I wanted to take another tilt at the piece I wrote for Day 29 of the 30-Day OTP Challenge in September--“I love you”s. The two are not mutually exclusive, really, but it didn’t quite capture the feeling I wanted it to.
Feel free to consider it a companion piece to “Flow,” though I didn’t write it as one.
This work contains MSQ spoilers for FFXIV through patch 4.4.
Shasi realizes she's in love with Thancred at Praetorium—how else to explain the relief and guilt she feels when the blade of light doesn't kill him?
The first time she puts a name to it is in the Allagan ruins they explore together—a lighter respite from regular duties he has not yet been declared fit for.
Whenever she visits the Waking Sands she comes to see him, to ask how he is. This is the only voice she gives to the ache in her heart: unselfish concern, which he mistakes for mere interest in when he will be restored to fieldwork.
But when he is, he is more closed than before, more guarded. It is her duty and her choice to protect him, and she will, always.
Until it is his to protect her. He is sorry they never got to dance at the Sultana's banquet. It is a debt he claims he will collect another time, but now the Brass Blades bear down on them. She must go, and be gone; the hope of the realm that exists embodied in her own person must survive. She wants to tell him before she flees, but there is no time.
When she hears his cries of pain echo in the sewers she wants to shout her confession back to him, but she has no breath for it. And soon she is alone.
Then she is in the company of others, in the small months of the year, in Coerthas. The Ishgardians are fond of their love festival, and she pours her pain out in ink one morning. She wants to consign the words and the feelings to the pyre—Thancred is dead, and she feels false to him every time she puts her arms around Haurchefant—but she has not the strength.
They are still awaiting her in Camp Dragonhead somewhere. Even now. Even then.
She does not think of them when Thancred re-enters her life in a spray of daggers—protecting her, as he exited it more than a year before. She wants to give vent to the relief she feels—why is he always so close to death? But the timing is all wrong. She will tell him soon, she tells herself.
She will tell him when she returns from the Aetherial Sea; when they are all together again. When things are as they should be.
But when she returns without Minfilia, he goes, and she fears it might be forever. How can she tell him she loves him when he can't stand the sight of her? How can she slip that bond around him when he wants to be gone?
It is not jealousy she feels when she notes the way he looks at Hilda. It is envy. She wants to be a comfort to him, she wants to hold him close, to tell him all that has transpired, to hear from him all that has happened, to be allowed, at last, to love him. Instead they argue. His pain is too near the surface, and calls hers to the fore.
They are ragged edges that will never fit together.
Time wears them down. Time, and horror, and loss; a small blue moon hangs in the sky over Baelsar's Wall. There are a few Ala Mhigan refugees who call it, with irony, Rhalgr's Beacon, for it betokens their destination. The Alliance will march beneath that star, even after the Allagan weapon has chased it from the sky. There is another banquet in the Fragrant Chamber once this is decided. The notion goes that the fete celebrates the official re-entrance of Ishgard into the Eorzean Alliance, but they both know it is a premature victory ball. They dance anyway, only two years late, and she longs to tell him.
They cross the Velodyna; they are driven back; blood sings in her sword-arm when she stands against the Viceroy. Ala Mhigo will not be yielded unto them, and Thancred will not make the long crossing to Doma. Shasi hopes that he and Urianger can be some support to one another—both have dealt with Ascians before; one by force and the other by choice. But in case of shipwreck she means to confess to him anyway.
She does not find him before her ferry departs.
When she returns there is the mission, and Krile missing, and there is the strange mutual fixation that has grown between her and Zenos yae Galvus. Thancred comes and bears witness to this last when she puts the prince under glass. She doesn't know why she asked Urianger to send him. She doesn't know why he came. She only fears he has been hurt, somehow, by his coming; by her phratry—no, her tryst, by then—with a man who had once been her enemy.
They do not speak of it. When she executes Zenos—when she cries, afterward—it's Thancred's arms that catch her. She knows then she has never been false at all. She has loved others, but always him, she understands; too, she understands now is not the time to say so.
She traverses Thanalan and then the wider world. Alone, not alone; with ghosts and spectres and her own mind for company. She and Fray do not talk about Thancred. They do not need to.
When that jaunt is ended, she comes home at last—to her little house in the Goblet. The yard is weeded and the stable is swept and the mail that has piled up beside her door is tidily organized. A little note slipped into the top stack betrays Thancred's involvement, and her heart feels fit to burst.
She returns to Doma and meets with the Ambassador. Asahi sas Brutus claims that none could have loved Zenos more or better than he; Shasi breaks apart a bit at the notion. It has been months, after all, since she first heard the rumor that Zenos was alive, though she felt his blood run over her hands, heard the last breath leave his lungs. When they open the grave and find it empty, Thancred is beside her, which seems almost too much to bear.
It is not what it seems. She knows this in her soul, and yet the ordeal exhausts her. Thancred is going to Garlemald, to hear what might be heard. She would have said nothing, but for Shpoki arranging events otherwise. She is too tired not to be with Thancred anymore.
She can kiss him, touch him; when he is inside of her she has to bury her face against his neck. If she does not mute herself, the words will come spilling out of her, and this she cannot allow. It would mean nothing to say it so carelessly, and this is more than she deserves.
He is gone a while, and she is about her business. They have almost a moon together before Lord Hien arrives for the summit in Ala Mhigo. She has her own rooms, but she does not want them. She wants his. She wakes in the pre-dawn light to see his sleeping face and kiss his brow before she rises, seeking to drive the restlessness from her soul.
Sometimes she wakes in the small hours, and she knows she has been screaming, and he puts his arms around her and reminds her where she is; that she is safe; that she is whole; that she is now. She loves him so much then that she is afraid to speak.
