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Ari couldn't be near his friends that night. He'd keep them awake.
Soon after the others had turned in, Ari slipped away from the camp and found a clear spot just a few minutes off. He slumped against a tree that overlooked a moonlit glade. Before long, Ari hunched forward and let out a single sob. Shocked by his own outburst, Ari quickly stifled his voice. He could quiet himself. He'd done it plenty of times before. No one would hear, no one would know, and Ari wouldn't draw anyone's attention.
With his hands over his eyes, and ragged breaths hissing in his ears, he didn't notice his company.
“Enough with the racket, slave!” Stan burst out, from behind and beside. “While your Evil King doesn't need sleep the way you helpless animals do, I enjoy my quiet time! Of all the nights for a mousy creature like you to start a ruckus, why must it be this one?!”
Ari inhaled sharply, attempting to better quell his hiccups. He probably shouldn't have used his gloves to dry his eyes, but it was better than dripping tears down his face in front of his worst critic. Well, second worst.
In Ari's periphery, Stan narrowed his yellow eyes. “What's all this again?”
Ari hoped to make himself presentable enough that the insults would wane, but he was sure his wet face looked as pathetic as he felt. He braced for a barrage of Stan's usual colorful adjectives.
“And what will this do?” Stan asked with more than a hint of scorn. “Tell me, foolish boy, what exactly does this solve?”
“Stop picking on me, Stan,” Ari said back, glaring into the distance.
“I am not picking on you,” Stan huffed, maintaining a rare indoor voice. “I am ordering you to answer my question, slave.” The calm, even tone behind his words, under normal circumstances, would have prompted Ari to make sure it was actually Stan speaking.
Ari swallowed down a cough made more of emotion than an itchy throat. “This doesn't solve anything,” he said sullenly.
“That's right. See? You're perfectly capable of thinking for yourself!”
Ari hunched back into his hands, rubbing hard at his face. “This doesn't fix anything.”
“Now that we're on the same page, why don't you do the intelligent thing and...” Stan trailed off as a shudder wracked Ari's body, accompanied by a quiet choke.
“It was all the Classification system,” Ari said, struggling to maintain a normal pace. “That's why, my whole life, everyone... I've always been...” He balled his hands into fists and dug them into his eyes, as if he could press the tears back into their ducts. When he heard nothing for some time, he assumed Stan had tired of his antics and left.
“Look at me, slave.”
Ari pulled his face away from his hands, no doubt red and raw, and dragged his forearm across to wipe the tears that had already soaked his hands through. Bitterly, he met the eyes of the ghoul rising out of his shadow.
“As your gracious master, I am allowing you this night to mourn.”
Ari blinked, because his eyes burned. Not because something in him surged with emotion at Stan in any way taking him into consideration.
“This world is cruel, even to its most worthy souls. My plight has surely shown you as much. You will never have the life you were owed. So use tonight to accept that. And tomorrow, you know what you're going to do?”
Ari closed his eyes for a few seconds. To combat the dry night air. Not because he really was pitiful enough that the Evil King himself thought he'd shatter without a few measly words of consolation. Not to hide the shameful tears of appreciation for the tyrant's personal care.
“You're going to get back to work, and you're not going to lament what fate denied you. And if you do feel yourself weakening again, buckling under the pressure of your sentimental little mind, do you know what you're going to do? Ari, look at me, I said.”
When Ari swallowed this new bout of tears, he looked back up to find Stan hovering closer.
“You're going to get angry. You're going to turn that misery into hellfire, and rain it down upon all who obstruct your path forward. Our path forward.”
Ari stared even as his lip began to quiver. His chest heaved unevenly as he stared, too anxious to break eye contact, but quickly losing control again. He was sure, in this moment, that Stan found his shadow especially easy to inhabit. “Thanks for being nice,” was all Ari could think to say, as another tear snaked down to his chin.
Stan's expression resembled a grimace, but his words were quiet. Ari might have even considered them as close to gentle as Stan might ever get. “I am not being nice. I am commanding you to obey, as your lord and master.”
Ari swallowed, closing his eyes to push a few more pesky tears out. “You didn't have to. You could have just left me alone.”
That seemed to bid Stan pause. “Even a terrifying and malevolent Evil King such as myself is obligated to guide his servants when they are lost.”
“That sounds more like a god to me.”
Stan made an irritated sound. “I expect you to be in a better mood the next time you try for that kind of flattery. Now if you must cry, do so more quietly! There's no need to wake up the whole forest.”
Ari nodded, offering a reflexive “Sorry.”
“For the sake of your already unremarkable reputation, we'll keep this between us. As usual.”
Silence fell. Ari dropped his face into his hands again. The tears didn't stop, but his throat didn't burn quite so much, and his breathing regularized before long. But despair worked in cycles, and Ari wasn't done stewing in his yet. At one point, he thought he saw a shadow descend from his left, but it either receded quickly, or hadn't been there at all. When his breathing again grew labored, he whimpered foolishly into the empty air, “Thanks.”