I don't think the Alfheim cities are named in canon, but there's this amazing Alfheim death game rewrite of SAO by Catsy called 'Fairy Dance of Death', and they've done some serious worldbuilding, and I'm treating the city names they used/made as canon XD
if I could turn back the clock, I'd make sure the light defeated the dark; I'd spend every hour of every day keeping you safe - You Are the Reason (Callum Scott)
o0o0o
"Pretty place, isn't it?"
Parasel is all white stone brick and blue tiled roofs, the different tiered levels of the city rising up and up to the palace overlooking it all. Rich blue flags with the Undine symbol emblazoned upon them flutter in the wind, which brings with it a tang of salt from the ocean that surrounds Alfheim.
Heathcliff hums, seeming unimpressed. "It's a little too magical for my tastes."
She rolls her eyes, strolling in through the gates past the NPC guards. "Of course it is. You're basically the only one to design an MMO without magic."
"It was an act of mercy," he argues mildly, and she turns to walk backwards, giving him a sharp look of disbelief.
"Oh, really," she asks sarcastically. "Take a droplet from an ocean, and you can still drown a person in it. Not sure if that makes much of a difference."
Heathcliff simply levels an even look at her. "Tell me, how much worse would it be if I had included things like healing magic? There was no need to put that kind of weight on anyone's shoulders, not for what I wanted. Likewise, I boiled down the realism of combat because there was no real reason to include it."
She stares at him for a long time, feet rooted to the ground, and people split around them smoothly like a river does around a boulder. They avoid Heathcliff too, leaving a gap in the current larger than Karma herself would occupy. Sometimes she feels as though even she is invisible to the rest of the world.
"I really don't like you sometimes," she finally says, and lets herself be carried away by the stream, with him trailing behind her, as always.
What he did will always be unforgivable—to Japan, to the world, even, and also to her. But his reasons, while selfish, didn't mean to hurt anyone. It was something that had to be done in order to satisfy his intentions, a stepping stone on the way, but it was never his goal. It does not make it acceptable in the slightest, but it makes it confusing.
And he truly made a masterpiece in Sword Art Online. Nothing in that game was wasted, not a single pixel—except all of the agony they went through.
"Did you hear?"
"Yeah, it went viral overnight. I was arguing with my parents for hours to even let me keep playing this game."
"I can't believe it...What happened? Do you think she was being, like, mind-controlled or something by Kayaba?"
The rumors haven't stopped for a moment. People talk openly, with no awareness that their topic of conversation is amongst them; sometimes, she's not even sure they're aware of Catherine.
She doesn't care, not really. The rumors are all idle speculation and gossipy drivel, none of it substantial. They don't know what they're talking about, and they never will.
None of them will.
o0o0o
After fulfilling her side of a bargain by helping a guild clear a minor dungeon, the sun has set, and she finds herself an inn in town to crash at. When coffee arrives, she slides one mug over to Heathcliff without a word, and he hums appreciatively.
"Regrets?"
"None," she snaps forcefully, hands wrapped tight around her drink so she doesn't have to see them tremble. He doesn't question it; she never has been able to lie to him before, but the fact that she would make this choice again and again and again doesn't protect her from the guilt.
"Would you do it again, if you could?"
"Every time."
"They made their choice," she says, but she's not sure if she's talking to him or to herself anymore. "And I've made mine."
With a sigh, he sets his coffee down and turns to her. "At least you had people who cared," he says, somewhat bitterly, and she hunches her shoulders.
It was selfish, and unrealistic, and she should've been happy with what she had; she knows this, but she's tired of being told how to feel, even by herself. Especially herself.
"You weren't there," is all she says, staring at the alert, hollow eyes of her reflection in her drink; she had refused to settle for living as a shadow, insubstantial, in his absence.
When Megu stepped back from her, something sharp and sour in her eyes, it hurt more than Karma expected it to. Because for all the blood on her hands, they never feared her, though they would've if she was brave enough to tell them the truth.
