#underroast

[ignis-scientia-estrogen-brigade]

I meant to have this chapter up last night, but there was so much I wanted to include and not quite enough narrative time to let it all unfold the way I’d intended for it to, so I got a little hung up stringing together all the details.

I have two more planned chapters of this fic left to wade through (the final one being the sin wagon you’ve all be waiting for) before I resume fulfilling my headcanon and art requests; it might be pertinent to mention that an invasion of visitors will be descending upon my house next week just in time for the annual San Diego Comic Con festivities, so this blog may go dark for a few days due to that. Never fear, though—I’m itching to get back to the drawing board my tablet and stylus, and look forward to firing up my picarto.tv stream again in the near future!

(SFW; Click on the link above or the cut below for the full text of Chapter 3.)

Ophelia doesn’t even ask for permission to accompany him on his walk home this time; she’d scrubbed down the kitchen and taken final inventory while Ignis had stood around twiddling his thumbs as Cid slurped down the last of his darkshells, and she’s already waiting for him at the back alley entrance of the bazaar when he finishes shutting the lights off and locking up the restaurant.

“How long have you known Mr. Sophiar?” she asks, trailing beside him as he steps off onto his usual path back toward his apartment.

He tries not to let his annoyance show, despite wanting nothing more than to be alone and nurse his misgivings in silence. “Over ten years now.”

“So you knew him before the nights grew long?”

“I did.”

“Was he always this cantankerous? I know there’s a certain precedent set for crabby old men, but he seems to have a particularly large chip on his shoulder compared to most.”

“Approximately. Although I do believe he harbors a considerable measure of guilt pertaining to a falling out he had with a close friend some years ago. We all have our daemons in the closet, I suppose.”

“And what, might I inquire, are your daemons?”

Her teasing cadence matches the playful elbow she nudges him with; the strategist clamps down on his jaw and wills his irritation away. “Crustaceans.”

A laugh. “Crustaceans?”

“Indeed. Dreaded creatures—their pointed pincers terrorize me in my dreams. A Karlabos murdered my mother, as it so happens.”

Her giggles ring out through the alleyway, and the sound of musicians hocking their final numbers before packing their instruments for the night drifts in the strategist’s ears. His fingers graze a nearby wall as they round the corner—the one he recalls having been graffitied with Dis Town Iz 2 Hot 4 U many years prior—and Ophelia’s laughs fade on the evening wind.

“Speaking of jokes,” she says, as they near the front steps leading up to his apartment, “I hope you know I was kidding earlier.”

He reaches for the keys in his pocket and frowns. “About?”

“About not being married. It is rather curious to think someone hasn’t snapped you up by now.”

His frown deepens as he struggles to find his keys. “I’m hardly a piece of fish bait.”

“Sorry—I only meant that there’s quite a bit to your appeal. I’m surprised a handsome man like yourself doesn’t have a harem of beautiful women waiting outside the doors of the restaurant hoping for an autograph.”

“I’m not sure I would categorize myself as handsome. At least, not anymore.”

The strategist can already sense the question hovering on the tip of her tongue. “At the risk of dancing around the obvious,” she says carefully, “I was wondering if I might ask you about your sight.”

The hackles on his neck are up again, but he forces an indifferent air. “There’s not much to say, really. I can’t see anything at all.”

“Then why do you wear that visor of yours?”

“Ah.” He finally manages to withdraw his keys and inserts them into the door. “I suppose ‘anything’ is a fairly broad generalization. My right eye is somewhat sensitive to light, and the visor helps to keep the glare of the sun from irritating it too much.”

“So why do you wear it indoors? I’ve never seen you take it off, not even on rainy days.”

He can no longer conceal the exasperation in his tone, and he turns to face her. “Because I don’t like distressing Mr. Tostwell’s customers. There’s a reason why the lenses are frosted—it saves other people from the bulk of the view.”

If he had expected to frighten her and send her scampering off down the alleyway, he is sorely disappointed. “Don’t be absurd,” she replies, her voice gentle. “Your face isn’t distressing in the least.”

In hindsight, the strategist surmises, Ophelia likely wasn’t aiming to remove his visor against his will, and was only intending to run a few fingers tenderly across his cheek. Even still, she ought to have known better than to reach for a blind man’s face with a hand he couldn’t see coming; he raises his own the instant he feels soft fingertips gliding along his chin, deflecting her wrist as he flinches away.

“Sorry,” she says quickly. “I wasn’t trying to—”

“It’s fine.” He gropes for his visor and readjusts it back across the bridge of his nose. “Although for future reference, I’m not particularly the touchy-feely sort.”

He can hear her dismay as her feet shift on the steps beneath them. “Did I do something wrong?”

Other than invade my personal space without my consent? Not at all. The strategist searches for anything to say that might disentangle himself from this delicate predicament without completely deflating her ego; when nothing immediately comes to mind and he’s left grasping at straws, he heaves a sigh and falls back on the oldest excuse in the book. “It’s not you, truly—it’s me.”

