Chapter 9: Encounters
To the end of the Earth, I'll search for your face
For the one who laid all of our beauty to waste
Threw our hope into Hell and our children into the fire
I am the one who crawled through the wire
I am the one who crawled through the wire
There's a million sad stories on the side of the road
Strange how we all just got used to the blood
Millions of stories that'll never be told
Silent and froze in the mud
Silent and froze in the mud
I know a cold as cold as it gets
I know a darkness that's darker than coal
A wind that blows as cold as it gets
Blew out the light of my soul
Blew out the light of my soul
I dream in my sleep, I dream in my days
Of some sunny street not so far away
Where up in a window a curtain will sway
And you and I'll meet down below
You and I'll meet down below
I know a cold as cold as it gets
I fight a war, I may never see one
I live only to see you live to regret
Everything that you done
Everything that you done
Everything that you done
Jolting out of sleep, I slowly become aware of myself and my surroundings. My head hurts and my body feels heavy, a feeling I am beginning to be familiar with. There is a hard mattress supporting my body, an uncomfortable object shoved under my head as a makeshift pillow and a thin sheet of material drapes over me. Breaths come in jagged gasps, and the air my body manages to pull in is sour and thick. Besides the heaviness, I cannot feel or move my limbs and a deep panic begins to overtake me. Why can't I think? Why can't I move? A laugh attracts my attention away from my current dilemma. It is a laugh I recognize, but I cannot figure out why.
There is a rustling of fabric and the sound of three swift steps, and then my world turns white. Light shines into my eyes, causing them to burn. The laughter increases at my discomfort, now a gentler, lighter, almost melodic sound. It sends a quake through my body, making me retch and my stomach roil. As the light shines on my eyelids I slowly begin to open them, blinking rapidly to adjust to the sunlight that filters into the room from the open window right across from me. Before I have a chance to take in my surroundings, a voice cuts through my inspection.
"Well if it isn't the Charm herself, gracing us with her consciousness at last." The voice contains well concealed malice, such a slight hint that only someone trained to detect it would; only a soldier would be able to perceive it. I struggle with my voice for a minute, energy seeping out of me and into my words.
"Who…who are you? Why—"
"Oh, don't worry Charm. I'm the least of your worries at the moment." The owner of the voice comes into my range of vision, tossing her hair over her shoulder as she stops at the foot of my bed. Her violet eyes stare into my own green ones and she brushes a stray piece of wavy auburn hair away from her face. She seems to interpret my question before I even have the time to formulate it in my exhausted mind. "My name is Averna. I am here much the same as you, kept against my will and yet, at the same time, I agreed to stay." She takes a few steps so that she is standing next to me, her hands lightly grasping each other in front of her. Her body is clad in black shorts and black camisole, with a black leather jacket over it. A silver and black leather belt sits diagonally on her hips, an empty clip exposed where a weapon used to be. Her hair cascades down to her hips as she raises her left hand to rest next to me.
"Why can't—" Once again she interrupts me at the beginning of my question, as though she knows what I am going to say better than I do.
"You cannot move because you've been beaten to within an inch of your life, Charm. Or should I call you Sarah? Or…what about Selphie? Yes, that one seems to hit the correct nerve." She steps even closer and leans down so that her eyes are level with mine. "Whichever one you choose, you are the same girl. Now stop trying to get up from that…slab and let yourself rest. As long as I am here they should leave you alone."
Glancing around the room before focusing back on Averna's eyes, I voice a question once again and this time she waits for me to finish. "Where are we? And who exactly are 'they' and why would they bother me?"
She sighs and straightens back up, touching a hand to her forehead. As she does this I see the beginning of a scar on her forearm that extends up her arm and disappears under the arm of her jacket. And now that I am paying attention, I notice that there is a scar on her jaw, an angry white slash that extends down and under her right ear. Averna returns her hands to their original position in front of her and trains her eyes out the window.
