#theories held together by red yarn and spite

[witchfall]

hard is the heart that feels no fear

summary: She returns to the First to sort out her nightmares. But neither Izzie nor the Exarch are prepared for the solution he proposes.

A Crystal Exarch x Warrior of Light fic Word count: 8200 (i’m back on my bullshit) Rating: M (we are sinning in here fam – some mild sexual content – but nothing mega explicit

Also on AO3 

Thank you to @vaniccio for betaing!!!

Copious Shadowbringers spoilers within. You have been warned!

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Izzie doesn’t say why she returns, so shortly after returning to the Source. The Exarch decides not to question the small blessings of the universe — her lazy wave, the way she still smells of Thanalanian cooking cloves, the soft way she brushes by him, like she’d just walked in from a hunting trip across the land rather than between the shattered remnants of a once whole world.

So much remains unsaid. And still, neither of them say anything.

—

He pours over research and she sits beside him in content silence. She hums in time to the flickering lantern. He again does not ask why she wished to do such a thing; the taverns of the Crystarium were far more her speed in this age of returned night — and yet here she sat, as if waiting for something. He relishes it, in spite of himself.

She fiddles with a glamour prism she found out in the Crystalline Mean. It refracts rainbows between her fingers. “Can I stay with you tonight?” she asks.

Blood rushes to his face as he turns toward her. She doesn’t look at him. In her usual gusty bravado, she plays with the prism as if she hadn’t said anything at all.

“I don’t have a bed,” he says, because that is the first thing he can think of. “I would prefer you to rest comfortably.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Old man. I regularly sleep on the ground. Like a rock.” Her gaze darkens. “When I can sleep.”

He sets his quill aside. He frowns. “That is not like you.”

Her gaze meets his. It feels like a test. What, exactly, is like me?  “Guess we’ll see,” she says.

She falls asleep on the floor of his private study atop a pile of his pillows and his blankets, gifted to him year after year by the residents of the Crystarium. He asks her no less than three times if she has everything she needs.

She throws a velveteen pillow at his head. “If you’re so concerned, join me here yourself!”

He laughs, but it feels off, and he gets the sense that is not what he was supposed to do. She rolls over so her back faces him, ending the conversation.

He squeezes his hands together, feeling base.

He sits at his desk. He tries to study aetheric theory. He tries to sort some accounting books. He tries, even, to take inventory of what tools still lay in the Tower, as Lyna had been pressing him to do for weeks now. His gaze keeps slipping back to Izzie. The light of his lantern casts a single beam across her hair, spread like a red web across her pillow. Her chest rises and falls, at peace.

She’s the hummingbird to his garden. He still recalls, especially in her absence, her crushing embrace the night of their return to the Crystarium. All things known. All things laid bare. He called her his inspiration, his light, and she watched him with such fragile longing. And then…he sent her home.

What it means to remember — to reminisce, smiling — is also, in that moment, to move on. You must have the faith that you can, no matter how much it hurts.

Something in the ambient aether shifts and darkens. The hair on the back of his neck stands on end. His ears perk toward danger. Toward Izzie.

He feels her terror, snapping like branches in the gale, before he hears her screams.

He and the Crystal Tower are nigh one and the same, and he could have sat still to check her health, but he near tumbles out of his chair in his haste. This is what happens when you try to move like the young man you most certainly are not.

The only time he has ever heard her scream like this is when the Light nearly shattered her soul.

He reaches into the energy of the tower by habit, to check if anything has gone amiss. But nothing has changed save her fear, shrill and keening across the aether. It scatters across his skin like sea spray.

“Awaken, I’seirivine. You’re safe,” he says softly, but she still writhes and sobs, caught in the mire of her nightmare. His hands hover over her. He still doubts whether he can touch her. Whether he should.

“Izzie,” he says softly. Her scream climbs, louder somehow, and that breaks him utterly. Any semblance of propriety or fear fades in an instant as he reaches for her shoulders, her face, her neck, anything to get her to return to him from the horror of her mind. He shakes her gently.

She gasps for air and nearly beans him in the head with her own as she flies awake in an instant. Her hands go immediately for a weapon, which he did not allow her here. He is nearly straddled across her by the time this occurs. He doesn’t think to explain himself, for she doesn’t ask.

She falls back into the pillows as he settles into a crouch beside her. Her hand suddenly snakes out and grabs his wrist.

“Ah.” She breathes out half a laugh, half a sob. “Godsdamn it all to hell.”

His eyebrows lift. “Your mother wouldn’t like that.”

She smiles distantly at him, though her face is wet. Something in him warbles, uncertain and hopeful, as she tugs on his wrist playfully, but for an unusual moment, she says nothing at all. She presses the back of her free hand against her eyes. The other still holds him in a vice grip. He is at a loss for words. That only ever happens around her.

