2022-04-24: Pretending
- Log: 2022-04-24: Pretending
- Cast: Xander Lovell, Riley Arwell
- Where: Shemeber Plains
- Date: April 24, 2022
- Summary: Riley awakens after some regrettable ‘last words’ and Xander is finally forced to finally verbalize his feelings to set the record straight.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Riley did not, in fact, die despite his latest attempt at final parting words to Xander. When he wakes again, it's at camp, set away from the plains and nestled in the woods to hide them. His wounds, from punctures in his middle to burns across his flesh, have been thoroughly tended to, each cleaned and bandaged. There's alchemy in his system for both healing and the pain, but some soreness may linger in spite of Xander's best efforts. And they were his best efforts, even though he's not in their tent, not at Riley's side, not keeping Riley's head in his lap and petting his hair like usual after one of their dangerous encounters with the Drifter community.
Instead, he's outside, by the campfire, facing away from the tent opening. He stares up at the canopy, where the wind rustles in the leaves, the sound not unlike the ocean's waves.
Blood splatters the ground where familiar thorns and flowers have been ripped out from the root, cast aside like plucked weeds in a pattern suggesting they were discarded urgently -- in panic, or in frustration. Xander's wrapped with bloodied bandages around his torso to go with the bandage around his shoulder. It doesn't remove all his pain, but it gives his nerves more space to exist, at least until the infestation regrows.
At the first sound that Riley's awoken and stirring, he should be asking how Riley's feelings. That's not what falls out of Xander's mouth.
"Pretend, huh?"
He doesn't look toward Riley as he says it, quiet and defeated.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Riley's awakening is announced by a series of groans of complaint, though the pain has faded significantly thanks to Xander's ministrations, and he's able to sit up easily.
"Oh, I lived after all," he says, somewhere between bewilderment and relief. He finds a bandage-wrapped and somewhat dejected Xander, off at a distance from him. At first he assumes this mood is because they failed, but...
Pretend, huh?
Uh oh, what did he say back then, did it hurt Xander's feelings...? Riley tries to remember his exact words, but it's a bit muddled. ...Oh. Yes. Was it that? That's a very problematic thing to say if you're going to still be alive afterwards.
"Xander, I... I didn't mean to change anything between us, I thought I might be dying and I happened to be feeling guilty so that's just what came to mind. I didn't mean anything about my feelings was pretend, just that I know that you-- I mean, who could expect you to feel the same about me after what I did? But it's okay, I like whatever we're doing..."
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander resettles himself next to Riley, wordlessly offering a flask of water and checking him for signs of complication or infection instead of asking. That there's no excess heat or inflammation. That the dressing doesn't need to be changed. That there's still clarity and awareness in Riley's eyes. There's something clouded in his own, and the dark circle under it is more pronounced.
Riley's words clarify something important, and yet pierce Xander so much more terribly that he grimaces like he's the one having his wounds inspected. Riley wasn't pretending. Wasn't play acting.
So this was Riley's truth, all this time. Xander thought -- Xander doesn't know what he thought. The logic kept twisting and changing. Loving a memory, or loving a promise of healing that would never come, or guilt and duty instead of love at all. But he knew. Riley knew this is what all he'd ever have. Kept Xander around. Wrote him love songs. Let Xander have all of him.
"You don't think I --" His voice cracks, and he huffs a broken sound, the pain giving way to a haunted acceptance of it. "No. Of course you wouldn't. Why would you?"
Riley can look for softness and sweetness all he likes, but Xander only has a shadow of himself left to give, his feelings poisoned and prickly, barely recognizable as affection.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Riley is recovering well, as far as Xander's inspection goes. He drinks his water and frets at Xander's dark mood. Maybe it was a careless thing to say. Xander works so hard to keep him alive, to keep them going... maybe pretending is a bad word for that, a dismissive word. He doesn't know what to call it, in truth. Honoring the past, maybe. Clinging fiercely to protect the shadow of what's left. His feelings mirror Xander's when it comes to pondering why the other is hanging on so hard to someone who should by all rights repel them.
