then it becomes, it becomes a problem

Linmir Celemariel
Ten years postwar
The Mournlands, Cyre, Khorvaire

You’re not still in love with Lairit. You’re not. It would be beyond stupid to be carrying a torch for someone you left literally a decade ago. It’s just… you haven’t actually really been in love with anyone else since. Flings with colleagues, sure. The occasional crush. Nothing quite like the white-hot iron that is (was? Is, surely is) Lairit.

So when you start dreaming about them, the first night in the Mournlands, it’s not—yeah, okay, it’s not wholly unexpected. Honestly, you hadn’t planned to go back to sleep at all after the inevitable ambush. Sleep’s been dodging you lately, especially since you started sleeping on an airship. You were barely dozing when Aelinor screamed your name: came awake in seconds, helped your party dispatch a gaggle of monster-lizard things, double- and triple-checked your sister for injuries.

After, you were too wired to do anything but take watch, clasping your hands between your knees to hide their shaking. The tiefling—no, changeling bard, Silvertongue, right—they stay up, too, and they talk more easily than you ever have and listen politely as you stumble through your patented She’s My Sister And I’ll Die For Her Someday rambling, and it’s nice! It’s very nice. Distracts you from the welling terror that you’ve brought Aelinor, your baby sister, into a ruined land to die over some dumbass quest. When you fall into silence, they start playing the guitar softly and then—

And then you’re at a party.

You know, for a dizzying second, that you’ve already done this, that you’re thirty and not nineteen. But whatever—dreams, right?

Nice dreams. Lairit’s hands, eyes, smile, attention fully on you for once. Lairit in a suit, which has always been one of your chief weaknesses, even with their (silk! Lapis blue!) cravat tied in some horrible Gordian knot that you’re going to have to pick apart with your nails later because they can’t be bothered to think of fashion when revolution is afoot.

“Perin,” they say, eyes blazing, that wicked half-smile baring their teeth, blonde hair a wild tangle about their face. “Dance with me.”

“Oh, gods, no,” you say, appalled, but they just laugh and sweep you into a waltz, and of course they’re leading. You are significantly taller; you are taller (a little) even when they have high heels on and you don’t. They tow you around the dancefloor like a gangly-ass mannequin anyway. And you—you let them. “You’re in a good mood tonight,” you say lightly, and almost yelp when they dip you.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” They spin you back upright, settle their hand at your waist. “Look around; look how far we’ve come.”

You don’t look around. They don’t either. You look at each other instead.

“I can’t do this without you, Perin.” Lairit’s smile is sadder and sweeter and fucking heartstopping. “Promise you’ll stay with me.”

“Hey,” you say. You stop dancing, cup their face in your hands—smooth one thumb along their cheekbone, let them turn their head to kiss your palm. “Of course I’ll stay. Where else would I even go?”

Their eyes are a little less sad now. “That’s right,” they say with satisfaction, “it’s you and me against the world, isn’t it.”

“Right,” you say—inanely, because it wasn’t a question. “I don’t trust anyone else to watch my back, to watch Aelinor, you know that, you know that.”

They press burning lips to your cheek and you blink and you’re back in front of the fire, in the fucking Mournlands, the bard Silvertongue nearby playing their guitar, and it was just a dream. You’ve had dreams about Lairit before. It’s nothing uncommon. It’ll be fine.

It’s not fine. By the time you’re hiking up a snowbound path along a damn mountain, it feels like someone is gently thumping you on the back of the skull with a mallet. Your hands are shaking again. Fairly normal if you haven’t slept in three nights, but less normal and more concerning since it’s really only been one. You’re getting old, or something.

At least you aren’t cold. There’s something to be said for wearing three layers at basically all times, right? Actually, as the day heats up, it’s almost nice . Balmy, even.

Lairit’s hand slips into yours, matching calluses catching on each other. “Perin?”

You look at your joined hands. You aren’t wearing gloves, and the sight of your bare hands gives you a weird feeling—something’s missing, that’s not how they normally look, even without the gloves—but you shrug it off and smile down into Lairit’s blue eyes. “What’s up?”

“Where were you?” they ask, amused. “You went distant on me there. What were you thinking about?”

Something about snow. A headache, which seems to be gone now. “I dunno.” You grin and wink. “Must have just gotten blown away with how hot you are.”

