Work Text:
First
it is one day without you.
Then two.
And soon,
our point: moot.
And our solution, diluted.
Parting Song, Jill Alexander Essbaum
--
First: It’s at Broken Glass. Sabre decides warm fingers are better than an evening sketch. A day or two without drawing is uncommon, but not unheard of. They’re at war, or something like it. When her brother spoke of war in his brief way, it was like this: permeating, monotonous. Sabre watches the red smoke rise off Garlemald’s capital at all hours of the day instead of seeing the sunrise. She smells asphalt in the snowfall. Waking is cold; daytime is cold; settling down to rest is cold. Images rove through her mind as shapeless, engulfing things, but they don’t entice enough to draw, even with charcoal. Her ink will probably freeze.
Second: After Zenos comes the difference. She does not permit herself to think on what’s been done to her, so she does not permit herself to draw it, either. Those crawling memories, belly to the snow and shaking hands, do not deserve her time. Neither does her own face contorted beyond her recognition.
Third: Elpis should reinspire her, but she forgets to open the book at the end of the long few days she’s there. She should try again. Except her sketches are flat and dull compared to the aethereal life she remembers. She’s never cared before she can’t draw the taste of the air by the pond, but it’s significant now. For once, she makes no attempt at the faces she recalls. They’re secrets she can’t share, so they fuzz into the back of her mind like vision after staring into the sun.
Finally: Ultima Thule raises her hackles just to mention. Storms rise in her at the thought. There is no part of her that wants to memorialize it. So, there. She stops drawing.
Beyond Finality: Her only desire for her recovery is to spend it at her brother Touya’s house in the Doman Enclave. Thancred accompanies her and stays until she is settled. Between them is not a chasm, but a thin glass pane. She sees him, speaks with him, reaches for him, but something comes up short. It’s probably her. She was the only one not unmade in Ultima Thule, which means she is the only one that Emet-Selch’s recreation did not touch. She often wonders how he would have put her back. Would she be more like Azem, and less like herself? Would she be better for it? Wouldn’t it have been nice if he could have drawn out the nuances in her like the precise spirals of Amaurot’s towers?
Thancred doesn’t mention her distance. He decides to embrace her before he, again, must leave her side.
The maples in the yard go scarlet with the dropping temperatures and shorter days. Sabre asks Touya to teach her to spar with her fists. They start slowly with her still-healing wounds, but he doesn’t tell her no. Should he? Alphinaud thinks so, and remarks on her bruises when he comes to tend her healing. G’raha’s wince tells her much the same, but he merely tells her to take care, and there is never a block between them. On the contrary: he looks at her as closely as he looks at everything, his eyes bright and red and exacting, and he holds her hand while he does. Ironic, that the man of crystal should be the warmest of those who would look at her tenderly.
Thancred always brings news when he comes by the house. News of Garlemald, of Old Sharlayan, of across this ocean and that ocean. It becomes disruptive, Sabre will hear no more of it. She withdraws to the yard when these discussions begin, remembering the days when she was too small to understand the politics spoken above her, and finds a strange longing for the cold alleyways and dark corners of her youth.
Fray is quiet. Stone silent. Shadows are soft, but they’re still lively. Fray is not. It makes her uneasy to think on too closely. They can’t have gone, but where are they, if not the constant bubble just below the surface of her? When did she become a well without a rope and bucket?
No matter, no mind, her brother says to comfort her, having no true idea what she means. The strength comes from within.
And he’s right, but where?
While Touya sweeps dead leaves off the step, Thancred joins her on the bench at the trunk of the apple tree in the yard. It has been at least several days, and maybe two weeks, perhaps not quite three, since she last saw him. He’s had his hand in his pocket from the start, and he’s finally ready to show her what he brought. He seems proud, or pleased, or hopeful.
Thancred places a small leather volume on her leg.
Sabre’s eyes widen. Her sketchbook. She should have missed it more, but she realizes she has not so much as wondered where it was. She touches the cover like a new lover, hesitant at a wrong move. Her fingers divot the leather in a way the book has learned to yield to. The pages are warped with—rain from Thavnair? Snowmelt in Garlemald? The sweat on her palms from holding it and bending it back and forth without opening it.
Opening it offers no catharsis. The early pages show her Norvrandt, which tells her how long she’s had this particular volume. A series of hazy, globular shapes with erratic lighting—Venat, though she did not have a name for her at the time. Old Sharlayan’s sketches go on for a while, most from her vantage at a café table with Alisaie.
She closes the cover.
