#that was what spawned this entire quartet of scenes that I'm writing cause I was FURIOUS LMAO

[frenchy-and-the-sea]

FFXIV - Jump (I Dare You)

I have a long list of excuses as to why this exists, but the most simple one is: I played through the Heavensward expansion as a dragoon and got attached. So did my PC. Thus, here is the first in a series of little in-between vignettes featuring my player character, Tritchet Pock, her family, and her impression of the big spiky dragon man that she unexpectedly got a little soft on. I’m posting it here mostly for posterity, and for the two people who are interested. 💜

~1400 words, set during the Heavensward main story quest, ‘Gifts for the Outcasts.’ (Inspired very very VERY loosely by The Regrettes’s ‘I Dare You’)

---

Shading her eyes against the glare of the sun, Tritchet Pock peered up to the towering canopy of trees above her and said, with a delicate shrug of one shoulder, “I just think you could use some help, is all.”

"Could I?" In her periphery, a sleek black shadow stepped forward to regard her, arms folding over its chest with the glossy click of armored dragon scale. Estinien had only been halfway through his work when Tritchet had stumbled across him again, dragging a stinking sack of nanka flesh through the dirt behind her. The errand that she and her sisters had been sent after had devolved quickly — and largely by her own hand — into a competition, which Wickit had swiftly won, and which had left Tritchet to handle the messy business of delivering their quarry back to Alphinaud alone. She had endeavored to take the longest route possible back as a last act of petty vengeance, and had instead stumbled across Estinien circling the roots of one of the forest’s massive caelumtrees, surveying the canopy above for another handful of fruit to add to his growing pile. 

Now he loomed over her shoulder, his head angled towards her in a gesture that indicated he was either raising an eyebrow, or glaring, or both. 

"And what manner of help, pray tell, would you be offering?" His tone, placid as pond water, at least mercifully implied more of the former than the latter. Tritchet chanced a grin.

“Why, the vertical sort!” she said brightly. “I’ve got it on some authority that dragoons are good at that, and I count at least two of them here. And as I’ve got the height advantage between the two of us —"

"Do you?" Now Estinien's tone changed, touched around the edges by the faintest glimmer of a smirk. Stood at his side, Tritchet could just make it out beneath the mirror-black curve of his helm — thin and bloodless, but more like a smile than anything she had ever seen on him before. Her grin widened.

“I do, in fact. I might only be Azure Dragoon the Secondary, but you and I both know that we’re matched where it counts — namely, in the business of a jump. And because you must spend every day of your life in fear of low-hanging candelabras —”

“ — then at your height, you must be expected to compensate. Yes, I see.” Estinien’s smirk vanished behind the shadowy jawline of his visor as he turned to regard her straight-on, head tilted ever-so-slightly to one side in a way that put Tritchet in the mind of a bird — or a dragon, maybe — sizing up its prey. She stifled a little shiver of alarm. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that she addressed the prime warrior of Ishgard, a man who regularly stood alone against dragons and regularly walked away, who seethed with the spillover of Nidhogg’s own rage and stood reliably against that too; whose power, if she was willing to be honest with herself, was more a match for Wickit’s than it would ever be for hers.

Despite her words, Tritchet suddenly felt very small indeed.

She turned away before it could get the better of her, coughing delicately into a hand. "I was, ah, only joking, you know. I’m aware that you’re perfectly capable of managing on your own.”

“No,” said Estinien suddenly, straightening so that she caught another glimpse at his ghost-thin smile. “Show me, Azure Dragoon the Secondary. You’ve made your assertion; I would see you able to prove it. I should like to know if Ishgard would be wise to seek more of our dragonslayers among the lalafell.”

That should have been an insult. There was the shape of one there, a dig at something that had dogged her heels through all of Coerthas — the sound of outsider, of usurper, of adventurer, spoken like a slur, even though she came with her lance and her grit and the Warrior of Light to their aid. Estinien, with his furious pride and penchant for sharp jabs of all kinds, ought to have only added to that chorus.

