We Bring The Fire - 4
Fandom: Final Fantasy X
Title: We Bring The Fire (part 4/4)
Characters: Auron, Braska, Chappu, Jecht, Wen Kinoc
Ratings: PG-13
Warnings: You probably won't like this if you don't like angst and violence. Anything more would be spoiler-y.
Notes: This was written for Laylah as part of the Doink! Final Fantasy Exchange. Only about a billionty months late (ಠ_ಠ), I'll be posting it in four parts. Many thanks to owlmoose for her perpetual patience and excellent betaing skills. Blame me, not her, for any leftover errors. You can also find this story on AO3 . Part one can be found here, part two can be found here, part three can be found here.
The white ceramic lid was scarcely noticeable, but Auron's perpetual scanning of his surroundings had caught it, sunk into the freshly fallen snow, the jar's ridged design resembling a misplaced seashell. Surely, he thought, it must be their missing jug of Ronso ale. Jecht must be nearby. Auron jogged ahead. "My lord," he shouted back at Braska, his breath huffing into white clouds as he uncovered the jug with a boot. Auron frowned when it was heavier than expected, puzzling over why it was full.
Not far from Auron, Braska stared over the side of a mountain path, seeming not to hear Auron, face drawn and hand clutched over his heart.
Then he fell to his knees, sinking into the snow. Auron abandoned his find and was at his side in a moment. And then Auron saw what Braska saw.
Jecht laid at the bottom of the rocky ravine, half covered in snow, hair clumped with frozen blood, limbs scrambled, graphic lumps of organ and flesh scattered in the snow. It looked like he'd been chewed on; his right arm was ripped from its shoulder and lay at a twisted angle. His face was as open as ever -- lips a cracked and chapped grey, vacant eyes trimmed with icy tinsel.
Braska grasped Auron's offered arm and stood shakily. Braska had seen countless injuries and nearly as many deaths in his career as a healer and summoner, vested as he was with the sad honor of pointing the dead to their final destination. But nothing could prepare him for this -- this friend that was now a body, splayed out like a lesson in failure and futility. Stricken suddenly with a wash of vertigo, he sagged forward and retched. Auron steadied him with a strong grip under his elbow. His nausea had not yet subsided when he became aware of the sound.
"What is tha--" By the time Braska had recovered enough to look up, Auron's head stood high, stretching his neck in the direction of the sound like a wolf.
It happened in an instant. Auron's hand flew to his sword, and he threw his body in front of his summoner. The fiend, bruise-purple and bipedal, reacted with a fierce, enraged movement, moving faster than a thing its size should. Behemoth, Auron realized with a stabbing dread. He could do nothing but thrust himself into the line of the attack, sword stabbing desperately, handling entirely unlike a sword. In a single swipe of the fiend's claws, Auron was thrown back violently, his already lifeless weight hitting Braska and knocking him to the snow, katana slipping free on the hard-packed snow, ringing as its blade hit a rocky outcropping. Before Braska had fully comprehended the situation, the call had already formed itself in his mind, arising in whole from scrambled, broken places. Bahamut.
The winter white sky opened then, ripped in twain with by the cold brilliance of the glyphs, rattling with a tornado of power. The pressing rush staggered Braska and he nearly lost his balance again, but the rage surged through his him like iron veins. His spirit and gut and brain and muscle strung to the heavens in glorious rage. Bahamut's wheel began to spin, scalding in mystical friction, despair for a world which is measured not by the spinning of its cosmos, but in the perpetuity of death. The Behemoth drew back another claw, but Bahamut had already begun to draw from his Summoner -- white hot, pure and honed to a spiraling singularity. And with all the righteousness of the universe behind it, it burst. For a wretched moment, Braska thought he saw fear in the fiend's eyes -- the simple, confused terror of a child -- a sweat-soaked hand clutching out for his mother's hand because he'd dreamed of falling off the edge of the world.
It was only then, as the fiend faded into a swarm of pyrefly light, that Braska saw it. Jecht's sword, falling in the space from where it had been lodged into the hide of the Behemoth. In the next moment it was over, Bahamut bowing to his summoner before crossing his arms and leaping once more into the sky.