"Did 'pretending' make it sound like you don't care? I know you're devoted..." he tries, uncertain.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Riley is, thankfully, as stable as Xander predicted he would be. He still double and triple checks the thorns at Riley's neck.
Devoted, Riley says. Loyal and faithful. Dutiful. Xander can't refute the assumption. Why would Xander have stayed in Cereza those years ago if not for misguided devotion to his obligations?
Riley thinks he's a kind of obligation. Xander wishes he had been the one shot instead of Riley.
"Yes?" Xander snaps his eye up to meet Riley's, baffled and letting anger drive him to sound like he has anything resembling life to him. "If I had the capacity for pretending, do you honestly think I'd choose to be like this?"
He's looked at Riley like this before: intense and stormy, his fervor roiling and at the brink of lashing out. It's easy to read it as mounting frustration preparing to direct itself at the closest available target -- and that's always been Riley -- but Xander tries to will Riley to understand it. That Riley is the only thing in existence worth having an emotion about.
"You have no idea. You don't know."
Xander thought it was impossible not to see it. As long as he downplayed his ugliest parts, he would be tolerable. But any window into the worst corners of Xander's heart would be better than this.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
The sense that Xander is angry at him is coming through more clearly than the specifics of Xander's insinuations. Riley can tell he gave great offense and the word 'pretending' was at fault. But as for what Xander has really been doing and feeling, if not pretending...?
You have no idea. You don't know.
This is true. Riley is at a bit of a loss. Xander is clearly upset, but Riley isn't sure what aspect of his comment punctured his feelings and what his reality is. What has all of this been to Xander? He thinks back to the earliest days after Cereza. Xander had no one -- he had killed anyone else he might have turned to. Riley let that be his excuse to stay close to him, to become closer than ever before. But that was horrible of him. The one who caused Xander's suffering going around acting like he had any right to comfort him. Xander let him do it anyway. Why? What did it mean?
"I'm sorry. I definitely hurt you." He reaches out to Xander's shoulder. "...What don't I know?"
Is there any chance he'd just tell him?
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Riley doesn't know. It's almost hysterical. Riley doesn't know. How couldn't he know? Well, if Riley thinks it's all pretend, then it wouldn't even matter what Xander's said--
Except Xander has not said.
He stares at Riley with disbelief and horror and lingering irritation all fighting for attention. Like the question itself is physically painful, Xander strangles some noise in his throat and buries his face in his hands. One more apology from Riley and he might have to stab out his own other eye.
But Xander can't just say it. He has to make Riley believe it. Xander has to make Riley understand a little handful of stupid words that are insufficient at describing anything going on inside of him.
Drawing in a shaken breath to steady himself, Xander forces himself to meet Riley's gaze.
"I love you," he says in a harsh whisper that makes it sound more like he's bestowing a curse. "The only thing left of me is that I love you."
Xander growls instead of smiling. "Why do you think I'm doing this?! Every time I split someone open, slit their throat, bleed them out... it's for you." He feels sick, but he doesn't let himself shut up. "For another song, or another adventure. One more word word, one more touch. I'd devour Filgaia myself if it would get me another minute of you."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
I love you. Riley's breath catches and tears spring to his eyes at the words. He wants so badly for that to be true.
Could it be true? Xander is telling Riley something he has long allowed himself to pretend, but not believe. It feels familiar and alien at the same time. They've been going along as if it were true, with Riley knowing that it couldn't be. It couldn't be.
"That's not for me, though, is it? You mean the old me, right? The me who hadn't betrayed you or stabbed out your eye or filled you full of evil impulses and shortened your life..."
Xander's promises of violence on his behalf silence him into a kind of awe. Another song, another adventure, another word, another touch. Those sound like things from now, things from today that Xander is treasuring and willing to kill for. Xander's determination to live hasn't been driven by spite toward the universe, it has been wanting more of... of him?
The tears start to stream down in earnest. Could Xander have really put his whole betrayal aside? Isn't that a wish too ridiculous for the world to grant?
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
The tears make Xander's stomach twist, but he has to endure it. The parts of himself he tried to subdue, to keep palpable because Riley's stuck with him, because if Riley wants to kill him, and if Xander ever fails to stop it, Xander would rather die feeling like Riley wasn't completely disgusted by him.
