Asch the Bloody (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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starwardbestrewn2020-11-27 01:30 am
bloodyashes) wrote in starwardbestrewn2020-11-27 01:30 am
Entry tags:
it's this guy
After the events at Castrum Lacus Litore, the mood in Gangos is a few shades lighter than black. The Southern Front remains at a standoff, the Garlean forces weakened by your assault but the best forces of the Bozjans quite literally stolen away. Neither side has the strength to make a move, and the Resistance, frankly, doesn't have the morale. Mikoto is still recovering, and you...
You can't throw yourself blindly into the fight to work out your emotions anymore. It was easier, in some ways, when you could, when you didn't bear the weight of adulthood on your shoulders.
You tell yourself not to take it personally. It's war, and not every battle can go in your favor. Near-mythical hero status aside, you are only one person, and you can't hold yourself responsible for every failure.
You tell yourself this, but it doesn't make it any less painfully, deeply personal, not just Mikoto's kidnapping and injuries or even the use of the Resonant research. No, what sticks with you like a splinter in your ribs is that members of the Resistance, strangers but still your comrades-at-arms, were tempered in front of you, and you could do nothing.
That's the failure that burns in the back of your throat and why you've come out here, on the far lookout point in the rocky cove, to be alone with your thoughts for a while. Or, perhaps more accurately, to be not-alone with your thoughts.
A few members of the upper command of the Resistance have seen you call forth a shade in battle, but none of them know the full meaning of it. In the entire camp, Mikoto is the only one who knows, and only because the fact that you have a split consciousness is terribly obvious when diving into the minds of others with the Echo. She seems to find it a little more distressing than those directly involved with the Scions, but she hasn't brought up the idea of trying to heal it, and you're grateful.
Grateful, because it means that you won't have to be angry with her for trying to help. As terribly ill as it must seem to an outsider, this - sitting together in the physical, your backs pressed together so that neither of you has to look the other in the eye - is what keeps you at equilibrium.
And so -
"You haven't given up." Asch speaks aloud less and less, unless he's angry, except when Luke's around. And Luke, thankfully, is still on the First, helping the last of the transition at the Crystarium, unhindered by a body of dying flesh waiting for him here.
(You wonder sometimes if it would make him happier to simply stay. If he does - if he's able to let go of the place where those you have lost intersects with those you have failed, then you envy him. But he was always better than Asch at such things.)
"Between Alisaie's work with the Light-blighted and the old Bozjan crystal healing, it feels just out of reach," you say. "And it's not like it's the first time that trying the impossible has paid off, even when all the rest of the world has lost faith."
An impression of Estinien flickers between you - This is not your hand! - the feeling of a writhing eyeball under your hands as you pulled - the moment Aymeric's resolve collapsed into relief, into guilt that he too had given up when his dearest friend was not beyond saving after all.
Asch snorts, his hair brushing over the join of your wings to your shoulders as he tosses his head. "Always the idealist."
What he doesn't say - what he doesn't have to say - is Don't hesitate. Asch is the heavy hand on the blade for if you falter, the part of yourself that can turn away from compassion when needs must, the part of yourself that you hope you never have to use.
"The idealist you wish you could be," you counter, shoving one wing into his shoulder like you would elbow him in the side, if the angle was right (not that it ever will be, when even as short as he is, he has damn near a fulm on you).
He doesn't deny it. You've long grown accustomed to it, to the saddest thing about the other parts of your soul being the things they won't allow themselves to be, the things they force themselves into because of their mistakes. It's the source of the almost vicious hedonism that confuses Luke so, because Asch has spent so long denying himself joy that you still at times have to almost force yourself into it.
(Content and quiet, somewhere beneath the depths of your memories, Ardbert sleeps, his burdens laid down forevermore, in a way that set him free, a way that neither you nor Asch could imagine doing.)
"You know that I'll bear that blood on my hands without regret," you say. "If it comes down to it - they wouldn't want to be used against their comrades. Against their people."
It isn't just that it's a mercy. It's the last choice they were able to make for themselves.
Asch makes a small grunt of agreement, all too familiar with the idea of a last choice (you feel a blade in your chest again, the blood dripping - ) and how it's been bearing on your mind recently. Since Emet-Selch, since Elidibus, since -
"Incoming," Asch says, interrupting your thoughts, and then promptly collapsing into a swirl of dark aether that rolls over your back as all of the extra thoughts and memories pour back into you. (You think that half the reason having him outside of you to talk to helps is because it means that you head is no longer stuffed-too-full and the extra space allows you to think.)
