#frydlona x haurchefant

[weatheredpileoftomes]

moonkissed

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 18, a free day, written bc Day 16 reminded me that I’d meant to get back to Frydlona and Menphina when I wrote about Frydlona’s personal theological beliefs (6.0 spoilers). Frydlona/Exarch and past unrequited Frydlona/Haurchefant, ??? to Shadowbringers postgame, ~3000 words. Spoilers through 5.3, for dark knight jobquests through 70, and for Shadowbringers craftquests capstone; canonical character death, survivor’s guilt. (There’s an immediate sequel to this I leave as bait for another even later future me.)

Menphina’s blessings are as stubborn as the tides, if not as regular.

The mark of the Lover is in Coerthas, graven deep into one of the cairns Frydlona passes every time she returns to Haurchefant’s memorial. They placed it well.

She doesn’t know if that was one of his favorite spots only for the view of Ishgard. It is a lovely one, with the city rising up from the mists like a confection of towers, prettier yet at dawn or dusk with the harsh grey stone washed rose and golden. But perhaps he’d found it in the first place coming to the mark of the Lover to pray, and only come back after for the sights. She doesn’t know. She will never know. She has not the right to know.

The Heaven of Ice is not just for lovers, but for knights and heroes, the truest and purest of what Halone could have been. She can’t imagine Haurchefant anywhere else—he was all of those things, little as she’d welcomed it while it still could have mattered. And it must have been gentle Menphina to welcome him there, not Halone in all her wrath.

Centuries of eager hands have worn the stone around the mark smooth as if it’s been polished, reaching out to it for blessing.

Frydlona flinches from it every time she passes. She comes to the memorial only in daylight and always leaves at duskfall, not daring to stand by it under Menphina’s silver beams. The Lover might be a gentle goddess, even welcoming Oschon in the face of Llymlaen’s justified anger, but surely even she must have her limits. The Hell of Ice is not only Halone’s domain, after all, any more than the Heaven of Ice is only Menphina’s.

It’s hard to imagine something so easy to anger the Lover as rejecting her blessings. She had given Frydlona a gallant and true-hearted knight, a man instantly loyal, warmly courageous, selflessly devoted. He represented Menphina’s virtues better than Ishgard’s; he could have been spun of the goddess’s own moonbeams to be her champion.

He would have helped Frydlona carry her burdens, if only she had been willing to let him, and she had slapped his every offer away.

The Hell of Ice is for cowards and oathbreakers, and Frydlona broke no oaths to him, and yet.

The moon of the First shines a subtly different light across the world, faintly gold-tinged like the great wall of frozen Light that still stands in Amh Araeng. Dalamud’s light was red-tinted, Menphina’s is pure white.

“Does she have a name?” Frydlona asks Lyna one night not long after returning from the Greatwood. She wouldn’t have asked before, or at least she wouldn’t have dared ask Lyna, but it seems most of Norvrandt’s secrets have been peeled away before her already. “The moon, I mean.”

“We call it”—a string of what must be Viis that Frydlona can’t even begin to break apart—“‘the Chariot of Yx’Lowka’. The Church of the First Light only called it the moon. The dwarves…” Lyna shrugs with a clank of her mail. “Who can say what the dwarves call it, if it’s anything other than ‘moon’.”

Frydlona nods. Odd, to stand under an unnamed moon, that only carries and makes no judgment.

“And you?” Lyna asks, frowning up at Frydlona. “What is…she…where the Exarch and you come from?”

Why Lyna hasn’t just asked the Exarch Frydlona couldn’t say, but even if it wouldn’t be rude to dismiss her question, it’s only fair to answer. “Her name is Menphina,” she says. “Goddess of love and…kindness, I suppose you’d say. The people she chose as her saints fed the hungry and brought medicine to the sick. Everyone who met them came away the better for it.”

Frydlona would love to be that kind of person, but if she ever could have been it’s been too many years and far, far too many deaths for it. The lives she’s left in ruins behind her…

Lyna nods sharply. “I see.”

That same unnamed moon shines gentle on the Crystarium as they limp back from Amaurot—all alive, all well. Somehow, all well. For a moment as they cross Tessellation Frydlona sees the Warriors of Darkness, joyful and waving, and Ardbert running ahead to meet them. She blinks and they’re all gone, only the crowds of people she’s come to know and work with since she came. All just as joyful.

They insist on a party. There’s already food, and music. Frydlona takes off her mourning and puts her Warrior of Darkness costume back on, brightening it up with a sash the shimmering blue of—well, it matches her glaives, technically, but she isn’t bringing them.

She doesn’t know what to say to the Exarch. She wouldn’t have known what to say to the Exarch even if he hadn’t told her she might as well keep calling him that, instead of by his name. They’re…colleagues, she supposes.

