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Colette had always been searching for a place to belong to.
When she first met Lloyd, it had been by chance. She didn’t meet him on his first day of school, when he had already been fifteen minutes late, earning a frown from the new professor but forgiven when he explained how far he traveled just to get here. It had not even been on one of the few trips that Lloyd had gone along with Dirk to Iselia, the dwarf picking up supplies to fill up their food pantries, and any extra seeds and tools for the vegetable garden he was just starting. On the former, she had been away at the Church for her routine lessons, and on the latter, she was always at home, the language of the angels swimming in her head as she devoutly read the scriptures from heavy tomes.
When she was already receiving her lessons as the Chosen, they only told her about her fate once she turned six – all with fanciful words of how she would take her place in heaven with the goddess and rest peacefully. But even back then, she understood the meaning of it.
So one day, with that knowledge deeply part of her, Colette had to leave her room, her house, and the books far away, so that she could breathe. She left in the middle of the day, thinking only to go as she snuck through the front gate to the forests surrounding Iselia, all before they would implement guards to prevent such a thing from happening again. She walked and walked, until the brush at her feet grew darker and the trees closed in, until the light dirt pathway slowly started to vanish.
She walked until she couldn’t anymore, the sun all but blocked out from the thick boughs overhead. There was no more path to lead her anywhere, the entire floor overtaken by snaking roots and shrubbery. The air felt cold around her. The shadows stretched wide, making the woods feel like early evening when it was still in the middle of the afternoon.
Or had she really lost track of time?
She stumbled over a stump – or it could have simply been a pebble, or only air. But she fell onto her knees, her hands clutching the grass between her fingers, thinking over and over the words that the priest had left her. And her grandmother, trying to soften the blow, with peaceful hands that stroked through her hair, but not denying the truth of what it all meant.
“Chosen, you will be like a friend to the world. And once you grow older, you will have to leave, but that is what happens to all of us,” Phaidra had tried to soothe, an old scripture book still laid at her knee along with Colette’s head. “It will just be a little sooner than most…”
She felt a hand take her own – but it wasn’t familiar, and it fit inside her own like a puzzle piece.
Colette blinked. She saw that she was on her feet again, grass stains on her bare knees, and on the sleeves of her dress. And right in front of her was a boy, his hair sticking up in wild ways, his eyes blinking along with her own. In a red shirt and suspenders that held up dark shorts, she wondered if this was someone from school that she couldn’t seem to recognize yet.
“Hey! Where were you going? It’s dangerous down this way!” The boy’s palm was just against her own, a little damp, scuffed with dirt. She realized why that was so.
“Oh! But my hands are dirty…” she could only trail out, still feeling a bit light-headed. Hadn’t she left her grandmother in the kitchen, and then had gone out the back door? What would she think…?
The boy tilted his head, the motion of it catching her attention. It reminded her of the neighborhood dog that she always wanted to pet whenever she saw it. “Are you okay? You were walking by yourself and being really quiet…”
She saw in his other hand that he held what looked like a long stick. The end of it was freshly snapped, like a jagged point of a knife. He tapped it against the ground, keeping in an even tempo.
“Ah? Where… am I?” Colette arced her head to look around her, but the trees looked unfamiliar, and she could hear the rapid flow of a river nearby. But this wasn’t anything like the small glades that were in Iselia. “Who are you?”
Another blink, and there was something about his eyes. Full and matching the shade of the tree bark, yet catching the light of the sunshine. They were in a sunny place now, the previous shadows from her wandering gone.
“You should tell people your name first before asking theirs, you know!” The boy huffed, but then looked embarrassed right away. “I mean…I guess I did just come up to you. I’m Lloyd! I live here. Well, near here. Not this place though. There’s a lot of mean wolves around.”
And still, Lloyd hadn’t let go of her hand. He was gently leading her away from the darker part of the forests, back out into the light with the pathway, with the flowers that lined parts of a nearby field, white petals drifting in the breeze. And on that same pathway, she saw what looked to be the largest dog in the world.
