Title: Human Voices Wake Us
Rating: SFW
Wordcount: 2677
Pairing: Celes/Siren
Summary: Her first contact with magicite draws Celes into an unexpected bond with Siren.
Note: Written for thalassashells for the 2015 round of FemslashEX.
Her tendons and sinews are taut as harp strings; her ribs are xylophone bars; the space between them is the hollow of a drum. A cool breath on her nape whistles through the flute of her spine.
Celes wakes with a start, hand squeezing the hilt of her sword. Her breaths come fast and harsh, and her face is hot. It isn't her turn yet to take the watch, but after collecting herself, she slips out of the tent to let the night air cool her.
When she first touched the magicite, her hand tingled. The feeling has never diminished, but within a day she grew accustomed to it as tactile white noise. If she focuses, she can feel magic seeping into her through the fabric of her pocket in the same way that she can feel her heart beat.
By the cold remains of the fire, she finds Sabin sitting cross-legged.
"Hey there," he says. "You having funny dreams, too?" Though she doesn't quite nod, Sabin finds his answer in her expression. "So's Gau. Locke hasn't said anything, but he wouldn't be grumbling about that cat so much if it wasn't messing with him in his sleep." He laughs.
Celes sits on a flat stone opposite him, back straight and legs together. Her pulse is still too fast. "I've had dreams like these before."
"Really? When?"
"After my infusion. They were much less intense." Understanding why twists her gut. Shiva's echo faded inside her, but Siren hums steadily. "We'll get used to them."
"I don't know if I'll ever get used to having a dragon-deer show me how to walk without breaking a blade of grass, but maybe I'll be able to understand what it's saying. It just sounds like wind chimes to me." Sabin flutters his fingers. "What's Siren like?"
Heat rises in Celes's cheeks. "Strange."
He laughs again, leaving her to wonder how much of an answer her face gave away this time. When she doesn't say anything else, he tips his head back to look at the moon. "Gau calls them 'awake dreams,'" he says at length. "I think I get what he means."
Siren vibrates inside her, singing against her skin.
The slamming of the door is percussion. This is absurd—demeaning—foolish—but what flutters in her throat is not bile but vibrato. Through every fiber of Celes that resists is woven a thread of longing.
As much as she hates the plan, they have no better one, and Terra should not suffer for her pride. When Celes parts her lips, sound floods out. She chokes on the breath she struggles to draw against it.
All at once, the urgency recedes. As she is whisked from station to station to learn the steps of another woman's dance, music simmers inside her, filling her without drowning her. When she echoes the notes of her trainer, her voice is not quite her own. Her body is a ship she captains, at once under her command and subject to the whims of the wind and waves. For Terra, she reminds herself.
Celes is allowed a nap before the evening performance, so she reclines on a fainting couch, magicite burning like a coal in her pocket. Crowds and kidnapping await her. She needs a few minutes to be herself, alone.
As soon as her eyes close, the darkness becomes a sea dancing beneath the sun. The crest of a wave becomes a slender arm, from which slithers a dark ribbon. The sun flows down into shining hair. The sea itself, without losing its depth, recedes in into a sharp-featured face to form two pools above a pointed nose.
"I'm sorry," Siren says, in a voice brighter and clearer than birdsong. "I let my desires control me, and you in turn. You are no harp for me to strum."
Celes's skin tingles with the dream of becoming an instrument, of having music made of her. "No more than you are a tool for me to exploit."
"Indeed." Siren's lips are wine-dark and curve easily. She reaches out, ribbons falling loose from her arm, to brush her fingertips along Celes's jaw. Though her skin appears smooth, there is a subtly strange texture to her touch, an insinuation of scales. "Let us overlap, instead. We'll enrapture them. We'll hold them all spellbound and dumbstruck, slaves to our voice."
A shiver licks up Celes's spine. She sets her hand on Siren's arm, which is the same curious texture, and feels the tickle of a stray lock of hair. Uncertain whether she meant to push Siren away or coax her closer, she gathers her scattered thoughts of the world that persists beyond the dream. "I'll gladly accept your help, though we don't want to enrapture them so thoroughly that our gambler forgets to kidnap me."
"Don't worry. We'll be irresistible."
Siren's hair is not hair, Celes realizes, but long feathers. Her eyebrows are pale down. Stroking her thumb over Celes's cheek, she leans in so near that her hum vibrates in Celes's body. A high, sweet note passes between them, from one mouth to another.
