Periphery [FFX, Auron/Lulu]
a/n: thanks for the beautiful prompt.
Fandom: FFX
Title: Periphery
Author:
logistika_nyx
Characters/Pairings: Auron/Lulu, party
Rating: R
Word Count: 5500
Other: prompt - ‘brightness - sharp at the edges and blurred in the center.’
---
pretense/progress
.
Lulu approaches as he stands on one foot in Besaid’s sands, emptying stray grains from his other boot.
She, appropriately for the beach, comes barefoot with the great mass of her hair loose on the wind. She glides with the awkward grace of youth, her discipline’s dark robe held from the sand with thin, pinched fingers. Her ankles show beneath the hem, steady despite shifting sand. Her skin has lost its tan. Auron recognizes that; too many days sacrificed to study now, too many nights lost in the light of a lantern. She should’ve gone to Bevelle where lanterns numbered like the stars, where night was as bright as day, where her pallor would have gone unnoticed.
She wouldn’t go, then. Won’t, now. Nor is it his duty to convince her. Love shackles the living as profoundly as the dead; Lulu stays in Besaid, for the same reason Auron returns when he can.
He places his boot back where it belongs. The sand shifts under his weight as it does under hers. Another pretence at life, for him to be irritated by sand out of its place.
“Sir Auron,” she calls, once within earshot. Her skirts lower, swallowing the gap between hem and sand. She waits for his approach, unblinking for the wind that strives to blindfold her with her own hair. “Yuna is well, and misses you. She is at her studies within the village. Will you allow me to take you to her?”
“Yes,” he replies, and, “thank you. Your own studies are progressing?”
Lulu precedes him by a half-step, another pretence there, that she leads and he follows when he knows this path with such intimacy. Facing into the wind, her hair becomes a banner, streaming. He sidesteps to avoid its lash.
“Yes,” she says, and, “thank you. I have chosen my specialty.”
“Oh?”
“I shall serve Yevon as an elementalist.”
Expected, considering her predilection for control. Still, Lulu’s youth and pride stand as stiff-backed as she. Auron affects surprise as best he can for one who has forgotten youth, pride, surprises.
“--of all elements? Impressive.”
Her smile flickers, muted for dignity’s sake. “I shall be Yuna’s guardian.”
A provocation there. A steel blade under budding curves. Yuna’s guardian, as you were to her father.
Auron won’t comment to congratulate, to deter, to shake her of the intent. Such passion is beyond him. Outside the scope of the spiral that binds him to walk the same path. Death sharpens his focus so all peripherals blur to insignificance. Auron sees only Braska, Jecht, an incomplete duty. Braska’s daughter, Jecht’s son.
Still, he wonders of the aftermath of Yuna’s intent, for the Guardians always accept the worst of it, transformed beyond recognition regardless of the pilgrimage’s outcome. Lulu will be the one to bear the weight of a success that doubles as the sharp blade of failure.
The thought is a surprisingly bitter one. Her shoulders are so slender that even the sun’s bright kiss threatens to break her.
.
Dreams of blazoned cities burn as sharp and strong as Besaid’s sun. Time is interminable for one such as he: the void would shape him into a fiend, had he let it. He cannot loose his control for even the time it takes for an eyelash’s kiss, lest time and voids and fiends swallow all his purpose, his duty, in that waiting insanity.
Death proves so bright that it blurs everything but the centre.
Auron walks towards the light. He cannot think of anything but that spiral, summoning him to serve. To walk the endless pilgrimage. To feed the hungry heart. To end it, for Jecht. For Jecht, who served where Auron would not, where Auron refused. For Jecht, who took on that duty unbidden, and willing.
For himself. The High Summoners die. The Guardians live to bear the worst of it. Auron follows his old footsteps, chooses this path as he hadn’t chosen this unwary afterlife. That choice, to continue, was made for him by the very nature of his being: dogged, stubborn, dutiful.
The dead march, but only in the trail of footsteps left from their life’s first pass.
---
remember/farewell
.
Lulu waits.
Not for him. His arrival, now, is purely coincidental, to find her sitting precisely on that broken line where sand battles grass for dominance. She waits for someone who won’t come.
Her face is wet, not with spray. She doesn’t weep, but tears escape her steel control to paint pale cheeks whiter, snow instead of sand. She doesn’t notice his arrival, not initially. Hate and longing twist her, the curl of her spine if not her neck, her long fingers about each other if not her wrists, her legs under the weight of her body. Her hair coils in great twists also, every strand fixed and pinned, trapped, as though if she could control that midnight mass she could control herself.
She wears black now. Neither a widow’s color nor the robes of her discipline, a girl’s dress nor the dress of a matron. Her shoulders slump, bare, and no less slender for the heavier curves that have colonized the last of her adolescence.
“Sir Auron,” she says as he approaches, “it’s been some time since.”
Her response is to the stiff snap of his coat in the wind, the susurrus of sand shifting beneath him, against him. She does not turn to face him.
“Yes. I apologise.”
“Yuna has missed you.” Sharply said, considering her usual modulation. She takes a shuddered breath before she recovers herself. “She will not say so, of course.”
“Of course.”
Salt-starched silence curls between them.
“Chappu is dead,” she says at last, without a tremor now. “He and I were close. He left to fight Sin and I refused to say goodbye. I was-angry.”
“Hmph.”
“Did you-with High Summoner Braska-“
“I didn’t either. Say goodbye. I was angry.”
“I didn’t-say it because I thought he would come back if I left it unsaid. I thought-I hoped-“
“So did I.” It surprises him when he continues. “Foolish of me, considering the numerous precedents.”
She laughs. Even with that sound, she keeps her voice too controlled. From what he remembers of laughter it should be loosed to flow where it would, where the wind would will it.
“Remembering is another way of saying goodbye.”
Lulu looks at him when he says that, up through the fall of her fringe, the thick wetness of her lashes. “Do you remember Braska still?”
Irony has never settled easily on Auron’s shoulders, an irony in itself considering his existence.
“With every breath.”
“You have experience,” Lulu says, stiffly for the subject. “Will it be this hard, with Yuna?”
Auron considers the centre of that question, its aching heart, his own fury, the shame, the impotence that betrayed him. Lulu has a Guardian’s stern compassion in her elementalist’s core, as force and calculation, persistence and endurance. Even with her face wet with tears, her neck does not bow. She doesn’t waste her tears on love or loss, instead it’s anger that provokes her so, anger at herself, regret for herself. Fury, shame and impotence, a Guardian’s three burdens. She knots them in the coils of her hair already, like jewels the weight of which will bend her neck at the last.
Lulu will undoubtedly see Yuna through to the very end before she breaks. Much as he did.
“With Yuna, it will be different.”
Lulu stands, smoothes her skirts deftly. A woman’s dress, he observes, with the cut and fit of one despite the lack of colour. Her eyes are almost level with his own. A deception of their uneven footing astride the tide of sand and grass, elevating her, sinking him.
“Different,” she says. “Not easier. Not harder.”
“Yes. Different.”