“It’s terrible. And embarrassing,” she whispers. “But I saw what minds could summon, once upon a time. That’s what he kept saying…”

“Spinning another of your yarns?” he asks. He puts on the old bravado, just for her. “Another song for the taverns?”

Her whole body seems to deflate. Again, she opts for silence.

He takes a chance. He lays his free hand over her fingers still clawed around his wrist and gently peels them away. He holds her hand like a broken bird. She lets him. He cradles it in his palm for a moment before his thumb rubs her life lines.  "What scares you so?“

She looks at him like he just called himself a dunce head. "Watching you die.”

—

Her screams careen in his head. Watching you die.

He proposes a solution.

She is across the table from him in her Pendants apartment. People whisper when he comes by, sure, but they know — as Lyna once told him ominously. They know what you have been waiting for.

Convenient, as he still feels so deeply unsure. Not of her — not of Izzie, tapping her sugary coffee drink in thought, squinting down at a book far above her scholastic reach regarding aether teleportation. Of his own want, and if it is fair.

“I felt it, in your aether. Your fear,” he explains. “Perhaps there is an imbalance. Perhaps I can help correct it.”

She looks up at him, eyebrow raised, but he knows this look — the one where she hides a deeper worry. He gestures forward in mollification.

“No, not like the light before,” he says. “Like what happens when people go through traumatic things. The scars go deep. And if aether is our soul, well…” He turns his palm upward at the ceiling in a shrug. It’s a theory. Few have as much control — or access to as much aether — as the two of them combined.

She sits up, eyeing him. “So, you’d…what, erase my bad memories?”

“Of course not,” he says softly. “I’d never…no. I would simply be there with you, in your mind, as we walk through them. Together, perhaps we’d find a way. And you could let go of fear.”

As he says it, he feels smaller. It’s not a bad theory. But he can hear someone like Alphinaud or — Twelve forfend, Rammbroes — dig into its flaws in an instant. Why do you really want to do this, G’raha? What do you have to prove?

She watches him, charmingly lackadaisical. An eon ago, he proposed similar theories about the Crystal Tower while she watched him and weighed his worth. She held his ego in the palm of her hand. She still does, and she doesn’t even know it.

“Okay,” she says suddenly. The tone of one with naught to lose. “Let’s try it.”

—

The Exarch squeezes his palm against his staff, but nothing quite shakes the anxious rhythm resonating where crystal and skin meets along his ribcage. He walks up to Lyna like nothing is different this day.

Nothing had been different the day he finally met Izzie as a ghost in the rift, either. At last, I’ve found you.

How angry she had been at him, then…

“Let no one else into the Tower until I say,” he says to Lyna. He lays a soft hand on her shoulder.

She salutes instinctively, but her gaze misses nothing. “What are you planning?”

“Planning?”

“You do not give this command, these days.”

He leans his hip against the staff. “What if I’m just an old man who wants a moment’s peace?”

“You never want that.”

Okay, he thinks. I deserved that. “Don’t you trust me, Guard Captain?”

“I trust you with my life. I still find it strange to see you skulking about so.” Her gaze is unwavering. “Is the Warrior of Darkness well?”

“Ah…yes?”

“She has been waiting for you within.”

The Exarch’s face warms. He is a man caught red-handed. “…is there something you’d like to say, Lyna?”

“Not in the slightest.” She snaps a salute. A small smile finally breaks through. “I simply wish to look out for two of the most important people to the Crystarium…and ensure nothing could happen that might…endanger their alliance.”

He is startled into a laugh, because he is not sure what else to say without exposing himself further. “Of course. You needn’t worry about that.”

“I know.” She sweeps away, unabashed, before he can say anything further. If he didn’t know Lyna well enough, he’d almost think it a threat.

—

When he enters the Tower, haunting notes rise from another room.

His tail twitches. His ears rise to meet the music as it starts and stops in a staccato. In one moment of echoing silence, he thinks he hears a small giggle and a muttering before another note, unerringly high, reaches to the top of the spire. He casts a spell of silence on himself before he can think to stop and he slips further into the Tower, robes catching at his ankles in his haste.

He finds her in one of the Tower’s spiraling staircases, back to him but with her face raised to the distant ceiling. Her hair, longer than he’d remembered, cascades down her shoulders like a red ribbon from her leather tie. With her hands spread out in welcome to no one at all, she sings a small run of discordant notes. She stops suddenly and laughs; it echoes, too, in the Crystalline blue.

His heart flies. His hands itch for drawing tools, which he has not used in ages. He stares openly at her back, her twitching tail, the tapping of her leather boots, and he sends a prayer to the Twelve, wherever They may be, for granting him life enough to see this sight.

But too soon, she twirls to face him.

She leaps nearly her full height in the air. Her soft notes turn into a crackling “aaHHhhh! Shit!” as if she just got caught stealing a pie from her mother’s kitchen. A hand flies to her chest. “Oschon’s — shit! How long were you standing there!?”

