Ancient Fic: Final Fantasy Tactics
Jun. 21st, 2021 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moemachinaMore ancient fic rescued from the marshes of fanfiction dot net. This time it's all discarded material from my Chorus take on FFT, because for a while I was just re-writing chapters in an endless sisyphean labor.
Death's Children (Final Fantasy Tactics, 2003)
They perched on abandoned crates, a gaggle of disconsolate children trying to ignore the smell and the flies. They breathed through their mouths. They looked towards one another. They restlessly shuffled their feet and moved their fingers, as if to seek unconscious reassurance that blood still shot through their arteries. The children had not anticipated this vigil. The wait before a battle was agony, and the fight itself was a confusing quilt of loud sights and colorful sounds, and the time after was a panting period of counting fingers and counting comrades and white bandages and foul-smelling medicine in little glass bottles. But this...
The awful thing about it wasn't the odor itself - though the too-sweet smell of decomposing flesh was reasonably horrible in its own right - but the memories it triggered of deaths past. It had a way of even reminding one of deaths where one had seen no trace of the bodies. They were irresistibly reminded of siblings curled in sick beds, bloody tavern fights, and dour funerals. They fidgeted uneasily. It is one thing to kill and another to deal with the body afterwards.
They were not strangers to death, but they had not yet become accustomed to his grim presence. It is an eerie thing to realize death's indifference to birthright or position. He works in concert with the invisible agents of chance. In the end, the main thing separating the puppets on the ground from the children on their crates was - not the ideological differences, not the disparate quality in weapons, not the forces of righteous justice - the simple fact that fortune had smiled on the latter side while death grinned on the former. It is an eerie thing to realize.
Delita sat along the edge of the street. The soles of his boots lay flat against the uneven brickwork and his knees were high and bent. Shadows pooled under the crooked curves of his legs. He ran a finger along the exposed edge of a crumbling yellow brick.
Right now, he kept thinking about standing in the cold winter rain and watching two bodies being lowered into the ground. His sister stood next to him and neither of them cried. For weeks afterward, he would bear the imprint of five little half-moons where she had tightly gripped his hand.
He absently rubbed his palm, remembering the pain.
From the corner of his eyes, movement - an odd sensation of clockwork gears being tightened just outside his perception - made him look up. Ramza stood, watching the street with a dark expression. The gears bent and snapped and Ramza spoke quietly from between his teeth. "When the hell are they going to get here?"
Delita shrugged and returned to the street bricks. "Dealing with the other battle sites first, I'd imagine."
Ramza irritably snapped his fingers. "Gariland's bloody bureaucracy has given us this. In Igros, we wouldn't have had to wait for the black wagons."
Delita examined the cracked corner of one brick. "I suppose not," he said. His voice was as cool and quiet as river mud. He thought of the grey color of predawn skies.
The other boy cracked each one of his finger joints with awful deliberation. Delita and the blood-grimed children on the crates regarded him covertly. The battle itself had gone reasonably well, though the children cradled gashes and bruises, but a message from headquarters had immediately soured their elation. Though waiting for the corpse carts was usually a task given to the greenest recruit, this time the entire party was "requested" to remain with the bodies. No reason was given for this change in policy, and they had been waiting for more than two hours.
Black flies already buzzed around the corpses, alighting on lukewarm flesh and skittishly taking off. Once-red mouths were pale and beginning to take on a bluish tinge as the blood stopped flowing through their bodies. When they had piled up the bodies, someone had gone to the trouble of closing their staring eyes and Delita smiled at the thought. A tiny measure of dignity in such ignoble deaths.
The smell was pervasive. Just when he began to forget about, a new breeze would bring a fresh assault on his olfactory glands.
Ramza cursed softly under his breath. Delita watched him without much pity. What was death to the irritable and frightened boy beside him but the gentle passing of a perfumed mother and a crusty old man going into that good night at the end of a long gray life? Delita had buried his parents after a jerky frothing fight with invisible demons of which he had witnessed every round. Even the crate children, swaddled though in their previous lives they might have been, had a closer connection to death than their scowling commander.
But Ramza couldn't hide behind his fretful impatience forever. Delita knew this, and so he waited.
When the black wagons arrived, they would trundle the stiff blue bodies into wooden troughs black with paint and blood. Like precarious beetles, they would wobble down the streets of Gariland, passing the sanctified graveyards of honest merchants and minor lords until they reached a pit a mile outside of town. Here the bodies would be dumped and here the bodies would be covered by disturbed dirt. The Church and the King would have preferred it if every single body could be mutilated and dismembered, but practical consideration for time and volume necessitated mass burials for most traitors and criminals, like the plague victims before them. Under the dark wet earth, flesh would mildew and rot, unraveling from the bone. Inside their skulls, the gray brain would decay and seep from their noses. Rain would come, and then the snow, to marinate a mixture of blood and meat and earth. Pale yellow flowers would burst from the earth in the spring, with pale green roots twined around yellow bone.
Ramza crossed his arms and ground his teeth, miserable to the core. Delita traced brickwork with his fingers. If they had been alone, he might have said something, but the children made him cautious of his tongue - if they remained ignorant of their commander's discomfiture, there was no reason to bring it to their attention. So he remained silent and watchful, and the glum children drummed their heels against their crates and idly checked their bandages and the edges of their swords.
"I suppose they're afraid of looters," Ramza said suddenly, the clockwork gears of his brain still wrestling with the original conundrum. "I don't see why it should matter, though." The glum children looked at him and, when he failed to continue, looked to Delita. But Delita was silently examining the brick facade, and so they irritably turned their attention inward once again.
Ramza restlessly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, drawing Delita's attention as erratically and irresistibly as a moth to a candle flame. During the battle, Ramza had gotten decked across the head - a lucky blow, nothing more - by a dull and rusty sword, and while the resulting cut had been shallow and deemed not worth bandaging, it had stained the surrounding cornsilk hair a mottled crimson. With every movement, that red badge of misfortune bobbed in the corner of Delita's eye, and he pressed his finger harder against the brick, leaving the tip red and sore.
There was the dull throb of a half-remembered pain against his palm.
"...or maybe... Maybe they want to try to identify the bodies before they bury them...?" Ramza wondered aloud, effortlessly resuming a monologue which had died five minutes ago. Delita said nothing, but privately wished he would shut up. The chattering would clue in the most oblivious child to their commander's inner turmoil. At the same time, a pang went through his chest. He recognized Ramza's habit to intellectualize uncomfortable situations - to dissect the motives and events and results - and with that recognition came a thrill of undesired sympathy.
