Sympathy for the Devil

Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch you. And part of you wants it... not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but because you're just a little bit in love with it.

- Douglas Petrie (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode 5.7 - "Fool for Love")

Sir Auron of Bevelle - honorary Holy Knight of Yevon and former Guardian to the Sumoner Braska - was not as of yet completely acquinated with the conventions of being dead.

Evidence the first: the pint of Kilikan ale currently being stared at in one of many indistinguishable graves where weary trevellers buried their alcoholism and their aching bones on the way to Bevelle. The Mi'hen Highroad was riddled with places like this and people like these. Ones who kept travelling in the knowledge that - in deliberate spite of the fact that they lived their lives from dive to dive - took comfort in that fact that they were a moving target.

Places like this he liked now. No - there's a correction to be made to that. Places like this he had always liked and thus would like for eternity, frozen in the moment where his forelock frosted grey with the thoughts of a young man old after his time. There was something about the low-hanging roof-beams and indirect light which no longer made an effort to clearly define the shadows on the floor. Scent of tobacco and a marinade of spilled dreams on the floor mingling with the remnants of the ale not consumed in the last night's drunken brawl. There'd be a kitchen - though a bad one - and food he didn't have to taste.

Braska had never wanted to stop in places like this, and Auron understood that. It was too tempting for Jecht, and Braska was not a drinking man. He preferred to down his sorrows in dreams and the martyrdom that had made him, at times, seem to almost glow with death. There was little to be done about that, and no use in any case trying to convince a man whose entire life had been engaged in flaunting his lack of conventionality for the 'greater good' of the value of anonymity.

Places like this, with no community around... nobody talked. No one mourned when you died or smiled if you lived and, as such, there was no need for mourning. No inconvenient 'old friends' o be met with and no questions asked.

For practical reasons he liked that. Questions would at this point be... inconvenient.

"Y'okay?"

A portly man polishing a glass tossed the question over his shoulder as an afterthought to the tip Auron'd given him early. Fair enough. He had been staring at his drink for the past thirty minutes.

Auron glared back anyways until the barkeep got back to better customers and larger purses.. For some reason he felt alot less like speaking nowadays. Or being polite. That might be the unaccountable nature of his post-mortem existance, or it might just be the same grief that had propelled him into Zanarkand a week ago. There were alot of things that the Guardian was not sure of anymore, including wether or not he cared and if that worried him at all.

A slow glance left.

A slow glance right.

And the creeping feeling, as he leaned on the bar counter, that he did indeed not care if a scene was made.

With nary an external sign of his own agreement with himself, the phantom - fayth? rouge aeon? there was no real terminology for this, was there... - took a cautious sip of his beer.

And waited.

Until, satisfied, he noted that it neither fell through an insubtantial stomach nor made him feel full nor tasted like much of anything but ashes on his tounge.

Well, then. That was something.

Levering himself up from his stool with with muscles that were disturbingly not tired and joints that did not crack, Auron hefted once more the large katana that he carried with him in his memories. He shrugged, and it dug into his clothed shoulder.

It was probably time or so to save the world.

He wondered, briefly, how exactly he knew what ashes tasted like before pushing his way past a small swarm of Al Bhed gathered at the door and into the sunlight that never really seemed all that fitting anymore. Nothing seemed all that fitting anymore - the world but a background to the ramblings of a soul which had lost its way to heaven.

***

He knew, academically speaking, why people feared death. And loved it too, of course - he couldn't forget that like he couldn't forget Braska. High Summoner Braska, doomed to die. That had in retrospect (he was of course no longer tied to such things) been part of the attraction. Braska had been safe as the death his comrades through. Pure and wicked and untouchable and a comfort when the flies bit you in your tent by the highway. Braska so distant and wonderful in that white shroud which had whisked here away. Cocooned and muffled from the world. Marking the place of the statue which would grace his pedestal once he was in need of the grave he'd set them to digging.

Braska had been easy to fall into because he had been a question that was already answered (it had been Al Bhed and drove him like a mated wolf to suicide), and something which Auron had never had to ask himself to work out on his own. Better to sit back and watch the drama play out than go off and... what? He was dead now. Was he still so afraid to admit it? . Jecht had not been so courteously out of reach. Jecht... had perturbed him.

Should he be so callous now?

Death is cold and eternal. It makes everything better. Not by solving anything - not really (Braska and Jecht had not cared and it burned him until he himself had flared out into ashes) - but by creating an absence of things to solve. This was not true in his particular case, of course, and thus he still walked the land. Yet as a general rule you could count on death about as much as you could count on sin. Heaven and hell, spirit and demon were handed out arbitrarily to those who gambled their cards right and wrong and without a chance to play their hand.