You stand and turn as though nothing at all weird was going on, just as a Hrothgar scout comes to a stop and offers you a Bozjan salute. You return it with the Crystarium one, still a little off-balance, but strange salutes are the last thing anyone's going to comment on when it comes to you.
"Your presence is requested at the front," the scout says. "A Garlean officer came across the line and surrendered himself. He says that you'll vouch for his trustworthiness."
You raise your eyebrows automatically, along with the upper parts of your wings, a questioning gesture that goes unrecognized here. "I'll head there right away," you say. "Was there anything else?"
"Ah," and the scount looks awkward for a moment, his ears drooping as he rubs the back of his head. "There was, actually. He said to tell you to 'make a better first impression this time.' Do you have any idea what that - hey!"
You don't wait for the scout to finish his question before you bolt off, dropping off the rocky viewpoint to glide across the water to the dock instead of taking the footpath around. The last few yalms, you're crashing through the waves as you go, just enough lift left that you don't sink into the sand underneath and stumble. Your thoughts are too big for your skull and your emotions are too strong for your body.
He has no room to talk to you about first impressions.
----
The encampment at the southern front hasn't changed in the week since you were last here, aside from emptying of people. But it's busy enough now, as the intruder in the Resistance's midst gets every suspicious eye in the camp gathered around the command tent.
Trying to shoulder your way past a bunch of Hrothgar is next to pointless when you come up to their elbows. You make a running leap with a loud downbeat of your wings to lift you over their heads, landing heavily just within the open flaps of the tent.
The figure standing at the table, under Bajsaljen's watchful eyes, is both a stranger and painfully familiar. Tall and slim as the majority of Garleans are wont to be, with black hair that's a shocking contrast to the average Garlean blond - but the posture is so precisely the same that there can be no doubt.
Hands folded precisely behind his back, smile so polite as to be mocking, Hadrian rem Peisis - Jade Curtiss - merely tilts his head and says, "And here I would have thought you'd have learned some manners by this point."
"I've always had manners," you say, and no, it's all Asch at the forefront now, rushing forward in a way that (he) (you) were too nervous and scared to do when faced with Luke. You were never close with Jade, which makes it, ironically, easier to be close to Jade now, because the past between you is less heavy. "I just don't think you deserve them."
"So cruel to your elders," Jade replies, feigning exhaustion as he adjusts his glasses. (The frames are round and thicker than his old ones, the eyes underneath are a blue-green that looks like the ocean on a muggy day, but the glint in them is the same.) "Children these days have no respect, wouldn't you agree?" This last is thrown in Bajsaljen's direction, and to his credit, the Resistance leader does nothing more than look back and forth between the two of you with raised eyebrows. You can only imagine what he must be thinking.
Hadrian rem Peisis is younger than you. You knew that intellectually, but it's something else seeing it, seeing a person barely out of their teenage years, younger than you were when you landed on Eorzea's shores nevermind when you well and truly woke up, and knowing the years that are really behind the face.
"I thought you were coming by way of the Gyr Abanian front, you bastard," you say, instead of acknowledging the comment or the confused looks. "Do you have any idea how many people I have keeping an eye out for you on that side? And then you have the gall to show up here?"
"My sincerest apologies," Jade says, without an ounce of sincerity. "But when van Gabranath and his legion started seeking research assistants from the capital, I naturally couldn't allow the chance to pass me by. Crossing the Empire isn't exactly a day's stroll."
"Of course you couldn't," you say. From a practical standpoint, it's a perfectly justified decision, but - "You've never made anything easy for anyone in your life."
"Now, now," Jade says. "I'll have you know that I've been perfectly cooperative with your friends in the Resistance."
You roll your eyes, very obviously, and then -
It's like something slips. One moment you're standing a couple feet away from him, and the next you've taken a couple steps and latched around his waist, head shoved up under his sternum and wings pulled halfway around his back.
"You bastard," you say, forehead resting on a generic Garlean engineer's uniform. "I don't know what the hell you were thinking, thinking I'd be satisfied with a letter. The only reason I didn't come to kick your ass all the way to Gyr Abania myself was that half my friends were fucking dying - "
Jade doesn't seem entirely sure what to do with this, with the parts of you that are Aodhan and Aodhan's straightforward demonstrativeness, but you hear a throat cleared behind you and a quiet, "Don't you all have anything better to be doing? Give them some privacy," before the sounds of the crowd dispersing.
