Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, Spira, blitzball, 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 mentioned I own Sanna, right? I don't own Angra Mainyu, though. I don't think I could design something that creepy-looking.

Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.

Green Eyes Plays Dress-Up

by flame mage

spherechange 15: Restless Sleep

The days started falling into a blurry grind after that. The new digging teams figured out what they were doing and started larger-scale excavations in the Eastern Expanse. I figured out that managing a dig really wasn't that different from managing a blitzball team--I sculpted the grand designs and made sure everyone, myself included, followed them. When I wasn't bawling someone out, making notes about our finds, or taking one of my increasingly frequent trips to see Marnela at the Cactuar Nation, I was out digging just like everyone else.

I still couldn't find a way to talk to Reppi without blowing my cover. Most of the other diggers saw me as background noise, the big bad boss whose orders they had to follow. I get the feeling that most of them probably liked me or at least thought I was okay, but part of the role Gippal had told me to play involved giving them a pretty healthy respect for me. I think I've mentioned before that because of our millennium-long status as Spira's scapegoats, we Al Bhed became pretty tough. That meant that in Bikanel with a mostly Al Bhed crew, "respect" was spelled "h-a-r-d-a-s-s." Nedus kept trying to talk blitz with me, but I was afraid that I'd slip and he'd see through my already-flimsy I'm-just-a-really-hardcore-fan line, so I avoided him. That meant that my only real friend around camp was probably Benzo.

I take that back. My other friend was more surprising: Marnela. She was growing increasingly desperate as she felt the fiend presence grow stronger and kept begging us to do something about it. The next time the Gullwings came to our camp, I finally sent them out to make official diplomatic contact, but it didn't do any tangible good for either side. But Benzo and I went out almost every day to see what was going on in her world and tell her what was going on in ours. Eventually I started kinda-sorta understanding what she was saying.

Benzo and I dug a lot, mostly away from the other excavation teams, mostly in the Eastern Expanse. We learned to deal with the fiends. He turned out to be an Alchemist, and when money came in from Djose we spent a lot of it on potions from the Merchant, which Benzo then mixed to heal me while I was getting sliced to ribbons close-range. I was used to bruises from the blitz sphere, but in the Sanubia Desert you will get clawed, beaten, pounded, impaled, and swallowed whole. The way he corrected my grammar still bugged me, and he still hated the way I cursed all the time, but we had a lot to talk about. It seemed like he'd been almost everywhere in Spira, and he told me about his travels and all the interesting people he'd met. I wanted to tell him about myself too, but I couldn't. Instead, I earned myself a reputation as a cynic by cracking a constant stream of jokes about anything and everything.

I was glad to have the two of them to talk to, but perpetual lonliness still weighed on my shoulders. The feeling reached a fever pitch when another transmission from Bickson came in via the commsphere. He was at Djose. I gathered that rumors had gone around that I was working on Bikanel, and he was begging Naida to register him for the dig. Normally she would have sent him through right away--he was young and strong and hardworking, exactly what we were looking for-- but she must have been under orders that anyone who knew me too closely couldn't be selected, and she turned him away with a cold sneer. I raged at Gippal for an hour before he finally hung up on me that night, but no one would let Bickson come to me, and no one would tell him where I was. The worst part of that transmission, though, was seeing Naaga. She'd chopped off her long, beautiful ponytail and feathered her hair into a pixie cut around her face and traded in her cutesy skirt and front-lace top for baggy pants and a pedestrian harness top. But the worst part for me wasn't the new look or the fact that she was wearing goggles now. It was the businesslike tone in her voice when she curtly told Bickson that she didn't know where I was and went back to installing a new firing mechanism in the drone machina she was building. It was the way she didn't even look twice when Gippal passed. Only a few months ago, my sister had been a boy-crazy teenage girl with a childish streak and a flair for being adorable and sneaky. All of a sudden, she was like a different person.

