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Aesa climbed the stairs of Rowena’s House of Splendors, knowing even without asking that she would find Estinien on the upper most balcony. She didn’t know if it was just his nature as the (former) azure dragoon that caused him to naturally look for the highest point available or the fact that it would be the least crowded area of the bustling settlement but her instincts were, as usual, correct. Estinien was leaning against the wall near the door, looking out in the direction of Silvertear Lake. She saw him tense slightly as he looked in her direction but then relax when he realized who it was.
“Hmph. Glad to see it’s you, Aesa. For a second I was worried that secretary of yours was about to come after me for something else” he said.
Aesa snorted. “So, what? You were up here hiding from Tataru? You know you can’t just keep avoiding her now that you’re officially a Scion.” She patted his shoulder as she walked by. “Besides, you finally gave in, right? She shouldn’t have any reason to come after you for anything now that you’re part of the team.” She moved to sit down at nearby table, leaning back in her chair as she shot Estinien a grin. “Besides, if you owe money for anything, she can just dock your pay directly instead of hounding you for debts.”
Estinien gave her a flat look and Aesa only laughed in response, gesturing to another chair at her table. “Now come on, stop brooding against the wall and sit down, yeah?”
Estinien’s look of exasperation only further increased at that but he did eventually unfold his arms and take a seat in the offered chair.
“There we go.” She smiled. “It’s been a while since we’ve gotten to just sit and talk. Feels like every time we’ve seen each other we’re in between battles or trips to other worlds.”
“Hm.” He leaned back slightly in the chair, looking out over the scenery again. “You’re right about that. It has been too long, hasn’t it?”
Aesa looked at her friend, observing his relaxed posture. Although Alisaie and some other Scion members complained about his terse personality, she could see that he was allowing the softer, kinder parts of himself to become more apparent as the layers of bitterness and vengeance had fallen away through the years.
Then again, the two of had always had a sense of effortlessness between them, despite how much Aesa liked to tease him or how often they would end up in competitive sparring matches. Both of them were fighters with a temper, both sometimes would let their words get away from them and both had been through tremendous loss.
But, most importantly, both trusted the other deeply.
“Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve got a present for you, Estinien.” Aesa grabbed the pack she had been carrying up off the floor and started to open it.
“For me?” Estinien eyed the pack, then her. “This isn’t some sort of trick, is it?”
“The hell, you think I’d stoop to something like that?” Before he could respond she pulled out a box, a small bottle and two eastern-style sake cups. “Think of it as a sort of ‘Welcome to the Scions’ present.” She grinned. “Even though it took you a hell of a long time to finally join.”
Estinien opened the box, his eyes immediately widening. “You— Already? You actually got some!?” He quickly reached in, holding up a piece of fried squid and inspecting it in disbelief.
“Of course. I figured it was faster for me to just teleport over to Kugane and bring some back as opposed to me asking one of the merchants to bring some.” She put the bottle on the table. “Managed to get some sake straight from the Hostelry too. Figured it’s late enough in the day for us to have a little bit of an indulgence.” She poured Estinien a cup, then herself one. Estinien had already begun to take a bite of the squid, looking pleased as a cat with a fresh kill.
“Just as good as I remember.” Estinien said between chews. “You have my thanks.”
“Mm, well this one was a present but now that you’ve got a job you’re gonna have to actually pay for these in the future.” She smirked slightly in response to Estinien’s unamused expression then reached to grab a piece. “You know I’ve never actually had these before…Are they that good?”
“Most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I could live off of it, if I had to.” Estinien said as he grabbed another piece.
“And get yourself a surefire way to catch a bunch of diseases from lack of nutrition” Aesa took a curious bite, taking a moment to chew before nodding. “Not bad…Maybe I’ll have to get some more for myself too.” She took a sip of her sake, the pleasant mixture of sweet bitterness going well with the aftertaste of fried squid. She eyed Estinien, who took a small sip of his own sake, looking just as pleased.
“See? Being part of the Scions isn’t so bad now, is it?” She said, grinning at him.
“Never said it was.” He replied. “They all seem like a reliable group, Alphinaud’s sister hating me notwithstanding”
“Ah, just give her some time. I’m sure you’ll grow on her in a few months…or years.” She said idly.
Estinien snorted. “Gods help me if I have to deal with her ire for that long”
“I don’t think even the gods will be able to help you then, unfortunately.” She said, waving a stick of squid in his direction.
