A/N: A slightly shorter chapter than usual this time...mostly because I had initially planned to skip over Bevelle entirely. But when I sat down to solidify my outline for the rest of this story, this addition suddenly seemed necessary. Hope you all find it enjoyable!
Chapter 9: Bevelle
As usual, Quistis needed time to recuperate after several hours spent puzzling her way through the Cloister of Trials and praying to the fayth in the recesses of Macalania's temple. While she slept huddled in a ball under a mountain of heavy quilts, Seifer spent his time roaming the temple grounds. A narrow path bridged the gap between Macalania's northern ice fields to the outcropping of rock on top of which the temple had been built. Below stretched a vast lake kept perpetually frozen by the fayth's otherworldly power, if the temple acolytes could be believed.
Chatter among the acolytes also suggested Maester Seymour's presence in the area, but Seifer never saw him. And when Quistis awoke, no longer flushed pale with cold, she announced that they would depart without waiting to greet the holy man. Seifer got the impression that she still hadn't forgiven Seymour for the role he had played in Operation Mi'ihen.
The trip back through Macalania Woods took a day and a half.
Finally, they reached the junction where days before they had parted ways with Squall and Rinoa. Since sending her childhood love off after another woman, Quistis had grown increasingly withdrawn. She obviously missed him. Maybe even regretted her decision. Although whenever Seifer asked about it, she insisted that Squall had nothing to do with her sudden mood. Fujin liked to kick him every time he brought it up, so Seifer had decided to let it drop.
Now he fought the desire to remind her yet again that Squall had abandoned her in Kilika, that he didn't care about her quest the way Seifer did, that there was no need to seek out either of their erstwhile companions while in Bevelle. It took a monumental effort for him—usually so outspoken—to keep his thoughts to himself.
It didn't take long before they caught up to another group of travelers. Not a summoner and guardians, but a group of female Yevonites who chattered like birds as they walked. A long suffering older man who might have been a retired Crusader or one of the women's fathers walked with them.
One of the women turned around when she noticed Quistis coming up behind them. "Isn't it exciting?" she said, her hands clasped together in front of her.
"What?"
"The wedding!"
Quistis glanced back at Seifer for a moment, the expression on her face half amused and half revolted. "You mean the wedding between..." she started, but the woman interrupted her.
"Maester Seymour and Lady Yuna! Of course! We were in Guadosalam visiting the Farplane when we heard and knew we had to come. I mean...finally, something to cheer about other than blitzball. Right?" She grinned and managed to walk backwards without holding up her group at all. "Hey," she continued, realization dawning across her face as she paused to take in Quistis's appearance. "You're a summoner! You're not like...a special guest of Lady Yuna's, are you?"
"Afraid not," Quistis replied.
The woman lost some interest in their group after that.
Seifer had suspected for days that their stay in Bevelle would be painful. Now he knew for certain. Even if they managed to avoid running into Squall, Rinoa, Maester Caraway, or a whole host of other people he'd hoped never to see again, they were guaranteed to encounter brainless Yevonite wedding-watchers just about everywhere. Which was almost as bad.
A couple of guards flanked the path leading into the city. They looked irritated—one of them trying to give directions to a Hypello pulling a cart of party supplies and the other telling a man with a huge green pack bundled onto his back that by law he wasn't allowed to sell his wares within the city limits.
The crush of people only increased when they passed through the city gate. Tourists wandered aimlessly, their eyes wide and their wallets open. Shops had plastered posters to their doors featuring poorly drawn renditions of the happy couple—Seymour's depiction somewhat too kind and Yuna's not nearly kind enough. One shop thronged with visitors had a display window filled with hastily painted commemorative plates, dolls, and embossed coins stamped out of cheap metal.
"They're sure making a spectacle out of this," Seifer said. "I don't see what's so thrilling. Just two people getting hitched. Happens every day."
Quistis shrugged. "Love's as good of a reason to celebrate as any. This is overblown. But it's also kind of nice."
"You really think they're in love?"
"Sure. They're getting married."
