Sins of the Fathers- Chapter two

By Pavana Lachrimae

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: If Squaresoft was mine, would I be writing fanfic? .

Teaser: Six years after the final defeat of Sin, a young part-guado girl named Darra seeks out the only remaining link to her parentage in a last attempt to find out who she is. But when the truth finally surfaces, will she really want to know? Seymour x ?. Lots of twists. Not a sue, and if you read it, you'll see why ;) …

A/N: Wahey! A review! Well, thank you very much and I'll try and do my best not to disappoint you. ; As always, criticism is welcome, as long as it's nice criticism that says "OMG w00T UR STORY ROOLZ!!". Haha. Joking…

-x-

The girl's gaze moved expressionlessly around my small home as she walked in, gripping her loose skirts with one tapered hand to avoid catching them on the doorframe. Her clothes were modest and unrevealing, a stark contrast to what most of us were wearing in these warm summer months, and even her sleeves were self-consciously long, half-covering the malformed and talon-like fingers that were characteristic of her guado descent.

"Sit down, Darra. Make yourself at home." I pushed aside the bead curtain that led to my bedroom, the coolest room in the house, where I kept the drinks. "So did you come here all by yourself?"

She didn't reply. I could almost sense the girl's discomfort; granted, she was doing her best to hide it, but I'd spent too much time around Seymour not to notice that underlying sense of awkwardness. She, too, felt different- incongruous to everything around her, missing something that everyone else had and yet never knowing what it was. The family resemblance was stronger than I had thought.

"Do your parents know you're here?" I ventured, after a second.

"My parents are dead."

"…I'm sorry to hear that." Darra was staring at the floor when I came back in, sitting precariously on the edge of her chair with her hands clasped tightly together, but she looked up when she heard me enter.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "They weren't my real parents, anyway."

"I know." What else could I have said? She genuinely didn't seem bothered. Perhaps, I thought, she had felt too separate from them all her life to care now.

Or perhaps, like Seymour, she was just particularly good at hiding things.

"How did it happen?" I asked.

"My mom- my adopted mother was killed by Sin when I was ten. My father died in an accident two years ago."

"I'm sorry. I knew your parents before you were born. They were good people."

"You knew my real parents as well, didn't you?"

Her words were sudden and accusatory; almost desperate. I recognised then that this was what she had been waiting her whole life to hear. I knew what she was thinking- that if she could only find some sort of tangible root to herself, if only she knew where she came from, then maybe her life would finally gain some sort of definition. Maybe she would finally know who she was.

And yet… she would finally know who she was. And that was the problem. I realised, prepared for her visit as I had been, I had never given any thought to whether or not she would be able to accept what I was about to tell her. The truth was so strange, the whole ordeal so hard to believe, that I was afraid of how she would react.

I didn't know how to start.

"Darra. This is going to take me a while to explain." Slowly, I sat down opposite her, trying to ignore the weight of her almost-frantic gaze.

"Why?" Her voice shook a little- she was close to breaking point. "What is there to explain? I just want to know who my parents are. Whether they're dead, or- or whether they didn't want me because of how I was, or… I just want to know why I'm like this."

"You are 'like that', Darra, because you are part-Guado." I tried to keep my voice steady, in an attempt to reassure the girl. "A quarter, to be precise. I thought you would have guessed."

Darra shook her head slowly. "My adopted parents never told me that."

"Your adopted parents didn't know."

"But-" This revelation alone was still taking some time to sink in, and she sounded a little subdued, if only from shock. "… I don't understand. There's only one half-guado old enough to be my father."

"Maester Seymour; I know. That's where your Guado side is from. As for the human…"

"You're mad." Her voice was thick and heavy with tears as she stood up, tried to push away from me. I took hold of her wrist firmly; she struggled away from my grip. "Seymour never had any children! He was a maniac bent on destroying Spira. That man is not my father and you are a sick woman!"

"Darra!" I stood up and grabbed her arm again. "Listen to me! I knew Seymour before he went insane. He was different. History may have lost that part of him, but I knew him before it all went wrong. And like it or not, you're his daughter, Darra. Look at your hands- look at the veins on your face. You're like him."

I could see her expression change as she realised. I was right, and the truth was inescapable. Her body seemed suddenly frozen beneath my grip; her icy gaze dropped to the floor again, eyes blank and numb and still coming to terms with what I had told her.

"And my mother?" she said quietly, after some time had passed. "It's you, isn't it? Or the woman he married- the summoner- was it her? I didn't…"

The part-guado girl trailed off. I let go of her arm gently.

"It's complicated. You… might want to sit down, Darra. As I said, this is going to take a while to explain. "