Work Text:
It started with red and white.
Really, it started with there being too many places in Ishgard where the Lord Commander was easily accessible. In a city with thousands of years’ worth of familiarity with war, access to their military leader was paramount, and generally considered to be a service paid by the taxpayers of Ishgard. Privacy, for someone like that, wasn’t exactly considered a given.
It made certain aspects of life more difficult.
The war room of the Lord Commander’s office was too publicly known, and too easily accessible. Knights and clergy alike were frequently at its doors, each bringing grave news of the increasingly bloody war with the dragons, or the holy war that Ishgard waged against the internal parasite of heresy. Aymeric would spend his often-limited time in Ishgard torn between the Vault and the war room of the Congregation, never wearying as he found solutions to problem after problem, night after frozen night. His patience was infinite, his knowledge and experience vast, and so he made himself as available as possible. Despite the blood on his hands and at his doorstep, Aymeric was determined to use his knowledge and experience to the benefit of Ishgard and its people, whenever possible.
What few knew, however, the Lord Commander was also provided a private office upon the acceptance of his post. On paper, it was reserved for confidential meetings, elite political guests of significant interest to Ishgard, and confidential correspondence of the highest posts in all of the Holy See. In practice, those items were often brought to the main public office regardless, leaving the private chambers largely unused.
On paper.
Instead, off the record, it was a quiet, secluded space where Aymeric could withdraw himself from the eyes of the public and his knights. It was somewhere he could safely fall asleep when a night watch kept him away from home too long, too exhausted to make his way up the hundreds of steps to his distant bed. It was where he could sit in silence in front of the fireplace, turning a thousand strategies over in his mind, an intricately spinning kaleidoscope of potential outcomes and catastrophes. It was where he could collect himself when the war, the blood, the screams and cries and begging from widows and orphans and furious hot-blooded knights all became too much to bear.
In practice, it was where he could be alone, at last, a secluded home away from home.
In practice, it was where he eventually brought the Warrior of Light.
They were hidden and alone, in ways they had never managed before. What had begun as a perfectly innocent conversation about defensive tactics had gone longer and longer, topics ranging further and further out. The clock struck later and later, and she showed no intention of leaving. They talked until their throats grew dry, until finally Aymeric had risen from where they sat together and pulled two bottles of wine from the ornately carved cabinet off to one side of the room.
“Will you stay?”
It was nothing, and it was everything. The asking, and the waiting, and the way he looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her . Like she was something precious to be held, something worth looking at with his hungry eyes, like she was more than just the title and the politics and the danger she’d brought into the city.
There was never a moment where she would have refused.
“This was one of my mother’s favourites, or so I’m told,” Aymeric said, settling on the floor in front of the fireplace. She was already sitting comfortably on the settee nearby, turning the cut crystal glass that he’d just handed her carefully around in her hand. When he turned to look at her, it was with that same piercing clarity she’d begun to look for whenever they were together – and often found turned in her direction – but his expression was softer, somehow. In this private bubble of firelight, he seemed more himself than anything she’d had a chance to see before. He was more relaxed as he leaned against the settee, more free with his words.
Warmth unfurled, slow and cautious, somewhere behind her ribcage.
Somewhere over the course of the night and over the several tastes of wine they’d already indulged in, they’d lost both their formal armour and their pretence that this – whatever this was – had ever been merely a professional alliance. He sat in his shirtsleeves and breeches, long legs crossed casually in front of him, and she sat with her arms and neck bare, legs tucked underneath her, able to watch him more freely than they’d ever been permitted thus far.
Able to speak freely, too, with no one to listen, and judge, and pick apart their every word. She’d always been naturally quiet, choosing to absorb the noise of others rather than add her own. With him, however, she was quickly finding that conversation came dangerously easy.
How could it not, with him listening to her so intently that she felt so utterly known by this man she’d known for only a short period of time?
“So you’re told? Don’t you know?” She asked, lips to the edge of the wineglass, tasting the liquid with more care now that she held the additional knowledge that went with it.
