A/N: First FFXII fic, and I'm still playing the game for the first time, so I haven't entirely decided which angles to approach characters from. But all the same, I hope you will accept this effort!
Disclaimer: SquareEnix, not I, owns Final Fantasy and its characters; I merely hold the controller and long for the days of Nobuo.
"Someday, When She Is Through With Shame"
If one does not know the secret, Fran thinks, one is free to judge. Condemnation is a man's weapon, and Fran's companions use it here as much as they dare. In spite of herself, she is touched by Vaan's fumbling bravado, the squawkings of a baby even among short-lived Humes. Nor can she blame Balthier for his derision, by which - because he loves her - he only means to protect. Demand entry or, being denied entry, reject those who would not have you - that is a man's way. It serves them well enough in the world, but here in the Wood it is crude and ugly.
Fran knows this is how the Viera now see her, as ugly as the words coming out of Balthier's mouth. That leaving the Wood means not wanting the Wood, a willful sundering of the circle. Fran cannot express how wrong they both are. The world outside is not death. To go and return - is that such a bad thing? It is not Viera who close their ears. To speak the Green Word, the Wood needs a Voice; to have a Voice is to have awareness and therefore choice. The Wood chooses to silence Herself against those who leave Her. The Wood does not sense Her children's thirst, does not see that a life expanded from the heart does not abandon the heart. The Wood knows only exchange: loneliness or isolation, freedom or sisterhood. Fran wants desperately to say that this does not have to be so.
She has seen the circle outside of the Wood.
Fran remembers the surprise of finding that Hume women act as Viera do: the protective cluster, sharing sorrow and joy and secrets of small things. Fran wondered how this could be, and for a time she thought she knew the answer. Hume women bleed and bear young. At the birthing, there is blood. Hume men are born from blood but grow to leave it. Hume women come from blood and return to blood and pass the blood down to their daughters. Blood is their bond, their truth and creation myth.
Some Hume women do not bleed, a thing Fran thought even more surprising. She remembers watching with a kind of detached pity as women were driven away by fathers, brothers, husbands, all for their lack of blood. A Hume woman's secret is a Hume man's tool, and Hume men have no room for broken things.
But as the broken women ran, the cluster rose to meet them; in many whispered voices that sounded, to Fran's hungry ears, like the voice of the Wood, the Hume women said, No, no, you are us and we are you. There is something deeper that defines us, some other thing that lets us understand, from the moment of our births, why it is both joy and sorrow to be woman. The bleeding is only a reminder; there are countless others. You are one of them, Sisters, and we need you.
So like the Viera! And yet so far from the Wood. It is a riddle, only half thought-out, and Fran thinks that if she stepped inside the circle, she might know both the rest of the riddle and its answer. Viera bonded in their isolation, Hume women united across space and time by their secrets. Why the viera are crafted to resemble Hume women but are not women; there is no Viera woman and no Viera man, only Viera. If Fran stepped inside the circle...
But she does not. She travels with a man who is also a loner because that is the shame of Viera who have deserted the Wood: exile within exile, no substitute for the Wood's embrace, no reminder of its Voice.
Strange, then, that it should take a circling back to the Wood to remember that this second exile, at least, is self-imposed. Her ears do not miss the soft breathing behind her, the faint rustle as a hand reaches impulsively towards hers before dropping back under disapproving stares. She is Viera, but Penelo and Ashe in their Hume-ish simplicity see her, as they see all Viera, only as a woman who does not bleed.
And so they understand her silence, are silent themselves while the men try to break down Viera walls with hot, blunt words. Penelo and Ashe know, where Vaan and Balthier do not, this kind of loss. They know what has been given up and the pain of choosing. They know the Vieras' anger because it has sometimes been their anger. They know.
Someday, Fran might turn to face them. Someday, when she is through with shame, she might learn the rest of the riddle by placing her Viera claws in each Hume woman's hands, and complete the circle.
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A/N: There is so much potential within the
game for female interaction, but so little takes place. It makes me
sad as each cutscene raises, then shatters my hopes, so I thought I'd
write some non-verbal female bonding. Feedback is much appreciated!