"I can't say I would have expected this reaction," Jade says quietly, once the last footsteps have melted away into the generic sounds of camp and warfare. "Not from you, and not for me. We were hardly close."
"Dying tends to make people reconsider their priorities a little bit," you say, all sharp sarcasm that would be biting if you weren't still standing here with your wings wrapped around him and your Baticul accent coming on as strong as it has in a lifetime.
"Even so, I imagine that I would be the last person you'd care to see again." A pause. "Perhaps second-to-last."
"I didn't care nearly enough about you to hate you that badly," you say, distinctly refusing to think of who the actual last person you want to see would be. You release one arm to punch him lightly in the kidney, here meaning hard enough to make the average person stumble a bit. Jade doesn't stumble or even flinch, and it's not because of the armor he's wearing. "And what the hell would I have said to Luke, if I got that letter from you only to have you die in some corner of the Empire without even seeing him?"
That gets a flinch, one so light and small that you wouldn't have noticed if you weren't standing literally touching him. "I see," Jade says quietly. "I hadn't heard... Is he here?"
"On a warfront?" you say, and look up enough to give him the 'you're supposed to be the smart one' look that you've perfected on Alphinaud and Thancred in alternating turns. "He's as soft as he ever was. He'd come out here because he thinks it's some kind of duty and cry himself to sleep every night for a year."
"I suppose he would," Jade agrees amicably enough. "Though it is unlike you to speak of him so fondly. Last I recall, you were still challenging him to duels."
You huff, feathers in your wings poofing out defensively in the corners of your vision. "Priorities," you mutter. "Also, Aodhan has a brother, so I'm a middle child now."
"I... see." You aren't sure he does, but you hear the faint shift of glasses-on-skin above you as he pushes them further up his nose. "Well, much as I appreciate the warm welcome, might I ask if you have any intention of letting go? It's a rather awkward way to hold a conversation, and I imagine we have quite a bit to speak about."
You make a show of huffing a sigh before you drop your arms away and curl your wings behind your back. "Fine," you say. "But if you don't hug Luke back, I'll have to take it out of your hide."
"...Fair enough, I suppose," Jade replies, taking a step back. "Now, where to begin... How much do you know about the true final days of Auldrant?"
You can't entirely hide the flinch at his phrasing. "More than I'm willing to stay standing around here for," you say. "Let's get your weapons, and I can start filling you in on the way bak to Doma."
You can't throw yourself blindly into the fight to work out your emotions anymore. It was easier, in some ways, when you could, when you didn't bear the weight of adulthood on your shoulders.
You tell yourself not to take it personally. It's war, and not every battle can go in your favor. Near-mythical hero status aside, you are only one person, and you can't hold yourself responsible for every failure.
You tell yourself this, but it doesn't make it any less painfully, deeply personal, not just Mikoto's kidnapping and injuries or even the use of the Resonant research. No, what sticks with you like a splinter in your ribs is that members of the Resistance, strangers but still your comrades-at-arms, were tempered in front of you, and you could do nothing.
That's the failure that burns in the back of your throat and why you've come out here, on the far lookout point in the rocky cove, to be alone with your thoughts for a while. Or, perhaps more accurately, to be not-alone with your thoughts.
A few members of the upper command of the Resistance have seen you call forth a shade in battle, but none of them know the full meaning of it. In the entire camp, Mikoto is the only one who knows, and only because the fact that you have a split consciousness is terribly obvious when diving into the minds of others with the Echo. She seems to find it a little more distressing than those directly involved with the Scions, but she hasn't brought up the idea of trying to heal it, and you're grateful.
Grateful, because it means that you won't have to be angry with her for trying to help. As terribly ill as it must seem to an outsider, this - sitting together in the physical, your backs pressed together so that neither of you has to look the other in the eye - is what keeps you at equilibrium.
And so -
"You haven't given up." Asch speaks aloud less and less, unless he's angry, except when Luke's around. And Luke, thankfully, is still on the First, helping the last of the transition at the Crystarium, unhindered by a body of dying flesh waiting for him here.
(You wonder sometimes if it would make him happier to simply stay. If he does - if he's able to let go of the place where those you have lost intersects with those you have failed, then you envy him. But he was always better than Asch at such things.)
"Between Alisaie's work with the Light-blighted and the old Bozjan crystal healing, it feels just out of reach," you say. "And it's not like it's the first time that trying the impossible has paid off, even when all the rest of the world has lost faith."
