#ffxivwrites

The pile of concepts on his desk didn't seem to grow any smaller, no matter how late he worked. It seemed as soon as one stack of forms was complete one of his assistants would come in with two more stacks, or a basket of crystals that he had to personally oversee. It was madness, an eternity of paperwork that haunted his dreams with no relief in sight. The pile of ominous aquamarine crystals on the far side of his desk likewise taunted him, no doubt a myriad of sharks he could hardly tell the difference between or would have so many extra appendages that he had no idea why they needed.

Who needed a flying shark? Or one that could walk on land? Or one that had a weirdly curved jaw that couldn't close and created what looked like a circular saw blade turned in on itself.

If he saw another shark, he would scream and tender his resignation immediately to the Convocation.

And so the pile, and any new additions, remained far from him.

Not to say other departments didn't have their oddities of choices or fada they all got into. He still remembered the horrible year that cactus shaped creatures were all the rage in the Words of Halmarut. Some of them had barely changed a thing, a different colour here, a specific flower on its head there, a very muscular one… he groaned.

The door swung open and his Deputy stepped in, bearing another basket. “Please, Lycoris, tell me that isn't a new batch?”

“Alas, Chief, it is. It is amazing how productive people are right now.” She sat the basket down and pulled out a smaller one from inside. “I separated the sharks already.”

“Bless you, would you like a promotion? I think you would make an amazing Chief.” He fluttered his eyelashes at her but she laughed. "You would have my stamp of approval!"

“No thank you, I like going home at night.” She put her hands on her hips and gave him a knowing look. “Besides, if a certain someone didn't hare off for weeks every time Azem called him, then he might be all caught up and able to go home at night.”

He gave her an exaggerated pout. “But, I'm drowning! You're so organized, between us we could smash through them all, perhaps literally in the case of the sharks, and we'd be done!”

“No you don't. You will not guilt me into overtime.” She wagged her finger at him. “I intend to go home to my husband and wife tonight, since Ajax and Talia are both in residence for once. I will not miss it for anything short of the end of the world.”

He sighed dramatically, sulking as he picked up another stack of paperwork. “Go on then, and think of me, wasting away behind my desk.”

Angeline broke her studied expression of cheery attentiveness and let herself work it out.

His voice was musical and pleasant, and it would be one of the chief things to recommend him except what he used it to say. The mouth they issued FROM - plush, upper lip darker than the lower in a fetching way, shaped like something a fat little baby could shoot hearts with. Contemplating that certainly took up some time, though not exactly fruitful on her end (on his, he managed to segue into a long held opinion about the function of one-or-another obscure experiment and was thoroughly enjoying himself.)

It wasn’t that he was UNclever, or unfunny or something - matter of fact, his lighthearted pranks never failed to truly lighten her spirits, succeeding in their warmth and depth where the Scions’ attempts felt perfunctory.

He was energetic - his extensive gesturing and how he never seemed to sit quite still spoke to that - and his pep and the sun would bring a berry cast to his cream skin in ways that appealed to her instead of invoking something less pleasant (like, say - smacked ham). 

And maybe it didn’t hurt that he caught how her expression drifted, how that brought him back to himself enough for him to cut from the best and most insightful late Allagan folk poets - however he had gotten there - to a well-practiced apology.

Angeline’s hand whipped out and seized its quarry - one of his ears, the one closest. She pinched its tip, not far above some finger-rubbed bald spots (and begrudgingly noted: not uncharming).

“I didn’t say stop, now did I?” Angeline said, her smile tugging wide her lips at about the same rate his eyes widened. “Go on. Folk poetry. Tell me your favorite.”

She gave one firm tug and then let go, beaming to let him in. “It might even be good.”

Angeline affixes herself and stares out at the horizon. This one is clear and crisp, a delineation easy to see. This time, she’s outside of Vesper Bay, far but apparently not far enough from the Waking Sands. Minfilia happens to be there with her - something uncommon, like she got caught out by a sharp eyed senior for some Special Attention, Observations and Advice. When Minfilia says, “When you look at things so deeply, I can never begin to imagine what you’re thinking about,” it is with a little bit of a puzzled bemusement, like this is the first time a presentation has not brought the exact response expected. 

Angeline affixes herself and stares out at the horizon. She is thoroughly bundled against the bitter Ishgardian cold - she hasn’t uncrossed her arms in hours, but she can’t bring herself to go back inside. She can see only a glimpse of it, and the slate grey sky against the granite of Abalathia’s Spine wrapping the city made the distinction one more of texture than of anything else. 

“I think a lot about a lot, but if you have to ask I suppose what I’m thinking about now is how everything just about is supposed to be contained in either one half or the other.” 

