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Published:
2018-04-30
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1/1
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Eroded Away

Summary:

Mikleo's feelings for Sorey fade into the mists of time as the centuries roll forward. //

With dawning horror, Mikleo recognized: Sorey had become an afterthought.

More suffocating was the crunching feeling in his heart—like frost crackling on dead leaves underfoot—that it seemed as if his history with Sorey tethered Mikleo to a future he no longer desired.

Notes:

Disclaimer: I do not own SorMik or Tales of Zestiria.

A/N: If you are allergic to angst, do not read.

This idea just would not leave me alone.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

The thought slammed Mikleo like a lightning bolt, probably sent by Gramps to knock some sense into him.

Sorey.

Dropping his latest research, Mikleo scrambled for the Celestial Record. Holding the book had once upon a time felt like holding Sorey’s hand, but now it just felt like faded leather and long-lost dreams. It was like a locked diary where Sorey lived inside the pages, but Mikleo had lost the key. With a sigh, he let the past drop with a dull thud. Dust billowed.

It had been two weeks into his current expedition before he realized that he hadn’t asked the most important question: What would Sorey think?

Then, worse, Mikleo realized it wasn’t that important. Not anymore.

He searched himself. Where passion used to burn, there was nothing but gentle waves of fond nostalgia. Even those were freezing over into preserved memories, valuable for the meaning they once held but shoved to the back of his mind as cognitive clutter.

With dawning horror, Mikleo recognized: Sorey had become an afterthought.

More suffocating was the crunching feeling in his heart—like frost crackling on dead leaves underfoot—that it seemed as if his history with Sorey tethered Mikleo to a future he no longer desired.

-+-

During Sorey’s sleep, Mikleo had reinvented himself without the crippling dependency upon which he’d built the first seventeen years of his life. At first, without Sorey, his world had been dark. Now he’d learned to create his own light, and he wasn’t willing to give that up.

Besides, Sorey wouldn’t stand for that anyway, if he knew.

But surely there was a way to reclaim what had been lost? To have the best of both worlds?

-+-

“I just need to remind myself,” Mikleo murmured to himself, sifting through his battered copy of the Celestial Record again. Maybe this time, he’d find that Sorey feeling. As a scholar, he understood: Lack of input would eventually plateau his feelings. Sorey wasn’t around to continuously feed Mikleo reasons to fall in love with him, not like those blessed seventeen years they’d spent together, and so Mikleo would generate that input on his own.

Only…

Everything was so stale.

Reading the Celestial Record still didn’t evoke the warm associations Mikleo had for Sorey.

Exploring ruins had become a personal hobby, fun on his own.

Elysia was his home, with or without Sorey.

Desperate to rekindle lost feelings through some bygone connection, Mikleo hunted prickleboar for meat he didn’t need.

It was a life wasted.

-+-

Rayfalke Spiritcrest was where dreams went to die.

Clouds hung low, as if trying to conceal a truth Mikleo couldn’t face. It had been hard enough to lose memories of Sorey’s face and voice, chipped away by time and eclipsed by novelty. It was worse when he realized that fact no longer bothered him—a personal struggle fiercer than fighting Heldalf or even killing Gramps out of mercy. Mikleo’s very foundation was shaken to the core as if struck by a tainted earthpulse.

“What’s wrong?” Lailah pressed, her face pinched with concern. “Mikleo, I can sense the malevolence. Is missing Sorey becoming too much?”

Mikleo jerked his head to the side, his breaths coming quicker. “No, that’s not it,” he said, shifting uncomfortably on the bare mountainside. If only it was. The air was chilly, almost as cold as he’d feared his heart had become. He grew silent for a long moment, focusing on the fading rays of sunlight so he wouldn’t have to focus the dwindling light inside. It looked eerie, that weak sunlight stabbing through the mist and clouds before being swallowed by darkness. “I love Sorey,” he finally blurted, though for the first time it sounded like a question.

Inhaling sharply, Lailah murmured, “Oh dear.” By her tone, she understood all too well.

“You can’t force it,” Zaveid said. “That only makes things worse.”

“It’s not fair to you or Sorey,” Lailah chimed in.

“Your guilt over not feeling the love you believe you should is going to turn you into a hellion,” Edna said bluntly, waving a hand towards Eizen’s makeshift grave.

“But—” Mikleo spluttered.

 “Don’t worry,” Edna said. “We’ll tell Sorey when he wakes up that you became a dragon waiting for him.”

“That’s not funny, Edna!” Mikleo snapped.

“It wasn’t supposed to be funny,” she shot back, quirking an eyebrow. “Would you rather we tell him the truth—that you succumbed to malevolence because you got over him and felt too ashamed at your non-feelings to function?”