Colette had almost forgotten to say anything, still dazzled by sights out from the shadows, by the dog that looked so fluffy to the touch, wondering what it would be like to dig her hands through the fur – and by the boy next to her, his eyes still catching that light.
“I’m…Colette. I’m the…” She paused, and suddenly the title that she had always known felt deeply heavy in her chest. She couldn’t finish.
“The…girl that got lost?” Lloyd finished for her, grinning wide then. “You’re silly! I was playing with Noishe when I saw you. You shouldn’t wander off! Or, that’s what my dad says.”
The dog named Noishe padded up to her, ears drooped low, sniffing at her curiously. She reached out to pet it, and the warmth she felt from scratching the dog’s head was the same as Lloyd’s hand in hers.
“I was lost,” she admitted, but the smile touched her lips easily, feeling refreshed. “But then you found me.”
And since then, it was hard for Colette to forget the shape of his grin, the touch of red on his cheeks. From playing? From the sun shining down on them both? Or because their hands stayed together? She remembered how much she didn’t want to grow up then, even more than before.
“Well, it’s good I found you,” Lloyd admitted. He was leading her and Noishe up a hill, past the rushing river, and soon she could see the shape of something in the distance. A house? Right in the middle of the woods, almost as if out of a fairytale…. “But I don’t know how to get you back home…”
Colette looked at the house as they moved closer; the weather vane in the shape of a rooster on top of its roof, the wooden shed to the right, the multitudes of potted plants that lay near the front door. She pointed at it suddenly. “There,” she said with full conviction. “I live there.”
“Huh?” Lloyd blinked, back to her then back to the house that looked so far off from everything she had known. “You do?”
“Well…today I live there. Maybe not tomorrow.” Colette scuffed her shoes against the dirt, excitement running through her chest, like the rush she had felt when she ran through the woods with complete abandon. But different this time, because she knew where to go. “Is that okay?”
Maybe another boy would have found her strange, or weird to suggest such a thing. But Lloyd only laughed, and excitedly pulled her along the makeshift bridge across the river.
No one had ever accepted her so easily.
“Sure it is!” Lloyd said, his happiness beaming out from the eyes that she couldn’t look away from. “So… welcome back, Colette!”
In the Church, the priests taught her the language of the Angels; an ancient script that only those of the cloth and the Chosen they watched over would be able to decipher. They taught her to memorize the landmarks of the journey that she would travel to, the names of ancient heroes that conversed with goddesses and how she would one day be as close to such figures when the time came. They taught her to watch and listen from a distance.
But Lloyd taught her to use her hands.
When Lloyd had first come to Iselia, she’d see the way his fingers would tap on the desk, (and ever since they first met, he’d always choose the desk closest to her – as long as he wasn’t late) starting off light, then faster, louder until the Professor would shush him across the room. But his hands wouldn’t stop moving then. Instead, they’d take something else, like the pencil he’d been chewing on, or the small little carving knife he always liked to carry around. Sometimes he’d draw lines on the paper, or carve them onto the wood.
And no matter what, he’d always show her what he made.
“That’s dad,” he’d point out to her, tracing the jagged edges of a beard, sprouting so wildly from a circle that was his father’s face. “You remember him, right? He’s really big!” And of course she did, recalling the adult with thick arms and a heavy beard, the way his laughter boomed inside the home when he first met her then. He hadn’t minded that she wanted their home for her own, at least for that one day.
Then Lloyd would draw a shape that she was familiar with, a furry creature standing on four legs, standing a head above the sketchy scribble that was Lloyd’s father. Scritch scritch came the sounds of Lloyd’s pencil on paper, his tongue just sneaking past his lips in concentration.
“I can’t draw at all,” she said, fingers curling around her dress, all as she kept scooting closer to Lloyd to see his work better.
“Huh? How come?” He sounded so curious. And though she still only knew Lloyd for a little bit, she didn’t think he was teasing her about it.
“Ah, it’s not really something meant for me?” It was the best way she could explain it. Why would a Chosen need to learn to draw?
“But you want to, right?”
“Well…”
Lloyd’s hands, even back then, had dwarfed her own. She felt the calluses against his palm as held her wrists gently, the lightness of his fingers as they seemed to dance over her knuckles, adjusting the shape of her hand. The pencil he gave her slipped easily into her grip.
