– JACK OF HEARTS –

"Its my first time away from home!" -Jack

"Sir Fratley, I don't think I can live on my own – not without you." -Freya

Freya slowly came awake surrounded on all sides but one by soft familiar bedding, and pressed down into it by an equally familiar warm weight. Fratley shifted softly on top of her.

This was how they had always slept together. She had missed this so indescribably.

She drew her arms and legs and tail around him and began to kiss him awake.

He slowly fluttered his eyes open and instantly began to smile. He tried to speak but couldn't due to the assault of kisses that grew stronger when he opened his mouth. He pressed down against her in response and she gasped.

"Fratley, I don't think I can live on my own – not without you." Freya repeated underneath him.

"Then you shall not." Fratley responded with a powerful kiss.

The morning light streaming through the small window made their hair glisten, and made a miniature cosmos out of the floating dust in the air.

For the first time since her devastation at knowing he lived without his memory of their life together, she was flooded with hope for building one with him anew.

Jack hid panting in the lee of a roof in a damaged alleyway. He wished he could enjoy being in Burmecia again.

It was his first time home since fleeing with his family during the Alexandrian attack, but even if the pain put on his broken body by the stresses of teleportation from Alexandria castle had not been present, his broken heart gave him the same if not greater pain.

After the better part of an hour recovering, and drying his face, he threw his hood up to keep the rain off his tender wounds and set off into the streets. It did not take him long to reach his next goal, so well aimed was the endpoint of the teleportation spell he had nearly died using.

He caught sight of Sir Fratley in a break in the rain. His tall and well defined self stood out against the small crowd of others and the rope lashed scaffolding as he worked tirelessly to rebuild a row of damaged stone dwellings along the street on which Jack tread.

Jack's broken heart beat painfully in his chest. He stood there for a moment, watching Fratley, shuffled his feet and resisted tears as he looked at the stones. Eventually they began to fall, and blended with the rain droplets, a blessing given to him by the skies of his home. He drew breath shakily, each time trying to stop his weeping and succeeding after the fourth try. He slowly stepped over to the edge of the restoration site and hoisted himself atop an ancient wagon piled with freshly cut stone waiting to be used. There he sat, and there he waited.

Each member of the party came to get stone and took barely any notice of him; he shifted dutifully out of the way if they needed a block he sat on. Otherwise he sat as still as the rest of the wagonload.

When it came Fratley's turn, Jack spoke up.

"Sir Irontail…"

Fratley turned his head to look at him.

"What can I do for you?" He asked with his usual earnest sincerity.

Here he was breaking his back in the rain to help rebuild the destroyed houses of others only because his code of conduct demanded he do so, and yet he still had all the time in the world for a rain soaked child. Same old Fratley, memory or not.

Jack drew another shaky breath.

"What ever is the matter?" Fratley asked, drawing closer.

Jack abruptly moved to Fratley and drew him into the most powerful hug his small good and bad arms could muster, his hood dropping as he did so.

"Thank goodness you're alive, you're really alive." Jack openly began to cry. He buried his head into Fratley's chest.

"Young Jack!" He exclaimed. "I feared that you…." The words died in his mouth as he examined the small boy.

Of course Fratley remembered him. This only made him cry harder.

Fratley looked down in horror at Jack's injuries.

"We must get you to an infirmary immediately." Fratley insisted.

"No." Jack smiled through his tears. "Of all my wounds, these you see hurt me the least."

Fratley felt Jack's hug tighten. He would take Jack to the best doctor or nurse he could find whether he wanted to go or not, but at the moment all he could do was reciprocate this affection.

Jack did not release his grasp when he stated, "Sir Irontail, I must speak with you, it's a matter of great importance."

Fratley restrained his reflexes in his response. Jack had an eloquence and an urgency in his eyes completely uncharacteristic of a child, even the war victims he had seen thus far.

"How may I be of help?"

