I've got to give a big thanks to everyone commenting. It's very encouraging. ^_^ (Except when I get lame reviews picking at my use of adverbs because it's the only "flaw" someone can find to insult me with when they don't like my style. That's pointless and obnoxious.)

I know this chapter's short. I'll post another longer one later today if I can, so it'll be worth it.

Disclaimers. I didn't create Escaflowne and therefore do not own it. I do, however, have a very nice boxed set.

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Van found her interesting and good conversation, if what little rapport they had could be termed as such, so he began to seek her out in his free moments. They never discussed inconsequential things and did not make small talk, for neither of them were the type of person to bear for long the specter of social banter. They were both impatient.

It seemed that all the talk they did not engage in with others collected and accumulated, growing old and aging in their minds until it ripened to a careful deliberation which could be spoken only in the presence of one another. He told her things that he would not imagine imparting to anyone, and she listened patiently, uncomforting but also in no mind to criticize the phantoms that haunted him.

He saw Hitomi in everything, he told her. He remembered, acutely, every place she placed her hand, every aspect of ground she'd ever stood upon, and every object new or unfamiliar to her, and the delighted things she had to say about them. He would see the window of the room she'd stayed in upon first arrival in Fanelia from any vantage point in the city, his view a natural progression to the hallowed chamber from anywhere nearby he happened to glance. Though the palace had been razed and reborn--everything in the city had been--the sacred essence of her was miraculously unaffected by the flames, when everything else important to him had not possessed such fortune.

It was worse at night, when the moons rose and he would squint to differentiate, from all those unfamiliar countries, the one that Hitomi spoke of and pointed to so easily. It was as when Van and his brother used to name the stars together, with a unfamiliar world to condense into simple logic rather than the sky. She pointed out all those places, patiently, longingly, and even now he felt the same angry sting of realization that he had then: she would return and leave all this behind her, were the opportunity manifest. She was a practical person, and for all their love, he was only just so important.

Perhaps it was because he had no one else in the world that he allowed himself so dangerously close to the heart of another human being. His people were scattered, his home in ruins. The mysterious girl with strange powers was the sole force to ground him in his adrift state. Hitomi, in contrast, had friends and family in wait for her, and their sheer force of presence outweighed any importance the king of Fanelia held. Because she had others to divide her love amongst, it was never as intense as his indivisible own.

Selena would nod, and listen. Her lack of emotional response reassured him more than the pity his silent suffering elicited from others. While he spoke, she followed the movements and gestures of his hands to landmarks, emotional or corporeal, that he recalled.

She seldom talked concretely of the past, talking in hypotheticals and maybes. She told him, "My childhood alone would make you cringe." He believed her, but it was only natural that the way she skipped and skirted around the topic, fluttering away when he should have her netted, ensnared in his words, would provoke curiosity. Van was not the type to pry, however, and he said nothing of it, continuing instead to chronicle the tread of his own pain, choosing instead to tell her about the thorough mediocrity of his life.

When all the indescribable emotion Hitomi awoke in him had been recounted as well as he was able, he told her of other things. He told her of his family.

"You'd think, being a king, that your life would have been happier," Selena mused. "If even royalty can't buy happiness in this world, how are normal people supposed to find it?"

"I did find it. I can find it again."