“No!” Mikleo said, looking down. “I just… How did this even happen anyway? I thought we were solid,” he lamented, nudging a rock with his toe. Half-buried in the dirt, it barely budged.

Edna was unusually solemn as she stared into the bleeding sunset. “Even a mountain can crumble, given enough time.”

Lailah nodded beside her. “A fire can burn out if it’s not fed.”

Zaveid said something about the “winds of change,” and Mikleo bit back a groan as he searched his own element.

Feelings, like water, could evaporate.

-+-

Mikleo wanted Sorey to become a seraph. He wanted Sorey to see the world he had sacrificed so much for and tried so hard to save. He wanted Sorey to be properly rewarded for his deeds as a pure-hearted Shepherd.

However, with the realization of his dissipating romantic feelings, Mikleo no longer prayed to Maotelus for Sorey to retain his memories. In fact, as selfish as it sounded, Mikleo prayed for the opposite.

“Mikleo?” Sorey asked, a song of wonder threading his voice. “Still falling down holes, I see. But your hair grew out. And your eyes—as wise as Lailah’s or even Gramps’s! Is it really you?”

No, Mikleo wanted to say, but couldn’t. I’m not him. I’m not the one you remember.

Sorey stared at him expectantly.

Mikleo’s throat tightened, and in the ruins of their relationship, he discovered a shining artifact: He still couldn’t say ‘no’ to that face. It filled him with hope. “Yes,” he breathed, leaning forward and feeling nostalgia crack his words. “It’s me.”

-+-

But it wasn’t. The old Mikleo had loved every possible little thing about Sorey.

Now? What had once been so attractive on Sorey had turned…annoying. His charm was nothing but a dry puddle.

“Oh, wow, look at that building!”

Mikleo remembered it being built. He’d never thought it was anything special. Actually, back in the early days, he remembered thinking that Sorey would like it—

Back in the early days, those kinds of drifting thoughts would stutter his mind to a halt.

Now it was the current Sorey who made hurt clench Mikleo’s heart like a tight fist.

I’m sorry I don’t feel the same. Anymore.

The guilt was staggering. But beneath it, the truth shone brighter with growing evidence. Sorey’s childlike excitement and wonder about the world, while refreshing at first, clashed with Mikleo’s developed maturity and enthusiasm tempered by centuries of actually experiencing the world Sorey could not.

They looked through different lenses.

-+-

“What were you going to tell me that one time?” Sorey asked as he stood with Mikleo on the Elysian cliffs.

Mikleo bit the inside of his cheek. He barely remembered his aborted confession, back before they faced Heldalf for the final showdown. “It’s not relevant anymore,” he finally said, squeezing the words through a tight throat.

Sorey gave him an odd look, but didn’t press the issue.

But then there came a time not long after when Mikleo had to say ‘no’ to that pure face. After a surprise kiss. It was the right thing to do, even if it pained him worse than losing Sorey the first time. “I think we should explore different ruins,” Mikleo said, in the same way someone might say, “I think we should see different people.”

Heartbreak swirled in Sorey’s eyes, the same feelings Mikleo had struggled to process several centuries prior.

“It’s not you,” Mikleo murmured truthfully, knowing both their hearts were broken spider webs. Why was ‘healthy’ so hard? “It’s me.”

Zaveid had once taught them that death was a form of salvation.

Feeling like he’d shed a burden at voicing his feelings—or lack of them—Mikleo realized, so too was rejection a form of freedom. For them both.

-+-

For their first seventeen years, they’d fit together like puzzle pieces. Completing each other. Complementing each other. Their love had been strong and true. With the passage of centuries apart, Mikleo’s edges had, in places, weathered away with experience to ultimately streamline him into a new shape. A new outline. One he’d painted over with years of independent identity-building. He’d even conquered his fear of dogs.

No, he was not the same person he’d been several centuries before.

He was not the naïve teenage seraph mourning his lost first love.

He was Mikleo, but he was not the Mikleo who was in love with Sorey; that Mikleo had been buried somewhere in the fourth century, with a sacred acknowledgment of his role in life and the proper respects paid.

Sorey was the same puzzle piece as always, his edges left untouched by time. A newborn at worst, considering his seraphic rebirth, or a seventeen-year-old at best. He no longer fit Mikleo. There was too much distance between them, and their paths had veered apart too long ago.

Perhaps, in time, they could build something anew. With effort and artistic fine-tuning, they could cut their experiences to match. To grow together again. Eventually. What was outgrown could be re-sowed.

But Mikleo, with the wisdom of a seasoned seraph, knew the odds of that happening were the same as discovering how to purify a dragon.

Notes:

And that's when I remember Mikleo's smile in the epilogue. You know the one. The smile that renders this heartbreakingly realistic "what-if" fic untrue.