But he'd be right to be. And if that's already their future, what point is there in holding back? Let Riley feel however he's meant to feel the next time he tries to shove a knife in Xander's back.
"You think I'd prefer to let you carry the curse alone, where I couldn't do anything about it? That I wasn't wishing for something, anything to keep us bound together?"
And he'd gotten that wish, terrible as its execution. A dark pact that tangled their souls and their fate in the worst way. Maybe Riley's feelings were different in the moment, but if Valmar is an evil god that feeds on desire, they must have, Xander used to think, wanted the same thing.
"I don't care what I have to do or who I have to become. Even if you can't look at me, as long as you're here to keep being you, it doesn't matter."
Xander does miss who he used to be -- when he was softer and kinder and stronger, when he smiled and laughed easily and the sound wasn't horrible, and when he saw himself as someone with the power to help people instead of hurting them -- but retaining that isn't worth the alternative.
"It's not the love you wanted," he says with a sigh, getting a kerchief to help dry Riley's tears. "But it's not pretend."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
You think I'd prefer to let you carry the curse alone, where I couldn't do anything about it? That I wasn't wishing for something, anything to keep us bound together?
Riley stares at Xander. Forgiving him would have been a miracle on its own, but this is more than Riley could have dared to let himself hope for. Some part of him has always insisted feebly that he didn't really mean to bring Xander into the curse for real. He never knew quite what it was that allowed that evil wish of his to be turned into reality. It just seemed that Valmar heard it somehow and made it so. Turned it from a cruel and selfish desire into something real enough to wreck Xander's life and end the lives of everyone they knew.
But if Xander was wishing it, too...
"Y-you wanted to be in the curse with me?"
Alas for Xander, this is a tide of emotion that no handkerchief can quell. Riley throws his arms around him, heedless of either of their injuries, sobbing outright.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
He doesn't know what to make of Riley's expression and tears, precisely. It's a lot of damning information. It's not soft and gentle. Xander doesn't know anymore how he's supposed to be tender with his feelings. They've become too bloodstained for that.
There was a Xander worth Riley's love and patience once, and Xander has to admit that he chose to throw that version of himself away. Cereza only showed him that he could.
"...Better cursed with you than blessed without."
Xander hesitantly pulls his kerchief back when he realizes the effort is smearing Riley's tears more than drying them. He has little time to consider an alternative before Riley's upon him. Xander nearly falls over, catching himself on one arm and holding Riley with the other. He opens his mouth, but doesn't trust himself to make his voice louder than Riley's sobbing.
There's something backwards about it, again, as Riley often is. But then again, who else is Riley going to cry on? Xander helplessly strokes down Riley's back in a pathetic effort to comfort him.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
They aren't tears of happiness, exactly -- it's all a bit too complicated for that. But some of the most mournful tenets of Riley's existence have suddenly been rewritten, and he will need some time to process.
Once that processing is complete, and Riley quiets, he seems almost imperceptibly to shift to holding Xander rather than being held by him. He pulls away enough to behold him with a tearful smile, eyes shining.
"Xander..." he says. "You love me!" There is absolute delight.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
It's not the first time Xander's been left thinking all he can do is hold Riley until the tears pass. There's no fixing their fate. There's no changing how he feels, either. He wouldn't want to. Not about this.
If that's all Xander can do, then all he can do is carry it out. But somehow, someway, in the time it takes Xander to note Riley seems to be calming down, Xander is the one being held.
He gives a single blink, and then he squirms like a fussy cat. When did this happen!
And now Riley sounds... delighted?!
"Did you hear anything that came after that part?!"
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Did you hear anything that came after that part?!
"Yes, I'm trying to inscribe it all on my heart. Let's see, there was lot of other romantic stuff about wanting my songs and touches... a sad part about feeling like there isn't anything else of you left... some troubling yet also romantic stuff about killing and devouring Filgaia to have more time with me... .. did I miss anything important?" Riley is wearing a very incongruous dreamy smile as he recites these confessions.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander turns bright red and shoves his palm on Riley's chest in one of his habitual not-shoves.
"Okay, fine, you were listening."
