Chapter Text
When Dion is ten, his father pulls him aside one evening and says, “It is time.”
Twilight paints the halls. The year is 855, and Dion’s mother has been dead for his last two birthdays; his father has not begun to court a new Empress, although even Dion is starting to become distantly aware of the council’s impatience regarding it. In two years Dion will take to the battlefield for the first time with an Eikon he has yet to master, and in three years he will hit a growth spurt that places the grown men he decapitates closer to eye level, and in four years he will understand that the hot feeling he gets when he looks at the stablehand’s son is more than mere respectful familiarity.
But for now, he is ten, and his father is meeting his eyes, serious and stern.
“Time?” Dion echoes. The attendants have been dismissed some hours ago– it is just the two of them and his father’s personal guardsman. Dion is at the terrible stage of being old enough to understand that this is important, but not yet old enough to grasp the interwoven nuances that drive the course of its necessity.
His father nods. “Follow me.”
They make their way silently down the halls. Dion watches the cut of his father’s shadow from the lamps, walking just behind him in step. It will be over a decade before the King morphs from a territorial yet steady hand to one that is bloodthirsty and unhinged; so ten-year-old Dion follows, trusting in a way he will slowly lose piece by piece with each passing moon.
“Your highness,” a branded servant mutters as they pass, pausing to curtsey. Flora, the voice of his mother chimes in his head, warm, and so Dion gives her a smile of greeting.
His father does not respond. Flora ducks her head lower; only after his father cannot see her face does Dion think he catches a small smile at him in return.
She hurries off as soon as they pass, steps fading away under the tapestries of Bahamut that line the halls. They tower over their makeshift group, easily ten times Dion’s size; unbidden, his eyes and step catch on a glimpse of red in the thread of one, lit by a sliver of moonlight.
“Dion.”
Dion startles. “Sorry, father.”
Down the halls, past the kitchens, into the elevated royal courtyard. The air is sweet and fresh as they pass through the gardens; here, his father pauses, picking a golden flower.
Dion perks up. “Are we visiting mother?”
“Yes, and no,” his father says. A moth flits by his fingers as he picks another blossom. He does not swat at it. To Dion’s confusion, he sounds sad. Softer than usual. “Come. You shall see.”
As promised, the graveyard greets them, familiar.
Long has it been Dion’s friend. The routine of his visits go like so: pick the flower. Approach the grave. Lay the bud to rest on the stone. Hope she can hear you, in the skies above; even if she cannot, take the time to speak. Do not cry, for you cannot let them see you do so—you are no longer a child, and Great Greagor took her for a reason.
Come back, week after week. Do not forget and do not stop, for she loved you.
“Hello, my love,” his father tells her this time. The morning star among the living, quotes the headstone in return. Dion watches as he places one of the flowers there, gold against white marble. “Dion.”
Dion steps forward. “Hello, mother. I hope you have been well.”
He waits for his father to hand him the other flower to offer her. His father does not.
Behind them, the guard stands, silent.
How strange, Dion thinks, observing the sight before him. For as long as he can remember, only one gravestone has ever rested beside hers: his father’s. The same white marble, no year of death yet foretold— yet he had ordered it placed there all the same when she passed, so that none would doubt where His Holy Highness would be buried when the time came. I lie here with the love of many, to be the love of yet one more, his declares, delicate cursive. For two years, Dion has seen those words, and those alone, next to his mother’s.
Now, there is another marker.
A simple thing. Tucked to the right of the deceased queen’s: a headstone of identical color. As smooth and blank as fresh parchment.
A cold, quiet feeling envelops Dion.
“My son,” his father says. Dion tears his eyes away from the stone. His father is not looking at him, nor at the graves; he is gazing out at the sky above them in all its twilight ink, as if pondering some great unknown that only he can see. The remaining golden blossom in his hand is muted in the dim light. His voice, when he speaks, is soft. “Of what do you see, when you consider the threads of your legacy?”
The question makes Dion pause— a temporary draw of attention, away from the freshly churned earth.
“My… legacy?”
His father nods.
“You were born for a reason, my son,” he says. Still, he does not look at Dion. His gaze searches the heavens, somewhere far away indeed. “Tell me: what do you believe it to be?”
The answer is easy, standing there before his mother’s grave. “To fight for the Empire, father,” Dion parrots, the words falling from his lips without thought. “To pay honor to Bahamut, and uphold Great Greagor’s will.”
It is as natural as breathing— what his father has told him, day in and day out. For so many years, he has trained for naught else. For it is he who Bahamut has chosen, and so it will be he who fulfills said duty.
His father hums. “Indeed. And why do you do so, son?”
Dion hesitates. “Why?” It is a question his father has not asked before.
“Why,” his father confirms.
Dion considers.
“Because…people will be hurt,” he decides after a time, choosing each word as carefully as he can. “If… If I do not use Bahamut’s power, then our enemies will win. Our nation will not be strong. Evil will prevail, and the good… they will suffer.”
The words feel clumsy in his mouth, despite his efforts. We must all strive to do the right thing, his mother used to say. And how often he had seen her do it in turn: in her gentle voice; in the way she knew all the servants’ names; in how kindly she treated the commonborn children who begged for attention and gil at their gates. Holding him to her when his room felt too large, and he would sneak into her bed, seeking comfort— always greeted with a smile. When the world feels dark, we must be light. We must be good, Dion.
Yet Dion does not know how to put such a very large feeling into so few words.
His father regards him. He has the look of a man who has seen a great many things: some of them good, and some of them bad, and all kinds in between. His gaze is a weight on Dion’s shoulders.
Slowly, he walks the few steps that bring him over to the side of the garden, where the walls oversee the city proper.
He motions to Dion to join him; so Dion comes.
“We stand at a precipice,” his father says, as they overlook the city together. Below, firelight flickers in houses like hundreds of red stars; people and their lives so close and so far, spread out like a beating heart’s tapestry for only the two of them to know. “I see it so very clearly as our great empire stands tall. For war lurks. The blight spreads. And our foes grow ever stronger. Knowing such, I ask this of you once more: what do you see, when you consider the threads of your legacy?”
“I…” Dion struggles. He is ten years old. He thinks of how his mother’s face had been ashen in death, and how the blight mirrors the color before it strikes in full. “I see… myself, doing my duty. Serving your wishes, father. Using my power in Great Greagor’s name for as long as I live.”
“Yet what if you should die for it?”
The words are calm, and unflinching, and heavy. They strike Dion with a cold so deep he cannot breathe.
His gaze jerks away from the city to look at his father– his father, whose piercing eyes already await him, expectant. The words spin in his head, turning his own eyes wide and afraid.
It takes him a few moments to manage, “Die?”
His voice wavers.
His father sighs. A deep, heavy thing.
Silently, he turns his gaze back to the city, away from Dion’s face.
“Legacies are not given, son,” his father tells him. The words seem to echo. Around them, the wind rustles the trees. A cricket calls into the sweet, floral air, and a boat rings a bell out in the harbor. Dion does not hear it. He is on the edge of something, looking at his father’s face. “They are created by our own hands. Through strength, and sacrifice, the history of this world is carved upon the pages and passages of time. Blood is the currency by which we will form the future— this is the truth of the victorious. Naught else will suffice.”
Naught else. Dion’s heart is pounding in his ears. Strength, and sacrifice.
Understanding sinks in, slow and pernicious. “And this blood– it will be… mine, father?”
“Yours. Mine. Our country’s, if needs be.” His father looks back at him. Dion cannot help but straighten. “You are chosen, my son. It is through life and death alone that we control our fates– and none shall be the master of both more than you. Only when you make peace with both shall your duty shine through with holy light.”
The cold in Dion deepens, something gaping and endless in his chest.
Many times has he bled. Many times have the Priests gifted unto him their blessed words. Yet he is shaken to stillness to hear of such holy light now, there on the edge of their walls. That he will fulfill his duty has never been a question, so there is nothing in him that knows to do so now. To doubt does not cross his mind for even a moment.
Yet he knows not what to say.
To make peace with both.
Is this the same as his mother’s kind words, Dion wonders? To be light: his blood, a light for his country?
“I…”
A failure to speak. His father regards him. There is the same deep sadness there that Dion does not often see nor understand.
Eventually, he orders, “Come, Dion.”
He draws away from the overlook and walks, with purpose and poise, over to the set of three headstones. Dion needs no other prompting than his expectant gaze: he follows again, heart in his throat, for he knows loyalty first and fear second and there is no other choice. He watches, as if from some place very far away, as his father crouches down and places the last golden flower on the blank gravestone.
