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"Ouch,"
Rydia said, gritting her teeth in a vain attempt to keep from crying
out. The finger poking at her shoulder were not the least bit
sympathetic to the bruised flesh, and it was sending pangs of pain
down her arm all the way into her fingertips. She kept her gaze
steadily on the window in the opposite direction, so she wouldn't
have to watch the man working healing magic on her joint. It tingled
in a decidedly different way than the White Mages' abilities back
home, and she wondered if it wasn't due to the artificial nature of
the spells in the world she now found herself in.
"You're sure it was a King Behemoth?" Rufus was asking Reno, who was
stuck, on the other side of the room, in a position that nearly
mirrored her own, with his left arm held firmly in the second
healer's grip.
"Yeah," the redhead said, and then grimaced and hissed. "Ow! Watch
it!"
"You two are lucky to be alive," Rufus said, sounding grave, and
Rydia let her eyes flick over his form before settling on the floor
tiles that were decidedly not Reno or in any way close to his
current vicinity.
"Yeah, well, I think we got the short end of that stick," Reno
quipped, and then cried out again, nearly yanking his arm back from
the healer's grasp. When Rydia raised her eyes again, managing to
pull them up from the amazingly interesting patterns in the tiles,
Rufus was eyeing her with an indescribable expression, and her
cheeks burned. She hastily looked away again, wincing as there was
another sharp burst of pain from her injured shoulder.
"We should keep an eye out, then," Rufus said. It seemed he was
talking to himself again, musing as he leafed through several sheets
of ink-heavy paper. "No doubt this is related to our fugitive."
"Is it?" Rydia asked, surprised. "How can you be sure?"
"Mako-infused monsters have never been this close to the city
before," Rufus told her without glancing up in her direction. "They
are not even native to this continent."
Feeling foolish, Rydia shut her mouth, and a few moments later, the
healer stood, and her arm was returned to her. It felt sore and
stiff, and she knew the artificial healing could do only so much,
but it was better than it had been when they had arrived, and she
could move it without too much pain. She tested it a bit, rolling
her shoulder, and then sighed, letting both hands fall into her lap.
The uniform was ruined beyond repair, and she felt guilty– it wasn't
even hers.
"Whadda we do then?" Reno asked, his face dark. "Wait for the
others?"
"I'll call back Tseng to look into this," Rufus said. He shook his
head as if to clear his thoughts. "You two should rest and recover."
"We can't just sit around," Reno shot back.
"We also don't have any leads," Rufus replied. It quieted Reno into
submission, enough, at least, that the healer next to his chair
could finish patching up the claw marks on his arm, and Rydia looked
down at her fingers, curling and uncurling them in her lap. "I'll
call you when we find something."
------
Awkward didn't quite cover the walk back to the apartment, nor the
rather tense atmosphere inside of it. Rydia bit her tongue, wanting
nothing more than the softness of a bed to collapse into, and wasn't
quite sure what to do when she recalled that there was only one bed
in the small apartment, and two of them. Her body was screaming for
sleep, and she wasn't sure how it was going to work itself out.
She waited in the hall area while Reno went into the bedroom, unsure
as to what exactly he was doing, and barely managed to wake herself
from her reverie in time to catch the garment he threw out the door
at her. It was a button-down shirt, most likely from one of his
uniforms. From inside the room came the twinkling sound of music,
light and foreign, and then she heard him speaking. Feeling out of
place, she sat down on the edge of the couch, holding the shirt in
her hands, and waited until he emerged again from the darkened room.
"Elena needs backup," he said. "You should get some sleep."
"You're injured," she said, startled. "You can't go anywhere, you
need to–"
"I'm fine," he told her, waving her quiet with his hand. "Had
worse."
"Rufus told us to stay here and rest," she said, jumping off the
edge of the couch to follow him to the other end of the room, where
he started to lace up his shoes again. "Are you always in the habit
of disobeying direct orders–"
"What do you know about orders?" he cut her off. He seemed angry.
"And what do you know about us or what we do?"
"I know enough about your method of avoiding things," she spat. "And
you can't avoid this, you can't avoid me by running out and getting
yourself hurt again."
"Watch me," he said, with a grim smirk. He bent over again, lacing
up the second shoe, and she knew she was rapidly running out of
time.
"You can't just leave me here whenever I'm not convenient to your
plans," she said. He righted himself and reached for his weapon,
lying on a small table near the door. She stuck her hand out as if
she could stop him from leaving, fingers grazing the creases in his
jacket. "Stop it, just– come here, let's just talk about this–"
"There's nothing to talk about," he snapped, swinging his rod in its
usual place against his shoulder. She wished a thousand times over
that she could take back her lack of responsiveness out on the dead
plains, wished that she hadn't been so exhausted from the battle,
wished that things had worked out differently, that her brain could
have caught up with the surroundings. She couldn't very well change
anything now, but she'd pushed him, and she had lost whatever
it was that had shimmered there between them– she reached out for
his arm again, catching a hold of the folds in his sleeve.
