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Grounded, chapter 4
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Characters: Edgar, also birds, also [spoilers]
Word count: ~5900
Warnings: Content notes for the fic as a whole on Pastebin. This chapter gets... infodumpy, my bad.
Notes: Chapter 4 of 8 of a gift for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
ovely for Yuletide 2020!
A kerchief was an eminently practical investment under the circumstances. The sky was overcast most days, so you might not feel the threat of sunburn - but spend enough time outside and the indirect glare would cook you, slowly but surely. Edgar was outdoors a lot more than had been his custom when he was king, and a burnt scalp was a lesson anyone only needed once.
The merchant's offerings were all a bit dingy, second- or third-hand, or water-damaged, or factory rejects, or all of the above. But this was good. It would contribute to a certain air of the downtrodden rake. "Circumstances have spat on me, but I'm still going to conduct myself with panache," or - well, probably smaller words than that. He should be more careful about slipping into a register too lofty for his ostensible situation. He haggled for a couple of misprint bandanas with conflicting patterns and thought, My, how the tables have turned – and all at once was hit with the sick hopelessness he generally had no time for. Locke was dead.
I'm a different kind of thief, he thought, abruptly, I can't just rip off another man's style, and selected a hat instead.
He continued poking through this disreputable assortment for anything else that might add to his disguise. His right leg gave him a twinge as he moved from one scrap heap to the next. Whatever he'd managed to do to himself in that black hole of memory around the crash, the damage, and the limp, seemed to be permanent. He wondered occasionally how it had happened, but always decided he was better off not knowing.
One oddity, among all these cast-offs – an irregularly shaped piece of blue silk, embroidered white and gold, but half the stitches torn out. For himself, these days he made an effort to avoid wearing any blues or golds too close to those of Figaro heraldry, but there was nothing wrong with looking. He lifted it out of the pile – and kept lifting, as it unfolded to a length of about six feet. He had seen this before. This was part of a chocobo's caparison, and more specifically...
He looked over at the merchant, eyebrows raised in question. Let him explain it.
“Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “my daughter found a bird riderless in the desert. We think it was Figaro scout corps. Rider must've died in the riots, and the poor thing was just trying to go home.” Aren't we all, Edgar thought. “Couldn't find home, so it was running around half-starved and out of its mind.” Aren't we all.
It was not an implausible story, as far as it went. It was also possible the scout had been subject to foul play. Edgar frowned, studying the caparison and the merchant by turns, and wondered, Did you murder one of my men?
Instead he asked, “When was this?”
The merchant scratched at his beard. An oddity in these times – it looked like a beard he had actually cultivated on purpose, as opposed to the vast majority of men now going around with some level of apocalypse scruff. “Don't remember exactly. Two or three weeks?”
Edgar pretend to study the cloth for any more defects beyond the obvious. He said, “You mentioned a daughter...”
The merchant laughed. “She's not interested in your type.”
Damn. That had been the wrong angle. Then again, he'd been vague enough about his intentions that maybe it wouldn't register as nosing around. Maybe he could still risk... “Have you sold that bird yet?”
*
The bird was a young hen, which was unusual in scout service – something about size dimorphism; Edgar had learned the reason as a child, but had not bothered to retain such information once the whole kingdom was dumped in his lap. He had too many other things to think about, and he had people for that.
Well, he didn't have people now. He had a nervous chocobo sizing him up with one eye and then the other, her talons leaving long drag marks in the dust of the bazaar.
“I see we've gotten off to a bad start,” he said, and she snapped her beak at him. She had reason to be uneasy. On top of everything else she'd endured, when Edgar had first tried to mount up, his bad leg had buckled under him. He'd fallen into her, and his reflexive clawing at the saddle straps had almost dragged her down. Mortifying.
He'd made better first impressions. He also had to worry, now, that if he got out into the desert alone with this animal he might not be able to fend for himself.
“I just want to try one experiment,” he said. It felt foolish, speaking complete sentences to an inarticulate animal, but he had never known how you were supposed to talk to them. He had learned enough to get from place to place and look elegant in the saddle, and that was the extent of it. Sabin had been the natural. Animals liked Sabin. “One quick trial, and if it works, we're home. If it doesn't, I'll find another safe place for you to stay. Either way, you won't have to put up with me for long. Let's at least not be enemies.”
She blinked at him.
A fragment of an old lecture drifted up out of memory. “A chocobo is a herd animal at heart,” the stablemaster was saying. Sabin was listening attentively; Edgar was staring out the window into a brilliant blue sky and plotting how to weasel out of that afternoon's Religious Studies lesson. “They can get feisty, and they may try to test your limits. But they like to know who's in charge. Be calm, and be decisive, and that's half the battle.”
In the present day the sky was green, and the hen lowered her head and let him approach. He kept saying reasonable things to her for as long as he could think of any, then fell back on saying inane things in a reasonable tone of voice, and by then he had gotten a good hold of the reins and led her over to a box he could use for a mounting block.
He thought, I'd better hope there are boxes around whenever I want to get down, and climbed on, and steered for the castle's last known location. It wouldn't be there, of course. But maybe once within a certain distance, the bird's homing instincts could guide them the rest of the way. Unlikely, but not impossible, and it could be done without major loss of time. And on the off chance it worked, if it really was this simple, it'd save him the rather more Baroque complications of his initial plan.
He was attacked two hours into the ride. This didn't surprise him.
Two riders converged on him from the dunes ahead. He aimed his mount to shoot through the gap, but she didn't trust him enough and balked, onto a collision course with the right-hand rider. He wouldn't be able to use any of his more interesting weapons without completely panicking his steed, so – sword. He pulled the blade free, almost lost balance – but struck out as the distance closed. His attacker's short sword rang against his with a jarring impact and bounced off, and they were past each other.
Then he was in the clear, for a few seconds while the attackers – yellow head scarf on the left, white on the right – whirled around for another go.
He couldn't take them both at once, but which one went first didn't matter. He angled leftward across Yellow's path. Subtly at first. One second... Two... He steepened the angle to intercept. White went sailing wide of him on the right. He was nearly side-on to Yellow. His chocobo made a panicked leap out of the way – and he brought her head around smartly as Yellow passed by.
“Good girl,” he muttered, and closed in.
He was behind Yellow and to the left – and Yellow was holding his sword in his right hand, defenseless at this angle. White was coming around again. Edgar would prefer someone alive to answer questions, but right now mercy would take more finesse than he had time for.
Edgar's chocobo surged forward, and brought his sword down and across. With the bird's weight behind the blow, the blade bit deep into Yellow's shoulder. With a cry Yellow dropped his sword and clapped his right hand over the wound. Three or four strides and he toppled out of the saddle. Maybe Yellow would bleed to death, maybe merely lose that arm. Edgar had been aiming for his neck,and a cleaner kill, but – mounted combat was such a terrible archaism. The threat was gone regardless. Edgar turned away and left him, and raised his bloody sword to meet White.
