seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Venezuela
seen from India
seen from Italy
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from Singapore
seen from Colombia
seen from United States
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Zimbabwe
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seen from United States
FF RP BLOG MASTER LIST:
@corditeheart : michele xu, ffviii
@burntchild : seifer almasy, ffviii
@deptofgunsandwomen : irvine kinneas, ffviii
@charmenerveux : quistis trepe, ffviii
@thehandofjustice : xv/kingsglaive multimuse
@faatali : ffviii aesthetic blog
and a gentle reminder that everything's a sideblog to my main @irishais !
A small, belated happy-birthday drabble
“Ah,” Quistis voice is more tired than surprised, or annoyed even, as the steps through the door, pulling a long, half-unbound fall of golden hair over her shoulder “I singed it.”
Xu is on her heels, kicking her office door closed being them. Efficient rather than unhappy. ‘Singed it’. Xu remembers. The acrid smell of burn stronger in the closed-in space than it had been in the hallway, or out in the field, or even in the car riding back, windows down to the clear Spring night.
Xu remembers the burst of energy and the spiral of flame. Quistis, mouth a gaping roar and wreathed in bright-hot light, smoke. Spitting embers. Hair flying in the force of it, and then the aftershock.
For a few seconds not…not twisted by the animal magic in her veins but transformed by it. A spirit of flame and terror and not life, but Alive.
Their pursuers didn’t follow them after that. Fell back. They joked, quietly, once they’d actually reached the car about work not being as challenging as it used to be.
Xu’s heart had skipped at the sight of her then, as it always did. Awe and joy and the smallest bit of fear. It skipped again now, as it always did. At the memory. At The lock of singed hair pulled over a tired shoulder and the knowledge that truthfully, there was no one else Quistis would allow to see this. Would allow to see that kind of magic and then talk about it after.
“It was clumsy.” Quistis sighs. “I can do better.” And Xu has never thought her a fool, but clumsy is not the word she would have used.
“We can cut it.” She offers, lightly. Half lightly.
She expects Quistis to nod. Expects her to reach for the scissors she keeps in the bag that she keeps under Xu’s desk. Expects that Quistis will hand them to her.
The shock of intimacy is there when she does just that anyway.
I've just reread that LuNyx "faith" oneshot you wrote and I have to sat it's really A+ writing. It gave me me fuel to otp feels. I've been binge reading LuNyx fics and your oneshot is one of the best in my list.
Oh, my god, this was so nice of you to send! Thank you so much for this lovely message-- I’m really glad you enjoyed it!! Luna and Nyx make me feel WAY TOO MANY THINGS and I love them so much <3 <3 <3
zesimi replied to your post: Oh man, association wise I cannot see your...
Before brainstorming, talking, and rping with you, I actually really disliked Seifer and didn’t see how Rinoa would have liked him. You made me reconsider his whole story and I even replayed the game later. Found that I actually sympathized with him a lot and all the SeiNoa feels just followed after~ :)
omgggggggggg i just want to frame this and put it on my wall iluuuuuu
(hope this makes you smile a little)
She whizzes by him, right under his arm actually, and if he hadn’t been laughing too hard he’d have caught her. He’d meant to certainly. Seen her sliding across the absurdly large space of hardwood floor in this absurdly large penthouse of hers that he only halfway doesn’t live in. But Xu in a moment of open playfulness is one of his favorite things, and it’s rare enough to catch him off guard enough that he’d slid himself right into the edge of the table and nearly knocked himself over instead.
So he misses her, and she slides by under his arm and in the instant he takes to recover his balance she whacks him. Right in the lower back. Right over solid organs that would bleed and bleed if her hand had been something sharp. As it is, it only stings a little.
“You’re dead, Turk.”
Alright so even her playfulness can be vicious too, sometimes.
And then she floats away, gliding across the wood, turning a spin in familiar socks that don’t match and about come up to her knees.
Hadn’t she said something once about having once been a dancer? Or liking too, at least.
Well he can dance too.
On the next pass she’s the one laughing and slipping a little, so it isn’t hard to dart her way, come in low and catch her over his shoulder and keep going. Hang on to her. Bounce of the wall and propel back towards the kitchen.
“Might be dead but you’re captured, yo. ‘Least dead agents can’t tell no secrets.” Slips a little, fuzzy with a little more of some expensive bottle she’d left on the counter than he’d really meant to have. Almost sends them both to the ground and it’s a giggling dual-effort to stay upright.
Back in the living room the laundry is piled on the couch, socks halfway sorted. All of the dishes in the sink actually are clean.
When he sets her on the counter, next to the open bottle, she takes another a sip and he kisses her because hey. Sharing.
Yeah. Maybe chores day should be an actual thing.
I'm fine (it doesn't hurt)
It’s fine.
This is fine.
He’s. He’s doing fine.
It’s not like this is the first time-
The first what, snarled to himself, though he hadn’t been aware of thinking anything. The first nothing. It happens. It’s fine.
Fine is the three days of homemade lunches piled on each other in the break room fridge, that he hadn’t even made for himself. Fine is the ring he’s running into the training room floor, where technically a track is supposed to be.
