Aerith waited for Hawke in the church.
It was a grey morning. Rain poured off the Midgar plate in thick, dripping sheets and tapped against the church roof in an uneven staccato. The hole Zack fell through let in a grimy stream of water onto the flower patch.
She sat on the edge of the flowers and watched the intermittent drips. At least she wouldn't have to do any watering today.
Tseng had told her about his talk with Hawke. That he knew she was a Cetra and that they were both under observation and deemed wards of the state. Obviously Hawke was not a cetra, but the truth was worse, and Shinra wouldn't believe it anyway. Not until they had her on an operating table and saw for themselves.
In the end that was all it came down to: Shinra's whims.
She had frowned at Tseng's careful announcement, his shallow concern for her reaction. She kicked him out of the church. With every dream she explored, every spirit she spoke to, the leash chaffed all the worse. After Aega's visions of the past, Tseng's regretful terms and conditions on her freedom left a bitter taste in her mouth. It always had, but she used to fancy that she didn't mind.
No wonder Hawke was so resentful. Freedom was easier to disregard before you knew how good it tasted.
The door creaked open and Hawke arrived, looking grim. She stood at the edge of the increasingly swampy flower patch. Aerith swung her staff, making the water dance in oily ribbons.
"Remember when I asked for your help with some healing work?" Hawke asked.
"Mm-hm." Aerith looked up at her from under her damp fringe. "Is this anything to do with why Zack can't stop pacing with worry?"
"Most likely."
She pursed her lips. "What is it? What's wrong?"
"The Blight."
Hawke explained what that meant. Aerith's hands tightened around her staff.
"I…" Hawke looked over her shoulder at the door and then back again. "Look. The first rule of dealing with Blight is you don't touch it and you burn anything that's tainted." She reached into one of the pouches on her belt and pulled out a snaplock bag. "That said…"
It was actually three snaplock bags inside each other, and within the innermost bag was a rolled up white cloth. Hawke held it up gingerly, not using her spiked gauntlet.
Aerith took it from her and squinted at the contents. It looked like a bandage, with very slight discolouration, like something darker inside had seeped through.
"It doesn't look like much."
"Neither do you, that's half the trick. Can you try healing what's in there?"
Aerith gave her a flat look then focused. She prodded the bag with her mana, questing out with little curls of creation magic. "Is there anything to work with? I heal life, not-"
There was a pulse inside the bandage. Her eyes widened. She searched it out and it grew louder, like a deep gong, shaking through her chest, seizing onto her breath. It was in her lungs, then her throat, then her mind, hissing deep, deep down into her thoughts.
She yelped and threw the bag across the room.
The pulse receded. She panted and clapped a hand over her thundering heart. It felt like a knot around her lungs had loosened.
Hawke looked sidelong at the plastic bundle where it landed on a pew. "It's disgusting, isn't it?"
"It's alive!"
Hawke nodded. "And unkillable." She retrieved the bag. "Don't worry, it's always overwhelming the first time."
Aerith's heart rate climbed down from trying to escape her chest, but adrenaline made her arms shaky. There was something familiar about it. She shook her head. "Nothing is unkillable. Not even the planet."
Hawke shrugged. "It's as resilient as a planet then."
Her brow furrowed. "I want to try again."
Hawke held it out for her. She was ready for the corruption's assault this time and went in with a blunt blast of healing magic. It didn't do anything. She set her jaw and kept at it.
She stepped back some time later, breathing heavily.
"I've seen this before," she said.
"What? Where?"
"It wasn't exactly like this. And it wasn't in person either. Aega, that Pride spirit, showed me one of my ancestors working some magic on a sick elf. I think she was trying to heal this."
Hawke straightened. "Trying?"
Aerith bit her lip, recalling the look of concentration on Matriarch Coerla's face, the pallid skin of the elf. His gasp as she finished her work. "The patient looked like he got better."
Hawke put a hand on her shoulder. "What did she do? How did she do it?"
