HAPPY BIRTHDAY THE TRINITY TREE. You're fantastic! You're a star!

Well, this will never have the loving, polished feel your story More Than a Job has, Trin, but I did my best.

Consider this interaction between a younger Cecille and Catseye. And a rather introspective look on how two completely different people can love the same person. I don't know, I got carried away. Happy (slightly late) Birthday anyway?

Warnings: swear words, vague sorta kinda polyamory?

No Beauty

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Cecille is not a beautiful woman, but there is something about her.

Catseye is no good with flowery metaphors, poetry and whatnot, he's always left that to Harry. Harry, who was softer than the finest fur trimming. Harry, who couldn't defend himself if a weapon leapt out of his hands and did his attacking for him.

Catseye can appreciate the finer things in life-a hot meal, a cushy bed, a cute girl to warm it-but he's never been much for the written word. Possibly because he can't read. Possibly because he's a realist, more pragmatic than even Aonyx's twitchy little Yuke partner, the newest recruit out of Crysila. Gods, she's colder than the slap of a winter ocean wave. For all that he uses words like weapons, he is no poet.

But there is something about Cecille that makes him want to be.

She is the only one left standing in the Daemon King's Court. Aonyx has slumped boneless to the ground, huffing quietly as he struggles to heal a leg mostly chewed off. Endellia, proud sorceress, is kneeling with her head bowed in a way Catseye knows she would never allow consciously. He has fallen, spread-eagle on his back as if he wants to hug the dark, smoky sky that arches above them all. And then she fills his vision.

Cecille stands above him, spine ramrod straight even as she tips her head down to meet his eyes. Those blue eyes are glacial as she takes in his gaping belly cut, the way the lacerations cross his entire body. She kneels beside him carefully, her hand brushes his forehead and then his lips. Her touch is cool, benediction, blessing, she presses something into his hand. Then she stands again, strides toward the waiting Lizard King, and there are spines and spears protruding from her back like pins in a cushion. Blood spills down her back in a red tide.

No one should be able to survive that. No one should be able to take that, get up, and walk back for more. To buy them time, he realizes, as a blue-green spell lights up to his right and he hears Aonyx begin to crawl over the sand to Endellia.

"Cecille!" he gasps out, fingers clenching reflexively. That's when he realizes there's a Cure stone in his hand, and that she's chosen him over herself.

He's shit at magic, but willpower is everything, as Aonyx always says, which must be why little Endellia is so damn good at it. He doesn't just demand magic from the stone, he expects it. To him, there is simply no option existing that would allow the spell not to work.

And it does. Soothing green and icy blue stir in his hand, and he has just enough energy to raise his hand and project it straight where Cecille battles, a whirlwind of weaponry.

Savage. Indomitable. Unchained.

She berates him for it afterward endlessly, always when scratching at the new red line that mars her face. Catseye knows she's not angry, not really. Cecille's not that kind. She just doesn't understand what he did, why he did it. Cecille's the kind of girl who always has to know why, in her own way.

Since he can't really explain it to himself, he usually just keeps quiet, 'cause he can't really explain it to her either.

Harry visibly flinches when he sees Cecille at the village entrance and Catseye could kill him for it. He hates the way she turns away and pretends she didn't see him, hates that when she looks at Harry from then on, it's always with her head turned slightly, as if to shield Harry from the sight.

Fuck Harry, Catseye thinks idly as he lounges on one of the stone benches, ignoring the dancers leaping and spinning around the crystal beyond. Apparently he isn't the only one thinking that, for all too soon he just happens to notice Cecille slipping away with him away from the crystal, into the dark.

Catseye returns to the wagon to have his nap. It's just too loud out by the crystal. Too distracting.

Enthralled. Inveigled. Embittered.

Cecille has a blank face a gambler would kill for, but Catseye's spent too much time around crooks to not be able to read through the cracks.

Something in that letter must have done her wrong. He sits beside her, ignoring the curious looks Endellia casts them from where she sits close to the myrrh tree, conversing with the mail moogle. Dipping his sore feet into the sluice's warm spring, he asks, "Bad news from home?"

