Written with ridiculous amounts of love for Sheffiesharpe and Mithrigil. If you two keep making Basch such an awesome character, how can you expect me not to try and write him as well? ;) Although I do find it a little ironic that I wrote this during a time when you both were showering him with much happiness!

And as always, comments and criticism is always welcome! This is just a brief stab at trying to get inside Basch's head and perhaps it went a bit on the heavy side... please do let me know what you think. Any feedback is most appreciated at this point.

Title: Atheism

Fandom: Final Fantasy XII

Characters: Basch, Noah

Rating: PG

Summary: In a life like Basch's, the gods are not welcome.

Basch learned early on in life to never hope for much of the world beyond this one.

As a child, one could have called him the pious sort. Once upon a time, before the world had devoured her, his mother had hoped herself into being such and thought highly enough of himself and his brother to believe they could become so as well. On his knees before silent saints made of colored glass, he had knelt and felt her shaking hand cup the back of his head and prayed as hard as he could that all would be well within their house. Kneeling before legends that might never have lived, he had prayed with all the breath within him that he would grow up a man to bring pride to his dead father's heart. Crouched in front of what the dead of his land had believed in for centuries, he fervently asked that they give him and his brother the strength to keep home and hearth, the ability to turn a modest profit on the land they had been granted so begrudgingly, and the wisdom to somehow make the darkness that flooded his mother's lungs even then recede outside of her.

But the years that had passed since had taught him, early enough on, that it didn't matter how much time passed or how hard he worked-- when some things were done, they could not be undone. His mother's still form within the casket he and Noah had carried to her finally resting place made him that it didn't matter how many prayers were offered-- whatever ruled their lives would dismiss them all. The sword and shield that had pressed on him from the age of sixteen and never returned taught him that some wounds never would heal, that some broken men would never be restored to their original form. And Landis… when Landis fell, it taught him yet more of what he could expect from what lay around him.

For Landis… Landis meant everything to him and now, now, everything is gone.

Landis is both lost hope and lost home, for nothing remains of it besides himself and the paltry remains of a kingdom long since devoured. If he went back now, if he forsook the duty that nothing more formidable than love has pressed into his heart, he would likely find nothing more than brick and bone to commemorate what has gone astray years before. Perhaps there would be a bit of pottery left to seed in the barren fields long left wild and fallow; perhaps, if he found himself somehow walking along the paths he used to trace as a boy, he'd find something in the form of his childhood-- the wheel from a toy horse, the lettered blocks his sister had broken almost a quarter century past-- left in what winded beyond.

But in the end, it would still be as of nothing at all. There is so much, Basch knows, so much that makes up a people and an empire, a civilization and a society, so much that the ink stains of history have already blotted out. The fires that once lit the hearths of his home have long since been smothered in heavier flames still; the art of its museums smashed, the algebras of it's classrooms dismembered.

And there is nothing Basch can do but hold his own silence in the midst of guarding what is left of the people who aided in the rape of his homeland, in those that pillaged and brutalized and burned till nothing more than a memory and a warning had been left of what had once been so alive.

All Basch can do is sit. All Basch can do is wait. All Basch can do is advise and guard, stay obedient and stay alive, testament to a legacy he has no means of passing on. And no matter how many things he wants to

(beg blast blame bruise bleed)

ask of whatever god granted this fate to him

(how could you do this to me-- why did you do this to me-- why did you give me no chance to revisit the past-- what led you to pass on to me a mantle so heavy that it refuses to let me turn back?)

he keeps his silence measured and stealthy behind the cudgel his brother's lips had pressed against almost to the very last.

For Basch already knows all too well that no matter what inventive a man might hurl, whatever gods ruled now would not speak. And for all the honeyed words that had dripped from lips promising ever lasting life, there are no miracles possible for anything he has ever loved in this world.