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So, I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 lately. And, I've found that, like many small or spin-off fandoms, there is not nearly enough fanfiction that people can find for it. So, I decided to write my own.
It may not make sense if you have no knowledge of Tactics A2. As it is, I suspect this isn't going to be widely read.
Oh, and I've jumped onto the bandwagon! Nothing particularly witty, but if you've got too much time on your hands and not enough trivial stuff to do, check me out!
There are two times in her life, Before Cid’s Treachery and After Cid’s Disappearance.
Even Before Cid’s Treachery, Illua never tells him the truth about the grimoire. Not that she would explain its properties to anyone from Khamja in the first place, but it feels like a special betrayal when she ignores Cid’s questioning looks at the book chained to her waist. Considering their usual proximity, he finds it odd that Illua has never been seen with the book before. She quashes the guilt with a warning hand on her Zanmato, and Cid wisely says nothing.
The bangaa that the fool who calls himself her superior has assigned to their team is not as wise. “What’sss with the book?” the dragoon demands. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those sssentimental women, carrying your journal everywhere you go.”
“We may need him for the mission,” Cid points out seconds before the dragoon is bereft a head. Illua considers the merits of his statement, before removing her katana from the bangaa’s neck, where it has left a definite score of blood.
“You’re too lenient on fools, Cid,” she reprimands as she begins walking out of the Grazton slums. “It may get you into trouble.”
“Heh, perhaps.” Cid turns to the bangaa and snaps, “Come along, pup. Don’t waste my time.” The bangaa looks ready to protest, but at the sound of the Zanmato clearing its sheath by about an inch, he follows along meekly.
Today’s mission is worse than normal. They are ambushed by a rival faction of Khamja after they have stolen the magicite from the scholar’s lab, and the other Khamja members are only focusing on Illua, attacking neither Cid nor the bangaa. It reeks of a setup, and when Illua dodges an arrow on pure Reflex, the way the archer freezes when the bangaa is hit instead only confirms it.
She confronts Cid after the battle, as he drags the dragoon’s wounded body along behind him. “You set me up, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t.” Cid’s reply is sure, unhesitating and unrushed. Illua isn’t convinced.
“You insisted we leave the traitorous fool alive,” she says, kicking the self-same backstabber in the ribs. He’s too far gone to groan, much less make it all the way back to base alive, but protocol states that all living members of Khamja must be taken back to prevent knowledge getting out. “How long have you been plotting against me? Which one of them bought you: Ktjn or Fynn?”
“Hrah, suspecting treachery even now?” Cid shakes his head, and Illua seethes at the act the Revgaji is putting on. “I’ve been yours ever since I joined up. Why would I plot with one of your rivals?”
“I don’t trust you.” She can’t afford to trust anyone but herself, but Cid had been the one she allowed to watch her back, that she allowed in her... It is simply too much to suspect anything but, though, when they hadn’t attacked Cid - Cid, who was practically interchangeable with her will. She doesn’t trust him, but it hurts.
Cid sighs, turning away from her and dropping the dragoon. “I find I grow tired of this,” he says, softly enough that she wouldn’t be able to hear him if she hadn’t been right next to him. “The constant suspicion you place on me...this isn’t for me, Illua.”
“Hmph. What is, then?” She waits for his answer, but he walks away, without bothering to collect the dragoon. She glances at the bangaa, thinks about having to carry him all the way back on her own on headquarters’ rules, and stabs him in the throat instead.
Later that night, as she stares down at the grimoire, Illua curses her foresight as she reads the description of Cid, the man who one day would lead her greatest enemies.
***
The next morning, Fynn knocks on the door to her office and lets himself in without waiting for a response. “You’re letting your best lieutenant go,” he gloats. “What’s the matter, finally decided that he wasn’t loyal enough for you?”
“Get out of my office before I make you get out,” Illua says, an icy suspicion creeping up her lungs. The ninja smirks at her before walking out.
She calls the newest member of Khamja to her - a hume named Ewen - and assigns him to determine if, when, and where Cid will be leaving. When the boy produces not only concrete information but a copy of the dispatch papers Jerrog signed to release Cid, she smiles at him, lips thinned and pressed together with only a bare quirk upwards at the corners. “Good work,” Illua says. “You’ll be transferred to my division as soon as possible.”
