I Withhold

Uncertainty was like a plague, and Rikku felt her bones and skin seething in it. It had been the clear solution in her head to all her problems, like a powerful all-healing potion, which would render her completely fear and trauma free. She had to go to the Den of Woe. It was the key that would free her from her torment. She would have preferred something simpler, but she didn't have that kind of mind power that allowed you to just suck it up and get over it. She had used it all up. There should have been a button in her mind that she could press to turn off her nightmares, and, particularly, the voice that still liked to listen to Gippal. It had been tucked away along with her memories of him. She hadn't forgotten it, because it writhed out the minute he came back, but she had repressed it, because there was no Gippal to torment her with stupid ideas, so out of lack usage, the instinct rusted away in her.

But he had polished it clean with his voice. It wasn't concern, not quite, but the need to prove he was right. That's why she could not listen to him, because in the end, she didn't matter to him, what mattered is that somehow he knew her better than she knew herself. But she could use his same tactics against him. There had to be someone that knew him better than he could have wanted. Of course, none of the boys would do. No man knows another man better than himself. It is part of their innate incapability to bond with enough depth to penetrate all the male rituals and pleasantries.

No, it had to be someone without emotional baggage—cold, yet calculative, a bit like him, but not so dense, and luckily for Rikku, she knew exactly who that person was.

"Leila," she called, knocking softly on the metal door to Leila's room. She heard a slight "mmm?" coming from inside, and took it as a form of permission to open the door. Rikku entered the small room to find Leila on her bed, lying on her side, with her legs stretched out and her torso slightly propped up, like a queenly odalisque. Leila looked up from the book she was reading, and regarded Rikku with a tilt of the head, while drumming her slender fingers on the sleek red hard cover of the book, constantly concealing and then revealing the first word in the title: Self-Sacrificing Heroes. She finally waved a hand for Rikku to come in and close the door, and then went back to her book. Rikku didn't know quite what she would say. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't really worked out what she would even ask Leila.

"It's a good book," Leila said and set it down on the metallic black desk next to her bed. On it there were beaded mats, and more books held up by machina parts and pipes, and papers stacked next to a half-consumed tray of food. "I heard you're leaving today for the Den of Woe. Wouldn't want to be in your place," Leila said and then smirked.

"I—," Rikku started, but couldn't continue. She had no idea what she wanted to say.

"You and Gippal didn't work it out then?" She asked as if reading Rikku's mind. She was still mad about Leila's meddling on that matter, but she couldn't show it. Rikku needed information, so she looked away, chuckling nervously and ruffling her blond hair a bit.

"We—Gippal and I—used to know each other when we were little," Rikku said suddenly, and Leila set her eyes on her with an impenetrable expression. The smirk had left her face, and her brow had tensed. "It's stupid. I don't know why I take him so seriously," she muttered.

"Then don't, not many do," Leila added, and then shrugged, as if the comment had come out on its own.

"You seem to know him pretty well, so I was hoping you could…" Rikku's sentence trailed off, unsure of the proposition it was supposed to make.

"I could persuade him to leave you the hell alone? You might as well be asking me to coax him into it. Say don't, and to him it means yes and more." Leila shook her head, and propped herself up to a fully sitting position. "Listen, why do you care so much what he thinks?"

"It's not that. It's that he could make my life very complicated and—" Rikku stopped, realizing that she was making up excuses. He could always try and stop her, but that didn't mean she would ever let him succeed. So he could get her in trouble with Nooj, and he could Baralai in trouble too. No, that was a problem, but still, in the end, what Gippal thought mattered. She hated the fact that he probably saw her as nothing but a stupid traumatized kid. "It's an old habit, I guess—caring about what he thinks."

"The whole childhood past thing again?" Leila asked with a bit of cynicism in her tone.

"Yup. So, what do I do?" Rikku's eyebrows raised expectantly.

"Maybe you have a thing," Leila murmured with a glint of amusement in her dark green eyes.

"A thing? What do you mean?" Rikku bit her lip. This conversation was going to the wrong subject.

"Maybe," she paused, "You have a thing for him—you know—like an old crush, resurfaced, or something like that."

