Work Text:
Try not to get so righteous
about what’s fair for everyone.
Find what’s left in you.
Channel something good.
Flickerish whispers to her sometimes.
It softly says nonsensical words aloud, as if it were doing the action unconsciously and thus going on without restraint. There’s never a pause in between the syllables it exhales, no endings to punctuate and separate any words from other words. One could describe it as a stream, ushering itself outward, an uttered run-on sentence that has no intention of stopping until maybe, just maybe, it’s told to. This seems to especially happen whenever she’s wiping it down, not so much after combat, but more so after her nerves heighten to the point that she needs to expel them somehow. She wants this routine to become a force of habit, thinking, that’s how soldiers work. Soldiers have a schedule with their bodies to the point that it makes them mechanical, operating under duress but doing so in a fashion that still makes them shine in the light. There’s a balance there that she desperately craves but can’t exactly maintain yet, energy such a coil in her that she often loses her footing. She hates to admit as much.
Jet had never met her aunt, but she’s more than sure that the General Rococoa of the House of Rocks doesn’t sound like the voice in her sword.
One night on the road, she thinks she’s the only one still awake, so she silently pads past her sleeping sister and uses the gentle snores of Liam’s pig Preston to disguise her steps as she walks the length of the caravan and retrieves her scabbard, which she left in a corner alongside Sour Scratch. In the starlight, the bow glitters a sickeningly sweet shade of green, and Jet catches herself staring at it as she takes her sheath into her hands. Idly, she wonders if Aunt Lazuli ever reaches out to Ruby in the same way this voice has. Would she know what it was like to hear someone unrecognizable calling out to her?
She’s about to retreat to the back of the caravan, thinking some privacy while everyone is asleep will do her some good, when someone breaks the silence by clearing his throat.
Her heart pounds against the half of the locket that hangs around her neck, a pulse of red from it beating with Ruby’s own blood, and her hand instinctively snakes around the hilt of her sword in reaction to the sound. There’s a selfish part of her that’s proud of herself for not needing the insistent reminder to go for it with immediacy. Reflexes tend to be achievements for her. She shouldn’t turn into a coward when it sounds so familiar, yet for some reason, outside of Candia, everything around her elevates her fears in ways she’s too scared to admit to even herself.
Startled eyes meet calm eyes, ones that have seen too little on ones that have seen too much. Seated and still in his armor, someone she’d assumed had been noiselessly slumbering away, is Sir Theobald. Something she notices and notes right away is that he’s taken his helmet off for once, and finally, he shows the entirety of his face. The man isn’t as old as she and Ruby had made him out to be. His gaze lingers on her as if he’s testing her, silently telling her to try him, and it dawns on Jet that it looks as though she’s intending to escape, straight out into the open air. The knight’s relief is visible when she shakes her head and settles at the very edge of the caravan instead, her hand bringing back a bit of cloth to let in more of the night. Now, she can better see the scabbard that rests in her lap.
There’s no exact invitation from her, yet Theobald rights himself up and shifts over to her side anyway, doing his best to peer at her and not be intrusive simultaneously. It’s either one or the other, so as is expected of his character, he’s blundering it badly. She lets him do it anyway.
“Are you alright, Princess?”
That seems to be the standard question to ask. The formality is so stifling for her, though, as someone that has successfully left the walls of Castle Candy behind. it’d been in the hopes of confronting people that carried themselves with a bit more normalcy. She supposes she should exclude Theobald from that, considering he’s no stranger, but she’s stubborn. “I’m fine, Theobald,” she answers indifferently as she draws the Twizzling Blade out, turning it over and over again and searching for the slightest smudge that mars its metal. There’s no inclination in her words that suggests he go away the way she normally implies. She simply doesn’t care for the conventions when there are barely any eyes on her.
“What are you doing up, then?”
“Couldn’t sleep. You?”
“Me?” He lets out a chuckles, as if the question requires hardly a thought. Really, it doesn’t. To put two and two together when it came to someone like Theobald is part of why he’s tempered so. It feels wrong to call the princess by her first name, but she seems to insist on a change of pace, so he obliges as if it were an order. “Jet, I’m Lord Commander of the Tartguard. I never sleep while the House of Rocks is under my care.”
It’s meant to be a light joke, but it gets to Jet. “And you’re not tired?”
She sees surprise rearrange his usually stoic features out of the corner of her eye. Then, he replies, as if ready for this.
“That’s not important. What’s important is your safety.”
Not a no, she wants to smart at him. That settles that, then.
Jet begins to scrub away at a pink smear near the tip of her sword, and Theobald takes that as a cue to carry on and pose another question to her.