Estinien brings news one evening, but once Touya has gone to bed, reveals his intention for delivering it in person. He and Y’shtola and Varshan wish to search for Azdaja in the Thirteenth. Sabre feels ill suddenly, and says as much. She tells Estinien she is not sure when she would be well enough for such a feat. He takes her answer, but Sabre lies awake into the night the way she did when she was small and sleeping under a wood plank in an alleyway. She feels this smallness, how Estinien, through no malice but sheer question, shrinks her enough to drop into a bottle. It is simple. She is the Warrior, and here is her new task.
This can’t be all she is.
It has become most of what she is.
She is a pass through, a bridge between souls, or worlds, or other things too large for her to hold between the thin bones of her fingers. She is a favor first and a friend second: a Scion is not a sister, no matter how the twins insist on treating her. They’re still young enough that it could be, that the organization means what it says. But even Estinien, new to its ranks, understands. They are sleuths to the unnatural, but Sabre is the only one who holds power to tamp down what they unearth in their insatiable curiosity.
She used to set things free. What she saw before, she brought to life. Yes, it was ink and paper, but there was aether in it too, if only hints that she had yet to fully understand. All this quelling and ceasing—she’s not meant for it. This thought stirs deep within her like Fray used to when she was stumbling lost. Sabre presses her fingers at her sternum and wishes the dark would come out all at once. She wants to touch every wall of the room, reach floor to ceiling, until she bursts from the confines. Like Touya’s old maples, her roots need to burrow further.
Touya would tell her that practice is meditative, and on this, they agree. Her practice is the rhythmic impact of her fists against a training dummy. While her brother likes the dawn’s light for training, she waits until dusk. He waits up for her most evenings and feeds her afterwards. They sit at the small kotatsu with her sketchbook like a placemat at an empty third seat.
“Would a new one be better?” Touya asks one evening. Each night he hovers over it as he takes the dishes up, unsure if she is done carving from it. She has stopped him each time, though she never so much as cracks open the cover of the leftovers she begs him to leave. There must be a reason it is stale at her fingertips.
Touya sweeps the step in the morning and the evening. Fall leaves drop their color and fall to the cobblestone path soon after, brittle, fragile, everywhere. But he has a good broom that reaches into the little crevices between stones, and with his methodic work, they’re cleared away. The broom shushes with each movement. Leaves bounce and scatter. It’s a calming sound, a place he grounds himself. This must be why he doesn’t notice his sister behind him until she says his name.
“You’re up early,” Touya says. He passes the broom to one hand like a staff. He dabs at his temple and pushes his hair back. When he turns, she’s dressed to go out. She isn’t often up before he is, especially not so prepared. Touya’s eyes narrow. She’s wearing her coat and carrying a pack.
“I kept waking,” she says. Her voice is softer than the broom bristles on the walkway.
And after that: The Warrior of Light is known for her mystery. She does not make public statements. She does not have portraits in halls of diplomats or government officials. Eorzea knows she is Au’ri, that she wields blades like shadow, but she would never make a long enough appearance for anyone to see the color of her eyes. Most who pass her on the street would not recognize her for who she is. Thancred knows, because he walks among those that speak of her; to know the temperature of the public is an asset. Particularly in wake of the Final Days, the ways she’s spoken of is far nearer to myth than woman.
The Warrior of Light is known, too, for her elusiveness. But it’s only the public eye she flees from. Isn’t it? Only the formless attention of those who do not know her she shirks off.
When Thancred arrives at her brother’s house in the Enclave, Touya does not say where she’s gone.
“She didn’t leave a note?” Thancred says. He starts curious. Always curious, even when he’d rather be angry, or frightened. He removes his shoes and hangs his coat as if he means to make this a social visit whether or not he finds Sabre here. It is only polite.
Touya Matsumura is a fastidious man. His house smells faintly of mint and citrus atop the new tatami. He stands at the kitchen sink washing a clutch of apples from the tree in his yard. His fingers flash over the red flesh and scatter droplets of water. He cleanses them to the high standard that every item in his home must attain.
“Check the table,” Touya says, in some ways as precise in his communication as he is in his housekeeping. He doesn’t lift his eyes from his task; each apple receives a measure of his attention, and it seems Thancred will have to take a spot in the queue.
Thancred kneels at the table in his usual place. With a jolt, his eyes catch on the small leatherbound sketchbook set opposite him. Just a few days ago, he found it in the Leveilleur estate in the room where Sabre had recovered after returning from Ultima Thule. Tucked neatly on the nightstand, Ameliance had expressed her surprise it had been forgotten, and for so long. Thancred pulls it over and spins it the right way around, but lays his hand alongside it. His only glimpses within have been guided tours. Sabre has never hidden them—in fact, she indulged curiosity at what lay between the cover. But viewing it without her hand on the pages feels like going through her closet.
