So, I'm behind due to MAJOR writing suction, in addition to some recent heavy work – good lord, its hard to organize people effectively. Basically… I wrote a lot, then looked at it all, said, "Good god, is this really necessary?" but kept at it. Eventually, I ended up with a healthy dozen pages of prolonged escape.

Problem is, the writing's been at such a high stress level for so long that reading it no longer carries a sense of urgency.

So now, for the fabled "leave the details to vague allusions and leave the rest to the reader's imagination, because surely they'll be much cooler in the reader's heads than in my words!"

This may seem like a cop-out, but truly, I tried. It's just that no amount of good writing could dig me out of the pit I let myself get into.

So now, we have a change of pace, as I attempt to drop you into the world Isara and Celes exist in now…

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"Isara! I'm back!"

To any other ear, from any other mouth, it would have sounded like an exhausted husband coming back home to a faithful wife. Of course, such a situation would raise no small amount of eyebrows, given the people involved.

For these two people, such calling was not borne out of affection, but out of necessity.

Celes threw his arms forward one last time before letting gloved hands rest gently on the spinning rubber, slowing himself to a halt in front of the door. Breath misting in the cold air, but smiling triumphantly, he let the perspiration from his exertions bead on his brow. Let her see them; he wanted her to.

He hadn't used the motors today – again. Isara was going to have a fit – again. He'd pull his medical knowledge and claim that it was better this way – again – and she'd go sulk for a little bit about new inventions being ignored – again.

For once, there was a sense of familiarity forming. Absently, he wondered just how long they would get to stay here.

A minute crawled by, but the ex-trooper felt no impatience at all. Sometimes, he'd have to wait a whole hour for her to finish whatever she was working on, too deep in machinery and small parts to extricate herself – or too engrossed to care. For her, there was little difference; one meant the other.

Fortunately, this was not one of those days. He heard the thump of running boots, and, seconds later, saw Isara – his savior, his comrade, his friend – shoulder open the rough wooden garage's side door, a rush of deliciously warm air escaping into the frigid environment.

The reason she had shouldered it open was obvious the moment she arranged herself in the doorway, leaning against the frame while keeping the door open with a foot. A rough assortment of parts – obviously picked up from the latest scrap run around the village – were still pooled in her shawl, which she held in front of her with two hands to form a bowl of sorts. If it had been her favored Darcsen pattern, she never would have treated it to such abuse, but this was plain canvas, more for a familiar weight on her shoulders than actual tradition.

Of course, her pride of her heritage was hardly extinguished yet. The replacement for the one lost somewhere underneath a house in Lia was already half-woven on a loom inside – borrowed from a sympathetic neighbor of the unnamed village they were in now.

Celes avoided eye contact for the time being, instead pointedly turning his attention to the mound of scrap with a resigned eye. "Isara, the entire point of you coming down is to hand me the crutches right inside the door because I don't fit. If you're holding that – "

"Yes, yes, yes –" she grumbled, and just like that, she fled, leaving him wondering as to why she had bothered greeting him the first place.

There was the sound of running on concrete once more. Deeper inside the building, metal scraped on metal before landing with the dull thunk of wood, followed by another set of footsteps, and this time, she opened the door in a more civilized manner, finely crafted crutches in hand.

She'd made them for him the first chance she'd gotten, which was to say a long time after their escape from the Gallian army's encampment, because that truly had been the first real rest they'd gotten – dodging the eastern war front had been easy enough, but getting past border patrols and security checkpoints had been a month of pure hell. Hopefully, this respite would last.

With a few steps forward, she wordlessly offered him his supports with a bare smile, continuing the ritual that had been established over the past three weeks, longer than any temporary hideout they'd had in the Empire, much less Gallia. Returning her pleasant expression, he quickly stripped off his gloves before reaching up to grab them, pulling himself out of his seat.

