balefire

He charms your contemporaries, your supporters- promises them the sky and stars wrapped in a neat, shimmering bow- and has the gall to look startled when your immediate refusal is met with unwavering support. Your constituents know, after all, which of you has their best interests at heart, so if he thinks, genuinely, that he's going to outdo you with one single, barely month-long campaign, he's sorely mistaken. He takes it better than you expect, but he doesn't stop trying.

And you hate him a little for it, at first.

You hate him more when he calls you 'friend' during attempted renegotiation- coos it, cloying and coquettish, but you recognize it for what it is: the carnivorous croon of a capable con-man- and you reply, without hesitation, that you no longer do business with 'friends'. He looks at Alexa like an accusation, you look at him like a warning. There are lines he should not cross with you- and you inform him of them without ever really saying a word.

Roses have thorns, Stoneheart- you should handle them with care.

(You don't think about how the last 'friend' you did business with was someone you took full advantage of without remorse. You don't think about how much the way he goes about things feels the same.)

Persistent to a fault, he seems to take offense to your refusal to fall for his flashy phrasing, his gaudy overtures. Offers 'gifts' you insinuate are bribes, offers 'compromises' you point out the losses in. Your people do not need the IPC's money, but the IPC desperately wants your System's power. Not a single one of those in positions of leadership are willing to cede it to them, and it becomes a stalemate. You become the figurehead on the chessboard, an immovable queen carved from rose-colored ice, a perennial, perpetual thorn in the IPC's side.

However, for as insistent as his bosses are, for how much they try and threaten, he, instead, learns.

It feels insulting to put it that way, but it's the truth of it; the IPC cares less about Grandis than it does about what it holds. Its people, its locales, its traditions- none of them mean a damn thing to the executives in their far-off homes, and it isn't long before that truth is spread around the people. Soon enough, most of the IPC deems it a waste to persist — but you have made yourself known to the cosmos at large long before it gets to that point. They have no recourse but to withdraw strategically, leaving Aventurine their sole point of contact. Most consider it a mercy he wasn't fired; you recognize it at the punishment it is.

The IPC still wants blood from this particular stone, and they expect him to be the one to squeeze it out- even if it's from himself.

You don't feel bad for him.

(Until you do.)

Not because he makes any particular appeals to your sympathy, but because you can tell, with every week he spends shuttling between planets in Grandis, how much it costs him everywhere else. There is no reprieve from other responsibilities, no assistance in managing his time, his work, the weight of the IPC's expectations that continues to be piled heavier and heavier on his shoulders.

You are called to retrieve him from one of the VIP rooms of the Golden City, alone and asleep not even a third of the way through his first drink. You are certain he didn't mean to pass out here. You are also certain he did not do so on purpose. However, there are Espers in Utgard who can easily put the unsuspecting to sleep without any chemical assistance. He probably didn't think to consider the fact. You have the Esper in question arrested, thank Alexa for her discretion, and decide to handle him yourself. To you, he weighs next to nothing, and you step through the purposefully-emptied employee corridors with him in your arms, irritated.

Aventurine sleeps like the dead.

(Aventurine sleeps like a scared child, curling into your warmth and murmuring a name you'll only understand later when he tells you who she is. You never tell him you were the one to carry him out when he awakens, groggy and half-panicked, in your office the next day.)

Both of you come to an uneasy truce then, attempt to form something like a mutual understanding. You can't help but keep seeing shadows of yourself in him though- but worse still, you see flickers of people you love there too. He weaponizes his looks like Alexa, clawing his way into as much power as he can manage while making fools of arrogant men. He dredges up knowledge like Narmer, without hesitation or fear of whether or not he should. You even spy, now and again- when you're allowed to see beneath the facade- some of Jin Yuyao's desperate need to survive, to get the revenge she thought she deserved out of your own flesh, your own success.

Before you know it, you find yourself sharing silent looks in meetings, searching for the familiar flash of tricolor eyes in your direction when you know he's in the room. It's a strange kind of knowing that you don't think about too much, until suddenly, it strikes you why you keep looking. Why you're always searching, always making sure- even if silently, even if only to yourself- that he's there. That he's still in your orbit.

...no, that's a lie.

You're looking to make sure you're still in his.

Yet unlike what you might have done when you were younger, you don't act- you don't even really think to acknowledge it, past understanding the fact. You simply let it be, because you think it's nothing but a passing fascination. Something that you'll look back on and laugh at yourself over.

(You are most assuredly not laughing now.)

