Suikoden, Pahn x Cleo, theme set delta
Fandom: Suikoden
Pairing: Pahn/Cleo
Theme set: Delta
Rating: PG
Author: Lirillith (liri42)
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: Spoilers for the first and to some degree the second game, and the sentences jump all over the timeline. I have them roughly organized into chronological order here.
#01 - Air
Even when he's in another room with the door closed, she can feel that he's there - the air feels different when the house is empty, even when there are others here but not him.
#02 - Apples
He's been back for a day and already he's demolished the bowl of apples she'd arranged in the kitchen for a bit of color; she'd planned to snack on them herself, but she'd expected them to last her for weeks.
#03 - Beginning
In the beginning, he'd never have believed she'd be the lodestone that draws him home every time; she was just an angry girl with close-cropped hair who seemed grimly satisfied when she tied the bandages too tight.
#04 - Bugs
She didn't really miss traveling - the lumpy bedrolls and the disgustingly early wakeup calls, the smell of the pack mules, the footsore climbing, the infrequent baths, the bugs and the bandits and the monsters and the carnivorous plants - but she missed traveling with him.
#05 - Coffee
She drinks her coffee black, whenever they have it, and failing that she wants her tea strong enough to dissolve the spoon, while he wakes up with pre-dawn katas and a run or brisk swim; sharing a room, let alone a bed, tests her patience, but she thinks on balance it's worth it.
#06 - Dark
When she reaches for him in the dark, her hand fumbles over his face, covering his nose and then chin before she gets her bearings.
#07 - Despair
He was beginning to despair of anything but a scowl from her until one day, once he was up and around in the camp, he slipped in some mud and fell on his ass, and she couldn't stop laughing at him the rest of the day; later he'd learn to like the sound of her laughter.
#08 - Doors
He was used to her temper from the first, but once they were settled in Gregminster he was in for a new shock - in his home village, they used screens and curtains, not doors they could slam when they were angry.
#09 - Drink
Before his first battle on Master Teo's side, she passed him a flask - he'd thought it was a man's, but it was hers - and told him it was bad luck not to share a drink with a comrade before a battle.
#10 - Duty
It was realizing she might never see him again that hurt; once she had time on the road to think about it, and in truth she could think of nothing else, she found it strangely easy to accept what he'd done, because it was clear enough he'd thought he was doing his duty, the same as she did.
#11 - Earth
Cleo took up gardening when the others were gone, because she needed something to do yet being hopeless at housework was too much a part of her to let go of it now, and because she liked the smell of the dirt and the plants, the feel of sun on her back, the calm that found her as she worked; maybe it was something like this that Pahn was after.
#12 - End
When the call came to lay down their arms, the realization of what it meant rippled over them slowly, so it took a moment before she sheathed her sword, before the ragged hail to the Emperor grew into a full-throated roar all around them, before the euphoria hit her and she grabbed him and kissed him full on the mouth.
#13 - Fall
When the leaves began to turn, blazing up toward the sky, he thinks of the way she used to complain of drab, wet autumns in Gregminster, soggy brown leaves being swept up into piles in the street, and thinks of writing to her, but he's not sure how to get a letter delivered from his hut.
#14 - Fire
He'd never mention it to her, he wouldn't know how, but he recognized from the moment she showed him the crystal Leknaat had given her that a fire rune was a good match for her.
#15 - Flexible
He couldn't bend the way she could, couldn't sit still while they sheltered a fugitive, even though it was Ted, even though she said they'd wait and see and Gremio said it had to be a misunderstanding.
#16 - Flying
The first time he faced her in a practice spar, he'd started to object - not so much because she was a woman as because he knew she mostly fought with projectiles, not staves - and she cheated, just to prove a point, sending him flying before he could finish the sentence.
#17 - Food
As much as he made of his appetite, she knew the way to his heart wasn't through his stomach or he would have been in Gremio's tent instead of hers.
#18 - Foot
"This isn't one of those things where you kick a tree over and over to toughen up your feet, is it?" she asked, and he said "that's a completely different discipline."
