serefin "tranavia's greatest idiot" meleski (meleski) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-10-13 09:17:00
DIEGO HARGREEVES
SEREFIN MELESKI
WHO Diego Hargreeves and Serefin Meleski WHERE The Underground WHEN Tuesday, October 13 WHAT Fight training goes real yikes when an old god finally decides to come out STATUS Complete! WARNINGS Blood, violence, slight eye/body horror, Diego being cool af
Serefin was growing tired of not landing a punch on Diego. Not just in general, but particularly today. Serefin had wanted to get some of that restless energy post-haunted hotel out of his system. And they had been sparring in earnest. Diego kept saying hit me, just hit me and, blood and bone, Serefin was trying. He didn't need to be prompted to do something he was already aggressively attempting to do.
But his chest was heaving, and sweat was running down his brow, and fists were sluggish, like he often became when he was getting nowhere—which really was unfair, how was he ever supposed to one-up the person training him? Much like he suspected he couldn't sneak around as well as Evie. Or be aware of his surroundings while blindfolded as well as Jacob. It also didn't help the longer he circled the ring, grasping for stamina he didn't have and focus that was quickly diminishing, Velyos was pacing around the fringes of his mind. Like an opportunistic asshole.
Give in. You cannot hold this off forever.
Violence did often bring the old god to the forefront and Serefin was ready to—a white-hot flash of pain from the fist to his jaw caused all rational thought to escape his mind. Diego punched him, again.
Serefin spat, saliva and a tinge of blood where his tooth cut the inside of his cheek. "You have to stop at some point," Serefin said, an edge of frustration working its way into his tone. He could feel Velyos giddy and eager in a way that Serefin was predisposed to hate at the induction of his magic with blood. If he didn't give the god attention, he would just go away. Right?
You know it's not that easy to get rid of me, Kowesz Tawość.
He winced at the title, one he had hated and certainly didn’t want Velyos using freely as a taunt. Serefin took a step back from Diego and put his fists up. "And when you do, I'm going get one right here," Serefin said, gesturing at the spot on his chin Diego had just hit.
Diego had a stubborn streak an entire ultramarathon long. When he made up his mind about something, he usually dug his heels in so deep until he was essentially a part of the ground. Told he couldn’t (or shouldn’t, honestly) do something, Diego would find a way, breaking down walls or windows or whatever else got in his way until he did whatever the thing was.
But patience was a cousin of stubbornness and even though Diego would have said he didn’t have any, he found it pretty easy to come back to the ring time and time again, reinforcing lessons, changing up what wasn’t working, waiting, waiting. A part of it was that Diego remembered what his own training at the Umbrella Academy, desperate for a scrap of praise, caught up on the endless treadmill of trying to gain his father’s approval, always prepared to be replaced because he wasn’t good enough. All of that had refined Diego into the very knives he threw: sharp, jagged, cutting. And what he was discovering he didn’t want to be. As he absorbed and reflected on that weird memory dump, he was realizing that he didn’t have to be that way either. He could still be a badass (fucking duh) who didn’t take shit from anyone, but it was okay for his lone wolf to find a pack. A small, selective pack, but a pack nonetheless.
All of that meant he wasn’t going to give up on Serefin. And Serefin kept showing up too, so he wasn’t giving up either.
“Do I?” Diego asked, snorting a chuckle. “Just gotta hit me, once, but I’m not making it fucking easy on you. Ruins the fun.” He tapped Serefin on the side of the head lightly, just a quick thing to bring his attention back and get out of his thoughts. “Come on now, you got it, put ‘em up and let’s go.” Serefin prepped, Diego moved to strike again.
Serefin put 'em up. But his frustration was building. And Velyos was clawing at his seams, a hunger Serefin hadn't felt in a long time. He was paying attention to the god now, he couldn’t help it, but—
The uppercut from Diego clipped him just right, and Serefin's head went back and his clumsy feet tripped over one another and he was down in a graceless mess. But embarrassing himself in front of Diego wasn't the problem. It was the cool rush of air across his face, followed by a vaguely familiar searing pain in his left eye, growing in intensity. It was a flash of a forest he had not seen in months.
I warned you.
Serefin's hand went to his god-eye, uncovered and brightly lit under the fluorescents of the Underground. His eyepatch was somewhere behind him, out of reach. But all he could see was the trees, the sweeping feeling of dread in its inky canopy, the trunks oozing blood, his sight going sideways. He had let Velyos become too conscious, let him cling to too much of him in Vallo. And while Serefin mentally was trying to pull himself free of the blazing vision, his body was crawling to his feet, aware of the surroundings.
Velyos was no longer in the dark.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but that did nothing, the fathomless star-dark left eye refused to close. And much like the incident on the boat—the one he had kept from everyone, even himself—he walked up to Diego, hands at his side in probably the most non-threatening way before sucker-punching him in the face.
