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The moment the ship was spotted in the sky above, Aymeric was already moving.
Eyes forward, against the crowd, he was a single droplet moving in the opposite direction of the sea of people. They came in waves all at once, all clamouring to get to the edges of the city, and a better look at the Ragnarok’s return.
The sky over Ishgard was the type of pure, azure blue that only the brightest Coerthan winter could create, and even though hundreds of eyes were squinting up into it, Aymeric was blind to it. His pulse beat white noise in his ears as he walked, drowning out rational thinking as he made his way down stone stairs and across arching bridges towards the airship landing. He heard no voices, registered no chatter, gave no real thought to exactly how he’d enact on the instinct that had seized him the moment the cry of the lookouts rang out.
There was only this: They were back, she was back, and he wasn’t going to wait a second longer.
Over the years, time and distance had both made themselves Aymeric’s intimate companions.
Both had made him an extraordinarily patient man.
But not now. Not after the agony he’d endured waiting for her, alone and helpless in a way that made every other separation of theirs pale in comparison.
It went without saying that his life wasn’t dedicated to waiting. His schedule was full, and his days long. Even before his time as Lord Speaker, the war had consumed his hours and indeed his life, endlessly filling the pages of his personal history with blood, battle, and political intrigue. There was nothing about his relatively short life that had ever been unfulfilling, or meaningless. He had a purpose, and a passion, and he was ambitious, clever, and – most importantly – hopeful enough to see it through.
When she had walked into his life, however, everything had been cranked into full sound and colour where it never had been before.
It made every moment spent without her just that much less by comparison.
In the way their lives were arranged, it was simply the way of things, despite several years now secretly joined as husband and wife. Their love story was littered with meetings and partings; long stretches of her on the road, and him unable to travel along because of the needs of his responsibilities, among many other reasons.
It was a risk he’d known full well of from the moment they’d decided (there was no decision, there was no moment, they were gone for each other from the moment they’d met) to follow their story to its inevitable conclusion. She was a legend, a beacon, a symbol of hope for thousands of innocents across the star; he wasn’t selfish enough to try and keep her to himself when she was, he knew, the solution to potentially save the lives of millions.
No matter how badly he might want to be selfish, and keep her to himself, always, safe in his arms and away from the violent dangers she faced daily with that sharp, devastating gaze of hers.
As she’d travelled over the years, he’d met her wherever he could. No one knew the Warrior of Light had a husband, and no one knew the Lord Commander had a wife; everything they did was kept in the highest secrecy. It led an extra layer of difficulty to an already difficult situation, bonding them together faster than they’d already been before their marriage. He worried for her, even though she was the last person on earth who needed to be worried over. He wanted to protect her, even though she was the last person who could have ever needed protecting.
It had been years of this and only this, their marriage existing in the fringes and in the shadows. They were forced to settle for secret moments, stolen in the dark, hoarded between them like precious jewels as they held each other, reminding themselves what it was that all of it was for.
Aymeric was, he thought, fairly used to the arrangement; it was, after all, all they’d ever known.
But they had never faced something like this.
He hadn’t been there when she boarded the Ragnarok, much as it killed him. Ishgard was plagued to devastation by the Final Days, even after the death of Profane Fafnir. Reform had come in ways that so many of Ishgard’s sons and daughters weren’t ready for, and that combined with the terror accompanying the coming apocalypse was too much for many of them to bear. Aymeric’s hands were irrevocably stained with the blood of innocents who had turned into blasphemies, leaving him no recourse but to dispose of them.
Often, he lay in his empty bed, reaching for the cold space where his wife should have been, and dreamed of fire, and bones, and sobbing children whose parents had been taken from them before their eyes.
The truth and the horror of it all made it impossible for him to travel to Sharlayan, though his wife (with the help of ever-loyal Estinien) kept him abreast of news when she could, letters flying fast and infrequent between them. Their fear for each other’s safety was palpable in every hastily scribbled word, and Aymeric’s nightmares started to incorporate her face, weeping blood, screaming agonies.
He’d never needed to see her so badly.
