Chapter Text
Zenos is alive.
Badly wounded, but alive, and the sight of him– Garlean prince turned pariah, her nemesis, her friend, somehow-- lying calmly and quietly on a cot in the private chamber of the Leveilleur Estate (which Ameliance Leveilleur insisted they commandeer) is making Kallian Tabris’ head spin.
That could also be the blood loss though, or the aether sickness, a byproduct of the veritable ocean of healing magic her friends expended to keep her alive, as well as, possibly, the effects of the strange and otherworldly atmosphere of Ultima Thule itself.
She isn’t ungrateful for her friend’s efforts by any means, and she’d thrown herself into the unknown fully aware that she was probably going to die so, really, a bit of aether sickness isn’t that steep a price to pay. She’s dealt with it before; it wasn’t that long ago that even simply teleporting to an Aetherstone sent her scrambling for a bush to throw up in.
Unfortunately, it’s aether sickness combined with severe blood loss, head trauma, and numerous, grievous bodily injuries, which means it’s been enough to keep her down for the count for almost a week now.
She’s been ‘assigned’ as his personal guard– which feels a little patronizing– because, for one thing, he needs to be watched near constantly and she’s the only one who might have a chance of stopping him if he starts causing trouble and, for another thing, she’s been summarily confined to bed rest, and she would probably be climbing the walls, leaving bed without permission, and generally making everyone miserable if she didn’t have at least one other thing to focus on.
She hates sitting around with nothing to do, which her friends all know. She hates it worse than anything. Even before she was the Warrior of Light, when she was still just Kallian Tabris, Novice Adventurer, she’d struggled to actually stay down during her downtime. There’s always something to do.
Even she has to recognize that she has little choice in the matter right now, though, because every time she tries to get out of bed by herself, an agonizing, lancing pain shoots up from her leg and hip and down her shoulder and wrist, settling in her stomach, and it makes her world-endingly nauseous, which then triggers the lingering aether sickness, and each time that happens she ends up leaning over her bed and throwing up into the basin set aside for the purpose like some sort of overindulgent, hung-over alcoholic.
And then, of course, each body-shaking heave makes her partially healed injuries screech in pain. Her battered organs, the broken and recently mended (but still markedly fragile) arm and leg, the gash that runs from her right shoulder and cuts down to her left hip (the work of Zenos’ scythe, gods, she can still remember the flare of heat and searing pain when he caught her in the crook of that hideous weapon and dragged her backwards)...
That one, she thinks, is probably the worst of the lot. According to Urianger, who has learned long ago not to mince words about the state of her own body, mostly by virtue of being the healer she trusts most to put her back together, she’d almost been cut in half.
The combined healing magics of Alisaie, Alphinaud, Y’shtola, Urianger, and G’raha had been just enough to keep her from dying, and to fix the worst of the injuries, but, at this point, according to the chirurgeons, the best thing for it is to let herself heal naturally, which means the road ahead promises to be long and arduous and excruciatingly dull.
”We have done everything that can be done with magic,” Alphinaud had told her when she’d pressed, sounding annoyingly even-tempered even though he knew that she knew as much, being a trained White Mage, and was just asking because she didn’t want to feel helpless. ”Some things must simply heal with time.”
Damn it all.
It hadn’t been so bad at first, owing primarily to the fact that she struggled to even maintain consciousness for longer than five or six minutes at a time. Her grand return to Sharlayan had been made upon her own two feet, certainly, but Thancred had been supporting most of her weight, and she only made it three steps onto the docks before her strength deserted her and down she went, and then they’d hauled her here to recuperate.
Now she’s awake, and convalescence is a bitch.
So Tabris’ days are spent lying in a cot, letting the chirurgeons tend to her, eating the food they bring, and fielding a thousand-and-one questions about her well-being from relevant interested parties (for someone who often chooses work over proper sleep, G’raha Tia can be an absolute mother hen when he wants to be), and resting as much as she can make herself, and the weirdest part about all of that is that she’s been watching Zenos do exactly the same thing, minus the concern from pretty much anyone besides herself.
Thal’s fucking balls, it’s making her nervous.
He has to be biding his time. Whatever understanding there’d been between them at the edge of all the stars can’t still be solid and grasping, can it? He hasn’t said a word to anyone since she used the last of her rapidly-depleting strength to drag his sorry bleeding ass back to the Ragnarok, an act that no one seems to understand, at all, including herself.
