A/N: First attempt at the Horror genre. Let's see how this goes.
In the beginning, she simply was.
She stood, cool and calm, and watched the world go by. There were fiends but they did not challenge her—there were beetles that crawled over her toes, but those did not disturb her.
It took her an age to take a step, or maybe only minutes. But she stirred because it occurred to her that she had a guardian. An image of a dark-haired girl with braids had pressed at the back of her mind, nagging, irritating her because she had no context for it. She had no context for anything, least of all herself, but that didn't bother her because nothing else insisted on inserting itself into her pleasant nothing-thoughts.
But after the age—or the handful of minutes—had flowed by her like water by a rock, not moving it but changing it all the same, guardian her thoughts said.
Guardian? she wondered back at herself.
Guardian.
Ah.
Then, with a flash like a whip across her mind's eye—guardian-dying-where-Lulu- potion -fight-broken-collarbone- pain-summon-Shiva-gone-Ifrit-gone-hurts—Irefusetodie—
She had found her life's context.
"Lulu," she said experimentally. Her voice sounded…different. Like she heard it from outside her body, and rather than echoing from throat to ear, it traveled a short distance to reach her.
Or perhaps she just had a cold. Probably should nurse it away before traveling on to Mt. Gagazet.
She moved around the low room, her eyes scanning the inky darkness of the edges for her guardian. The only light, soft and eerie and blue-green, originated with a glyph in the center of the floor. Had the girl been killed?
"Lulu?"
Ah, there. A crumpled little form…she reached for a potion and prepared a Cura spell mentally. No mana, she thought, wearily, when she tapped a void.
"Lu, are you all right?"
Crouching next to the body, she reached to turn her over—and paused.
The ground under her shoes afforded a strange traction. Curiously, she trailed a finger over it—sticky in parts, in others, slick—
Oh.
"Lulu?" she demanded, wiping the blood on her skirt's hem.
With stubborn refusal—Lu, you are not dead—she skimmed a hand the girl's shoulder carefully, trying to determine whether or not it was safe to move her. Her fingers caught on something jagged and sharp. Bone.
Broken collarbone, she noted clinically.
Well, she'd have to risk it. She couldn't cast a spell and she couldn't give the girl a potion through the back of her head.
Gently, she maneuvered her guardian's shoulders and head into her lap, so that the Lulu's head lolled back onto her belly. Her fingers trailed the girl's jaw—blood there, too—until they tripped over her mouth. She wiggled them into the cold corners of the mouth, coaxing it open, and dribbled most of the potion inside.
"Swallow, Lu. It's all right—everything's going to be fine—but you have to get up. We've been lucky this far but there're be a fiend here any minute and—"
She was crying, she thought absently, and there was snot running down over her lips. It was really unnecessary and wouldn't provide the proper example for her much younger guardian.
And it would be embarrassing, because the child was quite the stoic.
Because Lulu would swallow any minute now and—well, she wasn't getting around to it. So she'd have to do it herself. Tip the face up—careful; don't want to make the poor girl choke.
The movement put the upper half of Lulu's features into the weak light. Her eyes were open. Dull. Glassy. But most importantly, open.
Blue.
Trick of the light. It was blue, after all.
Her mouth twisted involuntarily, warping and tugging at her features. There were more tears stinging at her eyes, washing down her face.
A fumble for the girl's pulse confirmed it. Her guardian was dead. There was a clench of sick horror in her gut. She was well-acquainted with death. Should be used to it by now. Perhaps it was the fact that Lulu was not supposed to die. That was her job, never mind that it was a guardian's duty to guard her summoner to the death—it had never occurred to her that Lulu might actually do so.
She'd have to get the body outside, bury it, carefully avoiding those empty crimson eyes.
But they were blue.
And there was a familiar scar crossing the left eyebrow, a glistening white slash through the dark hairs.
Frowning, she tilted the face to see it better. It moved easily and in a greater arc than the neck normally allowed.
Brown hair. Broad features—small lips—a wide-bridged nose—
She hissed and flung the body aside, jumping up and clutching her arms tightly around herself.
Surely this was just a bad dream. But everything was terrifying sharp and clear in its reality.
Broken collarbone.
Broken neck.
Who knows how many deep lacerations.
Dead.
Me.
Her own battered face that had stared at her with vacant eyes.
Dropping down to the floor, she sat crouched in the middle of the floor, over the glyph—which radiated a pleasant sort of heat—shivering violently.
"I refuse to die for anything less than the whole of Spira," she said, sniffing haughtily and wearing a prim frown for no one but fiends and her own shattered body.
But, much as she would like to deny it, this was real and she was dead. She was a summoner who sent, who had the dance and the wand positions ingrained into her muscles—she knew the sending like she knew how to walk.