An impression of Estinien flickers between you - This is not your hand! - the feeling of a writhing eyeball under your hands as you pulled - the moment Aymeric's resolve collapsed into relief, into guilt that he too had given up when his dearest friend was not beyond saving after all.
Asch snorts, his hair brushing over the join of your wings to your shoulders as he tosses his head. "Always the idealist."
What he doesn't say - what he doesn't have to say - is Don't hesitate. Asch is the heavy hand on the blade for if you falter, the part of yourself that can turn away from compassion when needs must, the part of yourself that you hope you never have to use.
"The idealist you wish you could be," you counter, shoving one wing into his shoulder like you would elbow him in the side, if the angle was right (not that it ever will be, when even as short as he is, he has damn near a fulm on you).
He doesn't deny it. You've long grown accustomed to it, to the saddest thing about the other parts of your soul being the things they won't allow themselves to be, the things they force themselves into because of their mistakes. It's the source of the almost vicious hedonism that confuses Luke so, because Asch has spent so long denying himself joy that you still at times have to almost force yourself into it.
(Content and quiet, somewhere beneath the depths of your memories, Ardbert sleeps, his burdens laid down forevermore, in a way that set him free, a way that neither you nor Asch could imagine doing.)
"You know that I'll bear that blood on my hands without regret," you say. "If it comes down to it - they wouldn't want to be used against their comrades. Against their people."
It isn't just that it's a mercy. It's the last choice they were able to make for themselves.
Asch makes a small grunt of agreement, all too familiar with the idea of a last choice (you feel a blade in your chest again, the blood dripping - ) and how it's been bearing on your mind recently. Since Emet-Selch, since Elidibus, since -
"Incoming," Asch says, interrupting your thoughts, and then promptly collapsing into a swirl of dark aether that rolls over your back as all of the extra thoughts and memories pour back into you. (You think that half the reason having him outside of you to talk to helps is because it means that you head is no longer stuffed-too-full and the extra space allows you to think.)
You stand and turn as though nothing at all weird was going on, just as a Hrothgar scout comes to a stop and offers you a Bozjan salute. You return it with the Crystarium one, still a little off-balance, but strange salutes are the last thing anyone's going to comment on when it comes to you.
"Your presence is requested at the front," the scout says. "A Garlean officer came across the line and surrendered himself. He says that you'll vouch for his trustworthiness."
You raise your eyebrows automatically, along with the upper parts of your wings, a questioning gesture that goes unrecognized here. "I'll head there right away," you say. "Was there anything else?"
"Ah," and the scount looks awkward for a moment, his ears drooping as he rubs the back of his head. "There was, actually. He said to tell you to 'make a better first impression this time.' Do you have any idea what that - hey!"
You don't wait for the scout to finish his question before you bolt off, dropping off the rocky viewpoint to glide across the water to the dock instead of taking the footpath around. The last few yalms, you're crashing through the waves as you go, just enough lift left that you don't sink into the sand underneath and stumble. Your thoughts are too big for your skull and your emotions are too strong for your body.
He has no room to talk to you about first impressions.
----
The encampment at the southern front hasn't changed in the week since you were last here, aside from emptying of people. But it's busy enough now, as the intruder in the Resistance's midst gets every suspicious eye in the camp gathered around the command tent.
Trying to shoulder your way past a bunch of Hrothgar is next to pointless when you come up to their elbows. You make a running leap with a loud downbeat of your wings to lift you over their heads, landing heavily just within the open flaps of the tent.
The figure standing at the table, under Bajsaljen's watchful eyes, is both a stranger and painfully familiar. Tall and slim as the majority of Garleans are wont to be, with black hair that's a shocking contrast to the average Garlean blond - but the posture is so precisely the same that there can be no doubt.
Hands folded precisely behind his back, smile so polite as to be mocking, Hadrian rem Peisis - Jade Curtiss - merely tilts his head and says, "And here I would have thought you'd have learned some manners by this point."
"I've always had manners," you say, and no, it's all Asch at the forefront now, rushing forward in a way that (he) (you) were too nervous and scared to do when faced with Luke. You were never close with Jade, which makes it, ironically, easier to be close to Jade now, because the past between you is less heavy. "I just don't think you deserve them."