“Thank you, Lady Illua,” the boy says, bowing low. He is still young and naïve, easily pleased by little rewards and desperate for praise. He’ll make an excellent replacement for Cid, as long as she keeps a closer eye and tighter leash on this one.
Cid raises an eyebrow at the boy as they pass in the doorway. “New toy?” he asks Illua as soon as the door closes.
“Something like that,” she agrees, before noting with horror that she is already slipping back into their old banter. “What do you want?”
“I’m leaving.” He has always been blunt. It was once a trait that she admired in him, but now Illua wishes he played the word games of double meanings that the members of Khamja so frequently engaged in. “I’ve got needs that aren’t being met here.”
They lock gazes for a minute, but Cid lowers his first. “I figured I owed you the courtesy of telling you to your face,” he mutters.
“Then go,” Illua says, trying to sound as uncaring as possible. From his flinch, it seems as if she hadn’t succeeded. She tightens her grip on her emotions further, and says “I have no use for a piece that won’t play for me.”
“I thought you might say something like that,” Cid says, and tosses the dispatch papers Ewen had copied for her onto her desk. “I’ll say nothing of you or your motives.”
“I know you won’t,” Illua agrees.
"Come with me," he suddenly blurts out. "We'll both leave them behind. We'll travel the land together."
Illua measures the look on his face, wondering now which of her rivals had put him up to this. It was really no wonder why he had gotten permission to leave Khamja, when most left via death. "Farewell, Cid."
That night as Cid’s walking out, with only the sword on his back, Illua shows up with a pistol, strapped to the same belt as the grimoire. “I knew it seemed too easy,” Cid mutters, hands clenching into fists. “A gun? That isn’t your style.”
“I figured I owed you the courtesy of doing this to your face,” Illua says, parroting his words as she levels the pistol at Cid’s chest. “Are you going to draw? Try to ‘even the odds’?”
He raises his chin, proud to the very end. “Just get it over with,” he demands, and Illua is amazed at how unafraid of death Cid seems to be.
“Do you really think you’ll have a life once you leave?” Illua asks, and Cid shakes his head.
“I know I’ll have none should I stay.”
She inadvertently lets her hand drop as she pulls the trigger.
Cid falls to his knees, hands clasped over the red stain emanating from his stomach. Illua should shoot again, but finds herself unable to pull the trigger. She decides that it’s no matter. Cid was always special. Khamja’s rules could be ignored this once. Illua walks away as Cid bleeds out into the alley.
***
The first night after, she falls into bed and regrets not doing him the courtesy of killing him with a single bullet between the eyes, after she regrets killing him at all.
***
As Ewen bungles another kill that Illua is forced to clean up for him, she resists the urge to growl. Cid was never this clumsy, even when he was a novice at the art of killing.
Hrah, go easy on the boy. He’ll learn better that way. Her conscience has begun to sound like Cid, and Illua doesn’t like it. “Cid was better than you when he was a wet-behind-the-ears punk,” she snaps instead. “Do you expect to be able to take his place if you can’t even kill an unarmed woman silently?”
“I didn’t expect her to see me,” Ewen mutters sullenly, and Illua can see rebellion brewing in his mind. “Much less call for the guard.”
“Women do that when confronted with strangers in their bedrooms,” she says, snort of derision plain in her tone. “Come along before you attract even more trouble.”
She regrets having done for Cid instead of having found a way to keep him loyal. There are whispers of a draught from Ordalia, one that takes the memories of even the strongest of people. If she had taken the memories of treacherous thoughts, and kept him close, as before…
“That could have gone better,” Cid says, and she snorts at her conscience before realizing that it wasn’t just a mental voice. Hurriedly pulling Ewen back into the shadows, she peers out onto the streets of Camoa.
“Aw, it wasn’t that bad, kupo,” a moogle is saying to him. There are six of them, including Cid, and all of them are wearing a badge with a wing emblazoned on it. A clan badge. "You're a kupo boss - it wasn't your fault!"
"The traitor lives?" Ewen gasps. As Cid twists his head, Illua yanks Ewen back, and they take off running. "Idiot," she hisses at him as they flee. "He wasn't Khamja for nothing! Unlike certain others."
A judge. Powerful Cid, fearless Cid, had sworn an oath to a judge to keep himself from death. Had her Cid truly fallen to those depths? It just went to show that when one stopped seeking power, they became cowardly weaklings.
