Three-Way Handshake -- Ar Tonelico fanfiction (Spica/Jakuri, 1,572 words, mildly suggestive fluff)

Inspired by a snippet from Jakuri's drama CD in which the two of them get captured and locked in a cell, and Spica gets shot down by Jakuri after trying to hit on her (yes. I know. It is really sort of awesome). I didn't mean for this to turn out as PG-13 as it did; the latter part was the part I really wanted to write, but I needed to give it some sort of setup. I'd originally intended for Spica's flirtation to be a brief couple of lines, but ultimately, I have trouble not being wordy. This was meant to be a drabble, honestly.

No AT2 spoilers in here. It's pretty much all concept, and the drama CD is set before AT2 anyway. Blacked out for worksafeness, though, even though this is really tame.

More notes after the fic.



Spica had been hoping to catch a little rest, but for a prison cell, this place was cloyingly warm. She glanced over at Jakuri to see if she was having the same trouble getting to sleep; she was dying to remove her own heavy outfit, except that she had nothing else to wear, and Jakuri's clothing, such as it was, could hardly be any more comfortable.

The Reyvateil, it turned out, was the heat source. The shimmering haze that danced over Jakuri's skin, a sea of flame-tongues discernible only by the distortions they left in the air, was tinged, in the part of Spica's mind that understood harmonics, with an unmistakeable magenta hue. As she watched, the swell around her only intensified, and Jakuri mumbled a "don't stare" that was mostly muffled by having been said into her pillow. Oh, my. This could be interesting.

She reached out to stroke Jakuri's cheek, not even needing to make contact before her fingertips began to tingle from the heat and light that was pouring out from her. Her touch still cool by contrast, she drew idle, swirling patterns on her skin, able to feel, as she repeated the motions, the little traces she left behind as spots where the warmth was not so stifling.

"Nn. What are you doing?" Jakuri said, grumbling and eventually summoning the willpower to swat lethargically at Spica's hand.

"Hmm, such interesting circumstances we find ourselves in here. It's okay, there's nobody watching." She leaned in to whisper her words against Jakuri's ear, feeling her own face begin to blaze with the reflected warmth. "Don't be shy."

Jakuri buried herself further into her pillow. "I'm not being shy. I'm just not interested." And the flame was swallowed back up in a rush, as if for punctuation.

Oh. Well, she'd misread that signal. She sank back into the bed with more than a twinge of guilt, Jakuri's back stonewalling her. Reaching out with her mind to try and get a sense of the situation, she could feel Jakuri's every muscle clenched rigid, her jaw clamped down to keep her song from spilling out of her, the harmonics still rolling over her in waves though she was evidently trying to choke them down. The tension in the room was even more insufferable than the heat had been, and she sighed internally. Perhaps a subject change would help.

"...Are you still feeling rough? I could tell it was making you uneasy, being cut off from your magic like that."

Jakuri made a vague sort of groan that fell halfway between what-are-you-talking-about-now and do-you-seriously-expect-me-to-expend-energy-on-answering-you. It didn't deter Spica, who was, in part, feeling some genuine concern that the incident might have shaken Jakuri more than she was willing to admit, though mostly she just wanted to break the deadlock.

"I know I found it a slight, so it must have been much worse for you." She remembered Jakuri's ranting about how she was a Reyvateil, as if she'd felt that losing her song impinged upon that identity, as if to take away her singing voice was to divide her in some unacceptable way. She could understand; she'd been truthful when she'd said she hadn't been exactly comfortable under the ward either, and seeing Jakuri try not to choke as she struggled to convince her instincts that, no, there was nothing actually in the way of her breathing had given her a pretty clear impression of what must have been going on in her mind.

"Do I really look like I want to talk right now, Spica?" Her harmonic awareness picked up the subtext there, a flanging echo behind the spoken words: do I look like I want to bare my soul more than I have to right now, Spica? There was another, dissonant chord mixed in with the protest, and Spica knew her words hadn't been entirely an affront; a little undercurrent of relief, of thankfulness, that she understood enough to notice wound warm and bright through words that were otherwise knife-edged. And now that one wound had already been opened, the possibility of communication broached, the longing to bridge the empathic gap had flared up in her still further; a longing she knew Jakuri felt too vulnerable now to act on but that she was testing at anyway, sending out little tendrils of energy towards Spica that she quickly withdrew again, like someone teasing a loose tooth with their tongue. Once or twice she thought she heard a whimper from her, a thin, hot sound as one of those tendrils got a little too close and was swallowed up by Spica's own warmth.

