every day i have to restrain myself from screaming because so much of minfilia’s arc is trapped in 1.0 purgatory. watching cutscenes on youtube isn’t enough i need a 1.0 remake and im not joking
(”G.” Closeness. He never allowed it. Not for himself. But he would permit himself to relish from a distance. Thancred POV, WoL & Minfilia, early ARR. Very soft.)
- - - - - - - - - -
Thancred Waters was proficient at snooping.
It was a cultivated talent, to know how to spy—and as a consequence of prying, he was doomed with many secrets; riddles and enigmas he was cursed, thenceforth, to keep. It was an omnipresent peril of his chosen occupation; the bane of the scoundrel, to be clandestine and creeping.
The salt of Vesper Bay crowded his nostrils as he sought her—the Warrior of Light, Rosalyn—call me Samantha—and found not one, but two solemn bearers of the Blessing. The smaller Antecedent draped her arm in a loose cling around the taller, guiding her out into the square.
Waters froze at once and backed into the shadows.
From the way his gut curled and twisted on instinct, he knew he should leave.
Instead, brows down, guilty feet silent, a bizarrely boyish flutter stirred beneath his breastbone and he melted into the scenery, watching the pair with curious, questioning eyes.
Samantha was a stern and scowling person—there was a story behind it, her grimness; it came across like a disguise—but for Warde, she warmed and thawed. “What about here?” She gestured to a ledge.
“A wonderful suggestion.”
The girls perched together on cracked sandstone, encircled by flowering bromeliads, beneath the reaching foliage of a palm. Between them was a basket. The graven image of Nanarito passed judgment as Warde began to unpack—fruits and finger foods and folded handkerchiefs, a volume tuned for two—one stolen splinter of serenity condensed into a picnic. Minfilia handed a napkin to Samantha, and the lips of the sorceress quirked into an unpracticed grin.
Her dark stare unnervingly softened, a blush on her skin—
Thancred realized something.
She loves her.
He knew it was true. Even watching from a distance, his stomach brimmed with butterflies and flipped. It reminded him of pining; of young and wondering fondness, feelings quite distinct from his personal sentiments.
The bystander made sure he was shrouded—noted that nothing gave him more contentment than Warde’s sheer, unalloyed bliss. Here, he was able to see it. Minfilia was laughing, the pure distilled force of her affection focused on the harsh-looking girl peeling an orange—smiling through the juice and pulp of a wedge and allowing, just for a heartbeat, the dour mask to crack.
Thancred felt protective; hungry to grant them this easy, earthly instant.
Closeness. He never allowed it. Not for himself.
But he would permit himself to relish from a distance. Permit that, above the bitters of his self-imposed denials, he felt indulgent to simply bear witness—felt joy and jubilation, that they enjoyed what he would not. Love, for the girl he adored in every conceivable fashion, and the woman he dared to believe a young legend.
Minfilia turned her face to Samantha like a blossom in the sun; the golden-haired Warde and wild, rambling Warrior.
(Heavenly bodies that held her in their influence. “Let me help you.” Rating changes to “E.” Multiple relationships, several snippets from pre-1.0 Calamity to [ShB spoilers] pre-patch 5.3.)
cw: 18+, consensual OCxOC relationship with [in other depictions, unhealthy] BDSM overtones; rough sex, mention of Zenos (scars and injury), Estinien & Samantha being actual animals. Otherwise fluff and feelings. Many POV shifts, mostly wide third-person POV with eyes belonging to: Raphael, Minfilia, G'raha, Estinien, Aymeric, and Samantha (WoL).
- - - - - - - - - -
- ✧ ☄ ☽ -
Rain pit-pattered the window.
She swallowed the breath of fragrant mist rising from her teacup—took a scalding, half-steeped sip. Past the glass, out in the garden, the rosebushes hung their pretty red faces, the downpour making the blossoms gleaming and leaden.
A hum from his desk—that soft, commanding timbre—and she looked up as though summoned or beckoned.
