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Celes trailed a hand dark with soil among the lotuses. The mirror-flat of the water shattered at her touch, the only movement in the greenhouse. Edgar built it just for her, her green hideaway below the dunes – probably, and she smiled to herself, after she expressed but a momentary speculative doubt that he could. But the sands had never bested him yet. Water summoned from springs deep below the earth passed through the engines that gave life to the castle, where it warmed on its way to trickle down among the seed beds. Dense condensation lent a ruddy glow to the windows, an invitation to all in passing to find her fragrant patch of green, and all the colours that bloomed there. A rainbow under skies that turned grey nary twice in a year.
In Vector, house-high metal vats boiled enough water to flood the forged city. On the hour without fail it came hissing through a rat king of pipes and sluices in the centre of the palace. The greenhouse was but one stop on its journey, a cage of rusting metal and filthy windows all but forgotten. By all, save the girl who slipped her slight body through the half-open door on a sunless afternoon with no drill. Steam coated the glass and obscured all beyond the green cage where no lights remained in operation. None of them would ever think to look for her there.
Old news. Celes straightened and resumed her march, examining each leaf for dry spots. Not a one. Pacing always, patrolling always, but in the greenhouse all was quiet, every spear of green bright and wet with beads of dew. Her carnations, too. Through some hidden remnant of magic they grew in the lavender colour of dusk descending on the desert as the first stars returned. A new shade, all the more beautiful in its rarity. She ran her fingers over the folds of their blooming, delicate as the frills of a tulle gown, but strong beneath her touch.
Celes started, perilous close to tearing a petal. A whine of hinges announced a new arrival through the open door. Shoulders back, hair behind her shoulder, and Celes emerged from behind the buddleja with a practiced smile on her face.
Terra was waiting behind the leaves. Pale-faced, she rubbed at the bared back of her neck; another afternoon bent over her books in the library, the light from the hearth flickering in the lenses of her reading glasses. She closed the door behind her, leaning with one arm against it. “I'm not disturbing you?”
“Quite the contrary.” Celes motioned her inside, striding back to her workbench. “Not if it's you.”
Terra smiled as she stepped her sandalled feet around the puddles on the ground, long ferns she brushed by leaving a light shower on her skirts. Layers of floaty chiffon in the very colour of the carnations exposed her legs to mid-thigh, a belt of golden coins shone around her hips, and bound hair lay over one shoulder. She could have been another rare bloom, weaving as she did amongst the bracken.
“Be careful, the floor's wet,” said Celes, averting her eyes. “But what brings you all the way down here?”
Golden bangles rang a gentle peal as Terra plucked a tomato from its vine and popped it whole into her mouth. “I wanted to take some clippings back up with me. I wasn't sure if you were home yet, so I didn't bring tea and cake this time, I'm afraid.”
“Not to worry. I've been home since midnight.” The plants made a painterly circle all around them, fragrant herbs and tall, stubborn orchids and the reddest roses west of Kohlingen, still tight in their buds. “Two weeks without me to watch them. Who'd have guessed Sabin had such a green thumb?”
“He's a provider.” Terra took a seat in her usual spot on a metal counter, legs crossed and dangling an inch from the flagstone floor. “So, am I allowed to know where you've been? Were you doing anything salacious?”
“You've been at the dictionary again, I see.” Celes smiled as Terra took off her glasses to wipe away the fog, rubbed at the little half-moons they left indented in her nose. “But no. I was in Maranda formalising new sea trade routes – terrifically exciting, I promise. They have more silk than they know what to do with, I'm told.”
“I knew that!” Terra sat up straighter and extended one leg. The motion pulled her skirt a small way up her leg. “I bought this dress last week. A merchant from Maranda landed in South Figaro and he told me they have quite the venture going on since they learned to mill the sandworms for silk.”
“I saw it in practice while I was there. They're rather docile, really, now the magic is gone. Do you remember the miles we walked around the edge of the sand to keep out of their way, back in the day?” She stopped, pursed her lips. A phantom cold danced on the tips of her fingers, only for a moment. Too warm, now, to conjure the frost. Or so they said. “But now they make beautiful dresses for you.”
“Do you like it?” Terra stretched one bare leg out in front of her. Skin white as if the desert sun never touched her. “It's much shorter than my other things...”
Long fingers toyed with the hem of the dress, petals on petals in layers over her lap. Terra's legs were long and lean from riding the birds across the sand and pacing the ramparts under the stars. Perhaps, too, the long-ago hours of sword drills with a blade bigger than her child's frame. The body remembered, always.
“You wear it well,” Celes said weakly, turning back to her seedlings. “Why don't you take some of these carnations up with you? Since you look just like them.”
Terra craned to see, and giggled. “How lovely!” She took off her glasses again and thumbed at the fog but quickly thought better of it, folding them and placing them on the bench beside her.
Celes picked up a short knife, slicing on a diagonal. The stems fell away quick and clean – not like necks. A cold voice, one that never faded with the rest. This is all your hands can do, now these sandstone walls have made you soft? You were never made to grow.
Terra, flameless and no less cheerful for it, took the bouquet and laid it across her lap. “It's my favourite colour for flowers. It makes me think of spring, the way it looks in picture books.”
A child's sentiment – not that Terra in her youth had seen many books, or many springs. The empire would never put something so dangerous as words in hands it honed to kill, and what use had she then for flowers? But how gentle the pads of her fingers were when she traced along a printed line and pointed to a word she had never heard before. Celes had sat beside her in the library for the first year, close to the fire in the corner hearth, a perfect place for whispering. Close enough to hear the savour in Terra's voice as she breathed the sounds of sensuous and luxuriant and frangible, and other softnesses that had no place among the hard angles of Vector.
Terra drew a knee into her chest to rest her chin upon. Inching further and further until her skirt exposed the whole of her other leg. Glowing, it seemed, with a nameless and forgotten everyday magic.
Celes blinked.
“You've been back in the South, I see,” she said at length, voice carefully even. “Are you still keeping your group?”
“Sometimes. I think I've helped them as much as I can. At least I hope I did. But I still like to catch up with them sometimes, see what they're doing. Delena is selling her rugs again, in one of the shops close to the harbour. Raumer told me he hasn't been to a bar in a year now.” She smiled softly. “And I believe him.”
“And that's your impact,” said Celes, firmer. “Ever the mother hen.”
“No. They did it themselves.” She frowned, squinting off to the side. “They're all still living together in that house above the harbour. Do you think that's bad?”
“I couldn't say.” Celes pointed upward. “We all live here, don't we?”
“Hmm.” Terra swung her leg in a lazy circle as she thought. Her fingers found a part-wilted petal of a dark petunia, rubbed it softly beneath her thumb. A touch with the lightness of one who'd never held a weapon, persisting against all odds in everything Terra held. “I love this room, don't you?”
“Always.” Towards the evening, after drills in the heat of the courtyard and patrols on the battlements under the blazing sun, a moment alone underground wherever she could find it. “The smell of it most of all. It makes me think of the quiet nights out on the road, all of us around a campfire in the woods, under the stars.”
“Petrichor,” said Terra brightly. “That's what you call the scent. I read about it.”
“And everything else you can get your hands on.”
Terra, undeterred, carried on and pointed to the soil beside her. “It's an alcohol, if you can believe that. It comes from leaves and roots when they turn to mulch, just like fermenting fruit. And when the air is moist, like in here, the droplets splatter and spread the scent around. Did you know?”
