Work Text:
She was looking anywhere but at him and he wouldn't stop staring. Propped up in the sick bed, bandages wrapped around his middle, his loose tunic disheveled. Hair disheveled. She'd noticed that the fabric was starting to stain, dark blood seeping up through the wrappings and linen cloth both. It wasn't a lot, but the scent was sharp and metallic and she had to keep herself from reaching for him; it made her muscles ache but she couldn't even look at him. He was weaker than he suggested with his reassurances and the gentle smile he'd offered when she'd arrived, breathless and undone in the doorway.
He shouldn't have felt the need to pretend. She hadn't watched herself grieve before, and maybe her hands were shaking. He was alive.
"You're upset," Aymeric said. Quiet and a little raspy. She flinched. Kept her gaze pinned to the covers and her fists clenched in her lap. She wasn't sure why she was waiting, but she couldn't bring herself to move. For the fury of her arrival, time had slowed as she'd approached and dragged her limbs until she'd hunched on the little stool at his bedside and found herself unable to move further. It wasn't relief, exactly. She thought she heard him laugh, barely there and breathy, caught behind his effort to keep from upsetting his fresh stitches. He was alive.
In the corner of his room, a clock ticked away, marking the moments she remained frozen. He let her breathe. The light fanned across his bed through the window, golden in the dim like the sun itself wanted to touch him and make sure he was was there, rake its amber fingers through his hair. She perched on a stool outside of reach. "I'm.."
She wasn't miserable enough to lie to him. But she was miserable.
He was tired. They'd found him quickly and attended to him quicker still, but the bleeding had been difficult to stop. He'd had worse. And he was fond of her this way, even if it was unkind of him to think so. He fought back the gentle lull of sleep to listen to her, wordless and sighing. She'd been at his bedside like this once before, a ghost that crept in at night and ran her cold fingers down his wrists as he slept. She hadn't trembled for him then, haunted when he caught her gaze. Her silence had been heavier. She'd been far away. He couldn't tell her that the bone deep ache, the feverish burning where less talented chirurgeons had worked some inelegant magics, might've felt the tiniest bit worth it to watch her suffer for him. He wanted to laugh at himself too.
The True Brotherhood of Faith was beyond her reach, in some ways. Their rancor was built on a history that did not belong to her and on immutable truths they found insurmountable. In some ways, they should have been beyond Aymeric's reach too. But he had ever borne Ishgard's sins with a virtue bordering on maladaptation. She hadn't needed to watch the fullness of his rise to prominence to understand that much, nor Ishgard's hunger for martyrs. What good was god's favor if it came too late? What good was loving god if she couldn't understand love that didn't look like sacrifice? Haurchefant had broken naturally as he'd breathed and she'd never had a chance.
She was only ever a reaction to it all; a reflex that was late by virtue. People did not pray if there was nothing to pray for. Of all things, it wasn't right to blame herself, or him, for the desperation in the city that had bubbled over in blood.
But she did.
She didn't have to love Ishgard, or forgive it, the way he always would. Not if it threatened, at ever jagged turn, to take the bits of herself that dared to learn affection. And that was the reality of it, every reason she was frozen still and shaking.
"I am flattered by your concern, but I am alright," he said, chagrined. She must have made a face, bowed her head further in shame or surrender. He might've meant it but she wanted the ground to swallow her up if he'd determined she was so delicate. "Won't you look at me?"
Her dark eyes trailed reluctantly up to his clear blue gaze. She couldn't deny him much of anything. She looked furious. She looked terrified. How awful to be seen.
"You should not have been alone. Moving forward, Lucia ought to – " anybody else besides her, because they called her Saviour and she was always too late.
"Please, I beg you to stop before you further wound my pride," he held up a hand, lips curling into a lopsided grin. A little bitter. A little sad. She clamped her mouth shut and tried to turn her face from him again. The intensity of his stare held her fixed. "I will be more vigilant," he conceded. "And you should not worry over it." He was alive.
But maybe it wasn't good enough.
"This may all be for naught if they lose you," she muttered. He wasn't sure if he heard her, and in the end it didn't seem right to ask her to say it again. She'd become too accustomed to digging graves, in the dirt and in her mind. At night, she dreamed of Haurchefant's voice and woke up wondering why she couldn't get his face right. A shiver bolted down her spine. She couldn't lose Aymeric amongst all the bodies and she didn't know when that had started to matter. She took a deep breath.
"I'm sorry," he said. She didn't want to know what kind of expression she made or whatever face he would've made if he'd seen it. She wanted to apologize too, but none of the ways she could come up with felt fair. She wished he hadn't said it.
"I can fix it," she said instead, the guilt needling enough to set her back in motion. Her nerves ticked along with the clock and she pulled the stool closer so that she could inspect his injury and say less. The sunlight cast her eyes in shades of firelight, traced the curve of her jaw tenderly the way he'd not been given the chance, and she didn't notice the way it danced through her hair and lashes like she'd been gone for far too long.