They roll their eyes at you, but don’t drop your hand, so you count this as a win. For a moment, you just walk through this excessively flowery meadow, but Lairit doesn’t really do relaxing couple activities, so after a moment they step in front of you and catch your other hand. “We’re so close, Perin,” they say, voice shaking, their eyes—fuck— glowing, almost, with emotion and righteous ambition. “I know we can do it. I know I can do it, if you’re with me. We can end this war, we can free our people. We can have a home .”

You nod dumbly, because Lairit is very beautiful and you are very stupid.

“You want that, right?” They’re walking backward, overwarm fingers wrapped around your wrists to tug you with them, staring you down. “Tell me that’s what you want. Tell me you’re all in on this, Perin. I need you with me.”

“I want what you want,” you say, which is—should be—enough, what they want to hear, and lean forward to kiss them.

“LINMIR.” Aelinor’s voice in your ear (your old name), and her hand (bigger than Lairit’s, colder, gloved) closes tightly on your bicep and yanks you back.

“WHAT,” you say, at top volume, on a mountaintop in the fucking Mournlands, and you are thirty years old and your head hurts and your back’s not doing great either and you left Lairit ten-and-a-half years ago and haven’t heard from them since.

Your sister, who you didn’t leave, who you followed into the Blood of Vol and the adventuring life and the (fucking) Mournlands, is staring at you, pale, still gripping your arm harder than is comfortable.

“What,” you repeat, softer.

“You were going to walk off the cliff,” Aelinor blurts, flat and angry. “Linmir, are you okay, you were just—it was like you didn’t know where you were, you just walked— ”

“I’m fine.” And you are. You are fine. Except for the headache and the hand tremors. “I’m just a little tired—”

“Walking off cliffs is not ‘a little tired,’” snaps Aelinor, and the rest of the whole nosy-ass party has turned around and focused on you and your head hurts so bad . “What is going on with you? Talk to me.”

She doesn’t understand, you realize. She never understands. The thought pops, fully-formed, into your head; Lairit would be saying this if they were here, shaking their head sorrowfully—it’s different for her, and she’s too young, too brash, she’s never quite had a grasp on ideals —

“You’re probably cursed,” says the—the punk tiefling kid, you can’t remember his name right now— “Here, let me take a look.”

You don’t want to let him take a look. You flinch back, but now everyone has an opinion about it, they’re crowding you and arguing about curses. They’re...

They’re unfocused.

Well, yeah, exactly, they’re unfocused! You’re the second-oldest in this party, and the big guy—big cow guy, minotaur, Ar-something?—he seems like a kid half the time anyway. A follower, kind of dumb. Like you, but worse. How much do you know about these people, really? You’ve known them, what, a couple weeks, nowhere near as long as you knew even your most distant compatriots in the revolutionaries.

We’re the only ones we can trust here.

Which, fine, whatever. Not like you’re not used to being the only reliable person in a room.

“Yeah, uh.” Punk kid snaps his fingers. “You’re cursed for sure. Illusion magic up the arse. You too, big guy.”

And god, that’s so infuriating, why can’t they see you’re fine?

Why does he care? He’s just in it for his score. Lairit never had patience for mercenary shits like this, which made it all the more shocking that they tolerated you for as long as they did.

“Why do you care?” you snap, yanking your hands out of Aelinor’s. “It’s not like we’re friends. Hey, if I walk off a cliff, don’t you get a bigger share of the score? Isn’t that what you wanted anyway?”

He blinks at you, unimpressed. Somehow still smug. “Christ. That's uncalled for, isn't it?”

Get rid of him. Lairit wraps their arms around you from behind, closes their hands about your wrists. Searingly warm on the cold skin above your gloves. You feel their irritation as if it’s your own. We don’t need him. And really, you don’t. Your hand is already on your sword hilt, before you even know what you’re planning to do.

It’s not like he’d see it coming.

Then Aelinor leans forward into your space, eyes going white, doing her freaky ghost-seeing thing. “I don’t see any ghosts,” she says slowly. “But something—”

Her voice is like a snowball to the face. You jolt uncomfortably — you can’t feel Lairit anymore, and you had to have been imagining it in the first place, the terrifying reality of their presence beside you again.

“And you, big guy,” Ae continues, “you’re haunted as fuck.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” says the big guy, while you swallow against the pain in your chest and stuff suddenly numb hands into your trouser pockets.

The Mournlands, right? Weird place. Regular mountains are a weird place, magical mountains worse, anyone would get a little batty. But you have Ae, and you can lean on her as much as she leans on you, and you’ll keep each other standing.

It’s fine.

So of course the next time, it’s Aelinor. Or, rather, it’s not Aelinor, because you don’t see her.

