Sophia’s POV
Leo had only been traveling for a few short days, and sure, as an Immortal, the time passed even more quickly for me than it had for him. However, I still missed him. For nearly two years now, Leo and I had spent every night in this bed. We slept together, woke up together, had game nights, and had sex. And then I would go to Hell and he would go to Earth. It was a pretty similar setup to how things seemed to have worked in his old world, where two people would go to work, come home, and live their actual lives together. Somewhere along the way, my ‘actual life’, had shifted from Hell, and ended up becoming the small portion of every day I spent with Leo, here in this subspace.
Last night, I hadn’t let go of him for even a moment, and when I woke up, he was still in my arms. While demons don’t actually require sleep, it is still something that we are physically capable of doing. What this meant though, is that every night, I would still be up when he fell asleep, lifting his blindfold and telling him about my day, and every morning, I would still wake up first, and just lay there beside him, pretending to still be asleep. After a while, Leo awoke as well, but instead of stretching and getting out of bed as he usually does, he just….stayed still. He laid on the bed next to me, stroking my hair in the way he knows that I love, and did nothing else. Curious, I sank my consciousness into the soulbond to see what he was thinking, and…Nothing. There were genuinely no thoughts running through Leo’s head. No plans for enchanting, no experiments for the moon project, no ideas for new spells, nothing. Simply a vague sense of relaxation.
After about 15 minutes of laying there, I decided to ‘wake up’, and opened my eyes, hugging him tighter in a silent ‘good morning’. He rolled on his side, bringing himself face to face with me, and softly kissed my lips in response. Neither of us spoke, neither of us moved. We simply….existed. Together. It was something I’d never really experienced before, and especially not with Leo. Normally he’s always thinking about something, doing something, saying something. I thought about that week that he was completely unable to do anything, back when he modified his blindfold to see in 360 degrees around him. I remembered how….lost….how broken he looked, whenever I left him alone for a moment. I learned that week that Leo NEEDS constant stimulation, constant distraction. I try to avoid diving into his thoughts too much, because honestly I don’t think I’d be able to handle spending too much time inside of his mind.
The way I imagine it, Leo’s mind is a lot like the ocean that Sean describes. Unfathomable depths, accompanied by incomprehensible pressure. His thoughts like the incredibly fast, yet constantly shifting and wildly unpredictable currents, threatening to drag you away from where you’re trying to get, if not outright tear you to shreds. The darkness, the oppressiveness, of having millions of pounds of water pressing down on your entire being, blocking out any semblance of light from your surroundings. Intense cold, draining the very concept of warmth, of life, directly from your body.
Being born without any sort of real access to what he thinks, to what he feels would have already been terrifying enough. A horrific sense of being lost even in what should be the comfort of your own home. But due to how horrible his parents were, he never even had the chance to experience and learn what the comfort of your own home is supposed to be. He never learned how to be loved and supported, because his own family stole that chance from him, forcing him to learn how to handle things like hatred and violence instead. They took this sweet boy, someone who would have had just a little trouble connecting with people, and made him experience nothing but pure isolation, turning him into someone who practically cannot accept that there are people who could possibly care about him.
I know that he’s never outright said that he doesn’t believe that Ash and I truly care, but it still shows in the little things. The way that, outside of that one week where he was physically incapable of functioning while changing his vision, I have never heard him outright ask anyone for help. The face he makes, that I absolutely loathe, whenever anyone says anything even slightly kind to him, full of surprise, suspicion, and pain. Even when he went off to fight that army of bandits, and Ash got angry at him for putting himself in danger for such a stupid reason, he just could not understand why she was so angry. Actually, maybe it’s not that he doesn’t believe that we care about him, but that he doesn’t actually know what being cared about means.
And then there’s the ex-wife. The woman he tried to accept as someone who would be in his life forever, someone he fought his own nature for, and tried to learn how to trust her. Until she threw him aside, and stopped caring about him too. All of this rejection, this pain, this fear, I think it all just combined into a horrific monstrosity living inside Leo’s head. An Unknowable Terror, that dwells within his own mind, and if he gives himself a chance to slow down, a chance to really relax, he’s forced to come face to face with it. Put that way it’s only understandable that he needs constant distraction, constant stimulation. In a way, he’s still running away, because he doesn’t know how else to face the monster inside of him. The beast that was nurtured to protect him from the world, hungry for death and destruction against anyone who may hurt him again. Determined to reject the world before it can reject him first, because while a self imposed isolation hurts, it hurts significantly less than one you never asked for, never wanted.