Pause.
"What do you mean romantic?!"
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
What do you mean romantic?!
"Xander! How is all of that 'I would doom the world for one more moment with you' talk supposed to be anything but romantic? Mind you, I won't want you to devour the world, and I think all that devouring the world would get us is horribly subsumed into Valmar, but the sentiment is very beautiful."
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander opens his mouth with a protest, but slams it shut and growls, fangs and all.
After a moment he folds his arms and leans into Riley with a hrmph.
"Yeah, well, try and stop me."
Which is exactly what Riley intends to do, but at least they're on the same page about it now(?).
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Yeah, well, try and stop me.
"Mm," says Riley, with peaceful happiness. For a while he is content to rest like that, but eventually he tries to nudge Xander to show him his face. This ends up involving holding Xander's chin in his hands to behold him.
"Ahh, I can't believe it. You love me..." A broad, expectant smile. "Even right now, right this minute?? What about this one??"
It has been a long-held belief of Riley's that Xander's love for him only survived a couple of minutes after his confession before being immediately destroyed by Riley's subsequent actions.
But it didn't?? It's still there!?!? He can look at Xander and the Xander who looks back is someone who loves him? (maybe this kind of behavior will make him change his mind, Riley!)
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander looks up at the nudge all too easily, like he's expecting something other than a trap. But no. It's a trap and now he's stuck looking at Riley, chin cradled in his touch.
The broader Riley's smile, the hotter Xander's face gets.
"Yes, all of the minutes...!" he sputters in exasperation, like this is an obvious but also annoying fact of life. He squirms, jerking his head to the side to try and break eye contact.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
"All of the minutes..." Riley echoes happily, savoring the words.
And then Xander is trying to escape his gaze and even that familiar cuteness can be appreciated differently in this new light. Xander would devour the world for him but is too shy to make eye contact. So precious...
Riley lets him break out of his hold, but then nuzzles him.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Breaking free was a mistake and Xander faces a new, terrible consequence. He sighs, resigning himself to this affection while keeping his eye determinedly glanced aside.
It's only now beginning to dawn on him he may have provided Riley with a new era of teasing. But that's not fair -- the reality's the same...! Nothing actually changed...! But it did for Riley. Riley, who was living alone with his feelings for too long.
Xander pulls Riley down into a kiss and grumpily looks back away.
"... Don't think something that awful again."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Riley laughs. "Xander, you're so mad about all these touches you would devour the world for." Yes, a new era of teasing indeed.
Riley is... happy. He knows they're in another bind, and that Xander's pain can't be stopped until they kill again. That Drifters seem to be waiting to thwart them at every turn.
But he's got two years of deferred joy hitting him all at once and it's difficult to focus on anything else.
... Don't think something that awful again.
Riley leans against him. "I won't. I'll believe in you from now on. If your love can survive that time I tried to bury us a few months ago, I think maybe it can survive anything..."
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
"Sh-Shut up!" Xander snaps at Riley's teasing, his tone lifting toward panicked. It's notably not a denial of either his anger or his willingness for destruction. It would be more complicated to get into this problem of Xander's.
(It would actually be quite simple, but let him have that delusion a while longer.)
Xander shifts his weight so Riley's supported under it, his arms folded and his brows knit in a scowl as Riley calls him out in the most blatant way possible. Here, now, right in his own tent after a terrifying near death experience and heavy conversation. Unmatched cruelty.
"That's the idea." He huffs. "Not like that sort of thing isn't my just deserts anyway. Devouring Filgaia and all that."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
"You don't deserve to be buried prematurely in the earth," Riley tells him gently, petting him in reassurance. "At least, not to me. And I think we're the only ones we can really be accountable to at this point." They've met people who sympathize with their plight, but who could really say 'all right, it's fine for you to kill someone to live, go ahead' unless they're really unhinged, themselves?
How must it have affected Xander's view of what happened in Cereza if he feels that he chose to become part of the curse? No wonder he feels like his love for Riley is all that's left of him. It must have seemed like he threw everyone else away to join in his fate.
Once again, Riley has a feeling like he's learning about Xander's feelings when there's no time left to enjoy them. But he knows better than to lash out, this time. Instead, his tone goes soft.