As White bore down he made split-second calculations. His mount was faster and more maneuverable, assuming she'd answer to any given command; this could not be safely assumed. White was holding his sword awfully high.
They closed in. White's sword began to swing downward, in a too-dramatic arc that partially lifted White out of the saddle. Edgar did the thing you were not supposed to do in jousts, and dodged.
Meeting no resistance, White was left off-balance. Edgar wheeled his chocobo around to White's off side, sword held low, and sliced through the girth of White's saddle.
White fell into the sand; his chocobo shot off like a rocket without him. Luckily he managed not to skewer himself on his own sword, or Edgar would never have gotten any answers.
Edgar reined his chocobo into a halt and patted her neck. “Excellently done, my lady. What have I been telling you? We can't forget our training just because everyone's gone.”
“Kweh,” she said, which he took to denote a certain growing esteem.
He wiped his sword off on the saddle blanket and sheathed it, then walked her a little closer to the fallen White. Silently entreating the bird not to break his arm, he looped the reins around his elbow and took out the crossbow.
White had risen to a kneel on the rough stone, and he – no. She. White was a woman. Under the headscarf she had the same heavy brows and sharp nose as the silk merchant in town, but they suited her – she was really quite striking, and if she were at all interested in men and hadn't just tried to run him down he could imagine he'd enjoy passing the time of day with her. Alas. He trained his crossbow on her throat. He said, calmly, “What did you do to my scout?”
“What?”
“This bird is property of the Kingdom of Figaro. Did you and your father really happen to find it wandering at random? Or is there some intermediate step you left out of that story?” She didn't answer. “Think carefully. It's a poor token of your honesty that you tried to kill me as soon as I was gone. What pressing reason could you have for wanting me shut up, I wonder?”
“Never saw a scout,” she said, and spat blood into the sand. “Found the bird running around crazy, like Dad told you. No rider.” She shook her head. “Let me go and I'll say I lost you.”
“Why the attack, then?”
The woman smiled sarcastically. “Reward out for you, isn't there?” She gave him a mocking bow. “Your Majesty.”
*
He studied his reflection in a cracked shopfront window. He looked dingy and exhausted, the same as everyone else. But there must be something he was doing wrong – some signal he was giving off, some secret aristocratic telltale.
But how would I ever spot it? he thought, sourly. How many commoners do I even know, that I'd be able to act like one?
He mentally ran down the list of his old allies. All high-ranking military or else such oddball cases that class was not the distinguishing factor – Gau, for instance, wasn't of any noble extraction, but at the thought of using him as a template Edgar almost laughed aloud.
There was, of course...
No. He made an attempt, but Locke's casually insolent bearing came off completely different from someone with Edgar's height, or Edgar's breadth of shoulder; Edgar didn't have the same quick fluidity of motion; Edgar's bad leg wouldn't take the weight of that much artful slouching anyway. He sighed and moved on, and felt foolish for having tried.
The idea of cutting his hair occurred to him again, but he dismissed it out of hand. This was a settled point. He must have made that decision for a good reason; he would not be examining it further. Dye wasn't out of the question, though it took some experimenting.
*
He traveled south again. He rarely noticed any significant pain from his leg – it tended to intrude itself on his consciousness for a few moments after waking up, or when he was first trying to fall asleep, but he could put that aside easily enough. The principal inconvenience was that it simply didn't work as well as it should. The knee joint was annoyingly fickle. It would lock up with little warning, or lose range of motion as the day wore on. It made him slow and clumsy at a time when he needed to look capable. These were mechanical problems, and in moments of frustration he thought, I could've built myself a better leg than this. But at least it didn't hurt – usually – or at least the discomfort could be safely shunted to back of mind.
Usually. That autumn was a rainy one, and on damp days a leaden throbbing radiated up his thigh bone. It made him feel old. It made him miss the desert.
Then the skies would clear, and he'd laugh at himself for becoming such a mopey bastard, and stop thinking about it entirely.
*
It had been days before anyone in town would even speak to him; the citizenry was no friendlier than they'd been before the apocalypse. Seeing the increasingly squalid and dangerous conditions they lived in, his first impulse had been to come in with material assistance, start fixing things, improve security – but they wouldn't trust such high-handed charity. However it rankled, he'd kept his head down at first. Fended off an attempted mugging. Bought a few rounds for strangers, and then, after sussing out a little more of everyone's gang affiliations, bought rounds only for a specific subset of those strangers. Finally someone talked.
“Big ideas,” the man grunted, when Edgar explained what he had in mind. The man was a former railway engineer whose erstwhile employers in Nikeah had refused to compensate him for injury after an engine explosion he had barely survived, and had dismissed him a few weeks into his recovery. After all, he was missing an arm and had already been present for one disaster, and who needed that kind of trouble? Over the ensuing five or ten years he had slowly drifted downward, from beggary, to grifting, to one burglary that had gone horribly wrong, until he had finally fetched up here in Zozo as a receiver of stolen goods.
(Edgar had not been able to determine where the fault lay for the explosion, and couldn't ask too many questions, which galled him. The man was hard done by regardless, but he wanted to know.)
“Big ideas,” the fence repeated, thoughtful. “Be interesting to see if they pay.”
“They will,” said Edgar. “I know what I'm doing.” He gave the man a slip of paper and a handful of gil. “If you know anyone who may be interested, send 'em my way.”
The man read the address and raised his eyebrows. “Lot of stairs for someone with a bum leg. Gets slippery up there. Don't have an accident.”
An expression of goodwill, or a threat? No matter. Edgar had decided to set up shop in the top floor of the Sophia, Zozo's second-tallest residential tower. It had a certain status; it was named after a woman, always a plus; and it had had an elevator, installed in some more optimistic time, which had gone out of service before Edgar was even born. It had been surprisingly simple to fix, but for strategic purposes, he'd be keeping that development to himself a while.
*
The moon over Zozo looked huge and diseased. Gerad was making his first big play.
He stood in front of a plain brick wall. Its plainness alone should have given it away as a location of some significance; everywhere else in the city was begrimed with condensation, sprouting green stuff through the mortar, and wearing graffiti generations thick. This was different – all of a piece, the bricks a one-layer facade, and constructed to resist wear. He had tried taking a chunk out of one with a knife, and had been unsuccessful. This suggested that the few scuffs and irregularities present must have been put there deliberately, and to some purpose.
He addressed the six people who had bothered to turn up at his invitation, and any passersby wondering what the fuss was about: “In just a few more minutes, the vault of the so-called Thief Lord Rodolfo will open up for the first time since his decease, fifteen years ago. As thanks for attending my little party, each of you can enter the vault and walk out with as much as you can carry. And, if you'd like, you can leave. No questions asked. No hard feelings. But if that doesn't satisfy you... If you intend to stick around and see what comes next... Then you concede that, as of today, I run this show.”
