7: The Smell of Summer
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_oOo_
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Rita hated riding.
For one thing, it hurt. A lot. Rita ached in every bone and joint from the journey and her backside had that slightly numb feeling that meant it was saving up all the agony to really mess her up tomorrow. There was nothing she could have done about that. Any attempts at trying to sit still and straight in the saddle had just made her jog and jar herself stupid. She'd bit her tongue five times.
The only way to stop that from happening was to roll with the quietta's gait.
That. That was what Rita hated most about riding.
Nobody told her just what sort of motion happened in the saddle. If she'd designed the damn animals, things would have been much different. It could have been more like riding a trolley. You would sit on the flat part, it would draw a line from A to B and then it would simply go from one end to the other in one efficient, clean, horizontal line. Much better than the chaotic bony roller-coaster that happened naturally.
No one had seen fit to warn her that there was… rolling involved. She'd have sooner died than suffer through an entire day of that in Raven's lap.
Quiettas were clearly not meant to be ridden. Ever.
"How're ya holding up, Mistress Mordio?" Raven called from somewhere to her left.
"You need to ask?" she snapped, thinking of saddles and hating him for it.
"Still breathin', then," he muttered.
Rita tried very hard to tell just what was going on around her. For the first time in her life, she was completely lost. Even when she'd arrived at a place she'd never been before, more often than not it was still familiar. Geology, geography, geomorphology, topography... She had scoured Terca Lumereis twice over for aer krene before she'd ever left Aspio, all in the name of study.
But this was completely different. She hadn't been able to tell what direction they'd been riding in. The motions of the quietta were so alien that she had no idea how fast they had been going. When they had stopped and she had been deposited on the ground like a child, the world was a blank canvas two inches from where her foot stopped. She could have been standing on the precipice of a cliff for all she knew.
Rita was forced to stand there. Worse than that, Raven simply... walked away as if she weren't completely reliant on him. At first she was grateful he was gone. Within a handful of moments, she was insulted. What felt like an eternity later, she was almost frightened. Desperate for anything, she had reached back to touch the quietta. It was gone as well. He must have led it away somewhere while she stretched out her sore muscles.
If Rita was perfectly rational, she couldn't have been standing there for more than ten minutes. It was a life time to someone with only their own thoughts to colour the world, and Rita let out the breath she was holding when he eventually returned, making a ridiculous amount of noise as he went. She heard the rustle of cloth and a heavy clank of metal. Her curiosity was piqued.
"Where were you?" Rita demanded.
"Gettin' changed, nosey," was the snide response. After a small pause, "If ya wanted to participate honey, all ya had ta do was ask."
"Shut up."
He sighed and almost immediately after, she heard a peculiar set of thumps and ruffles and thwaps. Rita entertained herself by trying to identify what Raven was doing. It wasn't until she heard the familiar noises of flint on stone that she felt sure enough to speak up.
"Starting a fire?" There was the briefest of pauses before the familiar crackle began.
"Hey, not bad darlin'," Raven replied, sounding vaguely pleased. The next set of sounds was easier.
"Uh," Rita managed. Her stomach growled loudly in her over-sensitive ears.
"Oho? What's this? Is our genius mage a little hungry?" Raven wondered smugly.
"You wouldn't let us stop for lunch," Rita pointed out waspishly. Before her stomach betrayed her again, she slid a toe forward and encountered only rocks. "I might as well eat something while I think of it … Is there a... a pothole, a tree, or a puddle in the way?"
"Nope."
"How about our luggage? I bet you just threw it down as soon as we got here."
"You're all clear, darlin'," was his amused reply.
Rita hated waving her hands around in front of her, but she felt like her legs wouldn't work if she didn't keep them up as a barrier. She wasn't two steps in before her courage began to falter.
"Speak up, Old Man," she snapped, irritated.
"Sure sure," he said. "Over this way, Rita my sweet. Keep a comin'. Just follow the sultry, dulcet tones of my voice like a little bee to her Honey." He couldn't have strung the sentence out much further, or added more sickeningly sweet syrup to it for that matter. She was a foot away before he decided to add, "And stop."
She stopped. Something bumped her hand and after a curious moment, she realised it was a tin dinner plate.
"Speak up," she ordered.
"Yeah?"
She cuffed him with it.
"Misery," Raven moaned softly.
"I'm blind, not deaf," she replied curtly, then managed to sit down.
When Raven finished grumbling and busied himself with whatever meal he was preparing, Rita slipped the tiny blastia core from her breast pocket and ran her fingers over it.
If she concentrated really hard, she could visualise the formula that had been functioning for that split second before it broke down the… There. Rita's thumbnail found the crack and she slid it gently down the length of the lesion. Long, but shallow. The outer ring would be damaged, but that's easily fixed.
