Blue
A Slayers Fanficlet
By A. Stitt

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:

Slayers is the property of Hajime Kanzaka and Rui Araizumi. This fanfiction contains character references from all three seasons of the Slayers anime, as well as from the Slayers manga.

This serves two purposes for the author: first, to have fun, as it is fanfiction and not serious writing.

Secondly, I challenge myself to imagine a world in which characters deviate from canon romantic pairings, if only briefly. After noting that I was the only person without the courage to entertain the idea, I deliberately forced myself to attack my favorite canon pairing: Xellos Metallium and Filia Ul Copt. Several of my fellow Slayers fans have remarked upon alternate pairings for Filia. The most outlandish and WRONG alternate pairing I have ever heard of is Filia and Zelgadiss. It has no contextual evidence and the characters have no romantic chemistry (sorry, AU lovers). So, challenge-whore that I am, I am going to write them, LOL.

The story features Xellos's reactions, and the various poignant moments during which absence not only makes the heart grow fonder, but also proves to us that we have found, and need to fight for, our soul mate. Fellow Xellos and Filia shippers, be warned—you may find parts of this story depressing. But be of cheer—all is restored to its RIGHTFUL place in the end.

PART 1

"And is he dark enough?
Enough to see your light?
And do you brush your teeth before you kiss?
Do you miss my smell?
And is he bold enough to take you on?
Do you feel like you belong?
And does he drive you wild?
Or just mildly free?

What about me?

Well I know I make you cry
And I know sometimes you wanna die
But do you really feel alive
Without me?
If so: be free.
If not: leave him for me.
Before one of us has accidental babies.
For we are in love.
We are in love.

What about me?
What about me?
What about
Me?"
--Damien Rice

Blue. She always wears pink, always insists on her delicate, lacey, bone-china teacup femininity.
But he knows her better.
Blue is her color, it is sturdy, it heals, it is like flowing feeling mysterious currents of water, and honeysuckle is her smell. It's in her pores.
She has always told him that rain and cinnamon are his smells. Rain like that faint earthy-wet aroma right before a thunderstorm, when the protons and electrons in the air dance in electric anticipation. She once added that he reminds her of lightning, of fireflies, and of those beautiful weeds called dandelions. All gorgeous, all alluring, all enigmas. Respectively, they are: lethal; wistfully childlike; and irritatingly persistent.
He told her that her hair was like dandelions, the same color, and then he kissed it over and over, and laughed, his white demon fangs flashing, when she blushed the hue of June rose petals.
Maybe it is because rain reminds her of him that he gets vindictive pleasure out of knowing that there is a deluge today—the day someone else is taking her on a date. A picnic.
He gags. He never liked those. He hates the color pink. He hates maces and vases, and tea, and her burned cooking, and her stupid snorting giggle behind her hand, and her twenty pairs of gardening gloves, and her forty Victorian-era gardening hats, and her way of singing off-pitch lullabies to her son Valteira, the reborn ancient dragon…
And he hates how he misses Val like Val is his own son.
And he hates how he misses her, and he hates that she is so beautiful, so beautiful that it is like someone stuck a livewire down his belly and electrocuted him the first time he looked at her, even though he is supposed to be a monster, a demon, an unfeeling and selfish professional assassin, a priest and general of the ma-oh that opposes the shinzoku she serves…
He hates that he adores Filia Ul Copt and everything that he just now pretended to himself that he hates.
"There's only room for one of us," Xellos Metallium, the most powerful mazoku shy of the three remaining monster lords themselves, sits sopping wet and darkly brooding on the roof of the dragon priestess Filia Ul Copt's cottage.
He could easily erect himself a force field around the rain. But it's his ally right now. His ally against that abomination made of rocks, that somehow caught her eye.
He leans over the pediments and peers inside the second-floor cottage window. There is a vase of crunchy brown flowers still poised on the table beside her bed. Their bed. Dead flowers—she can't move herself to throw them away.
He picked her those flowers—dusty silver-lavender roses. He meticulously removed every thorn. Except one that he had missed, near the bloom—and on that thorn Filia had pricked her finger. Xellos had snickered and sighed, placing that finger between his lips. He had suckled the blood gently dry. Then he had lovingly chastised her not to grab at beautiful and dangerous things so impulsively.
He might have held his tongue if he had realized he was talking about himself, as well.
The puncture became a little infected the following week. Xellos wonders, now, if Filia took his words too closely to heart.
But the flowers that pricked Filia's eager finger are still there beside their bed. The fact remains.
The rain changes to sleet, but Xellos doesn't feel a thing.