Celes starts awake to find Gau's face looming above her. "Celes sick?" he asks. "You red."
She remains red as she is pinned into a dress so laden with lace that it weighs on her like armor, but all evidence of her blood is obscured by layers of white powder. Her hair is bound with a ribbon. In the mirror she finds herself garish, but the effect is meant to work from a distance. Up close, she would frighten and deafen. From afar, she allures.
In the darkened house, a sea of faces basks in her every breath. They are her army, eager to burn.
Celes grew up finding comfort in steel and glass, in the sterile chemical smells that lingered on Cid. The underground labs were home. As long as she followed the rules and procedures, she had nothing to fear from them.
All such certainty has been melting away from the moment that she entered the facility. Siren is an itch in her marrow and a keening at the edge of her hearing; wrong, wrong, wrong burns into her like a brand. In the ashes of memory, the walls of her sanctuary are charred bones.
In the heart of the lab, she opens a forbidden door and discovers what Cid protected her from. Her veins freeze solid. Behind her, Gau growls.
She can't let Siren's voice twine with her own to join him. The discordant storm would shatter glass and liquify brains.
Heinous, vicious, monstrous! Siren howls inside her, at the ragged edge of language. Worse than murder!
The creatures caged in glass are desiccated husks, long past saving. Celes's heart bursts with them.
The worst part isn't the shame or the bruises or the waiting alone in a sterile cell. The worst part is to have been trusted when she least deserved it, only to feel that trust shatter as soon as she learned to trust her weight to it. What the Empire decides to do to her now scarcely matters.
Darkness creeps over her cell until the walls and floor dissolve into shadow. A textured palm curls over her suddenly bare shoulder.
Celes whirls, losing track of gravity, and frowns at the impossible figure before her. "I don't have your magicite. You can't be here."
"Of course I can," Siren replies. "You carry something of me inside you now." Her fingers lace with Celes's, and a silencing spell throbs unbidden between them. "The brine that lingers in your hair is still the sea."
The darkness shifts into a moonlit sea, jagged with black rocks. They sit together atop one, hair tangling together in the wind. All around them, music rises, from the slapping of waves against stone to the cries of gulls.
A red glow appears on the horizon. Siren watches it as she says, "I did terrible things during the war."
"So did I."
Maranda was a civilian uprising, a cloud of flies stinging a dragon. When the dragon roused with Celes astride it, it descended upon a scarcely armed resistance as if upon an invading army. The flames melted the line between child and soldier. She relives the assault in a thousand dreams—the sickening rush of holding multitudes in thrall to her word, with life and death balancing on her tongue.
Siren's fingers draw a dark glissando from the strings of her harp. Her voice is low and soft, lilting toward a ballad: "When sailors braved my waters, they plugged their ears with wax. But I sang deeper, under the skin and through the bone. As I hummed through them, their limbs grew heavy, and their throats swelled against their voices. I watched them fall, still and silent, and then I burned their ships in offering to the god who shaped me."
Celes nods, slowly. "I put a city to the torch to make an example of it."
For a while they are quiet, until Celes runs her fingers through Siren's hair. The vanes of the feathers clink lightly together, as if their tips are gold.
"Before you," she adds, "I could create ice with my hands, but I set fires like any other human. It isn't magic that makes monsters."
The base of the statue cuts a deep groove into the rock. Something inside Celes splits open with it; magic bursts and leaks until she is a stew of swirling elements and roused echos. When Terra's hand grasps hers, she rediscovers gravity.
As they flee, stumbling over the bucking ground, Siren sings inside her: I was in thrall to the pitiless Goddess, who eroded minds and shaped flesh like clay. Even death was no escape from her.
The ground cracks at Celes's heels, and a swath of the island plummets through the clouds to rejoin the earth. She finds her balance in time to raise her sword. With a roar, a beast pounces from atop a crumbling hill.
Her blade sings through the air: None of the three can create, only ruin. They chisel away what displeases them until they have created a hollow for themselves. They will burn away the green and blue, and reshape the barren stone.
At the end of the world, they leap. The shock of impact travels up Celes's legs as she hits the deck of the airship. The wind claws at her face as Setzer forces the engine to its limits, but they cannot outpace the devastation. There is no shelter to take.
