Chapter Text
The people at the Hideaway are too soft-hearted for their own good, Benedikta surmises mid-afternoon, perched high on scaffolding where she can watch but remain out of reach. It’s the midpoint of the memory of having wings and the loss of them, where she can stay above everyone where she likes; untouchable and judgmental. And it is here she judges the ruins as a deep-lake reflection of Cid's cavity, his pulsing blood in the push and pull of everyone he saves, their heads glinting brightly from the patchy, hole-in-the-ceiling sun.
But just because she has given Cid an inch doesn't mean he can take the whole mile——and forgiveness is a diverting journey from softness, something she had forgone years after he had left, a sole survivor of Barnabas' service, his shadow stained more deep than the fresh scars painted over her belly.
Four days ago Benedikta had gleefully pushed Clive down the stairs, palms to back. She stood at the top to watch him tumble, try to catch himself half-way through, and fall all the way down anyway, the sound of his body collapsing eliciting a satisfactory trill in her heart. Juvenile absolutely, but daring too——she was always like that, skirting along the edge of what would be allowed, rebellion a flash behind her eyes——mischievous to those sweet on her and malicious to those not.
Clive hadn't retaliated. Only looked at her with that defeated, hooded gaze, as if she could scrape inside herself up the pity others extended to him, cushioning him from every failing and every pain, as they did now, pulling him up and dusting him off while throwing glances in her direction. He wasn't fragile. He was just another man that had taken out a piece of her: the only piece that mattered.
Garuda used to be everywhere. Impetuous winds on the edges of cliffs, the harder form of laughter, cackling with ire, pride when fear would set behind a man’s eyes, clutching too tight with possession even without the talons. She was power and she was gone.
Between being healed enough not to be bedridden and not disruptive enough to be supervised, Benedikta roams the Hideaway without Cid and brushes up against its incompatibility without him there to soften the blow. With that smugness to him he would be beside her saying, ‘oh she doesn’t mean any harm,’ and maybe she did or didn’t, but even scum like him could get anyone to believe him, his face an always willing openness.
She is a cataclysm. She is his opposite. In every sense her expression is shuttered and closed off unless she wants something——and so far she hasn’t decided what that is.
All she knows is that Cid expects her to make her way through this world: a skeleton he had built for tentative happiness, the valves of his bleeding and bursting selflessness a stain on the skin of every passerby. Here, they all rely on him too, echoes of the soldiers under his watch he’d make an effort not to remember the names of, too many lives to break, too many faces to lose. And he’d take on all that death anyway, a catacomb of the sacrifices expected of him and the young, youthful hopefuls he buried.
Benedikta lives best when her life is the only one to worry over. She’s been like that since her mother’s still-warm hand folded over hers in those minutes after death, when you can pretend like that lingering heat can be signs of living. Until the cold sets in. Until any love dies along with that sickness, clammy over Benedikta’s palms. It’s a familiar story. It’s an old story. And Beneditka wasn’t any more special for it.
Instead she became hateful and self-serving while Cid was always and is a folklore hero, the crutch everyone leans on, the whetting stone for every blade. And not a single person ever let him falter——only her, just her, before everything went to shit.
Earlier that morning, a Bearer girl who had been passing out bread burst into tears when Benedikta mentioned off-handedly that she’d rather put her teeth to the test on a piece of rock. Benedikta hadn't even considered it that cruel——it was just one of the habitual ways her mouth snapped, coarse and altogether too honest for a pedigreed liar. But cry the girl did anyway, and when instances of the same thing came up again to the point of repetition, no one-off mistake to laugh off, no curiosities of her personality that could be smoothed even, the Hideaway shifted from curiosity to leering at her both in fear and disdain.
It became a question of: when will Cid return? Not only because they needed him, as one might need air to breathe or when the lightning flashes to warn you of the roar of thunder, but because they were all wondering if he'd uproot the invasive root that had taken over their idyllic, protected garden. It’s the first time Beneditka comes face to face with how the Hideaway clamors around him, more a symbol than a man, more what he can do for them than what they can do for themselves.
It’s sickening. It’s the Lord Commander with the burden of lives on him, every decision a scale on human life.
