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“I blinded myself upon my sixteenth birthday,” Albeleo tells her unprompted as they sit beside the sea together, as casually as a kinder man would tell her the weather. Szocha looks away from the sea and to him, but he looks as nonchalant as he sounds, long white hair tied up and away from his neck and long legs stretched out so that the waves lap against his soles. He turns and meets her bafflement with a sharp smile, clear blue eye and cloudy white eye both crinkling at the corners as he continues, “I was a prodigy, you see, already rising among the guild’s ranks, already permitted to undertake the sacred self-blinding despite my youth. This was years before they ran me out, mind, and I'm sure they wish they hadn't granted me such honors at all, let alone so young.”
He hasn't yet told her the full story of how he was chased out of Ul'dah, preferring to watch her scramble around for scraps of information, and perhaps Szocha likes it too, that game, hours spent reading through guild logs and schmoozing with important people in Ul’dah and prying what little tidbits she can from him with kisses and touches. There was something about kidnappings and murders and another something about resurrecting zombies and another about meddling where he shouldn't with members of the Syndicate and yet another much less likely something about him letting a stampede of baby behemoths run loose in the bazaar.
“None of the materia I had found suited me, so I didn't take the full eye,” Albeleo finishes, fanning himself with one discolored hand. Adrammelech’s markings don't glow in the sunlight, but the way the red and green fade to purple at his fingers is much more obvious. She can easily picture those fingers dipping inside an eye socket and plucking, but she knows he was monstrous even before Adrammelech.
“I wonder if I would've done the same, if I had been better at thaumaturgy,” Szocha muses, tucking her knees up to her chest and digging her toes into the sand. She'd always been a better white mage than black, childhood lessons leading her to an adult path as a field medic before the calamity had fallen upon her shard and she had fallen to the source. She had been a big-eyed fifteen year old girl with ink-stained fingers in an even bigger world during her time at the thaumaturges’ guild and hasn’t seriously studied there since finding a more natural fit at the conjurers’ guild. Even pictomancy comes easier than thaumaturgy did, but she supposes that's because she's always had artistic inclinations.
“I rather like your eyes, so I suppose I am glad you didn't,” Albeleo tells her, and it would be touching if he didn't continue, “Should you ever feel the need to do so, however, I would like to preserve your discarded eye in a jar.”
Szocha leans in, stomach churning, and kisses him before he can say anything else. He laughs against her lips but tugs her closer, laying back in the sand to pull her atop him. His hands come up to cup her face, fingertips brushing the freckled skin just below her eyelids, but then slide back to tangle in her hair as he deepens the kiss.
They'd cleared dinner and drinks and dessert from the table already but Menenius is still sitting at his spot, tinkering with a miniaturized version of one of the helldivers he'd utilized on the Bozjan front, while Szocha sits at her own spot, sketching his likeness onto a blank page in her sketchbook. She probably has thousands of sketches of him by now, the armored enemy, the unmasked stranger, the bare lover, but she doesn't have this one yet, doesn't have the concentration on his face as he stares down at the helldiver with soft evening sunlight filtering through the window to shine on his silver hair. Albeleo is somewhere downstairs, likely puttering around in her personal alchemy lab, but she trusts him enough by now to not worry about him starting a fire or melting holes through her floor either on accident or on purpose.
“‘nenius?” Szocha asks, setting her sketchbook and graphite aside. Menenius hums, setting down his tools and pushing aside his helldiver to look at her as he replies, “Yes, my love?”
“How did you lose your eye?” Szocha asks, watching the smile fall from Menenius’s face as he mulls over how to answer. There's a long moment of silence and then he begins, “This was before we took Dalmasca. I was entering my fourteenth winter and three of my classmates decided they’d had enough of being forced to study alongside an elezen. They… wanted to make sure I was aware of their grievances.”
Menenius pauses, tipping his head to pull the prosthetic from his socket and set it onto the table between them, just beside the helldiver. It rocks gently from side to side on the table and she reaches out to steady it, looking up at him. The eyelid over his empty socket droops with nothing to support it and there's a sad, haunted look in the pale yellow of his other eye. He reaches out, taking her small hand in his and holding it tight as he continues, “You know well what Garlemald is like, how those perceived as outsiders are treated. It didn't matter that my mother was nobility even before she married a pureblood, because she herself was still an outsider by virtue of having pointed ears instead of a third eye. Fourteen year old Garlean boys are much bigger than elezen of the same age are and they… Well. It doesn't bear repeating what they did, just that they took my eye in the process.”
Szocha stares at him, wordless, the sting of tears beginning to well in her eyes. Her echo has given her flashes of his past before, but he had already been grown in the earliest ones, a lanky twenty-something just starting to fill out into his full broadness and with pale stubble just barely glinting on his square jaw. She has never seen before then, never seen him as a child, and has certainly never considered anything like this. Menenius lifts her hand to his mouth, kissing her knuckles gently before adding, “My new eye was a gift from Noah, given to me upon my official entry into the IVth Legion. It's a rudimentary model, more for aesthetics than function, but I've made sure to keep it in good condition over the years.”
The orange iris of his prosthetic stares up at her, and she wonders why van Gabranth hadn't made it yellow to match Menenius’s natural eye. She's wondered a lot of things about van Gabranth’s treatment of Menenius that she doesn't dare bring up most times and certainly doesn't want to bring up right now. Instead, she stands and leans across the table to press her lips to his empty eye socket. Menenius inhales sharply at her touch, before letting out a shuddering sigh that sounds like he's been holding it in for far too long.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, but she doesn't know what she's sorry for. Sorry that any of this had happened to him, sorry that she had been born twenty years too late to heal him as a teenager, sorry that his prosthetic is orange and not yellow. Menenius pulls her into his lap, cradling her and kissing the top of her orange head, but doesn't say anything in response.
Later that night when they're all in bed, Szocha thinks of her own mismatched eyes. She’d had two blue eyes until she was twenty-five, her father’s blue eyes in her mother’s face, until the First and the Light had seen golden crystals take over most of her body, one of her eyes included. It had been like that, jagged golden circling blue, until her journey to prevent the end of days had taken her and her sister to Elpis.
She thinks of the sweet scent of flowers in the air and a kiss pressed to her forehead by herself, but not her, the her that she was before she was herself and the blinding pain of the crystals in her eye scraping and swirling to form a golden limbal ring. It's been moons since she expended the last bit of her Light in Ultima Thule, seemingly for good, but still the limbal ring remains. Maybe it's a gift, she thinks, different than van Gabranth’s, or maybe it's more like the materia Albeleo had declined. She tucks closer into Menenius's warm side and feels Albeleo follow her to curve around her back, uncaring of the way the spines of her tail poke into his bare stomach, and thinks that whatever it is can wait to be found out on another day.