A wheelchair. A sign of absolute disability, it was the final insult one could pay a soldier who was used to being battle-ready and combat-fit at any given time. It was a good thing that he'd sworn that off a long time ago, the moment the Imperial machine refused to let Isara travel in peace.

As he worked the crutches into a position where he could move unaided, she leant against the doorframe once more, waiting for him to finish – scrutinizing him. Celes made no attempt to hide the sweat stains around his collar, the red of heat coloring his face, or the way he was breathing much harder than someone cruising in a ragnite-powered chair should have been.

This time, though, she simply gave a dissatisfied grunt and found something more interesting on the planks of the ceiling. She'd accepted his insistence of not relying on the motor. Victory.

With a final wiggle, he propped himself up and took a step with his left foot, swinging himself on the crutches instead of following with his right. That leg was in no condition to support his weight – not only did it have a not-so-old bullet wound in the thigh, the kneecap had been blown out only a week before they'd made it to this most recent haven when an Imperial guardsman took offense to his admittedly weak alibi of deporting a Darcsen across the border, a wound that no amount of ragnaid, even if they had had enough to splurge on it, could heal without intensive surgery. It was a good thing Isara had been watching out for him, so that the guard couldn't finish the job with a round to the head; a solid wrench to the skull later, they had merrily sped off, at least as merrily as one could with a man screaming in pain in the sidecar.

Just then, Celes noticed something. Isara had smugly handed him his crutches with her right hand. That realization made him want to laugh – she thought she was resisting him, but in reality she was playing right into his hands. Their entire trek through the Empire had been punctuated with constant chatter about her wound: about how she shouldn't have been steering the bike with her abused shoulder, Isara rebutting that he could hardly work the clutch with his lame leg. In the end, she'd won that argument when he'd lost the kneecap, although he'd insisted that it didn't count due to "outside interference". For the most part, he'd ordered her to rest the arm, but after last night's inspection of the wound, he decided that it was now the time to reverse the order and exercise it instead. He simply hadn't told her yet, intending to spring the surprise on her when she least expected it.

Oh, the games they played. They were like two bickering children.

She took a step back to let him through the doorway into the garage, closing and latching the door shut behind him. Briefly, he let his gaze flicker over her form. More than one she'd hurt something without telling him after banging a limb after a scuffle with a local authority or cutting herself on a sharp edge while working; as a result, he'd learned to always check her every time he saw her.

There was also the added benefit of her sometimes being an extremely restful place to let his eyes rest. Today, she was in pristine condition. As she walked back into the middle of the garage – slowly, to let him keep pace – her legs and feet kept a steady rhythm, her torso at a normal angle while her arms and neck seemingly floating with her body, such was the grace she exhibited, without the roughness of fatigue or injury. After so many days of calm, she'd been able to fully take care of herself, and regain some measure of beauty; she made the worn, grease-stained coverall look like a noblewoman's dress.

Three weeks ago, when they had still been on the run, he would have axed that train of thought the moment it started. The emotional damage that he would have been risking would have been too great, had they become separated. But now, after more than a score of days after the last news of Imperial presence, he let it float through his mind. It was an indulgence he permitted himself to enjoy – surely, he deserved as much after the trials he – they – had been through.

As she sat herself down next to her workbench in the center of the building and got to work determining just what she could do with the scrap piled on top of it, he scanned the rest of the garage. Everything was in place, established in the first week they'd arrived in the hamlet.

The Gallian motorcycle with an attached sidecar that had served them so well during their flight slept underneath a tarp, while the antique Polaris shotgun that had fended off both wolves and an overzealous Gallian border guard lay with a bandolier – fully stocked, as Celes insisted – next to two cots along one side of the building. The sidecar had once been packed with supplies, in case they had to run again, but gradually, as the days rolled by, they'd unpacked most of it, using some but trading most of it, items such as bullets for hunting and ragnoline being hard to come by so far away from urban civilizations – just the way they needed it to be.