She keeps that in mind as she slits Jerrog's throat right before the sunrise. The next day, when they find that not only Jerrog but two of the three most powerful in Khamja are dead. Illua is elected to the leadership with Ewen at her side, no complaints voiced aloud.
***
Illua exercises her new power in small ways, in petty ways. Clan Gully receives no high-paying missions, no fame-enhancing jobs to spread their names far and wide. After they start getting more jobs, though, Illua begins to become suspicious.
"What were you thinking, shooting Cid?" she demands as Ewen enters. "He's sworn to a judge. You know he won't die from his wounds."
"He's vulnerable, on the precipice of death," Ewen mutters, and Illua scoffs.
"He was Khamja," she reminds him. "As long as there's breath in his body, there's no vulnerability he'll show -"
"He's a coward!" Ewen slams his hands down on her desk, and she regards the Nightfall coolly. "He's a spineless fool who sold his soul to a judge just to keep that precious breath. The only reason that you don't see that is because you're still lost in your memories -"
"You forget your place," Illua hisses, Zanmato out and at Ewen's throat before he can blink. "Do not presume to know my thoughts."
"I can serve you better than he could," Ewen insists, and Illua is reminded of Cid's fearlessness with the pistol pointed straight at him. "Just let me step out of the shadow his memory leaves. I'll prove to you I'm twice the man he was."
Illua stares through him, turning over Ewen's words in her mind carefully. Cid's specter is in the corner of her mind, watching.
"If you can kill him," she starts slowly, "despite the fact he is sworn to a judge, then I will allow you to take his place. In all positions." In the end, she cannot count on Cid's loyalty or closeness - she learned this long ago. Power is all that she can count on, and if Ewen can muster up the power to kill Cid, he has as much right to those privileges as Cid once did.
As Ewen's eyes light up and she withdraws her Zanmato, he leaves with a particular spring in his step. Illua, as a contrast, slumps further in her seat as she plans out Baron Beltorey's silencing.
***
Illua regrets talking to the Lady Hunter when she catches a glimpse of the badge with a wing. Clanned, indeed. Zomala had whispered to her through the grimoire that this would be the one who could help her plans come to fruition, who she would turn to her cause, but to find that Cid had already gotten to her!
She supposes that she shouldn't be surprised. Cid has always been attracted to the powerful, just as Illua has. She wouldn't have supposed that the Revgaji could sense the power lying in this girl, though. Without Zomala's magicks, Illua herself would have remained blind to the potential lying in this 'Adelle', as the boy called her.
As she finishes weaving the mind magicks of Zomala on the girl's mind, she thinks back to the boy's grimoire, so similar to her own. Does Cid know about the power in the grimoires, then? The boy seems too naive to do anything with the power, but Cid is smart, Cid is jaded. Best then to retrieve the grimoire before Cid can start using it against her.
"Listen carefully," she murmurs into Adelle's ear, stroking the violet hair. "You remember nothing but what I tell you to remember."
"Yes," the girl murmurs, and glares at Ewen as he snorts.
"You have powers that are locked away in you," Illua says, repeating the words as she had read them in her own grimoire. "You will unlock those powers for me. You will use them to find the grimoire...the twin to this book...and bring it to me. Kill anyone who tries to stop you."
"You...want the grimoire?" the girl asks hesitantly, and Illua clamps the magick down further to ensure obedience. "Then I will...I'll find it for you."
As the girl leaves, Illua cannot help but smile at the effect Zomala's magick has had on her. Once the test works, she is free to use the magick of both grimoires on Cid and bend him back into loyalty.
"I'll be going to the ruins," she tells Ewen, who nods. "You take care of business on this end while I finish things there."
"Thy will be done," Ewen murmurs, and Illua leaves him.
***
As the boy strikes the final blow, it is Cid she looks to. "Pity me," she gasps. "Cid...Power...Power is all I am. Power sought me, and I sought it...always..." It is the closest she will ever come to apologizing, and given the look on Cid's face, he realizes it.
Illua can feel Neukhia coming through the portal, and thinks it wasn't supposed to be like this, that the evil should not have been summoned for any other reason than to put her on the throne of Ivalice, trusted lieutenant by her side. "I feel it coming..." she warns Cid. "Time...Time is over."
