Yuna turned off the water in the shower immediately, seeing Seymour, suddenly curl up, holding his head.
He was panicking. He wasn’t supposed to panic.
All she wanted was to convince him not to get a divorce. They’d have to go back to Guadosalam eventually, and she couldn’t let him go back single or determined to be such.
She thought it was about… well, sex, what with all the effort she’d put into it, she might be doing something wrong.
Now she had no idea. She wished he’d tell her what he wanted. Why couldn’t things be that simple?
Why couldn’t anything ever be simple with him?
She threw a towel over him and, at a loss of what else to do, gently petted his hair.
"Shh. Whatever it is… it doesn’t matter. It’s okay. Shh…"
She didn’t know if he was listening, but she stayed with him until he felt well enough to move.
At first, he has trouble staying upright, falling backwards constantly. As usual, he refused help.
Yuna could only stand there—correction, he felt more comfortable with her farther away—and watch as he clung to the walls.
It hurt. She couldn’t tell him, but it hurt that she couldn’t help him. It hurt that he felt better away from her.
It hurt that he didn’t want to look at her, or for her to look at him, when all she wanted was to hold him, to answer al his fears with her embrace, to chase away the darkness in his mind because she knew there was light in there somewhere… deep in his heart. He’d just gotten lost with so much darkness and so little light.
She couldn’t tell him. Did it hurt this much for him? His secret?
Now she understood why everything was pain for him. What’s new is frightening, what not… you know it already hurts.
"I always wondered what would happen if I were ever cornered," he finally muttered. He sounded strange, as if his lips were numb. "I’m surprised I didn’t hit you."
"You wouldn’t have hit me."
"I fought you… once… you cornered me with violence. You wanted to take my life… I wouldn’t have hit you now. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—"
"I understand."
"You don’t," he said. "That’s what I want… in a way. I want you to understand. I want… Yuna, I find you so beautiful, it’s hard to touch you without being afraid."
"You told me you saw strength in me when we met," Yuna said softly, as if trying to coax a kitten. "I was a summoner. I did so much for the entire world, for you. You can’t tell me you find me too delicate."
"That’s not what I was talking about," he said. Truthfully, he couldn’t remember what he felt first meeting her. He couldn’t remember at all. He remembered visions fuzzy around the edges, lacking most words about her about before he’d come back. He remembered quite vividly the every look, every glance, every time she made his heart lighter or feel as if it were in a vice. He remembered every word, every promise. "My mother was beautiful… and she gave her life for me… and with her as my Aeon I still did not understand how to save Spira. I though Spira was beautiful, just pained… and I betrayed it. Before I met you, there were women who… struck my fancy. They didn’t find it too rude to tell me what they thought of me by striking me in the face. Even when they knew who I was."
"I’m not going to strike you, I promise," Yuna said.
"You still don’t understand."
"I won’t leave you, either."
"We were not meant to be, Yuna," he said. "I was being selfish."
"You’re allowed to be," she said. "Like that, at least."
"I’ve never been allowed," he said. "I’m not like you… and I want to be. I want to know what you learned and I never did. I want to be able to touch you and you let me. I want to be good enough for you and I don’t know how. I want… I don’t know what I want, I’m sorry."
"If you ever know, you can tell me," Yuna said.
"I want to be what you want, Yuna," he said.
"I want to hold you," she said. "I want… I want to keep you warm from the cold… I want you to come to bed, and I want to keep the nightmares away."
"As much of the impossible you’ve been able to achieve, my nightmares are beyond you," he said, pushing away from the wall and slowly walking towards the bed.
Yuna said nothing herself as she crawled into bed and took Seymour’s hand. He was perfectly capable of it himself, but she wanted to help, and she hoped he could see a gesture of kindness for what it was.
He hated being seen as a afraid or weak, and he’d just panicked. She wanted him to know she was just being sweet—or trying to—by throwing the covers over him. She didn’t want him to think she were teasing him or flaunting the fact that he had been so scared.
"You’re so cold," she whispered, pressing close to him, but he very carefully extracted her from his bare flesh. "I want to make you feel warm," she said, setting her head against his chest and smiled. "I can hear your heartbeat."
"I never thought such a thing could be so comforting…" he said as she placed her hands on him again. He didn’t protest this time, but he knew, somehow, he’d be punished for mingling with what he didn’t deserve.
%%%
She had fallen asleep wondering if the fayth could talk to humans if they wanted to. She assumed she had her answer when she awoke from the dream.
At first she was lost in the dark, wandering through a labyrinth of doors and traps. Then, once she knew where she was it was all so simple, and she was at the end.
This wasn’t meant for her. This was Baaj. It wasn’t her dream.
There had been a sound that echoed through the halls and rooms and it was till here. Now she recognized it. It was a child, at first she thought it was a girl, but half a second later, she remembered where she was and chided herself for thinking he sounded that way. It was a young boy, crying.
‘This is so simple,’ she thought to herself as she went to the door to the Chamber of the Fayth.
