A/N: Now that I have named a fic after a song lyric (Bastille's 'Daniel in the Den'), I feel like I've gone through a rite of passage. Do I get a sticker?
"'...how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books,'" Setsuna reads aloud, "'And some of the children understood, and some did not.'"
"That's how I feel about music," says Marina. Setsuna looks across at her from his chair; she is clad in the purples she still loves, sipping tea from a cup that mismatches its saucer. "Everything I felt I had to say, all my hopes that the world could become a gentler place... I was never very good at politics, but when I sang, I felt I could ask people to listen, and that they would understand what I was trying to say." She sighs, and Setsuna wonders if it is age or sadness that has hunched her shoulders so over the years. "But some people never did."
"I understood," Setsuna tells her, closing the book. He would once have felt the need to grip it – anything – tight, but he doesn't feel that here, in this house. "Even back then."
She smiles at him. She can always tell where he is, even though she can't see him anymore. "I wish I could have sung more. Who knows how many people I could have reached?"
"Sing for me now. At the piano."
Marina chuckles, and though it now sounds much gruffer, Setsuna can still hear the soft girlish giggle that had once given away how young the regal Princess of Azadistan had truly been. "Finish your tea first."
A/N: I just really like the idea of them being retirement besties/partners/whatever they are.
The quotation Setsuna's reading is from 'The Book of Lost Thing' by John Connolly.