“How has the Twizzling Blade been treating you?”
That’s one she can answer in earnest. “Good,” she says honestly, taking it once again by the hilt and lifting it with a light hand, wrist doing most of the work as she levels it outward. “I’m getting used to it.” Her next sentence comes hesitantly. “It’s a lot better than a candy cane, anyway.”
His laugh is a little like a growl. “How did you come across that thing? Another productive trip to Dulcington with your sister, I take it?”
She nods, remembering that day well. If Lapin hardly had the perception to tell when the twin princesses were replaced with sugargrass scarecrows neatly crafted the night before, there’s no way he notices when they take a bathroom break that runs well over the time it normally should.
“We have our ways,” she mumbles humbly, shrugging.
Theobald knows she wants it to be a boast. “Unfortunately for me, I know that well,” he agrees.
Silence spills back into the caravan then, seeping through the floorboards as Jet continues to clean the blade of her sword. Theobald studies her carefully as she does so, watching her go at it with due diligence, though there’s a manner to it that warrants asking whether she wants to be doing it or not. It’s a wonder she’s not sharpening it instead, bringing a stone she stole from the distant mountains that crown Candia to it and harshly scraping candy against candy. There’s care in her work, a ritual that starts and ends in trained tenderness, which makes him realize that her relationship with her newfound weapon isn’t one she’ll see as easily as he. With such new eyes on it, that clue alone makes it clear why that’s the case.
“Sir Theobald, can I ask you something?” she suddenly poses, stopping abruptly to angle her body towards his and give him her full attention.
Not entirely caught off-guard, yet still shocked nonetheless, he concedes. “Of course. You can ask me anything. What is it?”
The allowance startles Jet. It would make sense for Theobald not to turn her down, something sworn in words, the stringent language of an oath. She thinks she’s taken by surprise for the sake of things and how she’s been treating him thus far. Maybe it’s a morbid thing to owe.
“Now, don’t make fun of me, or I’ll do everything in my power to make sure my dad relieves you from service and secures me as your replacement.”
Theobald doesn’t miss a beat, doing what he always does and rolling his eyes at her with the utmost sincerity. “Go on with your question, Jet.”
It takes her a good second to work up the courage to do it.
“Does your sword ever say things to you?”
His brows furrow at that, and Jet takes him not jumping at her words with a simple yes or no as an immediate sign. She tenses up, bracing herself for something, maybe the worst, not to be berated but to be waved away, a tell that the growing teenager wasn’t as properly prepared for life outside her small sphere of influence as she thought she was. They’re callous thoughts, but they come with a special day, of an eighteenth Saint’s.
He doesn’t do either of those things, for what it’s worth.
“The Broadsicle?” He reaches for it, a large red paw wrapping around its hilt, which is decorated in dots of red and blue and yellow. Unsheathed, it glistens a delicious shade of orange. Even without sunlight, Battlepop retains its own glow, or maybe that’s just Jet’s memory of seeing him raise it time and time again getting the better of her. Courageous, it’s the one thing she truly ties to him as an encompassing person, apart from his shield, apart from his armor, apart from the strict aura he imparts on her and Ruby daily. Without it, she’s not sure who he’d be. Then again, had she ever really taken the time to know him?
“Yeah.”
Once, twice, he twists it in his grasp, observing it intensely. He hoists it up, inspecting every single facet of it as if he were searching for something he’d never seen before. Maybe a mouth that had never opened. Maybe a chamber where a voice could come through. Any evidence of sentience.
“No.” Straightforward. Fair. “Sure, it’s seen a lot of combat, but it has yet to be wielded by any other owner.”
That gets Jet good. Not because Battlepop is one of a kind. No, she’d expect as much for someone of his caliber. It’s that he mentions it at all.
“What?”
He fixes her with a frown. “There’s a legend that all of Calorum knows. I’m sure the Chancellor has taught it to you.”
Against her body being made of black licorice, Jet blanches. There is no way she can muscle her way through this one. No excuse could save her because they’d only confound him with how bullshit they would be. Skipping months of classes with Lapin is all the evidence he needs. She’s not trying to hide how she’s been caught either, expression clear in telling the truth before she can conjure up any lie.
Theobald gathers as much and he grins. “I never understood why he tried to lecture you two on things you clearly didn’t care about,” he admits, albeit sheepishly. “I always thought it was better to tackle what you wanted to know as you wanted to know it. Information that actually interested you as it became a part of your current interests. It’s counterintuitive to teach what you refuse to absorb.” He glances at Jet then, and when he sees her somewhat speechless expression, the knight backtracks jokingly. “Don’t tell him I said any of this.”
