FFXII -- Ring Cycle, Zargabaath/Drace
Title: Ring Cycle Author/Artist:
mithrigil Fandom: Final Fantasy XII Pairing: Zargabaath/Drace Rating: PG (for Wagnerism) Prompt: Zargabaath/Drace - a night at the opera, comentary on the performance as flirting/courtship.
I want to thank the prompter of this so, so much. In fact, instead of one night at the opera, I gave you four.
Ring Cycle
Mithrigil Galtirglin
All four nights, they are in plainclothes, appropriate to their ages, their status. The first, Drace wears something not entirely gendered; a tunic long enough to pass for a dress, and slacks beneath. It is tasteful, but not particularly flattering, so Zargabaath does not say anything of the kind.
They must seem as any other gentried couple, in any other private box, Zargabaath thinks. This, he also does not suggest to Drace, who cares not to be reminded of any time she fulfills any man’s expectations, his included. Instead, they speak of the art itself, of its meaning-and oh, it is full of meaning-of its history.
“Do you not think it perverse, or strange at the least,” he asks, over the program pincer-folded in his glove, “that we so exalt the art of a land so brutally, so recently taken?”
“Not at all, neither,” she says without pause, turns a page in her pamphlet and reads on. “It is an old story, irreverent of conquerors and class.”
“But this is an Archadian hall,” he reminds her, “and those are Archadian singers. And the language is Landisch-”
“Altegesprach,” she corrects,
“-and the story is Landiser.”
“The story has no nationality, no country.” She sets her program down in her lap and turns to him, vexation on her brow. “It has only location.”
He knows she speaks of herself, in occluded terms. He knows not if she is aware of this.
Therefore, it is a long while before he says anything else. She has gone back to her program, perusing lists of people whose names she likely need not know; he appraises the theater instead, the frescoes, the plush of the seats, the people in them.
“No intermission tonight,” she muses beside him. “That is proper.”
He agrees.
The overture is long, the music wet, faster than the last time Zargabaath heard it. For all the times he has attended these tales, he has never done with Drace. The same is true for her regarding him. He grows bored with dwarves and naiads-the costumes are the same as the last four times, the performers only slightly different in them-and regards Drace in their stead.
She marks it, of course. With one of her more derisive smiles, the type that Zargabaath has finally learned to hear though full plate more than see. He misses them.
“I have always shared some measure of equity with the dwarf,” he explains, only low enough to be courteous and yet he still feels stifled by it. “He at the first is not ambitious, nor desirous of aught but that which his cunning warrants.”
“And then he turns into Ghis,” Drace chides.
“I would not say so.” Though there is some caution in Zargabaath’s own smile, it feels easy on his cheeks, perhaps to do with the laughing naiads in the light a story below. “The dwarf yet thinks of love, even after he has spurned it. Recall he has sons as well as minions. If your view of our friend is that he has lost sight of his original pursuits, I think you are mistaken.”
Drace considers this, long enough for the maidens onstage to build up to another laugh. “A case of the absence of the thing becoming the thing itself?” It is a question. It perplexes Zargabaath, somehow, that this is a question.
He answers it, “Yes.”
A long while later, when the tale has become one of gods, plural, who spew falsehoods and dissent among giants, she corrects him. It begins with a simple “No,” that Zaragabaath barely hears over the principal baritone-he is the same, these last four performances, and his voice has only grown more suited to the role-and continues after he looks to her. “The dwarf’s denial of love is not love, but obsession. The act is its own pleasure, and his sons are born of their mothers’ fear, not any especial respect for the father.”
“Fear is a kind of love,” Zargabaath suggests, and it comes so casually that he wonders if the words are his own.
Drace shakes her head. It is not entirely visible in the dim cast surrounding the god as he speaks to his mistress, the earth. “The magnitude of a feeling does not contribute to its likeness to another,” Drace counters, and then leans closer, close enough that Zargabaath can smell the reassuring, indelible oil and plate that define her. “Or are you a man to whom intensity is the only barometer for emotion?”
