They perched on abandoned crates, a gaggle of disconsolate children trying to ignore the smell and the flies. They breathed through their mouths. They looked towards one another. They restlessly shuffled their feet and moved their fingers, as if to seek unconscious reassurance that blood still shot through their arteries. The children had not anticipated this vigil. The wait before a battle was agony, and the fight itself was a confusing quilt of loud sights and colorful sounds, and the time after was a panting period of counting fingers and counting comrades and white bandages and foul-smelling medicine in little glass bottles. But this...
The awful thing about it wasn't the odor itself - though the too-sweet smell of decomposing flesh was reasonably horrible in its own right - but the memories it triggered of deaths past. It had a way of even reminding one of deaths where one had seen no trace of the bodies. They were irresistibly reminded of siblings curled in sick beds, bloody tavern fights, and dour funerals. They fidgeted uneasily. It is one thing to kill and another to deal with the body afterwards.
They were not strangers to death, but they had not yet become accustomed to his grim presence. It is an eerie thing to realize death's indifference to birthright or position. He works in concert with the invisible agents of chance. In the end, the main thing separating the puppets on the ground from the children on their crates was - not the ideological differences, not the disparate quality in weapons, not the forces of righteous justice - the simple fact that fortune had smiled on the latter side while death grinned on the former. It is an eerie thing to realize.
Delita sat along the edge of the street. The soles of his boots lay flat against the uneven brickwork and his knees were high and bent. Shadows pooled under the crooked curves of his legs. He ran a finger along the exposed edge of a crumbling yellow brick.
Right now, he kept thinking about standing in the cold winter rain and watching two bodies being lowered into the ground. His sister stood next to him and neither of them cried. For weeks afterward, he would bear the imprint of five little half-moons where she had tightly gripped his hand.
He absently rubbed his palm, remembering the pain.
From the corner of his eyes, movement - an odd sensation of clockwork gears being tightened just outside his perception - made him look up. Ramza stood, watching the street with a dark expression. The gears bent and snapped and Ramza spoke quietly from between his teeth. "When the hell are they going to get here?"
Delita shrugged and returned to the street bricks. "Dealing with the other battle sites first, I'd imagine."
Ramza irritably snapped his fingers. "Gariland's bloody bureaucracy has given us this. In Igros, we wouldn't have had to wait for the black wagons."
Delita examined the cracked corner of one brick. "I suppose not," he said. His voice was as cool and quiet as river mud. He thought of the grey color of predawn skies
The other boy cracked each one of his finger joints with awful deliberation. Delita and the blood-grimed children on the crates regarded him covertly. The battle itself had gone reasonably well, though the children cradled gashes and bruises, but a message from headquarters had immediately soured their elation. Though waiting for the corpse carts was usually a task given to the greenest recruit, this time the entire party was "requested" to remain with the bodies. No reason was given for this change in policy, and they had been waiting for more than two hours.
Black flies already buzzed around the corpses, alighting on lukewarm flesh and skittishly taking off. Once-red mouths were pale and beginning to take on a bluish tinge as the blood stopped flowing through their bodies. When they had piled up the bodies, someone had gone to the trouble of closing their staring eyes and Delita smiled at the thought. A tiny measure of dignity in such ignoble deaths.
The smell was pervasive. Just when he began to forget about, a new breeze would bring a fresh assault on his olfactory glands.
Ramza cursed softly under his breath. Delita watched him without much pity. What was death to the irritable and frightened boy beside him but the gentle passing of a perfumed mother and a crusty old man going into that good night at the end of a long gray life? Delita had buried his parents after a jerky frothing fight with invisible demons of which he had witnessed every round. Even the crate children, swaddled though in their previous lives they might have been, had a closer connection to death than their scowling commander.
But Ramza couldn't hide behind his fretful impatience forever. Delita knew this, and so he waited.
When the black wagons arrived, they would trundle the stiff blue bodies into wooden troughs black with paint and blood. Like precarious beetles, they would wobble down the streets of Gariland, passing the sanctified graveyards of honest merchants and minor lords until they reached a pit a mile outside of town. Here the bodies would be dumped and here the bodies would be covered by disturbed dirt. The Church and the King would have preferred it if every single body could be mutilated and dismembered, but practical consideration for time and volume necessitated mass burials for most traitors and criminals, like the plague victims before them. Under the dark wet earth, flesh would mildew and rot, unraveling from the bone. Inside their skulls, the gray brain would decay and seep from their noses. Rain would come, and then the snow, to marinate a mixture of blood and meat and earth. Pale yellow flowers would burst from the earth in the spring, with pale green roots twined around yellow bone.
Ramza crossed his arms and ground his teeth, miserable to the core. Delita traced brickwork with his fingers. If they had been alone, he might have said something, but the children made him cautious of his tongue - if they remained ignorant of their commander's discomfiture, there was no reason to bring it to their attention. So he remained silent and watchful, and the glum children drummed their heels against their crates and idly checked their bandages and the edges of their swords.
"I suppose they're afraid of looters," Ramza said suddenly, the clockwork gears of his brain still wrestling with the original conundrum. "I don't see why it should matter, though." The glum children looked at him and, when he failed to continue, looked to Delita. But Delita was silently examining the brick facade, and so they irritably turned their attention inward once again.