It’s a little—

It’s kind of—

People are thinking things, is the thing, from the way everyone talked to her after Emet-Selch had shot him and stolen him to Amaurot, as if she had some special right to be upset.

She brushes her fingers across the crystalline blades of her glaives. They’re beautiful, as much jewelry as weapon. He’d had them made for her, and kept them all those years, and then, what, been too shy to give them to her? She thinks, from the way he’d looked seeing her carrying them below the Tempest, that that must have been it.

She thinks about the way he’d looked seeing her carrying them below the Tempest, the way he’d shivered when she checked him for injuries, then shakes her head, hard.

Frydlona has spent years wishing she’d given Haurchefant the chance he should have had. They could have been happy. She could have made him happy, instead of only making his life harder and more frustrating until he’d—even then—jumped in front of Zephirin’s spear for her.

She’d treated the Exarch with suspicion and hostility, and still he’d planned the whole time to throw himself into the Rift for her.

He isn’t her second chance. She can be nice to him, certainly. There’s no reason she shouldn’t. They can be colleagues, and if she happens to find a book she might think he’d like she can buy it for him the same way she would for Alphinaud, or bring him something to eat if he forgets the same way she would for Y’shtola, and that’s perfectly reasonable.

And it wouldn’t hurt to spend time with him—she’s going to see him when she goes down to the party, certainly, and there’s no harm in talking to him there, for a start. Of course she wants him to enjoy the time he spends with her, when he was so ready to never have it again.

But she can’t— It isn’t fair, just because he’s alive, just because she saved him, to try to— She’s seen the way he looks at her, now that she can see his eyes again. She’s heard the way he speaks to her, even before that, the warmth in his voice like the heat at the door to a forge. It would be too easy, if he speaks to her again like he did above Kholusia, or in the ruins of Holminster, to just…reach out, like he so clearly wishes she would, like he just as clearly would never ask her to.

And she can’t, when he deserves so much better than her pity, her obligation, her wish to make amends.

He isn’t Haurchefant. She’d do well to remember that.

Frydlona has no shrine to Menphina. She’d had a runestone, once. It’s in her parents’ home in Cliffhide still if they haven’t gotten rid of it—she has a vague memory of brushing her fingers across it, thinking let me find that again, at least let me have another chance. It was before Haurchefant’s death, of course, she wouldn’t have dared after. So it must have been just before she left home.

Instead she kneels at the window of her room at the Rising Stones. Menphina is barely a sliver in the swirling sky above Mor Dhona, but that sliver is enough.

Please, she prays. Please, don’t let me hurt him.

The thin gleam of white in the sky makes no response.

Don’t let me do it. Keep me from just taking what I want, when I can’t give fairly in return. Let him find someone who loves him back for himself, not because he would have died for them and they think it would make him happy.

The thought hurts as it should. Menphina, pale and undistant, remains unmoved. Frydlona gets up slowly from the floor and makes her way to bed.

Frydlona finds the young Elf boy wedged into the corner of the steps outside the Pendants just at the edge of the pool of lamplight, sniffling.

“What’s wrong?”

He breaks down sobbing at her question, and she drops to her knees and pats his shoulder, feeling useless. Dead parents, mayhap—it’s still not entirely safe out there, with some sin eaters still roaming, and the usual sorts of beasts as well. Or even just the usual hurts of childhood—a fight with a friend, a friend whose family has gone looking for better opportunity elsewhere, a parent who’s too harsh or too unsympathetic.

He just cries harder at the touch, small body shaking.

“Can I do anything?” Frydlona asks, knowing she can’t. She doesn’t think he’s hurt, and she’s certain he’s not hungry. Nobody in the Crystarium would let a child starve.

“You’re too nice!” he wails.

She sits back in surprise.

Through a fresh flood of sobbing she thinks she makes out “night-light” before his voice jumps in pitch and his words all run together, which…what?

“Is this about the night-lights I made?”

A nod.

Something she actually can fix? It feels like a lesser miracle in itself. “Do you want one? I can make one for you, if…there were supposed to be enough for everyone.”

He raises his face, red and blotchy from crying, from his knees. “I broke it! I had one and I broke it and my mother says I can’t ask for another one because I don’t take care of my things and it’s dark! And you’re so nice and I broke it!” His voice rises to a scream.

“All right,” Frydlona says gently. “All right.” She finds a clean handkerchief in one of her pockets and hands it to him. “Well, you didn’t ask for a new one, I just found out you didn’t have one. So if I make you a new one right now, then you haven’t asked, and you’ll still have a night-light to take home with you.”

“But I broke it! Aren’t you listening? I broke it!” He balls up the handkerchief and scrubs at his face with it.

Frydlona puts as much doubt into her voice as she can. “On purpose?”

There’s a pause. “…no.”

“And you’re sorry it got broken, aren’t you? If you had another one you’d take very good care of it?”

He nods frantically.

