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masterofcarrots · 2 years

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God Save the King

My...uhhh....really questionable first attempt at fanfic. I'll post it to AO3 once they finally set up an account for me.

Adult themes because I'm in my 30s writing about mass murderers who canonically went on like an orgy-spree back at the beginning of time.

~~ Story below if you actually like reading stories in tumblr format~~

Boredom. Monotony. An endless, unceasing march of day to night and back to day just so it could start all over again. That was life for his kind.

How many times had Gandharva sat in a bath like he was now? Trying not to think, just exist, feel the cool comfort of the liquid around him as if it was an extension of himself. Besides Varuna, he had the best claim on that being true.

His arms dropped from the sides of the oversized tub carved from black basalt and filled with fresh snowmelt. Kalibloom's temples, perched atop the world as they were, suited his tastes in temperature.

A few of the girls serving the temple had offered to help run back and forth and keep the fires lit for him so he didn't have to bathe in the cold. He'd patiently explained, five times over to each, that a half a degree above freezing felt pleasantly balmy to him.

Wet wisps of hair the color of a glacier waved along the water now that they weren't spilled out over his arms. His appearance – the most full-grown adult one of his repertoire – was probably part of it. The girls had been told to watch out for the murdering bastard nastika king trapped there by the gods; looking as he did now – a little taller, a little better-muscled, a lot less bright blue-skinned – he wasn't unaware that he didn't fit the image.

It had used to be his preferred form of himself. After Shakuntala had been born and then grown upset because she'd overheard the gossip that there was something different about her, that she couldn't have come from the parents she did, he'd lied to her and told her they'd meant her hair color.

It hadn't been terribly long, in his perspective of time, that she'd understood they hadn't meant her appearance but her weakness compared to the older siblings she hadn't met. The lie had gone away. His green hair to match hers had remained.

Gandharva's eyes turned again from inside his head to the world around him. He debated whether he should count how many hairs he had on his head.

Every hundred million years or so, to pass the time, he did it. The answer never changed.

He could count the number of times he'd sat in the bath trying to figure out ways to make another hour disappear. His memory was good; it didn't degrade with time. It would waste some of the minutes that existed between now and an end that never seemed to come.

At least in the sura realm there wasn't a sun or moon that forced you to think about the arbitrary boundaries they all set on an indivisible concept.

Existential ennui was worse for him than most – the vast majority of his interminable days had been spent ranked among the strongest of a strong race, terrifying even for a nastika, and those few who topped him in pure strength couldn't compete with his regenerative speed. Maybe Ananta could have killed him, if the other king had been cruel, like Gandharva once had been.

The boredom, the wanting to put an end to his own infinite existence, that had long been a bigger threat to him than anything else.

He sank his right hand further under the water and formed a small whirlpool, letting it tickle his palm before drawing it upwards, above the edge of the tub, circling his hand around and making the water funnel dance along the surface, entertaining himself for all of five seconds before the dull tedium of life crept back in.

Pathetic.

He'd take boredom over what else liked to creep in these days, something far more pathetic than his failure to occupy himself, memories of how he'd chosen to have his fun years past, wondering if he shouldn't have taken a page from Ravana's book and spent all that restless energy fucking instead of fighting, because in the end – or really, the limitless middle between beginning and end – there wasn't much else capable of remaining interesting no matter how many times you'd been there and done that.

They didn't fundamentally require food or sleep. There was only so much to talk about. It mostly came down to how others were faring in the fucking and fighting departments, being a species like they were, with no need for philosophical curiosity like humans had.

Scientific advancements didn't improve their lives; they could explore the universe on a whim; they had seen how it had all begun, all the bits and pieces of history; pondering the truths of the world was useless when you knew so much about how the whole of creation worked that all there was left to learn were things you'd accepted you'd never get an answer to, because if the Primeval Gods had wanted them to know, they'd have told.

Lust, bloodlust, they alone kept the spirit alive unless you went for love and found yourself a third thing on the list of experiences that didn't grow boring over millennia and started with F – family.

The almost-forbidden F, for obvious reasons. Loving two people had ruined him this much. Letting himself care for any of those long-gone children from back at the beginning would have destroyed him more completely than the void he'd been told awaited him as an afterlife.

He was fine with that. He'd had enough life. The last thing he wanted was a fucking afterlife. The creatures humans called gods held it over his species as a threat, forever blind to the fact it was a mercy.

Cowards. They were more pathetic even than he was.

Love, family, there were reasons, and good ones, those experiences should be denied to him and the other nastikas at the depth that humans felt them. Most, maybe all of their children, so much weaker than them, would die first. Lovers, even strong ones, could die too, he knew that best of all, and when they didn't, while love itself might not grow boring, the lover could.

Humans only had to keep their promises to each other a few decades and frequently failed at that. There was no point in pretending it wasn't possible for nastikas to fall out of love given enough time, and if they all knew it, why invest themselves in something so totally when they knew one day, maybe long into the future, but one day, they might be the left-behind and not the leaver and it would feel like a knife twisted into their side starting from the end of the relationship and not ending until death or the end of time, whichever came first.

Gandharva had chosen fighting way back when, pinned his hopes on it to keep him alive and kicking, strange as that sounded, as it directly invoked the possibility of death. That was what had made it fun.

The prospect of getting the type of beating he'd done everything in his substantial power to deserve had invigorated him more than he cared to admit, because what he'd never wanted to admit was that he might deserve it. A little bit.

Maybe that's why he was so fascinated by that one human whose life he'd saved just so she could repay him by ignoring him most of the time. When he'd crossed the line from pathetic to extra-pathetic. Him, one of the few remaining original nastika kings, ignored by a woman who owed him her life, and he hadn't even threatened to kill her for it.