The soft splash of the sink pitters out. Touya brings a bowl of shining crimson apples with him to the table along with two small plates. He folds a towel and places the bowl softly at the center. He sits opposite Thancred with perfect kneeling posture, selects an apple from the top, and begins cutting it into segments with a knife Thancred hadn’t even seen in his hand. Thancred has never been one to adhere steadfastly to his manners, but seated across from Touya, he feels he must pull his spine straight and extend his patience into the very question he wants to ask.
“Are these from the garden?” Thancred says.
“I was fortunate the tree survived,” Touya says. The apple skin pops where the knife slices through. “It was in finer shape than the house, when I arrived. They’re very sweet—I hope you’ll enjoy them.”
Touya portions the apple like dealing cards. He handles that blade with the expertise of a weaponsmith. A pair of katana are displayed in the entry room, their handles fine and freshly-wrapped, and Thancred solidifies the idea they belong to the man in front of him.
The apples are crisp as folding new paper; he must take the whole slice into his mouth or risk dripping juice down his chin. He hums his approval and sees a very faint smile cross Touya’s face. In that little gesture he sees Sabre so clearly, and he wonders why this family is so restrained in their joys. He could answer it, of course, in their known histories—but little things like that go deeper.
When the apple slices have been eaten as neatly as they were sliced and washed, Touya seems ready to speak.
“I think she’s been gone for a while,” Touya says. “She left two mornings ago, but—well, you’ve seen how she’s been.”
“Did she forget this?” Thancred asks, tapping the cover of her sketchbook.
“I doubt it,” Touya says. “She’d stare at it in the evenings like she didn’t know the language inside.”
“Really?” Thancred’s incredulousness breaks down the formality, and Touya slouches a little.
“Really,” Touya confirms. He folds his arms over his chest and joins Thancred in staring down the book. “I went through it, but she really hasn’t touched it.”
“May I?” Thancred gestures at the cover.
“You may,” Touya says.
Opening the sketchbook spills aether onto the table, and it startles Thancred into nearly slamming it closed. He thinks briefly of the shells Sabre has charged for him and how they drip aether like wet paint. She’s always shrugged it off as usual. Perhaps it is when you have a river of power where most would be lucky to mine out streams.
After acclimating himself to the feeling of her aether like a strange shadow she stretched out in her absence, he checks the pages. He recognizes the Crystal Tower from her window in the Crystarium. Her weeks in Norvrandt are laid out for him from an erratic ascent to Mt. Gulg; strange silhouettes of a man Thancred has no recollection of; Hades, Emet-Selch, some ghastly amalgamation of the two; there’s G’raha looking battered but smiling and sunlit.
He reaches a particular section that makes his neck flash hot. He went with her to the Copied Factory when she asked, and their time during and after it reflects here. She’s drawn him a few times, and the dancers at the Beehive, and the sunrise where he finally got out of his own way to kiss her. He melts further. Wonderful! Her brother has seen this night in silhouette. He wonders if Touya knows the meaning and hopes to each of the Twelve one after the other he does not.
And on the sketches go, a lovely, if sometimes strange, representation of Norvrandt. Further drawings fill in the time between Norvrandt and Old Sharlayan, then Thavnair.
There are a few drawings from Broken Glass, but the tapestry ends abruptly there. Thancred flips several more pages, but the surface is clean. Even flipping to the back, there is nothing. He holds up the book and fans the pages, giving it a gentle shake. No clues fall free. He must have misunderstood Touya, if the answers are not within.
Thancred backtracks. “Where did she leave to?”
Touya shakes his head. With his shoulders tight, he looks ashamed. “She wished me not to say.”
“She did?” Thancred doesn’t temper his voice enough. Touya disguises his flinch as a cough.
“I had no right to press her for her reasoning,” he says.
Unease pushes through Thancred’s body like a draft through an old window. “Did she say when she’d return?”
“No. Only that she planned to.” Touya’s voice finally bleeds some emotion. “At first I thought she only meant she meant to spend the day out.”
Thancred doesn’t know Touya well, but what he knows of the man is that he means to bear the weight of this small family on his shoulders. What Thancred does know is the private and deep pain Sabre felt at their separation, and how she seemed so lively once they reunited. Amputating that relationship doesn’t seem like her.
“Did something happen?” Thancred finds himself asking.