It's not Cid that catches her up at the scaffolding though, where she’s let her legs dangle off the not-so-high ledge. It's that girl Clive brought back with him, another whipped soft-spoken mute who could hardly look anyone in the eye——including Benedikta, right now, who won't even bother to look up at Jill as she tries to find the words coming up through her clammed throat, standing on the stairs but not on the landing.
"Leave him alone." It could be considered a demand if it hadn't come out all soft, a harsh whisper at most. Benedikta rolls her eyes.
"Who?"
"Clive," Jill clarifies, more firm, a twist in her lips and her eyebrows drawn together. It's the most Benedikta has seen of her, face and expression both, and she sits up a little straighter to get a better look.
"And does Clive need you to fight his battles for him?" The sneer smeared on her lips is all ill-meaning and inconsiderate. "Although he acts like a mewling boy, he is all grown up. I’m sure he’ll be just fine." She wishes he wouldn't be——she wishes on his next outing some beast or knight will gut him wide open——but Benedikta doesn't say those things. She only looks up to the girl with a shake behind her eyes and ragged, silver hair, who fights for a boy who most likely doesn't even know she's here, her hands folded tight above her thighs.
“Who are you anyway?" Benedikta redirects, palms pressed behind her, acting relaxed when the tension has built up between her lungs.
"M-Me?" Jill's face blanches, caught off-guard and confused. Her name tumbles out. "I’m Jill."
"And where did they rescue you from Jill?"
Jill squirms, keeps rubbing ankle against ankle as if used to the friction. "The Iron Kingdom," she says, her whole face taut with reluctance; the admittance of an open wound not quite healed. It explains a lot: the way it is difficult for her to raise her head, how her voice drifts off if not catched, and how easy it is to belittle her own life, accustomed to giving it up for someone else.
“I’m glad you’re free of them,” Benedikta says. She finds out in a split moment she means it. It’s a surprise to them both and Jill perks up, raising her head.
“I——thank you.”
“I’m just impressed you’re alive.” Benedikta is sour and doesn’t mean for it to come out as dismissive as it does, though she had never been the kind sort. Calculating, manipulative, egregiously prideful and lonely to the point of pain, but rarely, if ever, soft, even for Cid.
Jill’s surprise eases into pain, and then into resignation. What is usually met with tears, Jill looks as though vacant; a see-through glass. “I didn’t want to be,” she murmurs, eyes distant, her smile a delicate press against the weary features of her face. “Until now.”
Benedikta understands that: that is why all her life she clung desperately to power——because even the illusion of it was better than being without it. Better dead than on her knees.
It’s hard for Benedikta to get the words out. She clears her throat. “Because of Clive?”
Jill flushes: less, Benedikta notices, for pointing out what Clive means to her, and more because that isn’t the complete answer. “Because of… a lot of things,” Jill says, “mostly because I believe in what Cid is doing. Living on my own terms… using my power in the ways that I want. In any way I can help.”
“Your power?” Benedikta prods.
“Yes, well…” Jill begins sheepishly, and there’s something in the way the air chills in Jill’s periphery, how her joints move stiff with a tell-tale shake, signs of overuse treading on calcification. What had been a familiar but not quite intolerable itch flares in a rush of recognition, flushed in Benedikta’s neck. All tentative understanding washes away.
Benedikta pounces, grabbing at Jill’s wrist. "Jill Warrick?" She blurts out. She doesn’t really need an answer.
"How do you know——" Jill begins to say, trying to pull away, but Benedikta is already rising, lunging for Jill with killing intent and every aim to confirm what already feels like a confirmation, arms outstretched like a weapon. Jill answers with frostbite at Benedikta's skin, burning, and terror marring her sweet-featured face. It's instinct. It's what Benedikta wants, Shiva dancing in those winterland eyes, and Benedikta's heart drops all the way to the bottom, farther than her gut. Farther than she even knew it could drop. "I am, sorry, I am so sorry, I thought——" Jill stumbles through, all anger and fear gone, reaching out towards Benedikta with a subservient, mind-numbing concern for a woman who had done nothing but wrong her: an enemy.
