Trembling from Beneath

It held together until she could reach her room. It held together with the glue of her anger and her dignity until the door latched closed, and limb by limb, the tumult of emotions inside her started rippling out of control. Her legs folded beneath her, and her bones thudded against the stone floor. Her chest was caving in, and she lumped forward with her mouth gaping open, and her arms, like shaking pillars, struggling to hold her up.

Her mind shut off the images she had seen in the Fayth room, but her body couldn't repress it, not at her immediate request. She bit her lip and balled her hands. She tried suppressing her heavy gasps, but decided to let them go as long as she didn't resort to tears. Slowly, her body returned under her control. Slowly, her limbs began heeding her orders, and the fear stopped reverberating throughout her body. Slowly, she lifted her weight off the ground, and it shifted from on her hands to on her knees and, finally, on her legs.

"Dra knuiht ec cumet pamuf sa; E ys vens," Rikku recited an old Al Bhed saying, often treated like a prayer, that her mother used to say whenever she was trying to remain calm. Conjuring her mother up through this prayer was the only sure thing to give her strength, but she couldn't help the questions running through her mind. Most of them started with the proverbial "why?" Why me? Why did Gippal do that? Why are these nightmares happening?

After convincing herself that the ground was truly solid below her, she fell on her hard bed and laid there with eyes fixed on the ceiling, fighting her battle with her mind, which wished to call forth old memories and old nightmares that she had left behind with the rubble of Home.

"No problem, I told him," she murmured thinking back to Baralai. "I can handle Gippal." She mocked herself in a cynical tone.

The more time she spent at Djose, the more she thought that Bevelle wasn't all that bad. She had only spent two days there, but they had been good days, and Baralai had been more than willing to help. He understood her. He didn't trick her, or patronize her, or hurt her. What did Gippal gain from it all anyway? He hadn't grown up at all. The Den of Woe, and everything relating to it meant so much to her, but Gippal couldn't understand. He was trying too hard to amuse himself.

She jolted up from her bed the moment she heard the steps coming down the hall and then stopping at her door. She quietly tiptoed over to it, and held her breath. It was him. She could tell. With one palm against the cold metal door, she begged him in her mind to leave her, because she couldn't do it. If he tried to get one more rise out of her, she might fall apart, and he would it see it, and she couldn't take that. If he knocked, she wouldn't answer the door, and it would only worsen whatever he already thought of her. In his mind, she was probably weak and stupid, and she couldn't afford to feed those thoughts. Her eyes filled with watery fear and anxiousness, and her hand formed a fist against the door. She took a deep breath and pounded with the side of her fist. The metal rung with a loud groan, and she heard a couple steps, and then complete silence. For few minutes, it was like that. And finally the steps began again, but each one grew farther and farther away.

"I hope you had good laugh," she said bitterly to the air.

It was their history together, her and Gippal's, that was the problem. He had some delusional notion in his mind that he knew her, when, really, he didn't know the first thing about her. The last time they had seen each other previous to a year ago was when they were ten. He didn't know her. It had been seven years. He looked completely different. She recognized him a year ago the minute she saw him. She had heard about him running the Machine Faction and felt proud of knowing him. No, of having at one time known him.

Rikku would have rather kept the fonder memories of him than gotten to know him again. She thought back to the little boy she had met so long ago, and wondered if there was some semblance of him in there. Why had Gippal taken her to the Fayth room? Nhadala had told him, she was sure, and so he wanted to see her scared out of her mind for himself. He had his laugh then. The great high guardian and Gullwing was the scared little girl he probably remembered.

During that one year that Rikku spent at his side, she devoted herself to him. Luca was full of so many different people, and the children got lost among the ambitions of the adults and the glittering lights of the stadium, so that in their innocent year all they had was each other. After receiving the stuffed toy from Gippal, she hadn't cried again, well except for those two times which had nothing to do with her father, but other more troubling circumstances. On both occasions, huge storms had struck the port and reached all the way to the outskirts. Gippal had never feared thunder and was used to it, but Rikku had never experienced it. She had been through endless of sandstorms and survived a fatal attack by Sin, but simple thunder terrified her. Perhaps it was because when Sin appeared, the skies trembled and roared above them as Sin came down to smite them. Perhaps it was because during a storm the blue turned gray like Sin's jagged skin, and the winds howled ungodly screams like those she had heard from the people dying all around her. Perhaps it was because after the loudest roar, her mother was sucked up by the force of Sin.

