A/N (Aroihkin's Notes) / Chapter originally written on 09.28.2005. Re-polished on 01.12.2006 for the arowrites dot net archives.

Review-replies can be found now on arowrites dot net.

Formatting repaired on 04.13.2010 -- thanks, ffnet, for eating all my scene-dividers sometime in the last four years!

05.02.2010: All scene-dividers have been eaten, again, on all of my stories. I give up. Please just go read this story on arowrites dot net where it hasn't been made incoherent; I am unable to keep up with this site's stupidity.

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Requiem for the Dream
( entry 15: fall of the delphinus )

The stairs downwards were damp, slick with rain and mud, and they descended far into complete darkness. Sounds of dripping water echoed up out of the somewhat natural and somewhat man-made caverns, and Ramirez paused at the top, steeling himself for a confrontation.

But even as he did, Alley strode past him and started down, not even bothering to draw a weapon.

The Silvite followed.

The dripping of water and his own, near-silent footsteps weren't the only sounds to reach his ears as they descended into the bowels of former-Valua. It wasn't Alley's own steps, either, for she moved like an insubstantial ghost. No, as they went lower and lower by the light of a torch Alley carried in one hand, the faint sound of humming reached his ears, ran over his nerves like ice-water.

Humming, humming, humming. Without a tune, without a pattern.

He was suddenly very nervous, set on an even higher alert, as Alley slowed her pace and the stairs came to an end. The torch-light didn't reach the edges of the chamber they suddenly stood in, and his guide came to a complete halt.

"Here," she held the torch out to him, eyes in its light just as cold as ever, "I don't need this, you do, so you take it. I've business to attend to down here."

"Wha--"

"They won't attack you, -Admiral-. They lack the means. Just continue forward and you're bound to meet up with them."

Before he could argue, she'd slipped out of the circle of light and vanished like a shadow, leaving Ramirez alone with the torch he didn't remember taking. Water dripped, the sound of tuneless humming continued from ahead, and the Silvite began to walk again, expression turning grim.

When Alley had informed him that the trio of pirates were still alive, he'd not believed her for a long stretch of heated argument. Finally, the Weaponsmaster had thrown up her hands and told him to get in the C.A.R. while she fetched the pilot. If he wouldn't believe her on his own, she'd -make- him believe.

Right now he sort of wished he'd just taken her word for it, instead of venturing far beneath the ruins of Valua, down into a part of the massive sewage system that hadn't collapsed. Three of his most hated enemies... the only ones who ever defeated Lord Galcian (and ironically, that was why he wanted them now)... were somewhere ahead in this thick darkness.

In the direction of the humming. The incessant, tuneless humming.

"...half the rear propellers were smashed, port side has been ripped completely open, and most of the navigational systems were ground into scrap on top..." Gilder was informing Drachma, quietly, "...the living quarters, the mess hall, the kitchens... crushed..."

Vyse rolled onto his side, away from Enrique's boots, and heaved.

"...everything past this room isn't even pressurized against Low Sky anymore... the engines will probably give out any minute..." Gilder glanced at Vyse, briefly, before continuing even quieter... "...I never thought I'd say this, but..."

/ ...they're all dead... we... we're all dead. /

Vyse made a small noise in the back of his throat, clenching his eyes shut as the unforgiving reality set in.

"I've..." he choked the words out, "I've failed everyone..."

"Don't be so hard on yourself, kid." Gilder said from the wheel, his tone grim, "You made a mistake. As the Captain, you'll have to live with that, but everyone here knew the risks..."

"It doesn't matter!" Vyse shouted, as though volume alone could fix things, "I failed everyone, after all of that! After -everything-!" That small noise grew into a sort of agonized keening as the boy curled in on himself, grabbing his legs and sobbing into his own knees.

"Boy," Drachma was the voice of rough reason, not placating like Gilder. "We'll mourn the dead later, right now we have to take care of the living."

The pirate shuddered, and after a moment managed to sit up, wiping his face. He shoved what had just happened out of his mind, knowing it would just hit harder later, but Drachma had a point...

"Right. Have the Rains stopped?"

"Not yet."

"We need to be ready to move as soon as they do. Where can we land?"