As much as he needed it, Braska did not have a moment to rest. His last guardian lay dying in a reddening slush of snow, the snow melting under the warmth of his blood. Too spent for life magic, Braska fumbled through their travel pack for the little jar of phoenix down. Their second-to-last, Braska noted. Placing the tuft upon his guardian's bloody lips, Braska found himself automatically reciting a simple recovery prayer, body tense until he saw the down lift and vanish on a faint current of breath. Auron coughed and attempted to sit up. Braska pressed him down gently. "Please. You are still wounded." Unlatching Auron's armor, he cringed at the jagged wounds, only partly healed by the phoenix down. It was a wonder that Jecht had even gotten a hit on the fiend, considering the ease with which it had felled Auron. Reeling his will back, Braska focused himself into his hands, expertly massaging the healing potion over striated muscle and the knots of old wounds, so that not a drop was wasted. Auron squirmed as the buffeted organs righted themselves and torn vessels repaired themselves.
When Braska was satisfied with Auron's recovery, he fetched his guardian's katana. It was then when Auron saw Jecht's sword, in the snow where it fell from the Behemoth's carcass. "My Lord, did you see--"
Braska nodded, neither question nor answered require between them. And then, still burdened by a sick knot in his stomach, Braska danced for Jecht. They were unsure if a man from Zanarkand could truly be sent, they were unsure if they had found him too late, they were unsure if they would face the jealous death-anger of a being formed from a man once called friend.
When no pyreflies rose from Jecht's corpse, Auron laid his friend's sword over the wrecked body. Braska turned away, too worn to watch.
With every fiend they encountered until the end of their journey, they asked themselves the same crushing question, never needing to voice it. They were just returning to the trail when Auron's boot knocked against Jecht's final sphere.
---
Jecht sits, defiantly shirtless against the chill winds of Gagazet. He's grinning, the unopened jar of Ronso ale at his feet. He trains his eyes on the viewer. "This one's for you, boy." He pauses, eyes flitting to his hands which are becoming progressively knotted around his knees. "Tidus." He straightens up, looks at the camera again. "Look, it's not exactly a secret that I wasn't a great dad for you. I mean, you know I love you. And I know you love me. I mean, shit. I hope you love me, at least. Because you -- and your mother -- you are about the only ones who ever did. The real stuff, I mean. The game stuff -- the fans, the groupies, the trophies -- they ain't real. Know what else?" Jecht picks up the jug and sets it down again. "This ain't real either. Haven't had a drop for over a month. And tonight, I was about ready to throw all that away, because --" Jecht scratches his neck and pulls the camera in closer.
"Stick with me, kid. Zanarkand. Our Zanarkand. Tonight I -- I don't even know if that's real. I know it sounds nuts, but I swear that all I can be sure of is this..." Jecht puts his fist over his heart, a gesture not unlike the standard Yevonite salute. "You're my boy. And --" That's where it ends, because in the next moment, the sphere flings sideways, thrown from its recording base into the blue snow, the overloud roar of the Behemoth crackling the volume threshold.
"Turn it off," Braska croaked, his voice thick.
Auron complied and turned to his Lord, unsure of how to help him. "I don't think I can do this." Braska said rawly. "I never thought I could do this. I'm a fool and a murderer. Auron, I can't let you die for me --"
Braska is cut off by his own quaking self -- a string cut, a banner falling, soaked through with grief and misery.
Auron, simply there and wanting. In him there were so many unvoiced truths because it had been Braska all along -- he had loved him as long as he could recognize love, that he had burned with guilt and fear when that woman had loved him because he knew he could never love her, and as ever, there is so much to say that he is ready to fall to his knees and, in spite of everything, beg Braska to stay -- it has always been so confusing, but there has always been so much, so bursting much.
And as always, under everything it all there remained an earthquake of needing. But Auron knew that he could not protect Braska in the way that Braska must protect Spira. Still, Auron churned with thousands of consuming unsaids and he only wanted to be held, to hold, just once, while on this side of the blue.
Instead, Auron smiled.
.
"No, My Lord -- Braska," he said, correcting himself with some effort, "Your daughter -- Yuna -- this is her world. I want her to live in it without fear. I want her to know hope. I want to continue."
Inexplicably, the air went glistening and unreal between them, like the wobble above a rising flame. Braska hefted his staff toward the ruins, still spread out below them as though in miniature. Like a king, he stood, chest swelled. He did not look back when he said it, but his words were heard and the smile in his quiet voice was unmistakable. "Auron. Thank you."
Not far from them in neither time nor place, a dead queen kindled her hearth, perched upon her throne of bones.
---
Auron, promise me.
