( - And with his mighty weapon he rose up and fired into the black sky, burning holes into the endless banner, until they were of such number he himself could not count them all. 'Stars,' he had named them, 'to light the way of my people in their travels - - on ground, on water, in sky.')
She watched from under burlap dress and heavy wrap, she watched through ocean eyes and searched and prayed. She prayed because even if Yevon did not hear from the likes of them, she would still continue this regressive lip service. She prayed never to see her cousin mount those ornate steps; painted and fashioned, gold-tipped and jeweled. A beautiful alter for so auspicious a death.
No, that wasn't the word. Not now, not ever.
(Sacrifice.)
Her cousin would never know how much she worried, how much she watched, and how very much prayed. The lone woman - hunched and devout - before Lord Ohalla one week, Lord Braska the next.
Brother had called her a fool - and worse - a secret traitor for scraping to a false God and their fanatic followers. The people, he cried, who'd destroyed them, killed their - - and then he'd stop, miserable and angry eyed, ready to tackle another machina problem with a bottle of whiskey on hand. He'd started drinking a lot once Gippal left, and even more when the Summoner's began training anew.
She wondered sometimes if there were things he never told her. She knew, sometimes, there were.
"May Yevon's blessing keep you child, go with the hymn of the Fayth."
She nodded silently to the priest, her eyes hidden in shadow and lips forming soundless words of supplication. A tainted soul who stepped within Their doors, hatred growing exponentially for its sanctum - - a skin itch that tickled deeper than she could reach, under the sternum, between the rib cage, only because They accepted all - even the "noble" crusaders - except them. Never them.
The self-inflicted lepers of Spira.
As a child it had rankled, stung, perhaps even bled, but now it meant so little - - a meaningless rift that she neither abridged, nor acknowledged. Yevon's children had stared when she walked past, her stumbling machina clicking and hissing behind. A motor on two legs. Some had whispered, other's taunted, and it had stopped hurting after a while - but only, after a while.
Her brother said she had the poison in her - - the same sick their favorite Aunty had, what made her run off and marry a Yevonite. He'd gossiped that his baby sister had it in her eyes, the way she walked, like she had every right to stand before the Temples of Yevon.
Maybe she did, she decided, but even so, she wasn't going to take the long way around as their Aunty had. It was a road too convoluted, too ambiguous for her.
Even if her brother was right about her wandering heart, even through her recognized fascination, her hatred, her fear of Yevon, she still only came there for one reason - -
She watched and she prayed that her cousin would never enter the dark and custom filled trials, never take the path of the Savior, the path of the Martyr, the path of the Sacrifice.
The path of the Summoner.
(He gave man the means to build his houses and towers…He gave them the power to both create - - and destroy.)
"Here is the Temple, here is the steeple. Go through the doors, and see all the people!"
She giggled at her cousin's fingers, as they wiggled like tiny fishes in her face. Yunie always had the super bestest games to play, and she was happy her Uncle and Aunty had brought her to visit. She'd been sad after they put her mommy in the ground, and brother wouldn't talk to her much about why. Why her mommy was sleeping somewhere else now. Poppy had tried telling her - she was sure about that - but he kept stopping to cry every few minutes.
She cried too when they took her mommy away, but only because she was scared and everyone else was crying.
Yes, she was definitely glad Yunie was there to help her figure out what was going on, and where her mommy went.
"Yunie?"
"Mmhmm, what?"
"What does 'gone to the Farplane' mean?"
(Ripping the land of the world asunder, he created the great masses and named them one - - Spira. However, he had much more to do this night...)
She studied the endless peaks of sand - hot blowing and scorched under the midday sun - frozen like a sentinel, awaiting that which would make her body move and pump blood again. The clinking slap of tarp against metal rang in the distance, a hundred, a thousand, a million yards away. It was a sound that signaled their clan was on the move again, and she was expected back to the encampment.
They didn't travel much in large groups anymore, but her father had always been rather charismatic and attracted followers like a stinking Maester.
He always cracked up whenever she mentioned it.
" Hm. Keep frowning like that Cid's girl and your face'll get stuck that way. "
She blinked hot and red eyes at his voice, the deep tones pounding against the inside of her skull. Maybe she should be silent and wander away, back towards people, family. Life.
Her first blood had passed, and she still felt no more rooted to this world than she had three years ago - eight years ago, any stretch of time ago. The hunger for home ate away at her insides, a gnawing she couldn't appease, even with her father's promises of rebuilding and creating - - she longed for it like a dead man longs for air.
A remembered necessity, desired perhaps, but never more than a memory within a dream.
She found herself spitting on it instead, even as her heart had wished for it. And if wishes were fishes - - her brother had lectured, while patiently, tenderly, showing her how to install a machina motor.
" You've been out here awhile, just thought I'd grace you with my company. "
She wondered what that smell was. He always had it on him, like machine oil and ocean - - the tangy, salty, heavy kind of ocean that made her little heart flutter with possibilities. Like the proverbial fence. She'd always wanted that great something on the other side she couldn't have on this one – here, in this place surrounded by barren wasteland.
She hated that strip of yellowed cloth even worse than she hated that fence.
