Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The night that the sky tears open, Martin is sitting on the roof.

It’s been a favourite spot of his for years. Slip up the back stairwell of his building, follow it spiralling around all the way to the top. Through the door that’s meant to be locked but has been just out of alignment enough for years to make it easy to shimmy open without the key. Through a small gap between the two run-down domes crowning the old building, and round into the tiny alcove behind.

It’s quiet up here, which is part of why Martin likes it so much. The rest of Zanarkand isn’t quiet, as a rule. Even in his tiny apartment, there’s still plenty of noise that bleeds through the walls on either side, or through the ceiling from the family of five that live upstairs. And while it’s nice, in a way, sometimes, to have the reminder that there are always other people in this city just going about the business of living their own lives, sometimes…

Well, sometimes Martin just wants the quiet. Sometimes old habits die hard.

That, and the view from his apartment isn’t nearly as good as the one from up here. Martin’s apartment building is old; the windows are all tiny things, designed for keeping the glaring midday sun out as much as possible. Practical things. They weren’t designed with the view in mind.

The roof, though, that’s a different story.

Martin doubts the people who built the place had a notion of anybody spending time on the roof, which naturally means that the view up here at night is stunning. The sweeping expanse of Zanarkand stretching out above and below, the domes and spires reaching up in great, elegant urban tangles that rise in layers higher and higher the closer they get to the city centre. The great arc of water cascading over the blitzball stadium, the smaller falls that pour off the edges of the round floating platforms that support the city's more fashionable districts. Seen at sunset, when the last rays of light make all of that water look like shining crystal burning with liquid fire, before the day fades and the lights of the city slowly start to turn on, one by one – it’s beautiful.

Zanarkand isn’t always beautiful, but seen like this, on that cusp of one light trading places with another, it may just be one of the most beautiful sights to have ever existed.

Tonight should be no different from any other night. Tonight isn't any different from any other night - right up until the precise moment that Martin sees, with crystal clarity, a great wave of ocean water rise up and sweep towards the city.

Martin’s first impulse is to run – but where to? The wave is massive, a colossus towering above even the highest spire on the highest platform, above even the water kept suspended in its arcing path over the city. Where can he run from that? Even if he makes it down the stairs and out the building in time, there’s no escaping something that vast. He’s going to drown. The entire city’s going to drown.

The wave stops.

Pressed against the wall on the roof of his apartment building, terrified out of his mind, head still spinning with thoughts of how the sea had been calm, completely calm until only a few seconds ago, and how he really, really doesn’t want to die – Martin starts to wonder if he’s dreaming.

The wave hangs there for an instant, suspended mid-motion like a frozen image from a spherecast.

Then it changes.

The water reshapes itself, slow and fluid, sculpting itself into a giant sphere that floats over the city. Almost like a blitzball pool – except there’s no machina powering this monstrosity, no spinning gyros forcing the water to remain in that shape, and not even the pool in the stadium is this large when it’s filled. Martin could swear that the buildings closest to the edges of the sphere warp, turning fuzzy like the blurred edges of a child’s watercolour painting.

For a moment, he wonders if maybe he fell off the roof. Maybe he’s lying on the ground right now, and this is some kind of bizarre dying vision.

It’s not a vision.

Martin doesn’t know where the thought comes from, but he knows it’s true. However impossible this is, however unreal it is – it’s really happening.

The sphere of water convulses. There’s a booming sound, quiet at first but getting louder and louder in Martin’s ears, and as the sound spreads, there’s another right behind it, this one the sound of splintering metal and cracking, groaning masonry. His ears still ringing, Martin can only watch in growing horror as smoke starts to rise from the collapsing skyline closest to the sphere.

What is happening out there?

Another convulsion, and now a flash of dark shapes come shooting out from somewhere within the water. Impossible to tell if they’re even aiming for anything – Martin's eyes catch some crashing down near the dockside, more plunging into buildings in clouds of dust.

The shapes start moving, and his stomach turns as Martin realises that the things are alive.

The sounds of sirens and distant screams carry on the wind. Martin's sure his legs are going to give way at any moment – but a blur of movement draws his eye, and he has to move closer to the edge of his little alcove for a better look.

Because - if he’s not completely lost it – there’s someone out there fighting those creatures.

It’s impossible to make out details from this far off, but the stranger is armed with a sword half as tall as they are, and is making short work of the dark, buzzing shapes and writhing limbs with movements that are as graceful and fluid as they are impossible. In a series of quick slashes, they effortlessly cleave the ones ahead clean in two, before circling around to the larger one behind and dealing it several punishing blows in quick succession.

Martin rubs his eyes, and the figure is gone.

More alarmingly, the gargantuan orb of water still hanging in the sky looks closer than before. A lot closer.

He’s got to get out of here.

That’s the first thing Martin thinks, and then with a jolt of new fear he remembers all the other people in the building, and he knows: first, he has to warn them.

Martin scrambles back through the gap between the domes, spends an agonisingly long few seconds frantically trying to get the door to the stairwell open, and then hurls himself through it, racing down the first spiral as fast as he can without breaking his neck.

There’s an emergency switch on every floor, ostensibly for if a fire were ever to break out, but Martin figures this situation is worth at least ten fires. The switches are old tech – still sphere-activated of all things – but they still work just fine. Martin hopes they still work just fine.

He shoves his entire weight at the door that leads to the top floor landing until it bursts open with a loud bang, almost trips over his own feet racing for the emergency panel. He slams his elbow into the glass panel covering the softly glowing sphere set in the wall and reaches in to grab it, letting out a small sound of pain when a jagged edge of glass nicks the side of his hand. There’s another recess in the wall to the right - Martin wastes no time, setting the sphere inside it with fumbling hands and praying he doesn’t drop it.

The effect is immediate: as soon as the sphere slots in place, a loud, grating sound blares through the corridor, building in pitch and intensity until it makes Martin want to grind his teeth. Within seconds, someone's sticking her head out of her apartment door, almost wrenching the thing out of place in the process.

“What the hell’s going on out here?” she hollers over the din of the alarm, scowling at him, and oh, Martin doesn’t have time for this, he really doesn’t.

“Big - thing outside!” he manages to shout back over the noise. He tries to use his arms in a futile attempt to show her just how big it is. Other doors are opening now, more people come to see what the fuss is. “Huge, round water thing heading this way – you heard that, that explosion noise a few minutes ago? You’ve got to leave, we, we’ve all got to leave right now!”

Her eyes widen. “Shit, like on the spherecast?”

As soon as he sees she’s got the message, Martin turns and runs for the stairs.

“Just get everyone out!” he calls back over his shoulder, hoping she hears him.

The sound of voices rising in panic as word spreads dogs his steps, but Martin’s already stumbling down to the next floor. Here, too, there are already doors open, the sharpest of his neighbours already making their way towards the nearest flight of stairs. Martin gives a heavy bang to every door that’s still closed when he sprints past, and tries to hurry along the people still standing in their doorframes wondering what’s happening.

Down another floor, and another. Like most buildings in Zanarkand, the one Martin lives in is decidedly round, and so by the time he hits the third floor he’s starting to feel a bit dizzy, not to mention out of breath.

Down here, the alarm’s been going for along enough that most people have got the message – the corridor's crowded, with people pouring towards the stairwells as fast as they can. Martin still catches sight of a couple of people who’ve made time to stuff a bag as full to bursting as they can, and one older man clutching a heavy trophy like his life depends on it, his face twisting in anger when anyone tries to tell him to leave it behind.

In the crush of people, a few children start crying. Martin holds his breath, feeling people pushing on all sides, and lets the sea of frightened faces carry him towards the next flight of stairs. Someone stumbles ahead of him, and Martin reaches out on instinct, catching them by the arm and hauling them upright before they can trip and take everyone in front with them, or be crushed underfoot.

“Come on, come on, keep moving!” he shouts, raising his voice as loud as he can to compete with the wailing alarm.

He doesn’t know if anyone hears him, and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. When Martin spills out onto the street with the rest of them, with more still behind, he gulps down the outside air and stumbles away from the door to let everyone else get out, trying desperately to get his bearings. He’s not even sure what side of the building he ended up coming out on. It's all chaos and confusion, panicked people fleeing in every direction with no thought for anything besides escape.

Until it isn’t. Everything goes silent, the screams and the sirens stop, and Martin swears that everything just - freezes.

A tall man, his face in the deep shadow of a large, rich purple hood, gold talismans strung from many cords on his belt, stands in the middle of the road. Martin can't make out any of his features, but even so - he could swear the man's staring right at him.

“It begins,” he says, and vanishes.

Sound and movement crash back into the world with the force of a fierce ocean wave.

In the corner of Martin's eye, light shifts suddenly.

He looks up. He doesn’t scream – only because what he sees robs him of any breath to spare.

Above him, the great bulk of the giant sphere floats suspended, warping the air around it into that soft, buttery-edged haze from before. This close, the effect makes Martin’s eyes water.

The asphalt in front of him cracks as something pierces it from above, and this time Martin does scream.

When the dust from the impact clears enough to see, he finds himself face to face with the buzzing, twitching creatures he last saw from a distance. They’re even worse up close; taller than Martin, with chitinous, spindly legs and stiff, quivering wing-like appendages that remind him of seashells.

Martin tries to scramble back, but a chunk of rubble catches at his foot and pulls him down, wrenching his ankle with a bright blossoming of pain. The things move toward him with a low, droning sound; the lump of rock Martin flings at them goes wide, his already poor aim thrown off by the throbbing pain in his ankle.

Martin braces himself to just throw himself to the side if they lunge, when a bright burst of light and loud crack abruptly scatters the lot of them into a lazy group of soft, pastel-coloured lights.

“Can you stand?”

The voice is deep and weathered with experience. Martin squints up through the blue afterimage behind his eyes; a lanky, wiry man in a beaten greatcoat stands before him, his grey hair cropped close to his scalp and his dark skin lined with a life hard-lived.

Martin’s never met this man in his life, but the giant sword is a dead giveaway. This is the same man he saw running circles around these monsters up on the roof.

“I – I think so,” Martin says shakily after a moment of catching his breath. He tries to get to his feet, hissing when he puts too much weight on his bad ankle too soon. “Shit. Think I rolled my ankle going down.”

“I can do something about that, but then you need to run,” the swordsman says.

So far, he’s been watching the street around them, the rippling shadow of water above them, and he hasn’t stopped to look at Martin at all. Satisfied that no danger is imminent for the moment, the swordsman turns to look at him now – and flinches back like someone who’s seen a ghost, a spasm of anger seizing his face for an instant between the shock.

