#khess

Stained Glass

"They remind me of you," Khess said quietly, his fingers still light on the edges of the bouquet as he handed them to Arms.

He didn't have to look at her to know her lips had pulled into a smirk. He could sketch the exact shape of her mouth with his off-hand, eyes closed, in the middle of a Stratosphere game. Still couldn't bring his eyes up to meet hers though. Instead, he kept them trained on the blue and purple hues of the bouquet’s stained glass petals.

"How so?"

Khess sucked in a breath, it was the only way he had figured out how to ground himself whenever she spoke. Always a breath, just a second to steady himself, drag some oxygen to his brain before it short-circuited and shut down. 

If someone had asked Khess to describe it he would say that his fiancée had a voice like molten lava. He'd say that it poured over him like honey; slow, sticky, sweet, but golden and light all the same. It washed through his blood and warmed him from the inside out, left him feeling heavy and weightless all at once. Like a ship on the sea, rolling over the waves like he was nothing to the forces of nature, but anchored by something heavier, wrought iron keeping him trapped in place. It got a little hard to breathe sometimes, and the waves crashed over him because it was inevitable. But she kept him there and drowned him in spurts of sea spray, weighed down with honey and lava to keep him from drifting away. 

For months it had floored him, left his brain buffering on repeat like she had gone in and ripped something out each time she spoke, and for a while Khess thought that he had made a mistake approaching her in the first place. 

If he was being honest, she was the only person he had ever met that made him question whether putting his all into loving everyone was, in fact, wise. Khess had shown up to the party at KAB's house to watch his first Stratosphere game, then he had seen the hottest person he'd ever laid eyes on hovering in the air surrounded by flying swords and thought, 

'Yeah, I think I could manage that.' Naturally. Like a fucking idiot.

The moment he stepped out of that mirrorcury into the SOMA house in Northern Donimear for their date a week later, and he had been wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, unsure of what to expect, and Arms had been wearing what - he had come to learn - Arms tends to wear (which is not a lot evidently), Khess quickly realised what he had actually gotten himself into. 

He wasn't so naive as to call it a game of wits. Or a game of cat and mouse, even. Games were supposed to be fun. And a mouse is chased--hunted. No, he didn't feel hunted. Watched, maybe. But watched in the way that the cat was lying there, lounging in the sun, occasionally looking up but never once choosing to break their peace to chase. After all, what was the point in the chase when the mouse walked right into your mouth anyway?

But things had changed. He didn't know when, exactly. Or the why or the how. It had just gotten easier at some point to talk to her. To listen to her without getting lost in the panic. He had, at some point, learned to keep his head above the water. Maybe it was when he saw her getting close to Faire. Maybe it was when he realised that all of the things he was offering, all of the love he had to give - not just to Arms, but to everyone - it just wasn't what she was after. Maybe it was the night before the Stratosphere game when their relationship had become more transactional. More political. Diplomatic, contractual, obligatory. All of those words that stripped the feelings from it and left him with something hollow and achingly familiar. 

Yeah. Maybe it was the familiarity. 

He had been asked to feign relationships before. The only thing different this time was, well, apparently everything.

Arms was kind and compassionate. She hid behind barricades built of calculated disinterest, sure, but Khess was stubborn enough to not be stopped by a barricade. And he trusted her. Liked her, even, which was a first for these kinds of things. Diad had been okay, likeable, but it was the first time he had ever been in the arranged marriage situation with someone else that had somewhere better to be. Diad and Kaya were better off with each other. And in the long run, Khess was better off with the High Matriarch of Tiluvia than anywhere else as well. If she kept to her side of the bargain he was more than happy to keep to his. It made it easier. Or it had. Before Everything Else That Came After.

You ever casually hook-up with someone for most of a school year, then get engaged to them one night during a casual conversation on your way to her sister's birthday dinner where you had just offered to keep her company (because you know those kinds of dinners are like being roasted alive on an open fire), announce the engagement to her entire (living) family at said dinner, and in the same breath then announce the dissolution of your previously arranged engagement (which then made way for your new-future-sister-in-law to get together with her childhood sweetheart a.k.a your ex-fiancé (who is in attendance at said birthday dinner might I add))? 

Then the next day you both enter into the most dangerous battle you have ever been in to try and save the very fabric of time and the universe itself, somehow meet what you suspect is a future version of your now new-fiancée who desperately doesn't want you to do whatever needs to be done to save the universe because of something that happens in the future, see a snippet of that future in which you and her have had a baby together where she also drops the bomb that the woman you just found out is your mum a few months ago might actually not be your mum and also you're dead? 