She has absolutely no idea why she didn’t just leave him there, at the edge of the fucking universe, where someone who’s done as many horrifying things as him surely deserves to rot for eternity.
She’s been thinking about it near constantly, trying to suss out the reason why she went through all the trouble of dragging her broken body the extra three feet it took to slap the teleporter into his up-turned palm. She’s pretty sure he was technically dead by then, or so close to it that it didn’t make a difference. It’s not like that wouldn’t have been a fitting end for him. He probably would have preferred it that way.
But Tabris is stubborn, and too merciful for her own good, and also, apparently, an absolute bloody moron. So now she’s forced his continued existence onto the rest of the world, and they all have to tiptoe around like he might suddenly start shitting voidsent and tearing holes in the fabric of reality.
Not that that would be out of character for him in the slightest. Honestly, at this point, it might even be a relief. Tabris knows how to deal with that Zenos. This one, this quiet, pensive, unobtrusive Zenos… She wishes he’d just do something already. At least then she’d know he isn’t, like… broken, or something. In his head.
Getting anyone to even tend to him had been almost impossible, and she’d almost died (again) doing it herself. She’d regained consciousness on the Ragnarok to find everyone staring down at her and ignoring him, and that makes sense, of course, it isn’t like any of them had a reason to help him, or care, or even any relevant context for why he was with her in the first place (except for Krile, who wasn’t on the ship), so she doesn’t even blame them.
It did mean that the first few minutes of her half-lucid consciousness were spent shoving past Alisaie (who still hasn’t forgiven her for it, she’s fairly certain) and Y’shtola (who doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge) and throwing herself across the room to shove as much of her White Mage training as she could down Zenos’ stupid bloody throat.
It’s all sort of a blur after that although, according to Thancred, she was cursing at Zenos the entire time she was healing him.
”’Get back here, you stupid idiot bastard’,” he’d quoted, looking as if he was enjoying the way her cheeks flushed. ”You don’t get off that easily. I’m tired of people dying. I’ll fucking kill you.”
In her defense, she was delirious with spent adrenaline and blood loss, and it isn’t like she’d really had the aether to spare on such a grand healing in the first place. No one is even sure where she’d managed to gather the bulk of it from. There’d just been a voice in her head insisting that she was the only one who was going to bother.
And honestly, if he had decided to stay dead, she’s sure that would have been the end of it.
She’d have sagged back into Urianger when he came to (very gently) pull her away, at least satisfied that she had tried, except– except Zenos’ stupid cold black heart had started beating again, and Urianger– sweet, blessed Uri– had taken over the healing without her even having to ask, as if he knew Tabris needed him to, as if he cared not at all for the repercussions of what would happen if he did and entirely for what might happen to her if he didn’t.
She’s not sure what she would have done if Zenos had really died. It’s probably unhealthy (but also accurate) to say she would have mourned his loss. He didn’t deserve it, surely.
Whatever her half-delirious urgency had done, though, whatever spark her desperate healing had dragged back into him, it had stuck fast, like burrs in her tail. Urianger had coaxed it along and, by the time they’d made it back to Sharlayan, he’d been stable enough that they’d been able to (discreetly) move him to the cot beside hers.
Thank the Twelve for the Sharlayan chirurgeons; centuries of long-standing and total neutrality on the affairs of the world, as well as their own rigid healer’s oaths, mean that Zenos was at least moderately well cared for. Not that he deserves it.
In all honesty, he doesn’t even deserve to be alive, not really, although she hates the idea that she should be the judge of who does and does not deserve to live, which people on this star deserve to draw breath. Warrior of Light status be damned, she never signed up to be judge, jury, and executioner.
There is no shortage of people who’d have been perfectly happy if all she’d brought back was a corpse, or even just herself. Once upon a time, Tabris thinks she’d have counted herself among that number. She has no idea how, or when, or why that changed.
It has to be said that their friendship is an oddity, insofar as it can be called a ‘friendship’ at all.