Bewitched, bedazzled, besotted.
He was thumbing through papers, grim-faced, unsmiling.
“Come,” he murmured. He sounded tired. The word fell from thinned lips like a drop of cool water from storm-laden petals. She rose from the armchair; padded, barefoot, past polished wood floors. Her long nightgown whispered behind her, a white, frothy slip of a thing—a gift from him.
He stirred at the sound of her subservience.
When Raphael Lemaitre lifted his eyes, Rosalyn Floravale was lost in them. They were green and golden and haunted with hazel, arcane and enchanting as the aurum of his hair. He wet his lips and tipped his quill in its stand; pushed his chair from the counter to allow her to perch in his lap. “Sit.”
Her heart stuttered with butterfly flutters as she climbed astride. He allowed her one rare moment of abandon, to stroke her hands through his long, flaxen hair. She pulled it loose of its ribbon. “You look tired,” she said, timid fingertips tracing his resplendent cheekbones. She cupped the sharp angle of his jawline; kissed the side of his mouth. “Let me help.”
He wrapped her wrist in his hand and closed his eyes. Raphael turned his face to press the hard slash of his mouth against the lines of her palm, the arch of his regal nose caught between her fingers.
“You always do,” he whispered. It was quiet enough to vanish—to disappear into the grumbling of the rainfall and the wind. Whether she heard him or not, before he could intercept it, she snatched the bridge of his glasses. Through his defenses slipped the first flicker of a grin; she cackled as he slipped very cold, very clinical fingertips up the front of her chemise, stiff against her skin.
Thumbs stained by ink moved directly to her breasts, his feather-light touch nonetheless kindling. She arched to fill his hands; to beg him, silently, to cast aside pretense. But Raphael Lemaitre was stern as a statue and nothing could sway him. As always, he looked up through bronze lashes, knowledge implacable, a stronghold unspeaking, unsmiling, unyielding.
After long hours lecturing students, he preferred quiet.
She writhed, impatient, in his lap. He watched a moment in silence. Hands primed for reading and writing moved, very slowly, down the outline of her body—found her hips and eased into a calculated shift. Their bodies moved together, and an ugly cry tore from her lips.
“Shh,” he hushed, unlatching his belt.
She held her lip between her teeth to stifle all sound as she watched him. Unbuckled, unbuttoned, he pushed the immaculate press of his trousers down just low enough to—
Her hot, greedy fingers snatched his length into her fist. Always so hungry to take him, she hitched herself up, and he hissed to see she was bare beneath the nightdress—completely unhindered.
They were practiced. So rehearsed, now, she knew the best fits of their bodies; made the frantic struggle of sex into something graceful and efficient. Her desperation always left him breathless, and in the midst of that rainstorm, his dignified lips fell soundlessly open as she sank to sheathe him inside in one stroke, riding him, unruly and ruthless.
Had her eyes been open in the blinding breath that he filled her—had they been open, not closed for the thrill—she would have seen incomprehensible adoration in his face; the brief, broken instant his chiseled façade collapsed. But the mask of power clicked back just as quickly—the need to restrain her,outlast her, and conquer.
She clapped her own palm over her own mouth to stifle her ragged cries and he kissed the valleys of her knuckles; let his eyes glitter like sunbeams in springtime.
Good girl.
- ✧ ☄ ✧ -
The Antecedent’s laugh caught, half-through her throat, and she stifled it.
“What?” Thancred’s scoff was both merry and biting. He stumbled to a halt, dragging the flabbergasted Hero beside him.
“The two of you look so—” Warde cut herself off. “Forgive me—” Her sky-pale eyes glittered, filled with bald amusement. The Warrior—Samantha—pushed her dark hair back with both hands, a fiery blush on her swarthy, sun-blemished cheeks.
“Are you laughing at us?”
A giggle escaped the Antecedent’s lips. She coughed back the cascade that threatened; pinned Waters with a gentle stare. “My dear Thancred—stand aside, if you please?”