"She was working with a braid of… of light. Spirit light?"
"Spirit magic?"
"Maybe. It sang like the lifestream and got louder and louder as she braided it together. She pressed it into his chest and he woke up. I think maybe she was drowning this out."
"Drowning it out?" Hawke looked up at the skylight, with its dripping water. "'As the music plays, so we dance,'" she muttered.
"I think I can copy it," Aerith said. "The cure."
"In the waking world?"
"Does it have to be?"
"How else will you get it to Angeal? He doesn't fully enter the Fade."
She frowned. Could she bring something back from the dreaming world into the waking? It felt like something she should have been able to do, but she had no idea how. "I'll come up with something. Can I keep this?" She gestured with the innocent bag of disease.
Hawke shook her head and took it back. "I'm not even supposed to have it."
"Hey, I'll be careful."
"I mean Shinra would haul us both off to somewhere dark and damp with soundproof walls if they found out I had this." She tossed it up and snapped her fingers. A fireball caught the evil thing and held it in midair. Black smoke billowed up with the smell of burning plastic. It was caught in a bubble shield and the fire burned hotter and hotter until there wasn't even ash left.
Aerith watched it crumple into nothing, disquieted. They were all playing with things they didn't really understand, Shinra, SOLDIER, even her and Hawke.
"Maybe that's why there's no Blight on Gaia," she mused aloud. "The Cetra healed it all."
Hawke's brow furrowed.
"Then why does Genesis have it?"
Hawke rang the bell to Genesis' apartment.
She had actually been invited this time and didn't need to force her way in the door. She felt slightly awkward about it. All sorts of things were permissible during a disaster that she didn't know what to do with in the calm that followed. She shrugged it off. Shame was for Orlesians, she was here because her friend needed her help.
He opened the door and there was no giant wing or catastrophic meltdown in process. Only a tidy row of cardboard boxes taking up real estate in the middle of the living room, and a collected looking Genesis in a button down shirt and jeans.
The first box was open, exposing a stack of yellowing paper with little holes punched down the sides.
Genesis lifted a sheaf of papers. "This is everything I took from Hollander," he said. "Everything I have on the experiments that created me."
"Any information Shinra has on the Blight will be in there somewhere?" she asked.
He handed her the sheaf. "Somewhere."
She studied the first page. It held a bizarre chart of a circle with little blips of alternating colour around the outer ring and again within it. She squinted.
She looked up. "I have no idea what I'm looking at."
"That is my genome."
"I see." She lifted it to the light. "Behold: a genome."
He glanced to the heavens. "I can tell you're going to be very helpful for this exercise."
She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. "Alright. Tell me what to do."
He gave thorough instructions and she began to sort through the boxes and photograph all of it. Shinra was suspicious of them both, every page they read they transferred to electronic form and then burned.
A significant amount of it was completely meaningless to her, but she could set aside budgetary reports from behavioural notes. The language was complex and full of incomprehensible jargon, and much of what she could understand was heavily censored.
But she understood enough.
She hadn't thought it possible for her opinion of Shinra to plummet any further, but they had experimented on Genesis before he was even born. Experiments involving the Blight, however accidentally. It made her skin crawl to read about it in a nice and comfortable home at the top of the city, in such clinical language and impersonal reports, like it was all perfectly sane and professional. She had to put a report down before she risked setting it on fire before recording it.
She had tremendous respect for Genesis for being able to stomach it all without blinking, especially since he actually understood it. He turned a page. A muscle in his jaw ticked.
"Aerith has offered her help, by the way," she said, interrupting a studious, hours-long silence.
He looked up. "The last cetra."
"Who, I assure you, loves being referred to by her species instead of her name."
"I was verifying who we're talking about," he said. He got up to turn the kettle on again. "How do you know her?"
"She found me passed out and bleeding on her doorstep the day I arrived here. She took me in and healed me. About three hours before I met you, actually." It was over eight months ago now.
