Gold / MaStar Week 2020 / mastar-week
Fire Emblem: Three Houses AU Support Conversation
(No knowledge of FE3H is needed to read this.)
Inspiration:
Caspar/Hilda Support Conversation Tree
and
"Dare to love yourself / as if you were a rainbow / with gold at both ends."
― Author-Poet Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
"Ugh… this sucks! Who knew he'd double jab with the left?" Sebastian groans. His face feels pretty sore and his ribs smart a bit, too. He doesn't look forward to begging Kim to use white magic on him. Somehow she always extracts more gold from his pocket than it would cost to buy some vulneraries for himself… and her heal spells hurt! He didn't know how a healing spell could cause more pain; Harvar's, when he was forced to heal, never stung so bad.
Tired at just the thought of facing Kim, Sebastian drops to the ground in the courtyard. The sky is turning pink and he knows that dinner will be in another hour or two. Maybe it'd be better to just rest here on the grass than to walk all the way back to his dorm. He drapes an arm over his knee and tenderly stretches out his leg. He must've twisted his knee a bit, too.
"You look awful, Seb."
He snaps his attention towards the voice, greeted with Maka's face and a sharp pain in his neck. He groans a little and rubs at it. "Just a little fight, Maks. No biggie." She looks unimpressed with him so he grins through the pain in his cheek. "I won, of course."
"Your whole face is swollen like you got broadsided by a griffin or something."
"I'm fine, fine!"
"You're hopeless is what you are," she says dryly. She pops a hand on her hip as she looks down at him. "Aren't you gonna go to the infirmary? Or to Kim?"
"The infirmary is too far and dinner is coming up soon," he grumbles. Looking up at her standing is getting tiresome.
"And Kim?"
"I'd rather suffer."
Maka crouches next to him, getting in his face in a way that makes blood rush to his throbbing face. "So you are in pain!"
Sebastian recoils a little, trying to put a little distance between them. Maka is way too close and his eyes involuntarily flick to her bare knees; she's foregone her black tights under her uniform today. He stubbornly focuses on her hair, in her ever present twin tails, instead of her bright green gaze. Looking at her hair has the disadvantage of now knowing how it slips over her shoulder when she tilts her head thoughtfully.
"Why are you always picking fights anyway?" she asks.
"I'm not-" she cuts him off with a dead-eye stare. "I don't always go looking for fights." He runs his hands through his hair, a little sweaty and sticking up everywhere. "If someone's doing something stupid or wrong, then somebody's gotta beat some sense into them! And it just so happens that it usually falls to me!"
"Can't you just leave well-enough alone? Find a teacher to take care of it?"
It's his turn to look at her with well-wrung disbelief. "I don't want to hear that from you, Miss I-Don't-Understand-Restraint," he says. "Besides, I can't just ignore it when I know it's wrong."
"How very gallant of you," she says with a quirk of a smile. "And don't bring up my battlefield tactics; that's different than picking fights at the monastery!"
"Battlefield tactics? You punched a direwolf in the face!"
"Desperate times, Sebastian," she says, sinking to the ground so that they're almost hip to hip, with her facing him. "You were right behind me with that combat art so it doesn't even matter. But we're talking about picking fights with things that can talk back. And how you can avoid getting your teeth kicked in."
She pulls a vulnerary and some clean bandages out of her hip pouch, where she keeps the gloves she wears under her gauntlets in battle. He lets her dab the solution on his face, hissing only a little at the cooling sensation. Maka cleans up his whole face and inspects her work with a hand on his chin, turning him this way and that, before she speaks again.
"If you keep picking fights, one day, you're gonna get beat so hard you can't help anyone."
He hums, thinking of what ifs and the color green. "Maybe."
Maka watches Sebastian fight an internal battle with himself. Well, it's a little less than internal, because she can see him make a motion forward towards the brewing altercation between a merchant and a burly customer. Then he stops, starts to turn away, rakes his hands harshly through his bright blue hair, and talks to himself under his breath. This all happens twice more before the customer knocks some of the wares off the merchant's table and Sebastian makes up his mind.
"Hey! You there! What do you think you're doing?!"
She sighs to herself, shifting her purchases from the market in her arms. "He just can't stop getting involved," Maka mutters to herself. Still, she can't help but notice that even as he engages in fisticuffs to protect the merchant from the rude customer, Sebastian has a grin on his face. There's something about him then, in that moment. The sun warms his skin and his movements are fluid, clearly trained and honed until second nature. He's having fun and it's obvious the joy he gets out of combining two things he likes: fighting and protecting people.
