Shatterheart
Disclaimer: All known and recognisable characters, locations, and names property of Square Enix
His hand shakes visibly as he lifts the Mistometer to check the read out for the second time in as many minutes; he did not see the numbers the first time and will not see them now.
His vision has turned inward, his eyes are blind. He cannot see himself as the façade splinters, proof perhaps that the gods know some pity.
He is fumbling now, with fingers that do not obey, for a wrench. The Strahl bares the brunt of his agitation as he falsely prescribes faults where none exist. Oh, and now he has dropped the wrench and the clang of metal tool hitting the engine room floor makes him jump and curse, shying from the sound like a startled babe.
He is so terribly afraid; he is so very close to shattering.
He is not really here; he does not know what he does or why and she, unmoving and remote, watches his collapse from a quiet corner of the engine room.
The familiar scent of glossair oil, metal, rubber and Mist does nothing to mask the heady aroma of despair that perfumes the air. She can almost see it; pain has a colour, deep purple and bruised shadow in the air.
She takes a breath and tastes his rage; it coats her tongue and fills her throat. She can almost imagine that it swirls, like engine smoke, down the stem of her neck and pools, purple and indigo haze, in the hollow chambers of her heart.
Viera without the Wood are hollow vessels. She cannot break because she is only as substantial as the air that wails through the branches of impassive trees in a silent forest that never truly cared.
Humes, in contrast, break all too readily, and she must concede, she has waited years for the cracks in him to open wide, gaping fissures and bleeding wounds, finally open to the air. The whole cannot last when he is too full. There is too much held within; even the vest he habitually wears is not tight enough to hold in the tide.
The dam will burst and when it does she will bathe in the flood of his grief.
Viera are hollow but Fran is hungry. His pain upon her lips is a mocking temptation and she wants more. She is empty and the void echoes within. She would like to blame the angry Mist of the Pharos but this perversity is hers alone.
'Damn it all,'
He curses as his clumsy hand slips from the tool and his arm carries forward with its own momentum to slice in twain the meat of his palm; the Strahl is enacting her own revenge against her master for his distracted molestation.
Now she is moving without conscious intent, a wraith like predator in stiletto heels. He turns towards the sounds of her clicking heels, looking up with shattered eyes that see only what he weeps for.
Fran kneels upon the edged and grated metal floor before him and prises his wounded clawless hand from where he clutches it close to his chest.
Drops of crimson blood stand in sharp relief upon the rough embroidery of his vest, and blood brilliant and vital, paints his pale and listless hand.
Disingenuously cursing the Mist for driving her to such dark depths, she raises his stricken hand to her lips.
Salt and richness; an elixir that is at once cloyingly thick and overly full-bodied is also fast running as water and hot as violent death; addictive in its way. Now she can taste his pain in truth and not only in her mind.
For a moment the chaos blind upon his eyes subsides and his pupils contract in disgusted betrayal as her lips burn scarlet with his blood. He sees, she has no doubt, through her hollow centre to the craven need lurking within.
That he knows her hunger is both vindication and damnation to her; she would love him if she could but all she can give him is a hunger for his ruin. He jerks away from her without a word, turning empty eyes back to the mess he has made of his Strahl.
'There is something wrong with the quadratic equaliser, Fran. We shall have to fix it before we make for Rabanastre.'
He tells her seemingly oblivious to the fact that any trouble with that device is likely due to the fact that he has ripped it out of its lodging in the body of the Strahl; there is symmetry in that one pointless, brutal act, he tears out the heart of his beloved craft much as his father has ripped his own asunder.
Viera do not know grief, for Viera do not know what it is to love and hate as he did his father. She would weep for him if she could but instead she quivers with anticipation for the moment his own tears fall.
She wonders if he has any consciousness of his hunched shoulders and twitching hands; that he reaches for the cuffs of his sleeves with blood covered fingers seemingly unaware that he has rolled up his shirt sleeves to his elbows already.
She says nothing at all to him; for even his sporadic speech cannot truly compete with the screaming of his thoughts. Grief and rage and bitterness in swathes of purple and yellow and green permeates the air to rise from his pores and collide with the swirl of confusion and loss that hangs over his head.
