Of all the things to expect, four months after the Dawn, a late night call from Gladiolus Amicitia was not something Ravus would have chose.
He considered not picking up, just to be petty: he only was awake to hear the call because he was in his study, trying in vain to stem the deluge of reports, petitions, requests and rebuilding plans, and the time of it quite beyond the bounds of politeness.
He reminded himself that kings couldn't afford even the sort of bitter freedom being an Imperial attack dog came with, and that Tenebrae needed a good relationship with Insomnia, now and in the future. He picked up the call.
"Ravus," Amicitia said, in a tone of a man on the end of his already limited tether. That didn't tell Ravus much, as all their interactions in the last decade went roughly in the same vein, but the hour of the call was worrying. "I need a favor."
Ravus gritted his teeth and decided not to spend his valuable governing time on putting Amicitia in his place. "What flavor? Why?"
"You need," Amicitia began, then audibly swallowed and reined himself in. "I mean. I will give you anything you want if you offer Ignis a job in your government and get him to take it."
Well, that was - unexpected. "I beg your pardon."
"Get him to go to Tenebrae. Get him out of Insomnia."
Ravus squeezed the bridge of his nose, hoping for the touch of cool metal to bring some clarity; it didn't. "Last I heard about Scientia," - after the funeral, he didn't say, because there was rude and then there was crass - "he was knee-deep in planning the rebuilding efforts. If I recall, journalists kept trying to get him for an interview and couldn't because he was being fought over by several committees at once."
"Yeah." Amicitia sounded too exhausted for his usual bluster, all at once. "He's working his ass off rebuilding Insomnia because he doesn't know how not to, and he's working himself to death. Just, Ravus. It's obscene. There's no Crown for him to kill himself for anymore, but he's trying."
"Why call me? Since when am I his keeper? Get him to retire. Exile him to the country. Buy him a damn restaurant to run."
"Ravus," Amicitia said. "No. He's organizing rebuilding because it's so big he's compelled to, because he knows how to do it. A force of habit, you know? Take it away from him, he'll go and - he'll - you know."
He did know, that's the thing. He was in Altissia, on that altar; he knew what Scientia had burned with, then and every time they crossed their paths after, during those years of darkness. But every fire would die, sooner or later.
"I know," he said, softer than he'd intended. "I - you do have my condolences for your loss."
Private ones; he sent an ambassador to Insomnia for the state funeral, with his public and politically appropriate sympathy, but couldn't make himself go. Not with Luna unburied, swept into the deep waters.
"Thank you," Amicitia said. "I know it's fucking weird. I know we're not exactly buddies. But you can give him a job that's big enough he won't refuse, and it won't be so - so personal, and maybe it will help, I don't know. He likes you, at least. I just can't - I can't fucking watch - "
"Neither of you are dealing very well, are you?"
"Yeah, well, I'm a Shield without a King; it's about as low as you can go in one lifetime." And Ravus is not that good at diplomacy, but even he can parse the concession and the boundary at once, Amicitia's public grief but not his private one, and appreciate it. "But I've got my sister, and I've got my family, and I can - I can figure out how to be something else, now. Iggy, though..."
Ignis, though. Indeed.
He didn't want a charity project. He didn't want to deal with Noctis' careless leftovers. He didn't want to do Amicitia's bidding. He didn't want to have anything to do with their shared history, the weight and dirt of it. He opened his mouth to refuse.
(Luna would have been so disappointed.)
"I'll call him," he said instead.
Despite the years of double-crossing Empire, Ravus had never been that good at subterfuge, so in the end he managed to suborn Scientia with the truth: they were desperately in need of help. Refugees and survivors were still flocking back to Tenebrae, along with Imperial stragglers who had nowhere else to go, and the logistics of accommodating them all - legal, financial, ethical, structural - were staggering. Most of the old councillors did not survive the years of struggle, and his new cabinet were trying their best, but were hopelessly overwhelmed.
He was never meant to rule; he was reminded of it every time he tried to make sense of their budget. Luna had been meant to. Luna had gotten the training. Luna had been going to sit on their silver throne with her eventual consort, a benevolent Queen, an Oracle, a shining star of their line.
He'd always been meant for the military; or, he supposed, if they'd had peace and he'd wanted to get a rebellion on, he could have run away to become a poet. An artist, peddling his tortured soul in Accordo. A vintner. A gardener.
That was beyond the point. He was what he was, and grudgingly ordering magitek soldiers around to subjugate your neighbor states did not, in any way, prepare you to restore the country's farmlands, for example.
