{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james","title":"r i s s y J A M E S","subtitle":"m u s e s A N D d r e a m s","author":{"name":"Rissy James"},"link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"service.feed","type":"application\/x.atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom","title":"r i s s y J A M E S"}}],"updated":"2015-01-30T18:23:29Z","entry":[{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:93628","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/93628.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=93628"}}],"title":"\"Hope, in Silence\" ","published":"2015-01-30T18:03:53Z","updated":"2015-01-30T18:18:04Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"character: aveline (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: varric (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: cmda"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: f!hawke (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: dragon age ii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: fenris (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: anders (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: f!hawke\/fenris"}}],"content":"Title:<\/b> "Hope, in Silence"
Author:<\/b> Amorissy
Characters:<\/b> f!Hawke\/Fenris, Varric, Anders, Aveline
Rating:<\/b> 16+ (violence, slavery)
Warning<\/b>: Set during game events, after "Alone"; spoiler warnings for up to and <\/b>including Act III.
Summary:<\/b> One-shot. A plan, a choice, and the consequences he suffered.<\/i>

Author's Note<\/b>: Title taken from "The Enemy<\/a>" by Mumford and Sons.  Written for Oleander's One.  A CMDA exchange fic.



Hope, in Silence<\/strong><\/p>


It's been days since he properly slept.

The shackles are a strange weight to bear. He is accustomed to such burdens, he has been told this and now with all certainty his body knows<\/em> this, for it's ingrained far deeper within him than mere markings on his skin could ever hope to pierce. To be someone he no longer remembers, to be bound wrist to ankle, helpless to fight.

Truly, it is only his own will that holds him. These are not the spellwoven chains of his master, forged in dragonfire, thousands of years old. These are crude and heavy, made of iron and so, so brittle. Made for the transport of prisoners and not the traffick of slaves, the noise they make as he moves is deafening.

And so he does not move. He sits and he waits.

She will come to him at dusk.<\/p>

–<\/p>


Hawke took the job as a favour to Aveline. It certainly wasn't because she needed the money.

"I've been hearing some unsettling rumours," the guard captain had said, pacing before the fire in the great hall.

Hawke had left the door ajar when Aveline was announced. He listened from the solar, an old habit. The book she had chosen for him was forgotten, its words already gone from his head.

Hawke had laughed at her friend, as she always laughed first, wholly and without reservation.

"Rumours? That's more Varric's speciality, isn't it?"

"Who do you think brought it to me?"

"All right, I can't stand the suspense. What are these unsettling rumours?"

"One of the regular caravans has been seeing some irregular activity," Aveline said.

"Is it mages?" Hawke asked. He could hear the frown in her voice, the hesitance.

"No," Aveline had said, utterly grim. "Slavers."

The sigh of resignation that had followed was as familiar a sound as any he'd come to know since arriving in this city, since he'd made the decision to spend his days at her side. A sigh with a smile, a breathy laugh, a shake of the head. He could not see her but he knew these tells of hers as well as he knew his own. She might bemoan herself and her friends and the whole damned world while she was at it, but she would not in all her selfless, sarcastic glory say no<\/em>.<\/p>

–<\/p>


His captors are not Tevinter, he has decided, but they are all human, with not an elf or dwarf among them. He hears a good deal of Ferelden in their ranks, and the arrogance of Orlais as well. There is one who never speaks, whose face is old and rutted with scars. And then there is the mage, the only one in the company, a woman who speaks only Antivan, who eyes him greedily and without shame whenever she passes him by.

Evenings leave him with much time to wonder at his current state, when the travelling is done and the fires burn brightly at each circle of wagons and tents all up and down the roadside. Fenris watches and waits, learning what he can of those who hold him so confidently, so ignorantly. They know not what he can do – but night by endless night, he comes to know what they can do. He comes to recognize that there are a few good blades among the company and twice as many bad. And he comes to know the mage. Talented, well-trained – and careless<\/em> with her magic, with how she uses it and who sees it.

These are the things he learns as he listens to them bicker and plot by the fireside each night, these slavers turned bounty hunters on a whim of chance and the promise of gold.

They will try to kill him when they find out there is no gold.

He cannot promise their success.<\/p>

–<\/p>


"Will you come with me?" Hawke had asked him later on when they were abed, after the candles had been extinguished and the fire had burned low, after she had fit herself snugly into the crook of his arm and warmed herself with her hand upon his chest.

"You need not ask. You know I will join you."

She raised up on an elbow, the lines of her face muted in the gloom. With the lightest touch upon his jaw, she turned his face to hers. A silly simple thing, really, because in the darkness, who was she to know what he saw?

"I think I do need to ask, if you don't mind," she said. Her fingers had spread out across his jaw and neck, her thumb sweeping across his cheek. Mapping him, finding her way. "Danarius is dead. You're a free man. I will always ask you what you want, even if I already know the answer."

Her words stirred him, touched him deeply. It still unsettled him how she could affect him so, and his arms tightened about her scarce without thought.

"Thank you, Hawke."

"It doesn't mean I can always give you what you want," she said, "and, mind you, I do<\/em> like getting my own way now and again."

"So I had noticed."

"Will you come with me?"

"Always."

She had leaned down to kiss him then, smiling against his mouth.<\/p>

–<\/p>


The routine, so far as he has come to understand it, is as follows:

He is roughly woken from his miserably light sleep and given food and water in the hour before dawn. It is always the woman, the mage, who brings his bread. He is kept separate from the others being carried around as property to be sold. She feeds them when she has finished with him.

There are <\/em>others. He's certain of it. It's the reason they came out this far.

The mage's thirsty eyes are eager to catch his when they two are alone. He gives her no satisfaction. Distant, removed, he is a slave who knows his place. For he does<\/em> know his place in this, what is expected, he remembers but he does not remember it like this<\/em>. There is a lifetime of such rules behind him and she is new to this, oblivious to the weakness she bears so readily to him. She does not know what he could do to her, given the will, the cause.

She lingers over him for far too long. She speaks low to him in her foreign tongue, murmuring and purring as a cat might, ready to curl about him, claim him. Callous, but not cruel, and greedy above all else.

After she has grown bored of his indifference, two of the men come to move him. He goes readily, puts up only what resistance would be expected, and is loaded into a wagon amongst a hundred ownerless things, spices and trinkets and bolts of silk. A cover comes down over the bed and he does not see the sunrise.

He knows that the other wagons must carry the other captives – he finds it difficult in his haze of anger and impatience not to refer to them yet as slaves –<\/em> and he knows they are packed in tighter, scared and without hope, as the jostling of these wagons laden with goods cloaks the clatter of their chains.

The caravan leaders will not stop to make camp again until late into the afternoon, and these slavers who work their vile trade among them have travelled the route many times by now, this grievous exchange of life for coin. Perhaps the lead driver is aware of what happens under his nose, perhaps he is not. Anything is possible in this world, he has found.

He knows these truths and does not shrink from them.

In his isolation, Fenris tracks the day. The sun moves across the sky, a circle of light far beyond the heavy, dark canvas. He is not blindfolded, and even in his humiliation, he is grateful for such a small thing.

This was his choice, after all.<\/p>

–<\/p>


It would take them almost a week of hard travel to overtake the caravan.

"It won't be easy to pick them out once we catch up," Varric had said, taking the lead only after Aveline had made it clear she couldn't spare herself for the job. The map was on the desk, but he was the only one who loomed over it, casting that daunting shadow of his. "If our information is good, then they're posing as merchants to travel on the main road to Wildervale. We can catch them on the far side of the pass if we're lucky. If not, farther on. This whole thing looks like it could takes weeks, all told."

"And what happens once we get there?" Anders had asked, staring darkly into the fire. He was always staring darkly at something of late.

"We're going to have to ask some questions," Varric had replied, sounding already weary. "We can make some friends."

It was then that Hawke had finally spoken up. "Because that's not conspicuous at all." She sat by the fire, her back to the abomination as she inspected each of her arrows carefully. The dwarf had turned away from the map to the sound of her voice. He leaned back against her desk, his arms crossed over his chest in that smug way he had. When she raised an arched brow at him, he only shrugged his shoulders in response.

"We'll figure something out."

She was not so easily convinced.

Through all of it, Fenris had said nothing at all as he stood apart, watching and listening while hidden in the darkness of the gallery.

He had gone down the stairs to sit with her after Varric and Anders had left, once the estate was quiet and the only thing that still stirred was the two of them. The fire was naught but coals by then. Neither of them moved to bank it for the night, letting the shadows claim the room one flickering breath at a time.

"Are you certain you want to do this?" he had asked, seeking her doubts and her fears only in those moments when no others would hear them brought to voice.

"Certain? No, no I'm not certain anymore. I wish Aveline was coming." She offered him a brave, tremulous smile. "We'll go and help anyway, of course. It's what we do, isn't it?"<\/p>

–<\/p>


Every night, she comes to see him just after dark.

He never hears her approach, a mark of her talent, what makes her special, this beautiful creature of shadow and nightsong to whom he truly belongs. He only knows her as she falls upon him, kneeling in the dirt and dead leaves to press a slender finger to his lips. Soon she replaces it with a kiss, and she tastes of wind and dust and sorrow. He aches to put his arms around her, to feel her soft beneath his hands, but even to tighten his fists against his thighs is to rattle his irons. To fit his arms about her would be to tangle her in his chains.

He lets his head fall back against the wagon he sits against. On the other side, merely a few yards away, the men and the mage who hold him sit around their fire, blinded by its comfort, unaware of the shadows that move around them. Farther up and down the road, other camps are set, and the voices carry through the trees. Women, children, innocents that shield the crude methods of his captors, all their brutal work.

But Hawke is not to be ignored, and she means to make her purpose clear. She crawls into his lap, a knee to either side of his hips. The chains are caught tight between them. He crooks his knees to cradle her where she is, and a breath of surprise flutters over her lips to brush against his cheek. Her forehead presses to his and there she rests for longer than she should.

Each night, the same; this struggle for courage, the will to go on as they are.

When she finally pulls away, she holds a flask to his lips and he drinks.

"Let me pick these locks," she says.

"It cannot be much longer," he answers. "A few days more."

"You don't have to –"

He smiles at her, but it's a crooked and halfhearted thing.

"I've endured worse."

"Bloody stubborn," she mutters low, her patience eternal for his repeat offences. She presses a piece of fruit to his lips; he eats it dutifully though he has not the stomach for it, even as she kisses the juice from his lips, brushing her fingertips along the lines of lyrium that stain his throat.

"If you continue to feed me this well, they will grow suspicious."

"Let them," she whispers, and her icy blue eyes tear into his. "Let's be done with this, let's just go home<\/em>."

He shakes his head, and his hand jerks to grip what he can of her, the swell of her hip, the edge of her leather cincher. The chains clink and clatter again, muffled by their close press. The touch of the irons is maddening. His teeth clench against his frustration as a further reach is denied him, and he is forced to cling to such minimal purchase when she hangs over him so, torn and without comfort.

"We've come this far," he says. "I am fine<\/em>, Hawke." A gentle word, a bit of hope, is all he can give her. He will not relent, and she knows it.

"Fenris <\/em>–"

"Go," he says, commands<\/em>, shutting his eyes against her closeness, the scent of the road heavy on her skin. His legs go slack, his bound and useless hands relax, he lets her go. "I will wait for you tomorrow."

Reluctantly, she goes. Without a word, she goes. Her weight and warmth are lifted from him, leaving him burning with envy, with anger, and with want. She goes and once more he is left alone. He does not open his eyes again to see if she looks back. He does not think he could bear the guilt if she did.<\/p>

–<\/p>


It took them five days on foot to catch the slow-moving caravan.

What they found was nothing out of the ordinary. A dozen guarded wagons, twice as many carts pulled by hand lumbering along with them, all heavy with sundry goods. On their way from Kirkwall to Wildervale and beyond. Many of the merchants travelling across the Marches with the caravan made their life on the road, dragging their families along with them from city to city, extra hands to work on market days. A hard life, but an honest one. As the four companions had stood on a ridge to watch the caravan snake along in the distance, it had not been known to them, not then, that two or three of those wagons carried slaves hidden in amongst the cookware and linens and spoiling fruit.

Hawke had not believed then that so simple an existence could harbour such wickedness in its midst. Fenris had kept his dark thoughts to himself as he'd stood at her shoulder, knowing the world as she would never know it, she who held her freedom by birthright, whose father had lived and fought and died to make it so.

It took them two days to work their way in. Hawke, all but anonymous on the road, offered her services as a scout to the lead driver, while Varric's penchant for stories and gambling made him friends easily at every fireside he passed. Fenris and Anders remained with the last wagon of the group, lagging behind with other travellers who followed the relative safety the caravan provided on the road through the Marches.

Hawke and Varric returned each night after the darkness fell, and disappeared again once the sun came up. It was only two days more before Varric overheard something he ought not have from a liquor-loosened tongue during a game of Wicked Grace. That night, Hawke had gone sneaking through the camps to single out the slavers masquerading as merchants and their secret chained burdens. She returned just before dawn looking utterly grim, and her normally bright eyes were shadowed and sad.

But the camp had been just waking then, and the air was alive with the calls for water and wood and wayward children. Hawke had only shaken her head at him, and left with him a kiss and a promise to return before dark.

It was, of course, later that evening when a new complication arose.

"We have a problem," Varric said, finding Fenris and Anders at the last fire. Night had fallen and Hawke had not yet returned from scouting.

"We always have a problem," the mage had replied breezily, but he stopped a moment later and turned to give the dwarf his full attention, a move that did not go unnoticed by Fenris. "Wait, is Hawke all right?"

"She won't be when she finds out what we have to do," Varric said, too serious to truly be himself. He kept glancing at Fenris, his brow knotted tight. "Those slavers I've been dicing with, turns out that when they were last in Llomerryn they heard about some magister who put a bounty on the head of an elf with lyrium brands." He laughed then, a hollow and humourless sound. "What a coincidence, eh?"<\/p>

–<\/p>


He is a prisoner to his own sense of honour a total of five days.

It still surprises him when he wakes to the nudge of a boot come dawn, how easily he can fall back into old habits, chains of his own making in his heart and mind. He fights less now, too fatigued to care. The silence within his head is surreal and it swallows him whole. He knows that he should find it strange, repulsive, unforgivable, but there is no malice within him to fuel such bitter thoughts.

All he can think of is Hawke.

Hawke and her quick smile, that clever and awkward tongue.

Hawke and this Maker forsaken willingness of hers to put herself before others, to put life itself on hold to help another soul as it struggles along in this world, someone truly and desperately in need. From what he's learned over the years he's spent with her, she wasn't always so fearless. It had started out about the money, about protecting those she loved, as it always does with the unlikeliest of heroes, but the years of loss and fragile joys have changed her. Everyone she loved and fought to protect is gone. Now she fights and puts the world on hold for its own sake, everything else be damned, and now all she has left is him.

She had found him in such need once, and she has never asked him for anything in return. And now here he finds himself, biding his time as rusted iron fetters weigh on him night and day, giving back to her what he can, suffering through each misery and blow to his pride just to help her save what she's gone and troubled herself to save. He does not blame her for being as she is, nor does he condemn her for aspiring to such noble action.

It is her choice. And this is his.

He realizes in these long hours of contemplation that it is not for Hawke alone that he endures what he has. It is loyalty to Aveline, who would see this injustice dealt with. It is trust in Varric, who has gotten him into worse scrapes over lesser causes. And yes, perhaps it is even for the strangers bound hand and foot as he is, somewhere along this lonely road, for those that have come before and for none to come after.

A bit of Hawke rubbing off on him, he supposes, and the thought is enough of a comfort that he makes it through another day.

Until the night comes and he sees her again.<\/p>

–<\/p>


Hawke had not been agreeable to Varric's plan.

"This is stupid," she'd muttered. "It's stupid and I won't do it."

"It's a genius plan," Anders said, sitting atop a stack of crates at the edge of the firelight, grinning like a cat with a mouthful of feathers. It was the most engaged he'd seemed in months, pulling himself from the abomination within long enough to enjoy watching Fenris thoroughly tormented. "Did you really promise to split the reward with them?"

"Only if they help me get his broody ass to Minrathous. I'm honestly a little surprised they didn't try to just slit my throat and come here themselves," Varric had said, though he sounded less pleased with himself the more Hawke protested. "Listen, Hawke, this is going to work. We gain their trust and the plan doesn't change, but we need to hurry, or else they're going think I couldn't handle this myself and come looking for him. We don't want this to turn bloody. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

She ignored him.

"Fenris, you don't have to do this," she'd said instead, glaring up at him. She held a length of rope in her hands, but she had twice already refused to bind his wrists. "This could not possibly hold you," she said, shaking it in his face as if he had not already known it to be true.

"It will hold me only because I allow it, Hawke."

He put his bare hands on her arms. He had already relinquished his armour to Varric; he felt vulnerable in that moment, standing there in his tunic and breeches, but his resolve was not to be denied. It was Hawke who trembled in his stead, Hawke who needed convincing.

"Hawke," Varric said, softening just for her, "we need to do this."

"This is stupid," she said again, but with one last withering look to Fenris, she tied his wrists all the same. "Stupid.<\/em>" When she was done, she reached for his gauntlet where it lay abandoned at their feet. Slowly, and with far greater care, she unwrapped the length of scarlet ribbon and knotted it about the palm of her bow arm.

She kissed him once when she was done before she turned and walked away, leaving him to his decision and his fate.

Varric looked miserable after she had gone, as if even he himself could have never imagined a twist such as this. "Listen, elf, I'm really sorry about this," he said, scratching the back of his head as his eyes guiltily skipped away. "We'll get you out of this as soon as we can, I promise."

"Get it over with," Fenris said as Anders stepped behind him. The last thing he remembered was the dancing firelight, the shadow slipping across the ground as the abomination raised his staff, and then no more.<\/p>

–<\/p>


On his last night in slavers chains, Hawke comes to him in the darkness to set his heart free.

"We're only two days from Wildervale," she whispers. She's in his lap again, her hands cupping his face.

"What happens now?" he manages to say. His voice has grown hoarse of late; it is all he has now, these few words they exchange every night. He leans his forehead against hers, and the cool touch of her skin is almost all he knows.

"Tomorrow they leave the main caravan, and take the road west. Varric says there is a buyer outside Nevarra."

"A long journey."

"One they won't make," Hawke assures him. "We'll wait until dusk. Then we'll come for you, and free the others."

Fenris tilts his head back to look into her face. "Have you spoken to them?"

Mutely, she nods.

"How many?"

"Fourteen," she whispers, and bites her lip.

It is more than he expects.

"And after?"

"I hadn't thought that far yet. Your act of nobility threw us all off."

"Varric assured me–"

"You still said yes," she says, and there is an edge to the words.

"I apologize," he says. He knows it breaks her heart to see him as he is when she has fought for so many years to keep him free. If he could see himself, the willing victim, he wonders if he would feel anything but disgust.

"You're in chains and you apologize to me?" she asks, incredulous. "I'm the sorry one – me –<\/em> do you hear me? Oh, you damned fool." She kisses him fiercely, arches into him, over him, forgetful in her gratitude. The chains rattle and groan as he reaches for what he cannot have. She does not desist – she must, must –<\/em>

"Hawke," he all but begs, tearing his mouth from hers. "You should go, I cannot –"

She nods, blessedly without argument.

"Tomorrow," she promises, and disappears.<\/p>

–<\/p>


When he next opened his eyes, there she was.

Her face was pressed to the dirt, and belatedly he realized it was because his <\/em>face was in the dirt and she had been watching over him. The pounding in his head blotted out all else for some time, all else but Hawke and that defeated, disapproving frown of hers, and if his head had not pulsed with pain as it did he might have found the decency to look properly ashamed of himself. Soon enough, however, the rest of the world came back to him, unfamiliar voices not far off, the tiny flicker of firelight reflected in Hawke's eyes, the night's chill on his unprotected skin.

And then as he shifted came the slither of chains, and he stopped cold.

"Hush," she said softly, and very carefully helped him to sit. Irons on his legs, his wrists; he could move only at the cost of his silence. He swore darkly, words he knew she did not understand. A small allowance, that forgotten indulgence, the old life brought to light again, and there was Hawke to see all its dark corners and sharp edges. He felt shame then. Such a selfish thing.

She found her seat atop his legs, pinning his wrists to her lap, something that was soon to become very familiar to him – and very precious. Her own hands twined in the hair at the back of his neck, and once she was anchored, immovable, she asked, "Fenris, why are you doing this?"

"I had thought I made myself clear," he said, and tried to smile for her. She was not placated. Her eyes searched his for lies, for truth, as restless as the sea. "Hawke–"

"I don't want you to do this. We can find some other way."

"Until then, this will have to suffice," he said, too wilful for one bound and brought low, "and I seem to recall being told that we don't always get what we want."

She gave a breathy laugh then. It stirred the hair hanging in his eyes.

"You appear to be," she said, words that stayed with him long after she'd gone.<\/p>

–<\/p>


The day of his escape is, as he expects, the longest day he has ever been made to endure.

Almost a week has passed since the deception of his capture and he is still kept separate from the other prisoners. Now that he knows how many there are, he cannot understand how the slavers have been able to keep their captives silent, how they have gone so long without notice. Perhaps they are gagged, or drugged. Perhaps they are simply already broken.

The road due west is quieter without the presence of the caravan, and they are travelling faster now. The dead magister's bounty on his head has made him something special to these fools, men who are nameless and faceless to him. Only the mage stands apart from the rest, yet he feels nothing toward her. There are few tasks more damning than the one she has chosen. Before this is all over, the slavers will be dead.

He wonders if he will be the one to kill her.

He finds relief in the fact that Varric has charmed his way into the ranks of the slavers with his bawdy jokes and tall tales, that there is someone close by with his interests at heart, now that the protection of the caravan and so many eyes is gone. He can hear Varric over the din of the wagon that bears him, telling the same old stories, spinning lies as shiny as new sovereigns.

Fenris takes his solace where he can find it, another lesson learned long ago. He lets it lull him into uneasy sleep.<\/p>

–<\/p>


The routine remains the same.

He is pulled from the wagon, thrown to the ground. For all his worth, he is still treated as the escaped slave they believe him to be. The mage comes to give him water and food. She plays with his hair as she watches him feed himself, the chains making an unholy noise in growing twilight. When she goes back to the fire and the other men, he cannot say that he is sorry in his knowledge of what will happen when the slavers are forced to fight Hawke or lose their precious cargo.

An hour passes, he thinks, before his saving grace is upon him. He hears them coming this time, Anders all but assuring it with his heavy footfalls, the knock of his staff against the trees. Varric has the slavers around the fire roaring with laughter, oblivious to their fate.

Hawke does not bother to greet him. She only sets straight to work with her lockpicks, and when the locks spring free, she gently pulls the chains away. He does not look upon them again.

His arms go about her as soon as they are able, and he sags against her a moment. Anders rolls his eyes and looks away. Fenris only holds her tighter, this simple blessing denied too long.

His armour is returned to him. She helps him with the buckles, moving quicker than he can think to, his aching muscles and raw skin his only burden now, one he can bear proudly and without shame. She gives him his blade, handled with reverence. The lyrium that runs through his flesh begins to thrum and glow as he touches upon the hilt. The familiar, heavy grip in his hand strengthens his resolve.

"And now?" he asks.

"Now we free the others and get them to safety," Anders says, pointing off into the darkness.

"And if we can do that without getting caught, then we rescue our dear friend Varric," Hawke says grimly, "and we put an end to this."

For the first time in far too long, Fenris smiles.<\/p>

–<\/p>


The slavers put up a poor fight.

For all it has taken to reach that very moment, it is over in under ten minutes. The mage is the last to succumb. She falls to his hand, her eyes pooled with disbelief until the moment the life in them goes out. Fenris watches, thirsty, and does not look away.

They leave the bodies for the scavengers. The horses, the wagons, and all the goods within them are given without question to the fourteen they save. They will escort them to the crossroads and then go their separate ways. It is a better outcome than any among them had ever hoped for. It is almost a happy ending.

Varric outs Hawke as a hero. She is thanked, hugged, kissed, and blessed until she is blushing.

Fenris hangs back, silent. His thoughts are dark. The anger inside him writhes. <\/em>

Anders approaches him, less himself in his charity, amiable and smug.

