Fic - Ballad/Lumen - "I almost lost you" kiss

[lady_mab]

is it self-indulgent to place this within the context of my own au? maybe, but also, this is something i've wanted to write for the end of it for awhile.

Exact request came through with the 😔 emoji, too

I don't think this counts as spoilers for the fic, but i mean, if you haven't read it yet, why not go start now?

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Ballad leaves Echo and Signet on the balcony and heads back inside. No one notices his arrival, except for one figure on the fringes of the crowd, and Ballad can feel his heart jump in his throat.

The figure moves, and Ballad immediately follows--pushing through the crowds, muttering apologies as he goes, out of the reception room and into one of the back halls of Thyrsus.

Footsteps round a corner just ahead of him, and Ballad allows himself to say, “Lumen, wait.”

They stop, and Ballad turns the corner too quickly after them.

Lumen’s fist collides with his chest, a weak attempt at an attack, but it gets him to pull up short all the same. They duck their head, lifting their other hand to press to his shoulder--not able to push him away, but not able to draw him in closer. “I don’t want to see you right now, Ballad Reverie.”

It hurts, more than it should. The tightness in their voice, their refusal over the last few days to even meet his gaze when he’s tried to find them in the Excerpt’s guard, not even Echo is willing to broach the gap between them.

“I’m sorry,” Ballad starts. He traces the tips of two fingers over the back of Lumen’s wrist, gently pulling their hands away from him. “I’m sorry, but I just want to talk.”

He retreats, slowly, backing around the corner. When he can’t hear the sound of retreat from Lumen, he leans against the wall. He lifts his hands to his face, trying to scrub away the exhaustion. “I’ve missed you,” he finally says, tiny, quiet, painfully loud in the silence of the hall.

“There were so many things, Ballad…”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” There’s a confidence in Lumen’s words that he’s not used to, and he aches for the person they became away from him. The person they were able to grow into when they weren’t under Advent’s banner, at his side, stifled. “I thought Echo had died, the way you carried on. And I know that you cared, because I saw what it did to you, Ballad.”

Ballad doesn’t say anything, because he has no excuse. He had a duty to Advent, a role to uphold, and he had performed it admirably. There had been the one moment of weakness, but then he had to carry on like there was nothing wrong.

Lumen takes a breath, and it wavers on the exhale. “I thought that I would be able to ignore it. The space that you left when I was arrested by Captain Gardner. But you didn’t let there be a space, and it was so unfair that I could hear you but Echo couldn’t, that you could know that I was okay but you didn’t know about Echo—”

“Lumen, I lost both of you in the space of--what, a month? Both of you were my responsibility—”

“We’re our own responsibility, Ballad.”

He slams his hand against the wall, then tips his head back against it to let out a frustrated sigh at the ceiling. “I was your commanding officer and they were my actions that lead to both of you on those assignments.”

There’s a sound, and Ballad jerks upright--thinking that Lumen has decided that enough was enough of this conversation.

But instead, he finds himself looking down into their upturned face, their eyes pale and solemn in their narrow face, and it’s all that he can do to keep his hands pressed to the wall behind him.

“I made my own choice,” Lumen mutters, not breaking the gaze.

“I thought I lost you,” Ballad answers. “I was so… so scared to reach out to you. Because what if the line was dead, what if I reached out and you weren’t there. And all I could think about was that our last conversation was an argument and that—”

Lumen cuts him off with a kiss.

It’s soft, light, like it could pull away and any moment.

But Ballad wraps his arms around them and pulls them in against him and kisses them harder. Their hands grip the front of his waistcoat, trembling, desperate.

Ballad doesn’t even realize that the apologies are slipping from his lips between kisses until Lumen shifts their hands to cup his face, holding him in place so that they can pull a long, drawn out kiss from him instead.