Bickson was in bad shape. More than once, he went back to Youth League headquarters, where Miyu was sympathetic but silent. I kept hoping that Rin would at least say I was alive and doing all right, but he wouldn't even tell anyone that much. The main thing Bickson did was make the commute from Besaid to Luca every day, sometimes even twice a day, and haunt all my usual hangouts. As a result, I saw a lot of what Beclem was doing to my team, and it started driving me crazy. These guys were carefree, fun-loving blitzers, and he was hounding and pounding them into dead-eyed soldiers. Some days he worked them so hard they could barely stand by the end of the morning, and then he'd drive them even harder in the afternoon. I became obsessed with running the Gunner's Gauntlet. I saw myself taking down fiends in my sleep and then beating Beclem up for good measure. Every time I got so tired and frustrated that I wanted to scream and smash something or curl up into the fetal position and let the sands sweep over me, I thought about him, and the sheer fury was enough to keep me going.
It was after one of those times that I first saw it. It was the dead of night and I was sleeping in the shelter, which was jammed and sandy and sweltering hot. Some deserts are burning all day and then freeze at night--not Sanubia. For hours, I lay on my back, remembering that first tournament two years ago. I kept thinking about the second night, when Bickson had taken me up to the roof of the Luca blitz stadium and I'd seen the skyline of the city for the first time. All those millions of lights, with the breeze coming off from the sea. All the sounds of music and laughter and people talking coming from everywhere, and these days machina too, and people speaking Al Bhed. The shelter was dead silent except for the sound of Goma's gentle snoring. I had to get out of there.

So I half-vaulted over all the sleeping bodies and tore off running on foot, completely alone. I knew by then that this could be suicide on Bikanel, where sandstorms and fiends both come out of nowhere. Even if I'd been in a hover, going out alone in the dead of night was more than my life was worth, but I didn't care by then. I was looking at the sand, but I wasn't seeing it. All I could think about was Beclem's stupid owl-eyed mask and that dully angry voice ordering the guys to get up, you lazy good-for-nothings; what have those idiotic captains of yours had you doing for two years?

I probably would have walked all the way out to the edge of the island and then jumped in the sea and started swimming back to Besaid if I'd had the chance, but as it turned out I didn't. I was in the middle of the Western Expanse when all of a sudden, I realized that I was trembling. It took me a second to figure out that it wasn't me--the ground all around me was shaking. And then the sand erupted out of nowhere underneath me and I was hurled backwards into the air.

I hit the sand hard and a small dune nearby collapsed on top of me. I'd left my goggles back at camp. The sand was filling my eyes and nose and mouth, and I was choking and flailing wildly. If I hadn't been able to force my head out, I would have died.

It's ironic, then, that getting covered by that dune might have been the only thing that kept me alive. I couldn't see what had caused the eruption, but it was obviously huge, and it was alive too. Tears were streaming down my face as I struggled to blink the sand out of my eyes, but I could see a massive dark hulk against the silvery landscape. Then I blinked again. There wasn't just one monster--there were three. Were they attached somehow?

"Marnela!" I would have gasped if my mouth hadn't been clamped around six pounds of the Sanubia Desert. This--this had to be the fiend she kept mentioning. In twenty years on this island, I'd never seen anything like it.

Suddenly I realized that it was growing larger. I sunk myself lower into the sand and froze, tilting my face upward to try to keep air going through my lungs. The fiend was getting closer...and closer...and closer...

Yep, I was gonna die, I decided. It was surprisingly easy to deal with, not even as big a deal as losing a blitz match. I don't know, maybe I'm just good at getting fatalistic. But even then, all I could think about was how much it sucked that now Beclem was totally gonna have the run of the team, and there wouldn't be a damn thing I could do about it.

Just like I'm convinced that if I hadn't gotten trapped in the dune, I wouldn't have survived, I'm also convinced that having something to get pissed off about helped me get through what happened next. I was so busy concentrating on everything I wished I was gonna live to do that I didn't have time to freak out as the thing got nearer and nearer. A few seconds before it was on me, I realized that it was too close. It hadn't seen me--but it was going to pass right over me. I started taking a blitz breath.