In Aincrad, the people she loved as family knew better, knew that her hands were painted red because she fought tooth and nail to protect them. She was strong and she was one of the most dangerous people in that steel castle, but the people she cared about never feared her; they knew she was dangerous because she loved them.
And Megu never even thought to wonder why.
The words slip out almost of their own volition.
"Besides, they weren't going to care the way I thought you cared about me," she whispers; when she sees him inhaling to speak, she interrupts quietly, "Don't say it, please." Better for them to just keep dancing around the issue, pretending.
She hears him sigh shortly, curt and tired. "And the Knights?"
Slowly, she shakes her head, curling in on herself. "You weren't there," she repeats in a numb whisper. "Neither was Asuna." And no one wanted him back but Karma.
Was it worth it? asks a tiny voice in the back of her head; she shuts it down. It doesn't matter if it was worth it or not; she made her choice and she will make it as worth it as she can, she will make the most of the hand she's drawn without the cards she's lost (thrown away), just like she always has.
"This is your own doing."
Karma takes a deep, shaky breath of the bitter scent of the coffee, hoping to chase out the sour resentment lodged in her heart. "You think I don't know it? I got tired of not being in control. You understand, don't you?"
Ever since that steel castle fell, her life has been spiralling after it, out of control, and she decided that before they could pry her fingers off the edge, she'd let go herself.
Later, Heathcliff is sitting at the table of the room she rented while she takes notes, looking through messages and the new jobs she managed to rustle up in Parasel. He looks supremely bored. Maybe that's why he made so much paperwork for himself in SAO—busy work does keep one busy, as the name implies.
He quickly catches the rectangular object she tosses at him, and he glances down at the cover. His eyebrows lift incredulously, and she smirks.
"The game didn't have a copy of it selling anywhere, so I made my own," she says proudly. "It just took a lot of transcribing. Feel free to point out any errors, though."
A mildly amused smirk tugs at his lips as he flips through the pages of her own copy of Wuthering Heights. "Isn't that plagiarism?"
She chucks the pillow at him, which he catches easily without looking up; instead of giving it back, he places it behind him on the chair and gets comfortable, already engrossed in the book, and she rolls her eyes.
"I'm not making anything off of it," she protests. "I just wanted to have it. Now do me a favor and read it out loud."
"Don't you need to focus on that?" he asks, nodding at the window of notes she has open.
"You know I can multitask. Start reading."
He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like "bossy" under his breath and cracks open the book. "Very well, Cathy."
A nostalgic smile passes over his typically stoic face as he clears his throat and begins to read, and she hides a mirroring smile in her menu while his voice fills the room.
o0o0o
On the way to Domnann, the Leprechaun capital, they pass through the Spriggan capital city of Penwether and keep on going.
"You're not going to stop and look for more jobs?" Heathcliff asks as they fly over the ancient stonework buildings and around the ziggurat overlooking it all.
"Nah. Spriggans are the mercenary race of Alfheim. They're going to be the ones taking jobs, not offering them."
They manage to find a safe zone only a half hour into a dungeon, and they take the opportunity to rest there. Karma knows full well that they could easily camp out in the hostile fields, and her sixth sense would warn her of any danger—as would he. Right?
The safe zone is a small cave—tiny, in fact; she decides to think of it as cozy. The temperatures are starting to drop as they get further north, and although Karma had her gear fitted with cold-resistant upgrades, she's still grateful for the warmth of company.
"We finished the book a little while ago," Heathcliff says, tapping her copy of Wuthering Heights on his knee. "Do you want to start again?"
She hums thoughtfully. "I think we've both read this book enough times. Maybe we'll crack it open for another read later."
One silver eyebrow crawls upward. "Are you saying you're bored of it now?" he asks, sounding remarkably scandalized, and she elbows him in the ribs.
"Of course not," she says with a sniff, grinning. "We can talk about it if you like."
The eyebrow does not descend. "Talk about what?"
"I dunno…For example…" She grabs the book, flipping through the pages with her thumb on the edge like one would a deck of cards. "What would you change about the story?"