She falls gracefully as he bids her farewell.
It may not make sense if you have no knowledge of Tactics A2. As it is, I suspect this isn't going to be widely read.
Oh, and I've jumped onto the bandwagon! Nothing particularly witty, but if you've got too much time on your hands and not enough trivial stuff to do, check me out!
There are two times in her life, Before Cid’s Treachery and After Cid’s Disappearance.
Even Before Cid’s Treachery, Illua never tells him the truth about the grimoire. Not that she would explain its properties to anyone from Khamja in the first place, but it feels like a special betrayal when she ignores Cid’s questioning looks at the book chained to her waist. Considering their usual proximity, he finds it odd that Illua has never been seen with the book before. She quashes the guilt with a warning hand on her Zanmato, and Cid wisely says nothing.
The bangaa that the fool who calls himself her superior has assigned to their team is not as wise. “What’sss with the book?” the dragoon demands. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those sssentimental women, carrying your journal everywhere you go.”
“We may need him for the mission,” Cid points out seconds before the dragoon is bereft a head. Illua considers the merits of his statement, before removing her katana from the bangaa’s neck, where it has left a definite score of blood.
“You’re too lenient on fools, Cid,” she reprimands as she begins walking out of the Grazton slums. “It may get you into trouble.”
“Heh, perhaps.” Cid turns to the bangaa and snaps, “Come along, pup. Don’t waste my time.” The bangaa looks ready to protest, but at the sound of the Zanmato clearing its sheath by about an inch, he follows along meekly.
Today’s mission is worse than normal. They are ambushed by a rival faction of Khamja after they have stolen the magicite from the scholar’s lab, and the other Khamja members are only focusing on Illua, attacking neither Cid nor the bangaa. It reeks of a setup, and when Illua dodges an arrow on pure Reflex, the way the archer freezes when the bangaa is hit instead only confirms it.
She confronts Cid after the battle, as he drags the dragoon’s wounded body along behind him. “You set me up, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t.” Cid’s reply is sure, unhesitating and unrushed. Illua isn’t convinced.
“You insisted we leave the traitorous fool alive,” she says, kicking the self-same backstabber in the ribs. He’s too far gone to groan, much less make it all the way back to base alive, but protocol states that all living members of Khamja must be taken back to prevent knowledge getting out. “How long have you been plotting against me? Which one of them bought you: Ktjn or Fynn?”
“Hrah, suspecting treachery even now?” Cid shakes his head, and Illua seethes at the act the Revgaji is putting on. “I’ve been yours ever since I joined up. Why would I plot with one of your rivals?”
“I don’t trust you.” She can’t afford to trust anyone but herself, but Cid had been the one she allowed to watch her back, that she allowed in her... It is simply too much to suspect anything but, though, when they hadn’t attacked Cid - Cid, who was practically interchangeable with her will. She doesn’t trust him, but it hurts.
Cid sighs, turning away from her and dropping the dragoon. “I find I grow tired of this,” he says, softly enough that she wouldn’t be able to hear him if she hadn’t been right next to him. “The constant suspicion you place on me...this isn’t for me, Illua.”
“Hmph. What is, then?” She waits for his answer, but he walks away, without bothering to collect the dragoon. She glances at the bangaa, thinks about having to carry him all the way back on her own on headquarters’ rules, and stabs him in the throat instead.
Later that night, as she stares down at the grimoire, Illua curses her foresight as she reads the description of Cid, the man who one day would lead her greatest enemies.
***
The next morning, Fynn knocks on the door to her office and lets himself in without waiting for a response. “You’re letting your best lieutenant go,” he gloats. “What’s the matter, finally decided that he wasn’t loyal enough for you?”
“Get out of my office before I make you get out,” Illua says, an icy suspicion creeping up her lungs. The ninja smirks at her before walking out.
She calls the newest member of Khamja to her - a hume named Ewen - and assigns him to determine if, when, and where Cid will be leaving. When the boy produces not only concrete information but a copy of the dispatch papers Jerrog signed to release Cid, she smiles at him, lips thinned and pressed together with only a bare quirk upwards at the corners. “Good work,” Illua says. “You’ll be transferred to my division as soon as possible.”
