The Invitation
The room erupted with laughter as Locke himself stood before the tables of merry guests on his own, facing the bride and groom with only a slightly apologetic look for the story he'd just told. Cyan had a number of drunken nights' worth of stories to share for his embarrassment, perhaps only bested in that category by Sabin.
He saw her across the floor of the tent, eyes fixed on him intently just like any other in the audience, except hers were distinct in their intensity. Perhaps he'd know her better in another life, where life itself wasn't so fragile and flippant. Later in the night he could approach her again, or he could drop it altogether and write her off on a list of could've-beens.
Paper lanterns hung from the ceilings casting a flame flickering glow on the faces of the crowd. He could stay in this moment for a while longer, the single man who held her captive as he caused a small twitch at the corner of her lips. But he toasted to the bride and groom instead.
Kefka's form shattered around them in a glimmering trickle of light, like a thousand shattered golden mirrors.
Locke had been considerably slower than before due to his previous injuries from the phoenix cave and somewhere from his peripheral Terra crawled to him on all fours, leaning her slick forehead to his to heal him and he pushed her gruffly back, signaling for her to retrieve Shadow's slumped figure over a pile of gravel.
"Life..." Kefka hissed, with an awkward gait unfitting for a god as he turned his body towards the woman at the far edge of the tower.
Celes.
While the others were preoccupied, Locke scrambled towards her, knife in the hand that clutched his chest. A trickle of warm blood fell over his eye, stinging it, and he squeezed it shut momentarily with a grunt as he ran.
"Dreams..." The disembodied voice boomed and Locke willed his legs to move faster.
"Hope..." Kefka towered directly over Celes now, and she knelt on one knee, looking up at him with an unsettlingly serene expression.
Dammit, she was in the best shape out of everyone, and yet she didn't move.
She was looking at the creature as if she looked at an old friend.
"Where'd they come from? And where are they headed?" Kefka cocked his head to the side. A pillar behind him cracked in half, as if obeying some unspoken order to self destruct. His silvery hair fell matted around him from his forehead to his shoulders, as if bearing the weight of an invisible crown that had since been cast off.
Locke heard footsteps from another behind him, but he didn't bother to turn and see who it was. The only other person who could reach Kefka at this point was Terra, who was spent from merely keeping everyone alive.
"These things I'll destroy!" Kefka boomed, and Celes rose swiftly to meet him as Locke finally gained on them and thrust himself onto Kefka, penetrating him some with his blade but forced back with the momentum of Celes' spell. She turned to him apologetically, wasting no time to toss a potion his way.
Kefka was getting remarkably slow, uncoordinated, and sporadic. It was Locke's experience that this was when foes became most unpredictable- they were either backed into a corner and lashed out in some furious way that could cost one his life if not prepared, or they simply faded into exhaustion.
Celes stopped Sabin's blow, parrying some desperate attempt as Kefka summoned an attack against her. The granite where she'd stood melted to soft gravel instead, causing an uptake of dust in the air.
She said something inaudible, and the god sank to his knees, an expression of both awe and disgust splayed across his face. He replied to her in sentences, reaching upwards to perhaps brush a hand to her cheek, or to break her neck, but no one would ever know because she drove her sword into him for what would be the last time.
The magicite around them glittered and shattered and Kefka bled out onto the stone floor of the tower.
Human blood.
The tower was a series of tunneled staircases and halls. The torches on the walls flickered and faded, and the group ran with Terra in the lead, looking over her shoulder when she turned a sharp corner or jumped a particularly nasty divide. Edgar took the rear and pulled any occasional straggler that collapsed from exhaustion, though as the structure shook and gave way their bodies were tossed here and there, and the adrenaline rush of certain death kept up their pace.
A chamber where the floors were barely tethered to the beams that once held them caused them to slow, each taking their time to maneuver across. Locke moved ahead of Terra here, testing the integrity of the place with the careful rocking from the balls of his feet as he went for the others who followed.