“This cannot be!” he rasps.

Martin fights the urge to shrink and stumble away as best he can, taking his chances with the monsters on his dodgy ankle.

“S – sorry, I – what?” he manages.

The swordsman studies his face for a few seconds with a fierce expression. Whatever he finds pulls from him a soft gasp, his eyes widening once more. The man’s jaw clenches as he swallows, clearly having a hard time mastering some kind of anger. Martin finds himself anxiously standing there, distant, panicked screams from other parts of the city echoing in his ears, wondering what he could have done to this stranger, hoping that it wasn’t bad enough to get him killed.

“I see,” the swordsman says at length, his voice even once more. There’s still thunder in the set of his eyebrows, but he regards Martin now with a look he can’t fathom. There’s something like wonder in it, and something, perhaps, all too much like pity.

On reflection, Martin would rather deal with the anger.

“It seems fate has brought us both to a strange turn,” the swordsman says. He looks up towards the underbelly of the great sphere, scrutinising it. Martin realises that it hasn’t moved at all since the man saved him.

Wait, is the monstrous calamity after this stranger?

“Alright then,” the swordsman nods out of nowhere. He reaches out to Martin with one hand, bringing the other in an odd gesture before him, as if gently parting the air in front of his chest.

Light glows at the tips of the man’s fingers. Martin feels a rush of warmth flow through his body and the next instant it hits him - his ankle stopped throbbing. He glances down at his injured hand; the cut he got from the building’s stupid antiquated alarm system is gone as well.

“The danger will pass from this city once I cross its threshold,” the swordsman announces, as though that’s a perfectly ordinary thing to say, as though he didn’t just heal Martin’s injuries with a kind of magic that nobody in Zanarkand has been able to do with that much ease in hundreds of years.

“H— Hang on!” Martin protests, “Are you saying you brought this thing here?!”

“Not intentionally,” the man says. He sounds sincere, deep regret in his voice. “But I’m not from this city. I fear that Sin knows I don’t belong here, and is trying to ensure my removal the only way it knows how.”

There are so many questions Martin wants to ask, but the swordsman’s face is suddenly lit from above with a sickly orange glow. Martin looks up, his eyes struggling to focus past the blurring and warping of the air, and lets out a strangled gasp.

The thing bearing down over their heads doesn’t even look like water anymore. It’s like – like a tear in the very air itself, a jagged hole ripped open in the sky to reveal something behind that burns with a menacing fire. Glimpses of rough, craggy skin warp in and out of the haze, and something else, something that looks disturbingly like a giant, glassy eye.

The buildings around them are crumbling apart, gradually imploding in fragmented pieces before being drawn up into this horrifying maw, stretching out thinner and thinner until they vanish completely. There’s a dead weight to Martin’s limbs, to the give of his ribcage – he feels like he can’t get a proper breath in suddenly. He wants to run – does he ever want to run – but he can’t lift his feet.

The swordsman must be in the same bind. He grimaces, his face already distorting into nightmarish proportions, and looks at Martin with an intensity that’s still somehow reassuring, even through the blind terror.

“Very well. Perhaps this is what's needed,” he says in a low undertone – and that’s the last thing Martin knows before the world tears apart into a searing flare of light – and a deep, crushing darkness.

Chapter Text

Martin remembers – he thinks he has a dream.

In the dream, he’s alone. It’s dark. He might be moving, dragging through something cold and heavy that pulls at his limbs and pushes down on all sides. Water? That can’t be right, he sees buildings. Slipping past like they’re the ones moving and he’s frozen in place over them. There’s no one else. Just empty buildings. He’s all alone. He’s so tired of being alone.

The buildings don’t move anymore. He’s floating, and there’s some kind of light below, and he wants to go towards it so he does. Some kind of black shape down there on a roof. A bird? A great, big black bird, and the closer he gets the bigger the bird is, the more eyes it has, shiny black opals peeling open down the centre of flight feathers, and then the bird isn’t a bird anymore,

It’s a person

Dressed head to foot in black, blurring at the edges, standing on the edge of a roof with all that light below, and then their eyes meet,

Something flashes—

It’s still a person, still blurred at the edges, but it’s a different person, he can tell. Bigger. Taller? With the light it’s hard to see. There’s a door on the roof and when Martin pushes it open he’s in a room that smells familiar, echoey voices raised harsh enough to carry up through the floor, sound of a door being wrenched open. The air from outside smells damp; it’ll rain tonight.

I’ll take my chances with the monsters out there over the ones in here, thanks—

Wait. That’s not how it happened.

“That was a different time,” says the man with the purple hood standing at the foot of the stairs.

Martin feels lightheaded. The rain smell is full of salt, a gentle rush of back and forth sound. His eyes feel heavy, his head feels heavy – and then he feels nothing at all.

The first thing he’s aware of is the sound of waves.

It’s a gentle sound, but an insistent one. The longer it goes on, the more it drags him up out of the darkness, and closer to – well, everything else. His limbs feel like someone’s tied an entire bloody skytrain to them. And there’s something coarse and grainy coating everywhere he can feel himself touching.

Sand?

“Hey, you alright there mate?”

Martin blinks unwillingly into consciousness. Everything is both too bright and too beige all at once. The sun overhead shines right into his eyes and he lets out an involuntary hiss, screwing them back up tight. When he dares to crack them both open again a second or two later, everything looks blurred. There’s a vivid purple-and-green smear of colour in amongst all the beige tones that seems to have a voice.

“Can you hear me?”

It sounds concerned. Martin struggles to remember how words work, making a few feeble attempts at sound. The inside of his mouth feels like it might have got coated in cold, wet sand as well. A stubborn, pressing pain in the side of his face at least explains why everything’s so blurry; his glasses must have come askew.

The blurry voice – which must belong to some sort of person, surely – is calling for someone else now, muttering words that Martin can only half-hear. Something about toxin and healers and something about a cart, before the soft crunch of feet on wet sand retreats away from him.

Why’s he lying on sand, anyway? Last thing he remembers, he could have sworn he was on the roof. There’s no reason for him to be face-down with waves tugging at his legs—

Wait. Waves.

A great, terrible wave reforming itself into something that could bring down an entire city—

Adrenaline flooding him back into full consciousness, Martin tries to get himself from the ground to his feet with no steps in between, and only succeeds in flailing his limbs in a panic.

Just to add insult to injury while he’s at it, he also nearly knocks out the poor person who was leaning over him trying to help.

“Whoa whoa whoa!”

Whoever it is, they’ve got good reflexes. Martin can make out the blur of them holding their hands up in the universal signal for trust me, I mean no harm.

“Steady there. Take it easy, we’ve got you.”

Between heaving in gasps of air and trying to force his arms and legs to co-operate with him for long enough to get himself sitting reasonably upright, Martin remembers to set his glasses back where they’re supposed to be. When he thinks he’s got enough of a hold on himself, he looks to his right, trying to get a better look at whoever’s found him.

He’s close to Martin’s age, he would guess, maybe a little older; fair-skinned but clearly used to spending a lot of time outdoors, handsome, with dark hair and a square jawline. He’s also wearing the most outlandish outfit that Martin’s ever seen. Are those bits of armour strapped in strategic places over those clothes?

Eye-searing outfit or not, he takes notice almost as soon as Martin’s regained the use of his senses. He offers him a brief but reassuring smile and then a water bottle in quick succession. Martin takes the water gratefully, only a little embarrassed when he ends up gulping down half the bottle before he can catch himself; he didn’t realise until right now just how thirsty he was.

“Where – where am I?” he asks, now that his mouth can form words again.

“Djose,” his discoverer says, taking back the bottle when Martin holds it out to him. “Near enough, anyway.”

Martin has no idea where that is or what it means. Now he’s got his bearings, he’s beginning to realise that he doesn’t recognise this place at all. Not the strange rock formations in the distance, or the dull, grainy sand, or the rocky road following the coastline underneath a large overhanging cliff. None of it.

Just how far did that thing carry him, before it spat him out again at the other end?

It must show on his face, the blankness and the creeping panic, because after a moment the other man takes pity on him and asks, “How much do you remember?”

Isn’t that a question.

“I,” Martin stammers, because the truth is, everything he remembers about what happened is jumbled up in a way that makes it seem like so much. “I, I don’t know, I. There were these things, a-a-and this giant hole in the sky, and some kind of – I think, I remember some kind of giant eye?”

Oh, great, he sounds like he’s completely lost it. He slides both hands under his glasses, pressing his fingertips into his eyes in an attempt to focus.

“Hey, it’s alright, don’t try to remember too much too fast. Let’s start with something smaller, yeah? What’s your name?”

This all sounds like excellent advice from someone who’s being very, very patient with him when he doesn’t have to be.

“Martin. Um, Martin Blackwood.”

The man gives him an encouraging smile. Martin’s surprised to see that he looks genuinely relieved.

“There you go, you’ve got your full name, that’s a good start! Alright, Martin Blackwood, I’m Tim. Any idea of where you might be from?”

Another good, simple question that he can actually answer. Martin vaguely recognises that Tim’s probably checking him for signs of a head injury or something, but it helps, having something to focus on.

“Oh, yeah, uh. Zanarkand?”

Whatever reaction Martin was expecting – bewilderment, recognition, maybe even an idea of where Djose is relative to his city if he’s lucky – it’s not the one he gets. Tim does a double take, his eyebrows shooting up towards his hairline.

“Zanarkand?” he says incredulously. He shakes his head, frowning. “You must’ve got a really heavy dose of that toxin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wherever you were before you got washed up here, it got hit by Sin,” Tim says patiently. He’s being gentle about it, but Martin can’t shake the feeling that these are things that Tim considers basic facts of life. Things Martin should have figured out by himself already.

Then Tim shrugs, and adds, “And since Zanarkand has been a fiend-infested holy ruin for a thousand years…”

Wait, what?

“No,” Martin says immediately, because obviously that’s ridiculous. Zanarkand, the city he’s spent his entire life in, a ruin? He’d say Tim was having him on, but he seems serious.

Even so, Martin can’t take that seriously.

He shakes his head, saying again, “No, that’s not— wait.” Something else Tim said hits him. “H-hang on a sec, Sin! That’s what was— He said that too, the guy with the— uh. Was there anyone else with me? A tall guy with a long coat and a – a bloody huge sword?”

Tim’s eyebrows are going to stay that way if he doesn’t lower them soon.

