Note: All characters, places, ect. belong to Square Enix.
All The Monsters
By Zero9grl
Once she was devoured, eaten by the monster, the monster that her mommy would have said slept under her bed. She never had a mommy so she surmised this monster was part of the family. It ate her for breakfast, lunch and dinner and now that she is grown and old and so much more than twelve years of nothing she thinks she sees this monster waiting for her at the end of the world.
"Just fucking kill me now," is what she told Kuja when he invaded Bran Bal and left her behind to rot in the laboratory. She couldn't stop him, couldn't warn Garland, couldn't do anything at all because he was the First and she was the lowly Third. How she wanted to die.
It was a quick fight. She grabbed him from behind to slit his throat and he threw her over his shoulder into the wall because he'd known, instinctively from all their past "sibling" spats, that she would sneak up on him. She always got him from behind, but not this time.
He stood over her and gloated, gloated at her weakness and inevitable uselessness. No one needed a third anything. A third wheel, a third accomplice, a third redheaded child in a family of brunettes. She was the extra, had always been and they both knew it as he stood over her and gloated at her pathetic attempt to slit his damn porcelain throat that was slender and graceful and everything her thick, unimaginative throat wasn't. Because he was the first and he had gotten all the best of everything. From the bodies to the souls to the magic to the minds. He had gotten the best of everything.
The only one who stood a chance against him was the Second and he had had to work for what he had gained. As the Third she could only acquire nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. He stood over her and gloated as she staggered to her feet from the unforgiving ground of the wall.
"Do you give up Mikoto? Do you recognize me as your true master?" He asked, sneered and he was everything; he was God walking Terra again, though all the gods of Terra had died so long ago.
"I know no masters, only monsters," she spat because it was true. She had no master, no one to serve and to worship. There was no patriarch for her pathetic little family of one to be found on Terra or Gaia combined. No patriarch, no matriarch, no master to take her hand and lead the way. Only monsters, insatiable monsters that ate her one limb at time.
"As your monster of nightmares then will you succumb to me?" He'd teased and they'd both known she wouldn't, couldn't, was incapable of laying herself down before his feet as a sacrifice for his lustful hunger. "Just fucking kill me now," is what she said to him and he'd smirked, all smug and self-satisfied in the most annoying ways because he had her beat, had her at his mercy and he had no mercy. He put her under a sleep spell and left her there to die.
Jackal grins and eyes lurking in shadows are silly things that adults imagine. Only children know the real monsters, the ones that maim as easily as they love and croon while they disembowel. She used to know these things when she was among the prepubescent. Now she is more than twelve and all she sees are jackal grins and eyes lurking in shadows. She realizes adult monsters are so much scarier than children monsters. No one ever sees the adult monsters bathing in the light.
Dying is very easy thing, living is so much harder; this is what Zidane had told her when he challenged her to live and she was not so sure he was right. Breathing was easy, breathing was natural. Lying down in a ditch until something ate her was slightly harder. He did not agree.
She lay in a ditch she found and stared at the summer sky with clouds and sun that moved and flickered like the Terran sun had not done for centuries. She thought that if she lay there long enough something would eat her and she would prove her point. She lay there for an hour and nothing ate her.
When she returned that night Zidane asked her where she had been. She told him truthfully she had been out lying in a ditch waiting to die. All she'd done was breath.
"So you want to die," Amarant had said and she did not know why he had been there, why he had been lurking in the shadows like all the forest monsters. "I've killed people for a living," he told her; this was not a scary concept to her.
He threw her through the window and she was not surprised. Breathing was a very easy thing as he gazed upon her with a jackal's grin and eyes lurking in shadows that were impenetrable. She told herself he was Zidane's friend; she had forgotten all the things she knew about monsters in her childhood and her limbs were ripe for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
He came at her again and she was caught by her thick, unimaginative throat. He applied monstrous force and breathing was not so easy, but neither was dying and she didn't care, didn't care one single bit about either. "Is dying easy now?" He asked and she shook her head no because it was not.
"Amarant, let her go," Zidane called angrily and nothing made Zidane angry. The monster bathed in sunlight tossed her aside like the other monster had so long ago and she was nothing, not even a third, because there was no first and without a first there could be no second which gave no rise to a third.
She was so much nothing upon nothing and breathing was just as easy as dying and both were far too easy. There could be no point to a choice between the two when they came and went as they pleased upon the will of monsters that hid behind jackal grins and lurked in shadows.
No one would kill her, no one would remain by her side. Despite Zidane she was still a pathetic family of one and all she knew was that dying and breathing and living and bleeding were all one and the same. All the gods were dead and all the masters gone and now the monsters dressed in the shadows and the light.
She was tired of being food for monsters.
"Amarant," she called and he turned to look at her, which was a mistake as she punched him in the face. She had always been quiet silent. "If I want to die I'll die; if I want to live I'll live. If I want to bleed or breathe or laugh or cry I will without the coercion of monsters."
She had never known a master, only monsters and now she would show the monsters a master that was her master. She was her own master.