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delicadenza · 6 years

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tatizeke + 7: romantic kiss

for @witchnyx. i have no control at all over how these ficlets spiral but this one mushroomed so much because these two lovebirds deserved only the most elaborate of setups.

directly inspired by “bloom” by the paper kites. crossposted to ao3; normally something of this length would go straight there and i’d just link to it here, but it’s going down for maintenance in a couple hours haha so i’m putting up here in its entirety as well.

Everyone who knew her knew Tatiana could not lie, or spin falsehoods, or so much as muster the nerve to tell an incomplete truth. No one knew this better than Tatiana herself—that something always gave her away, a slip of the tongue, a wandering eye, just because it was the way of things.

Not, of course, that she had anything to lie about, or that she’d ever had any desire to deceive people, but there were times that she did wish that she might go about life with a little less of her heart on her sleeve and in her face, like a window of clear glass illuminating everything that she might feel. Which was to say there were more than a few things she wished she could keep—if not hidden exactly, then at least slightly further down from the surface, where the light didn’t quite reach.

Ezekiel, naturally, was the first among those things. The first, the most precious, the best-loved of the things she couldn’t allow herself to share, and she was convinced she would die, absolutely die, if he ever discovered it. Little old her, in love with him. Ezekiel, her friend whom she’d pulled from the sea. The handsomest man in the village, the best rider, the Emperor’s favorite. So kind, so good, always bringing her seashells from the port and fresh fruit from the capital, always ready with a kind word and a pair of steady hands to assist her with any chore, no matter how menial. And she would endanger all that for this feeling. The thought alone filled her with so much dread that, terrible though it might be to be so dishonest, the only recourse she could possibly imagine was to get better at hiding. Somehow. Somehow.

“Tatiana, my dear,” the abbess had said the day Tatiana sought counsel at her knee, smiling with gentle impatience as if to say surely she already knew the answers to her own questions. Just as she had known that Tatiana was in love with him before his name had even left her mouth, before she’d finished saying even What if, hypothetically, there was a certain man. “You cannot hide the truth any more than you can hide the sun.”

So, half the village already knew, at least. Maybe it was to be expected. Maybe it wasn’t all bad; maybe it was reasonable enough to hope that she’d accumulated enough goodwill treating their fevers and setting their fractured bones to buy their silence on this most, most, most serious matter. And if she could somehow muster the fortitude to let these troublesome feelings pass with Ezekiel himself none the wiser, well, all for the betterment of everyone involved, really.

That, at least, had been the plan. The plan unfortunately didn’t account for the flowers—stalks upon stalks of bell-shaped white lily-of-the-valley suddenly springing up whenever Tatiana stepped upon the earth. Tatiana loved lily-of-the-valley, but it was more than a little uncanny to find it growing all over, first in small sprigs, then in bigger, denser bunches as the days passed, until the front and back yards of the church and the paths she took into town looked as though they’d been covered over with lace, fringed in white flowers in all the places she’d walked. The little girls at the priory, at least, were delighted by the appearance of so many, and over the next week the church filled with their fragrance. Bunches and bunches of them on the altars, woven garlands of them lining the window-frames and the walls. Tatiana, unsettled, bit her lip and told herself to bear it; that it’d pass, as all hiccups in the magic did.

But on the eighth day at dusk she went out to the woods to take water to the woodcutters, and it was just as she stepped across the clearing with a jug in her hands, ready to smile at Ezekiel and wish him a good evening, that she saw it—all the ground from the crest of the hill behind her speckled with white, like a peculiar, unseasonal snowfall.

“Thank you, Tatiana.” His smile was a slow, shy thing as he took the jug from her—always had been, since the day she met him, but today she was convinced. As normal as he might appear, as unmindful of the flowers blooming at her feet, he must know now. He must know, and she was going to die right that very day.

She could already hear the abbess in her head: You see, Tatiana, even that magic of yours is in love with him.

