~**Zidane's POV**~
I don't know how long I had stared at the moon that night, but it was something that I felt that I desperately needed. It didn't calm my mind or give me a state of peace, but I felt… happier just looking at it. Too much had been happening recently, and I know that I'm slightly paranoid because Dagger is supposed to have the baby any day now, and Jade and I still barely know each other even though we've been living under the same roof for about two years now. She's almost ten. God, how quickly she's grown up.
I really thought that we would be able to hit it off two years ago when I finished reading the play to her, but I don't know. Something didn't click, and we've barely spoken to each other since even though I know that she didn't mind me reading to her in the least. I don't know what happened, and in a way I don't want to know. And recently she's been running off for no reason, and yet I can't even say that I'm not her partner in crime on this. I've been running away for no reason, and I guess I'm just not setting a good example for her. Everything has been so much harder since I came back, but I'll be damned if I ever leave again.
I'm lucky that Dagger has taken care of most of the political work for me to do, but I still feel bad for letting her take care of it all. I know as their king I should act more like it, but it's just not my style, and I only dress the part when I have to at noble gatherings, and even then I get the chance to leave early.
I started to walk back with a lot on my mind. I knew that something was going to happen in the near future, and I could tell that Jade sensed it, too, when I looked into her eyes. It was just something behind them that I could read. A mutual understanding, in a way. It sends shivers down my spine and even haunts my dreams, which is why sometimes I can't even sleep at night. I haven't really told anyone about that, but I can tell that Dagger is beginning to wonder why I'm never there when she wakes up in the morning. I don't want to hurt her, but in a way I don't think that I can possibly hurt her more than I already have.
I think I stayed out there all night, just looking at the moon fall and the sunrise. I didn't want to head back for I knew something was going to happen that day. Something terrible, something great, I really didn't know, but I would have to face it sooner or later, so what better time than the present, ne?
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Jade sat outside the room while she listened to the doctors work with her mother as quickly as possible. It was hard for her to hear them since her mother's cries droned out any sound that came from the room. Her water had broken sometime earlier that day, and now she was about fifteen hours into labor. Her mother's water breaking was very unexpected considering that the baby came very early. It was about a month early, in fact, something that was rarely heard of. She wasn't allowed in the room with her mother because the doctors claimed that she was, 'too young,' and would, 'distract them from doing their job.' It didn't matter though. Jade didn't want to go in there and see her mother like that, anyway. She probably would have started to cry.
A nurse quickly rushed out of the room and darted her head from left to right. Looking down, she spotted Jade and quickly kneeled by her side. "Darlin'," she breathed quickly while grabbing a hold of Jade's shoulder. "Listen to me. I need you… to go find Beatrix. Tell her… her majesty needs her… to find the King. Please, my lady… be quick." Jade nodded and sprang to her feet while the nurse rushed back into the delivery room. It was only then that she had realized that Zidane was still missing from the castle. It had been over a day since he was last seen and she was desperately hoping that he hadn't left Alexandria.
She ran down the nearest flight of stairs, pulling her dress up slightly so that she wouldn't trip over it on her way down. Steiner was standing at the bottom of the stairs looking worried. Once he heard the footsteps, he turned around and looked up at his young princess.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asked as she finally reached the bottom steps. Stopping and focusing her energy for a moment, she puts two of her fingers on each of her temples and closed her eyes for a moment. She tried using her power to sense the auras around her to try to track down Beatrix. It was something that she rarely used and very few people knew about. They was no reason for them to know about it anyway, so the whole discussion about it was always kept under wraps. A few moments later, her eyes snapped open and were a dark brown before they faded back into their light blue.
"I can't talk, Steiner. I need to find Beatrix!" she yelled over her shoulder as she raced by him out into the courtyard. She saw Beatrix standing in front of a few guards that were reporting in from their duties. "Beatrix!" she called out as she ran up to her and almost crashing into her legs. Beatrix looked down at her with a confused look on her face while the rest of the female guards that were standing there spread out to continue their search. "Have you found any hint of where Zidane could be yet?" Jade asked, still slightly out of breath.
Beatrix shook her head before answering, "We're still looking for him, but the guards that were just here reported that they had seen him walking his way back saying that he was on his way and should be back within a little while. Why do you ask?"
Jade didn't reply to that and just asked, "Do you think you could cast float on me for a short while?" Beatrix stared at her for a moment before Jade clarified her reasoning. "I think I can get a wider range on locating his aura if I can get to higher ground, and you know I can't climb that well with my hand in its current condition."
"As you wish, your Highness," she calmly stated before she started to case the spell. "I just hope for Her Majesty's sake that this works." She clasped her hands together and a white aura surrounded her and Jade's body. Slowly, Jade began to be lifted off the ground and higher into the air. When she became high enough so that she could look over the trees, she placed her hands on her temples and concentrated on Zidane's aura, which was much different from other people's.
Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration as she tried searching for him. It was harder than usual because she didn't even know where to look, but at this height with her range, she could have probably reach into a small section of the town across the river. Several minutes had passed by of her searching, and she couldn't even pick up a small hint of where he was. The white light around her that made her float was slowly starting to fade. Beatrix yelled from beneath her, "Your Highness! You better hurry up because I can't hold you up there much longer!"
Jade nodded before she tried expanding her efforts in order to get at least a small hint of where he was. Just before the light around her fully disappeared, she finally locked on to his aura, which was now rushing towards the castle and heading into the front doors, but that wasn't the only thing that she picked up. Her eyes snapped open before she let out a piercing scream of pain that seemed to echo throughout the lands surrounding the castle.
