Another (Final Fantasy XII, Ashe/Drace) Title: Another Author:puella_nerdii Rating: PG Warnings: Minor spoilers through the Leviathan. Wordcount: 2,170 Prompt: cross-dressing - "the thrill of being another"
Vossler would not wish for her to do this, but a queen encased in layers of dank and dripping stone, a queen who cannot walk among her people and tread their streets, breathe their air, feel their sun—such a woman cannot call herself queen. She deserves neither crowns nor oaths. Ashe thus makes her resolution: she will emerge from the fetid waters pooling around her ankles and explore the streets of her city. Her city still, no matter the number of Imperial boot-prints stamped in Rabanastre’s dust.
“You need not take another watch,” she tells Vossler, and the words are not lies. Wan shadows stretch beneath his eyes, and the darkness leeches more of the tan from his skin each day.
“I drew the second watch, my lady,” he says.
“Balzac can take your place,” she urges him. “How much longer can you remain standing?”
“For as long as is needed,” Vossler responds, but she hears the exhaustion in each puff of breath he releases.
“Please,” she says, and then whispers: “Your queen commands it. I will not have you work yourself to death for my sake.”
He gives a thin nod. “If my watch will be covered—”
“It shall be.”
“—and if you would still command me to rest—”
“I would, and I do.”
“Then I shall.” He does not say thank you, but when he finally rests on his back, she thinks she hears him give a soft sigh.
As his eyes drift closed, she considers abandoning her plan, but no; were she to confide the details of it to him, he would prevent her from leaving or insist on accompanying her, and he does need the rest. With any luck, he will never know she was gone.
***
The attire she has chosen for this venture hangs oddly on her, but it was stitched to fit a slender young man perhaps two or three years younger than herself, as the trousers end just below her knee in the fashion of a youth. The scratchy fabric flaps loosely around her crotch, and no amount of tugging quite fixes the problem. Binding her breasts is no easy chore, as nobody is there to help her swathe her torso in the fabric. She looks at the lumpy layers of cloth and fears it is poorly done, but she dares not make her bindings tighter; her breasts already ache, and send the twinges of their complaints running down the length of her back. She catches her grimy reflection in the Garamsythe’s black waters. She may yet pass. They may guess her gender, but they will not guess her lineage.
Ashe does not know if the thought heartens or discourages her.
***
When she feels grains of sand scratching her face again, she forgets the cramp in her chest and the peculiarities of her trousers. Is this coarseness what a beard feels like as the bristles comes in? She blinks, dazzled by the glare of the sun from the water bubbling in the fountain. It seems so clear, so clean. Ashe dips the tips of her fingers into the pool of shimmering blue. The cool of it travels up her arm and dispels some of the heat weighing on her limbs.
Rabanastre shouts around her: seeqs bellowing and snorting; the patter of small feet against smooth stones; mothers barking out orders to their wandering children; the slither of a bangaa’s tail; the bright exclamations of moogles; the cries of vendors at the Muthru Bazaar; all carried to her ears from the lazy breeze tugging at her hair.
Gods, she has missed her city.
She reminds herself not to press her knees together as she sits on the fountain’s lip, though she catches her thighs trying to drift closed a number of times. She still hears her aunt’s voice chiding her to sit as a decent lady should, the dark insinuations about the lewd thoughts planted in men’s heads when her stance allowed them a glance up her skirts. But she is not a lady now, and she cannot sit like one.
Nor would a lady order shaved ice and shove the cup so close to her lips as she eats, but nobody thinks to chide her for such behavior today.
The cadence of Imperial boots falling in step reaches her next. Ashe’s lips press together. A knot of children to her left is freer with their mouths: they jeer as the ten helmed figures march past them.
“Hey, bucket-head!”
“Go back to Archades!”
“Is it true the Emperor’s so feeble that he soils his pants?”
“And then his Judges have to wipe him off afterwards?”
“And all of Archades stinks like a privy!” the smallest boy finishes gleefully, grinning wide enough to expose the gaps where his teeth should be.
“You dare give cheek to a Judge Magister?” the soldier at the head of the column growls, but the figure in the back holds up a gauntleted hand. Ashe cranes her neck to the side. The Judge Magister wears a full skirt of fanned plate, far fuller than the white cloth-and-leather pieces worn by—his or her? Judges are often but not always male, and Ashe does not know if she can state with confidence that someone she thinks to be male is truly of that sex, not when her own attire is similarly deceptive—by his or her subordinates.
“They are only children. Pay no heed to their words.”
A woman, she decides: her voice is low, low and rich, but it is a woman’s voice clearly enough. Ashe’s hand tightens around the cup holding her shaved ice. Most of it has melted by now. The bottom of the cup is thick with red sludge. She needs to pitch her voice even lower than the Judge’s if she wants to pass as a man when she talks—or perhaps she needs to alter the quality of her speech, make it rougher and hoarser. Coarser, too.
Then the gap-toothed boy decides to throw a rock. It glances off one of the bulbs adorning the Judge Magister’s helmet.
The children weave through the clanking Imperials with ease, ducking under flailing metal limbs and crawling through tangles of armored legs, but Ashe finds it harder to flee; she is not as small as they are, and her knowledge of Rabanastre is dated, dated and limited, and the guards are charging at her now, their hands outstretched, and this is exactly what Vossler feared and she should try to think like a street urchin, a cocky young boy. Were she truly that, she would know where to dart and how to flee, but her legs seem to be composed of the same stone that makes up the fountain’s basin.