“Not the alcohol part,” said Celes. “I'm only here to keep things fed.”
“And that's your impact. When I first saw this castle, I thought there was no colour in the desert at all besides the banners in the throne room.”
“And the ridiculous things the fop sat on it bedecks himself in.”
“Yes, those too.” Terra laughed lightly, and a lone sunflower tapped at her shoulder. “And this one gets taller every time I see it!”
“Four feet, now. Did you know it was my first? I found it in a village just outside of Jidoor on our way to the Falcon. Nothing else was left alive there, but this one held on.”
Terra smiled. “You couldn't bear to leave it behind?”
“I suppose not.”
“And now who's the mother?”
Celes huffed a laugh and turned back to the carnations, straightening the stems. Had the Terra of old ever been so saucy? To hear Sabin the bear tell it, a veritable jester had met him for the first time on the side of Mount Koltz. So unlike the frightened, shaking thing Celes found on the outskirts of Narshe, barely able to put a sentence together.
What changed? It was you. She reached out to you, wanted to know you, and all you did was snarl and gnash .
From behind her, a heavy sigh. “What an upside down world it is, that I could be a mother before anyone's been good enough to give me my first kiss.”
Celes tensed. An old ice trickled down the length of her spine. She paused, placid – but too late.
“Oh. That face again. Another one?”
A beat the length of a sharply drawn breath, and Celes nodded. “I'm sorry, Terra.”
“You know, it was Raumer from my group who taught me how to laugh at something that makes you sad. And all of...” Terra gestured vaguely to the air. “All of this, it's funny, at this point.” She laughed bitterly and leaned forward, elbow on her knees. “Well, if I'm wrong, you'd better tell me what it was like.”
Terra remembered in flashes, in fragments, flinching when a shadow fell upon her the wrong way, running tear-wrenched through the castle corridors from the smell of roasting hogs, retching behind a door for reasons she couldn't name. Cruel, cruel beyond naming it was, that those should be the memories she was permitted to keep.
“Celes?” Terra inched forward on the bench, her face as pale as the faraway full moon. “I'd really like to know, if you can remember. Unless... unless you think I'm better off not knowing, unless someone, well -”
“No, no.” Celes lifted a hand, to step forward and place on Terra's shoulder, but left it fall empty and useless to her side. “Nothing like that. It was only a game you used to play with some of the others.”
“Others?” Terra's face fell. “The ones who didn't fit the requirements.”
Celes inclined her head, and Terra followed suit. Their unspoken ritual, moments of silence for the twenty other plump-cheeked, high-pitched children who never saw the world outside of the infusion labs again. She shivered, cold and damp amidst the verdant tranquil that Vector would never allow. The world chose to spare her to tend the seeds – Celes, the ice witch, the coldest and hardest and sharpest of them, she must have been, to survive, to be the only one remaining of all those ruddy faces whose names faded with the years.
But they stole laughter in the shadows, all of them. And that deserved a memorial, too, whoever was left to keep it.
“You used to all sit in a circle when no-one was looking,” said Celes, “and you'd spin a dagger or a stave in the centre. The one spinning it had to kiss whoever it pointed to when it stopped.”
“Oh.”
“I'm afraid I can't remember who got you first.”
Terra frowned with the most endearing little line on her forehead as she stroked her own lips with the tips of her fingers – soft and full, and with a hint of a smirk playing at the corners, despite it all. “No. I don't remember that at all.”
“It was all child's play,” Celes stammered. The greenhouse seemed to have warmed with two bodies taking up space in it, twice the heat to cloud the windows and enshroud them from the world beyond.
A glint came back to Terra's eye. “So no tongue?”
“No.” Celes swiped her reddened face away and buried her fingers in the dirt. Ridiculous behaviour for a straight-backed and stern master of the sword, even one who gripped a trowel more often than flail or blade. What have you been reading on your own in there by the fire?
“I didn't realise it was weighing on you,” she said. “For a while I thought you were the same as Sabin and immune to that sort of thing.”
In the corner of her eye, Terra seemed to flinch, and her voice when it came rang hollow. “Yes. Everybody does.” She tilted her head, displaying the elegant swan-white of her neck. “Were you ever in the circle?”
“Oh no.” Celes threw back her hair, arched an eyebrow. “Such childish pursuits would be quite beneath the soon-to-be General Chere, don't you think?”
“I suppose. So there was no-one until Locke?” Terra bit her lip as a blush rose to her cheeks. “If you don't mind me asking...”
“I don't. I like it, that we can talk like this.” Like the women who clustered around the cafes lining the wide boulevards of Vector, coffee cups ringing softly on saucers as they whispered behind their hands of secrets that had no place in the training yard. Like the clusters of girlfriends who sipped wine from long-stemmed glasses and danced to the rhythm of the waves outside the bars in South Figaro on warm summer evenings, light as bubbles with no memory of the screams of the dying. She shook her head. “But no. Locke wasn't the first.”
Terra let the murmur of the running water speak for her as she waited, patient and undemanding. She's good at her job.
“I never told anyone this,” Celes said, slow and hushed, joining Terra in her corner. On the bench Terra leaned closer in turn, chin on hand. “Not even him. But the garrisons I trained with, all men, well. They had their opinion of me. Some rather lewder than others.”
Terra wrinkled her nose. “I can imagine.”
“And you remember how I was. They'd call me as frigid as the ice Gestahl shot me full of and say I thought I was better than all of them.” She sighed, dropping her head. “So when I was sixteen, I thought, why not prove them wrong?”
A private her own age, face pocked with acne scars, shuddering every time he laid eyes on the girl who made frost dance between her hands. But he followed her quick-step back to her tent when she offered and performed the drill as requested, sweating and panting on top of her in ice-cold air.
Terra shuffled forward. “And?”
“And it didn't help at all. The whole time, it took all the strength they gave me not to cry.”
She let go once he fastened himself back into his uniform and scurried away from her, tears freezing over as she wiped them away, overflowing the cup of her hands. Locke had made her warm, for a while. He looked at her with loving eyes that had seen loss before, yet he had grieved under the open sky, wandering where he chose. No life behind bars for him, no cuffs on his wrists and leather straps snaking tight across his chest.
The high priestess found her the day he set off to map the new Serpent's Trench and they shared their last kiss in the shadow of the castle gate. She pulled Celes from the alcove of which she'd wept on the floor and took her to the sunlit silence of the temple's anteroom.
“I'm not made for love in this lifetime,” Celes sobbed, collapsed in on herself as she sat with snot pouring from her nose. She dabbed at her eyes with the edge of her sleeve, wetting and soiling the fine embroidery. “They were all right about me. If I couldn't be enough for him, then -”
“Nonsense,” her saviour snapped, pouring a cup of sweetened tea with practiced grace. “Very rare is the first love that lasts a lifetime, my dear.”
She gave a warm smile in response to Celes' quavering you think so, said, “I know so. This young man, are you changed, for your time by his side? And did you change him in turn?”
“In every way a person can. So why can't -”
The priestess raised her hand. “Then isn't it cruel to regard what passed between the two of you as something to mourn? To say your happy years together were a failure? We grow always, Celes, and the hardest part can be that not all loves grow together. But we keep them with us, everyone we care for, through the ways we change.”
Celes lifted her cup from the saucer. It warmed her hands as she sipped, soothing her throat. “So you're saying that this actually makes me... more normal?”