It was then that Beatrix lost her concentration, and Jade plummeted to the ground. The wind whipped her hair around her face as she began her journey towards the ground. Normally, she would have whipped her tail so that she could go upright, but the pain that had shocked her nearly knocked her unconscious, and all her senses were muddled together.
Luckily, Steiner was near by when he heard the princess scream before she started to fall and he managed to catch her before she hit the ground while one of the near by guards was helping Beatrix regain her balance. She too had felt a small portion of the pain that Jade had felt since they were partially linked in magic at the time, but she was only dazed by it and not really affected. Beatrix got back on her feet and rushed over to Steiner and Jade's side to see how the princess was doing. Normally, even with the connection, they weren't able to feel the same pain like they did, but it had been strong enough just to reach Beatrix without doing any actual harm to her.
"Are you alright, Your Highness?" Steiner asked as he brushed a few strands of hair out of her pale face. He looked over her quickly, and noticed that she wasn't hurt by the fall, but her horn on her head was glowing a strange reddish color. Beatrix placed her hand on her horn and pulled it back quickly when she noticed that she felt the same pain again when she touched it.
"Jade. Jade?" she asked as she rested her hand on her forehead, making sure not to touch her horn again, to see if she had a fever at all. Nothing, as far as she could tell, and the princess's eyes were still closed. She was going to call out her name again, but her eyes suddenly snapped open again, and her horn flashed bright red before fading into its normal ivory color. A sharp whimper left her mouth as her eyes quickly filled with tears before they spilled over her cheeks. She quickly curled into a ball against Steiner and started rocking her body in his arms with small gasps and sobs coming from her.
No one knew what was going on with her, but she kept crying and sobbing with nothing to hint at what she was so sad about, but Beatrix knew that it had something to do with what happened. She leaned closer to Jade to ask her what happened when she was up in the air, but as she leaned in closer, she heard the small mantra Jade was whispering to herself over and over again as she rocked her body in Steiner's arms.
"Don't let her leave me… Don't take her from me, please…"
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~**One Week Later**~
Jade sat in her mother's room, looking out the window with a peaceful expression on her face. Even though she looked peaceful enough, a boiling rage and a heart filled with contempt and sadness was beating within her chest. So much had happened in the past week, and yet it seemed like nothing had changed at all. Even if the situation was now completely different from what it once was. Everything was now different, and there would never be a way to change it back to what it once was.
She was now the Queen of Alexandria, officially the youngest one to ever hold that position, and she was only turning ten years old in a couple of weeks. What had happened that she had to hold that rank? It was something that no one expected, and yet everyone hoped that it would never happen.
During the sixteenth hour of Queen Garnet's labor, she had passed away. The doctors were lucky enough to be able to save the baby before it, too, had died. It was a young baby boy, which still remained unnamed. The King, Zidane, arrived into the delivery room moments after Garnet had died, and that was when Jade had screamed in the courtyard not too far away. The whole scene was fairly tragic to everyone that was involved. Not many knew what had happened to Zidane after he came in to see his wife was dead, but from the gossip that was being spread around the nurses that were in the delivery room at the time, supposedly Zidane had held his wife's body after they had saved the baby and was rocking her in his arms, softly whispering, "Don't let her leave me… Don't take her from me, please…"
He had stayed like that, just rocking her and crying for several minutes, not willing to move nor release her from his grasp. Even though they wanted him to see the baby, they knew it was better to just let him grieve for some time. After all, he had just lost one of the few things that he really cared about in the world, and it was later said by a few of his friends that Garnet was one of the few things that he had left going for him.
He disappeared not long after, maybe a few hours after she had died, and no one had heard of him since. Since then, Jade and Beatrix had been left to take care of Jade's baby brother, 'The Young Prince,' as most called him since they had nothing else to call him at the time. It was hard, and the only person that Jade managed to be able to talk to throughout all this time was Beatrix even though most of the time was spent crying.
Lady Eiko was supposed to come and visit in a few days with Regent Cid and Lady Helda so that they could come and pay their condolences, not to mention help out Jade with everything that she needed. Cid had also said that he was willing to help her run a few things for a while until she was old enough to handle everything on her own, which by the way things were looking, wouldn't be too long since she was already mature for her age. They just felt bad for her because of everything that she has had to go through since the beginning of her life.
Now was just a time for Jade to sit by herself and try to collect her thoughts. Her eyes seemed empty and hollow, and as rare as it was to see her smile before, she now never smiled at all. She had issued the order to have them find Zidane, just so that she could know where he was for the time being, but in a way, she already knew. It was a place that he would go to visit old friends and be able to be away from everyone else, and while the sadness that he had almost ate him alive, he never had to cry because the Heaven's always did it for him.
This was one of the few things that she managed to learn about him before he had left. No one knew how long it would be before he would decide to come back, but she wasn't worried. She had expected this of him anyway. She knew he would run because it was the only way that he could deal with his pain, as he had said. She didn't really understand it, but then again she knew that everyone had his or her own different methods on dealing with what had just happened and running away was his.
She reached her hand into the crib that was right beside where she was sitting and gently stroked the soft blonde hair of her little brother. He had been sleeping most of the day and wasn't conscious of what had been happening. After all, he was only a week old. He had dark brown eyes like Garnet, yet he didn't receive her horn. He did, however, did have the same tail as his father, but unlike Jade's, it was the same sandy brown as his hair, not the dark brown that Jade had. Even though he was just a newborn, he was already starting to show traits of both his parents. He was calmer like Garnet, yet he still thought that everything going around his was amazing and was a very active but not fussy baby.