None of them - not Ramza, Delita, not the crate children - were veterans of the battlefield, but at least Delita and some of the children had been assigned corpse watch (usually in some cold and godforsaken part of the Gariland countryside after a raid on a bandit camp) as part of their novice training. Ramza, spoiled little child of the aristocracy that he was (a bastard, to be sure, but a favored bastard), had never had the misfortune to be picked for that duty. So these limp puppets on the ground, their mouths blue and their strings cut, were a startling and new discovery for him. A battle is different - the wait is agony, and the fight is chaos, but it's clean and simple and powered by the reptilian hump in the back of the brain. The aftermath is different. You look and wait and wonder why fate decreed that he had to die. You look and wait and wonder why fate did not decree the same for you. So you breathe and shuffle and check to see that blood still shoots through your arteries. You chatter on about foolish bureaucracies and looters.
Ramza reached to idly scratch the back of his neck, and the bobbing crimson stain and the angled elbow drew Delita's attention once again. He was loathe to admit it, but at the very start of the battle, when Ramza had drawn his sword and gone headlong into a sea of dull and rusty blades, some small part of him had screamed in horror and fear. It was an inner scream he recognized from a grey predawn sky and an orphan watching two thirds of his world slip into the dark earth, with the last third pulling him to the ground with a suffocating grip. He might have followed his parents had it not been for his sister. He might have followed Ramza had it not been for the children. So there was this sickening mixture of love - for the only one who understood him, for the one with the cornsilk hair and wide grin, for a kindred soul, damned aristocrat or not - and hatred, for the one who had abandoned him and rushed so willingly into death without understanding that grim eternity. For not thinking of the children.
The children themselves were now examining their cuticles and humming under their breath. Ramza watched the street eagerly for some sign of the plague wagons, but the ticking of his relentless clockwork mind was evident from his ragged fingernails and bitten lip. Delita watched him without pity, but with a dark degree of hope. Somewhere, the bodies and the odor and the pain of today were being filed away, deep under the grey loam of his brain. Sleep would come, and then dreams, to marinate a mixture of sights and smells and sensations. A new man would burst forth, no longer shielded by birthright to death's ignoble grandeur. A new man made out of muddy passions, no longer a coldly logical creature of clockwork and ideals.
Now he was frazzled and remote, but Delita was watching for the buds of spring. When Ramza finally bloomed, he would be waiting. He would be ready.
For how can death - how can tomorrow - frighten those that are two? Death's grim presence afflicts only the lonely with a weak grip on love (no one who really loved you would willingly rush into a sea of swords or succumb to invisible demons). How can death frighten those that have already met him, and given him a hearty handshake in the bargain? Death touches only the living but they will be like the resurrected undead, free to duck his embrace. They will be shambling, rotting zombies with daffodils bursting from their craniums. And they will be two, and they will be one, with pale green roots twined together around yellow bone.
Soon Ramza would understand death's grim eternity. Soon he would understand Delita.
The crate children played games with bits of string and forgotten coins. It was taking forever for the wagons to arrive, but the children knew that they would be here eventually. Until then, they would just have to wait. Until then, the smell was killing them.
Author's Note: This is, alas, probably the closest I'll ever come to writing gay Delita/Ramza porn. So savor it, god dammit!
This originally started out as a rewrite for Chapter Five of my FFT Chorus project (because, at the time, I utterly hated how the original chapter had turned out). However, I got halfway through this puppy before realizing that Irritable-Ramza and Obsessive-Delita, while being interesting extrapolations of their game personas, were not the direction I wanted to take Chorus. Also, I had formed a happier position on the original Chapter Five (I rewrote it slightly, and will probably rewrite it slightly in the future, but it functions okay in its current state) and so this revision became rather superfluous. On the other hand, I was hesitant to just junk what I had written, since about half of it had all this interesting (and gruesome!) death imagery (and the other half, of course, had horribly wooden Delita-Ramza interactions - ugh). So I retooled the concept, fixated on the death stuff, and made Delita brood like hell. I'd prefer to think that this story manages to be dark without being angsty, but I'll take what I can get.
I have no idea how a medieval corpse disposal system would work, so I cobbled together the plague wagons/pit from my half-remembered 9th grade lessons on the bubonic plague. In retrospect, it kind of makes more sense to burn the bodies but, uh...never mind that!
This story owes a major debt to the religious poetry of John Donne, in particular "Hymn to God" and "Death, Be Not Proud". So, uh, yeah. Corrupting the English canon, one fanfic at a time!
(February, 2003)
"In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize"
-Emily Dickinson
Alazlam: A Tall Glass of Spite
Delita's name appears for the first time a year before the Lion War broke out.
Alazlam's handwriting is thin and neat and precise. He'd had a tutor, when he was seven, who had demanded such precision and who hadn't hesitated to give a quick cuff to the head if Alazlam didn't perform to his satisfaction. The man had been gray and humorless. It had been the first time that Alazlam, soaked with the milky complacency of childhood, had ever really hated anyone.
His mother had been less than sympathetic - it wasn't easy for a widow to scrape together enough money to educate her son, and Alazlam had better be damn aware of the sacrifices she went through for him. After all, the Lord knew she hadn't been destined for this kind of life. She'd been a lady's maid once, and danced and dined with fine lords once, before Alazlam's birth had taken that all away. Stop being such a sniveling bastard - didn't he see what she had been forced to endure, all because of him? Then she would usually start crying, and Alazlam would wander away, feeling drained and grim.
She made him keep going to the man, and Alazlam could do nothing but endure it silently. He would lie in his bed at night and curl up under his thin sheets and nurse a hard, ugly knot of hatred. He would fantasize of killing the man, of humiliating him, of horrifying him, and then he would fall into a deep, dreamless sleep; a small boy's only victory against the cruel world.
Many soldiers returning from the war had no jobs, little money, and even less loyalty to the crown.
He stops here and absently taps his pen against the inkwell. Truthfully, one can write a hefty volume on the subtle economic factors that threaded their way through the Fifty Year's War and resulted a bleak recession on the other side. One can write several hefty volumes, in fact. Ivalice scholars are currently embroiled in an academic skirmish over whether to accept the established line of reasoning concerning the depression (As is presented in Carlos Avadramo's A True And Detailed History of the Land of Ivalice, where the principal blame falls on the exorbitant taxes levied on the common folk in an attempt to pay the aristocratic war debts, which eventually spiraled out in a general economic whirlpool of poverty and desperation) or to acknowledge the brash new theory (As advanced in The Causes and Effects of the Fifty Year's War, by one Alfred Edinger, who claims that the fighting men were so demoralized and affected by the horrors they had seen during the war that they returned home unwilling to participate in constructive economic opportunity, and instead turned to both unproductive and destructive behaviors). The supporters of the former accuse the latter of engaging in self-indulgent, revisionist psychobabble. The other side insist that the established view is narrow and shallow and ignores the general zeitgeist of the era. During more than one gathering of historians, the conflict has taken the form of outright physical assault.