As she reached for the door, it suddenly disappeared and she was met with a blast of bright kaleidoscopic light. She screamed and covered her face, despite already being within the blast.
It continued and she lowered her arm. It wasn’t harming her.
In fact, it was pyreflies, pure pyreflies. So many… she couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the colors, smiling as they finally separated and vanished, revealing the farplane glen, in all it’s floral and surreal beauty.
She walked a few paces, looking for whatever she was supposed to meet next. She heard voices circling her, but saw no one. They were garbled and overlapping, gibberish barely recognizable as a real voice—not at all identifiable as words.
She kept walking, eventually the voices silenced and she saw someone. Finally.
Seymour. Of course.
Something was strange about him. He seemed… content… happy even.
That was it. He was smiling, and it was genuine. There was no ironic, twisted humor. There was nothing morbid behind his smile or his eyes, no self-derision. There was no want but for what was right in front of him and it was her.
She went towards him, taking his hand gently and letting him embrace her slowly. His hand curled over hers, his long fingers comforting with warmth and the feel of flesh.
She pressed close, her hands on his chest. She felt his other hand on her back.
She sighed and closed her eyes. It was indescribably comforting in his embrace; it felt as if no one else in the world were as soft and warm and gentle as he was right now, and there was something else, something she couldn’t put into words, which no one else had. And yet…
Her eyes shot open as she heard a familiar noise across the farplane… something she’d forgotten about, and used to dream of: a whistle.
She turned her head towards the noise without thinking and the solid flesh she was leaning on suddenly vanished.
She caught her step and turned to Seymour about to say something, about to explain, about to protest, but there was nothing but pyreflies, slowly drifting around her, stumbling through the air as if lost.
She reach up and slowly cupped her hands about it. She brought her hands to her chest and carefully opened them, expecting them to be empty.
She smiled, seeing the single pyrefly in her hands when all it’s siblings had faded.
Then, breaking her heartfelt moment, she heard a scream. She knew the voice, and was equally startled by how incongruous it was to hear that voice as if was to hear a scream just now. It was Anzi.
She turned, abandoning the single pyrefly, but it was gone, all gone.
The farplane, the light form the pyrelfy, the scream were all gone.
She was in her bed. She was safe from the farplane and the fayth and…
The fayth. Were they telling her something in her dreams? How could she know? A dream was a dream, after all: incongruous, surreal, nonsensical.
He had disappeared into pyreflies. It was always pyreflies. She hadn’t even heard his heartbeat.
As the thought crossed her mind, she realized she wasn’t lying on him anymore. She reached to her side to see if he’d rolled over to mope or hide. She wanted to hear his heartbeat. That was what had been missing in her dream. His heartbeat.
He hand landed on something soft and damp and delicate enough that she crushed it in the process.
She sat up enough to see what had replaced her husband in her bed.
Flowers.
She smiled, despite the fact that she missed being able to hold him just now.
The bed had been strewn with flowers while she slept. He blamed himself for what had happened. If she kept forcing him into corners, she’d eventually have collected the whole jungle.
Most of the flowers were hardly exotic, in fact they were weeds villagers pulled from the gardens with as much swearing as effort. Seymour must have appreciated their colors to have left them.
Amid the hues so bright they seemed at war with each other was a bit of white that obviously didn’t belong, as if the color had gotten lost amongst the flowers.
She carefully extracted the white, finding it to be a note. He wouldn’t, would he?
No, indeed not.
It was a letter to her:
Where I forgot I was on an island, I’ll be waiting there.
I risk much by voicing the unspoken wishes I hold buried in my heart; only come if you will truly grant what I ask for, If not, please call for a boat to return me and do not think of me, for I bequeath you nothing but freedom, and shall find no fault in such actions.
PS: Come completely alone.
"Of course," she said to the note, which didn’t answer back or even complain as she abandoned it in the air to fall wherever as she threw on her shoes and left immediately.
%%%
The butterflies were still about; some seemed to insist to Seymour that he was a flower and others fluttered patiently about him in hopes of another sandwich.
Yuna stopped at the entrance to the clearing. She had hoped to find him the way he had been in the dream and this time sink into the sound of his heartbeat.
He was steeling himself for something. He looked the way he did before he proposed for the first time—she had seen the fear in his eyes then and he was even more afraid now, obviously because he’d recently been stepped on and mocked. She had no idea his pride was so fragile, not for him. When she’d met him he and his pride seemed invincible, and he languished in the fact.
Not now.
"Yuna…" he said, and she could see his eyes light up. Maybe she had slept in compared o him and he had thought she had called a boat.
He reached out his hand and she went to him, taking it. Instead of embracing her, though, he led her to the rock they had sat on in silence before. He held both of her hands and kneeled. She had to sit down to keep her hands in his, and that seemed to be his plan.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"If I ask you right now, outright, you will refuse, Yuna. I want to explain my actions, my feelings, and I want you to understand," he said. "Close your eyes please."