The doors behind Jade opened with very little sound as Beatrix walked into the room. She looked at Jade with a worried look in her eyes, but Jade didn't even turn around to know that it was her. She just continued to look out the window and softly stroke her brother's hair. "Any word on Zidane yet?" she asked with an even voice showing no emotion. Beatrix closed the door behind her and walked toward the window where, she too, looked out over the city. Without even turning to look down at the young queen, she shook her head and rested both her hands on the windowsill.
"Nothing yet, Your Majesty. We're still looking for him, even though that I know you know where he is." She paused for a moment as if to see if Jade would have responded to that. When only silence greeted her, like she had figured, she continued. "I also know that you are leading our troops in the wrong direction. It's like you're hiding him, and I just wanted to know why. If you know that he needs to help you run this country, since you are Queen until he returns, and it's his job to also help raise his son, why don't you just order them to bring him back?"
Jade lowered her head for a moment as she thought on that comment. She had asked herself that a while ago. In a way, she hated him for leaving her when she needed him the most like he always had done. She hated him for many reasons, most of them she couldn't even remember anymore, but they were there. Finally, she lifted her head to look at Beatrix, only to find her head general staring straight back at her. "I protect him because I understand him."
Jade stood up from where she was sitting and smoothed out the wrinkles of her dress with her hands. Wrapping her tail around her waist, she walked towards the door and simply waved her hand for Beatrix to follow her. Beatrix stood where she was for a moment, trying to figure out what Jade's words had meant, but she just figured that either they would be explained in time or that she would eventually be able to figure it out on her own. Following her queen silently, she eventually found herself out in the courtyard where the two Queens previous to Jade were buried.
Jade brushed her hand over the tombstone of the grandmother that she never knew, and the tombstone of her mother that her little brother would never know. She made it a personal note that she would tell all the stories of her mother to her brother so that in a way even though he would never meet her that it would be as if he had lived with her anyway. She also vowed that her brother would grow up to know what it was like to have a father, unlike she did for most of her life.
Beatrix watched in silence as Jade walked around both tombstones, slowly reading the inscriptions on both, and then placing a small garnet jewel in one of the O's on her mother's grave. She kneeled in front of her mother's grave and just sat in silence. This was the only place that she went other than her mother's room. Beatrix looked at her and finally saw the one part of Jade that was purely like Garnet and nothing at all like Zidane. They mourned differently, and the only difference between when Garnet's mother died and when Garnet died is that Jade still talked, but the way that they grieved was still the same.
Nearly half an hour must have passed that way everyday, but unlike most days, Jade stood up and looked at Beatrix with a serious expression on her face and her maturity shined in her bright green eyes. They both stood without moving, just staring at each other, waiting for the other to speak first. In the end, it was Jade who broke the silence.
"In ten days, I want you to go to Burmicia. If anyone else goes besides Steiner, they might intimidate him, and he might not return. At least give him that much time to take care of himself." Jade looked back at the two graves and let out a soft sigh. "He doesn't need to work right away. I just want him to take care of his son."
Beatrix nodded and walked over to Jade. Placing her hand on her shoulder, she gave it a soft squeeze before turning around to head back to the castle. Jade listened to her footsteps to tell when she had walked out of hearing range before she lifted her finger to her chin. Swiping off the tear that was about to fall, she looked at the small droplet and watched it turn into a crystal with a soft white light surrounded her hand. When in faded, she turned the small crystal around in her hand before resting it on Garnet's tombstone.
Softly, she kissed the crystal before whispering, "I'm learning, Mother. I'm learning…"
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~**Zidane's POV One Week Earlier**~
I don't know how long I've been running, but my legs are refusing to get tired as if they know I have to keep running in order to stay calm. I can hear my heart pumping in my ears, and I can almost feel my blood flowing through my veins. I don't understand how I can be so filled with energy, but if I look in deeper I can almost feel the emptiness that is just waiting to consume me whole. I'm running from that emptiness in a way.
Something is now missing, and I don't know if I can get it back. Wait… I can't get it back, and this is the whole reason why I'm running in the first place. I want to escape that reality that I can't have it back, that I can't have her back. I want her back so badly. I can't believe she left me, but it wasn't even her choice.
She died, and no spell nor item will ever bring her back to me.
My mind isn't quite sure where I'm heading, but I think it's just a natural reaction. Normally I would head out to see Ruby and the rest of the gang when I'm in a jam, but I'm not in a jam. For fuck's sake, my WIFE, my love, my life, my soul mate is dead. They won't be able to fix this. No one will, but still I know that one of my friends can help. She knows what I'm going through, and I think that she can help me. Well… She doesn't know exactly because she still believed that her love was still alive, but Dagger can't come back.
I know that my Dagger is dead.
Rain… I can taste rain sliding down my face. Or are those my tears? I can't tell the difference between the two because, frankly, I just don't care anymore. All those seven long years of waiting, hoping, wishing, and she was taken away from me only after two of the years were made up. I knew something bad was going to happen, but I never expected this. I never wanted this.
Is this what I deserve?
Burmicia… I think that I can let the sky cry for me from now on, but right now I need to find Freya. She'll help me out, give me a place to rest and everything else that I need. Everything except for my beloved Garnet. It's only been a few hours, and already I feel useless and hopeless. I should have treated her better. I should have told her that I loved her before she died. I shouldn't have left the damn castle last night! Fuck! I'm such a bastard! Steiner was right the first time that he told me that I shouldn't be with her.
I'm nothing but a petty thief, and it's all I'll ever be.
