A/N: Pick a Hymn. Any Hymn. (Though if you really want to know, I recommend the Yunalesca, Spira, or Sending versions.
Jump Ship
"That's it, then," he said, and meant it. He stood and strode, invisible, shadelike, onward through the mire of warriors and unraveling clerics. Knowing this embroiled him in a peculiar mélange of emotions; could this be, in fact, that error against which the venerable fathers had warned? A crisis— a singular, awesome trial of faith that stole the breath away in one great and uncertain seizure.
But perhaps the crises were best left to those more deserving than he, a dirtied extremity of the body politic. Let him have but the sticky bitterness of an ideology that by the end he had almost learned to love. Allies and Aeons.
And yes, he admitted, the power.
The morning was cold and pale blue and ablaze with activity that wasn't supposed to exist this early at all. Logos scratched at his temple with the end of his gun in an uncharacteristic but appropriately metaphorical gesture, walking on until finally finding himself at the very heart of Bevelle.
"You there," called a bald priest, who admirably managed to veil his own swelling horror when he reached out and caught Logos by one ample sleeve, scavenging anywhere he could for answers for perhaps the first time in his life. Even to an insalubrious hatchet man such as himself. "Where is the Grand Maester? Have you seen him?"
What was this life?
"Do you mean to say you've lost him? Grand Maesters hardly up and vanish without a trace!"
"Bite your tongue and just look!" the man cried, and shot off into the streets without another swiftly disintegrating glance.
No, Logos felt and tasted. No, he would not look! He would leave this place at once instead, collect his wits and Ormi and pull them all into a single, confined room where they might at last find some semblance of order or at least the ability to properly function once more. So he did, and on his way out he caught just the shrill beginning of that new waif of a captain's entreaty: Tell everyone of the Hymn—!
The city simmered and popped again and again with a random and nigh-frenzied litany: Mika. Hymn. Our fate.
He finally found Ormi beside himself. Or rather, beside a mangled, raw, mostly naked young acolyte and ringed by dozens of spectators and colleagues. He smelled blood and the unmistakable fetor of burning hair, saw the twitching and blistered deep pink pucker of immolated skin.
"Crazy sonovabitch set himself on fire! He set himself on fire Logos that is fucked up this guy'd be dead right now if we ain't had a black mage around!" Ormi's face was deep red and shining with sweat beneath his beard and helmet, and with an unceremonious flail he seized the latter and heaved it with all his power onto the stone path. Sparks shot from its collision with the ground and then it clattered noisily and effetely into motionlessness.
"Said it was for Yevon," he mourned.
The man near the temple, they said. The Hymn. Our fate. Mika.
In the solitude of a dusty little pub, Ormi set his elbows on the bar and then knotted his fingers in his hair. Logos cocked his head and pretended he didn't still feel a bit sick.
"You know," he finally interjected, coolly enough, "Kinoc is dead."
"Yeah," Ormi said. "I know."
"That leaves a considerable range of possibilities open to us. Not that in our present circumstances—" He meant the world, of course. "—it makes a extraordinary difference regardless of whatwe might do from here."
Ormi heaved a deep sigh. "The only thing I know for sure is I can't do this anymore. It's just— y'know, none of it makes any sense anymore! What the hell was that guy thinkin', doin' that…? I just can't get my head around it. Just… fuck it, Logos. I'm done. And I dunno, maybe we's all gonna die anyway, but at least it ain't with a buncha psychos like these."
"Did you happen to see the little girl they appointed captain of the guard?"
"Yeah. She's a good lady. But she don't belong here either."
"So you would vastly prefer to find yourself with a psycho like that summoner instead, then?"
"Yeah, y'know," Ormi replied with a humorless gust of laughter, "maybe I would."
A short stretch of nothing.
"That Shelinda's been goin' around sayin' some interesting stuff. Said we all gotta start singin' the Hymn o' the Fayth and that'll somehow work against Sin, or… somethin' crazy like that."
Logos fingered the grip of one revolver tucked into the depths of his heavy Yevon cloak. "So I've heard."
Our fate, they said. The Hymn.
"Or rather, so I hear."
They were quiet.
"It's pretty… ain't it."
"We'll go to Luca. There's bound to be something there."
"Heh. Just killin' time, huh?"
"Don't talk like that."
The sight of those clamoring masses locked in perfect and melodic stillness unstrung Logos a little as he and Ormi moved in solemn, parallel procession down the Highbridge. Ormi tossed his rifle into the moat with a kind of exhausted grace on the way, but the world was evidently too busy singing to notice. Logos somewhat feared that he would die a cynic, so he gave his companion a most deliberate glance just before they vanished into the silver woods. Ormi let out a relieved chuckle.
"Asatekanae kutamae."
fin