Diego sighed, scarred eyebrow arched expectantly. “Do not tell me that up in that fancy ass castle you didn’t have dance lessons.” He made a motion to put his hand down to pull Serefin up, but Serefin had already gotten to his feet and was moving towards him. “Right, try that again, huh? So, hands up, your one foot--”
Diego’s head snapped back from the force of the punch, both completely unexpected. “Holy fuck,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “Where the hell did that come from, huh? Been holding out on me, asshole?” Surprisingly, there wasn’t the reaction that Diego would have expected--something like grabbing a phone to re-enact the moment so he could send it out to literally everyone, or Serefin falling down to the ground, a hand to his brow and declaring that he could officially quit boxing, or literally anything else ridiculously over the top that Diego would have entertained for about ten seconds out of respect for his protege.
When none of that came, Diego looked at Serefin, really looked at him, and when he did he saw that the eyepatch Serefin wore because of the fucking god in his head (that Diego was totally going to kill, thanks a fucking lot) came off, his brow furrowed. “Hey, you--”
That was when the next punch came, thunderous in strength.
If Serefin knew what he was doing, he might have been more excited about finally landing a punch on Diego. As it stood though, his sight held an unending forest, trailing behind the robed figure of Velyos. Follow, follow, follow, his body seemed to say despite the stubborn refusal of his mind. But that place—coupled with the interminable need to bring the old god to that altar—didn't exist in Vallo. And terrified, Serefin wondered how far and to what lengths Velyos would force his hand to get there.
Diego, unfortunately, was in the way of all that. It wasn't that Velyos wanted to fight him. It wasn't even that the god had the singular authority over Serefin's body in the way a possession would. They simply shared one space, flipping a switch between one then the other.
And so the Serefin-Velyos-whatever amalgamation needed Diego to move. And from all the thoughts that had been swirling around in Serefin's head for months—of Diego, of Evie, of Jacob—Veylos simply plucked the knowledge out. Diego liked fighting, Diego had a mean right hook, Diego wouldn't give up. Serefin struck him across the face again, then snapped back with an elbow to Diego's nose, and a grab-shove to the ground to move Diego out of the way.
He almost made it through the ropes of the ring when there was a tug at the collar of his shirt, yanking him—throwing him—back into the middle. The vision was gone for a split second, and Serefin tried to close the god-eye again to no avail, only agony.
Velyos however, determined to get Serefin’s body past The Kraken, was up and swinging at Diego again.
Diego was not the most strategic of people, but he did see the starry skyed eye and clicked that puzzle piece together with Serefin’s behavior to make a picture of him not being in control. Diego didn’t really know what this whole god business meant, but he knew that he would not, could not let not!Serefin leave. Blood gushed out of his nose, and angrily, Diego wiped it away.
O-fucking-kay.
He wasn’t the deadliest of fighters--that went to the actual assassins, Five, Jacob, Evie, and Diego wasn’t even the strongest, that award went to Luther if he had been here or to some of the fighters at Fight Club. But what Diego had going for him was that stubborn streak and a fierce loyalty to people, and, once earned, he would go to the ends of the earth and back. So fuck yeah, he could fight a god for Serefin.
When Diego was younger, much of his educational training had been about physics. How something moved, and why, he spent hours watching things fall or be thrown or move and he had always wanted to do move the big things. He wanted to stop trains from going off the broken track, he wanted to veer cars away from pedestrians, he wanted to help planes land safely. Big things. But oh no, the Umbrella Academy had to start small, so then he’d spend hours throwing knives because heroes needed a ‘thing’, he threw them around corners, at impossible angles, he threw them like boomerangs that went out and came back to him like the deadliest form of juggling.
The thing about a punch was that it was thrown. It had speed, it had direction, it had force, it had trajectory. Even though Diego preferred using knives, his abilities weren’t because of the medium, it was because of the movement. If something had trajectory--knives, bullets, a punch, Diego could manipulate that. He inhaled, exhaled. Time slowed down for Diego, the fist inched its way closer and closer to his face, he felt blood from his nose crawl down his face, he inhaled, exhaled, and nudged.
Time sped back up, he saw everything in real time now, the air from ‘Serefin’s’ punch whipping by his face. Miss. He didn’t have time to think or react, before another one aimed at his stomach, and when Diego curved that punch the force of its new direction forced Serefin’s body to turn to the side. Diego, never one to play fair, seized on that and used the sudden imbalance to sweep Serefin’s legs out from under him. Diego was on him quick as a whip strike, one knee on his chest, one hand holding both of Serefin’s wrists. “Get back,” he growled. “Fucking get back or I’ll cut you out my fucking self, don’t you fucking try me, not with him.”