Both of her sentinel’s ash-blond eyebrows rose and he lifted both hands, play-acting a couerl-burglar at knifepoint. “Fair lady,” he drawled, reversing three paces.
Samantha watched in some blend of horror and unabashed fascination as Minfilia swept into the center of the room, reaching for her with unassuming, outstretched hands. “Allow me,” she offered, keeping her voice soft and tranquil, hoping it offered some solace. “Our friend here of course is an unrivaled tutor, but—” and she prayed her eyes, then, were soothing. Floravale was full of fire, but skittish, so much promise, so much wild. “Ascilia remembers the basics far better.”
From her guardian, she felt the heat of his exasperated affection—stern and probing cross-examination—and passed him a heartening glance.
Stay.
Samantha crept forward, still possessed of that caged-animal stare. “Ascilia?”
“My name,” she said, very quiet. A tiny smile curled her lips. “The true one.”
“But,” came the instantaneous mutter from the watcher, “If you so much as breathe an onze beyond this chamber—”
His interruption was disrupted. “I trust her,” said Minfilia, holding the Warrior in her eyes. Samantha had a fierce and determined appearance—a woman, to be certain—but despite over two epochs of namedays, the sorceress yet moved with self-doubt; exuded a muted and hushed lack of confidence that Ascilia, for all her abundant misfortunes, comprehended very well.
“That would be the Blessing,” offered Thancred, benevolently unhelpful.
“No.” Warde beheld Floravale with tender evaluation. They stood close, now; close enough to twine hands. “Somehow,” she wove fingertips together; locked eyes, light to dark, “I would trust her regardless.” Minfilia’s voice came out small and wondering, like a child.
Samantha responded in kind. “You would?”
Thancred cocked a resigned hip against the well-worn desk and sighed; watched as two would-be schoolgirls burdened by the weight of the known world swung into silent metronome rhythm, the Antecedent’s surefooted actions rendered clumsy by the Warrior’s ineptness.
Ascilia had been told, from the first of her years—admittedly mostly by Thancred, Twelve bless him—that the shine of her grin held the warmth to melt winters; that, perhaps, if she met all of Coerthas with her gladness, she could thaw even Dalamud’s harshest aetherical chill.
She aimed her finest smile at Samantha.
“I would trust you in twelve thousand lifetimes.” She used her chin to point to their toes, and Samantha tripped across the floor to follow. “Excepting yon loitering observer,” another admittedly unnecessary glance to reassure him, “Rarely have I met a soul I found—so suddenly familiar.”
Samantha’s complexion was olive, dark-freckled, but not deep enough to obscure the hot red of her blush. “I feel the same,” she babbled. “Familiar, I mean—as though I knew you long before we ever met.”
Warde spun the two of them to trace the empty Solar. “Marvelous,” she said gently, and Thancred’s eyes followed them both, serene and tempered. “We might make a proper friend of you yet.”
Minfilia pretended not to notice how her partner’s breath stoppered—looked away as Samantha cast a nervous glance to Waters. Warde was aware of the role he assumed on her arrival in Ul’dah; camouflaged the elation she felt at his aura of pride and protection. So you adopted her as well, my secret-keeper.
“Scion and associate,” he grunted, feigning indifference—though the look in his eyes was anything but.
The Warrior huffed. “I would love nothing more than your friendship,” she muttered, and the words were rough but honest. She was catching on to one bar of the dance—Tataru would be delighted. “But—” She laughed then, nervous. “How can I presume to join in?”
Her dark, delving stare flicked to Minfilia’s—smoldering and shy.
“Why,” and the Antecedent lifted both arms to guide her in a pirouette. “You join in the same as this.” The Warrior twirled and her uneven skirts whirled in tiers to hug her calves, catching on the buckles of her blonde spinner’s boots, tickling the trims of leather-embellished leggings.