I wish that there was something I could do to convince him, in the deepest parts of his soul, that he’s not alone anymore. That he doesn’t have to worry about me leaving, that no matter what, I’m here. But… sadly that’s not how it works. Even in another thousand years, there will probably be a part of him just waiting for me to leave him alone too. And as sad as that is…. The only thing I can do about it is just be with him, and hope that eventually, one day he’ll fully understand that he can trust me, that he can rely on me.
I don’t know what’s so special about today. I don’t know why at this moment, he’s okay enough to just not think about anything, and simply….be. Maybe there’s no real reason. Maybe it’s just a miracle, and the perfect confluence of events occurred to place him in just the right condition where Leo can actually have a moment to relax. Whatever the case, this is probably a good thing, so I didn’t do anything to disturb him. I just moved my head on top of his shoulder, and held him, and the two of us laid in silence. Together. With no outside worries, no reminders of the past, no thoughts of the future. We simply took some time to fully appreciate, to fully embrace this one moment, of a man and a woman holding each other in the bed that they share.
I reached my hand up, and stroked the side of his face, bringing my lips to his cheek, and…. A hair from his beard got stuck in my mouth. I spent a few seconds spitting it out, using my fingers to try and scrape it off of my tongue. While I was trying to fix it, Leo let out a laugh, the silence fully and officially broken. When I finally succeeded I turned to him, feeling rather apologetic, but he was smiling warmly, and said: “You know, I was thinking about this just the other day. I could really use a trim.”
Within a few minutes, Leo was sitting on a chair in the living room, me and Ash standing over him, trying to decide what look would suit him best. Originally, as usual, Leo was fully intending on doing it himself, and was about to grab the scissors from his shed and just cut his own hair, but I put my foot down. Knowing him, he’d probably just say it’s all in the way and cut everything too short. I barged into Ash’s room and told her the situation, and that I needed her help figuring out what style to go with, leading to our current situation.
The first thing we needed to take care of was the fact that Leo really didn’t take care of his hair at all. It was a wild, dark, and messy tangle matted over his face. So step one was using magic to actually brush and fully clean his hair. There was so much of it that this first step ended up taking almost a full hour, even with the ability to magically undo tangles. Once we’d finished, Leo’s head….
Ash and I were roaring with laughter. Evidently, Leo’s hair didn’t actually naturally fall down, despite all of his talks about how ‘gravity pulls all things equally’. When fully brushed and cleaned, Leo’s hair grew directly out from his scalp, becoming a fairly impressive mane, like you may see growing on a lion. Afterwards, we gave the same treatment to his beard and…. His head had transformed from a wildman shrouded in mystery into what was effectively just a fuzzball with a nose. His hair and beard combined to form a nearly perfect sphere of hair with about a foot radius, completely covering his neck, head, and a good six inches above his head.
Basically we had two options. One, we could keep the majority of the length and just work it into braids to keep the volume under control, or we could cut it really short. The beard though? The beard had to go. It definitely looked good, and the whole, ‘masculine wild man’ was definitely a turn on for me, but only when I was looking at it. When it came to the more…physical aspects of our relationship, the beard had a tendency to get in the way. It was scratchy, it tickled, just all around not something pleasant to work with in bed. Since that one was already settled I carefully used magic to cut the majority of the hair off, being cautious of his neck, face, and ears. Once that was done, I had him use my new favorite spell of his, the one that removed friction, and apply it to his face. I then took the sharpest blade we had in the house, and gave him a smooth shave. I then used magic to remove all of the loose hairs from his face, and Ash and I took a look at the final result.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Before this, it was almost impossible to gauge how old Leo was. You couldn’t actually see his face after all, and the sheer amount of knowledge he possessed made him seem far older than he actually was. But without the beard, and with his hair no longer covering his face….it was remarkable just how young he appeared. It was difficult to remember, but he was still rather young, only in his mid 20s, and his face demonstrated it. He had a gently rounded jaw, strong, but with a hint of youth about it, and a subtly cleft chin, directly underneath adorably puffy cheeks. Not quite chubby, but filled with a distinct boyish charm, especially when he gave his crooked smile, his left cheek flashing a dimple at us. We had removed his blindfold to do this, as we couldn’t really cut his hair with something covering the back of it, so the horrible burn scars that I had given him were fully exposed to the world. Well, the subspace. However, Ash had already seen them, so it wasn’t like there was any feeling of revelation to anyone.
