Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She was tall, Mistria’s new farmer, emphasized by her winding ponytail and sharp face. There were bags under her eyes, but whether that was from travel or just some feature of her complexion, Celine felt she shouldn’t be trying to guess the answer to. Classic small town girl fixating on someone new was a cliche she didn’t want to find herself lingering in for any longer than she had already. That said, she did cut herself some slack in the opening moments of giving her awkward self-introduction. It was the event of the year, in all likelihood. (After the earthquake, but that was best not dwelt on.)

Celine played off the used hoe as no big deal, but while she hadn’t used it in over a year there was a lot of fondness and memory to it, and taking it out of her shed this morning had been an exercise in getting over that clingy nostalgia she was susceptible to. She did get over it, sort of, but at the cost of some unfair expectation worming into her heart — that whoever this neighbor was, she hoped they would love farming. (She hoped they would get along.)

She soon felt guilty for having worried otherwise (making a fiction of the notion of ‘neighbor’ before the young woman had even arrived, all of last night) when she passed off the tool and their new resident took it appreciatively, like she knew something about woodworking and was aware that this was a handle meant to survive ages rather than a season or two.

Hayden arrived, and Celine couldn’t fault anything but her own childishness for the feeling of being ‘interrupted’. The intrusion of someone else did turn Celine hypocritically sensitive to the young woman (Aile, she reminded herself — the name that’d been on their tongues all week) being bombarded with gifts and insight from two people she’d never met before today.

Hayden rode off, leaving Celine to feel windswept by both their ramblings. Poor Aile, being set upon by her neighbors like this. Celine was desperate to excuse herself and about to do so when Aile rested the hoe in the crook of her elbow, broke eye-contact, and rummaged around in one of her dress pockets. (She was willow-like, until she wasn’t: slender and flowing but angled in ways that a tree never was. The dress — though Celine felt awful for saying this — seemed to be draped from her wiry frame like a sheet blown off the laundry line and onto something jagged and leafless. She was strong, Celine thought, but she didn’t look particularly... well.)

Aile came up with a notepad and a pen. Celine had a mounting surge of confusion that finally spilled over into mortification when Aile turned the notepad around.

Thank you for coming out of your way to welcome me, Selene.

The notebook, the checkered scarf tied round her neck, the slight pallor and occasional weakened tremble in her arms even though she seemed quite fit, the fact that an adventurer in her prime would suddenly have been interested in settling down in the middle of nowhere to run a farm — and Celine had rambled to such a degree that she was only putting it all together now after the most irrefutable piece of evidence had to pushed straight into her face. She knew she'd been a bit overexcited, but this was surely too much even for her.

Selene?
Seline?
Celine?

“A-Ah hah hah, you got it in three.”

She banished her nosiness and moved past the embarrassing way she’d tripped and metaphorically face-planted at the revelation of an unexpected disability. Aile had been writing Adeline for weeks, her letters being shared around the inn on Friday nights (with permission), and she’d never mentioned —

Why would she have? The thought — she hadn’t meant it, it’d only careened in from out of nowhere — sickened her, and she shook it off.

“Um... come to think of it, is your name pronounced ‘aisle’? Or ‘ale’?

Got it in two.

Celine’s embarrassment full-on combusted, turning her face splotchy and hot. She rubbed her neck.

“Ah hah... I may have been telling everyone for the last few weeks that it was the first one, b-but fortunately for you none of them believed me. It’s nice to meet you, Aile.”

That wasn’t a bad conversational... salvaging, all things considered. Celine would have floundered if given much longer, but she noticed the young woman’s eyes drifting sideways toward the scraggly plot she was meant to make a farm out of.

“Are you looking to get to it?”

Aile nodded. There was an intimidating energy in her eyes that excited Celine — made her hope that she really had lucked into a neighbor for whom this was or would become a passion. She felt a little giddy.