He raised an eyebrow. "And you didn't think to bring up her healing abilities until now?"
"She's sixteen, inexperienced, and in a very precarious situation with Shinra. It wasn't my secret to tell."
He nodded, holding his empty cup. "But she's a healer?"
"Not one who has ever healed the Blight before." She breathed out, aware of how meaningless that statement was. Nobody had ever healed the Blight before. Their sudden burst of industriousness didn't change how very low their chances were. "She'll do what she can."
He gave her a knowing look.
She looked away.
"Do you believe she can do it?"
"I think... even she doesn't know the full scale of what she's capable of yet."
He hummed and turned back to make the tea. She slid him her cup over the island bench. He filled it and slid it back.
"What specific information would help you?" he asked.
"Where the taint came from. It's not gangrene, it doesn't just appear. You have to contract it from something."
He looked over his shoulder. "What if it was synthesised in the labs?"
She shook her head. "The Blight is a magical disease. Shinra doesn't have anywhere near the magic understanding and power for that. Not to mention, it would be a tremendous coincidence. You have a slightly different strain from the one I know, but not that different."
"How are they different?"
"It's moving slower. Or that might be because of the strange way you contracted it. Still, you've had less... side effects."
He looked at her cautiously over his tea cup. "Side effects."
"You still have all your hair," she offered, slightly apologetic. She'd done her time at Ostagar long before Carver contracted it, and ventured through the blighted tunnels of the Deep Roads many times after. There was a laundry list of things that could happen.
He put a hand up to his hair. "What else?"
"Do you want to go anywhere, find anything?" she asked, glancing at him sidelong. "Start digging any tunnels?"
"I want to find the cure."
"Anything else?"
"I want to find whatever gave this to me and do much worse to them."
She nodded. "Had any strange dreams lately?"
Both of his eyebrows rose. "I cannot believe you, of all people, are asking me that."
"Stranger than the regular Fade, I mean."
"Besides being held captive by a demon of Sloth in an ancient dream palace for a week? No, nothing unusual at all."
She shrugged and turned back to the stacks of paper. "I wouldn't worry then."
They spent the rest of the night in study together. She kept his scientific dictionary at her side. As the innate horror of the material settled over her like a shroud, the material had the audacity to be boring. She occasionally stared at Genesis to shake off the inhumane apathy with which the scientists talked about him and Angeal.
The sky was turning pink when he snapped and tore a manilla folder in two. He ragged, pacing across the living room and waving the shredded documents in the air. He couldn't sustain it, and he soon returned to brooding. Horrific though it was, none of it was news to him. The burning of documents became a nightly ritual of catharsis.
She left before sundown to go do a job below plate. She came back two nights later and they did it again. It became a routine. Genesis would make her dinner and she kept him company while he had his humanity reduced to numbers and rubber stamped failure. He said she didn't have to keep coming, that he was being very poor company. She ignored him and showed up again the next night.
They started running out of material.
"Genesis," she called, holding out a document for him. "Am I reading this right? These are all the things they injected you with?"
He was curled up sideways on the armchair and sulking over a bowl of stir fried noodles. She knew if she stopped she wouldn't have the nerve to keep going, so her dinner was still in the wok. The curtains were closed and all the reading lamps on.
He finished a mouthful of pork belly and grudgingly took a look at what she was holding. There were lists of things with long chemical names grouped together under different phases.
"It's what they planned, this is only an early project outline. It ended up a lot more complicated as I failed to give whatever results they were chasing."
"What are 'J cells'?"
"I don't know. It's come up in other reports, it's shorthand for one of the active ingredients. Why?"
"I've been thinking." She leaned back on the couch and tapped her fingers idly against her thigh. "Aega called you an agent of the Evanuris."
"Probably because you were there."
"I am nobody's agent."
"But you've had dealings with Mythal," he pointed out, gesturing with his chopsticks between fishing around in his bowl..
