[Final Fantasy XIII] Crystal Dreams of Eternity
Chapter 5: (I.1) When They Were Children
A Final Fantasy XIII Fanfic
By Jen-chan
January 19 - February 1, 2011
CHAPTER SYNOPSIS: This part takes place before the game, and will detail some of the events that occurred in Fang & Vanille's childhood which defines their relationship.
When Vanille was five, and Fang was seven, they were rescued from the ruin and rubble in the wake of Cocoon's most devastating attack on Oerba in memory. Many clans had been destroyed that day, and all of Oerba was in mourning. Two orphans should have slipped through the cracks, but luckily, the young men and women who ran Oerba's orphanage believed that everyone in Oerba was family, and so the two survivors had been brought to them to be cared for.
Oerba Dia Vanille, they were not so worried about. She was young, and she had been alternating between sniffling and bawling, so they knew she would be all right eventually.
Oerba Yun Fang, they did worry for. The lone survivor of the famous hunter's clan was semi-catatonic. She hadn't moved or said a word since being brought to the orphanage. She'd simply sat on her bed a fearsome, smoldering look of rage in her eyes, though she stared at nothing in particular. Her eyes would swivel to glare at whoever would try to speak to her, but she had yet to say an actual word to anyone.
Finally, one of the young women who ran the orphanage, Schala, explained how things worked to Fang. "In this orphanage, we have to look after each other. The older kids look after the younger kids. So, you have to look after Vanille, okay?"
Fang didn't respond. The child simply turned her eyes away from the caregiver after she'd finished speaking. The young women sighed and shook her head as she walked away. "Tombas, you're in charge. Make sure everyone gets to sleep," she ordered the oldest boy (who was ten) in the room. Turning off the lights, she bid the kids, six in total, goodnight.
There was silence in the room for all of a few minutes.
Then Vanille started to cry again.
"Geez, Vanille," Tombas groaned, "be quiet! We need to get to sleep!"
Vanille tried to stifle her crying, but only succeeded to turn her cries into even more pitiful sobs.
"Ugh!" The older boy hopped off of the top level of the three layered bunk. He glared at Fang, who hadn't even gotten under her covers yet. "Hey, Yun Fang, do something. Vanille's your responsibility."
Fang didn't respond. She continued to stare straight ahead.
Tombas reached out and grabbed Fang's arm roughly. Still, she did nothing. He pulled her off of her bed and forcibly dragged her over to Vanille's bunk upon which he tossed her. The sobbing girl had to scoot out of the way to avoid being flattened by the slightly older one.
"Here," Tombas grumped. "Take care of her." Then, he climbed back up onto his bunk to go to sleep.
Fang's glare darkened further as she stared up at the bunk that Tombas had disappeared onto. She continued to glare at the bed for several more minutes, before another sniffle got her attention. Turning her head, she looked at the small girl whose bed she had been deposited on.
Vanille was shaking like a leaf. They continued to stare at each other for an unknown period of time, their silence only punctuated by the occasional sob from the younger girl, which eventually faded to silence. By the time this happened, the younger girl was exhausted. Her eyes drooped, and her body sagged into slumber, eventually falling over into the older girl's lap.
Fang didn't move for a long time after Vanille collapsed into her.
Then, finally, she put a shaking hand onto Vanille's head to touch her soft, feathery, red hair.
There was a lot on young Oerba Yun Fang's mind. Ever since she'd been rescued, she had been thinking, long and hard, about what the elders in her clan would have done had they been in her sandals. Revenge, of course, was the answer, but the question was how. Nothing else mattered; that was why she had ignored everyone's attempt to communicate with her.
But, Fang realized, as she softly pet the young girl's hair, the elders of her clan would probably had also made sure to take care of all those who needed it too - that was also an important value of the clan's.
And so, Fang thought, she'd just have to do both.
When Vanille was six and Fang was eight, they were asked to draw that they thought their futures would look like during art class at school.
By that age, Fang already learned that it would be enormously troublesome if she drew what she *really* thought her future would look like, so she drew what she thought would have been acceptable to their teacher.
