(no subject)
Disclaimer: characters property of Software Sculpters etc.
Series: Blind Glory
Worksafe
Pairings: Under negotiation. (but if Zel/Xel squicks you out, this is probably not the fic for you.)
Warnings: eventual slashiness, and also, this is set after the series.
Feedback: is enshrined, and concrit is also welcome, when welmannered.
Notes: I don't need much prodding. Fortunate, since I don't *get* much. So when I do get nudged, it's both appreciated and effective. No pride, no shame, no worries. ^,^V
For the record: I once spent a long time staring at the Slayers and trying to compare their relative sizes. The conclusions I came up with disagreed may be somewhat untrad, but please take my word for it that they're based on actual screenshots, and don't ask me to try and remember which ones. Let me repeat: this is a 2001 fic.
The Blind Glory arc is archived here.
Fill the Gutters With Gold
by Nightfall
Chapter 11: Striking a Chord
In which Xellos is Defeated by a Dead Pig, Zelgadis Indulges in a Fit of Hysterics, Amelia makes Trouble and Sylphiel Shakes her Lovely Pompoms.
It turned out that the pole was for Sylphiel and Zelgadis to carry the boar back on. Zelgadis had been inclined to complain about this, until Xellos amiably tried to carry it travois-style and turned out not to have the mass. He did carry Sylphiel’s satchel, everyone’s cloaks, and the skin. This last was apparently out of automatic reflex, for when asked what he planned to do with it, he answered, promptly and cheerfully, “Give it to Juuousama.” He then stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, and proceeded to be very quiet the rest of the way back.
Sylphiel left almost at once to go assist with the constant repair work on Sairaag city proper, but not before making sure they didn’t mind being left alone. Zelgadis, who knew all about things you just had to do, waved her away. Xellos, hanging all their cloaks up, reconsidered and gave hers back, telling her he couldn’t work if she was there anyway, because his recipes were secret. She giggled at him and ran off.
Xellos donned his apron from the night before and put up his hair again. If it hadn’t been for Zelgadis’s boot knife, which even cleaned was more suited to the assassin than the cook, he would have looked endearingly domestic. But it made him look like an evil clown, and a happy smile on a man in a topknot and a ragged green apron was downright sinister. Looking at him made Zelgadis shiver, and turn away to find a pot to boil water in.
While Zelgadis was making his coffee, he heard Freeze Arrow being cast out from where Xellos had wandered out to with the serving platter. Xellos returned with an enormous slab of meat that, if anyone else had been cooking, might have kept Gourry busy for five minutes. While Zelgadis drank, he started working on it, humming to himself.
Zelgadis wasn’t sure whether Xellos had been less than truthful with Sylphiel or was just sure that Zelgadis couldn’t reproduce his secret recipes-or wouldn’t. Since Xellos was humming songs he hadn’t heard in years, and was possessed moreover of a pleasant, throaty tenor, Zelgadis listened quietly for a few minutes, then went into the study to open his dimensional pocket and fetch the guitar he’d salvaged from a ghost ship once.
Being waterlogged and on its last legs anyway, it had needed massive reparations. He’d had to get quite grim about it with an old instrument maker in Sailoon, and still suspected that the man had just made him a new one with the same kind of wood, salt-cured. It was a cop-out, but at least he had one now.
He sat down at the table and started to tune it. Xellos, who had been chopping up some sort of vegetable that Zelgadis knew hadn’t been there before he left the room, looked up, startled, and fell silent. Zelgadis ignored him, but started hesitantly playing the song that Xellos had been humming. He felt more than saw Xellos smiling at him, and the music began coming back to him and springing more easily to his fingers. The sounds of food preparation resumed, but the humming didn’t.
When he finally looked up, he saw that Xellos was sitting by him at the table, eyes closed, chin resting on his hands, unsmiling. The food didn’t look even close to finished, and he wondered how long Xellos had been sitting there. “Do you know what Lina’s going to do to you if she finds the kitchen in this state?” he asked quietly, still playing.
