Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The helmet comes off. 

After blood and fire, after a fight that nearly shattered the heavens and Ishgard with it, Aymeric carries Estinien back. Up the slope and through Foundation, to the Congregation, and all the way up to the infirmary, which would be a surprise in itself given the wound in his side she knows still plagues him on cold days—every day, then—but it isn’t. Not after the helmet comes off.

To say Lucia had no expectation would be a lie. She expected a man of average comeliness, a bit rough around the edges, like anyone raised in the Temple Knights, and Estinien rougher than most at that. Maybe she wondered for the first year she served Aymeric and had to play silent watcher to their strange camaraderie. Did Estinien have a face? Was it horribly disfigured? It might explain his distance, and at least some of Aymeric's wistful gazing, if Estinien bore the horrid mark of some dragon's fang, claw, or fire. A mark he gained protecting Aymeric, no doubt. The tragedy of it, the longing.

At any rate, the reveal is so long in coming that by the time the helmet comes off, Lucia has almost forgotten to have expectations at all.

Aymeric works it free with an oddly practiced care, and she gets to play silent witness to the unmasking as skin is unveiled: the arch of an elegant, pale neck. A small, perfect mouth with dark lips. Cheekbones as sharp as Estinien’s armor, and then, to crown it all a cascade of snow-white hair, pale as the mane on some magical beast attracted only to purity and goodness and the laughter of children—but on Estinien’s head. 

What's lying in the bed is somehow not The Azure Dragoon, former possessed of Nidhogg, or even Aymeric's coarse-yet-loyal friend, but one of the most beautiful men she has ever laid eyes on.

To her everlasting shame, Lucia lets out a small laugh—a sound of pure shock. 

Aymeric tuts. "Yes, quite. He looks terrible."

Terrible. 

He cradles Estinien's—doll-like, comically perfect, lovely by any definition—head in his hands and sweeps Estinien's feathered bangs from his eyes. Eyelashes simply cannot be that long. It's not feasible in a helmet—how does he look out the visor? Beside Aymeric’s dark head and gilt-on-blue armor, Estinien’s pale hair and grime-coated mail look like some artist’s rendition of a fallen hero in the arms of his noble lover. She wants to lock eyes with any of the healers and to ask silently if they see what she sees, but her training won’t allow for more than a dead-eyed stare she hopes is managing to hide that she is losing it on a fundamental level.

"Oh, my dearest friend," Aymeric murmurs. 

And, well. Now Lucia gets it.

Aymeric carries Estinien home. 

All the way up to the city, until long after his arms have gone have numb, and his muscles are cramping with the effort. It's not so bad. Dragoon armor is light by necessity and Estinien lighter still. Possession of a mortal vessel did not enamor Nidhogg to its care and feeding, apparently—if he ate at all—and that thought sends him to a place he can’t go in that moment. Even the smell coming off the body in his arms is enough to gain him a respectful and wide berth as he makes his slow course back into the city. 

Up the steps, up the walk, past the ruins from dragonfire past, the scaffolds against walls either half-built or abandoned to the ice, into Congregation and up to the infirmary. 

On that last stretch, his limbs start shaking. Not with fatigue—or not only fatigue—but with fear for what they'll find when they get the armor off, if it comes off at all. The arm and shoulder will be the worst. The metal appears melted where the eyes were fused to it, and Aymeric’s mind entertains myriad horrors for what lies beneath: the armor bound to flesh and bone, or little left of either. 

But he can only go one step at a time. 

That’s one of the first bits of wisdom Estinien deigned to share with him, back when they were still early in their training for the Temple Knights. No doubt Estinien doesn’t recall it at all. Most like he forgot the moment after he said it: one step at a time. Aymeric was  unused to their long marches then, and though he was no slouch, the Knights asked much of their newest. Don’t look too far down the road, Estinien murmured as he idled by Aymeric a moment on a long slope, and though the words were so soft they might have been for no one, it braced him then. And if he spent the next dozen malms mindlessly following the bob of Estinien’s tail of tied-back hair, it was good a motivation as any. In a way, he never stopped.

A room is already set out at the Congregation. It’s one of the large ones that can make room for extra beds in hard times, but he’s grateful for its emptiness then. Aymeric lays his burden out on the crisp white sheets and then, quite suddenly, has no idea what to do with himself. A thousand people and questions, of course, demand his attention, but he can no more step away from the bed than he could let another carry Estinien to it. 

The chirurgeons work around him as best they can until it becomes absurd for them to try. 

"Sir." The head chirurgeon, Abel, gives him an apologetic look that says this is one battle that cannot be fought and won with the weight of a blade.

His compromise is to fit himself against the wall at the head of the bed, where he at least won't be tripped over. Leaving is out of the question. He focuses on breathing, on calming the dull thud of his heart in his chest as he watches the chirurgeons manipulate Estinien’s limp body. For a few moments they work in silence, and then one of the chirurgeons takes pity on him. "You might help us get his armor off, Sir.”

He nods, relieved. This, at least, Aymeric can do. How many times has he done this for Estinien? Hard days of training and weeks in the field when Estinien really seemed to think their Temple Knight armor was as good as a second skin, even far past when the need for a good cleaning overtook him. The habit stuck even after Estinien was named Azure Dragoon, if only because Aymeric was the only soul daring enough to point out that the patina of dragon’s blood and dirt he sported was not nearly as impressive or sanitary as Estinien seemed to think.  Sometimes he could even get Estinien to sit still long enough for a hair combing—but only sometimes.

He sits at the head of the bed and pulls Estinien's helmeted head into his lap as the chirurgeons work off the boots and greaves. With practiced ease, he draws his fingers under the helm until he finds the strap, uncinches it and pulls it off in one smooth motion.

Lucia's gasp of shock breaks the relative silence. 

Indeed, Estinien's face is wreckage. Sweat has drawn lines through the grime on his cheeks, and dried and drawn them again. His veins are webs of bruise up his neck and jaw where the dragon's malice once ran them red, and his pale hair is stiff with grime in places. Aymeric picks it from Estinien's forehead and has to resist the mad but desperate urge to bow his own head to meet it, to feel his too-warm skin and know he’s somehow lived through this, if only for the moment.

"Oh, my dearest friend," he says, because Estinien is that, at least, even now, and part of Aymeric has never recovered from having to loose an arrow at his heart and mean it.

After that, the rest seems easy. It’s like tearing off a bandage; they’ve come this far, and he still breathes. The rest of the armor comes off faster with his help. He pauses only to strip his own heavy coats and armor and lay them aside. They uncover Estinien's pallid skin one labored ilm at a time. The dirt left by the armor and weeks of wear has to be soaked off. A bath would be better, but the chirurgeons are still working on prying his gauntlets and breastplate and whatever lies beneath. It falls to Aymeric to tease the grime off his skin. A woman hands him a clean cloth and fresh bowl and he starts damping clean his hair and face until he looks familiar again, working around the red abrasions left by the Drachen mail. 

It's a kind of calming work. He falls into an easy rhythm. Dip the cloth, wring it, dab until the cloth is dark, repeat. This isn't the kind of work he's often afforded the time and space to get bored with since he became Lord Commander, but it was every day of being a Temple Knight. Endless marching, endless sparring, endless busy work with brief boughts of terrible excitement—Estinien always there, ahead or behind or right at his shoulder. Whittling arrow shafts in exchange for Aymeric making him something edible over the campfire, because whatever it is lancers do, it always left Estinien whip-thin and quietly starving. 

Only the murmuring from the chirurgeons as they finally reveal his forearm is enough to pull Aymeric from his thoughts.

He makes himself look, heart in his throat. The skin of it is raw and red and veined with black, and the texture of it odd, almost stippled, almost like scales, but… it isn’t bad. It isn’t bare bone or ruined muscle or rotten flesh. Aymeric holds his breath while they pull the off the breastplate, too, and for endless minutes Abel turns Estinien's arms over, flexes them, prods at the muscle and hums. When he looks at Aymeric, it's with a soft smile.

"I believe he will heal in full." 

At last, Aymeric feels he can breathe.

The Lord Commander doesn't leave Estinien's bedside that day, or that night; Lucia finds him propped there in a chair, elbow cocked on the bed, doing what he insists on referring to as “resting his eyes,” though in Lucia's opinion it's more apt to call it simply passing out. It's clear from the angle that he didn't fall asleep looking over the pile of missives in his lap but rather watching Estinien.

Ever the light sleeper, the smallest clearing of her throat has him jerking awake and searching the room until his eyes fall on her, and then dart to Estinien still resting in bed. He drags his hand through his hair and stretches a moment. "News?" 

"None." It seems for the first time in recent history everyone has taken the order to get some rest to heart.

"Good." His expression is still troubled though. Pinched, and a little blue around the eyes. She almost regrets waking him. Sleep has been hard to come by these years and even with Nidhogg defeated, Aymeric will find ways to keep himself utterly without time to do more than breathe, if that.

Maybe were Estinien awake he could aid her in badgering him into a meal at least now and then, but...

Lucia steps closer to make her own examination. Estinien's cheeks are still pale. More than can be accounted for by years of wearing his helmet at every sunlit hour. He's nearly as pale as his hair and the sheets that surround him.

 "How is he?" 

"Unchanged," Aymeric murmurs, and oh, the moroseness to it. As if Estinien would be one to die in his bed without even a whimper to mark his passing. If there's one truth in all Ishgard, it's that the only thing capable of killing either Estinien or Aymeric is their own sense of honor and stupidity. It's well that she's had years of practicing a straight face; the fond smile trying to break across it dies before her lips can twitch. 

"He looks—well enough, at least,” she tries. “His hair could use a washing, but he'll be handsome again one day, I'm sure."

Aymeric gives a quiet laugh, this side of aghast. "Handsome. He would jump out the window if he were awake to hear you say it." But then he looks to his charge and his head tilts a degree. “Handsome. Yes. I suppose he is."

There is no suppose about it, though. Even if one were to find him not to their taste, they would still have to admit Estinien beautiful.

She cocks her head and examines his face once more. Underneath the healing abrasions, it’s un-lined and delicate. “I suppose his lips are a bit thin.”

Aymeric shifts. "They—what?" He darts a look at her and then at Estinien's face, as if it will have changed in the last two breaths and says, "They are not."

She doesn't reply. He gives her a look that's perilously close to disappointed and then moves closer to the bed and reaches out. He hovers his fingers over Estinien’s mouth, and then traces down to his bandaged shoulder, and then to the arm that’s exposed above the sheets, so light she can't tell if he's touching at all. When he gets to Estinien's hand he lays his own on top of it and laces their fingers in a light hold. It's a gesture so seamless it can only be practiced, and it takes her aback. Not something she was supposed to notice, done in her presence only because around Aymeric sometimes forgets to keep up his guard around her. 

If Estinien were awake, would he be so brave? Would it be bravery at all? Or is this something he's already done with Estinien's eyes on him?

She knows the answer even as she wonders. This is something they would share and think nothing of. 

He sighs. "Handsome,” he scoffs again. “By the time I joined the Knights, he'd put the fear of his lance in anyone who thought to comment on his looks. And now I'm afraid I've known him too long to see him as anything save what he is."

What he means is that he's seen too much of Estinien, and she understands. Once, she thought Aymeric an avatar of beauty, but then she saw him idealistic and bloody and tired and foolish and young, and even, once or twice, drunk. And he was not beautiful anymore but a friend. That's what Aymeric means, but the difference between him and her is that Lucia has not had the urge to run her fingers down Aymeric's face recently, or held him in her arms even when he was out of danger simply to have him close, or stripped him free of his armor and wiped clean his naked skin with desperate care.

If Aymeric can truly scoff at Estinien’s good looks, it's only because they are secondary. It's only because, when he looks at Estinien in full armor, covered in a dragon's blood, cursing and raging and jumping about the field like a living meteor, he sees the same thing he sees before him now: a friend. 

No—not a friend. His dearest friend. Perhaps no one in Ishgard has known him longer or better. 

“You…” she starts and can’t find a way to finish. His dedication to his work, to Ishgard, always felt personal. But his father is dead now, for what little he was ever worth, and he’s spoken of his adopted parents only distantly and rarely. Never has she had cause to question what made his cause seem so close to him—but there must be something tying him to this city beyond what hope can provide. He must have something.

She considers his face, and Estinien’s, and their laced fingers, and wonders if she’s missed something. “You and he,” she starts again, though she loses her nerve once more and the words trail off too soft for Aymeric to hear, surely, even in the quiet. 

“Do you think he’ll wake? Truly?”

This is not the first time he’s voiced his fears, but it still takes her by surprise. “Of course,” she says honestly. “What would you do if he didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” The answer doesn’t sound lost so much as resigned, as if he truly doesn’t know, and then he takes a deep breath. “Carry on.” 

Of course. When has he done otherwise? Never has he sounded so resigned at the prospect. “He will wake,” she says, unused to this dynamic between them, unused to an Aymeric that needs comfort or accepts it. It’s not something she’s good at besides; it comes across terse and dismissive and wrong. 

Aymeric smiles though, softly, still looking at Estinien. “You’re right, of course.” And then, as if it’s natural and rote as his forms with the sword, he pulls the hand in his to his lips and presses them to Estinien’s bruised knuckles. 

And she realizes she has missed something. The only way any man could look at another this way, carry him, hold him, stay by his side, and say with bald-faced honesty that he cannot find him handsome is if he is already hopelessly, hideously in love with him.

Chapter Text

She isn't sure. Not that day, or even the next, both of which Aymeric spends in silent vigil by Estinien's sickbed whenever his duties allow it. 

Rather, it becomes a sort of archaeological study for her. In Garlemald, she had a passing interest in the subject—stories of great heroes they were raised for battle on, ruins they pillaged for power. For her, this is a purely intellectual question, a curiosity that won't stop nagging and grows the longer it sits in her mind, as she runs back through every moment she spent in close company with both Aymeric and Estinien, picking over remembered expressions and gestures for any clue.

The second day of Aymeric's vigil finds her in the mess hall, puzzling over it all while conversation swirls around her. It's loud and jovial the way it so rarely was during the war. Days later and they’re still trading stories about Nidhogg's fall. The raw excitement is infectious after so many hard years in this cold land. Ishgard's quiet has worked its way into her and usually she eats with no one but herself, or sometimes Aymeric, but to be in the thick of this… This is why she stayed. Aymeric's dream, almost fulfilled. 

"How's he?" Marcelain leans in across the table. He means either Aymeric or Estinien, and which doesn't matter since she left them both in the same position they've been in for days.

"As expected. No change." 

He nods to himself as if he already knew, as if all of Aymeric and Estinien’s secrets are not secrets at all to him.

She pushes her plate away and clears her throat, settling herself because she's not used to this, to doing anything so close to gossip and never about the Lord Commander himself. "You knew them when they were recruits,” she starts, and the table goes silent. "The Commander and Estinien."

Marcelain swallows, audibly, and nods. “Everyone knew them, those two.” A few other heads at the table bob in commiseration. “Estinien was a prodigy, right from the go. Fair with a blade and better with a lance—and what's more, he had the fire for it, and he was young. Still young now, I grant. They both are.” There are few who aren’t, she stops herself from interjecting. Even Marcelain can’t be past forty, but he goes on. “Aymeric used to follow him like a pup. Bring him rations when he forgot to eat. We had bets on Estinien learning his name first or skewering him by accident. Do you remember?” Beltardois nods and Marcelain shakes his head, rueful. "Now, look at them."

She has been looking. Hard not to.

"Oh the fights that man used to get into," someone mutters, and someone else—Handeloup, she realizes—snorts. 

At her raised brow he stops hiding behind his goblet of wine. He's known them at least as long as they've known each other. Once, she wondered why he was passed over for Lord Commander, but he never wanted it, nor any part of nonsense, she realized after a time. In all their days together, she can't recall him ever looking so exasperated or so fond. "Gods. That was when those rumors started about Aymeric and the Archbishop. All lies we thought, though it hardly mattered. Just some jealous soul trying to dark a rising star and no more, but Estinien couldn't stand for it. That was the first time I ever saw the man angry about something other than a Dravanian or a late meal."

He takes another drink and looks to the rafters as if they have more sense than dragoons. “If anyone so much as whispered about bastards or nepotism, Estinien would have them out bleeding in the yard in the hour."

"Do you remember the time—" Marcelain starts. Handeloup slaps the table and points.

"Yes! Aymeric had to bail him out of the Vault. Estinien nearly got himself dismissed from the Knights for that—" 

"And he told Aymeric it was a fight over portions in the mess, wasn’t it?” He shakes his head and pokes at his plate of gratin or whatever popoto dish they've decided constitutes a three course meal for the night and mutters under his breath, "Well, I might not kill a man for seconds, but I could rough him up."

"You would." Handeloup smiles, and sighs. “But, of course, Aymeric didn't buy it. He must have known right from the start." And suddenly his smile makes sense, because this is something they know, the two of them. Aymeric would never question Estinien on a decision. The brief time when he stole Nidhogg's eye with nary a word and hied off into the wilds of Coerthas for weeks doing gods know what comes to mind.

Aymeric simply took it in stride, with faith. He will return, when needs must.

"But that was their way," Marcelain says as if he's been listening to her thoughts. 

The past tense bites. They seem to all realize it at the same moment and the mood goes from the delight of jibbing those who aren’t there to defend themselves to downright dour in an instant. 

After a moment, Handeloup leans in close and private, keeping whatever he has to say between the two of them. "If you want to know more—" And of course he would notice her indelicate prying, of course, "—ask him about the dragon. Ask both of them, when our friend wakes."

"…Dragon. You couldn't narrow it down?"

He gives her a look that says he might be willing to die for Ishgard and their Lord Commander, and he would gladly have thrown himself into the fire to save their Azure Dragoon, too, but he's not paid enough to care about any soulful gazing. That’s all she’s getting out of him.

"How, again, did you and he meet?" she asks, and hazards, “Did it involve a dragon?”

It's not an awkward question to ask, not when her daily reports have to be made in part to Estinien's nigh lifeless body as Aymeric holds one of the scarred hands loosely in his own. A stack of missives written on mismatched paper sits balanced on his crossed legs, forgotten. The room is almost ethereal with morning light, casting the figure in the bed in washed out colors like he’s a tomb’s statue and wrought in marble.

