DISCLAIMER: All characters and ideas in these stories are not my property. They belong to Midway, Aruze, and/or whoever else created or owns Shadow Hearts.
A/N: I like writing one-shots, but I dislike having so many free-floating little pieces, so I've just been collecting them here. The stories in this collection are not connected in any way, they're just random Shadow Hearts one-shots. Criticism is always welcome, so long as it's constructive.
THIS STORY: Give Us This Day
RATING: PG
CHARACTERS: Yuri, Alice (Yurice)
WARNINGS: Fluff, SH1 game ending spoilers
Give Us This Day
Thrown against the stone path, gravel under his fingernails, blood mixing with spit as his mouth was ground against the cold ground, Yuri twisted his body and aimed the sole of his boot straight at Czernobog's chest.
"Ger'off me, ya big lug," he grunted, as the demon, tongue lolling against razor-like teeth, leaned over him. It took all of Yuri's strength to boot the fool back onto the hillside beside them. Czernobog regained his bearings in a flash, but Yuri was even faster, already on his feet and lunging at the bony creature's stomach. The impact shot tendrils of pain all the way up Yuri's arm, and his knuckles turned white and red in turns, but the stony skin cracked and Czernobog bent over with a startled growl.
"Whadd'ya want this time?"
Yuri's lucid nightmares had been far less terrible and frequent since he'd been freed from the soul of Seraphic Radiance. He'd even gone so far as to hope that the curse was really fading away. But this one, it was sharp and real, and the pain hurt just as much as that of any waking exertion would. Normally, too, the demons already beaten into submission remained subdued. What new strengthening of fear, sadness, and pain in Yuri's mind had awakened Czernobog to this rebellion?
The demon took advantage of his positioning on higher ground, and Yuri's apparent distraction, to launch himself from above, bearing down on the detested harmonixer with a beat of his terrible wings. Feeling the shadow descend, Yuri jogged back a few steps and threw himself into a spinning kick. His foot connected with Czernobog's midriff, as he had hoped, sending the demon flying again onto the hillside. But this time Yuri, too, unbalanced by the force of Czernobog's body, tumbled through the air and landed, sprawled, on a barren chunk of dirt outside the normal path.
As the huge dark elemental fell, Yuri saw him slam against his own glowing gravestone. The obsidian rock trembled, and with a jolt, the earth below tore open like a starving seamonster and swallowed its deviant child up. As the graveyard settled, Yuri finally relaxed enough to get his bearings.
Just above his head was another gravestone, but this one was small and cracked. Yuri vaguely remembered having seen it before, on previous trips. It had appeared very suddenly, although he couldn't pin down the exact moment or context, and it didn't have a name on it, or perhaps the scrawled words were too difficult to read.
Even upon thinking this, however, Yuri lifted his head and stared at the surface of little monument, only to see two words engraved deeply and permanently into the stone. Blinking, rubbing his eyes, and stumbling to his feet, Yuri looked again, hoping he might have hallucinated the previous impression. But no, the words remained the same.
Heartbeats came quickly and irrepressibly as the harmonixer tried to understand. The only people buried here in his mind were the people, or creatures, whose souls he had devoured. The graves were erected as prisons for the souls who had fallen under his curse, the hell-bound screeching spirits swallowed up in his darkness. At best he had guessed that the little grave was his own, waiting to swallow him up in turn, built up bit by bit through the malice and hatred of the souls within him. He had felt an increase in their strength and insistence since his battle with the demi-god. Their hunger for him had tripled into a ravenous craving. But there was no way such a grave as this one before him could exist. No way, unless…
Yuri didn't scream. He just woke up, starting awake so quickly, the bulk of his body tipped over the side of the bed and fell to the floor with a painful 'thud.' Must've moved around in my sleep, he thought as a sharp pain shot through the part of his elbow which had first connected with the wooden floor. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark; whenever he awoke like this, the foggy shadows of the real world always seemed more dream-like than the nightmares.
The wood panels being cold against his bare legs, Yuri stood and pulled on his pants. Sitting down on the edge of his bed again, the harmonixer felt how exhausted his body was; his muscles seemed heavy and sore and the arches of his feet hurt from walking. The jittery, tense feeling in his head, however, wouldn't allow him to sleep. Fear constricted his throat and chest until he felt he might puke. He couldn't get his mind off of those two words on the grave marker: Alice Elliot.
