Author's Note: This will be my first chaptered fanfiction in a very long time. Cross your fingers for me! The hope is to update it at least once every two weeks (more often, if I have the time), and the final output will be around 23 chapters long. Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and read on!
Disclaimer: FFIX belongs to Square and I'm not getting any money out of this.
One Moment at a Time
Introductory Moment: Hints of Change
The Flaming Amarant did not easily make friends.
He didn't see this as an inconvenience, as the Flaming Amarant wasn't out to make any. He had little to do with "Friendship" in the twenty-six years he'd been handed so far on Gaia-an even trade off, as "Friendship" had done very little for him in that same amount of time. Considering the quality of his "so far" life, the concept had quickly and unsurprisingly lost what shimmer most normal
(fools)
-people powdered it with before it even really had time to glint at him.
He'd given up its pursuit in exchange for survival early as an orphaned kid scraping by in Treno's poor district, where experiences in back alley shit holes taught him too much and jaded him too fast. The "stick together" attitude among the in-the-muck classes did well and good for people with families that they could latch onto, bonus points if they were born full-human (full-anything, really) and so had a larger group they could all pull together with. Amarant, however, having the luxury of neither, had found the "importance of friendship" speech becoming a load of steaming Dragon shit with the passing of myriad days spent dodging racial epithets and ham fisted blows, or sleeping crouched in garbage-strewn alleyways.
He hadn't had time for friends then. More than just being a "subber," (which was a charming nickname that too many drunk bastards had given him over the years, usually in yells that echoed, slurring, through coffin-narrow streets) you didn't make many friends stealing, fighting, and pick pocketing. Which was what you had to do, bare minimum, to survive those days.
He wasn't bitter for it. Just better, he'd say. Stronger.
It hadn't changed much when he became a teenager. He'd exchanged it for religion in his lost adolescence, a brief stint of discipline mixed with mental and emotional solitude that he'd entered aged thirteen and left at eighteen, due to a number of reasons, though more or less boiling down to an incurable case of hot blood and impatience. He had too much of the Treno street in him for any mountain monastery to scrub out, which was alright with him anyway. Five years study was enough to make him a comparable fighter, and that was all he needed. He didn't regret anything when he climbed down that mountain, back to the shitty civilization he'd come from-he hadn't made any friends with the monks either.
And now, as an adult, with his moment of self-rumination and the daily teeth-and-claws fight for basic survival more or less behind him, Amarant Coral exchanged friendship for nothing more simple than the sake of just not being bothered. Keeping it at a distance had given the man enough time to examine the concept from a detached perspective (fucking scientific, almost), and by the time that he had space for it in his life, he'd decided that he could do without the nuisance. He couldn't think of any point in his life where the bluebird of friendship could have swooped in and made things better without making things worse in bigger ways.
He had survived without it.
So fuck it.
He had strength and speed and a Gods-damned reputation, and he didn't need friendship.
He decided that this decision was permanent.
He kept this personal promise well enough. The few times Amarant Coral found himself conversing with people, one could bet it had nothing to do with the pleasure of their company (and very seldom did he use the word "pleasure" or "company" in the same sentence, not when money did not exchange hands prior to or following the proceedings-no, Amarant didn't seek pleasure most days, and if he did, he learned he could find it in better places than in the company of others). It was all business. What small amount of sociability Amarant could plea guilty to (though sociability would never be the right word) came through necessity or convenience, unavoidable moments in his chosen field of bounty hunting. Ignore "Friend." He could barely deign to call these people acquaintances. The closest-but still not quite appropriate-word he could be arsed conjure for them was "accomplices."
Most days Amarant called these people neither of those things.
He separated people out into blunt categories, composing the world of "people who paid him," "people who he had to fight," "people who he had to kill," "people with information," and "the unimportant dregs." Accomplices and enemies, that was the population of his world, and then there was all the rest: a whole goddamn society that he didn't give a shit about. Most of Gaia, existing in a place outside the Flaming Amarant's purposefully narrow universe (a place formed of things apart from shadows and wanted signs, or fistfights and inconspicuous meetings told in whispers behind closed doors and in the corners of dingy bars), could fit into that vast category.