Then it's the next day but also it's the day before and you experience some strange dream sequence inside the mind of a long dormant Titan in which the previously-mentioned-baby that you had with your previously-mentioned-new-fiancée-wife-mother-of-your-child is now a teenager that is mad at you for being a mediocre dad and is named after your mum-not-mum? Then you and your closest friends experience some incredibly traumatising versions of events in which everyone you've ever known and loved and shaped and been shaped by have died and you're left loveless and alone for over forty years (aside from aforementioned closest friends) so you all agree to work together to Wish reality back to how it was (plus some extras)? 

And now back in the present reality your new-fiancee-maybe-one-day-wife-and-mother-of-your-child doesn't know any of this, so you choose not to tell her, but you've been thrust back into this contractual relationship that feels so small and tender but so big and overpowering in the palm of your hands, and the heat radiating off of it is enough to ignite a second sun? But you don't want to jeopardise the bargain because she's going to help you fulfil that first promise you ever made to the full moon; to kill your parents; to destroy your House; to free your siblings. Which is big, huge, perhaps the biggest thing ever, maybe. 

But also. You don't want to scare her. You don't want to overwhelm her. You don't want to influence her decisions because sure, this relationship is contractual now, but if it grows into something more, if it's something you both for the first time, finally have a choice in, then you want her to experience it for everything it is and give her the chance to choose. And maybe that's bigger.

Or maybe telling her now and letting her have the choice now instead of keeping it to yourself is more important. But you haven't decided yet, because the world just un-ended and you're taking a moment to breathe for fucks sakes.

No? That hasn't happened to you before? Okay. Bummer. You should try it sometime.

"Khess?" Her voice was tinged with concern, and it was enough of an emotion to pull his eyes to hers. Which was a mistake, of course, because it had gotten easier to keep his head above water for a bit but then after Everything Else That Came After, it had gotten sososososo much worse. And her eyes were like stars and her skin was pristine and soft and she always tasted sweet, and her honey-voice, and her perfect hair and sure she wasn't telling him everything but now neither was he.

"Hm? Sorry-"

"Are you okay?" Lava tipped the end of her question down and it dragged along Khess's spine, sent a shiver across his body.

If he was a lesser man, Khess would have started salivating at her consideration of his okayness. At the mere inkling that someone like her cared. But he was twenty-one now and had better control of himself than that. Sure, his heart was thudding against his ribcage and his palms were sweating and his cheeks and the back of his neck were hot, but that was probably unrelated.

"Yeah, I'm fine, just distracted," he cleared his throat and stepped away from her. "What did you say?"

She had created a clay vase while he had been lost in his thoughts, it was warm and heavy, and she positioned it on her desk and carefully placed the flowers inside. They tinkled like bells against one another as she settled them into position. 

She had a smile on her face again, but it was shaded with the last dregs of confusion. Or worry, if he dared himself to think of her like that. If he thought lesser of her he might have assumed the tightness of her voice was annoyance at him not listening to what she had asked. Or frustration for forgetting what she had said. Others probably expected her to be the kind of highborn Turian that wanted everyone to be paying attention to her all the time. But that wasn't like her at all. 

"I asked how these flowers that you got remind you of me?"

"I made them."

"What?"

"I didn't get them, I made them for you."

"Oh. You did?"

"I did."

"They're very nice, thank you." Her eyebrows carried her earlier question still, and a more perceptive man than Khess might have seen further questions flash on her features for a moment.

His answer is:

All of it reminds me of you. I think it's the glass, mostly, and the strips of lead holding it together. I think people get caught up in either appreciating the beauty of the glass and the image it presents, or they obsess over the way the sunlight catches the colours and spreads it across the ground beneath it, but it's always one or the other that are their favourites, never the whole. And a sculpture like that, made of glass, people are scared to hold it, afraid of the consequences of it breaking more than anything. The clean up, the waste, the loss of something seemingly so perfect. But stained glass is a sum of it's parts in all ways. Sure, the glass itself and the light it paints, but under the strips of lead it's also made of broken pieces built together again. 

I think people look at you and see something they believe to be fragile. Easily breakable, to be handled with care. Wizards, y'know. Or they're afraid of how sharp the pieces will be if you break, so they never even try to hold you in the first place. Because they don't want to be cut if you break. Which is a waste, I think. A waste of an opportunity to let fear stop you. 

But they don't see that you're already built from broken pieces, and if you shatter into shards again whatever comes of that will be beautiful in all of it's parts as well.

But instead, he says, "The glass and the colour, and all the light between them. It all reminds me of you."

Because he doesn't want to scare her. And he doesn't want to overwhelm her.

And she says, "They're beautiful. Thank you, Khess. "

And Khess opens his mouth, and for a second he says:

Of course they're beautiful that's why they remind me of you. Of course, you don't have to thank me for this, I would lay down my life in an instant for you. Of course, I have seen a future of mine with you and one without you and I know which one I want you to choose. Of course, if it was satisfactory I would tear out my bleeding heart and show it to you, but these flowers will have to do.

But instead, he says, "Of course." And he hopes that she hears the rest.