I experimented with perspectives in this one – it bounces from one to the other to both in no particular order. Tell me if it works or is simply plain confusing, alright?
A safe within a safe? Strange. Regardless, our heroes have other matters to attend to…
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Celes sat in a chair, still chortling a bit to himself as Isara gathered up the shards of metal that surrounded the second safe. Her face was already twisted in a determined expression of curiosity – after immediately giving it a quick examination, she found that the first safe had, while suffering itself, kept this one in near pristine condition. More annoying was the fact that while ostensibly a safe, it had a door – and absolutely no way to get said door open.
Watching her absently slide a finger through the grooves that were the only marks on the unbroken safe, Celes gently reminded her of what she was supposed to be doing. "You have your ballast now. Doing anything about it?"
Impatiently, she stopped her examination and hurried away with another armful of metal pieces. "Yes. You have the crucible ready, right?"
He let out a breath of irritation at that, not at her comment but at the memory of that. "If I really have to answer that question, Isara, you're going to let me look at your head."
"No." The response was said with a smile, though. The previous night's refining crucible had been the largest one she'd ordered from him yet – and rightly so, as the ballast for a drop-forge was considerably larger than any metal tool or utensil. Twice, he'd spread the crucible too thin, the first one collapsing before it ever made it to the furnace, the second one rejected by Isara for being unable to withstand molten metal. The refusal wasn't one of animosity or pride, but of expertise, coming off more as a lesson than a rebuke.
It was just one of the many things that Celes found wonderful about her.
Concealing his less modest thoughts with a quick cough, he pulled himself up on his crutches and moved to the "residential" half of their home, setting himself down once again in a chair, but this time a chair at a table. On it, beside a pitcher of water and two cups, was the basket of food they'd received from Gerda.
Even as Isara cleaned up the last pieces – the smallest of which was no larger than his hand – he began to prepare dinner, or at least as much as one could "prepare" food that was, for the most part, already ready to eat. There were some things to be done, though, for additional flavor: slices of ham were thrown into a skillet, a sealed pot of soup heated, and bread toasted. All of this was done on the same "stovetop" that was actually an extension of the furnace near the center of their residence. The thing was perpetually warm, given the long life of the charcoal they both produced and utilized, and at any given moment could be merely stoked with oxygen to reignite. Given that they had refining to do later, anyways, he took the liberty of adding a little more fuel than he normally would for a little bit of cooking.
Ten minutes later, Isara looked up from the filled crucible to see a delicious meal ready to eat, but Celes nowhere in sight – although she knew exactly where he'd be.
With a tired yet pleased smile, she went outside to rinse her hands at the pump that came out of the ground. When she reached for the handle, though, she found that there was already one there.
Beaming, Celes gladly provided the water for her, a small service, but a service nonetheless. When she was done, she did the same for him, wrapping a conveinent towel around the handle to avoid staining her hands needlessly.
When both of them had cleaned themselves off, they moved back inside. Isara made a quick detour to throw a little more fuel on the furnace before sitting herself down beside him. Already, he'd begun work on the humble but filling fare. Wordlessly, she began to do the same. There was no conversation for a time as they ate, both extremely hungry but unwilling to say so to each other, instead pushing work to a later and later hour. Indeed, lunchtime had slipped by unnoticed while they'd been in the village, and breakfast had been little more than a little toast and jam from the previous day's "pay".
And they still had more to do when they finished eating. Inwardly, Isara wondered if they were working too hard, then reminded herself of the upcoming festival. It would be here in only six days, almost five now – and she really wanted to present the villagers with the forge in time for that.
She paused. Did that really mean so much for her? Were they really settling down so permanently?
Inhaling deeply, she began to give the same treatment to her food.
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Normal people would have cringed from the intense heat radiating from the opened door. This wasn't the intense that most people would associate with being to close to a campfire, or perhaps the intense of a flamethrower cascading death within a trench, something that Celes had narrowly avoided on the Federation front.
This was the intense that destroyed not just wood and flesh – this was the metal-purifying intense of a furnace.
Faces set in tense expressions, the two of them guided the crucible forward on what essentially was a giant pair of tongs, each of them holding one handle of the tool. They had to move quickly – the tool's improvised construction of mere iron meant that it would soften quickly and bend soon after entering the hellish heat. Not only that, but the heat would quickly transfer up the tool to damage their leather mitts and, if they were truly slow, their hands.
They'd done this refinement process before – but never with something as large as this. The weight was enough to have them almost panting with effort, and as they moved the object deeper into the fiery depths, the muscles they could use to support the weight rapidly dwindled.
