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It was a sound he never knew he'd be privileged to hear.
But once it passed her lips, -that golden peel of bells that skitters across the guildhall from where she sits with her friends while he skulks by the bar trying to remain unnoticed and unmolested by the people who have yet to adopt him into the fold. Regardless of what their minuscule master has declared and the loyalty he's shown during that battle with the master's idiot grandson and his cronies- once it's danced it's way across the hall and reverberated through the very core of him, he knows he needs to hear it again.
Again and again, like listening to the same song via musical lacrima on repeat. Over and over until the sweet melody of it makes him want to wretch.
But this, this freshly refined iron, this shining bit of sunshine turned to sound, the day he gets sick of it, is the day he gets his hearing tested to see if one of the Salamander’s roars have finally deafened him.
And then…
Then…
Then that first time that he’s the cause of it. That first time.
It's far worse.
The way it strikes him in the very marrow of his bones. The way her nose crinkles and the light that shines from her eyes as she looks at him.
Him.
Of all people.
As though he deserves it. As though what he did to her and her team, her family, doesn't matter to her. As if she's forgiven and forgotten and he's deserving of it. As though he, of all people, could bring something other than darkness and pain into the world.
So what if they'd been in the middle of training for Tenrou and it's mostly a breathless wheeze as she pants and sucks in air in great gasping gulps.
Even if it had been entirely unintentional, some quick quip, a verbal spar to go right along with their physical one and the terrible pun that it was -something about fighting a dragon and it being better slayed than done- has her nearly in stitches on the ground.
It's his secret goal then, to see if he can do it again; make her laugh and bring out that smile again. And when he succeeds a second time, even when its accompanied by groans and sighs from the people around him -his friends he realizes some time later- nothing can keep the smile off his face.
And so he plots and practices, like the lovesick fool he's become, because it takes work to sound like the smooth motherfucker that he thinks- hopes- they all think he is.
Soon he starts keeping track. Keeping track of how often he can make her laugh. What makes her laugh so hard she cries, or to her embarrassment -and his secret delight- snort.
It's his play on words that gets her the best -of course it is, because what else would he expect from a mage who makes her livelihood off of words made tangible- especially when she's expecting it the least and as the two of them grow closer, the more often he finds himself laughing along with her.
Their two voices mingling and blending together to form one harmony that for all his musical genius he could never replicate on or off stage.
Then, when the war breaks out and joy leeches away from their souls, not in a steady trickle or stream but the rush of a flash flood, when she puts herself in the line of fire and he's very nearly ripped away from her for good.
It's not until after, when he hears it again through the din of victory around them, half choked with sobs and muffled by fabric and the fact that her face is pressed so, so tightly into his shoulder and he doesn't know if it's her clinging to him or the other way around, that he realizes that he almost lost this, lost her and that sound he can't get enough of and an unexpected wave of relief at the fact that that he hasn’t floods through his veins. The sound and the feel nearly knock him to the ground.
He'll chastise her later for putting herself at risk, while he plays off his own sacrifice as no big deal.
But for now.
For now he'll take the tear stained kisses that accompany the laughter and smiles that he’ll never take for granted and spend the rest of their lives prying out of her.