Game Over!
wc: 1,674 | cw: war themes, light death | bad end meme
The train keeled through the turn in the tracks, shrieking and groaning, and sped west with hysteric clatter. The overtaxed wheels could not deafen it all: the humming windows, slamming buffers, children wailing in the previous car, that Alliance soldier who wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
“It’s like I always said,” he continued, with the only smile in the twilit car. “This was all coming to us eventually. Never expected the empire to want all that rock and salt back so soon. They got it, and we’re outta it, so I’d count that lucky against whatever’s going down in Gyr Abania now.”
If Arcian was here, she would have beat him into silence at this point. Or Brave. Or Nolanel. But they all stayed with the roaring magitek and stuttering bullets, bound by something stronger than law, and they forced the rest of the Bellworks away with no small amount of threatening.
The pocket of Brave’s hulking greatcoat was shredded by the brush of a reaper’s laser. Her hand toyed with the strips of fabric while she stood afore the Bells and declared that she wouldn’t be coming with them; Arcian would stay with her country and so would she; keep your linkpearl lines open for developments; she was sorry to curtail things like this, but she trusted them and loved them all. Her helmet stayed on through it all. Typical safety and typical hidden tears.
This was the Bellworks’ fight when there was saving to do–damage control, evacuations, nursing–but now Ala Mhigo was not a battle of outlast and survival, only killing as many imperialists as possible afore the keep inevitably fell.
She stayed at the station with them until a Garlean dreadnought sunk from the red sky. Then she was called to site of impact. The height of the rusty hills swallowed her from sight.
Max went missing sometime afore the doors closed and the whistles blew. She didn’t want to be told what to do. Haru, too, vanished into the armored legions for a place in the fire.
The alliance soldier shrugged when no one responded to him. There’d be a missing ration for him soon instead.
Sasamu flipped through a pack of cards she’d found under the seat, too abstracted for anything else. Yumi returned from the other cabin, having done her best to quiet the panicked kids, and sat on the jerking floor to meditate. As Norhi spread a poultice on her shell-burned calf, Vicky shakily offered advice for managing it. Although all linkpearl support crashed bells ago, Xan discreetly kept trying to activate hers. The look in Wyda’s eye was the most damning: the fight moved beyond her convictions and there was naught to do but betray herself or wait for the political and judicial courts to silence the guns.
It was the same uselessness Elliot felt all his life in the Holy See. The farewells were familiar, the haste and fear and frustration always with him, the future always pointless if one person wasn’t in it. He passed his rosary through his fingers without the focus to pray.
What could he ask for now? He’d already made the mistake of obeying Brave and Nolanel when they told him to go. He checked the time for arrival, he loaded his luggage, he mounted the stairs and claimed the window seat, numb, knowing it was wrong, knowing that each second he persisted drove a knife further through his back and to his heart, his damn heart.
Could he trade last memories? Arcian, blood in her hair, wrenching a knife from from the Garlean’s abdomen, panting as she dragged the corpse from the water supply stream. She spat bile from her mouth and mounted the hill for vantage. Arrows she’d collected for reuse poked from her knee-high boots. After pulling a few that had snapped and discarding them, she turned to the next Resistance camp. That–for Yumi’s shaking fingers and alert ears, her shut eyes twitching in the concentration it took to keep her body from quaking. For Xan constantly leaving her seat to check the windows, seats, and curtains for hostiles, then insulting the alliance lackey into silence.
Brave taking inventory of morphine and stimulants before the train’s arrival time had been determined, trying to trade ethers to the Wailers for alcohol. How Wyda and Norhi and he lined their personal supplies of potions into a crate labeled “EXPLOSIVES” and left a pair of flasks atop it to give eyes to a gauze smile. Then the half-stuffed pipe left with the supplies marked for removal. Brave’s pink handkerchief on Arcian’s skinned elbow. All those for Norhi trying to show Sasamu a card trick with tears in her eyes, and the ace of spades that kept sliding across the floor. Vicky vainly stuffing her ears from the racket with knitted gloves.
