Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 Spira, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
I looked over the Dona POV after playing FFX-2 and realized that it was incomplete. So here's the second part, relating to the second game and the two years in between the games. I don't own them. Don't sue me.
Alone
by flame mage
I failed.
Unlike most summoners, I have a lifetime to live with that. The majority who fail to perform the Final Summoning and defeat Sin die during the pilgrimage. Their graves litter the heights of Mt. Gagazet; their unsent spirits--and most are never sent, because who is left to send the sender?--walk the routes of their pilgrimages and stalk any of their living guardians for eternity.
They have it easy. They have to face their deaths but not their failures. They never have to hear the angry whispers as they walk through the streets, never have to be called "former summoner" and hear the pointedness in the words. One day I was "Lady Dona." The next day, I was just "Dona" once again.
I can't even describe the way it felt.
For a long time I was despondent. I pushed away anyone who tried to talk to me. I'd felt alone on my pilgrimage--not so much because I was above and suddenly different from all the people who had once shunned me, but more when they rejected me again and turned to that hateful child, Yuna--but at that moment I felt more so than I had since my childhood. All the years of training, my early pilgrimage...they had separated me from things like loneliness and shame.
I actually wasn't alone, though. The former summoner Isaaru went through the same process, perhaps more painfully--his pilgrimage was halted directly by Sir Auron, Yuna's legendary inherited guardian. Of course. It would stand to reason that the child would try to stop her competitors in their tracks. For a time I toyed with the idea that she had paid the Al Bhed to kidnap me. Perhaps she did. She wouldn't have been the first summoner to tamper with the pilgrimages of anyone who might have stood in her way. Despite her fresh-faced innocence, she knew something of publicity stunts.
I should be grateful to the brat for succeeding, I suppose, or my burden of failure would have been even harder to bear. The Calm happened. My failure didn't cost anyone anything except me.
It broke Isaaru. Now he's a tour guide at Zanarkand, if you can imagine, leading gawking imbeciles around ruins he wasn't strong enough to see with his own eyes. Defiling a place I used to believe was sacred. There were days when I believed I would go mad. Isaaru did.
It seems the world went mad too, sometime in those two years since this Calm began. The Eternal Calm. Ha. I preferred the days of Sin, when I had some societal value. Was the corruption of Yevon better than this age of...purposelessness?
Oh, Yevon's corruption hasn't ended, of course. It's still around, under new management Instead of four maesters, it's led by a single praetor--easier for the entire order to be manipulated under a single thumb, with no troublesome do-gooders like Kelk Ronso present to protest. It's still poisoning the minds of those who are weak enough to need a religion to cling to, the frail-minded who still hold on to their false hope.
The real hope in Spira comes from the Youth League, led by the former Crusader Mevyn Nooj. The League is dedicated to recovering the spheres of Spira's past, spheres long covered up by the machinations of Yevon. Here in Kilika, thanks be to Yevon--
--old habits are hard to break.
I meant to say that here in Kilika, the Youth League has quite a strong following. Sphere hunters are turning up records all over Spira, even as I speak, and shipping them to our headquarters at Mushroom Rock. And each one brings us closer to knowing the true story of Spira's past.
I must admit that it's personal for me. For two years I have been consumed with...my, but it's strange to admit this to someone. I have been consumed with the desperate need to know why Yevon lied to us for so long. Why Yevon lied to me.
In Spira, it is automatically assumed that all non-Al Bheds are Yevonites, but I first remember adopting Yevon in any conscious sense at the orphanage when I was a girl. For many of the other abandoned children there, perhaps it offered a bastion of hope to feel that an all-powerful deity was watching over them and would protect them. It offered me hope, too, but a different kind of hope--the hope of becoming a summoner. The hope of becoming someone.
I was never a fanatic, but driven by that hope, I believed. I put whatever faith I had in Yevon, and started becoming a summoner at fifteen. As all those hours of prayer became days, days became weeks, weeks became months, months became years, I, too, began to hold onto the hope that I could atone for the sins of mankind, and perhaps my pilgrimage would be the last.
When Yuna first came back with her motley crew of "guardians" and announced to the world Yunalesca's tale of the futility of the pilgrimage, that summoners could never free Spira from the shadow of Sin, I could not believe her. I was sure she was trying to justify her own cowardice. She had been afraid to die, and so she had tried to kill Sin another way, defying tradition. Sometimes even now I catch myself thinking that perhaps Sin isn't really gone.
The Youth League and its spheres told me the truth.
And now I have to know why. Why no one searched for solutions earlier. Why summoners were never told that their legacies were only temporary. Why only a coward could defeat Sin.
If Yevon's lies hadn't forced me to become a summoner, I could have become a hero some other way. I wouldn't have had to feel so alone, these long two years.
As I said before, of course, I was never really alone. Perhaps Isaaru suffered similar things before his breakdown, so emotionally someone else may have been near me. And physically--there was always Barthello.
Until now.
When I knew my pilgrimage was over, Barthello was the only one who was there with me. Barthello, my lone guardian. My lover. The closest thing to a friend I've ever had. He was always a numbskull, and I'd never given him much credit for being able to understand me, but he knew that we'd reached the end of our journey without me ever having to say it. He never said a word, either, only held me. Only let me scream and rant and sob. Only stood silent and composed under the rain of blows and insults I hurled at him that night. He never told anyone that I'd lost my own composure. Ever since I met him, I'd taken him for granted every day, but I realized later because of that night that he was a real person. It didn't stop me from taking him for granted, but it forced me to realize that he'd become more than a convenience in the years we'd been together.
I thought he'd leave. He didn't. He stayed. When Kilika was rebuilt, he came back with me. He was the one who bought our house, with the money he told me he'd been saving to build a statue of me when I had summoned my Final Aeon.
He swore that he'd keep on protecting me, as he always had, for the rest of our lives.
I could never tell him this, but I was grateful for that.
But he still clung to Yevon. When New Yevon regrouped, he was one of the first to rejoin the church, attend services, praise Yevon. Suddenly I began to come home and not find him waiting for me, as he always had been. He was at the temple instead, praying. As long as I'd known him, I'd been at the temples myself--praying as part of my training, or praying for a new Aeon. Now I had left the temples in the past, and he was still stuck there.
Finally, a few weeks ago, I threw him out.
I couldn't stand it any longer. After all, he was the one protecting me. A guardian should respect the wishes of his summone--my, my, my, even after all this time I still can't get the old jargon out of my head.
Strange how many little things are different. Strange how many little things remind me of him.
He was wrong. Of course. It goes without saying that I was in the right. But perhaps...perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps there are things that are more important than this argument. Perhaps it's more important that we're together.
What am I saying?
He was wrong.
But he's a person.
But he was wrong.
But I love him. Even though he was wrong.
I wish he'd just admit it and come home.
Because alone here--in our house in a new Spira--I am realizing that admitting that he's human may be the first step to finding out who I am as a human. Being more than a nameless orphan. Being more than a summoner. Being more than a slave to the spotlight.I wonder now if I've ever really known who "Dona" is.
But he was wrong. Yuna was wrong. Yevon was wrong. Everyone is wrong but me.
Outside our house, the people and the trees and the canals of Kilika are all moving. Inside, everything is still. Inside, I'm all alone.