Bedside manner:
Summary: I'll watch over and protect her, and I'll wait for her to realize that it's more than friendship that keeps me at her bedside. (Vayne Aurelius x Jessica Philomele) (SPOILERS FOR THE END OF THE GAME!)
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A/N: Sorry it's so short.
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Sometimes she'll look at me with concern, and tell me my talents are being wasted. That I should be out in the world, becoming a famous, respected alchemist like my father. I always tell her that fame, money, and respect would mean nothing if I let her die. She'll roll her eyes and sigh, calling me a dummy.
On better days, she'll whine like a child with a cold who wants nothing more than to play outside with her friends. I try to bring the outdoors to her. Flowers on her windowsill, stories of hiking around searching for ingredients, descriptions of animals I see outside. Sometimes she'll pester me into letting her perform a synthesis or two. I'll give in, but closely monitor her work. She'll roll her eyes and sigh, calling me a killjoy.
Some days she'll fall into a silence, looking at pictures from the academy. She misses those days. She misses the group of friends that always surrounded her. They come to visit, when they can. I can tell it just isn't enough for her. She wants to visit those friends herself, go out and make more friends. I tell her we'll find a way. She'll grin and tell me how happy she is to be living with a fellow optimist.
I know she's lonely. I know she dreams of things she knows she can't have, at least not now.
I once, twice, three times asked her to marry me, and I intend to ask her again soon. She thinks it's pity, no matter what I do or say to prove otherwise. She calls me an idiot.
"Don't you know we'd never have a normal marriage?" She asks me. She argues that she can't have children, I tell her we'll adopt. She informs me that, with her being so bedridden, we couldn't have a normal ceremony. I tell her we'll have a wonderful ceremony, regardless.
She screams at me to stop tying myself to her bedside. Tells me that even if she did say yes, I'd someday meet a woman I really did love, and regret marrying her. I tell her she's the only one for me.
She sobs into her hand, saying I wouldn't be happy. I tell her I'd be the happiest man in the world, and if she doesn't return my feelings, she should just tell me. She doesn't say a word. I pull her into an embrace, running my fingers through her hair and rubbing her back as she sobs words I can't even decipher anymore.
I tell her I love her each night before I go to sleep. She'll usually smile and say she loves me too. She really doesn't believe that I'm in love with her. Not yet.
So, I'll wait. I'll watch over and protect her, and I'll wait for her to realize that it's more than friendship that keeps me at her bedside. I'll wait for the day she'll finally answer my proposal with a yes. I don't care how long it takes. Who knows, maybe with time she'll realize how determined I am to stay by her side.
Until then, I'll keep trying. I'll save her life, and hopefully, someday, become a much bigger part of it.
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A/N: About Jess not being able to have children... Her illness seems to make her body very weak. Certainly too weak to handle childbirth. This one-shot was born out of my attempts to see something romantic in Jess' ending. I deduced that the two were living together, at the very least. It really annoyed me that Nikki's ending has her married to Vayne with like, TWELVE KIDS, while you see almost no obvious romance in Jess' ending. (Of course, I looked at it through my shipper shades, so I saw a certain tenderness in their interactions.)