Day Twenty-One: Shade
“Come here?”
Aymeric’s hand at her wrist was gentle, and she went willingly. The sun was bright and glaring over Tuliyollal, setting the ocean waves crystal shades of turquoise and sapphire. In the shaded dock of their private cabin, the couple had been sequestered for the better part of the day, door locked firmly against any intruders, and any prying eyes were sorely disappointed to find that their view of the sea was completely blocked from anywhere else on the mainland.
They were alone, and she could breathe again.
They’d done little through the day but sit in gentle silence together, but he pulled her out of the burning sun anyway, down into the comfortable lounge chair on the deck and into his arms. His skin was warm with sunlight, and he was golden all over in the way he’d taken so well to warmer climates; first in Radz-at-Han, and now here in Tural. She let him wrap his arms around her and pull her back against his chest, dipping her head to press her lips to his bare forearms, and feeling his brush against the top of her head in turn.
“You were meant for this, you know,” she told him quietly, gaze drifting out towards the picturesque scene before them of crystal waters and coloured coral. He made a questioning noise against her hair, and she leaned more comfortably back against his chest.
“Travelling like this,” she clarified. “You fit in everywhere you go, and I’ve yet to find a place you didn’t immediately adapt to.”
The unsaid was just that, but he heard it anyway. Unlike her.
She, by virtue of her status as the Warrior of Light, was never going to properly fit in anywhere. She was a hero and a guest wherever she visited, and the enormity of who she was no longer allowed her to simply exist anywhere, regardless of how her traveller’s heart would want to slip anonymously from city to city. That, combined with the very nature of her, made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere. She was unsettling in ways that Aymeric could never be, and cold in ways that were foreign to his nature – inner secret workings of his heart aside. He could play the game better than she could; always had.
Nosing into the curve of her neck, Aymeric kissed her bare skin, porcelain pale but still warm from the same sunlight that had touched him. “It’s because of you,” he reminded her softly, and his words whispered against her skin, setting down a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. “I would never have left Ishgard, if not for you. I would never have been who I am, if not for you.”
“That’s not true.” She turned slightly in his arms, enough that she could meet his piercing gaze. “Even had the war not ended, you would have gone. You knew what Ishgard needed before anyone else, and you would have found a way, outside of her walls if you had to.”
With one hand, he hooked his fingers under her chin, and tilted her face up to look at him. The whole world was in his eyes, always had been, and it still managed to take her breath away that every day he chose to look at her like that. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere, if it weren’t for you.”
His lips tasted like salt and sea when she kissed him, and he was always the warmest thing in any room. With the sun shining high above the peaceful, bustling city beyond, he kissed her slow and languid, because they suddenly had all the time in the world. Hands smoothing across her bare skin, he pulled her into his arms and carried her further back into the cabin and its cooling shade, as far away from prying eyes as possible. What he had in mind next was for no one but the two of them.