“She died when I was quite small.” Aymeric leaned his dark head back against the settee, dangerously close to her knee. The fire was warm, and comforting, and the bite of the white wine was pleasantly sharp on her tongue. “I only know her through stories.”
For a moment, she was silent, turning her glass around in her hand, quietly contemplative. He didn’t push, content merely to let the familiarity unfold between them, warm in the fireplace glow, hidden safely away from any prying eyes who might have thought to look for them there.
She felt possessive over him in a way that startled her. This secret, warm side of him, the one that was true, and real, underneath all of the formalities of societal expectations and valiant dreams. It made her feel seen, in turn. This is who I am. I’m not just the Warrior of Light. I don’t even know who that woman is.
You’re here with me. Not with the legacy.
And it was everything.
“We only had red wine when I was growing up,” she finally said, quiet and decisive. “I hadn’t tasted another kind until I left, and even then only for holidays and ceremonies.” She paused, and sipped at her glass of white, her gaze lost somewhere in the flames for a moment. “My mother was particularly strict on what was and wasn’t acceptable for a lady. Drinking in ‘excess’ was certainly among the latter.”
Turning where he sat, Aymeric faced her, shadows flickering across his face. The edges of darkness seemed to only make the blue of his eyes stand out all the brighter in the firelight, and they were fixed steadily on her face. He rested his arm on the seat of the settee, and didn’t touch her leg at all, and she was in far more danger here than she’d ever been facing any beast or godhead.
“You’ve never spoken of your family,” he said, quietly cautious.
“Nor have you,” she countered, and he dipped his head in amused agreement.
“Not exactly polite political conversation, is it?” He took a sip of his own wine, and then seemed to change his mind with further thought. “Though, thinking on it, perhaps my family falls under that category after all.”
She hummed, thoughtful, with something close to a smile lurking around her mouth. “Mine too.”
He held out his glass to her, and she tapped hers against it with a light chiming bell of crystal on crystal.
Nearby, the fireplace crackled gently. Outside the closed drapes, snow had begun to fall thickly over the city, ensconcing them further from the world. The quiet was comfortable, and she leaned back more comfortably where she sat. The movement shifted her knee closer to him, and when her leg brushed feather-light against him, neither moved away.
“Will you tell me about them?” He asked, and the expression in her eyes could have filled volumes, oceans, skies.
It took no time at all for them to lose track of the hour.
As the night wore on, and the world fell asleep around them, the Lord Commander and the Warrior of Light moved closer together by increments, both emotionally and physically. After the bottle of white was empty, the bottle of red followed, and eventually they moved to the amber-filled bottle that burned on the way down but achieved a type of warmth in ways the fire glow hadn’t quite managed.
Even that didn’t touch the kind of warmth growing between them there, in the coldest parts of the night.
In the darkness, and in secret, they told each other everything. Things of importance, and things that were frivolous and meaningless. Families, childhoods, likes and dislikes, fears and annoyances; their conversations were myriad, and nothing felt off-limits as the night wore on.
He told her of a life feeling both within and without in the intrigues and social niceties of Ishgard, and the expectations to exceed the circumstances of his birth that had been laid on his shoulders nearly from birth. She told him of feeling pulled apart into multiple directions at all times, dragged forward into narratives by the inexplicable force that was being The Warrior of Light.
He told her about the way he missed long mountain summers, warm afternoons laying in the mountain hillsides, and a childhood of loneliness and longing. She told him about growing up underground, exploring a labyrinth of tunnels unsupervised, and what it was like to feel the desert heat on her skin for the first time after she’d run away.
They spoke of first loves, first times, of victories and losses and regrets.
He told her about being afraid.
She told him about being afraid.
“You know,” he said quietly at one point, when the shadows were darkest and the hour was at its deepest of the night, “I don’t even know when your nameday is.”
His blue eyes were still so clear in the increasing darkness, with his face, his body, so much closer to hers now than he’d been before. Somewhere in the night, they’d moved closer to the dwindling fireplace, and they lay there together now, chaste and clandestine, facing each other mere inches apart where they lay stretched out on the floor. His head was pillowed on his arm as he looked at her, free in these stolen hours to openly memorise her face in the same way she was memorising his.