The corner of Xellos’s mouth turned up, but his eyes stayed closed. “Did Rezo teach you that?”
“A long time ago. Before he went insane.”
“You mean, before Ruby-eye booted him out,” Xellos corrected him with an unhappy smile.
“Did you know him well?”
“We trained together in the Guildhouse,” said the priest, brightening. “Briefly. Until he stood up in philosophy class one day, all five foot eight of thirteen-year-old mountain hick, and said there were too such things as good and evil in the world, and he was going to the Temples of Ceiphied to find out about them.”
“Did he get in trouble?” asked a fascinated Zelgadis, who was having trouble with the concept of his dignified ancestor as a rebellious student.
Xellos, without opening his eyes or raising his head, aimed an incredulous eyebrow at him from beneath the thick fall of hair. “For defending his own opinion and pursuing his beliefs? In the Shadow Guild Academy? In philosophy class? Although… I suppose you could say that; he attracted my attention. We’d barely spoken before that.”
“What did you do?”
“Oh, I ran out after him to tell him how much I admired his courage. That particular professor had all the students and most of the other masters browbeaten.”
“But not you.”
“Certainly me. Just because you’re afraid of someone is no reason to let them intimidate you.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“For leaving class without permission? Caned on the hands until I bled,” he admitted cheerfully. “In front of everyone. It was worth it, though.”
“Why?”
Xellos opened his eyes a crack and looked at Zelgadis seriously. “I know you hate him for what happened to you. And he and I, we disagreed about everything under the sun. But there was much of worth in the man. He was the best friend I’ve had in my life.”
“Including Zelas?”
“She has been my master. I love her dearly. We may be able to be friends now, but I won't set my hopes above 'occasional ally.' I will never be her equal.”
Zelgadis frowned at him. Self-effacement was all very well, but Xellos was sincere. “When you went after him,” he asked, leaving the question open-ended.
“Jumped right onto his oversized shoulders,” Xellos grinned. “He said it wasn’t fair to do that to a blind guy, but who else would have heard me coming in time to brace himself?”
“Did he?”
“Rezo the Red Rock?” Xellos scoffed. “I don’t think he knew how to lose his balance. We argued together for decades, and the only concession I ever got him to make took me eight years of persuasion.”
“You must have felt very strongly about whatever it was,” said Zelgadis, who couldn’t really imagine Xellos caring that much about anything, and felt that he had probably just been being perverse.
But, “Oh, yes,” Xellos agreed softly. “The day he finally gave in and admitted that it was possible, under sufficient duress, of course, to live a criminal life without having an evil heart was one of the proudest moments of my life. I’m still proud of it. He was a lot like Amelia when he was younger-more dignified, of course, and a lot less clumsy, but very quick to judge. When he started giving his help to people based on what they needed instead of his opinion of their merit, I threw a party for the whole Guildhouse.”
“I expect that made him happy,” Zelgadis said sourly.
“I didn’t tell him about it,” Xellos returned, offended. “I didn’t want to rub the politics in his face. I just bought him a drink and stopped calling him one of the names he particularly hated.”
Zelgadis was all ears.
“It’s a little colloquial,” Xellos warned him cautiously, “and no one speaks Costran anymore, let alone city cant.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Xellos ducked his head over furtively, leaning so the upper half of his face had a natural purple veil. “I used to call him,” he muttered, and finished incomprehensibly.
“Which means?”
“Well,” he said, more cautiously yet and still hiding behind his hair, “it translates as ‘Rezo, who is inflexible as a result of carrying his priestly staff inside his cloak.’ But as for what it means-that is… uh, a little, um, citified.”
Zelgadis’s fingers stilled on the strings as he stared at Xellos, who was looking, incredibly, embarrassed, from what he could see of him. He started to laugh, very hard, and found that he couldn’t stop. Eventually, Xellos smiled politely and went back to making dinner. He tried to quiet himself, but a variety of mental images kept setting him off again.
