for Cephiedvariable, gift 1 of 2 : Polyphony
Title: Polyphony
For:
cephiedvariable
Medium: Prose
Request(s): Hits two requests: Final Fantasy Tactics, "Delita/Ramza", and "Olan, Ovelia and Delita after the game"
Fandom(s): Final Fantasy Tactics
Characters/Pairings: Delita/Ramza, Delita/Ovelia, with some Olan, and the Church
Rating/Warnings: R
Feedback: Concrit always welcome
Spoilers: For the game entire.
Word Count: ~1000
Summary: "I have known dearer blasphemers," the King reminded her, "and they have died."
Acknowledgements: This is the first of two gifts on the same theme and the same request. Check back soon for the other!
Polyphony
tout par compas
for cephiedvariable
from Mithrigil
xii.
Olan was to have been drawn and quartered. Such was the most appropriate punishment for a heretic, the Church said, to be broken as the hearts of those who believed his lies, defiled as their immortal souls.
The King deemed this method barbaric and in the poorest taste.
“But he must share the fate of his incendiary words,” said the Church in chorus.
“Then burn him with his books,” the King decreed.
.
i.
“Stop it,” Delita gasped against the invasive lips.
Ramza did, and their foreheads banged together, nervous sweat-soaked hair tangling. “I-ow,” he said, belated, and palmed his brow. “Ow. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Delita interrupted. He was flattered, actually. Or that, at least, was what he told himself the blushing meant.
“I meant about the hitting your head just now,” Ramza muttered, and when Delita looked up at him, the blond boy was staring at his curling bare toes on the slick bathhouse tile. “Not about. Er.”
Delita glanced down between their bodies. “Oh,” he said.
.
xi.
“I trusted you, you know.”
“Foolish of you,” Olan replied, backward over the plank of the stocks. The King could barely hear it, above the jeering of the crowd.
“No,” the King muttered, shaking his head. “You did precisely what I wanted of you.” He laid a hand on the threadbare cloth covering Olan’s beaten back, just in case the condemned man could not hear either.
Olan shied.
.
ii.
The squeal of the grass reeds throbbed on the air. There was no echo; the plains were too vast, the skies too clear.
Ramza’s was pitched lower this time, a throaty, wet sound. Delita’s rang more like an angry bird. They droned, until either boy had to breathe, in which case the other’s tone prevailed a moment, staggered. They had gone on for a half hour at least, like a mass.
In this way, Delita avoided talking.
.
x.
The door to his chambers was locked.
“She has her own,” the King sighed to the ladies-maid, who had been chuckling into her sleeve and trying to mask it for deference.
“She’s trying to make a point, your Majesty,” the girl said, a poor actress if the mockery showed through. “Can’t very well tell you to sleep on the couch if she shuts herself in her own rooms, I mean. Your Majesty.”
The King rapped his forehead against the door.
.
iii.
“Algus is an ass,” Delita said.
Ramza went back to sharpening his dagger.
Delita let his legs swing, and his heels thudded on the moat’s wall in jagged counterpoint, throwing off the regular swipe of Ramza’s whetstone. “Surely you can’t-”
“I don’t disagree with you,” Ramza stated on the end of a strong scrape, and the sound was sharper and more assertive than his voice. “But at least he talks to me about things that aren’t war.” Another curt swipe, and he added, “You’ve not done that for weeks.”
Letting his feet still against the stone, Delita squinted over at Ramza. He was either flushed, or blushing. And since he was trying to hide it, likely the latter.
.
ix.
“What are you going to do about it, your Majesty?”
“Yes, your Majesty,” Ovelia quipped in the way only women can seethe, hands curled placidly and practiced in her lap. “What are you going to do about it?”
The King turned from his petitioner, and hid that he would have been aghast. “What I must do,” he answered, calm. “He is a heretic, and he will die like one.”
“But he’s Olan,” she said.
“I have known dearer blasphemers,” the King reminded her, “and they have died.”
.
iv.
The fort exploded.
Ramza saved himself.
Delita was convinced that he wanted it that way.
.
viii.
Of course, the King knew of the book long before the Church formed its missive and formal request to have the author dismembered. These things take time to draft, after all. Research must be conducted. Ends, tied. Inconvenient truths, erased. If a glorious institution intends to kill a man, it must make an unbreakable case for itself.
The King read, and quickly. He secreted away at least one copy; perhaps the other reached Ordalia, and its presses.
.
v.
The chocobo’s talons tore up the wet grass at a wobbling canter. The ground was too soft to gallop, and the cargo too precious, and Delita was amazed that an unconscious body still shivered and protested. He held her close with the same hand as the beast’s reins, and shielded his eyes from the rain with the other.
It had been a year at least; he could not forget. His skin could not forget, a year of healing from scars and dulling himself to touch. There were parts of his clothing that he could not feel for the numbness of his body, parts of his armor that were weight without cold, nerves cauterized against pain. It was part of how he always wished to be, he decided, invulnerable.
The rain pelted against his gauntlet, growing stronger. He heard, and did not feel.
And now I am the one saving myself, he thought.
.
vii.
Rising from his kneel into the proffered crown, the King closed his eyes respectfully to avoid the priest’s. The circlet had been sized appropriately, and rested complacently on the King’s brow, accepting him.
The choir had long since been singing, in winding homophony over the breathy, echoing murmurs of the crowd. Stretched thin and intertwined, words became syllables devoid of meaning.
.
vi.
Delita entered the church; Ramza already knelt before the altar. The heretic was armed and girt as a mercenary, in plate that did not fully encircle his torso, with spiked pauldrons, his golden hair shorn haphazard and close. Hardened, Delita saw as he neared, and were Delita not obsessed, he would not have recognized him.
Once there, Delita sank beside him. Ramza bowed his head further, and closed his eyes, and prayed. His whisper was the only thing stronger than silence, in this place.
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