In those blessed weeks they spend together they travel to a city in the depths of the Lochs and to a mountain crowned with stars and they learn every inch of one another, and when she says anything to him at all she carefully examines her words in her mind, turning them over in tiny eternities between the seconds, to be sure she has not told him she loves him by accident.
It is so close to the edge of her lips all the time, it lives on the tip of her tongue, and it is a struggle to keep it trapped behind her teeth. This is her her duty and her choice, for her love is a burden that kills.
At the summit and after, when Thancred is still as a grave in winter, she cannot help but despair. His very soul is missing, she has been told.
A moon’s time of happiness. Was that all they were to be afforded?
They lay him out in the infirmary of the Rising Stones. The strange, aether-tinted light of Mor Dhona streams in through the windows, ethereal on his skin. He is like a prince enchanted. He does not wake, not when she sits down beside him, not when she speaks to him. He will not rise to greet her, does not smile at her. He cannot go to the conservatory and sit at F'lhammin's piano and work out some composition while she reads. These small intimacies are lost to them.
Shasi leans over the bed, lays her head upon the pillow beside his, and feels the selfsame ache she has carried for six years.
i love you, she tells him, though i can't see how that matters now.
If he has any hope of surviving, it is in remembering that. He recalls his last moments as a man, in the dank darkness of a sewer. The enemy is advancing. The roof is collapsing. Behind him he can hear the footsteps of the retreat that he and Y’shtola mean to cover.
He had expected to give his life for Minfilia’s sake, and for the sake of the Warrior of Light, but Thancred does not think he is dead.
His name is Thancred Waters. He was born in Limsa Lominsa. He remembers the smell of the salt air and the feel of silvery wood on his bare feet. Bare feet were better for sneaking around in, for passing unheard among the throngs come down to buy the day’s catch. He remembers the glint of gold in the sun as he opens the purse he’s lifted to inspect his prize. He remembers the relief in his chest, the easing of the knot of hunger in his belly. He remembers the hand on his shoulder, the cold thrill of fear, knowing he’s caught. He remembers the way the old man smiles at him, holding out a hand to recollect his coinpurse.
Around him is a torrent of souls. He does not feel anything from them except their relentless tug, urging him to give up, to join the flow, to be at peace and swept away. Perhaps there is relief in not existing, but he cannot allow himself that.
His name is Thancred Waters. He was trained in the Sharlayan mainland. The old man is—was--is Louisoix Leveilleur, and he sponsors Thancred’s education. He becomes something more than a simple cutpurse, and he does not need to steal to fill his belly. The food is bland, but it is plentiful, and in that there is luxury.
This must be the Lifestream. This is the province of the dead, but he has made a promise, and he must live.
Her name is Ascilia, until it isn’t. Her father’s name was Warburton, and Thancred couldn’t save him. She was just a girl when she was orphaned. He remembers being an orphan, abandoned to the mercy of the world. She has a gift; she meets his mentor. They resolve to change the world. She has so many dreams, and Thancred shares them.
He must remain resolute. He must remain himself. He does not know whence the flow of aether carries him, but it is all he can do to hold himself together; he cannot swim against the current.
Their name is … their name is … their name is a secret no one knows any longer. They are Minfilia’s friend and Louisoix’s agent, and they can fight gods made flesh and stand against the Garlean empire. Thancred is praying for their safe return before the statue of Nald’thal in Ul’dah. Thancred is praying for their victory. Thancred is praying for salvation. Thancred is waiting for someone. Thancred is waiting for someone, and they aren’t coming, and he doesn’t know who it is.
His name is Thancred Waters—his name is Lahabrea—and he has betrayed his friends. He has failed them. He has failed the memory of Louisoix, and he has failed the realm. Five years—if not of peace then at least free from the long shadows of primals—have ended because of his failure. He should give up.
He cannot give up now, whatever his faults.
His name is Thancred Waters and he is himself again. His companion smiles at him with a warmth he does not deserve. Her name is X’shasi, called the Kilntreader, and she has freed him. She has saved him. She has fought beside him and taken up his cause as her own, never tiring, never complaining. They begin to call her the Warrior of Light, and Thancred agrees—the warmth he feels from her presence is the same he had all but forgotten in Ul’dah.
He made a promise to Minfilia that they would see each other again. He means to keep it. He needs to keep it. He made no such promises to X’shasi.
His name is Thancred Waters, and he has regrets. Some of them are old and some of them are aching, and some of them are fresh, realized only in the moment before he was swept away. He remembers the way X’shasi looked at him, her eyes so blue, the moment before he turned away.
All around him now he can see blue of the very same shade. He must keep himself together, he must remember who he is; he must remember her.
His name is Thancred Waters, and he is in love with the Warrior of Light, and he has never said so.
He can feel the air on his cheeks, on his skin, grass and stone against his nude body. He blinks and his vision resolves, and he finds himself under a strange sky, in environs he does not recognize. He does not know where he is. He does not know how much time has passed. But he is alive.
so a week ago, EL James previewed a new canker set to blight the modern literary landscape, a novel called The Mister, and you can read that excerpt here. it’s a terrible way to preview a novel, but whatever.
for some reason my friends and i were possessed to try remixing this whole “step into a bedroom, see the love interest, whoops he’s awake, nope, back to sleep now” framework and i did uhhhh well a bunch of them so here they are i guess
X’shasi x Thancred
Brushing her sweat-damp hair from her brow, Shasi elbows open the door, pausing on the threshold.
Still here? she thinks, but does not say, about the sleeping figure.