His ears then pick up on the sound of her footsteps slowly moving away from the landing. “You know, Ignis,” she says quietly, “you could’ve just told me you weren’t interested, rather than insulting my intelligence. I may not be the cleverest woman in Lucis, but I’m certainly not stupid.”

Walked right into that one, he thinks. “Ophelia, I—”

“Really, it’s all right. I’m a grown woman—I can handle a bit of rejection.”

He props a frustrated hand on his hip, rubbing at his throbbing temple with the other. “Might I persuade you to grab a cup of coffee with me? I think there’s a stand still open near the Coernix Station.”

Her suspicion is obvious even without the use of his eyes. “I thought you just got through patronizing my company.”

“As friends—perhaps get to know each other a little better.” He withdraws his keys from the door and pockets them once again. “Maybe even take a moment to address those pesky closet daemons.”

She remains silent for several heartbeats, until he hears the sound of her footfalls angling away from the steps. “Lead the way.”

His memory of the path leading to the 24-hour convenience store is a little hazier than the one he took to work every morning, but he sets off in a vaguely southwest direction with Ophelia trailing closely behind him. She resumes her morose silence, tiptoeing quietly along the cobblestone sidewalk and never crossing the plane of his forward motion, until the echo of the back alleys gives way to an open pavilion and his occluded eye slowly begins to register the bright lights of the gas station’s neon sign.

The coffee kiosk was actually situated a fair bit away from the Coernix Station, nearer to the wide concrete balcony overlooking the northern end of Taelpar Crag, but close enough to the minimart to capitalize on weary travelers in need of a quick caffeine fix. The strategist generally preferred to brew his own Ebony at home, for reasons that become more apparent as the two approach the stand; he can smell the aroma of underroasted Arabica beans wafting in his nostrils, and his nose wrinkles at the thought of actually having to pay good gil for what amounted to watered-down cat urine.

But it gives him something to keep his hands occupied with, rather than shoving them awkwardly in his pockets while he endures his companion’s loaded silence, and soon they are retrieving their warm paper cups from the kiosk clerk and settling in on a nearby bench.

“You’ve been asking me a lot of questions about myself this evening,” he says, turning his blind gaze in the direction of the valley’s gaping abyss. “Thought maybe you’d consider fielding a few of my own.”

The sound of Ophelia blowing softly on her hot beverage mingles with the stirring of the breeze. “A fair compromise.”

“I’m a little curious to know what exactly happened to your parents, if that’s not too personal an inquiry.”

He then hears her take a slow, deliberate sip of her drink, as if contemplating his words carefully. “Without coming across as calloused,” she says finally, “my father already had one foot in the grave.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d been fighting an infection for quite some time. Not a starscourge infection, mind you—we probably would’ve been immediately banished from Lestallum if that were the case—but he’d had a history of long illnesses, and it was only getting worse toward the end.”

“Was your mother ill as well?”

“She was not. But she’d heard of an elderly apothecary living in the back hills of Malmalam Thicket who might be able to help him when the doctors here no longer could.” Another sip, another moment of contemplation. “I told her leaving the city posed too great of a risk to their safety, what with all the daemons running about, but she wouldn’t listen. Looking back, I suppose she just couldn’t bear the thought of living life without him. As it turned out, she didn’t have to for very long.”

He grips at the sides of his cup and furrows his brow. “I’m terribly sorry. I imagine that must have left quite the hole in your heart.”

She shifts on the bench beside him, but she doesn’t appear to grow despondent; if anything, the strategist picks up on the slight uptick in her voice. “You would think so, but you’d be surprised. My parents and I never ended a phone call without telling each other we loved one another, and it was the last thing I said to them before they left. At the very least, I haven’t tortured myself into madness by dwelling on sentiments left unspoken.”

Her words cut through him like a dagger between his ribs, and the weight of the skull pendant around his neck suddenly feels as heavy as a boulder. “That’s… very admirable of you.”

“I spent my fair share of time cursing the Six, just as anyone would. But I’ve learned it’s a wasted effort to be ladened down with such remorse, and it’s hardly reasonable of me to cry foul when so many others have lost as much and more.” She then prods him jovially in the shoulder. “I’ve certainly had questionable men leave me with bigger regrets.”

It’s her unbridled earnestness, Ignis realizes, that sets her apart from his former protégé; there was no mystery surrounding Ophelia, no great onus of responsibility that required the complete tempering of all human emotions, and the fact that she was able to remain even remotely positive in the face of such adversity slices through the strategist’s melancholy like a sliver of light through a storm cloud.

“I apologize for my abrasiveness earlier,” he says, swirling his untouched coffee around in his cup. “It seems I’m still nursing a few regrets of my own.”

Rather than acknowledging his admission with a verbal response, Ignis feels her hand reach over and gently squeeze his forearm. His own hands are still wrapped around his cup in a vice grip, and he picks at a rough spot on the waxy rim as a quiet lull descends over the bench.

Then: “What was she like?”

