Author's Note: Thanks for all the readers who have commented, both recently and along the way. I'll be fixing that missing word in Chapter 12 sometime real soon now too.

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Paine?

At first I can only stare at the figure who has materialized so deftly out of space that still reeks of fishtails. My last night on the ship brought me ill dreams anew, visions that had me wake with the rough blanket kicked around my ankles. I would not be surprised if this is one of them, and the woman I fool myself to see is only a figment that will dissolve at dawn.

But red eyes stare back, equally surprised.

If this is a nightmare, then it has not yet begun to degrade. Paine has not scattered into a cloud of screaming pyreflies. Instead she stands there, every inch shocked. Dove-grey cloth is wrapped around her shoulders; the fabric bounces against the back of her legs, reined together in the form of a long tunic. She must be equally concerned about traveling incognito. That or too much black leather visible only absorbs Luca heat.

She wastes no time in speaking. "Baralai? What are you doing here? What is," she adds, gesturing to my clothes, my Yevon sash. Her fingers play like dark birds in the air, leather-clad. I should have known she would not remove her gloves, even if she tried to cover the rest with a shirt.

I grab the offending sash hurriedly and yank it off, shoving it half-into a pocket where it dangles more exposed than hidden. The bulge of it distends my pocket and I cover the evidence with a hand.

"Me?" I hurry to interrupt her before she tries to recover the rest of her broken question. Explaining why I look like a Yevon lackey is not something I think I have the wit for just now. Not while I am still trying to figure out if Paine sounded unhappy to see me, or only shocked. "What are you doing in Luca? Shouldn't you be..."

Trailing off, I realize that I have no idea of how to finish my own sentence. In all honesty, I never thought of where either she or Gippal might have traveled. "You wouldn't believe the nightmares I've been having," I add instead, rather lamely, realizing only afterwards just how incriminating that phrase could be.

"Maybe I would." Amusement in milkless chocolate is Paine's voice. I have missed it. "I have them about sunsets now."

Mi'ihen.

We are both silent then, as the worries of the harbor hurry themselves around us. Sailors tromp down the wood-and-stone walkways of the port.

It is Paine who speaks first once again. She has always been more direct, like an arrow shot to pursue its target and discover the shape of it in the same motion. "Never mind all that." Neither has she ever a taste for mystery. "I came to watch the Yevon ship disembark. There were supposed to be priests on it, weren't there?"

"New Yevon." My correction is unthinking, though I have never been so careful in Bevelle. "It's New Yevon now. And there are no priests. Not on this ship."

I watch her take this news in while my eyes encompass her only at their fringes. Such news bodes ill if fully realized. Paine is no dull-wit; she understands at least part of my meaning within seconds, enough that she does not waste time in asking me how I know.

"Will there be a second vessel arriving?"

Here is the rest of my own condemnation. "No."

Her exhalation, when it comes, sighs out of her in a pursed-lipped annoyance. I am continuing to look at the upper half of her left thigh in the meantime. Paine's shirt is trimmed with a dark grey thread to form swallowtail patterns up and down her body; focusing on that, I can pretend not to consider just what my work in Bevelle might have already damned me from.

While I am aware that Paine has trained herself with the blade, and is a fair shot with a machina gun, it is always in the position of the recorder that I find myself viewing her in. This is the same now, in the way her eyes fix upon me piercingly as if they were tallying up the angles of my body for better lighting on the records. "You're it."

"I'm the one that Bevelle sent, yes." Paine never uses five words where two can do, but I prefer ladeling on the speech. Easier to obfuscate that way. "Only, I'm not a priest. I'm just here to review the Seekers who are applying here. Don't tell me that you're thinking about joining too?" I add before I can stop myself, dread pulling my face back up to hers. I did not see her name in the files. If I had, I can be sure I would have destroyed it.

Relief comes in the form of the negating shake of her head. "Join Yevon? You must be mad, Baralai. Even if I didn't think that half of them would stab me in the back the second I looked away, that doesn't mean I trust what they're doing. As far as I'm concerned, anything that has to do with them is just a disaster in waiting."

The gentlest clearing of my throat, and her eyes dart down to where my palm is covering the ritual sash.

There is no apology in her face when she glares back up to me. "You're not making this any better, Baralai."

"Sorry."

She tries to forgive me; I see it in the way her chin wavers, shaking back and forth once more in resignation. "How long are you planning to stay with them?"

