Chapter Text
There was no air in the room and her lungs were burning. How laughable this was. The Warrior of Light had put down her title alongside the Dragonsong War; at least temporarily, the only reward she'd dared ask for was rest. She and Estinien had talked about it at length in hushed whispers on crooked rooftops before he'd left the city. She'd had enough wandering for a little while. He needed a new view. They'd agreed that their bones ached. He'd smiled at her before he left, softer than she'd thought the dragoon had in him. "Take care of him, Rinh, would you?"
"Take care of them, Ysayle, won't you?" she asked her fellow maiden of the Mother's favor. It had surprised her that she'd cared enough to ask, but Rinh hadn't known what else to do with the coiling guilt in her stomach. She'd only ever been what everybody else wanted. Putting her foot down felt wrong. Admitting she was tired felt wrong. Ysayle understood enough, silver hair twisting like a battle banner on the frozen air as she left the city with the Scions. Rinh hadn't known if they cared who walked behind them, as long as she carried the Blessing. She didn't really want to know.
And in the end, she might've been more bitter about the Alliance that had abandoned them than she'd cared to admit.
But there she was, realizing Ishgard had started to feel like the promise of a home for more reasons than asylum. That she'd wanted to put her burdens down, her wings, her roots, for more than just the rest. It was the rebuilding, but maybe it was also him.
"The Archbishop?" she asked him, her tongue tripping over the words. Hadn't they asked enough of him? He looked at her like he was asking permission and she didn't understand. Of course they'd asked him. For all the effort - the split lips, the broken bones, the spilled blood - to bring a voice to this place, how could they not have turned to him. A willing flock begging for guidance; freedom was vast and cold, and maybe the indulgent thing was to emerge slowly. "Is it what you want?"
Aymeric looked as miserable, and as sure, as the moment he'd decided to confront his father. He only had the heart to tear open so much of their history at once. Tradition was a skeleton that held them all together and he couldn't leave all the bones to mend without setting them first. He wouldn't have drawn her down to earth, anchored her to this place, if he was the type to say no. But there was no air in the room and it was the worst moment to start caring about the ache in her chest. Little thing fluttering, just starting to wonder about a world bigger than the cage of her ribs again, and there it was -- the reality of hope. It was so horrifically nascent, it should've been easy to crush down, but it wasn't.
His nod was slight, a little jut of his chin that was defiant to them both, and she had to close her eyes and remind herself that she could -- had to -- breathe. "Ishgard's future is one I had only barely dreamed of and you, and so many others, gave too much of yourselves for it." He'd told her he was a selfish man, once. Late in the evening on an empty street that hadn't cared how open his expression had been, or the way he'd threaded his fingers through her hair and she'd forgotten that they were tearing down a thousand years of marching into fire. "It will take time, but I... we can see it through." She hadn't really believed him.
He'd closed too much of the space between them, hunched his shoulders around them like he could carve a space in which she could reside like a secret. She felt jittery. Anxious. Things she'd so rarely entertained when facing so much worse. It should've been so much worse. His fingertips traced her jaw, curled under her chin, drew her up toward him. His breath was like a promise soft on her lips.
It couldn't be a promise of anything at all. She told herself there were a million reasons for the longing in his gaze. She was familiar with the nature of being untouchable. "I will be asked to take vows," he said. She nodded.
It wasn't supposed to have anything to do with her. "Far be it from me to stand between you and god," she said. He fisted her hair into his hand and tipped her face up toward him so she could see the flash in his perfect, clear eyes. She swallowed hard enough that it hurt.
"You never would, would you," she wanted to ask why it sounded like an accusation, a prayer, a dare. She wanted to ask why he looked as miserable as the moment he'd asked her to kill that man he'd spent so much time trying to reach. "And you will stay."
She choked down a wild laugh. "I wanted to rest a while. I thought I might help build something for once." It was never about staying with you. His nose brushed hers, parted lips stealing the breath off her tongue, all the things that might've been in this impossible thing they'd only just seen the glimmer of. He'd kissed her once, terrible and desperate in the deep moments of grief that had dragged her into sanctuaries for divinities she didn't follow. The ghost of his mouth against hers chased her down nightly. How laughable it would never catch her.