"Oh cheer up, Fenris," the mage says. "It's a good thing you did to help these people."

Fenris snorts, and says nothing.

"I'm serious. Letting them put you in chains again so Hawke wouldn't blow her cover? I could never go back to the Circle willingly like that, not even for her."

He walks away then, giving Fenris much to think about on the journey back to Kirkwall.<\/p>

–<\/p>


"I don't believe it. You're making it up."

"Would I lie to you, Rivaini? Most selfless thing I've ever seen, and I follow Hawke around for a living."

The solar of the Hawke estate is impossibly crowded, filled to the rafters with voices and laughter as all her companions gather together. This latest adventure had kept her gone far too long. Sitting before the fireplace, Varric's exaggerated retelling of their harrowed tale for Aveline and Isabela has held their attention rapt since their arrival.

"Hawke," Isabela says, shaking her head, "are you telling me you had Fenris in chains for five days<\/em> and never once took advantage of the situation?"

From her perch atop the desk, Hawke does her best to sound scandalized. "Really, Isabela–"

"That's it, I'm sorry, but I don't think we can be friends anymore."

As a gale of laughter goes up, Fenris slips up the stairs to the quiet of the gallery, where the lamps have been dimmed and the shadows are deep. Hawke is quick to follow. She's had trouble keeping her hands to herself since their return, and this moment is no exception – or at least, so he thinks, until she pulls from her pocket his ribbon, her eyes alight.

He holds out his wrist without a word. As always, she fills the space between.

"I know why you chose to do it," she says softly, glancing up at him every so often as she wraps the ribbon carefully about his gauntlet, tying a delicate and careful knot. "Even though you knew I didn't want you to."

"Well," he says with a smirk, remembering his best defence, "we don't always get what we want."

She grins. "Oh, we'll see about that."

And it's then that she presses up on her toes to claim his mouth with her own, and their friends down below are all but forgotten. It's then that he finds that he might give in to the warmth of this selfish, selfless woman in his arms, in this place where he has chosen to be.

And even as they are missed and their names are called, as the lamps flare and their refuge is discovered, as Hawke pulls away and her eyes shine as she looks up at him, he knows that he would not choose differently if given the chance.

Whatever the cost, he will remain at her side, and she will ever be the burden of his freedom.

And that, he finds, is no true burden at all.<\/p><\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:93304","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/93304.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=93304"}}],"title":"\"Cinders\" ","published":"2015-01-30T17:47:15Z","updated":"2015-01-30T17:47:15Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: varric (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: cmda"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: f!hawke (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: bethany (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: dragon age ii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: fenris (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: anders (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: f!hawke\/fenris"}}],"content":"Title:<\/b> "A Chance of Frost"
Author:<\/b> Amorissy
Characters:<\/b> Varric, Bethany, Anders, f!Hawke\/Fenris
Rating:<\/b> 14+
Warning<\/b>: Set during game events.  Spoiler warning for up to and <\/b>including the end of Act II.
Summary:<\/b> One-shot. As the fires burn in the city of chains, a lone Grey Warden returns to Kirkwall against orders and a storyteller finds the one tale he's not allowed to tell.<\/i>

Author's Note<\/b>:  Written for Isabeau of Greenlea.  A CMDA exchange fic.



Cinders<\/strong><\/p>


Andraste's ass.

He hates chaos. Hates it to his normally unshakeable core. There's so very few things that he despises so passionately, but this night has him seething. The noise, the senselessness, the loss. Chaos is ugly, it's cruel, and completely indiscriminate. It only takes, and destroys, and takes, and takes. The smoke and the screaming. No, he doesn't like chaos one bit.

But more than chaos, Varric hates chaos in his <\/em>city. He likes order, even if it's common knowledge that the order<\/em> of things around here is a little fucked up. There's a balance in his<\/em> world, at the very least, and he's gotten good at maintaining that balance if he ignores the humans and their skirty politics, unless, of course, he's in the mood for a little flavour.

Which has been his mood a lot as of late, ever since he'd set his sights on a plucky refugee and her apostate sister after they <\/em>had set their sights on his brother. In retrospect, it's a shame that two pretty faces and an impeccable reputation apiece had stopped him from noticing the uncanny knack for trouble that followed behind them like a particularly persistent stray. That's as apt a description as he can fix to it when it comes in small doses, but even he can't put to words, or even begin to fully comprehend, the meaning of nights like tonight.

Outside the walls of the estate, his city's near to burning. It'll be days before the fires in Lowtown burn themselves out. But the Qunari are all dead or defected now, and the chaos is relenting with nothing left to feed it. The veil of confusion and panic is lifting. Word is trickling down from Hightown to the undercity, and it's on his mind to get an ear out for what exactly<\/em> it is that they're saying so he can figure out how to top it later, but just then his focus is required elsewhere. He's trapped in his own little circle of chaos and there's not a thing he can do about it.

Strange how it seems almost routine now, this cycle of Hawke and the blood, glory, and profit. They'll make her Champion for this, if she lives. He fervently hopes she'll live – it's only the smallest part of him that muses at what he could do with the champion angle once this mess dies down a bit, and people are in the mood for a tale or two again, ready to drink to the woman who saved them all. It might be a good story if the hero dies, but it doesn't make for a very long one. No, his <\/em>hero's made of stronger stuff than all that, titles or no. Hawke can't, and won't, die – Blondie will see to it. She's still got a lot of good to do in this city.

But at that moment, glancing up the stairs, he knows there's not much he can tell himself to make the worry any less. He doesn't need to look around to see that he's not the only one afflicted with this damnable grief, either, but he looks around just the same, to take it in with his own eyes, this part of the story that's all pain and stench and tears, the part that no one ever wants to hear.

Their sudden, very loud appearance has rattled the household. There's a trail of bloody footprints streaked across the floor, and the elven girl Hawke keeps on for the dusting is eyeing it nervously, a twitch at the corner of her mouth, and he's honestly unsure whether she means to cry or clean. Bodahn's been in and out, a steady stream of activity, but Varric hasn't seen hide nor hair of his boy, and that bothers him more than it should.

And then there's Fenris, crimson-wristed and scowling, leaning a shoulder against the mantel. He's all agitation and guilt, and if Varric had an ounce of sympathy to spare, he'd say something to break this blighted silence because all this unknowing is really starting to drag him down.

After a while, Aveline comes in, then leaves again, reeking of smoke and blood. She bangs her way inside, a fiery human flurry of purpose, lingering only long enough to reassure herself that her last link in this world hasn't up and died on her. When she leaves, it's with an easy calm that Varric finds himself envying.

Of the others, he sees no sign. Off praying, off hiding, off saving stray kittens, it really makes no matter to him. He supposes he should be out there too, fighting for his city, putting things to rights, making a difference, that sort of thing, but he can't force himself to go. Perhaps he's just a coward with a strikingly beautiful crossbow.

Or maybe, just maybe, there's something more important he needs to take care of, first.

Time passes, ridiculously slow. There's a faint blue light cast against the walls up on the balcony, intermittent but strong as Anders tries to fix the bloody mess the Arishok made of Hawke. That cold blue contrasts nicely with the faint orange glow spilling in the windows, the fires down in Lowtown lighting up the late evening sky. It occurs to him that if someone doesn't get those under control soon, he might not have a bed to go back to when all this is said and done, and then a wave of panic near cinches his throat shut at the thought. He coughs uncomfortably, sputters really, but his feet stay planted. No, he's not going anywhere.

The front door bursts open soon after. Varric doesn't bother to turn, not when so many are expected back and even more haven't yet shown their faces, but the unfamiliar clink of mail echoing through the small entryway causes him to turn just in time to see Bethany. She strides confidently into the greater hall, only to balk as the high-vaulted ceiling opens up above her and she gets lost in the overreaching grandeur of the estate, like a little bird caught among Chantry rafters.

"Sunshine," he mutters suddenly, a single breath of a word, and then she's turning to him, her eyes lighting up as she sets sight on someone familiar, something to anchor her here in this great stone hall with its cold, lofty ceiling and blood-spattered floor.

"Where is she?" Bethany asks, eyes following the bloodied footprints up the stairs. "Is she –"

"A work in progress," he says as reassuringly as he's able. Curious, how much energy he can summon for this. Confounding, even. "Blondie's up there, doing that thing he does and hopefully doing it well."

"You still haven't learned to use anyone's name yet, Varric?" she asks, and there's a hint of familiarity, the comfort and ease of friendship, love and loyalty and all those other heady sentimentalities that are normally best avoided. He's about to smile and say something witty when there's a bright flash of bluish light from above and Anders shouts at Hawke, command or plea it's hard to tell, but all goes quiet again as suddenly as the charge began and Bethany is still beside him, paled and shaken, all that amity and affection flown as reality sinks in.

"I thought the Wardens were long gone by now," he says, a vague attempt at distraction.

"They are. I'll catch up," she replies, and she looks around her for the first time, taking it all in, the elven maidservant, the forbiddingly high windows and the behemoth of a fireplace. When she sees Fenris, sullen and silent, she pauses and for a fleeting moment it seems that she's going to say something, but soon enough her lips twist sadly and she sighs.

"Blue suits you," Varric says, and he knows he's truly floundering now, grasping and pathetic, but she smiles, and it's a rare and beautiful thing. He'll have to try and remember to give himself a pat on the back for this later.

"Thank you. Better than Circle robes might have, do you think?" she asks.

"Infinitely," he says, frowning. He can pretend all he wants that there's a hint of a teasing tone in her voice, but he knows better. He's heard this wistful musing from her before, and as ever, it comes as close to breaking his heart as anything ever has, another anomaly, one rightfully ignored. "It seems that the city owes the Wardens a debt of gratitude."

Bethany gives an indelicate laugh. "One that's not likely to be remembered, let alone repaid."

"That tough, huh?" he asks, looking up at her and enjoying the rising pink that colours her cheeks just then.

She looks up the stairs again; the magical blue glow has yet to cease, but there hasn't been another outburst like the one before. It's a good enough sign, experience tells him, but he can't seem to shake the anxiety that comes hand-in-hand with all this waiting. "This is a soft life she's living," Bethany says, cutting into his thoughts. "To step in only when she's called upon, the choice of what she stands for, or if she stands at all. It seems so easy."

"Easy?" He laughs. "She killed a Qunari commander in single combat. I don't even need to exaggerate on that point. I'd hardly call that easy."

"Maybe not so easy then, but still," she says softly, "it was her choice to fight alone. Not a one of you would have let her, otherwise."

Across the room, there's the scrape of stone and crunch of metal, an odd sound and out of place, and Varric looks up to see Fenris has moved, an almost imperceptible shift in bearing, but he sees it, the jet-chased gauntlet gripping the mantel, the brace of an arm holding more weight than it had before.

"She did what she had to," Varric says; he goes for pride and does it well. She's worthy of the champion's title, selfless and just, saving the city for the children, et cetera. No one will ever know she did it to preserve the dusky skin of a pirate queen, just as no one will ever know how much of her blood marks a trail down the steep stone steps of Viscount's Keep. He wonders then if it may have been more prudent to take her to the clinic in the undercity, but then – as jarring as if it's for the first time – he sees the bloody footprints marking their way across the floor and up the stairs and he knows she would not have made it that far.

"I forgot how fast news travels in this city. I heard about the Keep before I was in the city walls," Bethany says then, crossing her arms over her chest. "I shouldn't be here, I should be – but I couldn't leave it like this, I couldn't leave her if she was –" Her voice thickens with emotion, and without much in the way of thought, Varric reaches out and puts a light hand on her elbow. The smile as she looks down at him is genuine for all that it's watered with grief and loss. "I don't know why I ever bother to doubt her. She'll make it through anything. Always has."

"Not without help," he says, and gives her elbow a gentle squeeze, meant to be a comfort, before he lets her go, before he gets any ideas in his head about her staying in Kirkwall, about her being anything but a mage, a Grey Warden, and his recurring heroine's baby sister, besides. Ever the same thoughts, indecent and implausible. It has always been such, long before that cursed expedition and its terrible end, watching as Hawke had passed over her sister's wasting, blight-ridden body to a Warden who said it was no kindness; giving her sister over to a lifetime of service in return for life at all.

Seeing Bethany now, even as sad and bitter as she is with the dying firelight in her eyes, Varric knows he'd willingly lose her to the Wardens all over again in a heartbeat – a decision that had never been his, but a choice he knows Hawke would mirror were she conscious just now. In a heartbeat.

By every damn ancestor he's got, he's praying that she'll be having plenty more of those.

There are words he's wanting to say then, important words dressed up like only he knows how, but he finds he can't say them. Not with Hawke the way she is, not with Fenris looming darkly over glowing embers, not with the chance that the door will burst open any second, bringing Gamlen, Aveline, or worse. Meredith comes to mind, a golden blaze of righteous fury, and he shudders.

"You should go on up there, Sunshine," he says, forcing himself to say what's safe. "You could be of help."

"I'm no good at mending wounds," Bethany says. "I'm far better at making them now." She laughs, and he almost forgets about Hawke and the whole city along with her, just for a moment. And perhaps she forgets too, because then it's as if she remembers where she is and what brought her here, and the smile goes away. "Is she terribly hurt, Varric?"

"Not so terribly," he says carefully, but it comes out a little strained, and he can tell with one look that she knows it to be a lie. "Well, Anders knows what he's doing, anyway. He'll patch her up."

"She really saved the city," she says, exhaling long and slow to temper her disbelief. "And I wasn't there with her. I thought I'd given all that up for good, but... oh, I don't know, it feels wrong somehow."

"You wouldn't have wanted to be there," he says gently. "It wasn't a pretty fight."

"If only she'd learn a lesson or two from it. Stay out of trouble for a bit, you know?"

He smirks. "Oh, I imagine it'll be quiet around here for a while after this."

"Can you promise?"

No<\/em>, is his immediate thought, but before he can put it more eloquently into words, there's another shout from Anders upstairs, and all at once the blue light fades to ambient shadow and then comes the most blessedly welcome sound Varric has ever heard in his life: Hawke letting loose a string of rather choice, colourful oaths and a languid groan of pain. In no time at all, Anders is on the landing, beaming despite his bloody clothes and pale, haggard face.

"She's –" is all he manages to get out before a coarse, ragged shout erupts from the enveloping darkness at his back.

"Where in the bloody hell is the bastard that put me up to this?"<\/em>

Fenris glances up, but then only closes his eyes and lets his head hang. If it's a moment of indecision on his part, he makes his choice quickly, and it's not to run to her side for a good verbal lashing – though from what Varric knows about it, which is more than he should, it would be well-deserved indeed. No, instead Fenris lets go the mantel and kneels before the grate. The gauntlets come off, and then he goes about stoking the sparking coals with fresh kindling. Menial work for idle hands to prolong the inevitable. Probably a smart move.

Beside him, Bethany watches Fenris, transfixed, and in turn, Varric watches her. It's the quietest, most peaceful thing that's happened to him all day, and as is the way of such things, he doesn't realize the serenity he's found in one single moment in time before it's fading and gone too fast. Another cry of pain from upstairs breaks the spell, and there's a curse from Anders before he disappears into the bedchamber, utterly unaware of what just transpired beneath him.

"Get back on that bed, Hawke, or so help me –"

Bethany starts. "I should go."

"You should talk to her," Varric says, and he wants very much for her to stay, and it's the knowing she can't that hurts the most. Duty, honour, sacrifice, it's all hers now. No titles, no glory. Just darkspawn and death. "She's going to want to see you. It's been a tough year –"

"Nothing I say will change that now," she says, and it's a sad truth. "Don't tell her. I was never here, Varric."

"But it'd make such a good story, especially if there's a tearful reunion."

She smiles, rare and beautiful, and he can't help but smile too. He misses her.

"Goodbye, Varric." She leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead, and her face is an impassive mask when she straightens, but he's got a funny feeling she was still smiling when she kissed him, and that's all that matters. And then she's slipping through the doorway again, and there's that sound of her mail echoing in the small hall, and the heavy front door closes, and then nothing for so, so long.

He sighs. Bye, Sunshine.<\/em>

Fenris has finished with the fireplace by then, and there are flames licking at the wood he laid down. Drawn to it almost, Varric walks across the room and stands before the grate. For a time, Fenris stays kneeling, so that they're almost of a height, but then he stands, watching Varric carefully, appraising.

"Do all dwarves blush so easily?" he asks, smirking.

Varric groans and runs a hand over his face. "Yes," he says, and he despite it all, he chuckles at himself. "I think I finally understand what the beards are for."<\/p><\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:92935","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/92935.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=92935"}}],"title":"\"A Chance of Frost\" ","published":"2015-01-30T17:36:32Z","updated":"2015-01-30T18:20:10Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 18+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: f!hawke\/anders"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: cmda"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: anders (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: f!hawke (dragon age ii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: dragon age ii"}}],"content":"Title:<\/b> "A Chance of Frost"
Author:<\/b> Amorissy
Characters:<\/b> f!Hawke\/Anders
Rating:<\/b> 18+ (non-explicit nudity, sexuality)
Warning<\/b>: Set during game events.  Spoiler warning for up to and <\/b>including the end of Act II.
Summary:<\/b> One-shot. Anders' Circle training gives Hawke some rather intimate insight into the school of ice magic.<\/i>

Author's Note<\/b>:  Written for EasternViolet.  A CMDA exchange fic.



A Chance of Frost<\/strong><\/p>


Though she would never have admitted it aloud, Hawke missed the winters in Ferelden. She missed snow<\/em>.

It so seldom snowed in Kirkwall. While it was perfectly true that frequent winter storms lashed the coast with a wild fury, bringing rain and sleet and heavy wind, snow was a very rare and precious gift. Once in a very long while, when the stillness was ripe on warmer days, soft flurries would sift down from the clouds, but these delicate flakes would melt upon contact with stone or skin, leaving no trace but a single spilled drop so very like a tear.

Mostly, though, winter in Kirkwall was cold,<\/em> cold and dreadfully bleak. It was not the kind of cold that prickled the skin and turned noses pink, but the kind that bit and stung, the kind that went to the bones and stayed there all winter long. And the wind, always the wind, howling across the harbor, smelling of salt and frost.

This winter, her sixth in this damnable city, had come swiftly on the heels of the Qunari uprising, and never in all her years had Hawke known a season so dark and desolate.

The cold drove people into their homes to close their shutters tight. The market all but emptied out, only the most tenacious of merchants braving the frigid temperatures to peddle their bread and wool. Even the drunks in the Hanged Man were sedentary, less prone to their brawling. It was as if Kirkwall had gone into a troubled hibernation.

It was so boring<\/em>.

To be sure, that was not to say she was not glad of it. She was tired. After all, she'd stuck out her neck for the city and its people, an increasingly common occurrence, and had been begrudgingly rewarded with a title and a lifelong career as Kirkwall's de facto <\/em>hero, savior, and babysitter. Lovely. Meredith had been livid. Even lovelier.

Oft times she wondered if Meredith would ever learn the truth, and swallow the knowledge that Hawke had stood up for the city only after a favor to an ungrateful pirate with questionable loyalty had gone terribly awry. It was never a thought she dwelt long upon.

Now, months later, the smoke had cleared, the pirate had disappeared, and Hawke was left with a fancy title and a relic she didn't know what to do with. Months without word from Isabela, though others of a more optimistic nature would be quick to point out that the cold had slowed the ships and stopped the caravans.

Still, it hardly mattered. Perhaps Hawke needed a little time, herself.

It had been a quiet and lonely winter, though she could hardly say that the short days were terrible days, even with Mother's absence still so fresh, so tangible it ached.

Daily life had churned down to a nug's pace, which gave ample opportunity to study and practice her spellcraft, and while she wished for books, <\/em>she knew very well that such dangerous things as grimoires and tomes of magical lore were locked away in the Gallows, where even the mages of the Circle had very restricted access to them.

She'd asked Carver about them once, and he'd gotten so angry over her presumption that he'd stormed from the house and hadn't visited for months – something Mother had never failed to point out every time his name had come up. She'd never ventured to ask again.

So, she got by on what she could scrounge up, studying the almanacs, and the laws of alchemy, herbalist notes scribbled in the margins of botany texts, theories of the natural order written by sunblind surface dwarves a century dead.

She'd spent many hours with Merrill, discussing the ancient magics of the elvhen over tea. She'd spent countless more listening to Varric recite the history of lyrium refinement at her request, all the while speaking with a disinterest she wouldn't have believed he had in him. She'd even needled Fenris over drinks at the Hanged Man, all about the exhibitions of the magisters and the great and terrible power they wielded without shame, stopping her incessant questions only when he'd threatened her quite colorfully in Qunari.

Mostly, though, it was Anders who helped her. Passionate, irascible Anders, a Circle mage who had studied beside other mages, all under the tutelage of learned enchanters. It was so vastly different from the gritty, secretive practicum her father had pieced together for herself and her sister. Though she would never think to question her father's methods – after all, they had served her very well all her life – she could not help but feel her training was incomplete. She knew all of the how<\/em> and none of the why<\/em>, and it bothered her.

Anders, as was his custom, did not feel the same way she did. The man was born to be argumentative. He envied her status as a free mage getting by on gumption and a father's sage advice, and it always became a point of contention when she asked after his Circle training.

And so it was that she did not<\/em> ask for his help when she decided she would try to make it snow.

In theory, it was undeniably clever. She'd heard tell of the mages of Kinloch, and their prowess over the elements of air and earth, fire and ice. Right down to the division of the primal school, it was different, and Hawke was nothing if not curious. In her present state, her first winter without Mother in that dreadful big estate, missing her thatched-house home miserably, giving herself the gift of a little happiness and cheer seemed to be the right – nay, the only <\/em>course of action.

To summon an ice storm, to freeze a foe, to control the power of wind and snow, a true and chaotic mana-fed blizzard.

The only problem, it was a spell she did not know<\/em>. Still, when better to learn?

She waited for the perfect time with infinite patience. Endlessly cold, starry nights were out of the question, when the warmth of the world was lost to the vastness of the sky and the land shivered and froze. No, she needed an overcast night sky, insulated and utterly still, and so she waited, and studied.

Then, finally, the perfect afternoon came along a week after First Day, when the iron-bellied clouds rolled in to hide the sunset with gloom. That night, after the house had gone quiet and the fire in the great parlor had burned down to embers, Hawke wrapped herself in a heavy wool cloak and stole out to the kitchen garden at the rear of the estate.

The garden was little more than a tiny walled courtyard, but it had always served her well enough for a practice yard – the walls had the scorch marks to prove it. The yard was always put to good use. Orana had prepared the gardens when the temperature had begun to drop, and Bodahn had been after Hawke to build a glass hothouse, but she had not the heart to tell him she could not afford the space. There were no windows of other estates looking down on her little patch of solitude, no prying eyes. It was her<\/em> place to practice, where she might trip up or fail outright, ever on a quest to be the mage of talent and control her father had always wanted her to be.

Perhaps this would bring her one step closer to that faded dream.

Hawke sighed, and put away thoughts of her father. She focused more on the cold flagstones beneath her soft-soled boots. She pulled on her gloves, her fingertips already turned to ice. Despite the cloud cover, the night was bitter cold, and in no time at all, she was shivering. Clouds of her breath danced and dissipated in the still air. She pulled her hood up over her dark hair and looked around, first at the walls surrounding her and then to the sky above her, soft and grey and starless, and with a resolute twist of her mouth, she took her staff in hand.

At first, she only tossed a few ice spells at the hay bales stacked against the far wall, the magic spreading from her hands through the staff with ease. Whether it was channeling the cold to take hold from within, or layering the ground with leaping spikes of hoarfrost, these came to her without thought, her hand frozen to her staff as her connection and focus strengthened.

When she stopped casting and her racing heart slowed, when she took a deep breath and saw what her command of the cold had done, she couldn't help but smile and be proud. But it was familiar, and easy to accomplish. To attempt a spell she'd only heard tell of and never seen – Merrill would applaud her spirit, Aveline would shrug and wave her off, and Fenris would call her reckless, but she had to try<\/em>, didn't she?

She knocked the butt of her staff against the ground, working up her courage. If she attempted this, she might very well encase herself in a block of ice, or shatter the stonework, or wake up the household, or Maker only knew what else. She was not so much of a fool to think that magic, even something as simple as the primals, should be taken as lightly as all that.

