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Grounded, chapter 3
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Characters: Locke, plot-relevant birds
Word count: ~5000
Warnings: Content notes for the fic as a whole on Pastebin. Locke chapters tend to have more cussin'. I had to stop myself from including a very long A/N about why it's fine that I am putting behavior seen in one bird species into a different species but it's fine, this is a fantasy canon, or maybe Locke just isn't up on charadriiform taxonomy. does he seem like someone who would know? Does he?
Notes: Chapter 3 of 8 of a gift for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ovely for Yuletide 2020!
Locke had nothing to complain about at this point, aside from getting extravagantly seasick in all quarters of the world. Most people didn't have the wherewithal to travel at all these days, so he should count himself lucky even for that. He'd hunted down old contacts and called in favors from the Returners glory days and from the much less glorious days before. Where that failed, he'd find somebody mounting an expedition to figure out what had happened to such and such town now that the roads were gone and the ocean had inverted itself or whatever. He'd say, Hey, you need one more sword arm? You need a guy who's suspiciously well informed about the cider trade? And at some point the list of places he'd been became its own recommendation. You want news from Zozo? Nikeah? You get three guesses where Thamasa ended up after the dust settled, but you're gonna need ten, this one's wild -
Treasure hunting. Talking to people and chasing rumors and trading this piece of information for that old sheaf of papers, this music box for that key, buying a couple drinks for the right out-of-work professor and saying, Hey, what do you make of these etchings?
Of course, the world was a wreck. All the professors were out of work. The drinks were all both expensive and terrible. There was a lot less bartering and a lot more picking through heaps of abandoned belongings. People were scared, and mourning. Some were immediately suspicious of strangers and decided to hate him as soon as he opened his mouth; others had gotten so desperate for connection they'd give you anything they owned for a five-minute chat. He made rude gestures at the first class of people and tried not to take too much advantage of the second. He was fine. He was, comparatively, doing great.
Sometimes he could hear the Phoenix calling to him. Sometimes he dreamed about the quiet life with Rachel that he should have had, and woke up thinking, Well, we still could.
Sometimes he dreamed of the Blackjack breaking up. Celes thrown down into the sea, still splattered with Kefka's blood, for what little good stabbing him had done. Falling, as they all fell.
“That's too bad,” Edgar said, in the dream, and Locke turned to shout at him, but then stopped, and wondered how he had ever mistaken that bearing for complacency. He knew Edgar better than that. There was a point where you got so scared, the only way through was to pretend everything was hilarious, and Edgar had been looking death in the face, and had not wanted to upset Sabin.
How long had that worked? Had the pretense held up his whole way down, or...
When waking from these dreams, Locke was usually useless for three or four hours. The voice in his head would say, mockingly, “Okay, and what are you doing to fix that part?”
Figaro Castle had vanished from the face of the earth. Whether it had been blown up or knocked over or sunk under the desert again and just stayed there, nobody could tell him, and there was nothing he could do. Vector was a pile of rubble. His friends were gone, and not even their homes remained.
Rachel was his oldest debt, and the only one he could still repay. He couldn't let his attention be divided.
*
Rumor had always put the Phoenix magicite solidly in Imperial possession. Or at least, Gestahl had some kind of rock; some descriptions were consistent with what Locke now knew as magicite, and some sounded like people getting way too excited about carnelian. Locke had this theory, anyway: Gestahl had never had kids. He wasn't worried about a succession, meaning he didn't have any plans for letting go of power in the first place – he wanted to keep it for himself, for a long damn time. So it stood to reason he would have stashed the Phoenix somewhere safe, and left instructions for some loyal toady to go find it and drag him back if he croaked. He'd have had no idea what Kefka was planning, or that there would be no body left to resurrect, and – well, get fucked, you monster, it was a kinder death than you deserved – like to see you show your ugly face in the world you helped ruin. How'd you like to get beaten down like everyone else, knifed for twelve gil and left to rot -
Locke was getting distracted. The Phoenix was on ex-Imperial turf, he was pretty sure. He just had to figure out where it had been before, and where all the major landmasses had ended up, and then how to get to this hidey-hole, if any human could. Easy, right?
(A memory came to him unbidden: Edgar staring in thinly veiled distaste at a jumble of maps and papers. He had tipped Locke off about an estate sale in South Figaro – the deceased had been an “amateur historian,” however the hell you got that distinction, and he'd said some of her papers might be of interest. Locke had grabbed the whole lot on his way to the castle for their next meeting, and was sifting through them on the floor of his usual guest room.
“You could stand to be more systematic,” said Edgar, proving once and for all that, whatever his finer qualities, he did not have the treasure hunter's instinct for following a hunch. Locke shrugged, ate another handful of salted nuts from the bowl on the endtable, and contemplated a map where some bored doodler had gradually transformed the course of the Lete River into the head of a seriously lopsided chocobo. Useful? No. Funny? Yeah, kinda.
Edgar raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Do you even want to succeed?”
Locke had punched him. Edgar had never offered a comment on the Phoenix hunt again.)
Here at the end of the world, out of other options, Locke bought himself a little leather-bound ledger. It was the kind of thing he could have just lifted, in the world before, but it'd be cruel to now. There was so little demand for craft work, and so little access to raw material, and mobs going town to town burning books, saying they were decadent, saying we deserved this fate for trying to understand too much – yeah, okay, so Locke slipped the book binder an extra fifty percent. Plus a note about a relatively well-defended caravan rolling out of here next Thursday, though gods knew if the next town would be any better.
He got some pens. He holed up under a bridge and opened the notebook and thought, Okay, Edgar, we'll try it your way this time – and in a pocket in the inside cover there were ten gil. At the same time he was trying to look out for the book binder, the old guy had been trying to sneak him some extra, too. He laughed, although he could have cried. He thought, Damn, do I really look that lost?
He wrote down everything he knew. In the bag under his shirt, the Phoenix feathers felt warm against his chest, as if his guardian approved the intent.