Her picture was quite crude, even by a child's standard, but it wasn't like her heart was into the assignment. She drew a stick person with brown hair standing beside a large scribbled green mess with red crayon spewing from where a spear had been stuck into it.
No one had to know that the green mess was supposed to be Fal'cie Anima. She'd tell the teacher that was a flan or something.
She looked over at Vanille, who, thought two years younger, had definitely put more thought and effort into her picture. Vanille had drawn a house with four people in front of it. One of them had long brown hair and a spear while another, red hair in pigtails. It was pretty easy for Fang to figure out who those two were. The other two had short yellow hair. "Who're they?" Fang asked. The orphanage they lived in together had four other kids, but none of them looked like that.
Vanille shot Fang a put-out look. "Don't look! I'm not done yet!"
Fang grumped, but let the artist get back to work. She looked down at her own picture and put a few more spears into Fal'Cie Anima, adding a pool of red blood around him. But her impatience soon got the best of her, and she looked over at Vanille's picture again. "Come on, are you done yet?"
The younger girl finally put down her crayon and lifted her masterpiece to show the older girl. "That's me and my husband, and that's you and your husband." She said proudly. "This is the house we live in."
Fang laughed. Ah, so that was who the other two were.
Vanille looked over at Fang's picture. "Is that you hunting?" She made an expression of obvious disappointment. "Hey, where's me?"
Fang looked down at her picture. "Huh? Oh. Um... you're not here."
Vanille's frown deepened as her eyes searched the page. "Where am I?"
"Uh..." Fang rubbed the back of her head awkwardly. Crap! She had to think of something quickly, or the younger girl would probably start crying. "You're... uh... at home with our husbands."
The redheaded girl thought about this for a moment, but then shook her head. "But I don't want to be at home. I want to go hunting with you." She grabbed Fang's picture before Fang could stop her, and quickly scribbled a smaller red stick person beside Fang's brown one.
"There," Vanille said, giving the picture back to Fang. "Much better."
Fang looked at the picture. She considered if it really was better now. For some reason, seeing the red stick figure with the smiley face beside the dying Fal'cie Anima... did improve the picture. And made Fang's middle feel warm and fuzzy too.
"Yeah..." Fang admitted begrudgingly, "I guess it is."
When Vanille was eight, and Fang was ten, the adults who ran the orphanage decided that Fang should formally learn to hunt. She was, by far, the youngest child to start training in the hunt, but she was also, by far, the most skilled child of the six in the orphanage. Even Tombas, who was thirteen, could barely keep up with her.
Vanille had waited until well passed her bed time, and still, Fang had not returned from the hunt.
"Where are they?" She asked one of the adults piteously. "Shouldn't they be back by now?"
"They may have to camp out tonight," had been her answer. "But they'll be back tomorrow."
So Vanille had reluctantly crawled into bed. Of the six children, there were only four tonight. In addition to herself, Shayla, Donda, and Lei were there. Shayla, who was also thirteen (just a couple months younger than Tombas) was the next oldest, so she was in charge that night.
"Do you think she's okay?" Vanille asked the oldest girl.
Shayla shrugged. "Don't know." She had been slightly put out that Fang had gotten to go rather than her.
"Tombas will look after her," Leiz, who was twelve, said. He really looked up to the older boy.
"But Tombas isn't as strong as Fang," Vanille said, still worrying.
The other children couldn't deny this; as far as they could remember, Fang had taken her duty of protecting Vanille very seriously, and when some of the children at school had picked on them for being orphans, Fang had soundly beaten them all, despite being half their size. Not even Tombas had been able to do that.
Vanille didn't sleep all night. She had a deep rooted fear that one day, Fang would go hunting, and just not come back. It was a nightmare that she'd had for as long as she could remember, and she knew that if she did go to sleep, this would be the dream she'd have again.
So, the next morning, she stood by the door with dark, dark circles under her eyes.
When the hunting party finally returned, she cried, "Fang!" and quickly ran out to meet them.