He is sprawled face down, naked, across the large bed. She closes the door behind her quietly, looking him over with fascination. The sheets are twisted up around him, dark cotton wound around pale limbs. He faces her, his unbound white hair sleep-tousled and falling across his features. There is no scar on the left side of his face. This surprises her; given his penchant for wearing that blindfold, she had assumed there might be. One arm is tucked up under the pillow, the other extended toward her. His hand dangles over the edge of the bed; a thousand tiny cuts silver the skin of his fingers. His arms and shoulders are defined, but not brawny. Just beside his spine, halfway down his back, she can see the old stab wound, twin to the one on his front—and to the one she bears. He has other scars, though the twisting blue cloth of the bedsheet covers much of him below the waist.
One leg peeks out from the edge, though, bare calf exposed where it lays atop the bedcovers. His foot hooks over the hollow of the opposite knee. He stirs, fingers curling, extending, and his eyes open. He lifts his chin, his hair stirred with the motion so that she can glimpse the red tattoos upon his neck. His mismatched eyes focus, after a moment, fixed upon her face. She feels like she’s been caught at something illicit, takes a breath, readies an apology. Then he turns his head, shifting, settling. In a moment, he’s asleep again.
Cassilda x Nael
The door slides open. Cassilda steps through, freezing just across the threshold.
The White Raven is sleeping.
In the nude.
She sleeps facedown and, Cassilda cannot help but note to herself again, naked. She’s shocked and fascinated at once, feet rooted to the ceramite as she stares. She should be angry, Cassilda is distantly aware, that the Legatus has forgotten—slept through—their meeting. Instead she is transfixed by the way Nael is stretched across the length of the bed, tangled in her duvet. Nael faces the door, but her features are covered by unbound white hair. Her arms are extended before her, beneath the pillow, fingertips but a few inches shy of the headboard. Nael is broad-shouldered, pale as milk. A few faded scars upon her arms betray long practice with the sword. There are no scars upon the White Raven’s back. The rumpled bedcovers fall across the curve of her backside, just below the dimples of her hips. The crimson silk of the duvet winds between her legs; one dangles over the edge of the bed.
Nael stirs, the muscles of her back rippling. Her eyes open, pale blue and focusing swiftly on Cassilda. She goes still—as one must when a raptor fixes you with their gaze—and tries to muster an explanation. Before Cassilda can speak, Nael rolls to her side, away from the door, and settles back into sleep.
X’shasi x Zenos
Shasi pauses at the threshold of the nave.
Zenos is not yet awake.
Much less dressed.
He sprawls, too large, face down atop the cot. In the grey-gold light of dawn, she stands, staring. She’s seen him naked before; studied him, even, but this feels different somehow. He is fast asleep, tangled in the sheets, his unbound hair falling all around him. Through the golden strands, his features seem softer, somehow. One arm is beneath his head, the other slung over the edge of the cot, fingers dangling just inches from the floor. His broad shoulders and muscular back bear no scars; his pale skin seems almost to glow in the morning light.
The linen bedsheet preserves his modesty, barely; it winds from hip to taut backside, over and around one muscular thigh. One foot hangs over the side of the mattress, and the other off the end; he is too big, and the bed too small. He stirs, lifting his head. His eyes are deep blue, his gaze startling. It settles but does not quite fix on Shasi, who only stares impudently back at him until he turns his face away. A moment later he is asleep again.
Nero x Timaeus x Julia
The door creaks a little as Nero opens it, and he freezes.
Timaeus and Julia are asleep already. Dim lamplight from the hall falls across their bodies, intertwined and nude beneath the blankets. Timaeus sleeps facing the door, so Nero sees first his broad shoulders, his bare chest, the way Julia’s hand molds to the curve of his hip. His dark hair has begun to work loose from his queue, and a few strands fall carelessly across classical features and a strong jaw shadowed with a day’s growth of stubble. One of Timaeus’s hands rests on Julia’s forearm—his skin is so much lighter than hers—and the other is stretched out before him, across the undisturbed white expanse of sheets.
Julia is nestled against his back, her face buried against his shoulder. The duvet covers them both to the waist, but she has slung a leg overtop so that her bare calf hooks over Timaeus’s. Most of her is lost in shadow, but two limbs is more than enough to get a sense of her deadly exactitude.
Nero stands there, his shadow falling over both of them, and wills himself halfway across the world—to Nagxia or Meracydia or the New World; anywhere but the capital, two fulms from the edge of the bed and malms displaced from anything he deserves. Adventurers can do it by reflex; he, alas, is Garlean, and remains fixed right where he stands.
Timaeus opens his eyes, golden as candleflame, and blinks against the light. Nero shifts to cast his face in shadow. I was just, he means to begin, but has no followup.
“Nero,” Timaeus says, lifting his hand from the bed to wave him closer. “Come to bed.”
An AU in which your OTP has super powers. Are they a hero/sidekick duo? Are they archenemies? Are they both villains?
From the 30-Day OTP Challenge.
So ... they’re basically already superpowered vigilantes in the main universe (or at least Shasi is superpowered). There’s another AU prompt that’s redundant (what if they had magic? i hate to tell you this, but magic is already in the setting), so you’re getting two glimpses into a timeline where the Warrior of Light becomes someone else.
Shasi sas Intemperatus.
(She might be a villain, too.)
“Do you believe in Eorzea?”
It was the sort of question that demanded a ready answer, asked of X’shasi by the sort of man who would brook no less. As the lights of the Praetorium played over her face and his mask, the silence hung between them.
Was there a united Eorzea left to believe in? Would it long survive this operation? Ul’dah was in upheaval—and it was not merely the Sultana who had been lost to treachery in the Fragrant Chamber. The Syndicate had bullied its way into the war preparations and Teledji Adeledji’s hired killer had dispatched with the young monarch and her strong right arm.