Not making anything better indeed. If I had time to rehearse such a meeting, doubtless I would have kept a dozen lies ready on my tongue. For that matter, I would also have conducted the encounter while not in the middle of the dock. "It's not that easy, Paine." A forced interruption when we both duck away from a worker carrying a long pole of drying squid, and I continue with the stench of seafood in my nose. "I haven't found what I'm looking for from them yet. I... haven't even begun to scratch the surface--"

"So what you're saying is that you don't know."

Paine always was good at cutting through the subtleties.

She spares me further disdain, folding her arms, the hands sliding beneath her sleeves. "I'd wondered where you went. The medic told us later... you'd taken off that morning without a word. At first I thought you only left to get breakfast early--that you'd be bringing it back, along with extra for Gippal. I didn't think to look for you until the afternoon. And then it was too late."

Bared in such a manner, my own memories fall short. At the time it had seemed right to leave the Travel Agency so swiftly, without telling anyone; I had excused it to myself all the road down to Bevelle. Now under Paine's scrutiny, I find my own rationales lacking. "I didn't mean to--" I begin, lowering my head, but the apology only serves to unkey the weeks latched up between us.

Teeth bare in an animal's base anger. Paine is angry, angry in the worst way of a person whose negative emotions have had their birthing from affection. The snapped retort which is growled from her throat is forced quiet to a hiss; the effort only makes her sound inhuman at first, as if she were a fiend dressed in human shape. "You barely said five words before you disappeared!" Leather-wrapped fingers clench and open spasmodically, expressing all manner of thoughts in flesh rather than sound. "And now you still won't tell me what you're up to? What are you doing, Baralai?"

I rally what little survive of my wits. Even in the face of Paine's displeasure, I cannot forget the lessons that have brought us all to this desperate point of affairs. "You could get killed, Paine. You and Gippal both--we all almost died. That's why we planned to leave separately, remember? Tell me you haven't forgotten the betrayal that our own leader took upon us. We can't stay together. It would only risk us all."

The methodology of my voice is calming, meant to soothe.

Paine ignores it entirely.

"We also agreed to get back in touch with each other," she challenges me with, harsh and crisp. When I wince, she knows that I had forgotten that promise. "Instead I've heard nothing from any of you. Nooj, I can understand, but I haven't seen either you or Gippal. For all I knew, you could both have been killed in this search of yours. Do you know what that's been like? Not knowing if maybe we should have taken another way and stayed together?"

I can imagine. The Squad affected us all deeply; our recorder was no less touched, for all the private war we'd gone through in coming to trust one another. My fingers catch at her shirt, feeling the thin weave of it in my knuckles. "I know it's been hard. It's just... Paine, I don't want to see you get hurt again. I can take the risk myself, but you--"

"Stop trying to treat me like I'm a defenseless child!" A hard yank, and her sleeve goes flying from my grasp. "Do you think I'm so weak, or is this just an excuse to leave me behind?"

Typical. I always seem to make her angry. Too bad Gippal is not here to consol me with what to say.

In the sudden hush, I realize that our argument has attracted the attention of every single worker on the dock. The nearby ships creak in spectator whispers. My eyes catch one man looking at me with a brow crooked in curiosity; rather than reward him with an expression back, I only return my gaze hurriedly to Paine.

"You know it's not that." It had been some time before I recognized our recorder's tendency for bravado as covering a very real heart. It had been just as long for her to realize that my elongated speech was the same. "I'm only worried. I know what Bevelle is like. There are still people there who would be only too glad if we were dead. It isn't because I don't care about you, Paine." Even to my own ears, my claim sounds so thin. I do not know what else to do with it other than lay it flat as a offering. "Please trust me."

"I used to believe that." Paine's voice is as fine as a knifepoint. "Then I watched the sun go down again on the Highroad, and realized you'd left too."

I feel my blood stop.

"Just like he did."

There is no answer I can give her. Paine has frozen my tongue in the bed of my mouth.

So we stand, eye to eye, until a shout cuts the space between us.

"Well, now, this is a lucky turn of events." Confidence dwells in the mouth of this speaker; its children are bred out as words. "I'd never have thought to catch you both here. If only we'd have Gippal, then this would be quite the proper reunion, wouldn't it."

I know that timbre well. Recognize it before turning my head, looking towards the new arrival with all the dull horror of the fodder-beast knowing the butcher awaits.

Nooj.

He came with no greater fanfare than that, back into my life with the same ease as he had once ruined it. Epic winds did not rise to herald his arrival. If poets were to retell it later on the stage, they would have to do so with a fierce cunning indeed to make for anything other than a backdrop of hawkers at the fish-market.

