SoKeefe One-Shots

His Best Friend

Sometimes when Dex looks at Sophie, especially when she laughs or the sun catches her eyes and they turn that golden honey color, he's reminded of his boyhood crush. How he had looked at this girl with her decidedly moral nature and depth beyond her years and could do nothing less than fall in love with her.

Of course, so did everyone else. She was a force to be reckoned with and everyone who saw her in those first few months after she moved to the Lost Cities wanted to know her, even just to understand the wisdom in her strange colored eyes.

But he had become her friend, her best friend, and he realized that if this feeling of connection and understanding, of both himself and his family, was love then he wouldn't mind being in love with Sophie Foster.

Dex was the first person to understand just how indestructible her spirit was, how impossibly human, as it definitely wasn't something elves were taught. When they were kidnapped and she saved his life he saw her courage for the very first time. And then she kept saving him, even after he made the restrictor and yelled at her in his jealousy, she stayed his friend and loved him through it all. She stood up for him when the other boys called him scrawny or when they judged his parent's marriage. They're the ridiculous ones, she would tell him, referring to the other boys. No use judging something as precious as love or as uncontrollable as having triplets. She accepted him in all ways, she was safe, and she was beautiful, there was no way to not love her.

Then he kissed her, his first kiss as well as hers, and it was terrible. After years of comfort and pining it just seemed like the logical next step, even if in the back of his mind he had seen the signs pointing him away from this path. They agreed to be best friends, basically family, after that and Dex was satisfied.

But he could tell that Sophie wasn't.

Something had happened after Team Prodigious was formed. Sophie was tired, the ever-present dark circles under her eyes became a worryingly permanent fixture. Her relationship with Fitz was strained and every conversation she came back from with Forkle left her in an angry place. Her indestructible spirit was faulting and Dex couldn't help but mourn the loss. She was their leader, the face they looked to whenever something was going wrong, the very moral character they relied upon to move forward and it seemed like she was pulling away. Losing her will to go along with every plan that was laid out in front of them, not that she had been very good at following them before, but now she seemed beaten down.

She had been through too much too fast. They all had and they were too young to be at the forefront of it all but it all rested on her shoulders. It had taken Dex too long to realize that and he blamed himself for not being there for her more.

They had all taken breaks. Fitz left anytime he got too angry, weeks spent hiding in his room. Biana needed months after her face had been scratched by the mirrors. Linh had been out of commission when her brother had gone to the Neverseen. Keefe was constantly being detained to his room, though that wasn't entirely his fault, but Dex could tell that when things got hard it was Keefe's instinct to run away. Even Dex had taken time for his family, mainly for the triplets when they had manifested.

But Sophie? She never stopped. It didn't seem like she minded, even pushing others to keep working or stay away if it was too dangerous. When Forkle's twin died, the only person she knew from her human life that she got to keep, the grief she had been keeping inside was suddenly too visible in her eyes. She looked older now, the girl he knew fading before him.

She stayed strong, Dex knew he could always count on Sophie for that, but now those beautiful honey eyes carried a hardness that only grief can cause, unable to hide it away like she used to. Now when the council asked her for help she locked her jaw before nodding in agreement. When Della mentioned her and Fitz's flirtation Sophie snapped at her and didn't apologize. Dex had done his best to back her up but she seemed to be far away whenever he talked to her, like she was thinking about other places. Whether past or present, he could never tell.