“Perfectly normal, I promise you. Goodness, general, but you're so young. And the next time you find someone who makes your heart beat a little bit faster, you can love them all the better now.”
And beat her heart did, in her greenhouse thick with the syrup of flowers, as Terra's white hand clasped her arm with all the softness of falling blossom. In the end, she thanked the priestess for her time and the tea, and went immediately back to her blade. A circuit of the battlements, a circle around the perimeters, and drills in the yard until the sweat from her brow washed away the tears, as if nothing had changed with the vanishing of a slender figure across the dunes.
The nights after she spent alone in a bed too big for one, the shadows of her chamber yawning and hungry in the darkness. She could fill the void for a few moments with her own hand between her legs, biting down on her lip in the moment of bliss before the weight of the night fell upon her again. Empty always, afterwards – until the first time she finished and a pale face framed by hair of jade-like green appeared behind her eyes.
Terra, knowing no better, kept her hand in place and squeezed. “It sounds like my first one was better than yours, at least,” she said. “Maybe I'll remember the next.”
Celes forced a smile. “Well, if you're curious, I'm sure there's no end of men in the castle who'd gladly take you up on the offer. But take it from me -”
“It's not the same if you do it only to do it, right?”
“Not the same, no. Give it time. Find someone you really want to kiss. You'll be glad of it.”
“Okay.”
Terra, all smiles, slipped off the bench and onto her feet. Stood before Celes and close enough to brush noses, she leaned in.
Strawberries. Terra must have had some with her lunch, relishing them as she wove her tongue around them. The tongue that lapped against her own, brushing together soft lips with a curiosity that sent shivers down her spine. Celes' hand found a bony shoulder as Terra gripped her by the waist, and the other she raised to cup Terra's jaw, that perfect pointed jaw that begged for kisses on its underside.
They parted, panting and wide-eyed as colour bled back into the world.
“Well,” said Terra, grinning ear to ear, “I won't be forgetting that one any time soon.”
Celes wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Words refused to order themselves, her chest empty of air at the sight of Terra's reddened, wet lips curling in delight. “That was... not quite what I had in mind,” she stammered. “But it was sweet of you.” Sweet as strawberries. “To give that to me.”
Terra took a step away from her. “Sweet.” Her voice was quiet and flat and she turned to the floor, downcast – for but a moment. Sidling slowly backwards, the impish grin came back to her face as she reached up, clasped the thin strap of her dress, and let it fall.
Nothing lay under the dress save for white skin, a sharp collarbone exposed to the sticky air of the greenhouse. Celes froze in place, breathless with their kiss still dewy on her lips. “What are you doing?”
Terra laughed, a short and surprised sound. “Come on,” she said, her fingers closing around the other strap. She let it fall, baring the tops of her breasts. “You're more perceptive than that.”
Without looking away, Terra peeled the dress down to her waist. The rest of her was flawless snow, too, broken only by the dusty pink rosebuds that crowned the rise of her breasts. Smaller than they looked in the tight dresses she usually wore – perfectly palm-sized. Not for her eyes. Celes wrenched them away, wrung them shut, hands behind her back on the bench where no harm could be done by them.
“Terra,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Terra only shrugged and cast her belt to the side, throwing it to the floor with a gentle ringing. “I'm trying to ensorcell you.”
“Well, you went to the dictionary for that one,” Celes muttered, and shook herself. “You need to stop. This door doesn't lock.”
Undaunted, Terra only placed one hand on her hip, tossing the bound sweep of her hair over her naked shoulder. Pinpricks of sweat began to bead between her breasts in the cloying heat. “Is the door your only objection?”
Celes closed her eyes, but Terra half-undressed painted herself in the darkness. Her hands fell open at her sides for want of anything to grab. No gloves. Cid gave her the first pair when he found her, ten years old and holding back a howling grief as the red of a dying rose fell, ice-encased, from her cold hands. Nobody locked the greenhouse when nothing of value was kept there, only plants, and not the ones you chewed for food or for medicine. Yet they called her all the same, every hour after her drills, standing among clouds of scent and a tangle of colours whose names she did not know. No guards, no soldiers, no twenty other girls crammed into an unpainted dormitory. Just the slow drip of the dew from the leaves, the trickle of the font as the water made its way to her, unhurried and uninstructed.
But the mere brush of her fingertips stole the life from anything unfortunate enough to find itself in her path. Cid led her away from the roses that day, to a different set of gloves. Metal finished with leather, wrought to wrap around a sword.
She cleared her throat. “Anyone could see you.”
Terra shrugged. “So let them. I have no problem fucking you for an audience.”
That word was a harsh thing, guttural. It belonged not to a voice that whispered ever so sweetly. “If you want to pull that dress back up -”
“But why?” Terra sauntered back and forth before her, running her hands over the crests and valleys of her torso. “This body isn't ugly, so why be ashamed of it?”
Celes tore herself away and turned her back, busying herself arranging tools on her bench, scrapers and planters slipping between trembling fingers as she laid them side by side, where they ought to be. “I don't know what's gotten into you,” she said, throat tightening. “But you need to go, Terra. You need to put your clothes back on and go.”
Silence. No rustle of rearranged silk, no barely-there footsteps on the flagstones, no creak of hinges to signal Celes was alone again. Terra still waited behind her blazing white, the way she used to be when the other half of her took over. Showing skin no-one else's eyes had ever graced before. Celes gripped the edge of her bench in long fingers filthy with soil beneath her nails. Work-darkened, calloused, hard, they'd stain anywhere they touched.
“Celes?”
A quieter voice she spoke with, then. The one she used when they first found her, hesitant and on the edge of shattering, as if making itself small could keep it whole. Celes flinched as a soft hand found her back.
“It's me.” Two arms wrapped around her waist, a pointed little chin pressing into her shoulder. Terra, half-naked and flush against her. “I'm still me. And I can't read people the way you can, but I know you look at me sometimes. It's alright. I want you to.”
Celes remained still but for a shudder as Terra's nipples hardened against the her skin. Then the warmth around her fell away, back to where Terra was safe. A sigh ghosted in the air behind her. “I'm sorry. I thought this was what you wanted.”
“Terra.” Celes turned to find her with one arm inside the strap of her dress. She straightened again, jutting her chin and pointing one hip towards Celes – a challenge. “Most people talk about this sort of thing beforehand, I think.”
“I didn't exactly script it ahead of time,” Terra said, and laughed. “I only came in for the flowers. Well...”
“Well?”
“I did ask Setzer once what you should do when you're trying to seduce a woman -”
That explains it.
“- because I thought I could do the opposite of everything he told me -”
I stand corrected.
“- but then he must've done something right, if he got himself into the royal bed. So let's try this again.” She marched up to Celes and cupped her face in both hands. “I love you.”
Terra spoke as confidently as she ever had, not so much as a quiver in her voice. Her eyes were wide and gleaming with hope, the way they had on the journey home when she loosed her curls for the first time. Had any woman ever looked surer in her life? “I love you. I always ha -”
“No.” Celes took Terra's left hand in her right and drew it away, even as her heart clenched cold. “No, Terra. You can't tell yourself you've fallen in love with the first person who was kind to you.”
“And you can't tell me what I do or don't feel.” Terra frowned, steeled herself. “You should know better than anyone that I'm not the glass flower the others think I am. After everything we've been through.”
Nobody moved.