He supposed that the first sign that something had started, that the workings of that universe had begun shifting and wobbling at its edges, was when he somehow volunteered to help save the world. A world he refused to give credence to. Standing now, leaning on a guard rail overlooking a long drop down into shadows and platforms on the airship Invincible, with the Burmecian
(bint)
-dragoon Freya Crescent talking serious strategy with him (and, horror of horrors, discovering he was actually listening, actually occasionally answering back), he knew something had definitely happened that he hadn't planned back when he had joined this crazy expedition.
True, he came reluctantly, under motives that didn't run anything close to parallel beside the plans of Zidane and his fool's minstrel. His joining the group at first didn't seem to signify any real change-he'd followed along for his own reasons, call them selfish, he didn't give a shit. He could admit now (though only to himself) that it had been pride that had fueled this decision, mixed heartily with morbid curiosity, and the effects of his hot blood hoping in desperate indignation for a rematch. Because he had to understand what had gone wrong. Because he couldn't bear having his understanding of the world (that personal universe whose workings Amarant Coral knew-or thought he knew-with some cynical surety) done over by a git with a tail who didn't seem to understand the simplest aspects of it. Going in, he could hardly bear the lot of them (barely able to tolerate Zidane himself), and looking back at it, if he had wanted to stay the same old Amarant Coral, he should have jumped ship before it had set sail. He could have taken the defeat in stride, or just forgotten it completely
(except he couldn't, he knew; he couldn't forget losing to Zidane in Madain Sari any more than he could forget it the first time the Monkey boy had conned him in Treno, made him a wanted man)
-and moved on to other bounties. Ignore the mild tremor that had occurred-shook him, wobbled the edges of his universe-and regroup and go back to believing that the world was all under-the-table jobs and bar fights. Because if there was something that hanging around Zidane did, it was shake at your world vision, force you to realize how little you knew even when you didn't want to know. Even if you had a perfectly good reality already.
A little while after he had joined, after the embarrassing business of the fire shrine that ended up giving her the impression that they were on speaking terms (and in her defense, Amarant didn't do enough to convince her otherwise) Freya had told him that Zidane had changed her too, somehow. That Amarant was not alone when it came to these particular effects. Zidane had reached over and shook her hard, metaphorically speaking, and she had changed. Amarant could see it in the others too: Vivi, the brat, the princess, all of them, even if they didn't talk to him about it like Freya did, Amarant could see it.
Zidane was an earthquake. Following him was hugging the epicenter like an idiot, waiting for the partitions to fall and things to cave in at any damn moment.
He should've jumped ship.
Because now, conversing with Freya (done with fight strategy for now, the conversation, in a quest for more light-hearted fare, making an exhaustedly bad segue to the Genomes and the Black Mages) flying low altitude in a stolen airship above a mist-choked continent on the brink of an Apocalypse and heading, presumably, towards Death, Amarant reckoned it was too late to plunge off.
He hadn't wanted change, or to learn anything about how flawed his view on the world was. He didn't want to have any perception-shattering moments of clarity-he had tried for that in his adolescence deep in a mountain monastary and come up with jack shit and had long since decided it was not something he wanted. Epiphanies were for children, like Fate and the boogie man, over-used relics from morality plays. There was nothing beyond the invisible stained glass that he had wanted to see, no window of truth he wanted to break past. What he wanted to know was very simple: why had he lost to Zidane Tribal?
He discovered the answer to that question not so long ago, or at least it was the closest thing to an answer he felt he could ever properly get. He'd discovered it half-dead from a nasty fall after telling Zidane to fuck off, moldy castle stone gnashing against his ribs like dragon molars as he waited impatiently for the tonberries to eat him. Zidane had come with it like some kind of fucking highway man hero, swinging in on a rope and trying to drag Amarant's sorry carcass away from what should've rightfully been his grave, the one that pride had spent years digging him. He wasn't sure if he understood the answer, however. Even after Zidane spoke about what it meant to help people, what his "nature" allowed and disallowed him to do. That was another moment where something had clicked-the thing that his joining had bore omen of started moving into place. He could understand why he lost to Zidane, or he had in some way started to…as much as
(a cave stone could understand a beam of summer light)
-someone like Amarant Coral could understand someone like Zidane Tribal.
"I lost against his way of thinking," he'd grumbled to himself one day in a moment of realization that stung with the added surety that he may never really fully understand. But it was enough. He should have left then, as he had planned. But something in Ipsen's castle had done his mind over. The earth had quaked. The universe had wobbled.
