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“Little one…” Chase tipped his head up, narrowed his eyes, and stared. Beside him, a few tigers sat back on their haunches, staring up as well. There, on the ceiling, stood a bright dash of red and black, swinging back and forth from the tip of the chandelier. Where to begin…? “…Why are you upside-down?” seemed like a reasonable question to open with.
“—Big one!” the newly Heylin warrior brazenly jabbed a finger at Chase, “why are you beside-up-right!?” The chandelier swung, and Omi’s hold with his remaining hand tightened to keep him stable. He stubbornly refused to just stop pointing while throwing out this cutting rebuttal, even if it meant a more precarious hold while he continued hanging on the opulent fixture.
Chase cracked a smile at the tenacity. His excitability and hyperactivity were on full display ever since his qi had been split. “…An adept retort,” Chase complimented. “Spoken with the eloquence and command of a man fit to rule the world. You are learning well.”
Omi faltered and blinked owlishly, visibly surprised at the praise he’d received in exchange for the playful impudence. Chase’s smile widened wolfishly.
“That’s right, Omi. Exert your will like the leader you are. You stand above the world because that is the place where you belong.”
The confusion didn’t truly leave him, but Omi’s grin soon returned, along with his signature puff of pride as he declared, “Yes! I am most eloquent! And I am most high! Perhaps I am the highest in the world!”
Chase arched an eyebrow. “And it seems you’ve found a good vantage spot to look down on others.”
“Yes, it does!” Omi mirrored the facial expression back at Chase, trying for as cocky a grin and as quirked a brow. Chase’s expression softened in fondness when he saw it, and it took considerable effort to hold in a laugh at it. So, this was the embodiment of Omi’s darker half. They had a long way to go, but Chase certainly wouldn’t be bored while he taught him true darkness.
“…In fact, I can’t just take that lying down,” His eyebrows knitted into a scowl. “It’s as though you’re challenging me.”
Chase glanced down at the felines by his side. Wordlessly, the warriors understood. They leapt, Chase snapped, and in a smooth transition, fur turned to feathers, claws turned to talons, fangs turned to beaks. A flurry of crows flitted around, blotting out the room like the cloak of darkness that was blotting out much of the world outside.
Some of the crows roosted on the highest statues of the room along the walls, just below the level of where Omi still hung from. Some of them continued to dart around. Their colors were so dark that the ones at rest and the ones in flight seemed to switch places seamlessly. Omi gawked in awe at the sea of black feathers around him. It was difficult to keep track of anything in this sea of shifting black, especially while swinging side-to-side on a chandelier with the blood still all going to Omi’s head.
“I can’t idly stand around resting on my laurels and let you rise above me like that,” Chase said, and Omi looked back down at him, just as the man sunk into the shadows. Not poetically or metaphorically—literally sunk into the darkness at his feet, like one would sink beneath the waves of an ocean. In the flurry of sharp-edged black feathers and moving shadows of the flying birds, Omi couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light or a sleight of hand or misdirection or something sneaky, or if it was yet another ability in Chase Young’s arsenal. “I can’t allow that.”
The voice echoed from all around him, and its source was further obscured by the droning caw of the murder of crows gathered around Omi. Grinning in excitement, Omi looked around in a frantic curiosity. “Chase? Chase Young! Where have you gone!”
The lighting fixtures inside the chandelier began to flicker. The shadows around Omi pulled and morphed, rising into the clarity of an ominous, lurching figure. Omi was so startled that the remaining hand he had clutching onto the chandelier finally slipped off. The shadows molded into something solid that darted out and caught Omi by the wrist. The shadowy hand let Omi dangle there for a moment as the figure in the shadow took a familiar form.
“After all, we’re meant to stand above it all together, side-by-side, aren’t we? I know you would get far too lonely at the top without me.”
Omi brightened and reached his other hand up, placing a little hand on the back of the hand Chase had wrapped around his arm. “Chase Young! There you are! Haha, I have found you!” he declared, like he’d just won something. When Chase quirked an eyebrow in silent question, Omi yelled out a giddy answer. “Big one! Now YOU are the one up-down-side!”
Chase’s smile softened. With a kick, he pushed off of the ceiling. Instead of leaving them both to fall, they hung there, weightlessly floating. Omi’s eyes somehow widened even more. His excitement and awe reached a crescendo.
The flipped around in mid-air aerobics until they were both high above the floor, and staying up there by some mechanism of flight completely unknown to Omi. Omi flapped his arms and legs, as if he could swim, but he merely kept floating whichever way Chase had bidden him to turn. That didn’t stop the frenzied attempts at self-propelling or the mid-air martial arts he had begun doing now.
When the airy flips and turns and spins left them both hanging in the air head over heels, Chase grinned. “Why don’t we both hang upside-down together for now, little one?”