His head tilts in thought, seemingly intrigued. "What would I change…"
"Or, I dunno, alternate scenarios, or something. I mean, you're such a nitpick for detail-" At his expression, she snipes, "You know it's true. I'm sure you'd find something to criticize, or something you'd rather change. Besides, you're not that bad a storyteller. You do know how to throw in a pretty good plot twist."
The words twist in her gut like a rusty knife. He pretends like he didn't hear them, and she pretends like she didn't say them.
"Well," he starts, "there are a lot of choices made for certain reasons, and while I don't like every single choice—be it a plot point or a more stylistic theme or what have you—I can understand most of them, and how they add into the overall narrative, although I certainly don't like all of them. However, I hesitate to say that I would change them, even the ones I don't like, because without them, it wouldn't be the same story."
Karma laughs, elbowing him again and throwing him a mildly exasperated look. "I knew you'd say that."
He rolls his eyes. "That being said, it would be interesting to imagine what could happen if you changed x and y, or eliminated a variable completely." He glances at her. "Since you brought it up, I imagine you have some ideas as well?"
She shrugs. "Well, I've always been curious about what would happen if Heathcliff had stayed for literally two more seconds," she says, grabbing the book and rifling through the pages. "If he'd actually heard that Catherine loved him."
Sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, she can feel his hum reverberate in his chest. "I think they would try to start a relationship together. Heathcliff was always the more hesitant one about his feelings out of fear, so if he knew that she felt the same way about him, he might be brave enough to make a move."
It's incredibly weird hearing him using the name Heathcliff to refer to someone different. "Maybe. It'd be interesting if Edgar tried to take her back somehow."
Heathcliff snorts. "As if that coward would try to get between those two. That's a death wish for anyone."
"True." She leans back, eyes glossing over the ice clinging to the ceiling. "But in the end, Catherine would still want status and wealth, and Heathcliff would never be able to give her that. I think their differences would eventually tear them apart."
His slender fingers toy absently with the hem of her cloak. "Maybe she would be able to let go of that wish, if she saw the kind of life she could have with him."
"People don't change that easily," she argues, her hands curling around the edge of the book, and suddenly, she doesn't feel like they're arguing theory on some old work of fiction anymore.
This is their story now, they're living it. He seems to realize it at the same time as she does, whatever response he was about to give dying in his throat, and he closes his mouth silently, letting her lean on his shoulder, her fingers curling into the sleeve of his KoB robes, a relic of an abandoned age.
Do they have the strength to prove her wrong?
"It's strange," Heathcliff finally says out loud, sounding somewhat dazed as they watch snow start to fall outside. "You were right."
"Of course I was," she mumbles, already half asleep now. "What about?"
"That you're more Heathcliff than I am."
Karma yawns softly, not deigning to give a verbal confirmation, and drifts off to sleep. Her dreams that night are filled with the sounds of screaming metal and screaming people, and as she watches the blood drip drip, she thinks distantly to herself, this is odd. She's not supposed to get bad dreams when he's near.
She tells him this in the morning, because she tells him everything, and maybe she just wants to hurt him too, to rub it in his face how things have changed, how things will never be the way they were before, and it's all his fault. And then she feels awful about it, and vindictive, and the contradiction is confusing.
I don't know anything anymore.
o0o0o
Karma cheers aloud as the Leprechaun blacksmith hands her sword back to her, fresh off the anvil after a round of upgrades.
"Thank you!" she sings aloud, opening up a trade menu to pay, and she leaves the shop with a spring in her step.
After delivering a message from the Undine leader to the Leprechaun leader—something about trade agreements—she found herself wandering around the Leprechaun capital city of Domnann, sightseeing and shopping and looking for jobs. Plenty of players come here for equipment upgrades, since the Leprechauns are the blacksmith race, and for those upgrades, various materials and resources are needed. Having been here before, she made sure to bring a small collection of materials only acquired in select locations in Alfheim to sell. Her inventory much lighter and her pockets much heavier, she spent some of her money on her own equipment (and some more warmth insulating gear as well).