The possibility of calling his ancestor names had never even occurred to him. The man’s size, overbearing dignity, and confident little smile (which, when he came to think of it, was a lot like Xellos’s in its continual presence, although Rezo’s had declared false modesty where Xellos’s usually spoke of suppressed laughter) had forbidden it. It was wonderfully relieving to his feelings.
Xellos swept various finely chopped ingredients into a pot on the stove, and started to stir. “This tendency of today’s youth,” he pronounced sententiously, “towards pronounced disrespect for their elders is, I feel obliged to point out, highly distressin’ to an old man’s feelings.”
Zelgadis was obliged to rest his head on the table. And then, when his stiff hair got caught in the wood and he couldn’t pick his head up, that was even funnier. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Xellos looking down at him in benign bemusement, purple hair held back by a strip of bright green cloth and sticking out every which way from the back of his head, and then he had no hope.
When Lina and the others got back, Sylphiel in tow, he was still stuck to the table, chuckling weakly; he kept thinking of new epithets. Xellos had passed from bemusement to faint amusement, and from there gone on to ignore him tolerantly. Zelgadis wondered if Xellos knew that he hadn’t laughed except in bitterness or hysteria for six years.
The thought was a sobering one, and Zelgadis realized in its wake that the table still hadn’t let him go. “Damn,” he muttered. He started trying to pry himself free, but the angle was bad.
Warm, competent hands, encased in soft, palest blue gloves and a touch on the slim side, wrapped themselves around his cheeks and up his jaw, pulling him gently free and sliding away like wraiths, leaving him shivering. He prepared himself to be teased, but Xellos had already turned back to the counter.
“What's been going on in here?” demanded Lina, who did know about the whole not-laughing thing.
“Xellos was telling me about Rezo,” Zelgadis explained, unable to keep from smirking.
Lina raised her eyebrows at Xellos, who turned around to smile blandly at her. “Xellos, Sylphiel says you met something horrible near Flagoon and I should ask you about it.”
“We didn’t meet anything horrible, Lina-san,” Xellos said, his smile a puzzled frown wrong side up.
“Oh, yes, we did,” Zelgadis retorted fervently. A light clicked on behind Xellos’s eyes, and they glared at each other. Or rather, Zelgadis glared, and Xellos looked hurt.
Xellos lost. He said, “We did meet a wild animal, but it wasn’t horrible. It didn’t even try to hurt us. But I told it to go away, and Sylphiel hit it with a flare arrow, and now we have this lovely boar for dinner.”
As Lina lightened up considerably, Zelgadis regarded the priest in something very like awe. He hadn’t lied once, nor had he revealed a jot of information more than he liked. Truly, he was a master of applied (dis)honesty. Zelgadis admired that.
Lina returned from anticipation and squinted at Xellos suspiciously. “That must have been a very impressive flare arrow. And you must have been very frightening.”
“It was something to see, all right,” Xellos avowed solemnly, then darted over to grab Sylphiel’s arm and haul her forward.
He spoke no spell and made no gestures, but he must have cast an illusion spell anyway, for the next moment his hair was down and Sylphiel’s was up, and they were both carrying odd, floppy bundles of ribbon and wearing clothes even stranger than the Greater Beast's, all in purples and black. Even their nails had been somehow turned the same purple as Xellos’s hair.
“Go, Sairaag Purple People!” he cheered, pulling Sylphiel into a weird, enthusiastic dance that she, against all probability, seemed to know. She went willingly enough, embarrassed but delighted. She kept giggling into her ribbons and casting Lina hopeful, helpless glances.
The rest of them stared. Gourry’s chin was somewhere around his collarbones. Lina said, appalled, “Well, that’s more of Xellos’s legs than I ever wanted to see in one lifetime.”
“Is it just me,” Zelgadis wondered, “or does he have a really long neck?”