“Just copy mine here. Try drawing Noishe!” He grinned at her, all teeth and stretching his cheeks that she thought she could see dimples. It made her stare, fascinated, and how this was something no one had told her about at all.
With his hands guiding her, she learned to draw for the very first time. It wasn’t anything particularly amazing, and her own doggy was lop-sided, complete with uneven ears and an oversized tongue. She had tried to capture the likeness of Noishe on that first day she had seen him standing beside Lloyd, on how the light made the green of his fur that much brighter, like the fields that surrounded Iselia.
Yet even as she saw the stark difference between her and Lloyd’s, his voice thrummed next to her in pride. “See? You can draw just fine!”
“Lloyd! Are you bothering people now?”
Raine’s voice was sudden, and with that, Lloyd had to let her go. The warmth of his hands left, even though she could remember the shape of it.
But still he smiled at her, inclining his head just a bit until so that only Colette could see. Only for her.
When she would go back home, she would try to practice drawing too, all within the margins of her own scripture books; little butterflies and happy dogs, and the wide-eyed smile of someone that filled her head during the day.
Her heart felt so, so full.
It was only natural for people to leave their home, to leave their friends behind.
Colette was just doing it sooner than most.
Outside, as the floorboards of the balcony creaked underneath them both, she went over the lie in her head, turning it over like a fine piece of jewelry. In the dark, she could hide away any small tells, any moments that Lloyd would catch her in.
She had to try not to laugh, because how easy it was to just let it free, a small giggle filled with every worry and fear in its waves.
“You know, this will be the first time we ever go somewhere that’s not just in Iselia.” Lloyd leaned back against the railing, his smile lighting something within her that it was almost too painful. But she took it as something good, something she would remember once she was on the last leg of her journey and… “We’ll get to see the whole world together!”
A world where she could be so easily lost, maybe forgotten. But she should want that for him, at least. “That’s what you always wanted to do, isn’t it?” she asked him, remembering the little dreams he’d tell her she’d ride on Noishe, his hand over her own to keep her steady, fingers entwining through green fur. “I think in a regenerated world, you can finally do that even more.”
The moonlight caught his eyes, and already she wanted to go and embrace him. But wouldn't she just trip right into the wood, with his hands reaching to keep her balanced? “Yeah. Maybe after the world’s regenerated, we can go on another trip together too. How about it?” He said it so casually, as if such dreams were not nearly as impossible as touching the stars in the sky. “But maybe once you become an angel, we can go back home for a little while. Is that okay?”
It was childish for her to wish for anything different.
In her heart, she brought with her the scent of oak as she left with Raine and Kratos in the early morning, the remembered texture of finely polished wood when she had leaned on the railing with Lloyd, looking up at the stars. And she kept the shape of his smile, lit up by the moon, tracing it over and over in her head.
Even if she had to lose a friend, she could keep parts of it, couldn’t she? These small memories that kept her mind afloat as she walked further away from home.
And when Lloyd lived in the new world, maybe, if he wanted to, he could do the same for her.
If he wanted to.
For a while, after Remiel called her forth and she felt her heart shatter in her chest, Colette had been adrift.
She knew of death, but she didn’t know how it would be for her. Would it be like the shutting of a door, cutting off light for her and leaving her in the dark? Or would it be like going to sleep, stuck in dreamlessness, never on the verge of waking up again?
Instead it was like she was floating out to sea, half-blind, with no compass to point out her way, and no sail to take her home. And through it all, she was left with the imprints of memories she had trouble placing.
She remembered the shape of the temple she would pray at, the scent of the tea her grandmother would make for her, the sad smile her father would sometimes have… and Lloyd, his hand in her own.
The longer she was away, the more she was beginning to forget.
Colette drifted as voices danced around her, half-remembering who they were, until she would forget again. Sometimes, she would still feel a hand inside her own, yet find nothing there.
And other times, she would see shadows out in the distance. The faces of friends she knew, and friends she didn’t yet. It was strange to see the new among the familiar, but in all of that, she could still see Lloyd, a passing ship that she tried to call out to. But, he couldn’t hear.