Benedikta doesn't even care about the pain. She just wants Jill gone. "Go away."
"I——"
"Get out of my fucking sight," she repeats, a snarl in her throat, and Jill has no choice but to retreat, eyes wide and the tips of her fingers still blue.
Benedikta has hurt many people in her life. More than she cares or cared to count. But rarely does she deal with the aftermath and doesn't deal with it by shredding it with her talons——it's much harder to burn bridges when you've burnt them all down, and it's much harder to feel no guilt for the Shiva dominant when you've seen her face.
Hugo for all his posturing was just a man who knew how to shove around his weight indelicately. He never thought hard about anything beyond a delusion she would paint, seeing her as most men did——something, and not someone, to claim; a well manufactured part she had no problem playing. He was just another man who didn't know better. Fell in love with the idea of her more than the girl she had tucked away, skinless and raw to the touch.
In the strength of his arms, she'd let him believe he could keep a harpy caged as long as Waloed had an unwitting collar around his neck. She'd hold his leash and tell him to bark, and if he broke Shiva in two, where in her heart did she have the space to care? The Iron Kingdom couldn't be won over, Shiva was a lost cause, and she had enough things to worry about beyond a girl on the other end of a leash——she was already tethered to her own.
If she stopped for a moment to turn back, she’d have to face all the other fractures she patched together in her frantic, clawing loyalty to a King who would kill at the sight of even a stumble, his blade deceptively shallow against her throat. Now that girl is real——a stark and familiar after-image of Benedikta who had once seen Cidolfus as salvation, made trusting by his unabashed and generous laughter, kind against all her fears. Another victim of powerlessness.
Fuck. Maybe she shouldn't have pushed Clive down those stairs.
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Two days later Cid is exasperated and exhausted after a less than successful multiple day trip, and he's not excited at the prospect of fielding a thousand different complaints. He finds Benedikta in his Solar, where she had secluded herself in an attempt to hide away from Jill's apologetic eyes. Benedikta still hasn't gone to the infirmary. Refuses to.
Cid in the meantime looks like this is the last thing he wants to be doing. He'd rather be sleeping off the weight of travel, but now they're both stuck in his office with an admonishment he wants to say but can't. He's leaning up against his desk, a cigar hanging off his bottom lip without taking a drag and looking up at the ceiling——for gods, for his own thoughts, for patience, maybe. Beneditka doesn't look for his tells anymore, just half expects him to tell her to leave.
“Look, we've already been over this Benedikta," he says, breaching the silence, "if you have nothing nice to say, don’t.” He finally sucks at the cigar, the smoke pilfering through his nose. “They’ve all been through enough.”
So has she. It sticks in her throat too much to tell him that she makes a mess of things now without the intention to——she’s trying to be better, trying to be kinder, trying to understand the small budding life of all these people she wouldn’t have bothered to care about until realizing it had mattered to Cid. Still matters. But it’s not easy to come face to face with the carnage she had excused away for the sake of a far-fetched dream, stepping on others to gain a foothold, only to find Cid at the top creating what they wanted without all the blood.
She hates this place almost as much as she has come to hate herself: half for how she fits inside it, and half for what it’s doing to him.
"If you can’t stand what I’ve turned into then you shouldn't have saved me," Benedikta snaps. She knows she's landed the blow when she sees that subtle, minute fracture, a stiffening Cid tries to deflect by his routine casualness. There’s a crack in the casing of her; an overfull vase overflowing. She’s back to those days where she latched into him in rage, trying to see if he still bled red for her. "You should have finished the job like a Lord Commander would,” she says, her voice raising, “taken one of your swords and pierced straight through me." The amber of her eyes burn alight with the accusation. She feels wretched and her voice breaks. "You know I will never fit in here."
Cid throws up his hands, a worn out picture of vexation. “Look around you. We’re in the deadlands making a life for ourselves. Being a Dominant doesn’t matter here. It’s not about being powerful, it’s about making a way and being who and what you want to be.”
