They said the red thread of destiny was a myth.
x
Sometimes, Estelle likes to sit down and watch people. It's been a habit of hers ever since she was a young girl - a young princess. One who often had to sit in long, boring, drawn-out meetings with a bunch of… well, old fogeys, in Rita's words.
It is necessary that you attend this meeting, your highness.
The council requests your presence, your highness.
Yes, you must be there, princess.
No, you cannot stay in bed all day, your highness.
We cannot hold this meeting without you, princess.
Of course, not a single one of them ever really needed her there. They talked about her like she wasn't in the room, made decisions for her without asking her, assumed she wanted this but not that, that but not this. So she sat in her seat and, because no one paid attention to her, watched the men as they talked.
Lord Ermont had a tendency to furrow his brow when he wasn't paying attention. Magister Noland liked to tug on the thin wisp of a "mustache" on his upper lip when he came up with schemes to try and benefit himself. Captain Ardheim would tap his upper arm three times when he was losing hit patience.
So on and so forth.
It was tedious and it got them nowhere, and Estelle hated it with all her heart because it was just so useless and boring.
Sometimes, though, Estelle likes to look back at it fondly. If she hadn't at least learned some things about reading body language, she wouldn't have found something special. Something... unique.
Something like a red thread tied to little fingers.
She remembers being thirteen and asking, "Lord Tyrin, why is there a red string tied on your finger?"
They had all looked at her when the man showed his empty hands. The princess had blinked at the bare finger, then stared into her lap. "I-I'm sorry, it must have been my imagination."
But once she started concentrating on herself, there was a red string tied on her finger. She looked at it carefully as if moving would scare it away, but as her thoughts drifted to reasons why, she noticed it began to fade.
What was it?
She kept her mouth shut and watched the men's hands. Faintly, she could see the strings on their fingers if she concentrated hard enough. Lord Ermont's seemed to connect to… one of the servant's hands at the end of the room?
An idea slipped into her mind - an old myth she'd read about a boy throwing a rock at a girl as a child, only to discover they were "fated lovers" in an arranged marriage later in life.
But… wasn't Lord Ermont's wife in the courtyard?
The princess had almost smiled bitterly to herself after a second. What a thought to have when here she was, surrounded by stiff old men trying to decide who they could marry her off to.
Trying to decide how much their prized cattle was worth, and who was wealthy enough to pay the price.
Ridiculous.
Internally, however, she had wished the two of them luck - even if she was just imagining things, even if the man's wife might have been hurt (or not, she didn't know; they never seemed to enjoy the other's company anyway), the idea of being in a loveless marriage was a mockery in her eyes.
Estelle remembers the time she looked at Karol's thread when they'd met Nan for the first time. He was connected to young girl, but halfway between them his straight line turned into her zigzag of spikes.
She remembers looking at her own thread one day and blushing in embarrassment when it came too close to a certain swordsman whose name rhymed with Zuri Mowell. She had looked away, of course, because she was too embarrassed to wish and, admittedly, too scared to have her heart broken again.
(The first time she tried to get a glimpse of her link had been with Flynn, and she broke her sixteen-year-old heart when the red, imaginary line missed his own completely and went straight through his forehead.)
She remembers how, if she hadn't looked away, she would have missed the coils around Raven's neck.
It had surprised her enough that she had blinked it away, then worried her enough that she focused on it again.
It was long and winding, curving up from his finger and twisting around his neck as if to suffocate him. It curved around his arm, stretching into the air…
… and joining the spiky, tangled mess that was Rita's. Or at least looked like it did. It had been such a mess, who knew if they were really connected?
But Estelle had been surprised, to say the least. Rita had never shown even an inkling of romantic interest in the archer, and Raven's affections were always directed towards Judith (and other… bouncy women). She did suppose, though, that perhaps they just… needed time?
Her teenaged crush on Flynn hadn't lasted long, after all, and her only other experience with love (other than with a certain long-haired swordsman, but that was for the present, not the in-between) was a bunch of ink on paper. Stories filled with ridiculously helpless women and strong men and brave acts of heroism that, once performed, would supposedly capture the hearts of said women instantly.