He’s undoubtedly a villain. He’s done things in his life that no one could (or should) forgive. He’s a monster, through and through, hiding in the skin of a moderately attractive Garlean man, and she’s the hero, so she ought to hate him, and there are times when she has, absolutely– stole her body and took it for a joy ride, almost killed her friends, tormented Ala Mhigo for years for nothing more than his own whims-- but in the end there’s just something about him that she… understands.
Not entirely, and not in a way that excuses what he’s done. It’s just that maybe, once upon a time, her mother was gone and her stomach was always empty and her little siblings cried all day for food and water and the only thing she found any joy in was fighting, too. She’s an Ala Mhigo alleycat, through and through, she spent her childhood running the streets of the Ala Mhigan Quarter, fighting tooth and claw for whatever she could get to try and make things easier for her dad and her siblings, and that seems selfless, except the fact is–
The fact is, she likes fighting strong opponents. Has always liked it. She likes the way the blood rushes in her ears, the way her heart thuds in her chest. She savors the tight, solid connection of her fist into flesh, and the taste of blood in her bared teeth. She likes the feeling of staring down her enemy across a line in the sand and snarling ownership of whatever patch of ground, whatever person or place or thing, that she’s claimed as her own.
She’s a healer now, but she wasn’t always. Her daggers and her greatsword live on her weapon rack, but she can still feel the weight of them in her hands. She still feels that wild and feral creature in her chest, salivating in sheer animal delight whenever a new danger rears its head.
She thinks Zenos is the same, in a way. That he is like her, and how she was as a child– seeking the only happiness she understood with all the fury of a thousand freshly-summoned Ifrits– and it isn’t perfect, he’s an adult and he has done awful things for his own selfish gain, but she can’t look at him and not see herself. ”My mirror,” he’d called her, as they both lay there dying, and he wasn’t wrong, and she hates it, and she also cannot deny it.
The difference, of course, is that she’d still try to save the world even if she didn’t like the fighting that came with it. She loves her family. She loves her friends. She’d do anything to save them, to save the star, throw herself into the grasping claws of a being composed entirely of sorrow and grief and a wailing, never-ending song of destruction, whatever she has to do to keep them safe. Zenos…
She is fairly certain he only ended up helping her in the end because it was the only way he could be certain he might get what he wanted out of her. She’s not fool enough to think he flew across the stars just for her, but, then again, when they had stood together in the strange orange light at the end of everything, he’d told her she could say ‘no’ to his offer and he would respect it, and she… believes he would have kept his word.
Also, she kind of owes him for helping her out, regardless. Even if he did it for selfish reasons, he did do it, and that has to count for something. He was there with her, in the end. If not for whatever divine intervention it was that dropped the teleporter out of the sky, they’d have died there, together, a macabre, bittersweet end to both their stories, all knotted together like lengths and lengths of bright red string.
So maybe she feels a sort of attachment to him. It is absolutely fucked up, but it’s true. She cannot deny that, either.
It doesn’t make him any less of a potential threat, though, and it doesn’t make her willing to forget that. He might be sedated for now, but that could quickly change.
Honestly, she does hate seeing him like this, beyond even the wariness it sets alight in her belly. He’s lying peacefully propped up on his cot, staring out of the window at the sunny world beyond, like he’s just a regular injured patient and not an enormous, murderous dickhead with a fucked up sense of…everything.
He’s bandaged and splinted almost as much as she is. His warped Voidsent-arm is bound by an iron shackle that radiates oppressive aether, the work of Krile, G’raha, and Y’shtola combined. Supposedly, it’s suppressing some of his insane power, although she can’t speak to the efficacy. None of them can. That’s why she’s sort of metaphorically shackled as well, to him. If he decides to attack, she’ll have to be the one to put him down.
Not that he seems like he’s going to do that which, again, is really making her incredibly leery.
Settled in her own nest of pillows and blankets, and irritated by his seeming disinterest in anything and everything around him, Tabris scowls.
There is also the matter of how his being alive will affect everyone else to consider. If anyone aside from the soon-to-be-officially-disbanded-Scions (as well as the leaders of the Eorzean Alliance, and a select few people in Sharlayan, out of necessity) had any idea that Zenos yae fucking Galvus was here, there’d have been a furious mob outside in seconds, screaming for his head, and she’d have had to stand there in front of them and say no, they couldn’t drag him out into the street and kill him, even though he deserved it, she wouldn’t let them, and then reckon with the shock and disgust and hatred they would turn on her instead.
