Work Text:
Alistair remembers exactly when this little routine of theirs started.
It was their second meeting, when she had begun bringing him flowers. It surprised him at first, how she had asked to sit next to him at the edge of the Black Pool and requested permission to weave flowers onto the arms of his wheelchair.
He still remembers how quiet and cautious she was in their first meeting, and how he ended up doing most of the speaking. But when she left, she turned to him, her gaze heavy with acknowledgment of the title she had gained, and the title they both now shared.
“Thank you, Teacher.” She had said softly, and with that the title of Keeper was now hers, and Teacher was his.
Since then, every small meeting or long discussion, she has brought flowers to weave into the chairs of his wheelchair. Removing the old and replacing them with the new, she brought him new stories each time.
Crocus
For the day that child Aigis was awakened. She had been so distraught by the mission she saw as her ultimate failure, it was only after she reached the part of how Aigis had tearfully apologized for the trouble she believed herself to have caused that the Keeper had broken down into tears sobbing throughout her retelling of events of what had occurred at the Orphanage.
He wished he had hands to pat her head, and comfort her that it wasn’t her fault that so many lives were lost due to the Sculptor’s machinations. But he could only listen, and instead comfort her with words.
Tansy
She asks him about Herbert that day. There is anger in her voice as she tells him about her latest investigation, and she seethes about how the manipulations of the Sculptors caused a mother to mutilate her own daughter. She wants to know why, what caused a student who once followed their ideals to distort them so heavily. He cannot answer her fully, but she learns about desperation all the same.
Amaryllis
A story about the grief and pride of a Lemurian priestess whose pain and obsession with a comforting lie had ruined countless lives, including her own. The Keeper complains about a sword piercing through her leg, which causes him to slightly flinch, but he’s still aware of the undercurrent of fear in her words as she rushes through how the injury healed on it’s own and how she still has no way of knowing how it managed to do so.
Violets
She brings an armful of the purple blossoms once, weaving them into the arms of his wheelchair excitedly, face flushed as she tells him the story of her and Ramona’s visit to the opera and how she had managed to convince her silver-haired partner to stop for cake before returning to campus. She is so full of joy that it makes him beam with pride about how much she has grown, how she still values her happiness and pursues it despite the pain that torments her.
Holly
It is the Silver Night Festival, yet at midnight she sneaks into the Black Pool anyway, an armful of holly with her. She tells him of Salvador’s presents. Of how Miss Mason and Ogier decorated the cookies together, each in the design of someone important to them and how Aigis, Lily, and Jenkins had carefully requested their own to decorate. How Miryam spent hours under the watchful gaze of Sanga perfecting a cookie of Tulu before sneaking away to leave Murphy’s gift at her door under the guise of trying to ensure the cookie never spoiled. Ryker and Dexter had nearly gambled all their own presents away, before Ramona had abruptly put a stop to it by threatening to add their names to Czort’s paperwork check-in. Leonora is almost breathless laughing as she tells him all that has occurred, weaving holly onto his chair. They laugh and exchange stories until the morning as she falls asleep leaning against his wheelchair. And his only wish for that Silver Night Festival is that this joy she experiences and shares with him could last for as long as possible.
The day before that fateful morning, she decorates with a bouquet, a mix of sweet pea, poppies, and hydrangea. There is no story to accompany her weaving, simply a quiet humming and a request for him to tell her a story. He can feel the restlessness of the Aeons, and for a moment he wonders if she can too. But he does not ask her, and instead obliges her with a tale of own of his former investigations with his own teacher.
When He descends, she weaves a forget-me-not into a stray sweet pea’s stem. He is not surprised by this turn of events, he knows she can handle it, that she understands the cost...that he understands the cost.
He wishes that he was surprised, so that he could scream at the unfairness, of a child who was only born out of a whim, whose own self does not care for her and will devour her back into itself.
He wishes that he could stop this.
He cannot.
And in the leftover silence, there are no more flowers that decorate his wheelchair.