#there's a ribbon of Aytien flavor in here but nothing substantial

[efrmellifer]

FFxivWrite ‘20, Sixteen

Prompt: Lucubration, during Stormblood, 900 words

They might as well have been adrift in the Ruby Sea, for how dry and comfortable Etien felt. She didn’t even hate water; she quite liked it, actually. She’d enjoyed wading in streams as a youth, taken a few moments to enjoy a dip in the waters of Costa del Sol when she got the chance, and even might have liked to try swimming in this sea, if it were deemed safe (though considering the sharks she had already had to confront… maybe not).

But lying damp in the sand, a few shells and rocks around her, had sleep becoming a far-off prize she couldn’t claim. So she sat up, feeling the sand start practically pouring off her clothing where it hadn’t already gotten in.

Gods, she had never thought she was going to miss snow.

Standing, she dusted herself off, then brushed and shook the wet sand from her hands. The risk of frostbite was absent, sure, but she was… gritty. She would rather pull pine needles from her hair than attempt to free the still fairly-soft strands of every little grain.

Well, Etien wasn’t going to get any sleep, so she might as well make the most of this time.

She grabbed some supplies to make sure she’d have sufficient light and some writing materials. But she wasn’t going to write letters this time. Usually, she would have. But what had she to say now that was new?

She was still alive, still sad and easily upset by everything that was happening around her. Still feeling guilty about what she had said after the fight at Rhalgr’s Reach, that it wasn’t her fight.

She felt bad for saying it, when so much loss or the fear of it had just struck everyone—not just the Resistance, but in Y’shtola’s injuries too.

She was just tired. Newly engaged and recently happy, but now she was tired. She didn’t doubt that everyone depending on her like this cared about her. That wasn’t the problem. It was just that sometimes, she felt…used?

Etien knew it was selfish. The gifts thrust upon her had to be used in service, or what good were they?

She sighed, shaking her head and turning to the parchment. She wasn’t a mapmaker, astronomy expert, or chronicler by any means, but she had been trying to take as many notes as she could.

She liked stargazing, so she started with that, turning her face to the sky and trying to take down the positions of the stars in relation to each other. Her mother—or really, her mother’s father, whom she’d never met—would have been far better at this, having used the stars to navigate. If it could be used for that, she would be happy, but she had no such faith that her clustered dots of ink would be suitable for that.

When she got bored of that, she drew crude shapes on another parchment, mostly labeling locations, landmarks, and warnings.

“Big bunch of crabs,” she wrote by one circle. “Massive drop-off here,” she scrawled over a patch of the ocean. Good enough.

She pulled up the third and final piece of parchment, committing the last day or so to its surface.

“We repair boats, we argue with Tansui, we sleep in the sand, and I slap Alphinaud awake, thinking I’m   comfortably in bed instead of hunkered down against the elements. It was almost funny. Half in a dream, I turned, and I thought to pull myself closer… never mind the details of what I thought. The point is that as I rolled, I stuck out my arm and flopped it immediately onto the poor boy’s face, giving him a wake-up reserved for the worse days. He sputtered as he rose, then grumbled as he lay down again, but I suppose that’s to be expected.”

Suddenly, a wave of exhaustion came over Etien. She rested her forehead on her hand, cradled between her thumb and pointer finger. There was a word for what she was doing, in some ancient tongue. Aymeric knew it, he’d used at one point when she’d been waiting for him.

Despite how tired she was, she struggled for the word. It began with an l. Lugubrious? No. Lucubration. While she thought it was a silly word, she guessed it was shorter than “burning the midnight oil” or “burning the candle at both ends.”

Funny, how many phrases about overworking oneself involved burning.

And oh, she burned. She was trying to hide it, now that the crying jags had tapered off to only strong waves of the need bringing her to tears, but she had never been good at hiding her feelings.

Moreover, to say it as she burned implied a lot of lust in it. There was some, no point in lying. But her chief desire for him laid more in how perfectly her arms encircled him, how neatly they fit under a blanket together, seated side by side. Against the wind, they stood, and together they were warm.

But that burning was a hearth fire. This was different. This was a burning that was going to leave nothing but a pool of wax gone cold by morning.

She would be cold, too, with the wind coming off the sea. But at least it got the candle she’d burned to gutter and fade as she finally fell asleep amongst her notes.