Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As it turns out, fighting primals is exhilarating. Thancred has never been one to envy Velvet the Blessing of Light—it sounds like a headache, to be honest—but for once, he can see the appeal.

Not to say that it’s easy, of course. Sleipnir—or should it be Lunar Sleipnir? Whichever it is, the horse’s hooves are terrifyingly large, and while Thancred has managed to avoid any direct hits, the glancing blows he’s taken have been stunningly painful even through his breastplate. Urianger lingers closer than usual, star globe at the ready to mend anything worse than a scrape, even as Thancred privately wishes he’d stay closer to the back line. At least Y’shtola maintains a sensible distance.

At first it seems that they might win. The fight rages all around them, but they’re pushing the Telophoroi back. Whatever Fandaniel has in store, it seems he underestimated the combined forces of Eorzea’s finest.

But here’s the thing: in battle, skill can only take you so far. You have to have luck as well, and luck doesn’t last forever. Lunar Odin darts away, then suddenly, lightning-fast, turns to charge, and Thancred’s stomach sinks like a stone.

Y’shtola is a master sorceress; Urianger is a master healer. In matters of magic there are few who could oppose either of them, and fewer still who could fend them both off at the same time. But this is not a battle of spell against spell: it’s spell against steel, and the horseman’s sword is quick and merciless.

Lunar Odin snaps the reins of his steed, sickly purple blade outstretched. Y’shtola, sprinting across the field, will make it in time, but Urianger had been beside Thancred, soothing the ache in his ribs left by one of Sleipnir’s hooves, and despite his height and the length of his legs, he isn’t a fast runner.

Thancred stops and turns his back on the enemy, pulling hard on Urianger’s arm, forcing him down into an awkward half-crouch. For just a breath, the air is still. The full moon’s light rakes down over the battlefield.

He’d forgotten to be careful. Forgotten that there are no happy endings for the likes of him, only pain deferred, moments of happiness stolen and then coming due with interest. There isn’t even enough time to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to spare a word for Ryne. Only to take a breath, and brace.

Urianger’s eyes go wide, realizing a heartbeat too late what’s about to happen. Y’shtola’s warning rings through the air—

—and then something strikes Thancred from behind, a mountain’s weight condensed into the edge of a blade, and he’s falling into the darkness before his body gets around to registering the pain.

(falling and falling and falling and falling and)

He can’t say how long it lasts. Time has no hold on the interminable darkness that lies beneath sleep, in the empty places vacated by blood as it spills. But the fathomless dark gives way, first slowly and then faster and faster, to the clear blue of pure aether, deeper than the ocean, older than memory. 

A bright spark passes him, sinking rapidly into that interminable blue. Other sparks descend all around, some close and some far, some quick and some more slowly. Departing souls, some of them probably fresh from the battle he just left. Gleaming ripples follow the masses of aether as they shed their outer layers: memory and mind dissolving into the sea. He knows, suddenly and instinctively, that nothing will remain of them soon except the bright motes at their cores, infants’ souls ready to be reborn anew.

He knows, in that same instinctive way, that the same fate awaits him. Already the world he left behind begins to seem like a dream. 

It’s not right. It’s not right. He wasn’t ready to go, gods damn it all!

There’s a strange sensation, then: a moment ago he’d seemed to be a disembodied consciousness floating in that endless blue. But as terror and rage bloom within, he finds that he has arms, legs, and a head once more. They’re not his —they seem to be made of stone, or perhaps crystal—but they’re something.

Yet at the same time, they seem out of place. The blue of the sea seems almost to fizz and bubble on the surface of this strange carapace he finds himself in. A crack forms in one of his strangely spindly arms, and he watches, fascinated, as something wisps out of the gap, floating away.

It had been fear, he realizes suddenly, as a gentle calm laps at his mind like the tide. The Sea is dissolving away his reluctance.