Touya takes a deep breath and swipes at his eyes with his sleeve. “I think it must have been everything,” he says. “Sometimes in the morning after we’d meditate, she’d remark on a battle, or a person I didn’t know. I think we’d both hoped the meditation would help her, but now I’m less certain it did.”
Thancred’s own hopes wither at Touya’s words. All she’d wanted in wake of them was to be with her family. Thancred’s hopes had been similar: that her brother and his home would heal deeper wounds.
There’s a long silence, and Touya’s brow betrays the ways he fights with his thoughts.
“She told me,” Touya says after a while, “there was an old friend she needed to visit.”
Eventually: Sabre is a long shadow in russet afternoon sunlight slipping between members of the crowd. Kugane is always busy, busier with the New Year. Around her, the lilting buzz of Hingan in a hundred different voices fills the last of the space between bodies. Above her, gleaming lanterns in bright colored paper already hang in long strings above the markets.
She doesn’t so much as brush her sleeve against someone else’s. No one needs to notice her, head-down and predetermined destination in mind. The sunset is too thick to see through, but her feet know her path.
Seiji’s studio is a corner place at an intersection that seems more significant than it did the last time she was here. He’s got lights in neon, now, bright blue and pink. They’re lit and chattering. He is happiest as a bee in a hive, delighted at the constant inhale and exhale of patrons through his doors. His books are always filled, but somehow his clients never have to wait long. When she stumbled through his door several days prior, he ushered her in like she’d barely been gone a day. Change is no obstacle to Seiji.
She breathes easier to enter his doors and doesn’t want to examine why. He is not her blood, but he fills a space like he could be. It’s unfair to Touya. She hates that. She’ll apologize when she knows how to, when the shapes of herself have settled again, when she knows what to say other than I know you’re upset, but—
She and Touya are so similar, sometimes, she does not know how to speak to him. Fray would laugh at that (she wishes she could hear it) and say, Well, of course, you spent so long ignoring yourself!
The sliding panels block away the crowd noise, and despite the youthful evening, the studio space is empty when she arrives. The incense is freshly burning and spices the air. Seiji’s himself lounges in the waiting area on one of the sofas, propped on a decorative pillow. He grins when she looks his way.
“Hey, boss,” Seiji says like usual. “I’ve got an idea. Wanna hear it?”
Sabre tilts her head, curious. Seiji is the loudest, most vibrant man she’s ever met, but somehow he only warms, never eclipses. “I would.”
“Come on back!” He hops up from the sofa, long strides cutting him through the room in seconds. He’s darting towards the back corner of the room—her corner. Her booth, when she apprenticed with him. Her heart starts wildly. She hasn’t looked since coming back, but knows he hasn’t changed a thing. All her old sketches—lifetimes old, it feels, despite the passage of only a handful of years—will still be plastered to the walls, or stuck under the chair legs.
She reaches for his arm as he passes, ready to tell him it’s not necessary, she’ll look later, actually, it’s getting late, coward—
“Tada!” Seiji throws back the curtain. Behind, propped up on an easel, is an enormous canvas. Its moon-white surface draws her attention, and all her old sketches fade into her peripheral.
“Ink is a no go right now, yeah? How about you just paint something?”
He gestures to her workstation. It’s filled with water color tubes from his collection, most likely, given the way they’re rolled and smudged. They’re clustered like a box of flowers in the height of summer, jostled together and messy in their liveliness.
“You can even paint with your hands. Bet you’d have a blast.” Seiji smiles. “I’ll leave you to it. Closing up early tonight, so don’t worry about cleaning up for clients.”
“You’re not taking any?”
“Nah, it’s izakaya night! With a couple of my regulars. So, you have your fun, and I’ll have mine. And I’ll be out late, and you’ll be in here ‘till the sun comes up, so good night and see you later!”
In his whirlwind way, Seiji buzzes out the door. The tailwind behind him flutters tacked-up sketches in his wake; they swoop and dive like birds. In his absence, the room pales with silence. The blank canvas leans like it’s been waiting for her to meet it at the end of a street, inevitable. Sabre pulls into herself to avoid its wide white gaze. She has sketched on canvas before. Her inks have dripped into the textured surface, and even she has touched color every once in a while. Yet, she cannot remember the last time she rendered in something other than charcoal or ink.
Never before has a blank surface loomed over her, rather than extended an invitation. She has always seen each sketch page as a necessity. Her mind so often overflows it is all she can do to reach the next page before scrawling onto the table. Why here, then, does a surface like an open hand feel like sticking to flypaper? She has just as easily scratched out sketches she dislikes, or sheared dull pages from the spine of her book.