Most of the other objects had been scavenged from the rest of the villagers, most prominently the remnants of a blacksmith – a blacksmith! There wasn't a press or machine in the garage that had been pre-manufactured; Isara had had to piece everything together with parts forged and hand-cast with charcoal fueled clay crucibles – there wasn't enough ragnite to be exploited for the mere work, instead being kept for emergency heating for survival – while various devices were powered by improvised ragnite cells and a ragnoline generator. Celes still had a scald on his hand from her latest improvement, metal rails on which a drop forge could be set up on. Hopefully, that would reduce that amount of casting they'd have to do, for the small objects, anyways.

They had a lot of those to do – after all, their presence here wasn't supported by charity. While at first they'd paid for food, necessities, and the use of the building through trading with the village spokesperson, that wasn't viable for any longer than a few days. The moment Isara had noticed them ogling the motorcycle, however, she'd put two and two together and offered her services as a machinist.

Their acceptance – and quality of living – had dramatically increased after that little meeting.

"Celes, can you go prepare another refining crucible?" she called from her seat, not taking her eyes off of her work for one second. "I'd like to finish the drop forge with some bearings. Umana –" that was the spokesperson – "says that they could really use some new metal utensils for the upcoming festival."

The festival, which was supposedly the solitary spot of entertainment for most of the townspeople during the long winter months in the mountains; the unnamed hamlet was mainly self-sustaining through agriculture, producing little in the way of trade goods, so there was little work to do. There was no real name or tradition behind it, unless one counted its consistency of being borne from boredom as a tradition.

That Isara was planning for such an event a full week later brought a smile to his lips. So she was expecting to stay too – that pleased him. It pleased him so much that he decided against complaining that he'd been working for much of the day as well, and instead hobbled immediately to follow her command.

The supplies for the crucibles were all together in a relatively neat pile along the wall – a sealed box of moist clay, with some basic shaping tools and an example stacked on top of the lid. Despite being on crutches, he'd lost no upper body strength, so carefully threading his legs and crutches to bend down and pull everything up was no problem at all. Moving was a bit awkward – he couldn't use either hand to swing his crutches forward - but a lot less than it could have been as he used his armpits to help him walk the two steps back to the bench.

Sliding the gear out in front of him, across from Isara, he continued the ritual, upon which they told each other of their day. "I saw Naru this afternoon."

"Oh, really?" Her expression quirked with amusement, thinking of the old medicine woman that was all the hamlet had had. "That must have been quite a spat," she commiserated.

"Tell me about it," he grumbled, confirming her first impression. "With all the fireplaces in the houses, burns are a commonplace thing. More surprising is how these people deal with the injury – they plaster them with animal fat, of all things!" He knew that in the grand scheme of things he was being hysterical, but such an egregious error made him grind his teeth. "I tried to get her to learn that –"

"You cool it in water, apply ragnaid if necessary, and loosely wrap, yes, yes," she finished for him. Smiling contentedly, she picked at an indescribable hunk of – something – with a tiny tool. "Steel, I think."

He sighed, although his own hands never slowed as they worked the clay into ingot molds for smelting ore into pure metal. There had been a deep pocket of it not too far up the mountainside, and Isara had already enlisted some of the more chronically idle townspeople to drag themselves out and mine some of it out. Many such pockets existed – which was to be expected, given the terrain – but fortunately for the two of them, the hamlet was not turned into an industrial mine cranking out weapons for the Imperial war machine due to the costs involved with setting up in such a remote and treacherous area.

Fortune really did smile on them by providing such a perfect place to winter.

Coughing softly, more to catch her attention than to clear his throat, he brought up a more sensitive subject. "It's too bad we couldn't have stayed in Gallia."

Immediately, she stopped her tinkering and snapped her eyes to his own, surprised by the conversation. "Yes, it is," she offered tentatively.

"Do you think they –"

"I'm sure Welkin, Alicia, and the rest of Squad 7 are still waiting for me to come back," she cut off rudely. A more intelligent man would cease the line of questioning, but he pressed on blindly anyways.

"Isara, I really don't think that report would have made it through to him."