Her smile does not sit easily on tear-glazed cheeks. “Yuna will be defeating Sin. Salvation and loss together. I imagine it will be different. But I will have time, I suppose, to say goodbye properly this time. A death with some meaning. Thank you for your words, Sir Auron.”
“You’re welcome.”
As he follows her into Besaid, his gaze caught by the swing of corded hair level with her hips, he realizes why her statement strikes him as incongruous. She is too sharp, too focused, to reach a conclusion so far from the truth unless she deludes herself, and willingly.
.
Death is death, and no poem makes it otherwise. All deceptions are delusions. Auron cannot consider anything in the periphery. Death’s brilliance permits him thought only to focus on the centre, lest the whirlpool of delusion drown him, destroy him with life’s false reflection.
Death is as bright as pyreflies, sharp at the centre, blurred at the edge. Death is the edge, that of his blade, as thin as, as focused, with one intent.
He is a sword, tempered. A sword can be nothing but a sword. Auron exists, he does not live. If he would achieve his purpose he cannot contemplate another. He has no room for delusion.
It would be bearable, perhaps, if death had stopped his grief as well as his heart.
---
revolution/resignation
.
Luca hasn’t changed. For some reason that surprises Auron, as though ten years could’ve have made a difference where hundreds have not.
But Lulu has.
They all have, except for he, for Yuna, the dead and the surrendered. The blitzballer wraps himself even further in such blurred inconsequentiality, as though he could avoid the sharp truth of what his duty will bring him to do to Yuna. The Ronso holds more silence now than he had when Auron tasked him, a simmering anger compressed under the weight of regret come too early, for Yuna still walks amongst them. Jecht’s boy sparks with new focus, with intent, as he had not wandering the paths of a dream. Romance, adventure, making a difference seems to be the suppressed dream of every sporting star. Such a dream seduced Jecht. At the end, Jecht understood the worthlessness of all dreams. Jecht’s boy doesn’t understand. He keeps trying to talk to Yuna, on the stairs and in the sun, in a way to make her see the sidelines, to lose her target. Auron could’ve stopped it. He could’ve explained, would you look at the audience when you’re kicking a goal?
He could’ve just told the boy to shut up.
Auron doesn’t do either. Explanations or instruction hadn’t worked on Jecht. And Jecht hadn’t made a difference to Braska’s resolve in the end. Those so insistent on changing others end up changing only themselves.
“So silent, Sir Auron? What do you contemplate so deeply?”
“Yuna hasn’t changed.”
“She has. She is stronger-“
“That.” Auron snorts. “Strength, knowledge, skill. Expected. She hasn’t changed.”
Lulu’s silence, far from sullen, draws him to speak.
“Her focus,” he explains. “She hasn’t deviated, not once. She won’t.”
“Of course not,” Lulu says, “she’s known what she would do since her father’s death.”
“Calmly resigned to her fate.”
“In command of it. Making a choice.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ve changed,” Lulu says, and succeeds in startling him.
He would have told her the dead don’t change, except the dead also don’t like answering questions.
“Hmph.”
Lulu ignores him. “Have I changed?”
Of course she has. Her focus is so sharp it almost hurts him, and he wonders unwillingly who hurt her so that she binds herself with such implicit control. Belts, chains, beads; constraint and defiance in equal measure, as though the travails of the road won’t deter her, the touch of weather and effort won’t force her to bend. A corset holds her rigid, flaunts femininity as defiance, defense, attack; she can’t hide it so she won’t, but neither will she bow to it, indulge it. Of them all, only Lulu matches his garb for the starched weight of fabric, the number of bindings and buckles.
She dresses herself already in with the garb of a warrior who wears failure as success, loss as gain, death as life, as though fabric can hide hurt.
“You have. You’re stronger.”
“That,” she says, dismissively. “As expected. But where it matters I haven’t changed at all. I won’t deviate from my duty either, Sir Auron.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
Something leaves her, a layer of stiffness, of worry. The breeze toys with the few loose strands of her hair at the nape of her neck, tangling midnight with the silver of her fur collar.
“I thought,” she says, “even though I know how silly it is to think this, that perhaps you joined us because you thought us incapable.”
‘Thought me incapable,’ he knows she wants to say.
“This is my duty as Braska’s Guardian, incomplete. It has nothing to do with your own capability as a Guardian.”
For some reason he can’t fathom, that provokes a berry-bright smile, lingering.
.
Life is change, insurmountable for the individual. But all change is a delusion when death doesn’t care, and the kick of a ball has as much meaning as the strike of a sword. The dead cannot change, he nor Yuna, cursed to walk with the calm resignation the same path, always, to their ending. He’ll help her get there, and then he’ll let her die.
That death can’t be helped, or could, but only at the loss of another. What burns, though, is the realization that Lulu garbs herself as one dead also, that she expects only death in her future. It burns him, for as much as he wouldn’t wish Jecht’s fate on anyone but himself, he knows how much it will hurt her to live through that aftermath.
He wouldn’t wish that roaming grief on anyone, but he won’t let Lulu die in his place.
---
shameless/ashamed
.
When Jecht’s boy weeps, his heart broken like this broken heart of Home, Auron remembers Jecht wept also. Hidden away, where the man thought himself unwatched, unheeded; unlike his son who rails in front of an audience, shameless in how ashamed he makes them all feel. Something in the son’s barefaced grief strikes Auron as a lot stronger than the father’s hidden shame.
“I should’ve told him,” Lulu whispers, so that only Auron at her side can hear.
I should’ve told him, Auron had thought, back then. Should’ve told Jecht sooner, should have given him a chance to get away before all the boundaries started to blur.
“You did tell him,” Auron says. “Just now you told him.”
“Sooner.”
“Why? So that he could have had a chance to run away?”
“So that he wouldn’t have fallen in love,” Lulu hisses, the sound of her voice like a spark on metal. The air tastes like blood in this steel cave. Rust. Rotting.
“’Sentenced to death, so she deserves no love?’” Auron can’t help the vague mocking. “A little proud, there, to think you can control the most elemental of human drives.”
Lulu flinches from that, far more violently than even his mockery deserves.
“He will distract her,” Lulu says, “he will break her, he will divert her, he will blur the path-“
“If he’s anything like his father,” Auron says, “he will do exactly the opposite. You wouldn’t believe the weight of grief love can make bearable. If Yuna wills it, Tidus will carry her to her death.”
“If Yuna wills…” Lulu stutters, as she never does, “Yuna’s will…is Spira’s will. She must not consider her wants.”
“Such a selfless intent.”
“Selfless? Of course this is selfless, for what else do we have, walking this path to death, always death, but our hopes for others? Do you think I look forward to seeing Yuna die? To maybe dying at her side? This is for Spira, not for us, not for Yuna, not for me. Why else do you Guard her, but to preserve her sacrifice for Spira?”
Auron turns away. He shouldn’t bother. He shouldn’t talk.
“My intentions,” he says, unwillingly, “are not as selfless as yours.”
“My intentions,” Lulu says, “are not as selfless as they seem.”