He laughs, if only to keep the heat building in his eyes from spilling over. “Not too long, I assure you.”

She throws her hands behind her head and squints in an impressive display of forced nonchalance. “I was…testing the acoustics…”

His smile grows. “Were you really?”

“Yes!” she says. Her tail flicks up in offense. “I couldn’t ever do that back in the day.”

“Ah. Because of the monsters.”

Her mouth twitches into a smile. “Because of the monsters. Yes.” She gazes openly upon him, eyes shadowed in thought. He wonders what she is looking for.

“Are you ready?” he asks quietly.

She shrugs, but her gaze does not waver. “I might be.”

He extends a hand to her and gestures before him until they walk astride. Hundreds of years have passed. Wars have ended. Worlds have died. And still, they fall in together like only yesterday they’d been scrounging for artifacts under the miasma of Mor Dhona. And just like those old days, he launches into a theory about the application of aether within the Crystal Tower.

Aether is soul and memory, which the Echo resonates within. And the Tower is a beacon for all of it — magic and life. He’s had a hundred years to consider the applications of aether. He’d carried souls across the Rift and her, in her entirety, to this world. Surely he could look in on a few memories, if he wove the right spells and…

“It requires trust,” he explains. They walk into his study. “For me to access your use of the Echo…”

“Which I do.” She bites her lip, looking more serious than he expects. “Trust you, I mean.”

He watches her for a moment. She had a thousand reasons not to.

“What?” she asks, placing her hands on her hips. “Honestly, G'raha, if this was gonna be the moment you decided to off me, I wouldn’t blame you, but it probably wouldn’t help anyone…and since that is your motive apparently at all times, I think I’m probably good. You know?”

Her unusually gruff tone — the way she says his name, the way she seems to know exactly what he is thinking — obscures the fact that she is playing with him. He doesn’t realize it until she lightly shoves his shoulder.

“I’m teasing you,” she says. “Remember?”

“How could I forget?” He rolls up his sleeves. “All those times you called me a dumb school boy in your frustrations.”

That earns him a laugh from her. “I’m a scholar of Baldesion,” she says, in a put-on voice that reminds him of Alphinaud. It sounds funny coming out of her country girl mouth. “I have very fancy learnings and am very smart.”

He settles into a pillow on the floor and allows himself a moment to look at her. Izzie fidgets in place, boots toeing the marble. She then flops to the ground with a practiced fall that obscures the grace with which she moves on the battlefield. She pulls her knees into her chest. She wears a mask of hard-won courage, and yet she reminds him so much of the young woman in his memories, the one who still wore short braids near her cheeks.

“We don’t have to do this,” he says again. “At any point. You can pull away and I will not press any further.”

“No,” she says. She unfurls, just a little. “I want to. I want to…there’s been…” She gestures wildly about her head. “Whatever. Let’s just do this thing.”

‘Let’s just do this thing’ is not a standard he typically would allow as consent for any type of treatment, but something in her eyes makes it clear she will not be deterred. They shine in such a way that reminds him, oddly, of Silvertear Lake.

He extends his hands, palms up. “Your hands, please,” he requests quietly. It takes a century of control and preparation for his voice not to break. The way she looks at him does not help — ears pinned to her skull, eyes tight, as if trying to look through a cold fog.

All these unspoken things. All these lines they’ve drawn. Something is fraying. He is helpless against it.

She places her hands in his, calloused and hesitant. He closes in eyes against the pounding of his heart and focuses instead on the distant hum of the Tower that lives in his head now.

Focus on her pull of life. The taste of fire that singes his mouth. The summer breeze, easing his brow. Her soul.

Her light.

Light shatters her skull like glass. Memory becomes thought. Time slows until it is nothing but blinding morass, unmoving.

She jumps near a foot in the air, cussing wildly, immediately breaking their connection. He reels, too. For a moment, the pain of the memory was two-fold — her experience and his own remembrance of it, watching light trail from her eyes like tears. For a single, split second, he had been in her soul with her.

His hands would shake, if she did not seize them suddenly.

“I’m so sorry—” he starts but she fiercely shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Let’s just…not start there. Okay?”

What have you gotten yourself into, Exarch? You’re risking it all, this strange careful dance, and for what?

She watches him in silence.

He prepares the spell again.

—

Ma appears first.

Izzie Shena Idel is at tea with her, on a rare day in which both of them can afford the time. She remembers the turquoise sheen of her teacup and the way afternoon light strikes clean lines between the sun-bleached pillars of the small Ul'dahn cafe.

“You’re thinking about something,” Ma says. Her voice feels far away.

“Lots to think about, you know,” Izzie says.

Ma levels her golden Dunesfolk gaze and Izzie’s ears pin back on her skull. Izzie may be double her adoptive Ma’s height, but the fear never leaves the body once one has been chased down dusty streets by a lalafellin mother with a rolling pin.

