Ivalice Meta -- claim #1, crossover. Title: Flood Author: Mithrigil Fandom: Ivalice -- This one 75% FFXII, 15% Vagrant Story, and 10% FFTactics -- crossed over with Battlestar Galactica '04. Characters: Larsa, Basch, Zargabaath, and Leoben Conoy. Rating: R for violence and dogma. Spoilers: For the end of FFXII. Knowledge of VS, FFT, and BSG (up through season one, episode Flesh and Bone) not required but nonetheless highly amusing.
Flood Mithrigil Galtirglin
“We found the ‘prophet’ at the shrine of Zalera in Tsenoble, as you predicted, your Excellency.”
“As my informants discerned,” Larsa corrects, setting down the stick of wax. He waits for the blotch on the letter to cool, then presses his signet into it, and slides the letter aside to harden. “The man wanted to be found.”
Zargabaath extends a file over the desk; Larsa takes it, and begins thumbing through it, careful not to let the open binder smash the cooling seal nearby. “Rion is having him interrogated. He insists on meeting you.”
“Precisely why he wanted to be found,” Larsa says, processing, turning the page. “I believe I can give him that.”
“I would advise against it, your Excellency.”
Larsa smiles. “He has something to say to me, Zargabaath, and he is one of my people.”
“And what will you do with what he tells you?”
“Learn from it, I suspect.” He turns to another page, the last, the one that details the mission of the cult itself. “What makes this Leoben different from any other sect leader in Ivalice?”
Zargabaath’s sighs grow heavier these years. “Your Excellency, that is precisely why I advise against it. He is no different than any other zealot, and he seeks to win you through his prophecy.”
“And he, like all the others, deserves a fair shot at it. Perhaps he is right,” Larsa adds with a shrug, and closes the file. “He wants only that chance, and I will give it to him.”
“Your Excellency—”
“I dreamed of the man, Zargabaath. I dreamed of him before his followers committed their atrocities. That is what started all of this.”
Shifting his hips, the Judge takes ahold of his helm and bows his head to slide it back on. “He is a dangerous man. There are many would-be prophets in these days since the war, but Leoben is…different. His prophecies ring true, the street-ears say, and those enraptured by the way he hums revelations—as though he gives the time of day or the temper of the air! They call him a miracle.”
“And what is your qualm with this, Zargabaath? That they reserve the term for me?” Larsa stands, and smiles, proffering the file to Zargabaath and already on his way around the desk. “I am as intrigued as those street-ears,” he adds with a mischievous flicker to his eyes. “Indulge this youthful fancy. I am yet seventeen—I have not lost my taste for games.”
“This is no game, your Excellency,” Zargabaath sighs, metallic and stifled through the mask of his helm.
“I suspect it is not to Leoben either.”
“In any case, has your informant warned you of this purported power of Leoben’s? That he can guess the past of those he meets, can even read a man’s heart?”
“Penelo said as much, yes.”
“Take Gabranth with you.”
“If this Leoben reads hearts, that could prove disastrous.”
“Then permit me there beside you.”
At the door, Larsa turns, and glances over the shoulder of his robes. “Why, Zargabaath. I would not dream otherwise.”
--
He might be asleep or in trance—the man lays with his arms dangling and his cheek on the table. He is fair-haired and not quite shaven, his age not readily apparent. He does not look up at the door when Larsa enters.
Larsa halts, and stares. There is a cast of sweat on the man’s brow, and on the table itself, glinting on the oiled wood. Something in Larsa shivers. The guards file in behind him, and Larsa stretches back a hand, waves them aside. “Only Zargabaath and I,” he warns them.
“I do not mind your friends,” Leoben says softly, too loud to be a murmur but still slurred, still pressed against the table. “If it puts them at ease, by all means.”
“But not if it puts me at ease?” Larsa counters with a smirk.
Then, Leoben straightens, first uncoiling back in the chair and then sliding it back, gathering himself to his feet. The mark of his breath is on the table. For a moment, Larsa forgets to appraise the man, and looks instead at that, and leads toward that with his feet.
“It would not,” Leoben says. “You would rather be alone. You fear that I will not speak freely in the presence of your guards.”
“Men such as you are more likely to put on a show if there is an audience.”
There is a gap in Leoben’s teeth, and Larsa is drawn to it. “This is neither farce nor folly, Lord Larsa.”
“Speak your piece,” Larsa says, leans his hands on the corners of the table and dares not glance at Zargabaath from here. “Defend the actions of your followers.”
Leoben sits, a slow and serpentine gesture that never lets his eyes leave Larsa’s. They’re a salten blue, lighter than Penelo’s. The file guessed but did not clarify that Leoben was Dalmascan. “The power of water is the power of benediction,” he says, staring firmly up into Larsa’s eyes. “Blessings to all it gives, yet it covers all, jealously wanting for itself. Wield the roaring flame, wither the water's lust until its desire is parched and dry. The water, once withered, will be reborn as tears—”
“You did not come all this way to quote me that.”