Apparently, you’re fighting ghouls in this horrible, blood-splattered fortress. You slept for a few minutes earlier, on Ae’s insistence, and you really are feeling better—right up until a pale, scrawny, bald thing sinks its teeth into your shoulder and rips.

The pain knocks you to the floor and whites out your vision for a few seconds. When you come to, you get that giddy feeling of haha, wow, that was too close, the scruffy druid staring at you in the obvious aftermath of a healing spell. It makes you a little nauseous, honestly, but what can you do except hit it harder than it hit you.

And, like, it’s not like it’s hard. Once you’re properly, uh, motivated, you can chop through these guys like nothing, and the rest of the gang isn’t slouching, either. You do a really excellent stop-thrust into the chest of one hanging out in a doorway before it can take a bite out of the bard and it groans and flops to the ground.

You look up, grinning triumphantly, into Lairit’s gaze.

They’re grinning too, you can tell even with the bandana covering the lower half of their face. “Good job!” they yell, over the din of the street riot. “Watch out for the one behind you!”

You spin on your heel, sabre up to a guard position. This whole street’s a mess, because someone called the guard on what didn’t strictly need to be a violent event—you can spot your friends melting into alleyways and bolt-holes, and also trying to fight their way out, and also getting arrested. There’s a tank of a guy in front of you with a ridiculous battle-axe and you duck his first swing, yell back over your shoulder, “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine, we just have to run!” From the corner of your eye, you see the bright flash of their hair. “Perin! Get out however you can. We’ll meet up later!”

You laugh, and salute, and swing your sword in a perfect, beautiful arc across the giant guard’s shield arm.

He screams. He drops. 

The next second, huge arms grab you from behind and crush you against someone’s chest. You yell and thrash, pinwheel your legs, kick backwards as hard as you can, but don’t connect. Another guard—and where are they finding these fucking mammoths— has a hold of you, has a hold of your sword arm, has lifted you off the ground—  “Get off!” you bellow, trying to kick him in the crotch.

“No,” says the guard, and “what the fuck,” says someone else.

“Get off of me!” It comes out as one long roar, and if you could get your sword free—if you could reach the dagger in your boot—you’re not some tiny waif, he shouldn’t be able to lift you like this, your brain is stalling out—

“Linmir,” someone or several someones are saying. “Linmir, Linmir,” only that’s not your name anymore, you forswore it, there was a whole thing. Another guard squares up and tries to hit you with a quarterstaff, which is totally bad etiquette, and you spit in their face.

How could this happen? You—

This didn’t happen. That’s the thing. You remember this riot—no one grabbed you, you took Lairit by the wrist and pulled them out of the chaos before the guard started really getting nasty, and then you went home and tried to convince them to make out with you instead of obsessively comb over where the afternoon went wrong.

You remember this riot, because it happened before the end of the war. You were eighteen. You didn’t wear gloves. Ae hadn’t even started church school yet.

And now… and now.

A few blinks and the world swims back into focus. You’re still pinned, but the guard you spat at is just the druid, wiping her face disinterestedly. The room around you is dark, dank, covered in putrid blood and offal.

And, oh yeah, again, still hoisted up in the air against a bare but furry chest, not able to move. Which. Nobody touches you like that. Nobody’s supposed to hold onto you like that. Ae can, maybe, but you’d rather she didn’t, and right now you’re already hyperventilating from the—whatever that was, that you saw.

“Hey, Argos,” you say, and your voice is impressively calm, and you are damn proud of remembering his name when you’re on the verge of a panic attack, “what the fuck.”

“Hey, Linmir,” says Argos, and he is not calm, he sounds like he’s on the verge of a Rage, “what the fuck.”

“I asked first,” you snap. “Put me down, don’t touch me, put me—”

“Not doing that.” His arms tighten and you grimace. “Not until I know you’re done with whatever that was.”

“Whatever what was?” You try to elbow him, but then you catch sight of the druid eyeing you warily, of the punk staring at you wide-eyed from around the doorpost, of a flash of healing magic in the bard’s signature purple and where is your sister.

The ghouls bleed black or dark rust (where is she), unless they’re very fresh (where’s Aelinor), and these ones aren’t fresh at all (she was right behind you, she always covers your back), but there’s bright red blood on your sabre and spattering up your arm (she saw you drop the last ghoul, she would have come to heal you right away).

The guard screamed when you hit him. It was familiar, you thought, but that was stupid and you'd dismissed it. But he'd sounded like—

Like—

You’re going to be sick. 

Over the roaring in your ears: a memory of Lairit laughing.