Aymeric quirks an eyebrow at her. He’s dour today, more worried than he has been. "It’s not much of a tale. We were both Temple Knights, in the same company, and he already a name on everyone's lips by his skill alone.” He turns to her, the lightest of smiles pulling at the corner of his lips. “I haunted his steps wanting to know his secret, though he hardly knew I existed. We were caught unaware one day on the march. All of our company was decimated save he and I. Estinien set off for the hunt without me. I followed and found him facing off against a foe ten times his size. He might have won on his wits, but I had a spare arrow—and, well.” 

Lucia smiles despite herself. Aymeric might be the best shot in the whole of the Temple Knights, though it took years to find that out. “And after?” Two fresh young Knights alone in the wilderness of Coerthas with no more than a bow and a lance is hardly a happy tale. 

"Suffice to say, the path back to Ishgard was not what we expected. I'm not sure which of us made a poorer pillow for the offer but we both got our shot at it. He hardly said a word the way back, but..." Aymeric touches his mouth, as if he isn't sure what expression he's making. "By the time we returned, I was sure. No other would I have at my side in a fight." He glances at her and adds, "Excluding present company, of course."

She inclines her head. “Of course."

For a moment she thinks that’s the whole of it and it’s hardly the revelation she thought it would be, but then Aymeric sits back all at once, releasing Estinien’s hand to comb through his own hair, almost nervously. "We drank the night we returned. Every ounce of liquor we earned and a few more beside. That horrid sweet stuff they sell in the Brume—I still have no taste for it, to this day."

She knows what stuff exactly. A fruit concoction you can smell more than taste, that made her long for Garlemald's harder spirits, that taste like nothing but regret or maybe ceruleum fuel. "I never took you for a drinking man. Either of you."

"We’re not. We got blindingly drunk and swore to be brothers in arms, by duty and by blood, and I woke with a headache like someone pushed me off the Observatorium."

She repeats his words in her head once, and then twice. Unless she’s missed something rather significant… “Blood?”  

Aymeric raises his palm to her—the one he was holding Estinien’s hand with, and there she sees it: a thin line of scar that breaks all the lines and calluses. If she checked Estinien’s hand, she’s sure he would have one to match. He rubs over the scar with his thumb as he pulls it back, a nervous tick she realizes she's seen a hundred times. 

"That's what I remember of the night, at least."

Another piece teased free of the morass that is their relationship, polished and put on a shelf. She wants to sigh, one part relief, one part weariness, because she’ll never forget the cold down her spine of realizing Aymeric could still surprise her the day he marched into the Cathedral on his own, ready to fight his father for nothing greater than what was right. Gods forbid she find out too late that Aymeric made some sort of death pact with Estinien when they were both young and drunk, or perhaps that they performed some other sort of pact and a ring is tucked safe somewhere in Aymeric's voluptuous armor marking them both as lawfully wed and desperately frustrated.

Doubtful.

She imagines them both bleary with drink after a week in the wild with nothing for warmth or comfort than the other, heads bowed together, making promises. Maybe the ring would be better, on second thought.

“It’s nearly time for dinner,” she says in a tone she hopes conveys that he still requires food and she’ll frogmarch him down to the mess if he doesn’t comply willingly. 

To her quiet delight, he nods and gathers his papers and stands with a groan. “You’ll get me if anything changes?” 

Nothing will, but she nods. It’s not as though Aymeric is the only one lined up to keep watch at Estinien’s bedside, anyway.

She has only to wait mere minutes for the boy to stick his head in the door. “Has he—”

“No.” Though she wishes Estinien were awake for no other reason than to tell off his endless string of well-wishers and worriers. 

What would he say to Aymeric? A quiet word? A smile? She can’t imagine what it would look like on that face. She tries to imagine him saying any of the thousand indelible curses she’s heard him utter, from that mouth, and can’t. She tries to imagine his glare and can’t do that either. Her time as a spy was inglorious and short-lived, but back when she'd still entertained thoughts of betraying Aymeric, Estinien was a point of terror. She'd wondered why the illustrious Azure Dragoon, ever-armored, bothered with a petty officer of the Temple Knights like Aymeric, and wondered if he could smell the disloyalty on her like a dragon sniffing out blood. 

But then she'd heard Aymeric on one of his swooping schemes for Ishgard and thought she might understand why Estinien cared for him so. 

Or was it that he simply cared for Ishgard? 

"On your travels with him, did he say anything?" Lucia asks the boy, mostly to distract him from his own tears, which have been coming in proximity to Estinien’s body, quietly, softly, just at the edges of his eyes. It's been a challenge to keep a rotating schedule between Aymeric's quiet lovelorn vigil and Alphinaud's anguished silence where they won't get in the way of each other. Really, it's a whole spectrum of mourning—and the man isn't even dead yet. In fact, he twitched the day before while Aymeric was wiping clean his brow—clean of what?—and she'd thought it might overturn the entire schedule.

Alphinaud wipes his eyes on his fine sleeves. "Rarely. He mostly made fun of me for not knowing how to set a cookfire or keep briars out of my boots." She has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing at the very concept of the perennial beggar at Aymeric's table knowing more about cooking than Alphinaud, but then the boy rubs at his cheek with one sleeve, almost angry. "He did speak of peace. I think he would be proud of the Lord Commander. Of all of us. Of what Ishgard will become." 

The if he were here to see it is nearly whispered at the last and it almost undoes her.

She feels a sort of companionship with the body in the bed, the two of them forced to bear silent witness to all the folly of man that has played out in this room. But of course, he hasn't really had to do more than sleep and look beautiful and tragic. It's hard not to be a bit resentful, on principle. Without passion or judgment she traces back over his unlined face, over the small, dark mouth, and high cheekbones, up to his eyes, still closed in perfect sleep—

No, not perfect. His eyes are moving behind his lids, trapped in some dream. If she reached out and slapped him, he’d open his eyes, almost certainly, but she can’t bring herself to do it in front of the boy.

Alphinaud follows her gaze and bursts into tears once more.

It still takes him a day to wake. Even then, he wakes only long enough for a short conversation she hears second-hand, between the Warrior, the boy, and Aymeric. By all appearances it will be a long recovery with time enough for Aymeric to get his fill of Estinien as captive audience—but as in all things, Estinien delights in bucking expectations.

The thing wrong with him, she decides later, standing beside Aymeric as they both stare down at the carefully made and very much empty sickbed, is that he's a good man. 

A worse one would play off the renown of a defunct position as head dragonslayer in a city no longer interested in slaying anything and live out all his days in blissful peace. An even slightly less than good one would at least stick around for the free food and good company, but no.

She can't make out a single word of the illegible note—is it even in common?—that he's left on the pillow but Aymeric stares at it a long time before he says anything, fingering the edge of it until it's all feathered and bent.

"I knew he would do this," he says at last. Not with regret, or anger, or even simple, selfish disappointment, but almost with pride. If only he looked a little less like someone had torn his heart out, too. 

"Did he say where he's gone?" 

"No. Only to make things right."

What right? As if Ishgard safe wasn't enough. As if giving up half of one's life and almost the rest of it too wasn't enough. And yet Aymeric sounds nothing but fond. They really are a match made in some sort of heaven.

She tries for optimism. "He'll be back."

"No," Aymeric says after a tight breath he can't mean for her to hear. "I don't think he will."

And that's just morose thinking, except that he might have a point. A man bent on fixing all that's wrong with their world would never find rest in it. Garleans are made of more pragmatic stuff. Honor never before reason and often well after that. Maybe that's why she stayed, for all their hard-bit Ishgardian honor, but there are moments she can't help but wish for some of that selfishness. It would make life easier. Far easier than watching this.  

Aymeric folds the note once, and then over again and tucks it into the hidden folds of his black tunic. Without another word, he leaves, and for once he leaves no orders in his wake. Not even a goodbye, for courtesy's sake, and the chirurgeon's assistants still in the room watch him go, darting looks between themselves. She forgets how intimidating he can be, something about his brow and the quirk of his mouth. If only they knew.

"Sir, what shall we do with the armor?" one of them asks, motioning to the discarded Drachen mail piled against the wall. 

"Don't throw it away. The Commander will want it." 

Lucia takes the red-stained helm in hand—gloved hand—with a care that's at least half disgust. "To remember the sacrifices we all have made to end this war," she mutters which is at least better than the truth that Aymeric will likely spend some minutes staring at it and then some minutes more, later, doing the same, when he thinks no one is watching. Perhaps sigh at it.

She already feels a headache coming on.

He does just that, it turns out. He also holds the thing up to stare into its hollow visage deeply, at length, and then taps his forehead to it and murmurs some indistinguishable nothings.

It might be a bit more serious than she bargained for.

Love and war rarely meet under best circumstances. She's seen it a hundred times, in a hundred different forms. The obsessive, fanatical affection her sister had for Gaius. The little crush every other new recruit has for the Lord Commander, convinced it's something real. Haurchefant and the Warrior of Light, a great burning thing, growing each day, extinguished before it could really catch. That isn't this.

This is a settling down kind of love. This is an end of the day, heads together over some secret confidence, thigh-to-thigh and breath-to-breath kind of love that you take for granted because it's become so ingrained it seems merely a part of them both—and it hurts to watch. Maybe once Aymeric knew it for what it was, but too long spent pretending it was nothing, and the lie became the truth. And now a man who could march into the seat of Ishgard’s power to confront his bastard of a father with a thousand-year lie can't brave up the will to fight for something he wants only for himself.

There is no word from Estinien after his exit. They hear from the Warrior that he might have been to Azys Lla for god knows what reason. A journey of redemption, just as Aymeric said, and well. If he wanted redemption, he might start by coming home and pulling Aymeric from his window-vigils. He seems to think Estinien will appear in mid-air or perched on some distant rooftop, though when she asks, he only says in his low-sweet voice that he's surveying the horizon. 

Surveying the horizon. Gods spare them all.

Weeks turn to a month, and then they receive a small missive scribbled in hieroglyphic handwriting via moogle or flying bird or dragon. Lucia isn't there for the arrival; only the aftermath. 

"He's alive," Aymeric tells her and almost breaks on the word, the note the only object on his desk. "I am… relieved."

"Did you think otherwise?"

"Of him? No. His last will be so spectacular, no doubt we'll feel the tremors of it even here." But for all that he's smiling, it's only faint, and his eyes are lined, as if he really does wait for the rumble of a distant storm to prove him right. And if this is him with Estinien absent, she doesn't want to see him with Estinien dead. There would be a statue. She can see it now, towering over the Firmament in spiked glory, and none would ever know that what lay under that carved helmet was the face of some lordling's porcelain doll. 

Oh, the dolls. Wind-up dolls… Dress-up dolls… Maybe an official painting that would stare at her every time she walked into Aymeric's office. To honor him, he would say in his finest voice, and she would have to find new employ on principle. 

It's been, she realizes suddenly, too much of this. She owes him something. For all the trust he has in her, for all the faith, she owes this man the truth. 

"We are honest with each other," she says. Not a question, but Aymeric shifts and nods. 

"Always."

"Then I would like you to consider what I am about to say. Deeply."

He nods once more, but it's wary. She tries to think of a tactful way to say what needs to be said and comes up empty-handed. Pretty words were never her province, so goes simply with, "You are in love with him."

Aymeric frowns, opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again to say, "With whom?" 

"Estinien."

To his credit, he doesn't balk nor make for the window. In fact, he seems to find it funny. He shakes his head and waves his hand. "No, no. Love?" He shakes his head once more, the mere concept ridiculous apparently. "I love him, yes, but as a friend. As a brother. In arms. I love him as all Ishgardians love their fellows." He's on a roll. Gearing up to a full speech. 

She quirks an eyebrow at him, and he bulls ahead. 

"Ah, perhaps not all, but—no." He stands from his desk. "I would know. We have been together all these long, long years, through all hardship." He pushes a hand through his hair. "One of us would know." 

Now he's pacing, slowly, in circles. They bring him round until he's at the window, his usual sighing spot, and there on the mantle sits Estinien's helm. For a moment he stares at it, perhaps remembering what she's remembering: how he dragged his fingers across it this very morning, murmuring his worries to someone that was not there. He pushes his hand back through his hair, mussing it until it looks the way he sounds: in absolute chaos. "I don't—I worry for him. I care for him. I do not wish to see him in pain. His happiness is our happiness, for all he has sacrificed." 

This, he seems to think, is some checkmate on it, some perfect argument. As if anyone else in Ishgard gives a rat's furry ass about Estinien Wyrmblood's happiness. As if anyone else is keeping his bloody Drachen mail oiled and set up on a stand in a private room on his estate.

She stares at him, unphased, and waits for all of this to sink in. Aymeric is many things but stupid is not one of them, for all her private ribbing.

And then he turns to her and works his mouth in silence until he can find his words.

"Oh, Halone," he whispers. "Do you think he knows?"

Isn't that the question.

The problem with loving Estinien—as one soldier loves another, by course—is that he's almost never there. If he were, maybe Aymeric could preoccupy himself with typical struggles, like fighting himself to find the words that will keep Estinien at his side a moment longer, worrying that every stolen glance might be the one that gives him away, and wondering if he'd really caught a glimpse of Estinien's eyes through the visor of his helmet or if it was just another trick of the light.

Three months to the day since he last saw a hair on Estinien's head. Is he eating right? Doubtful, Aymeric thinks, recalling every sit-down dinner he managed to cajole Estinien into over the years and the careless heap of any and all greenery left behind on his plate. Is he sleeping well? This, too, is unlikely, for how many nights did Aymeric crawl out of his tent in the early hours to find Estinien still seated by the company fire, light catching in his pale hair, a vision in the night? Or out on watch, perched somewhere high. How many cliffs did Aymeric scale to bring him the last of dinner? How many times did he grab Estinien's shirt along with his own when they had a few free hours to do mending and wash? How many times did Estinien appear back in camp at the end of a long day, brace of rabbits in hand to wordlessly hand to Aymeric to make something edible out of. They had it down to a fine art.

The reality is this: he doesn't need Estinien. They were ever self-sufficient friends—and yet, he wants. If only for a quiet conversation or the passing of a look or even his crude, naked honesty. 

All of this burns in him, a low flame, so used to its confines that it never tries to spill over and set him to distraction. It's only enough to keep him inexplicably warm, because it is warm and any heat is a blessing in the city of eternal winter. The Warrior is gone to some place too far off to ; the Firmament is half-built, and all is quiet, so he can allow himself this much, he thinks.

The small, precious distraction of knowing that somewhere else in the world stands another with just the smallest thread to keep them tied. Perhaps Estinien is leaping off some building at that very moment, swooping in for a grave rescue. Finding another gallant half-dead hero to drag to Aymeric's doorstep. 

A faint hope lives in him that this place at least is still a home to Estinien. That after long days, when his journey wearies him, it's Ishgard's spires he dreams of, and that if all else failed him, it's Ishgard he would return to. Sometimes when he returns to the manor, the suit of red drachen mail in the sitting room catches the corner of his eye and he almost starts. A specter, to mock him, but self-inflicted.

"Forgive me, Lord Commander," Francel says. "You seem distracted." 

Aymeric starts, and remembers ago at once he's not in his office but surrounded by people—who are trying to pretend they aren’t watching their Lord Commander and Speaker of the House of Lords stare into the middle distance like an idiot. Francel’s smile is politely concerned. He sounds genuine with the question, like he really would save this tour of the rebuilding efforts for another time to spare Aymeric—as if either of their schedules allow for that. Workers and newcomers, move around them, children playing at tossing snow and crossing blades. One even has a bow and seems to be trying to shoot down the snowballs his friends lob at him.

It's been so long since Ishgard felt so alive. Aymeric nods to Francel, chagrined. "Apologies. It's all… a bit overwhelming."

Francel smiles. He looks like a boy in a Lord's clothes with that expression. "It is, isn't it?" 

They've touched up the stonework, added a few beds of the spare flowers that can still survive Ishgard's perpetual winter, and started on the larger houses. At night, Ishgard looks like a jewel clinging to the mountainside, and now it feels like one, too. It feels alive. for a moment the little yearning that’s worked its way into Aymeric’s center eases. He is proud, and when Estinien returns, he will be, too. 

“As I was saying, about the statues...” Francel prompts.

"Statues?" Aymeric asks, keeping one eye on the snowballs that keep getting lobbed nearly past his head. Their aim leaves something to be desired, though the boy with the bow seems to be improving, even with his poor stance. Maybe he would appreciate a few tips.

"Yes. There were suggestions that we might make a monument to Lord Haurchefant, perhaps. Or the Azure Dragoon.”

The screaming of children playing nearby is almost enough to make that thought not bite. As if he could walk through this city with a statue of Estinien staring down at him from every angle.

“Lord Fortemps must be consulted, but I think it would make a fine gesture.” He sidesteps another poorly aimed ball of snow, politely ignoring the way Francel’s eyes seem to have gone the slightest bit bright.

Francel bows his head. “I thought—maybe we ought to ask the Warrior as well, just to see. I know it’s not much, all told, but—” 

Aymeric reaches out and lays a hand on his shoulder, and hopes the gesture is overly familiar. “You’ve done well. I cannot imagine how I would have managed half as much in twice the time. Truly—you honor all of us. And Haurchefant as well.” 

And now they are both pretending Francel is not crying as the happy chaos of the new city moves around him. Gods, what he would give for Estinien at his shoulder, for a quiet comment or a careful word to put it all in perspective and his heart to rest. 

That is the very last clear thought he has before something hits him low in the stomach.

He jerks and stares down to see if it’s a snowball or a rock and a snowball and finds himself staring at the feathered end of an arrow shaft, which is sticking out of his stomach, because of course it is. Francel follows his gaze, and lets out with a tiny sound of shock. It’s the opposite side of where he was stabbed, at least, and that’s something, but it still feels—

"Not again," Aymeric murmurs. Already the sound of blood rushing through his head is numbingly loud and his vision is spotting from the pain his nerves haven’t registered yet. It’s unfair, is what it is. It’s silly. This is something Estinien would berate him for—can’t you wear armor over your chest? a voice in Aymeric’s head mocks.