"I will be glad for your support." His voice was raspy, rough and caught on distractions that were best left to scatter unspoken.
Her gaze was dark and true and at that distance he thought he might catch fire on the smoldering embers that burned there. "As long as it's you," she started. He pressed his thumb to her lips. Something between them and whatever thing she might've let fray his resolve.
He was ordained in private and none of the hands on his head, on his back, on his shoulders, were hers. They offered him up as a bridegroom of Halone, a knight holy and true, and he wished he'd asked her what kind of goddess her home had shaped her into so that he'd have known how to let his heart worship in secret. It was the worst sort of miracle. "Speak your name."
She'd said, "As long as it's you."
He stared up at the bishops around him and thought he ought to have knelt before her, made her say his name at least once.
Aymeric hadn't believed Ishgard could ask too much of him. It was a pathologic hunger that drove him to build himself into someone worth a name. It was an immovable conviction that carried him on to see the path his mother believed possible. It was a beautiful and aching mortality that rebelled against him then. How much better it might've been to steal away and build that woman into a divinity that would ask nothing of him.
He spoke his name -- the name of Ishgard's first Eminent Commander, shepherd and shield. He drank the wine that was covenant of all the ones who had come before him and shouldered the city's burdens, its truths and its convictions. He promised the church his body and set down his heart.
Rinh was in the front pew when he emerged into the sanctuary. The cathedral was a sea of bodies spilling out into the cold, so much hope and fervor he nearly balked, but she was in the front pew. He saw her from the dais and found all the stillness he craved in her stare. Behind him, his bishops and his knight commanders. Before him his flock. But it only mattered that she was there and that he could only hold her gaze for so long before he was forced to let her go.
She watched him look out across the city that had lurched against the way it had so desperately needed him, the High Houses and the Lowborn on equal footing, and her among them. She watched him stand in white and blue, velvet and plate, a scepter in one hand and Naegling still strapped to his hip. They'd cut his hair and set a metal circlet, heavy, on his head. A new sort of Archbishop for a new Ishgard, draped in the phantom beauty and terror of her past, and she hated how perfectly it suited him. When he spoke, they all fell into a pristine silence. "I am humbled to continue to serve you," he said. Archbishop Aymeric the First, Eminent Commander of the Holy See.
She had to smile when she heard his name, despite the twisting ache hollowing out her chest. "As long as it's you," she'd said. She was a fool.
She met him in a rush that shouldn't have felt covert and shouldn't have been a collision. After the parishioners had received their blessings and the knights their orders, after the sun had slipped below the horizon, she was in his room -- third floor, through the balcony nestled above the garden. He was on his knees, palms cupping her face as she lifted the circlet from his head. "Please tell me you'll stay," he breathed, and she was struck by the honesty that rushed into his expression. Hadn't they decided they were better than this? His blue eyes were striking under the sun and most beautiful under the moonlight, when he made faces that could belong to her.
"It's too late, isn't it?" she asked, letting him trace the corners of her eyes, her lips, with his thumbs. He pulled her closer. When had they ever been like this? When had they ever let it mean what it wanted to mean? And maybe that was her fault but maybe this would've been a thousand times worse if she'd made sense of him sooner. There was no version of him that would've denied his home and there was no version of her that would've asked him to. She held the circlet in her hands. "To leave."
Tension unwound from his shoulders and settled in his spine. She could only be his grace and his burden. "I'll see Ishgard become a place that brings you rest," he said. She nodded. It was too kind. "I'll be the first and the last," he said.
"I wanted to build something, Your Eminence. That hasn't changed," she pulled away from him and set the circlet in his hands. "It suits you. It could only ever be you." She brushed a wave of his dark hair across his forehead. He closed his eyes. She was at his window, perched back on the balconette, disappearing into the night before the strange truth of it all could settle in the space between them.