Truthfully, it would pain Alazlam to mention either theory here. Both philosophies smack of the same typical, tiresome methodology. Historians sit around, measuring grain export rates and bullion levels or tediously pontificating on great, amorphous concepts with no grounding in fact. Nobody seems to care that it does not matter. Certainly it does not matter enough to wage a feud between two different theories. Nobody was interested in the important thing, the provable thing: what had that economic quicksand led to? The pat answer is "The Lion's War", but nobody is interested in exploring that. Everyone just accepts that facet of history, and runs off to argue inconsequential economic trivialities.
So it doesn't matter why there had been an economic downturn - it just matters that there had been one. That is the only point Alazlam cares about, and that would be the only point his intended audience would care about. Surely the historians would scream about the omission, and seek to modify or deny his thesis with drudgingly pointless arguments based on his economic simplifications, but Alazlam finds himself failing to care. Even...looking forward to the anal bastards.
Alazlam realizes that he has formed a fist around his pen, and forces himself to relax and assume the proper form. Surely Mr. Trelane had taught him better than that. Surely he did. Alazlam smiles darkly.
Many became thieves and rebels plotting rebellion against the royal family.
The government would probably have something to say about his work. After all, they had spent much care and effort into indoctrinating the populace so as to believe their "official" history of Ivalice. Something that so dramatically challenged their vision, as his work will, would certainly provoke some sort of reaction. And the Church, of course. The Church would also have something to say about it.
He is looking forward to that as well.
Robbery and murder were commonplace in Ivalice.
The small window behind him is open, allowing the first tentative breezes of autumn to wander in. From the street below come the muted noises of foot traffic and the calls of fishmongers and kettle-wives, colorful ribbons of sounds and profanity emerging from the dull blanket of sound. There would be grimy young pickpockets working the area and giggling girls dressed in red scarves and tall young men lounging around with nonchalant calm.
Below him, Mrs. Ladanam and her daughter Katrina would be serving breakfast to their patrons in a busy, merry common-room. They would leave his breakfast outside his door in accords to a mutual understanding that all three had in regards to disturbing Alazlam while he was working. Sometimes they would go up to find the food still there, long since cold, hours later, and Mrs. Ladanam would cluck about how thin that poor man was. Katrina would merely laugh and bring him up a new plate - she knew he would surface from his work eventually and discover how hungry he was. Surely he was one of their strangest tenants, but not at all a bad egg, and sometimes he told her little stories (on those rare occasions when he would enter the common-room) that were charming and funny.
And if Alazlam had told her of his work, of what he is trying to do with it, she would have merely laughed again.
Many heroes and wizards came out of that era.
Alazlam pauses, again. Reflects. Dips his pen in the inkwell.
Two of note came out of Magic City Gariland.
Author's Note: (6/15/06) Originally Chapter Four of my nerdy FFT: Chorus project. Five years later, I decided it was terrible and completely rewrote it to include more original characters and P. G. Wodehouse pastiches. This is the original chapter.
"Blood is the seed of blood, hundredfold the harvest,
The gleaners that follow it, their feet are crimson"
-Euripides, Medea
Delita: Dawn of the Harvest
Delita sat propped against the firm side of the chimney, his legs stretched along the length of the roof. By all rights, he should have been miserable. The air held the edge of the sullen winter, and the wind was hard and dry, so he should have been cold and huddled on his high perch. Warm sunlight, though, spilled across Magic City Gariland like liquid butter. The slick heat had thoroughly soaked the roof tiles, so heat radiated against his back and legs. The chimney itself served as a windbreaker, shielding and protecting him.
A spider's web of criss-crossed streets spread away from under him. They disappeared behind the rooftops of the city, crimson peaks tumbling away under the sky like ripe tomatoes. It was not an old city, as creaking mausoleums like Igros and Lionel were measured - but neither was it a new town, with orderly streets and well-planned aqueducts and the pervasive sense of urban atheism. No, Gariland rested comfortably in the middle. It had a history, but it was calm history of burghers and alchemists and hedge-wizards, and it had a future, but it was a sedentary future of commerce and security.
Delita scratched his nose and then resumed his still position. He had unbuckled his scabbard in order to sit more comfortably; it rested next to him on the roof. Above the white streets and the red roofs, he could see the smudge of green and gold on the horizon of the fields and farms, lying just outside the city.
He was sitting on top of a bakery. At least he was reasonably sure it had been a bakery; it hadn't been a great priority to establish the exact profession of the building. All that was needed was to inform the owner (who had been wearing an apron and covered in flour, so Delita was reasonably sure that he had been a baker) of the current situation, and what allowances the civil code of Magic City Gariland called for in this current situation. The baker (and really, what else could he be?) had been less than happy about the cadets taking up position next to his business. He had been even less thrilled about the occasion that called this pack of callow children to perch upon his front step under the distant autumn sunlight.
His feelings ultimately mattered not a whit, and Delita had interrupted his complaints with the request for a ladder, which his wonderful host had reluctantly granted. He had clambered up the ladder with the baker's youngest children clustered around the base, looking up in curiosity, and then bade them to return the ladder to their father, which they did slowly. Delita idly wondered if they had gone back to baking - the umber scent of bread lingered in the air, but there was no smoke issuing from the chimney.
He turned his attention to the green gold strip on the horizon. It was late autumn, but not too late, and so he supposed that the farmers would be out there still, wading deep within their fields of wheat with swinging silver scythes. It was a casual, random thought, and Delita was surprised by the burst of feelings and images and warm nostalgia the thought brought on - he could remember the harvests from his childhood vividly, as if they were inked in brilliant color right there in front of him.
A low whistle interrupted his thoughts. He pushed himself to the edge of the roof and looked down, to where a lanky cadet stood grinning up at him.
"Found yourself a cozy spot, eh?" Ramza asked merrily.
Delita shrugged. "It'll do."
"Aye, that it will." Ramza happily turned his gaze down the length of the deserted street and pointed to a position three buildings down. "I put young Roland on the little bridge back there, and I've got the others positioned in the alley behind here. When Alexandro's group drives them this way, this will be the place to bottle them up."
"If Alexandro drives them this way," Delita said tonelessly.
Ramza looked up at him and a frown slid over his fair face. "Oh, are you still riding that? I tell you, Delita, they'd have to be pure idiots to go up north of the canal. This is the fastest route out of the city.
"That assumes that they know the layout of Gariland." Delita turned his gaze back to the horizon. He was bored with this argument; Ramza refused to acknowledge that his position had any validity. It was like debating with a brick wall.