Slowly, the low din of noise around he and Francel quiets as one by one people turn to stare at the scene he’s making: Francel, hands over his mouth, and Aymeric trying very hard to decide how long he can feasibly remain standing with an arrow bolt inside him. "Good shot," he thinks to tell the boy, who is clutching his bow with both hands, his face whiter than the snow around them. 

Everyone is white as snow, actually. Aymeric himself is probably white as snow, too, if only because stomach wounds are rarely as pleasant as one might imagine, even the second time around.

Not pleasant at all. His vision is swimming. "Well," he says to no one in particular, though Lucia is suddenly right in front of him, along with three others of the Temple Knights. Handeloup had the day off to spend with his daughter—he’ll be so cross at being called in to take command for the night for something so foolish. Lucia’s eyes flick down to the arrow, to the shine spreading out across his dark tunic like ink spilled. A damn inconvenience is what it is. The crowd around them is the deathly silent of those who haven't yet figured out how to react, but there are whispers starting, prayers and despairing sounds.

"It's not so bad," Aymeric says for the benefit of everyone in earshot. "I do have armor on." 

Well, on the shoulders and legs and arms. His point is undercut as he dabs at the edge of the spreading stain and his hand comes away dark with blood. It's not... great. He wipes it off on his cloak and turns to Francel, who looks like he might be about to cry.

"Perhaps we might continue this at a later date."

Francel nods frantically and Aymeric carefully, gracefully, with all the composure his years of training can abide, walks his way back to the gates of the Firmament. This is part of the growing pains of leadership, he tells himself. These are the simple mistakes one will make when an entire nation’s worth of responsibilities are placed upon one’s shoulders. Nothing but growing pains, he thinks faintly. 

Maybe it’s best Estinien isn’t here to watch his inglorious rule after all.

Chapter Text

Ishgard has changed. Gone are the piles of rubble that marked Foundation, the scrimped up fourth-hand boards nailed everywhere to keep the city from falling apart and taking unaware citizens with it, the masses of starving with their hollow eyes. They are still there, all of it is, but it's better than it was. A quick walk through the Crozier shows a dozen new merchants and new wares all around. Fruit only sold in Gridania and Ala Mhigo. Clothes and jewels that once would have been laughable in Ishgard's markets even a year past, for who could afford to buy them?

The people are filling out, and the city with them, and the sight does something to him, twists something just behind his ribs, like longing. It’s been too long—and, somehow, not long enough.

He stops at a bright stall of fruits and flowers and buys a spray of blooms tied with a ribbon the shade of blue that reminds him of Aymeric's eyes, because this is the sort of sentimental gesture Aymeric has always appreciated and maybe Estinien feels… not guilty, but contrite, for leaving without a word and staying gone so long.

The seller is a Hyur man who couldn’t look more out of place in cold Ishgard with his bright silks. Estinien is weighing the logic of bringing a peace offering of exotic apples, too, when the man tires of his silence. "New to the city?" he asks.

Estinien grunts. It used to be he could get away with even less, because who could argue with a suit of armor? But now the man can see his eyes and some modicum of social skill is required. 

"Well, good. Best keep to yourself,” the man offers, unasked, and leans forward. "The Temple Knights have been a bit… on edge since the recent incident." He does a poor job of pretending like he doesn't want to be asked for details.

Estinien grunts again, weighing fruit hand to hand. Was it the redder they are, the sweeter? Does Aymeric like apples? No, he does. Or, he did, back when they were new to the Knights, and Estinien had found a tree with a decent haul, before the frost had come to Ishgard, and when he tossed one to the dark-haired boy that followed him here and there, Aymeric had taken it like it was the best meal he'd seen in weeks—though Estinien had shared a rabbit with him just the day before. 

"Yes, it was terrible business. Terrible," the merchant says and pauses. 

Estinien sighs to himself. “What?”

"Oh, you haven’t heard? The Lord Commander stabbed in the street—again!"

The fruit in Estinien's hand falls to the cobblestone street with a wet sound. "Stabbed?"

The merchant leans over the stall to stare after the fruit, frowning. "You'll have to pay for—"

"Stabbed?" Estinien repeats, ready to grab him by the lapels of his velveteen jacket. "Again?" The word tears out of him and the merchant flinches from head to toe. 

"On second thought, those are on me, never you mind—and yes, again. Where've you been?"

East. Garlemald. Possessed by a dragon and still picking scales off his arm. Diving into facilities built by those bent on decimation more than rule with the prayer that he might stave some of it off in time for the real heroes to arrive. But he doesn't reply. The nearest aetheryte is a minute's walk, but he might make it in half the time if he went quickly, and he's good at that. From there it's only a sprint to the Congregation. Not that they'll recognize him like this, but the spear strapped to his back will be convincing enough, one way or another. 

Stabbed—again. Again? Estinien will have his hide, if aught remains of Aymeric to take it from. 

A slide of something oily and almost forgotten settles into his gut. That anger, that feral rage at the prospect of loss and the need to sate it on someone or something, because there was always somewhere to throw blame, but now he reads it for what it is. Guilt, in full. He is angry at Aymeric for being fool enough to let down his guard twice and furious at whoever let it happen, livid at the one who did it, but the larger share is for himself. The why wasn't I told is easily answered. How could they have? And Aymeric was never one to worry him about the little things like a hole in his gut. Too busy being quietly, elegantly stoic.

He does make it to the Congregation in half the time, every breath between coming harder and shallower, like his lungs have forgotten how to breathe the cold. Just as he's weighing the value of a jump against his dignity and the hassle of dealing with the guards at the Congregation door, a familiar face steps outside, flanked to either side by Temple Knights who all three look like they last got sleep several days ago.

"Lucia!"

Her eyes light on him. Recognition flickers across her face and then it clouds like a storm over the Hinterlands. "Oh," she says, sounding like nothing so much as someone picking a bug off their plate. "It's you."

His feet slow against his will, as if sensing that walking into the maw of this beast might be inadvisable. 

"We tried to send word," she says when he's close enough that she doesn't have to shout. "Imagine my surprise when the Scions had no notion where you might be and that you hadn’t picked up your linkpearl in weeks." She doesn't sound like it was a surprise at all, rather she sounds tired and more than a little peeved, and now Estinien's anger is melting away, leaving naught but a low fear.

"He's all right?" 

The question comes out more a plea and her face softens a bit. "Just a... minor wound. He's still in bed and fighting every moment of it." She nods to the doors, toward the infirmary, and it's all the permission he needs to push past her and the bewildered guards who clearly haven’t recognized him at all.

“Good luck,” she shouts after him, and something after that’s clipped by the heavy doors slamming shut behind him. The guard at the stairs jumps when he realizes Estinien is headed toward him. He gives the guard a look hopes brooks no argument, but as the man sees Nidhogg strapped to his back he seems to decide it’s not worth it and steps aside.

There are more guards present than ought be in an infirmary, a fact Estinien notes with growing anxiety as he mounts the stairs outside the great doors of the room he’s spent more than his share of time in. At least the infirmary staff seem to remember him—they’re coming out of the room just as he’s ready to push his way inside, and Abel simply notes his presence with the quirk of a brow that seems to say, Where have you been?

Aymeric is propped up in bed behind him, lined in afternoon light. His bed robe is open at the front, revealing the wrap of bandages across his midriff. He looks up at the sound of the door opening, or at the grunt of surprise and rage that Estinien makes half by accident, and the sheaf of papers in his hands slip to the bed. One hand is wrapped in bandages, too, and Estinien can nearly see the moment in his mind’s eye—Aymeric gripping the blade in his gut and pulling it free with his own strength. The fool. The utter idiocy.

Estinien walks with what he feels are measured steps, to stand beside the bed, hands fists at his side, as Aymeric watches his approach the way he might once have watched a dragon's looming shadow.

"I've told you a thousand times,” Estinien says with a roughness to his voice he can barely speak over, “that armor is worthless if it doesn't cover your damn vitals. No one is trying to stab your shoulders, boy."

Aymeric gapes at him. "Boy? Boy—we're the same age."

Estinien folds his arms. "You're still a boy if you wear armor that's no better than a child’s dress up clothes."

"It's traditional."

"What part of the tradition is getting stabbed in the stomach, repeatedly? I don't recall."

"I was not stabbed.” Aymeric busies himself reordering the papers into a neat pile on his lap. “Twas merely a... misadventure in archery.” Absently, he flexes his bandaged hand. “And splinters, I suppose.”

"You were shot? In the city?"

That’s different, but Estinien can’t decide if it’s better or worse than the brazenness of a broad-daylight stabbing. Assassination from afar is something else, and yet if the dragoons still have purpose in this city, to keep watch on the skies must be it. He’s formulating the outlines of the shouting he wants to do when Aymeric gives him a withering glance. 

"By accident. The boy had an incredible draw for his age."

"You were shot by a child? And you still tell me you don’t need proper armor?”

Aymeric's mouth works uselessly. It's his most devastating tool, nigh as deadly as his blade the way his lips curl at the corners in some secret, constant amusement, never mind his voice, but it fails him now. "My apologies, we cannot all wear a full suit of drachen metal to every social engagement."

And yes. He may have a fine voice and finer words, but he's never had Estinien's penchant for arguing, and Estinien has little shame left and never had the grace to not play dirty. A seat is propped against the wall; Estinien pulls it up next to the bed and sits as Aymeric watches him with one eye, wary.

For a moment he lets himself study Aymeric—all the little newnesses, and everything that hasn’t changed from when they were barely more than boys. He still has that same intensity to his gaze, that makes every person in turn feel as if they are the only object in the room worth looking at. It settles over Estinien like a familiar weight, and he lets out a sigh of breath he didn’t realize had been waiting to escape. It’s more than half relief. 

"I have a spare set you could borrow, though it was none too clean last I checked." And there's an image—Aymeric's fine form in the svelte gold on black of the traditional dragoon armor. 

"No.” Aymeric smooths the sheets with one hand and says primly, “I have a spare set, which my dear friend left on the floor of the infirmary, and which I am keeping for him, should he require it again.” When he looks down, his hair falls over his forehead. It’s longer than it was when last they met, starting to curl at the ends the way it only ever threatened to when they were younger. The urge to take a lock of it between his fingers and see if it’s as soft as it was then is almost overwhelming in the moment. 

He reaches out and fingers the edge of the bandage instead. Aymeric flinches at the touch. 

"It hurts?"

Aymeric shakes his head. "Not the least. It'll come off in a few days, and I no worse for the wear." 

"...This is the second time."

"Ah. Who told you?" 

Estinien lets a grim smile set his mouth. "A foreign man in the market. To my great surprise. Twice, really? Was the first a child as well?" 

“No, not quite. A minor assassination attempt, I think—his heart wasn’t really in it.” Aymeric waves it off. “And besides, that was long ago, before you were returned to us." 

A beat passes as this information absorbs. He was not lost to Nidhogg long enough for Aymeric to suffer a wound dire enough to be called an assassination attempt and yet singlehandedly haul a near-dead dragoon back to Ishgard in his arms. They're of a height, and Estinien is heavy—was, even after all Nidhogg's rage had burnt away of him.  Estinien's throat closes in stale emotion, dread long passed its prime.

"When you carried me back to the city, you were hurt?" It's not a real question. Something is leaping about at just the edge of his ken, some truth yet to be realized. 

"Not—no. It was well healed by then." 

A lie. A bald one, at that, and Aymeric is so painfully honest. All his cunning lies in the dignity of his position, his intelligence and unflinching honor, but he wears his every thought on his sleeve when his guard is down and it's always down when it's the two of them. He could not lie to Estinien for all the gold in Saint Reymanaud's Cathedral. This is so like him. If someone told him the only way to win the Dragonsong War was to feed himself on a platter to Nidhogg he'd have called the cook and the butcher both and tipped both for their time. It makes something in him uncurl from its long sleep and begin to rage.

Estinien's hand fists in the sheets between them. "You idiotic—" He bites off the curse and leans closer, making every word count. "I'll not lose you. Not to some halfwit fool with a knife in the damned street. Not to a boy with a—a toy bow. And not to your own stubbornness. Already have I wasted half my life seeking mad revenge. Already have I lived with a dragon's rage for his dead love coursing through my veins, like fire. I'll not do it again."

Aymeric's blue eyes widen. His lovely mouth falls open, but no smooth response, no disarming quip falls from it. And then Estinien, for perhaps the first time in his life, is obliged to repeat his own words back to himself in his head.

Comparing himself to Nidhogg and Aymeric to Ratatoskr. A perfectly adequate way to refer to one's friend. A perfectly normal thought. A perfectly wonderful sentiment to express aloud, to said friend, inches from his face. He closes his eyes in private despair.

"It was but a metaphor," Aymeric offers him, voice pitched oddly. "I understand, my friend."

But it wasn't. It wasn't a metaphor at all and Estinien is perhaps the last person in Ishgard one would accuse of such a thing. The truth is that the thought of Aymeric gone is a black pit in his mind. If he has a family, if anyone could qualify, it's Aymeric. His oldest friend, his quiet companion, and all of Ishgard's good luck. If he had died in the Vault to the Knights' tortures, no force in the nation could have held Estinien's rage at bay. What use saving Ishgard if the city killed the best hope it had? Nidhogg could have taken his mind on a whim at the rage of that, at the grief. Estinien would have let him.

"It was not a metaphor."

Aymeric blinks at him, those eyes like nothing so much as Ishgard’s sky on a blue morning like they haven’t seen in years. His mouth falls open as he searches Estinien’s face. Years of looking at him through a helmet have spoiled Estinien for the number of chances he's had to lazily trace the line of Aymeric's mouth and let it mean nothing. 

And then Aymeric's face is closer than it was, and his eyes wider, and Estinien's mind goes in two directions at once as he realizes what he's doing—because Aymeric isn't the one moving and the part of him that has survived all his years on action and instinct cannot live in this room another second without knowing what Aymeric's perfect mouth feels like pressed to his own. It's not a new thought—not a new desire—but he only realizes it in that moment as the cup of his want finally runs over and almost ruins everything.

Many times and at length he's reminded Aymeric of the utter foolishness of ordering Nidhogg's eyes tossed into the abyss, and just as often wondered at the prospect of Aymeric de Borel panicking himself into that particular flavor of idiocy—what a spectacle it must have made. Now, understanding dawns. He panics and the hand that was reaching up to cup Aymeric’s cheek with only half his awareness instead grabs Aymeric by the back of his head and pulls him down and his mouth settles not on Aymeric’s lips but amid the fly-away curls covering his forehead.

He pulls back, mouth burning from even that—from nothing, from the hint of warm skin, from what he almost did. Aymeric is staring at him as if he really has grown horns at last. 

Estinien stands so fast the chair screeches against the floor. "Don't run into any more knives until I return,” he orders, and then makes what is at least his second or third most graceless retreat from the room, after every time in training he jumped off a cliff by accident. Maybe worse, even, than that.

Aymeric doesn't say a word.

"If someone—if a friend were to—" Aymeric pauses, hums a sound of confusion, and finishes, "Well, no. It can't be. I just can't sort it." 

The headache that started the moment she caught sight of pale hair and a red spear—and why the spear? Why now, when there are no dragons left to fight?—redoubles its efforts. "What did he do?" She can be forgiven if it comes across just a bit protective. Leave it to Estinien to appear from thin air for the first time in an age, do something that has Aymeric looking at his hands like he doesn't recognize himself, and disappear again in a veritable breeze.

"He—well. He touched my forehead with his mouth. I can't decide…" he trails off, now staring at the window, and with the peak of his bandages under the jacket draped around his shoulders, he looks younger than he has in some time. 

She notes this as she tries to sort his words into a language she recognizes. "Mouth? He—kissed you?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." He taps his forehead. "Just here."

"He kissed you." She's simply trying to make the words work. Trying to imagine a reality in which Estinien even knows that the concept of a kiss exists is another thing entirely.

"No!" Aymeric says more forcefully, frustration starting to color his face. For a moment it looks like he'll stand from the bed; Lucia takes a step forward and he sits back immediately, cowed. "No. It wasn't like that." 

The cool rationality in his voice would be more convincing if the fingers against his lips weren't shaking, and well. Maybe this is just the chance she’s needed to put them all out of their misery.

Chapter Text

Precisely three steps outside the Congregation's doors, with his hands shaking and his heart beating in his chest like a war drum, a blur of white descends on him. 

The thing about dragons, and baby dragons perhaps in particular, is that they are large, and the part of him trained from childhood to recognize the flash of scale against the sun and to pick the acrid scent of their fire from the slightest breeze reaches for his lance on instinct. It's only Orn Khai, but it's the first time he's seen the dragonling since they entered the city and he flew off to "see the sights" before Estinien could do as much as warn him that not all Ishgard was quite so tolerant to the change in the status quo as Estinien. Though it probably would have done nothing but earn him a laugh given the hundred or so times Estinien threatened him with immediate slaying on their long, long boat ride from the East.

Estinien wheels on him and reconsiders drawing his lance after all. "Where in the seven hells have you been? I told you to stay close soon as we reached the Shroud."

Orn Khai ignores his tone and wheels around in a flourish. "Exploring!"

Exploring Ishgard, the city of barely reformed dragonslayers. That's perfect. Estinien is treated to a vision of Orn Khai fluttering around the Brume, playing in the snow with children, unheeding of the angry mob of pitchfork wielding parents about to skewer him into dragonet kabobs. "I told you—the people of Ishgard are not like those of the East. They still fear your kind."

Orn Khai sticks his tongue out.  A gesture he picked up from one of the lalafell Scions no doubt, most likely the one with the ridiculous ears on her hood. Estinien closes his eyes and tries to will himself to patience. Far easier to slay a dragon than try to protect one, and if anyone had told him as a Temple Knight that one day he would be playing nursemaid to a dragonet ten times his age, he might have quit then and there and struck out for a life as an onion farmer. The money was good, he heard, and maybe Aymeric could have been convinced to go into business with him. Less stabbings in onion farming, surely. 

"Is he your mate?" 

Estinien nods absently and then realizes what's been asked. "No!"

"I was watching. Through the window." The clarification isn't strictly necessary. 

"He's a friend."