“I came all this way because your henchmen insisted I do so.”
“You came all this way to tell me something. What is it?”
“Is the message of my men not clear enough?”
“I do not read blood, as you do.”
“You would learn much if you did.”
Larsa forces a smile. “Have you come to teach me how?”
“I have come,” Leoben says, and pauses, and parts a streak of his sweat on the table with his finger, “because your henchmen insisted I do so.”
His hands are too exposed—Larsa will not ball them into fists, he will not.
“Have I proven myself sufficiently different from any other zealot?” Larsa catches Leoben glancing fleetingly at Zargabaath at that.
“You have proven nothing save your aptitude for verbal legerdemain,” Larsa says and succeeds in not snapping it. “It seems you will perform your mummery for an audience of one.”
Leoben’s laugh, if one can call it that, is short and muffled, as if to a joke that only he can hear. “An audience of two. You forget your sheathed skeptic, there in the corner.”
“And you would—”
“I would not be judged.”
“Is that what your men slaughter themselves for? To malign the Magistracy?”
“My men slaughter themselves for a myriad of reasons, and that is one that some ascribe to, yes.”
“Is there a common one,” Larsa comes close to asking, but no, it is a demand.
Again, Leoben laughs, closeted and cold. “They are sheep, ruled by fear.”
“Is that how you lead them?” Larsa recalls something, a gesture, a tone of voice, and refuses to let the shiver out.
“I do not lead this country,” Leoben says.
Slowly, Larsa sits. “You truly are like any other zealot,” he says, “conflating your political agenda with the dogma of those blind enough to follow you.”
“And you do not the same? You market the mythos of the boy hero, the hope of the coming generations, to distract your people from the truth of your dying world.” Leoben leans forward, eyes challenging. “Forget not the Esper whose shrine you ‘found’ me in.”
“And now, like all other zealots, you preach apocalypse at me.” Larsa sighs, and again remembers Zargabaath is here. “How is it going to end, this time? Is that your message? That we will perish in fire and water and all will be reborn as tears, and only my influence and financial backing will elevate your cult to the point where you can help us?”
“I thought you smarter than that, son of Solidor.”
“Why are men who claim to follow you staining the streets of High Archades?” Larsa’s teeth are grit, his patience tried, the words ‘son of Solidor’ pulsing in his ears like stormclouds. “If you—”
“It is inevitable that expansion, due to the discovery of gold, causes the infrastructure of a mine to weaken.” Leoben’s eyebrows, thin and gold and sheened with sweat, raise slowly. His eyes have not left Larsa’s once. “But so rarely does the mine take responsibility for the accident.”
“And by gold I am guessing you mean Nethicite,” Larsa says, folding his hands in the lap of his robes. “I am not my father, I am not my brother. I can only emend their actions; I cannot recant them.”
“It is not their actions that have damned your city, but your acceptance of them.”
“Acceptance?”
“No matter the height of the cradle, you cannot contain the child. No matter the height of the wall, you cannot contain the flood.”
“You have a fondness for water metaphor.”
“It is perpetual,” he admits. “The first portent I knew. ‘To drink from this fountain is peril,’ a friend of mine will say, when she is born, ‘and we must seal it off, so that the people do not drink.’ And the people will drink, hearing and disregarding this, as they drink of your opiates, and the people will die.”
“And what is it that the people are drinking?”
“Complacency in security’s garb. A shield to turn a thousand stones but cave in the face of disease.”
Larsa scoffs openly. “The only shield I see is the one covering your eyes.”
“Now that is funny,” Leoben drawls, sagging back in his chair and darting his eyes at the ceiling, the sconces, the walls and the spaces between, “that is truly funny, your Excellency. You appraise my shields from the embrace of your own.” And at that word, Leoben opens his arms, palms up, sudden enough for exasperation but too much mockery in his face to make that so. He turns his eyes on Larsa’s; it is offering. “You cannot keep me out, son of Solidor. I know your heart.”
His accent is Landiser, Larsa finally realizes. It is like Gabranth’s, close-lipped and dark-voweled, and his eyes are that small. He is an expatriate of that land.
Larsa knows to hold that in reserve. “Tell me of it, then. This is the power that bought your notoriety, is it not?”
“Time bought my notoriety. You hand cannot silence me, and so I continue to speak. Yes, I read hearts, I see the patterns, I see the truths that float past you in the stream but no—no, none of these things win my fame. Have you not heard the rumors? That I am one of many?”
“These I dismiss,” Larsa snaps.