Rosalyn and Ascilia met each other eye-to-eye, the hybrid mage no small margin taller—
And then the woman the Antecedent hoped might fill the old soles of an Archon tripped all over herself and they were entangled, slip to surcote. With an exaggerated sigh, Thancred bustled over to unravel them. “So much for hoodwinking the Syndicate.”
Above their sudden, wild laughter, Samantha barked. “I trained in natural magick, not parlor tricks.”
Minfilia was breathless. “I’ve been cured of misgivings.”
- ☽ ✧ ☾ -
His tail swayed back and forth as he looked at the Tower.
There in the distant yawn of that crystalline throne room, the Void yet stretched—and there beyond, through that rift in time and space and aether,Nero—
G’raha Tia balled his hands into fists and squared his center of gravity; felt the heft of eons past and future ghost to settle on his shoulders. There was something, something—something he was missing.
Something he yet needed to finish.
Like Nero, he hungered for Allag. For all G’raha knew that his colleagues might deride him—the lash of Scaevan sarcasm was, after all, something far harsher than biting—he almost, quite often, relatedto the defector; met cold eyes the color of midwinter mornings and saw something brittle tucked behind them.
Brittle, and bitter—substratum primed to crack.
“Raha?”
The barest sound of her voice pooled to tug at his navel. He turned before she could see the way the dense hairs along his tailbone stood up; loosed a casual grin like a mockery of an arrow. “You found me.”
“Of course I—” In the darkness, she almost looked frightened. The plucking sensation dropped inconveniently lower as she trudged up to glare down at his face, a worry line creased between her brows. “You—” She pursed her lips and spluttered. “After all that happened—” She flicked one frustrated hand toward the looming, glittering spire. “Tell me before you run off like that.”
Oh, she was furious—furious and terrified.
For him.
Pleasure stirred in his heart and down between his legs before he could ignore it. He raised his eyebrows. “Worrying after me?”
She scowled harder. “You—” Her hands were balled into fists so tight he could see every ridge of her knuckles and half-gloves. “Of course I worry after you, Raha.”
A tremor itched down his back and he ignored the sudden, feral urge he felt to pounce. “As you see,” he said instead, gesturing to himself. “Whole and hale.”
“Uncharacteristic,” she muttered. She thrust out one hand, flexing stiff fingers.
He had the choice, then, to continue to rile her—but he wove them palm to palm instead, following back to the outpost. A thrill marched up his spine as she all but dragged him to camp, his deepest, most animal instincts ecstatic to be chased and claimed.
He supposed he should have known, somehow, that things would shift—change being the crux of existence, the eternal pendulum swing. But had he known, even after; even granted the gift of both foresight and hindsight, would he have picked another way?
When he thought of it centuries after, he remembered a mirage. For what else could it be but delirium imagined, delusions he dreamt in the lifetimes he slept in the Umbilicus, the haze of his waking besides?
But wherever it came from, in no past, present, or future would G’raha rob himself of one memory: Her legs, a cage to bind him as he moved, slowly and carefully, inside.
- ☾ ❅ ☽ -
His growl was furious. “Let me help you.”
She squirmed away from him like an eel but Estinien chased her; pinned her down with the obstinate weight of his body. He was scalding hot, the gift he stole from Nidhogg affecting his temperature.
“Letgo of me,” she growled, trying to kick him, but he curled in a way that placed his long frame at the advantage. His right hand was encrusted with scales of obsidian, vaguely monstrous, and where he touched her a tickling miasma of aether descended. Warped crimson and violet levin tangled down her body in gossamer cobwebs, and each felt the other flicker within—that strange place they were blended from sharing the Eyes—however swiftly her tenure had ended.
“Let me look at you,” he snarled, and just as the smoke of his eldritch magick found a crack in the light of her blessings, seeping in, he snatched her wrist in his hand and used the secret she taught him against her.
A cry tore from her throat—arse—and she crumpled, limp, to the blankets.
Then, with the skilled and ruthless fingers of a hunter, he stripped her bare of skirts and bodice and shucked her free of her chemise, much like he might clean an antelope carcass.