He looks up from his beverage and stares at her for a long moment, although his eyes see nothing but darkness in return. “It’s a funny thing,” he whispers. “I can scarcely remember the sound of her voice, but I’ll never forget the way she used to look at me.”

But it wasn’t only the emerald orbs that had peered past his spectacles and directly into his soul that the strategist recalls to mind, nor was it the fiery red hair that had smelled like lust and restraint and all the delightful things that made her exactly who she was that visits him in his dreams every night; it was her smile he remembers most of all, the one she forfeited when he touched her just where he knew she liked it, when they were behind closed doors after a long day of maintaining rigid facades and could both finally let their guards down, and it was only a small kindness that his precious memories of her had not been purged right along with his sight.

“Was it you who put a stop to things?” Ophelia asks. “Or was she the one who ended the relationship?”

“The latter, more or less.”

“How did she do it?”

“She died.” His voice falters slightly, but he bites down on the inside of his cheek and ignores the painful wincing in his chest. “At least, I presume she did. She was working at the palace when Insomnia fell.”

Ophelia’s side of the bench falls silent for a moment, until he hears the sound of her hair shaking softly against her shoulders. “Was there no evidence of her whereabouts after the invasion? I personally saw hundreds of people fleeing the city before they garrisoned the bridge—is it possible she could’ve escaped in the confusion, somehow?”

“I tried searching for anything that might’ve revealed to me what ultimately happened to her, but the Citadel’s records were all either lost or scattered.” His fingers have resorted to bending the edges of the cup’s rim absentmindedly as he scours his mind for memories he’d long since locked away. “Even Cor Leonis couldn’t tell me very much, and he was her superior officer. Only that she’d been on patrol duty during the peace talks, which was the last time he saw her alive.”

“Did she have any family? Perhaps they might have some leads, if they still walked among the living.”

“Her parents resided in the north, according to her work documents I had access to when I was employed as a royal retainer. She also had a sister living here in Lestallum, although it was unclear whether she had any contact with the family.”

“A sister?”

He nods. “She’d evidently eloped with an Altissian merchant some years back. I could never bring myself to seek her out, though.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because”—he’s gripping the cup so hard now he can feel the paper walls begin to fold in on themselves—“because I never wanted to ask, since I never quite wanted to know the truth of it. She either perished in the fall, or she went out of her way never to look for me.”

Ophelia’s fingers release his forearm, and she runs a hand across his shoulder. “I’m sure if she knew how much you loved her, she would have.”

But her gentle touch isn’t enough to soothe the aching beast inside him, and the tears he’d hoped to stem begin to pool in his one open eye. “It’s hard to say, because I never actually told her so. I thought there’d be time enough later to settle our feelings, when the life we wanted wasn’t quite so at odds with the vows we made to the crown. And now I fear she died never knowing how dearly I loved her.”

“You couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen. Nobody could have.”

It wasn’t so much the lack of foreknowledge, the strategist concedes to himself, that haunted him the most; it was the awful reality of knowing she had almost assuredly been pregnant even before she herself did, because of course he knew, because it had been his job to notice the little things, because he hadn’t believed for even a millisecond that the nausea and indigestion she’d experienced the last few nights they were together had anything to do with the stress surrounding the peace accord. He’d left for Altissia silently fretting about how to properly handle the situation, hoping only that Noct would eventually come to understand the necessity of him stepping down from his duties as royal advisor so that he might step up and take responsibility for his utterly irresponsible actions.

But it didn’t matter anymore, because both Noctis and the redhead were gone—the latter likely buried under a mass grave he’d unknowingly tread upon the last time he ventured into the city—and Ignis was left with nothing but the weight of a skull pendant around his neck that served only to remind him of the unbearable burden of living.  “Apologies for unloading on you like this,” he says, righting himself in his seat and resuming a firm grip over his emotions once again. “I suppose in the grand scheme of things, she was a drop in the bucket of everything I’ve ever lost.”

Ophelia’s hand falls from his shoulder, and she lets out a long sigh before finally speaking. “Ten years is a long time to carry that weight on your heart, Ignis. Don’t you think it’s time you forgave yourself?”

He rises from the bench and gropes for the balcony’s railing, emptying his cold coffee over the edge and out into the wind. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t even know how to start.”

Her footsteps stop beside him, and her clothes rustle as she leans agains the balustrade. “You could start by seeking closure. All you have to do is ask around—Lestallum’s not that big of a city, and a Lucian woman married to an Altissian merchant certainly narrows the playing field down quite a bit.”

He then feels the sensation of her fingers entwining in his, but there’s no trace of opportunism in her touch; it’s merely another display of the earnestness that has come to define her, and the strategist closes his own hand around her palm as the tightening in his chest suddenly eases a tad.

“I could even assist you, if you’d like.”

Her voice is quiet, her proposal modest and unobtrusive, and Ignis glances down at her for a long time before offering her a weak grin. “That would be… rather helpful, thank you.”

[loveofdetail]

why is underroasted coffee so trendy