FIC: Not Just a Ghost's Heart [FFX/X-2, Jecht/Auron, Tidus/Yuna] (Prologue)
Title: Not Just a Ghost's Heart (Prologue)
Author: Regann
Pairings: Jecht/Auron, Tidus/Yuna
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything; I just play with them.
Notes: This is probably the most self-indulgent thing I have ever penned. This is set after FFX-2's "Last Mission" release, so it contains spoilers for it and the good/perfect endings of FFX-2.
Summary: Three months after his resurrection by the fayth, Tidus is happy on Besaid with Yuna. But it seems like the fayth aren't quite finished showing their gratitude -- and it seems like Spira might not be ready to deal with the consequences. Jecht/Auron, Tidus/Yuna. (aka: RESURRECTION FIC, KIDS!)
Not Just a Ghost's Heart (Prologue)
Jecht.
Jecht?
He wasn't sure where the voice was coming from but it was insistent, a steady litany more in his mind than even his ear, one that refused to let him stay lost in the blessed twilight of half-consciousness he had settled into.
"What?" he growled, or thought he growled, although he wasn't sure if he'd only thought it. Everything seemed to echo, as if spoken in a huge, empty cavern but there was a lack of weight to everything that made him think that perhaps none of it was real.
Open your eyes, the voice commanded and he obeyed. He hadn't even realized they'd been closed until he'd blinked them open, only to see that he was in some kind of cavernous chamber, made of stone and sigils and smoke. The walls were covered with carvings that made no sense to him and he could make out statues in the dim light. But even as it made no sense to him, it was also familiar and the dissonance of those two thoughts made him frown as he looked around for the source of the voice.
“Who’re you?” he asked out loud, a little surprised by the rough, slurred sound of his own voice. It bounced off the empty walls, but it was a different echo than before.
“Jecht.”
He turned at the noise, again different from before. There were suddenly three women behind him, dressed in bright clothing, women he was sure hadn’t been there a moment before. They stood together in a loose triad, and it was the one who stood slightly closer to him that spoke. “Do you not know us?”
He looked at them hard, searching their faces for something similar. He shook his head. “Should I?”
The speaker sighed. “We are not surprised but we hoped otherwise,” she said. “We are kin, after all.”
“Yeah?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “How do you figure that?”
“You were once our dream,” she explained. “And then you were our brother in the dreaming. Then, you were one of those that helped free us from our tireless service.”
None of what she said meant sense to him but, like the room, they struck a chord inside him, something that told him it should. He settled on waving an arm at their surroundings. “So this isn’t a prison?”
She shook her head. “No, this was once our home,” she told him. “We could think of no better place to return you to.”
“Thanks?” he asked. He wasn’t even sure where they had returned him from, let alone where they had returned him to. “I guess.”
“We owed you nothing less than this,” another woman, silent thus far, spoke up, stepping to stand beside the first speaker. “Both for you and for ourselves. We tired of the dreaming, but we’ve found that we missed our dreams. We offered rewards in our gratitude and forgot those who had suffered most. But now, we have tried again, to re-pay debts that cannot be repaid.”
He wasn’t sure what they had done for him or why they thought they owed him, but he was reticent to ask. Something inside him made him bite his tongue against his uncertainty, some deep fear that ordered him to hide any weakness, to put up a brave front in his face of his confusion. So instead of asking all the questions that drummed in his mind, he crossed his arms and nodded. “Sounds good enough to me.”
At that, the first speaker smiled a little. “It was not as simple as we had thought it would be,” she said. “Not as easy as it had been the last time. There was darkness twined with the light of you, scars left from your ordeals. But we did what we could. We are glad to have succeeded.”
They watched him expectedly, as if waiting for some answer. He looked down at his gauntleted arm. “Thanks again?”
One of them laughed, but he couldn’t be sure which one. But it was the third one that spoke this time. “We promised a new sea to those of you that helped us,” she said. “This is not a new sea or a new sky. Or perhaps it is, to you. Regardless, it is a new chance. For everyone.”
The first speaker nodded. “Welcome, once again, to Spira,” she said. She glanced at the women on each side of her and they seemed to communicate with their eyes before they all nodded, as if in agreement. “Fare well, Jecht.”
“Wait,” he started to say but it was too late. For a split second, the women transformed before his very eyes into strange, fantastic creatures - one a plump woman dressed as a ladybug, one tall and slender like a mantis, the last slight and yellow like a bee. He stood frozen, gaping at the spectacle, even more mystified as they disappeared completely in a flash, nothing but trails of floating lights left in their wake.
As the lights from their departure faded away, he looked down at his hands, shadowy in the dim light. He saw the gauntlet, the sun-darkened skin lined with the scars, and the blunt, calloused fingers of his naked hand. Just as much as everything he had encountered since the voice had pulled him out of the dark, the sight that met him was alien, surprising and unfamiliar. He reached one hand up to touch his face - rough, grizzled - and then his hair, which was long and coarse.
He didn’t know what had happened or where he was; he didn’t know why the women had left him there or their reasons for doing so. He hadn’t known who they were or knew how they were all connected. He also had no idea what he was going to do next.
But most frightening of all was that he had absolutely no idea who he was. And he wasn’t even sure where to start to figure it out.
All he knew about himself was the name they’d kept calling him.
Jecht.
**
When Tidus started awake, heart pounding, it took him a few minutes to gather his wits and recognize his surroundings. The room was dark and quiet, the only sound that of his harsh, stuttering breaths and he could sense that he was completely alone, which an instinct told him was part of the reason he was uneasy. For some reason, it was wrong to be alone.
After several minutes of deep breathing and forcing his heart to slow, Tidus began to absorb the details around him as the dream…nightmare…whatever that had woke him up started to fade. He was lying in a comfortable, if narrow, bed under a light sheet, and above him was the rounded slope of the roof that was typical of Besaid architecture. Finally, he felt himself relax as he slotted himself into the proper place and time: he was in his bed, in Besaid, in the small home he shared with Yuna, where they had spent almost every night together since he’d returned three months earlier.
And that was the person that was missing - Yuna. She was gone off on some adventure with Rikku and Paine, something to do with some mysterious note. She had commed in before they’d left Luca to explain it.
Tidus threw off the sheet and gave up any chance of trying to get back to sleep. Instead, he sat up and pulled himself off the bed, then rummaged around in the dark for his shoes. He slipped them on and ducked out of the hut and into the quiet night.
The path he walked was lit by the stars that swirled above him although his eyes detected the faint hint of sunrise in the east, a sign that it was much closer to dawn than midnight. But the breeze off the sea was cool and it helped further soothe away the tension he still had in his muscles after his nightmare, even as he rolled his shoulders to release it. Tidus wasn’t sure what it had been about this dream in particular that had bothered him so much; he had had his share of sleepless nights since he’d be re-gifted his life by the fayth, nights when he had ruined his and Yuna’s slumber with his thrashing and sleep-shouts. But usually they faded from his mind almost as soon as he came to himself, barely a whisper left by the time Yuna began to make soothing noises at him. Even though the details were gone, though, this dream was haunting, refusing to fade away. It left a lingering fear, a clutch in his chest that made him anxious and sad all at once. And something about it, he realized, as he continued to follow the familiar grooved path to the coast, something about it had reminded Tidus of his father.
It had been a question that almost all of his friends had eventually asked him - what did he remember of being dead? Well, they hadn’t called it “dead” - they had used all sorts of euphemisms but the question had been the same. What did he remember of those two long years of separation, the years in which Yuna had quietly pined for him before she’d went on her grand sphere-hunting adventure to save Spira once again. Like their question, they hadn’t exactly phrased Yuna’s experience quite like that either but Tidus had read between the lines in a way he hadn’t been able to on the pilgrimage, to see the ache their friends had felt for her during his absence. Like the dream, thinking of Yuna being so sad over him made Tidus’s chest hurt.
The answer to what he remembered of his time on the Farplane wasn’t a simple one, either. He had - if not memories, then vague impressions, but he didn’t think time passed for departed souls like it did for people still alive on Spira. He often felt like he’d spent more time in the sea off Besaid’s coast coming back into existence than he had passed on the Farplane.
The memories he did have were all of those first few minutes after Sin’s defeat, as he had finally faded away. There had been great golden clouds, and a sense of peace and…his father. He remembered Jecht most clearly of it all. But that was it.
Sometimes, Tidus wondered if that was what his restless dreams were about, the memories of his time on the Farplane trying to make themselves known. Other times, in his darker moments, he wondered if it was a sign that the fayth hadn’t put him back together properly, that there was holes where things should’ve been or lines knit together that shouldn’t have been. Bringing someone back from the dead sounded like a complicated business; Tidus wouldn’t have blamed them for not being perfect at it.
Usually, though, Tidus just accepted the dreams as a small price to pay for what he’d been given. A new chance at life, a life with Yuna, a life with his friends - Wakka, Lulu and their adorable baby; Rikku, and Kimarhi. Even in the dream world of his birth, even when he’d been the most prized blitzer ever (behind Jecht’s legacy, of course), Tidus had never been as happy as he was now.
His feet, almost of their own volition, brought him to the gentle lapping waves of the Besaid coastline, a coastline where he had washed up twice now, both times making his life infinitely better. By now, the sun was more than peeking over the horizon, it was painting the sky red and gold, a few early-rising Spira gulls making their presence known by their piercing cries. Tidus breathed in deep of the sweet-salt air and settled on the beach to watch the sun rise. He wondered idly if Yuna was doing the same wherever she was. He just hoped she was having a good time.
Mostly convinced that the uncharacteristically jarring nature of his dream was just a by-product of Yuna’s absence, Tidus relaxed as he watched the sun bring light back to the world, biding his time until she returned.
**
Gippal looked out over the broken ruins that jutted out of the sea, the last remains of the archipelago that had once been one of the greatest cities in Spira - until Sin had laid it low. It was, he admitted to himself with a frown, the story of life in Spira, but he couldn’t help but find it depressing as he examined the ruins from the deck of his ship. Around him, other members of the Machine Faction were busily readying for their next excavation which would be of the waters and what was left of once had once been Baaj.
In a way, he was there because of Rikku, although he hadn’t spoken to her or any member of her sphere-hunting group since their defeat of Vegnagun. Still, the coordinates for the archipelago had been in some data he’d gotten from her during her short-lived stint working with the Machine Faction and he knew that it was approximately where Cid had found the Fahrenheit, back before Sin’s defeat. Rikku had also been full of stories of Yuna’s guardians exploring the ruins so that the summoner could commune with the fayth there during her pilgrimage. So it had been Rikku who had piqued his interest in the place and the potential it held for hidden machina. The more they explored, the more he continued to see that whenever Yevon had been, forbidden machina usually wasn’t far behind.
“Ynah'd oui funneat ypuid fiends?” a voice asked near his elbow and Gippal turned a little to see Linna at his side. It was hard to tell when she was wearing her goggles but it looked like she was also watching the way the waves buoyed around the jagged stones that peeked up above the water’s surface.
Gippal shrugged. “We’ve faced fiends before,” he answered. “Why should these be any different?”
Linna copied the gesture. “A lot of the Faction didn’t want to come here,” she said. “There are still some superstitions attached to places like this.”
“Why would we be worried now?” he asked. “Sin is gone, Yevon is mostly gone. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Linna waved an arm, her long sleeve fluttering in the salty air. “There are still fiends,” she said. “There are still ghosts that haunt their watery graves. Two years isn’t much against a thousand years.”
“There’s nothing special about Baaj,” he said. “Other than the fact that another salvage crew found an airship here and no one has been back since.”
“Ev oui cyo cu, pucc,” Linna said with another shrug, making Gippal wonder when he’d lost all his real authority over his crew. He blamed Linna’s particular disregard on her sister, Nhadala, who had long since started running over him like she did her desert crews.
“I do say so,” he said. He squinted up at the sky with his good eye. “We should probably start some preliminary surveys if we’re ever going to get started.”
Linna made a sweeping examination of the ruins that laid out before them, dots of weathered stone and crumbling foundations. “Where would you like us to start?”
“Let’s start with the south ruins and move north,” he decided after a moment.
“Will do,” she said before she began to shout out orders in Al Bhed, and Gippal could feel the ship moving under him to accommodate the command he’d given. They were turning from their westerly direction to more south-southwest.
He watched for a moment as they floated by the scattered islets, trying to discern anything that stated where might be the best place to start their searching. It was only because he was so focused that he even noticed the smudge on the edge of the horizon, on one of the islets far from their current position.
“Cdub!” he called out and the ship slowed immediately. He turned to Linna, pointing at where he could still make out a smudge of what looked like the smoke of a fire. “Do you see that?”
“Smoke?” she asked and he nodded. “A fiend?” she asked next.
Gippal sighed. “Why would a fiend have a fire?” he asked. “No, it’s something else. Maybe someone has been stranded out here. Another crew maybe?” He shuddered at the mere thought of it, being trapped on the desolate rocks that had once been Baaj. “We need to check it out.”
Linna was shouting orders again and the ship sped up, slicing through the scattered ruins when they found a passage large enough for their small craft. As they came up on the source of the smoke, Gippal saw that he’d been right and it was a fire, a small crackling affair in the middle of a flat stone that might’ve once been a floor or a road. Through the smoke, he saw a figure that seemed to be seated by the fire. At their current distance, all Gippal could make out was a red robe and a dark, bent head.
“Hey!” he called out as the ship was finally within the shouting distance. “You need help?”
Every inch they drew closer meant Gippal could see more details and he saw them now - the red robe, the ornate shoulder guard, the still-bent head. But at his call, the head lifted and the figure - a man, Gippal was close enough to see - rose to his feet with a swagger that made Gippal freeze.
He didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted places or all the other superstitious drivel that some Spirans and even some Al Bhed still believed in, part of the legacy of an eon spent fearing Sin. But Gippal knew the man that stood before him, had heard stories about him long before he come across him in the desert two years earlier.
Gippal also knew that the man he was thinking of was very, very dead.
The ship came to a stop within spitting distance of the ruin on which the man stood and Gippal saw that he wasn’t wrong. This was who he thought he was, even though it made no sense, even though he looked different, less gray and less grave and less…old. There wasn’t a less delicate way to put it. The man before him was the legendary guardian he knew but he looked years younger.
Finally, he choked words out from around the disbelief that clogged his throat. “Auron?”
“Hmm.” It was a sound, impatient and put-upon, the sound Gippal would expect from the man who had told him that only a jackass could change the world. “I wondered how long it’d take for someone to show up.”
Gippal did the only thing that made sense in the moment -
He laughed.
If there was an edge of hysteria to it, he could always deny it later.
**
(End of Prologue)
Notes: I have said for months I was going to do this and now...I am. XD
This entry was originally posted at http://regann.dreamwidth.org/455133.html. Comment on either post.
Author: Regann
Pairings: Jecht/Auron, Tidus/Yuna
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything; I just play with them.
Notes: This is probably the most self-indulgent thing I have ever penned. This is set after FFX-2's "Last Mission" release, so it contains spoilers for it and the good/perfect endings of FFX-2.
Summary: Three months after his resurrection by the fayth, Tidus is happy on Besaid with Yuna. But it seems like the fayth aren't quite finished showing their gratitude -- and it seems like Spira might not be ready to deal with the consequences. Jecht/Auron, Tidus/Yuna. (aka: RESURRECTION FIC, KIDS!)
Not Just a Ghost's Heart (Prologue)
Jecht.
Jecht?
He wasn't sure where the voice was coming from but it was insistent, a steady litany more in his mind than even his ear, one that refused to let him stay lost in the blessed twilight of half-consciousness he had settled into.
"What?" he growled, or thought he growled, although he wasn't sure if he'd only thought it. Everything seemed to echo, as if spoken in a huge, empty cavern but there was a lack of weight to everything that made him think that perhaps none of it was real.
Open your eyes, the voice commanded and he obeyed. He hadn't even realized they'd been closed until he'd blinked them open, only to see that he was in some kind of cavernous chamber, made of stone and sigils and smoke. The walls were covered with carvings that made no sense to him and he could make out statues in the dim light. But even as it made no sense to him, it was also familiar and the dissonance of those two thoughts made him frown as he looked around for the source of the voice.
“Who’re you?” he asked out loud, a little surprised by the rough, slurred sound of his own voice. It bounced off the empty walls, but it was a different echo than before.
“Jecht.”
He turned at the noise, again different from before. There were suddenly three women behind him, dressed in bright clothing, women he was sure hadn’t been there a moment before. They stood together in a loose triad, and it was the one who stood slightly closer to him that spoke. “Do you not know us?”
He looked at them hard, searching their faces for something similar. He shook his head. “Should I?”
The speaker sighed. “We are not surprised but we hoped otherwise,” she said. “We are kin, after all.”
“Yeah?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “How do you figure that?”
“You were once our dream,” she explained. “And then you were our brother in the dreaming. Then, you were one of those that helped free us from our tireless service.”
None of what she said meant sense to him but, like the room, they struck a chord inside him, something that told him it should. He settled on waving an arm at their surroundings. “So this isn’t a prison?”
She shook her head. “No, this was once our home,” she told him. “We could think of no better place to return you to.”
“Thanks?” he asked. He wasn’t even sure where they had returned him from, let alone where they had returned him to. “I guess.”
“We owed you nothing less than this,” another woman, silent thus far, spoke up, stepping to stand beside the first speaker. “Both for you and for ourselves. We tired of the dreaming, but we’ve found that we missed our dreams. We offered rewards in our gratitude and forgot those who had suffered most. But now, we have tried again, to re-pay debts that cannot be repaid.”
He wasn’t sure what they had done for him or why they thought they owed him, but he was reticent to ask. Something inside him made him bite his tongue against his uncertainty, some deep fear that ordered him to hide any weakness, to put up a brave front in his face of his confusion. So instead of asking all the questions that drummed in his mind, he crossed his arms and nodded. “Sounds good enough to me.”
At that, the first speaker smiled a little. “It was not as simple as we had thought it would be,” she said. “Not as easy as it had been the last time. There was darkness twined with the light of you, scars left from your ordeals. But we did what we could. We are glad to have succeeded.”
They watched him expectedly, as if waiting for some answer. He looked down at his gauntleted arm. “Thanks again?”
One of them laughed, but he couldn’t be sure which one. But it was the third one that spoke this time. “We promised a new sea to those of you that helped us,” she said. “This is not a new sea or a new sky. Or perhaps it is, to you. Regardless, it is a new chance. For everyone.”
The first speaker nodded. “Welcome, once again, to Spira,” she said. She glanced at the women on each side of her and they seemed to communicate with their eyes before they all nodded, as if in agreement. “Fare well, Jecht.”
“Wait,” he started to say but it was too late. For a split second, the women transformed before his very eyes into strange, fantastic creatures - one a plump woman dressed as a ladybug, one tall and slender like a mantis, the last slight and yellow like a bee. He stood frozen, gaping at the spectacle, even more mystified as they disappeared completely in a flash, nothing but trails of floating lights left in their wake.
As the lights from their departure faded away, he looked down at his hands, shadowy in the dim light. He saw the gauntlet, the sun-darkened skin lined with the scars, and the blunt, calloused fingers of his naked hand. Just as much as everything he had encountered since the voice had pulled him out of the dark, the sight that met him was alien, surprising and unfamiliar. He reached one hand up to touch his face - rough, grizzled - and then his hair, which was long and coarse.
He didn’t know what had happened or where he was; he didn’t know why the women had left him there or their reasons for doing so. He hadn’t known who they were or knew how they were all connected. He also had no idea what he was going to do next.
But most frightening of all was that he had absolutely no idea who he was. And he wasn’t even sure where to start to figure it out.
All he knew about himself was the name they’d kept calling him.
Jecht.
**
When Tidus started awake, heart pounding, it took him a few minutes to gather his wits and recognize his surroundings. The room was dark and quiet, the only sound that of his harsh, stuttering breaths and he could sense that he was completely alone, which an instinct told him was part of the reason he was uneasy. For some reason, it was wrong to be alone.
After several minutes of deep breathing and forcing his heart to slow, Tidus began to absorb the details around him as the dream…nightmare…whatever that had woke him up started to fade. He was lying in a comfortable, if narrow, bed under a light sheet, and above him was the rounded slope of the roof that was typical of Besaid architecture. Finally, he felt himself relax as he slotted himself into the proper place and time: he was in his bed, in Besaid, in the small home he shared with Yuna, where they had spent almost every night together since he’d returned three months earlier.
And that was the person that was missing - Yuna. She was gone off on some adventure with Rikku and Paine, something to do with some mysterious note. She had commed in before they’d left Luca to explain it.
Tidus threw off the sheet and gave up any chance of trying to get back to sleep. Instead, he sat up and pulled himself off the bed, then rummaged around in the dark for his shoes. He slipped them on and ducked out of the hut and into the quiet night.
The path he walked was lit by the stars that swirled above him although his eyes detected the faint hint of sunrise in the east, a sign that it was much closer to dawn than midnight. But the breeze off the sea was cool and it helped further soothe away the tension he still had in his muscles after his nightmare, even as he rolled his shoulders to release it. Tidus wasn’t sure what it had been about this dream in particular that had bothered him so much; he had had his share of sleepless nights since he’d be re-gifted his life by the fayth, nights when he had ruined his and Yuna’s slumber with his thrashing and sleep-shouts. But usually they faded from his mind almost as soon as he came to himself, barely a whisper left by the time Yuna began to make soothing noises at him. Even though the details were gone, though, this dream was haunting, refusing to fade away. It left a lingering fear, a clutch in his chest that made him anxious and sad all at once. And something about it, he realized, as he continued to follow the familiar grooved path to the coast, something about it had reminded Tidus of his father.
It had been a question that almost all of his friends had eventually asked him - what did he remember of being dead? Well, they hadn’t called it “dead” - they had used all sorts of euphemisms but the question had been the same. What did he remember of those two long years of separation, the years in which Yuna had quietly pined for him before she’d went on her grand sphere-hunting adventure to save Spira once again. Like their question, they hadn’t exactly phrased Yuna’s experience quite like that either but Tidus had read between the lines in a way he hadn’t been able to on the pilgrimage, to see the ache their friends had felt for her during his absence. Like the dream, thinking of Yuna being so sad over him made Tidus’s chest hurt.
The answer to what he remembered of his time on the Farplane wasn’t a simple one, either. He had - if not memories, then vague impressions, but he didn’t think time passed for departed souls like it did for people still alive on Spira. He often felt like he’d spent more time in the sea off Besaid’s coast coming back into existence than he had passed on the Farplane.
The memories he did have were all of those first few minutes after Sin’s defeat, as he had finally faded away. There had been great golden clouds, and a sense of peace and…his father. He remembered Jecht most clearly of it all. But that was it.
Sometimes, Tidus wondered if that was what his restless dreams were about, the memories of his time on the Farplane trying to make themselves known. Other times, in his darker moments, he wondered if it was a sign that the fayth hadn’t put him back together properly, that there was holes where things should’ve been or lines knit together that shouldn’t have been. Bringing someone back from the dead sounded like a complicated business; Tidus wouldn’t have blamed them for not being perfect at it.
Usually, though, Tidus just accepted the dreams as a small price to pay for what he’d been given. A new chance at life, a life with Yuna, a life with his friends - Wakka, Lulu and their adorable baby; Rikku, and Kimarhi. Even in the dream world of his birth, even when he’d been the most prized blitzer ever (behind Jecht’s legacy, of course), Tidus had never been as happy as he was now.
His feet, almost of their own volition, brought him to the gentle lapping waves of the Besaid coastline, a coastline where he had washed up twice now, both times making his life infinitely better. By now, the sun was more than peeking over the horizon, it was painting the sky red and gold, a few early-rising Spira gulls making their presence known by their piercing cries. Tidus breathed in deep of the sweet-salt air and settled on the beach to watch the sun rise. He wondered idly if Yuna was doing the same wherever she was. He just hoped she was having a good time.
Mostly convinced that the uncharacteristically jarring nature of his dream was just a by-product of Yuna’s absence, Tidus relaxed as he watched the sun bring light back to the world, biding his time until she returned.
**
Gippal looked out over the broken ruins that jutted out of the sea, the last remains of the archipelago that had once been one of the greatest cities in Spira - until Sin had laid it low. It was, he admitted to himself with a frown, the story of life in Spira, but he couldn’t help but find it depressing as he examined the ruins from the deck of his ship. Around him, other members of the Machine Faction were busily readying for their next excavation which would be of the waters and what was left of once had once been Baaj.
In a way, he was there because of Rikku, although he hadn’t spoken to her or any member of her sphere-hunting group since their defeat of Vegnagun. Still, the coordinates for the archipelago had been in some data he’d gotten from her during her short-lived stint working with the Machine Faction and he knew that it was approximately where Cid had found the Fahrenheit, back before Sin’s defeat. Rikku had also been full of stories of Yuna’s guardians exploring the ruins so that the summoner could commune with the fayth there during her pilgrimage. So it had been Rikku who had piqued his interest in the place and the potential it held for hidden machina. The more they explored, the more he continued to see that whenever Yevon had been, forbidden machina usually wasn’t far behind.
“Ynah'd oui funneat ypuid fiends?” a voice asked near his elbow and Gippal turned a little to see Linna at his side. It was hard to tell when she was wearing her goggles but it looked like she was also watching the way the waves buoyed around the jagged stones that peeked up above the water’s surface.
Gippal shrugged. “We’ve faced fiends before,” he answered. “Why should these be any different?”
Linna copied the gesture. “A lot of the Faction didn’t want to come here,” she said. “There are still some superstitions attached to places like this.”
“Why would we be worried now?” he asked. “Sin is gone, Yevon is mostly gone. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Linna waved an arm, her long sleeve fluttering in the salty air. “There are still fiends,” she said. “There are still ghosts that haunt their watery graves. Two years isn’t much against a thousand years.”
“There’s nothing special about Baaj,” he said. “Other than the fact that another salvage crew found an airship here and no one has been back since.”
“Ev oui cyo cu, pucc,” Linna said with another shrug, making Gippal wonder when he’d lost all his real authority over his crew. He blamed Linna’s particular disregard on her sister, Nhadala, who had long since started running over him like she did her desert crews.
“I do say so,” he said. He squinted up at the sky with his good eye. “We should probably start some preliminary surveys if we’re ever going to get started.”
Linna made a sweeping examination of the ruins that laid out before them, dots of weathered stone and crumbling foundations. “Where would you like us to start?”
“Let’s start with the south ruins and move north,” he decided after a moment.
“Will do,” she said before she began to shout out orders in Al Bhed, and Gippal could feel the ship moving under him to accommodate the command he’d given. They were turning from their westerly direction to more south-southwest.
He watched for a moment as they floated by the scattered islets, trying to discern anything that stated where might be the best place to start their searching. It was only because he was so focused that he even noticed the smudge on the edge of the horizon, on one of the islets far from their current position.
“Cdub!” he called out and the ship slowed immediately. He turned to Linna, pointing at where he could still make out a smudge of what looked like the smoke of a fire. “Do you see that?”
“Smoke?” she asked and he nodded. “A fiend?” she asked next.
Gippal sighed. “Why would a fiend have a fire?” he asked. “No, it’s something else. Maybe someone has been stranded out here. Another crew maybe?” He shuddered at the mere thought of it, being trapped on the desolate rocks that had once been Baaj. “We need to check it out.”
Linna was shouting orders again and the ship sped up, slicing through the scattered ruins when they found a passage large enough for their small craft. As they came up on the source of the smoke, Gippal saw that he’d been right and it was a fire, a small crackling affair in the middle of a flat stone that might’ve once been a floor or a road. Through the smoke, he saw a figure that seemed to be seated by the fire. At their current distance, all Gippal could make out was a red robe and a dark, bent head.
“Hey!” he called out as the ship was finally within the shouting distance. “You need help?”
Every inch they drew closer meant Gippal could see more details and he saw them now - the red robe, the ornate shoulder guard, the still-bent head. But at his call, the head lifted and the figure - a man, Gippal was close enough to see - rose to his feet with a swagger that made Gippal freeze.
He didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted places or all the other superstitious drivel that some Spirans and even some Al Bhed still believed in, part of the legacy of an eon spent fearing Sin. But Gippal knew the man that stood before him, had heard stories about him long before he come across him in the desert two years earlier.
Gippal also knew that the man he was thinking of was very, very dead.
The ship came to a stop within spitting distance of the ruin on which the man stood and Gippal saw that he wasn’t wrong. This was who he thought he was, even though it made no sense, even though he looked different, less gray and less grave and less…old. There wasn’t a less delicate way to put it. The man before him was the legendary guardian he knew but he looked years younger.
Finally, he choked words out from around the disbelief that clogged his throat. “Auron?”
“Hmm.” It was a sound, impatient and put-upon, the sound Gippal would expect from the man who had told him that only a jackass could change the world. “I wondered how long it’d take for someone to show up.”
Gippal did the only thing that made sense in the moment -
He laughed.
If there was an edge of hysteria to it, he could always deny it later.
**
(End of Prologue)
Notes: I have said for months I was going to do this and now...I am. XD
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