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The clearing in which Yasuo stops is unmarked save for a sapling tree, only a few years old at most. Riven could count the leaves on it, if she stepped closer.
She does not step closer. She hangs back a respectful distance as Yasuo approaches it, first dropping to his knees, then folding to sit cross-legged in the verdant grass, head bowed.
She is not unwelcome, Riven knows, even here. She has simply become used to being the intruder, and tries to minimize her shadow on the soil. So different than the drilled-in teachings of the Noxian military would have her act.
She resists the urge to stand alert, on guard. She forces her shoulders to relax even as her throat tightens. Still, she glances through the trees, watching, listening, even if she's not certain for what. The spirits of the dead in Ionia are known to linger, and if she trusts Yasuo—which she does—today is a day to be watchful for such spirits.
"Nothing is going to ambush you," Yasuo calls, his voice breaking Riven from her rigid stance.
The first time he'd said that to her, months ago now, she'd assumed it was from derision. An uptight Noxian soldier in a foreign land, prepared for a new danger from any direction. Prepared for every civilian to wish her dead. Armed to the teeth for every encounter, ready for peace to turn to war at the fall of a leaf to the ground.
After hearing it a dozen more times since then, she has learned its true purpose—to comfort her. To remind her, as many times as she needed to hear it: You're okay. You're safe. I promise.
Riven gives her head a little shake, clearing out the whispers that haunt the corners of her mind like cobwebs for a moment, and focusing on Yasuo anew. He looks up at her, his expression simultaneously open and closed, as it somehow always is. Honest, but reserved. Transparent with his thoughts but guarded with his emotions. All with a glint of humor in the corner of his eye, a smile at the edge of his upper lip.
How he smiles at her so often, Riven doesn't know.
She offers him that same hint of a smile in return. Not bold enough to embrace a full smile yet. Bold enough to allow herself to appreciate Yasuo anyway.
"Thank you," Riven says, testing her resolve with a few steps closer, sandals sinking deeper into the soft soil the further she strays from the road. She is bold enough to approach, bold enough to kneel beside him. Not bold enough to count the leaves on the maple sapling before her.
For a heartbeat, she is grateful she never met Yasuo's half-brother, because his voice would haunt her, too. Your fault. His blood, too, is on her hands. She and Yasuo, both murderers, intertwined hands dripping with crimson. Unforgiven. Unforgivable.
For more than a heartbeat she sees that crimson, droplets scattered across the ground, pooling at the roots of the tree. Seeping into the ground. Seeping towards her knees.
She closes her eyes. This haunting has played out across her vision dozens of times.
"In Noxus," Yasuo says softly, "do you have burial grounds too?"
Yasuo's dialect of Ionian is graceful, but rough around the edges, like he is. Riven's imitation of it is still clumsy. She doesn't get the tones right, mispronounces the consonants the Noxian language doesn't have. She finds herself fumbling for words often enough to bring conversations to a halt.
But Yasuo understands her, and Riven understands him. She doesn't need to open her eyes. Mentally, she steps around the crimson.
"Only for the noble houses," Riven answers. She hadn't stepped foot into the city until she was a soldier. But she'd seen the well-groomed yards where highborn lineages were honored with statues and mausoleums, names and deeds carved into granite. "Most bodies get burned."
Yasuo hums, though Riven's still not certain it's a thoughtful hum and not a derisive one. Birds chirp in the trees above them.
"Normally, there's a marker on the gravesite," Yasuo says. "Stone or wood. Something to commemorate the person laid to rest."
Riven visualizes this, for a moment. When she opens her eyes, the blood staining the ground is gone. Green grass, rust-colored leaves.
"Did you plant this tree?" she asks.
Yasuo nods. "The first year I came back. I'm the only one who comes here anyway."
Yasuo is still exiled from his hometown, where the true gravesite for his half-brother would be. He is not allowed the solace to properly mourn. So he comes here, instead, to a patch of open ground along a scarcely-traveled road, that he is left to mark for himself only. The place... the place where...
"I'm surprised it's still alive," Yasuo muses, almost to himself. "Thought for sure something would've eaten it or trampled it by now."
"Shava told me the soul of Ionia provides for every living thing," Riven says, though she's not sure whether it is a comforting thought—for Yasuo or for herself. "Even seeds."
"Do you believe it?" Yasuo asks. A genuine question.
Riven isn't sure. She should. She is supposed to. The beliefs her adoptive parents demonstrated to her are part of being Ionian, or at least part of imitating it correctly. Even if her Noxian roots still frown at the thought.
Yet she's seen the way trees here bend to protect, secure, envelop. She's seen vines lash, snare, trip. The only thing that moves like that in Noxus is metal, and then only with a powerful sorcery. And then, only in pursuit of death.
"I think this sapling would not have survived, where I grew up."
