of orange blossoms and dumpling soup

me before: i could never write this it would be stealing
me now: grandpa you're everything. i'm gonna click every one of those funky little buttons

"Old man Cole? You in there?"

Nia didn't have hands enough to knock, encumbered as she was with a packet of dumpling wrappers, a pint-sized canister of flour, a couple of Shade Trout imported from Leftheria (luckily, Rex had been able to haggle her a discount), and a sloshing jar of Anlood meat broth. There was a Sumpkin tucked into one side pocket of her jumpsuit, and a handful of spice jars crammed into the other. Even though she suspected Cole, and Uraya in general, to be more summarily cultured in the culinary arts than, say, the Ardainians, she didn't trust the absolute cruft that was his backstage residence to be all that well-equipped for such savory endeavors.

She was about to call again when she heard the telltale shuffling of booted feet, and the coughing that always accompanied, moving towards her.

"'Old man', huh?" he started wryly when he had opened the door. "Didn't anyone ever tell you to respect your elders?"

The obvious, easy retort would have been that Vandham called him "old man" like it was nothing, and even if he was an ageless old elf he certainly wasn't five hundred years old. But, then, no one ever had told Nia that, because she'd become one with her sister, but her sister hadn't been her sister until her sister was no more. That's not how a family works, now is it.

"What's all that you've got there? You don't trust me and Iona to do our own shopping? She keeps me alive and kicking just fine, I'll have you know." And did she? Nia guessed that she did.

"It's, er...ingredients for Ruska Dumpling Soup. Gra- Azurda heard me sayin' I knew how to make 'em, and then he came up to me later and said you might like it if I came to see you, and all. I thought it was worth the trip, anyway."

Cole moved an age-spotted hand to the corner of his jaw to scratch it. "Azurda, huh? He's the only lizard I ever did like - and you can tell him I said so, too."

There was something a little too venomous, a little too familiar wrapped up in those words, so Nia skirted around them with something vaguer, less pointed. "Where is Iona, anyway?"

"She's in school today," Cole said simply. "What, you didn't think they ran those anymore? I said you were a kid just like her, but of course you're not quite that young. And you never were, were you?"

Nia couldn't find it in herself to do anything but nod, a shaky, uncertain thing.

"Well come on, if you're going to supplant my lunch plans you may as well do it right."

She laid out the ingredients on the kitchen counter (it was dusty near the back under the cupboards, just in the approximate shape that would have been left by Iona's little arms running a rag as far back as she could) in as businesslike a manner as she could muster up, and Cole just let her work. It was quick to prepare the protein and set the base to boil, but then the actual dumpling-making took a little while. She had time, here this afternoon.

Cole broached the quietude first. "Shade Trout, eh? It's supposed to be made, or should I say is best done, with Tornan Trout, but of course they don't swim around where anyone wants to go, nowadays. Did you know Mythra made me dumplings with Armored Centipede paste, once upon a time?"

"Eh? Mythra cooked for you? You knew her, as more than just...the Aegis?" Never mind the fact that she'd done it with creepy-crawly bugs.

"Ah," Cole said, and his shoulders sagged somehow further. "She didn't tell you. Of course. You know, my play...that's not how it really was. Never thought I'd be one for revisionist history, but..."

But what? It wasn't really all that apparent, to Nia, if it was supposed to be. She figured she could coax out what he meant if she told him what she did know. It was nice to just be able to...do that.

"Mythra told us. That much, I mean. How she fought with Addam, and it was really her who sunk Torna. Maybe her and Malos together, I don't know. It doesn't much matter what anybody else wants us to believe about what happened before, does it? I gotta think so, or I couldn't live with myself."

Because that was how she had to keep going. Her time in Torna, the new one that sunk every day little by little under its own weight and not the one that had been blasted down into the Cloud Sea, still hung heavy on her heart. A heart that she had, of course, because all of them did, probably even Malos, and what did they use it for? There's a lot of things to love, and hate, in this world.

Cole studied her from a few paces back. "You're more confident than you were the last time I saw you."

"Am I?" And Nia thought in that moment that she perhaps could smile, even turn around to show it, with the fangs in her teeth and all. "I've been tryin'. Dromarch says he's noticed too."

"Where is your big cat, anyway?" He'd wanted to come, wanted to talk and conspire and commiserate with Sir Cole himself, but Nia had said no, not yet, you'll just embarrass me, and he'd said of course, my lady, and hadn't agreed at all, and she'd broken a little and pet his soft fur a little extra before she left. "Somewhere else," she said, stamping it out before she could stammer.

"So not quite that confident?" The grin faded. "N-no...not quite that much." She could tell he wasn't intimating that Dromarch himself didn't know, though. "I don't blame you. It's a heady thing."

He really thought she was going to be on and out with her secret after just one talk with him? Cocky old blighter. He wasn't wrong, though. She'd thought about it many a time, in the oppressive dry-mug heat of Mor Ardain where everything was so cloistered up and wrecked over. Something for a change, maybe.

"You mentioned...the men you freely gave your weapons to. Men you fought with. What did you mean by that, really?"

"Well." Cole smiled himself now, a glib, crooked thing that was a little uncanny. "You must have deduced who one of them was."

"Was it Vandham?" She'd never confronted, more confided in, Cole about her guilt, about not saving him. She couldn't tell if it would have been better or worse to do that before the words she'd just said.

Cole nodded. "It was Vandham indeed. Even just a few years ago - that is, about thirty, because thirty is as much out of five hundred as three is out of fifty - I was much lighter on my feet. Him too, before he got to be so big."

Nia knew he was lying about the scope of the time, and he knew she knew and...whatever. The thought of a scrawny Vandham was something much more arresting.