So many unanswered questions are running though my head, and I'm wondering if things would have turned out differently if I just spent more time with her. Would she have lived if I never left the castle? What if I tried to get along better with Jade, or helped her out with more of the political roles? Or what if I never caused the reason of her death…
… What if I had never gotten her pregnant again?
I had a feeling that I should have listened to Dr. Tot when he told us that, but I felt that it wasn't that big of a deal. I didn't need to pay that much attention to it because I knew, or I had thought at that time that my Dagger could take any challenge that anyone could ever give her and she would make it out alive. I'm such a blind bastard. I should have known that I was putting her at too much risk.
Falling to my knees when I reached the hallway with all the steps, I placed my hands on the ground and hung my head. My lungs were burning, and I could tell that my legs were starting to get sore after my all out sprint to this city. My whole body was shaking when I took deep laboring breaths, trying to get my body back under control. I had given up, and my body decided that it was time to do the same.
My arms buckled underneath the weight before finally giving in. My upper body fell onto the steps in front of me as I was still trying to catch my breath. I was living in a nightmare. After several minutes of just lying there, my breath was still not under control. In fact, my breathing had turned from deep breaths into sharp gasps. My lungs were burning and my body was still shivering. I felt like dying right then, just dying and joining my beautiful Dagger in Heaven, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I couldn't do that. I still had two people back in the castle that needed me, but I didn't care.
I didn't care if I was being selfish and greedy. All I wanted was Dagger and some damn oxygen, but neither were coming to me at the moment. I tried standing up, but I only managed to roll myself onto my back with my wet hair sticking to the sides of my face. My eyes closed and I placed my hand on my neck, feeling my rapid pulse beating within my veins.
And then everything became dark…
~*~
I woke up with a wet towel on my head. It wasn't cold, but it wasn't exactly hot either, indicating that it had been lying there for quite some time. The roof above my head was one that belonged to a house, and if I strained my hearing long enough, I could make out the sound of the rain falling on it. I tried to move some of my muscles, but only a low groan came from my mouth because of the soreness that I felt. I had tired out my body on the way here, and there was no telling on how long I was sleeping.
My hearing picked up the sound of a near by door opening to my left. I didn't have the strength to lift my head to see who it was, but as soon as the person spoke, I had recognized her voice automatically. "Still trying to walk before you can crawl, aren't you Zidane?" she asked in a calm voice before she walked over to my side where I could she her face clearly. Freya still looked the same since I last saw her, and I wasn't surprised when I saw a hint of disapproval when she looked down at me.
Turning my head away, I let out a sigh and tried lifting my arm, only to let out a frustrated moan when all my muscles tensed up after I had tried to complete the action. "The Hell happened, Frey?" I asked in a hoarse voice when I rested all my muscles again. She took the damp compress off my head, and replaced with her hand, I'm assuming to check to see if I had a temperature. Deeming that I was fine, she removed her hand and pulled up a chair next to me.
"Well," she said. "for starters, one of my people found you passed out on the bottom of our city stairs. Since they realized who you were, they brought you to me, when I noticed that you were flush and seemed exhausted, probably since I'm guessing that you were damn foolish enough to try to run the whole way here." At that moment when she gave me a hard look, and I only looked away, she simply shook her head. "You did, didn't you?" Silence. "God, Zidane. What's wrong now? How is Garnet's pregnancy going, or is something wrong with it? Supposedly, she's supposed to either have the baby soon, or she's had it already."
Painful memories shocked my brain as all my muscles tensed up at one thought. "Dagger is dead," I whispered softly, mostly to myself, but Freya must have over heard.
"She what?" she gasped in alarm as she grasped my arm in a way to get my attention. My head whipped around to look at her in the eyes while tears rimmed my own.
"She died, Freya. My Dagger is dead." She didn't say anything after that, slowly soaking in the information that I had just given her. Who knew that one small sentence could hold so much meaning and power to many people all over the world?
"And the child?" she asked suddenly while I was in the process of berating myself once again. This was the moment that I realized that I had almost forgotten all about my two children. I was now the father of both a daughter and a son, and I had left them both there like the bastard father that I am. Fuck, no wonder Jade hates me so much.
"Shit! A son… Dagger bore a son, and I left him and Jade all by themselves. I'm such a fucking jackass!" I hissed as I banged the back of my head against the pillow that it was resting on. Freya placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me a concerned look.
Before standing up she calmly said, "You can stay here as long as you need to before you feel that you need to go back, but trust me. Eventually, you do have to go back. As much as I know that you want to sit here and grieve for the rest of your life, there are people that need you to be there for them, not to mention your children. Once you're back in good health and you're on your feet again, you can go home." She turned around to head for the door, only pausing a moment at the door to say one last thing to me. "Don't rush it, Zidane. You need rest."
And then she left.
I stayed in the bed, simply looking up at the ceiling that came into a fine point going towards the sky in the center. A light shade of purple and blue flickered on the way in the same pattern as the candlelight that was moving in the room. It was going to be one of the few things that would be able to calm my nerves for a long time.
That and the soft rain that fell on the roof that I would be sleeping under for the next sixteen days…
(A/N: I really hope that no one decides to kill me for this, but I decided that Garnet was going to die about a year ago. Wow... It's been more than two years since I started writing this... I am a slow as hell writer! XD Oh well, I've had to deal with writer's block a lot so I would go through months without writing anything, and I thought that I owed it to you all to write a nice long chapter that hopefully none of you were expecting. Anyway, I can finally say that the story is half way done, so you all can expect more. I was happy with this because it's the first time that I've written over 40 pages of a story and didn't get bored with it. R/R. Love you all, bye!)
