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She sat
in the chair, tapping her foot idly against the floor and
deliberately ignoring the gleaming green orbs on the desk in front
of her.
"You stay here while I'm gone," he'd said; "This won't take long.
Here, amuse yourself." He'd snapped the orbs from his rod casually
and tossed them into the uneven sea of paper on his desk. One had
rolled onto the floor, three underneath the wicker contraption
labeled "Inbox", and one was resting on top of an empty notebook.
She could feel the orb. It was staring at her. Mocking her.
Rydia huffed and turned the chair around. She wasn't going to
touch them. Reno wasn't her boss, and even if she was scarily
dependent on him in this new world, he didn't get to tell her
what to do. She wasn't a kitten, to sit in his office playing with
bits of gleaming glass while waiting for him to return.
The other side of the office was boring, however - a coffee-stained
couch with a lopsided photo above it of a waterfall - and Rydia
sighed aloud in boredom as she spun the chair back around to face
the messy desk again.
She wondered what they were.
It wouldn't hurt, she thought, to take one and see what it did. If
they were just marbles, she could throw them at Reno when he came
back. Maybe they did something special. She remembered the gift Yang
and Yingyi had given her at their coronation, a pair of smooth round
stones that rolled around the palm and created a soothing chiming
sound, a specialty from Fabul. She had to swallow hard at the
homesickness that the simple memory had produced in the back of her
throat.
To distract herself more than anything - she'd been crying enough,
these days - Rydia reached forward and grabbed the shining green
marble.
It was cool to the touch, but even as she looked down on it in her
palm, it warmed up, radiating heat back into her skin. It had
started to glow, and something inside the stone was swirling around,
like mist, or almost like water. The stone was thoroughly warm now,
and it was tingling in her palm.
And suddenly Rydia felt something else tingling, in the back of her
head, and it was like a switch going off - that small portion of her
spirit she'd had to abandon as a young child in the Land of Summons,
making a dangerous choice...
She closed her hand around the strange stone, willing it into life -
willing it to be - and she felt the Curaga pour from inside her,
washing over her arms and legs, warm and tingling. The scent of the
healing magic reminded her of Rosa more than anything, and Asura;
Rydia bent her head over the stone, clutching it even tighter,
casting Curaga over and over and over, trying to let the calm, warm
feeling of the magic stay her tears, hoping the healing rish could
help soothe the tight pain in her heart.
"I see you figured it out."
She turned around, and Reno was standing there, smirking at the
sight of her; she must look a fool, with specks of magical residue
still in her hair and sparkling around her, clutching the small orb
to her heart as if it were her lifeline. But that really didn't
matter at the moment.
"I can heal," she said, but even as she said it she knew he
would never understand. How could she explain to him - to an
assassin, to a killer - how could she explain how much she'd ached
over their travels for the simple ability to stay a wound? How she'd
felt like such a trained weapon during the war? How, only after it
had been done, she'd realized what giving up her white magic
meant?
But she blinked, and realized Reno might understand, in the
end. After all, he was a weapon too. And this - this magical orb -
it was his.
She clutched the bead tighter in her hand, resolving to keep it near
her if she could, and as she threw herself at Reno and pressed her
lips to his, she cast Curaga, again and again.
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