"The engines..." Fina turned away from the monitors, face tear-streaked, "Vyse, the engines won't hold that long--"

"We have to try. Is everyone..." he gulped, "everyone else already dead, or can we..."

"They're gone." Enrique said quietly, "Their lungs wouldn't have lasted longer than three minutes, and we've been trapped under here for longer already."

Vyse felt his throat tighten again. An explosion from below sent tremors through the ship, and his heart jumped.

"Sub-engine three just died." Aika reported in a choked voice.

"The Rains have stopped."

"Go to Valua." Enrique helped Vyse to his feet. "We can land on the Gate, and hide in the sewers until we think of something. Galcian will never think to look there." Vyse nodded, numb, and Gilder eased the crippled warship gradually into acceleration to the North, the craft responding sluggishly with so many propellers gone.

And so it was that the Delphinus limped for its homeland, with dead bodies and broken dreams for its final cargo.

Despite the further burden on the engines, they dared not rise from Lower Sky until they reached the dark skies of Valua. The crumpled, gashed form of the deadliest ship in Arcadia rose from the darker recesses of Lower Sky with sputtering engines and shaking supports. It hovered almost ponderously for a moment, and then angled for the remains of the Great Valuan Gate.

There it impacted hard enough to send the remaining live crew to the floor, jostling the dead, and if they had ever entertained any ideas of going anywhere else in the craft...

Well, those ideas would have been crushed just as surely as the remaining sub-engines between the Gate and the belly of the ship.

"The main engine won't shut off." Gilder swore as Vyse dove out the bridge door, "Vyse, we have to go, now! Lets grab the lifeboats."

But the Captain was staring at the bodies, littered everywhere. Don, Polly...

"Vyse!"

The boy ignored the yelling, running back onto the bridge and grabbing the giant Blue Rogue flag down off of the wall with a violent jerk from both hands. He couldn't just leave them out in the open like this, for the sky fish and the rain, and...

In a matter of seconds he had sliced the flag in half, in quarters, in eighths, until he had as many body-sized shrouds as he could make from the blue fabric. Deaf to whatever Gilder and Enrique were saying, he sprinted back into the ruins, began covering his dead crew.

Three, maybe four people were covered when a large hand came down on his shoulder.

"Boy... dead later, living now. We're getting you kids off of this bomb."

He stared numbly at Drachma, and kept the remaining scraps of flag as the old man suddenly lifted him off the floor and carried him to a waiting life boat. He was dropped inside where Aika already sat, stunned.

Enrique climbed into another with Fina, and Gilder sat in a third with Pow held firmly in hand, his parrot flapping wildly overhead.

"Come on Drachma, get in." Gilder gestured impatiently, his glasses skewed.

"I'll go get another one." the old man said, "Needs to be lighter than you and me, to make it across that chasm. Now go."

It was with a sense of deja vu that Vyse found Drachma shoving all of their lifeboats off, the engines kicking in and taking off as the old man turned back to the Delphinus. Horror coursed through him as he stared, transfixed, as his friend re-entered the ship.

"-NO!-" he screamed, or Aika screamed, it didn't matter who it was. It might have been all of them at once.

The main engine, which had been whining steadily rougher this whole time, finally clicked, was silent for a few seconds. And then the machine -wailed-... right before the explosion ripped the craft open like a paper toy.

Aika clung to him, sobbing, as he stared back in shock.

And the lifeboats continued on.

There was light somewhere up ahead, albeit a very dim glow. The humming, the dripping water, the sounds of his own steel-shod boots scraping quietly against stone, were soon accompanied by -smell-. Sickness, unwashed bodies and stale vomit, rotting food. A muttering, even softer than the humming, reached his ears as the Admiral paused, covering his mouth and nose with one gloved hand.

What in the name of Zelos was going -on- down here? Giving up on his determination to not seem alarmed, he shifted the torch to his left hand... uncovering his face again, unfortunately, and summoned his blade to his right. Perhaps Alley had been wrong after all, perhaps they were dead down here.

But what about the humming, and the muttering, and... was that pacing?

Wait, what--!

Something zipped around the distant corner, careening toward him as little but a shimmering blur. Instinctually, he ducked and raised his blade... but nothing impacted.

Ramirez took a deep breath, and looked up.

