![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
- *fic,
- ff,
- ff: xiv,
- ff: xiv: oc
wip
Characters: Syhrthota Lynahlwyn, J'rizhan Tia
Content: gore
On the second day after the ambush, walking side by side out from the long shadow of Brewer's Beacon, I found the courage to tell him I would not be instructing him after all.
He said nothing at first, save in the slight twitch of his ears I'd learnt to recognise - better to watch for that than look him in the eye. I pressed on into his silence, before he could decide to press back. "I'll not question your aptitude, mind," I told him. "A misstep or two, aye, but none that couldn't be remedied by time."
"'However'." His voice remained low and a little raspy, despite the rest I'd allowed him once dusk fell.
"Yes, Tia, 'however'. I'd do you a disservice to be less than honest. I -" No sooner had I hesitated than I cursed inwardly as I hadn't since my patrolling days. "- fear I am not the fighter I was. And I find the longer I think about it, the less I fear it; the more pride I take in it. Any fool can swat at cloudkin, but what of the stand we must take against hunger, destitution and fear?"
I gestured down towards Swiftperch as we crested the hill and crunched our way down the path. "Swinging an axe may help these people survive, day by day. Our work, our real work, will let them live. We can yet make up ground before the guilds hear of it."
Unless that blood-crazed fiend had already done unseen damage beyond repair to the thoughtful young scholar of botany I was introduced to all those moons ago, I was certain that Tia noticed my slip. Still, every word of it was true. He could label me a coward for refusing to take up the axe again even to help a valued colleague of mine, I thought, or simply for refusing to trust him with my reasons. Cowardice I could accept. I'd carried that mantle long before we met.
But rather than protest, he reached up to give me a light pat on the shoulder as we rounded on the inn. I started, and he even laughed a little, if dryly. "I see," he said at last. "Then I'll borrow the axe a few suns longer. 'Tis a distraction, nothing more."
At that moment he saw the look on my face, and his own brow creased in answer. "Lynahlwyn?"
Concerned or not, he was about to retreat to his room and what little was left of his research notes for the remainder of the night, if our routine held. I made one last attempt, though I'll admit my heart wasn't in it. "If you must pursue it," I said as carefully as possible, "that may be best. Keep the armour too, if you like."
If I kept it, I'd have to clean it. If I cleaned it, I knew I'd only waste time thinking back to the origin of each stain, each scratch and scrap of bloodied flesh.
In the morning, he left a note to inform me that he would check in with the Arcanists' Guild in Limsa before the "errand" he intended to run, then return within the week. On the face of it, it was of only minor inconvenience. We were already at the mercy of my old contacts for the time being, drawing up plans and making horrendously circuitous arrangements to retrieve the supplies we lost up in the ruins of Nym. In the meantime, farmland laid to waste by the Calamity does not spring back overnight. There was data to gather and crops to attend to, meagre as both may have been.
As for J'rizhan himself, I'd never yet known him to miss an appointment he'd agreed to, any more than I'd known him to attend an appointment he wasn't keen on. Perhaps people without that inborn independent spirit would never seek out the adventuring lifestyle to begin with, let alone permit it to bring them far across the sea from everything they grew up with. I wouldn't have known.
I had never before known him to rip an animal apart with such enthusiasm that the fragmented bones were unrecognisable, either. Work would drive the image out of my head for a time, the way I faithfully relied on it for, but every other evening the smell wafting from him and the glistening in his hair would return to me and circle for a while. The few times I paid attention to it, I concluded it was essentially more cowardice on my part, when I had seen far worse. On the other hand, even the personnel secretaries at the Botanists' Guild no longer remembered me from before they took me on, thanks to Dalamud, and plants only rarely bleed.
Then again, the piles of mangled jackal corpses produced by the Yellowjackets whenever a pack found its way onto our precious fields not only didn't bother me, but tended to come as a relief. After the first couple of days, I decided not to put too much thought into it. I had need of my thoughts elsewhere.
Content: gore
On the second day after the ambush, walking side by side out from the long shadow of Brewer's Beacon, I found the courage to tell him I would not be instructing him after all.
He said nothing at first, save in the slight twitch of his ears I'd learnt to recognise - better to watch for that than look him in the eye. I pressed on into his silence, before he could decide to press back. "I'll not question your aptitude, mind," I told him. "A misstep or two, aye, but none that couldn't be remedied by time."
"'However'." His voice remained low and a little raspy, despite the rest I'd allowed him once dusk fell.
"Yes, Tia, 'however'. I'd do you a disservice to be less than honest. I -" No sooner had I hesitated than I cursed inwardly as I hadn't since my patrolling days. "- fear I am not the fighter I was. And I find the longer I think about it, the less I fear it; the more pride I take in it. Any fool can swat at cloudkin, but what of the stand we must take against hunger, destitution and fear?"
I gestured down towards Swiftperch as we crested the hill and crunched our way down the path. "Swinging an axe may help these people survive, day by day. Our work, our real work, will let them live. We can yet make up ground before the guilds hear of it."
Unless that blood-crazed fiend had already done unseen damage beyond repair to the thoughtful young scholar of botany I was introduced to all those moons ago, I was certain that Tia noticed my slip. Still, every word of it was true. He could label me a coward for refusing to take up the axe again even to help a valued colleague of mine, I thought, or simply for refusing to trust him with my reasons. Cowardice I could accept. I'd carried that mantle long before we met.
But rather than protest, he reached up to give me a light pat on the shoulder as we rounded on the inn. I started, and he even laughed a little, if dryly. "I see," he said at last. "Then I'll borrow the axe a few suns longer. 'Tis a distraction, nothing more."
At that moment he saw the look on my face, and his own brow creased in answer. "Lynahlwyn?"
Concerned or not, he was about to retreat to his room and what little was left of his research notes for the remainder of the night, if our routine held. I made one last attempt, though I'll admit my heart wasn't in it. "If you must pursue it," I said as carefully as possible, "that may be best. Keep the armour too, if you like."
If I kept it, I'd have to clean it. If I cleaned it, I knew I'd only waste time thinking back to the origin of each stain, each scratch and scrap of bloodied flesh.
In the morning, he left a note to inform me that he would check in with the Arcanists' Guild in Limsa before the "errand" he intended to run, then return within the week. On the face of it, it was of only minor inconvenience. We were already at the mercy of my old contacts for the time being, drawing up plans and making horrendously circuitous arrangements to retrieve the supplies we lost up in the ruins of Nym. In the meantime, farmland laid to waste by the Calamity does not spring back overnight. There was data to gather and crops to attend to, meagre as both may have been.
As for J'rizhan himself, I'd never yet known him to miss an appointment he'd agreed to, any more than I'd known him to attend an appointment he wasn't keen on. Perhaps people without that inborn independent spirit would never seek out the adventuring lifestyle to begin with, let alone permit it to bring them far across the sea from everything they grew up with. I wouldn't have known.
I had never before known him to rip an animal apart with such enthusiasm that the fragmented bones were unrecognisable, either. Work would drive the image out of my head for a time, the way I faithfully relied on it for, but every other evening the smell wafting from him and the glistening in his hair would return to me and circle for a while. The few times I paid attention to it, I concluded it was essentially more cowardice on my part, when I had seen far worse. On the other hand, even the personnel secretaries at the Botanists' Guild no longer remembered me from before they took me on, thanks to Dalamud, and plants only rarely bleed.
Then again, the piles of mangled jackal corpses produced by the Yellowjackets whenever a pack found its way onto our precious fields not only didn't bother me, but tended to come as a relief. After the first couple of days, I decided not to put too much thought into it. I had need of my thoughts elsewhere.