"I've had dealings with Flemeth, who is functionally a different person now. But spirits are not so clumsy as to mistake people for one another. Especially not a Pride spirit. They deal with individuals, and she accused us both."
He slowly stopped negotiating with his food. He didn't look up. "What are you suggesting?"
She drew in a slow breath. The more information they sifted through the more suspicious she became. Genesis was a mage in a world with no other human mages. Angeal, who came from the same experiment, had enough of a connection to the Fade to be a borderline case.
"No amount of Mako, or chemicals, or any other inorganic material made you this powerful."
He didn't move. "I know."
"Neither did they give you the ability to shape shift."
His brow furrowed, still staring into the depths of his bowl. "Why does the shape shifting matter?"
"The ancient elves were natural shape shifters," she said. Even the Avvar needed spirits to teach them how to do it.
He finally looked up, startled.
"I'm not- ...look at me. Do I look elven to you?"
She waved him off. "Even half elves rarely look it. Sometimes they'll have slightly pointed ears, or especially bright eyes. Modern elves are short and slender, but the ancient ones were tall and impossibly strong, especially when in magic rich environments."
He narrowed his eyes. "Like Mako."
She tilted her head in agreement. She had no idea how or why such a thing could have happened, but he was, vexingly, correct: she had had dealings with Mythal. And if that was possible, what else could be too? There were Elvhen artefacts in supposedly cetran burial mounds.
He shook his head. "But you're suggesting Shinra had access to the DNA of an elf that has been extinct on Gaia for thousands of years."
"Said to be extinct. Much like the cetra."
He turned to sit the right way in the chair and steepled his fingers in front of his face, his elbows on his knees.
"What else do you know about the ancient elves?"
"I'll show you. Find me in the Fade and I'll... remember what I can."
"Thank you." His lips pulled to the side. "But the spirit was still wrong. I am not their agent, even if your theory is correct."
She frowned. "Neither am I."
Genesis sat surrounded by the last of the classified information he had stolen from Shinra. The last of the information he had about himself. It had raised more questions than it solved.
He was furious at Shinra, but it had burned down into glowing embers. He didn't know what to do with it all. There was no clear solution, no easy target for his fury. He had spent enough time in Wutai to learn the dangers of striking without thinking it through.
The sound of running came from the kitchen. He looked up with a frown and followed the sound.
Hawke was pouring dishwashing liquid into the steadily filling sink.
"Here, I'll do that," he said.
She shook her head. "You cooked."
"Nonsense. You're my guest."
"Should have been faster then," she said, snapping on thick rubber gloves.
He had to settle for drying.
The kitchen was brightly lit and smelled of kimchi and the raw onions he had diced earlier. It was nice to be away from the oppressive, endless papers. Hawke scrubbed and held dishes up to the light, her eyes narrowed as she searched for any survivors of her onslaught.
"You said you started a war once," he said quietly. "That it made everything worse."
The plate she was holding slipped through her hands and splashed into the sink. She stared at him, looking quite put out.
"Just casually drop that into the conversation, why don't you?"
"What was it about?"
She shook herself and dove back into the sea of suds. "Didn't I say?"
"You said 'freedom.'" He ran his tea towel over a plate and added it to a stack. "Mage freedom I presume?"
"Presume away."
He kept drying the dishes and didn't say anything. Her shoulders hiked up in the silence.
"You're more underhanded than people give you credit for, you know that?" she groused.
He smiled, taking his favourite knife from the drying rack. "You're not normally this easy to crack. You held up far better against the Turks."
"Yes. Well. They're Turks. Frustrating their efforts is practically my day job."
"Mm-hm. And the war for mage freedom?"
She sighed. "That was what we all called it afterwards, when it was too late to change course. Or the Mage Rebellions. The Mage-Templar war. Depends on which side you were standing."
"What happened?"
"Do you remember that stone building we ran through before facing Sloth?"
He did. It had baffled him at the time, when he was under bombardment from spirit attacks on all sides, but when he thought about it afterwards it was obvious what it was, and why Sloth had thrown it in their faces. "The mage prison."