There was a combination lock on the door around the corner, of the kind that had been newfangled twenty years ago. Of course people had tried to crack it; this was Zozo. So why had they met with so little success?
“This is a combination lock in more than one sense of the word. Around the corner is a dial on which the entrant must select the right sequence of numbers – the combination. But that's only step one. It acts in concert with a mechanism behind this wall.” He patted the slightly too smooth brick surface behind him. “When the combination is entered, a timer starts ticking down thirty seconds. If another combination isn't entered into this wall during that interval, the lock resets, and the combination is shuffled to another entry on a list of preset alternatives. With trial and error, it would be possible to determine what all those alternatives are – certainly quicker than running down every possible string of numbers. But personally, I don't have that kind of time.”
He was starting to lose the group's interest. Had he gone too in-depth? A chronic problem. And now that he'd accidentally established Gerad as a man prone to technical rambling, he'd have to come up with some plausible justification in his fictitious past. But that was for later. “You three,” he said, pointing out individuals of whom only one was a plant, “I want you to depress a few sections of this wall that I'll point out to you. Whatever else you may hear or feel, don't let up until I say so.” The three exchanged dubious glances. “Oh, sorry,” said Edgar, “do you hate money? I'll find someone else.” With a show of skepticism, his plant stepped up, and after a few seconds the other two followed. Sometimes crude tools were the most effective.
He positioned them along the wall and showed them which bricks to lean on. It was interesting, what this whole complicated song-and-dance said about this erstwhile Thief Lord; he must've had at least two trusted lieutenants, and he wouldn't have been able to access his own treasure without them. Friendship was a beautiful thing, apparently. It was convenient for Edgar's purposes, too. If he'd gotten in alone, it would have been impressive, but it would not have given his prospective crew the same pride of ownership. If a break-in was something one could own.
The mechanism now partially engaged by his accomplices, it offered no interference when he went around the corner and drilled out the whole lock cylinder. There was a lot of squealing metal; there was no trivial amount of smoke; for a moment an ominous clicking and thumping inside the wall suggested the clockwork within might grind right over the blocks inserted by his lovely assistants. Someone screamed to keep it down; someone started throwing rocks from a window across the street; random idlers joined the party to ask what the hell was going on, and were met mostly with shrugs. But then it was done. The lock fell out onto the paving stones. Edgar powered off the drill.
“All right,” he said, “come around to this side.” He pulled open the door. The rainy gray evening light of Zozo didn't penetrate far into the room, but he'd brought a lantern. In the moment it took to light it, four or five thieves had rushed in ahead of him. Such initiative. He held the light up, and surveyed the room. His first treasure hunt. He pointedly did not wonder what any other treasure hunters of his acquaintance would make of it.
Almost immediately the sight depressed him. Zozo was humid, and this vault wasn't well-sealed; those silk hangings and Doman folding screens showed clear water damage and the plush cushions of these antique chairs were spotted with mold. Was that a harpsichord? Who the hell stole an entire harpsichord and stored it without climate control? There were piles of tarnished silver and sculptured candlesticks heavy with verdigris. There were two immense jewelry boxes, their velvet-lined interiors crumbling to dust and dumping rings and necklaces to the floor at a touch.
And this had been a hoard worth protecting so stringently, fifteen years ago? Strange how things lost value -
They had apparently not lost value to his followers, who were throwing open cabinets and drawers to disgorge gold and jewels onto the floor and sifting through these artifacts like the experienced appraisers they were. He conceded that he was wrong. He had grown up in such opulence that he had no sense of scale – just how much of a difference a few hundred gil could make to a person. He thought back to when he'd sold off his things after the crash, and realized he could have asked a much higher price, and was glad that he hadn't. He could afford to be taken advantage of, now and then.
But – no. Something still didn't seem right. Something seemed missing, somehow.
Edgar paced the perimeter of the room, watching men, women, and one enterprising child load down pockets and waterproof bags with treasure. It was enough. He'd impressed them, he was sure, and some number of them would be willing to listen to him for some future enterprise in hopes of another big payout. Why risk that? Why make any additional commitments he couldn't guarantee?
“Hey Chief!” A woman called out. “Why the face? Don't you want any of this?” And, grinning, pulled open her vest to show off a string of twice-stolen sapphires glittering against – honesty compelled him to admit it was a truly magnificent decolletage. Stupendous. For a dizzying moment he tried to remember if Gerad was also an incorrigible womanizer – had he ever decided? - but then he gave up.
“Please,” he said, grinning back at her, “it's Gerad. Especially to ladies.” She buttoned up her vest with a laugh and turned away to resume plundering.
It took longer than he would've liked to banish that image from his mind's eye – the graceful curve of her throat, and good gods, those breasts. It had been at least two months since he had felt the touch of another human being, but this was unpleasant to reflect on, so he stopped reflecting. There was a puzzle here, and that was more important – why was he so convinced that this wasn't the full extent of the cache?
“This isn't it,” he said suddenly. “He wouldn't store everything in a vault he couldn't access alone.”
“Where's the rest, then?” someone called out.
“Keep looting. I'm working on it.”
*
By the end of the evening he'd developed a suspicion. He had told his ragtag band – at that time numbering eighteen – to come to the top floor of the Sophia in seven days and he'd tell them everything. Unfortunately, it'd only taken three days to confirm his suspicion, and there had followed four rather annoying days of sitting on his hands. He reminded himself that pacing was an important part of any drama. He reminded himself that he had ample experience at biding his time.
Now at last it was the appointed night. No one had seen him enter the building. No one had seen him climb the external staircase, where approximately twenty-five miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells were presently lounging around smoking damp, malodorous cigarettes. Perhaps some had been impressed by last week's showing. Other potential motivations included boredom, a desire to watch an upstart fail, or intent to rob him. They were here in any case, and he could work with that.
“So good of you all to come,” he said, walking out onto the stairway, and a few of the less jaded of his prospective gang members started. Gratifying. He knew he'd kept the elevator secret for a reason. “I have some good news, and then I have a proposal.”
“Did you find another stash?” a man spoke up.
“No,” Edgar said lightly. Pause for effect. Confused muttering from the audience. “I found four. Surely you gentlemen – and ladies,” he added with a half bow to two young women sitting precariously on the railing. “Surely you remember the clock vault. And the vault I showed you last week. Does that stir any associations? Does it make you think 'that's odd, why is this town so full of defunct clockwork?' My friends, I don't want to state the obvious, but it turns out... things stop working if you strip them for parts and jam the casing full of gold dust. Hell, either step alone would do it, but...”
He lobbed a small velvet bag underhand to a man in a ratty purple jacket. Instantly all eyes were on Purple Jacket Man as he moved underneath one of the stairwell's external gas lights and pulled the bag open. He peered inside a moment, then looked up at the crowd and said cautiously, “It looks legit...”