And then the moonlight was gone and my nose was half an inch from a smooth, running, scaly wall. I nestled my head as far down as I could while keeping the little hollow of sand from caving in over me. Another thing that kept me alive: as a blitzer, I could hold my breath a lot longer than most people. It took about thirty seconds for the thing to pass over me, and in that time, I couldn't get any air--not that I would have dared to breathe even if I could have.

When it was finally gone, I exhaled slowly and took a deep breath. I could move my head and neck a little, but the rest of my body was completely buried. I tried to free myself and discovered that not only was I totally stuck, but moving really hurt like hell. I couldn't tell yet if anything was broken, but I was definitely going to have some bruises if I ever got out of there.

Later I'd look back on it and laugh sardonically about just how many ways the world is out to get you. I could have died in one more way--totally immobile under the sand, I would have starved to death if a dark shape in the sky hadn't happened to pass over me.

It was the freight hover!

I took another deep breath and screamed as loud as I could, without worrying about words. Sanna probably couldn't hear me very well over the noise of the hover, but she must have picked up a little, because she stopped to hover in midair and look around for the source of the scream. I did it again, even louder, and she backtracked and landed on the sand near me.

"Sanna!" I yelled as soon as she jumped out of the hover. "I'm trapped. I need your help."

"Nhadala?" she asked. She was pacing so fast that she nearly stepped on my face. When she saw me, she gasped. "Hang on, girl. I'll have you out in no time flat!" With that, she dropped to her knees on the ground and started digging me out of the sand with her hands. It took her a couple of minutes to get my arms free, and after that things went a little faster. Eventually I was able to wriggle all the way out and get myself spread out on the desert floor.

She peered down at me through her sandscratched goggles. "So, who'd ya take with ya?"

"No one," I replied with my eyes closed.

"Where are your goggles?"

"Back at camp."

"Why'd ya come out here?"

"I felt like taking a damn walk," I snapped.

Sanna bent down and smacked me. "You idiot," she snapped right back at me, "You're not a greenhorn. You know better than to go out all alone in the middle of the night without even goggles on. If I hadn't gotten an early start outta Djose, you coulda been in there for days. What were you thinking?" Before I could answer, she replied for me, "Ya weren't. Can you stand?"

In answer, I struggled to pull myself into a sitting position and then all the way up. She grabbed my wrist and half-dragged me over to the hover. "Man, if the forewoman's like this, I hate to see what kinda shape the diggers are in. Come on, missy. You are going right back where you belong."

I was sore as hell and really wishing I hadn't decided to do this. Sanna didn't help any. "Man," she kept muttering to herself all the way back to camp, "Talk about arrogant. People like you always think nothing can touch them. Think you're so much better or faster or smarter than everyone else on the planet? Yeah, well, you've been better and faster and smarter all the way to the grave if I hadn't been there to bail your ass out. When are you gonna grow up already?"

"Who the hell do you think you're talking to?" I demanded. "Look, kid, maybe you got Gippal protecting you back on the mainland, out here you answer to me. Bikanel is my turf."

"Bikanel is no one's turf anymore," she shot back. "Least of all yours. Ya just proved that! And Benzo tells me you've been runnin' around, swiping supplies from ships, charging into the middle of the Leblanc Syndicate without thinking...you act so tough, but you're just like a little kid, never know when to stop."

I wanted to scream at her. It was like a slap in the face. I was thinking about Naaga on that sphere and her short hair. When she was a little kid, I was the serious, responsible one. I was the one who always did everything. In two years...I'd grown up too fast, and then I'd regressed.

Back at Mi'ihen, I mentioned how celebrity changes people. It changed Bickson. It changed Rin. It changed me. It makes you feel...unstoppable, somehow different from everyone around you, especially when what got you there is something as physical as blitz.

And now Sanna was grumbling to herself and calling me an arrogant little kid. Cracking my knuckles, I stared angrily out at the unchanging desert landscape and wondered if she was right.