The late afternoon sky stretched before them, sunbeams trailing glimmering roads on the waves, strips of flat narrow clouds dyed deep orange, the edges of rounder ones turned cotton-candy pink. They laid in the cabana's open air platform, on a couch all too large to be thought of such, but assured of it not being considered bedding by the staff.

"Its to accommodate customers of all sizes— should even the great Gulool Ja Ja have wished to stay for a night, the For'ard Cabins would have been ready and waiting!" The pleasant attendant had said with cheer, when he had repeated Eithne's quiet musings from the night before to her.

In the distance he could see cormorants silhouetted against the sunset, a picturesque sight that was only punctuated by the soundscape— the soft breeze like peace itself, rustling through the thatched awning above them, rolling across the evening's low tide and ruffling his bangs with a hint of sea spray.

And in his arms, a fragrant bouquet of the softest white lilies— Eithne, fresh from the shower, smelling strongly of flowers and sandalwood. The scent had always followed like an echo in her wake, but this was different. As she settled into the crook of his arm, her head against his neck, long white ears tucked neatly against the side of his face, it filled his chest like a song.

Looking down at her, he could see a faint red blush across her face and arms, a kiss from the Turali sun from the day's excursion. She was loved by this land nearly as much as she was by Eorzea, the last bits of daylight dyeing her white lashes into gold threads.

There is no greater bliss, he thought to himself, the seagulls mewling in agreement.

She had settled her legs over his lap, arms resting on her thighs, sometimes pointing out shapes in the sky as she quietly named each new bird that entered the scene. He had never taken her for a birdwatcher, but their time together had revealed to him how observant she was of nature. She had done the same in the First, though he had failed to realize it then.

"Had I told my younger self that I would end up here, with you, he would've told me off I think." The words tumble out of him, a surprise to both of them, as he breathlessly pushed back his bangs with his free hand. "Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself."

"Didn't you live on an island? Being next to the ocean shouldn't be so surprising." She comments, eyes on the horizon, but he hears the smile in her voice. "Though, perhaps maybe the frigate would be new to you. Too cold in Old Sharlayan for them."

He laughed a little, resting his cheek against her head, her damp hair feeling cold against it. "Now, had I told him you'd develop a sense of humor, he would definitely disregard me completely."

He feels a pinprick on his right arm, which held her close, as she pinched him in protest, and he laughs in full now. He had lived in this hale and whole body for some time, but the sensation still felt unbelievable to him. He wonders if she still felt the miracle of it, after all the wondrous and unbelievable things they had experienced in the time since.

"What about you?" He says, listening to her quiet breathing amidst the sound of the waves and the birds, "What would young Eithne have thought, knowing she'd have that reckless Sharlayan boy wrapped around her finger one day?"

"It depends," she says, her voice quiet, though it doesn't lessen its impact. "on when, I suppose."

"A-Ah— Right," He resents it, how easily he seems to shatter these most precious of moments due to some careless banter. His hand tensed, remorse coloring his words. "Of course. I'm sorry."

She looks up at him, smiling gently. "No need to apologize. It's really that I had scarcely spared a thought for love throughout the years. Even if— Mm…"

Pausing mid-thought, she looks back to the sea, and he lets the waves fill in the silence. Farther beyond them, the sun dipped a little lower beneath the horizon.

"I think… I would first be confused, more than anything." There is an edge to her words, self-derision shaping the curve of her smile into something sharp. "Maybe even angry, after a moment. I wouldn't have understood."

Picking up one of her hands, he traces her knuckles with his thumb absentmindedly, her smooth skin irradiating warmth. "That's understandable, to lose a lover is—"

"No, no." Eithne raises her other hand to wave him off, the tension in her shoulders becoming obvious after how relaxed she had been just moments before. "Even before meeting Haurchefant. I meant, if I spoke to the me who first explored the Crystal Tower."

Now this was curious. "Now then, I know we butted heads a little in the beginning; would you have found me so disagreeable?"