“It’s always been about being powerful.” That gets Cid to really look at her, the woman awash in the orange candlelight, bony and fierce and scratching at unhealed wounds. She wishes she could know what he was thinking——this man that used to be her everything. She used to know. Used to see right through him. Was the only one who could. He had always been clear water to her, but now the storm has arrived, and the wind doesn’t listen to her any longer, and shit, she should have listened when he was telling her how to steer a ship when the waves came crashing in.
“It doesn’t have to be. Not anymore. That’s what I’m trying to do, Benedikta. Live and die on our own terms, remember?” He looks at her and she is back on that ship, shoving her shoulder into him playfully, telling him what was the use in knowing how to sail when she could fly? “You do remember, don’t you?”
What she does remember is laying side by side with him on her bed in Waloed, the edges of their hands brushed up against each other but no longer holding; it had been ages since she had taken his hand. These days she can stand on her own. Other days she holds onto him not to steady herself, but to steady him——he’s growing increasingly off-kilter, and half the time his smile doesn’t meet his eyes like it used to, the slate of blue she remembered all dark. “We’ve become crueler since the start of all this, haven’t we?” She says aloud into the quiet, and his pinky curls around hers.
He doesn’t need to say anything. They were just Benedikta and Cid behind the door, slammed away from the creatures they became; not Intelligencer and Lord Commander, nor the monsters that were growing so large inside them they couldn’t avoid the way their teeth no longer fit in their mouths, or that their nails could cut straight through skin. Here they could be human again, where one of them would always stay on shore in case the other wandered too far into the tide.
How then, did he expect her to remain the same without an anchor? “I used to,” she says. Cid’s face crumples. “You are much too late in saving that girl, Cid.”
“I know. But I wasn’t going to leave you there Benna.” It slips out of him too fast to catch. He knows his mistake once it’s out: it’s altogether too personal for the breadth of the wreckage between them, for the storm that has been coming on for years.
Benedikta’s face pinches. “Don’t call me that.”
Cid puts out his cigar in his ashtray. It’s a waste——it’s not even burned halfway through——then presses palm to desk, leans all his weight there. “Whoever you’ve become I’ll accept all of it. I wasn’t there for you before, but I’ll be here for you now.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she spits, and her whole body peels away, pulling from him and his torrent.
“Don’t I?” His smile is back, but it’s carved strangely, like someone had chiseled the stone too roughly and there are bits of it gone: it’s grieving, but beneath that, it’s loving. It had never stopped being there. “I missed you.”
“Stop.” Her voice trembles. It’s not as strong as she needs it to be to hold against him. He offers out his hand open palm and it’s there for her to take. It’s always an unavoidable choice with him: always him, immoveable, while she frets over any step she may take forward. His palm has the framework of what she remembers, rough and calloused with scars along his heartlines, but it’s here she realizes it’s not him that changed but her——and she can’t fit inside him anymore. “I can’t be here right now,” she rushes out, the words shrill.
His fingers curl. “Ben——”
“I can’t do this.” Once she’s taken one step back it’s easier to take more, and she’s out the door before he can say anything else.
She was walking before but now she finds herself running, stumbling across wooden floorboards, lost in long, twisting hallways, and trying in desperation to find somewhere no one else has touched. That used to be the sky for her: she knew every time she unfurled her wings the stone would pick away through her marrow, threaten to weigh her down, but how could anyone take that from her, that taste of freedom, the crisp air on her tongue, the clouds wispy on her cheeks?
The sky could wipe her clean of the nights she laid in her King’s bed smiling through her terror, of all the dozens, hundreds of nights she didn’t return to her own room, held down by a thousand different hands. They’d always want her beneath them, but up there she could believe there was a place for her above it all, absent of gravity——only her and the birds knew what it was like to be higher than the horizon.
She thought she was done running but she’s never stopped. Not even for the one hand that had always waited for her to hold it, never above or below but always beside. If she caught her breath she’d die, she thought, but she ended up a corpse regardless, standing in the cavern of Cid’s empty room at Waloed, her palm clenching, unclenching as her entire world went lopsided, until her hand had turned into a fist that kept on shaking, lighthouse dark.