She checks her bag. A few crystals, some wire, jeweler’s pliers—ah, there, a nice fat round opal. Some fire and lightning in its heart will do a fine job of making light. “Things get broken sometimes. It’s just how it is. That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to fix them if you can fix them, or have anything like them ever again if you can’t.”

Sailors follow stars, but the sea follows the moon. Menphina has never pulled the waters of the First to and fro. The Tempest has never risen to her call or sunk in her absence.

Elidibus’s specters are so real Frydlona can touch them.

She knows this, because she has had to kill some of them already. She has cut into the memory of their flesh, spilled the memory of their blood. Nightmares that still won’t die, friends that already have or might still.

Myste clings to her hand, so tightly Frydlona can feel the bones grate together. It anchors her.

“Keep walking,” Fray says.

Frydlona had fumbled her glaives when Papalymo attacked her. Fray knows the greatsword best, and that’s what Frydlona is—what they are—carrying now, Fray’s hands wrapping around hers on the hilt every time she draws it before Fray is the one to swing, and swing, and swing again.

She lets Frydlona be the one to clean it, after.

“Look,” Myste cries. The sound is torn from his throat, so frantic Frydlona hardly recognizes it.

Across the square stand three men in Ishgardian garb, one of them with blue-silver hair the same gleaming shade as Myste’s. Frydlona stops dead, and even Fray doesn’t move her feet closer. Fray had walked her all through occupied Ala Mhigo, ridden Frydlona’s paralyzing fear like a bad crosswind and brought them safe to harbor anyway.

Fray stands there below the Tempest, on a star neither of them were ever meant to walk, and stares just as Frydlona does.

Myste drops Frydlona’s hand and takes off at a run, pale as a ghost himself. She wants to call him back, but she doesn’t know if her voice will work. He circles the group and runs back, even faster. “It’s all right!” he calls. “Come see!”

Frydlona does move, then. They’re like the bystanders she had seen around some of her earlier battles but even more so. They don’t see her, or respond to her.

Her knees wobble and then give. She sinks to the cool stone.

Haurchefant is arguing with his father about Camp Dragonhead, the men and supplies they need and the ones they could use. Wages, repairs, profits and income. Frydlona doesn’t understand it, but she sits there and listens anyway.

Myste could never have shown her this, she knows it now. This Haurchefant can’t make any demands of her, and can’t offer her forgiveness in exchange. But Myste’s couldn’t have either, not really.

She’s never followed the economics of Ishgard. She’s never commanded a fort. She has no earthly idea what Haurchefant and his father are talking about. It’s so…ordinary, strangely so, for a conversation between a ghost and a memory, in such a place as this.

It’s real, she doesn’t doubt that much—even if this exact conversation never happened, it still could have. Elidibus’s specters are terrible because they’re so real. But it’s not what she remembered.

Count Fortemps’s face is younger, brighter. She’s sure Elidibus meant that to haunt her, but she knows. Arguing over the budget for Camp Dragonhead he’s a little pompous, a little old-fashioned, but still responsible. He listens when Haurchefant makes points. He’s willing to consider that he doesn’t know everything. There is a kindness to him, harsh as he can be to his living sons. Frydlona had feared that harshness herself the whole time Haurchefant had been alive, and hadn’t been able to see the kindness after without choking on it. This is a Count Fortemps she could look in the face.

Haurchefant is—she had remembered him differently, even now. He is the commander of Camp Dragonhead, responsible for dozens on dozens of lives. He is conscientious, passionate, well-informed.

And yet, the star is full of such people.

Frydlona sits quietly against the wall, watching him. He seems smaller than she imagined him, the living memory of the man whose ghost has driven her across greater distances than she can measure. She has carried so much for him, knowing he would have believed she could do it. Knowing that, as long as he had died for her, she had to do it.

Haurchefant exclaims, “And yet with only so many lancers on hand half of them will get only one day off a sennight, and the other half none! Either send us more men, or appeal to Lord Drillemont to take on a greater share of the patrols.”

The deep peacock-blue of the haunted city blurs behind Frydlona’s tears. He had been a good man, and she wishes she had treated him as he deserved. And yet, what would he say if he could see her now?

Elidibus’s specter carries on his appeal, but Frydlona thinks of the real Haurchefant, dying in her arms, blood bubbling in his mouth as he asked her to smile as one last favor to him.

She thinks of the soul-deep exhaustion that had driven Fray to lash out like a wounded animal in a trap, of years afterward spent faking a strength and a courage she didn’t feel. Of the bright and shining gold of her Warrior of Light outfit. Of the dread of people expecting that of her. Of forcing herself, time and again, to go on at the end of her strength, dragging herself one more aching step not with the love of her friends but from the fear of a ghost’s regret.

She thinks of Haurchefant after Ul’dah, bringing her hot chocolate when she was frozen past the marrow of her bones, of Haurchefant in Ishgard, inviting her to a chocobo race, a play, a choral mass at Saint Reymanaud’s Cathedral.

