Chapter 17: Strange Highs and Strange Lows
Strangelove, Depeche Mode
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Another day, a little more eyeliner than before, and surprisingly, still no one had said anything. Earlier that morning, Ezio had passed by L, and she’d given him an interesting look, but hadn’t said anything, either. Ezio was never terribly skilled at reading other people’s moods or expressions, particularly not L’s, as her varying looks seemed to all have a different meaning, depending on the day. He had long ago given up making sense of her. It was likely much better for his blood pressure.
Drake was working on another book. Ezio was reading one, occasionally listening to the sounds of Drake scribbling away over there. Ezio had to wonder if there was a quicker way of getting your words out, but it wasn’t like he had any brilliant ideas.
Ezio slid further down in his chair, lying across it somewhat sideways, brushing black waves of hair out of his way. His hair had a habit of being unnecessarily unruly, but Morgyn’s was certainly worse. He could take mild comfort in that.
If he’d expected either Drake or Morgyn to completely lose it over the eyeliner situation, it would likely have been Drake. They were all from a much different time, of course, but Morgyn didn’t have a gender and had been fighting with that reality their whole lives. Drake, on the other hand, was a totally different story. He had no reason to be so accepting of it, but then, he did have a habit of being accepting of Ezio. Most of the time, Ezio tried not to think about it. It was much easier that way, but he did figure out, a long time ago, Ezio seemed to be able to do very little that was wrong in his eyes.
Ezio couldn’t say it wasn’t true the other way around.
“Are you okay?” Drake asked suddenly.
Grey eyes flicked from the book to look up at Drake. “Yeah,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Drake shrugged. “I don’t know,” he answered. “You just seem a little restless over there.”
There were times when, how much attention Drake paid to him was nothing new or interesting. And there were other times when it was somewhat befuddling and mind-blowing. This time was one of the latter times. He was always a little bit embarrassed to be reminded how much attention to him Drake paid, and this time was no exception to that, either.
“Just trying to figure some things out, that’s all,” Ezio said, smiling.
“If you need to talk, you know I’ll listen,” Drake said.
Ezio knew that. In some ways, it was almost a problem. Drake was always spending way too much time on him, if one asked Ezio. No one had directly asked him, however, and that was likely for the best.
“I know,” he said. There were simply some very complicated things having a war in his heart, but that was nothing new. The war came and went. Battles were fought, won, and lost at what seemed like random, but it was merely following the patterns of his emotions. Those, too, were in constant flux.
Many made the mistake of thinking that only Morgyn was the chaotic one of the Embers. Ezio was just as chaotic. He simply hid it better.
“Sometimes, I wonder if you do,” Drake said.
Ezio laughed. “Ouch,” he said, still smiling slightly. As valid as that was, it still managed to be a little bit of a blow. Drake meant well, Ezio knew that, and he tried not to take it too personally. Drake was right, at any rate, and Ezio could use to remember that he did have people to talk to. Still, Ezio was not Morgyn. It was Morgyn that most needed the external feedback. Ezio looked internally.
“I know you’re a quiet person,” Drake said. “And I don’t want to push you, I just worry about you a lot.”
Ezio knew that, too. He released a sigh, his eyes narrowing slightly in sadness. “A lot of the time, I just need to figure things out myself, first. It’s hard for me to talk about things I don’t have words for, and I can’t find the words if I don’t think about it on my own.”
Drake sighed. He understood that, but he also understood that it was a good excuse to make others stop looking at it, and eventually, forget it. Drake wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but he also knew that he couldn’t make Ezio talk to him, no more than Morgyn could manage it. As frustrating as it was, it was also reality.
“Well,” Drake said, looking up at him, “is this just a thing, or do you think you’re more of a she?”