"The Gallows," she said, showing her teeth. "When Kirkwall was founded it was where they kept the slaves. But slavery is illegal now, don't you know, so we lock up mages there instead."
He took another plate. "Why do you want to go back to this place?"
"I never could shake a bad habit."
"That's what you call being a second class citizen?"
"Do you want to hear about the war or not?"
"By all means."
There was a very long pause. She reached for a copper bottomed pot that was always a nuisance to clean. She picked up the steel wool and got to scrubbing. He leaned against the bench and waited, for however long she needed.
"So," she said, eventually, focusing on a blackened patch of steel. "An apostate friend of mine blew up the chantry cathedral as a protest."
He raised an eyebrow. "A strongly worded protest."
"They kept ignoring all the letter campaigns," she said, with a flippancy that didn't last. She heaved a breath. "As retribution The Templar Knight Commander Meredith declared the right of annulment. That's when they decide all the mages are too much bother and slaughter them. Men, women, children, elderly. The strong and the weak, the troublemakers and the peacekeepers alike."
"Collective punishment to stop any others from speaking out."
"And it's legal. A Templar's right. It didn't matter that it was an apostate that destroyed the Chantry, that there are thousands of Circle Mages in Kirkwall who had never even heard Anders' name." She finished destroying the imperfections on the pot and handed it to him. She carefully unclenched her jaw. "It wasn't their fault. So I stopped it."
"You killed the Knight Commander?"
"And many others." She let out a breath and reached for the wok. "Of course, none of it would have been noticeably different from any other mage riot, there have been uprisings before, but I was the Champion of Kirkwall. The defacto city leader of an independent city state."
He nodded slowly. He had suspected something similar. She carried herself not just with defiance, but with an air of authority at odds with her supposed life on the fringes of society.
"So when I killed Meredith and decimated the templar forces it wasn't simply stopping a massacre," she said with regret.
"-It was making a statement."
She nodded. "A statement the other Mages and Templars all over Thedas picked up and ran with. The next thing I know the whole continent is on fire and I've started a war."
"And you're a hero for it," Genesis said with conviction. "Your name is a rallying cry for freedom."
"Ha," she laughed, short and bitter. "My name is a cry for a great many things." She handed him the wok and moved on to another dish, flicking her fringe out of her eyes with a sharp gesture. "Most Circle Mages spend their whole lives locked up in those towers. In appalling conditions, but it was all they knew. All their childhood friends, their lovers, their mentors were other Circle Mages who lived and died within those walls. They never had to wonder what they were going to do tomorrow, where the food would come from or how they were going to pay the rent."
She tossed her hair back from her face again, and gave a snarl of frustration at her fringe dripping into her eyes. He reached to help but she shook her head.
"And then one day, their predictable lives are completely upended." She ran out of dishes and stared at her gloved hands in the now grey and sud free water. "They're thrown out into the cold and told that this is freedom while starving to death in a society that thinks they're all inherently evil."
"No war is won without struggle." He crossed his arms and leaned back. "That doesn't negate the worth of the cause."
"But people are easily scared," she said, glaring into the water. "Even the brave ones." Her hands formed fists but then slowly relaxed. Her expression lost its fire. "Sometimes there's no easy escape from a lifetime of brainwashing telling you don't deserve any better. Sometimes a familiar burden is preferable to the threat of what will happen when it's gone."
"I know."
She finally looked up at him.
He heaved a breath that felt like a brick in his lungs. "Goddess forgive me, I know."
"I didn't. I should have, but I grew up an apostate." She pulled the plug. "Before I even knew that I was a mage I knew my Pa was one and we had to keep it a secret or they'd take him away and we might all be hanged for hiding him." She laughed again. It wasn't bitter anymore, just hollow. She shrugged helplessly. "Hating Templars is all I've ever known. It was easy for me to declare war against them, I've been fighting it all my life."
