Chapter 83: Warm Moments
Alena sat in her bed, moping. Though she wouldn't admit to it, she was emotionally drained and a little depressed.
The room she was in was of some comfort, at least, with its warmness and a sense of comfortable cosiness that had grown on her over the past weeks she'd practically lived out of the room. It wasn't an ideal living situation, but it was… nice.
Something that had begun to irk her, though, was that she felt left behind. No matter the perfectly reasonable rationalisations for why Maximilian, and more importantly Rethi, were out working towards a grander goal, she still felt useless. She felt almost like baggage.
Sure, every now and then Maximilian would have a scant moment to spare, to talk to her in the gentle tones that he almost always spoke in. Those moments relieved some of those swirling emotions, but never long enough to matter. She had begun to feel disconnected from what Maximilian and Rethi were actually doing.
Sleeping with Rethi at night, regardless of the fact that Rethi didn't actually need to sleep much, if at all, anymore. Whether he was even sleeping as Alena slowly drifted away into sleep on his arm was something that had also begun to eat away at her.
She was being coddled, or at least it felt that way. Maybe Maximilian just hadn't come to the point where she was useful yet, like Rethi had been for at least the first few days of coming to Crossroads. It was possibly the most infuriating part of the man she knew as her boyfriend's master, leader, and aspiration.
Maximilian's goals were clear, now that she knew them. To save the worlds from the Champions of his own. A noble goal, but one with an uncountable number of paths to reach it. Maximilian's methods were alien in some ways, partly due to his own ideas and morals that he impressed upon his actions, but also because it almost felt like his mind was a maze.
To get the information you wanted out of him, you had to turn down all the correct corridors to reach it. Not to say that Maximilian was intentionally hiding things, in fact he was exactly the opposite, but to get the right information, you needed the path to get to it.
So when she had one day asked what she was meant to be doing, he had answered with, 'What do you think you should be doing?'
An entirely unhelpful answer to her plight. He'd had no time after that, having to go to some party or another for whatever his goals required. But she can't help but feel as if she'd just asked the wrong question but got the honest answer for it.
And here she was, lying in bed for hours after the fiasco of a day she'd had.
It'd started normal, pleasant even with the weather, but things had changed rapidly when Rethi had dragged the other man and the tall dark-skinned woman into the Skinned Lizard. They'd done as well as they could have for the man without use of her life shifting, but he was going to have a horrific recovery that could easily end in a life-threatening infection. She'd pushed Valeri out of the room and healed the man with relative ease, though he'd find himself needing to eat and sleep desperately.
She had hoped to explain away the healing, to keep her origins and power a secret, but the man was sharp beyond belief. She had almost seen the connections being made as soon as he'd awoken, his eyes glancing from where his wound used to be and to her. He'd figured it out in a mere moment, and from there it just snowballed into the reveal over that tense dinner.
They didn't look at her the same anymore, even after Maximilian had assuaged their fears for the time being. The one who was most receptive, interestingly, was the greedy Gek she'd come to know as Venn. She'd seen him around, with her being at the inn that she called home all day.
Mostly, the man seemed skeezy, but since the Skinned Lizard staff worked with him on occasion, usually signified by him being dragged into the back room by Tek or Tenra, Alena thought that he probably had some good in him.
Though, when he'd actually approached her after being revealed as the monster they all feared, he'd been… polite. Or overly so, smarmy like he had been with Maximilian and then Rethi right after he'd spoken a few words to her. Clearly it was because he was being opportunistic, trying to curry some good favour with their group of, frankly, legendary existences.
But regardless, it was more than she'd been expecting after that, the fears of being exposed muting themselves with a wary suspicion. She wasn't so disillusioned that she'd ever think that she could gallivant through the streets, proclaiming herself a life shifter to all who would listen. She'd just end up stabbed.
But wariness and the lack of greetings and goodbyes were an easy price to pay for them holding her identity to themselves.
Alena stretched out on her bed, filling the centre of the wide bed with her form. Though, her reverie was interrupted when she heard the simple metal key in the lock of her door, Rethi wearily stumbling into the room moments later.
She watched idly as her boyfriend stripped himself of the majority of his clothes, kicking off his shoes and the simple socks beneath before flopping onto the bed in the space that Alena couldn't quite fill by herself.
"Big day?" She asked, Rethi's long groan came shortly after, muffled by the pillow that he'd stuffed his face in to hide from her, and she supposed the world itself. Alena couldn't help but giggle at the boy, the same one who'd been ready to fight an entire room of potentially extraordinarily strong opponents for her safety only hours before. Now, though, she was just her boyfriend. More normal than you'd ever expect someone with the title 'Divine Warrior', moping about his day just as she was.
Rethi turned his head to its side, looking right at her as his slightly chubby cheek pushed up against the pillow, retaining just a bit of the boyish look instead of completely succumbing to the trend of his powerful, muscled form.
"Are you okay?" He asked softly, something he asked more often than she'd like to admit. If he was asking at all, it probably meant that she wasn't feeling 'okay' at all. A weird sixth sense that Rethi had developed, either by being around the freakishly good mind reader that was Maximilian, or just having figured her out.
"Not really." She said, propping herself up on an elbow, facing her boyfriend face to face almost. Rethi chewed on his lip for a moment, though he came back with another question in his due time.
"Because of Master Max revealing you or because of the other thing?" She rose an eyebrow at that.
"The 'other thing'? What other thing?" She asked dubiously, wondering if she'd somehow missed something in the day's craziness. Rethi rose from his laying position, mimicking her own propped up positioning.
