fuckyeahfinalfantasy | FYFF: MISSION ONE, ACCEPT Y/N?

FYFF: MISSION ONE, ACCEPT Y/N?

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[Anon, I shipped this before I even knew what shipping was. ♥ Which is why I am wandering back to the meme months later to fill this. Hope you enjoy!]

At first he stays because he cannot leave. Even before he realized that half his left leg was gone, fever stole his thoughts and cracked bones stole his movements. Every breath hurt and reminded him that he was, despite his best intentions, alive.

He remembers standing perfectly still in preparation and practice for death as the tower shook and shattered around him. For the first time in years, his arms were open. "Come get me," he said, without challenge or mockery, to the ghosts who waited. He remembers pain, but only in the instant before the darkness welcomed him.

Here his memories feel like dreams of another man's life. He has lived three lives already; he doesn't want another.

This time the piece of the past that has followed him is Terra, whose answers are clear, simple, and infuriating: "You were missing. I came back to find you."

Apparently the only part of him that died was the part that knew how to vanish without a trace. He hates speaking now, hates the naked clarity of his voice without his mask, so he only stares at the place where his leg should be beneath the blanket.

"It was gangrenous," she says. "We couldn't save it, not without—"

"Magic," she doesn't say, but he hears it in her abrupt silence. Looking at her hands, she picks up after a beat: "I thought you could recover best here in Mobliz. We didn't know where else to bring you. We don't even know your name."

So here he is again in an isolated corner of the world, snatched from death's hands. He knows how this story ends. He'd just as soon skip to the epilogue without destroying someone who thinks he can be saved.

He wonders if Strago suggested Thamasa, but he felt the old man's shrewd eyes on his back from the moment Interceptor took to the girl. Strago must know, and know better.

"Where's Interceptor?" he asks.

"With Relm. We weren't sure you were going to make it."

This is two questions answered for one. The reactions roiling inside him refuse to coalesce into anything simple, so he lets none of them out.

When he doesn't respond, Terra raises her head again. "Edgar said he can make you an artificial leg once the wound heals. It won't be the same, but you'll be able to walk again." She laces her fingers together. "Then you can go wherever you want."

At last his silence drives her away, and he drifts back into fevers that weave his pasts into his present and melt them all together.

He stays; he heals; he waits. Time is sealing him up with scars, but he can still feel everything, even the leg that isn't there. When he begins to hobble on crutches, he stumbles every time he trusts his weight to a ghost.

When he catches his reflection in a window, he finds a stranger; he looks older than he remembers, his face thinner and his cheeks more hollow, and bruises bloom between forgotten scars. He knew every stitch and fold of his mask.

Every time he dies, he comes back different, nameless. He draws the curtains as if hiding the image will turn him back.

For so long he has run with death at his heels; when he stopped, death lost interest. Now he has fallen into a drowning slowness, a rippling reflection of his mayfly life in Thamasa.

"How are you doing?" Terra asks him every morning, and she never takes silence or shrugs for what they are. She holds a one-sided conversation as she changes his bandages and rubs medicine into the places that are slowest to heal. Her hands are still callused from her years with a sword; her palms sometimes still flatten and flex as if she means to push healing light through them.

Today he meets her eyes (the last time he did so, they were shining and golden and wild) and says, "I was trying to die."

He doesn't know what he was expecting, but it wasn't for her to finish tying the bandages around his knee and reply, "I know. I'm trying not to hold it against you."

His arm tenses under the chill of the salve she paints over a deep wound. He wraps words around the bitter taste of absurdity that won't leave his mouth: "You know what I am."

Her fingers still briefly before she removes them and wipes them clean. "I once killed fifty soldiers in three minutes."

He remembers this vaguely, from a time before he cared. "Not of your own will."

"I don't think that mattered to the soldiers." She closes her tin medical kit and smiles thinly at him. "We're not who we used to be."

Not "who," he said, but "what"; his identity may be forever in flux, but he is always a bringer of death. Every time he changes, he becomes less.

When his silence makes it clear that he is finished with the conversation, Terra leaves him to his breakfast. At the threshold she pauses and says, "I don't think you ever killed your emotions, not really."