“Yes, Zelgadis,” Lina sighed. “Xellos is a very short stick. We’ve all noticed. And now we’re hoping that he’ll put his turtleneck and his nice baggy pants and especially, L-Sama willing, his lovely big cape on so we can all stop noticing.”
Zelgadis, only a little taller and carrying even less muscle mass, was annoyed. “He’s taller than you,” he pointed out, even in his irritation forbearing to comment on her figure. He got smacked on the arm by her handy little pocket-slipper anyway, which inspired him to comment, “You know, I think that’s less of Sylphiel than I’ve ever seen exposed.”
“How can you say that?” Lina demanded, going outraged and girly on him. She did that at the oddest times. “Poor Sylphiel-chan’s legs are bare, and she hasn’t got her gloves on. And she’s so modest, too.”
“Modest?” Zelgadis snorted, some male or masochistic impulse spurring him. “If you call halfway between shrine maiden chic and Martina’s lack of outfit ‘modest.’ She’s got practically no shoulder guards, and those tassels are just asking for trouble, in case you hadn’t noticed. Her tunic barely covers her-that skirt’s twice the length. And her leggings are so much paler you notice how short it is.”
Possibly to distract Lina from ruining her slipper on Zelgadis’s spiky head, Amelia squealed, “Don’t they look adorable together?”
As a distraction, if that was indeed how it was meant, it succeeded admirably. Lina stopped hitting Zelgadis (and Zelgadis stopped devoting his attention to ignoring Lina) to look at them carefully. Her verdict, after some thought, was, “You’re right, Amelia. They do almost look related.”
Although Sylphiel’s eyes lacked Xellos’s distinctive backwards tilt, her hair next to his looked faded, dull, and uninteresting, and her nose was straight instead of tapering to a delicate, upturned point, Zelgadis agreed. “He could be her little brother.”
“If he weren’t older than dirt.”
“No, no, you two,” Amelia giggled. “Not like that.”
[end ch. 11]
Series: Blind Glory
Worksafe
Pairings: Under negotiation. (but if Zel/Xel squicks you out, this is probably not the fic for you.)
Warnings: eventual slashiness, and also, this is set after the series.
Feedback: is enshrined, and concrit is also welcome, when welmannered.
Notes: I don't need much prodding. Fortunate, since I don't *get* much. So when I do get nudged, it's both appreciated and effective. No pride, no shame, no worries. ^,^V
For the record: I once spent a long time staring at the Slayers and trying to compare their relative sizes. The conclusions I came up with disagreed may be somewhat untrad, but please take my word for it that they're based on actual screenshots, and don't ask me to try and remember which ones. Let me repeat: this is a 2001 fic.
The Blind Glory arc is archived here.
Fill the Gutters With Gold
by Nightfall
Chapter 11: Striking a Chord
In which Xellos is Defeated by a Dead Pig, Zelgadis Indulges in a Fit of Hysterics, Amelia makes Trouble and Sylphiel Shakes her Lovely Pompoms.
It turned out that the pole was for Sylphiel and Zelgadis to carry the boar back on. Zelgadis had been inclined to complain about this, until Xellos amiably tried to carry it travois-style and turned out not to have the mass. He did carry Sylphiel’s satchel, everyone’s cloaks, and the skin. This last was apparently out of automatic reflex, for when asked what he planned to do with it, he answered, promptly and cheerfully, “Give it to Juuousama.” He then stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, and proceeded to be very quiet the rest of the way back.
Sylphiel left almost at once to go assist with the constant repair work on Sairaag city proper, but not before making sure they didn’t mind being left alone. Zelgadis, who knew all about things you just had to do, waved her away. Xellos, hanging all their cloaks up, reconsidered and gave hers back, telling her he couldn’t work if she was there anyway, because his recipes were secret. She giggled at him and ran off.