And the Scions—what Scions were not lost in the attack on the Waking Sands or yet in the grip of the foe. That she had killed Adeledji and his assassins was cold comfort for the loss of her allies.
Raubahn’s successor, Eline Roaille, had been adamant that despite these setbacks—despite the aetherial readings on the Rhotano; despite a sickness in the Shroud the Hearers refused to intervene and curb—the Alliance must come together and act.
So she had acted, more alone than ever, and when the moment had come that Gaius van Baelsar asked her to speak, X’shasi Kilntreader found she had little to say.
“Yes,” she said, because it was what was expected of her.
“If that were true, you would not have taken this long to say so,” the Black Wolf laughed.
“I believe in it enough to fight for it,” X’shasi told him, the heel of her hand resting against the pommel of her blade.
“Eorzea’s unity is forged of falsehoods, and its city-states built on deceit. To believe in Eorzea is to believe in nothing,” he said, his tone a lofty scolding. “To die for Eorzea is to die for nothing.”
“But to kill—”
“And to kill for it is to kill for nothing, too, girl,” the legatus said. “Pay attention.” He advanced, unhurried, his gunblade still at his back. “What happens when you kill me?” Gaius van Baelsar asked her.
“I descend to the heart of this wretched place and I destroy your weapon. I dispatch Lahabrea,” X’shasi told him, setting her teeth.
“And then what?” Gaius asked her. “And then you return the conquering hero, no doubt. Perhaps your homeland awaits your coming, every roadway lined with parades. But when they have tired of feasting at your victory table, what happens?”
She looked at him with eyes as blue as ceruleum flames, and said nothing.
“Ul’dah returns to its internal warring, no doubt,” Gaius said. “The vipers crawl over one another to the throne and whichever one wins floods the streets with poison. Perhaps the Admiral can strike a treaty with the sahagin before they succeed in summoning their eikon, but she will break her word in time. The Elder Seedseer watches her nation rot because her gods will not give her leave to act, and she is not strong enough to defy them. Are you?”
“Am I what?” X’shasi asked, bewildered.
“Are you strong enough to defy your masters? Nothing else will save Eorzea now,” he told her.
“Do you think yourself the answer to all of Eorzea’s ills?’ X’shasi demanded to know.
“I was the answer to Ala Mhigo’s,” he said, laughing. “Better to peddle order and stability than madness and deceit.”
“You would be hard-pressed to find a willing buyer in Eorzea after the destruction the Empire wrought at Carteneau,” X’shasi told him. Her knuckles were white around the grip of her blade.
“I sought to spare Eorzea from the depredations of the White Raven,” van Baelsar told her. “She would have razed this place for spite’s sake. This realm deserved a better class of conqueror. But you are right; to bring Eorzea under my heel carries too dear a cost to bear.”
“But you have not drawn on me,” X’shasi said, “so you yet carry some hope.”
“The very same hope that all Eorzea rallies behind.”
“Surely not,” X’shasi protested.
“They would follow you. And you would lead them far better than they have managed.”
That had the ring of truth to it, she realized, watching that pallid mask. The lights of the Praetorium no longer swept over him—the lift had rumbled to a stop long before, she realized. The air around them was still, and thick with aether, dripping with it, like blood, like pitch; in the silence she could hear the whispers and the distant screams of the beleaguered dead. She could feel in this place a pulsing haze, and felt the lights grow dim; the aether rippled, and—
“Lahabrea,” she breathed. She felt the oppressive weight of the darkness, the quickening of long-dead magics. “The Ultima Weapon ...”
“What of it?” Gaius van Baelsar asked her.
When X’shasi answered, she knew not where the words came from; heard and felt and thought, and spoken, though foreign to her tongue. “It is not what the Dark Minion has told you,” she warned; “it is more. The destruction it wreaks makes this star tremble, from seventh hell to highest heaven.”
“What?!” Gaius demanded.
“I don’t know,” X’shasi muttered. “But we have to stop it.”
“A truce, then,” the legatus said.
“For now.”
They emerged together onto the platform that housed the Ultima Weapon. Its black carapace was aglow already in deepest crimson and brilliant azure, creating a sickly violet light that barely cut through the shadows gathering in the chamber. Lahabrea saw them coming and only laughed, a cruel sound from a friend’s throat.
“Behold the Heart of Sabik,” he said, “the core of your Ultima Weapon.” His sneering tone laid bare his contempt for his erstwhile ally. “Behold a fraction of the one true god’s power!”
“Lahabrea,” the Black Wolf growled back. “Your faith has blinded you.”
“And have you come to grant me clarity?”
“No,” X’shasi said, drawing her blade and beginning to channel her aether along its length. “The only thing I intend to grant you is death.”
That made him laugh, raucous and mocking. “Kill me and you kill him,” Lahabrea told her.
His mockery was cut short by the crack of a rifle’s report at Shasi’s shoulder. She glanced aside to see that Gaius van Baelsar had drawn his weapon at last. Lahabrea stumbled forward a step and rose, undeterred, and the legatus charged him to engage with a stroke of his blade. The Ascian caught it with the silver-shod claws of his gauntlets, shadows rising from where he stood in a writhing, flailing mass.
Watching the pair tangle, X’shasi swung back her blade and brought forth her focus to spew a gout of flame, letting the gust of hot air dry her unshed tears. Blackness pooled on the platform, thick as tar, and Shasi had to step lively to keep it from grasping at her ankles. She could still hear the keening anguish at Ultima’s heart or perhaps at her own—or perhaps that was just the scream of cermite on steel as Lahabrea repulsed his attacker.