“Warrior of Light things?” Ma asks warily.

Izzie doesn’t like to talk about that with her Ma. Of late she has begun to understand the taut fear Ma must feel, hearing of her exploits. That vague horror in which you have no control over the fate of the people you love.

“I keep having the dream,” Izzie says.

Ma is a Dunesfolk, to whom dreams matter, so she sets her tea down. “Tell me, my love.”

The dream rolls out like a tapestry off Ma’s spinning wheel until Izzie is breathing heavily, excitement thrumming under her skin. She becomes part of the dream. She’s pulling a prank. She’s in Mor Dhona, under those crystal-shorn skies, and she’s pulling a prank because she doesn’t know what else to do with this electric energy that sizzles under her skin every time she looks at the most frustrating man in the world.

G'raha Tia, he says. Student of Baldesion, fancy archon wannabe, blah blah, suck my godsdamned— whatever. She pulls yet another of the squishy, mottled lizard toys out of her bag — the ones made to look like the real thing for children but feel more like the gunk you pull out of your belly-button — and hides it within his bedroll. 20 down, 15 yet to go.

This is not how a Warrior of Light should behave, she can hear Y'shtola or someone say in her head, but maybe that’s why she is so seized to do it. It is a very Izzie thing to do.

But this time, unlike in real life, he catches her. He suddenly stands in the doorway, heterochromic eyes glinting with laughter.

“What are you doing, Miss Idel?”

She has no good answer.

‘You’re annoying’ is a cop out. So is ‘because I felt like it.’ She felt like it because he annoyed her because there was something about him she could not place…a timelessness or a knowing. Everyone expects the Warrior of Light to carry themselves as he does: real intelligence wrapped in handsome bravado. No one expects a Warrior of Light to be a young miqo'te girl who’d rather spin a yarn than lead an army.

But in the dream, just like in real life, he laughs. He calls it a good joke, because he is a good person — a bit pretentious and dramatic but hopeful and kind. He places one of the yellow lizards on her cheek and smiles and her face feels sticky and hot. The joke is ruined. He is supposed to be offended, if only for a moment, but he never is.

—

They both startle apart like young kits, uncertain what they’ve gotten into. Want and pride and a sundering kind of loss tear through him in an instant, and he realizes he does not know which feelings were his own.

She looks away, embarrassed, but she extends her hands out to him again. “You know, I miss Ma constantly.”

He clears his throat before he speaks, suddenly finding the words difficult. “And how is Lady Sheshena?” He flexes his fingers within her palms. He focuses on weaving aether and not the feel of her skin.

“Fine. Good. She’s good. Mad at me, you know. For all of this warrioring business.” Her eyes dart around. Her breath quickens.

“That sounds like her. From what you once told of me…I am glad she still lives.”

They both refuse to speak of her dream. They let it lay there, dead on the floor. Before he can say another word, she weaves her fingers between his.

“You should see more,” she says, voice tight.

—

“Maybe I think he’s insufferable.”

“Have you considered,” Rammbroes says, “that you are insufferable in the exact same way?”

Of course, he is right.

She listens for once to G’raha’s dramatic lectures on Allagan history, and he seems grateful for it. He challenges her to climb the crystalline spears throughout Mor Dhona, only to laugh as she slips down right onto her ass. I didn’t think you’d actually do it! But when she rises and grins at him, challenging him back, his smile turns sheepish and young and charming in a way it never is when he tries too hard.

He wants to charge into the tower with only his bow. Rammbroes does not let him. The travails of war are for her to take on with her own bow; that is, ultimately, why she is even there. She is not a historian like him. She is not learned or wise. She is preternaturally good at killing things.

“Sing for me?” he asks, strangely sheepish and quiet. “Would you?” And it’s so gentle, the way he asks, that she does so without further prompting. She opens her mouth and lets the notes fly. The song, an old one her Da would sing while on the merchant trail, shimmers under the stars.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Remember me to one who lives there

He once was a true love of mine.

—

The aether sings and suddenly he feels 300 years younger. He’s meeting a burgeoning legend and realizing she is the same age as he. He is cut down by eyes of seaglass green. He thinks to impress her, but all he does is make her angry.

She is trying to tell him something, but he is caught on her memories of their time together, still not warped by eons. None of the stories ever got it right. How bright eyed and gullible and loving she was. And is. She’s unchangeable in all the ways that matter.

Her grip turns his skin white. She grimaces as if in pain, but when he opens his mouth to ask after her, she shakes her head.

They take another breath. The current takes them.

—-

Izzie Idel, Warrior of Light, is betrayed. She ends a thousand-year war. She frees two nations. Her hair grows out of her childish braids and she stops laughing so much. She loses her Da to sickness. She buries another close friend (for leaving G’raha, she has realized over the years, was like burying him, too). Nothing phases her anymore. Some days, she wonders if she can actually feel pain.

