Evolution: Chapter 14
Evolution
Chapter 14
Summary: This is a story of the Evolution of the character of Lightning throughout Final Fantasy XIII. The story will begin in the Vile Peaks and go through the rest of the game. There will be AU components to this tale. No Pairing (although you can read whatever you like into it.)
-The Twilight Kingdom-
She's always been afraid of the dark and now it's all that's left to her; pain, the dark and the fear of all those nasties that lurk within it. She gropes around, moves hand over hand along the walls to get her bearings. She has no memory of the textures of this room. She's blind in a strange place. Anxiety chokes her. There is a sharp pressure building behind her eyes and between her temples; half of her wishes that her head would burst just to alleviate it and put her out of her misery. She gropes at her face. Her fingers come away sticky. She pats at her cheeks, moves up until she finds the source of the pain. The source of the blood. She traces her fingers over her eyelashes, then up over her eyelids.
Over hollow, empty eye sockets!
The pain at the contact is nothing compared to the agony of memory. She wails as it assails her. The accusations. 'Witch,' they'd called her, and tore her baby from her arms. She was deemed a 'Demon and deceiver' by the clerics. For her visions. Visions she's had for so long she can't remember what life was like before them. Visions she's had since the day the gods touched her.
Cursed her, damn them!
She sobs once and winces at the zing of pain through her ribs. Her whole body aches from the beating she'd received at the hands of her 'jailors.' They'd hit her with feet and fists until she wept and begged, dragged her before the elders who'd proclaimed her to be a 'Seer and a Witch' and had burned her eyes from her head with a fired iron.
The pain had nearly rendered her unconscious (Apparently, she hadn't even deserved that reprieve) but it's the smell that haunts her even now.
A door slams and she jumps, presses her back to the corner. She hears footsteps but sees nothing from her ruined eyes. Hands grab her at each elbow, drag her from the corner and she screams. One of her captors punches her in the jaw. She staggers and trips over the hem of her skirt, hangs in their grasp until she can get her feet beneath her again. Their grips are bruising, crushing as they haul her outside.
She feels the warmth of the midday sun beat down on her. She hears the murmur of the crowd turn to a roar. Something hits her in her temple, drips down her face. Her head and ears ring from the blow; ring with the curses and epithets the crowd hurls at her.
The two men pull her forward, this time more slowly. Giving everyone time to abuse the 'witch.' She wonders if her family is in the crowd. Wonders if they've murdered them for 'cavorting' with a witch. If they've murdered her infant son for being demon spawn. She can't bear to think of it, hopes that she'll die without ever knowing if her nightmares are real.
They reach the end of their walk and the first step hits her hard in the shin, almost sends her sprawling. Those clutching her arms don't care. If she doesn't walk, she'll be dragged. She steps up, and again. Again. She reaches the top without further injury. She wishes she could see, get one last look at her home. She turns her face skyward, wishes she could see Cocoon above. Hears the whispers again. Promises. Quid pro quo. So easy, just one little word and she'll have satisfaction if she just gives in...
She's pressed back to a post, hands bound behind her. She takes a deep breath of cool air as they light the pyre around her. She smells the burning wood, the burning linen of her dress. Remembers the horrible smell of her flesh burning. Yellow red glowing metal pressing to her eyes the last sight she'll ever see. She tenses as the heat sears her skin, licks at her legs and she yells out 'yes.' Croaks it, growls it. She feels tearing, hears popping noises from without and within. She opens her mouth for one final scream and...
...The crowd screams instead.
It takes a full minute before Lightning realizes that she's conscious again. The usually sharp boundary between nightmare and reality is virtually gone. Her whole body burns and she can't help the residual and primal fear firing through her from her ghastly dream. Her heart beats out a rapid staccato in her chest and throat. She opens her eyes, sees only black and has a horrifying moment of déjà vu for her dream. She gasps to scream, finds the weight pressing on her too great to get enough breath. The sense of suffocation ramps up her panic. She thrashes, finds that she's pinned completely immobile. The darkness only increases her disorientation and confusion. It takes a few more heartbeats for her memory to catch up to reality. When it does, Lightning wonders if she wouldn't be better off back in her dreams again.
She can't move because she has been buried alive beneath an avalanche of rock and dirt. No, not she. They have been buried. Her heartbeat and breathing accelerate. Her head spins, sparks out bright explosions of colors in the darkness. She feels consciousness slipping from her and she works to slow her breathing. She knows that hyperventilating might render her unconscious. If she loses consciousness now, there's a good chance she'll never wake up. She toys with that idea for a heartbeat, wonders if that is such a bad thing after all.
She smashes the thought, balls it up and tosses it the way of all refuse. She can't afford to indulge such depression. Not as long as there are others counting on her. Not as long as her word and honor still matter to her. (At her current rate of deterioration, she figures that concern will expire sometime tomorrow.) She shakes her head in an effort to clear it of the growing misery. Determination screwed tight, Lightning takes her time concentrating on nothing but regaining full control of her body, starting with her breathing. When she no longer feels faint, she works to free herself. She wriggles, hears rocks shift, roll and settle in the darkness. She's still pinned. "Hello?"
Something tickles and digs into her ribs, startling her. She shifts away and the pressure follows, presses into her ribs with a conscious effort. Fingers.
"Hey," she grunts and shimmies in an effort to turn. She twists her body, feels the weight ease around her arm. She works it upwards and out of the rock pile until she can move it freely. She pushes at the debris around her neck, her collarbone. She braces her hand against the rocks around her and pushes. Inch by painful, tearing inch she forces her way out of the mound of rubble until both arms are free.
She stops, panting, painted in sweat, blood and dirt. Tears of pain pour from her eyes and track down her face to land salty and traitorous on her tongue. In accordance with her strict tenets regarding all things irritating, Lightning ignores them. She feels around her until her hand brushes against something other than rock. She hears, "WARK!" and moves faster, pats at the ground until she feels flesh. "Sazh?"
"U-u-n-mm."
"Sazh?" Shimmies around slowly, afraid of collapsing the pile and crushing her buried friends. She gets her hands around his face, feels up towards his hairline. "Sazh, can you hear me?"
"S-s-oldier?"
"That's right," she encourages, a tear falls off her nose. She's happy that she can't track its path in the darkness. She lets go of him, uses her hands to push herself up until her hips are out of the rubble, twists her body and carefully digs around Sazh's head. "Stay with me now."
"Where'm...I.," he lets out a wet cough (spraying who-knows-what all over her face), "gon-na go?" He's fading. He's going to die before she can dig him out of here. She feels her heartbeat ramp up at the thought and grunts. She can't afford panic! She needs to keep herself together! She decides to put all this lovely adrenaline to good use. She places her hands on his face again (ignores the clammy iciness indicative of shock) and calls up her strongest healing spell. Her head spins and her stomach flips but Sazh moves his head in her grasp with renewed energy. When he asks her, "you alright?" his voice is stronger.
"Fine," she answers. It's a total lie and they both know it.
"Yeah," he groans. The rock pile shifts beneath her as he moves. "Sure ya are!" She
"I'm better than you anyway." She digs around him until she feels his shirt, shoves her hands under him to pull his torso from the rubble. He groans. She slows her movements, afraid of sending bone into soft tissue.
"No arguments there." She runs her hands over his ribs looking for breaks. Sazh hisses and moans. She pours even more healing magic into him. The effort costs her, makes her queasy and shaky, but she's terrified that Sazh is going to die in the dark under her hands. Die and leave her alone in this pitch black tomb. He sighs in relief at the healing, at the reprieve from the pain. "Thanks." He starts working at the rubble around him, worming and wriggling to free himself from the pile. "We gotta get the hell out of here."