Skidding to a stop, Gaius lifted his gunblade, emptying the ceruleum reserves in a series of criss-cross strokes as he dashed toward the Ultima’s feet. They ignited in sequence, raking across the platform in a blaze of blue heat, leaving trails of flame behind. Shasi could have cursed him for abandoning her, but she watched him climbing the thing’s frame, calling for Nero tol Scaeva. The Paragon turned and lifted a hand, fell words tumbling from his lips, and Shasi sprinted forward to tackle him.
She heard the crack of bones as she took him to the ground, and when he rolled to his back, those dark eyes fixed upon her. Shasi had not the room to make use of her arts, so she simply hauled back and punched him, pummeling Lahabrea with blows as he cackled and writhed beneath her, struggling beneath her weight. He worked one hand free and raked her face with his claws. Her world went red with blood; it filled her nose and seeped between her lips until it was all she could taste. She spit it back at him in a glob of crimson, trying to get her hands around his neck.
Shasi pressed her thumbs against his throat, digging into those tattoos—Thancred’s tattoos—as though she could throttle him out, blinking blood from her eyes. His gurgling laughter still sounded in her ears, louder and louder as the room seemed to quiet. She looked away, unable to bear the sight any longer, and saw Ultima still and black, its limbs slack and inactive.
Whatever magic the Heart of Sabik held, then, it would not loose. At least there was that small mercy.
“Purge the tank,” Shasi called, rising to her feet, hauling Lahabrea up by the neck.
“What?” Gaius asked.
“The ceruleum tank! Purge the fuel!” she howled. A moment later, the fuel vented in a ripple of heat nearly invisible but for the blue at its edges. She let go of Lahabrea’s throat and kicked him in the chest instead. He stumbled backward, and X’shasi made herself watch as flesh blackened and hair crisped, flesh sloughing from bone until only darkness clung there.
And then, as it had done with the essence of the primals, Ultima’s heart drunk deep of the lingering essence of Lahabrea. A veil of rime spread over the black steel, evaporating in the last flames of ceruleum. There was a terrible stillness in the chamber then, Shasi’s last ally crumbling to ash.
Well, not her last. “So you do know the value of sacrifice,” Gaius van Baelsar said, emerging from the cockpit to regard her.
She looked up at him, blood streaking her face. “Yes,” Shasi said. “I do.”
Exactly what it sounds like. This could include your OTP doing other couple clichés, too. Bonus if they’re unaware of how cliché they’re being.
From the 30-Day OTP Challenge.
Finishing each other’s ... references?
The Ceruleum Processing Plant had only a small infirmary, overtaxed by the wounded from Operation Archon. X’shasi was among them, though by the third day she was well enough to be ambulatory. Nobody would tell her anything directly—not about Thancred; not about the rumors that some of the wounded would be relocated to Revenant’s Toll, and so, against orders, she left her bed.
Oh, she had cause to regret it—the wound at her stomach had been closed well enough by guild conjurers, but there was still lingering pain. But she would have regretted more her inaction.
They were on far ends of the field hospital from one another, and she found his bed ringed with guards. Shasi expected them to protest, but for Eorzea’s savior they stepped aside. She supposed she had beaten him once already.
He was awake, though he looked wan and frail. She had not killed him, but it seemed a near thing. Inwardly she thanked her mother for her emphasis on field triage. If X’shakkal had been less thorough in her instruction of red magic, the scales might have tipped the other way. She felt herself smile with relief, and for once, did nothing to smother the gesture.
“Thancred,” she said softly. He turned his head to face her, though he said nothing. “How are you feeling?”
“Thou cuttest my head off with a golden axe,” he quipped, tone and throat both dry.
“And smilest upon the stroke that murders me,” Shasi finished. “I do not.” She flicked an ear, moving to sit at his bedside.
“I didn’t know you were interested in the theatre.”
“I’m from Ul’dah, aren’t I?” Shasi said, tilting her chin. “Home to the finest bards in the realm?”
“At least one of them,” he agreed, winking back at her. “Can you hand me that waterskin?” he asked. She did, and he took a long drink. “So then,” he said.
“You seem to be yourself,” she said, delicately.
He lifted a hand to his throat, feeling at the absence of that black crystal. “So it would appear, though my gaolers remain unconvinced.”
“They didn’t see what I saw,” Shasi told him, looking away a moment.
He reached for her hand, taking it for just a moment. “I don’t remember it clearly myself, nor the moons before. What I do recall was my absolute surety that I would not survive this. And so,” he said, “thank you.”
“I did only what was necessary to preserve the light of dawn,” Shasi said, still not able to look at him. He let her hand go a moment later. “On which subject—the Eorzean Alliance means to mark the end of the Seventh Umbral Era at Silvertear Lake in a week’s time. Gods only know I’ll be expected to attend.”
“Well,” said Thancred, “I can’t exactly allow you to suffer their attention alone, can I?” He grinned at her, and she found herself smiling back.
“Then you had better get well soon, Thancred,” she told him, rising to stand. “I’ll see you in Mor Dhona.”
“Count on it,” he promised.
When your OTP confessed their feelings. Or were their feelings originally a secret until someone else intervened?
From the 30-Day OTP Challenge.
I actually wrote this from X’shasi’s perspective a while ago. (That version is NSFW; this version ends before anyone takes their clothes off.)
He might have ignored the linkpearl in favor of continuing to pack, but the truth was he didn’t have all that much to bring. And its insistent chime could not be long endured. Thancred tried to welcome the distraction, fitting it to his ear.
“What can I do for you?” Thancred asked, the same way he had a thousand times before.
“Hi,” Shpoki said, laughter in her voice. “Can you come up to the roof?”