He stayed and fought battles beside people he would never have before called accomplices, over things that hadn't mattered a spit gob to him. He continued to attempt to understand things that only frustrated him in the end.
But he stayed. He'd been recruited into this fool's army like a country boy conned into service by bulletin board propaganda and promises to see the world. And he stayed.
During their travels so far (though then, heading towards the Iifa Tree and the supposed "final battle," Amarant wondered how many more "travels" they'd have together-the voice in his head that asked was not hopeful or frightened, but faint and almost disinterested-an observation…scientific) Zidane had said over and over again that Amarant would never change. It was like a fucking catchphrase sometime. Freya echoed that sentiment often as well, usually following an insult. Both used it as a way of explaining off Amarant's continued antisocial tendencies, as if they'd expected him to blossom into a social butterfly like a girl exploding into her blouse at puberty.
("That guy will never change," came the quip, and when the rat in particular would say it, he'd get a pang of annoyance thinking about how a month ago he would've told the likes of her to jog on if she'd even tried to mouth a word to him that didn't lead up to "fight me." You want change, you got it.)
He wished he could say he was as hewn out of rock as they thought he was, stone-faced and unchanging like the mountain monastery of his youth, as decided and sure as he'd felt when he'd committed with finality at age 19 that he would be a bounty hunter and that friendship was for gossips and snotrags. But he wasn't sure if that was so.
The fact that he had stayed spelt enough for him, though Zidane and the others didn't seem to catch the importance of that gesture. He supposed it was because they all felt they had to be there, standing side by side, all eight abreast facing down a demon that threatened their world. They all had their reasons to fight, their "something
(someone?)
-to fight for," all noble and duty bound, and so they must have assumed from his presence that he did too.
The only one who didn't was the rat, who, like she did now, would talk to him on nights keeping watch over their group as they trekked plain looking for some sort of clue on where to go next. On one of those occasions, she had asked the question that the rest had just assumed-"Why are you here?" He'd given a vague answer, claiming nothing better to do, and he could see in the look of her eyes that she thought it was a cop out answer. And he did too. But it was much better than the truth to him, and much much better than the almost-truth of "I don't know."
He may have confided a lot in Freya Crescent ("a lot" for Amarant Coral suggesting that he did more than grunt at her most days, ignoring that time in Treno where she had somehow tricked him into telling her snatches of his past, an embarrassing moment he didn't understand and would like to forget happened), but he'd be damned if he would let her in on what was so close to soul-searching that it disgusted him (ignoring again that time in the Fire Shrine, which he didn't understand and would like to forget happened…sometimes he thinks that while Zidane was an earthquake, Freya was a punch in the jaw that sometimes knocked things loose and it was irritating).
Amarant didn't have anything to fight for. Not really. He owed the world nothing, and had expected to die early-another "reality" of that narrow universe he used to live by, before an earthquake had torn the fence down. If he had ever fought for anything beforehand, it had been for himself. He wanted to tell himself that this was the reason this time too. He fought for the right to live, for his own existence. Because the last person he wanted dictating what his life would be was a self-absorbed peacock, an entitled mad man running on vapors farted out of his own long-expired delusions of grandeur...
But the niggling voice in his head telling him that
(his universe had wobbled)
things had started to change added, quietly, that maybe he was fighting for this group now too. Though he could barely tolerate most of them, though he doubted the majority of them would ever really look on The Flaming Amarant as something like a friend, though he was still an antisocial bastard who would cut you open with words or weapons, take your pick, just as soon as he'd say hello, something had changed. He wouldn't call them friends, but he couldn't be rid of them, even if he had wanted to (and he told himself he wanted to, with less and less conviction each day).
Yes, things had started to shift after joining Zidane Tribal's team, despite Amarant's best efforts. Things were happening to his world and to himself that Amarant Coral had not planned on.
Reality was changing and Amarant had a feeling he was going to change with it. He had a feeling that more of that change lurked like a beastin the horizon. A shadow in the mist, past Freya Crescent and Zidane Tribal and the rest of them, past the Invincible, past the hulking mass tangle of the Iifa tree-if there was anything to see beyond it-the change lurked there.
He could feel something in him rising to protest, but it was his own damn fault. He had stood beside the epicenter and waited too long.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Tell me what you think, and I'll see you next week, maybe.