disclaimer: disclaimed
dedication: to Jupe.
notes: lmao i called this bitch Vampirella for so long, y'all. also technically, Ness isn't actually the Builder here, but whatever, i do what i want.
notes2: nobody — mitski.

title: mo(u)rning glory
summary: Vanessa, Aadit, and the Rogue Knight in between. — f!Builder/Aadit.

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"I wondered if you were going to come."

She finds him at the edge of the world, on a high cliff overlooking the sea in Meidi, right at the very league of civilized land before the Peripheries begin. It's been a long trek, chasing breadcrumbs and whispers and too many half-baked crackpot theories to count. Vanessa settles down next to the man who used to be her husband, and swings her legs free through the breeze. They're a mismatched set: her in dusty pale leathers leached of colour by the sun, and him in purple and orange with his mask cast aside.

"You owe me an apology," she says. "Do you know what labour is like? It's garbage! I bled everywhere for, like, three weeks, and you weren't even there to hold my hand!"

Her ex-husband blinks once, slowly, and then he turns to stare at her with starving eyes. "What?"

"Her name is Nemmy—Anemone," Vanessa amends, and jerks her chin back in the direction of the enginebike resting on its kickstand behind them. "The bike always puts her to sleep, it's great."

"What," he says again.

"When two people love each other very, very much—" Vanessa starts, saccharine sweet.

"Ness," Aadit stresses, and oh, Vanessa thinks, there he is.

She doesn't lean against him the way her entire body is screaming at her to do. She's still too angry for that. Instead, she crooks on eyebrow at him, the long purple-dark of her hair falling over one of her eyes. "That's what they call me."

"I didn't know you were—"

"Pregnant?" Vanessa finishes the sentence for him, snorts a little. "Yeah, neither did I. Not until after you left."

She doesn't tell him about the day she fell off her horse, and came to two hours later to Millie nuzzling at her concernedly and Ack standing over her making horrible sounds. Scared the piss out of herself, wigged her poor robot farmhand out to the depths of the planet and back, and later had the unfortunate gall to shout at Xu about it, even though really the fault had only ever been her own.

She doesn't tell him about any of it, because he should have been there.

Vanessa had fallen in love with someone who liked to talk through the world's quiet places, and leave them untouched behind him. Who'd been kind, and gentle, and awkwardly funny—he'd had the worst sense of humour, but it had matched her own, and that was part of it, too—and who'd thought that war was the most dehumanizing thing there was. He'd treated every living creature, sentient or not, with a bone-deep respect.

There's no faking that, and Vanessa knows it, but still—

She needs to ask.

"Was any of it real?" she says, as casually as she can. On the long days driving through the desert, she'd worked herself in circles, wondering if it was right to give him the kind of power this question gives him. He'd left in the first place, and she hadn't shattered because it wasn't the first time someone that she loved disappeared on her (thanks, Pa), but it—rankles, to let him have so much say in what she's going to do next. Because what would his answer change? Nothing? Everything? Both?

One of those days, Vanessa stopped at a tiny watering hole for a night to let Nemmy play in the water in the drippy crimson sunset's light. She'd looked at her daughter, splashing in the oasis and getting sand all over herself, and figured out that it probably didn't matter. Not for her kid. Not for their future.

But Vanessa needed to know.

She needed to know for herself.

Her ex-husband takes a breath. Closes his eyes for a second longer than a standard blink, a trembling, shaking thing that doesn't do anything to her heart.

"You know it was," Aadit says.

"And you still pointed a sword at my throat, huh?" and she drops that beautiful, heavy sword that she's carried for the last year and a half between them. "You can have it back, if you want."

"I left it for you," he says, more wind than sound. His lips barely move, bloodless white. "Ness, I—"

"Don't start," Vanessa cuts him off, a little sharper than she'd intended. A tiny seed of hurt is buried deep between her shoulder blades, right behind the th-thud of her heart. She'd been so angry, those first months. It had been all-consuming. She'd lost weeks to that crimson veil, and sure, she'd lived through it, but when she finally though to ask the rage its name, it had whispered: grief.

Vanessa doesn't really want an apology, anyway. It won't change anything.

"Are you gonna tell me why?" she tips her head backwards to look up at the sky. It's a hundred times easier than looking at him. "'Cause I was thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, the more it didn't make sense. The whole thing, you know? Us. This."

His shoulders slump on the exhale, and he runs a hand over his face. He's scruffy, and his hair is tied back in a horsetail, kept out of the way. There are awful smeary lines beneath his eyes, and his skin is ashen grey.

Sun and sky, he looks exhausted.

"You weren't supposed to happen," he says, at last. Every word sounds like it's been wrenched out of his chest, completely unwilling. "I was supposed to keep a low profile."

"Good job," Vanessa snorts, before she can stop herself. "We got legally married, Aadit. How is that keeping a low profile?"

"It wasn't," Aadit shakes his head, still speaking low. "It isn't."

"If you say 'you shouldn't be here'—!"

"You shouldn't."

"But I am," Vanessa snaps. "So, what? Gonna tell me to leave, husband? Gonna make me take my baby and go?"

"I don't know, Vanessa!"

"Well, you should!"

He doesn't have an answer for that.

Don't cry, Vanessa tells herself, vicious in the mouth. She swipes furiously at her cheeks, seething when they come away wet. Her fingers shine in the afternoon sun, refracting light the way glass does. Don't you dare cry. Not over this. Not here. Not now.

The whole thing is stupid, and she still has no idea why she even came.

But Vanessa doesn't move to get up. She just sits there with her tears in her throat and in her eyes, streaming down to the point of her chin, and the ocean as blue as the sky; she's staring hard at the line in the distance where the two collide. She still doesn't look at her husband. She won't give him the satisfaction.