“I’ll leave you to it, then. See you tonight? There’s a big welcome party for you at the inn, of course. Take care, Aile.”

A wave would have sufficed, but Aile took the time to write, See you there, Celine.

Everyone was surprised, to varying degrees, but they took it all in stride. Celine had the knowledge (if not the keys for implementing it) that getting all hung up on her own embarrassing reaction was an emotion meant entirely for her, and of no use to Aile or anyone else.

Aile accepted her role as the star of the show with grace, letting herself be seated in a central location and writing a steady stream of answers to the frequently overlapping questions asked of her. Her writing in the moment was almost unchanged from her long-form letters. By and large she was earnest and straightforward, interspersed by the occasional twist of dry sarcasm. More than a few of her replies had Dad howling, and Dell was tugging on the sleeve of any adult in range who’d give her a moment’s attention to ask what wordplay — the concept and the particular instance in question — was. (For all of a few seconds before she got distracted by something else she wanted to ask.)

The kids were mostly responsible for the existence of overlap among the questions, but Aile didn’t let that be an excuse to ignore them. At one point in the night, Dell, having wandered off a little (probably feeling put out by some of the more boring topics to her — geography, politics, economics), received a full sheet of notebook paper from Aile, surreptitiously passed to her as she walked by. Judging by the way Dell’s eyes just about fell out of her head when she looked at it, it was undoubtedly some tale, tall or otherwise, about Aile dueling one kind of monstrous creature or another. Dell all but carried her two friends upstairs at a sprint to read it out to them (and ask for their help with bigger words, no doubt).

Celine could not for the life of her figure out if Aile had written it in advance, or if she’d been penning it just now in between answering all sorts of replies in perfect stealth.

Chapter Text

Call her the turnip queen, and these her turnip jesters.

Her weapons, veteran and worn, gifts of camaraderie, served her well in taming the fools and slaying any pretenders who sought to help themselves to her prime plots of earth. (Gods there were a lot of sticks and logs and stone and weeds in the world.)

She was already getting used to it. She was already liking it. She could wipe her brow and smile with smug pride now, but in truth she’d doubted. She doubted still, simply on cursed reflex, that, while she was due some recompense from the world, the world would not be so obliging. Pessimism was persistent, but her giddy joy steadily chipped it down.

Potatoes and cabbages may have had a larger margin that her turnip subjects, yes, but profits compounded when re-invested straightaway. It was exponential, no? Surely, there was at least a non-trivial chance that she was on to something here, choosing the lesser returns with the higher compounding rate. Surely, she did not really give very much of a damn. She enjoyed being occupied, and this turnip-over rate (would Holt give his blessing off of that alone? Best keep it in her pocket) kept her quite busy. Her plot was full. As were the neighboring ones she’d prepared. Hm.

A shovel was in order, and while she could purchase one she was alight with a tingling confidence; some new, drunken contentedness. She wanted to make her own, disaster though it’d be. She had no compunctions trusting her neighbors’ handiwork, but the idea turned to instant fixation — that she’d try cooking, smithing, carpentry, and anything else she could lay her greedy, deprived hands on.

Her turnips were in the majority, yes, but she did not grow them in exclusion. A little of everything was good for the novelty, and for the townsfolk’s occasional request. And the flowers — well, she’d been asked to grow plenty of those, hadn’t she? The first time her daisies bloomed, she put the prettiest one in a pot and delivered to Celine. The girl’s wholly unprepared stammering reception left Aile wheezing privately to herself for the rest of the day. With a reaction like that, she was never going to stop.

Chapter Text

To Celine's dismay, Aile turned out to not quite be ‘her age’. She could’ve stretched the term for four or maybe five, but six years apart while in their twenties was a little too much to wrap them up into one bracket. But six was also a number that kept her close enough to be in the same generation. She was older than Celine and her peers, and she acted like it.

Most of the time.

