A Weather Eye on the Horizon

Title: What You Once Were
Fandom: Tales of Vesperia
Pairing: Yuri/Duke
Rating: Teen
Post-game, ending spoilers
For meimi in newgameplus
Teaser: "You are not the warrior you once were, Yuri Lowell. None of us are.”



Post-game, inspired by the picture in the credits of Duke hanging out with all the woodland creatures.

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The forests of Tolbyccia are a lot thicker than Yuri remembers. The trees grow so close so close together that sometimes it hard to tell who’s branches belong to who, which trunk connects to which. The entwining of the leaves nearly blots out the sky, lending the forest floor a perpetual state of semi-twilight.

Yuri wonders if it has to do with the time of year, or if it had been easier to navigate when it had been the six of them working together. Or maybe it had to do with the flood of Aer that had been released over the world…

Come on, who’s he kidding? If he’s honest with himself, he knows why it is. Why every motion is more difficult than it used to be.

Of course, life without blastia isn’t impossible, but fuck if it hadn’t made things easier. Now he can actually feel the weight of his sword, the strain in his shoulder as he swings it in a arc to cleave a monster. He gets tired much, much faster, and doing back flips isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be. It’s hard.

“Dammit.” He drops down onto a rotting log, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Gotta get used to this.”

Repede makes a noise of agreement and thumps his tail. A moment later, his ears prick up, like he’s heard something Yuri hasn’t. A low, rumbling growl starts in his throat.

“Repede?” Yuri tightens his grip on his sword. “What is it?”

Repede only has time to let out one resounding bark before it crashes out of the leaves. Yuri gets one quick look of leathery wings and a sharp, pointed beak before its on him. He leaps backward, and if he’d had blastia he would have been able to avoid the attack—as it is, it catches him a glancing blow across the ribs, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing into a stand of thorn bushes. His head connects with something hard, the forest going swimmy before his eyes. He can hear Repede’s frantic barks as the monster bears down on him.

Yuri raises his sword in defense, but he can feel himself losing consciousness, vision spinning away to a point of blackness. The last thing he remembers is everything going quiet, even Repede’s barks, and then the sensation of being lifted, like he flying toward the sky.

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Yuri wakes lying on his back atop something soft. Above him, a rocky ceiling swims into focus.

He pushes himself up on his elbows, groaning, head swimming, and realizes two things. He is not dead, and he’s naked. His torso is wrapped and bandaged, and when he tries to sit up he feels a jolt of pain in his chest. Ribs—probably not broken, just cracked. There are scratches on his arms from the bramble-bush, the worst of them cleaned and bandaged as well.

“So you’re awake.”

The voice is deep and resonant and entirely familiar.

With effort, Yuri props himself up further. He can’t keep the shock out of his voice. “Duke.”

He is kneeling beside a campfire, wine-dark eyes turned glassy and strange in the wavering light. He is naked to the waist, hair cropped short, but he is still unmistakable.

“You were asleep for quite awhile. Don’t try to get up--,” he cautions, rising to his feet, still graceful, even if a great deal of his majesty has been lost with the hair and the coat. “You have a concussion and two cracked ribs. “

Yuri had been reaching, more or less unconsciously, for his sword, which isn’t anywhere to be found. Duke hadn’t really seemed like a bad guy—under other circumstances he would have been interesting for a whole other reason, if a little more stoic than Yuri’s usual type—but they had been enemies up till a few months ago. No point in being careless. The room darkens for a moment, colors bleeding into one another for a moment. He drops back onto the furs.

“Shit.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and when he opens them again Duke is leaning over him. Up close, Yuri can see a pattern of yellowing bruises across his abdomen, a criss-cross of scars on his stomach disappearing beneath the hem of his trousers. He wonders if he’d given him some of those scars.

He can’t really do much as Duke puts a hand to his forehead, pulling back his eyelids, making Yuri feel like he’s back in the Knights, undergoing the semi-annual physical exam.

There’s a few moments of pain, then a coolness spreading out from where Duke’s fingers touch his forehead, soothing away the ache. Everything comes a little more into focus.

“Healing magic? How did you do that without blastia?”

Duke smiles, just a little. Yuri isn’t sure if it’s an expression he’s ever seen on his face before. Up close he smells like earth and wet leaves and sweat from the heat of the fire. His cheekbones are sharper without his mane of hair to soften them, and his eyes look bigger, so deep you could drown in them. He is not as beautiful as he had been, but that doesn’t make him any less hypnotic.

“One needn’t cage the power of the planet in order to make use of it,” Duke says. His hands move lower, feeling across the cuts on Yuri’s arms, down to his ribs, touch gentle.

Yuri is very aware that he is naked and more or less at the mercy of the man they’d teamed up to beat the shit out of in order to save the world. Hell, he’s practically being felt up by him.

“Terca Lumeries is willing to give aid to those who ask for its help,” Duke goes on, pressing down lightly on Yrui’s ribs, making him gasp. “The Child of the Full Moon is capable of it as well, if I recall correctly.”

“Yeah, she is,” Yuri answers. He can still remember how shocked they’d all been when Estelle had used magic without a blastia equipped. “So you rescued me, huh?”

Duke raises his eyebrows stoically. “Obviously.” He presses down harder on Yuri’s ribs and shit, does it hurt. It isn’t the sort of pain that Yuri likes either, the sort that mixes with adrenaline and battle-high into a sort of breathless euphoria. “The monsters this far north can be vicious. I can’t imagine what you were doing here on your own.”

“I wasn’t alone, I had—hey, where’s Repede?”

He makes to sit up again, until Duke puts two hands on his shoulders, forcing him back down to the ground. “Have you learned nothing from this experience? You are not the warrior you once were, Yuri Lowell. None of us are.” There is something in his voice, a hitch, a moment of weakness. “’I believe your friend stayed by your side until he was sure that I wasn’t going to do anything untoward to you—.” Was that another smile? “And then he left. To bring help, I imagine. Now, rest.”

Yuri sighs. “Fine. But at least tell me why I’m naked.”

Duke stands up. “There was quite a lot of blood when I delivered the killing blow. Monster’s blood can be harmful to flesh after prolonged exposure.” He gestures down to himself, at his patched and dirt-stained trousers. “And I have nothing else to offer you.”

“Hey, it’s alright.” Yuri stretches out, as luxuriously as he can with two cracked ribs and an aching head. The fur felt wonderful against his bare skin. “It’s nice and warm in here anyway.”

Duke’s gaze lingers on him for a few moments. There is something longing in his gaze, something hungry, and Yuri remembers his words before their fight in Tarqaron—how if they’d met under happier circumstances, their encounter might have been of a different sort.

“So…how far away are we from civilization?” Yuri asks, as Duke goes back to tending the fire, the old-fashioned way, feeding it bits of kindling and twigs, without magic. Apparently Terca Lumeries isn’t nice enough to help him with that.

“Four days,” he answers without looking up. “As the crow flies.”

“Well, then.” Yuri attempts to strike a seductive pose, but it sort of makes his head pound. He settles for lying on his back and rubs his arms across the fur. “Guess I’m gonna be naked for awhile.”

Duke glances up, and he is most certainly smiling now. “So it would seem.”