Now that his face could be properly seen, under where his blindfold sits, apart from the ruin where his eyes used to be, were a graceful sort of high cheekbones. You could also clearly see the Markings that cover his entire body were also on his face. Frightening looking cracks in his skin, traveling up the left side of his jaw, then splitting into three, one tendril stretching across his nose, one carrying on upwards, ending over his left eyebrow, and one circling around to the back of his head, concealed by his hair.
Once we saw what kind of face we were working with, Ash and I got down to deciding what to do about Leo’s hair. She wanted to cut it to about half of the length on the top, and trim the sides and back down short, whereas I was in favor of braiding it. We decided to test my way first, since if it turned out not to actually look good we could always undo it and cut it after all. I went into Leo’s shed and brought out a few scrap ribbons from his Aspect Manifestation cloth, then got to work. I had Ash hold the hair on the right side of his head and the hair in the back in two separate hands, then divided the hair on the left side of his head into three, and made three simple braids starting from the left side of his face that trailed to the back of his head. Once I got there, I had Leo hold the three braids in place so they wouldn’t get undone, then did the same to the right side of his head. I then connected the top braids on the left and right, then the middle braids, then the lower braids, so that they merged into one solid braid down the back of his head, and then fed all of the hair on top of his head down behind the braid, turning it into almost a cage that kept all of his hair in place.
After the styling was complete, Leo put on the finishing touch by putting his blindfold back on, covering the middle braid, and keeping the cage secure. We then made our way over to the bathroom, so that we could see his reaction to his new look. He stood in front of the mirror for a couple minutes, using one of his flying knives to look at the back of his head, and lifting his blindfold to check out the braid cage. Eventually, he spoke,
“How the hell did you shave my face and I end up looking even more like a viking? I mean it looks hella good and everything, but that just seems counterintuitive you know?”
We did not know. What are vikings?
The rest of the day passed in a similar manner. We didn’t really do anything of importance, Sean and Veronica were informed that we were taking a day off of experiments, so they knew not to bother us. Leo did go to his shed for a short while, but rather than do any enchanting, he came out with a sizable plank of wood and a knife, and carved it while he listened to me and Ash gossiping about these new friends of theirs, Duke and X. I couldn’t be certain, but I think there may have been some small sparks between Ash and that X guy, though she’d definitely need to work out things with Mike first.
After a few hours of chatting, Leo laid down his newest creation, and it was….a hexagon? On the hexagon were oddly carved diamonds of various sizes, giving the grid almost curved lines.
“Uhh, what’s that?” Ash asked, me nodding curiously in agreement. Rather than responding to us, Leo just took out our chess board and placed the black and white pieces on his new hexagon. He then pulled out a spare board and placed only the wooden pieces on another side of his hexagon, so now there were three sides set up.
“Wait, is this-?” I began asking, but he interrupted me with a nod.
“Three player chess! Now alliances and betrayals are on the table as potential strategies, and the positioning is completely different! You have to watch out for attacks on two fronts, as well as attack two people at the same time! In other words, it’s chess with the ‘paranoia and fuckups aplenty’ expansion pack.”
Ash and I looked to each other, and through our private telepathic channel, came to an agreement. This moron just made himself an impossible game. Sure, he regularly kicked our asses in normal chess, but with both of us on the same side? This man was going down. Leo spent a few minutes demonstrating how the pieces’ movements would have to change, given the slightly crooked nature of all of the lines, making rooks and bishops curve oddly, and knights, already fairly unpredictable while in the middle of a normal board, were now pure chaos on the battlefield, able to pop up and take pieces from seemingly anywhere.
After a couple rounds getting used to the new movements, it became clear that Leo was not in fact going down. He had always had a nasty habit of using our own pieces against us, pinning down our pawns in order to protect our more important pieces, but with three players, it reached a whole new level. Especially while the two of us were trying to work together. Leo would pin down one of Ash’s pawns protecting her queen, and she would reply by moving her queen to safety, forgetting that her queen was protecting my knight and my bishop. He would also put his queen and rook into specific spots, where in order to take them, I would have to first take Ash’s pieces, and after I did, he’d then send a bishop or a knight charging in from nowhere, attacking my queen or putting me in check, forcing me to retreat and play defensively, meaning I took out Ash’s pieces for nothing.