Well, this sucked. But Serefin had never been more thankful for Diego in his life at that moment.
The Kalyazi forest loomed around his vision, but outside of that Velyos was losing a battle against a superhuman. There was a hiss-crack of frustration as his fist and attempts to move Diego out of the way were met with open air and blatant misses. It was all going to be painful later when Serefin’s body caught up with the struggle that was happening with his mind, but when he hit the ground, Serefin's head knocked sharply against the ring floor and the forest disappeared.
There was a moment of lucidity, and Serefin didn't like the position he found himself in: on his back with a knee in his chest, and Diego uttering a vicious—though kind, Serefin would realize its kindness later—threat to his face.
Try me, słabeusz, Velyos taunted back to Diego, but only Serefin could hear the cruelty in the words. How unimpressed the god sounded, how unafraid. But Serefin was afraid, he was so so afraid.
He could feel his vision waning again, a darkness filtering through his left eye and into the edges of his right. Serefin remembered that he had told Jacob that no, it didn't hurt having the god in his eye. But it did now, it did now. All Serefin wanted to do was claw the pain away, rip his god-touched eye right out—his hands struggled to do so, legs kicking out fruitlessly, his body twisting to break free. But that was made impossible with Diego holding him down.
Blood and bone, he had never been more thankful that Diego was aggressively stubborn and annoyingly stronger than him in this situation.
"Cover it," Serefin grit out between clenched teeth.
Diego’s free hand clenched into a tight fist, painful, the cut of his jaw set sharp like a knife. Blood was starting to trail down his chin and neck. He was running on adrenaline from a fight that had only just begun and from someone he cared about being threatened and there was nothing he could do. There was always something for Diego to do, someone to kill, someone to save, some criminal to arrest and most recently, some Armageddon to prevent. He didn’t sit still, he didn’t give up. When Diego threw his weight behind something, he was an immovable object.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he said, a promise in blood. “It’s going to be great.” And then, because Diego Hargreeves wasn’t known for his self-preservation skills, because he was a reckless dumbass idiot with a fuck it up attitude and a flair for the dramatic, he winked, so that was the last thing the god saw before Diego’s hand scrambled around and found Serefin’s eyepatch. With the angle he was at, he couldn’t get it around Serefin’s head without releasing him and Diego wasn’t certain he wanted to do that until he knew Serefin was back in charge of himself. But he was able to cover the god eye, throw the stars in darkness and seal the edges with his fingers
This did not feel like a win. It felt like a thorny, bitter defeat of some kind, somehow.
He waited, waited, waited, until it seemed as though it was Serefin, scared, shaking, before Diego released his wrists and sat back. “Hey, hey.” Diego’s voice came out harsher than he intended, but he wanted to grab Serefin’s attention before anything else. “You good? You okay?”
The darkness was a welcome reprieve. The shadowy forest was gone, the intimate pain in his god-eye was quickly dissipating, and Velyos was shuttering himself away, having used his hold for a brief, destructive moment of control. But not without one last shuddering chill down Serefin's spine, as if the old god dragged his index finger across Serefin's mind—a reminder.
What was left was Serefin breathing hard over a fight he vaguely remembered participating in, Diego looking wrecked above him while pressing the eyepatch into his face, and the sickening feeling of blood leaking out of his eye like tears. All things considered, this was not the worst situation that Serefin had ever found himself in. But he felt more miserable than before.
He wanted a drink.
When Diego let go of his hands, his arms slumped, tucking the eyepatch back into place where Diego couldn't. Serefin didn't make any more of a move to get up—the idea of moving felt impossible and dangerous given his circumstances—and he simply wiped at his face when he felt the blood leak around the covering. He hated that side effect of Velyos's touch.
"Your face looks horrendous," Serefin said, not really answering Diego. He didn't know how he felt, and he didn't think it was anywhere near good or okay. "Did I do that?"
“Wow, rude,” Diego quipped, rolling his eyes. He stood up and walked to the edge of the ring and grabbed a towel for Serefin so he could clean up. Then, oh right, Diego realized he should wipe his own face. He found another towel and then went back to Serefin, offering him a hand to stand up before giving him the towel. Diego wiped his mouth and neck--he needed a shower but he certainly wasn’t going to leave Serefin now or any time soon.
“No,” he said once, firmly. “You didn’t.”
And that was enough for him. It was like with Vanya, who had too much power thrust upon her, never taught any sort of control because their father was too threatened by what she could do. Even though there were consequences to her actions (like the goddamn apocalypse), it wasn’t Vanya’s fault. This wasn’t Serefin’s fault. “You’re ‘you’ now, yeah? Don’t have to make you tell me something only you know?”