Jack lead Fratley by the hand cautiously away until he found a nearby shed that was rain-tight but still abandoned, and there he sat him down, and refused to let go of his forepaw. Before Fratley could say anything, Jack again began to cry, and pour out what was in him.

"Thank you for everything you've done for me and my family. You tried so hard to save mum and my little brother, you did your very best. I wanted you to win so badly…"

Fratley remembered as well, as it was one of very few memories he now had, and one which pained him endlessly.

"I felt so safe with you, so did Adam, so did Mama. I wish you could have stayed with us, but I'm glad you didn't because you'd have been killed too, and Freya needs you."

"How do you know…" Fratley began to ask

Jack interrupted him. "You must promise me something."

"Anything within my power." Fratley felt compelled to say.

"You promise me that you will care for your beautiful Freya, and never forget her or leave her again."

Fratley's response stuck in his throat, and his chest tightened.

"I have a gift I beg you to accept. Please consider it a debt of gratitude to you, sir Knight."

Jack withdrew an emerald green orb from the small satchel at his side. Fratley was immediately captivated by its beauty. It was the color of calm tropical seas in legends of paradise, as transparent as a teardrop and it shimmered from within like starlight, with a hint of iridescence.

Fratley gently took it in his forepaw and worked his fingers to turn it over, as his other one was still clasped in Jack's. As he took hold of the glassy orb, he found it warm to the touch, which surprised him. The shimmer inside seemed to magnetically move against the limits of its inner walls and concentrate at the points where his hand touched it, and toward his heart, and he swore he could feel a physical pull toward him, as if the object was trying to fly from his hand and toward his upper body.

"What is…." Fratley began, but stopped himself. He felt he was in the presence of something sacred which demanded his whole respect, and that even questioning its nature would somehow be disrespectful.

"I shall treasure this forever." He half-whispered. He felt a great finality once this passed his lips.

"Yes, you will." Jack beamed up at him with a smile that made his half-face look almost complete again. "And now, thanks to you, I have almost fulfilled what I set out to do. I am a fortunate one indeed. I must leave for Cleyra as soon as I can, it will be a very long journey."

"But my young friend, Cleyra was destroyed!"

"I know."

Jack leaned toward Fratley and hugged him again, and took the forepaw that he held in his and gave it a long kiss.

"I will miss you."

Jack abruptly rose, and released Fratley's forepaw that still tingled from his gesture. This warmth distracted him from the duller sensation of the Orb in his opposite forepaw getting hotter, and beginning to vibrate. Jack made quickly for the door.

"Jack, wait! I – "

The Orb in Fratley's grasp exploded in a shower of emerald green, and rainbow. The entire shed lit up and the rain falling around it became droplets suspended in the air. Aurora Borealis streamed from the open door and broken window, and cascaded along the lines of mortar and puddles of water between the stones of the street, and up the ivy of the walls of the neighboring buildings. It was as gentle as it was intense. All this occurred in complete silence.

Jack watched for a moment in awe, and then scampered away.

The shed, in fact the entire world around him, had disappeared from his senses. Fratley looked up into a warm tunnel of light and feeling, the End of which seemed impossibly far away and bore the sublime characteristic rainbow iridescence of oil trickled upon the surface of water on a sunny day.

He knew, without knowing how he knew, that this was the furthest distance he had ever or would ever gaze across, and that this End he peered at was something the wisest in all the world sought their entire lives just to catch a glimpse of, and rarely succeeded in doing.

That End did not move toward him nor did he move toward it, but from it across the impossible distance came to him wisps of itself equally resplendent, as if it were shedding tears. They drifted down like feathers, hundreds of them. When the first settled on his heart, it exploded into him what had been so long missing.

Memory.

With this warm explosion came the faces of his parents and the feeling of security in their arms and his favorite hiding places. His first memories, and his memories of remembering them.

Another wisp from that far away unknown place came to him and deposited its warmth into him.

This brought with him his first memory of experiencing laughter.

Another.

This brought with it the first time he had ever tasted a dead pepper and spit it out as his grandfather laughed.

