Work Text:
i.
You and ZAYNE are ten.
He's been your best friend for as long as you can remember, always at your side. He gives you candies whenever you feel lightheaded, and fishes out a bandaid from his bag whenever you fall and scrape off the skin of your knee on concrete, and walks you home in the evenings whenever Caleb had after-school basketball club. When Grandma gives you pocket money to buy new crayons, or a new drawing book, she leaves just enough extra to buy those candies he loves so much from the roadside stall; and when Zayne's mother gives him money intended for school materials, he can't help but spend it on the popsicles you said you liked.
Zayne is your dearest best friend, just as you are his. He's never said it, but you know; you know it because he sits on the table nearest to yours, and doesn't care when your other classmates tease him for holding your hand during recess, and follows in your little footsteps as you drag him through the school's playground.
("I'm gonna be a hunter when I'm older!" You grin, limbs tangled in the bars of the climbing dome-tower. Your hands smell slightly of metal, there's paint peeling off the bars and sticking to your skin, and you are young and fearless.
Zayne stares up at you, from where he sits in the eye of the tower, eyes peeling away from the book he's reading: The Snow Queen. "Why?" He asks, voice as soft as always. You're upside down on the top of the dome when you look back to answer him, and a young Zayne doesn't know if his heart is beating so fast because he's scared you'll fall, or because of something else.
"Because," the sound of your hand against the metal bar as you swing around reverberates in the cage, in your chest, and in Zayne's mind. You hoist yourself out of the grid spaces, sitting on the bars now, "I want to take care of everyone!")
Zayne is your sweetest friend. He knows when you're tired and hungry, even when you insist you're aren't, and proceeds to hand you a little sweet. He knows when the sun gets far too bright and the day far too hot, and places his little hands over your forehead to cool you down, Evol swirling at his fingertips. He muffles the sound of the school bell with his palms over your ears, just as when your classmates get too rowdy, or when Caleb yells for you from across the room. ("Don't be so loud." He says, voice even and face as calm as ever, and you watch him gently whack Caleb on the shoulder. "It's not nice." Zayne does not say that it's because your ears are more sensitive than most.)
(The years pass, and not much changes between the two of you from the days of your childhood, besides the cavity fillings and growth spurts and skills with your Evols. Zayne still offers you those little candies, still dreams odd dreams, and still talks in the softest voice he can muster when he speaks to you. But eventually, Zayne moves away, and your family in Bloomshore District becomes you, Caleb, and Grandma once again.)
…
ii.
ZAYNE is a sweet, gentle lover.
As sweet as the macarons and cakes and pastries he lets you buy, and the extra ones he buys to leave on your wanting plate. As gentle as the way he says your name, or the way he calls you darling, or my love , or the less common my snowflake when he spots you plodding over to the kitchen in the early morning. He’s already dressed as smart as always, with hands stained with the juice of the fruit he skillfully cuts. Unbreaking strands of crimson apple skin twine around his fingers—neat, perfect, and then finally cut away by a decisive flick of the knife.
“Good morning, my love.” Zayne looks up from the peeled apple. His voice is a soft, low hum in your ears—it always is, always has been for as long as you could remember. “Eat up. You need your energy for today.”
( Not like today is anything different, or anything special… but he just wants you hale and healthy everyday. )
Lucky mornings go like this, when Zayne does not have to rush to Akso: he gently slides the plate of breakfast he’d prepared over in front of you (always with a bowl of cut up fruit). then, he takes his own plate, and sits beside you at the kitchen island, shoulders brushing against each other’s as he settles on the barstool. The early morning sunlight bathes his apartment in rose-gold hues, slowly warming you from the chill of the night.
“Did you sleep well?” Zayne asks—as he always does, monitoring your health in these small ways too—and his voice mixes with the faraway sound of Linkon City rousing from slumber. Telltale sounds of traffic buzzes in the streets of the concrete and beton jungle below. Birdsong flits through the air, church sparrows flying past the window. Conversation too, bounces from topic to topic—today’s duties, an invitation for lunch at a cafe near akso, predicted times that you two will return home.
It’s a string of little murmurs, on these mornings with Zayne. And this thread of domesticity ends at the doorway, with a final soft, “I love you. Take care of yourself today,” as he presses a lingering kiss to your lips and another peck to your forehead. then, the click of the door closing as he pulls away.
( It’s the hardest part of his day. the easiest is the return — an always a too-warm embrace that seeps into his very bones, a peppering of kisses to your cheeks, and a sweet “I missed you, my snowflake. How was your day?” )
...
iii.
Who are you?
The FORESEER does not feel. He cannot afford to. He is not allowed to. The foreseer is as cold as the ice that he is both ruler and slave to, unrelenting, unforgiving. Merciless. A tool for Astra—a cruel god, crafting an even crueler tool. A hand meant to be made, tormented, and dealt.
And yet, when he sees you, a poor thief masquerading as an envoy... Well, he cannot, for whatever reason, find it in himself to be a weapon. Not when he sees visions of lives he has and hasn’t lived flicker into view like distorted deja vu , all centering around this false messenger he has ensnared in ice.
“You forget yourself, testing the limits of my benevolence.”
And even though the words are harsh (oh, and a small part of his inner self recoils at his words), Zayne's voice is a gentle murmur. Soft yet stern, a hint of confounding warmth in his cold tone; second nature.
( “Don’t cry.” He says, at the end of it all. The jasmine flowers bloom, a gentle, silent symphony. )