Celes was nimble enough, but her fatigue had weighed her down and she was exhausted. She ran lightly over the preset course, stumbling over a gaping ledge and falling forward, causing something to drop from her waist.
The others moved past her, attempting to pull her along as they went, but she pushed them off, crawling on all fours to retrieve what she'd dropped behind her. Locke felt his heart hammer in his chest as he called for her and went ignored. He dove and gripped her by the ankle of her boot and she only kicked him.
"Get back!" She hissed. He fought her defiance with his own. He was willing to honor her request for noninvasive conversations but he'd be damned if Celes became a part of the carnage of the tower.
Whatever the thing was, she was hell-bent on retrieving it. As he spotted something fluttering on the edge of the floor where she was headed, his urgency overrode any sort of rational thought and he reached and grabbed her by the belt, roughly knocking her off balance and sliding her toward him. Somewhere behind them Terra screamed for them to stop and the beams under the floor shook and groaned under their weight.
Celes rolled onto her back and sent a powerful kick to his stomach, loosening his grip briefly, but he only winced and tightened his fistful of her garment further. He cried out through his teeth in pain as her boot came all too close to crushing a particularly sensitive target in his groin. Nevertheless, he used the strength he could muster to pull her back to him as she delivered blow after blow.
Finally he loosed his grip enough so that she could roll back onto her side and dive for the edge again, claiming something small in her gloved hand while sending the the floor teetering over the edge with her momentum.
"CELES!" Locke bellowed and slid further down the floor to where she hung from the newly shortened ledge, clutching the uneven ground with both hands, one of them wrapped in an unbelievably familiar pattern.
She looked back at him, clear blue eyes wide in the dim flickering light in utter terror.
Locke hooked a foot on a ledge on the uneven ground behind him he reached with both hands and grasp hers, attempting to stabilize the body the kicked wildly and swung like a rag doll in the wind.
"Locke." She sputtered, her body trembling in fear.
Locke's forehead was only inches from hers. "I will not let go. I promise."
He leveraged his foot as an anchor and maintained an arm over her shoulder. He pulled her upward. They were both slick with sweat and she slid backward some, causing her to panic and grab at him harder, her grip so tight that he winced. Her breath blew harshly in his ear and she breathed.
He pulled steadily, tucking her into him until he finally was able to reach her belt again and pull her from the reaches of the depths below. Wrapping an arm over her shoulders, he crawled with her to a more stable part of the floor, and the trail they'd just used to crawl over fell away into the darkness.
Locke pulled the tattered remains of his bandana from her shaking hand and held it up to her inquisitively.
"I..." She stammered and looked down at the floor.
He was furious with her. After all this time she'd shut him out time and time again, all for her own damn pride. But to top it off she went after something so arbitrary and small, putting her own life on the life to do so and nearly ending his when he attempted to stop her from being foolish when he was right in front of her.
"You almost ate it trying to pick up this silly trinket." He snarled.
She snatched it back from him. Despite his anger, he maintained his arm around her shoulders to pull her to him if they needed another quick escape.
"I-I know."
"I don't know why you would throw your life away like that, Celes. And I know I probably never will."
He realized that his emphasis on the last two words was an almost cruel stab at her reservations. He jerked his head in the direction of their companions who were watching them in horror, motioning that it was time to move again.
The airship reeled and bucked from the unwelcome turbulence of the maneuvers it wasn't designed to perform. On deck, Edgar yelled something obscene, undoubtedly out of the rush of relief that washed over him when the result of their ordeal sank in:
Kefka was dead. Terra was still with them. And magic would fade from the world.
Locke looked to Celes as she joined him, leaning shakingly on the railing of the deck.
They could all use a drink, a doctor, and a hot bath, but they all gathered on the deck in a pathetic bloodied mess as the grey lights of dawn graced the world yet again.
"The bandana." Celes croaked. Half of her long braid had fallen out, causing bloodied clumps of hair to whip around her face in the breeze. The rising sun cast strange shadows over her features, making her appear much older than she really was.