"So cruel to your elders," Jade replies, feigning exhaustion as he adjusts his glasses. (The frames are round and thicker than his old ones, the eyes underneath are a blue-green that looks like the ocean on a muggy day, but the glint in them is the same.) "Children these days have no respect, wouldn't you agree?" This last is thrown in Bajsaljen's direction, and to his credit, the Resistance leader does nothing more than look back and forth between the two of you with raised eyebrows. You can only imagine what he must be thinking.
Hadrian rem Peisis is younger than you. You knew that intellectually, but it's something else seeing it, seeing a person barely out of their teenage years, younger than you were when you landed on Eorzea's shores nevermind when you well and truly woke up, and knowing the years that are really behind the face.
"I thought you were coming by way of the Gyr Abanian front, you bastard," you say, instead of acknowledging the comment or the confused looks. "Do you have any idea how many people I have keeping an eye out for you on that side? And then you have the gall to show up here?"
"My sincerest apologies," Jade says, without an ounce of sincerity. "But when van Gabranath and his legion started seeking research assistants from the capital, I naturally couldn't allow the chance to pass me by. Crossing the Empire isn't exactly a day's stroll."
"Of course you couldn't," you say. From a practical standpoint, it's a perfectly justified decision, but - "You've never made anything easy for anyone in your life."
"Now, now," Jade says. "I'll have you know that I've been perfectly cooperative with your friends in the Resistance."
You roll your eyes, very obviously, and then -
It's like something slips. One moment you're standing a couple feet away from him, and the next you've taken a couple steps and latched around his waist, head shoved up under his sternum and wings pulled halfway around his back.
"You bastard," you say, forehead resting on a generic Garlean engineer's uniform. "I don't know what the hell you were thinking, thinking I'd be satisfied with a letter. The only reason I didn't come to kick your ass all the way to Gyr Abania myself was that half my friends were fucking dying - "
Jade doesn't seem entirely sure what to do with this, with the parts of you that are Aodhan and Aodhan's straightforward demonstrativeness, but you hear a throat cleared behind you and a quiet, "Don't you all have anything better to be doing? Give them some privacy," before the sounds of the crowd dispersing.
"I can't say I would have expected this reaction," Jade says quietly, once the last footsteps have melted away into the generic sounds of camp and warfare. "Not from you, and not for me. We were hardly close."
"Dying tends to make people reconsider their priorities a little bit," you say, all sharp sarcasm that would be biting if you weren't still standing here with your wings wrapped around him and your Baticul accent coming on as strong as it has in a lifetime.
"Even so, I imagine that I would be the last person you'd care to see again." A pause. "Perhaps second-to-last."
"I didn't care nearly enough about you to hate you that badly," you say, distinctly refusing to think of who the actual last person you want to see would be. You release one arm to punch him lightly in the kidney, here meaning hard enough to make the average person stumble a bit. Jade doesn't stumble or even flinch, and it's not because of the armor he's wearing. "And what the hell would I have said to Luke, if I got that letter from you only to have you die in some corner of the Empire without even seeing him?"
That gets a flinch, one so light and small that you wouldn't have noticed if you weren't standing literally touching him. "I see," Jade says quietly. "I hadn't heard... Is he here?"
"On a warfront?" you say, and look up enough to give him the 'you're supposed to be the smart one' look that you've perfected on Alphinaud and Thancred in alternating turns. "He's as soft as he ever was. He'd come out here because he thinks it's some kind of duty and cry himself to sleep every night for a year."
"I suppose he would," Jade agrees amicably enough. "Though it is unlike you to speak of him so fondly. Last I recall, you were still challenging him to duels."
You huff, feathers in your wings poofing out defensively in the corners of your vision. "Priorities," you mutter. "Also, Aodhan has a brother, so I'm a middle child now."
"I... see." You aren't sure he does, but you hear the faint shift of glasses-on-skin above you as he pushes them further up his nose. "Well, much as I appreciate the warm welcome, might I ask if you have any intention of letting go? It's a rather awkward way to hold a conversation, and I imagine we have quite a bit to speak about."
You make a show of huffing a sigh before you drop your arms away and curl your wings behind your back. "Fine," you say. "But if you don't hug Luke back, I'll have to take it out of your hide."
"...Fair enough, I suppose," Jade replies, taking a step back. "Now, where to begin... How much do you know about the true final days of Auldrant?"
You can't entirely hide the flinch at his phrasing. "More than I'm willing to stay standing around here for," you say. "Let's get your weapons, and I can start filling you in on the way bak to Doma."