lirillith | FFVI: Celes/Terra

Title: Dreams and False Alarms
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Characters: Celes/Terra
Word count: ~700 words
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Memories in Mobliz, and things left unsaid.

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Terra's hair is a forest, greens shading into blacks and browns and threads of sunlight. Celes winds one curl around her finger, then another; her other hand is buried in Terra's hair, rubbing her scalp. The familiarity of the arrangement is both comfort and hurt, balm rubbed on a bruise. The last time this had happened, they'd been soldiers together. It had been her head in Terra's lap, Terra speaking, low and reassuring: You worry too much. I'll be back on active duty in no time. His Majesty will understand. The mess in the lab was just an accident.

Terra's hair seems darker now than it once was, but that may just be the lamplight, or memory. It's been so long since they were this near to each other.

That means it's the chance she's been waiting for, these past few days in this ruined town. She can't hesitate now, even if she has no complement of officers waiting for her command, no braid on her shoulders or cloak at her back to give her authority. Her hands have stilled, and Terra is looking up at her, expectantly, so all she can do is speak. "Do you remember when we met in Narshe?" she asks. She intended to sound casual, offhand, though she feels breathless as she finally speaks the words she's rehearsed in her head a thousand times, that she's carefully selected on sleepless nights. Not when we first met, but that can come later.

"When I asked if you could love?"

"You asked me if I'd ever loved anyone." She remembers the words as precisely as she remembers the runic pattern to intercept a spell. No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

"Are you sure? But I guess it doesn't make much difference."

It does, though, and Celes doesn't know how to proceed now. I did love someone, she meant to say. She lets a curl spring free from her finger, trying to regroup, to rally her words. There's no reason she can't go on as planned. She could love. She did. It went like this.

"Is it Locke?" Terra asks.

"What?" The word's just a reflex. She'd known this was coming, too, or rather, she should have. "No, it— never mind. I was just thinking out loud."

"If you say so." Her tone is dubious, but Celes feels Terra relax against her legs again, all but purring, and that helps to nudge the cracks closed again.

She'd understood Locke. That was what the others had seen, and misread, what Terra had either seen or absorbed from Edgar or Cyan or Setzer. She knew how it felt to see no recognition in eyes that you'd loved. But Terra doesn't remember what she'd been made to do and what she'd chosen to do. She didn't have to decide on treason, to make a choice to kill her former self. And Celes may envy her that blankness, but it means she dreads disturbing it, bringing back the entire Empire just for the sake of two young soldiers who loved each other for a while. The girl Celes had loved is gone now, and so is the girl Celes had been.

But when Terra sits up to spread a blanket over her legs, the spot where her head had rested is cold until she returns, curling back up contentedly, one hand resting idly on Celes's knee. "You should stay here with us," Terra says, quietly, her eyes on her hand, or something in the distance; she could have said it when she was sitting up, when she could look Celes in the face, and she didn't. It's a habit of Celes's, something that Terra used to hate but still picked up over time. Celes lets herself trace a thumb over the curve of Terra's cheek, the shell of her ear.

"Maybe I will," she says, even though she's never stopped thinking of how to take on Kefka, how to find the others; if Figaro still exists, that's one starting point, Kohlingen another. Terra smiles and turns her head then, and "for a while" goes unsaid. Later, she thinks. There are a lot of things to discuss later.