Kingdom Hearts } Whispers in the Night
Word Count: 2346
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Romance
Ships?: Aeleus/Aeris, Lexaeus/Nakoma
→Friendships?: Nakoma&Aeris, Tifa&Aeris
Characters: Nakoma, Aeris, Aeleus, Lexaeus
→Cameos: Tifa, Braig, Even, Dilan, Ienzo, Xigbar, Xaldin, Vexen
→Mentions: Donald, Pocahontas, Riku
Rating: G
Spoilers: The Apprentices' backstory
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts or any related characters. This was written out of enjoyment of the series, and no profit is being made.
Music: "Main Theme" ♪ "Momoiro Gabriel" ♫ "Haru, Mankai no Sakura no Shita de" ♪ "Momoiro Kakarichou"
Notes: Because trilies and at_splickenfic and Ana (who doesn't have an el-jay woe) make me ship it. Plus, you know Nakoma and Aeris would be BFFs if they ever met. This = The magic of Kingdom Hearts fandom.
Somehow, we’d make the whole world right.
Whispers in the Night
There are two very important things that Aeris realizes when she looks into her backyard the morning of the First Annual Interplanetary Meeting for Peace (as Hosted by Radiant Garden).
One: there is a woman in her apple tree.
Two: the woman looks uncomfortable.
And not because she is sitting in a tree. No, she looks perfectly fine up there, her toes gripping the bark and her knees tucked to her chest. She stares out into the distance, at the dawn-painted sky above the garden wall.
The woman doesn’t look much older than Aeris, and she is certainly one of the representatives from one of the other worlds. Guests from all over Interspace have been discussing things up in the castle over the past couple of days, so maybe it’s not so unusual that a woman with coppery skin, small dark eyes, and black night hair is perched in her tree like a songbird.
Aeris approaches the tree as quietly as she can until she stands beside the trunk and is able to look up between the branches. The woman looks uncomfortable because she is deep in thought about something, her hands curled beneath her chin.
She suddenly turns her head and looks down at Aeris and the flower girl takes half a step back, her eyes wide. The other woman had heard her after all.
Aeris recovers quickly. “Hello,” she says. “You’re not lost, are you?”
The woman shakes her head. “No, I’m not lost. I’m sorry for intruding.”
Aeris laughs and smiles gently. “You’re not intruding at all! It’s a Meeting for Peace. You’re welcome anywhere.” Then there is silence as the woman stares down at her.
Her gaze is a little unnerving, Aeris can’t help but feel. Her dark eyes are deeply focused on her, just her - Aeris - and she feels as though her very soul is under examination.
“Is your name…?” The woman bites her bottom lip nervously, hesitates and tries again. “Is your name Aeris Gainsborough?”
“Yes.” Aeris smiles. “Are you a friend of Yuffie’s? Or Tifa? Did they tell you about me?”
The woman looks very troubled. “No,” she says softly. “Aeleus did.”
Aeris’s heart pains at the name and this time she does not recover so quickly. Memories flash in her head like flickering old film. It only takes two seconds, but she hears the other woman apologize. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have bothered you so early in the morning-” Branches creak, bare feet slap on stone-
“Wait!” Aeris lifts her head, but the woman is gone. The branch she was perched on sways in her absence and it is only then that Aeris realizes the branch is a short jump’s distance away from the garden wall.
Aeris flings the metal gate open and stares out into the repaired streets of Radiant Garden. The woman in the animal-pelt clothes is gone, gone, gone.
But that’s never stopped Aeris Gainsborough from hoping.
---
“Her name is Nakoma,” Tifa tells her at noon.
It is lunchtime at the restored castle and the world representatives mill about the courtyard. Long picnic tables filled with meals from all sorts of different worlds fill the place. Watching from one of the castle balconies, the two old friends watch Donald Duck taste-test an Atlanticean seaweed dish and then spit it out, wings flailing and feathers ruffling.
The woman they were talking about, Aeris’s mysterious morning visitor, is nowhere to be seen. But Tifa had known who she had meant as soon as Aeris had described her. “She’s the sort of… lady-in-waiting to the princess from the New World. Or… Jamestown, I suppose. The name sort of depends on who you ask. I met Pocahontas earlier this morning.”
Aeris nods, quiet with thought.
“She didn’t… say anything to upset you, did she? Pocahontas said that she was really nice.” Tifa’s voice edges towards the protective tone she gets sometimes.
