The Gift
Dying, Heiter thought of Fern.
She has made it in time, his already fogged thoughts kept repeating softly, lulling him as if to sleep, the memories as scraps of tenderness and pride. She has made it in time. Everything's all right now...
He then walked to the door of the room he had offered her, not long after Fern moved in to live with him, holding the mage's staff he had obtained for her. His hand lingered awhile, somehow unnerved, ere he knocked. No wonder, he was not used to giving gifts to little girls. It was strange enough that she lived here, her persistent presence filling his heart with bemused and surprised warmth.
"May I come in?" Slipping his head into the crack of the ajar door, he peeked inside.
Fern at once abandoned folding evenly her nightgown on the bed and, having turned around, gave a solemn nod.
"Of course, Heiter-sama," she replied in her quiet voice. She never spoke much, and when speaking, she was always composed, her words always arranged cleanly like a jigsaw puzzle put together, like that nightgown on the bed. Partly Heiter put it down to the fact that she still hadn't got used to living with him and was still uneasy and uncomfortable around him, partly, however, something told him Fern would never be different. It was just her, and that made her special. 'Special to me' - another odd observation to Heiter's recently formed collection of unknown experiences.
"Fern, I have something for you," he said.
Fern's eyes widened like platters, as though giving her something was an utterly unthinkable thing. "For me?"
"Mages need staffs like priests their holy scriptures," he went on slowly, his gaze wandering to the top of the staff he was holding. Fern only now seemed to pay attention to it. Her eyes became even rounder and she shifted her now nearly frightened gaze a few times from the staff to Heiter.
Heiter adjusted his grip on the staff, yet his hand on it still trembled slightly as if tingling. "Since we already know you're going to be a mage, I thought you'd need one too."
He extended the staff towards her, and when after a while she still had not moved from the place where she stood, he encouraged softly, "Come on, it's yours!"
Hesitantly, with her face tense, Fern took the staff, so much taller than herself, and began to examine it closely.
"Do you like it?"
The look she gave him was enough to make something in Heiter's chest tighten, and then she set the staff against the wall therewithal and unsurely, fearfully, no less hesitantly, approached him and hugged, her face buring into his bishop's home robes. "Heiter-sama."
Heiter chuckled lightly and patted her head, yet he still froze inside. Gratitude had not been a stranger to him, and in his long life, he had been gifted different kinds of it. Himmel had been grateful to him for their friendship and he had showed it oft, Eisen too, despite he had let it show rarely, and perhaps even Frieren, despite she had showed it never. Throughout the ten years of their quest, people had been repeatedly grateful for the minor and major favours they had done them on their way, and then, already after the Demon King's defeat, they had been eternally grateful for his defeating, and then, for his teachings and good advice once had been a bishop...
Yet never before had he known the gratitude combined with affection.
Heiter thought even that, till that moment, he might have not known love at all.
She has made it in time, the thoughts repeated one last time, then the true sleep came, long and boundless like peaceful oceans, bringing gentle dreams, preparing him for the meeting with the Goddess.