Standing quickly and roughly massaging his face with one hand, fingers digging deep into the skin as if to rub away the horrible thoughts, Yuri pulled his jacket off the foot of the bed where he had slung it and threw it around his shoulders. He stalked out into the cool air of the hallway and leaned against the railing.
It was the soft gasp of air and the sound of soft limbs gliding over the carpet that alerted him to the presence of another person. Looking down sharply, brows drawn together, Yuri identified the other night owl, to his surprise, as Alice. The petite girl was sitting at the top of the staircase, gazing at Yuri. His entrance had obviously startled her, and her legs were drawn up protectively under the skirt of her nightgown. On top of the gown, she had wrapped a large scarf around her neck and shoulders to keep out the cold. Her silver-white hair, freed from its constraining braids, fell in thick waves about her head. Yuri had never seen her with her hair down, other than the few times she had attempted to brush it or wash on their journey. Since reaching civilization, Alice had always kept these matters of personal hygiene strictly out of sight of her male companions. Seeing her like this, Yuri could understand why; she looked like some wild angel, ethereal and wide-eyed. He wanted to reach out and gather up that hair, rubbing it against his face and taking in its scent until he drowned in it.
Instead, he just looked down, surprised, and stuttered, "Alice."
"Couldn't sleep, hmm?" Alice smiled shyly at him and focused her gaze on the bottom of the staircase, as though she were waiting for something to arrive there. In profile, her face looked much paler and thinner than usual. Slight shadows had begun to appear in the delicate skin under her eyes.
"Ha ha, nah." Yuri laughed off his concern and embarrassment. "You?"
The girl tugged the scarf self-consciously tighter around her shoulders. Unbeknownst to her, a small patch of white skin was revealed on her back. Attracted by the vulnerability of that spot, Yuri approached her and seated himself on the top stair at her left. "I was… I just wanted to look around here again," she was saying. "Just to be here, seeing and hearing and feeling it."
At first her comment seemed cryptic, but a slow awareness in Yuri, a further constricting in his chest, told him that he understood all too well what she was talking about.
"Why did you do it," he asked, almost bitterly.
For a moment Alice was silent. She pulled the lacy edge of her nightgown down to cover her toes and shifted her legs restlessly. Then she said, "Because I had to."
"No, you didn't," Yuri started miserably, but his companion cut him off with a soft, but strong voice.
"Then I did it because I wanted to, if that's what you want to hear. Either way I did it, and I don't regret it, even a little."
How had she known what he was talking about, Yuri wondered, without considering for a moment that she might still not know, might be talking about something else. No, he was sure she knew, the same way he had known what was on her mind. Whether she really didn't regret it, that he found difficult to believe.
Sullenly he stared at the pattern on the carpet—grayish pears surrounded by creeping vines—and traced the weave with an idle finger. Stinging tears began to well up behind his eyes, but with gritted teeth and a 'hmph' of will he held them back. "I still don't get it," he insisted. "I lost because of my own weakness. It was my own fault. And havin' you suffer for it, that was the last thing I wanted."
"I know," Alice nodded. "And I hope you can forgive me." She hurried own before he could express astonishment at that sentiment. "But when I tried to imagine a world without you in it, it was… I just couldn't. A world without your laughter, or your voice, or your bravery. I don't want that world to exist, not yet. This earth needs you, and… so do I."
Yuri watched the girl brush a strand of silver hair behind her ear, still staring at the ground. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes crinkled with a secret smile. Small, with a slightly boyish face, narrow, faded blue eyes on either side of a straight nose, pale skin, and odd white hair, Yuri thought she was beautiful beyond description. The thought of a world without her was becoming increasingly difficult to bear. He didn't feel brave at all.
"I'm really sorry," he muttered, rubbing his sweating palms together and digging his bare toe absently into the soft carpeting.
"You shouldn't be," she countered, finally looking up and turning to face him. Gazing shyly into his face as he, in turn, gazed at her, she giggled a little. Her capacity to find humor in the oddest places always astounded Yuri. He prided himself on taking things in stride, but Alice had a clever, hidden smile for all occasions, and a sense of humor he wouldn't have guessed at, that cold night in the rocky plains, when they first met. "It's already been worth it," she continued. "I've had so much fun in the last few weeks, how could I regret a minute of it?"