“It is time,” his father repeats, rising. Dion’s stomach is somewhere far below the earth. “You must decide what you wish will be carved upon the stones of your legacy, when your fate meets its end.”
He twitches his hand; the guard steps forward.
Then, in front of Dion: a quill, and a thin slip of parchment. Enough to hold words to mark a life cut short.
Dion stares at it.
“Pick your words, and pick them well,” his father says. “For we must not fear death. You must not.” His stare cuts into Dion like spears of ragged glass, unflinching and piercing. Dion looks back, heart pounding. “Tell me, Dion. When the time comes, would you die for our country?”
He is ten. His mother has been gone for two years. Over the next five, he will learn how to decapitate a man before he understands what it is to love one. They stand in a graveyard that he knows like the back of his hand, and before him a flower sits on freshly tilled earth, dug deep enough to hold a prince yet prepared to welcome a child.
Dion thinks of his mother’s smile, of Flora’s curtsey, of the kitchen staff who sneak him extra rolls at dinner. He thinks of how his country sings of Bahamut with hope in their hearts, and of the soldiers who drill day and night in the training grounds, and of flickering fires below that hold so many wishes and dreams and lives. He thinks of portraits lining halls, and the idea of a legacy, and blood is the currency by which we will form the future.
And then he thinks of other mothers like his, all over the Empire’s lands, who live at peace due only to the blessing he has received.
When the world feels dark, we must be light. We must be good, Dion.
“I would,” he promises his father, and means it more than he has ever meant anything.
Nearly two decades later, when the traitorous Empress has slithered into his father’s bed and a silver-tongued child with empty eyes stands to inherit the crown, Dion will wonder at the timing of it all.
It will echo in his head as he stares at his own bloodied lance and his father’s lifeless corpse; when he wakes, in the aftermath of the destruction he has wrought, both kin and country ruined by his hands. The flowers. The grave. The promise. And he will think: why did his father pick that night, of all nights, to show him such things?
Did he know, somehow?
“Dion!”
Did he know? That the clock of his own sanity ticked down ever faster– that as much as his second-born would be a monster, so too would his first? Did he look at Dion and see the truth that twilight: that his son was destined not for greatness, but for shame, that Dion’s path would always lead to a call for redemption of which the only appropriate offering he could ever give would be an early death, his own flesh and blood?
The same blood pours hot over Dion’s monstrous body as he staggers. His vision blurs.
“Dion!” someone calls again, but Dion does not answer. “Bahamut!”
It is the end of all things. The sky and Ultima scream around him. In this floating crystal, where there is naught but his own regrets and a sliver of hope held in two other men whose hearts are not as blackened as his, he fights. And so he screams back, a roar that shakes the heavens.
“Go!” he urges the Phoenix, wings spread. Ifrit falls. “Save your brother!”
“But—”
“Go!”
The Phoenix goes. Bahamut stays. For his father had asked, Would you die for our country? and Dion had heard Would you die for your people?, and his answer has always been: yes. With every single part of him, yes.
Yet he cannot help but wonder: if his father had known, then why not warn him of the rest?
“Perish, foolish wyrmling,” Ultima’s eikon tells him. Dion does not hear it. The thoughts spinning in his head are too loud for mere words to break through.
For why did his father not tell him?
Why did he not say: you can save our people, but first, you will kill them. You will rip them from their homes and their families. You will paint the streets red with their blood. With holy light corrupted, you will destroy that which you love and, for the parts that you did not burn in wicked radiance and that for some unfathomable reason beg you to allow them to stay, you will instead cut them from you so that they are not stained by your failure.
(Know that I do not ask this lightly, Terence.)
No. All those years ago, his father should have said: you will die alone, Dion, and you will deserve it.
“I am sorry,” Dion says aloud now– to no one, to everyone. To one person in particular, always, always.
And he gives it all he has.
Blinding light. A rush of power as Ultima screams– or is it him? He knows not. There is an explosion, and pain, and then: the sweet rush of wind.
The strength leaves him. He falls.
How fitting, he thinks distantly, that this should be his end. He has already fallen from grace, and now it is another fall that will kill him. It strikes him— as his body becomes his own once more, as the stars fade, and the tattered remains of what he once was rushes to meet the unforgiving ocean below— that despite one twilight night of vows and a golden flower, he will not be buried next to his mother and father after all.
No matter. It is as he deserves. Kinslayers have no right to a burial proper.
Would you die for our country, Dion?
“Now, father… it is done,” he breathes, as his vision goes black. Faces float in the inky haze that replace it: his mother, his father, Terence. Always Terence. A medicine girl, and all of his holy dragoons. He was ten then, and thirty-three now, and if this makes his final act a promise twenty-three years in the making then perhaps the world is kind, indeed.
The last thing he thinks before he dies is this: at least he did not fail in all his father’s expectations.
The thing is, though.
Sometimes, the world has other plans. Sometimes there is a god that can be seen who is cruel, but also one that is hidden who is kind, and a lost one who finds themselves again when noble souls fall into their waters needing help. Sometimes at what feels like the end of all things, there is a beginning.
Sometimes, people deserve to live.
And the thing no one told Dion about being willing to (wanting to, begging to, screaming to) die for your people is this: it does not always work.
It does not always work. And so Dion does not die.
Instead, he opens his eyes.
The first thing that hits him is the pain. Immense, staggering— the kind he has felt only once before, when he took to the skies and destroyed the lives of all he loved. Worse now. It is as if poison has spread to every capillary in his body, and it forces reality to return not in a gentle lull but instead a torturous crack of awareness.
Then he feels the grit. The cold. The wet. His eyes drag open.
He is lying on a beach.
Mid-morning sun shines across the sand, painting the dark grains around him into a landscape of shimmering black onyx. He is soaked to the bone, the smell and taste of salt overwhelming his senses as the water laps quietly on the shore. Low tide sweeps across him in a cold embrace; his armor is ripped and ruined, a few curious crabs scuttling across the seaweed that has stuck to it as he stirs.
His first foolish thought is: Sunshine. The night has ebbed, then. The second is: Is this truly death’s domain? And the third, most important thought is: Wait. Sunshine.
The sun.
To lift his head is torture, yet he does, staring at the bright outline of it in the sky above. The day greets him in a canvas of endless baby blue—no trace of shadow. No more tortured tint to life itself.
And there in the distance: the familiar waters of the Straight of Autha.
“There were once legends of the waters north of there,” Terence had told Dion, one year before Dion’s father would look at him with cold eyes and order him to betray the Dhalmekian Republic’s good will. Tucked against Dion’s body in the quiet of his tent, which had long ago become their tent, on the days Terence could sneak in. “Serpentine monsters and pirate treasures. My mother was fond of repeating the tales to me before bed when I was young.”
His voice had been soft. Dion himself had been exhausted– drained dry from years and years of war. Dreading another. Bahamut eating him alive. And there Terence was, as always: knowing. Giving him something else, a path to sleep’s embrace.
“Oh?” he’d asked, and Terence had looked up at him, eyes bright.
“Indeed.” He had smiled. No matter how many times Dion was graced with it, it was always the most beautiful sight of his life. “Have you ever been there? In the waters themselves, I mean.”
Dion had shaken his head.
“Well.” Terence had tucked himself closer. He had been playing idly with Dion’s calloused fingers, Dion recalls now. “Perhaps one day we shall visit, and see if she was right.”
The pain that lances Dion’s heart at the memory makes him draw in a breath— which soon has him coughing, body spasming as his lungs protest the motion. Fitting, he thinks dizzily, that death should give him a semblance of peace, then torture him with such familiar sights. He coughs, and coughs; and when he raises a hand to wipe the spittle from his lips, it instead comes back foamy red.
He stares at it. Blood. His blood.
The realization sinks in slowly. Then, like the ember of a flame lighting wood, it alights.
He… is alive?
Horror fills him. With all his effort, he cranes his head to look southwest, body screaming in protest. In the sky, no floating city of Twinside hovers over the horizon. Long ago must the waves have welcomed the remains into their dark waters, as he lay here unaware and deserving of the same.
Yet Dion is still here. Yet Dion bleeds, as only the living do.
No. It cannot be. Would you die for our country? He was meant to— he—
Another lulling wave sweeps beneath his body, gliding over the shore. A bright splash of color slips into the periphery of his vision– and it is precisely then that Dion notices the feather.