Seifer shook his head. "Stinks of being arranged to me."
"Why?"
"Aside from the fact that someone like Yuna would never fall for someone like Seymour? It's just too convenient. Like it's been specially planned to give people something to talk about other than Sin."
"I think everyone would rather not have to think about Sin for a few days," Quistis replied.
The first three hotels they found were all booked solid. So they ended up on the far side of town in a seedy looking motel snuggled in between a women's lingerie shop and (judging from the smell) a sub-standard sushi restaurant.
"Still better than the ground, ya know?" Raijin said as they walked into their room.
"Not by much," Seifer replied.
Having hot water, he later had to admit, was a nice change of pace. By the time he emerged from the bathroom, scrubbed pink and smelling like the flowery motel-brand soap he'd all but dissolved away on days of accumulated dirt, he had no trouble making himself comfortable on the hard mattress. Until Raijin joined him, anyway—the two of them slightly too big to fit comfortably side by side on the narrow bed.
The next morning, they left for the temple.
Bevelle's religious corridor proved no less busy than the downtown streets and malls. Most of the faithful come to witness the nuptials also appeared eager to pay a visit to the heart of Yevon on Spira. Everywhere, people bent in prayer, the Hymn of Fayth on their lips. They found the doorway into the temple clogged, two acolytes attempting to wrangle the masses into an orderly line. With some effort, Quistis managed to flag one of them down.
"Lady Summoner," the acolyte said and bowed. "I'm sorry. We've been a little busy."
"I can see that," Quistis said and bowed back, though not as deeply. "I'd like to get in to pray to the fayth."
The acolyte frowned. "I don't know if that will be possible..."
"Is someone else in the chamber?"
"No. It's not that. It's on account of all the visitors. Maester Mika has temporarily ordered the cloister locked."
"Can he do that?" Seifer asked.
Quistis and the acolyte both nodded.
"But...your pilgrimage is more important than some stupid wedding."
The acolyte held up her hands helplessly. "There's nothing I can do. I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few days before you'll be able to pray here. I'm sorry."
"At least there's plenty to do to pass the time, ya know?" Raijin said when the acolyte walked away to return to her shepherding duties.
"Technically, we could just move on," Quistis said, a thoughtful look on her face.
"What do you mean?" Seifer asked.
"There's no requirement that I have to visit every temple and pray to every fayth in Spira. In fact, that's not even possible anymore. A lot of the fayth have been lost or their temples destroyed. I skipped Besaid's temple. I can skip Bevelle's too, if I want."
"Skipping over a provincial backwater like Besaid and the Heart of Yevon aren't really comparable," Seifer said, doubtful.
"It's unorthodox," she agreed. "But I feel like..."
She sighed and didn't finish her sentence. Seifer wished she would. Much of her thoughts recently had been a mystery to him and he wanted to get some handle on exactly what was going on inside her pretty blonde head.
"Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with getting the hell out of Bevelle," Seifer said. "But we need to restock anyway. So we might as well wait around for a day or two and see if they open this place back up." No good getting to Zanarkand a few days faster only to end up there unprepared, he thought. He didn't mind dying. But not for nothing.
"I suppose," Quistis replied after a moment's hesitation.
On the way back to the hotel, Seifer walked behind her so that he could stare down at the top of her head and puzzle over her attitude without being observed. They passed by a street fair opening for the day which drew her attention for a second, slowing her pace by half and making her glance over her shoulder at it until she noticed Seifer close at her heels. Then her head snapped back around and they made their way toward the mall with single-minded purpose.
When they finished shopping, they returned to the hotel.
"I'm going to take a bath," Quistis said right as she walked in the door. She dropped her bags at the foot of her bed and walked into the bathroom without looking back. A moment later, Seifer heard the water turn on.
"What's got her panties in a twist?" he asked, directing the question more at the universe than anyone standing in the room.
Fujin responded anyway. "FEAR."
"Fear? Of what?"
She rolled her good, unpatched eye. "SIN."
"That doesn't make sense," Seifer replied with a frown. "She's been preparing to face Sin her entire life. Why would she get scared now? I mean...it's not like she didn't know what going on a pilgrimage meant."
