Castor sighs. "When last we talked, just surviving seemed to be the most we could hope for. But we're not exactly grasping at threads, are we? What do - what do you want, Lucas? What do we want?"
Lucas leans forward, resting his forearms on the railing. His fingers dangle down toward the desert that sprawls out below them, even as Castor continues to cling to his upper arm. It's a repose, one that comes with the creaking of leather and the sigh of a man exhausted from a day's work, but still somehow energized by what sits before him.
"I had sorta been enjoying not having to answer that question."
He looks eastward, over toward the hulking shadow of the Burning Wall beyond Highbridge. In the twilight, it loses some of its definition, becomes more an amorphous spindly thing hovering massively in the dark. A creature in the mists.
"Just... being. Just finding a rhythm in the world. It's nice. Do I have to want anything? Do I have to do that already?"
Castor: @way-to-the-future, Lucas: @shadowburgers.
Artist: @horreurscopes, thank you so much! Their commission sheet is here.
(Featuring @calendulafield, @cheche-dotharl, and @way-to-the-future, respectively. Memorabilia materia were a game mechanic used in the #FFXIVHeartless campaign and created by @borderbipoline.)
What follows are three memorabilia materia, spontaneously generated by an Allagan lamia named Scylla aboard the Salemtaza’s Voyage, and rendered to dust after sitting unfound for several days.
*
Dawn Materia -- This pink and yellow materia resembles a rising sun. When you hold it, you feel like starting something new.
The air here is trying to kill you. This is more melodramatic than the truth, but still your eyes burn and your throat is a raw corridor. The mask you wear barely shields you from the worst of it. At least you're no longer oozing from the nose, but this is little comfort, not with how all of your new colleagues are giving you such a wide berth, staring at you with concern and confusion.
They mean well, but the attention churns your stomach. The jokes are easier to take. (Distantly, you hear the Captain, We are learning about Lucas' steadfast fight against defecating himself to death through cheese.)
She is the only one who steps into the invisible bubble that everyone leaves around you, the only one to extend a hand and try to feel your face and touch the misery that coats you like a thin candy shell, a brittle armor against unwanted attention.
"May I?" Sui asks with her hand extended to you, an offering. A connection, if you can abide it.
"Only if you promise not to look sorry for me while you do it. Please, say something mean." You mask the urgent plea in your voice with a touch of humor.
"Uh--" She stammers. The doubt on her face is overwritten by determination, even as she stalls to think. "I... I hope..." Red roses bloom on her cheeks in a familiar expression of dawning embarrassment at herself, and in this you find a sacred kinship, for your cheeks burn exactly the same. Still, she pushes through: "I hope you defecate everywhere!"
Immediately, she claps her hand over her own mouth in horror, and something blossoms inside of you. It's gratitude, unfurling to tickle the walls of your stomach with a trailing thrill. You don't love her yet. But you will.
*
Midnight Materia -- Flecks of white swirl in this indigo materia like a snowglobe. When you hold it, you feel confident in your abilities.
It's past the eleventh evening bell in Ishgard and you are stuck trying to track down the last retainer in the city who possesses a very specific hat for sale. Obtaining this hat is mission critical, though you couldn't explain why, if pressed.
There's a hand in yours as you stalk across the Pillars with ice crunching on the cobblestone under your boots. It's a small hand, and the woman attached to it is looking up at you with dim but curious eyes, absolutely willing to follow your lead in every regard. Her encouraging squeeze sparks a brilliant idea to take shape in your mind. A bargaining chip; one of the oldest grifts in the books.
"Hey, Cheche... Could you pretend to be my petulant girlfriend? For about five minutes? Can you pretend to be angry?" You coach her through it, bidding her to embody a spoiled child who really wants candy, except in this case the candy is a singularly gaudy hat.
She takes her time considering this. Snow falls all around you, illuminated by the soft orange glow of the street lamps, even at this time of night. It collects in her blue-black hair, speckling her horns with white spots that slowly -- too slowly -- melt away.
"All right. I think I can try," she affirms, clearing her throat before stomping her foot hard against the street. It echoes down the open alley, but not so loud as the shrill shout that follows: "Lucas! I am wanting my sparkly purple hat and it is not in my hands. Where is it?!" Her brows are furrowed, very cross, and her arms fold over her chest in a haughty display.
You rock back a few ilms on your heels, as though the force of her tantrum had landed you with a physical blow. Oh, this is perfect. She's perfect. The swelling in your thieving heart in this moment is pride, trickling into your veins with a warm glow. You don't love her yet. But you will.
*
Lunar Materia -- This white materia is cloudy as a chunk of moonstone. When you hold it, it first feels very cold in your hands, but it warms quickly to the touch.
You're drunk. Your nerve endings buzz in a blunted fervor, somehow painfully alight but woefully numb all at once. You were angry, before, but you can't remember why. There's a man next to you, with hair as white as the snow that falls in the Brume, and he's handing you a pistol.