Whatever it is she sees, she feels it tingling in her chest and on her cheeks, like sunbeams through treetops.
"Hah!" he crows, as the customer shoves the money owed at the merchant and scurries off with a limp. "That takes care of that!"
His voice is too low for her to hear what he says to the vendor, but when he looks up, he does a double-take in her direction. Sebastian nods to the man once more before running over.
"Eh… you weren't… watching just now, were you?" he asks, scratching the back of his neck. There's dirt smudged over his freckles and another bruise peaking out along his jaw, just starting to get red.
"Who, me?" she feigns. "Watching what?"
Sebastian stares at her. "The fight. Just now. That I definitely didn't start." His eyes widen a bit at his confession and Maka tries not to notice the shade of blue-grey there. "I mean, that guy was- and the seller-"
"Sebastian-"
"-I couldn't just stand there and let the old man get treated like that! That guy was completely out of line, so I dealt with it. It turned out fine, didn't it?"
Maka can't hold in her smile, even as small a thing it is. "Why would I complain about you defending a merchant from a cad? I found it rather entertaining, to be honest."
This is clearly not the response Sebastian is expecting. His mouth opens as if to retort with more loud words, but clicks closed in a way that makes Maka's teeth ache in sympathy. He pauses for a few seconds, staring at her in disbelief. Lips twisting into a suspicious pout, Sebastian observes her through narrowing eyes.
"Nothing to say about getting injured?"
"No, not today," she responds. The rapid flashes of emotion on his face is amusing and Maka wonders how else she can make it change. "You actually looked pretty heroic back there."
She's only teasing him, but something in her thrills when his face fills with red embarrassment starting on the tips of his ears and nose.
It isn't enough.
"Fighting with so much fervor, I think my heart might have skipped a beat."
The flush creeps over his cheeks, obscuring his freckles. "Your heart?" he asks faintly. Then something peculiar happens behind his eyes. The flush fades away and he lets out a loud laugh. "You really just love watching a good fight, huh? Me, too. Obviously."
He tugs one of the bags out of her arms and his usual carefree smile is on full blast. "Heading back? I'll go with you. Maybe we ought to spar more often!"
Maka just watches his shift in attitude in amazement. She isn't quite sure why she was flirting with Sebastian, but she hadn't quite expected his reaction. Even so, she wouldn't mind seeing that color pink again.
There's one little patch of grass outside the training hall that is shaded by a large oak tree. Huffing and puffing, Sebastian and Maka throw themselves down onto the soft ground. Their uniforms are dirty and their practice weapons thunk into the grass beside them. Sebastian looks up at how the light filters through the tree's big leaves, assaulted again by the color green. He lays there, letting his heart beat come down from its sparring high, with the breeze ruffling kindly through his sweaty hair.
He picks through the shades above him, trying to find the one that matches the eyes of his training partner.
"That was fun," Maka sighs beside him, tone indicating she's probably stretching. "Ah, this feels good."
"Yeah," Sebastian says. He closes his eyes for a moment to take in a deep breath and release it slowly. "You really don't know restraint, do you?" He chuckles a little when Maka starts to complain. "No, no, it's good!"
"Stop making fun of me, Sebastian!' she says anyway. He can practically hear the pout on her face.
"I'm not making fun of you," he laughs. "I like that about you. Most people would hold back in a spar or put too many rules on it for it to be useful. Not you, though. You just… go for it!"
"What's the point of sparring if you aren't pushing yourself?" she mumbles. "If we don't give it our all, we won't get any better."
"For sure," he agrees. Sebastian hauls himself onto his side to look at her. Maka's hair is splayed over the grass haphazardly, her cheeks are flush from exercise, and her eyes are lit by the dappled sunlight that falls over her. "I still think that you just like a good fight. Or maybe the way that I fight in particular."
Her head tilts just enough so she can look at him from the corner of her eye. "And what gives you that impression?"
He pauses with a hum. "Well… what was it again? That you said last time… that I looked heroic?"
She shifts her gaze and faces away. Her hands fold together over her stomach. "I almost certainly did not say that."
"No, no you did!" he says excitedly. He rolls over onto his stomach so they're shoulder to shoulder. "I think you also said that your heart-" his face is awfully close to hers now and he can see the much darker red on her cheeks than moments ago- "skipped a beat…"
The last few words trail softly through the air between them as he observes her. Maka still isn't looking up at him. He can feel how tense she is where his elbow touches her arm, can see it in the set of her jaw. The shadows of the leaves sweep back and forth, leading his eyes across the ruddy skin on her cheekbones down to where some of her hair is sticking to her neck from sweat. Sebastian swallows.
