Disclaimer: I don't own Dissidia.

I'm usually pretty shameless, as far as fanfiction authors go. But I feel bad about having written this chapter. Please enjoy!

Chapter Six: The Devil's Trill

As my feet step once more onto the Crystal World, my eyes spy a ghost sleeping like an angel. I don't believe it.

My first instinct is to call to him, so I don't. Instead I silently cut the distance between us and fold my legs under me when I get close to him, close enough. He sleeps on his side, arms stretched out just a little, maybe in his dreams obsessively embracing an imagined lover.

And without the guard of his waking mind, his tail strays from under that ridiculous skirt of his. I think of everything that makes him different from me. The way his hair turns to feathers at the top, his pale skin that makes a vampire look healthy, and how he just can't seem to keep on any weight.

He also cries out in his sleep. I didn't know that. Sorry, Cosmos. I've got my own agenda.

"Kuja," I mutter. I want to feel sorry for him, I want to abandon him, I want to wake him up and talk him out of this, I want to kill him. Instead, I do something that might get me killed instead: I stroke his hair and try to stop the faint whimper in the back of his throat.

He doesn't wake up, which is a shame. But he smiles a weary, grateful smile and shifts a little. His hand curls gently around my wrist, and doesn't let go. Honestly. Sometimes I can't believe that he's, well, who he is. Just drives it home, I guess, knowing how easily we could have become each other instead.

If you were me, Kuja, you'd still be reaching out to your lover in your sleep, knowing you won't find her in waking. Except you'd have memories, not fantasies. But you know all about that, don't you?

I won't hold Dagger ever again. Even if we win and I go back, she won't be waiting for me. So I don't want to go back.

I hate myself for the things I make myself do, sometimes. But it's all for the end result.

I pull my hand away from his and replace that out-of-mind kind touch with a knife at his throat. "Wake up, big brother."

He opens his eyes slowly, languidly. I don't think he really recognizes my voice or hears what I've said. But he figures it out soon enough. There's a flicker of fear—not surprise, genuine fear—before his face hardens into a blank expression, except that with his face, he looks like a sculptor's magnum opus.

"Really, Zidane," he asks me, sighing patiently. "How many times must you make this mistake?"

And he evaporates in a ribbon of blue light, only to reappear to my side. He stands and crosses his arms expectantly, and stares at me with one of his 'you have five seconds to prove you're not wasting my time' faces.

He didn't move behind my back. He didn't attack. What the hell, Kuja?

"All right, Zidane, what do you want? Aside from the obvious, of course," he says, looking over his shoulder. Oh. He stands between me and the Crystal. "To which I might add that you aren't maximizing your scruffy thievery skills to their highest potential. You know how tired I get nowadays," he muses. "So why didn't you just take it? I don't think I would have woken up."

"Because you've got something of mine," I tell him. "And I need that more than I need to be the one to rescue the Crystal."

His eyebrows arch high. "Really?"

I sigh heavily, and the grip on my daggers gets just a little tighter. He's such a better actor than I am. "Come on, Kuja. You know what I'm talking about! I don't have time to put up with your games."

"But you have all the time you could ever want, here in the Crystal World," he smirks, walking a half-moon path around me. "So you'll just have to spend a little more quality time with your dear older brother and humor him, because he honestly has no idea what you mean."

He would refer to himself in third person. "How'd you come back from the dead, Kuja? Who in all of Gaia would actually care enough for you to save you from a death that, in my opinion, pales in comparison to what you actually deserved?"

"Oh, Zidane. If you're attempting to appeal to my sense of guilt, then you need to tell me what you're seeking."

I blink. My guard drops. "What? I'm not guilting you about anything. That's your job."

Silence.

"Seriously, no one helped you, did they," I tell him. "For someone who threw a fit because he figured out he was mortal, you just won't die. That takes skill, I gotta admit."

I watch him as he pauses, and idly coils his hair around his pinky. Then he looks up. "Zidane, if it's a thank-you you want from me, then perhaps you could have accepted it when I traveled across two continents to do so. I didn't offer a rain check."

"Funny, I don't seem to remember that," I inform him, slowly.

I frown. "But I'll tell you what I do remember. I remember showing up at the Black Mage Village one day, to find it burned to the ground. Good thing Mikoto made it. She told me what happened, Kuja. You shouldn't have left her alive."

