Awhile ago, I wrote a story about World B, and the worlds that might have laid beyond. Every so often it wanted to be rewritten, which is where this started off. But this isn't the rewrite of a story about World B and beyond.
This is a story about going home.
I'll be uploading this story in three sections, nine chapters each, a few months apart.
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy IX and Dissidia are the property of Square Enix. The people who came together to make these characters and their worlds made their fans a home to which they will always return.
CHAPTER ONE
I was alone in a strange world. Of all things, that was what made me long for home. No matter how many of the same years I wasted away here, this world would never be anything but strange. To call it anything else would be to call it 'home', and that would be an insult to the world that made me feel like a stranger since I was a child.
The waves sighed ragged at the end of the day. The sun set sanguine on the horizon. One of my fondest childhood memories looked just like it. Except then, it was night. The clouds were smoke from the fires swallowing a thousand souls. The sun was a gorged and gloating eye.
But enough about the man who only now wanted me to call him 'Father'.
I looked over my shoulder once, twice. A panicked awareness I've never indulged before. To my relief, I left no footprints. While this world was being reborn, it was also timeless. This was just one of a thousand peculiarities.
Still, the sand muttered under the press of my heels. The world's last dying gasps mingled with its first breaths in the wind skating over the grass. The sound warned me, hushed me.
The blood-red sunlight and the scent of stone combating the briny salt on the wind told me I'd missed the last thunderstorm. I really could have used the rain. I wanted to feel as clean and untouched as the rest of this forsaken world.
Eventually the familiar hue sank below the horizon. It was replaced by bare moonlight for a bare night. A wanting white, only a little paler than my skin. In its own time, the gentle rose of dawn blossomed.
Where did all the hours go? I must have stopped walking at some point. My feet hurt, but every part of me hurt. The fading moonlight struck a puddle of rainwater in front of me and I saw myself as clearly as if I were staring into a mirror.
For a moment, I considered tearing everything off: ripped jacket, unbuckled armor, the belts barely hanging off my hips, the drape of white askance the silver-furred tail I begrudgingly claimed as part of me. But then I would be as naked as the day I was brought into being, as naked as the world being summoned forth.
No. I needed my clothes. I chose them myself. They were all I had left.
My red-lacquered fingertips skimmed over my body. A seam stitched itself here, blood worked itself out of white there. I delicately touched my cheekbone and winced. A breath of magic, then I felt nothing. Once again, I was flawless.
A blade of grass stirred behind me. I flinched.
No one there. Just the sound of a brave new world. My tails fled under my skirt and I went back to considering my appearance. If nothing else, I could always count on my reflection: my porcelain doll's skin, the unruly feathers I embraced years ago.
I added the crimson line to my eyes myself, of course. Why not accent that telling blue gaze. Hardly anybody knew what it meant, the word that whispered in my blood: Genome.
Objectively, my body was stunning. Statuesque, even, in how precisely it represented Terra's grotesque and deathly idols. It failed to hold my soul intact with the same ferocity I expected of it, but it was mine, and it was so beautiful.
Then there was my tail. This final brand reminded me I had that senile old man to thank for the pathetic husk of a life I now clung to, despite his best attempts to grind me into dust under his boot.
Yes, I could always count on my reflection to be consistent. No matter how exquisite, I always appreciated the humor in how much I now hated it.
I upheld and exceeded every definition of a narcissist. I had the face of an angel. It was so heartbreakingly captivating that people had this obsession with viewing me as they wanted me to be, rather than who I was. I truly was a breathtaking mistake.
My sweet, stupid little brother once thought that somewhere, far, far down, I had a heart worthy of a champion of Cosmos. I just needed someone who understood me. He was aching to volunteer.
He sincerely believed I had some inner wound eating away at a great wellspring of light inside me. He believed that inner wound had a name: Garland.
Of course. I had no business claiming sole responsibility for my crimes. That's why I was so tragic; it wasn't my fault. It was all on our father: my peacock's pride, my inability to trust people and accept kindness, all of it springing from some deep, buried anxiety of rejection, misplaced emotional hurt, and a lifetime of loneliness.
I didn't even deserve the comeuppance my actions might have once brought upon my head. Even I had to admit that in this world, where balance was the ultimate and inescapable law, I'd spent too long trying to outrun karma.
Zidane just knew I didn't really want to seize this awful world and bring it to its knees. I didn't really want to make it rue its very existence from now until eternity do us part.
But he knew better now. And so did I.
This barren husk didn't even merit my attention. If I tore back the veil—if I followed the spirit of this conflict back to the beginning—I wouldn't find a Crystal. I would find nothing but a pale wanting echo of a living, beloved world.
What was an Angel of Death to do with a world hardly alive in the first place? How could I be expected to reap the souls of the remaining few when they hadn't yet suffered enough to give this world a soul of its own?
No more would this world skulk in the shadow cast by the dragon Shinryu's dance with Cosmos and Chaos. It was going to breathe the true pulse of life. Its inhabitants would buckle under the weight of anguish and despair.
By the time I was done, both sides would be begging for permission to lay down their weapons forever. I would do what no recognized Warrior of Cosmos has ever been able to accomplish: I would bring peace to this world.
I would cast the shadow of death. It would be my final reaping.