:Life was easier to understand. Fayth were born to it.

Still, the screaming and the crying and the tears of gratitude never failed to be just a little bit puzzling. It was just some spawn. Slashed and faded now - something had to die, that was the law of things. Could they really be so terrified of an end not even belonging to a loved one but to themselves? What in the world wasn't there to die for? Didn't fate give them time to prepare? Trying to break fate had been the death of him, certainly, but being placed beyond the spiral or mortality the Guardian had a bit more perspective on these things. His mind no longer had to busy itself with the impossible, miraculous mechanics of survival... his own or his comrades'.

:"Jecht, was this truly necessary?"

The towering, half-formed hulk of the regenerating Sin loomed above - a canker in the sea.

***

The corpses about him could not make him wary.

Auron had seen corpses before this. When there wasn't a sender and the blood had not dried yet to summon down darker desires.

"Are you happy like this? Really?"

Don't be an asshole, Auron. An' you know I'm still around. Calm ain't done with yet. A rustle in the trees. Something in the wind. Jecht was there like he was there - there and not, chained to the world. And yet it puzzled him, this mounting ennui. Shouldn't he be burning with some passion for revenge? Shouldn't Jecht be noble or terrified in the face of his own deterioration? How could he be so calm about all this?

A quick glance over to the left, past the limited horizon of his peripheral frame of sight. Their eyed had gone glassy. And it struck the knight as somewhat disturbing that nothing was happening to them... nothign at all. Collapsed spines and rivenhearts were too still and too...

This is a new look for you Auron was not amused. Or caught off-guard, for that metter. Could he be already corrupted? A Marloboro was forming in the background from the ribcage of a young mother. The mayfly sparkled of her fayth had fled to better things. And it comforted him. That too was wrong. What...

"What do you want?"

You owe me, jackass. Don't you remember?

The birds had fled. The dead? They have no fears.

"I owe Yu Yevon nothing. Nor you," there really was no reason to be tactful, was there? Or even cryptic.This was the Enemy. His promises told him that. "It's your fault that he's dead, you know."

And would that ever let go of him?

Awwww shit... Braska? Never pegged you for a nancy-boy, Auron... well, hell, I guess I did, but who the fuck cared then eh?

"It's your fault he's dead," the ghost repeated patiently, seemingly oblivious to the smakoing ruins of the caravan behind him that had been screaming out for blessings from their god delivered in thunderbolts and blind fury. "You're Yevon. So you killed him. And you're also Jecht. So you killed him as well, because you couldn't handle living and you let him sacrifice himself. I wouldn't have done that. You know I wouldn't. If you hadn't... ."

An explosion in the distance.

Couldn't handle living? Look who the hell's talking.

:Auron shook his head in resignation, "If you are Jecht then leave me be. I have a promise to keep. His daughter...."

That's not the only promise you made.

"Is that a threat?" One salt-and-pepper brow arched in inquery.

How could I threaten you? You're a goddamn ghost. And why the fuck are you wandering randomly around the countryside for a fucking months while my kid is in danger? .... you know what your problem is, Auron?

"I'm certain I'm about to find out."

You want revenge. You wanna think you're all noble doing this, but that's the same bullshit line you had when you were alive and we both know that that wasn't about helping kittens down from trees and thinking about the goddamn children. You're just like all the rest of them. You want revenge for not being alive and kicking and living the goddamn dream. Happy ever after. Fuck. Except with you it's different because that stick up your ass has you all convinced that it's not because of you you're a monster... but him. Isn't that right? You think Braska would want that?

"I'm adjusting while I prepare to carry out my oath. I have to make sure that neither of you were for nothing! Can't you see that? I just have to figure out how I can make the living understand that it was all for nothing..." the fury crept in, and he was almost... animated? Jecht has alwats had a singular talent for provoking people. Even him.

Then adjust while you're doing something fucking useful. You think I don't know what you're really thinking? Fuck. Awwww... poor baaaby is dead. And I'm Yu-fucking-Yevon, so shut the hell up! You wanna pull this shit and pretend that you're alive instead of going back to see Braska on the farplane? You wanna avoid the wifey because of your fairy little dreams? Fine. Then come with me.

"With Yevon," it wasn't a question or a statement so much as a speculative snort.

No. To Zanarkand.

....

So it happened, just like with all the rest. You turned into a monster. Get over it, you sad bastard. It's an Auron-shaped monster, and the Auron I knew wouldn't spend all his time moping like a girl even if he wanted to get done like one. You get me?

Not bothering to spare a backward glance, the form of an old man allowed himself to fall into the surging waves.

Maybe it was a suicide after all.

***

Author note: For some reason this fizzled out in the middle of the writing. And yet I post it anyway for little discernable reason! Ah well?