Sophia’s POV
Once I’d met Sean, I was all set and ready to head back to Veronica’s place and send us to the moon, but when I announced this at home, rather than the encouragement and praise I expected from the man I loved, I received naught but a flick to the head. “How the hell are you gonna make fun of me for conducting experiments that blow up in my face then turn around and just say ‘fuck it I’mma go to the moon’? Like, what’s your actual plan?”
I rubbed the stinging spot on my forehead. I kinda wished that I had mentioned this before we had had sex, when my powers were fully unsealed and an attack such as this would be utterly inconsequential, but my excitement had led me into grabbing Leo and rushing us into bed as fast as possible. I glared up at Leo and muttered, “What do you mean plan? We go to the moon, put moon in subspace. Seems pretty simple to me.”
Leo placed his hands on his face and sighed deeply. “Sophia, that’s idiotic. You have no clue how far away the moon is. You don’t even know how big it is. I know that you think it’s roughly the size of the Earth I’m on now, but we’re dealing with sizes beyond full comprehension, at distances that can’t even really be put into words. Even moving as fast as light, it would take you 8 minutes to get from the Sun to Earth on my old world. And Hell is way bigger than that place, so given the fact that the day and year cycle seems to be the same, it’s most likely that all of the distances are increased proportionally to the increased size of the planet. For God’s sake, how do we even know that Hell is the planet? Maybe Hell is the moon revolving around the much bigger planet that you think is a moon, we’ve done absolutely nothing to verify that yet…..
“And then even if it is a moon, you have to somehow deal with the fact that Hell and the moon are both moving at insane speeds through space, I’m talking hundreds of miles every second, maybe even thousands considering the possible distance increases. And then there’s the fact that in order to have a day/night cycle, Hell has to be spinning, which means that even if you went straight up for a few hours then straight back down, you’d still travel in an arch and end up miles and miles away from where you started….
“And don’t even get me started on the fact that magic is a thing, hell, your own flame is probably deeply rooted based on the flames of Hell right? And they give off inherent magical properties, so what about Hell’s fire? Does that have inherent magical properties? Given that it’s been burning for as long as you can remember and you’re old as fuck, that’s a solid yes. What does that mean? Does the Ocean also have inherent magical properties? If so, then we need to take those into consideration when planning potential landing sites after the fact. And what about outer space? The concept of space is very closely linked to the concept of stability, so when you go into outer space will there be a higher concentration of stability impeding travel? We need to test that…”
And on and on he went. Detailing everything that we would need to take a while to fully study and comprehend before we could actually follow through on the plan and make it to the moon. As much as I wanted to be insulted that he basically called me an idiot, the constantly growing part of me that liked being tied up and dominated by Leo was finding this incredibly sexy. Like he was just whipping out pure intellectual superiority and using it to put me in my place. I found myself interrupting his tirade so that we could go another few rounds.
After that night, Leo started giving instructions, telling me and Sean to do a bunch of random stuff like flying straight up, waiting a while, then flying straight down, then measuring the distance traveled, both of us going far away from each other, rising a predetermined distance that would put both of us above the false sky of smoke, then using magic to make a large white horizontal plane, and a 100 foot tall pillar pointing straight up, measuring how long the shadows were, taking those shadows and tracing the shape the end made over the course of a day, and a particularly memorable one where he had had me practice tapping my fingers at a specific rate, calling that rate ‘approximate seconds’, and had Sean fly various heights, before allowing himself to freefall, my tapping supposedly marking how long it took him to fall. He then decided that he didn’t trust my tapping skills and gave me a carved stick, and asked me to tell him how many times it tapped. According to Leo, he was trying to figure out, ‘what the fuck is with our gravity’, which informed me that there was something wrong with our gravity. As for what it was? I had no clue.
To be completely honest, I didn’t really understand the point of any of the tests that Leo had us run, but I did understand that Leo believed these to provide vital information for the project, so I completed all of them to the best of my abilities. Well, that was one reason. The other was that Leo ended up getting so focused on the tests and the data they provided that at times he stopped treating me like a person and more like a tool to be used to provide him with information, which definitely tickled a little part of me, leading to some fairly intense nights for the both of us.
After dinner, when Leo mentioned ‘wifeing me up’, I was extraordinarily confused. Is that not what we were doing? It took a while to remember that Leo was human. He had different customs, and was used to a different normal, so I tried to stifle my bitterness and calmly explain to him how relationships worked in demon society. What I had not expected was the reaction he had to that revelation. He appeared to have suffered a blow to the head, completely dazed. He sat motionless in his chair for what felt like days, months, years, completely unresponsive. I started growing rather fearful. What if he decided he wasn’t ready? What if he didn’t realize that? What if he chickened out at the commitment. But gradually my fear started giving way, to a surge of righteous wrath.
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What the fuck did he think we were doing?? Did he really think I’m something impermanent that he can leave whenever he wants?!? He is fucking MINE. I marched right up to him, grabbed him by the chin, and forced his face into an angle where his blindfold would see me. “The fuck are you so surprised by huh?! I fucking love you dumbass, and you’re stuck with me forever. If you don’t like that then tough shit, deal with it.” The fury was still surging within me, the actual NERVE of this boy!!
