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Green Season
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Characters: Mostly Sabin! Edgar, Celes, Cyan, and Terra also get a scene each
Word count: ~2200
Warnings: Allusions to people's canon sad-ass backstories. Not much else goin' on here
Notes: For![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout Yahtzee challenge. Prompts were "frigid," "sandy," "responsible," "selcouth," and "oily" and I figured I'd go for one of the big-ticket items off the bat. Hence, one ~400-word ficlet for each. Taken all together (and slightly out of chronological order, for aesthetic purposes), they form a story about what a nice dude Sabin is. Turns out it's refreshing writing somebody pleasant sometimes! Who knew! (I will forget about this immediately.)
I.
There are three different ways to raise a castle from the sand. First, obviously, is to have a big old engine in the basement so you can raise and lower it out of the desert all damn day.
(Not all day, Edgar would tell him, there's hardpan under all the sand and drilling down into it puts a lot of wear and tear on the machinery, and you have to have a whole bunch of engineers standing by the whole time. Edgar would say this, but he's basically never turned down an opportunity to show off the engine to anybody.)
The second way is to find a castle under the sand and dig it out. Everyone is still talking about what to do with the Ancient Castle, but Sabin's pretty sure the answer is obvious. First you go in with some really big shovels, and then you use progressively smaller shovels as you get closer so you don't mess up the stonework. But it all depends, doesn't it? Whether you want to open it up and see the way the world used to be, and remember the first time that magic went away, and try to learn something – or whether you think it's a tomb and the people resting there should be left, respectfully, to their slumber.
(Locke's spent more time down there than anyone, hunting for treasure, and when Sabin tries to talk to him about it, usually ends up arguing both sides of the conversation. There's a third side that he never says, but that's obvious to everyone: he kinda likes having that place and all the mystery and tragedy and big shiny gemstones to himself, and maybe isn't ready to share.)
The third way to raise a castle from the sand is to come up from the south, and watch it climb slowly over the horizon. Even knowing this visit will be a short one, seeing the parapets swim up out of the space between the dunes makes him feel like the world's a good place, and there are solid things in it, and they're gonna be okay.
(“Mirage?” says Gau, his chocobo a few lengths behind Sabin's. “Mi-raaaazh.” Cyan taught him that word a day into their ride, and he keeps practicing, muttering it to himself.
“Sorry, not this time,” Sabin tells him. “This is the real thing.”)
II.
“Do you know what irritates me?” Edgar says abruptly, over breakfast, and Sabin starts ticking points off on his fingers.
“Bugs. Priests. Bad welding jobs. Giving audiences before noon. Soup with chunks in it.”
Suppressing a shudder, Edgar says, “Stop that. It was rhetorical. I meant the fact that all the telegraph wires burned down.”
“Oh.” Sabin considers. “Yeah, that wouldn't have been in my top twenty guesses. Why? Do you need to get a hold of somebody?”
“Well” - and there's this pause. So now Sabin has to pay attention, because that means it's not royal business. “It's been a while since everyone's been in the same place,” Edgar says, and sounds almost embarrassed that he's noticed, or that he's saying anything about it. “Hasn't it?” Sabin raises his eyebrows. Edgar says, “It was an idle thought.”
“What,” says Sabin, “you miss being crammed into the Falcon with everybody?”
“Of course not. I love having a mattress again. I want it buried with me. Look – forget I said anything.” Edgar seems even more embarrassed now, and is drinking coffee like it's his job.
“We could invite everyone here,” says Sabin. “Like for a party.”
“Ah, but that brings us back to the distance communication issue -”
Sabin says, “So I'll go in person. Round everyone up. Tell 'em to meet here in a couple months. That should be enough time, right?”
Edgar looks like he wants to turn him down. Or he thinks he's supposed to, or that's what somebody would do if they were auditioning for the role of Most Responsible Person At This Breakfast Table. Guy Who Has a Whole Kingdom to Think About, Thanks.
“I bet you're not the only one getting lonely,” says Sabin. On some primal older-brother instinct Edgar wings a fig pastry at his head. Sabin catches and eats it with a shrug. Edgar pretends like picking out another pastry is serious business that demands all his attention.
After a bit, Sabin says, “Terra probably wouldn't wanna spend too many nights away from her kids, but if we could get Setzer to bring her here and back, instead of going overland, I bet she'd say yes.”
“It wouldn't be anything elaborate,” says Edgar. “Couldn't be. You might imagine, replenishing the stores depleted after a year underground is taking a while.”
“But we're doing this?”