"Maybe it's just hit her, ya know?" Raijin offered. "Like...nerves the night before a big game."
Seifer still didn't quite believe it. "Did she tell you guys she felt that way?"
"NO."
"Then what makes you think—?"
"OBVIOUS."
Maybe to some people. Certainly not to him. But he knew that if Fujin's assessment was correct, if Quistis was beginning to have real doubts and fears about facing Sin and performing the final summoning, he needed to do something about it. He had to keep her on track. And if that meant distracting her from her own destructive thoughts, that's what he had to do.
They had gil left over after buying all of the supplies that Seifer figured would get them all the way to Zanarkand. Plenty to buy admission and a night of entertainment at the street fair they had passed.
He walked over to the bathroom door and pounded on it with his fist.
The door popped open and Quistis stood on the other side, a white towel wrapped around her body and a tired glare on her face. "Do you have some kind of problem with the idea of someone relaxing in a hot bath? Because this is the second time you've interrupted one in the past few days."
"No. I just don't want you to spend the whole night in there."
"Why? What's it matter?"
"Because we're going out. Somewhere special," he told her with a grin. "So get cleaned up. We'll wait."
0 0 0
Rather than relax, Quistis spent her time in the bath wondering what Seifer had planned. A special place to him could constitute any number of things, and he'd spent enough time with Rinoa and her rebellious friends to learn all of Bevelle's shadowy nooks and crannies. Did he plan to take her to a club—perhaps the place that Rinoa had recalled when they'd visited NORG's Bar in Guadosalam? Or maybe he still had friends in the area that he wanted to take her to meet. For a minute, she even entertained the notion that he might know a secret way into the temple's cloister.
"Am I going to need my weapon for this little outing?" she asked when she walked out of the bathroom, her wet hair still wrapped up in a towel.
"Always a good idea to carry one just in case," Seifer replied. "But...probably not."
So, not a back entrance into the temple, then.
She let down and brushed her hair, then pulled her black satin summoner's ribbon out of her bag and began to tie it in a bow about her hips. Seifer walked over and stopped her hands, then pulled the sleek ribbon out of her grasp.
"Let's not be a summoner and guardians today," he said and dropped the identifying ribbon onto the bed. "Don't want to draw too much attention from the crazy wedding-goers," he added, making Quistis think of the woman at the city gate who had assumed that Quistis would be attending the wedding as a guest of Yuna's. As if somehow all summoners knew one another.
"Okay," she said, surprised at the reluctance she felt at leaving the ribbon behind. It had been a long time since she'd been seen in public without all the accoutrements of her station.
They left the motel and walked back toward the middle of the city—the same way that they had come back from the temple. When they arrived back at the street fair Quistis had noticed earlier, Seifer surprised her by walking over to the ticket booth and exchanging gil for four wrist bands. She tried not to gape at him as he wrapped hers around her wrist.
He'd noticed her interest in the fair and resolved to take her to it.
How...utterly charming.
"Your wrist band will get you into tents and on rides," he told her. "But you have to pay at the booths."
Barely listening, Quistis nodded. Childish excitement made her want to jump up and down, grab him by the hand, and run into the fair at full tilt to see what new and exciting sights it had to offer. Already, she could see red and blue tent tops, flashing lights, and booths packed with candy. On the air, she smelled hot sugar, animal musk, and melted butter. A little girl ran past with a foil balloon displaying Maester Seymour's face.
Although the fair had up a number of posters and items depicting the happy couple, the fair itself looked to be a regular affair...not explicitly set up to celebrate the wedding.
"Where should we start?" she asked, feeling overwhelmed.
"FOOD."
"Yeah. I'm starving, ya know?"
Quistis drifted along, soaking up the sights, smells, and sounds of the fair as the rest of the group went from booth to booth, buying Raijin two chili dogs with the works, Fujin a bag of buttery popcorn, and Seifer a soft pretzel. He tore off a bits and handed them to Quistis—who ended up sampling everyone's food rather than getting her own.