#19 - Grave
They went to Master Teo's grave together, a week after the victory, a day before the Young Master and Gremio left - he prayed for understanding and forgiveness, she for safety for everyone who hadn't left yet but seemed about to.
#20 - Green
When he finally comes down from the mountain, and starts his way towards her, towards home, the first thing that surprises him is how green the lowlands are; high altitudes and sparse vegetation had come to seem normal.
#21 - Head
He was taken aback, and she misunderstood - "scalp wounds always bleed like crazy," she said - and it was true, it was a lot of blood, but more than that, he'd thought of her as invincible and untouchable, and seeing her injured at all bothered him much more than he'd have expected.
#22 - Hollow
When they came back from Soniere missing one, Pahn's face was stony with rage, and Tir seemed hollowed-out, his eyes empty even of grief.
#23 - Honor
They were both commoners - officers, true, but they'd come up through the ranks - and close service to Master Teo still didn't make them into nobles or knights; they worked in terms of loyalty, not of honor, and that's why she had so little patience for his talk of atoning, as if it had been a matter of smirching himself instead of untangling hopelessly-divided obligations.
#24 - Hope
It was strange to realize that a boy you'd known since he was seven embodied the hopes of a nation; it was even stranger to realize you thought he was worthy of all the faith placed in him.
#25 - Light
Everyone talks about the light they see in Tir's eyes, as though there's something in him that they can believe in, something undefinable about the way he is, not about anything he says or does; at first Cleo found it strange, because he was still the same person he'd always been, until Pahn pointed out that strangers are recognizing something that they've known about him for years.
#26 - Lost
Most of the time they don't mention it, but they lost the Young Master when they lost Gremio, as irrevocably as if he'd died too, and while they don't exactly draw closer together, they hang on; the two of them are what's left of what was once a home.
#27 - Metal
"I don't see what's wrong with leather," he says for the fourth or fifth time, flexing his arm to make the chain mail jingle, and exasperation finally takes over and she says "Fine, take off your boot so I can stab it."
#28 - New
Gregminster after the war is a different place from the city she and Pahn had known; new buildings have sprung up since they left, familiar places have been burned and are being rebuilt, and fellow soldiers from the Liberation Army have decided to stay.
#29 - Old
Out of the service of House McDohl, in the orbit of that swine Kraze, he finds himself back in touch with old friends from the Succession War days, and every last one of them asks after Cleo, as if he needed another reason to regret his decision.
#30 - Peace
There were memories she'd always cherish from both her wars, and she wouldn't trade the experiences, good and bad, for anything; but what she treasured were the moments of peace between battles, and everything good that came from war managed to survive peacetime in some form or other.
#31 - Poison
"And you're sure you're okay?" she asked doubtfully, not used to such an enthusiastic response to her cooking, and he replied, mouth full, "It's pretty good - why, am I supposed to keel over?"
#32 - Pretty
Her hair was getting shaggy, she thought, way too long, but he blurted "I think you look good like that" and after that, even though she didn't want to think that was her reason, she couldn't bring herself to get more than the barest trim to keep it at that precise length.
#33 - Rain
They've all been told it was destiny written before they were ever born, but on some level she still feels he changed their lives, maybe even the course of the empire, when he said he was going to the chemist's and ducked outside on a rainy night.
#34 - Regret
"I don't think I ever told Gremio how much I always respected him," she says, and he says "Master Teo," before his voice chokes off, and she just says "I know."
#35 - Roses
She couldn't stand the sight of flowers after coming back from Scarleticia; he couldn't blame her, even though he reserved all of his hatred for Milich himself.
#36 - Secret
They'd fully believed they'd kept their relationship a secret, until Master Teo asked if they'd prefer to share rooms in his home in Gregminster.
#37 - Snakes
"Funny," he says, bandaging her foot, "normally I'm the one who gets stupid injuries," and she can't muster the strength to do more than toss the empty bottle that had held the antidote at his head.
#38 - Snow
Just as he straightens up with a snowball in his hands, she creams him, and he can hear the Young Master's piping laughter and her own deeper chuckle as he's wiping the snow out of his eyes.
#39 - Solid
Sometimes she complains about his stolid nature, his stubbornness, but he's stable and solid as bedrock, reliable and loyal.