But he’s still descending slower than the sparks around him. Perhaps, if he tried to hold on, he could…

Well, not return to life. That ship has clearly sailed: he can’t seem to swim upward, not to mention there’s that dark in-between place between here and there. But he could resist the sea’s cleansing, at least for a time. He could force his memories, the remnants of his mortal life, to calcify around him, and he could drift on the tides as a lonely shade instead of sinking down. It’s unlikely to accomplish anything—all souls must eventually be reborn—but it’s the spiteful, stubborn thing to do, which gives it a certain allure even as it strikes him as a foolish and ultimately pointless idea.

He doesn’t get any time to deliberate, though. Because at that moment, something unexpected happens, something that doesn’t happen to any of the other souls around him:

A claw of white-and-gold fire seizes him from behind, all searing light and the sudden smell of petrichor, incongruous and impossible in this place so far removed from such tiresomely real things as rain and soil and noses. He barely has a moment to realize that it’s happened before the claw is suddenly dragging him up, against the pull of the Sea and its peaceful blue depths, back into that dark place that’s neither here nor there.

And then it drags him back out of that, too, back into a world of smoke and screaming and bodies that can hurt.

Bodies that can hurt a lot, as it turns out.

“I think a mountain fell on me,” he groans. His voice is hoarse, as though disused for weeks. Probably just the smoke from all the ceruleum-powered warmachina. He tries to sit, and three pairs of hands reach out to steady him. “I’m fine, I’m fine, just a little dizzy…”

Y’shtola’s face swims out of the confusion first, pale eyes narrowed and ears flat. Her hands are smeared black and red, and there’s a stink of iron and sulphur about her, but she doesn’t seem to be injured.

She’s clearly in a bad mood, which means that needling her is a bad idea, so of course he does it anyway. “Miss me?” he manages. The grin that always used to get the best eye-rolls out of her fits oddly on his face, but it’s better than whatever grimace was there before.

Her eyes tighten, and she lifts her chin to address someone over his shoulder. “I don’t know how you did that. I’d say I don’t want to know, but that would be a lie. All the same, I’d rather you not do it again.” She turns her head back towards him, and there’s something fragile in her expression, something sincere, something that she usually takes great pains to hide. “And don’t you do that again either, understand?”

“Love you too, Shtola.”

There’s the eye-roll, but her shoulders relax a little, too. “I’m going to help Alisaie with the tempered,” she says, and rises and strides off without hesitation.

That leaves two pairs of hands. Stiffly, he turns his head to the side, and gets a mouthful of silver hair for his trouble. Urianger is plastered along his left side, face pressed into the side of Thancred’s head. His hands are glowing with healing magic, but he doesn’t seem to be attending to any wound in particular, instead just spilling aether haphazardly into Thancred’s aching torso. He’s also trembling finely. 

“I’m all right,” he says. “I’m fine, come on, save your strength.”

“Thou wert not,” comes Urianger’s muffled reply. “Thou wert—in front of me, and I could not—” He takes one long, unsteady breath, and the glow fades from his hands. The full-body ache throbs, a little, and Thancred holds his breath for a moment to avoid flinching. “I will take thee to the healers’ encampment,” Urianger declares, leaning back enough that Thancred can look him in the face. His eyes are red-rimmed.

“I—” Thancred begins. Urianger’s eyebrows come together sharply, and Thancred hastily changes course. “—would welcome your assistance,” he finishes.

Urianger helps him stagger to his feet. (Odin is nowhere to be seen, but there is a rather large scorch mark on the ground. Thancred doesn’t comment on it.) As much as he’d like to get back onto the field, he’s forced to concede that a visit to the healers’ is probably a good idea. Every ilm of him hurts to a frankly unnecessary degree. 

Thancred doesn’t need to look back to know who the third pair of hands is. He knew from the instant that white fire touched him. Already the blue depth is fading, dreamlike, from his memory; tomorrow, he probably won’t remember anything except the bare facts of what happened. Well, and one other thing: the thought that sprang into his mind as he was dragged back through the dark.

