By Pavana Lachrimae
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Squaresoft is not mine; no copyright infringement is intended.
A/N: I'm sorry this has taken such a long time coming. If you're still reading, please tell me what you think. I hope I didn't get too wordy in this chapter. Looking over the last few chapters, some of the sentences… erck, I could cringe. But maybe that's just me. Anyway, enjoy, and thanks for reading :)
x-
You were born, Darra, on a stiflingly warm night in summer, the anniversary of your grandmother's death. Unusually, the closed skies of our underground city did not keep out the heat but seemed instead to trap it in, making it difficult to breathe.
It was not easy for your father. I knew he was afraid. He had been caged up in that room for several months. He did not know if he was going to leave it alive.
x-
It started late in the morning. I was away from him when it happened. I had not been out of the house for some time. Those last few claustrophobic weeks had left me desperate for a change of scenery, and I had started finding excuses to escape to other parts of the manor. It wasn't hard to get the other servants to leave me alone. Most of them avoided me, believing I was still 'contagious', or else, that I would bring shame to anybody I was seen with.
Under the pretence of talking to the kitchen staff (a shaky excuse because they didn't actually talk to me), I had left Seymour with Dr Orfeo and hidden myself away in what used to be Anima's quarters, enjoying the short respite from the young man's increasingly burdensome company. It may have been a mistake. By the time the older man had found me and brought me back, the boy was already struggling to withstand the pain.
Orfeo and I stayed with him until well into the night, when we were forced to have the two junior doctors fetched from their homes nearby. Rumours about our young patient's condition no doubt escalated the morning after- several people opened their doors to see what was going on, the hollow corridors of Guadosalam being a perfect medium for carrying echoes further than you wished them to go.
It was for this reason that we could not let him cry out. To do so would have awakened the suspicions of everyone around us; I knew, as well, that Seymour's pride prevented him from showing how much pain he was in, and he would have been humiliated had Jyscal or Tromell heard his screams. He endured it silently for eight hours before the agony finally became too much and I found myself clamping my hand over his mouth to stifle the sound. He sobbed like a child when I let go. Seymour was only four years younger than me, but four years ago I had been little more than a girl.
Due to the construction of their bodies, the second stage of labour- delivery- is usually far easier for a Guado woman than a human. For him, it was twice as difficult. The passage through which the child passed was malformed and raw; the entrance, which was supposed to form along the base of the stomach as a natural part of pregnancy, had not developed properly. That night, for the second time in my life, I saw the scalpel taken to his unprepared flesh. And, for the second time in my life, I had to look away.
The drugs did little to alleviate the pain. His mixed parentage meant he was resistant to most of the medicines we could give him, and magic would have been virtually useless. Still, the sedatives did prove useful eventually; by the time they made the incision the teenager neither knew nor cared where he was any more.
By then the doctors had taken over fully, and I was left to sit beside him, offering comfort I was no more qualified to give than he was to receive. I knew he was no longer coherent, because suddenly he gripped my hand and said; "Mother, you came back."
x-
Anima- or at least, Anima's body- had been dead for eight years. I didn't know whether I really looked like her. I couldn't recall her face, and I had never been close enough to her Aeon to see the portrait.
Although she had never technically died, Jyscal still performed the proper rites. With omissions, of course. There was no sending. She would never appear on the farplane, although I would see her son there countless times after he returned from Zanarkand. He was still a young boy, but with something vital missing this time, as if part of him had been encased with Anima in that statue at Baaj. Mother and child, frozen together in soul-time, nothing left walking but an empty shell.
x-
"Your mother's not here any more," I told him. In the distance I heard Dr Orfeo's voice rise in panic, and the teenager's body tensed beneath my palm. I put my other hand to his wrist; it was so thin my fingers could almost form a complete circle.
Agony sharpened the younger man's eyes for a moment, and it looked almost as if Seymour was thinking clearly again, but his gaze soon became hazy and unfocused once more, and he still did not know who I was.
"You've been gone a long time," he said. His breathing was heavy and laboured. "Don't leave now. Please?"
His hand was squeezing mine so tightly it was becoming hard to endure. Trying to ease my way out of his grip a little, I wrapped my hand around his wrist again. It seemed to calm him down, and then even though the pain must have been unbearable, and the air too hot and stinking of blood for breath, he turned his head and gave me a sweet, mad, trusting, childlike, utterly disturbing smile.
"I am going to die."
x-
Anima's arms, stripped thin by the sickness. Her hooded eyes; her refusal to eat. Her voice, steady as ever, heard with my mother's through a tattered curtain on her final night in Baaj.
"You have no right to tell me what is best for my child!"
"He needs you, Anima. You don't have to do this. You still have time."
"What are a few weeks going to matter? You know why Jyscal sent us here. There are people out there who would harm my son for what he is, if they had the chance. I must give him the strength to protect himself, while I still can."
x-
"You're going to be fine," I lied. "It won't be long now."
"Please look after it for me," he said, and it took me a moment to realise what he was talking about. "I don't... don't want..."
Seymour's voice trailed off. I think he had forgotten what he was going to say. Already his grip on my hand was tightening again; I could almost feel the pain in my own body, although I had never experienced it myself and never would. When he eventually came down from the spasm he closed his eyes and let his head roll back a little.
"You told me once - it is like falling asleep," he said quietly. "I'm not afraid. I only wish I could have - been of some use - like you..."
x-
"And what makes you think depriving him of your memory will make him any stronger? Anima, he's going to hate you for making him do this!" My mother's words were harsh, but justified. Anima's response was unusually defiant.
"He will thank me eventually. I'm giving him more power than most people know in their lifetimes."
"Do you really think that's worth it? Do you really think that's wise?"
"At least this way, my dying will help him! I cannot leave Seymour alone in the world. I have no other choice."
That was the last time we saw her. After that, just as her son later on stepped forward to meet the darkness, she would surmount her fear of death by flinging herself into the void.
x-
"Lord Zaon... Yunalesca... I have failed you."
Empty bodies. Whispering. The stench of blood. I no longer understood what he was saying; I kept silent. "I want you to call it that," he said, "if it's a girl, I want you to call it that."
"Call it what?"
"Lesca..." he whispered. Then, as if by explanation, "I would have made you proud."
"I know," I lied.
"Heba?"
I looked up. Doctor Orfeo's face was grave. A child's cry cut through the thickness in the air. Giving the teenager's wrist one last squeeze, I went to leave, but the faintest tug on my hand stopped me.
"If it is a boy," Seymour said, and then a name, the father's name that I did not tell Darra but instead made lost to the crying of the baby.
I stood up. His hand slipped from mine with little resistance- by then he was too weak to even lift it- and I left his side for the last time. A bloodied bundle was pressed into my arms.
Wearily, Doctor Orfeo beckoned over one of the junior doctors. "Tell Jyscal the baby is dying, and his son may be in his last hours."
Beneath me, the baby cried, great, long, healthy squalls. I could only just hear Seymour's voice from behind me.
"Where is it?" he said quietly.
Orfeo spoke gently. "I'm sorry. It's stillborn."
"Don't lie. I can hear it crying. Let me-" and then his voice cut off abruptly, and I thought him dead. Dr Orfeo's hand pressed wordlessly at my shoulder; he led me towards the door that would lead to my room and out into the rest of the manor. The bundle quietened in my arms. I passed through the threshold then, with a child that was not mine- the sting of separation buzzing behind me still, like the snapping of a thousand tiny threads.