“…oh?”
“I am ashamed,” Lulu says, swiftly. “Ashamed. How can I face them; mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, face them with her death, her failure? I would rather die myself, die and face them not at all, unless I could say ‘we triumph today’.”
The questioning lilt of her voice makes him ache, unexpectedly. Strange to find his own hubris wrapped in a heavy black dress, wielding a blade of elemental control, not softened in the slightest by the white flesh of a woman.
Auron tastes the question. He tests it. “We triumph today?”
Jecht’s son curls with his fists buried in the sockets of his eyes. Honest. Angry. As impotent as all of them. It might take him longer to resign himself to that fact.
“Ask Yuna about triumph, Lulu.”
“I would rather ask you, Sir Auron.”
“Can’t you read my triumph in the scar on my face?”
Lulu’s stillness sears.
.
Yuna holds her focus, sharp, centred. She will not allow the peripherals to distract her. She will not read deeper than she needs to, to proceed. She will achieve her goal, undeniably, and Auron will help her, and then let her die.
No. He shouldn’t lie to himself. Yuna will help him, and let Jecht die.
His foe unvanquished, Auron can’t perish until it is. He will be reborn again, seven times again, until he makes amends. Foe and friend blur in his vision despite his efforts to keep them sharp. Auron would die, but he would live; he cannot determine which. A life as Sin is as false a life as this one. But he can’t care, can’t risk it with the void hungering for him. He will free Jecht. Yuna will help them, change them, destroy them.
A one-eyed gaze lacks depth, and the brain must compensate to create its own delusion of such.
Auron wonders why he’s so tired, when he has no need for sleep or dreams.
---
need/want
.
Pyreflies stain Lulu’s skin with pink and green, sharp blossoms on milk-pale skin mimicked in the stillness of Lake Macalania’s water.
Auron holds his blade across his knees and sharpens it. It doesn’t need it. He’ll damage the blade if he continues. He’s not going to be around for it to make a difference.
“Let him go,” he says, when Lulu stands to stop Jecht’s son, when she would move after him. “Trust Yuna.”
It’s hard to let go, he appreciates that for her. Lulu’s fists are tight, and her acquiescence is harshly nodded. She can control fire and ice, wind and water, earth and lightning, but can’t control those around her with nearly as much ease.
“Trust Yuna,” Auron repeats. “She’s not going to change her mind no matter what he says to her.”
“And you know-“
“I do. Braska stopped here.” He meets her eyes, sees pyrefly-light catch within, wine-dark depths. “To suddenly gain beauty such as this is a greater sadness than loss.”
“I--”
“Beauty didn’t change Braska’s mind about anything, in the end.”
Lulu looks as though she wants to speak, and instead turns away. Silent on the crystalline dust of the leaves, she glides away, weaving through the branches, a shadow, sleek, disappearing. Auron doesn’t watch her go; he knows. He can feel it, just like he feels the path of pyreflies on air currents, aimless, passing over where the blitzballer sits on a log, long-legged and sprawling, head cradled in his hands. The Al Bhed girl slumps at his feet, forehead on his thigh, motionless for once. The Ronso has his eyes closed, his head tilted, alert. Listening.
Pyreflies sing. Somewhere, Yuna weeps.
Unsurprising. This is where Braska wept.
The thought won’t leave Auron then, that this is where he wept, for the first and last time, lost amongst the sharp-edged trees, the fractured reflections, the sword-edged hope of what they were truly, truly going to do.
Pyreflies seduce. A death chant that calls him with an uncanny desire, blazes a bemusing glory, a song of void and freedom. Beauty such as this breaks men such as he, broke him before, beauty and freedom, transient, non-existent. Broken. Bevelle tried to break him, but all it took was Spira itself. The three of them would have done anything for Spira. Jecht had. Braska had. Auron might have, if he could’ve seen Spira through vision as clear as death had left his now. Auron stands, brushes the edge of his blade clean, and sheathes it. His sleeve falls from his shoulder. It’s not until he ducks under a branch, climbs over another, that he realizes what he’s doing. Where he’s going.
It’s one thing to wonder if Lulu weeps, as he had a decade ago. It’s another thing to disturb her so. To need to see--
Auron finds her kneeling at the water’s edge. Moonflowers and pyreflies rise on the swell of a soft, still wave, as though the water strives to stay in contact with the graceful curve of her hands, her wrists, as she cups a palmful and drinks.
She weeps as silently as she had on the shores of Besaid, smooth-cheeked but for the curl of her tears.
“You take this better than I did. I broke a good blade here. On the trees.”
“Were you so angry with Braska, then?”
“With myself.”
Her skirts make a strangely martial sound as she shifts aside, for him to kneel next to her. The water cools his fingers; her buckles clink as she rearranges the fan of fabric.
“Sir Auron…surely you were a paragon of a Guardian. What need had you to be angry with yourself?”
“Need? No. Say want instead.”
Her eyes slide, sidelong, to gaze at his extended hands. He can see it in the slight tilt of her chin, the elongation of her neck.
“Why did you want to be angry, then?”
“Anger is a shield.”
“A mask.”
He inclines his head. “Yes. Apt. A mask to hide truth, sorrow, shame. A shield.”
“Shame?”
“I could do nothing to stop him. He’d die, and I’d let it happen. I’d assist it. To this point, some core of me still thought of the glory of it. The celebrations. The acceptance. But he would die. As I said before, my intentions were never as selfless as yours.”
Lulu lets her hand rest in the space between them, flat-palmed, fingers fanned. “That’s not what you said before.”
“I’m fairly sure I-“
“You said your intentions are not as selfless as mine. ‘Are not’, Sir Auron, not ‘were not’. What are your intentions with Yuna, then, if they are not so selfless?”
He forgets how clever Lulu is, sometimes, such is the distraction of berry-stained lips and long-fingered hands for all he tries not to see them.
“Back then,” he says, instead, “I believed in Yevon’s purpose. I thought Bevelle full of fools and distractions, but that was just Bevelle. A shell around Yevon. I believed in Yevon. I believed in the value of sacrifice.”
“…and now?”
“Now I believe in neither Yevon nor Bevelle. Nor the value of sacrifice. All a shell.”
“You think Yuna wastes herself.”
“No. She will achieve another Calm. There is something in that. But she won’t change anything.”
“Then why do you stay with us, trifle with us? If you lose, if you gain, do you care?”
Her voice breaks. Her voice breaks him.
He can’t tell her. Not now. She wouldn’t believe him. Just as beauty breaks a man’s heart, Yunalesca can break his soul, his sword, his strength. He can’t tell Lulu. That desolation awaiting her seems an obscenity to lay on her now.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” she hisses, as he rocks back on his heels. Her hand darts, clamps around his wrist, plants his palm back to the dirt. “You dare speak like that, true heresy from the tongue of the great Guardian, one of the scant few who has ever walked through the dark heart of Sin and walked out again. You speak to me like a man does a woman, and then you turn and would disdain me like a monk does his subordinate.”
