In Vayne Glory

Disclaimer: All Characters, locations etc. property of Square Enix. I'm just messing with them for my own twisted amusement.

A/N: This is an AU story wherein I intend to corrupt, subvert and otherwise run roughshod over game canon – just a warning. If you have read any of my other Final Fantasy XII stories before some of the non-game characters will be familiar to you, as I am recycling my OC's. This story will also feature Vayne as a central protagonist (though this is an ensemble story) and it could end up being pretty dark. Heroes need not apply; villains all the way baby!

Prologue 694 O.V: Solidor; Ever Solidor

It began in blood; that is what the scribes and the bards and the peddlers of senatorial propaganda would pen as they made slander their daily bread and sought to tear down their betters while currying favour with those equally weak and ineffectual. Vayne knew this. Clenching a fist tight to his lips he was assaulted by the offal stench of blood and thicker things. His brother's blood slipped like silvered mercury from between his whitening fingers. He could not hold on and his elder brother slipped away; away into death.

'Why Tibor?' The question was rhetorical, the wreck of a man lying at his feet could no more answer him now as could carrion rotting in the gutters of Old Archades. Carrion; interesting that House Solidor's second son should be reduced so quickly to nothing more than a red ruin. One might start to think he was nothing more than a man, no better than those whose blood he had shed for his ambitions.

The carpet was saturated, blood oozed from the exotic Nabradian weave as Vayne lowered himself down beside the carcass. Red hands ghosted over the body, but he dared not touch. Strange that the broken shell of his brother should command his deference, his reticence, when the living body had not. Vayne laughed and distantly heard the thunder of booted feet approach. Across the room the shattered crystal lamp cast distorted, knife-toothed shadows over a wall flecked with blood. Meditatively Vayne flexed the fingers of both hands. The door to the boudoir burst open. Vayne heard panting breaths constrained by a heavy metal helm. He heard silence where honour refused to allow a gasp from the man in the doorway. He smiled, feeling the mask of blood stinging his cheeks crack in a thousand fissures over his flesh.

'These hands,' he murmured not looking up, not looking away from the bloodied fists pressed against his knees, 'These hands have done murder, Bergen. These hands of mine have rendered my brother naught but a stain upon our family's history.'

'L – Lord Vayne?' Ah and there is hesitance in the obsequy; nay not hesitance – fear. The Judge's boots make an interesting noise as they pass over the blood drenched carpet. There will be no saving the rug, Vayne thought blandly. This blood spilled will ne'er be washed clean. Slowly he stands, knowing that he is a frightful sight, blood all over and blue eyes blazing with the maddening calm of one who is beyond so many things now.

'Judge Bergen, tell my father his traitor has been dealt with.' There is no quaver in his voice, no hesitance. He extends his one hand, knuckles popped and swollen, still quilted in his brother's blood. 'Here is Torlin's signet ring, found amid Tibor's belongings; evidence of my brother's complicity in the murder of my other brother.' Dropping the signet ring into a metal clad palm Vayne noted the slick gleam of burnished silver winking in the light from under the fresh gilding of blood. So much blood from one small and cowardly man; it had pumped freely for so very long after Tibor had stopped twitching. His brother, the senate's willing puppet, had bled out like a pig. Just like a filthy pig in his slops. He had squealed like one too; squealed as Vayne's fists had rained down upon him.

'My lord – the senate….' Bergen is his man, Vayne knows this, the Judge's House is not so well situated that he can think to play the son of the Emperor against the scions of the Senate, yet even Bergen, brutish lout that he is, senses the magnitude of these events. The lowest hound can scent the hunters on the wind.

'Will make no hue or cry,' Vayne smiled thinly and his boots made scarce a sound gliding over a patina of broken glass, shattered crockery, and drying blood as he retrieved the sheathe of papers from the vanity. 'Did you think Tibor worked alone? The vultures of the senate were swift enough to sniff out the weakness in Torlin, and the avarice in Tibor, but they are too enamoured of their own skin to make good on the promise of their failed treachery.'

There is blood on the papers; Tibor's and his own, such a potent combination. It is a fitting thing. Solidor blood to cast macabre legitimacy upon Senatorial conspiracy; Father will be pleased. His enemies cowed while Gramis' hands are left shockingly clean. To think all such machinations have cost him are his sons; a small price to pay for the throne.

And these hands will bare the scars ever more; red and broken.

'My lord,' Bergen steps over the corpse cooling on the floor, 'the Emperor, he has lost two sons' already. It is……a difficult grief to overcome.'

Vayne smiled, sentiment is not Bergen's strength, and this sentiment is so very misplaced. There will be no grief in a gambit well played. Above the mantle the serpents of House Solidor writhe in sinuous rapture; tangled in deceit. The motto prosaic in its simplicity: Solidor; ever Solidor. In a room that smells of blood and piss Vayne Solidor laughs.

'Yes, our honoured Emperor has bred dogs of war and allowed us to go feral.' Vayne flexes his hands, these hands that have murdered and will murder again. Solidor; ever Solidor. 'Is it not fitting that my brothers should turn upon the hand that fed them, one and then the other?' He asks mildly, knowing the question is a careful lie and the answer far more complex. It is not the hounds who revolted but the master. There is a babe in the cradle, a new son, fresh and untainted by serpent's poison. Mother died in his production and he is to their never satisfied father what Vayne and his brothers' fallen could never aspire to be: hope.

Larsa, little brother, you know not what has been wrought in your name. I would pray you never do but there is no god to which I may beseech.

There has been much death within the serpent nest this year. First Torlin, eldest and most favoured of their late mother, but never strong enough for rule; Vayne does not know if his bookish elder brother truly sought that greatest of vices, that most foul poison of Archadian diplomacy, peace with the enemy. In truth it does not matter. Torlin was never destined to live within, let alone command, the Empire. Then Tibor, ambitious but a fool; Tibor had ever been indolent, where Vayne had worked even before attaining his majority, towards ingratiating himself with the army, Tibor left it too late, and had to go begging to the senate for his political legitimacy. Alas poor Tibor, his death became inevitability when he agreed to work as the senate's puppet against their father.

But what of Vayne? Barely a man, just scarce fifteen and already a fratricide; their father has left perhaps the cruellest fate open for his third son. Solidor; ever Solidor. Hope must not be so despoiled with blood as Vayne himself. Yet without despair how can there be hope?

Ah lord father, you are a cruel master indeed to those whose blood is owing to you. I am undone before I am yet begun; all for the babe in the cradle.

Vayne's fingers grow tight and itchy as the blood begins to dry, staining indelibly into pale Solidor flesh. The papers tremble in hands that did not falter then, when his brother fell broken at his feet, but which tremble now. Like Tibor those papers fall to the vanity in a whispered tumble. Lies of convenience conveyed in parchment; politics etched in blood. Vayne finds he is trapped in his own reflection within the vanity mirror. He is the raven come to feed amid the spoils; he is the serpent whose blood runs colder than death. He is the fratricide who beat his own brother to death with his bare hands. He is his father's hound and his father's fool. He is the blade of Solidor made flesh.

He is Vayne - and this is his glory.

Blood is only the beginning.