prompt: temperature (free day) • words: 1041 • era: heavensward patch content • [ masterpost ]
the degree or intensity of heat present in a substance or object.
Falcon's Nest would never be a comfortable place for Bianca, not after the incident preceding the reveal of Aymeric's mural. Along with the harsh winds and the powerful chill came an edge of paranoia. What had once been a beautiful, if snowtorn, plaza now was nothing more than a memory dripping in ice.
She sat on a low stone wall that surrounded the square. Every gust left her tugging uselessly at her coat. Fur-lined though it was, nothing could well and truly keep out the cold.
It was a miserable place.
Or, perhaps, she was miserable, and the turmoil in her chest was what cast everything in such a severe light.
She didn't want to spend her remaining days in Eorzea there, with snow melting in her hair and hunger in her belly because she didn't trust the food. Not that it would be any better in Garlemald, but at the very least, they might offer tasters.
“You look like you could use another coat.”
Thancred took the stairwell in front of her with careless ease. The smile he wasn't wearing might have looked the same – easy and natural, favoring the left just a little. Instead, he wore a grim expression and a bruise on his knuckles. Color bloomed between them, purple as a plum and fading to yellow as it crawled up the back of his hand.
“Perhaps,” she murmured, her eyes falling away from Thancred's face and focusing instead on the toes of her boots. “Or I should sit closer to a fire.”
“Here.”
“No, I don't—”
The weight of a much heavier coat settled upon her shoulders before she could finish protesting. He needed his coat as much as she needed another. Seeing him without one made her shiver, even with the warmed fabric of his jacket settling against her.
“It'll be colder in Garlemald,” Thancred reminded her as he dropped onto the wall at her side. “You'll need more than just coats.”
“You don't have to... look out for me like this.”
Her voice weakened as she buried back into his coat, shutting her eyes for a moment as she absorbed the heat from his body before the chill of Falcon's Nest stole it away.
Thancred stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, snow already melting on the toes of his boots. He glanced at her behind a fall of silver hair, murmuring in a voice that was half-hesitant, half-fond, “Of course I do.”
The red in her cheeks was from the wind and the cold. Her nose was red, too. And her ears. And even her chin.
Bianca tucked her hands beneath the much longer sleeves of his coat, fingers curling against the warm fur the lined the hem.
“... Thank you.” A pause. “Did you only come over here because you thought I looked cold?”
“I—”
Thancred stopped short, his response freezing on his tongue before he swallowed it back and took a moment to reconsider his approach. She could see the cogs of his mind turning just behind his eye. She waited, curious.
“I wondered if you were going to leave for Garlemald without saying so much as goodbye.”
She had already given her farewells to most of the remaining Scions. Halvar held her for the better part of an hour after she asked him to take up the mantle of the Warrior of Light. Jadeite stared at her, shocked into a silence so sudden it was unlike even him. He knew better than anyone what Garlemald was capable of... and only agreed to let her go when she assured him a dozen times that she could be careful.
Y'shtola gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. Alphinaud told her that he was impressed and that this was perhaps the path she was meant to take. Tataru made her promise to keep in touch. Twice.
Her mother swore she'd raize the empire to the ground if they hurt her.
Her father, laughing, assured her mother that Bianca would be more than capable of doing such herself.
But Thancred...
She didn't quite know how to tell Thancred.
And now, she wondered who might find her sitting on a bench in the forbidding cold of Garlemald and offer her a measure of warmth.
Pulling Thancred's coat farther around herself, Bianca looked at him from above the high collar. She worked an apology around in her mind before settling on something else entirely. “I was saving you for last,” she said, her eyes squinting in a smile he couldn't quite see. “Because I knew you would hate that so very much.”
Thancred furrowed his brow, and then, he laughed.
“Gods, I do hate it.” He rubbed his bruised hand through his hair, silver glinting against the sickly bruise on his skin. “I hate being thought of last.”
You weren't, she wanted to say.
Instead, she slipped one of her hands out of its sleeve and rested it just below the red ribbon knotted around his thigh. “Not last,” Bianca assured him with a teasing tilt of her head. “Third, I think. Or perhaps fourth?”
Thancred's nostrils flared in a frustrated snort of laughter. He shoved her hand away only to hold out one of his own.
“Give me my coat back, you wicked little thing.”
“I shan't,” Bianca said as she tucked her hand back into his sleeve and tucked even more comfortably into the over-sized jacket. “You offered it to me, and it's terribly cold.”
A wind rushed through Falcon's Nest, throwing her pale blonde hair and Thancred's furred collar away from her face. She winced and twisted away from the gust, towards the man sitting beside her despite the recent change of his mind.
Rather than asking for his coat a second time, he lifted his arm and brought her in flush against his side. That way, the cold wouldn't bother her.
Only he would.
“You thought of me first,” he murmured, his lips inches above the crown of her head. “You can tell me if I'm very far off.”
Her heart thumped – heavy and quick – and she felt a warmth rush into her cheeks.
“You aren't.”
The wind whistled past again, but she didn't feel the bite of it.
Commission for @abyssalmermaiden ! Aryaille and Thancred doing the best kind of shared tankbuster hehe :3 Thanks so much for commissioning me, and happy pride!! 🖤🤍💜🤍💚🖤