He had moved most of his things into her room anyway. Dark blue and silver sequined and more beautiful than he knew what to do with. The courts always said he should’ve worn purple for his lilac rimmed thunder, but she knew him best——knew that the slate of his eyes were best complemented by the way the sea looked when mist was in the air and you couldn’t see the bottom. She’d have it picked out before every ball he didn’t want to go to, only lured in by her wide-open smile at his arrival and the open space she’d leave for his arm to link through.
“Always late, Cidolfus,” she used to tease him, half-lidded and syrupy and only a mask of impatience because he was always punctual to the things that mattered. Like promises within promises and the way she could always find a way to slot between his thighs and he always left them open, how he always tried to make her laugh and she always smoothed the creases between his brows, how he wasn’t a crier but she cried all the time as if to fill an ocean for them both.
“But you’ll wait,” he’d say, insufferable, but even hating him she’d find herself mapping out the fuzz at his jaw, charting true north with him as her compass. And she’d hold her breath, hold and hold and think about kissing him and wouldn’t, and he’d look down at her with a glint in his eye heavier than she’d ever see anything weigh on him, heated under a thin veneer.
They had always been almosts, not forevers——and that’s why she couldn’t be mad at him, not truly. Could only hate him as much as she obsessed over him, a lightning strike scar still burning from the impact.
It ends up being emptiest at the cells, so she plops down by the stone and the chains and presses the backs of her hands to her eyes, wet in her throat. She won’t cry. She won’t. That’s what all her rage was for all this time, to carry her through, even when her wings couldn’t. She wants to be alone most of all, where she can be blighted and weak and untouchable by Cid and consequentially, the Hideaway’s, gentleness, warmth threatening to seep through and make her aware of the cold.
How alone she had made herself, and proud of it. It was what Barnabas had wanted and asked for, for he was a man completely built to be remorseless, callous, cutting losses, sitting on his throne and leveling her with a gaze that requested she would show no grief. “Cid is a traitor,” he told her, brushing hair from cheek, the pads of his fingertips hard on her pulse, “he betrayed us both.”
The noose was already strung up, Cid just kicked the chair from beneath her. Their King was no longer a man with any heat, just a cadaver strung up by false ideals——and dead things can only love dead things.
That’s where Jill finds her, because of course she does, and Benna hasn’t moved from where she’s knees to chest, arms folded to press her face into. “I don’t want to hear it,” she says, muffled, but Jill sits down next to her with no ceremony, all silence. It leaves space for things Benedikta should say instead, an explanation maybe, or an apology later, or perhaps nothing, as Benedikta calms to the sound of Jill’s breathing, one shared breath at a time.
“I don’t deserve this from you,” Benedikta says after a while, and Jill just leans her shoulder into hers, enough that Benedikta doesn’t pull away.
“I know,” Jill murmurs, and that’s when Benedikta cries——when she comes to terms with these new and old people in her life and the embracing of her wounding, cradling all the abrasions of her and not casting her out. She might not get it right the first time, but she could try again.
“I’m sorry,” Benedikta offers, and she’s not the type to offer that so readily.
“I know that too,” Jill replies, indignant, and Benedikta snorts. Yeah, she deserves that.
“I’m not sorry about pushing Clive down the stairs though,” she amends, and that gets Jill to laugh. It’s a quiet, newborn thing, wobbling and trying to find its balance and exasperated, but keeping up with that stubborn push of tolerance, and although nothing is quite forgiven and the bridge isn’t completely built, Benedikta has placed the first stone. That’s enough for the both of them for now, two women trying to emerge from a man’s shadow. “And,” Benedikta adds, peeling her face away from her skin to peek at Jill, who has been looking at her all this time, “I think you should have better taste in men.”
Jill’s face squeezes, as if Benedikta had taken a piece of paper and crushed it in her palm. “And you should be nicer to Cid,” she snaps back, and Benedikta is taken aback by the fire behind it.
“He deserves it,” Benedikta says, though she finds her conviction eroding away.
“Maybe. But you could always afford to be a little kinder,” Jill insists, giving what could only be described as pleading, face upturned.
But she’d have to do more than that to make Benedikta budge from not only a grudge, but a decade of her always pushing and Cid falling back with no resistance. “No I don’t think I could.”