Zargabaath stifles a laugh, and the swelling horns in the orchestra-so many of them!-aid him. “I am not,” he admits. “But fear of-and fear for-are indicators of care and reverence.”
“These are not love,” Drace says.
Zargabaath says nothing.
-
Of the four parts of the cycle, the second is Drace’s least favored. This surprises Zargabaath not at all, for all its relevance to Drace’s own story, for all its organic imagery surrounding the subjugation of a powerful creature. Zargabaath recalls commentary that he has read on the tale, that the state of being human is higher than any Walküre, than any god at all, and that the story is then one of the creature being exalted, not confined. He does not fully believe it himself, and so says nothing.
He half expects Drace to desert him for the shouting-match-turned song that is the father-god damning his daughter to fire. Of course she stays, though the wrinkles in her gloves flatten on the spine of her program and her cheeks are plain with consternation.
“The only scene worse than this is the one preceding it,” she mutters, and though it is an entirely dignified thing it shows nothing of her age, her experience.
Zargabaath lets a small smile leak out toward her. “As in, ‘do not self-slay, the plot is in your womb’?”
That elicits a laugh of her, and Zargabaath can hear the pressure on her program allay some.
He goes on, over the faint shushing from the patrons in the box adjacent to theirs. “The mores of this story nonwithstanding, it is well-told, if you react so strongly.”
“Or poorly told, if you do not,” she counters, the corner of her eye glinting in borrowed light from the stage.
“I am moved,” he admits, a touch defensively, and thinks that tone is required. “But I have seen this many times.”
“A thing that truly stirs you does so no matter how often you see it.” The concluding strains of this opera begin to flare, with fire to counter the water that saturated the first. It is very well-done, Zargabaath thinks. Drace goes on, “Complacency is a sign of mediocrity.”
“Is it now,” he says, rather than say nothing-she is getting to him, and it is something of a relief, but he knows not if he ought proceed, if what she says is bait more than banter. “Then I had best mark the things that impress me most.”
-
They are drunk on the third, because that is what one feels after the hero’s tale, after watching him undo all that his father has wrought. This is Archadia; the audience does not cheer when the dragon has fallen, nor when the hero, undeterred by fear, scales the mountain to his prize-his bride, if you will, but on that count Zargabaath of course says nothing. But though the people hold their applause until it is proper, it resounds, and atones for the silence to follow the true acts of greatness. Zargabaath’s head still rings from it, as if the people are applauding him, his way of life.
So they stagger into his apartments, laughing and comparing, and he presumes Drace has made the same conjectures as he, from the way she speaks of Larsa (who is jealous, it seems, that Drace has deserted him these three nights for a story much larger than he, because apparently some ambitious mid-rank, some Gabranth, has been telling him one version or another) in the stead of the hero.
But the power of the story (and no small amount of brandy) has dulled Zargabaath’s ears to Drace’s stream of words. And when he slides out of his gloves and shoes, and affords she do the same, she is not hesitant, and goes on with her commentary. Soon, she is stretched out beside him on the other leg of his couch, as if weary from a good bout, tonight’s tunic undone over her shirt. It is more suited to her open, letting the fabric pool over her breasts, her hard stomach, letting the sleeves billow where the cufflinks are gone. He has not spent so much time with her out of armor as this, perhaps ever.
There is no wall of fire about her, he realizes. Perhaps there has never been.
So he tells her so, tells her that tomorrow night, she should leave her tunic unclasped. That freedom becomes her.
It likely had nothing to do with what she had just been saying, but she breaks off and turns to him. There, there is another of her derisive smiles-and doubtless another of her witticisms-but he holds out his hand to her across the coffee table.
“You are not Siegfried,” she says plain.
He knows she expects him to reply that she is not Brunnhilde. Instead, he takes her hand and kisses it.
-
She returns to her quarters only to bathe and change. The fourth story is the longest, and it will take all afternoon, all evening, to watch the old world end.
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