#WELCOME TO 'IDEA THAT SHOULD BE IN STORMCHASER' PART 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

[fistsoflightning]

let it all be said

ffxivwrite2022 14: attrition n. the act of weakening or exhausting by constant attack or pressure.

thancred & zaya. 6.0 85-86 MSQ spoilers. 1582 wc.

Do you really love me?

It was something Zaya had asked him with a heavy tongue and far less coherency through the haze of their first levinstrike tincture, when Chessamile and Tehra’ir and Urianger hadn’t come to a consensus on how much aethersand was needed to restore the natural imbalance of Zaya’s aether and had overestimated in their calculations, and in the moment Thancred hadn’t known how to react before they’d passed out. When he’d asked them the next morning, baffled and a bit hurt, whatever they had seen in his expression had them panicking. A seed of doubt planted in their head by a nosy onlooker, they’d told him, apologetic. The regulars at the Seventh Heaven hadn’t made it any better when Zaya had made to return to the First with his belongings at his request, seemingly convinced that Thancred couldn’t have changed in the years since.

I don’t know how you couldn’t, they explained frantically, even though Thancred had done his best to assure them that no real harm had been done. If the way you hold me isn’t out of love, then I don’t know what way is, and then, more hesitant: I just thought you might have said so, by now.

Thancred had been too focused at the time on keeping Zaya from worrying themselves to tears over nothing to process that last statement, but it stuck with him like burnt caramel in his teeth. It didn’t seem to bother Zaya past being a fleeting, nasty whisper in their head ignited by everything else they’d told him about, but in exchange it became a voice in his own, ever louder in the dark.

Why haven’t you told them?

At first it was because it was too soon—even after years of looking and wanting and telling himself they are not someone you can have—and then it was out of fear that he would only sound like his old self, when he used words like love and beloved carelessly. Later, he decided to tell them when they returned to the Source, and then changed that resolution when he wasn’t ready to ‘when the world stopped needing to be saved every other week’.

That last one in particular had been a bad excuse, because now the Final Days that had wiped out the Ancients were terrorizing Thavnair, threatened to destroy their very star, and he still hadn’t said shite. 

Thancred rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms before he returned to wringing the excess water out of a pair of washcloths in the basin. Now was hardly the time for him to get stuck in his own head, lest he turn himself into a blasphemy over three words he kept himself from saying.

If not now, a quieter, more honest part of him said, no less scornful than the voice that accompanied him in his darkest hours, then when, you daft idiot? You know well enough that the world never stops long enough for the two of you.

It was a question that he had no good answer to, but he was saved from having to consider one by Zaya, knocking gently on the drawers of the vanity they were leaning on to call his attention; when Thancred looked up, he was momentarily charmed by the way they had pinned their bangs away from their face before he realized what Zaya wanted of him.

"My apologies," he said softly, making his way over before he held out one of the damp washcloths to them. "I fear I got lost in thought."

Zaya looked up at him curiously, but ultimately said nothing as they took their washcloth and turned around to clean their face. When their eyes caught his again in the reflection of the mirror, their resultant smile was brief and dim before they looked away, busying themselves with finding their facepaint in their pack.

Perhaps it was the early hour, or the burning sky hidden behind the curtains he’d drawn shut the night before, but Thancred had never seen Zaya’s nerves get the best of them, not like this. His eyes narrowed as they shifted their weight from one foot to the other and then back again, the same way they might have kept balanced in a fight.

"Feeling alright?" he asked. They stilled, eyes flicking back to his figure in the mirror, and then set down their usual assortment of cosmetics and brushes on the vanity.

“Fine,” Zaya answered hastily, signing the word into the mirror for him to see. It was, annoyingly, the answer Thancred was expecting—after all, what better way to spread despair than for the Warrior of Light, savior of worlds, to admit they were less than alright with the current apocalypse they had to fix—but then their hands twitched, halfway back to their pot of facepaint and their brush, and lifted again as Zaya moved to add, “nervous.”

Thancred kept quiet as he stepped out of the shadows and to Zaya’s back, slightly to their left so he could be seen in the mirror. “I’m here to lend an ear, should you have need of it.”

The scales on Zaya’s nose and brow warped as they scrunched their nose and reached up for their cracked horn, fingers looping in the tails of the silk ribbon still tied around it. “M’ horns ‘re fine,” they said, reflection frowning back at him in the mirror. Thancred laughed, reaching out to clasp their shoulder.

“Not quite what I was implying, bluebird,” he said, delighting briefly in Zaya’s flustered expression before he clarified, “Did you want to talk about whatever has you anxious?”

Zaya shook their head, though not in refusal. “Scared,” they admitted to his reflection, the gold specks in their irises flickering as the candlelight swayed back and forth. “Th’ land is on fire, and ‘m leaving.”

It was a fear Thancred understood well; he had never taken well to being redirected from the battle at hand, despite knowing full well his capabilities served better elsewhere. “Things do tend to worsen when we turn away,” he said, gently running his thumb along the line where the scales on Zaya’s arm met skin, “Though I suppose you have far less experience than I do in retreating to fight another battle.”

He watched the mirror even as Zaya’s head dipped down, their face invisible as the shadows overtook everything except the glow of their limbal rings. “Wanna stay.”

Thancred swallowed thickly, and felt as if the air around them both had changed through naught but Zaya’s honesty. His hand dropped from their shoulder so he could curl his arms around their sides, pulling them closer to his chest. “If you were not our best chance of reaching out to Elidibus, I would…” he said quietly, biting his lip before he could continue.

Strictly speaking, Elidibus seemed far more reasonable than his fellow Paragons. There was a fair chance he would speak truthfully on the subject of the Final Days to the other four Warriors, but they were too far beyond the point of no return to risk learning nothing, and Zaya had apparently established some manner of bond with the Ascian in the short moment before he was sealed in the Crystal Tower. Anagnorisis, Urianger had called it. Recognition.

If they hadn’t pointed the fact out themselves over their table at the Meyhane last night, Thancred might have fought to keep Zaya here, ashamed as he was to admit it—but it was at their suggestion that their paths were diverging.

Years ago, it had been him citing their duty as Scions to keep the distance between the two of them from growing closer. It would be unfair to ask differently of Zaya now, especially with so much more at stake than there was when it was just primals and tempering and Garlemald. Completely selfish.

But to hold his tongue was to keep running. All these years, he’d buried his true thoughts away out of fear that his words might sway someone he loved into doing the wrong thing, especially because his dearest friends and family were all in the same business of keeping the world from calamity—only for his lack of them to nearly convince his foster daughter to give up her life to make him happy. He’d failed to tell Louisoix and Minfilia how much he cared for them because he’d convinced himself it wasn’t the right time to pour his heart out.

When, if ever, was the right time, for people like them? Where did duty end and loving begin, if they were ever separate to begin with? How wrong could loving someone be, if all you had was stolen time between this terror and the next?

What broke him from his reverie was not some answer from on high to all his long-held questions, but a touch, and a voice he loved; Zaya’s head shifted beneath his to look at him in the mirror, one of their hands coming to rest on his above their sternum as they steadied their voice and asked, “You would what?”

Perhaps a better Scion would have said nothing, rather than let the most reckless Warrior of Light know there was a different path for them to take; Thancred, however, knew Zaya preferred the truth above all else, and so he let himself fall.

“I would have asked you to stay,” he said, and then, almost drowned out by the sound of his own heart racing: “I love you.”