She thinks, perhaps, she has done his memory a terrible wrong.

Myste’s small arms wrap around her as she cries, here, in the deep gloom under an alien sea, far below any ray of sun or moon. She cries until she feels washed clean as old shell.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

let me in

For Wondrous Tails of FFXIV, “confessions”. Frydlona/Exarch and past unrequited Frydlona/Haurchefant, post-Shadowbringers (probably 5.2), spoilers through the end of 5.0 and for drk quests through 50, ~2200 words. Canonical character death, grief, survivor’s guilt.

Frydlona is tired of the lie.

“I was wondering,” the Exarch says softly, “if you would be willing to tell me of some of your adventures yourself.”

Rain taps lightly against the glass overhead. The lavender tops of the trees far below his favorite vantage point sway. A few children splash gleefully in a puddle, so small Frydlona can’t even tell what sort of children they are. She wonders how long it’ll be before rain in Norvrandt is a commonplace thing again.

How long before she doesn’t have a reason to be up here with him anymore.

“Which ones?” she asks, trying to sound as if she hadn’t been trying to catch him watching her just for the selfish glee of it. She shouldn’t. He deserves better.

“Oh, any of them.” A moment’s pause, then he adds, more slowly, “I have…wondered what happened just after we parted ways. Count Edmont de Fortemps’s memoirs said your arrival in Ishgard was just a few moons after I sealed the Tower.”

Of course bloody Heavensward has followed her even here, to another star. “Mm.”

The Exarch looks away, giving her the crystalline side of his profile. She wonders if the crystal soaks up the cool of the rain. “Pardon me. That was a painful time in your life, and I had no right—”

“We went back to Saint Coinach’s Find,” Frydlona says quickly. “It was…uncomfortable. Nero left right away, and that distracted Cid, but everyone else… We wanted to free you.”

She thinks he smiles, a little.

“But there was a lot happening with the traitor in the Immortal Flames and—well, in the Crystal Braves, too, but we didn’t know that yet. And I don’t really know anything about magitek or Allagan technology except how to break it, so I left the Ironworks and the Sons trying to figure it out and went to do what Minfilia asked me to.” Did he think she should have stayed, or wish she had? Is that it?

She must have hesitated a moment too long, because he says, “Of course,” as if it really is that obvious. “I hope…I hope you were able to find some respite between these errands?”

Frydlona shrugs. She wouldn’t describe Severian’s desperate quest as respite, but Serendipity had insisted she learn a few things about mammet repair, and Fufucha and Redolent Rose were always pleasant company. “I helped a few of my guildmasters with projects when I was in the right place for it. Did some fishing. I managed a quick visit home after Moenbryda died—it was good to see my family, and especially later I was glad I’d had the chance.”

“Of…course.” This time he sounds… She doesn’t know what to call it. Not uncertain, exactly.

She doesn’t know what answer he wants.

“And then you were all betrayed.” The Exarch looks up at her. His Allagan red eyes are vivid against his pale face, faded hair, the rain-veiled city beyond. “Yes?”

“Wilred tried to warn us.” She’d been so angry at Wilred when they first met—what had he hoped to gain by summoning Rhalgr, except the deaths of everyone who followed him?—but she knows the Ascians better, now. She knows Wilred better, too. Poor boy. “They killed him before he could, and then…”

There have been worse nightmares since then, but the thing that still haunts her most isn’t Nanamo crumpling to the floor while the Warden’s Paean echoes uselessly in the air, or the hot spray of Raubahn’s blood across her dress, or even Merlwyb and Kan-E-Senna turning and walking away while Frydlona herself knelt on the floor in chains.

It’s the knowledge that if she’d had her wand with her when she went for her personal visit with the sultana, Thancred and Y’shtola would never have been lost for so long in the Lifestream. Hydaelyn might have taken Minfilia anyway, but perhaps she could at least have said goodbye, or Hydaelyn might have found someone else. They could have had more time with Papalymo. Maybe even Haurchefant wouldn’t have had to die.

“We were all betrayed,” she agrees.

The only sound is the rain, drumming on the glass, roaring down the gutters. The Exarch waits patiently while Frydlona prepares to tell the well-worn lie—she’d forgotten to seed it, earlier, hadn’t mentioned those trips to and from Camp Dragonhead as a respite. She probably should have. It’s certainly what Alphinaud and Tataru had assumed.

Menphina’s tears, she doesn’t want to. The truth is too ugly to give him, even if it would cure him of his infatuation, but maybe if she just…doesn’t lie. “We couldn’t think of anywhere to go except to hope for a welcome in Ishgardian lands after that. I didn’t know that the Admiral and the Elder Seedseer had their doubts, or that Lolorito”—she makes a face—“could be reasoned with. Not that we could have stayed in Ul’dah either way. Lord Francel didn’t have the resources to help us, really, but if Lord Haurchefant had refused we would have tried him instead.”

