day eight >> tepid
#ffxivwrite2022 #ffxiv #prompt #heavensward #stormblood #shadowbringers #endwalker #stelmaria #haurchefant #yotsuyu #graha #wolgraha #spoilers
warnings: blood ; description of a deep abdominal wound ; i be spoiling everything up in here
general: feels ; hurt/comfort kinda; this just kinda took on a life of its own ; fuck if i know
adjective
- (especially of a liquid) only slightly warm; lukewarm.
- showing little enthusiasm
Glowing logs crackle and snap, then rustle as the soft piles of ash collapse under their own weight. Flames flicker and dance, casting grotesque and outsized shadows on the walls. The heat spreading from the grate is strong and steady, yet it barely takes the edge off the omnipresent chill.
Stelmaria slouches deeper into the thick quilt, pulling her stockinged feet up off the freezing floor. This unrelenting cold weather makes her bones ache and her nose run freely no matter how many warming tonics she forces down her throat.
Camp Dragonhead is silent as a tomb this late, or this early, depending on your point of view. These bells before the first delicate peach and gold stripes of dawn reach for the eastern sky is the best time to sift through her muddled thoughts.
“Would you like company my friend? I’ve brought you a little something.”
Heavily distracted, an awkward amount of time passes before Stelmaria realizes Haurchefant is speaking to her, much less to register what he's asking. His smile never falters, even as the silence stretches on.
“Oh,” she murmurs, scooting to make him a space beside her. “That’s very kind of you.”
He shakes his head, silver-blue hair sparkling in the firelight, “Please, think nothing of it.”
There is a gently steaming mug in each of his broad, calloused hands. They, much like everything else about the elezen, are sturdy and dependable at any time of day or night.
And Stelmaria had cause to know.
She takes one from him, chapped skin greedy for the accumulated warmth of both mug and palm.
Except it isn't as hot as she assumed it would be.
“Did I burn the milk?” His voice is concerned.
Her confusion must have been obvious. “I just assumed it would be boiling hot,” she explains, letting the wafting chocolate and cinnamon smell bolster her heart.
A single brow lifts before he chuckles, warm and sultry enough to shame the blazing fire. “Ah no... I always thought it impolite to serve a drink so hot your guest cannot enjoy it at its most delicious. As it cools the chocolate settles to the bottom. If you daub cream in top it melts right away.”
“I see,” she says, without truly seeing.
He grins, cheeks coloring as he replaces the quilt slipping down her narrow shoulder. “In my admittedly inexpert opinion, hot chocolate should be served at a temperature just above tepid. That's when everything is in balance, the taste, the scent, even the look of it. As a host that is the moment where I can maximize my guest's enjoyment.”
“And being a true paragon of knighthood—living to serve and all that—hospitality is all about giving your best for another,” she teases.
That first sip is smooth and rich, everything a sweet drink meant to warm from the inside out should be. Heaven contained within a humble earthenware mug.
“Indeed. Though the way may be difficult and the task daunting, to be a knight is to throw yourself against the odds and succeed,” he says heartily, clinking the lip of his mug against her own.
The more of Haurchefant she sees the more she grows to like him. His flowery offers of shelter, sympathy, and friendship unnerved her at first, but with every word and deed he'd proved himself the genuine article—a true man of virtue.
Her second sip is even better than the first somehow, spreading warmth and comfort from her heart to every ilm of her tense limbs.
“You would go so far for just a friend?”
“No such thing as ‘just a friend’ my dearest Warrior. Every soul is special to someone and should be treated as such.”
Her throat tightens, “And if the someones have all gone? What then?”
He puts his mug on the side table and faces her, clear blue eyes quite serious, “They haven't gone. The missing Scions will be found in time. Alphinaud and Tataru love you like family. And...”
Hesitating, he glances away.
“And?”
“And I would care for you as well. If it's not...”
“It's not,” she says, and resettles the quilt to cover him as well. Two against the world, instead of just one.
“Stella? What’s this?” asks the innocent, bird-like voice, so very different from the imperious tone that haunts her dreams.
Dreams of opium scented smoke and sharp pinpricks of pain. Of moon-pale breasts clasped to moon-pale breasts. Crimson lips and fragrant petals.
Gunpowder and blood and castles falling into the sea.
Tsuyu’s wide, guileless eyes gaze at Stelmaria over the steaming mug, politely waiting for an answer.
Tsuyu and not Yotsuyu.
“It's called hot chocolate. Drink it before it gets cold.”
“Hot?” Tsuyu repeats, concerned.
“Well, it’s more warm than hot really,” Stel admits. “Go on. You won’t burn your mouth, I promise.”
“All right!” the Doman woman chirps, before quaffing the lot in one go like a greedy child. “Thank you!”
Stel does her best to smother a giggle. “What did you think?”
The carmine lips purse under a thin film of hot chocolate. “More, please?”
“Lyna, I beg you. Leave me to my rest.” G’raha Tia does his utmost to sound terse.
Really, he just wants a few bells of peace to catch up on his reports. He’s been shamefully behind since Stelmaria appeared in the First and his extended convalescence upon returning from The Tempest hasn’t helped matters in the slightest.
