sheffiesharpe (sheffiesharpe) wrote in kinkfest, @ 2007-09-05 19:39:00 |
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Current mood: | thoughtful |
Fic: "Dead Man," FFXII (Basch/Gabranth, PG)
Title: Dead Man
Author: sheffiesharpe
Fandom: FFXII
Pairing: Basch/Gabranth
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1050
Spoilers: Endgamish.
Summary: Postgame (happier ending version).
Prompt: Sensory deprivation: a little place of forgetting.
A/N: …it seems more like remembering than forgetting. Apologies.
“Dead man,” Gabranth says, and he’s standing in the doorway, left hand gripping the doorframe for balance. He’s still not well enough to walk long alone, though it doesn’t stop him. He grimaces, brushes off help, goes on. And that is reassuring, somehow—he is still who he was—though it worries Basch: when they stand together at the top of a staircase, at the edge of a balcony, there is something in his brother’s eyes that begs Basch to push him. He is giving Basch his chance, or he is asking Basch to take it, and Basch does not know how to reassure him that all he wants is his twin, that if he wanted his revenge, he could have never concentrated hard enough to cast the most potent of the healing spells he knew. It would be easier on his brother, he knows, if he would give him anger, but he has none to give, not anymore, and maybe that is his revenge. All he knows is that the words startle him—he does not know their context. He turns his head—he cannot understand how to see in his brother’s helm.
“Dead man,” he had said. Gabranth takes another step into Basch’s borrowed room—his only for a few more months, he thinks—and he still favors his right leg. “Let’s play dead man, Basch.” And there is almost a smile on his wan features, and Basch remembers. The game. The game they had played as children: one of them would close his eyes, cover his ears, and remain utterly still—as a dead man—and try to guess what the other had done—moved a chair across the room? put the spine of a book against his leg? stuck a feather in his hair? the pad of the thumb over his navel? the fur cuff of a glove on the inside of his bicep? Basch sets the helm to the side.
Gabranth pulls the door closed behind him, and the sound is heavy, dampening. They are cut off, and now Gabranth allows Basch to grip his arm, to steady him across the room. Basch hates that there is this plated glove to chill his brother’s skin, the way it chills him from the outside in, but Gabranth takes no note. He is used to so much metal.
Basch leads him to the couch so he can sit, so he can rest and speak no more fever-words, though Basch knows that his brother is neither fevered nor mad. But Gabranth does not sit. He pulls his feet up, lies back, is still. After a moment, he pulls a small packet from his pocket. He says, “I will hear nothing,” and he opens it, touches damp fingers to the inside of his ears. He puts the empty packet on the floor, and he closes his eyes.
“Gabranth.” Basch’s throat tightens, but his brother is deaf. The distillation in the packet paralyzes, cushions, and blocks the ears—the demolition engineers and the destroyer mechanics use it to protect their hearing. His brother will know no sound for an hour’s span. He does not hear the metallic crunch of Basch kneeling beside him, and he is looking straight ahead behind his eyelids; his eyes do not move. Basch waves his hand, then swings his armored fist close, stops his hand but two inches from his brother’s jaw. Gabranth is not flinching because he is not cheating, not stealing that increment of sight the cover of eyelashes can conceal. They had both peeked, before, sometimes, had used a kerchief as a blindfold when the game had become more focused on catching the trick, when they had laughed and wrestled and reveled in the acuity of skin.
The preternatural stillness bothers Basch—knowing his brother cannot hear makes his own ears rasp two-fold at the creak of his cuisses, the faint crunch of wood under his knee—another scar bitten in by steel.
Basch’s long knife clatters at his hip—a ceremonial badge of office, though Larsa cautioned him to wear it when and where the dual blades of Judge Magister Gabranth were not permitted. Basch unbuckles that belt, pulls the blade two inches from its scabbard, and the mithril slither makes his neck prickle. It should make his brother—make any soldier—rise to fight, but he hears nothing. He cannot see that Basch draws the blade, looks at the narrow reflection of them both on its mirror-bright length, cannot hear it fly and fall and gouge the wood in yet another place. But Gabranth shifts, tilts his head back, invites the metal to his throat.
Basch would weep if he were able.
He throws the knife’s sheath, too, and sags forward. His breastplate rings against the couch-frame, and Gabranth’s fingers twitch. His hands press flat to the cloth, seeking the vibration. Basch unties his cape, touches the edge of one tie to Gabranth’s forearm. His brother is still. He does not speak, does not guess what it is.
Basch touches the back of Gabranth’s hand with his grey fingers, and he still does not guess, and Basch says that he must, that those are the rules, but is brother is deaf to everything and the way Basch’s torture-broken voice breaks again.
Gabranth’s trousers are hitched up by his out-stretching, a sliver of ankle bare, and Basch reaches for a pen. He draws with no ink and with no skill: a sun, only circle and rays; the curly hooks of waves; the name his brother used to have. There are no marks when he draws his hand away, but the muscle is tight against the tickle. Gabranth’s eyes flick right—toward Basch—and Basch takes a coin from his pouch. He warms it, rubbing quickly, and rolls it across the backs of his brother’s fingers. His palm turns, bared, and Basch lets his gauntlets fall. He puts his hand, his whole hand into his brother’s, picks up the other and clasps it to his cheek, pushes Gabranth’s fingers into his cropped hair, draws them heavy and still to the beard he’s groomed to match, turns his hand and presses shaking lips to the rough knuckles.
Gabranth’s fingers squeeze around his, and finally he speaks, he guesses, too loud and too unmasked because he cannot hear himself. “My brother. My brother’s forgiveness.” And he reaches for Basch with both hands, deaf and blind, and Basch closes his eyes, too, because here he does not need to see.