The Exarch opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again. He looks baffled.

She’s doing such a poor job of this. Nothing to do but go on. “He was…he was very kind. Much kinder than he had to be.” Her eyes are prickling. She has to breathe deep, swallow hard, but her voice at least doesn’t break. She hadn’t expected the truth to hurt this much, still. “He tried to make us welcome. Give us what little joy there was to give in Coerthas.”

Frydlona had thought the worst of him, grieving and unmoored as she was, and that is not a conversation she wants to have with the Crystal Exarch, or with Feo Ul again. Cold and cruel and heartless.

“It was lonely.” The strain of it rips at her throat. She can feel the tears running down her cheeks, hotter than the spray of the rain. “It was cold, and grey, and for all I knew most of my friends were dead, and he was—he was so kind, and he didn’t have to be. I didn’t expect—”

She does lose her voice there, breaking off in a sob.

The Exarch reaches out his crystal hand toward her, glittering through her tears, then jerks it back as if he’s been burned.

She doesn’t deserve his comfort. She shouldn’t even be crying; she has no right. “I’m sorry,” she says, as clearly as all her training will let her. Even so, her voice is still thick with the tears she can’t stop shedding. “I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

“You loved him.” There’s pain in his voice. She can’t look at him. “There’s no shame in grieving him still.”

“I didn’t, though.” Frydlona almost chokes on it, but she’s said it.

She thinks she’s said it, anyway. It might have been Fray, but Fray wouldn’t have stopped at a simple truth. Fray thinks Frydlona should take advantage of the Exarch’s devotion. Fray would have said—Twelve only know what she would have said.

“I…you…what?” He sounds lost, not angry or even disappointed.

The whole ugly mess bursts out, as easily as it had to Urianger. “I didn’t think he cared for me. I hated Coerthas, and Ishgard, and every wretched soul who let the Inquisition just slaughter anyone they wanted, and it seemed like he was part of that. He’d wanted me to save his friend—I didn’t think of that as brave, at the time, I was so disgusted by everyone else. And then we owed him such a debt for taking us in when we were outlaws, I didn’t know how I could ever repay it. It was…too much, if he’d just been looking for a mistress.”

The Exarch draws a sharp breath, but he has the sense not to interrupt.

“He wasn’t,” Frydlona says quickly. “He never—once we were in Ishgard, once his father made us wards, he even stopped flirting. I think he…guessed, a little.” She’d resented him so fiercely, and he had taken such care to never push her for a no she might have been afraid to give. “But the count making us wards was even worse, a bigger debt. Too much. I didn’t know what Haurchefant wanted, and I was so tired, and he kept…talking to me. Inviting me to things. I didn’t—I could have told him I was tired, instead of going and pretending I was having fun. Getting angrier and more tired the whole time.”

The sheer waste of it levels her. It always does. He had only wanted to spend time with her, give her a distraction to lift her spirits. See her smile. She’d made everything so much worse for herself.

“I thought I was… I don’t know. A funny hobby to him. I never took a single thing he said seriously, except the flirting, and even that I thought was just that any other adventurer would do as well, and I was just convenient.” She hadn’t been convenient. She should have known. “And then he died saving my life, and I—I never. If I’d been…kinder, better, if I’d done anything to—to make his life better while he still had it…”

She closes her eyes. It does nothing to stop the tears. “His family all thought we’d been courting. I was afraid to tell them we weren’t while he was alive, in case that was the only reason we were allowed to stay, and then once he was dead… They thought he’d been happy. They thought he’d died like a lover in a ballad, and it made sense to them. I didn’t know how to take that away.”

She wishes it had been true. She thinks maybe they could have been happy, if she’d let them be.

For a moment there’s nothing but the rain, still beating on the glass above their heads. Then, so quietly she can barely hear him, the Exarch says, “Ah.”

It’s for the best, really. It shouldn’t feel as if her heart is cracking again to know that she’s disappointed him. She’s never deserved him, when all she can want is the chance to do it again and do it right this time.

“Did, ah. Did you…have anyone to confide in?”

“Biggs and Wedge, and Cid. Urianger.” That still cuts to the bone, even after his apology. The first person she’d told deliberately, and what he’d done with it. “My family. Thancred, eventually. You.” Sidurgu and Rielle know enough to be a comfort, but the fact they’ve given it without asking for details is more comfort yet.

“Ah,” the Exarch says again, much sharper. “I…see.”

Far off, over Lakeland, thunder rolls and fades.

“Frydlona.” He waits. When she looks at him, vision still blurred, he’s twisting one hand around the other wrist. “May I offer my opinion?”

She’s afraid of his opinion. “Yes.”

He glances up at her, eyes the brightest thing in this storm, and then away again. “I think he would—you showed some kindness to him then, did you not?”

