Chapter Text
It was romantic, it was like every story with which I inspire the lonely. The kind of thing that makes people think I'm naive, a fool, a liar. I will admit it took me a long time to realize myself that I wasn't but this was when I did.
They were so happy. Their love was real. They learned from each other. Elysius helped Mar lighten up, and Mar helped Elysius have empathy.
I loved them too, obviously. I hadn't known them for very long but they were so important to me. But the thing was, I loved them like they loved each other. I wanted them. Especially him, especially the man who had made everything better, who was always there when we needed saving. I had never–trusted somebody so much before. I was in love. Elysius got it - after all, while she had simply lusted for me, she had fallen in love with him too. Who wouldn't?
So it was hard, as I hear it apparently always is, to be so close to what you can't have or don't belong to. As much as I'm all about love, I'd never felt that way before on the inside. Other people have been in love with me like this, and it is not good because while I theoretically want everybody to be in love I don't want them to be in love with me, and it generally means it's time for me to go. Now I know why feeling it directed towards me didn't feel good - because it felt like causing pain. Now I understood that pain. I was a third wheel, and given the circumstances there was only one way to make it stop.
"I have to go," I told him. I am the master of pretense and nobody's shrewd eyes could shake me. But under his big blue eyes, I squirmed.
"No you don't." He stated it back to me like it was fact, contradicting what I had just told him as if it weren't up to me. He was right, I didn't have to, but I couldn't bear staying with them. "I mean–why?" He caught what he'd done. He had blurted it out, spoken for me without thinking, and it meant something to me that such a careful, contemplative man reacted with emotion like that. It was genuine - of that I was almost sure. Almost.
You see, people usually liked me. It was my gift. I'm also an empath, so I can generally feel the emotions of others and know if their fondness for me is because I earned it, or because everybody likes me, or if they just want something from me. If I didn't have that ability to discern empathically, I would never be absolutely certain if anybody actually liked me, or if it was just an effect I had, and that would be rather bad for even my self-esteem.
The thing was, Mar-Vell's gift, the Cosmic Awareness, it made his mind so strong that I couldn't feel through it. I couldn't feel what he was feeling and it made everything so uncertain for me. If I were honest, despite what I just said I hardly need my empathy to know how people feel. But the fact that I felt so different about him made me feel lost without that sixth sense.
"Why do you have to go, Eros?" I heard something in his voice, something personal, and he put his hands on my shoulders. It didn't sound like hurt, but it didn't not, and I couldn't look him in the eyes.
"It's not fair to you and Elysius that I tag along with you and rob you of your privacy," I explained. I settled into my role as the manifestation of love to give me confidence, to shield me from being vulnerable to the very force I represented.
"You've found love again. Real love. The kind that refreshes the spirit – a love that gives her life new meaning and fills the hole in your own heart."
I glanced up just to see how he was doing. His face was blank, he was silent. He was listening. He was listening, even to this, which most would brush off as shallow nonsense.
I looked at his neck so at least my face wasn't tilted down. I continued to advise. "When you have a chance like this–that's rare. To have the chance to choose to live with someone you love, to love freely. And you need to take that chance while you have it. You know this."
He looked thoughtful. He didn't adjust his hands on my shoulders, not even slightly. "You're right." The fact that I knew I was right made me feel worse. "But I am–we are, aren't we? Elysius is right here. Why does that mean you have to go?" His voice leaked the slightest amount of distress. It made my face hot in shame. The last thing I ever wanted to do was cause him distress!
But he questioned me so earnestly, wanting to learn from me. Very few people thought I had anything of value to say, and I didn't, really. I just gave vague, unrealistic platitudes, like I had just then, and I could
never understand why he took my words so seriously.
And I knew I had an honest-enough but face-saving answer in me to the question of why I had to go, but it was taking me a while to find it, and before I could he spoke again.
"Eros," he said softly. "I've been waiting for this."
By the Gods, of course he knew. His Cosmic Awareness. God, how stupid I felt trying to rely on ancient detached mystique to lie to a practically ascended being. I was such a hypocrite. A fraud, really, because at that moment I felt so embarrassed that I wear my heart on my sleeve. My emotionality felt like a weakness, not the strength I tried to convince others it was. I would have given anything for tears to not have spilled from my eyes.
"You can say it," he told me. I imagined it must have been his protectiveness, that all-knowing nurturing streak of his, the savior and Protector, taking pity on me, wanting me to get it off my chest. I was furious. I was dazzled. I felt belittled, condescended to. Maybe I deserved it, but–
But then he moved his hand. He tilted my chin up to meet his eyes, in the way a romantic always dreams of. And his eyes looked different than I thought they would– his gaze was intense, and vulnerable. "Please say it."
But the world of emotion around me was empty, and with something like this I just couldn't trust my eyes. So I deliberately expected the worst: if he wanted to feel superior to me or if he just wanted me to bare my vulnerability to him as deeply and completely as possible, more than anyone else ever in thousands and thousands of years, ever in my whole life–then–
–Fine. I would give it to him. I couldn't deny him anything.
I screwed my eyes shut, bracing myself. "I love you," I said.
I didn't stop there, because Eros of Titan telling somebody he loved them was meaningless. "No," I continued, a preemptive rebuttal, reaching up and grabbing his hand with both of mine. "I mean, I love you. Like I've never loved anyone before. Anyone, ever, I've never felt like this, not in 7,000 years. I can't. I can't, I love you."
I grimaced. It was painful. It was humiliating. There was no catharsis, no relief in it. It was an admission that I was wrong. It was the universe teaching me a lesson to never preach to people about things I didn't actually know anything about, like falling in love.
I rubbed my cheek against his palm and I squeezed his hand so hard because I didn't want him to go, I wanted to be with him forever, I wanted him to choose me too. I didn't want to go.
But then I felt a feeling. The barest hint of relief. Affection - and not the pitying kind. I thought I might have just been hallucinating.
Then I realized it was coming from Mar-Vell. I recognized the identity of his emotions as those of the man from before Eon strengthened his mind, when he was just a reckless but determined Kree exile. It was calmer, wiser than the last time I felt it, but it was him.
My head snapped and I looked at him wide-eyed. The love I felt hadn't changed, but the effect it had on me started to. Absolute misery was inverting into confusion, hope, anticipation, curiosity, giddiness. I needed to know more, immediately, and I touched his temple with my fingers to get it.
Love, love like mine for me, for me, it overwhelmed me, almost knocked me over. And he grabbed my face and he kissed me, we kissed, and it was the absolute best kiss I'd ever had, and I've done a lot of kissing. It was hard, unrelenting, overpowering with passion, and I was dizzy from it, but I had him to hold onto. I didn't understand why he loved me. But I didn't care. His love was real.
I had never been so happy. I had never realized how lonely I was. I hadn't been wrong about love after all.
Once again it turned out I was safe with him all along.