He considered it, casting his gaze around his room at the Waking Sands. “I think I can spare a moment,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later. Just go ahead and head up there now.”
“As you like,” he said, bemused.
Little point in putting it off; he misliked the way his footsteps echoed on the stone anyway. It was a reminder of how empty this place had become. True, they were headquartered elsewhere—and they had operated from somewhere else before—but the hollow sound reminded him of all those people that the Waking Sands, that the Scions, had come to lack. Soon he would be gone, too.
The thought sped his steps until Thancred emerged onto the roof. Though he looked, there was no sign of Shpoki—but he was not alone; X’shasi was there, turned to gaze out over the sea. The moonlight put silver in her hair and glittered on the waves beyond. She turned, just as his gaze settled on her, and seemed just as surprised by his presence as he was by her. She laughed, startled.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was expecting someone else.”
“I don’t think she’s coming,” Shasi told him. She shifted her weight, clasping a hand beneath her throat. He noticed, then, that the white cloth draped about her shoulders was not a cape but a blanket, gathered around her. The black pourpoint she wore stood in sharp contrast, but at least it wasn’t her armor, black and dreadful.
“Ah, well,” he said. He smiled, realizing he’d been had. “Shall I leave you to it?”
“No,” she said, and the simple word seemed to hearten him. “Stay, if you like. Unless you’re busy,” she said, making of it almost a question. It was an escape he was determined not to make. “When are you leaving?”
“When the team leads to Coerthas,” he said, crossing the rooftop to lean with her against the lip of the stone. “I’ll leave with them.”
“To look into that aetherial disturbance?”
He might have liked to. It would have been easier than what he truly intended. “Presumably,” he said, a faint smile tugging at his lips. He lifted a hand to his forehead, brushing back his hair, but the sea breeze tugged at his white locks again a moment later. “It’s not really my area of expertise,” Thancred admitted. “But it’s the sort of thing I might oversee. I just want to be seen leaving with them, so that if anyone is looking for me ...”
“They’ll think they know where to find you,” X’shasi said.
He nodded, turning his head to look at her. “It won’t hold up to any serious scrutiny, but I don’t think anyone’s that keen on chasing us down in the Darkhold. And if it only buys me a day or two, well … that might be the difference between my making contact with Alphinaud or not.” Or dying in some Garlean gaol.
She seemed to be thinking it, too, for she had little to say, only hummed out a gloomy sigh, shoulders hunching beneath her blanket.
“And you?” he asked. “What will you do?” What have you been doing? That was the real question. He knew half the answer; she had been treating with the Empire on behalf of Lord Hien, and it had gone as well as he might have feared. But the moons prior to that were a mystery to him, as they were to the other Scions.
“You know me,” she said. “I always find something.”
“I do know you.” Thancred didn’t think it was anything so benign as caving, this time. She might at least have invited him for that. “I know that the moment the dust settled in Ala Mhigo, you were off to do something else, and you came back in black iron with some great guillotine over your shoulder.”
“Maybe it was just time for a change,” she said, softly.
“Maybe,” he said.
She was standing on his right; she always did. Never in his blind spot. It meant that Thancred always had a clear view of that silver scar upon her cheek. Her service to the Scions had marked her at last. He would have spared her that, if he could have, but how could he? He had dealt her a dozen unseen wounds long before. He spoke her name, unworthy though he was to do so, and lifted his hand to her cheek. She turned her face toward him, leaning into his hand for just a moment, her eyes closing.
It didn’t last. She turned back toward the bay, the moon carving shadows into her face. Her expression was closed, but in her eyes he could see some terrible weight.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, pressing his hand to the stone instead.
“I am,” she said, shaking her head as though to clear the pall of sorrow that had settled about her. She looked upon him with gladder eyes when she said “You too.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said.
Before he could charm her with a smile, she said, “I will, though.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, not a dismissal but a promise.
“I know,” she said. “I just wish I could be sure of that.” She pursed her lips. “We don’t work together as closely as we used to. I … miss it, sometimes.”
That was news to him. “I do, too,” he admitted. A sigh gusted out of him: “Gods, all our problems seemed so simple then, didn’t they? And then I ...” The litany of things he’d done seemed to long to recite.
“And then Lahabrea,” she said, tone soft but insistent. It was another of her courtesies, like standing on his good side. She had insisted always on holding him blameless for all that had happened when they had collared him with that inky crystal. But he had been the one responsible for its arrival there, no matter how she protested his innocence. “And now,” she sighed, “Minfilia is gone, and Elidibus is bending the Emperor of Garlemald’s ear.” Her expression ached with it, or perhaps simply from her recollection of how she’d come by that knowledge.
“You’ll muddle through somehow,” he assured her, trying to find a smile. “I’ve never seen a challenge you couldn’t ruse to. You’re strong.”
She shivered beneath her blanket. “Never strong enough,” she said, “though I try to be. For everyone. For you.” It wasn’t just the cold that made him want to hold her close then, though Thancred was less than sure she’d allow it. “Everyone has placed such trust in me, and I don’t want to disappoint them.” It was more than she’d ever said on the matter, but the words continued to tumble from her lips. “I don’t want you to regret bringing me here. Making me part of this.”
“Never,” he protested, and though he meant it with all his being his voice barely rose to a whisper. “How could you think that?”
Didn’t she know? She had saved Eorzea half a hundred times already, and him specifically a dozen more. She had done the impossible when they asked it of her—and even when they didn’t. It had not been a secret that nobody expected Thancred to survive. Lahabrea had said as much, with his own voice, and Thancred had resolved to die at X’shasi’s hand, if that was what it took to save the world. Only he had not. Nor had Estinien, nor the Warriors of the First. Nor …
“Because there was a part of me that didn’t want you to come to the Lochs with me,” X’shasi said, sounding ashamed. “When we went to check the grave, I wished that I had gone alone. But I knew that wasn’t possible.”
