Disclaimer: Copyright infringement for the sake of creativity, in this instance aimed at Konami.
Notes: Spoilers for Suikoden 3 (now that I've played it), probably taking place somewhere in late chapter 4 or early chapter 5. Flame Champion's name is Mars in my fics, as in my game, until Konami gives him any remotely canon name.
And why do all my first fics for games end up being about two characters drinking together?
I can't stand it when she looks at me like that.
...I guess that's not true. I've learned that I can stand a lot of things that I wouldn't have thought I could.
Like when I was a kid. There was another kid that lived near me, a wolf got him when he was pretty young. He lost half his left arm, and his face was scarred pretty bad. He adapted well, thinking back, but none of the other kids played with him. The scars all over his face scared them, so they ran away from him.
He scared me too, I guess. Not because of the way he looked, but seeing the place an arm should've been... I lay awake sometimes, just thinking about what it must have been like to have a part of you just... gone. Forever.
Hey, I was just a little kid.
I was scared to death of having something like that happen to me, of being maimed. I had this thing about wolves, too, for a long time. Until a pack of them came after another kid when I was a little older, and I took them out. Something like that goes a long way towards getting rid of a phobia - you just attack it head on. Literally. And you see it's not that bad.
I didn't even know I'd lost that fear of being maimed until I lost the eye. I just took it. What else could I do, really? Die of terror? Not really my style, even back then.
I used to be afraid of dying, too. Not that it's unusual, since almost everyone is afraid of death to a degree. Maybe because we don't know anything about it except that it'll happen someday, and we won't be able to stop it. Somewhere along the way, I'm not really sure where, the idea started to look pretty good after all.
The longer you live, the more you learn to live with. And I've lived a long time.
You learn to just disregard the little things, because it's not going to kill you, and the stuff that could kill you, or kill a lot of other people, is what you really have to concentrate on. Anything else will go away eventually, if you just wait long enough. And I've got all the time in the world to go on waiting.
Waiting, and drinking. And ignoring.
She's not being obvious about it, I don't think. She's pretty good about that. If I hadn't known her for years, I don't think I'd have noticed. She's not the kind of girl that you'd even expect to have those kinds of feelings. That sounds harsher than it really is - I know everyone's got feelings. Just some of us have learned not to act on most of them.
She's had a few drinks, though - she's smaller than me, and lighter. She knows how to hold it, of course. No one would be able to see it'd affected her at all if they didn't know her. But I do know her, and even sitting here staring at the wall, I can feel her eyes on me, like she'd never let them be if she wasn't a little drunk.
There have been others, here and there. You live as long as I do, and no matter how mean and ugly you are, you'll find someone who thinks you're just their type. But she's different - none of the others knew my secret.
And she does, and she's still here, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She's done that for ages... that look she always gave me after a few drinks, that tone of voice she used when it was just us, and Ace and Joker were too busy going off on each other to pay us any mind... but after she found out the truth, it changed a little.
That change, that's the part I say I can't stand even though I can, because I don't have a better way to put it.
"...Don't pity me."
I don't get drunk easy, but I guess I'm headed that direction, because I didn't realize I said it out loud until I heard her movement behind me, like she just leaned forward, elbows on the table.
"Who said I pity you?"
"Your eyes did."
There's a pause, and I can hear her leaning back in the chair, picking up the bottle. "You're not even looking at my eyes."
No disappointment or annoyance from her - just a statement of fact, and I respond with another. "I don't need to."
I take another drink myself, and I can sense her lowering her head, because I can't feel her eyes on me anymore. She's got this intense way of looking at people, it burns right into them. It's good in our line of work - we get information fast when she's staring at whoever it is we're questioning, and enemies get unnerved before the battle even begins.
She'd be worth keeping around even if that wasn't the case, though. She's got skills to back up those eyes of hers. Really an incredible girl.
