Edea keeps a garden. It’s hard growing anything on Centra’s clay, she claims mildly, without a touch of - magic. Not flowers, though; vegetables and cocoa, wheat and onions and hops that can be fermented.
Rinoa, who had pictured sunflowers as tall as she was, or azaleas dyed deep blue, can’t quite hide her disappointment.
She’s clumsy with growth, too. “A drop of magic, nothing more,” Edea instructs. Rinoa can’t finesse a drop -- it tumbles from her hands and her soul, a crashing wave. The air crackles with it. They’re lucky it doesn’t attract monsters. The stalks of the infant crops stand too straight in their shock.
Ellone helps. Rinoa can’t help but regard her with a mix of curiosity and envy, wondering about the woman who manages to be special and other even among Sorceresses and wishing that she had grown up as Ellone had: in the company of Squall and the rest. Ellone blows gently on the soil and sends the crops hurtling through their lifespan, blossoming from seeds to shoots in a matter of seconds.
Rinoa merely watches from the stone walls, sometimes with a book or a draft of a letter in her lap. She doesn’t touch the vegetables, even though Edea and Ellone are both too kind to tell her not to. She gets it.
One day, weeks into their “retreat”, she wakes up and the room is filled with uncommonly blue azaleas, peeking out from the slits of dirt between the stone floor. The three do their best to move them to pots, safe and rich soil, but they don’t survive the transition. Death comes harder for them, petals baking and crumbling in the mid-morning light.
Rinoa, who doesn’t want to be the type of Sorceress who commands life and death simply because she’s bored, says as much to Edea over tea.
Edea asks, “Why do you think Ultimecia abandoned me for you?”
She continues, explaining - power. Edea had merely cultivated it; Rinoa was fit to the seams with it, every crevice between bone and sinew hiding impossible volumes. Abandoning a puddle for the ocean; choosing a machete over a butter knife.
“I don’t - ” she starts to say, and then, “ - do you think they should have locked me away?”
Edea’s answer is simple, final. “We cannot solve problems in the past.”
Ellone can, Rinoa thinks - and doesn’t say.
-
Ultimecia keeps a garden. It’s impossible to grow anything on the backs of the dead SeeDs that litter the ground below her castle, she thinks angrily, not without fresh blood to ripen the stone. Not flowers, nor crops. She grows life in frames, a whole world safe and still in gold-touched 20x24. She grows masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh, crystal that sings for death and the specters in snail shells.
When time expels her, at the point of a gunblade, the magic remains. All the growth rewinds back to the source, like a universe folding itself back up to the heat energy of the big bang.
It finds the brightest point in time, makes its home there.
-
Sometimes, Rinoa is feverish - claiming it’s because she isn’t used to the salt in the air, the low altitude of the continent. Ellone, who is used to caring for others, is deftly attentive, bringing her cool water and making sure the windows are open.
They sleep in the same bed. The orphanage bunk beds are too small for them.
Ellone never complains, even when Rinoa hogs the blankets or spreads out too far. It’s fine. She’s slept in worse places, on the floor of research labs or against the cold wall of a ship that would not move again until spring’s thaw.
Ellone never lacked for love (and still doesn’t), but there were days when she did not know where her next meal would come from, or if there would be a roof over her head. Rinoa, by contrast, has had too many homes - a train car, a mansion, an academy - but wears her heart on a sleeve in a desperate bid to give it away to the first person who might want it. The younger woman will never accept pity, so Ellone doesn’t feel any. She simply keeps the windows open on hot nights, surrenders most of the blankets, and - listens.
Rinoa, burning like a furnace, ends up in her arms most nights.
-
Edea understands the moment the fever leaves her. Thoughts, cool and composed and utterly her own, take precedence in her own body once more. Her joints feel weakened, barely able to hold herself up (too much weight around her neck, at her eyes - where is she?) -- a puppet, strings cut, having to learn to stand.
She remembers very little. A flash of white, the glow of firelight bouncing off twisting shapes and black light bodypaint - a bullet whistling through the air, a perfect shot right between the eyes - well done, child, but -
A girl she’s never met before; a perpetual spot of light in her peripheral vision, bright enough to burn if gazed at directly.
An embrace, arms incongruous, lips to forehead, to cheeks -
A new horror smashes its way in. Edea refuses to give it succor, forcing herself to think, to rememer: the children - Ellone -
-
Ellone is alive because Rinoa fought for her, despite not knowing her. She knows this.
She brushes some hair out of Rinoa’s face, feeling her sleeping skin, the veins bulging faint at her temple.
Ellone is alive because Rinoa accepted a garden of masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh into herself and tucked them into the back of her mind, where they risk growing and growing until only the magic, and not the will or the life, holds the girl’s skin together still.
“Thank you,” she says, again and again, punctuating her gratitude with kisses - at the forehead, at the cheeks, at the lips - until Rinoa is awake again, awake and burning critically warm, not only returning her embrace but clinging to it.
yeah, this definitely got away from me! I don't love the last line but dammit, had to end it somehow 😡
rinoa/ellone + edea (and ultimecia) - conduction.
