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Chapter Text

050. Flower

White Roses & Purple Carnations

"Hey, Gau, come and have a look over here!" I called to him, waving him over to where I stood. We'd gone out together, past the woods surrounding the town of Thamasa and onto the great open plains of rolling, green hills past that. Flowers had started growing again in the early spring of this year, one year after Kefka died. And by now, in the ambient temperature of the late summer, the flowers were growing furiously, getting in one last burst of colour before finally fading for the year.

Gau ran over my way, to the willow tree on the hill, sheltering the group of flowers I'd found. "This... Is a Willow tree. Green willow." Gau stated in a half-broken way, looking the tree up and down, paying close attention to the string like leaves. His language had much improved since we first met, thanks to Cyan, and he was finally becoming somewhat articulate. Granted, it would still take a while to be perfect, but it was getting there. Even I had to verbally acknowledge that.

"How did you know that?" I asked, shocked at that he even knew the specific name for this kind of willow. I only knew that because old man Strago told me so, and about the story surrounding it. A looong time ago.

"It's re..quired in Doma. For the heirs." He explained succinctly.

"Huh. The more you know."

"But I don't like this tree." He declared and something of his former posture returned, the slight hunching of his shoulders and gathering together of his hands. He almost looked like a rabbit or a squirrel or something. But still, he was very upright by then, standing tall next to his adoptive father.

"Why?" I asked, leaning up against it.

"Feels false. Like a liar. Like it'd give you false love." He explained, raking the tree up and down with uncertain red eyes.

"Oh." I looked back at the tree too, looking at the trunk and the face like arrangement of knots and suddenly, I too saw something insincere about the tree. "Huh, wired. I get that vibe too." I shivered unconsciously and my eyes were draw to the stringy leaves, and I couldn't help but break off the ends of one of the tendrils, much to Gau's umbrage. "We have a story about it in Thamasa, that a man and woman promised to meet here on the eve of their wedding, but the man never showed up."

"How... bad." Gau stated simply, looking somewhat repulsed at the slowly drifting tendrils of leaves.

We stayed there in a comfortable silence for a while, the both of us watching the setting sun leave a fiery stain on the sky. "Oh, yeah, I forgot but don't you think these flowers are so pretty?" I asked, pointing at the collection of purple flowers lying at my feet.

Gau looked at them with discerning red eyes and bent down to pick a few. "Purple Carnations." Gau declared, arranging the few flowers in his hand. He'd become unnervingly good at his new job, awe inspiringly, even. His father should've been leaping at the chance to know him, he should've been so proud... But Cyan was his father now, for all intents and purposes. "They remind me of Relm. In my studies they did." He smiled coyly to himself, looking at the flowers intently, as though he were in on a personal joke.

"Oh yeah? Well, I think that... White Roses remind me of you!" I declared with a coy smile. I'll never know why I chose that particular flower then, but it couldn't have fit more.

Gau snickered to himself slightly, and before he could say anymore, Shadow (Pa, as he was now called) called us both back in with a slight growl to Gau. Pa was way too overprotective, even from when I was that age. And before we could even think about walking, Interceptor herded us back at a quick sprint.

I will never know why the Doma royalty are required to know the language of flowers, but I suppose it's just tradition. And it can be quite handy, if I want to be all pretentious with my painting and assign each flower I paint in a scene a meaning. Of course if it were a landscape, I'd probably go mad by the end.

But more to the point, I also know why Gau smirked so much when he said that purple carnations remind him of me. Apparently 'Capriciousness' and 'Changeable' are two qualities that stand out in me. Still, I took solace in the 'whimsical' attribute and I think I agree. And even if a White Rose was certainly every inch him back then, 'innocent' to a fault, I've no longer got such luck. Heck, he's nigh on salacious sometimes. Who am I kidding, he'd be boring if he still were at that stage of life.

Maybe the teaching outsiders to Doma the language of flowers is a good thing - I now know that when the snootier members of the Nobility have a portrait painted of themselves holding a thistle, for example, they think they're royalty. That they're better than us. And when they are coincidentally in the same room as my poor potted Angrec when it dies, and then 'suggest' that I shouldn't grow anymore, they're also telling me that I'm not qualified to be their queen. Like they're qualified any better! Besides, it's a pretty ugly flower anyway.