He’d never gotten the chance.
For days, Aymeric stood on the walls of Ishgard, staring up at the endless expanse of sky above. For days, he kept himself busy with the hurt and the hopeless, his hands full of tasks so they wouldn’t feel so empty without her. Somewhere, beyond stars, beyond space, beyond what even he, even knowledgeable as he was, could possibly fathom; somewhere beyond everything was where she had gone. She had been gone so many times before, and he’d thought he’d one day grow used to it, but he never did. Even if he had, she’d never been so terribly out of his reach, even during that cold, terrible year she’d been trapped on the First.
Aymeric had worried for her before, but never like this. He’d missed her before, but never like this. He’s known fear before, but never, never like this. Never had the stakes been so knowingly high, nor the impossibility of her return so extraordinarily possible.
If the Warrior of Light perished, the Star was doomed. There was no other way around it; they would die, every single one of them, until no trace of the world as they’d known it remained.
If his wife perished, Aymeric wasn’t sure he’d survive long enough to see the death of the world that would follow.
Not without her.
Time lost meaning while he waited. Even the blasphemies themselves seemed to be holding off on their attacks as the world held its breath, waiting for word from beyond the faint pinpoints of starlight above. The Star waited, and the Scions battled alongside their chosen. Fighting for all of their lives. Prayers were so thick and frequent that they were nearly tangible on the air, physical manifestations that could somehow carry their saviour home to them.
Aymeric prayed, too, but it wasn’t in the same way. He’d always prayed wrong, he suspected, and he knew it now, because he didn’t ask for her to come home to save them, or to have an answer, or to descend as a deliverer from their sealed and horrific fate.
He merely prayed that she came home for her sake, and her sake alone. If they were all going to perish, he wanted to do it with her hand in his.
So that even at the end, she wouldn’t feel alone.
Give her back to me. It was a refrain he’d chanted silently to himself through the long year she’d spent on the First, and every day before and after that they were parted by war and peril. It was a plea written on the insides of his bones, carved into his very soul, so deeply ingrained in him that to breathe was to call out to whomever might be listening to grant his request.
Give her back to me.
For days on end, he stood awake, searching the skies, heartsick and hopeful. In his waiting and his torment, he remembered her eyes, and her smile, the shape of her neck, and the way her fingers twined in his. He stared into the endless expanse of stars above, feeling phantom sensations of what it was to have her head on his chest, or to see how the colour her hair shone in the sunlight. If he stood quietly enough, he could nearly hear the quiet way her breathing evened out, slow and steady, as she fell asleep on his shoulder.
He was so full of longing, of pure and simple human love, that he felt sure that his need for her alone, the infinite stretch of his long waiting was what would, at last, bring her safely back home.
For better or for worse.
He could never have conceived how much worse was waiting for him in turn when he reached the airship landing at last.
At first, he only noticed how battered she was.
Half supported on Estinien’s arm where they appeared together at the aetheryte shard, the dragoon’s arm wrapped firmly around her waist to keep her steady, Aymeric immediately clocked that she was covered in blood and grit to an extent he had rarely, if ever, seen before. His gaze went frantic across her form, heart in his throat, trying to figure out from sight along how much of the blood was hers. Her once-pristine coat was torn and tattered, and her hair hung in messy strings around her face, limp and loose, prompting him to brush the strands immediately away from her forehead with one shaking hand, needing to see her eyes.
He let out a breath of sharp, relieved air when he found them bright, and clear, and focused only on him.
You’re alive you’re alive you’re alive.
Not quite able to smile, she reached for him, her fingernails torn and caked with some strange semblance of mud. He pulled her towards him in turn, wrapping her small hand in his, feeling out the way the skin of her palms had been nearly ripped raw from where she’d gripped her sword. Her eyes were still on him, bright and feverish, even as she moved towards him, the movement made all the more awkward by the way Estinien wouldn’t let her go.
The dragoon met his friend’s eyes, and Aymeric’s chest crystalized into something icy and foreboding.