"I wish there was a way we could just live on... maybe we should try to find Dean."
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander grunts as if in protest, but lets himself soak up the reassurance for now. It isn't as if he plans to ever accept what it is he deserves. Xander will push back against any fate that acts against him, as long as he can. "I don't blame anyone for trying," he says. "That's all."
It's gotten easier to see Riley's murderous plans for the future aren't because Xander deserves it, and aren't because Riley wants to get rid of him. It's one half a theological disagreement and one half Xander being too stubborn to give up on hope he claims is gone. Somehow, it never really is, despite that each time it glimmers it's crushed again and again. Maybe one day there won't be anything left.
That's not today. When Riley brings up Dean, Xander's quiet a moment, thinking of how they'd just fought Avril, how Avril was trying to honor what Dean wanted, and maybe it was what she also wanted for herself... And if it was, had Dean had any influence on that? Dean, who'd been relieved they weren't dead...
"... Yeah. Maybe."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
At the very least, no hero is likely to show up and try to stop them from trying to be purified. Riley imagines they might even be praised for trying. But it could waste precious time... And, of course, it could mean delivering themselves to their doom, just like with the priests before. And maybe Dean would shed a tear for them, but there's no denying it would be... convenient as a way to get rid of them without getting anyone's hands dirty. Riley finds himself resenting that a little.
"...Was that really one of the priests from the purification ritual?"
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Riley isn't alone in those grim thoughts. Xander's already shared his hesitance with the ritual. He trusts (and when did that happen) that Dean would not mean to harm them with it, but that does not mean it won't harm them. That, tangled as their souls are now, it won't hurt. That it could weaken them and leave them vulnerable.
Dean seems unlikely to take advantage, but might someone else? It's a risk. But what if it worked...? Xander hates that he already knows exactly what he'd do.
The moment feels more somber from all the misguided delight Riley was feeling before. Xander keeps close.
"Mm. The one who first tried to stop us when I lead you away. He lunged. I panicked." Xander gestures as his own face. "Broke his nose with my staff. I tossed one of the medicinal candies at him as we ran, because I felt guilty. ... I wouldn't have felt guilty if I'd done worse to him today."
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
"Oh, right, I think I remember you hitting one of them..." Riley had been in a daze at the time, grappling with the idea that rather than being cured at the triumphant end of their quest, he was supposed to volunteer to die.
And that was an innocent young Xander's first brush with violence against a human... Here is where Riley would normally feel a cringe of guilt at having plunged him into a life of murder, and that guilt isn't absent now, but it has a more complex and bearable flavor.
"Thank you for saving me back then," he says, giving Xander a kiss. Did he ever thank him for it at the time, or was it straight to eye stabbing? Poor Xander deserved better.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
"They were going to kill you," Xander says, not recalling that's exactly what he said when Riley questioned him back then. The tone's different now: no longer panicked and baffled, but tired and venomous. Granas' servants no longer deserved his benefit of the doubt.
But both kiss and gratitude turn Xander softer as he looks to Riley, almost questioning. Riley hadn't asked to be saved, and hadn't been terribly enthusiastic about Xander wanting to try. Being handed that dagger...
There's a still, guarded moment before Xander wraps his arms around Riley and pulls against him in a hug. His eye stings, but he decides to not let it become tears, as if any such thing were in his control.
"I'll always choose saving you."
Even Xander knows that may not be reassuring in the hell their lives have become. But it's the truth.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
They were going to kill you.
"They were..." Riley agrees. "If you hadn't hit them and dragged me away, they probably would have." Sometimes he does think of that like a regret -- like he was supposed to let that happen, and now he's on the wrong path, following a sequence of events sprung from his own selfishness that should never have taken place. In his most indulgent moments, he sometimes thinks of the events since that day as not quite being real, since surely the real Riley would have given up his life before taking anybody else's. So this is just an offshoot reality, or some kind of dying dream. It's one way to cope with being a murderer.
He wonders if knowing he didn't destroy Xander's love will eventually change those feelings, any.
I'll always choose saving you.