He smirked in response, then grew more thoughtful as he chewed another piece. Aesa made a mental note to buy a bigger batch next time with how quickly the two of them were going through the Kugane delicacies. “That G’raha Tia though…he’s an odd one. I can’t seem to figure him out. From the way he acted when we first met I thought him a foolish boy merely playing at being a mage. But then the next second he started to act like someone with the experience of someone…much older.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’m overthinking it”
Aesa looked at him, chewing contemplatively as she thought about her next move. On the one hand, she really wished someone else had thought to mention to Estinien exactly who G’raha was. But, on the other hand, doing it now in a more controlled environment was probably better. She shuddered to think of how this would go if he found out in the middle of a battle or tense negotiation with Sharlayan. “Well…” She began, leaning back. “You’re right that there’s something different about him compared with the other Scions.”
He glanced at her curiously and she continued. “You remember when all the Scions got pulled onto the First? Then I passed out during that battle with Zenos’ body?”
Aesa could see a flash of anger pass through Estinien’s eyes and his jaw clench slightly. Despite the flippant joke he had made about her passing out on battlefields, she knew he had been worried about Alphinaud and her and that worry had a risk of coming out as anger or frustration.
“I do…” He said carefully. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well…” She paused, then folded her arms with a light sigh. “G’raha was the one who summoned us.”
A very long, very tense silence followed as Aesa watched the realization slowly dawn on Estinien’s face. Then, suddenly, he slammed his hands on the table and stood up in a violent motion as he quickly moved towards the door.
“I’m going to talk with him.” He said, his voice low but oddly calm. Aesa knew that, more than anything, showed the true depths of his anger.
Luckily, Aesa had been prepared for this exact reaction. Quicker than an eyeblink, she grabbed him by the shoulder and the waist and proceeded to wrestle her friend back towards the table, causing him to grunt as he strained against her grip.
“Oh like hell you are! I know exactly what kind of ‘conversation’ you’re about to have with him.” She panted in between the struggle of Estinien pulling forward and her pulling him back.
They continued like that for a few moments, lightly wrestling with each other as Aesa continued to explain in between grunts exactly why G’raha had felt the need to resort to such methods. Finally, Estinien relented and stepped back towards the table. The anger in his eyes hadn’t faded, however, and Aesa maintained her grip on him.
“He could have all the gods damned reasons in the world, Aesa, that doesn’t change the fact that you could have bloody well died back there, and I—”
Huffing, she pinched the end of his ears and pulled his head down closer to hers. “What else is new? I have life and death experiences all the damn time. Plus, if he hadn’t done all that, you, me and most everybody we knew would be dead anyway!”
Estinien pulled himself out of her grip, rubbing his ear with a slightly sour expression as he glared off at nothing.
Aesa put a hand on her hip, frowning. “Look, I know where you’re coming from Estinien. I was madder than hell when I saw him in person…took every bit of self-restraint I had to not deck him for pulling all the Scions into another world.” She paused. “But…it was an accident. And one that came out of desperation.”
Estinien remained silent, still glaring at the wall.
Aesa sighed again. “Besides. It’s not gonna do, to have one of my best friends and my lover at odds like this all the time.”
Estinien scowled further, but in a way that Aesa could tell was hiding a slight blush at being called her ‘best friend’. However, it faded as his eyes started to widen in realization. After a few seconds of thought, he whipped back around to face her, looking aghast. “You—” He stuttered, mouth opening and closing in a very good imitation of a freshly-caught fish. “You’re—”
Aesa sat back in her chair, confident that Estinien was now too distracted to extract any revenge on G’raha.
For the moment, anyway.
“Well there’s a start of a sentence there, Estinien. Just a few more words and you might get a thought out.”
He smacked the table, rattling the bowl of dried squid slightly, before he gestured vaguely in the Rising Stones’ direction. “Him?! But he’s so….so…” He continued to gesture with his hands, as if that would somehow get his point across, before he finally picked a word. “Young!?”
“Hm, I dunno about that. Technically he’s over a hundred years my senior” Aesa replied, impassively chewing on a piece of squid. “Plus, what, are you calling me an old lady or something?” She shot Estinien a grin, which widened as he tried to backpedal the potential insult but then immediately froze when her first comment hit him.
“…I’m pretty sure I must have misheard you Aesa. Because I know you didn’t just say a hundred-year difference.” He said slowly, sitting back down in his chair.
“Oh I did.” She replied simply.
He stared at her for a long moment then sighed and slumped in his chair, running his hand along his face. “Forget it. I’m not even going to ask at this point. After all this Allagan nonsense and traveling to other worlds or whatever it was you were doing, sometimes it’s better just not to know.”
Aesa laughed, grabbing another piece of squid before Estinien could get to it and earned a lightly annoyed glower in the process. “Come on, Estinien, it’s these kind of amazing deeds that gets you and me written about in the history books, right?” She paused to chew the piece of squid, then some of her playfulness faded into a more thoughtful look. “I guess I know what you mean, though. A Baldesion scholar constantly sticking his nose in historical tomes and all that doesn’t exactly seem my type, does it?”