One by one the gentle kindnesses from Afar fell on him. Each one bringing with it precious gift of memory, remembrance, completeness, wholeness. What was missing was gently, painfully, wonderfully returned. The rate and quantity of the Stuff being shed upon him steadily increased. Touch after touch, piece by piece, his life swirled back into form inside of him.

No longer in order in terms of time, but in the order he so desperately needed. Smells and tastes and touch came first and laid the foundation for more complex and nuanced experiences of places, people, things and situations.

His fruitful and satisfying childhood, his tendency to ponder, his early thirst for adventure and the trouble it often brought him. His terrible sense of self doubt that set upon him in his teenage years when he found out that his body was not, in fact, unbreakable, and in stark contrast, when he became acutely aware of the discomfort he instilled in others by being adept at nearly everything he tried save cooking.

And then, catalyzed partly by that memory, with a burst of inner summer's warmth came Freya. The memories of her erupted and blossomed into him like spring foliage after a rainy season, so intensely it hurt him.

How she had caught his eye the moment she appeared before him for her Novitiate. How he had become quietly smitten with her during that delicious time, and how she became very un-quietly smitten in return. How it felt to be young and healthy without a care beyond honing their skills together and being in eachother's company.

How it felt to mutually progress past the initial flirtatious inconsequential stages of merely finding her adorable, something that took he far longer than it took her, and fall deep into love with her as he discovered more about her.

The way he was forced to resist his instincts to wrap himself around her when he learned her early life and family were casualties of the recent war, and how she had essentially no prospects whatsoever being born into a small family with a largely unspoken last name, and how this bleak prospect was now cemented by her having no living family left, and the way she was trying to transcend and live a meaningful life despite having difficulty mastering even the simplest of tasks.

How she struggled to remember to properly prepare her dress and armor, how it took her much longer and considerably more effort than the usual Novitiate to learn to handle any of the basic blades or the Burmecian shortspear. How she got overheated easily in summer, and how she would become cold and shiver on a brisk autumn day that he and others would barely notice. How her first high jump ended with her shrieking in pain from a broken ankle and how he set it for her. How he endlessly fawned over her and offered encouragement, and the ceaseless taunts and shaken heads and hushed discussions in archways it began to instill in the Dragon Knighthood.

How he had become infatuated with her rare vibrant blue eyes, a color highly unusual in their people.

How she had reacted when he revealed his admiration of this and other facets of her beauty.

And how she had reacted when he revealed his feelings for her, and his own intense joy when she quietly, tearfully reciprocated them.

How it felt to make love with her soft body and beautiful soul, how it felt to twist around her in bed and how good she tasted and smelled. How he and he alone was able to bring a fluttering smile across her face and a shimmer to those soulful blue eyes. How he had lovingly helped her reach orgasm for the first time. How they chased each other, how they caught each other, how they yearned and writhed for each other no matter how physically close they pressed and the promises they made buried in the blankets. How he delighted in the discovery that she was intensely ticklish, and how he delighted in becoming addicted to the laughter and sounds she made when he took advantage of this.

How her laughter was an intense but rare thing that only he had ever been able to bring forth…

How they had kept this a secret for some time as the fable of the Novitiate falling in love with her mentor was equal parts clichéd and traditionally inappropriate. How her heart and will had strengthened from his love and touch and presence in her life, and how her progress then eclipsed any she had made before and seemed as then a blur. How upon announcing their feelings for each other within trusted circles, they were met with accolades as she was no longer Novitiate unmolded, but a skilled fighter, a virtuous and trusted and gentle-spoken Lady, the very first Lady in service in the military or as a knight of any capacity in Burmecia; an asset to the Kingdom and the pride of King and country.

And then began coming to him the completeness of his life. With each wisp now came the missing threads to bind the tapestry of his life together.

And then came the shame and regret.

