There's a Great Black Wave In the Middle of the Sea
Title: There's a Great Black Wave In the Middle of the Sea (For Me)
Series: Battle For the Sun (new main canon story, new chapter)
Flavors: Blackberry 6: set the record straight, Rhubarb 22: long time, no see, Gingerbread 4: fairy godmother (kind of loose)
Topping: Cherry (differently serious, nu!semi-nuts!Cygnelius, written with a deadline), Malt (birthday: 1306: "I know that we're different / we were all one cell in the sea, in the beginning." - Minnow and the Trout, A Fine Frenzy)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: To say the ocean is unpleasant for Cyprian would be to utter a woefully inadequate understatement.
Notes: Suddenly, Cyprian's deathfic looks just a smidgen different. Title is from an Arcade Fire song, because it was far too perfect.
When the war was on and I could still be relied on for screaming like a girl child discovering arachnids at the first exploding of an ambush's mortar, I was in a platoon with fifty other men and twenty women off the Gulf of Mitara near Umeda. We were the proud few who were deemed completely and utterly worthless, and were a sprained ankle away from an honorable discharge or an unsanitary sneeze away from a dishonorable one; nobody was especially particular. Christ knew I wasn't. I mostly tried blending in with the corners of whatever room or tent I occupied, since I knew once I was discharged my campy pink hair would be the subject of more fond reminiscences than myself as a whole, and I'd already lost Sorensen to the Second Division Cavalry three transfers ago. Once every quarter-full blue moon, I talked about various flowers with Mari Yanagisawa - or rather, I'd allow myself to be lowered as a translator between her and whatever flower of the week she'd pulled screaming from the ground - or Mari's brother Hikaru, who spent most of the time he spoke to me asking me to make the rounds at taverns with him and be his wingman, since "you'd be a natural at it, man - you don't believe me, I'm pretty sure Mari's still lugging around that ridiculous mirror gran gave her." Even rarer, and more welcome, I'd get a chance to be massacred at darts by Raul Mori. He was loud and foul and vaguely pudding-shaped, but he didn't mind that I tended to wear flowers in my hair "in case of a fight" and he let me drink as much alcohol as I wanted; naturally, I idolized him immediately. It was less that I couldn't hit the board if it took up the whole wall - and considering I was usually drunk off my awkward beanpole ass whenever I was around him, that did tend to factor - and more that Mori only had the eye of a hawk when he was hammered halfway to the center of the planet. He only ever missed when his arm was paralyzed, and he bragged about how he'd gotten his aim as a reward from the Emissary of Ibis in exchange for being a "frequent contributor to the special hell for headless Sangrians." He'd given his life up for his country years ago, and all that was left was a golem whose clay was beginning to crack.
"Those goddamn sons of whores tried to get rid of me," he told me once, and about thirty times after the once. "Saying I was old and wore out, and I should return to my family in the Gardens. Whenever they'd tell me, I'd just force my spine straighter than a Hullandian banker is crooked, and I'd say, "Fuck off and die in a fire, sir," with a perfect regulation salute, and then I'd go back to where I was needed."
"I can imagine why you would feel the need to act like you didn't know why they sent you here," I said, and he wheezed laughter with just enough bass that I could tell if somebody got a good cackle out of him when he was younger it would probably have had enough power backing it to trigger avalanches from two provinces away. Then, like he did many times after, he ruffled my hair, and I tried to get the concept of no touching sunk into what scant gray matter remained in his soft old head, like I would do every time. He never listened, but then he seldom listened to anyone who wasn't barking orders or strategies loud enough during a firefight.
I've told you that to tell you this.
A month and nineteen days after I turned seventeen, there was an attack on Umeda. Not a rogue bunch of hobbyist extremist douchebags with homemade bombs that more often than not had a safeword that was a variation of the word penis, but an actual naval force - and not just any of the Sangrian navies, but the goddamn Hullandians, with their ships all carved from dragon banyans and their cannons packed with charmed carcass shells, the Honningstrand flags high and waving in winds which were, without any doubt, favorable that day.
