where the white light burns through
Nov. 7th, 2023 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seleniasTitle: where the white light burns through
Fandom: Final Fantasy XVI
Characters/pairing: Dion/Terence, background Kihel
Rating: gen
Word Count: 2000
Notes: Bonus gift fic for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
trickortreatex ! :3 I felt inclined to write something sweet after Nothing Owed, haha. Pure indulgence. Post-game reunion fic.
-
Terence is warm and solid when they collide. Dion does not parse much from the initial contact. A slip of dark hair, arms absconding him from the ground to pull him forward hard into the brook of his own, and a hoarse and strangled cry in his ear. Dion has heard this voice across all the years and residences of his life and he lets it wrap around him, incredulous, and only stays standing with the hand he bunches in the back of his tunic to cling to as they stumble. Tears soak his collar and the side of his neck. Dion considers the road he’d meant to walk to Oriflamme and knows Terence was not to be upon this route.
He was a body in an unmarked grave or gone from him as he’d bid and Dion had not allowed himself to hope.
Like so many things he has been undeserving of, this fateful encounter winds him to hopeless, hysterical disbelief. Dion shoves himself further into the loop of his familiar arms and Terence slots his head in his hair. He means to call his name or his station but what he says is a blur, and the incongruent blend of titles and tears makes them both hold tight in helpless laughter.
Selfishly, Dion is glad for this delay in the appearance of his escort North. He’d be half to Caer Norvent by now, stumbling under disillusionment and illness both, and they’d be lone ships passing in the night. Would it be better if that was the story to be told; at least one of them may know some semblance of peace under the mask of knowing very little at all, and the other a more noble end. It’s not to become them.
“You’re here,” Terence breathes. “You live,” he says, and the answer is decided.
“—What if it had not been me,” Dion murmurs into his mop of hair and pulls back only enough to press their crowns together. People part around them. “That was reckless.”
“I would know you,” Terence croaks. “You carry yourself the same. Perfect posture, still.” His hand hovers over his shoulder, over air, and that hand holds him at the waist instead. Terence can trace his ribs where his touch is heavy, and certainly feel the stone where Dion’s flesh has given way under his brutal commands, and the atrophy of his exhausted body during the long months of his recovery where he’d hoped to pass and never did. His eyes, when Dion can see them through the veil of tears are the same calculating, steel gray Dion’s relied on his entire life, flecked wetly but glittering warmly; they take in all of him, but mostly linger on his face, where he longs for an answer Dion now must give. Words fail.
Dion presses a shaky thumb along the bruising shadows under his eyes and water runs down his hand. Terence laughs in fraught disbelief again, leaning into it, and the mesmerizing sound spreads out from their dark corner of the market like a wave in a pond. The spell breaks and they shuffle weakly together.
“Come now, we’re in the way. I don’t fear discovery anymore but I do want to at least hear you clearly.”
“This way.”
They stumble like people possessed out of the road and encampment both and under a great pine wreathed with needles. Cones crunch under their feet. The air is wet with rain and fog slopes up the hill they stand on. All around, tents are pitched for the lost, and each stream of refugees bearing south or north over the Dhalmekian border reveals more reunions and farewells. Dion has no fantasies that anyone he knew in his old life still remained. Yet he’d crossed paths with the one he’d tried to fixate on the least. He’d only thought of returning to Oriflamme to lay his father and his responsibilities in the grave, and following the case he would make before the justices and what remained of the council, himself as needed.
“When Twinside rose, I feared the worst,” Dion confesses. “I had thought I’d sent you to your death.”
“I felt it was a near thing,” Terence says mildly. “I had wished for it.” He speaks not of physical ailments; Dion trails his hand over his heart and presses to feel it race and the assurance that it beats. The bulk of him, still honed, is softer and leaner at the edges, like he was carved away or reshaped.
“Tell me you didn’t,” Dion says. Terence shakes his head. Dion closes his eyes in grief and imagines shaking him and spitting curses at the sky.
The calm that took them in the many long years of their commitment is absent; longing makes the heart grow stronger and he’s known it for every separation they’ve weathered in constant war time — but what of death, becoming it, defying it, and then returning in pieces? There are no maps to follow, no path trodden before them that they should look to — only this moment and the stones that have been cast by Dion’s hand and the bones they’ve broken in turn.
There is nothing Dion can ask of him that he wouldn’t give — and so he won’t ask, even if in this moment he wants nothing more than to take his old self to task for the damage done and beg forgiveness, however unworthy he is.
“You found the girl then,” Dion says wetly. Terence huffs and scrubs the back of one hand along his eyes. His hands are bare of gloves, his body without the silver armor of his station and the steelsilk beneath. He looks ordinary, oblique, another man on the road, not a seasoned commander at all. He blends in perfectly in the new world blooming across Valisthea and the people rising to meet it; his soft underbelly on display as virtuous proof of the promise to live without him. He does, Dion notes with relief, still carry a sword, and it glitters sharp and silvery when he moves.
