Chapter Text
Two weeks after she can move again without the pain lodged in the side of her skull, off-balanced in her ribs, Cid unlocks his solar door——there's a lecture and a half about trust, about making her way through life the way she might want, about dreams that are attainable if you reach hard enough for them, but Cid is a sentimental fool and she thinks mostly he's tired of finding his room in a mess when he returns, the curl of her mouth self-satisfied when he picks papers off the floor the dozenth time.
It's petty. It's spiteful for no other reason than to see his exhaustion pull at this crow's feet harder than it used to, every act of her punitive resistance a way to soothe the hummingbird trappings of her heart. She doesn't know this Cid.
In Waloed, in the space between not knowing he was leaving and knowing, she'd catch him up on those high-rise balconies with cigarettes in his mouth, the shadows to him long and stretched in the lean of his body. He couldn't be interrupted then, and he couldn't be interrupted even less when he was five jugs of mead in, his eyes glassy but as if saying they were never quite glassy enough, laughter a spilt stain on wooden grooves of pub tables.
She did intrude on him once and only once——took the cigarette right out of his mouth. "If it bothers you so much," she said, her tongue full of smoke, "why not just leave?" 'As if you would,' was the implication behind it, though sometimes she did think on the still water days of it just being the two of them——how little she had known of the world and how much he had seemed to know the whole of it, the palms of her hands full of blisters and camp firelight punctuated by the worst cooked food you had ever tasted, his electric outline leftover static in her breastbone.
She didn't know then how close she was to the breach in his hull; the very start of all their wreckage, driftwood on an ashen beach. Back then, he just treated it like she caught him in a secret, his hand palming his hair in that usual exasperated way of his, always half into a complaint before knowing better. "What, and give up this dream we both care so much about?"
When he hunted around for another cig, she had taken that one too. There was always an affection to him a hair's breadth from his annoyance that she always dared to pull out——never tiring of seeing it there, and him never tiring of showing it. The conversation didn't really matter to her as much then as disrupting the thundercloud of his thoughts, to have that untroubled, warm and drowsy air back into the slots of her fingers.
Benedikta thought that weight to him was war. She thought she could soothe it out of him as he soothed it out of her, gingerly tracing the knobs of her wretched, flight-weary spine.
"No more running?" She had murmured when they had both still believed in Barnabas' promises——while he was still a king with a brightly-shining, comet-streaked dream, and they could taste the starlight.
"No more," Cid confirmed, in that constant deep grumble of his, her eye of the storm. She should have told him she loved him on that day more than any other, when they could taste the sea-salt in the air and there was mud on both their boots and the drizzle had matted all of Benedikta's hair to her cheeks. The day had been innocuous, but that was kind of the point, sandwiched between points of no return and youth-like naivete.
But she didn't, and she couldn't, for a thousand little reasons but mainly: how his gaze was forever locked on some point over the horizon, and hers on his profile, stubbled with the casual carelessness of travel and that self-assured knowledge he knew his smile could do all the work.
So she just grabbed his hand instead. "Still not tired of that, are you?" He said, chaffing, but his fingers had curled around hers.
At the hideaway, Cid comes less than he goes, which isn't all that different to when they had both been laboring for Waloed, red-cheeked and weary and grateful to collapse into each other on the rare chances they were both home at once. Now, however, Benedikta is always stuck waiting and resentful towards the peace he carries, her one familiar tether even though there are parts to him she no longer knows.
There is less callousness to him. His shoulders buckle like they used to, but he doesn't carry that all alone——he's happy to have his knees bent, shoulder to shoulder with his charity cases, an open dam overflowing with belief. She shadows him at first, pinched and taut with suspicion, until they're looking up at her too with that undiluted hope so palpable she bites and chews and spits it back out at them.
She doesn't want to be here. She can't be anywhere else. Cid is all beseeching eyes and self-sacrificing and he's a person with a hundred people to soothe his ills now, and hundreds more to protect. Ultimately, it all boils down to, she's not an irrefutable, untouchable and integral existence to him anymore.
He's doing just fine——and she's breaking and shrieking and sleeping in minutes. "I'll bear all your rage, Benedikta," he tells her, long after the lacerations have turned red along his arms and his skin is flecked between her nails, "if that'll soothe you."
It doesn't. It does. It's an unspoken, 'as long as your rage doesn't bleed onto someone else', so she bites into him so deep its his blood dribbling down her chin. She grapples with his large immoveable body and wishes he'd be even the slightest bit malleable. "It won't," she doesn't promise but she swears and she feels him sigh beneath her, sagging.
See, though, that her promises and swears mean nearly nothing——she's fundamentally a liar, after all, and when she's stopped wearing bandages and the scars are all new, freshly healed red flesh, she finds herself weary from resistance, her flashes of outrage lapsing into a strange watchful silence.
They all treat her like a livewire. They should. She fears if she is touched again she might explode, the shrapnel she leaves behind a festering wound of her existence. But Cid is stubbornly accepting as he is, as he always has been, and maybe there are things that won't change, threaded into him as tightly as the canvas of his wide open arms.
"Apple?" he offers, off-handed, the infamous thing postured precariously in his fingers: and it's a silent peace offering; it's her insurmountable walls letting light seep through.
She takes his apple. Rips it from his hand even, snapping it from his hands and pressing it to her mouth before she can have second thoughts. And it's bitter. It's so bitter, with the slightest tinge of sea-salt. "This tastes like shit," she mutters, but there are angry tears in her eyes and she eats it down all the way to its core.
All these years, and she will never tire of his barking, sloppy laughter, the sun streaked in her wings.