"Where we are I cannot really tell you. All I know is that we are on the Centra continent." This shocks me because it means that I was transported over the ocean. How long have I been out? Averna interrupts my panicked thoughts as she continues to answer my previous questions. "Now, who 'they' are I can explain a little more. They're enemies. They thrive on seeking out everyone that could be an obstacle, and even those of us who never would have been. They like to eradicate others. They are ancient, and if you play your cards right, they may find out that they need you alive more than they need you dead. Follow my lead and you'll survive for a while longer."
"How do you know so much?"
"When you have been around as long as I have and seen as much as I have seen, you learn to predict certain reactions. You gather knowledge on how to endure."
"And how long have you been around? For that matter, how long have I been here?"
"I've been here entirely too long, just leave it at that. You have been here for about thirty-seven hours now."
I look away from Averna and take in the details of the room for the first time. There is nothing special about it: none of the bars on the window that one would expect of a prison, the walls are plaster covered brick, a terra-cotta color that is chipped in places. There is nothing besides the basics in the room. Besides the bed that I lay on, there is a chair, a small table with a water pitcher and glass, and a bench that spans the length of the window.
Averna turns and almost floats over to the bench by the window, sitting down and staring off into space. She seems deep in thought and I feel bad about interrupting her, but I have another inquiry.
"What is it?" Her voice startles me. What is even more disconcerting, though, is that she never even looked at me. It was like she read my mind, because she sure as shit didn't know from looking at my face.
"Nothing. I'm just…tired."
"Then go to sleep. The faster you get better the faster I can get the hell out of this room and disappear again…fade back into the ground." Her voice fades away and she is quiet for a few minutes. In the quiet, I cannot help but think about my friends and Tessa. Perhaps, since they already know about her, Quistis and Seifer can look after my baby. I'm sure it won't take Quistis long to figure out who the father is, though, and I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world if Tessa wound up with him, instead. After all, he probably knows me the best of anyone and he could tell Tessa about me and she would at least have her real daddy in her life, which is better than any of us ever got. This line of though invariably leads me to think about the bandages that wrap tightly around my abdomen, and the fact that these men tried to carve out my insides. As I am thinking about this, Averna turns back to me suddenly and in four big strides she is leaning over me on the mattress, her eyes burning into my soul. "Did they do it to you?" I have no idea what she is talking about, but when I feel her hands on me I attempt to push her away. Forgetting for a moment the bandages that cover almost all of my skin, I shove her hands back.
"They did, didn't they? Tell me, Charm! Was there a knife—a dagger?"
I can feel the stitches in my arms pull and I grimace at the feel, slowly bringing my arms back to my sides and closing my eyes, shutting out the fervent eyes of Averna as she gets a crazy gleam in the violet irises and I feel as though she is shuffling through my brain. "They did...at least, they tried, didn't they? They tried to take children from your future. But it looks like they may have failed, and that they were too late. Because," she lowers her voice to barely a whisper, "you already have a child. How did they miss that?" I'm not sure how to answer her, because I don't even know what is going on. She seems to understand my dilemma, though. "Don't worry, Charm. This just might give us the upper hand eventually." Smiling, Averna reaches out and smoothes my hair back from my sweaty face. "You may have saved the both of us, Selphie." Slipping back into sleep, I send a prayer out to anyone who is listening that this will come to an end soon. No matter what happens to me, I just want this all to conclude as fast as possible.
My dreams bring me little relief from my situation, as they are filled with screams and torture. I see Averna, strapped to a table in an empty room that reminds me too much of a morgue, her head turned to the side and eyes vacant. Gagging, I see that she has been stabbed several times in the abdomen, one jagged cut across her lower abdomen and it looks like something has been pulled out. The remainder of her shirt is saturated with blood and she takes no breaths. Nausea seeps into me because she looks as though she has been carved open. Taking a step closer to her I am shocked when her head jerks to face me. Her lips move, but the voice belongs to someone else, someone who was once the person who knew me best in the world…someone who rejected me in the end. Irvine's voice fills the small, cold room as Averna's mouth shapes the words.