Haurchefant’s blood on her hands, soaking into her clothes. They’d been past saving, and she hadn’t much wanted to try. Such a simple thing, to hold the dying. Even she couldn’t possibly have denied him that. The barest kindness imaginable, but still she nods.

“That would have been more than enough for—for a knight such as he,” the Exarch says.

Frydlona, rather hysterically, supposes he would know if anyone would, as he’d just barely managed not to say. It’s the reassurance she’d so desperately sought from Thancred, that he couldn’t give her. That maybe it could be all right, that maybe that one dying moment’s mercy counted for something after all. That maybe, even if he had thought about it—for a minute, a day, a year, a lifetime—first, that Haurchefant still wouldn’t have changed his mind. That she doesn’t have to bear that.

“I think he would not have saved your life for that to be a burden to you, or for you to be miserable.” The Exarch is looking back over the Crystarium again, with nothing but the crystal side of his face visible. The stone doesn’t move, but his ears are drawn down.

She’d said as much to Ryne, in Amaurot, and still not thought about it. “A smile better suits a hero,” she whispers.

It feels…better, and worse, at the same time. If she could set another part of being the Warrior of Light down, if she could stop trying to be someone worth a good man’s death…

She takes out a handkerchief to dry her face and blow her nose. “Thank you,” she says, louder, for the Exarch’s hearing this time.

He glances at her again, and whatever he sees makes him smile with such relief the sun might as well have come out. Frydlona’s stubborn heart kicks at her ribs, still ignoring her. She can’t. She can’t. She cannot.

She still stays atop the watchtower with him until the rainclouds clear from the sky.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

hells open, heavens weep

For FFxivWrite2021 Day 23, “soul”. Post-Stormblood, mild spoilers through 4.0 and major spoilers for drk 6070 jobquests, ~950 words. Canonical character deaths, survivor’s guilt, grief.

Frydlona wasn’t at her best.

She had picked up the habit of running a finger along the jagged edge of her broken soul crystal; now that it’s mended, the habit lingers.

“Are you all right?” Rielle asks.

“I should have realized sooner.” The symbol etched into the crystal is rough under Frydlona’s fingers, a murmur of texture against the smoothness of the stone. “Before he called up your—your nightmare.” She almost says your mother, stops herself barely in time.

Rielle’s jaw tightens, but her voice is strong. “Sidurgu is overprotective. I’m fine.”

Sidurgu protests, but Frydlona, staring into the crackling fire, barely hears it. Count Edmont had offered her the hospitality of Fortemps Manor, but she has no right to it, any more than any other of the kindnesses he’s offered the woman he believes to have been his favorite son’s betrothed. She’d come back to the Forgotten Knight instead.

It’s quieter here than in Ala Mhigo, cold and grey and peaceful. Ishgard’s long war ended nigh on two years ago, and the riotousness of celebration has faded to the steady work of rebuilding. Aymeric and Francel have much to be proud of.

When she goes back to rejoin the Scions and Lyse, they’ll expect things of her again. There’s still a war to be fought, still an empire to hold off. Sidurgu and Rielle expect nothing more of Frydlona than what she can do—pick up a sword, and go on, with or without a smile and a brave word to the troops. She can steal a few more minutes here with them before she returns to her work.

“But you, Frydlona.”

Frydlona blinks and looks around at Rielle. “I should have suspected sooner that something wasn’t right. Sidurgu did.”

Rielle rolls her eyes, not disguising the fondness there. “Sidurgu suspects everyone.”

“I wanted to believe Myste could offer what he promised.” Frydlona presses her thumb flat against the starry sword of the crystal, over Fray’s mark, grounding herself. “The—the last one, before this, he… Houdart was a true ghost, I think. He knew things Gallien didn’t, or at least he seemed to.”

That that tragedy had come because Gallien never told her he needed more medicine—she could have made it for him, if he’d only asked. She had watched Buscarron, she had asked about the remedy. He hadn’t had to die at all.

“You wanted to see someone yourself,” Sidurgu says, wincing. “Even after he called up Ser Ompagne?”

Frydlona closes her eyes and nods. Tears sting against her eyelids, and she has to remind herself that it doesn’t matter if Sidurgu and Rielle see. To anyone else in this corner of the Forgotten Knight she’s just another swordswoman, the heavy armor she wears plain and unmemorable. She’d stopped wearing gleaming-bright armor after Whitebrim, in case…in case. Even once she knew that wouldn’t happen again, she hadn’t changed it back.

“But…” Rielle’s voice is unusually hesitant. “But you would have known they were dead.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.” Frydlona’s hand tightens around the soul crystal. I forgive you, Fray says in her memory. I forgive you, I forgive you. She doesn’t know what she would do without Fray. “I just—I need—if it were his ghost, like Houdart’s. If I could just—tell him I’m sorry, for everything. Ask if he still doesn’t regret it.”