"May I?" she asked, more clipped than she'd meant to. She was always more clipped than she meant to be. More sullen, more distant, not where she needed to be when she needed to be there. Her brow furrowed. She wasn't built for any of this. She wasn't built for anything, and this wasn't supposed to be about her. She'd come to him faster than she thought she should've and hadn't been there fast enough. There'd never been a place for her at his side, moonlight anomaly, act of god, and yet it mattered so deeply in that moment that she hadn't been where she had never thought to be.
He didn't say anything, but she saw him nod slightly out of the corner of her eye after a heartbeat of hesitation that, to be honest, she didn't quite understand. Aymeric was very still when she reached for the hem of his tunic. "I–would you prefer I did not?" His exhale was sharper than she'd expected.
"No, 'tis alright if you wish," he said. Her ear twitched, fingers frozen where they hooked the edge of the fabric. He was watching her with a focus that made her want to shrink away. She didn't have to. But it felt like repentance to face the ugliness of what she'd let happen directly. If that was selfish, she was frustrated enough to indulge it, but the way his breath hitched when she tugged the shirt up to expose the bound planes of his torso... she couldn't help but second guess herself.
His stare still fixed intently on her when she began to unwrap the bindings. Gingerly in case they had dried against the fresh sutures. She wasn't about to comment on the way they'd left him. And, she had found, the men of Ishgard seemed unperturbed by the acquisition of new scars. And she hadn't been there to do any better. She hadn't been there to keep it from happening and they'd barely thought to tell her at all. He was alive and she was better put to use for miracles.
She wanted to ask whether they believed god lacked the agency to bestow her blessings where she wished, no matter how unfair. That she stood in Ishgard, breathing and spotless, seemed like proof enough. She wanted to stick her fingers into the wound, split the stitches, as if she could insult it out of existence. He breathed slowly, too carefully. She hated it.
She could feel herself staring, brow furrowed, impotent, and wordless. He watched her and the tension that ran down her spine and the way she tried to tuck it all away so reflexively. The way she failed, for once. "These things take time," he said gently.
Her attention snapped back up to his face, a little flare of something furious and, perhaps, more wounded than him. "You're giving them everything," she said. There was more there, there always was. "I don't want you to forgive them." She rarely said it.
He inclined his head, leaned back so his vision didn't swim. He didn't mind her thinking of him. "I won't," he said. "If you don't want me to," he reached out to trace a fall of her hair along her cheek. He wasn't all that forgiving of a person.
"I don't really want you to forgive me either." She said it so quietly he nearly missed it, under her breath and beneath a more surgical examination of his injury as if he'd have let it slip past.
"I do not think I can quite give you the credit." Aymeric let his fingertips follow the curve of her jaw then, an indulgence he thought he could blame on fever or the sun, slipping beneath her chin to pull her attention back to him. "Next time, perhaps." She scowled at him. "Tell me, what is it?" he asked her. Pent up like she still didn't realize there was room to stretch. She pulled her face away from him and pulled back the last of the bandages. He went very still under her hands.
The stitched up gash, raw and angry, was a new stroke on a canvas of older hurts. More than she'd expected, maybe, despite perfunctory knowledge caught briefly and at a distance prior. Enough that she went searching for his gaze and found, even more startling, a distant sort of dark that so rarely colored his winter blue eyes. Her lips parted. "You–" She swallowed whatever it was that she might've wanted to say. He couldn't have said if he was glad. Instead, she asked him again, "May I?"
His eloquent mouth pressed into a thin line, hesitancy or pain, but he gave her another wordless nod in the end. She relieved him of his tunic in full and tried to ignore the sharp inhale that seemed to restart his breathing when he was made to lift his arms above his head. Leaned back into his pillow, his chest rose and fell, slow and measured, sweat beading on his brow, and for once this meeting he seemed disinclined to stare at her. He focused on the sky beyond the ceiling above, face tipped upward and a stubborn set in his jaw that was only a little from the pain.
The map of scars that fanned across his body, over his chest, over his shoulders, traced some histories she could guess and others she suspected she knew. And there were older ones still, light enough that she worried for the age at which he'd acquired them. They were both silent for a long while and she felt he was bracing for some sort of judgment she couldn't entirely fathom. But then, he hadn't been surprised by her simmering anger. He'd apologized, and he hadn't promised he wouldn't let it happen again.
Eventually, he said, almost awkwardly, "as a young man, one may be motivated to brashness in the hopes of making a name for one's self." It was her turn to let out a long breath she hadn't realized she was holding, all the pitiful guilt and blame unraveling in that perfectly, disarmingly, human way he pulled the thread. And gods above, he didn't mean a thing by it.
"I should say that imagining you as a brash boy is difficult," she said. "But, perhaps you'll forgive me for saying it seems... just like you."
Maybe they were both surprised by the softness in her voice, the warmth that curled off her tongue and drew his attention fully back to her, swimming in the deep dark of her eyes. She was the first to look away. "It seems you're not one to take signs from any god," she said, reaching to trace a careful finger along the edge of the hemmed gash in his side. She felt him tense under her touch, but he didn't shrink away. It didn't hurt. She couldn't.