"It wasn't that either, Raha." He loved the sound of it; the nickname had become a recent addition to her parlance. It still caused him a bit of shock to hear it, making his heart flutter every time. More evidence of their closeness, proof that his grandest dreams had become reality. "It had nothing to do with you. I just…"

Another pause. He never hurried her along, always waiting for her to work through whatever feelings roiled about inside her mind. Many were the burdens of a hero such as her, and did anyone find it easy to speak of their troubles? Eventually, she takes the hand atop hers, threading their fingers. "I didn't believe it was right for Hydaelyn's Weapon of Light to be waylaid by romance. My feelings were always secondary to the cause; a nuisance at best."

A twinge in his chest, the words setting alight the hairline fractures of ghostly crystal that had, in another life, infested his body. He had resented her at first when they were younger, mistaking her aloofness for arrogance, the vacant stare as disinterest or, at worst, disdain. Even after they had grown closer, as he laid in the tower awaiting sleep whilst thinking of her, and after he opened his eyes to world without her, he had puzzled over what had been hidden in her heart. As he tried piecing together the woman behind the facade, he formulated hypotheses and drafted theories— ones that, in her arrival to the First, had been found lacking.

Even now, they remained woefully incomplete.

Squeezing her hand, he moves to speak, praying to whatever gods remained in their world that his words did not fail him— but she looks up at him, the sunset encompassed in the liquid gold of her doleful eyes. The words die on his lips, slightly parted, when she looks down at their hands.

"Haurchefant was never my lover. I… I never told him, you know." Her voice sounds so quiet, even as close as they were. Distant, as if speaking through a veil. He hated it, the sadness that seemed to encase her in these moments. "I hadn't even realized I loved him, until he laid bleeding and broken, until it was too late."

He thinks of waking up a boy still in the Eight Umbral Calamity and finding the world changed beyond recognition— her death haunting every shadow, every victory and loss. He had never told her how he had come to feel during their brief time together, and when the doors had closed on her, eyes wet and smile faltering, he had thought it best; thought it noble and fair and any other descriptor he had ascribed to greatness in those days. He had told himself he believed it, and he had become such a good liar in their time apart.

"I felt more than foolish, after thinking that love would have dimmed my resolve." There was a bitter undertone, but in truth he felt her unraveling, as if he had pressed against ancient walls and had them crumble under his palm. Before them, a path forward, uncharted and perilous. "I was weak regardless, and I thought for a time that I had wasted my one life in the service of a goddess who had made of me both curse and blessing."

Apt words, he thought. G'raha Tia, too, had felt similarly once. Unable to change the present, but the only hope they had to change the past. Useless. Invaluable. He chased the echoes of her light, the comet trail of a long-extinguished meteor. The Exarch had carried that weight across the First, and in Ultima Thule he had once again felt the weight of it bearing down on him.

Regret is not the same as grief, as he'd come to know intimately. Whereas grief was a throbbing wound, regret was a thorny vine, coiling and writhing. Some days you managed to forget, and other times it choked the air from your lungs, draining the ventricles of your heart, turning you into a husk of yourself. To know he would never see her again had been sorrow unlike any other, to never know how things may have been shaped differently had he spoken that day— that was torment.

That was why he had made her promise, had built up the courage to reach out his hand.

"I'm sorry." Her voice was little more than a thread now, her shoulders under his arm slumped and defeated. "I shouldn't speak of this. It— It must be uncomfortable for you."

"Never." He utters fervently, the emotion coming out stronger than he had intended. He brings her hand to his lips, before holding it to his chest and above his heart. "He was a part of you, whether it had been put into words or not. What more joy could a man have than to know his beloved had been so cherished by so noble a soul. He—"

He finds it difficult to speak, myriad memories of his moments of self-sacrifice flashing before his eyes. Eithne, beyond the doors of the Crystal Tower. Eithne, her soul at the edge of shattering, calling out his name. Eithne, fist outstretched, cheeks wet and glistening in the starlight.

