CELEBRATING THE HOLIDAY EVERYONE LOVES TO HATE*
Fandom: taking back Valentine's Day since 2008!
So last year bottle-of-shine had a Kissing Battle. The last edition is here (EDITED TO ADD: this is the old battle, not the current one!). It was a lot of fun and might be known around FF-fandom circles as the best Meme ever**.
Pretty much everyone I know is stressed about something, too, so this round of the ( Read more... )
So last year bottle-of-shine had a Kissing Battle. The last edition is here (EDITED TO ADD: this is the old battle, not the current one!). It was a lot of fun and might be known around FF-fandom circles as the best Meme ever**.
Pretty much everyone I know is stressed about something, too, so this round of the ( Read more... )
"You stay here while I'm gone," he'd said; "This won't take long. Here, amuse yourself." He'd snapped the orbs from his rod casually and tossed them into the uneven sea of paper on his desk. One had rolled onto the floor, three underneath the wicker contraption labeled "Inbox", and one was resting on top of an empty notebook.
She could feel the orb. It was staring at her. Mocking her.
Rydia huffed and turned the chair around. She wasn't going to touch them. Reno wasn't her boss, and even if she was scarily dependent on him in this new world, he didn't get to tell her what to do. She wasn't a kitten, to sit in his office playing with bits of gleaming glass while waiting for him to return.
The other side of the office was boring, however - a coffee-stained couch with a lopsided photo above it of a waterfall - and Rydia sighed aloud in boredom as she spun the chair back around to face the messy desk again.
She wondered what they were.
It wouldn't hurt, she thought, to take one and see what it did. If they were just marbles, she could throw them at Reno when he came back. Maybe they did something special. She remembered the gift Yang and Yingyi had given her at their coronation, a pair of smooth round stones that rolled around the palm and created a soothing chiming sound, a specialty from Fabul. She had to swallow hard at the homesickness that the simple memory had produced in the back of her throat.
To distract herself more than anything - she'd been crying enough, these days - Rydia reached forward and grabbed the shining green marble.
It was cool to the touch, but even as she looked down on it in her palm, it warmed up, radiating heat back into her skin. It had started to glow, and something inside the stone was swirling around, like mist, or almost like water. The stone was thoroughly warm now, and it was tingling in her palm.
And suddenly Rydia felt something else tingling, in the back of her head, and it was like a switch going off - that small portion of her spirit she'd had to abandon as a young child in the Land of Summons, making a dangerous choice...
She closed her hand around the strange stone, willing it into life - willing it to be - and she felt the Curaga pour from inside her, washing over her arms and legs, warm and tingling. The scent of the healing magic reminded her of Rosa more than anything, and Asura; Rydia bent her head over the stone, clutching it even tighter, casting Curaga over and over and over, trying to let the calm, warm feeling of the magic stay her tears, hoping the healing rish could help soothe the tight pain in her heart.
"I see you figured it out."
She turned around, and Reno was standing there, smirking at the sight of her; she must look a fool, with specks of magical residue still in her hair and sparkling around her, clutching the small orb to her heart as if it were her lifeline. But that really didn't matter at the moment.
"I can heal," she said, but even as she said it she knew he would never understand. How could she explain to him - to an assassin, to a killer - how could she explain how much she'd ached over their travels for the simple ability to stay a wound? How she'd felt like such a trained weapon during the war? How, only after it had been done, she'd realized what giving up her white magic meant?
But she blinked, and realized Reno might understand, in the end. After all, he was a weapon too. And this - this magical orb - it was his.
She clutched the bead tighter in her hand, resolving to keep it near her if she could, and as she threw herself at Reno and pressed her lips to his, she cast Curaga, again and again.
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WAY TO MAKE ME FLAIL IN UTTER GLEE
GLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEe
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH OMG
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