A noisy, crowded dirt corral caught her attention.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing.
"Chocobo show," Seifer replied and shouldered his way through the crowd so that she could get a good look. Inside of the corral, a group of three women dressed in yellow leotards edged in white feathers galloped chocobos in tight formation. All three women stood mounted on their bird's back, their feet braced one on the bird's rump and the other between its shoulder blades. They held hands as their chocobos raced around the corral.
Then, with a clap, all three women let go of each others and hopped from one bird to another, switching mounts without missing a beat.
The crowd cheered. Quistis clapped and grinned.
The usual rules of physics didn't seem to apply to these women. They performed trick after trick, all of them at high speed, at one point even balancing on their hands and making shapes with their legs in the air like a group of synchronized swimmers.
Quistis could have stood and watched them all day. But after only a few minutes the women dismounted, waved, and shouted to the crowd that they would perform again in three hours. When they left the corral, some of the crowd thinned out. And two more chocobos were led in by a man dressed in an old-timey robe over a suit of armor.
"I am Lord Zaon!" he announced with a theatrical bow. "And I need an opponent. Any willing soldiers in this lovely audience?"
Zaon glanced over the crowd once, waiting for hands to raise. One kid, maybe only twelve, held his up high, waving it back and forth so that Seifer sighed with disgust and resignation before putting up his own. The performer narrowed in on him instantly.
"You!" he shouted. "You're perfect! Come on down and we'll get you suited up."
Amused, Quistis watched Seifer hop the corral fence as the crowd cheered for him. He had to shrug out of his coat to put on the mail shirt Zaon offered him. Then he drew on a helmet as well—black with a red plume.
"Now, as everyone knows, history's most epic battles were fought over the love of a maiden. Is there a Lady Yunalesca in the audience?"
For this request, a few dozen hands shot up into the air belonging to everyone from little girls to old women and everything in between. After making a show of looking over his choices, Zaon pointed to a young girl with red pigtails in the front row.
The performer helped her over the fence, lifting her across and setting her down in the dirt on the other side. Her little feet vanished into the loosely packed floor of the corral, full of crushed chocobo droppings and bits of straw. She walked bow-legged as if over sand to where Seifer stood, now brandishing a halberd with what looked like a rubber tip. While the crowd hooted and cheered, the performer put a long, white wig on the little girl and gave her a necklace of blue stones with flowing streamers to put on.
Then he began to weave his tale.
"Zaon, proud defender of Zanarkand, challenged to battle by a warrior of Bevelle," his voice boomed as he pointed to Seifer. A huge cheer went up among the crowd, but for Zaon or Seifer—defender of Bevelle—Quistis wasn't sure.
The performer went on to set the scene: the city of Bevelle had captured Lady Yunalesca and deprived her of her aeons. Lord Zaon had been dispatched to rescue her. At the back of the corral, a group of kids moved cardboard props back and forth—mostly depictions of machina weapons falling to the ground and exploding.
The game was for Seifer, mounted on choco-back, to try and keep Zaon (also on choco-back) from reaching Lady Yunalesca.
Bird feet scrabbled through the dirt, throwing up a cloud when Zaon made his first pass. He rode just as flawlessly as the women who'd starred in the previous show. And though Seifer had some talent on his mount as well, the man easily out-maneuvered him, performing elaborate tricks the whole way.
The crowd laughed when Zaon tossed out a rope while passing by at full speed and looped the end of it around Seifer's shoulders. Quistis laughed, too. Zaon's chocobo whipped past her, a thundering blur of man and bird and then he was on the other side of the corral, standing in his stirrups, working the crowd into a lather.
Raijin cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Get 'em, Boss!"
Quistis and Fujin's voices joined his.
Seifer fought out of the rope and tossed it to the ground, then spun his rubber-tipped halberd around once in his right hand. Zaon missed the deft movement. Nor did he take much notice of the tensed, ready-to-pounce muscles bulging in Seifer's arms as he turned his mount and approached for another pass.