As it stands, the general populace is blissfully unaware of his continued existence, so Zenos has a view of the blue tile pathways and soft white buildings of Old Sharlayan proper that is entirely uninterrupted by torches or pitchforks. Not that he seems to care.
He has to be planning something. There has to be some new, terrifying plot forming in his head right now, and she knows she needs to be ready to combat it, which is why she hates being stuck in bed.
He looks oh-so-innocent now, illuminated in a halo of soft orange light by the warm sun, his eyes half-lidded, his hands resting on his thighs as he leans against the plush pillows (he doesn’t deserve plush pillows, fuck him) propping him up. He looks peaceful. He looks… not serene, but at least passively accepting of the current situation.
Fuck. This is a mess. It’s a mistake, and now he is here, and she has, somehow, to deal with it. It is her fault, after all. Her responsibility. She supposes she could let the Ala Mhigans have him. Maybe Doma. Maybe the Garleans, they have to want a piece of the man who destroyed their shitty Empire. The hangman’s noose is an option. The executioner’s axe. None of that, though– she would have to do it herself. She doesn’t know why, but it would have to be her.
She wishes she understood her own feelings. They’re so tangled together she can’t even begin to sort them out. She decides she’ll have to speak with the others– Y’shtola and Alphinaud, maybe, and Urianger, they have all three grown accustomed to providing advice or encouraging commentary as she works through whatever troubles are currently–
“You,” Zenos says, and the deep evenness of his voice startles her as it rumbles almost sleepily through the silence, “are staring, my friend.”
It is quite literally the first thing he’s said, to anyone, since he first awoke, and Tabris wants, immediately, to deny it, to tell him to fuck off and die already, except, for one thing, he’s right, she is staring and, for another, she’s gone out of her way to keep him alive, so him dying at this point would just be wasted effort on her part.
She shows him her teeth, her sharp miqo’te fangs bared, and, ignoring the fact that he’s been entirely mute for the last week, says, “I am trying to figure out what you’re planning.”
He blinks, in that slow way he does when he’s considering something, and she hates that she recognizes what his expressions mean at all. “Planning,” he repeats. A faint smile curls the edges of his mouth upward, and a quiet, infuriatingly smooth chuckle slips from his throat. “And why would I be planning anything at all?”
Tabris flattens her ears. She sits up a little straighter, ignoring the thin fingers of painful levin arching up her spine.
“Zenos,” she says. “Don’t sit there and insult both of us by acting like you aren’t a literal tactical genius. I know how smart you are. I hate it, but I know. There is absolutely no way you’ve been sitting here for this long, not thinking about what you’re going to do next!” She leans forward, closer. “So now I’m asking, what are you planning? What other unhinged scheme are you thinking about to get me to dance to your tune?” She sucks in a breath, and presses, more intensely, “What was the point of you showing up at the edge of the fucking universe? What do you want?”
“Must I truly repeat things to you that I have only recently explained with all bright and crystalline clarity?” She can tell from his tone that he is no longer amused, more annoyed, and a part of her takes delight in the fact that she’s gotten under his skin. The other part of her, the part that has become the most adept at reading him, thinks that there is something beyond that which has drawn his ire. Something deeper.
Maybe, she thinks, maybe he’s irritated because he thinks she ought to just understand what he means. Maybe he thinks that their being equal in power, that the similarities between them in their zest for battle and testing their own strength, means that she’ll know what his intentions are at any given time.
Maybe he’s disappointed to find that isn’t the case.
“Fine, Zenos. Let me tell you what I know,” Tabris says, trying to keep her tone even. “You spent your entire life pursuing your precious ‘Hunt’, looking for any worthy opponent and being disappointed when you couldn’t find one, and, also, killing indiscriminately in the name of Garlemald the entire time.”
He shrugs a shoulder. “That war, that cause, was never my own. I sought only to find my equal in battle.”
“That doesn’t make it better, Zenos,” she snaps, then pinches the bridge of her nose. “Whether you cared about the Empire’s completely disconnected, Ascian-fed goal of creating a single ‘perfect race’, or not” the words drip from her mouth like poison, “you still helped them conquer and destroy. You still helped them ruin lives! All for your own selfish reasons. You didn’t even care! Gods, that might even make it worse.”