"Sounds like a plan." She pulls, pushes, shimmies-tries to get her legs out of the pile. She's panting by the time she gets her right leg free and screams when she moves the left. There is a pulling-tearing-pulsating agony sweeping from her foot to her thigh. Fresh sweat breaks out on her lip and forehead. Her head gets light, starts spinning hard revolutions that drag her stomach into the mix. She shivers, suddenly freezing despite the oppressively close air of the cavern.
"Woah, hey!" Sazh catches her around her hips, stilling her struggles. "Don't move." There's a sound of more rocks shifting. "We need some light in here. This is ridiculous."
"We can't risk fire." Her voice wobbles from the incessant chattering of her teeth. Lightning breathes deep in an effort to control the pain radiating up her leg, quash the nausea. It's not working. If anything, she's at risk of hyperventilating again. "We don't know if there are gasses trapped. Or if we have any fresh air coming in at all. Fire will use up all our oxygen."
She hears Sazh shuffling, sending rocks skittering away as he moves around her. Somehow he's managed to extricate himself from the pile of rubble. She's confused by, but thrilled at, the development.
"And thank you so much for the whole new nightmare," he comments. She feels his hand graze her left hip as he shovels the rocks away from her leg. "You really are a ray of sunshine, aren't you?"
"Sorry," she gasps, swallows down whatever crept up her esophagus into the back of her throat. It burns the whole way down. She really doesn't mean to be so depressing all the time. She's been too serious for too long, taking care of her sister and herself in the wake of her parents' deaths. She's pretty sure that she has no idea how to lighten up anymore. The only one who has ever managed to make her lay down some of her burden is...
"Oh, don't apologize, soldier. I like your gloom and doom," Sazh jokes. "It keeps things real for me."
The words touch a nerve with her. /Don't apologize. That just makes it worse./ Horror washes over her like an ice cold tidal wave as memory pours in.
[Strong fingers pressed into her arm. Soft hair beneath her hands. Cracking overhead. Silt raining down, a heart stopping precursor to the main event. Two tons of rock tearing from its ancient home to crush her like a bug. A hard hit from the side, saving her from a quick and messy death.]
Her heart stutters and drops into her stomach, forcing all the current contents of her stomach out her mouth in one acidic burst. She shakes so hard she grabs onto her ribs to keep from flying apart. Snow! Hope! They had been on the other side of the cave in when it happened. The last she'd seen them, they were both standing directly under the collapse. Her mind whites out, her body goes numb and she moves without conscious effort. Sazh is yelling at her but she can't hear his words over the blood pounding in her ears and the wailing in her head. Her whole focus is on finding Snow and Hope. They can't be gone! She won't accept it. She won't allow it!
Arms close around her and drag her backwards. She's free of the rock pile but she can't break the hold on her. She bucks, screams, sobs and screams again, frustration over her impotence overwhelming her, spilling boiling tears from her clenched eyelids. She flexes every muscle in her body in an effort to escape Sazh's iron grasp. Sazh is speaking into her ear, a soft and urgent litany of 'relaxes,' and 'we'll find them, Soldiers.'
She's dizzy by the time she stops struggling. All her energy disappears and she wishes she could disappear with it. She folds into herself but Sazh holds her up. He lifts her off her injured leg and carries her down the pile and away from the plugged up tunnel. Lightning shakes from a potent cocktail of pain, misery, guilt and fury. The perfect darkness only forces her deeper into her own mind where she watches earth and rock rain down on Snow and Hope over and over again. She'd been so close to them. They were right beside her when the ceiling started caving in.
Now they are forever out of reach.
She sobs once, hard enough to re-fracture her freshly healed ribs. Sazh's fingers tighten as he trudges forward. She thinks he may have whispered something soothing but she's not sure. She stifles the next sob, pinches the bridge of her nose hard enough to hurt. She digs the fingers of her left hand into her left knee, sending sparks of agony firing through her injured leg. She needs the pain. The physical pain distracts her from her misery, gives her something else to focus on. If she thinks right now, she'll shatter into a million pieces.
A small scratching sound to their left brings them up short. They both hold their breath, unsure if they've located friend or foe in the darkness. Lightning can feel Sazh's heart pounding as his muscles tense in fear and anticipation. Her hand rests on her weapon, ready to draw and fire if necessary. A very human grunt and moan startles them from immobility. She points and says "there," before her brain can engage and advise her that they are both blind, rendering her pointing useless. She shakes her head at her own stupidity. "Put me down, Sazh. We'll have to feel our way to be sure we don't step on whoever that is."
"That's Vanille," Sazh says with a confidence born from long weeks of companionship. Vanille, she realizes, is Sazh's Hope. The time that she had spent wandering with and caring for Hope, he had spent with Vanille. She can hear the concern in his voice, feel it in the tension thrumming through him. She's not sure why the thought had never before occurred to her. Self absorption comes to mind, and she can't help but feel shamed by the thought. She's spent so much time focused on herself and her pain, that she's forgotten to consider her friends' feelings. They deserve better from her.
Sazh puts her down on the ground as she requested. He walks and she crawls, her injured leg dragging behind her like dead weight. They both move slowly, meticulously picking over the debris. Sharp stones bruise and scratch Lightning's palms and knees as she crawls. A few minutes of careful searching and Lightning finds a leg, pats her way up until she brushes Vanille's brand. Her own flares to life with an urgency that sucks the air from her lungs and nearly throws her across the corridor. She snatches her hand back and cradles it against her. Vanille groans louder and Lightning's whole body tingles and prickles in the aftermath of the contact.
"I've got her." She pretends that her voice didn't just break. Sazh is kind enough to keep silent about it, allowing her to hold fast to her fantasy of composure. She hears Sazh approach, senses him when he kneels next to Vanille. She moves up further until she finds Vanille's head. Her fingers catch in the girl's hair as she feels around her head for any signs of obvious trauma. She doesn't feel any large lumps or any tackiness indicating bleeding. She brushes grit away from the girl's skin. Vanille is lucky not to be buried under the rocks as she and Sazh had been. It seems as if she had been far enough away from the point of the collapse not to be swept under any large debris. They'd never have found her in this darkness if she'd been buried. Her thoughts drift backwards to where two friends /family/ lay buried. She bites down on her lip until she tastes blood and refocuses her attention on Vanille. Lightning shifts, stretches her throbbing leg and sits. She shimmies closer to Vanille and bumps into another body.
Fang.
"Hey, I've got Fang too." She feels until she finds the woman's throat, checks for a pulse. Feels a weak but rapid thud-thud-thud under her fingers. Fang's alive but in distress.
"She alive?" Sazh sounds as if he doesn't want to know the answer.
"Yes." Lightning feels some of the tension thrumming through her abate.
Sazh sighs so hard that his breath ghosts over Lightning's face, stirs her hair. "Well, that's something at least."
Fang and Vanille are both alive. She and Sazh are both conscious if injured. It is a miracle considering half the ceiling collapsed right on top of them. She wonders if Hope and Snow might have been so lucky.
Lightning's gut clenches and she doubles over, curls tight around herself. She can't deal with this now. She has to put Snow and Hope out of her mind. There are three people here that she needs to help before she worries about those beyond her reach. She needs to focus on a solvable problem or she'll give in to her desire to curl up on the floor and wait for death. Tempting as that option may be.
"What do we do?" Sazh asks, yanking her from her thoughts. What do we do? He poses an excellent and logical question. The problem is, she has no idea. Her mind is a total blank. Every train of thought she follows ends at a dead end named SnowandHope. She just can't focus. She wipes her hand across her blind eyes, rubs at her forehead. "Soldier?"
/I've been following you since the day we met, haven't I? You haven't steered me wrong yet./
Haven't I? Guilt cripples her with its intensity. Look at this mess!
"Hey, Soldier!" Sazh's tone is sharp and loud, snapping her from her funk. "I need you to focus now. We need you to focus."
