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They’d finally made it to Ishgard—more importantly, they’d made it alone, without disaster looming over them or duty nipping at their heels. The freedom suits him, P'stachio thinks, smiling as she watches G’raha flit about, marveling at everything in sight: new buildings made from hand-hewn stones, aqueducts full of clear running water despite the cold, and—she notes the blush tinting his cheeks—steam rising from hot springs scattered throughout the quarter.
But when he sees the rose bushes, each bloom covered in a thin layer of ice that glistens in the fading light, he’s nearly beside himself.
“They’re beautiful,” he breathes, dropping down to examine them more closely. “I wish I could take one with me.”
He traces a reverent finger along the edge of a pink petal, and P’stachio shivers, imagining that touch decidedly, depravedly elsewhere. “Why stop at wishing?” she asks, grateful for the flowers’ distraction as her own face colors to match, feeling warmer than she has a right to while snow falls gently around them. Alone and together is a heady combination, and it’s making her dizzy. “Go ahead.”
“But won’t anyone mind?”
There’s a note of concern in G’raha’s tone, like after all this time, he still expects to be chastised for breaking a rule. There’s something about it that pricks her heart; that after everything he’s been through—everything they’ve been through—some part the fledgling scholar cutting his teeth in St. Coinach’s yet remains. But P’stachio ignores the pang and smiles instead, raising a hand in mock-solemnity.
“As the Warrior of Light, I grant you the leave to do so.”
G’raha laughs, a clear, musical sound that reverberates in her chest, another remnant of lives gone by but one she’s all too happy, always too happy, to hear. “An illustrious title it may be, but I’m not sure if the botanists would appreciate—”
“Sod the botanists—I helped plant them too, silly.”
His eyes widen. “Did you really?”
“Mhmm,” she says, bending to cup a rose in her palm. “I had a bit of time on my hands, and the Lord Speaker made it plain they needed all the help they could get—even that of an amateur gardener like myself.”
“It’s hard to imagine you being an amateur at anything.”
“Do you recall teaching me how to shoot a bow?”
G’raha barks a laugh at the memory, and she grins in kind, recalling how she’d nearly sent her first arrow flying straight into Rammbroes’s backside. “Archery notwithstanding, these roses truly are incredible. I should’ve guessed you had a hand in it.”
P’stachio quirks a brow. “Oh?”
“Of course,” he affirms, eyes crinkling. “They’re the embodiment of triumph over adversity—of living on, despite the odds. Your touch is written all over them.”
Heat blooms in her cheeks, and a moment passes before she’s gathered herself enough to respond. “As I—as I said,” she coughs, barely managing to look at him. “Take as many as you’d like.”
He smiles.
Oh, that smile. Gods help me.
“I only need one.”
He turns back to the roses as if he hadn’t just delivered a fatal blow to her very being, and P’stachio can do naught but stare in response. It’s only as his fingers begin to close over a thorny stem that she snaps out of her daze. “Do take care, Raha, they’re—”
Too late. He draws his hand back with a hiss.
“—sharp.”
Stars dot the sky by the time they reach their room at the Forgotten Knight. G’raha sets the rose in a glass on the table and busies himself with the hearth, prodding at the embers until they produce a suitable flame. P’stachio, watching him work with only one hand, can’t stop thinking about that godsdamned flower.
“Is it still beautiful, if it can cause such pain?”
“Hm?” He cranes his head over his shoulder to look at her. “Is what?”
“The rose.”
“Ah,” G'raha responds, rising from the fireplace to wrap her in his arms. His warmth is a welcome departure from the frigid air outside, and when he drops a kiss to the crown of her head, inhaling deeply as he does, she nearly forgets how to stand. “Some would say more so because of it.”
Though the pinprick in her heart remains, P’stachio scoffs, taking his hand. “Are you one of them?” Drunk on his closeness, she raises his hand to her lips, gently swiping her tongue across his bloodied thumb.
G’raha’s stares at her, transfixed, breath coming in short gasps. “Yes, I, ah—I am,” he pants, the blush painting his cheeks visible even in the firelight.
She hums, gazing at him through dark lashes. “Care to elaborate?”
He laughs hoarsely, his free hand moving to her waist. “I’m not sure I can at the moment.”
P’stachio doesn’t pull away, but steps backward until she finds the edge of the mattress and sits. “Why did you want to keep it?” she asks softly, staring up at G’raha as he towers over her, brow furrowed as he considers her question.
“The rose? Well…it reminds me of you, I suppose.”
“What, likely to draw blood at the slightest provocation?”
He laughs. “I hadn’t considered that, no.”
She knows she’s being petulant, that it’s only a flower, but she presses on regardless. “Then why?”
G’raha flops onto the bed next to her, a wrist thrown over his eyes. “I expect you’ll find my reasons somewhat trite,” he exhales, sounding faintly embarrassed.
In other words—her favorite version of him.
P’stachio pokes him in the ribs. “How fortunate that I find your triteness unbearably charming.”
A breathy laugh—another blow to her composure. “You would have me debase myself so?”
“It is one of my preferred pastimes.”
“And here I thought Ishgard to be a vacation from my duties.”
“Not so,” she corrects, pulling the hand from his eyes. “In fact, the future of the realm may well depend on it.”
G’raha takes her wrists, smiling despite his grousing. “It depends on me waxing poetic like a lovestruck fool?”
P’stachio blushes furiously. She knows—of course she knows—but to hear the words spoken outside of her imagination, in a voice unaltered by imperfect memory, still thrills her. “Mm, it does, I’m sorry to say.”
“Well then—if such is my fate, so be it,” he grins.