The performer was positioning for some sort of trick when Seifer kicked his chocobo into a gallop and intercepted him, swinging the blunt end of the halberd hard, lining it up with the inside of his arm to give it extra impact. The poor man grunted in complete surprise as the weapon hit him square in the middle and swept him right off the back of his chocobo into the dirt.
The audience, not sure for a second what they were seeing, remained hushed.
Seifer jumped his chocobo over the man's fallen body, raced back over to little Yunalesca, and bent down to loop one arm around her. With a heroic tug, he hauled her up into the saddle in front of him, then lifted his toy halberd in the air and turned to face the audience.
"VICTORY!" Fujin shouted.
The rest of the crowd laughed and clapped, cheering and whistling for the champion of Bevelle as he rode back and forth, brandishing his weapon with the lovely maiden in his arms.
In a startling display of showmanship, he then rode the chocobo over to the edge of the corral and handed a flushed, laughing Yunalesca down into her mother's arms.
The performer knew better than to burst the impression that the whole thing had been set up from the beginning, so he got up, dusted himself off, and bowed to the still mounted Seifer. Although Quistis saw the sour look on his face when he walked up to him and took back the halberd.
"Nice job!" Raijin said and clapped Seifer on the back when he returned to their spot in the crowd. "You really showed that guy the difference between someone who plays at being hero and someone who really is one, ya know?"
"Yeah. The cocky little shit deserved to be put in his place," Seifer replied, soaking in the admiring looks from everyone around him with a self-satisfied grin.
"If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black...," Quistis said, her arms crossed.
"There's a difference when you've earned the right," he told her.
"Sure." She elbowed him. "Still, I admit...that was quite the display of knightly skill, Sir Seifer."
He glowed at her praise.
They'd all had enough of chocobos, and Quistis didn't want to spend more time than she had to around Seifer's growing legion of admirers, so they left the corral and walked deeper into the fair. They passed by a man with a trained monkey playing a tiny set of bongo drums. And they circled around a Yevonite forcibly handing out leaflets calling for the destruction of the blitzball pool in Luca, calling it a "machina monstrosity offensive to Yevon."
A man-made pond, thick with flowering lily pads and with a tall fountain at its middle marked the center of the fair. Beyond it, Quistis could see a strange assortment of contraptions, moving fast with blinking lights and people in baskets, screaming and laughing. A huge slide packed with people waiting to go down rose above it all.
The carnival rides turned them all into five-year-olds.
Quistis rode down the slide on top of a board with wheels, Seifer behind her and Fujin screaming the whole way down next to them. She waited in line three times to get on another ride which twirled swings around in a huge circle. And all four of them got on the merry-go-round with a group of children who elbowed them out of the way so that Seifer and Raijin got stuck sitting on one of the bench seats while Fujin rode a hard plastic chimera and Quistis rode a green, sprightly looking thing with a red jewel inset in its forehead.
She had never had so much fun in her entire life.
Seifer bought her a huge, frosty glass of lemonade which she sucked eagerly to soothe the itch in her throat from an afternoon spent whipping through the air, smiling and laughing.
"Does Bevelle have these fairs often?" she asked.
"Some of it's here year-round," Seifer replied. "Some of the vendors are probably just here to make a buck off this wedding bull."
All she'd known of Bevelle before setting out on her pilgrimage had revolved around the temple and Yevon. She'd thought it a somber town filled with priests and acolytes and those who most wanted to live near the ancient, beating heart of their faith. She hadn't anticipated a such a lively, secular city. Standing amongst the crush of happy people, she found it difficult to imagine Kilika out on the fringe, probably still recovering the dead and cutting wood to begin rebuilding.
Was this what life had been like before Sin?
Was this what life would be like when the monster was finally vanquished?
As the sun went down, the rides kept running, their lights making them all the more spectacular. She sat down on the fountain's edge to finish her lemonade and catch her breath.
"Is this what you and Rinoa did the summer you spent here?" she asked when Seifer sat down beside her. Raijin and Fujin got back in line to ride the slide.
