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It starts a little like this:
A boy wrapped in a blanket, unraveled in the arms of her father, with unruly black hair and disquieted amber eyes. He is a wild child through and through, and she thinks that she had wanted to know him since that very first day. His snapping does nothing to deter her and she merely jumps on his stomach (despite loud words of protest) while shoving the words back down his throat with a glare. His disinterested gaze is sharp and angry but her smile does not dim, does not diminish.
She peppers him with endless questions. A strange and unfamiliar creature he was, that was true enough, but that was exactly the reason she wanted to get to know him better! Things like what’s your favorite food or do you like fishing? I love fishing! I should show you how to fish! He tends to respond to that sort of questioning with nothing but the cold shoulder and a quiet glare, but she isn’t discouraged in the least. It wears him down eventually, she can tell, until he finally lets his guard down and smiles for the first time since he’d been brought into their home, and it’s just the silliest thing she’d ever seen.
She was far too young to know that life was so unfair to the people who had never deserved it, too young to realize that the world would not bend to her will and that sometimes things just happened. Too young to understand that grit teeth and stretched skin and aching fists would not change things, garbled and confused and bruised as they were. It’s that same sort of understanding that she comes to as she grows older that she sees that Joshua had come from a lonely, lonely place. A place he did not want to talk about but he still dreamed about, if his tossing and turning at night had anything to say about it.
But still, she had wanted to learn how to love him.
Problem: Estelle Bright, despite her name, is not exactly the brightest orbment in the factory, and she needs to pass this test if she ever wants to become a bracer.
Solution: Just have Joshua tutor her! He’s a real smart cookie and this way they both can get some studying in. A perfect plan, if I do say so myself , she thinks to herself triumphantly.
Unforeseen factor: Joshua is much more of a Spartan teacher than she could have possibly imagined. At least he isn’t as bad as Schera, though.
“Joshuaaaa,” she whines, giving him the best puppy-dog eyes she can muster, “it’s so nice outside! Can’t we go out and have some fun for once?”
“No can do. Our test is tomorrow and we still need to go over bracer history,” he answers, standing in front of the door like some sort of faux bodyguard. “You don’t want Scherazard to get mad at you because you failed another exam, right?”
She gulps a little, then turns back to her textbook. The last tongue-lashing (and almost actual lashing, if it wasn’t for Joshua stepping in as a mediator again) she got from Schera still lingered fresh in the back of her mind. No, Estelle was not exactly in a rush to get another long-winded lecture. But still, the temptation of the outdoors was so close…
“But fishing… and ice cream…” she complains, setting her head down on her desk with an exaggerated sigh of despair. “Just a little bit, Joshua? Can’t we just have a little bit of free time?”
His glare is enough to send her back into her textbook with fervor. “Eep! Yes sir, I’ll shut my mouth and stop complaining. So… the Bracer Guild was founded in S.1152, though bracers have been active even before then…”
She hears him sigh exasperatedly and immediately perks up. Aha, so her doe eyes weren’t for naught after all! She always knew that he’d give in because of her irresistible charm!
…And then her hopes are immediately crushed when he sets another stack of practice problems in front of her.
“Once you’re done with these, then we can go out. Deal?”
“Fine! Deal!”
“Joshua,” she says.
“Yes, Estelle?”
“When will you stop holding back on me?”
He tilts his head at her, putting on a facade of confusion. “I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to,” he answers, leaning over to pick up his wooden knife off the ground.
“You know exactly what I mean, you snark,” she huffs, kicking the fake sword away into the dirt. “Every time we spar, I always win, and I can tell you’re going easy on me! That’s not fair! Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’m weak!”
“It’s not because you’re a girl,” he relents. “It’s just…”
“It’s just…?”
“I don’t want to end up hurting you.”
“That’s real sweet. Now hurry up and pick up your sword before I hurt you,” she says boredly, squinting at him as he hobbles after it like a dog. “So, are you going to fight or no-”
Her staff is sent spinning out of her grip. Joshua, as if nothing had happened, casually begins removing the dirt on his practice sword with his shirt. She’d been knocked over with the force of his blow, and now she’s in the dust herself, gaping at him. For a second, he’s worried that he actually hurt her, but before he can say anything, she breaks out into laughter.