“No, it was nothing like that!” Aeris says, smiling at her friend. “Well... It made me curious more than anything.
“She said Aeleus had told her about me.”
Tifa says nothing, only moves slowly to place a hand on Aeris’s shoulder softly.
“Pocahontas said something earlier about how they fight the Heartless on their world. Her and Nakoma.”
Aeris nodded, to show she was listening.
“Pocahontas said that she’s had strange dreams since she was little. It was something that connected her to the spirits in her world. When the darkness came, it deepened her connection to the spirits and her connection to Nakoma. And because Nakoma was sort of like… Pocahontas described it like two rivers that split. Nakoma was her reflection, so because her connection to the spirits strengthened, Nakoma’s did too.
“The way she explained how her own powers worked reminded me of summoners. She can speak to animals and summon things like… the spirits of the earth or wisdom to her aid. Spirits that never really had a mortal form.”
“And Nakoma’s the opposite?” Aeris leaned her elbows on the railing.
“Yeah. Spirits that were mortals and have passed on.” Tifa leaned on the railing too, but faced backwards to look back into one of the castle’s hallways.
Aeris remembers the last kiss, the fire, the falling buildings. She remembers Ienzo’s hand tugging her, she remembers the feeling of carpenter’s hands on her bare shoulders.
Tifa pulls her into a one-armed hug, but she still remembers. And it still hurts.
---
Dusk has fallen on the town of Radiant Garden, and the lanterns had been lit in the streets.
“Wingapo.”
Aeris turns and smiles, her flower basket bumping against her legs. “Wingapo.”
Aeris tilts her head in curiosity at the woman who stood on the other side of the narrow street. Nakoma is wearing her hair differently than she had been that morning. It’s down across her shoulders now, and she’s tied her hair ribbon around her eyes. Aeris thinks of Riku and the stories she’s heard from him about how he used to walk around blinded the same way, how he was guided by the darkness. “Your name is Nakoma, isn’t it?”
She nods. “It is.”
“My friend told me how your powers work.” Aeris clasps her hands together, holding the handle of her basket. “Are you on patrol? For the Heartless?”
The woman nods again. “I volunteered. But,” she smiles and approaches to walk beside Aeris at a leisurely pace, “it’s really more important that I talk to you.”
“About... Aeleus?”
“Sure. While we’re at it, I can tell you about the other little voices in my head.”
They walk in near silence, only the sound of Nakoma’s bare feet against the street bouncing off the houses. The Indian woman grins and lifts her blindfolded eyes to her. “Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t joke about that, should I?” She lifts her hands into the air and waves them in little circles. “They’d get all touchy if I accused them of that.”
“The spirits get touchy?” Aeris furrows her eyebrows just slightly, forgetting that the other wouldn’t see it.
“Oh yes. The ones that are connected to me are a little like what you might call ‘ghosts’. They still feel all the things they would when they were alive or act the same way. Pocahontas’s are a little stiffer.”
Nakoma lifts her blindfolded eyes to the night sky. “I forget that they’re dead sometimes,” she whispers.
Aeris knows immediately from the volume and the way the voice carries in the night that the other woman has lost someone too. “Nakoma? Aeleus really did tell you about me, didn’t he?”
“Yes. It took him a while to find me. And it took him a while to talk about you. But once he did, he just…” Nakoma smiled fondly. “He loves talking about you. He loves everything about you.”
She laughs as Aeris’s heart throbs against her ribcage and beats in her throat. “Sometimes, he’d make me shiver, talking about you.
“It took even longer for Ienzo to talk about you. But he loves you too.”
“Ien-” Aeris starts but pauses when they reach the end of the street. She usually turns right here to get home, but the wind blows their hair and the tails of Nakoma’s blindfold down the left turn and it seems like something calls to her from that direction.
“Is this where we part ways?” Nakoma asks, just the tiniest undercurrent of sadness in her voice.
Aeris has to bite her lip to stop from screaming ‘No, never’. “Can I see them? Or… is that not the way it works?”
The shaman woman’s lips curve upwards gently. “Or course you can. That’s what they wanted.”
“Wait.” Aeris lets her hand basket slide back to rest in the crook of her elbow as she unties her hair ribbon and takes the elastic from the end of the braid. She wears the elastic around her wrist and ties her own ribbon around her eyes. “There. I’m ready.”