“Sometime around the March equinox, I think,” says Edgar. “Local weather permitting. Tell them that.” He closes his eyes in calculation. “We'll be starting to get spring vegetables from South Figaro. I think it's doable. If everyone likes spinach.”
“I'll make sure and ask.”
“What?” says Edgar, already distracted.
“If people like spinach.”
“Oh. Sure. But it's just occurred to me – if you are going to be traveling all over the place -”
“Oh, here we go,” Sabin says. Because that's the kind of thing you're supposed to say when His Majesty your brother gives you homework – not that it's actually a fair complaint. Edgar's never asked him for much, which is part of Edgar's trouble.
“It's just a couple areas I'd like you to look at. I'll write down all my questions so you'll know what to make note of.” Edgar is busily moving breakfast aside and looking for writing implements. “Figure out what we can rebuild.”
“Yeah,” Sabin says. “Of course.”
III.
Somehow he sorta knew Celes would be the hardest to convince. She's not that big on socializing for its own sake, and at one point there was a whole bunch of relationship drama that maybe she's been enjoying having a break from, and... From the stuff she's told him about growing up in the Empire, growing up a soldier, seems like she might not have great memories around the idea of parties.
“And my role is what?” she says, her eyes like ice chips. Not because she's making any special effort to be cold, he thinks, but just because she's like that. “Just to put in an appearance?”
“Nah,” he says. “No roles, no appearances. Come hang out, if you wanna. That's all.”
“It's a long way out of my way just to 'hang out.'”
A long way indeed: he found her in the suburbs of Maranda, working on fortifications. He has this feeling like she's been working her way toward entering the city itself, where somebody is bound to still recognize her, and then who knows what they'll do to her? And whatever it is, she's just going to let them, or why go at all?
It would be such a damn waste. She could do so much good, and be much happier, anywhere else.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. He doesn't know what exactly he plans to say. What comes out is: “Fight me.”
She frowns. “What?”
He's warming up to his own idea. “Yeah! Fight me. For old times' sake. If it reminds you what you've been missing, come see us in the spring. Or uh. I guess it'd be fall here.” He shrugs. “Whatever, it's in March. In the meantime, let's go.” Grinning, he drops into a fighting stance. “C'mon, let's throw down.”
“Not here,” she says, but hey, she's agreed to do it somewhere. It's progress.
They go out into a field to spar. There's this weird grass growing here, where if you touch any part of it the seeds pop off and go flying everywhere like they were spring-loaded. So they're fighting, and every move sends showers of little golden flecks zinging through the air – every move is planting something new.
Celes handles herself a little differently than he remembers – a little more patience, a little more finesse. Maybe it's because the magic's gone, maybe because the monsters around these days don't need all her brute force anymore. Or hell, maybe it's because she's – what, twenty? - and her style is still settling into its mature form. Fun to watch, whatever it is. And there's a couple fleeting moments where she smiles, around her gritted teeth, and he thinks – he hopes! - maybe she's having fun too.
They've trampled the grass flat in a wide circle, and all that flatness dotted with new seeds, by the time she calls it quits. She's breathing hard. “All right. March, you said?”
“Terra's coming on the twenty-first.”
“Then so will I,” says Celes, for once not cold at all.
IV.
The weather isn't back to normal yet. Or maybe the weather is just different now and they haven't gotten used to normal yet. Sabin doesn't know. He's not a weather scientist. He just likes to hope that things are still in a process of settling down, and they won't always be like this.
“The magic got all mixed up all at once, right,” he says, trying to sound reasonable and like he knows what the heck he's saying. “And maybe Kefka was doing stuff to keep making it worse all year, but it still took a while for all the effects to, uh … take... effect?” Cyan doesn't seem to hear him. Cyan is staring at a lake. “And now maybe all that built-up weirdness has to take a little bit to get out of the world's system.”
It rained yesterday, out of nowhere. They should have seen a storm front coming, the ground is so level out here, but they didn't. Between one blink and the next, it seemed, the sky was a yellow wall of clouds and glare and huge raindrops were thumping into the ground.
“It was no natural rain,” Cyan says, still staring at the lake. It's a little, flat stretch of water in a weird shape, like rain's been collecting in this valley since the end of the world and hasn't figured out how to get to a river yet. And there is an oily sheen on top of it, slick and multicolored, like yesterday's rain wasn't rain at all.
“So there's setbacks sometimes,” says Sabin. He believes this, so why doesn't it sound as convincing as he wants it to?
Cyan's face is bloodless and his voice sounds like echoing up from deep underground. “This lake is... attainted.”
