[He isn't quick to drop his guard, but there is something so utterly disarming about X'rhun and the way he's looked at, that Ardyn struggles to find a reply.
It isn't how one of Bahamut's visions would act, it isn't what they would say. He hears no poison wheedling at insecurities or bolstering the notion of the futile. Ardyn is instead granted only with his friend's tinge of humor, wry and sanguine, and he did not realize how much he had missed it until now. Something in his shoulders slump, his lean into the wall more marked. He hardly knows how to process the flare of tangled emotion in his chest, memories and associations suddenly revived and standing before him.
And so he falls upon his default — the smile of a man lived too long and lost too much, thin and never sincere. But it lacks its usual acid, a strange hopefulness in his eyes betraying all else.]
X’rhun… is it really you?
[He had thought he should never see him again. Resigned himself to it, chalked it up to another loss in a long line of them. Regrets, shoved down and locked up tight. His retort is strained, reaching out with his words if he cannot bring himself to do it quite yet with his body.]
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It isn't how one of Bahamut's visions would act, it isn't what they would say. He hears no poison wheedling at insecurities or bolstering the notion of the futile. Ardyn is instead granted only with his friend's tinge of humor, wry and sanguine, and he did not realize how much he had missed it until now. Something in his shoulders slump, his lean into the wall more marked. He hardly knows how to process the flare of tangled emotion in his chest, memories and associations suddenly revived and standing before him.
And so he falls upon his default — the smile of a man lived too long and lost too much, thin and never sincere. But it lacks its usual acid, a strange hopefulness in his eyes betraying all else.]
X’rhun… is it really you?
[He had thought he should never see him again. Resigned himself to it, chalked it up to another loss in a long line of them. Regrets, shoved down and locked up tight. His retort is strained, reaching out with his words if he cannot bring himself to do it quite yet with his body.]
You just can’t stay away, can you.