“Uh, no, just you. Friend of yours?”

“Not hardly,” Martin scoffs. “But he was right there with me when I was grabbed, I swear it.”

He sneaks a look up and down the beach, just in case. But it’s just like Tim said; there’s no sign of that distinctive sword or coat anywhere. Maybe the swordsman got up and walked off already. He seems like that sort of type. The type to take being transported to who-knows-where by a bloody monster in stride, like it’s a regular old Tuesday.

“I’d count your blessings if I was you, Martin. Most people who get as close to Sin as you just did don’t live to tell the tale.” Tim shakes his head, looking grim. Then he blows out a gust of breath, with a lop-sided, faintly impressed smile to go with it. “Zanarkand, though. That’s a good one. Didn’t realise Sin’s toxin could send you that loopy.”

For a second, Martin wants to argue again. But as soon as he opens his mouth, it hits him; Tim really believes what he’s saying. That Zanarkand – Martin’s Zanarkand – is a crumbling ruin that’s been standing lifeless for, what did he say, a thousand years. He says it with the confidence of someone who’s stating a real fact, one they could prove if they had to.

Could that thing – Sin – have carried Martin through time somehow?

It sounds absurd even in the privacy of his own head. But what else does he have to go on right now? Nothing. Nothing except the kindness of someone he’s just met, and the knowledge that whatever attacked his city last night – or a thousand years ago, or whenever it was – the people here in wherever he’s ended up know about it.

Martin closes his mouth, and takes a deep breath. Okay. He’s lied his socks off in pretty much every job interview he’s ever had, he can lie about this too.

“Ha... um, yeah. I, I guess I don’t really know what I was thinking.”

Luckily, Tim takes his hemming and hawing as a sign of whatever aftereffects this toxin is supposed to be having on him.

“S’alright,” he says peaceably. “It’ll pass, sooner or later. Just don’t go saying that around any of the priests at the temples, you’ll give them a heart attack. Either before or after they get you for heresy.”

Tim winks, and his tone is light, but Martin gets the feeling that he’s not actually joking. Not really.

What kind of place has he ended up in?

“Right,” Martin swallows. “Right, yeah. Um. Where, where did you say we were again? Djose…?”

“Yeah, not too far off from the temple,” Tim shrugs. He brightens the next moment, some kind of idea occurring to him. “Oh, we can give you a ride there if you want. It’ll be the safest place to wait it out till your head’s right again.”

“I – yeah, that’d. That’d be really kind of you, thanks. Um. Who’s we?”

“Me and Sasha. Well, and the other Crusaders riding the cart, but mostly just us. Sasha’s good people, you can trust her.”

“My ears are burning,” says a new voice.

Tim and Martin look up at the same time. A tall woman, her long black coils of hair barely kept in check by being pinned out of her face, stands over them on the sand. Her outfit looks just as eclectic as Tim’s, albeit a lot more colour co-ordinated. Martin can’t help but notice that her glasses look off somehow; they seem to have leather frames, of all things.

She folds her arms and looks at Tim, dimples forming in her deep brown cheeks. “How’s the patient?”

“Speak of the chimera,” Tim says warmly. “Martin, this is Sasha. Sash, you’re gonna love this one. He thought he was from Zanarkand.”

Sasha’s eyebrows go the same way as Tim’s did.

“Wow. Sin’s toxin must have really done a number on you,” she says to Martin. Then she crosses the two steps it takes her to reach Tim and leans down to give him a light smack on the arm. “Be kind, Tim.”

While Martin enjoys the warmth that is the novelty of a total stranger feeling the need to stick up for him, he also really doesn’t want to be the cause of an argument.

“No, yeah, um. You’re right, I’m still not – I’m not all here, really,” he hedges. “I guess, things are so mixed up that I forgot that Zanarkand was… was a ruin?”

Martin wonders if he’ll ever get used to saying that, or even thinking it. He’s still not sure he really believes it.

“More like the ruin,” Sasha replies. “Destroyed in the great Machina War between Zanarkand and Bevelle, remember?”

Martin, of course, does not remember. He couldn’t tell you what Bevelle is, never mind find it on a map. How could Zanarkand ever be at war with a place he’s never even heard of?

He can’t just say that, though. But if he can get away with playing the amnesiac – and for the moment it looks like he can – then he can do that.

“Right! Right, yeah, I… I guess that must have been where my brain pulled that one up from,” he babbles. “Um. Sorry, my head is killing me.”

That at least is not a lie. Martin thinks his brain is fast reaching the limit that any human brain can be expected to deal with.

Sasha’s face softens immediately, full of concern. “Hey, don’t worry. You’ve been through it today. You’re not injured anywhere, are you?”

“Oi! I checked him over already!” Tim says, full of indignation.

Sasha gives him a pointed look. “Yeah, you did, and I know what you’re like, Tim.”

“Oh, no, honestly, I’m fine,” Martin rushes to reassure them. “Just a few bruises, it feels like.”

Actually, it’d be safer to say that his whole body feels like one big bruise at this point. However Sin actually carried him here and wherever it dropped him off before he washed up on this rocky beach, he must have taken a battering. Nothing feels broken, though, and he says as much, even as Sasha crouches down next to him and does a careful, methodical full-body check, pressing lightly as she goes.

Whatever she finds must satisfy her, because she nods and says, “Hmm, alright then. Just as well, I’ve got a couple of potions but I’m no white mage.”

She stands up once more, pulling off the gloves she was wearing and balling them up inside-out before brushing her knees off. Martin takes that as his cue to stand as well. He’s probably more pleased than he should be to find that his legs still work.

“Get that toxin washed off and we’ll see about getting you a ride to the temple with us,” Sasha tells him now. “Oh – you remember the Prayer, don’t you?”

This is yet another thing that Martin should apparently know but doesn’t, and he says so, trying to sound more like someone who is trying desperately to remember something they know is on the tip of their tongue, and not someone who hasn’t the first clue what Sasha’s talking about.

Tim and Sasha exchange a look at that. Still, they seem to take it in stride, and promise to jog his memory after he’s toxin-free enough for their liking. Martin’s still not sure what they mean by Sin’s toxin, but he dutifully wades out into the surf far enough to dunk his head under the waves a few times and give everything a rub-down in the salt water.

He’s surprised when he comes up for air, wiping the stinging ocean water away from his eyes, and finds a light, powdery substance drifting away near the surface of the water where he dunked himself.

Well. That answers that, then.

The Prayer comes as a surprise too. Tim and Sasha both demonstrate, making him copy their movements until they’re both satisfied. It’s not the gesture itself that surprises him, though it’s rather elaborate for a prayer; both arms sweeping back and out before coming forward to rest in front of the breastbone, head bowed, palms cupped towards each other as though cradling the top and bottom of an invisible sphere.

No, what surprises Martin is that he’s seen it before. Seen it plenty of times, even. Hazy, half-forgotten memories of the athletic kids at school, drunk sports fans stumbling past him in packs late at night, and the one time he ever actually set foot in the stadium to see a game, before it became clear that, ever the disappointment, he didn’t and wouldn’t ever have any interest in blitzball.

See, the thing is, the gesture that Tim and Sasha are calling a prayer – that’s the good luck charm he’s seen people who do care about blitz use for victory.

What has happened to the world in the past thousand years?

Chapter Text

Martin doesn’t know what he was expecting when Tim and Sasha talked about a cart, but a literal wooden cart pulled by two enormous yellow birds was not it.

“Don’t tell me you can’t remember what a chocobo is,” Tim says when he sees Martin’s face.

“I – I dunno, I have a feeling that maybe there weren’t many of them where I was from?” Martin deflects.

At any rate the birds look tame enough, docilely munching on some greens as they wait for the cart to be loaded. Once Martin’s got over the shock of seeing a bird taller than he is, they're actually rather cute.

After a quick word with the woman driving the cart – Crusaders, had Tim called them back on the beach? – the three of them clamber up onto the back, and a few minutes later, the cart rolls off. Martin’s surprised by just how quickly it moves. He wouldn’t call it a smooth ride, not by a long shot, but the chocobos are obviously a lot stronger than they look.

According to Sasha, the cart cuts the time it takes to get to this Djose temple down to about half a day, rather than the two days it would take on foot. That still gives Martin plenty of time to sit and think about the true scale of the absolutely mental situation he’s found himself in, so he pleads a need to rest for the first leg of the journey and tries to do just that.

The first problem, the most immediate one, is that he’s got so many questions, and he doesn’t know which ones are okay for him to ask. How was Zanarkand destroyed? Why are they using carts drawn by chocobos to get around instead of machina? Sasha mentioned some kind of huge machina war, so it stands to reason that the answer to both of those questions lies somewhere with that, but then where does the Sin monster come into it? For that matter, what even is Sin, and why do Tim and Sasha seem to expect Martin to know as much about it as they do?

He’s pretty sure those all come under questions that would not be okay to ask, even for someone who’s supposedly suffering from the after-effects of Sin’s toxin.

The second problem, the one that Martin can’t bring himself to examine too closely yet, is how he’s ever supposed to get back home. Because if Sin was the thing that carried him here, and somehow stranded him a thousand years out of time in the process, it stands to reason that the only hope he has of ever getting back is to deliberately go seeking out the monster that attacked his city.

Put it bluntly, that just sounds suicidal. Even if his time travel theory is right – and he’s got no real proof yet that it is – there’s no guarantee that deliberately throwing himself into Sin’s path again will make the whole thing happen in reverse. Going off the way Tim and Sasha talked about Sin, not to mention everything else he saw of the thing with his own two eyes, Martin’s far more likely to get himself killed in the attempt.

But if that’s true, that means he’s stuck here. Wherever here is. It’s not like he had all that much going for him back in Zanarkand, but at least it was home. At least he knew was he was doing and where he stood. Here, he’s a stranger in a frightening and unfamiliar land, with no idea of how the rules work or how to survive.

Something nudges his shoulder, jogging him out of his thoughts. Despite the gentleness of the touch, Martin still flinches, his heart skipping a beat.

“Sorry, Martin, didn’t mean to startle you,” Tim says apologetically. “Just wanted to check you were still with us. You were really zoning out there.”

“No, it’s – it’s fine,” Martin sighs. “Just got a lot to think about, you know?”

“Yeah, I bet. And it’s not like the Djose shore offers the most inspiring view either,” Tim says dryly, gesturing at the landscape passing by on either side of the cart.