The hair slips away from his hand like rainwater as he looks at me. He's quiet for a while. "Am I hearing you correctly?" he asks me. "Am I hearing my plucky, valiant little brother suggesting that I should have let the black mages and the Genomes die? That I should have turned my backs on them, that I shouldn't have protected them? Shouldn't have saved their lives…?"

"Kuja, you razed the Black Mage village to the ground yourself!"

He denies it. Just plainly denies it, with a simple bare-faced, 'no'.

Then he smiled, but it was that weary smile he gave me in his sleep. "I suppose, though, you must have heard differently. I am a rather easy target for blame, aren't I? But I'd think that you, of all people, would at least—"

His voice dies. He clears his throat. It's not a cough, although it sounds like a faint echo of the gagging fit that usually follows up afterwards. "After all," he continues, his voice slowly, faintly hollowing out, "why would I travel there? I'm hardly wanted. I only went to the Black Mage village in the first place to search for you."

For someone who really can't stand the thought of someone pitying him, he's warmed up quite well to the idea of wheedling it from me. "Why, so you could kill me too?" I demand. "You think that if you kill all the Genomes, all the Black Mages, and me, you'll somehow not die?"

I watch his face. I watch his subdued flinch, his halfway stopped reaction. Kuja forgets to put his mask back on. "I was worried about you!"

"When I woke up," he tells me as he draws close to me, gets in my face. "When I woke up and you weren't there, I was scared to death that you'd done something totally stupid like gone off to look for help for my sake, and gotten yourself killed! I wasn't gonna sit around and see if your dead body showed up, so what else was I supposed to do?"

"Why would you expect me to be there when you 'woke up'?"

"Well, excuse me for giving you a little more credit that that! It didn't even cross my mind that you weren't there because you had just left…"

He jerks away, looks away. Of all theatrics, he's putting out tears, but he knows better than to let them fall. He tilts his head back. "Why even bother to go through the trouble of saving me in the Iifa Tree if you were just going to abandon me in the desert?"

But he's talking normally; his typical faked theatrics are hardly the first thing on his mind if that's the case. I just don't know what to say next.

Seriously. Nothing comes to my head.

"So that's where you ended up afterwards," I tell him slowly, the words forming through the fog settled in my thoughts. I shrug. "I guess that makes sense…"

And I do have a thought. I bite my lower lip as I try to phrase it in the best way possible. "Kuja, uh," I begin, terribly eloquently, and I look up at him. "I don't know how to say this, but I think you're remembering what you want to remember."

I'm a little bit freaked out right now, to tell the truth. I look at those eyes, amazed at how just a shade off can make someone so out of place. "Kuja, you got out of the Iifa Tree on your own steam. No one helped you. No one," I tell him, "would have helped you."

"Zidane, I'm not making this up!" he shouts. He's gripping his hands into such tight fists that his nails must be cutting deep into his palms. "I remember that you came after me! I remember that you didn't want me to die alone!"

He's like a little kid. I put my hands up to gesture in my own defense, and back away a bit. Easy, Kuja. "Hey, I'm not saying that you're lying. Maybe to you, that's what really happened…"

"Really, Zidane? Really, now," he retorts. He's furious. I've never seen anyone Trance outside of physical combat before, but I feel as if I'm about to witness it for the first time.

"Well, try this on for size. When I finally made it to Alexandria, the same darkness that destroyed the Black Mage village had torn your precious little girlfriend's kingdom apart. There was nothing left. And you weren't there… I thought I owed it to you, at least, to protect her."

I only remember watching her fall. And suddenly, I want to either curl up in a ball and hide, or hurt someone. Preferably him.

"My bad. I guess someone else besides you, then, just happened to mess with her mind so much that she thought it would be better to kill herself."

That look on his face. I don't know how to respond. But I don't get the chance.

He looks up, and there's a subtle flash of hatred not meant for me. He pauses, and quick thought flashes behind his indigo eyes. "Get out, Zidane," he mutters.

"Over my dead body," I respond. "We're not done yet. You've still got what I'm looking for."

And his hand closes around my collar before I know it. "No. You don't understand. You have to get out of here, now," he tells me quickly. It's like our conversation never happened. "I can't let him see you!"

I'm pushed backwards with enough force to crack my skull open if I hit the stone. But I land softly, in another place entirely. What just happened?