"All right, Marian," she muttered to herself, "try not to give yourself frostbite, eh?"

And so she raised her staff high and called out to the frayed edges of the Fade – and nothing happened.

Again and again, nothing,<\/em> but for a few scattered blasts of dissipating cold, and a single gust of wind that whipped her cloak and robes around her ankles. Her woolen stockings had done little against the unfortunate draft.

Complete and utter failure.

Her heart sank. Try as she might, no matter how she filled her head with thoughts of drifting snow and howling wind and driving ice, she could not summon the smallest of storms. Dejected, she set her staff aside and slumped down onto the bench.

It was only then that she saw Anders leaning casually against the wall by the door. He crossed his arms over his chest, smirking.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm picking daisies, what are you doing?" She returned his smirk with a smile.

"I'm watching – well, I don't quite know what I'm watching, but it's rather amusing," he said.

"I do try," she said, and frowned. "I didn't know you were coming tonight."

"I hadn't planned on it," he said. He pushed away from the wall and she stood from her bench and they met in an embrace at the center of the courtyard. His cloak was rough-spun and weathered, and it felt scratchy and comforting against her cheek.

"Now tell me, what were you doing?" he asked. "Are you practicing a new spell?"

She grinned up at him. "Was it that obvious?"

"Well, normally people don't wave their arms around like that unless they are casting magics or having some sort of fit."

"Is that so?" said Hawke, scowling.

"I am a healer, I do know these things."

While she was not convinced, she was not so insulted as to ignore an opportunity that had presented itself so fortuitously. "If you must know," she said, giving him her most charming and impossibly disarming smile. "I was trying to make it snow."

"You – why? How<\/em>?"

"Magic, naturally."

Anders searched her face for sign of another ruse, and she hated to disappoint him, but she tried her very best to look the honest sort. "Hawke –" he began.

Too eager now, she cut him off. "I was trained by my father, who taught me the magic of the Marches," she said, giving her shoulders a shrug. "But in Ferelden, the mages of the Circle are taught differently, aren't they?"

"Yes," he said slowly, and his eyes narrowed. He was beginning to get that cornered look he so often got when pressed about his past, for she had always been abrupt and less than subtle and had seen this look more often than she liked.

She decided to take a step back – figuratively, that was. Physically, she stayed put right where she was in the warm safety of his loose embrace.

"Our first year in Kirkwall," she said softly, "Carver spoke a little to me of his time at Ostagar."

Anders raised a curious eyebrow.

"He was drunk," she explained, and understanding, he nodded for her to continue. "He told of a Circle mage who had fought among them. He said the mage had summoned an ice storm, and –" She frowned, and sighed, and shook her head. "Never mind, I'm sorry. This is stupid."

"It's hardly stupid," Anders said, not unkindly, and for that she gave him a grateful smile.

"No, it is. Saying it aloud, I see it now. Hear it, I mean," she said, and put her hands over her face.

"I know the spell you speak of," he said. "It's a powerful spell, and it requires a great deal of energy from the caster." He pulled her in a little closer, resting his chin against her temple. "In the Circle, you are taught the basic principle of all schools of magic, just as your father taught you, but without study, it is only with skill and experience that you learn the application of actually casting spells. A spell of that level would take months of study to wield with confidence in battle."

"You can quit trying to make me feel better," she said, and laughed.

"I never learned to cast it myself, but I can teach you what I do know about its application," he said. His arms tightened about her. "It's not much, but it might give you a starting point for your study."

Hawke grinned, and kissed his lips. "Would you?"

"It won't quite be the snow you want," he said, his voice too sad and his face too serious.

She put her gloved hands on his cheeks, and kissed him again for good measure. That got a tiny smile out of him, but he let her go in the next instant, all business as he layered the folds of her cloak back over her shoulders, exposing her arms and the front of her robes.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"It all begins with the cold itself. Have you ever known true cold, Hawke?" he asked her as he smoothed his hands down the curve of her shoulders one final time. He took a step back – a literal step back, of course – and gave her a scrutinizing look-over from head to toe and back again.

"No," she said without hesitation. She'd been well cared for as a child, even in the uncertain years before her father had settled them in Lothering. Their first winter there, a boy in the village had once fallen through the lake ice – near enough to the shore as to find his sure footing, but he'd received a good dunking, soaked through and turned blue.

No, thank her lucky stars, she did not know true cold.

"The enchanters of Ferelden teach that the primal school is a balance of the four elements," he explained, and she rolled her eyes at the lecture in basic theory. "At the beginning of each lesson, my teacher would have the templars douse us with buckets of ice water, so that we might know<\/em> the cold. To better understand and channel its power."

She made a face, still thinking of the village boy. "You're making that up."

"I wish I were, love," he said, and he gave her a fleeting half smile. "Whatever you might say about the poor instruction, I won't deny that it was effective. He taught us a good deal, and I'm sure a great deal more to those who continued to study with him."

"What did he do when it was time to learn about fire properties?"

That earned her a grin. "You don't want to know."

After all this banter, still he had made no move, but even in the span of a minute or two, she'd begun to feel the creep of the chill night through her heavy winter robes.

"So, are you going to dump ice water over my head, then?" she asked, her new-found chill making her impatient.

"No," he said, and held out his hand. Eagerly, she reached out her own. Without a word, he tugged off her glove. He took a moment to run his bare fingers over hers, but it was the cold that got to her first, spreading over her knuckles with needled touch. Anders then reached for her other hand, and when he had both of her gloves, he tucked them into his belt.

He watched her another long moment, again that appraising look-over, and stepped forward to gently lower her hood. The night's cold whispered upon her neck, growing bolder by the minute.

"It's the knowledge of true cold that's the key to its mastery," he said, putting his hands firmly on her shoulders to coax her into turning around, so that her back was to his chest, and she could see the hay bales stacked at the far end of the courtyard, the traces of her ice spells still glistening in the torchlight.

"Cold is when your skin burns," he said, and then his arm was around her, pulling at the first of the clasps that held her robes closed, just above her left breast. She knew her robes were as familiar to him as his own; he had undressed her countless times, but never like this. "Cold is when you feel that ache in your fingers and your toes."

"You wouldn't dare," she said, laughing breathlessly, but he already gave a tug at the second clasp, near to the bottom of her ribcage. The fabric sagged, and she felt a caress of night air against her skin, and shivered – and not, she guessed, from the cold.

"Your bones shake," he said, the third clasp at her waist undone by his quick fingers, "and your jaw quakes." He paused then, brushing icy fingers along her skin as he pulled her hair out of the way and pressed a light kiss to the nape of her neck. She let out a sharp exhale, giving up the warmth of her mouth to the cold night in a puff of fog.

"It sears your lungs," he continued, heedless. His other hand, the sneaky <\/em>one, was creeping across her abdomen to the final clasp of her robes, holding the whole of it closed at her right hip. "Steals your breath."

She cringed. "Oh please, please don't," she said, unashamed of her begging.

The sneaky hand slipped inside her robes, fingers playing delicately at her waist. She was more than chilled, every inch of her skin broken out into gooseflesh. Maker above, she hadn't been the one to start this torment, had she?

"Are you cold yet, Hawke?" he asked, lips against her neck, leaving a trail of warmth that never lingered, only grew colder as his attention moved elsewhere.

"What do you think?" she asked, and immediately regretted her sass as he moved his hand from her waist to her breast, finding her unbound and bare. As his cold fingertips ran over her skin, she gasped, and when he pinched her lightly, she muttered a dark obscenity.

"I'd say you are at that," he said, and gently bit her neck.

"You are a cruel, unfeeling<\/em> –"

Anders pulled his hand out from beneath her robes, taking care of the final clasp as he went. Slowly, he peeled her robes open, exposing her to the cold winter night.

"The cold takes all of you, Hawke," he said, returning his hands to her bare stomach, pinning her robes back with his wrists. "It doesn't matter how protected against it you think you are."

"Anders –"

"Watch, Hawke," he said, and held a hand up before her. She watched as the pale frost grew over his fingertips, evidence of his command over the magic in his blood, no less than hers but control was a moot point for her at this juncture, and she knew she was lost. His hand returned to her, burning with cold as it ran up between her breasts. And the other –

Her knees buckled, and she leaned heavily against him. "You wouldn't dare," she said again, weaker, meeker, and she let her head fall back against his
shoulder, closing her eyes as the frost in his fingertips ignited her skin, and the desire that lurked beneath. Despite the strength she thought she had, the willpower she thought she possessed, she cried out when he pressed a firm hand between her legs.

"You have to give yourself over to it," he whispered, his voice hoarse in her ear, and she could feel him against her, the want in him, cold be damned. The hand between her legs tightened. She bit her lip against the urge to cry out again. Her cheeks prickled painfully, her fingertips were beginning to throb, yet all she could focus on was his touch of frost. "Will you give yourself over to the cold, love?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes," was all she could manage. Her knees had long since resumed their shaking.

"Good," he said, and very suddenly, his hands abandoned their amorous attentions. He spun her around again, and as easy as one, two, three, four, had buttoned her robes closed, and she was left with her mouth agape and her body in an unbearable state. "You did well for your first lesson, Hawke. You're a fast learner."

"Cruel," she sputtered, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. "Unfeeling<\/em>."

He grinned at her, but she could not deny the tremble in his hands as he pulled her hood over her hair once more, smoothing it away from her face. He was looking at her quite strangely, eyes unreadable. "Hardly," he said, and there was something thrilling to the heavy hush in his voice. He leaned down to kiss her deeply. "Now comes the fun part. Let's go inside and get you warm."<\/p><\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:92879","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/92879.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=92879"}}],"title":"\"In the Wake of the Storm\"","published":"2015-01-30T16:15:00Z","updated":"2015-01-30T18:23:29Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"character: fang (final fantasy xiii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xiii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: snow (final fantasy xiii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: In the Wake of the Storm<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Amorissy
Characters<\/strong>: Snow & Fang, Light, Hope
Rating<\/strong>: PG
Warnings<\/strong>: Includes story spoilers up to and <\/b>including the events of the Fifth Ark.
Summary: <\/strong>Fighting with Fang is like fighting at the centre of the storm. A hero's scattered thoughts.<\/i>

Author's Note<\/strong>:  Written for Zerrat over on <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span> for their 2012 Secret Santa gift exchange.



In the Wake of the Storm<\/strong><\/p>


First time Snow laid eyes on her, he knew right away what to make of Fang, and maybe that's where all the trouble started. He didn't know much else about her just then, let alone her name<\/em>, but he knew, down to his bones knew<\/em>, that he'd stumbled across the path of someone he didn't want to be messing with.

Now, first impressions are hard to forget, harder yet if they leave a nasty bruise, and so it's with welt-coloured glasses that he looks back and thinks that this unlikely, grudging partnership is most likely to be what's going to get him killed.

Funny thing, he always thought that honour would go to, well, him. Or maybe to Lightning, if she ever gets her way.

It's tough, really, being this good with people....<\/em>


The first few days after Bresha only serve to show him how wrong he's been about Fang – and how right he's been, as well. For what it's worth, she seems to have taken a shining to him, with all the grace and delicacy of a hammer. Another thing he – and his skull – have learned fast.

A woman after his own heart. There's been a lot to learn from her, in fact, and not all of it's been good.

On his first night, Fang comes to the cell where they keep him. He's pacing, angry, and all he wants is to think of Serah, to find the sweetest memories of their short time together and wrap them around himself until he can't see or hear anything else but her<\/em>, and yet every time he closes his eyes, there's nothing but crystalline blue. All her bright facets shine so painfully clear, and it's all he knows.

Fang interrupts his brooding, spinning a chair round on one leg to sit astride the back of it. Says she's got a story for him, and at once she begins, weaving her tale of Pulse and fal'Cie and Serah. <\/em>All the while, she's shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head, so detached and free of guilt that before the end he falls to his knees and he rages <\/em>inside, shouts and curses and cries. The dark metal belly of the Cavalry cruiser rings with the echoes of his frustration and his pain – and it doesn't make a lick of difference.

Smug, she smiles and offers him a hand to rise. "All finished, then?"

What other choice does he have but to take that hand?

As he stands, he pulls the bandana off his head, and with shaking fingers unties the knot. Without much to-do, he wraps it twice around his forearm to conceal his brand. When he looks up, Fang is glaring at him, and furious as he is with her, he withers a little under her hard green eyes.

"No," she says, and the tone she gives him brooks no argument. "Not when you're with me."

She reaches over and puts a hand on his arm, and he's surprised by the strength in her grip. She pulls at the bandana to reveal the black mark on his skin, still so alien a sight. One more symbol of his devotion to his beloved, for all the useless silver hanging around his neck.

"You ashamed of this?" Fang asks him, jabbing at his brand with her thumb. "You let me know right now if this is gonna be a problem."

"This must be your first visit to Cocoon," he says drily, raising his hands palms up in surrender.

"This here," she says, jabbing him once more before letting him go, "this is your only ticket to salvation. You wanna see your girl again?"

He grunts, unable to manage a single word. His teeth are clenched too tight as he watches Fang closely. There's no pity in her face, no anger, or shame, only honesty and cold resolution.

"You want my advice? Stop sulking and complete your Focus. Worry about yourself while you can still fight. You don't need to worry about the girl anymore."

Silence follows, and the words sink in slowly, a lonely weight to bear down on his soul. He doesn't have to worry about Serah now. She's in stasis; she's safe. She'll awaken – someday.<\/em>

"The world ain't gonna help you with your Focus," she says, and tosses the bandana back to him. "That's a fight you gotta face on your own. Now, put that damn thing back on before your hair blinds me." She shakes her head, and if he thinks he sees a trace of a smile as she walks from his cell, it's probably only his imagination.

The next day, his training begins.<\/p>


Fighting with Fang is like fighting at the centre of the storm.

This revelation isn't one that hits him right away. Not on the Lindblum<\/em>, not when the cuffs come off and she starts driving toward him, a whirlwind of double-bladed terror. Her muscles are tight and controlled, each motion measured, it seems, to what he can handle and fight against, and the moment he finds his footing and his confidence, that's when she starts pushing<\/em> him, and the sweat at his temples freezes with his focus.

The power of the l'Cie is one that he struggles to maintain. He fights too hard and his stamina drains to nothing. Forget learning to control it, he's on his knees with the burden of it, panting hard, and she's still on him, goading him, shaming him.

For her, it's as easy as breathing.

And so he watches her, follows her, listens. The engines of the ship hum so loud he can hardly hear his own thoughts, and so he doesn't think, and moves on instinct, and when instinct fails him, he does as she does, and learns<\/em>.

And soon he begins to see the storm, but he will not be at the mercy of it. So he plants his feet and braces his arms, and though the winds rise and the rain drives against him, he will not be moved.<\/p>


There's a softness that comes into Fang's eyes sometimes, one he knows too well. It reminds him of Light, that same gentle glint that comes and goes so quick when she talks about her sister. It's the only time he's able to put the two in the same head-space. The world just doesn't seem big<\/em> enough for Fang and Light to stand side by side.

It's talk of the girl that brings that softness to Fang's otherwise sharp eyes and stills that quick and clever tongue. He doesn't quite know what to make of it, and he likes his fingers too much to come right out and ask.

But searching for the girl only turns up Light and the poor kid who'd been dragged into their mess, so just as soon as Snow figures out how to reconcile the thoughts of Fang and Lightning in his head, he's faced with the two of them in the flesh, in a polished city courtyard, while all the might of the Sanctum bears down upon them and the screens flash the spectacle of their demise to the world.

For a while, everything he knows narrows down to a blur of blades and long hair and arcs of glittering ice.

And then – and then Light is gone and he's with the kid, alone, and his mouth runs without his mind. There is chaos and smoke, and the crowds of angry civilians seethe and swell as the tide, and his mouth –<\/em>

Retribution comes swift for him, and cruel as it is, it doesn't kill him – the kid doesn't –

Everything dims, fades, contracts to nothing but red<\/em>, and his ears are filled with the kid's last scream.<\/p>


He has been brought low, and he has risen up again.

Still, he fights.

He doesn't know why he still pushes on, watching Lightning's back, keeping an eye on Hope – both when he can spare them, sleep be damned. There's a long sleep waiting for him at the end of this road, somewhere in the hazy future that's all coloured deepest blue. It's the warm promise of home, somewhere in the distance.

He fights because there is no other choice open to him. He fights for Cocoon, for her innocence and <\/em>her ignorance, for all those fear-twisted faces that don't know any better but to hate him. He fights for himself, for all the good he knows he can still do in the world. He fights for Serah, peaceful in her crystal embrace.

He knows now, he was not chosen. He laid himself down as an offering, and the fal'Cie took him, and burned its curse into his flesh. It took the others, marked them all in kind, chased their dreams with seeds of destruction.

And so he fights for the others, because saving the world means saving them, too.

When they storm the Palamecia<\/em>, he's not sure who he's fighting for, but he's got the why tucked safe away, that one eternal tear is what keeps him going.

He will not let that slip away.<\/p>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:92552","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/92552.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=92552"}}],"title":"\"Mykonos\"","published":"2015-01-30T15:02:03Z","updated":"2015-01-30T18:19:01Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: ff_land"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: jecht (final fantasy x)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy x"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title:<\/b> "Mykonos"
Author:<\/b> Amorissy
Characters:<\/b> Jecht
Rating:<\/b> PG
Warning<\/b>: Minor spoiler warning for Jecht's story, as revealed in Luca.
Summary:<\/b> One-shot.  He is no villain, but the beast within the beast.<\/i>

Author's Note<\/b>:  Title taken from "Mykonos<\/a>" by Fleet Foxes.  Written for Round 7.02<\/a> in the Ultima Arena<\/a> over at Final Fantasy Land<\/a> on Dreamwidth.



Mykonos<\/strong><\/p>

He's not –

He is –<\/em>

He cannot – he can't not<\/em> –

He remembers.

He remembers the pain, the way it bloomed within him, consumed him and all he was. This shell, this foreign being – this agony, how it surges, how it seethes. It is familiar as old bones; as new as a silver dawn. He is made of salt and sin.

This shell knows nothing but pain, and in that knowing, there is nothing but desperate fear.

The fear. The fire.

He is –

There is fire within, and water without, and he knows the rush of that eternal touch. The kiss of life against obsidian flesh, that hiss unending given up to the sky, as blue and restless as the tide.

The tide pulls him. It guides him. At its mercy, he drifts.

And in his drifting, the world is torn asunder.

There is no hope. No hope for such as he.

All that hope – all that intent – all that sacrifice –<\/em>

Nothing – for nothing<\/em> –

And in his haze of fire and water, he knows for true.

The cycle continues, and all must play their part –

And for his part –

He never means –<\/em> never meant –<\/em>

He is trapped, and his courage becomes his doom. His bones have long turned to stone and his flesh has burned away. He is ash on the wind, he is dust. Caught, floating, spiralling somewhere in the everlasting between, this endless rusted city of dying dreams. The pyreflies wail and he cannot escape their mourning. They do not mourn for him. His greatness, his purpose, it fades to nothing in the wake of this<\/em> – his part – must play our parts – and his was to be the saving of the world –

And now he will be its destruction. A cruel fate he's chosen.

Chosen. His choice. He didn't want – he doesn't want this –<\/em>

To watch with eyes that do not see, listen with ears that do not hear. His body, gone, that husk of tender mortality that could not survive the giving; this shell, this great, hulking shell, the world's destruction. Always there, this beast that curled within him, born of fire, this child of fayth and fury and failure.

With eyes that do not see, he sees the world as it breaks beneath him as waves against the shore.

With ears that do not hear, he hears each scream and anguished cry.

And sometimes –

Sometimes, its the call of the gulls in the quiet of morning. And the sun –

To blackest depths, he sinks. Sinks and sighs and lives on, he, the harbinger of divine justice, the most cruel of all those who have come before.

He is shamed beyond reckoning.

He can no longer abide the sun.<\/p><\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:91866","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/91866.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=91866"}}],"title":"5.06: Drabbles (Final Fantasy XII)","published":"2013-01-29T21:27:26Z","updated":"2015-01-30T17:05:42Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: vaan\/penelo"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: ashe\/balthier"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: ondore (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: vaan (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: gabranth\/drace"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: drabble"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: gabranth (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: balthier (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: ashe (final fantasy xii)"}}],"content":"Author<\/b>: Amorissy
Characters<\/b>: Balthier, Ashe, Vaan, Gabranth, Ondore
Rating<\/b>: PG
Warning<\/b>: Minor spoilers for game events.  Includes canon character death.

Author's Note<\/b>: Written for Round 5.06<\/a> in <\/a>ultima_arena<\/b><\/a><\/span> over at <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span>.


Title<\/b>: "Of Candles and Stars"
Prompt<\/b>: Imitation
Characters<\/b>: Balthier\/Ashe


This hero's journey is folly. Had he the will of a lesser man, he would quit this cause and take to the sky. He would leave the princess to her fate, she who is deemed worthy to stumble in the footsteps of dynastic forebear.

She is a shadow, as the candle is but pale imitation of brighter, burning stars. Her name may yet be writ bold in blood on the sands of her kingdom, but she, as he, is only a hume-child, and she is vulnerable, and venerable as the dawn.

She is the dawn, and he cannot look away.


<\/a>

Title<\/b>: "Ratsbane"
Prompt<\/b>: Vermin
Characters<\/b>: Vaan


The boy is vermin. Ratsbane, he's called on the dark streets below the sand. He has the stench of Rabanastre about him, of stagnant water and baking stone. Son of the desert, son of Dalmasca, a waterway wayfarer with his head in the clouds.

Lost child, soft-eyed, hopeful. His body is sharp, hardened by hunger. On his person, quartz and turquoise to mark his low birth. His heart is nourished by the runoff of war. He has no cause, no purpose, only anger, a sun-fed fire and the quick strike of his steel.

He is vermin. He is what remains.


<\/a>

Title<\/b>: "Best Laid Plans"
Prompt<\/b>: Trap
Characters<\/b>: Vaan (Vaan\/Penelo)


He doesn't know how this happened. He was careful. Kept her out<\/i> of it. Now she's snatched by bangaa, holed up in a mine. She's probably hurt, hungry. His guilt mounts by the minute.

She wasn't supposed to get tangled in his mess – not that he'd intended to make a mess, but he's past dwelling on that now. He's up to his ears in traitors and pirates and plots, and all he can think about is Penelo. It's making it hard to keep his head, and he needs<\/i> his head because even he can see.

Penelo is a trap.


<\/a>

Title<\/b>: "The Judge Magister"
Prompt<\/b>: Possession
Characters<\/b>: Gabranth (Gabranth\/Drace)


Gabranth is a man haunted.

Anger is a taint upon his soul, its possession of him as strong as the hold of a demon out of the darkest hell, bloodied claws sunk deep into his heart. He is at the mercy of his memory, and with his own hands, he commits the horrors from which his noble brother turns his head away in sorrow and shame.

There is king's blood on these hands, boy's blood, brother's blood.

And now hers, even hers. He takes his blade to she whom he loves and calls it justice.

Gabranth is a man damned.


<\/a>

Title<\/b>: "Her Only Wish"
Prompt<\/b>: Opposition
Characters<\/b>: Marquis Halim Ondore IV, Ashe


Ashelia. Never was there more dutiful of a child, sweet of spirit, wise beyond her years.

This young woman who stands in opposition to him, who is she?

This woman is a stranger, hardened by life underground, bitter by necessity.

He remembers this gentle face, full of hollow and shadow. He knows these grey eyes, knows the burning resolve within them. It fills him with grief.

“Uncle,”<\/i> she pleads with him.

To steel himself is no easy thing.

To stand aside and let her disappear into the night with the pirate and her knight, this is hardest of all.
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:91486","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/91486.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=91486"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2013-01-24T02:23:06Z","updated":"2013-01-24T02:23:41Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Index<\/b>:  Table of Contents here<\/a>.

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>


Author's Note<\/b>: All right, my pretties, I'm back. What's more, I bring plot-filled chapters and future OC name-drops with me. This completes laying the foundation for the direction of the story. I hope you enjoy, and thank you for waiting so patiently.<\/p>


'Til Kingdom Come<\/b>

Chapter Seven<\/b><\/p>

Glitch<\/i><\/p>


Glitch could remember a lot. No one ever gave him credit for it, but there it was. The truth. Cold and hard and truth-like. His memory was to be commended. It probably had been, lauded with a ceremony and a fancy diploma tied with a ribbon, he was certain of it. Certain of it.