—

Sweat rolls down his back. Death and deserving, fate and fairness — her fury cracks open like a geode, thinking of it all.

Pain careens in his chest, freshly wounded. He saw how she had died the first time — that boundless life, sucked out of her with a single breath. He nearly saw her immuted into something else…a soul death he could never rescue her from. Did she want that, in the end?

Seaglass eyes won’t let him free. She leans in. “Don’t turn away.”

—

She gazes somewhat obscenely at the exposed chin his robe allows. At his mouth, smiling and full. She gazes until he is done explaining something or other about how the tower had teleported into the First. She gazes until she has no more polite rope from which to dangle.

“Just like that, then?” she asks, heart falling. “Then…G’raha Tia is…?”

“I’m not familiar with that name. Is there something I should know?”

(He did know, he did, if it hadn’t been 100 years in waiting for this moment he would have told her everything…)

She dumbly tries to explain it. She feels like a child trying to explain her made-up games to an adult. But he shakes his head. He has found no such individual in the tower, he says plainly.

She can do little but nod. The robes, she’ll think later, alone in her room at the Pendants. He’d never play a role like this. Too stuffy. Too serious. He was handsome and was happy with people knowing that fact. Why would G’raha hide from her for so long, if not for some grand happy joke?

She moves them through that memory swiftly, grappling it away from him.

She realizes who he is a moment before his hood flies off. Light shatters her skull like glass. Memory becomes thought. Time slows until it is nothing but blinding morass, unmoving.

“G’raha!” she screams over the shattering. She reaches toward him desperately. “Don’t!”

He seems to stumble. His eyes, those ruby things, shine. And then his gaze settles into loving resolve. He will die for her. He will not give her a choice. The doors are closing again and she is screaming for him — no, please don’t do this, don’t you know that I’ve always loved—

Fare you well, my friend — my inspiration.

How many more will She take from me, before it is done?

And then the gunshot goes off.

—

He pulls away with a sharp gasp. She reels, reaching again for the weapons not on hand.

“We’re alright,” he says before he is sure of it. The singing of the tower dies down in the back of his head. Don’t you know that I’ve always loved you. His vision settles, but his heart does not. “I did not expect to be…pulled so…”

His memories of her are an old book of pressed flowers, and he suddenly can’t stop turning the pages. The silhouette of her nose. The sheen of her hair. The curve of her hip. The muscles tensed in her freckled arms as she sets up a shot. The gleam of sweat just above her lip.

The way she is looking up at him now, certain and shadowed. He is afraid of the power of wanting, even now.

“What are you thinking about?” he breathes out in question.

“You,” she says simply. She reaches out to touch his cheek, the one marred with crystal. Three fingers trace the blue in his skin. “There’s something I need to know.”

Something cracks inside of him. Her thumb lingers near his mouth. It’s all he can think about. He is surprised he can string words together. “Did I see too much?” he asks.

She shakes her head, infinitesimally. How must he look to her now, watching her like a parched man stares down a mirage of water?

“You missed a lot,” she says. He can see her throat move as she swallows down air. “You don’t know it all. You…you weren’t there.”

But it is not fury in her voice. It’s a shattering kind of doubt — a glass sieve, cracked down the middle.

“What do you mean?” he asks, gentle.

“I’m just a girl,” she says. Her voice smothers some darker emotion. “I’ve always just been me. And no one thinks…I’ve never asked to…”

Flawed and young and uncertain and bright — singing a thousand songs, some of them stupid, all of them grand, always laughing, always ready to kick you down a notch, always ready to help, no questions asked. In another life, he’d have asked to stay with her. Always.

She removes her hand and clenches her fists on her lap, gritting her teeth against some great pain. “I never would have asked this of you.”

“You know that I came on the hopes of a thousand, thousand others.”

“You came here to die!” Her eyes burn bright. “You were never going to let me know that it was you!”

She is blistering fire and he aims to be burned by it. The words feel choked. “I wanted to save you from the pain,” he says. “You have so much yet to do.”

“Oh, yes, my great destiny!” She spits the word like venom. It echoes across the blue. “How stupid do you think I am? You don’t think I suspected? The whole time? You don’t think you’d have just been another person I have to lose to save…everyone else? Oh, that’s fine. I’m just Izzie. I don’t get to keep anything!”

He sits in stunned silence. She looks down at her knees, fingers digging into her pants as she takes in a shaky, keening breath. Tears spill from her eyes. “I—I…I’m sorry…I’m just…no one knows. And no one can.”

The final crack gives inside his chest. No, the young man within him shouts. You can’t let her feel like this. I’ll die first.

His hand, his still-Spoken hand, reaches for her cheek. His fingers tremble against her skin. She looks up, mouth slightly open. Startled.