Just travelling with Heathcliff is nostalgic. She actually never really went out with him alone into uncleared fields, because from the beginning, it was always with Godfree and Uzala. Once or twice, she managed to convince him to leave the base for once and kill some monsters with her, but neither of them had much time to do so as often as she would've liked.
But once on Floor 1, when it was just the four of them still, they did have to split up into pairs so they could save time and take on quests in different locations that would be more beneficial for them. Heathcliff also took the time to talk to people, make contacts for the future. She remembers letting him do all the meeting and talking, clinging to his side like a shy puppy, like his shadow.
A wide smile splits her face from ear to ear when she sees how much she has left even after upgrading her sword, and Heathcliff comments, "You look happy."
"I am," she agrees wholeheartedly; even the snow is being gentle in an almost merry way, instead of storming like it sometimes can. "I got some pretty decent spending money."
"I assume there's something in particular you wanted to buy?" he asks expectantly, trailing along behind her. He doesn't leave footprints in the snow, nor does it melt on his skin, and he doesn't leave shadows stretching on the ground. She doesn't mind too much that he's not all there, not really; she'll take what she can get.
It's strange, now that it's just the two of them again, and not just because their positions are reversed, with her doing all the work now. When they established an actual base, he almost never left it except to help the front lines out with boss fights. They still spent a lot of time together, but it was just talking, for the most part. Once in a while, he would come to the new Floors with them to explore the towns that had opened up.
Still, they always found ways to spend time with each other. It didn't really matter what they were doing, so long as they were doing it together. Being at his side was and is something she loved in and of itself.
Not for the first time, she wonders if he genuinely enjoyed it like she did, or if he was just that good at putting up with her without giving away how bored he was, because between the strategy talks and the mission debriefings and the training reports, they talked about a lot of pointless stuff. She remembers they had a whole debate on whether rectangular pizzas or circle pizzas were better, spanning one orange guild hunt, two field bosses, and three weeks total. And he still remembers it, if the way his eyes nearly rolled out of his head at the mention of it yesterday was any indication.
"Mmm. I might not be able to find it, though," she admits, scanning the streets as she tries her best to follow that blacksmith's recommendations. "I was looking all over for it in the real world, but no dice. Hopefully, I'll have better luck here."
With a wry smile, she realizes the subtler meaning to her words and grins back at him, exposing perfectly white teeth. "After all, I managed to find you in here."
It is a good thing. She wants this. She does. And she'll keep telling herself that until she believes it too.
o0o0o
In the safe zone of an underground labyrinthine dungeon, Karma holds up her new necklace to the light of the tiny fire she lit, admiring the smooth contours, the splashes of crimson set against the silver.
"You remembered it exactly," Heathcliff concedes, once again reading through Wuthering Heights, because he can.
"How could I not?" She still remembers the moment she first laid eyes on her original copy of the necklace. It was cold then too, on Christmas, a day full of snowball fights and questionable ice skating and improvised sledding.
Bitter longing fills the holes in her heart and eats away at them more as she thinks of them no matter how hard she tries not to.
She loved—loves—them, she really does, but they were so far away. In Aincrad, she used to always be able to see them simply by hopping on a teleport gate, no matter how many kilometers separated them. And Karma isn't the touchy-feely type, not by nature, but she is that way with people she's close to—a shoulder bump, a friendly punch to the arm, an exasperated elbow to the ribs—and it was only until they were limited to tiny boxes on a screen, in no way sufficient to fully express the warmth and loudness of their personalities, that she realized how spoiled Aincrad made her.
Even so, no matter how far away they were, the distance is insurmountable now.
I didn't want to go.
What is Uzala thinking? What is everyone from the KoB thinking? They've certainly heard about it by now. Maybe they've even been contacted to inquire about her motives or reasoning, but they won't be able to tell anyone much.
They might understand, though. She hopes that they at least understand, even if they can't accept it or forgive her.
No regrets. She means it, she has to mean it, or else it'll drive her insane, thinking about what could've been if she hadn't-
Stop it.
But was it worth what she has lost?