#40 - Spring
As blossoms and tiny leaves begin to appear on the trees like lace, he remembers the way she used to talk about the cherry trees in her hometown, and he wishes she were here, if only to see the brief mountain springtime before the wind scatters the petals.
#41 - Stable
He'd looked everywhere for her until finally, something clicked back into place, and he checked the stables, where they'd housed the two or three horses that had been brought to the island, Alen's and Grenseal's and Milich's mare Genevieve; she'd been in the cavalry once, and while he hadn't thought she was that attached to the creatures, that was where she'd gone to calm herself.
#42 - Strange
No matter how many times she sees him ready for battle, wearing his chain mail and armed with a pike, it still seems strange, disconnected from the Pahn she knows.
#43 - Summer
Humidity settles over Gregminster like a miasma, and she envies the children playing in the fountain, Pahn bathing in snowmelt and fighting bears or whatever he's doing, even fishermen, and she hates to fish.
#44 - Taboo
"...and then he says 'it's rat,'" Pahn says, and adds, "It was pretty good, actually," and she says, "You are not kissing me."
#45 - Ugly
She's never thought of scars as defacements, more like badges of honor, and she'd met him tending his wounds after a duel with Master Teo, but she doesn't like to look at the fresh, still-livid marks where he barely made it through the last bout against the man they once served.
#46 - War
He'd found most of the best parts of his life - his loyalty to Master Teo, his place in the McDohl household, and Cleo - because of a war, and at some point during the second war he lost all of those things.
#47 - Water
"It's not soothing, it's making me crazy!" she says, and he suggests, very gently, "Come inside where you can't hear the waves anymore?"
#48 - Welcome
For all that she argued with his decision to leave, and teases him now about running low on money or getting sick of his own cooking, he knows that this is the one place in the world he's unconditionally welcome.
#49 - Winter
She hadn't really been lonely before, but that winter - with Pahn back to stay, and Tir and Gremio coming and going but always coming back - was the happiest she'd been in years.
#50 - Wood
After three years on his own in the mountains, he's become a pretty good cook, and she goes out to split kindling while he starts preparations for dinner.
Pairing: Pahn/Cleo
Theme set: Delta
Rating: PG
Author: Lirillith (liri42)
Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: Spoilers for the first and to some degree the second game, and the sentences jump all over the timeline. I have them roughly organized into chronological order here.
#01 - Air
Even when he's in another room with the door closed, she can feel that he's there - the air feels different when the house is empty, even when there are others here but not him.
#02 - Apples
He's been back for a day and already he's demolished the bowl of apples she'd arranged in the kitchen for a bit of color; she'd planned to snack on them herself, but she'd expected them to last her for weeks.
#03 - Beginning
In the beginning, he'd never have believed she'd be the lodestone that draws him home every time; she was just an angry girl with close-cropped hair who seemed grimly satisfied when she tied the bandages too tight.
#04 - Bugs
She didn't really miss traveling - the lumpy bedrolls and the disgustingly early wakeup calls, the smell of the pack mules, the footsore climbing, the infrequent baths, the bugs and the bandits and the monsters and the carnivorous plants - but she missed traveling with him.
#05 - Coffee
She drinks her coffee black, whenever they have it, and failing that she wants her tea strong enough to dissolve the spoon, while he wakes up with pre-dawn katas and a run or brisk swim; sharing a room, let alone a bed, tests her patience, but she thinks on balance it's worth it.
#06 - Dark
When she reaches for him in the dark, her hand fumbles over his face, covering his nose and then chin before she gets her bearings.
#07 - Despair
He was beginning to despair of anything but a scowl from her until one day, once he was up and around in the camp, he slipped in some mud and fell on his ass, and she couldn't stop laughing at him the rest of the day; later he'd learn to like the sound of her laughter.
#08 - Doors
He was used to her temper from the first, but once they were settled in Gregminster he was in for a new shock - in his home village, they used screens and curtains, not doors they could slam when they were angry.
#09 - Drink
Before his first battle on Master Teo's side, she passed him a flask - he'd thought it was a man's, but it was hers - and told him it was bad luck not to share a drink with a comrade before a battle.