“You’re alive.” He takes a risk and touches her face with his crystalline hand, too. “You’re safe. Our world will go on, and I will not have to know a world where you are dead and buried in the ground. That was my hope. That was why I came. I couldn’t accept anything else. I was the only one that could do it. And so I thought…I thought…”

He leans forward until his forehead touches hers and he can feel her shaky breath against his face.

“If someone could still hear your laugh…if you could still sing for me, out in the sky,” he says, voice broken, “then maybe, somehow, it would all work out.”

He steps over the threshold.

And suddenly he closes the distance between them, pressing his lips to hers in soft desperation. He relishes her small, shocked gasp, the way her shoulders give. Her warm hands circle his neck. He’s been dreaming of this for longer than he’s been awake, but he forces himself to pull away.

Her eyes are dazed now. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have—

“Why’d you stop?” she whispers.

“This is supposed to be about you,” he says before she can protest further and utterly shatter his will to do what they actually came here to do. “This is supposed to be about your memories.”

Her fingers tighten on his tunic as she pulls back to catch his gaze. “It’s not just about me, and you know it.”

He shifts one hand so that his palm cradles the back of her skull. His fingers tangle in her hair. She doesn’t move.

“We can keep trying,” he whispers. He doesn’t know what he’s asking. He’s afraid to admit it to himself. “Or we can stop right here. It’s already been…there’s so much to—”

Her eyes narrow in challenge. “We’re doing this,” she declares, “but only if you can take it. Only if…you’ll still let me be here with you, when all is said and done.”

He falls.

“Hear me, I’seirivine.” His fingers dig further into her hair. “Only time itself could stop me from protecting you.”

Everything comes together at once, and perhaps that is why the spell does not startle him so much this time. Just as he bridges their aether, so too does she lean forward, capturing him in another kiss. The warmth of her body collides with the cold zing of the crystal connection and he grunts from the electricity. She gasps and then sighs with such sudden abandon that his arms seize her to him. She collapses into a pile of limbs in his lap. He hears singing, far in the back of his head.

And then he feels more than any mortal man should.

Her body in the physical realm curls around him. He deepens the kiss and for the first time feels the whole of her mouth. He is set aflame, shuddering. How many days did he think of this, guilty and alone, wondering…

The aether responds in kind; her aether caresses his skin like a desert breeze, fiery and alive like the sands she hails from. He reaches for it with his own aether, the cool whisper of water and earth, until they coalesce together — a life-giving flood that burns his lungs.

He gently pushes her body into the pillows he’d gathered for her. There is no logical explanation for this, he realizes with a jolt. He does it because he desires to, and she pulls him down with her. He wants to run his teeth against her clothes and his fingers down her skin until nothing separates them any longer after centuries of being apart.

He pulls back for a moment, startled by his own want.

“No,” she says, suddenly, desperate. “Don’t stop. I want—” She chokes up on the words.

It isn’t just his own want, he realizes then, stupidly.

He listens to the aether and dives with it into memory as he kisses her jaw, her neck. He lets his tongue linger and she shivers. He is two people at once — the young man who had dreamed of this and the older one that needs to see her healed.

The blood of dragons stains her skin. The blood of men, and then the dark of void, not long after.

He thinks to remove her clothes, to better cleanse her of that corruption, but her hands are already undoing his robes. He pulls her back up into his lap and his fingers lift her tunic. He waits for her to lift her arms of her own accord before he removes it whole.

She looks down upon him for a moment, standing up on her knees straddling his lap. He slowly runs his warm, still-Spoken hand over her scarred stomach, her marred shoulder, the thin, careful line down between her ribs. He imagines himself as healing aether, washing away the pain that came with each mark.

She never stops fighting…

She leans down to work him out of his own clothes, determined. Her fingers brush his skin like feathers.

“Have you done this before?” he asks, sheepish and quiet.

“Nope,” she says. She grins at him suddenly, blinding, before pecking him on the lips. “I’m picking it up as we go.”

No. That peck won’t do. He runs his hands over the silken curve of her waist, up her back, and presses his mouth just under her chin. The aether connection between them shifts and turns like a tugged, silken rope. Cold clashes with their building heat as memories crack and collide together — their very life forces, commingling in ways that should be impossible. They both cry out, him against her throat, her into the caverns of the tower.

He thinks to pull back again, but she suddenly crushes him in a kiss and he lets go. Her hands wander. He fumbles with the clasps on her clothes. She glances to his face as new parts of their bodies are exposed to air. Is this what you want?

“I want you,” he whispers as she leans in close, as if to listen for it, “however you want me.”

“But how do you want me?” she asks, coy and uncertain all at once.

“Oh, Izzie.” He sighs as one of her hands traces his chest. “In every single way.”

She lays him down beneath her. His nails dig suddenly into her back.