Myste couldn’t have given her that. If she’d realized who Myste was sooner, she would have known that, and maybe spared Rielle the sight of Ystride de Caulignont.

Myste couldn’t have given her that, because she can’t give it to herself, after all.

“Why would he regret it?” Fray asks from behind her. “Look at you. So kind, in spite of every time I tried to make you less so.”

Frydlona half-expects her to go on: savior of Ishgard, friend of Doma, liberator of Ala Mhigo. Everything she’s done, every war she’s fought, all of them good and necessary, every accomplishment worthy of pride and gladness, none of them doing any more to ease the guilt festering away in the far corners of her soul than her glaive through Zephirin’s throat did.

Fray doesn’t, though. What she says, so much more gently than when Frydlona first picked up the crystal from a corpse in the Brume, is, “Listen to your friends, you fool. Rielle had the right of it in Gyr Abania. Do you want me to tell her you think she’s too young to be worth listening to?”

“Don’t you dare,” Frydlona says. Aloud, because she’s forgotten; it’s just Sidurgu and Rielle, after all.

“What?” Sidurgu asks.

Frydlona shakes her head. “Fray.” At the alarm flickering across Sidurgu’s face, she quickly adds, “Not—she wants me to listen to Rielle, that’s all.”

“Sound advice,” Rielle says. “Have you eaten yet today?”

Frydlona has to think about it, and while she does Rielle jumps up to wave over a barmaid. Stew, Rielle says, and mulled wine, on a day as bitter cold as this.

It does sound good. The fire crackles behind her, the noise blunting the harsher edges of Frydlona’s thoughts. She’ll let Rielle order her food, and lecture her and Sidurgu both, and maybe before she leaves for Ala Mhigo again her friends’ kindness will have done something to salve the wound that Myste had torn open again.

It hadn’t been healing right, she knows; if it had been Myste would never have…happened. Maybe this time it will heal clean.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

it’s the wrong song, in the wrong style

Have remembered that I actually have someplace to put this fic Mjrn asked me for over the summer now, so uh. Have fic? ~1500 words, post-Heavensward, set during + spoilers through 3.2. Frydlona/Thancred by way of Frydlona/Haurchefant and Thancred/Minfilia, with all the spoilers that implies for the content notes list.

Sometimes you just have to hear it from someone.

The rasp of whetstone against metal is almost, but not quite, swallowed up by the Dravanian night: wind, the cries of owls, the distant moan of an unfamiliar beast. Frydlona doesn’t turn around and risk blunting her night vision on their banked campfire. “You should get some rest. She won’t thank you if you kill yourself looking for her.”

“She’d hardly be able to, if I were dead,” Thancred returns, just as softly. In spite of that there’s a rustle of cloth as one of their companions stirs in their tent. “Still, I see your point.”

The sky is black overhead, the depths of it hidden by clouds. She knows Idyllshire isn’t far from here, and Y’shtola’s Master Matoya not far either, yet still they could be the only waking creatures in Dravania. Dawn is still hours away. “Would you—” Frydlona starts, before she can think better of it.

Thancred stops honing his knives. After a moment, when she doesn’t continue, he says, “Would I?”

“Krile said…” Krile hadn’t said anything, not in so many words. She had implied, in what she said about Thancred, what she said about herself. The sympathy in the way she looks at him sometimes, between the little verbal jabs. Krile can’t help, though; she and Minfilia were...Frydlona doesn’t know, exactly, but Thancred’s fear and grief have a rawness that Krile’s don’t.

“Oh, gods.”

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Frydlona asks, so abruptly she almost looks around for Fray.

“I never—” Thancred bites the sentence off.

In the muffling dark she can hear the breath he draws in between his teeth. Their fire is a tiny speck in the blackness; it serves to throw shadows more than to illuminate anything, and even with the fire and the fur-lined cloak around her shoulders she is so, so cold. “Please.” Jehantel has taught her to sing while shooting, while sprinting, while bleeding, but the word still cracks in her mouth.

She doesn’t hear Thancred move at all, but when next he speaks his voice is right at her side. “I never laid a finger on her,” he whispers harshly.

Frydlona jumps; she can’t help it. Her earrings swing against her cheeks, cold as slivers of ice. “I know. But—but you are, aren’t you?” Aren’t you? Please?

“Why does it matter to you?” He would have denied it by now if he could, and the lightness of his tone is so hollow it echoes. “If I’ve ever given you the impression that you’d need to win my heart to secure any other portion of my anatomy, let me assure you that—”

“I wasn’t,” she starts, and stops. It should get easier to confess. It doesn’t. Your ribs are a bellows, Jehantel had told her, your throat an open pipe. Her throat is an open wound, more like. “Haurchefant.”

Thancred doesn’t say anything for a moment. She can feel him, close enough he blocks some of the wind but no closer. “You weren’t...?”