*
Outside the ruins of an old Imperial outpost a bird straggled along the shoreline. Its feathers were dingy gray, and its long yellow beak lolled open. One of its wings hung to the ground, leaving a wobbly trail in the sand beside the imprints of its feet.
Shorebirds were liars sometimes. They'd fake weakness to lure you away from something they valued. Like they were saying, “I'm easy meat, come get some,” but they'd stay just ahead long enough to get you away from their nest, or their favorite feeding ground, or a cache of treasure. Once you were good and disoriented they'd take flight, perfectly whole. Locke had always respected the hustle.
But this little guy – what could he be protecting? Locke looked at the trail of footprints. They led back along the shore until sand gave way to gravel. Beyond that the land rose up into a black wall of a cliff. If this bird had a nest or a cache back there, he could just sit on it and dive-bomb people who came at it from below. Fancy maneuvers like this were an unnecessary risk.
It occurred to Locke that he had not seen another bird for days. No other birds, no mating, no nest.
The bird came closer. Not like it was trying to trick him, but like it was too out of it to know he was there at all. The two biggest feathers on its bad wing were broken. Blood crusted its shoulder. It wasn't faking anything. It couldn't fly, and within a day or two it would starve. Its third eyelid flickered open and shut at random, its eye flashing white and yellow, white and black.
Before he even knew what he'd decided to do, Locke had the poor little bastard tucked under his arm, holding the bad wing immobile against its side. It windmilled its feet in feeble irritation and darted its neck out like a snake, trying to bite something or anything, but its beak closed on empty air. He could feel its pulse against his side – so powerful for such a small heart, and so inhumanly fast. It was fever-hot.
(It'd be worse if it weren't. Birds ran hot, a stablehand had told him one day, when he asked why Figaro's chocobo barn always felt like a blast furnace.)
The bird fought him all the way back up the shore. He'd left his increasingly worn-out tent and rapidly vanishing supplies up at the edges of the pine forest. He had only come down here to look around. The walk felt weeks long. His passenger kept trying to gouge chunks out of him.
“Stop that,” he said, “I'm here to help,” but if it actually did stop struggling it could only mean it was dead. Even now he could feel its protests getting weaker and weaker, and his eyes stung at the futility of it all. “Quit wasting your strength, little guy. It'll be okay, but you have to trust me.”
It was still alive when he found his camp. He wrestled it into a drawstring bag, leaving only its head exposed, and felt sick at how little it was able to resist him. He went through his medicine stash with shaking hands. What was the potion dosage for a seagull? They were a lot smaller than humans, but they ate a lot of complete trash, stuff went through them fast, they were probably pretty hard to poison -
The pouch of spent Phoenix feathers felt warm under his shirt. Like a reminder of all the Espers had given them. Gods dammit, he thought, I could have just done magic on this all along.
He held the shape of a spell in his mind, the way the magicite had whispered it to him. He couldn't do it the way the Espers did – it was like they built their magic out of colors a human couldn't quite see, or sounds he couldn't hear – but sometimes this imperfect copy was just enough.
“Go to sleep,” he told the bird, and let the spell go. The bird went still. If it died now, it would be painless. But he took it out of the bag and felt its chest, and for now, its heart still beat.
Then he kinda sat there for a while, half laughing and half sobbing. This was ridiculous. The hell was he doing? The bird was gonna die and then he'd be all messed up about it for a week. Should've walked away. Should've just put it out of its misery. Easy meat. Wild animals didn't want to be rescued.
Some people didn't, either. Never stopped him before.
Little guy wasn't getting anywhere fast with that damaged wing, even if it survived the night. Would the feathers grow back on their own, or was this a “wait for molting season and pray” type of situation? When was molting season? What season was it now? Was anything in nature going to go the way it should this year, or ever again?
He tried to frame a healing spell in his mind, and felt it fizzle out. He sighed, dried his eyes, and forced a few drops of potion down the bird's open beak. It couldn't make anything worse. Then he tucked the gull back into the bag so that when it woke – if it woke – it couldn't hurt itself again or wander off. He put some dried meat on the ground within reach of its beak. He wondered if it would eat nuts, figured it didn't have the beak to get into them, and spent way too much time smashing his reserve of tree nuts open between two rocks and leaving the nut meat piled up in front of the bird. Night fell; his patient didn't wake up; he slipped up and accidentally brought one of the rocks down on his own hand, and thought, Fuck, I should probably call it a day. He wasn't sure when he had last slept.
The potion was already open anyway, and they didn't keep long after they'd been exposed to air. He popped the cork back out, raised the bottle toward the dying bird in a miserable little salute, and took a swig for himself, for his stupid bruised fingers and sleepless nights.
A voice in the back of his head said, “You shouldn't waste medicine like this. Who knows if you'll ever get any more? If you'd stop throwing everything away on lost causes, maybe you'd stop losing everyone.”
“Shut up,” he said, aloud, too tired to understand he was talking to himself.
*
The bird lived. The bird never liked him, but it knew where the food was coming from. When he let it out of the bag it hung around, making clumsy attempts to distract him and steal all his stuff.
He spent days on that beach, with that bird, finding it food and dodging when it tried to bite him. This bird is an asshole, he thought. For some reason this discovery made him happier than anything had in weeks.
The potion had done something; the damaged feathers had fallen out, and new ones were coming in out of season. I've saved a life, Locke thought. I've saved the life of a stupid feather-brained thief who's never gonna thank me. He had to stop himself there; if he let the emotion overcome him, the bird would take this chance to rip out all his tent pegs.
One night in a spirit of camaraderie he tied a spare bandana around the bird's chest. The next morning it bit a chunk out of his ear and flew away.
He watched it rise unsteadily into the air and wished it a long and dishonest career.
“See?” he told that skeptical voice within himself. “There are no lost causes.” It didn't answer.
*
He dreamed of Rachel, plummeting through the air and then spreading ash-gray wings – not falling at all, but pulling up out of a dive. She shot up into dazzling sunlight. She had always been exactly this beautiful.
