#❛ a'atahni tia. － i can't help but love you even though i try not; i can't help but want you. ⟨ hiroto caelum / oathofpromises. ⟩

[crystalmarred]

Rare is the moment that people hurt by past experiences come together to find healing. Though that journey has not yet been seen to completion, with hurt that yet lingers at the edges of shadowy rooms, Bonding is one step of many towards one another and the child that calls Hiroto ( @oathofpromises ) and A'atahni her fathers. February 3, 2024.

[crystalmarred]

Hiroto looked across at A'atahni as he took a slow sip of his beverage. Tsuru was tucked into bed, and the two men were spending quality time together. The viper reached out and softly entwined his hands with the others.

“A’atahni… I was wondering what you would think about changing your last name to Caelum. I know I never pushed it when we got married, but I want you and Tsuru to truly feel like part of my life. You know the story with my own family, but I wanted to ask if it’s something you would want to do.” 

Hiroto knew that was a lot to ask of anyone, but it had been the whole center of his attention for quite some time. The two made him happy, and all he wanted was to make them content as well.

(Some soft for the husbands <3 know we talked about this a bit in DMs)

UNPROMPTED ⇢ @oathofpromises

It had become habit for the two of them, to put Tsuru to bed and then spend the remainder of the evening together. Often Atahni would grab his drink and curl into Hiroto, sometimes to find wandering hands and other times, something sweeter.

When Hiroto reached out, laced their fingers together, it made clear the latter was more in the cards than the former. His lips curled upwards into a smile, his eyes lidded, though he didn't quite manage to lean up and kiss him before words were spoken between them.

A'atahni, Hiroto started. An odd usage of his name, given the two of them had married. The use of the tribal letter at the front of his name felt so... foreign now, after all this time.

But the sentence that followed widened his eyes.

The thought hadn't even crossed his mind, truthfully. Not because he didn't love Hiroto—though that still felt strange to say, at times—but because he'd never had a surname. Tia was not a last name. It was a title, awarded to him by the absence of a better option. For the longest time, he just been A'atahni and no one more.

"Meadowsweet, you know I've no last name to speak of," Atahni started, though he was quick to continue, 'fore Hiroto assumed he meant something that he did not. "I'd love to... I know Tsuru would, too..."

Atahni paused to shift closer to his husband, lean into his side.

"Are you sure you want me to?"

He had to give him some way out of it, didn't he? Though that was, perhaps, a silly thing to think, given they'd been Bonded some time ago.

[crystalmarred]

[ propose ] after a successful proposal, sender slides the engagement ring onto receiver's finger-Hiroto to A’atahni

MEME ( accepting! ) ⇢ [ propose ] after a successful proposal, sender slides the engagement ring onto receiver's finger. ⇢ @oathofpromises

Unexpected. That was the best way that A'atahni Tia could describe Hiroto Caelum having kneeled before him to offer him a ring of all things. It wasn't common in Eorzea to offer a ring. Often, it was a wristlet that symbolized the promise, but Hiroto had gone further than that to declare his... his love.

It was still such a foreign word, but it no longer tasted sour on his tongue when he spoke it, no longer swelled an unbearable ache in his chest that no doubt stemmed from the fear of a loss that he'd already once suffered.

Perhaps it was because Hiroto had been dealt a similar hand, though the circumstances differed dramatically. It had made it easier in ways, harder in others. It made him want in a way he had only more recently started to accept he didn't need to fear as badly as he had.

When first Hiroto had broached the subject, A'atahni had thought little of his gentle, sweet confessions. After everything, it was so foreign an idea that someone would genuinely express a desire to be with him without end. But Hiroto had said something painfully similar. And then he'd said it once more, twice, until A'atahni had done himself a service and stopped counting by his own will.

What was it he had said that first time? It was something like... I couldn't bear the thought of living without you, or something to that effect. A'atahni couldn't remember, had dismissed it at the time, slapped him playfully and told him to stop. He'd paid him no mind, convinced it was an exaggeration or worse yet, a lie.