I don't know how long I had stared at the moon that night, but it was something that I felt that I desperately needed. It didn't calm my mind or give me a state of peace, but I felt… happier just looking at it. Too much had been happening recently, and I know that I'm slightly paranoid because Dagger is supposed to have the baby any day now, and Jade and I still barely know each other even though we've been living under the same roof for about two years now. She's almost ten. God, how quickly she's grown up.
I really thought that we would be able to hit it off two years ago when I finished reading the play to her, but I don't know. Something didn't click, and we've barely spoken to each other since even though I know that she didn't mind me reading to her in the least. I don't know what happened, and in a way I don't want to know. And recently she's been running off for no reason, and yet I can't even say that I'm not her partner in crime on this. I've been running away for no reason, and I guess I'm just not setting a good example for her. Everything has been so much harder since I came back, but I'll be damned if I ever leave again.
I'm lucky that Dagger has taken care of most of the political work for me to do, but I still feel bad for letting her take care of it all. I know as their king I should act more like it, but it's just not my style, and I only dress the part when I have to at noble gatherings, and even then I get the chance to leave early.
I started to walk back with a lot on my mind. I knew that something was going to happen in the near future, and I could tell that Jade sensed it, too, when I looked into her eyes. It was just something behind them that I could read. A mutual understanding, in a way. It sends shivers down my spine and even haunts my dreams, which is why sometimes I can't even sleep at night. I haven't really told anyone about that, but I can tell that Dagger is beginning to wonder why I'm never there when she wakes up in the morning. I don't want to hurt her, but in a way I don't think that I can possibly hurt her more than I already have.
I think I stayed out there all night, just looking at the moon fall and the sunrise. I didn't want to head back for I knew something was going to happen that day. Something terrible, something great, I really didn't know, but I would have to face it sooner or later, so what better time than the present, ne?
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Jade sat outside the room while she listened to the doctors work with her mother as quickly as possible. It was hard for her to hear them since her mother's cries droned out any sound that came from the room. Her water had broken sometime earlier that day, and now she was about fifteen hours into labor. Her mother's water breaking was very unexpected considering that the baby came very early. It was about a month early, in fact, something that was rarely heard of. She wasn't allowed in the room with her mother because the doctors claimed that she was, 'too young,' and would, 'distract them from doing their job.' It didn't matter though. Jade didn't want to go in there and see her mother like that, anyway. She probably would have started to cry.
A nurse quickly rushed out of the room and darted her head from left to right. Looking down, she spotted Jade and quickly kneeled by her side. "Darlin'," she breathed quickly while grabbing a hold of Jade's shoulder. "Listen to me. I need you… to go find Beatrix. Tell her… her majesty needs her… to find the King. Please, my lady… be quick." Jade nodded and sprang to her feet while the nurse rushed back into the delivery room. It was only then that she had realized that Zidane was still missing from the castle. It had been over a day since he was last seen and she was desperately hoping that he hadn't left Alexandria.
She ran down the nearest flight of stairs, pulling her dress up slightly so that she wouldn't trip over it on her way down. Steiner was standing at the bottom of the stairs looking worried. Once he heard the footsteps, he turned around and looked up at his young princess.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asked as she finally reached the bottom steps. Stopping and focusing her energy for a moment, she puts two of her fingers on each of her temples and closed her eyes for a moment. She tried using her power to sense the auras around her to try to track down Beatrix. It was something that she rarely used and very few people knew about. They was no reason for them to know about it anyway, so the whole discussion about it was always kept under wraps. A few moments later, her eyes snapped open and were a dark brown before they faded back into their light blue.
"I can't talk, Steiner. I need to find Beatrix!" she yelled over her shoulder as she raced by him out into the courtyard. She saw Beatrix standing in front of a few guards that were reporting in from their duties. "Beatrix!" she called out as she ran up to her and almost crashing into her legs. Beatrix looked down at her with a confused look on her face while the rest of the female guards that were standing there spread out to continue their search. "Have you found any hint of where Zidane could be yet?" Jade asked, still slightly out of breath.
Beatrix shook her head before answering, "We're still looking for him, but the guards that were just here reported that they had seen him walking his way back saying that he was on his way and should be back within a little while. Why do you ask?"
Jade didn't reply to that and just asked, "Do you think you could cast float on me for a short while?" Beatrix stared at her for a moment before Jade clarified her reasoning. "I think I can get a wider range on locating his aura if I can get to higher ground, and you know I can't climb that well with my hand in its current condition."
"As you wish, your Highness," she calmly stated before she started to case the spell. "I just hope for Her Majesty's sake that this works." She clasped her hands together and a white aura surrounded her and Jade's body. Slowly, Jade began to be lifted off the ground and higher into the air. When she became high enough so that she could look over the trees, she placed her hands on her temples and concentrated on Zidane's aura, which was much different from other people's.
Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration as she tried searching for him. It was harder than usual because she didn't even know where to look, but at this height with her range, she could have probably reach into a small section of the town across the river. Several minutes had passed by of her searching, and she couldn't even pick up a small hint of where he was. The white light around her that made her float was slowly starting to fade. Beatrix yelled from beneath her, "Your Highness! You better hurry up because I can't hold you up there much longer!"
Jade nodded before she tried expanding her efforts in order to get at least a small hint of where he was. Just before the light around her fully disappeared, she finally locked on to his aura, which was now rushing towards the castle and heading into the front doors, but that wasn't the only thing that she picked up. Her eyes snapped open before she let out a piercing scream of pain that seemed to echo throughout the lands surrounding the castle.
