#someday i am going to draw in detail how they tie up the robe to be out of their way

[sntoot]

more of azem lore sketches, they did not listen to their father at all

[theroseofthorns]

Rose Hips | A TAMB/MTnY fic for Tumblr

Part IV of IV: She Flies Ever Homeward

(Part I, Part II, Part III)

We arrive home on a drizzly Monday, stepping from Alice's side into the rain. Chise offers her a cuppa, but Elias is already in the doorway and Alice declines. She's carving her alchemists' sigils into the ground on which she stands, crystal gifts from Chise serving as fuel in her palm, by the time Chise has made it three steps. She's well and gone by the time Elias reaches us, sweeping into the mist to draw his robe around Chise’s shoulders, and her body into the shelter of his.

I run on ahead. Silky will want to bathe the smell of sea salt off me as it is, but should I come in with the added “reek” of wet fur, she'll have it in her head she needs to blow dry me immediately. Infernal invention. I shake off what I can in the open doorway before making a dive for the fireplace rug.  

Chise and Elias drift into the doorway soon after.

They pause in it, Chise halting to wrestle off her shoes with Elias’ arm still about her shoulders, as if the rain might reach out and drag her back into its reach at any moment. With the grey world behind them, midmorning sun diluted to a light without brightness, the door frame rising up around them in dark silhouette, they look posed for a photograph.

Chise, released from her shoes, looks up at him from beneath the shelter if his arm and robe with the glimmer if the rain reflected in the green of her eyes--bright against the backdrop of him and the grey world beyond. Her hair is barely damp, droplets running from the crown of her head like a bleeding halo. Elias is eerily dry, being of shadow that he is, as much corporeal as not.

They look at each other for a long moment. Chise speaks first.

“How are you?”

“Better, now that you're back. I worried.”

“I did, too . . . I don’t like making you lonely. Did anything interesting at least happen when I was gone?”

Elias looks up for a moment as if genuinely trying to recall something he may have forgotten before uneventfully declaring that he'd decided the borage was read to cut. Chise smiles.

“We'll have to get some flowers for Silky while we're working, she can put them in the ice cubes again.”

“She does love such decorative detail.”

A beat of silence ensues. The rain outside is loud compared to them. It's a chilly rain, the late summer sort come early and the salamander looks like a cat got into the cream, curled in the fireplace, puffed up with his own usefulness. I've half a mind to chase him around a bit.

“Did you enjoy your trip?” Elias finally asks. I prick an ear, searching for any indication of whether he cares about the answer, or is asking to be polite.

“It was great,” Chise says, “it was so relaxing, it was almost boring, when we weren't in the water.”

“I’d have thought the water would get repetitive.”

“That’s the first time I've been to the ocean.”

A fact which showed when the first moderate swell knocked her clean over while Alice snorted her oft-tempered laugh.

“I'm glad you liked it. Perhaps we can go back, sometime.”

Maybe for the honeymoon.

Chise flushes.

Shut up, Ruth!

“That would be nice,” the chagrin she shows me in her mind carefully contained and thus undetectable in her words. “We found a restaurant I think you'd like. . . Oh, by the way, I brought you something.”

Elias cocks his head.

“A souvenir?”

“. . . I suppose you could call it that, if you want to. Here, just give me a moment. . .”

She turns to the slightly dampened suitcase she's dragged in, only half on its wheels as it tumbled along the path, and wrestles for a moment with the outermost zipper before withdrawing the little gift she’d found him the third day. When she'd insisted on walking the cold dawn beach alone. She's wrapped it in, of all things, her swim cover up.

“Here,” she says, attempting to pass it into Elias’ gloved palm. He falters before taking it and after a moment’s pause, shrugs off his robe to pass over her shoulders while he inspects her gift, requiring both hands to unwrap it.

He must have jumped up quickly when we arrived, or slept late again: He's once more in his shirtsleeves, dressed beyond that only in the tie she once gifted him, and his vest.

He accepts her gift with his now free hands, and studies it for a moment before slowly picking the fabric free from its surface. Once revealed, he holds it up, high over her head, to view it in the muted sunlight. Chise hugs his robe closer around her shoulders, though I know she isn't cold.

