Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“You’re kidding me.”

Ascension rustles around the kitchen, fixing up some tea and snacks for his guest and fiancé. He’d just turned the venting fan down to dial into the conversation in the living room.

“Rose, I’m being completely serious.”

“Okay, so, to be clear, this is not a homophobia thing. This is a ‘I wish you gave me more than one week’s notice’ thing.”

“Well, if you don’t want to do it, just say so,” Ascension knows Cid well enough to picture his scrunched up frown, even from behind the wall between them. He saws through cucumber slices slowly to eavesdrop on the conversation. The knife makes but just a dull thud when it hits the cutting board. “But really, you’re making a big deal out of being our witness. You get up and sign the paper that the officiant gives you. Simple as that! ”

“That’s not the– You’re getting married, and you didn’t tell me until the week of!”

“... I don’t see your point.”

“Ugh, here’s the thing: I don’t have anything for your registration, I don’t have any good clothes, and as far as I know, no one’s taken you or Ascension out to a stag’s. You know, the good part of the wedding stuff.”

“Did you want to be my best man?” Cid pokes at a seething Rose.

“No. Ascension!”

Ascension perks up, a little too fast to deny his snooping, and pokes his head out the kitchen doorway with a tray of tea that has cooled a little past its prime– an unbefitting alibi. “Yes, Rose?”

“I’m your best man now,” she declared, “After tea, we’re going to hit the village.”

“I would like that very much. Is Cid coming?”

“Absolutely not.”

Cid rolls his eyes amusedly and lounges back in his seat.

Rose holds up a long black gown against Ascension. Catching Rose’s intent to use him as her personal mannequin, he holds it up against himself, freeing her hands to throw a matching black shawl over his head. He adjusts that one as best he can as well, one hand pinning the dress to his chest and the other clutching the ends of the shawl at his chin. Rose stands back and looks the outfit up and down before grabbing everything back from Ascension. They repeat this routine with varying combinations of fabrics and designs, each of course, colored ivory black.

Rose doesn’t comment a single word on any of the outfits, nor does Ascension know Rose– or women in general– enough to interpret her body language as she picks out new clothes. With the mechanical way she peruses and lingers over certain garments, Ascension knows her styling choices are certainly not random, but they might as well be, with the unpredictability of when Rose will toss something onto him. A distracted Ascension catches her newest selection in the nick of time, jolting him from his shopping-fatigued stupor.

He strikes a playful pose with the superimposed garment, emulating a runway model. Rose tilts her head silently, judging. Ascension settles back into his casual standing pose, unsure if he’s struck a nerve. It’d been a long time since he’d been alone around someone other than Cid, and Rose’s intensity certainly did not make it easy for him to settle his social anxiety.

“So, what’s a stag’s?” Ascension asks, mustering all his confidence to break the ice. Yeah, it’s a little embarrassing that he doesn’t know by now.

“It’s like a hen’s but for guys. Um… Sleepovers, partying, doing stupid shit…” Rose pauses here, tapping a deliberating finger on her chin. “Don’t ask me! I’ve never been married– Wait, you haven’t had one?”

“Well, I hang out with Cid and we’re both still bachelors. So maybe that counts?”

Rose turns around and disappears into the racks of clothes in the boutique, her way of showing exasperation. After a while, she reappears from the depths of the store and crosses her arms. “Fine, fine! Let’s have a stag’s. Kick out Cid for the night and we’ll do all those fun things.”

“I don’t know if I’d like that very much.”

“He’ll be fine. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll host one for him too.”

“Okay. That sounds a little better. What about your dress?”

“I think what I’m wearing is nice enough.”

Rose leaves the store first without another word, leaving Ascension blinking with a bushel of clothes in his arms.

Warm humidity sticks to him, accompanied by rolling gray storm clouds shrouding the moon and stars. Here and there, the harbingers of a storm patter against the house, sounding like rolling marbles. The lights in Cid’s house are off, even though the sun has long since set. When Ascension had messaged Cid about shacking up somewhere else for the night, he’d expected Cid to have returned to his lab adjacent to their home. Maybe Cid felt properly doghoused and stayed at the village tonight– the poor thing. Or went camping. Or went mining–

“Hey, Earth to Ascension,” Rose snaps her fingers at him, “What color do you want your nails?”

“O, um, I don’t have nails, Rose.”

Rose looks down at Ascension’s hands. His nailbeds had been cauterized off long ago, soon after the nail stopped growing from all the times they’d been torn out. In their place, pale scars line the phantom divots of his fingertips. She clucks her tongue in disappointment.

“Wait– where’s your ring?”

“What ring?”

“Don’t tell me he proposed without a ring… or did you propose? Wait, is this a case where you both get rings or does the gay cancel out the ring thing?”

“Cid proposed. Not with a ring, but something…” Ascension blushes like a schoolgirl. It really is starting to feel like a stag’s with how giggly he’s getting at the opportunity to brag about Cid. “I’ll just get it.”

A few moments later, Ascension descends the stairs with a chest propped against his own. Rose sits patiently in the living room, entertaining herself by perusing through the bookshelves with her arms behind her back. She looks like she was just about to pick out a book when Ascension carefully drops the chest on the floor. It thuds against the hardwood floors despite his immaculate imitation of a ship loading crane, reverberations shaking the pots on the top of the shelf.

“Look inside,” Ascension puffs.

