Statues (FFX)
Title: Statues
Setting: Between X and X-2
Pairing/Characters: Lulu, Rikku, implied Lulu/Auron
Words: ~2300
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied sex
Props: go to lassarina for the beta-read.
Notes: Part of an arc I’m playing with, bridging between FFX and FFX-2. The arc is very tentatively called Bridges and also includes Sworn. The only thing that really needs to be known to read this piece is that in Bridges, magic has changed after the loss of the aeons in FFX: magical abilities no longer work as they did (hence the new system in X-2!).
This was meant for my Rikku claim at pyre_flies, but it became much too Lulu-centric.
Summary: Memories of the vanished. Rikku lets her guard down. Lulu does not.
Lulu’s small hut is lit dimly with the light of the torches outside. Besaid is celebrating again, in its gentle way, as it has been celebrating for almost a month - since High Summoner Lady Yuna’s glorious return. Today is an extra-special celebration, for the Al Bhed airship is here with supplies and news and the curiously coloured and shaped Al Bhed themselves. The children of Besaid love to tackle the captain, who is simply known as ‘Brother’; the adults love to listen to stories of a Spira beyond their island, a Spira being healed.
Lulu has already retreated. She aches with it all, seeing happy children and wondrous parents and wondering what it will be like to grow up without Sin. She still cringes at the word machina. She cannot look at fire anymore without wondering if she will ever wield it again. She feels like a shell of herself, but backwards somehow: all her memories inside, nothing outside. She is still the wall she has always been; and yet, memories never stop hurting you.
The cloth slides aside softly, and Rikku peers inside. “I thought you were in here,” she says, coming in without invitation. Rikku is relatively famous in Besaid, and Lulu is surprised to see the young blonde in her hut, instead of out beside the bonfire with her cousin.
“Where is Yuna?” Lulu asks, almost instinctively; after so many days of looking after her Summoner, the habit is not easily broken.
Rikku grins. “Out listening to Brother tell stories,” she says, “and correcting him when he gets stuff wrong. Like, he said Kilika had a blitzball stadium?” She throws Lulu a wry glance across the tent. “I’m pretty sure he only adds the mistakes in to hear Yuna correct him,” she admits.
Rikku looks like she is a little on edge, and as much as Lulu is wishing for solitude, she can’t help but wonder about the girl. They’ve all been strong - so strong - for Yuna, and none of them have gone through any of their own emotions for her sake.
“Yuna is not short on adoration,” Lulu replies instead, watching Rikku flit around her tent like a nervous butterfly.
The girl laughs. “Nope, and especially not from Brother,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s - I know it’s an okay thing, like for Spira, but - well, for the Al Bhed, it’s kind of gross to like your cousin, y’know? Just a little.”
Lulu says nothing, watching as Rikku finally sits down in the corner on a cushion - and it’s less sitting down and more collapsing, as if she’s finally admitted defeat to something. The silence diffuses through the tent, disturbed only slightly by the faint crackle of the fires outside and the laughter of children.
“D’you mind if I stay in here for a while?” Rikku asks finally, her voice a little soft and surprisingly weary for someone of her nature.
Lulu raises an eyebrow before she can catch herself; surprised, she shakes her head slowly. “Be my guest.”
Rikku sighs. “I just need,” she begins, decisively, as everything Rikku does is decisive; but she trails off, looking at the soft cloth which has moved to cover the entranceway to Lulu’s home. The Al Bhed girl stares as if she can see through it, as if she’s watching her brother and her cousin and all the Besaidian children through the deep blue weave of it.
“Some peace,” Rikku finishes finally. She leaves the thought there, resting gently in the air between them. They have always been opposites, the two of them: Rikku, brightly sun-toned and chipper, while Lulu carries the pale-dark, solemn mysteries of night. But their night and day have always been bound together by Yuna: their dusk, their dawn.
“Tired of being famous?” Lulu asks. She tries not to be harsh about it, because inside she’s wondering what could be bothering Rikku so much more than - than anything bothering herself, or Yuna.
