Disclaimer: If I owned Baten Kaitos, I would have ditched the main characters completely and focused on these guys. And the dialogue/voice acting wouldn't have been so bad.
A/N: I thought about making this a longer story, but thought I'd try it out as a one-shot first. What do you guys think?
No Apologies
What he remembered most was pain. Pain in his head, in his arms and legs, deep in his gut, down to his bones, burning his skin. He knew he'd cried, and had not been ashamed, if only it would stop. He threw up more than once, too, his stomach twisted in knots from feeling his limbs stretching in ways they should not have. There was no one to help with the pain, no one to rub circles on his back when he was sick. Because the old man didn't care, and Ayme hurt just as much as he did. But what he remembered most after that was a young man. The man was older than he and Ayme, but younger that the old man. He used to bring them things when the old man had left them. Sometimes treats like oranges or brown sugar candy, sometimes toys, clearly worn by another child's hands, but not broken. As the young man came more often, he and Ayme went to the room with the strappy chair less and less. But the damage had been done
He had noticed that Ayme didn't look like she had, and he knew she was much stronger than she used to be. She kept accidentally breaking things. And he knew he was different. He'd run his hands over his face, feeling the changes, and he knew he could no longer stand completely upright. Instead, his back bowed in and his shoulders slumped forward., giving him a look of constantly slanting. And he still hurt. Everywhere he hurt, because his body knew that it had been combined with things that did not belong there, that his limbs had been stretched and twisted in ways that they were not meant to be. His whole body was rejecting the wrongness of it and it hurt.
The young man did help them, though. He'd been the one to set them free, to convince the old man to move on to a new project. The emperor had declared the two of them failures and wanted them killed, but the young man had saved them. They may not be divine, he had argued, but they would make elite fighters with training. They could be useful.
He'd apologized many times since then. Apologized for how they had suffered at his father's hands, how they suffered during their training., learning to control their powers, how they would later suffer on the battlefield. But his apologies didn't ever seem right. Why should he apologize?
Why should he apologize when he'd sat up so many night with crying children, massaging their cramped muscles and soothing their nightmares? Why should he apologize when he had cried, too, holding them to him? Why should he apologize when they had seen the white raised lines on his chest and back, proof of his own hardships? Why should he apologize when they had cried seeing those scars winding their way across their hero, knowing how they must have hurt? Why, By the clouds, should he apologize?
He continued to apologize, as they grew up and grew older, and as the Emperor's behavior became more bizarre and erratic. It was on the Goldoba, on their way to Sadal Suud, when they finally stopped him.
"Don't apologize, Giacomo," he had started.
Ayme had agreed, "Yeah. We may have started here because we had to, but we stayed because we wanted to."
Giacomo had let out a watery laugh at them, but took them at their word. There were no more apologies.