It happened a month ago—the reason why Xellos sits out in the rain on Filia's roof, instead of bundled up in her warm soft arms, head nestled between her breasts, with the scent of honeysuckle in his nose.
Just another argument. But something much more profound at the same time.
Filia had quixotically decided to plant several hundred chrysanthemums in her back garden. There was a void space, fertile soil gone to waste, in the upper left corner of the back lot. To Filia, a master gardener, this was sinful.
So she enlisted the most sinful person she knew to rectify the situation: Xellos, who could do virtually anything conceivable to mortals, except cook or garden.
Filia's was a strange logic indeed.
However Xellos, whom Filia had ensnared on his way between pillaging, deceit, or theft on behalf of his maker, the Greater Beast, was in a receptive mood. A receptive mood for Xellos entailed an openness to all things pointless, nonsensical, and eccentric.
Therefore he was enthusiastic about the chance to cake his glorious silk priest robes with dirt digging a hundred holes and filling them with a hundred plants.
A perfect companion to Filia's "logic" was Xellos's jovial will to entertain insanity.
Although, Xellos was probably—no, indubitably—insane as well. It was a nice setup.
Nevertheless, he enjoyed playfully needling his beloved girlfriend, making casual remarks about how squirrels, gophers, and chipmunks enjoyed the piquant after-dinner flavor of mum blossoms. Oh yes, and deer, too. And by the way, did Filia know that hibernation, for all these animals, was at least two months away?
Filia ignored her lover's cheerful sarcasm with aplomb—usually, she took a swing at him with her mace, or loudly insulted his mother. She was in a good mood today—frankly she adored Xellos with all her heart and soul, and he was with her doing her favorite pastime in the world, for her happiness.

Life was good. And unequivocal happiness made Filia, an Aries if ever there was one, myopic and reckless. And when Filia was myopic and reckless, it usually became rude and blunt. And when she was rude and blunt, it made Xellos, a Gemini if ever there was one, evasive and verbally cutting.
Thus:

The dragoness hauled out a tray of twelve mums while openly gazing at her demon's perfectly crafted physique. She plopped them down on the grass near the empty plot where he labored. She tried to be quiet while she watched him work. His shirt was removed and all he wore were his baggy black priest's pants and high, slender brown boots. His shoulder blades were like two scythe-tips, dipping in and out of his gently tanned olive flesh as he dug precise little holes in the earth. His spine, just barely visible, coiled and uncoiled like a lithe serpent, his arms, neither flimsy nor bulging, moving rhythmically and harmoniously with the whole of his form. And the back of his neck was candied with sweatbeads, and a few tempting strands of his velvety dark purple hair slivered out of his short ponytail like shredded iris petals.
Oh gods. She adored him.
Filia did not realize that her lips were less than an inch from the back of that absurdly seductive neck until a smoky chuckle emanated from the throat inside it. "Filia," said the head sitting on top of that neck, "if you distract me this successfully from my planting, it will never get done." Damn! Reverse psychology! That voice was coy and irritatingly nasal and also somehow quite satiny, and it made her want to smack and kiss its owner simultaneously.
She had actually managed this many times.
"Sorry," the dragoness quipped, voice shaking only slightly. She sat back on her haunches in the dirt. "I didn't mean to be such a bother." Her mouth wriggled in a helpless attempt not to giggle.
Xellos lashed around with the silent, oily grace of an eel. His grin, dimpled and fanged, was both boyish and profane. "I wouldn't call you a bother, precisely…" He lunged at her, pinning her down like a puppy pins its favorite playmate. "Lunch break?" he purred, face imploring.
Filia's breathing hastened. "No," she finally decided, her hedonistic self hating her industrious self. "Later. Tonight. Val might see us now. And anyway you've only planted thirty mums so far."
"Oh, pooh. Very well." He sat up, cross-legged, hand cupping his chin. He of course didn't offer her a hand up.
Filia rolled her eyes and helped herself to a sitting position. There was a pause while Xellos sat there mulling over the secrets of the universe.
"DID YOU KNOW…?" he abruptly burst out, eyes gleaming eagerly. Xellos was a windbag and generally loved teaching at people.
"Probably," Filia grinned, in an attempt to take the wind out of his sails.
"Oh, shut up." It worked. He pouted. "Let me pretend to know something that matters to you."
Her heart melted, damn him. "Aw." She got slowly to her feet, and kissed his perfect forehead through his pageboy bangs. This was always her quelling gesture for Xellos—it extracted from him a sweet and abashed little smile, the kind of smile that she only saw from him, otherwise, when he was sleeping. "Go on," she said, just as he flashed that exact adorable expression at her.
Damn him!
"WELL," he prattled, chest puffed out and steam regained, "chrysanthemums are symbolically related to many things, chief among them motherhood. That is why we call our mothers 'mum,' heeehehe!" A high-pitched, frantic giggle followed this proclamation. Xellos's laughter, when he was most acutely amused, was an acquired taste to listeners. It smacked of a homicidal clown who had inhaled helium.
"I see. Very interesting." Filia ran her fingers fondly through her happy sage's hair as she passed him in pursuit of the next flat of mums. "I don't think my mother and I are on good enough terms for that nickname, though."
"I suppose." His voice had changed, and she cursed herself inwardly for leaving herself so wide open to his voracious curiosity. No going back now. "Filia, I know a lot about your mother, but you have never spoken of your father. Yet your new Supreme Elder, Milgasia, speaks often of him with reverence. Who was he?"
Filia felt her skin going clammy. She tightened and released her fists several times before turning to face him. His visage was insufferably pleasant and piqued. She wanted to punch him for being so impassive about his own nosiness. "Bazard Ul Copt was the Supreme Elder before Milgasia. During the Darkstar Campaign."
In the silence that followed, a feather hitting snow could have been heard.