"Oh, good. I don't want to watch you mate. I was worried when you touched him. Human mating is so messy." The dragon opens his mouth and makes a growl that Estinien realizes is him gagging. Which is fair, but he's seen dragons mate and it's not much better. 

"You weren't invited," Estinien mutters. It's too close to the feeling he's been trying to outpace since he left the Congregation. Now he picks an aimless direction and starts walking, as if that's going to spare him further questions. Orn Khai flits up beside him with a single flap of his wings. 

"Did he like your gift? When my sire was courting Faunehm he brought her a beast from the wild. One of the great efts that dwells in the river. Or so I've heard."

Oh, gods, the flowers. Estinien looks down at his pocket where the bouquet is wilting dejectedly. They were a sorry offering anyway, he consoles himself. "I doubt he has room for an eft," he mutters. Or anything else, as if Estinien could afford it, as if he isn't nearly on his last gil between keeping himself and Orn Khai fed and housed, to say nothing of the cost of their slow passage back to Ishgard. No one is as impressed with a dragon here as they were in Kugane and rather more inclined to charge double than half.

"What about a karakul?" 

"No." Estinien glances at him, appraising. "But maybe he'd find use for a dragonet. They're working on rebuilding the Firmament, I hear—how are you at carrying loads?" From experience and the pack waiting in their room in the Forgotten Knight, stuffed to the brim with Orn Khai's favorite odds and ends, he's not much fond of carrying anything at all. "And I am not courting him." Even the thought is laughable. Him, courting anyone. The conversation came up now and again around the fire when they were young in the rare cases he wasn't fast enough to escape as soon as the wind of conversation moved in that direction, and  it was foreign to him as tales of far-off Ilsabard and Sharlayan. No one would have him for the courting, and all he longed for was blood beside.

He pauses at the edge of the city, where there is nothing in the distance but snow fields and mist. How ominous it once seemed—how hopeless. Anything could hide there in wait. It tormented his dreams when he’d made Azure Dragoon, and for a solid year he was happy for the helm that hid the bruises under his eyes when his nights were full of dreams of destruction befalling what little he had left. This was why Aymeric made such an amiable companion. Estinien fought for the past, for what had been stolen from him and might be stolen again, and Aymeric fought for the future, for the possibility of what Ishgard could become when the killing was done. The ends differed but the means made them kindred. And he never asked Estinien about his future spouse, either way.

He could not imagine courting for some quiet life with a spouse to tend a happy home and children, but he could imagine someone at his back in blood and fire. That he had already.

Orn Khai is still prattling on about courting gifts by the time they've circled back and are staring at the doors of the Forgotten Knight. Estinien braces himself as he pushes open the doors. The streets are abandoned enough by evening that no one can mind the odd pair they make, but that’s only because the cold outside is unbearable. The din from inside the inn is audible even at the stairs.

It silences the moment Estinien and Orn Khai descend and enter sight. Even a baby dragon is hard to miss. Should have gone around the back and jumped to the balcony, he realizes as the patrons' faces cross the spectrum from enraptured to enraged. It's early in the night, but not so early that one table isn't already on what must be their third round—one man seems to notice them a moment after the rest and then starts and stands from his chair so fast it goes clattering to the floor behind him. His two companions rise with him, hands already on their blades. Wonderful.

"You best go back the way you came," the man starts in what must be his most threatening voice. It's dimmed a bit by the errant slur, but it gets the point across. 

Estinien loosens his stance. His spear is on his back, but he doesn’t reach for it. It won't do to start skewering drunks in the city's favorite tavern. "No. I don't think I will."

The man's face scrunches in rage or confusion. "That—that thing can't be in here. Get out."

"He paid for his room same as you." Estinien moves to step past him. Actually, Estinien paid, but that's how it always goes. The things he's done to keep them both in house and feed... "Don't do this," he adds, and it comes out exactly as tired as he feels and then some.

It doesn't work. 

The man takes a stumbling step toward him, and if every eye in the place hadn't been on him before that, they are now. He has no weapon in hand, but fists hurt, too. He's Roegadyn, and bigger around than Estinien by far. The man sizes him up like an ox ready to charge, but twice as stupid with his eyes dulled by the drink. 

When he finally moves, it's with surprising speed. Estinien steps out of his way and the man goes tripping past before he corrects his course and goes again. It's awkward, terrible, the absolute apex of his day. 

On his next sidestep, he positions himself so at least the man will be headed away from Orn Khai, who is watching along with the rest of the patrons in utter fascination instead of leaving like he should be. The fighting prowess of the legendary Azure Dragoon, Estinien thinks to himself dully, as he raises his hand to deliver a blow to the back of the man's head that will end this. 

He misses the woman entirely.

Unlike her companion, she doesn't telegraph what she's going to do before she does it. The flash of a dagger at the corner of his eye is his only warning as she pulls back her hand for a throw. It would be an easy thing to dodge, even so—but she's not aiming at him at all. Her eyes are on Orn Khai.

Even young dragons are big. Even young dragons are a wide target, and his scales are not like those of some ancient wyrm. He can be cut. He can be killed.

"Orn Khai!" Without thought but with enough forethought to brace himself for the oncoming pain he dodges in front of Orn Khai. Stupid, he thinks as he does it  and stupid again a moment later when he sees the woman decide the throw is still worth it. Time slows. Aymeric will never let him live this one down—

"Enough."

He was so focused on the blade, he missed the other player in the room. The damaged leg doesn't slow Gibrillont down, and leave it to the owner of the oldest tavern in Ishgard to know how to stop a fight before it can start destroying property. He has the woman's hand in death grip; she flinches and the blade falls from her limp fingers. Her companion is too stunned from his fall to do more than stare blankly. The other man with them takes his chance to sit back down as if he's never seen the other two in his life.

"You fools. Do you know who that is?" Gibrillont asks and releases the woman who tears her hand back and rubs at her wrist. Her stony silence is answer enough, and Estinien wishes briefly he might do anything to stay Gibrillont from his next words, but they come all the same. "That is Estinien Wyrmblood—the Azure Dragoon." He inclines his head with enough real respect in the gesture that Estinien feels a piece of himself escape down through the floorboards. 

And now the silence in the room is intent and focused. Ah, yes, the great slayer of dragons, the great protector of the realm—the man who let Nidhogg possess his very body and soul. His shoulder smarts where the eye once sat, as it does now at odd moments, and he rolls it in half a shrug and  sighs. "That title belongs to the Lord Commander now," he tells them, but the look in Gibrillont's eyes says, with apology, that it will never be so.

This reverence, he hasn't earned. He glances to Orn Khai. Though the expressions of dragons are oft hard to decipher, he would know delight anywhere. Of course, he would love this, and never mind that he narrowly avoided being made into mince dragonet moments before.

"We'll take our meal in our room," Estinien tells Gibrillont under his breath and makes his way around the mess he’s made as best he can. It's a short walk across the room to the second set of stairs that will lead outside, and he spends all of it ignoring the craning of necks and unquiet whispers that follow them. Orn Khai at least has the common courtesy to wait until they're outside and out of earshot before he twirls in midair around Estinien in a swoop that seems designed to trip him and send him over the half-rubble railing. 

"You're famous!"

"I am not." 

"Yes you are! Had I only known I traveled with such a celebrity...” It’s half in jest, but there’s admiration in it, too, as if he believed the Azure Dragoon only infamous to dragons—and that’s the distinction, isn’t it? Infamy and admiration are far distant from one another. 

Estinien wipes at his forehead to push the hair aside. His skin is hot—too hot, like it always is when he fears or angers now, a small reminder of what he briefly was. “Maybe, once. No longer.” 

No sense dwelling in the hazed past, but Orn Khai is having none of it. “They do. I saw children playing with little mammets that look just like you. You were fighting a snow dragon—which is silly. We can’t be made of snow, of course—”

"You did not." That's not even worth entertaining. Not even the thought of it. A mammet? How could Aymeric approve of something so sentimental? No. Orn Khai is mistaken.

"Tomorrow," Orn Khai promises when he sees the skepticism in Estinien’s eyes, "I'll buy you one and prove it." With what, or more specifically whose, money isn't clear. 

The excitement in his eyes leaves a bitter taste in Estinien’s mouth, but shame is a concept as far from Orn Khai as the Steppes are to them both now. "Toys and half-true stories—no. I am not their hero anymore.” If he ever was. Aymeric took the title and the duty both, a burden off his shoulders. "I cannot protect them. Not as I once did." Because protecting meant killing and vengeance and the beating thrum of anger and loss tearing at the heart of him. The vision of his lance pierced through dragon flesh, dripping viscera, the grin behind his helm, comes unbidden and he has to breathe through his nose and brace himself on the railing outside the door until the wave of nausea passes. 

If Orn Khai notices, it doesn't show. By the time Estinien fights the lock on their door open, he’s back to half-bursting with excitement and almost bowls Estinien over on the way in as he swoops to the windowsill  and stares out at the vastness of Ishgard at twilight, at the lights on the spires that seem to glitter in the cool air. "I suppose with the Azure Dragoon at my side I could get a tour of the castle, then—"

"It's a Cathedral."

"—and maybe a special audience with the Lord Commander himself. I have so many questions. Should I bring him a gift? A hat, perhaps? Do your kind wear hats?" 

What kind he could possibly be referring to is lost on Estinien—Elezen?—as is his enthusiasm, but it does bring back a fond memory of the first time he saw Aymeric attempt formal wear for some lord's gala and the sight he made in a hat and alpine jacket that nearly swamped him, as ridiculous as it was compelling, in the oddest way. 

"Why are you smiling? Are you thinking of him?" Estinien grunts and Orn Khai ducks his head slyly. “Are you quite sure you don’t want to m—”

"Do not finish that sentence."

"Oh, why be coy? We’re all adults here, after all,” he says primly, and adds under his breath, “Anyway, you're the one who kissed him."

Oh, for the love left to him. "It wasn’t a kiss!” Estinien flaps his hands at Orn Khai, waving him out the window as he does. “Out. Out!"  

Orn Khai clings to the sill indignantly. "But it is so cold outside, and I hate the cold, Estinien—Estinien, wait—”

"Your grandmother was an ice demon. You'll live."

"Shiva wasn't—"

An ice demon? His grandmother? Estinien pries his last claw free and closes the shutters, if only to gain himself a blessed few minutes of silence—a decision he immediately regrets when his own thoughts are nothing but an endless loop of Aymeric's face, getting closer, the shock-blue of his eyes and then the terrible softness of his hair and the heat of his skin, the match for it burning up Estinien’s back with a shudder as he thinks of it. Now every tryst he's borne unwilling witness to while he stood guard at the edge of camp is coming back to him.

He buries his head in one hand and prays for strength, for logic, for the incessant tapping at the window to cease for even a moment. 

When it finally does, he barely notices. It’s the knock at the door of a harried maid delivering food that pulls him from his reverie. There’s an extra portion of meat on the side that would have been unimaginable once upon a time but apparently is another sign of Ishgard’s new rise. It’s not more than Estinien can eat on his own, but Orn Khai would never forgive him. If he’s still there at all, that is. Probably off searching out trouble or deciding to test his theory that the office of the Lord Commander will be open to any stray dragonet that claims acquaintanceship with errant dragoons. Oh, god—the things he could tell Aymeric… 

Estinien flings the shutters back open, and there's not a scale in sight. "This is not the Far East!” he calls to the night. “You can't go flitting off…" He trails off in muttered curses, mentally preparing himself for a night of dragon hunting in the cold and light snow—not nearly as fun as he once found it, not after months of fair weather and temperate evenings—but then he sees the steam rising from just the other side of the lintel, and then the slight sound of claws scrabbling for purchase. 

"Get in here," he says with a sigh, “and stop talking about mates, or you really will spend the night outside.”

Orn Khai crawls back into the window, looking like nothing so much as an oversize lizard. He eyes at the plate and Estinien nods and turns away to turn down the bed to spare himself the sight of a dragonet swallowing most of a side of karakul whole. 

It's somehow not in him later to complain when he feels the ample weight of another body settle against his legs, over the sheets. Actually, it's welcome. It wasn't in Othard where he had to strip down to almost nothing to get any sleep at all in the heat and the added mass of a dragon’s wing sprawled across him only made it that much more unbearable. 

Now, it’s the oddest comfort. Maybe, on occasion, it was nice to have the company. To sit together sharing a freshly roasted meal by a fire, listening to his companion babble endlessly about dragons and they're mysterious ways. So much of his life felt like penance, but on those nights he could imagine his lance had never split the hide of a dragon, that their fire had never taken all he loved. On nights like this, even.

"Sleep well," he murmurs to the quiet.

"I still think that he might want a courting gift,” Orn Khai murmurs. “You should consider it at least—" 

"Good night, dragon."

Chapter Text

When Lucia walks into the infirmary the next morning, reports and schedule in hand, Aymeric is gone. This shouldn't be a shock—when has the man ever let something as minor as an arrow wound keep him down?—but for a moment, it is. Aymeric has been less rash in recent months, more prone to fully thinking things through. Maybe we shouldn't throw these eyes off the bridge, she imagines him saying now the fullness of experience has settled over his shoulders. Maybe that's a bad idea, come to think. Perhaps confronting my father and his band of torture knights on my own is not the best course. Why don't we all go together?

She was wrong. It isn't so much experience and it isn't so much wisdom and he hasn’t lost either. His current madness is fully a symptom of being in proximity to that dragoon.

So, with a bare nod to the chirurgeon who is taking the sheets off the bed, she about-faces. He's not in his office, because she'd have seen the signs when she walked in. The only other two options are at his manor or, in truly spectacular fashion, off at the training grounds. As soon as the thought occurs to her, she closes her eyes because yes, that has to be it. Where else would he be? He likes to swan about them at times like this, to remind everyone and maybe himself most of all that he can roll with the numerous punches that are his lot. The training grounds are one of the oldest locales in the city. Gated behind heavy cedar doors carved with griffins and swords and every other fearsome imagining, opening onto a wide arena, open and bright—and totally covered in mud. They make jokes about it, about falling in, about all the sad young temple knight trainees that must be buried in it. Usually it's frozen solid, but get enough feet on it and the mud starts flying.

Aymeric is at one corner, facing off against a guard who looks like he'd rather be facing down a dragon at the gates. It's a treat to fight the Lord Commander, but it seems the man has run the math and can't decide which is worse: accidentally putting in real effort and making Aymeric’s wounds reopen or going too easy and ending up with a mouthful of mud. 

As she watches, Aymeric lunges. He’s not using his greatsword but one of the training blades carved of wood. The man barely bothers to put up a perfunctory block and ends up on his back. Apparently the mud is the lesser evil. He stays down once he’s there, and Aymeric steps back, looking only a little disgusted. Really, what did he expect? A fair fight?

"Sir," she greets. 

They both look at her, though the guard looks exponentially happier for the distraction.

Aymeric wipes his hands on his tunic, though it seems a lost cause. For a moment she can’t figure out why he would wear white to train and then realizes it’s borrowed from the infirmary. "Oh, Lucia. I'm sorry I didn't send word."

She hopes the smile shows in her eyes. "I knew where you would be, sir. No trouble."

His expression falls when he sees what she's carrying—an accident report from the new construction, several letters of complaint about the amount of sweeping workers have been tasked with, a missive from Limsa about bean shipments or something nearly as essential.

Aymeric slips seamlessly into a bland expression, stolid duty in every line of him, and on impulse she says, “I think I can handle most of it, sir.”

“Yes, well.” He glances down at himself, at the mud and the bandages peeking out from his shirt. “I am a bit of a mess.”

She doesn't want to ask about the dragon in the room, so to speak, but it’s Aymeric who brings it up first, as he’s stripping his shirt in the small annex where spare clothes are kept and a wall of heated showers sparingly used are lined against one wall.

"I heard a story,” he murmurs.

Lucia raises an eyebrow, though she'd been trying to spare him a bit of modesty by at least averting her gaze.

"Apparently there was an incident at the Forgotten Knight. Estinien was involved. Or—a man with a lance and white hair and an attitude. I can't imagine it being anyone else." He gives a wry smile, twice as fond as it should be. And no. It certainly wouldn't be any other.

"What sort of incident?" 

"Oh, you know." He pulls on the skin-tight black undershirt that goes beneath his usual armor, shrugging. "He turned into a dragon. Summoned Nidhogg. I don't know. No one died."

"No one died," she echoes. That's something. As is the light in Aymeric's eyes. The only thing worse than Estinien being in the city is Estinien being without it, truly, for this singular reason. At least they know where he's staying. Maybe she can convince Gibrillont to hand over the keys to his room, bolt up the windows. At the minimum, she can station a guard. 

She's mentally going over which of the younger recruits she could cow into the task and pointedly not watching Aymeric pull over his legs the thin black cloth that he would probably not disagree are closer to leggings than anything else when there's a quiet clearing of a throat from the door.

And there he stands. The man himself. 

Limned in light from the door, miraculously unblooded and clean-armored, looking well-rested for perhaps the first time in their acquaintanceship. Actually, it's the third time she's seen him awake and unhelmeted, but what little she could ever see of his eyes through the armor always looked a little too dark around the edges.

"Ah, my friend. Here for a spar?” Aymeric is terrible at sounding anything but delighted in Estinien’s presence, even with those brief words. “I would be happy to oblige."

"You're out of bed?" 

Aymeric lets out a small sigh. "Yes. My legs are remarkably unaffected. Since when do you worry so?”

Estinien walks closer, and closer, and then sets his hand on Aymeric's hip, just below the bandage, thumb drawing a line over it.

Lucia shouldn't be here. 

Aymeric flinches, but doesn't turn or pull away. He meets Estinien's gaze unrelenting. They could in fact be several years married by the volume of conversation held in that look. After a moment Estinien tosses his head to one side and steps back, putting a very reasonable inch between them. Not room enough for Halone, certainly. "Since when are you so reckless?" 

"I think we've already had this conversation." Aymeric nods to the grounds outside. "No one here will give me a good fight, but you could. I really can't tempt you?" In skin-tight black cloth, the only color on him the blue flash of the bauble that hangs from his ear, still flushed and damp from the earlier exertion, he asks this. Lucia decides to count the stones in the wall beyond them both. Perhaps they need a sort of stone inventory. Yes, a counting of all the rocks in Ishgard and their current state. That sounds useful and grand. 