Seiji has arranged her work station with the care of flowers to a diplomat. Jars with fresh water gleam clearly; clean rags drape over the edge of the table like ivy learning its space; an array of brushes with quill-sharp tips wait. The tubes of paint are a thin, flexible metal, cold to the touch. A bit of dried green flakes away under her inspection. More than half of it has been dedicated to projects already. She sets it aside to examine its peers. Seiji has left her more tubes than she could quickly count: bold primaries, coral pastels, white for lightening and even black, though she thinks she is expected not to use much of it. She unscrews a cap.
Bright carmine on her fingertip as if she pricked herself to get it. She nearly shakes it free with a pounding heart, but Seiji’s words echo. She controls her swipe and drags the red across the canvas. The rough surface finds her skin when the paint runs out. She’s gashed the canvas with her color. She refuses to let the injury stand.
With a crease in her brow and her jaw tucked tight, she takes up blue and dots her finger with it.
Seiji has the right of it. Once she starts painting, Fray stands behind her again. Judging her. Appraising her. Nothing new. Is Fray as knowledgeable in painting as they are in swordsmanship? Do they recognize the abstract ceiling of the Ragnarok in the red-hazed colors she uses? The pearlescent Elpis flowers? Hermes’s green eyes? They don’t comment, so maybe she’s the expert between them for once. She knows their face is her mirror, but she can’t help but think if she pulled their helmet free, a deluge of aether would waterfall down their shoulders and splash the room full of darkness. Her fingers flex with the thought.
An embrace. The firm affection of drowning. Don’t drink too deeply. But what if she did?
“I don’t think it’d drown you. Not anymore. Not like you are.”
Sabre turns so quickly she nearly spills the water. Fray isn’t a lover of their own voice; whenever they speak, she attends like they’re at the head of an auditorium, lights dim in the seats. She doesn’t like the inflection in their voice. They’re too certain. It’s Fray’s prerogative to know, and equally their penchant to challenge her.
“What do you mean?” she says. Her voice is airy with apprehension.
“The Light came closer than I ever have. But you overcame that.”
“I didn’t—” Sabre reaches for a rag to clean her hands. Lines of blue hide in the creases of her fingers.
“Don’t look like that,” Fray says. “Your strength isn’t your obligation.”
Her fingers nearly tear the cloth. Isn’t it? What is she to have done otherwise? Leave Ardbert’s legacy to wither after a hundred years of torment? Let Emet-Selch kill her? Not even Zenos, Shinryu-emboldened, could end her purpose. Hades had not arrived at her bloodied side to offer succor in the aethereal sea, but to ferry her back to the living shore. There is nothing but obligation.
Alisaie is the only one who’s ever dared to say it. To pull back the curtain on the burden Sabre carries and squint into the force of its brightness. The rest may thank her, their eyes skirting away, but they’ll never know. Alisaie might wish to, but even she can’t heft the weight and understand. And now Fray would stand among those who place her on a pedestal she has not the balance to remain upon?
The stool crashes behind her as she rises to her feet like a tidal wave. Her hands numb with a tingling like crawling insects. Around her, the lights dim. She can’t help it. Fray faces her, unyielding.
“You’ve run before, but this is different.”
She takes a step towards Fray with her hands outstretched. Their arms are loose at their sides, but the pull of invitation hooks into her ribs. It’s not like Hydaelyn’s visions. Knowing what she does now, she wonders if communion is some resonant part of Azem bouncing up like a cry in an alley.
“What do you think those you hold close could possibly ask of you?”
Her fingers hook under the cold edges of Fray’s helmet.
Finally.
Communion always catches her like a patch of black ice. Barely feeling the slip, her surroundings change in a whorl of black. No need to brace against it like she once thought. The fall has no hard stop. It will be as endless as she allows, and this time, she breathes her lungs full, opens her arms, and unfurls her ribcage to the mist and shadow. Her refuge.
When Ardbert offered his axe, the space around him flowed white. An effect of the Light, she’d thought at the time. But, no. Just him. Her soul is a different color, no matter what Emet-Selch thinks. No, that porcelain white was all Ardbert, a blanket of snow to soften the cut of his goodbye. That’s the only soul she knows, apart from her own. Rejoined, they’ve all become nothing more than shadows at her feet: flattened, color-stripped.
Her feet settle on pale grey stone. Each step carries her past dark pillars rising nearly two stories up. Her heartbeat echoes through the corridor.
