I spent an hour or so last night composing a graceful way to say 'goodbye'
to the project of posting part of my novel on this site. With no reviews,
I had assumed that what I was saying was of no interest to anyone except
me. Thank you, Jessiy Landroz and Ms Imperfection, for your encouraging
and helpful words; I shall take heart and slog on. Don't despair – some 'R-
rated' material in on the distant horizon.
Also be warned – AU will continue to creep in. There is no way I can totally exorcise it without re-writing the whole bloody book.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chapter One – Conclusion
"Wake up, Nooj. It's time to wake up, now." The words were soft but insistent and he could sense a glowing light though his lids. His first thought was that he was not blind, at least that had been truth. As from a dream, he remembered parts of his earlier awakening and the horror of that memory propelled him half way toward consciousness. It was difficult to open his eyes – the lids seemed burdened by the heaviness of the light pressing against them. He peered through his lashes, trying to understand where he was and what was happening. He was lying on a bed in a large brilliantly white room, his head slightly raised and sheets over his naked body. He could feel their weight on his right side but his left was numb and heavy.
"Stupid," he thought dazedly, "Of course there's no feeling on my left side; it's gone." The memory of a catastrophe involving him glimmered briefly and then was gone. He became dimly aware of the presence of other people, all watching him intently. As his eyes began to focus, he recognized two members of his former Crusaders command and a faint smile tweaked his mouth. Turning his head on the pillow, he was conscious of the fuzziness of his vision and tried to blink it away as he strained to identify the other figures around the bed. Why couldn't he see them clearly? - He had always had the eyes of a raptor. From their voices, they were strangers to him, both the men and the women. He absently wondered what they were doing there.
One of them, by his appearance, an Al Bhed, spoke. "Good morning, hero. Have we slept well? I trust we are feeling alert and vigorous this morning." An unfamiliar face loomed over him and he felt a curious sensation of anxiety at the sound of the almost familiar inflections. Raising his hand to fend off the stranger's approach, he felt it seized and cool fingers pressed against the pulse points of his wrist. He tried to pull away but was not strong enough to break the man's grip.
His anxiety increased as his world seemed to spin and separate him into two beings - blending, parting - falling. His vision blurred more and he felt nauseated as he clutched at the linens with the hand his tormentor had finally released. It was as though he was suspended in a web of scrim between two dimly seen stage sets. In the one, he was hovering above a mountain peak, with spectral shapes moving and toppling – he couldn't remember precisely what had happened to him there but it had been terrible, unthinkable. On the other, he was in a white room with indistinct contours, his senses fogged and no connection to anything in the fragmented memories he could access. He tried to move but was frozen by weakness or a reluctance to choose either as reality.
"Good morning, hero...." The words dragged out – impossibly slow and deep.
Nooj felt a sudden surge of disgust for the man and turned away. An uncertainty was troubling his mind, a sense of something fundamentally wrong. With excruciating effort, he lifted his right arm and reached toward his left shoulder. There was something cold and hard where there should have been nothing at all. The messages from his fingers to his brain were making no sense that he could understand. Was there some sort of disconnect or had a head injury left him unable to interpret what his senses told him? A tsunami of fear washed over his consciousness, leaving him trembling and unwilling to risk further tests. Everything was strange – he had no reference for emotion of this sort. For a moment, he became vertiginous with the loss of presence. What had happened and where? He gathered his courage and with sudden decisiveness looked at the place his hand still rested. Where his left arm had been there was an articulated limb of metal and ceramic. He made an effort to lift it, to flex the hand but there was no response from the inert object at his side.
"Raise the bed," he demanded hoarsely. He threw back the covers and looked for his left leg. It, too, was machina, rigid, motionless and foreign. With dawning horror, he touched that as well.
"What have you done to me?" he howled in despair. "What have you done?"