No. Feathers.
Dozens and dozens of shimmering ruby-orange feathers, spread out over the beach. Some float in the nearby tide, lulling on the waves; others are nestled into the sand, more curious crabs gathered around them in groups of twos and threes as they poke and prod.
They are instantly recognizable.
“Phoenix?” Dion rasps, searching the horizon as the present pushes back in. Naught answers him but the soft sound of the waves. The feathers dot the beach like a trail of radiant breadcrumbs, curving around a bend unknown; he tries to sit up, to go over to one– and his vision goes white with pain. It is the same feeling as before, that incomprehensible burning, as if Greagor’s holy light has chosen to sear him from the inside out. He gasps into the beach, rough grains of sand filling his mouth. The crabs that were on him leap away with clicks of their claws, scuttling into the water and out of sight.
Dion chokes for air. For a moment, his strength is gone. The freezing waters lap at him. The sun shines above yet brings no warmth. Abruptly, he is so very tired.
Would truly be so terrible, to die like this instead?
Prince Dion of the House Lesage: I have a tale to tell you.
The memory trickles into his awareness, a faraway call. Something in Dion raises its head. Yet still his body cannot move.
Dion! A joyous laugh. To what do we owe this honor?
The flicker inside of him grows. Raises its head higher.
…No.
No, Dion thinks distantly. He… cannot die here. For Joshua is…
He…
(He already failed Joshua Rosfield once. Will he truly do so again?)
This time, Dion is braced for the pain. He still cannot stand— yet on weakened limbs, he drags his battered body across the sand instead, the few meters between him and the nearest feather tortuous in their length. His hands are bare, gauntlets long since lost; when he reaches out and touches a delicate plume, it is cold.
Dion is no expert on the Phoenix. He knows enough to understand it is not a good sign.
This time, he forces himself to be louder: “Phoenix!”
Nothing. The feathers beckon him.
The trek is slow, and painful, and messy. Dion crawls across the beach, heaving from effort as he claws at the sand. The weight of his body carves a trench in his wake, sand scraping and cutting with each pulling drag; within minutes, his nails are scraped raw and bloodied. One feather passes, then another. The seaweed tangling his body catches on rock–nearly drags him to a halt for good. Pulling, he realizes as he feels something in his flesh rip, on open wounds.
What cruel luck, he thinks distantly, as he tears it from its tangle. As he continues on. This natural net of the ocean stopped him from bleeding out as he lay unconscious on its shores.
He wishes to scream.
Instead, he tries, “Phoenix?” And when still there is nothing: “Sir Joshua!” Then, more desperately, over and over until he is hoarse: “Joshua! Joshua!”
When he manages the bend of the beach ten minutes in, he finally sees him.
Joshua Rosfield is lying face-down in the darkened sands, unmoving.
Dion’s heart leaps into his throat. Water and sand cling to him as he scrambles to try and stand. Fails. The world spins; the angle of the sun casts an odd light, forcing him to squint. In it, for a singular moment, Dion swears he sees a gentle shroud– blue of a fish’s shimmering scales in clear water, or the very depth of a hottest flame, floating like a quiet blanket of moonlight around the Phoenix’s body and slowly sinking in.
Then Dion blinks, and it is gone.
Only Joshua remains, deathly still.
It is with a pulse of adrenaline that Dion manages to stagger to his feet, slipping on sand as he goes. Pain becomes some distant, otherworldly thing. The waves draw back from the shore as he stumbles to his side, falling to his knees beside him.
“Joshua,” he gasps, turning him over. He is freezing to the touch, as Dion knows he himself is, soaked through with saltwater. His lips are blue, skin ghost-white.
He is breathing.
The relief is staggering. And then: quickly fading. He will not survive long like this. Minutes, maybe.
There is naught else Dion can do.
He carries him.
Later, he will not be sure where he found the strength for it. The medics will tell him it is a miracle he managed it, and his body will remind him of the truth in their words. When he recalls the memory, he will feel as if he watches it through someone else’s eyes: as he tears himself out of his own armor, as he pulls Joshua to him and discards his wet clothes, as he rises and stumbles and screams from the agony.
Yet in that moment, he simply moves. Step by step. The Phoenix, feather-light yet so very heavy, hangs limply across his back.
They walk along the shore. Dion’s mind drifts, somewhere else entirely. The ocean sings to him like a lullaby. Unbidden, he remembers the waters near the Isles of Ark, after they had traded one capital for another. Terence’s blue eyes with the bright blue of the sea, as he teased him about his choice of name for the Empire’s most recent wyvern.
(“Oh, do stop.”
“Apologies, My Prince. It is just,” a stifled grin, “Céline is rather– on the nose.”
“Oh, now, is that so?” Laughing, light. It had been so long since Dion had laughed. Terence had managed it. “I would challenge you to think of one better, in the short time I had.”
Terence’s bright smile. Always, always bright. “I believe you would find me well-prepared, my liege.”)
Dion’s vision swims. The beach stretches behind them. There is a path leading somewhere– a town? Salvation? He knows not, only that he must not stop. He takes it, more instinct than man. With each step, Joshua gets heavier on his back. He is no longer cold, warmed by where their bare skin touches and the efforts of Dion’s flushed exertion lends him heat, but for what? If Dion fails now, the ravens will find them.
The ravens, or worse. Two fallen Dominants in Waloed do not make a merry pair.
Yet his strength fades. He calls for Bahamut; there is nothing but a searing pain. He screams, yet nothing comes out. His body falters.
He will not make it, he thinks distantly, as he drags them both up the rocky incline, away from the water. He will die having failed once more. Worse, for now he carries a life far more precious than his own.
There is a sound that floats to them, other than the waves.
“...ne! …one!!”
Dion pauses. Sways. Did he hear something? No, he thinks dizzily. No, he is imagining it. Hallucinations. He has little time.
The sound gets louder. “...yone!! …nyone!?“ And then, somewhere nearby: “Hello?! Is there anyone out there? Can you hear me?!”
Dion’s head spins. The surprise is so great that he stumbles in his next step– nearly falls onto the path, catching himself against the jagged cliffside he wasn’t even aware was there instead. The rock slices open his hand in a sharp, bloody line. He does not feel it.
That voice. It is Ifrit’s.
Is this real?
Dion’s voice comes out a rasp. “Here.” It is weak and pathetic. “Here.”
“Does anyone still live?” the voice calls again– and again, and again. Ifrit has not heard him, he realizes; for it is Ifrit. No other would be looking so desperately for signs of life, here in this empty aftermath. Why does he not call the Phoenix by name, Dion wonders. Has Dion’s failing mind truly gone so far, to forget how Ifrit would address his brother?
Right here, he tries to say despite that, but his throat is useless. It makes no sound. He may as well be a breath of wind.
“Is anyone out there? Do not be afraid, I wish to help!” The voice is getting farther, as if they are moving away. “Hello, anyone–”
Dion’s voice rasps. He will lose this chance.
No. No.
After Dion’s mother died, he had nightmares like this. In them, he was always alone. Always bleeding. Dying, or watching someone he loved die, unable to call for help; steadily being crushed under the wyverns he trained as they lay dying too, their blood intermingling on the ash-laden battlefield. All he had to do to make it stop was scream. Call out. Yet he would open his mouth, and nothing would come out.
Please, Dion thinks, now. Please. Let me have survived for something. Let it be this.
His knees shake. The voice snakes farther away.
He screams.
“He is here!”
The sound rips from his throat, echoing across the cliffs. He knows not from where inside him it comes; only that it must, and so it does, loud enough to send nearby ravens scattering– and his own mouth spewing blood. He stumbles.
Ifrit’s voice halts abruptly. Dion sways. And then, with scrambling rocks and a renewed desperation: “Bahamut?! Is that you?!”
“Ifrit,” Dion breathes, as his legs give out. It is naught but a whisper. He must tell him. “Here. Joshua is here.”
This time, he does fall. Suffocating on his own blood, the world spinning into meaninglessness. The weight of Joshua slides on his back, and Dion twists, takes the brunt of it so that Joshua lands not on the rocks and dirt but on him. Gravel digs into his skin. His head hits the stone. Everything rings. He cannot move his limbs.
There is nothing left in him.
Please, Dion tries to whisper once more at the blue sky above. To who, he does not know. Is Great Greagor watching, still? Perhaps to ensure his judgment. He lies on the ground, Joshua at his side. The calling voice swims in his head, a tunneling echo that seems only to bring it further and further away.