Using only her fingers and the snapshot image burned into the back of her eyes, Rita pieced together a theory about the gem in her hand.
She had decided with complete confidence that it was a hoplon blastia by the time dinner was served.
"Grub's up, miss mage."
Rita held her plate out, felt it dip with weight, then used a finger to prod whatever was placed there. A sandwich. She lifted a corner of it and poked again. A stir-fry noodle sandwich.
Rita listened to Raven eat his meal with the unmistakable clink and clatter of cutlery. She smiled to herself and picked up her own dinner with one hand.
They ate in total silence after that, and that suited Rita just fine. She was carefully putting the blastia back in her breast pocket when Raven decided to break the unspoken rule of no talking.
"Well, this is a fine mess and then some," he sighed, tin bowl hitting the ground with a clang.
"You should have had a sandwich like me. I keep telling people it's-"
"I meant being on the run," he corrected bleakly.
"Oh. That," Rita muttered.
"Kinda wish I knew what it was all about. That sure would be nice."
"Your buddies in the Black Birds didn't tell you?"
"Dark Wings. And nah. They didn't."
There was a marked silence. It was awkward and horrible.
"So," Rita attempted, plucking at her stockings. "We'll be at Heliord soon, right? I mean, we didn't do all that... that riding today just to get nowhere."
"Don't worry your pretty little head," Raven replied, but his voice sounded thick and morose. "We'll be outta each other's hair before sundown tomorrow."
It was the answer Rita wanted to hear, but it still stung with insult.
"F-Fine by me," she replied, "I have very important work to get back to."
"I bet ya do. I guess the next time Karol sees ya, you'll be thirty with some rugrats of your own?"
"What? Are you crazy? And like you're one to talk, you cancel so often Estelle doesn't even bother with invites anymore. What, are you getting too old to multi-task?"
"We've all got things ta do, places ta be." There was a twinge of warning in his voice that she'd never heard before.
Rita scoffed at him, then turned her face aside. It was a shallow gesture. She had nothing to look at let alone avert her gaze from.
As she sat there in the very bleak silence, hearing only the crackle of the fire and the sounds of nature at night, Rita wondered furiously why this part of her life had simply stopped functioning as it should. The blindness was a given, and even then she knew that she would overcome that trial with time...
No, she wondered when Raven had become so awkward to be around.
It was true that they had never really gotten along. There were definite alliances and friendships within Brave Vesperia, and Rita had long ago come to think of her relationship with their oldest member as the most contrary and barely tolerated one. The others had found it funny.
She had enjoyed it, once upon a time.
There was an understanding of sorts between them. Raven liked trying to stir her up, and she liked beating him senseless for it. That much was clear to everyone involved. Every dumb voice and every ridiculous statement almost begged for her retaliation and she gave it, without fail, slamming him for being the half-wit letch that he was and secretly loving every moment of being the sensible grown-up one.
It had been kinda nice. It was practically a partnership.
What had changed, or specifically when... well, that was something no amount of logical assessment could discern. Rita supposed she should, at the very least, be grateful that Raven tried to be subtle about it. Maybe he finally got sick of hanging around a bunch of kids. Maybe he got sick of the violence.
Whatever his reasons, their oldest companion was suddenly never around when they expected or wanted him to be, and Rita gave up the annoying task of trying to figure out why. She had work to do, after all.
If he was over Vesperia and the people in it… well, that was his damn prerogative.
"I'm done. Sleep," was all Rita said, dropping her plate and suddenly wishing it was tomorrow already. She clamoured to her feet, arms folded. "Where do I go?"
There was a heavy whump that sounded suspiciously like Raven throwing himself down on his bedroll.
"Sleepin' bag's to your left."
"Oh, that's a great help."
"Go on, I'll tell ya when you're gettin' warmer," he said gallantly. Rita sent a glare at his voice, but knew she probably looked ridiculous. Feeling like a moron and blaming him for it, Rita turned on the spot with a finger pointed directly out. She was halfway through a turn when he spoke up.
"Yep. That way." She began her slow creep forward, hands outstretched. "Warmer. Warmer. Whoops, cooler. Nah, just kiddin', you're warmer."
"I'm going to remember this, Old Man!"
"You're no fun. Warmer again. Gettin' hot, Rita-darlin'. Hotter. Muuuch hotter."
She didn't like the voice he was using at all. Luckily, her foot bumped into something soft and downy. She dropped to her knees and patted the unrolled sleeping bag.
"Smokin'," was all Raven said, before heaving a huge and exaggerated yawn.
Rita fumbled her way out of her boots, into the bed and she curled up angrily. She didn't give him a good night, but that was fine as he didn't say it either.
That awful loaded silence was getting too familiar.
Rita screwed her eyes shut and punched her pillow into pulpy submission. Sleep was a long time coming, but it crept up on her in the darkness and stole in behind thoughts of guilds and blastia cores.