Two of the Imperials seize her by the collar and haul her into the nearest shop and up a flight of stairs, dragging her behind them like a sack. She chafes not at the pain but at their manner as they handle her. Still, she remains silent. Let them think of it as a sullen teenage silence, if they wish.
“Sedition,” one soldier hisses, slamming his fist into his palm. “You think it’s funny, do you? You and your friends think it’s funny to strike the people who keep the bloody Rozarrians from burning this sand pit to the ground? Well?” he bellows in her ear. She scowls. “Is that funny? Why aren’t you laughing, boy?”
He called me boy. She is too awash in relief to notice the impact of his hand ringing against her cheek. They do not recognize her. After more bellowing and perhaps a few more blows, they’ll likely release her.
“What’s your name?” his companion asks.
Ashe says nothing. She had prepared a name, but she cannot recall what it was now. The only fake name that comes to mind is Amalia, but that will not serve her here.
“Speak when you’re asked a question, boy. Don’t they teach you manners in this place?” He seizes her chin and jerks it forward.
“Amil,” she says, dropping her voice into the back of her throat. “I’m Amil.”
“We could send you to Nalbina, Amil.”
Ashe’s stomach plummets. No.
“Would you like that?” the soldier continues. “Rotting down there with the cutthroats?”
“That’s enough,” the Judge Magister says, her voice sharp as steel. “It was a silly jest, and hardly an offense meriting imprisonment. You need not terrorize the boy.”
“But his friend struck you, Judge Drace,” the soldier continues.
“And I do not seem to be grievously injured,” Drace replies dryly. “Leave this room. We have tarried long enough with this foolishness. I will see that the boy has not been scared senseless, and then I will join you at the Muthru Bazaar.”
“We aren’t to leave your side, Judge Drace…” the other soldier begins.
“I assure you, I am more than capable of defending myself. Leave.”
They do so. Ashe does not find it difficult to see why. She resolves to learn to speak like that; Vossler has a similar trick when he issues orders, but it is not a trick of the voice that comes easily to her.
“Your name is Amil?” Drace asks, lifting her helm. She is not beautiful, but she is striking: patches of silver glint in her dark hair, and the arch of her nose is regal.
“Yes, Judge Magister,” Ashe mumbles, forgetting her lessons in elocution. Drace seems a sight more observant than her men were.
“Have you any family, Amil?”
“No, Judge Magister.” She looks down and sees that she sits with her ankles touching. She shifts into a wider stance and hopes Drace does not notice the adjustment. “They died.” That statement, at least, is true enough.
“What of a home? Do you have that?”
“Of sorts,” she answers. Her throat throbs when she speaks in this scratchy, deep manner.
Drace’s hand rests on the table as she traces the grain of the wood with her thumb. “I can give you enough gil for a trip to the bathhouse, a new set of clothes, and a good night’s supper. Consider it repayment for my men’s foolishness.”
She flushes at the thought of taking charity from an Archadian—and a Judge Magister, no less. “The offer’s kind, but no thank you.”
Drace’s fingers cup her chin much as the soldier’s did earlier, but her touch is more inquisitive than insistent. “Amil, you named yourself?” she muses. “Amil is a man’s name.”
Ashe drops her voice as low as she can. “Yes, Judge Magister.”
“You are not a man.”
She coughs, and Drace’s smile is wry.
“Your voice is passable, but you carry yourself as a woman would.” Drace guides Ashe’s hand to the center of her torso, where her ribcage is encased by a shining breastplate. “You center yourself here. When men move, their center of gravity is lower, generally. There are always exceptions.”
Ashe works her mouth, but no sound escapes it. She nods slowly, as though her head moves through some thick substance. She leaves her hand on Drace’s armor; some of the sun’s warmth remains in the metal, and her fingers hum at the sensation.
“Why are you thus attired?” the Judge Magister asks.
She thinks on it before responding. Her answer cannot be the whole truth, but perhaps she can share part of it. It will sound more convincing than an outright fabrication. “There is a thrill in it,” she says slowly. “In being another.”
Drace laughs just once; the corner of her mouth twists to the side. “I can’t deny that. But you spoke truly when you said you had no home and no family?”
“I did.” Because of you and your kind, she remembers to add silently, lest she forget the reason Rasler came home with arrows buried in his chest. She pulls her hand back from Drace and rests it in her lap.
“If you will not accept my gil, accept my condolences. And if you wish to continue your charade, practice your walk.”
Ashe gives a single nod.
“I would know one more thing,” Drace says. The hard lines in her face gentle when she turns her gaze upon Ashe once again. “If you are not Amil, who are you?”
“Amalia,” she says, and it is almost truth. Amalia is who she must be now.
“Amalia.” Drace pronounces it as though the syllables were music—the ringing of great old church bells, perhaps. “It is a lovely name. Do not discard it.”
“I will not,” she says.
“Good.” Drace rises. “I have business to attend to in the Muthru Bazaar, I fear. My soldiers will not take kindly to waiting in the sun for me. The heat cooks their wits, I think. A good day to you.”
“And to you,” Ashe remembers to add as Drace pulls the door closed behind her.
Her breasts begin to ache again. She scratches at the bindings and wonders when she will return to being Ashe.