thinking of javier having to be psychically restrained from following lloyd into the reincarnation portal, only being able to be stopped because he's already half-dead from all the blood he lost trying to protect lloyd from helkaros. javier struggling with world-shattering power to free himself and crawl after his best friend, being told it's useless it won't help even if he follows there's no certainty they'll meet each other in their next life and him, delirious in pain and grief, thinking that it would be worth it. whatever happens next, whatever comes after, if there's even the slightest chance, the smallest possibility that he could find lloyd in his next life... it would be worth it
it takes arcos and marbella both to finally talk him out of it and it's not so much what they say as the reminder that he still has a duty there that he can't abandon it no matter how much it tears him apart. because he swore to protect the frontera family and he swore to protect lloyd and he failed at the latter but lloyd would never forgive him if he failed at the first. because lloyd died protecting his family and javier can't leave them behind now no matter how much he aches to follow him.
because if it were only him javier wouldn't hesitate to live countless lives and die even more countless deaths just for a chance to find lloyd again but it's not and javier can't justify not spending the rest of this life protecting the very family lloyd gave his life for.
and besides, he reasons once the grief has settled deep into his chest, a solid weight he knows he will carry for the rest of his existence, he will cross that gate at some point. it may take months or years or maybe decades but he will cross it. and then he can follow lloyd to wherever he may have gone just like he swore to.
it's only a matter of time.
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She broke off the kiss when she felt the top button of her shirt be undone.
Panting, Jillian took a step back, eyeing Suzanne’s black veil, her vows. A pair of concerned eyes stared back at her while a pair of hands still at Jillian’s shirt trembled slightly. She caught them with her own and kept them in place.
“Are you sure?” Jillian breathed out, before raising one and then the other of Suzanne’s hands to her lips, bestowing delicate blessings upon hardened knuckles.
A tender smile lit up the face a scar had once darkened. Suzanne leaned into her again and pressed a soft promise upon Jillian’s mouth.
“Are you?”
The candlelight flickered. Silence reigned gracefully over the convent and the city below it while their breath mingled hot and nervous, alive amid stillness.
This was nothing new; they were both aware of what lovers did, of course — only the memory was so distant, the idea so foreign… Suzanne had married heaven, Jillian knowledge; fleshless spouses such as these could never adore them back. Years, lifetimes of neglect suddenly made new what was old as time as they stood together at the precipice of this unfamiliar intimacy.
Love had simply happened; circumstance allowed a word, a gesture, a touch — this rarest of benedictions, this uncanny discovery science would never fully explain, faith never fully accept. Touches were made bolder, hands dared to clasp one another, pull, hold tight, invite the inevitable kiss to seal the contract and tear down the veil…
The veil.
Jillian touched it solemnly, waiting. With tremulous fingers, she began to undo it as soon as another button on her shirt was tentatively pushed out of its place; they spoke in their own mute language, echoing the question and the questioning answer with every timid move: “Are you sure? Are you?”
In this languid ritual, no inch of skin was taken for granted. Every revelation was adored, slowly, slowly, ever searching for certainty — a kiss at the base of the neck, another at a shoulder, hair coming lose, are you sure, are you sure, are you sure...? There was something blasphemous, there was something sacred in each curve, each joint, each scar; Jillian needed not envy Suzanne’s repertoire of hymns, for they would both compose their own with every kiss. Divine rhymes in the tongue of quietness littered the warmth they so carefully exposed.
Hesitation darkened the shadows around them — how pathetic, how ridiculous, how adulterous, for who would now worship god or numbers, the invisible deities who had hitherto kept their beds so cold and spacious? How audacious to display a birthmark, a crease, a patch of unkempt hair, mortality itself, when the holiness of prayer or genius had so long carried the privilege of guarding them…
A total embrace, two hearts reaching out to one another madly, terrified of beating so near, so alike — but more frightened still to avoid this, to part.
Night time is god’s asylum for sin, for shame; so they remained where the orange flame could yet paint them out from shadow, where they could quickly notice whether the answer had or had not changed — are you sure?
A gasp, a moan — quiet, slow, pure, unlike any of the songs of devotion or the groans of dying enemies Suzanne was so used to, unlike the inhuman humming of machines Jillian herself had hallucinated into being.
Fumbling thumbs, accompanied by giggles only the girls they had once been had any right to utter, travelled uncertain, insecure, knowing their desired destination but losing themselves in the infinite invisible roads that led everywhere. An awkward angle elicited embarrassment, but what was there to be embarrassed of? Theirs were other sorts of experience. Killing, healing, creating, inspiring… The nun and the immaculate mother would have time to learn together what worship was, with less questions at every touch, less fear at every breath…
But never without wonder.
And as Suzanne sighed and Jillian heaved and neither deigned to contemplate the cross on the wall when religion lay down right beside them, entangled with their very limbs, they kissed once more.
The first few rays of daylight lazily coloured the trail of smoke which the melted candle had left in the room.
“We’ll have to get up soon enough… Morning service.”
An incredulous guffaw of laughter shook bare, radiant skin, catching in the folds of discarded clothes mixed in a heap of black and white upon the stone floor.
“Are you very sure...?”
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