He stood watching her from below, as chunks of wood and machinery plummeted to earth around him. He wanted to hide his face. But no. Not if it cost him this view for one instant.
*
In the morning he said to the empty sky: “I've been alone too long, right? That's what this means. It's too long since I talked to anyone who didn't have a beak.”
*
In the houses of the wealthy, cooks had fallen far enough to start frying old sourdough in butter and calling this some kinda “rustic breakfast.” The poor – y'know, the actual rustics – didn't have butter. Good to know that even after the end of the world, Jidoor was the worst place in it.
He double-checked the address on the flyer he had folded into his ledger. THE GATHERING STORM, it said: ART AND ARTIFACTS OF THE LATE GESTAHLIAN EMPIRE. LIMITED EXHIBITION. Heard about it from a woman in South Figaro, an occasional con artist he knew from before. She said she'd tried to hire on as a guard but her nosing around the storage room had made the sponsors uncomfortable. But what she'd gotten a look at before they'd thrown her out had looked legit.
“Good luck,” she'd told him. “No offense, but if even I wasn't charming enough, I don't see how you're gonna pull it off.” It had seemed like a weird thing to say at the time. He'd thought, I'm plenty charming, just watch me.
But he'd had to do some costume work to be able to walk into the noble quarter, and he'd had to shave for the first time in ages, and for that he'd had to look in a mirror. He had seen how much flesh he had lost in his face, and the knot of scar tissue around the hole in his left ear. He looked like hell.
He must have been a different person, back when he'd come to Kohlingen. If he'd been this janked-up piece of work he'd have never gotten to speak to Rachel at all.
And she wouldn't have fallen, and with nothing to remember, she wouldn't have forgotten him, and when she and her family died it wouldn't have meant anything more to him than any other Imperial raid. He'd probably have never joined the Returners. He wouldn't have dragged Terra along to talk to the Espers and accidentally hand Kefka the keys to godhood.
So yeah, fuck Jidoor's upper crust for walling themselves off in relative luxury while commoners starved, and also fuck them for making him think about all this.
He turned down a side street that would take him around the back of the exhibition gallery. The front was all columns and grandeur, but the back was just a flat gray slab with a couple scraggly trees wilting by the delivery entrance. Nothing he could grab on the way down if he had to go out a window. That awning would tear before it took his weight. He squinted upward. The streets were too wide in this part of town for an easy escape roof-to-roof, but there was enough random architectural bullshit going on up there that he could probably find a hiding place if he had to, just hunker down and wait out whatever happened. If he'd had time to plan ahead he could've stashed some rope up there. Couple wooden boards maybe. Ah, well, it kept things interesting.
He slipped into the delivery entrance, head down, hands in pockets, and wound his way through service passages until he got to the coat check. He summoned his best air of “I'm totally supposed to be here, I'm Mr. Fancy Britches himself, questioning me is the dumbest move you'll make all day” - basically, a really unflattering Edgar impression. Like if you gave Edgar's mannerisms to the worst person imaginable. This was a fun one, but it was more fun when the man himself was around to be annoyed at it. Those days were gone.
Anyway. He slid over from the staff side to the patron side and waited for a big enough group to enter that he could tag along behind them.
Then got so pissed off he almost left right away. Bastards had hors d'oeuvres. Outside in the city the aqueduct was full of slime, every poor family's kitchen garden had been torn apart by bugs, and these guys were doing decorative things to boiled eggs. Those were perfectly good greens just sitting around garnishing plates – people could've eaten those, what business did this stupid gallery have buying them all up out of the mouths of -
No. Eyes on the prize. This was not his problem to solve, not right now. He was here for the Phoenix. Picking a fight now did nothing for Rachel.
(Would she be happy to see him, knowing he had walked away? Was he still anyone she would recognize?)
Anyway. The other weird thing was that the guests were covering their faces, with veils or domino masks or big floppy hats. Okay, so any buying was supposed to be anonymous – not a problem. He was here as a proxy, he decided, and cranked up the snotty attitude. After all, the only people more status-conscious than the rich were their most loyal commoner hangers-on. He was here representing some fancy lady thinking about adding to her collection. She deferred completely to his judgment on art, because he was some kind of expert or something. For fun, he imagined that his client was Celes, who barely had a concept of art in the first place.
He thought of Celes, not the way he'd seen her last, but the way she'd looked studying the libretto, trying to pretend she still wasn't in earnest. Like it was all still means to ends, like she didn't get it, like she wasn't going to try to sell this thing.
Locke told himself, Knock it off, you have a job to do.
He strolled around the edges of the room, doing his best to look officious and self-important. If anyone was rude enough to ask, he planned to claim he'd suffered a wasting disease. People like this hated sickness, and liked pretending it didn't exist. They wouldn't want to pry, and they'd give him plenty of space. And strange as it was to say, space was a thing he could use. He hadn't seen this many people in one place in a long time. It was humid in the main gallery, and – loud, in a way that most places weren't loud anymore.He'd told himself that he missed the bustle, but now he found it just made him uneasy. Were people still allowed to congregate like this?
These people, in velvet and lace, with their voices echoing off polished hardwood floors and bright marble walls – he had to fight down the urge to touch his mangled ear – would they ever lose sleep over a dying bird? Did they understand how big any one life was? Had to be two hundred guests in this building, not to mention the staff. A good two hundred fifty lives. What the fuck. Had he ever understood that much? Before?
He was here for the Phoenix. For Rachel. Understand later, he told himself. Right now you gotta sell the attitude.
He looked at a case of tacky jewelry with variations on the Imperial crest. He looked at some fancy tableware. And they had the nerve to call these “artifacts.” On a rack in one corner someone had actually scraped some of old Gestahl's propaganda posters off of a wall somewhere and had them mounted for framing. Take this shit out back and burn it, he wanted to say, but had to stay in character. So he said primly to the older guy in the rust-colored coat currently flipping through them, “This is in poor taste, don't you think?”