Probably, it was because within an hour of meeting her, she'd had a sword pointed at his throat before he'd seen her move. It wouldn't have hurt him all so badly, he knew.

But just for a second, in the time that it had taken for him to register the factual inability of her to truly harm him, that flicker of mortality that kept him alive had shivered through him.

He was helpless against it – against her. He had far more reasons to want to die than stay alive; he had to hold on to what he could if he didn't want Menaka's sacrifice to go in vain.

Apparently, suicide had been deemed so likely all the servants in this temple he was confined to while the world and its gods sorted things out must have been instructed to keep sharp objects away from him.

As if he'd be so determined that he'd manage to do it using a regular old knife. He wasn't that fucking pathetic, thank you very much.

He'd chosen bloodlust all the way up until the closest thing the universe had known to a literal, actual siren had convinced him to try love. Not that he hadn't had any impure thoughts about Menaka, their relationship hadn't been one of contented celibacy, but lust had been a product of love, not the other way around.

Asura, he thought, had combined all three – fucking, fighting, and fucked up family – in a far more pathetic way than he ever had, if that time Gandharva had interrupted him and Ravana in the middle of things was any indication.

He shook his head to clear it, water droplets flying off the ends of ice-blue hair and onto the dark stone around him. Any more gross memories of Asura and Ravana and he really was going to end it all.

At least his relationship with his – the priestess, he wasn't a god and didn't want to be – wasn't as bad as Chandra's with his. She'd summoned him back, for reasons Gandharva couldn't name, since as far as he could tell the woman despised her god with every ounce of her being.

Chandra was pathetic too. Running around at the beck and call of some human that didn't respect him and was basically cheating on him with a more powerful god, a real God. Laila – he thought that was her name – was kind of scary, for a human.

Agni's perpetual pathetic-ness went without saying. Of all of them, he had the worst relationship with a priestess right now.

The problem with Teo wasn't that she hated him. It was that she was still working out how she felt about him, and that might come down to feeling absolutely nothing.

He'd rather her hate him. At least that meant he was as fixed in her mind as she'd managed to become in his.

Chandra's woman had hated him for two measly decades. Agni's woman had the accumulated hatred of two thousand lifetimes, or however many it had been.

Those two women knew the gods for what they were – cheats and liars pretending to be helpful. The gods were just as perpetually bored as the nastikas and just as harmful to humans. Instead of harming them directly they mostly stuck to messing around in their lives other ways, then drove the humans crazy for entertainment.

It was hilarious, absolutely hilarious to someone like him, who'd met all the so-called gods and knew their habits, that the ones the humans liked the least – Yama, for example – were the most honest, and the ones that humans loved – Indra being the poster child – enjoyed making their worshippers dance around like puppets in a personal show.

Pathetic. All of them.

Gandharva sank down further into the water, not sure why he was keeping his chin above it except for the fact that it seemed to scare the humans who couldn't help seeing him as close to human when he stayed underwater too long.

He wondered if Agni and Chandra used their elements in private the same way he did, when he needed to believe in something, even if it was a ghost.

Another flick of his wrist and the water level around him lowered, half of it now taking shape in front of him, an afterimage of his late wife that at his command leaned down to kiss him.

Just on the forehead. That was how pathetic he was.

His hearing was better than human, so he heard the footsteps coming before the knock at the door.

He'd send whatever servant it was away after yelling out that yes, he was still alive, he just liked sitting in water and didn't get all wrinkly like they did.

A knock never came. The doorknob began to turn.

It had to be Teo. She was the only person besides the gods that had the gall to invade his privacy without warning, and it was boots he'd heard in the hallway, not bare feet.

He'd let her catch him in a way he'd never in several billion years allow anyone else to, his watery Menaka still poised affectionately above him.

That sort of weakness was charming to humans in a certain kind of way he needed to charm her to have her believe that in spite of all the blood on his hands, he didn't totally lack emotional range and couldn't be written off as a mindless murderer.

When he and Teo had been drunk one night seven years ago during his time playing pretend – he didn't really get drunk unless he wanted to, and usually when the offer was extended he wanted to, intoxication being supremely helpful in denying the agony of forever - they'd discussed enough on the subject of Gandharva's ambiguous-on-time-markers previous relationship that the depth of the empty place in him wasn't news to her. He knew not to expect jealousy over that, only sympathy.

He was glad of it. He didn't feel prickles of envy either over the past, couldn't, because his species simply wasn't built that way. They'd all have murdered each other over it early on if they'd had a tendency for hating the ones before themselves on the list of romantic entanglements.

The reason he'd stopped laughing at her stories of former lovers hadn't been because they existed – if they were going there, while it may have been so long ago it would be nigh-inconceivable to her understanding of years, he had hundreds of lovers and thousands of children to disclose. He'd quieted because of something else she'd said.

She'd been lost, after the Upheaval. Had looked for, and found, forgetfulness in a way common to all species created by the Primeval Gods, which did have to make one wonder about them, a little bit.

And she'd joked, that had been the sad part, in the first instance that she'd hinted she liked him for reasons beyond pity she'd joked that he treated her too much like she was made of glass.

She was made of glass, to him. Jostling her in a way Menaka would have found playful would snap her in half.

She hadn't been so fragile, to all the others. It had been convenient, oh so convenient, that she was tough for a human, didn't need patience and care, like she didn't deserve to be treated tenderly and –

And there he went, getting pathetic again.

Even he, violent as he'd been at the time, had enjoyed the counterpoint of gentleness in other moments. As evidenced by the fact he was still holding Menaka's form above him. For much longer than he'd planned.

He'd pretended like he hadn't heard Teo come in, like he'd been too caught up in being morose over his past he was unaware of anything else but regret and longing.