You snatch it from him, checking the frizzen with a practiced gesture but unsteady hands. "You know, my father wouldn't tell me how to shoot. I asked him, but he said it wasn't for me. I had to learn from my brother." You cock the gun and lift it partway, looking off into the distance at a now-familiar little shooting range. Rotten produce, rotten wood, empty bottles. What a mess. What a fucking mess.
"What was for you?" he asks in a calm voice, watching you closely.
"Nothing that I wanted." You spot your target and shift your boots apart, steadying the gun with your other hand by cradling your own fingers.
"What did you want to be?"
"A cog in a machine." You take your shot. In the distance, a potato explodes in a brilliant display of white splatter and gore. Deadeye, even in your present state.
"Good shot. You aimed a little low." A beat, and then: "I wanted to be a prince."
You glance sidelong at your companion, a bit of humor creeping into your expression like pernicious ivy. Honeysuckle taking over a blast zone. "Really? ...Hey, Castor? What's your other name?"
"What?"
"Your other name." You pass the spent flintlock back to him, gesturing for him to pass you another. You aren't done.
Displeasure overtakes him, stretching his mouth into a thin line. "My name is Castor. It's my uncle's name. And my grandfather's."
"Arendt isn't the name of a prince though, is it."
"Why does it matter?"
"I want to know who keeps me up at night." A flush passes through you at the honesty, darkening your cheeks, so you misdirect by flapping your fingers impatiently. The pistol. Gimme.
"I'm not a prince, Nevin. I'm a career criminal. I am not who my father wanted me to be." Another flintlock is passed to you without comment. "Suppose you can understand that."
You repeat the process, checking the powder. The mythrite is such cool blue in this moonlight but warm under your touch when you cock the mechanism. "We still bear their names though, don't we?"
The sack of potatoes still sits on the other side of the street, blown partway open by your earlier shot. His hand is on your shoulder, pressing you to mind your stance. It has a heavy weight, warmer than the gun that you cradle. The connection sits like molasses, slow and dense, soothing your shaking hands.
You shift your feet, square your shoulders.
"Lucas."
You squint at your target, lifting your fingers from the guard.
"kir."
Pull the trigger.
"Naevos."
Three potatoes are neatly dusted from the middle of the sack by your neatly aimed bullet. The sack itself slumps over, spilling rotten tubers all over the stone. You take a breath, quick and shallow, audible in the stillness of creeping dusk.
"You're a good shot, Lucas." Lucas. Lucas. Not Nevin, Lucas. His hand moves to your shoulderblades. "When I used to think about fucking the imperial corps of engineers, I didn't think it would be literal."
You laugh, a brutish exhale of breath that comes out in a billowing plume of white that evaporates quickly, rising all around your face like smoke from a gun's barrel. Under the bile of shame, something takes to seed in your belly, a hearty little thing still wrapped in its shell, waiting for the right time to sprout and grow. Acceptance, as you are, as you were. You don't love him yet. But you will.
I’m down to my last koban, can you believe it? My pocket was full to jingling with them when I got off the boat in Gyr Abania, with a different name and all the aspirations of an idiot, but since then I been leaving one or two of them behind in every fountain and well that crosses my path. A dipshit leaving bread crumbs as he cuts his way through the most unfamiliar terrains, knowing he’ll never truly find his way back to where he started. Not as the same guy he was when he left. Guys like me, they can’t go back the same. They go back dead, or changed, or not at all.
Part of me falls out through a hole in my pocket with every step I take on this continent, but that isn’t a bad thing. I’ve dropped my koban in fountains at the Snail in Idyllshire, Saint Valeroyant’s forum in Ishgard, the Gold Court of Ul’dah, the pools of Voor Siran Siran in the Sea of Clouds, even chucked a few into some toxic sludge near the hyperstellar downconverter in Azys Lla. I don’t always make a wish. It’s almost habit by now. A ritual offering, some little piece of me offered up to get us through this alive.
But I remember that first wish, rocking back and forth on my heels in the chill breeze of Ishgard, turning a koban over and over in my hands, trying to scrub the grime of my sins off onto its gold surface like some sort of soul alchemy, and praying to find the right path. I wish I could say I’ve found it, but I’m still waiting for fate to play out on that one.
I’m down to my last koban, with my feet planted deep in the soil of the Shroud near Fallgourd Float, and Castor off next to me sunning himself like a grinning fool on a rock, still soaking wet from the dip we took in a crystal clear river. The boughs are sighing over my head, but for once it doesn’t feel like the trees are talking shit about me. Maybe they can tell I’m different now, maybe they know it better than I do.
I’m down to my last koban, and for once, I have no idea what to wish for. Friends, family, a home, all the shit I didn’t have before? I’ve got it now. I don’t know if I’ve found the right path, but I’ve got a path forward, and that’s good enough for me, good enough for now. This one’s just for you, I say to the forest in my head, flicking the little gold coin with my thumb. I toss it backward over my shoulder and turn around just in time to see it catch the brilliant light of the sun, plinking under the surface of the stream with a muted glunk, only to settle with the stones and sediment at the bottom. It’ll be covered with silt in time, and then pressed down into clay, and with it the last of my sins will be buried.
