let go
DISCLAIMER: Yggdra Union © Sting. I own nothing.
(falling in love is searching for missing pieces of ourselves – it's all right 'cause there's beauty)
The breeze is a soft chill against Gulcasa's skin, and he breathes in the wind and exhales slowly. The air has that scent of pine on the edge of burning that's peculiar to late fall and early winter; it reminds him of bonfires and rituals and the dark peaceful nights he could always walk the streets without fear.
His breath and the soft rustle of his hair and his clothes in the wind are the only sounds. After spending the day like this, he's learned to differentiate between them—his clothes make more noise, and the sound is heavier somehow. When the wind runs through his hair like a lover's fingers, it makes a sound like silk shifting.
After the first hour or so, the fabric of the blindfold on his face stopped bothering him. It's thick black linen, and the way it folds and rubs the skin just above his ears irritated the hell out of him for about twenty minutes, after which he got used to it and started concentrating more seriously on what he was doing.
It's hard. It was hard. But he's realized, he's learned to take smaller steps and let his body stabilize, feel the ground beneath his feet a bit more to make sure that he won't topple. Holding your arms out in front of you is cheating, Nessiah told him at the beginning of the day, and anyway that gets far too tiresome. Stretch out your other senses. Trust them a little more.
He ran into things a lot, assuming that he knew where exactly he was when really he didn't. Even now, it's hard to sense inanimate objects. Living creatures are a bit easier to deal with—he can hear them breathe, hear them move, feel their warmth.
He's learned to concentrate—to picture things in his head. And he's learned just how dependent he really is on his eyes.
Gulcasa's heard stories of soldiers and those who fight bare-handed training with blindfolds on, and he wonders if they took time to learn to orient themselves blind first. He can imagine doing his scythe drills with this thing on after a few weeks of learning to get around without his sight, but only then. Perhaps that's just because using a scythe is so dangerous and takes so much skill—and so much of his skill is probably reliant on flashes of silver and scarlet in his peripheral vision.
He trusts himself a little less when he can't see. Perhaps he needs to try trusting himself a little more, now he's learned not to be overconfident.
It's been—enlightening… would probably be the word? Anyway, he feels like he's learned a lot more since deciding to try this. It would have been harder to decide to do it if he really knew how difficult it would be in the beginning, but then he thinks he still would have done it.
He wanted—wants—to know. To have more of an understanding of what it's like to live like this.
When he said so, Nessiah's habitual smile had fallen away a bit, and his tactician had tilted his head and given him this long considering stare.
"I didn't live blind for very long, really," he said curiously, but Gulcasa had just insisted that he wanted to know.
"Then I'm not going to stop you. But there's a difference—a great difference—in putting a blindfold on for a few hours and spending days and weeks without sight."
He knows that, obviously.
The thing is that while he couldn't have ever guessed what spending weeks or months or whatever it had been in the dark was like before, now he might be able to understand it at least a little. The self-doubt and the attention you have to pay to every detail you can sense as if your life depends on it (because it might, you could never know) and the deep, deep quiet you need to survive.
He knows that if he were in the main part of the castle instead of up here, there would be no way in hell that he could manage. He needs the ability to differentiate, to analyze every sound if he doesn't want to end up hopelessly confused.
…Maybe being up here in the quiet is cheating too, when you think about it that way.
But Gulcasa understands now—he understands how overwhelmed he'd be—and maybe that's just as important in its own way.
There's still so much he doesn't know (maybe is afraid to know) about what it's like to be Nessiah; just the fact that Gulcasa is and has always been surrounded by people who've supported him means that maybe he can never know. But he still wants to try to understand. He still wants to try to learn to look at things from Nessiah's perspective.
Soft sounds—something dragging momentarily, lightly on the stone floor—draw Gulcasa's attention, and he places them as footsteps and realizes he's got company. He listens hard, trying to place the gait, until he picks up the quiet but dull sound of metal and realizes.
"Nessiah."
"You still have it on?" There's warmth in Nessiah's voice, and he sounds pleased. Gulcasa wonders what kind of smile he's wearing. (Communication is harder. So much of it is nonverbal.)
"Of course I do. I said I would."
"That's very true." And there's that soft, almost-a-giggle laugh.
Nessiah doesn't say anything more, but there are footsteps that grow louder along with that soft slide of metal on metal, and Gulcasa is just about able to hear the shift of Nessiah's robes (a lot quieter than his own clothes, both from the distance and from how worn those robes really are) when a small left hand lifts his right one, softly weaving their fingers together. It's a little startling—Nessiah's hands actually feel warm, so he's probably been up here too long—but more than that, the definite connection with another living being is a relief. Blindness is isolation.
"Let's go back. I'll take you inside." Nessiah's words are still warm, and they have a rare kind of gentleness to them.
"Alright."