Xellos donned his apron from the night before and put up his hair again. If it hadn’t been for Zelgadis’s boot knife, which even cleaned was more suited to the assassin than the cook, he would have looked endearingly domestic. But it made him look like an evil clown, and a happy smile on a man in a topknot and a ragged green apron was downright sinister. Looking at him made Zelgadis shiver, and turn away to find a pot to boil water in.
While Zelgadis was making his coffee, he heard Freeze Arrow being cast out from where Xellos had wandered out to with the serving platter. Xellos returned with an enormous slab of meat that, if anyone else had been cooking, might have kept Gourry busy for five minutes. While Zelgadis drank, he started working on it, humming to himself.
Zelgadis wasn’t sure whether Xellos had been less than truthful with Sylphiel or was just sure that Zelgadis couldn’t reproduce his secret recipes-or wouldn’t. Since Xellos was humming songs he hadn’t heard in years, and was possessed moreover of a pleasant, throaty tenor, Zelgadis listened quietly for a few minutes, then went into the study to open his dimensional pocket and fetch the guitar he’d salvaged from a ghost ship once.
Being waterlogged and on its last legs anyway, it had needed massive reparations. He’d had to get quite grim about it with an old instrument maker in Sailoon, and still suspected that the man had just made him a new one with the same kind of wood, salt-cured. It was a cop-out, but at least he had one now.
He sat down at the table and started to tune it. Xellos, who had been chopping up some sort of vegetable that Zelgadis knew hadn’t been there before he left the room, looked up, startled, and fell silent. Zelgadis ignored him, but started hesitantly playing the song that Xellos had been humming. He felt more than saw Xellos smiling at him, and the music began coming back to him and springing more easily to his fingers. The sounds of food preparation resumed, but the humming didn’t.
When he finally looked up, he saw that Xellos was sitting by him at the table, eyes closed, chin resting on his hands, unsmiling. The food didn’t look even close to finished, and he wondered how long Xellos had been sitting there. “Do you know what Lina’s going to do to you if she finds the kitchen in this state?” he asked quietly, still playing.
The corner of Xellos’s mouth turned up, but his eyes stayed closed. “Did Rezo teach you that?”
“A long time ago. Before he went insane.”
“You mean, before Ruby-eye booted him out,” Xellos corrected him with an unhappy smile.
“Did you know him well?”
“We trained together in the Guildhouse,” said the priest, brightening. “Briefly. Until he stood up in philosophy class one day, all five foot eight of thirteen-year-old mountain hick, and said there were too such things as good and evil in the world, and he was going to the Temples of Ceiphied to find out about them.”
“Did he get in trouble?” asked a fascinated Zelgadis, who was having trouble with the concept of his dignified ancestor as a rebellious student.
Xellos, without opening his eyes or raising his head, aimed an incredulous eyebrow at him from beneath the thick fall of hair. “For defending his own opinion and pursuing his beliefs? In the Shadow Guild Academy? In philosophy class? Although… I suppose you could say that; he attracted my attention. We’d barely spoken before that.”
“What did you do?”
“Oh, I ran out after him to tell him how much I admired his courage. That particular professor had all the students and most of the other masters browbeaten.”
“But not you.”
“Certainly me. Just because you’re afraid of someone is no reason to let them intimidate you.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“For leaving class without permission? Caned on the hands until I bled,” he admitted cheerfully. “In front of everyone. It was worth it, though.”
“Why?”
Xellos opened his eyes a crack and looked at Zelgadis seriously. “I know you hate him for what happened to you. And he and I, we disagreed about everything under the sun. But there was much of worth in the man. He was the best friend I’ve had in my life.”
“Including Zelas?”
“She has been my master. I love her dearly. We may be able to be friends now, but I won't set my hopes above 'occasional ally.' I will never be her equal.”
Zelgadis frowned at him. Self-effacement was all very well, but Xellos was sincere. “When you went after him,” he asked, leaving the question open-ended.
