21.1 Fic: Cypher Reflection 2

I'm never going to make it to the end of summer, am I?   Cypher was leaning on the ship's railing. The ceaseless wind was cold on his face and hands, filling his sleeves, lifting his coat, messing his hair, and doing fuck all to clear his head.   They were sailing over the Misty Sea. The mountains were a dark blur below, and the stars were so many and so close it seemed miraculous they hadn't hit one.   Their course was still mostly eastward. Sailing into the sunrise. In a few hours, it would break over the seven peaks of Celestia, burning gold and scarlet through the fog, chasing night across the vaulted sky and glittering over the impossible depths of the sea below.   And it still wouldn't be the most beautiful thing he'd seen that night.   Her sunset hair, lifted on unseen breeze, floating over her shoulders. Her stormcloud eyes, shining like the stars reflecting in them, alight with ardor as bright and bold as a lighting strike. Her smile, soft as a whisper, warm as a sheltered candle.   She made the windblown deck of a ship miles above places he’d never touched feel so...   Like home.   He folded his arms over the railing, looking down. It would probably be dizzying if he could even see what was below them. The sea, he supposed. Technically the ocean. Did this count? Probably not. He heard the surf was so loud that you had to shout to be heard over its force.   If you whispered my name from there, I bet I’d still hear it.   He reached back for her voice, played it again in his mind.   Not how I thought that’d go. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? When is anything as planned with her?   He was smiling into the dark before he even realized it. Even spoken in frustration, in a desperate plea, did she know what a gift it was to hear? Had the elemental in her blood given power to her breath? It was like a spell, snapping him out of his panic, calling him to the moment, clearing the confusion in a blink. The power of a name. ‘I see you. Hear me.’   As unexpected as the fervor that followed after.   'That feeling you had when you went to the library in the middle of the night? I feel that now. I told you then I would have done the same thing in your shoes, and here I am.’   He hadn’t been sure, that morning, that she understood the depths of his panic the night before. He’d felt – still felt – like a damn idiot for not thinking it through, but at the same time, he couldn’t have done any different. Iterating alternatives had felt so definitively like a waste of precious time. Even attempting it was an exercise in futility when the image of her back in that cell kept crashing in like a bad dream.   ‘I can't do nothing - you have to let me help.'   That she felt the same infuriating futility was baffling. Did she really not know how much it was worth, just letting him stick around? Giving him her trust, her support? Just being willing to help? Careful distance had always been the answer to any hint of the danger growing in his mind. To have someone step closer instead, how could she call that nothing?   ‘I want to turn whatever this thing is into a vacuum of space. I don't care what it is, or how it came to be but I hate it, and if it's even a little bit corporeal I want to erase it from existence.’   The venom in her voice was the kind he usually heard her reserve for tyrants, despots of nation or home.   He was pretty sure she got it, now.   She’d do the same for anyone. Don’t read into it.   Hard not to, though, when she was lighting up the deck with a promise to catch a falling star for him, facing him with a softness that dissolved his walls and held him in place. He couldn’t have stepped away if he wanted to. Her gravity held him in rapidly decaying orbit.   Tethers of resigned futility slackened, and all the words he kept stuffing down crowded forward, truths tangling his tongue. Pointing out the time had been the only sensible thing he could say.   He stayed there a while, watching the fretted silver fire flicker overhead and all around. Study could wait. For just a moment, while they touched no one and nothing, he wanted to sit with his senseless thoughts.   If some falling star gave me a Wish yesterday, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have used it just to make sure nothing ever hurt you again. Now I’m not so sure I’d survive the repercussions of leaving myself out.   Be patient with me, I’m not used to this. I don’t know how to be worried over. I can’t understand why someone like you would spend a second thought on someone like me.   You know I’d tear reality apart for you too, right? That I’d rather fall to pieces beside you than live in healthful, ignorant bliss without you? That there’s nothing you could ask of me that I wouldn’t give?   Not that there’s much you don’t already have.   When the east sky started lightening to grey, he flexed his chilled hands and straightened his bent back. Let his lighter steps carry him indoors.   There was another fight ahead. And for once, he felt ready.