From below, Ramza's clear voice floated up, "Gariland's streets are logically organized, so if those knaves have any common sense of which to speak, surely they can find themselves here. And even if they don't, I'm certain that Alexandro will give them the necessary motivation. He knows where we're stationed." He stood there for a few more minutes looking up, but as Delita resolutely ignored him, he sighed and said, "Well, whatever. If you see them, give the signal. And if you hear Roland give the signal, pass it along to us." He silently wandered off, and Delita watched the distant, green horizon.
Strange, really, that he could remember things about the harvests from his childhood. He hadn't thought about his childhood in years, much less the autumn traditions. He had always been too young to actually participate in the harvest before they had sent him to the Academy, so his scanty memories were solely formed as a passive observer, and yet...there they were, imprinted into his mind. Strange.
From this position, Delita could see nearly the whole length the little street, now lonely and deserted. Occasionally someone would scurry along its length, but they could sense the eyes trained on them and would hurry to move off it. Delita's bakery was positioned right at the turn in the street, where it abruptly twisted off and joined the main thoroughfare out of the city. Distantly, he supposed that Ramza might have a point: this would be a good place to fight. If they came this way.
He could remember that after the harvest, the villagers would have a great, roaring bonfire. They would serve strange sweet cakes and hot cider and tell wonderfully bloody stories around the heat, surrounded by inky darkness. All the harvesters were there, all their wives and pretty daughters and solemn sons.
The Church frowned on such festivals, considering them to be throwbacks to pagan worships, and officially condemned them. Which is why Zalbag, when he caught two small boys returning to the manor from one of the bonfires, had given them a whipping they would not soon forget. The Church - and the manor, for that matter - usually elected to turn a blind eye as long as the affairs were discreet and held at a decent distance, but when presented with incontrovertible evidence, they were forced to act.
A gust of wind suddenly started moving in a new direction, against Delita's unprotected face. He sealed his eyes, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and gritted his teeth. For a moment, it chilled him, freezing his breath in his lungs. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. Delita opened his eyes and returned to autumn.
As a boy, Delita hadn't understood the Church's attitude - the festivals were about food and life and happiness. Only when he was older did he comprehend the meaning of the harvest and the onslaught of winter and the old traditions that had degenerated into incomprehensible rituals. Around that fire they celebrated the fruit of the land by killing it at the peak of its ripeness and consecrating it to their old, strange gods. Little of that remained in the contemporary festivals, though - it was just an opportunity to relax and get drunk after the hard work of the harvest.
He was concentrating on the issue so intently that he missed the first call; a second low whistle was required to get his attention. He looked up with a start, and automatically returned the whistle. No one was on the street; they must still be around the bend. Delita grabbed his scabbard. He half-consciously registered a second whistle from his right - Ramza - and swung his feet over the edge of the roof. Delita had learned early the value of not thinking through certain situations, so he choose not to notice the great distance to the ground and instead pushed himself off.
He hung in the air for a stomach-churning instant, and there was an insistent hard note of regret and anguish and fear, and then he landed on the packed earth. Gravity drove him to his knees and he blinked for a second, coming back to himself. He straightened, brushed himself off, and looked ahead.
At the thieves.
They stood about fifty feet from him and had just rounded the bend. They stared back at him, their surprise at a strange boy dropping from the top of a two-story building temporarily rendering them still. Time stopped for a second, with everything frozen in crystalline perfection. Delita saw their ragged clothes, their dirty faces, the blood stains around their wrists and arms. They saw a sturdy young man with dark hair and darker eyes, clutching a long, worn scabbard.
No one was breathing.
And then Ramza was beside him, visibly radiating light and glee, and saying, "Stop right there, knaves! Surrender now or die in obscurity!"
Delita winced (Die in obscurity?) and the thieves stared at him in a mixture of fury and confusion. One of them shouted, "What's this? A bunch of children?" Another one cried, "Just kill them and get it over!" The dusty group began to draw their swords; they suddenly seemed a lot less spell-bound and a lot more lethal. From behind them, Delita saw Roland pop up with a drawn sword, waiting for Ramza's move; now everyone was out and in position.
Delita could feel the others at his back but he suddenly felt less confident about their situation: desperation emanated from the thieves like smoke and he knew that they would give no quarter. "Ramza," he said quietly as the cadets drew their swords, "I wouldn't rush them..."
Ramza misinterpreted his warning as being in line with their earlier argument and irately cried, "Stop patronizing me, Delita. I am a Beoulve, and I know what I'm doing."
The thieves snapped to attention.
"A Beoulve?"
"THE Beoulves?"
"They must be from the Academy."
"Hey, we've got some military brats here."
"It's the snot-nosed little nobles."
"God damn."
Abruptly, as if responding to some hidden signal, they shook themselves from their golden molasses petrifaction and began as one to run towards the knot of cadets standing in the middle of the road.
Ramza screamed, "Move out!" and there was a moment when tension snapped through their group like a bow hitting the violin's string; there was a moment where it felt distant and unreal and dreamlike; there was a moment where Delita's mind went cold and blank because, like his fall, there were some actions that should not be thought through.
For a moment, there flashed through his mind an image of the wheat fields in the morning, like a sea of gold laced with crystal dew.
He drew his sword, and as the first thief in the group made a desperate sideways lunge at him with a knife, Delita sliced open the side of his head. It was a quick uppercut, from below the jawbone to the outside edge of the eye. The other man stumbled back in a mess of blood and screams. He made another attempt, but Delita parried the blow and than thrust his sword in the thief's belly. The man gurgled a crimson curse and then went down.
Around them reigned noisy, frenetic chaos as bodies slipped left and right, jumped and then collapsed with a shriek. As Delita yanked his blade free, he saw that the man had been wearing a golden locket that gleamed along with the glossy blood in the wet wreck of his neck.
After that, he stopped noticing details.
Author's Note: Originally written as Chapter Five of my Chorus project; eventually booted so I could write something completely different for that section. I still contend that "Golden Molasses Petrifaction" would be a good title for a rock song, and I have no idea what "pervasive sense of urban atheism" was supposed to mean. (Oh, teenaged self, you are inscrutable.)
(11/29/02) - Some very minor editing to change a plot device that always bothered me (instead of just "happening" conveniently across this particular street, the thieves are actively being driven towards it by another team of knights). Hooray! I feel the vague stirrings of interest in this baby, though I'm not certain whether to go with the original conceit (which would mean that the next chapter has original characters - that seems awfully tiresome at this point, however) or forge ahead with Algus. Hmmmm...
(01/12/02) - This went through...several rewrites, and it's still a little patchy in places, but I desperately want to move on, and this chapter's current state is sufficient for my purposes. So now, moving on. Hurrah! Next Time: Send in the Mary Sues!