Chapter Text

050. Eyes - Relm/Gau

"Hey Gau, look at me for a minute," Relm called out to the feral boy - he hadn't been a boy for a while actually, he was more of a man, now. At nineteen going on twenty he didn't count as a boy any more, right?

He looked over at her, and into her eyes resolutely, challenging her

Definitely red. Who has red eyes? No one I've seen, that's for sure. Only Terra's are quite as strange eyes and she's, well, Terra. She's allowed to have sparkly eyes.

"Yeah, thought so." She mumbled under her breath and went back to her painting on the small pad of paper in front of her. Card sized - to be copied for the new year's cards this coming hear, even if it was summer at the moment.

"W-Sorry?" Gau asked, catching himself before he slipped out of his tightly wound manners; he was going to be King of Doma next, after all. But still, after all these years, it didn't sound right to have Gau speak in such a... Normal accent. There was no twang of something wild nor an uneasiness that made his speech fluid - however that worked.

"I was just noticing your eyes." She stated plainly, putting her art tools down on the table beside her, hoping all the time her arms travelled that the table really was there, and never breaking eye contact with him.

It reminded her, oddly enough, of another time. One time when they were much younger. Well, it was only seven years ago.

"Hey, Gau." Relm greeted nonchalantly, nodding her head like Setzer did and grinning like she'd always done.

She was sitting calmly, alone (Sabin did try to perform her vitals when she later told this part of the story to him), in a secluded corner of the rocky wasteland of an island, playing the 'Memento Ring' from Thamasa, as Celes had called it whilst inventorying. But it was her parents, their promise rings it turned out - they weren't pure like Relm had always thought and they weren't married liked she'd assumed they would've been. But that was okay. She gave the plainer band to Shadow, since it didn't really fit anyone else, and he... Well, he was her best friend here. Maybe even in the world. Bar that old man, of course.

But it was Gau who found her, after hours alone. He clambered up the mountain - she could hear him disturbing the rocks of the mountain's face as he climbed up. Why didn't he just use the path? Too long for him? Or maybe he's secretly one of those Mountain Goats...

"Uwooo! What's that?" He asked in a significantly broken lilt. Relm followed the line of his outstretched finger back up his eyes, red and glistening at the ring - or more precisely, the three shiny garnets that were inlaid in the surface.

"It's my mother's promise ring. To my father." She traced her finger over the engraved word on the inside of the ring, her only clue 'Clyde', before holding it up for him to see.

"Can Gau have?" He asked with huge, shimmering, crimson eyes.

Relm floated her outstretched palm and snatched it back towards her before she could really even process what she was doing. "No!" She cried. "I-I mean it's my mother's. It's the only thing I've got left of my mother. And it has my father's name written into the back, it's the only clue I've got." She explained timidly for her - too timidly for the usual Relm, but Gau understood. There was a certain light of intelligence that shone in his eyes, and threatened to burst forth when, tenaciously, she inches her palm forwards and let Gau look at the ring.

"Gau seen Shadow with one like this."

He observed, looking all over the ring, holding it at all angles and heights.

"I gave it to him." Relm explained, to which Gau made an affirmative sound similar to a deep growl.

"Gau hope Relm finds her father." He looked at her with apologetic, red eyes.

Soon after, the two of them went back down the mountain together. They both used the path that time.

"You like to stare at my eyes a lot, don't you?" Gau remarked with a drawled tone and strung out, languid words. He snapped Relm from her reverie in her memories, and compelled her upright.

Relm snorted, just a tiny bit, at his comment. If it'd been anyone other than Gau, she would've axed them. This was something that Edgar would say - that clueless, pompous king.

"I was just checking they're red. I don't meet many people with red eyes."

"You never stared at Shadow's eyes." He pointed out astutely.

"Yes but Pops at least had blue eyes, even if they were all swirly and milky." She retorted swiftly.

Gau moved slightly closer to her, his full height towering above her as she sat down, forcing her to tilt her head to him, until he knelt on the ground. He never once broke eye contact.

"You know Relm, I'm due to ascend sometime in my life, and I really need a Queen."

Relm raised her eyebrows and shrugged slightly. "So?"