Rikku shakes her head, grinning again despite the mood in the small hut. “Not me,” she says, and then corrects herself: “Well, yeah, a little, but it’s not that big of a deal, some of it’s kind of cool! It’s hard to not be recognizable when you fly around in the world’s only real airship,” and this is said with a hint of pride, which Lulu acknowledges with a brief nod.
“I - I just,” Rikku starts again, and then looks at Lulu dead-on, right into the mage’s eyes: green and honest. “I miss them too, y’know?”
It hits Lulu’s heart again with a pang, an ache she’ll never get rid of, no matter how hard she tries. Tidus, laughing after a battle, his hair soaked with sweat as he gives Wakka a high-five. Auron, moving with precision and grace across a battlefield before anyone else had taken their first breath. Memories never stop hurting you.
“I - I can’t say it to Yunie, y’know,” Rikku continues, now staring at the backs of her hands as they have a nervous wrestling match in her lap. “Because, y’know, if I miss them both this bad, how much does she miss them? I - Tidus, really,” she amends, and her hands do another uneasy flip around each other. It’s another difference: Lulu is always still, peaceful and cold like stone, whereas Rikku is as warm and active as sunlit water herself. “So I can’t ever say it, can’t ever tell her, because she’s gotta be missing them both and hurting like a thousand times more than I do.”
“Yuna would never fault you for that,” Lulu says, and her voice is still low and creamy and carries none of the ache. She is proud.
Rikku gives a little half-laugh at that. “I know, but that doesn’t mean I wanna make it harder on her,” she says softly. “I - I just…”
Lulu nods, knowingly. None of them really know what to do with Yuna, who is bearing up under all of this better than any of them individually.
“I - well, it’s like,” Rikku says all in a rush, “I had a crush on him, kinda? On Auron?”
Lulu’s heart freezes; her entire body and soul are tensed in a way she recognizes, when someone is saying something you know is going to hurt you and you’re trying to prepare yourself so that it doesn’t hurt, much. She’s done it her whole life - parents, Sin, Chappu, Sin, Ginnem, Summoners, Sin, Sin, Sin - and so it’s not completely unfamiliar, it’s simply reflex … but a painful one. Memories never stop hurting you.
“I mean,” Rikku continues, caught up in herself a little now, “I had a crush on Tidus when we first started out. I couldn’t help it, I liked the guy, he was cute. But then I saw the way he and Yunie were looking at each other, and I realized there was no way, and so…”
She looks up at Lulu, urgency on her face; she’s embarrassed even as she speaks. “I mean, I never really like liked him, really, I was just - passing time, y’know? So I thought about having a crush on somebody else. An’ Kimahri, I mean, he’s - well,” she says, laughing a little, “he’s too, uh, furry. Definitely too furry. Although - he’s totally made of Ronso awesomeness, he’s …just not my type.” She pauses, as if realizing she’s on delicate ground, somehow; the ice is thin beneath her wavery voice. “And I thought about liking Wakka, but - but then Wakka hated me. An’, an’ Auron, he was knightly and tough and brave…”
Lulu’s quiet; she’s reliving it in her mind. It began with a gaze held one second longer than necessary; a challenge, between elder guardians, as to who was the superior. They both had their own experiences - more experience than the other would ever know, until the very end of the story. It was a dare: who would look away first? Who was stronger, more stubborn? It was a test for guardians who had already been through their own tests, to whom the journey of the pilgrimage was familiar. A challenge Lulu could rise to, knowing her own abilities this time; she’d developed a spine of ice. She didn’t look away.
“It wasn’t really a crush, honest.” Rikku’s still talking, in a soft un-Rikku-like voice, as if this catharsis to the gentle darkness of Lulu’s hut can heal her like Yuna’s magic cannot. “It was just - something for a distraction, y’know, something to think about to keep me from thinking about Yunie all the time. I needed something - something lighthearted, like, a simple feeling, to contradict all the other ones.”
