Title: Innocent Edge
Prompt: Lloyd/Colette - "I'm not a hero."
Word Count: 760
Warnings: Spoilers abound. Best to wait until you finish the game.
A second prompt complete for the LJ community tales-ficathon.
x x x
The Tower of Salvation was heavy in the distance, a thin line of white against the reds and golds of twilight. The view from Hima was as stunning as Kratos had mumbled it was- something he'd never thought he'd see in his entire life.
Tomorrow we'll see what's inside. For some reason, the thought both excited and terrified him. The excitement he understood; after all, it wasn't everyone who got to see the entire Regeneration. The gnawing fear he wasn't too sure about. It was the kind of twisting in his stomach he got right before a battle he wasn't sure he could win.
Colette appeared up the road behind him, not the noiseless way in which she moved but the cloud of dust her wings disturbed notifying him of her presence. He turned his head towards her, motioning with his chin to a spot to the right of him before he sat, his legs dangling over the side of the cliff.
She sat neatly and folded her hands in her lap. It made his chest ache to see her so- so- so something. Quiet? Defeated? No, but there was something distinctly Colette missing from her.
He held out his hand as he might offer food to Genis, not looking in her direction. She took it and pressed a finger gently to his palm. The gentle pressure almost brought tears to his eyes, but there was some kind of desperation to the way she wrote that brought his attention forward.
are you scared, she said, eventually.
"A little," he said. "I don't know what's going to happen, and people like me like to know what's going on, right?"
what kind of people, she wrote.
The question threw him off a little bit. "Um, people whose minds have only one lane?" Raine had said that to him once when he had answered that Martel was the inventor of the sword hilt, and it had taken him a while to understand what she had meant.
a hero, she wrote. He wasn't sure if it was a question, so he waited for something else. someone who will regenerate the world.
She squeezed his hand as she wrote the last word and he felt the pressure through his exsphere. Something electric spread from his hand through his arm to his heart and he had a good feeling what it was.
Nevertheless, he shook his head and wrapped his fingers with hers, holding her small hand as gently as he could. "I'm not a hero, Colette," he said. "You're the one who'll save us all."
The Tower of Salvation was heavy in the distance, a line cutting the sky in half; she would have laughed bitterly if her voice was still hers, and instead could only weep at the irony of it all.
x x x
She had never really thought about Lloyd's height until now, but there weren't enough comfortable places to sleep in Dirk's house and someone had suggested the two of them share Lloyd's old bed. His feet hung over the edge, while her outstretched toes met his calves.
It was odd, really. The bed was obviously built for one- and one a lot smaller than Lloyd. But was it really necessary for him to have his arms around her like that? Was it strange for her to feel an odd sort of happiness in his embrace?
She tilted her chin up and found his ruddy eyes trained on nothing, an invisible object across the room. "Gonna go to Derris-Kharlan tomorrow," he said, more to the room than to her.
"Are you-" she inhaled, realizing she had walked this way long ago. "Are you scared?"
"A little," he said rather slowly, understanding her need for pause. "A lot, actually. Which is strange, because this time I know I'm heading straight into a fight, and you'd think knowing what was going to happen would make me feel a little bit better."
It was the Zelos in him to joke when under pressure. There was a little bit of everyone in all of them.
"A hero," she said anyways, placing her head underneath his, an ear to his throat. "You're going to save the world this time. Not me."
"I'm not a hero, Colette," he said. "Not alone. We're all in this together."
She would have laughed if she could, but instead found happiness gathering in the corners of her eyes.
x x x