Chapter Text
It has been a few hours since Vanille and Sazh have separated from the female soldier and the young teenager. He has doubts about their decision to part, but so far things have worked in their favor. The only enemies around are guard robots, which are easily disabled with a couple of shocks of magic. Along the way to the path to Sunleth, they get lucky and find supplies that PSICOM either forgot about or didn't bother guarding. They debate on whether or not it might be a trap. It isn't, as far as they can see, so they take what they need and move along.
Two hours before sunset Vanille complains that she could do without the military rations they found and insists on finding food for them. Thanks to his mandatory wilderness survival training, Sazh starts to tell her about the different types of wild vegetables and berries they might find as they approach Sunleth. It's useless information though; all they have seen so far are piles of junk.
"Hm," the girl pauses, bringing her right index finger to her lips. "I was thinking about hunting for one of those birds we’ve seen flying around, with their nests everywhere."
He says it's fine, that he will set up the tents and campfire. If he hadn't already realized that she was much, much more adept at combat than she had looked, he'd have balked at the thought of it. The way that she’s able to identify how fresh robot tracks were, and is able to sneak around some of the more dangerous security machinery they encounter...she seems to have an equal or better awareness about her than Lightning, the soldier. Yesterday, when Sazh asked Vanille how she'd developed this keenness, she quickly replied that she had read a lot about animals and nature as a kid. It wasn't a convincing answer, but he let it go.
She returns within half an hour with a huge grin, but more importantly with a duck. He watches her prepare it as he gets the fire going. It clearly hasn't been her first time doing this. After quickly pulling some feathers from the breast area, she makes an incision only an inch long. From there, she is able to remove the skin, slowly pulling it off at some parts, but also giving a few strategic but strong yanks and slices to free the breast meat.
She hums idly to herself as she does the work. It’s incredible, how nonchalant the whole ordeal is. A couple of days ago Lightning and that man Snow gutted a wolf, and they'd taken half the care that she did. What they decided on was sloppy anyway; they hastily sliced its belly open, bickering about which meat was fit for cooking. Why had she not offered her expertise then?
As he gives her some water so she can wipe away the blood from her hands, she makes a noise of surprise. "Oh! I'm going to need two pans for this. May I use yours?"
He removes his from his pack and puts it on the ground beside her. One pan is the perfect size for cooking the amount of meat they have from the breast and limbs, so he's a bit confused as to why they need two. "Sure. There that much meat on the thing?"
"Well, one pan would be for the meat, and it would be good to cook the innards in another!" she chirps.
"Innards?"
"Like the gizzards and organs and stuff. We can't waste it. That's some of the best parts!"
He groans. People eat organs ?
"If you don't like it, that's more for me. I'm really hungry, anyway."
---
When the meal is finally cooked, Vanille gives him most of the meat and she takes the rest. Sazh digs in to his food right away, but out of the corner of his eye he watches as Vanille puts her fingers out in front of her. He’s inquired about that too, but she says that it’s a meaningless childhood habit. He’s not sure if he believes the girl; while she’s doing that she always has a look of intense concentration. He wants to press her further about a lot of things, to understand where she's from, but it’s clear that he will always get a smile paired with an evasive answer.
They eat. The meat is bland. It’s slightly overcooked as well, but this is no restaurant. It's merely a relief to have a hot meal instead of a hard nutrition bar.
As they dine quietly, he wonders. This girl knows how to survive in the wild. He's always heard rumors about groups of people on Cocoon who lived without depending on the fal'Cie for food and shelter. These tribes were mentioned in passing, and always in mockery; how could those inane savages choose to live without the guaranteed safety that society provided? Perhaps she was from one of those tribes. Maybe that's why she spoke with an unfamiliar accent, and why she was indifferent to the hysteria about being turned into l'Cie.
But if that's where she was from, what had she been doing in New Bodhum to get caught up in the Purge? It’s possible that they'd found her in the woods on the border, he reasons.
Out of the corner of his eye, he notices she's leaned against a hunk of rounded steel, military grade blanket wrapped around herself. Her eyes are focused above.
"What are you looking at up there? Anything troublesome?" he jokes.
But she makes a non committal noise in response. Maybe she's still in shock, and that's why she doesn't talk about herself. Doesn't want to think about any family she's left behind for good.
Family. The word pushes his own thoughts elsewhere. Dajh. His poor boy, dragged along by cruel fate. It hurts worse knowing that things had finally been looking up in the past month for his son. Sazh had turned into a bit of a recluse after his wife died, and it had affected his only child. Even Dajh's teacher at school had told him that the boy wasn't doing well socially, that he'd prefer to quietly play alone. But a few weeks ago he'd attempted to remedy that. The two of them had gone to a local waterpark, where he had befriended another kid. Sazh had made pleasant conversation with the parents as their children played an extensive game of water gun tag, and they'd found out they'd lived a few miles away from each other. They'd exchanged contact information and Sazh had given a loose commitment to bring his son back there the weekend after their trip to the Euride plant.
He'd have to miss out on those plans. Now it would be miraculous for him and his son to be able to go anywhere together at all.
He grunts, chastising himself. 'Can't think like this. Gotta keep my sights ahead of me. Can't go-'
"The lights. I was thinking about them." She interrupts his internal pep talk. "Do you know about the stars on Gran Pulse?"
"Who doesn't?" He’d learned a bit about the atmosphere of Gran Pulse during his pilot training. Gran Pulse has stars in their night sky, faraway lights from celestial bodies. The lights in the skies of Cocoon are merely the illumination of nearby cities.
"Oh. I was just thinking that it's sad that there are stars there, but here it’s,” she frowns pensively. “Fake. Do you think there’s a place on Cocoon where the sky is completely dark?”
He shrugs. “Everywhere’s near a city. If there was, it’d be unsettling anyway. All that darkness.”
“You’re right, I suppose it would be.” She shakes her head and the negative expression on her face vanishes. “Well, I suppose that’s enough for chatting. We should probably clean up for the night, shouldn’t we?”