It takes a sec to work out what he means. “Poison.”
“Aye.”
And Sabin knows suddenly that if no one does anything Cyan is just gonna stand and stare at this place, without really seeing it, for hours. The sky is blue, and the plains around are green and gold, but – this is the difference, isn't it, between “healed” and “healing?” A wound can take a while to close.
“The fumes,” Cyan says. “Rising from the moat. The light behaved thus, moments before -”
“Come on,” says Sabin, and slips a hand inside the crook of Cyan's elbow. “We'll camp somewhere else. Gau will find us.”
V.
The sky over the desert lights up that night – two years since Kefka's tower fell and the world began to heal. Two years since magic left them. One moment without any preamble there's just a river of green and purple sparkling between the stars.
Relm sees it first: “Oh, how pretty!” and then takes her best guess, rounding on Edgar: “Hey Ed, did you rig something for this?” Edgar shakes his head, and while Strago wrings his hands and tries to tell Relm you can't just address the king as “Ed,” she looks significantly at Setzer.
“Not me, either.”
Across the courtyard Terra is staring upward, turning around in a circle. She seems to be glowing a little, purplish-pink, but maybe it's just the way the light is moving overhead. Maybe it's not. “It feels like … my people,” she says.
Setzer says, “Probably magnetic, I've got instruments back on the ship,” and Edgar looks like he's about to ask him to go check. So Sabin steps in, and grabs both of them around the shoulders.
“Hey,” he says. “You two nerds are gonna be quiet right now and let Terra have this, right? Do science about it tomorrow.”
“Magic didn't stop,” Terra says, vaguely. “They didn't disappear. They only went away somewhere else.”
“Do you think it's a message?” says Celes, who normally doesn't go out for sentimental stuff like that. But magic was part of her, too. She and Strago and Relm, everyone who had magic before, are drifting toward Terra hoping to see what she sees. So's Gau, even. But what's surprising about that? Sabin asks himself, shaking his head. Gau learned all kinds of tricks from his animal friends, some magic, all equally natural. Of course he would've noticed when some of them quit working.
“A message?” Terra repeats, like she's weighing it in her mind. She shuts her eyes. They're all bathed in a green glow, the color of new buds in spring. She says, “I'd like to think so.”
Characters: Mostly Sabin! Edgar, Celes, Cyan, and Terra also get a scene each
Word count: ~2200
Warnings: Allusions to people's canon sad-ass backstories. Not much else goin' on here
Notes: For
getyourwordsout Yahtzee challenge. Prompts were "frigid," "sandy," "responsible," "selcouth," and "oily" and I figured I'd go for one of the big-ticket items off the bat. Hence, one ~400-word ficlet for each. Taken all together (and slightly out of chronological order, for aesthetic purposes), they form a story about what a nice dude Sabin is. Turns out it's refreshing writing somebody pleasant sometimes! Who knew! (I will forget about this immediately.)I.
There are three different ways to raise a castle from the sand. First, obviously, is to have a big old engine in the basement so you can raise and lower it out of the desert all damn day.
(Not all day, Edgar would tell him, there's hardpan under all the sand and drilling down into it puts a lot of wear and tear on the machinery, and you have to have a whole bunch of engineers standing by the whole time. Edgar would say this, but he's basically never turned down an opportunity to show off the engine to anybody.)
The second way is to find a castle under the sand and dig it out. Everyone is still talking about what to do with the Ancient Castle, but Sabin's pretty sure the answer is obvious. First you go in with some really big shovels, and then you use progressively smaller shovels as you get closer so you don't mess up the stonework. But it all depends, doesn't it? Whether you want to open it up and see the way the world used to be, and remember the first time that magic went away, and try to learn something – or whether you think it's a tomb and the people resting there should be left, respectfully, to their slumber.
(Locke's spent more time down there than anyone, hunting for treasure, and when Sabin tries to talk to him about it, usually ends up arguing both sides of the conversation. There's a third side that he never says, but that's obvious to everyone: he kinda likes having that place and all the mystery and tragedy and big shiny gemstones to himself, and maybe isn't ready to share.)
The third way to raise a castle from the sand is to come up from the south, and watch it climb slowly over the horizon. Even knowing this visit will be a short one, seeing the parapets swim up out of the space between the dunes makes him feel like the world's a good place, and there are solid things in it, and they're gonna be okay.
(“Mirage?” says Gau, his chocobo a few lengths behind Sabin's. “Mi-raaaazh.” Cyan taught him that word a day into their ride, and he keeps practicing, muttering it to himself.