He considered it, for a moment. It was not exactly public knowledge, the relationship between the Warrior of Light and the Crown Prince of Garlemald. But everyone there when they had slid aside the stone and found the tomb empty … all of them had known that it was her lover missing from the grave. How hard had she fought to keep her composure before them all? “You think your actions with the Viceroy made us lose faith in you? We’ve all—“
“Don’t you dare call it a mistake,” she interrupted. She was vehement, and if the memory of Zenos had not seemed to haunt her at the graveside, she seemed wraith-ridden enough now to make up the difference.
“No,” he agreed. “We’ve all made judgment calls. Some of them have worked out well,” he said, with the breath in his lungs she had allowed him to have, “and some less so. Do you doubt Alphinaud because of the actions of the Crystal Braves?”
“No,” she echoed.
“There you have it. Whether or not I believe Zenos yae Galvus deserved a second chance, you gave him one. He saved Lyse’s life, and showed us there was another option to deal with the primals. For that alone, it would be worth it, but ...”
But he also made you happy, Thancred could not bring himself to say. He had seen it, under sunlight and glass. He had seen, too, the way it wrenched her soul to have to kill him. At least he had spared her the sight of all Ala Mhigo witnessing her unhappiness.
Her hand brushed his shoulder, bringing him from his thoughts. “I could never regret meeting you,” Thancred said. “Do you regret my bringing you here?”
“No,” she said, quickly. Then she took a deep breath, squeezing at his shoulder as she sighed. “I’m tired, Thancred,” she said.
He turned to smile at her. “Don’t let me keep you,” he apologized.
“That isn’t what I mean,” X’shasi said, shaking her head. She lifted her hand from his shoulder, slipping it back beneath the drape of her blanket as she turned to face him. “If I don’t say this now, then maybe I never will. Gods know I’ve failed to thus far.”
He was too aware then of the glittering of the stars, the call of insects in the night. Of the intensity of her gaze. The moment became too immediate, too pressing, and he struggled to hear her over the sound of his own thundering pulse.
“You’re leaving,” she said. “Who knows for how long? So … everyone looks to me, even when I’m not sure I want them to. It’s hard, and I’m too tired.”
“X’shasi,” he said, her name coming out of him hoarse and reverent.
“I’m too tired not to be with you anymore, if that’s an option. If it isn’t, then—“
He took her face in his hands and he kissed her, heated and impulsive. Just long enough to obliterate any doubt as to his preference. The chance to be with her having at last presented itself, Thancred could not bear for even the moment to hear that they might remain apart. “It is,” he whispered.
“It is?” she asked, with such wonder in her tone that one might forget it was she who had asked in the first place.
“Yes,” Thancred said, wrapping his arms around her.
With his good eye, he saw a flicker of movement on the city walls above, and as X’shasi lifted her chin to kiss him once more, Thancred said a prayer of gratitude for meddling friends.
The first time a member of your OTP (or both members!) realized they had feelings for the other.
From the 30-Day OTP Challenge.
Light fell across the city in slanting shafts. It was not sunlight, Shasi knew, not this deep; only the glow of spires far overhead. When she thought of how far beneath the surface of the earth she must be, she felt the crushing weight of it on her chest.
He must have noticed the way she stumbled, because he had stopped, brought a hand up as though ready to steady her. “Perhaps we should look for a place to rest,” he said.
“I’m alright,” Shasi protested, flicking her tail in annoyance.
He smiled a bit, looking tired himself, but his gaze did not rest on her too long. He was looking out over the ruins when he spoke again: “It’s probably almost midnight,” he said, “and the bridge ahead is out. I’d rather attempt that climb in the morning, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re right,” Shasi said. “There’s a clearing off to our right,” she told him, eyes raking the skyline. “Perhaps there.”
“Twelve willing, it won’t be overrun by rafflesia this time.”
“Like you’d mind a fight a bit,” she laughed.
That made him smile, full and genuine, and she was glad of it. It was a rare enough sight these days, done too often as an aegis against further questions. It lingered as they made camp—warm enough not to need a fire, they simply laid out their bedrolls in the last standing corner of a spire whose rubble was scattered across the park. Shasi insisted upon taking first watch over her fellow Scion.
Thancred could sleep almost anywhere. He’d told her that, but she hadn’t really believed it until he’d come afield with her again. It chafed at him, she knew, not to resume his full duties right away. Twelve knew it would gnaw at her. But he seemed better here, buried beneath the earth, and though his footsteps made no sound, Shasi was glad to have him travel with her.
The city was too vast to be alone in. She knew that of a surety, looking back the way they’d come, to the higher tiers of the city. The most distant lights flickered like stars, growing dim at last. She looked up at the remnants of an empire—the spires where its citizens had spent their lives, the path of archways leading back and away from where she sat.
Occasionally, a pulse of light would pass from one arch to the next, sliding like beads of light along an invisible string. They swept through the city, across and outward and down, following the path of the bridge ahead. It swept over the gaps between the bridge towers, through suspenders that dangled over an empty chasm. It was a golden light, playing over Thancred’s face as it passed.
After a while Shasi realized she wasn’t watching the light pass anymore as the city sang to itself, only Thancred’s face. She sat, transfixed by the way that light and shadow played across his expression. His brow did not ease even in sleep, and she felt a pang of sorrow at the realization. Better, then, in the field, but not well. Not yet.