He is with Xander in the intensity of the moment and the seriousness of that promise and the gloom of his own ruminations... for a moment. Then a smile creeps stealthily onto his face.
"...Because you love me," he suggests happily. Riley has been ruined and can no longer be stopped.
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
It's because of Xander that Riley has become bloodstained. Riley didn't want this. Riley didn't want to become a monster. Then Xander made it happen, and Xander decided to keep walking the path of survival. And Xander does regret that Riley ever felt the need to take a life himself. That Riley forced himself to perform brutalities he'd rather die than commit. Xander should also regret his own atrocities.
He doesn't. And he doesn't regret that they're both still here.
What he regrets is searching Riley's face for a reaction and experiencing the cold dread that comes with Riley's lips quirking up like that.
Because you love me.
Xander flinches, his cheeks growing redder. "Ah..."
He was always saying it, he thought. In trying to protect Riley, in treating Riley's wounds when he failed, in making promises and agreements for the future. In snapping at him in concern, or giving in to absurd requests, or with Xander's own touches, intending to comfort or reassure. Before today, he thought Riley knew that. Riley's teasing was at maximum strength since they'd began sharing life like this...
...Except, in reality, it wasn't maximum anything.
"O-Obviously," Xander growls, like it is an affront to have it said out loud, "What other reason would there be?!"
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Riley takes, perhaps, too much enjoyment in Xander's terror at his love confession being played with like a new toy. Riley relishes in his reddening a bit before offering him the reprieve of a hug.
"I just like to hear it..."
The novelty of this will wear off eventually, right...??
...Well, it hasn't by that night, when just as Xander may be starting to nod off, Riley nudges him.
"So when you said you wanted to take my eye and also the rest of me... you loved me, then?"
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Hugs and other such gestures are always how Riley's gotten out himself out of Xander's retribution before, and it is how he'll continue to do so, it seems. Xander sighs, reluctantly accepting. It'll take a while for his complexion to normalize, though...
"Then I'll tell you again later."
Between recovering from battle and the new and novel emotional exhaustion Riley's found to inflict on Xander, he finds himself more eager for sleep. But even after uprooting his thorns earlier, it's difficult to get comfortable and focus beyond the discomfort creeping back into his bones. Or. Whatever part of him that actually hurts.
It's almost welcome that Riley nudges him for attention. Something else to think about.
... Just kidding never mind.
"Yes." Xander sighs it more than he says it. "That's what I meant. That you -- I -- that I wanted --" He makes a frustrated, strangled sound and gestures vaguely in the dark, assuming Riley can pick up on the rest.
(But if Riley could pick up on the rest, you wouldn't be having this conversation, Xander.)
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
"I mean, I didn't think you meant you wanted to stab me in every available place, at least..."
And to be fair, for many of Xander's actions, love would be the simplest explanation if Riley hadn't already eliminated that possibility. At the time, his understanding of their relationship was in such a shambles as to assume Xander meant something more like "I'll allow you to stay near me as long as you dedicate the whole of your being to making up for what you did." Perhaps, if Riley was lucky, there was also an overtone of desire to that offer/threat.
To think it was just regular, wholehearted love, without any component of revenge or retribution...
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander is certainly feeling a need for revenge right now. ... But not for any of the reasons Riley has been concerned about. And not that Xander has ever been particularly skilled in turning the tables in these conversations.
He sighs again.
"You shouldn't have stayed with me. But if you were going to..." Xander hesitates, trying to find his words, and even as he does they become quieter with each one he speaks, nearly mumbled, "...Then I wanted that to mean you'd be... mine."
It was a threatening way to put it. But everything about Xander's existence had felt threatening since Cereza, and in that moment, as much toward Riley as anyone else.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
"I shouldn't... have stayed with you? What is that thought doing in your head??" Riley plops his hand on Xander's head and shakes it lightly to dislodge any other outrageous ideas.
"At what point was I supposed to wander off and abandon you? When you were helpless and traumatized and healing from a dangerous injury I had given you, or when you had just come back to me and we were the only people who could possibly understand what the other was going through?"
But... did he ever understand what Xander was going through? Did what was actually going though Xander's head at that time have a single thing to do with what Riley had imagined it to be?