You can’t leave yet. I didn’t give you permission to go.

He doesn’t need to thank her. She already knows.

Chapter Text

The Scions close ranks around Velvet as they disembark the Ragnarok, Tataru in the vanguard and Krile bringing up the rear. In all honesty, Velvet shouldn’t be on her feet, eerily silent and unreactive as she is, but even in her current state, she’s hard to stop when there’s somewhere she wants to be.

The Baldesion Annex is no further from the harbor than it was before they’d left, but the walk seems to take twice as long. Velvet is limping, just enough to be noticeable, and her face is gray and set, stoic mask fixed firmly in place. She manages to stay on her feet until they reach safety, but the door is barely shut behind her before she’s collapsing in slow motion to the tiles.

Ojika runs over in alarm, but Tataru takes him firmly by the arm and says a few hushed words, and then the two of them scamper off to prepare a sickroom. 

There’s the faint breaking-glass sound of a glamour being dispelled, and the illusion of Velvet’s beautiful new jacket and trousers ripples and falls apart like a mirage, revealing the cocoon of torn fabric and bandages beneath. It would have been stupid to cause a panic during that long trek through the city, but even so, the subterfuge feels uncomfortable. There are new bloodstains seeping through the cloth, Thancred notes with detached clarity. And many of the wounds that had seemed relatively minor on the Ragnarok’s bridge, flying back from Ultima Thule, are much worse in the lamp-light of the Annex.

All of the other Scions cluster around her as she slithers, boneless, to the floor. G’raha’s hands settle on her collarbone and sternum: preserving her vitals, if Thancred had to guess. Urianger and Y’shtola claim the two most grievous of her wounds: Y’shtola the crack in her skull and Urianger the deep puncture in her lower abdomen. Alphinaud and Krile divide up all the other serious injuries, through some system known only to the two of them. Alisaie, face pale but determined, taps Alphinaud’s shoulder and is quickly swept up in the flow, mending each lesser cut and scrape that dares to release so much as a drop of blood. Even Estinien gets involved: the hair on the back of Thancred’s neck stands on end as a reddish glow suffuses his body and a strange gleam enters his eyes. There’s no enemy to fight here, though. Instead he crouches awkwardly at the outskirts of the knot of people, reaching in to rest a hand on G’raha’s shoulder, and that red glow begins spooling out of him as he lets flow his unnaturally over-abundant reserves of aether.

Thancred has only his own life force to offer up, but much as he’d like to contribute, he knows better than to try. He learned the hard way, years ago, that his body’s aetherial flow was distorted too severely after the Bloody Banquet to be lent and borrowed the way that other people’s can. 

He can’t bear to sit idle while the others work, though. No one even glances up as he departs the room, nor when he returns laden with linen and gauze, but Alphinaud and Krile move apart to make room near a sluggishly bleeding gash on Velvet’s leg as he approaches. 

The undyed cloth slowly turns red under his hands. The blood is warm and tacky, and there’s far, far too much of it. It’s not enough. It’s all he can do.

Eventually, Velvet’s blood stops flowing quite so freely, and she keeps breathing when G’raha lifts his hands from her chest. There is a brief conference among the healers, ending with a consensus that she can probably be moved off the floor of the entrance hall of the Annex without too much danger. Thancred takes one end of the stretcher, Estinien the other, and Alisaie spots them as they lift. The others are dead on their feet, exhausted by the ordeal yet unable to rest just yet. 

Velvet had lost consciousness sometime after they’d entered the Annex—frankly, she probably hadn’t been entirely awake on the walk over—and she doesn’t stir as she’s loaded onto the bed in the newly-prepared room. There’s a cot and a couple of chairs by her bedside, for people to monitor her and rest nearby as she sleeps. Thancred does a quick inventory of the group, discovers that he’s the most alert of the bunch, and promptly claims one of the chairs. G’raha nearly faints into the cot, asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow. 

