Someday
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Final Fantasy VI. I only wish I did, and can't wait to get my hands on the lovely music player once I'm done with everything in FFVI Advance.
It was a ticklish word.
Late at night before she went to bed, Relm sometimes tried it out to herself in a whisper, confiding it to the pillowcase so no one would hear. It sounded funny—maybe because there hadn't been anyone for her to say it to in a long time. Still, she turned the syllables over and over in her mind, as if she might grow accustomed to them in time.
Still, she couldn't quite imagine herself calling him that to his face, nor could she imagine what his reaction would be if she ever did. Although the connection was there—was still there—was waking up again, it had been asleep (or dead) for too long to make things easy between them.
A lot of the time, she wasn't quite sure if she would ever be able to completely forgive him. The space between then and now was riddled with the poison of loneliness and jagged shards of gut-wrenching pain. It had changed her, shifted her insides like the earth on a faultline so that the person she was in her heart wasn't the person she looked like outside anymore—changed her in the way that the world had been changed, ruined and bleeding, a year ago.
But he'd changed too. He'd become a completely different person, so much so that she hadn't realized for a long time, even when they'd traveled together. But she thought she knew him well enough now that she believed she saw flashes of the man he'd used to be… every once in a while.
And so, whenever she ran into one of those once in a whiles, Relm thought of that ticklish word, and wondered absently what it would be like to let it out into the open.
Still, she didn't think she'd say it… just yet.
She was so caught in her deliberations that she'd been basically ignoring everyone else: Locke and Celes and Terra and their animated discussion of plans to go after Kefka, the others' input and approval and the occasional veto of one aspect of the scheme or another. But she woke up to her surroundings when she felt a supportive hand on her head, giving the red-blonde curls sticking out from under her bandanna a gentle ruffle.
"…Do your best."
And she looked up at him, that taciturn, impassive figure in black, and wondered what his expression was right then beneath that cold steel mask, and smiled.
Not yet, but… well, maybe someday.
:owari: