Love Me, Harm Me

You don't see (the monster in) me

"A tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous." - Kamikaze, Beatrice Garland.

.☀.🌑.☀.🌑.

There wasn't anything left for him to say. Really, right now, what could Meliodas really say?

Ending up back at the beginning wasn't really a surprise for him. Foreshadowed by Zaneri's words that day in the bar, carried out by the ever-faithful strings of fate, Meliodas knew that everything in his past had built toward this present. Unlike most people, living a life that went linearly - a straight path that only ever diverged to zigzag up or down - he lived a life which curved and twisted and looped around itself. A cycle. An endless cycle.

Over and over and over, Meliodas found himself retracing the paths he had thought he'd discovered in his youth. Now, though, ten years wiser and so used to the repeating track, he could see exactly how it overlapped, didn't change, only seeming different because his own footprints had become faded and invisible. Distant relics of the past.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, his father had told him about a creature that had swallowed its own tail. Forever looping, stuck in an endless chain with no start nor end, it was reduced to a mere myth - a cautionary tale to anyone stupid enough to think that the past did not serve as lessons for the future. That creature had been a snake; it represented ouroboros.

Years ago, a younger Meliodas had laughed at his father's tale. Clearly, it was made up, another one of his attempts to condition and educate his son about the dark, complicated world in which DK operated within. However, the symbol had stuck with him; the idea of perpetual cycles of life and death clung to him.

Now, looking back, it was rather humorous that Meliodas had chosen to get that symbol tattooed. Ironic, really, that his sixteen year old self had shrugged it off like it was nothing major.

"It looks cool," Was his resolve to the mark, vibrant on his bicep and prominent against his skin, "I mean, it's a dragon!"

Yeah. It was a dragon. So. Fucking. Cool.

If he had really been thinking back then, had really thought about why he had wanted a permanent reminder of the story his father told, then Meliodas would have realised that it wasn't because the symbol was 'cool'. Really, it was because he knew exactly why his father had told him about that myth; Meliodas, just like that snake, was something destined to repeat his past over and over again.

Aside from him, everyone else seemed to be aware of that fact. His father, from his childhood, had always drilled it into his son that he constantly made the same, silly mistakes. Zaneri, every time Meliodas dropped into a dark place, was right there - waiting with the same smug eyes and coy smile - knowing exactly what he would do next. Even Zeldris, his own brother, kept an eye on him because he knew that without the right guidance, without a distraction, Meliodas would lead himself down into the darkest depths of his mind.

Only Elizabeth was oblivious to the truth. For a while - for too damn long - she had been blinded to the true monster he could be.

But, just like everyone else, once the truth came out and the monster was revealed, she had upped and left. And Meliodas couldn't even blame her for it. If he were Elizabeth, he would be running for the hills too.

"You know," Stubbing out the last stub of her cigarette, Zaneri sighed as her sharp green eyes studied Meliodas from across the table. As she paused for a second, grey smoke escaping her lips, she blinked slowly, "You really never change."

Tiredly more than curiously, Meliodas raised a brow at her statement. If he had been given the choice - which he hadn't last night - he wouldn't even be here right now, a plate of breakfast he had never asked for but was obligated to at least try to eat set out in front of him. If he was given the choice, Meliodas wouldn't be here; he would be somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere impossible to reach now that it was destroyed.