Krile sits down in the other chair, but even she is visibly drooping. Thancred frowns. “I’m not disputing your skill—far from it—but if she were to suddenly take a turn for the worse in the night…”

“I’ll find someone,” says Tataru as she weaves her way through the crowd, two trays in hand. One, laden with a teapot and a few slices of what Thancred suspects is Archon loaf, she hands to him; the other, containing only a covered bowl and a spoon, she sets on the bedside table. There’s something forlorn about it, something that smacks of wishful thinking, that Velvet will recover enough to wake up and eat before whatever’s inside goes cold. Thancred looks away.

“Father,” says Alisaie. Several eyes turn to the door, and then to her when she clarifies, “He’ll help you—he may not be very personable, but he knows everyone in town. And in a pinch, he has enough training in somanoutics to lend a hand himself.” She gives a jaw-cracking yawn and sways, but then rallies and finishes, “And he’s the speaker for the Forum. If you bring people in from the mainland, he can tell the immigration staff at the port to let them through. And he owes us.”

“That he does,” Alphinaud mumbles, leaning heavily on Alisaie’s side. 

“I’ll find him,” Tataru promises, and is out the door in seconds. Ojika departs after her, Y’shtola in tow, talking in low voices about making a list of approved visitors and cleaning the foyer. The twins stumble out, and Estinien after them, leaving Thancred, Krile, Urianger, a still-sleeping G’raha, and their unconscious charge.

Urianger looks dead on his feet, and doesn’t protest when Thancred offers him his own seat. “I shall stay until another healer doth arrive,” he says, probably trying to forestall being sent away before a replacement can relieve him.

Half an hour or so passes in near-silence. The teapot is full of Tataru’s special blend, brewed so strongly that it makes Thancred’s eyes water, but it keeps him awake, so he’s not complaining. The Archon loaf is foul as always, but he chokes it down anyway. It won’t do anyone any good if he faints from hunger now.

Urianger manages only half a slice and a few sips of the tea before the door opens to admit Fourchenault Leveilleur and an elderly man that Thancred recognizes as the current headmaster of the Studium. Fourchenault introduces the newcomer as Scholarch Montichaigne, who, in addition to being an administrator, is a senior instructor in healing magicks. Fourchenault stays only long enough to assure them that Montichaigne can be trusted not to blab to the whole city about Velvet’s condition before making a beeline for the door.

He pauses on the threshold, though. Still facing away, hands clasped behind his back, he says, “If she wakes, tell her: thank you.”

It’s more words in a row than Fourchenault has said to him since before Louisoix died. “Tell her yourself,” says Thancred flatly. “When she wakes.”

Fourchenault just nods, still facing away, and leaves.

Evening falls, and Alisaie comes along to relieve Thancred of his vigil. G’raha recovers enough to walk back to his own room, and Y’shtola takes over from Krile and Montichaigne as the healer on duty. 

Velvet doesn’t stir even once. It’s hard not to take that as an ill omen.

A week passes. Velvet still doesn’t wake, doesn’t even twitch in her sickbed. She still breathes, and her heart still beats, albeit sluggishly. Yet there’s something undeniably off about her too-still body. 

The first few days, they’d tried to feed her, but had learned quickly that she wouldn’t swallow broth or even water. When Kan-E-Senna had arrived with two other Padjals in tow, she’d taken one look at their attempts and shaken her head. “She is not dead,” Kan-E-Senna had pronounced, “but she does not live, either.” They’d switched over to simply transfusing living aether instead—more difficult and taxing to provide than food, but at least her body doesn’t reject it.