His eyelids flutter. Unconsciousness pulls at him, simpering sweetly in his ear. It hurts to breathe. To think. To exist.
Something soft touches his face. He blinks, hazy. A shape is above him. A face. Fluffy.
Whiskers?
“Meow,” a little kitten tells him, as something nearby causes a group of rocks to cascade down the path, as Dion’s world goes black at the edges. “Meow?” it repeats, as it stares at him, bats his face lightly with its paw. A shadow falls over it, and it looks up, away from him; meows at that, instead.
Of course. Dion’s heart aches. A hallucination after all, then.
Why must it always be kittens, he thinks, and allows the darkness to take him.
The first time Dion truly notices Terence, it is the summer of his twenty-first birthday.
At the time, it feels to Dion a morning like any other: one where he slips from the palace and walks to the training grounds before dawn, the world silent and still around him. The sky hangs softly above Oriflamme in an ethereal shade of muted blue-green, morning light not yet cresting over the horizon. Were he a bard, he would sing his praises of the color– yet he is not, so he walks quietly along the inner canal that runs beside the palace, the flow of water his only company outside his own mind.
The world is so very calm, when the city sleeps. “The time of bakers and fishers,” his mother used to say– warm, always warm. “So why are you awake, Dion? Afraid a fisher will catch you?”
“What? No, I am not a fish!”
“Are you sure?” his mother would laugh. She had a magnificent laugh, free and full. Turning to his father: “Darling, did I birth a fish who is pretending to be a little boy?”
She would oft tease him like that. Never mind that she woke early, too. Woke early, until she never woke again.
Perhaps it is that, the memory of her and her voice, that draws him to stay with the ritual of it: this slow walk alone. Here, white walls curving gently around him, the Empire feels at peace. A rare feeling nowadays, with the ever-constant tension that hangs over his people and home alike; it has been six years since the fall of Phoenix Gate shifted the political world on its axis and introduced a snake to his own, and war brews. Dominants eye each other across tenuous borders. Bahamut pulls at his skull.
So he wakes early, and walks, and thinks, here in the silent pre-light. Twenty-one, and the silence is simply that: silence. Familiar. Quiet.
It is not surprising, then, that he so readily hears the splashing.
The splashing, and a voice.
“Easy now— oh, no, hang on, hang on…”
Too many long years of training. Too many assassination attempts. Better safe than sorry your highness, even for Dominants, his second-in-command Colette is fond of telling him, and he has never needed the reminder.
He is on alert instantly.
His lance vibrates silently in his hands as he brings it to attention. From his angle, he cannot see around the curve where the sound originates—and so he strides forward, ready. A louder splash, this time, and his concern deepens. This area is off limits to any but the royals and his own dragoons. Has someone fallen in, somehow?
“Easy,” he hears the voice repeat. Closer, now. There is an edge of distress. “Easy… just wait a second— oh!”
Another loud splash. To whom does this voice speak? Dion can hear no reply, yet all signs point to a negotiation.
He turns the corner, and processes several things all at once.
First: there is a figure in the canal.
Broad-shouldered, facing away from him— painted in shadow from the tree they are under. The early morning light reveals no details, but Dion can see the shape of them: one arm raised and holding something up to the branches above, the other at an odd angle at their side. Injured? Carrying an object obscured?
Second: armor is scattered on the ground directly in front of Dion.
Dragoon armor.
“Do you believe she will target the Order, my lord?” Colette had asked him last week, as the two of them huddled over maps. Another order from his father to send them to their borders; another sleepless night, as Dion tried to soothe his own frustrations. It was the first time either of them had dared to float the idea aloud— this poison they skirted around, fangs bared.
Yet Dion knew they were both all too aware. Always ready.
“I do not believe there is any path she shall fail to try,” he had admitted, there in the lantern light. “We must be prepared.”
Colette had nodded. She had not seemed surprised. “Understood, my liege.”
The conversation comes back to him now in full, seeing the discarded armor. It is unmistakable– none but dragoons may don this color, nor his personal seal. Yet why is it here? He thinks of the splash; of his father’s new coldness; of the council’s nervous glances; of how many tricks that woman has up her sleeve.
Enough tricks to fell one of his men? Enough to strip them postmortem and try to hide the evidence, here in the early hours?
Not fallen in, his mind whispers. Thrown.
He strides forward.
“Freeze!” he shouts, and the shadowed figure jolts. They whirl around as Dion raises his own lance, ready to throw it across the stretch of water if he must; and as much as Dion detests to acknowledge it, this stranger is no amateur, for in the half a breath it has taken for him to ready his lance and call out, they too have turned whatever they were holding up to the tree on him as well.
Instincts matching instincts. A held breath as they both wait, gauging the other.
Then, cautious:
“My… liege?”
The tree near the canal sways with a small brush of wind. The shadows move, letting the dim predawn darkness shift just so; and Dion is looking at the face of someone his own age.
Brown hair. Steel blue eyes. Soft features. Oddly familiar. And there, in his hands: a lance of the 7th Unit.
For a moment, Dion is too thrown to reply.
“My liege!” the dragoon calls again. And he is indeed a dragoon; it is evident now, in the smooth and practiced motion of how he had turned, how he instantly lowers his lance so it no longer points at Dion. Those are the shoulders of a dragoon, the posture, the reflexes. Not dead, but very much alive—sounding about as startled as Dion feels, as well.
Dion stares, trying to reorient himself, as the man attempts something equivalent to a salute despite being nearly submerged in water.
“Soldier?” Dion echoes back, trying to find whatever angle will turn the situation in front of him into something understandable.
He is unsuccessful.
“Yes, sir!” The dragoon is still attempting his salute, although he continues to hold his left arm oddly, well above the water. Frozen, however, as Dion requested. “My sincere apologies for startling you, Your Highness. I assure you nothing is amiss: I am a dragoon within Wyrmright Rainier’s unit, and I can expla— ah!”
A minuscule shape falls from the tree above.
In a blink, the dragoon has thrown himself forward to catch it.
Dion knows his dragoons. Exemplary in decorum, quick to serve, loyal. He and Colette do not tolerate anything less. A dragoon would not disobey a direct order from him unless it was important. And it is that particular, undeniable truth that has Dion promptly striding to the edge of the water, ready to wade in to assist.
What is happening here? What threat lies in plain sight?
“Soldier! What—”
Yet the dragoon is already turning back to him, holding whatever it is he has caught. His expression turns apologetic as soon as he sees Dion standing nearer. “Your Highness, I apologize for my disobedience, I’m merely— not again!”
Another shape, falling down on him. If Dion held doubts for his theory of this man’s place in the 7th Unit, this alone would quash them: the dragoon jumps nearly a meter out of the water to snatch the shape from the air before it can land in the canal, lance glinting as he does.
And while Dion would normally appreciate the athletic feat, it is precisely at that time that he finally hears the meowing.
Meow.
Dion pauses. Meow. Stares. Meow? Pieces begin to fit together. Meow!
It takes him a moment nonetheless.
Meow.
“...Kittens?” he asks, as proximity finally, finally, reveals the scene to him in full.
“Kittens,” the dragoon confirms, sounding dismayed indeed. And Dion realizes that he is holding his left arm oddly not because he is injured, but because three balls of fluff are currently clinging to the linen of his sleeves; that the negotiation he heard earlier was directed not at another person, but a much smaller creature; and that he has not walked into an attempted assassination or betrayal, but is instead watching one of his dragoons currently submerge himself in freezing water to rescue an entire litter of misplaced, screaming kittens.
The relief is staggering.
It is immediately clear what must be done. Dion wades in.
“How did they end up in such straits?” he calls, as the current of the canal presses against him, cold as Shiva herself. Sweet mercy, it is freezing. “And how many?”
“Six, my liege!” The dragoon is staring at the tree above, free palm raised as he prepares to catch the next wailing bundle should it decide to leap. Sweet mercy, Dion thinks again: the man only has so many hands left. He must note Dion’s new proximity from his approaching voice, for he glances back—and his eyes widen. “Ah– you– my liege?”
“Allow me to assist.”
The dragoon blinks at him. “I–”
A shrill meow from the tree draws both of their attention. Two remaining kittens are still in the branches, scrambling to hang onto the bark; Dion peers up at them as he finishes crossing the distance to join his dragoon. The predicament is clear–they are too far up to easily reach, and yet the tree itself is too feeble to withstand the weight of a dragoon jumping onto it to assist. Any unfortunate kitten present at the time would be sent tumbling into the canal below.