Celes stole a glance at Isara's face right as they finished – it was almost grey, but with what, he couldn't tell. He didn't feel as stressed as she looked, though. He'd been a foot soldier for decent span of time, and he'd been making sure to exercise with the wheelchair. He was also a male; no matter what females might argue about equality, the fact remained that he had a larger frame to support weight with than hers.
Isara let out a gasp of – something that was most certainly not just exertion – right as they finished reaching in, arms at full extension.
Without thinking, Celes pivoted and roughly shouldered Isara away from the tool, grasping her end of the tongs and supporting the weight completely by himself. As she silently stumbled away, he decided it wasn't quite as heavy as he thought it might be; the weight of the second safe inside the first had been, although not the majority of the total weight, a good deal of it.
With a rough shove, he pushed the crucible to its final position and hopped back. Rather, he tried to hop back, but only then recalled his inability to bend his injured knee, instead merely falling backward helplessly like a turtle.
Knee injuries, he decided, while not completely debilitating, were excessively irritating.
Face still taut with – something – Isara kicked the furnace door shut as he rolled away. The heat, while still present, rapidly subsided. When the heavy metal portal sealed with an ominous clunk, she took the opportunity to let out a whimper of agony, hoping that Celes wouldn't notice.
Unfortunately, he did. Instantly, he was on his feet, despite his maimed joint, guiding her with firm but gentle hands to the chair that he'd used before dinner.
"Where?" he asked brusquely.
She shook her head, unwilling to give in. "Did the crucible make it in okay?" she requested, blatantly ignoring his own question.
"Yes –" he started, before shaking his head and continuing, "forget that, Isara, where?" He threw off the leather mitts, almost dumping them where he knelt in the earth. Realizing who he was right in front of, he barely corrected himself, dropping the mitts onto her lap – it wasn't dropping a tool onto the ground, and it wasn't as if he was going to leave her until he knew exactly what was wrong.
She shook her head again. "It's nothing. I just felt my grip slipping, and panicked."
He hadn't traveled with her for weeks without discovering many of her characteristics, and her willingness to hide pain was something that he found both endearing and absolutely unbearable. Three times during their travels her bullet wound had pained her to the point of losing consciousness, and yet each time she tried to shrug it off as stress. It had been then he'd decided to excavate the admission of injury any time she appeared pained, because any time she looked like she was in pain, it meant that she'd hurt herself badly enough to break her iron façade, and was serious indeed.
Quickly, he reached for her own mitts; instantly, she pulled her hands away from his. "Celes, stop, you're embarrassing me," she moaned, turning her head to the side. Instead of a healthy red glow of shame, though, her cheeks were pale with shock. Target sighted.
"Hands. Now." When she still refused to respond, he juggled the options available to him in his head. One idea came to mind, inspired by his proximity to a certain part of her body, but he instantly dismissed it as outrageously rude and idiotic. Once again he reached for her hands, his arms circling around her hips to reach them. Even when he grasped firmly on her wrists and pulled, she refused to let him see them.
He sighed. Even as he let go and pulled back, he decided to take the idea he'd had earlier. If it didn't work, at least he would have satisfied a minor urge.
And with that, the palms of his hands descended upon her bosom.
Right before they made contact, she jumped with surprise – shock, really – and instinctively threw her hands forward to defend herself.
Before her mitts could push him away, though, he had scooped them off of her hands and dumped unceremoniously into her lap to rest on top of the first pair. She tried to lay her hands into her lap, but already his hands had closed like vices around her wrists. With a sigh, she gave up the struggle, resigning herself to his care as he scrutinized the injuries.
"Well, damn," he groaned. Letting one hand hold both wrists – a tough job, given his hand's small size – he snatched up one of her mitts, examining it. Upon finding no fault, he threw it back down and grabbed the other one, meant for the right hand.
There it was. The seam between the thumb and the rest of the glove had popped loose underneath the weight of the crucible, and thus there had been a gap in the thick padding for heat to escape through, leaving an area of molten skin and angry red tissue around the same area on her hand.
Snatching up the gloves, he pulled her up and outside through the door, throwing the gloves onto the workbench as they went by it.
Once again, he pumped for her, an icy cold stream to quench the still bubbling flesh. At least she wasn't so passive as to make him kneel down there and push her own hands underneath the stream water. The burn might have hissed with heat, but if it did, Isara's sharp intake of breath and the splash of water against the ground concealed it.
"Yes, yes, I know, it hurts, acknowledge the pain, admit it," he said in a stream of comforting words. "Pain is your body's way of telling you you've been hurt – ignore it, and you only harm yourself further. And when you harm yourself, every one around you feels hurt as well –"
"Shut up," Isara moaned. He accepted it, silently pumping water for another minute. It was ice cold outside, to say nothing about the temperature of the water – the sweat from their exertions and the heat rapidly chilled them.
