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windupnamazu · 8 months

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the weight of living

ffxivwrite2023 #21: grave a burial place.

Lunya & G'raha. Pacific Rim AU. 393wc. ⮞ There's an albatross around your neck.

He finds her out on the northernmost deck of the Shatterdome as the first rays of morning light paint the city of Vesper Bay in rosy pinks and warm oranges. For a city on its final legs, standing defiantly in the face of the apocalypse, it's beautiful—even the ichor-filled sea dyed primal violet and the hulking silhouette of Ifrit's skeleton forming the Bone Slums are peaceful in the moment, and he stays silent as he approaches her with slow steps, not wanting to disturb her prayers.

But Lunya turns anyway, her smile gentle, attention stirred by the Drift and their permanent resonance, an unending song between them. Wisps of her freshly-cut hair flutter in the wind and she's cast golden and holy in the sunrise.

"When Marshal Leveilleur and Einar left for Carteneau, I had a feeling they weren't coming back," she says, eyes trained on the rising peak of the Shatterdome behind him. "You feel that way with every battle, but that day I couldn't shake the idea that this is it. This is when I lose him."

And she was right. The cairns dedicated to the lost Marshal and Warrior are merely that: cairns. Piles of stone. Markers for something that could be here but isn't. Endless are the number of should-be graves piled with flowers that can't exist because there was nothing left to pull from the wreckage.

"I didn't cry when they told me he was dead." She doesn't cry now, either. Neither of them think she remembers how to. "I told you that, right? A lot of people think I'm heartless because of it."

And they're wrong. He knows her heart more than she's ever allowed anyone else to. The girl before him is made of galaxies and a raw, relentless, burning kind of love, the kind that moves gods to test their children and leave them to find their own answers. All-consuming. Bone-aching. It's echo in his own leaves him starving, desperate for more.

But he doesn't need to say so out loud; Lunya's smile tells him she knows everything, just as he knows all of her.

"They live in my memory," she says with a sort of finality. "Do you think that's enough?"

"I think it has to be," G'raha says honestly.

When they leave for breakfast, hands entwined, two Nymeia lilies remain in their place.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #tales from the warriors of light #oc: lunya #g'raha tia #v: to the edge of our hope #a missing scene to the megafic i still havent finished

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