Estinien doesn't answer him and they stand there, the three of them, Aymeric looking very tempting and a little disappointed, Estinien looking as if he's never in his life known how to form words, Lucia trying to decide if the wall will collapse on them all. After another beat of silence, the two of them sharing a conversation she cannot and will not be privy to, she straightens and gestures with the papers in her hand toward the open door. "I should go—" But she might as well be talking to the wall for all that she’s become a part of it to the pair wrapped in whatever this is.

"Fine,” Estinien murmurs at last. “Yes. It's been too long." 

This is how she ends up spending her morning less getting anything tangible done and more watching this: the odd dance at the center of the training grounds that is Estinien and Aymeric ostensibly about to fight. She isn't alone. Anyone that was in the grounds already is stood to the side at respectful distance, and most who weren't are filing in. Rare to see the Commander in action, and rarer to see their once-protector at all. Near the door, she thinks she spots the guard knows she assigned to the Cathedral and then a familiar head of hair that is Handeloup trying not to be noticed. Hopefully someone thought to leave a skeleton guard at the entrance to the city in case Garlemald decides this is the day to deal with their western neighbor.

No—in truth, the grounds aren't all that large, and the fight not all that long. Aymeric draws first blood, and last. His movements are practiced, quick as they must be and strong with an arm used to lifting a blade five times the size of the one in his grip, though she notes he’s switched to his own short blade which she’s seen cut through solid armor. He ducks under Estinien's lance as the dragoon makes a wide sweep—too wide—and Aymeric's sword nicks just the crook of Estinien's unarmored elbow. 

Sloppy, she thinks at first, but then it happens again. 

Estinien dodges a downward blow that has Lucia flinching less for the danger to him than the way she knows it must be pulling at Aymeric's stomach, and then Estinien twists in place for a backhanded thrust that can only be meant to butt the hilt of the lance right into Aymeric's solar plexus. 

It doesn't. He aims it down and out at the last instant, right past Aymeric entirely—a novice’s clumsiness, which he is not.

Aymeric shifts into the move. He turns around it, a one-two step in the slush and mud. Faster than her eyes can follow, he flips the blade in his hand and aims it behind him, at Estinien, with a chirurgeon's precision. How he can make a sword move like a dagger is another reminder of what he is. Not some doddering politician, not the bastard son of a tyrant, not at all without his own tooth and claw. His eyes narrow; he lets the tip of it pierce the leather strapping across Estinien’s chest, and through it, a clean slice that sends the belt dropping to the mud.

Right over the heart, Lucia think, not sure if she should be impressed or embarrassed. Impressed, she decides. Estinien can do nothing with a weapon so long and Aymeric almost within the circle of his arms. He jumps back, hand over his chest, and she wonders if he knows as well as she does that had Aymeric wanted it to be, the blow could have been near enough to fatal. 

He’s breathing hard. Aymeric isn’t. 

Aymeric shakes his wrist out and tips his head from side to side like a week of bed rest gave his neck a twinge and that’s the furthest of his injuries. The dark cloth covers his bandages; the only sign they remain is a slight raising of the skin-tight cloth around his mid section.

Estinien eyes him from the distance between them. No room for a jump. Room for a proper fight and nothing else and then Aymeric is back in his space with a series of strikes that Estinien blocks with the handle. He could sweep Aymeric’s leg and send him to the mud. He could catch the blade in the bladed confusing at the tip of his spear—and risk cutting Aymeric’s bare hand. He could use the handle and risk a few bruises.

It’s a hard fight to win when the man you’re fighting is precious to you as life, and with a start she realizes this is exactly what she’s watching. 

Estinien won’t win this.

As she thinks it, Estinien boons for a bit of distance between them with a precise series of jabs that run no risk of touching their target. Aymeric dodges instead of blocking and then with that shred of space, Estinien swings his lance at Aymeric’s head as if it were less blade and more bludgeon. The crowd gasps; they’re both so fast that it is impressive and to the untrained eye it might actually look like Estinien intends to actually win. 

Aymeric ducks, with ease. He swings his blade with the same laziness at Estinien’s exposed neck and he does intend to win. Lucia sees the moment he could stop it and chooses not to. It kisses Estinien’s neck. A thin line of red blooms between steel and pale skin.

Not a deep cut, and yet, deep enough.

Estinien freezes in place, lance still stretched before him. Even at a distance, Lucia can see the way his throat bobs against the blade, the way his eyes shift to Aymeric and close. He slides to his knees and presses his lance into the mud at his side. "Well fought," he offers hoarsely.

It wasn't, but she's one of a handful there who could recognize that as Estinien's lowest effort, and maybe the only one who appreciates the thought. She won't be scraping Aymeric out of the mud now. It's good for people to see him up and active, but not at the cost of his good health and precious blood. 

Aymeric clearly doesn't share the sentiment. Something burns in his gaze. After a too-long moment he pulls the blade away and wipes the thin line of blood off on the black cloth over his thigh. 

“Well fought,” he murmurs in return and helps pull Estinien to his feet. 

Light applause goes around and then all seem to realize as one that they’ve boldly forsaken their duty to watch the man who gave them said duty have a glorified street brawl. With remarkable haste, the small arena empties, and she wishes she were with them, because the moment they are alone again, Aymeric shakes his head at Estinien. “I am not breakable, my friend. No more than you are.” 

“No.” Estinien pulls his lance from the mud and considers it. “But far more important.”

“Really?” Aymeric reaches for him, draws his fingers through the runnel of blood at Estinien’s neck. The gore of it is a small shock—none of them are scared of blood, but the way Aymeric considers the roll of it between his thumb and forefinger is something else entirely. “I would wager that you’ve bled more for this city than most.” 

Only Aymeric could make the words this city sound like me. Only Aymeric could get away with it. 

If Estinien reads this, it doesn't show. 

“When are you leaving?” Aymeric asks then, apparently ready to be bold.

And this does surprise Estinien. His eyes widen and the long silence that follows is its own answer. Lucia tries not to despise him for it as Aymeric nods, the picture of dignity in resignation. “Come. Come to the manor for dinner ere you leave. Let me at least send you off with a good meal.”

"Wouldn't miss it." 

"Then, tonight?"

Estinien pauses, and then nods. In the brief silence that follows, Lucia is fool enough to think this is a win, that a short end to a long suffering is close at hand, and then Estinien asks, "Might I bring someone with me?"

Lucia had been only half listening and so at first she thinks she's misheard. Aymeric, perhaps in a similar boat and now drifting off to sea in it, stares at him.

"My traveling companion," Estinien clarifies. "We met in the East."

She wonders if in all Ishgard's long years there was ever a silence so perfect as in the moment following those words. It descends over them, crystallizes, a flash freeze. Of all the possibilities, somehow this one failed her. In all her caution and worst case scenarios, the thought of Estinien somehow being first to the finish wasn't it. But now he's gone and gotten himself a traveling companion . She hardly thought him capable of such a thing.

Aymeric's voice shatters the quiet. “Yes, of course,” he said softly, sweetly. “Any friend of yours is friend to me.” This is laying it on a bit thick, but for once, Lucia can hardly blame him.

“Don't say that until you've met him,” Estinien replies in literal stride, and then he is going, lance on his shoulder, waving, and gone.

Aymeric armors himself in silence, and Lucia follows him as he walks out of the near empty arena and  down the stairs and out into the soft-lit city. The falling ice clings to his black hair like a veil as he walks and walks, past the Last Vigil, until the edge of the city is in sight, and then he stands upon the bridge.  Nobility drips from his every ilm. 

“Glad,” he says apropos of nothing. 

“Sir?”

"Glad, am I. That he’s found someone. I always wondered if he might."

Not full glad, she notes, and she's always known in a peripheral way that Aymeric was sincere with his grand words and long speeches but it's only now hearing the lack of enthusiasm that she realizes exactly how much of him is earnest under better circumstances. He gives much of himself to the city and more to his friends. 

She is trying to convince herself that hating Estinien for this is beneath her. "I doubt it's what you think," she comforts. A feeble play, but she has to try.

"Perhaps." He stares off, across the mountains, ever covered in snow, the far distant lowlands with their bleak trees and crumbling castles. "Will you come?" he asks.

"I have dinner plans," she hurries to say, "but I'll make an appearance."

She does have plans—to eat alone in her rooms going over reports and finishing paperwork. Aymeric's pain, while vast and heart wrenching to witness, is not enough to pull her from an evening of pastry wrapped fish, more gratin, and her own good company. The promise of meeting whatever poor soul has fallen in with their errant dragoon and decided to follow him back to his city, whatever soul Estinien found more to his taste than his oldest friend and the man he’s sworn his life to, a man he would sit at the bedside of and lay his lips upon, a man he bled in the mud for moments ago. Well. 

She wouldn't miss it for the world.

Chapter Text

Aymeric grips the banister with white knuckles and a nervous misery Lucia can almost feel. If Estinien is late, she will hunt him down herself, but he still has half a bell. 

When a knock comes at last, Aymeric jumps. She pretends not to notice, wrapped in the quiet dread of whatever is waiting on the other side of that door. 

This moment night ruin them all. Battle has trained her to visualize the enemy, to form it in her mind before the shock will steal her wits from her, and oh, what foes she's seen. A warrior, she imagines. Maybe an archer. Maybe that's a thing for him. She'd thought—well. She'd thought many things. Maybe it will be someone they know. The Warrior, perhaps. That would be about right, about ruinous enough. 

The attendant is already opening the door and it was naive to imagine she could forestall shock because Estinien is dressed nicely. Actually nice. The blue shirt is open at the top a bit scandalously but it looks not only clean but new and maybe even something approaching stylish. Never mind the pants, never mind the boots, never mind the long jacket. 

He holds out a bottle of wine. "From La Noscea. I've heard it was sought after. Not sure if that makes it good." A pause, deft. "Was I wrong?" he gravels out.

At last she chances a look at Aymeric. He's smiling without any humor or joy and she hasn't ever seen him with that expression so it takes him opening his mouth and saying in a scratch of a voice, "Sought after. Yes. Yes, it is. So I've heard." He takes it and almost drops it. "You said you were bringing a guest?"

She braces herself. She feels Aymeric do the same from a step away as Estinien nods and motions behind him. 

But there's no one behind him. No one at eye level, at least, and with giddy panic she wonders what he could possibly be about to invite in the door, and then with the scrabbling of claws on the hardwood floor, she sees.

A dragon. A baby dragon. Of course, he brought a dragon.

The creature slips in the door on all fours. It looks like nothing so much as a large cat like the one Aymeric keeps spoiled in the upper reaches of the manor. The dragon has a cloth sack tied around its neck and shoulder like a satchel and Lucia decides then and there that while the defense of Ishgard is of imperative importance and Aymeric's mental wellbeing even moreso, she's not been paid enough to deal with whatever this is.

"Orn Khai," Estinien introduces with a peculiar pain. "Our paths crossed in the East.” He gestures to Aymeric. “This is my friend, Aymeric de Borel. And his second, Lucia—"

"I was only dropping off papers," she offers as quick as she can and nods to the door which is unfortunately still blocked by at least part of the dragon. They're big, even young. She'd only meant to stay until she knew for certain she wouldn't have to mobilize the Knights to hunt Estinien down for missing a date. 

The dragon—Orn Khai—steps into the foyer more fully and bows his head. "It's very nice to meet you both. I hope my servant has been on his best behavior."

"Servant?" growls Estinien, and then mutters at a volume meant only for the dragon, "I'll serve you for dinner."

"We're too chewy," the thing grouses in a volume meant for everyone's ears. "Anyway, you're a terrible cook."

This cows Estinien for exactly as long as it takes Lucia to realize she has only brief moments to get out with her sanity unwounded. She steps carefully around Aymeric, with a murmured, "I think you can handle this, sir." His mind appears to be irreparably separated from his body by this revelation that what he thought was his romantic competition is anything but. "Enjoy your dinner."

By the time Lucia's exit registers, it's too late to stop her, and then nothing is left to do but look at Estinien who has dressed himself in leather and blue and brushed his hair, even, and tied it back the way he once did. The dragon, by rights, should be more interesting. Aymeric forces himself to look at it instead and finds it looking back at him with what might be interest or wisdom or hunger. Hard to tell without the pupils.

"I welcome you both," years of propriety and good manners supply for him. "My home is yours so long as you remain in Ishgard." He bows, and that's rather more than manners demand, but needs must.

Estinien frowns at him. "Sorry we didn't bring anything back from the East," he leans in to say. "Next time. How are you feeling?"

It takes him a full breath to remember what he's talking about and then all the leather and blue don't stand a chance before the old grooves of annoyance. Sit this one out, Aymeric. You're needed in the city, Aymeric. "This, again? Truly? I'm well enough to eat."

He rolls his shoulder. "I'm sure, but I know you." He steps past and into the house as if he owns it, and he might as well. "Did you cook?"

"A little something," Aymeric admits.

In truth, as soon as their disastrous spar ended, he scampered back to the Manor like exactly the wounded beast Estinien thinks he is, though it was less the hole in his stomach than the monotonous echoing of travel companion through his head. Cooking always took the edge off whatever worry he had. It made him useful. He can't wield a lance like this man can, he can't jump off a mountain and meet the bottom no worse for wear, he can't bear a dragon's vengeance and come out of it sane, but he can be there at the end with a plate of something hot. Maybe with a city still standing, too. Were that it were enough.

Estinien huffs. "I know you," he repeats. 

He does that.

Aymeric watches him walk towards the dining room, right past the steward that knows better than to ask if he can take his lance from him or pour him a glass of wine. Unflappable as the man is, one look at the dragon at Aymeric's side and he goes terror-white. Aymeric waves him off. "It's fine. I'll handle the rest of the evening.” After all, if there’s one thing Estinien likes less than standing on ceremony, it’s strangers waiting on him and watching him eat. A lesson hard learned in their early days together. 

The dragon taps his arm with a claw, which is a wholly new sensation to experience. Aymeric handles it with only a slight shudder. 

"He was worried about you," the dragon confides. His confiding voice is rather too loud for it to be a secret. Ahead, Estinien freezes and turns back.

"Dragon, I swore—" 

"I'm not going to say anything about that! I just wanted to ask how his wound was. You creatures are so fragile."

"Everyone is fragile with a hole in their stomach.” Estinien tosses his white head and trails off as he goes, muttering, “Shouldn't even be standing.”

Aymeric tries not to sigh and almost succeeds. To Orn Khai, he says, "It doesn't pain me. Thank you for asking. You have to tell me about your travels, you know, he never writes."

"I don't know if he knows how," Orn Khai says with delicate concern.

And well, after some of what Aymeric's seen out of him, it's barely a lie. “I suppose the lance is mightier than the sword,” he says mostly to himself, but the dragon lights on this like a pearl.

“You’re so well spoken,” he says, almost in shyness. 

Aymeric beats back his embarrassment. “I’m not.”

“You’re very tall, as well.” 

“No—not really —”

“And handsome.” 

Now Aymeric does blush, and his mind spins off on the possibility that dragons have Elezen standards of beauty, and what exactly that could be, and what about him is possibly considered so. So wrapped in the thought does he get that he almost walks into Estinien who is stationed at the entrance to the dining room, looking back on them both like a god of wrath. 

“Orn Khai,” he says, gruff.

The dragon in question marches past him with deliberate steps. Estinien watches him go with a practiced gaze, not at all unlike a weary parent. “If he bothers you…”

“He doesn’t,” Aymeric assures him. “I admit I thought your traveling companion would have fewer wings.”

Estinien draws his brow together as if the utter idiocy of the thought that he would keep company with something other than a dragon is too ridiculous for contemplation. Relief still courses through Aymeric. He’s mad with it, and still at the edge of that precipice and looking down, unsure of the fall now. For one more night, at least, this is his. 

From the dining room, Orn Khai says in his reedy voice, “Did you make squid? That’s his favorite.”

“Squid?”

Aymeric did not make him squid. Nor, much to his shame, was he aware such creatures existed. Ishgard is not known for its waterfront property. This is perhaps an oversight on his part, some fatal lack in his education. Orn Khai delights in describing the creature to him in lurid detail, in all its tentacled glory, and Estinien spends the first part of their meal more with his face mostly buried in the bowl of warm, sweet, soup Aymeric remembered as his favorite from their ration days in the Knights when he had to make parsnips and popotos edible. The rest of the meal is spread out between the three of them, all of them tucked to one end of the long dining table. 

Orn Khai is talkative, but it's all interesting and more then Aymeric has heard or likely will ever hear about what Estinien has been up to, so he eats slowly and savors the company. Tales of dragons, of strange lands with wide green plains, of mountains fed by fire, of rarer delicacies than Aymeric has imagination enough to form. Estinien comes up for air only to offer minor corrections to Orn Khai’s story.

“I do not eat it raw. It has to be cooked. Crisp,” he assures Aymeric, who had not been judging in the slightest.

“I never took you to be so adventurous.” Aymeric rolls the wine around in his cup. But of course, Estinien has been halfway across the world and back. He’d go further still given the chance and a boat that could make the journey and oh, the bitterness of that thought sours the wine as it meets his lips. Two parts of jealousy from opposite ends: the world for taking a friend; his friend for having the world to take. 

Estinien snorts. “Never by choice. My lance for one of your meals, any night.” 

“Your lance?” 

"Well," Estinien rolls his shoulder. " A lance, maybe." Aymeric laughs.

Orn Khai watches this exchange, politely interested in his own bowl which he has been lapping at like a dog. Aymeric has no utensils made specifically for the use of dragonkind, but maybe he should commission some, in the interest of diplomacy. Orn Khai is half seated in one chair, front legs on the table, nearly cute. 

He pulls back with a mustache of orange squash that he licks off most daintily. "How did you two meet?" 

Without hesitation, Estinien says in characteristic bluntness, "He saved my life."