No longer did that niggling thought of no, you absolutely could, creep up in the back of his mind.

Still, it did not prove any less surprising when Hiroto had come home and insisted upon a dinner, just the two of them. A homemade dinner with Tsuru surprisingly turning in with an early dinner and hardly a fuss for it, too.

It was strange from the start, but when he added the candles and the flowers, it only served to further his growing suspicions. Worse, then, is when their meal finally came to an end and Hiroto reached out, intertwined their fingers.

Part of A'atahni knew it before he said it, before he started in with his spiel that sounded far too close to marriage vows and then finally, finally, he stood and rounded the table, asked the question that A'atahni had known was coming yet he remained unprepared for.

Will you marry me?

A score of fear washed over him. His heart pounded, his lips dry, his tongue twisted around words that terrified him in a way he could not properly express. Were he the same man he'd been before, surely he would have answered with a laugh and a curt refusal. He'd have broken Hiroto's heart quicker than it could beat and not been bothered by it.

But now, he surprised himself. When he laughed, it was watery, as if tears sat waiting to fall over the brim of his eye and muss the mascara on his eyelashes.

A'atahni wanted him. Not in the way of taking him to bed—he'd done that so many times, after all, he should have gotten bored an age ago—but in a much deeper way that he wished he didn't understand, that he dreaded the familiarity of.

"Y-Yes," A'atahni said, though his voice shook as much as his hands did. Fear gripped him in a way that was different from Hiroto Caelum, who assumed betrayal over what A'atahni worried for most.

Loss. Now that he had fallen in love, all that made his heart ache was the reminder of what had happened to C'torih, his death and the permanent loss of him. He wished that he'd been stabbed in the back, that he at least knew some part of the man he'd loved was still out there, even if fictional.

Though to say it had been a struggle, to watch Hiroto push the ring onto his finger was so, so easy. The way his eyes watered, he had no choice but to reach up, tug away the glasses and sit them to the side. He left them on the kitchen table as he reached down to cup Hiroto's cheeks. When he stood, rose into A'atahni's waiting embrace, their lips met and a needy sound of want slipped out.

A whisper escaped him as their lips parted. A soft, too-gentle, "I love you..."

Confidence in those words, at last, after months of avoiding it like it might redraw the tattooed scars on his heart. It terrified him still, but somehow... somehow... it did not weather him as it once did.

[crystalmarred]

A place so near to where he lost his last lover, where his husband holds him close now... The Violet Tides...

[crystalmarred]

playing with their hair-Hiroto to A’atahni

MEME ⇢ @oathofpromises

It wasn't uncommon for A'atahni to find hands in his hair, long and calloused fingers tangled into black locks that mixed with the bleached streaks made to make him look more related to the little girl Hiroto had since started to call his daughter just the same.

"Hiroto," he started as a smile spread across his glossed lips as the word rolled off his tongue with such ease that it would have startled him those many months ago when they were new to this, before they'd have called it a relationship proper. "Did you know Tsuru asked to dye pink into her hair?"

It was his doing, he was sure. He'd bleached his hair after he'd adopted her, so some part of that must have influenced her want to mimic the features of Hiroto now, though she hadn't the context to understand that it wouldn't quite make sense for her to look like both of her fathers.

Nevermind that both of them were far too smitten with the physique of other men for it to be likely that they'd properly father a child outside of adoption.

"She wants to look more like you, I suppose?"

It was an interesting thought. He wouldn't have to bleach his hair anymore, at least, though it was hardly a decision he could make on his own now that he was a married man and Hiroto had not only taken on the responsibility of being her other parent, but also gifted them both his own name.

The way that Hiroto played with his hair, toyed with the locks there, it was hard to reach up and pull his hand down to his glossed lips to press a kiss on the back of his hand.

"What do you think? Should we let her?"

[crystalmarred]

A conversation shared on the deck, long after the moon had risen high in the sky, long after Tsuru had been lost to sleep...