How what happened next isn't important; it never is. It happened something like waking from a nightmare, the worst parts still bouncing around in your head, only for you to realize the only reason you can still hear your daughter's raw voice screaming for mercy against the fires of hell is because you left the oven on and your house is burning down around you, and it will be unthinkable to tell anyone how she died without dreading it when you notice them stifling amusement. If you really want to know, find yourself a library and pick any book off the shelf having to do with military FUBAR clusterfucks written near or after the end of the war. Any of them published within a week of the incident will be able to tell you what happened better than I did; the only thing I remember is the sight of the sea filled with decaying flesh and wondering if any of them were the Yanagisawas or Mori. I did find Mori - found him a few times that I could recognize. His jaw was a good ten feet from the rest of his head, and all I could think was "Guess he's not going to be bringing down any avalanches any time soon." It was the shock. I read somewhere that shock is a defense mechanism, but that fucked me over more than if I'd just become a stone then and there. Nine survivors, only two of them soldiers, if you could have called a kid who'd just signed up for duty the previous afternoon to impress his girlfriend and me soldiers. We were so green the grass on the other side of the fence looked at us with longing. All of the other sides.
I was trying to make it out of town alive when he found me. He doesn't have a name anymore, and he sure as fuck didn't offer it, but myth and legend call him the Emissary. He's been made out to be some sort of demonic caricature - Holloweve is all about warding him away with sweets, rampant couples-themed commercialism, and love stories, for the love of creation - but he didn't have fingers like bagh nakh forged from the shadow fires of Dis or eyes like gimlets. He was a mystic a very long time ago, and whatever inhumanity people had seen in him, if they'd seen him, came from his unnatural coloring - eyes like dried blood, hair like moss - and the way he would look at people. Our eyes met from (un)reasonably close by - when he looked at me, it was like he knew in theory how I worked, and that we shared some common ancestry, but it was too far gone from him to recover. I was wounded and having a hard time convincing my legs to move, but the memory of what he was got me through the sound and the sensation of swimming through a mass grave. There are veterans who fight old lost battles every night they dream; I don't dream unless someone's making me. It doesn't mean I can stand the ocean any; sometimes any sort of water will do me in. There are men with my particular brand of war weariness, and I even found a few myself. They were old, old men, even the ones barely older than I was, beloved pillars of the community all. Unfortunately, they were beloved in the same way village idiots are staples of small towns. Who doesn't want to live on the same block as Hobo Jesus?
So when I say on the morning after I learned that it was possible to get screwed but good in my worst nightmares as well as the sorts of dreams I wished I could remember (but that these sorts of fuckers were much more likely to call on me again) the first thing I did was to board the first ship bound for elsewhere, it wasn't all because of a curiosity about scurvy and nine hundred silver riding on how soon Jaida would try to murder us all in a fit of mild cabin fever. Upon landing at our destination, I couldn't even find it in myself to kiss the solid ground.
"I had an uncle in Umeda," Jaida said, eyeing the swath of people like she was secretly dividing her share of Holloweve sweets. "Died a year ago, left everything to his son. I wonder if I could trouble him for his inheritance?"
"I'll thumb wrestle you for half," Cliff offered, leaning on Kristen. He'd found his land legs eight seconds ago, but apparently Kristen hadn't sussed that out yet. Jaida smiled, knifelike, and said, "I'll thumb wrestle you for your right to keep on breathing any time, but inheritance is strictly off-limits. Just because you burned yours doesn't mean you can take the inheritance of the first sad sack with a mortal body and a go-getter cousin."
Cliff's eyes widened, and he stood up swift enough to knock himself flat-assed on the pavement. "How could someone like you know who I am?"
"You're gonna want to think real hard about what you just said so you feel the relief that much stronger when I decide you've spontaneously developed some bizarre form of word salad. Your face is more well-known in the entire Kingdom of Harland than the king of the entire Kingdom of Harland. Why don't you tell me how I know who you are?"
"I'm what?" Cliff said, standing easily, and I tried calming my head as I said, "We're leaving right away. Just as many useless knick-knacks in Harumachi as here."
There must still have been some green in me yet if I thought it would get easier, but at least I discovered exactly what it took for my companions to double-time it, and all it took was a mortifying public fainting spell.