The weirdest look came over Xellos's face in the duration. Somewhere between constipated and shocked. But Xellos was the most brilliant person Filia had ever known, and even an idiot could put together what she had just confessed.
Finally he spoke. "Bazard Ul Copt was your father. Yes?"
"Yes." She shut her eyes.
"The Supreme Elder, before Milgasia, was named Bazard." He spread wide his mud-covered palms.
"…yes."
"Filia. I may be making logical leaps here, but…"
"Yes, the Supreme Elder was my father." She uttered it through tight, white lips. "He kept it secret so that I would not find favoritism by any means but personal merit while training to become a shrine maiden of Ceiphied. We didn't even speak as father and daughter in private, for fear of falling out of practice and unveiling the sham."
Xellos dropped his gardening trowel and shot to his feet. He made a twisting, dancelike motion with his torso, bobbing his head thrice rhythmically. The effect was supposed to be exasperation, but it only came off as something slick and slightly effeminate. "What a charade. In other circumstances I might salute you for the refined deceit. But seven hells, Filly! You might have told me at the time…"
"Might have told you what?" Filia attempted coldness and only managed sulkiness. "I hardly think it would have made any difference during the Darkstar Campaign. Your consideration of my feelings would take the back burner to your beloved Beastmaster's agenda…"
This last remark struck a deepest and most sensitive chord.
"Now, wait a moment…!" Xellos's eyes went from amethyst to magenta.
"No!" Filia went on with the intrepid roar of a bulldozer, reckless in her sullenness. She turned her back on Xellos, raising a small, pale, childlike hand as though in the throes of a spiritual testimony. "You'd still have tried to kill my father for getting between you and your goal. I'm sure of it. I was sure of it then. So I've never told you." Her palm smacked the cottage wall with a cruel finality.
A pregnant silence ensued, one which the dragoness knew well to be the eye of one of Xellos's rare but formidable temper-storms.
"And that's your problem," came his impossibly cold voice, arctic and soft, a bewildering hybrid of snake hiss and dove croon, each word crisply enunciated. "You're always unequivocally sure of your expertise on everything. Including my intentions. My character. My hazardously high regard for you. Even my very worth."
"Those," she snarled, spinning on like a dervish, "are hefty accusations coming from a mass murderer. How arrogant of you, Xellos." The triumphant flush of her cheeks should have made her more beautiful than ever, but it did not.
"I see. You're resorting to that infantile tactic of defense by offense." He smiled—the look was condescending, and decidedly malicious.
It was a look he had cast many victims in his long lifetime, but never Filia, who was spared more vitriol at her lover's hands than she would ever know.
But Xellos had already hit his red zone this time. Now all he meant to do was draw her into the kind of blind rage that complemented his cool, cerebral character, that slaked his appetite for the chaos and passion of which he was not personally capable, but which he ever craved. He continued in that purr which grew exponentially more like a hiss with every syllable: "Don't gawk at me like some constipated toddler. You who felt guilty over what your race had done to Val…and I consoled you and promised you that you had NO culpability in what your race did…because I already KNOW that I'm not one to judge ANYBODY, considering my OWN sins…and still, to WIN an argument, to never say 'I'M SORRY, XELLOS, I WAS WRONG,' You—YOU! How inconceivable of you, Filly! Sure, you're STUBBORN, but THIS…"
"DON'T CALL ME FILLY WHEN I'M MAD AT YOU!" Now she was screaming, and threatening to shatter the decibel scale while she was at it.
"Oh, DO pardon me, FIL-I-A. I can sleep with you, raise your child with you, and live with you monogamously for every expected eternity, but I can't call you 'Filly' when you're mad, gods no. And don't leave my staff in the bathroom. And don't tell your first-time customers I'm not a human. And on and on and ON! The rules must be abided by, regardless of their arbitrariness…" He took a step towards her, trampling a mum underfoot. Neither of them noticed.