Ezio blinked in surprise, and looked confused. That was what Drake had come away with? Then again, Ezio supposed that was a logical thing to wonder, given Morgyn was moving wildly between genders at the moment. They weren’t exactly the same, but they had enough similarities that it was logical to presume that, in light of Morgyn’s gender issues, Ezio might realise he had one or two. The good news, he supposed, was that he didn’t seem to.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think it’s just a thing.” Occasionally, there would be days where he felt weird, in a way that was hard to explain even to himself. On those days, being called ‘he’ was annoying, but it was a fleeting, surface-level annoyance, not a deeper one, and within a day or two, the feeling went away again. Life went on, he stopped being annoyed by being gendered male, and, truthfully, he tended to eventually forget that it had ever happened at all. At least, he forgot until it happened again.
“Okay,” Drake said, “I was just making sure.”
“Thank you,” Ezio said. “For caring enough to ask, I mean. Weird that you would, though.”
Drake shrugged one shoulder, looking down at the floor for a moment, before looking back up at Ezio. “I can’t tell you how you feel,” he said. “Only you can say that. And I don’t want to hurt your feelings on accident.” And that, really, was as complicated as it needed to be. The point, of course, of pronouns and labels were to enable someone to communicate to others how they felt and who they were. Identity was important to a lot of people, and communicating that identity was, too. Like most things rooted in language, they were intensely unfit for the purpose a lot of the time, but as time went on, people invented new words to describe the world around them. Labels and pronouns would be no different.
Ezio smiled. “I guess that’s true,” he said. “If I ever change my mind, I’ll let you know. You’ll probably be the first one I tell.”
“I’d figure Morgyn would be first,” Drake said.
“Sometimes Morgyn knows things without me saying anything,” Ezio said. “It matters more with you, somehow. Maybe because you care.”
The pages were still changing. Thus far, Ezio couldn’t figure out any sort of pattern to which pages he could read when, so it did seem as if the book almost had a mind of its own. Ezio wasn’t sure he was comfortable dealing with a book that seemed to have a mind of its own (Morgyn was right about there being books here enchanted by people that weren’t very good people). What he’d said to Morgyn was correct, however. He had no other leads, and this may be the only way he could get answers about anything.
All the same, he did recognise this was an inherently dangerous situation to find himself in. He didn’t know how much of this book was the truth, what its goals were. One thing Morgyn didn’t think of that he certainly had was the possibility the spirits he was dealing with weren’t good ones. There were plenty of malicious spirits. He’d dealt with more than his fair share of them.
Today, however, there was a passage that he could read in this mysterious book. This time, it wasn’t in Simlish, so he was having a little bit of a tough time making sense of it. Unconsciously, Ezio tilted his head to either side, cracking his neck, and then went back to rifling through books, comparing glyphs. It was all a mess to him, but he was making a little bit of progress.
The portion that he’d managed to translate was talking about some kind of an ocean. Ezio thought, an ocean of stars, or something to that effect, though he had the feeling that ‘stars’ was a figurative reference to something else. The word was spelled slightly differently, depending on where it was in a sentence, which he’d never personally seen in practical linguistics before. Perhaps whoever had written this wasn’t trying to be terribly practical about it.
Then, the passage went on to speak of something being born in this ocean it was talking about. If he was translating the next bit of the passage correctly, the ocean was where this something was born, and where it went when it was gone. That was the word for ‘die,’ he thought, in this language, but something being born somewhere and then returning to it to die was a strange concept to him. Things tended to simply die. Unless this wasn’t a physical death and more of a metaphysical one. Or, perhaps, even metaphorical.
This book was more complicated, and temperamental, than Ezio had been expecting. It was either testing him, the information it had to impart was dangerous as all get out, or he was going to end up selling his soul to some evil spirit by the end of this.
Just so, in the background, he could hear the soft melodic calling. The song that seemed to harmonise with something in him. It was almost always going, anymore, though it was usually quiet enough, now, that he could rather effectively block it out. He still wasn’t sure what to do with it. He thought about mentioning it to Morgyn, but the blond was already worried about him enough as it was.
Still, black tiger and his medications were working decently for keeping him stable. He’d needed to change a few medications he was taking, because they had undesirable side-effects, but the fact he was up and moving at all was kind of amazing unto itself. He wasn’t stupid, though often he wished he was. Likely, Ezio had been on a fast track to finally dying, and without being fully aware of it, Lilith had saved his life, just by handing him a card with an address on it.
