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Often, shortly after the move to Revenant’s Toll and when there is slightly less demand for the Warrior of Light, Thancred is able to find you tucked away in the corner of the Rising Stones with a book.
He quite likes you on these days. On all days, really, but there is something rare and warm about seeing Hydaelyn’s chosen one in a plain tunic and Chocobo-print pants.
“What’ve you got there?”
You startle slightly before looking up at Thancred from your spot on the floor, knees tucked into your chest. You hold up the tome in your hands—something on the botany of the Black Shroud.
“It’s quite interesting.”
“I’m sure.” Thancred means it. He suspects you know as much. “Have we a good selection of reading material in our new home?”
You shy up a little, then, ears pressing to your head. “Oddly, there’s quite a lot of bawdy poetry. Is it yours?”
“Urianger’s.” Thancred lies easily, and watches you parse through it for a handful of seconds before that small smile peers up at him. “Someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose. Is it any good?”
The smile leaves quickly, replaced by a look that Thancred figures is oft reserved for Ascians. You stand up and drift to the bookshelf’s edge, standing tip-toe to put your reading back in its spot.
The main room of the Rising Stones is empty, save for a few Scions playing a quiet game of cards in the back of the other wing. Thancred wonders how many people wandered through here without noticing the Warrior of Light all small in the corner, and wondered if that was your intention.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, Thancred,” you say, and Thancred obediently severs his train of thought with a blink. “How are you?”
It should not surprise Thancred that the Warrior of Light, trained well, knows his weak points as thoroughly as you would a primal’s.
“Well as one can be, I suppose.” Thancred’s smile is tight, and he sees you notice it with a slight furrow to your brow. “A little sore, sometimes. Figures it takes the body a while to adjust to a different soul.”
You stare at him. Thancred can tell that you want more, that you don’t want half-truths and pleasantries. You say nothing, and the silence works wonders.
“I have dreams. They are frequent, and… upsetting. I am never in control of my own self, simply viewing another pilot it. I need not remind you that Lahabrea was seldom… gentle to his vessel, I assume.”
I dream of killing you, over and over again. Forced to watch my own hand be the one that summoned the power to kill you, watch your body fall to the ground. I fear soon I will have seen your eyes without life more than I have without.
Cool fingers touch his face. Thancred looks at you, feels the familiar drum of aether on your fingertips as your eyes close. The effect is instantaneous—muscles relax, heartbeat slows, blood works through his body as it should. A distant part of Thancred wonders if this is the work of magic or simply just an amplification of the effect that you have on him.
“Accompany me to Dawn’s Respite?” you ask once the flow of aether has stilled, but your hand remains cupped against his jaw. “I’d like to try something Raya-O-Senna taught me, if you do not mind.”
For perhaps the first time in his life, Thancred’s vocal chords are seized. He nods, instead, and almost physically sags with the weight that returns to him when your touch leaves his skin.
“If you’re good, perhaps I’ll read you some of that bawdy poetry.”
Thancred laughs, loud and true. The smile it sparks on your face is beautiful, and it’s only through a skillful catching of his tongue that Thancred manages to not tell you as such.
You take Thancred’s hand and make the short trip to the entrance of Dawn’s Respite. Much like the rest of the Rising Stones, it is near empty, with one Lalafellin passed out cold. You take Thancred to a bed tucked in the corner and pull up a chair, looking at him and nodding to the bed.
Thancred trusts you well enough to not ask what it is that Raya-O-Senna taught you, but quickly becomes more curious when you start unlacing the front of his tunic.
“Let me know if you ever want me to stop,” you say quietly, eyes darting to and from his as you make quick work of his front. Thancred can think of few things more terrifying than the idea of you stopping.
With his tunic loosened, you spread the generous vee of his undershirt to better see the expanse of his chest. Your hand rests carefully on his sternum, and a feeling similar to the one before begins to spread through his chest.
“Curing one’s physical ailments is a simple siphoning of one’s own aether to that of another, and then siphoning that new supply to the areas of the body that need it most.” Thancred closes his eyes and listens to your voice, feel it surrounded by the slow drum of aether. “It is impossible for a healer to cure an ailment of the heart or mind, but there are ways to help aid the process. Ways to provide aether to parts of the body that need to be soothed. The best of us can administer cures that heal both internal and external wounds, but I fear I’m still working on that.”
Thancred almost objects, saying that receiving a boon from you on the battlefield is just about one of the nicest feelings, but soon figures that that might amount to his being in love with you.
Your hand leaves his chest. Thancred frowns, eyes blinking open just in time to see you dismount from your chair and sidle into the small bed. Thancred accommodates you near instantly, turning onto his side and moving towards the bed’s edge as you do the same.
Thancred watches the shadows of your eyelashes play at your cheeks as you settle. You bring your hands together and curl your arms, tucking the know of fingers beneath your cheek where they flatten. Thancred feels blessed when he moves a hand of his own to your face, fingers uncertain in brushing a lock of hair behind your ear before returning to his side of the bed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” you ask, quietly.