He says nothing. She sighs, and manages to regain what patience she has left. “So. In Ala Mhigo, we fought, and I lost. And then again in Doma, but you.. You saw something in me, I think?”
“A spark,” he says, as agreeable as he can be, or so she thinks. “The barest sliver of a promise that perhaps you might prove to be a worthy foe, once you had strengthened your body and your resolve. Once you had whetted your fangs to killing perfection.”
She makes a somewhat disgusted face. “Ew,” she says, and shakes her head. “So we fought, again, and you absorbed a giant… mutated… Primal dragon, and then I still won, and you killed yourself.”
She remembers the glint of his blade against his own throat, the far-away look of fading pleasure in his eyes as he struck, the first true emotion she had ever seen within them. “But you came back. Except someone else had taken your body. So you jumped from host to host, like an Ascian, which is…” She shudders. “Just… awful.”
“I deemed it necessary,” he offers, though not in a way that suggests he thinks it will help anything. “For I knew I would need to reclaim my own body before I could ever hope to match your strength again, and there was little else upon my mind save for the possibility that I might once more experience the singular, overwhelming pleasure of facing you on the field of battle…” He trails off, and then sighs. “In the end, my motives matter little, as I believe you have heard me say before..”
Her tail lashes as she thinks of their meeting in Garlemald, Jullus demanding an explanation, and Zenos, callously shrugging him off with a wave of his hand and a scoff.
”Would you be happier, had I a “good” reason?” He’d asked, his face betraying nothing but a strange sort of contempt. ”If my motives met with your approval, would you no longer resent the outcome? If so, then perhaps a beast’s skin would suit you better.
And he hadn’t been wrong then, she thinks, like he isn’t wrong now, not entirely. Hypocritical as it was, he had been right. The Garlean Empire and all of her loyal soldiers had visited despair and death and conquest upon the many people of the star, and they had done it united beneath one banner, one ideal. One motive which met with their approval. It was only after the world as they knew it fell out from under their feet, only after their Prince had betrayed them, that people like Jullus had looked up and wondered why someone would do the things Zenos had.
It doesn’t excuse him, though. Nothing does, and she grits her teeth when she thinks about all of the people he must have killed while seeking his old body. Many of them had probably been ‘the enemy’, but no one deserved to be overtaken the way Ascians did, the way Zenos had.
“You finally made it back,” she presses on doggedly, against her own emotions. “You killed your father, which… it is probably fucked up to say I’m grateful for that, but I am. Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed doing it myself.” Varis zos Galvus had made it clear in the short span of their one conversation that he would brook no argument against any of his own goals. “Also, his hat was ridiculous.”
Zenos makes no response to that. She forges onward.
“You allied with Fandaniel, the Ascian, who you knew was an Ascian, and plunged Garlemald into a vicious, bloody civil war. You killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people, whether by your own hand or your decisions, all in the thoroughly unhinged hope that it might make me angry enough to fight you again. You would have absorbed Zodiark if Fandaniel had not beaten you to it.”
She sighs, and rubs her face with both hands. “And then Alisaie told you what an absolute bloody fucking shithead you were, which actually made you think, for a moment, because suddenly it seemed like you might never actually get what you wanted so badly.” A battle with her. A test of their strength. Both of them fighting with every onze of power available to them. “You went off to brood, then showed up in Sharlayan, talked Krile into letting you absorb the rest of the Mother Crystal, turned back into a giant mutant dragon Primal, and then raced across the stars to help me fight the Endsinger, all so you could offer me another fight. But you…”
She trails off, her brow furrowing. His motivations for helping her had been selfish, surely; he cared little for the fate of Etheirys and everything for the chance to fight her. Yet it was true that, without him, she probably wouldn’t have won.
”Gorging upon what remained of the Mothercrystal, I reclaimed the form of the dragon. And, hungry still for our reunion, I rode the light of the stars to you.” His voice had been distorted by his shape, his massive, monstrous form, and she had been breathless with disbelief, with fear, with joy.
”Zenos, if I didn’t know who you were,” she remembers calling back, ”That would almost sound romantic!”
He had carried her through the emptiness of space in their pursuit of Endsinger, his back the battlefield, bellowing their shared challenge, and she had screeched and snarled and laughed, and when it was over he had stood aside and waited while she bent to help Meteion reclaim her shattered hope for the universe.