Nakoma takes her hand and the walk through the streets, the blind leading the blind.
---
The air smells like oranges and apples and falling petals. It is a half-but-never-truly-forgotten smell, and Nakoma says, “Aeris, take off your blindfold.”
Aeris does so, and recognizes the orchard, the wide patch of bare dirt where the grave marker of a festival bonfire lays in the form of blackened soil. She can see it in her memory, hear it, taste it, remember it, love it and oh her heart is hurting. The wind stirs her hair around her shoulders and down her back.
“They told me to bring you here. It was Dilan’s idea.”
Aeris turned to her companion. “Dilan? He spoke to you too?”
“Braig and Even with him, of course. After Ienzo, I can’t remember who found me first. Dilan and Braig are attached at the hip, so they found me together but I can never recall if Even came before them.”
A flash of colour at the edge of her vision makes Aeris spin, her heart thumping painfully. Her hair swishes about her shoulders and then...
“They’re not here yet, but they’re coming,” Nakoma says behind her, but Aeris hardly notices. There is a fawn made of peace-pink light staring at her. It blinks it’s big eyes and then bends its neck to nibble at the grass. Though the blunt teeth are made of light and air, she sees the blades of grass snip-snip shorter.
Before Aeris can properly express how amazing-Nakoma-look-at-this! it all is, she hears, “Hello,” and then a word that’s surely a term of endearment in a language most have forgotten. She turns and Nakoma has crouched to run her hands through the light-pelts of several spirit rabbits. They’re made of shades of bright blue and dark blue and startling teals.
Nakoma turns to her, grinning, her copper skin all lit up in blues and greens from the crowd of ghosts pressing their wobbling noses into her legs. “The spirits that are most like you approach first. She likes you.”
Aeris turns back to the pink fawn, which approaches shyly. She lays a hand open in the air, and the fawn fits her head within her palm. It is warm and soft, and yet if Aeris stares, she can see through it to the bare soil beneath.
“She lost her son, that fawn. A hunter shot her in the winter, before she got to see him grow up.”
Aeris’s heart nearly stops.
Nakoma tilts her head, listening to her. “Aeris? Miss Gainsborough?”
She shakes her head, fighting tears. “Just ‘Aeris’.”
Nakoma stands. “I didn’t mean to say anything that-”
“No, it’s not that.”
“…Aeris?”
“Yes?”
“They’re here.”
Aeris shivers, and it’s not due to the cold. She turns and half-glimpses him and her heart hurts so much with love that she squeezes her eyes and tries to run, but Nakoma’s frame collides with her and holds her for a second - a sister’s embrace.
“I was scared the first time I saw him too,” and her voice is filled with tears and something about the way she says him is so different but so the same that Aeris opens her eyes.
Nakoma is still blindfolded, but her expression is so understanding that she finds the strength to turn and see him.
Aeleus looks the same as he was loved. His eyes are blue stars beneath a lion’s mane of auburn light and his smile is a comet’s tail of white light and she rushes into fireplace warm arms.
His face feels solid under fingertips and her eyesight blurs with tears and her stomach flutters with joy and sorrow and so many things. She stands on her toes and kisses him, missing just a bit because she sobs and kisses him again.
Time blurs in his arms, but eventually he releases her and she can run her hand through Ienzo’s hair, where the light of his face disappears into the darkness of night. There is Even’s awkward hug that she takes for all its worth and Braig and Dilan with their brothers’ smiles.
And when Aeris finally, finally turns, the fawn to the rabbit, she sees Nakoma. She is standing amongst a group of men who may be the same as her sun-warm family, other than the fact that they are clothed in the welcome coolness of night.
Beside Nakoma is a man with the same blue star eyes and the same smile. His hair is different - ginger, but… the way he looks at her, the woman who has finally lowered her blindfold, and smiles back, the same speak-volumes gaze…
Aeris understands, as she sees the grin of Xigbar and the height of Xaldin and the folded arms of Vexen, things she never could have understood from Jiminy Cricket’s journals.
She meets Nakoma’s eyes and they sigh, smiling, crying. They were mirror images of one another, Somebody and Nobody, black and white.
---
“And then they went and kicked ass together, and lived happily ever after?” Xigbar’s echo-voice hypothesises.
“I don’t see why not,” Braig’s voice answers, as the two women leave the orchard hand in hand.