Instead, Tritchet watched in mute fascination as he strode over to the nearest trunk and carefully leaned his lance against it, head tipped back to survey the treeline again. He was not just calling her bluff, she realized with a jolt; he was answering it, without a scoff, without a sneer, without the haughty swagger of someone who expected to win without a fight. He hadn't even tried to turn her away with a terse word about frivolity. He just saw her challenge and met it, ever the equal — which, incidentally, made her an equal too.

Something in her heart turned over like an engine starting, and Tritchet shucked her lance and the stinking sack at her side like they had both suddenly caught fire. 

“First to the top, then?” she asked, casually, like her voice wasn’t trembling with barely pent-up excitement. Estinien's mouth turned faintly upwards at the corners. 

“To the highest fruit, I think,” he said, “as we’ve still a duty to court the Gnath. I, for one, do not care to be the one who keeps the likes of your sister waiting when there are alms to be given.”

He made a pointed gesture towards the sack still oozing wetly to the ground beside her, and Tritchet felt the heat beginning to puddle at the center of her chest suddenly swell into a bonfire. Envy was an old, familiar vice, but the dragon’s soul that stirred inside the heavy blue stone around her neck made it new every time, burning like fresh hellfire when the wyrm remembered its pride. She rolled her shoulders to work the shivery restlessness out of them and grinned, showing every one of her teeth.

“Oh Estinien,” she said sweetly, “you don’t have to worry about keeping Wickit waiting. Right now, you just have to worry about how you’re going to keep up with me.”

Estinien's head tipped to one side, another glare-or-raised-brow projected through the black sheen of his helm, but Tritchet barely noticed this time. Any apprehension about calling the Azure Dragoon’s ire was gone, now — she was suddenly all adrenaline, one buzzing, dragonfire heartbeat of envy and ambition and bright, sledgehammer joy. Estinien seemed to think Wickit was the one to worry about; he thought that he only needed to consider the Warrior of Light. Tritchet was going to show him. She was going to match him at his own game. Better, she was going to win it; she was going to fly.

The last thought came unbidden, a lingering sentiment of the wyrm’s fierce love of the sky, but Tritchet embraced it anyway, welcoming the familiar, liquid-fire thrill that pooled deep in the muscles of her legs as she gave the dragon its head. Beside her, she could just make out the feeling of its twin writhing up from beneath the iron grip that Estinien always kept on it, a ravaged, smothered spark of wanting that still occasionally managed to send up puffs of signal smoke. He took a position beside her, all but on fire to her dragon’s eyes.

“Very well,” he said, with offensive calm. “We make for the highest fruit of this tree; the first to claim it, claims victory. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Tritchet, falling into stance beside him. The thrum of anticipation was a roar in her ears now, deafening, drowning the dull hum of the forest into silence by comparison — so much that she nearly missed it when Estinien spoke again, in quiet aside under his breath.

“Then I bid you good luck, Azure Dragoon the Secondary.”

—

Twenty minutes later, Tritchet marched out of the woodline clutching a ripe, sun-swollen caelumfruit the size of both of her clenched fists, looking immensely pleased with herself. 

“It was easy,” she told Alphinaud when she handed it to him. “Estinien was right, in the end; caelumtrees are nothing to a dragoon’s jump. Given enough time, any one of us could do it.”

She passed a grin over one shoulder, back to where the man who was 'any one of us' had escaped into the protective shadow of the mountainside, and expected to be glared into an early grave.

She wasn’t.

Instead, she found herself glancing up past the liquid black of Estinien’s helm, unreadable as stone, and swearing to the Twelve and back that she saw him smile.

#my writing #ffxiv #ffxiv writing #heavensward spoilers #not really but like...for this quest I guess #tritchet pock #oc crap #truly have I ever written something this self indulgent? no #i'm trying not to care but! i'm anxious! #anyway i like the spiky bastard man a lot #thank you again to gabby #my partner in crime #who on the day that I confessed that I thought tritchet was getting soft on estinien #realized that we were about to do the aetherochemical research facility #and did not say SHIT except to cackle when the last cut scene rolled and say HAVE FUN before logging off the discord call #that was what spawned this entire quartet of scenes that I'm writing cause I was FURIOUS LMAO #anyway if you choose to read then THANK YOU ILU and i'm sorry lmao