Yes, I am alive! This story is alive! It lives! If you'll notice, I went back through the older chapters and corrected some of the glaring grammar/style mistakes, which allowed me to actually love this again. Unfortunately, I've been away from it so long I may or may not have lost the thread of the plot. This is me running with what I have. The best sort of writing always ends in surprises?

This chapter is dedicated to, uh, the internet. And what it's for.

Konitsu

•••

“You know, Cliff…”

Cliff was fairly sure that he didn’t know. The list of things that teenage girls knew and he didn’t was ever increasing. Luckily, he was fairly sure they’d made most of it up, and thus none of it counted for much. Even if his contact with teenage girls was mostly limited to Maria, she had to qualify for an experience of some sort.

“What?” he asked, not looking up from the navigation screen. Once you made eye contact, all was lost.

“I’ve been doing research,” Sophia said.

Curiosity piqued, he met her gaze – almost against his will – and saw in it his doom. “Research?” he echoed. “On what?”

“Things.” She blushed. Why did she blush? “And I think maybe this um, stuff between Fayt and Albel isn’t…so bad?”

“You’ve all gone insane!” Cliff threw his hands up. “If I weren’t so damn worried about your general mental stability, I’d wash my hands of all of you. Hasn’t Mirage told you my hunches are never wrong? And believe me, missy, this hunch could take up a whooole room.”

Sophia fidgeted in her seat, looking like nothing more than a student who wanted to call their teacher out on a horrific mistake.

“But I’ve been surfing the network, and uh – “

Cliff hadn’t ever heard Sophia pause so much. If she started stuttering…

Cliff raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been doing research on the net?”

In Cliff’s worldly experience, teenagers doing ‘research’ on the net usually resulted in one of several options – porn, bombs, anarchist rebellions, bad porn, emotional attachments to dead people, and porn that shouldn’t exist under any concept of common decency.

“People write stories!” She held up her hands, as if declaring her innocence on whatever matter this was. “And there’s manga –“

“Comic books?”

“There’s manga, and sometimes the characters are like Fayt and Albel and. Well, the relationship is always good for someone!” After that, she trailed off in a hurried, humiliated mutter, her face burning bright red.

Cliff leaned toward her, morbid fascination overcoming common sense. “What was that last bit?”

“Thesexisalmostalwaysreallyhot,” she repeated, slowing down from ‘frantic shame’ to ‘nearly coherent’.

It was always the damned porn.

“Let me get this straight,” Cliff said, putting on his best Serious Face. “You want me to support Fayt and Albel’s little romp into psycho-land – where, I might point out, Albel already lives – because you’ve been reading porn? On the net?”

“It’s not – It’s not porn!” She squeaked out the word like she couldn’t quite believe she’d said it. “It’s erotica! It’s sensitive! Where people find their soul mates and one true love and discover what it means to open up to each other!”

“Sensitive,” Cliff repeated. “Sensitive erotica.”

“Fayt could heal Albel’s troubled soul!” Sophia pressed forward. “It almost always works!”

“And what, tell me, happens when it doesn’t work?”

Sophia tittered nervously. “The sex is still hot?”

Cliff slammed his head against the main console. The ship beeped. He liked to think, deep in his heart, that it was a beep sensitive to his precarious emotional situation.

Porn.

•••

“You’re pretty good at this whole rallying-the-townspeople bit,” Fayt said, dragging the borrowed comb through Albel’s loose, wet hair.

Albel sniffed disdainfully and tried to look as if he wasn’t having his hair brushed by someone he’d just recently discovered he liked to make out with. “I was an extremely competent military commander. How could civilians deny my commands?”

Fayt snickered. “Minions.”

The ‘town meeting’ had gone exceptionally well. Fayt, ever determined to be the voice of ‘maybe not utterly insane’ among the chaos, had finally convinced the newly rebellious gathering to come up with a list of complaints and suggestions to be sent to the ruling lord. After the two and a half literate people drafted up a nice, fancy version, a messenger would be sent out. All they could do now was wait and hope the situation resolved itself without violence.

Well, Fayt could. Albel seemed hell bent on expecting violence, and after the meeting had insisted on running the few farm boys who called themselves a militia through their paces. The farm boys, Fayt suspected, would never be the same again. Three would have nightmares about Albel for the rest of their lives, and one was absolutely smitten with the psychopath. Fayt could sympathize.

After that, baths were in order. Fayt tried not to be too disappointed when Albel insisted on taking his alone. Something would be done, eventually, about Albel’s shattered self image, but Fayt doubted storming him naked would help. Or help Fayt get through the day alive.

“The most incompetent minions I’ve ever had.” Albel scoffed, something Fayt didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone actually do before. “I’m surprised the idiots even know which end of a pike to hold. I never would have put up with this ridiculous inadequacy from my soldiers.”

“They’re not soldiers,” Fayt reminded him. “They’re farmers. They’ve probably never used weapons against other people in their lives.”

“Incompetent, useless, idiot farmers,” Albel persisted, the litany of insults giving his voice an almost gleeful edge.

“And I’m sure they think you’re just the most charming thing in the universe. I’m surprised no one has decided to kill you, yet.” Fayt began one of the braids that Albel wore, and reflected that the swordsman probably only wrapped them to keep from looking utterly ridiculous. The bi-colored hair, interestingly enough, was a natural genetic quirk.

“As if they could.”