"You are so revolting when you're sarcastic!" She threw a bag of wet clay found against the cottage wall at him.
He dodged it effortlessly. "You certainly have a long list of conditions by which I revolt you. What are you, a glutton for punishment? If I'm so sickening, why is it you want ME and no one else?"
A moment passed before Filia's shocked face tightened into an angry leer. "What a compelling question," she growled, through smiling dragon fangs. "Maybe I should go window shopping."
His left eye twitched closed, then pried back open. "You can't be serious."
"Oh, I am. Believe me, I am. No matter how appealing this stormy relationship of ours is…"
"FILIA, do you have ANY concept of how much I've given up, just to…"
"I'm tired of listening to you bemoaning how cursed you are by falling in love with a dragon…"
"I NEVER said…"
"Oh YES, you did! I'm TIRED of you disappearing for weeks on end because Zelas Metallium suddenly has somebody for you to kill or some place for you to blow up or some perverse greed for some dark object you have to retrieve, like some DOG. I'm TIRED of Val having to explain to his classmates that his daddy isn't really a 'bad' person, he's just part of a species called 'evil race.' I'm TIRED of you laughing at me when I act naïve, or clumsy, or impulsive! That's WHO I AM!"
"I KNOW THAT." Xellos pounced the silence following this flow of vicious complaints, face spectrally pale. He hardly knew how to shout, but his voice jumped an octave above his normal pitch, taut and reedy and sing-songy: "And if I didn't find those flaws endearing and appealing and WONDERFUL, Filia, I would have LEFT you!"
"I DON'T THINK SO, XELLOS!"
"OF COURSE YOU DON'T, AND THAT'S ALL THAT MATTERS, RIGHT? WHAT YOU THINK! WHAT YOU THINK IS THE ONLY TRUTH THAT EXISTS, RIGHT?"
"NO, ALL THAT MATTERS IN THIS RELATIONSHIP IS WHAT KEEPS YOU, A SICK SELFISH PUPPETMASTER, ENTERTAINED LONG ENOUGH!"
"Aw, FILIA…!"
"YOU'RE SO DAMNED SELFISH, XELLOS, THAT I SWEAR, EVEN IF IT WOULD SAVE MY LIFE, YOU WOULDN'T CONDESCEND TO GET A HAIRCUT FOR ME!" She flicked her wrist at his head of neat, glossy, hypnotically beautiful purple hair, sending some poetically strayed strands flopping over his eyes.
"Tuh!" He sputtered and fumed, lashing the hair out of his line of vision. "Are you REALLY so delusional?" His arms trembled at his sides. He swallowed loudly, as though to keep countless violent urges in check.
It was perhaps incalculably fortunate for both of them that Xellos was a master of self-control.
"If you want to define this as delusion, then yes." Filia's chest panged as she said it, but she was too proud to take back her words now.
"And you're really that eager to go 'window shopping'?" Now he was strangely calm, his features placid.
"Yes."
For the briefest instant, Xellos flinched. Then it passed, and he stepped back from Filia, whom he had been prepared to deeply kiss, whom he had perhaps taken a bit too much for granted, this time.
His scent, like earth after rain, and sandalwood, and citrus, and candy corn, faded.
Filia almost gave in when that smell dissipated in the air. Almost. But she didn't budge. Not visibly.
Xellos turned serenely away from Filia.
Amazing how two parts of one soul can somehow be rent apart so softly.
He spoke as though it were a benediction: "Very well. You got your wish. Just don't fall through the glass window leaning in looking. Because no one else is going to clean up your messes and still hold you. And, Filia, because no one knows you as I do, I am going to ask you NOT to do what I KNOW you will do: Don't start blubbering and calling my name five minutes after I'm gone, or tonight when you're in bed alone, or tomorrow when I'm not here for breakfast or to walk Val to school…"
Rage and grief flooded Filia, jolting her from her anesthetic stupor. Suddenly the reality of what she had stupidly and frivolously suggested, and the damage it had done, hit her like a tsunami wave. She exploded, "ARE YOU DUMPING ME—?"
"Or ever again." The snide impassivity with which he spoke those last three words was remarkably painful to their recipient.
Filia's eyes spilled over torrentially as Xellos smiled—smiled through his own agony—and vanished from her cottage, and did not return for some time.