“Trapped,” Dion realizes.
“Indeed,” the dragoon agrees, grim. To Dion’s pleasant surprise, he does not protest, nor fret, nor throw himself at Dion’s proverbial feet and beg that his royal blood not be subjected to the common act of a kitten rescue now that Dion has already committed. Instead, he turns, and hands one over. “As requested, my lord.”
Their hands brush as Dion takes the kitten, which instantly digs its claws into him. Dion does not wince– he is too busy trying to place the face in front of him. He seems so familiar. 7th Unit. Around his age.
A name floats into his head, in Rainier’s voice: Sir Terence Durand. And then in his mother's: Oh, Terence! Hello dear.
It cannot be.
“You were my uncle’s squire when I was a child,” he realizes, staring despite himself. The hair. The shape of the face.
The dragoon– Terence– startles, looking away for the tree for a moment.
“I– yes, my liege. You remember that?”
“Rainier has told me of you,” Dion manages, instead of the much truer thought ringing in his head: You were the boy who taught me not to be afraid of chocobos.
It is a hazy memory, one Dion has not looked at in years and in fact thought was lost: a smiling boy who he had once known by name, gently holding his hand and showing him how to brush the soft down of a sleeping chocobo. Terence, do help the Lord with his mount; Terence, raise the flag like so; all the jobs of a squire, and then this: Terence, smiling quietly as Dion hesitantly fed a bright yellow chocobo a slice of apple. Back when his mother had made the world softer- until she could not anymore, and grief and loss painted all of Dion's memories of those early years in tones of muddy grey.
He has not thought of that shy, kind boy for over a decade. For Dion's duty called, and Terence, well... Dion lost track of him, as one does with those they knew in passing as children. Different stations. Different lives. He had neither time nor the luxury for anything but the path forward.
What an odd twist of fate, to stumble upon him once again here, after all this time.
For what Dion told Terence was not a lie: Rainier has spoken to him at length about Sir Terence over the past few months. The commander of the 7th Unit is not one to boast, nor exaggerate– yet according to him, the man currently standing in front of Dion is one of the most well-liked dragoons under his command, one who has slowly worked his way up through the ranks over the past several years; "Loyal to a damn fault,” Rainier had told him in their last report, when they were discussing who might be made a Captain now that Herminia’s wife is expecting. Twenty years old, and Rainier had argued for it anyways. Not without reason, he had insisted: after all, Sir Terence was in high demand, and not just within his own ranks. The 14th’s last mission had involved intercepting a ship, and Liviana had specifically asked to take him along.
“Not like I can claim surprise,” Rainier had mused, as Dion considered the request. “His mother was a sailor, married into some minor noble family. He knows his way around a current and a lance, that’s for certain–and don’t get me started on the lad’s head! Never seen someone keep so calm when things turn shite. Let the man prove himself, my liege.”
The man in question now regards him, openly curious.
“I see. I am– honored, I hope. My liege.”
“And cold, it seems,” Dion observes, tracing the details of his face. Terence shows no sign of remembering more than being a Squire. Forgotten over time, then, Dion supposes. Same as Dion himself. The realization pushes him back into formality. A glance at Terence’s fingers reveals they have turned blue at the tips; yet when Dion holds a hand out for another kitten, Terence shows no sign of clumsy numbness as he hands it over. “Pray tell, what happened?”
True to Rainier’s word, Terence proceeds immediately into a formal report. “I was walking to the city from the barracks when I heard them crying. I have seen them before with their mother, yet never in such a state. Before I knew it, one had fallen– perhaps it is best to show…”
He reaches a hand up to the collar of his own tunic. There is a damp spot there, well above where the water line soaks his chest– and for the first time, Dion notices that there is a lump underneath the fabric. With a care Dion would not expect from such strong hands, Terence reveals a tiny, shivering shape.
“They are not yet old enough to swim,” Terence explains, half of his attention clearly still on the tree, in case of falling kittens. His face is tight with worry; he looks down at the orange runt currently clinging to him for warmth. The kitten whines, pathetic. “I weighed bringing these few to the edge, yet if the others fall without me here to catch them…”
Dion looks at the kitten. It is a sorry sight. No longer in danger, now that it has something to cling to for warmth, yet undeniably in need.
It mews at him, weak.
“Easy,” Terence murmurs to it. He cradles it to a dry spot against his neck, painstakingly gentle. “Easy.”
The sight… strikes something, in Dion.
For how long has he been trying to save them, Dion wonders abruptly. This dragoon, who threw off his armor and rushed into the canal at the first sound of distress. They live in a world of kill or be killed– and here stands Terence, nearly white from the cold, yet sparing his warmth for this tiny life that he has made his charge.
We must all strive to do the right thing. We must be good, Dion.
His mother’s hands, soothing the wounds of a child. Terence’s fingers, tucking a kitten far from cold waters.
How many years has it been since Dion has seen that twin kindness?
“I considered hitting the trunk so they fell,” Terence admits, and Dion blinks. He has been staring again, he realizes. A small mercy: Terence does not appear to have noticed. He is busy regarding the tree. The final two kittens are still screaming in protest at their undoubtedly unpleasant morning; their brothers and sisters scream back, likely with some strongly worded thoughts of their own. “Perhaps we may try, now that more hands are available.”
Dion draws in a breath. Focus, he scolds himself. He follows Terence’s gaze to the trunk in question. Interesting, he thinks. No. More than that: clever.
In his hands, his lance hums.
“Well, then, Sir Terence,” Dion says, and Terence straightens to attention immediately, gaze on him with a measured, steady intensity. Just as Rainier had claimed. “I suggest you prepare to catch.”
Terence’s eyes alight. Dion flips his lance. Raises it. Throws.
Terence catches.
Wading out of the water is made significantly more difficult with five squirming balls of fur intent on scratching them to an early grave, but they are Holy Dragoons, the Empire’s most fastidious and feared forces.
They manage.
The first thing Terence does when they emerge back onto solid land is lower himself into a proper kneel. “I apologize again, Your Highness,” he says, head bowed deep. It only appears half-ridiculous, with two kittens clinging to him. “I am indebted for your help. That I have used so much of your time is a disservice to the crown.”
“At ease,” Dion reassures him. His own kittens are meowing incessantly, perhaps in celebration. “It is naught that a fresh change of clothes cannot fix.”
And a fresh change of clothes they will need, indeed. They are both soaked through, their shirts and trousers clinging to them and dripping relentlessly onto the ground. Dion’s dominant blood ensures he can withstand the elements, yet even he can feel the chill.
Still, Terence does not rise. “Of course, my lord. Should I fetch someone?”
“There is no need. I will attend to it.” When Terence does not so much as budge, Dion cannot help but chuckle. “At ease, Sir Terence. I believe you may set aside some of the formality, given our past few minutes.”
He motions to the kittens, and then himself. Terence glances up at him, then back down. Dion is encouraged to see a flush of red on his cheeks; the heat returning to his body, Dion hopes.
“That…Very well, my liege. If you insist.”
“I do.” He motions with his hand. “Please, rise.”
Dion watches, amused, as Terence goes to stand, still dripping water. The three kittens that were using Dion as a lifeboat have abandoned him in favor of crowding around Terence’s legs, meowing up a storm; Terence checks on the orange runt in his shirt in favor of picking them up to join their kin, leading to a chorus of disapproving mews.
“Small mercies,” Terence breathes, and Dion steps forward to look.
Against the warming skin of his clavicle, a content kitten sleeps.
“Praise to Great Greagor,” Dion says, relief flooding him. The kitten purrs as it breathes, a steady in and out. Such simple things, Dion thinks, watching it. The smallest moments of light, in a world so dark. It feels as if a weight has lifted from his chest. “I suppose this is a success, then.”
Terence looks equally relieved.
“Indeed, Your Highness.” He turns his full attention to Dion. There are flecks of silver hidden in his irises, Dion realizes. He had not noticed those, earlier. “Without you, I would not have been able to save them all.” Then, impossibly earnest: “Thank you.”
Dion’s breath catches.
Thank you.
Dion has been thanked a great many times by a great number of people. Some true, and some false— some acting on pure formality and decorum, an obligation they must fulfill when it is the crown prince to whom they speak. In turn, Dion fulfills his duty and follows his orders, and sometimes he is thanked but most often he is not, and he has come to neither expect nor cherish the words when they cross his ears for they have never guided the reason he picks up his lance each morning.
Yet—something about the way Terence says the words now feels so… different.
