CONTEMPT'S BLOOM IS FOREVER
Published on January 26, 2022 (♒︎)
Content Warning: The consent for a few fade-to-black sexual episodes is dubious, including one where one party is under eighteen. Alcohol is involved and protestations are made, although both characters come to regard the event as something they desired. An arranged marriage is discussed in which one of the parties is very young.
Author's Notes: Sad shipfic written for my own birthday. All passages should be exactly 200 words long. Inspired by Born Gold's "Boy Foundry," from which the title hails, and a comment on my original ship manifesto for this pair discussing how both parties could contribute to one another's growing class hatred through "typical FFT miscommunication and daily tragedy."
Zalbag was not looking for the letter among his brother's belongings. He was looking for proofs—or else for refutations. That folded paper, still sealed, could not be meant for Dycedarg. The parchment was cheap. The stamp was crude: an F soldered to an M or else a W—three crossed nails and a half-a-nail after. It was fitting for a blacksmith's children. Zalbag knew the device well.
He had not thought he would see its like again. Zalbag traced the cracked edge of the letter, pausing over where somebody had seemingly put it to the fire before having a change of heart. He wondered if he could make out the shape of words through the thin vellum: if there would be some name that he could detect without opening it. He made no such attempt.
Instead, he closed his eyes tightly and let himself take one deep, trembling breath—something not quite a sob. Zalbag did not break the seal. Instead, he replaced the letter unopened. It could have no bearing on the matter at hand, and it would still await him at its conclusion.
Dycedarg, Zalbag thought, needed whatever charity he could afford in the judgement to come.
Wiegraf was in Zardigas when the war ended, and he did not think of Gallione. He thought of little save unentangling the Dead Men from the city. There were fines to pay, debts to reckon. Golagros had somehow obtained a fiancée. It was two weeks before they departed, leaving the Nanten to their carousing and the Zelmonians to their prayers.
On the road west, he had no mind for the white-towered capital towards which he moved. The summer was uncommonly cool: an extended spring that promised balmier days while never delivering. Miluda, always laughing now, seemed warm enough to make up the difference. The sunlight soaked into her unbound hair and turned it gold.
They lost a few men who peeled off near Lionel—a few nights to Dorter drinking. When Wiegraf's thoughts turned to his pay, it was always to imagine the weight of coins in his palm—with no reckoning as to what they might buy. It was only when he heard Boco's talonfalls on Igros' streets that he lingered on future concerns: on a homecoming without a home.
Seeing a green banner on the city's gate, Wiegraf consider too whose home it was to which he returned.
To Miluda, the feast at Igros was something of an anticlimax. They'd all been poisoning their livers for months. While she appreciated the Duke giving them a night's worth of costlier toxicants, she'd much rather they'd had their wages and leave to poison themselves elsewhere.
The sky burned bright with rockets and dragon's eggs, and she realized she'd lost track of her brother. She did not look for him. Wiegraf had grown melancholy that month past as she had grown merry, and Miluda determined to give him the comfort of not being fretted over.
So, she danced. She drank. She interjected herself into Golagros’ tragical recollection of a lost fiancée. She filled herself with food until she felt sick for it and then filched dinner rolls and broken subtlety in anticipation of a leaner days. Noblemen's gifts were something like fairy coins, she thought, set to turn to old leaves if you didn't make use of them while you could.
It was well past dawn when she made her way to an inn where the Dead Men were quartered. The rolls remained in shape and substance, although Wiegraf was still lost to whatever world was made for rich men's parties.
"I hear you were part of the last push out of Zelmonia, Captain Folles."
"More or less."
The Savior of Ivalice had appeared before him, his garments black, his features saturnine. It took Wiegraf longer than he liked to remember that the old general had died.
"My condolences, by the way. I'm sorry your father couldn't see the end of things."
"My father knew the end was coming."
"If that was a comfort to him, I'm glad of it."
Wiegraf did not turn away then. He should have. He was drunk. He was drunk, and he was speaking with Zalbag Beoulve, a man whom he had not seen since both were boys and full of hot-blooded idiocy. He let his eyes trace the angles of light on his gaunt face, draw paths through the map of his freckles, run along the tracks of new won scars.
Zalbag spoke of little substance, but he did not turn away either.
Instead, he drank, and Wiegraf drank too, and all the distance between their last meeting and the present collapsed, as though one of those scarlet-capped magicians had pushed them out of time’s proper order and into the tempo of plays and poems.