And then, when she turned to face him again, he had offered her battle, and there had been something different about the way he had done it, something shifted in his words, in his tone.
It had been an offer, a true one, and not a demand, as it had been before. The difference, she thought, between a petulant child and a grown man.
Before, in the garden on the roofs, they had battled as if they were characters in some epic story, she the hero and he the villain, both of them invariably bound by the constructions of those roles, and it had seemed to her as if that was how he had viewed them both, people playing parts that had been carefully constructed for them by someone else– him, perhaps.
Yet in that moment, standing quite literally at the edge of the universe, he had told her to shirk the mantle of ‘hero’, as if suddenly he saw her as her, as a person beyond the Warrior of Light, and he had offered the only gift he truly understood.
It was… not a kindness, perhaps, she isn’t sure if Zenos knows how to do kindness, but…
It was an attempt. The one and only attempt he has ever made, to her knowledge, to do something genuine and good (as he understands it) for someone else. She had felt something flicker in her chest, then. Something like hope, for him, of all people, that perhaps even he might find a different way, a better way, to live.
Tabris sits back, her tail curling around her waist. She stares at him, wonderingly, and he stares back, meeting her gaze as evenly as he ever has.
“You offered,” she says, quieter this time. “You’d never done that before.”
“It was a revelation,” he tells her. “An… epiphany, of sorts. I do not imply that I did not wish to experience for myself the ecstasy of our battle, that I did not covet the very thought as I have coveted nothing else. Yet…” He trails off, then turns back to the window. He sighs.
“The elezen girl was astute enough in her observations. In my wanderings, as I pondered her words, I realized that my own single-minded pursuit of my goal, of you, my only friend, had in the end served only to force wider the yawning chasm of difference between us. For how, indeed, might you turn your eyes to us, when the very fate of the star you cherish so deeply hung in the balance?”
And it’s selfish, what he’s saying, simply his own need for her attention overriding his blatant disinterest in the lives of others. Tabris stares at him, wondering if she should say something, if she even could say anything that might matter to him, but he continues before she can decide.
“And then, beyond that,” he says, his brow furrowing almost imperceptibly. “Beyond my own desires, I felt… I know not how I might describe it. A need, quiet, at first, and then deafening in its intensity. The need to see you victorious, to bask in the radiance of your triumph over your prey, battered and bloody and seething with the heat of your success. I knew it would be… glorious.”
Her ear twitches. Tabris studies him. “It’s always about your feelings and your desires,” she says. “Did you care about what could happen to me? What might have happened, if you hadn’t come?”
Zenos considers her question before he responds. “I have never understood the people around me,” he says, and it strikes a chord of memory within her. Lying on her back with her face towards the stars, vision growing darker and breaths coming in quiet gasps. Zenos, somewhere close by, and the rumble of his voice.
“I have never understood them, and, in truth, I have never wanted to, for what might they offer me but petty, mewling squabbles, half-truths and fragility? Much better, thought I, to remain apart, a single extraordinary warrior turned against a tide of tedious banality. Much better, thought I, to pursue only my own desires, my own overwhelming thirst for a worthy opponent. It is the way of us all, man and beast alike, to seek our own satisfaction above all things. Yet, when first our blades crossed…”
He pauses, and looks at her again. “You are my friend, warrior. My first, and only, friend, the only foe who might hold their own against the full force of my strength, and yet I did not find only a match for my zeal for the art of battle in you. I found, to my surprise… understanding. There were– there are-- many things about you which make little sense to me. Your compassion. Your generosity. Your care for every fragile and ultimately useless life you save. Yet there are other things, darker, animal things, that I believe you know as well as I, and in that moment, in those flashes of time where our blows struck true, I felt… I felt.”
Tabris stares at him because she can think of nothing to say. Zenos is a selfish bastard of a man. He is a monster. He kills for the pleasure of it, and nothing excuses the horrors he has wrought upon all the people of this star, and yet…
And yet, she sees what he means, what is hidden beneath the undeniable cruelty of his existence.
He wants what everyone does, deep down; to be understood. Truly understood.
“Alright,” she says. She hates that she can be swayed by this, by the barest hint of humanity within him. “Now what, then?”
