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By now, they don’t need to ask why the other is awake at this hour. They just know.
She hands him the teacup. “Here. I hope the taste is satisfactory.”
Alcryst accepts it. “Thank you.” The delicate Firenese china is almost too warm to touch; despite appearances, Céline likes her tea boiling hot. He blows on it before taking a sip.
“It’s quite good,” he lies. Truthfully, he’s more of a coffee person, but he knows saying those words to a Firenesian is tantamount to saying you like to toss puppies onto bonfires for fun.
Céline gives him a warm, if tired, smile. The bags under her eyes hang heavy, but he knows they’ll vanish within a day or two. Unlike Céline's, his are permanent. Hereditary. A gift from his father.
His father was never very good at giving presents. Yet Alcryst would give anything to receive a shoddily-handwrapped, suspiciously-bow-shaped parcel from him just one more time.
Go on, guess what's inside. ...A bow? Bwahaha, that's my boy, smart as a whip!
Picking up her own teacup and saucer – her pinky finger automatically assumes the proper Firenese position, daintily outstretched – Céline pushes open the kitchen door with her hip and exits into the café terrace. Alcryst follows her.
It’s always odd to see the normally-bustling Somniel so quiet. The shops in the plaza are closed and boarded up for the night. There’s no one reading in the terrace or sunbathing by the pool. Even the smoke from Timerra’s campfire, where her and her other Solm friends sing and laugh long into the night, is nowhere to be seen. All is still and tranquil, even the air.
The waters of the pool are motionless, a perfect mirror for the stars. Céline steps out of her slippers and sits on the pool’s edge. She slides her feet into the water, and the stars that have been encased in glass shudder and vanish in the ripples.
Alcryst follows suit. Céline holds onto his teacup while he carefully rolls up his pants, and she brushes her skirts to the side to make room for him to sit. He dips his feet in, and a jolt of sudden cold travels through his legs and up his spine – but it soon fades to a comfortable, frigid numbness.
Céline hands back his teacup, and he takes another sip. Now it’s approached a temperature which he would call “piping hot” and Céline would call “cold.” The warmth spreads through him, starting in the base of his chest and radiating outwards. Combined with the pool’s cool, refreshing waters, the mixture of pleasant sensations is almost enough to drive the memory of the nightmare away.
Almost.
He works up the courage to speak, but he can’t work up the courage to make eye contact. He looks into his teacup, its brown waters too dark to capture the light of the stars.
“Which one was it this time? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Céline lifts her teacup and takes a long, silent sip.
“It was the one where he collapses in the middle of battle,” she says, “and they cleave his skull in two with an axe.”
She states Alfred’s death like she’s delivering any other statistic to a war council. The town guard suffered significant losses in the last skirmish. Twenty-four wounded, ten dead. Seven missing in action. Like it’s something rather ordinary. Like it’s something rather inevitable.
Sometimes, Alcryst is terrified of Céline. Maybe even more so than of Ivy and Hortensia. At least he knows both of them are capable of tears. The Céline who was capable of tears most likely died with her father. It's an awful thought to have about someone he considers a dear friend, but now that his head has vomited it up, he can’t swallow it again.
He fills his dry mouth with tea.
“And you?”
She moves her legs as she speaks, perhaps to get her blood flowing, and her skirts and the water softly swish in tandem. The ripples extinguish the stars and tear at the moon.
Alcryst breathes in. Closes his eyes.
“It was the one with…” He swallows. “The arrow.”
He’s watched Diamant die in more ways than he can count. Many of the deaths are brutal, filled with gore and viscera. But the arrow dream is one of the worst, because it’s one of the most prolonged. At least in the decapitation dream, Diamant dies instantly. In the fireball dream, almost instantly. In the arrow dream, it takes minutes, and each minute is an hour. Time moves as though everything is covered in snow, and yet Alcryst can never move fast enough to block the shot, to take the arrow himself – he’s always one step too far away, forced to watch as it flies across the battlefield and buries itself in his brother’s right lung.
The person firing the arrow varies. Sometimes it’s a faceless Corrupted. Sometimes it’s an Elusian soldier. Sometimes it’s Emblem Lyn. Sometimes it’s Alcryst himself. The dream always ends the same way, though: both of them on the ground, Alcryst, kneeling, Diamant, writhing. His hands are soaked with his brother’s blood, and so is the ground, and so is the sky, and so is the ground, and so is the sky. There’s nothing noble, nothing dignified, nothing kinglike about it – just his brother gasping, choking on his own blood, clawing at nothing, eyes as glassy and fearful as a fish flapping in the bottom of a boat. His last words come out as gargles, drowned in pink seafoam.
Alcryst can never decipher them before he wakes up. Maybe that's for the best.
He can’t bear to picture it anymore, so he opens his eyes. His teacup is still half-full, or perhaps half-empty. He raises it to his lips and drinks deep, ignoring the protests of his tastebuds as the hot liquid burns them. Only boiling chamomile can quench the cold, dark pit in his stomach.
It’s then that Céline’s teacup clatters against the saucer, hard enough to chip.
Alcryst looks over to see a splatter of brown liquid pooling on the tiles. One drop soaks into her skirt, a solitary stain in an ocean of white. Her hand is shaking. She quickly folds it into a fist and hides it beneath the other one. Her mouth remains pressed into a thin, tight line, and her gaze remains locked on the moon.
He doesn’t need to ask if she’s all right. He just knows.
Slowly, Alcryst sets down his own cup, and slowly, he reaches over. He lifts her hand from her lap, the one that was just trembling. It’s something he would never dare attempt by the light of day, not to anyone, let alone a princess of Firene. But at this hour, the borders of Firene and Brodia are as transparent as the pool’s glassy surface. Like the water reflects the sky, Céline reflects him.
Despite all of that, panic seizes him. His hand’s probably disgustingly clammy. How dare he be so presumptive? If there’s any young woman in Elyos who doesn’t need her hand held, it’s Céline. He’s infantilizing her. He wouldn’t be surprised if she declares war on Brodia first thing tomorrow-
But before he convinces himself to pull away, her fingers quietly close around his knuckles. Their hands couldn’t be more different – her fingers are shorter, the nails painted the same shade of pale-green as a newly-sprouted bud, while his are longer and calloused from his bowstring. Yet they fit together as easily as two pieces of a puzzle.
He says nothing. Neither does she. For some things, there are no words.
If Chloé or Jade saw them, they’d probably think it was a scene from a fairytale romance. But Alcryst knows better. They aren’t prince and princess, or hero and heroine. They’re not even Alcryst and Céline. Right now, they’re Alcrie and Céline-Bean, age five, small enough to be picked up by their big brothers and swung around in a bear hug, given a piggyback ride through the castle, carried up the stairs to bed.
Right now, for just a little while, they allow themselves to be children again.
Together, watched only by the moon’s dead, unblinking eye, they hold their vigil with joined hands until the first pink rays of sunrise climb the walls.