A/N: I'm all about AriaxPerry, but I couldn't help but notice how close Roar and Aria have gotten in the two books. Perry has noticed it, too, and even suspected something when they came back from Sable's, which is what inspired this. This takes place after Aria and Roar escape from Sable's place – a 'what-if.' I love this series and commend Rossi for her amazing writing.
Home
They drifted on the barge along the river, seated among the cargo of burlap sacks and other goods. Maverick, its leather-faced captain glanced at them both curiously through the trip, trying to sort out the mysterious silence and sad looks Aria gave her companion, a "Roar." The passage for two cost her the better of her blades. The barge was heavy with noisy passengers and the air dry. Though the watchful eyes on them were bothersome, most awkward was the silence of her partner. It would be a few more hours of discomfort to endure, followed by a few days on foot, before they would be home. Perry's home.
Home. Home was an elusive concept. Ephemeral as an Aether storm; above, it curled in brilliant blues, grays, and whites. It was no more real than the realms Paisley and she wasted away youth.
Aria's connections through her eye piece were not reachable. She tapped the clear flimsy device, nudged her head in various positions to no avail. Too much static interference from Aether brewing, grumbling thunderous clouds. She needed to speak to Soren immediately, but the boy whose company filled her with momentary dread and self-disgust was unavailable. Her old life was destroyed and her new one, now, was nearing its end. She could not afford to be more selective in allies or enemies. The Still Blue was everything that mattered now, or should. There was no minimizing the impact of Olivia's death.
For Roar the Still Blue was Olivia. His Liv.
Unarguably, the half-Aud, half-Mole girl failed them all. No Still Blue, no Liv, or any closer to retrieving the young prisoners her mother, Lumina, attained for experiments. Talon, Clara... but their disappearance from the Tides were as much as Vale's fault as Lumina's. Perry could not hate her for her mother's doings as he did his eldest sibling. Their return would change that.
The latter news of his sister's violent passing would be the most difficult to deliver. The thought weighed her down, heavier than the crates which creaked with the gentle swaying of the barge. Aria's head still reeled at the thought of having killed Roar as well in the act of saving him. But what did she save? Physically he lived, but his quiet, still presence next to her was more corpse-like than anything. His shallow breathing appeased her concerns.
She was returning to Perry after abandoning him with news of death and a shell of a person.
An hour passed where a second attempt of connecting to Soren failed, when Roar wrapped his arms around her. It was more for her than his sake. Aria took the invitation for the surreal closeness greedily, searching for his heart in the crowded barge. Her head brimmed with concerns, thoughts, pain, regrets, and other touches of emotions which flowed into him like waves, and she welcomed his into her to dissipate into oblivion.
Aloneness overcast Roar, a thick, stubborn fog where one could scarcely breath.
Aloneness was hers, too.
She understood loss, for her mother perished as sudden as Liv from Roar's life. But there were obvious distinctions. For starters, her mother's death came late and as a grim discovery. Liv, Perry's lovely sister was breathing, fighting, assimilating in her own strange way into her new future before Roar and she decided to seek her out, with the pretense of a rescue and search for the mythical Still Blue. They both knew Roar's heart was leading the pathway to the Scire. Liv had begrudgingly accepted the fate her older brother sold her out to, in favor of preserving the Tides for her family and friends left behind. Choosing duty over love to break Roar's heart even further, in a final moment she earned his forgiveness. Her bleeding body, dying, is what they left behind as a parting early wedding gift.
Perhaps Aria was to blame. It would be easy. Brooke, Liv's best friend, would find it credible, as would the rest of the Tides' inhabitants. They were all seeking and plotting her fallout anyhow. This would be the proof they need to justify their hatred. They not only lost the sister of their Blood Lord, but the other half of goods promised as a dowry. They would starve to death because of the stranger who seduced the young Blood Lord. The whore that she was - proven even more detrimental to their unity and survival. One had said it to her face, the rest thought it clearly. She lacked the ability of Roar to read thoughts by physical contact, and even then, they'd all cringe at her touch. They'd only seek to poison her. The mole and her eel-smooth, pasty skin should have never emerged from the dark crevices of her techie-bizarro world.