"R-right. I know." She can't concentrate. There are too many warring feelings and thoughts rattling around inside her head and heart now. No matter how hard she tries, she can't expel the nauseous worry for Snow and Hope. She pushes it aside, throws it away and it just comes flying back at her. Like Hope's Airwing. Snap out of it. You aren't helping anyone this way! She shakes her head roughly, exacerbating the obnoxious tension headache pounding in her ears and behind her eyes. She needs to focus on solvable problems, one at a time. She can't help Snow or Hope unless she helps herself. First order of business is to find a way out of here. She looks around before remembering that she can't see anything. Frustration heats her face and muddles her thoughts even further. "We need to move. This area is too unstable. The rest of the ceiling could cave in any minute now."
Obvious and unhelpful, but at least she's actively contributing rather than imploding.
"I don't know how we're going to get them out of here." From his tone, she can tell Sazh agrees with her assessment of obvious and unhelpful. He's too kind (or exhausted, or some combination of the two) to point it out. "I can't carry all three of you."
"I'm fine," Lightning parrots before she realizes the stupidity of the statement. Her left foot is basically crushed. The pain from the appendage is constant, radiating and near overwhelming; she can feel the blood pooling in her boot. There's a very good chance that her boot is all that's holding her foot together. She's seen crush injuries before and they are always horrific. Past experience has taught her that the damage to the structure of the limb or appendage causes a buildup of fluids or blood, increasing pressure that damages or destroys soft tissue and nerves. Even odds that the damaged appendage will require amputation, especially in a battlefield situation where treatment is delayed. What's sad is that amputation is her best bet right now. The complications from the injury can kill her in a slow and incredibly painful way.
She is very much NOT fine.
"I take that back," she says before Sazh can dispute her. "We need to wake them up. Do you have any supplies on you at all? Anything you carried in your pockets?"
"Huh? Um. Just an elixir. Maybe you should..." An elixir huh? She has no idea if it will help her; odds are, it will knock her out. If sleep offered even the slightest reprieve, she might be tempted. As it is, sleep is more disturbing than reality and she'd rather avoid it altogether. She won't take it. It might help the others. She gropes at her thigh for her own pouch, comes up empty.
"No. Save it for Vanille or Fang. I'll be okay." She ignores her blatant and terrible lie. "Alright. We need to see how badly they're injured before we move them. So, we need to see."
"I thought you said there might be gasses." Sazh sounds like he's second guessing himself for being foolish enough to ask for her input. She's not sure. Trying to read someone without the benefit of sight is more difficult than she'd have ever imagined.
"I did." She doesn't think so, but she doesn't trust her own senses enough to say she's sure. She's so out of whack that she might very well be on fire right now without even noticing. "There may be trapped gas in here. Then again, maybe not. I think light has to be a priority right now, but I don't want to make the call alone. So, what do you think?" She won't make this decision alone. She's in no condition to make any sort of command decision. She wishes someone would take the reins from her and let her wallow. She just can't formulate a coherent thought.
"I think...screw it. Let's just do it," Sazh declares. "We may all be dying anyway, right? A good explosion might be just the thing. It's a hell of a lot faster than suffocation, dehydration or starvation, right?"
Lightning's mouth twists into a sardonic smile. Good to know she's not the only one feeling fatalistic. "And you called me a ray of sunshine."
"Yeah, well, I guess you're rubbing off on me." She nods, forgetting for a moment that he can't see her.
"That seems to be a general theme here." Lightning pulls her weapon, tears off a piece of her cloak and wraps it around the blade in a makeshift torch. She swallows and says, "Ready?" Pauses to give Sazh a chance to take it back. "Here goes nothing." She calls up the fire spell and lights the material on her blade.
They don't explode which is, considering their atrocious luck, surprising. They do, however, get a chance to wish they had exploded. Or, at the very least, had remained in the dark. The devastation is worse than she could have imagined (and she's got a pretty vivid imagination these days). The cave is collapsed behind them toward the entrance, rocks piled around the stalactite that almost killed her, forming a jagged plug. There are rocks spattered with blood sloping away from the cave in. Lightning can see the blood from her leg speckling the surface of one indent in the rock pile and a fanning halo of blood around where she figures Sazh's head had been. She looks away from the horror scene behind her towards their only possible point of escape. It looks open, but the measly ring of firelight only illuminates the immediate area. She won't know that it's open for sure until she gets there. She glances around and spots the extinguished torch near Vanille's outstretched hand. "Grab that." She points at the torch.
Sazh obliges her, holding the torch up for her to light. She tears the cloth from her weapon and extinguishes it, checks her blade for damage. Smiles at the still pristine blade. At least something around here lives up to its promises. She touches a thumb to the blade, spends a whimsical moment admiring its craftsmanship before holstering her weapon and directing her attention to important matters.
The torch illuminates a bit more of the cave. She stares into the dark maw ahead of her searching for any sign of obstruction. There's no reflection; nothing but pitch darkness, and Lightning feels a small flicker of traitorous hope burn within that they might just escape this tomb after all. She hadn't dared to believe it. She glances back at her companions and Lightning gets her first look at Sazh. Her eyes catch on the fresh scar running from the crown of his head to his jaw, caked with congealed blood. The bruise around it is a bare shadow against his otherwise unblemished skin. "How's the head?" she asks. His hand flies up to trace the scar. He winces a bit at the tenderness.
"It's better, thanks to you."
"Don't thank me yet." Lightning mumbles as she turns her attention back to Fang. She's as white as chalk, which only makes the bruise along the side of her face more vivid. There's a splatter of blood on the cave wall near her head marking the point of impact. Lightning winces and checks her pulse again, notices it's still too fast and too weak. Getting weaker as she counts it out. There's a near black bruising across her torso, getting darker all the time. Possible internal bleeding. If that's the case, Fang is going to die if they can't figure something out. Lightning looks at the slowly rousing Vanille, decides she's useless to them for healing right now. She'll be lucky if she can heal herself. Lightning tries to muster her strength to call up a healing spell. All she gets for her effort is woozy. Lightning draws her hand away, lays her hand on Fang's arm. On her brand.
It's like an electrical charge travelling up her hand, through her arm and to her chest. It sucks the breath from her lungs, sets her whole body aflame. She pulls her hand back and checks for blisters. The skin of her palm is unblemished. She glances at Fang, notices that the bruise on her face looks lighter and greener, rather than the vivid blue-black-purples of fresh bruising.
What the...? She looks down at her arm, at the gouge she'd gotten before they'd entered Mah'Habara to find it closed. The skin looks discolored in the torchlight, dingy and gray, but the painful wound is sealed and her arm is whole again. She looks over at Sazh, his attention firmly locked on a semi-conscious Vanille. He's speaking softly to her, trying to bring her back to consciousness, patiently waiting with a potion or elixir for when she's ready. The girl is grumbling but waking. All in all she's doing okay. Lightning puts Vanille from her mind and focuses on the newly discovered bit of l'Cie magical nonsense. She looks back at Fang and wonders if she's lost the final shred of her sanity.
The strange bolts of crippling energy, like she's laid hands on a live wire, firing through her body at the slightest hint of contact with their brands. The burning intensity radiating from her own brand in return. She's not sure what it means, but she's desperate enough to test her half baked, half formed hypothesis.
"Sazh," she whispers. "Can you come here for a minute?" He looks up at her with a tilted head. Something in her eyes puts him on edge, makes him wary. She can almost see the wheels spinning in his head. "I'd like to try something."
"What's up, Soldier?" He asks. Unsure but not unwilling.
"Do you trust me?" The question seems to put him even more on edge. She half expects him to grab Vanille and run away.
"Sure I do," he declares, though she can see he's still undecided. She doesn't blame him. She's not sure she trusts herself either. "What do you need?"
"Show me your brand," she says, and he gets even more uncomfortable. He shifts a bit before obliging her, opening his collar for her perusal. She moves before he can react, places the fingers of her left hand over his brand. His eyes widen as her whole body ignites again, and she sees a quick flash of blue white fire in his eyes before she pulls her hand back. The entire contact was less than two seconds. The scar that had been on his face only minutes before is gone.
Her head spins.
"What the hell was that?" he yells, panting.
"Did I hurt you?" She blinks rapidly in an effort to focus her eyes again.
"Yes!" He shouts. "No," he reconsiders. "I don't know. But don't do that again!" He shifts, looks down at Vanille, then looks back up at Lightning. "What the hell was that anyway?"
"I don't know," she admits. "Magic?" He gives her a disbelieving look and she just shrugs. She has no idea what this development means. She's been getting progressively less shrewd as time passes. Right now she feels one step above brain dead between the exhaustion, injuries, and constant stress. Part of her secretly wishes she had just taken that last step. "But your scar is gone."
"What?" His hand flies to his face again, presses fingers along his hairline and now vanished scar. "I don't get it. You wanna clue me in."
There are few things she'd like more than to offer an explanation. All she has is a half baked, vaguely formed theory. No, not even a theory. A notion. "Wish I could. It was just a thought."
"A thought?" He parrots. "Touching my brand, lighting me up like a bonfire and somehow healing...everything, was just an idle thought?" His lip curls.
"Sort of," she mumbles. Her mind is someplace else as she stares at Fang's spreading bruise. "But I think that it might work." She's not making sense. She knows she isn't, but her brain is moving too fast for her mouth. Wheels are spinning and she thinks...
"I'm not following you, Soldier."
She heaves a sigh, tries to figure out how to say something that hasn't formed into a cohesive thought. She pulls at the threads of her tattered thoughts, tries to gather them up like scraps before giving up the task as fruitless. She doesn't have time for explanations anyway! She grunts and says, "forget it." Decided on a course despite the total lack of information, she reaches out her right hand, grabs Fang's arm and touches Sazh's chest in one move. The power passes through her like a circuit, rips across the pathways of her nerves and veins. Had she the ability to think, she would worry her blood might boil from the sheer power. It feels like days, but in seconds Fang rockets upwards shattering the connection.
Lightning doesn't even realize that she can't see until the world filters back in. She blinks as she does a quick inventory of her mind and body, hoping to determine if she's sustained any noticeable permanent damage. Everything feels intact if a bit numb. When comprehension returns she finds that she's sprawled on her back staring at a large crack in the ceiling. She traces its path back towards the pile of collapsed rock before Fang's face blocks the view. "You alright then?" Fingernails dig into her arm as the other woman drags her upright. The change of orientation gives new meaning to the term light headed. "Wanna explain what the hell you just did?"
"Don't know." She blinks until her eyes focus and catch on the yellow green shadow of a bruise along Fang's face. "But it worked."
"Yeah sure, it worked. That's just great." Lightning's not sure why Fang is so pissed until the other woman presses a cloth against her nose. Fang grabs Lightning's right hand and puts it over the cloth. "Hold that there. You're bleeding like mad. We don't know what the hell you did, or what sort of damage you might have done and all you have to say about it is 'it worked.' Drinks all around then, right?"
Lightning is too tired to deal with angry sarcasm. "You were dying." She's not sure how she knows that, but as soon as the words come out of Lightning's mouth, she knows they are absolute truth. "Bleeding inside, I think." Fang doesn't subside at this news.
"Yeah, it's not that I'm ungrateful," Fang says, pulling Lightning to her feet. "It's just that you're playing with forces you don't understand. And I thought that we agreed you'd start taking better care of yourself."
She's at a loss. Truly. Did Fang expect her to let her die? "I really didn't..." Lightning trails off. She's not going to apologize for saving Fang's life. The thought of it is preposterous, and she's once again too slow and exhausted to work up any righteous indignation at the notion. She just can't be bothered anymore. "Whatever."
It takes a few seconds of Lightning standing before she remembers her crushed foot. She looks down, past the reddening cloth in her hand to her (previously) injured foot. There's a strange shadowing on her leg above her boot and a squishing from the blood that has pooled and congealed inside her boot, but otherwise it feels normal. No pain, no tingling. Huh. That's a happy side effect.
She looks back up and Sazh, Vanille and Fang are all staring at her with wide eyes. "What?" They don't answer, just exchange uncomfortable glances with one another. "What?" She repeats.
"Nothing," Sazh says, but he looks terrified. Vanille won't meet her eyes. She is too fascinated with stuffing all salvageable provisions and items into her recovered pack. Fang looks at Vanille and Sazh and harrumphs before turning her attention back to Lightning.
Stuck with the dirty job again it seems.
"Yeah, forget about them. Let's get out of here before this cave decides to finish what it started." Fang hands Sazh the torch and grabs Lightning by her arm.
Lightning allows the subject change and almost lets herself be dragged away from the collapsed ceiling. Truth be told, she'd like nothing more than to escape from this makeshift tomb. The atmosphere is getting hotter and stuffier with each passing minute, and getting a full breath of air is becoming a chore. She takes one step, glances backwards /Snow and Hope/ and she digs her heels in. "Wait! What about Snow and Hope?"
Fang sighs and nods at her, obviously expecting the question. "I know. But we can't help them right now." She tugs on Lightning's arm again, hoping to nudge her onward. Lightning yanks her arm back from Fang so violently that blood wells from furrows left by the other woman's fingernails.
She pulls the bloody rag away from her nose. "That's unacceptable!" Blood pours over her lips, into her mouth and over her chin before streaming onto the floor. Fang grabs the rag from Lightning and presses it back against her nose, presses her against the wall of the cavern and crowds her in. A hard forearm against her collarbone and a full and intimate press of Fang's body against her own pins her immobile. The move is so sudden and unexpected that Lightning forgets to be angry at the manhandling.
"Okay, listen to me carefully," Fang whispers soft and even, right in Lightning's ear. Her tone is piteous with a hint of menace and raises goose bumps on Lightning's whole body. "I want to find the kid and the Hero too. But we. Can't. Help them. Right now. Got it?" Fang pauses to lift Lightning's hand to the cloth again. The pressure against her clavicle doesn't relent. "The ceiling collapsed." As if Lightning hadn't noticed that... "It looks like the floor did too. Odds are, Snow and Hope are no longer on the other side of that collapse. If they lived-and knowing that stubborn Hero and his complete unwillingness to disappoint you, I'm sure they did-they're somewhere below us. You can't dig through that pile of rock without dumping the rest of the ceiling down on your head. Maybe theirs too. And you're not going to do them any good staying here and getting yourself killed. You wanna find them? You come with us. Now."
Fang lets her go and steps away in one smooth move, tensing up for the hit she's sure is coming. The hit she knows she deserves for that little stunt. Lightning surprises her (and herself) by standing stock still and considers the merit of the other woman's words. Lightning lets her head fall backwards until it cracks against the stone wall behind her (ow!), doing everything in her power to force herself to accept Fang's words as truth. All of them.
Especially the part about Snow being too stubborn to die. Even if it's only to make sure he doesn't disappoint her. She'll embrace her selfishness just this once if it means they'll both still be alive.
The alternative is unthinkable.
"So you think they're below us?" She lets her hope germinate. It's all she has left.
"I think that's the only possible scenario where they are both alive, yeah." And if they aren't alive, it doesn't matter anyway. Fang doesn't say it, but it's written all over her.
"And if I go with you now, you won't get in my way." I'll kill you if you do. Don't test me. She leaves the threat as an unspoken implication.
"I'll do you one better. I'll help you find them." Lightning studies Fang for any trace of subterfuge. She decides that either Fang is one of the best liars she's ever seen, or she's telling the truth. The cynic in her believes the former. The rest of her- that loves Snow and Hope beyond all reason-has no choice but to believe the latter.
"Alright," she concedes. "We'll play it your way." She casts one more glance at the cave in /I-swear-I-promise-I'll-find-you/ before turning away. "Let's go."
Chapter 15 here...
Chapter 14
Summary: This is a story of the Evolution of the character of Lightning throughout Final Fantasy XIII. The story will begin in the Vile Peaks and go through the rest of the game. There will be AU components to this tale. No Pairing (although you can read whatever you like into it.)
-The Twilight Kingdom-
She's always been afraid of the dark and now it's all that's left to her; pain, the dark and the fear of all those nasties that lurk within it. She gropes around, moves hand over hand along the walls to get her bearings. She has no memory of the textures of this room. She's blind in a strange place. Anxiety chokes her. There is a sharp pressure building behind her eyes and between her temples; half of her wishes that her head would burst just to alleviate it and put her out of her misery. She gropes at her face. Her fingers come away sticky. She pats at her cheeks, moves up until she finds the source of the pain. The source of the blood. She traces her fingers over her eyelashes, then up over her eyelids.
Over hollow, empty eye sockets!
The pain at the contact is nothing compared to the agony of memory. She wails as it assails her. The accusations. 'Witch,' they'd called her, and tore her baby from her arms. She was deemed a 'Demon and deceiver' by the clerics. For her visions. Visions she's had for so long she can't remember what life was like before them. Visions she's had since the day the gods touched her.
Cursed her, damn them!
She sobs once and winces at the zing of pain through her ribs. Her whole body aches from the beating she'd received at the hands of her 'jailors.' They'd hit her with feet and fists until she wept and begged, dragged her before the elders who'd proclaimed her to be a 'Seer and a Witch' and had burned her eyes from her head with a fired iron.
The pain had nearly rendered her unconscious (Apparently, she hadn't even deserved that reprieve) but it's the smell that haunts her even now.
A door slams and she jumps, presses her back to the corner. She hears footsteps but sees nothing from her ruined eyes. Hands grab her at each elbow, drag her from the corner and she screams. One of her captors punches her in the jaw. She staggers and trips over the hem of her skirt, hangs in their grasp until she can get her feet beneath her again. Their grips are bruising, crushing as they haul her outside.
She feels the warmth of the midday sun beat down on her. She hears the murmur of the crowd turn to a roar. Something hits her in her temple, drips down her face. Her head and ears ring from the blow; ring with the curses and epithets the crowd hurls at her.
The two men pull her forward, this time more slowly. Giving everyone time to abuse the 'witch.' She wonders if her family is in the crowd. Wonders if they've murdered them for 'cavorting' with a witch. If they've murdered her infant son for being demon spawn. She can't bear to think of it, hopes that she'll die without ever knowing if her nightmares are real.
They reach the end of their walk and the first step hits her hard in the shin, almost sends her sprawling. Those clutching her arms don't care. If she doesn't walk, she'll be dragged. She steps up, and again. Again. She reaches the top without further injury. She wishes she could see, get one last look at her home. She turns her face skyward, wishes she could see Cocoon above. Hears the whispers again. Promises. Quid pro quo. So easy, just one little word and she'll have satisfaction if she just gives in...
She's pressed back to a post, hands bound behind her. She takes a deep breath of cool air as they light the pyre around her. She smells the burning wood, the burning linen of her dress. Remembers the horrible smell of her flesh burning. Yellow red glowing metal pressing to her eyes the last sight she'll ever see. She tenses as the heat sears her skin, licks at her legs and she yells out 'yes.' Croaks it, growls it. She feels tearing, hears popping noises from without and within. She opens her mouth for one final scream and...
...The crowd screams instead.
It takes a full minute before Lightning realizes that she's conscious again. The usually sharp boundary between nightmare and reality is virtually gone. Her whole body burns and she can't help the residual and primal fear firing through her from her ghastly dream. Her heart beats out a rapid staccato in her chest and throat. She opens her eyes, sees only black and has a horrifying moment of déjà vu for her dream. She gasps to scream, finds the weight pressing on her too great to get enough breath. The sense of suffocation ramps up her panic. She thrashes, finds that she's pinned completely immobile. The darkness only increases her disorientation and confusion. It takes a few more heartbeats for her memory to catch up to reality. When it does, Lightning wonders if she wouldn't be better off back in her dreams again.
She can't move because she has been buried alive beneath an avalanche of rock and dirt. No, not she. They have been buried. Her heartbeat and breathing accelerate. Her head spins, sparks out bright explosions of colors in the darkness. She feels consciousness slipping from her and she works to slow her breathing. She knows that hyperventilating might render her unconscious. If she loses consciousness now, there's a good chance she'll never wake up. She toys with that idea for a heartbeat, wonders if that is such a bad thing after all.
She smashes the thought, balls it up and tosses it the way of all refuse. She can't afford to indulge such depression. Not as long as there are others counting on her. Not as long as her word and honor still matter to her. (At her current rate of deterioration, she figures that concern will expire sometime tomorrow.) She shakes her head in an effort to clear it of the growing misery. Determination screwed tight, Lightning takes her time concentrating on nothing but regaining full control of her body, starting with her breathing. When she no longer feels faint, she works to free herself. She wriggles, hears rocks shift, roll and settle in the darkness. She's still pinned. "Hello?"
Something tickles and digs into her ribs, startling her. She shifts away and the pressure follows, presses into her ribs with a conscious effort. Fingers.
"Hey," she grunts and shimmies in an effort to turn. She twists her body, feels the weight ease around her arm. She works it upwards and out of the rock pile until she can move it freely. She pushes at the debris around her neck, her collarbone. She braces her hand against the rocks around her and pushes. Inch by painful, tearing inch she forces her way out of the mound of rubble until both arms are free.
She stops, panting, painted in sweat, blood and dirt. Tears of pain pour from her eyes and track down her face to land salty and traitorous on her tongue. In accordance with her strict tenets regarding all things irritating, Lightning ignores them. She feels around her until her hand brushes against something other than rock. She hears, "WARK!" and moves faster, pats at the ground until she feels flesh. "Sazh?"
"U-u-n-mm."
"Sazh?" Shimmies around slowly, afraid of collapsing the pile and crushing her buried friends. She gets her hands around his face, feels up towards his hairline. "Sazh, can you hear me?"
"S-s-oldier?"
"That's right," she encourages, a tear falls off her nose. She's happy that she can't track its path in the darkness. She lets go of him, uses her hands to push herself up until her hips are out of the rubble, twists her body and carefully digs around Sazh's head. "Stay with me now."
"Where'm...I.," he lets out a wet cough (spraying who-knows-what all over her face), "gon-na go?" He's fading. He's going to die before she can dig him out of here. She feels her heartbeat ramp up at the thought and grunts. She can't afford panic! She needs to keep herself together! She decides to put all this lovely adrenaline to good use. She places her hands on his face again (ignores the clammy iciness indicative of shock) and calls up her strongest healing spell. Her head spins and her stomach flips but Sazh moves his head in her grasp with renewed energy. When he asks her, "you alright?" his voice is stronger.
"Fine," she answers. It's a total lie and they both know it.
"Yeah," he groans. The rock pile shifts beneath her as he moves. "Sure ya are!" She
"I'm better than you anyway." She digs around him until she feels his shirt, shoves her hands under him to pull his torso from the rubble. He groans. She slows her movements, afraid of sending bone into soft tissue.
"No arguments there." She runs her hands over his ribs looking for breaks. Sazh hisses and moans. She pours even more healing magic into him. The effort costs her, makes her queasy and shaky, but she's terrified that Sazh is going to die in the dark under her hands. Die and leave her alone in this pitch black tomb. He sighs in relief at the healing, at the reprieve from the pain. "Thanks." He starts working at the rubble around him, worming and wriggling to free himself from the pile. "We gotta get the hell out of here."
"Sounds like a plan." She pulls, pushes, shimmies-tries to get her legs out of the pile. She's panting by the time she gets her right leg free and screams when she moves the left. There is a pulling-tearing-pulsating agony sweeping from her foot to her thigh. Fresh sweat breaks out on her lip and forehead. Her head gets light, starts spinning hard revolutions that drag her stomach into the mix. She shivers, suddenly freezing despite the oppressively close air of the cavern.
"Woah, hey!" Sazh catches her around her hips, stilling her struggles. "Don't move." There's a sound of more rocks shifting. "We need some light in here. This is ridiculous."
"We can't risk fire." Her voice wobbles from the incessant chattering of her teeth. Lightning breathes deep in an effort to control the pain radiating up her leg, quash the nausea. It's not working. If anything, she's at risk of hyperventilating again. "We don't know if there are gasses trapped. Or if we have any fresh air coming in at all. Fire will use up all our oxygen."
She hears Sazh shuffling, sending rocks skittering away as he moves around her. Somehow he's managed to extricate himself from the pile of rubble. She's confused by, but thrilled at, the development.
"And thank you so much for the whole new nightmare," he comments. She feels his hand graze her left hip as he shovels the rocks away from her leg. "You really are a ray of sunshine, aren't you?"
"Sorry," she gasps, swallows down whatever crept up her esophagus into the back of her throat. It burns the whole way down. She really doesn't mean to be so depressing all the time. She's been too serious for too long, taking care of her sister and herself in the wake of her parents' deaths. She's pretty sure that she has no idea how to lighten up anymore. The only one who has ever managed to make her lay down some of her burden is...
"Oh, don't apologize, soldier. I like your gloom and doom," Sazh jokes. "It keeps things real for me."
The words touch a nerve with her. /Don't apologize. That just makes it worse./ Horror washes over her like an ice cold tidal wave as memory pours in.
[Strong fingers pressed into her arm. Soft hair beneath her hands. Cracking overhead. Silt raining down, a heart stopping precursor to the main event. Two tons of rock tearing from its ancient home to crush her like a bug. A hard hit from the side, saving her from a quick and messy death.]
Her heart stutters and drops into her stomach, forcing all the current contents of her stomach out her mouth in one acidic burst. She shakes so hard she grabs onto her ribs to keep from flying apart. Snow! Hope! They had been on the other side of the cave in when it happened. The last she'd seen them, they were both standing directly under the collapse. Her mind whites out, her body goes numb and she moves without conscious effort. Sazh is yelling at her but she can't hear his words over the blood pounding in her ears and the wailing in her head. Her whole focus is on finding Snow and Hope. They can't be gone! She won't accept it. She won't allow it!
Arms close around her and drag her backwards. She's free of the rock pile but she can't break the hold on her. She bucks, screams, sobs and screams again, frustration over her impotence overwhelming her, spilling boiling tears from her clenched eyelids. She flexes every muscle in her body in an effort to escape Sazh's iron grasp. Sazh is speaking into her ear, a soft and urgent litany of 'relaxes,' and 'we'll find them, Soldiers.'
She's dizzy by the time she stops struggling. All her energy disappears and she wishes she could disappear with it. She folds into herself but Sazh holds her up. He lifts her off her injured leg and carries her down the pile and away from the plugged up tunnel. Lightning shakes from a potent cocktail of pain, misery, guilt and fury. The perfect darkness only forces her deeper into her own mind where she watches earth and rock rain down on Snow and Hope over and over again. She'd been so close to them. They were right beside her when the ceiling started caving in.
Now they are forever out of reach.
She sobs once, hard enough to re-fracture her freshly healed ribs. Sazh's fingers tighten as he trudges forward. She thinks he may have whispered something soothing but she's not sure. She stifles the next sob, pinches the bridge of her nose hard enough to hurt. She digs the fingers of her left hand into her left knee, sending sparks of agony firing through her injured leg. She needs the pain. The physical pain distracts her from her misery, gives her something else to focus on. If she thinks right now, she'll shatter into a million pieces.
A small scratching sound to their left brings them up short. They both hold their breath, unsure if they've located friend or foe in the darkness. Lightning can feel Sazh's heart pounding as his muscles tense in fear and anticipation. Her hand rests on her weapon, ready to draw and fire if necessary. A very human grunt and moan startles them from immobility. She points and says "there," before her brain can engage and advise her that they are both blind, rendering her pointing useless. She shakes her head at her own stupidity. "Put me down, Sazh. We'll have to feel our way to be sure we don't step on whoever that is."
"That's Vanille," Sazh says with a confidence born from long weeks of companionship. Vanille, she realizes, is Sazh's Hope. The time that she had spent wandering with and caring for Hope, he had spent with Vanille. She can hear the concern in his voice, feel it in the tension thrumming through him. She's not sure why the thought had never before occurred to her. Self absorption comes to mind, and she can't help but feel shamed by the thought. She's spent so much time focused on herself and her pain, that she's forgotten to consider her friends' feelings. They deserve better from her.
Sazh puts her down on the ground as she requested. He walks and she crawls, her injured leg dragging behind her like dead weight. They both move slowly, meticulously picking over the debris. Sharp stones bruise and scratch Lightning's palms and knees as she crawls. A few minutes of careful searching and Lightning finds a leg, pats her way up until she brushes Vanille's brand. Her own flares to life with an urgency that sucks the air from her lungs and nearly throws her across the corridor. She snatches her hand back and cradles it against her. Vanille groans louder and Lightning's whole body tingles and prickles in the aftermath of the contact.
"I've got her." She pretends that her voice didn't just break. Sazh is kind enough to keep silent about it, allowing her to hold fast to her fantasy of composure. She hears Sazh approach, senses him when he kneels next to Vanille. She moves up further until she finds Vanille's head. Her fingers catch in the girl's hair as she feels around her head for any signs of obvious trauma. She doesn't feel any large lumps or any tackiness indicating bleeding. She brushes grit away from the girl's skin. Vanille is lucky not to be buried under the rocks as she and Sazh had been. It seems as if she had been far enough away from the point of the collapse not to be swept under any large debris. They'd never have found her in this darkness if she'd been buried. Her thoughts drift backwards to where two friends /family/ lay buried. She bites down on her lip until she tastes blood and refocuses her attention on Vanille. Lightning shifts, stretches her throbbing leg and sits. She shimmies closer to Vanille and bumps into another body.
Fang.
"Hey, I've got Fang too." She feels until she finds the woman's throat, checks for a pulse. Feels a weak but rapid thud-thud-thud under her fingers. Fang's alive but in distress.
"She alive?" Sazh sounds as if he doesn't want to know the answer.
"Yes." Lightning feels some of the tension thrumming through her abate.
Sazh sighs so hard that his breath ghosts over Lightning's face, stirs her hair. "Well, that's something at least."
Fang and Vanille are both alive. She and Sazh are both conscious if injured. It is a miracle considering half the ceiling collapsed right on top of them. She wonders if Hope and Snow might have been so lucky.
Lightning's gut clenches and she doubles over, curls tight around herself. She can't deal with this now. She has to put Snow and Hope out of her mind. There are three people here that she needs to help before she worries about those beyond her reach. She needs to focus on a solvable problem or she'll give in to her desire to curl up on the floor and wait for death. Tempting as that option may be.
"What do we do?" Sazh asks, yanking her from her thoughts. What do we do? He poses an excellent and logical question. The problem is, she has no idea. Her mind is a total blank. Every train of thought she follows ends at a dead end named SnowandHope. She just can't focus. She wipes her hand across her blind eyes, rubs at her forehead. "Soldier?"
/I've been following you since the day we met, haven't I? You haven't steered me wrong yet./
Haven't I? Guilt cripples her with its intensity. Look at this mess!
"Hey, Soldier!" Sazh's tone is sharp and loud, snapping her from her funk. "I need you to focus now. We need you to focus."
"R-right. I know." She can't concentrate. There are too many warring feelings and thoughts rattling around inside her head and heart now. No matter how hard she tries, she can't expel the nauseous worry for Snow and Hope. She pushes it aside, throws it away and it just comes flying back at her. Like Hope's Airwing. Snap out of it. You aren't helping anyone this way! She shakes her head roughly, exacerbating the obnoxious tension headache pounding in her ears and behind her eyes. She needs to focus on solvable problems, one at a time. She can't help Snow or Hope unless she helps herself. First order of business is to find a way out of here. She looks around before remembering that she can't see anything. Frustration heats her face and muddles her thoughts even further. "We need to move. This area is too unstable. The rest of the ceiling could cave in any minute now."
Obvious and unhelpful, but at least she's actively contributing rather than imploding.
"I don't know how we're going to get them out of here." From his tone, she can tell Sazh agrees with her assessment of obvious and unhelpful. He's too kind (or exhausted, or some combination of the two) to point it out. "I can't carry all three of you."
"I'm fine," Lightning parrots before she realizes the stupidity of the statement. Her left foot is basically crushed. The pain from the appendage is constant, radiating and near overwhelming; she can feel the blood pooling in her boot. There's a very good chance that her boot is all that's holding her foot together. She's seen crush injuries before and they are always horrific. Past experience has taught her that the damage to the structure of the limb or appendage causes a buildup of fluids or blood, increasing pressure that damages or destroys soft tissue and nerves. Even odds that the damaged appendage will require amputation, especially in a battlefield situation where treatment is delayed. What's sad is that amputation is her best bet right now. The complications from the injury can kill her in a slow and incredibly painful way.
She is very much NOT fine.
"I take that back," she says before Sazh can dispute her. "We need to wake them up. Do you have any supplies on you at all? Anything you carried in your pockets?"
"Huh? Um. Just an elixir. Maybe you should..." An elixir huh? She has no idea if it will help her; odds are, it will knock her out. If sleep offered even the slightest reprieve, she might be tempted. As it is, sleep is more disturbing than reality and she'd rather avoid it altogether. She won't take it. It might help the others. She gropes at her thigh for her own pouch, comes up empty.
"No. Save it for Vanille or Fang. I'll be okay." She ignores her blatant and terrible lie. "Alright. We need to see how badly they're injured before we move them. So, we need to see."
"I thought you said there might be gasses." Sazh sounds like he's second guessing himself for being foolish enough to ask for her input. She's not sure. Trying to read someone without the benefit of sight is more difficult than she'd have ever imagined.
"I did." She doesn't think so, but she doesn't trust her own senses enough to say she's sure. She's so out of whack that she might very well be on fire right now without even noticing. "There may be trapped gas in here. Then again, maybe not. I think light has to be a priority right now, but I don't want to make the call alone. So, what do you think?" She won't make this decision alone. She's in no condition to make any sort of command decision. She wishes someone would take the reins from her and let her wallow. She just can't formulate a coherent thought.
"I think...screw it. Let's just do it," Sazh declares. "We may all be dying anyway, right? A good explosion might be just the thing. It's a hell of a lot faster than suffocation, dehydration or starvation, right?"
Lightning's mouth twists into a sardonic smile. Good to know she's not the only one feeling fatalistic. "And you called me a ray of sunshine."
"Yeah, well, I guess you're rubbing off on me." She nods, forgetting for a moment that he can't see her.
"That seems to be a general theme here." Lightning pulls her weapon, tears off a piece of her cloak and wraps it around the blade in a makeshift torch. She swallows and says, "Ready?" Pauses to give Sazh a chance to take it back. "Here goes nothing." She calls up the fire spell and lights the material on her blade.
They don't explode which is, considering their atrocious luck, surprising. They do, however, get a chance to wish they had exploded. Or, at the very least, had remained in the dark. The devastation is worse than she could have imagined (and she's got a pretty vivid imagination these days). The cave is collapsed behind them toward the entrance, rocks piled around the stalactite that almost killed her, forming a jagged plug. There are rocks spattered with blood sloping away from the cave in. Lightning can see the blood from her leg speckling the surface of one indent in the rock pile and a fanning halo of blood around where she figures Sazh's head had been. She looks away from the horror scene behind her towards their only possible point of escape. It looks open, but the measly ring of firelight only illuminates the immediate area. She won't know that it's open for sure until she gets there. She glances around and spots the extinguished torch near Vanille's outstretched hand. "Grab that." She points at the torch.
Sazh obliges her, holding the torch up for her to light. She tears the cloth from her weapon and extinguishes it, checks her blade for damage. Smiles at the still pristine blade. At least something around here lives up to its promises. She touches a thumb to the blade, spends a whimsical moment admiring its craftsmanship before holstering her weapon and directing her attention to important matters.
The torch illuminates a bit more of the cave. She stares into the dark maw ahead of her searching for any sign of obstruction. There's no reflection; nothing but pitch darkness, and Lightning feels a small flicker of traitorous hope burn within that they might just escape this tomb after all. She hadn't dared to believe it. She glances back at her companions and Lightning gets her first look at Sazh. Her eyes catch on the fresh scar running from the crown of his head to his jaw, caked with congealed blood. The bruise around it is a bare shadow against his otherwise unblemished skin. "How's the head?" she asks. His hand flies up to trace the scar. He winces a bit at the tenderness.
"It's better, thanks to you."
"Don't thank me yet." Lightning mumbles as she turns her attention back to Fang. She's as white as chalk, which only makes the bruise along the side of her face more vivid. There's a splatter of blood on the cave wall near her head marking the point of impact. Lightning winces and checks her pulse again, notices it's still too fast and too weak. Getting weaker as she counts it out. There's a near black bruising across her torso, getting darker all the time. Possible internal bleeding. If that's the case, Fang is going to die if they can't figure something out. Lightning looks at the slowly rousing Vanille, decides she's useless to them for healing right now. She'll be lucky if she can heal herself. Lightning tries to muster her strength to call up a healing spell. All she gets for her effort is woozy. Lightning draws her hand away, lays her hand on Fang's arm. On her brand.
It's like an electrical charge travelling up her hand, through her arm and to her chest. It sucks the breath from her lungs, sets her whole body aflame. She pulls her hand back and checks for blisters. The skin of her palm is unblemished. She glances at Fang, notices that the bruise on her face looks lighter and greener, rather than the vivid blue-black-purples of fresh bruising.
What the...? She looks down at her arm, at the gouge she'd gotten before they'd entered Mah'Habara to find it closed. The skin looks discolored in the torchlight, dingy and gray, but the painful wound is sealed and her arm is whole again. She looks over at Sazh, his attention firmly locked on a semi-conscious Vanille. He's speaking softly to her, trying to bring her back to consciousness, patiently waiting with a potion or elixir for when she's ready. The girl is grumbling but waking. All in all she's doing okay. Lightning puts Vanille from her mind and focuses on the newly discovered bit of l'Cie magical nonsense. She looks back at Fang and wonders if she's lost the final shred of her sanity.
The strange bolts of crippling energy, like she's laid hands on a live wire, firing through her body at the slightest hint of contact with their brands. The burning intensity radiating from her own brand in return. She's not sure what it means, but she's desperate enough to test her half baked, half formed hypothesis.
"Sazh," she whispers. "Can you come here for a minute?" He looks up at her with a tilted head. Something in her eyes puts him on edge, makes him wary. She can almost see the wheels spinning in his head. "I'd like to try something."
"What's up, Soldier?" He asks. Unsure but not unwilling.
"Do you trust me?" The question seems to put him even more on edge. She half expects him to grab Vanille and run away.
"Sure I do," he declares, though she can see he's still undecided. She doesn't blame him. She's not sure she trusts herself either. "What do you need?"
"Show me your brand," she says, and he gets even more uncomfortable. He shifts a bit before obliging her, opening his collar for her perusal. She moves before he can react, places the fingers of her left hand over his brand. His eyes widen as her whole body ignites again, and she sees a quick flash of blue white fire in his eyes before she pulls her hand back. The entire contact was less than two seconds. The scar that had been on his face only minutes before is gone.
Her head spins.
"What the hell was that?" he yells, panting.
"Did I hurt you?" She blinks rapidly in an effort to focus her eyes again.
"Yes!" He shouts. "No," he reconsiders. "I don't know. But don't do that again!" He shifts, looks down at Vanille, then looks back up at Lightning. "What the hell was that anyway?"
"I don't know," she admits. "Magic?" He gives her a disbelieving look and she just shrugs. She has no idea what this development means. She's been getting progressively less shrewd as time passes. Right now she feels one step above brain dead between the exhaustion, injuries, and constant stress. Part of her secretly wishes she had just taken that last step. "But your scar is gone."
"What?" His hand flies to his face again, presses fingers along his hairline and now vanished scar. "I don't get it. You wanna clue me in."
There are few things she'd like more than to offer an explanation. All she has is a half baked, vaguely formed theory. No, not even a theory. A notion. "Wish I could. It was just a thought."
"A thought?" He parrots. "Touching my brand, lighting me up like a bonfire and somehow healing...everything, was just an idle thought?" His lip curls.
"Sort of," she mumbles. Her mind is someplace else as she stares at Fang's spreading bruise. "But I think that it might work." She's not making sense. She knows she isn't, but her brain is moving too fast for her mouth. Wheels are spinning and she thinks...
"I'm not following you, Soldier."
She heaves a sigh, tries to figure out how to say something that hasn't formed into a cohesive thought. She pulls at the threads of her tattered thoughts, tries to gather them up like scraps before giving up the task as fruitless. She doesn't have time for explanations anyway! She grunts and says, "forget it." Decided on a course despite the total lack of information, she reaches out her right hand, grabs Fang's arm and touches Sazh's chest in one move. The power passes through her like a circuit, rips across the pathways of her nerves and veins. Had she the ability to think, she would worry her blood might boil from the sheer power. It feels like days, but in seconds Fang rockets upwards shattering the connection.
Lightning doesn't even realize that she can't see until the world filters back in. She blinks as she does a quick inventory of her mind and body, hoping to determine if she's sustained any noticeable permanent damage. Everything feels intact if a bit numb. When comprehension returns she finds that she's sprawled on her back staring at a large crack in the ceiling. She traces its path back towards the pile of collapsed rock before Fang's face blocks the view. "You alright then?" Fingernails dig into her arm as the other woman drags her upright. The change of orientation gives new meaning to the term light headed. "Wanna explain what the hell you just did?"
"Don't know." She blinks until her eyes focus and catch on the yellow green shadow of a bruise along Fang's face. "But it worked."
"Yeah sure, it worked. That's just great." Lightning's not sure why Fang is so pissed until the other woman presses a cloth against her nose. Fang grabs Lightning's right hand and puts it over the cloth. "Hold that there. You're bleeding like mad. We don't know what the hell you did, or what sort of damage you might have done and all you have to say about it is 'it worked.' Drinks all around then, right?"
Lightning is too tired to deal with angry sarcasm. "You were dying." She's not sure how she knows that, but as soon as the words come out of Lightning's mouth, she knows they are absolute truth. "Bleeding inside, I think." Fang doesn't subside at this news.
"Yeah, it's not that I'm ungrateful," Fang says, pulling Lightning to her feet. "It's just that you're playing with forces you don't understand. And I thought that we agreed you'd start taking better care of yourself."
She's at a loss. Truly. Did Fang expect her to let her die? "I really didn't..." Lightning trails off. She's not going to apologize for saving Fang's life. The thought of it is preposterous, and she's once again too slow and exhausted to work up any righteous indignation at the notion. She just can't be bothered anymore. "Whatever."
It takes a few seconds of Lightning standing before she remembers her crushed foot. She looks down, past the reddening cloth in her hand to her (previously) injured foot. There's a strange shadowing on her leg above her boot and a squishing from the blood that has pooled and congealed inside her boot, but otherwise it feels normal. No pain, no tingling. Huh. That's a happy side effect.
She looks back up and Sazh, Vanille and Fang are all staring at her with wide eyes. "What?" They don't answer, just exchange uncomfortable glances with one another. "What?" She repeats.
"Nothing," Sazh says, but he looks terrified. Vanille won't meet her eyes. She is too fascinated with stuffing all salvageable provisions and items into her recovered pack. Fang looks at Vanille and Sazh and harrumphs before turning her attention back to Lightning.
Stuck with the dirty job again it seems.
"Yeah, forget about them. Let's get out of here before this cave decides to finish what it started." Fang hands Sazh the torch and grabs Lightning by her arm.
Lightning allows the subject change and almost lets herself be dragged away from the collapsed ceiling. Truth be told, she'd like nothing more than to escape from this makeshift tomb. The atmosphere is getting hotter and stuffier with each passing minute, and getting a full breath of air is becoming a chore. She takes one step, glances backwards /Snow and Hope/ and she digs her heels in. "Wait! What about Snow and Hope?"
Fang sighs and nods at her, obviously expecting the question. "I know. But we can't help them right now." She tugs on Lightning's arm again, hoping to nudge her onward. Lightning yanks her arm back from Fang so violently that blood wells from furrows left by the other woman's fingernails.
She pulls the bloody rag away from her nose. "That's unacceptable!" Blood pours over her lips, into her mouth and over her chin before streaming onto the floor. Fang grabs the rag from Lightning and presses it back against her nose, presses her against the wall of the cavern and crowds her in. A hard forearm against her collarbone and a full and intimate press of Fang's body against her own pins her immobile. The move is so sudden and unexpected that Lightning forgets to be angry at the manhandling.
"Okay, listen to me carefully," Fang whispers soft and even, right in Lightning's ear. Her tone is piteous with a hint of menace and raises goose bumps on Lightning's whole body. "I want to find the kid and the Hero too. But we. Can't. Help them. Right now. Got it?" Fang pauses to lift Lightning's hand to the cloth again. The pressure against her clavicle doesn't relent. "The ceiling collapsed." As if Lightning hadn't noticed that... "It looks like the floor did too. Odds are, Snow and Hope are no longer on the other side of that collapse. If they lived-and knowing that stubborn Hero and his complete unwillingness to disappoint you, I'm sure they did-they're somewhere below us. You can't dig through that pile of rock without dumping the rest of the ceiling down on your head. Maybe theirs too. And you're not going to do them any good staying here and getting yourself killed. You wanna find them? You come with us. Now."
Fang lets her go and steps away in one smooth move, tensing up for the hit she's sure is coming. The hit she knows she deserves for that little stunt. Lightning surprises her (and herself) by standing stock still and considers the merit of the other woman's words. Lightning lets her head fall backwards until it cracks against the stone wall behind her (ow!), doing everything in her power to force herself to accept Fang's words as truth. All of them.
Especially the part about Snow being too stubborn to die. Even if it's only to make sure he doesn't disappoint her. She'll embrace her selfishness just this once if it means they'll both still be alive.
The alternative is unthinkable.
"So you think they're below us?" She lets her hope germinate. It's all she has left.
"I think that's the only possible scenario where they are both alive, yeah." And if they aren't alive, it doesn't matter anyway. Fang doesn't say it, but it's written all over her.
"And if I go with you now, you won't get in my way." I'll kill you if you do. Don't test me. She leaves the threat as an unspoken implication.
"I'll do you one better. I'll help you find them." Lightning studies Fang for any trace of subterfuge. She decides that either Fang is one of the best liars she's ever seen, or she's telling the truth. The cynic in her believes the former. The rest of her- that loves Snow and Hope beyond all reason-has no choice but to believe the latter.
"Alright," she concedes. "We'll play it your way." She casts one more glance at the cave in /I-swear-I-promise-I'll-find-you/ before turning away. "Let's go."
Chapter 15 here...