The knock comes again, more insistent this time, but the accompanying voice isn’t Lyna. “There’s no tricking me with that half hearted nonsense, and if it wouldn’t fool me you can be certain Lyna won’t believe it either.”
His crimson ears flatten, eyes darting everywhere to locate an escape only to come up empty. Every ilm of his flesh aches and the wound where Chessamile pried the flattened round from his shoulder itches like demon’s fury. He’s refused to accept help to bathe himself, neither has he finished a meal nor slept more than a bell at a time.
In short, he’s a mess and the Warrior is about to find out how low he can sink.
She must have grown tired of waiting for his reply because she breezes into his bedroom while he’s still debating jumping out the window. “Drink this,” she commands and places a steaming mug on his bedside table, heedlessly upsetting his careful piles of notes, books, and broken quills to do so.
He identifies it by scent alone. “Hot chocolate?”
“Yes,” she replies, without elaborating. “Drink that while I run a bath for you.”
The Lord of the Crystarium nearly spits the sweet mouthful across the room. “Bath?!”
“Lyna tells me you seem uncomfortable at the idea of her assistance, but she’s worried you’ll make yourself ill.”
He tries a confident chuckle before having a nonchalant sip of the chocolate, “Lyna is—“
“A lovely sweet woman who’s put up with her beloved grandfather’s ridiculous foolishness for decades? Yes I’ve heard all about it. Leaving aside Lyna’s observations, Chessamile tells me you smell like an unwashed amaro and you’re neither eating nor sleeping.”
Her entire diatribe is delivered in bursts as she stalks between his bedside—where she oversees his hot chocolate consumption—and his adjoining bathroom, where presumably a tub full of hot water awaits.
There’s no use in further obstruction. He swallows the last of the drink like an obedient kit and accepts her help in rising from his bed.
She smells of myrrh and orange blossoms, staying close to his side in case he trips, patiently attending his plodding steps. The chocolate, much to his surprise, radiates warm contentment from his belly.
“I’m glad you came. That you’re here,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t mean the drink or the bath.
Her face relaxes, the slow smile spreading over her features the same one he remembers from their adventures in the tower, all those years ago, when things were simple and a future together wasn’t an impossible dream.
“Me too,” she replies.
They had gone to the end of the universe together, just the two of them, all the way out past the razor edge of existence where the fabric of time and space begins to unravel. A place where anything that might be imagined can and does spring into being.
An eternal new beginning, the promise of life and hope stretching across that endless expanse the way that dawn brings a new day, all color in motion and joyous to behold.
She fought Zenos to the death there. She watched him breathe his last, whispering words to speed him on his return to the aetherial sea.
She bled there. Shrapnel from her shattered rapier embedded like diamonds in her skin. The hole Zenos put in her belly oozing dark, dark blood. The smell... all wrong... He placed a spell there, for healing, but it wouldn't stick. He tried staunching the wound the old fashioned way, using the pressure of his hands.
But the hole... it was so big... he couldn't... it wouldn't... something soft... the blood...
She was dying and he could not save her.
Yet, with a miraculous series of beeps they reappeared aboard the Ragnarok, spurring a frantic rush of movement and sound. Everyone trying to heal her all at once. Alphinaud, Alisaie, Yshtola, Urianger, at one point Thancred found a potion that he tipped down her throat, and Estinien snapped commands to the Lopporits to 'get this woman to a healer and do it now.'
Sharlayan.
The best doctors the nation could claim decided some of her organs were obliterated but no one will give him details. He just can't stop thinking about how far into the hole his hands could slip.
It turns his stomach.
A hot bath in the annex. The water red as wine, red like Dalamud, circling the drain to slip away and disappear.
A comfortable bed where he won't sleep.
He can't sleep. Not until she wakes.
Exhausted but tense, he pads to the kitchen and puts milk in a pan to warm. Then finds the chocolate and cinnamon and sugar and cream.
He decides to make it exactly how she does, down to which hand she uses to stir the finished mixture—always seven times clockwise—to set the magic charm. He adds everything she likes, as though he's planning to bring it to her, extra cream, extra shavings, extra cinnamon, and extra sweet.
Extra sweet, like her.
His throat tightens, burning as if he's swallowed the sun. He breathes slow. Concentrate. Breathe again.
It's done.
He takes it to her, thinking maybe she'll wake.
The bed seems huge, or perhaps she seems smaller than usual. The gleaming violet curtain of her hair fans over the pillow like a goddess' halo. Her narrow chest rises and falls but she's so ghostly pale, the only spots of color aside from her hair are the ugly bruises from the rapier shrapnel.
Her chocolate goes on the nightstand and he sits beside her, the burst of anxious energy that carried him this far finally spent.
He takes her freezing hand and rubs it between his own, trying to ignore the insistent belief that they've come to the end of things before they had a chance to begin.
“Is that chocolate?”
His laughter turns to tears as he runs his lips greedily over the back of her hand, and “Yes. Yes it is. It should be the perfect temperature for you to drink.”