Love Me, Harm Me

(Why are you) like sunlight

"More and more I was beginning to feel like a spectator in my own life."

― Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses

.☀.🌑.☀.🌑.

Bad days - dark days as he calls them - were never pleasant for Meliodas. To everyone else, to all the people around him, watching as he unravels, spirals out of control with each and every passing bad day, it looks as if he enjoys them. From the outside looking in, to spectators watching from the other side of the glass, his bad days looked like manic tantrums, times where he knew what he was doing and was in full control.

How wrong were they all.

Just like everyone else, like all the people timidly watching from behind the glass, Meliodas himself was only a spectator. Mind hazed in a heated fog of little thought, senses dulled with a smog so strong that it felt like almost permanent sleep, bad days were like never being awake. Bad days were like unpleasant nightmares - only much more real - the effects lasting and impacting on his every day life.

Living a normal life, being a normal person, was something Meliodas never really got to have. Even before the bad days, before the mornings where he would wake up half-alert and half-dreaming.

Growing up the way he did, around the people he was around, was never bound to create the perfect, functioning member of society. Oh no, Meliodas was lucky to be functioning at all. Childhood for him was a precarious game of guess who - only the characters were all things that could kill him if he chose wrong. Tack on the extra stress of a younger sibling, crippling pressure to do his father proud, and an uncle who needed to learn how the back the fuck down, and you could understand why Meliodas' psyche was not in the best possible state it could possibly be in. Scratch that - his mental health was crumbling.

Piece by piece, chip by tiny chip, Meliodas was destroying himself. Slowly but surely, he was erasing all traces of who he was. All by his own cruel, unforgiving hand.

Meliodas can't remember the first dark day anymore. He can't name the first shift, the first time he woke up and felt like everything he was experiencing was a horrid lucid dream. For the first sixteen years of his life, dark days and good days were all meaningless blurs of highs and lows that passed with the endless flow of the annual calendar. Routine. Normal. Part of his life.

But then, and he remembers it so clearly, there was something that broke through. Small cracks of sunlight, tiny pieces of starlight that just parted the fog like thin fingers pushing apart a heavy curtain. Change was rare back then; light never actually came to visit him. So when he caught it peeking through, Meliodas decided to follow it.

Trying to capture it, contain this small change for himself, he ended up meeting its source: Elizabeth. Pressed against the fence, her fingers hooked within the spokes, she watched the ongoing match, fine pink spread over her heart-shaped face. And, right around her, radiated this same light. Bright, white light that just blinded him, stunned him.

And that's when Meliodas woke up.

"You really should be more careful," Sighing, Elizabeth shakes her head as she opens the front door half-helping Meliodas in. Not that he needed it. She just felt the need to help him every time he happened to get into a scrap on a bad day - which was about nearly every bad day.

"And I told you not to worry," Meliodas tells her, shaking his head. There was a reason why he left her that note. There was a reason why he didn't tell her in person where he was going. Meliodas knew that if Elizabeth had found out, she would have dragged him right back home, berating him all the way while simultaneously checking for injuries.

Classic Elizabeth - he thinks - always fretting about me but never herself. The person who needed it most. The person who did so much, sacrificed so much, for someone who would inevitably crumble away, reduced to a walking, talking husk of empty function and meaning.

Often, Meliodas wonders why she still sticks around. Why she still lives here, with him, following him around and always tidying up after him. Elizabeth. His lovely Elizabeth. Always doing everything for him, always sacrificing everything for him, when really it was her who deserved all the world and more. So much more than he could ever give her.

"You know I'll never stop worrying about you," Elizabeth murmurs, voice soft. She does her best to hide it, but he can see the hurt - feel the hurt - within her, gentle hands removing themselves from him in order to seek out her well-used first aid kit. Wry, a small smile fixes on her lips, "Despite your sometimes-neglect, I still consider you a good friend, Meliodas."

"Sometimes I wish you didn't," He comments, just as quiet. As he watches her grab the first aid kit, he notices her abandoned plans for the evening: abandoned takeaway card, empty mug and an open box of teabags. Deep within him, some part of Meliodas twitches with guilt - wants to apologise for inconveniencing her once again. But another part, much more dominant, roars that she shouldn't have interfered anyway. What he did was his business. Elizabeth didn't need to worry about him. The consequences she faced were all due to her own incompetence.

"You and your silly words," Elizabeth tuts, shaking her head she produces the first aid kit and easily rips open a fresh packet of antibacterial wipes. Without hesitation, she presses it to the wound on his face, ignoring his sharp hiss from the sudden sting. "You have to try better than that to get rid of me. Honestly, I thought you would have gotten the hint by now."

"I could say the same to you," Meliodas grunts out, frowning as Elizabeth wiped at the dried, congealed bits of blood against his nose. He'd earned that from headbutting someone, his nose meeting the hard surface of a thick skull.

"Watch it," Elizabeth warns, blue eyes challenging his own as she rips open another fresh packet of wipes. More fiercely, she presses it to the second wound - a cut on his bottom lip. "You wouldn't want me to leave now, would you?"

"Isn't that what I've been trying to do for the past two years?" Meliodas chuckles, raising a brow, challenging her stare with one of his own. Easily he smirks, relishing in the way she bites her lip.

Nothing leaves her lips. Instead Elizabeth falls silent, not meeting his gaze as she gets a fresh bag of frozen peas from the freezer, thrusting it into his hand as she rummaged around the first aid kit for a plaster. All the while Meliodas stares at her, bitterness settling onto his tongue, noting how she pinches her brow, teeth pulling at her lip as she busies herself with everything, anything, but his words. His sometimes-neglect that hangs on the tip of his every word.

"No, I don't want you to leave," Meliodas admits, much more quiet than before. Elizabeth stops before him, fingers frozen in the motion of smoothing out his plaster. He presses his forehead against hers, sharing the next words like a secret omen, bound to only them through the ancient laws of whispers and secrets. "Sorry for saying that, Ellie. Thanks for patching me up. I appreciate it."

A shaky breath enters her lungs. "Anytime," She smiles back, breathing out as she closes her eyes. All too soon, she is distancing herself again, zipping up the first aid bag and binning the used wipes and empty wrappers. "But pull these crap again Meliodas and I'll seriously go on a dry spell. You need to stop living life half-in and half-out."

"That's no what you said last night," He grins, adjusting his grip on the now thawing bag of peas. Clumsily, his fingers slip over one another, pressing the bag more firmly into his face. "If anything you were praising me for it!"

"I mean it, Meliodas!" She calls loudly from the hallway.

All he does is laugh in response, knowing very well that she was blushing ear-to-ear - never a rare sight for him with Elizabeth Liones. It's only minutes later, the bag of peas still melting in his grasp, that he reminds himself how much of a shame it was that he'd probably never be there to see it fade.