Or did he not want to hear her?
In all her drifting, she felt alone. And the fear that came when Remiel took away the last remaining thread of her humanity was her only companion.
There’s nowhere for you to go.
Colette tried to grip back the hand she could still feel. But it wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been. Even if she sometimes saw his face.
Lloyd will grow up. He will go away, the fear inside her said, continued to say. And you want to keep him locked in place?
When Sheena had spoken to him back in Sylvarant, he had smiled and laughed. She saw that now, in passing, like quick flashes of light. When a man with brilliant red hair had half-embraced Lloyd, he had grumbled but didn’t push him away. When a girl with eyes so familiar spoke, Lloyd would always turn to her.
She didn’t want him to keep from meeting these new people, new friends.
But then, what of her home?
Nowhere to go.
For a time, she stayed out in that nameless ocean, drifting and drifting, slowly losing her way. It was hard to look out for any familiar light through the darkness, easier to try and sleep. Still, she thought she felt that hand, the same hand that had brought her up to his house with no hesitation. But isn’t he gone? the fear in her kept asking. Why would he stay behind for you?
It was difficult to not be selfish.
“So that I could have a home to go back to.”
In that ocean of darkness and fading memories, she felt the hand there, remembered how it held the broken pieces of something precious. She would have accepted it as it was, kept it locked within her grip that she wouldn’t even give way to the angels. And once, when light flooded her senses, when she felt such a force try to take away a precious gift, she was able to keep that promise to herself.
Faces that she knew and didn’t know, all of it so much that she couldn’t even stay standing. But there was solid ground, and there was a hand to bring her back to her feet.
“Colette!” Lloyd called out, bringing her near, almost embracing her if it weren’t for the remnants of dirt on his jacket (and she could strangely recall a rigorous climb up a cliffside..) “You remember me?”
“Lloyd! Of course I do.” She felt the weight of the necklace on her, keeping her rooted, no longer adrift. “I think with this… I was able to find you.”
His smile always left her warm, left her nerves singing. “Heh, welcome back then. We missed you.”
Only did she realize just then – could a home be more than a place, but a person that lights your way?
There were little figurines on the stand, half of them already covered in snow.
“Are you looking for a souvenir?” spoke the salesman of the cart, decked in multiple layers, his mittened hands grasping one of the small things that had nearly drowned within the white. The finer details of its ears pressed flat against its head, the snout that made up its front, along with the embedded gems that served for its eyes – it all reminded her of something so familiar. She felt bad just getting one, and clumsily handed the gald to the salesman, carrying both charms in her shaking hands.
Was it because she was afraid? Or just so cold? The chill spread across her now unmarked skin, made her bones feel stiff, made her lungs ache from the sting of the cold air. Was she still afraid it would all go?
“They bring you luck,” the salesman had told her just before she left, his smile hidden away in the caverns of his scarf. “And we could all use a little luck nowadays.”
She wondered if she would have such luck now. She couldn’t stop shivering as she went to Zelos, asking a dear favor of him as she gave him the snow bunny to bring to Altessa. “Maybe he’d like it?” she asked of the other Chosen, wondering if he thought she sounded so childish just then. “It could go with his home, or maybe he could give it to Tabatha once she’s…”
Zelos patted her shoulder, and something in his motion felt more freeing. Maybe even relieving. “Anything for you, angel. Don’t mind doing a little delivery if it means I get to leave this place.”
“Ah, you don’t like the cold?” she asked him. But, no, she could see the smile on his face too, hear the little snicker that left his throat. “Or is it something else?”
“Don’t worry about it… but thanks for asking.” Zelos placed the bunny in his pocket, more carefully than any other gift he had ever received from a lady. “But you still got that other one, right?” He nodded to the snow bunny still clutched in her hands. “Make sure to give that guy a good home, too.”
Home has always meant something else to her, and maybe Zelos saw that too. With a wink, he left with the others on the Rheairds, and soon found herself rushing back to the inn, the cold biting her cheeks.