It was then that Beatrix lost her concentration, and Jade plummeted to the ground. The wind whipped her hair around her face as she began her journey towards the ground. Normally, she would have whipped her tail so that she could go upright, but the pain that had shocked her nearly knocked her unconscious, and all her senses were muddled together.
Luckily, Steiner was near by when he heard the princess scream before she started to fall and he managed to catch her before she hit the ground while one of the near by guards was helping Beatrix regain her balance. She too had felt a small portion of the pain that Jade had felt since they were partially linked in magic at the time, but she was only dazed by it and not really affected. Beatrix got back on her feet and rushed over to Steiner and Jade's side to see how the princess was doing. Normally, even with the connection, they weren't able to feel the same pain like they did, but it had been strong enough just to reach Beatrix without doing any actual harm to her.
"Are you alright, Your Highness?" Steiner asked as he brushed a few strands of hair out of her pale face. He looked over her quickly, and noticed that she wasn't hurt by the fall, but her horn on her head was glowing a strange reddish color. Beatrix placed her hand on her horn and pulled it back quickly when she noticed that she felt the same pain again when she touched it.
"Jade. Jade?" she asked as she rested her hand on her forehead, making sure not to touch her horn again, to see if she had a fever at all. Nothing, as far as she could tell, and the princess's eyes were still closed. She was going to call out her name again, but her eyes suddenly snapped open again, and her horn flashed bright red before fading into its normal ivory color. A sharp whimper left her mouth as her eyes quickly filled with tears before they spilled over her cheeks. She quickly curled into a ball against Steiner and started rocking her body in his arms with small gasps and sobs coming from her.
No one knew what was going on with her, but she kept crying and sobbing with nothing to hint at what she was so sad about, but Beatrix knew that it had something to do with what happened. She leaned closer to Jade to ask her what happened when she was up in the air, but as she leaned in closer, she heard the small mantra Jade was whispering to herself over and over again as she rocked her body in Steiner's arms.
"Don't let her leave me… Don't take her from me, please…"
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~**One Week Later**~
Jade sat in her mother's room, looking out the window with a peaceful expression on her face. Even though she looked peaceful enough, a boiling rage and a heart filled with contempt and sadness was beating within her chest. So much had happened in the past week, and yet it seemed like nothing had changed at all. Even if the situation was now completely different from what it once was. Everything was now different, and there would never be a way to change it back to what it once was.
She was now the Queen of Alexandria, officially the youngest one to ever hold that position, and she was only turning ten years old in a couple of weeks. What had happened that she had to hold that rank? It was something that no one expected, and yet everyone hoped that it would never happen.
During the sixteenth hour of Queen Garnet's labor, she had passed away. The doctors were lucky enough to be able to save the baby before it, too, had died. It was a young baby boy, which still remained unnamed. The King, Zidane, arrived into the delivery room moments after Garnet had died, and that was when Jade had screamed in the courtyard not too far away. The whole scene was fairly tragic to everyone that was involved. Not many knew what had happened to Zidane after he came in to see his wife was dead, but from the gossip that was being spread around the nurses that were in the delivery room at the time, supposedly Zidane had held his wife's body after they had saved the baby and was rocking her in his arms, softly whispering, "Don't let her leave me… Don't take her from me, please…"
He had stayed like that, just rocking her and crying for several minutes, not willing to move nor release her from his grasp. Even though they wanted him to see the baby, they knew it was better to just let him grieve for some time. After all, he had just lost one of the few things that he really cared about in the world, and it was later said by a few of his friends that Garnet was one of the few things that he had left going for him.
He disappeared not long after, maybe a few hours after she had died, and no one had heard of him since. Since then, Jade and Beatrix had been left to take care of Jade's baby brother, 'The Young Prince,' as most called him since they had nothing else to call him at the time. It was hard, and the only person that Jade managed to be able to talk to throughout all this time was Beatrix even though most of the time was spent crying.
Lady Eiko was supposed to come and visit in a few days with Regent Cid and Lady Helda so that they could come and pay their condolences, not to mention help out Jade with everything that she needed. Cid had also said that he was willing to help her run a few things for a while until she was old enough to handle everything on her own, which by the way things were looking, wouldn't be too long since she was already mature for her age. They just felt bad for her because of everything that she has had to go through since the beginning of her life.
Now was just a time for Jade to sit by herself and try to collect her thoughts. Her eyes seemed empty and hollow, and as rare as it was to see her smile before, she now never smiled at all. She had issued the order to have them find Zidane, just so that she could know where he was for the time being, but in a way, she already knew. It was a place that he would go to visit old friends and be able to be away from everyone else, and while the sadness that he had almost ate him alive, he never had to cry because the Heaven's always did it for him.
This was one of the few things that she managed to learn about him before he had left. No one knew how long it would be before he would decide to come back, but she wasn't worried. She had expected this of him anyway. She knew he would run because it was the only way that he could deal with his pain, as he had said. She didn't really understand it, but then again she knew that everyone had his or her own different methods on dealing with what had just happened and running away was his.
She reached her hand into the crib that was right beside where she was sitting and gently stroked the soft blonde hair of her little brother. He had been sleeping most of the day and wasn't conscious of what had been happening. After all, he was only a week old. He had dark brown eyes like Garnet, yet he didn't receive her horn. He did, however, did have the same tail as his father, but unlike Jade's, it was the same sandy brown as his hair, not the dark brown that Jade had. Even though he was just a newborn, he was already starting to show traits of both his parents. He was calmer like Garnet, yet he still thought that everything going around his was amazing and was a very active but not fussy baby.
