Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or placenames that appear in this fic: they are the property of Square-Enix and I am taking no financial gain from this work of fiction.
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I will
see you again to-morrow.
I will
see you again in a million years
I will
never know your dark eyes again.
These
are three ghosts I keep.
-- Carl Sandburg, "Valley Song" (1918)
- - - - - - - - - -
It is quiet in this place that smells of mildew. It is a textured sort of silence, edged with the sound of rain falling on stone and the clicking of knitting-needles. These small sounds pass unnoticed, but they're there, and even if neither of them listen both of them still hear. Sounds that pass like the rain outside and are forgotten just as soon, yet today there is something different, some little noise that cannot, will not be ignored.
He sits by the window as he has for days, a shadow among shadows, and he watches the raindrops that fall like a drummer's beat on the pavement, a background wall to their sphere of silence. In the murky, rain-damp light, the only colours are red and blue: blue for the rain and the moonshine-stones, red for her coat and his hair and the blood spilled between them. Red like blood, like wine and the rising sun so invisible in this place. Blue like ice, like rain and like the shadows on the snow that covers the world's most unreachable peaks.
The clicking of the knitting-needles is a constant, a never-changing whole they can depend on, and it fills the ever-stretching silence in between their uncommon conversations. Not that anyone else can call what they do conversations: few of their exchanges are made up of more than ten words, and what they say are the bare bones of sentences, raw and harshly truthful. Flowery descriptions seem strangers here, pearls in a heap of coals, and they do not say more than what is necessary. In the lengthy pauses – the silent in-betweens that last for days – the clicking sound of her knitting does away the need for speech.
In these silent days, she watches him, storing his image in her memory like one stores away trinkets of youth to remember better days. In the line of his tense shoulders, she can see the battles they have fought, against each other and together, and in the half-light falling on his hair she can remember the blood she has spilled. He knows she watches him, and she knows that he knows, but it is an open secret, the kind that disappears if it is spoken about, and so they never speak of it.
He comes to her long after he should have stopped. As the rain drums down on the ruins of her city, he comes to her, walking from the storms into her home without so much as a by-your-leave, and she's grown too used to his appearance to protest. Despite his burglar break-ins, she knows that he comes to her because he has run out of places to go and he knows she will not question him. She never says it out loud, and he never admits it, and so it has become yet another question they will never ask.
What he runs from even she does not know, but she knows that it is bad enough to keep him up at nights.
In each other's ghostly company, they become more than the knight and the bounty hunter; when no words need to be spoken and there is no demand for propriety and rigid manners, they are stripped of their masks, come undone in a mute transformation, and they become themselves once more. The room that smells of mildew and rainwater is a cage, locking her in and keeping the world out of her reach, but it is also safe; a safety she has craved, is craving even now. What he thinks of her desperation he keeps to himself.
Today, when he has been here for three days, the rain beats down as it always has. It creeps in like mist and wets her hands and feet and makes her bones ache, yet she cannot leave this place: strings of memories stronger than chains bind her, ever so tightly, to this rain-washed ruin and the shattered people within it. Grass and weeds will cover the fallen stones soon enough, and then she will be forced to leave, but she can still cheat herself that tomorrow, the ever-lasting tomorrow will be better.
"Does it ever stop raining?" his voice that grinds like stone on metal is the first thing that breaks the silence in days.
"If you don't like the weather, you can always leave." she answers, not hurt but still defensive of her beloved city, "You know where the door is."
Her words, despite their not-too-serious intention, break the cold air and the quiet understanding between them, and just for a moment he turns away from the window and stares at her, though it's hard to tell with his tangled red hair in the way of his eyes: she knows that somewhere underneath the tangles and the never-meant-to-be strands, his eyes are watching her with an intensity she has never known in anyone but him. His gaze is too searching for her brittle comfort, and when he speaks again the words scrape against her like the rough stonework around them.
"You need to get out of this rotting ruin, Crescent," this is the first time he has spoken her name in all the time in between, "Every damn stone that falls down makes you wince."
In the face of her silence, he continues, breaking every rule they have set but never spoken about as he goes, every word tearing into her with teeth and claws of iron and of truth, and she can do nothing but listen: her speech is gone, her tongue numb and mute.