“Sorry, not this time,” Sabin tells him. “This is the real thing.”)
II.
“Do you know what irritates me?” Edgar says abruptly, over breakfast, and Sabin starts ticking points off on his fingers.
“Bugs. Priests. Bad welding jobs. Giving audiences before noon. Soup with chunks in it.”
Suppressing a shudder, Edgar says, “Stop that. It was rhetorical. I meant the fact that all the telegraph wires burned down.”
“Oh.” Sabin considers. “Yeah, that wouldn't have been in my top twenty guesses. Why? Do you need to get a hold of somebody?”
“Well” - and there's this pause. So now Sabin has to pay attention, because that means it's not royal business. “It's been a while since everyone's been in the same place,” Edgar says, and sounds almost embarrassed that he's noticed, or that he's saying anything about it. “Hasn't it?” Sabin raises his eyebrows. Edgar says, “It was an idle thought.”
“What,” says Sabin, “you miss being crammed into the Falcon with everybody?”
“Of course not. I love having a mattress again. I want it buried with me. Look – forget I said anything.” Edgar seems even more embarrassed now, and is drinking coffee like it's his job.
“We could invite everyone here,” says Sabin. “Like for a party.”
“Ah, but that brings us back to the distance communication issue -”
Sabin says, “So I'll go in person. Round everyone up. Tell 'em to meet here in a couple months. That should be enough time, right?”
Edgar looks like he wants to turn him down. Or he thinks he's supposed to, or that's what somebody would do if they were auditioning for the role of Most Responsible Person At This Breakfast Table. Guy Who Has a Whole Kingdom to Think About, Thanks.
“I bet you're not the only one getting lonely,” says Sabin. On some primal older-brother instinct Edgar wings a fig pastry at his head. Sabin catches and eats it with a shrug. Edgar pretends like picking out another pastry is serious business that demands all his attention.
After a bit, Sabin says, “Terra probably wouldn't wanna spend too many nights away from her kids, but if we could get Setzer to bring her here and back, instead of going overland, I bet she'd say yes.”
“It wouldn't be anything elaborate,” says Edgar. “Couldn't be. You might imagine, replenishing the stores depleted after a year underground is taking a while.”
“But we're doing this?”
“Sometime around the March equinox, I think,” says Edgar. “Local weather permitting. Tell them that.” He closes his eyes in calculation. “We'll be starting to get spring vegetables from South Figaro. I think it's doable. If everyone likes spinach.”
“I'll make sure and ask.”
“What?” says Edgar, already distracted.
“If people like spinach.”
“Oh. Sure. But it's just occurred to me – if you are going to be traveling all over the place -”
“Oh, here we go,” Sabin says. Because that's the kind of thing you're supposed to say when His Majesty your brother gives you homework – not that it's actually a fair complaint. Edgar's never asked him for much, which is part of Edgar's trouble.
“It's just a couple areas I'd like you to look at. I'll write down all my questions so you'll know what to make note of.” Edgar is busily moving breakfast aside and looking for writing implements. “Figure out what we can rebuild.”
“Yeah,” Sabin says. “Of course.”
III.
Somehow he sorta knew Celes would be the hardest to convince. She's not that big on socializing for its own sake, and at one point there was a whole bunch of relationship drama that maybe she's been enjoying having a break from, and... From the stuff she's told him about growing up in the Empire, growing up a soldier, seems like she might not have great memories around the idea of parties.
“And my role is what?” she says, her eyes like ice chips. Not because she's making any special effort to be cold, he thinks, but just because she's like that. “Just to put in an appearance?”
“Nah,” he says. “No roles, no appearances. Come hang out, if you wanna. That's all.”
“It's a long way out of my way just to 'hang out.'”
A long way indeed: he found her in the suburbs of Maranda, working on fortifications. He has this feeling like she's been working her way toward entering the city itself, where somebody is bound to still recognize her, and then who knows what they'll do to her? And whatever it is, she's just going to let them, or why go at all?
It would be such a damn waste. She could do so much good, and be much happier, anywhere else.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. He doesn't know what exactly he plans to say. What comes out is: “Fight me.”
She frowns. “What?”
He's warming up to his own idea. “Yeah! Fight me. For old times' sake. If it reminds you what you've been missing, come see us in the spring. Or uh. I guess it'd be fall here.” He shrugs. “Whatever, it's in March. In the meantime, let's go.” Grinning, he drops into a fighting stance. “C'mon, let's throw down.”