This, combined with well timed quips from Leo, turned our 2 vs 1 chess game into an every man for themselves bloodbath before we even really knew what happened. He had somehow eventually forced me and Ash into such intense pettiness that the game had turned into me vs her with Leo skirting around the edges, picking off pieces, and still somehow making it my fault whenever he took one of Ash’s pieces, and Ash’s fault whenever he took one of mine. After a particularly nasty game ended when he managed to checkmate both of our kings at the same time with a pawn, a knight, and his queen, I carefully inspected Leo and accused, “You are actually an evil genius. Are you reading our minds or something? How the hell do you know just what to say to make us forget that you’re the real enemy?”
Leo calmly started setting up his pieces again, as he answered, “People have an innate desire to not feel like they are the ones at fault. In a normal chess game, you are somewhat forced to understand that you lose because the other player is better than you, and that your lack of ability is your own responsibility, your own fault. However, when another player is added in, and you two try to form a team, all of a sudden, the ability to blame someone else becomes an option. Instead of losing being ‘your fault’ you now have the ability to say that your losing is ‘your teammate’s fault’. And because this desire to not be at fault is so subtle and innate, you often don’t even realize that you’re blaming the other person when at the end of the day, it’s neither of your faults. The fault lies solely with the problem itself. In this instance, I am the problem, I am the one at fault for both of your losses. When two people who are supposed to be a team end up fighting each other over the best way to solve a problem, the only one who comes out on top is the problem itself. Rather than letting your emotions get the better of you, the both of you need to practice calming yourselves down, and looking at the board from an objective standpoint. You need to realize that the problem is not you, Soph, or you, Ash. The problem is me. Only when you do that will you be able to truly work together and beat it.”
The three of us fell into silence, the soft tapping of chess pieces being placed in their starting positions on the board providing the only sound as his words took their time to fully sink in. I thought about any time a serious topic would come up in conversation with Leo. I thought of how many times I wanted to physically fight this man, as he shuts down, and speaks in a soft, emotionless, almost bored tone. How he had never once risen to my provocations, and argued back at me, instead only addressing his subconscious saving of Ash, his inability to understand his own emotions, his history with his ex wife. Every single time I’ve wanted to fight with this man, he has made it practically impossible, and only ever addressed what was identified to be the problem. I took a look at the board, and Ash, thinking about all of the pettiness, the angry taking of each other’s pieces that had set the stage for his back to back victories. We had started these games with the intent to work together to beat Leo, but our emotions had driven us to completely collapse, allowing him to win. Is this why he doesn’t fight? I realized. Is this what he’s worried would happen to us if he let himself get dragged down to my level, and actually let himself get angry and argue back? That our relationship would completely collapse over nothing but pettiness and griping?
As I thought about all of the previous rounds, I had to admit, if that truly was the case, then he had a point. At any one of those times, if he’d succumbed to his anger, and lashed out at me, would we be as happy as we are today? Would we even have ever gotten together? Or would we completely hate each other, and I would have never moved into the subspace, fallen in love with Leo, become friends with Ash? Is all of that….is every morsel of peace that I have found in my life thanks to this one thought of Leo’s? This love, this happiness that I have, is it entirely due to the emotionless, almost bored tone that irritates me so?
I sent a message to Ash through our private channel, and she nodded, and left to her wing. I then got up from the couch, and walked over to the chair that Leo was sitting on, looking confused as to why Ash had left without saying anything. I took his wrist, and led him towards our room. I didn’t tell him what I’d realized, as it felt as though if I acknowledged it verbally, it would somehow lose its preciousness. As though it were a luminous stone, shining best when left in the dark. However, that didn’t make it any less beautiful. This warmth, this appreciation, this love I have for this man, I wanted to share it with him.
When we arrived at our room, I laid Leo down on the bed, and undressed, finally taking off the hoodie that I’d stolen from him. I climbed on top of him, and kissed him. Softly, yet passionately. This wasn’t a night for fun, lighthearted power dynamics. Not a night for ropes, for leashes, for damn feathers or paddles. This was a simple night, a night for a woman who was hopelessly in love with a man, and who had an unquenchable desire to share that love with him, on the bed they shared, in the home they shared, in silent thanks for the life that they shared.