He’s not wrong. The shoreline in the Djose area seems to have precious little to offer, apart from rocks, sand, more rocks, and the occasional sullen-looking cluster of rockpools. A geologist might have a field day with it, maybe. Martin thinks he can understand why they haven’t passed a single village, or even a small, lonely house, since their journey began. Who would want to live in a place this bleak?

“The sort of view that really makes you wonder how come more people aren’t just rushing to join up with the Crusaders, doesn’t it?” Sasha says in a tone equally as dry as Tim’s.

“Both of you are Crusaders, then?” Martin asks. That feels like a safe enough question. “Have you been with them for long?”

“A few years now? Long enough to have a few operations under our belts,” Sasha replies. “Before that, we worked at the temple up in Bevelle.”

“Oh, you’re not from round here then?”

“No, we spent most of our lives up north. No one’s from around Djose, not really. Even the priests in the temple were sent here from somewhere else.”

“How come?” Martin thinks he may have some idea, though. “Sin?”

Sasha shrugs. “Probably. Somewhere gets attacked without warning and people never bother to move back in afterwards, you know how it is.”

No, he doesn’t. The way that Sasha does – the way that she’s so blasé about it, and the way Tim is quiet like it’s the sort of story you’re used to hearing every day – it chills Martin’s blood even more than the idea of Zanarkand being a ruin.

“That’s horrible,” he says.

“’Course it is,” Tim says abruptly. “But that’s the whole reason the Crusaders exist, isn’t it? To put an end to it and stop it from ever happening again, no matter what Yevon’s got to say about how we go about doing it.”

“Wait, you lot fight that thing?!” Martin blurts out without thinking. He cringes as soon as the words are out of his mouth. His flimsy cover isn’t even going to last a day at this rate. “Sorry, I – I must sound like a kid with how much the toxin’s scrambled me, it’s just – I don’t, I still don’t remember much about when it attacked my home, but I-I do remember it levelling whole buildings without even batting an eye!”

Martin wonders how much mileage he has left on the excuse of “Sin’s toxin”. Hopefully enough for him to pick up enough about this place to muddle through with the rest. He’s good at that.

“Someone has to, right?” Tim asks him. “What, was I supposed to just cower behind a wall back up in Bevelle for the rest of my life and let some summoner do all the work for me like everyone else? Not likely.”

There’s a stubborn, sharp edge to Tim’s smile that Martin isn’t sure how to read. Whatever Tim’s reasons are for joining the Crusaders’ calling to fight a very literal harbinger of death and destruction, Martin gets the feeling they’re extremely personal.

Sasha must notice the way Martin hesitates in the face of Tim’s sudden intensity. She leans over and nudges Tim’s shoulder gently with a closed fist.

“Hey, last time I checked we were on our way to sign on as guardians with some summoner,” she says gently. Turning to Martin, she adds, “You might have already guessed that I mostly signed up with the Crusaders to keep an eye on this one. He’s hopeless without me and he knows it.”

Tim looks faintly abashed. Martin watches him very visibly shake himself out of his own dark mood, clutching both hands over his heart in a wounded motion.

“Harsh, Sasha.”

“True, Tim.”

“Yeah, I know.” Tim offers her a lop-sided smile. “You just can’t resist reminding me at any chance you get.”

Watching the easy way Tim lets Sasha pull him out of whatever dark place he was teetering towards, Martin tries hard not to feel so wistful about it. Tim and Sasha, he thinks, must have known each other for a long time.

Something else they mentioned is playing on his mind, though.

“So, summoners… they fight Sin too, don’t they?” he says slowly, once again trying to play the amnesiac slowly having bits of his memory nudged back into place. “But in a different way to the Crusaders. Um, a more official one?”

How that could possibly work, or what a summoner could possibly summon that would give them more of a chance against Sin than the Crusaders, Martin has no idea, but he’s hoping Tim and Sasha will enlighten him.

Tim snorts. “More official. Yeah, you could say that. Especially since Yevon excommunicated the lot of us because they didn’t like how cosy we were getting with salvaged machina.”

Another piece of the machina puzzle for Martin to try and slot in somewhere, but he thinks he’s starting to see the shape of it. People – or at least people belonging to whatever this Yevon thing is – must believe machina are bad news for some reason. Probably to do with the Machina War Sasha told him about. It still doesn’t quite add up for Martin, but at least he feels like he’s got a grip on the end of the thread.

“Ah, yes,” Sasha intones in a deep voice. “How dare we use that which is forbidden instead of joining the rest of Spira in hand-wringing over atoning for the wrong-doing of our ancestors.” She sighs. “Classic Yevon,” she adds in her normal voice, clearly going for levity. “Still, you have to admit they’ve got a bit of a point. The summoners still have a higher success rate than we do.”

“I don’t have to admit anything.”

“How many Calms can our motley organisation claim for itself, again?”

Tim grumbles under his breath at that. Martin gets the feeling that he’s missing yet another vital key to understanding this place – Spira – that everyone is going to think he should have.

“And… what’s the Calm?”

Martin knows he’s finally put his foot in it and asked a question a step too far when both Tim and Sasha stare at him.

“I didn’t know Sin’s toxin could make someone forget things like this,” Tim says after a moment of stunned silence. He turns to Sasha helplessly.

“Me neither,” she says, intently studying Martin’s face.

Martin wants the ground to swallow him up. But they won’t believe him if he comes clean, either, will they? Who would?

He has to fight back a sigh of relief a moment later when Sasha says, “But we don’t really know what Sin’s toxin is capable of. I mean, you know as well as I do, the records are totally inconsistent at the best of times. And there’s not many of them.”

“For obvious reasons, yeah,” Tim says, still frowning. He lets out a whoosh of air, looking back at Martin with a face twisted with sympathy. “Sorry, Martin. I can’t wrap my head around how lost you must be feeling right now.”

You have no idea, Martin thinks.

What he says, with a weak smile, is, “Yeah, just a bit. The inside of my head feels like a construction site or something.”

Tim snorts. “Alright, then let’s construct. The Calm is…”

He looks at Sasha again. “Sasha, how do I even explain the Calm? You’re the nerd, help me out here.”

“You,” Sasha says primly, “Came away from your studies with distinction, Timothy.”

“That doesn’t mean I know how to explain things!”

Sasha rolls her eyes, and with great dignity, turns away from Tim to devote her full attention to Martin.

“The Calm is what happens after a summoner defeats Sin,” she starts. Then she shakes her head, her face twisting as she finds her own explanation wanting. “Hang on, no, that isn’t the best way of explaining it. You’d be more accurate if you said that the Calm is the period of time when Sin doesn’t appear. After a summoner manages to defeat it, and before it eventually rises again with a new shape and starts attacking again.”

Wait.

“So… wait, so. Even if a summoner fights Sin and manages to beat it somehow, it – it still comes back?” Martin can hear his own voice getting more and more high-pitched. “How – how many times has this happened?!”

Tim and Sasha exchange a look.

“Must have been five Calms since Sin first appeared at the end of the Machina War?” Tim says doubtfully. Sasha nods.

“But that was a thousand years ago!”

Five Calms. Five, in a thousand years. Martin dreads asking them how long a Calm lasts. He already knows he won’t like the answer. Already knows he won’t like the answer to the ten other questions that are crowding for space on his tongue. Like, how many people have died in attacks like the one that happened to Zanarkand the night Martin was snatched away. Like, how many Crusaders have died trying to bring the fight to Sin. Like, how many summoners have died while trying to bring the Calm, if only five of them in the thousand years that Sin has been wreaking havoc upon Spira have ever managed it. Like—

“If – if Sin always comes back anyway, then why do summoners keep fighting it the same way? I mean, what’s the—”

“Don’t,” Tim says sharply. Martin shuts his mouth right away. Tim's face is thunderous; he looks like he’s barely managing to rein in his temper.

“If you were about to ask what’s the point, don’t you dare. I know I said the Crusaders look for another way, and we’re not wrong to. But don’t you dare say that just because the Calm doesn’t last forever that there’s no point to what the summoners do. You’ve – you’ve seen Sin up close. You know what it does. A few years where nobody has to go through that – it’s worth it.”

Tim clenches his jaw, either stopping himself from saying more or simply unable to go on. Martin feels wretched, and very, very small. What was he thinking? He doesn’t know how these people have lived. How any of the people on Spira live. Not really.

“Sorry,” he says, barely above a whisper. “I – I wasn’t thinking.”

Sasha shakes her head, throwing a sympathetic, yet pointed look at Tim.

“No, you weren’t really,” she says simply, but not unkindly. “But I also think anyone would be shocked if they heard what we just told you in your shoes. Maybe we’d all react that way if we woke up with all our memories of how the world works scrambled up like yours.”

It’s a little condescending, but Martin can tell Sasha’s at least trying to make him feel better about saying something so unbelievably insensitive. He’s starting to realise just how lucky he is that it was Tim and Sasha who stumbled across him on the beach. He has the horrible feeling that not many other people in Spira would be this understanding.

Still, he can’t help thinking to himself, as the three of them lapse into an uncomfortable silence, about how a thousand years and five Calms could have passed with nobody finding a more permanent way to put Sin down.

Because everyone’s too focused on surviving, he realises straight away. Or something like that, anyway. Martin thinks so. That has to be it. There’s no other reason anyone would let a situation like this go on for so long otherwise.

After a few minutes, Sasha speaks up again.

“It’s probably a good thing we’re getting all of this out of the way before we hit the temple, actually. Save giving the priests—”

“A heart attack?” Martin guesses wryly.

Tim snorts. “Beat you to using that one already, Sasha,” he says, recovering some of his humour. “Never mind the priests, can you imagine Jon’s face if he’d heard some of that?”

“You know I can,” Sasha says with a small smile. “Jon’s a friend of ours from back up in Bevelle,” she adds, at Martin’s mystified expression. “He’s a summoner who’s just started out on his pilgrimage, and he also just happens to have the biggest stick up his arse of anyone we know when you catch him on a bad day, so… you can imagine his reaction.”

Martin can, and once again feels very, very lucky to have been found by these two Crusaders.

“And he’s going on pilgrimage… to beat Sin?”

“Yep,” Tim nods. “Visiting every temple, praying to the fayth, hopefully managing to not piss them all off for long enough to bag an aeon at each one… it’s a long journey, so Sasha and I are going to go offer our services as his guardians to make sure he doesn’t get lost on the way.”