“Not at all,” the man said, and pulled a sample out of the rack to examine it. The artist had done their best to make Gestahl look young and vital and less jowly, and they'd missed the mark; this guy staring heroically off into the distance didn't look like the Emperor, but wasn't enough unlike him to be good-looking. “It's a reminder of disaster averted. If the Empire hadn't collapsed when it did, we'd be living under its rule right now. The current unrest is upsetting, but it will die down.”
Fuck off out of here with all that, Locke thought, but instead said, “Ah, you were lucky enough not to lose anyone to the war? My heartfelt congratulations.”
The man gave him a sharp look from under his gray half-mask. “Your pardon - what house do you represent, again?”
Locke gave him a technically correct but highly sarcastic bow, moved to intercept a waiter circulating with flutes of white wine, and just didn't go back to answer the question.
The wine was sour and flat and had this weird metallic tang and he'd always been more of a beer guy anyway. He took some consolation in knowing all these rich ghouls had to drink this too, and pretend it was as good as they were used to, and convince themselves they were having a grand goddamn time. A disaster averted? The current unrest? Was that how they were spinning this?
They were just as scared as anyone. They were dealing as best they knew how. He couldn't summon any sympathy. But he made himself finish the wine slowly, less like a guy using it to take the edge off a simmering rage. He was sure he'd been better at this part, once.
His talisman, the bag of Phoenix ash still concealed under this stuffy secondhand dress shirt, was cold and inert. Of course you couldn't expect a dead bird to talk you through this kind of bullshit. He'd brought it all the same, wanting to show it he was serious.
He was serious. He felt a little steadier after thinking about it. This room was all kitsch; if he was going to find any clues, they'd be in something more personal to the Imperial family. He moved deeper into the gallery, passing a wall of battle paintings claiming to show the first decisive victories of the Magitek Knights.
“Those are mass-produced, you know,” he told a teenage girl looking at The Conquest of Tzen. She wore a black mask patterned with purple butterflies, and underneath it her eyes almost vanished in a lake of blue eye shadow. She frowned at him skeptically. “It's true. A designer prints off some paint-by-numbers instructions and they have a whole factory of workers churning them out. You can tell by the brushwork.” He pointed to a spot at random in the painting's sooty sky. “Amateurish,” he scoffed. “No artistic feeling at all. But people let themselves be taken in so easily.”
She looked back at the painting in disgust; he couldn't tell if he'd actually convinced her or if she was just being your typical snotty kid. Whatever. He should probably get to the main event before he made too many waves. He was on edge. He wasn't as good at this as he used to be. He wanted to plunge on ahead to the next room, but he made himself stroll, instead, like he was in no hurry. Like everything mattered just as little as these fancy fucks thought it did.
He walked down a hall with a bunch of small side galleries, and peered into each without sensing anything. But at the end of that hall was one last room, and in that room there was just the one painting. Even if the Phoenix had nothing to tell him, you didn't get to be a treasure hunter for this long without learning to take a hint.
It was a giant portrait of Gestahl. And this one actually looked like him, which inclined Locke to think that, whatever the artist's technical achievement, it was a shit painting. At triple life size the old bastard's subtle knowing smile was nauseating. There was a glint in those eyes that made your skin crawl.
He heard footsteps approaching from behind. “Magnetic, isn't it?” said a voice over his shoulder, and Locke had time to prepare himself with a suitably haughty expression as he looked back. He was addressed by a small, neat, gray-haired man all in black, and undisguised. Okay. So one of the sponsors, then? Or a honcho at this gallery? While Locke did the math, the stranger went on: “There's something so compelling about evil. A charisma, almost, that we find ourselves subject to almost against our will.”
“And that's what this show is about?” Locke said. “Thinking atrocity is stylish?”
With shocking candor the man said, “If that were my thesis, I'd have more portraits of Kefka Pallazzo.”
Locke thought, You motherfucker. Instead he said, “Oh, yeah. Light of Judgment's real sexy stuff.” Which was probably not any more diplomatic.
“Young man,” said the art gallery bigwig, “who are you?”
“I'm searching for rare treasures on behalf of a great lady,” he said. Wasn't even a lie.
“Yes,” the man said, with a small smile, and there was a momentary glint in his eyes that matched that in Gestahl's portrait, pinning Locke between them. “But I wonder what you were doing before you received that commission, hm?”
Locke relaxed. Everything had suddenly become so simple. There was always this moment, right before things went off the rails, right as the game changed on you: this moment of clarity where you realized, Okay, the time for careful maneuvers is over, I'm about to start some shit. Like hanging, just for an instant, in midair.
“Look, pal,” he said, dropping all those upper-class affectations and shifting into a stance that was not quite for fighting, and not quite a threat, yet. “We can shake hands, and I can get out of here, and get back to it. That option's still on the table.”
Don't take it, he thought. I could use some excitement.
He had seen it, in the last moment before he turned his back on Gestahl. Hidden against the background of the emperor's lap robe, in spidery brush strokes just above the inside edge of the frame, the painting said: “We will meet again where the mountains form a star.”
Gallery security arrived, in the form of three big guys in suits, all way better-fed than anyone had a right to be at present, and Locke thought, Here we go. The Phoenix's blessing was with him. It wasn't like he could die here.
The old guy was saying something about having Locke escorted to a holding cell; Locke was not listening. Where the mountains form a star. He thought with regret of Figaro Castle's map room, where he could have solved this in ten second flat, if the world was still the shape it used to be, and if the castle hadn't been eaten by the sand. So he had some more research to do. Somebody at the University of Narshe had been talking about doing a survey -
The old guy stopped talking and made some kinda gesture. Locke had completely tuned him out by now. But one of the security guys grabbed Locke's shoulder.
“I'll pass, thanks,” he said. “Places to be.” He twisted away and ran for it.
He probably would've gotten away clean, if he hadn't stopped to slam a knife through the portrait's left eye.