There was a hush, and then everyone started talking at once. One of the women on the railing punched the other in the shoulder from sheer excitement, and both almost fell off.
Edgar let the buzz of speculation run its course a few seconds, then held up a hand for quiet. “Lots more where that came from. I'm hoping to enlist some help in retrieving it all. That's step one.”
“Only step one?” said somebody, right on cue.
“Step two is we convert it to something negotiable. The world has changed. People can't eat gems, and gold makes terrible tools. There's no guarantee money for its own sake will be accepted anywhere – priorities have shifted. I say this not to be discouraging, but to promise you that we will find some fools to scam out of much more useful trading supplies. All of which is a boring but necessary preamble to step three.”
The fact was he had not chosen Purple Jacket Man for that bit of crowd work at random. The fellow's name was Radim, and that name was on a very short list. As King of Figaro, a lifetime ago, Edgar had presided over the sentencing of a number of criminals, but there were five who particularly interested him now. He had been prepared to keep coming up with public displays of criminal enterprise until at least one of those five showed up. This part was pivotal. It was also the final test of his disguise; Radim had seen the king that day, and might have glimpsed him again on inspections of the prison level.
But it was Gerad standing under the gas light, asking a fellow robber, “How would you like another crack at the Figaro job?”
*
Only once, in all the weeks of planning, did anyone ask Gerad who he had been before. Anyone could fall on hard times, of course, but his specialized knowledge and needlessly lofty vocabulary kept tipping people off that he had fallen farther than most.
“I worked in security,” he said, and for once let his expression turn somber. “It ended badly. Don't ask me again.”
This spared him the trouble of having to extemporize a back story. People were free to assume that he was an extremely private person and that whatever had happened to him had been suitably traumatic.
*
In Nikeah harbor, while overseeing the loading of their ship for Figaro, within striking distance of his goal at last, he thought he saw -
But that couldn't be. There were blonde women everywhere; he had been mistaken. As he got closer to taking back the castle, and all that entailed, he had been dogged by memories of his time with the Returners, of that sudden liberation from having to be king. Those days were over, and those people were gone. He couldn't let nostalgia overwrite his perceptions.
They sailed in the morning. If there was time, that night, he might seek this mystery woman out in town – some line occurred to him about “a kiss for good luck” – and prove to himself that she was not Celes Chere.
He saw her three more times, in his peripheral vision. Leaving the bar. Going down to the docks. Haggling with someone over relics. She wasn't Celes. He had seen Celes fall from the sky like the rest of them, and this woman, although she moved with a similar elegant economy, was obviously too thin –
And obviously keeping an eye on him. He was inspecting a crate of certain hardware particular to tunneling into a castle when he noticed her lurking just over his shoulder. “What's your problem?” he said, not as politely as he might have liked.
“Edgar,” said Celes, no more politely, “what the hell are you doing?”
It made sense, in its way. If anyone else was going to survive, it would have been the Magitek supersoldier. She was inhumanly tough, and her magic had countless applications toward survival even in this damaged world, and -
She was alive. He didn't have time to think through the implications right now – he had a castle to reclaim – but the mere fact that someone else had made it out –
When Sabin emerged from one of the market stalls to stand behind her, it was all Edgar could do not to break into an idiot grin. He strung together some garbled attempt at a blow-off and hurried away. He'd get them a message that night, if he could, but for now he had preparations to make, and a crew of robbers to keep motivated, and for that he needed his hands to stop shaking.
*
On the ramparts of Figaro Castle – open to the sky for the first time in nearly a year – Sabin said, “Y'know, Terra's alive, too? She didn't want to come with us, but she's doing okay.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said Edgar, feeling the familiar sandstone of the wall rough on his palms. He was back, although not for keeps. Not just yet.
“Oh – don't mention it to Celes, though. She took it pretty hard. Terra staying in Mobliz, I mean.” Sabin frowned in thought a moment, and then added hastily, “Don't tell her I told you that, either.”
“Don't worry,” said Edgar. “My lips are sealed.”
Sabin was squinting off into the desert. “If we can figure out where the Veldt ended up, after everything got shuffled around, I bet we'll find Gau. I have a good feeling about Cyan, too, but I'm not sure where he would've ended up.”
“An interesting question. The reports about Doma are... odd. If the castle is still unfit for human habitation, I don't have a second guess.”
Sabin shrugged. “Hey, I know what I feel.”
And that was Sabin for you. He always had. Edgar said, “Do you have a good feeling about anyone else?”
“Well...” Sabin thought about this a while. Then he grinned, and threw an arm heavily around Edgar's shoulders. “I always knew you were gonna be okay.”
“Yeah,” Edgar said, and smiled, and couldn't remember whether he was lying. “I knew you were fine, too.”
*
Walking the newly unfamiliar road from the castle to Kohlingen, Edgar asked, “An idle question, Celes, and please don't take it amiss, but – that bandana –”
She looked defensive. “It was tied to a bird. I don't know more about it than that.” And she moved away, closing off all conversation.
It was a data point. He guarded himself against any great excess of hope.
*
The Falcon flew again, and she was a marvel. Edgar's unfeigned admiration of her design earned his way into Setzer's good books, although he learned to be very circumspect in suggesting any modifications.
But the Falcon flew, and – got surprisingly crowded in surprisingly short order. The world became larger, even if it wasn't the one it had been before. One by one Edgar had to mentally un-bury old allies as they came aboard, much the worse for wear, but alive. Sabin's “good feelings” were unfailingly correct. Terra was more open to persuasion than she had first seemed. And if, on her boarding, she and Celes had immediately locked themselves into Celes's cabin and had not been seen until the next day, it was their own business. Thereafter Celes seemed – insofar as one could tell these things with Celes – happier.
In Jidoor, Relm came aboard with several entire suitcases crammed with art supplies and changes of clothes – and paused in the entrance hatch to tell Celes, “Oh, get this. There was a show last month with art from the Empire. I wasn't there, their stuff's trash – no offense – but apparently some weasely-looking guy broke in and stabbed a painting and got the shit kicked out of him. That sound like anybody we know?”
Celes and Edgar exchanged glances.
Celes said, “Where did that painting end up?”
*
As they stared down into the crater that opened on the Phoenix Cave, Edgar said, “This is probably going to be weird.”
Celes deadpanned, “You don't say?”
“I mean – even aside from whatever monsters or booby traps or geothermal hazards await us below. If by some chance Locke hasn't died – if he's still there, or if he's found a way back to Kohlingen with the stone –” It was unaccountably difficult to speculate about this out loud. He shook his head. “He's... not rational on the Rachel question. You know this. I know this. If at all possible, I think I should be the one to talk to him.”
Celes thought this over. “Well. You have known him the longest.” True. “It's probably the least loaded option.” Not necessarily. “If we find him alive.”
