#telamn

in waloed, in the space between not knowing he was leaving and knowing, she'd catch him up on those high-rise balconies with cigarettes in his mouth, the shadows to him long and stretched in the lean of his body. he couldn't be interrupted then, and he couldn't be interrupted even less when he was five jugs of mead in, his eyes glassy but as if saying they were never quite glassy enough, laughter a spilt stain on wooden grooves of pub tables.

she did intrude on him once and only once——took the cigarette right out of his mouth. "if it bothers you so much," she said, her tongue full of smoke, "why not just leave?" as if you would was the implication behind it, though sometimes she did think on the still water days of it just being the two of them——how little she had known of the world and how much he had seemed to know the whole of it, the palms of her hands full of blisters and camp firelight punctuated by the worst cooked food you had ever tasted, his electric outline leftover static in her breastbone.

she didn't know then how close she was to the breach in his hull; the very start of all their wreckage, driftwood on an ashen beach. back then, he just treated it like she caught him in a secret, his hand palming his hair in that usual exasperated way of his, always half into a complaint before knowing better. "what, and give up this dream we both care so much about?"

when he hunted around for another cig, she had taken that one too. there was always an affection to him a hair's breadth from his annoyance that she always dared to pull out——never tiring of seeing it there, and him never tiring of showing it. the conversation didn't really matter to her as much then as disrupting the thundercloud of his thoughts, to have that untroubled, warm and drowsy air back into the slots of her fingers.

benedikta thought that weight to him was war. she thought she could soothe it out of him as he soothed it out of her, gingerly tracing the knobs of her wretched, flight-weary spine.

"no more running?" she had murmured when they had both still believed in barnabas' promises——while he was still a king with a brightly-shining, comet-streaked dream, and they could taste the starlight.

"no more," cid confirmed, in that constant deep grumble of his, her eye of the storm. she should have told him she loved him on that day more than any other, when they could taste the sea-salt in the air and there was mud on both their boots and the drizzle had matted all of benedikta's hair to her cheeks. the day had been innocuous, but that was kind of the point, sandwiched between points of no return and youth-like naivete.

but she didn't, and she couldn't, for a thousand little reasons but mainly: how his gaze was forever locked on some point over the horizon, and hers on his profile, stubbled with the casual carelessness of travel and that self-assured knowledge he knew his smile could do all the work.

so she just grabbed his hand instead. "still not tired of that, are you?" he said, chaffing, but his fingers had curled around hers.

at the hideaway, cid comes less than he goes, which isn't all that different to when they had both been laboring for waloed, red-cheeked and weary and grateful to collapse into each other on the rare chances they were both home at once. now, however, benedikta is always stuck waiting and resentful towards the peace he carries, her one familiar tether even though there are parts to him she no longer knows.

there is less callousness to him. his shoulders buckle like they used to, but he doesn't carry that all alone——he's happy to have his knees bent, shoulder to shoulder with his charity cases, an open dam overflowing with belief. she shadows him at first, pinched and taught with suspicion, until they're looking up at her too with that undiluted hope so palpable she bites and chews and spits it back out at them.

she doesn't want to be here. she can't be anywhere else. cid is all beseeching eyes and self-sacrificing and he's a person with a hundred people to soothe his ills now, and hundreds more to protect. ultimately, it all boils down to, she's not an irrefutable, untouchable and integral existence to him anymore.

he's doing just fine——and she's breaking and shrieking and sleeping in minutes. "i'll bear all your rage, benedikta," he tells her, long after the lacerations have turned red along his arms and his skin is flecked between her nails, "if that'll soothe you."

it doesn't. it does. it's an unspoken, 'as long as your rage doesn't bleed onto someone else', so she bites into him so deep its his blood dribbling down her chin. she grapples with his large immoveable body and wishes he'd be even the slightest bit malleable. "it won't," she doesn't promise but she swears and she feels him sigh beneath her, sagging.

see, though, that her promises and swears mean nearly nothing——she's fundamentally a liar, after all, and when she's stopped wearing bandages and the scars are all new, freshly healed red flesh, she finds herself weary from resistance, her flashes of outrage lapsing into a strange watchful silence.

they all treat her like a livewire. they should. she fears if she is touched again she might explode, the shrapnel she leaves behind a festering wound of her existence. but cid is stubbornly accepting as he is, as he always has been, and maybe there are things that won't change, threaded into him as tightly as the canvas of his wide open arms.

"apple?" he offers, off-handed, the infamous thing postured precariously in his fingers: and it's a silent peace offering; it's her insurmountable walls letting light seep through.

she takes his apple. rips it from his hand even, snapping it from his hands and pressing it to her mouth before she can have second thoughts. and it's bitter. it's so bitter, with the slightest tinge of sea-salt. "this tastes like shit," she mutters, but there are angry tears in her eyes and she eats it down all the way to its core.

scowl creasing on her face, she waves him back. "scoot further."

cid laughs. "there's only the wall behind me benna."

"and a wall in front of me," she mutters. "what?" he definitely heard her. he's achy and grey-haired but damnably not deaf.

before she decides ripping his throat out with her talons would be a better alternative, she moves forward to fold her body in front of him atop the bed, arms crossed, knees curled up into her stomach. the only space is nearly off the edge, so she lays on her side, stiff. unyielding.

"benna?" his voice is behind her, along with his heat. the humor has seeped out, misplaced by what almost sounds like fear. she can't tell, not without his face, tells hidden in the quirk of his brows, the strained pull of his lips. he sounds unsure, and it makes her nervous. they know not how to grapple with their malleable and shifting relationship, the lines benedikta had once drawn all dusted away.

she wants him to touch her. she also thinks if he placed a hand anywhere near her, she'd bite it.

in waloed, her bed could've been twice, maybe three times the size of this one. no matter how many times she found him lounging in her room, his legs stretched and his body wrinkling her sheets, her smell was still all over it: mandarins, bergamot, sandalwood, and ... beneath, a sweet pungent zing; the fresh aroma of ozone. through her perfume, they faintly smelt of each other, each a storm in their own right.

the width of that bed was their clung-to distance; a safety-measure. out of the corner of her eye, she'd brazenly stare at him, and sometimes, but not often enough, he'd look back at her and the tips of his lips would curl, the hardness of his face softened by her company. she did not know what loving was, then.

she hardly knows it now. shifting on her shoulder as she unwraps her arms, she impatiently fumbles about, looking for his hand behind her. she thinks she hears him snort, but a tentative brush of his fingers meets the tips of hers, and she is quick to pull his whole arm around her, paired over her ribs. with permission, cid attempts to intertwine their hands, their fingers slotting awkwardly as benedikta struggles with the exchange. it becomes half-formed, her fingers curling into his palm, and he huffs with laughter into the back of her head, his breath tickling her hair.

"shut up," she says, having enough awareness to be just a smidge embarrassed.

"need more practice?" all former trepidation has faded in cid's tone, which has become honey-sweet.

oh, it's become a competition now. benedikta's jaw locks. "i'll be an expert in no time."

"i'm sure you will," he agrees, maneuvering so that their hands untangle and refit as they should, finger beside finger, palm to palm. benedikta deflates. it doesn't have to be all bad: he's within her grasp, not a cloud she's been chasing. inside her, the storm rages, seeking to reconcile that which longs for him and that which resents him. "get some rest," he requests with some force behind it, nose to her nape.

benedikta squeezes her eyes shut. it hurts. she thinks she'll be hearing his breathing weigh down with the lull of sleep long before she feels its own pull, but cid uses his leverage to pull her closer, back to chest, and he is all-encompassing. deep and pungent, smoke lingering, and then -- the ozone.