She lost so much more that she's managed to find again now, she reminds herself forcefully, the edges of her new necklace digging into her palm, the iciness of the steel nipping at her skin even through the fabric encasing her hand.
The question of whether or not she truly has found it again tries to surface, and she pushes it back down to where it belongs, out of sight and almost out of mind.
Heathcliff blinks when the pendant swings over the pages of the book, and he gives her a mildly cross (no pun intended) look. "Do you mind?"
She wiggles the necklace in his face. "Put it on for me."
With a long-suffering sigh, he takes the necklace and puts it on himself before settling back pointedly. She narrows her eyes in response to his deadpan amusement, and he holds her gaze evenly for a few seconds before rolling his eyes and gesturing for her to turn around.
Her shoulders tense, her posture stiff and brittle like ice, when she hears him shift behind her. The pendant drags against the base of her neck for a moment, unexpectedly cold, and she knows he's behind her, his hands inches away from her neck; her breath freezes in her chest as Clover's ice cold fingers dig into her windpipe-
"There," he says out loud as he moves back, and she releases a long breath, shoulders slumping as a thin sheet of ice shatters; her heart beats again as she presses her palm against her knee unconsciously.
The metal sits frostily underneath her shirt against her sternum, right above where he stabbed her in their fight. She rubs the spot absently with the heel of her hand. It might be her imagination, but the pendant doesn't seem to be absorbing her virtual body heat at all.
"Are you real?" she blurts out, and their feeble fire flickers, sending shadows dancing across the walls.
A book page flips idly. "As real as you want me to be," he answers, echoing the response he gave her when she first asked him that question.
Desperate to get a better answer this time, she presses, "But are you—do you—is this you, thinking and feeling right now? Or is this some sort of AI that just...acts like you?" She twists her fingers together in the hem of her cloak, her eyes glued to the too bright red fabric shifting in her hands. "Are you really Heathcliff?" Are you really what I came back here for?
When she can bear to look up at him, he looks almost amused, the dying campfire reflected in tiny embers in his eyes. "That's an interesting question."
With a dull snap, he closes the book, long, slender fingers pressed together, a razor thin smile on his lips. Monsters groan and growl from outside their safe zone, and the miles of earth above their heads suddenly seem so much heavier.
"And I think you already know the answer," he says, looking almost apologetic in his sadness. "You aren't the only one who left things behind in Aincrad, Catherine."
Humans are wonderful at bluffing and faking and putting on masks, and they're even better at risking their well-being to satisfy what some call curiosity, and others call stupidity.
Even gods, or humans playing gods, can't turn back time, but they sure can pretend until time runs out and there's nothing left to hide behind.
o0o0o
oh, you were my hurricane 'cause in your eyes I felt so safe, and in them I found shelter from the storm - Hurricane (Anson Seabra)
it's like wishing for rain as I stand in the desert, but I'm holding you closer than most, 'cause you are my heaven - A Drop in the Ocean (Ron Pope)
Haha what are happy endings?
Also, Karma: "What would you change about Wuthering Heights?" Alternatively: "Let's brainstorm fAnFiCtIoN"
(Honestly though, there are a few good ones on AO3 XD)
Speaking of fanfiction, there's this one called 'Kayaba's Dream' by Racke (I know it's on FFN, not sure about AO3) that inspired the first part of this chapter, where Heathcliff was talking about how the exclusion of magic was an act of mercy. It's a short but very good meta (is that the right word? XD) about why Kayaba decided not to use magic in SAO. Anyways, it's one of the very few Kayaba-centric fics out there (and honestly, most Kayaba-centric fics out there, I've probably read XD).
I love 'You Are the Reason' :D I kinda like to see the 'light defeating the dark' as not just Karma defeating the forces fighting against her, which is a more direct interpretation (and I love symbolism :D) and she's not really 'light' anyways XD Honestly, I feel like it applies more to Heathcliff, where they both wish the light would've defeated the dark in him so that he could've kept her safe instead of hurt her. Unfortunately, it's a little too late for that...
Anyways. I just love song lyrics a lot. I think about them late at night :3