When he called and put his request on the table, Scientia put up a token protest, but even over the phone, Ravus could hear the resignation in his voice, the lack of real purpose. A beast of burden, he thought, that's what Noctis' fiery chamberlain was reduced to. Why not change the yoke? What difference did it make for him now? They reached an agreement, and Ravus made the arrangements.
He fielded at least ten calls from various Lucian officials howling in outrage over his poaching, and vengefully sicced them all on Amicitia. He talked to Scientia about what he would need and procured the paraphernalia necessary for a blind man's work; he found Scientia a secretary, one of Mother's cronies' granddaughters, a quiet and sharply intelligent young woman who would be able to keep up with Scientia's wits and workaholic habits. He waited.
He found himself looking forward to it, even. His people had accepted him back, and he had earned their loyalty through the eternal night, keeping the remains of the kingdom alive and its lights burning. Still, if they loved him, he didn't know the language of that love, and if he loved them in turn - if he would bleed and kill to keep them safe, those under his hand - he didn't know how to express it, either. His sister's shadow fell ahead of him on the stones of manor floors, on the ash of their burned gardens, on the faces of his retainers and courtiers and ministers, and if he knew how to expel it, he wouldn't want to.
He never wanted that rebellion. He wanted to kneel before her throne and swear fealty to her, carry out her mercy and slay her enemies. And yet, here he was.
Scientia, he thought, would at least understand that.
When Highwind's dropship finally delivered its cargo, he met it at the manor's courtyard and came up to welcome the lean figure standing in the shadow of the ship's hatch.
After all that fuss he expected Scientia to look - unkempt. Wild, maybe, like Fulgarian's hermits, with their shaggy hair and their disarrayed clothes, their twitching fingers. But Scientia, walking unerringly towards him to make his bow, looked as pristinely immaculate as always: clothes sharp, hair carefully arranged, movements fluid and precise. Gaunt, maybe, but they all were now, after the years of rationed food and frozen fields.
Then he saw Scientia's face, and faltered for just a moment, and knew that Amicitia was right. He had known Scientia at his lowest, had fought him and with him, had witnessed the fire of his desperation. But the man standing in front of him was like an abandoned building waiting for a demolition crew.
Ravus thought he was, maybe, in over his head. On the plus side, he couldn't remember the last time he wasn't.
"Scientia," he said, and took the offered hand. "Welcome to Tenebrae."
Scientia inclined his head, polite, subservient; his visor hid his eyes. "The pleasure's mine. If I could be shown to my quarters I can get ready to begin work in two hours."
Like that. Ravus thought: ah well. Look, sister: here I am. If I'll clean up your careless boy's wreckage, will you be glad? Will you forgive me; will you forgive me; will you forgive me.
"Gladly," he said out loud and turned to lead his new advisor home.
He expected Scientia to work like a man possessed, burning himself with long hours and willful exhaustion. The reality was quieter, duller, more unsettling: Scientia worked from dawn to dusk without raising his head, with the brisk, even efficiency of a threshing machine, no pleasure in his successes or disappointment in his failures.
Ravus' council members tried to get him at first, angry at being superseded by a foreigner and ranging their attacks from honeyed, underhanded jabs to the old (and therefore impervious to diplomacy or good manners) Count Fulvis cornering him in the hallway after one of the meetings on the resource relocation with loud, angry accusations.
Ravus was ready to step in, either to shield Scientia from the meddling (he idly imagined the annoying Amicitia getting a whiff of the proceedings and calling to berate him, which was untenable), or to rescue his governing body from the sharp side of Scientia's tongue. Neither turned out be needed.
Scientia's response to his opponents was simply dull, flat; he repeated his points in the same quiet voice, barely bothering to lift his blind gaze, and the sheer heavy passionless of it rolled over their anger and disdain and smothered it. It wasn't clever politics or excess humility; even his lack of care was, in itself, unremarkable, smooth and polished like a stone.
There was no sport in needling him. Eventually, everybody stopped bothering.
It helped that he did know what he was about: their rebuilding efforts were finally taking shape. Scientia's colorless reports, carefully typed up by Octavia, shaped the Tenebrae for Ravus in the ways he couldn't grasp before, in the streams of numbers and checks and balances: income, expenditures, births and deaths, the ever-present threat of starvation, the carefully arranged regrowth. Trade deals: the other countries' demands, expectations, exhortations, made transparent and clear.