If only he could remember.

Still, otherwise, steel trap. Really.

For instance, he could remember his way around the palace. Some might scoff, but it was no mean feat. Alta Torretta was the heart of the Outer Zone, the central spire of the Central City, a delicate spindled marvel of plated bronze and emerald glass, a beacon of beauty in these dark times.

At least from afar, or so it seemed. Near to a hundred floors separated the grand entry hall from the rooftop arboretum under its crystal dome, and all but a handful of them had been abandoned to the annuals, filled with nothing but dust and decay and terrible, terrible memories.

But when it came to that handful of floors and the several dozen rooms that made them up, he could find his way around well enough. Call it talent, instinct, or residual memory –

There, another thing. He could remember a lot of big words, and what was more, he could often remember what they meant<\/i>, and the looks he got never ceased to amuse him, whether it was a roll of the eyes from Cain, or that impish grin of DG's that he liked so much, or even that gentle fluttering at the corner of the Queen's mouth that almost counted as a smile.

Not that she was Queen yet, not without the support of the guilds. Lady Lavender, people were calling her, though even that was more a courtesy of respect.

Lavender. Of all that he remembered, she was at the fore. Fleeting wisps of image or sound, a touch or a whisper, so many lines drawn on so many papers, and through all of it, her. <\/i>Books and quills and little brass gadgets, bits of string and polished stone, chestnut curls and the tarnish of silver, her hand on his sleeve, always <\/i>her hand on his sleeve, but whenever he looked down, there was no soft touch, no pale tapered fingers, only the blush in his cheeks and the babble of his tongue.

He could remember a lot, and he couldn't say he cared for it, not at all.

Still, it kept him afloat in this strange place. He didn't get lost, and no one had to go looking for him, and that was something. Getting distracted was different from getting lost, of course, but he worked very hard to avoid that. And by very hard he meant very <\/i>hard, but sometimes it was unavoidable. Like when a maid would smile sweetly and ask for his help, or he'd hear a note of soft music drifting from down the corridor, or DG would catch up to him and tug him in the opposite direction, whisking him off to he knew not where.

DG was good at that.

Sometimes, he managed to return the favour. Together, they'd explored what seemed like miles upon miles of corridor, and dozens upon dozens of lonely cave-dark rooms.

He very much wished he were with her now, elbow deep in curiosity, helping him to pick up memories as he went like pebbles along a riverbank, but when Glitch glanced at the clock, his heart sank. It was past midnight. DG was in her room asleep, and he was stuck where he was, no friend, no hope of escape, and no pocket full of stones.

"Are we certain that we can trust him?"

It was Lady Lavender's voice that cut into his thoughts, descending featherlight into the muddle that was his mind to disperse the fog with sweet, bright clarity.

"He seems loyal to Azkadellia if nothing else. The council he has given so far has been sound," Tutor said. "As for his plan to bring Zero into this mess, well –"

"Vysor wouldn't suggest anything that would harm Azkadellia," Glitch said, glancing nervously to the queen – no, the lady, his lady. "He'll stand by her side so long as she's standing."

Lavender turned her head ever so slightly toward him, and the corner of her mouth fluttered. He cleared his throat – loudly, too loudly – and looked away.

It still boggled the noggin, her decision to include him in these private meetings. Did his presence offer her some sort of comfort, or did she truly believe that he could in some way redeem himself? Unlike DG, whose guilt was written so plain on her face that it broke the heart, he did not feel he had failed his queen. The mirror had shown him true, he'd fought bravely and suffered for it.

Memories like that don't slip through the seams. Memories like that are a forever brand.

Still, forever branded or not, he was there to help and to do what he could. He owed it to Lavender and he owed it to DG. Truth be told, maybe he owed it to himself, too. It was a whole lot of owing, but he was up to the task. He had to be.

"Cain and Lindsey are likely to attract the attention of the southern guild on their return trip," he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say. "What with their valuable cargo and all."

"Let them," said Tutor. "I can't see an easier way to coax Bowen Reid out of hiding."

"Reid won't move until Andrus does," Lavender said with no small amount of distaste in her voice. Glitch couldn't remember the southern general Bowen Reid, couldn't put a face to the name, but a similar feeling arose in him, and he wrinkled his nose in sympathy.

"Andrus just needs convincing," Glitch said, but it was hopeful, so very hopeful, and it made him sound all the less certain. Which was fine, he supposed, because he was<\/i> uncertain, because he didn't remember Andrus either, but the respect he garnered with just name alone was quite impressive.

And they were all in need of a little impressive.

"I think Andrus will need more than a little convincing, but all that will keep for now," Tutor said, and ran his big hand heavily down his face. The weariness was showing. It had always shown, Tutor and all his frayed edges, that paper-thin determination holding all the rest together, but there seemed to be more grey in his black hair of late, and his eyes had lost their shine. "Your Majesty," he continued, shoulders sagging, "with all due respect –"

"You are wondering if I have given any thought to your proposal," Lavender said, and the smile on her face was gentle as she regarded the old teacher. "And the answer is yes, I have, though it troubles me greatly. I have no wish to declare the kingdom's vulnerability to the rest of the world."

"I don't believe that will be the case," Tutor said. "News of the battle at the tower will travel fast. It's only a matter of time before it makes it across the sandsea to Evonny, and from there – well, there is no knowing."

Lavender's reply was cautious. "We have no reason to believe Evonny will honour the old alliance, let alone strike a new one."

From his seat, Glitch squirmed and raised a single finger in point. "Evonny needs our moretanium. Couldn't hurt to offer a renegotiation of terms."

Lavender levelled him with those haunting pale eyes. A chill went through him, and he was about to start stammering an apology when she smiled<\/i>, teeth and everything, and all the breath and empty words went out of him.

"Does Evmund still sit the throne?" she asked.

Tutor nodded. "He does, Your Grace."

"I cannot think beyond our borders when our own house is in such disarray," she said, and sighed. "I cannot leave Andrus to his silence. Nor Reid to his biding."

"Or Bluesire to his hiding," Glitch piped up, and chuckled. Lavender's brow knit as she looked at him, and he sunk down a little further into his seat, clearing his throat and trying to look for all the world like he wasn't as foolish as he was making himself out to be.

"Uniting the guilds and seeking Evonny's aid may not be mutually exclusive," Tutor said. "There is no denying that you must remain here to bring Andrus and the others to the council table. They have no reason to refuse you the throne – nine annuals of fighting in your name can't be forgotten that easily."

"I had begun to wonder," she said, so solemn that it almost frightened <\/i>Glitch and he didn't know why. <\/i>It happened so often now but it never failed to overwhelm him, that sudden surge of emotion, a rising swell in his throat and his heart thundering so loud he could hear it echoing in his head.

Instinct with no memory to justify it was a bitch<\/i>.

So thankfully oblivious to his rambling thoughts and swelling surges, Lavender sighed and rose from her chair to pace the undressed windows. From his seat on the sofa, Glitch saw nothing but the light of the lamps, the glass awash with a golden glow and the city beyond it lost. Nervously, he tapped his fingers on the tops of his legs, some unfamiliar staccato rhythm. The urge to do something, or say <\/i>something, was creeping up on him, a spark in his nerve-endings that could only be ignored so long.

Tutor raised an eyebrow at him, but he could only tuck in the corners of his mouth and shrug.

The minutes ticked by in silence, and it gnawed at him, over and over, say something say something say something. There were words, he'd always had the words<\/i> and the words had meant <\/i>something, and he'd helped, he'd always been there to help.<\/i> He knew that and had been told that and had seen <\/i>it in the foggy, dirty glass, but now he was powerless and mindless and wordless and he really was no help at all.

Lavender still paced, and he was quiet and small, and Tutor was old and weary. They were the three meant to bind the world together while the rest trickled in over the lines drawn in the sand near a decade ago, held back by their anger or suspicion or obstinacy.

Maybe the kingdom was doomed. Maybe the House of Gale would never rise again.

Or maybe there was hope yet.

"You mean DG, don't you?" Glitch asked, his own unsure voice the one to finally break the silence, but hope could not be contained with silence. "You want to send DG."

"I do," Tutor said, but there was no pride in him as he said it, no confidence, no joy. "I mean your husband as well, Your Grace, and there are a few council members who could also be considered."

"Our council is small enough as it is, and now it dwindles by the day," Lavender said. "Above all else, I must<\/i> bring the generals to the table. I fear we are stretching ourselves far too thin."

"Well, it's good to know all our options, right?" Glitch asked, partly because he always endeavoured to be optimistic, and partly because he wasn't sure if knowing the options made the choice any easier. His decisions had never affected others on any <\/i>level, not before finding DG anyway. To have the weight of responsibility Lavender shouldered – she might not be queen, but she was still looking out for the people of the Outer Zone... no matter what she had to sacrifice along the way.

Mournfully sad, really. He swallowed hard against the next rising tide within him, and stayed quiet.

"We shall see what choices are left us before the end," Lavender said, and she turned away from the window. She seemed to have paled, her lips drawn tight, and the circles beneath her eyes showed all the more. In a sudden flash of clarity, he remembered the lady ten annuals past, chestnut curls and glowing smile, clad in silk and leather, and then it was gone again, just one more image to sort through when he closed his eyes at night, before the dreams came and jumbled him anew.

"I am grateful for your council, gentlemen," she said, and the smile she gave was all wisp and shadow. "I will consider heavily all you have said, but I can think no more tonight. We will wait before we bring this before the council. It is no decision to be taken lightly."

"Sleep well, Your Grace," Tutor said.

Glitch only bowed his head deeply, afraid to open his mouth to break the spell he still found himself in, that vision of Lavender as she was.

He left the room with his new-old friend, checking his long-legged gait to match the teacher's slower one. It wasn't until they'd left the queenless queen's residence and were well away from the ears of the red-scarfed guards who patrolled the corridor that Tutor spoke up with an aggrieved sigh.

"Well, that could have gone better."

Glitch gave his friend a wobbly smile. "I thought it was my job to state the obvious."

"DG can be of great help," Tutor said firmly. "Azkadellia is in no condition. It's all still too soon for her. The poor girl can barely face her own reflection."

"We'll make Lavender see that," Glitch said, cheered by his own optimism. "DG would jump at the chance to help."

"I worry this may be a little out of her league," Tutor said, and he gave an indulgent smile. "I thought the worse thing I'd have to deal with when it came to that girl was making sure she didn't accidentally blow herself up. Guess I was wrong."

Glitch walked beside Tutor in silence. He thought about his young friend, her determination and her strength, her wit and her compassion. He thought about the impact she could make. She could change the world, really, if she set her mind to it.

No one could deny that the world could do with a little changing.

That, there, was reason enough. Now, all he had to do was just convince her<\/i> of that.<\/p>

Chapter Six<\/a>  |  Chapter Eight
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:91364","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/91364.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=91364"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2013-01-19T00:44:15Z","updated":"2013-01-24T02:24:51Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Index<\/b>:  Table of Contents here<\/a>.

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>


'Til Kingdom Come<\/b>

Chapter Six<\/b><\/p>

Cain<\/i><\/p>


Wyatt Cain's world had gone to hell.

He'd never expected any of this to be easy.<\/i> As a matter of fact, he'd been under the distinct impression that he knew better than any of his companions just how hard this road would be to travel. The road to redemption, the road to reconstruction, the road to their bright new world and all that rested just beyond the horizon, stretching on to a destination that none could see.

He knew hardship, he knew suffering, he knew sacrifice. <\/i> As did the others, that much was painfully certain. He wasn't as much of an unseeing fool as to ignore that fact.

DG had lost her past twice.<\/i>

Glitch had lost more<\/i>, his past, his place in the world, his brain<\/i>.

And Raw –

Well, there hadn't been any word from Raw. Not since he'd left the tower a few days after the eclipse, a young cub of his tribe in tow. Off looking for home. Trouble was, rumours trickling down the Old Road all seemed to confirm one awful truth: the leonine race of empaths had been decimated during the reign of the Sorceress, and those that remained had gone into hiding.

Cain expected the truth to be colder, harder, and uglier than even that. As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn't say when – or if –<\/i> they'd be seeing their friend again.

It shouldn't concern him.

It couldn't <\/i>concern him.

The world might indeed have gone to hell, but time hadn't stopped its onward march just because the going had gotten a little rough. Things needed doing,<\/i> and for some gods' forsaken reason that was beyond his comprehension, he was the one meant to be doing them. Chosen. Hand-picked by the princess to be a glorified errand boy.

Oh, hell. <\/i>

Four weeks prior, Cain had woken in the grey dawn on the day of the eclipse, his choice already made. For his wife and for his son, he'd freed a Longcoat from one prison to secure him in another. It was sort of poetical, not that he'd been able to see past the end of his own nose at the time to realize it. No, he'd been caught in a haze, trapped in a ravaged place made up by his own mind and his own bitter experience.

Somehow, he'd known it would not be the end. He'd known that locking Zero in the iron suit deep in the wilds of the southwest would not put to rest their cruel and ugly past, nor would it right the wrongs done to his family.

It would never truly end.

Over the course of the first week of his own freedom, somewhere along the road, his urgency for revenge had turned to a desire for justice, but beyond that – he just did not know. Perhaps he'd thought that sparing Zero's life would be worth the burden he'd carry because of it, knowing that he'd saved himself from the stain of more spilled blood.

It had been a choice. He'd taken action – and now he was drowning in consequence.

If only his son could have seen it the way he did.

Since coming from Azkadellia's chambers – and a brief run-in with DG afterward – Wyatt had spent half the night out of the palace, first tracking down, and then placating, his son.

He'd found Jeb at the garrison, an old Pastorian-era building in a north-end district that the Longcoats had been using as a base of operation in the city. It had been quickly abandoned sometime in the early evening hours the day of the eclipse. Jeb had moved a small company of his men to Central City a few days after the fall of the tower.

The people of the city had taken very little notice to the arrival of resistance soldiers. It had been the arrival of the royals, Azkadellia among them, that had turned their heads.

Since then, Jeb had been splitting his time between the palace and the garrison. He had not ridden out to the resistance camp at the tower since his arrival, sending his scouts and messengers between instead. Cain could not recall the name of the lieutenant left in charge of those operations, but insofar the decision had been a sound one.

Still, Cain was not wrong in assuming that his son was beginning to feel restless, trapped in the city with a desk job and council seat thrust at him after spending so much time in the field, and so many annuals on the run. It made him proud to see his son shoulder such responsibility, but it also made him ache with guilt.

Nine long annuals before, Cain had joined the resistance himself, angered and lost after fleeing Central City with his family. He should have kept on going. The ports had still been busy then, the sandships still heavy with goods for trade; room enough for refugees who had the platinum to pay for it. He should have taken his family across the desert, smuggled them all over the border before Azkadellia's reach had extended too far.

Should have...<\/i>

It was easy to assuage this guilt with busy work, easy to push such dark thoughts away during the daylight hours – and long into the nights, avoiding his dreams still plagued by the faces and voices of the past. There were moments – such as the one he found himself in then – that he wondered if his son had not adopted a similar outlook on his life.

As for the news that Azkadellia wanted Zero freed, and that Wyatt was the one saddled with the unpleasant task, Jeb took it as well as Cain would have expected.

"I'm coming with you."

Jeb was leaning over his battered desk, all his weight on his arms, staring his father down with a tone that brooked no argument. He sounded like his mother.

Cain sighed. "Don't think that's such a good idea, son." Not with Cpt. Lindsey accompanying him. Three days on the road with the darkly brooding ex-coat was daunting enough.

"You need me," Jeb said.

"I need you here<\/i>," Wyatt replied quickly, and grit his teeth together, his jaw tightening, near to painful. He didn't like the look his saw in his son's eyes, panicked and uncertain.

Above all else, Jeb was impulsive – always had been, always would be. It was a trait he'd gotten from neither his mother nor his father, something that was wholly his own. It had landed him into more trouble than – well, it was safe to say that it was one of the few things his son had in common with a certain young woman Cain had recently become acquainted with.

As for DG – he didn't expect that she'd take the news any better. Hell, he wasn't exactly overjoyed himself, yet he couldn't deny that he'd never truly considered declining – politely or otherwise. He strongly sensed within himself a need to see this through, and it was a loathsome twist to see that same need etched clear in his son's face.

"I got a couple of favours to ask," Cain said, levelling his son with a glare. "I think it'd be wise to double the patrol on the route south of the gorge. To tell the truth, I wouldn't mind knowing what's been happening down that way these past few days."

His son seemed indecisive for a moment, but then he let his head hang with a sigh. The tension went out of his arms and he sat heavily in his chair, which groaned loudly as it absorbed the abuse.

"I'll do you one better," said his son, tired suddenly, deflated, defeated. "I'll send my best scout with you."

Wyatt said nothing, torn between trusting his son's judgement or his own instincts steering him toward that polite decline he'd passed over earlier with Azkadellia. Once more, however, he went with what his head told him was the wisest course, and not what his heart vaguely hinted was the right thing to do.

"Yes, sir," Wyatt said, smirking. Jeb's head shot up, and he smiled. It was a refreshing sight.

After, they had talked for another hour or more, going over maps and what reports Jeb could sort out of the mess of his filing system. Kid was in dire need of an assistant, but Cain knew he was putting it off. In all likelihood, it was only a matter of time before one of the guild leaders finally showed his face in Central. The general would bend his knee and pledge his men to Lavender, and Jeb would quietly step out of these too-big shoes he'd been valiantly filling.

Then, maybe –

By the time Cain had left the city garrison, it was late. He hailed a taxi and rode back to the palace in silence. The driver stared overlong after he'd dropped Cain off at the gates to the palace grounds. It was an occurrence that was becoming more and more commonplace here in the city, his face recognized, his deeds known, and it was taking a good deal of getting used to. He wondered if he'd ever manage it.

The palace was dark, and quiet. The halls were all but empty, only the occasional guard posted to some stairwell or another, a door here or there. Little heed was paid to a tired old Tin Man as he walked the dim-lit halls, destined for bed and bad dreams.

Midnight had come and gone by the time he reached the rooms that had been given over for his use while he remained in Central. In no uncertain terms was it assumed his stay would be a long one. Still, it was clean and spacious, and it afforded a view of the Hall of Histories.

Comfortable, he would have called it, if not for the young woman standing at his window, dressed for bed and staring out at his view.

"I figured you'd be getting a bit anxious," he said, shutting the door a little harder than he'd meant to. The sight of her didn't make him happy. She smiled at him, which only made it worse. "What are you doing here?"

"You can't fool me, Cain," DG said, her smile never faltering in the face of his curt manner. "I know how this story goes. You're about to disappear on some secret mission, and if I don't find out what it is before you leave, curiosity might get the better of me before you get back, and then who knows <\/i>what would happen."

"Wouldn't want that," he muttered, distracted by her presence and the shadows and the soft filtered light.

"Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to tell me what you're up to."

"Seems to me like your logic is a bit glitched there, DG." He proceeded to turn on a few lights, chasing the shadows to the corners of the room so that they might not play tricks with his eyes. The brightness only served to bring out the fresh honesty he so often saw in her face, those sky eyes of hers dancing with interest despite the late hour and his halfhearted indifference.

"My logic is perfectly sound," she said, rolling her eyes at him. "Quit stalling."

Cain sighed. "It's nothin' to get excited over. Got to pick up a prisoner from down south. Shouldn't take more than a couple of days."

"Oh," she said, and her mouth twisted dubiously. "Well, that was easy."

He couldn't help but smile. "Sorry to disappoint. Now, listen, I got four hours to sleep, and –"

"Since when do you transport prisoners?"

When he scowled at her, she batted her eyelashes in return, trying to look innocent. She hadn't left the window, and she drummed her fingers idly on the sill, a rare instance of patience, and if he had all the time in the world, he might have called her bluff, but he only had four hours and so he grumbled, and sat himself down in the nearest arm chair.

"Since I'm the one that locked him up," he said, leaning back. It was easy enough to gauge her reaction by the way the news sent her fidgeting.

"Zero," she said, and when he nodded, she exhaled long and low and loud. "Well, that's a relief, I guess."

"Why's that?"

As happened so often, DG took a sudden interest in the floor as she muttered her answer, words she seemed hesitant to give voice. "When you didn't – well, he was gone, so I thought –"

"You thought I'd finally killed him," he suggested softly. Timidity did not become the princess; she was made far tougher, made for more than sighing and simpering. Those bold blue eyes were meant for piercing a man's soul, not for skipping away with indecision and guilt. "I won't lie to you, princess, the thought crossed my mind more than once," he said, and she looked up at him, all surety and bittersweet faith.

"Well then, I guess you do have to go," she said, and sheepishly brought her hands up to hide her face. Almost immediately apologetic, she made straight for the door. "I really didn't know, Cain, I'm sorry. I should let you sleep."

Later on, he'd think back and be surprised at how fast he jumped up to catch her by the arm as she rushed by. Something had flustered her and fast, and he wanted to know what it was. She stiffened, and refused to look him in the eye, but that didn't stop him from noticing the blush in her cheeks.

"What's got you so worked up all of a sudden?" he asked, and belatedly wondered if he wanted to know the answer.

"There's a distinct lack of communication around here," she said, and shook her head, frowning deeply.

"Sorry to say, Deege, but you better get used to it," he said. "You're not in Kansas anymore."

She sighed. "That's for damn sure."

It felt almost spiteful to remind her of this, but he felt he had to say the words, give voice to that uncomfortable truth. Central City was far from safe. In these early days of their hard-won victory, life in the realms was still bound by courtesy and driven by intrigue and ambition. Even now, the guild leaders played their games, waiting to be courted and favoured, holding out and holding each other back.

Cain had glimpsed this world once, had a brief taste of its bitter fruit in the days he'd shadowed the Mystic Man. This was the world DG had been born into, one she didn't remember. The kid might have considered herself mature enough on the other side of the rainbow, but when it came to life in the Zone, she still had a bit of growing up to do.

"You keep your head up in council while I'm away, you hear me?" he said. "You can catch me up when I get back."

"Sure thing," she said, and the watery little smile she gave him tugged a bit at his strings, just when he was attempting to give her a good guilting. It did not improve his mood any, but when she gave him that shy, sweet look – he gave her arm a squeeze, meaning it to be comforting, but in the next moment she turned into him and hid her face in his shirtfront. The abrupt increase in contact startled him, and he stood frozen, very suddenly hyper-aware of the fact that she was in her nightclothes and she wasn't supposed to be there.<\/i>

"DG –"

"Just be careful, <\/i>okay?" she said, so quiet and quick, and muffled into his chest that he scarcely made it out at all. She sagged a little, all the fluster and frustration slipping away. She was so warm<\/i>, solid and slender, and he sighed, and gave in, and wrapped an arm around her back if only to hold onto that little bit of contentment for just a minute more.

"Say you'll be careful," she said again, and her hands curled about his collar.

He hesitated, not wanting to give her any promises when he wasn't so certain himself how it would all play out. But when she looked up at him all doe-eyed and trusting and her thumbs brushed against his skin, he found himself saying, "You know I will," and wondering if he would come to regret it in the end.<\/p>

Chapter Five<\/a> |  Chapter Seven<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p>
<\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:91000","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/91000.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=91000"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2013-01-19T00:29:53Z","updated":"2013-01-19T00:49:13Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Index<\/b>:  Table of Contents here<\/a>.

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>

'Til Kingdom Come<\/b>

Chapter Five<\/b><\/p>

DG<\/i><\/p>


It was an ambush, and Cain had been in on the whole thing.

Well, that second part was debatable, but at that exact moment in time, DG was feeling none too charitable. She was, however, feeling ready to bolt and she wasn't sure why. She certainly hadn't been made to feel unwelcome, she hadn't been chastised, propositioned, or otherwise berated, but she had a nasty, twisting feeling in the pit of her stomach that by the end of her visit with her mother, she'd find herself agreeing to do something that she didn't really agree with at all.

"More tea, darling?"

"No, thank you, Mother." Two cups were enough.