“Trust me, I won’t,” she assures him, still processing what all he’s said to her. After a minute, though, she resumes cleaning her sword, as if nothing had happened. What little dignity was left to her, she could scrounge up and find in its reflection. “So? What’s the legend?”
Settling a little, Theobald thinks of somewhere to start. He has it in his head in no time. “Long before you were born,” he begins, forming his words into that of an informal storyteller’s intonation. “And I guess, before I was born as well, there was a myth passed on solely by word of mouth over the span of the years of our Bulb. It was about how past lives could be heard constantly echoing through one’s weapon if it’d ever had any owners before its current one. Remnants of the souls of those now lost to time persist within them, and they are heard to this day. Something important to remember, though, is that it only happens if said person has mastered their weapon of choice. It has much to do with attuning the weapon to and making the weapon an extension of one’s self. Thus, a piece of them is left when they are gone. It’s even said that they guide the hand of whoever wields it now, lending wise words and what have you.”
Oh, that was an awful lot, wasn’t it?
At that, they gaze at the Twizzling Blade, its faint edge reflecting a dull glow. Jet can’t hear it talk now, so she chalks it up to having company.
“I don’t think it’s Aunt Rococoa.”
The confession crackles in the air around them, akin to Amethar’s skin after it comes into contact with a little liquid. Theobald turns it over in his head methodically, concerned less with what it means in correlation to Jet’s particular relationship with Rococoa and more with why he’s the one she came to with this. It’s in her voice, the fact that this is the first time she’s speaking it out loud. It’s evident in how she surprises even herself with the words. He’s honored to have a say in the sharing and divulging of this secret. One thing is clear, though. Her father or her sister would have been more obvious candidates. He’d go as far to guess more ideal. So, why aren’t they on the other side of this conversation?
“Why not?” he asks after a while, leaning back a little and drinking in the sight of the sky, dark yet still star-filled as ever. “You’ve never met her.”
“I know, I know.” Jet sounds frustrated, as if this were an argument she’d foreseen. “But I know. Aunt Rococoa wouldn’t sound so soft, you know?”
Theobald knows. He’d known her as much as he’d known any other sister. Her voice was about as severe as one would expect, hard-edged to match the precision of her perfect weapon. As much as she was kinder around her sisters and brother of the House of Rocks, Rococoa had commanded herself to talk in such a way that she constructed sentences as if they were working defense mechanisms. Tactical decisions were what her words were, drawing strategic lines in ways deft action couldn’t. There were never mere things to say because someday, she wouldn’t be able to spare her breath for much more.
That, at the very least, is true now.
“Tell me what it sounds like, then.”
So, she does. Reciting pieces of what she’d heard before heaves a slight burden off her back, like shedding something she hadn’t known she was wearing. Peasant clothes were one thing. This was something else entirely. Fragments of phrases she can’t exactly explain, they slide off Jet’s tongue with ease. She isn’t doing justice to some of it, tone bending and breaking a little in exhaustion at the repetition, yet she delivers on it, until at last, she thinks she’s said it all. She looks to Theobald after, barely holding back the perceptible smile finding purchase on her face.
“So?” she prods on.
“So?” he parrots back, but he relents as she pokes him in the side for it. “Okay, you’re not far off, it isn’t like General Rococoa at all.” She hates to admit how much his affirmation means to her. But Theobald’s not done. “Still, knowing this gives us more room to ruminate. For starters, whose voice do you think it is, if it isn’t hers?”
Jet pauses at that. It isn’t as though she hasn’t thought this far. Instead, it just feels sacrilegious to try and argue anyone else. What if it is Rococoa and somewhere out there, she’s inciting the ancient anger of her strongest aunt, also one of the most noteworthy fighters of Calorum’s time?
“Is it alright if I don’t have an answer to that?” Out of everything, this is what she lands on. Another need for validation.
“Of course,” he replies, and she doesn’t overthink it. Until he continues. “It’s not important to me that I know. It’s important to you that you know.”
And he’s right. Why wouldn’t he be right? She refuses to agree aloud with Theobald now, when they’re at a grey area of strange acquaintance, slowly shouldering their way into some sort of relationship, but she senses in her heart that what he says is true. She wants an answer. Who is it?
“What’s it like, wielding Battlepop?” she asks instead.
With it in hand, he hefts the weapon to and fro, as if feeling it in either paw will pose a new experience in line with the very first time he held it.