It was inexplicable, their dynamic, to anyone outside them. They had built up a rhythm with no discernable pattern, a dance only they would stand up for. Benedikta would go for his feet and he would lift her in the air to avoid the damage, and by the time she touched the ground again they’d both be laughing, her arms around his neck, his hands palming around her waist. She didn’t know if it was possible to hurt him, her sailor in the rough watered storm, for he always took his hurts quietly——and when she stood on that shore she’d become his hurricane, all bets on whether or not her storm was strong enough to kill him or bring him home.
“Then be kind to me,” Jill requests with a half-smile, the curl to her lips faint.
Benedikta looks side-long at Jill, who is desperate to be trusted, a woman carved from ice bearing down the heat of the newly open sky. Of not knowing what that looks like. If there is something Benedikta can do in reparation for all that she turned away from, it is this——being side by side through the growing pains. “That’s not as hard,” Benedikta acquiesces, and Jill bumps their shoulders together.
“I’ve never had a friend before.”
Benedikta holds her breath, her voice coming out strained. “Me neither.”
Jill breaks the awkwardness with another spill of laughter. She’s beautiful for it——her happiness; her penchant for sharing it. “We are quite the pair, aren’t we?”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Benedikta protests with no bite, a smile itching around her mouth.
“I’d never,” Jill says, her eyes closed and deceptively relaxed. She tries to take Benedikta’s hand. The way Benedikta might have a decade ago, when she needed to feel as though she didn’t have to carve her way through the world alone. Benedikta doesn’t brush Jill’s hand away but doesn’t hold tight to it either, and it’s a midground that’s a meanwhile sort of satisfying.
Benedikta isn’t a hero: she’ll never be the type to choose someone else over herself. But here, languishing in her grief, her head feels a little clearer knowing that she doesn’t have to hide behind the rage to keep her body facing forward; that she doesn’t have to be up in the sky anymore to feel the wind.
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Jill is gone when Cid wakes her up mid-evening or early morning. It’s hard to tell what time it is in the cells, where it’s dank and cool and no light finds its way in——but it’s quiet enough above to know that most are still sleeping. That they should be too.
Benedikta is not ready to see him. To see the anguish too palpable to be hidden, pulling against all the lines of his face. Without all his bluster, spice-scented smoke in the confident curve of his mouth, he looks old: like the world has grinded him down, flesh to bone, bone to marrow, and it doesn’t even matter the difference between doing it under a king or himself.
“Come home Benna,” he says, and she can’t argue over all the details of what home might mean, not now, as long as she can fall into his arms and he’ll keep them open. As long as home stops being a place and is allowed to be a person again.
“You won’t leave this time?” Her hands are in his cropped hair, gripping tight to the tufts of all the gray. He doesn’t even flinch. Can’t sense her fear of how fragile he really seemed, all sand falling between the webbing of her fingers.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Cid tells her, pulling her up and into him and back to where it all started at his Solar——low candlelight, one bed, and his blood scrubbed off the floor. She thought she would have to talk to him about where she was going to sleep after there were no more excuses: her healing, him gone, but Cid doesn’t seem in the mood to debate over things they had already built answers for.
He places her down and he’s right behind her, built up static afraid to reach out for how much it would hurt from the contact. The bed isn’t even bigger than all the rest, despite him being the leader. It’s much smaller than her one in Waloed——than his, though his room had been ransacked ages ago——and it reminds her of those slips of time where they’d scrape by with one bed inn rooms, where their backs would touch even when they were trying to keep apart.
She turns towards him and his whole body stiffens, hesitation written in his pressed lips, in the pads of his fingertips, hovering over her shoulder, in the way he has stopped saying anything at all. Rare does the charlatan, the snake in the grass, keep his mouth shut. Up close, he seems even more brittle, gaunt and hollow and beneath even that yearning to be seen, as if no one else before had bothered.
And that is when it clicks together. When Benedikta realizes, oh, he didn’t have an anchor either. She should’ve known——shouldn’t have fallen for that perfectly tempered image he presented, that everyone needed to believe——should’ve known that he too, had fallen apart in his own way. Overcompensating, happily the avatar of everyone’s wants, so self-sacrificing he’d turn to ash before he even noticed the wildfire burning its way through, happy as he is to be tinder.