He should thank her, later.
The chiming melody grew louder, for a moment. Ezio sighed, setting the book down in his lap. The passage he was working on translating had moved onto talking about some kind of substance that, if he was translating correctly, had birthed magic. Or birthed fairies, and then fairies birthed magic. Or maybe it was the other way around and the fairies birthed magic first and magic had created this substance.
This language was confusing.
“Yeah, I hear you,” he said, under his breath, to the chiming melody in the sky. He never did figure out a specific direction that it was coming from. It seemed to be from everywhere, and yet nowhere at all, at the same time. That in and of itself was unprecedented. Between the chiming melody, and the mystery leather-bound book, Ezio was sure dealing with a lot of those unprecedented things these days.
Then, he felt it. The sense that something was watching him. Ezio immediately scrambled to his feet, his muscles slightly protesting the sudden movement, and bolted across the space to the window. Ah, yes, there it was, staring back at him in the inky blackness and swirls of colour and scattered pinpricks of light that made up the sky. The cluster of stars that moved as one.
Ezio reached down into his pocket, pulling a notepad and a pencil out, and quickly, he tried to sketch the shape of the cluster of stars onto the page. If he stood up and found a window quickly enough, upon feeling like something was watching him, most often, he could catch sight of the cluster of stars. He still didn’t know what it was, if it was some kind of a creature, or if it was just a trick of the light, or something else entirely.
He glanced down, trying to figure out if the shape he’d sketched was remotely right, but when his grey eyes looked back up at the cluster of stars, it was gone again. Ezio leaned over to one side, seeing if he could find it, wherever it’d gone, but there was no sign of it. Every time he saw it, and it was gone again, he wondered if he was hallucinating. He did that, from time to time.
Ezio looked back down at the notepad, at the shape that he’d sketched. As he gazed at the sketch, he thought it almost looked like a bird of some kind. An invisible bird seemed improbable, but he was a spellcaster. He was a witch. Many things in Ezio’s long life were improbable, and yet, existed all the same.
So few things made any sense that Ezio was beginning to wonder if anything had ever made sense. It felt like things had always been a little messy and convoluted, even if Ezio didn’t fully understand why or how, and neither did Morgyn. It was easier to ignore it and go on with life when neither of them had any idea how messy and broken everything was beneath the surface. The spirits were still stirred up, intensely enough that, if Ezio wasn’t careful, their residual emotional energy could keep him awake until dawn through sheer close proximity. And by close proximity, he meant not very close at all.
L was starting to act a little weird. If Ezio was guessing correctly, she was incidentally channelling some of that residual emotional energy the spirits were giving off. She seemed unaware of it, however, which was new for her. L was always wildly aware of it when she was channelling a spirit or several, but this one seemed to slip right through her fingers.
Something big was happening, Ezio knew it now.
Still, fretting about it wasn’t going to solve anything. He tried to remember to take breaks from the mystery book, to distance himself from the whispering that was constantly in the shadows and the singing that never seemed to stop anymore. It was almost enough to give him a constant migraine, but Ezio tried not to focus on it. It wasn’t like it was going to go away, if he ignored it, but he was hoping that it’d at least become easier to deal with.
“Ezio?” a voice said.
Ezio looked up from his book, finding Drake looking at him with concern in icy eyes.
“What?” Ezio asked. “Did I say something weird?”
“No,” Drake answered. “You’re just really jittery.”
“I’m not jittery,” Ezio argued. “I’m just fine.”
“Ezio, your leg hasn’t stopped moving in probably ten minutes,” Drake said blandly, pointing at Ezio’s leg.
The black-haired man looked over at his leg. It was, indeed, jittering. Wordlessly, Ezio put his leg down. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“That’s not why I said something,” Drake replied. “What’s wrong?”
And, as usual, there were too many problems for Ezio to keep track of. He didn’t know where to begin explaining anything in his head, what he should explain in the first place. Maybe it’d be best to simply keep it all to himself, like he always did. The nervous energy did need somewhere to go, however, and maybe the easiest way of giving it an outlet was to talk about it.