Martin understood about half of those words. The half he did understand, though, makes him realise that he won’t be able to rely on Tim and Sasha for much longer. It’s a sadder and more frightening thought than it should be, considering he’s barely known them for longer than a few hours. He’s not sure he’ll find the priests at the temple even half as likeable. Or as safe.

He’s beginning to understand - really understand - just how much trouble he’d be in, if he slips up in his lie and people find out that he’s not just from Zanarkand, but a Zanarkand that uses machina as naturally as breathing. But what else is he supposed to do? Ask to come along on this summoner’s pilgrimage just to avoid being left behind at a temple? He’d slow them down at best. Get himself or the rest of them killed at worst.

That’s it, then. Martin quietly resigns himself to being left behind, and asks, “And… whereabouts are you lot headed on this pilgrimage? At, at the end of it, I mean.”

Sasha gives him another strange look. So does Tim – but then he laughs suddenly, rubbing the back of his head.

“Funny thing, actually, given what you said when you were still high on toxin,” he admits. “We’re heading to Zanarkand.”

Chapter Text

Even if Martin wasn’t still trying to wrap his head around everything he’s finding out about Spira – not least the coincidence of being washed up right into the path of people whose final destination is Zanarkand of all places – even without all that, he doesn’t think he would have been any better prepared for his first sight of Djose temple.

It’s a tall, imposing building, more of a tower than anything. Set against the dark rock of the cliff face at the very end of a deep ravine tucked away on the shoreline, everything about it looks built to last; a lone, steadfast bulwark looming over any who approach.

That’s not its most striking feature, though.

No, that honour definitely goes to the giant chunks of rock that are suspended in orbit around the temple by flickering arcs of lightning.

“Oh, the lightning mushroom rock’s open,” Sasha says as they draw closer, with all the air of someone commenting on the weather. “Jon must be through the cloister and speaking with the fayth already.”

“Sasha,” Tim says with a great effort, trying to hold back laughter. “Maybe give Martin a minute, he looks like he’s about to keel over.”

“Are – are all the temples like this one?” Martin asks, still staring wide-eyed at the lightning darting between the floating boulders. He can’t believe that this kind of sight is that normal.

“Oh, no way,” Tim assures him. “The fayth here is just really tuned in to the thunder element, so it influences the area around the temple. The others have their own brand of weirdness going on.”

“Tim.”

“I mean, their own brand of awe-inspiring power, praise be to Yevon.” Tim rolls his eyes in Sasha’s direction. “It’s weird, Sasha, give Martin a break. Not everyone’s as comfortable with magic as you.”

“You’re a mage?” Martin asks, surprised. Sasha nods, but not until after she’s rolled her eyes right back at Tim first.

“Yeah, I mostly deal in elemental spells. You know, black magic. I tried branching out into white magic once, but I could never really get the knack of it.” She sounds a little put out by that. “What, you didn’t think I walked around with all these books strapped to me for fun, did you?”

She indicates the series of tiny, leather-bound books strapped to the belt around her waist.

“Don’t be fooled,” Tim says to Martin in a stage whisper. “Some of those aren’t for magic, they’re her nerd journals. So definitely for fun.”

“Brave man, antagonising the woman who could throw lightning at you whenever she wanted,” Sasha says serenely, but there’s no bite to it.

“That’s pretty amazing, though,” Martin offers. “I – I can’t be sure, but I don’t think we had anyone who could do things like that where I’m from.”

People who could pull tiny bits of magic to them to give them a bit of an edge when they needed it, sure. But no one who could do anything on the scale Sasha’s suggesting she can. Maybe once upon a time, but – no one in Zanarkand needs magic like that. If anyone ever did know it, it’s long become a lost art – something from kids’ stories.

“Well, you have to work at it,” Sasha demurs, but she looks pleased at the compliment. “Anyway, shall we go inside?”

The inside of the temple is just as dark and imposing as its outer face. There’s lightning flickering away in here as well, bright orbs of electricity glowing brightly at the tips of pillars that are set at strategic points around the hall, or so Martin assumes. They send the occasional tendril of light sparking lazily outwards every so often, and Martin decides that, even if it’s probably perfectly safe, he’s going to keep a wide berth from them all the same.

The rest of the hall looks like what he would probably expect a temple to look like on the inside. Tiled mosaic floor, walls lined with intricately carved, imposing statues. A couple of shadowed doors branch off on either side to smaller chambers further into the temple, while a great, wide staircase leads up towards an elaborate archway at the very back of the hall.

Above the archway hangs a heavy embroidered banner bearing a sigil in black. A giant, lidless eye, or at least something that looks a lot like an eye, set above two wing-like shapes that flank something that looks vaguely like a person.

Martin feels an irrational urge to cover the banner up. It’s silly, but having that big eye staring down at him makes him feel uncomfortably like he’s being watched.

They’re not long through the door before Sasha pulls away to go and find a priest she can ask about their summoner friend. That leaves Martin and Tim to mill about the entrance hall, kicking their heels and – in Martin’s case, anyway – trying not to get in anyone’s way.

At least that’s easy enough to do; the priests must all be elsewhere in the temple, doing whatever it is that priests of Yevon do. Once Sasha leaves, the hall is quiet but for the two of them and the constant hum of the lightning pillars.

And the singing.

Martin was too distracted by the lightning on his way in to properly register it, but it draws his attention now: a constant tenor voice echoing throughout the temple, bright and melodic, light like air but faintly melancholy all the same. It makes Martin think of open skies and summer rainstorms.

Now that he’s paying attention to it, as the song draws on Martin realises that he knows this tune. The words are strange, but there’s no mistaking it – it’s a folk tune, from back home. The sort of tune mothers use to get their kids to sleep, before those kids get a bit bigger and start setting their own words to it like they’re the first generation to ever have that idea.

Strange to hear it in a holy place in this hostile world.

“Who’s that singing?” he asks.

“What? Oh, you mean the Hymn,” Tim says absently; he's obviously not as struck by it as Martin is. “The fayth are always singing it. I mean, constantly, they never stop. Or at least that’s always been the case for every temple I’ve been in.” He glances towards the archway at the top of the stairs. “Guess they don’t have much else to do, aside from waiting for the next summoner to come along and beg their power off of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, they’re spirits, aren’t they?” Tim looks a bit uncomfortable. “Of people who gave themselves to Yevon while they were still alive so that summoners could draw on them to call down aeons to fight Sin. It’s not like they can go anywhere outside of the temple they’re in.”

Martin finds himself filled with a dull, leaden sort of horror. He’s already heard so many horrifying things today that it’s a wonder he still has room for any more, and he wonders if there’ll come a point at which he just stops feeling it. When hearing about these things just becomes a fact of life for him like it seems to be for everyone else in Spira. Just something to accept and move on from.

If that point does exist, he hasn’t reached it yet. He thinks about it – the idea of giving yourself to Yevon, whatever that means – and he feels nauseous. It can’t be anything pleasant. Just another thing people do when they’re desperate for any chance to actually push back against Sin.

It must show on his face. Tim sighs, and adds, “Yeah, I don’t like thinking about it for too long either. Kind of gives me the creeps if I’m honest. You have a look at the statues of the high summoners yet? Who knows, might help jog your memory.”

Martin hasn’t, and he gladly follows Tim’s lead in changing the subject, allowing Tim to take him around the four larger-than-life statues flanking the staircase, two on either side. Martin doesn’t recognise any of them, obviously, and there’s no memories missing for them to jog, but he lets Tim play the tour guide and tell him their names and when they defeated Sin and odd, random bits of trivia about their lives.

They get to the statue furthest on the right, the newest one, and Tim pauses for a moment with a slight grin on his face.

“Ah, here she is. High Summoner Gertrude Robinson. Brought the Calm, what, fifteen years ago now?” Tim shakes his head. “I was still a teenager back then. Sasha met her once, says she was a right battleaxe.”

Even cast into stone, High Summoner Gertrude looks like a right battleaxe. An elderly lady, stern and formidable, with a sharp jaw and even sharper eyes. Definitely the sort of person Martin can imagine taking on Sin and winning. Even the fact that she survived in Spira long enough to be immortalised with wrinkles is enough to tell him that she must have been tough.

“Gertrude’s an interesting one, actually,” Tim’s saying. He glances about furtively, checking that it’s still just the two of them, and then drops his voice low. “Don’t mention this within earshot of anybody from Yevon, but she was a raging heretic for most of her life. They’ve been trying their damnedest to paper over it ever since, but nobody’s ever searched harder for an unconventional way of beating Sin than she did. I’m still convinced she only went on pilgrimage in the end because she knew she was getting old and wanted to stick her fingers up at Yevon one last time before she kicked it.”

Martin looks back up at the statue of Gertrude.

“Yeah,” he says. “I can see how her managing to beat Sin could have caused some real headaches for them.” If what Tim’s saying is true, anyway – and there’s far too much genuine admiration in Tim’s voice for Martin to think it’s not. “I know you said all summoners have them, but it’s weird to think of someone like her needing guardians. Like you and Sasha are doing for your friend.”

“Yeah,” Tim starts, but Sasha’s voice from behind them cuts him short.

“Hope you two didn’t get into too much trouble while I was gone.”

Sasha’s returned to them with a robed priest in tow, and Martin tries as hard as he can not to let any hint of what he and Tim have just been talking about show on his face.

“We’ve been good as gold,” Tim tells her, before turning to the priest and performing a quick version of the Prayer. Martin hastily follows suit. “Any word on Jon?”

Sasha glances at the priest with a carefully composed expression. “Father Edwin says it’s been over a day since he went into the cloister.”

“That long?” Tim asks sharply, the smile on his face plummeting. “Is he alright in there?”

“Sasha tells me that this is his first temple?” Father Edwin says with gentle patience in his words. “The first fayth is often the hardest, or so the records show. The first real test of a summoner’s mettle – and that of their guardians.”

Martin gets the feeling that that last comment is aimed specifically at Tim. He doesn’t think Tim’s wrong to be worried, though. How long is a summoner expected to ask a fayth to lend them their power? Are they allowed to take a break to sleep? To eat? Or is that considered a failure to pass the test?

“But what if something happens to the summoner while he’s in there?” Martin blurts out.

The priest startles, seeming to actually notice him for the first time. His eyes land on Martin, and he does a double take, before dropping into the most deep and elaborate version of the Prayer that Martin has seen yet.

“Praise be to Yevon!” Father Edwin exclaims. “Sir Blackwood?”

Maybe Tim was right to check him for a head injury on the beach. Martin thinks he might need to check again to be safe.

