Author's Note: Written for the hetchallenge community on livejournal, for participant Gramse.
Disclaimer below.
Arcadia
I always thought it was you who wasn't ready.
Hitomi brushed her hair, still cropped as short as it had been back then, from her eyes and stared down at her high school's track. She'd graduated two years ago, but whenever she came back home from college in the city and went for a walk, she always ended up here - standing on the grassy hill, looking down at the track.
Sometimes there were current high school students there, achieving their goals and savoring their rivalries and playing out their small dramas in that all-consuming way that seemed so foreign to her now. It didn't seem right to call it immature, accurate as that was - nearly everyone went through that intensity of feeling and miscommunication and slow awakening from being so self-centered. Calling it immature somehow implied to her that it was bad, and it wasn't.
It was simply that she had already awakened, and could stand on the outside and look back at that adolescence. Just as she stood now on the hill looking at a place that had, for a few years, been her entire life.
And now it meant so little to her.
The only thread that bound her to this place was that it had been where she'd first met him.
There were no students on the track now - it was dusk, the lurid tones of sunset slowly fading away, the street lamps only just flickering to life. The summer light had a strangely warm glow to it, blues muting to mauves and white to peach. Cicadas filled the warm air with their trilling.
Hitomi turned and began to walk away, taking the shortcut through the woods that led to the temple up the hill. She liked to walk in these familiar places, but not out of the nostalgia that sometimes drove other former students to wander the area. To her, visiting these places were a kind of preparation.
When she'd left him, she'd thought it was because she simply wasn't ready. She'd only been sixteen, after all, and had missed her parents and her friends - and a heart so divided could only be put to rest with time.
She thought now that she might have been afraid, with that unreasonable fear of an immature mind. She'd merely been too young.
She didn't feel so young any longer. And youth aside, she never had doubted her heart, once she'd finally realized.
Most of the way up the steps to the temple, she stopped, gaze down and to one side. Her lips parted slightly as the wind brought her a scent that didn't seem to belong. The buzz of cicadas died away.
Hitomi smiled slightly, then turned and sat down on the steps, smoothing her straight skirt over her legs. She closed her eyes.
I always thought it was you who wasn't ready, but I was wrong.
Van stood at the window of his suite, watching the sun slip behind the mountains in a last dazzling wash of color. The low light turned his city to gold, and he smiled with pride. In only a few short years, the reconstruction was nearly complete.
The light gleamed in the red stone of the pendant around his neck, and it seemed to gleam with its own light, warm against his bare chest. He smiled softly - there had been so much to attend to, so much to take care of. His mind had been so full for so long that this quiet moment seemed somehow deafening.
A year ago, he'd finally convinced his advisors to cease their pressure for him to take a bride, after Celena Schezar had thrown a rather magnificent tantrum upon it being suggested that they wed. She'd been a favored candidate of his advisors, after the princess Eries had refused to participate in their scheme of betrothing Van behind his back. When the Lady Schezar's outburst had failed to jeopardize diplomatic relations between Fanelia and Asturia, the advisors had little excuse left to push for traditional marriage in the name of political alliance.
Though the elders despaired, to Van, their acquiescence was a great relief. He assured them that he would marry, when the time was right.
Alone, in darkness, he sometimes wondered when that time would be. If it would ever be. If he'd done the right thing, letting her go. If he'd made a mistake in never telling her, showing her exactly how he felt about her. If he'd been foolish to believe that she understood the all-encompassing depth of those feelings.
And then he would close his eyes, and feel the wind in his hair, and the touch of a hand in his. He saw her, sometimes, smiling and looking back and waiting.
He doubted the truth of his heart as he doubted everything - with the uncertainty of a boy pushed too quickly into adulthood. It took him a long time to realize that it was she who was now waiting for him.
I always thought it was you who wasn't ready, but I was wrong. It was both of us.
There was a story now, a fairy tale that had appeared and grown in popularity, about a lost girl become goddess and an winged boy become king, parted and pining for each other until a curse of their own devising was broken. Van only smiled and remembered the kind green eyes of the Girl from the Mystic Moon, and closed his eyes and dreamed of her. Hitomi only smiled and listened to her friend Yukari dramatically insist that she'd nothing to do with such a story, despite the fact that she'd written it down as Hitomi had related it to her.
The sun finally dipped below the horizon, warm twilight tones shifting cool and blue. The city cast in gold shifted to silver.
Van lifted his head, eyes closed, and breathed deeply. Draconian wings unfurled, spreading wide and white from his back, so bright that they seemed to glow with their own light. His smile widening, the king stepped from his window, out into the air.
Sitting on the steps, eyes closed, Hitomi breathed deeply. Her smile widening, she lifted her hand, and felt the soft caress of an errant feather on her fingers.
Both of us.
"Now?"
"Now."
His strong fingers closed around her delicate hand, and the queen of Fanelia stood and stepped forward and opened her eyes.
On the steps to the temple, white feathers drifted down before being swept away in the evening breeze, and the cicadas fell silent.
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