Ezio didn’t know what, exactly, was bothering him this time, though. It could be a combination of several things, rather than one in particular. He wasn’t sure what to say.
“I don’t know,” Ezio said, completely honestly. Obviously, something was, though.
A flash of blond hair and blood flickered through his mind. Ah, no. Now that he was thinking about it, he knew what was wrong. It was probably the same thing that had made him dive head-first into anything but thinking about that.
Ezio blinked, head tilting down slightly. It felt like a personal failure that he wasn’t over it, this long after. He still had nightmares about it, like some kind of stupid child that couldn’t let go of anything.
He didn’t want to think about it. He certainly didn’t want to admit it to Drake. “Nothing,” Ezio decided to say, instead.
Drake frowned. He knew better than to take Ezio’s ‘nothing’ statements at face value. They more or less never meant nothing. More likely, it was something that Ezio didn’t want to face or deal with, or didn’t know how to. The problem was, avoiding something generally didn’t solve it. Drake didn’t want to push. But if he didn’t, it was very likely that Ezio would destroy himself with it, whatever it was. On the other hand, if he pushed too far too quickly, Ezio would just shut him out. He did know how to, unfortunately, but there wasn’t anything for it.
“Are you sure?” Drake asked.
“Of course,” Ezio answered, without thinking. Of course it was nothing.
“You’re lying,” Drake said softly. “I can smell it.”
Ezio sighed, closing the book he’d been trying to read. “You know, that’s just a little bit creepy.”
Drake snorted. “I can’t control it,” he said. “What’s wrong? I don’t want to push you, Ezio, I really don’t, but you can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
“Doing what?” Ezio asked.
“Holding onto it only hurts you in the end,” Drake said. “I want to help. Let me help you.”
Drake had only been doing that helping him thing for far too long, if one asked Ezio. No one had, but still, he thought it. It was always Ezio that needed Drake, not the other way around, and at this rate, maybe it’d always be that way.
“It’s nothing,” Ezio repeated. “You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I think I do,” Drake said calmly. “You’re jittering, picking at your nails, you wake up screaming sometimes, Ezio, look, it is okay not to be okay.”
Was it? Ezio didn’t know how to not be okay. He didn’t have a choice back then, and maybe he had one now, but the habit was hard to kill. Things were hard enough without him breaking apart at every turn, he certainly didn’t need to make it worse. All the same, bottling it didn’t make anything better, either. Sooner or later, he’d explode, just like a lot of things did under pressure.
He’d thought he should work on this talking thing, but there were some things that were still too raw, too close to his heart, for him to easily talk about. Being the strong one would always be his first instinct.
His body had decided he was weak in other ways, and he couldn’t stop it. But this, though, he could control.
He shook his head. If he wasn’t okay, then what was he? That wasn’t something he wanted to bother thinking about and wading through, not now. Sometimes, if he tried hard enough, he could almost convince himself that he was okay. So what if it wasn’t viable in the long term? He didn’t have a long term, anyway.
It was so hard to switch his thinking.
“If I’m not okay, I don’t know what that means,” Ezio said. “And I don’t think I’m ready to figure it out.”
Drake sighed. It seemed to him that Ezio was figuring it out, a little at a time. But sometimes, it was a lot easier to go along with something, than it was to explain that it was wrong. Instead, Drake stood up, holding his hand out.
Ezio looked up at him in confusion. Drake moved his hand a little closer, and finally, Ezio reached up and took the hand Drake had offered. Gently, Drake pulled Ezio up onto his feet, and loosely wrapped his arms around him, in case Ezio decided that he didn’t want the contact.
Ezio tensed up, slightly, at first. And then he released a breath, relaxed slightly into Drake’s arms, and returned the embrace.
Slowly, steadily, Ezio relaxed. The knot in his chest that had started to twist up began to loosen. Somehow, it did help. Drake had a way of making everything seem okay, even when it felt like Ezio’s whole world was falling apart.
“Jackson sure went away quickly, didn’t he?” L said.