On Saturday, Celine caught Aile walking away from Darcy’s stall with a coffee in hand, her posture not quite selling the idea that she planned to drink it. She was also walking in a direction that held precious few coffee-lovers but one conspicuously placed little sister...

“A-Aile. Aile, wait up a mom — Hi! Aile. Um. Nice Saturday, isn’t it?”

A calculating look overtook Aile’s features. She stopped and regarded Celine calmly, giving her a good-morning nod. She also, still, did not raise the coffee to drink any of it.

“A-Are you... a coffee person? Or maybe you’re already joining the Mistria tradition where we gift our neighbors their favorite drinks when we’re feeling friendly?”

A bit unfair to ask her questions when her hands were full. Aile shrugged, and Celine was struck by how effective that was.

“Um... Have... Have you checked out Merri’s stock this week? She’s got a bookshelf I’ve been eyeing for months. She knows I’ve been eyeing it, too, which has be the only reason she brings it out every week. Come look at it with me? Maybe you can help me make up my mind.”

Aile took a deep breath and exhaled it with a posture of dignified surrender. She raised the coffee to her lips and sipped it, eyes flashing up to Celine’s with a twinge of competitive delight in them. Sh-She’d really been — Celine wasn’t imagining things at all! This troublemaker had been walking off with every intention of giving Dell coffee — for what, just to watch the town burn?? And then she had the nerve to be all playful about it! Nevermind what her sharp eyes were doing to Celine right now (or on the regular), no heart-stutters could make her forget the single most imperative rule of all Mistria: that her sister never get her hands on coffee.

She’d have to keep a closer eye on Aile, this supposedly mature new addition to their town.

~

Curses. It'd have been the entertainment highlight of the month, Aile presumed. She was mollified, however, by Celine’s exasperation. Watching her piece it together, her face scrunching from suspicious to scandalized as she cottoned on — ah, Aile would repeat her attempted act of chaos weekly just for the fun of Celine looking at her like that. (Maybe next time Celine would call her out. Maybe the time after that she would pout. Ah, she would, wouldn’t she? Aile wanted to see it.)

Tactically, of course, Dell had no idea of what she’d missed out on. Aile was fond of the little warrior, and as apology for intent to use her as entertainment, Aile bought her a slice of cherry tart later in the morning and was regaled with the tale of the largest bird the girl had seen all week and how it’d scooped up and eaten a mouse right in front of her. ‘And it was a big mouse, Aile.’

Chapter Text

Aile adored being the front-seat audience member to Dungeons and Drama. She’d maybe never been so unfailingly entertained by anything in all her life. (A theoretical spot at number-one was still reserved for the day in which Aile got coffee into Dell’s hands, but alas, it was not yet that day.)

They were a riot.

Balor was secretly getting into it. Eiland was deft at lobbing out hooks for his players to engage with. Adeline was a hilarious disaster. Celine was the keystone; the anchor; the core. She’d been visibly unsure about taking occasional leaps of comedic genius at first, but they’d been met with success, and she had inadvertently learned and then taught the rest of the table how to role-play amidst a realm of dice and numbers. Aile frequently struggled not to slip off the bench at Celine’s deadpan deliveries of some of her more ridiculous interpretations of extreme rolls. The best part was that she hadn’t gotten carried away with the successes. She held herself back so well that when she did go silly it was delightful.

Josephine plied her with food and Aile did let herself occasionally drift toward the counter long enough to have a few drinks pushed at her. Juniper was easy to flatter into anything, but what was fun was how blatantly she wanted to be flattered into things. Aile, it turned out, had fun flattering people who possessed a level of self-awareness. Symbiosis at its peak. (Aile was convinced beyond most reasonable doubt that Juniper would sleep with her if Aile’s flattery ever drifted toward flirting, but, well, Aile was a romantic, and Aile’s affections were also otherwise occupied. Flings had never worked out for her, nor had non-romantic exchanges of ‘benefits’. And in any case, Juniper wouldn’t have lasted half as long as Aile would want her to. Brats like Juniper were meant to be teased to death, but in some cursed paradox of nature, brats like Juniper all, without fail, fell asleep before the teasing reached satisfaction for the teaser.)