Nolanel slumped amongst a dozen of his unit, cleaning a new halberd after his usual one cracked from being caught in a sky armor’s blades. An apple, red as anything, was pressed to the ground by his booted foot after others had tried to steal it. Upon seeing Elliot, he hefted the weapon to his shoulder and sprung up, snatching the fruit. He spoke without being prompted, which was horrible, and walked easily, which was damning. He seemed desperate to remember happiness afore he lost it forever, but Elliot could not manage to give the laugh so dearly needed. People rushed across the thoroughfare they entered. Elliot took Nolanel’s arm and dragged him from the scramble, alongside a Resistance building. Leaning into the aged wood, Nolanel swiped the apple across his coat to clean it. He took a deliberate bite, searching Elliot’s face for the correct thing to do. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” he finally said. “Every man for the keep’s the word, but–” He looked to the cliff-sides and hunched trees he’d defended before with stiff hatred. His face twisted in pain. Heaving a breath, he threw his halberd and apple to the ground with all pretense. “I don’t know what I thought, gods have mercy. Ishgard–” His voice snapped with his calm, and he grabbed Elliot and kissed him, feverishly, savoringly, hands on his neck, back, body familiar and soul shared. Nolanel’s grip tightened when he spoke against Elliot’s shoulder, “Go home. Go home.” And as if struck, he jerked away. The sun peeked over the mountaintop behind him, darkening his retreating silhouette. He cried as he paced, the rock scurrying from each step. His hands scrubbed at his face, and he would not remove them when he whimpered, “I can’t see you go. I’m for the keep–we leave tomorrow–preparations–prayers–you must go home.”
Elliot left as requested, numb of everything but hatred of himself. To replace that memory with a different last–anything. He’d give anything.
Is this what he had to be? An evacuee to Gridania, then to split from the only others he loved to go to Ishgard alone? To explain to his father that yes, he was there at the front, and he left when matters devolved beyond salvage because his ticket was booked and he was told to? To prove that he was coward enough to leave to death the only person who gave him the bravery to try and live? He gambled Nolanel away–again!–to war. Yes, yes he was a coward, and a fool, and a disgrace–let him be so if he could have what he wanted. But if he could not have even that–what was he then?
Elliot stood, his rosary clattering from him. His nails bit into his palms, and he held his breath before he said, “I have to go back. I need to get off this godsdamned train.”
Wyda was the first to respond with something other than disbelief, having felt the same urge take her in hours passed. “Like hell you’re getting off. Sit back down, Elliot.”
Norhi uncertainly murmured her agreement with Wyda. Xan scoffed.
Elliot’s next breath had his face burst red. “I don’t want to go home! I don’t care if it’s a sham or if it’s a massacre. I want to be there. I must, I–”
Wyda moved to grab him.
The entire train lurched. Sparks from the wheels flashed across the window. Axles and supports screamed, and smoke billowed from cracks in the floor. The car ahead of them tilted from the tracks; its occupants were thrown to the side. In the second before it overturned, Wyda screamed Elliot’s name; he cried that it wasn’t him.
The car derailed. The wheels clipped on the tracks, igniting a harsher fire on the bed of the car. With a crash of metal, wood, and glass, they collided, shooting into the wastes of dust and beasts. The previous car plowed through the flank of the Bellworks’ car. Norhi and Sasamu vanished beneath its charging wheels. Yumi scrambled from the impact; she tumbled down the aisle towards the exit as if guided there by instinct, not advance planning. The emergency lever did not move–the mechanisms within it had been smashed–but she madly continued to force it.
Figures outlined in flame poured from the car ahead, doubled from black smoke and shock. Xan had no interest them. She stole the alliance soldier’s sword, bludgeoned a window with its pommel, and leapt to freedom. Dozens of recovering passengers surged after her, blocking the escape. With fake patience, Vicky shielded herself behind seat backs and fired bullets into a line of windows; only two shattered immediately.
Wyda still had Elliot’s collar in her fist. Pity distorted her face until she looked away and released him, letting him figure himself out while she shoved towards the back of the car. Heat waves and tears smeared her figure from his sight while she knelt to the splinters that crushed Norhi and Sasamu. Her curse confirmed what he already knew.
Yumi split from the door and assisted Vicky. Wyda bunched her shirt around her face to guard from the smoke. She trembled; they all did; but only Elliot did nothing, and was nothing.