Drake simply glanced at her, and shrugged one shoulder. L was awfully nosy sometimes, when she got it in mind that she needed to know something. Simultaneously, she seemed to simply know things more times than Drake was comfortable with. Of course, it always seemed to be intuition more than simply knowing things. Drake tried not to think about it, so technically, he could be wrong, he supposed.
L was an interesting person, and by interesting, Drake meant that he never understood her. She was just as chaotic, sometimes, as Morgyn. They were chaotic in different ways, ways that Drake couldn’t easily put words to. Ultimately, he let that train of thought go. It didn’t matter, he supposed.
Of course, by now, he’d learnt that L never came up with anything out of the blue like it so often seemed she did. Likely, whatever she said, they were ideas that had been bouncing around in her head for a long time before she spoke them. L was kind of as an iceberg to him. She seemed small, and shallow on the surface, but there was a lot hiding below that surface.
“I suppose so,” Drake said. He was putting books back onto the shelves. (Ezio didn’t have to anymore not because everyone suddenly remembered to do it on their own.)
“That was awfully noncommittal,” L said. “It’s no secret you were never fond of Jackson. Or anyone Ezio has ever dated.”
Drake wasn’t that obvious, was he? Maybe he was. The vampire shrugged. “Jackson had issues, and that’s all.”
“You can’t convince me with that,” L said, sounding amused. “What really happened there?”
If he didn’t tell her, Drake was quite sure she’d never let it go. L didn’t have friends or anything. Come to think, she never seemed to go anywhere, either. Drake wondered about that from time to time, but he figured it wasn’t really his concern. If one of the sages wanted to live here permanently, then who was he to say she was wrong to do so?
However, neither did he want to discuss this with her of all people. That was, perhaps, a little unfair. She’d never been terribly unkind to him, despite being rather unkind to almost everyone else.
“I may have threatened to kill him,” Drake said absently, kind of hoping she didn’t notice what he had said.
L, unfortunately, did notice, and laughed. “I’m sorry, did you say you threatened to kill him?” she asked.
Drake simply gave her a withering look in response.
Strangely, L sobered up. He was serious. That was almost too much. In hindsight, however, L understood why. If her hunch was correct, Jackson was hurting Ezio. Love made people do some quite stupid things. Threatening to kill someone was so high up the list of possible reactions to something like that, it was almost strange L hadn’t seen this coming.
“I see,” L said. “I’ll keep an eye out and help make sure he doesn’t come back, then.”
Drake nodded once. “Thank you.” She didn’t have to help, and he appreciated the assist. It wasn’t as if Drake trusted Ezio to tell him if he’d come across Jackson. Perhaps Morgyn might, but Morgyn didn’t always know, either.
“You really do love him, don’t you?” L asked, her tone soft.
Drake snorted. Of course he did. Drake probably loved Ezio more than was logical, in ways that he shouldn’t. Truth be told, Drake hadn’t focused too much on his convoluted feelings for Ezio, because things were difficult enough for them both. Drake didn’t need to go complicating their lives, and making Ezio deal with yet one more thing that he couldn’t handle. It wasn’t the thing itself, perhaps. It was the combination of everything put together. Very easily, one more small thing could be the tipping point, the thing that threw everything else out of balance. Drake didn’t want to do that to Ezio.
“It doesn’t matter,” Drake answered. “He deserves better, and I’m not better, it’s that simple.”
L snorted, rather loudly and derisively. Sometimes, Drake thought maybe she wasn’t entirely female, either. She had some weirdly masculine mannerisms sometimes. “Here’s a question for you,” L said. “Have you ever asked Ezio if he thinks you’re not better?”
Drake blinked. “Why would I do that?” That would require informing Ezio that Drake loved him in the first place, which, as he’d just established, was a bad idea.
L sighed, loudly. “Sometimes, Drake, we don’t want better,” she said. “We want a specific person. Better and good enough have no meaning in things like this, because those are subjective things that hold very little weight. Have you asked him what he wants?”
Drake’s gaze cast to the floor. He stayed silent.