Ramza restlessly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, drawing Delita's attention as erratically and irresistibly as a moth to a candle flame. During the battle, Ramza had gotten decked across the head - a lucky blow, nothing more - by a dull and rusty sword, and while the resulting cut had been shallow and deemed not worth bandaging, it had stained the surrounding cornsilk hair a mottled crimson. With every movement, that red badge of misfortune bobbed in the corner of Delita's eye, and he pressed his finger harder against the brick, leaving the tip red and sore.
There was the dull throb of a half-remembered pain against his palm.
"...or maybe... Maybe they want to try to identify the bodies before they bury them...?" Ramza wondered aloud, effortlessly resuming a monologue which had died five minutes ago. Delita said nothing, but privately wished he would shut up. The chattering would clue in the most oblivious child to their commander's inner turmoil. At the same time, a pang went through his chest. He recognized Ramza's habit to intellectualize uncomfortable situations - to dissect the motives and events and results - and with that recognition came a thrill of undesired sympathy.
None of them - not Ramza, Delita, not the crate children - were veterans of the battlefield, but at least Delita and some of the children had been assigned corpse watch (usually in some cold and godforsaken part of the Gariland countryside after a raid on a bandit camp) as part of their novice training. Ramza, spoiled little child of the aristocracy that he was (a bastard, to be sure, but a favored bastard), had never had the misfortune to be picked for that duty. So these limp puppets on the ground, their mouths blue and their strings cut, were a startling and new discovery for him. A battle is different - the wait is agony, and the fight is chaos, but it's clean and simple and powered by the reptilian hump in the back of the brain. The aftermath is different. You look and wait and wonder why fate decreed that he had to die. You look and wait and wonder why fate did not decree the same for you. So you breathe and shuffle and check to see that blood still shoots through your arteries. You chatter on about foolish bureaucracies and looters.
Ramza reached to idly scratch the back of his neck, and the bobbing crimson stain and the angled elbow drew Delita's attention once again. He was loathe to admit it, but at the very start of the battle, when Ramza had drawn his sword and gone headlong into a sea of dull and rusty blades, some small part of him had screamed in horror and fear. It was an inner scream he recognized from a grey predawn sky and an orphan watching two thirds of his world slip into the dark earth, with the last third pulling him to the ground with a suffocating grip. He might have followed his parents had it not been for his sister. He might have followed Ramza had it not been for the children. So there was this sickening mixture of love - for the only one who understood him, for the one with the cornsilk hair and wide grin, for a kindred soul, damned aristocrat or not - and hatred, for the one who had abandoned him and rushed so willingly into death without understanding that grim eternity. For not thinking of the children.
The children themselves were now examining their cuticles and humming under their breath. Ramza watched the street eagerly for some sign of the plague wagons, but the ticking of his relentless clockwork mind was evident from his ragged fingernails and bitten lip. Delita watched him without pity, but with a dark degree of hope. Somewhere, underneath the cornsilk hair, death's lonely kingdom was being surveyed and mapped with mechanical precision. Somewhere, the bodies and the odor and the pain of today were being filed away, deep under the grey loam of his brain. Sleep would come, and then dreams, to marinate a mixture of sights and smells and sensations. A new man would burst forth, no longer shielded by birthright to death's ignoble grandeur. A new man made out of muddy passions, no longer a coldly logical creature of clockwork and ideals.
Now he was frazzled and remote, but Delita was watching for the buds of spring. When Ramza finally bloomed, he would be waiting. He would be ready.
For how can death - how can tomorrow - frighten those that are two? Death's grim presence afflicts only the lonely with a weak grip on love (no one who really loved you would willingly rush into a sea of swords or succumb to invisible demons). How can death frighten those that have already met him, and given him a hearty handshake in the bargain? Death touches only the living but they will be like the resurrected undead, free to duck his embrace. They will be shambling, rotting zombies with daffodils bursting from their craniums. And they will be two, and they will be one, with pale green roots twined together around yellow bone.
Soon Ramza would understand death's grim eternity. Soon he would understand Delita.
The crate children played games with bits of string and forgotten coins. It was taking forever for the wagons to arrive, but the children knew that they would be here eventually. Until then, they would just have to wait. Until then, the smell was killing them.
Author's Note: This is, alas, probably the closest I'll ever come to writing gay Delita/Ramza porn. So savor it, god dammit!
This originally started out as a rewrite for Chapter Five of my FFT Chorus project (because, at the time, I utterly hated how the original chapter had turned out). However, I got halfway through this puppy before realizing that Irritable-Ramza and Obsessive-Delita, while being interesting extrapolations of their game personas, were not the direction I wanted to take Chorus. Also, I had formed a happier position on the original Chapter Five (I rewrote it slightly, and will probably rewrite it slightly in the future, but it functions okay in its current state) and so this revision became rather superfluous. On the other hand, I was hesitant to just junk what I had written, since about half of it had all this interesting (and gruesome!) death imagery (and the other half, of course, had horribly wooden Delita-Ramza interactions - ugh). So I retooled the concept, fixated on the death stuff, and made Delita brood like hell. I'd prefer to think that this story manages to be dark without being angsty, but I'll take what I can get.
I have no idea how a medieval corpse disposal system would work, so I cobbled together the plague wagons/pit from my half-remembered 9th grade lessons on the bubonic plague. In retrospect, it kind of makes more sense to burn the bodies but, uh...never mind that!
This story owes a major debt to the religious poetry of John Donne, in particular "Hymn to God" and "Death, Be Not Proud". So, uh, yeah. Corrupting the English canon, one fanfic at a time!
(February, 2003)