Mm. Shame. Just barely, but, a shame all the same.

March was an unexpected favorite of Aile’s. He loosened up immediately when he drank, though maybe part of his amicability toward her was that she’d never once messed with him in the ways she sometimes liked to mess with just about everyone else in the village. He didn’t seem the type for it. She wasn’t sure if he would realize she was sparing him on purpose, but his tipsy self was so unguarded with her that she hoped it was something intentionally reciprocal rather than pure intoxication.

The card table was educational. Aile had an excellent poker face, but nothing to back it up. She’d learned the hard way that indiscernibility was neither immunity to being deceived nor, unfortunately, skill.

She was ready to help the kids break into Balor’s house if only they asked it of her. She loved the childish earnestness with which they also believed that she would, and it circularly guaranteed her acquiescence. Hilariously, they talked themselves out of it right at the cusp, every time. Oh well. When one of their machinations did come to fruition, Aile would be ready to get them into trouble, and then right back out of it.

Chapter Text

Despite projecting otherwise at all times, Aile was in fact not always one-hundred percent confident in the whims she acted upon. When Celine offhandedly asked for some direction in her storytelling for Dell, three times no less, Aile got a tad ahead of herself.

By which she meant that she'd created a notebook full of story-beats and items and enemies that could be engaged with all in a branching web that could serve as a framework for Celine to pull from and build off of and yes this did look a bit like an amateur Dungeons and Drama session but when she showed it to Celine in the girl’s house one afternoon she was met with something other than humorous ridicule, and that was simply unable to be categorized as anything other than a roaring success.

“Aile, this is... amazing. You came up with so many ideas, but you didn’t... Somehow you’ve left all this room for me to work with them. That’s so thoughtful. Thank you.” After a beat, “Wh-Why?”

Aile shrugged. It’d seemed fun.

Celine narrowed her eyes at her and Aile relented with a roll of her eyes. Use your words, fine fine.

So she scratched her initial thought out verbatim.

“W-Well, I’m glad, but that’s still extremely sweet of you, even if you enjoyed yourself. You might think I was asking you just to make conversation, wh-which isn’t not what I — ahem. I’ve been honestly worried my imagination won’t be enough to keep Dell entertained. But I enjoy our little story times so much. This is a very precious gift for me, Aile. Thank you so much.”

Ah.

Well.

Leave it to earnest girls to find just the right cracks in her armor and make her blush. Regrettably, Aile did not actually blush, as a rule. She splotched. And now Celine was the first person in Mistria to know that.

‘It’s nothing’ would have fallen out of her lips if she’d been able to speak. But in imagining herself putting pen to paper, she realized how silly and momentum-robbing such a comment was. So she just stood there with the notebook pressed to her chest like some sort of shield over her heart.

“Um... W-Would you like some tea? I have a few spring-only recipes I’m rather fond of.”

Habits died hard, and Aile had not known the meaning of retreat for the last ten years of her life. She sat down, posture impeccable, and would have been the picture of composure if not for her complexion betraying her so starkly.

Ruthlessly, she found her mind wondering how to warm up to Nora. Holt was secured via Aile’s surprising-to-everyone, apparently, love of puns. Dell’s friends had sharp eyes and together they’d deduced that Aile may have been trying to smuggle coffee to her, which seemed — despite the failed attempt — to have earned Dell’s undying affection.

...

...

When Celine came over with the tea, Aile had written, I expect pictures of the resulting adventure. Illustrations by both player and storyteller will suffice as compensation.

"...! I-I’ll do my best, then. U-Um, so what did you mean here — this part about a ‘bear-wizard’?”