Thank you.
Years from now, Dion will think back to this moment. He will think of how Terence looked at him; how their eyes met and how Terence did not lower his own, as so many in his life were wont to do. He will think of the wonder of it all–of standing there, and having Terence hold his gaze, looking at Dion in a way he could not recall having been looked at before. Not as a dragoon viewing his commander, or a man the Dominant of Bahamut, but something else. Thank you, and Dion will marvel over how the words held no hint of envy, nor false flattery, nor any hope that it would somehow benefit him to speak it aloud.
How Terence just said them, because he felt they were true.
He means it, Dion realizes then. Terence means it.
It will be one of those moments: the kind that is important, even if at the time Dion does not know it. And he does not, not really. For Terence says thank you, and holds his gaze, and all Dion can think is: there is still good in this world, it seems.
“T’was nothing,” he says, and finds that he means it in turn.
(How odd: that something he says so often can feel so very true in this moment.)
There is a momentary flash of surprise on Terence’s face. Why, Dion does not know. They look at each other. That something is there, under the surface– curiosity? Dion does not know him well enough to tell. His eyes are so clear.
Then, slowly, as if a rising sun: Terence smiles.
It is a quiet thing. Private, almost shy, as if meant to hover between the two of them alone. It is soft, and gentle, even as it brightens everything. A new sight, here in this predawn light.
“Not nothing, my liege,” Terence says—and then, as if it is the easiest thing in the world, offers him that smile in full.
The morning sun begins its first peek over the horizon. A brush of wind brings the sweet scent of flowers dancing across cobblestone; at their feet, and in one dragoon’s tunic, the kittens meow. And Dion cannot help it: there, standing alongside the canal as the shadows around them turn to light, he finds himself smiling back.
A month later, when Herminia’s child is born, Dion will find Rainier in the strategy room.
“The man you wished to make Captain,” he will say. Rainier’s eyes will alight. “Sir Terence Durand. Let us discuss your proposal, once more.”
When Dion wakes, he is warm.
It is a hazy, soft thing, the slow trickle of consciousness. Darkness surrounds him. The cold and wet are gone– cold and wet from what, he wonders distantly. For why is to be dry such a surprise? There is something solid and cool below his body; a thin layer over him, scratching slightly against his skin. His chest and hands feel tight, as if wrapped in an unknown hold.
Yet that heat.
Instinct has him shifting, feeling for the comforting press of Terence’s body against his own–the only time he ever wakes warm. “What would our people do, if they knew the Dominant of Bahamut had such cold feet,” Terence used to tease, and Dion would never fail to press said feet to his calves in retaliation. A gasp, and a laugh. “My Prince! That is not fair play!”
Yet when Dion searches for him now, instead of the steady weight of Terence’s body, he is greeted with a staggering burst of pain.
It is like nothing he has ever felt before, this agony. Starting in his chest, spreading out to every part of his body like the branches of a tree. An impossible burning, down to the root of him. What poison lies in him, he thinks dizzily, as his eyes fly open, as he chokes in pain. It is as if his very veins have been brought to the surface of his body and turned to molten metal– as if his blood itself burns with a stinging, noxious gas, branching out to every capillary.
For a moment, the torture of it is so immense he cannot see. He gasps, turning onto his side, body spasming.
There is a small noise: thump-thump-thump. Three objects, falling in succession.
Then: “Meow?”
Dion’s world spins. He gasps in air. Digs his hands into– straw?
The room reveals itself to him.
He is in a cottage. Old, by the looks of it: stone walls chipped away with time and salt-laden air. He himself is on the floor, laid out on a makeshift palette made of straw. The dark of night coats the space around him in shadow, broken only by the light of a flickering fire in a soot-coated hearth to his right. On it, a pot steams, sending the weak scent of medicinal herbs floating across his senses.
On the straw near his stomach, rumpled with sleep and looking very put-out indeed, are three bleary-eyed kittens.
For a moment, Dion can do naught but stare. The kittens stare back, cross.
“Meow,” one repeats, and the memories rush back to Dion in full.
The urgency that fills him sends his pulse leaping. “Joshua,” he whispers, stomach dropping as he remembers the beach, the walk, the fall. He turns his head, body screaming in protest– and his heart leaps.
Next to him, on his own makeshift bed, the Phoenix sleeps.
Not the Phoenix, Dion realizes, as the final details fall into place. For behind Joshua there is a rickety wooden table placed between them and the door, where a figure is slumped over in a chair, deep in slumber himself. The man once called Ifrit– who now, like the Phoenix, Dion cannot feel the presence of at all. Nor did he feel it on the beach, or on the path, where Ifrit no doubt found them.
In front of his very eyes, the Dominants whose twin flames lit up the night sky sleep. Yet no longer are they Dominants at all.
Just… men.
Men, he realizes, watching the firelight flicker across Joshua’s body. While Ifrit– Clive– breathes slow and steady, Joshua’s breathing comes in a low wheeze, each breath pained and labored. Cuts cross his cheeks, dark bruises painted on his shoulders; Dion can see little more beneath the ragged blanket that covers him from the chest down, but he can tell by the line of his body that he is in no small amount of agony.
Yet he lives. He lives.
Something touches his wrist. He jolts– and nearly knocks over a kitten.
It mews loudly in protest, wobbling unsteadily into Dion’s bandaged hand. For he is bandaged, Dion realizes: from palm to nails, and all of his chest. They are makeshift –old cloth and leaves that itch uncomfortably– yet Dion is too distracted staring at the kittens to pay much heed to them.
T’was not a hallucination, after all.
“Easy,” he whispers to the tiny thing as it meows again. The word comes out a rasp; his throat, when he tries to swallow, is dryer than the Dhalmekian Republic. His lungs burn. “Easy.”
The other kittens have abandoned him, moving over to the hearth. A glint of silver beside it catches Dion’s eye– his heart leaps once more.
His lance.
With no small amount of effort, he manages to pull himself to the edge of the straw, body aching deeply enough to make him wish he were dead, yet be certain he is not. He has known pain. Known it, and conquered it. Yet it takes him many moments to conquer this one. It is with the searing burn in his veins and several failed attempts that he drags himself to the hearth, the kittens scattering as he reaches it.
His lance shines in the firelight, orange and silver intermingling as one.
There is no familiar hum of greeting when he touches the warm metal. Just the weight of it in his hands, causing his arms to shake like a newly born foal.
It is then that the realization truly sinks in. Before, he had been too delirious to truly understand, but now the truth is as stark as the morning sun he woke to. Magic has left the land. The eikons themselves have fled in turn.
It is done.
The implications spin before Dion like stray threads. Emotions war inside him: relief, disbelief, shock. The same horror as when he lay on the sand, for why is he alive?
Fate called for his death. Yet here he breathes, alongside better men. How?
“Dion?”
The voice is feeble and shaking. Dion startles nonetheless. He tears his eyes away from his lance to look.
Joshua Rosfield looks back at him, eyes wide and shining.
“Dion?” Joshua breathes again as their gazes meet, as if unable to believe it. A smile spreads across his pale, sunken face. When he drags in a breath, each word is no more than a hoarse whisper of air. “Dion! You are–”
He chokes, drawing in a gasp– and begins to cough. Deep, rattling things, ones that shake his entire body.
There is a spray of red.
“Sir Joshua!” The lance, the kittens, his failure: all are forgotten in an instant. Dion’s pain is something distant and inconsequential as he rushes to him, unable to stand and stumbling instead. Joshua coughs and coughs, hand pressed tight over his own mouth to muffle the noise; it is with a clumsy, meager strength that Dion grabs the bowl of water by his bedside and slides an arm around his back to help him sit up.
It earns a low noise of pain.
“Tis… tis nothing,” Joshua breathes, voice ragged. His eyes are on Clive’s sleeping form. Bandages wrap around his hands, his arms–Dion, unbidden, finds his gaze going to his chest as if he expects something to be there, yet he sees only smooth skin. “I am… fine. Please do not… concern yourself.”
Still, he drinks without protest when Dion raises the bowl to his lips, his bandaged hands inadequate. Water spills down his chin, yet it appears neither of them have the strength to wipe it away.
“I will fetch a cloth.”
A rattling breath. “No. No, stay, I…”
Dion presses the bowl to his mouth again. Only after Joshua has nearly drained it does Dion lower it from his lips. Muscles shaking from the effort, he helps Joshua settle back down to the straw.