You have done something sinister to him. The effects of your aetheric treatment work in tandem with the comfort of your face, smell, you, to help his brain come up with a single thought: I know you well, Thancred Waters, and know this is the safest you will ever be.
“I don’t know if I will ever atone.” It comes out in a breath. Were you not so close, Thancred doubts you’d be able to hear him. “I let myself become weak, and susceptible to Lahabrea’s influence. I know that the actions he took within my body were not my own, but had I not gotten so close, so clumsy, he would not have been able to cause that harm.”
“It would have been someone else, had it not been you,” you say softly.
“Yes, but perhaps not someone who could have so easily hurt the Scions. Hurt you. Hells, until recently, Lahabrea had spent more time with you in my body than I had. I was privy to a certain threshold of his thoughts—perhaps feelings might be a more apt term—and the hatred that he felt whenever you were in his sights… it was unbearable. I could never hurt you. You know that, yes? Know that—despite how I killed you, at the wreckage of the Praetorium?”
At some point, you had gotten closer. Thigh to thigh, hand on Thancred’s shoulder. It drifts down as he finishes speaking, finds his hand. You move it to your chest, a shoddy reversal of the aetheric treatment of before, and Thancred wonders for a second if he ought to do something before feeling the steady drum of your heart underneath his fingertips.
“You did not kill me, Thancred. Lahabrea did, and he failed. I lived, as I continue to do now. Yes, possessing your body allowed Lahabrea a certain level of authority to our plans, but I am certain he would have found another way to get into our ranks were it not your body that he overtook. And that opportunity arose only because of your desperation to do right by us—the Scions, me, Minfilia. Everyone. You were susceptible to Lahabrea because you weren’t taking care of yourself, Thancred, and I will be damned if I live to see that ever happen to you again.”
Your heartbeat hastens as your words become more and more harried, laced with a desperate earnestness that he knows on you well. Your grip on his hand has become unconsciously tight, and Thancred’s desperate for the contact as your eyes rove over his face, which isn’t as nearly as pinched as yours.
“I’m sorry if I overstepped, Thancred. It’s just—I care for you, you know that? Please let me. I can—”
The urge to kiss you supersedes Thancred’s want to hear the rest of your sentence, then, and he’s not too proud to admit it.
The hand on your chest abandons its post to cradle your face as his lips press to yours with a care Thancred seldom wields upon getting someone to bed, yet you are different. Kissing you feels like an extension of what you were doing earlier with your aether, magnified and enhanced. Fireworks going off all over his body. Sheer joy when you kissed back, when your hand left his to trace over his tattoos before working its way into his hair.
It is perhaps a new epoch when Thancred sits back up, readjusting to bracket you between his arms and admire how you look well-kissed. He can near feel the heat coming off of your cheeks, and fears his aren’t faring that much better.
“Thank you,” you say, very quietly, and Thancred has half the mind to kiss you senseless.
“Thank you,” he returns, leaning over to support himself on one arm as to better stroke the length of skin underneath your eye. You turn to face him diligently. “Have you considered pursuing counseling as a line of work if the whole Warrior of Light thing doesn’t work out?”
“Perhaps, if my clients are apt to kiss as well as you do should my services help,” You lean into Thancred’s hand, coeurl-like. “Though—and tell me if I’m being too presumptuous, please—but I don’t think I am privy to kissing those other than you now, if that’s alright.”
Thancred kisses you again for that, a quick one that still makes your eyes flutter close and hand find his. You curl into him, and fit perfectly into his negative space.
“Not too presumptuous at all,” Thancred says quietly into your mouth after a moment. “You… trust me to take care of you? After everything?”
You slide out from underneath Thancred and sit up, much to his chagrin. He follows, despite, and once the both of you are upright you take both his hands into yours and set them in your lap.
“I have no reason to believe that there is anyone else on this star that could take care of me as well as you do. You’ve been doing it since I met you—do you remember that, by the Sultantree? By the Twelve, Thancred, I was so scared, but being with you lessened that fear so greatly. I have never come to associate you with pain. Only care. Only love.”
Thancred remembers the Sultantree well. You’d called him handsome, and was almost too flustered to speak for nearly a bell. Protecting you, helping you was the first thing he’d ever done to you. Long before an Ascian piloted his body and ended your life.
And now, you are sitting in a bed with him in the home you both share with the Scions, holding his hands and saying words like love. Perhaps he is Hydaelyn’s chosen after all.
You still fit perfectly into him when Thancred takes you into his arms. He kisses all over your hair and forehead—the easiest parts of you to reach—and delights in your small laughter. It’s your legs around his middle and a dramatic shifting of your weight that sends him back onto the bed, back into a state of being tangled together. You settle into him and he settles into you, and it is perhaps the nicest Thancred’s ever felt.
You’re the one who falls asleep first. There is a small, whispered conversation about love before rest overtakes you. Thancred takes to reverently tracing the lines of your face before settling back against the pillows, protected and protecting.
(It is Tataru who finds both you and Thancred in bed together, a few bells later, and the entirety of the Scions that never let either of you forget.)