Fang looked different somehow, and yet, still the same. Maybe it had to do with the way she was standing. She seemed, somehow, older. More serious. There was a cut on her cheek. But when she saw Vanille, she gave the younger girl a big smile and a wave, and she looked like the same Fang as always. She held up something small and feathered which used to be alive but now was not. "Vanille! Look! I got a Gremlin!"
The younger girl crashed into the older one, sobbing happily. "You're back! You're back! Don't leave again!"
Fang blinked. "V-Vanille..."
"I worried so much!"
And Fang held the crying girl until she was finished.
When Vanille was ten and Fang was twelve, Fang decided she was strong enough to go hunting by herself. She was sick and tired of the adults holding her back. She had to get stronger, sooner, and to do that, she had to practice against bigger and badder monsters.
Vanille insisted on going along with Fang. Fang had said no. "You don't even have training with a weapon!" She said.
"I can carry potions!" Vanille insisted. "It's dangerous for you to go alone! If you don't let me go with you, then I'm going to tell Schala."
Realizing that if that happened, then there would be no way for Fang to leave the village without supervision for a long time, Fang had finally relented.
It was a disaster.
They came across a gorgonopsid. Fang told Vanille to hide, which the younger girl did, while she went out to challenge the beast.
Fang didn't stand a chance; fully grown men often lost.
She would have died if Vanille hadn't rushed out from her hiding spot, potions in tow. She raced out to Fang, even as the wolf-like monster had been about to pounce, and pushed Fang out of the way.
Vanille took a vicious swipe from the creature's claw. Her body arched through the air, and then thudded to the ground, unmoving.
"Vanille!" Fang weakly made her way over to the fallen girl, her whole body trembling with the effort it took to lift her bladed lance.
The Gorgonopsid leapt.
Fang saw death looming in front of her.
And then there was a loud 'bang!', and the monster hit the ground, unmoving. It took Fang a moment to realize what happened; someone had shot the creature. Whirling her head over in the direction of the shot, she saw several of the adults of the orphanage.
They took the two girls to Oerba's hospital, where it was pronounced that Fang would be fine. It was lucky that she'd gotten potion timely, but Vanille had lost too much blood, and it did not look good.
Fang's whole body shook with the knowledge that it was her own reckless inability that had caused this to happen to Vanille. She stayed by Vanille's side the entire night, the next day, and the entire next three days after that, holding her hand and praying to the Goddess Etro.
~Please! Your Providence! Let Vanille be okay! Just let Vanille be okay! I'll do anything!~
Then, it was discovered that Donda, who was also twelve, just a couple months older than Fang, had the same blood type as Vanille. The boy was quickly brought in, and they worked to transfer his blood to Vanille.
It had been close, but Vanille finally woke up.
Fang wept tears of relief. It would be the only time that Vanille would ever see the other girl cry. "I'm sorry!" Fang cried, "I'm so sorry! I'll get stronger! I'll get stronger, and I'll protect you, and NOTHING will ever hurt you again! NOTHING!"
Vanille smiled weakly. She went back to sleep after that, but she slept with a content smile of security on her face.
Later on, Fang bumped into Donda, who was feeling dizzy, but otherwise okay. "Donda!" She cried.
Donda looked at Fang. "Hmm? What's up?"
Fang looked at her feet. "T-thank you." She said awkwardly. "If... if you were not here..."
"Oh." Donda laughed kindly, and waved his hand. "Don't worry about it. After all, we are all family, right?" He said. But then, he added teasingly, "still, get a grip! Vanille's your responsibility! You can't let anything happen to her, or Schala will have your head!"
Schala or otherwise, Fang didn't care. She would *never* let anything happen to Vanille again.
When Vanille was eleven, and Fang was thirteen, the boys of the orphanage were taken away to go to camp for a week by some of the village's men for 'men's lessons', as they did not have their own fathers to teach them such things.
Fang had, at first, been furious at the exclusion, until she discovered that the boys were not going hunting, as she had originally thought. They were simply going camping with some older men to learn some of the skills that men needed to know. Only then had she been mollified.
"What kinds of things do dads have to teach boys that they don't have to teach girls?" Vanille asked innocently.
"I don't know," Shayla said from her top bunk. "Probably the birds and the bees and how to make babies and all that."
