kh_drabble | Challenge 249 [O Holy Night, Terra x Aqua]

Challenge: #249 Candlelight
Title: O Holy Night
Word Count: 525
Spoilers: None! 100% pure imagination on my part.

O Holy Night.

The only thing that shone beyond the candlelight was his teeth.

He wasn’t smiling.

She turned away, lay on her side and listened to the sand shift closer inwards. Hour by hour, each drop of wax for another, the tide was unraveling against the breeze holding it in. It would slide up inch over inch of land, tasting each shell, each kernel made of a discarded home. She waited for the sea but breathed air to keep her head from splitting wide open with the idea of what he could be.

Aqua – oh, the irony – listened for waves and heard instead, a lone wail from a dream that had ended quicker than she could open her eyes to the dark and Terra’s fist closed around a handful of his sheets.

“Hear me out!” she once would’ve said to anyone. “See what I can do! See who I am!”

The sea crawled nearer. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift below the current’s call; down to the bottom where a ship lay with her maidenhood broken beyond repair. Her masthead was askance on her deck and she looked at Aqua with accusing cabin-hole eyes that were black, hollow and cold without the souls that used to occupy her heart.

An eel leered at her from behind a wall of tangled sea-brush. Its teeth shone but it wasn’t smiling.

She woke up a second time early in the morning. Too early to train, too late to really replay the vision and take it apart to match the broken pieces to fit again. Nothing fit, nothing would make sense once she opened her eyes to the flailing candlelight.

Terra was breathing too heavily to be truly awake but his eyes were wide open and straining to see. They were blue, beautiful like the ocean; they glowed for seconds before the candle-flame was finally swallowed by hungry-as-quicksand wax.

But they weren’t smiling.

Aqua folded another cloth in two, dipped it into a basin of cool water, then placed it on his flushed, sweaty forehead and lay down beside him to wait out the rest of the night. Outside, the sky was lightening from sapphire to cyan. But, like how it always had been with the world, the night lingered close, its breath cold enough to numb and sting an open wound.

She was staring into duality; the light in one eye feebly pushing against the darkness of the other. Terra’s hand was as hot as his blood, flinching against her cool palm. His teeth had shredded the skin of his bottom lip in a fight against the fever-wrought hallucinations. So he’d bled out in spurts over the pillow and here were the stains right where she could see: faint, thumbed down from where he’d raised his hands and grasped at the cotton.

If he had wanted to tell her something before, the need must have long since passed by now. Whatever he had seen was wrapped tight in bounds that stretched beneath the blood-spotted bandages over his skin.

She smelt salt in the air but could only taste her own tears in the dark.