“Oh, these you dismiss, you who have seen your brother ensorcelled by one of the six, you who have offered friendship to Destiny, you who have slain cold ones only to see them rise again, you who have walked the halls of Nabudis—you believe in my prophecy, but not the resilience of my soul?”
“I am not interested in the resilience of your soul.”
“What then of your own?” Leoben smirks, braces his arms on the corners of the table. “You’ve a soul, I doubt it not—if not your own, then all the hopes that rest on you have conflated and been given the semblance thereof.”
The insult, if it can be one, makes Larsa’s blood run cold.
Leoben blinks, once, slow, leaning ever nearer. “You are your father’s soul, and your brother’s conscience.” He pauses. “You fear this.”
Larsa says nothing.
“Oh you’ve got one of your own, otherwise you wouldn’t fear it,” and he’s betraying lower birth now, in his language, in his bearing, “but maybe it’s not the one that they wanted you to have. Or maybe it is, but what they wanted turned out far worse than what they conspired against.”
Larsa says nothing.
“Bring wine next we meet,” Leoben drawls. “I would, but I’ll be ill-equipped. Bring wine and a chalice that is rounded at the top, and I will show you your people. Your cup overflows and they call forth a flood. The walls of your city are as your skin around a boil—you remember those, son of Solidor, you powder them even now, but powder feeds pus and your face becomes less recognizable by the morning. Every morning. You wake and see not you. You clothe your retainers in faces of unchanging metal that you might never fail to recognize them. The man in the mail is another, and he is dead and has no name, and only the face that you give him.”
“Your Excell—”
Larsa barely marks Zargabaath’s voice before the table flies out from between him and Leoben—a hand like a vice around Larsa’s neck—the twin dragons digging into his flesh—the wall to his back, hard and wakening—no breath—no air—no floor—
Leoben cocks his head and smiles, and pins him harder. “Each time a different role,” he whispers. “Perhaps next time, I will interrogate, and you elude—”
Something pries him away—his nails leave welts in Larsa’s neck, and when Larsa hits the floor he cannot catch himself on it and sags along the wall. Zargabaath has Leoben doubled-forward and locked, has the hilt of his sword raised to wallop him and then has, and Leoben topples, to his knees, to the level of Larsa’s eyes.
Zargabaath’s voice has never sounded more artificial. “Are you all right, your Excellency?”
“—Yes,” Larsa coughs, and gathers in his robes, but presses into the wall and cannot yet stand. He stares, at this Leoben, at the blood running out his mouth, at his swollen raw cheek with gleaming stubble (like Gabranth’s, but like which one, Larsa cannot—recall—), at his laughing pale eyes, rimmed with sweat.
"You were—” he speaks, still he speaks, and Zargabaath brings his boot down on Leoben’s flank and the man gasps but the words pour out of him with the blood, swarming, “—you were born of a father who wanted the world of you, and for you, and forgot to give it to you. A man who—” he groans, and Zargabaath raises his sword, “—wanted nothing more than to deny he had aught in common with you. A man who wanted you to deny that you were a Solidor, a—a monster, and hark, you—became a monster. You took your father’s gift and your brother’s lesson and you fulfilled every prescription. You are a leader of men, desirous of only peace, yet strong enough to withstand war. And yet—and yet you are the tyrant they sought to prevent. You are—” the creature coughs a trail of bloody water, more the latter than the former, and Larsa watches the carpet, twining trails of red on red. “—you’ll become the Gods that you dethroned. You’ll become Occuria."
Holding his teeth down, Larsa glares at Zargabaath. “Throw him off the parapet.”
--
Larsa bathes alone—as alone as his retinue will permit, and that means with Gabranth. But Gabranth has never forced conversation, never pried, never spoken out of turn, and so Larsa is as good as alone. The water moves him, and the salts, and he drifts. He clutches his necklace, and nearly sleeps. He relives the sight from the top of the tower, of the creature’s sober eyes—are they truly like Gabranth’s?—of the body spinning, bouncing off the balcony, breaking on the orchard dais’ tile.
He looks across the bath to the doors, at Gabranth ever vigilant, and asks that he remove his helm.
Gabranth obliges, and comes nearer, though not enough away from the door to compromise his post. His eyes are hooded and haunted but yes, the shape is the same, swollen by the scar.
“To what gods did you pray, in Landis?” Larsa finds himself asking, his voice childish and high, if thick from the steam.
Basch is taken aback some by the question, but his eyes are warm, and his lips smile. “I, to none. It is…there was a god to seek the favor of in war, or in the home, or on a journey. They were like mortal men, but they are gone. I have read some, of these gods and the Espers as the same.”
The tile under Larsa’s elbows is wet, the water running over the edge. He considers this. “For a journey, then. To guide a soul. To whom should I pray?”
Perhaps it is only the temper of the air, but Basch’s face pales.