Zalbag had been a boy not yet eighteen at Yardow, and had already a name for himself in soldiering. He had not yet grown—however—into the fame due his family. In the prolonged panic of the retreat, he was not so far removed in sphere and station from other soldiers. He had not thought the captain of the Dead Men hopelessly beneath or beyond him.
They had been drinking then as they were drinking now. The wine had been near to vinegar. The sky had been scarlet.
Even with the instant burnt into his brain through a thousand recollections, Zalbag never could track the events that lead to it. They had been drinking, and he seemed to sink into the earth, to flounder and drown there. They had been drinking, and there was a second heart beating against his chest, an unbroken circuit where hands met his hands and lips his lips. They had been drinking, and for every protestation he must have made, he allowed himself to drink further and to be drunken of.
He must have prayed, but if Ajora had abandoned paradise to tell him this well bore poison, he only would have drunk deeper still.
"It's just a little further. I don't mean to detain you."
"I think you do."
"You offered to walk with me."
Wiegraf knew he must have, just as he knew that Zalbag knew what was to happen. They were at a room now. They were laughing again. Wiegraf allowed himself to stumble over the threshold and into his companion: two players ready for a farcical second act.
The door and the space between them closed shut.
He felt the curl of fingers digging into his neck, the mingling of wine taste in their mouths. Zalbag was not so clumsy now—not as he had been. He was no boy pinned to the ground in darkness, whispering pious excuses in between his ragged gasps.
Wiegraf was caught now in a tangle of linen. Hands were tugging at his shirt. He took it off unprompted, trying to mute his own objections with more graceless kissing. The stars outside blurred into the fireworks blurred back into freckles and scars.
"I remembered you. I remembered this."
Zalbag's breath cut against the skin of his neck like a knife, and he shivered to think what it was he meant—whether this was a requital or a revenge.
It was before dawn, and it was unclear whether the day would be a gray one or not. The sky looked like a bruise. When Zalbag awoke to the shock of arms thrown around him, he did not flinch. He only groaned a little, ready to wring the neck of whatever cock was waiting to crow.
After a few minutes, when Wiegraf did not wake of his own accord, Zalbag laid a hand on him. He woke, swatting him away like an ill dream, and they discussed—briefly—the particulars of escaping, the pragmatic concerns of being found.
"Could we wait?" Wiegraf eventually said, voice halting and raspy. "I think I'm content for once with waiting."
There rose an flutter of unspoken prayers in Zalbag's breast—pleas to God and his intercessors that he should not succumb. They were flattened entirely by the weight of Wiegraf's body leaning against him—by a stubbled face buried in his neck. He remained unmoving for all the pounding of his heart and head seemed they might wrench him apart.
He sighed, and the rose glow of a proper sunrise changed everything's hue. It was only then that he returned the embrace.
The war was over, and Dycedarg made merry as he could. He was keen that summer to dine with his brother, who was never merry if he could help it, and when he dragged Zalbag to Larg's table out of a morning of sickness, he could not help but exalt a little in the circumstances.
"I'm glad to see you lost in your cups for once; I tire of watching you live like a monk."
"I might take up the cloth now that the war's over," Zalbag retorted. "I hear the Marquis of Limberry is applying for an Examinership."
"Don't compare yourself to Messam. You've an epithet from your deeds; he from his hair."
Dycedarg soon lost control of the conversation. Bestrald set himself to relaying gossip Zalbag surely hadn't followed and jokes concerning people Zalbag surely hadn't met. It was only when they turned from politics to scandal to ladies that Dycedarg got another word in to his brother, teasing him as to the Savior of Ivalice being in want of a wife.
He watched as Zalbag smiled at his remark as he had with each of Bestrald's quips—smiled and turned pale as a skull amongst his sables.
"I'm not your dog here to come when you call," Wiegraf hissed. He looked over his shoulder, scanning the garden for eavesdroppers. "You shouldn't have written."
"What should I have done?" Zalbag asked flatly. "Did you not want to see me?"
"What if I didn't?"
"You came, dog or no."
Wiegraf crumpled the note in his hand and imagined its three lines compacting together: the time, the place, the order. He did not like the thought that this was now something about which men wrote, about which a man might plan. He offered Zalbag no reply.
"Wiegraf..."
Zalbag placed his hand over his, two palms and two gloves overlying the paper.