At the end of that minute, he stopped. Isara slowly came to her feet, eyes rising back to his. For a moment, he felt closer to her than he ever had before –
And then she sneezed. His own followed a mere half second later.
"Get inside," she said in a low voice. He was only too glad to follow her.
Now that the furnace door was closed, the heat inside the building wasn't unbearable, but actually quite pleasant after the cold. "The cots," he ordered, and as she made her shaky way towards them to sit, he grabbed his duffel from the wall – still in one piece after everything it'd been through – and hunted inside of it for what he needed. Meanwhile, Isara resolutely kept her eyes on the floor, unwilling to pay Celes the slightest bit of attention.
She regretted doing so when the cool relief of ragnaid washed over her burn.
She knew better than to snatch her injury away from him and waste the precious resource, but she flicked her gaze towards his face, affixing him with a glare meant to shame him. It failed, seeing as he was concentrating on guiding the ragnaid wand with all the precision that he had, which was to say a great deal. Unable to squat with his injured knee, he'd simply sat right beside her. Their shoulders were pressed against each other, but she made no comment – it'd simply pull attention to his disability.
"You're wasting that," she muttered.
"No, I'm not," came his response, just as low.
"It's just a burn."
"Just?"
"It'll heal on its own."
He flipped his gaze up, eyes intense. "Do you want to keep using your hand?"
That question shocked her, forcing a gasp out of her lungs. "Y-yes."
His singular visible eye glanced back down. "I'm afraid for the tendons near the joint. I'm no hand surgeon, but I can say that they most certainly didn't escape undamaged. I guess ragnaid isn't necessary… in the same way that oxygen isn't necessary."
The analogy, although absurd, still shamed her. Her want – no, need – to remain independent, to not trouble others with her problems, still beat inside of her. Rapidly, she changed the subject as he expertly wrapped the wound, unable to linger on the thought. "We're really a bunch of cripples, aren't we?" she joked.
He grunted. "That's not funny." Even so, he looked down at his leg, distracted. "Still, you did do a good job on that."
Her hand, as if recalling the experience, rested itself on the brace. "Of course, I'm not too much better off."
His own hand laid itself right above her old bullet wound. "Your shoulder –"
"Your thigh –"
His hand closed over her freshly bandaged one. "Your hand –"
Heart racing, she continued the one-upping. Her free hand rose to his face, touching the cloth band. "Your eye," she wondered aloud, tilting her face close to his to examine it. Again she had the urge to pull it up and see exactly what lay behind it.
He had no response. What was he supposed to say? That it wasn't at all injured, and that it was, right now, treated to a lovely view down her coverall?
Instantly, he rebuked himself. That sort of statement would get his head put on a pike in seconds.
Regardless of his intentions, both of them suddenly reflected on their current position. His hands were on her – her hands were on him. Their faces were merely inches apart. Their lips were merely inches apart.
Suddenly, it seemed that rising and leaving was the best idea for him, before something else of his did for him.
Quickly, he pulled away from her and quickly moving to the work side of their home, busying himself in cleaning. Indulging himself at this time was a bad idea. "I'll finish up here," he called to her, a little too loudly.
Too disturbed herself to protest, she sat frozen on her cot, practically traumatized by what she had just felt – the same feeling she got when a piece of machinery was about to break, or explode. "I'll handle the fueling of the furnace, then –"
"No need, I'll handle that myself!" he chimed in, cutting her off. "Go get some rest, you'll need it if that burn's to heal." Pointedly, he turned his back to her, their silent signal for the other to
You're pushing me away, she thought as she carefully tottered to one side of the room to change into her sleeping clothes, but in the end, she decided that was best for the moment. It was safer that way.
At least until she knew exactly what to think of Celes.
When she lay her head back against the pillow, she turned one last time to check on Celes. Back still turned, he worked at the rotary bellows of the furnace enthusiastically – excessively so. "You're just as bothered as I am," she murmured to herself.
But it was true that she was in pain, and that she was tired. Celes knew how long to keep the fire burning – she'd taught him that much. Her eyes closed as she drifted off to sleep, lulled by the whoosh of the furnace.
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Shameless shipping is shameless. And I got to make my first risqué comment. That's got to be worth something, right?
In any case, as our protagonists continue, expect things to get progressively more and more awkward. Just how risqué do you guys think the writing should get? Trust me when I say it could easily go, *ahem*, "all the way", but if you think that would detract from the story, then I can leave things at vague implications. (Also, trust me when I say that any explicit wording would not be empty pleasuring, but be interspersed with meaning.)
This is a job for the review button down there! Now help stop unemployment across the internet and give it a job!