He'd expected her to say something by now, even if it was that he was indecently exposed due to the bathwater having other occupations for the time being.

Adding to his laundry list of pathetic actions, which now included doing laundry when he'd lived in that Half village for a few years, he was the first to break and express curiosity. His head turned towards the door to see why she hadn't so much as gasped in pleasant shock.

The eyes that met his were shocked alright. Definitely not pleasantly. No attempt was being made to hide the disappointment, or, dare he say, disgust.

Right, then. He was never going to live this down.

When he said never, he really meant it. The memories of nastikas didn't fade with time. He and Makara would be remembering this and pretending it hadn't happened literally until they died. Which at this rate, Gandharva assumed they both were hoping was imminent.

How many times had he told Makara not to sneak up on him just because his stupid Darkness attribute made him so damned good at cloaking his presence?

Before it was too late, he needed to make the evidence disappear.

Gandharva dropped the water back over him and mentally prepared what order he was going to tell his most embarrassing stories about Asura and Ravana that he'd kept untold and in reserve. Those were sure to override and replace Makara's disgust at catching him making a fake wife to kiss him.

Makara groaned weakly, purple-tinted lips twisting in displeasure. His fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose for a moment as if he had the universe's worst headache.

"Well, that leads into what I was going to say anyway, I guess," he muttered, eyes still closed.

"How did you get here?" Gandharva asked.

Makara shrugged. "There's been random portals opening for some time now. I finally got lucky and came through."

"No, like…" Gandharva gestured at the room around him. "Here here."

"The priestess let me through."

Not again, his mind groaned, hating that Teo remained so unsuspicious she'd been convinced by another of his kind that they were a Half in need. He was really going to have to talk to her about this spontaneous adoption habit.

"Teo?"

Makara shrugged again. "If that's what Agni's woman is going by these days."

All the mental power given over to plotting how to erase Makara's memory quickly changed to plotting an escape. If it left Makara mentally traumatized and at risk of spreading gossip over how pathetic his king had become, so be it.

Brilith hated Gandharva, Brilith knew who Makara was, and Brilith would not allow him into Gandharva's presence unless he was there in the role of torture device.

The bathroom had a door, which Makara was presently standing in front of. There was a window that had a sheer drop down to the city nine thousand meters below them.

He'd survive the fall. And then promptly end up locked back in the jail cell he'd managed to sweet-talk his way out of.

Ignorant – or maybe not – of Gandharva's distress, Makara sighed again and began speaking.

"The Tarakas are dying off for now, it looks like," Makara said. "Our territory is safe again. And habitable by weaker ones because of that stupid ocean you almost killed yourself making."

"The Tarakas are dying off thanks to me, you know," Gandharva bragged to his unfriendliest friend, who often seemed to forget which of them was in charge. "You're welcome."

"All praise the great Gandharva," Makara said, intoned so flatly it was worse than obvious sarcasm. "You've reminded everyone you aren't as useless as you've seemed the past five hundred years. The nastikas respect you again. Some more than that. And seeing as it's time, I won't go telling everyone what I just saw."

"Time for what?"

Makara and Chandra should really get into a contest of who could stare at whom with the best I hate that I have to put up with you and am a centimeter away from ripping out your intestines face. They even kind of looked alike.

"Don't tell me you can't feel it."

"Ah," Gandharva said, looking at his fingernails with faked nonchalance, still not sure what Makara was after but completely sure he didn't want to know. "So you're jealous that I still miss Menaka that much, but don't even miss you enough to come back home now that we can go."

He saw Makara's hair move out of the corner of his eye, the other man cocking his head and finally breaking his dead-on-all-but-a-technicality-looking expression.

"Do you really not feel it? Have you spent so much time sucking at being the king it changed your biology?"

The inspection of his fingernails began again, in earnest this time. Truthfully, with Taraka gone, his transcendentals back, the penalty he should have paid for taking sura form a few years ago forgotten except for in whatever had made him cry when he'd killed that monster and suddenly felt like he'd lost something he hadn't known was there, he was no longer king in name only.

It was why Agni and Chandra had given him free roam within the temple grounds. They knew they couldn't hold him there against his will if he really wanted to fight it. And Agni, at least, knew how pathetic he was, and that he wasn't going to fight it, that a larger part of him than he planned to acknowledge wanted to stay there in the human realm; his pending "judgement" from the gods was no more than a bad excuse.

He'd be perfectly happy if they killed him, anyway. They probably knew that. And Agni knew how Menaka had felt, that you could only make up for the past by being alive. So as long as they didn't expect he was going to grossly misbehave again, his eternal life sentence would continue.

"Aghh," Makara groaned, interrupting his thoughts as they went down dark paths again. The other man's look of contempt was back. "Fine. If I have to explain it to you like you're some innocent, I can."

Makara approached closer and loomed over his rightful king, arms crossed. They'd activated lecture mode.

"Our clan's population is well below what it needs to be to fend for ourselves in the long term. Strong parents make strong children. You are the strongest male and the strong females are willing to give you the time of day again. Do I need to re-educate you on how one makes children or do you still remember?"

Oh. That. Makara was wondering if he could feel that – the re-emergence of the we need more of us instinct in nastikas that had led to the explosive population-building in the beginning.

That he'd been feeling for years. It hadn't changed just because children would have a chance at survival now. He'd been ignoring it long enough he'd almost forgotten it wasn't supposed to be a fact of life.

"Anyway, here's the list of who all's still around," Makara said, pulling a sheet of paper out of his robe. "I'm willing to hear you out if there's anyone you particularly hate the idea of sharing children with."