“If.”
Characters: Edgar, also birds, also [spoilers]
Word count: ~5900
Warnings: Content notes for the fic as a whole on Pastebin. This chapter gets... infodumpy, my bad.
Notes: Chapter 4 of 8 of a gift for
A kerchief was an eminently practical investment under the circumstances. The sky was overcast most days, so you might not feel the threat of sunburn - but spend enough time outside and the indirect glare would cook you, slowly but surely. Edgar was outdoors a lot more than had been his custom when he was king, and a burnt scalp was a lesson anyone only needed once.
The merchant's offerings were all a bit dingy, second- or third-hand, or water-damaged, or factory rejects, or all of the above. But this was good. It would contribute to a certain air of the downtrodden rake. "Circumstances have spat on me, but I'm still going to conduct myself with panache," or - well, probably smaller words than that. He should be more careful about slipping into a register too lofty for his ostensible situation. He haggled for a couple of misprint bandanas with conflicting patterns and thought, My, how the tables have turned – and all at once was hit with the sick hopelessness he generally had no time for. Locke was dead.
I'm a different kind of thief, he thought, abruptly, I can't just rip off another man's style, and selected a hat instead.
He continued poking through this disreputable assortment for anything else that might add to his disguise. His right leg gave him a twinge as he moved from one scrap heap to the next. Whatever he'd managed to do to himself in that black hole of memory around the crash, the damage, and the limp, seemed to be permanent. He wondered occasionally how it had happened, but always decided he was better off not knowing.
One oddity, among all these cast-offs – an irregularly shaped piece of blue silk, embroidered white and gold, but half the stitches torn out. For himself, these days he made an effort to avoid wearing any blues or golds too close to those of Figaro heraldry, but there was nothing wrong with looking. He lifted it out of the pile – and kept lifting, as it unfolded to a length of about six feet. He had seen this before. This was part of a chocobo's caparison, and more specifically...
He looked over at the merchant, eyebrows raised in question. Let him explain it.
“Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “my daughter found a bird riderless in the desert. We think it was Figaro scout corps. Rider must've died in the riots, and the poor thing was just trying to go home.” Aren't we all, Edgar thought. “Couldn't find home, so it was running around half-starved and out of its mind.” Aren't we all.
It was not an implausible story, as far as it went. It was also possible the scout had been subject to foul play. Edgar frowned, studying the caparison and the merchant by turns, and wondered, Did you murder one of my men?
Instead he asked, “When was this?”
The merchant scratched at his beard. An oddity in these times – it looked like a beard he had actually cultivated on purpose, as opposed to the vast majority of men now going around with some level of apocalypse scruff. “Don't remember exactly. Two or three weeks?”
Edgar pretend to study the cloth for any more defects beyond the obvious. He said, “You mentioned a daughter...”
The merchant laughed. “She's not interested in your type.”
Damn. That had been the wrong angle. Then again, he'd been vague enough about his intentions that maybe it wouldn't register as nosing around. Maybe he could still risk... “Have you sold that bird yet?”
*
The bird was a young hen, which was unusual in scout service – something about size dimorphism; Edgar had learned the reason as a child, but had not bothered to retain such information once the whole kingdom was dumped in his lap. He had too many other things to think about, and he had people for that.
Well, he didn't have people now. He had a nervous chocobo sizing him up with one eye and then the other, her talons leaving long drag marks in the dust of the bazaar.
“I see we've gotten off to a bad start,” he said, and she snapped her beak at him. She had reason to be uneasy. On top of everything else she'd endured, when Edgar had first tried to mount up, his bad leg had buckled under him. He'd fallen into her, and his reflexive clawing at the saddle straps had almost dragged her down. Mortifying.
He'd made better first impressions. He also had to worry, now, that if he got out into the desert alone with this animal he might not be able to fend for himself.
“I just want to try one experiment,” he said. It felt foolish, speaking complete sentences to an inarticulate animal, but he had never known how you were supposed to talk to them. He had learned enough to get from place to place and look elegant in the saddle, and that was the extent of it. Sabin had been the natural. Animals liked Sabin. “One quick trial, and if it works, we're home. If it doesn't, I'll find another safe place for you to stay. Either way, you won't have to put up with me for long. Let's at least not be enemies.”
She blinked at him.
A fragment of an old lecture drifted up out of memory. “A chocobo is a herd animal at heart,” the stablemaster was saying. Sabin was listening attentively; Edgar was staring out the window into a brilliant blue sky and plotting how to weasel out of that afternoon's Religious Studies lesson. “They can get feisty, and they may try to test your limits. But they like to know who's in charge. Be calm, and be decisive, and that's half the battle.”
In the present day the sky was green, and the hen lowered her head and let him approach. He kept saying reasonable things to her for as long as he could think of any, then fell back on saying inane things in a reasonable tone of voice, and by then he had gotten a good hold of the reins and led her over to a box he could use for a mounting block.
He thought, I'd better hope there are boxes around whenever I want to get down, and climbed on, and steered for the castle's last known location. It wouldn't be there, of course. But maybe once within a certain distance, the bird's homing instincts could guide them the rest of the way. Unlikely, but not impossible, and it could be done without major loss of time. And on the off chance it worked, if it really was this simple, it'd save him the rather more Baroque complications of his initial plan.
He was attacked two hours into the ride. This didn't surprise him.
Two riders converged on him from the dunes ahead. He aimed his mount to shoot through the gap, but she didn't trust him enough and balked, onto a collision course with the right-hand rider. He wouldn't be able to use any of his more interesting weapons without completely panicking his steed, so – sword. He pulled the blade free, almost lost balance – but struck out as the distance closed. His attacker's short sword rang against his with a jarring impact and bounced off, and they were past each other.
Then he was in the clear, for a few seconds while the attackers – yellow head scarf on the left, white on the right – whirled around for another go.
He couldn't take them both at once, but which one went first didn't matter. He angled leftward across Yellow's path. Subtly at first. One second... Two... He steepened the angle to intercept. White went sailing wide of him on the right. He was nearly side-on to Yellow. His chocobo made a panicked leap out of the way – and he brought her head around smartly as Yellow passed by.
“Good girl,” he muttered, and closed in.
He was behind Yellow and to the left – and Yellow was holding his sword in his right hand, defenseless at this angle. White was coming around again. Edgar would prefer someone alive to answer questions, but right now mercy would take more finesse than he had time for.
Edgar's chocobo surged forward, and brought his sword down and across. With the bird's weight behind the blow, the blade bit deep into Yellow's shoulder. With a cry Yellow dropped his sword and clapped his right hand over the wound. Three or four strides and he toppled out of the saddle. Maybe Yellow would bleed to death, maybe merely lose that arm. Edgar had been aiming for his neck,and a cleaner kill, but – mounted combat was such a terrible archaism. The threat was gone regardless. Edgar turned away and left him, and raised his bloody sword to meet White.