The voice is small and distant and pleading, as though from a child in the next room over and years ago. But he could still hear it and he clung to it, willing the fading spark of a memory into a bonfire. Bucking against the toxin-induced delirium, he repeated over and over: the new Master is not my Lord. He willed himself to burn.
Oaths had once made his flesh and coursed through his veins like blood, but he had long been scorched away to a core of clattering bones. He kept his remaining memories there, permeating the sponge of his marrow.
Vision charred with smoke, he looked upon the land below. Did he know this place -- small and rocky, shivering with silvery evergreens? Had he set foot upon the land, had he thrown his sword against the fiends in their defense? Had he protected them once?
The leash tightened around his throat, then. The voiceless commands come coiling and ceaseless; the Master herds with vulnerabilities: Because the world could not be ours, the world could not be right. Auron is at once selfish and servile, each motion manifest rage.
Even the voice of his Lord is silenced now, mute lips forming the same words over and over, even when there is hardly an Auron left to hear it: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Then the mantra slows and becomes indistinct - his Lord and his Master are no longer separate but have merged into one. The veil has burned away. The voice speaks with the tick-wing hiss of Yevon, each word meted out in the kind, measured cadence of Braska. We are here, it says. We bring the Just Unmaking. We bring the fire.
Braska's Calm had lasted longer than most.
The throatless roar of wildfire. The pines bend like the fur of a running wolf, the scudding clouds vanish, all the sky goes burning-bright, as though the sun has drawn too close.
A young wife, crouched over a kettle, sniffs the hissing steam. She is sure she smells smoke; has she burnt the tea? It is only when the roof of her hut catches fire when she realizes. Sin is here because her village has not done enough, prayed enough, given enough, obeyed enough. She knows they have not done enough. And she knows that she should grateful that her husband, deep and sick with fever, will not wake.
For one moment she considers running, swimming, flying. Escaping.
Her face is tight with rage and fight when she begins to smell the roasting of her own skin. She realizes with a twist the unjustness of it all, with as much certainty that the moment affords, and with it comes a fleeting and defiant peace. She lays her quivering lips upon her husbands.
In a small mercy, it happens fast -- flesh burns away, the loam of death settling upon their skulls, and their faces set in the final smile that has us all.
Later that night, a boy who is a better sailor than his old man ever was, sets his course toward the orange blaze on the horizon.
Title: We Bring The Fire (part 4/4)
Characters: Auron, Braska, Chappu, Jecht, Wen Kinoc
Ratings: PG-13
Warnings: You probably won't like this if you don't like angst and violence. Anything more would be spoiler-y.
Notes: This was written for Laylah as part of the Doink! Final Fantasy Exchange. Only about a billionty months late (ಠ_ಠ), I'll be posting it in four parts. Many thanks to owlmoose for her perpetual patience and excellent betaing skills. Blame me, not her, for any leftover errors. You can also find this story on AO3 . Part one can be found here, part two can be found here, part three can be found here.
The white ceramic lid was scarcely noticeable, but Auron's perpetual scanning of his surroundings had caught it, sunk into the freshly fallen snow, the jar's ridged design resembling a misplaced seashell. Surely, he thought, it must be their missing jug of Ronso ale. Jecht must be nearby. Auron jogged ahead. "My lord," he shouted back at Braska, his breath huffing into white clouds as he uncovered the jug with a boot. Auron frowned when it was heavier than expected, puzzling over why it was full.
Not far from Auron, Braska stared over the side of a mountain path, seeming not to hear Auron, face drawn and hand clutched over his heart.
Then he fell to his knees, sinking into the snow. Auron abandoned his find and was at his side in a moment. And then Auron saw what Braska saw.
Jecht laid at the bottom of the rocky ravine, half covered in snow, hair clumped with frozen blood, limbs scrambled, graphic lumps of organ and flesh scattered in the snow. It looked like he'd been chewed on; his right arm was ripped from its shoulder and lay at a twisted angle. His face was as open as ever -- lips a cracked and chapped grey, vacant eyes trimmed with icy tinsel.
Braska grasped Auron's offered arm and stood shakily. Braska had seen countless injuries and nearly as many deaths in his career as a healer and summoner, vested as he was with the sad honor of pointing the dead to their final destination. But nothing could prepare him for this -- this friend that was now a body, splayed out like a lesson in failure and futility. Stricken suddenly with a wash of vertigo, he sagged forward and retched. Auron steadied him with a strong grip under his elbow. His nausea had not yet subsided when he became aware of the sound.