Inexplicably, Leo burst into laughter. Once more, I felt my emotions shift as anger gave way to confusion. What the hell was so funny?!? Okay, maybe there was still some anger in there. “How fucking backwards is our relationship?!” He asked breathlessly through his wild and manic laughter. It was a laugh I’d heard quite a few times since that night when he murdered those five attackers, and I’d come to understand it to be his true laugh, that he kept bottled up most of the time so that he wouldn’t frighten the people around him.
“First you basically kidnap me, then our souls are bound, then we move in together and sleep in the same bed for months before finally apparently getting married without my knowledge, and then after all that is when you tell me you love me?!? The fuck kinda Ross and Rachel shit is this?!?”
Oh shit. While I had thought it several times over the course of the past year, it wasn’t until this moment that I realized that I had never actually informed Leo about how I felt about him. Looking at our relationship from his perspective, I couldn’t help but burst into laughter along with him. Gradually, we made our way from the kitchen table over to our bed. Laying down, and still experiencing the occasional chuckle, I had just one burning question for him.
“This is okay, right? Tell me what you’re thinking.”
Leo let out a small sigh, and rolled over to face me. His voice took on the same air it always did when he spoke of important conversations. Calm, collected, emotionless, almost bored. An air that irritated me to no end when I was angry with him, but was extremely comforting to hear when I was nervous or afraid. Like many things, I knew that it was a quality that was central to his personality, to the life that he had lived back on his old world. Perhaps it was a defense mechanism, after all, his mother couldn’t work her way into his head if he didn’t give her any emotions to leverage against him.
“I told you once that I was married before.”
I nodded, the conversation we’d had about his various exes was a perfect example of how his emotionless air could be infuriating while I was trying to pick a fight with him. It was utterly impossible, as he simply didn’t fight back. He would just sit and listen, then jot down what I was feeling like it was a fucking bullet point list and acknowledge each individual item with cold rationality.
“To be completely honest, to this day, I’m not actually sure I ever truly loved her. There’s a very decent chance that I just didn’t want to be alone, so when she asked me to marry her, I accepted, and simply chose to spend my life with her so that I wouldn’t be. Looking back on it, it was no real surprise that she fell out of love with me, considering I probably never gave her any either. Sophia I need to know you understand that I really have no clue what I’m feeling at any moment. All I have to work with are approximations. I know that coming home to you every day slows down my heart rate and relaxes my body. I know that my facial expressions form a smile whenever we mess around and fight over stupid stuff. I know that at any given point in time you are liable to make me experience sexual arousal. In short, I know that I like you both romantically and sexually. But love? Love I don’t know. I can’t know. I have no frame of reference as to what it’s supposed to be. I can absolutely tell you that I am 100% willing to spend the rest of my life with you, but will you be happy with that? Can you tell me with complete certainty that you can accept the possibility that I will never truly be able to love you back? That one day you won’t get tired of waiting for a day that will quite possibly never come and just toss me aside?”
I stared at him, stunned. Not because of the words he spoke, but because of what I heard. A tinge of feeling had entered his emotionless voice. Not enough to overpower the message he uttered, but enough for me to notice. It was a subtle tremble, like the strings on an instrument, yet from that infinitesimal note of emotion I could see…grief. Despair. Isolation. And overwhelmingly, I could see his fear. The scared and broken child, praying to an either nonexistent or uncaring God that his parents would stop hurting him and just love him like they were supposed to. The damaged beyond repair boy running away from home, choosing to face the dangers of the wild and later on the inner city, rather than the horrors of the place he had every right to call home. The completely shattered man, somehow functioning despite everything he’d been through, willingly putting his very life in the hands of the woman who asked to marry him, only to throw it out with the rest of the garbage, giving him another crack in his barely functioning existence. The Seth that I had met, before he became the Leo I grew to love.
I pulled him close to me, reversing our usual sleeping position and placing his head on my chest, stroking his hair, and kissing him lightly on the forehead. As I gave this man all of the affection he deserved, I whispered to him, “As long as you choose to stay with me, that will be enough. For eternity.”
“For eternity, huh?” He whispered back, lost in thought. We stayed there, with me stroking his head until he fell asleep in my arms. I pulled his blindfold up slightly, and made sure that it was fully charged despite the fact that my checks had been useless ever since he switched to material from his Aspect Manifestation, and looked at the horrifying scars I had given him during our first time sleeping together. He always kept them covered, so that I wouldn’t feel guilty every time I looked at his face, now devoid of the warm brown eyes with flecks of green that I had so adored. With the blindfold lifted, I spoke to him, saying all of the things that I wasn’t fully comfortable telling him when he had the ability to hear me. At some point through the past year, this had become part of my routine, and I had started treating his sleeping face as my own personal diary.
“You know, you could have mentioned that having my weight on your shoulder like this is so unbearably uncomfortable,” I scolded the unconscious Leo, without moving him to make myself more comfortable. He’d never once moved me from here after all, despite how unpleasant it actually apparently was for him. I continued talking to him for a while, before drifting off to sleep along with him.