She rolls her eyes, fighting a smile. That he can jest about his destiny marks how far they’ve come, though it doesn’t stop her from squeezing his cheeks with one hand, too fondly for a proper admonishment. “A poet and a comedian—how lucky I am.”
G’raha laughs again, pressing his lips to her collarbone in apology. The retort on her tongue melts into a sharp intake of breath as he trails kisses up her throat, leaving fire in their wake. “Shall I begin?” he murmurs into the shell of her ear.
In this moment, she cannot think; she can hardly hear; she can only feel.
She can only feel him.
“Ah—please.”
Deft fingers loosen the clasp at her neck, push fabric aside as his lips continue their torturous path. “You wish to know why the roses reminded me of you?” he murmurs, teeth scraping gently against her shoulder. He bares her skin at a pace that feels cruelly slow, his ministrations bordering on sacramental.
At last, shed of all her armor, she finds she has nothing clever to say.
She manages a single, trembling nod.
He pulls her—and more willingly she could not go—flush against him, his heartbeat a match for the staccato rhythm of her own. “Beneath your frosty exterior lies something exquisitely beautiful. And if you’d let me,” he pleads, reverence in his tone, “I would spend my entire life watching such a thing bloom.”
My entire life—gods. P’stachio shivers at the thought, the sharp edge of fear now pressing against the need swelling between them. She moves away just far enough to see the confusion in his eyes and knows the knife inside her has cut them both.
Concern darkens G’raha’s features as he fumbles for words, his hands falling limply to his sides. “Is this not what you—? If I misunderstood your feelings, I apologize—”
I want you more than anything, she thinks, panic setting in. “You haven’t misunderstood, Raha. I simply—”
“Then pray, tell me your thoughts. I’ve been known to grasp a simple concept.”
The corners of her mouth lift despite the roiling maw beneath her breastbone. “Perhaps it isn’t so simple,” she exhales.
He regards her warily, as though he dreads what she might say next. “Even still, might I help you untangle it?”
As she looks at him, ears pressed low, the dam breaks. Her eyes fill with unbidden tears, and in a flash he’s holding her again, a bulwark against everything she’d burn if he but wished it. And though he never would, that flame still curls around her heart, fills the dark pit beneath her sternum with something perhaps more dangerous than despair, something warmer and more intoxicating than she’d ever known before him, or than she ever would after.
She’s already lived through one after G’raha Tia. There will not be another.
P’stachio takes a breath. “I cannot ask you to bind yourself to me. I know not what the future holds, nor the danger it might place you in. I cannot take the risk of harming you, no matter how desperately I want you at my side. I am…unfathomably selfish, when it comes to you.”
He trembles against her—from sadness or rage, she cannot tell.
Finally, he speaks.
“I readily accept that between us, I’m more the fool,” G’raha says quietly, his thumbs brushing the wetness from her cheeks. “But do you honestly believe that? How could a person who dedicates her life to saving others possibly be selfish?”
She flushes hotly beneath his touch, but he doesn’t allow her to turn away. “You’ve no idea,” she mumbles, unable to put words to the depths of her hunger, to the lengths she would go to keep him safe and whole and hers.
A growl of frustration, of worry, creeps into his voice. “Then will you not enlighten me? I want nothing more than to share your burden, and nothing less than to become it. I’ll devote my life to studying your mind if that’s what it takes. Please.”
She hides her face against his neck. She cannot look at him, balanced as she is on the precipice of this confession. “What I wish…” she pauses, bravery again eluding her.
His throat vibrates against her lips as he speaks. “All I want is to see you happy. Won’t you keep just one thing for yourself?" She feels him swallow, his next words barely whispered.
“Won’t you let it be me?”
She moves as lightning strikes, and his lips sting from the force of her. G’raha’s hands grasp her waist, her hips, pulling her towards him as she threads fingers through his hair, twining them together until no space remains. “You’ve ruined me,” he gasps, rising again and again to meet her. “I’m ruined without you. Please.”
P’stachio’s ragged breath ghosts over his ear. “I would let you consume me,” she sighs. “All of me, even though so little of my life is my own.”
Lips press into her shoulder, a prayer formed between them.
“And if I give you mine?”
Despite his warmth, she shivers at the implication. “You cannot say such things—"
“What I cannot do is think of another,” he says, taking her hand. He drops a kiss to her knuckles, then places her palm gently on his chest. “Will you keep it?”
Gods, she can hardly breathe. “Keep what?”
“What you stole from me a century ago," he smiles.
Oh, that smile. It will be the death of her even as she lives to see it.
“Do you feel it?”
So much, and yet little else. G’raha’s heartbeat drums under her fingertips, and she presses them harder into his skin as if to draw strength from its rhythm, to hear nothing but his life confirmed, to remind herself she isn’t dreaming. “I do,” she whispers, closing her eyes against the sudden prick of tears. “But what if it withers under my care? What then?”
“My darling,” he hums, shifting against the pillows to gather her into his lap, fevered motions turned languid, honey dripping up her spine. “Without your care, it would’ve ceased to beat back on the First. I have done naught but flourish in your light. I beg you,” he murmurs, soft and revenant, “let me offer you the same.”
“And what of my thorns?” she whispers, shuddering as he thumbs circles over her hipbones.
“Then pierce me, my love. My life is yours, to keep or to take. Will you have it?”
P’stachio cannot bear it. She drags her fangs across his pulse, and with her tongue tastes a heart impossibly sweeter than his words. “Only if you keep mine in turn.”
“Well,” he huffs, a smile still playing at his lips, and tugs her gently forward. “Who am I to deny the will of my star?”
She slides against him; feels him tremble as she ghosts fingers across his jawline. “Your star,” she whispers, pressing a featherlight kiss to his neck, “does not intend to deny you, either.”