The Man With The Gloves (mxmxmxm)

20. The M-word

"Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary." (Oscar Wilde)

Kneel.

Ashur wanted him to bloody kneel.

He wanted him to unlearn everything he had learnt, so to speak.

Keep your head high, don't kneel in front of your enemy, don't look down. That's what his parents and his several preceptors used to teach him. Be a warrior, son. Be worthy of your vampire inheritance.

Except, Ashur wasn't the enemy here, so maybe it was okay if Fayez knelt for him. What was Ashur, exactly? Zephyr had said they were Fayez's mates, but Fayez wanted them to be so much more than that.

He didn't need any more pals. He already had two friends, thank you very much. Helmut and Nassiba were more than enough for him. Two friends was more than what he used to have anyway. One is company, two is a crowd.

Why did Ashur ask him to do such a weird thing? Did he think that there was something off about Fayez and wanted to test out his theory?

More importantly, why did Fayez feel a sense of excitement at the prospect of obeying the prefect?

Wasn't Fayez the real weirdo here? What should he do? Try to play it off as a joke? But then, whatever he did, Ashur always seemed to see right through it.

"You're overthinking, Faye. Actually, I observed that you tend to do that a lot."

Fayez looked up, startled. Ashur was looking down at him without showing any signs of impatience. It made Fayez relax a tad bit.

"You - you really want me to kneel?" he asked in a timid voice.

"I would like to, yes. I think you want it even more. But, of course, it's completely up to you. It's your choice to make." he replied in his soothing voice.

Ashur was giving him a choice. It was a bit frightening, in a sense. He never really had to make any choice, as he stayed at the castle with his parents. The choices were already made. The decisions had all been taken. The destiny had been written without him taking any part in it.

"If I kneel - or if I don't. Will it change things between us? Will we become more - or less? What if I change my mind at some point?" Fayez mumbled, unsure of what it was exactly that he was asking.

It didn't matter if he was always kind of rambling. Ashur understood him perfectly. Ashur was way too good at reading Fayez alreay. How long had they been living together? A couple of weeks?

How long had he been living under his parents' roof? A few centuries? Yet, they always looked at him like he was an alien who just landed from another planet. Someone who they cared for the way one would do for an untamed cat that has been rescued from a dangerous street. Sure, it's a nice feeling to feed and protect a weaker being, but the creature will never really be a part of the family. The differences between the two species are such that the communication doesn't feel fully satisfactory.

This child is a bit peculiar, but it will get better once he grows up, they said, when he was still an infant.

He's not a ray of sunshine, but isn't it normal? They're all like this at this age, they declared, as he became a too quiet teenager.

He's never left the Castle yet. Going to the ISB will do him a lot of good. Hopefully he'll come back a different person, they whispered behind closed doors, thinking he was too far gone into his own bubble to even hear them.

The thing is, he was an adult, now, and adults never really changed, did they? It was too late for him already.

He didn't think he could ever make his parents proud of him. He might have been naive into thinking that going to the ISB could turn him into a stronger being.