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The lilies are not native to Coerthas, but they come in shades of both red and white, or so Aymeric has heard. The red ones, he imagines, would be the most striking in the snow, and they are the only ones that are blooming. Like open wounds slashing the stonework and covering the grand and impenetrable tower of the Vault, the species of the lilies is not the most impossible thing about their presence. Aymeric has never seen the grand cathedral look so beautiful.
He has never seen it look so terrible.
By all rights, he should be resting in his sick bed, but he has already spent the three days since he rose from the gaol beneath this very fortress confined to an infirmary room. Interminable bells of fever and dreams of the fragmented face of god (her face) and a touch, a voice, he cannot find… admittedly, it all feels much longer.
The time had started to bleed into the many days before. Fever, beatings, broken bones. Reliving details without the tether of physical pain has been liminal and nauseating; something he can deflect and intellectualize far more easily from outside the nightmare haze.
In the darkest seconds of his second morning back above ground, she appeared at his bedside. Lured from sleep by her cool hand on his forehead, she’d said, “I told you it’s not pleasant.” Her, her magic — one and the same under her derisive scrutiny — but he was alive enough to hear it. Which seemed, at the time, like it mattered. He finds he wants it to matter more now, staring up at this great monolithic truth of his childhood irreparably changed. By love, and by loss, and for all of it he remains standing outside. Ever a man at the gates, perhaps. Aymeric is aware that it is a luxury he is here to think so.
So, there are the flowers, which are preternaturally still in the bitter winds. And then the Astrologians have also been in a panic. More accurately, the Astrologians are in a different sort of panic from the tremors rippling through the rest of the city. Among the unbelievable things that have occurred over the last many bells, the stars have been charted in the positions they held nigh two moons prior. So, perhaps it all has been longer, the way it feels like it has, and he’s simply waiting for time to catch back up. It has been too long since he has seen her with his wits about him, either way.
None of this feels fundamentally important right now, which makes the fantastic nature of these miracles (if they can be called miracles) disorienting in their distance.
Aymeric has the distinct impression he can’t touch any of it, even if he wanted too, like he’s been brought back phantom to the ways she has changed Ishgard. What does matter, in the worst sort of way, is that she has put too much between them. Intangible, untouchable, time and space tangled. He is reminded of how very different they are, of the otherness she has worn in so many ways since she stumbled in from the snow. He supposes he’s spent a lot of fruitless time hoping he could prove the sensation wrong. An admittedly self-indulgent act, crafted to satisfy his own neuroses. His own ambitions. It’d been easy to tell himself he’d been showing restraint.
But he’s been a fool for a while. Poor jester. Tragedy calls for his part and he’s still standing here, staring at these flowers that don’t belong on time that doesn’t exist, wondering which part this is supposed to be after all. And where he’s supposed to be in it.
What kind of woman moves heaven and earth, dances for god and dreams in death?
Aymeric doesn’t know. Holy, maybe, but Ser Haurchefant’s body was still cold when they brought him down. Down, down; the steps had never seemed so steep or so long before. He had climbed them since he was small, and now they burst with flowers. Aymeric feels like he is watching the worst Act from the audience with the sinking sensation he’d been meant to take the stage and missed his cue (please do not applaud). A new failure of his conscience to haunt him through the night. He’s still thinking about her, though. He’s still seeing all the red. Aymeric would like to say nurture has purged him of the father that wouldn’t claim him, but the concerns that sit consistently at the edge of his peripheral vision are a harsh rebuttal.
What kind of man covets what is god’s first, and another man’s second? What kind of man covets, sees the sin, and insists it’s worship instead?
Aymeric knows. These miracles are terrible. They aren’t for him. His miracle is burnt out in night sweats and scars older than their injuries and the deep, ferocious emptiness of having been visited by something divine. And having been left behind. He should be resting in his sick bed. He should have known the perils of blind devotion.
What kind of man? A fool of the worst sort.