"So you didn't just fight with him? You gave him your daggers, and all?" Daggers. Things he could stab himself with, just like the scythes. Why was it the bloody same?

"Nia, are you alright?" Cole asked suddenly. "Huh? I'm fine. Just stirring the soup, yeah?" But the spoon juddered between her fingers as it swept around the pot.

"You're shaking," he said, uselessly. Well, but it wasn't useless. People had to notice things at some time or other. Foreshadowing, wasn't it, even though in this case it was coming after the fact.

"I could have saved him," she blurted out of a sudden, dropping the spoon almost wholesale into the pot, but there was still a quickness to his movement, and he caught it. "I had that power. I still have it. I always did, even wh-- Before I looked like this."

"And does that make everything incumbent upon you? Just because you're a healer?"

"Well...yeah."

"Nia, look at me." She looked, and his face was grave. Graver than usual. "I don't blame you."

"You don't?"

Cole shook his head. "Of course not. Vandham was a bleeding heart, just like--" He paused, collected himself. "Just like a lot of good men and women I've known. He did what he did knowing full well it was a sacrifice. It's not always on the supporting cast to bring about a deus ex machina just because it's possible, even dreamt of. People make decisions. Sooner or later, you have to live with them."

"Did you make a decision?" The jabbing question was less sudden than the confession, but it was brash in its unconfidence nonetheless.

"What's that you say?" It was in a distracted motion that the spoon changed hands again, beneath their noses, beneath their chests with the twin crystals. "Did you make the decision? To be the way you are?"

Ah. "I did," he said slowly. "Amalthus was the one who wanted it done, but I was the one who chose to walk into the laboratory with my face on straight. And did you?"

Did she? Of course she didn't. "No," she answered him, and her voice was a squeak.

"I gave him my daggers," Cole said, dialing the subject back around, and it was the repetition, call and response, of prose as much as it was the warm, guiding tone that let Nia know he wasn't talking about the Praetor, then Quaestor, maybe even Magister, anymore. "But the reason I don't blame you couldn't be further from something so maudlin as that 'I understand.' They're guns, you know."

Guns? They were what now? He was gone before she could say it: creaked across the floorboards, out of the kitchen, hacked a cough at the threshold into his office, then the very back room, and when he came back it was with another holstered dagger in his hand. Rheumatism seemed to grip at him as he worked the handle, but the practice, the ease was there.

Sure enough, the very thing was a gun, filigree magazine and barrel and all. "Shine your boots, point and shoot. The whole shebang. I never healed anyone, with or without these things."

Like a tiny ether cannon, and Nia was good with those. Pretty cool, old man. Pretty cool. She couldn't resist a taunt. "You had to have worked with a healer, right, though? Unless your aim and your footwork is just that good."

"It used to be," he said with a wink that was so slight Nia almost missed it. But then, it probably still hurt to wink out of that eye, even after all these years. Some things you just never stop feeling, and that scar looked very, very real. It's not incumbent on you, Nia. But it felt like it.

"I still got hurt, sometimes. I'm surprised at how long it took me to turn into a walking carcass, but the signs were always there. You've met her, haven't you?"

"Met who? Someone else who's been around for as long as you have? Sheesh, makes me feel a little creepy." Cole didn't humor her sardonic spiel.

"Haze." The word, the name, was said in an inflection just as hazy as the selfsame inspiration. Rounded and almost affectionate, but tinged with something damned sorrowful.

"I don't know any Haze. We met a Fan though, if you're up on windy names."

Cole closed his eyes, winced like the very wind had indeed been knocked out of him. After a few seconds, he gave a grim nod. "The same Blade. But not the same person. And didn't she look like someone you've seen, too?"

Nia scratched her head; Cole was right, the face had sparked some sort of idle recognition in her, but she'd chalked it up to seeing too many faces in too many places to bother either keeping track or purposefully losing it anymore.

"Jin's Driver," he said, and then she knew. "Oh." "Indeed."

"So you were all...?"

"Lora, Jin, and Haze, a veritable band of merry men in their own right. Hugo, Brighid, and Aegaeon, the Ardainian vanguard of their own time. Addam and Mythra, the first firmament of the pneumatic Aegis."

"You must have been on that third team, then." Cole nodded, and Nia nodded with him. Three by three, like a neat little square. Their, her, cockeyed group wasn't half so simply reconcilable.

"But that means that Addam-- Oh." And the pieces began to fall into place, because an Aegis was an Aegis and a goofball Driver was a goofball Driver, and a Flesh Eater who didn't have a home but trusted the man in the middle was...maybe that wasn't timeless, but still.

"And that's what we call a parallel, my dear." Cole patted her back with a slightly lingering touch, then turned away to fiddle with some junk on the table. Soup still simmering, but it's not done yet.

When they had almost finished their meal, passed mostly in a slightly awkward silence, and Nia got down to the very last dregs of broth in her bowl, she was about to lift it to her lips and just drink the rest down, but she stopped herself, because Cole was an old man, right? Kinda genteel, and all. Not even Mythra would do that, never mind Tora.

But then when she looked up and across the table and saw him doing the very same thing, she near about snorted soup and spices out of her nose.

He grinned at her when the bowl came down, wide and easy. "I'd say old habits die hard, but then that wouldn't be as poignant as befits you. I'm comfortable with who I am, shall we say. Proud of it, even. How's that?"

Nia was teary-eyed in her ramshackle amusement, and she had to gulp away the laughter to finally get it out: "Did you eat the centipede dumplings after all?"

"Of course I did," Cole said dryly. "How else do you think I lived this long? A little bit of danger is good for the soul."

Interestingly enough, none of the TTGC insect collectibles carry over to XC2, so I took the liberty of choosing among the comparatively smaller future selection for something Nia would recognize.

Basis for this fic is within here.