"How do we stop them?" Celes shouts, though no one outside her skin can hear her over the storm. Her blade drinks magic from the air, to no greater effect than a fish passing the ocean through its gills.
What would you stop? It's too late now.
The deck cracks.
On the other side of the shattering, there is only darkness. The smell of the sea washes over her, and Celes is surprised to discover that she is still solid and breathing. Her other senses return like a slow dawn: the taste of old salt in her mouth, the light filtering through her eyelids, the hum harmonizing with the sigh of the tide. Her head rests somewhere warm and soft. Damp sand presses against her back.
When she opens her eyes, Siren is smiling down at her, feather-hair fluttering in the breeze. Above, the sky is red. Sailors' delight, Celes remembers vaguely, or sailors' warning.
She clears the rust from her throat and asks, "Am I dead?"
"Not entirely."
The sea rolls in and out, hidden by a curtain of golden feathers. "I don't understand."
Siren laughs like the shiver of a tambourine. "The trouble with you, my dear, is that you have trouble with shades of gray."
"There isn't any gray to it." Frowning, Celes reaches up to touch Siren's cheek. She finds it solid. "There's no overlap between 'alive' and 'dead.'"
"Oh? Then what am I?"
Warm and strange, fierce as the sea and fragile as blown glass. After a thoughtful pause, Celes replies, "Between. Is this a dream that I can wake from?"
"Perhaps, if you wish." The pads of Siren's fingers catch in Celes's hair, like the teeth of a comb in need of oiling. "Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?"
"No. There's still so much I have to do."
With a sad smile, Siren leans to kiss Celes on the mouth. Her lips are cool and wet, pressing like a wave upon the shore; perhaps later, Celes's own lips will be stained wine-dark. The taste of brine lingers.
Celes rises and brushes the sand from her bare skin. Her body feels too light, as if her bones have been hollowed. The beach is vast and flat, without another creature in sight. No gulls cry.
"Is it really too late?" she asks.
"The world will never again be as it was. Land, sea, sky, and life itself were all forever altered from the moment the gods awakened." Siren presses against her from behind, hair folding around their shoulders. Soft breaths tickle Celes's nape.
Moving slowly to avoid dislodging Siren, Celes bends to scoop up a handful of seawater. What doesn't trickle between her fingers she freezes solid in her palm. "We were forever altered, too."
Siren's laugh is deep and wry, vibrating through them both. A spark from her hand melts the ice back into the sea. "Then wake," she whispers. "You were not meant to linger between."
They have forever altered the world, and themselves with it. Dead things seep into the barren earth and arise in green; the shadows still, and the rivers flow. Between the ribs of rotted dragons, flowers bloom.
Celes is riddled with holes, hollowed and hallowed places where magic has evaporated and nothing can take its place. Her sword is dead metal in her hands. When she touches snow, she shivers.
Craving something near solitude, she retreats for a while to the tiny island where Cid is still content to live. There is an element of penance, she suspects, though she never asks and he never tells. They don't talk about feelings; they don't try to fill silences. If she has to be reborn again, she might as well do it in the presence of the only parent she has ever known, who has already twice delivered her into new lives.
They drink tea and eat fish and don't talk about anything that resists words, and gradually she becomes restless.
The world has been forever altered, again and again, but the beach hasn't changed since she and Siren sang together to render the fish slow and groggy enough to catch. Only Celes has changed. Leaving her clothes in a heap on the sand, she probes the water with her foot. The chill makes her hiss. As she wades out into the sea, teeth gritted, her legs grow numb. The shore falls away beneath her feet.
Out here, the only sounds are the waves and the wind and the gulls. She closes her eyes and treads water as she listens. Clumsily, she tries to harmonize. She sounds better, and truer, when she dives and hums underwater.
Her flesh is tinged blue when she returns to shore. Her fingers struggle to pull her clothing over her wet skin. When Celes returns to the house, the sun has nearly set, and Cid scowls with worry. He lectures her about hypothermia as he heats water for a bath.
Nodding, she breathes on her hands to encourage feeling back into them. The smell of the sea fills her nose. She begins to cup a hand over her ear to capture an echo of the sound of the waves, but Cid is still speaking. She doesn't want to be rude, nor to explain. When she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the bathroom mirror, her lips are purple with cold.
Celes steeps her body in the tub, but she piles her hair atop her head to let the brine linger.