Characters: Locke, plot-relevant birds
Word count: ~5000
Warnings: Content notes for the fic as a whole on Pastebin. Locke chapters tend to have more cussin'. I had to stop myself from including a very long A/N about why it's fine that I am putting behavior seen in one bird species into a different species but it's fine, this is a fantasy canon, or maybe Locke just isn't up on charadriiform taxonomy. does he seem like someone who would know? Does he?
Notes: Chapter 3 of 8 of a gift for
Locke had nothing to complain about at this point, aside from getting extravagantly seasick in all quarters of the world. Most people didn't have the wherewithal to travel at all these days, so he should count himself lucky even for that. He'd hunted down old contacts and called in favors from the Returners glory days and from the much less glorious days before. Where that failed, he'd find somebody mounting an expedition to figure out what had happened to such and such town now that the roads were gone and the ocean had inverted itself or whatever. He'd say, Hey, you need one more sword arm? You need a guy who's suspiciously well informed about the cider trade? And at some point the list of places he'd been became its own recommendation. You want news from Zozo? Nikeah? You get three guesses where Thamasa ended up after the dust settled, but you're gonna need ten, this one's wild -
Treasure hunting. Talking to people and chasing rumors and trading this piece of information for that old sheaf of papers, this music box for that key, buying a couple drinks for the right out-of-work professor and saying, Hey, what do you make of these etchings?
Of course, the world was a wreck. All the professors were out of work. The drinks were all both expensive and terrible. There was a lot less bartering and a lot more picking through heaps of abandoned belongings. People were scared, and mourning. Some were immediately suspicious of strangers and decided to hate him as soon as he opened his mouth; others had gotten so desperate for connection they'd give you anything they owned for a five-minute chat. He made rude gestures at the first class of people and tried not to take too much advantage of the second. He was fine. He was, comparatively, doing great.
Sometimes he could hear the Phoenix calling to him. Sometimes he dreamed about the quiet life with Rachel that he should have had, and woke up thinking, Well, we still could.
Sometimes he dreamed of the Blackjack breaking up. Celes thrown down into the sea, still splattered with Kefka's blood, for what little good stabbing him had done. Falling, as they all fell.
“That's too bad,” Edgar said, in the dream, and Locke turned to shout at him, but then stopped, and wondered how he had ever mistaken that bearing for complacency. He knew Edgar better than that. There was a point where you got so scared, the only way through was to pretend everything was hilarious, and Edgar had been looking death in the face, and had not wanted to upset Sabin.
How long had that worked? Had the pretense held up his whole way down, or...
When waking from these dreams, Locke was usually useless for three or four hours. The voice in his head would say, mockingly, “Okay, and what are you doing to fix that part?”
Figaro Castle had vanished from the face of the earth. Whether it had been blown up or knocked over or sunk under the desert again and just stayed there, nobody could tell him, and there was nothing he could do. Vector was a pile of rubble. His friends were gone, and not even their homes remained.
Rachel was his oldest debt, and the only one he could still repay. He couldn't let his attention be divided.
*
Rumor had always put the Phoenix magicite solidly in Imperial possession. Or at least, Gestahl had some kind of rock; some descriptions were consistent with what Locke now knew as magicite, and some sounded like people getting way too excited about carnelian. Locke had this theory, anyway: Gestahl had never had kids. He wasn't worried about a succession, meaning he didn't have any plans for letting go of power in the first place – he wanted to keep it for himself, for a long damn time. So it stood to reason he would have stashed the Phoenix somewhere safe, and left instructions for some loyal toady to go find it and drag him back if he croaked. He'd have had no idea what Kefka was planning, or that there would be no body left to resurrect, and – well, get fucked, you monster, it was a kinder death than you deserved – like to see you show your ugly face in the world you helped ruin. How'd you like to get beaten down like everyone else, knifed for twelve gil and left to rot -
Locke was getting distracted. The Phoenix was on ex-Imperial turf, he was pretty sure. He just had to figure out where it had been before, and where all the major landmasses had ended up, and then how to get to this hidey-hole, if any human could. Easy, right?
(A memory came to him unbidden: Edgar staring in thinly veiled distaste at a jumble of maps and papers. He had tipped Locke off about an estate sale in South Figaro – the deceased had been an “amateur historian,” however the hell you got that distinction, and he'd said some of her papers might be of interest. Locke had grabbed the whole lot on his way to the castle for their next meeting, and was sifting through them on the floor of his usual guest room.
“You could stand to be more systematic,” said Edgar, proving once and for all that, whatever his finer qualities, he did not have the treasure hunter's instinct for following a hunch. Locke shrugged, ate another handful of salted nuts from the bowl on the endtable, and contemplated a map where some bored doodler had gradually transformed the course of the Lete River into the head of a seriously lopsided chocobo. Useful? No. Funny? Yeah, kinda.
Edgar raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Do you even want to succeed?”
Locke had punched him. Edgar had never offered a comment on the Phoenix hunt again.)
Here at the end of the world, out of other options, Locke bought himself a little leather-bound ledger. It was the kind of thing he could have just lifted, in the world before, but it'd be cruel to now. There was so little demand for craft work, and so little access to raw material, and mobs going town to town burning books, saying they were decadent, saying we deserved this fate for trying to understand too much – yeah, okay, so Locke slipped the book binder an extra fifty percent. Plus a note about a relatively well-defended caravan rolling out of here next Thursday, though gods knew if the next town would be any better.
He got some pens. He holed up under a bridge and opened the notebook and thought, Okay, Edgar, we'll try it your way this time – and in a pocket in the inside cover there were ten gil. At the same time he was trying to look out for the book binder, the old guy had been trying to sneak him some extra, too. He laughed, although he could have cried. He thought, Damn, do I really look that lost?
He wrote down everything he knew. In the bag under his shirt, the Phoenix feathers felt warm against his chest, as if his guardian approved the intent.