“Lulu. Let me go.”
“Never,” she says. “Whatever your lust for death, you owe me.”
“I owe you nothing. My debt lies with Jecht.”
“You owe me an explanation,” she cries, and he sees there, the rigid rage in her, as tightly bound as her corset.
If she had a blade, she would have broken it too. Not on a tree, though. On him probably. The thought makes him smile.
“You mock me, Auron?”
“Never.”
“I had focus,” she says suddenly. “Such a sharp focus, Sir Auron. I could permit myself to see nothing but the centre, the heart of this pilgrimage. I refused to look aside, to see anything in the periphery. Even if death was the outcome, it seemed worthy, Spira seemed worthy. The centre was sharpness, and I let the edges of life blur into inconsequentiality, friendships, family…love…but now, but you-“
To hear his own thoughts spoken back to him startles him enough that he ceases to strain against her, his knees hitting the dirt again, his thigh against hers.
She’s warm. He’s not.
-when he keep guard at the rear of the group, the flicker at the corner of his eye distracts him. Wind stirs black fabric, and it demands his focus where Yuna’s arrow’s path does not. Stray hairs work themselves free of constraining braids, to curl against the pale slenderness of an elongated neck, the slope of shoulders, all the more precious for that imperfection. The glitter of light on metal clasps commands, demands. He can’t help but admire the control that guides Lulu’s every steely motion, as though her body is her blade, her mind her whetstone, her magic just an incidental thing compared to the steel core of her self. Distraction. Distraction --
“-you would mock what I thought worthy of my death, of Yuna’s death,” she whispers. “You would mock my intent. You make a mockery of me, Sir, of my efforts, with your words. Your disdain is so sharp, that--”
“The centre blurs,” he says, then, and turns his hand in her grip, to claim her fingers, her palm mirroring his. His knee shifts, slides between hers, so that his red coat parts and her black skirt lifts. The coarse fabric of his pant-leg finds the silk of her thigh, black against white, white against black. “The centre blurs, and the only sharpness is at the periphery of vision.”
Lulu’s eyes widen at his approach, wine-dark; her free hand finds the stubble of his cheek, and rubs. He pins that hand too, between his cheek and his shoulder, between two layers of fabric and two layers of flesh.
Lulu’s lips part. He thinks he has never seen her smile, not properly. Yuna smiles all the time.
“Yes,” she says, “exactly,” and, “it is rather distracting.”
He laughs a little then. She frees her hand, only to linger, to remove his glasses. She offers them back.
“Your shield, Sir.”
Auron sets them to one side, leans, that his lips are almost on her bare shoulder. He feels her gasp, for the proximity; he slides his fingers along the stiff waistline of her corset until he finds the lace and unravels it, releases her. Black satin curls around his fingers, crimped.
He hands the lace to her, gravely.
“Your restraint, lady.”
Lulu discards it over her shoulder. He watches it fall onto the water’s surface, black and sharp amongst moonflowers and pyreflies both pink and green.
.
I long for death, he surrenders to the midnight wave of her hair, speechless, and then I loathe it, the longing, or death itself, or myself for longing to begin with.
Her hair cannot hear him, unbound, ink that spills across the redness of his coat beneath her. Wondrous, that hair, that he can comb it to the length of her knees, that on release it curls to the curve of her breasts, dark-tipped and warm. Lulu is white and shadow, black and light, red and warm. She is sharp at the edges where her flesh curves to surrender the stark edge of vein-lined hipbones, the rising arch of her ribcage.
Auron’s lips find her collarbones wanting; he applies himself, that she arches under him to meet his kiss.
Lulu is sharp, with wit and knowledge, with her tongue and her taunts, with sorrow she scarce wants to indulge, but here, she, he - indulging, indulgent-as he had never in life, as she would have scorned as weakness had he not first bowed to whim. Lulu is extravagance, to curl so against his hips; Auron is selfish, to think to take her virtue, he has always been selfish and disguised it under duty, as she hides her hedonism with an iron control--
--cold, she whispers into his chest, why are you so cold?
Auron arches into the splay of her fingers on his shoulders, the press of her heels on the backs of his thighs. She bruises so vicariously that a kiss flowers purple on her collarbones, that his touch marks prints on her breasts. Each breath that escapes her is acknowledgement, each mark evidence of his existence, an imprint. He is tender, so tender, but her flesh tells a lie.
She shivers. His flesh tells a greater lie. One that would hurt more than his touch. Lulu proves so bright that she would blur all death and duty, with her sharp grace.
He isn’t alive. He can’t promise her anything-
More, she flutes, and pyreflies scream a song along with her, curling, calling, coming, he can’t stop, won’t, shan’t, the pyreflies, and he arches, lost, losing, and there’s light in her eyes and his, so bright, so many--Auron--
Her voice, his name; it saves him before the void claims all his purpose for its own. He recalls himself, withdraws, and her face is a mystery. Pyreflies kiss the upturned lips of moonflowers; he can’t kiss her. An apology would insult her. Would insult him. He isn’t sorry. He’s just wrong.
Whatever, he tells her hair, the fur of her collar, the lace of her corset, anything and everything that can’t hear, can’t care, whatever happens, I won’t let you die in my stead.
Jecht would’ve laughed at him. Promises disguising selfishness. Auron hasn’t changed, not at all.
Lulu doesn’t smile, through her thick lashes, her dark lips. Instead, she laces her fingers through his hand and kisses his knuckles. Auron doesn’t deserve any of this, her longing, her respect, her reverence, but to tell her why would make a mockery of her, of her belief. He couldn’t do that to her.
If only death had robbed him of desire as well as dignity.
---
wish/will
.
“A bright and pleasant day,” Lulu tells him, “to make death’s journey.”
Zanarkand’s broken roads stretch before them. Auron thinks there’s a metaphor here, if he could see past Lulu to grasp it.
“Goodbye,” she says, sudden.
He understands. Death wish, she calls it. Duty is his name for it. Whatever the name, there’s one end. She thinks she’ll deter him, somehow. Taking his place, probably. She still doesn’t know the truth. He should’ve told her. Sooner. Before she fell in love. Auron smiles. The dead walk in circles. Everything has been said before. Needed to be said again.
“Too many goodbyes - people think twice about leaving.”
She meets his gaze, his glasses in the way, and doesn’t smile back.
“Before, you said that remembering is another way of saying goodbye.”
“I remember.”
“I think,” she says, considering, “that saying goodbye is another way of saying ‘I will remember’.”
The awareness behind her words takes a while to sink in.
“You know.”
“Of course I know. Do you take me for a fool?”
“Yet still you-“
“Being dead doesn’t make you any less of a man.”
She’s nothing like him, Auron realizes then. He saw only what he wanted to see, his own reflection, when she was never, ever anything like him. Maybe if Braska had a Lulu instead of an Auron things would’ve been better. Lulu doesn’t follow in his footsteps, not at all.
“I’m glad. To have known you.”
She inclines her head, with a small smile now. “Thank you, Sir Auron.’