Death's Children (Final Fantasy Tactics, 2003)
They perched on abandoned crates, a gaggle of disconsolate children trying to ignore the smell and the flies. They breathed through their mouths. They looked towards one another. They restlessly shuffled their feet and moved their fingers, as if to seek unconscious reassurance that blood still shot through their arteries. The children had not anticipated this vigil. The wait before a battle was agony, and the fight itself was a confusing quilt of loud sights and colorful sounds, and the time after was a panting period of counting fingers and counting comrades and white bandages and foul-smelling medicine in little glass bottles. But this...
The awful thing about it wasn't the odor itself - though the too-sweet smell of decomposing flesh was reasonably horrible in its own right - but the memories it triggered of deaths past. It had a way of even reminding one of deaths where one had seen no trace of the bodies. They were irresistibly reminded of siblings curled in sick beds, bloody tavern fights, and dour funerals. They fidgeted uneasily. It is one thing to kill and another to deal with the body afterwards.
They were not strangers to death, but they had not yet become accustomed to his grim presence. It is an eerie thing to realize death's indifference to birthright or position. He works in concert with the invisible agents of chance. In the end, the main thing separating the puppets on the ground from the children on their crates was - not the ideological differences, not the disparate quality in weapons, not the forces of righteous justice - the simple fact that fortune had smiled on the latter side while death grinned on the former. It is an eerie thing to realize.
Delita sat along the edge of the street. The soles of his boots lay flat against the uneven brickwork and his knees were high and bent. Shadows pooled under the crooked curves of his legs. He ran a finger along the exposed edge of a crumbling yellow brick.
Right now, he kept thinking about standing in the cold winter rain and watching two bodies being lowered into the ground. His sister stood next to him and neither of them cried. For weeks afterward, he would bear the imprint of five little half-moons where she had tightly gripped his hand.
He absently rubbed his palm, remembering the pain.
From the corner of his eyes, movement - an odd sensation of clockwork gears being tightened just outside his perception - made him look up. Ramza stood, watching the street with a dark expression. The gears bent and snapped and Ramza spoke quietly from between his teeth. "When the hell are they going to get here?"
Delita shrugged and returned to the street bricks. "Dealing with the other battle sites first, I'd imagine."
Ramza irritably snapped his fingers. "Gariland's bloody bureaucracy has given us this. In Igros, we wouldn't have had to wait for the black wagons."
Delita examined the cracked corner of one brick. "I suppose not," he said. His voice was as cool and quiet as river mud. He thought of the grey color of predawn skies.
The other boy cracked each one of his finger joints with awful deliberation. Delita and the blood-grimed children on the crates regarded him covertly. The battle itself had gone reasonably well, though the children cradled gashes and bruises, but a message from headquarters had immediately soured their elation. Though waiting for the corpse carts was usually a task given to the greenest recruit, this time the entire party was "requested" to remain with the bodies. No reason was given for this change in policy, and they had been waiting for more than two hours.
Black flies already buzzed around the corpses, alighting on lukewarm flesh and skittishly taking off. Once-red mouths were pale and beginning to take on a bluish tinge as the blood stopped flowing through their bodies. When they had piled up the bodies, someone had gone to the trouble of closing their staring eyes and Delita smiled at the thought. A tiny measure of dignity in such ignoble deaths.
The smell was pervasive. Just when he began to forget about, a new breeze would bring a fresh assault on his olfactory glands.
Ramza cursed softly under his breath. Delita watched him without much pity. What was death to the irritable and frightened boy beside him but the gentle passing of a perfumed mother and a crusty old man going into that good night at the end of a long gray life? Delita had buried his parents after a jerky frothing fight with invisible demons of which he had witnessed every round. Even the crate children, swaddled though in their previous lives they might have been, had a closer connection to death than their scowling commander.
But Ramza couldn't hide behind his fretful impatience forever. Delita knew this, and so he waited.
When the black wagons arrived, they would trundle the stiff blue bodies into wooden troughs black with paint and blood. Like precarious beetles, they would wobble down the streets of Gariland, passing the sanctified graveyards of honest merchants and minor lords until they reached a pit a mile outside of town. Here the bodies would be dumped and here the bodies would be covered by disturbed dirt. The Church and the King would have preferred it if every single body could be mutilated and dismembered, but practical consideration for time and volume necessitated mass burials for most traitors and criminals, like the plague victims before them. Under the dark wet earth, flesh would mildew and rot, unraveling from the bone. Inside their skulls, the gray brain would decay and seep from their noses. Rain would come, and then the snow, to marinate a mixture of blood and meat and earth. Pale yellow flowers would burst from the earth in the spring, with pale green roots twined around yellow bone.
Ramza crossed his arms and ground his teeth, miserable to the core. Delita traced brickwork with his fingers. If they had been alone, he might have said something, but the children made him cautious of his tongue - if they remained ignorant of their commander's discomfiture, there was no reason to bring it to their attention. So he remained silent and watchful, and the glum children drummed their heels against their crates and idly checked their bandages and the edges of their swords.
"I suppose they're afraid of looters," Ramza said suddenly, the clockwork gears of his brain still wrestling with the original conundrum. "I don't see why it should matter, though." The glum children looked at him and, when he failed to continue, looked to Delita. But Delita was silently examining the brick facade, and so they irritably turned their attention inward once again.
Ramza restlessly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, drawing Delita's attention as erratically and irresistibly as a moth to a candle flame. During the battle, Ramza had gotten decked across the head - a lucky blow, nothing more - by a dull and rusty sword, and while the resulting cut had been shallow and deemed not worth bandaging, it had stained the surrounding cornsilk hair a mottled crimson. With every movement, that red badge of misfortune bobbed in the corner of Delita's eye, and he pressed his finger harder against the brick, leaving the tip red and sore.
There was the dull throb of a half-remembered pain against his palm.
"...or maybe... Maybe they want to try to identify the bodies before they bury them...?" Ramza wondered aloud, effortlessly resuming a monologue which had died five minutes ago. Delita said nothing, but privately wished he would shut up. The chattering would clue in the most oblivious child to their commander's inner turmoil. At the same time, a pang went through his chest. He recognized Ramza's habit to intellectualize uncomfortable situations - to dissect the motives and events and results - and with that recognition came a thrill of undesired sympathy.