From her position by the window, her mother smiled. She was a vision of loveliness, and DG had been watching her carefully as she'd moved about the sitting room, directing the pair of pretty maids who worked tirelessly to give the suite a deep clean that was ten years overdue. Today they were pulling down the heavy draperies to send to the cleaner.

Outside the windows, evening was falling fast and the glass was filled with reflection and lamplight, and it wasn't long after the offer of a third cup of tea that her mother dismissed her servants with their armloads of dusty velvet drapery. Once the door had clicked softly closed behind them, her mother turned toward her, brushing her hands off on her trousers as if she'd been the one up on the ladder.

"I'm proud of you," she said, though she didn't look happy about it.

DG wrinkled her nose. She'd missed council. It had to be a trick.

"I know that the couple who cared for you left the city today," Lavender went on. "Your father suggested last night that you might try to sneak out to see them."

Huh. That, she hadn't been expecting. With a kingdom at stake and the outer realms swarming with deserted Longcoats, she would have thought the least of her parents' concerns would be what was running through her <\/i>mind. Well, then. "I thought about it," she admitted carefully.

Her mother's serious expression softened. "And yet you did not go. When you missed the meeting, I was worried that you had."

DG squirmed a little. Sentimentality was not her thing, but her mother seemed to wear it like perfume, and it made her horrifically uncomfortable. "I just needed some time to think."

Her mother smiled, actually smiled<\/i>. "And what did you discover, my angel?"

"I discovered –" and here she paused, and sighed, thinking of the dead gardens and her Kansas parents and Cain. "I discovered that I need more time to think."

Her mother's smile fell; DG could almost hear <\/i>it shatter like so much brittle ice. "I wish with all my heart there were time for us to mend ourselves," Lavender said sadly, and she took her daughter's hands in her own. DG looked at her, wishing with all her <\/i>heart that she had the words to both comfort her mother and put the entire god-awful situation to an end.

"I was not so foolhardy as to think for even a moment we would all come out of this unscathed, but nor could I ever have imagined the terrible circumstance we now find ourselves in. I would have thought it impossible."

DG didn't like the sound of that. What had happened at that meeting? She replayed what Cain had told her in her mind – an ambush on a supply train? As far as she could recall, since the end of the war there had been three ambushes in as many weeks, and none of the other attacks had left her mother in such a bereft state. No, something else was going on, something she was certain she was meant to understand – if she could just figure out what it was.

"There will come a time for our wounds to heal," her mother said wistfully, almost as if she were trying to convince herself it was so. "Time enough, once we've finished. There is still so much left to accomplish."

"Mother –"

"Would that it had all ended at the tower. We're in need of such a happy ending," Lavender said, and her grip on her daughter's hands tightened.

DG tried her best not to wince. She frowned, and gave up pretence all together. "Mother, I don't really understand," she said.

"I know, darling," her mother said, and gave her daughter's hands a gentle squeeze before letting her go. "I find it difficult to comprehend at times, myself. For now, know this: there are still battles to be fought before we can consider ourselves safe."

This time, DG couldn't help but cringe, her throat cinching. "More fighting?"

Lavender reached out to brush her fingers over her daughter's hair; it was a struggle to sit still, to stop herself from jerking away from a gesture that was meant to be motherly, that would <\/i>have been motherly if she were just more daughterly. Her mother's hands were soft, familiar, but it just felt alien<\/i> still, and she just didn't know what to do<\/i>.

"Some battles are not fought with soldiers, but with words and deeds – and promises, too."

DG tried her best to hamper an aggravated sigh, but she still huffed a bit as she said, "Okay, Mother. I really need you to speak more plainly. I missed council, and I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're talking about."

Her mother's pretty lavender eyes searched her face, and DG wished she had something more to give than sheer exasperation. Like sentimentality, mind games and wordplay were just not her thing, and she'd read enough Martin to know that meant she wouldn't survive a day at court even if her mother did re-establish one, and that someday she might make an excellent pawn in the aspiring schemes of some dastardly mustachioed jackass.

"You know our position here is precarious," Lavender said, and DG nodded, though she was pretty sure precarious<\/i> was an understatement. "Our family's claim to the throne is a strong one, the strongest, but should the guilds protest it, or heaven forbid ally with each other to oppose us, we do not have the strength of arms to hold Central City."

This, DG knew. The resistance had fought to restore their lost queen to power, to put an end to the horror and hunger of the reign of the Sorceress, but after nine years without knowing if their queen still lived<\/i>, nine years of fighting the Longcoats as they ransacked the countryside searching for the emerald, the cause of the resistance had lost its way.

Whatever benevolent presence had been plucking the strings of fate must have had taken pity on their cause the day a rogue band of the fractured resistance had ambushed a prisoner transport to reunite Cain with his son. Without that singular spark of random chance, DG could not see how there ever could have been a hope <\/i>of stopping the Sorceress and her machine. Without the emerald, DG hadn't had a shred of proof as to who she was, and yet Jeb and his soldiers had trusted her – no, surely it hadn't been her <\/i>Jeb had trusted, but the man who'd stood at her back through it all.

Still, it was a comforting thought, and it gave her the courage to smile at her mother. "Will we be able to convince the generals otherwise? Make them see the light?"

Her sorry excuse of a joke made her mother frown. "I don't know, darling. Perhaps."

DG slumped back against the cushions, giving up on princess posture. Her mother's frown deepened, but that didn't bother her as much. "So what do we do?" she asked, looking down at her hands in her lap, at the discoloured upholstery, anywhere but into her mother's eyes, which could always manage to look both sorrowful and disappointed when she did meet them.

"For one thing, we don't miss any more council meetings," her mother chastised lightly, and DG summoned the decency to look sheepish. Maybe she should have slipped out to say goodbye to Hank and Emily after all; she had a feeling she was going to be regretting it for days.

"Whatever is decided to be the best course of action, I am certain you will fulfil your role with dignity and grace."

DG raised an eyebrow. "My role?"

Her mother took her hand again, but instead of squeezing her fingers comfortingly as she had before, she turned DG's hand over and ran an absent thumb over her unmarked palm. "Astor always said there was great power in you, darling, did you know?"

Something inside DG's chest tightened. "I remember him saying something like that." She closed her eyes. Remembered? It was branded in her mind forever, an ugly memory that was heavy with guilt and rust.

"Your sister is more powerful than you."<\/i>

"I don't wish to frighten you, DG," her mother said, "but there are difficult times ahead, and I must know that I can rely on you to help see our family through."

Family. Our <\/i>family.

DG had had a family once, a mother and a father and an old barn cat who would come when she called him, all blown away by a storm, whisked away, stolen away<\/i>, for a cause and a purpose and a destiny she hadn't known she had. <\/i>

She hadn't realized how much chasing the ghosts of the past would cost her. She'd gained so much more, true parents and a sister and her friends, <\/i>but what about what had been lost? Everything she had known, all the experience that had shaped the person she was had been based on a lie. Who was she if she wasn't what she'd left behind?

Can a house still stand when its foundations have been washed away?

"You can rely on me, Mother," she said, and the words were empty<\/i> words, but we believe what we want and she wanted <\/i>to believe.

"Soon we will know enough to plan our course out of this storm for good and all," Lavender said, and for a moment DG wanted to believe whatever it was that her mother believed because it sounded so much more reassuring than anything she could come up with. "I have faith that you will be up to whatever task I set you too."

She nodded quickly. "Of course I will." As soon as the words had slipped out of her mouth, DG got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that agreeing so readily, so blindly to her mother's wishes was no better than signing off on a contract without reading the fine print – or any print at all.

There was a knock on the door soon after, and her mother rose to answer it herself. DG watched her go, struck by the grace of movement her mother possessed, even when wearing a pair of trousers. The leather corset she wore over the outside of her blouse was cinched lightly to give better form to a slender body, one that DG herself had inherited. With her long hair braided down her back, this was as plain and simple as her mother ever dressed, and still she was the most beautiful creature DG had ever laid eyes on.

Her mother stood back to allow her guest entry. Tutor walked in, as big and solemn as he always was, glancing around the room nervously with his hands deep in his pockets.

She waved at him over the back of the sofa. "Hi, Toto."

Tutor looked surprised to see her. "Hello, DG. We missed you at council today."

"Yeah, I'm getting that," DG said unhappily. She was pretty sure she knew what was coming.

"Darling," her mother said, "there is business that I must attend to."

DG sighed, and smiled. See?

As much as it had made her dreadfully uncomfortable, she had thought that perhaps she and her mother had been coming to some sort of understanding, in an are we there yet? <\/i>kind of way – or perhaps Tutor was saving her from signing her life away to her family forever out of guilt.

Who knew?

"I'll see you tomorrow, Mother," she said, and left the room quietly. Whatever business the two of them had with each other, they saved it until after the door was shut behind her.

The corridors were dimly lit, cold, and completely empty. It was a welcome change from the glaring lamplight and warm stuffiness of her mother's rooms, and DG found herself slowing her steps to prolong the walk to her own rooms, where much of the same awaited her. Her thoughts, however, stayed back in her mother's suite.

It bothered her to no end that her mother had used words like plan, <\/i>and course<\/i>, and task<\/i>. And her personal favourite, the harbinger of all her mother's great and terrible words, storm<\/i>. Of all the words in all the worlds, that was the one that made her blood run cold, right up there with emerald <\/i>and flayer<\/i>, the ones that made her feet itch to start running and not stop until – well, never <\/i>seemed just about right to her.

But she couldn't. And she wouldn't, <\/i>because –

"Whoa there, kiddo, watch where you're going."

Because there were hands on her shoulders, and it was time she grew up.

"Sorry, Cain," she said, surprised by how many apologies she was making today.

"It's all right," he said, and let her go as fast as he'd grabbed her. DG paused, and gave him a more thorough look over. He seemed agitated, or rather, more <\/i>agitated than was normal for him. One step above growling and one step below putting a hand on his holster, had he been wearing one. "Just be more careful."

He made to step around her without further discussion, which only confirmed her suspicions. Angry, glaring avoidance. Something was definitely wrong, and somehow Cain's problems seemed far more appealing than her mother's. She didn't waste any time contemplating on just how messed up that sentiment was in and of itself, instead reaching out and snagging the tin man by the arm as he walked past.

"Whoa there, yourself, Tin Man. Where's the fire?"

"Listen, I gotta go –" He shot her an impatient glance that didn't quite meet her eyes. He'd set his lips into a hard scowl.

DG didn't let up her iron grip on his arm, which was tense and hot beneath her hands. He'd rolled his sleeves to the elbow sometime since she'd seen him last. She suddenly wished she'd kept her hands to herself, but it was that touch alone that seemed to have stopped him in his tracks.

"Cain, what's wrong?"

He sighed, and his shoulders slumped. He watched her for a moment before he said, "Looks like I have to go out of town for a couple of days."

"Oh," she said, and she cleared her throat before she continued, unhappy with how disappointed she sounded. "Wait, since when?"

He looked around, and even though they were utterly alone, DG could understand why he did so. The palace had always seemed a place where the walls could eavesdrop as they pleased, and tell the tales to those who knew the right questions to ask. It was unnerving, and creepy<\/i>, and it sent a shiver down her spine just to think about it.

"Don't think here's the best place to be talking about it," he said, and the look he gave her was hard, and she shrank back, finally letting her fingers slip off his arm, but he caught her hand and held it tight and what was<\/i> it with people and her hands tonight?

"Listen –" he began, but paused, looking down at her and thinking, brow furrowed and nostrils flaring. "Let me get a few things put in order, and I'll come see you before you go to sleep. I'll explain then, all right?"

She frowned. "Can't you at least tell me –"

"DG," he said firmly, and he dropped her hand like he'd only just then realized he was holding it. "Later. All right?"

She nodded, and he walked away without another word with heavy steps, shoulders weighted with burden. She watched him go, knife twisting in her heart, and she had to wonder why it was that she missed one damned council meeting, and the whole world went to hell.<\/p>

Chapter Four<\/a>  |  Chapter Six<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p>
<\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:90810","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/90810.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=90810"}}],"title":"\"The Price of Peace\" ","published":"2012-12-23T04:22:05Z","updated":"2015-01-30T17:03:52Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: ff_land"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: ashe (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: The Price of Peace<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Amorissy
Characters<\/strong>: Ashelia and her knight
Rating<\/strong>: PG
Summary: <\/strong>A personal recollection regarding the deciding of the fate of a daughter of kings.

Author's Note: <\/b>Written for Round 5.02, "The Beginning", in <\/a>ultima_arena<\/b><\/a><\/span> over at <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span>.



The Price of Peace<\/b><\/p>


The emissaries arrived before dawn. Their king had not travelled with them.

It was a dark and uncertain time. Talk of war had drowned out all else. The skies were watched, and the roads were thick with spies, and so it was that lesser men convened to discuss the fates of lands and rulers both, there in the sprawling city of Rabanastre.

I watched their arrival from a high window, a ghost in the shadow. Sunrise was only a pale whisper on the horizon. I should have been abed, yet I could not sleep. Alone, I had crept through darkened corridors to look on, unseen from my perch, a little bird of sweet voice and no words.

I was a timid thing, all those years ago. My hand had held neither blade nor bow.

That day, as every day, the sun rose scorching over the city. The palace remained quiet. Even I found it to be an idle day. My ladies dressed me in my lightest silks. Within me, my heart was leaden with worry.

The doors to the council chambers were closed. I imagined those weary old men within; their robes were grey, their faces, their hearts. Mumbling over their parchment, weighing trade and harvest, the costs of bread and labour. Discussing the worth of their treasuries.

Two kingdoms, akin in legacy, alike in prosperity. To forge a stronger union, my father had said.

Would that I had understood his sorrow then.

The day passed. The sun set. Darkness descended upon the desert. Beyond the city walls, the sands were still and silent.

After dinner, I retired to the gardens alone. I heard music drifting over the walls, languid, sultry, and distant. It made me brave. I took the quiet back ways into the depths of the palace.

The hall outside the council chamber was guarded. I lingered beneath a darkened arch, looking out over the garden. A hundred lanterns glowed in a verdant, fragrant sea.

The hour of midnight was nigh to striking when the doors finally opened. Out slipped a single man, a satchel secured at his side. I stepped out from behind the great sandstone pillar to watch him leave.

Then, the clangour of mail was behind me. I turned, caught. Too late to hide.

"My lady, you should not be here," said the knight, towering over me.

"I could not stay away," I said, watching the light of the council chamber spill out into the hall. No sound came from within. I stepped back once more to the protection of the pillar and the clinging gloom. With great hesitance, the knight followed.

"Is it finished, then?" I asked.

The knight nodded. "It is."

"That man carries our fates in his satchel," I said. "You will tell me."

"I cannot," he said, bowing his head. "I am sorry."

"I would hear it from you," I said. Boldly, I touched his unshaven jaw.

So solemn, the knight rested his hand upon mine. "Princess, you are to marry."

The knowledge weighed heavy with sorrow. Gently, his arm went about me as I trembled, and together we stood in the shadow, bound then, forever, by the sealing of my fate.<\/p>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:90543","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/90543.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=90543"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2012-11-23T23:04:40Z","updated":"2013-01-19T00:32:29Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Index<\/b>:  Table of Contents here<\/a>.

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.



'Til Kingdom Come<\/b>

Chapter Four<\/b><\/p>

Azkadellia<\/i><\/p>

Azkadellia's head was a lonely place. Her thoughts echoed<\/i>.

It was an unfortunate side effect of her sudden wholeness, one among so many others, but it was one affliction she could not escape, turning her days into wretched, ugly waking nightmares, because her thoughts were dark <\/i>things, full of pain and guilt and lingering doubt.

Was she still Azkadellia?

Was she still alive, herself, or some construct of flesh and blood, all dolled up in green?

Was she free<\/i>?

She didn't know, couldn't know, and as the days went on, marching slow, so did she.

It had become something of her custom to spend as much time alone as she was able to manage without drawing undue suspicion. It was an effortless endeavour. Her presence made people feel uncomfortable and conflicted, and so she stayed away. She did not begrudge it of them. She felt the same, truth be told, each and every time she stared into the mirror, trapped in her own skin. Her own<\/i> skin, hers, left behind when the witch was driven out, and she was stuck in her hollow flesh with her dark, echoing thoughts.

The days were much longer now, and the world more complicated.

She felt something of a shamed mother, wringing her hands at her pack of angry, unruly children, bound by circumstance, unable to speak, unable to act<\/i>. Those who'd laid down arms after the suns had broken out of their unnatural prison, these were not loyal men. These were the cowards, frightened of a witch, of the power she'd wielded.

Once upon a time. Now her magic sapped her energy, left her breathless and turned her limbs to water. It heated her blood and quickened its rush through her veins, sent her vision spinning, her head reeling.

Her sister petted her, praised her, told her the power would come again, and in those damn sad limpid pools that were her sister's eyes, Azkadellia could see herself reflected, a failure, a conspirator. No victim was she.

DG could never know.

Not that DG was her greatest worry. Ever. No, DG was trapped in her own little circle of oblivion, cycling through her guilt and her pain and her questions like she was caught up in a twister that carried her higher and higher and never set her down.

The others... Tutor, her mother, the ex-lawman who followed her sister's lead wherever it took her... she wondered, incessantly wondered, if they knew, if they could sense that Azkadellia's innocence was not as pure as DG proclaimed, that her soul was not as untarnished as everyone hoped, so desperately hoped.

As for her father, as for DG... there were times when Azkadellia could not bear to see the love in their eyes, the smiles on their faces at the very sight of her. They suffocated her with expectation, while her mother stood back and waited, always watching. As she rightly should. As they all <\/i>rightly should.

She was not immune to the whispers behind her back, to the questions that went unasked, nor the wariness in the eyes of those she loved. Just as her sister strove always to help<\/i>, Azkadellia, too, wanted nothing more than to return her home to its former glory, to come to the aid of her people, to save<\/i> something, if indeed there was anything left worth saving.

There was little could be done, but that little...

The idea had first come from Vysor as he'd quietly offered what council he could, a seed of thought to burrow its tendril-thin roots deep into her mind, to grow and flourish and consume her waking moments until it was all she could think about.

The only course. A chance. A long shot, to be certain, but – what choice did she have?

And so it was that the chain of events that began with a simple, soft-spoken suggestion brought Wyatt Cain into Azkadellia's apartments, standing as close to the door as he could without seeming rude, and then another step back for good measure. His hands were on his belt if only because the man seemed never to put them anywhere else, anchoring himself on the only strength he knew, his own self. He wore neither harness nor holster, his gun conspicuously absent from his new life within palace walls.

DG trusted him, wholly, completely. Blindly.

But could Azkadellia?

"Mr. Cain," she said, rising from her chair.

"Your Highness," was his required reply, and the bow of his head was stiff, a short jerk if nothing more. "You sent for me?" Eager as ever to be moving far and away from her and her requests. Familiar songs known by heart.

"I did," she said. "Would you please take a seat? I have little to offer but –"

"If it's all the same, I'd like to get this done." There was no anger in his voice, no coldness, but a certain detachment, an impatience that she couldn't ignore.

"Of course," she said, a little disappointed. She'd hoped to catch some measure of the man, this man who'd done so much to thwart so many of the witch's plans, this man who'd overcome everything that had been thrown at him – with help from DG and that certain, special luck of hers. He'd been beaten, imprisoned, chased, bitten, shot, tossed from a window, drowned, chased again, imprisoned again<\/i>; he'd lost his wife, his son, his land, annuals of his life, and still he'd played an crucial role in the ending of the war and the restoration of her mother's line.

He was the one.

"Mr. Cain," she began, "it was brought to my attention that you know the location of – well, a certain fugitive." His eyes narrowed, cutting through her, and she could have shivered for all the ice that was held there. She steeled herself as best she could, her hands on the back of an armchair to keep them still and herself steady, but she did not meet his gaze again for fear she would quail and quake and lose her nerve. "If he has gone into hiding –"

"He's not hiding," Wyatt Cain said evenly. "We locked him up, and good riddance."

"A wise course of action, to be sure," she said carefully, "but as you well know, our circumstances have changed."

"What circumstances?" he asked, and his words were a knife's edge, sharp and shining. His feet shifted, almost as if he meant to step closer to better see the lie in her eyes, but after a moment he thought better of it, and stayed where he was.

"You were present at this afternoon's council meeting," she said. "You are aware of the situation with the insurgents, and the attacks on our forces."

"'Course I'm aware," Wyatt Cain snapped, forgetting himself. "That don't mean –"

"Mister Cain<\/i>," Vysor said loudly, stepping forward from his darkened corner. "You will remember with whom you speak."

"Oh, I remember," said the ex-lawman. "Not like to forget."

Azkadellia watched as Vysor's face hardened, and while she'd become accustomed to such whispers, there were few who would dare to speak with such naked honesty in her presence. She might have found it refreshing if it did not leave her so saddened.

"Leave us," she said softly, and though she could read the objection in her advisor's eyes, he'd served too long under the Sorceress to be capable of insubordination. Vysor bowed his head – a graceful gesture, one of respect that softened the blow of Wyatt Cain's succinct statement – and he left the room without another word, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

"If you have concerns, I would hear them," she said, wanting to emulate the poise and poignancy of her mother, but she felt the blundering child trying to correct a mistake, tromping around in shoes far too big.

The Sorceress had never had much of a stomach for diplomacy, and Azkadellia truly felt lost in such matters, attempting to wrest what little control over her life she could. Her sister was determined to fix what wrongs they'd done. Was it her lead Azkadellia was meant to follow, or was she doomed to walk the road alone, no hope of a redemptive end?

"Trust me," said Wyatt Cain, smirking, "you don't want to be hearing what I've got to say."

"On the contrary," she said, "I am quite curious."

Wyatt Cain seemed to want none of it. "How did you find out about Zero?" he asked firmly, spitting out the name like so much foul poison.

"A rumour heard along the road," she said, purposefully evasive.

She did not tell Wyatt Cain that she'd just banished the source of her information from the room. Vysor's meddling, his ever efficient digging into the business of others that had yielded so much to the witch still remained at her disposal, though she was loath to put it to use. Wealth and fighters and spies, he'd delivered it all to the Sorceress, but never the emerald, that which she coveted above all else, and she'd have killed him for his failure but for the fact that the plans for the very tower she'd raised around her had been the result of his string-pulling and double-crossing. Her most trusted advisor. That singular feat had been his proving and had won his place at her side.

And so Vysor endured after the death of the Sorceress, the end of the war, and all the long, marching days that had come since. His loyalty belonged only to her, Azkadellia, not her family name nor the cause nor the country. Hers, and hers alone.

"What exactly is it you're wanting with Zero?" Wyatt Cain asked, his hard voice breaking into her thoughts with all the grace and subtlety of a thrown brick.

"I need his help," she said, and nothing more. Though she had nothing to hide, nothing to prove, she knew that without the man before her, her sister's guardian and friend, she would never find the one person with whom she had even the slightest chance of mending all she'd broken. The only chance she had at mending herself<\/i>.

"There's nothing that man can do for you, Your Highness," Cain said, not unkindly, but it was only the briefest glimpse of tenderheartedness afforded her before he'd steeled his gaze again. "He's better off where he is."

"That is not your decision to make, Mr. Cain," she said, forcing out the words lest she choke on them. She'd heard too much, knew too much, understood all too well what Cain had lost to the war and the Longcoats. What Zero had taken from him, and why...

"You don't know what you're asking," he said, and for the first time there was true emotion in his voice, something deep and sorrowful that played with the strings of her heart. Almost ironic, as there were those who believed she had no heart, that she'd lost it to the witch, or that it had become some black, twisted thing beating away inside of her.

"I know what I am asking of you, Mr. Cain, and I could ask it of no other."

"So I mark it on a map –"

"No," she said quickly, "it must be you."

Wyatt Cain narrowed his eyes at her. "Why?"

Azkadellia paused, gathering what courage she had. "Your discretion in such matters, for one," she said. "You are a trusted ally of my mother and sister. Also –" And it was here that she balked at such a vile admission, "– your effectiveness was noted by the witch. She found you particularly... troublesome. I would use that to our advantage. He must know from the beginning how the game has changed."

Wyatt Cain took a moment to respond, and it seemed to Azkadellia that he was chewing on what she'd said, but it wasn't until he finally spoke that she realized to some relief that he'd stomached it.

"And if I refuse?"