← Back to Archive
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Romance
Ships?: Aeleus/Aeris, Lexaeus/Nakoma
→Friendships?: Nakoma&Aeris, Tifa&Aeris
Characters: Nakoma, Aeris, Aeleus, Lexaeus
→Cameos: Tifa, Braig, Even, Dilan, Ienzo, Xigbar, Xaldin, Vexen
→Mentions: Donald, Pocahontas, Riku
Rating: G
Spoilers: The Apprentices' backstory
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts or any related characters. This was written out of enjoyment of the series, and no profit is being made.
Music: "Main Theme" ♪ "Momoiro Gabriel" ♫ "Haru, Mankai no Sakura no Shita de" ♪ "Momoiro Kakarichou"
Notes: Because trilies and at_splickenfic and Ana (who doesn't have an el-jay woe) make me ship it. Plus, you know Nakoma and Aeris would be BFFs if they ever met. This = The magic of Kingdom Hearts fandom.
Somehow, we’d make the whole world right.
Whispers in the Night
There are two very important things that Aeris realizes when she looks into her backyard the morning of the First Annual Interplanetary Meeting for Peace (as Hosted by Radiant Garden).
One: there is a woman in her apple tree.
Two: the woman looks uncomfortable.
And not because she is sitting in a tree. No, she looks perfectly fine up there, her toes gripping the bark and her knees tucked to her chest. She stares out into the distance, at the dawn-painted sky above the garden wall.
The woman doesn’t look much older than Aeris, and she is certainly one of the representatives from one of the other worlds. Guests from all over Interspace have been discussing things up in the castle over the past couple of days, so maybe it’s not so unusual that a woman with coppery skin, small dark eyes, and black night hair is perched in her tree like a songbird.
Aeris approaches the tree as quietly as she can until she stands beside the trunk and is able to look up between the branches. The woman looks uncomfortable because she is deep in thought about something, her hands curled beneath her chin.
She suddenly turns her head and looks down at Aeris and the flower girl takes half a step back, her eyes wide. The other woman had heard her after all.
Aeris recovers quickly. “Hello,” she says. “You’re not lost, are you?”
The woman shakes her head. “No, I’m not lost. I’m sorry for intruding.”
Aeris laughs and smiles gently. “You’re not intruding at all! It’s a Meeting for Peace. You’re welcome anywhere.” Then there is silence as the woman stares down at her.
Her gaze is a little unnerving, Aeris can’t help but feel. Her dark eyes are deeply focused on her, just her - Aeris - and she feels as though her very soul is under examination.
“Is your name…?” The woman bites her bottom lip nervously, hesitates and tries again. “Is your name Aeris Gainsborough?”
“Yes.” Aeris smiles. “Are you a friend of Yuffie’s? Or Tifa? Did they tell you about me?”
The woman looks very troubled. “No,” she says softly. “Aeleus did.”
Aeris’s heart pains at the name and this time she does not recover so quickly. Memories flash in her head like flickering old film. It only takes two seconds, but she hears the other woman apologize. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have bothered you so early in the morning-” Branches creak, bare feet slap on stone-
“Wait!” Aeris lifts her head, but the woman is gone. The branch she was perched on sways in her absence and it is only then that Aeris realizes the branch is a short jump’s distance away from the garden wall.
Aeris flings the metal gate open and stares out into the repaired streets of Radiant Garden. The woman in the animal-pelt clothes is gone, gone, gone.
But that’s never stopped Aeris Gainsborough from hoping.
---
“Her name is Nakoma,” Tifa tells her at noon.
It is lunchtime at the restored castle and the world representatives mill about the courtyard. Long picnic tables filled with meals from all sorts of different worlds fill the place. Watching from one of the castle balconies, the two old friends watch Donald Duck taste-test an Atlanticean seaweed dish and then spit it out, wings flailing and feathers ruffling.
The woman they were talking about, Aeris’s mysterious morning visitor, is nowhere to be seen. But Tifa had known who she had meant as soon as Aeris had described her. “She’s the sort of… lady-in-waiting to the princess from the New World. Or… Jamestown, I suppose. The name sort of depends on who you ask. I met Pocahontas earlier this morning.”
Aeris nods, quiet with thought.
“She didn’t… say anything to upset you, did she? Pocahontas said that she was really nice.” Tifa’s voice edges towards the protective tone she gets sometimes.