He had the chance, at least. She had not had to kill him, six months gone, while the fires of the Praetorium threatened to consume them both. Lahabrea had told her that he meant to force her hand. That the only way Thancred could be rid of Ascian influence was if she herself cut it from him, ungently. He would die from it, she had been promised.
How lost she would be now if that had been true. How grateful she was that he lived.
She wanted to stretch out beside him, to wrap him in her arms, to hold him until he felt safe. The moment she realized this, X’shasi vowed not to. Thancred had enough to consider without considering her, and he could have anyone in the world he wanted.
She had resigned herself, once, to killing him. Why should he ever want her?
Your OTP stargazing. Where are they doing this? Are they out camping? Are they sitting on a rooftop? What constellations are they looking at?
From the 30-Day OTP Challenge.
It did not surprise her when he stormed out of the Mushroomery. Oh, it hurt—not the sharp hot pain of injury but the pervasive slow ache of a lifelong ailment—but it did not surprise. She did not follow after, leaving Alphinaud to weather Matoya’s rebuke alone. What would be the point? Thancred had heard enough from her; he would not now hear more. But when he did not return at nightfall, Shasi made the decision to go and look for him.
Shasi liked the hinterlands; under better circumstances she was more than happy to hike along the Thaliak and climb the Abalathian peaks. But, things being what they were, she could only feel the marsh give underfoot and feel the oppressive weight of the stone overhang above.
The boards marking out safe passage through the mire had weathered to silver; she followed them north to the foot of the ruined bridge. From there she could see the tower of Idyllshire, the nautilus shell of Sharlayan shining like a beacon in the night. The sky was pricked with stars, and she saw one streak from the zenith toward the cloud-wreathed peaks along the western horizon.
One was supposed to make a wish at such times, Shasi knew, but her heart was too heavy for youthful superstition. And anyway the things she wanted were beyond the power of stars to grant.
She did not see Thancred as she climbed the hill toward the Answering Quarter. Shasi doubted she would, if he did not wish it, but she had to hold on to the slenderest hope. Otherwise she would have to grapple with the idea that Thancred’s tenure with the Scions—and his place in her life—would not survive the loss of Louisoix and Minfilia. He could be malms from here already, Shasi thought. We would never find him. The thought made her want to put her head in the Thaliak and scream.
That was not an impulse she could afford to indulge, and so she turned her gaze toward one of the nearby spikes of basalt—Abalathia’s Teeth, she’d come to call them. The surface of them was gritty to the touch and irregular enough to climb. Perhaps not in these boots, Shasi thought, and kicked them off into the grass.
The stone was cool beneath her fingers as she stretched and reached, pulling herself up by her arms until she found a foothold. It was not meditative in the least, groping for purchase in the light of the gibbous moon. But that had always been the appeal—when one had to focus on the next handhold, there was no time to think about anything else. Soon she was climbing with confidence, her tail swinging behind her to counteract the momentum of her body weight. The spike of rock tapered as it rose; when she could wrap her arms around the column, Shasi could see over the rooftops of the Sharlayan colony and the evergreen trees scattered before her.
The night had deepened to a velvety darkness; the sky here was flooded with stars she had never been able to see in Ul’dah. It reminded her, briefly, of her months in the Sagolii; then she remembered being small, standing on mountaintops on the other end of this range, in a Gyr Abania made insurmountably distant by time and imperial intervention.
She was not there now, Shasi reminded herself. She was in Dravania. She was looking for Thancred.
There was a figure standing at the cliffbank over the Thaliak; his hair and tunic seemed pale in the moonlight. Shasi tried to keep an eye on him as she began her descent, just as slow and measured as the climb.
The grass was cool, and felt soft under her feet after the scraping of stone; she could not bear to put her boots back on, and so she carried them instead. Shasi could hear the buzz of insects and the call of night birds, and the rush of water as she approached the cliffs. She held her breath and tried to listen for the sound of her own footfalls, stepping lightly as she dared.
He heard her anyway, at least well enough to turn back and look at her. The surprise made her drop her boots; they fell with a hollow thud against the loam.
“What is it?” Thancred asked.
“When you didn’t come back, I …” Got worried? How childish. “I thought I should come looking for you.”
“I’m fine,” Thancred told her, turning away from her. He cast back his arm and whipped it forward. A moment later she saw a splash of white in the river below.
“I don’t think so,” Shasi said, stepping up beside him—to his right, the side of his face not covered by his bandanna. She crouched, feeling in the grass for a few stones of her own. “Nobody would blame you for that.”
“I always wanted to visit the colony,” Thancred said. “I thought perhaps she’d like to see it too.”
“I thought this was Sharlayan,” Shasi said.
“It is. It was. Part of it, anyway,” Thancred murmured. “They abandoned it around the time I left for Ul’dah … from the motherland. I never got to see it. And now I never will. Nor her.”
Shasi sighed. She turned her face away from the nautilus beacon, but there, in the water, was the vast bubble enclosing Alexander. The water inside seemed still, even as the wider Thaliak flowed and whorled around it like a vast island. “I’m sorry,” she said, because of all her options it seemed the best. “Perhaps …”
“Don’t,” he said softly. “There’s nothing to be said that can make this feel better.”
“I know,” Shasi admitted.
“How could you?”
“I’ve lost people … I don’t want—what I mean to say is—” she said, fumbling her way around a confession of love he wasn’t ready to hear and she wasn’t ready to give. Shasi sighed, turning her face away as she felt the pricking of tears. “You were coming back, weren’t you?”
“Eventually,” Thancred admitted. He lifted his chin, looking up at the stars.
“You’ll see her again,” Shasi promised. “Whatever it takes.” She tipped her head back, mirroring Thancred’s posture, and found her vision slightly clearer for it, her tears brimming unshed as she returned the silent regard of stars.