"I'm happy that you came."
Wiegraf felt his shoulders go slack.
"You would do well not to wager your happiness on me in the future."
If it was an argument, it ended there. There was an instant of absolute nothing, a silence filled with the trilling of insects and the scent coming off the lavender and larkspur. Wiegraf searched after excuses, after reasons he might depart.
He did not depart.
The note fell from their hands, and another morning had broken when he finally retrieved it, dew-stained and disintegrating.
It should have been a scandal that Zalbag Beoulve was out hawking in mourner's weeds, his father less than three months buried. It was not befitting that man renowned for piety and temperance should give himself up to sport in such circumstances, even if the late general could be little hurt by it. It should have been scandal too that he had the captain of the commoner's army as his companion, that he had elevated a tradesman's son to a role better born knights might kill for.
Dycedarg found, however, that scandal was loath to touch heroes, particularly ones with no enemies this side of the Larner. He said nothing to his brother as to how he conducted his affairs, and certainly made no observations as to what about him was or was not scandalous.
Still, he watched. He watched Zalbag grow bright as it seemed June might finally blossom into a proper summer. He watched and considered his own plans for the autumn, thinking more than once that few men spend their lives with no real foe—that the fair-haired Commander Folles had in him a great many qualities men loved in their favorites and hated in their enemies.
"Do you remember what Gallione was like before?"
"Of course I do."
"How would you describe it? What do you remember before Romanda?"
"I remember the trade ships along the coast and the stretches of forest north of Lenalia. I remember when there was a village down on the hook of the peninsula. I remember when Zeakden was a long stretch of fields."
"Was it?"
"It was. We passed it one year when we went to the capital through the northlands."
Zalbag hadn't recalled the occasion or the time, but he had been very young and the great stretches of unmarked snow had left an impression on him. He had thought at the time that it was a shame that their birds should mar the ground with their talons: that there was some insult in leaving a trace of oneself where you hadn't been asked to go. Dycedarg had told him stories about the Siege Wield and its lost people back then, and he had taken it to heart that there were some places to which men did not belong.
"Zalbag?"
Wiegraf's voice was very quiet now, and dusk was rapidly falling.
"Yes?"
"What will you do without a war?"
Bestrald Larg did not like the suggestion being made to him, but he liked less the thought of their plans unwinding without others in place. He was certain Ruvelia would have slain Dycedarg seven times over with a glance should he have mentioned it in her presence.
"You make a case," he conceded, "but I can't imagine you'll lead your brother into it. He doesn't seem he would take to that sort of match."
"He still hasn't made good on his threats to take orders."
"Make sure you don't drive him to it."
Dycedarg laughed and said something to the effect that he little understood the Savior of Ivalice—that he had a human heart and hot humors to fuel it. Bestrald, who had never seen Zalbag slacken in his reserve, did his best to believe him.
"Old Denamda would think it a pretty final act, don't you think?" Dycedarg continued as he made his case. "A fairy tale ending. I'm surprised it wasn't a consideration following the withdrawal."
"Denamda died following the withdrawal, Dycedarg."
"Well then." Dycedarg poured him another glass of claret without being asked. "Let's set out to write our finale before our king does the same."
Wiegraf made no accounting of what he did to anyone. He did not beg Miluda's leave to spend his days riding in Hokuten colors; he did not beg Zalbag's to disappear back into obscurity. He had grown comfortable with his absence of direction. The future and all the transformations that money would force upon him were always distant now.
Perhaps it was by some gloomy perversity of his own nature that he asked they ride north by northeast that day, into the forested hills beyond Gariland. He knew it would make him unhappy. Still, to seek out the overgrown remnants of a little village took him as far from future concerns as was possible, and he decided Zalbag must be there with him, caught in that same gap outside of time.
Zalbag was happy to follow him, and as they set out, Wiegraf felt a brief and irrational resentment that he should be glad of the journey. As they pushed through the Lenalian plainland, it struck him anew that Zalbag still wore black, his silhouette cutting a hole in the endless blue that surrounded them.
It took Wiegraf longer than he liked to remember that the old general had died.
Dycedarg did not speak to Bestrald as to Zalbag's response. He did not need news that was not heartening. His brother had many protestations to the effect that he could not love and would subject no woman to a union hopeless of his affections. There was something of cruelty, he thought, in calling him out upon a lie.