(He follows it, but doesn’t see it. Isn’t keeping track of seconds, or meters, or kilometers.)
Fine is the key burning in his pocket. The report that had waited sixteen hours to be started, before Tseng had quietly taken it off of his desk.
Fine is walking into his own place, climbing to it, laying down next to the bed, and a sudden attack of claustrophobia.
There had been a funeral. Two even. He’d gone to neither. There had been a write-up. He hadn’t even pretended to read it.
It didn’t change anything if he did. So why bother?
Fine is a few drinks to many at the last bar they’d been too, with no one to pick a fight with.
He is fine.
It is two whole days, and being told off work for it (because there are actual rules against working 42 straight hours. This is how people get hurt. Sot what, he thinks, so what. People get hurt anyway), before he finally follows the burn in his pocket home. Or as close to it as he figures he can find. Hi lives where he lives. home has never been a zip code. Or any other set of numbers.
When he finally opens the door, UT is yowling. And doesn’t stop yowling. Not for three cans of food and two hours of petting and a trip riding shoulders around the whole damn, echoing, too-big place.
Terror, he figures, senses something wrong. Terror is grieving.
He is fine.
He is so fine, that after work the next night, he hits up a bar he has been to only twice. He finds a woman with dark hair, and dark eyes, who smells almost like vanilla. He pays for her time, and he takes her back to Xu’s place.
He doesn’t want her. It doesn’t feel good. That’s the entire point.
He has only ever wanted two people in bed with him, and Xu is was half of them. Reno has no illusions. Is not even really pretending. He pays for her time and takes her to bed because he knows that it’s going to hurt him. Maybe, he thinks, somewhere far in the back of his head. maybe that will wake him up.
Whatever waking up feels like, he doesn’t feel it the next morning.
So he tries again. This time with that other redhead Xu’d been so fond of. Nikki? The one he didn’t make noodles for.
It doesn’t hurt the right way, and in the morning he catches only half a glimpse of her on her way out. He says nothing.
In the morning, he empties out the fridge, throws away all the food that nobody is going to eat now. Cleans out the bathroom. Wonders just what the hell he’s doing.
Finally, two days later, Tseng allows him back to work. Tseng sends him a recoding of the funeral, because it’s ‘proper’. Tseng leaves a newspaper, and two magazines on his desk.
This is stupid, because Reno knows she’s dead.
He isn’t in denial.
It’s just nobody ever told him how he’s supposed to lose … He doesn’t have the word for what she was. Not a friend. Not a lover. Not a comrade. Not a rival.
All of them. None of them.
He doesn’t have the rights to sell Xu’s place, just some of the more arbitrary things in it. So he keeps visiting until it’s closed on, because there is no one left to pay it’s taxes, and then he takes UT to his.
It’s only been a week. So much for timing.
He hates vanilla.
He hates gunpowder.
He is fine.
“You know for probably like the first time ever, I ain’t sure if it’s me or you that smells worse, yo.”
He’s turned the shower on before the bathroom door is even closed, before he’s gotten anything more than his boots and his belt off. It’s a cheap enough hotel and a cold enough week that it will be a few moments before the water heats up to anything that will actually feel cleansing.
His jacket comes of easily enough, but his shirt sticks. Blood half-dried pulling uncomfortably, and crumbling at the fabrics edges. He drops them both in a heap on the toilet seat, without ceremony.
“Of all the things I’m better than you at, stinking is not one of them.”
And it’s comforting, the fact that she’s right behind him. That in the mirror he can see that she’s keeping her feet, and coordinated enough to manage her own clothing. Has enough energy left in her to manage a cleanup, and not just beeline for the bed.
It’s not that it has been an especially grueling job. Just a long one.Just a lot of bodies.
“Death don’t smell good on nobody Kitkat.”
“Well it smells better on me.”
“Ain’t arguing. Just ain’t sure they’re gonna be selling copper and vanilla as a luxury anything anytime soon, yo.”
She doesn’t need his help but he turns to help her anyway. With the obnoxious little things at least. Weapon straps. Belt buckle. Shoelaces. Make sure her phone is on the counter, to the side, away from any possibility of water damage. Sets it all out in a neat row.
Half lifts her into the shower ahead of him. She can get started while he finishes stripping down.
He’s forgotten his goggles, and she slides them off his head as he slides between the water and her. Lets them drop. They’d be way too loud as they his the edge of the tub, and then the floor, if not for the sound of beating water. He’d winced as they stuck on matted hair, and she’d made a noise that more or less called him a wimp. “Yeah whatever.”
They are both mapped in bruises and scrapes. And for minutes the water running off them, the soap foam, is pink. Deep at first. Finally lighter. And while he’d been pretty sure already most of that pink didn’t belong to either of them, it’s still better to run his hands over unbroken skin. Better to have little else to wince at when she turns him around to trade their places, stop him ‘hogging all the water.“
And when he finds himself on his knees, hair clean enough that her fingers thread through easily, the sharp tang of her doesn’t taste a thing like blood. Doesn’t smell a thing like finality. And he’s grateful that the water hasn’t run cold yet. Because he figures they both need a few minutes to remind themselves that they aren’t only that.
