The Birth of Pain

Disclaimer: See chapter 1.

A/N: Here, with surprising speed, is the next chapter in the Birth of Pain, enjoy! Also, would you prefer that I spend more time on Auron and Leyla's relationship or fast-forward to the juicy bits? It's up to you; just leave your preferences in your review.

He had met her only a year after being promoted from squire to full-fledged warrior-monk but when looking back it seemed he had known her all his life. That his life had begun on that day.

A month prior squad 27 had lost its black mage, Bergil, while scouting the freezing trails of Macalania. Bergil had been old by that time, but he made up for it in wisdom and doughtiness. Yet neither of those saved him in the end.

Their party was ambushed by ice flans that seemed to emerge from the very ground they walked on. Bergil had not had time even to release his sharp intake of breath in final cry before the flans had descended on him as one, enveloping him with their combined spells in a block of ice with a crystalline ching!. The fighting after that was furious, hot, and desperate. Two more men went down, their faces covered in a thin coating of frost before it was over. Bergil, they discovered had died instantly. Not of cold but of suffocation as the ice worked its way down his throat, freezing every drop of moisture.

Looking back it was almost as if the flans had known that the elderly man traveling in a squad of 19 hale, hearty young men was their greatest threat. And who's to say they did not? Were not fiends the troubled souls of the dead unable to pass on to the Farplane? Perhaps within the wriggling nucleus of the ice -flan scattered memories of its past life still lived. Perhaps one of them had even been a black mage. Or a warrior-monk.

For some reason Bergil's death, the first in a long line of friends he would see die before his very eyes was the one that bothered him the least, even at the tender age of 17. At the time death was something he could deal with, that he could prepare for. It was not until he became older, and more cynical that death began to hurt him more and more, every loss striking him to the core.

Had he been older perhaps he would have wept that day when Bergil and the two other warrior-monks were delivered up the long steps of Bevelle to await their sending. The summoner in question had delayed the start of his pilgrimage a day in order to perform the dance himself. As a former warrior-monk himself, the summoner had felt it his duty to honor a fallen comrade though he had been in a different squad.

After Bergil he had somehow become fixed in his mental image of black mages as venerable, wise, and usually male despite the attempts of his closest friend, a priest of Yevon, to dissuade him of that image. Braska pointed out that he too was a practitioner of the dark art in addition to the white magics required of a priest and that while he was most certainly male, he was neither venerable nor all that wise.

Yet the image had endured until after a month out of idleness as their squad awaited another black mage to make them fully functional again, something had come along that had changed everything, starting with his prejudice of what a black mage was supposed to be.

"May I present to you your new mage, gentlemen," their Commander Ralleth had said in his stern, clipped voice. "I hope you haven't been slacking off in your training because tomorrow you will resume your duties. All of them," and with a final piercing look had left the room and the new recruit.

It wasn't until much later that he found out why she had come to him first, straight as an arrow while still maintaining a slight seductive sway in her no-nonsense stride. It was the first chance he had to really look at her and never once after that did he become tired of it.

At first glance she was almost like a ghost, skin so pale it was more like marble or alabaster than flesh and steel gray hair, each piece in a perfect braid no thicker than a little finger all tied away from her face with a black leather cord. At first he thought her eyes were simply dark brown; perhaps even black from the way they seemed to leave dark holes in her face like wounds. It was one of many shocks that day to discover her eyes were not black or brown but red, deep crimson darker than his blood- colored coat.

Beside her outlandish coloring her clothes were hardly to be remarked upon, for it was common knowledge that black mages were a flamboyant bunch and he had seen more startling outfits than hers even within the temple of St. Bevelle. Every piece of material seemed to be layered across another, ocean blue leggings over black pants somehow attached to a thin black top by five scaled pink leather bands that provided little more covering than the top. Flaring out from the clinging blue sleeves that came halfway down her bicep were a pair of black bell- like sleeves that gave her the odd appearance of a bird due to the gold feather-patterned embroidered on the material. Leaning against the wall where she had left it on her way to his corner of the room was a four foot high staff with a jade ball at the end, also worked with intricate patterns. Though not necessary, most mages had some sort of accessory that they channeled their power through, staffs and moogles being the most popular.

How he noted all these details in the few moments it took her to cross to him he did not know. Some would call it love at first sight however, at the time all he was thinking was vague shock that the he Auron had been waiting for for the past month was in fact a she. And not just any she, but one within a year of his age or he'd eat his gauntlets.

"Pleased to meet you, I am Leyla from Kilika Port," she said saluting, fist over chest in a manner that would have made even the strictest Crusader drill-sergeant proud.

Training took over and he returned the salute, partially relieved that he was back on familiar ground. "Auron, warrior-monk of Bevelle," he said with unintentional curtness.

She nodded to herself, "A native then. Well, I'll expect you will be a great help in acquainting me with the city. Let's start tomorrow, once we are done with our first patrol."

And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could say to that.

A/N: If you would like to see more of this story (I assure you, it gets better and ties together many loose ends in FFX and X-2) Please Review. It doesn't have to be long, just a little show of appreciation would be muchly appreciated .