And from there, Lulu knows, it moved on to touching - once the gazes weren’t enough, once it was obvious neither one would buckle. It was the brush of her arm against Auron’s shoulder as she used a potion. The slight graze of his fingertips against the nape of his neck as he said softly: Good battle, Lulu. The small exchange of touches between them ran like a currency neither could exchange, and the challenge grew: because there was something in this challenge, unlike the gruesome truth of the pilgrimage. They both wanted something out of this life, and stole from each other in glances and brushes and lingering gestures, a language even they didn’t speak. And yet neither backed down.
“An’ so I’d think about Auron, and me an’ Auron, and like how I’d make him laugh, sometimes, and eventually …yeah, I guess I liked him.” Rikku shakes her head, the newly-growing braids she’s sporting now clicking slightly against each other. “I guess I convinced myself worse than I’d thought. Does that make sense?”
And from there it moved on to furtive meetings in the woods, in a separate tent far away from the rest of the group. Lulu, moving silently away from the sleeping bodies, knew that she had to be perfectly quiet: all they needed was one fiend finding her, for her magic was nowhere near quiet or subtle, and the ruse would be up - the precarious balance of the pilgrimage destroyed. Eventually she learnt to take Wakka’s blitzball, the one with the charm hanging off of the end which repelled all sorts of fiends: it was portable, and never missed. She’d worm her way through night, slowly, knowing Auron would wait. They had both been brewed in too much patience, stone-cold guardians steeped in silence.
Rikku is flicking a bead between her teeth, lost in thought as she speaks to Lulu’s darkness. “I don’t really know if I liked him for reals or not,” she continues slowly, around the bead, before she tucks it back into her headband thoughtfully. “But I’ll never know now, will I? It’s like Tidus. I’ll never know whether he’s a better brother than Brother or not.”
Kimahri knew. He’d known the very first night. Lulu wonders sometimes what Kimahri thought, watching his graven guardian crawl through brush, hugging a blitzball to her chest, in search of the other graven guardian. He must have known. But she knows now that the Ronso value different things, and that Kimahri must have understood that this was a release for things they could not talk about. She’d always assumed he would keep the secret, because he was Kimahri; Lulu realizes she should have somehow said thank you, but does not know how it would have worked.
Skin on skin - Auron’s body had always been cold, surprisingly cold for a man made of muscle, and Lulu often had to warm him with fire whispering under her skin and lightning through her veins. They’d made love like the world was ending - which they knew was the truth. Neither one was soft. Auron carried too many scars for a man of that age; most soldiers with scars like that were dead, Lulu knew (as she knows now). And her own skin was knitted up and cold, tense with years of pretending to be stone, and sometimes Auron would have to massage the feeling back into her shoulders, her back, her belly and legs and breasts until she could move like she wanted to, rising gracefully or wrapping herself around him.
Lulu comes back into herself, slowly, as silence fills the hut once more. The fire outside is still crackling and she now hears Yuna’s soft laugh as the children plead for another story.
“Rikku,” she begins, her voice still perfectly blank and solid. She feels like she should be trembling, but she knows she is not. She will never warm anyone with her magic again; but perhaps no one needed it as much as she and Auron did.
The young Al Bhed shakes her head, laughing a little. “Nah, I don’t really need advice, Lu. There’s nothing I can do anyway, y’know? I just kinda… wanted to tell somebody, I think. And I can’t tell Yunie.”
“Speaking of which,” Lulu prompts gently.
Rikku stands up. Her face looks a little clearer, its color less tainted with ghosts. “Yeah, speaking of which, I should make sure Brother isn’t proposing marriage to her or something,” she said, and her voice is light again: not weightless, never weightless, but light, carrying sun and heat and hope.
“Rikku,” Lulu says as the girl makes to leave. “If you ever do need to talk …do it here.”
Rikku smiles, her face lighting up brightly. “Thanks, Lulu,” she says earnestly, and then she leaves the tent.
Lulu stays, in the darkness, trying to tuck the memories back in where they belong. She means what she said: Rikku is better saying things to her than to Yuna. Young Yuna has borne up under this better than the rest of her guardians - someone on the outside might think she was taking care of them - but Lulu knows it only takes a little bit to be a little bit too much.
She, on the other hand, will hold these things like a reservoir. She wonders if one day she will turn to stone, a statue, petrified by the force of will it takes to keep these things inside.