It was rare that Estinien was shocked, but his eyes went wide on reflex at the sight of the wounds on her body—fresh tracks and puckered scars, no few left by Ame-no-Habakiri. His scale-flecked thumb stroked a path by the lines left by the katana and he shuddered with a convulsion, consumed at once by rage. Again, both could feel it curl within,an actual, aetherical connection.
Death, came the inward rumble, not from her, but from Estinien.
I will kill him.
She coughed out a laugh. “Who can kill the unkillable,” she croaked, increasingly convinced that the prince was akin to a demon. “That man defies all rational definition.”
“Slag him,” Estinien spat, physically shaking. His eyes were frozen on the places stained by Doma, by Galvus—her flawed and magnificent skin— “How could you allow him—”
“I let nothing,” she hissed, the command of her magick returning. She huffed a breath to transpose the fire building in her chest and it came out an icy mist. “How could you allow Nidhogg?”
Hard, dark eyes caught her glare. They were locked for a handful of hot breaths and heartbeats. Estinien lunged, pulling the blow just before their browbones cracked together; nestling gently instead.
His voice rarely hitched, rarely fractured. “He told me to protect you,” he whispered, and in the depths of it she heard something shatter; a glacier’s melting edge.
Aymeric.
“You are,” she rasped, both hands on his face. “You do. You did.”
Thought evaporated. Tussle turned to whispers turned to snapping and biting. His clothes were gone, saltwater on his face. The source of the tears hardly mattered.
Samantha hooked her knee around his haunches, tossed her head back, and howled.
- ☾ ✧ ☽ -
The canopy of the Twelveswood swayed above.
He laughed, and a cackle of crowcall escaped her. “And here I thought,” she rasped, hoarse, “The Lord Commander was not the type to be prevailed upon.”
A crooked grin twisted his lips. He hooked his elbow to buttress her back; dipped her low so that the gleaming, star-white fringes of her blanched-bright hair swept almost to the ground. “But you, my Hero,” he exhaled, “Are prevailing.” He whorled her upright and was gratified to find her grinning, broad and breathless. “And I of course admit a certain bias in the case of our affairs.”
She unfurled against his arm and tossed her head; barked another wine-drunk chortle at the stars that glittered far above the boughs. The lamplight cast the stern angles of her face into shadows impossibly softer, framed by the intermittent pinprick-incandescence of fireflies.
Like them, her splendor shone foremost from within.
“Impolitic,” she teased him, “For a statesman to play favorites.” And then, without warning, she was deadweight in his hands. The Warrior of Light dragged the Speaker of Ishgard down to dewy cushions of moss and leaf-litter; jerked her chin toward the bottle long abandoned. “And to ply a weary Scion with drink, nonetheless.” She quirked a brow. “Are you trying to intoxicate me, Ser Aymeric?”
He was smiling down at her, beguiled—hers, helplessly, always. “Not on drink,” he murmured, brushing the tips of their noses together. “Though I concede I misjudged the—vigor of this vintage.”
She snorted and dissolved into guffaws, and he held her, amused and admiring.
His design was elaborate—ambitious and, to his horror, slightly extravagant—from aperitifs with her parents, to the banquet in the ballroom, to this tour of girlhood haunts and havens, he had plans.
But let her this moment, his skipping heart warbled. This breath of freedom from Norvrandt.
Your grandiose suggestions can wait.
- ☾ ☄ ✧ -
He held his frame at an angle away from her.
Distant.
“Close the door,” she begged again. The Exarch met her stare through copper lashes, the side of shrewd, slitted eyes, and the Tower itself seemed to inhale. There was a long, gravid pause.
Then, very sudden, very quiet, the access to the Ocular clicked shut.
And they were alone.
The Exarch—G’raha—gripped his right arm like it pained him. She reached for it on impulse. “Let me help you.”