“This is impressive,” Elias says of the gift, “it's rare to see a stone so glassy on these shores. It looks volcanic excepting the color. Where did you find it?”

He lowers the stone, dished as though the sea had chosen to fashion them a little bowl, a green so dark as to rival pine, between them again.

“I was wading out by the end if the beach. I saw it up on the sand still holding some water, and it made me think that, even though it's small, it could be used for scrying. . .  So Ruth helped me link it to this.”

She touches the pendent hanging from her own neck.

“I'd appreciate privacy, of course, but . . . Well, I thought, when we're apart, you could use it to see where I am, if you're ever worried.”

“Chise . . . That is . . . “

He pauses, instead of finding words, speaking in the sudden gesture of pulling the hand not cradling the stone to his body and pressing a flat palm and clutching, digging fingers over his breastbone while his jaw hangs open, wordless. Stricken by more emotion that he knows what to do with.

“Elias?”

“I,” he struggles to articulate, “feel like something is clenching up my chest. My heart . . . It hurts.”

Chise reaches up and takes his hand, curling her fingers around the edge of his palm, at the base of his little finger, so that he's clutching her fingers to his chest as much as his own hand. He stares at her, still speechless, holding her hand to his heart.

“It's an excellent gift,” he manages to say, and Chise leans in to throw her free arm around his waist. It's a firm embrace, her cheek against his vest—a smooth texture, and cool, his hand rather warmer—and one he does not return so much as collapse into. Elias put his arm around her middle back, clutching the stone in his hand, and falls across her shoulder like a liquid, muzzle tucked into her hair, torso curled around her so that he's stooped almost low enough to lean on her shoulder.

I can feel the swelling in Chise’s chest as they hold each other, and I elect to look away until Elias straightens up again. Chise doesn’t let go of his hand.

A year has brought so few real solutions, however many false starts. So often, it seems comforting each other is still the best they can do, and I know she doubts as well as I do how effective that comfort can be, given what they face.

. . .  Perhaps I do understand Silky’s rush to fast their hands: Elias is only just beginning to fathom his own emotions, and barely so, but grief, surely, he will come to know all too well someday, however distant or near that day may be. Perhaps she’s seeking to maximize what time they have, that the agony of bereavement might be worthwhile.

Elias breaks their eye contact to glance through the open door.

“Let's get you away from the cold,” he says, and ushers her further into the room with an arm around her shoulders, her gift still clasped in his hand.

Someday, you stubborn fools, you will realize how much you love each other.

***

“Tell me about your trip,” Elias says, as Chise drops in a heap onto the couch beside him. The silver one bustles over to place a cup of tea in front of her on the table, they exchange smiles before she retreats again, returning to her sorting of Chise’s luggage and laundry.

“What do you want to know?” Chise asks, rolling her head along the back of the couch without lifting it as she turns to him.

“What did you do, aside from wading down the beach your own?”

Chise feels flush for a moment without it appearing on her cheeks. Her surprise at his too-knowing jabs is milder than it used to be.

“You weren't watching me the whole time were you!? We talked about this.”

“I didn't have anyone or anything follow you,” he assures her, “as I promised.” However reluctantly. “But I do know you too well to believe you would be reasonably cautious for three unsupervised days. Ruth, did she even bring you?”

“I have no comment.”

“As I thought. But that wasn't my question, anyway, was it?”

He wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her against his side, waiting for her story. I feel something fuzzy in my chest which says the tune of my thoughts are in sync with hers as he really does want to know floats through my head.

“Well,” Chise begins, “we spent almost all of the first day at the beach. When we got to the hotel, our room wasn’t ready, so we had to leave our bags. We thought we might just go for a walk, but we were talking about swimming, I mentioned that I'd never been to an ocean before, even growing up in japan, and she wanted me to try it as soon as possible after that.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Um… I mean, yes, it just took some getting used to.”

Elias leans down and around, bringing him eye to eye with her.

“How so?”

Chise, to her credit, rarely looks truly sheepish, and so looks terribly endearing when she does.

“Well, I didn’t really realize how…uneven the seafloor is off the beach. It's so smooth on land. I suppose it's silly, looking back on it, but I tripped into a dip in the sand from the waves because I wasn’t expecting it.”