He looked at her, with her jagged hair and soft laugh lines, scared arms and lean muscle.
"I envy you."
She smiled at him, tragic and beautiful. "You shouldn't."
"Your life has only ever been in your hands. I was born shackled, even if I didn't know it yet."
She pulled off the rubber gloves and then yanked up the side of her tunic out from her thick belt. She held it up to reveal an ugly scar over a lean midriff. It may have been from multiple injuries, but the scar tissue was thick and had merged into a solid clump. At least one of them probably cracked a rib, if not impaled her entirely.
"My life is in my hands because I do whatever I have to in order to keep it that way." She let her shirt fall again and started wiping down. "Freedom's not free. It's not even cheap."
He pulled up his button down shirt to show the web of surgical scars on his abdomen. "Neither is subjugation."
She looked out of the corner of her eyes. "Comes with nice abs though."
"I earned those abs myself, thank you very much, Shinra didn't give them to me."
She cracked a smile. "Enhancement doesn't just make life effortless?"
"Please. It takes a great deal of skill to make this look effortless."
She laughed, a genuine laugh, even if it did peter out quickly. He felt some of the weight on his shoulders go with it. There was no more work to be done here, they could return to the damning files in the living room. Hawke leaned back against the bench, her arms crossed.
"Sephiroth doesn't want to risk turning on Shinra?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Oh, my friend, do you fly away now, to a world that abhors you and I?"
She looked down and sighed. "I'm sorry."
"So am I."
She glanced back up at him. "But shouldn't it really be 'that abhors you and me'?"
"No, the common tongue had different rules for the first person nominative at the time this translation was made," he snapped out of habit.
She grinned. "Did it?"
He cleared his throat. She probably didn't know that it was the lowest of low hanging fruit of Loveless critique. He tossed back his hair and draped the damp tea towel over his shoulder. "Yes, it did, as supported by multiple surviving texts and translations made at the time. Not only does 'you and I' roll off the tongue better, it's a perfectly valid translation."
"Oh, I see," she nodded thoughtfully. "So its grammatical inaccuracy in the name of historical accuracy?"
He scowled. No, she knew it was a cheap shot. He flicked the corner of the towel at her leg with a crack.
She yelped. She stared at him with delighted outrage and laughed. She ran her hand along the underside of the tap and flicked some water droplets at him. A shiny magic barrier caught them in midair. He fixed his hair in the concave reflection, his self-satisfied expression shining back at him at a warped angle.
"I've had this argument a thousand times before, you will not sway me."
"Alright, Let it be 'you and I' then," she said, crossing her arms but smiling still. "But remind me to show you how to cast real magic barriers sometime."
She wandered back out of the kitchen. He braced himself and followed her.
Everything was exactly where they had left it. She stood on the edge of the living room rug, considering the remaining stack.
The moment had ended, but he had another question. He wasn't sure she would indulge him, he knew full well that her honesty was something she chose to grace him with, for all her complaints of him being underhanded in his questions.
"Do you regret it?" he asked.
Her shoulders slumped.
"No."
"Even though you lost?"
"I regret not winning," she muttered, staring down at her boots.
"Do you regret making a stand?"
"You mean not standing by and watching a massacre I had the power to stop? Do I regret not letting the Templars slaughter anyone they wanted, unchecked? Do I regret refusing to lay down and die? Do I regret trying?" She straightened her back. She looked at him over a squared and strong shoulder. "No. I refuse to."
She stepped onto the rug and dove back into the work.
"Thedas does not deserve you," he said softly from the edge.
She smiled, a cold and furious thing with no artifice to it. He felt like he could have drowned in it. Maybe he wanted to. Maybe they could burn the world down together.
"On the contrary. I am everything Thedas deserves."
A/N: Thanks for reading! Reviews and constructive criticism are welcome. They're also really helpful for me to tell which storylines you guys are enjoying and if you have any questions.
Next Time: Teaching a SOLDIER how to throw a fireball.
