“Heeey, Commander Cowskin, guess who’s back for a training centre visit? Me, it’s me. Are you gonna let me see the gunblade stock yet? Did I earn that privilege yet?”
The scar was small, but ugly. Just under the ribs, looks like it angled up into the diaphragm. If you were alone – which I assume you were – and weren’t dead already, you certainly would be now. There was an undercurrent to her voice – not even a tremor, but something deep, as if caught in her chest and refusing to budge – that told Auron that ‘just work’ or ‘just a fiend’ was anything but.
That tone, that undercurrent, warned Auron not to press, where otherwise he might have. ‘Spare you the details’, she said, but he wanted details, a full picture of what could have driven Chuami to the point where she might snap, but not break. That was the kind of willpower that even most Unsent could not claim – to be able to teeter on the brink but not irretrievably fall. And yet, she had.
“I survived, but I can’t say I won.” And wasn’t that a feeling he knew well.
The way she described the fiend of her soul as if it were separate… for a moment, he wasn’t sure what to think. It wasn’t the same as his own experience. Chuami spoke of the fiend – or perhaps, more accurately, its influence – as a sort of… outward corruption. Disparate. ‘It’ thinks, she said, ‘it’ knows, as if there were a separate being within her, circling like a predator that waited for a moment of weakness to strike.
“I don’t know where I ended and it began.”
For Auron, there was no such difference. Himself, the fiend – one and the same. What he was now, and what he might become. Alive or Unsent, all people had inner demons – pain and envy and wroth, all the buried darkness of a mortal soul – the fiend within us all. Sometimes, he might imagine he felt a presence – red and black and scales and that resounding roar – yet, it was still him. His soul, his pyreflies, the shadow of the form they might take – not a separate entity come to control him.
Auron wasn’t sure which was worse.
But what she described next, the feeling of strength, of power… That he knew all too well. He could see it in her eyes when she admitted how she wanted it, and he knew, he knew what she meant – a bright spark of excitement, the thrill of it, everything sharp and focused, quicksilver, and the burning burning flare of power in one’s veins that howled to extinguish life…
He stamped down those thoughts as soon as they rose.
At least now he knew how exactly she had pieced together the truth of his own Unsent state. Her brother. The idiot one, who thought that he could drop a piece of information as delicate and well-guarded as ‘I know you are Unsent’, even using it with the intent to blackmail, and walk away with no repercussions. Intelligent and observant enough to piece together what little information there is that might lead to that conclusion, but still a fool.
As her laugh petered out, her shoulders slumping now that all the pent-up emotion was finally released, he sighed. “I did die, Chuami. Just because you found out now instead of when it happened doesn’t make it any less true. Mourning is… understandable.” It was a pathetic answer, but Auron always had been terrible at comfort. And now, when it involved his own death? Even more so.
“I won’t judge you for nearly losing yourself. I can’t. It would be hypocritical of me to do so.” His voice regained the steely undertone, a note that demanded the attention of the listener. “But I am warning you. Down that path lies madness. I’ve seen it happen. An Unsent can retain themselves for years, some for decades, or even longer. But every time you get close to what you did, welcoming it in…” A slow breath, holding a barely-audible tremble.
“You’d end up like Seymour.”
She looked down at the floor beside her as Auron spoke. Seymour, huh…?
It was a thought that dragged up a mixture of feelings. Fear, horror – and shame at the tiny spark of excitement that came from somewhere further back, the shadowy corner of her mind where she convinced herself it slept. Seymour was insane, damaged, misled, but by the end, he was almost invincible. Auron was right; madness was the best she could hope for if she willingly followed the fiend into whatever oblivion it tried to drag her into. Though, part of her wondered if it might be a relief, to just let go, despite all he was saying.
Blinking her eyes back into focus, aware that she had crossed a line in thinking this and irrationally worried that he might have overheard, Chuami looked back up at Auron. Mourning is understandable, he’d said, but he didn’t look particularly comfortable with the idea. Was that because he thought she had no reason to feel as strongly as she did for him? Or was he just… squirming at having to be the one to listen to her talk about it?
Her head tilted slightly and a faint smile appeared on her lips as she looked at him. Isa had told her once that children remain children until they can see their parents as people, and she found he was right. Once he’d said it, she began to take note of little things, like the way he almost always burned himself on the match he lit his cigarette with, or the cracks in the gloves he wore. Things picked up years before she came along, small reminders that he wasn’t just her guardian, he was a man, he had been a boy, and he had made all the mistakes and been on all the adventures she had; though they had affected him in completely different ways, producing an individual who shared little to nothing with her in terms of outlook and experience.
Why was it only now that she realised she had not been viewing Auron in the same way? As much as Isa, Auron had his own life before her, before Yuna, before even Braska. She asked questions of him, drew information from him, as if he were somehow omnipotent, but she never imagined until right now that there were things he didn’t understand; that she could shed light on for him. Maybe it was about time she tried giving something back.
It was with this thought in her mind that she finally answered him with a story of her own. Well-rehearsed but never spoken, even her brothers only knew fragments of what had passed while she was away for that unbelievably short time in her youth. Hearing it all told at once was strange, even to her ears. She couldn’t imagine what Auron must have been thinking as this unexpected torrent of words poured out of her. She told him of the salvage crew, of Anjali, of how quickly everything had happened. She did not spare herself the embarrassment of explaining to Auron that this girl she described was everything to her, that she couldn’t imagine loving anyone so dearly; so that when she told him of the cavern, he would understand. So that when she moved on to tell him of how she got that scar, he would understand all the more how she had kept from losing herself completely, how one agonized part of her had pulled back hard enough to keep the fiend from killing what she, in her state of unreality, believed to be her lost Anji. When she’d finished, Chuami was surprised to find she wasn’t crying as she thought she might. In fact, she felt relieved, almost peaceful.
“I… thought you ought to know.” she said, quietly, looking away once more with a tired smile. "It seemed important. After all, we’re a endangered species. Shouldn’t we share survival tactics?”
“It’s called ‘I Wanna Forget What Day It Is, So Let’s Make Excuses to Drink Copious Amounts of Gin’. But we can make it more interesting by playing Liar. You have to tell me two things about yourself, one true and one not. If I can identify the true one, I win – if I can’t, I lose, and that’s one shot. Honestly, I just don’t really wanna be on my own, so if you’ve got nothin’ better to do…”
sovereignarchive 