“No,” Auron says, and smiles also. “Thank you, Lady Guardian.”
---
Fandom: FFX
Title: Periphery
Author:
logistika_nyx
Characters/Pairings: Auron/Lulu, party
Rating: R
Word Count: 5500
Other: prompt - ‘brightness - sharp at the edges and blurred in the center.’
---
pretense/progress
.
Lulu approaches as he stands on one foot in Besaid’s sands, emptying stray grains from his other boot.
She, appropriately for the beach, comes barefoot with the great mass of her hair loose on the wind. She glides with the awkward grace of youth, her discipline’s dark robe held from the sand with thin, pinched fingers. Her ankles show beneath the hem, steady despite shifting sand. Her skin has lost its tan. Auron recognizes that; too many days sacrificed to study now, too many nights lost in the light of a lantern. She should’ve gone to Bevelle where lanterns numbered like the stars, where night was as bright as day, where her pallor would have gone unnoticed.
She wouldn’t go, then. Won’t, now. Nor is it his duty to convince her. Love shackles the living as profoundly as the dead; Lulu stays in Besaid, for the same reason Auron returns when he can.
He places his boot back where it belongs. The sand shifts under his weight as it does under hers. Another pretence at life, for him to be irritated by sand out of its place.
“Sir Auron,” she calls, once within earshot. Her skirts lower, swallowing the gap between hem and sand. She waits for his approach, unblinking for the wind that strives to blindfold her with her own hair. “Yuna is well, and misses you. She is at her studies within the village. Will you allow me to take you to her?”
“Yes,” he replies, and, “thank you. Your own studies are progressing?”
Lulu precedes him by a half-step, another pretence there, that she leads and he follows when he knows this path with such intimacy. Facing into the wind, her hair becomes a banner, streaming. He sidesteps to avoid its lash.
“Yes,” she says, and, “thank you. I have chosen my specialty.”
“Oh?”
“I shall serve Yevon as an elementalist.”
Expected, considering her predilection for control. Still, Lulu’s youth and pride stand as stiff-backed as she. Auron affects surprise as best he can for one who has forgotten youth, pride, surprises.
“--of all elements? Impressive.”
Her smile flickers, muted for dignity’s sake. “I shall be Yuna’s guardian.”
A provocation there. A steel blade under budding curves. Yuna’s guardian, as you were to her father.
Auron won’t comment to congratulate, to deter, to shake her of the intent. Such passion is beyond him. Outside the scope of the spiral that binds him to walk the same path. Death sharpens his focus so all peripherals blur to insignificance. Auron sees only Braska, Jecht, an incomplete duty. Braska’s daughter, Jecht’s son.
Still, he wonders of the aftermath of Yuna’s intent, for the Guardians always accept the worst of it, transformed beyond recognition regardless of the pilgrimage’s outcome. Lulu will be the one to bear the weight of a success that doubles as the sharp blade of failure.
The thought is a surprisingly bitter one. Her shoulders are so slender that even the sun’s bright kiss threatens to break her.
.
Dreams of blazoned cities burn as sharp and strong as Besaid’s sun. Time is interminable for one such as he: the void would shape him into a fiend, had he let it. He cannot loose his control for even the time it takes for an eyelash’s kiss, lest time and voids and fiends swallow all his purpose, his duty, in that waiting insanity.
Death proves so bright that it blurs everything but the centre.
Auron walks towards the light. He cannot think of anything but that spiral, summoning him to serve. To walk the endless pilgrimage. To feed the hungry heart. To end it, for Jecht. For Jecht, who served where Auron would not, where Auron refused. For Jecht, who took on that duty unbidden, and willing.
For himself. The High Summoners die. The Guardians live to bear the worst of it. Auron follows his old footsteps, chooses this path as he hadn’t chosen this unwary afterlife. That choice, to continue, was made for him by the very nature of his being: dogged, stubborn, dutiful.
The dead march, but only in the trail of footsteps left from their life’s first pass.
---
remember/farewell
.
Lulu waits.
Not for him. His arrival, now, is purely coincidental, to find her sitting precisely on that broken line where sand battles grass for dominance. She waits for someone who won’t come.
Her face is wet, not with spray. She doesn’t weep, but tears escape her steel control to paint pale cheeks whiter, snow instead of sand. She doesn’t notice his arrival, not initially. Hate and longing twist her, the curl of her spine if not her neck, her long fingers about each other if not her wrists, her legs under the weight of her body. Her hair coils in great twists also, every strand fixed and pinned, trapped, as though if she could control that midnight mass she could control herself.
She wears black now. Neither a widow’s color nor the robes of her discipline, a girl’s dress nor the dress of a matron. Her shoulders slump, bare, and no less slender for the heavier curves that have colonized the last of her adolescence.
“Sir Auron,” she says as he approaches, “it’s been some time since.”
Her response is to the stiff snap of his coat in the wind, the susurrus of sand shifting beneath him, against him. She does not turn to face him.
“Yes. I apologise.”
“Yuna has missed you.” Sharply said, considering her usual modulation. She takes a shuddered breath before she recovers herself. “She will not say so, of course.”
“Of course.”
Salt-starched silence curls between them.
“Chappu is dead,” she says at last, without a tremor now. “He and I were close. He left to fight Sin and I refused to say goodbye. I was-angry.”
“Hmph.”
“Did you-with High Summoner Braska-“
“I didn’t either. Say goodbye. I was angry.”
“I didn’t-say it because I thought he would come back if I left it unsaid. I thought-I hoped-“
“So did I.” It surprises him when he continues. “Foolish of me, considering the numerous precedents.”
She laughs. Even with that sound, she keeps her voice too controlled. From what he remembers of laughter it should be loosed to flow where it would, where the wind would will it.
“Remembering is another way of saying goodbye.”
Lulu looks at him when he says that, up through the fall of her fringe, the thick wetness of her lashes. “Do you remember Braska still?”
Irony has never settled easily on Auron’s shoulders, an irony in itself considering his existence.
“With every breath.”
“You have experience,” Lulu says, stiffly for the subject. “Will it be this hard, with Yuna?”
Auron considers the centre of that question, its aching heart, his own fury, the shame, the impotence that betrayed him. Lulu has a Guardian’s stern compassion in her elementalist’s core, as force and calculation, persistence and endurance. Even with her face wet with tears, her neck does not bow. She doesn’t waste her tears on love or loss, instead it’s anger that provokes her so, anger at herself, regret for herself. Fury, shame and impotence, a Guardian’s three burdens. She knots them in the coils of her hair already, like jewels the weight of which will bend her neck at the last.
Lulu will undoubtedly see Yuna through to the very end before she breaks. Much as he did.
“With Yuna, it will be different.”
Lulu stands, smoothes her skirts deftly. A woman’s dress, he observes, with the cut and fit of one despite the lack of colour. Her eyes are almost level with his own. A deception of their uneven footing astride the tide of sand and grass, elevating her, sinking him.
“Different,” she says. “Not easier. Not harder.”
“Yes. Different.”