Rose sideeyes him– he thinks– before opening the chest cautiously, as if an animal might jump out. Lightning shines from the chest, as brilliant and blinding as when he first received them.

“WHAT.”

Ascension stands there, beaming. There’s not much to explain about a chest full of diamonds. Dumbfounded, Rose gingerly closes the chest and turns around to take a book from the bookshelf, trying to appear nonchalant. The beak of her mask dips low in bashfulness.

Rose is a luddite at heart– with her interests lying more in cozy builds and aesthetics than machines and efficiency. From the first time he’d met her, she had still been using unenchanted tools to unobtrusively peck away at the world around her, so unlike Cid’s penchant to transform. Preoccupied with the craziness of her world and her ever-growing list of chores stemming from her relatively primitive lifestyle, she still holds the value of even a single diamond much more dearly. Given this imposed scarcity, Ascension understands Rose's perception of the gravity of his gift, which only serves to make him that much more smug about it..

“Alright, sorry for doubting you… and Cid.”

“It’s okay.”

A loud crack like bone separating from bone suddenly rings out. Ascension flinches, cowering instinctively; Rose jumps from her seat. Mere moments after the following silence, a deafening downpour of bombard the house. Trembling, Ascension seats himself next to Rose, waiting for her next suggestion. In the monotone, the two of them are awkwardly silent, looking for opportunities to interject with casualness, conversation, opportunities that have long since passed. Rose pretends to enjoy the rain. Ascension follows suit politely. Clearly, the atmosphere dogs Rose, who discontentedly stands up and claps her hands together.

Rose sighs, a low breath lost in the wind that whistles through the windowcracks. “It’s your party, but I don’t even know what you want to do.”

“I liked what we were doing.”

“And what exactly were we doing?”

“Reading, I thought.” Ascension points to Rose’s haphazardly chosen book. She takes her hands away as if it were dangerous.

“I’ve never read it.”

“It’s lovely,” he reassures, “A good story for warm nights. He’s a romantic.”

“Weirdo,” she laughs. In the warmth of the house, metronomed by the steady rhythm of the spring rain, Rose opens her borrowed copy of A Midsummer’s Night Dream and begins to read.
While Rose has gone off to see to dragging Cid away for his stag party (and to chew him out again in private, he’s sure), Ascension fries potatoes and sausages for lunch. Yesterday’s rain smoothed out grass and flowers alike to a green ocean revealing silver where the wind passes over. Even with all the mud, the newly-built gazebo (which construction was greatly expedited courtesy of Rose) remains white and pristine in the distance. The roof gleams sunlight where water pools in the cracks between each shingle, framing the rising sun in a faint glow. Yet still, the sky is lined with the silver underbellies of budding stormclouds.

Wet, heavy footsteps approach his home.

“Small problem,” Rose announces her arrival, peeking through Ascension’s kitchen window with this unorthodox greeting. “I can’t find Cid.”

“Have you tried his lab downstairs? You can just go in.” He rolls a sausage around to reveal a line where the filling had burst from its casing.

“He’s not there. And before you say it, yes, I tried the village and the cathedral too.”

“Did you message him?”

“He’s not responding.”

Ascension turns off his cooktop and brushed his hands clean on his apron.

No response. His heart feels so tight it could burst.

Without even stopping to breathe, he teleports to the usual suspects, the mines, the cathedral, the village.

Zilch, zero, nada.

From the corner of his eye, he can tell that Rose is getting skittish with every failed search. The minute motions of her head, indicated by the sway of her oversized mask, betray a quiet anxiety. She sheepishly looks around for threats, bracing herself and flinching every time she glances up.

“Any luck?” Rose calls.

“No.”

“You don’t think…”

“No.”

It simply cannot be. Cid knows better than to get whisked off by those entities the one day Ascension decides to leave him alone. If anything, he’s more than capable of handling himself, even if Ascension gets overprotective of him. He knows this. He trusts this… or should he?

No matter, Cid’s gone and for all he knows, Cid’s somewhere cold and dark and painful. He shouldn’t have left Cid alone, shouldn’t have let Rose talk him into leaving him for the night, shouldn’t have told him to not come back. Stupid, stupid, stupid Ascension!

The flashing lights from his power barely has time to blind him before he’s off to another location again, around and around in a flurry of zoetrope frames the places he knows Cid could be, must be. Just one glimpse, one familiar curve of that bright silhouette would be enough to release the terrible pressure in his chest. The mines, the cathedral, the village, the–

Between the strobes, Rose is getting farther from him, an inky smear getting smaller against the bright magenta arcs. He stops teleporting to call after Rose. “What are you doing?”

“The gun Cid gave me’s out of ammo. I don’t have anything else, and I don’t think it’s safe for me to be here any longer.”

She stops in her tracks, but she doesn’t turn back. Her arms stiffen at her side. “Um… if you find him, I left you something in that book we read yesterday. I thought you might have needed a ‘something borrowed’.”

“We need to find him. It’ll be safer to stick together,” he begs. A selfish lie, he knows.

“I’m scared too. I don’t have anyone like you do.”

“Please don’t go.”

“At least in my own world I know those weird guys can take care of it!” She takes a deep shuddering breath. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and disappears down the hill. The rain clouds close over the sky, blotting out the morning sun, casting twilight over the valley.

For the first time in a long time, he is alone.