An injector spray stung his arm and, almost instantly, he felt a deadness possess him. Drugs, he thought with a helplessness that was foreign to his nature, not spells but drugs. As though the sedative had been the trigger, memory returned in a rush. He was cognizant of his body and what had happened to it. With a surge of relief, he knew that his mind was intact but that comfort was immediately overwhelmed by the recognition of his confinement in the rigid shell of this alien body. He had a purely animal urge to escape, to rid himself of the imprisoning limbs as a desperate beast would gnaw off the leg that was held in a trap. It was a nightmare to him – to Nooj. He knew his name now and that he had been a Warrior and had fallen on Mount Gagazet defending the Summoner. They had drugged him to control him, these strangers. If it had been spells, he knew ways to counteract them, but drugs...he struggled against the invisible chemical fetters holding him to the bed. Why were his old comrades letting this happen? Had he somehow become a dangerous lunatic that must be confined? At that moment, death seemed so desirable that he was sickened by the intensity of his longing. On Mount Gagazet when he felt death take him, he had embraced the darkness. He had reached the destination he had journeyed toward – the home, the womb, the comforting hearth. And now it had been snatched away; he was expelled into a coldly inhospitable world.
He stopped trying to fight the medication since he could make only the most feeble physical resistance. Instead, he turned inward, hunting the truths of what had happened since he had felt himself die. Calling on skills practiced since boyhood, he stilled himself in order to understand his situation. Logically there was no way he could have survived the attack Sin had loosed and he had intercepted – so how did he live? Was this a fragment of a dream occurring in the eternal instant between death and dissolution?... With effort, he tried to retrace his reasoning but found that he could not follow his own mental processes; that path, too, was closed. With a bleak acknowledgement of the disorder persisting in his thoughts – his inability to focus his mind as well as his eyes, he surrendered to the exigencies of the moment. Confused and trapped, he turned his head away from the room and into the pillow, his eyes squeezed shut, his face shielded from prying stares by his right arm. He less heard than felt the attempted reassurance of the voices around him as they faded into an incoherent cacophony of buzzing against his ears.
"The arm is designed to move very like a flesh and blood arm. You will learn to use it easily and naturally. We have come a long way in the development of replacement limbs..." "Captain, we are looking forward to having you back with us..." "It's not just an arm – it has a machina clavicle and...""Sin is still alive; we need your courage and leadership...." "You will find the heart has an estimated life of a century if we can just avoid having it ripped out, ha, ha......." "Your new rib cage is almost sixty percent stronger than the..." "We have ground spectacles to restore your vision to nearly what it was. Here try..." Slowly the comments died away altogether as the visitors, thinking he had fallen into the sudden sleep of the invalid, left the room. He shuddered and two unaccustomed tears forced their way from under his lids. Silently, he cursed his weakness as something inside him abruptly dissolved and reformed.
"Nooj, it will be all right." It was a woman's voice and a woman's touch that called him back to full awareness. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand on his chest, where the human skin and the synthetic tissue joined. He could feel her fingers caressing him and he thought he could almost feel her touch on the insensate area. It was a strange sensation, soothing and arousing at the same time. Ethereally pale with skin that shimmered in the dim light, she appeared weightless, ephemeral. To his blurred vision, she seemed less an actual being than a product of his chemically addled mind. He blinked fiercely bur she remained there, smiling down at him and continuing to stroke his body.
Slowly she moved her hand to his cheeks, wiping away the moisture, and then on to his left shoulder where the human and the machina blended. Again, he thought he could feel her touch. She gently and carefully slid her hand beneath the sheet, down his hip to the machina leg and again that strange sensation seized him. Without conscious volition, he reached for her with his good arm and pulled her down to him, his lips seeking hers. They were alone and he embraced her with a desperation that laid bare his rage and need.
With a start, Nooj realized what he was doing and jerked back, releasing his grasp. "Forgive me. I am not myself," he said with a bitter, self- mocking laugh. "There is little enough of me left; I must try to keep what remains true to what I was."
"There's more left of you than you think," she said and bent to rub her cheek against his chest. "Mmmm...I do love the smoothness of the men of your race."
"It's strange... when you touched me, I seemed to feel where there are no nerves." He murmured absently. Then, recollecting what she had seen when she came in, he flushed scarlet. "And I deeply regret that you were exposed to my maudlin self pity."