"All of them," Gandharva said breezily, not looking at the page. There was one name he knew was missing on the list, and that was all that mattered. He smiled up at his second-in-command. "You can do it instead."

Gandharva materialized his clothing just in time for Makara to use his robe to haul him out of the water and throw him against the wall.

He'd known that was going to happen. He didn't really mind if the temple servants saw him undressed after they ran over to see what the noise was about, but humans were generally less physically-inclined than suras, and were liable to get extremely strange ideas about what it meant that Makara appeared to be wrestling him while one of them was nude.

Out of many of the funny things he'd learned in his stay on this planet, "naked wrestling" being a term parents used to avoid explaining to their children just what they were up to in bed had to be one of his favorites.

He was pretty sure Maruna had learned the euphemism as well. The first thing Gandharva was going to do after he made a very necessary apology to that kid was to suggest that if he wanted to, Maruna could take out his anger with some one-on-one, nothing in the way fighting and then watch as he created an entirely new trauma in the chicken's mind wondering if he meant it the sura way or the human way. Gandharva might even offer to do it in his weaker and thus more fair-for-fighting female form to make his intentions that much more ambiguous.

"Look, you childish dumbass," Makara began in his perennially disrespectful way. "This is about the survival of our race. You need to go to bed with them, not wake up cuddling with them. I think we'd all prefer you not. Stay pining for Menaka for all I care, but unless you tell me you're physically incapable of-,"

"What if I am?" he cut in. He couldn't care less if Makara thought him that lacking in ability. Most days, he wished it were true. It would make life easier.

"Then change into a female and make yourself useful," his quickly-becoming-not-a-friend snapped back. "Whatever works for you."

By now, the servants had come running. A spell had repaired the wall back to its uncrushed-by-a-man-far-less-delicate-than-his-fine-bone-structure-hinted state.

Seeking an easy out from this conversation, Gandharva escorted Makara to go reflect on their many misdoings at the Lake of Reflection. Mostly so that Gandharva could push his annoying companion off the bridge the next time he said something stupid.

Makara didn't need to know that part.

"I'm going to assume you were joking about really not being able to," Makara said, breaking the silence. "I don't think it works like that for us, no matter how pathetic we get."

Yeah. He was going to push Makara off the bridge. Just because Gandharva was pathetic didn't mean Makara should be allowed to tell him so.

Yeah. Makara had forgotten why he wasn't king. It was time to-

Ahh. And there was Agni's woman, preventing his assassination plan and chiding them for causing trouble.

"Did he tell you he's in love with a human woman?" she asked, pretending like Gandharva wasn't there and only looking at Makara. "You must be embarrassed for your entire clan."

"She's lying," Gandharva replied reflexively, mirroring Brilith by ignoring her and turning only to the other man. "She's mad I've killed her a couple times. You were probably there for a few, Makara."

"I wish I were lying," that maddening woman muttered. "If only for Teo's sake. It makes you wonder about yourself, that such despicable creatures see something loveable in you."

Gandharva wouldn't repeat that to Agni. Unless the god really pissed him off. Brilith would calm down eventually. Probably. In another lifetime. Maybe.

She took her leave. Makara tilted his head back, took a deep and completely performative breath, then looked at him again.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Makara hissed. "Like I said, I don't care who you're in love with. This isn't about that, and if I start telling people how far gone you are, all the eligible prospects will lose respect for you again."

Fuck. He should have just leaned into Brilith's accusation.

"I let a Half from our clan slap me," he confessed, suddenly eager to let out something so shameful it would make Makara give up on him as a total nutcase. "More than once, actually. I sat in front of her on my knees and let her have at me until someone else stopped her."

Teo, dammit to the deepest hell, had a friend who'd had some very personal feelings to work out towards her ancestral king and the emotional resonance he'd made her a part of more than once. His pride had written off allowing the thrashing to take place as a trust-building exercise.

"You…" Finally, Makara was lost for words. "You what? Can they even do that? There isn't some kind of instinct that prevents them from trying to hurt you?"

"I think she's related to you, now that I think about it," Gandharva reflected, not entirely sure if he was lying. "It must be where she gets her shitty personality from. Her name's Clari. You should check in on her and see if you can figure out which one of your children messed up your bloodline before we talk about having more."

"Gandharva!" Makara yelled, exasperated now. "Come home. Get yourself busy. It will even be fun if you let it."

"You're always mad about how stupid I became over Shakuntala," he laughed, shaky, her name still sensitive so soon after the last vestige of her had disappeared at his own hands. "You really think it's a good idea for me to have more children?"

"Oi," Makara griped. "I think you misheard me. We need you for making children. There's no way in hell we're letting you raise any of them. So don't worry about that part. You don't even need to learn their names. Come back and play house with your woman here until we need you again."

"I can't go back to being like that," he confessed. "And even if I could, I'm not allowed to leave, and none of our clan's females are here. We can fight about this another time, if I survive that long. And if not, you'll be the king then and the honor of the job goes to you."

He gave Makara a wink. An absolutely salacious one.

"Fine," the other man said. "Fine. Be that way. You're going to regret it, though."

"I won't," Gandharva sighed. "Most anyone that needs my protection is gone by now, Makara. The nastikas can survive fine on their own. They don't need me to lead them; they don't need me to help make a new clan for them just so we can go fight and get everyone's children killed anyway."

He wondered, watching Makara's retreating back being lost to the fog of the wintry atmosphere, if that was the last Gandharva would ever see of his oldest friend. More of him hoped so than hoped not, if this was going to be the theme of their conversations until Gandharva caved.

Menaka would be happy. Not because he was remaining true to her – she'd much rather him move on, he was sure – but because he was remaining true to what she'd want, because he'd chosen not to indulge himself in the momentary pleasure of creating for the later pleasure of wreaking destruction.

