Author note :
Last night a friend of my sister's was home and I learned that she was pregnant. She is two year younger than me. This led to a sleepless night for me thinking of pregnancy and motherhood. Somewhere between 2am and 3am my over-working brain came up with that story. How it went from a 17-year-old mother to Paine is still a mystery to me though. Lack of sleep tends to do that to me, I guess. Anyway I had to get is out of my system and so I wrote this short fic.
It is a story about Paine's parents, that I - of course - made up from beginning to end. It is only loosely connected with the FFX2 events and could almost be called "AU".
I have no particular liking to Paine, actually she is my less favorite member of the YRP trio, but she turned up to be a good source of inspiration for me.
Disclaimer : SquareEnix owns all the fun ! …. sigh I wish they would share Aerith with me, though… :(
PAINE : THE EARLY EARLY YEARS
Ever wonder where babies came from? Of course you have, as everyone else, and most likely you got an answer: something about birds and bees and storks and fairies in the worst case, but the point was that it took a mother and a father to make a baby. That meant that every baby had parents, and, incidentally - since every grown up has once been a baby - everyone on Spira had, at point, had parents too, even the orphaned ones.
Her mother was not a fair-haired princess trapped in some ivory tower by some evil king, and her father was no knight nor prince no anything near noble. In fact there were no noble in the world she was born to, only priests and summoners and a bad big monster named Sin who destroyed everything in its way.
No, her parents' life was nowhere near a fairytale, actually they were plain merchants.
In addition of being no princess, her mother was not even pretty - or at least that was what people in the holy city of Bevelle used to think. Fate, or genetics as you may call it, had played an bad trick on her and she was born an albinos. She had thin white hair and a pale complexion and for that people thought she was either anemic or a ghost. Her eyes too were subject to wonder: they were red as if she had spent the whole last year crying when if fact it was only their natural color. Neither her skin nor her eyes could stand the sun for very long and so she spent most of her life in the shadow of her room - which turned up to be a good thing because when she went out people would call her names.
Her father was a frail looking young man, freshly arrived from Porto Kilika to the big town of Lucca. He had planed to go there, make some money, and then go back to his hometown, find some girl, marry her and die old and happy in a hut full of his grandchildren. But fate obviously decided it other way. He did make money buying and selling goods , and along with the money came friends too. One of his particular friends was a young man from Bevelle. He was named Auron and was studying to become part of the Church of Yevon. They soon became as close as brother, and Auron brought him home once to meet his family. By chance (or fate) his sister was no one but the white-haired red-eyed non-princess.
So that was how her parents met. Now you probably wish they lived forever happily ever after. But they did not. For, you see, all this happened in a faraway time, when High Summoner Yuna was nothing but a toddler, barely able to stand on her feet and far to young to even think of trying to bring the Eternal Calm. No even Lord Braska had gone on his pilgrimage yet, and Sin was still roaming free round Spira, wrecking havoc everywhere he went.
At first her parents did not care about Sin because they were in love and when you are in love you do not care about that sort of thing. But when her mother found out that she was pregnant, they both decided that they had to do something, anything, to ensure a Sin free future for their child. For a while they toyed with the idea of joining the crusaders. They doubted they could be any help, with her mother being both pregnant and unfit for outdoor activity. Still they gave it a shot and found out that their addition too the group was not too much.
Being with child was hard of course, a warrior with morning sickness and a swollen belly was bound to had more difficulties than the others. But it was worth the joy of having the baby furiously kick its mother's belly, knowing that it was safe and healthy. Then someone would make a comment along the line of "This little guy's gonna be a tough fighter" and the mother would answer "It's gonna be a girl". Then they would all laugh and pretend for a while that life was easy and that babies could grow free to choose whether they wanted to be girls or fighters.
Back then medical knowledge was far from those we have now: women had to go through all the throes of a giving birth and could not ask for a saving shot. When you were giving birth in a crusader's camp tent by the moonflow, there was nothing but a ragged mattress, a bucket of hot water and a midwife if you were lucky.
Despite her unusual appearance, her mother was quite a regular woman when it came to giving birth, which means moody and terribly angry at the whole world. Sweating, hurting and bleeding from seven hours of painful labor, her mother was shouting every obscenities in the world and even making up some of her own. She was swearing at her husband for being responsible of her state and trying to crush his fingers in her hand. Eventually the midwife delivered a healthy little girls, with blood red eyes like her mother and a tendency to kick anything that went near her limbs. But when the midwife asked what her name was to be, her mother - that had no recovered yet - hissed "What about PAIN !" and her father being a little slow from time to time decided that is sounded nice, and so "Paine" it was.
Three years later, the big evil Sin found it appropriate to take the lives of the albinos girl and the Kilika merchant, because they were fighting him and it was fair to do so after all. That day the little girl called Paine was orphaned, but because she was both a tough fighter and a somewhat lucky girl she lived. In the end Lady Yuna, along with Sir Auron defeated Sin and then befriended her. Although she never got to call anyone "mother" or "father" again, she found faithful friend that she could call "family". This was her happily ever after.
Now if only Lady Yuna's blond ditz of a cousin would stop making fun of her name…..
Why make Paine related to Auron?
Just because I read once a fanfiction in which they were related (can't remember which one, sorry, it was a long time ago) and I thought it was a good idea. With the way she look and acts, Paine HAS to be related in some way either to Auron or to Lulu !
As usual, comments and advice about my grammar and/or spelling are welcome and highly apreciated