"Oh, I expect the nerves will regenerate to a degree and you can never underestimate those Al Bhed engineers. They'll find a way to create synthetic nerves that are better than real ones." She reached for the spectacles on the side table and set them on his nose, briskly hooking the temples over his ears. "As to the self-pity, you've a right to it. You must realize that you've been sleeping for more than six-weeks, you're physically weak from your ordeal and, what's more, you've just been hit with a massive dose of tranquilizer. What do you expect of yourself? ... Things will get better, love. I'd be furious too if I thought the Maesters were using me for their political games. Go ahead and fume but not too much. Your priority now is to get stronger and get out of here before they really take you over." She lifted a glass of water to his lips and watched as he drank thirstily.
"So all this is real and I am alive – in parts; I wasn't sure.... What do they want from me?" Now that he could see her clearly, Nooj noted that she was as beautiful as he had imagined. As he had noted even with blurred vision, she was indeed radiantly fair.
"Oh, you're alive all right – all of you and they want you to pull their chestnuts out of the fire they started. They've made a mess of this war and need you to whip up the populace and the troops into that well known fighting frenzy. Are you aware that Mounfar set up that encounter on Mount Gagazet?"
"What? He planned that debacle? Why?" Nooj had thought it was Kinoc
"Oh, he didn't intend for it to go quite that way. I have to give him that. He's not a common murderer; he just wanted to distract the people from some inconvenient truths that were starting to emerge. As a matter of my certain knowledge, you were cast as the star of the production – after the Summoner, of course." She watched him carefully, gauging his reaction to her words.
"I remember dying there. What happened to Sin after I died? . Is my memory false?"
"Not entirely; we were told that Sin vanished as soon as it unleashed that attack that caught you and you were put in a sort of mystic deep-freeze by some Mages until the Al Bhed could work their own magic and implant their heart and lung and ...so forth. Mounfar didn't want to lose you."
"Is that why he's going along with the Al Bhed in this travesty? How can he even think I'd want to live like this? With this worse than useless arm and leg? As a half-human freak?" Had he the strength, Nooj would have struck out in fury in spite of the drugs. "Is this his apology for what his plotting did to me?"
"I think in part. He doesn't have much understanding of how other people think. What Mounfar sees is that he has acted to keep you alive and you ought to be biddable for that reason alone. You've become the contemporary equivalent of a mythic hero, you know, and useful to them. They didn't pin those medals on you just to honor you and show appreciation for the number of fiends and Llyob you've killed; they always have several reasons for anything they do. They plan to use you for a lot of things. This time they intend to hide behind your reputation to protect their own and coax you into supporting their unnecessary wars. The next time it may be for installing a new government - first in Bevelle then all over Spira. Watch them carefully; they'll offer you anything they think you want – they've already given you a new life – but they'll expect you to sign on as their accomplice. In short, they want your soul," she spoke with the absolute assurance of one who knows and who is not often wrong. "I, in case you were wondering, want your body."
He stared at her, astonished. "My body? What are you talking about? Is it a habit of yours to make sadistic jokes – do you have any more about cripples? Or maybe you think a good laugh is just what I need to cheer me up and you're playing the clown to divert me. There's not enough of my body left to feed a baby fiend. Perhaps you have a taste for machina."
"I'm not a clown and I'm certainly not perverted. I've wanted you for a long time and now I have a chance. Finally you're flying low enough for me to reach," her look blended mockery with concern. "Nooj, I'm here when you need me. I'll help you fight the Maesters and get out of this place.... By the way, my name is LeBlanc."
"LeBlanc, the woman who inherited the Syndicate. I saw you at that medal ceremony in the second row with members of the Council. Didn't you invite me to some of your soirees after that? You're not one to talk about high flyers - with you among the highest. You're the one who makes the boast that you always get what you want and you make me a target. Lady, you aim too low." He politely kissed her fingertips. "Now, go back to your buying and selling; you've had your entertainment for today."
"I'm flattered that you remember me but, understand, I'm not entertaining myself. I'm entirely serious about everything I've said to you. It won't take you long to realize I never lie about anything- except in the way of business- and I haven't lied to you. You won't keep me away. I'll be here tomorrow, love, and we can begin hatching our own plots. Now rest and start regaining your strength; you're going to need it. And don't keep underestimating the Al Bhed. Those despised limbs will serve you better than you think right now. I assure you, this has been your worst day; things will get better." Bending, she brushed his lips lightly with hers and was gone leaving behind a trail of fragrance and a final thought. "I inherited the Syndicate in much the same way as you inherited the Crusaders."