"You broke your promise to Tessa. She's all alone in the world now, and she wants to know desperately who she is; she wants to know who you are." I take a step away from Averna's body, my back pressing against a cold wall as I start to hyperventilate. The scene changes and all of a sudden, Irvine is standing in front of me and we are back in his room at Garden, our clothes thrown haphazardly on the floor, his hands cupping my face as he looks down at me, a smile tugging at his lips. The memory envelopes me in its embrace, bringing back how his skin felt against mine, how he held me, how he kissed me, how he touched me. He leans down and places a tender kiss on my lips, drawing back to look at me again. A tear runs down my cheek and he uses his thumb to wipe it away. In the back of my mind a voice whispers that it didn't happen like this, that everything was intense and passionate and completely out of control, but it is ignored.
As he stares down on my face, Irvine's voice once again sounds, this time coming from his own lips. "Our Tessa wants to know who her father is…who I am. Why are you hurting us this way, Phie?" He leans down and kisses away the next tear that escapes, his eyes sad and his hands still cradling my face in a way that he has done countless times over the years, and as fast as I appeared in his arms, I am once again in the room with a massacred Averna. The body on the table sits up and slowly the head turns to face me once again, white eyes staring past me, a bloodied arm raising to point over my shoulder. Before I can turn around, someone has grabbed me around the waist, pinning my arms to my sides, and has hoisted me in the air so that my feet no longer touch the ground. I feel a rope twine around my wrists and the next thing I know, I am suspended from a tree in a dark forest, blood flowing from cuts that cover my skin.
A dagger dances in front of my eyes, the person holding it blurred in the background. Just as the dagger comes down to stab me in the heart everything shifts again and I am no longer in my own body, but instead in the body of a young woman with long mocha hair. Instead of being suspended from a tree I am tied to a wooden pole, my feet surrounded by dried brush and sticks. As I stand in this foreign body, one arm twisted to an unnatural angle and bound to the other around the pole, someone steps forward with a torch and tosses it on the pile of brush. I try to scream as the heat nears, as the arm pulls, as the pain grows, but the woman whose body I am in makes no sound at all as she is consumed in flames. Her eyes are focused on a man standing in the crowd holding a baby, and as her long red skirt catches fire and the flame fast rushes for her skin, the first tear slips down her cheeks.
Jerking up in bed, sweat pouring down my brow, a scream hoarsely tears out of my throat. As my heartbeat slows back to normal and my eyes focus on reality, I realize that it was all just a dream. Looking around the room, I see that Averna is still sitting on the bench by the window, seemingly lost in thought having somehow managed to stay in her own world through my outburst. The world slowly seeps back into my bones and I realize that I am in searing pain, so I lower myself back onto the uncomfortable slab that my body rests on. Averna appears next to me, fretting over me and my pain. Placing her hand on my forehead she whispers in my ear.
"Go to sleep, child. Truth seeks you out at your weakest…I'll try to slow it." My eyes close and I slip back into dreams as Averna strokes my head like a mother, the horrific images gone for now. Somehow, I know that Averna is the reason that my nightmares stay away.
Author's Note: Alright. So. I realize it has been ages since I last updated. My only real excuse is that school has totally picked up its pace, and since my major is a killer I've not had much free time to write. Also, I had a hard time getting this chapter going. This is actually the third version I have written. I kept starting and then losing the feel for where I was going, and thus starting over. Anyway, this is definitely not an indication that I am getting back into a regular update rhythm, because I cannot promise that. All I have to say is: Thank God for Spring Break this next week! I'll get the next chapter out as soon as possible, probably back with the rest of the gang since Selphie will be spending some time healing. Well…review and tell me what you thought of this chapter, and know that I appreciate every last one that I receive! Oh, yeah! The song at the beginning of this chapter is Cold as it Gets by Patty Griffin, one of the best musicians out there!
Gilly Bean the repentant.
Edited 11.28.08