“Necessary.” Despite the fact that there cannot be a wrong answer, he dare not say any other. It’s the correct one. Words like right are a claim he can’t commit to, words like fulfilling show a selfish flaw he doesn’t have, and words like perfect lie right through his teeth. True knights put off resorting to those. “I don’t remember a time when I was without it. The Broadsicle, that is.” True names carry weight she could never know.
“Do you think you’ll stay the hand of whoever wields it next, then?” Jet persists, stuck on the tale she was told.
“I’d like to think I’d stay my own hand a little while longer.”
Theobald doesn’t say it so bitingly, but Jet can gather from context that she should lighten up. Think and keep talking, she tells herself, eyes straying from where they stare in fascination at the man next to her. She sees a silhouette of something close to him and redirects the conversation accordingly.
“And Swirlwarden?”
The shield is propped up on its own, the lollipop intact even after all the contact it has had in clashes past, a constant endurance test apparent in appearance. There is something sacred about it in contrast to the Broadsicle, innate in the way it was built to protect rather than to slay. While she is more than sure that Theobald has seen his fair share of sacrifice, it has never been on his side, prevented by his shield in every single case. As much as the man may follow some semblance of the Bulbian Church, he isn’t a savior in any sense, but he has saved lives. Titles, as many as someone the likes of the Rocks may have, aren’t always synonymous with beings. Sometimes, all that one can be is an action, not an honorific.
“The Suckershield,” Theobald clarifies as he hoists the heavy thing into his lap, “was a more recent addition. A couple of years after I came under the company of your family as Laz’s ward, I was assigned more to Amethar’s care than hers. I was his charge, so to speak. At the time, we all could tell the archmage had it in her to take heed and see to herself. Looking back on it now, we were right to think so. A woman that sees all should know how to save herself.”
Shouldn’t she?
He sighs, his shoulders weighing themselves down in the density of his armor. “In any case, in order to carry out my new duty correctly, I was fitted with whatever any form of currency could equate to. That included the Broadsicle and... this.” Sliding a paw across the surface of the shield, he can feel how well worn it is. Though uncracked, technically still reshaped, taking on a new form with every fight Theobald finds himself in the fray of.
“I was given this after your father fell out of a tree.”
It takes a second for her to actually hear what he said.
“Wait, he what?”
Somewhere in there, a younger Theo snickers at the thought of it. “Outside Castle Candy,” he elaborates, bringing Battlepop up to point at the outline of her home, fortified since forever. “He scaled a peppermint tree chasing a creature that had stolen a stick he was using as a makeshift sword. The branch snapped right beneath him. When he fell, it was only a few feet.”
A meteorite, though. Amethar was a meteorite.
“He never told you this?” Theobald’s dumbfounded, truth be told.
Jet shakes her head, jutting her chin out. “Was that the only incentive to strap a shield onto your person?” Boy, she’s been blunt tonight.
“A little,” he admits. “At the time, it was safer for me to do than catch him or cushion him. I tended to... turn to extreme measures when it came to rescuing the king in my youth.” Without realizing, he reaches up to his left ear and feels out where it’s cuffed, tracing the curved cut where a piece of himself was carved clean after a vicious fight in the wake of adolescence. He goes further. “I was a lot like you back then, actually.”
“Oh, don’t start this.”
The knight, sitting in a stupor up until now, snaps out of it. “Start what?”
“Start this spiel where you insist you were cool this whole time!”
“I was cool! I am cool!” The two of them settle visibly when they hear the volume they’ve taken on, but Jet poorly stifles a laugh at the sight of Theobald’s petulant features and has a couple of those asleep in the caravan shifting through their collective unconsciousness. They breathe their respective sighs of relief after they all still. “In all seriousness, though,” he continues, significantly quieter, sterner, cooler, “I was.”
Fine. She’ll let him have this. For now.
“In what ways?”
There’s a beat as Theobald thinks up how to start, thrumming his paws on Swirlwarden in a tiny dance and humming his way through his memories. Briefly, Jet thinks she can tolerate him and, yeah, see how he’s cool. He talks as though he walks through an endless wood, rambling until he’s beaming, overtaken by a guilty love for conversation. There’s a warmth to him that she can’t place. It transcends them.
“I wasn’t reckless,” he finally says, “but I didn’t take care of myself. I charged into things headfirst without much foresight, thinking things would solve themselves as soon as my sword landed in its proper position on a person. You’re excited for blood to be shed, and you’re allowed to be, but that comes at a cost and at a head when you’re confronted with the fact that a life will be lost in certain circumstances. It’s an inevitability you beat into yourself. One of the first lessons I learned as a squire was that for as much as you may want to sacrifice yourself for those that you care about, you can’t continue to do so if you die. Eventually, you have to fight for your life the way you would theirs. Call it... reluctant equivalents.”