Also be warned – AU will continue to creep in. There is no way I can totally exorcise it without re-writing the whole bloody book.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Chapter One – Conclusion
"Wake up, Nooj. It's time to wake up, now." The words were soft but insistent and he could sense a glowing light though his lids. His first thought was that he was not blind, at least that had been truth. As from a dream, he remembered parts of his earlier awakening and the horror of that memory propelled him half way toward consciousness. It was difficult to open his eyes – the lids seemed burdened by the heaviness of the light pressing against them. He peered through his lashes, trying to understand where he was and what was happening. He was lying on a bed in a large brilliantly white room, his head slightly raised and sheets over his naked body. He could feel their weight on his right side but his left was numb and heavy.
"Stupid," he thought dazedly, "Of course there's no feeling on my left side; it's gone." The memory of a catastrophe involving him glimmered briefly and then was gone. He became dimly aware of the presence of other people, all watching him intently. As his eyes began to focus, he recognized two members of his former Crusaders command and a faint smile tweaked his mouth. Turning his head on the pillow, he was conscious of the fuzziness of his vision and tried to blink it away as he strained to identify the other figures around the bed. Why couldn't he see them clearly? - He had always had the eyes of a raptor. From their voices, they were strangers to him, both the men and the women. He absently wondered what they were doing there.
One of them, by his appearance, an Al Bhed, spoke. "Good morning, hero. Have we slept well? I trust we are feeling alert and vigorous this morning." An unfamiliar face loomed over him and he felt a curious sensation of anxiety at the sound of the almost familiar inflections. Raising his hand to fend off the stranger's approach, he felt it seized and cool fingers pressed against the pulse points of his wrist. He tried to pull away but was not strong enough to break the man's grip.
His anxiety increased as his world seemed to spin and separate him into two beings - blending, parting - falling. His vision blurred more and he felt nauseated as he clutched at the linens with the hand his tormentor had finally released. It was as though he was suspended in a web of scrim between two dimly seen stage sets. In the one, he was hovering above a mountain peak, with spectral shapes moving and toppling – he couldn't remember precisely what had happened to him there but it had been terrible, unthinkable. On the other, he was in a white room with indistinct contours, his senses fogged and no connection to anything in the fragmented memories he could access. He tried to move but was frozen by weakness or a reluctance to choose either as reality.
"Good morning, hero...." The words dragged out – impossibly slow and deep.
Nooj felt a sudden surge of disgust for the man and turned away. An uncertainty was troubling his mind, a sense of something fundamentally wrong. With excruciating effort, he lifted his right arm and reached toward his left shoulder. There was something cold and hard where there should have been nothing at all. The messages from his fingers to his brain were making no sense that he could understand. Was there some sort of disconnect or had a head injury left him unable to interpret what his senses told him? A tsunami of fear washed over his consciousness, leaving him trembling and unwilling to risk further tests. Everything was strange – he had no reference for emotion of this sort. For a moment, he became vertiginous with the loss of presence. What had happened and where? He gathered his courage and with sudden decisiveness looked at the place his hand still rested. Where his left arm had been there was an articulated limb of metal and ceramic. He made an effort to lift it, to flex the hand but there was no response from the inert object at his side.
"Raise the bed," he demanded hoarsely. He threw back the covers and looked for his left leg. It, too, was machina, rigid, motionless and foreign. With dawning horror, he touched that as well.
"What have you done to me?" he howled in despair. "What have you done?"
