Umbra
Disclaimer: Not mine. If they were, the Renegades would have been more clearly central.
Unnumbered millennia of layered history have left a world rich in meanings, possibilities, and unspoken secrets. Even now, as she leans against a tree, watching as her younger brother and Colette plot a joke on an unsuspecting Lloyd, Raine's mind is a thousand years away. What people were standing here a century ago, and what were they doing? What did their wishes and dreams look like, and what would they think of the world today?
She wonders how many ghosts, removed from her reality only by something as nebulous as time, are standing against this very tree, observing a world that she has never known.
She shakes her head, disturbed by the metaphysical direction her thoughts are taking. Raine may be passionate about the past, but she likes to consider herself also logical in the pursuit of knowledge. Despite her love of mystery, Raine needs to believe that the world is simple, ordered, and ultimately understandable. Her perception of reality has shifted so much in the past year that it is a constant battle to keep it from being shattered entirely.
A battle currently being lost. As fascinated as she is by the past, Raine is not accustomed to seeing it stroll into the park and settle down in the shade of a tree halfway across the park from her own. She watches as he watches the children, the hint of a smile upon four thousand year old lips. She stands there entranced, staring as a sudden gust of wind assaults cerulean hair unassailed by time itself. Absorbed by the irony, it does not immediately register to her that this is not an artefact, but a real person, and one who is at best a very dangerous ally.
With a start, she glances frantically towards Genis and Colette. They are still huddled together, whispering excitedly, oblivious to the outside world. Relaxing slightly, she turns back and notes, with surprising disappointment, that her momentary visitor has vanished as quickly as he arrived. In this place if not in the world at large, his memory has again been consigned to the past, and he is a ghost once more.
For perhaps the first time in her life, Raine does not know what to make of that thought.
As she sits awake, listening to the quiet sound of her sleeping brother's breathing, the short, wordless encounter—if it can even be considered as such—replays itself in her mind. She frowns down at the notes in front of her (even were recent events not so historically important, Raine likes to keep records for posterity), a thought lurking at the edge of her mind.
She taps her pen moodily against the paper, eliciting a sleepy complaint from Genis. Putting the pen down hastily, she sighs in exasperation. This is a puzzle that will continue to elude her.
Raine finds it vaguely ironic that the mysteries of her own mind are confounding her significantly more than those of the past. Smiling bitterly, she packs away her notes, extinguishes the candles, and crawls into bed.
She is a heartbeat away from sleep when the stray thought finally presents itself. An impression of blue, the soft rustling of fabric, and she suddenly knows that yesterday was not the first occasion on which he had come to watch them.
Once she remembers again (and it takes her an embarrassing long time to do so), Raine wonders why she never noticed before. She can now recall having upon occasion glimpsed the angel. Over the past year, he has danced across the edge of their lives, the ghost of a memory unnoticed by any besides Raine.
At first she is disturbed; their history with this particular Seraph has never been anything but uncertain. She tries to convince herself that if he meant them any harm, he would not simply be waiting patiently, but she knows that one does not survive four millennia without patience. And by all accounts, he is a consummate planner.
She continues to watch silently, soon coming to accept the rare and yet increasingly frequent visits by their unwelcome guardian angel. His appearances are almost innocuous: one week she sees him walk down a street in Palmacosta, silent as a shadow. When a curious Raine rushes after him, he is gone. That day, she learns that this Seraph has the uncanny ability to turn corners and vanish.
She is hardly surprised.
At this point, Raine is forced to admit that she has gone into ruin-mode, as Lloyd so subtly puts it. Even now, after everything, she is unaccustomed to watching ancient heroes walk out of the history books, trailing four thousand years of memories behind them.
It does not take long for the others to realize that something is odd about the Professor. One evening at diner, Genis suddenly asks her what the problem is.
For a moment, she considers denying anything. But she decides that if he means no harm, there is no point in keeping silent, and if he does, the others should be prepared. "I'm seeing Seraphim everywhere," she comments, as casually as possible.
She regrets it a moment later, when Lloyd's eyes light up with sudden hope. "Da… Kratos?" he asks, a heartbeat away from leaping from his seat.
"No," she replies gently. "Yuan. I believe he's been following us around a bit, though I have no idea why." And this is one of the things that bothers her most: how can one possibly imagine the motivations and psychology of a person who has experienced four millennia of various cultures? Raine cannot conceive of it, and this gap in her understanding gnaws constantly at the edge of her consciousness.