"I think you can love." His voice had been as lead, and he'd allowed a long pause during which Zalbag grew quiet. "—and even if you cannot, I think you have a sorry estimation as to how much love women demand of their husbands."
Zalbag said nothing. He'd continued.
"I know—if nothing else—that you love our house—that you loved our father. I know that you love your country. There are points in life where each man must reckon to what his heart gives priority."
They had persisted in silence, and Dycedarg did not break it for a while. He knew his brother would take ill to being told that many happy union persisted with both parties finding hope in affections beyond it. Zalbag had taken ill to everything else discussed.
Before parting, however, he did consent to meet her.
"I didn't know the Romandans came this far inland."
Wiegraf sat down on a piece of stonework, flung upward from the moss and ivy like a great, decaying tooth.
"You wouldn't have, would you?" he said quietly.
Even though it was one of the warmer days of that ill-starred summer, Zalbag felt very cold.
"I don't really know what happened. Miluda didn't say much. When she met me up near Riovanes that June, I told her to go home."
"Wiegraf..."
"She said we didn't have one anymore. We let it drop. I only came back this way once before."
Zalbag watched as Wiegraf stood, paced, traced his hands over the outline of what had once been a boundary wall. He felt that he should have something to say to him, but what was there one could offer a man who despised pity as much as he did.
"I used to think that I'd come back here again and it would be different—that perhaps the last few stones would have tumbled and there wouldn't be a trace. Either that or that somebody would just resettle. Everything comes out of something. There has to be a first man in every wilderness."
Much of Delita's recollection of the event would fall away, until all that remained him was the image Wiegraf Folles, flaxen hair ruffled by the summer breeze as he stood by the eastern gate. He did not recall the panting bird he rode or the manic pacing that followed his dismount. He did not recall his shout to an unseen companion. He would—perhaps—remember that there seemed something happy about him, for he surely never saw Wiegraf Folles joyful after that day.
He had little mind for anything beyond that; Delita was not yet shrewd enough to be watchful. He had been leaning against a section of the lower bailey, whittling a piece of wood into nothingness, and Wiegraf had come riding in fair and flush as any knight victorious in war. If there came a shadow stalking toward him—a black robed man eager to give his greetings—Delita didn't mind it. If there were words exchanged, Delita did not hear them.
Eventually, he looked up to find nobody there. Had he not recalled the man one gray afternoon in Dorter, the whole incident might have been lost—impressed in no living memory a few short years later.
Miluda had allowed her disquiet to progress into worry, but stubbornness kept her from making it known. She did not investigate her brother's disappearances, although she wished he would do her the courtesy of making them less obvious. He must know that she knew the road to Igros' keep.
Nobody talked, however, and this was some relief to Miluda. Nobody knew or else nobody wished to know. When Wiegraf returned from two nights' absence, the scent of sunlight and damp earth on his cloak, who could tell where he'd found his bed. Miluda asked if he were well, and he told her he was well.
"I was back north, you know... everything is very green now."
Miluda did not bid him finish. Wiegraf had a different burden of mourning than her—a grief of absences rather than a wounds. Physick that worked for one might prove poisonous to the other.
She smiled, placing her hands around one of his.
Miluda left him to a new disappearance that evening, trying all the night to free herself of her own unwellness: of the feel of smoke in her throat, of the cry of crows overhead.
"I have not agreed to anything."
"You agreed to a meeting."
"What of it? Do you expect me to be moved?"
"I think you are very happy to be moved as men move you." There was a pause, the creak of a leather glove. "I wish you would stop demanding it of me sometimes-- I think you delight to have some base creature to ravish you out of your vanities.
"Some base creature? Is that how you think I reckon you?"
The light cut through a flurry of dust motes between them. For once, the air felt very hot.
"I'm not your dog." Wiegraf's voice was low to the point one could not hear it crack. "I do not come when you call."
They could have quarreled further then. They could have come to blows. An infinity of possibilities hung between them, and as both looked to the other, it seemed impossible that they would persist without tipping into some new and irrevocable folly.
It was perhaps, the gentlest sort of violence that they should part as they did. There were bruises the next day where their hands had gripped one another's flesh, where they'd clawed themselves into a kiss.
Wiegraf was a man who could be quiet in his melancholy, but he had never been quiet in his despair. Miluda did not recognize the first few nights as anything extraordinary. To be drunk to distraction was hardly a condition worth noting among the Dead Men.