It had been enough for her to all but run back to the priory, turning up more flowers as she went. At her prayers that night and the next morning she went down on her knees for the better part of an hour, silently begging the Mother to please take this from me, pleasepleaseplease, but as she rose she could have sworn she saw patches of green and white poking out from between the stones of the floor too.

In her more irrational moments—increasingly frequent of late, because of these darned flowers—Tatiana wondered if it would be possible for her to work only on stone floors or on the sands of the beach, if she could go into town for healing errands by horse or by cart or in her clunky winter boots regardless of the season, so that her feet never had to touch the bare earth again. She was convinced Ezekiel had begun to look at her oddly, his eyes straying after her as she went about her chores as if to confirm that she was as peculiar as she felt, and everyone else at the priory besides, though she never got anything more than the occasional gentle, Are you ill, Tatiana? What ails you, Tatiana? Even if they knew, and were likely waiting, just as she was waiting, for all of this to pass.

On the fourteenth day, as a kind of mercy, the abbess sent her down to the shoreline to gather kelp for pickling. Or it would have been a mercy had she not found herself wandering toward the exact spot where she had found the injured Ezekiel, months ago now, in the spring. It would have been a mercy had she not found him there a second time, watching the water, as if the very thought of him were not enough to undo all her hard work.

And because on the beach there was nothing to hide behind, blast it, he saw her just as she saw him. And then, horror of horrors, he began to approach, slowly, booted feet sinking partway into the sand with every step, and it was all poor Tatiana could do not to drop her basket and her shoes both and run into the water without looking back. To her credit, she somehow managed the presence of mind to put them down on the ground instead, gently, just in case.

When she rose again, he was there, not two steps from where she stood, and wearing such a look as she had never seen on his face before—frowning, almost fearful, gnawing pensively at the inside of his cheek with his teeth.

“Good morning,” she heard herself say. It came out in a squeak.

“Tatiana.” His gaze flicked down toward her feet, uncertain. “Tatiana, have you been well?”

Oh no, she thought. You never want to speak to me again. And then, all at once, in a torrent, because that thought alone was the sum total of all her fears, and therefore entirely too much to bear, Since you did ask, I’ve most certainly not been well, if you wanted to know I’ve been losing sleep for days, Ezekiel, because I love you, and how I do love you, and I’ve been so afraid—

“… that you’d mind it if I told you so, and I hope you don’t mind, but if you do mind I can do something about it, or I can try even if it might not work, seeing as I haven’t been able to do anything about these flowers that just pop up everywhere I walk, it’s been days now since they started and I love them but they draw so much attention, and Mother told me I couldn’t hide the truth, I just couldn’t, but I—” Father Duma’s claws, had she just said all that aloud? “Father Duma’s claws, did I just say all that aloud?”

Her next thought—which she managed, somehow, not to say aloud—was that just now she would like nothing more than to bury herself in the sand. Speedily.

But then he looked into her face—really looked at her, like he was honest-to-gods only seeing her for the first time—and smiled. And, oh, what a smile it was.

When he bent his body down toward her and lifted his arms around her in an embrace, holding her so close her feet left the ground and all the air left her body, the only word she could manage to say was “Oh.” Because Tatiana remembered what she had been told about the truth, and because despite her best efforts the truth was there, streaming down over them like a sunbeam for all the world to see, there was nothing for it but to frame his face with her hands and kiss him until her head spun, and his mouth was warm and yielding, and she could sense the magic everyone said she was touched by sparkling all the way down to the ends of her hair.

He was smiling again when he set her back down, as though she had schooled his lips into that position and they now knew no other shape.

“I have loved you,” he said, on his first breath, “so long.”

Tatiana looked in the face of everything that she had feared and found she could do nothing now but smile back, and keep smiling as he bent to take her basket in one hand and her hand in the other, as she picked up her sandals by their straps so they swung in the air at her side.

“You can tell me about it at home,” she said, and home they went, hand in hand over the white sands that gave way in no time at all to grass, soft and cool and singing beneath her bare feet.

#tatiana (fire emblem)#zeke (fire emblem)#fire emblem echoes: shadows of valentia #fe15 #fanfic #kiss meme #tatizeke

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