Setting: Between X and X-2
Pairing/Characters: Lulu, Rikku, implied Lulu/Auron
Words: ~2300
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Implied sex
Props: go to lassarina for the beta-read.
Notes: Part of an arc I’m playing with, bridging between FFX and FFX-2. The arc is very tentatively called Bridges and also includes Sworn. The only thing that really needs to be known to read this piece is that in Bridges, magic has changed after the loss of the aeons in FFX: magical abilities no longer work as they did (hence the new system in X-2!).
This was meant for my Rikku claim at pyre_flies, but it became much too Lulu-centric.
Summary: Memories of the vanished. Rikku lets her guard down. Lulu does not.
Lulu’s small hut is lit dimly with the light of the torches outside. Besaid is celebrating again, in its gentle way, as it has been celebrating for almost a month - since High Summoner Lady Yuna’s glorious return. Today is an extra-special celebration, for the Al Bhed airship is here with supplies and news and the curiously coloured and shaped Al Bhed themselves. The children of Besaid love to tackle the captain, who is simply known as ‘Brother’; the adults love to listen to stories of a Spira beyond their island, a Spira being healed.
Lulu has already retreated. She aches with it all, seeing happy children and wondrous parents and wondering what it will be like to grow up without Sin. She still cringes at the word machina. She cannot look at fire anymore without wondering if she will ever wield it again. She feels like a shell of herself, but backwards somehow: all her memories inside, nothing outside. She is still the wall she has always been; and yet, memories never stop hurting you.
The cloth slides aside softly, and Rikku peers inside. “I thought you were in here,” she says, coming in without invitation. Rikku is relatively famous in Besaid, and Lulu is surprised to see the young blonde in her hut, instead of out beside the bonfire with her cousin.
“Where is Yuna?” Lulu asks, almost instinctively; after so many days of looking after her Summoner, the habit is not easily broken.
Rikku grins. “Out listening to Brother tell stories,” she says, “and correcting him when he gets stuff wrong. Like, he said Kilika had a blitzball stadium?” She throws Lulu a wry glance across the tent. “I’m pretty sure he only adds the mistakes in to hear Yuna correct him,” she admits.
Rikku looks like she is a little on edge, and as much as Lulu is wishing for solitude, she can’t help but wonder about the girl. They’ve all been strong - so strong - for Yuna, and none of them have gone through any of their own emotions for her sake.
“Yuna is not short on adoration,” Lulu replies instead, watching Rikku flit around her tent like a nervous butterfly.
The girl laughs. “Nope, and especially not from Brother,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s - I know it’s an okay thing, like for Spira, but - well, for the Al Bhed, it’s kind of gross to like your cousin, y’know? Just a little.”
Lulu says nothing, watching as Rikku finally sits down in the corner on a cushion - and it’s less sitting down and more collapsing, as if she’s finally admitted defeat to something. The silence diffuses through the tent, disturbed only slightly by the faint crackle of the fires outside and the laughter of children.
“D’you mind if I stay in here for a while?” Rikku asks finally, her voice a little soft and surprisingly weary for someone of her nature.
Lulu raises an eyebrow before she can catch herself; surprised, she shakes her head slowly. “Be my guest.”
Rikku sighs. “I just need,” she begins, decisively, as everything Rikku does is decisive; but she trails off, looking at the soft cloth which has moved to cover the entranceway to Lulu’s home. The Al Bhed girl stares as if she can see through it, as if she’s watching her brother and her cousin and all the Besaidian children through the deep blue weave of it.
“Some peace,” Rikku finishes finally. She leaves the thought there, resting gently in the air between them. They have always been opposites, the two of them: Rikku, brightly sun-toned and chipper, while Lulu carries the pale-dark, solemn mysteries of night. But their night and day have always been bound together by Yuna: their dusk, their dawn.
“Tired of being famous?” Lulu asks. She tries not to be harsh about it, because inside she’s wondering what could be bothering Rikku so much more than - than anything bothering herself, or Yuna.