Xellos's mouth twitches and he rears upright on the sodden roof, as Zelgadiss Greywords arrives at Filia's door.
Go inside?
Or lie in wait?
Sabotage it?
Or let it sabotage itself?
Xellos smiles.
Perhaps something in between.
With a fizzling sound and a bodily shimmer, Xellos teleports off the roof. And inside the cottage.
"Zelgadiss?" Her voice. Her indescribable voice. Syrup. Larks. A music box. When angered, a bugle. A lioness's cry. When sad, the rustle of a field of tall grains. The voice that his most private self worshiped, like the rest of her, like an idol when it was the Beastmaster he was supposed to love most. The girl he loved so damned much.
Oh, Filia, damn you. You don't know a thing about us, or yourself.
And then she runs right into him—collides with him bodily, in her clumsy, adorably clomping charge down the stairs.
Xellos is overpowered by honeysuckle, and he hopes Filia doesn't hear him moaning with suppressed longing.
She draws back like a child burned by a stovetop. Not a bad analogy, when it comes to the two of them. "It's you," she blurts, rather stupidly, face blank.
Damn that angel's face. He wants to kiss it and touch it and rip the flesh off it all at once. And damn that tendency to say blunt, obvious things. It's painfully cute at the same time that it's irritating.
She's wearing a blue dress. (Oh gods. Vindicated!) A long slender blue dress, one she wore to Val's first school pageant, sexy but relatively modest, curving and swelling in all the right places. She looks like a walking, clean, loving river.
Blue!
"Where is Val?" Xellos is surprised at his own capacity to be calmly terse to the creature who can inspire anguish in him, now, by mere sight.
"At a friend's," Filia replies with equal coldness.
"Good. I don't want him hurt by this."
She can tell his sensitivity to her son's feelings is genuine. Xellos loves Val very much, and perhaps always will. So she refrains from the retaliatory insult poised on her tongue this time. "Fine," is all she retorts. "What do you want? I'm busy. Get a meal elsewhere."
"I haven't been hungry for some time," he hisses, casting her a haunted glare.
Is it just her overly sympathetic imagination, or does he indeed look paler and thinner than he did a couple of months ago, less boyish, sallower? But all Filia asks out loud is, waspishly, "Oh yeah?"
Whatever. The great self-server, Xellos, bothered by a little triste's ending? No way.
Filia continues to delude herself in this fashion, with an internal voice that is high-pitched and a little manic, until Xellos interrupts her with his reply.
"Yeah. I've been working overtime. Not much else to do. Gives me ample opportunities to feed on negative energies. Or to realize I have no appetite anymore in the first place."
"The self-pity act doesn't flatter you, Xellos. You're not a victim."
"I never was before." He smiles bitterly, the unspoken implication heavy. The words actually cause her to avert her eyes as he continues, "And the fickle tart act doesn't flatter YOU."
Filia slaps him, so hard that the noise resounds through the cottage.
He smiles more broadly, but it is not a kind gesture. "Do it again. I missed that. I know you did, too." His voice is snide and yet somehow colorless.
"You're sick."
"Yes, I am, actually, and not in the way you mean. Or maybe in addition to the way you mean. But I don't want your pity, much as you might otherwise believe. I came to watch this insane charade crash and burn. He wants Amelia, Filly. Not you. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say just he's just taking pity on you, because after all, look at you…" And then Xellos reaches out a hand and places it on Filia's hot angry cheek. Both of them falter a little bit as he adds, breathlessly, "What more could a man ask for…?"
A throat is pointedly cleared behind them.
Filia wriggles away from Xellos, turning her back to him. "He's leaving, Zelgadiss. So you stay put." Her voice is high and thin, now, to match that hysterical voice in her head.
Xellos alone recognizes it as her trying-not-to-bawl voice.
Much as the mazoku wishes he could claim to dismiss that voice, it cuts him in places he had thought were sealed off or absent. So he trains his cat-slit amethyst eyes on the bundle in Zelgadiss's hands. He sneers. "Oh, flowers. The most pointless trope of all romantic gestures."
Filia lets out a little gasp and turns on him in disbelief. "Don't be a hypocrite."
"I'M not," he retorts immediately.
"Get over yourself, Xellos," Zelgadiss intercedes brusquely. "Don't be a sore loser."
Xellos profoundly insults the honor and significance of his adversary : He doesn't even look at Zelgadiss. He doesn't even dignify his dig with a reply. He keeps his eyes glued on the flowers, and Filia's face, in intervals. "What are those? Vendor-bought? On sale for a gold coin? Heh."
"Yes," says Zelgadiss, but Xellos does not proceed until Filia, too, says, "Yes, I assume so."
"HA," Xellos brays, and nothing more.
"I think they're…er, lovely," Filia growls, cheeks exploding a bright, self-condemnatory red.
"Liar." Now Xellos turns and looks directly at Zelgadiss, a weird gaze of triumph and condescendence. "She likes wildflowers." He smiles acidly at the predictably tame pink bouquet that Zelgadiss proffers Filia.
"THAT's a lie," she hotly intercedes, seizing the flowers—looking not at Zelgadiss, but at Xellos. "Ignore him! Pink is my favorite color!"
He barks another laugh—it sounds forced. "It is not. Blue is." He gazes suggestively at the very dress she wears.
"Blue is YOUR favorite color for me, not MINE."
There is a vein gently pressing against the fair olive skin of his temple. "Oh? Well I must say it looks ravishing on you right NOW. And why is over half your wardrobe blue? Why was it, before you and I even became involved?"
Her cheeks flame. "It's a convenient color—it goes with everything!"
"Bullshit." He laughs again—high, cold, scornful. "You like wildflowers, you like them blue, and all kinds of other colors, you like them chaotically different. You like all kinds of textures and values and hues and scents. You pick wildflowers and you grow them in your garden. I know. I stopped to look. I PAID ATTENTION, because that MATTERS TO YOU."
Zelgadiss steps back, looking both irritated and strangely abashed. One for the curt and cutting remark, he now appears speechless. He is watching Filia closely.
Filia is physically shaking in rage, her eyes moist. She only hesitates a moment before flinging the cruelest blow she can think of: "HE can say he loves me. He can SAY it. He has HUMANITY in him. Normalcy. WARMTH."
Xellos falters. His eyes narrow and he hisses in a pained breath, through bared fangs. Then he is composed, and he is smiling. "He can SAY it. I can SHOW it. It's too late, Filia. No one will ever grasp the paradox that is YOU better than ME. I see your soul and it's BLUE."
And then he is gone.
Silence.
Zelgadiss advances on his date carefully. "…Filia?"
"Let's go."
He sighs, swaying from one foot to the other in thought. His white shaman robes billow. "We don't have to do this. I think maybe it's too soon…for me as well…"
"No. Let's go." She grabs his hand; the bones in his wrist make a cracking noise with her fervor as she drags him out the door.
This time, there is no one on the roof watching.