Her smile does not sit easily on tear-glazed cheeks. “Yuna will be defeating Sin. Salvation and loss together. I imagine it will be different. But I will have time, I suppose, to say goodbye properly this time. A death with some meaning. Thank you for your words, Sir Auron.”
“You’re welcome.”
As he follows her into Besaid, his gaze caught by the swing of corded hair level with her hips, he realizes why her statement strikes him as incongruous. She is too sharp, too focused, to reach a conclusion so far from the truth unless she deludes herself, and willingly.
.
Death is death, and no poem makes it otherwise. All deceptions are delusions. Auron cannot consider anything in the periphery. Death’s brilliance permits him thought only to focus on the centre, lest the whirlpool of delusion drown him, destroy him with life’s false reflection.
Death is as bright as pyreflies, sharp at the centre, blurred at the edge. Death is the edge, that of his blade, as thin as, as focused, with one intent.
He is a sword, tempered. A sword can be nothing but a sword. Auron exists, he does not live. If he would achieve his purpose he cannot contemplate another. He has no room for delusion.
It would be bearable, perhaps, if death had stopped his grief as well as his heart.
---
revolution/resignation
.
Luca hasn’t changed. For some reason that surprises Auron, as though ten years could’ve have made a difference where hundreds have not.
But Lulu has.
They all have, except for he, for Yuna, the dead and the surrendered. The blitzballer wraps himself even further in such blurred inconsequentiality, as though he could avoid the sharp truth of what his duty will bring him to do to Yuna. The Ronso holds more silence now than he had when Auron tasked him, a simmering anger compressed under the weight of regret come too early, for Yuna still walks amongst them. Jecht’s boy sparks with new focus, with intent, as he had not wandering the paths of a dream. Romance, adventure, making a difference seems to be the suppressed dream of every sporting star. Such a dream seduced Jecht. At the end, Jecht understood the worthlessness of all dreams. Jecht’s boy doesn’t understand. He keeps trying to talk to Yuna, on the stairs and in the sun, in a way to make her see the sidelines, to lose her target. Auron could’ve stopped it. He could’ve explained, would you look at the audience when you’re kicking a goal?
He could’ve just told the boy to shut up.
Auron doesn’t do either. Explanations or instruction hadn’t worked on Jecht. And Jecht hadn’t made a difference to Braska’s resolve in the end. Those so insistent on changing others end up changing only themselves.
“So silent, Sir Auron? What do you contemplate so deeply?”
“Yuna hasn’t changed.”
“She has. She is stronger-“
“That.” Auron snorts. “Strength, knowledge, skill. Expected. She hasn’t changed.”
Lulu’s silence, far from sullen, draws him to speak.
“Her focus,” he explains. “She hasn’t deviated, not once. She won’t.”
“Of course not,” Lulu says, “she’s known what she would do since her father’s death.”
“Calmly resigned to her fate.”
“In command of it. Making a choice.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ve changed,” Lulu says, and succeeds in startling him.
He would have told her the dead don’t change, except the dead also don’t like answering questions.
“Hmph.”
Lulu ignores him. “Have I changed?”
Of course she has. Her focus is so sharp it almost hurts him, and he wonders unwillingly who hurt her so that she binds herself with such implicit control. Belts, chains, beads; constraint and defiance in equal measure, as though the travails of the road won’t deter her, the touch of weather and effort won’t force her to bend. A corset holds her rigid, flaunts femininity as defiance, defense, attack; she can’t hide it so she won’t, but neither will she bow to it, indulge it. Of them all, only Lulu matches his garb for the starched weight of fabric, the number of bindings and buckles.
She dresses herself already in with the garb of a warrior who wears failure as success, loss as gain, death as life, as though fabric can hide hurt.
“You have. You’re stronger.”
“That,” she says, dismissively. “As expected. But where it matters I haven’t changed at all. I won’t deviate from my duty either, Sir Auron.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
Something leaves her, a layer of stiffness, of worry. The breeze toys with the few loose strands of her hair at the nape of her neck, tangling midnight with the silver of her fur collar.
“I thought,” she says, “even though I know how silly it is to think this, that perhaps you joined us because you thought us incapable.”
‘Thought me incapable,’ he knows she wants to say.
“This is my duty as Braska’s Guardian, incomplete. It has nothing to do with your own capability as a Guardian.”
For some reason he can’t fathom, that provokes a berry-bright smile, lingering.
.
Life is change, insurmountable for the individual. But all change is a delusion when death doesn’t care, and the kick of a ball has as much meaning as the strike of a sword. The dead cannot change, he nor Yuna, cursed to walk with the calm resignation the same path, always, to their ending. He’ll help her get there, and then he’ll let her die.
That death can’t be helped, or could, but only at the loss of another. What burns, though, is the realization that Lulu garbs herself as one dead also, that she expects only death in her future. It burns him, for as much as he wouldn’t wish Jecht’s fate on anyone but himself, he knows how much it will hurt her to live through that aftermath.
He wouldn’t wish that roaming grief on anyone, but he won’t let Lulu die in his place.
---
shameless/ashamed
.
When Jecht’s boy weeps, his heart broken like this broken heart of Home, Auron remembers Jecht wept also. Hidden away, where the man thought himself unwatched, unheeded; unlike his son who rails in front of an audience, shameless in how ashamed he makes them all feel. Something in the son’s barefaced grief strikes Auron as a lot stronger than the father’s hidden shame.
“I should’ve told him,” Lulu whispers, so that only Auron at her side can hear.
I should’ve told him, Auron had thought, back then. Should’ve told Jecht sooner, should have given him a chance to get away before all the boundaries started to blur.
“You did tell him,” Auron says. “Just now you told him.”
“Sooner.”
“Why? So that he could have had a chance to run away?”
“So that he wouldn’t have fallen in love,” Lulu hisses, the sound of her voice like a spark on metal. The air tastes like blood in this steel cave. Rust. Rotting.
“’Sentenced to death, so she deserves no love?’” Auron can’t help the vague mocking. “A little proud, there, to think you can control the most elemental of human drives.”
Lulu flinches from that, far more violently than even his mockery deserves.
“He will distract her,” Lulu says, “he will break her, he will divert her, he will blur the path-“
“If he’s anything like his father,” Auron says, “he will do exactly the opposite. You wouldn’t believe the weight of grief love can make bearable. If Yuna wills it, Tidus will carry her to her death.”
“If Yuna wills…” Lulu stutters, as she never does, “Yuna’s will…is Spira’s will. She must not consider her wants.”
“Such a selfless intent.”
“Selfless? Of course this is selfless, for what else do we have, walking this path to death, always death, but our hopes for others? Do you think I look forward to seeing Yuna die? To maybe dying at her side? This is for Spira, not for us, not for Yuna, not for me. Why else do you Guard her, but to preserve her sacrifice for Spira?”
Auron turns away. He shouldn’t bother. He shouldn’t talk.
“My intentions,” he says, unwillingly, “are not as selfless as yours.”
“My intentions,” Lulu says, “are not as selfless as they seem.”
“…oh?”