"I never meant to hurt you, Ness," he murmurs.

"Oh, get fucked, Aadit."

"Honestly," he continues. For the most terrible thirty seconds of her life, Vanessa thinks he's going to touch her and then it'll all be over, but he doesn't. "I-I was going to come back. When this was all over."

"You never were a great liar," Vanessa laughs, disbelieving. It comes out a little too high-pitched, breathless and watery. Frick. "Look, if it didn't mean anything—"

"I never said that, princess."

Vanessa stops. Blinks. Looks at him for the first time. Blinks again. "Sorry?"

"I never said it didn't mean anything," her ex-husband says, hotly, and his eyes are suddenly dark slits in his face. There's a crackle of emotion in his voice like poison, but it's still better than apathy. Vanessa hates him on principle, and she's going to ignore the way the crackling hurts her heart.

"You still left," she mutters. Wraps her arms around herself, drawing in. A shield, just like in the old stories.

"What else was I supposed to do?"

"I don't know, not be a coward?!"

That seems to stop him short, and knock some fight back into him. Aadit straightens, scowling. "Do you really think I would have left if I didn't have to?"

"Uh, you kinda did!"

"They would have killed you if I hadn't," he says through his teeth, and it—it sounds like it costs him, to admit it. "I thought it through."

"The only person who tried to kill me was you!"

"That?! We both know that wasn't me trying to kill you, Ness. If I'd been trying to kill you, you'd be dead."

Vanessa smiles with all of her teeth. "Wanna bet?"

"No," Aadit says. The fight goes out of him all over again, and his shoulders drop. "I don't even like thinking about it."

"What, once was enough?"

"Once was too much."

He holds himself painfully stiff at her side, rigid as a steel rod. Inflexible. He hadn't been like that, hardly ever, except about strange things that she'd always brushed off as a quirk of personality. Obviously, not the case!

But suddenly, it's all too much, and by the sun, Vanessa is tired. So, so tired; tired of being angry, tired of being tired. She's a thousand leagues away from home, and the air doesn't smell right, and Aadit still looks like every comforting thing that she's ever wanted. Even in profile, all she can think about is the long winter nights in front of the fire, tucked beneath the same blanket, and the feel of his palm curled around her bare knee. Laughing into his mouth, spicy and sweet, dragging him to bed but trying not to make too much noise. He'd let her, too.

Vanessa allows herself to drop her head to his shoulder and rest there, for a while.

"Do you want to meet her?" she asks, eventually. She doesn't specify which she; there's only the one that matters, and they both well know it, given that Vanessa has to crane her neck every few minutes to make sure that nothing's snuck up on her bike, trying to skivvy off with her sleeping kid.

Hasn't happened so far, though.

They seem to be entirely alone.

"Do you want me to?" Aadit asks, after a moment's hesitation. It aches between her teeth that he can still do this to her, when she'd thought she'd purged him from her system so thoroughly. It's galling in every way. She never wants it to stop.

"Look, she's already got a deadbeat grandpa, you know?" Vanessa sighs into his shoulder. "Don't give her a deadbeat dad, too."

Aadit cracks a smile. Vanessa catches it out of the corner of her eye, but only because she's looking for it. He knows how she feels about Pa. They'd talked about it. What hadn't they talked about?

Oh, right. Him.

"Is Aadit even your real, actual name?"

"I'm a knight, not an actor," he mumbles. "It's my name."

"Good," Vanessa murmurs. "That's good."

(And maybe the big lies are all really just cracked-out versions of the truth, twisted up until they don't look the same anymore. Big lies cover up little lies, but everyone needs little lies. Without little lies, the big ones don't make sense. Vanessa isn't stupid enough to ask if he loved her. It's a moot point, regardless.)

Unwinding from the precarious edge of the cliff is an exercise in control. Vanessa scoots backwards, the red Meidi earth hard-packed beneath her. It's not quite like Sandrock; not as dry, not as hot, but somehow more remote. Pebbles scrabble beneath her and drop away, over the edge, all the way down to the sea. It's so far down that Vanessa loses sight of them. Its so far down that she can't even see the splash.

She dusts herself off, and then offers her husband a hand. "Are you coming, or not?"

Aadit stares at her offered palm for what feels like an eternity. Vanessa could push him over the edge of the cliff right now, if she wanted, and no one would ever know.

But she doesn't.

Vanessa just wants her husband to be her husband again. Whatever that will cost, she's willing to pay it. Some things are worth the price of a person's soul.

Aadit grabs her wrist, uses the leverage of it to pull himself into standing. Once he's up, she expects him to let go; she's braced herself for the sting, acidly sharp, the kind of pain that has to be breathed out through the lungs.

But instead, his palm slides down, and he laces his fingers through her own. He glances down at their clasped hands. "Is that alright?"

Yes. Of course it is.

She still doesn't want to give him the satisfaction. Maybe it's petty, wanting to punish him like this. Whatever. Vanessa never professed to being a good person; only a violent one.

"C'mon," she says. "Come meet your daughter."

His sword is on the ground behind them. They'll grab it later, or maybe not at all. Maybe it'll sit on the cliffside forever, until it turns to stone. Until it turns to dust. Until time itself doesn't matter, and there are no people left to keep count.

She tugs on his hand, pulling him inexorably forward. One foot in front of the other, all the way back to the bike, and then a thousand leagues on the way back home. There are conversations that they need to have. Sun and sky, she doesn't even know if he's going to come. This might just be a concession, and then he'll go, again.

Mybe. But maybe not, too. Because it's like this:

There's Vanessa and Aadit, and there's the Rogue Knight in between.

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fin.