Aymeric inclines his head. "I did, thank you for remembering, but that isn't how we met." He wonders if Estinien remembers this part. The wine must be getting to him. He settles back in his chair and crosses his legs under the table. They met the day Aymeric joined the Knights, when all the new recruits were lined up to meet their company. And all the older Knights were not much older than the rest, but hardened and weary. The one closest to Aymeric was not older at all but his age or younger, his scruffy pale hair tied back and his lance strapped to his back as if at the ready, even for that moment of perfunctory greeting. Aymeric watched as the man cast his eyes over the lot of them and though his lips stayed in their thin line, silent, the message came across all the same. Aymeric could feel the disdain radiate from him. Their eyes locked for a moment, perfect and long. Even then, even young and gaunt and angry, Estinien was beautiful. And Aymeric was, of course, utterly lost in him.

"Do you remember?"

To his shock, Estinien nods. "I remember.” Their eyes meet over the table and for a moment the shade of that man is in him still, but a shade only. He’s grown, remarkably, against every odd. Changed in ways Aymeric doubts he would have had the skill to change himself. Estinien clears his throat and leans back. “You were so green you looked as if a gust of wind might blow you off the edge of Ishgard.”

“Yes, well. We can’t all be tempered by such… conviction.” 

“Revenge isn’t conviction,” he says bluntly, “and well that you weren’t. I didn't say it was bad. I simply couldn't figure out why a little princeling had signed up for the Knights."

"Princeling!" Aymeric laughs. "What pray tell was princely about me then?"

Estinien's brow pinches as if it's a foolish question. "You kept your hair longer." He motions to his own head, miming the floppy curls that used to blow in Aymeric's eyes during training—hence the haircut. But that was a very long time ago. Long before they were friends or even acquaintances, really. His curls hardly survived past those first weeks in the company. A long way back to remember something so unworth the thought.

"Had I known you preferred it that way, I would have kept it." Aymeric says the words without thinking, without catching himself, all his trained diplomacy failing him in this his moment of greatest need. If Estinien sees anything suspect in the statement, he lets it ride. Aymeric leaves it and turns to Orn Khai conspiratorially. "Don't believe him. You know, I had to introduce myself five times before he remembered." 

"I'm no good with names," Estinien grouses from behind his cup. Which is true, but it had been a sort of delight to realize halfway through their two man march back to city after the decimation of their company that the man beside him had once again forgotten his name and was trying hard not to ask. He'd had to tell him once more that night, deep in their cups. Once more in the morning when Estinien's hangover granted him the memory that they were the two of them companions sworn by blood—but not said companion's name. 

Aymeric . Easy enough. Not even very many vowels by Ishgard standards.

"Hmm.” Aymeric considers his cup. “I'm reasonably sure I was the last man alive you knew at the time." 

"That's not true."

"Oh?"

"...Alberic," Estinien says after a searching moment. 

Aymeric stifles a laugh. The tug of a smile pulls at the corners of Estinien's mouth.

"He could never remember the names of our regulars in Kugane."

The dragon says this, and nothing more, and Aymeric watches the smile melt from his friend's face.

He tries not to look too interested. "Your—regulars? Your regular what?" Aymeric fails desperately.

Estinien it seems does not want to answer this question, or to look at Aymeric at all because he's far too busy glaring at his traveling companion. "Orn Khai," he warns in a deeper voice than Aymeric has had the pleasure of hearing recently, a growl of threat that falls on deaf ears. 

The dragon flaps a demure wing at him. "We worked at the Shiokaze Hostelry for a while. They treat dragons with great respect there." The tone is pointed—bemoaning a failing more of Ishgard or of Estinien, it isn't clear.

"You worked?" Aymeric says, and then to his beloved friend, " You worked? For wages?"

Estinien narrows his gaze. 

"In—in customer service? Oh, Estinien. What were they thinking?"

Estinien sighs. "It was more about the dragon."

"I was very popular,” Orn Khai preens.

"We had to get money somehow. They don’t exactly hand out gil to rough travelers there. What was I to do?” Estinien argues, as if anyone is arguing with him.

Aymeric digests this. Estinien, working. A man whose first job was the job he kept for nigh fifteen years, and what he managed to do with the wages Ishgard threw at him for honor and bravery is anyone’s guess. Aymeric refuses to ask, but the way Estinien handles gil is a sort of studied incompetence that can only come from having too much of it. "Yes, well. You are terrible with money." It’s bare fact. Estinien might be the only man in Eorzea capable of haggling a price upward. "And there are worse ways to make it than serving food," he consoles but the image of Estinien carrying plates and taking orders is breaking him and it must show. His stone-on-stone voice making careful inquiries. Would you care to hear tonight’s special? Can I get you anything? Would you care to hear our dessert menu? No, it doesn’t bear imagining. 

"Him? Serve food? Not likely." Orn Khai snorts. 

"Then what did they pay him for? Greeting customers?" Aymeric laughs at his own joke—but no one is smiling. Estinien is inspecting his plate as if the little pile of vegetables he's left there is really worth the consideration. He spears an ambitious bite of carrot.

“I told you already. He was my servant.” 

Estinien goes very still. "Dragon," he warns in a low voice. 

"He even had a uniform."

A uniform .

"Oh?" Aymeric inquires, at utter war with himself.

A brief standoff occurs. Estinien, still, his fork still hovering before him with his bite of carrot stuck on the end of it, as he would wield his lance. The dragon, innocence in every scale, reminding Aymeric of nothing so much as his old cat the moment before the beast decides an unguarded glass of wine would do much better on the floor than sitting on that pesky table. 

A heartbeat, and another, and Aymeric hardly dares to breathe as the dragon says finally in his little trill, “Would you like to see? They put him on a poster. I have a copy here—” 

The fork falls. “You little bastard .”

“It’s appropriate to bring a gift!” 

“How long have you had that?”

Orn Khai sniffs. “Since Kugane. You ought to clean out your pack more. There are all sorts of foul things in there.” This he confides to Aymeric, the tragedy of it. Aymeric can hardly imagine. In their shared youth, they kept the same pack and it was solely up to Aymeric to organize it. Left to his own ability, Estinien would keep every spare scrap of food and useless materia—quicktongue, truly?--and ruined shred of armor. Once, they’d had a short and loud row over a bit of ovim cheese that had certainly been in there long enough to grow its own personality. 

With deft claws, Orn Khai unties his bag and pushes it across the table toward Aymeric with a wing. The scroll is the only object inside. It’s tied round in red ribbon that must be silk. 

“He put up a fight, but I think the red suits him,” Orn Khai offers, as Aymeric unrolls it, as if speaking of a beloved pet he cajoled into clothing

Red does suit Estinien. It always did, though Aymeric would have preferred him draped in blue. The scroll contains a painting done in simple, thin strokes of ink, reds and blacks and smears of silver for the dragon's scales and for the hair of the Elezen the dragon is curled around. Orn Khai, perched on his shoulders, an almost protective wing furled on one side. It is a remarkable likeness of them both. Spiked letters of Othardian script banner the top and fill the edges.

"How did they get you to sit still long enough?" Aymeric asks Estinien faintly.

A better question he lacks the bravery to ask is how they got him in the red robe he’s wearing in the painting. The folds of it are tight and reveal the hollow of his pale neck and little else. Absent is his lance, for once, and that is another question he decides he’s better off not asking.

Estinien’s only answer is a snort, which forces Aymeric to look at him and then, naturally, to imagine the man before him dressed as he is in the painting. It strikes him not for the first time that Estinien is uncommonly beautiful, given the opportunity to show it.

“Were there many of these made?”

Orn Khai bows his head in a nod. “All over the city.” 

An odd thing, not unlike envy settles into his gut. Envy that anyone might have seen him like this, on any common wall. A question occurs to him and dies on his lips as he looks up at Estinien. 

Estinien shakes his head, as if Aymeric asked it. “I didn’t wear that past the painting. And it did keep us fed for a month. I can’t complain, in the sum of it.”

“...Remarkably circumspect of you,” Aymeric remarks. 

“Surprised?”

Aymeric turns his gaze back to the image of him, his hard lines softened by the ink, by the hue of red, but not only this. A rush of heat goes through him and to his shame it is not the wine or even the simple fact off the long object of his affection drawn to perfect effect but the fact that he would let it be done, that he would laugh about it in the aftermath. It is embarrassing, deeply. He colors. “Only a bit.”

Orn Khai leans his long neck across the table and offers with grace, “You can keep that one. I have others.”

An incline of his head is the most Aymeric can muster, and the hope Estinien is not watching too closely. Aymeric clears his throat. “I would hear more of your travels in the East, if you would share them.” 

Estinien raises his brow and sets about stabbing at the last of his vegetables into one horrifically large bite. “I would.”

The candlelight banks color off Aymeric's hair as they walk the long hallways to the inner rooms of the estate. It isn't a large estate; the de Borel family was wealthy but Aymeric’s inherited house is nothing on par with that of the Haurchefants. Both are several long marches from anything Estinien grew up with. He would be happy with two sticks leaned together and a dry patch of dirt to sleep on, and has made due with worse.

Aymeric seems to realize this. Worse, he seems to think it one of Estinien's better qualities. 

"Was dinner too much?"

Estinien makes a disbelieving sound. "Dinner was perfect." 

"Next time I'll cook for you," Orn Khai interjects politely.

"I don't think his tastes are as rugged as mine, dragon." 

"Oh, I think my tastes are at least as rugged as yours." To Orn Khai, Aymeric says, "Nothing would delight my heart more, my friend."

Estinien's stomach does something odd at the phrasing, a tight press of fondness that makes him want to roll his eyes and smile in equal measure, but Aymeric is looking at him with his too-sharp gaze. His regular gaze, really. As if he's planning something, or has been and already has the fruits of his labor laid out before him. He stops his guests before a door and opens it onto a small library with a fire already bright in the hearth and wide, soft looking manor chairs. 

And a glint of steel from one corner. Estinien's gaze flashes to it as Aymeric opens the door fully and finds his own body staring back—or the shell of it. His old armor, drachen mail in stained to carnelian with old blood. A grotesque display. Estinien moves toward it with the odd sense that if he looks away, it might start moving. For once, Orn Khai is silent, and he's grateful for the gift of not having to find anything to say.

"I didn't know you'd kept this."

Aymeric steps up beside him. "Ah. Lucia thought to save it. Though, I confess, I was relieved she did."

"A bit macabre, don't you think?"

"You'll recall I carried you back to the city in that. A man must look upon his work now and again." A winsome smile, but there are hollows of shadow on his face now, the odd dancing reflection of the hearth in the red stained armor.

He did carry Estinien back. Of course he did. "I am grateful."

"Surely between the two of us we have no need for gratitude." 

"Maybe. Still, I would return the favor—if I could lift you in that frilly getup you insist on carting around." And isn't that a thought. 

Aymeric sighs, utterly put upon. "I will endeavor not to inconvenience you so."

"You'd best not." He makes his gaze sharp. Aymeric gave up the armor for a fine waistcoat for the night, a bit ruffled but he no worse for it. It could almost make one forget he has a layer of bandages beneath it, holding his guts in. 

At least the drachen mail is practical. Estinien looks it over, the memorized feel of each ridge and dent playing over in his mind. It wore like a second skin, like scale.  "I thought I was going to die in that," he says to the empty helm. 

Beside him, Aymeric draws a breath and holds it for a long beat. When he speaks again, a cold comes with it like a window left open, like snow scattering across the carpet. "I know." He tilts his head to Estinien. "I took it off you. I know."

Estinien stiffens.

"And you must know that I could never allow that to happen. I really don't know what I would do." A wistfulness hides in his tone, as if he really doesn't. As if Estinien is around enough to have any use in his life at all, let alone to serve as a stone on which anything might be built strong enough that his death would cause it to crumble.

What good has he been? A killer of dragons, a harbinger of war? The memory of Aymeric's face as he nocked his arrow and pulled back the string to fire, to kill, and the relief of it in that deep place Nidhogg kept him inside his own head. In his absence, Aymeric has rebuilt their city and their people, staved off distant war, and the only blood on the stones of their city is his own. Estinien has no place in this equation.

"You'd carry on."

The words fall in silence.

"For the good of Ishgard, certainly," Aymeric says after a time. "Again, you vastly underestimate your importance. I wonder how it is that I can be expected to give up so much and maintain grace." He says this with a quiet viciousness.

The anger is visceral, but deeper than that is the hurt. Estinien realizes he's staring at his friend across the scant distance between them, enraptured by the bitter twist of that beautiful mouth. His lips are colorless in this light. His voice lowers. 

"You said you would tear this city apart for my loss. Do you think I would do less for yours?"

Estinien shifts uncomfortably and breaks the gaze. "...Were you possessed of an ancient dragon's lust for revenge, I might have my worries."

"Oh, quite right. I am imbued only with the command of a nation's full military might and its peoples’ faith. Little risk."

"Name a square after me, then. Make another mammet."

"You saw those, did you?" He can feel Aymeric’s gaze shift away, but the bitterness too. Estinien would smooth it away if he had the skill, but Aymeric is turning away to heave himself down into one of the soft velvet chairs before the hearth and let it take all his weight. "Lucia made terrible fun of me for that, but they sold so well we almost constructed a new district on the profits alone."

Estinien stares at him in horror.

Aymeric spreads his hands wide. "You are a pillar of Ishgardian society even in your absence, my friend."

The fire makes hollows of his fine features. Do you think I would do less for yours? Absence. Little different from loss when the years are tallied and for all that he's made himself useful, a toll must be paid. Woeful unfair that Aymeric is the one paying it.

"I do stay safe you know. Near as I can to it."

Aymeric smiles and at least it's genuine. "You fool me not at all."

"No." Estinien ducks his head, hiding his own smile, thinking of half a dozen tales that would grey Aymeric's hair in the telling. "I suppose I don't."

Something heavy sits between them then as if some lumbering beast making itself at home on the carpet, basking in the fire's heat. Estinien opens his mouth again, pausing on something he knows he'll regret saying. His words are never what they should be, never the way he wants them to sound, and he isn't quite sure what it is he wants to say except that there's a cut on his neck from Aymeric's blade, still throbbing, and it feels nothing like pain. The grace in that moment. The ease of it. Like it was something Aymeric were owed—every drop of his blood, every moment of obeisance.

Aymeric's gaze falls to his neck. The wound is sure to scar. Maybe he would like it to.

He's saved from himself by a sound in the hallway and then Orn Khai peeking in the door, and Estinien can't decide which is the worse prospect: that he was so wrapped up in Aymeric that he didn't notice the dragon sneak off, or that it was a deliberate boon to give them privacy.

The dragon clears his throat. "There is an animal in the hallway. Do you want me to dispose of it?"

"Animal? Ah! No, please, that's the cat—" Aymeric stands and makes for the door with a speed that doesn't quite imply he thinks his guest would eat a live cat but leaves room for the possibility. He sags with almost unnoticeable relief after a peek around the door. "That is my roommate, though I'm sorry to report he does very little to earn his keep."

Estinien wonders if it would be impolite to ask how old the creature is. The animal looked as if it was ancient the day Estinien met it. Its only  interaction with Estinien in a decade of acquaintanceship was to bite his hand when he left it too long hanging off the side of a chair, as one is wont to do in sleep. 

"Is it dangerous?" Orn Khai asks.

“Yes," Estinien answers quickly.

" Only to unattended drinks," Aymeric says with a pointed look sent Estinien’s way, but adds under his breath, "and unsuspecting Warriors of Light."

Estinien’s first reaction is an undignified, “Ha!” But then the words connect and he stutters through the "No. Your cat attacked the Warrior? They’ve met?"

Aymeric hmms, making his way back to the chair, one eye still on Orn Khai. “I had our friend for dinner. It was quite a nice night, cat excluded."

Quite a nice night. 

And it dawns on Estinien that he is the highest of fools. Several revelations click into place—the loyalty, familiarity, trust—all claims on Aymeric he once kept exclusive rights to, surrendered in absentia. And Halone, why wouldn’t a man like him keep a lover? How naive has he become?

“Our friend makes for good company,” Estinien says with a wryness he doesn't intend but can't make into something light once it's out.

“Oh don't look at me like that. You two have had at least as much fun together. I can keep his company, too.” 

“I wouldn't call it fun.” Not that kind of fun, at least. He fights the color rising in his cheeks, but Aymeric takes no notice, tripping off on a sigh.

“Always off on some grand adventure, ah. The heart has a terrible tendency to long for what it cannot have.”

His words make some black mix of envy and greed bubble up at the furthest part of Estinien’s mind, and his stomach goes tight as if he's had no meal, as if he's starved. That Aymeric wants the Warrior is not the least surprise and Estinien is almost a good enough man to not hate the Savior of Eorzea for taking this one more honor. No one more worthy. Certainly not Estinien. But still—only barely worthy enough. The black thing in him curls around this new knowledge and sinks its claws in. Makes him ache for it. Aymeric and the Warrior. sharing meals. Sharing the night. Sharing all sorts of passions Estinien cannot begin to. 

He's yours, says something inside him, a shadow of his own voice. 

But he isn't. And if he ever had a chance at otherwise, he's missed it now. 

It takes him a moment to remember what Aymeric's words were. He nods. "It does that," he murmurs in reply, staring into the armor again, seeing nothing. "It’s late.”

Aymeric draws a breath. 

“We should go.” Estinien nods to the dragon, who is watching him now, he realizes, watching them both with eyes that are too knowing by half. 

“Truly?”

There is a tone in his voice Estinien hasn’t heard before and can’t begin to divine the meaning behind. He nods, only, and says, “We've already imposed on your hospitality long enough for one night." It’s only true. He pretends not to notice the disappointment in Aymeric's eyes.

“It isn't imposing and it's hardly hospitality, Estinien,” he says, somewhere between chiding and begging with that aching sincerity only he can muster and mean in his faith. Old friend to old friend, no more. “You could stay. It would be no imposition.”

A deep breath, he allows himself, and shakes his head. “Not tonight. In truth, I’d hoped to get an early start in the ‘morrow.”

After a pause, Aymeric murmurs, “You’re leaving.”

It isn’t a question, and he doesn’t mean the house. A lie is on the tip of Estinien’s tongue, and then a careful obfuscation, an omission, something to ease the parting—more respectful than disappearing without a goodbye at all as is his habit. “We’ll say our farewells before we go. I swear it.” The dragon is uncharacteristically silent, eyes black and slit and judging. Estinien dreads the walk back to the inn. He’s all but ready to run it, to run from the room, to run all the way back to Othard licking his unidentifiable wound all the long way there. The silence is awkward now and he wishes it were otherwise. “Thank you for having us, truly, Aymeric. It’s been too long.”