It is a kaleidoscopic canopy of guilt magnificent in its complexity; truly a banner of state fit for his kingly head.
She can see the pulse jumping in his neck and reaches out one long clawed finger towards that captured beat.
Instantly he grows still in response to this unsolicited touch and the scent of a prey animal caught in the predator's snare rises from him; he has never been prey to her before, but then, he has never been quite so close to breaking as now.
She presses the point of her nail into his neck and the skin dimples.
She knows that she has strength enough to puncture that smooth, young, fine grained flesh. She could set loose a different sort of flood, one equally hot and equally exhilarating, if she wanted.
He would not stop her; his life in her hands, she holds his heart in hers…..and she wants only to shatter it.
He works on being as still as he can be, though he is not good at it and stillness is not native to his being.
He does not attempt to turn his head to look on her, and would likely end up cutting his own throat on her nail were he to try, instead he stares straight ahead and breathes in and then out.
All the while his pulse dances under her fingertip and she feels the rhythm pass through her skin and along her nerves to quicken the hollowness inside her. She is so horribly hungry. She is tired of her emptiness.
She lets her long, overly large, hand encircle his neck and feels it when his flesh heats and his heart jumps in both alarm and anticipation. She watches an unexpected blush pigment his paleness as she scratches her nails over his bobbing throat and leans in to whisper against his bejewelled ear:
'Shatter,'
And he shivers, twitching as her cool, distant words enter his mind and join the tumult within him; another drop to fill the over-burdened ocean straining at his splintered walls, 'shatter heart.'
He shudders and she inhales, breathing in the draught of his mounting emotion. The ocean presses inexorably at his crumbling defences. The wall will not hold and she kneels eager, and so terribly hungry, awaiting the deluge.
The hollowness within throbs a staccato beat within the cage of her chest and a dry fire longs to be quenched between her legs.
She blames it on the Mist that does not exist, the ghost vapours that filled her fit to bursting as the Sun Cryst burst, for what she is about to do. Viera are hollow and empty, they know neither lust nor sorrow, thus this hunger within her cannot have its origin with her.
Possessed by Mist that is not Mist, intoxicated by the rainbow of his grief, she leans in toward the pinking shell of his ear (and yes he knows, knows, what is to come) and takes the broken twist of metal adorning his earlobe into her mouth.
He has stopped breathing, breath caught in his chest, and while he could never resist her, he still holds stubbornly firm to the tattered edges of his barricades. With one hand still clasping his throat in gentle but firm command she tugs him towards her body; she wants him to shatter so that she might feel.
She flicks her tongue across the shell of his ear and swipes one hand (that which does not surround his surprisingly fragile neck like a collar) down the length of his chest; it is not a caress but instead the opening shot in a battle that she will not lose.
'Break.'
She turns his head by jerking on his neck with the hand that holds him captive and does not so much kiss him as savage his bottom lip with her teeth. She is hungry and all that fills her is Mist and her own dull and stolid thoughts.
In the face of the heatless fire of her need he is trying to gather himself; manning the barricades of his soul and trying to patch the cracks. Hot cheeked with the fierce blood and vitality that fills him to bursting and drives her need, he shakes his head.
He will not surrender this to her but instead would sooner hoard his pain within the flimsy walls of grief.
She knocks him back with her free hand on his shoulder, so that he is unbalanced and his shoulder blades hit the hull wall of the Strahl with a resounding, empty thunder. Her hand still secure at his neck she slings one long leg across his leather clad lap and pulls his face towards her.
'Break.'
She repeats against his lips, for he is no leading man here, but merely an answer to her need; a banquet for her delectation and she is half-wild with hunger already.
She chews on his lips under the guise of a kiss and she can feel his resistance weakening as she hammers against his defences with the most effective weapon at her disposal: her very self.
'No,' he does not sound like himself as he tears his mouth free and looks up at her, pinned as he against his brutalised Strahl, with hot chaotic eyes.
She sees in those dark mirrors a vision of evil; a white haired female with feral eyes and questing lips who would tear from one grieving Hume-child the very marrow from the bones of his grief. She would rob him of his mourning for a father dead in flesh less than a day and dead in spirit for far longer.
She wants it; she wants his pain, his rage, the life in his blood stream. She wants to fill her void with all that he holds within because she is hungry and so tired of the emptiness.