“Not here,” she says, but hey, she's agreed to do it somewhere. It's progress.
They go out into a field to spar. There's this weird grass growing here, where if you touch any part of it the seeds pop off and go flying everywhere like they were spring-loaded. So they're fighting, and every move sends showers of little golden flecks zinging through the air – every move is planting something new.
Celes handles herself a little differently than he remembers – a little more patience, a little more finesse. Maybe it's because the magic's gone, maybe because the monsters around these days don't need all her brute force anymore. Or hell, maybe it's because she's – what, twenty? - and her style is still settling into its mature form. Fun to watch, whatever it is. And there's a couple fleeting moments where she smiles, around her gritted teeth, and he thinks – he hopes! - maybe she's having fun too.
They've trampled the grass flat in a wide circle, and all that flatness dotted with new seeds, by the time she calls it quits. She's breathing hard. “All right. March, you said?”
“Terra's coming on the twenty-first.”
“Then so will I,” says Celes, for once not cold at all.
IV.
The weather isn't back to normal yet. Or maybe the weather is just different now and they haven't gotten used to normal yet. Sabin doesn't know. He's not a weather scientist. He just likes to hope that things are still in a process of settling down, and they won't always be like this.
“The magic got all mixed up all at once, right,” he says, trying to sound reasonable and like he knows what the heck he's saying. “And maybe Kefka was doing stuff to keep making it worse all year, but it still took a while for all the effects to, uh … take... effect?” Cyan doesn't seem to hear him. Cyan is staring at a lake. “And now maybe all that built-up weirdness has to take a little bit to get out of the world's system.”
It rained yesterday, out of nowhere. They should have seen a storm front coming, the ground is so level out here, but they didn't. Between one blink and the next, it seemed, the sky was a yellow wall of clouds and glare and huge raindrops were thumping into the ground.
“It was no natural rain,” Cyan says, still staring at the lake. It's a little, flat stretch of water in a weird shape, like rain's been collecting in this valley since the end of the world and hasn't figured out how to get to a river yet. And there is an oily sheen on top of it, slick and multicolored, like yesterday's rain wasn't rain at all.
“So there's setbacks sometimes,” says Sabin. He believes this, so why doesn't it sound as convincing as he wants it to?
Cyan's face is bloodless and his voice sounds like echoing up from deep underground. “This lake is... attainted.”
It takes a sec to work out what he means. “Poison.”
“Aye.”
And Sabin knows suddenly that if no one does anything Cyan is just gonna stand and stare at this place, without really seeing it, for hours. The sky is blue, and the plains around are green and gold, but – this is the difference, isn't it, between “healed” and “healing?” A wound can take a while to close.
“The fumes,” Cyan says. “Rising from the moat. The light behaved thus, moments before -”
“Come on,” says Sabin, and slips a hand inside the crook of Cyan's elbow. “We'll camp somewhere else. Gau will find us.”
V.
The sky over the desert lights up that night – two years since Kefka's tower fell and the world began to heal. Two years since magic left them. One moment without any preamble there's just a river of green and purple sparkling between the stars.
Relm sees it first: “Oh, how pretty!” and then takes her best guess, rounding on Edgar: “Hey Ed, did you rig something for this?” Edgar shakes his head, and while Strago wrings his hands and tries to tell Relm you can't just address the king as “Ed,” she looks significantly at Setzer.
“Not me, either.”
Across the courtyard Terra is staring upward, turning around in a circle. She seems to be glowing a little, purplish-pink, but maybe it's just the way the light is moving overhead. Maybe it's not. “It feels like … my people,” she says.
Setzer says, “Probably magnetic, I've got instruments back on the ship,” and Edgar looks like he's about to ask him to go check. So Sabin steps in, and grabs both of them around the shoulders.
“Hey,” he says. “You two nerds are gonna be quiet right now and let Terra have this, right? Do science about it tomorrow.”
“Magic didn't stop,” Terra says, vaguely. “They didn't disappear. They only went away somewhere else.”
“Do you think it's a message?” says Celes, who normally doesn't go out for sentimental stuff like that. But magic was part of her, too. She and Strago and Relm, everyone who had magic before, are drifting toward Terra hoping to see what she sees. So's Gau, even. But what's surprising about that? Sabin asks himself, shaking his head. Gau learned all kinds of tricks from his animal friends, some magic, all equally natural. Of course he would've noticed when some of them quit working.
“A message?” Terra repeats, like she's weighing it in her mind. She shuts her eyes. They're all bathed in a green glow, the color of new buds in spring. She says, “I'd like to think so.”