Performing the rites, she sent the dead onto the next plane.
She could not send herself. Could not save herself. Same thing.
Abomination.
Fiend.
Her wand felt wrong in her hands. Could she even summon in this form? She clutched her weapon to her chest. Ixion, Shiva, Valefor, Ifrit, Bahamut, she said within the quiet of her mind.
No answer.
All dead. No, not that—they were never alive.
They weren't dead. They simply were not.
Crumbled, shattered, broken, busted. Rather like her body.
Faded away like a memory. If she were living, she could revive them, but because she was dead, technically, they had left her. Alone.
Yojimbo, she said. The reason she was here, in this damned cavern, in the first place. Stolen, hidden aeon.
Fault for that could be laid on the Al Bhed. She could blame them for her death and Lulu's disappearance and likely death, hate them for it, but that took energy, and she was just so weary.
Yojimbo.
Soft, melancholy trails of music—vague and far off, like something half-remembered. But it wasn't her recollection of an event, because along with it came the clank of armor and the impression of a dark forest with the cool wet smell that came after a rainstorm, all existing within the confines of her mind.
Thank you, she said with a nod.
Time creaked by, unbearably slow in its passage. That was probably because she was waiting, for a slim undead girl with braids and a full-skirted traveling dress, a girl who never came.
She had thought Lulu to be killed as well, and so she had expected companionship aside from the music in her head. When she first realized her guardian wasn't going to come, she still remembered enough of herself to feel a wash of relief. Lulu was still alive.
I should go find her, she told herself sternly.
"She will find me a summoner to send me."
And that was the catch, the thing she needed, the only thing that could heal this disease, and the one thing she dreaded.
Since she was a young child with an affinity for white magic, she had known she would become a summoner. And because she was young and idealistic in the days before her death, she had known like she knew her own name that she would bring the Calm.
She had run full-tilt toward death, and she hadn't cared.
Things were different now.
"I don't want to die," she told the lifeless body in the corner.
A bit late for that thought, she imagined Lady Ginnem's slack mouth said.
"No. Not yet."
Dead, said the deep black slash across Lady Ginnem's throat.
"Yes. But not gone."
The dead should not remain among the living.
"I am not among the living." She deliberately turned her back on the corpse.
She stayed, telling herself she just needed time to come to terms with her death and reenter the world; then, she would ask someone to take her to a summoner and then request, with bowed head and soft words, a sending.
She played out the scenario a hundred thousand times in her head, and rehearsed aloud the words she would say to keep them from fearing her, to show them she was still sane and not a threat.
She filled the days with exploring the cavern, and testing out Yojimbo against the rare fiend that challenged her. But he was a costly aeon, and she had to be careful of her dwindling gil. On occasion, she ventured outside, mostly to see whether it was night or day and keep count of time's passage.
Sometimes she lost track of little things like days, and would emerge to see a soft dusting of snow when 'yesterday', the plains had baked under the summer sun.
Winter had come and gone once, perhaps twice, when the first summoner came down the winding path from the Calm Lands.
She was small, and dark-headed with streaks of gray, and there were sandals on her feet and flowers embroidered on the hemline of her robe.
In spite of the gray, she judged the lady summoner to be perhaps in her mid-twenties at the eldest. She was in the company of a single guardian. He was blond and his body was bared from flat belly to broad shoulders, and he brandished a pair of naked blades. She would later remember the pair only by these attributes. They were as nameless to her as she was to them.
Her mind reviewed the words she had carefully planned for a summoner, as she watched them from the murky shadows of the cavern.
And then she shook her head and eased away. When the illumination of the pyreflies that flitted around her shoulders gave her away anyway, she deliberating chose not to say them.
Instead, as the lady summoner reached for her wand, she said, silently, Yojimbo.
Afterward, she searched the folds of their robes for gil to replenish what she had spent in the battle. Using a finger to smooth the lady's eyelids shut, she told herself that it didn't matter. After all, if the woman could not even defeat a failed summoner, she would not have been strong enough to receive the Final Aeon. She had done her a service.
Even now, she had no gift for lying to herself.
Shaking violently with knowledge of the significance of her actions, she laid the bodies up a bit on the path, and built a small cairn. Within a season, she thought, they would be gone; if not for her watchful guard, the stripped bones of her own body would've been scattered by fiends.
She returned to her own tomb and stared dully at Lady Ginnem's skull.
Fiend, the empty eye sockets accused.
She nodded stiffly in acknowledgment, and brought her foot down hard on the cranium, over and over. When she had finished, she surveyed the myriad pieces with a tight little smile.
– There is no human left in you now, is there? –