The doors behind Jade opened with very little sound as Beatrix walked into the room. She looked at Jade with a worried look in her eyes, but Jade didn't even turn around to know that it was her. She just continued to look out the window and softly stroke her brother's hair. "Any word on Zidane yet?" she asked with an even voice showing no emotion. Beatrix closed the door behind her and walked toward the window where, she too, looked out over the city. Without even turning to look down at the young queen, she shook her head and rested both her hands on the windowsill.
"Nothing yet, Your Majesty. We're still looking for him, even though that I know you know where he is." She paused for a moment as if to see if Jade would have responded to that. When only silence greeted her, like she had figured, she continued. "I also know that you are leading our troops in the wrong direction. It's like you're hiding him, and I just wanted to know why. If you know that he needs to help you run this country, since you are Queen until he returns, and it's his job to also help raise his son, why don't you just order them to bring him back?"
Jade lowered her head for a moment as she thought on that comment. She had asked herself that a while ago. In a way, she hated him for leaving her when she needed him the most like he always had done. She hated him for many reasons, most of them she couldn't even remember anymore, but they were there. Finally, she lifted her head to look at Beatrix, only to find her head general staring straight back at her. "I protect him because I understand him."
Jade stood up from where she was sitting and smoothed out the wrinkles of her dress with her hands. Wrapping her tail around her waist, she walked towards the door and simply waved her hand for Beatrix to follow her. Beatrix stood where she was for a moment, trying to figure out what Jade's words had meant, but she just figured that either they would be explained in time or that she would eventually be able to figure it out on her own. Following her queen silently, she eventually found herself out in the courtyard where the two Queens previous to Jade were buried.
Jade brushed her hand over the tombstone of the grandmother that she never knew, and the tombstone of her mother that her little brother would never know. She made it a personal note that she would tell all the stories of her mother to her brother so that in a way even though he would never meet her that it would be as if he had lived with her anyway. She also vowed that her brother would grow up to know what it was like to have a father, unlike she did for most of her life.
Beatrix watched in silence as Jade walked around both tombstones, slowly reading the inscriptions on both, and then placing a small garnet jewel in one of the O's on her mother's grave. She kneeled in front of her mother's grave and just sat in silence. This was the only place that she went other than her mother's room. Beatrix looked at her and finally saw the one part of Jade that was purely like Garnet and nothing at all like Zidane. They mourned differently, and the only difference between when Garnet's mother died and when Garnet died is that Jade still talked, but the way that they grieved was still the same.
Nearly half an hour must have passed that way everyday, but unlike most days, Jade stood up and looked at Beatrix with a serious expression on her face and her maturity shined in her bright green eyes. They both stood without moving, just staring at each other, waiting for the other to speak first. In the end, it was Jade who broke the silence.
"In ten days, I want you to go to Burmicia. If anyone else goes besides Steiner, they might intimidate him, and he might not return. At least give him that much time to take care of himself." Jade looked back at the two graves and let out a soft sigh. "He doesn't need to work right away. I just want him to take care of his son."
Beatrix nodded and walked over to Jade. Placing her hand on her shoulder, she gave it a soft squeeze before turning around to head back to the castle. Jade listened to her footsteps to tell when she had walked out of hearing range before she lifted her finger to her chin. Swiping off the tear that was about to fall, she looked at the small droplet and watched it turn into a crystal with a soft white light surrounded her hand. When in faded, she turned the small crystal around in her hand before resting it on Garnet's tombstone.
Softly, she kissed the crystal before whispering, "I'm learning, Mother. I'm learning…"
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~**Zidane's POV One Week Earlier**~
I don't know how long I've been running, but my legs are refusing to get tired as if they know I have to keep running in order to stay calm. I can hear my heart pumping in my ears, and I can almost feel my blood flowing through my veins. I don't understand how I can be so filled with energy, but if I look in deeper I can almost feel the emptiness that is just waiting to consume me whole. I'm running from that emptiness in a way.
Something is now missing, and I don't know if I can get it back. Wait… I can't get it back, and this is the whole reason why I'm running in the first place. I want to escape that reality that I can't have it back, that I can't have her back. I want her back so badly. I can't believe she left me, but it wasn't even her choice.
She died, and no spell nor item will ever bring her back to me.
My mind isn't quite sure where I'm heading, but I think it's just a natural reaction. Normally I would head out to see Ruby and the rest of the gang when I'm in a jam, but I'm not in a jam. For fuck's sake, my WIFE, my love, my life, my soul mate is dead. They won't be able to fix this. No one will, but still I know that one of my friends can help. She knows what I'm going through, and I think that she can help me. Well… She doesn't know exactly because she still believed that her love was still alive, but Dagger can't come back.
I know that my Dagger is dead.
Rain… I can taste rain sliding down my face. Or are those my tears? I can't tell the difference between the two because, frankly, I just don't care anymore. All those seven long years of waiting, hoping, wishing, and she was taken away from me only after two of the years were made up. I knew something bad was going to happen, but I never expected this. I never wanted this.
Is this what I deserve?
Burmicia… I think that I can let the sky cry for me from now on, but right now I need to find Freya. She'll help me out, give me a place to rest and everything else that I need. Everything except for my beloved Garnet. It's only been a few hours, and already I feel useless and hopeless. I should have treated her better. I should have told her that I loved her before she died. I shouldn't have left the damn castle last night! Fuck! I'm such a bastard! Steiner was right the first time that he told me that I shouldn't be with her.
I'm nothing but a petty thief, and it's all I'll ever be.