He didn't know what his true self was anymore, and the lake certainly wasn't going to show it to him. All he could see was someone indistinguishable from human because of the red obscuring the fact his skin was colored like ice and his hair changed from near-white at the roots through pale blues and into hints of lilac by the ends, the deformity in his right pupil made invisible.

Whoever that creature was, he was a little bit less pathetic-looking than he had been yesterday.

For the first time since he'd been woken up by Ms. Kupatergent in the forest, he tried sleeping. He wished he could dream, like humans did, live in a fantasy world of his own imagining for a few precious hours.

Because he didn't need to sleep, nothing natural occurred to make him wake up, either. It was Teo that did it, coming into his room to announce to him that it was time to take his watch back up over the endless march of days.

Except she didn't. This day would be a little more interesting than most. After hearing of his penitent beating at the hands of Clari, one of her relatives had arrived in Kalibloom to enact a similar form of vengeance.

Gandharva shocked himself, and Teo, by agreeing to do whatever this Mari woman wanted to make up for the "endless piles of unimaginable fucking bullshit" Gandharva had forced her to go through whenever he was feeling out-of-sorts. Teo had bashfully repeated the phrase Mari had said to her when she'd made the request to be granted an audience.

Gandharva shocked himself, and every witness to the event, Agni and Chandra most definitely at the top of the list, by appearing in front of them within a few minutes of meeting Mari, knees on the ground, head bent to touch the floor, arms stretched out before him in a full display of debasement, praying for all he was worth to be saved.

He apologized. From the bottom of his heart he confessed every sin he could remember, apologized, begged for forgiveness and mercy. When he dared to raise his eyes off the floor for a moment, he thought even Brilith was considering his plea.

"Come on, Gandharva," Agni said, choking on his laughter. "You did say you'd do whatever she wanted to make up for it. And if this is what she wants, I mean…if I weren't a married man…"

Agni shut himself up fast with an apology to his hoping-for-a-divine-divorce wife.

Pathetic idiots, the both of them, Gandharva and Agni, maybe they really were starcrossed soulmates, fated to say very, very stupid things without thinking that it would come back and bite them in the ass later.

Regardless, the not-totally-enlightened god couldn't prevent his eyes from doing a last sweep over the naked and unashamed woman standing to the side of Gandharva with her arms crossed in exasperation.

To the world of gods and nastikas, as far as his clan went, it was Urvasi who'd won for being the most desirable of the women. Even among all the clans, she'd ranked in the top three, and long debates had formed over whether it was her or Shuri or Airavata that deserved the number one spot.

The truth was known to exactly two people before today. Gandharva, and the definitively-not-a-man standing next to him. It wasn't really a competition at all, unless that competition was for a distant second place.

"Agni," Chandra muttered, eyes as transfixed on the floor as Gandharva's. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

The larger man crossed his arms over the bare chest that Gandharva was doing his best to stare at and convince himself that actually, men were more to his taste, now that he thought about it.

"I didn't say anything when Brilith stared at Sagara being naked," he pouted. "There's no reason to make a big deal out of it. I mean, who wouldn't stare at this one? There'd have to be something defective about you."

Okay. There was a time and a place to wonder what the hell that was about and why the murder-priestess and naked murder-snake were put together in the same sentence, but right now, Gandharva had more important matters to concentrate on, like the fact that his body wasn't allowing him to revert to the child form he'd used for a few years nor to a female one because…well, because. There was only one reason that happened. Biological impulse really wanted to make him aware he was an adult male right now.

"I didn't mean Brilith. She'd probably you rather run away with Miss…Mari, and never come back. But do you not…?" Chandra sighed, uncrossed his arms and recrossed them the opposite way. "Never mind. I shouldn't expect any better from you."

What was preventing Agni from recognizing a nastika in human form and mistaking her for the world's most attractive Half like Teo had – Gandharva was a little hurt, just a little, that Teo had put him alone in a room with a woman like that and hadn't even come to check up on him to make sure the physical relationship remained a one-sided expression of violence like "Mari" must have promised her – was that said nastika had cloaking abilities to fool a god and hide their transcendental value. Any god but the source of the Darkness attribute to begin with, who for once might be on Gandharva's side, and clearly understood the depths of the problem they were faced with.

Ever the idiot, Agni continued digging his soon-to-be grave.

"She kind of reminds me of you, Chandra," Agni laughed. "If you were part sura, a woman, and way hotter. You love yourself enough I bet you're tempted."

It wasn't that he was wrong. Gandharva could see the way Chandra's gaze was fighting not to look and then got caught when he did, the same way his own eyes had stayed studiously concentrated on the floor or the fire god because when they weren't what they saw was…

Perfect.

Brahma or Visnu had wanted to play around with them all. Maybe Kali. Perfection from head to toe, the only thing that looked more perfect to him than Shakuntala.

Long hair the deep purple of pre-dawn, a deep, rich blanket of soft, saturated velvet. Skin the palest flush of translucent lilac and seemingly covered in fresh dew. Eyes ruby red, lips as full and colorful as ripe plums and shaped like a bow Vayu dreamt about being able to recreate, and that was just her face, her flat, uncaring, I challenge you, I dare you to make me part my lips and flutter my eyes closed and arc my unimpressed eyebrows up face-

Yeah, yeah, he was pathetic, Gandharva knew that, once he used every ounce of willpower he had to turn his imagination off. But he wasn't that pathetic. That was as far as the bad thoughts were going to get.

Way back when, so far back it was in those memories he'd chosen to forget with time, Makara had felt it his duty to offer to take the form he didn't prefer for the sake of making as powerful of a rakshasa as their clan could.

