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Jill’s world has ended many times before. When Metia dies, in a way, it doesn’t feel much different to the times before.
The first time was when she was left home as a child, the warmth and fire of Rosaria rushing North. At twelve she could remember it much better than she can at thirty, and she takes comfort in the fact that things were once clearer to her. Now all she knows is that Elwin Rosfield took her hand and asked if she’d like to come to Rosalith with him, that he had two sons who would love to meet her and be her friend, that the Blight wouldn’t follow her there. That she’d be safe in Rosalith, and someone would always see that she was so. She stayed in the caravan with two Northern women and the maiden cloak used for royal weddings draped over her lap.
The second was when the Iron Blood raided, and all the horrors that it brought. It still, despite everything else that has happened to her, feels like the worst. Even if she’d forgotten the feeling of being taken from her home the first time, the memories will never leave Jill, no matter how old she gets. She will always remember the uncertainty, the unease that followed the Duchess’ departure, the way the castle was sacked. She remembers realizing no one was coming, hearing of what happened at Phoenix Gate, that Clive and Joshua and the Archduke were dead, and Jill was alone in the world. But she’d carried the loss of Joshua and Clive and the life she’d been living, half-unhappily, half-grateful for the fact she was at least alive, and well, and fed, and there wasn’t a monster sleeping at the end of her spine.
Alone until the ice came, alone until something cold was found curled at the bottom of her spine, alone until her thirteenth name day, as if becoming a woman was supposed to hurt.
(When they made Shiva into a weapon, she remembers the rage she felt from the Eikon inside her.
I WAS SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU . It would scream and thrash, and it reminded Jill of all the old fables. Stories of women being pursued praying for guidance and protection. Stories of women turning into laurel trees to hide from those who would do them harm, myths of women with serpents growing from their heads, to protect them from men who had already done the harm.)
The world ended many times over for thirteen years. More horrors she can bear to think of, more heartache than she’d want to remember. But the world went on, unyielding, the sun rising above the sea even if Jill didn’t want to face the next day.
The Nysa Defile feels like the first time Jill can remember the world ending only to be remade, and remade in a bright and vivid life that she hadn’t lived before. Clive was there and alive and but not quite whole, but still more human to her than anyone else she’d known in years.
The world ended and began every day at Clive’s side, but it lost the sorrow that dragged along with it. Even hard days, when it felt like all aspects of the realm were working against them, they still ended when the evening came and the stars brightened. It was always them together, making camp with Clive, talking idly between them, sitting shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip in front of a makeshift fire, or in the quiet confines of an inn along the road. Back then, Jill used to worry they’d run out of things to talk about, like they’d use up every word and the warmth of his tone would die out. But that never came, and never did in the five years that followed.
The world has ended again, but this time she’s forced to go on. Not from the Iron Kingdom, not for Shiva’s instance that she stays alive, but for someone else. The world ended, but like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, Jill must live on, must remake the world, even if she doesn’t feel able to.
“You came back to me. The heavens must have a plan for us.”
For Jill, this is not the first time Clive has not returned home.
But this reunion is much different than the one they had before.
Jill can feel the exhaustion clinging to her as she readies the bath, her fingertips grazing the surface of the water, warm to the touch and sweet smelling. Without the crystals, without magic, it’s taken some time for Mid’s pump to heat the water. It’s the most active she’s felt in weeks, going from one end of the washroom to the other, taking the salts and soaps from the shelves lined along the wall and bringing them back to the bath. Clive sits on a stool at the far end of the room, his head resting against the closed door that leads out into the upper deck of the Hideaway. The silence between them is filled with his soft breaths, not quite snores, not quite asleep, but his eyes occasionally flutter open, and Jill feels frozen in his gaze, something clenching dangerously tight around her heart when she looks at his scruffy hair and his beard, the dried blood on the scar on his cheek.
There feels like there’s a thousand things they have to say, but Jill is tired of crying. Above them, there’s a large enough skylight, in such a place that no one in the Hideaway could stumble across, giving enough ventilation, but also the sole source of natural light. Above them, Jill can see the night sky beginning to shift to pink, the day rushing to greet them.
Jill has never been so grateful to see the sunrise.
“It should be ready now,” Jill says, moving closer. She swallows when his eyes slide open again, his blue eyes rolling over her, and Jill can’t remember the last time she’s been this tentative with touching him. It feels death-defying to reach out and take his hand, wind her fingers with his, move his palm against hers and all of the healed cuts. He has more on his face, his shoulders, his back probably, but at least getting him clean is the best way to properly assess all of his wounds.