He chuckles wryly. “We have had our final battle, Warrior of Light. I knew when I offered it that one of us would die, or both, perhaps. I had accepted it.” He pauses. “Relished it, even, for what might make a better ending than one we might reach together?”
“Creepy,” Tabris comments.
“I have savored the pulsating joy as you brought the full might of your being to bear against me once more,” Zenos continues, as if she hasn’t spoken. “Our candles burned to ash. In the end, there was nothing I wanted more, no other thing that I might offer to you, my first and only friend.”
She flattens her ears, now in full understanding of what his ‘gift’ had meant to him, and yet at the same time recoiling at the sheer twisted nature of it all. He has truly never had another friend.
“In the end, it was I who fell, first, and so I resigned myself to defeat. There was little else I could do, little else I aspired to do, so transcendent was the joy I felt. As before, I relished the coming end, for I knew nothing could ever compare to that moment, that spark. And yet…”
He trails off, and Tabris twitches an ear in impatience. “‘And yet’?” She repeats.
“And yet, just as I had succumbed to the bliss of death… well. At the end of everything, I found you, once more.” He watches the sway of the trees in the wind outside the window, and, if Tabris suspected Zenos capable of it, she would almost call his soft sigh wistful. “There are those who would say I should be grateful, and more still who would rail against my resurrection, and yet I find that I am merely… ” He looks at her, narrows his eyes slightly. “Curious.”
“Curious?”
“As to your own motivations,” he clarifies.
Tabris feels her heart clench tight in her chest. She remembers the fading visions of the star she had saved as they flashed before her eyes, Gridania, Ul’dah, Kugane, the Crystarium, the Crystal Tower stretching like jagged claws into the sky. Her friends, her family– Lord Edmont, her father, her brother and sister, Thancred, Y’shtola, Urianger, Alisaie, Alphinaud, G’raga, Estinien–
all of them safe, now, at least from this, the world-ending threat they could not defeat without her. She remembers the sound of his voice, fuzzy and distorted in her ears,
”Was this life a gift… or a burden?” He rasps, fading, ever-fading. “Did you find… fulfillment?”
And her foggy mind is filled with thin words she cannot speak, rising above the tide of deep red agony to say yes, yes, it was a gift, all of it, every second, and she is fulfilled, she can die now, with him, in this place that is not truly a place, because they are all safe, finally, finally–
Her tail lashes. “I was tired of death,” she says, truthfully. “I am tired of it. You being dead doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t make anything better. It just makes you dead. Answer my question, Zenos; what do you plan to do now?”
He sighs, again, and turns his focus back to the trees outside. “I could resume my Hunt. I could dedicate myself once more to stoking the flames of your ire, your fury and scorn. Yet it benefited me not at all when last I attempted such folly. A waste,” he adds, “of time and energy, for it would amount to much the same the second time.”
“Third,” Tabris offers. “If you count Ala Mhigo and Doma, although I guess you didn’t do most of those things back then specifically to bother me.”
He nods briefly in agreement. “I might regain my strength, with time; I might hone my blade once more. I will do that, in fact; my body will demand it of me ere long, as I suspect your own will demand it of you, for we are warriors, and we cannot find comfort in complacency and inaction. Yet that will take time. For the foreseeable future…”
He leans into his pillows, and Tabris sees the loose lines of exhaustion in his form, a massive, tired coeurl bedding down for the night. Has this conversation truly taken so much out of him, or is it the shackle on his arm, draining him of his power? Perhaps it is both.
“I am… very tired,” he says, so softly she almost doesn’t hear it, and she knows without asking that admitting as much to anyone is a concession he never thought he might give. “For now, the only thing I am planning is… sleep, and recuperation.” He chuckles, very quietly, and it could almost pass for a normal person’s sense of humor when he says, “I trust you are not terribly disappointed.”
Her expression softens, and she puts her head back against her own pillows. She’s tired, too. “Maybe a little,” she admits. He is as subdued as she has ever seen him. “But I won’t hold it against you.” She yawns, so wide her jaw cracks. “Too many other grudges there, anyway…”
He doesn’t respond and, when she squints over at him, she sees that’s because he’s fallen asleep. She sighs, but her own eyelids are drooping and, by the time a chirurgeon steps in to check in shortly thereafter, Tabris has joined him in slumber.