#10 - Duty
It was realizing she might never see him again that hurt; once she had time on the road to think about it, and in truth she could think of nothing else, she found it strangely easy to accept what he'd done, because it was clear enough he'd thought he was doing his duty, the same as she did.
#11 - Earth
Cleo took up gardening when the others were gone, because she needed something to do yet being hopeless at housework was too much a part of her to let go of it now, and because she liked the smell of the dirt and the plants, the feel of sun on her back, the calm that found her as she worked; maybe it was something like this that Pahn was after.
#12 - End
When the call came to lay down their arms, the realization of what it meant rippled over them slowly, so it took a moment before she sheathed her sword, before the ragged hail to the Emperor grew into a full-throated roar all around them, before the euphoria hit her and she grabbed him and kissed him full on the mouth.
#13 - Fall
When the leaves began to turn, blazing up toward the sky, he thinks of the way she used to complain of drab, wet autumns in Gregminster, soggy brown leaves being swept up into piles in the street, and thinks of writing to her, but he's not sure how to get a letter delivered from his hut.
#14 - Fire
He'd never mention it to her, he wouldn't know how, but he recognized from the moment she showed him the crystal Leknaat had given her that a fire rune was a good match for her.
#15 - Flexible
He couldn't bend the way she could, couldn't sit still while they sheltered a fugitive, even though it was Ted, even though she said they'd wait and see and Gremio said it had to be a misunderstanding.
#16 - Flying
The first time he faced her in a practice spar, he'd started to object - not so much because she was a woman as because he knew she mostly fought with projectiles, not staves - and she cheated, just to prove a point, sending him flying before he could finish the sentence.
#17 - Food
As much as he made of his appetite, she knew the way to his heart wasn't through his stomach or he would have been in Gremio's tent instead of hers.
#18 - Foot
"This isn't one of those things where you kick a tree over and over to toughen up your feet, is it?" she asked, and he said "that's a completely different discipline."
#19 - Grave
They went to Master Teo's grave together, a week after the victory, a day before the Young Master and Gremio left - he prayed for understanding and forgiveness, she for safety for everyone who hadn't left yet but seemed about to.
#20 - Green
When he finally comes down from the mountain, and starts his way towards her, towards home, the first thing that surprises him is how green the lowlands are; high altitudes and sparse vegetation had come to seem normal.
#21 - Head
He was taken aback, and she misunderstood - "scalp wounds always bleed like crazy," she said - and it was true, it was a lot of blood, but more than that, he'd thought of her as invincible and untouchable, and seeing her injured at all bothered him much more than he'd have expected.
#22 - Hollow
When they came back from Soniere missing one, Pahn's face was stony with rage, and Tir seemed hollowed-out, his eyes empty even of grief.
#23 - Honor
They were both commoners - officers, true, but they'd come up through the ranks - and close service to Master Teo still didn't make them into nobles or knights; they worked in terms of loyalty, not of honor, and that's why she had so little patience for his talk of atoning, as if it had been a matter of smirching himself instead of untangling hopelessly-divided obligations.
#24 - Hope
It was strange to realize that a boy you'd known since he was seven embodied the hopes of a nation; it was even stranger to realize you thought he was worthy of all the faith placed in him.
#25 - Light
Everyone talks about the light they see in Tir's eyes, as though there's something in him that they can believe in, something undefinable about the way he is, not about anything he says or does; at first Cleo found it strange, because he was still the same person he'd always been, until Pahn pointed out that strangers are recognizing something that they've known about him for years.
#26 - Lost
Most of the time they don't mention it, but they lost the Young Master when they lost Gremio, as irrevocably as if he'd died too, and while they don't exactly draw closer together, they hang on; the two of them are what's left of what was once a home.
#27 - Metal
"I don't see what's wrong with leather," he says for the fourth or fifth time, flexing his arm to make the chain mail jingle, and exasperation finally takes over and she says "Fine, take off your boot so I can stab it."
#28 - New
Gregminster after the war is a different place from the city she and Pahn had known; new buildings have sprung up since they left, familiar places have been burned and are being rebuilt, and fellow soldiers from the Liberation Army have decided to stay.