Fayt considered the collection of scars across Albel’s bareback, the trophies of a lifetime of near constant fighting. “Do you ever miss Elicoor?”

Albel snorted. “Where did that question come from?”

“Just wondering,” Fayt said. “It was your home, after all. I miss Earth sometimes – our old house, college. High school, even.”

“There was little there left for me,” Albel muttered, voice uncommonly soft if still filled with general loathing and malice. “You separated me from nothing irreplaceable. Woltar will get over my absence, and I am sure many people are absolutely joyous about it. In any case, I do not want to be around when His Majesty’s new brood mare begins popping out spawn anyway. It will be horrific.”

“…you are such a poet. I really stand in awe of your way with words.” One braid tied off. “You know, kids aren’t so bad, if you’d give them half a chance to do something other than burst into tears or run away screaming.”

Then again, Albel didn’t give adults much of a chance, either. And while being able to reduce grown men to tears with a look was a talent Fayt wasn’t going to deny, it didn’t exactly make for exciting social situations in the fun way. And there was only so much ‘being run out of the village by the angry, shouting mob’ that one person should have to endure in a lifetime.

“I certainly hope you never plan on having children,” Albel snapped.

Fayt noticed the tension in Albel’s shoulders, followed his convoluted line of logic, and sighed. He strongly resisted the urge to roll his eyes, despite the fact that Albel wouldn’t be able to see it if he did. It was the principle of the matter, and the deeply ingrained paranoia that Albel would somehow sense it. Fayt was still not writing off the possibility of Albel’s mystical ability to sense insults to his person.

“Somehow, I doubt that adoption is in my future,” Fayt said. “So unless you plan on growing a womb…”

Albel scoffed. Again. “I wouldn’t be the one with the womb.”

“No, I think you would be.” Fayt contemplated this as he finished off the second braid. “I think I saw a porno like that once.”

“…porno?”

“You don’t know what – pornography? You know, erotic…pictures? With technology, they can, well, they move.”

Albel turned to stare at him incredulously. Fayt realized, with slowly dawning horror, that it was going to be a long, long night.

•••

Maria was in the middle of writing a reply to a curious, obviously secretly evil symbologist (no, sir, you may not know even the tiniest bit about the research that turned Fayt Leingod and I into genetic freaks capable of utterly decimating ugly vases with a mere thought; that is classified information and you really sound like a douchebag) when her communicator buzzed. Thankful for the distraction – it was enough to startle her out of her outraged funk, and she deleted the last few lines of her e-mail – she answered it. Fayt stared up at her from the comm screen, half disgruntled and half, if she read him right, horrified.

She did her best not to smile. “You look troubled.”

“Do you know what I just had to explain to Albel?” Fayt sounded about as strained as he looked.

“The all encompassing power of love?” She switched the comm call to her computer screen, covering up her passive-aggressive attempts at polite. “The importance of regular counseling? How to hide the bodies in a quick and timely fashion while you secure the nearest escape routes?”

“Porn. Modern porn, the kind on the net. With ‘moving bits’.” Fayt glared at her. “This is entirely your fault.”

“…I fail to see how.”

“I kissed him.”

“While I’m happy for both of you, I’m not quite sure how that leads to impromptu explanations of porn.” She smiled her cat-with-canary smile. “Though I can imagine a few different routes.”

“You told me to kiss him!”

“Did I?”

“Maybe not in so many words, but ya.” He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his already unkempt hair. He needed a haircut, she noticed idly, he was heading into dangerously shaggy territory. “Look, I don’t regret it or anything, I really do like Albel and – but, well, maybe I’m not exactly the person who should be in charge of introducing him to ‘the all encompassing power of love’.”

Maria canted her head to the side. “Why not?”

“The first meaningful sexual discussion we’ve ever had was about porn. That’s not exactly what I wanted to base our relationship on.”

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t think most people expect meaningful sexual discussions about much of anything. The world would probably be a much better place if they did.”

He scowled at her – it was kind of cute.

“Look, Albel’s…been screwed with enough. I don’t want to do anything that’ll hurt him worse. And I’m good at reading him, but who knows what’ll set him off, and we’ve never talked about sex before. If I hit one of his buttons with this, it’s going to be a pretty damn big button.”

Fayt, as sarcastic, lazy, and teenage-boy as he could sometimes be, worried about other people more than was probably healthy. Everyone else in the universe realized that they couldn’t fix all of the things wrong with Albel Nox, and dedicated their time to staying at least ten feet away from him. Only Fayt would take one look at the tragically screwed up bundle of Weird that was Albel and decide to befriend it.

“There’s only so much trauma one person can pack into a lifetime,” Maria said. “Sex may be the one thing that hasn’t been turned negative for Albel. I don’t know, but I’d guess.”

“You can’t think –“

“That he’s a virgin?” Maria rolled her eyes. “I hate to shatter your worldview, Fayt, but there is such a thing as a twenty four year old virgin. Even voluntary twenty four year old virgins. They’re wandering free across the lands, not having sex at every turn.”

Fayt blushed up to his ears. “Shut up, okay? That’s not what this is about.”

“Mmmhmm.” She propped her chin on one fist. “Well, now that you know that Albel won’t be underwhelmed by your sexual prowess – or lack there of – you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“That’s not what I was worried about in the –“

Maria switched off the comm call, returning to her e-mail with a brighter outlook on life. She always felt better after a little schadenfreude.