Caged - Freya, PG
Fandom: Final Fantasy IX
Title: Caged
Rating: PG
Word Count: 561
Notes: Romance. Angst. Freya/Fratley In-game. A prompt fill at
, prompt was "Freya/Fratley". Also a prompt at
for "dream."
Summary: Dreaming had been unbearable. Reality had been worse.
It would have been a lie to say she hadn’t dreamed of the moment. The moment when she found Fratley, or Fratley found her, or Fratley came home. Seven years of her life had been spent yearning for the moment, waiting with tapping fingers and dwindling impatience. It was impossible to not have imagined how it would play out. Mostly, though, she tried not to think about it. Dreaming seemed to hurt the longer time passed.
At first, when he had just left and she was still hopeful, she had imagined his return as something dramatic. Perhaps she would be fighting an Ironite on a mountain side and just before she was struck down, Fratley would appear like a sudden thunderstorm and tear the sky asunder. It didn’t matter that Freya was hardly going to lose to an Ironite, or that she would never need to be rescued. Fratley had a way of making her more and less than what she was, made her dream in what-if’s and what-could-be’s. She dreamt of hunting on the Burmecian Plains just the two of them with nothing but the armor on their backs. She dreamt of how the wind would whistle at the cut of their blades.
But a year later, reality found her only with an empty plain and a biting chill. The glamour of being alone had faded, her armor cold and her spear heavy. The mountains surrounding Burmecia, once majestic and blue in her sight, became a jagged cage closing in. She would never get out. He would never get in.
The King tried to persuade her to stay. Standing under a stone balcony, his hand clutched in his robe, he asked, “Why must you leave too? Leave a kingdom that needs you?”
Freya stood under the downpour of the storm, feeling the trickle of droplets in her ear. Thunder rumbled deep in the distance and she felt it echo within her, hollow. “I cannot stay,” she only said. Because it was too painful to see her small quaint stone house and imagine the life she wasn’t leading. Fratley pulling the curtain of the bedroom window open, a cup of java in his hand. Fratley trying to roast axion on her stove and almost smoking them out, because cooking was the one thing he had never been good at. Her, laughing, as she tried to fix their meal. His smile, small and quiet, as he wrapped an arm around her waist.
It was as much fear as pain that drove her to climb the mountains in the middle of winter. Domesticity, permanence, roots. Things she had never wanted had become more precious than the things she had always desired. What awaited beyond the cliffs, she did not know. But whatever it was she was sure could not be worse than watching herself drain like rainwater in a gutter.
She was wrong.
When Cleyra happened, it was like she...woke up. Seven years of chasing a phantom, and that is exactly what she found. She had travelled thousands of miles to find him and when he had stood there only an arms breadth away, she had thought finally. But when she looked in his face, it was like she had never left at all. His eyes reflected those empty plains back home, devoid of everything they had shared.
He had been everything to her. Now, she was nothing to him.
It would have been better to dream.
Title: Caged
Rating: PG
Word Count: 561
Notes: Romance. Angst. Freya/Fratley In-game. A prompt fill at
, prompt was "Freya/Fratley". Also a prompt at
for "dream."
Summary: Dreaming had been unbearable. Reality had been worse.
It would have been a lie to say she hadn’t dreamed of the moment. The moment when she found Fratley, or Fratley found her, or Fratley came home. Seven years of her life had been spent yearning for the moment, waiting with tapping fingers and dwindling impatience. It was impossible to not have imagined how it would play out. Mostly, though, she tried not to think about it. Dreaming seemed to hurt the longer time passed.
At first, when he had just left and she was still hopeful, she had imagined his return as something dramatic. Perhaps she would be fighting an Ironite on a mountain side and just before she was struck down, Fratley would appear like a sudden thunderstorm and tear the sky asunder. It didn’t matter that Freya was hardly going to lose to an Ironite, or that she would never need to be rescued. Fratley had a way of making her more and less than what she was, made her dream in what-if’s and what-could-be’s. She dreamt of hunting on the Burmecian Plains just the two of them with nothing but the armor on their backs. She dreamt of how the wind would whistle at the cut of their blades.
But a year later, reality found her only with an empty plain and a biting chill. The glamour of being alone had faded, her armor cold and her spear heavy. The mountains surrounding Burmecia, once majestic and blue in her sight, became a jagged cage closing in. She would never get out. He would never get in.
The King tried to persuade her to stay. Standing under a stone balcony, his hand clutched in his robe, he asked, “Why must you leave too? Leave a kingdom that needs you?”
Freya stood under the downpour of the storm, feeling the trickle of droplets in her ear. Thunder rumbled deep in the distance and she felt it echo within her, hollow. “I cannot stay,” she only said. Because it was too painful to see her small quaint stone house and imagine the life she wasn’t leading. Fratley pulling the curtain of the bedroom window open, a cup of java in his hand. Fratley trying to roast axion on her stove and almost smoking them out, because cooking was the one thing he had never been good at. Her, laughing, as she tried to fix their meal. His smile, small and quiet, as he wrapped an arm around her waist.
It was as much fear as pain that drove her to climb the mountains in the middle of winter. Domesticity, permanence, roots. Things she had never wanted had become more precious than the things she had always desired. What awaited beyond the cliffs, she did not know. But whatever it was she was sure could not be worse than watching herself drain like rainwater in a gutter.
She was wrong.
When Cleyra happened, it was like she...woke up. Seven years of chasing a phantom, and that is exactly what she found. She had travelled thousands of miles to find him and when he had stood there only an arms breadth away, she had thought finally. But when she looked in his face, it was like she had never left at all. His eyes reflected those empty plains back home, devoid of everything they had shared.
He had been everything to her. Now, she was nothing to him.
It would have been better to dream.