Jet is stunned into silence. Belatedly, she can see why Theobald couldn’t claim Battlepop as the weapon of choice to carry his voice. It was a thing of beauty, yes. It wasn’t him, though. He may not ever know it himself, but it’d be from Swirlwarden that she found his words made more sense. Protector, never slayer. Oh, it’s one thing to hear a whole speech from him, but it’s another thing to actually take it and keep it close.
“Can you teach me?” she hears herself ask. She curses herself for how she sounds.
It’s not the normal killing blow she means, but all the blows in between.
Can you teach me, as someone that’s saved my father Amethar time and time again?
He studies her. Then, nodding his assent, he says, “Training starts in the morning. We’ll walk with the caravan.”
Try your best to slowly withdraw
from the darkest impulses of your heart.
Try your best to feel and receive.
Your body is a blade that cuts a path from day to day.
What they don’t know is that hours later, Ruby will fall for the very first time. Jet will not watch her sister die, but she will feel it in her throat as an arrow finds its way, the charred steel of bacon stealing breath. The silhouette of her through the canvas of the caravan will turn graceless, and as sisters lose grips on each other’s hands, a new hand will grasp the younger’s graciously. One belonging to an aunt, to an archmage, will bring her back to life. Or will it? The Locket of the Sweetest Heart burns bright through the dark, the only light Ruby will ever want to head towards, knowing that it belongs to her sister, older by a tremulous two minutes. No, Jet will bring her back to life, because one of the first lessons she learns from Theobald is that for as much as she may want to sacrifice herself for those that she cares about, she can’t continue to do so if she dies. One body over another, necklaces connect. Break that shaft in two.
What they don’t know is that days later, Lapin will fall for the very last time. Jet will watch the Chancellor die, despite the tears that stream from her eyes and the clouded view of the stained glass windows in the way. The light of the cathedral will shine bright on a sole individual, touching the plates of golden armor on his body as if he deserves it. Every part of Sir Keradin Deeproot will be clear, save his eyes, cloaked in shadow as he turns to face the family that has, in a miracle, escaped. Boring holes into her head, marking the Rocks, by blood or by water, with a vengeance he will fulfill. Not today, though. By the Hungry One above, the Bulb is mindless, but she won’t know that until after. For now, what she knows is that Lapin is not all she made him out to be, either. Clutching Preston close, his last snort of life awfully close to her ear, this Lapin is caring. He is sure in the only action he has taken. Sacrifice will christen his name.
What they don’t know is that miles later, Primsy will fall.
Some deserve to die. She doesn’t. So simple. She lives.
Princess Jet Rocks, Duchess of Gumberly and Lady of the Realm, will grow up without ever really realizing. These deaths will age her in ways she won’t know. She wasn’t supposed to live this long, in all actuality. Thus, another year takes a toll. For every day after she has turned eighteen years old, this girl will extend the date on her tombstone. A death sentence is on her back until the sugargrass beckons to reclaim her.
Eventually, it does, as all things do.
Sir Theobald Gumbar, Sworn Knight of the Order of North-Gumbia, will grow old without ever really realizing. These deaths add up to a count that he has long since started already, consequence of his inability to quickly adapt and save those that need him the most. Years have taken tolls on him, bags beneath his eyes a result of his inadequacy more than pure sleep. Death will come to him in that because he’s lucky.
Eventually, it does, as all things do.
She doesn’t know she is going to die a small distance from the safe walls of Castle Candy, in the mundane town of Dulcington that she’s snuck out to time and time again, one time more too much to save her oh so short life. Not on the ambuscaded roads of Sucrosi, not in the false safety of Comida, not on the stormy seas of the Yogurt Shoals. Losing one’s life so far from family is a harsh sentiment.
He doesn’t know Swirlwarden is going to sear his arm the second the door to Toby’s chamber slams shut behind him, the sight of the knight’s dead body distracting his eyes for a moment too long as its gleam tries to direct him away and straight towards his duty. As clever as his Knock spell is, the washed light of his shield will die with her. It’s cruel, how the world works, yet he’s already accepted it.
They don’t know that leaving and returning to Candia will undo them. Home can’t be survived the way uncharted territory can be sometimes.
The sun rises. The sky looks so healthy. The air is perfumed with the scent of fruit. What Jet and Theobald do know is they will train in blows today.
And when the time arrives for Jet to utter her final words, that she loves her sister and that she did the right thing, her voice, softened through sobs, isn’t coming from her mouth above.
It’s coming from Flickerish.
Knuckled under pain, you mourn but your blood is flowing.