Vanille seemed completely startled. "Babies come from bees?"
There was a pregnant pause, followed by the creaking of a bed as Shayla sat up. "Vanille... you don't know where babies come from yet?" She asked. There was no mislabeling the mischief in her voice.
"Shayla, don't," Fang warned. "Vanille's too young." She had only been given 'The Talk' a couple months ago herself, when she had first experienced some unexpected changes in her body, and she *still* wasn't sure she was recovered from the shock.
"I am not!" Vanille insisted. "Tell me!"
So Shayla did. In explicit detail.
"Shayla, will you please shut up?" Fang finally said, after a particularly graphic description. "Vanille isn't old enough to hear this, and you know it. Look at her, you're scaring her."
Indeed, the eleven year old's eyes were bigger than saucers and she had her blankets pulled up over her mouth. "I'm not scared!" Vanille blurted. "I just... I just..." her voice got really tiny.
Fang sighed. "Case in point, Shayla. Shut up."
The oldest girl sniffed icily, but did as requested. "Hmph. See if I ever give YOU advice again, Yun Fang," she grumped.
With the haughty older girl shut up, Fang looked over at Vanille. "Hey, are you going to be alright?" She asked.
Vanille thought about it for a moment, then shook her head.
Fang sighed. "Come here. You can sleep with me tonight."
The redhead eagerly hopped out of her bunk and slipped under Fang's covers.
Fang let Vanille get comfortable.
"... Fang?" Vanille asked, her voice still tiny.
"Hmm?"
"... if... if that's where babies come from... I'm not sure I want them."
The older girl couldn't help but laugh at the younger girl's declaration. "Well, I'm sure that one day you will. But that will be a long time from now, so don't worry about that tonight."
When Vanille was thirteen and Fang was fifteen, Tombas, who was now eighteen, shocked the entire orphanage when he successfully hunted the palarex antelope, and then gave its prized tongue to Schala, who was more than ten years his senior.
It was a symbol of his desire to marry her.
Schala, unsure of what to do, had not answered her young suitor, and had ran away from the orphanage, much to Tombas's depression.
That night, the five of them discussed the day's occurrence amongst each other. They slept the same way they always had - Fang and Vanille on the lower bunks, Donda and Leiz in the middle, Shayla on the top bunk. Tombas's bunk, adjacent to Shayla's, was empty, as, in his depression, he had not returned to their quarters that night.
"I didn't even realize Tombas felt that way about Schala." Vanille said.
"... I don't think he actually does," Leiz said quietly. "But Tombas is a good guy, and he feels like he owes Schala too much. He doesn't want to see Schala alone."
Fang had been quiet. "But is that right? Should he ask her to marry him, even if he doesn't really love her?"
"Would you have Schala be alone?" Shayla asked. "She's turning thirty one this year. If she doesn't marry soon, she may never have kids."
At this thought, the group became silent, until Vanille quietly agreed with Shayla, "yeah, that... would be horrible."
Fang turned to look at Vanille, surprised to hear such a thing from Vanille, but Vanille was not looking at Fang.
Fang sighed, as she looked away from Vanille again. See? She thought to herself, remembering a silly conversation from many moons ago, told'ja one day you'd want'm.
The next morning though, brought a pleasant surprise to all the residents of the orphanage. It had turned out that Tombas had managed to find Schala, and they had spent the whole night talking.
Tombas had admitted that he actually did love the older woman; he had only told Leiz that he wanted to marry the woman out of duty because he had been embarrassed. After he had admitted the truth, Schala had admitted to her own feelings and that was that. They would be married that month.
That year marked the beginning of many changes.
Tombas no longer slept with them in the orphanage. He and Schala started to build their own house. Leiz, evidently taking a page from Tombas's books, had confessed his own feelings for Shayla. That had made things rather uncomfortable for the five who still lived in the orphanage together, and more often than not, Vanille, Fang and Donda would find excuses to sleep elsewhere.
