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- - -
Terra keeps Maduin's magicite in a small velvet box at the back of her closet.
Some nights, when the dreams and the terrors are too strong – the memories, really, because isn't that what's most terrifying, that it really happened? – she crawls softly across the floor and to the back of the closet, where she can cradle the cold magicite to her breast. She isn't really sure why it comforts her, because it's been empty and lightless since the collapse, now just a pretty piece of glass that once held her father's soul.
But she finds it helps her, anyway. Maybe it's just the thoughts of her father: the confirmation that she, Terra, came from something good, and not from the poking, prodding, peering, prying ways of the Empire.
- - -
Terra wraps her arms around him, and her hug is genuine and full of life. "Be careful," she says, even though it's an empty platitude, and they both know it; Locke's not only strong, he's famous now.
"I'll be back soon," Locke says, embracing Celes; she stiffens at first, but then relaxes into him, and Locke wonders whether she realizes how much of a gift her trust is.
He adjusts the pack on his back and heads out. South, this time, he thinks, along the shore; the map is in his pocket, waiting to be filled in. He concentrates on the sunny day and the clouds in the sky, and tries not to think about the two women in Mobliz. He wants to bring them jewels, roses, treasures, to make their faces light up and their cares vanish. But he's not so naive (anymore) to think even the most precious of gems could soothe any of the wounds they now bear.
So he gives them space, although it's hard for someone like him. He wants to grab on and never let go.
- - -
"What is it like for you?" she asks Celes softly, over the tea: they've been trying to grow it, with the help of the children, and whatever they did didn't work, because it tastes awful. But Celes is drinking it like a grim champion, and so Terra continues to sip, as if this ordinary-life victory is somehow meaningful.
Celes looks into her cup, her gaze as bitter as the brew. "Not as bad as for you, I'd think," is all she says, and Terra wonders why: not as bad doesn't necessarily mean good, and she really is honestly concerned.
But she doesn't want to ask, because Celes is staying with her, in Mobliz, until they both regain their sense of balance, and she's afraid of upsetting her first and newest friend.
- - -
Celes can't bring herself to throw away the dull piece of glass that once was Shiva, and she hates herself for the sentimentality even as she struggles to put the proper name to it. She keeps it like a talisman, wrapped into the pommel of the sword she rarely uses these days, and she can't explain why. The Esper's gift, the power grafted onto her bones and into her veins: her magic is gone, and no amount of emotional nostalgic remembrance will ever allow her to call forth Blizzaga again.
She thinks about asking Locke, one day; sometimes he seems to know how she feels more than she - or at least he came equipped with the proper words, whilst she sits in uninformed silence and thinly veiled irritation.
But she doesn't, and she's afraid it's because she's embarrassed – and that emotion she hates herself for, even more than sentimentality.
- - -
Locke brings back fruits, and spices, and stories which entertain the children long past their bedtime. Celes watches him, wonders how he spills words off his tongue with such ease; she finds it difficult to speak more than three words to the children. Idle play was never in her vocabulary.
She turns then to watch Terra, who sits before the fire; it's as if Terra's never warm enough, even on these last days of summer when the sun hangs high in the sky and the night stays thick and warm. Celes gets up, and grabs a blanket from the basket in the corner, and comes to sit beside her friend; she can see the shadows on Terra's face, better than anyone.
She catches Locke's eyes on them, briefly, before he turns back to the children and explains how he nicked the tonic from the Rabite.
- - -
Locke wonders, sometimes, whether they'll forgive him: any of them, all of them, women he'd tried to save in Rachel's name. He stays because he doesn't know what to do nor how to do it; and treasure hunting seems pointless when he's living with two broken women and carrying the last piece of a third in a small bag around his neck.
He wonders if he'll ever feel worthy of Rachel's gift – but then he remembers he never felt worthy of Rachel even when she was alive. Celes and Terra don't make him feel like that at all – but maybe it's because they outshine him so; there isn't even any pretense of being worthy. All he can be is Locke.
- - -
It is an odd equilibrium they reach, and sometimes Terra wants to shout at them both: go, go, go off and do your own things; don't stay here for my sake, waiting for me to get better, because it won't happen. Some of these things that pain her are things that cannot be fixed. The gaping hole in her heart will never be healed. The best she can hope for is to break even.