Riven reaches out to touch one of its tiny leaves. She is almost surprised when nothing, human or otherwise, reacts to her action. She examines it with the fragment of her mother's care and reverence she'd managed to inherit. Shava would know exactly what to say. Riven struggles to find the right words.
"It's nice to be somewhere you don't have to fight to stay alive."
Wind rustles through the branches that surround them, sending the leaves on the tiny maple into a flutter. Briefly, Riven fears her awkward words have tripped her once again, and she's upset Yasuo. But she dismisses the thought as fast as it arrived. The Yasuo beside her now is too controlled, too careful, to let emotion make him falter, even if she has spoken carelessly.
Nonetheless, the corner of his mouth quirks in what could pass as the beginning of a sarcastic laugh. He shakes his head a little, ignoring the stray dark hairs that fall into his face.
"That what Noxus is like?"
Riven thinks about it, nods. "You have to fight for everything. Everyone does. Even the plants."
She thinks of the mosses that have learned to cover dry, lifeless stone, spined toxic plants that will take a predator down before allowing themselves to be eaten. Crops that can survive without water for weeks. Everything fights in Noxus. There is no other way to live.
"Maybe we should've traded places," Yasuo murmurs. "You could've grown up here. I think you would've handled it better than I did."
"I wouldn't wish my childhood on you." Riven wrings her hands. She's tried, ever since her exile, to carve the memories of Noxus out of her chest. It hasn't worked as well as she wished. "Noxus is not a gentle place. Even to children."
"Maybe it would've hurt less if my whole life had prepared me for it."
Riven presses back the memories that arise. Intertwined hands dripping with crimson.
"It doesn't."
For a moment, Riven wonders if she's about to cry. It's hard to tell anymore what will shatter her and what will pass through her like a warm day's breeze. This time, though, her throat doesn't close like she's about to choke. Her cobweb whispers remain silent.
"I'm glad I found you here," Riven admits. She nods at the tree. "And I'm glad it lived."
"I am, too."
"I'm glad you lived."
Yasuo is silent. Riven lets him be. She would've done the same if he'd said it to her.
"Do you believe in spirits, Riven?"
The faintest tremble haunts Yasuo's voice.
"I believe in you."
"Do you believe in spirits bringing back the dead, Riven? Do you believe in the soul of Ionia reanimating people you watched bleed out on the ground?"
"I see them every day," Riven whispers. "Bodies I cleaved in half with my own sword. I hear voices that screamed my name with their dying breaths."
"Are they real?" Yasuo insists, his distress more and more evident in his voice. "Would you be able to tell if they weren't? Could you find them if you looked? Would they hear you if you spoke to them?"
"If I was in Noxus, I would've said no. I would've laughed at the thought." Riven says. "But here? I don't know how to tell."
But I believe you, she thinks.
"I have to know," Yasuo says, hands forming fists in the loose linen of his pants. He still kneels, but his spine is rigid, body tense. "If there's a chance, I have to—"
"I know," Riven answers. "And I'll go with you."
"Riven, I won't drag you across Ionia chasing a ghost."
"Where else would I be, if not with you?" Riven aches to reach out, to clasp one of his hands in hers. It doesn't matter whose blood stains whose hands anymore. It's all the same color, all impossible to wash away. "To live alone on the farm? To be an outcast in a different village, until I'm driven away?"
"It could be fruitless," Yasuo murmurs. "It could be dangerous. It could mean not having a home to go to for months."
"My whole life has prepared me for that," Riven answers. She knew she would be adrift the moment she signed as a soldier. "There is nowhere in the world that isn't dangerous for me now. There is no home where I can be truly safe. If I am to be an exile for the rest of my life, I'd prefer to do so by your side."
"That might be the most dangerous place of all."
"I will stay until you tell me you no longer want me there," Riven declares, squaring her shoulders, bristling just slightly. That soldier's core still lives on in her, bravery in the face of the unknown, determination where others would falter, a self-sacrificial instinct that tells her to make the most of herself. This is when she feels most alive. This is the most alive, the most capable she's felt since crawling out of the pit of chemicals that should have killed her. "Whatever hell could possibly come next is a shadow compared to what I've already done. I need to see if my own spirits can be real. Because if I can speak to the people I killed and tell them that I will spend the rest of my life regretting it, maybe I can make peace with the fact that I lived."
For the first time in a while, Yasuo looks at her—truly looks at her, eye to eye, and she finds herself tearing up.
"Would you deny me that?" Riven asks.
She meets his brown eyes with resolve, the hard-won Noxian kind, one of the few traits she's kept from her homeland that she's proud of. A weed that's survived too long to be yanked out so easily. A woman who should've been long dead, still alive. Still fighting for it.
"Yone would have liked you," Yasuo says, a hint of a sad smile playing across his face just before the tears start to fall.
In the cracks of her Noxian resolve, the Ionian tenderness Shava and Asa instilled in her continues to grow against all odds.
She pulls Yasuo into her arms and lets him cry.