Estinien’s hand was pressed firmly against the Warrior’s side, firm and insistent, and something about the way he held her forced Aymeric’s attention down and held it. In a slow, time-sluggish moment, his gaze froze on the way the blood oozed, too red and too dark, between Estinien’s fingers where he pressed into her side. The relief he’d felt at seeing her face slowly began to bleed away at the edges, leaving room for only cold, paralysing fear.
Estinien wasn’t holding her steady. He was holding her together.
Increment by static-filled increment, Aymeric began to take in exactly what was happening, the details coming to him now that the relief of seeing her alive had had cold reality doused on it. Buzzing filled his ears, and he was barely aware of his own lightning-fast instinct to move as he replaced Estinien’s hand with his own on her waist, pressing hard pressure onto the gaping, open wound he found there. It sliced clean through her armour, so terribly deep that it nearly took his breath away to feel it. His hand barely spanned the largest part of it, his fingers immediately slippery with blood as he physically tried to hold the edges of her wound together.
When she inevitably fell, it was slow and measured, supported in her descent by his own arms, lowering them both slowly to the ground like a flower petal falling from its stem.
Vaguely, he was aware of Estinien speaking somewhere above them, rough and rapid. Help was on the way. The other Scions were aware. The best physicians Sharlayan, Thavnair, the Steppe all had to offer were all coming to Ishgard any second now. He was going to alert their own chirurgeons.
She’d been standing until she’d faltered.
She’d been stable until she wasn’t.
She insisted on coming here.
“I came back.” Her voice was like a quiet cry against his neck where Aymeric cradled her to him, bundling her safely into his lap and against his chest where they’d fallen to the cold stone ground. Estinien was long gone, searching out chirurgeons with a speed only he could accomplish, but Aymeric had helpless, desperate eyes only for his wife, and arms only capable of holding her close.
Her blood was slick against the shattered metal armour on her coat, but his grip didn’t falter.
He could see it now, every stark detail of her imminent death laid out so terribly before him. The pallor of her skin, the fever-bright glint in her eyes, the blood beading sluggishly from the corners of her lips. Her injuries were grave, and myriad; the wound at her neck looked freshly closed by healing magics, and the bruises under her eyes betrayed the violent blows she’d taken, far more than once, to the delicate bones of her face. Her coat was shredded with a violence even he couldn’t picture, exposing dried blood caked onto older injuries, some of them slowly opening up before his eyes as he watched, like weeping, bloody flowers. Blood seeped through his fingers and thickly down his wrist where he pressed desperately against the wound in her side, by far the worst of the lot. He could feel her pulse now, each beat of her heart sending more of her blood spilling out and onto him, irrevocably staining him.
Aymeric categorised each injury with a helplessness that nearly drowned him. Each seemed to mock his foolish moment of joy at the sight of her home, his pathetic healing magics that were ruinous in the face of what she suffered.
He’d gotten her back, only to lose her twice over.
“I came home,” she whispered, like a reminder, or a prayer, her throat gargling with the blood that was gathering there. Swallowing around dry tears, Aymeric bent his head low over her as he held her protectively close, cheek to cheek where he sheltered her from the bitter elements, the mocking sunlight, the whole godsdamned world.
Not a single other person on the Star had any right to her in that moment, and he would have burned anyone alive who tried. She had given everything, and he wouldn’t allow her to give any more. She had saved them and for what?
Nothing was worth living for if she died.
Her fingers were at his temple, his jaw, his cheeks, weakly tracing faint bloody pathways anywhere she touched. It felt like she was mapping him out, even as he pulled, desperate, at what amounts of power he knew, trying if not to close her wounds than at least to stem the bleeding, if only a little. He trembled as he held her, but his hands were firm, the safest place she could have been.
It was useless.
Heaving against dry, desperate tears that wouldn’t manifest and wouldn’t fall, Aymeric watched a lifetime with her slip away between his fingers like smoke. All her secret smiles, her sly side-glances, her rare laughter. The way her hair fell over her eyes first thing in the morning when the sun wasn’t quite up. The determined gait her walk took on when she was about to hand a man twice her size his what for. The way she sometimes went up on tiptoe to kiss him, if only for an excuse to lean that much closer. The shape of her under his hands, the taste of her lips at midnight, the way she could look at him across a crowded room and make him feel like she was dancing her clever fingers across the back of his neck.
