Forward but Never Forget/XOXO - Ch: 54 - FORWARD (FINAL CHAPTER<3)
Your visit was on a day of brilliant sunshine. You had taken a public ferry across the channel, a sleek new vessel with an electric engine and a hull reinforced with rust-resistant plating. The river, once a murky, polluted conduit of industrial waste, was now a thriving artery of commerce. You saw fishing boats, pleasure barges, and even a school of children on a field trip, their small faces pressed against the glass as they pointed at the Iron Pearl's fantastical silhouette at the horizon.
In your seat in the second-class compartment, you'd settled back with a sigh. How different this was to your first crossing on a stinking, leaky barge, its engine coughing black smoke into the already smoggy air. You'd been horribly seasick, and the ferryman, a grizzled old salt with a face like a dried apricot, had laughed at you.
"First time Down-Low, eh?"Ā he'd jeered, tossing a bootlegged piece of hardtack in your lap.Ā "Take heart, Piltie. You'll get used to the stink."
You never did. You simply learned to hold your breath.
But that was then. Now, the air was clean. The water was clear. And the people, on both sides of the river, were shellacked, somehow, with a new, prosperous sheen. It was not as if Piltover had taken Zaun, given it a good scrubbing, and told it to behave. Rather, Zaun had, with its own two stubborn hands, dragged itself out of the muck, bathed, splashed on a bit of cologne, and presented itself at Piltover's doorstep with a smirk and a proposition.
And Piltover, to everyone's shock, had accepted.
You smiled as you watched the ribboning blue of the water. Your hand was clasped in your fiancĆ©'s, who was napping in the seat next to you.Ā HeĀ had mastered the art of sleeping anywhereāa skill you suspected was a Fissure-born adaptation rather than a personality quirk.
The rise and fall of his breathing held a comforting rhythm. You were heading to Zaun, not as an intrepid journalist on a risky assignment, but as a newly-minted dual citizen. Your fiancƩ, of Fissure birth, had already secured a modest, but perfectly serviceable, apartment in a district that, a decade ago, you would have been terrified to even pass through.
Life, you thought, had a curious way of writing its own endings.
AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO
FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)
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