"Let's get married." He said, as plainly as if he were stating the hour.

Relm's eyes widened slightly, but she too didn't want to break the eye contact - she didn't want to lose. "Pops would kill you."

"I'd let him try."

"We're too young for this."

"Your eighteenth birthday is soon, isn't it?"

"That's my point."

"None of us live that long."

"You can't just randomly spring something like that on me."

"Can't I?"

She narrowed her eyes at him and sucked on the inside of her cheek.

"Okay. Yes, let's do it."

And the red eyes finally broke contact, and gleamed not only with latent intelligence and a dulled love of shiny things, but with joy.

Chapter Text

094. Alcohol

The night was still young; the fiery yellow sun just sliding beneath the rolling green hill of Doma, casting a brilliant, eerie orange glow over all the world, if only for a moment. The grey, stone castle was dyed a brilliant, fierce shade of vermillion at this time, giving a certain lull to all those near it as, just for a moment, nothing but peace could be felt.

Despite this natural beauty just outside their window and shining into his room, two could not stop to look outside; they did not want to.

"And you stole it from the castle's stores?" Relm asked, eyebrows shooting up high. Her clothes, the less than lady-like baggy paint-stained peach trousers, and black top that had evolved to be slightly more modest as she grew, covered by an orangey cape, were splayed around her as she lay carelessly on the floor.

Gau eyed her with dark, red eyes, and looked out the window with a look of exasperation. "Of course."

Relm sat up slightly to flash him a winning smile, only to be pulled the entire way up by Gau.

"Oi!" She beat him on the tricep, only to remember that unlike the years gone by, Gau was strong - stronger than she'd like to think - and he probably didn't feel her thump that much. The smirk on his face only confirmed it, which she scoffed at.

She turned her sights on the two bottles in front of them with curious eyes, ignoring Gau's shove, just hard enough to send her off balance for a second. The last time this had happened, they'd ended up fighting, and it had become wholly less playfully, and entirely adult in nature.

The two bottles - both glistening in the sunlight and unopened - held very different contents. One was taller, thinner, with pink liquid inside that seemed to shimmer slightly in the sunlight. Or maybe it was just calling out to her.

The other bottle was very much stouter, with a golden brown colour to it. It was Gau's choice, what he'd 'lifted' from the castle's cellars - in fairness, as prince he can pretty much do what he wants. But Relm didn't like the look of it, it reminded her of that horrible tasting drunk Shadow had given her on her birthday - that tasted like ash in her mouth and burning and everything awful. And so she vowed to always stay away from Whiskey now on.

"What," he must've noticed her eyeing the bottle wearily, and gathered the glass tumblers he'd also 'lifted' from the kitchens and breaking the seal of the shorter bottle, "nervous?" He eyed her with irritating amounts of mirth and she merely scoffed at him. Never, not like she was very apprehensive of the taste or anything...

Before she realised, his hand was bumping her upper arm, offering a lowly filled glass to her, a glass of his own in his other hand.

She look it and eyes it wearily, scrutinising the amber-golden contents throughly. "Look, I told you about that incident with whiskey and-"

"It's not whiskey." He rolled his eyes at her and grinned sitting back in a more relaxed way, irritating her with the way his flexing arm muscles distracted her from everything else. "It's scotch." He downed his glass and, not wanting to be left behind, so did she.

And that, she regretted - it tasted bitter and horrible and not like anything she wanted to drink, ever.

Before he even had time to laugh at her scrunched up face, she'd opened the taller bottle of pink sherry and downed half a glass. She felt the pounding of the alcohol in her veins fast but at least this had a far nicer, fruitier flavour washing around her tongue. She felt and odd sense of freedom, like she could float, and her legs felt delightfully numb.

"Careful, might end up doing something you regret there." Gau grinned at her glare, reaching out to push her arm again, but she got there first, flicking him in a simple of his arm, somewhere she knew sent a twinge of pain through him.

She knew exactly what he was alluding - one of the couple of times that Sabin or Edgar or even Celes had warned her away from staying too close to Gau, he'd overheard them and ha never let it go.