On those nights, if it was warm enough, Vanille and Fang would camp out on the roof of their school, while Donda would hang out with some of his other friends. It was the first time in their lives that they'd ever had any real semblance of privacy, and they cherished it. They would talk for hours on end. After all, it was a period of great change in their lives, there was often a lot to talk about.
On one of these nights, as Fang and Vanille laid in the reclining chairs on the rooftop, staring up at the stars, Vanille asked, "Fang, do you remember that picture I drew as a kid?"
"... the one with you and me and our husbands living together?" Fang smirked. "Yeah?"
"That's never going to happen, is it?"
A funny feeling flittered across Fang's chest. She looked over at Vanille, and saw that the younger girl was looking earnestly back at her.
Fang sighed, turning away. "... no. Probably not."
Vanille was silent for a moment. And then, she stretched, and looked back up at the sky. "Ah well," she shrugged, her voice becoming its usual chipper tone again. "That's alright. It'll just have to be you and me then. You'll have to mow the lawn though."
Fang laughed heartily. "You know the chances of that happening are equally slim, Vanille."
"Whaddaya mean?"
Now Fang paused. "Vanille, you know what I want to do in my future. And it doesn't involve owning property and kids."
There was an uncomfortable silence in the air, before Vanille replied, her voice tiny, "why not? Doesn't that sound nice?"
"Yeah, it sounds lovely - for you. But me... you know there's stuff I need to do. Those damn vipers just keep coming down, thieving from us. I hear another town got ransacked last winter. Someone's got to stop them."
"Yeah, but why's that got to be you?"
"Because no one else will DO anything about it!" Fang snapped. Then she regretted the strength with which she had expelled her words when she noticed the wounded expression on Vanille's face.
"... sorry," Fang mumbled. "But... that's just how it's gonna be. As soon as I get old enough, I'm taking Fal'Cie Anima's trials."
They didn't talk anymore that night.
But when Vanille sniffled, Fang sighed, and held her close.
AUTHOR'S NOTES & OMAKE:
Chapter 5, AKA III.3, will go back to post-game. *sigh* In retrospect, I think I should have just written 3 different stories, rather than jumping back and forth between 3 parts like this. Thanks for putting up with me, guys!
Cheers,
jen-chan
OMAKE 1: Spoiler Alert!
FANG: [Has been asked to draw 'her future', but all she's put down at this point are doodles of tits and cocks] Hey, Vanille, are you done yet?
VANILLE: [Eagerly drawing away] Don't look! I'm not done yet!
FANG: [Gets bored. Swipes Vanille's picture. Sees a brown stick figure holding a spear and a red stick figure with pigtails. Also sees a pink stick figure holding a gunblade, a blonde stick figure with a bandana, a silver stickfigure with a boomerang and a black stick figure with an afro. The pink stick figure and the brown stick figure are holding hands.] Aaaw, is this our family?
VANILLE: [Shyly] Yeaah. Let me see yours! [Swipes Fang's picture] ... ... ...
FANG: [Sweatdrops] ...
VANILLE: Actually, this explains a lot.
OMAKE 2: Hellish upbringing
[SHAYLA, DONDA, LEIZ, FANG and VANILLE are all in bed, talking about TOMBAS proposing to SCHALA]
VANILLE: I didn't even realize Tombas felt that way about Schala...
FANG: Screw that, I have a much more pressing concern! So I'm supposed to be 15 by now, with Donda being the same age, Leiz being one year older and Shayla and Tombas being 18? How the HELL do you justify sticking a co-ed group of horny teenagers into the same bedroom?
VANILLE: Erm... maybe the readers are supposed to believe that since we all grew up together, we don't have a sexual attraction for each other?
FANG: ... except that Shayla and Leiz supposedly kick us out of our own beds so they can boink later on in the scene?
VANILLE: Well... that'st *sort* of a way of addressing the situation... if you squint...
DONDA: Fang, don't point out the plot holes or this fic may be sucked into the vacuum of the invisible world's chaos.
LEIZ: Yeah, and what are you girls complaining about anyway? It's us GUYS that have it rough! Do you know how hard it is to be a poor teenaged boy sharing the same room while you and Vanille have been acting all 'innocently' snuggly every night for the last decade?