It should have been reassuring to have three entire white mages of the Shroud working on the problem, but an air of baffled helplessness lies so heavily over the Senna siblings that Thancred almost wishes they would just leave. Their power and skill give the Scion healers a much-needed reprieve from round-the-clock duty, true, but they seem entirely unprepared for whatever it is that’s gone wrong with Velvet. They have no solutions to offer, and precious few ideas of things to try beside simply pouring raw aether into her body; a reprieve seems to be all they’re good for.

Thancred is aware that he’s being unfair. Whatever had happened in Ultima Thule after Velvet had sent him and the rest away is entirely unprecedented in the history of Etheirys—perhaps even in the entire history of the universe. It’s hardly the Padjals’ fault if their training and traditions don’t teach them how to deal with once-an-eternity flukes. And having eight master healers instead of five means that they can all keep regular, if staggered, sleep schedules, and each tap their own reserves of aether only one day in two, instead of every day. But it’s painful all the same to see three of their number—Velvet’s friends and fellow students of white magic—one of them a world leader, even!—unable to get over such petty things as their magical senses telling them they’re trying to heal a corpse. 

(Unfair, he tells himself, but it doesn’t help with his frustration. At least the Scions don’t let their own squeamishness tie their hands.)

On the third day of the second week with no change, Alisaie sits down next to Thancred at the breakfast table. The food is a joint effort between the staff of the Last Stand and the Leveilleur estate, coordinated by Tataru, who is so good at putting on a brave face and lying about Velvet’s condition that Thancred is seriously considering asking for her assistance the next time he’s called on to do intelligence fieldwork. (If there ever is a next time, with Garlemald so thoroughly off the table as a threat.) 

It’s been a while since any of the Scions had the energy or peace of mind to chat idly over a meal, so Thancred is startled when Alisaie takes a deep breath and says in a rush, “I’ve been having strange dreams ever since we got back from Ultima Thule.”

“Strange dreams?” Thancred asks, curious despite himself.

“The Aetherial Sea,” Alisaie says. “I think—I can never quite remember them when I wake up,” she grumbles, stabbing a piece of roasted popoto harder than it deserves. “But I think I’m dreaming of the Aitiascope. G’raha has been having the same dream, too. I think we all might be having it, actually, but G’raha’s the only other one who can recall any details.”

“All of us, except me?” Thancred says, but then he frowns. Come to think of it…

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you,” says Alisaie. 

A clear, bright blue rises in his mind’s eye: an unearthly vibrance of color that can’t exist in a world with sun and moon and stars to wash it out and bleach it into normalcy. Yes. Yes, he’s seen it recently, he’s sure. Even if he can’t quite recall…

“We’re going to go back down into the Aitiascope,” Alisaie is saying. “Myself and Alphinaud and all of us who can be spared.” Of course I can be spared, Thancred thinks grumpily, though he knows Alisaie doesn’t mean it in quite the way it strikes him. After all, it’s not like he’s keeping it a secret that his forays into Noumenon’s restricted sections aren’t turning up any leads. “Will you come with us? Please?” she asks, and he immediately feels a distant prickle of shame at his temper, even concealed as it is. “We don’t know what we’ll find down there, and we could use the help.”

It’s unlikely the shades of the unquiet dead have gotten any less vicious than they were on the last excursion, and it would be foolish in the extreme to stake their lives on the memories of departed friends clearing their path a second time. And Alisaie, for once, sounds her age: no longer the little child she’d been before he’d crossed the ocean with Louisoix a second time, but still so very, very young. “Of course I will,” he says, too tired for anything but bare sincerity. 

Alisaie doesn’t seem reassured by his easy acceptance, by the lack of even a hint of a joke or a quip, but neither does she seem deterred by it. Instead she just says, “Thank you. We’re going tomorrow morning, as soon as Alphinaud’s had a chance to rest from his shift this afternoon.”

Thancred nods, and Alisaie departs, buzzing with newfound conviction. Her good mood is infectious, and as the day goes on, he starts to feel more and more like his old self. They’re going to go to the Aitiascope, and they’re going to find Velvet and bring her back. Simple as that. 

