Because Albel both lives and dreams by his own rules.

WARNINGS:
Spoilers, running free and untamed.
For all that there's no real porn, hot and throbbing and homoerotic like whoa.
Also violent and gory and all that good stuff. I mean, come on, it's about Albel. You were expecting fuzzy bunnies?

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Albel's claw blurs silver and lays Cliff's cheek open in three places. The lazy grin on Cliff's face disappears like smoke. Sometimes I dream of killing you, Albel hisses, his blood-red eyes raking avidly over Cliff's bleeding cheek. He's up in Cliff's face, too close, within biting distance, within throttling distance, daring Cliff to strike him back... nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Albel vanishes in an affronted whirl of purple skirts, a bit of blood still gleaming on the tips of his claws.

He isn't lying. Albel doesn't lie.

His madness is a vicious, tangible thing squatting in the back of his mind; therefore in his dreams there is always a tremendous pressure upon him.

It's dark, too dark to see, and he's being squeezed on all sides by walls he cannot see, hot and stifling and soft. The body under him is huge and slick with sweat and blood, slippery against him where they're forced together by the pressure. Huge hands bat and clutch at him without any strength, catching for a moment on his warbraids or in the tattered folds of his skirt before loosening and falling away.

Cliff is dying and Albel has killed him, finally, and the dream-knowledge (which is always true) makes him bare his fangs in triumph.

The last time Albel was defeated in single combat was eight years ago. The last time Albel was defeated in any sort of combat was five years ago. In those days before Elicoor was brought screaming and newborn into the universe, he barely needed to draw his sword; just the promise of his involvement was enough to bring most things to a stuttering halt.

He was a prodigy. He was a madman. He was fearless. He was dying of boredom. And he walked through the world entirely alone.

There was no one else in Albel's world, because only Albel and those worthy of being his opponents lived there. No one had been able to stand up to him for many years. Therefore there was no one worthy of his notice; they were all less than human. Ghosts. Maggots. Scum. Trash.

This was a state that could not last, and although Albel did not know it then, that state ended when a silver meteor crashed into the walls of Airyglyph.

Squeezed against Cliff as he is, Albel cannot use the sword; there is no room for the long blade. With a will, therefore, he sinks his claws into the body beneath him, feels it shudder and convulse under him as the metal-shod ruin of his left hand punches deep into vital areas and pulls back dripping, again and again.

It has never been this good. No one has ever survived this long once Albel has killed them. But he continues to rend and claw at Cliff and Cliff continues to thrash under him, still alive, that freakishly powerful body able to take such punishment, allowing Albel to sate his bloodlust so fully--

--in his dream Albel keens out a sound, high and purring, and his eyes drift halfway shut against the blackness.

It was evening; shadows tumbled from their feet to stretch across the roof. Nel's shadow was a negligible slender thing and Fayt's was hardly longer, but Cliff's shadow was long enough almost to touch the wall on the opposite side of the grounds.

Albel's shadow fell across Cliff's face. Huge, some remaining bit of his rational mind noted. Albel ignored it.

Gnats. Maggots. Insects.

Those huge hands are still pawing at Albel, smearing handfuls of blood down his bared arms, leaving prints of themselves on his naked waist, pulling weakly at his leggings until they slide down his legs to catch on his boots. Still alive. Cliff's still alive under Albel, and Albel just wishes he could see it, see the ruin of the Klausian...

Suddenly even the claw is too impersonal and Albel lets the vicious pressure of his madness crush him against Cliff, sinking his teeth into the side of Cliff's throat.

Cliff tastes of fear-sweat and blood, and those hands sink weakly into Albel's hair, and his pulse throbs weakly in Albel's mouth. Albel's eyes roll up into his head and he groans out an urgent sound, savaging Cliff with his teeth, tearing at his throat, his shoulders, his jaw...

Cliff knocked Albel's sword away like it was a troublesome gnat and countered with a punch that shattered two of Albel's ribs. Albel staggered backwards, eyes widening as he saw another human being for the first time in eight years. His madness caught and held on Cliff's face. His universe shifted in a great silent shaking rush.

Cliff's eyes narrowed as he brought up both huge fists in a defensive stance, and Albel bared his teeth in a welcoming bloody grin, beckoning Cliff closer with a lazy gesture of his claw. I see you, he growled under his breath. I see you. He lunged for Cliff, and that's when Fayt and Nel hit him from either side.

He'd forgotten they were there.

He still cannot see but he no longer wants to. Being able to see it would somehow take away from this immediacy, this intimate knowledge of what it feels like to die. It thrills him in a way he cannot explain. Feverish and hungry for it he sucks blood and sweat from Cliff's skin, writhing, grabbing, taking...

Cliff's arms loop weakly about Albel's ribs. If he weren't dying he could crush Albel in that bearhug but as it is he just clings to Albel, as if he were drowning. Albel catches his face in both hands and drinks deeply from Cliff's mouth, sweet under the coppery taste of the blood.

In the way that you simply know things in dreams, Albel knows that if he can breathe in Cliff's last breath, he'll capture the Klausian's soul, take in his strength, use it to throw off the weight of that unbearable pressure once and for all. So he crushes his mouth to Cliff's and waits, drugged with excitement and sated on blood, for Cliff to die.

After that one solitary scream of cheated, slighted rage Albel did not move again, his unnerving red eyes fixed on a point somewhere far, far ahead of him. They healed him, arrested him, dragged him to Airyglyph in chains, and buried him, leaving him to rot. Albel reacted to nothing. For the first and last time in his entire existence Albel was tractable. A mannequin draped with purple rags.

Shackled in the dungeons of Airyglyph Albel hung from his chains like a dead man, and his fevered dreams took on a new shape for the first time since he, in his pride and arrogance, was brought low all those years ago. He dreamed of a tall blond man, bleeding, underneath him.

And, as always, of pressure.

But dreams are slippery things.

Cliff's mouth moves against Albel's, weakly, trying to frame words or push him away. His arms are heavy around Albel's ribs. Albel snarls in vexation and bites at Cliff's lower lip. But now those arms tighten and that mouth clamps down on Albel's, and suddenly he is not dying, he never was, he is whole and sound under Albel. His wounds are gone, forgotten by the dream as it moves into another place, dragging Albel with it.

Albel, in a panic, tries to break free, but a dreamlike lassitude fills his limbs and he cannot. He thrashes in that grip, pressed hard against a huge warm body now slickened only with sweat, and he knows that soon he'll die, or worse, surrender--

Albel's eyes snap open in the dark. He gasps in huge cool breaths and struggles against the sheets tangled around him; he's so hard that he aches, and his mouth tastes of blood from his bitten lip.

When they came to free him from his chains, he was barely aware of the rest of them, but Cliff shone like a beacon that he could not ignore. It brought him back from the place of pressure into which he had retreated. A worthy opponent at last.

While they struck the chains from his wrists he stared at the lines printed around the Klausian's throat and imagined slicing that throat open with such precision that he did not nick the lines. The image obsessed him.

It always will.

Five years later he'll sneer and tell Cliff I still dream of killing you, but by then Cliff knows enough to suspect that the important words in that sentence are I dream of you.

I love Cliff/Albel. This fic isn't really representative of why.

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