RELATIONSHIPS: Lunya/G'raha
ERA: Pre-SHB
WARNINGS: None
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/10/20
DETAILS: Three prompts from a friend: [1] don’t leave [15] trembling hands [16] in dreams.
"Wake up, silly," the illusion whispers, its stolen voice tender and honeyed with affection. A small hand brushes across his forehead, tracing a crease worn into his brow through long nights of studying and candles melted to stubs. "You can't stay asleep forever."
The sky is a rich violet when he awakes, like twilight over the Rhotano, a dark canvas that makes the spectre's hair glow white like starlight when he gazes up at it. It smiles at him—(and for all the time he spent staring at her in the waking world, he doesn't think he could ever perfectly recreate just how her eyes glowed when she did)—and watches contentedly as he pushes himself up from its lap.
He yawns though there is no need to and rubs dew from his eyes where there is none. When he pulls himself to sit across from his companion, his tail sweeps petals loose from the crumpled bed of flowers beneath them, a warm crimson in the last dredges of an eternal dusk.
"Good morning," he tells the ghost. It doesn't respond, but the way it slowly, deliberately blinks and tilts its head lets him know he was heard. It stares into the distance, to the far edge of their garden, where the flowers blur into nothingness and the dream begins to end. He doesn't know what it sees, but he follows its gaze anyway, trusting it will tell him if it's important—and it is.
"It's time," it tells him after a heartbeat, twilight eyes still trained on the horizon.
His hands curl into the earth, grabbing a handful of crushed forget-me-nots in his palm. He knows he's pouting, childish as it is, and he knows he has no right to, but—"Must I leave?"
Strands of starlight whip around the mirage's face as it turns to glower at him.
"You already have." For a moment he sees the girl he left behind in another time, mouthing a broken don't leave me too as the doors closed on all their possibilities. It looks at him through a veil of lashes, glare softening at what he knows must be guilt writ on his face. Then, it grips at the end of his sleeve and pulls itself up to stand, a train of white silk pooling around its feet.
There are few chances for them to be at eye level with each other, and his breath catches as it steps forward. He knew, when he first fell asleep, that conjuring her image was trouble—but it does nothing to stop how his heart does a calamitous jolt in his chest at the movement.
(The years he spent fixated on Allag feel like nothing, now, compared to how fascinating he finds her.)
The borrowed face of the woman he abandoned sends his pulse skyrocketing, and he wonders if it can hear the way his ears begin to ring as it leans in until their noses are gently touching tip to tip, and when it breathes he can feel a facsimile of her warmth on his lips, and he finds himself closing his eyes and leaning forward too, hoping, wanting—
"...I thought it'd be easier if it was like this." It laughs quietly, sinking back onto its heels, abashed and ashamed in equal measure as his eyes flutter open. "Even in a dream, I'm still a coward."
Its hands slip down into his own, though he doesn't know which of them is trembling until it lets go and he's left holding only the air in his lungs, which stutters out in shock and rattles him with want.
His mouth is dry but the scolding words make him lunge forward anyway, to grip it by the shoulders as a protest wells onto his tongue. "You are not a coward, you're—"
"The bravest person you know," the girl in white interrupts wryly. "And still... neither of us will remember this once we wake up, so I... I should have... Well, this shouldn't have been possible to begin with." She reaches out, her small fingers hovering over the crease on his forehead, where her aether singed a physick as they fled from a world of darkness. "But you and I, we're a pair made for the impossible, aren't we, Raha?"
Realization knocks G'raha's heart sideways."Lunya?" Some Sharlayan scholar he's turned out to be if he hadn't noticed the one nearest to his heart was with him all along. "Is this really... how could this... how are you—"
"You're usually more eloquent than this," his dearest friend teases, the corners of her eyes wrinkling with fondness and sadness in the fading light of their sanctuary. "Did any of your tomes tell you that in Eorzea, twilight is said to be the time when worlds intersect? When the veil grows thinnest?"
Stars begin to glitter in the corner of his vision as he stands, his head spinning with the revelation and a dozen more questions. His tail coils anxiously around his leg, looking for some semblance of balance as the boundaries of their world begin to blur and the wind picks up, taking with it a shower of petals in a dance.
"Time's up." The sigh Lunya exhales is heavy, longing as she looks at the darkening sky and the river of stars that starts to twine across it. "This was a good dream, wasn't it?"
"Wait!" he says, desperately reaching for her as the earth shakes beneath them, beginning to draw them apart as ink begins to spill across the floor, swallowing him in night. "I know I do not deserve forgiveness but—Lunya, I'm sorry I left you behind, I'm sorry I didn't say anything—"
"I know!" Lunya calls back, her final smile for him gentle and grateful as her image breaks into motes of light. She is swathed in moonglow, luminous and radiant in their last moments together, and he thinks that even if he did stay around to write her biography he could never describe just how beautiful—how inspirational she is. "I know, Raha! And I should have told you: I'm in love with you too—"
As the dream dissolves into nothingness, the last of her aether entangled with his own finally fizzling out as he begins to awake, G'raha allows himself to cry, exhilarated and heartbroken for reasons he can't remember, all while a worried crowd whispers around him.