She looked over at Estinien, who nodded slightly.
“But…” She continued, looking out again. “I’ll be damned but I do love him Estinien.” She picked up her cup of sake, swirling the liquid thoughtfully and making as if she was going to take a sip before stopping.
“I mean, whenever it came to romance and marriage and all that, I wasn’t ever really for it, you know? All the examples I’d seen made it seem like you were chaining yourself to somebody who’d use anything they could against you, use all of your feelings to get their way. And my parents were probably the best example of that.” She added a bit more bite to that last part, her expression darkening just slightly before she continued on.
“I mean, hell, the closet thing I felt to wanting that was with Haurchefant. And, well…you know how that ended.” She took a sip. “After that I didn’t really have any interest.” Estinien’s expression softened slightly in understanding but he remained quiet. He understood more than most, after all. He had been one of the few people to see how she had been right after his death; full of nothing but bitterness and rage.
Aesa’s mind traveled to a few years in the past, back when the Dragonsong War was still raging and soon after they had freed Aymeric at the vault. When she tried to think of that time, a lot of it felt like it ran together in a terrible, numb blur but she could remember that, for some reason, she had ended up pulled along by a few of the Ishgardian knights to spend a late night at the tavern. She had acted cheerful, more than happy to play the part of returning hero, to be surrounded by other people for a short amount of time, to be taken out of her own head.
They had passed Estinien on the way.
“Come on, Ser Estinien, Aesa’s coming for a night out! What’s stopping you? Join us, join us!” One knight had said.
”Oh don’t bother you know he never comes.” The other one had replied, shooting the irritable dragoon a glance. “Says he hates this kind of thing”
Estinien had looked from Aesa, to the knights, then back at Aesa. She had ended up glancing away, feeling for some reason that Estinien was staring straight through her.
“…Fine” he had finally said. “I’ll go.”
And so he had, although he spent the entire time sitting next to Aesa at the bar, looking like he would rather be anywhere else as he slowly nursed some ale. Aesa decided not to pay too much attention to that and enjoyed in the pleasant numbing sensation that drink after drink had on her. Finally, after her other drinking companions had left for the night, it was just the two of them sitting together in the nearly-empty tavern. Estinien was still sipping that same drink he had ordered at the beginning of the night, occasionally glancing over at Aesa as she leaned over her glass. Her head had felt fuzzy but, without the chatter from her drinking friends, it was beginning to feel more painful and oppressive than pleasant.
Why the hell did he even come? He obviously doesn’t want to be here… She had thought, glancing at Estinien for a moment before downing the rest of her glass. She began to reach out to ask the bartender for another but paused when she felt a hand on her forearm.
She looked back over at Estinien, who was looking back at her with a frown.
”What?” She snapped, her irritability increasing rapidly.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” he had asked quietly.
Aesa grit her teeth and pulled her arm away from Estinien’s grip, suddenly feeling so dizzy from the alcohol that she nearly fell off her stool at the motion. “What the hell…Are you my chaperone all of a sudden? Why don’t you mind your own damn business?!” She felt her anger rising suddenly. What was his problem? What right had he to judge her?
“Is that why you came?” She snarled, though the slurring in her voice took some of the bite out of it. “So you could look down your nose at me?! Well you can just throw yourself off a cliff for all I care. I—“
Estinien didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her as he suddenly put a handful of gil on the bar and stood up, reaching for her arm. ”Come on, you’re going back to the Fortemps manor.”
Despite her protests, Aesa had been too off balance from the alcohol to put up much of a fight as Estinien pulled her out of her stool and back outside, though she managed to wrench her arm out of his loose grip after they had gotten out of the door.
“What the hell is your problem?! I don’t need your help!” She stumbled back a bit, head swimming.
Estinien hadn’t made to grab her arm again but didn’t move either, looking at her with an expression that was unreadable with the helmet covering his eyes. Aesa had felt her anger flare again, more defensively this time.
“And I sure as hell don’t need you to judge me, Estinien. What the hell do you know?! So what if I wanted to get drunk, is that a crime? I’m—” She continued ranting when suddenly her vision flashed back to the vault, to blood, to—
“Shit…!” She gripped her head, doubling over as a wave of pain and nausea nearly knocked her to her knees. Estinien had reached out to her but she knocked his hand away. “I don’t need your damn pity! I…Fuck, I just wanted to forget for a bit, Estinien! I just didn’t want to feel so—I just didn’t want to remember! Just for a damn minute! And I can’t even have that, can I!?”