And almost screamed. The torch hit the floor and sputtered out against the bare stone.

Cupil. It was Cupil. But... but... the creature had always reflected Fina's physical health and mental state, and Cupil was...

Cupil was...

He had never, in all his experiences, seen anything as horrifying as an -insane Cupil-, jaw gaping and razor sharp teeth that had never been there before -gleaming- from mere inches away. The beady black eyes were glazed, crazed, Ramirez found himself sitting on the floor and staring at the Silvite construct.

Which was drooling, and staring back, unblinking. There was a red glint to those black eyes that he hadn't noticed before, and the Admiral shivered.

"C-Cupil?" Ramirez had opened his mouth to speak, but snapped it shut, wrenching his eyes away from the construct to stare at the one who had spoken. Fina had come around the corner, ambling slowly with her hand on the wall. "Cupil? What have you foun..." her voice trailed off.

Silvite stared at Silvite. Cupil chuckled gleefully in something barely even resembling its old chirping voice, and zipped away.

"It's alright Fina." When had Alley gotten here! The Weaponsmaster walked past him, and past her, and paused before going around the corner herself. "He's on our side now."

And then Ramirez found himself being clung to by a sobbing Fina, with no real recollection of how she'd stumbled to him so quickly or how he had stood up off the floor to catch her. The sounds of muttering and pacing had stopped, the humming hadn't even paused.

"Fina... what..."

"Ramirez! You're really here... really here..."

"You were the one muttering and pacing." There was one part of the puzzle solved. Fina didn't seem to hear him, she just tightened her grip on his shoulders and kept repeating herself, over and over. "Fina, snap out of it."

The other Silvite ignored him.

"Ramirez is here, it'll all be okay now. Really here, really here, really here..." she muttered.

"-Fina!-" Ramirez grabbed her shoulders and pushed her to arms-length. "Snap -out- of it!"

"...really here... really here... really here..."

Disturbed, he let go of her, pried her hands off of his uniform, and stepped away. She stepped toward him, and the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.

Unthinking, he fled around the corner, into the dull light, and nearly tripped over a crouching form on the floor. The source of the humming, one side of her red hair currently being manipulated into a braid by Alley's callused hands, the other side still in a disheveled version of the same style. Likely Alley did this for her every time she came to the sewers, but Aika never did so for herself anymore.

The pirate was rocking slightly on her heels, scarred hands twitching at her sides, the fingertips raw with scar tissue as though the pirate had scrabbled at the stone walls until she'd hit bone. Ramirez fought back his own vomit at the smells of this chamber, which would be almost impossible to air out...

Aika tilted her head up and stared at him, blankly, humming tunelessly. The former Admiral stepped away from her as well, horrified. Was this the same arrogant girl who had always stood next to Vyse and backed up his every ridiculous claim? And where was Vyse, then?

He looked all around the room, searching for a sign of the pirate. Off in the corner stood two cutlasses in their sheaths and a giant boomerang, all three items dusty with lack of use. A pile of blue and white cloth was on the floor near them, and it was even dustier.

"Where..."

"He's under the blankets over there." Alley pointed at what Ramirez had assumed was a garbage pile of cloth, barely cleaner than the blue scraps by the weapons, and in much worse condition.

There were no sounds, no visible movement.

"Is he alive?"

"He is. I just checked on him a moment ago. Ramirez..." the Weaponsmaster sighed, and he stopped, unaware he'd even been crossing the room to the makeshift bed. "Be careful, he... no one ever knows what he'll do when he's shocked into doing anything at all these days."

"I believe I can defend myself against an unarmed, insane pirate child, Weaponsmaster."

"I know you can. Just don't kill -him-."

That gave Ramirez pause again, but then he nodded. Alley went back to her braiding and the former Admiral crossed the rest of the way to the pile of blankets, staring down at the pile as though his glare alone would salvage this situation. If the pirates were all too insane to fight, their use was nil. If they could be salvaged...

Not one for delaying the inevitable, Ramirez reached down, took a handful of the blankets, and jerked them back in a single, savage movement.

-- --: -x- :-- --
Skies of Arcadia Legends belongs to someone else.
All here that is not found in the canon... is mine.
Never steal if you value your spleen.