Here, now, and then never again.
“I’ll get you your pantheonic, if you’ll let me,” he continued, naming the Eorzean tradition of symbolically providing someone the flowers favoured by their patron deity on their nameday. His voice was softly vulnerable as he offered, in a way she was beginning to recognize.
“I don’t have a nameday,” she admitted, just as quiet. Their secrets had dropped to whispers as they traded them, yet losing none of their weight. His eyes on hers were curious, and she shrugged as best she could from her position, stretched out on her side facing him. “I suppose there had to have been a day, but I don’t know when it is. No one ever told me.” Her gaze dropped to the way his warm fingers were tracing, feather-light, up and down the delicate skin of her bare forearm where it lay between them.
Why me? She found herself wanting to ask in return, not for the first time feeling swept under the enormity of what exactly they were doing. Of anyone for those endless eyes of yours, all of that bottomless goodness you hold…I am such a damaged, broken thing. I haven’t lied to you once all night; surely you see the truth of me now, too.
Why me?
“Besides,” she continued, letting her fingertips press upwards to meet his own when they drifted lightly down to her upturned hand. “Growing up, we’d never done pantheonics.”
“I’ll get you your favourite, then.” Aymeric’s eyes were waiting to meet hers when she looked up at his face again. Her mouth was dry, and she was warm, warm, warm.
“Snowdrops,” she found herself answering, surprising even herself to have an answer so easily ready.
“Snowdrops,” he repeated like an agreement, and she relished the way his breath caught, imperceptibly, when she let her fingertips wander along the exposed skin of his wrist. They watched her progress, letting the silence envelop them both.
“I may not know the day,” she added, only when their fingers bracketed each other, mutual exploration, mutual respect. “It was spring, though. Sometime in spring, I’m fairly sure. There were always snowdrops then.”
She could nearly see the moment he filed the knowledge away, storing up details about her and her life with the same dedicated focus that she’d seen him wield in both battle and politics. It was a calm, assured way of dealing with the world that she both identified with and respected.
She’d never met someone so similar to herself before.
Particularly not someone who looked at her the way Aymeric did.
“Let me guess,” she mused, relishing in the forbidden feeling of his fingertips pressing against hers, the only contact between them despite laying so close, facing each other with their backs to the world in a way they’d never be permitted – nor allowed of themselves – to do anywhere outside of that room. “Yours is in summer, and that’s why you loved the season so.”
“Solstice morning,” Aymeric agreed, and resumed tracing feather-light touches across her palm, up her wrist, and along her forearm. Her chest rose and fell in an unsteady rhythm. “Fortunate, later on with the Temple Knights. It was often too hot for lengthy patrols that day, and it was nearly like having a day off, all for my nameday.”
“Generous of the fates,” she mused, and was rewarded with one of his pure, rare smiles. That same one that made her stomach twist inside her, elated and terrified all at once.
“You should have seen Estinien one year,” Aymeric went on in a quietly confidential tone, amusement laced through his voice and lurking attractively around the corners of his mouth. “Hottest solstice on record, the astrologians claimed – well before the Calamity, of course – and we’d been sent into the mountains to look for a group of dragons that had been attacking the local villages for their livestock…”
When the fire grew dim, they rekindled it. When their drinks grew low, they refreshed them. Her blood grew slow and warm in his presence, her tongue tasting the spice and sting of the alcohol, and she forgot to be afraid of her walls coming down. She was safer in that room, with Aymeric a few beats away, telling him anything that crossed her mind, than she’d ever been in her life.
What was a kiss without a kiss? It was their fingertips touching, their eyes meeting in the half-light, their every imperfection laid bare between them and given to the other to protect. It was her gently brushing his dark hair away from his eyes as she’d pictured doing a thousand times before, letting her hands linger on his skin as she watched unknown emotions play out behind his eyes. It was him stretching his arm out so that she could pillow her head on it, so close that only the barest amount of restraint kept their lips from meeting as they continued to talk quietly.