An injector spray stung his arm and, almost instantly, he felt a deadness possess him. Drugs, he thought with a helplessness that was foreign to his nature, not spells but drugs. As though the sedative had been the trigger, memory returned in a rush. He was cognizant of his body and what had happened to it. With a surge of relief, he knew that his mind was intact but that comfort was immediately overwhelmed by the recognition of his confinement in the rigid shell of this alien body. He had a purely animal urge to escape, to rid himself of the imprisoning limbs as a desperate beast would gnaw off the leg that was held in a trap. It was a nightmare to him – to Nooj. He knew his name now and that he had been a Warrior and had fallen on Mount Gagazet defending the Summoner. They had drugged him to control him, these strangers. If it had been spells, he knew ways to counteract them, but drugs...he struggled against the invisible chemical fetters holding him to the bed. Why were his old comrades letting this happen? Had he somehow become a dangerous lunatic that must be confined? At that moment, death seemed so desirable that he was sickened by the intensity of his longing. On Mount Gagazet when he felt death take him, he had embraced the darkness. He had reached the destination he had journeyed toward – the home, the womb, the comforting hearth. And now it had been snatched away; he was expelled into a coldly inhospitable world.
He stopped trying to fight the medication since he could make only the most feeble physical resistance. Instead, he turned inward, hunting the truths of what had happened since he had felt himself die. Calling on skills practiced since boyhood, he stilled himself in order to understand his situation. Logically there was no way he could have survived the attack Sin had loosed and he had intercepted – so how did he live? Was this a fragment of a dream occurring in the eternal instant between death and dissolution?... With effort, he tried to retrace his reasoning but found that he could not follow his own mental processes; that path, too, was closed. With a bleak acknowledgement of the disorder persisting in his thoughts – his inability to focus his mind as well as his eyes, he surrendered to the exigencies of the moment. Confused and trapped, he turned his head away from the room and into the pillow, his eyes squeezed shut, his face shielded from prying stares by his right arm. He less heard than felt the attempted reassurance of the voices around him as they faded into an incoherent cacophony of buzzing against his ears.
"The arm is designed to move very like a flesh and blood arm. You will learn to use it easily and naturally. We have come a long way in the development of replacement limbs..." "Captain, we are looking forward to having you back with us..." "It's not just an arm – it has a machina clavicle and...""Sin is still alive; we need your courage and leadership...." "You will find the heart has an estimated life of a century if we can just avoid having it ripped out, ha, ha......." "Your new rib cage is almost sixty percent stronger than the..." "We have ground spectacles to restore your vision to nearly what it was. Here try..." Slowly the comments died away altogether as the visitors, thinking he had fallen into the sudden sleep of the invalid, left the room. He shuddered and two unaccustomed tears forced their way from under his lids. Silently, he cursed his weakness as something inside him abruptly dissolved and reformed.
"Nooj, it will be all right." It was a woman's voice and a woman's touch that called him back to full awareness. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand on his chest, where the human skin and the synthetic tissue joined. He could feel her fingers caressing him and he thought he could almost feel her touch on the insensate area. It was a strange sensation, soothing and arousing at the same time. Ethereally pale with skin that shimmered in the dim light, she appeared weightless, ephemeral. To his blurred vision, she seemed less an actual being than a product of his chemically addled mind. He blinked fiercely bur she remained there, smiling down at him and continuing to stroke his body.
Slowly she moved her hand to his cheeks, wiping away the moisture, and then on to his left shoulder where the human and the machina blended. Again, he thought he could feel her touch. She gently and carefully slid her hand beneath the sheet, down his hip to the machina leg and again that strange sensation seized him. Without conscious volition, he reached for her with his good arm and pulled her down to him, his lips seeking hers. They were alone and he embraced her with a desperation that laid bare his rage and need.
With a start, Nooj realized what he was doing and jerked back, releasing his grasp. "Forgive me. I am not myself," he said with a bitter, self- mocking laugh. "There is little enough of me left; I must try to keep what remains true to what I was."
"There's more left of you than you think," she said and bent to rub her cheek against his chest. "Mmmm...I do love the smoothness of the men of your race."
"It's strange... when you touched me, I seemed to feel where there are no nerves." He murmured absently. Then, recollecting what she had seen when she came in, he flushed scarlet. "And I deeply regret that you were exposed to my maudlin self pity."
"Oh, I expect the nerves will regenerate to a degree and you can never underestimate those Al Bhed engineers. They'll find a way to create synthetic nerves that are better than real ones." She reached for the spectacles on the side table and set them on his nose, briskly hooking the temples over his ears. "As to the self-pity, you've a right to it. You must realize that you've been sleeping for more than six-weeks, you're physically weak from your ordeal and, what's more, you've just been hit with a massive dose of tranquilizer. What do you expect of yourself? ... Things will get better, love. I'd be furious too if I thought the Maesters were using me for their political games. Go ahead and fume but not too much. Your priority now is to get stronger and get out of here before they really take you over." She lifted a glass of water to his lips and watched as he drank thirstily.