“When I die, will you be the one to bring me flowers?” Her voice is jarring, slicing clarion through the bizarre miasma of his thoughts and the distraction of picking at a fresh fault line in his own character. He goes rigid. Her phantom disappears when he looks for her in the night. He is beginning to question whether he ever did hold her (even for a moment). Then, let this be divine intervention of the pettiest sort.
He should be mourning properly. As if any of them know how to do that anymore.
“Would you…” he speaks to the Vault. Silent sentry. “I do not feel that you would want me to.” This isn’t what Aymeric wants to say, but he does anyway. He wants to ask her why she’s here and why it took so long for her to come. A conceit.
“I wouldn’t.” The Warrior of Light agrees. “I won’t.” Aymeric finds he must restrain himself from flinching. She doesn’t speak in absolutes. “But I think somebody probably will.”
“I can bring them for myself, perhaps, when I come to keep you company.” He says it like it’s a confession, threaded with guilt and relief in equal measure. He keeps his eyes fixed on the towering splay of flowers. How very pointlessly bold of him. As if her grave will be anything but a garden.
The Warrior of Light is quiet for so long that he wonders if she’s gone. Another dream. Another ghost. He almost turns.
“In the end, you might be too good, Lord Commander.” He does flinch then. There’s something flinty in the soft thread of her voice, new and private. Not for him. Of course not. They feel the loss laid out bodily between them.
Goodness he has survived. Goodness he has inflicted on others. He plays through the slow lurch of the procession from the Vault again. She didn’t look mortal. Haurchefant looked painfully so. Aymeric had felt his own finite existence hanging like a stone around his neck. He thinks the Warrior of Light has closed something away inside herself that he’s not supposed to go looking for. He thinks he probably deserves it. He thinks he should be grateful she cannot read his mind.
“‘Tis not I that suffers that affliction,” he says, and it’s only when the words taste rotten that he regrets saying so. Aymeric does turn then. Sudden, with something like an apology caught in his momentum. Her expression is inscrutable for the brief moment she meets his gaze. She draws her attention away. Too fast, he thinks. Too intentionally. How much worse to know holy grace and have it taken than not to know it at all.
“Not the only one, perhaps,” she says slowly. He watches her peer down at her hands and flex the fingers. He doesn’t need to ask what — who — she is remembering holding onto. He doesn’t need to look for blame.
He can find that himself. He holds onto it carefully. This is to be his penance along with all the rest. He will grieve in his own way, insufficient as it must be.
“Everything will go back to the way it was. Everything else will catch up.” She says, like it should comfort him, as if it isn’t all laced with regret. In Aymeric’s plans, she hadn’t saved him (but he’d dared to hope). She crouches down to draw her fingertips over a scarlet blossom and he watches as it curls and withers and dusts away on the wind. “Just the memories will stay, a little displaced.” She stands back straight, a small figure the city can’t quite swallow, and folds her hands into her sleeves. In her plans, she’d saved everyone.
Her expression is crafted with such care, he thinks she must have forgotten the way she raged in his arms, or that she would like him to. It was such a brief moment in which they’d both existed flayed and utterly raw. He supposes he likely did a poor job of holding them together, but she doesn’t want his help with her own reassembly any more than he can stop himself from wanting to, anyway. This part shouldn’t matter the way that it does.
She says: “you should only be concerning yourself with recovering.” Everything else is far beyond his control, after all. “You almost died.”
It’s Aymeric’s turn to look away. He faces back toward the Vault. How unfortunate this is the comfort he faces toward. It’s an awful thing to do. It might be better if he could find some accusation in anything she’s saying, but she’s as turned inward on herself as all his own violent dreaming. They are alike that way and she doesn’t deserve it. He thinks about telling her that she should be concerned about taking care of herself too, but that feels selfish and petulant and he thinks he’s made himself regrettable enough without asking her to bear that part of him too.
He just wishes she would look at him, not through him. He’s not the ghost, after all.
But maybe that’s the worst part.
“You’re right.” He says instead, and hopes that means she’ll appear at his bedside again. It can be kinder between them if he’s half awake. It can be simpler if she’s intervening in his fevers. Hopeful, miserable, fool. But as she says, this will all catch up. It must.