Prompt: # 38 Honesty
Summary: With this new beginning, with this new chance, they could not hide.
A/N: Let's go back to Noctum Will Rise. My first multi chapter for the Versus world. It is before Eclipse and set just after the scene cuts in the epilogue where they have come full circle.
Veritas is Latin for "truth".
Veritas
And this time, this time it is a hopeful heart that beats again.
Words seem at the same time worthless and absolutely necessary. He is standing just before her now and the smile is still on her lips. It is a time to speak but no words greet her. There were so many things to be conveyed, yet no sounds were uttered. The beating in his heart has not soothed to a low hum. It was still rapid within his chest as this moment stretched. He wanted to savor it. This moment of the unknown. This feeling of newness. They had come full circle now. This was their new beginning. This was his new world. A world where he could actually hope and be with her. This is what he hopes. He hopes to be with her. Fear for her sake had been what had stopped him before. Now, he felt a different sort of fear as he continues to stare at her. He feared just how things would go now that he was free. Free to feel what he already felt for her. An indeterminable feeling that was strong inside him and no other had produced within him before.
The sparkle in her eyes tell him that she understands. Not only does she understand his thoughts, she knows them. She knows because she can actually hear the thoughts that run through his mind. As he could hear the hopeful thoughts from hers. This strange telepathy that they shared together was going to take some getting used to. It should have bothered him that his mind was being shared. Instead, he only wonders how far they can be from each other before he can no longer feel her presence within his mind. To think, that they actually had time to test all this out. They could do anything and nothing, but he wanted to do everything. This new found liberty was refreshing. This new start was like Spring was to one who had suffered through a long Winter. The ice and snow were finally melting and fresh buds were forcing their way to the surface. How beautiful would their world be in full bloom?
"Does it bother you?" she asks. She does not have to explain to what she is referring. That very thing was telling him that she was anxious for his answer. There was no resentment in her either, but nervousness at his reaction to their connection. This puzzled him, yet at the same time, it was perfectly in character for her. She had always been upfront where he had always been evasive.
It is the first time he has heard her speak since... he does not want to think of that. The sting of that memory is still too fresh in his mind. He suppresses a shudder. There is a slight dip in the garment that she wears and he can see the fresh scar upon her chest. It taunted him and accused him. It asked him why he had done it. It asked him how he could have let it happen.
"A little," he says at last. Of the many things that he owed her, honesty was one of them. They would not have lies in this new beginning, as they would not have war.
"It is, unsettling," she adds carefully. She tilts her head almost teasingly as she looks up at his face. Taking one step closer to him, she looks up into his eyes.
He nods his agreement.
"Do you feel the others as you feel me?" she asks suddenly. There is a strange expression in her face and he does not understand. It almost looks as if she were unhappy with the prospect, instead of intrigued like he would have thought she would be.
"I feel the presence of their Crystals, but I do not hear them as I hear you," he confesses, but he watches her closely as he speaks to observe her reaction. There is that twinkle of satisfaction and happiness in her eyes at his words and it does something to him. Something inside him sighs with her obvious pleasure of this unique ability shared between them.
"How do you feel?" he asks. The pleasant feeling vanishes and he almost dreads her answer, but he has to know.
"I am fine," she says with a quick, pointed nod of her head. "At first I was a little confused to find myself in the middle of a battlefield, but the whispers explained."
He nods with understanding. "I, thank you, for meeting me here," he says hesitantly. "I know that you probably did not want to come back here like this."
"It is a fine night and I feel like we are starting fresh," she says with a quick inhalation of breath. "What better way to start over than coming back here? It was brilliant of you, I think."
"There are many things I would thank you for," he continues.
"And I would hear none of it," she replies. "You were justified."
"So were you in seeking revenge," he counters.
"I was upset," she confesses. "Of course I would be. I was grieving."
"I felt your grief," he says quietly, staring intently at her face. "You should have exacted your rightful revenge."
She shakes her head. "Even then, I knew it would not have been the way it should have been if you had succeeded in your plan."
"How did you know what I had planned?"
"Despite you always claiming to be so dark, I know you to be good," she says with a patient smile. "If I had been the victor of the prize, that would not have made any sense."
"Yes it did," he argues, because it had made sense. She should have had her vengeance on the one who had killed her father. He was just a murderer.