Or woman... whatever. She's not a girl, at thirty-one years old, but I look at her and can't help thinking how young and naive she is. After more than half a century of watching people, seeing them grow from little kids to middle-aged and elderly, everyone looks young and naive. You think "someday they'll learn", but then you realize that they don't have as much time to learn as you do, so maybe they won't.
But like those childhood phobias, the frustration of seeing people grow old and die while you stay the same... it fades away, because there's nothing you can do to change it. That's just how things are, and you can either accept it and go on about your business, or you can obsess over it until you can't handle the important things anymore.
I chose the former a long time ago. If I'd had my way, things would have been different in some respects, but things turned out pretty well after all, until now. If I had any complaints, they weren't worth making, because they weren't any of my business.
Even knowing that pretty much everyone I knew would grow old and die, after all this time waiting to see what happened, it still surprised me that there came a time when it was too late to put things back the way they were.
I sound old now too, I suppose, and I take another drink from the bottle. It's the old people who want things to go back to the way they were, and the young people don't care - they don't have memories that reach back far enough to see just how different things are now, and compare them to the times when every day was an adventure.
I'm an old man. Mars and Wyatt should be sitting by a warm fire somewhere, telling stories to grandchildren while the heat keeps their joints from aching, and I should be a couple decades in the grave. Or the three of us should still be sitting by that fire making dinner and tossing good-natured insults at each other, one of the two.
All I know is I wasn't supposed to outlive Mars or Wyatt, and here I am sitting in the breeze blowing off the lake, in a little wooden room on board a beached ship, surrounded by empty bottles.
And, of course, there's a girl behind me that knows why I'm here, and why I'm so quiet, but she doesn't understand. She couldn't, not really.
"What would you think of me," I begin, and I feel her eyes on me again, "if I looked my age?"
There's a long pause before she answers, and there's a rustle of fabric as she shrugs. "I dunno. How old are you?"
"Old." I could get more specific, but we've never really needed specifics, she and I.
"Hmm..." There's a clink as she sets the bottle down on the table. "Let me take a good look at you, first."
It's only fair, since I asked the question, so I turn around, and she's staring at me like when she's trying to decide whether an informer's telling us the truth or not.
Finally she nods, and folds her hands on the table in front of her. "Okay, first of all," she begins, her voice all business. "If you looked old, you'd probably have lost your hair. So you'd be bald." I raise an eyebrow slightly, but she continues.
"Without that hair covering half your face, you'd probably have a deeper tan. And wrinkles - if you looked old, you'd have some wrinkles."
I frown slightly, not understanding what she's getting at, and she nods emphatically. "Yeah, and you'd have that grim look on your face, like usual. So you'd be bald, brown, a little wrinkled, and grouchy. With the eyepatch..." She pauses, and her eyes have a sparkle of mischief as she smirks and leans forward. "I'd probably end up accidentally drinking with Gau a lot."
I just stare at her for a second. I had no idea how she might answer the question, but this...
Her smirk turns to a more satisfied smile when I start laughing.
It's probably not a sound she's ever heard from me before, come to think of it. If she has, most likely it's only been an ironic chuckle, because there wasn't much honest laughter coming from me even when it was me and Wyatt and Mars around that fire. She doesn't draw attention to it, though - she just sits there with this pleased curiosity in her smile, enjoying it. Because she still knows how to enjoy things.
It's easy to get jaded when you've lived as long as I have. All the things you're afraid of come around eventually, and you either spend your life running from them or face up to the fact that your fear wasn't entirely rational.
And down there with the bad things you try not to think about because they really can't be that bad, it's easy enough to forget about the good things you kept denying, because it was easier to deny everything than to try to pick and choose. The instinct to have someone close to you, someone special, who knows you... that's gone the same way.
I always wondered if all of it was just buried somewhere deep, or if time had just worn it all away. But I just laughed, so it looks like it was buried after all.
I guess no matter how old or young you are, there will always be something that surprises you sooner or later.