Rikku shakes her head, grinning again despite the mood in the small hut. “Not me,” she says, and then corrects herself: “Well, yeah, a little, but it’s not that big of a deal, some of it’s kind of cool! It’s hard to not be recognizable when you fly around in the world’s only real airship,” and this is said with a hint of pride, which Lulu acknowledges with a brief nod.
“I - I just,” Rikku starts again, and then looks at Lulu dead-on, right into the mage’s eyes: green and honest. “I miss them too, y’know?”
It hits Lulu’s heart again with a pang, an ache she’ll never get rid of, no matter how hard she tries. Tidus, laughing after a battle, his hair soaked with sweat as he gives Wakka a high-five. Auron, moving with precision and grace across a battlefield before anyone else had taken their first breath. Memories never stop hurting you.
“I - I can’t say it to Yunie, y’know,” Rikku continues, now staring at the backs of her hands as they have a nervous wrestling match in her lap. “Because, y’know, if I miss them both this bad, how much does she miss them? I - Tidus, really,” she amends, and her hands do another uneasy flip around each other. It’s another difference: Lulu is always still, peaceful and cold like stone, whereas Rikku is as warm and active as sunlit water herself. “So I can’t ever say it, can’t ever tell her, because she’s gotta be missing them both and hurting like a thousand times more than I do.”
“Yuna would never fault you for that,” Lulu says, and her voice is still low and creamy and carries none of the ache. She is proud.
Rikku gives a little half-laugh at that. “I know, but that doesn’t mean I wanna make it harder on her,” she says softly. “I - I just…”
Lulu nods, knowingly. None of them really know what to do with Yuna, who is bearing up under all of this better than any of them individually.
“I - well, it’s like,” Rikku says all in a rush, “I had a crush on him, kinda? On Auron?”
Lulu’s heart freezes; her entire body and soul are tensed in a way she recognizes, when someone is saying something you know is going to hurt you and you’re trying to prepare yourself so that it doesn’t hurt, much. She’s done it her whole life - parents, Sin, Chappu, Sin, Ginnem, Summoners, Sin, Sin, Sin - and so it’s not completely unfamiliar, it’s simply reflex … but a painful one. Memories never stop hurting you.
“I mean,” Rikku continues, caught up in herself a little now, “I had a crush on Tidus when we first started out. I couldn’t help it, I liked the guy, he was cute. But then I saw the way he and Yunie were looking at each other, and I realized there was no way, and so…”
She looks up at Lulu, urgency on her face; she’s embarrassed even as she speaks. “I mean, I never really like liked him, really, I was just - passing time, y’know? So I thought about having a crush on somebody else. An’ Kimahri, I mean, he’s - well,” she says, laughing a little, “he’s too, uh, furry. Definitely too furry. Although - he’s totally made of Ronso awesomeness, he’s …just not my type.” She pauses, as if realizing she’s on delicate ground, somehow; the ice is thin beneath her wavery voice. “And I thought about liking Wakka, but - but then Wakka hated me. An’, an’ Auron, he was knightly and tough and brave…”
Lulu’s quiet; she’s reliving it in her mind. It began with a gaze held one second longer than necessary; a challenge, between elder guardians, as to who was the superior. They both had their own experiences - more experience than the other would ever know, until the very end of the story. It was a dare: who would look away first? Who was stronger, more stubborn? It was a test for guardians who had already been through their own tests, to whom the journey of the pilgrimage was familiar. A challenge Lulu could rise to, knowing her own abilities this time; she’d developed a spine of ice. She didn’t look away.
“It wasn’t really a crush, honest.” Rikku’s still talking, in a soft un-Rikku-like voice, as if this catharsis to the gentle darkness of Lulu’s hut can heal her like Yuna’s magic cannot. “It was just - something for a distraction, y’know, something to think about to keep me from thinking about Yunie all the time. I needed something - something lighthearted, like, a simple feeling, to contradict all the other ones.”