She should be left out to die in the open, where Aether would lick upon her form with all its unforgiving electric whip.
"You're soaked through but you're far from resembling any water creature," Roar's voice filled her head. His hand rubbed her knuckles gently. "No scales or mole-y texture."
Aria's gray eyes widened. "How much of that monologue did you catch?"
His dark hair shielded his eyes as his head drooped between his knees. He released her hand and hugged his arms around his legs loosely. "It was all my doing. Nothing you could have said would change the situation. If anything, you're the reason why I still live."
Aria leaned on him, feeling for a tanned brown wrist. "It's okay for them to hate me. I hated Perry at first as you know. Consider this my karmic debt."
"Don't be stupid, Aria. Perry would smell your lie miles away. And it goes without saying that you are a terrible liar. The worst imaginable. Your eyes get all moon-sized and you stiffen up like a bamboo stick." She sniffled in between a forced laugh. It was ludicrous but correct. "Olivia was mine and I've killed her, alone. It's my truth to carry back to her brother and my best friend."
"I could have stopped us," she whispered.
"No."
Perhaps it was weakness in a moment of mutual grievance. She felt for him, and he for her. It wasn't an assumed or imagined commiseration. Their skins touched as close, old friends, sharing memories in vivid flashes, all enhanced with the most transcendent sounds. It was an intimacy they'd never share with the Scires they loved.
An in a brief moment of forgetfulness, she envisioned their lips meeting.
Perry has once mentioned they'd be perfect for each other–two strong Auds whose union would strengthen their ability in their offspring. She was only half an Aud, but it was all he saw of her then in the consideration. The other half was no better in matchmaking, no favoring the blond boy with the crooked nose, feline eyes, and motley scarring.
Roar was no disappointing runner-up prize. His dark good looks and infinite charms could make any girl in Reverie swoon. He was the kind of fantasy only existing in one of the realms, a swashbuckler piracy dream.
One she could touch, whose presence she'd experience without a Smarteye.
And the kiss was so terribly, terribly… terrible.
He was right. She was a bad liar.
It was champ.
Roar flinched from her grasp.
Silence between them was loud and gritting. Every ripple in the water screamed out, breezes seemed to howl and pierce her eardrums, dialogue which previously clamored about muted upon speakers' lips, and her head rang and she waited for something, but only nothing followed in the time that went on seemingly forever.
His eyes met hers in a wary side-glance. A hand rose to her cheek, and asked something.
She closed her eyes. "Yes."
If her eyepiece worked, Aria would be home. A new realm where parts of her new and old life remained displaced and disconnected in a mosaic; nearly meeting but permanently cemented apart. They would never touch.
A fragmented reflection of her.
Home there was a crude carving of a wild diurnal bird, an immaculate box where human history lived in a mishmash museum and prospered outside of Reverie in the world of the savages she now ran with. Home was mother with her secrets. It was the Opera House where she sang "Arctic Kitten" and followed with "Angel of Music."
Home was in the arms of a half-Scire, half-Seer, young boy with snarled locks of pale yellow hair and green nocturnal eyes. The one who'd soon hate them for losing Olivia, the Still Blue, Talon, and anything else gone wrong since she'd stepped outside the Pods.
Home felt like a stolen kiss.
Upon arriving ashore, Maverick said she could do better than the sullen Roar fella.
She couldn't, Aria assured.
The one exception she lost long before. She could never win against genetics, no matter how perfectly assorted and recombined genes she possessed. Her mother had picked traits like children out here picked flowers. Like roses, like violets. Her faceless father gifted her with survival instead of love. If she was born to thrive in both worlds, then why did she feel like a caged songbird on either side? Where was her place... where was home?
Roar reached for her hand, intertwining his fingers in hers.
It was time to be grateful for what she had.
"Ready?" he asked.
She mentally replied in the negative, then a shaky affirmative, and finally a defeated hazy indecision.
There was only one certainty in mind.
Home was this.