“Welcome back, Colette,” Lloyd had said to her, his gift hanging from her neck with a comforting weight. But in words, she heard something else too when he said that…
Or was that just wishful thinking?
Colette was all shivers as she rushed towards the inn, boots sinking into the snow, soaking them through. One charm flew across the ocean in the dark to reach a kind but grumpy dwarf, reminding her of Dirk in small ways, if not all.
The other stayed clutched in her hands, small enough to hide away from sight. It was nothing more than a toy, a childish thing, yet it felt as nice to her as the necklace she wore.
"Lloyd," she called out once she'd had the courage to knock on his door, to see him silhouetted against the windowpane and the snow flurries just outside. The room was doing all it could to stay warm with the heater in the corner, but she didn't mind the chill. It kept her awake as she kept asking. "Do you wanna go for a walk?"
She hated her own doubts, how much she worried for Lloyd to choose something else. But his smile to her gave her the answer, even before he spoke.
Home was warm with him.
“Welcome back, Colette.”
“Thanks.”
“Hmm? What’s wrong?”
“Ah well, I really like it when you say ‘welcome back.’
“Uh? Why?”
“Do you remember when you said it to me when I returned to my normal self?”
“You mean the time at Fooji Mountains.”
“Yeah. I was so happy. When you tell me, ‘welcome back,’ I really start to feel like I’m really back.”
“I see. I’ll say it at any time and as many times as you like!”
Colette was running late.
She had spent so long in Iselia throughout the evening. The temple where she had once endured hours of lessons and ritual was now a refuge for the orphans of fallen cities such as Palmacosta and Luin. The teachings of Martel couldn’t leave her, even after everything. She couldn’t help the prayers that fell naturally from her lips, or the soft remembrances of helping others. Many priests still made their pilgrimages, though it was now that they would stop at Iselia, to follow the once-Chosen in her charity.
But she hadn’t meant to stay so long…
In her haste, she had decided to use her wings, though only doing so once she was far enough away from the village. Easier to get past the trees and the steep cliffsides, the winding of the river that would make her circle around if she were on foot. But she could still follow it, knowing where it would eventually lead to.
She heard Noishe barking up ahead. “Ah, Noishe!” she called out, pink fluttering behind her, trailing stars as she saw the shape of the dog running across the grass – and the shape of a home she had long grown to know.
At the door, silhouetted by the firelight inside, was Lloyd. He waved both arms to her, his jacket unbuttoned and hanging loosely from his shoulders. “Colette! Welcome back!”
She hadn’t really meant to fly that much faster – already she was going at a fast pace as it was. But the sight of him made her want to fall that much quicker to the earth. Already Lloyd was there to catch her, his arms moving around to clasp her tight, feet stumbling to keep them upright.
“S-Sorry..” Colette apologized, winking in both amusement and shame. “Guess I must have tripped.”
“In the air?” Lloyd laughed, his voice traveling through her in a steady rhythm as they stayed close, one that she was beginning to know by heart. “But I can tell it was a good day for you.”
A nod, hands pressed lightly to his chest, fingers curling into his shirt. “It really was. But, I’m glad to be home again.” She stayed there, in his hold, with the crackling of the fire in the forge nearby, hearing the footpads of Noishe as he walked around outside, happy enough to sleep knowing that everyone was back home. They were only staying here for a few weeks while Dirk was away, and then they would need to go back on their journey, but…
“What is it, Colette?” he asked, his voice soothing, his words sincere. He hadn’t let up his grip.
“Do you think you could…say it again?” She could fall asleep in his arms if she let herself, and there were times that she did, never having felt safer than she did right now. “I just like hearing it.”
She felt his hand – the hand that had once pulled her out of the dark – lift her chin to kiss her. It was just one of many that he gave to her, but it left her in a sea of sweetness all the same.
“Hey, Colette,” Lloyd whispered against her hair, then kissing her forehead lightly. Even within this home, and the cold wind at her back from the still-open door, she felt his warmth over everything else. The necklace around her neck and pressing against skin, the figurine she could feel at his chest, still tucked close. All these things that made her feel like she belonged.
“Welcome back.”