Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I do not own these characters

AN:

This is a take on the X/F thing, whatever it may be. I wanted to try to explore a (pretty twisted, but I hope interesting) relationship between two non-humans with non-human emotions. I especially I wanted to explore Filia's motivations in their relationship…I understand that it is a little different take on them than most peoples'…. I only hope it is not totally without merit and that no one is offended.

EDIT: I re-formatted the text to hopefully make it more readable. The back and forth between thoughts and the actually evens seemed a little confusing to me, hopefully it is better now.

The Balance

He was late.

And in the shadows of her modest cottage, a young mother made yet another pot of tea and waited. Dark clouds were building on the horizon, ominous and fast moving, and the first stinging drops of rain tapped against her window. Her son was asleep in bed, though the summer sky had not yet grown dark and she was left alone, waiting, with no company but memories.

She walked to the window and saw in the darkening panes her own reflection; a tall woman stood there, un-naturally tall for a human, with thick, soft curves, buttery hair and guile-less blue eyes. Her mouth, she thought, had not always been as sensuous and pouting as it was now. It had once been innocent and pursed, before it had felt cold kisses and swollen to signal the first awakenings of lust.

That object of lust was late. She bit her lower lip and looked down to see a tear splashing in her cold, untouched tea. She knew that there was a possibility that he was not returning, or a possibility that this was all a prank to goad her into violent emotion.

Please, Gods, let it be the latter.

She was a creature of extremes, and she needed the chaos of those extremes manifest in her life to keep her awake and alive.

The years she had spent under the thumb of the priests of the temple had been an endless haze of boredom and depression so deep she could not recognize it for what it was. She had come alive during the Dark Star campaign, been reborn just as her son had. She had come alive with fear, with compassion, with hatred, and with love.

She had been baptized by the clash of light and dark, and her own beloved child was the fruit of that explosive union. The continual clash and break had become her sustenance and life. She depended on it.

And she depended on him. She remembered him pinching her cheek like a petulant child when he had left the week before. She remembered how his cold fingers had turned her face hot with a single touch and filled her heart with longing even as she had lashed out angrily.

She knew he didn't love her the way she loved him, but somehow it had never mattered. She knew her own love was a dark, sticky, tainted thing, a desperate convergence of lust and need and attachment. She knew that though he might not be able to love exactly as she did, she provided something that he could not live without, and that bound him to her more tightly than love.

He once told her that the extreme cycle of her emotions, both light and dark, intoxicated him to the point that he had long since depended on them to live. The belief that he would die without her provided her a rather un-holy feeling of satisfaction. It only seemed fair.

She fingered a cookie on her plate, and considered eating it, but the single raisin winking out from the crusty oatmeal looked some how lonely and sad, and that hit much too close to home.

Her sudden and visceral attraction to him had frightened her when they had first met, but she had been a silly child, a naïve young woman with a body and soul ripe to be plucked away from the assiduously memorized ideals of her mind. And he, with an epicure's delight, had set about the plucking, not realizing that he was equally ripe for change.

She had realized quickly that her dogmatic repression at the temple had not made her truly good, but instead a pretty doll who never questioned and recited by rote. The cultivated ignorance had left her best intentions twisted. She had been taught to shun evil, to believe it only existed in the hearts of men and monsters, not knowing what lurked in the hearts of her teachers, much less in her own.

When she met him, everything shifted. He challenged her, hurt her, and she raged, and then learned. All the darkness and hatred she had bottled up in her heart she unleashed on him and he took a very sensual pleasure in it. And after the loosing of her extreme feelings, she felt purified, purged and alive.

She was like a stone in a tumbler, and he rubbed off her edges and left her smooth and sated.

She had resisted him as long as she had been able, but everyday found them drawn inexorably closer, like magnets holding themselves apart by sheer force of will. She knew he had never meant to be drawn in as she was, had thought it all a game until suddenly finding himself checkmated and bound to her more tightly than any spell or ceremony could have produced.

After months of tumbling from battle to bed they had found themselves seduced into an easy and unspoken partnership. She had never asked him to stay, but one day he simply had. He lived with her between missions from the Lord Beastmaster, and Zelas had never reprimanded him or complained. Filia knew that, despite all their denials, Mazoku could love, after a fashion, and certain could care; perhaps Zelas found some small joy in her cold heart at seeing her son content.

With Xellos had come two huge black wolves, who prowled around their yard and growled at any passerby daring to glance in. When Xellos was gone, one slept at the foot of Filia's bed, and the other kept an unsleeping watch at the door. They had frightened her at first, all claw and tooth and wicked violet eyes, but she was used to them now, and sneaked them scraps of meat under the table. They, in turn, had taken to rubbing against her legs and jutting out their shaggy heads for a scratch behind the ears. Xellos had commented distastefully that she was coddling them from Mazoku guards into lap dogs.

The townspeople had gotten used to the two strangers, although some still whispered at the strangeness of the couple. The woman was all smile and blush and full, womanly curve, a strange contrast to her companion's androgynous angularity. Some gossiped that her baby was not his, but more level heads neither commented nor cared.

Filia, still bruised from the judgment and scorn of her people, found their petty gossip mildly comforting. If that was all that they thought to accuse her with, she was relieved.

The rain was pounding against the window, the wind howling and rattling the shutters. Still he did not come. Her face felt hot and there was a leaden weight in her gut. She had dressed for him, worn the simple white gown she knew he favored. He loved to see her in white, representing something he dually despised and craved.

She had once thought that her association with him would taint her 'purity', that sharing her bed with a monster would leave her defiled. But with knowledge and experience had come acceptance and compassion deeper than anything she could have aspired to as a priestess. Being with him left her purer, more truly good, than she had ever been.

She had once craved serenity. She now knew that serenity would leave her screaming with boredom. She needed the flashes of anger, the physical release of a thrown punch, reaching out with fist or teeth, Xellos just a few inches out of reach. If he didn't make her cry occasionally, she began to feel twisted, and would provoke him into provoking her. She would emerge refreshed and truly pure in heart and soul.

She watched how Lina and Amelia loved, and felt perverse. They longed for easy affection and adoration; she needed the snarling, bestial, yet somehow tender balance that she walked with Xellos. She needed that mutual physical desire that matched and mimicked their desperate emotional need. Perhaps it was their nature as animals to mate thus.

A single sharp flash of lightning illuminated the hunched figure silhouetted in her doorway. Before the thunder sounded, she was at his side, strong arms catching his body as he slumped against her. His body was wracked with tremors and slick with sweat and she knew that he had stayed away from her for too long. She met his ashen-faced gaze as he whispered, "I hate you. I hate that I love you."

She understood. She knelt with him still clasped against her breast and laid her warm lips firmly against his cold ones, felt his tremors subside at her touch.

"I know, darling," she said, "I hate you too."

Fin.