He could see the shadow of Scientia's training behind those reports, the immense structure of information crammed into his head - the training that had probably begun far before he hit puberty - and couldn't help but wonder at the waste of creating a perfect advisor for a king destined to be nothing but a blood price.
If Scientia was bitter about sharing the fruits of his labors meant for his beloved prince with a Tenebraean spare, an afterthought king, none of it passed the bland emptiness of his face. He haunted Ravus' study like a ghost too polite to ask for an exorcism, and Ravus was thankful, and Ravus battled, daily, the urge to call Amicitia and tell him the favor was rescinded.
He could understand the extravagance of Scientia's grief and thwarted loyalty; he wasn't a hypocrite enough not to, when it looked out at him from his mirror every morning. But he would have expected Scientia, with his precise efficiency, to be more proactive about it. To rage and try to avenge himself on the uncaring Six, maybe; to martyr himself in humanitarian efforts, trying to reach atonement; and if all else failed, post-Dawn Eos offered just as many opportunities for death, intentional or accidental, as it had ever done in the darkness.
Why wouldn't Scientia pick any of those options, if he wasn't trying to rebuild himself back to life either? The relentless automation of his days made Ravus feel guilty for his own stilted attempts at living. And then, of course, angry; but even his ever-reliant anger couldn't find purchase.
Scientia's bare presence seemed to leech the color from the air; they circled each other in that gray silence, and if something had to give, sooner or later, Ravus suspected it would be his sanity, first.
On the anniversary of Luna's death, it rained, as it always did. He imagined sometimes it was the Hydraean's apology, and that thought always set his teeth on edge. Gods or kings or messengers, friends or bridegrooms or brothers - who didn't let her down, in the end? Who deserved to mourn?
He had not held a funeral for her, back then; by the time he had recovered from Ardyn's attack and crawled back to Tenebrae, the country had been burning under the heavy lash of the Empire's revenge. Noctis and his entourage had made their way into Gralea while Ravus had gathered the remainder of his people and fought his own war.
He had fully expected to die with them, and embraced the relief of a clean last stand. But the Empire had devoured itself, Noctis delivering the last blow before entering the Crystal, and Ravus had found himself a survivor, crowned by survivors, sentenced to live.
The next year, and the next year, and the year after that; no public ceremony seemed grand enough for her, and nobody felt close enough to share in his private mourning.
People of the Tenebrae burned candles for her. He spied private house altars with her crude portraits in the servant quarters, hastily hidden at his approach. The more daring courtiers proposed a toast in her memory here, a eulogy there, and he raged inwardly - he made himself not object, made himself avert his gaze - tried to make himself give his blessings, to light his own candles, to share his own memories - and failed every time.
No body to inter next to their parents. Even his last memory of her was ephemeral, a ghost floating above the roaring water. His silver sister, the girl who ran, laughing, among the flowers - Ravus, Ravus, look - subsumed by her destiny, ravaged by pain and longing, implacable in all the ways he never was, lost, lost.
He didn't want to drink or rage or remember, this year; he found himself looking forward to working with Scientia instead, to the bitter colorlessness of their shared duty: what could be better tribute?
But instead, when he arrived to his study, he was greeted by nervous Octavia and the news that Scientia was "indisposed," and sending his apologies. He gaped at her in an entirely un-royal fashion. Indisposed? He was pretty sure Scientia's death wouldn't stop him from showing up to work, for years to come.
He stormed to Scientia's rooms, scattering servants and courtiers in his wake, and promising himself that if this were the day where Scientia chose to become aware of the world around him and try to express some tact, some sentiment in sparing Ravus his presence, that would be it - he'd send him home packing, and damn Amicitia to all six hells and beyond.
The doors provided no resistance, slamming open with a satisfying bang; the rooms beyond it were silent and dark. He was halfway through the empty salon when he heard it - a low, ragged moan coming from the bedroom, an animal sound of agony bitten off by tightly clenched human teeth. The hair on the back of his neck rose.
He cleared the room in two strides and slammed into the bedroom, kept dark by the heavy ornate curtains. Scientia was on the bed - Scientia was half-naked on the bed, head thrown back, ungloved hands twisted tightly in the sheets, the tendons of his neck standing out in stark relief. The line of his body imprinted in Ravus' mind, a stark graphite study: the darkness, the shadow, and the light.
The light: Scientia's body was covered in scars, thick broken branches of them crawling up from his hand towards his heart, hugging the column of his throat. The scars that were burning, spilling jagged purple light as if Scientia's body was nothing but a clay vessel filled with it, a collection of fractures waiting to shatter.