She did as she was told, though somewhat afraid for not being able to see him. She hoped that his expression would have changed for the better when she opened her eyes. When he didn’t know what to do, know knew what his next reaction would be, and it was often outrageous and rather suicidal in some sense. Even proposing to her had been a dangerous move for him.
"I’ve never been given what you have, Yuna," he said. "I do not understand your world, Yuna, and if I am to live in it, I need you to teach me how. Every action I make had a chance of being used against me. Every action I have ever made I have had to do better than anyone else that anyone has ever known and purely independently just to bee seen as good enough to deserve mere acknowledgement.
"You speak so freely to people, Yuna and I envy you. Trust is too dangerous in my world and I am too unused to it now. It is painful for me to look into you eyes and speak my mind without hiding in some fashion. I cannot help but be afraid of you, Yuna. I have known and received only pain in my life, and because of that I never want another to suffer.
"I was eight when my mother died. I saw blood all over the floor and a dagger through her chest. She still clung to the note form my father even after death. I stayed in the room until, I prayed not for an Aeon, but for my mother, but that is how I received her. She spoke to me in a dream, and pleaded with me not to follow her to farplane.
"I learned from her, Yuna. Everything I’ve ever held in my heart I knew from her. And now, you wish to change all that because you don’t understand. Because you’ve never known.
"Yuna, she took her life so painfully, yet she was granted so much power, and she resides on the farplane in eternal peace. She is free from everything, because she gave herself pain. She taught me… when life is nothing but pain, you can choose what pain you receive, and pain can grant you so much more than if you had refused it. Receiving my tattoos was painful, but it gave me so much, an I felt so free.
"I don’t fear pain, Yuna; not when it can give me a reward in return."
Yuna felt his hands leave her for a moment. She felt him place something in her hands.
"Please, Yuna," he whispered so close to her ears she could feel his lips move without quite touching her. "Hold no reservations for what I ask; I accept and desire it completely, and all for you and only for you." She could feel him move back and when she heard him next, he had moved back to kneeling in front of her. "Open your eyes."
She opened her eyes and he looked the way he did after proposing: confident that now that he’d dare ask fate not to strike him that she’d comply.
She looked down at what she held in her hands and was surprised to find it was his knife.
"I don’t understand—" she said, interrupted by his fingers on her lips. She wasn’t asking him to kill him, was he? He couldn’t. He was joking about death being a better option than staying here and trying to sort things out… right?
"I told you that the other Maesters at first wanted to improved upon my appearance by taking a blade to my ears. What I did not tell you was that I was willing to accept such a thing, if it would truly mean being accepted by a race as one of their own.
She tried to say something, anything, even gibberish if she had to, but she couldn’t manage anything out of her mouth.
"I want you to trim my ears," he said, gently taking hold of her shaking wrist. "I want only you, because although it pains my heart to do this, even admit it, you are the only one I so fully trust."
"Seymour…" she said, finally managing something, though nothing after it. his heart was so delicate. His last words, just before she’d killed him, echoed in her mind. ‘Do you pity me now?’ He had fought off death just to know her answer. What was it going to be now?
"Yuna…if you are willing to give me pain to reprimand, are you not willing to give me pain to reward?"
That did it. She didn’t care if it was his deep, dark request or not. She didn’t care how hard it had been to work up the courage to even ask for this. It was wrong. It was fucked up and she would not go along with it. She had been determined from the start that she would drag him out of such an outlook on life, even if it meant kicking and screaming.
"No." It was just a whisper at first, but she stood up and said it louder and fiercer.
He said nothing. She hated silence from him. It wasn’t fair. The only time she’d yelled at him with the intention of doing both him and his pride harm it had had no effect. At least not the desired one. He hung his head and stood too, turning from her so she couldn’t see his face.
She reached for him, about to say his name, but he grabbed her by the wrist fiercely and stopped her in her tracks.
"You could not even lift a knife to grant me the equality I begged for, but you dare touch me after refusing such a display?" he asked.
"What?" she asked.
"You want to keep me as I am. You want to lord over me; you want to keep me as something so wrong, so disgusting purely so you can be forever above me. You wish to command me, Yuna. Well, I refuse to be commanded!"
He looked at her, so full of anger and hate and feeling betrayed. It was history all over again. He asked with all his heart and she refused because she decided there was something wrong with him. Now… now she was all alone.
She steadfastly looked at him. Even as she expected to be hit, she kept eye contact with him.
"If this is love to you then I refuse it. I vowed, long ago, that I would only accept what I asked for on my own terms. Having nothing is better than servitude." He tossed her arm down. "Touch me again and I shall regard it as a threat. Follow me and I will make you and your island regret it. I would rather die again than have your pity and I wish to every power within this world that when I say this it would mean I could stop loving you: I hate you Yuna."
There was nothing to say. That time had gone and she had failed in the biggest way possible. She just stood there, watching him wander into the jungle and wondering which of their hearts hurt more.