“Aye. I had thought you were sending me to a grown woman, not a child.”
“She’s well, then.”
“Bless her, yes.” Terence leans forward. “She hardly needs me at all.”
“She’s taken care of you,” Dion says, more softly.
“Yes. As I’m sure you hoped, I’m fearfully attached.”
“You’ve a soft heart. I knew you would.”
Terence can’t seem to unhand him. Their fingers grip each other and Dion can only squeeze rhythmically with the one to get his relief across. Terence had once been a boy born from graphite, destined for a world of books and numbers and keeping, and Dion had stolen him away when he’d confessed he’d rather champion a companion he believed in. And he’d donned armor and played war and matched Dion blow for blow until they could lead a legion of their own — and in that success, Dion had wondered if he’d hadn’t robbed from him the chances of a peaceful life, though he never complained, or said he longed for other things, he cried often enough on his behalf and worried that Dion’s end would be long before his own and he’d know misery without him. Tears that, Dion found, came so easily upon him now, flowing like a thaw in spring.
They’re strangers in this new world with none of the markings of the old accept the absence of them, and when Dion shuffles closer, Terence draws him in tight again, palms flat and needy against the width of his back, and breathes so deep his chest pushes into his own.
His touch, at least, remains the same.
“You asked a lot of me,” Terence says. His voice reveals no discontent. “And I did it. And I mean to care for her still.”
“Good,” Dion says. “She is so lucky to have you—”
“—But I promised myself to you. And I would keep the vows I’ve made to both my wards, Greagor willing.”
Dion quiets. He blinks into the gray light of the afternoon, the heat Terence emits warming his skin and the sparse rain sprinkling through the branches above cooling it. In this half-light, this half-existence, Dion feels in two worlds, and it’s a path he recognizes as Terence having tread for him through all these long years. The opportunity to bridge it is arriving; he can return to him as a man and not his master. They’ve known no other way to live.
“You need not a reason,” Dion manages. “I’m still yours, if you want me.”
“I haven’t stopped. I said I was your servant. I’m trying to tell you I still am.”
Dion shakes his head. He could explain how he’d spent the last months in a bed with kindness thrown over his withering body like a shroud and waited fatally for it to be pulled over his face while Terence spent his days combing the Dhalmekian coast for a trace of him. How many hands saw he’d make it this far, and how those same hands intended to help him reach whatever end was fated for him. Perhaps the goddess thought she needed to interfere again and give him this one thing to torture himself over before the real end finally arrived. Dion does not think there is time to waste on a pair of besotted men such as them.
Close at hand, a girl’s call floats on the wind. Terence’s eyes raise, searching, a whistle sounding from his pursed lips toward the crowd and the busy road, and Dion is proud that he’s set upon the course Dion laid before him — already looking forward, even if he is holding too tightly to the old world in his arms, fingers gripped to bruise. It is true that they are not the same men; it is true that it changes nothing of their feelings.
Some distance away, a figure dressed in white weaves through a throng of bodies toward them.
Relief and hope and joy kindling anew, Dion holds tight the thought and pushes onward.
“There are rumors you’ve likely heard,” Dion murmurs. “The crystals — they’re gone forever. And the eikons with them.” He pauses. “I have no services I can offer my country. I cannot even wield a blade.”
Terence looks at him for sometime. “And what of the afflicted? Their curse?”
“They have paid their dues.”
Terence leans weakly against the tree behind him, hands still about him, and Dion eases his stumble and follows after. “You’re just a man now,” he says. “Just Dion.” His eyes are wide, and once again, his dark lashes grow wet. He laughs low in shock, then delight.
Dion cannot absolve himself of either of the misery they’re smitten with, but he can measure it now, and knows that it must have an end.
“It’s a new chapter for you,” Terence says. “You’re free to choose.”
“No, not entirely. There’s work to be done, if I am welcome to do it, but I’d be remiss without someone to see it with.”
“You soft fool,” Terence breathes. “Traipsing around Storm without a guard. I know of one who would accompany you.”
Dion considers. He already knows his answer but there must be new conditions. “I would like to meet him immediately, but only on his terms, with no duties to bind him. Only then can I accept. I am not a prince anymore. I will not make a contract, and I have no money to pay for services.”
“Please, say all the poetics you want but you will always be the person I follow.”
“May I keep you, then,” Dion whispers. “I shan’t let you go this time.” Terence’s fingers slide into the hairs at his neck to hold him in answer, eyes slanting close and mouth soft against his own.
It’s the sweetest kiss of Dion’s life because it means many more to come without the casting of his lot and the sorrowful end he’s escaped.