Alone, visiting a friend’s grave in the snowy mountains of Coerthas. The cold wind blinds her. It makes her angry, its indomitability. No matter how hard she coils herself against the frost, it finds a way inside her defenses. Cold like ice in your blood. Cold like crystal, against the sun — where he has gone and left me alone—

Where I have become more tower than man—

He jolts in fear. She pulls back at once, hovering over him, scanning his body for injury. He curses himself. He is supposed to be her guide in this.

“I’m sorry,” he sputters out instead. His body convulses for a moment — from the cold made manifest.  "I’m not…"

“No,” she whispers. Her finger touches his mouth. Her gaze meets his. A lifeline. “Shh. I missed you every godsdamned day. Every single one.” She leans down until their foreheads touch again. “I thought I lost you twice. You beautiful idiot.”

His aether curls around her naked form. His heart pounds, keening with joy as she leans down to press kisses to his crystalline edges. Heat pools in his abdomen. This is not why they are supposed to be here, some part of him remembers.

“Never again,” she near growls into his neck, as if to keep the tears of loss at bay.

“Never,” he says. He would say anything if she would keep touching him like this — like she has waited all her life, like he, for this moment alone.

Her fingers linger on the edge of his undergarments. Her sudden hesitation is endearing.

“I need not eat or drink much,” he says distantly, “but all parts of my body remain…in place…”

She looks at him for a long, strangely lucid moment. “It wouldn’t matter,” she says softly. “Either way—I’ve loved you for so long, I—”

The aether arcs, a livewire, and he wraps his legs around her only to spin and press her beneath him again. He kisses her until she moans in his mouth, and even then it doesn’t feel like enough. He presses as much of his skin to her as he can, and she pulls the crystalline parts of him to her, her hand gripping his blue one, until they are one in everything but name. One in everything but…

He feels fumbling, like a teenager, but his voice is sure. “Is this what you want?”

Her hand sneaks below him and squeezes, just so, and his words melt into groans. Minx. Terror.

“More than you know,” she says, nearly angry with need.

“Oh?” He slips his fingers down, down, down. “You have no idea what I know.”

The heat of her desire spikes in her aether, so fizzy and bright that he slams their hands, still woven together, against the floor. She’s right. It wouldn’t even matter if they could do this part. His body, what’s left of who he is as a Spoken being, yearns with a power he hasn’t felt for ages. It seeks out her soft hands, her warm mouth. It wants what is freely given, out of love and joy. His body coils and coils, a spring without release, as his own aether responds in kind, building and building. Yes. Yes. They would do this together.

She guides him in the physical world as he guides her aether down toward darker things.

Alone, facing down a monster of a man. My enemy. My friend. The craze in his eyes — she is so much the same as him. She is single-minded and able to kill with nary a thought. Maybe this is who she will become—

“Not you,” he near groans into her ear. She shudders. One of his hands cups her face and then tangles in her hair. He feels her move beneath him and he sighs, unable to speak.

He sees her in everything, some days. The laughter of the children sprinting through town. The hawking cries of the merchantess, her shining jewels and necklaces, enchanted. The fury of the daughter, wielding her sword to protect her brother. The loving circle of the father, greeting his wife as she returns from guard duty. The hearth fires in the Pendants…but most of all in the birds, the few of them still left about the Crystarium, singing as though the world had not changed utterly. Singing like it was always the perfect afternoon.

Her singing as they work in Mor Dhona. Her voice, warbling and true, carries throughout the camp over dinner. Her dirge songs as she dives into the tower without him, to keep her enemies at bay. All of them haunt him. He goes to the garden, just to hear it and imagine…

She pushes him back for a moment and he instantly stops. He feels as though he is falling down a thousand stories, seeing the fear in her eyes.

“You pushed them all away for 100 years,” she breathes. The dark tendril in her aether says enough. It pulses. To her, this consequence was too horrible to name.

He tries to smile. Tries to joke. It feels like jagged glass in his throat. “These are the sacrifices one must make to be able to sell the Crystal Exarch persona, you know.”

Her eyes are heavy and wet. She doesn’t believe him.

He runs his thumb across her cheek and leans in close. “No one could ever know, if I wanted to see you whole again one day.”

“You didn’t have to hide from everyone,” she whispers up to him. “I’m sure someone would have married you. Someone must have wanted to know what was attached to that pretty mouth…”

He smiles, because he can’t help it. It is extremely like her, tangled up in him as she is now, to wonder of his past hurts. He leans down and rubs his nose against hers until she smiles back, laughing a little, the tension simmering away.

“Sizing up the competition?” he asks.

A flash of a grin. “Maybe.”

“You needn’t.” He takes a hand down to her tail and strokes it softly, carefully. Her back arches up.

“B-but I’m—you didn’t…what if—?”

What if I never arrived? What if none of it worked?

There it is, there. The darkness inside of her, the kernel of fear, blooming to life as he sheds scrutiny upon it. He caresses it with hearth fire — with warmth and love, assurances. Home. Their time together as what felt like children, now. So long ago. So many eons ago.