#29 - Old
Out of the service of House McDohl, in the orbit of that swine Kraze, he finds himself back in touch with old friends from the Succession War days, and every last one of them asks after Cleo, as if he needed another reason to regret his decision.
#30 - Peace
There were memories she'd always cherish from both her wars, and she wouldn't trade the experiences, good and bad, for anything; but what she treasured were the moments of peace between battles, and everything good that came from war managed to survive peacetime in some form or other.
#31 - Poison
"And you're sure you're okay?" she asked doubtfully, not used to such an enthusiastic response to her cooking, and he replied, mouth full, "It's pretty good - why, am I supposed to keel over?"
#32 - Pretty
Her hair was getting shaggy, she thought, way too long, but he blurted "I think you look good like that" and after that, even though she didn't want to think that was her reason, she couldn't bring herself to get more than the barest trim to keep it at that precise length.
#33 - Rain
They've all been told it was destiny written before they were ever born, but on some level she still feels he changed their lives, maybe even the course of the empire, when he said he was going to the chemist's and ducked outside on a rainy night.
#34 - Regret
"I don't think I ever told Gremio how much I always respected him," she says, and he says "Master Teo," before his voice chokes off, and she just says "I know."
#35 - Roses
She couldn't stand the sight of flowers after coming back from Scarleticia; he couldn't blame her, even though he reserved all of his hatred for Milich himself.
#36 - Secret
They'd fully believed they'd kept their relationship a secret, until Master Teo asked if they'd prefer to share rooms in his home in Gregminster.
#37 - Snakes
"Funny," he says, bandaging her foot, "normally I'm the one who gets stupid injuries," and she can't muster the strength to do more than toss the empty bottle that had held the antidote at his head.
#38 - Snow
Just as he straightens up with a snowball in his hands, she creams him, and he can hear the Young Master's piping laughter and her own deeper chuckle as he's wiping the snow out of his eyes.
#39 - Solid
Sometimes she complains about his stolid nature, his stubbornness, but he's stable and solid as bedrock, reliable and loyal.
#40 - Spring
As blossoms and tiny leaves begin to appear on the trees like lace, he remembers the way she used to talk about the cherry trees in her hometown, and he wishes she were here, if only to see the brief mountain springtime before the wind scatters the petals.
#41 - Stable
He'd looked everywhere for her until finally, something clicked back into place, and he checked the stables, where they'd housed the two or three horses that had been brought to the island, Alen's and Grenseal's and Milich's mare Genevieve; she'd been in the cavalry once, and while he hadn't thought she was that attached to the creatures, that was where she'd gone to calm herself.
#42 - Strange
No matter how many times she sees him ready for battle, wearing his chain mail and armed with a pike, it still seems strange, disconnected from the Pahn she knows.
#43 - Summer
Humidity settles over Gregminster like a miasma, and she envies the children playing in the fountain, Pahn bathing in snowmelt and fighting bears or whatever he's doing, even fishermen, and she hates to fish.
#44 - Taboo
"...and then he says 'it's rat,'" Pahn says, and adds, "It was pretty good, actually," and she says, "You are not kissing me."
#45 - Ugly
She's never thought of scars as defacements, more like badges of honor, and she'd met him tending his wounds after a duel with Master Teo, but she doesn't like to look at the fresh, still-livid marks where he barely made it through the last bout against the man they once served.
#46 - War
He'd found most of the best parts of his life - his loyalty to Master Teo, his place in the McDohl household, and Cleo - because of a war, and at some point during the second war he lost all of those things.
#47 - Water
"It's not soothing, it's making me crazy!" she says, and he suggests, very gently, "Come inside where you can't hear the waves anymore?"
#48 - Welcome
For all that she argued with his decision to leave, and teases him now about running low on money or getting sick of his own cooking, he knows that this is the one place in the world he's unconditionally welcome.
#49 - Winter
She hadn't really been lonely before, but that winter - with Pahn back to stay, and Tir and Gremio coming and going but always coming back - was the happiest she'd been in years.
#50 - Wood
After three years on his own in the mountains, he's become a pretty good cook, and she goes out to split kindling while he starts preparations for dinner.