Ravus closed his eyes; the web of light shone on the inside of his eyelids.
Scientia groaned again, and Ravus's nostrils filled with the memory stench of his burning arm. His heart lurched in his chest, his body torn between an impulse to step back - to run - and to touch that light, filled with longing.
He bit his lip until he tasted blood and took possession of himself, cell by agonized cell. The Ring could not save his sister; it would hold no power over him now.
The Ring had not saved Scientia's master either. He seized the horrible, wild pity the thought raised in him and went to lean over Scientia's bed under his own will.
Scientia didn't even notice him until Ravus had laid his hand against his burning cheek, and even then he didn't startle or try to defend himself. His remaining eye was clenched tightly shut; more sounds spilled from him, as if Ravus' touch had pushed them out.
"Every year?" Ravus asked, quietly. "Does anybody know?"
"Yes," Scientia said, a long helpless exhale, and the burns pulsed in a gathering wave; he convulsed again. "Nobody... knows."
His left hand crept up in short, jittery movements, clutched at Ravus'; he imagined the cool metal of it being a relief that Scientia's body wanted almost of its own volition.
"Please leave," Scientia said, "it's not... It always passes, tomorrow... Tomorrow..."
Tomorrow I'll be fine, Ravus mentally filled in for him; tomorrow the legacy of the Kings' ire would fade, leaving nothing behind; the cracks would mend into their proper form. Tomorrow Scientia would be in the study, bent silently over his papers, tomorrow and the day after that and all the days thereof.
"Tomorrow," he said out loud, "we shall not speak about it."
He crawled into the bed, heedless of the soles of his boots catching and tearing the precious linen, and leaned against the headboard. He gathered Scientia to him, as careful as he knew how - without the protective armor of his clothes he was all sharp angles, fragile bones - and held him to his chest.
Scientia's resistance was short-lived; his scars shone brighter again, wrenching another moan out of him, and in the wake of it he leaned against Ravus, too exhausted to control his body.
"I have a right to this," Ravus said into his hair; his own voice sounded strange to his ears. "It burned me too."
Scientia was weeping, silently, open-mouthed; his tears burned Ravus' chest through the thin cloth of his shirt.
"Just today," Ravus said. The light shone through his clenched fingers. "In my house, under my hand, you don't have to be alone with this."
If she could, he thought, Luna would have held him like this after the Ring had taken his arm; if she could she would've sat with him, and told him to cry and scream, and put her cool palm over his aching eyes. If they'd had time. If they'd had a chance.
He held Scientia instead, through hours and hours of agony, silent and motionless, and if his face was wet, nobody was there to see it.
True to Ravus' promise they didn't talk about it the next day. Ravus left quietly in the evening when the light had faded and Scientia fell into exhausted sleep, to spend the night tossing and turning in his cold bed.
(It was a shock to realize just how long it'd been since he'd touched another person, or been touched.)
In the morning Scientia appeared in his study, pale but composed, nodded at Ravus, and got to work. Their usual routine consumed them quickly - reports, meetings, relocations - except for Scientia being even quieter than usual, and Ravus catching himself staring at him from time to time, imagining the outline of now-dormant scars under his clothes, the touch of his ungloved fingers.
Months passed slowly. Nothing changed, and yet something did: one day Scientia snapped at Lord Fulvis after yet another tirade about encroaching foreigners, stunning the old fossil into enraged astonishment. Another, smiled at his secretary as he thanked her for the information on grain yield she prepared, causing poor Octavia to blush and stammer and almost drop her cup of coffee. One evening, Ravus caught him in the manor kitchens, trailing his long gloved fingers over the cook's spatulas, and cravenly went away before the man could spot him. One of Scientia's immaculate proposals even had a pun in it, so atrocious that Ravus needed a couple of minutes to compose himself.
He didn't trust it, this slow thaw; didn't trust himself in how much he wanted it. Not just for charity's sake, not just for Luna's imaginary approval, but for the phantom memory of Scientia's shaking shoulders under his fingers, fever-hot and brittle and alive. For how lonely he found himself, once he saw himself in the mirror of Scientia's plodding existence: better off on the surface, but not so different, underneath.
Amicitia had called several times, not quite demanding reports, and Ravus, instead of snapping, told him what he could: that Scientia was still living, sleeping less than he should be but in sustainable amounts, and grazing his way through a complete rehaul of the country's immigration process. He even shared the pun, out of a weird mix of pity and pride, and could've sworn the other man had teared up on the other side of the phone.