But she cannot say it, because every time she opens her mouth to try, Celes is there with a blanket and a kindness in her eyes so unusual and unexpected it surprises them both. Or Locke is there, just to stand beside her and maybe hold her hand, make a joke about protecting girls in need, or to flip something shiny at her until she is sufficiently distracted.
Autumn comes, and Terra finds she still can't ask or tell them to leave.
- - -
Celes wakes that morning early, twitchy and off-balance, her blood prickling under her skin as it looks for magic it won't ever find again. She's restless, and it makes her pull her sword from its place by the door and head outside into the crisp autumn air. She walks to a clearing: and feints, suddenly, and then snaps into stillness, blade at attention in the morning mist.
She goes through her drills, precisely, taking care to execute each movement the way she learned so many years ago. She's both pleased and chagrined that she has not yet forgotten the rhythm and cadence of swordplay after so many months, and she wonders at her own surprise.
She enters the house sweating, and pauses in the kitchen. Terra is brewing the awful tea, and Locke is providing commentary; they pause, and both their eyes are on her, weighted with concern.
- - -
Locke thinks of Kohligen, sometimes: the house he owns, in name only; the other house where Rachel slept her sleep. Kohligen was ordinary, a town so sweet and dull that adventuring was almost common-place and made one instantly a hero, for at least a week.
Mobliz is different. Here, there are dangers lurking in every abandoned ramshackle house, around every bend of the still-monster-ridden road, and he finds he's just as much of a hero for taking care of the spider in little Kimm's room as he was for bringing Rachel precious coins and jeweled hairpins. He and Celes and Terra manage to get a working roof on a third house before the first snowfall, and the beaming looks on their faces as they celebrate by surreptitiously spiking their own mugs of cider with Setzer's best are a shining treasure all their own.
He told both these women, once, he'd keep them safe; wouldn't abandon them, wouldn't let them fall. His wanderlust is cured, instantly, every time his eyes travel through the centuries-worth of shadows on their faces.
- - -
Terra knows she's learned to love, but sometimes she thinks she's doing it all wrong. Her love for the children she's taken as her own is clean, clear, strong-shining and heart-felt. But she loves Locke and Celes both with a dark breathless intensity, so strong she aches with it sometimes; it confuses her even as she revels in it.
She thinks of asking Locke, because he's been in love before, and he might know. But some instinct tells her that figuring out her own heart is another one of those battles humans fight their entire lives - and sometimes never win.
- - -
"Is it still bad?" Celes asks Terra, late that night, because there's a tension strung through the air, and neither of them can sleep. Terra's huddled by the fire in blankets and blankets and quilts, a pile of them so thick Celes wonders how she can tell Terra's shuddering underneath.
She sits down next to Terra, methodically picking her way through the blankets until she gathers Terra in her arms. The close contact isn't as bothersome when it's for a purpose; Celes remembers nights in the army, advice on body-heat. She's often surprised at how soft Terra is, how pliable – then she remembers the Slave Crown, and shudders more for it.
"I feel empty," Terra whispers, and Celes can see it, feel it, like the magic of Scan beneath her fingertips. Terra's body has not yet adjusted to its new humanity; Celes wonders, as she holds Terra close, if it ever will.
Eventually she picks Terra up, blankets and all, surprised at how easily her arms accept the burden.
- - -
Locke realizes he should be surprised, the next morning, to find himself wrapped around something warm and twitchy and human-shaped. But he isn't, for some reason, because his bed smells like apples and frost, and it's familiar. He opens his eyes slowly. Celes is watching him, her eyes deep and unreadable, one hand still resting in Terra's hair.
He tightens his arm around Terra and says nothing.
Eventually, Celes nods, her mouth relaxing into something similar to a smile.
- - -
Terra despairs, sometimes, that Locke and Celes are staying out of some feeling of obligation, some sense of responsibility: Locke, the promises he makes to women in Rachel's name; Celes, the chance to make right some of the Empire's wrongs. She wants to call it friendship as much as she fears to, and it makes her wary; Terra knows there isn't much in her that's worth befriending.