“I am ashamed,” Lulu says, swiftly. “Ashamed. How can I face them; mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, face them with her death, her failure? I would rather die myself, die and face them not at all, unless I could say ‘we triumph today’.”
The questioning lilt of her voice makes him ache, unexpectedly. Strange to find his own hubris wrapped in a heavy black dress, wielding a blade of elemental control, not softened in the slightest by the white flesh of a woman.
Auron tastes the question. He tests it. “We triumph today?”
Jecht’s son curls with his fists buried in the sockets of his eyes. Honest. Angry. As impotent as all of them. It might take him longer to resign himself to that fact.
“Ask Yuna about triumph, Lulu.”
“I would rather ask you, Sir Auron.”
“Can’t you read my triumph in the scar on my face?”
Lulu’s stillness sears.
.
Yuna holds her focus, sharp, centred. She will not allow the peripherals to distract her. She will not read deeper than she needs to, to proceed. She will achieve her goal, undeniably, and Auron will help her, and then let her die.
No. He shouldn’t lie to himself. Yuna will help him, and let Jecht die.
His foe unvanquished, Auron can’t perish until it is. He will be reborn again, seven times again, until he makes amends. Foe and friend blur in his vision despite his efforts to keep them sharp. Auron would die, but he would live; he cannot determine which. A life as Sin is as false a life as this one. But he can’t care, can’t risk it with the void hungering for him. He will free Jecht. Yuna will help them, change them, destroy them.
A one-eyed gaze lacks depth, and the brain must compensate to create its own delusion of such.
Auron wonders why he’s so tired, when he has no need for sleep or dreams.
---
need/want
.
Pyreflies stain Lulu’s skin with pink and green, sharp blossoms on milk-pale skin mimicked in the stillness of Lake Macalania’s water.
Auron holds his blade across his knees and sharpens it. It doesn’t need it. He’ll damage the blade if he continues. He’s not going to be around for it to make a difference.
“Let him go,” he says, when Lulu stands to stop Jecht’s son, when she would move after him. “Trust Yuna.”
It’s hard to let go, he appreciates that for her. Lulu’s fists are tight, and her acquiescence is harshly nodded. She can control fire and ice, wind and water, earth and lightning, but can’t control those around her with nearly as much ease.
“Trust Yuna,” Auron repeats. “She’s not going to change her mind no matter what he says to her.”
“And you know-“
“I do. Braska stopped here.” He meets her eyes, sees pyrefly-light catch within, wine-dark depths. “To suddenly gain beauty such as this is a greater sadness than loss.”
“I--”
“Beauty didn’t change Braska’s mind about anything, in the end.”
Lulu looks as though she wants to speak, and instead turns away. Silent on the crystalline dust of the leaves, she glides away, weaving through the branches, a shadow, sleek, disappearing. Auron doesn’t watch her go; he knows. He can feel it, just like he feels the path of pyreflies on air currents, aimless, passing over where the blitzballer sits on a log, long-legged and sprawling, head cradled in his hands. The Al Bhed girl slumps at his feet, forehead on his thigh, motionless for once. The Ronso has his eyes closed, his head tilted, alert. Listening.
Pyreflies sing. Somewhere, Yuna weeps.
Unsurprising. This is where Braska wept.
The thought won’t leave Auron then, that this is where he wept, for the first and last time, lost amongst the sharp-edged trees, the fractured reflections, the sword-edged hope of what they were truly, truly going to do.
Pyreflies seduce. A death chant that calls him with an uncanny desire, blazes a bemusing glory, a song of void and freedom. Beauty such as this breaks men such as he, broke him before, beauty and freedom, transient, non-existent. Broken. Bevelle tried to break him, but all it took was Spira itself. The three of them would have done anything for Spira. Jecht had. Braska had. Auron might have, if he could’ve seen Spira through vision as clear as death had left his now. Auron stands, brushes the edge of his blade clean, and sheathes it. His sleeve falls from his shoulder. It’s not until he ducks under a branch, climbs over another, that he realizes what he’s doing. Where he’s going.
It’s one thing to wonder if Lulu weeps, as he had a decade ago. It’s another thing to disturb her so. To need to see--
Auron finds her kneeling at the water’s edge. Moonflowers and pyreflies rise on the swell of a soft, still wave, as though the water strives to stay in contact with the graceful curve of her hands, her wrists, as she cups a palmful and drinks.
She weeps as silently as she had on the shores of Besaid, smooth-cheeked but for the curl of her tears.
“You take this better than I did. I broke a good blade here. On the trees.”
“Were you so angry with Braska, then?”
“With myself.”
Her skirts make a strangely martial sound as she shifts aside, for him to kneel next to her. The water cools his fingers; her buckles clink as she rearranges the fan of fabric.
“Sir Auron…surely you were a paragon of a Guardian. What need had you to be angry with yourself?”
“Need? No. Say want instead.”
Her eyes slide, sidelong, to gaze at his extended hands. He can see it in the slight tilt of her chin, the elongation of her neck.
“Why did you want to be angry, then?”
“Anger is a shield.”
“A mask.”
He inclines his head. “Yes. Apt. A mask to hide truth, sorrow, shame. A shield.”
“Shame?”
“I could do nothing to stop him. He’d die, and I’d let it happen. I’d assist it. To this point, some core of me still thought of the glory of it. The celebrations. The acceptance. But he would die. As I said before, my intentions were never as selfless as yours.”
Lulu lets her hand rest in the space between them, flat-palmed, fingers fanned. “That’s not what you said before.”
“I’m fairly sure I-“
“You said your intentions are not as selfless as mine. ‘Are not’, Sir Auron, not ‘were not’. What are your intentions with Yuna, then, if they are not so selfless?”
He forgets how clever Lulu is, sometimes, such is the distraction of berry-stained lips and long-fingered hands for all he tries not to see them.
“Back then,” he says, instead, “I believed in Yevon’s purpose. I thought Bevelle full of fools and distractions, but that was just Bevelle. A shell around Yevon. I believed in Yevon. I believed in the value of sacrifice.”
“…and now?”
“Now I believe in neither Yevon nor Bevelle. Nor the value of sacrifice. All a shell.”
“You think Yuna wastes herself.”
“No. She will achieve another Calm. There is something in that. But she won’t change anything.”
“Then why do you stay with us, trifle with us? If you lose, if you gain, do you care?”
Her voice breaks. Her voice breaks him.
He can’t tell her. Not now. She wouldn’t believe him. Just as beauty breaks a man’s heart, Yunalesca can break his soul, his sword, his strength. He can’t tell Lulu. That desolation awaiting her seems an obscenity to lay on her now.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me,” she hisses, as he rocks back on his heels. Her hand darts, clamps around his wrist, plants his palm back to the dirt. “You dare speak like that, true heresy from the tongue of the great Guardian, one of the scant few who has ever walked through the dark heart of Sin and walked out again. You speak to me like a man does a woman, and then you turn and would disdain me like a monk does his subordinate.”
“Lulu. Let me go.”
