Work Text:
It was difficult to live in a time he didn’t belong to. Rahn felt like he had to keep his head down and constantly dodge certain events and locations, in order to avoid causing paradoxes or future problems. The worst part was the loneliness. He missed his family, his best friend, his home, even the seasons.
It was odd, therefore, how much a single person could change one’s outlook. Rahn would commend Althyk for that much; the god of time’s apparent fun with his life had led him to meet Violet.
He could hear his sisters teasing him all the way from the past.
But it was true. A single, precious, beautiful girl changed everything about him. Violet saw him as a friend, not an embarrassment or a failure or not good enough. That was how he’d seen himself, and he didn’t realize just how crippling it had been until she looked at him, smiled, and said, “Has anyone ever told you how beautiful your eyes are?”
Rahn turned red as a tomato, redder than his hair, and immediately covered the green one. It was his mother’s color, he liked to tell himself when he felt bad about it, but it wasn’t what he wanted. “I-I mean, my mother has told that to me a few times.” And his older sisters had teased him affectionately over them, but neither of those counted.
Her hand tugged his off his face. Just to see his eyes. Rahn wondered if she knew his heart was running faster than a chocobo. “You should listen to your mother, Rahn. Or do boys not like being called beautiful?”
“I don’t know,” he stammered, and wished desperately that his best friend were here to tell him what to do.
“Do your sisters have red and green eyes like you?” she asked curiously.
“All four have red eyes only,” he answered, and he couldn’t help but feel pained. The only boy, the only one without two red eyes, the only one considered “short,” the odd one out in the family. Always.
“Oh, that makes you special!”
Rahn looked up and once again was blown away by how beautiful the snow maiden before him was. Her violet eyes smiled with… admiration? “Yeah, especially strange,” he said, and tried walking along the forest path so that they’d be moving again.
Violet stopped him. “Rahn, please don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“Do what? Speak the truth? I’m the only boy and the only one with heterochromia. I’d call that strange.”
She huffed. “Men. Don’t you see? You have something no one else does. Haven’t you ever considered that maybe your sisters wanted green eyes like you?”
Rahn nearly hit a tree trunk but managed to swerve at the last second, thanks to his dancing agility. “Why would they want that?” he asked, startled. The idea was in his mind, though, and he couldn’t quite comprehend why he had never thought of it before.
“Why do people want anything? Maybe they think your mother is pretty and want to look like her.”
“‘Green eyes like emeralds, hair spun from moonbeams,’ as my father says.” Rahn used to think, growing up, that his father was silly over describing his mother, but then he met Violet and she changed his mind.
“Silly chocobo. Think outside the box a little, all right? Now, I think we have some sylphs to help.” Violet took the lead and Rahn made sure to pull out his nouliths so that he could shield her better. She hadn’t quite perfected maintaining a good distance from his healing spells and charging ahead just yet, which made him all the more eager to cast shields around her in case he lagged behind.
She thinks my eyes are beautiful. She thinks both of them are, not just one. Violet had complimented him because she wanted to, which was all the more incredible because of how quiet she was. Maybe… she was opening up to him, too.
It wasn’t just by complimenting him that she made him have a new outlook. It was also by making him realize that he could change how he interacted with his family. Ever since he had appeared so far back in the past, he had longed for his family and missed them desperately, but whenever he came home, he didn’t do anything different. Rahn hadn’t contemplated the idea that he could do something different about his interactions with his parents and sisters.
Violet laughed at a story he told of when he was barely eight years old and constantly found himself dragged into playtime with his sisters. “It must really be something to have four sisters,” she said, leaning back on the bench they shared. “And all so far apart in age, too.”
“Sometimes I wonder if my parents planned it that way, or if we were all accidents,” he admitted, which just made her snort. He grinned cheekily and even wiggled his ears for her.
“And? When you go home now? Don’t you have stories from when you went home only last week?”
Rahn paused. “Marigold wanted me to teach her how to play the harp, so I practiced with her a little. She started singing so beautifully.”
His companion sighed. “That sounds nice. It must be wonderful to have a family full of singers like you do.”
He couldn’t admit to her that he was extraordinarily shy and was more likely to listen to his family sing than sing along himself. Sunflower and Daffodil had long since given up on begging him to sing with them, but Aster and Marigold hadn’t yet. He could see the hurt look in their eyes and remembered how Marigold had tried choosing a duet to sing together before he played a different song.
It hit him like lightning that he was cutting himself off from his family. Inadvertently, he was building walls around himself that didn’t have to be there. His sisters just wanted to play with him now that they were all too old for toys and tea parties. “It is nice,” he agreed, his chest aching to go home and finally feel brave enough to sing along. “I’m lucky.” Knowing and understanding were two different things, though, and she was the one who made him see it.
Rahn would have more than enough stories to tell her when he came back.