L took a drink of tea, leaning against the kitchen counter as she was. Then, she set her teacup back down on the counter, and crossed her arms. “You may be surprised,” L said. “But don’t take away his voice because you’re afraid of what that voice might say.”
“I’ve already accepted that he likely doesn’t feel the same,” Drake said, his tone wry.
“That’s not what I meant,” L said.
“Then what did you mean?” Drake asked.
“I meant, that you’re afraid of what it means if he does feel the same,” L explained. “Like this, you can go on with nothing changing too drastically, with things exactly the way they are. It’s an easy existence, being his friend and nothing more. If he feels the same, however, then you have to decide if the risk of it driving you apart is worth the opportunity to become more. The interesting thing in all of this is that you two already function as if you were married. You always have. You fill a role and are someone that no one else can fill or be. You mean things to him that no one else ever will, not even Morgyn. And I think that scares you, as much as you enjoy it, too.”
Drake frowned. Sometimes, L was a little bit too perceptive.
L picked up her tea, raising her eyebrows in a pointed manner. “Don’t invalidate what Ezio may want simply because it is easier that you remain not good enough.”
Drake didn’t say anything, simply watched her walk away in silence. His eyes cast to the floor, and he wondered when he became so easy to read.
Morgyn had wanted him around, in case the blond needed his help. So far, however, Ezio didn’t see a reason for him to be present. Morgyn was working with Elise quite fine without him. Incidentally, better than he would, right now. There was still all of that energy burning like fire just under his skin, like something he couldn’t get out of him, nervous energy with nowhere to go.
When Jackson first said it, that the anger had nowhere else to go but at him, Ezio didn’t understand. There were plenty of other things to direct anger towards, plenty of ways to express and burn off that anger, he’d thought. Ezio could have learnt to bear it, because that was a weight that was there because of him. The least, he figured, he could do, was help Jackson stay standing under it.
And when the pain in his own heart fused with the lingering threads of anger and resentment he still carried, the result was something that he still didn’t quite understand, but was much closer to understanding.
The nervous energy finally came out. He stood up, slammed a foot down on the balcony floor, and sent ice everywhere. Elise squealed and slipped, hitting the ice. “What the…”
“Ezio?” Morgyn asked, one hand reaching for him.
He snarled in response, pulling one hand up, balling it into a fist, and shattering the ice. That hand then swept at the air and threw all of the shards at Morgyn.
Morgyn’s eyes widened. “Ezio, what the fuck!” the blond squawked, darting behind one of the cauldrons, and pulling Elise along.
“Fight back,” Ezio said, through clenched teeth.
“No,” Morgyn answered.
“Fight back, or I give you no choice,” Ezio said.
Ezio would, too. Morgyn frowned, thinking. If the blond refused to stand and face him, then there was a fairly good chance that he would end up catching Elise up in this mess. After a moment of deliberating, the blond turned to Elise. “Stay here,” Morgyn said.
“Okay,” Elise answered.
The blond stood up. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk?” Morgyn asked.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ezio answered. He didn’t even know what he was so angry for, he just knew he was and he really wanted to freeze Morgyn to a wall.
“Duelling grounds,” Morgyn said, and then raised an arm and disappeared.
Ezio’s eyes narrowed, and then he too, raised an arm and disappeared, reappearing not far from Morgyn. It took only a moment’s hesitation, and the Ezio twisted around and threw a barrage of ice crystals. “Fight me like you mean it!” he hissed.
Morgyn’s eyes widened again, and the blond disappeared with a slight pop. A moment later, the blond reappeared across the grounds. “I always do!” Morgyn said. One arm shot out, firing a blast of flame. Inferniate tended to be stronger for Morgyn, and unfortunately, Morgyn had a habit of trying to overwhelm opponents, rather than using a notable sort of strategy. It had always worked before, however, and Morgyn had no reason to change anything.
Ezio frowned; it was just like Morgyn to try that sort of thing. He reached downward, towards the ground, with both arms, and yanked upward. A wall of ice rose between them, thick enough to block the Inferniate blast. Ezio then punched at the air; the ice wall shattered into another barrage of icicles, and then Ezio disappeared, reappearing behind Morgyn. Lazily, Ezio threw a bolt of lightning.