Elias’ impassive skull cracks open at the jaw, teeth parting to allow some expression of concern that even I can predict, if only through the change in intensity in that void sensation of his form.

“It was fine!” Chise hurries to assure him, and his teeth lace shut again. “only I was on my knees still when the next swell came, and so I got a face full of water. Ruth had to rescue my hat.”

Given that all is well that ends well, Elias finds this enormously funny.

In the slow moments between tasks and duties and teaching and musings that make up much of their days together, provided his mood hasn't been consumed by worry or thought in that way which is not quite brooding, but distant to the point of appearing aloof, he can be rather quick to laughter—provided it’s his kind of joke. Little misfortunes amuse him greatly, as does a certain degree of posturing some people consider to be wit, as does irony, the obvious, the disconcerting of others (though that much Chise’s own sharp and oft bitter wit has greatly tempered) . . . The list is a stunningly long one.

Chise smiles, too.

“I got a mouthful of saltwater. It was disgusting.”

He sniggers rather louder. Elias has an odd laugh, at best. Hissing, almost, when it escapes up his throat and out his mouth. When it rumbles in his chest, however, a pang that isn't pain and a swelling that isn't hurtful sometimes resonates so soundly in Chise that I feel one of us must have some wound to lick. Or, at least, an itch.

That is not, however, how she feels just now. The swelling of her quiet, still often-cautious joy stops short, and instead becomes a dull and gut-deep tightening that somehow, incongruously relates to a different tension in her face—some reflexive feeling in her mouth that makes her press her lips together when they would rather press out, a memory tingling across them of an awkwardly executed moment in the snow.

Should she find out about this, the Silver One is going to lose her senses.

 If I’m tempted to say anything to either stop or encourage her in the face of this momentous possibility, I don’t allow it to seduce me completely. I look at them out one eye, just barely cracked, not so much feigning sleep as allowing genuine tiredness to show. It seems a subtle enough approach, as neither of them, even Chise, glances my way to measure my reaction to the electric tension they both must surely feel as she sweeps her eyes across the curves and dips and jutting edges of his skull, perhaps asking herself once again where precisely is most appropriate to kiss someone without lips. I can feel the memory of her last attempt at this burning on her lips, the texture of him smooth and neutral as stone, if inconceivably warmer, rather than the sometimes slick, sometimes splintered feeling of long-exposed bone one might expect. She has her eyes set on a smooth space above the jagged line of his teeth and below his left eye orbital.

Elias’ laughter quiets less steadily than it came. He doesn’t raise his head, or pull further away.

“Chise?” he asks, and she releases a breath she’s been holding in a fevered huff, blinking rapidly, her wandering focus broken. You poor, idiot pup.

“Yes?”

“What is that look on your face? It’s new.”

New to you. She doesn’t usually look at him that way when he’s looking back. She probably doesn’t know that she does it at all--ignorance, however, does not undo the fact that it happens more frequently with every passing month.

“Oh? I don’t know, I think for a moment I wasn’t really thinking.”

“About anything?”

“Not really.”

Elias’ pilot lights burn at her from inside their sockets. She shifts a little. Evidently, this reminds him that his arm is still around her shoulders, as he lifts it awkwardly away by a millimeter or so, still touching her in several places.

Chise clears her throat.

“I guess, I might have been thinking that I . . .  like it, when you laugh,” she confesses. A warmth floods her cheeks that she can feel acutely, but which is not quite visible.

Elias stares at her wordlessly, except to hum to himself. But his arm resettles around her shoulders. Chise swallows unspeakable, confounding words she can’t quite parse within her mind, and looks away.

In the beat of silence that follows, she leans in against his side.

You two, I chastise her, fulling expecting confusion as her response. I receive no such thing.

Maybe next time, she replies within the confines of her mind.

Despite her moments of shyness, I believe she’s growing bold. What advice can I give to her, knowing this?

I settle on: Don’t wait on him any longer than you want to.

Shadow is ageless. Surely, he’s been around long enough that he’ll be able to figure it out.

Her head resting against his rib cage, she promises me that she won’t.