Azkadellia smiled, still an odd, empty gesture to her without such cruel amusement as the witch had always taken. "You and I both know you are in no position to refuse."

Where such certainty came from within her, she was sure she didn't know. Such moments of vexation were not unknown to her, always leaving her disquieted, unsettled. Remnants of another life, that other <\/i>life, moments and memories that could not be shaken off.

Cain glared at her, oblivious to her irresolution and making no attempt to mask his displeasure. He made a small growling noise in the back of his throat, and asked, "When do I leave?"

"Tomorrow, at first sunrise, I think shall suffice."

After he'd left, all but slamming the door behind him, Azkadellia collapsed into the nearest chair, her legs finished with holding her weight. She cared little for the small cloud of dust that escaped from the upholstery, and even less for crushing her gown with her poor posture. Her body, so accustomed to rigid brace and bearing, did not know how to just relax,<\/i> and she felt something of an abandoned marionette, dropped and left in a heap of wood and string. This was how Vysor found her.

"The Tin Man left here in quite the huff," he said, and there was a smug smirk on his face, familiar enough an expression to give her comfort even if his words left her cold. "He will undertake the journey, then?"

Azkadellia nodded, touching a soft hand to her brow. "Tomorrow. I want Captain Lindsey to accompany him."

"I'm afraid neither will be pleased to hear this news."

"That is of no concern to me," she said. "As long as the task is completed and Zero is brought to Central City, everything else is of little importance. You will help Captain Lindsey make his preparations. Everything must be ready."

"As you wish, Your Highness," Vysor said, and left quietly once more.

Alone, Azkadellia slowly rose from her chair, absently smoothing her hands over her gown. There was so much to be done, yet little she had to do herself.

Waiting, it seemed, was to be her task, and she would do it grudgingly, as she must.

For fifteen annuals, she'd waited so impatiently as the plans of the Sorceress had taken their shape, as the pieces had come together. So much pain and so many deaths, so many nights of struggle and weeping and cursing, she'd fought and lost and watched helpless as the words had come and her hands had acted and she'd begun to understand the futility in resistance, the hopelessness of fighting.

All the plans, all the pieces, and all it had taken was one little storm to bring it all to a shattering end.

The mirror above the desk showed her pale face, her wide, dark eyes. Reaching out, Azkadellia touched a slender hand to the glass, and sighed. What a coward she was, afraid to face her own reflection. She took a deep breath, and raised her eyes.

The sad, shamed woman in the glass shuddered and began to cry.
<\/p>

Chapter Three<\/a>  |  Chapter Five<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:90171","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/90171.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=90171"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2012-11-08T20:06:46Z","updated":"2012-11-23T23:09:05Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Index<\/b>:  Table of Contents here<\/a>.

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>

'Til Kingdom Come<\/b><\/p>

Chapter Three<\/b><\/p>

Cain<\/i><\/p>

Twenty-seven days.

Wyatt Cain was a free man, and had been for twenty-seven days.

So why the hell did it feel like his iron prison was closing in on him again?

It had been creeping on him for weeks, lurking in the shadows as it were. Can't shrug off a shadow. He wasn't one to let personal troubles interfere with what had to be done. That wasn't to say that the past few weeks had been a shining example of his control of character, but there it was again. The suit, affecting him in ways that were not easy to ignore or elude, let alone overcome.

Moving on meant walking forward, one damn step at a time, and he'd done that, was doing<\/i> that, and still that shadow dogged him, pestered and plagued him. The dreams were bad enough, pale and stained with bloody memories, night after night, those faces, always those faces, but he'd wake to sunlight and room to stretch, and the dreams would fade to nothing as he filled his time, his every waking minute, with substance and purpose.

Idle hands, or something; he had thought the work would distract him. He had thought being useful would help<\/i>. By the gods, it had to be better than doing nothing<\/i>.

Now, he wasn't so sure.

It was Jeb that had been the deciding factor, that final push that had made up Wyatt's own mind to stay in Central City to do what he could, though that seemed to be little enough as it was – aside from keeping his mouth shut. With the guilds divided and fighting amongst themselves and no standing army to speak of, Jeb's meagre company was all the O.Z. had in the way of white knights, protectors of all that was good and pure, the kittens, the daisies, and the light.

The resistance, damaged men and broken women and hungry children. It was enough to make a man want to close his eyes and never hope to open them again. Sometimes Cain thought he could become that man, turn his head and let it all pass him by, but then the dreams would come on him in the darkness and he'd wake to more sunlight, more substance and purpose, and his cycle would begin again.

That first night after the tower had fallen, though – no, he hadn't been prepared for that.

It hadn't started to itch at him until second sundown, hadn't started to twist inside of him like some serpent coiling around his tender, beating heart. He'd felt strangely empty, that much he remembered clearly, even if the rest was fogged with the fondness of memory. Hollow<\/i> was a good word for it, he supposed, all hollow. Each damned heartbeat had echoed loudly in his ears.

He'd taken refuge with his son, one tent among dozens sprung up at the base of the tower since the fighting had come to its tentative standstill. Something about the canvas had put him at ease, where the oppressive marble opulence of the tower rooms had left him cold and wanting.

Outside, the air should have been ringing with celebration but was instead heavy with loss, and every heart was filled with questions and no answers. The dead were still being recovered from inside the tower, and the field medics were barely coping. His own son had been called on to identify the dead, and he'd returned to his tent wide-eyed and pale, and what remained of Cain's heart had broken a bit then, for a past he could not mend and a future he could not give, for a son who was no son and all he had left in the world.

Reports from the scouts were trickling in: near to half the enemy force had fled, the lines broken the very moment the suns had come back out. Even the resistance was not without deserters, men who'd gone back to homes in the bordertowns, or what little remained of them, gone home to families and farms, gone home to forget.

It was meant to be victory. The men and women who surrounded the fires blazoning in the night, these resistance fighters had set out to overthrow an wicked witch, a tyrant. None yet knew they'd saved a princess from an evil spell. He remembered wondering if any of them would ever truly believe.

And so he'd sat with his son amongst the trappings of the meagre existence of life on the run. The talk had been all business, talk of tactics and supplies and casualties. So many casualties, and the greatest of all lingered over them as a ghost. It had been remarkably easy to avoid such matters of the heart as existed between them; there among the maps and the men was where both excelled. If either had admitted to taking comfort in the presence of the other, it wasn't said aloud.

They had spoken on the resistance. They had spoken on the men, on scouts and generals alike. They had spoken on the weather, the state of the Old Road. They had not spoken on Adora, nor on the suit that held the man who had killed her, somewhere in the southern wilds, waiting for salvation or justice or death.

"Can we expect reinforcements?" he remembered asking, and too remembered how the fleeting look of worry that crossed his son's face had unsettled him deeply.

"Can't say," Jeb had said heavily. "Most of them will probably just drop arms and go home. Only ones you can expect to head this way are the ones without a home left to go to."

Wyatt had stared down at the map spread open on the table, the most recent that Jeb had to offer. He remembered how much it had saddened him to see how the lines had changed since he'd last laid eyes on them. The guild boundaries had been redefined in all five realms, the towns he remembered – including the one he'd been born in – had been wiped away as if they'd never existed. The northern and southern palaces were missing as well.

It could almost have been an entirely different world, but even then in the wake of the battle, Wyatt Cain had known better. Lines of ink were just that, nothing more than an observer's depiction, heavily biased by the weight of the Sorceress' regime. He had imagined then there would only be a few weeks of respite before fighting picked up between the guilds over territory claims.

It had been a generous estimation, proven wrong within only a few days, and the weeks since had not been any kinder.

Necessity had found the royal family moving to the safety of the city, but it wasn't necessity that had found him moving with them. It was his son, those heavy duties he'd taken on from a man he refused to speak of – and that was what Cain kept telling himself, all these weeks later. It was his son, it was for his son, for the cause, for the future of his homeland.

It had nothing to do with a pair of sky blue eyes. It continued to have nothing to do with that, either, even as she turned those eyes on him and stared him down, daring him, daring him to do something<\/i> and damn it, he had yet to figure that part out.

"You don't have any idea what she wanted?" DG asked him then, her jaw set to determined.

She wanted to know about her mother, and the council meeting she'd skipped. Playing hooky was exactly the kind of thing he would have chalked up to the kid before the tower, before reality had set in and made her a bit more serious and sad.

"Not a mind reader," he said, a simple passing remark, but it wasn't until he'd glanced over his shoulder that he saw he'd touched on a sore spot. "Listen, kid, I'm just here to deliver you to your mother, not to play at guessin' games." He didn't like the look on her face, that look <\/i>she got, the one that made him think his heart just might split in two for the sweet sorrow of it.

They continued on in silence after that, her tromping along in the lead, all pluck and spine. If it had been any other moment in time, the absence of conversation would have been a welcome change, if only because it put an end to her incessant grilling of her mother's intentions. What vexed him was that of the council meeting itself, she'd asked very little, and now it seemed she'd ask no more at all. He had never expected her to have much of an interest in supplies and skirmishes – he himself sometimes had trouble forcing the concern at the council table. Under any other circumstance, he'd expect her to be brimming with questions. Her sudden quiet was just disquieting<\/i>, because when it came to DG, one never knew what wheels were turning beneath that crown of tumbledown curls, and that could be a downright dangerous thing.

The twist of dreary passages she led him down played tricks on his mind. A lifetime before, there'd been a time or two he'd set foot in the royal palace, accompanying the old man whether the call had been business or leisure. He remembered a more vibrant place, unending opulence, lush colour and rich fabrics, full of glass and greenery and enough mirrors to give just about anyone a fixation. He remembered a young queen, a doting consort. The princesses, he'd never laid eyes on in those days, but for the rare picture appearing in the newspaper, grainy and unflattering, two pale cherubs with wide, sombre eyes.

And now, all these annuals later, here he was again in this faded place, barely reminiscent of old glories, and here beside him walked his princess, grown up pretty but still pale, still sombre. The girl trusted him, looked up to him, called him friend.<\/i>

But in those sky eyes, he sawwhat she tried so damn hard to hide, he saw<\/i> and he knew better. It was why he'd grown accustomed to her sudden silences, and why they bothered him so. As to what to do about it, he was at a loss. Ignoring it seemed the only tried and true method, and so to this he adhered, day in and day out while the kid drifted farther and farther away from him.

If things were different...<\/i>

He looked down at DG walking beside him, and he was both distracted and distraught by her intense interest in her shoelaces.

"Deege," he finally tried, and she glanced up to give him a crooked grin, and he couldn't tell if she was trying to throw him off with a feigned calm or if she'd truly wrestled free of whatever had been eating at her.

"It's okay, Cain," she said, and if her smile was not genuine, she was fooling him just fine. "I'm sure she'll understand if I just explain to her why I missed council."

"If you're sure," he said, all the while knowing she wasn't.

It wasn't long before they came upon her mother's residence, a set of heavy doors at the end of a wide, empty, echoing hall, flanked by a pair of young men of an age with the princess at his side. Both wore woollen scarves knotted round their necks, faded and frayed but still clinging to the red of their cause.

"Thanks, Cain," she said, stopping to smile at him once more, eyes flickering indecisively across his face. "Will I see you tomorrow?" she asked, giving him a prompting little nod.

"'Course you will," he said, because what could<\/i> he say other than the truth, to reassure her he wouldn't up and leave, no one would up and disappear, that even if she woke up tomorrow with a head full of fog in a bed in an attic on the other side of the rainbow, she would still know she hadn't been left or forgotten, that it all hadn't been some awful, wonderful dream.

And because there were guards in the hall, he kept his hand off her shoulder, off her elbow or her back or wherever it had become his custom to extend that gesture of comfort and friendship, and his fingers curled into his palm to stop the twitch and the itch. If she noticed, she kept it to herself, though that overlong look she gave him was enough to tighten his fists and force him to turn before – well, just before<\/i>, and he left it at that, left her there, and walked away.

It was no good, and it was getting worse.

He'd never intended to go down this road – that was how the argument began in his head, every damn time. It was familiar to him, this back and forth over heavy truth and bitter reality and that consistent pull of want <\/i>and can't <\/i>that was never, ever satisfied.

At times, it shamed him, other times intrigued him, left him daydreaming, left him laying awake at night. Then, his dreams would come over him, as dreams were meant to do, and he'd wake twisted and uncertain and sick with guilt and the prospect of carrying the weight of it around his neck for the rest of his days. Because, really, what was one more weight to one such as him.

Old arguments, easily put aside. These were his thoughts when he heard his name called, and he stopped trying to find his way back to his own quarters and turned toward the voice.

The man chasing after him was Carver Lindsey, a young field captain of the Sorceress' army who'd been there during the resistance siege. A man who had very recently found himself in command of the few remaining units, gaining with it a seat on Lavender's council and far too many problems. He was a handful of annuals older than Jeb, and like most of the young men who'd joined the war late, he seemed to have more balls than sense.

"Something I can do for you?" he asked, biting off the courtesy of addressing the man by rank. Even with the war over, and with the man in front of him never having done him a wrong, he was still grievously bitter.

"The princess is requesting a moment of your time," said Captain Lindsey, with the wry smile that said it was not a request.

"I just came from DG not ten minutes ago," Cain said, making no attempt to mask his impatience. "Whatever it is, it can't be that important that she didn't tell me then."

"Princess Azkadellia is requesting a moment of your time," the young captain corrected.

"She making it a habit to send you with her messages?" Cain asked, raising an eyebrow.

Lindsey scowled at him. "I carry out my orders without question, sir. I suggest you do the same."<\/p>

Chapter Two<\/a>  |  Chapter Four<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p><\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:89986","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/89986.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=89986"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come - Complete Index","published":"2012-11-05T03:01:14Z","updated":"2013-01-24T02:25:50Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"writing: complete index"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Status<\/b>:  Work in progress

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.


Table of Contents<\/b>

Chapter One<\/a>  |  Chapter Two<\/a>  |  Chapter Three<\/a>  |  Chapter Four<\/a>
Chapter Five<\/a>  |  Chapter Six<\/a>  |  Chapter Seven<\/a><\/div>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:89671","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/89671.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=89671"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2012-11-05T02:49:41Z","updated":"2012-11-08T20:09:33Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  OCs, some new, some appearing from my Emerald 'verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo.
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>

'Til Kingdom Come<\/b><\/p>

Chapter Two<\/b><\/p>

DG<\/i><\/p>


Everything was dead.

Everything was dead because of her.

That there was an ugly, sobering truth, but it had been sinking in for few weeks now, and DG was finally beginning to feel that she was coming to better terms with her guilt. After all, it wasn't making her weepy anymore, and most days there were only a few things that could set off that sickening feeling twisting in her stomach, or that suffocating heaviness expanding in her chest.

Only a few<\/i> things.

Still, sometimes when she was alone, it crept over her, all quiet and consuming, and she just gave it time to sink in a little further, roots growing so deep as to become a part of everything she was. What else could she do? Running wasn't an option, neither was hiding, and actually facing<\/i> her troubles seemed so impossible. The severity of it, that grand, encompassing scale, her little stone sent skipping and all those far-reaching ripples. One little mistake to shake the very foundations of the world.

All right, maybe that was pushing it. Yet it was hard at times to keep her secret shames in check. Especially when it surrounded her as it did now.

She'd tucked herself away in one of the gardens, in need of a little peace. The palace was full of these little hidden enclaves, untended solariums and overgrown balconies, conservatories resting abandoned beneath broken panes of lead glass. There was even a terraced courtyard that had once been a vegetable and herb garden behind the main kitchens. She'd found so many of these places and more during her explorations, and had a feeling she'd never come close to finding them all. She wasn't sure she'd wanted to.

Because everything was dead.

She'd returned to an old haunt, hiding herself with the deliberate knowledge that she was expected to be somewhere else. She just didn't have it in her to listen to more bad news, not just then. She was too damn tired. She slept strangely here in the O.Z., and she didn't know why. It didn't help matters that her new bed was three times the size of the one she'd slept in almost every night of her life.

Every night of her life that she could recall, anyway. This new bed, fourpostered, headboarded, and huge<\/i>, her father had told her that it had always been hers, the bed and the room and the view, even though she'd only stayed in Central City a handful of times as a child, and never for long.

"Place definitely isn't for kids," <\/i>her father had said, with a sad smile and a weary shrug.

As she looked around the forgotten solar, she couldn't help but agree.

Still, of all the lonely, empty, ruined rooms she'd wandered through in the past few weeks, this place was by far her favourite. A little brighter than the rest, there was still colour here beneath the layers of dust. The walls were lined with empty cabinets with doors of delicate stained glass, symbols and figures she couldn't place or name, but she hoped someday to know. The shelves were empty; what they'd once held, she could only guess. Trinkets and shiny things perhaps, taken or stolen when the city fell.

It wasn't exactly a happy place, but it felt safe. She always managed to come back, each time the path a little more familiar, a little less frightening. This section of the palace was almost deserted, and she tried to enjoy it while she could. Someone was going to come looking for her eventually. After all, there was somewhere else she was supposed to be.

It was late in the afternoon when she finally heard the telltale echo of footsteps that signified DG-time had come to its end. She was standing by the windows, chair abandoned, book forgotten as she'd become distracted by the view and the rhythm of the city. The windows looked out over the north side, the spindly towers glinting silver and bronze in the light of the suns. The far muddy shores of the lake were just visible over the wall, and it was the causeway that she was watching, and the people and vehicles on it that held her attention when the footsteps grew louder and the doorway darkened.

"Kiddo, I'm gonna need you to explain something to me."

She turned her head. "Now there's a switch," she said, smiling.

Wyatt Cain stepped into the solar with all the delicacy and discomfort of a man who knew he didn't belong. Fallen ivy leaves were crushed to powder beneath his heavy steps as he came into the room one, two, three paces. It seemed as far from the door as he was willing to allow himself to get, and he stood there as a man holding his ground, waiting for her to make her move.

DG didn't have any moves for him, but she didn't have to ask to know why he was there. "How did you find me?" she asked instead, still all light and smiles and she found it more exhausting than hauling her guilty burdens with her wherever she went.

Strange, that.

Cain offered her a half-smile. "Listened to the guard that said 'she went that way'."

"Oh," she said, slightly disappointed. Perhaps bribes were in order.

"Now, back to you explaining why I'm getting dragged to this council of your mother's and you're up here playing hide-and-seek by yourself."

"Not by myself. You found me, you win." She grinned then, a real one that made her cheeks ache. Maybe she needed to start smiling more.

Cain scowled at her, in no mood for games. "Wasn't looking to win, DG."

"Did you take notes at the meeting?" she asked, with less of a smile, feeling a new twinge of guilt. Not much, just enough to make her feel bad and wish she'd put a little more consideration into her afternoon plans. Perhaps gone to hide somewhere she wouldn't be found so easily. Maybe next time.

Only, one look at Cain's face told her that next time<\/i> wasn't going to be for a good long while.

"Another ambush," he said. "Jeb lost three men."

She chewed on the inside of her lip a moment, wrestling with thoughts far bigger than they'd a right to be. She knew she was supposed to distance her heart from these soldiers, these strangers<\/i>, but she didn't know how and the struggle inside left her feeling sick and confused. It strained something in her, like the splitting of seams and she fought it as she fought everything, a mad scramble to keep it all from tearing open.

She'd always been good at holding the pieces together.

"Was there anything else?" she asked, turning her back on the window for good to face Cain.

"Your mother wants to see you," was all he said.

"So she sent you to come and find me?" She frowned, unsure why this revelation was so disappointing, but for the fact that it made her feel suddenly uncomfortable and brought on the quick realization that Cain stood between her and the door. Lovely.

"She didn't send me," he said, "but I had a guess as to where you'd be."

Again, more sinking unhappiness. "Well, you found me," she said. A little redundant, but he'd had yet to move, except to tuck his thumbs into his belt to show her he wasn't planning<\/i> on moving. She looked away from him, stared at the floor and the scattered drifts of ivy leaves, star-shaped and brittle. The trellises on the wall held only naked vines.

"I win," he said quietly, smirking. "Now why're you hiding up here, kid?"

She rolled her eyes at this shameless winkling for information, but as he had quite effectively trapped her in a corner with what promised to be no small amount of effort on his part, she didn't see much use in putting up resistance.

"Come here, I want to show you something."

There was a moment of hesitation from him, brief but there<\/i> and she hated herself for noticing. He came though, boots heavy and dull against the floor, and the leaves beneath them crumbled to dust. And for all she'd come to rely on his steady presence at her back, it was different now, changed<\/i> and she hated herself for that too, for all the hope that had blinded her to the grim reality she'd fought for, a new future that stretched on into forever.

Miles to go.

Right<\/i>.

"The council chamber's got a view just as pretty as this one," Cain said, utterly impassive.

"I needed some time alone," she said, the truth caught like a burr on her tongue.

"You're gonna have to do better than that," he said, and she knew he was right. He'd told her often enough that she spent far too much time alone already, that hiding in her room wasn't going to make the world go away. She'd gotten angry the last time he'd mentioned it, his blue eyes filled with that wearying concern. She'd demanded what right he had to reprimand her, when he chose to spend so much of his own time locked up all by his lonesome. He'd said that after eight annuals, he was just used<\/i> to it, in a voice so low she'd scarcely heard and she'd wanted to die from shame.

She looked at him, considering. As much as it damaged her pride to admit, for everything that had happened the very least she owed him was a little bit of truth now and then. After all, he was still there<\/i> when she'd half expected him to disappear into the smoke after the tower had fallen. Still there, and watching, and helping, and attending boring meetings on her behalf and bringing her the bad news to take alone.

It was almost camaraderie. It was almost comfortable.

Almost<\/i>.

She wanted out of there.

"I was saying goodbye," she said, and she half-expected the suns to cloud over and the city to go dark and the world to come crashing down on top of her head, but the only thing that happened<\/i> was a hand descending on her shoulder, heavy and strong and where was the damn lightning<\/i>?

"Goodbye to what?" he asked in that oddly gentle way he had, he who was all bristle and grumble and growl.

She pressed her forehead to the glass, to better block his reflection from her field of vision so she couldn't see<\/i> his face and the way he watched her.

"Hank and Emily left today," she explained, feeling childish and cornered. "Out the north gate."

Cain sighed, and gave her shoulder a squeeze. She wondered if it was possible to die of frustration.

"Council chamber looks out over the west side," he said, and then paused, and she imagined him measuring out his words very carefully, his jaw set firm against useless sympathy. "When was the last time you saw them?" he asked finally, almost casually, because really, <\/i>what could he say? She could have almost felt bad for him, if she hadn't been concentrating so hard on not feeling anything at all.

"I saw them for a few minutes when we came to Central City," she said, disappointed in how miserable she sounded. "They didn't know me. They were very happy to meet me."

"I'm sorry, kiddo." The hand on her shoulder slid down to rest on her upper arm, fingers wrapped round still heavy and still strong and she was beginning to suspect she would never be so lucky as to be struck down by lightning.

"Me too," she sighed, and her words fogged the glass and hazed out the world.

"You ready to head downstairs?" he asked.

"No," she said, but turned away from the window anyway, away from the city and the bridge and all those people down below waiting and eager for the bright new future she'd supposedly given them. The smile she gave Cain was the smile she was certain she'd give to them<\/i>, those hungry, hollow, hopeful people who thought she'd come to save the world.

Only, Cain saw her smile for the lie it was and that was trouble<\/i>.

"Cheer up, kid," he said, dropping his hand and she wasn't supposed to wish he'd put it back, and pull her close and hold her until the universe righted itself and she could breathe and rest and live. "I'll walk you down."

Her stomach twisted unpleasantly. Come to see her do her duty, that was Cain, and she was still cornered and there was no escaping him. Damn it.

"How mad was she?" she asked.

"Hard to tell," he said, and then his hand was warm on the small of her back to give her a little nudge toward the door, and she wondered what she'd done to deserve this very special hell – and then she remembered, and she struggled for that newly-found grim resolution that had gotten her through so much during the eclipse, but it was nowhere to be found, not here, not with him. "I don't know why you're worried," Cain went on, so unaware. "She doesn't look the yelling type."

DG gave a laugh, made small by tension. "You should see her disappointed face," she said.