Was it enough? He didn't know. They circled each other, polite and respectful, and anything else Ravus could've offered died behind his teeth.
Autumn swept the summer away. Ravus got used to the sight of the wheat fields, ripe with the harvest, where Luna's sylleblossoms grew once.
He learned to smile at his servants (nobody seemed worth the effort before, with Maria retired to the country), and as awkward as it felt to his lips, their answering smiles seemed sincere. He got a standing invitation to a weekly game of chess with his minister of finances.
The court started making noises about balls and receptions and festival celebrations, and while he couldn't quite bring himself to care, he stopped feeling the automatic repulsion at the thought.
Scientia's notes slowly morphed from tutoring to proposals, to the exchange of ideas, and the weight of the country on his shoulders stopped crushing him, day by day.
And yet Ravus felt uneasy, breathless; something was brewing in the air, a suffocating tension, a premonition of disaster. He waited, silent, until one night he woke from a dream he couldn't remember (flashes of Luna's pale face, rain washing the dark stones), and something drove him out of the bed, made him go to the rooftop of the manor, to the stone walkway under the flagstones.
He could feel the air thicken as he ascended the spiral stairway, a tang of ozone in the back of his throat. The first lighting hit just as he cleared the doorway.
He stopped dead in his tracks. The afterimage burned on his eyelids in the darkness right after the strike: Scientia, standing on the thin stone parapet, his back to Ravus, rocking a bit on his toes with an unconscious grace of an old gymnast.
Ravus mouth went dry, sticky with horror. He cleared it, made himself take two deliberately heavy steps. "Scientia," he said, quietly, and breathed out when his voice didn't startle the man into plummeting down. "Do you really have to kill himself in my house?"
Scientia didn't answer; he pivoted on his toes, took several sure, light steps along the parapet. The stones under Scientia's feet were narrow and uneven, washed slick by falling water, and yet he walked over them like they were a paved road.
Ravus' heart beat in his throat, heavy; the rain bombarded them both with unrelenting intent.
"I'm doing nothing of the sort, as you can see," Scientia said, conversationally, reaching the end of the wall; he pivoted again and started walking in another direction. "My apologies for your concern."
"I dislike being made a fool," Ravus said; each word felt heavy and alien in his mouth. "What are you doing here then? Trying to gather your nerve for it?"
His words arrested Scientia in motion - he stopped across from Ravus, jaw tense, shoulders straight, heels in the air over the edge of the wall. His hair, beaten down by water in an uncomfortably familiar way, obscured his left eye; Ravus stared at the scar and waited. He felt as if he had never woke up; as if, if he were to lunge across the distance separating them now, the air would hold him fast as Scientia fell.
"The nerve?" Scientia said, and laughed, a dry, harsh sound. "You think I lack the nerve to fall?"
"I wondered," Ravus said. "Could not have been for the lack of opportunity. Or desire."
"Ah," Scientia said, "you understand, of course. It would be so easy, wouldn't it? If I could - if I could allow myself - "
"Did Noctis forbid you?"
He had thought about it. The king who had returned to die; the boy who had grown up to die; he had to have known. What had he said to Scientia, in that last, darkest night before the Dawn?
"No," Scientia whispered; Ravus saw the word more than he heard it, over the punishing force of the falling water. "No. He didn't have to. What would give me the right?"
"Surely," Ravus said, just a shade too sharply, "he couldn't fault your service."
Scientia made a violent negating motion, throwing his arms wide; it rocked him, but he righted himself before Ravus could move.
"No," Scientia said. "No. You don't understand. I knew."
What, Ravus wanted to shout, but at that moment he already knew, and he felt a great, exhausted surge of pity raise in him.
"I knew," Scientia said again, "I knew even before he went into Crystal, and I never told him - I tried, I tried, I offered everything, I would have - I would have paid anything, and it was all useless - and I let him - and I let him..."
"Scientia," Ravus said, gently, and his legs finally obeyed him; he took a step forward, and then another. "Ignis. Do you think it would have helped? Do you think you could have made a difference?"
The lighting strikes came faster now, one over another; he moved between their flashes until he stood almost flush to the parapet, Scientia towering over him. He could reach out and touch him.
"Do you think it mattered? My sister knew her fate, and I begged her, I pleaded, I sold my pride and my country and my arm and I would've sold my soul if I could find a buyer, and Ignis - you were there - do you still think it would have mattered?"