“No, it was nothing like that!” Aeris says, smiling at her friend. “Well... It made me curious more than anything.
“She said Aeleus had told her about me.”
Tifa says nothing, only moves slowly to place a hand on Aeris’s shoulder softly.
“Pocahontas said something earlier about how they fight the Heartless on their world. Her and Nakoma.”
Aeris nodded, to show she was listening.
“Pocahontas said that she’s had strange dreams since she was little. It was something that connected her to the spirits in her world. When the darkness came, it deepened her connection to the spirits and her connection to Nakoma. And because Nakoma was sort of like… Pocahontas described it like two rivers that split. Nakoma was her reflection, so because her connection to the spirits strengthened, Nakoma’s did too.
“The way she explained how her own powers worked reminded me of summoners. She can speak to animals and summon things like… the spirits of the earth or wisdom to her aid. Spirits that never really had a mortal form.”
“And Nakoma’s the opposite?” Aeris leaned her elbows on the railing.
“Yeah. Spirits that were mortals and have passed on.” Tifa leaned on the railing too, but faced backwards to look back into one of the castle’s hallways.
Aeris remembers the last kiss, the fire, the falling buildings. She remembers Ienzo’s hand tugging her, she remembers the feeling of carpenter’s hands on her bare shoulders.
Tifa pulls her into a one-armed hug, but she still remembers. And it still hurts.
---
Dusk has fallen on the town of Radiant Garden, and the lanterns had been lit in the streets.
“Wingapo.”
Aeris turns and smiles, her flower basket bumping against her legs. “Wingapo.”
Aeris tilts her head in curiosity at the woman who stood on the other side of the narrow street. Nakoma is wearing her hair differently than she had been that morning. It’s down across her shoulders now, and she’s tied her hair ribbon around her eyes. Aeris thinks of Riku and the stories she’s heard from him about how he used to walk around blinded the same way, how he was guided by the darkness. “Your name is Nakoma, isn’t it?”
She nods. “It is.”
“My friend told me how your powers work.” Aeris clasps her hands together, holding the handle of her basket. “Are you on patrol? For the Heartless?”
The woman nods again. “I volunteered. But,” she smiles and approaches to walk beside Aeris at a leisurely pace, “it’s really more important that I talk to you.”
“About... Aeleus?”
“Sure. While we’re at it, I can tell you about the other little voices in my head.”
They walk in near silence, only the sound of Nakoma’s bare feet against the street bouncing off the houses. The Indian woman grins and lifts her blindfolded eyes to her. “Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t joke about that, should I?” She lifts her hands into the air and waves them in little circles. “They’d get all touchy if I accused them of that.”
“The spirits get touchy?” Aeris furrows her eyebrows just slightly, forgetting that the other wouldn’t see it.
“Oh yes. The ones that are connected to me are a little like what you might call ‘ghosts’. They still feel all the things they would when they were alive or act the same way. Pocahontas’s are a little stiffer.”
Nakoma lifts her blindfolded eyes to the night sky. “I forget that they’re dead sometimes,” she whispers.
Aeris knows immediately from the volume and the way the voice carries in the night that the other woman has lost someone too. “Nakoma? Aeleus really did tell you about me, didn’t he?”
“Yes. It took him a while to find me. And it took him a while to talk about you. But once he did, he just…” Nakoma smiled fondly. “He loves talking about you. He loves everything about you.”
She laughs as Aeris’s heart throbs against her ribcage and beats in her throat. “Sometimes, he’d make me shiver, talking about you.
“It took even longer for Ienzo to talk about you. But he loves you too.”
“Ien-” Aeris starts but pauses when they reach the end of the street. She usually turns right here to get home, but the wind blows their hair and the tails of Nakoma’s blindfold down the left turn and it seems like something calls to her from that direction.
“Is this where we part ways?” Nakoma asks, just the tiniest undercurrent of sadness in her voice.
Aeris has to bite her lip to stop from screaming ‘No, never’. “Can I see them? Or… is that not the way it works?”
The shaman woman’s lips curve upwards gently. “Or course you can. That’s what they wanted.”
“Wait.” Aeris lets her hand basket slide back to rest in the crook of her elbow as she unties her hair ribbon and takes the elastic from the end of the braid. She wears the elastic around her wrist and ties her own ribbon around her eyes. “There. I’m ready.”