"The 'you not knowing what to do' thing." Alena smiled bitterly; her boyfriend having hit yet another nail on the head.
"Bit of both, really." She said quietly, sighing deeply as she looked away from the concerned boy at her side. "I don't know, especially with the whole thing Maximilian did today with trying to unite everyone under his umbrella, I feel like I'm useless in the machine he's building."
"How?" Rethi asked gently, though he continued before she could answer, "Sure, you haven't done much yet, but the others in the Skinned Lizard haven't either. They're still waiting by the sidelines until Maximilian gives them something to do." Alena scowled softly, knowing that he was right, at least to a certain extent.
"But when do I even get used? What's my purpose here? The others in the Skinned Lizard are parts of a larger community that they can rally, I'm just here for not much other than to heal someone if they really need it, which both of you almost never will." Alena felt the frustration coming from deep within her much like how it had in the near past, but Rethi raised a hand easily, stopping her from snowballing into that nigh incoherent rage.
"Look Alena, I understand." He said, words firm against her own self-defeating ones, "It wasn't so long ago that I thought the same way as you. Like, how was I going to help Maximilian between him being an actual damn Demigod, and you being capable of healing almost anything with time and practice. I was just a kid with a sword, no matter how good I might've been at learning it." Rethi shrugged lightly as Alena felt her mind recontextualise hundreds of little interactions where his expression had just been a little off, or his tone just a little too sharp. She realised now that it was the same frustration as her own.
"But," he said as he flopped back over onto his back, "I just kept moving forwards anyway. I thought that maybe I'd get lucky somewhere and find a good sword, or maybe find a special technique. Like great warriors do in the stories, you know?"
"And then you got given a Divine Sword. And your master turned out to be a Champion and a Demigod." Alena jibed, a common friendly insult that Maximilian and Rethi would throw between each other, both mockingly downplaying their own luck. Rethi laughed dryly, but then gave her a solid look.
"And you were born to one of the most competent life shifters on Orisis, and one of the men with access to the most legitimate medical knowledge between both worlds. And your boyfriend is a Divine warrior, and his master is a Champion-Demigod hybrid." He rose an eyebrow archly.
"Who's the lucky one?"
Alena awoke in the late morning, finding her boyfriend still laying at her side, sleeping with his hands clasped behind his head and elbows out to the side, almost like a set of wings. The comparison made her giggle lightly on the inside, with Rethi being all too close to an actual servant of a God, though Angels are just a thing of legend. Not that it would stop them being any less real than a Demigod.
She couldn't resist reaching out with her hand and feeling against his chest. Running her fingers across the ridged muscles that seemingly covered every part of his torso, despite the stubborn layer of baby fat that smoothed those ridges considerably. Thankfully, even though the muscles were hard, they still remained soft enough to be comfortable as she laid her head gently against his chest.
She felt her head move up and down as he breathed, completely unimpeded by the weight of her head over his lungs.
Her fingers felt against his skin, and like she had done at least hundreds of times now, she let her power seep into his system as she monitored his body idly. She knew that this could be considered creepy, breaking all sorts of boundaries that she wouldn't ever break with anyone else, but Rethi hadn't only agreed to letting her check his body whenever she felt like it, he'd found it to be decidedly non-creepy.
'I dunno, you look at my wounds all the time, what's the difference between that and looking at the rest of my body too?' Something that had no good answer. She would've explained that it was invasive, if it were anything more than sending a little bit of ether through his body, something he could easily reject with the amount of Divine energy that flowed through him.
She felt a certain sense of calm as she looked over him, the world around her dimming so that she could better understand his internal workings. His body was a symphony to her delicately tuned ears, almost completely in synch with itself, each component, each organ, each muscle, membrane, cell, all working together to optimise itself for the best possible function.
She'd like to say that his body was the best that she'd ever viewed, at least with the girlfriend-ly pride for her boyfriend, but Maximilian's own was something entirely different. The difference between Rethi and Maximilian is that Rethi's body is as if a human were taken to it's peak, with Divine power playing a significant role in optimising it past how it should theoretically be able to perform in nature, but Max's body surpassed all that was human.
In fact, much of his biology was completely redundant, where most of his organs could easily be taken from his body with literally no demerits. He stood as an example of what immense power could do to a body, and she knew that there were those even stronger above him, namely the Keeper that they talked about on occasion.
Whether their bodies would exist on the same Godly symphony as Maximilian's did wasn't the point. It was just one way that you could reach that power, and Alena found herself almost tempted to seek them out, to find what made them so powerful aside from their own ether and Divine energies.
"Having a good peak?" Rethi said in amusement, though it hardly shocked Alena as she'd watched his body wake from its sleep state, the brain activating all sorts of chemicals as the body awoke as well.
"The best peak." She said contentedly, feeling the thrum of a chuckle in Rethi's chest, letting her energy and instinct leave Rethi's body shortly afterwards. They laid in silence for a while, just allowing the comfort of their embrace to subsume them while they were conscious. Though the day was hardly one to be disallowed its reign.
A gentle rap against the door was enough to wake the two from their sweet reverie, the voice on the other side pushing through the door with the ease that it always did.
"Rethi, Alena," Maximilian called, a smile audible in his voice, "I'd like to speak with you both in the storage room for a moment, please." They didn't need to respond, hearing the man walking away from the door only moments later.
Alena looked up at her boyfriend's face from her place on his chest, finding him smiling down at her warmly.
"Looks like we're in for another interesting day."
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