And from there, Lulu knows, it moved on to touching - once the gazes weren’t enough, once it was obvious neither one would buckle. It was the brush of her arm against Auron’s shoulder as she used a potion. The slight graze of his fingertips against the nape of his neck as he said softly: Good battle, Lulu. The small exchange of touches between them ran like a currency neither could exchange, and the challenge grew: because there was something in this challenge, unlike the gruesome truth of the pilgrimage. They both wanted something out of this life, and stole from each other in glances and brushes and lingering gestures, a language even they didn’t speak. And yet neither backed down.
“An’ so I’d think about Auron, and me an’ Auron, and like how I’d make him laugh, sometimes, and eventually …yeah, I guess I liked him.” Rikku shakes her head, the newly-growing braids she’s sporting now clicking slightly against each other. “I guess I convinced myself worse than I’d thought. Does that make sense?”
And from there it moved on to furtive meetings in the woods, in a separate tent far away from the rest of the group. Lulu, moving silently away from the sleeping bodies, knew that she had to be perfectly quiet: all they needed was one fiend finding her, for her magic was nowhere near quiet or subtle, and the ruse would be up - the precarious balance of the pilgrimage destroyed. Eventually she learnt to take Wakka’s blitzball, the one with the charm hanging off of the end which repelled all sorts of fiends: it was portable, and never missed. She’d worm her way through night, slowly, knowing Auron would wait. They had both been brewed in too much patience, stone-cold guardians steeped in silence.
Rikku is flicking a bead between her teeth, lost in thought as she speaks to Lulu’s darkness. “I don’t really know if I liked him for reals or not,” she continues slowly, around the bead, before she tucks it back into her headband thoughtfully. “But I’ll never know now, will I? It’s like Tidus. I’ll never know whether he’s a better brother than Brother or not.”
Kimahri knew. He’d known the very first night. Lulu wonders sometimes what Kimahri thought, watching his graven guardian crawl through brush, hugging a blitzball to her chest, in search of the other graven guardian. He must have known. But she knows now that the Ronso value different things, and that Kimahri must have understood that this was a release for things they could not talk about. She’d always assumed he would keep the secret, because he was Kimahri; Lulu realizes she should have somehow said thank you, but does not know how it would have worked.
Skin on skin - Auron’s body had always been cold, surprisingly cold for a man made of muscle, and Lulu often had to warm him with fire whispering under her skin and lightning through her veins. They’d made love like the world was ending - which they knew was the truth. Neither one was soft. Auron carried too many scars for a man of that age; most soldiers with scars like that were dead, Lulu knew (as she knows now). And her own skin was knitted up and cold, tense with years of pretending to be stone, and sometimes Auron would have to massage the feeling back into her shoulders, her back, her belly and legs and breasts until she could move like she wanted to, rising gracefully or wrapping herself around him.
Lulu comes back into herself, slowly, as silence fills the hut once more. The fire outside is still crackling and she now hears Yuna’s soft laugh as the children plead for another story.
“Rikku,” she begins, her voice still perfectly blank and solid. She feels like she should be trembling, but she knows she is not. She will never warm anyone with her magic again; but perhaps no one needed it as much as she and Auron did.
The young Al Bhed shakes her head, laughing a little. “Nah, I don’t really need advice, Lu. There’s nothing I can do anyway, y’know? I just kinda… wanted to tell somebody, I think. And I can’t tell Yunie.”
“Speaking of which,” Lulu prompts gently.
Rikku stands up. Her face looks a little clearer, its color less tainted with ghosts. “Yeah, speaking of which, I should make sure Brother isn’t proposing marriage to her or something,” she said, and her voice is light again: not weightless, never weightless, but light, carrying sun and heat and hope.
“Rikku,” Lulu says as the girl makes to leave. “If you ever do need to talk …do it here.”
Rikku smiles, her face lighting up brightly. “Thanks, Lulu,” she says earnestly, and then she leaves the tent.
Lulu stays, in the darkness, trying to tuck the memories back in where they belong. She means what she said: Rikku is better saying things to her than to Yuna. Young Yuna has borne up under this better than the rest of her guardians - someone on the outside might think she was taking care of them - but Lulu knows it only takes a little bit to be a little bit too much.
She, on the other hand, will hold these things like a reservoir. She wonders if one day she will turn to stone, a statue, petrified by the force of will it takes to keep these things inside.