Lessons Learned, Skills Acquired
Celes did not know how to catch fish.
She was, however, a former general of the Gestahlian Empire and a Magitek knight, educated from early childhood by the best lecturers and the brightest minds of the most advanced nation in the world. How hard could it be?
And indeed it took her less than an hour to make her very first catch. It practically swam into her waiting hands. Proudly, she carried it back up to the hut she and Cid occupied and settled on the porch to clean it. She had no knowledge of what that task entailed exactly, only that it needed to be done, but thought herself capable of figuring it out during the process. However, once she cut its belly open, she learned why the fish had been lethargic enough to catch with her bare hands.
Its insides were wriggling with worms.
The sight almost made her retch and with a disgusted shriek, she pushed it back into the bucket she had carried it up from the shore with.
She wanted to go back down to the beach and try again, but the sun was already setting. Going without dinner was no option either, Cid needed the sustenance badly to regain his health. So she reluctantly picked the fish up again and cut away almost everything until she was left with two strips of pale muscle that seemed clean. She burned them to a crisp anyway. It tasted terrible, though Cid ate his without complaint.
The next day she ventured out onto the island in search of something - anything - edible. Her grandad said there was nothing around anymore, but Celes wasn't ready to give up hope that quickly. After the few hours it took her to cross the island she began to fear he might be right. There were no animals to be found. No deer, no rabbits, not even a rat. And no fruit either. Only bones, dead trees, and brown grass. She came across a couple of fiends, weak and dying, smelling already so rotten she didn't dare think of eating them. The world really had ended and they were left in its dying ruins.
Instead of a meaty catch, she returned to the hut with a bag full of dry weeds and roots she thought she remembered as being edible. She cooked them into a tasteless broth. It quenched the worst of their hunger, but Cid desperately needed something much more nutritious. So in the afternoon, she returned to the beach, wading through knee high waves after those fish that didn't just hover there half-dead in the water.
It was a stern lesson in humility.
While she was dripping with sea water after another futile attempt, the salt stinging in her eyes and her weakened muscles complaining, her thoughts wandered into the past. She remembered the fishing villages around the coast of Maranda. They had used fish traps made from only basic materials for centuries with huge success. While there, she could've learned how to make something like that. Instead, she had ordered those villages seized and their equipment put to the torch. All as part of the effort to starve out the capital in case of a long siege. Unnecessarily, as it turned out. Because once the troops under her command had marched on the city, they surrendered almost immediately anyway.
As sunset drew near, she began throwing her magic at the fish in pure frustration. The ocean was surprisingly resistant to her efforts with both ice and fire, shielding the fish from the worst of her attacks. Her endurance was still lacking from her long sleep, so she couldn't keep slinging spells around for long. In the end, it earned her two fish that turned out mostly parasite-free but left her exhausted like she had just fought in an extensive battle.
It became her sole routine during the following days. Getting up after sunrise, heading down to the beach, and then splashing through the water and pouncing after her slippery prey for hours. Usually, it took her most of the day to end up with one or two healthy fish in her bucket; three once.
She soon grew tired of drying her clothes every night only to find them still damp in the morning, so she started to charge at the fish naked. It was not like there was anyone around to see her. Except for Cid, and he had seen her like this a hundred times over ever since she was a babe, owing to her Magitek enhancements and - more recently - her long sleep, both under his care.
And he was in no condition to make his way down to the beach anyway. His cough was getting worse every day, and resisted every attempt to cure it with her magic. Worse, she often caught Cid slipping back into bed when she returned from the beach earlier than he expected, much to her chagrin. Why couldn't he just rest? His health was still deteriorating and there was nothing for him to do.
While preparing their dinner one evening she recalled that in the kingdom of Doma people ate their fish raw, served only with rice and seaweed, or so Celes had read. It had seemed like an utterly foreign idea back then. Now she wondered if there was a reason for it; was fish consumed that way more nutritious? Domans were considered to live rather long lives after all. Could it be done with any kind of fish or only certain species? Was there a trick to it when preparing the meal?