Chapter Text

Not all days were sunny, and were they so it’d ruin the world. Not all foods were sweet. Not all drinks fizzy. Not all moods calm. Not all nights restful.

Aile wondered if it was anticipation, or some subconscious accumulation of things that boiled over precisely on the days of her weekly appointments with Valen, a pattern ironclad in its certainty despite this being only the third such meeting. They hardly merited being regarded as ordeals, these checkups. And yet Aile was consistently bleary and strained the whole night and morning leading up to them.

She’d requested her appointments as early in the day as the doctor could bear to have them, which wasn’t all that early.

So she watered her jesters, felled a few trees, cuddled her baby chicks, and set off.

She wasn’t confident in her ability to be her ‘unfailingly cheerful’ self (a description she treasured too much to ever resent), and so she took the long road, east past the pond, helping herself to some blueberries and other wild fauna, putting some weight in her empty backpack.

Valen smiled at her as she entered, and it looked knowing, as if she’d have any way of knowing what route Aile’d taken to get there.

“Good morning Aile. Come right in.”

It was warm, but she’d worn long sleeves. She sweat in them, but the cold kind. Thank gods Valen was so circumspect. She didn’t want to... be this version of herself in front of anyone if she could help it. She didn’t want to be this self at all, but the more people saw it the more real it would feel, or something.

Stop. She was truly better off not thinking on days like this.

Aile had already asked last time if they could leave the examination room’s door ajar for fresh air. It was a large room with windows, but it didn't circulate very well with the door shut. Valen remembered to leave it open. She sat Aile on a stool and scooted her own up next to her.

“If I may?”

Aile exhaled through her nose and shut her eyes. She nodded, and leaned into the doctor’s kindness by leaving the scarf for her to remove.

Ah, how silly that this would be her ‘dark secret’. Not her throat having been torn out, but that it was still an intensely raw experience. Traumatizing, one might say. Her throat was really just the reminder. Aile’d come back without it. No one else had come back at all.

Dell’s conception of monster stories was to be encouraged. Most of the time, they were accurate. The dangers were understood. The scenarios were prepared for carefully. Scenarios like Aile’s were anomalous. It’d taken no less than four unexpected happenings outside of their control to accumulate and break the bounds of their preparation and experience, leaving them at last truly out of their depth.

She really hated dealing with —

“If you’d take care of this properly, we wouldn’t be meeting every week, you know.”

It was amazing how gently Valen could make such a brutal admonishment. Aile knew it was true.

“How badly does it hurt?”

She tapped out a number on the doctor’s thigh.

“Well, that’s within expectation. Can you endure it for another week? I want to apply the same salve.”

The wounds were closed and beyond risk of infection, but restoring the front of her neck to any semblance of muscular or cosmetic health was, apparently, ‘work more suited for a surgeon, but I have some ideas of what we could do’, according to the doctor of two weeks ago.

Aile’s toes twinged in her boots and she exhaled as slowly as she could manage through her nose as the doctor dabbed her neck clean and then started the reapplication of the tissue stimulating salve she’d broken out the week prior.

It throbbed. Not the salve, yet, just her entire throat at large. The feeling of absence, of things torn that hadn’t reconnected, of trauma to all the tissue in the area — it all accumulated and spilled over when it was touched. It made her wonder how she got through the day with how miserably it hurt. She didn’t even have the option of facing off with her dignity or whatever else you’d call it; she silently sobbed at the misery of it all and kept her eyes shut — not that she could see herself; just as a means of trying to shut out the incongruity of this suffering self with the Aile she tried to be; an Aile who didn’t mind that it hurt; an Aile who treasured the memories of her friends and her life and would always be acquainted with grief but was allowed to continue living and searching for happiness. There was even a vague but simpler idea than the rest: of a future Aile who may still cry because of how fucking much this hurt, but wouldn’t be mortified to be seen in such a state.

A very vague idea.

“If I give you the salve, will you reapply it yourself?”