As he gets ready to go to bed, though, something about that thought catches at him like a spiderweb, felt but not quite seen. He turns the words over in his mind. They’re going to the Aitiascope to find her. They need to bring her back, because she’s somewhere else, and they’re going to the Aitiascope to find her, because they’ve all been dreaming of the Aetherial Sea.

Operating purely on a hunch, he pads down the hallway to Velvet’s sickroom. Raya-O-Senna is the healer on duty tonight, having relieved Alphinaud only an hour or so beforehand. Luckily, she doesn’t seem to be mid-transfusion, so he might be able to talk her into what he wants. “Can I talk to her?” Thancred asks, putting on his best friendly-apologetic smile. “It’ll only take a minute or two.”

“Sure,” says Raya-O, and then a moment later she realizes he’d meant privately. He can see that she wants to protest, but she’s already agreed, and after all he’d said it would only take a minute. “If anything changes, though, call for help right away,” she says sternly, and then leaves the two of them alone.

Thancred sits down in the chair next to her. He frankly has no idea what he’s doing, except that it feels like it might be the right thing, the only thing that he can do. “Velvet,” he says, and then stops, frowning. It’s not enough.

Her hand lies cool and still at her side. He takes it in both of his, and has to suppress a shudder. She has the same dry, vellum-smooth quality to her skin that Hoary and Ocher and most of the other Hellsguard he’s met have, but her body’s temperature is much lower than normal, and it feels uncomfortably like holding hands with a mannequin. He waits until her hand warms up a bit, waiting for that feeling of right-ness to return.

Luckily, it doesn’t take long enough for Raya-O to get bored of waiting and barge back in. “Velvet,” he says again. “We’re going to find you.” No, that’s not quite it. “You’re in the Sea,” he says slowly, feeling as though he’s fumbling through a dark room by touch, searching for something but not knowing what it is, only that he’ll know when he finds it. “You’re in the Sea, and you can’t get back on your own. We’re looking in the right place now. Just hold on, and—” He suddenly has to suppress a yawn. “Hold on just a little longer…”

Thancred blinks, and then shakes his head. What had he been saying? Velvet is still lying catatonic on the bed before him, but something has changed. He looks around. 

The room isn’t any different. Or at least, he doesn’t see any changes. A part of him wants to simply ignore the oddness of the moment, to call Raya-O back in and go to bed, but that doesn’t quite feel right.

But it doesn’t exactly feel wrong, either. Still following that same hunch, he stands and crosses the room. “Raya-O?” he calls out. His voice rings out too loud in the quiet, and he winces. “Raya-O? Did you notice anything…?”

He trails off. The corridor is empty. Raya-O is nowhere to be found. Neither, come to think of it, is anyone else. The building is utterly, eerily silent. There isn’t even any noise from outside. The neighborhood the Annex stands in doesn’t tend to be loud at night, but it’s impossible to completely block out the sounds of a city the size of Sharlayan, even if the windows were fastened tight, which they aren’t.

Thancred frowns. Then he returns to Velvet’s sickroom. The window is open, but there isn’t a city beyond. Only endless, fathomless blue. 

He crosses the room and pokes his head out. The bridge beside the Annex is still there, but the water isn’t twenty or thirty fulms below, the way it had been when last he’d been outside. Instead, faintly glittering waves lap at the top of the cliff’s edge, at the underside of the arched stones. The harbor below is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the higher ground behind the building, nor the ground on the other end of the bridge. It’s as if a giant had reached down from the heavens and scooped the Annex clean out of the city, depositing it instead in this bright, silent expanse. 

And sitting on the far end of that bridge to nowhere, legs dangling off into the blue as if into a lake or an ocean, is Velvet.

She doesn’t turn to look at him, even when he sits down next to her. She just keeps staring, staring, staring down into that endless depth.

“You’ve been here a while,” says Thancred eventually.