Rinoa, who had pictured sunflowers as tall as she was, or azaleas dyed deep blue, can’t quite hide her disappointment.
She’s clumsy with growth, too. “A drop of magic, nothing more,” Edea instructs. Rinoa can’t finesse a drop -- it tumbles from her hands and her soul, a crashing wave. The air crackles with it. They’re lucky it doesn’t attract monsters. The stalks of the infant crops stand too straight in their shock.
Ellone helps. Rinoa can’t help but regard her with a mix of curiosity and envy, wondering about the woman who manages to be special and other even among Sorceresses and wishing that she had grown up as Ellone had: in the company of Squall and the rest. Ellone blows gently on the soil and sends the crops hurtling through their lifespan, blossoming from seeds to shoots in a matter of seconds.
Rinoa merely watches from the stone walls, sometimes with a book or a draft of a letter in her lap. She doesn’t touch the vegetables, even though Edea and Ellone are both too kind to tell her not to. She gets it.
One day, weeks into their “retreat”, she wakes up and the room is filled with uncommonly blue azaleas, peeking out from the slits of dirt between the stone floor. The three do their best to move them to pots, safe and rich soil, but they don’t survive the transition. Death comes harder for them, petals baking and crumbling in the mid-morning light.
Rinoa, who doesn’t want to be the type of Sorceress who commands life and death simply because she’s bored, says as much to Edea over tea.
Edea asks, “Why do you think Ultimecia abandoned me for you?”
She continues, explaining - power. Edea had merely cultivated it; Rinoa was fit to the seams with it, every crevice between bone and sinew hiding impossible volumes. Abandoning a puddle for the ocean; choosing a machete over a butter knife.
“I don’t - ” she starts to say, and then, “ - do you think they should have locked me away?”
Edea’s answer is simple, final. “We cannot solve problems in the past.”
Ellone can, Rinoa thinks - and doesn’t say.
-
Ultimecia keeps a garden. It’s impossible to grow anything on the backs of the dead SeeDs that litter the ground below her castle, she thinks angrily, not without fresh blood to ripen the stone. Not flowers, nor crops. She grows life in frames, a whole world safe and still in gold-touched 20x24. She grows masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh, crystal that sings for death and the specters in snail shells.
When time expels her, at the point of a gunblade, the magic remains. All the growth rewinds back to the source, like a universe folding itself back up to the heat energy of the big bang.
It finds the brightest point in time, makes its home there.
-
Sometimes, Rinoa is feverish - claiming it’s because she isn’t used to the salt in the air, the low altitude of the continent. Ellone, who is used to caring for others, is deftly attentive, bringing her cool water and making sure the windows are open.
They sleep in the same bed. The orphanage bunk beds are too small for them.
Ellone never complains, even when Rinoa hogs the blankets or spreads out too far. It’s fine. She’s slept in worse places, on the floor of research labs or against the cold wall of a ship that would not move again until spring’s thaw.
Ellone never lacked for love (and still doesn’t), but there were days when she did not know where her next meal would come from, or if there would be a roof over her head. Rinoa, by contrast, has had too many homes - a train car, a mansion, an academy - but wears her heart on a sleeve in a desperate bid to give it away to the first person who might want it. The younger woman will never accept pity, so Ellone doesn’t feel any. She simply keeps the windows open on hot nights, surrenders most of the blankets, and - listens.
Rinoa, burning like a furnace, ends up in her arms most nights.
-
Edea understands the moment the fever leaves her. Thoughts, cool and composed and utterly her own, take precedence in her own body once more. Her joints feel weakened, barely able to hold herself up (too much weight around her neck, at her eyes - where is she?) -- a puppet, strings cut, having to learn to stand.
She remembers very little. A flash of white, the glow of firelight bouncing off twisting shapes and black light bodypaint - a bullet whistling through the air, a perfect shot right between the eyes - well done, child, but -
A girl she’s never met before; a perpetual spot of light in her peripheral vision, bright enough to burn if gazed at directly.
An embrace, arms incongruous, lips to forehead, to cheeks -
A new horror smashes its way in. Edea refuses to give it succor, forcing herself to think, to rememer: the children - Ellone -
-
Ellone is alive because Rinoa fought for her, despite not knowing her. She knows this.
She brushes some hair out of Rinoa’s face, feeling her sleeping skin, the veins bulging faint at her temple.
Ellone is alive because Rinoa accepted a garden of masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh into herself and tucked them into the back of her mind, where they risk growing and growing until only the magic, and not the will or the life, holds the girl’s skin together still.
“Thank you,” she says, again and again, punctuating her gratitude with kisses - at the forehead, at the cheeks, at the lips - until Rinoa is awake again, awake and burning critically warm, not only returning her embrace but clinging to it.
yeah, this definitely got away from me! I don't love the last line but dammit, had to end it somehow 😡