"I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism. Space!"
- Premier Anatoly Cherdenko
"Bring out your dead!"
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"When did we stop trying to count our dead?"
- Yui Takamura (also voiced by Estellise Sidos Heurassein)
"Yeah? Fuck you, too!"
- R. J. MacReady (also voiced by Zouken Matou and Seth Brundle... in the Japanese dub)
"I'm going to die."
- Siggy Marvin
"Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes."
- Carnac the Magnificent
"Jesus, look at that. His guts are hanging out. You'll have to put 'em back in."
- Jacob's Ladder
"…COOLRANCH."
- Final Fantasy VII
The snow covering the Valhalla Plains was turning red as Cless's vitality drained by the pint. Mint knelt beside him in a panicked fervor of prayer and examination. Her stained white gloves sifted through his damaged armor and inspected each injury with a devoted urgency to keep the life inside his body that rivaled the greed of the worst scavengers looting him for valuables. Skillfully casting Cure, Heal, and Dispel on every problem she found, Cless was still losing his life faster than her mana could regenerate. Every time it seemed like she fixed the worst of it and almost had a chance to wipe the sweat from her forehead, she'd pry further into his armor and find another hidden slash from a gargoyle claw, or an embedded arrowhead shaped like a lizard's snout.
This is how he always was. Hiding all of his pain from her the entire time he was defending her, and then letting it all catch up with him when there was too much to hide. Mint probably would have fallen on the battlefield in nervous shambles if it weren't for all of her mother's teachings helping her keep her focus. She was trained as an artist working on a canvas splotched all over with ruby and crimson, and her job was to make it clean again.
Not surprisingly, Cless also knew something painful about her mother he still hadn't told her.
A low groan swept over the battlefield, but it wasn't the groan of more combatants dying from their wounds. This was the groan of nature: The dreary, ominous howls of the wind as the snowfall thickened and a storm blew in.
Most of the fighting had ended, so at least she didn't have to worry about moving him roughly and potentially causing more harm. Now the assault came in the form of a relentless blizzard, as if Aselia herself was trying to wipe away her battle scars. King Alvanista's men and Dhaos's monsters were both being buried under a freezing blanket made of pure white powder.
Mint remained vigilant in her work as the weather consumed her in blinding white squalls. She could hear voices yelling—human voices, this time—as the search parties trying to recover other fallen soldiers retreated from the cold. But Mint didn't have that option. If she had selfishly chosen to that option, the price would be Cless's life.
She squinted in the blizzard as she lost sight of what was lying only a couple feet below her eyes. Only the pale, weakening golden light from her palms helped her keep track of what she needed to do. Her nose and her ears stung like they were on fire as they were consumed by the intense chill. Her gorget hid the frantic steam escaping her mouth as she tirelessly prayed and conjured. Aching, labored gasps stifled all of her vocal enchantments as she tucked her head down to preserve the little heat she had left.
She sensed the last of Cless's wounds finally closing under her palms just as her eyes lost the ability to stay open. The storm was too much. Her overworked fatigue was too much. She didn't have the strength to get off her knees. She couldn't move in the foggy white snow piling around her. She couldn't even see the snow.
The bright all-white healer was a tiny speck lost within the terrible white storm. The planet's gravity seemed to intensify as the freezing winds pushed down on her. All her mind could think about now was sleep.
She collapsed horizontally over Cless's cuirass as all of her strength length in a single frail, defeated sigh. Their final resting positions overlapped to form a cross.
The fingers of her empty left hand weakly twitched in a casting configuration. Desperately, almost stubbornly, her pale lips whispered a single word with the only drop of energy she had left.
"… bar… rier…"
Her blinding white world faded into total darkness. For a time, in the deep recesses of her howling, frigid dreams, she could hear Martel's humming lullaby. But then, even the lullaby faded into lifeless silence.
The ice covering the two motionless lumps on the ground was hastily swept away in layers. A hand covered in dark gray armor and four layers of eggbear pelts reached into the snow pile and came back out grasping a smaller limp hand wearing a white glove.
A man's voice yelled "Over here!"
The blurred dark outline crouching in front of the sun's glaring rays was joined by two or three other blurred, faceless, barely humanoid outlines. An entire recovery team was now digging out the two lumps in the snow.
Somewhere in the delirious, hypothermic depths of Mint's mind, she was able to discern she was one of those two lumps.
"What have we got here?" one of the arriving shadows said. "Another face that needs to be buried? Or another demon to gut and toss in the firepit?"
"It's a soldier. Young one. And this must be his personal medic. She's not wearing the same gown as one of ours." One of faceless blurs was talking to the other.
"Poor bastards. But they look like they go together like a dirk with its scabbard. Wish I could bail from this rotten ice cube with the woman of my dreams sometimes," a voice said. To numb, barely conscious ears, it sounded like a hundred muffled voices.
"I don't see any wounds. A lot of recent scars, though. Lass must have done her job so well she didn't have anything left to save herself, then the storm got 'em anyway. Shame."
One of the black sun-blocking silhouettes loomed closer.
"Wait. Aren't these the kids Lester and Klein were looking for?"
"Oh, great. The king's not gonna be happy they wound up like this." An armored foot stomped in the snow. The distant vibrations felt like they could have come from an eight-legged horse.
"Maybe we won't have to worry about that," the closer human-shaped void said. "They're still breathing."
"How in the… ? It's been hours since we fired the-"
"There's a spell surrounding them. Weak, but traceable. It shielded them so they wouldn't freeze to death. She must have cast it on him to keep him alive. But she's so close to him that it's keeping them both alive. Barely."
"How? Isn't that thing supposed to interfere with all magic?" One of the echoing black outlines sounded confused.
"Maybe this one runs off her own supply? How should I know? I'm not the party healer. I just load the meat cart."
The glaring blue sky loomed closer as the frozen colorless ground drifted away. The two lumps took more recognizable forms as the rest of the snow and ice was brushed off. The world became warmer, by a fraction of a degree.
"Okay. They're going on the army carriage with you. I'll follow behind on horse. Tell 'em to boil two extra bowls of stew as soon as you get to the camp," a blurry silhouette said.
"What's the order? Beef broth?" another asked.
"No. That's for fevers. Herb extracts fight off the cold. They're both going to need a lot of mint."
Author's notes:
Continuing my pattern of "Write a fanfic where something really weird happens to Rin Tohsaka / Black Mage, counteract it with a more positive fanfic about Mint Adenade / White Mage."
One way I always describe Akane Higurashi / Akane Soir is "She's a Mint who's not always the greatest at managing her Cless's HP."
Reddit taught me what a gorget is today. I dunno why Junko Iwao keeps being French chicks.
My first idea was to have Arche and Klarth find them, so it would be more of an emotional reunion. But then I thought about replacing them with shadowy anonymous royal rescue team dudes, because it's more spooky and impersonal, and it's probably more accurate to how it would have happened in a medieval post-war wasteland. Then I thought, maybe I'm being too spooky, and I should switch them back with Arche and Klarth. Ultimately I chose the nameless faceless randos since they're part of the authentic Teito Moyu experience.
Why didn't Jack and Rose both get on the floating door?
Whoever is downvoting this on Reddit is just mad because they can't hear the main theme music from John Carpenter's The Thing playing in the background the entire time this fanfic is happening. (I made my best effort to emulate this and "set the mood" by adding the MacReady line at the beginning of fanfic.)
The "Says Barrier while she dies as final act to keep Cless not-dead" thing was inspired by a sequence from the Tales of Phantasia radio drama.