She is almost touched by shame, as she tastes the rising of his lust (angry and resentful though it be) because she knows that he knows that it is not him that she craves so much as what he can give her.
Shame, affection, compassion, these are all Hume in origin and Fran is of wilder more primal roots.
She wants and she needs and therefore she will take; she knows anyway that the love he bears her will not allow him to resent her too much once she is sated and she scorns his flesh once more.
'Heart, you will shatter,' she tells him almost pityingly as she places one hand against his chest and feels his quick breaths, laboured and unsteady now, straining against the restrictive confines of leather and velvet.
He surprises and delights her with a flash of his familiar arrogance. He bares his teeth sharply and it is almost a smirk, 'Not yet, my dear Viera, I'll not give you an easy victory,' and he shifts deliberately underneath her as his fingers, covered in his own blood, dig into her hips just a shade away from hurting her, 'if you want it, Fran, then be prepared to fight for it.'
Faster even than she can catch the sight of, one of his hands jumps from her hip to circle her neck, and his fingers are blunt and his hand not so long, but there is undeniable strength in that grip.
They now mirror each other, a choke hold on each, until he cups the back of her neck and jerks her forward for a kiss.
She wins the first engagement of arms when she slices callously through the strings and ties fastening the vest to his back and swallows his growl of irritation as her reward (he loathes when she ruins his clothing – and this vest had been a favourite of his).
'Shatter.'
She insists pulling the shredded remnants of his vest from him so that he only has tight patterned leather trousers and insubstantial cotton to defend himself from her.
'Heart you must shatter; you hold within too much.'
He does not answer with words, possibly he is beyond them and possibly she has snatched from him the breath he needs to speak, as she playfully scrapes her nail points down the length of his spine careful not to break the skin - at least not yet.
Later, when all fleeting defences of fabric and cloth are fallen, she is feeding from his lips and waiting for the inevitable (he is breaking, she can feel it) when he takes advantage of her complacency to knock her on her back and cover her.
His dark eyes are black pits digging into the centre of his crowded soul as he looks, almost coldly, down on her.
'Your sales pitch needs some work Fran. I can hear your need; I am not the one who is breaking here.'
She wonders briefly if he is right; is this very alien need in her not symptom of the collapse of her Viera soul? Is she not a base and needy thing without the strength of the Wood to hold her upright?
It matters not she decides split seconds later as his own burgeoning need takes proceedings to the next level. A series of small skirmishes and she allows him this victory…….her hollowness filled at last.
'Shatter, break……..heart, you must,'
She cleaves to him hooking her longer legs around his and winding her arms about his neck and shoulders as she presses up against the length of him, impaling herself upon him with a violence he would never inflict upon her but that she thinks nothing of inflicting on him.
'Break now, you cannot hold it long within,' she insists and digs her nails in and trails them down his back. He shouts out as blood meets air and the sound echoes through the engine room as she creates channels of pain within him and without.
He breaks.
He shatters and she is drenched in all he holds within; she holds tight and refuses to relinquish that hold as the torrent of every whisper of emotion, every howl of pain and every twist of regret, washes throughout her being.
Hunger sated she is filled now. Molten pleasure alien to Viera fills the hollow that is Fran and she is empty no longer now that she is filled with him.
His arms, which had been braced upon the grating floor of the engine room, lose their strength and he half collapses against her as they hit the steel floor. She strokes the sweat dampened hair fallen across his brow as he rests his head upon her chest.
Staring up at the Strahl's hull roof, quiet and satisfied, her hunger abated, Fran can still scent the first of his tears falling as, after the shattering, a son finally has the space and time to cry for a father fallen.
She holds him as he silently, oddly calmly, cries himself to near slumber, his head cradled against her breastbone.
'Mend heart,'
She breathes to him stroking a pointed nail down the curve of his disordered sideburn and he surprises her by smiling against her skin, 'In a little, but for now, this breaking is not so very bad, after all.'
Fran smiles; Humes are such strange creatures and none stranger than her partner.
He bleeds, he breaks, and he rebuilds his walls, simply so that she can shatter him again and again and again.
She is hollow and he breaks too readily, but together they are enough to withstand the flood.