The third and probably the last in my arc of FF9 fics involving Beatrix and Kuja (sequel to By Candlelight and Requiem). I decided that I needed to tie it up somehow, and what's better than a goodbye?
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or the placenames depicted herein; they are the property of Square-Enix and I am taking to financial gain from this work of fiction.
They never found him.
Truth to tell, they never looked very hard; they arrived, made their conclusions and went home. The world was saved, the sky was blue and the birds were singing – this was not a time to worry about the dead. That came later, when summer turned to winter and the echoes of the wedding bells had faded away.
He had no grave.
What was the use of putting up a gravestone for a murderer when he had never been found? The best they could do was point anyone who asked towards the massive tree of life and hope they understood that somewhere beneath those crushing roots was the corpse of a man who had brought down a world.
She had not quite comprehended just what had happened, even though she had heard the story ten times or more. It made no sense to her that he was dead – she had wished it more than once, dreamed in the wolf hours of the morning – she had thought that he would never end. Despite his teetering-on-the-brink-of-destruction way of moving, of speaking, she had thought that his insanity would outlast them all.
She had been wrong.
He was more fragile than she had come to think of him; even in his Trance he had failed, had been beaten by the thief and his friends. But it was not then that he had died – that had come later, when the tree of life had whipped and snapped in death-spasms and the world was tumbling down around his ears.
She had seen it from afar, safe on her airship, had seen the tree-roots lash like pained animals, had seen them crash down upon themselves. Only afterwards had she been told that it was the tree itself that killed the marionette, the world-destroyer. Only afterwards did she find out that he had attempted to redeem himself by saving the very people who brought him down.
The wind was harsh here in the semi-desert, the cracks made by wind and water like gaping wounds beneath her feet. She had not come here to pay her respects, for this man deserved none, but she had come to pay her remembrance; no one deserved to be forgotten, and especially not him. If the world could not learn from its mistakes – and the skies above knew he was one of them – then it would repeat history until it fell apart.
It was ironic, in a way, that he had been crushed beneath the weight of the tree of life, the life that he had sought to hard to destroy. Then she had thought him quite mad, driven there by pure whim and fancy, but now she knew his reasons for the very last days, and she pitied him. Immortality was never a true promise anyway.
With a bitter smile on her lips, amused in her quiet way, she drove her sword as deep as she could into the ground, where it stood swaying in the wind. It was fine – she could get a new one – and it was getting old and worn by now, the edge no longer as sharp.
The sword, harsh and silver grey against the red earth and the green tree, was crowned with an empty glove made of silver and purple glass, a gaudy and useless thing, but appropriate -
- she remembers the weight of it on her shoulder, three seconds from waking, and when she does at last open her eyes, it lays beside her as a last testimony of his lingering presence -
a last monument to someone's life. It was all he would ever get, but it was enough. There were no words, for the time of words was past, kept for a time when she was still the lady-warrior and he was still the madman made of feathers, metal and dusty elegance. There was not even an eulogy, for if she opened her mouth and spoke her voice would be broken.
Dust, like dancing fingers of death, slowly covered the monument of remembrance that she had raised as she turned and walked away; one day, it would be gone, filed away by the sand and the wind and the sun, but in her memory he would always be feathers and metal and teasing words, a demented angel laughing and dancing with destruction.