“Um,” Martin stammers. “I’m, I’m sorry, what? I think you’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.”

Tim and Sasha are both staring. Martin hears Tim mutter, “But that is his name,” while Father Edwin looks puzzled now, though a deep awe still lies across his face in a way that makes Martin deeply self-conscious.

“You’re sure? The resemblance is uncanny. Though,” and he scrutinises Martin’s face now, looking thoughtful, “Now that the shock has passed and I think on it, you are a little on the youthful side.”

The youthful side for what? Martin throws a helpless look at Tim and Sasha, silently pleading for them to help him out of whatever he didn’t know he just walked into.

Sasha coughs. “I think there must be some kind of mistake, Father,” she tries, though she keeps throwing curious looks Martin’s way. “Martin washed up on the shoreline earlier today. He was recently attacked by Sin, and came under the influence of the toxin.”

Once again, Martin finds himself the object of another of Father Edwin’s looks of amazement. The priest moves into the Prayer again, seemingly unaware that he’s doing so.

“It seems we must give thanks to Yevon indeed,” he says gravely. “I will pray that whatever effects the toxin has had pass swiftly for you. Still – I find it astonishing that you have not yet noticed.”

Father Edwin lapses into a brief silence, thinking. “I think it’s best if I show you now,” he says decidedly. “I may have been the first to notice, but I certainly won’t be the last. Follow me.”

Father Edwin turns on his heel and walks swiftly over to the far right hand side of the entrance hall. Martin, Tim, and Sasha all look uncertainly at one another, but it seems like they don’t really have any choice except to follow him. At any rate, not doing it would be rude, seeing as how they’re in Father Edwin’s temple.

There’s less light at the left and right sides of the hall; the flickering light from the lightning pillars doesn’t fall as consistently here. The statues lining the slightly raised platform against the walls here are smaller in stature than the colossi the four High Summoners have been blessed with, slightly smaller than life-sized rather than larger-than-life. Father Edwin takes them down the row almost to the door, and then stops.

“The guardians to the High Summoners may receive less attention than those whom they served, but they are no less deserving of honour and remembrance,” the priest explains. “Each temple of Yevon contains the lesser statues such as these, made in the image of those who were willing to lay down their lives to protect their summoners should the need ever arise on the long journey to Zanarkand.”

He gestures to one of the statues now, leading their eyes. “You see? Like I said, the resemblance is uncanny.”

Martin follows Father Edwin’s hand to where he’s pointing and feels like he’s been punched in the gut.

It isn’t like looking in a mirror, not exactly. At least, not for longer than a second. But in many ways that’s almost worse, because for every difference he can find, it just makes the things that are the same jump out at him even more. That’s his chin. His nose. The same shape of his eyes. Older, yeah, but the same enough to notice.

There is a sound like rushing water in Martin’s ears.

“Wow, he wasn’t wrong,” Sasha says, the first to recover her voice.

“Yeah,” Tim agrees, sounding a little awed and shaken himself. “You sure there’s not something you want to tell us, Martin?”

“I think,” Martin croaks. The ground feels very far away. “I think – that’s my dad?”

“Oh, holy shit,” Tim says softly.

At the same time, Father Edwin nods and says, “Sir Emil Blackwood, guardian to High Summoner Gertrude.” His voice softens as he says gently, “You said he was your father? This could be an auspicious sign, for you to have found yourself in this temple on the same day it may see a new summoner take the first step on his own path to defeating Sin.”

“Yeah, you know what?” Tim says abruptly. “Martin, we’re taking a moment outside for a bit. Come on.”

Tim nudges his elbow gently, and Martin allows himself to be steered away in the direction of the door, though he barely remembers moving his feet afterwards. The next thing he remembers is sitting on the ground outside the temple, the lightning still arcing far above his head, with Tim next to him.

“Right, come on you,” Tim says briskly. “Knees up, head between your legs, and just breathe for a bit. You looked like you were about to pass out in there.”

Martin follows those instructions, and tries to focus on just breathing for a bit. If it’s possible for a mind to feel full to bursting and completely empty all at the same time, that might be where Martin’s at right now.

“Never a dull moment with you today, is there?” Tim says after a while. “I mean – good that we found something in there to jog your memory, but what a way to get reminded about your dad.”

“Can we not talk about it?” Martin says bluntly, still staring at the ground.

To his credit, Tim takes that in stride. “That’s fair,” he says. “But if you want to, I’ll listen.”

Martin doesn’t want to. Martin doesn’t think he’ll ever want to. And even if he did, it’s not like Tim will be around to listen in a couple of days anyway.

He still remembers when his dad disappeared. Long since moved past it, obviously, because there were other things to worry about, but now Martin looks back on it with new eyes.

He thought for years that his dad had just… up and left. Gone without saying a word. Dads do that, sometimes. And it wouldn’t have been out of nowhere, really; Martin was old enough when it happened to notice that things were getting… strained. Had been for a while, since Mum started getting sick. They had a fight, Dad walked out to clear his head, and never walked back in, and Zanarkand is big enough to disappear in and never cross paths with someone again if that’s what you want. So Martin quietly put the pieces together in his own head after it happened, grappled to come to terms with it, and then quietly put it all away in a box when he was done.

Other things to worry about.

But now he’s seen that statue, and he’s remembering things like: there was a really bad storm the last night he saw his dad. Really bad, the sort of once-in-a-lifetime, thing-you-tell-your-grandchildren-about-when-you’re-eighty bad. It actually flattened all the boats down the dockside area and tore up some of the buildings where it hit hardest. Now he’s thinking things like: was that a storm? Or was it actually Sin, passing close by? Close by enough to damage things, and maybe snatch up a man who really was just taking a walk to clear his head?

Martin doesn’t know what to think. But one thing’s for sure: somehow or other, his dad got dragged away to Spira just the same way Martin has been. Just in time to land in the path of Gertrude Robinson, High fucking Summoner, and – what, pledge himself as her guardian? How did that happen?

Maybe he discovered he couldn’t get back, says a voice in Martin’s head.

Maybe you’re just wishful thinking, he thinks back at it irritably. It really isn’t fair, to have old wounds ripped open like this on top of everything else.

“Thanks for the offer,” he says to Tim at last. “But I think what I really need is just to pass out until the world makes sense again.”

Tim hums, considering this.

“Not a bad shout. But I’ve got something else in mind if you’re willing to hear me out?”

It turns out that what Tim has in mind is teaching Martin to fight.

“It hit me that maybe the toxin stole that from you too, if you ever had it,” he explains. “And you know, hitting things is therapeutic. If nothing else, you’ll sleep better tonight.”

Martin is not a small guy. But he’s also never fought anything a day in his life. Actually, he tries to go out of his way to avoid fights, if he can.

“What, now?” Martin protests. He appreciates Tim trying to look out for him, a total stranger, like this, he really does, but - something in him recoils at the idea all the same. And besides which - “Come on, I mean - is this really the time? After what that priest said, shouldn't you go and help your friend?”

“Wish I could,” Tim says with a tight edge to his smile. “But Sasha and me technically aren't Jon's guardians yet, so we can't go in the cloister unless we want to put the whole pilgrimage at risk, and Jon might just kill me himself if I do that. Trust me,” he adds when Martin opens his mouth, “I'm not a fan either.”

Martin presses his lips together in an effort not to say any of the things running through his head right now. He's not sure he likes what it says about Yevon, that their rules are so stringent they'd rather leave a summoner in their temple to the very real danger of starving or exhausting themselves to what could be the point of death rather than let anyone go in to help.

“There'll be guardians in there with him already, anyway,” Tim sighs. “So, you know, I've just got to suck it up and twiddle my thumbs out here.” He flashes Martin a crooked smile. “So you see, if you give in and let me put you through your paces you'd actually be doing me a bit of a favour.”

Martin's not sure if Tim knows what he's doing, but unknowingly or not, he's found Martin's weak spot, framing it like that. Relenting a little, Martin asks, “Do I need to know how to fight?”

“If you ever wanna travel anywhere else in Spira, you’ll at least need to know how to hit a fiend hard enough, fast enough, or smart enough to give you enough time to run away from it,” Tim tells him. “The Crusaders protect the main roads as best we can, but we can’t be everywhere at once.”

“There’s a lot of fiends about, then?” Martin frowns. He’s not even surprised to hear that regular monster encounters are a part of daily life at this point, after everything else he’s already heard about Spira. But even so…

“Another one of the many things we have to thank Sin for,” Tim says grimly. “You’re not seriously saying you forgot that as well?”

“I don’t think we saw many of them back home,” Martin says truthfully. “I think… I remember it was always a really big deal whenever one showed up.”

“Even more reason to teach you one or two tricks now, then,” Tim shoots back with a nod. “Come on, the temples always have a few old relics lying around. Let’s see if there’s something that’ll suit you.”

Tim has a job of it; even after they’re shown to a small storeroom that appears to be a veritable treasure trove of things that people have either donated to the temple or left behind over the years, Martin can’t find it in himself to feel comfortable with any of the weapons Tim finds for him.

He flat-out rejects the sword as soon as he sees it. They consider the bow for a while, debating Martin’s upper body strength and the advantage of being able to take down fiends at a distance, but eventually dismiss it when Tim admits that he has no idea how to teach anyone how to shoot and that if anything got the drop on Martin at close quarters, he’d soon be in hot water. Tim extols the virtues of the partly rusted halberd leaning against the wall for its ability to keep things at arms’ length, but Martin can’t help eyeing the length of it with deep suspicion. Martin is not a graceful person. He’d be more likely to stab his own eye out with that thing, or trip over it when he tried to attack, and he tells Tim so as well. Tim even pulls out his own pair of handaxes at one point, showing how their relatively light weight and particular balance can be played to his advantage, and pointing out how they can be thrown if it ever really comes down to it. Martin can see his point, but the idea of swinging a couple of axes around just sounds utterly ludicrous to him.

Eventually, Tim suggests, “What about a couple of daggers? They’re pretty light, you can hide them and wear them around easy enough, and anyone can give things a good stab if it comes down to it. Stab something enough times, you’ll eventually hit something vital.”

“That’s… a really, really disturbing thing to say, Tim.”

“It’s true, though. Or, look at it this way: if something ever does get too close to you, you can pull a dagger out and surprise it quicker and stealthier than anything else. Might surprise them long enough for you to run.”

That’s more or less how Martin finds himself the extremely uncertain owner of a pair of small, lethal-looking daggers. Tim spends the rest of the time they have until the light starts fading outside following through with his promise to put Martin through his paces, showing him the most effective ways to stab and even block with them.