“Jumped right onto his oversized shoulders,” Xellos grinned. “He said it wasn’t fair to do that to a blind guy, but who else would have heard me coming in time to brace himself?”
“Did he?”
“Rezo the Red Rock?” Xellos scoffed. “I don’t think he knew how to lose his balance. We argued together for decades, and the only concession I ever got him to make took me eight years of persuasion.”
“You must have felt very strongly about whatever it was,” said Zelgadis, who couldn’t really imagine Xellos caring that much about anything, and felt that he had probably just been being perverse.
But, “Oh, yes,” Xellos agreed softly. “The day he finally gave in and admitted that it was possible, under sufficient duress, of course, to live a criminal life without having an evil heart was one of the proudest moments of my life. I’m still proud of it. He was a lot like Amelia when he was younger-more dignified, of course, and a lot less clumsy, but very quick to judge. When he started giving his help to people based on what they needed instead of his opinion of their merit, I threw a party for the whole Guildhouse.”
“I expect that made him happy,” Zelgadis said sourly.
“I didn’t tell him about it,” Xellos returned, offended. “I didn’t want to rub the politics in his face. I just bought him a drink and stopped calling him one of the names he particularly hated.”
Zelgadis was all ears.
“It’s a little colloquial,” Xellos warned him cautiously, “and no one speaks Costran anymore, let alone city cant.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Xellos ducked his head over furtively, leaning so the upper half of his face had a natural purple veil. “I used to call him,” he muttered, and finished incomprehensibly.
“Which means?”
“Well,” he said, more cautiously yet and still hiding behind his hair, “it translates as ‘Rezo, who is inflexible as a result of carrying his priestly staff inside his cloak.’ But as for what it means-that is… uh, a little, um, citified.”
Zelgadis’s fingers stilled on the strings as he stared at Xellos, who was looking, incredibly, embarrassed, from what he could see of him. He started to laugh, very hard, and found that he couldn’t stop. Eventually, Xellos smiled politely and went back to making dinner. He tried to quiet himself, but a variety of mental images kept setting him off again.
The possibility of calling his ancestor names had never even occurred to him. The man’s size, overbearing dignity, and confident little smile (which, when he came to think of it, was a lot like Xellos’s in its continual presence, although Rezo’s had declared false modesty where Xellos’s usually spoke of suppressed laughter) had forbidden it. It was wonderfully relieving to his feelings.
Xellos swept various finely chopped ingredients into a pot on the stove, and started to stir. “This tendency of today’s youth,” he pronounced sententiously, “towards pronounced disrespect for their elders is, I feel obliged to point out, highly distressin’ to an old man’s feelings.”
Zelgadis was obliged to rest his head on the table. And then, when his stiff hair got caught in the wood and he couldn’t pick his head up, that was even funnier. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Xellos looking down at him in benign bemusement, purple hair held back by a strip of bright green cloth and sticking out every which way from the back of his head, and then he had no hope.
When Lina and the others got back, Sylphiel in tow, he was still stuck to the table, chuckling weakly; he kept thinking of new epithets. Xellos had passed from bemusement to faint amusement, and from there gone on to ignore him tolerantly. Zelgadis wondered if Xellos knew that he hadn’t laughed except in bitterness or hysteria for six years.
The thought was a sobering one, and Zelgadis realized in its wake that the table still hadn’t let him go. “Damn,” he muttered. He started trying to pry himself free, but the angle was bad.
Warm, competent hands, encased in soft, palest blue gloves and a touch on the slim side, wrapped themselves around his cheeks and up his jaw, pulling him gently free and sliding away like wraiths, leaving him shivering. He prepared himself to be teased, but Xellos had already turned back to the counter.
“What's been going on in here?” demanded Lina, who did know about the whole not-laughing thing.
“Xellos was telling me about Rezo,” Zelgadis explained, unable to keep from smirking.