Aymeric stands and dusts at his clothes absently, as if brushing something off. “Never too long, my friend,” he says.

But it has been. They both know it. And far too late to do more than regret it now.

Chapter Text

The thing about dragons is that, much like the men who fight them, they have little understanding of mortal hearts. Estinien's feels peculiarly absent, as if he forgot to put it in his pocket on his way out the door, and it's sitting there on the sideboard beside the de Borel manor's front door waiting for his return.

"Why?" asks Orn Khai, padding through the soft snow beside him.

Estinien doesn't take the bait. He's got a policy on not answering stupid questions. It's what's kept him free of conversation by linkpearl all these good years, but then Orn Khai moves a step ahead of him and cranes his head back with a glare, and of course if anyone knows his habits, it’s the damn dragon he’s spent the better part of a year with. "Why are we leaving?" the dragon reiterates.

"Because it's late.”

He snorts and it comes out as a tiny burst of steam in the cold air. “That’s not how I meant it, Estinien.” There’s a particular emphasis on his name, a put-upon air. Estinien knows what he meant. It’s his purview to know what people mean and to ignore it when it doesn’t bear considering. “And it’s not even midnight.”

The snow makes everything bright, carries the streetlights through the whole of the city. It’s odd to walk it like this, to feel no urgency, no dread, only a low and undefinable ache. “It’s late if we’re getting an early start.”

“He was sad.”

The who is on the tip of his tongue, but it is late for him and later still for these games. He did, for some ungodly reason. Estinien can’t muster a denial so he stays silent and directs them down the lonely streets. A few people are still about, men and women in long coats and dresses, fine cloth, a peacetime luxury. He’s underdressed for the weather and for the times, it seems. “A night in his company and you know him better than I do. Extraordinary.”

“Estinien.” The condemnation is quiet.

“I’d no notion a dragon of your esteem could be so swayed by a pretty face.” It isn’t fair and it isn’t nice. He left his ability to be both back with Aymeric it seems.

Orn Khai barks the harsh sound that counts for a laugh in his kind, sending a puff of steam up with it into the spinning snow. “Did you not?”

Estinien stutters to a stop, feeling the barb slide through him as keen as Aymeric’s blade that morning. The night seems destined to be one marathon of humiliation. His head is caught in the wheel of it, as if tumbling down a long hill, recalling all the small charms of Aymeric’s being, the heat of it rising in the core of him, and the misery after. Quite a nice night. Quite nice. It’s none of his business at all and the raw humor that he might ever have thought it was is too much to bear at once.

Orn Khai steps in front of him and halts their meager progress. “Why are you leaving?”

“We’re leaving,” Estinien corrects after a moment, a pause to gather his scattered pieces.

“I didn’t take you for a coward.”

The dragon might have breathed have fire at him and done less damage, he thinks dully. His misery catalyzes to rage. “Coward.” It scrapes out of him, that guttural low he can’t seem to control.

Orn Khai falters but then he braces his little legs on the cobbles and his scaled brows narrow. “I didn’t take you for a coward.” He enunciates the last word into three syllables in his small echoing tongue.

“Pray, what makes you an expert on this matter?” But then Estinien knows. Orn Khai knows of devotion. He knows of love. Estinien takes his temper in hand and says in a measured voice, “He likes another. This is not as your parents were—we are not dragons. Our love only lasts a little while and it changes and fades.” Like the seasons once did. Like the stars at dawn. A fool’s memory.

“It hasn’t for you.”

No, he’s right about that. That’s the crux of it—maybe some piece of him still belongs to Nidhogg and always will and even if Aymeric returned that—that obsession, that need, he could never chain the man to that. The memory of running off with the eye is acrid now, the mark of a man he can no longer be and yet cannot escape. The fact a simple creature kenned onto it in a few short days makes him want to laugh.

He’s least wanted to admit this truth, even to himself. “I am a burden to him. Not an asset. What is it you imagine I’m going to do, dragon? Settle down in the city and beg at his table? He has a pet already.”

If Orn Khai has a response to this, he doesn’t voice it.

“We’re leaving,” Estinien repeats.

“Running,” Orn Khai corrects, and even through his strange voice Estinien can hear the odd hurt in it, as if Estinien’s failing is his own. “You’re running away.”

No; toward something, he wants to say. He’s running toward something. It’s what he’s always told himself, and now it sounds hollow in his own mind, and the words never make it past his frozen lips. Orn Khai watches him fumble and then with a great show of strength unfurls his wings and beats them, sending a blast of powder-light snow and ice out with each flap as he rises into the air.

“Orn Khai,” he warns, taking a step forward.

“I’m not leaving. I like it here.” The dragon stares down at him, still rising. “The Lord Commander told me I could stay as long as I wanted.”

“That’s not—that isn’t what he said! Oh, for the love of—” Estinien bites off a curse. Orn Khai isn’t listening. He’s off now, beyond the distance of grabbing by the tail, even with his long jump. “It isn’t safe for a dragonet!” he shouts uselessly as the dragon wings off, fading into the mist. “Orn Khai!”

But arguing with someone in possession of wings is both fruitless and foolish.

Estinien runs a few steps to follow and then realizes the spectacle he must make to anyone still about on the streets and stops. The creature can’t live out of doors for more than a few hours in the spiritual more than literal sense; he knows where the inn is and from the air it’s a sinch to find. He’ll be back before morning, if not in the hour. And who’s going to see a dragon on a snowed in night? Even if they did, it isn’t as though anyone could actually catch him. Shooting a dragon on the wing would be tantamount to war and—and it’s dark. No one has that aim.

By the time he’s back at the inn, he’s doing his best to walk at a pace that isn’t a run. The room is predictably empty.

He props the window open and ignores the gust of snow that blows in with it, scattering across the bed. “Dragon?” he asks the night, but softly.

It has no reply.

“So, it went well, then,” Lucia says with all delicacy.

Aymeric is not keeping himself confined to his office today, no. When she arrived at the Congregation that early morning, it was to the Commander himself doing a surprise inspection of the armory, as one does before the sun is up. Now the first rays of the morning sun are casting through the windows and snow crusted over them and he’s moved on from the armory and onto going over old reports. For what? Handeloup had thought to ask, despite the very serious look Lucia sent him over the Commander’s shoulder. And Aymeric had replied only with a wry, Because it’s my job.

She shouldn’t have left. Or, she should have called up at least a small number of Knights to keep a watch outside his house. Anything, really.

Aymeric does not deign to reply to her question. Given to bluntness, she asks, “Where is Estinien now?”

“Off,” Aymeric says.

“Off. He left? He left the city?”

Aymeric does not hum or nod or make any reply. She wants to grab him, gently, by one shoulder, and ask if it was his cooking. If it was something he said. If it was anything that bore out explaining, that might be remedied, that she might call up a company to drag the man back to the city to fix. But her heart opens in a twin ache. It reminds her of Livia and her hopeless affection. The last of her family lost to a foolish love. Perhaps she’s lucky not to have lost Aymeric to it as well. The whole city’s luck to have him bound here, and no luck for Aymeric at all.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs.

He pauses his shuffling of papers and he doesn’t look at her in full but inclines his head in the smallest acknowledgment. And she wants to follow it with some explanation for a man she barely knows. He does care for you, she wants to offer. He loves you, she thinks she can say with some certainty, in the way lovers do. It’s rotten to watch one man suffer so much for something that’s exactly a sword’s length away, if one of them would reach out. Months more of this are stretching out before her now, Aymeric’s lovelorn loss compounded and crystallized and no. No, she can’t. Better that they actually fought than this.

It isn’t too late to arrest him, surely. How fast can a dragoon move?

She’s considering this course of action as she bows and takes her leave. But then, she’d need an excuse. Maybe she could manufacture something.

At bottom of the stiars she pauses to consider it, and it’s the only thing that saves her from running head long into the boy coming at her at speed.

A new recruit, judging by the shine on his mail. “Sir!” he shouts at twice the necessary volume and sketches a salute. He’s panting with effort. They really should institute a bit more stringent of a training schedule.

“Yes?” she asks after several seconds.

“Ah,” he says between breaths, “we, uh, we have a report of a fight at the gate! I was told to get someone. It’s about a dragon and an individual—”

“White hair?” she asks.

The boy’s eyes get wide. “Sir—uh, no, Sir. They didn’t say if the dragon had hair.”

She closes her eyes. “The man. White hair. It’s not a question.” She opens her eyes and makes for the door, pushing the boy ahead with a hand on his shoulder. “Lead on.”

The walk gives her a solid ten minutes to decide what she’s going to say to the man when she gets there and by the time she can hear the commotion of shouting in the distance, she’s managed to work up a sheen of rage sweat beneath her heavy armor. It redoubles when she crests the top of the ramp and stairs that lead down to the Arc of the Worthy and sees Estinien with his arms akimbo on his hips staring down what looks like Beltardois, the man who wouldn’t give up gate guard duty even when offered three separate options for promotion, and a group of knights who she knows for a fact ought to be moving the rubble pile that she’s walking by.

Estinien must sense her approach because he half-turns, enough to see who’s coming, and then wheels back on the Knights. “Now look what you’ve done.”

All four of them snap to rigid attention and a chorus of, “Sir!” Everyone is so respectful today, she thinks wryly, and wonders if her frustration is starting to show on her face. She’ll have lines before forty and this idiot will be beautiful until the day he dies.

“Report,” she states.

Beltardois is characteristically eager. He steps forward. “At first light, this individual attempted to cross the Arc without appropriate clearance. When approached for questioning, he—”

"You cannot be serious,” Estinien interrupts. “I’m looking for a dragon,” he says to her without humor, his low tones a bit raspier than they were the night before. It doesn’t look like he’s slept, come to that. He motions at waist height with a flag palm. “About yae high. Scales. Wings.”

“Dragon hunting is strictly forbidden by the Holy See.” Beltardois points at the lance in Estinien’s hand and looks at Lucia with all the grace of a tattling child, but she appreciates the energy. Especially when Estinien holds it out from himself as if he’s only now realized he was holding it, or perhaps in shock that anyone would take offense to it, despite the thin coating of dragonsblood that rimes it.

“Yes, as I said, I’m aware. If you haven’t seen him, then say so.”

Beltardois ignores him. “So I told him to surrender his weapon—”

“Not likely.”

“—and when he started causing a commotion I sent a runner up the hill to retrieve someone with authority. We had word of a man of this description causing trouble in the Knight an evening back and I thought it best to detain the suspect until an inquiry could be made.”

“Lucia,” Estinien says, in pleading desperation.

She arches a brow. “And did our trespasser think to introduce himself?” she asks, a question clearly meant for Estinien. The shutter of his gaze means that’s a firm no. “Ah.” To the Knights, she says, “I don’t believe it’s within our authority to detain the Azure Dragoon, but you were well to send for someone.”

For a moment, the howling wind coming off the mountains is the only sound, and then Beltardois looks between the two of them as if waiting for the punchline of a joke—Lucia being known for her jokes, of course. When none surfaces. he drops to a kneel. “Sir, I didn’t realize—”

“I’m not the Azure Dragoon. And I don’t have time for this. Have you seen the dragon or not?” To Lucia he says, “He flew off last night. I’ve seen no sign of him, but I’m certain he remains within the city unless,” and he looks to the Knights again, “someone carried him off through these gates. So I ask, have you seen my damn dragon or not?”

“No, sir. If we see any pass this way, we’ll send word, on my honor.”

Your dragon? Lucia thinks. “Thank you, all,” she says to her Knights, an, “We’ll let you return to your duties.” They scatter like mice before a cat, leaving her with the man she most and least wanted to see this morning. She nods back to the ramp and begins the walk, not waiting to see if Estinien will follow. He falls into uneasy, dead silent step. It’s off putting, though she ought to have clocked it. All the Knights Dragoon are light of foot, even in their mail, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t be cat-quiet out of armor and on leather soles. Still, it makes the hair rise on her neck. “So, your dragon?”

“I don’t flatter myself that the war is over for all Ishgardians as it is for me. I would prefer to keep my eye on him.” A whole army could march through the gaps in that explanation.

Estinien is quiet for another moment, and then he makes a sound near to a sigh. “We quarreled. One meal at Aymeric’s table and he was ready to replace that damn cat.” He stretches with a pained groan; something in his shoulder actually pops. “How old is that thing anyway?”

“I’ve never asked. Older than the Commander, I would imagine.”

“At least. Beats me why he keeps the thing around. He has a soft heart for worn things.”

“No. Not really. Just for you.”

Estinien’s stumbles in mid step, an awkward lurch that conveys to the slightest missed placement of one foot—he catches himself with the lance, using it like a common walking pole. The utter indignity widens her eyes. So small a truth and it almost had him on his face. Oh, but she has so many stored away.

“Trust, I need no escort,” he offers magnanimously when he's pulled himself together. “I'd hate to steal you from your duties.” His words are an echo of her own to the younger Knights. He’s a decade too early to make the attempt. He knows it, too, by the tepid look on his face as if he's wholly aware of what's about to come.

She shakes her head with equal magnanimity. “It’s been too long since you and I were afforded the chance to talk," she says with bluntness she might have borrowed from Estinien's own book. "You've missed much in your absence. But then," she smiles at him, "the Lord Commander worries about you so often it’s as if you’re still here in some small way.”

His head bows. “He worries without cause.”

“I doubt that.”

“Then without need.”

She stops. She turns to him. She puts an armored hand at the center of his chest when he doesn’t do the same. A glance of warning from him, and then a look of resignation. No; he isn’t getting out of this one. At least not unscathed in ways that will count to him more than a simple wound of the flesh. “You know what it is he needs?”

“No?” His eyes flash dark.

“You may think his worry silly, but it is his. He doesn’t care without reason. It’s what makes him worth following, what makes this city worth—“

“Are you in love with him, then?”

The dark rasp of his tone has her in stance in an instant. It isn’t anger. It isn’t pain. It’s not a sound a man should be capable of making. “No,” she says in stark honesty. “I am not.”

But it isn’t her imagination—his eyes are darker than they were, darker than they have any right to be on a snow-cast morning, a depth of blue closer to the bruise-black of night. She’s fought enough dragonkind to know their mark. The aura of it surrounds him. He’s angry. Even the thought of competition is enough to bring him to this. A dragon in the manger, even a thousand malms away from his prize.

It's pathetic.

She laughs. “If I were, it might be easier. Instead, I watch my friend pine for a man who hardly seems to remember he exists.”

“Then take it up with the Warrior!” He slashes his lance across the air in front of him as if stabbing at a ghost and this time she stifles her laugh of shock, but only just.

“The Warrior? Halone, why would I involve them in this affair?”

He doesn’t reply. His black eyes are focused somewhere over her shoulder, shoulders braced against misery, and oh the drama of it. At last, she understands.

“You think him in love with the Warrior of Light.”

She wished so. And for a time, she thought the same. That perhaps his eyes had been pulled to someone more present, or at least better dressed, but no. A breath of news from Estinien, a moment of his scant regard, and he again was the only star in Aymeric’s eyes. “He’s in love with you,” she says, like a dagger, and watches it sink into him just the same. “He has your portrait in his office. When he ordered the mammets, I thought he had finally been driven mad by it. Did you truly not realize?”

“You’re wrong,” he says flatly, the same grating voice.

He thinks he has the right to anger. She knows anger, too. She steps into his space and pokes the center of his chest, making her finger into a claw. “He’s in love with you. Not with the Savior of Eorzea. Not with me. With you. With a man who can be bothered to give him the time of day but once a year.”

“No, he isn’t,” he says flatly, as if the mere thought of it beggars belief and inspires madness. “We’ve been friends a very long time,” he starts, but Lucia bites out a sharp laugh.

“Oh, the best of friends! And you will not even do him the honor of trusting his own mind?”

“I trust his. Not yours, not on this.”

She breathes and looks to the sky. Halone, give me strength. “Why is this so unbelievable to you?”

His look means to wither, but on that face it hasn’t the effect he intends. “Can you truly not recall the concessions he’s made for you, the defenses he’s levied in your name—you ran off with an Eye and he swept it under the rug! He keeps mementos of you like a lost love!

“I…” He swallows. “I don’t write enough. You’re right. It’s not one of my better qualities.”

The admissions shocks, but it shocks a rage into her, with it. “Then use the post. Use the aetheryte. Come home, once a season. You know what I think?”

“What?” he snaps. They’re all but fighting in this street, where anyone might watch. It gives her some vague satisfaction—yes, let him be embarrassed by this. Let him suffer that small humiliation.

“I think I know why you don’t. I think you’re scared.”

“Scared of what?” His confusion seems genuine, as if it hadn’t occurred to him there were any man, beast, or existential terror left to inspire fear in him on this star.

“Of him.”

An almost comical offense comes across his face. A thing almost of disgust. “Scared. Of Aymeric,” he quotes. “He isn’t that much better of a fighter.”

She laughs. “No, you’re scared he might actually love you. You’re scared that he wants you. Why is that so terrible?”

His gaze darkens.

“I’ve thought you many things, Estinien, but never a coward.”

This sinks deeper than the dagger of her revelation that Aymeric might love him. Does love him, she knows, with the certitude usually reserved for stone foundation and Ishgardian winters. He’s not talking now. The black is bleeding back into his eyes and she wonders for a moment if she’s pushed too far. In for a gil, in for a million or so more, she decides. “You’re right,” she says to him. “He would never love a coward.”

“Coward,” he snarls. “Yes. I am a coward. Do you know what I fear?” He waits for no answer. “I fear myself, and what I would do for him. Because of him.”

“Do you think he would ask something of you that you would not wish to give?”

“Yes. If something happened to him, he would expect me to accept it with grace. I would not.”