She never looked for Azem before. Fled from her, if anything. The dreams that spilled into her mind like coffee tipped searing from a pot were never memories. She took them in, added them like another page in her book, and kept turning. Her thoughts turn back to the molten sun she sometimes holds in her hand. Would an old part of her offer guidance, even after death?
The shadow is as water before her. Sabre’s reflection ripples with a steady gait as she steps into the pool. Her waist is cold with it. She only has to hold her breath and drop her knees to feel the rest. When she was Fray’s wayward orphan, the thought of falling that far frightened her. If she has no more fear, why would they try to stop her? Tell her she can’t? They never have before.
She needs no catch of breath to prepare herself. Mind made up, she slinks beneath the ink.
This castle is only a hundred years old. It was grey from the start, obsidian panels, but the flowers used to bloom. The crawling ivy siphoned the reds away. There were water lilies in the pond, but they’ve overturned and withered. It only just now occurs to Sabre the castle is inkwork, something she’d draw in her sketchbook.
In that glass-cut darkness, a woman braces herself on the floor. Painting tarp crumples beneath her legs and her knees throb. Her tail flickers with agitated ripples, like a rainstorm dropping with fury, more and more droplets until they make a noise of splatters against the surface of puddles. Her shadow does not lay out behind her, lifeless—it bursts around her like crackling lightning, carving deep little spaces through the air. Her eyes, gold, burn white through the ink of it all. Her look is changeless. She smears paint onto her thighs without noticing.
Behind her, the canvas is full with color. Trails of petals wrench from the twisting forms rendered in brushstrokes. They cut and tumble. The figures are wilting stems hemorrhaging them as they dance across the cloth. A winter of daisies fills the foreground.
One look at it is enough for the man standing at the parting between shop and studio. He says the woman’s name like a primal prayer. Joke’s on him, that she’s already come back once like that. What would it take to accomplish again? The wraith of her has no idea, and doesn’t know if she wants to.
See this, Fray?
The woman receives no further word.
Now: She’s mortified when she’s aware enough to be.
Thancred stands on her threshold abuzz with tension, apprehension, and—she flinches at this one—fear.
It’s quickly enough stripped away to leave room for anger. He hasn’t seen her in weeks, and this is a horrible way to find her. She hasn’t seen Thancred since her wounds were still bandaged, and that was more than enough injury to flash at him. She wondered, sometimes, what it would have been like if he had held her like more than she’d break. It seemed as though every time she asked for him, another ilm of distance wedged between instead. It became something in need of shattering, and all at once, she’s ready to do so.
“What are you doing here?” Sabre says. Most times, she melts her voice at the edges. Not now. Every sharpness hones it.
“Hello to you too, darling,” Thancred says, and his voice is all wrong, too. He’s airy and lilting like he is with clients he needs information from. It does nothing to ease his sudden entrance and everything to agitate her further. His gaze almost immediately flicks behind her, where she knows the shadows are writhing over her canvas.
Sabre digs her nails into her knees. One more swipe leaves comet tails of paint where there’s room left on her legs, and she stands slowly. Everything behind her rises up: the shadow, the fury. She crosses her arms, and the last of the tacky paint sticks to the insides of her elbows.
“Did he tell you?” she makes herself ask. She doesn’t want to be mad at Touya, too, but if he broke such a simple promise to her, she’ll be sick with the grief.
“I asked,” Thancred says, “but he only hinted. You did worry him.”
And she’s sorry for it. She doesn’t need another reminder to bleed her for it. “So, you tracked me down like a hunting mark?”
“With good intentions,” Thancred replies. His brow furrows. He looks at the floor, but it’s only to judge where he may step. He takes exactly one further into the room, mindful of the tarp, the errant paint, and the blackness. When he looks up again, and past her, his eyes settle on the canvas. Sabre lets her gaze fall there, too. It’s not as therapeutic as the act of painting, but as her eyes drift over the colors and patterns, her startled anger simmers instead of spits.
“This is different from your usual style,” he says.
It isn’t. He just hasn’t seen some of the pages from Ala Mhigo.
“Seiji suggested it,” she says.
He pauses, and she feels another ilm of distance wedge between them. She knows the look in his eyes. His clever mind is tumbling with thoughts, but he’s locked her out of every single one. Are they back to the Waking Sands, when he hid his frayed memory from her? She’s willing to let him have that one—they were barely strangers to each other. But Ishgard after his aether came back wrong, and coaxing it from him took ages? Why is he treading backwards, when it took so much effort to move forwards?
“I’m glad to see you pick up the brush again,” says Thancred.
A small smile shapes her lips. “No brush. Just this.” She wiggles her painted fingers.