Scientia's lowered his head, his arms; he was still poised on the edge, in control, but his entire body was shuddering in tiny uncontrollable tremors. Like a beast of burden, Ravus thought again, beaten into submission; in a minute I could take his hand and tug down, and bring him inside, and dry him off, and tomorrow morning he'll show up for work again. Maybe in five years, he'll learn to pretend better, for other people's sake. Maybe in ten, he'll let somebody touch him. I learned, did I not?
Exhaustion gripped him, sang in his bones; he couldn't bear his own thoughts, this dutiful future unfolding.
He took Ignis' narrow wrist with his metal fingers - felt the minute shift of Ignis' muscles that meant he was going to step down, his lack of resistance - and then he lunged forward and pushed.
Ignis screamed as he went over the edge; a sharp short sound that felt like it was punched out of his lungs, like it had nothing to do the man himself whatsoever: the body, of course, resented death even when the mind craved it.
Ravus grunted, folding over the wall, holding onto the slick stones with all his might; he felt the grind of Ignis' wrist bones under the metal of his arm, the wrench of his straining muscles, the clear fresh smell of the rain.
Ignis hung in his grasp, silent after that first scream, breathing harshly; Ravus could see every single raindrop hitting his white face, turned up to him.
"Ignis," he said, "I can let you go."
Ignis' eyes were closed.
"I can let go and it won't be your fault. I can set you free if that's truly what you want."
He would, he thought, let go and see Ignis plummet down, hear the dull sound of impact, walk slowly down and collect the body. The rain would wash the blood off the stones. Amicitia would probably come to kill him, and maybe Ravus would let him and maybe Ravus would flee or fight, but it had to be better than another moment of this, of both of them snared by a fate that had already run its course.
"Why?"
A calm was settling over him, a sense of well-being he could barely recognize in himself, a joy; he thought that the last time he had felt it was before the Insomnian king came to Tenebrae, bearing his wounded son. He smiled and wished that Ignis could see it.
"Live or die," he said, and tightened his grip, "but do it for yourself. They didn't have that option, but what else had we survived for?"
"I don't," Ignis said. "I don't know how. I can't. I."
"Ignis," Ravus said, and it was such a relief to want, to know his own desires. "Who knows? But we can find out together. I can promise you that."
His body was screaming at him - his arms, his back - his fingers, clawing at the stone. "Decide," he said, "decide, Ignis, whatever you want, but choose fast."
He felt it then, the surrender; all the tension ran out of Ignis' body, and he thought, oh, and he thought, please, but he had promised, and he tried to unclench his fingers - and then Ignis swung his other arm and clutched at Ravus' arm, and swept his legs up, scrabbling for the purchase on the wet stones of the wall.
The wild shift in weight made Ravus overbalance, pulled him over. His shoulder joint groaned and dislocated, and he cried out. For a breathless moment he was sure he was going to go over the edge himself: a final joke from the gods, the two of them falling just as Ignis chose life.
He growled in helpless anger and pulled - and felt, or imagined, slim cold palms settle on his shoulders, holding him steady. Between the torrents of falling water he could've swore he saw black-clad arms, one gloved and one bare, helping Ignis up.
He heaved again, and the ghosts, if they were there, pulled with him - and Ignis was over the edge, finally, barreling into Ravus and knocking him down. He drew Ignis to him, hugging him close, folding Ignis' face into his shoulder, and laughed. Rain poured into his eyes, his open mouth, and tasted like wine and life.
"Did you," Ignis muttered, reverent and exhausted and raw, "was there..."
"Yes," Ravus said, "yes." And then he found Ignis' hand, and tugged his glove off, and gently stroked the deep bruises his fingers left.
There was nothing to be afraid of; they were, finally, alone. He brought Ignis' hand up and touched his lips to Ignis' fingers.
Ignis jerked violently under his arm, startled - but didn't pull his hand away.
"Stay," Ravus said, "will you?"
"Yes," Ignis said.
Some time later, Ignis climbed to his feet, slowly and gingerly, and Ravus reluctantly let himself to be helped up as well. The rain had finally stopped; the full moon rose, and painted Ignis' hair silver. All that water, he thought suddenly, slacking the thirst of his land. Maybe some sylleblosoms survived, somewhere in his forests. Maybe one day they'd search for them.
"Come on," Ignis said impatiently, "we need to change into something dry and deal with your shoulder before it gets worse." And Ravus smiled at him, and took his hand, and followed him in.