If she didn't want to talk, then Spica wouldn't make her talk. To press a Reyvateil to do anything with her voice-- and not least Jakuri, who had always been particularly sensitive about that, even for her species-- was never a safe endeavour, for one thing. But she couldn't let her go on like this, especially now that she'd shown, however obliquely, that she was willing to open up.

She began to hum, low in her throat, a bass note that she could feel resounding in her muscles and unravelling the knots that had accumulated there over the course of the day. She knew she ran the risk of only angering her further, but whoever was on Jakuri's mind, she needed to harmonise with someone if either of them were going to get any sleep tonight. Feeling her bumping up against her like a moth butting a lightbulb was already doing a number on her nerves, and she was willing to bet it wasn't doing much for the Reyvateil, either.

Jakuri rolled over to face her with a huff, though her expression was more curious than annoyed. "Spica...."

Not wanting to let up on her humming in order to speak, she let the frequency carry her emotions. It's just so you'll sleep. I'm sorry for assuming. Just relax into it. There was only so much she could convey without words, but she figured Jakuri would at least pick up sleep, sorry, relax.

Her hopes seemed confirmed when Jakuri's posture eased up, and the Reyvateil began to purr at her own, higher frequency. Forgiven, was hurting, feels nice, she thought she caught in her response, the feelings flowing into one another and crashing over each other in their haste to be expressed, their warm foam breaking against the shores of Spica's mind. She wrapped an arm around Jakuri's shoulders and felt her scoot closer, angling her head towards Spica's chest so as to best pick up the resonance; Spica laid her hand on Jakuri's ribcage, feeling the vibrations travel up through her arm and snake down into the base of her spine. She wondered who all that emotional overflow had been for, if not herself, but thankfully it didn't seem to be bothering her as much now that she at least had a release valve for the pressure.

Calm. Happy. Tired, Jakuri hummed, hugging her arms close to herself as her eyelids fell closed. Good. Relax. Rest, Spica continued, and Jakuri took that rest and wound it into her own vocalising, emitting a warm, steady tone that drove out the last prickles of aching from their bones.

Slowly, over time, Jakuri's part of the chorus began to waver, and Spica felt her harmonics settling into a deep and easy rhythm as her consciousness faded out. ...strange... special... human... was the last thing she managed to emote before her voice left her completely, and the steady sound of her breathing took over its role.

The soothing pulse of her harmonics reverberated through Spica, too, and she found her own eyelids suddenly weighted. Strange. Special. Human. She smiled to herself as she drifted away, her thoughts echoing the concepts with the same wordless resonance that had voiced them.


She awoke to the feeling of Jakuri's warmth most pleasantly draped about her. Physically speaking, she'd rolled away at some point in the night and collapsed into an artless tangle of limbs on the other side of the bed; but that nonetheless spoke volumes, since she'd never seen her sleep any way other than curled into a fetal ball, and she could feel the distinctive chords of Jakuri's energy lazily twined around hers, their rises and falls slipping between the pulses of her own life like they had always been there and knew exactly where they fit.

She was quietly confident that her companion would wake up, probably in a decently better mood for the peace she'd managed to find during the night, and demonstrate little evidence of morning embarrassment. This was natural like breathing to her, natural like singing; that she'd been so reticent to harmonise was the abnormality, for normally Reyvateils melted into everything that surrounded them as easily as warm summer light. But that was, she admitted, part of what she found so delightful about them. And if she'd helped her friend to get back, even a little, to being the blithe spirit she was intended to be... well, that was all the reward she needed.

Almost, anyway, she thought, running her fingertips over Jakuri's pale throat and feeling the pulse-like flutter there. She brushed her lips against the sweet spot and let the quiet purr of her systems sink deep into her body; capturing, for a few moments longer, the one song of hers that she would never cease to sing.



From the author: Probably the second "expository" piece I've written recently (the other was for another fandom), in that it basically exists to showcase an idea I had about the game's world and how it works; in this case, my thinking was that harmonics is essentially a state of being produced by things in the area vibrating at the same frequency, or carrying the same energy, and that by making sound intended to express soothing emotions you could cause the harmonics of someone who was anxious to resonate at a more comforting frequency.

And yes, Jakuri's final words there were in the drama CD, more or less. I think she was more trying to say that Spica was different from everyone else she knew than really emoting at her that much; it's ambiguous.

And the title, for those who didn't know, is a reference to this.