One Aymeric de Borel, who had at that moment only just approached her from behind holding two mugs of hot chocolate on a Haurchefant-flavored tipoff it would be sorely needed but who hadn’t yet opened his mouth, simply came to a stop next to her and considered. “Is it… truly everything?” He probed gently, with the air of one stepping lightly and gamely into the ring. When she seemed to make no move to reach out for the hot chocolate, he set it with some precision onto the rail in front of her. A brief expression of eye-rolling frustration, there and gone too quickly for it to speak to any real depth, scrunched her face and then passed. Another few long minutes passed, and Aymeric was just about to offer something again when Angeline said, “I know there are things that are supposed to - “

“ - be bigger than it, but when I’ve encountered them it still hasn’t been true. It’s still in one of either two halves.” Aymeric de Borel studied Angeline’s face, the set of her brow and mouth beneath their lovely softness. They had not yet had their third what they would go on to consider ‘date’, and Aymeric was still figuring out what precisely to make of this romance they were fashioning - and the kind of peculiarities he had begun to pick up on. Honesty, as ever, was his best quality, so he took a stab with, after a brief consideration, “if you spend so much time looking, it begins to narrow what you can find.” At his voice, at something in it that it ventured toward, Angeline’s arms lightly unwound, and she let a hand arc out and down for the cup, her palm already feeling its warmth - 

Angeline affixes herself and stares out at the horizon. Her hand comes down on the empty red wooden railing before her. Kugane is swallowed in a cocoon of charcoal - the lights are just coming on at the wharf and will trickle up and up until the giant floodlights tear open the night, peel it back to reveal the red meat slab of Kugane Castle. The doorway and peephole into a tightly locked house of a nation. Despite the increasing lights, the set of Angeline’s mouth is tight, like against sickness, and she still carried the smoke of Rhalgr’s Reach in her nose and throat. “The few times I see something more, it doesn’t last long. It’s an illusion. Like it truly can’t exist.” The phlegmy rasp in her voice was half bitter by content, and it sounded so unfamiliar to her own ear it made her give a start that broke into full-chested coughing. She braced herself on the railing with both hands, hacking until she was bent almost double. 

“Well I’m certainly glad you’re getting that out - “ came Alisae’s brash bark. She strode in and clapped Angeline heartily on the back until the fit subsided. “I really hope nothing’s catching…? We have a bit of a trip back.” Angeline recovered enough to catch her breath, shaking her head hard enough to swish. “Well then it won’t do to look so gloomy,” her erstwhile kouhai drawled, lifting her eyebrows in challenge. “Clouds the eye.” She squared up on Angeline’s left, bundling against the rail, and took in the disappeared horizon, obliviated into the fog. “Makes you forget something vitally important.” Angeline’s quick rasping breaths had slowed and steadied as Alisae spoke. 

She swallowed as she studied the younger girl’s face, what she could see, the curve of her cheek and her giant goofy ear blocking most of it.

Angeline wished sorely that in that moment she could see Alisae’s eyes, but in that way both women were alone when Alisae said, “When you spend so much time looking that looking is all you know, what you’re looking at almost ceases to be.”

Angeline affixes herself and stares out at the horizon, doubled here, sea and sky as one. Waves lapping above clouds. Her last attack, surging light, was about five minutes ago. Another three until the next, until she has to strain with every muscle in her body and with seeming new ones every day to hold it in, the wings sprouting from her temple, wrists, and neck creaking as they thickened and ached.

They have so far refused Emet-Selch his final audience, dawdling rather rudely in his lair, Urianger not lowering his voice when he and Thancred exhanged some rather uncharitable comments about the architectural and civic design, their smiles only briefly losing their careful tenseness, quickly resumed. It took a lot of convincing for the Scions to let her excuse herself and walk alone (and, in fact, only threatening worked; Angeline honestly reminded them that not a one of them could do a thing to stop her). Her head ran mixed and clear - the sharp rays of the Light aether inside her slicing whatever she was thinking about in two before spinning her mind to something else until she caught herself like a thrown spinning plate. Her palms ached sharply and for a second she was certain she held that very plate in her hands, reflecting her or that insufferable other her back at her, until she relaxed her clenched fists and her nails slid cleanly out of the slits they had made, the wounds unbleeding and gently glowing. On her request, the Crystal Exarch once heaved a fondly aggrieved sigh and held his right palm over a light set in the Crystarium floor, scattering it into momentary constellations above them. “About three quarters of the constellations there were on the First can’t be seen from what remains of Novrandt,” he had murmured, half despite himself. He tried clamming up when Angeline rounded on him, and as always it worked only moderately well. “More than a few people make it a point to know and remember them regardless, to fill in the rest of the sky even beyond what they could see.”

Angeline caught here how his voice deepened, just a touch, speaking of two skies. A clear bell to recall him now. “A common kind of mission I share. Remembrance can fill an absence, hold it, fill it back in.” An irrepressible half-grin pried his lips - he couldn’t help it. “Make right. I wont allow it to be any other way.” Despite the twisting in her guts and the echoing gunshot ache in her chest his very memory brought a smile to her face. Like an unlucky wind, an over-spoken-of devil, as if he could detect the presence in her thoughts and couldn’t stand the answer, she felt the oncoming of their garrulous host. Her baited escort to a sorry excuse for a welcoming imminent, Angeline lifted her chin and surveyed once more the solid phantom city below her.

“A clear cut example of what happens when someone forgets,” Angeline declared right as Emet-Selch’s skirt swishes were audible, right before he was ready to sweep his arms open and utter some sparkling line he spent millennia thinking about how to deliver. She felt him see someone else as he took her in, even as his opprobrioric tirade spilled out, echoed out across the 1:1 scale doll city just for him, A Monument To Memory, Grand As Once It Was. Angeline wasn’t listening.