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He can feel that Ash has settled on… if not the crux of the issue, then a thread of it, and, as Kepler had expected, he begins to poke and prod and picked at the frayed edge as they make their way back across their castle courtyard-- such as it is-- and through a side entrance.
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“No, it’s nothing that serious,” he says, quickly, reaching back with spread fingers to wave away the concept with a quick flick of his wrist-- though he pauses on the lowest step of their climb up to their chambers, considering. It was somehow not that serious and even more serious in the same vein.
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“It has nothing to do with-- with the Solstice,” he says, instead, slow, as if he’s trying out these words to see if they stick, if they fit better. And they do, and it seems to assuage him as they reach their bedroom door.
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Kepler unlatches it and turns around, bumping it open with his ass as he takes both of Ash’s hands in his own and leads him into their quarters.
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“Before I say anything,” he says, kicking the door shut on the opposite side, “I need you to promise me that you’ll let me fight when… when the time comes. No matter what. I need you to promise me that.”
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And maybe he’s botched it before he’s even begun but he wants Ash’s word on the matter before he even tries to start at the meat of the thing.

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Ashley Shepard[break][break]

NOTES

[break]
- Sees NPCS he knows die ; ' ( [break]
- Riding the fear - hope - fear parabola [break]
- Galarian Zapdos is KO'd and Kepler gets trapped underneath him. Very badly hurt. Thinks he's gonna die and then his Cinderace appears and saves him. [break]
- Kepler hunches over Chocobo because he doesn't want to leave him. [break]
- Cinderace follows Ashley Shepard's Raboot's lead and uses ELECTRO-BALL on ETERNATUS, unwittingly aiding Necrozma.

MADE BY GUNSMILE

Ashley Shepard [break][break]

NOTES

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- Gathers the populace along with King Ashley Shepard and Queen Selena Desmarais and helps to lead them to the battlefield.
- Does Theoden's 'forth and fear no darkness' speech for INSPIRATION AND MORALE [break]
- Waits for the royals to call the charge and then, you know charges. [break]
- Dives into the horde on his Galarian Zapdos and attacks various poison soldiers with psycho cut. [break]
- Galarian Zapdos attacks a Toxtricity general with ancient power. [break]
- Using my last three salac berries JEEPERS CHRIST RNG

MADE BY GUNSMILE

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For all of his complaints about age-- and Kepler knew there were quite a few, as they woke up together in the morning, and he was privy to all the popping and crunching of Ash’s joints as he rose from the bed, and Kepler got to watch him with not-so-secret appreciation-- Ash could definitely still get it, as the kids said. But age was another one of those concepts that seemed separate from the body. For a scale based on numbers, it was terrifyingly unpredictable in a way that made his stomach clench.
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Ash is aged more, Kepler thinks, by the weight on his shoulders-- and though Kepler’s grown, filled out, and become stronger, there are some things he just simply can’t help lift. He knows his husband laments the empty spaces in his life, once filled with friends close enough to be family. He knows the crown is heavy in a way that normal systems of measure cannot describe. And he knows, despite his best interests, there will always be heft and weave to the doubts that plague Ash’s mind, body, and soul, dug deep like poisoned fishhooks and seeking to drag him down under the constant pull of gravity.
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The King’s Shield-- later, when they discuss it, Kepler will find it oddly comforting that both Ash and Isaac Merlo had the same thread of an idea-- lodges into the packed dirt of the practice field and Ash crosses to him, locks of bicolored hair damp with sweat and sticking to his forehead. Kepler lets him take his hand and kiss his knuckles and he still blushes, like always. At first, he’d worn the title of queen more like a joke, than anything. It had to be held up with a downy guard of humor, lest the hidden thorns cut into his skin and peel him open like a clementine. He hadn’t gone by female identifiers since he was twelve, and for a long time, they’d been more harmful than anything else.
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But after a short while, it began to become… comforting. The word itself advanced beyond its dictionary meaning, and transformed into a stand-in for something else entirely: the king’s closest companion, to protect and be protected; something revered, something valuable. The gender of the thing was stripped away, completely. Now, it was just another word for Ash to say love.
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Chocobo gives a very un-godbird-like squawk to say hi, dad!
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“They did seem to last a little longer against you than before,” Kepler says, trying to force some light into his tone, but the smile he conjures crumbles soon after. Ash asks him what’s wrong and he feels compelled, for a second, to just blurt it out; but the words stick in his throat like thorns again, and his gaze drops. But he can’t lose his confidence… they are running out of time.
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“Walk with me?” he asks, extending an arm. And it occurs to him, then, something which might make this whole endeavor slightly less strangulatory.
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“I have something to show you.”