She leaned her head on a nearby wall, panting as she tried to hold down her bile. She kept expecting to hear the clinking of Estinien’s armor as he walked away but, for some reason, he stayed, watching her quietly. After a long moment she spoke again, her voice hoarse.
“I just wanted to forget…Gods, I just…” She sank into a crouching position, her head still resting against the cold stone. “I miss him so much…I miss him so damn much and it’s all my fault…!” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the tears that had been forming.
“Forgive me…” She whispered. “Forgive me…forgive me…” She kept repeating over and over until she finally fell silent, too numb and exhausted to feel humiliated.
After another moment of silence Estinien had crouched next to her and, much to her surprise, put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s not your fault.” He had said quietly, giving her shoulder a slight squeeze. “It’s not your fault, Aesa.”
Her head whipped around to stare at him, shocked at the look of sadness and empathy on his face, apparent even with his eyes hidden. So many people had told her similar things: that they were sorry, that she shouldn’t blame herself, but it hand found it all empty and placating. But for Estinien to say something like that, the one who was usually shunned for being rude and thoughtless…
She felt like he truly meant it.
So she had let him sling her arm over his shoulder and help her stumble back to the manor, pausing every so often when she needed to wretch in an alleyway, offering what quiet support he could until he was sure she was safely back home.
And, finally, Aesa realized why he had come with her in the first place.
For some reason he, Alphinaud and Aymeric had all stayed by her side despite her showing the worst parts of herself, parts that she had sworn to keep hidden around others lest they abandon her. But, they stayed, and it was something that she would forever be grateful for even if she couldn’t quite understand it.
Aesa remained silent for a few moments before suddenly continuing on. “But…” She smiled slightly, fondly. “When it comes to G’raha, it feels like he’s holding my heart gently…taking care of it like it’s something precious, I think. No matter how bruised or ugly a thing it seems to me sometimes.”
She looked up at Estinien expectantly, who looked away with a sigh as he folded his arms. “Didn’t expect to hear all this romantic poetic language out of you of all people, Aesa.”
She let out a small laugh. “Weird, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll break out into a love ballad next.”
Estinien snorted in response, though he couldn’t hide the small smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “Do and you’ll find your lyre underneath my boot”
“And my boot will be up your ass” She smirked back, sipping the last bit of her cup.
“Well…” He sighed, glancing away. “If you’re happy that’s what matters in the end, I guess. And…I’ll…” Estinien continued the sentence as a half-mumbled jumble of words, looking increasingly embarrassed.
“Eh?” She asked, leaning closer. “What are you mumbling about?”
Estinien sighed in frustration, looking more self-conscious as he refused to meet her eyes. “I said I’d…do my best. To be…nice. I guess.” He tried to finish the last part of his sentence as quickly as possible, looking increasingly irritated.
Aesa smiled brightly. “Thanks, Estinien. Coming from you, that’s a lot.”
“Hmph.” He folded his arms, looking away and doing his best attempt at hiding his small smile.
“And…” She paused as her teasing expression faded into something more serious and sincere. “Thanks again. For…joining us. Really. It means a lot, Estinien. Not just for Alphinaud’s sake, but…” She trailed off, looking lost in thought.
She couldn’t quite figure out how to express it but he just felt that, despite having already beaten dragons, gods, sineaters and Ascians, they were about to face their most difficult trial yet. But despite the upcoming battle, having another one of her close friends with her made her feel better, somehow. She knew her younger self probably would call her needy for thinking this way; that she should be able to handle things on her own. That she should be strong enough that she didn’t need anyone.
But she also knew, after everything that had happened, that not only could she not do things all on her own but she didn’t want to. She wanted to support the people she loved and be supported in turn.
However, even with understanding it, it was a hard thing to admit.
Estinien looked back over at her, studying her expression. They were both silent for a few moments until, surprisingly, it was Estinien that spoke up.
“I meant what I said back there.” He replied softly. “After everything you’ve done, there was no other option.”
“Hm.” She smiled slightly. “Well, I guess this gives me a chance to pay you back for saving my life back at Ghimlyt Dark.”
Estinien scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Spare me. If anything, I still owe more than I could ever repay for you saving me and all of Ishgard, not to mention bloody restoring half the damn city.”
Aesa laughed, her brief melancholy seeming to have dissipated. “What, so we’ve gotta just keep saving each other over and over to try and pay each other back, is that it?” She held up a fist in his direction. “Well, I guess I’m okay with that. You watch my back and I’ll watch yours, right?” She grinned. “Just like usual”
Estinien blinked at her then smiled lightly, holding up a friendly fist to bump it against hers.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He smiled back.
And, this time, he didn’t try and hide it.