“Tell me,” Terra said, lowering her voice to a pitch unheard since the days she could streak like star-fire across the sky. “If someone came to the castle with bad intentions for someone I care about, do you think I'd hesitate?”
Celes shivered, shrinking from the burn in those pale eyes. “Not for a moment.”
“Correct. I'd take one of the swords from the statues in the hall and run them through, or cut their throat, before they could even look at you or the children.”
“I don't doubt that you would.”
Terra turned from her, offering the view of a smooth back, unabashedly naked. “Do you know something?” She paced with a predatory deliberation, a shark's smile forming on her face. “And I've never told anyone this before. But when I came to this castle for the first time, Edgar and Locke didn't know about my magic. Only that the empire wanted me. And you remember how I was then, I'm sure. Hunched over, jumping out of my skin if a door creaked the wrong way, trying not to take up any space. Anyone I met only spoke to me in whispers, pushed me by the shoulders wherever they wanted me to go. But we were attacked crossing the desert, and I showed them what I could do.”
She grinned, then, a wicked thing. “And you know, a part of me loved the look in their eyes when they were afraid of me.”
Celes shivered. Theirs were far from the first hearts Terra had struck fear into, weaving fire in the air with the wave of her hand – not that she could remember. Not that the battle-hardened soldiers who shied away from the witch cared to look for the fear in the empty eyes behind the flames. No, their gaze fixed on her power, and sometimes the budding breasts growing beneath the flimsy gowns they gift-wrapped her in. Celes had hung her head in shame, drawing inward her body, changing by the day beneath armour that could only shield her for so long.
Before her, Terra swept a lock of hair as green as the ferns back behind her ear. “It's gone, Celes,” she said, pointing to the silver scar at her temple. “No-one's told me what to do in a long time. And you don't have ice in your blood anymore.”
Celes wrapped a hand around the purple blot that marked the first injection site, the first spoiling of her skin before swords and whips and the wear and tear of life on road took their toll.
Terra shrugged. “If you can look me in the eye and ask me to do it, I'll get dressed again and go. Promise.”
Only the running water dared to make a sound. Celes' throat had stoppered, the way it did when she caught the talk around the campfire, the furtive whispers in the training yard. “I can still look, though,” would be one private's response to an older comrade's reminder of the power that lurked under the soft skin of the emperor's prettiest toys. A secret sight, something shameful. A prelude to roughened hands and tearing and taking, but what else should one such as Celes expect? Fit for the touch of neither man nor beast, they called her, and laughed even as they cowered.
Locke was all slow and careful assurances in the Jidoor inn where they spent the last night before the assault on Kefka's tower, where she let him strip the bindings from her body for the first time. Leather and laces murmured against her skin as gentle as the silver moonlight as she learned to be soft in all the places a woman was meant to be. But his touches were reverent, almost cowed, always – as if she'd never taken off the general's guise at all.
Fit for neither man nor beast.
But no-one ever said anything about a creature just like her. “You were there,” she said, cracked and halting. “You were always there. In Vector, and here, too. Growing things.”
“That's right.” Terra's fingers worked light and deft as they traced a stray forelock of Celes' hair. “We're always marching to the same beat, Celes. And it's not a war drum anymore. So you know you're not going to break me by taking what you want. Just try. You can't.”
Terra's smile softened, and stepping back, she lifted her dress up and over her head. Framed by a wall of morning glory, clad in nothing but unadorned white underwear, she could have been a painting by a forgotten old master, her hair and pallor blending into the leaves as if all were one. But she stepped forward over the puddles on the floor and wrapped her lean body around Celes. That quick mouth found hers like they'd done it the thousand times she'd wished for.
“You're so beautiful,” Celes breathed between kisses, damp beneath the clothes that clung to her like burrs. Heavy hands she kept by her side – where to put them, without the barrier of clothing between them? But Terra drew away a fraction, took one in her own. Her eyes fixed on Celes – an invitation, an assurance she could stop – as she lifted the hand to her chest, placing it on her left breast, gasping when their skin met. The sound came again, deeper and throatier, when Celes pressed and rubbed her thumb over her nipple, and Terra drew closer to the tender skin below Celes' jaw.
“I wanted you to do this for so long,” Terra whispered in her ear, then kissed behind it. “Do you know how many times I touched myself in bed and pretended it was your mouth on me instead?”
Breathless at the lightest scrape of teeth on her throat, Celes leaned back and let her hands drink in the body that offered itself. She ran her fingers through Terra's hair, massaging her nape, and traced the flow of her spine with her knuckles. As Terra's ministrations left black on blue on her neck, Celes cupped a breast in each hand, and Terra's face when she raised it was hungry – like she could smell how aroused she was. Celes held her tight and kissed her – playful this time, teasing her mouth.
Then Terra moved back, breathing hard with a quick tug on Celes' blouse. “It's not fair if you're the only one still dressed.”
Celes nodded and dropped her hands away from hard nipples that seemed redder where her fingers had been. She made quick work of the buttons that kept the loose cotton covering her own, sliding her arms free as Terra watched with darkened, heavy-lidded eyes.
“Keep going.”
Celes lifted her hand to the strap of her bra – and stopped. An uneven line of grey-mauve circles mapped the path of the syringe along the length of her arm, darkened craters in sun-browned skin stretched over hard muscle. Still she bent at the waist, unhooked her bra and let it join her shirt on the wet ground – exposing the gash across her right shoulder. A mere moment of foolish inattention and the boy's sword caught her, left the flesh to crag and silver as the years went by.
But Terra's eyes showed no sign of disincentive. Not at the sword's brand, nor the whiplash and friction that left their marks across Celes' abdomen. She only stared at her newly bared breasts and ran a hand slowly over her own chest, her stomach – and lower. Keep going, that hand said, slipping inside her underwear and lingering there.
So she did. Belt and boots followed suit, and then fumbling fingers found the lacing of her trousers. Terra's eyes widened as she slipped her own undergarments down and off, discarding them with a dainty kick. Half-naked, confronted with the patch of mossy hair at the juncture of Terra's legs, Celes at least had an answer for the burning question that plagued her garrison all those years ago.
She drew a deep breath and blinked their sneers away. No place, no time for that. Not least with Terra smiling darkly and touching herself, slow but insistent, urging with all of her being for Celes to hurry it up. Under that rapt stare she peeled one leg out of her trousers and lifted the other – toppling to the side as she went.
Planting both feet back on firm ground, she bent and rolled the trousers the rest of the way down instead. Behind the curtain of her hair Terra tapped one foot on the floor, and Celes could only laugh. “At least now I know I'm not dreaming.”
In a flash Terra was on her again, back in her arms and fitting the angles and curves of their bodies into alignment. She placed her legs to either side of Celes' knee and rocked herself back and forth with a delighted gasp. As soft moans took flight and raised the hair on Celes' arms, Terra's hand stroked over the plane of her stomach. “I've always loved your muscles,” she murmured, grinding harder against the leg Celes held in place. “And how strong you are. But look at the way you're tensing up and shaking every time I touch you.”
Terra's voice was breathy and thin, poised on the precipice of a nervous giggle, but the swipe of her palm against the sensitive skin under Celes' right breast drew a long-dormant gasp from her throat. Her back arched as Terra's lips left her neck and moved south to her nipple, sucking and licking as her other hand travelled lower, over the small of her back and around to grip her by the ass.