She lifts one shoulder, then lowers it. "No. Only confused about how to reply."

He's never been one to press. And despite how closed off Cecille can be, he knows she'll open to him. "Aye?"

"Aye. He talks of our future together as if it were so certain. Set in stone, made law. Always so afraid for me. Next year, he says, next year this, and next year that. As if I wanted to leave everything to run a farm!" she bites her lip, then shrugs one shoulder again. "Perhaps I do. Would it be so bad?"

The worst, he wants to tell her. But he doesn't. He never does.

Staring at her face, he is certain in that instant that the scar is what makes her face. Somehow, that slowly fading red line has transformed her from merely striking to intensely breathtaking. The frown on her lips, the stern slant to her eyebrows, the bridge of her nose so obviously once broken, the hint of cheekbone have suddenly been united in purpose by that scar.

How can Harry not see that? How can the bastard miss that the scar, and the job, makes Cecille what she is? How can he say he loves her if he doesn't even realize that what he loves so much about her-her independence, her determination, her kindness-are all the things he can't stand to even look at?

Cecille's eyes meet his, powder blue demanding answers from his own grey. For a moment they waver, and she reaches out as if to hold his hand before pulling back suddenly, burned. He slicks a hand back through his hair, unconsciously awkward as he thinks quickly. He doesn't have those answers. Not so long as she loves Harry.

"Come on, Ocean Eyes," he says at last, gesturing back toward their Yuke partners. "The magickers must be getting lonely."

"No one's ever called me that but you," she muses as they stand together. "Ice Eyes, sure. But Ocean Eyes?"

"It suits you," he says, and lets her think it is some misjudgment about the color. In Leuda, he'd been a deep sea diver. Try as he might, past the sandy shelf, he'd never found the bottom of the ocean. There were always hidden depths.

Bottomless. Intriguing. Enigmatic.

He begins to realize that it's the hard parts of Cecille he likes best. The no-nonsense, callused grip, bared teeth, steel sword, glacier eyes, battered and scarred Cecille he sees on the road, the one who disappears the moment they enter Crysila.

The hard Cecille is who she really is, he thinks as he watches her dance carefully and tenderly around Harry's questions about the year. The Cecille who guards his back, whose back he guards, should not have to protect her lover from herself. And yet she does.

He can save her, he knows. He can keep her in the caravan, year after year, until those hard parts of her replace all the softness Harry thinks he loves. Until she can finally be free. Yet, at the same time, he wants anything but that.

Finally, he figures out that he just might love her. And that's when he at last sees what he has missed all along.

There are two Cecilles. Not two people, but two sides. The fighter and the lover. The woman who never cries and the girl who laughs delightedly. The wolf at his door and the startled fawn in the wood. He's always known she was complicated, this takes it further than he ever imagined. A double life, really. Hidden depths indeed.

And not too long after that realization does he realize that he doesn't care. He loves her anyway, both parts, as best he can. And that likely Harry feels the same way he does, loving even while seeing there is a side to her he can never really know. For Harry, that is the woman who guards Catseye's back. For Catseye, that is the woman who dreams of a peaceful life with a farmer.

They love the same woman. And though Cecille never kisses him, or dances with him at festivals, or sneaks away in the dark with him, Catseye knows, without doubt, that she loves him all the same. She gives Cure stones to him, trusts him with her secrets, puts her life on the line for him, looks at him so full of feeling, touches him like she knows him better than he knows himself.

Maybe she does. He wouldn't put it past her.

And it's okay, he sees now, for both he and Harry to love her. And it's okay for her to maybe love them both back. It doesn't have to be a fight, it doesn't have to be a competition. They can both have her, the parts they love most. The partner and the lover. Catseye's Cecille and Harry's. She can be both. She can be everything.

She is everything.

Amalgam. Fusion. Perfection.

Catseye is no poet, like Cecille is no beauty. Never has been. That's Harry's job.

But sometimes, for Cecille, he likes to try.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.