One glance, and Gandharva had forbidden him from turning female ever again, out of a deep and abiding fear of the consequences.

It was the type of beauty you couldn't distract yourself from, the type that inspired endless jealousy, the type that would make all the clan turn male to fight over and none of them would get a damn thing done besides killing each other or, quite literally, getting Makara done. If they were lucky.

It was a secret between the two of them, why there was such a power gap between king and second in command. Menaka was stronger as a male but had preferred female; Makara was the rare nastika stronger as a woman even without counting sex appeal but preferred being male, leaving Gandharva with both his backups in their weaker states by default.

And that had been a good thing for him, on many counts.

Makara would have lived as a woman if Gandharva had asked. Not out of love – Makara didn't know the meaning of the word, for sure – simply out of duty.

It was why Makara followed him to this day, because he'd known from the beginning Gandharva could be a good king and put clan above clam – no, that was a bad joke, he was going to kill himself for sure now – anyway, he had the wherewithal to put his people's wellbeing before his own, when it came down to it.

The only reason Makara wasn't beating Agni to a pulp for making lewd suggestions about him – her – was that there was a more important mission at stake. The haha, too bad, I can't leave here and there's no suitable women around so what can you do? mission.

Maybe, maybe Gandharva could deal with Makara on her own, had they been ruling over a clan with a healthy and stable population and neither had the nagging impulse at the back of their minds to help it get to that state.

As things stood – pun not intended – trying to fight Makara on his own while she wasn't wearing clothes was going to start with sura-type naked wrestling and very quickly end in the human way that neither of them actually wanted it to but Makara was convinced it needed to for some stupid, bullshit political reasons.

So right now? Right now all Gandharva could do was beg for help from beings that could close their eyes and go find enlightenment again and leave all thoughts of love and lust and pleasure at the top until Makara was bodily removed from the human realm.

"Umm…." Teo's voice cut in. She must have heard the news there was some fresh absurdity happening in her temple due to Gandharva and had come to check. "What's…. ahhh….Mari? Why are you…naked?"

When Agni laughed, it shook the room with force. Nobody had ever accused him of being a quiet god.

When Agni held in his laughter, the way he was doing now, he sent the energy out around him instead. The previously cool stone beneath them all warmed and cooled in the same tempo as heaving breaths.

"He, well, Teo, you know, it's no secret to any of us that if you and Gandharva were just a regular man and woman you'd be, you know…"

Gandharva didn't raise his head enough to observe whatever obscenely lurid motion Agni was probably making with his hands, because then he'd be overcome with the urge to make sure nobody but Yama got bothered by Agni's inane ramblings for the next few centuries, which would involve a perilous amount of time looking at things other than the safety of the floor.

"And if you think about it, I mean, we know the Halfs get affected by emotional resonance, and, umm, I think Clari's cousin here might be, you know, sharing the…the mood, now that she's so close to him."

He couldn't see Teo's face, but he could imagine it. The blank stare of processing information that separated them further from each other, wondering if it was possible to have the remotest bit in common with a creature like Gandharva, someone who, based on Agni's one hundred percent incorrect theory, had the innate power to make all lower life forms of vaguely similar nature irresistibly attracted to him until he locked himself up in the place all the gods agreed Agni belonged.

Horny Jail. That was what Marut had called it. She wasn't one of the more delicately-inclined creatures inhabiting the realm of the gods, in Gandharva's opinion.

"First off, she isn't my cousin, I've never seen her before," he heard Clari chime in, just as rude toward the gods in tone as she was towards her sura superiors. "And it can't be what you said. If I see any vulnerable body parts on that one on the floor there, all I'd feel is the urge to bite, and not in good way."

The reflexive, recoiling cringe he made at the mental image was the best antidote Gandharva had found so far to combat other, far more unspeakable mental images.

He felt something move next to him, another body coming close, warm, no…hot. Very hot. The temperature way.

"Why are you down here too?" Gandharva whispered, glancing to the side enough to see Agni bent over in a very similar position to himself.

"Brilith was looking inspired by what Clari said," Agni whispered back. "It feels safer down here."

"You're probably right," he replied, nodding a bit to himself.

When he'd imagined that one day there was a possibility he and Agni might support each other side by side in a fight, this…well, this definitely hadn't been how he was thinking. Actually, Chandra would probably be with them too if Laila were in the room.

"Makara," Chandra coughed out. "Put on some damned clothes. It's one thing to disrespect the temple of gods like me and Agni. This is a Primeval one we're talking about."

"Kali never seemed big on clothes herself," Makara spoke, voice beautiful as the rest of her, refreshing as spring rain with the gentle comfort behind it of waves breaking on a distant shore. "I think she'd approve."

Chandra couldn't argue with that. Neither could Agni, or Gandharva. First and foremost, Kali would approve of how much generalized chaos Makara's refusal to materialize clothing was causing.

It took a second for the other shoe to drop on Agni. When it did, there was mistaking it. His laugh was uncontainable, the type that Gandharva would bet had people on the other side of the world wondering why the fires were flickering in their hearths, the source of all flames having trouble inhaling the oxygen that made them burn. The god had to roll over onto his back where he laid on the floor and hug his stomach.

"M-Makara? What the – why are you…"

Agni's voice drifted away for a moment. "Right. I think I get it. We're all familiar with this situation."

"Good," Makara said, which she wouldn't be saying if she knew Agni better, and knew that whatever situation Agni was talking about, he'd made another entirely off-base assumption about what was going on. "Then all you need to do is ignore Gandharva's pathetic attempts to weasel out of helping with rebuilding our clan. I'm not here to make trouble for the rest of you."

"You know," Agni sighed, the measure of his misery obvious in the dimmed light of the fire warming the room. "There's times I think Ananta let himself get done in just to finally get a break from Sagara chasing after him."