She hated thunder and though she hated to cry in front of Gippal just as much (she always wanted to prove to him that one year older was really no big difference at all), the tears just gushed out of her eyes and soon enough she was shaking in her bed with her hands pressed tightly against her ears.

His hand pulled softly at her arm, and she lifted her head slowly to meet his gaze. She was afraid that he would be angry with her for keeping him awake, but how could he even sleep with the constant strike of lights anyway?

"Are you scared?" He bent down and whispered in her ear. She nodded, still sniffling uncontrollably. "Do you want me to call my mom?" he asked softly, and Rikku panicked. She didn't want someone else to see her cry. She didn't want Magda telling her father about her fits.

Rikku sat up suddenly and grabbed his arms. She shook her head. "Please don't," she pleaded with him. The skies rumbled again, and she jumped toward him. The cat that lay in her lap fell to the ground beside them. She held onto Gippal tightly.

"I should call her. She would make you feel better." He insisted, but she shook her head more fiercely and tried to stifle her scared sobs. He sighed.

"Then you'll just keep crying the whole night." He looked down at her and she looked up at him. She couldn't tell in the dark if there was any anger in his features, and though he hadn't sounded like it, she still felt hurt by his comment. She let him go, glanced down at the cat and then picked it up. She slipped back into her bed quietly, and he stood there for a while and then returned to his bed. When the storm finally settled over them, a bright flash brightened the sky like day and caused a horrible crash that made the ground rumble beneath them. Little Rikku gasped, jumped out of her bed and rushed to him.

"I'm awake," he said. She climbed up on the bed and lay down. Her small hand found his, and she grasped it tightly as another flash of lightning and roar of thunder hit. He didn't protest, but gently wrapped his fingers around her palm. Through the rest of the storm, she held his hand and cradled the stuffed cat by her side. It was the safest she'd felt in a long time.

---

Rikku threw the crumpled paper against the stonewall. It had been a day since the whole scene at the Fayth room happened, and she still hadn't come any closer to understanding what had possessed Gippal to take her there. A part of her didn't want to know, so she made sure to avoid him, staying in her workroom most of the day. The problem was that she couldn't concentrate. She tried, but the ringing in her ears came back along with the anger. The worst part of it was that she didn't even remember what happened in there. One minute she was following Gippal, and the next she was running for her life out of that room. She knew it had been the pyreflies, but she was horrified at what Gippal may have seen her do. It wouldn't stop, not until she faced her fear in the Den of Woe.

"Cred!" she yelled, crumpling yet another plan that she had messed up and tossing it to side.

"Whoa," Leila said as she ducked the small projectile. She picked up the paper ball before nearing Rikku. "Having a bad day?" she asked while she bounced the crumpled ball in her hand. Rikku smiled in spite of herself. She kind of liked Leila, even though the woman was mostly a workaholic and hadn't really spoken to her.

"My concentration sucks today." Rikku shrugged, and Leila smiled with a curious gleam in her eyes. She grabbed another crumpled paper from the ground and started juggling the two in her hands.

"It's Gippal, isn't it?" It was a statement rather than a question. Rikku glared at her, both surprised and speechless at Leila's supposition.

"Don't look so shocked. I can tell these things." She continually threw the two objects higher and higher, still catching them and alternating them with ease. "He's torn up about it," she said, glancing at Rikku, and then, "Oh, he won't admit it even to himself, but whatever he did to you, he feels guilty." She dropped both paper balls on the desk. "His pride won't let him approach you about it, but that's how men are." She shrugged and headed back toward the door.

"Leila?" Rikku called to her, still puzzled as to why she would tell her all that.

"Call it a woman's intuition," she said with a smirk and left.