"Oh, for Shiva's sake, I do not have a thing for him. It's not like that at all. I just want—" she had to stop. It was a bad idea to even explore it, but the sentence finished in her mind regardless. She wanted to be seen as a woman, like Leila was, like Yuna, like Paine. Why was she stuck forever as the child? Why was she the little sister figure Gippal would forever love to torment? Her mind stopped there out of fear of going somewhere unknown. She couldn't handle that at the moment, but a light laugh from Leila served to pluck her from her thoughts.

"God," Leila said, with the remnants of her laughter still lingering as a smile on her lips. "I'm having a girl talk. It's the scariest thing I've ever done." She picked up her book again, but didn't open it. "Do you know how Gippal lost his eye?"

Rikku shook her head, anticipant of the revelation. "Do you?" Rikku asked.

"No, no one does," she said, and started on the book again, slowly lying back down. Rikku stood there for a few seconds, not quite understanding what Leila had said, but she eventually took the hint and got up and left. So nobody knew how Gippal had lost his eye. Gippal had his secrets, but how did that help her? It didn't help. Maybe Leila had said it just to bother her, or distract her, or god knows what that woman's intentions were.

She returned to her room, and said a few goodbyes and that she'd be back in week on the way there. She picked up her bag, a rolled up the tent Ty had lent her and put some gil in her pocket. She would have to buy some food in the supplies store outside of the temple. She left her room and somberly walked down the halls of the Machine Faction. The dread that had ebbed to the very bottom of her mind began to surface again. She was going to this place for a week. It was creepy, dark, damp and unpredictable in there, and though Shuyin was gone, the pyreflies still lingered like glittering ashes. She may as well try and camp out at the Farplane. Actually, the Farplane might have been better. It was pretty in there at least, and it certainly wasn't the site of a massacre.

She heard the crackling of the electricity above her and smelled the dusty air once she stepped out onto Pilgrimage Road. To her surprise, Gippal stood by the bridge talking to one of the engineers. Rikku ignored him and went into the store to manage her wages and buy some food. The store clerk already had a package of supplies ready for her, saying the faction would pay for it because she was doing it on duty. Gippal had hired her for the demolition after all. He'd caved in probably from the guilt.

She went outside again, ready to utter a quick 'later' to him and move on to her journey. The engineer talking to Gippal left just as she was passing by, and she changed her mind about even talking to him. She would just keep walking.

"Hey, Cid's girl," he said, and she stopped with a groan. She turned around to face him.

"Thanks for hiring me, so on and so forth, and I'll see you in a week." He raised his eyebrow at her and she quickly turned back to her path.

"Can I ask you something?" Gippal said.

"No," she mumbled, but faced him again despite her inner protests.

"What did you see in the Den of Woe that makes you so afraid?" Her mouth parted. She searched his gaze for some kind of hint that he was joking, but no, he was seriously asking her that. What kind of question was that? What kind of answer could she even give him? She wasn't just about to sit down and tell him. She placed one hand on her hip and glared at him. It was right then, hours later, when the conversation with Leila finally made sense.

"What happened to your eye?" She glared at him, and he shook his head as if he hadn't registered her question.

"What?" His brow wrinkled.

"Your eye," she pointed as she said it, "what happened to it?" He narrowed his eye on her and then smirked.

"Fine, point taken. We all have our secrets." He shrugged and shook his head.

"See you in a week," she said, feeling more confident with each minute.

"If you come back sane," he retorted. But nothing could bring her down now, so she scoffed at his comment and walked away.

---

Gippal wandered around the outside of the temple, occasionally grunting with frustration and sometimes outright shaking his head at no one. He did this for several minutes. His thoughts had plunged into the whole Rikku matter and how unreasonable and infuriating she could be. Did anyone else know she was doing this? Where the hell was Yuna, Miss Goody, to talk her out of insanity? The problem was not that. It was Baralai. This was a man he had trusted with his life during the most dangerous times. Gippal had always seen him as the most reasonable and composed out of all of them. So what the hell happened?

Gippal went back inside the temple and caught Ty who was running by with few tools.

"Hey, get me a comm sphere. I need to call up the Praetor." Ty nodded and a few minutes later he was at Gippal's office with the blue contraption in hand.