Fandom: Final Fantasy XVI
Characters/pairing: Dion/Terence, background Kihel
Rating: gen
Word Count: 2000
Notes: Bonus gift fic for
trickortreatex ! :3 I felt inclined to write something sweet after Nothing Owed, haha. Pure indulgence. Post-game reunion fic.-
Terence is warm and solid when they collide. Dion does not parse much from the initial contact. A slip of dark hair, arms absconding him from the ground to pull him forward hard into the brook of his own, and a hoarse and strangled cry in his ear. Dion has heard this voice across all the years and residences of his life and he lets it wrap around him, incredulous, and only stays standing with the hand he bunches in the back of his tunic to cling to as they stumble. Tears soak his collar and the side of his neck. Dion considers the road he’d meant to walk to Oriflamme and knows Terence was not to be upon this route.
He was a body in an unmarked grave or gone from him as he’d bid and Dion had not allowed himself to hope.
Like so many things he has been undeserving of, this fateful encounter winds him to hopeless, hysterical disbelief. Dion shoves himself further into the loop of his familiar arms and Terence slots his head in his hair. He means to call his name or his station but what he says is a blur, and the incongruent blend of titles and tears makes them both hold tight in helpless laughter.
Selfishly, Dion is glad for this delay in the appearance of his escort North. He’d be half to Caer Norvent by now, stumbling under disillusionment and illness both, and they’d be lone ships passing in the night. Would it be better if that was the story to be told; at least one of them may know some semblance of peace under the mask of knowing very little at all, and the other a more noble end. It’s not to become them.
“You’re here,” Terence breathes. “You live,” he says, and the answer is decided.
“—What if it had not been me,” Dion murmurs into his mop of hair and pulls back only enough to press their crowns together. People part around them. “That was reckless.”
“I would know you,” Terence croaks. “You carry yourself the same. Perfect posture, still.” His hand hovers over his shoulder, over air, and that hand holds him at the waist instead. Terence can trace his ribs where his touch is heavy, and certainly feel the stone where Dion’s flesh has given way under his brutal commands, and the atrophy of his exhausted body during the long months of his recovery where he’d hoped to pass and never did. His eyes, when Dion can see them through the veil of tears are the same calculating, steel gray Dion’s relied on his entire life, flecked wetly but glittering warmly; they take in all of him, but mostly linger on his face, where he longs for an answer Dion now must give. Words fail.
Dion presses a shaky thumb along the bruising shadows under his eyes and water runs down his hand. Terence laughs in fraught disbelief again, leaning into it, and the mesmerizing sound spreads out from their dark corner of the market like a wave in a pond. The spell breaks and they shuffle weakly together.
“Come now, we’re in the way. I don’t fear discovery anymore but I do want to at least hear you clearly.”
“This way.”
They stumble like people possessed out of the road and encampment both and under a great pine wreathed with needles. Cones crunch under their feet. The air is wet with rain and fog slopes up the hill they stand on. All around, tents are pitched for the lost, and each stream of refugees bearing south or north over the Dhalmekian border reveals more reunions and farewells. Dion has no fantasies that anyone he knew in his old life still remained. Yet he’d crossed paths with the one he’d tried to fixate on the least. He’d only thought of returning to Oriflamme to lay his father and his responsibilities in the grave, and following the case he would make before the justices and what remained of the council, himself as needed.
“When Twinside rose, I feared the worst,” Dion confesses. “I had thought I’d sent you to your death.”
“I felt it was a near thing,” Terence says mildly. “I had wished for it.” He speaks not of physical ailments; Dion trails his hand over his heart and presses to feel it race and the assurance that it beats. The bulk of him, still honed, is softer and leaner at the edges, like he was carved away or reshaped.
“Tell me you didn’t,” Dion says. Terence shakes his head. Dion closes his eyes in grief and imagines shaking him and spitting curses at the sky.
The calm that took them in the many long years of their commitment is absent; longing makes the heart grow stronger and he’s known it for every separation they’ve weathered in constant war time — but what of death, becoming it, defying it, and then returning in pieces? There are no maps to follow, no path trodden before them that they should look to — only this moment and the stones that have been cast by Dion’s hand and the bones they’ve broken in turn.
There is nothing Dion can ask of him that he wouldn’t give — and so he won’t ask, even if in this moment he wants nothing more than to take his old self to task for the damage done and beg forgiveness, however unworthy he is.
“You found the girl then,” Dion says wetly. Terence huffs and scrubs the back of one hand along his eyes. His hands are bare of gloves, his body without the silver armor of his station and the steelsilk beneath. He looks ordinary, oblique, another man on the road, not a seasoned commander at all. He blends in perfectly in the new world blooming across Valisthea and the people rising to meet it; his soft underbelly on display as virtuous proof of the promise to live without him. He does, Dion notes with relief, still carry a sword, and it glitters sharp and silvery when he moves.