Instead of answering her, Clive raises their joined hands, pressing a kiss to the back of her hand, the hair on his face brushing against her skin. She’ll have to get used to it; he doesn’t seem to be rushing to get rid of it the way he is with the extra length to his hair, now brushing over his shoulders. In all of her years of knowing Clive, even as children, when he'd sprouted into young adulthood before her, he never liked having much facial hair. He was always cleanly shaven, or at least the slightest shadow to his face. The beard he’s grown is thick and coarse, all up his cheeks and down his chin, needing a trim, but it’s dashing on him.
His lips send a shiver through her, and without realizing, she bends to kiss his forehead.
She feels foolish to think he’s the only one between the two of them who changed. Her hair is still long, but it’s much shorter than it had been five months ago, brushing against her shoulder blades, rather than down to her knees. She’d been so protective over her hair, at the memory of him wafting his hands through it, at the feel of his fingers tugging, but when she’d been told about the babies–twins, deduced by Tarja–her first reaction was to take a knife to it, as if this was how she’d accepted she could never go back to before Origin, and hanging on to so much dead weight wouldn’t do her any good. When Clive looks at her, and down at the swell of her stomach, she wishes he wouldn’t, she wishes he’d avert his eyes, or look elsewhere. In many ways, they’re both having a hard time with this, five months of distance,
Clive stands to get stripped, Jill tilting her head to look up at him, pulling her hand away from his first. He steps around her to get closer to the long bathtub, his back to her as she moves to the stool, bending slightly so she can bring the seat closer to the bath. There are very few rules in the Hideaway, and communal bathing has never been something prohibited, but it’s empty tonight for them. The residents are still reeling from the sight of a man come to dock on an old, blight-bitten sailboat, hair long and shaggy and matted, hand turned to stone, a gaping wound in his chest.
(When she first saw him on the ship, she’d assumed the worst, and that meant she stood her ground on the balcony as the water brought him in. She couldn’t bear the idea of his corpse washing ashore, having to be the one to find him in that state, until the dock became abuzz with energy, people shouting for Tarja, for Otto, for Gav, for her, to come see the miracle the Founder had bestowed them. Then Jill had shuffled herself down to the dock, to see with her own eyes this miracle, ambling down awkwardly, hands clutching her stomach.
She doesn’t remember much of what came after, and the washroom has brought her peace for the first time since he washed ashore.)
“Here, I can get that.” Clive says from behind, and Jill turns just as he steps closer, her eyes immediately at the level of a nasty scar over his heart, the skin puckered, still raw, immaculately stitched by Tarja. It stretches from his shoulder, wide and hooked, moving down to his pectoral in a thin line. The rest of his body has always been littered by scars and marks and burns, but this is the nastiest one he’s gotten in years, cut with something Jill feels is more than the average steel and magic. Jill doesn’t think when her hand reaches out for it, pausing just inches from it, her eyes wide. She doesn’t have to imagine how painful it must’ve been.
“Did you get this…” She starts, the words stuck in her throat, Clive looking down at her and full of concern. “Was this from Ultima?”
“I assume so,” He says, and Jill remembers he doesn’t have much memory still, nearly cursing herself for being so careless for forgetting. “It looks like it hurt.”
“Would you join me?” Clive asks, finding her hand again, keeping it against his chest. “I don’t want to be away from you.” He says, and Jill feels herself melt with his plea, nodding.
Clive helps her in, after she has untied the belt of her blue apron and she pulls the long white shift over her head. He’s not much help for undressing, given the state of his hand. She sits at one end, him at the other, the bath long enough for his whole frame, some of the water flowing over the side, the rosy dawn resting above them. Jill nudges forward until she’s straddling his knees, a range of soaps and shampoos on the floor next to them. He helps her reach over to retrieve a bottle, one hand steady on her thigh, keeping her upright, and the other holding her elbow up. Jill comes back with a bowl, filling it with water, and pouring it over his head, pushing his bangs back.
Clive laughs when the water rolls over him, and Jill feels herself ache at the sound. She can’t remember the last time she heard it.
“Now we match.” Clive hums, sitting up straight, looking up at her, pulling her closer. Her bump brushes against his stomach, stopping them from sitting flush against each other, but for a second it feels this had been a normal pregnancy, and Clive hadn’t been torn from her, and she hadn’t spent the past five months worrying that her fretting and panic would somehow hurt the children. For someone who just returned from almost certain death, off in an unknown world, left having to crawl his way home to get to her, he looks surprisingly content, a smile on his lips, as his hand of flesh grazes against her stomach.