“I knew it!”
“Um, err, well… are you and Joshua married?”
When Tita suggests the idea of Joshua and her being married , it makes something seize up inside of her like she’d just swallowed a fireball, burning all the way down through her throat to her stomach. She can’t help but smile funny and wonders if it really looked that way to outsiders, that Joshua and her were like that . It’s the same kind of thing that makes her brain go kaplunk when Scherazard gives her that teasing grin and her dad gives her that knowing look that makes it feel like they can see right through her.
It’s not that she can deny anything that they’re saying - if anything, she’s grown less and less confident in the classic words she’s repeated all this time. He’s just like family to me! and that was the end of it, really. She finds that she pulls away from his hands quicker, takes a few more heartbeats to meet his eyes, and in the same way she feels the unspoken agreement between them set that clear-cut distance that she doesn’t quite have the courage to power through yet.
Still, though, looking at him she feels a strange mix of feelings. There’s happiness in the sense that she’s seeing her wild child (because he was hers, was always hers, even in just her thoughts) grow up to be this smart, level-headed boy. There’s also a strange sense of relief that he’s decided that his place in this world is with her, a fitting happy ending to the bittersweet whirlwind of their childhood.
That’s the scarier thought, though, that the wall between him and her had gone from brick to paper to barely anything at all only held together by the secret of the past he hadn’t wished to tell and her wish to respect the silent boundaries they had set so long ago. There’s that irrational fear, of course, that if she reaches her hand out through that wall that it will turn back to stone, back to the steel-cold eyes he had when they had first met. It’s for that reason she doesn’t; for once she’ll take the route by increments instead of leaps and bounds.
All that matters is that he’s by her side. That’s all she needs.
“Joshua,” she says.
“Yes, Estelle?”
“We’ve known each other for a long time, don’t you think?”
“It has been five years since we first met. It has been some time… why do you ask, though?”
She huffs a sigh of exasperation. “Just humor me. I was just thinking… we’ve really been through a lot, huh? Whether it was facing down Mayor Dalmore in Ruan or rescuing the professor in Zeiss or fighting off the sky bandits in Bose… you’ve always been there, beside me.”
“Estelle-” he begins, before she cuts him off.
“I never thanked you for all of that, did I?” she continues, starting to ramble. “We’ve been through thick and thin and I feel like I’ve never appreciated how much you were always there for me, to clean up the messes I made. Through it all, you always kept a level head, and you always looked out for the both of us, and you always-”
He places his hand on hers and smiles that lopsided smile he does that makes her heart have palpitations, and she stops dead in her tracks. “Look at me, Estelle,” he says, and she’s almost forced to look up at him by the honesty his words demand. “You’ve never needed to thank me for any of that. I care about you, and I want you to be safe and happy. Just take that as a given. We’re family, aren’t we?”
But what if I want something more than that?
She catches the words in her mouth before they can escape and shoves them down where they couldn’t be heard.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she says and means it. “So we’ll always be together, right?”
He looks at her funny. “Of course.”
Not even a day later, he breaks that promise.
“Joshua,” she says, words blurring together from the sleep drug starting to take hold.
(He’s gone before she can say goodbye.)
Estelle doesn’t allow herself to think about Joshua.
If she does, he shows up. A delusion born between sleepless nights and loneliness or an overindulgence in reminiscence. He always shows up with that same damned smile on his face, night breeze blowing through his hair. She stares and stares until he disappears, but it’s never enough. She doesn’t dare tell anyone about it, because then they’d think that she’s going crazy about it, and she’s definitely not crazy!
But still, she grieves. About the many, too many things that she has yet to tell him, the too many things still left unsaid.
(“Sometimes,” he whispers, “I think it would have been better if we’d never met.”)
Is that really true? Did I really hurt you so much that you didn’t want me around anymore? Is that the reason you left?
She has no one to ask these questions to but the moon.
They hang, unanswered, in the same night breeze that carried him away.