A romance i have longed to write for an age now, hampered a little bit by the fact that i never found the time or energy to complete the game itself, i'm now reading the full script i got off the net, and perhaps there will be chapters to follow this one. i've not ascertained the timeframe, either, so my references are vague.

FF Tactics and all its characters belong to Squaresoft, not me.

Dancing on Knives

Fluid, graceful creature. Lithe, taut, like the glittering, slender blade grasped familiarly in her gloved hand. Lean, shapely muscle under her soft skin.

He knew its touch. Living on the road and often in rough wilderness, tending wounds and falling into weary slumber side-by-side, plunging into the war and running along its front lines, endlessly wondering when it would stop, when they could stop.

Agrias had not always fought this way. Her style and blinding heaven-drawn power put distance between her and her enemies. When she did clash blades the force behind her powerful blows served to repel and stun. But with Ramza, who had begun with the simple, standard practices and had eventually taken a preference to the Eastern styles of fighting, favouring the close, swift styles of martial arts and ninjutsu, Agrias frequently found herself adopting instead the intimate and dangerous pattern in which blade slid against blade, rasping like a passion-wrought voice.

These exchanges were where their friendship had truly sprung, even when the young noble had been her salvation and Ovelia's greatest hope while she had been, a single warrior, helpless to save her charge. Common ground? Perhaps. Mutual admiration for each other, valiant and skillful on the battlefield as they were? It helped.

But it was when their blades crossed and Ramza matched each step, each cut and parry, each devious stroke, learned from her and eventually bested her more and more often, that Agrias could look into his eyes and not have to make up some excuse for doing so.

Those beautiful blue eyes. He was sparkling innocence and cold killer all at once, this youth who could plan and lead the bloodiest of battles, then chase a dragonfly down the banks by the falls on the same evening.

She watched his smiling face in the dying light of the forest clearing as their steps interwove and Ramza danced her across their sparring ground in a blurring pattern traced with sharp steel, his exhilaration infectious as wildfire, consuming as obsession. Darkness deepened and the smell of rain was in the air, and here Agrias took the chance to fling Ramza's sword wide, golden hair swirling about her as the misty rain came down in almost shy intrusion to their hour of swordplay. His smile never left his face as she dove her blade in to touch its gleaming tip to his throat.

Or at least, that was what she had meant to do, because in the split second the shadows closed in further and the rain got in her eyes the young noble had disappeared.

Turn!

Agrias was not slow, she was not at all slow, but the blade which lanced with a viper's speed under her ear stopped all movement, pressing deathly still and cool against her neck in Ramza's steady, steely grip. Not the barest tremour of fatigue. He frightened her these days. She lowered her sword, inclined her head, acknowledged defeat as the rain continued no heavier than before, possibly because of the foliage above.

Behind the female knight, dark blue eyes wandered over the dampened, silky golden braid, the curve of a hip, the skin of her neck.

Sweat washed into rivulets by the sudden light rain, like tears.

Like blood.

He had watched her clean her longsword after the last battle, driving the blade into soft earth and drawing it out restored, stripping the bloodied armour and drenching the bloodied gold of her head in the nearest stream. Didn't want to hurt, didn't want to kill. There had been only one thing she meant to wield her blade for, and that had been taken away. Agrias, Holy Knight, came to realize, slowly, that her calling drew her beyond service to the throne, or even to the young girl who suffered so much under her duty as Princess of Ivalice.

Agrias, who still called upon the Heavens and was answered by power, no longer knew how to pray for the dead and the dying, her faith in the church and all she had been taught and all she believed corroded as events unfolded, save for the guiding presence when she drew her sword. You could trick the mind but not the spirit, and while she held her blade she held conviction. Heaven watched over her still.

"I know only this, Ramza, that there is still a God, and that I am still His servant," She had said to him once. "Even if He bids me go where I have never wanted to go."

Ramza, who only had his eyes to believe, let her faith be the assurance backing him where paths blurred and he felt nothing he could do would change the direction all of Ivalice seemed to be surging, some terrifying end, where it would have been so easy to step down and hide from the persecution and the pain and the slaughter and the screams and the blood. There had to be reason for each pained step toward that end, and Agrias, some part of him knew, whose clear unshadowed eyes were all that was beautiful in his sight while friend and foe fell and suffered around them, would help him find that reason.

The young man leaned in, silent, as he drew his blade away, not a hair on her head injured, and spoke in his melodic young tenor. "We should head back to camp."

And so they danced when circumstance allowed, and sometimes even when it didn't, so important a reminder this was to themselves that there was pleasure aside from the pain, that there was a life to be regained somewhere, some purpose, some good thing to restore, lest they lose sight and sense and the clarity which had to bring them to some satisfying truth at the end of the war.

Most of all, it was a kind of courtship Agrias understood.

She turned to follow, their bodies close but never touching, the muffled sound of rain and the muffled sound of armour familiar and warm despite the chilly weather, toward rest and food and prayer until the morrow, and what more they must see and do, as they would need their strength to walk through war and battle, once again.

"Ramza, where are we going tomorrow?"

"Let me worry about that."

"Then let us be your strength, Ramza."

Strength to walk into the pain.

Strength to step...

Upon the knife.

-End Chapter-