Nakoma takes her hand and the walk through the streets, the blind leading the blind.
---
The air smells like oranges and apples and falling petals. It is a half-but-never-truly-forgotten smell, and Nakoma says, “Aeris, take off your blindfold.”
Aeris does so, and recognizes the orchard, the wide patch of bare dirt where the grave marker of a festival bonfire lays in the form of blackened soil. She can see it in her memory, hear it, taste it, remember it, love it and oh her heart is hurting. The wind stirs her hair around her shoulders and down her back.
“They told me to bring you here. It was Dilan’s idea.”
Aeris turned to her companion. “Dilan? He spoke to you too?”
“Braig and Even with him, of course. After Ienzo, I can’t remember who found me first. Dilan and Braig are attached at the hip, so they found me together but I can never recall if Even came before them.”
A flash of colour at the edge of her vision makes Aeris spin, her heart thumping painfully. Her hair swishes about her shoulders and then...
“They’re not here yet, but they’re coming,” Nakoma says behind her, but Aeris hardly notices. There is a fawn made of peace-pink light staring at her. It blinks it’s big eyes and then bends its neck to nibble at the grass. Though the blunt teeth are made of light and air, she sees the blades of grass snip-snip shorter.
Before Aeris can properly express how amazing-Nakoma-look-at-this! it all is, she hears, “Hello,” and then a word that’s surely a term of endearment in a language most have forgotten. She turns and Nakoma has crouched to run her hands through the light-pelts of several spirit rabbits. They’re made of shades of bright blue and dark blue and startling teals.
Nakoma turns to her, grinning, her copper skin all lit up in blues and greens from the crowd of ghosts pressing their wobbling noses into her legs. “The spirits that are most like you approach first. She likes you.”
Aeris turns back to the pink fawn, which approaches shyly. She lays a hand open in the air, and the fawn fits her head within her palm. It is warm and soft, and yet if Aeris stares, she can see through it to the bare soil beneath.
“She lost her son, that fawn. A hunter shot her in the winter, before she got to see him grow up.”
Aeris’s heart nearly stops.
Nakoma tilts her head, listening to her. “Aeris? Miss Gainsborough?”
She shakes her head, fighting tears. “Just ‘Aeris’.”
Nakoma stands. “I didn’t mean to say anything that-”
“No, it’s not that.”
“…Aeris?”
“Yes?”
“They’re here.”
Aeris shivers, and it’s not due to the cold. She turns and half-glimpses him and her heart hurts so much with love that she squeezes her eyes and tries to run, but Nakoma’s frame collides with her and holds her for a second - a sister’s embrace.
“I was scared the first time I saw him too,” and her voice is filled with tears and something about the way she says him is so different but so the same that Aeris opens her eyes.
Nakoma is still blindfolded, but her expression is so understanding that she finds the strength to turn and see him.
Aeleus looks the same as he was loved. His eyes are blue stars beneath a lion’s mane of auburn light and his smile is a comet’s tail of white light and she rushes into fireplace warm arms.
His face feels solid under fingertips and her eyesight blurs with tears and her stomach flutters with joy and sorrow and so many things. She stands on her toes and kisses him, missing just a bit because she sobs and kisses him again.
Time blurs in his arms, but eventually he releases her and she can run her hand through Ienzo’s hair, where the light of his face disappears into the darkness of night. There is Even’s awkward hug that she takes for all its worth and Braig and Dilan with their brothers’ smiles.
And when Aeris finally, finally turns, the fawn to the rabbit, she sees Nakoma. She is standing amongst a group of men who may be the same as her sun-warm family, other than the fact that they are clothed in the welcome coolness of night.
Beside Nakoma is a man with the same blue star eyes and the same smile. His hair is different - ginger, but… the way he looks at her, the woman who has finally lowered her blindfold, and smiles back, the same speak-volumes gaze…
Aeris understands, as she sees the grin of Xigbar and the height of Xaldin and the folded arms of Vexen, things she never could have understood from Jiminy Cricket’s journals.
She meets Nakoma’s eyes and they sigh, smiling, crying. They were mirror images of one another, Somebody and Nobody, black and white.
---
“And then they went and kicked ass together, and lived happily ever after?” Xigbar’s echo-voice hypothesises.
“I don’t see why not,” Braig’s voice answers, as the two women leave the orchard hand in hand.
← Back to Archive