They share a soft laugh. It doesn’t feel the same, even so.
There’s no reason to clean her space when she’ll be at her station again before the canvas dries. But she clusters a few paint tubes together like flowers in a vase. Folds a rag. Thancred behind her is like the reflection of sunlight on the metal edge of a blade. For all he holds his arms loose at his sides, there is something he’s not telling her, and it’s bleaching his edges.
“This is your old studio, then?” Thancred says finally.
“My mentor’s,” she says, nodding. She thumbs the side of her canvas where a drop of paint tries to run. “Before I traveled to Eorzea, I was here.”
“Well, even better,” Thancred says. “A home away from home.”
She doesn’t need convincing of that, and it shouldn’t matter to him, but he says it like it does. Sabre’s gift has always been intuition, and the tone of his discomfort is so obvious it screams in the undercurrent of his voice.
“Did my brother ask you to find me?” she says. That might be worse than giving up her location. If he hadn’t wanted her to go, he would have said, wouldn’t he? They are not so close as twins, but she’s never known him to be anything other than straightforward.
“I was coming to look for you, actually.”
She dislikes the hesitation, the half-speech. She says, “Has something happened?”
Thancred rubs the side of his neck, fingers flashing over the color of the ink there.
“No. But, something will be happening. Nothing bad,” he says, hurrying his speech along when her spine draws straighter and her eyes widen and her expression falls carefully blank.
He’s worse than his cartridges. Something charges him, but it’s no even current. Little jitters and bites frame him guilty of something, regretful of something, but the shape of it escapes her like afterimages from lightning.
“I’ll be leaving for Tural in a week,” Thancred says.
“Oh—well, you had me expecting Garlean unrest,” she says talking herself down.
“By the Twelve, I hope not.”
“Is this more reconnaissance?”
“Something like it, I suppose.”
“Something you’ll do alone,” she adds.
He holds back. She stings at what’s unsaid: that he has the decency to leave word before going.
“When did this come about?” Sabre asks. She backtracks in her mind. Has it been so many weeks since Ultima Thule? Long enough for the Scions, fractured though they are, to move on without her? Long enough that there is something worthy of their attention? It occurs to her they must have done more mundane investigations before the Echo and the Ascians came into it, but she has no frame of reference for how large or small such endeavors may be.
“A couple of weeks ago,” Thancred says. “You needed your family, not another task.”
It should comfort her. No more weight of the world. No ask too great. No obligation for her strength. But she feels suddenly stricken.
“You’ve made your decision, then,” she says.
“Let us take care for a while,” Thancred says. “I’ll write to you should anything catastrophically notable happen.”
When Thancred carried out reconnaissance in Gry Abania, when Sabre returned to Kugane the first time, they sent letters back and forth. He’d started it, teasing her on the docks, but his had been the first letter to arrive. None of what he offers holds that teasing, that promise.
“If it’s that big, just choose the link pearl,” she says.
“I doubt it will,” he says, easy, dismissive. “So, take your rest here. Well-earned after everything.”
That’s it, what he doesn’t want her to know. That after everything, after she’s given everything, she has nothing left to offer them. She wonders if it started with her answer to Estinien. One time she asks for reprieve, and it’s a permanent affliction? It’s not to say she wants to go to Tural—she doesn’t—but to skirt around even asking her? She needn’t have worried, she sees. Her arguments with Fray were worthless after all. No more will be asked of her, and it is a hollow realization.
She wants to ignore him and watch the paint dry, but it will take too long. She’s no stranger to locking away her thoughts. Sometimes they’re better saved, anyway, when she can draw them in broad strokes across the page. What’s she to say, anyway? Agreeing with him will sting turpentine over a cut. Her mask will crack from wishing him well.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here for long,” she says eventually.
“I can always look for you again,” Thancred says. He smiles. He’s just out of her reach, giving her and the canvas space. She does what he won’t and closes the gap.
The paint she smudged from the side of her canvas is blue and dark. She reaches for him, telegraphing the movement, and streaks the color along his cheekbone.
“Not your color,” she says.
Thancred’s secrets are never truly kept. His job is to know them and make them known. He’s very good at it. The Scions honed him, but there must be something in him already, some part that wants to cherish, but can’t help to share anyway. Perhaps that’s why Sabre feels some dismay when a set of letters arrives for her not a week past his visit.