"This place is a rotting corpse, a ruin," he is angry now, but his voice never wavers: with the precision of knives thrown from a killer's hand, his words land precisely where he aims. "Beyond every hope of redemption, you sit here in your safe corner with your knitting and your spear and a man who cannot remember your face if he tries, and then you act as if this is right! Burmecia is dead and gone, even if you build it up like it was it'll still be dead and there's nothing, nothing you can do about it, and you still cling to it like seaweed to driftwood."
She's raging and bleeding and hurt, and she wishes that this is not how it happens, that somewhere in the afterlife her mother is having tea while her father mends the roof and that she's still a knight of something more than rubble, but she's just not, and that makes his words hurt all the more.
"Every day you wake up and you drink your damn tea and you look out the window on the ruins that look just like they did yesterday and the day before that, and you see nothing wrong with it," even though his words are angry, their meaning all too clear, his voice never changes from its level calm state, and that made it somehow worse.
In a last defense, the last stand of the knight she wishes she still was, she straightens a back that has been bowed for too long, squaring her shoulders and meeting the gaze she knows is on her. Not one line in his stance betrays that he has just told her the scathing truth, and he watches her silently as she gathers her shivering emotions to reply.
"If my disposition bothers you so much, I cannot understand why you keep returning," she is arguing now, her hands shaking in an anger that has been locked away for months, years.
One shivering, impossible moment (now she can see his eyes, and for the first time she can remember he is truly angry, all blue skin and bloodstain-hair and slow rage and she is afraid), the world tilts upside down like it did when the metal-and-feathers puppet fought is mad man's battle, and she is standing on the edge with nowhere to look but down. Like a dream, a crawling, bleeding, eyes-in-the-dark dream, he moves: arms come undone from their crossing, one hand snatching up his precious claws from a rotting bench, the other grabbing the strap of his meager pack.
Then she is suddenly alone, the door still open and letting in all the world's wind and all the world's rain, and she was acutely aware of her loneliness. The wind rattled through the tumble-down shelves and the ornaments bought and cared for by someone else before the puppets came, and the wetness on her face is too warm to be rain and he's gone again, leaving her here in this place where days grow longer for each week that passes and the man waiting for her in the place she used to call home does not remember the day they went swimming in the mountain-stream (that memory she warmed herself with even as she heard rumours of his death), and if this is what life is like she is not sure if she wants to be part of the game any more.
The door has been pulled off its hinges, a lonely and echoing drumbeat against the wind and the rain and she wrests it shut, wasting more energy than she should but it doesn't matter now, and it never will again; if this is all she'll ever have, if this is the place she will stay when all her life has crumbled into pieces (he can't be dead, they're all telling lies because she remembers that night so long ago when she told her, swore truthfully and determined, that they would live forever or until she found him, and the glittering life in his eyes did not let her believe otherwise) and everyone who matters is moving on, then she is going to die in this place like the truer knights before her, those who had not failed.
- - - - - - - - -
That night, Fratley makes tea and they sit in silence, and for the first time in a time beyond ageless, she does not go through the usual routines: as the sun sets she does not speak of days long gone and over because something in the truths told has caught hold, clinging to her mind like an insistent scar. She knows now that there will be no more mountain streams, no more swimming, and that she will never wake up to the sweet tune of her knight's 'I love you's: she knows now that the future has forever changed, turned into something she doesn't want to live.
- - - - - - - - -
He comes back, his pack missing and the leatherwork of his claw torn up, and she lets him in like she always has and they return to their game of silence, but they both know that this time the rules have changed and the board is different: she has aged the lifetime she missed in his absence, and where she was the constant he has now taken her place, and it is she who cannot speak her mind even if she wants to.
An unfamiliar surprise is evident in his actions, however, when she presents him with a lopsided scarf in a vaguely green colour (the damp has washed it out) but he accepts it nonetheless, wrapping it around his neck to ward of a chill she is certain that he cannot feel, and in his own way he has accepted her peace-offering, shown a friendship that always has and always will consist of sharp angles and awkward silences.
They need no words as he sees all of her belongings stuffed into the rotting cupboards of their hideaway, her spear leaning against the wall and no sign of her amnesiac knight. She has moved on and so has he, and when he leaves this time he will not be leaving alone.