“His fiancée,” Frydlona manages. “His...anything. He tried to court me, and I didn’t...believe him. Until he died, and...” And it had been too late then. She understands what had driven Severian to try to resurrect his love, even for a moment; she hadn’t appreciated his courage at the time she first stumbled into helping him. She would be too afraid to see Haurchefant again.

“Hells,” Thancred mutters. His arm settles around her shoulders, pulling her against his side.

He’s as chilled as she is, but still so much warmer than the night air, and it’s no more than a moment before Frydlona starts to feel warmer too. “Would you—if it had been you who”—she can’t say died; she won’t believe it until she has no choice—“was lost, and Minfilia was here…”

Thancred’s arm tightens almost painfully around her shoulders, then eases.

“If you had…” When she lets her mind drift, she can still see that damnable Ishgardian stonework, the brilliant light of Zephirin’s attack. The metal of Haurchefant’s shield starting to smoke while she just stood there. “If you had been able to...push her into the shallows of the aetherial sea, and gone into its depths in her place.” The wind is so cold it burns her face. “Would you have regretted it?”

“No,” Thancred says immediately.

When she raises her free hand to her earring, the solid weight of it the only promise she can keep, her cheeks are wet. She can taste salt. “Even though...you and she—”

“You think I’d rather risk her dying because I never swived her?” He sounds so offended, so genuinely shocked, that she stops crying for a moment. “Seven hells, Frydlona, is that really what you think of me?”

It sounds awful, when he puts it that way. “N-no.”

“Is that what you think of him?”

Another rush of tears steals her words. She shakes her head, even though Thancred won’t be able to see. Not any more, it isn’t. But still, she could have been less wary, less bitter, less resentful. She has to become a hero worth dying for, because she certainly hadn’t been a friend worth it.

“If he was anything like me,” Thancred says, “if he’d watched you die when he could have done something to stop it…”

Frydlona works the edge of her cloak loose from between them and tucks it around Thancred as best she can. He leans into her a little more, still so tense he might as well be carved out of wood but feeling less like he might shatter at a touch. Or maybe that’s just her.

“Minfilia hates having to ask other people to take risks for her,” she says. It’s easier, talking about Minfilia instead of herself. “Every time she ga—gives me a mission, if I look back as I’m leaving… She feels responsible for everything that happens to us. She’d rather risk her own life than ours, if she could.”

“We’re not here to be protected at her expense.” Thancred’s voice is newly rough. “That’s not—”

“How she sees it,” Frydlona says. “She talked to me about what it meant to lead the Scions, sometimes.” One of those times had been one of the last conversations they’d had. She won’t let it stay that way. They will find Minfilia. They will bring her back. “I know she’s glad you’re here, and as well as you are. She—she’s always wanted that. Your safety. Your happiness.”

Silence, except for the wind wailing between the mountain peaks. Frydlona adjusts her cloak around them both, holding in what warmth there is.

“If I kiss you, will you slap me?” Thancred asks, almost casually but for the jagged edge to his voice.

She should, probably. “No.”

When she turns toward him the firelight picks out the harsh glitter of his eyes, the tension in the lines of his face. Even less casually than before, he says, “It must be reassuring that you’re tall enough you don’t need to worry I’ve mistaken you for—anyone else.”

“I don’t mind.” She wishes she could do anything to help—be Minfilia for the space of a moment, if she has to, since she can’t find the real one.

Fray, unexpectedly, snaps, “You’re not a bridge for other people to step on to get to their comfort.”

Frydlona barely even has to work not to look around. She’s getting used to this, she supposes. ‘He’s my friend,’ she tells Fray, remembering to do it silently. ‘He’s hurting.’

“You’re hurting too,” Fray says.

“Frydlona?” Thancred sounds uncertain now. “Are you all right?”

About to agree, she stops. You’re hurting too. “Can I…”

“You?” He tilts his head, considering. “Most likely. What?”

Even knowing that if she doesn’t say something Fray will keep critiquing, Frydlona has to close her eyes to ask it. “Can you take your hair down?”

When Thancred doesn’t answer right away, she thinks at first she’s misstepped after all. Maybe he had only meant to reassure her, truthfully. Maybe he only wanted—

He takes her hand and brings it to the back of his head. The hairclasp is cold against her fingers, and she fumbles getting it loose. It slips free and lands somewhere in the folds of her cloak, or on the ground. His hair is softer than she had expected, longer than—longer, but only a bit.

Her hand is shaking. She steadies it against his neck.

“Your move, I believe,” Thancred says, voice as unsteady as her hand. “Or this is about to get comical.”

If that’s what he wants—she doesn’t know. He hasn’t said. She leans in to kiss him, tasting salt again and not sure this time which of them is crying. Forgive me, she thinks despairingly, his hair falling like silk through her fingers, and be well, please, be happy.