Worrying about acknowledging the feeling is no longer an issue; it pervades every interaction, creeping in like a strangling vine. You burn with fury because you feel humiliated- caught like a fly in a carnivorous flower that had not meant to even attract you. Because Aventurine does not think of you the way you think of him; honestly, Aventurine barely thinks of you at all- at first, at least. It's worse, when he begins to consider you a friend. When he tries to buy you thinks he thinks you'll like, instead of whatever's most expensive. When he calls you, not for business, but to gossip. When he visits, haggard and exhausted rather than his usual polished perfection, and languishes lazily among the cushions of the couch in your office.

When he gently calls you 'dear Abigail', instead of his by now half-teasing 'my friend', as if waiting for the rejection.

As if he's ever been rejected in his life, the little fool.

No, Aventurine has always been a coveted gem in many a collection- and that's also something you learn not from rumors, but from him. A directness and honesty that he only now, only hesitantly begins to show, as his visits become more regular- if still unpredictable. And you make time for him, of course you do; you can't help but want to. It only serves to further drive home the fact that this is not a passing fascination- it is something you're not quite sure you've ever let yourself feel.

That it wasn't a matter of 'letting' yourself at all is more concerning to you than it should be.

You have practice, at least, with not letting the affection show. It feels as though you've done nothing else since you were twenty-three years old, after all, than reign yourself in. If there's anything you take pride in, it's your ability to control not only yourself, but your reactions, the way you interact with others. It makes you seem cold and calculating to some, demure and composed to others. In your own heart, however, you know that what you really are is someone who has never wanted to let anyone else be the reason why she fails.

Even your closest friends know this, aware that though they are people you allow yourself to trust, the person you will always trust above all else is yourself.

So because you're so confident you can contain it all... you are certain that somewhere along the line, you slip.

While he doesn't show it, you think Aventurine is, if not aware, then at the very least suspicious. You tell yourself that has to be the reason why he shows up less, why it feels like he's pulling away. So you do the same in turn, unwilling to let your heart be the sole casualty in the fallout that is certain to come —

— and are baffled when somehow, now, he begins to give chase.

As sudden as it is unexpected, he reaches for you, hands empty of gifts but full of promises.

But you think of yourself, standing outside the Miracle, eyes fixed on its massive height, waiting. You think of the aftermath, the silence after you put your life on the line for him- he doesn't know, you didn't tell him- and you realize... he will always do this. He will always take- without question, without hesitation- anything you offer, and then pull away because he either feels or realizes it's too much to accept, feels as though there is something you expect in return that he either cannot or will not give. You're not sure which is which.

It's hard not to be angry at yourself for being unable to tell, because you know that were it not for the rot taking root in your heart, you would be able to discern it immediately. Yet whether due to false hope or uncharacteristic foolish optimism, you know what you want the answer to be- and you also know that it won't be the one you get.

So you continue to keep your distance, but you do not keep him away.

You are, after all, a woman of your word. And it was implicit, when you accepted the hand he offered as nothing more than a friend, that you would not abandon him. Not when so much and so many had already left him behind, alone in the universe with nothing but himself to rely on.

(You can try not to love him, but you can't know you'll succeed. All you can do is try. )

It would be less difficult, however, if he didn't keep toying with you.

Not on purpose- he'd have to be paying attention to you for that. But it's still painful, nevertheless- each slippery, selfish little slip-up embedding itself into the softened, vulnerable center he's been chipping away at all this time.

And don't say no, unless you want to break my heart.

Honestly, you wonder... does he even realize that a heart that he won't allow himself to show you is hardly liable to break?

And you are certain your friends are worried that you aren't furious. That you haven't dragged him, head-first, into facing all the things he refuses to acknowledge. It's a difficult prospect to even face, because if there's anyone you've met more dead set on covering themselves in thorns than you are, it's Aventurine of Stratagems.

You don't do it, you know, because you're afraid.

People can pretend all they like, but no friendship survives an unrequited confession. Not the same way it was before, and certainly not without breaking one or both people irrevocably. Irreparably. And while before you'd been certain you were stronger than Raine's wall, you have to wonder if the damage he's already done to you wouldn't cause you to crumble. And he's been shattered enough- by others, by himself. You don't want to be another fracture he's forced to mend.

So you will remain at his side as best you can from star systems away, and if he should call, you will answer. But you will not be the one to reach out, you will no longer be the one to offer. You will not continue to give- to cut into yourself, to give the disease a means to invade- only to remain behind, bereft.

Snowfield roses will bloom if they truly wish to- and you certainly have no desire to be felled by something like this.