How many times had she felt the pain of keeping silent, of holding fast to duty even as her heart yearned to take what it wanted? How many times had he pushed her to stand on that thin line between Warrior of Light, and Eithne Cuinn?

"He kept you safe." Which was more than he could say for himself at some points, all things considered. He placed a kiss on her forehead, still a little damp but drying quickly in the gentle wind. "Which is the reason why we are both here today; so I myself hold a great deal of gratitude to the man."

Looking up at him—a strange sight in and of itself— he saw tears threatening to spill, her yellow irises like sunlight filtering through water. She was so lovely, and his heart ached at the sight. The swell of the waves faded into silence, nothing but the sound of her stuttering breath, a sniffle here and there, reaching him. When her lower lip trembled, he dipped his head to kiss her almost on instinct. She was so warm, all powder lilies and a dark sweetness in his embrace.

He had meant to be brief, if he had thought anything at all, but his mouth lingered, searching, caught in her pull like a satellite.

"When we go back to Ishgard…" It was she who spoke again after their moment, as he rested his forehead against hers. "Would you like to visit him together?"

"I would love to." The sun had, at some point, disappeared beyond the Salt, the horizon blushed purple in its wake. Somewhere by the shoreline he heard distant squeals and laughter, a gull crying for the day's end, the waves lapping against the stilts of the cabana. "You did promise to show me the sights."

"Sometimes, I just don't know… how much I should say, or— or if I even have any right to speak of it." She speaks suddenly, as if by accident, the words first trickling in a slow cadence before gaining speed, pouring out. A familiar feeling for him, though an unusual occurrence for her. In the back of his mind, he tucks away the feeling that he has rubbed off on her, a treat to ponder over another day. "If it even matters, since he never knew, and we were nothing. Well, we were friends, but I—"

"But you, Eth, are a daughter of House Fortemps, if Sir Edmont has any say on the matter." He unravels their fingers to brush her cheek. "I have read Heavensward enough times to know that. And something tells me it was less an act of gratitude and more so of a father doing his duty; to honor you. Don't you think so?"

At his words he thought he saw her blush a little, though the rapidly fading light made it hard to see, and the hint of sunburn on her cheeks helped to further disguise it. "I suppose I could be convinced. Though, that's frustrating in its own way…"

He made a small sound in question, as he pushed her bangs from her face gently to look at her in full, fingers brushing through her soft tresses, mostly dried by now.

"Then that would mean he and gods knows who else would have known of my feelings before me," Eithne's nose, covered in soft, slightly darker hair like a hare's, twitched. One of the small signs of irritation she rarely showed, which he had compartmentalized next to the way her ears would flutter in embarrassment, and the subtle tapping of her foot when impatient. "After I spent all that time, agonizing over it."

"That also means that Haurchefant might have known as well, even without words." He smiled wide at her, trying to stifle a chuckle at how endearing she was being in that moment. Her pale, sparse brows furrowed, nose twitching at regular intervals now.

"Mmm." She closed her eyes, brows still knitted together. However, he could see a shift, could feel the deep exhale she gave after a moment. Without speaking, she nestled closer to him, her arms wrapping around his chest in attempt to hide her face— from all of his staring, most likely.

However, as she tried to run from his gaze, her long ears smacked into his face, causing her to lean her head back abruptly with wide eyes. "Ah, sorry…"

He leaned in to kiss her temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her lips; unable to restrain himself. She was so soft, so sweet. Tomorrow she would hide all of it away, folding the vastness of her being neatly under title of Warrior of Light, in order to face whatever new hunt or quest she had promised to aid in. He had whatever was left of the day to enjoy this moment of pause, of loving vulnerability.

"Hungry?" He spoke into her jawline, lips trailing down to the crook of her neck. "I'll cook. I've been practicing, in hopes of impressing the Scions' resident culinarian."