They didn’t sleep, and they didn’t look away, and when morning came, something would be irreversibly changed.
What are we doing? She didn’t ask, despite knowing he was asking the same. This is too dangerous.
Too dangerous, and far, far too late.
It ended with red and white.
When dawn finally broke over the pure white snowpeaks of Ishgard, it was with a blinding red glow that lit spectacularly across the sky and promised violent storms later in the day. Even through the closed drapes of the private office they’d hidden themselves in, the ruby light bled through, its bright and bloody hues forcing them to acknowledge a truth that they couldn’t ignore for any longer.
There was a war on.
They were the Warrior of Light and the Lord Commander, with responsibilities, obligations, and innocents relying on them.
They had been indulgent.
They couldn’t allow this again.
In the pale morning sunlight, they moved in silence around the small space, gathering themselves and their belongings. Bottles were returned to the cabinet. Glasses were stowed away out of sight, and sofa cushions were put back neatly in place, as though no one had been there at all. The small table that had been moved out of the way so they could lay in front of the fire was returned to its rightful spot, and the fire itself was doused in a curl of disappointed smoke.
In silence, she handed Aymeric his gauntlets to secure back in place. In silence, he watched her pull on her thigh-high boots. With the dawn encroaching ever closer on their hiding place, they pulled themselves together, back into the roles they’d been born to play out.
Still, forbidden and sacred, Aymeric carefully pulled the laces closed on her armguards for her, his fingers moving almost forlornly across the worn leather that now covered the places he’d not long ago touched her bare skin. He was close enough that she could nearly breathe in the heady, masculine smell of him, and her eyes nearly fell shut just to experience the moment all the better.
It took no time at all for them to return to exactly who they’d been before.
They were nothing like who they’d been before.
Standing facing each other, they looked down at their linked hands, breathing in tandem, neither wanting to break the fragile moment that they’d managed to stretch into an entire night. Locked in mutual desire to stay as long as possible, they simply stood with their hands held, his thumb running back and forth against hers like a reassurance.
But if she didn’t leave soon, she’d be seen.
They were many things, but nothing if not practical. Somewhere over their short time of knowing one another, they’d grown extraordinarily skilled at hiding the way they shattered the myriad of rules they were meant to be following as people in positions such as theirs.
In the end, there was no ceremony to her leaving. There was simply a quietly ducked head as she turned away, and her hands falling devastatingly from his. There were her light footsteps moving away down the hallway, refusing to look back and see him illuminated in the doorway. There was no way for her to see his expression, dark and unreadable, as he watched her retreating back.
They had never spoken of what they were doing. They had barely touched. They hadn’t even kissed.
In the winter morning light, she was a ghost. She had never been there.
The entire night might not have ever happened, except for weeks and months later, when she returned exhausted to Ishgard from her trek across Dravania.
Her room at the Fortemps Manor had been kept pristine in her absence, the old count waiting patiently for the return of a girl he’d long ago decided was as good to him as a daughter. After so many hard nights sleeping on the road, it had been a wearingly welcome joy to see a warm bed, a washstand, and even a door to close behind her for a moment of privacy. The canopied bed had its covers turned down for her already, and a warm brazier was lit in the corner, keeping the room comfortable so that she could rest as long as she needed. Tea had been made and left, and it was with weary relief that she pulled off her muddy boots, stacking them together by the doorway as she entered the room.
The borrowed bedroom was a perfect picture of order, and comfort. She might have fallen into the bed and into a deep sleep without a second thought, if not for the way the heavy drapes over the window barely fluttered in the cold Coerthan air, the window open just enough to be noticeable.
When she crossed the room to close it, her attention dropped to the ornate nightstand beneath the windowsill, and for a moment, everything went still. The room, the wind, even her very breath in her chest.
Slowly, like a sunrise, warmth began to bloom gently in her chest where she’d let it go cold in her time away.
There on the nightstand, resting in the perfect centre of a silver tray meant to hold jewellery that she didn’t own, lay a single delicate sprig of snowdrops.