"So all this is real and I am alive – in parts; I wasn't sure.... What do they want from me?" Now that he could see her clearly, Nooj noted that she was as beautiful as he had imagined. As he had noted even with blurred vision, she was indeed radiantly fair.
"Oh, you're alive all right – all of you and they want you to pull their chestnuts out of the fire they started. They've made a mess of this war and need you to whip up the populace and the troops into that well known fighting frenzy. Are you aware that Mounfar set up that encounter on Mount Gagazet?"
"What? He planned that debacle? Why?" Nooj had thought it was Kinoc
"Oh, he didn't intend for it to go quite that way. I have to give him that. He's not a common murderer; he just wanted to distract the people from some inconvenient truths that were starting to emerge. As a matter of my certain knowledge, you were cast as the star of the production – after the Summoner, of course." She watched him carefully, gauging his reaction to her words.
"I remember dying there. What happened to Sin after I died? . Is my memory false?"
"Not entirely; we were told that Sin vanished as soon as it unleashed that attack that caught you and you were put in a sort of mystic deep-freeze by some Mages until the Al Bhed could work their own magic and implant their heart and lung and ...so forth. Mounfar didn't want to lose you."
"Is that why he's going along with the Al Bhed in this travesty? How can he even think I'd want to live like this? With this worse than useless arm and leg? As a half-human freak?" Had he the strength, Nooj would have struck out in fury in spite of the drugs. "Is this his apology for what his plotting did to me?"
"I think in part. He doesn't have much understanding of how other people think. What Mounfar sees is that he has acted to keep you alive and you ought to be biddable for that reason alone. You've become the contemporary equivalent of a mythic hero, you know, and useful to them. They didn't pin those medals on you just to honor you and show appreciation for the number of fiends and Llyob you've killed; they always have several reasons for anything they do. They plan to use you for a lot of things. This time they intend to hide behind your reputation to protect their own and coax you into supporting their unnecessary wars. The next time it may be for installing a new government - first in Bevelle then all over Spira. Watch them carefully; they'll offer you anything they think you want – they've already given you a new life – but they'll expect you to sign on as their accomplice. In short, they want your soul," she spoke with the absolute assurance of one who knows and who is not often wrong. "I, in case you were wondering, want your body."
He stared at her, astonished. "My body? What are you talking about? Is it a habit of yours to make sadistic jokes – do you have any more about cripples? Or maybe you think a good laugh is just what I need to cheer me up and you're playing the clown to divert me. There's not enough of my body left to feed a baby fiend. Perhaps you have a taste for machina."
"I'm not a clown and I'm certainly not perverted. I've wanted you for a long time and now I have a chance. Finally you're flying low enough for me to reach," her look blended mockery with concern. "Nooj, I'm here when you need me. I'll help you fight the Maesters and get out of this place.... By the way, my name is LeBlanc."
"LeBlanc, the woman who inherited the Syndicate. I saw you at that medal ceremony in the second row with members of the Council. Didn't you invite me to some of your soirees after that? You're not one to talk about high flyers - with you among the highest. You're the one who makes the boast that you always get what you want and you make me a target. Lady, you aim too low." He politely kissed her fingertips. "Now, go back to your buying and selling; you've had your entertainment for today."
"I'm flattered that you remember me but, understand, I'm not entertaining myself. I'm entirely serious about everything I've said to you. It won't take you long to realize I never lie about anything- except in the way of business- and I haven't lied to you. You won't keep me away. I'll be here tomorrow, love, and we can begin hatching our own plots. Now rest and start regaining your strength; you're going to need it. And don't keep underestimating the Al Bhed. Those despised limbs will serve you better than you think right now. I assure you, this has been your worst day; things will get better." Bending, she brushed his lips lightly with hers and was gone leaving behind a trail of fragrance and a final thought. "I inherited the Syndicate in much the same way as you inherited the Crusaders."