“Terra,” she breathed, opening her legs wider. She was sopping wet just out of Terra's reach, where those fingers needed to be – but Terra stopped, held her still by the hips, pressing hard enough to flood all the blood in her body to her groin. That quick mouth left her nipple as Terra kissed her again, all tongues and moans they swallowed, pushing their bodies together as close as two could be. What have you been reading that taught you to kiss this way?
Upon parting for air Terra's eyes were moving downward, bright with mischief. One finger came to rest along the length of her slit, so close, so close, and Celes fell forward into her arms with a sharp gasp. Someone was there to catch her, always, and she breathed deep the scent Terra carried through the desert of a verdant and whispering forest.
But then Terra was gone, taking her warmth with her. Without so much as a blush she leaned back against the bench and spread her legs, running her own hand over her sex. Beckoning. Celes dropped wordless to her knees before her and placed both hands on Terra's thighs. Above her and holding her eye, Terra only nodded, pushing her hips forward by way of request.
Celes swallowed, settled for stroking her palms over the expanse of skin presented to her. Terra was as roused as she was and trembling with want for the swipe of a tongue, for the sweet suckling of eager lips – the most delicious ache in the world, and Celes was no stranger, though never on this side of the equation. Never with a woman. But of course Terra hadn't, either. No-one had ever done as Celes did and grasped her by the hips, brushing kisses against the soft inside of her thighs until she whimpered. Terra's hand threaded itself through her hair, guiding her with a wordless urge. A deep breath in and Celes kissed her there between her legs, where no other mouth had been offered the privilege. No other had been blessed with the chance to put out their tongue and sweep it oh-so-softly over her, letting her mingle with the thick and heady air of the greenhouse, savouring the tremors that shivered across her body and the sigh that fell from her lips.
“That's it,” Terra murmured, her head thrown back and eyes fluttering closed when Celes raised her own. Full of hunger, she parted Terra's lips with both hands as Terra rearranged herself, legs wider, further back on the bench, all the better – and yelped. Celes caught her back with both hands as one foot slipped on a small puddle, her head veering close to the hard edge of the counter.
Steadying herself on the bench with balance and composure regained, Terra laughed. “Well, now I know I'm not dreaming,” she said, and softened into a hazy smile. “Lie back.”
That calm, benign look belied the quiet authority of her words. Celes, General Chere, bristled where she knelt on the damp floor. But an order was an order, and Terra was all the more beautiful from below. She lay back among the trailing vines, flinching as the cold pressed into her bare skin, one inch and then another. Anyone could have opened that unlocked door and find her naked, spreadeagled on wet ground, with Terra high above – it sent a deep, throbbing ache of pleasure pounding to her sex.
“Well,” she said, to Terra's lofty smirk. “Are you joining me or not?”
Terra cackled under her breath as she sank to her knees. Leaning back, she bundled their discarded clothing together and placed it under Celes' head in a makeshift pillow. Kind of her, though it offered little in the way of warmth or relief for the back. Undeterred, Terra straddled her waist with her knees pressing into the stone, and moaned lightly when their skin touched. Hands running over the insides of her thighs had her shuddering, arching her back; and if anyone was to open the door, they'd have found Terra grinding gently back and forth on Celes below her, pinned in place.
Terra plucked one purple bloom from the fronds on the bench above, raising it to her laughing mouth. “Who knew it would be so easy to get you doing what I want?” she purred, plucking the petals one by one and letting them fall in a slow rain over Celes' exposed stomach. Her hand fell to Celes' shoulder, the pad of her thumb trailing to her throat and pressing ever so slightly. She mapped the contours of Celes' collar, the soft skin of her bicep, then let those deadly fingers crest over the swell of a breast. Celes gasped as Terra tweaked a nipple, grinning to herself all the while. “You can touch me too, you know. Any time you like.”
An invisible hand clapped itself over Celes' mouth, even with both of Terra's cupping her breasts and a searing heat flowing from those fingers through the length of her body. Many hands, calloused by war. Barely warmed by the fire they spoke at, in a circle, of what they'd do to Terra given five minutes alone with her in the flimsy dresses the emperor put her in. Of what Celes would do to anyone who stood in her way.
She gathered her voice to a feeble croak, at last. “My hands aren't gentle.”
Terra sighed, sitting back. “And just what is it you think they're going to do to me?”
“I don't know,” said the voice of a lost child, left alone in the cold. “I don't want to find out.”
Terra frowned, then brightened, lifting her hands to her hair – and she stopped, mouth open on a half-formed word.
Celes nodded gently. “What were you going to say?”
“Nothing,” said Terra, shaking her head.
“It must have been something, especially now you're turning red.”
“No, it was silly, you don't -” But her eyes fell on Celes spread under her again and she reached out, running painfully gentle fingers along her jaw, guiding Celes' eyes back to her own. “Just that I might have an idea.”
With that, Terra arched her back and pulled the ribbon from her hair. Loose, fern-coloured curls tumbled down over her shoulders. A very painting of the past, when she freed it for the first time over the green of a world reborn.
Regaining her smirk, she stretched the strip of silk between her hands. “If you're so worried about it,” she intoned slowly, “put your hands up by the leg of that bench.”
Celes froze. Cold iron gripped her by the wrists, wrenched her arms over her head in a cellar thick with mould where she'd never see the light of day again. Straining at the metal, screaming, all her dignity abandoned for the slightest chance of a break in the chain. Beaten black and blue with blood in her mouth and spit in her hair, she only waited to die in the ignominy befitting a monster turned traitor.
But there was Terra waiting above her, hearth-hot and beautiful with a blue fire in her eyes that never died with the other half of her, the day the magic went away.
Celes nodded and did as the heat between her legs bade, placing one hand on either side of the metal. A wide-eyed Terra leaned forward, bringing the buds of her nipples almost close enough for Celes to lick and suck on, should she only lift her neck. “You'll tell me if you change your mind, won't you?”, she said, stroking Celes' palm.
A snaking caress wound its way around her wrists. The silk was soft and Terra's touch was softer, holding her in place. She tied a knot, firm and quick and deft, and lifted her hands away. Celes tugged lightly, just once, at the binding – it didn't shift a bit. Just what else could those nimble fingers do? Celes shifted her hips on the ground, helpless to do anything but press and rub her thighs together for the slightest hint of relief.
“I will,” she stammered. “But that won't be necessary.”
Terra sat back on her heels, admiring her handiwork. “Do you know how gorgeous you are, Celes?”
She only laughed and turned to face the stone ceiling above them, the same as it ever was, barely touched by the tallest of the climbing plants. “Whatever is Edgar keeping in that library that put all of this in your head?”
“That doesn't answer my question.” She laid herself on top of Celes, skin on skin at every juncture. “I want to hear you say it. That you know how beautiful you are.”
Met with silence, Terra only shook her head and nibbled gently at Celes' neck. Arching her back, Celes pulled her constraints tighter and hissed. The binding made her shiver in a way Terra must have felt, must have, close as they were. “I want you to know,” she poured into Celes' ear. “Look at you, tied up, desperate for it. Who'd ever be scared of you?”
“I...” She tugged at the knot again – immovable, just like Terra, leaning up on her elbow and smirking at her.
“Just three words,” she said. “Two, if you bring in a contraction.”
“Yes. It was me who told you what a contraction is.” Celes groaned at the burn beginning to kindle in the muscles of her arms. “There you have it. I'm beautiful. So many have said. Now if -”
Terra swatted lightly at her thigh. “All in good time.” She drew up onto all fours and cold and clammy air flooded between them. Her head bowed, eyes unfocused, as if waking from a dream.