"I can imagine," he said, and perhaps she<\/i> was imagining it, but the tightness of his voice gnawed at her all the way downstairs.
<\/p>

Chapter One<\/a>  |  Chapter Three<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:89534","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/89534.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=89534"}}],"title":"'Til Kingdom Come","published":"2012-11-01T18:49:03Z","updated":"2012-11-05T03:08:19Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 16+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: 'til kingdom come"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"

Title<\/strong>: 'Til Kingdom Come, Part One
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James

Characters<\/strong>: Everyone ever.  Major and minor series characters.  New OCs and quite a few from my Emerald 'Verse.
Pairings<\/b>:  It's complicated.  Past Cain\/Adora, eventual Cain\/DG, canon Lavender\/Ahamo
Rating<\/strong>: 16+

Summary<\/strong>:  Being a somewhat fabricated, but mostly accurate, history of the Outer Zone, therein concerning the aftermath of the Emerald War and the restoration of the House of Gale.<\/p>

Author's Note<\/b>: This part and chapter include the introduction of Carver Lindsey, a.k.a. the Hot Longcoat from the final battle at the end of the mini-series. <\/a>miller0259<\/b><\/a><\/span>  has an icon<\/a>.<\/p>

Concerning the Rating<\/b>: It will change when the plot dictates. Consider yourself warned if you don't want to start a story that will eventually change in rating.

Disclaimer<\/b>: Do not own, though I'd probably treat it better.
Spoiler Warning<\/b>: For everything, ever.<\/p>

'Til Kingdom Come<\/b><\/p>


Part One<\/b><\/p>

"Hm!" said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. "If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?"<\/i><\/p>

"I really do not know," replied the man, with a deep sigh. "Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron."<\/i><\/p>

L. Frank Baum, The Marvellous Land of Oz<\/u>

Chapter One<\/b><\/p>

Lavender<\/i><\/p>

The council table in the Silver Hall was made seat thirty-two. A great behemoth of heavy pearlwood and ornately carved serpentine, the table was as old as the palace itself. It dominated the council hall, this ancestral table, a shadowed ghost of what had once been. From the high gallery that overlooked the hall, another fifty or more people could stand to look on and listen as matters great and small were brought before the queen. A half a century before, the hall and those who spoke and fought and ruled there had reached for the spires of greatness, there at the heart of the Shining City.

Now, instead of silver and satin and emerald glass, there was dust and decay and lingering gloom. A scuffed, dusty table, surrounded by windows covered with a decade's worth of soot and grime, empty frames where once the gilt mirrors had reflected the centuries of history's making. Now, instead of a council of the greatest, most powerful minds of the kingdom, nine ragged souls sat around the table, each in turn more weary than the last.

Lavender – the Lightless<\/i>, it was whispered, if one listened to idle talk – sat at the head of the long table, her chair on a small dais, and watched her makeshift council impassively. Nine, when it should be ten<\/i>, she thought, frowning at the empty seat that had been occupied only the day before. But then she happened to glance over to the next vacant seat down the line, and the next, and the next, until at last her eyes came to the high seat opposite hers, a place of honour and importance with only a ghost to hold it.

What a piteous motley she had gathered there. The abrupt ending of the war had made strange allies of them all, and she could not restore order to her country alone. It did not help matters that at just that moment, two of her bedfellows were exchanging bitter profanities, the heavy table between them bearing their weight as each leaned threateningly toward the other.

Perhaps she would not restore her country at all. The empty seat mocked her with that grave uncertainty.

To her left sat her husband, hopelessly slouched in his chair as he watched the proceedings with a smirk on his lips. To her right sat her once-advisor, Ambrose – now called Glitch<\/i>, a name that did not roll off the tongue so well – caught in a moment of abject stillness, but for his eyes darting back and forth with each thrown insult.

"Please, gentleman," Lavender began, but her words went unheard as the young resistance fighter and longcoat field captain continued to exchange their hostilities. Fifteen annuals prior, when the dark witch had taken Azkadellia, these soldiers had been small children, blissfully protected by their mother's skirts. Now, in the wake of the war – the Emerald War, they were calling it – Lavender could not forget that these young men were hard and haggard, seasoned by their battles, and each was utterly despised by the other.

They were making her head ache.

"Gentlemen,<\/i>" she tried again, but her voice did not have the strength it had once held. Once upon, she'd been able to silence the council chambers with that single word. She'd scarcely needed even that.

At the far end of the table, emptiness struggled to fill the seat opposite hers, lonely and cursed. She mourned the old man. Oft times, she even missed him.

The argument grew more heated, the contenders heedless of those watching anxiously. A fist was slammed down, rattling nearby ink-pots and candlesticks. As far down the heavy table as she was, Lavender felt no reverberation, but the sound cut through her nevertheless. She winced, and stood.

"Enough<\/i>," she all but shouted, far sharper than ever intended. The fighting came to an abrupt end, and all eyes turned on her. Very well then. "How many men were lost?"

"Three of mine," said Jeb Cain, still seething and glaring across the table.

The subject of his loathing was a young Longcoat, the highest ranking officer to remain loyal to Azkadellia after the surrender at the tower. When the smoke had cleared, only a few hundred of the witch's forces had thrown down their weapons. The rest had fled once the clouds had parted and the suns had slipped out from behind the moon.

"And the deserters?" Azkadellia asked, and for all the steel in her voice, her eyes were cast down. Rarely did she look up anymore, shy and scared, drawn inward by her pain. Yet still she fought for purpose, to right the wrongs she'd inadvertently done, and for that Lavender was both proud and grateful. The rest would have to come slowly.

"Three as well," the dark-haired captain said, sitting up straighter at the voice of his mistress. "A failed ambush. The rest disappeared after the fight, but tracking them at this point is unlikely." He was not so open with his hostility as his rebel counterpart, but the menace in his voice had not diminished.

"And the supplies?" asked Glitch, reminding Lavender of the Ambrose he'd been with his practical concerns.

"Supplies were recovered and accounted for," said Wyatt Cain, tapping his fingers restlessly on the table. He looked at Glitch over the empty seat that separated them, seemingly as troubled by it as Lavender was. "Requisitions were sorted out at the base camp, and the rest is already on its way to Central City. Should be here before nightfall."

Lavender allowed herself a small smile for the peace the news brought her. Her kingdom was bleeding, her people were starving, they deserved all the relief she could provide in these brand new days of peace, however little it might be. Small refugee camps had already started cropping up outside the walls of the city, ragged mothers and their hollow-eyed children, the wounded and the homeless and the exiled.

"Has there been any word from the generals yet?" her husband asked, though in truth they were generals no longer. In the golden antebellum annuals, it was little more than an honorary title given to the warmasters of each province, the men voted to lead the provincial forces by the people of the four outlying guild factions, men who had sworn their fealty to the queen and council of Central City, the fifth province and seat of power in the Outer Zone.

"Andrus is dragging his feet," said Jeb Cain with some distaste. "My scouts are still trying to ferret out the others."

"You won't find Bluesire until he wants to be found," his father said, and Lavender found herself agreeing. The warriors of the Midlings were notoriously prickly about unwelcome visitors.

"Give them time," she said, still holding to hope. "Rumour travels faster than truth, but eventually they will come out of hiding to ascertain it, and we will be waiting. Have your scouts keep searching."

Once her kingdom had been united by the support of these generals, these four great men. Five, <\/i>she reminded herself, staring down the seat opposite hers, the chair identical on its dais, carved and crowned and beautiful. Yet the war had taken the old wizard and divided the rest, and while each of her generals had fought the forces of the Sorceress, they had also descended into fighting amongst each other, and in the nine annuals Lavender been imprisoned no one had managed to unify the resistance factions in her name.

And yet this rogue band of the southern resistance, under the leadership of a young man barely old enough to remember the O.Z. as it had been, had come to the aid of her daughters and helped to win the war. She no longer held the rosy view of her world as she once had, and she doubted this young, sandy-haired rebel was up to the tasks necessary to unite the provinces and return her to her throne, and yet...

He was of an age with her youngest daughter, and deeds spoke truer than words. She could not bring herself to imagine the loss, sacrifice, and determination that had put him where he was, at the council table in the Silver Hall of Alta Torretta, the ancestral home of the royal family at the heart of Central City. She looked again to the empty seat that belonged to her DG, and sighed.

"I put additional patrols on the west branch of the brick route," said the young Cain. "Longcoat insurgents aren't going to simply forget about the stores in the tower."

The Longcoat captain across the table – Lindsey, she was certain his name was – looked sharply at Jeb Cain, his mouth twisting in an attempt to keep his tongue. The bitterness of turned tables, yes, Lavender knew that well, but she could not in her heart sympathize with those who'd lost everything in service to the witch's cause.

"How long can we expect the stores to last?" Lavender asked, touching a cold hand to her brow. The tension of the table was beginning to tire her. She could not fathom how she'd once spent entire days in this chamber, listening to her councillors bicker over policy while the nobles in the gallery quietly tipped the scales of favour with their coin.

"Not long," said the deep, solemn voice of Willem Lesley, a professor of magicks from far off Rossa, beyond kingdom of Evonny. The most educated man at her council after the unfortunate headcasing of Ambrose, her daughters had known him affectionately as Tutor, and he rarely answered to any other name. A quiet, contemplative man, he sat last among them.

"And the treasury?"

This time it was another who spoke, the dark-skinned man who left Azkadellia's side only to sleep, a man her daughter referred to as Vysor. "There is little that remains of the queen's treasury as you remember it, my lady," he said in an officious manner, one she recognized as belonging to a well-schooled advisor. "It was the export of the moretanium that funded the expansion and allowed the tower to be built."

"Export to where?" asked Glitch. "The amount of moretanium needed to build the Sunceder alone –"

"The foremen kept the miners very... dedicated<\/i>," Vysor said with a wry smile. "Trade was mostly with Evonny. Ixii cut ties after Central City fell. They were very fond of the Mystic Man, and took his betrayal rather badly."

The news of Ixii did not surprise her. Relations had been strained long before her accession after the death of her mother. The betrothal of her DG to the heir of the Ixiian throne had been meant to strengthen the crumbling alliance. Her daughter's 'death' had sent it all spiralling.

"And what of Aurissau?" Lavender asked. She was deeply unsettled. With the chaos that had surrounded her constantly since the events of the eclipse and the final battle on the steps of the witch's tower, she'd given no thought to the lands beyond her own borders. The state of the world had mattered so little.

"There's been little contact with Aurissau since the port of Qhoyre was destroyed," Azkadellia said in a small voice.

"Qhoyre no longer stands?" Lavender could scarcely believe what she'd heard, but the sudden sag of her daughter's shoulders told her terrible truths.

"The city was found to be smuggling well-connected royalists out of the country," Vysor finished for Azkadellia, and left it at that.

Lavender sat back in her chair, at a loss for words. All that remained of the alliances forged by her ancestors were ashes long scattered to the wind.

"Your Grace, I believe it may be necessary to seek aid from the other kingdoms," Tutor said, a reassuring voice she remembered well, always careful, always truthful. "Without funds or support, we stand little chance of flushing out the remainder of the Longcoat deserters. Your position is vulnerable. The next few annuals will be very harsh, and if the insurgents continue to attack –"

"Support comes from the generals, once they pull their heads out of the sand," her husband said, with some heat.

"Without monetary aid, we won't be able to supply our own men, let alone keep the torch-and-pitchfork crowd fed and happy," Glitch said, managing to be both crude and astute.

Lavender held up a hand, and her councillors fell quiet. She looked around her, at her daughter with hands locked in her lap, at her scarred advisor with his fluttering smiles, at the ex-lawman who always stayed so quiet, at the two young hot-heads who could not get past their blind hate of the other's cause to work together toward a common goal of lasting peace. Last she looked to the empty seat to her right, set between a concerned Glitch and a brooding Wyatt Cain.

"I believe we are finished for today," she said, and stood. Almost immediately, her husband was at her side, holding out an arm and she gave him a grateful smile. To the rest, she said, "I want those supplies distributed as soon as they arrive. Captain Cain, have a small group of your men ride out to meet them. I'll have no thefts, there are hungry people waiting."

"Yes, Your Grace," said the young Jeb Cain, and he bowed as he left the room.

The old tutor was not to be deterred so easily. "With all due respect, Your Grace, we must –"

Again, she held up a hand. "I will think on what you've said, my friend, I promise you." She looked around the great hall, haunted by ghosts with familiar faces, the echo of nine lost annuals calling out with every footstep taken. It sent a chill deep down into her, one of foreboding that lingered in her bones.

"Are you all right, Your Majesty?" asked Glitch, with soft concern.

She nodded, shaking off her dark fears as only so much stress and worry. "Yes, I am," she said. "Now, would someone please bring me my daughter?"

<\/p>

Chapter Two<\/a>
Complete Chapter Index<\/a><\/p><\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:88334","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/88334.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=88334"}}],"title":"4.12 \"Birthstone\" icon set","published":"2012-09-05T03:06:56Z","updated":"2012-09-05T04:35:30Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: ff_land"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"icons: final fantasy"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":".icons by rissy"}}],"content":"Note: Placed Third in challenge 4.12<\/a> @ <\/a>ultima_arena<\/b><\/a><\/span> over at <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span>. Come play with us!


12 - Final Fantasy XII + Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings


P R E V I E W<\/b>

<\/img> <\/img> <\/img><\/center>
<\/center>
\n \n \n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t

Final Fantasy XII + Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
birthstone icon set<\/center><\/b>
<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n\t
Garnet<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Amethyst<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Bloodstone<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
Diamond<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Emerald<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Moonstone<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n
Ruby<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Peridot<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Sapphire<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n
Opal<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Topaz<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t\t
Turquoise<\/i><\/center> <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t\t <\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/center><\/a>

Comments are nice. Credit is nicer! Both are appreciated."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:88080","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/88080.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=88080"}}],"title":"\"Only Cowards Stay While Traitors \" - Complete Index","published":"2012-08-24T17:02:05Z","updated":"2012-08-24T18:47:45Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 18+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"writing: complete index"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Characters<\/strong>: Cain\/DG, Glitch, Raw, Tutor (includes other major and minor characters)
Rating<\/strong>: 14+ overall (18+ rated material in final chapters)
Status<\/b>:  COMPLETE
Summary<\/strong>:  The fade to black was merely the blink of an eye.  Respite for only seconds.  After all, the road is long.


Table Of Contents<\/strong>

One<\/a> - Two<\/a> - Three<\/a> - Four<\/a> - Five<\/a>
Six<\/a> - Seven<\/a> - Eight<\/a> - Nine<\/a> - Ten<\/a>
Eleven<\/a> - Twelve<\/a> - Thirteen<\/a> - Fourteen<\/a> - Fifteen<\/a>
Sixteen<\/a> - Seventeen<\/a> - Eighteen<\/a> - Nineteen<\/a> - Twenty<\/a>
Twenty One<\/a> - Twenty Two<\/a> - Twenty Three<\/a> - Twenty Four<\/a> - Twenty Five<\/a>
Twenty Six<\/a> - Twenty Seven<\/a> - Twenty Eight<\/a> - Twenty Nine<\/a> - Thirty<\/a>
Thirty One<\/a> - Thirty Two<\/a> - Thirty Three<\/a> - Thirty Four<\/a> - Thirty Five<\/a>
Thirty Six<\/a> - Thirty Seven<\/a> - Thirty Eight<\/a> - Thirty Nine<\/a> - Forty<\/a><\/div>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:85885","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/85885.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=85885"}}],"title":"\"Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run\" ","published":"2012-05-08T13:13:18Z","updated":"2012-05-08T13:13:18Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: cowards and traitors"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Characters<\/strong>: Cain\/DG, Glitch, Raw, Tutor (includes other major and minor characters)
Rating<\/strong>: 14+ (subject to change)
Summary<\/strong>:  The fade to black was merely the blink of an eye.  Respite for only seconds.  After all, the road is long.


Chapter Thirty Seven:  What Stays and What Fades Away<\/a>


Table Of Contents<\/strong>

One<\/a> - Two<\/a> - Three<\/a> - Four<\/a> - Five<\/a>
Six<\/a> - Seven<\/a> - Eight<\/a> - Nine<\/a> - Ten<\/a>
Eleven<\/a> - Twelve<\/a> - Thirteen<\/a> - Fourteen<\/a> - Fifteen<\/a>
Sixteen<\/a> - Seventeen<\/a> - Eighteen<\/a> - Nineteen<\/a> - Twenty<\/a>
Twenty One<\/a> - Twenty Two<\/a> - Twenty Three<\/a> - Twenty Four<\/a> - Twenty Five<\/a>
Twenty Six<\/a> - Twenty Seven<\/a> - Twenty Eight<\/a> - Twenty Nine<\/a> - Thirty<\/a>
Thirty One<\/a> - Thirty Two<\/a> - Thirty Three<\/a> - Thirty Four<\/a> - Thirty Five<\/a>
Thirty Six<\/a> - Thirty Seven<\/center>

Note<\/b>:  Livejournal's text editor is not working ideally for me any longer.  Until the situation improves, I will be linking future chapters from FanFiction.Net<\/a>. I apologize for whatever inconvenience this may cause."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:85022","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/85022.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=85022"}}],"title":"\"Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run\" ","published":"2012-04-14T23:11:09Z","updated":"2012-04-14T23:11:09Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: cowards and traitors"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Characters<\/strong>: Cain\/DG, Glitch, Raw, Tutor (includes other major and minor characters)
Rating<\/strong>: 14+ (subject to change)
Summary<\/strong>:  The fade to black was merely the blink of an eye.  Respite for only seconds.  After all, the road is long.


Chapter Thirty Six: In the Light of Day<\/a>


Table Of Contents<\/strong>

One<\/a> - Two<\/a> - Three<\/a> - Four<\/a> - Five<\/a>
Six<\/a> - Seven<\/a> - Eight<\/a> - Nine<\/a> - Ten<\/a>
Eleven<\/a> - Twelve<\/a> - Thirteen<\/a> - Fourteen<\/a> - Fifteen<\/a>
Sixteen<\/a> - Seventeen<\/a> - Eighteen<\/a> - Nineteen<\/a> - Twenty<\/a>
Twenty One<\/a> - Twenty Two<\/a> - Twenty Three<\/a> - Twenty Four<\/a> - Twenty Five<\/a>
Twenty Six<\/a> - Twenty Seven<\/a> - Twenty Eight<\/a> - Twenty Nine<\/a> - Thirty<\/a>
Thirty One<\/a> - Thirty Two<\/a> - Thirty Three<\/a> - Thirty Four<\/a> - Thirty Five<\/a>
Thirty Six<\/center>

Note<\/b>:  Livejournal's text editor is not working ideally for me any longer.  Until the situation improves, I will be linking future chapters from FanFiction.Net<\/a>. I apologize for whatever inconvenience this may cause."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:84745","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/84745.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=84745"}}],"title":"\"Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run\" ","published":"2012-04-14T23:08:30Z","updated":"2012-04-14T23:08:30Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: cowards and traitors"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Characters<\/strong>: Cain\/DG, Glitch, Raw, Tutor (includes other major and minor characters)
Rating<\/strong>: 14+ (subject to change)
Summary<\/strong>:  The fade to black was merely the blink of an eye.  Respite for only seconds.  After all, the road is long.


Chapter Thirty Five: Walk These Empty Streets<\/a>


Table Of Contents<\/strong>

One<\/a> - Two<\/a> - Three<\/a> - Four<\/a> - Five<\/a>
Six<\/a> - Seven<\/a> - Eight<\/a> - Nine<\/a> - Ten<\/a>
Eleven<\/a> - Twelve<\/a> - Thirteen<\/a> - Fourteen<\/a> - Fifteen<\/a>
Sixteen<\/a> - Seventeen<\/a> - Eighteen<\/a> - Nineteen<\/a> - Twenty<\/a>
Twenty One<\/a> - Twenty Two<\/a> - Twenty Three<\/a> - Twenty Four<\/a> - Twenty Five<\/a>
Twenty Six<\/a> - Twenty Seven<\/a> - Twenty Eight<\/a> - Twenty Nine<\/a> - Thirty<\/a>
Thirty One<\/a> - Thirty Two<\/a> - Thirty Three<\/a> - Thirty Four<\/a> - Thirty Five<\/center>

Note<\/b>:  Livejournal's text editor is not working ideally for me any longer.  Until the situation improves, I will be linking future chapters from FanFiction.Net<\/a>. I apologize for whatever inconvenience this may cause."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:84677","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/84677.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=84677"}}],"title":"\"Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run\"","published":"2012-04-14T23:05:54Z","updated":"2012-04-14T23:05:54Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"tv: tin man"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: cowards and traitors"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: 14+"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"pairing: cain\/dg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Rissy James
Characters<\/strong>: Cain\/DG, Glitch, Raw, Tutor (includes other major and minor characters)
Rating<\/strong>: 14+ (subject to change)
Summary<\/strong>:  The fade to black was merely the blink of an eye.  Respite for only seconds.  After all, the road is long.


Chapter Thirty Four: Sometimes Fabricated, Mostly Accurate<\/a>


Table Of Contents<\/strong>

One<\/a> - Two<\/a> - Three<\/a> - Four<\/a> - Five<\/a>
Six<\/a> - Seven<\/a> - Eight<\/a> - Nine<\/a> - Ten<\/a>
Eleven<\/a> - Twelve<\/a> - Thirteen<\/a> - Fourteen<\/a> - Fifteen<\/a>
Sixteen<\/a> - Seventeen<\/a> - Eighteen<\/a> - Nineteen<\/a> - Twenty<\/a>
Twenty One<\/a> - Twenty Two<\/a> - Twenty Three<\/a> - Twenty Four<\/a> - Twenty Five<\/a>
Twenty Six<\/a> - Twenty Seven<\/a> - Twenty Eight<\/a> - Twenty Nine<\/a> - Thirty<\/a>
Thirty One<\/a> - Thirty Two<\/a> - Thirty Three<\/a> - Thirty Four<\/center>

Note<\/b>:  Livejournal's text editor is not working ideally for me any longer.  Until the situation improves, I will be linking future chapters from FanFiction.Net<\/a>. I apologize for whatever inconvenience this may cause."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:84334","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/84334.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=84334"}}],"title":"Fiction Master List: \"Final Fantasy\"","published":"2012-03-28T19:51:31Z","updated":"2015-01-30T16:31:42Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":".master list"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xiii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":".master list: final fantasy fiction"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy x"}}],"content":"
Recent Update<\/strong>: 01.30.15<\/span><\/div>



Short Stories (One-shot)<\/strong><\/u><\/span>


-Final Fantasy X<\/b>-<\/div>

"By Sea (To Stay)<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Yuna's pilgrimage was not her first journey across Spira.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Yuna, Kimahri
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span><\/div>

"And Never to Return<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

The road to Zanarkand never seemed so long.  A guilt-ridden, unguarded mind fears the lonely nights most of all.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Auron, Lulu
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span><\/div>


"Mykonos<\/a>" <\/em><\/span><\/span><\/b>

<\/div>
He is no villain, but the best within the beast.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Jecht
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span><\/div>
-Final Fantasy XII-<\/span><\/b><\/div>

"XII Drabbles<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Four drabbles.  Hunger, silver, wind, curse.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Ashe, Vaan, Balthier, Fran
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span><\/div>

"Unfortunate Duty<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Formerly titled "Words of Unfortunate Duty".  There were times when Balthier could almost regret the roles he had to play, a liability he most definitely could not afford.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Balthier, Penelo
Rating<\/strong>: 14 <\/span><\/div>

"Of Dalmasca's Sorrow<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Formerly titled "Not Forgotten".  The Queen is dead.  Long live the Queen.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Major and minor cast ensemble.
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span>
Warning<\/b>: Character death.<\/div>

"Lament for a Son of Dalmasca<\/span><\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Or, "How to Mourn a Traitor".  Ashe cannot forget his face, he who sold her for peace.<\/span>

Characters<\/strong>: Ashe, Basch, Vossler
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span>
Warning<\/b>: Canon character death.<\/div>

"The Price of Peace<\/span><\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

A personal recollection regarding the deciding of the fate of a daughter of kings.<\/span>

Characters<\/strong>: Ashelia and her knight
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span>

<\/div>"XII Drabbles: Set II<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Five drabbles.  Imitation, vermin, trap, possession, imitation.<\/span>

Characters<\/strong>: Ashe, Balthier, Vaan, Gabranth, Marquis Halim Ondore IV
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span>
Warning<\/b>: Canon character death.<\/div>

-Final Fantasy XIII-<\/span><\/b><\/div>

"In the Wake of the Storm<\/a>" <\/em><\/span>

Fighting with Fang is like fighting at the centre of the storm.  A hero's scattered thoughts.<\/i>

Characters<\/strong>: Snow, Fang
Rating<\/strong>: PG<\/span><\/div>
<\/a>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:84002","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/84002.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=84002"}}],"title":"\"Lament for a Son of Dalmasca\" ","published":"2012-03-28T18:23:51Z","updated":"2015-01-30T17:00:01Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: basch (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: ashe (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Lament for a Son of Dalmasca <\/em>(or How to Mourn a Traitor<\/em>)
Author<\/strong>: Amorissy
Characters<\/strong>: Ashe, Basch, Vossler
Rating<\/strong>: PG
Warnings<\/strong>: Canon character death.  Set during game events; spoiler warning for up to and<\/b> including events of Raithwall's Tomb and the fate of the 8th Fleet of the Archadian Imperial Army.
Summary: <\/strong>Ashe cannot forget his face, he who sold her for peace.