Sasha joins them midway, offering pointers of her own and creating targets of magical ice and water for Martin to practice on.

“You’re holding back against Tim,” she tells him. “You won’t be able to hold back if something out there comes at you for real. It’s better for you to figure out where your real limits are now while you’re still just practicing.”

Whatever the reason, Martin’s grateful to be facing off against Sasha’s moving yet decidedly non-living elemental targets. She was right; he was way too afraid of hurting Tim to actually focus on his technique. This helps, even if there’s a little voice in the back of Martin’s mind telling him that there is no way he will ever use what they’re teaching him.

By the time they call it a day, Martin is tired, sore, desperately in need of a shower, and ready to collapse on the nearest flat surface, soft or not. He also feels so much better than he did a few hours ago. Apparently there really was method in Tim’s madness.

“Nice work,” Tim tells him with a tired, satisfied grin. He holds a fist out to Martin expectantly; Martin blinks at it for a moment, before gently tapping his own against it with a worn-out smile on his own face.

“I can’t promise I’ll ever actually use any of this,” he warns Tim, hoping he doesn’t sound ungrateful.

“Eh,” Tim shrugs easily. “Like I said, it’s hard to go wrong with a dagger. Just make sure the pointy end’s pointing the right way.”

“I think Martin could have figured that one out on his own,” Sasha begins to say, but half of her words are drowned out by the sudden, overwhelmingly loud noise of grinding rock.

All three of them jump. Above them, the giant boulders around the temple have stopped their lazy, lightning-clad orbit and are being drawn back towards the walls of the building, wrapping around it like a cloak. The sound it makes is terrific. Martin’s ears are still ringing even after it’s over and everything above the main door of the temple is completely clad in what now looks to be solid stone.

When the noise and the movement cease, everything seems almost too still in comparison. Tim and Sasha look just as dazed as Martin for a moment before Sasha’s eyes widen in realisation.

“Tim! The lightning mushroom rock closed!”

For a second longer, Tim stares at her like she’s suddenly started speaking some incomprehensible language.

“Oh!” he exclaims a moment later, clapping a hand to his forehead. Martin tries to follow the thread, and recalls what Sasha said about the weird lightning rock when the three of them were heading in.

“Your friend?” he guesses, second-hand relief rising within him. “Does this mean he’s done?”

“Done, and hopefully with an aeon to show for it,” says Sasha, who looks like she’s having a hard time keeping a lid on whatever she must be feeling. “Come on, Tim, let’s go.”

She tugs on Tim’s arm a couple of times, before remembering herself and throwing an apologetic look at Martin. He shakes his head, smiling in spite of himself, and waves a hand towards the door.

“Go on,” he says. He might not have a handle on the situation, not even a little, but he can tell how much this means to them both all the same. “I’ll catch you guys up.”

Sasha needs no further encouragement, walking briskly towards the door of the temple and pulling Tim along until he matches her pace.

Martin watches the door close behind them. Then he stretches, because he vaguely remembers reading somewhere once that you’re supposed to do that after a work-out unless you want to wake up the next morning with every muscle in your body seizing up. Then he counts out a minute in his head, looking up at the twilight sky and trying to see if he can spot any stars coming out. Then he sighs, and turns back towards the temple, opening the heavy door as unobtrusively as possible so he can slip inside.

The entrance hall is one of those timeless rooms that looks the same no matter what time of day it is outside. The crackling balls of electricity still hum atop their pillars, casting the dark room in strange shadows, and the fayth’s singing still echoes around the room.

Tim and Sasha hover impatiently near the foot of the stairs, and to Martin’s surprise they’re still alone. He would’ve thought they’d be at least talking to their friend by now. Maybe he should have given them more time. Maybe the cloister behind that door under the archway at the back is a lot larger than he thought, or their friend passed out, or—

The door at the back of the room opens up with a grating clang.

Three people emerge at the top of the stairs. Two women dressed in full armour, and a man, shorter than either of them and wearing a long, elaborate robe that swamps his slim frame. He leans heavily on the armour-clad warrior to his right, who is much paler than either of her two companions, with a pointed chin and a shock of red hair visible under her helmet. Her gaze sweeps over the room; although her stoic expression doesn’t flicker even once, it’s clear she’s sizing each of them up as her eyes land on them. The other warrior looks equally as stoic as the first; she's the same height as her comrade, give or take an inch or so, but sturdy and compact instead of lean and wiry, with high cheekbones and a square jaw. A headscarf keeps her hair bound neatly away under her helmet.

That leaves the man between them, who must be Jon – the summoner Tim and Sasha are here to meet. He looks about as awful as Martin feels after the day he’s had; utterly exhausted, drawn and haggard, with an obvious pallor to his brown skin even in the dim, flickering light of the entrance hall. Martin isn’t sure if the bags under his eyes are from the ordeal of staying awake to treat with the fayth, or if they’re a more permanent part of his face, but the eyes above them are very striking: large and very, very dark, set deep on either side of an aquiline nose. His wavy black hair, shot through with grey, is flyaway and sticking up every which way, even pointing directly up on end in some places.

The two women with him must be the other guardians Tim mentioned earlier, Martin realises. Really, it makes sense. Tim and Sasha said their hometown of Bevelle was some ways to the north; Jon couldn’t have been expected to journey down here with no guardians.

Martin watches as Tim and Sasha turn to one another with twin looks full of emotion, relief and joy and worry and other things he can’t read, before they turn back to the stairs and Tim calls up.

“Should we have brought a bottle of something to mark the occasion?” He sounds jovial, his voice echoing even above the singing of the fayth.

Jon’s exhausted face twists into the side of the warrior’s arm, obviously grumbling even at this distance.

“When did you get here, Tim?” he grouses, in a rich voice made raspy by fatigue.

“Earlier today,” Sasha pipes up. “I see you’ve stayed true to form and started without us.”

“That’s the Jon we know,” Tim adds sagely. “Ever the workaholic.”

Jon stares down at them both with one of the flattest looks Martin’s ever seen. With the height he has standing at the top of that staircase, it’s pretty effective. “Are the two of you done?”

“Us? Never.”

“It’s like he doesn’t know us at all,” Sasha adds with a nod, deep fondness amid the teasing all the same.

“Friends of yours, I’m guessing?” interrupts the warrior with the headscarf. She’s too far away for Martin to see if she has an eyebrow raised or not, but the tone of her voice certainly does.

“For my misdeeds,” Jon says dryly. Martin thinks he sees the warrior smirk at that, and then Jon says something else to her that Martin can’t quite catch that makes her look sharply towards Tim and Sasha.

“Oh,” she says, loud enough for Martin to hear. She doesn’t sound especially impressed. “The Crusaders.”

“Who haven’t seen him in years!” Tim stresses. “Get down here already and let us have a proper reunion!”

It’s slow progress, the guardian on Jon’s right maintaining an obvious vigilance to make sure he doesn’t trip on the stairs, but Jon manages to make it down to the bottom more or less under his own power. He’s barely stepped down onto the tiled floor of the chamber before Tim’s on him, pulling him and Sasha both into a hug before either of them can say anything about it.

“You look absolutely terrible,” Tim says. He doesn’t have much of an indoor voice, so the sound carries back to Martin even with how much he’s trying not to intrude too much on this moment.

Jon, neatly squashed between the two Crusaders, says something acidly; Martin misses some of the words, but it sounds like he’s asking Tim if he’d look any better after hours of trying to talk with a fayth. Sasha says something then, and Martin hears Jon respond, crisp and acerbic, “An absolute nightmare, thanks for asking,” before his voice drops into something quieter and surprisingly warm, the words themselves lost beneath the Hymn.

Tim and Sasha finally let their friend have a bit of space to breathe, though Martin notes Sasha’s hand remaining steady on his elbow.

“What,” Sasha’s voice carries over, clear and warm, “You didn’t think we’d sit this one out, did you? Who else is going to be brave enough to tell the great summoner when he needs to fix his bad hair day?”

“Certainly not those two up there,” says Tim, who still has no indoor voice.

Jon rolls his eyes, making a point of it enough that even Martin can see him doing it. He glances towards the guardians in question; their faces are still more or less impassive, though the one with the sharp cheekbones is looking at Tim with raised eyebrows.

Sasha, ignoring Tim, prompts Jon with another question that Martin doesn’t quite get all the words for, though he hears the word “aeon” mentioned. Jon nods, his face resolute; Tim and Sasha look at each other once again, and Martin sees Tim heave out a sigh.

“That’s it then,” he says, quietly for him. He seems to rally himself the next moment, an audible grin in his voice. “Well, look at you. A proper summoner, then.”

“Shut up, Tim,” Jon says sharply, though with no real venom that Martin can hear. His eyes pass behind Tim and Sasha and through the space that’s left between them now that they’re no longer hugging him, and land on Martin, who is still hovering close to the door.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Thrown off by being noticed – and by having everyone else’s attention drawn back to him so bluntly – Martin freezes up.

“Um—”

“That’s Martin!” Tim cuts in. He nods his head toward Jon, and to Martin’s growing horror, starts to none-too-subtly guide his friend closer to the entrance, where Martin’s standing. “Martin, Jon.”

Jon turns deeply suspicious eyes onto Tim, exhaustion briefly taking a back seat to a laser focus.

“And why is he here?”

“He washed up on the beach this morning,” says Sasha, who Martin is grateful to see is following Tim closely. “After facing Sin.”

Jon blinks, starting. “Oh,” he says awkwardly, wrong-footed by this. “I’m – glad to see you escaped unharmed.”

“Yeah, about that.” Tim sounds casual. Tim sounds way, way too casual. “You don’t mind if he comes with us, do you?”

“What,” Martin says, sure that he just heard that wrong.

“What?” Jon snaps, almost stumbling over with how sharply he tries to look back at Tim.

“What?” Sasha echoes, looking over at Tim with a pointed, raised eyebrow.

“‘Course you don’t,” Tim says breezily, ignoring the three of them, and also ignoring the steady way that Jon’s other two guardians are boring holes into the back of his skull with their eyes. “Why would you—”

“Tim?” Jon interrupts him. There’s a wild undertone to his voice, and he looks as though he is trying valiantly to restrain himself. “A word?”

Jon drags a grinning Tim off into a corner of the temple antechamber away from the others, a move that would be far more effective if he didn’t have to lean on Tim for support half the time that he’s pulling him across the room. Tim looks back at Martin and Sasha with that same grin, mouthing trust me! before blithely allowing Jon to steer him where he will.