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_oOo_
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The Union cell had vines and trees growing in it. Rita felt like she was in a jungle, it was so noisy with bugs and wind and creaking branches. The cell bars jutted up out of the densely shrouded earth and went up, up, up into the sky until they were out of sight.
She wondered if she could climb them.
"You're not going anywhere."
There was a person on the other side of the cell. Rita tried to leap up, but vines were tangled around her ankles and wrists. Kaufman stepped into the light and pushed open the cell door. She was impossibly tall for some reason.
"Get me out of here, I'm not with them," Rita declared, and it was a good bluff.
"I can't do that," Kaufman replied. To Rita's horror, she was unzipping her jacket. "I want to see your guild license," came next, and the light reflected blindingly off her glasses. Rita tried to move away again but discovered that the vines were now iron. The rough cold metal slipped from her fingers.
Kaufman shrugged out of the low-cut brown coat and tossed it aside. She began unbuckling her belt.
"I don't have it with me," Rita lied. She pressed a hand to her hip to hide the rectangle of card. When Kaufman quite casually began unbuttoning her white blouse, Rita squirmed. She tried to pretend it didn't bother her.
"Hah, it's in your pocket," Kaufman suddenly said, and she stepped away from the small pile of discarded clothes and across the forest floor, snapping twigs and crunching over dry leaves. She reached down and pawed roughly at Rita's pocket.
"Oops, she's got ya there," Raven said shrewdly. Rita spun around to swing a punch at him, but there was only blackness behind her... And when she turned back, Kaufman was on the other side of the bars again.
The lingering feeling of someone grabbing at her pocket persisted; Rita slapped at her hip until the sensation stopped.
She sat on the cell bunk and watched the blackness eat up the forest floor. It chewed away at the ground beneath Kaufman's feet and continued on until it stopped at the edge of Rita's bunk. She felt like a goldfish in a bowl of ink.
When she looked up, the single figure left in the blackness turned slowly, all billowing white lines and lace. The woman in the wedding dress raised two hands, curled into fists, as if she were tightly clutching something precious she was about to set free.
She raised her face and her veil ruffled. The woman's eye sockets yawned empty, soulless and black.
"You're not even using them," the Caged Emperor's Bride said.
And then she opened her palms.
Two perfect eyeballs stared back, turquoise and glossy, pretty like marbles.
"Hey!" Rita cried out, horrified. She couldn't see herself anymore, so she could only trust that her legs were running her forward and that her hands were reaching for what was rightfully hers.
"I don't like the colour," the Emperor's Bride said next. She sighed, gave Rita a sympathetic face full of remorse and then bowed her head.
When she crushed the eyes between her fingers, everything exploded into black.
Rita stopped dead, stunned.
The darkness was like soup, suffocating and crushing, and if she concentrated really hard... she could feel the Caged Emperor's Bride moving through it like a fish through the shallows.
A hand gripped her wrist, cold and tight.
"Got you," the Bride whispered.
"NO!"
"-ita! Rita! Quit Struggl-"
"Get your hands off me!" Rita shouted, flailing. Her legs were tangled so she had to swing her fists instead. Another hand caught her other wrist.
"Easy, sweetheart! Rita, you're dreamin'! It's a dream!"
"They're broken!" she managed. She tried to blink her eyes awake, tried to see where she was just so that she could prove it wasn't in that jungle cell filled with ink.
But she couldn't. Her ankles were still stuck. No amount of kicking freed them.
"Settle down now, darlin', it's alright," the voice said again, insufferably calm, and suddenly there was pressure against her wrists that increased until they were pinned to the ground by her shoulders. She knew she was at the edge of panic, but didn't know which side she was on.
Slowly, Rita stopped struggling and focused on getting her breath back. One of her wrists was released.
"A dream," she croaked.
"Just a nightmare. Ya back with me now?" Raven asked. The back of her head struck her pillow with a thud.
"I-I can't wake up," she decided with a groan.
"Sure ya can."
Easy for him to say. He could be trying to trick her again, like he had when the Bride stole her eyes from her.
The memory doused her like a bucket of cold water. Her knee-jerk reaction was to shove Raven so hard she heard the air leave his lungs in a sudden burst. It gusted across her face in a warm wave.
Warmth?
Rita was so preoccupied with the sensation that she barely heard him sigh in resignation. She did hear him quite clearly get up and move away to his side of the camp though, and Rita focused intently on every footfall until he fell back down to his own sleeping bag.
There was the small amount of noise of him settling back in... and then Raven simply disappeared.
There was nothing left of him. Just the blackness and the cold wet patches on her face and the sounds of the wind in the leaves around her. It sounded so much like the jungle cell that Rita sat bolt upright, gripping her sleeping bag tightly.