Serefin dragged his body to sit up and took the towel, but he waved away Diego's hand. He couldn't find a reason to be on his feet. What he wanted to do was lay back down and feel a little bit more miserable about himself and the situation, but with Diego looking over him, wiping the blood Serefin caused from his slowly bruising face, he knew that was impossible.
He pressed the towel to his cheek, under the edge of the eyepatch, careful not to disturb the solace there. It came back stained red with blood, and Serefin sighed, a weary resigned thing. He closed his good eye, waiting for the inevitable, but still Velyos remained far away in that deep recess of his mind. One good thing, one singular good thing.
"I'm always me," Serefin said, sounding bitter and a little petulant. Of course he didn't like the idea that Velyos could slip in and out while distracting Serefin's consciousness with an subconscious vision. It was cheating—Serefin had no say in the matter, no way to fight it. This could happen again.
This would happen again. It was worse than the incident on the boat; Serefin had only almost killed himself then, not someone else.
Serefin frowned as he looked back up at Diego. "We should take a break from doing this for awhile. For all my posturing, I do not want to actually hurt you. I—ugh" Oh, there it was, Serefin was laying back down in a defeatist lump.
No one was fucking defeatest lump on Diego’s watch. Diego didn’t let himself linger in sadness much. “He’s an asshole. I’m awesome. That’s very simple,” Diego had said, about his abusive father who had shanked him and left him to die. Anger, Diego knew what that world was, bitterness, sarcasm, he threw those as sharp and easily as his knives. But sadness, that was a mountain Diego had yet to climb. Even when faced with Ben’s grave as a child, Diego had turned that grief into being so mad at Luther for making a terrible call and letting Diego carry the team on his back, when in reality Diego had just wanted to mourn. There had been no room for anything ‘soft’ growing up in the Umbrella Academy,
But Diego wanted more for the people he cared about, even if he had yet to fully realize that for himself.
So he grabbed Serefin by the arms and pulled him to a standing position, saying, “Cut that shit out,” as he did. And just in case Serefin tried to squirm away, Diego held his face between his hands. Not because he wanted to convey kindness, of course, not because he wanted to impart the earnestness and honesty of his words. “There’s no giving up here, huh? You have people who give a shit about you, and believe me, I know that’s scary as all fuck. But when people give a damn about you, when they’d run into your fucking haunted church thing to break it down, or when they’d fight your fucking god, or whatever else multiple goddamn times for you? Your responsibility--your duty to those people who give a fuck, is to do the best damn job you can do at taking care of yourself.”
“I give a fuck, for the record, and I don’t give up on my people. So we’re going to figure this out, and I’m going to kill it myself.” He patted Serefin’s cheek and stepped away so he could snag his water bottle from the side of the ring and soak his towel in a vain attempt at cleaning himself up.
Going from horizontal to vertical in one swoop was disorienting. And Serefin barely had his feet underneath him before Diego was grabbing his face in one fierce display of solidarity. He swallowed hard, unable to look away, but that was the point.
He thought he might combust with the ferocity of Diego's words. His whole body trembled with the force of them. It wasn't often that people gave a fuck, and while he knew that Kacper and Ostyia did in their own way, it had been months without them propping him up. His feelings often mattered little when there was so much at stake.
That was without dealing with the vivid visions and the unconscious control the god sometimes had. Serefin knew it was only going to get worse, was getting worse. Like Velyos's strength and hold was catching up to him in Vallo. Serefin’s sanctuary here was not going to be one for much longer—wasn't anymore, given what had just happened.
All he had wanted to do was to go to sleep and never wake up. But Diego was saying no. He was saying people cared about what he did because he was somehow a person to give a fuck about. That whatever disaster was going on in his brain, whatever danger he was unknowingly but willingly putting on these people, no one was going to abandon it—him. So he couldn’t abandon himself either.
Caring and being cared about was uncomfortable. Serefin didn't know how to handle it.
Diego was walking away before Serefin even understood what was happening. "All right," he said quietly, then again louder. "All right, all right. Just not today, let me fix your face first." Even if he didn’t sound confident in being able to now or what he’d be risking so soon after everything.
“Not today,” Diego agreed. “But when you’re ready.” Magic and gods, that was all out of Diego’s domain, but there were plenty of people with experience. The point was, not alone. For Diego, the lone wolf, that was a hard lesson to learn, but for other people it was easier.
Diego considered Serefin's offer. On the one hand he probably could have used it, his nose bruised, one eye swollen, the other one black and blue. On the other hand, he wasn't all that sure what would happen with Serefin's magic and the god thing lurking so close under the surface. It wasn't worth it.
"Nah," he said, coming back to punch Serefin in the shoulder. "It's sexy. Let's get lunch. And don't think this fucking counts as punching me, by the way."