She twisted her lips. "Shut up, it'd be your fault too." She spit back, acidly. She knew he'd never snap at her though; it was Gau, her closest friend next to Interceptor and Shadow. He'd promised her a dozen times over that he'd never leave her, and she believed it, even in the solitary dead of long, winter nights.

He rolled his eyes, but then drifted his ruby gaze down to his glass, and lifted it slowly into the air, his arm coming to rest on his propped up knee.

"You... You hate all alcohol but sherry, don't you?" He came to the realisation with a world-shattering note in his voice, before sniggering wildly at her.

Relm looked at him oddly, doubting it was just the alcohol but refusing to see how this could be that funny.

"Of everything, the tough, tomboy Relm who never wears dresses when she can, only likes the pinkest, and girliest at of all alcohols." His voice was riddled with bumps of laughter and she looked at him through seething eyes. Acidly, she poured herself a small amount of scotch, just barely enough to cover the bottom of the tumbler - which she hoped Gau wouldn't notice - and downed it, trying to ignore the sting in her throat and vile taste in her mouth. She desperately hoped she hadn't pulled a face, but from Gau's continued laughter, she doubted it.

"Shut it, pretty mountain boy." She growled, and passed the bottle to him when he gestured through laughter, folding her arms tightly. She'd always called him mountain boy, after they got back from their... Adventure; wolf boy just seemed a bit too mean, even if he truly was wild, feral, with unrecoverable language and all the rest. And then he was recoverable - and made a very good recovery at that. So much so that he became handsome, with pretty red eyes. So, he graduated from 'mountain boy' to 'pretty mountain boy'. She knew he didn't appreciate it.

"You know Relm, no one else can make me laugh quite like you can, just by existing." He gave a grin that reminded her of the boy she'd first met, all those years ago.

If she hadn't known him like she did, she might've blushed. But since she did, she knew that grin accompanied all his most subtle of insults.

She shook her head, pouring more sherry into her glass and shooting Gau a star glance. "This is why I'd rather go to Interceptor for a confidence boost."

He snorted, and they clinked their glasses in the air. "How crazy was Cyan, anyway, when he decided to adopt you and make you the heir to an entire country?"

"As crazy as Strago was when he took you in?"

"Oh," she frowned, debating whether to let this topic slide by, and took another sip. "Touché."

"Sometimes I wonder how you even got past that clown."

"Oh, like I wonder any different?"

"You really should've… fallen over a rock thingy and fallen to your death."

"Well I'm surprised you didn't drown in one of those puddle thingys"

Relm rolled her eyes so exaggeratedly slowly it was almost painful.

"You are so much drunker than I am."

"Oh whatever! I'm shorter!"

"Yeah, I know." He smirked. "You make an excellent arm rest."

"You are absolutely the worst."

"And you're that much better?"

Relm snorted, and Gau laughed along with her. "You know, they used to call this invective, not friendship."

"Friendship? You are aware that I'm just using you for your connections, right?"

Gau leaned over closer to her, so close that the red of his eyes entranced her already pliable senses, and she felt the heat from his scotch-scented breath on her cheeks.

"You want more than a friendship?" It was a growl barely above a whisper, belaying the wildness he'd grown up with. The wild love that had already lain dormant in his heart for the girl he'd grown up with; the girl that only the sloth had ever enabled him to act on.

"Yes." It was more a gulp than a romantic declaration of interest. "I mean— yeah, sure." She looked away from the piercing red stare as nonchalantly as she could.

She was expecting a soft kiss, but instead he pulled back. And he smirked widely. "I knew it."

"W- what - was that a joke?!" She stood up, pushing the glass aside. "Because that sure as hell wasn't a funny one!"

Her breathing was heavy in a flurry of anger as he took her by the elbow and pulled her over to sit on his lap. This time it was because she knew Gau that she blushed.

"Not a joke, just something I'll file away for the morning." Gau's piercing stare caught her again, and in the storm of his eyes that said the thousands of words he wasn't, her anger abated. She found that she didn't really need to say anything anymore. "Relm, I've considered you the most important person to me for years now."

"You love me?"

He snorted. "No. Do you love me?"

She frowned. "Of course not. I barely spend time with you anymore."

"Then there we go."