While a highly plausible theory, in Gandharva's opinion, he failed to see how that observation had any connection at all to the impending doom of crossing lines with Makara they'd long ago sworn sickened them to think about.

"I mean, Makara, take it from me," Agni went on, getting back on his feet and approaching where she stood. "I know what it's like to feel like you might have to wait forever to find happiness with the only person you want it with. But I don't think using an excuse like repopulating is going to make things turn out the way you want."

There it was. Agni's newest entirely off-base assumption: Makara's black heart – it was black, Gandharva had seen it – was filled with a different type of love than subject for king.

If that were true, Gandharva would gladly see himself out of this world like Ananta had.

Deep purple lined in black rustled on the floor to his right. Makara was himself again. Gandharva's forehead removed itself from the floor to the sound of an otherworldly snarl from his friend's throat.

He scanned the room just in time for him to see a look mirrored across all the human faces that weren't Brilith's, a remembrance that no matter how almost-human the two nastika looked and how immaturely human they were presently behaving, they were very, very far from it.

"Agni," Makara said, voice laced with the threat of a thousand tortures, hands that were well-used to killing powerful things lacing themselves into red robes. "If you ever say something like that out loud again, I will find a way to kill you, and every time you make it out of hell, I'll hunt you down and send you right back. Gandharva will probably help."

He made a quick nod of confirmation to Makara's assertion.

"You were the one trying to drag him off to bed so badly," Agni complained, dumb as always, or maybe just playing it. Gandharva could never tell. He couldn't discount that the man had known how poorly Makara would take his words and had indeed done it on purpose, either to help Gandharva, or to help save the world from bad parenting. "What else did you expect me to think?"

"That some of us understand the concept of personal sacrifice," Makara spat. "We need to increase our population, we need this idiot's help, and he said he'd do it except for some flimsy excuse about being trapped here without any good women around."

"Liar," Gandharva cut in, finally able to get up on his feet and fight back. He saw Teo's hand twitch for her sword and wondered if it was him or Makara she wanted to stab first. "I said I wasn't going to, and you wouldn't shut up about it, so I said it wasn't worth fighting about right now anyway due to the small inconvenience of the rest of our clan being stuck in a separate dimension from me."

The fight started there. Re-started there. However you wanted to call it.

It didn't end there. It didn't end for a long time, not by human standards, anyway. For non-humans it wasn't so abnormal to argue for days straight when you wanted to. It wasn't like they had to eat or sleep in between and when things got personal, well…there was a lot of old history to rehash.

By the time the light outside had fallen low and Agni had lit all the candles at once and all the humans in the room had learned a plethora of strange details about the biology and practices of a sometimes-similar, sometimes-alien race and any secrets Gandharva or Makara had been hoping to keep from others had been announced to the world, the argument had gone approximately nowhere.

Not until Agni's woman interrupted, laughing so hard all of a sudden he and Makara both stopped to stare at her while she was overcome with uncharacteristically girlish giggles.

"Sorry," she recovered, waving her hand at her face like she was too hot. She got close to him, very close, put her hand out and touched his cheek almost affectionately. Gandharva saw the opposite of affection glaring back at him in Agni's eyes. "If I didn't know you two as I do, I think most of this would be too big a shock to me to feel anything else."

She nodded towards the other humans, Teo, for one, looking confused over how and why the relatively-young priestess thought she knew two nastika so well, because it was one of those things that couldn't be said, not in front of people who didn't know, not unless you had permission.

"And if I were them," she said, jerking her chin at the two gods still standing next to each other. "I suppose all this inane drama would be old news, and not so funny to hear for the fifth time. But for me…"

She drifted off, and Gandharva really wished she'd stop touching his face, because he didn't think Agni was planning on staying still much longer.

"It's the first time since I remembered that something's given me such a long break from what's in my own mind." She gave his cheek a final pat. "I didn't realize how much I'd love hearing embarrassing stories about you told in front of the last person you'd want hearing them. So I'll help you out a bit."

Gandharva didn't suspect Brilith of lying, exactly. He also didn't suspect she liked him enough after the past few hours to really want to help. She'd give him help, of a sort, that he probably wouldn't want, help in the same way the goddess of the temple they were standing in would define the term.

"Makara," she said. "Either you can go peacefully, or I'll make you go."

Makara didn't do much, just treated Brilith to the same I can't believe I have to deal with this idiot stare he usually gave Gandharva and turned to address her god.

"Agni," he said. "Your feral pet is very arrogant. You need to remind her that giving you the power you need to kill me will probably kill her first."

"Agni won't need to fight for me," Brilith cut in.

"Don't tell me you're so arrogant you think you can do it on your own?"

She shook her head.

"That red bird that used to follow Gandharva around came back to find me after a long…" she drifted off again, smiled to herself. "After a long time away. He's trapped here too. He stays not far out of the city. Garudas have good eyesight. He'll see it if I send a signal."

She tapped her staff on the ground for emphasis, fire threatening to shoot out and off into the sky to summon Maruna, which would be a weirder turn of events than Gandharva kneeling down in front of gods and praying earlier in the day, he was pretty sure.

"In this dimension, you wouldn't stand a chance against a fifth stage rakshasa," she finished, glibly, almost sweetly.

Yeah, so, Brilith currently hated all the non-humans in the room with her. They couldn't forget that. After seeing how entertaining it was to watch Makara and Gandharva torment each other all day, she wanted to make sure Agni didn't miss out on the fun. That was his conclusion.

Based on the fire god's face, the implication that his love-of-many-lifetimes had some kind of secretive, special relationship with Maruna was working very well.