The unforgiveable, awful, unforgettable misery he had wrought upon the one he loved, and how he would have stopped had she demanded he stay, and how he knew she wouldn't for the virtuous and selfless nature he instilled in her. How he had sewed the seeds for the destruction of her and his own happiness for something as broad and fleeting as King and Country.

How he had arrogantly and foolishly deluded himself that the actions of one man with a spear from an ancient and unchanged kingdom awash in rain eternal could have made a difference upon the stage of the Wide World at large or turned the tides of Time, and stilled the hand of Kingdoms that made ships that could navigate the skies, or those that possessed the ability to control deep magic and powerful things beyond the realms and understanding of men and beast.

How she had confessed her truest heart to him and told him that she could not make do without him close at hand, and how he had replied with cold and empty and stale words unbecoming his love for her. How she had fallen to the ground as he walked away. How he should have asked her at the very least to accompany him upon his fool's errand, and how he had broken the one empty and outlandish promise he had made to her: To come back. Even when he had come back, he had not truly. Not until this exact moment, and not due to his own skill, or volition, or sense of honor.

The warm light continued to pour into him.

"To what corners of the world have you travelled?"

And then came the horror of what he had endured at the outer reaches of his lonely fools errand. How pining and heartache and an unsure nomadic course had lead him across oceans to the edge of the world and beyond it. How there, past the Great Fall, then the Great Fold, across the Great Dark Gap and then beyond the Great Sweep of Horizon and Azimuth he had found himself in a dark and alien Chasm that stretched ever onward underneath unfamiliar fast-moving stars, in a realm beyond where color reached. And how in passage through that glassy sided chasm, searching ever onward as it stretched, at that point only to try and find his way back to the world, he had come upon that border past which memory could not reach and had not known it. A towering translucent wall spanning the chasm and sky above it, silent and pensive.

How he had braved it the way he had foolishly braved all other things under the guise of a Dragon Knight, and this in a place where the name Burmecia, and the name Fratley, and the idea of Knight, or love or even memory no longer had a meaning.

How with fear in his heart he had outwardly spoken words of encouragement to himself and how those words had been swallowed by the air around him before reaching his ears, for even sound held no domain there. And how with an outward audacity maintained as if the eyes of his King were always watching him, he braved the barrier.

The warm passage above him to where the sublime and loving wisps were coming from, the passage to a place far beyond where that otherworldly chasm stretched, had faded and he could no longer see its iridescent End. He could only see the worn and dusty thatched ceiling and beams of the old shed and the last remnants of the aurora of that fading Blessing, but down still drifted the last few feathery rainbowed wisps. He desperately savored them in his eyes and memory as they drifted toward him in the way prayers were made by children, but he was now gutturally afraid, for he now knew what these last touches from that far off Source bore. He became aware of the sound of his own weeping, the echo of the last time he heard it drawing ever nearer…

And now came the memories of all of his memories being torn from him, the last memories he had ever held and yet still not been allowed to keep.

How in that black and distant chasm he had braved the barrier and instantly regretted it. The feeling of each of these memories, now just regained, being ripped asunder from his body and mind and heart and spirit, some in clusters and fistfuls, some in tatters and long tendrils, some all at once and some horrifically slowly. He re-lived the loss of each memory, each experience, each face, each emotion, each Sacred and deep-kept thing that he, like any other living, thinking, feeling creature was sure until that moment it was impossible to have separated from him.

With each wisp that erupted into him now came a memory of a memory torn, ripped, peeled away from him no matter how hard his feeble self had tried to hold it. How they had escaped his grasp frictionlessly, like trying to grab light. How he had screamed and torn at the barrier, and then his own face and body trying to stop it to no avail. How he had looked for some malevolence to blame within the barrier but found only indifference, and presence, and how he was forced to reckon with the nature of things beyond his narrow understanding of the world while all this pain was inflicted upon him, all these things were taken from him pitilessly.