So many unanswered questions are running though my head, and I'm wondering if things would have turned out differently if I just spent more time with her. Would she have lived if I never left the castle? What if I tried to get along better with Jade, or helped her out with more of the political roles? Or what if I never caused the reason of her death…
… What if I had never gotten her pregnant again?
I had a feeling that I should have listened to Dr. Tot when he told us that, but I felt that it wasn't that big of a deal. I didn't need to pay that much attention to it because I knew, or I had thought at that time that my Dagger could take any challenge that anyone could ever give her and she would make it out alive. I'm such a blind bastard. I should have known that I was putting her at too much risk.
Falling to my knees when I reached the hallway with all the steps, I placed my hands on the ground and hung my head. My lungs were burning, and I could tell that my legs were starting to get sore after my all out sprint to this city. My whole body was shaking when I took deep laboring breaths, trying to get my body back under control. I had given up, and my body decided that it was time to do the same.
My arms buckled underneath the weight before finally giving in. My upper body fell onto the steps in front of me as I was still trying to catch my breath. I was living in a nightmare. After several minutes of just lying there, my breath was still not under control. In fact, my breathing had turned from deep breaths into sharp gasps. My lungs were burning and my body was still shivering. I felt like dying right then, just dying and joining my beautiful Dagger in Heaven, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I couldn't do that. I still had two people back in the castle that needed me, but I didn't care.
I didn't care if I was being selfish and greedy. All I wanted was Dagger and some damn oxygen, but neither were coming to me at the moment. I tried standing up, but I only managed to roll myself onto my back with my wet hair sticking to the sides of my face. My eyes closed and I placed my hand on my neck, feeling my rapid pulse beating within my veins.
And then everything became dark…
~*~
I woke up with a wet towel on my head. It wasn't cold, but it wasn't exactly hot either, indicating that it had been lying there for quite some time. The roof above my head was one that belonged to a house, and if I strained my hearing long enough, I could make out the sound of the rain falling on it. I tried to move some of my muscles, but only a low groan came from my mouth because of the soreness that I felt. I had tired out my body on the way here, and there was no telling on how long I was sleeping.
My hearing picked up the sound of a near by door opening to my left. I didn't have the strength to lift my head to see who it was, but as soon as the person spoke, I had recognized her voice automatically. "Still trying to walk before you can crawl, aren't you Zidane?" she asked in a calm voice before she walked over to my side where I could she her face clearly. Freya still looked the same since I last saw her, and I wasn't surprised when I saw a hint of disapproval when she looked down at me.
Turning my head away, I let out a sigh and tried lifting my arm, only to let out a frustrated moan when all my muscles tensed up after I had tried to complete the action. "The Hell happened, Frey?" I asked in a hoarse voice when I rested all my muscles again. She took the damp compress off my head, and replaced with her hand, I'm assuming to check to see if I had a temperature. Deeming that I was fine, she removed her hand and pulled up a chair next to me.
"Well," she said. "for starters, one of my people found you passed out on the bottom of our city stairs. Since they realized who you were, they brought you to me, when I noticed that you were flush and seemed exhausted, probably since I'm guessing that you were damn foolish enough to try to run the whole way here." At that moment when she gave me a hard look, and I only looked away, she simply shook her head. "You did, didn't you?" Silence. "God, Zidane. What's wrong now? How is Garnet's pregnancy going, or is something wrong with it? Supposedly, she's supposed to either have the baby soon, or she's had it already."
Painful memories shocked my brain as all my muscles tensed up at one thought. "Dagger is dead," I whispered softly, mostly to myself, but Freya must have over heard.
"She what?" she gasped in alarm as she grasped my arm in a way to get my attention. My head whipped around to look at her in the eyes while tears rimmed my own.
"She died, Freya. My Dagger is dead." She didn't say anything after that, slowly soaking in the information that I had just given her. Who knew that one small sentence could hold so much meaning and power to many people all over the world?
"And the child?" she asked suddenly while I was in the process of berating myself once again. This was the moment that I realized that I had almost forgotten all about my two children. I was now the father of both a daughter and a son, and I had left them both there like the bastard father that I am. Fuck, no wonder Jade hates me so much.
"Shit! A son… Dagger bore a son, and I left him and Jade all by themselves. I'm such a fucking jackass!" I hissed as I banged the back of my head against the pillow that it was resting on. Freya placed a hand on my shoulder and gave me a concerned look.
Before standing up she calmly said, "You can stay here as long as you need to before you feel that you need to go back, but trust me. Eventually, you do have to go back. As much as I know that you want to sit here and grieve for the rest of your life, there are people that need you to be there for them, not to mention your children. Once you're back in good health and you're on your feet again, you can go home." She turned around to head for the door, only pausing a moment at the door to say one last thing to me. "Don't rush it, Zidane. You need rest."
And then she left.
I stayed in the bed, simply looking up at the ceiling that came into a fine point going towards the sky in the center. A light shade of purple and blue flickered on the way in the same pattern as the candlelight that was moving in the room. It was going to be one of the few things that would be able to calm my nerves for a long time.
That and the soft rain that fell on the roof that I would be sleeping under for the next sixteen days…
(A/N: I really hope that no one decides to kill me for this, but I decided that Garnet was going to die about a year ago. Wow... It's been more than two years since I started writing this... I am a slow as hell writer! XD Oh well, I've had to deal with writer's block a lot so I would go through months without writing anything, and I thought that I owed it to you all to write a nice long chapter that hopefully none of you were expecting. Anyway, I can finally say that the story is half way done, so you all can expect more. I was happy with this because it's the first time that I've written over 40 pages of a story and didn't get bored with it. R/R. Love you all, bye!)