"-I wanted to tell you about it." She said earnestly, her blue eyes almost appearing childlike for the first time.
Locke shook his head and leaned back over the rail, looking to the patchwork ground below. "You shouldn't have to. If it's that important to you, why should I need to know?"
Celes gripped the bar of the deck in one hand, swinging her body to and from it absentmindedly.
"I'll never get to crack your code, Chere. And that's alright."
Edgar and Sabin were being particularly loud behind them, and Celes turned to look at them at he resumed his gaze on her. Up ahead, Terra stood by the bow of the ship and pulled her long hair from it's pony tail, looking to the brightening horizon and she ran her fingers over her scalp. Celes then changed her direction to the girl instead.
"I never intended to be anything to 'crack'." She murmured in a volume so low that he knew it wasn't his to hear.
No doubt, his friends were all incredibly flawed, Celes included. But the thing he realized about friendship was it's tendency to mask certain flaws. When he saw someone as a friend, he more or less saw them as he wanted to; Sabin was a hard drunk but a loyal man. Edgar loved the people around him to a fault. Terra was kind and gentle, but still incredibly naive and gullible. Friends saw only the best in each other.
When he saw someone as a stranger, he saw them exactly as they were. Celes was quiet, she was strong. She commanded respect and when she didn't get it immediately, she became untethered. She didn't eat food that had touched other foods on the same plate. Her face became flushed when she drank wine. When he kissed her she was vulnerable and audibly receptive to every single touch. When he was close enough he could see the subtle freckles on her nose that momentarily made her appear younger than she actually was. When they lay together she was an open book. But at all other times, she was incredibly guarded.
She was beautiful, and even if he'd spotted her for the first time on the street he'd want to find a way to break open her skull and peer into her inner monologue, but to his disdain, it didn't work that way.
His father in his late old words said it best:
'A woman you have to break was never yours to begin with.'
When the ship finally docked somewhere outside of Maranda, Locke packed his things in a single bag and slipped off, squeezing the shoulders of the remaining inhabitants as he passed. Celes was still asleep in her cabin below.
It wasn't even a week later that he discovered one of his wounds had become infected. He lay in a bed for days, sweating like a madman in a fever dream and seeing her under the chandelier of her dressing room in the opera house.
He wondered about how she obtained the scrap of the bandana that he'd left behind in a village she'd never been to. He wondered about her exchange with Kefka. He wondered if she in fact did love him the way he was sure that she did when she looked at him sometimes. And if that were the case, he wanted to ask her the about the exact moment that it happened.
He knew his moment- under the stars of Bristle Hole when he encountered her on the lake.
Or maybe before then.
The fever broke and he took up odd jobs to repay the debt, compartmentalizing the image of the woman as a stranger.
He was involved in reconstruction efforts, he drank too much ale too many times. He crossed the world the South Figaro and checked in with his friends. He met other women with flushed cheeks and warm beds and saw countless birds fly overhead. He sought after treasure in the deepest depths, resurfaced by the sudden shift of land and sea. He scoped out the desert where Bristol Hole should've been, but with empty hands he resorted to the realization that it hadn't survived the mass destruction. He headed to Narshe and purchased more opium.
Sunrises were brighter again.
A year after all that began, a wedding invitation arrived.
A/N: Sorry for the wait, I moved this week and have a few more days before I leave town for a week. Welp, that's it with the main story, by not for Locke/Celes! The last chapter will be the full blown wedding chapter I've teased, and then a possible epilogue after that depending on how that chapter leaves me. I'm really excited to write it because it's basically what I wrote this whole thing for.
Writing Locke/Celes has been so satisfying because I find they're a common and relatable trope in many real life adult couples: the fun-loving free spirit and the serious and guarded passionate one. FFVI is so good for the dynamic of it's characters for the time it was produced and it has been so satisfying to expand on those- I may explore single oneshots of others after this, who knows. I do have some spin offs or "deleted" content from this from where the wine got the best of me! I may edit and post those separately.