*
Outside the ruins of an old Imperial outpost a bird straggled along the shoreline. Its feathers were dingy gray, and its long yellow beak lolled open. One of its wings hung to the ground, leaving a wobbly trail in the sand beside the imprints of its feet.
Shorebirds were liars sometimes. They'd fake weakness to lure you away from something they valued. Like they were saying, “I'm easy meat, come get some,” but they'd stay just ahead long enough to get you away from their nest, or their favorite feeding ground, or a cache of treasure. Once you were good and disoriented they'd take flight, perfectly whole. Locke had always respected the hustle.
But this little guy – what could he be protecting? Locke looked at the trail of footprints. They led back along the shore until sand gave way to gravel. Beyond that the land rose up into a black wall of a cliff. If this bird had a nest or a cache back there, he could just sit on it and dive-bomb people who came at it from below. Fancy maneuvers like this were an unnecessary risk.
It occurred to Locke that he had not seen another bird for days. No other birds, no mating, no nest.
The bird came closer. Not like it was trying to trick him, but like it was too out of it to know he was there at all. The two biggest feathers on its bad wing were broken. Blood crusted its shoulder. It wasn't faking anything. It couldn't fly, and within a day or two it would starve. Its third eyelid flickered open and shut at random, its eye flashing white and yellow, white and black.
Before he even knew what he'd decided to do, Locke had the poor little bastard tucked under his arm, holding the bad wing immobile against its side. It windmilled its feet in feeble irritation and darted its neck out like a snake, trying to bite something or anything, but its beak closed on empty air. He could feel its pulse against his side – so powerful for such a small heart, and so inhumanly fast. It was fever-hot.
(It'd be worse if it weren't. Birds ran hot, a stablehand had told him one day, when he asked why Figaro's chocobo barn always felt like a blast furnace.)
The bird fought him all the way back up the shore. He'd left his increasingly worn-out tent and rapidly vanishing supplies up at the edges of the pine forest. He had only come down here to look around. The walk felt weeks long. His passenger kept trying to gouge chunks out of him.
“Stop that,” he said, “I'm here to help,” but if it actually did stop struggling it could only mean it was dead. Even now he could feel its protests getting weaker and weaker, and his eyes stung at the futility of it all. “Quit wasting your strength, little guy. It'll be okay, but you have to trust me.”
It was still alive when he found his camp. He wrestled it into a drawstring bag, leaving only its head exposed, and felt sick at how little it was able to resist him. He went through his medicine stash with shaking hands. What was the potion dosage for a seagull? They were a lot smaller than humans, but they ate a lot of complete trash, stuff went through them fast, they were probably pretty hard to poison -
The pouch of spent Phoenix feathers felt warm under his shirt. Like a reminder of all the Espers had given them. Gods dammit, he thought, I could have just done magic on this all along.
He held the shape of a spell in his mind, the way the magicite had whispered it to him. He couldn't do it the way the Espers did – it was like they built their magic out of colors a human couldn't quite see, or sounds he couldn't hear – but sometimes this imperfect copy was just enough.
“Go to sleep,” he told the bird, and let the spell go. The bird went still. If it died now, it would be painless. But he took it out of the bag and felt its chest, and for now, its heart still beat.
Then he kinda sat there for a while, half laughing and half sobbing. This was ridiculous. The hell was he doing? The bird was gonna die and then he'd be all messed up about it for a week. Should've walked away. Should've just put it out of its misery. Easy meat. Wild animals didn't want to be rescued.
Some people didn't, either. Never stopped him before.
Little guy wasn't getting anywhere fast with that damaged wing, even if it survived the night. Would the feathers grow back on their own, or was this a “wait for molting season and pray” type of situation? When was molting season? What season was it now? Was anything in nature going to go the way it should this year, or ever again?
He tried to frame a healing spell in his mind, and felt it fizzle out. He sighed, dried his eyes, and forced a few drops of potion down the bird's open beak. It couldn't make anything worse. Then he tucked the gull back into the bag so that when it woke – if it woke – it couldn't hurt itself again or wander off. He put some dried meat on the ground within reach of its beak. He wondered if it would eat nuts, figured it didn't have the beak to get into them, and spent way too much time smashing his reserve of tree nuts open between two rocks and leaving the nut meat piled up in front of the bird. Night fell; his patient didn't wake up; he slipped up and accidentally brought one of the rocks down on his own hand, and thought, Fuck, I should probably call it a day. He wasn't sure when he had last slept.
The potion was already open anyway, and they didn't keep long after they'd been exposed to air. He popped the cork back out, raised the bottle toward the dying bird in a miserable little salute, and took a swig for himself, for his stupid bruised fingers and sleepless nights.
A voice in the back of his head said, “You shouldn't waste medicine like this. Who knows if you'll ever get any more? If you'd stop throwing everything away on lost causes, maybe you'd stop losing everyone.”
“Shut up,” he said, aloud, too tired to understand he was talking to himself.
*
The bird lived. The bird never liked him, but it knew where the food was coming from. When he let it out of the bag it hung around, making clumsy attempts to distract him and steal all his stuff.
He spent days on that beach, with that bird, finding it food and dodging when it tried to bite him. This bird is an asshole, he thought. For some reason this discovery made him happier than anything had in weeks.
The potion had done something; the damaged feathers had fallen out, and new ones were coming in out of season. I've saved a life, Locke thought. I've saved the life of a stupid feather-brained thief who's never gonna thank me. He had to stop himself there; if he let the emotion overcome him, the bird would take this chance to rip out all his tent pegs.
One night in a spirit of camaraderie he tied a spare bandana around the bird's chest. The next morning it bit a chunk out of his ear and flew away.
He watched it rise unsteadily into the air and wished it a long and dishonest career.
“See?” he told that skeptical voice within himself. “There are no lost causes.” It didn't answer.
*
He dreamed of Rachel, plummeting through the air and then spreading ash-gray wings – not falling at all, but pulling up out of a dive. She shot up into dazzling sunlight. She had always been exactly this beautiful.
