Humour. Like logic, but different!
I'm going to do something very mean. You'll find out what in two chapters time.
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Darkness Falls
Chapter 26: You're Mine
They walked through Sin, their rational minds screaming at them that this was not possible. A place like this could not possibly exist inside a beast not even the size of a village, let alone a city. Yet as far as they looked, they saw fog and grey waterfalls, and Yevon symbols guiding them… somewhere…
Rikku shivered and hugged closer to Auron. She could see fields skulking in the distance, and even though she had seen fiends with stranger shapes and more teeth, these ones freaked her out. They seemed more, lost, was the only way she could describe it. The stares in their eyes were not as sharp as other fiends, and instead of attacking they just watched. It was unnerving.
"What is it?" Auron asked quietly. Even if the fiends didn't seem that hungry, no need to take chances.
"This place just scares me," she said. She saw movement to her left and her head whipped around to see a strange catlike creatures watching them, just watching, as they moved through the misty landscape.
"We're all here, you don't have to worry," he said.
"I just feel like one of us is going somewhere," she said.
Instantly Tidus' head swung around to look at her, and he opened his mouth, about to speak. Auron glared at him, and he shut it. She didn't need to know yet.
Rikku didn't see either of this, but she felt Auron move. She looked up. "Auron?" she asked.
"It was nothing, I just thought I saw a fiend," he said.
Rikku accepted this explanation without argument. This place made her quiet enough as it was.
"Did Sir Jecht do this?" Yuna whispered under her breath.
"Looks like something he would do," Tidus replied.
"But why?" Lulu asked.
"Jecht would not have wanted to us be unduly delayed by strange pathways," Auron said. He alone did not seem to be affected by the strange effect that made everyone speak in whispers. It was like trying to whistle in church. The brain told the body to do it, but the body didn't listen.
No-one spoke, until;
"That's kinda depressing," Wakka said.
Tidus glared at him, and he said no more.
"Jecht doesn't want this any more than we do," Auron
said.
As if in answer, the fog suddenly began to swirl around their feet, ebbing and
flowing into recognisable shapes and patterns in the floor.
"Don't look at them," Auron whispered.
"Keyakuu," Rikku whispered, looking down at the face or her late brother, hidden in the patterns in the unholy fog. Suddenly Auron reached down and slapped her across the face. She reeled.
"What was…?"
"It's not him, don't look at the shapes. That goes for you as well Wakka," he said sharply, noticing his gaze wandering."
"What are they?" Lulu asked.
"They are the memories of those Sin has killed, and those killed by other means, taken from your memories and made real by Sin. It is like the Farplane, only designed to distract you from your goals. Don't look at them," Auron said.
On his own part, Auron was looking dead ahead towards the next floating glyph, knowing that if he looked down he would see the spectres of Jecht and Braska hovering there, waiting for him to look.
"We press on," he said quickly, and began to move, staring dead ahead at the horizon. The fiends around them followed and watched, never getting close enough to be worth fighting, but there, on the edge of their vision.
"What are they waiting for?" Yuna whispered.
"They wait for their release from Sin," Auron replied. "Everyone killed by Sin becomes a part of it, in some way. These just… more… than others."
"That's terrible," Yuna whispered.
As if responding to her words, the fog stopped swirling, the faces disappeared, and the world returned to normal. Rikku let out a deep sigh and leaned against Auron for a few seconds.
"I'm worry I slapped you," he said.
"S'OK, I understand," she whispered. She laughed. "When we get back, we're gonna have a big party, just like Tidus said we would, understood?" she said, imitating Auron's voice.
Auron smiled. "Perfectly ma'am," he said stoically.
Inside his mind was spinning. What am I going to tell her?
Tell her you old fool!
But what if she hates you for it?
Idiot! She's unsent as well! How could she hate you?
I never told her.
Tidus doesn't care, and Rikku loves you! The only thing she's going to hate you for is leaving her!
But…
What do you think is going to happen, when she watches you fade away, and she's left alone, betrayed by you?
I don't…
What could you possibly say that could surprise her anymore? She nearly started becoming a fiend!
"I can't do it," Auron whispered.
"What was that Auron?" Rikku asked lightly, looking up at her lover.
Auron looked down at her, surprise on his face. Had he said that out loud? "It was nothing. I was just thinking to myself," he said.
"Liar," Rikku countered.
"It was nothing, I mean it," Auron replied. He looked up. A fiend stood directly n the path of the team, and this time it didn't look like it was going to move.
Rikku's gaze swung from Auron to the fiend and she sighed. A Chimera, great, my favourite kind of fiend.
Wakka, Tidus and Auron drew their blades, Yuna and Lulu hanging back to support with healing spells and the medicine they had stocked up on.
To their surprise, the fiend gave no move to attack. It just stood there, all three heads – and the tail – regarding them with something like curiosity.
Auron walked up to it, blade ready in a second to swing down and slice the thing in half. The Chimera stared at him with one head, the other two fixed on Tidus and Wakka, and the tail looking at Rikku, hissing occasionally.