“Aye. I had thought you were sending me to a grown woman, not a child.”
“She’s well, then.”
“Bless her, yes.” Terence leans forward. “She hardly needs me at all.”
“She’s taken care of you,” Dion says, more softly.
“Yes. As I’m sure you hoped, I’m fearfully attached.”
“You’ve a soft heart. I knew you would.”
Terence can’t seem to unhand him. Their fingers grip each other and Dion can only squeeze rhythmically with the one to get his relief across. Terence had once been a boy born from graphite, destined for a world of books and numbers and keeping, and Dion had stolen him away when he’d confessed he’d rather champion a companion he believed in. And he’d donned armor and played war and matched Dion blow for blow until they could lead a legion of their own — and in that success, Dion had wondered if he’d hadn’t robbed from him the chances of a peaceful life, though he never complained, or said he longed for other things, he cried often enough on his behalf and worried that Dion’s end would be long before his own and he’d know misery without him. Tears that, Dion found, came so easily upon him now, flowing like a thaw in spring.
They’re strangers in this new world with none of the markings of the old accept the absence of them, and when Dion shuffles closer, Terence draws him in tight again, palms flat and needy against the width of his back, and breathes so deep his chest pushes into his own.
His touch, at least, remains the same.
“You asked a lot of me,” Terence says. His voice reveals no discontent. “And I did it. And I mean to care for her still.”
“Good,” Dion says. “She is so lucky to have you—”
“—But I promised myself to you. And I would keep the vows I’ve made to both my wards, Greagor willing.”
Dion quiets. He blinks into the gray light of the afternoon, the heat Terence emits warming his skin and the sparse rain sprinkling through the branches above cooling it. In this half-light, this half-existence, Dion feels in two worlds, and it’s a path he recognizes as Terence having tread for him through all these long years. The opportunity to bridge it is arriving; he can return to him as a man and not his master. They’ve known no other way to live.
“You need not a reason,” Dion manages. “I’m still yours, if you want me.”
“I haven’t stopped. I said I was your servant. I’m trying to tell you I still am.”
Dion shakes his head. He could explain how he’d spent the last months in a bed with kindness thrown over his withering body like a shroud and waited fatally for it to be pulled over his face while Terence spent his days combing the Dhalmekian coast for a trace of him. How many hands saw he’d make it this far, and how those same hands intended to help him reach whatever end was fated for him. Perhaps the goddess thought she needed to interfere again and give him this one thing to torture himself over before the real end finally arrived. Dion does not think there is time to waste on a pair of besotted men such as them.
Close at hand, a girl’s call floats on the wind. Terence’s eyes raise, searching, a whistle sounding from his pursed lips toward the crowd and the busy road, and Dion is proud that he’s set upon the course Dion laid before him — already looking forward, even if he is holding too tightly to the old world in his arms, fingers gripped to bruise. It is true that they are not the same men; it is true that it changes nothing of their feelings.
Some distance away, a figure dressed in white weaves through a throng of bodies toward them.
Relief and hope and joy kindling anew, Dion holds tight the thought and pushes onward.
“There are rumors you’ve likely heard,” Dion murmurs. “The crystals — they’re gone forever. And the eikons with them.” He pauses. “I have no services I can offer my country. I cannot even wield a blade.”
Terence looks at him for sometime. “And what of the afflicted? Their curse?”
“They have paid their dues.”
Terence leans weakly against the tree behind him, hands still about him, and Dion eases his stumble and follows after. “You’re just a man now,” he says. “Just Dion.” His eyes are wide, and once again, his dark lashes grow wet. He laughs low in shock, then delight.
Dion cannot absolve himself of either of the misery they’re smitten with, but he can measure it now, and knows that it must have an end.
“It’s a new chapter for you,” Terence says. “You’re free to choose.”
“No, not entirely. There’s work to be done, if I am welcome to do it, but I’d be remiss without someone to see it with.”
“You soft fool,” Terence breathes. “Traipsing around Storm without a guard. I know of one who would accompany you.”
Dion considers. He already knows his answer but there must be new conditions. “I would like to meet him immediately, but only on his terms, with no duties to bind him. Only then can I accept. I am not a prince anymore. I will not make a contract, and I have no money to pay for services.”
“Please, say all the poetics you want but you will always be the person I follow.”
“May I keep you, then,” Dion whispers. “I shan’t let you go this time.” Terence’s fingers slide into the hairs at his neck to hold him in answer, eyes slanting close and mouth soft against his own.
It’s the sweetest kiss of Dion’s life because it means many more to come without the casting of his lot and the sorrowful end he’s escaped.