“I haven't, either,” said Celes in a voice that cracked. “Not with a woman. So it isn't just you.”
Terra lifted her gaze again and smiled more softly, reaching out to stroke the sharp angle of Celes' cheek. “Well,” she whispered, “we've both always been fast learners, haven't we? You with this garden, me with my books...”
“Exactly.” The tension fell from Celes' body, all the worst case scenarios melting away as they laughed together. It was Terra, who'd hard won her life and had no-one to hold her, to tell her how lovely she was, to caress and kiss her into a sheet-clutching ecstasy that would show her how good having a body could feel. And Celes had never been one to bow away from a duty. “Now come here.”
“Bold of you to give me orders when you're the one tied up,” said Terra, crawling forward. A last kiss, quick and furtive, and she spread herself with knees on either side of Celes' shoulders. A steadying hand raked along Celes' scalp as she lowered herself, breath hitching when Celes leaned upward to dab at her. A laugh escaped, a slight exhalation that had Terra flinching again. There she was, the frostbitten terror of an empire who stalked the ramparts with her freezing glare, lying bound and naked and helplessly ensconced in the warm and heady cave Terra made of her body.
Celes shivered, parting parched lips as Terra settled, awaiting the touch of her tongue in earnest. She raised her head again as far as she could and kissed her, prompting a tiny whine and a ripple that washed across the muscles of Terra's stomach. Now who's easy? Light-headed on her scent Celes licked the length of her, lingering a moment on the hardened bud at her centre that had Terra yelping. The grip on her hair tightened as she did it again, again, taking all the time in the world.
“Celes...” A needy, rasping gasp of her name as Terra's head fell back. Opening her legs wider, she splayed herself across Celes' face in a wordless plea for more. But she could stand to wait a moment longer. Celes lapped at her leisurely, all the better to draw out more of the quivers and moans that ran through the lithe woman who pinned her down. Later, in a bed and with both hands free, she'd let one rest on and toy with a peaking nipple as her other worked hard and fast to see how Terra liked her fingers. She'd push Terra's thighs against her chest and hold her there, immobile as she was, writhing and crying out as Celes moved at her own pace. She'd have Terra sit facing the other way as they pleasured one another in tandem, burying their moans in each other's arousal. But in her domain among the flowers it was enough to be Terra's root, to let her roll her hips as Celes squeezed her thighs together for something, a hint, any pressure at all. She pressed her tongue harder against the slick flesh that begged for her, breathing in her nectar.
Air already heavy with the breath of the flowers thinned as Terra moved faster, ground harder, her fingers making a fist with Celes' hair in its centre, pulling just on the edge of too much. “Your mouth is so soft.” She breathed in a silken whisper, dream-like and desperate, turning guttural as she pushed herself harder into the tongue that fought to keep up with her. “Don't stop, Celes, that's it, that's just right.”
Back and forth, back and forth, as Celes lay sated with the taste of her that no-one had ever known before. She moaned in the back of her throat as she suckled on Terra, swooning from her and untouched and building as the pace quickened. She'd be the first to learn, in turn, the sweet things Terra's mouth and hands were capable of. She moaned again, sucking on her like a drowning woman – there was no space between Terra's movements for teasing or savouring. In that bed under the moonlight she'd take hours to lick Terra open until she pleaded, slick heat building between them in the chill of the desert at night, time after time, how could she have ever thought to say no?
The air between Terra's legs grew denser, a weight to breathe. Celes flicked her tongue like fighting as she rolled her hips harder, back and forth and back and forth, crashing in waves against the mouth that opened for her. Her cries loudened as a tremor took her legs. With a harsher gasp Terra fell forward and clenched Celes' hair in her fist, her other hand slapping the wet stone as she ground down, moving in erratic bursts while her whole body shuddered with pleasure.
Terra fell slack on top of her once the shocks subsided, flinching and whimpering when Celes drew soft circles with her tongue. Wet-mouthed and buried in Terra's body, her arms lifted – and stayed put, tensed in mid-air by the silk ribbon. She tugged ineffectually at the bindings while her body begged to hold Terra and press kisses to the sweat on her brow. Instead Celes lay aching in the sticky, sweet-smelling enclave Terra made with her spent body, a body heaving with hard breaths as she scrambled back up onto her elbows. She swam before Celes' eyes with the ivy tangle of her hair all in disarray and a glowing sheen cast over her white skin, and nothing in an inch of the world they travelled together had ever been more beautiful. Beautiful, and braver than anyone, and she loves you.
“I love you, too,” she panted.
Terra dived down for an open-mouthed kiss, hungry and eager as she tongued her own taste from Celes' lips. When breathless she nuzzled her neck, trailed her mouth in a slow line down Celes' chest as she settled on the softest part of her stomach, grinning away. “I know,” she said, face aglow. “You don't hide things as well as you think.”
“I want to touch you,” Celes said, pulling again at her bonds. “I want -”
“Not just yet.” Terra swung her feet behind her in the air, as calm and casual as if she wasn't lying naked and freshly fucked on a damp stone floor. “I like you here. I might even leave you all strung up. Can you imagine? Anyone could walk in and find you.” She licked a stripe over the line of muscle bisecting Celes' stomach and chuckled at the shiver she earned. “What would they say about our famous fearsome general then?”
Celes moaned – desperate, with Terra's tongue doing no more than forming words. “The longer we spend down here,” she said, “the more I start to wonder if you want someone to walk in on us.”
“Well,” said Terra, laughing as she glanced towards the ceiling in an imitation of contemplation, “it would change the patronising way they think of me if they did. But if it really happened I know I'd never be able to look them in the eye again.”
“In that case.” Celes rolled her hips and rippled her body under Terra's weight by way of a hint.
“Patience,” Terra whispered, kissing just below her navel and reaching up to flick one nipple, the softest reprimand. “You're not heading up the troops now, general, and you're being awfully demanding now I have you at my mercy. Don't forget I could put my dress back on and leave you as you are, if I wanted.”
“If you expect me to beg,” Celes said, as proud and dignified as anyone could sound while naked and bound and displayed for anyone who wished to see the flowers upon that of all afternoons, “then I must inform you that I've endured far worse than this and remained the very ideal of determined stoicism.”
Terra quirked an eyebrow. Moving with painful slowness, she traced a finger from Celes' navel to the join of her thighs.
Celes jolted at the cold touch to her hot skin. Her hips rose of their own accord, pulling and wrenching at her arms as she groaned. “Please,” she croaked, the sound catching in her throat as her eyes fell closed. What would they think, every soldier who cowered from her and every uniformed master who told her to wipe away her tears for good, if they saw her trembling with need underneath a smug Terra? She shivered again and spoke more firmly. “Please, Terra.”
She gave a contented hmph of laughter and traced the finger over Celes' sex, teasing at the edge of her opening, dancing on the verge of where she was needed most. “Well, that was easier than I thought. Anything else you'd like me to know?”
“Please, Terra,” Celes said, again, lifting her neck as far as the ribbon would permit. “Touch me, please, it's been so long...”
“Oh? How long?”
“I feel like I've been down here forever. Terra, please, just...”
“Just what?” The voice of her torment was no less chirpy and composed, no less infuriating, no less lovely as it drove home her need. “Do you like it when I do this with my hands?” she drawled, and Celes inhaled sharply as her finger rubbed at her folds. “Or did you want my tongue?”