“You’re a fool, Cidolfus,” she murmurs. “There wasn’t another single person in the world you could find that saw you the way I see you?”
“Not one.” His mouth moves into a pale imitation of a smile, grim. “Perhaps there was no more fitting companion than you.”
Thank whatever demented God that she is not a holy woman: that Cid does not know how self-satisfied she first feels, gratified that he suffered to the point of nonrecognition. That the young, roguish man she met had become a puppeteered shell, happily offering up pieces of him until there would be no more. In every body he laid with, did he still see the shape of her, as she saw him in others?
Grabbing his palm, she allows it to rest over her cheek, for his large palm to settle over her chin, rubbing over the edge of her ear. To be allowed to touch her again has him shaking, afraid to do wrong, and she boldly holds his gaze through it all——to be two broken things and to be fine with not fitting together. She hates him. She loves him. She——”I missed you too,” she says.
His touch on her steadies at that, firms in conviction. His thumb brushes over a white-healed scar at her brow, one he doesn’t remember. They have to relearn each other again. To be retaught everything that had come as easily as breathing once. “I’ve been away far too long,” Cid teases, though his tone is soft. Just enough for Benedikta not to break one of his fingers.
“Took you long enough.”
With a bemused huff, Cid brushes back the wheat of her hair, leaving her neck exposed to his lingering, explorative touch. “I want you to know, I never wanted to escape from you. There was——”
“Don’t say anything else,” Benedikta interrupts. She knows if he continues it’ll ruin everything: this peace they’ve built up that she could break at any second, her temper ever-burning. And what was that about Cid always liking to be tinder? She already knows what he was going to say. That it wasn’t about her as much as it was everything else. That he was always the type to choose his ideals over his own happiness——their happiness.
“If I had to compromise my ideals,” he says, voicing her thoughts, “am I really who you fell in love with anymore?”
Her breath shudders, seizes. It sucks up dry and scathes against her throat and he really should have kept his mouth shut. Should’ve known better than to break her open to ask a question he knew the answer to——that he knew that she had loved him and had left anyway. Her mouth opens, and she thinks she’ll say the worst thing she has ever said, feels it like tar and volcanic ash stained dark over her withered heart, but he unfurls her fist first and places something in her hand.
It’s the necklace. The necklace that was his that became hers that became a haunt of his memory, ripped from her neck and chain and gripped so tight it became a crease in her palm, bleeding. “Thought you might want this back. I’ve been keeping it for you.”
“Fuck you,” she seethes, trapped between him and the wet of her eyes. She’d rather die than forgive him as much as she would rather die than let him go.
Cid stays completely still, his hand cupped at her cheek. He looks at her now as he did when she was a younger woman, side by side with him atop her sheets where they never really touched, as though they could substitute it with ghosts. Better a person she didn’t know than her horizon: sky meeting sea. She’d rather fail at that than the only person she loved that really mattered.
Back then, she was terrified happiness was a fleeting, dissipating and noncommittal thing. And she had been proven right. In this shithole though, they are both at their deadends. There isn’t any point to waiting; everything that might be broken has already been broken. So she leans forward——which isn’t really far at all——and kisses him.
She surprises him with that. They knock against each other, ill-fitting, unknown to each other in this as they might have been known everywhere else. Then when the surprise bleeds from him, he fans his fingers into her scalp, finds purchase in the threads of her cropped hair. They’re both insincere lovers but they’re acting like first loves now, and when her tears fall free from her eyes he kisses those too, his mouth damp against every patch of open skin.
His desire for her is a wash that crescendos into a wave, like he had always been standing by until she drew her line next to his, conscious of where they connected; continuous, no longer parallel.
Maybe tomorrow she will tell him she loves him. Maybe tomorrow she will tell him she never really stopped.
Most likely he already knows. He has without fail known her better than she has ever known herself——just as the moment she started loving him, he wasn’t an outlaw or a commander or a mercenary or even the leading man——he was just Cid, he was just human. He was hers.