Stories that didn't even come close to describing what love really felt like, like how seeing him made your stomach fill with butterflies, even after so many months of travelling and working together. It didn't tell you how you wanted to hear his life story, how you wanted to tell your life story, how you wanted to hold him in your arms, how when you accidentally fell asleep on him, his smell would linger on your clothes and you would spend the rest of your day smelling the sleeve of your dress (secretly) because he just smelled so gosh darned good.
Did Rita ever feel like that around Raven, she wondered?
Estelle remembers seeing Raven at Baction, dressed up in a captain's uniform and going by the name of Schwann Oltorain. She remembers the suffocating coils of red around his neck, spiralling around and around, tightening and tightening and extending into a huge tangled mess behind him before it reached for the other tangles, the loops and zigzags that stretched to the girl she knew stood behind her, and not the tall beauty beside her.
She remembers seeing them back in the Zaphias castle, recovering from their injuries. She'd spotted Rita at the time, working on his blastia with the thread on her finger just a little bit less tangled, a little bit less of a mess.
Raven wore his like a loose scarf.
Each knot of hers untangled each day. Each coil of his unwound each day.
She'd had a moment with the both of them - separately - where she told them she knew, and watched how they reacted.
Rita had, of course, denied it. Denied, denied, denied. Refused to acknowledge the possibility. Turned her tomato of a head away and hissed awkwardly that they were not having this conversation, she did not want to talk about that lech of an archer, it wasn't even like he'd be interested in her, anyway.
Raven was the strange one, though. He'd smiled forlornly at her like an old sage who'd seen too much of the world and said I'm an old man, sweetheart. She's young. Things don't work out like that.
His response had absolutely baffled her. There she was, Princess Estellise Sidos Heurassein, with old (and possibly senile) councilmen throwing noblemen twice, thrice her age at her ever since she's been twelve. And there he was, Raven of Altosk, of Brave Vesperia, Schwann Oltorain, Captain of the Imperial Knights. A man amongst nobility who had undoubtedly attended meetings where fathers married off their just-flowered daughters to men in their forties.
She thinks of how wrong he was that day.
Twelve months ago, the world had been saved. Raven had collapsed, a dull light glowing from his chest, sparking against metal embedded in his chest. Rita had hunched over his form, hands steady as she opened his blastia grid and typed in formulas, clack clack clacking away while the others watched, breaths held.
Clack clack clack. Tap tap tap tap. Tick tap clack.
Each clack of Rita's fingers unwound the red string around her pinky from the remains of the tangled mess. Each tap straightened it out, shortened the thread, brought her closer to the dead, dead man-
Until a final finger pressed a glowing button and the man on the ground sputtered and coughed, gasping for breath as he regained consciousness.
They'd all kept quiet when the mage's exhausted panting eventually turned into sniffing, then to sobbing as she buried her head in the poor bastard's shirt. Even when he put a hand on her head and whispered to her, she kept her grip on him.
Hey, hey, it's alright. I'm alive, now, hun. I'm alive, and it's thanks to you. You did well. I'm okay. You're okay. We're all okay.
Six months ago, the world was adapting to a life without blastia. Rita was getting used to the constant in her life that was Raven (because she "needed to monitor his heart twenty-four seven" before the conversion was finished), and Raven was getting used to the fireball that demanded he unbutton his shirt every now and then.
Two months ago, Rita was mad at him, and Raven was distant with her.
One month ago, they still weren't speaking to each other.
Three loose knots are lying on the floor. Two coils sit on his shoulders.
One pair of lips is connected to another.
In the castle, Estelle is unable to take her eyes off the scene from behind the doorway until someone claps a hand on her shoulder and scares her half to death.
As it turns out, she's ready to die right then and there when a red thread connects the hand on her shoulder to her hand clutched to her chest, and in her ear Yuri Lowell softly murmurs who are you spying on?
Dec 19/14