Then they were running out of gil. There were whispers about the proceedings in Lesalia, and Miluda did not know if Wiegraf knew. She did not ask, just as she did not fret. When she found Wiegraf in his room, sober and still as death, she did not speak. It took a moment for him to turn to her—to announce himself as something other than a corpse.
She asked if he were well. He stopped looking at her.
"You should get yourself into a temper," she said. "You're like a dark sky in want of a storm."
He nodded, and Miluda felt very suddenly that she had done something wrong, that she had done everything wrong. Then, unreasoning, she desired to tell him things long untold. To open old wounds to him and usurp his petty griefs.
She did no such thing.
She fell instead to holding him, thoughts still flush with cruelty.
Zalbag was a man alwaysquiet in melancholy and in despair, and Dycedarg had no head as to what could be done when he fell to frenzy. Reason had been tried. Appeals had been made. Zalbag had paced the long tapestried room, distracted, frantic, and forever repeating the substance of his resolve.
He would not marry. He could not love.
Dycedarg tried, by so many variations, to refute him—or else to explain what the kingdom gained regardless of human sentiment. How could he map it out in an hour—the gossip that Zalbag hadn't followed, the people Zalbag hadn't met? How could he show him how close they may well come to staving off another war?
It was—perhaps—that seeing his brother maddened that threw off his own reserve. Had he been able to keep a cool head, he certainly wouldn't have touched on the matter he did or spoken of it in the manner he had. He regretted it immediately.
Zalbag delivered a hard-handed slap across the angle of his brother's left cheek, and no more words were exchanged.
Dycedarg only broke the terrible silence that overtook that room with the clack of his boots departing it.
When Miluda Folles met a nobleman a little ways past the gate of Igros Castle, she knew he was not the one she sought. She stopped him anyway and found herself with a Lord Beoulve rather than a Ser.
The vast gulf between the two was quickly apparent to her, and she nearly bid him good evening. Instead she turned to him quietly and explained she had something for his brother.
"Ah," he said in a measured voice, "from your brother."
He held out his hand expectantly, and Miluda held the letter in she carried very tightly a moment. She lifted it to show him.
"If I give this to you, will you see it gets to where it belongs?"
He smiled broadly.
"I assure you, good lady, it will find its proper place in my hands."
Miluda smiled back as she felt her shoulders drop. She thought many sad and bitter things. It had been a point, following her abruptly ended girlhood, to never be a fool.
When she gave over the letter, she reckoned it was no more foolish than to see it delivered to Zalbag Beoulve himself.
"I think we understand one another," she whispered, already turning.
Simon was glad to have concealed the promise of a coming journey from the princess, as he had no disappointments to dispel alongside his disquiet. Ovelia had grown gentler for the loss of her friend, and Simon hated now to see someone suffer in gentleness. He prayed that Miss Beoulve had been kept in similar ignorance and that neither girl might know that they might have met again in a little month. He hoped both would enjoy the calms of maidenhood for some time more.
He had no concrete evidence of his suspicions, but what inquisitor ever did? Monks gossiped as readily as courtiers. He vowed to never mention any of it and to accept a reprieve from anxiety. Still—in prayers, in quiet, in the stillness of study—the pageantry of rumor and inference still played out in his brain, all parties moving like chessmen.
The narrative made sense: a friend waiting in the family, two creatures betrothed already to kingdom and station. Who among either faction could oppose Denamda's daughter joined to the champion of her father's age?
He tried not to give his thoughts credence, lest he dwell on how they might have prolonged a coming peace.
It was well after midnight, and Boco's feathers shimmered with dew as he slept. Wiegraf pulled his cloak close, listening for the sound of talonfalls. He was tired. The night was not warm. As he looked up towards the dark sky above them, he thought of it: the weight of a hand upon him—with no reckoning as where they might go after.
It was well after midnight, and he did not despair of a second rider. For all the treacheries of his rank, Zalbag Beoulve would not refuse him in silence. He knew that as sure as he knew the stars would keep their track. Zalbag might meet him in hate, might cast his words before him, might call him to account. Still, he had had time to send word and no word had been sent.
It must follow that he was coming.
Wiegraf lay back upon the grass and watched the sliver of the moon dim and disappear among the clouds. There was an occasional spark of a firefly. His bird purred beside him.
When he realized he was drifting, he did not rouse himself.
He knew, even as sleep overtook him, that he could not wake alone.
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