"You know, the Praetor called like two days ago. I was going to get you, but he just wanted to talk to Rikku." Ty said as he placed the comm sphere on Gippal's desk.

"He did, did he?" Gippal muttered absentmindedly. He felt a slight pang of spite toward his friend—he had some nerve to just call Rikku, like she was on vacation. "Thanks, Ty." Gippal dismissed him and got ready to call Baralai. He would give the Praetor a piece of his mind.

"This is Ellil in New Yevon," answered Baralai's assistant.

"Hey Ellil, I need to speak with Baralai. Is he around?" Gippal asked.

"Oh, Gippal sir, it's good to hear from you. Yes, he's around, let me inform him." The man left from screen view and less than a minute later, Baralai was in view.

"Hey Gippal, is something wrong?" He actually looked worried, and Gippal figured it was all over Rikku. They weren't going out or anything, were they? His brow tensed with slight annoyance.

"Yeah, something's wrong. How could you give the spheres to Rikku?" Gippal's voice was calm and sly, inquisitive and perhaps condescending, but not demanding.

"I don't understand what you're asking." Baralai's face hardened with a lack of expression, as a tact as politician's.

"Ri-kku, you know, cute little blonde with a propensity for insane things like camping out at the Den of Woe," he uttered as his patience continued to thin down. "You do remember why we hate that place, right?"

"I think she can handle herself quite fine. I mean, she did face Vegnagun," Baralai responded with his usual collected pacifist tone which a lot of times either eased Gippal or irritated the heck out of him. Today, it was definitely the latter.

"Yes, with Yuna and Paine by the way, not alone."

"Gippal, we're both busy men, what is this about?"

"Have you been listening? Out of all people in Spira, Baralai, I always thought you were the most reasonable, but this is the first time I hear about you not thinking with your head." Gippal smirked knowing that such a comment was bound to innerve even the most self-controlled of people. He was practically accusing good ol' Baralai of being a pervert, but the Praetor simply cocked his head to the side with an amused smile.

"You're not making any sense. She asked for the spheres as a favor, and I complied. It's fairly simple."

"I'm sure Nooj wasn't in on it," Gippal retorted, and Baralai laughed.

"You and I know Nooj and how that would have never happened," Baralai said.

"Maybe for a good reason then." Gippal shook his head, and Baralai stared with a confused expression in his eyes.

"Okay, now you're scaring me. You'd never agree with Nooj on anything." Baralai shook his head.

"On most things, but seeing her for myself all freaked out was totally different than hearing the story, you know. God only knows what she told you."

"What are you talking about?" Baralai said, his eyebrows tightly knitted, trying to regard Gippal closely through the screen. That's when it hit him. Baralai didn't know about Rikku's whole incident, and, of course, she hadn't said anything to him.

"She didn't tell you why she suddenly wanted to have a little camp out in that musty old hell, did she?" Gippal asked, but received his answer through his friend's somber brown eyes. He stared intently through the screen, waiting for Gippal to continue. "Less than a month ago, she was almost killed by a fiend in a cave during a dive. She completely panicked, and got herself hurt. I think she's pretty freaked out by pyreflies, and if there's something that cave is filled with, it's those damn things."

"I didn't know," Baralai muttered. Gippal shook his head and regretted using his friend as an outlet for frustration.

"Oh hell, it's only a coincidence that I know. Besides, she would have stolen the damn things if she had to. So yeah, didn't mean to take it out on you." Gippal scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. He always hated apologies.

"It's fine. It's good to know, but, has she left yet?"

"Yeah, like I said, there's no stopping that one." Gippal cleared his throat. The conversation had gotten extremely awkward and uncomfortable.

"Okay," Baralai said, then a long pensive pause, "Well, tell me if you hear anything." The screen shut off. Gippal winced. Baralai looked a lot guiltier than he had expected. He realized then he needed to rid himself of the worry over her. It was her own damn choice to plunge herself in that place, and if she didn't come out sane, well, it was her own doing. He was no babysitter.

But no matter how deep he dug to bury his thoughts on her, they still lingered, and the despaired look in her eyes, her screams, and her fear slid through the cracks of his consciousness, like disembodied ghosts.