“Never,” she says. “Whatever your lust for death, you owe me.”
“I owe you nothing. My debt lies with Jecht.”
“You owe me an explanation,” she cries, and he sees there, the rigid rage in her, as tightly bound as her corset.
If she had a blade, she would have broken it too. Not on a tree, though. On him probably. The thought makes him smile.
“You mock me, Auron?”
“Never.”
“I had focus,” she says suddenly. “Such a sharp focus, Sir Auron. I could permit myself to see nothing but the centre, the heart of this pilgrimage. I refused to look aside, to see anything in the periphery. Even if death was the outcome, it seemed worthy, Spira seemed worthy. The centre was sharpness, and I let the edges of life blur into inconsequentiality, friendships, family…love…but now, but you-“
To hear his own thoughts spoken back to him startles him enough that he ceases to strain against her, his knees hitting the dirt again, his thigh against hers.
She’s warm. He’s not.
-when he keep guard at the rear of the group, the flicker at the corner of his eye distracts him. Wind stirs black fabric, and it demands his focus where Yuna’s arrow’s path does not. Stray hairs work themselves free of constraining braids, to curl against the pale slenderness of an elongated neck, the slope of shoulders, all the more precious for that imperfection. The glitter of light on metal clasps commands, demands. He can’t help but admire the control that guides Lulu’s every steely motion, as though her body is her blade, her mind her whetstone, her magic just an incidental thing compared to the steel core of her self. Distraction. Distraction --
“-you would mock what I thought worthy of my death, of Yuna’s death,” she whispers. “You would mock my intent. You make a mockery of me, Sir, of my efforts, with your words. Your disdain is so sharp, that--”
“The centre blurs,” he says, then, and turns his hand in her grip, to claim her fingers, her palm mirroring his. His knee shifts, slides between hers, so that his red coat parts and her black skirt lifts. The coarse fabric of his pant-leg finds the silk of her thigh, black against white, white against black. “The centre blurs, and the only sharpness is at the periphery of vision.”
Lulu’s eyes widen at his approach, wine-dark; her free hand finds the stubble of his cheek, and rubs. He pins that hand too, between his cheek and his shoulder, between two layers of fabric and two layers of flesh.
Lulu’s lips part. He thinks he has never seen her smile, not properly. Yuna smiles all the time.
“Yes,” she says, “exactly,” and, “it is rather distracting.”
He laughs a little then. She frees her hand, only to linger, to remove his glasses. She offers them back.
“Your shield, Sir.”
Auron sets them to one side, leans, that his lips are almost on her bare shoulder. He feels her gasp, for the proximity; he slides his fingers along the stiff waistline of her corset until he finds the lace and unravels it, releases her. Black satin curls around his fingers, crimped.
He hands the lace to her, gravely.
“Your restraint, lady.”
Lulu discards it over her shoulder. He watches it fall onto the water’s surface, black and sharp amongst moonflowers and pyreflies both pink and green.
.
I long for death, he surrenders to the midnight wave of her hair, speechless, and then I loathe it, the longing, or death itself, or myself for longing to begin with.
Her hair cannot hear him, unbound, ink that spills across the redness of his coat beneath her. Wondrous, that hair, that he can comb it to the length of her knees, that on release it curls to the curve of her breasts, dark-tipped and warm. Lulu is white and shadow, black and light, red and warm. She is sharp at the edges where her flesh curves to surrender the stark edge of vein-lined hipbones, the rising arch of her ribcage.
Auron’s lips find her collarbones wanting; he applies himself, that she arches under him to meet his kiss.
Lulu is sharp, with wit and knowledge, with her tongue and her taunts, with sorrow she scarce wants to indulge, but here, she, he - indulging, indulgent-as he had never in life, as she would have scorned as weakness had he not first bowed to whim. Lulu is extravagance, to curl so against his hips; Auron is selfish, to think to take her virtue, he has always been selfish and disguised it under duty, as she hides her hedonism with an iron control--
--cold, she whispers into his chest, why are you so cold?
Auron arches into the splay of her fingers on his shoulders, the press of her heels on the backs of his thighs. She bruises so vicariously that a kiss flowers purple on her collarbones, that his touch marks prints on her breasts. Each breath that escapes her is acknowledgement, each mark evidence of his existence, an imprint. He is tender, so tender, but her flesh tells a lie.
She shivers. His flesh tells a greater lie. One that would hurt more than his touch. Lulu proves so bright that she would blur all death and duty, with her sharp grace.
He isn’t alive. He can’t promise her anything-
More, she flutes, and pyreflies scream a song along with her, curling, calling, coming, he can’t stop, won’t, shan’t, the pyreflies, and he arches, lost, losing, and there’s light in her eyes and his, so bright, so many--Auron--
Her voice, his name; it saves him before the void claims all his purpose for its own. He recalls himself, withdraws, and her face is a mystery. Pyreflies kiss the upturned lips of moonflowers; he can’t kiss her. An apology would insult her. Would insult him. He isn’t sorry. He’s just wrong.
Whatever, he tells her hair, the fur of her collar, the lace of her corset, anything and everything that can’t hear, can’t care, whatever happens, I won’t let you die in my stead.
Jecht would’ve laughed at him. Promises disguising selfishness. Auron hasn’t changed, not at all.
Lulu doesn’t smile, through her thick lashes, her dark lips. Instead, she laces her fingers through his hand and kisses his knuckles. Auron doesn’t deserve any of this, her longing, her respect, her reverence, but to tell her why would make a mockery of her, of her belief. He couldn’t do that to her.
If only death had robbed him of desire as well as dignity.
---
wish/will
.
“A bright and pleasant day,” Lulu tells him, “to make death’s journey.”
Zanarkand’s broken roads stretch before them. Auron thinks there’s a metaphor here, if he could see past Lulu to grasp it.
“Goodbye,” she says, sudden.
He understands. Death wish, she calls it. Duty is his name for it. Whatever the name, there’s one end. She thinks she’ll deter him, somehow. Taking his place, probably. She still doesn’t know the truth. He should’ve told her. Sooner. Before she fell in love. Auron smiles. The dead walk in circles. Everything has been said before. Needed to be said again.
“Too many goodbyes - people think twice about leaving.”
She meets his gaze, his glasses in the way, and doesn’t smile back.
“Before, you said that remembering is another way of saying goodbye.”
“I remember.”
“I think,” she says, considering, “that saying goodbye is another way of saying ‘I will remember’.”
The awareness behind her words takes a while to sink in.
“You know.”
“Of course I know. Do you take me for a fool?”
“Yet still you-“
“Being dead doesn’t make you any less of a man.”
She’s nothing like him, Auron realizes then. He saw only what he wanted to see, his own reflection, when she was never, ever anything like him. Maybe if Braska had a Lulu instead of an Auron things would’ve been better. Lulu doesn’t follow in his footsteps, not at all.
“I’m glad. To have known you.”
She inclines her head, with a small smile now. “Thank you, Sir Auron.’
“No,” Auron says, and smiles also. “Thank you, Lady Guardian.”
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