Just in time, Morgyn disappeared, too. The icicles and the lightning crashed into one another, and Morgyn reappeared behind Ezio. “Ezio, please, I don’t want to fight you, not like this.” He wasn’t being as careful as he usually was. Morgyn could see the rage in the lines of his body, but didn’t understand why it was there. Who said what? It didn’t matter – quickly, Morgyn threw a streak of purple energy.
Ezio grunted in annoyance, raising a hand and firing another stream of energy in response. The two streams locked together, neither overpowering the other.
“You’re such a chaotic, destructive personality anyway,” Ezio said. “You’re enjoying this and you and I both know it.” Ezio didn’t imagine that would be different merely because it was Ezio on the other end. The blond always did seem to enjoy their sparring sessions.
“You’re my brother you idiot!” Morgyn answered. “I don’t want to hurt you! And you can’t duel very long anyway, you’re going to have to slow down eventually!”
“We’ll see about that!” Ezio replied. The energy streams buzzed and hissed, and suddenly grew too much for either to handle. The streams exploded where they met, throwing both Embers in opposite directions. Morgyn flew right off the island. Ezio went hurtling towards the cherry tree, but disappeared just before he could hit it.
Just as Ezio reappeared, Morgyn popped back up not far away. It seemed they thought a lot alike, teleporting to the same place like that. Ezio snorted slightly, throwing an arm out and tossing an ice bolt.
Morgyn loosed a surprised squeal, dropping under the ice bolt as it shot across the grounds to embed in a tree. Morgyn looked up at him, and then green eyes narrowed, and Morgyn reached up, aiming at Ezio’s nose, and shot a jet of fire.
Ezio noted the movement, and then disappeared, popping up behind Morgyn and slamming one foot down onto the stone. Ice shot up under Morgyn, throwing the blond across the grounds again. Morgyn hit the cherry tree Ezio had almost hit, and then crashed into the dirt.
This was almost ridiculous. They were relatively evenly matched, and neither of them was going to win this, most likely. Still, that wasn’t the point. Winning was never the point. Maybe for Morgyn it was.
Morgyn sat up, eventually pushing up off the grass. The sage needed a plan, because Ezio was stronger, overall, and smarter, and Morgyn knew better than to think the blond could hold much of a candle to him. With neither of them able to gain a notable upper hand, they’d simply go on forever, until one or the other of them burnt out, and unfortunately, Morgyn thought it’d be Ezio that did first. Morgyn didn’t want to find out the hard way those little pills of his couldn’t handle this.
“Ezio, there’s no sense in this,” Morgyn said. “Just calm down and we’ll talk it out.”
Ezio rolled his eyes. “The point isn’t winning,” he said, and then slammed his boot into the stone. Ice shot across the grounds towards the tree, and then burst upward into spikes.
Morgyn’s teeth ground together, and the blond stood up and disappeared. With all this teleporting all over the place, they were liable to both end up with a constant sense of vertigo. Maybe the only way of getting Ezio to stop this was going to be giving him no choice. Morgyn frowned, but threw out an arm, and a magical chain went out with it.
A startled blink answered. Ezio wasn’t expecting a binding spell. He glared for a moment, and then reached up, grabbing said chain, and shot ice up the links and Morgyn’s arm. The blond gasped and squeaked in surprise as the ice spread up towards Morgyn’s shoulder.
“You’re gonna have to do better than this,” Ezio said. “I said fight me with everything you’ve got.” Ezio yanked on the chain, pulling it to the side. Morgyn went with it, but the blond kicked off the cobblestone, raised an arm, and as Morgyn came down, the sage released an electrical charge.
That was almost clever, Ezio thought. Morgyn was smarter than this, and liked to pretend otherwise. But it was easier that way, because then no one had expectations, and Ezio knew that expectations were at times a crushing, weighty reality. Ezio couldn’t quite move out of the way of that; barely, it hit him, just enough to send one arm into a spasmodic fit for a second.
