She dipped a hand into her bag. "Did you get a good look at these?" she asked, rummaging.
He looked over. Years of friendship with her, years of commonplace awe and good times, had conditioned him; when she said "look," it was always worth it to do so.
The two pair of glasses Melchior had given them lay in her hand, folded so that the bows, not the lenses, touched her callused palm. He picked up the dark pair and unfolded them, examining their workmanship. He had always harbored a secret admiration for her spectacles, an awareness of the way they magnified her eyes and modified her expressions. These, though...these were not the same. The bows and frames were sleek and light, but strong, made of some metallic material that shone with an oily-gunmetal finish. Rainbow accented the earpieces, and glittered in the tiny screws that held together bow, frame and nose piece. The lenses were smoked, but beneath the tint he saw a slick sheen that reminded him of spilled oil. He brushed his fingertips against his tunic to clear away the lubricant his eyes and skin insisted was there, but nothing came away on the fabric. These were not her spectacles. These were to her ordinary wear what the Masamune was to his mother's butcher knife.
"Try them on," she encouraged, but instead he slid them on her, right over her normal spectacles. It was an awkward, crooked fit, with the dual impediment of her normal glasses and her helm, and at first she laughed, putting a hand to the frames as if to remove them.
"Crono, what are you doing?" she asked. Then she blinked, looking around at the sunny castle yard in fresh fixation, and laughed again. She took off the sunglasses, so he started to hold out a hand to accept them, thinking she would now make some joke and pass it off as she so often did. A part of him felt a little sorry; even after all these years, sometimes their individual awkwardnesses came between them. But instead she removed her own glasses, plunking them into his outstretched hand, and replaced the smoked sunglasses on her nose. "Wow!" she said. Her laughter pealed again. "Check this out!"
Grinning, she unfolded the other spectacles and brought them up to his face. The sun flashed momentary rainbows off the lenses as she settled them over his eyes, her practiced fingers easily tucking the bows over his ears without poking the ear pieces into his temples.
He also grinned; he couldn't help himself. These really were cool—very cool. The rainbow lenses, tinted slightly, eased the sun's brightness; he immediately felt the strain on his eyes ease. Even had the spectacles only done that he would have been grateful, for the afternoon sun was brilliant today. But there was more: the environment...suggested itself...more plainly through them. Every dip and gap and rock and blade of grass in the ordinary ground was thrown into relief. He thought he might see the veins pulsing under his own skin, or hers, if he so chose. And the ley lines! Ambient magic, before only assumed, could now be seen. He even felt smarter, his brain less cluttered. Every thought seemed more complete...more elevated, for lack of any better term. He wondered if Lucca always saw the world with such intellectual clarity, and if so, what the sunglasses must be doing for her. He was heady, even high with this rush of new information.
Her hands cupped the sides of his face. Tilting his head down to be so able, she kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was essence of Lucca: warm, dry, firm, unromantic, slightly awkward, almost businesslike. She was not Marle—her hands were not soft, nor perfumed at the wrists for the occasion—but he could smell her, soap and sweat and engine oil, and the sweet nostalgia of her unremarkable familiarity called up every warm afternoon, every secret and accident and expedition and explosion in a lifetime of camaraderie. He remembered waking into twilight at the top of the mountain, sprawled in the dead embrace of the tree in an ephemeral shadow cage of its backlit branches. He remembered confusion, fear, freezing cold...and her, kneeling beside him with bloody snow on her clothes while her eyes streamed freezing tears against the wind. A gladness for her, too big and fierce to be anything as refined as love or gratitude, set his breath unsteady with its soft hysteria.
Perhaps misreading this physical signal, she stepped back, recalling her hands, and offered a slightly chagrined half-smile. "Oh, hell, Crono, I guess I—" she wiped her eyes self-consciously. "I guess I just—" He saw that she, too, was struggling to control herself. The kinship in that notion in turn drew him from his reverie back into the present.
He put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. After a thoughtful pause, she poked him and reached out a hand, palm up. He obliged by placing her glasses in it.
A/n: Written by Whitechapel.