Perhaps this is true. He has never been able to kill anything that wanted to die.

On his better days he stalks aimlessly in the shadows, Duane's clothing hanging loosely from his atrophied frame, seeking a solitude that lasts more than a few minutes. Once he sent grown men scurrying away with a cold glance; now he can't even divest himself of inquisitive children unless one of Mobliz's adults intervenes. One of the most persistent little girls is brash, flamboyant, heartbreaking.

Learning to ignore his phantom limb lets him make his way beyond the village, where he can sit in silence on the edge of the cliff and watch the churning of the sea far below. He could fall so easily. He has fallen so many times before.

You can go wherever you want, he tells himself, but he doesn't know what he wants. He doesn't want to want.

Sometimes his secluded spot has been claimed by Terra, who stares south over the water as the wind tangles her hair. He never announces himself, only hobbles back to his room to lock the door and muffle the noise of children growing up.

When he hears the baby cry, he knows he will have nightmares.

On his worst days he stays in his room, eating and reading what Terra brings him. He isn't strong enough to steal away often to the shore. He isn't strong; he's an echo trapped in a seashell, flesh bound reluctantly to dusty bones. Terra left him a journal to record his thoughts, but he has already given up trying to improve on the flat white of the paper.

"Setzer's bringing supplies tomorrow," Terra tells him after shooing away a little boy with persistent questions and little respect for closed doors. She sits beside him and offers soup. "You can leave with him on the airship if you want. I know you're not happy here."

She might have stopped before "here." With a grunt that she can interpret as thanks if she likes, he accepts the bowl and eats mechanically. He hasn't been hungry since he woke.

"Or," she says, with something fragile fluttering under her voice, "you can stay."

From outside comes a child's scream of "Mama!" Terra is up and out the door in an instant, leaving him to remember a burning house and a former life he didn't want to acknowledge. This time he has no dog to force his hand and provide an excuse.

Why should he still need excuses? He leaves his soup, picks up his crutches, and follows.

The children are crowded around the front of the house, herded by Duane. In the center of the village, Terra brandishes a sword at a growling devoahan. It digs its hooves into the dirt and lowers its horns.

This village and its children mean nothing to him, but he has never felt more useless.

When the beast charges, Terra leaps aside and catches it with her blade as it passes. It roars and shakes its head, spattering blood from the cut over its eyes. Terra plants herself between it and the village, right hand white around her sword, left hand twitching around an absence of magic.

With a low growl, the devoahan turns and runs back into the wilderness. Children flow past him to Terra's side as she sags with relief. After giving them a moment to cling, she asks sternly, "Who left food out?"

"Paolo," reply several of the assembled.

Terra fixes one of the older boys with a look of weary disappointment. "You know better."

She takes care of things. For now she takes care of him, but if he left tomorrow and never returned, she wouldn't lack for damaged things to look after. The thought is oddly reassuring.

When Terra comes back inside to hang her sword high out of the children's reach, he waits in a shadowed corner, trusting his balance to the wall. The children bustle blithely past him, unaware that someone he used to be would have dropped the devoahan in an instant with a shuriken through the eye. He wonders if they know that Terra could have ended it as easily but chose not to.

The world is a cleaner place without mercy.

"You should have killed it," he says as Terra drops back on her heels.

"I'm tired of killing things." She picks dried blood from the back of her hand, then locks eyes with him. Her voice has the edge of a challenge: "Aren't you?"

"I'm just tired." This is too stark, too honest; he traces her disappointment in the lines around her mouth. "I shouldn't be here."

"Then leave." She doesn't look at him. "There's nothing keeping you."

Her words crowd his head like struggling butterflies when he tries to sleep. The future forks inescapably before him, and he has no curtains to pull around it.

In the dark he slips outside as quietly as he can, easing his crutches over the wooden floor, and stands alone in the chill of the stars. The wind tugs at the empty leg of his trousers. This has long been his preferred way of leaving—home, partners, family, bodies. He doesn't know how to negotiate an exit.

The sea chops up the moonlight like a perpetually breaking mirror. He stands on the edge of the cliff, closes his eyes, and sees Terra disappointed again.

His bed is cold when he returns to it.