Virun is often lost.
She can’t see, after all. Even before her beloved friends left her to die on the beach (another sharp jab of pain, like a knife wrenched and twisted in her gut), even when she had all of their eyes to accommodate for her own blindness, she always felt like she was lost – if you could never truly see the path you were on, she had reasoned, it didn’t matter if someone was guiding you or not. You were still lost.
They were the only ones with control of the map. She could never even read it.
She feels his breath against her tangled forelock, and barely processes his questions. She doesn’t look at him, or where she thinks he is. Your eyes scare them, Virun. Take the blindfold. Well, the blindfold is gone, now, and she is the only one who is scared, insofar as she can tell – and the fear is an ugly, choking thing. It aches. Her words come out choked and stumbling: “I can’t see you. I have…always been blind. I…I don’t know how long I was adrift.” If she can call it that. The space between worlds is like a sea, too, if a vast and depthless one; moving through it feels like floating. She finds herself longing for that strangling ocean, now, even as she feels the bulk of him press up against her, forcing her up.
She wants the tide to wash her out to sea, to waterlog her great feathered wings and drag her down, down, down - down into a darkness where there is finally nothing, where her darkness is no longer something wrong and unnatural but the only thing that is right. She wants that cold, cold comfort, she wants the salt water in her lungs, she wants-
But she can’t, because Celes is waiting. No it isn’t, fool girl, it’s never coming back for- No. She stumbles up on unsteady and awkward limbs, swallowing down a fresh wave of nausea and exhaust. It would be so much easier to sleep, but this…this Ein is at her side, pressing against her, pushing her forward. His words to her seem like a distant dream. “Okay,” she whispers, soft and breathy to his reassurances - you have to get home. But do they even want you back, Virun? Without them, they have no use for you. You’re just a- But she doesn’t have time to think of that. She can only think of the stench of saltwater and the wind, the cold rain dripping against her skin; she tries to think of what she feels instead of what she knows, of the faint, massive warmth of her companion and the sharp, jabbing pain of her injured wing.
She wishes, more than ever, that she could spread her wings and fly away from everything – it would be much easier, she reasons, than stumbling upwards in this sandy hell, her every movement labored and painful, her quavering frame betraying her. Then you might be less trouble for this stranger. (As familiar as he seems – why can’t she remember? She’s paranoid, she tells herself, imagining it. She does not think that she thought the same of Celes, at first, that she had been nothing more than a lonely little girl who had finally snapped after years of isolation.) It isn’t just that, though. She feels everything when she flies. Even though she can never see the sky, (They tell her that it is beautiful, but she doesn’t – can’t – know what that means. She doesn’t remember.) she can feel every twitch and turn of the wind as it threads through her feathers. On the ground, she is meek, stumbling, reliant; it is only in the sky that she finds her way.
Finally, she thinks, she feels the brush of wet, sticky grass against her legs. It takes all of her energy not to collapse on the spot, but, out of what is largely a courtesy to her savior-apparent, she remains standing, wobbling on her hooves. “We are…off the beach, then?” She asks, her tone choked with uncertainty; she hesitates, for a moment, then asks again. “This…place. Where are we?” Even if she could see, she wouldn’t know that.
(This can’t really be the Novus Celes claimed, she reasons. Something must have gone wrong. They wouldn’t have left her like this…would they?)
Of course they would, Virun. You only hurt yourself more, thinking it might be otherwise.
all my love won't bring you back to me and oh my god I'm wasting away
PULLED FLOWERS AT MY FEET, LOST IN THE WIND
@@Torstein - replying at a reasonable time? what's that?