He stood watching her from below, as chunks of wood and machinery plummeted to earth around him. He wanted to hide his face. But no. Not if it cost him this view for one instant.
*
In the morning he said to the empty sky: “I've been alone too long, right? That's what this means. It's too long since I talked to anyone who didn't have a beak.”
*
In the houses of the wealthy, cooks had fallen far enough to start frying old sourdough in butter and calling this some kinda “rustic breakfast.” The poor – y'know, the actual rustics – didn't have butter. Good to know that even after the end of the world, Jidoor was the worst place in it.
He double-checked the address on the flyer he had folded into his ledger. THE GATHERING STORM, it said: ART AND ARTIFACTS OF THE LATE GESTAHLIAN EMPIRE. LIMITED EXHIBITION. Heard about it from a woman in South Figaro, an occasional con artist he knew from before. She said she'd tried to hire on as a guard but her nosing around the storage room had made the sponsors uncomfortable. But what she'd gotten a look at before they'd thrown her out had looked legit.
“Good luck,” she'd told him. “No offense, but if even I wasn't charming enough, I don't see how you're gonna pull it off.” It had seemed like a weird thing to say at the time. He'd thought, I'm plenty charming, just watch me.
But he'd had to do some costume work to be able to walk into the noble quarter, and he'd had to shave for the first time in ages, and for that he'd had to look in a mirror. He had seen how much flesh he had lost in his face, and the knot of scar tissue around the hole in his left ear. He looked like hell.
He must have been a different person, back when he'd come to Kohlingen. If he'd been this janked-up piece of work he'd have never gotten to speak to Rachel at all.
And she wouldn't have fallen, and with nothing to remember, she wouldn't have forgotten him, and when she and her family died it wouldn't have meant anything more to him than any other Imperial raid. He'd probably have never joined the Returners. He wouldn't have dragged Terra along to talk to the Espers and accidentally hand Kefka the keys to godhood.
So yeah, fuck Jidoor's upper crust for walling themselves off in relative luxury while commoners starved, and also fuck them for making him think about all this.
He turned down a side street that would take him around the back of the exhibition gallery. The front was all columns and grandeur, but the back was just a flat gray slab with a couple scraggly trees wilting by the delivery entrance. Nothing he could grab on the way down if he had to go out a window. That awning would tear before it took his weight. He squinted upward. The streets were too wide in this part of town for an easy escape roof-to-roof, but there was enough random architectural bullshit going on up there that he could probably find a hiding place if he had to, just hunker down and wait out whatever happened. If he'd had time to plan ahead he could've stashed some rope up there. Couple wooden boards maybe. Ah, well, it kept things interesting.
He slipped into the delivery entrance, head down, hands in pockets, and wound his way through service passages until he got to the coat check. He summoned his best air of “I'm totally supposed to be here, I'm Mr. Fancy Britches himself, questioning me is the dumbest move you'll make all day” - basically, a really unflattering Edgar impression. Like if you gave Edgar's mannerisms to the worst person imaginable. This was a fun one, but it was more fun when the man himself was around to be annoyed at it. Those days were gone.
Anyway. He slid over from the staff side to the patron side and waited for a big enough group to enter that he could tag along behind them.
Then got so pissed off he almost left right away. Bastards had hors d'oeuvres. Outside in the city the aqueduct was full of slime, every poor family's kitchen garden had been torn apart by bugs, and these guys were doing decorative things to boiled eggs. Those were perfectly good greens just sitting around garnishing plates – people could've eaten those, what business did this stupid gallery have buying them all up out of the mouths of -
No. Eyes on the prize. This was not his problem to solve, not right now. He was here for the Phoenix. Picking a fight now did nothing for Rachel.
(Would she be happy to see him, knowing he had walked away? Was he still anyone she would recognize?)
Anyway. The other weird thing was that the guests were covering their faces, with veils or domino masks or big floppy hats. Okay, so any buying was supposed to be anonymous – not a problem. He was here as a proxy, he decided, and cranked up the snotty attitude. After all, the only people more status-conscious than the rich were their most loyal commoner hangers-on. He was here representing some fancy lady thinking about adding to her collection. She deferred completely to his judgment on art, because he was some kind of expert or something. For fun, he imagined that his client was Celes, who barely had a concept of art in the first place.
He thought of Celes, not the way he'd seen her last, but the way she'd looked studying the libretto, trying to pretend she still wasn't in earnest. Like it was all still means to ends, like she didn't get it, like she wasn't going to try to sell this thing.
Locke told himself, Knock it off, you have a job to do.
He strolled around the edges of the room, doing his best to look officious and self-important. If anyone was rude enough to ask, he planned to claim he'd suffered a wasting disease. People like this hated sickness, and liked pretending it didn't exist. They wouldn't want to pry, and they'd give him plenty of space. And strange as it was to say, space was a thing he could use. He hadn't seen this many people in one place in a long time. It was humid in the main gallery, and – loud, in a way that most places weren't loud anymore.He'd told himself that he missed the bustle, but now he found it just made him uneasy. Were people still allowed to congregate like this?
These people, in velvet and lace, with their voices echoing off polished hardwood floors and bright marble walls – he had to fight down the urge to touch his mangled ear – would they ever lose sleep over a dying bird? Did they understand how big any one life was? Had to be two hundred guests in this building, not to mention the staff. A good two hundred fifty lives. What the fuck. Had he ever understood that much? Before?
He was here for the Phoenix. For Rachel. Understand later, he told himself. Right now you gotta sell the attitude.
He looked at a case of tacky jewelry with variations on the Imperial crest. He looked at some fancy tableware. And they had the nerve to call these “artifacts.” On a rack in one corner someone had actually scraped some of old Gestahl's propaganda posters off of a wall somewhere and had them mounted for framing. Take this shit out back and burn it, he wanted to say, but had to stay in character. So he said primly to the older guy in the rust-colored coat currently flipping through them, “This is in poor taste, don't you think?”
