Question meme

[stigmateyes]

I haven't done one of these in forever and I guesssssss things have happened. Also, I'm sick and bored. :(

So here's your question meme for Ryner/Night and Zero/Thorn.

Comments

[hunting]

That's why I saved it for last. :3

[deadofknight]

Ace is the type who saves all his emotional investment for a very few individuals. I…wouldn't necessarily say that he's by nature co-dependent, but he tends to invest so heavily that the object of his investment occupies a hugely important place in his psyche. In canon this is Julius and Alice (and the mostly-fanon hatemance that I imagine him having with Vivaldi, to a certain extent.). In Aather, the subject of his enormous emotional investment is of course Zero. Which means that Zero is Ace's Most Important Thing.

This has a lot of effects on Ace, some negative and some positive—it's Zero's influence, or rather the influence of wanting Zero to be his friend forever and ever, that makes Ace do his best to play the role of Good Knight. It means he takes protecting teams during games seriously, it means he tries to be thoughtful about the quests he gives out and to make them helpful or useful ones. At the same time, though, Ace's investment in being a Good Knight goes about as far as his investment in being bffls with Zero forever, and so it's rather fortunate that Zero is both a pretty good role model and that Ace is incredibly invested in maintaining the level of his friendship with Zero. This is why Ace takes so many pains to conceal the bits of his memories that he considers to contain things Zero won't like—not because Ace is perturbed by all the killing and whatnot, but because he is perturbed by the fact that Zero will be perturbed, and he doesn't want that. He doesn't want to ever give Zero any cause to think of Ace as anything other than a Good Knight, which is actually Ace's desire to never give Zero any cause to ever reject him.

And…well, Ace is aware that Zero has a lot of issues, but he also just…doesn't have the emotional apparatus to always understand what those issues are! To him Zero is full of weird quirks and flaws that Ace doesn't understand and at times thinks are kind of naïve or stupid…but at the same time he recognizes in those quirks and flaws a goodness of nature that he himself lacks. And…it's not that he wants all of Zero's feelings or issues, not at all; in fact he feels pretty good with his emotional stuntedness as it is. But it's…well. You know what they say about loving your friends because of their flaws, not in spite of them? That's his attitude. Zero is fucked up and sometimes stupid about things but that's okay, because that's the Way Zero Is and also Ace will look out for him. And he's totally okay with having to do that because, even though Ace is often fucked up about friendship, and how to recognize it, and what it entails, he still takes it very seriously and is a friend to the best of his ability. There's not a whole lot he wouldn't do for Zero or for Zero's sake. His skewed sense of self-preservation does play into this a bit, of course; saying he'd die for Zero has a lot less meaning when it comes with the coda that he'd do it because he knows he'll come back anyway, one way or another.

As for the physical aspect of things…well…Ace's possessiveness plays in here because he enjoys having another way to hold and have and be with Zero. He's not thinking too hard about romance because that way lies Alice and, well, that's a huge knot right there that he doesn't really want to think about, especially when he'd rather be thinking about kissing Zero. He loves Zero a lot in a platonic bro way, but not quite romantically…? It's kind of hard to explain, and I suspect it's going to be much like his issues with friendship in that Ace isn't going to recognize/realize whether or not he's in love until something forces him to face the undeniable truth that Zero might love him.

I think part of why Ace doesn't really think of Zero in a romantic way or even a potentially romantic way is because very early on they both established that they're in love with women who they can't have in Aather—Zero has Yuuki, Ace has Alice. And Ace is very good as separating sex from romance (but not romance from sex) so while the idea of carrying on behind Alice's back doesn't bother him, he thinks it would bother Zero. Except apparently it sort of doesn't…? But at the same time because he feels that Zero is super loyal to Yuuki he feels like romansu is really off the table (and, again, Ace doesn't really want to be thinking about romance anyway). But holy hell does he love getting to touch Zero and kiss Zero and have Zero and so for now he's just rolling with what feels good. And kissing Zero feels really good.

He continues to wish Zero would get over his topping issues though. Either top or be topped, there is no constantly flip-flopping back and forth. Or at least Ace wishes there weren't. :T

Let me know if you expansions or clarifications~~~ /o/