"What is tha--" By the time Braska had recovered enough to look up, Auron's head stood high, stretching his neck in the direction of the sound like a wolf.
It happened in an instant. Auron's hand flew to his sword, and he threw his body in front of his summoner. The fiend, bruise-purple and bipedal, reacted with a fierce, enraged movement, moving faster than a thing its size should. Behemoth, Auron realized with a stabbing dread. He could do nothing but thrust himself into the line of the attack, sword stabbing desperately, handling entirely unlike a sword. In a single swipe of the fiend's claws, Auron was thrown back violently, his already lifeless weight hitting Braska and knocking him to the snow, katana slipping free on the hard-packed snow, ringing as its blade hit a rocky outcropping. Before Braska had fully comprehended the situation, the call had already formed itself in his mind, arising in whole from scrambled, broken places. Bahamut.
The winter white sky opened then, ripped in twain with by the cold brilliance of the glyphs, rattling with a tornado of power. The pressing rush staggered Braska and he nearly lost his balance again, but the rage surged through his him like iron veins. His spirit and gut and brain and muscle strung to the heavens in glorious rage. Bahamut's wheel began to spin, scalding in mystical friction, despair for a world which is measured not by the spinning of its cosmos, but in the perpetuity of death. The Behemoth drew back another claw, but Bahamut had already begun to draw from his Summoner -- white hot, pure and honed to a spiraling singularity. And with all the righteousness of the universe behind it, it burst. For a wretched moment, Braska thought he saw fear in the fiend's eyes -- the simple, confused terror of a child -- a sweat-soaked hand clutching out for his mother's hand because he'd dreamed of falling off the edge of the world.
It was only then, as the fiend faded into a swarm of pyrefly light, that Braska saw it. Jecht's sword, falling in the space from where it had been lodged into the hide of the Behemoth. In the next moment it was over, Bahamut bowing to his summoner before crossing his arms and leaping once more into the sky.
As much as he needed it, Braska did not have a moment to rest. His last guardian lay dying in a reddening slush of snow, the snow melting under the warmth of his blood. Too spent for life magic, Braska fumbled through their travel pack for the little jar of phoenix down. Their second-to-last, Braska noted. Placing the tuft upon his guardian's bloody lips, Braska found himself automatically reciting a simple recovery prayer, body tense until he saw the down lift and vanish on a faint current of breath. Auron coughed and attempted to sit up. Braska pressed him down gently. "Please. You are still wounded." Unlatching Auron's armor, he cringed at the jagged wounds, only partly healed by the phoenix down. It was a wonder that Jecht had even gotten a hit on the fiend, considering the ease with which it had felled Auron. Reeling his will back, Braska focused himself into his hands, expertly massaging the healing potion over striated muscle and the knots of old wounds, so that not a drop was wasted. Auron squirmed as the buffeted organs righted themselves and torn vessels repaired themselves.
When Braska was satisfied with Auron's recovery, he fetched his guardian's katana. It was then when Auron saw Jecht's sword, in the snow where it fell from the Behemoth's carcass. "My Lord, did you see--"
Braska nodded, neither question nor answered require between them. And then, still burdened by a sick knot in his stomach, Braska danced for Jecht. They were unsure if a man from Zanarkand could truly be sent, they were unsure if they had found him too late, they were unsure if they would face the jealous death-anger of a being formed from a man once called friend.
When no pyreflies rose from Jecht's corpse, Auron laid his friend's sword over the wrecked body. Braska turned away, too worn to watch.
With every fiend they encountered until the end of their journey, they asked themselves the same crushing question, never needing to voice it. They were just returning to the trail when Auron's boot knocked against Jecht's final sphere.
---
Jecht sits, defiantly shirtless against the chill winds of Gagazet. He's grinning, the unopened jar of Ronso ale at his feet. He trains his eyes on the viewer. "This one's for you, boy." He pauses, eyes flitting to his hands which are becoming progressively knotted around his knees. "Tidus." He straightens up, looks at the camera again. "Look, it's not exactly a secret that I wasn't a great dad for you. I mean, you know I love you. And I know you love me. I mean, shit. I hope you love me, at least. Because you -- and your mother -- you are about the only ones who ever did. The real stuff, I mean. The game stuff -- the fans, the groupies, the trophies -- they ain't real. Know what else?" Jecht picks up the jug and sets it down again. "This ain't real either. Haven't had a drop for over a month. And tonight, I was about ready to throw all that away, because --" Jecht scratches his neck and pulls the camera in closer.