She laughed again, a bell-like laugh, and Yuri had to chuckle too. "Yeah, beatin' up monsters sure is a riot, huh? And there's nothin' like raiding orphanages!"
The two of them sat awhile that way, laughing and watching as the fading moonlight cast deepening shadows across the floor of the hallway. "But you know," Alice began quietly, as their humor died down, "it's moments like these that I really did it for. And this is what I'll miss the most."
"Chronic sleeplessness?" Yuri's grin twisted as he raised an eyebrow at her.
Alice favored him with one of her little glares in response. But it was short lived. "No. Being here, with… people I care about." She seemed to hesitate, chewing on her lower lip for a moment, then, with a determined flash of her eyes, she pushed ahead. "Being here with you, really. It's these moments that mean the most, even if they seem so small and worthless. It's worth it for the pleasure of just having this day—any day—to spend with you, even if it won't last. That's why I don't want to sleep, to let the days end so soon. Just sitting here quietly and seeing you and hearing you…"
"With me?" Yuri straightened his back a little uncomfortably. Suddenly his whole body seemed to itch, and he scratched the back of his neck with a restless motion. Sure, she had apparently wanted to save his life so badly, she'd given up everything. But Alice was a giving soul that way. It didn't necessarily mean that she had any special attachment to him, did it? Yuri had never felt much of an attachment to any of the people whose lives he'd saved, with the exception of the silver-haired girl beside him. But to believe she felt the same way about an uneducated, hot-headed fool like him! Nah.
"Yuri, I…" Alice seemed to lose her steam and looked away again. Her scarf slipped off her left shoulder and the sight of her bare skin again aroused deep feelings in Yuri. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold her and swallow her up until every part of her was completely his, protected by him, inseparable from him. "I wanted to tell you that I lo…"
The sound of a door creaking loudly on its hinges brought both companions out of their individual reveries with a horrible start. To his surprise, Yuri found he had been unconsciously leaning closer and closer to Alice as she spoke, one hand stretched towards her. Now, he jerked back in surprise. But he wasn't fast enough.
"I saw that," Margarete purred in self-satisfaction and delivered a swift kick to Yuri's ribs. "You keep your lecherous hands off of her!" As the harmonixer doubled over with a groan, nearly sliding down a few of the stairs, the older woman continued, cooing, "Oh, Alice, I was so worried. I woke up and saw that you weren't there… I was afraid something had happened to you!"
"Oh, please don't be worried." Alice consoled Margarete with a soft, pleasant voice, but Yuri detected a hint of the same scolding annoyance that sometimes appeared in her eyes when he was too bold with her.
"Don't you know you ought to be getting some sleep," the buxom spy went on, the flimsy material of her lacy nightgown clinging absently to her curves. "It's much too cold out here to be running about without clothes on!" At this point in her lecture, Margarete gave a pert nod in Yuri's direction, eyes glued on his bare chest, his jacket having slipped mostly off.
"Ha," Yuri snorted. "Looks t'me like you're the one that oughta be cold." He felt some annoyance at the lost moment. "And shouldn't you be sleepin'?"
Margarete sniffed and tossed her head, slightly curling golden locks, mussed by sleep, billowing about her. "Forgive me for being concerned with the health of our poor Alice. The strain is enough on her as it is!"
Margarete was undoubtedly referencing Alice's complexion, grown notably sickly in the last two weeks, and her slight loss of weight. Yuri wanted to growl that Margarete had no clue about Alice's condition or how to soothe it, but Alice had already stood up and was brushing the wrinkles out of her nightgown.
"Nevermind," she said, straightening her scarf again. "It's true, I've been very careless." She aimed her gaze directly at Yuri and murmured, "Tomorrow is a new day, and, God willing, I'm sure it will be another one worth living for."
Margarete murmured some assent and led Alice back into their shared room, but Yuri was sure the message had been for him alone. Standing slowly, he gathered up his jacket and went back into his own room to get a little more sleep. With his odd upbringing, he wasn't sure what he believed in anymore, but it seemed as likely to him that Alice had the right idea, as anybody. Indeed, more likely. As the tiny bar of light visible under Margarete and Alice's door blinked out, he thought, Dear God, thanks for today, and, in your mercy, grant us tomorrow, too.