Aile shook her head. Valen likely smiled or nodded, but Aile couldn’t notice either when her eyes were alternatively shut or blurred.

“I don’t suppose you’d feel better if I said you were being a very brave girl and that I’d give you your pick of the candy drawer on your way out.”

Aile briefly wondered at the sanity of inducing a nasal snort from a crying patient, but it was revealed to be a trick within a trick, as there was a tissue waiting to catch the ejecta, and Aile suspected Valen had just wanted to clear her sinuses a bit without asking her.

“Relax. I’ve tried mixing the salve with another one that numbs a bit. It should feel a bit better soon.”

It kind of did, though the threshold was so high it was hard to parse nuance.

Valen worked with such concentration as to set the mood almost trancelike. Aile was caught up in it eventually, thoughts swaying around the locus of her discomfort (really, ‘agony’ wasn’t inappropriate here). It was almost peaceful.

It was how both of them missed Valen’s door-chime and the corresponding footsteps until it was too late.

“Doctor! Dell’s got the biggest splinter I’ve ever seen and Dad’s only going to make it worse for — oh —”

Somehow, the lone syllable of ‘oh’ was itself choked off, born as a mundane exclamation of surprise and dying instants later in strangled horror.

“S-Sorr —”

Celine — for of course it was her — stumbled into the doorframe by the sounds of things, in her haste to retreat.

“I...If you have the time, d-doctor...!”

Aile’s imagination was quite potent, but she still thought it’d be gentler to keep her eyes shut until Celine’s shoes squeaked out into the lobby; to not have to see Celine’s devastation at having intruded upon something so private. For that was definitely the point of greatest loss, here. Aile loathed being seen like this, yes — the hypothetical had understated the reality of how viscerally ill she felt at knowing Celine had walked in on this — but it was, incredulous as the thought should be, instantly transcended by the knowledge of what horror Celine must feel for her carelessness. (And really, it wasn’t. The door was open. Valen had even given her a look, last week, as if to say ‘you know this might lead to an accident, yes?’) It was Aile’s fault, and with any luck she’d only ruined Celine’s entire week, not more. The girl would figuratively beat herself black and blue for this. Aile needed to reassure her. Unfortunately Aile had no desire to speak of this, ever. There at last, her thoughts jammed, as she could not determine which reality was more untenable.

“Don’t squirm. We’ll be finishing up here. Dell comes straight to me with her worse injuries, so the biggest splinter Celine has ever seen won’t be cause for concern. I’ll check on her when we’re done.”

To think that Aile and Dell had in common aggressive imposition on the doctor’s confidences.

...

“There. I’m ready to wrap it. Would you —”

Like to spend a few minutes puking, first? Yes. Valen tied a white cloth loosely around Aile’s neck and then scooted aside so that she could run to toilet and stress-vomit until her stomach was empty and she was embraced by relief. Aile was a skilled puker, of late, and the protective cloth hadn’t been necessary. She rinsed, brushed her teeth (Valen thought of everything), and returned. The cloth was removed and gauze was tightly wound round the salve concoction sheening her throat. Valen kept it just the right size for Aile’s checkered scarf to completely hide it.

Thank you, Valen.

“You didn’t do the exercises, did you?”

...

“Work on them, please. I know it’s terribly uncomfortable, but you asked me to heal you as much as I can. This is a part of those plans which requires your cooperation. Every other night, at least. Will you try?”

Yes.

“Good girl. Here. Take your pick.”

...

...Aile picked strawberry. Valen pat her on the back and rubbed it for just a few seconds.

“Having a new resident of a town this small can be miraculous or disastrous, you know. Balor is delightful, and I thought we’d used up all our luck on such a pleasant young man. Yet, there’s no room to deny that your presence has already made Mistria an even lovelier place to live, Aile. I’m very glad you’re here.”

Leave it to Valen to strike while Aile was weak. It couldn’t be healthy for her throat to be taut with crying for an hour straight like this. She’d nearly gotten herself composed again, too.