“Thank you, Lady Illua,” the boy says, bowing low. He is still young and naïve, easily pleased by little rewards and desperate for praise. He’ll make an excellent replacement for Cid, as long as she keeps a closer eye and tighter leash on this one.
Cid raises an eyebrow at the boy as they pass in the doorway. “New toy?” he asks Illua as soon as the door closes.
“Something like that,” she agrees, before noting with horror that she is already slipping back into their old banter. “What do you want?”
“I’m leaving.” He has always been blunt. It was once a trait that she admired in him, but now Illua wishes he played the word games of double meanings that the members of Khamja so frequently engaged in. “I’ve got needs that aren’t being met here.”
They lock gazes for a minute, but Cid lowers his first. “I figured I owed you the courtesy of telling you to your face,” he mutters.
“Then go,” Illua says, trying to sound as uncaring as possible. From his flinch, it seems as if she hadn’t succeeded. She tightens her grip on her emotions further, and says “I have no use for a piece that won’t play for me.”
“I thought you might say something like that,” Cid says, and tosses the dispatch papers Ewen had copied for her onto her desk. “I’ll say nothing of you or your motives.”
“I know you won’t,” Illua agrees.
"Come with me," he suddenly blurts out. "We'll both leave them behind. We'll travel the land together."
Illua measures the look on his face, wondering now which of her rivals had put him up to this. It was really no wonder why he had gotten permission to leave Khamja, when most left via death. "Farewell, Cid."
That night as Cid’s walking out, with only the sword on his back, Illua shows up with a pistol, strapped to the same belt as the grimoire. “I knew it seemed too easy,” Cid mutters, hands clenching into fists. “A gun? That isn’t your style.”
“I figured I owed you the courtesy of doing this to your face,” Illua says, parroting his words as she levels the pistol at Cid’s chest. “Are you going to draw? Try to ‘even the odds’?”
He raises his chin, proud to the very end. “Just get it over with,” he demands, and Illua is amazed at how unafraid of death Cid seems to be.
“Do you really think you’ll have a life once you leave?” Illua asks, and Cid shakes his head.
“I know I’ll have none should I stay.”
She inadvertently lets her hand drop as she pulls the trigger.
Cid falls to his knees, hands clasped over the red stain emanating from his stomach. Illua should shoot again, but finds herself unable to pull the trigger. She decides that it’s no matter. Cid was always special. Khamja’s rules could be ignored this once. Illua walks away as Cid bleeds out into the alley.
***
The first night after, she falls into bed and regrets not doing him the courtesy of killing him with a single bullet between the eyes, after she regrets killing him at all.
***
As Ewen bungles another kill that Illua is forced to clean up for him, she resists the urge to growl. Cid was never this clumsy, even when he was a novice at the art of killing.
Hrah, go easy on the boy. He’ll learn better that way. Her conscience has begun to sound like Cid, and Illua doesn’t like it. “Cid was better than you when he was a wet-behind-the-ears punk,” she snaps instead. “Do you expect to be able to take his place if you can’t even kill an unarmed woman silently?”
“I didn’t expect her to see me,” Ewen mutters sullenly, and Illua can see rebellion brewing in his mind. “Much less call for the guard.”
“Women do that when confronted with strangers in their bedrooms,” she says, snort of derision plain in her tone. “Come along before you attract even more trouble.”
She regrets having done for Cid instead of having found a way to keep him loyal. There are whispers of a draught from Ordalia, one that takes the memories of even the strongest of people. If she had taken the memories of treacherous thoughts, and kept him close, as before…
“That could have gone better,” Cid says, and she snorts at her conscience before realizing that it wasn’t just a mental voice. Hurriedly pulling Ewen back into the shadows, she peers out onto the streets of Camoa.
“Aw, it wasn’t that bad, kupo,” a moogle is saying to him. There are six of them, including Cid, and all of them are wearing a badge with a wing emblazoned on it. A clan badge. "You're a kupo boss - it wasn't your fault!"
"The traitor lives?" Ewen gasps. As Cid twists his head, Illua yanks Ewen back, and they take off running. "Idiot," she hisses at him as they flee. "He wasn't Khamja for nothing! Unlike certain others."
A judge. Powerful Cid, fearless Cid, had sworn an oath to a judge to keep himself from death. Had her Cid truly fallen to those depths? It just went to show that when one stopped seeking power, they became cowardly weaklings.