"Oh," Lloyd says, and remains unnaturally silent through the rest of dinner.
In the next few weeks, Raine notices that she is no longer the only one searching every shadow.
The next time she sees him, he does not disappear. The Seraph is seated at a table inside an inn, staring out the window at nothing in particular. Raine wonders what other scene those eyes are watching, what ghostly images are sharing the street with her.
Before she realizes what she is doing, Raine has drifted into the inn. She orders the day's special and, not giving herself time to reconsider, slips into the chair across from him.
At first, he doesn't turn away from his study of the window, and Raine wonders whether he's being deliberately frustrating, or truly doesn't notice her. Finally, however, shortly after she has begun to feel uncomfortable, he deigns to glance at her. "Raine Sage," he greets her coolly, amusement dancing in his eyes.
"You didn't run away this time," she remarks, somewhat surprised. She suddenly regrets the comment, feeling as if this were some mythological djinni story, and she has just wasted a question.
He raises an eyebrow and smirks slightly, "I have never run away."
Raine barely resists the urge to kick him. Or better yet, correct him.
Instead, she says, "We thought you had gone to Derris-Kharlan."
"With Kratos?" he hesitates, suddenly distracted by the food he is listlessly pushing around his plate. Raine recognizes a stalling technique her own brother uses, and has to remind herself that Yuan is not her brother, and may very well kill her if she dares to slap him.
Fortunately, he recovers on his own. "Four thousand years is long enough to know I would not wish to spend eternity alone with him," he says, an ironic note in his voice Raine cannot quite understand. "In any case, solitude can as easily be found here."
"Solitude," Raine repeats in a vaguely silken voice. "Is that why you've been following us around?"
His face is neutral—guilelessly so—and for a moment, Raine is certain that she has made a serious error. Then she remembers that this is a person who led a rebellion beneath Yggdrasill's very nose for Martel knows how long.
"I don't trust you," she informs him, frowning.
"I never said you should," he replies smoothly, rising. Apparently, he is done shoving his meal around the plate. She wonders if he even touched it, and if he needs to eat at all.
Raine watches him leave the inn and disappear down the street.
She is still staring out the window at an empty road when the waiter arrives with her dinner.
"I saw Yuan today," are the first words she hears when she walks into Lloyd's house. She glances at Lloyd—the speaker—and notices that he looks more pensive than usual.
"He didn't try to kidnap you, did he?" Genis asks with a slight smile.
"No," Lloyd snorts. "We… talked." He seems slightly surprised at the notion.
"About what?" Raine asks, before thinking. What else could they have to talk about?
"My fa– Kratos." Lloyd hesitates, then, with a shake of his head, continues, "My father. I wanted to know what he was like before– well, everything, and Yuan's got four thousand years worth of stories to tell."
"And he actually talked to you? With real words?" Zelos, visiting for the week, asks. "No offense, but I never thought he liked you that much."
"I don't think it matters," Lloyd says thoughtfully. "I don't know. Maybe he just needs to."
Raine doubts it. Whatever mystical hold Lloyd now has over the Seraph, she is certain that it isn't a mutual desire to share thoughts and stories. Raine understands Yuan enough to know that he hoards his memories, and guards them carefully. Secrecy is not a habit easily overcome.
Raine herself barely got more than a single sentence of meaningful conversation out of him. Burying her resentment, she tells herself that it is professional curiosity and indignation—not jealousy—that she feels.
"You spoke with Lloyd." It is not quite an accusation.
"I did." The affirmation is delivered with the same not-smile she has come to associate with him.
It is a different table, a different café, a different city, a different world (if there were still two worlds—the cultures are still so distant that sometimes she forgets), but the same scene.
"If you're not careful, he'll think you don't hate him," she comments, sipping her wine. As will I, she adds silently.
"He's not quite stupid enough for that."
"Then why?"
He doesn't answer immediately. Raine watches as he takes a bit of steak and chews it almost curiously. She finds herself again wondering about angelic dietary needs.
A moment after she is certain she will get no response, he says simply, "Because Kratos won't."
A multitude of theories, realizations, and new questions come to mind. Raine sifts through them carefully, knowing that if she makes the wrong move, he will disappear again, perhaps for good. She finally realizes that there is but a single question that will hint at the answers to the others: "You didn't want him to leave."