And then the shed was empty save one more drifting, weightless, iridescent form. And now he struggled and gnashed his teeth and tore at himself and the earth around himself just as he had on the cold and alien rock of that dark and distant chasm and the wrong side of that silvery cosmic barrier stretching across it. For he knew what this last precious, awful fragment of himself bore. He tried to be away from it for fear of the pain he knew was coming. He could not handle it. He could not go through this, not again. Not a knight ten times as strong and resolute as he could bear a second time this torment. The wisp of light gently followed his struggling form through the air on invisible currents of Aether ever toward him. It continued to him as his aching back drew up against the stone wall. He cowered and sobbed as it did. His tears blurred it in his vision. He tried to swat it away, to no avail. It made slowly, directly for his Heart. He shut his eyes before it made contact.

And then erupted into him the memory of the loss of the memories, and feelings, and meaning of his precious Freya. For this was the last thing the barrier had syphoned out of him, the thing he had held onto more desperately than all the others.

Freya, Freya –Freya!

He had bargained and pleaded with the great un-listening presence to leave him only with this most sacred remnant of who he was and who he needed, he had squirmed and writhed and shrieked and toiled upon that black glassy ground that all else be taken from him before the memories of her, so he might hold onto Freya just a little bit longer, and that robbery might stop before even the last remnant of her was taken from his soul. But it didn't, and she had been. He screamed her name and the Chasm ate it, as the shimmering silver-gray barrier had eaten the rest of her. And the feeling of everything that was her, and his life with her, and his love for her, and his promise to her, being ripped from him, had been so awful it had torn out a piece of his Soul with it, the part of him that clung to her most tightly. And though he had now regained it, with it he had regained this incomprehensible feeling of its loss and for a moment he wished to forget it all again just to be rid of this torment as he cried on the floor of the shed, for now it would not cease.

He cried for her, he screamed her name as he had in that fearsome and Empty place beyond the Horizon, over and over. And now instead of it being devoured in the air just past his lips, it rang over the falling rain and echoed in the gloomy street and against the walls of the war-torn buildings. And he kept screaming.

And like a final blessing, she was at his side in an instant. And wordlessly, as he screamed for her despite her smothering him in her kisses and her bosom, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what had happened, and she too began to cry.

Fratley wound himself around Freya as a thread around a spool. His screams, which had flowed in her absence, now ebbed in her presence.

"My Freya – " He sobbed. "I cannot be without you."

She had to prove it. She had to be without doubt. Trying many times to form speech through her cries, she finally was able to ask him a question.

"Wh – when you – when was the first time I wore this – and why did I wear it?" Her tail had already coiled around him, and she took and held the small orange ribbon at its end against his chest.

"I – I first saw you wear it when you came to meet me at the inner gate of Burmecia, wh – when I – the day I…." He momentarily lapsed into heavy sobs. Bringing himself to utter the action he was most ashamed of stabbed at him. She pressed the orange ribbon of her tail against him harder with her forepaw, demanding the complete answer. "When I left you behind – " Those words caught in his throat.

"And you wore it because that is a piece of the ribbon – that our people's poor wives tie around their gates and trees when they are widowed!"

It was true, he had finally returned to her, and he had answered a question that had been unanswered and burning in her mind since he had left her, for she never knew if he had noticed that she'd worn it on that horrible day.

"H – How could I not have noticed?"

"How could you have noticed, and taken your leave anyway!"

She tore the ribbon to scraps between them.

Now it was her turn to shriek pitifully, and she buried herself in him and did so with emotions that overpowered even his.

He had been given the blessing of forgetfulness and the pain had been dulled, while all this time she had born its weight.

How could he have left me like this…

"F – Fratley I…" She could not speak through her tears.

All that time spent searching for him, missing him, aching and breaking for want of him. It had broken her somewhere deep inside, it was now all she felt she knew. She had to be the rational one for all those around her come what may, on top of the ever-present loneliness. She had to give good council; she had to be other's strength and guidance when she so painfully needed it herself from someone who was not there. The cracks in her soul finally opened an out poured all the misery and grief and poison this way of living had grown inside her.