Leila was a total conundrum to her. Rikku had been surprised that Gippal or none of the other guys were all over her, but she had command over the whole place without being authoritative, as she called it. The normal reaction of most women toward someone as attractive as her would be jealousy, but Leila seemed to get along well with the rest of the women that were part of the Machine Faction, well, all except for Nhadala, but whatever her reasons, Rikku was sure they were justified. Leila was head of the main operations, so she carried a lot of weight in the faction. She unnerved Rikku in the way that someone intimidating might have a kind of negative effect on a person. Rikku liked her in a hesitant and competitive way. There was no question that Leila was telling the truth. She had said amusedly (which had become her trademark trait) as if she enjoyed the advantage of being somewhat omniscient in the Machine Faction, and even almost like a warning: try anything, and I'll know. The point was that Gippal had shown distress about yesterday, but why should she care?

"It's his own damn fault," she muttered to the empty room, but then smiled down on the graphic in front of her. She had her concentration back. Something Leila said had eased Rikku's mind, and she wasn't about to spoil it by scrutinizing their conversation. It would have to wait until she was finished.

But nothing in life was ever as easy as just putting it off, and it was only half an hour later and nowhere near done, when Gippal entered Rikku's workroom.

"Leila said you wanted to see me," Gippal said, and Rikku's eyes widened. She took it back. She didn't like the meddling bossy woman at all.

"She lied," Rikku said suddenly.

"Ah," he said, but still stood there. Rikku pleaded for him to go away in her mind, but he simply stared. "How's work?" He actually wanted to start a conversation with her. Was he out of his mind?

"You tricked me," she said as she outlined the machina piece on the paper in front of her. "Twice. You tricked me twice."

"You've proved to be quite the help though," he said with a soft chuckle and a hand behind his head.

"After this, I'm going," Rikku said, still not glancing toward him.

"Nooj would have never agreed to this. If I tricked you, then you and Baralai tricked him," Gippal said, recalling Nooj's call informing him about Rikku's departure to deliver the spheres.

"It doesn't matter. Baralai is the only one who understands anyway." She flipped the machina piece over, noting the mechanisms on the other side on the paper.

"Well, he wasn't thinking with his head," Gippal added spitefully.

"Not everyone is as perverted as you," she said dejectedly. "I'm almost done. Then I'll go collect my wages from Ty and leave today. You can have your spheres in a week."

"If I tell Nooj," he began and she whipped her head toward him.

"Don't even think it." She glared, and an idea formed in her mind. She smirked at him, and he narrowed his eye at her.

"I'm not going to like what you're going say next, am I?" Gippal asked. She dropped her pen and stood up. Her face brightened with a devious gleam.

"There's no reason for Nooj to even become suspicious, and for you to really to lie to him, if you hire me for the inspection of cave. It's perfect. I'll map out the best places to put the explosives." She cocked her head to the side with a "hmm?"

"You want me to pay you to do something insane?" Gippal stood flabbergasted.

"Exactly. It's better if one person does it, someone that's been there already. It's not a big deal," she said, but stopped when Gippal stepped forward and closed in on her.

"It's not a big deal? What happened back in the Fayth room is not a big deal?" Gippal spoke with a forceful voice and with his body looming over hers, and the air between the two like a heavy weight pulling her down.

"I don't need your approval, and it's been too many years for you to play the protector now," she said softly, but staring straight at him. She wouldn't let anyone intimidate her out of this decision.

"This has always been your problem. You're not logical. You're spoiled and stubborn." He clamped his mouth shut, clenching his jaw. "Do what you want," he added. "It has nothing to do with me." He moved away from her and patted his hands as if the dust in them were all his thoughts concerning her.

---

Al Bhed Phrases

- "The ground is solid below me; I stand firm" is my translation for that phrase, although "E ys vens" literally means "I am firm." I'm treating this phrase like a colloquialism, so it can't be translated literally, just like we can't do so for other languages. It's my effort in trying to make Al Bhed sound a little more genuine.

Chapter has been edited, so I hope it flows a little better. There were some grammatical errors that just flabbergasted me.