"Your fighting style… does inspire me," she admits quietly. "There's something uninhibited about it, and you always look like you're having fun. I want that, too. To be able to let go, to do what I want with all the enthusiasm I have instead of abiding by rules or expectations." She toys with the pin on her lapel shaped in the crest of House Albarn. "The way you do things, live freely by your own convictions and no one else's, I like that."
"Getting to that rebellious age?" he teases. Maka finally looks up at him, eyes narrowed. "I am pretty impressive, but you know… you're nothing to scoff at either." Green eyes widen at him, so much that he has to look at the brown bark of the tree instead. "You're amazing, okay?"
"Amazing?" Her voice shouldn't be that unsure. "Me?"
"Yeah," is all he can say. Sebastian feels a little lame that he doesn't know how to expand on the many ways he thinks she's cool.
Maka hums a little to herself and they lay there for a while more. He sinks down to lay his head into his arms, all the while, her arm is still pressed loosely to his side. They don't look at each other. The breeze and noise of rustling leaves and other students and teachers walking around sounds far away, but soothing.
"Sebastian! Hey-! Seb, wait up!" Maka yells, running after the blue haired boy. He doesn't stop, but he does groan loudly and slow his pace enough for her to catch him.
"What?" he snaps. He doesn't look at her, fiddling with the latches on his chest plate. He's covered in dirt, mud, and gore from the monsters they'd taken out on today's mission.
"No need to be so terse," she mutters. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."
"I'm fine," he says, still snippy. Maka can feel her cheeks flood with frustrated blood and her fists curl tighter.
"Look, I'm sorry if my concern for your wellbeing causes you some kind of distress or something, but-"
"And what about concern for your own wellbeing?" She pulls back when he turns on her, blue eyes wide with some kind of energy and fervor she can't identify. "You can't just charge a crest stone dragon like that without a battalion at least! Can't you make sure you've got back up? I admire your guts and all, but seriously?"
Maka withers a little under his onslaught, but straightens her back when he takes a breath to continue. "I don't want to wait to get things done!" she says hotly. "Besides, I didn't ask you and yet you show up anyway! You just have a hero complex— you just like protecting the weak."
"Th-that's not the point!" Sebastian stutters, backing up. Maka follows crowding him back. She must look like a fright to him, just as dirty and blood-soaked as him. "It's different!"
"How is it different, Seb? Because you're so good, so strong that you can protect everyone, even when they don't ask you for help?" Maka drops her axe to the ground and grabs him by the edges of his chest armor. "You aren't one to do favors. You barely pay attention to anyone on the battlefield other than your opponents. How does that make you different, better than me?" She shakes him by his armor. "Why are you always trying to rescue me?"
"Because you can't die!" he yells. "You really think I'm so heartless that I wouldn't help you when you're in trouble? I don't do this for just anyone, but you- urgh, I just- you're so stupid!"
He grabs her face and tugs, not enough to hurt her, but she finds herself dazed when their foreheads collide. His hands are warm on her cheeks and his breath beats harshly against her nose.
"Gods, you're oblivious," he says into the small space between them. "Just ask for help next time. I'll be there."
Maka rewets her mouth before she speaks.
"Why?" she asks quietly. She could have meant any number of things: why was he calling her stupid and oblivious, why can't she die, why would he save her over others. She didn't know which to ask first so she asked them all in that one word.
Sebastian shifts while grumbling unintelligibly to himself. She's pulled until he can rest his chin on top of her head, arms dangling over her shoulders. Maka doesn't release his chest plate, thumbing over a chip in the armor absently. Expression hidden, he lets out a long suffering sigh.
"Seb?"
"I might get in scuffles with street thugs and thieves or cads, but up against monsters and enemy soldiers… I can't help but find myself near you. I know you can take care of yourself; believe me, I have the scars and bruises to prove it." Maka grips the metal in her hands tighter. "I want to be there though. Call my name, ask me to go with you, Mak."
She nods slowly, categorizing all the things he's said and also won't say. "I'll rely on you then."
His head tilts to lay his cheek atop her head, the last of his tension leaving his body.
"We should get back to the others," he says, but makes no move to do so. Her hands link behind his back to keep it that way.
"In a minute."