Like a glaring eye it accused her, hit her like a thousand watts of electricity straight through her stomach, until she shit, pissed and puked all over herself. She hated the fact he would think to wear it around her - - especially around her.
" Take it off. "
" …What? "
" I hate it, I don't like it, take it off. "
She didn't wait for his response or his reaction - as was her way in most things - but leapt forward to snatch it from his face. Offensive little thing that made her sick and annoyed, she grinned smugly at it, balled it up and chucked it a hundred yards across the sand.
" Cid's girl! "
And now, she wondered, this new quiet between them. Is this what happens when one becomes a woman? Relationships, friendships, were they no longer so one-dimensional? She missed her square and triangle - turned cube and pyramid with their newly added mass - third, forth, fifth dimensions unknown to her world. There should've been a technical manual that went along with boobs, and woman feelings, everything…
" Why…? "
She turned her woman's face to meet his face, now free of that little piece of spite, and smiled in that perfectly, womanly way. One green eye, one milky blue. One like hers, and one like the ocean and the sky and all those things that were far away from her and wonderful.
" Don't ever look at me, don't ever come around me, with something that shields your eyes from me. 'Cause if you do I will proceed to rip it off and chuck it a thousand million miles away. Every time. "
" …Some people get uncomfortable, well, you know- "
" I'm not some people. "
There was that silence again, the one that made her sad and happy at the same time. Knowing someone too well destroys the natural growth all beings have to go through - - as her cousin had divulged, old-beyond-her-years knowledge, to a girl she'd called her sister.
And that was that. She was a woman and he was leaving.
(From the firmament of the Farplane, He made this place; not for the parading of the ill, but for the celebration of good…)
" Do you think it's him, girl ?"
She knew about a lot of things - it was granted as an Al Bhed – and a few things, and not so many things - - but this one?
This one she wasn't so sure of.
('I am the thought that truly terrifies all Spira (Yevon).')
" Oooh! By the Thunder Plains! It's slot A into slot B, angled into bolt C, and then connect piece D to E! A retarded scavenger machina could do the job! "
She wondered sometimes, how their people had survived these one thousand years.
(Into his little dolls he carved like a gift - but in truth a curse - the eye spiral of greenish hue, and so doing, he said, 'That you may know, my children, though you will always be set apart, your fate is that of a circle cutting endlessly inward - infinite within its own lifetime.')
"It's a lie."
She felt the wet heat build up in her eyes, an insistent itch that begged to be scratched, scratched until it burst watery red – puss filled and gangrenous. Incessant little throbbing. It smarted of a desert coyote with gouging teeth and claws poisoned by the flies of the Fiend. She wished she could sooth it away, ease the sensation a little so it wouldn't chafe as much, like the ties across her back - beauty and pain simultaneously - but that was a pipe dream.
The oh-so-many-dreams that inundated their Spiral.
She remembered a dark haired girl who'd dreamed of racing the continents with her cousin-sister, jumping the sky and finding Truth. Because - that little girl had said - Truth was like a tiny silverfish (not the invertebrate but the bug) streaming across oceans into the smaller places of the world, where it could only be found and held by the incredibly brave. Or ravaged by the incredibly stupid.
Her cousin had always been very old for her age.
"I'm saving you! Why can't you accept that?!"
She blinked the sting and glitter away, a look of post-Sin destruction on her face of having never known the waters that gushed so pliantly, so deeply within her cousin. Perhaps she should've looked closer. Forced smiles, forced steps, broken dreams.
Oh so many dreams spiraling endlessly beneath her feet.
"I can't. Because if I do I'll reject even my own people."
"W-what?"
"Because if I do, I will walk to the Farplane."
And she hated saying it - the silence between them so deep - even her sister (cousin) couldn't see the bottom with her bottomless depths of wisdom.
"Because if I do…"
She despised that bitter sting, a slithering traitor down her face.
"I'll see you there. Not my mother. Not a score of my lost friends. Only you reflected in a lie from my memory."
She watched and smiled as her cousin read between the lines, a lightning of smart like the demi-God she was, gathering and piecing it into her own memory. A quilt to be pulled out at odd times and admired.
She would shadow her sister's footsteps to the end, she thought, and really, what had she been doing anyway?
(He dug the trenches, piled the mountains, spilling the water like blood from a pump into the low places of Spira...)
" He is one of the Crimson Squad. "
She looked away from the too-blue sky to her brother, his long shadow stretching across her stomach - on into infinity - its abstract arms with abstract wrenches waving into the yellow sand air. She didn't concern herself with who he meant - - she knew who he meant, as there was only one of their clan they spoke of in nameless terms.
She wondered if he had anybody, was loving anybody, with blonde hair and a familiar smile. She wondered if there would ever be anyone like her.
What she didn't wonder was would there ever be anyone like him.
" Really? Well, at least he's doing something against Sin. He always wanted that. "
" Heh, heh, little sister how dumb you are sometimes! You always wanted that. "
Even to her, the curses she unleashed sounded bitter and hollow.
(A/N - R&R. To my sole reviewer, you are VERY awesome. And I very much appreciate your input.)