As White bore down he made split-second calculations. His mount was faster and more maneuverable, assuming she'd answer to any given command; this could not be safely assumed. White was holding his sword awfully high.
They closed in. White's sword began to swing downward, in a too-dramatic arc that partially lifted White out of the saddle. Edgar did the thing you were not supposed to do in jousts, and dodged.
Meeting no resistance, White was left off-balance. Edgar wheeled his chocobo around to White's off side, sword held low, and sliced through the girth of White's saddle.
White fell into the sand; his chocobo shot off like a rocket without him. Luckily he managed not to skewer himself on his own sword, or Edgar would never have gotten any answers.
Edgar reined his chocobo into a halt and patted her neck. “Excellently done, my lady. What have I been telling you? We can't forget our training just because everyone's gone.”
“Kweh,” she said, which he took to denote a certain growing esteem.
He wiped his sword off on the saddle blanket and sheathed it, then walked her a little closer to the fallen White. Silently entreating the bird not to break his arm, he looped the reins around his elbow and took out the crossbow.
White had risen to a kneel on the rough stone, and he – no. She. White was a woman. Under the headscarf she had the same heavy brows and sharp nose as the silk merchant in town, but they suited her – she was really quite striking, and if she were at all interested in men and hadn't just tried to run him down he could imagine he'd enjoy passing the time of day with her. Alas. He trained his crossbow on her throat. He said, calmly, “What did you do to my scout?”
“What?”
“This bird is property of the Kingdom of Figaro. Did you and your father really happen to find it wandering at random? Or is there some intermediate step you left out of that story?” She didn't answer. “Think carefully. It's a poor token of your honesty that you tried to kill me as soon as I was gone. What pressing reason could you have for wanting me shut up, I wonder?”
“Never saw a scout,” she said, and spat blood into the sand. “Found the bird running around crazy, like Dad told you. No rider.” She shook her head. “Let me go and I'll say I lost you.”
“Why the attack, then?”
The woman smiled sarcastically. “Reward out for you, isn't there?” She gave him a mocking bow. “Your Majesty.”
*
He studied his reflection in a cracked shopfront window. He looked dingy and exhausted, the same as everyone else. But there must be something he was doing wrong – some signal he was giving off, some secret aristocratic telltale.
But how would I ever spot it? he thought, sourly. How many commoners do I even know, that I'd be able to act like one?
He mentally ran down the list of his old allies. All high-ranking military or else such oddball cases that class was not the distinguishing factor – Gau, for instance, wasn't of any noble extraction, but at the thought of using him as a template Edgar almost laughed aloud.
There was, of course...
No. He made an attempt, but Locke's casually insolent bearing came off completely different from someone with Edgar's height, or Edgar's breadth of shoulder; Edgar didn't have the same quick fluidity of motion; Edgar's bad leg wouldn't take the weight of that much artful slouching anyway. He sighed and moved on, and felt foolish for having tried.
The idea of cutting his hair occurred to him again, but he dismissed it out of hand. This was a settled point. He must have made that decision for a good reason; he would not be examining it further. Dye wasn't out of the question, though it took some experimenting.
*
He traveled south again. He rarely noticed any significant pain from his leg – it tended to intrude itself on his consciousness for a few moments after waking up, or when he was first trying to fall asleep, but he could put that aside easily enough. The principal inconvenience was that it simply didn't work as well as it should. The knee joint was annoyingly fickle. It would lock up with little warning, or lose range of motion as the day wore on. It made him slow and clumsy at a time when he needed to look capable. These were mechanical problems, and in moments of frustration he thought, I could've built myself a better leg than this. But at least it didn't hurt – usually – or at least the discomfort could be safely shunted to back of mind.
Usually. That autumn was a rainy one, and on damp days a leaden throbbing radiated up his thigh bone. It made him feel old. It made him miss the desert.
Then the skies would clear, and he'd laugh at himself for becoming such a mopey bastard, and stop thinking about it entirely.
*
It had been days before anyone in town would even speak to him; the citizenry was no friendlier than they'd been before the apocalypse. Seeing the increasingly squalid and dangerous conditions they lived in, his first impulse had been to come in with material assistance, start fixing things, improve security – but they wouldn't trust such high-handed charity. However it rankled, he'd kept his head down at first. Fended off an attempted mugging. Bought a few rounds for strangers, and then, after sussing out a little more of everyone's gang affiliations, bought rounds only for a specific subset of those strangers. Finally someone talked.
“Big ideas,” the man grunted, when Edgar explained what he had in mind. The man was a former railway engineer whose erstwhile employers in Nikeah had refused to compensate him for injury after an engine explosion he had barely survived, and had dismissed him a few weeks into his recovery. After all, he was missing an arm and had already been present for one disaster, and who needed that kind of trouble? Over the ensuing five or ten years he had slowly drifted downward, from beggary, to grifting, to one burglary that had gone horribly wrong, until he had finally fetched up here in Zozo as a receiver of stolen goods.
(Edgar had not been able to determine where the fault lay for the explosion, and couldn't ask too many questions, which galled him. The man was hard done by regardless, but he wanted to know.)
“Big ideas,” the fence repeated, thoughtful. “Be interesting to see if they pay.”
“They will,” said Edgar. “I know what I'm doing.” He gave the man a slip of paper and a handful of gil. “If you know anyone who may be interested, send 'em my way.”
The man read the address and raised his eyebrows. “Lot of stairs for someone with a bum leg. Gets slippery up there. Don't have an accident.”
An expression of goodwill, or a threat? No matter. Edgar had decided to set up shop in the top floor of the Sophia, Zozo's second-tallest residential tower. It had a certain status; it was named after a woman, always a plus; and it had had an elevator, installed in some more optimistic time, which had gone out of service before Edgar was even born. It had been surprisingly simple to fix, but for strategic purposes, he'd be keeping that development to himself a while.
*
The moon over Zozo looked huge and diseased. Gerad was making his first big play.
He stood in front of a plain brick wall. Its plainness alone should have given it away as a location of some significance; everywhere else in the city was begrimed with condensation, sprouting green stuff through the mortar, and wearing graffiti generations thick. This was different – all of a piece, the bricks a one-layer facade, and constructed to resist wear. He had tried taking a chunk out of one with a knife, and had been unsuccessful. This suggested that the few scuffs and irregularities present must have been put there deliberately, and to some purpose.
He addressed the six people who had bothered to turn up at his invitation, and any passersby wondering what the fuss was about: “In just a few more minutes, the vault of the so-called Thief Lord Rodolfo will open up for the first time since his decease, fifteen years ago. As thanks for attending my little party, each of you can enter the vault and walk out with as much as you can carry. And, if you'd like, you can leave. No questions asked. No hard feelings. But if that doesn't satisfy you... If you intend to stick around and see what comes next... Then you concede that, as of today, I run this show.”