"Oh really? And why not?"

He chuckled darkly. "If I recall correctly, you were the one who made such a ruckus rescuing."

Immediately, she flushed red, determinedly returning to her work to avoid his gaze. Interesting. He hadn't expected that reaction. "It was really all Halsey and Worrick," she said. It was an obvious lie; he'd learned that while she could lie well enough under pressure from someone they thought an enemy, such as a border guard, she fell apart in front of him. It was merely one of the many things that he found endearing about her.

"Maybe they spread the word to not resist," he mused, thinking of how trained soldiers had literally jumped out of their way despite being armed and perfectly capable of stopping them, "but who made the smoke rounds that coated the entire parade ground?" That had been instrumental in preventing any of the brass, all calm and dignified from their watching points in guard towers, from seeing the exact events. It had also saved them from any possible machine gun fire from the same towers while they were still within the camp.

"I perfected the recipe for… Marberry," she mumbled, embarassed. "It was no big deal to make a few with all the ammunition in the camp as materials."

A shiver ran down his spine – he still had trouble believing that she had been piloting the deadly weapon that day, although he wondered if the thing was out of commission now, without a mechanic. Guiltily, he hoped so. "Fine, then, but who was driving the bike?"

She'd come out of the clouds like a bat out of hell, mask over her face and eyes to protect her from the choking miasma. However, he'd still recognized her immediately as the only woman, especially the only Darcsen woman, in the base, and had unhesitatingly boarded the sidecar – no mean feat while in ropes – putting all his trust into her hands.

She hadn't disappointed.

With the evidence of her daring stunt resting in the same room as them, there was little she could do to refute the truth. She blushed even hotter, if that were possible, and ducked her head down out of sight.

Satisfied, he drove his point home. "Isara, whatever case you had, you dissolved the moment you threw your lot in with me."

"I know."

"Then how can you still think…" He didn't have to finish the sentence.

"I have faith."

The answer took him off guard, but he quickly recovered, squaring his jaw before opening it to argue. "Faith? What has faith ever done for people?"

"It leaves them open to the possibility of good things, and gives them courage to fight on through their hardships." As she spoke, a smile grew on her face, as if she was personally familiar with these words.

"Faith is little more than an idealistic fallacy, which can fool people into wasting their lives for nothing."

Isara's smile disappeared as fast as his had. "I'm surprised that you of all people, Celes, find the idea of faith so distasteful."

"And why is that? I was on the front, if you remember, Isara. I couldn't put my faith in anyone surviving." His expression grew darker and darker as he continued. "Blind faith in my comrades would have killed me more than once, and if they had had faith in me – " his hands started shaking; to disguise the fact, he buried them into the clay – "when I couldn't pull the trigger on another human, they would have died."

His unease failed to go by her unnoticed – expression suddenly softening, she put down the piece of scrap she had been holding and reached across the table. He flinched, almost cringing away, but she moved quickly, snatching his hand with her own, pressing it tightly with her fingers, boring into him with those deep dark eyes of hers.

"But those same men… when you treated them, there was nothing they could do except put their faith in you."

"No, they –" He cut the thought short, realizing it was a stupid argument. How could a mortally wounded man, much less an unconscious one, help his doctor treat him?

For a few moments, they sat together, hands clasped across the table. Celes stayed still, unsure of just what to say. Furtively, he enjoyed the contact of her fingers locked with his. Perhaps he'd say as much during the festival –

They'd have to get there first. Almost simultaneously, both of them pulled their hands away and hastily dug them back into their work. Celes bashfully turned his head downwards, pretending to be at the tricky part of forming the crucible, but despite his efforts, still saw enough to notice that Isara had acted in the exact same manner.

They had had an interesting time together, and the upcoming festival only promised more of the same. For so long, interesting had meant dangerous – but now, here in Fhirald, it happily seemed to have no other meaning.

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Let the fluff begin, so that we can see our heroes in a non-combat situation. That is all.