Mixing Business with Pleasure | Tales of Symphonia

[farina]

Title: Mixing Business with Pleasure
Fandom: Tales of Symphonia
Words: 9,605 words
Summary: They’d discussed it a few times over the past decade but always ended up coming to the same conclusion: it was easier not to commit to anything. It was safer. She had a life of her own and saw in herself a puzzle piece that could never quite fit him due to circumstance. He understood and agreed it was for the best; he was still afraid to love her openly, anyway. So they made do.
Pairing/Character: Regal/Raine, some mention of others.
Extra Info: This is quite dialogue-heavy. It also deals with fantasy racism.
Rating: Explicit
Genre: Romance/Angst, a bit character study-ish regarding personal fears and doubts of the characters.

Notes:

This is the longest thing I’ve written since 2014 and it took days to write, which is rare for me. I usually write in one long sitting or perish. Massive thanks to the giant Baja Blast my husband gave me yesterday afternoon since it got me through the last third of this story. ;)

My original intention with this was to do a quick and dirty “ten years post-game” story where Regal and Raine have loved one another all that time but were both too afraid to agree to marry due to fear, with him being afraid of putting her life in danger and her being afraid of ruining his reputation.

Then it got tender and sad and I felt that ten years was a good time frame for that specific issue to resolve itself, and thus this story bloomed from an estimated 3k to over 9k words long.

I wanted to write something where the stumbling block the characters faced made sense, since that’s so often a problem in this type of story. The last thing I wanted was to ruin the readers’ suspension of disbelief with contrived drama.

Raine’s fear is perhaps the most expected: she’s lived in fear her whole life. This fear also extends to other people she cares about, and she’s 100% justified in believing if she married Regal that he would suffer for it. People would stop believing in him, possibly stop trusting him, he could potentially get unseated from his own company, he could have his title stripped, and so on. Like, she knows how racist the world is and is not wrong in fearing the consequences of an official union between them.

On the flip side, I think it’s foolish not to also explore Regal’s fears. The first woman he loved died by his own hand and he blamed it all on himself. He eventually found out that she would have been taken and experimented on anyway (because Presea was a success), and therefore would have died in the same manner, but that doesn’t erase the way he felt all those years. If he married Raine, it puts her in the spotlight. People will talk about her and judge her. She’ll be expected to attend events on his arm. And if people hate the idea of her enough they might even try to hurt her. He’s also been in high society enough to know how cutting the court can be. Emotional trauma is bad enough, but the guilt he would feel if physical harm came to her, or God forbid she was killed, would just be so overwhelmingly awful.

This isn’t even getting into the complications of future children.

Part of the issue then became how to tell a story that skipped ten extremely important and meaningful years, so I settled on sprinkling in bits of memory. Regal is a thoughtful sort of character anyway, and with the two of them not getting to see one another often it felt all right to let him reminisce in bursts. Plus this helped to highlight only the more important/relevant bits of history, like the first time he realizes she’s been a victim of violent racism.

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I hope the sex did something to emphasize their closeness and knowledge of one another. I wanted to balance Raine’s pragmatism with that kinder side she tends to hide from others, so I fell upon this characterization: she’s terribly blunt most of the time, still has some trouble with expressing certain emotions, and even after a decade struggles with the idea of losing control even during sex with someone she loves and trusts. Of course, it doesn’t help that this relationship is being kept secret: it’s at least half a formed habit to be quiet by this point.

Regal’s silence is mostly for Raine’s benefit, but he never struck me as a particularly noisy person anyway. I do think one of his love languages is Acts of Service, though, so make of that what you will.

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Not a bath scene exists in the world where I’m not reminded of I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Dry Out (a scene from Big Fish). That kind of quiet contemplative imagery is what I was going for, but with clothes off.

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Their cyclical conversation where they can’t reach a definite conclusion but both still obviously want to get married was fun to write, but it also felt pretty natural. They both know what they want at this point in their lives but that doesn’t mean they feel comfortable agreeing to it without giving it the appropriate amount of thought. Neither of these characters is overly impulsive and they’re both just trying to work through ten years of stuff.

I think it’s easy to say “they love each other so they should just do it” but sometimes it’s just not that simple.

Because they love each other, the choice is hard.

Speaking of that, “If I loved you less” is from Jane Austen’s Emma, though in the context of Emma the sentence finishes, “I might be able to talk about it more.”

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“Stay safe, Raine,” he said instead.

We all know he is saying he loves her with that line but I’m pointing it out here in case it wasn’t obvious enough. ;)

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Apparently nobody in the known world agrees on how to capitalize the title of this story. Most writing styles capitalize the “with” but not all, and not even all book titles write it capitalized. So I kept it lowercase for my own sanity and peace of mind.