While Agni may have been the target, truthfully, Gandharva didn't think anyone in the room, most of whom had various levels of grudges against the not-so-little kid, had escaped without taking some degree of mental damage from the revelation.

Chandra, surely, had his time in the spotlight coming. He was smart enough to know it, if the way he was eyeing the nearest window was any indication.

Gandharva closed his eyes, trying his best to figure out if Brilith was just lying in order to be hurtful or if there was a chance she was telling the truth in some form.

If she was…if she was, it was about time he had a not-father to not-son talk with Mr. Chickenhead about how killing Brilith in a couple previous lives when Agni hadn't seen and Gandharva hadn't known was one thing, but stealing her right out from under his nose was like, so stupid of an idea it must have created an extra dimension because none of the others could handle that level of unfathomable idiocy.

From what Gandharva had…gently encouraged out…he was going to put it that way, yeah, from what he'd gently encouraged out of Maruna, the boy had been stuck on that one bad egg in his clan.

Samphati didn't have any real similarities to Brilith beyond being women who were frequently angry, and suras tended to be incredibly picky about type in a certain kind of way.

Unless – well, unless it was the attitude, he supposed. That would put another piece of the puzzle neatly into place. Neatly, but unpleasantly. Namely, the question of why Maruna had been so willing to follow Sagara's directions.

Samphati, Brilith, Sagara, there was kind of a clear pattern, if you thought about it, something like, overpowered women with grudges against the world and a questionable grasp on sanity.

Poor Maruna. It felt like he belonged there with them, in Gandharva's Exclusive Extra Pathetic Club.

Gandharva groaned and rubbed at his temples, trying to block out the not-entirely-figurative meltdown Agni was having over in the corner.

First off, he was going to assume he shouldn't sneak up on Maruna and Sagara together under the assumption they were plotting. They'd probably be doing something else, and Gandharva could live without a perfectly-preserved-into-perpetuity memory of witnessing that abomination stuck in his head.

Worse, now that he knew Brilith had, for some reason, seen Sagara undressed, he had to wonder if there was a connection between that, and what they were doing with Maruna, maybe separately, maybe together, after all this time Gandharva had thought he'd heard it all, but no, no, there were things out there that could shock him yet.

Second, he really hated Sagara. He didn't know how Maruna could possibly do this to him, knowing Gandharva wanted to kill her most times he thought about her. Mostly, he was held back out of a shred of empathy for the sole female member of his extra pathetic club.

On the bright side, this meant there wasn't a single thought about Shakuntala that her father wouldn't approve of floating around in that bird's brain. He was willing to call it a wash.

------------

Maruna's ear twitched. His actual ear, not the appendages he'd lost when he'd grown that most people had thought were his ears.

His head picked up from where it was resting, on top of a blonde one, which itself was resting against his shoulder.

People would still be suspicious of Samphati being out of control. Until things calmed down some and could get properly explained, it was best for both of them to lie low and not attract attention from the wide variety of individuals who might want them dead.

And since they were stuck up on a mountaintop together, most days feeling like there was no future and the ones that didn't feeling like the future was theirs to decide with their elders as good as gone, Akasha's my daughters are reserved for nastikas rule had been conveniently forgotten.

Even after she recovered, Samphati was probably a little too crazy for anyone who hadn't seen her back when she was happy. After what he'd been through himself, the same was probably true in reverse.

So for now, they had each other, and a lonely mountainside outside of Kalibloom, where Ran had told Maruna was probably best to wait because with Gandharva, you never really knew.

Ran must have sent a letter to the temples to say not to murder him on sight, please, because after only a billion years of wearing him down, humanity had domesticated a sura. His original human, somehow, was a priestess sharing this time with him, the one he'd almost killed in Atera.

She'd gotten her memories back. She'd come to find him. Thank…he didn't think his species was supposed to thank the gods, but in this case, it felt appropriate to thank a specific one, she had not come to tell him that she was still creepily stalking him with unrequited love through the ages, but just to say hello, ask a few questions, and tell him they could be friends, maybe, when she sorted through her feelings – not those feelings, morality-feelings – about distant past-present Maruna and temporally-past-two-decades Maruna.

He was fine with that. He was kind of doing the same.

She'd told him she was glad he'd learned to smile, and sad he'd lost his not-ears, which she'd considered his most expressive feature. She'd agreed with Ran he should stay outside Kalibloom.

"What is it?" Samphati finally asked.

They didn't talk a whole lot, because neither of them felt the need to fill in each and every moment of silence with chatting. Amazingly, after living this fucking long, he was pretty sure he'd run out of things he felt needed to be said about his life in about a tenth of the time that Ran had before he'd accidentally lived for way longer than humans were supposed to. And that was if Maruna was feeling particularly talkative.

True to himself, he didn't say anything back, only shook his head.

Maruna had a sixth sense. To be technical, he had a seventh sense. Sixth sense was for detecting cloaking, which he had, so the extra, idiosyncratic sense he'd added along the way, something like a unique transcendental, was his seventh sense.

He couldn't see Gandharva from where he was. He knew he was in the city, was as sure as he could be that he was in the one temple unless he'd wiggled his way out of captivity, so somewhere in there, in that temple, Gandharva was doing something – specifically, thinking about something that might ruin Maruna's life. He could feel it.

Gandharva was there, Agni was with him, their fusion transcendental was to combine their idiocy exponentially and not additively, and of all the places to be idiots, they had to be doing it in the temple dedicated to Chaos.

Honestly? Maruna was beginning to think he should have just stayed in that one fucking cave and never come back out.

#kubera #kubera webtoon #one last god kubera #many crack ships #most of them falsely imagined #maruna's OT3 #please come discuss this series with me I'm begging you #I'll write literally anything #as long as it's crack

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