Joshua shivers when he is flat once more. His hand, now covered in red, rests on Dion’s arm with a frail grip; his eyes, staring at Dion, are wide.
“Pardon. Without the Phoenix, I find myself– weak.” He does not look away from Dion. To Dion’s horror, tears begin to shimmer across the forest green of his gaze. “Thank the flames. When you did not wake, I feared…”
Any further sentiment is cut off as he coughs again, weaker. Dion reaches for the bowl once more, but Joshua shakes his head. He motions to Dion instead, wordless: for you.
“There is no need—”
“Do not be foolish,” Joshua croaks. His eyes are wide and imploring. “Dion. Please.”
The desperation there takes Dion aback.
“Please,” Joshua repeats, when Dion stays frozen with surprise. Voice shaking, tears sliding down his cheeks– and what possibly could Dion do but drink, when Joshua is asking him like so? What mere mortal could disobey when faced with such unfiltered concern?
Slowly, he drinks. The horrendous agony in his chest flares as he raises the water to his mouth– yet the cool slide down his throat nearly brings him to tears, so sweet is the feeling. He allows himself one gulp, two; sets the bowl down, refusing more.
‘Tis enough. The rest shall be for Joshua, same as his strength.
“Thank you,” Joshua breathes when he is done, as if Dion has done him a personal kindness. His hand spasms on Dion’s arm, his skin feverish. More tears slide down his cheeks. “Oh, Dion. I am… so very glad to– see you.”
Dion forces his throat to work. “And I, you.”
It is true. As much as Dion does not understand why he lives, nor deserve it, he knows not what he would have done should he have woken to find Joshua dead.
A glance at Clive shows him still sleeping. The kittens have come back to join them; one crawls onto his leg as Joshua catches his breath, still looking at Dion with shining eyes. Dion has been subject to many gazes over the years, but there is something pure and ever-kind in Joshua’s very being that only two others in Dion’s life have ever matched.
It is overwhelming. Perhaps that is why Dion finds himself asking, “Of how did we come to be here?”
“Clive,” Joshua says simply. The water has helped his voice, yet he is still so pale. Each word is ragged. “The kittens woke him. And,” a shaky inhale, “you called him to us. Three days have passed.”
Dion marvels. Three days he has laid here, useless.
Useless, yet alive. What a cruel trick fate has played, Dion thinks distantly. To survive Ultima is itself a miracle; yet to not perish in the aftermath, doubly so. There is little chance the fall of Twinside from the sky was gentle, and he knows those tides. Feral, Terence used to call them. The sailors say they lust for blood.
Dion closes his eyes. No. He cannot think of him now. He will break.
“Dion.” Dion’s focus sharpens back. Joshua is watching him, hand pressed against his chest as he sucks in air. His mouth wavers, a fresh set of tears. “I must tell you. How–thankful I am. I owe you… endless gratitude.”
Horror fills Dion. “You owe me nothing.”
“I do, I–”
Dion cannot allow this to continue.
“You do not,” he repeats. “Lest you forget, I merely carried you a few steps. Had your brother not come when he did–”
The shake of the head he gets in response is vehement.
“No.” Joshua’s voice has gone urgent. His grip tightens, face twisting in pain; Dion moves for water once more, but Joshua refuses it. There is an urgency in his eyes that stills Dion in place. “That is… the point. Clive would not have known to… I remember little, but, had you not found me…”
He tries to say more. Nothing but a rasp comes out.
“Think naught of it,” Dion urges, as Joshua’s grip on his arm weakens. Confused at the intensity, the odd weight of each word from Joshua’s mouth. “Speak no more of gratitude. It shall come later. Your wounds are grave.”
Joshua’s breathing is ragged. “As... are yours…I–”
He does not get to finish. For he coughs again– once, then harder, doubling over from the force of it. Dion’s hands alone stop him from falling off the makeshift bed; the bowl of water is knocked over with a clatter. Joshua hacks, and coughs, blood coating his lips, and this time, he cannot muffle their sound.
Over at the table, the slumped figure stirs.
Slowly, at first, the rouse of the weary. Motions delayed and dazed. Then, sharper.
“...Bahamut?” A blink. “I–Joshua? Joshua?!”
Clive Rosfield leaps up from his chair with the speed of a wild coeurl. In seconds, he is at Joshua’s side.
“Joshua!” he croaks, as another cough wracks Joshua’s body. It is with desperate, rushed motions that he slides an arm around him, bringing him to rest against his shoulder. “Joshua, hold on! I have you.”
He searches for the bowl, eyes wild. There is something about how he is moving –how quickly he has come to his side, the way that he says Joshua’s name– that has Dion’s momentarily stilled in shock, for he has never seen Ifrit panicked.
Instinct soon follows.
“Ifrit! Allow me to assist. What does he–”
“Medicine,” Clive instructs, and Dion staggers to standing, the world white with pain. Joshua is spasming, Clive keeping him from biting his tongue and destroying himself with the very body he resides– so it is Dion who grabs the bowl, who stumbles to the pot at the fire. His father would turn over in his grave were he to see Dion use the sacred lance to hold himself up, and yet Dion must, for his own legs are too weak. The boiling liquid sloshes in his haste, soaking through his bandages and to his scraped-raw skin, yet he feels it not.
He is back in moments. “Here.”
“Flames guide you,” Clive breathes to him, as he blows on the steam and brings the bowl to Joshua’s lips. Joshua winces at the heat of it– drinks obediently anyways.
So focused is Dion on watching him drink, that it takes him a moment to notice the hand.
He stills.
“Easy,” Clive murmurs to Joshua, as Joshua shakes. Joshua’s breathing remains ragged, a wheeze with each inhale; he tries to speak, but Clive shushes him. The gray, cold stone of what once was Clive’s hand sends a static shadow dancing across the wall as he shifts so Joshua can slump fully against him. “Do not speak. The pain will ebb soon, I swear it.”
His voice shakes. Desperation underlies every motion. A deeply-rooted fear, there in Clive’s face. Joshua’s fingers are wrapped tight around his wrist, though for all appearances not to stop him from assisting his feeble sips.
Simply there, as if he too is afraid to let go.
It is a startling sight, there in the darkness. Intimate. What horrors did these brothers face in that cursed sky, Dion wonders, after Dion’s own strength failed?
What nightmarish possibilities became real, there in Ultima’s fortress?
There is not time to ponder it.
“Allow me,” Dion offers quietly, as the last of the liquid drains from the bowl. He pushes aside the searing pain to take it from Clive once more, gritting his teeth. For what consequence is mere pain, when it is clear Joshua suffers so? This man who has shown him such concern, when he himself lies in the balance of life and death? “I will fetch more.”
Clive’s voice is low and raw. “You have my thanks.”
Together, they feed him the medicine. Together, they watch as –slowly, oh so slowly– Joshua’s eyelids flutter. His breathing eases.
When the fingers gripping Clive’s wrist loosen from the sweet pull of painless sleep, Dion lets out a breath he was not aware of holding.
Silence stretches. Clive stares at Joshua, throat bobbing.
It takes many minutes before, with a gentleness that belies his one remaining good hand, he lays Joshua back down on the straw, pulling the blanket atop him once more. He runs the same hand down his face.
Dion regards him. With the firelight flickering on his body, and no Joshua to block his view, Dion is given the first look of Clive’s exhaustion in full. Shadows dark as ink lay beneath his eyes, his clothes ripped and torn. His hands are shredded from plants’ thorns. He has the look of a man who has been to the depths of despair and back– for likely he has.
Faced with it, there is only one question Dion can ask.
“Ifrit— Clive,” he corrects, as the situation strides one step closer to clear. Clive turns to regard him. Dion finds that he wishes not to ask, and yet he must. “Your brother’s wounds… Tell me: what trials awaited you, in Ultima’s cruel grasp?”
And tell him Clive does.
“I must know,” Clive says hours later– after he has told him of the beginning, and the end, and the unexpected after. The fire has gone low, fresh wood placed on top of glowing embers to coax it back to life; Joshua sleeps, occasionally moaning low with pain. They sit next to each other on the floor of his bedside, moonlight streaming in through the broken window.
Dion has been quiet. Listening, mostly. Thinking– for there is so much to ponder. Yet at this, he blinks, looking up.
Clive regards him with eyes turned red at the edges. Dion had considered many horrors that would have put him in that state, yet only now that Dion has heard the story in full does he understand the haunted shadow that lurks behind Clive’s eyes. That Clive Rosfield –the former Dominant of Ifrit, the legend Cid, a man Dion does not know well yet can see so clearly is pure of heart– sits before him victorious is no question.