How did people wake up? Had anyone really thought about it before? There was no way to prove that she had. The Bride could be anywhere, and every rustle of every leaf could have been her veil shifting like gossamer against her face. There was no way of being sure. The wind moaned through something hollow: was it her eye sockets, so black they bled ink?
Rita didn't feel like she made a decision. She just started moving without any real say in the matter, and she would deny that lack of control later on when the world didn't feel like a black lie and Estelle had fixed her eyesight. For now, she didn't fight the twisted feeling that compelled her to stand.
She kicked her way free of her sleeping bag and stood shivering in the dark, wanting to ask but not knowing the words to use.
"It's too cold for a walk, darlin'."
There. An echo of him, like a hazy after-image. Rita expelled all of the air in his lungs in one shaky breath.
She followed the memory of his voice and each foot fall on the rough earth a small victory in itself.
It was hard not to hate the blackness with all of her heart. In the darkness, her world had shrunken down to a tiny nugget that was only big enough for the things that she normally didn't care about. All that was real for her right now was what she could touch.
There was a rock under the left side of her foot, not quite large enough to roll her ankle but sharp enough to hurt. There was the incessant tickle of her hair around her face which turned into a tug when it caught in the crease of lips. The sound of the light breeze through the leaves was made tangible when she streamed slithers of the cold wind through her blindly groping fingertips.
Every step erased the old things and brought in new. None of it mattered, but it was all that there was.
Raven became real when his fingers closed around hers.
Rita latched on to the warm digits immediately, not knowing if she was crushing them in her haste, not really caring either. Once she was sure he wasn't going to vanish the moment she let go, Rita bumbled and groped her way from his wrist to his elbow, getting annoyingly tangled in that stupid oversized jacket of his along the way. Once that was secure, she patted and slapped her way up to his shoulder and gave it a clinical squeeze and a rough shake.
He was sitting up at least. Sturdy enough. Warm enough by half. More real that the Caged Emperor's Bride and less frightening by far. It would do.
Rita navigated her way around where he sat and lowered herself awkwardly to the ground at his back. She was mostly on the dirt, so she gave him a jab in the spine.
"Sh-Shove over," she stuttered, poking him again roughly and shuffling further onto the bedroll when he obediently moved. She found that shoulder again and gave it a suspicious pat. Still there.
Raven didn't say a word.
"Shut up," Rita ordered anyway. There were only two kinds of response she knew him to have, and it disturbed her to find neither the usual smug mockery nor the lewd comments.
She shivered a little.
"You breathe a word of this to anyone and it'll be your last," she warned him with real, deathly intent. Still no reply. "A-And for your information it wasn't a nightmare."
His back was a broad expanse of warmth against her side and she felt him turn slightly. Rita could almost see the expression of leering disbelief.
"It wasn't!" she snapped. She vented her embarrassment and anger by hauling on his blanket until she pulled it out from under him. "It was just w-weird. So shut up. Go to sleep. If you wake me up again you're dead." She felt substantially better with each order, and Rita yawned hugely. She wrapped herself up tightly, dropped a cheek to one of his shoulder blades and scowled.
"Stop tensing up," she muttered, jabbing him in the kidney once or twice as if he were a lumpy pillow in need of fluffing, then settled down again.
Raven was really uncomfortable. He was as still as a statue and it was like trying to find comfort on a rock. And when it was all said and done, he was still Raven. But she couldn't see him, and that helped, and he wasn't speaking which helped even more. She just got the tolerable parts.
He was giving off enough warmth to make her head all muddy with fatigue, and the scent she had been vaguely aware of but never truly understood was filling her nostrils.
He smelled like summer.
Like drying grass? Rita wondered. She hugged herself tighter and, not quite aware she was doing it, angled her face closer. Her nose almost met the middle of his shoulder-blades. Nope, not that. Maybe the beach. Not that either. Of skin just shy of sunburnt? Warm rain on sand. Maybe the barest hint of spice? Her next deep breath in evolved into a yawn afterwards.
Whatever. Who knew?
Raven smelled to her like a lazy day doing nothing much under the scorching sun, and Rita slowly drifted to sleep feeling quite calm.
The Caged Emperor's Bride was perfectly at home among moaning wind and rustling leaves, a creature of cold nights and biting iron... but she had no place in that bubble of warmth and summer. The feeling was so absolute that Rita would forget both the Emperor's Bride and the ridiculous fear that had driven her to where she now sat by the morning.
She would recall the calm though, and decide after the mortification of waking up that it hadn't been such a bad night after all.
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_oOo_
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A/N: I didn't intend on torturing Rita instead of Raven, but it certainly turned out that way. Her weird collection of irrational fears is adorable!
Something akin to PLOT happens next chapter... Thank you for your patience!