None of them - not Ramza, Delita, not the crate children - were veterans of the battlefield, but at least Delita and some of the children had been assigned corpse watch (usually in some cold and godforsaken part of the Gariland countryside after a raid on a bandit camp) as part of their novice training. Ramza, spoiled little child of the aristocracy that he was (a bastard, to be sure, but a favored bastard), had never had the misfortune to be picked for that duty. So these limp puppets on the ground, their mouths blue and their strings cut, were a startling and new discovery for him. A battle is different - the wait is agony, and the fight is chaos, but it's clean and simple and powered by the reptilian hump in the back of the brain. The aftermath is different. You look and wait and wonder why fate decreed that he had to die. You look and wait and wonder why fate did not decree the same for you. So you breathe and shuffle and check to see that blood still shoots through your arteries. You chatter on about foolish bureaucracies and looters.
Ramza reached to idly scratch the back of his neck, and the bobbing crimson stain and the angled elbow drew Delita's attention once again. He was loathe to admit it, but at the very start of the battle, when Ramza had drawn his sword and gone headlong into a sea of dull and rusty blades, some small part of him had screamed in horror and fear. It was an inner scream he recognized from a grey predawn sky and an orphan watching two thirds of his world slip into the dark earth, with the last third pulling him to the ground with a suffocating grip. He might have followed his parents had it not been for his sister. He might have followed Ramza had it not been for the children. So there was this sickening mixture of love - for the only one who understood him, for the one with the cornsilk hair and wide grin, for a kindred soul, damned aristocrat or not - and hatred, for the one who had abandoned him and rushed so willingly into death without understanding that grim eternity. For not thinking of the children.
The children themselves were now examining their cuticles and humming under their breath. Ramza watched the street eagerly for some sign of the plague wagons, but the ticking of his relentless clockwork mind was evident from his ragged fingernails and bitten lip. Delita watched him without pity, but with a dark degree of hope. Somewhere, the bodies and the odor and the pain of today were being filed away, deep under the grey loam of his brain. Sleep would come, and then dreams, to marinate a mixture of sights and smells and sensations. A new man would burst forth, no longer shielded by birthright to death's ignoble grandeur. A new man made out of muddy passions, no longer a coldly logical creature of clockwork and ideals.
Now he was frazzled and remote, but Delita was watching for the buds of spring. When Ramza finally bloomed, he would be waiting. He would be ready.
For how can death - how can tomorrow - frighten those that are two? Death's grim presence afflicts only the lonely with a weak grip on love (no one who really loved you would willingly rush into a sea of swords or succumb to invisible demons). How can death frighten those that have already met him, and given him a hearty handshake in the bargain? Death touches only the living but they will be like the resurrected undead, free to duck his embrace. They will be shambling, rotting zombies with daffodils bursting from their craniums. And they will be two, and they will be one, with pale green roots twined together around yellow bone.
Soon Ramza would understand death's grim eternity. Soon he would understand Delita.
The crate children played games with bits of string and forgotten coins. It was taking forever for the wagons to arrive, but the children knew that they would be here eventually. Until then, they would just have to wait. Until then, the smell was killing them.
Author's Note: This is, alas, probably the closest I'll ever come to writing gay Delita/Ramza porn. So savor it, god dammit!
This originally started out as a rewrite for Chapter Five of my FFT Chorus project (because, at the time, I utterly hated how the original chapter had turned out). However, I got halfway through this puppy before realizing that Irritable-Ramza and Obsessive-Delita, while being interesting extrapolations of their game personas, were not the direction I wanted to take Chorus. Also, I had formed a happier position on the original Chapter Five (I rewrote it slightly, and will probably rewrite it slightly in the future, but it functions okay in its current state) and so this revision became rather superfluous. On the other hand, I was hesitant to just junk what I had written, since about half of it had all this interesting (and gruesome!) death imagery (and the other half, of course, had horribly wooden Delita-Ramza interactions - ugh). So I retooled the concept, fixated on the death stuff, and made Delita brood like hell. I'd prefer to think that this story manages to be dark without being angsty, but I'll take what I can get.
I have no idea how a medieval corpse disposal system would work, so I cobbled together the plague wagons/pit from my half-remembered 9th grade lessons on the bubonic plague. In retrospect, it kind of makes more sense to burn the bodies but, uh...never mind that!
This story owes a major debt to the religious poetry of John Donne, in particular "Hymn to God" and "Death, Be Not Proud". So, uh, yeah. Corrupting the English canon, one fanfic at a time!
(February, 2003)
"In broken mathematics
We estimate our prize"
-Emily Dickinson
Alazlam: A Tall Glass of Spite
Delita's name appears for the first time a year before the Lion War broke out.
Alazlam's handwriting is thin and neat and precise. He'd had a tutor, when he was seven, who had demanded such precision and who hadn't hesitated to give a quick cuff to the head if Alazlam didn't perform to his satisfaction. The man had been gray and humorless. It had been the first time that Alazlam, soaked with the milky complacency of childhood, had ever really hated anyone.
His mother had been less than sympathetic - it wasn't easy for a widow to scrape together enough money to educate her son, and Alazlam had better be damn aware of the sacrifices she went through for him. After all, the Lord knew she hadn't been destined for this kind of life. She'd been a lady's maid once, and danced and dined with fine lords once, before Alazlam's birth had taken that all away. Stop being such a sniveling bastard - didn't he see what she had been forced to endure, all because of him? Then she would usually start crying, and Alazlam would wander away, feeling drained and grim.
She made him keep going to the man, and Alazlam could do nothing but endure it silently. He would lie in his bed at night and curl up under his thin sheets and nurse a hard, ugly knot of hatred. He would fantasize of killing the man, of humiliating him, of horrifying him, and then he would fall into a deep, dreamless sleep; a small boy's only victory against the cruel world.
Many soldiers returning from the war had no jobs, little money, and even less loyalty to the crown.
He stops here and absently taps his pen against the inkwell. Truthfully, one can write a hefty volume on the subtle economic factors that threaded their way through the Fifty Year's War and resulted a bleak recession on the other side. One can write several hefty volumes, in fact. Ivalice scholars are currently embroiled in an academic skirmish over whether to accept the established line of reasoning concerning the depression (As is presented in Carlos Avadramo's A True And Detailed History of the Land of Ivalice, where the principal blame falls on the exorbitant taxes levied on the common folk in an attempt to pay the aristocratic war debts, which eventually spiraled out in a general economic whirlpool of poverty and desperation) or to acknowledge the brash new theory (As advanced in The Causes and Effects of the Fifty Year's War, by one Alfred Edinger, who claims that the fighting men were so demoralized and affected by the horrors they had seen during the war that they returned home unwilling to participate in constructive economic opportunity, and instead turned to both unproductive and destructive behaviors). The supporters of the former accuse the latter of engaging in self-indulgent, revisionist psychobabble. The other side insist that the established view is narrow and shallow and ignores the general zeitgeist of the era. During more than one gathering of historians, the conflict has taken the form of outright physical assault.