There was a paused, and they took a moment to study each other. He seemed older to her in that split second, somehow, and it wasn't just the alcohol that warmed her insides and gave her a startling flutter as she studied his face. He was, in his own way, handsome. Wild, carefree, but passionate.

"But perhaps I will, one day."

"Soon?"

He gave a smile, that was somehow sad for reasons she couldn't quite understand. It seemed to tear into her heart and she felt his pulse racing beneath her palm.

"Sure." The unsaid words that lingered between them told her how insincere of a word that was.

And then gravity seemed to crash back down upon them both. Relm looked away, and the silence deafening her ears made her feel silly. She clambered off him, and readjusted herself, still not quite able to look him in the eyes.

But when she was far away from him, closer to the door Han her heart wanted, she looked back at him - just once. There was that imperceptible sadness. It filled her with something similar to the frenzied desire to paint she often got. "Goodnight, Gau."

His red eyes spoke to her soul, drove her crazy in that moment she lingered on them — and then she left.

She knew in that very moment that the pair of them were inextricably, unquestionably, paired for life.

Chapter Text

021. Born

When they were twenty-three and twenty, respectively, their eldest son was born.

Strago had died almost a decade ago, at this point, and in their small family, a new addition was welcomed happily. Well, after a while.

The pair had married two years ago - when Relm was but eighteen - and Shadow hated every second of it. He yelled for a long time to Gau, then Relm (who shouted just as much back), and even to Cyan. He reasoned that she was too young, she didn't know what she was doing, Gau was taking advantage of her and that she was going to end up being manipulated by a bunch of 'stuck up nobles'. It didn't take a genius to see that Relm, a girl who had helped save the world at twelve and three quarters (because the quarters matter just as much as the full years at that age), was none of the above. It didn't take a genius to see that Shadow, the man who in a different life had lost his fiancee before they made it to the altar, was just nervous.

Relm still married Gau and dragged her dad down the aisle, no matter how much he sulked.

So when their son was born just two years later, he was born to be the Prince of Doma, the first man in either Relm or Gau's families to be destined for greatness. To not have to drag their way upwards and break their bones as they did so. And Shadow did, eventually, come round to it all. When he held the baby, with blue hair and teal eyes, so much like his father with just as much strength and life, Relm actually thought she saw him smile. It was a strange sight, and one she couldn't bear to see for long. She took the baby back in her arms and nursed him herself.

Gau and Relm were lucky, she thought, for Cyan to still be alive as they had their two other children and raised them as carefully as they could. They had a daughter - strawberry blonde with red eyes that pierced you so deeply with that same penetrating gaze Gau had.

And then younger son, how much Shadow had changed when he held the baby, all blonde hair and hazel eyes, looking just like Relm had done when she was born. Relm actually saw the shadow of Clyde hiding under the mask and the strained eyes. It almost hurt to look at, seeing her father becoming the man that she had detested for so long. The man who'd ripped up her childhood.

She just sat in the large bed and looked away, out of the windows and over the green fields of Doma.

Doma had been rebuilt before Relm even moved there, and by the time their eldest son was three, even more expansion work had been finished. The castle seemed grander, and the town extended itself into a city. It could almost rival the Figaronian Kingdom, now. Relm often sat and overlooked the city with her daughter, but two years old, and as she grew up and Relm grew older, they admired the city together. They painted together, mother and daughter, ever so slightly different in looks but vastly different in destiny.

Sometimes she told Gau how she would look at their children and wonder how it was that their lives were going to be oh so different from theirs. That they would live in a safe world all their lives, they knew who their parents were and could see them every day, that they wouldn't have to spend some of their lives hiding their talents and gifts. Gau could appreciate her better than anyone else when it came to her worries. He too felt the lingering fear of the oppressive sky they'd once seen when they looked up as children, and marvelled at how that same sky was so different for their daughter and their sons. He even indulged himself to think that raising his children to be so happy was perhaps the one thing he'd been put on this world for. That - and for being the other half of Relm, moulded as they were by the calamities they'd shared. As they got older, of course they discovered more and more sticking points they might fight over. Lust faded out and love settled into a pattern. But neither one of them regretted their decisions - not their young marriage or their haste to children. They knew each other better than anyone else in the world - and neither would have it any other way; not for better or for worse.