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Fuck the Gridanian foster system.
Seriously.
They first met on the plains of La Noscea, not far from the Moraby Drydocks, and in all of her eighteen summers she's never seen this much exhaustion in one person.
U'mikke – all deep blues and sun-kissed skin – had left her family, the U tribe of the Sagolii Desert to make a name for herself in the Ul'dahn gladiator pits, but adventurers go where there's work and money, and that particular autumn that place had been Limsa Lominsa.
Sei, on the other hand, was barely sixteen, and made of elbows and raw, burned out rage. U'mikke supposed that was befitting a teenager who had ran away from Gridania to learn arcanima from the Lominsan customs office, of all things.
There's a ferry between Thanalan and La Noscea. The Black Shroud? Well, tough luck.
He lay there, flat on his back in the sparse grass, motionless as a statue of marble and ivory. The only colour on him was the half-hearted flickering of their campfire in the salty breeze, but his eyes were glowing with the reflection of a myriad of stars.
Clusters of burning gas, beautiful, deadly, and dying, U'mikke reminded herself.
The emerald carbuncle hummed, and nuzzled closer into its summoner's side.
Raiding the bandit camp had been easy. But the adventurers' guild wouldn't have assigned two greenleaves on a truly dangerous job, so that wasn't much of a surprise. The guild was pretty strict about skill levels.
There hadn't been a flash of clarity. No awe-inspiring, booming voices. Or gods descending from the heavens. Just a tiny morsel of regret stuck behind U'mikke's collarbone while the two of them made camp on their way back to the city.
Regret at soon needing to return to Ul'dah, and maybe never seeing this Keeper kid ever again.
And that's how it would've turned out if one Ul'dahn merchant with a taste for whatever Lominsan privateers managed to liberate from Garlean vessels hadn't bullied the customs office into having one of their employees escort his cargo all the way to the sultanate.
Sei was a lowly paper-pusher nobody would miss overmuch if he left his position for a moon or two, thus when the question of whom to actually send arose, it was an easy choice.
The desert seemed less like a malicious wasteland out for his blood now that arcanima buzzed just beneath his skin, and he relished the exquisite, alien feeling of not being at another's mercy.
U'mikke volunteered to show him around Ul'dah because. Because–.
She missed him, alright?
There. She said it.
Happy now?
At least Momodi was happy to have the arcanist off her hands. Running an adventurers' guild never does get easier.
They went to the markets, and instead of marvelling at the riches of sultanate like damn near everybody else, Sei proceeded to identify any and all goods which originated from Vylbrand like reciting a poem by heart.
Visiting the guilds of disciples of Hand and Land wasn't much different. Although he did show interest in the techniques of alchemists and goldsmiths, and casually commented how he's tried to learn sewing before because it's such an important life skill.
So, overall, he was being the personification of unimpressed, and wasn't that just the most refreshing thing U'mikke had seen all year?
They skipped the pugilists because U'mikke didn't care enough herself, but made a point to attend gladiator training, and she appreciated how he simply let her ramble on about types of swords for a good while.
She was going to apologize for boring him, but he shrugged. He cared that she cared, he said.
And. Well.
Wasn't that something?
The important bit happened when they were leaving the guild of thaumaturges.
„How does one make holy water?“, Sei suddenly asked. Likely inspired by the trip to the den of the void mages, but still entirely unprompted.
He wasn't looking at her, so all U'mikke managed in her confusion was some knitted brows.
„One boils the hell out of it“, he explained, side-eyeing her with the biggest, dumbest grin.
Something nameless and unspoken passed between them then. More powerful than the strange synchronicity they felt while fighting highway robbers.
They both burst out laughing, and were leaning on each other most of the way back to the Quicksands between reemerging giggle fits.
Years later, when U'kouri Tia – U'mikke's elder brother – learned of this anecdote, he teased her that she had effectively married Sei because of a pun.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
Because two years later, as they stood on a hill in Middle La Noscea, Dalamud descended on Cartenau.
And the world ended. Just like that.