“See you, Aile.”

Feeling the need to regain a bit of her self-confidence, Aile snuck a kiss on the doctor’s cheek, even though she mostly just wetted it with her sloppy face, and then skipped out the door.

She took the same route back. When she passed by Celine’s farm she didn’t see the girl anywhere.

Chapter Text

Friday morning was a tactical choice of appointment time on Aile's part. It gave her the late morning and all afternoon to hurl herself into farming, to calm herself with tactility and concentration, and then to wash the last of the awful taste out of her mouth with a long evening of warmth and revelry.

There’d been a slight wrench hurled into this Friday. She was leery of apologizing for her... for anything about her history, her body, her situation, but she did feel guilty for strong-arming Valen into breaking her habits toward privacy on account of playing the odds for a less stuffy examination room. In a town like this Aile really should have known better. It was all to easy to imagine Dell getting into trouble the moment the sun was up with such frequency that a call would be expected rather than simply possible.

The next move, however, was taken from her hands before she could properly agonize over it. As Aile rose from her turnip beds at nearly four in the afternoon she was greeted by the sight of Celine standing on the other side of one of Aile’s short fences, arms crossed and face stormy.

“Aile.”

Aile patted her dress for the notebook, having already written out a dozen pages in all kinds of moods and forms, knowing she'd find among them something that in the moment she actually wanted to say —

“I apologize for my gross invasion of your privacy. That was reckless and unacceptable of me, a-and I am so sorry.”

Aile grimaced at having been too slow to prevent this, and flipped through the pages while shaking her head. Celine wasn’t the one who —

“I suspect you’re going to try to turn this around and blame yourself for leaving the door ajar. Your appeal is rejected.”

Aile looked up and blinked a little stupidly.

“We’re a small town and that room can get stuffy. We all leave the door open when we’re in there. I burst in because I’ve gotten used to a certain familiarity with my neighbors — one we’ve discussed and consented to. I let myself include you in that category without ever thinking twice about it, without asking you, without considering you, and that’s possibly the rudest thing anyone has done to you since you moved here. I’m sorry.”

...Aile’d not been ready for... fierce Celine. It was making her feel a bit... cherished and vulnerable. O-Oh dear.

Aile walked up to the fence and set her notebook on it with a silent sigh, accepting the uselessness of all her preparation and wasted pages. (Not wasted, just... oh hush, this wasn't the time for thinking that hard.)

Thank you. I forgive you.

Fierce Celine just about expired on the spot, replaced at once by the Celine that Aile was much more familiar (and comfortable) with.

“A-Are you sure? You can be... I think I’d be quite mad at me. I don’t mind if you want to stew for a few days.”

It sounded like something you’d say in cheeky jest, but Celine looked dead serious. It had some double-negation effect and actually make Aile burst out in a puff of laughter.

“Wha — Wh-Wh-What on earth is s-so... A-Ah, I see, you don’t want to be mad at me, you want to mortify me.”

Aile wiped her eyes and vaulted the fence, kneeling down to where Celine had squatted into a face-covering little ball of embarrassed young woman. Feeling like she could get away with it, Aile patted her head. And rubbed her back. And then wriggled her fingers around to scratch under her chin —

She got a snappy glare for her troubles and was delighted.

“I see. You’re the type to be given an inch and take a mile.”

Aile had never felt so seen in all her life.

“Well. I’m — I don’t — That’s... s-sometimes, I wouldn’t... protest if you imposed a bit more than you do. You’re so self-reliant, i-it makes a neighbor wonder how to help you, sometimes. U-Um. That’s — Don’t think too hard about — I-I have some work to finish before going to the inn. See you there, Aile.”

She swept off, resembling a tomato, and Aile slumped back against her fence, somehow shocked by the realization that'd she'd dodged the sincerity of until now via her constant internal snark.

This was a crush.