"Damn fiends," Wakka muttered. "Wherever we go, there they are. I swear they have some kind of transport to get to where we are first."
"SuMMonEr."
Though they had seen Sin half-blown up, Rikku dead, crystal forests and ships that flew through the air, for some reason a talking fiend was still able to faze them.
Yuna just stared at the thing, which stared back.
She felt an elbow in her side, and turned to Rikku. "Answer it," the blonde Al Bhed whispered.
Yuna looked at the beast and cleared her throat. "Yes?" she asked hesitantly.
All four of the Chimera's heads were fixed on her now. "You SeeK tHE HearT OF sIn," it said through two of its heads. The effect was unnerving, as if two people were reading different parts of the same script, and one had bronchitis, and the other a sore throat.
"I…I do," Yuna said, more confidently this time.
"yoU May PASs."
Yuna blinked. Out of everything, she had expected a fiend to give her its permission to travel through its territory. They were more into gunboat diplomacy then anything else.
"Thank you," she managed to say.
"Don'T MentIoN iT," the Chimera said, and wandered off again. They watched it leave and disappear back into the fog. Almost at once the fiends that had been dogging their heels since the airship snarled then bounded off into the distance, away from them.
"That was... unusual…" Wakka managed.
"Don't count your Chocobos," Auron stated, and walked on.
Soon they came in front of something that had frankly no reason to be here.
"Anymore than lots of fog, fiends, and a place the size of Luca, does?" Rikku asked when Wakka made his observation.
"Yeah, but… stairs?" Wakka said, gesturing at the object in question.
Before them stood a flight of stairs that lead upwards out of the fog. On either side was a burning torch that flickered in an unseen wind.
"The stairs are here, so we go up them, that's logic," Tidus chipped in.
Auron grumbled in exasperation at Wakka's stubborn refusal to accept the existence of stairs, and proved him wrong my promptly walking up them, Rikku following.
Wakka sighed. "Can they do that?" he asked.
"Wakka, these are stairs, deal with them," Lulu said, and followed.
Wakka took one look at the stairs and tentatively placed one foot on the bottom one. When the universe failed to dissolve around him he placed the other foot on. When the universe still showed no sign up upping the sticks and leaving he followed after the others.
He really hated this place.
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Rikku stood, weapon out, and an expression on her face that could have melted glass and made charging Behemoths freeze and reconsider trying to eat this particular person.
"Seymour," she said quietly, and both syllables were full of enough poison to knock out a Blitzball team.
"My dear Rikku. And Lady Yuna!" Seymour said brightly.
"I thought we finished you off at Gagazet," Tidus said, drawing his sword. Wakka and Auron did the same. The Maester seemed unperturbed however.
"So you made it this far?" he said. "I must thank you. Now that the Lady Yunalesca has been destroyed, the only means of killing Sin has forever gone. We are invincible!"
"Sin absorbed you!" Tidus shouted.
Seymour shrugged. "I can learn to control it from within. I have all the time in the world!" he shouted.
Tidus snarled and took one step forward, sword out and ready to swing. Rikku stopped him before he had taken two steps.
"He's mine," she said, and Tidus knew better than to argue.
Seymour smiled as Rikku walked up to him and faced him. He shook his head. "You could have had so much Rikku. We could have been together. Instead you go with this gutter-trash," he said, pointing at Auron.
"If he's that, then that makes you the thing's that crawl around in the gutter," Rikku said, and ran at him.
It was almost pitifully easy. Seymour raised his staff and tried to fire a beam of lightning at Rikku, but she ducked under it without stopping and smashed her Godhand into his face. Seymour reeled backwards and just stared. He snarled and raised his staff to strike her, but she merely raised her hand and the staff caught on the spikes. She pirouetted and the Maester's weapon was pulled out of his grip, flying away into the darkness beyond the plateau they stood on. Without it he was merely a badly defended target, and she treated him as such.
Seymour lay on the ground, one hand clutching his heart where the holes from Rikku's glove had punctured his chest, the other supporting him on the floor. He looked up at Rikku. "I didn't… this can't be… I was supposed to live forever," he gasped.
Rikku merely stared down at him. Wordlessly she held out her hand, and without speaking Auron held out his sword to her. She took it, not even noticing the weight of the thing, and held it over her head.
Seymour looked up. "You could have had everything." he whispered. "We could have been together."
Rikku snarled and swung the sword over her shoulder. She struck once, and once was all it took.
"Missing you already," she whispered, as the Maester's body disappeared into the air around them, the pyreflies already fading on their journey to the Farplane, where she had no doubt he would receive a… heartfelt… greeting.
She turned back to the others, and lifted the sword up, slamming it into the ground point first, where it vibrated for a few seconds. The others just stared back. They had never seen so much hatred so… concentrated.
Rikku turned back to the others, took a deep breath, and smiled.
"Well? Shall we go on?"
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Ah, finally she gets her revenge. Excellent. ^_^