An indefinable expression momentarily flashes across a face unaccustomed to giving away anything. "No," he finally breathes, almost too softly to be heard. In a brilliant rain of feathers, he is gone.
Paying the bill, Raine smiles to herself. She sees now that she was right, and knows beyond a doubt that he will be back.
"Do you have a new project, Professor?" Colette asks, twirling a blade of grass absently between her fingers.
"I… what?" Raine manages, startled from her thoughts.
"That look in your eyes," Colette points out. "It's almost feverish," she adds with a giggle. "I only see it when you're thinking about ruins."
"Oh, I see," Raine replies, fighting down a blush. "Well, I do have four thousand years worth of modified history to set straight."
Colette simply looks at her, and Raine is again amazed at how much the young woman has been changed by the last few years. As naïve as she can still be, her innocence is now tempered by a true wisdom and understanding. Eyes from which the Goddess Herself once gazed linger upon Raine, and she finds that she cannot meet them.
"All right," Colette replies with a dazzling smile. "But remember that there's more to memories than a glimpse of history. And even a thousand years of ice can shatter."
With those words of advice, Colette stumbles over to the door. Seeing a pair of butterflies fluttering over a flowerbed, she becomes a child once more.
Raine watches her but does not follow.
Rumours of the location of one of the final (now increasingly evasive) Exspheres have reached Lloyd's ears, and what remains of their group rushes off to Asgard to investigate. From what she has heard, Raine knows that this journey is potentially more dangerous than most of their recent ones. Therefore, she is hardly surprised when she notices that they have company in the form of a particularly elusive angel.
Fortunately, the retrieval succeeds without a problem, and he is spared from revealing that he actually cares.
It is not until the following night that Raine finally manages to escape the others long enough to look for him. She turns away from the inn at which they are staying, and away from the central section of the city. Raine cannot imagine finding him among common people, immersed to any degree in a modern daily life. The idea seems almost blasphemous.
Almost instinctively, she moves towards the ruins, and is not surprised to find him wandering among them, looking almost lost. She stares for a moment, thrown by the dichotomy between the edifices that time has torn down and the man it has forgotten. She cannot decide which of the two seems more real, and for a reason she cannot pin down, is shaken.
He glances up, mild irritation written on his face, and Raine suddenly realizes that she has walked in upon a scene not meant for her, the intricacies of which, despite however much research she may do, she will never understand. For perhaps the first time in her life, Raine feels like an intruder upon another's personal history.
"I'm sorry," she says, turning away to return to the inn and put this bizarre fascination out of her mind.
He gestures impatiently. "It's fine," he says sharply. "What did you want?"
To know; to learn; to understand; to study. To be able to look at him as either an object or a person, but to not have her perception lost somewhere in between. To know which aspect of him it is that so intrigues her, and to box off that fascination, comprehend it, get rid of it.
She wonders why she was able to see Kratos as an all too real part of the present, and cannot now do so here.
She sighs, unable or unwilling to put such thoughts into words. "Why do you constantly seek me out?" she asks instead.
"Seek you out?" he repeats with a quirk of his lips. "I believe it's the other way around."
She shakes her head, "If you didn't want me to see you, I wouldn't. I understand if you feel some sort of responsibility towards Lloyd, but why me?"
He turns away for a long moment, uncertain how to answer. "It is hard enough to live through four thousand years, without having to understand them as well," he finally admits.
And suddenly Raine understands. Not everything, but enough. She has become his mirror: he has been watching as she watches him, uncertain, perhaps, of what thousands of years of existence under Cruxis have left of him. She wonders if she sees him as a ghost of the past because he currently sees himself as little more.
"I'd love to help you, but I'm sure you'll refuse," she says, and sees him smile slightly in response. "Even so, you're welcome to drop by if you change your mind. Or even if you don't."
She walks away first, leaving him with his memories. Some of her questions have been answered, but a thousand remain. Without the mystery, the fascination will soon fade, and Raine is content to hold onto it for now.
Finis.
A/N: The title is Latin for "shadow" or "ghost," and you can probably see why. I was trying to do several things here, so this is at the same time a bit of a study in obsession, the possible psychology of someone who's lived through such an abnormally long lifespan (yeah, no Seraph is fully sane), a slight address to the Kratos Problem, and a little bit more. Hopefully I succeeded in at least some of it.
Expect more of Yuan; he's an incredibly demanding muse, even when demanding his privacy. Also, if you want more out of him here, I'll see if I can get him to speak for himself for a follow-up.