She was fire to his water -- bound, channeled, guided by his cool-eyed strategy. She spurred him to action, to the flashpoint-boil of irritation that tore him out of the abstract, spread him out into the here and now.
So closely woven, they became vapor, mist: insubstantial and flighty (and they thanked the Wanderer on their knees for that, that he had seen fit to hold them at his side) -- but the ground tilted so often under their feet that they sometimes wondered if it would drop out from beneath them.
Renan missed her laugh, deep and throaty, and his dark chuckle. Their bright crowing was still alien, when memories rang so loud in their head: what it sounded like to hear and to laugh, also.
Sometimes they could feel him shift forward in the inseparable dance -- feel the wash of stillness, the weightless depths stretching below them, buoying them into clarity.
She emerged within them as joy, as the lick of flame, the flash of an axe blade -- war, bright-headed -- that let them pelt forward through pain and distraction to the goal.
They were one, yes -- but sometimes their frayed edges let the threads show through.
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Written for FFXIVWrite2020 Warm-ups #5: Make up your own warm-up idea! (10 sentences max). In this case, the prompt I chose for myself was “a significant relationship.”
N.B.: Renan is pictured above, pronouns are they/them.