“Not at all,” the man said, and pulled a sample out of the rack to examine it. The artist had done their best to make Gestahl look young and vital and less jowly, and they'd missed the mark; this guy staring heroically off into the distance didn't look like the Emperor, but wasn't enough unlike him to be good-looking. “It's a reminder of disaster averted. If the Empire hadn't collapsed when it did, we'd be living under its rule right now. The current unrest is upsetting, but it will die down.”
Fuck off out of here with all that, Locke thought, but instead said, “Ah, you were lucky enough not to lose anyone to the war? My heartfelt congratulations.”
The man gave him a sharp look from under his gray half-mask. “Your pardon - what house do you represent, again?”
Locke gave him a technically correct but highly sarcastic bow, moved to intercept a waiter circulating with flutes of white wine, and just didn't go back to answer the question.
The wine was sour and flat and had this weird metallic tang and he'd always been more of a beer guy anyway. He took some consolation in knowing all these rich ghouls had to drink this too, and pretend it was as good as they were used to, and convince themselves they were having a grand goddamn time. A disaster averted? The current unrest? Was that how they were spinning this?
They were just as scared as anyone. They were dealing as best they knew how. He couldn't summon any sympathy. But he made himself finish the wine slowly, less like a guy using it to take the edge off a simmering rage. He was sure he'd been better at this part, once.
His talisman, the bag of Phoenix ash still concealed under this stuffy secondhand dress shirt, was cold and inert. Of course you couldn't expect a dead bird to talk you through this kind of bullshit. He'd brought it all the same, wanting to show it he was serious.
He was serious. He felt a little steadier after thinking about it. This room was all kitsch; if he was going to find any clues, they'd be in something more personal to the Imperial family. He moved deeper into the gallery, passing a wall of battle paintings claiming to show the first decisive victories of the Magitek Knights.
“Those are mass-produced, you know,” he told a teenage girl looking at The Conquest of Tzen. She wore a black mask patterned with purple butterflies, and underneath it her eyes almost vanished in a lake of blue eye shadow. She frowned at him skeptically. “It's true. A designer prints off some paint-by-numbers instructions and they have a whole factory of workers churning them out. You can tell by the brushwork.” He pointed to a spot at random in the painting's sooty sky. “Amateurish,” he scoffed. “No artistic feeling at all. But people let themselves be taken in so easily.”
She looked back at the painting in disgust; he couldn't tell if he'd actually convinced her or if she was just being your typical snotty kid. Whatever. He should probably get to the main event before he made too many waves. He was on edge. He wasn't as good at this as he used to be. He wanted to plunge on ahead to the next room, but he made himself stroll, instead, like he was in no hurry. Like everything mattered just as little as these fancy fucks thought it did.
He walked down a hall with a bunch of small side galleries, and peered into each without sensing anything. But at the end of that hall was one last room, and in that room there was just the one painting. Even if the Phoenix had nothing to tell him, you didn't get to be a treasure hunter for this long without learning to take a hint.
It was a giant portrait of Gestahl. And this one actually looked like him, which inclined Locke to think that, whatever the artist's technical achievement, it was a shit painting. At triple life size the old bastard's subtle knowing smile was nauseating. There was a glint in those eyes that made your skin crawl.
He heard footsteps approaching from behind. “Magnetic, isn't it?” said a voice over his shoulder, and Locke had time to prepare himself with a suitably haughty expression as he looked back. He was addressed by a small, neat, gray-haired man all in black, and undisguised. Okay. So one of the sponsors, then? Or a honcho at this gallery? While Locke did the math, the stranger went on: “There's something so compelling about evil. A charisma, almost, that we find ourselves subject to almost against our will.”
“And that's what this show is about?” Locke said. “Thinking atrocity is stylish?”
With shocking candor the man said, “If that were my thesis, I'd have more portraits of Kefka Pallazzo.”
Locke thought, You motherfucker. Instead he said, “Oh, yeah. Light of Judgment's real sexy stuff.” Which was probably not any more diplomatic.
“Young man,” said the art gallery bigwig, “who are you?”
“I'm searching for rare treasures on behalf of a great lady,” he said. Wasn't even a lie.
“Yes,” the man said, with a small smile, and there was a momentary glint in his eyes that matched that in Gestahl's portrait, pinning Locke between them. “But I wonder what you were doing before you received that commission, hm?”
Locke relaxed. Everything had suddenly become so simple. There was always this moment, right before things went off the rails, right as the game changed on you: this moment of clarity where you realized, Okay, the time for careful maneuvers is over, I'm about to start some shit. Like hanging, just for an instant, in midair.
“Look, pal,” he said, dropping all those upper-class affectations and shifting into a stance that was not quite for fighting, and not quite a threat, yet. “We can shake hands, and I can get out of here, and get back to it. That option's still on the table.”
Don't take it, he thought. I could use some excitement.
He had seen it, in the last moment before he turned his back on Gestahl. Hidden against the background of the emperor's lap robe, in spidery brush strokes just above the inside edge of the frame, the painting said: “We will meet again where the mountains form a star.”
Gallery security arrived, in the form of three big guys in suits, all way better-fed than anyone had a right to be at present, and Locke thought, Here we go. The Phoenix's blessing was with him. It wasn't like he could die here.
The old guy was saying something about having Locke escorted to a holding cell; Locke was not listening. Where the mountains form a star. He thought with regret of Figaro Castle's map room, where he could have solved this in ten second flat, if the world was still the shape it used to be, and if the castle hadn't been eaten by the sand. So he had some more research to do. Somebody at the University of Narshe had been talking about doing a survey -
The old guy stopped talking and made some kinda gesture. Locke had completely tuned him out by now. But one of the security guys grabbed Locke's shoulder.
“I'll pass, thanks,” he said. “Places to be.” He twisted away and ran for it.
He probably would've gotten away clean, if he hadn't stopped to slam a knife through the portrait's left eye.