If Doma's culinary wisdom held the key to saving Cid, she had no way to find out now. Back then she had not bothered to learn more about it, just absorbing it as a quirky fact. Their warrior culture, their military tactics, and the topography of their lands had been more in line with her interests; preparation for the next invasions.
As Celes thought about Doma, she of course thought about Cyan, too. His frosty, almost hostile demeanour towards her had grated on her throughout their journey, and she had been too proud to see his ire wasn't directed at her personally but at what she represented. She wondered if there would've been a way to make amends. To forge real camaraderie, not just to tolerate each other. She might have learned a thing or two from the seasoned warrior.
It took almost impaling herself onto a piece of driftwood during another fruitless dive to finally uncover the memory of a useful lesson. She remembered an anthropology book she was made to read once maybe ten years ago. It had a section about the tribes in and around the Veldt, uncivilised in the eyes of the Empire, the text mostly mocking their backward ways and beliefs. But it had come with the drawing of a woman, standing naked in a river, a spear raised to strike at the fish at her feet. The long-forgotten memory was suddenly as clear in front of her inner eye as the day she first saw it.
And Celes knew how to make a spear and how to use one. There was dry wood aplenty on their island. She immediately abandoned her attempts at fishing by hand and set out to find a suitable piece of wood. It didn't take her long to locate a dead tree with a suitable branch. Brandishing her knife, she went to work.
The spear she ended up making wouldn't hold up in battle, too short and too brittle, and would certainly get her mocked in a military parade. But for fishing, it would suffice.
She learned to be patient soon after, as charging into the water with her spear was just as fruitless as chasing the livelier fish with her hands. So she stood in the tide as motionless as the woman in the picture, the waves washing around her knees. The spear raised and her muscles coiled to strike once her presence no longer threatened the fish and they swam closer again.
It wasn't until she recalled a science class about light fracturing through crystals and also the surface of water, that she correctly adjusted the thrust of her spear to finally skewer a fat fish. It made her laugh out loud and whoop with joy. Something Celes would've been embarrassed about at other times. In truth, she had a hard time remembering moments when she had felt a similar spark of elation. The people of the Empire had probably expected her to feel something like it after her conquest of Maranda.
It was still too little, or probably just too late. For on the next day, when she returned to the hut, two of the biggest fish she'd ever caught slung over her shoulder and two more in her bucket, she didn't catch Cid sneaking back into bed for once. Because he was already lying in it.
Unmoving, cold.
At that moment all strength left her.
She had of course read poems and seen plays about tragic heroes and hopeless youths in love, seeking dignity in choosing death. They were all far from Celes' mind as she ascended the cliff on the island's northern end. As was everything else but utter despair. There was nothing left. She was now alone in a dying world, stuck on a dying island and surrounded by dying sea life. She saw no reason to postpone the inevitable anymore.
When she woke again on the beach, half her face buried in the sand and seaweed tangled in her hair, she figured she couldn't even do dramatic suicide right.
Then she spotted the seagull; and the torn blue shimmer of hope wrapped around its wing.
Author's Notes
Many thanks to changeableLandscape for beta reading.
Of course, this also grew far larger than originally intended. The first inspiration was just a thought about Celes trying to catch fish on the solitary island and reminiscing about how she had been raised to destroy and conquer, and the many things she didn't learn that would help her in that moment. Then I thought up a few more things she regrets as the days pass and Cid grows weaker.
And then I somehow remembered the drawing of the woman with the spear in the river. Not from an anthropology book, but from a 30-year-old TTRPG handbook that still dwells in my basement to this day. It was a perfect fit for this story. I guess it's true, we writers really do put something of ourselves into our stories :D
Thank you for reading :)
Any kind of comments are welcome and appreciated.