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It should come as no surprise to him; it was, after all, a cyclic, scientific eventuality. In its most essential terms, a disability, a binary fission of life in its most basic form… all things that are guaranteed, at least to a certain chance of a percent, to come to pass. He’d been stuck in this strange, fragmented memory of realism for almost 20 years… 20 years without the wonders of modern medicine and science, and though he did his part to spread his knowledge and experience, there was only so much he could do, even when his own corporeal existence was concerned.
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And he couldn’t say it was… an unwanted happenstance. Seeing Ash so joyous and free with the children at the orphanage had him feeling some kind of way, a lightness weaving into his soul at the pure, unadulterated happiness of his partner… a lightness that-- again, a scientific eventuality, a fact-- brought with it a shadow, a sliver of sorrow that he couldn’t possibly give Ash everything he’d ever wanted.
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But you can, a nagging, long-silence voice peeped from the back of his brain, digging up through the detritus like a buried seed, for whom growth had finally reached a level of possibility through the arrival of exocentric homeostasis. You can… technically. It was the same voice, Kepler thought, that goaded him in the face of human experimentation, or, when he’d been in school, fudging the numbers for the grade. He could skirt by on a technicality. But would it cheapen the result?
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It is, at first, a nauseating feeling, the subsequent reminder of the long-fought war he’d been fighting with his body… his body that, for most of his life, had seemed a separate thing from Kepler himself, so much so that he often felt like a parasite inside of a host. And that had calmed as he’d grown, as he’d come to recognize what it was that felt so square peg-round hole of it, and over time he’d metamorphosized and accepted and, eventually, come to a shaky peace with the workings of his biology. That’s all it was, after all, was a science. It comforted him to think of it like that: his physical nature was a series of traps and tubes, of vesicles, liquid, and chemicals, all underscored with an electrical current that keep things functional. For him, there was a sharp, steep canyon between the anthropomorphizing of his cells, tissues, organ systems, etc, etc, and the things that made Kepler, Kepler.
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To him, his reproductive tract was about as useful as the dysfunction in his heart: present, annoying, and treated and handled with appropriately dosed medication. But even then, there was a fluidity to his existence-- like smithed metal, heated and shaped and folded over time, something he’d had to break in and wear out for it to be of any comfort-- that soothed the screaming alarm bells in his head.
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So this development is… he splays a hand over his lower abdomen and frowns, struggling with the concept. He’d been so far removed from all of this… This-ness… that until it’d actually happened he’d never even imagined it as a possibility. And wasn’t that ironic?
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Of course, it was coming nigh to the eve of their destruction. His fingers clench in the fabric of his shirt as he sinks his teeth into his lower lip, tired eyes finding themselves in the mirror, forcing himself to come to terms with the presence of the corporeal meatsack in which he’s been doomed to spend the rest of his days.
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However few they might be.
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He’d tried to tell Ash days ago when they’d received the missive from Summer Atreides promising aid in the face of the apocalypse, but the shaky peace he’d maintained for so long had crumbled in the face of his love, and he’d needed to pull back, gather his forces, and regroup. It wasn’t so much fear of how it would be received that drove him to knee-knocking cowardice, but instead, the vocalizing of it would make it real. And the worry, of course, that Ash wouldn’t allow him to fight in the upcoming battle; this alone was a heavy enough weight that it choked his throat and tempted him to keep it a secret.
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But he couldn’t possibly not tell the man he loved. His husband.
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So he changes out of his sleeping clothes and into some standard of his everyday wear and heads out into the courtyard where King Ashley Shepard has been testing the mettle of his King’s Shield against the blades of his soldiers. Chocobo falls in step next to him, a comforting presence always at his side; and for the briefest of moments, in the rare Galarian sunlight, Kepler leans on the fence of the training field and watches with rapt appreciation as his husband turns all of his best fighting men into the dirt without so much as lifting a blade.
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They’d be strong. Kind. Smart...
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As soon as the smile comes, it fades.
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... If we don’t all die, first.

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