“I...” Celes squirmed, face heated past boiling point. “Both. Either. Anything. You can't leave me this way, Terra, you can't, please -”
“At last, she asks politely. Alright.” Terra's voice trailed to a reedy whisper as she pushed herself back, her chin hovering over Celes' waiting need. And then Terra was still, chewing for but a moment at her lip – a chink in the armour. “Here I go.”
“You'll be fine,” said Celes, smiling, and would that she could reach down to stroke the stray hair from Terra's furrowed brow and ease her. “If the way you kiss is -”
She choked at the quick sweep of Terra's tongue over the pooling wetness before her. Even so slight a pressure seared every nerve in her body and she writhed against her bindings. Terra lifted her chin, grinning away as though she'd been down there some thousand times before. Narrowing her eyes and scowling only had Terra grinning wider, but she lowered her head in turn, kissing her once before her tongue came out again.
Celes fell slack and moaned deeply, straining her arms, useless and trapped. Terra made her way slowly, slowly downward, kissing the skin she found exposed for her before her tongue lapped at last at her opening. She had Celes shuddering and moaning with the lightest laps at the arousal she'd spent so long fine-tuning, at her head of green curls busy between her legs. Celes ground her hips against that mouth, urging for more – but Terra was quick, pushing her thighs back towards as her stomach and keeping her pinned as she teased.
Celes sighed. In truth, the soft, warm lines Terra licked all over her could have been to prolong to the agony, but she could just as easily have no clue where to put her tongue to take Celes to the same heights she rode to. But it was Terra, and Terra was nothing if not observant. When she graced the spot that had Celes' whole body clenching, she dived back in and pressed the widest part of her tongue against her.
Celes squealed.
All motion ceased. Terra stopped and spluttered with laughter. Opening her eyes, Celes did the same, face all the redder as helpless giggles racked her whole body, filling the emptiness where Terra's tongue had been.
“That wasn't a dignified sound,” Terra said, stroking the backs of her thighs lightly. “Do you think anyone would ever believe me if I told them you squeak? That you turn into a little mouse just with my tongue on you?”
Laughter subsiding, Celes settled back and parted her legs wider. “Any time you want to make me do it again -”
Terra swatted gently at her calf. “Don't go acting tough now after you just squeaked at me. Ask nicely.”
She sighed. “Terra, please.”
A wink. “I'll let you have that one.” Then Terra dipped her head and suckled at the centre of Celes' pleasure, making circles with her tongue in a way that turned the world to white. Celes whimpered and gyrated her hips on the ground, straining the ribbon. With her hands free, she'd press herself against Terra's mouth and take all she had to give, but the binding bit at her wrists with sharp reminders and sent a new kind of chill down her spine.
Eyes open a slit, Celes gasped aloud at the sight of Terra with her hips pushed in the air and her own hand working between her legs. The moans that fell from her lips rumbled softly on Celes' skin. How many times have you done that, Terra? Was it always me you imagined down there? How long were you carrying this around? Terra nigh on screamed when she came, a release that could have been years in the making, and how sweet it would be to join her. One foot planted firm on the floor and Celes raised herself again, grinding as hard as she could on the quick little mouth that wasn't fast enough.
As if taking pity of her, Terra stroked with her fingers at Celes' entrance. Within her an emptiness yawned, aching to be filled, and Terra took her clenching as permission enough and eased her way inside. In and out, in and out, slow at first but quickening Celes's breath all the same. She tossed helplessly on the ground as Terra drew slow circles inside her, the opposite direction to the way her tongue moved, meeting in the middle in a crescendo of bliss. “Yes, Terra, yes, perfect,” she keened, pulling and pulling at the taut ribbon. How hard could it be to break, to tear in two? “Please, keep going.”
A weary sigh rippled like the stroke of silk over her skin, soaked and aching and desperate. “Again with the orders,” Terra muttered, but the pace of her fingers quickened as her mouth descended anew. And then she stopped, but only for a second.
Her voice lowered to a rasping, hungry exhalation. “Imagine if the whole castle came through that door right now. What they'd think of you, if they saw.”
Bowing her head again, Terra mouthed all the pleasure she could from the body offered her. One last lap of her tongue and a great wave washed over Celes, alight in every inch of her as she jerked and cried, loud enough to alert any guard stationed at the top of the stairs, loud enough for anyone gathered in the throne room countless feet above to hear. The ribbon wound tighter around her wrists as she craned, then hollowed into trembling as the wave ebbed away.
One last shudder racked her body as Terra planted a quick, almost chaste kiss on the centre of her mound. A moment in the dark and Celes opened her eyes again. Her greenhouse was much the same as ever, its ceiling of warm-coloured stone and walls of fogged glass, ferns trailing over a floor wet with spring water that trickled in with a gentle music from deep under the sand – but there was Terra, hauling herself up on her knees beside her head, one breast poised over Celes' face as she reached out to untie the knot in her ribbon.
The silk fell away and drifted to the floor. Celes' hands fell, too, limp and tingling-numb. She brought her arms in close to her chest, rubbing with her thumbs at the indented skin where the binding had chafed. Terra, winding the ribbon in criss-crossing lines between her fingers, leaned in and laughed as if wine-merry as she kissed her again. “I told you,” she murmured, her lips still wet with where her mouth had been. Nodding at her handiwork, she took a reddened hand in hers and raised it, kissing close to the wrist. “I told you you'd do well for me. You always have, at anything you tried.”
“I don't know what to say,” Celes panted as the tremors in her limbs slowed and subsided. Hardly a new dilemma for one such as me, born on the wrong side of the rest of the world. But Terra was warm beside her as she lifted herself from the floor, resting her head on her shoulder. A tongue could work in other languages than the spoken; the body said all one needed to when given a chance to speak.
She traced her knuckles over the hollow of Terra's cheekbone, kissed her there, plucked out the drying carnation leaf tangled in her hair. A tension shifted from the join of Celes' shoulders, even as a dampened chill ghosted over her sweat-slick skin. How funny and how very sad that cruel words, thrown without thought into the whiskey-soused air around an army campfire, could have ever held her back. From giving Terra the pleasure and performance and precise attention she deserved, having her take what she wanted in a body colonised and strip-mined for so long. From letting herself unwind and unspool and forget it all for but a moment. From being alive, in every facet.
“I don't know what to say, either,” Terra whispered in a small voice, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I haven't felt like that since... well. Not since I could fly.”
Positioned above her with all abandon gone... yes. Yes, the part of Terra that tore through the sky and screamed with all she couldn't say had never left. Not wholly. Nothing real ever did. Celes nuzzled at her neck, sweet-scented with the musk of their lovemaking and the small breaths of the flowers. “We should get dressed again,” she murmured. “I half-expected to sit up and see faces at the windows.”
She picked up Terra's dress and shook it out. To little avail – the delicate fabric had creased where it crumpled into a ball, all its petalled layers in disarray, and runoff from the floor had blotched the fabric. Celes' garb fared little better, but she shrugged on her blouse all the same. “Aren't you cold?” she said, nudging Terra's shoulder with her own as she wove her lacing back into decency. “Terra?”
She hadn't moved from where she sat, curled into a tight cluster of elbows and knees and staring towards the door.
“All japes aside, Terra, you should put this on again. And,” she said, allowing an allusive lilt back into her voice, “the sooner we get out of here, the sooner we can find a bed, if you'd like.”
