I Am The Greatest Femboy Mage

Elian’s thought were still a mess by the time he finished washing and went to bed. He lay there for a really long time, unmoving, staring into the darkness of his ceiling as he sorted out everything that happened today.

Awakening the second petal.

The flood of information Vale had given him, the cult, being in danger, extra classes.

Walking in on Bellamy engaging in some... thing.

Lastly the reality check Bellamy had given him, telling him how oblivious he was about his own image.

He let out a weak chuckle.

Who would’ve known holding on to an old habit of wanting to go unseen would end up backfiring so hard, much less get him to be the center of attention of an entire academy.

He let out a long sigh, relaxing his body, letting his thoughts flow past him untouched as the darkness came to claim him, slowly falling into a deep slumber.

The abyss was waiting once he did, the unnerving depths of it all the same as Elian woke floating in nothingness. The stars seemed to twinkle brighter this time, and The everbloom was already waiting by the time he shook of his disorientation.

"That was a long day." It said.

"Stop stating the obvious." Elian replied with a deadpan stare.

"No, your answer was supposed to be ’No shit Sherlock’."

Elian paused, blinked at the audacity, then opened his mouth, hesitating before he actually spoke.

"Were you always this vulgar with your language, and... what is a Sherlock?"

The staff shifted, the same restless motion as always.

"You know what? Nevermind." It floated a little closer to Elian, leaning in as if to make itself look bigger. "You are genuinely terrifying, you understand? Awakening the second petal before you even learn about circles is genuinely diabolical."

Elian frowned.

"All i did was listen to what you told me." He pulled his legs up, folding them into a comfortable position before he continued. "I didn’t even do the awakening part myself, It just happened."

The staff drifted back slightly, considering that, the same restless motion it always made when it was deciding how honest to be.

"That’s exactly the point, and also exactly the problem," it said.

"You keep treating ’it just happened’ like an excuse instead of the actual mechanism. Nothing about this bond works when you’re trying. You froze an entire room today because some idiot instructor asked you to cast ice you’d never cast before, and you didn’t have time to build a wall around yourself first."

"That’s not comforting."

"I didn’t say it was comforting. I said it was diabolical." A pause, almost fond.

No, not almost, Elian thought. The staff was definitely starting sound more and more like it was fond of him.

"Do you understand how many mages spend their entire lives trying to unlearn the instinct to control everything, and never manage it? You’re doing it by accident, at seventeen, because you spent so long hiding you never noticed you’d also stopped bracing."

Elian sat with that a moment, turning it over the way he turned over most things the staff told him, slowly, suspiciously, waiting for the part that would make him feel worse rather than better.

"Vale said something similar," he admitted. "About the fall the other day. About not having time to think."

"Vale’s smarter than she lets on, for a woman who spends half her lectures pretending she’d rather be doing anything else." The staff’s crystal head caught a mote of light, held it. "She’s not wrong, though. You want to know the actual mechanism behind Resonance-bonding, since apparently you’ve decided today is the day for uncomfortable truths?"

"I feel like I don’t have a choice either way."

"You don’t, really, but I appreciate you pretending otherwise."

It drifted closer, the way it did when it wanted him paying proper attention.

"A Resonance bond doesn’t mature because of power. It matures when distance happens, how far you’ve drifted from whatever version of yourself you’d be if nobody was ever watching. The five petals aren’t a scale of strength, Elian. They’re a scale of how much of that distance you’ve closed. It’s all about learning to be yourself, true strength has always lied in being yourself and not someone that the world tried to make you be."

Elian’s chest did something complicated.

"So the reason my family failed for six generations..."

"Is that every single one of them held onto that distance like it was load-bearing. Some of them for good reason, actually. Fear does that to people, generation after generation, until nobody even remembers what they were originally afraid of, just that fear is apparently the family tradition."

The staff’s voice had gone quieter, the edge smoothing out as it continued.

"You’re not special because you’re powerful, for the record. While yes, you are technically powerful. You’re able to do this because you started closing the distance before you even knew there was a name for it. The mirror. The hair. Your new friends. All of it. That work was already half-done by the time you touched me in that vault, and now it’s being completed"

Something about hearing it stated that plainly settled strangely in Elian’s chest—not quite comfort, not quite grief, some third thing he didn’t have a word for yet.

"Three petals left," he said quietly.

"Three petals left." The staff agreed, and for once didn’t soften it or sharpen it, just let it sit there as fact.

"And for what it’s worth—since I know you’re currently spiraling about a cult with a stupidly named leader and a teacher who just informed you five teenagers are apparently worth killing—the distance closes faster under pressure, not slower. Whatever’s coming for you, it’s going to make you more of yourself, not less. That’s the only comfort I’ve got tonight, and I’d take it if I were you."

"I’ll take it."

He shifted, deciding that he needed a better floating posture for this conversation.

"Now what?" He asked, looking at the staff.

"Is anything new going to happen now there is one more petal? What exactly did it do anyways. The nurse told me something about my body becoming more durable."

The Everbloom didn’t answer right away, instead taking it’s time to think about something.