"Uh...just once," he admitted, sounding reluctant. "She was more into plotting against her father than spending time enjoying life."
"Why is she so angry with him, anyway?"
He shrugged. "I never saw any point in trying to figure out how Rinoa's mind works."
"Well, I hope they manage to work things out between them. There's plenty of people who don't have a parent left. Seems a shame for her to push hers away."
Seifer scoffed. "Not all parents are good ones."
Surprised, she glanced at him. "You're speaking from experience?"
"My dad," he said after a moment. "I'm happy to put all of Spira between me and him. And if Sin snatched him while I was gone...can't say that it'd tear me up too much."
"Did your parents have...a bad relationship?" she asked, not sure how to politely ask whether or not it had been abusive.
"No. My mom was head over heels for the jerk."
"Then there must be something redeeming about him..."
"Not that I can see."
She sipped her lemonade until she began to draw air up the straw before working up the will to ask, "Your mother isn't around any more?"
Seifer's response was clipped: "She died."
His tone didn't invite any more prying into his family life, so she decided to let the issue drop. No point ruining a perfectly good evening with bad memories, after all. And she didn't want to think about death. She had plenty of time ahead of her to do that. Tonight was about life. Enjoyment. Happiness.
"Fujin and Raijin are going to be in that line for a while," she said. "Want to walk through the rest of the fair with me?"
Beyond the rides, a quieter portion stretched through a bit of a city park lit tonight by strings of lanterns. A band played on a small stage, a strange assortment of people who looked to themselves be part instrument. A few people danced together barefoot in the grass.
"This is wonderful," Quistis said and took in a deep breath. "Like a dream."
"I'm glad you're enjoying it."
"Why made you bring me here anyway?" she asked. "It seemed to come out of nowhere."
He shrugged. "You seemed sad."
Unable to restrain herself, Quistis reached out and grabbed his hand. She squeezed it hard and then ducked her head, embarrassed at the surge of affection that filled her. "Thank you," she said. "It means a lot to me...both that you noticed and that you cared enough to do something about it. This has been one of the best days of my life."
She flinched at how pathetic that sounded, but when she glanced up at Seifer she didn't notice any pity on his face. Rather, he looked down at her with an inscrutable expression that she'd never seen on him before.
"You know...I could have had a lot more fun with that Lord Zaon guy if you'd volunteered to be my Yunalesca," he finally said.
"Damsel in distress isn't really my style."
"Exactly. A spell or two from you added to the mix, and we could've rode that chocobo right out of the ring together."
"You do know that you were supposed to play the villain. Right?"
"Evil knights are people, too."
She laughed. "You're just misunderstood?"
"Of course."
The music stopped as the band finished a song. Above them, in the black, star-studded sky, a yellow firework exploded. Quistis had never seen one before and watched in amazement as sparks spread out and drifted slowly to earth. Another exploded just behind it, the boom rippling through her hair.
"Must be midnight," Seifer said. "The fair's about the close."
"What?" she looked at him with alarm, not wanting the night to be over.
"Time to say goodnight," one of the men on the stage announced, catching her attention.
The people gathered in the grass cheered as another firework exploded above them. And then more than half of the crowd grabbed the person nearest to them and embraced in a kiss. Puzzled, Quistis stared out over the sea of happy lovers, bringing the evening to a close the best way they knew how.
Seifer tugged on her hand and she turned to face him.
A moment later, he bent his head down and pressed his mouth to hers. Nothing could have surprised her more. He didn't finesse it. Just kissed her once and then lifted his head back up. Still, it left her reeling. She felt her face grow warm.
"It's tradition," he explained.
"Oh..." she breathed.
He dropped her hand and looked away from her, back toward the fair—although she saw him lick his lips.
"We should go find Raijin and Fujin. This place is going to close up any minute now."
"Right."
She followed after him, sad to see the night coming to an end but happier than she'd felt in over a decade. If she could have hauled him back into the grass and stayed there forever, she'd have wrapped her arms around him and never let go. But real-life called. Tonight, even that sobering thought couldn't suppress the smile on her face or the spring in her step.