“Sorry?” Jill asks, pouring another bowl of water on his head, her eyes drawn to the way the skin around his scars looks paler compared to the red of his chest and collarbone. The new scars, at least, ones she’d never seen before, and Jill has mapped each and every scrape and cut and burn from the last five years, would know them better than the night sky. Clive has been a half-god, half-man for so many years now, that it’s odd to see him vulnerable, so damaged, nearly broken.
One of his hands lifts from her hips, the sound of the water falling gentle and sweet, and Jill knows where he’s moving to, his eyes wordlessly asking for permission. His fingers make wet contact with the stone of her wrist, and it occurs to Jill then that their left hands both bear the curse. Jill has less stone on her fingers and wrist than he does, and it’s enough to make a substantial difference to her range of motion.
But there’s another patch of petrified skin, right over his heart. The heart he uses to love her with, pump blood around his body, keep him alive. She doesn’t want to think about how close he was to something fatal. She’s heard of the curse starting inward, then spreading out, beginning in vital organs. In the middle of Jill’s chest is something similar, right on her breastbone, stiff and smooth the way the cursed skin is always. They’ll never know the extent of the curse, never realize the true impact, and even in all of Tarja’s fussing and fretting, Jill knows the pregnancy could be an anomaly, if the stone has taken root as quickly as it did his seed. Her eyes burn, not even trying to stem the tears. The bowl falls over the side of the bath, hitting the floor with a deafening sound.
“See,” He says slowly, and it makes sense all at once. Clive moves her hand to his shoulder, down to the slope of his pectoral muscles, over the broken skin and scar tissue, down to the curled fist, lying dead in the water, then back up to his chest. “We match now.”
“Only you can make that sound endearing,” Jill says, brushing her fingers over it. She wishes she could be the the one to heal it, maybe if her love had’ve poured into her magic, into Shiva when he took her, it would’ve been better, slowed the curse when it started, been less ugly-
She pauses at that thought, suddenly disgusted with herself for thinking that. Clive has never said that about hers, probably never even thought it, and all of the loving and tender and lingering kisses he’s pressed on her palm and fingers, and over her breast and on her sternum floods back to her, and the warmth she felt every time he did it.
On his chest, the stone almost bunched and gathered, as if the bud of a flower, before it thins and moves across his chest, nearly cresting towards his shoulder. Jill’s is longer, spreading vertically down, but not as wide, and jagged. It was the first place the curse started to grow. She remembers being nineteen and noticing it for the first time, just a small, star-shaped patch, barely noticeable, but in that instant she’d wished it would take her whole, to spare her the agony of the spread.
With a gentle motion, she pushes on his chest until his back is at the curve of the bath. She starts with his shoulder, pressing her first kiss against the curve of his muscle, the soap of the water sharp to taste, even if it smells like roses. Jill moves down to his heart, his heartbeat firm and steady, despite the cast over it. She presses a kiss against it, pushing all her prayers to her lips. Then, tentatively, she raises his fist to her mouth, and kisses each petrified knuckle, each more endearing than the last. He watches her under his thick black hair, his eyes soft.
Suddenly she gets Clive’s attention to hers. This feels like an act of devotion, of worship, almost, to replace the numb feeling with something sweeter, to try and kiss it better, even if they can’t.
Jill moves up his neck with softer, sweeter kisses, getting to the corner of his jaw, where his scar blooms. She presses a firm kiss there, her fingers brushing his chin. One of Clive’s hands moves up her back, kneading at the sore spot she’s had the entire pregnancy, a particularly awkward patch of the curse. The relief is palpable, but it’s without the warmth of the Phoenix in his fingers.
She pulls away, suddenly shy. He can’t have known the spot is there, made worse by the weight of the children. His memory is hazy and cloudy, as if the last five months of his life–her life–did not happen, but yet he remembers all of her sores and still manages to soothe them. Clive’s eyes are open when she leans back, taking her in with a soft expression.
“Well that felt nice.” He murmurs, his hand moving along the arm braced on his other shoulder, before burying itself into her dry hair. Clive leans forward again, his other hand moving higher up her back. “Thank you for that. You waited so long and still love me enough to be gentle.”
“I would’ve waited forever.” She breaths, the universal truth of the past five months slipping out, out in the open and she can’t take it back.
It feels too much for Jill then, and she tilts his chin upward, quick and harsh, before kissing him, the first they’ve shared since he came back, and hopes the salt on their lips doesn’t just come from her.