Truthfully, it would pain Alazlam to mention either theory here. Both philosophies smack of the same typical, tiresome methodology. Historians sit around, measuring grain export rates and bullion levels or tediously pontificating on great, amorphous concepts with no grounding in fact. Nobody seems to care that it does not matter. Certainly it does not matter enough to wage a feud between two different theories. Nobody was interested in the important thing, the provable thing: what had that economic quicksand led to? The pat answer is "The Lion's War", but nobody is interested in exploring that. Everyone just accepts that facet of history, and runs off to argue inconsequential economic trivialities.
So it doesn't matter why there had been an economic downturn - it just matters that there had been one. That is the only point Alazlam cares about, and that would be the only point his intended audience would care about. Surely the historians would scream about the omission, and seek to modify or deny his thesis with drudgingly pointless arguments based on his economic simplifications, but Alazlam finds himself failing to care. Even...looking forward to the anal bastards.
Alazlam realizes that he has formed a fist around his pen, and forces himself to relax and assume the proper form. Surely Mr. Trelane had taught him better than that. Surely he did. Alazlam smiles darkly.
Many became thieves and rebels plotting rebellion against the royal family.
The government would probably have something to say about his work. After all, they had spent much care and effort into indoctrinating the populace so as to believe their "official" history of Ivalice. Something that so dramatically challenged their vision, as his work will, would certainly provoke some sort of reaction. And the Church, of course. The Church would also have something to say about it.
He is looking forward to that as well.
Robbery and murder were commonplace in Ivalice.
The small window behind him is open, allowing the first tentative breezes of autumn to wander in. From the street below come the muted noises of foot traffic and the calls of fishmongers and kettle-wives, colorful ribbons of sounds and profanity emerging from the dull blanket of sound. There would be grimy young pickpockets working the area and giggling girls dressed in red scarves and tall young men lounging around with nonchalant calm.
Below him, Mrs. Ladanam and her daughter Katrina would be serving breakfast to their patrons in a busy, merry common-room. They would leave his breakfast outside his door in accords to a mutual understanding that all three had in regards to disturbing Alazlam while he was working. Sometimes they would go up to find the food still there, long since cold, hours later, and Mrs. Ladanam would cluck about how thin that poor man was. Katrina would merely laugh and bring him up a new plate - she knew he would surface from his work eventually and discover how hungry he was. Surely he was one of their strangest tenants, but not at all a bad egg, and sometimes he told her little stories (on those rare occasions when he would enter the common-room) that were charming and funny.
And if Alazlam had told her of his work, of what he is trying to do with it, she would have merely laughed again.
Many heroes and wizards came out of that era.
Alazlam pauses, again. Reflects. Dips his pen in the inkwell.
Two of note came out of Magic City Gariland.
Author's Note: (6/15/06) Originally Chapter Four of my nerdy FFT: Chorus project. Five years later, I decided it was terrible and completely rewrote it to include more original characters and P. G. Wodehouse pastiches. This is the original chapter.
"Blood is the seed of blood, hundredfold the harvest,
The gleaners that follow it, their feet are crimson"
-Euripides, Medea
Delita: Dawn of the Harvest
Delita sat propped against the firm side of the chimney, his legs stretched along the length of the roof. By all rights, he should have been miserable. The air held the edge of the sullen winter, and the wind was hard and dry, so he should have been cold and huddled on his high perch. Warm sunlight, though, spilled across Magic City Gariland like liquid butter. The slick heat had thoroughly soaked the roof tiles, so heat radiated against his back and legs. The chimney itself served as a windbreaker, shielding and protecting him.
A spider's web of criss-crossed streets spread away from under him. They disappeared behind the rooftops of the city, crimson peaks tumbling away under the sky like ripe tomatoes. It was not an old city, as creaking mausoleums like Igros and Lionel were measured - but neither was it a new town, with orderly streets and well-planned aqueducts and the pervasive sense of urban atheism. No, Gariland rested comfortably in the middle. It had a history, but it was calm history of burghers and alchemists and hedge-wizards, and it had a future, but it was a sedentary future of commerce and security.
Delita scratched his nose and then resumed his still position. He had unbuckled his scabbard in order to sit more comfortably; it rested next to him on the roof. Above the white streets and the red roofs, he could see the smudge of green and gold on the horizon of the fields and farms, lying just outside the city.
He was sitting on top of a bakery. At least he was reasonably sure it had been a bakery; it hadn't been a great priority to establish the exact profession of the building. All that was needed was to inform the owner (who had been wearing an apron and covered in flour, so Delita was reasonably sure that he had been a baker) of the current situation, and what allowances the civil code of Magic City Gariland called for in this current situation. The baker (and really, what else could he be?) had been less than happy about the cadets taking up position next to his business. He had been even less thrilled about the occasion that called this pack of callow children to perch upon his front step under the distant autumn sunlight.
His feelings ultimately mattered not a whit, and Delita had interrupted his complaints with the request for a ladder, which his wonderful host had reluctantly granted. He had clambered up the ladder with the baker's youngest children clustered around the base, looking up in curiosity, and then bade them to return the ladder to their father, which they did slowly. Delita idly wondered if they had gone back to baking - the umber scent of bread lingered in the air, but there was no smoke issuing from the chimney.
He turned his attention to the green gold strip on the horizon. It was late autumn, but not too late, and so he supposed that the farmers would be out there still, wading deep within their fields of wheat with swinging silver scythes. It was a casual, random thought, and Delita was surprised by the burst of feelings and images and warm nostalgia the thought brought on - he could remember the harvests from his childhood vividly, as if they were inked in brilliant color right there in front of him.
A low whistle interrupted his thoughts. He pushed himself to the edge of the roof and looked down, to where a lanky cadet stood grinning up at him.
"Found yourself a cozy spot, eh?" Ramza asked merrily.
Delita shrugged. "It'll do."
"Aye, that it will." Ramza happily turned his gaze down the length of the deserted street and pointed to a position three buildings down. "I put young Roland on the little bridge back there, and I've got the others positioned in the alley behind here. When Alexandro's group drives them this way, this will be the place to bottle them up."
"If Alexandro drives them this way," Delita said tonelessly.
Ramza looked up at him and a frown slid over his fair face. "Oh, are you still riding that? I tell you, Delita, they'd have to be pure idiots to go up north of the canal. This is the fastest route out of the city.
"That assumes that they know the layout of Gariland." Delita turned his gaze back to the horizon. He was bored with this argument; Ramza refused to acknowledge that his position had any validity. It was like debating with a brick wall.
