A crowd of people waited just outside Viper Manor as Riddel paced back and forth inside the Drawing Room. Today, they were celebrating her father's tenth anniversary as General of the Dragoons. The ceremony entailed honoring him with a medal for his service and valor to his people over the years.

It had been Riddel's responsibility to tend the Hero's Medal she was to present him with in less than a few minutes, but she had turned frantic and panicked after dropping it on the floor and cracking its exterior.

Mostly everyone was outside, already seated as the ceremony had been going strong for the past half hour, and her father had been flanked by all four of his Devas, leaving Riddel generally stranded and alone. Sitting down, she ran her fingers over the crack gingerly, turning ideas over in her head over how to conceal the blemish. A soldier had already come by to give her notice to be ready in several minutes, but she had squandered the better part of her time staring blankly at the crack.

Despite her delicacy and poise, Riddel had befuddled one of the most important distinctions her father would ever be presented with, and she felt nothing short of failure stir in her chest as she envisioned the faces of the men who would escort her to her father. To blemish such an important piece of history seemed such a stupid thing to let happen, and yet, she had dropped it from her very fingertips.

As she sat staring confounded as to what to do, a knock startled her to sit up straight.

"C-come in." To her surprise, it wasn't the soldier who had given her her five minutes grace period; it was Karsh. He looked particularly handsome with his hair swept back, contained for the formalities of Manor House functions, and dressed entirely in his Dragoonian Armor. He looked eons wiser, she thought, in his uniform. "Karsh? What are you doing here?"

Karsh noted her lack of preparation and the small artifact neatly cradled in her hands. Riddel was a young lady of assured promptness, and so he became particularly aware of the lack of timeliness she seemed to be plagued with. Something had to have happened, he thought to himself.

"Came to check up on you," he responded, casting an observant eye over the room. Riddel had been dressed and ready, but she looked far from prepared to take the stage.

"But you should be outside, with the rest of the Devas-"

"Yeah, I don't do conformity very well, if you haven't noticed before." Riddel allowed a fleeting smile to flicker across her face before she lowered weary eyes upon the medal once more. "So what's up? Whaddya got in your hands?" Karsh tried to keep his tone conversational, not wanting to alarm Riddel or give her more reason to become flustered. He could tell by the red in her cheeks and the sparks in her eyes that she was overwhelmed by something, he had seen her like this in the past. He sat down next to her.

Riddel shrugged and looked back up at him, and Karsh felt in that moment, for whatever reason, he wished he could consume whatever ailed her and spare her from the confines of her prison.

"I broke the medal, Karsh." Karsh furrowed his eyebrows at her confession, and cocked his head to the side in slight confusion. "I cracked it. Here, look," she said, offering up to him the small object she had nestled in her palms moments before. Karsh looked down, and saw the Medal his father had welded himself out of the rarest and finest materials for the General. It burned bright in all of its beauty save for the one glaring crack that rippled down its face.

Karsh knitted his brows deeper as he gently touched one hand to Riddel's, turning and angling her cupped hands to watch the way the medal glimmered. She took his silence for disappointment.

"I'm sorry Karsh. I don't know how I did it. I took it out of its case to polish it and then it just… it just slipped right between my fingers. I felt so stupid, and now I ruined it, and daddy's going to be so upset, and your father worked so hard and, and-" Riddel had gone silent at hearing Karsh's laughter. It had been the last thing she expected him to do and the sound had startled her.

Their heads were both bent in a sort of mock-prayer stance, lowered reverently over the medal in her hands, and as she looked up at him with confused eyes, she could feel her head nearly hit his own.

"Strange, isn't it, how something so small could make someone so scared." He looked up at her, their faces close as they hovered over the medal. "It's just… a piece of metal, right? Obviously not my dad's best work either, if it can crack so damn easy." Karsh laughed again, his fingers kissing the insides of her palms as he stole the medal for himself and began tossing it up and down in the air carelessly. Riddel's eyes went wide and she went to reach for it.

"Karsh!" He evaded her hands, however, and she rested her arms on his lap as she looked up at the medal uneasily, scared he would drop it at any minute. "We're sitting here, almost in prayer, and for what? For a piece of metal? For something… we can't take with us. It's just… material. It's nothing really." Riddel had shifted her eyes from the medal to Karsh, and she stared up at him surprised by her own surrender to his voice. He spoke with a veneration she hardly knew he could possess, but he sounded so gallant and beautiful in all of the wisdom he spoke. "What should really matter, are his people, and his soldiers, and his daughter, all of who love him very much, so much, that one would even shed a tear over something as small as an ornament for his vest. That's what your dad would care about, not some… object."

Riddel smiled and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear, feeling sheepish for her initial reaction to the crack in the medal. Karsh had been right, her father would be most proud and thankful for having her there at all; his concerns for the superficial were minimal.

"People matter the most Riddel, not things. People like… you…" Riddel stared up at him still, his eyes distant and faded as though he talked about something else entirely. Her heart always thumped when he became like this. It thumped out of fear of what he might say, and it thumped for the things she would learn, but sometimes, already knew. Karsh lowered his eyes to meet her own, and he smiled as though remembering his moors to reality. "And me, people like you and me and… Dario. We're what matters, not this," and he tossed the medal on the bed carelessly.

Riddel had sat up, suddenly hyper-aware of how close the two of them leaned into each other, and smiled softly at her friend. "Thank you Karsh. You are truly a great friend." Karsh smiled and looked down at his own lap. Friend, it reminded him of all the ways he could never be with her, it reminded him of the line he could never cross.

"Yeah, yeah, I only came to get you before people started booing poor Dario off the stage. You left him to the dogs to cover your ass." Riddel laughed, oblivious to the way Karsh used humor as a defense mechanism. "You ready to do this thing?" She nodded; all her confidence and poise returned to her, her thanks in debt to a would-be lover.

"Can't forget this," she remarked, holding up the glinting piece of metal between her porcelain fingers. Karsh snatched it out of her hand with a smirk, pocketing it as he replied,

"Yeah, can't forget that. I'd hate to see the state of panic you'd be in if you actually forgot it entirely." She slapped him playfully on his shoulder and he grabbed at her wrists, pulling her against his side and swallowing her beneath his massive six foot two body.

The two of them eventually left for the ceremony, and Karsh thought to himself on the way out, it was funny how freely he talked of mending cracks in a medal, when he could hardly mend the cracks in his own heart.