Author's Note: <\/b>Inspired by Round 2.11 in <\/a>ultima_arena<\/b><\/a><\/span> over at <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span>.  Originally posted here<\/a> and here<\/a>.





"Look on what my haste has wrought. Did I act too quick? Or was your return too late?"<\/i>
- Cpt. Vossler York Azelas<\/i>

Lament for a Son of Dalmasca<\/b>
Or "How to Mourn a Traitor"<\/i><\/center>


The Dawn Shard is the only light that burns for Ashe in the darkness behind closed eyes. When night comes, for it always must, sleep is an elusive lover that whispers sweetly to her, lingering somewhere at the shadowed fringe of conscious thought. When all others have fallen to its lonely promise, she is kept awake, haunted by the weight of her burdens, left desperate, wanting, never to be claimed by the blissful embrace. And with her restlessness comes the light of the stone, shining and pulsing strong, drunk on mist and flame. Kindled to falseness with the willfulness of her embittered heart.

Ashe cannot forget his face.

The dreadnought's fiery end, like a slaver's searing brand upon her every waking moment. His name rests unsaid like acid on her tongue, he who sold<\/i> her for peace. No one dares speak it, and yet his memory remains; his betrayal suffocates, and chases weaker heads and hearts away from her fury, intense in its absolution.

The stone lies course, cold and empty, a stark remembrance. Would that she could afford him no other.

She fights against his memory, she curses him, curses their cause, curses herself.<\/i> A hundred times she'd die with her blade in hand if only to save herself from the burn of his betrayal; the hollow echo of his oaths still clings to her, a taint that will not wash away until her shoulders buckle and her wretched cleansing comes. Her eyes brim with the shame of her regret, each spent tear another treachery to leave her exhausted and unsatisfied and utterly without.

The dreams come eventually, for she is still a hume above all things and bound to fragile existence. Inevitable and unbidden, fitful sleep takes her, and in thrall to visions of princes and traitors, she is shaken to the very foundations of her resolve. Her dreams put her at the mercy of every doubt and gnawing fear that has found the deepest, most secret places of her mind, every black thought that has settled there in these long, hard years of mourning and bitter hate, and when she awakens with the first greys of dawn, she is so very, very tired.

The skin of insurgence is shed no more readily than a mantle of royalty, and she can be Amalia no more than she can be Ashe and oh, how she loathes this nullity. Her weakness shows, her hesitance clear. She knows it, and she struggles amidst the in between of were and are, of was and will be.

She feels the eyes on her. So patiently do her companions wait for her, and their complacency startles her at times, but then she sees it, that weariness in the shadows of their eyes that mirrors her own. As the sun rises over the city, this place of her birth that hides them so well, her companions take to the streets, seeking out the quarrels and the comforts that thrive here in abundance, within the desert's beating heart. One by one, they return to watch her, but without scorn or pity or indecision, and all else she cannot tell. She does not trust herself to recognise anything, for once she'd known a true knight's adherent determination and unerring fidelity, and then she'd watched unflinching as the flames burst and consumed the sky.

He does not leave her thoughts, shutting out all else but for the weight of the silver wrapped still around her finger, but fresh wounds are demanding, and old scars keep. Night comes. Sleep does not. He was ally, he was adviser, unfailing as he'd protected her, guided her – his death shimmers in the darkness behind her eyes. She opens them; the light of memory is slow to fade. She rises. The shadows swallow her whole.

Day is saturated by sun and sand, and she lingers alone in empty rooms, but by night, the little sanctuary comes alive with the scents and sounds of those who surround her, those who share with her a grudge and a hope and a cause, an enmity for the empire that has darkened their hearts. The traitor has left them nurturing their anger, not a soul among them untouched by the whims and passions of greater men. It will sustain them. It must.

Hidden away midst the merchants and their dusty wares, the bazaar below their safehouse flourishes in the late hours. The murmur rises from the street; the hot, heavy desert breeze, the breath of the city, stirs the curtains. It calls to her, the clamour of hawkers, the words and music and life.

It's not until she's a finger's reach away that beyond the veil she sees first the blade, naked steel glinting in the moonlight and market's glow. Her eyes adjust, the light that haunts her sleep gone, and she sees him on the balcony, kneeling before the blade of dead or dying order, laid at rest upon the wooden bannister. His knotted shoulders are bare but burdened, his vigil is silent for all that it is filled with the voices that were carried to the earth with the traitor, that final kiss of steel and blood and seeping mist.

She watches him, head bowed before the blade, watches through gauze that hazes the edges of the truth, softens betrayal with clouded eyes and moonlight. She slips outside, bare feet softly muted on the smooth, white sandstone, but the spell is broken with her intrusion, and suddenly the harsh clarity is upon her, the too-sharp angles of his dungeon ravaged body, the sword notched and dull, the city's music lost in the deafening rush of night's heady breeze.

Basch raises his head and a shuddering breath goes through him. He makes to stand, but there's a sound in the back of her throat, a protest no words can capture; he stills, and waits. She has nothing to offer him, and it is no easy thing as she crosses the balcony and lowers herself to her knees beside him. Her eyes don't leave the blade, where all the city's lights have sunken to gleam and wink like the brightest of stars.

Beside her, he lowers his head once more, given over to a quietude of body and soul she's never possessed. It's familiar, and it frightens her, the surge of memories better left scattered like leaves to bitter wind. That fierceness is still within her even now, the slow burn of an ageless anger and the weight and truth of duty pressing ever upon her. With eyes open, she sees naught but the bared blade, but she is not foolish enough to believe a refuge is to be found behind her eyelids, no, the stone waits there, not empty but blazing with power, taunting her until her eyes cry for mercy. To shut them is to know her fathomless shame.

A stone for a kingdom; no, truly, a stone for a life. A judge's blade, the pale column of a pirate's throat. A stone, just a stone, warm and luminous and heavy in her hand. For a life, for their<\/i> lives. For Dalmasca.

Not a drop spilled. It was no price to pay. She feels it, the blood and ash of her betrayer's end, the swirling mist and smoking ruin that devoured so many souls with greed and pride and folly.

It is then that the broken knight beside her begins to speak. His words are low, lacking eloquence, and yet she is bound from the first passing of breath from his lips. Her eyes lift from the blade's peaceful repose to look upon his face, weathered and tired and scarred by blood's betrayal. He takes no notice of her, his oath gruff and quiet and solemn, words that are etched upon him for an eternity, severed, taken, and now renewed. She knows of courage, and she knows of sacrifice; the fingers of her right hand touch upon her left, the last remnant of a love two years gone.

No soft remembrance for a traitor's failure, but for a dead stone and a cold blade.

When the knight beside her speaks of loyalty, she draws in a sharp breath. Never does he falter, through the glory of death in service, beyond gods' blessing and peace eternal. With no shame, he speaks finally the traitor's name, a whisper of a prayer that she echoes without hesitation, the sin of a single utterance lost to the city's discord.

And - and Ashe's world does not end with her acknowledgement of him<\/i>, of his death or his crime. She keeps breathing, and with each life-kissed filling of her lungs, a moment of peace passes, so that upon every exhale, the iron grip of resentment and anger bearing down upon her heart lessens, and lessens, and lessens. Long moments of silence come and then go, and still she breathes, and lightens, and lives on.

Basch rises, and she allows him to pull her to her feet. He watches her. He shields himself. With distance, with respect and purpose. "Tomorrow," he presses upon her, a weak grasping for gentility, for he's uncertain. She is, herself, uncertain. "Tomorrow you must decide a course of action."

That his words are directed at her takes a moment to settle in, and she nods slowly. "Tomorrow," she repeats. The thought of the pale pinks of dawn fills her, the promise of the earliest hours of a new day, and as easily as sunrises sweeps over the desert sands, so too does fatigue creep through her heavy limbs. She leaves Basch there, to the wind and the street-noise and the blade of ancient order, his vigil incomplete.

The dawn will come, for it always must, and perhaps she should not fear the coming, nor the darkest hours foretold within the heart of the stone. She is not lost, and she is not broken, and though the stone is cold, and empty, it is still heavy in her hand, and a comfort, she finds, as she lays down. She is so very, very tired as she closes her eyes and sleeps<\/i>.

That night, she dreams of Nabradia.<\/p>


Point of Interest: <\/i>The original entry I had planned for the challenge was called "Five Times Ashe Nearly Forgave Basch and the One Time She Finally Did".<\/p>
<\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:83823","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/83823.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=83823"}}],"title":"\"Of Dalmasca's Sorrow\" ","published":"2012-03-28T18:10:51Z","updated":"2015-01-30T16:59:05Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"challenge: ff_land"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy xii"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: ashe (final fantasy xii)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: Of Dalmasca's Sorrow<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Amorissy
Characters<\/strong>: Main and minor cast ensemble
Rating<\/strong>: PG
Warnings<\/strong>: Character death.  Mild spoilers for the end of the game.  AU-ish, as I've never played "Revenant Wings".
Summary: <\/strong>The Queen is dead.  Long live the Queen.

Author's Note<\/strong>:  Formerly titled "Not Forgotten<\/i>'.  Written for Round 2.08<\/a> in <\/a>ultima_arena<\/b><\/a><\/span> over at <\/a>ff_land<\/b><\/a><\/span>.  Originally posted here<\/a> and here<\/a>.



Of Dalmasca's Sorrow<\/b><\/p>


The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.<\/i>

No one believes. The bells are ringing, singing; a sad, sweet song but no one believes. Too soon, too sudden, like an echo of the past made real, made bright and bursting. It is too sharp, too sour, too much<\/i>, and the women weep in the streets of the crumbling city. The windows and spires of Rabanastre stand tall, steadfast and strong, but within her walls, there is pain and confusion and disbelief. The women weep and the men drown their sorrow in drink and prayer and pride.

The day her body is laid out in state for her people whom she loved so well, the crowds are thick and tears are free. Some say she was a beauty beyond words, others say a betrayer beyond salvation. Her people cannot feed themselves on her promises of tentative peace, not now. This uncertainty is a worse fate than the occupation of the empire, not so far left behind, not forgotten and never forgiven. No consort, no heir, only a council of ancient old men who hide behind closed, carved doors while her body lies cold on marble plinth, stone upon stone.

Word seeps out into the street, whispers beyond trace; rumour spreads like wildfire in tavern and clan hall alike, and it burns all those who hear the restive mutterings. Some say she named a successor on her last breath, others that she passed with no word on her lips, or perhaps the name of a clandestine lover, or husband long dead. Behind their closed, carved doors, the council remains silent as their pale as ash queen.

Through the streets come processions of unimaginable wealth and beauty; the children stare wide-eyed at the sombre black banners embroidered with silver, at men more powerful than their simplest notions could imagine. The people part for each cortege, climbing down the stone steps of the cathedral as each great ruler comes to bend knee in respect, to see one last time a woman of bravery and ability. The very first, bearing proudly the entwined serpents of his house, young emperor and scarred judge. Their faces are masks, hard, unfeeling, but their eyes betray, always the eyes betray, red-rimmed and empty. The emperor leaves the cathedral to speak his heart and his sorrow to the people; his knight protector does not move from bended knee. It will be two days before he is guided away.

The streets grow quiet; the processions slow. Old men who have watched kings and daughters die sit in silence, contemplating on newer, darker futures. Fragile peace, was it so meagre a dream to be crushed so easily?

On the third day, the streets give way to restlessness; men in plain clothes are dispatched to keep the queen's laws, but all know them to be imperial dogs shed of their mail and helms as the young emperor strives ever for peace. <\/i>Does he know it is a futile gesture, that he can never earn the forgiveness of those who remember too well the darkness and stench of the lower city streets? His brother spoke pretty words too, on the very steps the young emperor climbs every day to the great gleaming cathedral whilst she lies within.

There is blood that third day, on those very stone steps as a pirate is recognised as wanted. Guards try to stop him, but he will not relent, and his blade flashes as brightly as his smile as he cuts down those who would keep him from her. There are tears in his eyes when the scarred judge finally breaks his vigil to call off his men. The fierce Viera is unmovable, but her bowstring sings her mournful prayers, and her arrows are fletched with grief.

There is no rain to wash the blood away, only clerics with buckets in hand, and as the soapy water runs down the steps in a tumbling cascade, so too does it wash away what fight remains in the pirate, bloody blade in hand. The clangour of steel on stone reverberates down into the square for all who have ears to hear as his knees hit the steps and he swears an oath to gods and men alike.

On the fifth day, their brave, beautiful lady is laid to rest in the dark, lonely crypts beneath her desert palace, with father so merciful, and husband so courageous; together for eternity, sleeping in stone, never forgotten.

The sixth day is empty of bells, void of tears or cries, a day without anger or blood. The rumours still spread, still burn uncontrollably, but there is substance to the words and those moments give pause to those who listen with open hearts, and think with clear minds. A protector, it's said, a protector named, sought after, found, it matters little for it's plain now for all to see, and hear, if truly desired.

By afternoon, the city comes alive with the comings and goings of pages and stewards, merchants and clansmen; for near a week the silence had stirred no shadow within the walls of the great, sand-strewn city, but now the lips of her people blaze with hearsay in the sun-baked streets.

By dusk, the clear call of trumpets beckons them to the square, not bells, but trumpets<\/i>. Forward they go to get their glimpse, to see and to hear and to know<\/i> they are not lost, not forgotten.

She stands before them atop the steps, a girl as golden as the desert sun, with feathers in her hair. She smiles for them, this hand chosen, this successor, and in that smile she knows them, for she is<\/i> them, and the sigh of solace that carries from the crowd is the breath of the desert as it sweeps over the great gleaming cathedral.

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen. <\/i><\/p>
<\/a>

<\/p>"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:rissy_james:83512","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/83512.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/rissy-james.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=83512"}}],"title":"\"And Never to Return\" ","published":"2012-03-28T18:00:44Z","updated":"2015-01-30T16:54:50Z","category":[{"@attributes":{"term":"character: auron (final fantasy x)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"story: one-shot"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"character: lulu (final fantasy x)"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"game: final fantasy x"}},{"@attributes":{"term":"rating: pg"}}],"content":"Title<\/strong>: And Never to Return<\/em>
Author<\/strong>: Amorissy
Characters<\/strong>: Auron & Lulu
Rating<\/strong>: PG
Warnings<\/strong>: Set during game events. Spoilers for up to and<\/strong> including events of Luca and the Mi'ihen Highroad. <\/em> Mentions of Auron and Jecht's respective backstories.
Summary: <\/strong>The road to Zanarkand never seemed so long.  A guilt-ridden, unguarded mind fears the lonely nights most of all.

Author's Note<\/b>: Originally posted here<\/a>.



And Never To Return<\/b><\/p>


The highroad was a ribbon of earth bearing them away from the glittering mirage of Luca, the dust of their footfalls the only mark of their passing. By nightfall, when they made camp on the windy, rolling plain, the city, so consuming and vibrant, was but a distant glow on the horizon, fallen ever into the emptiness where some expected never to return.

Auron hoped, dared hope, to never return; he held no love for Luca.

He stood on the promontory of a small hill, his back to one of Mi'ihen's ruins that loomed over the others as they sat by the fire; they'd settled off the road, a small wayside that circled the shatter-stone dome; safe enough for a starless night, the first night – his <\/i>first night. Auron, separated, alone, watched the illumination at the edge of the world they left behind. It was a false sunrise, an empty promise, hollow and echoing with the voices, not of his ghosts, so oddly silent this night, but of his new charges, the innocent, the faithful as they lingered awake, staring into the flames where he could not see.

He had thought it to be easier somehow, resuming this journey as if not absent for ten years past. To take up the mantle of guardian once more, though no legend was he. Spira had told his story many times, and it had grown. It would threaten to swallow him whole before the end. For now, he used it to his advantage; it kept them on the periphery, watching with stolen glances, muttering by the fireside. Tidus showed no such restraint, but Luca had shaken him; his tongue, for now, would keep.

What of the others.

He'd first laid eyes on the five – five!<\/i> – on the docks as the ferry arrived, rumour and whisper preceding the summoner, the daughter of Braska he'd all but abandoned to such trivial demands as injury and mortality. That the boy had already found her did not surprise him, no. Tidus had merely, blindly, followed the forces that had guided him, perhaps believing in the temptations of coincidence and luck. Now he knew better, finally set right on his feet after floundering in his ignorance in this strange world so different than the one from which he'd been unwillingly torn. Auron was none the lighter for the weight off his soul; many other stories to tell yet, more hurts and the boy would have to face each one head on. Dream life over, kid, time to wake up.

The others.

Yuna, still guarded by the Ronso who'd honoured him; the blitzer with the easy laugh; the quiet mage, barely more than a girl, bound by the shackles of a woman's mourning.

These five – no, they six now – were the hope of this world. Spira; he held no love for Spira, either. The grip of death on land and sea; the darkness lurking in the eyes of all her children.

In another life, with the eyes and heart and arms of the devout, of a faithful man, he'd walked this road, his blade sharp and keen for all its righteous purpose. Had he really climbed the slopes of Gagazet with these tired feet? Had he truly stumbled back, bitter and broken? Tonight, with his aged gaze and singular, cynical outlook, the road to Zanarkand seemed twice as long.

There was familiarity where he stood now, but it did not calm him. More comforting was the ache in his muscles, the dull throbbing that spoke in the archaic tongues of tissue and flesh, songs of the body that he'd long forgotten. For ten years, Tidus had needed no protection; guiding him was a minor annoyance and training him had been a joy but never a challenge. It had stopped once blitzball had taken over the boy's life; to his credit, he hadn't grown soft. He'd done well with the fiends in the stadium, and on the road under the blazing sun, his first true test against the dangers of wilder Spira. Now, here they were, guarding a summoner who'd yet to scuff her boots, and the boy still blundering along without an ounce of understanding, confident in his blade and his misguided intention, still running from the truth of his father's fate.

Zanarkand was all too far.

Auron took a deep breath, the scent of death ever constant in Spira, saturated by the thoughts and prayers of those who breathed the air.

No, he knew; Zanarkand was all too close.

His doubts were not alone that night around the camp. He heard her coming up the hill, the soft shuffle of her footsteps, the metallic chime of her skirt. She kept her distance, filling the sinking doorway with her shadow, a pale hand resting on the lichen that clung to the cracks of the ancient stone. He did not turn to her, did not take his eye off the horizon, rosy-pink under a haze of cloud cover. He waited for her to speak; he would not attempt to guide the conversation when it was she who had sought him out. Silence was his companion in comfort, and he did not send it away easily, if ever willingly.

"You impressed them today," she said; she was steady and cautious with her words, a trait he knew he'd come to admire.

"There was little cause," he said, and after a moment added, "I, too, found myself impressed today."

The mage, this Lulu, sounded skeptical as she replied. "Don't humour. There is still a very long way to go, but less time to learn than they think."

It is a precise observation, and gave him reason to turn toward her, finally force his gaze away from the wash of colour and light on the horizon; he knew then he'd see Luca again, one more nagging hunch that pulled at him in brief snatches all too often. He looked over silver rims, past dark lens to take a moment to study, consider what he had drawn on from watching the mage – all of them – over the course of the day.

Powerful; elaborate, but effective.

"I don't make it a point to humour," he said, watching her shift but not flinch away, as many before her may have done. Had done. "Tidus has improved since last I saw him; he's still impulsive but he'll have to wrest with that on his own."

"He is –" Her sentence fell short at one quick glance from his eye. "He's finally begun to show his potential."

Auron smirked at her concession, well-hidden behind his cowl. He turned back to the horizon; had he expected the view to change? Luca gone, perhaps. The stadium, the people, quick eyes and loud voices and grabbing hands. So much gil, everywhere. No, the lights of Luca still burned. His back was to Bevelle, another obstacle in his path. Ten years since Bevelle, ten years of dragging the burden of failed promise along with every step he'd taken. Braska, Yuna; the boy's mother.

"Tell me of Yuna."

Lulu paused, and long moments had come and gone before she spoke. "Her natural ability is very strong, and her training was –"

He snorted, doing nothing to mask his disdain, about which she was silent and respectful. "I saw enough proof of her training today. Kept in the temple, reading scriptures and repeating her chants. How much time was spent teaching her to defend herself against an armoured charge?"

When she replied, her voice bristled. "As much time spent teaching Tidus to hack away with that sword, I imagine."

"Perhaps." He chuckled, low enough into himself as not to draw her attention. She kept a safe distance and he was not about to encourage her – Spira, in all its reality, overwhelmed him still, and her presence was agonising, radiating with the power she commanded with mere focus. Still, he couldn't quite remember how long it had been since he'd been made to smile, however fleetingly.

"You've watched over her a long time," he said. Here was another who'd taken up his charge, unknowingly tying herself to Spira's deathly cycles. So young she must have been then, ten years past, binding her heart to a girl fated to walk the summoner's path. It led only to Zanarkand, led ever to death. Had he been so different?

"As a sister." There was a rustle then, not of the breeze through the tall grasses of Mi'ihen, but of her skirt as she stepped away from the shelter of the ruined doorway. She did not do so to come much closer to him, but to get away from the wall, from the soft voices and firelight beyond. When he glanced over his shoulder, he could make out the pale column of her throat, her face tipped up to take in the overcast, starless sky. She was not worried about what danced on the horizon, no, her eyes were skyward.

"Well then," he said, returning his gaze not to what troubled him most but to what pained him least, the last vestiges of Luca glowing in the night. "As a sister, tell me of Yuna."

She paused again, and there was a lifetime in the moment of silence, and he could feel it for just an instant, the burning island sun beating down upon bare backed children, the cool evening breezes. And then the mage sighed, and there was a smile in her voice as she began the telling of her stories; the clarity passed him by and he was left on that windswept, grassy plain, the lights of Luca calling to him in the distance.<\/p>
<\/a>

<\/p>"}]}


Fang is beginning to slip away.

She would take on Cocoon alone. He wonders if she'd do it with two hands bared, destroy the world just for the sake of one friendship. Then he sees her brand, glowing soft white in the gloom of the buried Pulse ruin, and the only answer he can find makes him shudder.

He doesn't see it until after, the subtle moments that skip along behind them like trailing strings, all those times when he should have noticed but didn't, and there's no one to blame but himself. Too preoccupied with his own demons, all his thoughts funnelled down to sorrow and despair.

Raines has shaken her, that much is true, but they're all shaken, but more than that they're not broken<\/em>, and so they fight on, and fight on, and on.

The Ark tests them all, Fang most of all, he sees that now. She's a blaze across the battlefield, wild and brutal, a fury glorious to behold. But then the last enemy falls, and she levels him with that cold, distant gaze, and he's left with no ground to stand on that she hasn't already put behind her.

What is strength when you stand alone? What is courage when there is no one to share your fear? She takes nothing from the others, least of all from him, and he's so stuck in his wallowing that he can't see she's backing off. The shining she'd once taken to him slowly dies away.

When finally she turns her back to them, he knows in that instant that once more he's failed a task he hadn't known belonged to him. She turns her back to him and to Light and their Focus, and it's in the moment of her anger that the beast comes to take her.

It comes for her and she strikes it down to claim it as her own. Just as he had, the day he met her.

So maybe there's hope yet.<\/p><\/a>