There was a combination lock on the door around the corner, of the kind that had been newfangled twenty years ago. Of course people had tried to crack it; this was Zozo. So why had they met with so little success?
“This is a combination lock in more than one sense of the word. Around the corner is a dial on which the entrant must select the right sequence of numbers – the combination. But that's only step one. It acts in concert with a mechanism behind this wall.” He patted the slightly too smooth brick surface behind him. “When the combination is entered, a timer starts ticking down thirty seconds. If another combination isn't entered into this wall during that interval, the lock resets, and the combination is shuffled to another entry on a list of preset alternatives. With trial and error, it would be possible to determine what all those alternatives are – certainly quicker than running down every possible string of numbers. But personally, I don't have that kind of time.”
He was starting to lose the group's interest. Had he gone too in-depth? A chronic problem. And now that he'd accidentally established Gerad as a man prone to technical rambling, he'd have to come up with some plausible justification in his fictitious past. But that was for later. “You three,” he said, pointing out individuals of whom only one was a plant, “I want you to depress a few sections of this wall that I'll point out to you. Whatever else you may hear or feel, don't let up until I say so.” The three exchanged dubious glances. “Oh, sorry,” said Edgar, “do you hate money? I'll find someone else.” With a show of skepticism, his plant stepped up, and after a few seconds the other two followed. Sometimes crude tools were the most effective.
He positioned them along the wall and showed them which bricks to lean on. It was interesting, what this whole complicated song-and-dance said about this erstwhile Thief Lord; he must've had at least two trusted lieutenants, and he wouldn't have been able to access his own treasure without them. Friendship was a beautiful thing, apparently. It was convenient for Edgar's purposes, too. If he'd gotten in alone, it would have been impressive, but it would not have given his prospective crew the same pride of ownership. If a break-in was something one could own.
The mechanism now partially engaged by his accomplices, it offered no interference when he went around the corner and drilled out the whole lock cylinder. There was a lot of squealing metal; there was no trivial amount of smoke; for a moment an ominous clicking and thumping inside the wall suggested the clockwork within might grind right over the blocks inserted by his lovely assistants. Someone screamed to keep it down; someone started throwing rocks from a window across the street; random idlers joined the party to ask what the hell was going on, and were met mostly with shrugs. But then it was done. The lock fell out onto the paving stones. Edgar powered off the drill.
“All right,” he said, “come around to this side.” He pulled open the door. The rainy gray evening light of Zozo didn't penetrate far into the room, but he'd brought a lantern. In the moment it took to light it, four or five thieves had rushed in ahead of him. Such initiative. He held the light up, and surveyed the room. His first treasure hunt. He pointedly did not wonder what any other treasure hunters of his acquaintance would make of it.
Almost immediately the sight depressed him. Zozo was humid, and this vault wasn't well-sealed; those silk hangings and Doman folding screens showed clear water damage and the plush cushions of these antique chairs were spotted with mold. Was that a harpsichord? Who the hell stole an entire harpsichord and stored it without climate control? There were piles of tarnished silver and sculptured candlesticks heavy with verdigris. There were two immense jewelry boxes, their velvet-lined interiors crumbling to dust and dumping rings and necklaces to the floor at a touch.
And this had been a hoard worth protecting so stringently, fifteen years ago? Strange how things lost value -
They had apparently not lost value to his followers, who were throwing open cabinets and drawers to disgorge gold and jewels onto the floor and sifting through these artifacts like the experienced appraisers they were. He conceded that he was wrong. He had grown up in such opulence that he had no sense of scale – just how much of a difference a few hundred gil could make to a person. He thought back to when he'd sold off his things after the crash, and realized he could have asked a much higher price, and was glad that he hadn't. He could afford to be taken advantage of, now and then.
But – no. Something still didn't seem right. Something seemed missing, somehow.
Edgar paced the perimeter of the room, watching men, women, and one enterprising child load down pockets and waterproof bags with treasure. It was enough. He'd impressed them, he was sure, and some number of them would be willing to listen to him for some future enterprise in hopes of another big payout. Why risk that? Why make any additional commitments he couldn't guarantee?
“Hey Chief!” A woman called out. “Why the face? Don't you want any of this?” And, grinning, pulled open her vest to show off a string of twice-stolen sapphires glittering against – honesty compelled him to admit it was a truly magnificent decolletage. Stupendous. For a dizzying moment he tried to remember if Gerad was also an incorrigible womanizer – had he ever decided? - but then he gave up.
“Please,” he said, grinning back at her, “it's Gerad. Especially to ladies.” She buttoned up her vest with a laugh and turned away to resume plundering.
It took longer than he would've liked to banish that image from his mind's eye – the graceful curve of her throat, and good gods, those breasts. It had been at least two months since he had felt the touch of another human being, but this was unpleasant to reflect on, so he stopped reflecting. There was a puzzle here, and that was more important – why was he so convinced that this wasn't the full extent of the cache?
“This isn't it,” he said suddenly. “He wouldn't store everything in a vault he couldn't access alone.”
“Where's the rest, then?” someone called out.
“Keep looting. I'm working on it.”
*
By the end of the evening he'd developed a suspicion. He had told his ragtag band – at that time numbering eighteen – to come to the top floor of the Sophia in seven days and he'd tell them everything. Unfortunately, it'd only taken three days to confirm his suspicion, and there had followed four rather annoying days of sitting on his hands. He reminded himself that pacing was an important part of any drama. He reminded himself that he had ample experience at biding his time.
Now at last it was the appointed night. No one had seen him enter the building. No one had seen him climb the external staircase, where approximately twenty-five miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells were presently lounging around smoking damp, malodorous cigarettes. Perhaps some had been impressed by last week's showing. Other potential motivations included boredom, a desire to watch an upstart fail, or intent to rob him. They were here in any case, and he could work with that.
“So good of you all to come,” he said, walking out onto the stairway, and a few of the less jaded of his prospective gang members started. Gratifying. He knew he'd kept the elevator secret for a reason. “I have some good news, and then I have a proposal.”
“Did you find another stash?” a man spoke up.
“No,” Edgar said lightly. Pause for effect. Confused muttering from the audience. “I found four. Surely you gentlemen – and ladies,” he added with a half bow to two young women sitting precariously on the railing. “Surely you remember the clock vault. And the vault I showed you last week. Does that stir any associations? Does it make you think 'that's odd, why is this town so full of defunct clockwork?' My friends, I don't want to state the obvious, but it turns out... things stop working if you strip them for parts and jam the casing full of gold dust. Hell, either step alone would do it, but...”
He lobbed a small velvet bag underhand to a man in a ratty purple jacket. Instantly all eyes were on Purple Jacket Man as he moved underneath one of the stairwell's external gas lights and pulled the bag open. He peered inside a moment, then looked up at the crowd and said cautiously, “It looks legit...”