She keeps that in mind as she slits Jerrog's throat right before the sunrise. The next day, when they find that not only Jerrog but two of the three most powerful in Khamja are dead. Illua is elected to the leadership with Ewen at her side, no complaints voiced aloud.
***
Illua exercises her new power in small ways, in petty ways. Clan Gully receives no high-paying missions, no fame-enhancing jobs to spread their names far and wide. After they start getting more jobs, though, Illua begins to become suspicious.
"What were you thinking, shooting Cid?" she demands as Ewen enters. "He's sworn to a judge. You know he won't die from his wounds."
"He's vulnerable, on the precipice of death," Ewen mutters, and Illua scoffs.
"He was Khamja," she reminds him. "As long as there's breath in his body, there's no vulnerability he'll show -"
"He's a coward!" Ewen slams his hands down on her desk, and she regards the Nightfall coolly. "He's a spineless fool who sold his soul to a judge just to keep that precious breath. The only reason that you don't see that is because you're still lost in your memories -"
"You forget your place," Illua hisses, Zanmato out and at Ewen's throat before he can blink. "Do not presume to know my thoughts."
"I can serve you better than he could," Ewen insists, and Illua is reminded of Cid's fearlessness with the pistol pointed straight at him. "Just let me step out of the shadow his memory leaves. I'll prove to you I'm twice the man he was."
Illua stares through him, turning over Ewen's words in her mind carefully. Cid's specter is in the corner of her mind, watching.
"If you can kill him," she starts slowly, "despite the fact he is sworn to a judge, then I will allow you to take his place. In all positions." In the end, she cannot count on Cid's loyalty or closeness - she learned this long ago. Power is all that she can count on, and if Ewen can muster up the power to kill Cid, he has as much right to those privileges as Cid once did.
As Ewen's eyes light up and she withdraws her Zanmato, he leaves with a particular spring in his step. Illua, as a contrast, slumps further in her seat as she plans out Baron Beltorey's silencing.
***
Illua regrets talking to the Lady Hunter when she catches a glimpse of the badge with a wing. Clanned, indeed. Zomala had whispered to her through the grimoire that this would be the one who could help her plans come to fruition, who she would turn to her cause, but to find that Cid had already gotten to her!
She supposes that she shouldn't be surprised. Cid has always been attracted to the powerful, just as Illua has. She wouldn't have supposed that the Revgaji could sense the power lying in this girl, though. Without Zomala's magicks, Illua herself would have remained blind to the potential lying in this 'Adelle', as the boy called her.
As she finishes weaving the mind magicks of Zomala on the girl's mind, she thinks back to the boy's grimoire, so similar to her own. Does Cid know about the power in the grimoires, then? The boy seems too naive to do anything with the power, but Cid is smart, Cid is jaded. Best then to retrieve the grimoire before Cid can start using it against her.
"Listen carefully," she murmurs into Adelle's ear, stroking the violet hair. "You remember nothing but what I tell you to remember."
"Yes," the girl murmurs, and glares at Ewen as he snorts.
"You have powers that are locked away in you," Illua says, repeating the words as she had read them in her own grimoire. "You will unlock those powers for me. You will use them to find the grimoire...the twin to this book...and bring it to me. Kill anyone who tries to stop you."
"You...want the grimoire?" the girl asks hesitantly, and Illua clamps the magick down further to ensure obedience. "Then I will...I'll find it for you."
As the girl leaves, Illua cannot help but smile at the effect Zomala's magick has had on her. Once the test works, she is free to use the magick of both grimoires on Cid and bend him back into loyalty.
"I'll be going to the ruins," she tells Ewen, who nods. "You take care of business on this end while I finish things there."
"Thy will be done," Ewen murmurs, and Illua leaves him.
***
As the boy strikes the final blow, it is Cid she looks to. "Pity me," she gasps. "Cid...Power...Power is all I am. Power sought me, and I sought it...always..." It is the closest she will ever come to apologizing, and given the look on Cid's face, he realizes it.
Illua can feel Neukhia coming through the portal, and thinks it wasn't supposed to be like this, that the evil should not have been summoned for any other reason than to put her on the throne of Ivalice, trusted lieutenant by her side. "I feel it coming..." she warns Cid. "Time...Time is over."
She falls gracefully as he bids her farewell.