From Krile and Raha. Raha has a talent for intimacy in a phrase. He’s unduly capable of making her heart feel like it has risen through the surface of her sternum, red and unbound. He makes no mention of her sudden flight from her home. Makes hardly a mention of anything tenuous at all, save a brief, throbbing empathy. When the Tower began to leech into his arm, he writes, he found nowhere to direct the pain but inwards, and she dares not finish reading the line. Sabre’s loosened heart thunders as she folds the letter down.
Krile’s is how she knows Thancred said something, however small, however revealing, something enough Krile knows where she is and what she’s been up to.
I always admired your sketches, Krile writes. As I did Alphinaud’s. While no great abundance of time exists in Sharlayan when the students are returning to their studies, I find myself with a collection of scribblings. I’m not sure if you’d find them charming or childish. But they’ve inspired a project that I think you may have great interest in.
She doesn’t. She won’t. She won’t give Thancred the satisfaction of knowing the letters even reached the right address. So she tells herself, at first.
Petulance isn’t a pretty look, is all Fray has said on the subject. It angers her in a way she would not have ever known the depths of. Since when does Fray deal in surface scratches? It drives her to find the small case she tucked behind used rags. She hasn’t worn the linkpearls since waking in Sharlayan. She selects one lesser used and rolls it in her palm.
For the most part, all she has to do is listen while Krile speaks. A natural lecturer. What Krile says draws a steady brush over her raised hackles.
Yes, Sabre says, strangely. Yes, I think so.
The last thing she speaks is her location, and Krile promises to see her soon.
Under warm lantern light, Krile joins Sabre and Seiji on the deck. Kugane’s bustle is removed from them by two stories; it chatters beneath them in the way a river might, an agreeable babble. It fills every silence with ease, though Seiji could just as easily mend those gaps. He likes Krile immediately, and Sabre knows she’s charmed. He joins them, sprawled in a large cushioned chair at one corner of the deck. A length of black silk drapes his legs, and his fingers flash with the rhythm of his embroidery thread.
At the other corner of the deck, Sabre and Krile perch upon cushions with Krile’s sketchbook between them. The cover bears the logo of Sharlayan’s student shop. So, too, do the colored markers she spills from her bag.
Her drawings are sweet things. Simple in many ways, yet her command of line and detail impresses. She prefers rounded corners, exaggerated proportions, but her drawings are undeniably appealing. She flips through a page of little floating moogles, then a comical spread of namazu, and Sabre finds satisfaction in her art alone when Krile announces what she can make them do.
Aether winds around Krile’s paintbrush, and one of the chubby little moogles lifts from the page. It shimmers like a tiny firework, and appropriately, it bursts in a little splatter.
“I’ve seen you wield something similar in battle—is it shadow or ink, I can never tell?” Krile says.
“Just the shadows,” Sabre says, staring intently as the faded drawing Krile lifted from the page. “But you’ve given me ideas.”
“Heavens! The ideas came from you. Aether can be channeled in all sorts of ways. Pigment made from fire aspected crystals, for example?”
Sabre laughs in truth and startles herself with it nearly as much as she finds the novelty in it. “Exploding moogles?”
“It would be funny, wouldn’t it? But, think of your aether as a catalyst. You could set off a whole chain reaction with a bit of planning and the right paint.”
Sabre’s thoughts are built less for the theory, but her intuition follows along with Krile’s words. She asks Krile to demonstrate once more, her own aether spreading around her as she does.
She’s not sure she can maintain the aether in the same way Krile can, buoyant and bright, but she’s more certain about her own work. She has no little sketches, no sweet and simple things. But Seiji in the corner, there—the shape of his embroidery is floral, petals spilling like water from pitchers. There’s enough of a shape to commit to her memory. In the air before her, she swivels her pen about her aether until the shape in her mind takes place. The little flowers bloom petal by petal, and Krile makes a sound of delight beside her.
She hasn’t drawn since Broken Glass. But this? Painting the air, only to let it pop or fade moments later? She feels as though a band has loosened from her neck.
When Touya visits, they walk the streets aimlessly until the sun goes down. On one of the wide red bridges overlooking the river, Sabre pulls her sketchbook from her bag. She’s had dozens of them. When she was young, she covered scraps of paper from edge to edge. There were only so many she could fit in an envelope in a pocket. She wanders close to the railing where the rush of the river beneath jumps up louder. Leaning her elbows on the wood, she holds the book between both hands over the water.
Touya joins her. He’s just close enough their shoulders brush.
“If you drop it here, we can’t return it to you,” he says, understanding warming his voice. He speaks outwards towards the river. It’s easier that way, speaking into the chatter of the water.
Leaving it Sharlayan wasn’t on purpose, but leaving it at his home was.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Maybe a new one would be better.”