For a moment, he thinks she’s not going to answer. But then she nods, slowly, as though moving through syrup. “The whole time, I think,” she says. Her voice is hazy. Dreamy. Like she’s on the edge of sleep.

“You couldn’t squeeze back through that window?” he asks, allowing some of the frustration and fear of the past two weeks into his voice. “Not even to say hello?”

She blinks. Her eyes twitch over to the side, once, twice, as though she were trying to look over at him but couldn’t quite bring herself to look away from the depths. “It’s a small window,” she says. There’s a little more life in her voice.

He can see it fading, though, bit by bit. Little gleaming motes are flaking off of her lower legs where they’re… not submerged, exactly. The surface, as it were, is above them; they’re both underwater already. But from the parts of her that are deepest into that blue.

It’s slow. She still looks like herself, sounds like herself, feels like herself, even after a week and a half of the Sea working at her. And there’s a lot of her to dissolve, in a way that has nothing to do with the physical; in this space-that-isn’t-space, she has a kind of gravity to her. But it won’t protect her forever. If she stays here long enough, she’ll slip into the depths eventually.

He knows, immediately, that she knows that too. And he’s beginning to suspect that it might just be what she wants.

But then again, if that was what she wanted, she could just slide off the edge and let the Sea bear her away. And instead, she’s just sitting here, drawing it out. As if…

As if she can’t decide.

“Come back, or go,” he says, voice tight. “But don’t stay here. Not when we’re waiting for you.”

“Should I come back, then?” she asks, and there’s no weight behind the question, just that same drowsy calm. “Because you’re waiting?”

Yes, he wants to say. It would be easy—just one word and everything would be fixed. This place doesn’t seem to follow ordinary physical rules, but he thinks if he took her by the arm and hauled her bodily back into the Annex, she would have to come back, to leave this shallow edge of the Sea and live again. 

The blue of the Sea is impossible, too pure to exist in a world with sun and moon and stars. It’s the same impossible blue as Ryne’s eyes had been, until she’d made her choice.

“I can’t choose for you,” he manages to grind out before his throat closes entirely. He coughs.

“How do I choose, then?” she asks, and it may be quiet and buried, but beneath the calm, there’s real anguish. “Can I die, when everyone I cared about gave up their lives for me? Can I live, if I’m no longer needed?”

Well.

Not a choice, then—a lifeline. Turns out it’s easy after all.

“I don’t know the right answer,” he says. “But if it’s permission you want, to lay down and die, you’ll have to ask someone else. Because I won’t give it.”

She blinks. Once, twice, three times. And then, moving slowly, as if she’d half-forgotten how, she draws her legs up and away from that ledge, and pushes herself clumsily backwards onto the stones.

The color of the un-space around their floating piece of Sharlayan doesn’t fade, exactly. But from one moment to the next, it goes from the blue of the Aetherial Sea to the blue of a summer evening sky with no clouds, endless and deep and not at all impossible.

Velvet curls up with her back to the railing, arms wrapped around her knees, tears falling silently down her face. “I didn’t know,” she whispers. “I wasn’t sure there would still be a place for me, when everything was over and done.”

Thancred has been on the receiving end of her unimpressed stares enough times that he’s pretty sure he can manage an approximation. 

For the first time since she re-appeared on the Ragnarok bleeding and broken, a hint of color steals its way onto her face. “It’s not the same thing,” she protests faintly.

“Yes it is,” he says, and gets an arm under her shoulders, and hauls her to her feet. “Now let’s go inside. You’ll need to get some rest if you’re going to fend off an army of angry healers in the morning.”

“An army?” she asks, alarmed, and he just throws his head back and laughs.

Thancred jerks awake, the uncomfortable chair digging into his back. Raya-O is shaking his shoulder. “—hear me? Hello? Hello? Oh, I knew this was a bad idea—oh, you’re awake!” She scowls at him. “You said you wanted to talk to her, not catch whatever she’s got!”

