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Frieren is not as dim as she appears.
No, of course not. She could not be who she was if she weren’t sharp, and she’s learned more about people in her lifetime than her apathy lets on. She’s a good student when she wants to be.
So she knows, even though she doesn’t admit it even to herself, what a mirrored lotus means. She knows that Fern is not as subtle as she thinks she is. She knows why young people such as her traveling companions might inexplicably wander off alone and return empty-handed. And she knows, in the undusted corners of her heart, why she is going to Aureole.
She knows that people look at her and see someone too ancient to make up her mind in a human lifetime. It is not a reputation that Frieren minds, because childishly delaying her decisions is a particular forte of hers even if it is not an inevitability. But it really isn’t that at all.
Some passing party of adventurers is stealing Stark today, yet another job offer he’d been too kind to refuse, and Fern drapes a scarf around his neck, pats it into place. She lets his hands linger on his chest and presses up on her toes to kiss his cheek when she thinks that Frieren can’t see, and she tells him, quietly, “be safe, Stark-sama.”
Frieren does not need her peripheral vision to see his smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, equally hushed, in on a secret. “I always am.”
“You are not.”
He laughs—this, Frieren can hear clearly—and there is an unidentifiable rustle of fabric. “It’s an easy job.”
“Still,” Fern grumbles. “Be safe.”
“’Course, Fern.”
Quiet for a beat. A hitch of breath, then, in a rush that is half giddy and half frightened and all tender, “I love you.”
They really do think they’re being secretive about all of this. It is amazing how much Frieren is assumed to overlook.
“Love you too,” he answers, and is off.
People joke, and often, that Frieren is a lost cause in love, unable to know her own mind fast enough. Once, maybe. No longer. But it isn’t the flow of time that’s the problem.
Frieren has never known what to make of Fern and Stark. Superficially, yes: a pair of traveling companions who’ve fallen into a mutual attraction. But that is not a why. There is no explanation for the tender affection of preference in that description. There is nothing to explain how two people could come to be so comfortable with the fact of loving each other that they’re able to put it into words.
Maybe it is time, after all. Thousands of years of solitude make it hard to imagine affection.
**
She’s found herself playing with her ring lately, twisting it around on her finger when she’s worried or bored. It calls his face to mind. Frieren is well aware of the futility, but he had been the one to tell her it was good to remember.
Maybe it would make him happy to be remembered like this. Maybe it would only depress him. Frieren always was a depressing sort of person, anyway, to people who really thought about the life she’d lived and how much more of it there would be. She bets it would, actually.
Frieren wonders about that sometimes—why it had to be her, of all people. Why he couldn’t have just been sensible and dreamed about fame and glory and the girl back home. Why he couldn’t have imagined the Hero’s Sword or an immortality potion under Grausam’s spell and not a wedding.
(A wedding, of all the damn things.)
Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves: this ring, that illusion. The thoroughly depressing thought that he was perfectly content to admire from a distance what could not imagine itself giving him what he wanted. That Himmel, who had gone so far as to imagine her at the altar when given the choice of anything he could ever have wanted, had been able to see in his mind’s eye what she could not.
When Frieren thinks of love, it is so divorced from her everyday life, the mundanity of herself, that it seems pointless to think about. There is nothing concrete to attach to something she’s never experienced, something that directly contradicts a thousand years’ experience. Perhaps he had stopped short of kissing her under that spell (though she’d been willing, she can admit now, she’d been willing) because she could not picture the vague fondness she feels when she thinks of Himmel in conjunction with anything tangible, anything reachable, anything real.
Magic is the art of visualization, after all. Of course Frieren could not bring to pass what she couldn’t even picture.
You really were supposed to be smarter than that, she thinks, twirling the ring around the tip of her finger, but—no, really, he was not. The tragedy of Himmel the Hero was never his stupidity. Far worse to be all at once wise enough to know that somebody does not know how to love and unwise enough to love her anyway.
**
The market is always busiest on weekend mornings, full of groups: clusters of friends, families, couples who wander about in pairs. It is not often that Frieren is preoccupied with those crowds, but today she can’t help but be.
There is a youngish couple whose child must be three or four, toddling after them with one hand in his mother’s and a stick of pulled candy in his other. The father carries a stack of parcels; the mother wears a red-striped apron. They are talking about something in animated voices that are pleasant even from a distance.
It is not that Frieren’s chest has never felt funny when she thought of him—it is the fact that she cannot picture the same couple with Himmel’s face and her own.
**
Aureole, too, turns abstract after long enough.
She has lost track of the years, though they’re few. Not a day has gone by without a diversion, and their intended journey meanders endlessly; it is as though they hope never to reach the end. Frieren would not be surprised if her own heart lay in that direction.
Because, when she is really and unreservedly honest with herself, Frieren doubts that a place she can speak with Himmel again exists.
It is a nice idea, consigned to the backwater of nice ideas in an unused part of her brain where every other ambition with an end goal of Himmel resides. She would quite like it to be real, the same way that she would have kissed him in that illusion if it had been the time and the place. But belief…
Belief takes visualization. And she has never been quite able to do that when it comes to him.
**
She dreams, sometimes. That a weight over her chest is Himmel’s heavy arm, and that he is snoring next to her. (It is a tent pole that time, blown down in the night.) That they are standing on the lip of a waterfall, and he leaps first, hand in hers. (It had been raining.) That he is kneeling in front of a tiny Fern, nodding vigorously at what she says. (He would have been near-dead by then, not this picture of youth.) She cannot say that Himmel isn’t at least a resident of her subconscious.
It shouldn’t surprise her, though. He’s always belonged to the realm of things that are not quite.
**
In crowds, when he doesn’t want to risk losing track of her, Stark places his hand at the small of Fern’s back.
This is not new, or surprising; he always does. But it strikes her one day in particular because it is something that Himmel would have done if only she had let him, and because it strikes her as regrettable that, before he was an old man on his deathbed who had spent eighty years loving her in vain, she probably wouldn’t have.
Still, she cannot picture the warmth of his hand on her back, or how large it would feel against her slender waist. She tries to imagine what he would say to her, but she comes up short. Only—and it embarrasses her to even admit that she can imagine it—the same debonair smile he gave to everybody he was kind to, and something gallant—this way, Miss Frieren, something unnecessary, stay close to me.
That would’ve been it, she decides, stay close to me. Curious, when all those imagined words make her think of is how very far away he feels instead.
**
He knew, she decides. He knew magic well enough to know that a mage who could not imagine something was a mage who could not do it. No wonder he had been so annoyingly chivalrous about the whole thing, his touch so irritatingly light. No wonder.
Still, sometimes, she pictures his hand on the small of her back, and she wonders if it is new or if she has always simply been too frightened to admit that, with effort, she could have done it all along.