From below, Ramza's clear voice floated up, "Gariland's streets are logically organized, so if those knaves have any common sense of which to speak, surely they can find themselves here. And even if they don't, I'm certain that Alexandro will give them the necessary motivation. He knows where we're stationed." He stood there for a few more minutes looking up, but as Delita resolutely ignored him, he sighed and said, "Well, whatever. If you see them, give the signal. And if you hear Roland give the signal, pass it along to us." He silently wandered off, and Delita watched the distant, green horizon.
Strange, really, that he could remember things about the harvests from his childhood. He hadn't thought about his childhood in years, much less the autumn traditions. He had always been too young to actually participate in the harvest before they had sent him to the Academy, so his scanty memories were solely formed as a passive observer, and yet...there they were, imprinted into his mind. Strange.
From this position, Delita could see nearly the whole length the little street, now lonely and deserted. Occasionally someone would scurry along its length, but they could sense the eyes trained on them and would hurry to move off it. Delita's bakery was positioned right at the turn in the street, where it abruptly twisted off and joined the main thoroughfare out of the city. Distantly, he supposed that Ramza might have a point: this would be a good place to fight. If they came this way.
He could remember that after the harvest, the villagers would have a great, roaring bonfire. They would serve strange sweet cakes and hot cider and tell wonderfully bloody stories around the heat, surrounded by inky darkness. All the harvesters were there, all their wives and pretty daughters and solemn sons.
The Church frowned on such festivals, considering them to be throwbacks to pagan worships, and officially condemned them. Which is why Zalbag, when he caught two small boys returning to the manor from one of the bonfires, had given them a whipping they would not soon forget. The Church - and the manor, for that matter - usually elected to turn a blind eye as long as the affairs were discreet and held at a decent distance, but when presented with incontrovertible evidence, they were forced to act.
A gust of wind suddenly started moving in a new direction, against Delita's unprotected face. He sealed his eyes, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and gritted his teeth. For a moment, it chilled him, freezing his breath in his lungs. Then, just as suddenly, it was gone. Delita opened his eyes and returned to autumn.
As a boy, Delita hadn't understood the Church's attitude - the festivals were about food and life and happiness. Only when he was older did he comprehend the meaning of the harvest and the onslaught of winter and the old traditions that had degenerated into incomprehensible rituals. Around that fire they celebrated the fruit of the land by killing it at the peak of its ripeness and consecrating it to their old, strange gods. Little of that remained in the contemporary festivals, though - it was just an opportunity to relax and get drunk after the hard work of the harvest.
He was concentrating on the issue so intently that he missed the first call; a second low whistle was required to get his attention. He looked up with a start, and automatically returned the whistle. No one was on the street; they must still be around the bend. Delita grabbed his scabbard. He half-consciously registered a second whistle from his right - Ramza - and swung his feet over the edge of the roof. Delita had learned early the value of not thinking through certain situations, so he choose not to notice the great distance to the ground and instead pushed himself off.
He hung in the air for a stomach-churning instant, and there was an insistent hard note of regret and anguish and fear, and then he landed on the packed earth. Gravity drove him to his knees and he blinked for a second, coming back to himself. He straightened, brushed himself off, and looked ahead.
At the thieves.
They stood about fifty feet from him and had just rounded the bend. They stared back at him, their surprise at a strange boy dropping from the top of a two-story building temporarily rendering them still. Time stopped for a second, with everything frozen in crystalline perfection. Delita saw their ragged clothes, their dirty faces, the blood stains around their wrists and arms. They saw a sturdy young man with dark hair and darker eyes, clutching a long, worn scabbard.
No one was breathing.
And then Ramza was beside him, visibly radiating light and glee, and saying, "Stop right there, knaves! Surrender now or die in obscurity!"
Delita winced (Die in obscurity?) and the thieves stared at him in a mixture of fury and confusion. One of them shouted, "What's this? A bunch of children?" Another one cried, "Just kill them and get it over!" The dusty group began to draw their swords; they suddenly seemed a lot less spell-bound and a lot more lethal. From behind them, Delita saw Roland pop up with a drawn sword, waiting for Ramza's move; now everyone was out and in position.
Delita could feel the others at his back but he suddenly felt less confident about their situation: desperation emanated from the thieves like smoke and he knew that they would give no quarter. "Ramza," he said quietly as the cadets drew their swords, "I wouldn't rush them..."
Ramza misinterpreted his warning as being in line with their earlier argument and irately cried, "Stop patronizing me, Delita. I am a Beoulve, and I know what I'm doing."
The thieves snapped to attention.
"A Beoulve?"
"THE Beoulves?"
"They must be from the Academy."
"Hey, we've got some military brats here."
"It's the snot-nosed little nobles."
"God damn."
Abruptly, as if responding to some hidden signal, they shook themselves from their golden molasses petrifaction and began as one to run towards the knot of cadets standing in the middle of the road.
Ramza screamed, "Move out!" and there was a moment when tension snapped through their group like a bow hitting the violin's string; there was a moment where it felt distant and unreal and dreamlike; there was a moment where Delita's mind went cold and blank because, like his fall, there were some actions that should not be thought through.
For a moment, there flashed through his mind an image of the wheat fields in the morning, like a sea of gold laced with crystal dew.
He drew his sword, and as the first thief in the group made a desperate sideways lunge at him with a knife, Delita sliced open the side of his head. It was a quick uppercut, from below the jawbone to the outside edge of the eye. The other man stumbled back in a mess of blood and screams. He made another attempt, but Delita parried the blow and than thrust his sword in the thief's belly. The man gurgled a crimson curse and then went down.
Around them reigned noisy, frenetic chaos as bodies slipped left and right, jumped and then collapsed with a shriek. As Delita yanked his blade free, he saw that the man had been wearing a golden locket that gleamed along with the glossy blood in the wet wreck of his neck.
After that, he stopped noticing details.
Author's Note: Originally written as Chapter Five of my Chorus project; eventually booted so I could write something completely different for that section. I still contend that "Golden Molasses Petrifaction" would be a good title for a rock song, and I have no idea what "pervasive sense of urban atheism" was supposed to mean. (Oh, teenaged self, you are inscrutable.)
(11/29/02) - Some very minor editing to change a plot device that always bothered me (instead of just "happening" conveniently across this particular street, the thieves are actively being driven towards it by another team of knights). Hooray! I feel the vague stirrings of interest in this baby, though I'm not certain whether to go with the original conceit (which would mean that the next chapter has original characters - that seems awfully tiresome at this point, however) or forge ahead with Algus. Hmmmm...
(01/12/02) - This went through...several rewrites, and it's still a little patchy in places, but I desperately want to move on, and this chapter's current state is sufficient for my purposes. So now, moving on. Hurrah! Next Time: Send in the Mary Sues!