She screamed into the folds of his clothing and pressed her forehead up underneath the arch of his chin. She clawed at his hands and arms to hold her tighter. Her voice cracked against the despair.

Each time a wave crashed against her shore she convulsed. When it began to subside and cries turned to gasps, it suddenly renewed and poured forth again stronger yet.

Fratley clung to her even harder than he had tried to cling to his memories of her as they were taken from him, and she clung back.

He understood everything she was trying to silently say. With his memory had returned the familiarity of their love language.

He wrapped around her completely until she could no longer be seen.

How could I have left her like this…

Here he had been with her and even while trying to be close to her again, he had been so passively disconnected from how she felt, he was astounded at how all this pain could ever have been locked inside any one being for so long without it turning her spirit and body to dust. And more astounded, and appalled at how her pain had not cut through him when they had touched and returned his memory by its own power alone. He and only he had left her so alone, and this was his punishment.

"I'm so, so sorry…." It stuck in his throat.

She looked up at him, angrily, pleadingly.

He drew back, kissed her forehead and did not release the kiss. She pushed against his kiss and closed her eyes against torrents of tears.

He had done this to them both. It was now his duty to put it right.

He held her to him for a long time, long after she quieted. When the trembling weakness in his legs finally lessened, he gathered her up and carried her home.

"Your beautiful feet are weary and world-worn, you shall no longer tread on them."

In the candle lit sanctuary of her – of their – little home, she began to pour out all she had yearned to say for so many years, and he took her face gently in his forepaws and gazed intently into her eyes in order to better listen to her.

"I looked for you, I looked for this for so long. I walked this empty world wide to find what love felt like again. I haven't felt love since you left me alone."

He kissed her.

"I preserved those memories. I kept them but they grew stale, almost like they weren't even my own"

He kissed her again.

"I missed you so much. When I found you and you didn't remember me, I wished to die. I kept wishing that from then to now."

He pressed his forehead against hers and shut his eyes.

He lovingly washed every part of her and mouthed on her as they held each other close. He was alarmed at how thin and bony she had become, failing to eat for want of him and eternally travelling light, never stopping to give herself what she needed. Still, she was somehow as soft and lovely as he remembered.

As he remembered…

She rediscovered his body and he re-rediscovered hers, and helped her remember just how good she was capable of feeling. She had forgotten this with the same absolution he had forgotten everything else.

"Fratley I can't live on my own, not without you."

He replied by silencing her with a kiss far harder than any he had given her before.

He lovingly stroked her where she was most sensitive and followed there with kisses. He was silently disquieted as he discovered her unfamiliar scars and blemishes in the candle light, she had been hurt so many times since he had left her. But she squirmed in his grasp and squeaked, and he lost himself in the whole of her again.

He was delighted to find she was still as ticklish as ever. Her breasts were cloudsoft and sensitive and he dwelt there longer than anywhere else and worshipped, and listened to her heartbeat. Every kiss and gentle pull and tug and push there sent her breathing heavily. He had always been shamelessly addicted to her bosom.

She began to attack him with a new boldness and found that indeed he too was ticklish in certain places, and took full advantage of it. They frolicked together in her welcoming bed and soon became a twisted mass of entangled white limbs and noses and tails. He pinned her to the bed and she joyfully thrashed against his body and begged for him.

With every move they made he worked his way into her. He thrust and she thrust back, they fit together. They glued to each other.

The love they had made the night before had been wonderful and had set her heart to beating again, but this was very different. Satisfaction of every old desire and the resolution to every last one of her searches was to be found here. This was sacred and desperate and intense, the bed they nested into felt close to the Origin of Love itself.

Neither of them lasted long and she came first and explosively, as she always did. This set him off and he drove her into the bedding, breathing hard in release. Before his breathing had even calmed, he had fallen asleep. She kissed up into him and followed suit very quickly.

She had finally found him, the drawn circle of her life was now complete and there could finally be rest for her heart.