The fur ruff of his pauldron has not lost anything over the months we have been parted; if anything, it is all the more brazen, like a lion showing its victories through the thickness of its pelt. His walking stick, the same. From long experience I know just how easy it would be to knock the man down with a hook-sweep of my leg, despite all the air of command that the Deathseeker seeps from his very pores.

And yet my will is choked. It is Paine who speaks first while I am dumbfounded, struck mute by the sight of his smug pride and her own accusations.

"Gippal would be smarter than to come here when Yevon is visiting," she says, and continents could smother in the glacier chill of her gaze.

Nooj does not seem impressed. Shame. "And what does that say about you two?" Not waiting for an answer, the Deathseeker nudges his cane to the side; whether the spreading of his shoulders is conscious or no, he still looms like a cobra on display. "So... where is our errant Al Bhed? The Thunder Plains, maybe? He could attract lightning with his hair, that's what I've always said. How else has it managed to stay up?"

Paine clamps her mouth shut, refusing to volunteer more. The next parry falls to me by default. I am the speaker of the group, too loose with my words by far. Such is the normal case. Right now, I count myself lucky to manage a token resistance. "You have no business here right now, Nooj. I think you should leave."

All my time for preparation, and those plain phrases are all I can think to manage.


Trema would die laughing at his Lustrum's lack of wit.

"You're so confident to tell me what I can and cannot do with my time, Baralai." In defiance of any threat I might pose, Nooj turns his body further, paces a step away from me. That brings him closer to Paine. I do not like that. "On the contrary, though, I have plenty of reason to be in Luca. I'm sure you've heard of the Seekers? A noble quest indeed," he muses, "to unearth the locked secrets which Yevon has kept from Spira all this while. I think we can all sympathize with that."

"Maybe Yevon had a good reason not to share." That answer is hastier than I would normally like; under most circumstances, I would agree with Nooj, but for that I am possessed by the urge to defend even Bevelle from this man. "Or maybe they just realized there were some people who should never have that information."

Nooj has my case in an instant when I speak, and we both know it. "So are you saying you agree with what they did? With what they've done to us all? A thousand years of lies, Baralai, and it's all made better because some people might not have bowed their backs as deeply as the Maesters wanted them to?"

The Deathseeker has the gift of speech. Rather, he has the knack for rallying troops; I can hear it already in the way my own common sense yearns to bend to the other man's logic. But this is no battlefield. The only squadrons called to task would be those of mobs.

Instead, I find enough bitterness beneath my soul to stand upon, find solid ground. From there I take my stance. "Don't put words in my mouth, Nooj."

"They're the only honest ones I can count on that way. How about you, Paine?" Mi'ihen's champion turns his well-honed charm upon our recorder. History could have vanished entirely in truth to consider how he looks at her; there is no sign of the lethal aim he had turned upon us, not now.

Thankfully enough, Paine does not reply.

When he is given only silence on her part, Nooj turns away from Paine and swivels a look far more intent upon me. "What we saw down there was an answer, Baralai. You know that as well as I." Hissed comes his breath, mixing with the ghosts of exhalations made here but a few scant seconds ago. "I won't let you or anyone else get in the way of it."

"An answer?" I twitch a brow with more confidence than I think I feel. "For yourself, or for others?"

"Well." His smile is thin-lipped. Whatever barb may have landed through my retort, I care not; it served its purpose just in getting the Deathseeker to draw his posture back. "We'll just have to see which one of us gets to it first."

Goaded beyond my best instincts, I find my hand twisting; the bunched fabric of the Yevon sash comes visible in the fist of my fingers. It rises like Sin out of the oceans itself, brandished like the bloody mark of a murder-rag. "Or maybe you won't be able to get to it at all."

If I'd hoped to cow Nooj, my hopes should have been strangled in the cradle. Amusement is the only reaction on the Deathseeker's face as he pieces the evidence together. "So... you're the Yevon flunky who's been sent here? I expected more from you, Baralai. Pity. I suppose I know just what kind of results I'll be getting for my petition for membership." With that, at last, Nooj turns his head fully away. His cane thumps on the dock as he begins to haul himself away. "It's too bad, Baralai. I wouldn't have thought you to sell out to them so easily."

An angry man might have spit a threat back to that. I keep my words locked in my mouth and swallow them down to drown in the bile of my stomach instead.

I think I just might hate him.