She holds Maduin's magicite to her heart so tightly she can feel the edges digging into her skin. Sometimes, she wishes her amnesia back: she doesn't want these memories of fire, of Kefka, of cruel malice and crueler laughter.
Then she looks into Celes' eyes, the next day, over a mug of tea still not much improved from the first, and almost says something - and realizes it is that much worse for her friend, who did it willingly.
- - -
Locke sets something down on the table, between them. He pauses for a moment, and then exhales, and removes his hand.
Magicite. Only glass, now, dead and empty.
"Is that--?" Terra whispers.
Celes says nothing; she knows which one it is, even without the tell-tale crack down the center.
"I know it's silly," Locke says, his mouth quirking in a wry smirk-smile, "but it's my good luck charm." His fingers linger on it.
There's a long moment, and Celes thinks of the pommel of her sword, and the carefully-wrapped pendant hanging from it.
"I didn't think someone like you needed a good luck charm," she says instead, and watches Terra's fit of silent laughter for a handful of seconds before Locke realizes it's a joke.
- - -
Locke can track his movements around Mobliz without trying; it is the center of his circle, and he wanders round it at a set distance not too close and not too far. He longs to scoop them up and keep them safe, but neither would love him for it, and he isn't even sure he would know what to do anymore.
He comes home that night to find Terra sitting at the table, a small velvet-wrapped box in front of her. When he sits down next to her, she smiles sheepishly and opens the box, pushing it towards him.
"I thought she might like company," Terra says, softly. Locke knows what stone she keeps, and his heart aches for all the things he can't protect her from.
- - -
Celes wonders whether she'll ever feel free of it: the past, circling her like a strange ghost. She's too tied to Locke and Terra, now; both are symbols of things she wants, but cannot put names to, although she tries: forgiveness, perhaps; new chances; acceptance.
It is Terra she looks to: Terra who lost so much, whose life was taken from her, and yet continues on, one cold solitary step after the other. She endures like a soldier, like the weapon she almost was – as if the terrors and atrocities of her past were merely a foundation, a starting-point, a lesson learned.
Celes wants to do the same, but she doesn't know how.
- - -
The next morning Terra watches as Celes takes her sword from beside the door and leaves the house, vanishing into the cool spring mist. This is something Celes does, occasionally but not often, and Terra envies the comfort military discipline brings her. Celes chose to be a General, for all that her choices may have been few. Terra forgets that sometimes.
So she waits, in the kitchen, preparing water for tea and watching Locke try to clean a pot. But this time, when Celes returns, there's something different in her eyes; she sets her sword down on the kitchen table and begins to unwrap one of the stones on the pommel: slowly, deliberately, meaningfully. Locke stops to watch.
When Celes sets the magicite on the table, she does it boldly, and firmly. Terra only looks at it for a second, and then looks into her friend's face, into her friend's eyes.
"This was Shiva," Celes says, and to Terra, the words sound like a farewell.
- - -
Locke thinks about circles, and about Phoenix, and about dying to be reborn. He's not a schooled man like Edgar, and he's no philosopher, but this is a special lesson he feels life wrote just for him. All the times he tried to save things: only to have them give of themselves, of their own free will, and maybe love is the kind of currency he can't ever close up in a treasure chest and hide away, and maybe it's better that way.
Because life steals everything, the grandest thief of all, and Locke's nothing compared to the master treasure hunter: time.
- - -
Terra isn't really sure why this feels so important, but she somehow knows it is: the three of them, together, putting their past to rest.
She kneels, and sets the velvet box into the hole Celes dug. Locke begins to fill it in, and Terra watches until it's just another patch of ground in the achingly simple Mobliz cemetery.
Then Celes kneels beside her, and Terra sees the cutting in her hands, a rootlet from the vine that makes their miserable tea, a tea so awful she wouldn't serve it to her own father, or Locke's lost love, or Celes' Esper benefactor, let alone all three – and Terra starts to laugh, wondrously, peals of laughter echoing over the bones of Mobliz until she's almost sobbing with it.
Celes looks at her as if she's lost her mind, but she continues to laugh, and Locke joins her, his rough chuckle like an embrace wrapping around them both.
Finally Celes smiles, and that's as good as a laugh, and Terra thinks: maybe we'll be alright after all.