A quality she and him might meet in the middle on, then. But the truth that stares at her is one he cannot be too stupid to have realized. “Do you think that any less true now than it would be if he knew you loved him in return?” A rictus of shock freezes his face. Of pain. She has never, in all her days, had the urge to hug this man. It comes to her now. “You sell yourself short on grace.” He seems to forget—something terrible has already come to Aymeric. He has already, bold as brass and somehow less intelligent, walked into the Holy See and rendered his life forfeit. And while one would be hard pressed to say Estinien was at all a calm creature then, he didn’t tear the city down. Perhaps it’s that he thinks Nidhogg has changed him and will come rearing out of him at the first spot of blood on Aymeric’s tunic at the hand of some careless child. If this is his fear, it is a distant one, and made of the sort of fear that could undo a man in regret. “Will you not at least let yourselves be happy?”

Slowly, his lance comes down. The pommel of it taps the ground with an inelegant sound. He takes several breaths, his eyes beginning to fade to pale once more. “Will I not,” he murmurs, in repetition or question, it isn’t clear. He turns away. “I have a dragon to find.”

“So you do. What did you two fight about, anyway?”

He shoots her a guilty look. “This and that.”

Oh, this and that. Right. She knows all about this and that. “You could try asking Aymeric to help you look.” As an excuse. As an opener. As anything.

Estinien gives a tepid nod.

“I’ll walk you there.”

The morning snow that falls over Ishgard has a certain peace to it, one Aymeric found ironic. The blood he’s seen on that snow—the blood he’s put on it. Back when there were proper seasons and it was a rarity rather than a certainty, he loved it. Now he tolerates it, as all Ishgardians must, with a deep exhaustion and perhaps deeper affection. In his most indulgent—most pathetic, perhaps—moments, he lets himself imagine waking in the house with that same snow sparkling on the windowsill, the fire gone out in the night, the soft sheets warm from more than his own heat. A body in his arms, or against his back. Someone close. Snow white hair on dark sheets.

This indulgence goes almost too far, and this is where he stops himself. If he were a better man, he might be ashamed of himself. The heat it inspires must truly be a sin of some sort, and he’s thinking exactly this at the moment Estinien walks into his office.

Lucia marches in behind him, as if she’d been instructed to bring in a perpetrator. She looks a bit too satisfied about it. Once he’s in, she blocks the door, as if he’s some pet that might try to run right back out if given the room.

Estinien opens his mouth to perhaps give some greeting, and then realizes who’s occupying the chair across from Aymeric’s desk. The dragon has a book open in front of him, a random selection on the War from the shelves around Aymeric’s office; Aymeric has been trying with some difficulty to not feel like a babysitter since he arrived at the office that morning with the window open and dusting snow across the floor and the dragon waiting politely for him.

“You little shit.”

“See?” Orn Khai says. “He’s not very polite.”

“No. No, he isn’t.” Aymeric lets their gazes meet and finds the cool morning reflected back at him in Estinien’s eyes. “Good morning. I hadn’t thought to see you again.”

Estinien flinches. Aymeric notes the full armor, the lance held before him in both hands now like anyone else would hold their hat on their way to offer a sincere apology. Lucia folds her arms and stands gryphon in the doorway behind him, a certain violence in her stature that Aymeric is often privileged to see. He looks between them, the space of their mutual silence speaking volumes he’s glad they decided to keep outside his office.

“Can I interest you in breakfast?” he offers, for lack of anything more sane.

“No,” Estinien says, but not before hesitating. “Might we, ah, talk a moment?”

Behind him, Lucia nods, though Estinien isn’t looking at her. Aymeric wonders if she had him rehearse it. “Alone,” he adds, for the dragon’s benefit.

It’s strange, this concession to manners. In their younger years Estinien would grab him by the collar of his hauberk and drag him out of camp if anything truly pressing required his private attention—well, not all that pressing, come to think. Most of the time it was some approximation of there’s a flock outside camp and I’m shit with a bow. After their ascension he dispensed with the dragging but never with the assumption that he could have Aymeric’s ear any time he wanted it, company be damned. The hair rises on the back of Aymeric’s neck now.

At a nod from Aymeric, Lucia takes her leave; the dragon marches out the door after her with a single, prolonged look at Estinien.

Their absence leaves Aymeric with absolutely nowhere to look save Estinien. He has bags under his eyes, and his hair is loose about his face, fly-away soft in that manner that Aymeric knows means it hasn’t seen a brush.

“I’m sorry,” Estinien opens, without preamble or warning.

“For what?” Aymeric asks. Foolish question, and not one he wants answered. He tries to brush it off. “You have no cause to apologize to me.”

“But I do.”

And then he’s quiet for a damn long time during which Aymeric can feel the sluggish beat of his heart like he has oil flowing through his veins in place of blood, the apology already running sour in his stomach. It takes Estinien a long while to come to his reason. Aymeric makes a study of Estinien’s face as Estinien makes a study of the polished wood desk between them. The set of his shoulders reads like misery. At last, he says, “You deserve a better friend.”

“Than the man who saved this city?” Aymeric laughs. The humor falls flat.

“Who almost destroyed it,” Estinien corrects.

“Who saved it,” Aymeric insists. He puts a hand to his forehead and closes his eyes in brief struggle with his own exhaustion. Something is drawing tight inside him.

Estinien works his jaw like he’s chewing on the old, hard jerked meat they had to share in lean days on patrol and then pins Aymeric with a look like whatever is about to come out of his mouth is full bodied and fully Estinien—

And Aymeric finds that he hasn’t got the stomach for it. Estinien’s regret will make them both ill. Aymeric stands all at once and begins gathering the papers from the desk before him. Meaningless request, obeisance that will require some answer and his signature, pretty-worded missives that say not at all what they mean, all of which he will navigate effortlessly. But not this. Not this conversation. Not all the reasons Estinien has come up with for leaving him. “Breakfast,” he says decisively. “Let me feed you before you take your leave, at least.”

He steps around the desk and past Estinien and makes it almost to the door before Estinien stops him short with a word and then a hand around his wrist. The armor Estinien wears is thicker than the thick black cloth and hammered filigree of Aymeric’s own; the metal seems to strain against its own pressure as it presses into a grip that allows Aymeric to move no further from him; a hand more used to holding a lance in battle than another man’s arm. His voice strains beneath the same weight. “Aymeric. I don’t leave because of you.”

But it hardly matters. The net result is his absence, either way. “I know.”

“No, you don’t. This city—” he bows his head, bows it between them, between this small space he’s made of their bodies. “This city has no use for a man whose turned his lance against man and dragon both.”

Even to Aymeric’s ears, the words ring hollow and weak. He searches Estinien’s face. “Is that your reason? Truly?”

“No.”

His grip tightens convulsively, and falls away. Aymeric draws his wrist back to his side and stops himself from running his fingers over the place where he was held, watching instead as Estinien sets his weapon on the desk and then begins to fiddle with his vambrace. It’s the oddest display. Aymeric watches with a fascination that feels near prurient as the armor releases with a metallic click and falls to the floor. Most dragoons prefer nothing between their skin and their armor, built as it is to be a second skin; he never knew Estinien to differ in the practice, but as the glove and wrist piece fall away, they reveal a rippling dark beneath which Aymeric takes for cloth until Estinien turns the arm over. The haze of sun filtering through the ice at the window is poor light, but light enough for this.

Black scales dapple up his arm. As he twists the limb, they glitter with their own carnelian light.

Aymeric takes a single step forward, a weak thing, unable to tear his eyes from the spectacle. He watches his own hand reach for Estinien’s arm, the sheaf of papers he was holding go scattering across the floor to join Estinien’s discarded armor. He’s grateful, then, for the absence of cloth on the tips of his fingers, as he draws his thumb from the pallid spiderwebbing of veins at Estinien’s wrist up over the ridges of scales which stretch to the inside of his elbow and up until they vanish beneath the rest of his armor. Beside the irregular rows are patches of raised skin. Scars, Aymeric realizes with a start, marks of little violence where Estinien once tried to pry the things off.

Estinien’s breath tightens. Aymeric’s own jaw has unhinged itself; if there are right words to say to this revelation, he doesn’t know them.

“In truth, I am more dragon than man.”

This is his reason. Or some part of it. “Why did you keep this from me?”

“Would you have preferred I strip for your inspection every time I walk into the city?”

In a boon for self-preservation, Aymeric leaves that unanswered. “I’m not so rich in friendship I can afford to lose one. Does it go beyond this?” Better to know now than later, for there are ways a man might become a dragon in full, ways in which his skin and bone and blood might all turn against him. The only surprise is a dull one, self-effacing, that he hadn’t realized this possibility all along.

“No. Seven’s sake, Aymeric, I would tell you if I became a dragon.” He actually seems to think this is the truth, so Aymeric levels him with a look. Estinien has at least the grace to seem cowed. “The eyes left this mark on me.”

“I recall.” But he hadn’t thought them a permanent feature. “Is this why, then? You must know, if you breathed fire, it could hardly make you want you less.” He’s still holding Estinien’s arm in his own, palm in palm now, the lines and scars of Estinien’s callused skin facing up at him. A single patch of scales sits over the knuckle of his thumb, half-visible; he can’t stop staring at it.

And when he looks up at last, Estinien is looking back at him. “He lives within me still. Aymeric, if you were lost to me, I would rubble this city for you. I could do no less.”

Aymeric doesn’t do him the disservice of wondering if this is within his power. He knows it is. He imagines Estinien as a dragon from the old story books, those few preserved from before the War, where dragons were creatures of greed sitting on hoards of treasure they had no use for except that they thought it pretty and that it ought to be theirs.

“You’re scared.” It is simple, in the end.

Estinien’s expression sours. “This, again,” he mutters, and says, “Yes. I am scared. Would you truly subject these people to that threat?”

“Threat,” Aymeric laughs, without an ounce of humor “Do not pretend that this is selflessness. Do not pretend this is for my sake.” His words become ragged; he hasn’t any reason left to keep them from being so. The wound through him chooses that moment to remind him of its presence and he wishes for a moment, madly, that it hurt worse. That there were anyone left in this city brave enough to spar him and make it hurt. That he might find any excuse to put himself through a pain greater than the one settling in behind his ribs now, that dull edge.

Estinien sets his teeth to make some further excuse, but Aymeric drops his hand. It isn’t his to hold. It won’t be. Estinien has made sure of that, for both of them. And where will Estinien go now, he wonders. Somewhere so far none of them have heard of it, and happy enough as long as Aymeric and Ishgard are safe behind the glass of his memory, pinned and preserved.

He should have left without saying goodbye, Aymeric thinks, and his mind’s cruelty surprises him. “Forgive me,” he says. “If this is what you came to say, I have other business to attend.”

The papers are still spread over the floor, but they’ll wait. He spares them a glance as he heads to the door, and doesn’t look at Estinien, even when the man calls his name. Perhaps it’s his turn to leave.

Aymeric slams out of his office like he means to take the door off his hinges. He nearly does. The force of it against the wall is such a foreign sound it sends the few guards milling down the hallway jumping in place; Lucia rises from her crouch where she had been conversing with the dragon in low tones on his version of the night gone sour.

“Sir?” she starts, but Aymeric is looking nowhere and at nothing, his expression black, his blue eyes hooded with an emotion she never thought to see there.

As he makes for the stairs, she looks back through the open door of the office to see Estinien staring after him. A pile of armor and what appears to be the papers she organized that morning is confettied across the floor. Estinien is staring in shock as if he thinks Aymeric has performed a magic trick by storming out; their eyes meet but briefly, and then he says savagely, “I know! I know,” and then takes off in the direction Aymeric made his run.

Beside her, the dragon makes a little sound of exclamation, as if they’re watching a street show, and takes off after him. Lucia considers the indignity of following, and waits a breath before she joins the trail—in what she tells herself are elegantly measured steps, cries of Aymeric and Wait, damn you and Excuse me, Sir! echoing back up at her through the halls of the congregation.

The thing about it is that, in the Holy See’s infinite wisdom, there are not exactly stairs going all the way down the bottom from the upper floors. This was some concession to safety, she imagines, though the effectiveness of that when their opponents in the war had wings is lost on her now. What there is, is a lift, and by the time woman, dragon, and dragoon reach it, it’s already headed for the bottom. They’re given to wait while Estinien stares a hole into the gated off elevator shaft, as if he’s seriously contemplating cutting through it and leaping down—but he left his lance in the office. Little blessings.

It’s never seemed so long a wait as it does in that interminable moment, and then they have to get on the thing together, the three of them packed in because even baby dragons are rather large. “If you fuck this up,” she muses philosophically, and leaves the then to Estinien’s imagination.

He has his arms folded across his chest like a second set of armor. “I won’t.”

“Really, because it seems like you might have already—“

“I won’t.”

She almost believes him.

And when the lift opens, it seems he’s due at least one shred of good luck: the exit to The Congregation is blocked entirely by a shipment of boxes which Vaincannet, their quartermaster by self-appointment—privately, she thinks he simply enjoys keeping lists of things—is trying to get through the door.  Aymeric is standing beside this display with his gaze focused into the safe middle distance, nodding along as Handeloup tries to discuss something with him. The Congregation is lively by all standards, with everyone who had anything better to do now stuck inside and making small talk.

Estinien seems oblivious to all of this. “Aymeric, stop.” His voice is a ragged blade’s edge that cuts through all conversation in the room. For all that his words are meant for one man only, everyone turns to him. Even Aymeric, looking pained.

“Ah, I’d thought our conversation finished.”

It’s as close to peevish as he gets and every man there knows it. Handeloup takes a small step back as if he’s realized there’s a fuse attached to his Commander.

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“I’m sure I know where it was going.” Aymeric smiles blandly as he says this, his voice light as air.

Estinien approaches him and sets a hand on his shoulder and then actually turns Aymeric to face him. “Yes, I am scared. And yes, I’m leaving,” he says, in what might be the worst opener to an apology she’s ever heard, if that’s indeed what it is. And then he says lowly, but not low enough to not be heard in the echoing silence of The Congregation, “If I had my druthers I would sit in that office eating your food and sending every fool who wants your time back where they came from. But there are other battles need fighting. I have to leave.”

“I am—desperately aware, Estinien.”

“—And I will come back. I swear it on my life.”

Aymeric can but look at him, it seems, expression ill.

“On my lance,” Estinien corrects.

The smile pasted across Aymeric’s face is a sickly thing on a mouth like his and it becomes uglier as he says, “And I’ll be waiting. Is that what you expect of me?” He bows his head. “But of course, I will be. What else could I do.”

As if realizing their audience at last, Aymeric straightens. He nods at Estinien. “I will await you, my friend.”

“That isn’t what I—you don’t have to wait for me. You don’t have to stay here all the time and I can come back and you don’t have to look at me like I’m leaving you at home to tend dinner while I fight some war! Live for yourself now and then, you damn fool.” He slashes the air with his hand, and that’s where the armor on the floor of Aymeric’s office came from she realizes, and then the full scope of what’s exposed comes to her in curl of shock.

Scales, all the way up. Like the click-click-click of her armor snapping on in the morning, it comes together, and she thinks that if she were half a dragon who once tried to burn a city for love, she might play the coward, too.

Aymeric has frozen to the spot. Over his shoulder, Handeloup appears to be experiencing the most profound regret of his life for not removing himself as far from their argument as possible when he had the chance.

“Damn this,” Estinien bites off the words. “Damn this,” he repeats, louder, and then with little warning at all his ungauntleted hand slides to the blue collar of Aymeric’s formal wear and fists the cloth in a deathly grip and pulls.

And for a moment she thinks this is going to be a fight, that she’ll have to intervene, but it isn’t a fist that meets Aymeric’s face. Handeloup finds it in himself to stumble out of the debris zone at last as Estinien meets Aymeric’s mouth with his own in a savage kiss. Several gasps ring out while Lucia tries to understand what she’s seeing. It is clear neither of them have kissed anyone to the excess of knowing how to do it. Estinien keeps his eyes opened, glaring at Aymeric that mere ilm away, whos’ own eyes are shocked wide. It’s the only point of contact; the rest of their bodies are still a near full yalm distant, as demanded by both Halone and their armor.

It might have continued that way for minutes, but Aymeric is like a dam breaking. He surges forward, as near as he can get—again, the armor—his hand coming to Estinien’s hair and his mouth opening and Estinien following that lead. It isn’t a kiss at all, but desperation. Two men at the end of their wits and words, finding some other way to have it out. It is like two animals attempting to consume each other by the mouth.

“By the Seven,” Vaincannet whispers in either prayer or plea.

It is rather the display, for a building supposedly ordained by the Holy See, and more so when the ostensible leader of their church and the once-leader of their Dragoons engaging in it. Well. Perhaps Halone was no prude. And they are wearing armor, at least, a blessing she realizes as Estinien shifts and almost succeeds in taking out one of Aymeric’s eyes with the spikes on his shoulders. The shift brings him leverage to tug again at Aymeric’s collar, to tip their heads in odd angle, to bump forehead to forehead and then to lick his way into Aymeric’s mouth with a shattered breath and a groan that echoes in the quiet—

“I think we’ve about got this dislodged,” someone says from the other side of the shipment of boxes, which are still, as they have been, blocking the door, but not so much that Firmalbert can’t stick his head around one and into the room and see for himself why absolutely no one gives one flying shit about boxes.

He makes a very small sound of shock that is very large in the quiet space and sounds closer to the cry a gastornis makes when surprised, and then ducks out of sight again with a mangled, “Sorry! Don’t—don’t worry about it!”

The pair at the center of the room part, without parting, still close enough that they must be able to breathe each other’s breaths. “I’m leaving,” Estinien repeats after a moment. “But I’ll come back every damn week if you like.”

Aymeric sighs against him. “Only because you know I’ll pay your travel costs.”

With a rather embarrassing smile pasted across his thin, red, wet mouth, Estinien shakes his head. “I am terrible with gil.”

Aymeric’s hand is still in his hair. He cards through it to the end of the loose, white strands as he pulls away. “You are. And yet I still find it in me to love you.”

And Lucia, the dragon, Handeloup—who is still standing far too close, and the rest of the Temple Knights there so gathered are treated to the rare sight of Estinien, once-head of the Order of the Knights Dragoon, once-bearer of Nidhogg’s eye, and current holder of something far more valuable, blushing. His cheeks run ruddy and he clears his throat and says with historic eloquence, “Ah. Well, you know I—of course. Same.”

She supposes that if it’s good enough for the Lord Commander, she can hardly judge otherwise.