For a reason he cannot fathom, she smiles then. It is a knowing sort of smile that immediately throws him off kilter. She steps closer and he stiffens in a sort of panic.
"I would never have been able to kill you," she confesses and she smiles at the stunned look that must be on his face. "As angry, as vengeful, as justified as I may have been, I could never have done it."
"Why not?" he almost demands and he leans in closer to her face. "Why?"
She does not look afraid when she returns his stare.
"No one should ever die without knowing the feeling of hope," she says.
He frowns.
"You needed to succeed," she explains. "It was always supposed to be you because you have suffered the most."
"And you have not?"
She shakes her head. "Not like you have."
"I do not understand," and he is sure his face expression this without the words.
"Not right now," she agrees. "But you will."
"Will you explain it to me?" he asks meekly.
"Why do you think they found it fit to bring me back to you?" she asks with a teasing smile on her face.
She was like an oracle. She was a goddess. She was of another world.
"I am glad you are back," he admits without any hesitation. Those words sound too cold, too unfeeling but it is all he can express at this moment.
"So am I," she admits too. "How else am I to chase away your nightmares if I am dead?"
"Had you become a ghost or spirit, I would have wanted you to haunt me," he says.
"I can still haunt you now," she says, with a small laugh.
He smirks down at her playfulness. Her manner is just as it was that night. She was charming and teasing and all together everything that made him look in awe at her. He could not have let her see how much she captivated him then, but he could now. He watches her closely and notices her looking at the ring on his finger. The ring that Etro had seen fit to place there without his consent. She looks disapproving and he feels compelled to explain.
"I do not understand the significance of this," he says raising his hand to give her a closer look.
She reaches out tentatively, with that delicate frown still on her face, and touches the metal ring.
"It suits you," she comments but he can sense there is more. "But I do not like that she has a claim on you."
Possessiveness was not something that he would have expected from her. It reflects his own thoughts, to be sure. It just surprises him to see it in her as well. He finds he does not mind it one bit that she is possessive of him. There is a sense of satisfaction that she wants this "claim" over him. It meant that his feelings of possession were not as presumptuous as he had previously thought. This mutual feeling compelled him to reassure her.
"It is just a ring," he soothes, even though he is still tempted to cut the wretched thing off. "No matter what her meaning, it does not hold the same meaning to me."
She stares at it a moment longer and the feelings he is receiving from her are a mixture of jealousy, curiosity and suspicion.
"You will not share me?" he asks, a bit of his usual cocky facade returns. It is his turn to be teasing.
"No," she says bluntly. "In my dreams I did not envision having to share the angel in my dreams."
"I thought you were going to settle for a boy," he says with raised eyebrows.
"As you will settle for just a girl?" she counters, looking back up at his face.
"I am not settling for just a girl," he says and his smirk turns into a soft smile as he sees and feels the confusion from her eyes. "I am gaining a star. My Bright Star."
"I do not settle for a boy," she replies with a matching smile. "I am gaining a prince. My Dark Prince, with fire in his eyes and whispers in his ear. He will watch the world below along with me."
"I think you lie when you claim you cannot shine against the artificial lights of the city," he chides softly. Their faces are coming closer together. "There is no light that could possibly outshine the brightness of yours."
She looks at him curiously for a moment before she smiles one of those heart stopping smiles.
"Those words from anyone else's lips would have sounded almost too sweet to consume," she says.
"But since they were from mine?" he asks.
She gives him an assessing look before responding. "I feel like you give me too much credit," she confesses. "It gives me the pressure to be perfect and I am no angel."
"But at least you are a girl," he says.
"You really are trying to make me fall in love with you," she says and there is a look on her delicate features that tells him that she likes the idea. It gives him hope.
"You said you had already started," he says with a smirk again.
"That I did and still hold to," she says frankly.
For some reason, she does not press for a declaration for his own feelings. Hers, she does not deny and expresses freely. But she does not demand a similar confession in return for her own. He does not even feel a secret wish for a similar declaration from him from their connection. All he can feel is her caution. A caution that was fueled by his last reaction to her blunt declaration. If he had not felt as strongly as he had already for her, he knows that he would have started to form them now. The lack of pressure leaves him eager to give her his own assurances.
"I will declare to you what I did not before," he says. He pauses to watch the eager anticipation on her face. This look, this expression, he will cherish for as long as he lives. Within the bright eagerness of her eyes, he knew one thing. His new world, was in her. "I may have already started as well."