He would always find her.

“My love,” he says, because he can say it. There is no need to pretend he saw her otherwise. That chocobo was well out of the stable now. “My beloved. If waiting was all I had to do to see you again…to know you lived…to know I could protect you…I would have done it, willingly, and for longer.”

Something cracks in the aether as the darkness rages back. His grip around her turns taut. He buries his face in her hair, breathing hard. Here, he has found the seed of her terror. He would see her through this.

The fear the fear the fear the fear, a gunshot, ruby eyes, falling down dead, dead, dead, DEAD—

He sits up and holds her in his lap, one hand behind her head, tucking her into his chest, even as his body heaves with heat. “Nothing shall harm us here, in my domain. Nothing.”

Dead because of her, for she is just like Zenos. All who come near her die, eventually. A grave on a cold cliff. The bright, blinding light of Papalymo’s final act, giving his all. A flash of silver hair, falling through the sky, down forever. I am a God Killer. That is all I am.

No. You are a guiding star. You are the loving light.

The light, all consuming—

My northern light. My compass bearing.

THE LIGHT—

You will not be broken.

She grips him back, arms tight around his shoulders. He gasps from her strength.

And neither will you.

You can rest easy with me.

The dam breaks. She throws her head back and she calls out his name into the crystalline tower. His true name.

Mine, he chants in his head, my Izzie, my love, my inspiration, my song.

And then, just as suddenly, it ends. They collapse together on the pillows. Though their aether slips apart like a robe shorn from a body, the thrumming still lives within him. She falls away from him for a moment. Tears stream down his face. He is tense with waiting, half-expecting her to disappear.

She is unusually silent as she observes him. For a long moment, she says nothing.

“You’re just a dream, aren’t you?” he asks. His voice doesn’t feel like his own, tired and gravelly and alive. He reaches for her, desperate to know.

Only then does she lean in and press her nose to his. She rubs his tears away with her thumb. “I could ask you the same thing.”

One of her legs tangles up with his. His relief is nearly blinding. He traces careful circles on her back with his fingertips. He brushes her tears away with his lips.

“I love you,” he says. He would never make the same mistake of his youth, saying nothing until doors started to close. “Dream or spirit or girl or whoever you are.”

“Walking disaster.”

He smiles against her cheek. “Wild entity.”

She closes her eyes. Her shoulders lock up for an instant before she leans into him, face wet against his shoulder. Her arms lock tight around her own middle, her forearms pressing into his stomach, and she takes in a high-pitched, stuttering breath.

“I don’t deserve to ask things of you,” she says, “but please, don’t go where I can’t follow you.”

She sobs then, bleeding the last of her soul shattering anger. He tightens his arms around her and rubs the back of her neck with his thumb. He holds her until her breaths calm. He holds her until heat stops pricking in his eyes.

He would be her safe haven, for as long as the universe would allow. Until she is ready to fly away from him.

Something in the tower shifts, clicking and groaning in its agelessness. It’s a sound that is ingrained so thoroughly in the background of his life that he thinks nothing of it until Izzie shoots out of his arms with unnatural strength, holding some part of his discarded robe over her body.

“Oh motherfuck,” she mutters, hesitating between jumping to her feet and diving under the pillows. “What if that’s Lyna?”

She looks to him in unabashed fear. The face is so familiar that he bursts into laughter.

“She was explicitly instructed to let no one in the tower until I said.” He snakes an arm up around her waist to pull her back down with him.

She squints. “She knows I’m here.”

His mouth twitches as she processes this. Her hands fly to her eyes and she falls back dramatically into the pillows with a great, frightened nooooo.

“…she probably knows exactly what just happened,” Izzie says.

“Maybe not.” He strokes her hair. He smiles because he can’t help it.

She peeks at him from between her fingers. “Don’t be dumb.”

“You’re right.” He kisses her temple. “So much for your reputation.”

“What about your…your persona of distance and benevolence…”

“Sadly, ruined once and for all by a wanton woman who wandered into my chambers. A very sad tale. Shall I tell it to you?”

She whaps his chest lightly with the back of her hand, but her mouth puckers up, holding back a laugh. “People are gonna think I was trying to curry favor with you.”

He digs his nose into her hair. “Are you so ashamed of me, my love?”

That laugh finally comes free, and she dissolves into giggles. “Maybe I was trying to curry favor with you. I’d like to see them try it.”

He pulls a blanket over them and tucks her in against him. “I’m afraid you’ve ruined it for all of them.”

They lay together under the starry blue crystal, cradled in feathers and cotton and velvet. The stories would never tell of this moment, and that was well. He held it in his heart.

Perhaps he had a role still yet to play, if only to remind her to believe in what yet would come to pass. For no force of 13 worlds could break his faith, if all paths lead to Izzie Idel, the Warrior of Light and Darkness both, breathing softly against his chest.