That everything he loved was nearly lost in turn is not either.
“You need naught but ask.”
For it matters not how little they knew of each other before. The life they now safeguard together is well-known enough to the both of them.
Clive is silent for a moment, watching the unsteady rise and fall of Joshua’s chest. And so Dion waits.
“You know now, of the price Ultima levied,” Clive starts eventually, voice low. “Our deaths, for his cruel gain. Through every trial and tribulation, that sum never changed. And when the time came, it was paid in full. I…”
Clive’s voice catches. Breaks.
On the bed, Joshua shifts, a gasp of pain. Clive and Dion twitch in unison. They hold their breaths. Joshua sleeps.
Clive’s next inhale is unsteady.
“I held him, Dion,” he croaks, voice low and pained. “As life left him. With my very eyes, I saw Joshua die.” He closes said eyes, as if to keep them open is to relive the sight. Some part of Dion had known— known, and not, and prayed to be wrong— yet the words still are a blow. “The final hour: there and gone, and with it my brother. Tried as I might, phoenix flames do not revive the dead. Yet– yet here he is.”
Here he is, indeed. Here they all are.
“He lives,” Dion murmurs, soft. One good thing, among the curse of this new life he now has.
Next to him, Clive’s breathing hitches. He raises his good hand, wiping his face.
“He lives,” he agrees. There is emotion in the words that transcends description: a relief and gratitude so raw and powerful that Dion doubts even the famed Zantetsuken could cut through them. “So I must know, Bahamut. No– Dion. Tell me.”
He turns his eyes to Dion; and Dion’s meets them, for in that gaze he sees a fire and steel that stems not from the Eikons they lost, but the consequences that their departure has left behind.
“Tell me,” Clive repeats. “Did you see anything? Do you know who returned my brother to me?”
The feathers. The beach. The sight of them flashes through Dion’s mind, bright against the sparkling onyx sand. Something nags at the back of his mind. A tug– as if known but forgotten. Lost in the haze of blood and exhaustion, when he fell to his knees in the sand at Joshua’s side. It is on the tip of his tongue, and also not at all.
“I know not,” he admits. For no matter how much he ponders, Clive is right: he cannot fathom how the three of them sit here and breathe.
Clive is silent. He closes his eyes.
Quietly, he says, “Then I must give my thanks to the man whose actions I understand.” He looks at Dion. “Had I known to look for him, there is no doubt I would have. Yet all signs told me his peace had been found with the sea. Dion. Had you not been there…”
He trails off.
There are ideas in life that one can stumble across— truths and possibilities in the interconnected and frail tapestry of human existence that are too terrible to speak aloud. Sitting side-by-side with naught but their blood and a fire, Dion and Clive find themselves facing one now.
Had Dion not been there.
I owe you endless thanks, Joshua had breathed, when he saw Dion’s face. The sincerity in them had felt out of place for the mere act of being carried.
Now, Dion wonders.
Had he not been there, would Clive have found the feathers? Would Joshua’s body have clung to the last semblance of its warmth? Or would they both have been washed away long before another arrived, taken by the rising tide?
Clive draws in a low, ragged breath. “I thank you,” he croaks. He places his hand on Dion’s shoulder. “Endlessly, I thank you.”
And Dion watches as he cries with all his heart.
The thanks echoes in Dion’s hollowed chest. Only Clive’s tears stop him from rejecting the notion in full. For so many good people die in this world– yet here he sits with another chance at life, wasted on a man who does not deserve it. Here he sits, gifted with gratitude, when there is no good deed he could ever endeavor that would balance the sin on his soul.
So he does not speak. The firelight illuminates the tears sliding down Clive’s cheeks: thin, saltwater testimonies of much seen, and lost, and gained. The possibility that had come so close to reality hovers, and in it Dion thinks of a bright bird in the night sky and a bright man greeting him with a hug that few others would dare to give.
He draws in a slow breath. Moves to turn and offer Clive what meager comfort he can.
Yet instead of Clive’s tearstained face, the fire flickers just so– and unbidden, in shadows that mimic the brush of torchlight on stone, Dion is greeted with a memory instead.
One of another’s face, much the same, as he had looked at Dion for what they both knew was the last time and whispered, “My Prince.”
Terence.
It is unexpected and sudden, the press of the recollection. Cursed, for he has not had the time to prepare for the thought of him. To shield himself to numbness. And so the strike to his heart is instant and brutal and incontrovertible.
It sends him spinning. Oh, Terence.
The ache of it drowns out all else. How his body screams with searing pain, how he has failed, how he sits here unworthy and sinful and failing the first promise he ever made; a single name, and it is all painted inconsequential. For to remember how Terence last looked at Dion, tears sliding down his face, is a fate crueler and more terrible than even this new life could ever be.
Dion had caused him to cry with such strength. I will ever be your loyal servant, said and shown year after year. And Dion had known.
Dion, I cannot leave–
He had used it.
But you shall.
Dion had ruined him. As he has ruined all he loves.
Now Clive cries, near silent at his side. And no matter how deeply he wishes it were not so, it is as if looking at a mirror. For as Clive mourns, the fear whose gaze Dion has refused to meet lest it bring him to his knees and leave him curled to die rears its head at last, here in the quiet of the night.
Surely, Terence is safe?
Great Greagor, please. Let him be safe. Should he not be– the alternative– No. It is too horrendous to consider. Yet it digs into Dion’s mind with jagged claws, unyielding.
Should he breathe while Terence does not…
Ideas too terrible to speak aloud, and possibilities too excruciating to carry. Dion cannot bear to look directly. He cannot.
(Terence.
“Dion,” he had said. The moment the realization had crossed his face, and the truth of what Dion intended floated before them– and that is what Terence had chosen. His name. Dion, not in the private shadows of their tent but in the open air, overheard by any. Dion, a singular slip in the blurred lines they had learned to dance between formality and intimacy for three stolen years.
Dion, I cannot leave, and only now does Dion see that Terence had been begging him in a language only the two of them could ever understand the depths of.
Dion. Dion. Dion.)
Something new begins to burn in him.
“Yet we are not done,” he breathes. To Clive, to the room, to fate itself. That thing in him raising its head once more. For the clawed fear is unyielding, yes—yet it is not only fear that can be taught to refuse to yield. Slowly, he clenches his hand. Slowly, he lets the searing ache in his chest flow through him. “Sir Clive. Perhaps the truth yet alludes you. Yet we will not find our answers here.”
For Joshua is alive. As is Clive. As is Dion. Those truths, no matter how Dion may hate his own, are undeniable. Yet a new question to a truth now unknown screams in Dion’s chest.
They live. Yet what of the man Dion loves?
Is Terence alive?
No other thought can compare. No challenge, nor burden. What matter they, if the miracle of a second chance has been wasted on him when the best man he has ever known is no longer of this world at all?
No. It will not do.
Clive raises his head. He looks at Dion– and Dion knows that this is the gaze of a man who has killed thousands, and felled a god to save his people, and has lost and gained and lost again. And in it, Dion sees the same all-consuming determination that screams in his own breast.
“No,” he agrees. “We will not.”
Terence’s tearstained face. Joshua’s weak grip, wrapped around Clive’s wrist.
To step into fire is to tame it; to embrace his sin and shame is to turn them to steel. A new truth hovers, and it is this: the only path now is forward, towards the only constant Dion has ever known.
Punish me as you wish, he thinks to Greagor, in her place up above. He will take it, and gladly, for it is no less than he deserves. His failure, the hatred and lives of his people, the tenuous spark of Joshua’s life now in his and Clive’s hands. The sin. The shame. He will bear them all. My life is still yours, as I promised that night.
Yet he will not allow this weakness, when he knows not of Terence’s fate. Unholy light he may be, but a darkened path must be lit. The sanctity of its source is of no care to the shadows.
So light it he will.
I am sorry, father, he thinks. He will not make him wait long. Yet he cannot rest until his question is answered. He will not yield until he knows if the man who holds his heart and soul in his hands yet lives.
And so he tells Clive, “Forward.”
Clive regards him. His gaze goes to the moon. To Metia alongside it.
“Forward,” he agrees slowly. The tears have dried. “For Joshua. For everyone.”
For Terence, Dion does not say, yet hears it more clearly than any other sound since he woke. He grips his lance. The shadows of the fire flicker. Between them, Joshua and the kittens sleep.
And onto the path they step.