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander's expression goes flat as he makes a grumbling noise while he's shaken, but he endures it without wriggling. It's Riley asking further that has him baffled and lifting up on his arm to squint at him.
"After I killed everyone?" That's technically the first of the examples Riley provided, but Riley, of course, worded it wrong. There's a spike of regret as he says it, though. Like maybe Riley will realize how horrible it all is and suddenly want his distance. Riley, who was under the weight of bloodlust for months and somehow only stabbed out Xander's eye.
He hesitates, settling back down and scooting closer. "... Thank you. For staying back then."
In the same way the world was coming down on them too hard for Riley to express any gratitude for being saved from the priests, Xander had never said as much about Riley's commitment to keeping him from wasting into nothing, either. Xander instead tried to push him away.
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
After I killed everyone? Riley's hand on Xander's head turns gentler, stroking his hair.
"Let me share the blame for that. It isn't something you did because you wanted to."
Again, the guilt feels different than it did. Xander “chose” to join him in the curse. But he didn't choose that. And Xander's feelings of acceptance can't erase the violence and selfishness of Riley in those moments that led to Xander fleeing from him only to be overcome by bloodlust while Riley stayed behind wallowing in despair.
... Thank you. For staying back then.
Riley wraps his arms around Xander and gives him a silent squeeze. It’s as much for himself as for Xander.
He never thought of leaving back then, but those were hard days. His only company was corpses, his own remorseful thoughts, and a Xander who was so far away he almost seemed a corpse, himself.
"I never wanted to go. I just wanted you to come back."
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
"You didn't want me to, either," Xander offers weakly.
Xander didn't want it. But even that sentiment feels distant. Sometimes he wonders: didn't he? Didn't he hate being there, being bound to Cereza, having given up his dreams because of it? Did Valmar grant that wish as cruelly alongside letting them share a fate? But Xander also wasn't able to really see the way he withdrew from everything -- the proof that, without Riley, Cereza would have been his grave, more bound to it than he'd ever been.
Even now, thinking of it threatens to chase him back there and the emptiness that comes with it. But the arms around him ground him from that. They always did. It's why he thought he had to chase them away, terrified of what and who he'd find on the other side. It was Riley, in the end. Still waiting for him, despite everything.
"...You brought me back. I'm here now."
Because... well, he doesn't have to say it now, does he?
<Pose Tracker> Riley Arwell has posed.
Riley snugs him closer. "Mm, you're here."
But does he want to be? Riley is not sure if this revelation about Xander's love explains the strange paradox of his misery with what his life has become and his refusal to give that life up at any cost, or if it only deepens the mystery.
If he were staying around just for Riley's sake, would Riley's... ... invitations to give up (to put it very politely) have been met with such panic and anger? Xander said he'd kill for one more word, one more touch.
Is he... enjoying himself after all? Xander remains a layered and perplexing creature.
"So..." Riley searches for a way to lighten the mood. "When you made me fruit punch, that was love, too?"
A little later: "...And when you fed me your pineapple, that was love?"
And then: "And when you make extra antidotes so I can eat unidentified mushrooms..?"
He will continue on in this manner until Xander stops him in exasperation or he himself falls asleep in between thinking of examples.
Entirely too many of them are food based...
<Pose Tracker> Xander Lovell has posed.
Xander breathes out, and lets some of his tension fade with it. It's easier to relax like this. Doesn't get caught up focusing so much on the pain. Maybe he'll be able to sleep. The grim nature of their reality isn't a deterrent, so he doesn't expect any need for the mood to shift.
But this is Riley they're talking about, and Xander flinches back awake.
He sighs, heavy and long suffering. "...Yes."
Later...
"Y-Yes, go to sleep."
Even later...
"Yes," Xander groans, tortured and beleaguered.
The more Riley asks, the more he gets repeat affirmations of increasing frustration... but also increasing incoherent, until all Xander's responses are muffled sounds in their bedding.
It will, in the end, be Riley that has to fall asleep first. Xander squints at him, distrusting, before placing a careful kiss to his temple.
"Just assume it's always yes," he says quietly before closing his eye.