"Stick with me, kid. Zanarkand. Our Zanarkand. Tonight I -- I don't even know if that's real. I know it sounds nuts, but I swear that all I can be sure of is this..." Jecht puts his fist over his heart, a gesture not unlike the standard Yevonite salute. "You're my boy. And --" That's where it ends, because in the next moment, the sphere flings sideways, thrown from its recording base into the blue snow, the overloud roar of the Behemoth crackling the volume threshold.
"Turn it off," Braska croaked, his voice thick.
Auron complied and turned to his Lord, unsure of how to help him. "I don't think I can do this." Braska said rawly. "I never thought I could do this. I'm a fool and a murderer. Auron, I can't let you die for me --"
Braska is cut off by his own quaking self -- a string cut, a banner falling, soaked through with grief and misery.
Auron, simply there and wanting. In him there were so many unvoiced truths because it had been Braska all along -- he had loved him as long as he could recognize love, that he had burned with guilt and fear when that woman had loved him because he knew he could never love her, and as ever, there is so much to say that he is ready to fall to his knees and, in spite of everything, beg Braska to stay -- it has always been so confusing, but there has always been so much, so bursting much.
And as always, under everything it all there remained an earthquake of needing. But Auron knew that he could not protect Braska in the way that Braska must protect Spira. Still, Auron churned with thousands of consuming unsaids and he only wanted to be held, to hold, just once, while on this side of the blue.
Instead, Auron smiled.
.
"No, My Lord -- Braska," he said, correcting himself with some effort, "Your daughter -- Yuna -- this is her world. I want her to live in it without fear. I want her to know hope. I want to continue."
Inexplicably, the air went glistening and unreal between them, like the wobble above a rising flame. Braska hefted his staff toward the ruins, still spread out below them as though in miniature. Like a king, he stood, chest swelled. He did not look back when he said it, but his words were heard and the smile in his quiet voice was unmistakable. "Auron. Thank you."
Not far from them in neither time nor place, a dead queen kindled her hearth, perched upon her throne of bones.
---
Auron, promise me.
The voice is small and distant and pleading, as though from a child in the next room over and years ago. But he could still hear it and he clung to it, willing the fading spark of a memory into a bonfire. Bucking against the toxin-induced delirium, he repeated over and over: the new Master is not my Lord. He willed himself to burn.
Oaths had once made his flesh and coursed through his veins like blood, but he had long been scorched away to a core of clattering bones. He kept his remaining memories there, permeating the sponge of his marrow.
Vision charred with smoke, he looked upon the land below. Did he know this place -- small and rocky, shivering with silvery evergreens? Had he set foot upon the land, had he thrown his sword against the fiends in their defense? Had he protected them once?
The leash tightened around his throat, then. The voiceless commands come coiling and ceaseless; the Master herds with vulnerabilities: Because the world could not be ours, the world could not be right. Auron is at once selfish and servile, each motion manifest rage.
Even the voice of his Lord is silenced now, mute lips forming the same words over and over, even when there is hardly an Auron left to hear it: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Then the mantra slows and becomes indistinct - his Lord and his Master are no longer separate but have merged into one. The veil has burned away. The voice speaks with the tick-wing hiss of Yevon, each word meted out in the kind, measured cadence of Braska. We are here, it says. We bring the Just Unmaking. We bring the fire.
Braska's Calm had lasted longer than most.
The throatless roar of wildfire. The pines bend like the fur of a running wolf, the scudding clouds vanish, all the sky goes burning-bright, as though the sun has drawn too close.
A young wife, crouched over a kettle, sniffs the hissing steam. She is sure she smells smoke; has she burnt the tea? It is only when the roof of her hut catches fire when she realizes. Sin is here because her village has not done enough, prayed enough, given enough, obeyed enough. She knows they have not done enough. And she knows that she should grateful that her husband, deep and sick with fever, will not wake.
For one moment she considers running, swimming, flying. Escaping.
Her face is tight with rage and fight when she begins to smell the roasting of her own skin. She realizes with a twist the unjustness of it all, with as much certainty that the moment affords, and with it comes a fleeting and defiant peace. She lays her quivering lips upon her husbands.
In a small mercy, it happens fast -- flesh burns away, the loam of death settling upon their skulls, and their faces set in the final smile that has us all.
Later that night, a boy who is a better sailor than his old man ever was, sets his course toward the orange blaze on the horizon.