Terra nodded. “Mmm.”
“Not that it'll help if anyone catches us. Our things are soaked, and our hair, and I'm sure they'd be able to smell -”
“I just -”
Celes paused, immobilised by the open palm Terra held up in front of her face. Wincing as if in pain, Terra looked away from her, holding herself closer. “I just need a minute. That's all.”
Celes pressed her lips closed and waited, as told. The woman who not so long ago used Celes' mouth with such wild abandon sat huddled in the same position, facing the wall with arms tight around herself. A cocoon. Or a shield. Celes frowned and reached with one hand to trace the lovely arc of Terra's spine.
Only a shudder met her there. Terra flinched from the touch, and when she turned her head, her face was wet with more than dew.
“Terra?” Celes shuffled onto her knees and crawled to sit in front of her, stroking the fingers of Terra's left hand. “What's wrong?”
Terra looked at Celes with all the fire in her eyes as they made love drowned and dead, wiping with the heels of both hands at the tears spilling down her cheeks. She dropped her head to hide her face and hugged herself tighter. “I'm sorry,” she said, voice cracking. “I just need a minute.”
“Of course.” Celes gripped Terra's hand in hers, even with the bottom falling out of her stomach. “It can be... overwhelming. And not just for the first time. This was certainly not what I planned to do with the afternoon.”
Terra gave a clucking, bitter laugh from within her hiding place. “I really did just come in for the flowers,” she whispered. Then she dropped her shoulders and sobbed, long and keening, on the floor.
Celes bristled as Terra pulled her hand away, still holding the ribbon, still tangling it back and forth between her fingers with a clumsy urgency. She reached out to touch her arm, then stopped. But she gentled her voice as she spoke. “Why don't you try to tell me what it is you're feeling that's making you cry?” she said. “That's what you get other people to do, isn't it? If I -”
“No.” Terra shook her head, swallowed a sob. “Not you.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and breathed out slowly, stumbling over her words. “Do you remember, a long time ago, in Narshe? When we met for the first time?”
“Outside of Vector, yes,” said Celes. Get to the point, she didn't say, as she rubbed at the gooseflesh the cold made on her arms, winding its way into her bones.
“You're right. As usual.” Terra sniffed and wiped her nose again. “But do you remember? I hurt you.”
“I remember.” Celes' voice was tight and clipped, too loud in the heavy haze of the greenhouse, damp air thick with the airborne intoxicant Terra had extolled with such confidence not so long ago. Her hands she clasped beneath her, lest she grab Terra by the bony elbows and shake her from her stupor. She only stilled, shivering with no arms around her.
Terra only sniffled, dropping the ribbon onto her feet. “I didn't mean to...”
All this time, you've been holding it over me? But Celes kept her voice even, as befit her station. “I always meant to talk to you about that.”
“I only wanted to ask -”
“I know, I know. You were saying we were the same.”
“I didn't do it very well, did I?”
Another bout of crying, racking Terra's slight body as she collapsed into herself again. “No,” Celes said, as soothing as she could with her heart hammering. “It took two of us that day. You tried to reach out, and -”
“I just wanted to know. I asked General Leo and Shadow, too. And they were very kind to me, and now -”
And the winding vice of tension within Celes snapped. “Why are you talking about our dead friends now?”
Her voice became the clash of two blades, too loud in the stillness of the greenhouse. No drawing it back in, as the flowers did the water in their soil. Soundless reverberation seemed to rattle the very windows. And if anyone should hear Terra crying from the corridor and run inside, they'd find her unclothed and ruined, and Celes sat beside her bristling like a beast in hunt. And what would they think of her then?
Nothing they don't already.
“I'm sorry,” Terra said again, her attempts to dry her face with the rest of her skin long abandoned. “I only wanted the flowers.”
All else be damned, Celes reached out and clasped Terra's shoulder, soft but insistent with a burning that had to go somewhere. All was quiet a moment until Terra sat straighter, took in a deep breath, and turned back to her again.
“Well,” she said, “I did think about it before. Sometimes. When you and Locke were together I was so happy for you, both of you, but I couldn't understand why it made me sad at the same time. Not at first. But then he left and I wondered if you were lonely in bed on your own and then...” Terra shook her head. “What I mean is, well, I remember what Shadow and Leo said to me and then I don't know what they'd think of me now. Tying someone up, telling them what to do, what kind of a way is that to show them you love them?”
Celes took her into her arms and held her to her chest, pressing kisses to the crown of her head. “I'm still here, aren't I?” she said, rubbing Terra's back as she jolted with little half-suppressed sobs.
“I don't think I'm very good at this.”
“That's for me to decide.” Celes kissed her temple and smiled fondly, gathering the strength in her voice again. “You know, when I was with Locke, I couldn't – well. It was never bad. Far from it, actually. But I always felt...”
Terra shifted against her, meeting her eyes. They were dewy and bloodshot but wide again – that curiosity, piqued anew. Celes kissed her brow and continued. “He had an idea of me, I think. A role I filled. I doubt he thought so consciously. But I never would've felt I could ask him for anything, well, you know. Unusual.”
Terra drew back then, looking into her face with a small frown – but she'd stopped crying, at least for a moment. “Is this something you wanted? The whole time?”
“I can't say I'd ever indulged in a specific secret fantasy about having my hands tied with your hairpiece on the floor of my greenhouse on an otherwise ordinary afternoon, no,” she said, laughing. “But that's you. The way you go about your life here, it's as though you've never so much as thought about all the boxes people put themselves into. And that's how you... You gave me something I didn't know I needed, Terra. If that's not love, then what is?”
Terra dabbed at the last of the fluid from her nose and smiled again – a weak thing, but true. “You know just what to say, always. And that's why you're ambassador now.” She leaned closer, tilting up her head, a little edge back in her look. “So... was I better?”
Celes brought one hand to her chest in mock scandal. “I couldn't possibly say. Only different.”
Terra blinked the last lingering tears away and took her dress from behind Celes, unfolding it in her lap. With the crack of stiffened knees Celes stood and stretched her arms over her head. She offered a hand down to Terra, who'd slipped the sodden dress back over her head, and helped her back to her feet with what strength remained in her shaking limbs.
“I'll be alright,” she said. “It's just, well, a lot.” Terra sighed as she smoothed her skirts, tugging at the darker dampened patches. “Oh, dear. It really is obvious what we've been doing, isn't it?”
“You slipped while picking the carnations and pulled me down with you. Or we had a water fight, which I would win.”
Terra laughed. “You'd like to think so, wouldn't you?” She slipped her sandals back onto her feet, but it helped little. Her hair was a knotted briar and her dress, wrinkled and wet, did nothing to disguise the prominence of her still-roused nipples.
Celes nodded, reaching down past the sodden patches daubed on her legs for her boots. “We could head for my chambers, if you wish. They're closer and more out of the way. We'll find you something more presentable to put on.” And I could have you screaming the night away with no-one the wiser. You'll see what I can do with a bed under us, she didn't say. Not with Terra still pale and shaken and blinking away tears. Celes would only clothe her, hold her, let her fall asleep on her shoulder or read to her until guilt, that most unwelcome of intruders, left the way it came in the night.
“If we can get that far without being spotted by anyone.” Terra picked up her ribbon and tied it around her own wrist, running claw-shaped fingers through her hair. “We really could've planned this better.”
“I think you and I could use less strategising in our lives, don't you? Now don't forget your glasses.”