"Please," she begged. "Don't just leave me here, don't–"
"Ah, shove it," he said, yanking his arm away from her fingers.
"You'll be fine."
"Stop it!" she cried out, resisting the urge to stomp her feet. The
corners of her eyes were stinging, and she tried to convince herself
that it was the weariness of the day barreling down on her. "You
were the reason I came here, and now you're just going to
leave me alone, where nothing makes sense and everything is strange
and–"
"Well, maybe you shouldn't have come!" he shouted, whirling on her.
His outburst quelled her into silence, and she couldn't hear
anything other than the pounding of her heart against her ears. He
turned and left, slamming the door behind him, and his departure
made the chambers feel keenly empty. There was a long moment when
she tried desperately to get her feet to move, to run after him, but
she knew, somehow, that it would do little good. Every nerve was
aching, and there were hot tears on her cheeks, and she wondered how
she'd let everything get so far.
She thought of Cecil and Rosa, of Baron and the fields beyond it,
and the wave of homesickness washed over her before she knew what
was happening. She took a few stumbling steps backwards until her
heel hit the couch, and then she slumped down into it, crying into
her hands. She'd hadn't thought when she'd gone through the portal,
and now she was paying the price– she might never see her friends
again, the family she had grown to love, the home she'd come to make
in the castle. It was not the same as the loneliness on the Moon nor
the ache of Mist's loss, it was overpowering. It covered everything,
coating her thoughts, making every object in the foreign room she
was in that much more frightening.
For a long time, she sat there, trembling and crying as quietly as
possible, until her face was sticky and her head was throbbing. She
missed her friends so much she thought she would break– and, when it
was clear that she was going to have to take care of herself, she
finally stood and stripped off the jacket she'd tried to lose
earlier that day in the outskirts of town. She still had the
leggings from Elena that she'd woke up in, and she pulled them on
with Reno's shirt, and then, hugging her arms to her form, she laid
down on the couch, shivering.
All she could think about was her home– the smell of the flowers
that grew beyond Baron's moat, the sting of the sands in the Damcyan
desert, the melodic lutes they played at the court of Troia, and the
shimmering colors to Fabul's royal chambers. It hit her all at once,
blinding her, overtaking her vision, and she did not know when it
was that she finally drifted off to sleep, thoughts of Mist and her
mother and the Land all she could see.
--------
When she woke again, the room around her was dark. She shifted
slightly, surprised by the shift in time, and there was a blanket
covering her form. The cushions beneath her were sloping, indented
to her figure, and she pushed away hair that had gathered in the
corners of her mouth. Her eyes felt as they were full of sand, as
they always did when she cried herself to sleep, and she rubbed them
hoping to dislodge the itchy feeling.
After her eyes had adjusted enough to see what she was walking into,
she stood. She could barely make out the shadowy form of Reno's
weapon on the small table, and his shoes next to the door. She
didn't know how she'd slept through his arrival, for the chambers
were hardly big enough to avoid hearing someone's entrance, but it
hardly seemed to matter. The bedroom lights were off, shrouding the
entirety of it in inky blackness, but the door was open a crack, and
she crept towards it on the balls of her feet.
She could barely see the bed, and he didn't stir as she approached
the door, so she gently pushed it open enough to slip through. Her
thoughts were too muddled to make out what exactly she was doing,
but she was aching for the knowledge that she was not alone, that
someone else was there with her, and it seemed a logical move. She
was glad, at least, that he'd made it back unscathed– she'd been
avoiding thinking of what a failed mission in his work meant because
it was simply too much to wrap her head around, and the fear crept
into her heart like cold fingers.
She wondered if he was still angry at her.
Her feet made tiny creaking noises on the floor as she approached
the bed, and she hugged the shirt closer at the small chill in the
air from the spinning blades above her head. There was a long moment
that felt like an eternity where she just stood by the side of the
mattress, wrestling with herself, and finally she reached forward to
draw back the blankets.
It was only after she'd crawled into the bed, pulling the sheets up
close to her chin, that he shifted enough to notice her presence.
Her breath caught in her chest, constricting her throat, and she was
terrified that he would demand she leave. There was a second where
neither moved, and she thought perhaps he was making a decision, and
then he rolled over to throw his arm over her waist. His form was
warm behind her, warm and incredibly comforting, and she allowed
herself to snuggle into the embrace. If he would accept it as her
apology, she would do the same. Besides, it felt too good not to let
her eyelids flutter closed again, lulled to sleep with his breath
against the back of her neck.
She slept.
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