no longer here. Helpless fury, the inability to isolate or define it, which only feeds it. The sensation of being cut off from everything that grants him the strength to resist-- resist Beryl, Metalia-- and that gives him agency and reality, solid and true. Confusion, betrayal. Blood on his hands-- not just the physical, the evidence of what Metalia does when she shoves him out and then leaves him reeling and disoriented, but guilt over something his body was there for but his mind was not.

More knowledge hits as the flood recedes: Zoisite is with Nephrite; Zoisite is not alone.

Not alone. Just that much brings Endymion such profound relief-- and it's a relief he shares unreservedly with Kunzite, as if knowing on a fundamental level how important it should be to him.

It's been a couple seconds since the contact, since the channel was flung open and braced, and Endymion turns to rest his forehead against Kunzite, breathing no longer hitching, tension slowly draining.

Soon.