Morgyn realised, about there, as Ezio’s teeth grit together and he slid backward on the stone, what the blond had unleashed. Morgyn almost went to apologise, but a large ice spike killed the words before they’d left Morgyn’s throat.
The longer they went on, though, the less anger there was in Ezio’s body. It was helping him start thinking again. Yes, Morgyn had been this angry before, a few times, too. The blond frowned, but raised a hand and threw an energy bolt, dicing the ice spike in half. Either half of the spike crashed behind the blond, and Morgyn called a burst of fire where Ezio stood. The black-haired caster twisted out of the way, and Morgyn followed him across the stone. Ezio narrowly missed one, jerking his arm away from it as it shot upward.
Strangely, Ezio threw a burst of flame of his own, but at the ground. It was too late. By the time Morgyn realised what Ezio was doing, the blond had slammed into the stone under them and slid a few feet. For a moment, Morgyn’s head went blank from the pain, and then the sage’s teeth ground together, and Morgyn’s hands wrapped around Ezio’s wrist and shot off another electrical discharge.
It didn’t last long, but long enough; Ezio jerked backward as soon as the charge had stopped and his muscles unlocked. Ezio waved a hand, aiming upward. A circle of ice formed under Morgyn. The blond barely had enough time to release a gasp, as the ice rocketed upward towards the sky and formed a solid pillar of ice around the sage.
Encased in the pillar, both of Morgyn’s hands began to glow, as did the crystal around the sage’s neck. The pillar exploded outward, and Morgyn stepped out of its remnants, immediately throwing a stream of flame in Ezio’s direction.
Ezio returned fire with an energy bolt. It crashed into the flame, both exploding. And then Ezio threw a rapid-fire volley of energy bolts. Maybe one of them would hit.
Morgyn stepped backward, raising an energy shield, blocking most of the bolts. Some of them spun off in random directions, destroying the nearby scenery. The blond then threw one energy bolt back, and then a streaking arc of lightning.
The energy bolt met another of Ezio’s, the two exploding. The lightning came from behind it, and Ezio disappeared in a burst of light, and reappeared behind Morgyn. Ezio then raised a boot and kicked the back of Morgyn’s legs.
The blond almost immediately dropped. And stayed down. The exhaustion, now that Morgyn was down, began to set in. Ezio put up more of a fight, and gave Morgyn more trouble, than the blond was expecting.
As Ezio stood over Morgyn, he blinked once, and then released a sigh. He was angry at himself, it turned out, and that shouldn’t have been surprising. For reaching a point where he had no choice but to kill his twin. But it wasn’t as if he had a choice. It was either that, or watch Morgyn suffer and die, and not be able to fix it.
With a death that violent, Morgyn’s ghost would’ve been next to impossible to reason with, and Ezio would’ve likely ended up dealing with something he didn’t think he could deal with. Reasoning with the spiritual monster that his twin had become while also trying to deal with his own grief and pain would not have ended well.
It was a completely necessary choice. And Ezio felt like a monster for making it, no matter how good his intentions had been, even as the memory of making it hurt him.
Ezio didn’t attack again. Morgyn glanced up at him. “What was that?” the blond asked.
For a moment, Ezio considered explaining. He decided he didn’t want to. “It was nothing,” he said.
“You froze me,” Morgyn said, voice raising, standing up. “I think that’s a little beyond being nothing!”
“Just let it go, Morgyn,” Ezio replied, turning and heading for the portal that led back down. He was winded, and needed to sit down.
“Ezio, obviously it’s important,” Morgyn said, following after him. “Please, let me in.”
“I said it’s nothing!” Ezio hissed. Ice crackled under his feet, and then shot across the island, encasing all of it in ice.
Morgyn sucked a breath in, coming to a stop. Ezio also slowed to a stop. For a moment, neither said anything, surveying the ice. It wasn’t perfectly clear by any means, but it was thick, and vapour rose from it.
“Ezio,” Morgyn started, “you’re a lot more powerful than I thought you were.”
Ezio snorted softly. “No, I’m not,” he said, and headed for the portal.
