Kunzite watched affectionately as the younger demon donned the uniform of an officer in the service of Metallia. It wasn't unlike his own as a King, but the cloth was of a lighter shade of grey. The trim was pale blue, matching that on the demon king's uniform and indicating that Zoisite was in his legion.

Occasionally, the boy would freeze, a startled expression coming over his face, and Kunzite knew that he was discovering the new senses with which his demonic nature had endowed him. Of course, the youth lacked any real understanding of what had happened to him as yet. He was only aware of the physical ramifications of his transformation, knowing nothing about magic. But time and training would fix that.

The elder demon shook his head. He only vaguely remembered what it had been like for him, and his transition into the demonic state had not exactly followed the normal pattern. He was quite possibly the oldest living being in the Dark Kingdom--with the exception of Metallia, if that malevolent disembodied consciousness could be truly said to be alive. Six thousand years . . .

He remembered nothing at all of the time before he'd arrived here, unless that vague image inside his head of a group of people armed with stone-tipped spears, throwing rocks at him to drive him away, was a memory. He was fairly certain that he'd fallen through a rogue portal to reach the Dark Kingdom. That was the only reasonable explanation for his arrival here. But he didn't remember that, either.

No, his earliest clear memories were of floating inside the sphere that was the closest thing that Metallia had to a body. The spirit had never encountered a human before, and she had been fascinated with him. She had recognized his intelligence, although she had at first been unable to communicate with him.

And so, Metallia had experimented, making changes inside his body. The pain had been excruciating, all the more so because he hadn't understood what was going on. It hadn't been until the spirit had discovered how to force her magic into him that they had been able to establish a rudimentary form of communication.

Metallia had never developed the concept of language, and those months of pain and change had very nearly driven the idea out of the mind of her young human captive as well, but the demon goddess was able to make him understand that she wanted more human captives. Many more. And so he went to work for her, capturing the creatures that had formerly been his fellows and bringing them to her. Metallia analyzed each new captive, sucking out whatever knowledge he or she might contain, distilling it, and infusing whatever she recognized as potentially useful into the mind of her servant, until his own memories had been overwritten with new information. Not that it mattered to him by that time. He had become something far different from what he had been when he had first entered her realm.

He had come to hate his own body by that time. The people among whom he moved were tall, slim, and beautiful, and his own short, broad body and flat face had suffered by comparison. He was tired of being stared at, tired of being mocked, and so he'd begged a favor of Metallia for the first and only time in his life. She'd taken him into herself and changed him again, giving him a new face, a new body.

Little had he known what the price would be.

Kunzite shook his head and returned to watching Zoisite dress. He wondered how he was going to explain it all to the youth. That they were both second-class citizens here, and always would be. Because, even though Kunzite was Metallia's oldest servant, he was male, and therefore the demon goddess couldn't use him as an avatar. The Dark Kingdom always had a female ruler, someone whose body Metallia might be able to take over in an emergency. No male could ever rise to the top here. And so, although both of them were far superior to any human, they were both doomed to be little more than slaves.

At least Metallia would never need to touch the boy directly. The King knew that there was something missing inside him, something that the demon goddess had stolen from him all those years ago. An independence of spirit, perhaps? In any case, he knew that Zoisite still had it, and that it was something that the youth should never be permitted to lose.

"Kunzite-sama, what are you thinking about?" The soft, husky voice still held a measure of innocence. That was probably the oddest thing about this boy. Three years in the Dark Kingdom, and now transformed into an energy-stealing demon, and he still managed to retain a little bit of purity. Kunzite didn't understand it, and knew that he never would.

Instead, he muffled the youth's mouth with his own, forestalling any additional questions.

"I was thinking that you are probably the most beautiful and desirable thing that I have ever seen, and that we can't afford to be as late for this meeting as I would like to make us," he whispered in the younger demon's ear when he finally decided to come up for air. "Come on, let's go."