It should have been easier, to look and see a friend. But it was hard to reconcile—to dissect him from her trials in Norvrandt—to blend the ardent young scholar with the venerable, cryptic old man. Even as he turned and opened his posture to her—even as she took him by the shoulder, the shape so familiar—he was something slightly else. “Samantha—” The richness of his very timbre was darkened, subtly altered, the Exarch ancient in ways that G’raha Tia only wished to understand.
“No.” Her low voice echoed hoarsely in the room. “Don’t dispute it. Don’t speak to me of debts or death or some other damnation imagined.” His right shoulder was hard as granite. She dug in her fingertips. “You don’t deserve to suffer, Raha,” she muttered. “You never did.”
His face was serene and impassive. But as she watched—as she poured healing aether through his fractures, letting it slip between the tectonics of him and the Tower—something cracked.
Strong arms hooked the small of her back, his stature humble but packed, dense and deceptive, with power. He crumpled with a breath and turned to crush his face against her shoulder.
“Say it again.”
Shocked from focus, her spell fizzled—but her grip on him tightened. She hugged him, hard. “You never deserved it,” she rasped, one hand cradling his neck. “Not one bit.”
The hard tips of his crystallized fingers caught between the layers of her bodice. The breath he took rattled his body.
How long they stood and swayed there was unknown.
- ☄ -
The spell to shield her aether was proving easier to weave, but whether it was effective was a question only Estinien could answer.
It was late by the time she reached the Manor. Snow fell in flurries, all but stopped, and she took her time shedding her layers, sneaking into the foyer so as not to wake the—
A breathy laugh, far down the hallway.
She froze and craned her neck. A dim glow from the direction of the parlor. Sweeping back her hair, now damp with melted snowflakes, she tiptoed down the vaulted corridor, ears peeled for—
“Fury bless it.”
Aymeric’s laugh, again. “You keep too much tension in your shoulders.”
A grin curled her lips in a reflex like breathing and she picked up her pace, keeping quiet. The heirlooms and artifacts stored on the walls seemed to watch and adjudicate as she crept to the archway, peeking in.
There in the parlor, limned by firelight, the two most eminent figures of her Ishgard were dancing.
Estinien swayed away from his partner, long torso bared to the hips, garbed in ash-colored slacks that hugged his thighs too tightly—a pair nicked from Aymeric, no doubt. And the lender himself was dressed all in black, the high neck of his collar offering only the barest glimpse of alabaster throat.
Quiet and clandestine, she leaned against the frame, watching as the two of them simpered.
“Poor form,” crooned the lord of the house.
“My arse,” came the clapback.
With lupine grace, Estinien slunk back, snatching Aymeric’s wrist. A wicked smirk curved Borel’s beautiful mouth as he followed. “That, I assure you, is formed quite correctly.”
And then Estinien laughed. It was a raw, candid sound—wide and rambling as the grin on his lips. At the gleam of his teeth, a wild, uninhibited rapture surged through her, and she realized with a start—
It did not belong only to her.
Before she could think to escape, a hard, towering body barreled for impact. “You little rat,” Estinien growled—and she caught a glittering wink in his right earlobe as she was lifted from the floor, hefted easily over his shoulder.
She slumped and twisted to find Aymeric watching, smiling bright. “Ignore me,” she insisted. “Keep bonding. I have a mind to go to the—”
But Estinien was already carrying her up the stairs. “You smell like—” She could hearhis nose wrinkle. “Too much of those damned Lakeland lilacs and not enough like me.”
She huffed. “Last I checked, the world was not, in fact, compelled to smell Wyrmbloodian.”
Trailing behind by several paces, Aymeric followed, laughter lighting the ice of his stare. He pushed the rook-black curl from his eyes and fixed her with earnest attention. “Welcome home again, beloved.”
every day i have to restrain myself from screaming because so much of minfilia’s arc is trapped in 1.0 purgatory. watching cutscenes on youtube isn’t enough i need a 1.0 remake and im not joking
ALT
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