* Light Content Warning - mature theme: drug use.
AC: I've placed an '*' in the section before it, so feel free to skip from that point on if you might be triggered by this. *
<< Smells Like Teen Spirit - Malia J >>
Kaius flopped down onto his bed and stared up at his ceiling with a blank expression.
He had just spent the last two hours attempting to explain the mechanics of a lie to an Angel of Truth and with it, he had come to two distinct conclusions.
First, Uriel wasn't simply unaware of what constituted a lie.
Was he wholly ignorant of why and how a human would do such a thing? Yes. Could he still perceive when someone was not being truthful in their words? Also yes; as though it were an innate feeling that tugged at his consciousness, he'd explained. But with the awareness, could he now tell a lie himself? No.
Kai had tried, over and over again. Even Rameses had pitched in at one point and had asked Uriel to say something that was clearly not true.
He had asked him to state something simple, holding up a knife and requesting for him to say: "This is a spoon."
But Uriel had simply shook his head, an odd blank expression clouding over his ocean blue eyes, "But it's a knife." The effort didn't appear to cause him any physical discomfort, he simply was unable to utter the words. As though it were a foreign language to which he had zero comprehension.
Which led to Kai's second conclusion.
He was truly, wholly, utterly - screwed.
Kai pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw stars, a wave of anxiety writhing inside of his stomach like snakes.
If they asked Uriel the wrong question, it wouldn't be a fine, it would be heresy.
One or both of them would be arrested. They would never let them see daylight again.
And that was the best case scenario.
Kai had seen it before, when he was twelve years old and he and Rami had been running from a group of older boys that Rami had accidentally looked at the wrong way.
They had stumbled into the slums amongst a throng of people all crowded around a large clearing.
Rameses had immediately tried to pull Kai away, a primal fear hiding behind his dark eyes that Kai had never seen before. But he hadn't asked him what it had meant, why Rami was so surprisingly and uncharacteristically afraid to be there.
Instead, the curiosity had been an irresistible pull inside of him and he'd brushed away his hold around his wrist, weaving through the crowd of bodies until they reached the front.
And there, in clear view of the hushed congregation of the slums, were two lifeless bodies hanging from a post that had frozen his heart in an icy grip.
One with a sign that read: Non believer
And another: Heretic
Rameses seemed to know what Kai was seeing behind his wide, hazel eyes when an edge of panic had begun to creep into his voice as they tried and failed to coach Uriel.
And so, after two hours of desperate pushing and pleading with the Angel to use even the simplest form of deception, Rameses had knelt down in front of him and lightly grasped the side of his face.
"Enough now, Kai. I know you're afraid but we'll think of something. I'll be there too even if they try to stop me. I won't let them take you away. Everything will be ok. Just go and get some sleep."
Kai wanted to trust him. He wanted to believe every word but the fear wouldn't subside. A part of him even wished he had the means to run again.
He could take a ship and leave Zenin with Uriel tomorrow. They could find a nice, quiet planet where nobody knew their names and work on his Artifact away from prying eyes, somewhere the council would never find them.
'Run, run, run. That's all you do, Kai.'
He sat up with a start, panting heavily through the rush of adrenaline in his body.
"No...no I-I won't. I won't run." He said aloud, into his empty room, to no one at all.
His eyes fell on the battered shape of his pack that Rameses must have placed in the corner of his room when he'd brought him home.
He crept over to it and began to unpack, if only to keep his hands busy and shift his focus to something else. Something that wasn't dead eyes and creaking ropes.
As he did so, his hand wrapped around something unfamiliar that he had almost forgotten.
A smooth round pebble of a bright, unnatural jade.
When Demetra had slipped it to him, Kai had pulled it out of his pocket and pushed it unceremoniously into the bottom of his pack with no intention of laying eyes on it again, but now...
Maybe this was a solution. He had years to spare after all. Could Demetra make something for Uriel, to give him the ability to lie? Even if only for a few hours, a day at most.
He placed it to one side. It was something he could try, a tiny glimmer of hope, he would ask her tomorrow when the house wasn't sleeping.
And then, he found another item that had slipped his mind.
A soft leather pouch with a velvet ribbon.
'Oh, this was...for the nightmares, right?' Kai recalled, shuddering at the memory of those dark wings fluttering just out of sight.
He pulled at the ribbon and tipped it into his hand, several small balls of a deep, obsidian black rolling out onto his palm.
At first he thought that they were of a strange glossy material, as though they had been wrapped in glass. But when he lifted one up to his eye, he noticed that there was no reflection at all, like it absorbed every glint of light towards it and swallowed it whole before its surface could reflect it back.
'Yeah...nope. I'm not eating this. Fuck that.'
He tipped the contents back inside the pouch, tossing the entire thing onto his nightstand as he dressed for bed.
But from the moment he pressed his hand against the light rune beside him and his room was swallowed by darkness, the deep clawing feeling of anxiety dragged at his insides with icy claws.
He lay there for another hour, staring into the dark of his room, willing his mind to shut off and stop screaming at him with the same words on repeat:
You're going to die again before you ever had a chance to change your fate.
You let your family believe you were dead for two weeks.
You used him.
You're nothing but a coward.
Run, run, run...
'That's all you do, Kai.'
He groaned aloud and groped for the leather pouch, 'Fuck it. I'm trusting you, Demetra. If this witchy bullshit kills me, I'll haunt you every day for the rest of your life you spiteful old hag.'
*
Before it passed his lips, Kai faltered under one final moment of hesitation, his fingertips shaking imperceptibly.
And then, Kai popped it into his mouth in a rush and swallowed.
He lay back down on top of his sheets carefully, as if he were waiting for an axe to fall onto his head.
But for a few seconds, there was nothing. Just the sound of his deep, shuddering breaths and his heart pounding in his ears.
And then he felt it.
It was slow at first, just a tingling in his extremities that switched to a gentle numbness as though his body were being gradually submerged into cool water.
The sensation was pleasant, he thought. Like taking a dip into one of the clear streams that ran through Sekhet Forest.
But the moment it reached his head, his quiet musings disappeared.
Everything did.
All at once and completely, as though he had plunged head first into a void in reality.
He couldn't feel panicked or afraid, or even relieved by the nothingness, he couldn't feel - anything.
Not the mattress underneath his body, the pillow his head was laying on, the sheets under his fingers.
He had a vague intuition that he was still inside of his bedroom, like a faint echo at the back of his mind, but even his ceiling wasn't his ceiling anymore.
Instead it was a wide open sky of a billion stars, burning inside the void with a comforting warmth that spread through his veins like a slow fire.
He could even see the two moons that encircled Zenin and a small red ball of burning light that was Asmarata. Ever present and blinking back at him like a dreadful omen.
But the dread was absent.
Every shred of guilt and fear had fallen to the floor like it never existed to begin with.
Before sleep pulled him away, there was no final, stray thought. Not even a fleeting feeling of relief or contentment at the blissful, euphoric numbness that had doused the fire in his mind.
There was nothing.
No sound, no feeling.
Just escape.
Just a beautiful, endless silence and a dreamless sleep.
**