An entire life, an entire perfect, flawed, horrible, wonderful person, lost.
She was brave, and she was beautiful, and she was the best of any of them, and she was his .
And heaven help the Star if she didn’t make it.
Aymeric’s grief was a howling beast, wailing agony in his chest, holding her close and feeling her heart beat warm blood over them both.
At some point, when her breathing had become ragged and unpredictable, and still no help had arrived, she murmured, softly, that she loved him.
He nearly broke at how much it sounded like a goodbye.
I love you, he whispered against her temple, her cheeks, her dry, parted lips. I love you, I love you, I love you. You’re going to be alright.
Her fingers tightened, just slightly, where she tried to grip his wrist, because they didn’t lie to each other.
“You’re going to be alright,” Aymeric told her again, working his throat around unshed tears, raw rage and his endless, bottomless, incorruptible grief.
If he’d ever been considered a pious man before, it was nothing compared to how he begged on his knees to the universe at that moment, felled low on the stone ground, hunched protectively over his wife while he cradled her, reassured her, and desperately tried to stop her from bleeding out in his arms.
Please. Please don’t leave me.
They should have died a thousand times before this. The Vault, the Steps of Faith, the Ghimlyt Dark. The First and the flood, the Final Days and the Garlean legions. Beasts and gods alike, the horrors of men who tried to take them from each other, through steel, and poison, and an endless list of inhumane cruelties not found in nature.
She’d been so strong, so many times before. She was without question the strongest person he knew, and to see her felled low was a gross reversal of nature, of sanity, of truth . She couldn’t leave, any more than he could bear to let her go.
Not when they finally had a chance at a life, a proper life, together.
Please, love. Don’t leave me.
Something tore, deep within the recesses of his soul, when she let out a breath and didn’t immediately try to draw a second one. When she went deathly still in his arms, something irreplaceable inside Aymeric fell away, as utterly sapped from existence as any whose death hadn’t returned them to the Star.
Shuddering, she struggled to draw breath again, and Aymeric kissed her cracked, parted lips, gentle and devastating.
There was only one acceptable option; he couldn’t endure the other.
He wouldn’t.
With a swiftness and strength that drew from reserves he hadn’t known he had, Aymeric rose from where they’d both collapsed into each other, cradling her protectively in his arms as he rose. The movement jostled her, and much as it killed him to disturb her, there was a certain measure of relief when she made a quiet noise of exhausted pain when he moved.
“It’s alright,” he reassured her, and she pressed her face weakly into his chest, her trust in him immediate and absolute. His grip tightened in response, protective and assured. “I’ve got you. You’re going to be alright.”
Keep breathing, love. Just breathe, and keep breathing, and I’ll do the rest.
Holding the fallen warrior close to his chest, Aymeric moved, as steadily and quickly as he could without breaking into a sprint. The distance wasn’t far, but it was the longest he’d ever travelled, counting out the moments in her ragged breaths against his chest.
I’ve got you, love.
The most precious thing on the Star was in his arms, and he would do anything – anything – to keep her safe. The cheering crowds were distant, and Estinien was gone, but Aymeric had his wife in his arms, and he refused to believe in an end to this story where she died. He refused, with every ounce of his being, to acknowledge a world that wouldn’t have her in it.
She had saved them.
He would save her.
“We’re going home,” he murmured into the top of her head as he walked, her blood soaking warm into his tunic, but he didn’t break. Drawing on his aether, he pressed what healing powers he possessed into her as he carried her, reserving only enough strength to keep them moving forwards. “I’m taking you home.”
She made a quiet noise of agreement against his chest, her eyes falling closed. Safe now, safe at last, she went slowly limp in his arms, and he held her tighter, terror clawing raw and agonising at his heart until he wasn’t positive it was her blood or his own seeping across his chest.
We’re going home.
You’re going to be alright.
Or I’m going with you.