“Catch what she’s got?” Thancred asks, baffled, and then his brain catches up. “Ah.”

“You were less dead than she is,” Raya-O grumbles, “but you weren’t any more alive. Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to give your healer a fright?”

“Technically,” says a weak, hoarse voice from the bed. Raya-O jumps and whirls around, eyes wide. “You’re my healer, not his healer.”

Raya-O’s mouth opens and closes several times, and then she turns and pokes Thancred’s chest with one finger. “I’m going to get Kan-E,” she says. “You stay here and watch her and don’t die this time.” She pokes him again, for emphasis, and then runs for the door.

“You’d think she’d—” Velvet cuts off into a fit of coughing. Luckily, there’s a pitcher of water on the bedside table. Thancred steadies Velvet as she sits up and drains an entire glass in one long gulp. “You’d think she’d tell me not to die,” she finishes once she stops to take a breath. 

“I think that was implied.”

“Eh.”

“Don’t die. Happy?”

She draws breath, probably to say something sarcastic, but then the door bursts open so hard it slams against the wall and five different people all try to crowd in at once, and the sickroom is suddenly full of exclamations and laughter and tears and stern admonishments to never, ever scare Alisaie like that again, ever.

Velvet is plainly still exhausted and weak—the worst of her wounds haven’t even properly closed up yet—but the cheerful noise seems to invigorate her rather than tiring her out, and when at last the twins give up on conversation and mob her for a hug, she smiles like the sun coming up.

“But how?” Alphinaud asks, eventually, once the hubbub has died down somewhat. There aren’t enough chairs, so most of the room’s occupants are perched on the edges of Velvet’s sickbed. Every time someone had tried to leave to fetch more seats, she’d managed to catch them by a hand or a sleeve or a shirt hem, and eventually they’d all gotten the hint. “We were so sure you’d gotten stuck halfway into the Aetherial Sea.”

“Oh, I was,” she says airily, and waves a hand in Thancred’s general direction. “Thancred came and fished me out.”

Every person in the room turns to stare at him. Thancred rolls his eyes. “I argued you into fishing yourself out.” The stares continue. “She just needed a taste of her own medicine,” he clarifies, and Velvet sticks out her tongue at him. “Am I wrong?”

“I’m going to sleep now,” Velvet announces, and closes her eyes. Alphinaud snickers and elbows Alisaie, and gets a much harder elbow in return, to the general amusement of the room. After a moment, Velvet cracks one eye open and adds sheepishly, “Will you stay? Some of you, at least? I think there are some pallets in the closet down the hall.”

The mood is nearly festive as the Scions set up cots around the room, like going to bed in the dim hours of the morning after Umbernight, when the dawn peeps up over the horizon after a long sleepless night of singing and feasting and prayers to Azeyma to bring the sun back for another year. It’s more than a little stuffy with so many people bunking in one room, but none of them try to leave. Not even Estinien, though he does shove his own cot into a corner near the window.

The room goes quiet bit by bit, the sound of nearly a dozen people’s breathing softening into sleep one after another. Thancred can’t quite manage to drift off, though. Maybe it’s because of his inadvertent nap earlier—though that rings hollow, frankly; he doesn’t think his little dream sojourn exactly counts as sleeping. More likely, it’s a delayed reaction to all the stress of the past few weeks. They made it back safe. They all made it back safe, all of them who had boarded the ship to Sharlayan less than a month ago. They did what they set out to do, and finally made it back in one piece, and they didn’t even have to leave anyone behind this time. It feels as though it can’t be real.

Someone is watching him. Thancred opens his eyes, just a crack. Velvet is looking right at him, and he sees his own disbelieving relief reflected in her face.

And then she smiles again, tired and secret, and closes her eyes, and just like that, he can feel himself slipping comfortably under. It was real, every bit of it, and the light of dawn can’t snatch it away. 

(She doesn’t have to thank him. He already knows.)