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Haurchefant's gauntlets catch the low firelight, each mythril ring glinting. With the heavy plates and leather gloves removed, the maille of his tabard gleams like stars. A broad, steady canvas of metal and shadow, interrupted by isolated lights. But from the wrist down, it is a river. As he scrawls out records, orders, requests, each finger moves in tandem, and the light ripples and dances. You think he must know that you love that play of light and dark; there is no reason for him to sit within his private chambers still half-dressed for battle. It would almost be a noble sacrifice, his comfort for your own. If you didn't know just how much he enjoyed being watched like this, how little hardship it truly presents. The armourers of the Jeweled Crozier are some of the finest metalworkers in the world.
Before Ishgard, you had not believed maille could be so thin, so liquid, and still offer any protection. But, fighting aevis talons with their ragged blade edges, something that would cause slashes to skitter like stones on the skin of a lake was the difference between disarmament and death, or a steady grip and victory. Each finger is wrapped in an impenetrable weave of wire no thicker than a coarse thread, capped with a stiff metal cup, not quite a claw, but not so blunt as a knuckle either. The construction is magnificent. You know from long experience: there is no loss of dexterity, and the weight is light enough not to tire more delicate wrists than either of you have on offer.
You watch the light play off his gloved hands in a rich silence. He glances at you from time to time, hoping you might be deigning to actually get some rest. But each time, though you blink as slow and heavy as a couerl, you meet his eyes briefly. Then back to watching the lights.
It's hypnotic. The way his hand glides across the parchment, the susurrus of metal on skin and vellum lulling you to a state of molten ease. For you, this is rest. There will be dragons to slay and churches to topple all too soon. But in this moment, with the fire contained to the hearth and not swallowing whole the tinderbox of the Coerthan capital city, you let yourself drift.
Even the constant hum of the Echo, always itching in your skull, warning you where the next attack will fall before it does, warning you when an unseen foe has you in their focus, falls silent. The most you ever hope for, even in your sleep, is that you won’t fall through the ice, dragged into another mind entirely. That you will skate a few more yalms along the surface of living thought.
Here, watching his hands, you almost feel like the person you must have been before the Calamity, though you don’t know who they were. Just that there must once have been a time you didn’t have the thrum of Hydaelyn in your blood. This silence feels like that.
You are so sunken into languid peace that when he stands from his desk, you watch him stretch and come to you without even a flinch. Without counting out fifteen steps ahead, what you would do if he summoned up his blade and tried to plant it in your unprotected gut, how quickly you could draw your spear from the aether and impale his beautiful head upon it, how you would suppress the horror of the act.
You simply exist, untethered.
He smiles at you, gentle as the sunset over the snow.
When he offers you his gauntlet, you press your cheek against the warm, fine metal with a tender sigh. Those covered fingers tip your face further up, to meet his bright eyes. “Are you sure you will not sleep, my friend?”
“Why do you call me that?” You ask. In another time you might have been appalled at this syrupy slur in your voice, as though you had drunk yourself to the edge of sickness. You’ve noticed the Elezen of Ishgard pepper the phrase into their speech. You think it may mean something different for them. Something that must be confirmed and re-confirmed. Something special, to which they sing hymnal praises. Or else something fragile, in need of constant reinforcement and repair. Some reflection of Ishgard itself, shattered into their language.
The warm wires of his maille gauntlet brush across your lips, dividing you from his thumb. It is only long experience with the unpleasantness of metal against your teeth that stops you from dragging his thumb into your mouth.
“You are my friend, of course,” is his explanation.
“Is that what you call this?” You press a kiss to the palm of that warm, warm hand, blocked again by the maille. He does you the service of leaving his hand there, covering half your face, a shield against things you do not name.
“This?” Soft, endlessly kind in his amusment. “This I call the Warrior of Light, finally at ease.” His other hand curls around the back of your skull, finger-guards and rings all catching at your hair. But he moves so slowly, with such care, the sparks across your scalp blend into the softness of this moment. Not enough to draw you into focus, but enough to make you aware of your breathing, of your vitality. With anyone else, your neck exposed like this would be a death sentence.
You love him.
He laughs, angles your whole head. You follow willingly. He presses a kiss to the top of your hair. “I think love must mean something different in the rest of Eorzea, my friend.”
One day, you’d like to untangle the subtleties of speaking the same language, removed by centuries of war and isolation.
“I’m not afraid of you,” you say, trying again to express the intimate depths of your self for him, in a way he can understand. Words are a pale imitation of the Echo. He is trapped within his own body, his own mind, never plunging into the depths of others' lives, never tangling with others' souls. But you try, as he tries.
“Good,” he says, the unyielding metal of a fingertip tracing the soft skin beneath your eye. If he asked, you’d let him have it, the way the rest of his people all clamour after the eyes of dragons. He would never ask, so you will never be forced to pluck it out and press it into those gloved hands. “I will endeavour to live up to that faith.”