Empty handed, I walk back over to the rock, sprawling out next to Castor on its sun-warmed surface. The water beads up on his shoulders, dripping in crystalline trails down his arms while he takes an exhausted snooze, so I lean over and kiss some of it off. Tastes bright, mineral.
This is nice. This is all I need, for now. The next thing will come.
“Sometimes I wonder if attachment is a weakness. If my desire to live -- my desire to see him live -- won’t get in the way of success. I don’t want to be weak; when this shit goes up in flames -- and it will go up in flames before the deed is done -- I have to be able to do whatever needs to be done. Sacrifice has to be on the table. I won’t have it any other way. I have to see this through.”
“I ask myself ‘why him’ and most of the time the only answer I can come up with is because he was in the right place at the right time, and just... kept being there. He just kept being there, in that place, whether the time was good or bad or not worthy of note. He was there, until I couldn’t imagine him being anywhere else. Sometimes that’s enough.”
“I hope nobody else ever figures out how pretty he is when he cries.”
The Twelveswood reminds me of my mother’s homeland, but that’s a place I can only ever see in the hazy golden-green of childhood nostalgia, and I’m never quite sure if these are memories that I have of a real place, or if my imagination cobbled them together from her stories and my impressions. I’m not immune to that particular breed of infantile whimsy where things like pixies feel just as real as the sunlight on your face, and Gridania is a little bit like that. It’s alive in a way that makes me feel stupid, like nothing I’ve trained for could prepare me for the simple awe of looking up in a dark cave to see roots as thick as my whole body jutting out of the ceiling like the vaulted arches of a chapel sanctuary.
This place is full of that kind of shit, and I’ve never felt more foreign than I do around the density of Nophica’s fat bounty. I feel unshielded, unprepared, painfully seen by the matron and her vines that creep into every breach in my defenses like nature taking back an abandoned castrum. I am caught flat-footed by the simple intimacy of an unshakable truth: I am lonely here, without you.
I sit on the forest floor with my scabbed hands curled in my lap, palms open for Nophica’s green vines to hold like a tangle of fingers, and I imagine a different kind of intimacy: the anguish of letting someone like you roll me over the hard-packed dirt until my shell splits and cracks open, sliding away to reveal that I am not a man of nature’s meat and bones but rather of intelligently crafted cogs and wires, kept chugging in perpetual motion by a fine clockwork heart. I’m a creature of careful stasis and painfully susceptible to inertia, but, fuck, I do love having a worthy stimulus to react to. I feel soft heat, I taste the tang of blood, and every servomotor in my body begins to spin with agonizing friction.
That’s a long and incredibly fucking stupid way of saying that I can’t stop thinking about your mouth. I love how you open up for me so I can taste myself on you--and you should know that when I say this, it’s not admiration; it’s narcissism. You take the familiar and uncomfortable parts of me and make them strange and palatable by putting them in the novel frame of your obscene lips.
The clarity I find under the living white noise of the forest tells me that what I want, what I really fucking want, is for you to speak my name into my mouth until the hot, imperious moisture of your breath starts to rust all of my gears, until abrasion makes all the motion inside of me come to a flaking, shuddering stop. Lucas, I hear you say. Lucas, Lucas, not Nevin but Lucas, because my name is gilded in a false gold that will soften and dent under your canines, and splitting my skin is the holiest thing you can do with that mouth your father gave you.
Being surrounded by all this natural fucking splendor emboldens me to meditate on a more perfect world, one where you put your hands on me and this time I don’t stop you. My brass buttons slip through your fingers like three more of my tarnished wishing coins pinking into the river, and when your fist slides into my clothes, the feeling that I get is a little more like if you grasped my throat and throttled me with a tyrannical clench.
Fuck, you’re so good at this.
A flush rises to my cheeks to remind me that there are honest parts of me yet; my body has reactions that I still cannot control. The warm rush of my blood tells the truth even when my mouth is too busy sucking on your bottom lip to fashion a suitable lie about how I don’t spend every conversation aching to kiss you. Not because I like you--make no mistake, you are the most impetuous piece of decorated dog meat that I’ve ever met--but because being furious with you makes me feel more at ease than any amount of loose flattery from everyone else. That’s fucked up, isn’t it?
It’s fucked up, but it’s my truth, and the truth needs to be spoken aloud to the gods even when it’s embarrassing and inconvenient. I have to own it, don’t I? That’s how this works.
I open my mouth to invoke you--yes, you--under the dappled light of these holy, ancient trees. I open my mouth to whisper your name in a blasphemous tone, in the hopes that this will suffice in place of a more thorough accounting of the schism you’ve created in me, but all I can get out is an aborted syllable before the boughs around me explode without warning into the furious beat of a dozen black wings. Jerking forward a few ilms as though stumbling ass-first out of a dream, I awake to find a flock of crows screaming to the clouds that they have perceived my sins and judged me disloyal.