There was a hush, and then everyone started talking at once. One of the women on the railing punched the other in the shoulder from sheer excitement, and both almost fell off.
Edgar let the buzz of speculation run its course a few seconds, then held up a hand for quiet. “Lots more where that came from. I'm hoping to enlist some help in retrieving it all. That's step one.”
“Only step one?” said somebody, right on cue.
“Step two is we convert it to something negotiable. The world has changed. People can't eat gems, and gold makes terrible tools. There's no guarantee money for its own sake will be accepted anywhere – priorities have shifted. I say this not to be discouraging, but to promise you that we will find some fools to scam out of much more useful trading supplies. All of which is a boring but necessary preamble to step three.”
The fact was he had not chosen Purple Jacket Man for that bit of crowd work at random. The fellow's name was Radim, and that name was on a very short list. As King of Figaro, a lifetime ago, Edgar had presided over the sentencing of a number of criminals, but there were five who particularly interested him now. He had been prepared to keep coming up with public displays of criminal enterprise until at least one of those five showed up. This part was pivotal. It was also the final test of his disguise; Radim had seen the king that day, and might have glimpsed him again on inspections of the prison level.
But it was Gerad standing under the gas light, asking a fellow robber, “How would you like another crack at the Figaro job?”
*
Only once, in all the weeks of planning, did anyone ask Gerad who he had been before. Anyone could fall on hard times, of course, but his specialized knowledge and needlessly lofty vocabulary kept tipping people off that he had fallen farther than most.
“I worked in security,” he said, and for once let his expression turn somber. “It ended badly. Don't ask me again.”
This spared him the trouble of having to extemporize a back story. People were free to assume that he was an extremely private person and that whatever had happened to him had been suitably traumatic.
*
In Nikeah harbor, while overseeing the loading of their ship for Figaro, within striking distance of his goal at last, he thought he saw -
But that couldn't be. There were blonde women everywhere; he had been mistaken. As he got closer to taking back the castle, and all that entailed, he had been dogged by memories of his time with the Returners, of that sudden liberation from having to be king. Those days were over, and those people were gone. He couldn't let nostalgia overwrite his perceptions.
They sailed in the morning. If there was time, that night, he might seek this mystery woman out in town – some line occurred to him about “a kiss for good luck” – and prove to himself that she was not Celes Chere.
He saw her three more times, in his peripheral vision. Leaving the bar. Going down to the docks. Haggling with someone over relics. She wasn't Celes. He had seen Celes fall from the sky like the rest of them, and this woman, although she moved with a similar elegant economy, was obviously too thin –
And obviously keeping an eye on him. He was inspecting a crate of certain hardware particular to tunneling into a castle when he noticed her lurking just over his shoulder. “What's your problem?” he said, not as politely as he might have liked.
“Edgar,” said Celes, no more politely, “what the hell are you doing?”
It made sense, in its way. If anyone else was going to survive, it would have been the Magitek supersoldier. She was inhumanly tough, and her magic had countless applications toward survival even in this damaged world, and -
She was alive. He didn't have time to think through the implications right now – he had a castle to reclaim – but the mere fact that someone else had made it out –
When Sabin emerged from one of the market stalls to stand behind her, it was all Edgar could do not to break into an idiot grin. He strung together some garbled attempt at a blow-off and hurried away. He'd get them a message that night, if he could, but for now he had preparations to make, and a crew of robbers to keep motivated, and for that he needed his hands to stop shaking.
*
On the ramparts of Figaro Castle – open to the sky for the first time in nearly a year – Sabin said, “Y'know, Terra's alive, too? She didn't want to come with us, but she's doing okay.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said Edgar, feeling the familiar sandstone of the wall rough on his palms. He was back, although not for keeps. Not just yet.
“Oh – don't mention it to Celes, though. She took it pretty hard. Terra staying in Mobliz, I mean.” Sabin frowned in thought a moment, and then added hastily, “Don't tell her I told you that, either.”
“Don't worry,” said Edgar. “My lips are sealed.”
Sabin was squinting off into the desert. “If we can figure out where the Veldt ended up, after everything got shuffled around, I bet we'll find Gau. I have a good feeling about Cyan, too, but I'm not sure where he would've ended up.”
“An interesting question. The reports about Doma are... odd. If the castle is still unfit for human habitation, I don't have a second guess.”
Sabin shrugged. “Hey, I know what I feel.”
And that was Sabin for you. He always had. Edgar said, “Do you have a good feeling about anyone else?”
“Well...” Sabin thought about this a while. Then he grinned, and threw an arm heavily around Edgar's shoulders. “I always knew you were gonna be okay.”
“Yeah,” Edgar said, and smiled, and couldn't remember whether he was lying. “I knew you were fine, too.”
*
Walking the newly unfamiliar road from the castle to Kohlingen, Edgar asked, “An idle question, Celes, and please don't take it amiss, but – that bandana –”
She looked defensive. “It was tied to a bird. I don't know more about it than that.” And she moved away, closing off all conversation.
It was a data point. He guarded himself against any great excess of hope.
*
The Falcon flew again, and she was a marvel. Edgar's unfeigned admiration of her design earned his way into Setzer's good books, although he learned to be very circumspect in suggesting any modifications.
But the Falcon flew, and – got surprisingly crowded in surprisingly short order. The world became larger, even if it wasn't the one it had been before. One by one Edgar had to mentally un-bury old allies as they came aboard, much the worse for wear, but alive. Sabin's “good feelings” were unfailingly correct. Terra was more open to persuasion than she had first seemed. And if, on her boarding, she and Celes had immediately locked themselves into Celes's cabin and had not been seen until the next day, it was their own business. Thereafter Celes seemed – insofar as one could tell these things with Celes – happier.
In Jidoor, Relm came aboard with several entire suitcases crammed with art supplies and changes of clothes – and paused in the entrance hatch to tell Celes, “Oh, get this. There was a show last month with art from the Empire. I wasn't there, their stuff's trash – no offense – but apparently some weasely-looking guy broke in and stabbed a painting and got the shit kicked out of him. That sound like anybody we know?”
Celes and Edgar exchanged glances.
Celes said, “Where did that painting end up?”
*
As they stared down into the crater that opened on the Phoenix Cave, Edgar said, “This is probably going to be weird.”
Celes deadpanned, “You don't say?”
“I mean – even aside from whatever monsters or booby traps or geothermal hazards await us below. If by some chance Locke hasn't died – if he's still there, or if he's found a way back to Kohlingen with the stone –” It was unaccountably difficult to speculate about this out loud. He shook his head. “He's... not rational on the Rachel question. You know this. I know this. If at all possible, I think I should be the one to talk to him.”
Celes thought this over. “Well. You have known him the longest.” True. “It's probably the least loaded option.” Not necessarily. “If we find him alive.”
“If.”