Lina raised her eyebrows at Xellos, who turned around to smile blandly at her. “Xellos, Sylphiel says you met something horrible near Flagoon and I should ask you about it.”
“We didn’t meet anything horrible, Lina-san,” Xellos said, his smile a puzzled frown wrong side up.
“Oh, yes, we did,” Zelgadis retorted fervently. A light clicked on behind Xellos’s eyes, and they glared at each other. Or rather, Zelgadis glared, and Xellos looked hurt.
Xellos lost. He said, “We did meet a wild animal, but it wasn’t horrible. It didn’t even try to hurt us. But I told it to go away, and Sylphiel hit it with a flare arrow, and now we have this lovely boar for dinner.”
As Lina lightened up considerably, Zelgadis regarded the priest in something very like awe. He hadn’t lied once, nor had he revealed a jot of information more than he liked. Truly, he was a master of applied (dis)honesty. Zelgadis admired that.
Lina returned from anticipation and squinted at Xellos suspiciously. “That must have been a very impressive flare arrow. And you must have been very frightening.”
“It was something to see, all right,” Xellos avowed solemnly, then darted over to grab Sylphiel’s arm and haul her forward.
He spoke no spell and made no gestures, but he must have cast an illusion spell anyway, for the next moment his hair was down and Sylphiel’s was up, and they were both carrying odd, floppy bundles of ribbon and wearing clothes even stranger than the Greater Beast's, all in purples and black. Even their nails had been somehow turned the same purple as Xellos’s hair.
“Go, Sairaag Purple People!” he cheered, pulling Sylphiel into a weird, enthusiastic dance that she, against all probability, seemed to know. She went willingly enough, embarrassed but delighted. She kept giggling into her ribbons and casting Lina hopeful, helpless glances.
The rest of them stared. Gourry’s chin was somewhere around his collarbones. Lina said, appalled, “Well, that’s more of Xellos’s legs than I ever wanted to see in one lifetime.”
“Is it just me,” Zelgadis wondered, “or does he have a really long neck?”
“Yes, Zelgadis,” Lina sighed. “Xellos is a very short stick. We’ve all noticed. And now we’re hoping that he’ll put his turtleneck and his nice baggy pants and especially, L-Sama willing, his lovely big cape on so we can all stop noticing.”
Zelgadis, only a little taller and carrying even less muscle mass, was annoyed. “He’s taller than you,” he pointed out, even in his irritation forbearing to comment on her figure. He got smacked on the arm by her handy little pocket-slipper anyway, which inspired him to comment, “You know, I think that’s less of Sylphiel than I’ve ever seen exposed.”
“How can you say that?” Lina demanded, going outraged and girly on him. She did that at the oddest times. “Poor Sylphiel-chan’s legs are bare, and she hasn’t got her gloves on. And she’s so modest, too.”
“Modest?” Zelgadis snorted, some male or masochistic impulse spurring him. “If you call halfway between shrine maiden chic and Martina’s lack of outfit ‘modest.’ She’s got practically no shoulder guards, and those tassels are just asking for trouble, in case you hadn’t noticed. Her tunic barely covers her-that skirt’s twice the length. And her leggings are so much paler you notice how short it is.”
Possibly to distract Lina from ruining her slipper on Zelgadis’s spiky head, Amelia squealed, “Don’t they look adorable together?”
As a distraction, if that was indeed how it was meant, it succeeded admirably. Lina stopped hitting Zelgadis (and Zelgadis stopped devoting his attention to ignoring Lina) to look at them carefully. Her verdict, after some thought, was, “You’re right, Amelia. They do almost look related.”
Although Sylphiel’s eyes lacked Xellos’s distinctive backwards tilt, her hair next to his looked faded, dull, and uninteresting, and her nose was straight instead of tapering to a delicate, upturned point, Zelgadis agreed. “He could be her little brother.”
“If he weren’t older than dirt.”
“No, no, you two,” Amelia giggled. “Not like that.”
[end ch. 11]