"Neither are you." His voice was low and hoarse in a way that made levin dance along her skin.
"Let me help you," she said. As if she hadn't already saved the impossible dream of a raging boy. As if she'd only ever seen the things she'd broken for the chance to be set right. He'd take so much more of a beating for believing in the chance they'd been given.
"I would take anything you wished to give me," he said. He was still watching her. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted iron.
"I am sorry," she said at last, and her fingertips were soft and fluent and much too cold.
"Never apologize to me." She tried not to think about that.
Instead, she thought about the great bounty of the star, the way the land burst stubbornly forth with new life to beat back every injury it sustained, the way the skies stretched ancient and made every death that loomed large in their minds collapse into the fine coil of histories until the jagged edges disappeared. She thought about her own life spilling into him and the great well of her aether wrapping this and every struggle he'd endured into the sea of her magic. Until he might drown, gasping and swallowing the flow of her soul so it filled his mouth, his lungs.
She felt him shift under her. Vessels spidering like roots anchoring earth, spools of thread knitting him together, them together, burning hot. She felt ancient shades of grief wind themselves up her body, reaching for her to pull as much as she was pushing. Tidal, she knew the ghost of all of him and felt the thrust of a blade shackled with so much tradition into her own side. She was a maiden dancing at the shrine of his ugly childhood emptiness, the furious loneliness that sang to her discarded bones. She devoured his fever, she felt like death. She saw the beauty of the way he could long to be better, greater, truer and let it crash into the endless, swallowing empty of her own gravitational pull.
She was good at forgetting by necessity.
He wrapped his hand around her wrist, squeezed gently as if to tug her back to him and the present. She blinked. He was dizzy, nauseous with the disorienting tilt of her but his gaze was steady. "Do not tax yourself on my account," he said, labored, but his skin didn't flush angry and red and the stitches pulled away from the puckered skin, freshly laid but long unneeded. She couldn't take away the pain, but she could prevent the fever.
"I have mended more and worse," she said. He gave her that strange smile again, a little bitter and a little sad. Haurchefant's body had come down from the Vault unblemished and kind. She'd lain on the steps, cold as the stone, and he'd never despised his own body more than when his knees had buckled and they'd taken him away.
"I do not doubt it." He said it as if he'd felt as much of her as she'd felt of him in the flow and twist of their aether. She hadn't seen herself grieve.
"It isn't pleasant, I know."
"I wouldn't say that."
His hand still held fast to her wrist and he pulled her then, careful as if to keep from startling her. Slowly, slowly, guiding her palm to rest over his chest. His heartbeat sped beneath her fingertips, coming down from the same peak that fluttered down her own veins. She wasn't stupid enough to pretend it was the vertigo or her own shuddering limbs. Aymeric sighed, weary or relieved, and closed his eyes. "Your hands are always so cold."
"'Tis pleasant, if you'll permit me to say so," he murmured. She felt a flush creep up her neck and was glad that he was not watching her. "Thank you. For being upset."
She didn't know what to say.
"It may still scar."
"Worthwhile things often do," he said. She frowned. He still held her hand to his chest. His eyes were still closed.
"Many people would be... are upset." She thought of Count Edmont's stern face. Alphinaud's bloodless cheeks.
"Perhaps." Aymeric said, and she thought he believed her, but also that it didn't matter. She wondered about his other scars - the old ones she didn't know and the newer ones she couldn't see, mementos of a distant father laced like a permanent burden, heavy on his back. She wondered why he was ashamed and why, despite it, he offered it to her anyway. Why he could say thank you like that.
A very tiny part of her wanted to tell him that he was perfect and it was the worst part of him. Because he wasn't, and it made spaces for her to inhabit; impossible spaces she fit too well and didn't want to look at. Because he wanted her to be angry if it meant she was thinking about him. Because her soul recognized his too easily. Because his heart beat as fast as hers and he wanted her to know it. Because, she thought, he'd never say.
"I think you should take better care of yourself," she said instead.
"I shall take it under advisement."
"But, if you call for me..."
"You might reconsider offering a reliable means of summoning you to my side,"
"I do not jest."
"Nor I." His grip on her wrist tightened, and for a moment she thought he would pull her entirely from her seat. He had opened his eyes and was watching her again. She could not bear it, or the sparking smolder of irritation that bloomed in her chest. "In the end, I am not too proud to show you how very foolish I am."
His voice was so very quiet, so very sweet and low, wrapping around her and raking a shiver down her spine. It didn't sound at all like the Aymeric that commanded Ishgard's faithful, or deftly danced politick, or tore down histories. But it was still devastating. Surely, he was delirious from the draughts given to ease his pain, the careening and wild growth of her magic, and this most personal near-death experience.
She said, more petulantly than she wanted, "I was worried. I was afraid." And his smile was too lazy, too satisfied, as he settled deeper into the pillows propped under his back and closed his eyes again.