Martin watches them go. He’s vaguely aware of the two warrior guardians beginning a low conference of their own, as Jon begins a series of unsteady, agitated gesturing at Tim on the other side of the room, but Martin barely has the thought to spare for any of them as a low, rising panic starts churning at the pit of his stomach.

“What is Tim doing?!” he asks Sasha, low, urgent, and maybe verging slightly on the edge of hysteria.

“Tim is…” Sasha says slowly, as she sidles up next to Martin. She sighs. “Tim is doing what Tim sometimes does, which is make wild choices with the best of intentions without thinking them through or consulting other people about it first.” She throws a long-suffering look Martin’s way. “You’d think I’d have reached my quota with one friend who was prone to that.”

“I can’t – I can’t come with you!” Martin hisses, trying to keep his voice down, and also trying not to think about what is going on in the other two conversations happening right now. “I don’t know how to fight, I don’t know – I-I can’t remember the first thing about what a summoner does, or what happens on a pilgrimage, or— what’s he thinking?”

Sasha is almost infuriatingly calm. “At a guess…”

She glances over to where Jon and Tim are, her eyes narrowing in thought. “I think he’s thinking that you’ll be better off with us than stuck here in this temple.”

She pauses, then adds, “I agree with him.”

Martin stares at her.

“You – you what?”

Sasha, of all things, smiles.

“Don’t let Tim run all over you with his enthusiasm about it, even if he does convince Jon you’re still free to say no if you don’t want to come with. I mean, it’s not going to be an easy journey,” she says, pragmatic as anything. “But we can at least take you to somewhere with more people. You know, somewhere a bit safer. And you might be more likely to find someone you know.”

That is not going to happen. But Sasha doesn’t know that, and it’s Martin’s fault that she doesn’t know that because he’s the one who decided to lie about it, and so it makes sense that she’s saying it.

As an afterthought, Sasha adds, “And you won’t be cooped up in this temple with priests who think you’re some kind of second coming.”

Martin grimaces. Tim’s distraction with the impromptu combat training was effective, but even just the mention of that encounter – and the realisations that came with it, the ones that Martin is still not ready to properly examine yet – brings it all back to the forefront of his mind, adding to the low-level churning in his gut. He sternly shoves it away for later.

“And if I leave with you, a literal summoning party on their way to pray for the power to battle Sin, won’t I just be giving them more fuel for the fire?”

“No more than if you hang around one of Yevon’s strongholds,” Sasha retorts, which is an infuriatingly sensible response, even if she doesn’t know why she’s so right. All things considered, a temple dedicated to a religion that believes machina are evil and that Zanarkand is a ruined destination for holy pilgrimage that also happens to be full of fiends is probably the least safe place for Martin right now.

Martin sighs, frustrated. “Does Jon even want me to come? I don’t want to get in the way—”

“Don’t let Jon put you off. He’s not his best self when he’s stressed.” Sasha hesitates, a crack showing in her veneer. “I’d want you to come along, if you decide you’re up for it.”

“What?” Martin blurts out, a lot louder than he meant to, and with an effort pulls his voice back down. “Really?”

Sasha nods, looking surprised. “Yeah, why not? You have had –”

She sighs, a wry smile on her face. “Look, let’s not mince words, you’ve been having the worst possible kind of day since we met, and you’ve been handling it really well, considering. You wouldn’t be out of place in a summoning party. The other stuff like the fighting’d come with time, and Tim and I could cover for you with that.”

Sasha makes a compelling argument. The warm, inviting smile she’s wearing helps. Martin dithers; he’s done a pretty good job, he thinks, of talking himself out of wanting to go along, listing all of the very reasonable things that would make it a terrible idea. But Sasha – who actually has an idea of what Spira’s like, who belongs to an organisation whose mission is to throw itself cavalierly at Sin, who only just met him – she thinks it’s a good idea.

It throws him off, in a way he doesn’t really like.

“I – I don’t know…” Martin starts, fidgeting anxiously. Movement out of the corner of his eye makes him turn; Jon is stalking back over in their direction on wobbly legs, Tim sauntering behind him with a face like the cat who got the cream. “Oh, no, here he comes.”

Jon comes to a halt a few steps away, looking up at Martin with a deep frown.

“Tim,” he says stiffly, after a moment’s thought, “has explained the situation. And. I suppose, if you want, you can come with us as far as Luca. If that’s what you want. Since it would be safer for you that way.”

It’s the least graceful, most grudging invitation Martin has ever heard in his life.

Maybe that’s why Martin suddenly finds himself seized with a spark of irritation that quickly flares into boldness, and he says:

“Yeah, why not. Um. Thanks?”

“Jon,” says the red-haired warrior guardian in a low voice.

Jon sighs. “It’s done, Daisy.”

He looks at Martin doubtfully, the exhaustion setting back into his face with a vengeance. “I just hope I don’t regret this,” he mutters as he turns and staggers away. “Tim, he’s your problem.”

“Aye-aye, boss,” Tim grins, while Martin stands there trying not to feel stung.

Sasha nudges his arm gently.

“Fifty gil he’ll have changed his mind by the time we actually get to Luca,” she says absently, and winks at Martin. “We’ll call it a trial period for now. Welcome aboard.”

Chapter Text

Martin wakes the next morning to an unfamiliar ceiling.

He opens his eyes, expecting to see the thin orange line of the streetlight glow on the old, flaky, spiderweb-cracked plaster of his bedroom; it almost jars him right out of his body when instead he sees dark stone above him, latticed through with borderline-delicate copper pipework.

He bolts upright, takes in the low wooden beds and equally low table, the thin rug on the floor, the wall hanging with its black eye symbol – and only then does he remember.

Sin. The weird swordsman who vanished into thin air. Zanarkand wreathed in fire and smoke, the beach, Tim and Sasha, his dad, somehow winding up agreeing to play guardian for a summoner—

Martin buries his face in his hands for a second. Right. That was a thing that happened.

It’s very tempting to try and convince himself it’s not real. To just lie back down and go to sleep in the hope that next time he opens his eyes, he’ll see his bedroom ceiling and not the temple.

But that’s not going to help anything, is it.

Martin counts to ten. Then he grabs his glasses, tries to make himself look at least half-way presentable, and finally grabs the pair of daggers sitting innocuously in their sheaths at the foot of his bed before he ventures out in search of Tim and Sasha.

The temple has no windows, which makes it impossible to tell what time it is. He hopes he hasn’t overslept or anything. Bad enough already that he’s an obvious outsider who has no idea what he’s doing without adding that into the mix.

After a few minutes of wandering and poking his head in every open doorway he passes, he spots Tim and Sasha sitting at a table inside what looks like a small mess room. They smile brightly when they meet his eyes, waving him over.

“Morning! We snagged you some breakfast,” Tim grins as he sits down, pushing a small bowl of rice and vegetables Martin’s way. “Don’t ask us where Jon and the other two are, ‘cause we don’t know either. We were gonna head outside and wait for them once we’re done here.”

“I haven’t held you up, have I?”

“What? Nah,” Tim says dismissively. “It’s probably still dark out there, I don’t even think half the priests are up yet.”

“That’ll probably change soon,” Sasha says pensively, sipping at a cup of tea she has cupped in both hands. “Seeing as how they’ll all want to see Jon summon.”

“Or we could just sneak away beforehand. They’d be none the wiser.”

Sasha gives Tim a look over the rim of her teacup. “You and I both know Jon won’t go for that. Always got something to prove, that one.”

“Ugh, I know. Let me dream, Sasha.”

“That’s a whole thing then, is it?” Martin asks. “Getting him to summon before we leave?”

“Honestly, I don’t even know,” Tim shrugs. “Something something symbolic renewal something something hope something. It’s all for show, really. The fayth already said yes and their opinions are the only ones that matter.”

“Would you like any more cynicism to go with your rice, Martin?” Sasha asks dryly, and nudges Tim with an elbow.

The remainder of breakfast passes by quickly. Tim and Sasha are all too obviously used to being a unit, and cheerfully banter at each other all the while with no need for Martin’s input. He finishes eating, and the three of them head for the main chamber via the quartermaster’s store, where a young-looking acolyte who doesn’t seem entirely awake yet helps outfit them with small, lightweight packs, enough to carry a bedroll and some small provisions without being too bulky or throwing them too off-balance.

Martin wonders at the temple’s generosity for a few moments. Then he remembers what exactly they’re setting out on this journey to do, and things start to make sense. Stands to reason they’d want to do whatever they could to boost the chances of their success, however small.

Once they’re packed, they pass back through the dark, flickering entrance hall and out through the main doors. Outside, the temple and the rock surrounding it are bathed in the red light of the day’s beginning, the morning sun casting long shadows. A handful of people in robes – presumably more priests and acolytes – mill about in varying states of wakefulness, clearly waiting for something.

Martin catches a few of them doing a double take when they catch sight of him and whispering to their fellows behind their hands. It makes him uneasy; part of him hopes he’s just a novelty after being washed up on the beach the way he was, but he can’t help feeling like maybe Father Edwin might be a bit of a gossip.

He is suddenly very, very glad that he won’t be staying at this temple.

After a few minutes of standing around and waiting, the temple doors open again, and a hush falls over those who have gathered as Jon and the two stern-looking warrior guardians from the night before step outside. Martin notices for the first time that everyone has arranged themselves so as to be standing in a loose sort of ring, leaving a wide, empty space in the centre.

Jon steps forward into the midpoint of that space now, his mouth set into a severe, determined line. He looks slightly less exhausted than the previous night, at least, though that isn’t saying much. He’s also holding a large, elaborate staff in both hands. It looks heavy, almost as tall as Jon himself, made out of some dark material that fans out at both top and bottom into some seriously embellished ornamentation, swirling motifs of that same eye-shape of Yevon that make the whole balance of the thing look off.

It looks like a fiendishly difficult thing to use, by all accounts, but if Jon is having any difficulty he must be putting his all into hiding that. He closes his eyes and lifts his face to the sky, raising the staff with both arms above his head before bringing it down directly in front of him. Lightning begins to build and flicker around him, sparking toward the staff, and when Jon lifts his arms slightly all of that sparking light snaps to the end of it in a great ball, streaks of it still arcing off.

Jon turns now, the staff sweeping out in front of him to throw that flickering ball of lightning ahead of him, where it vanishes into thin air. Or no, not quite; Martin thinks he sees some sort of glyph flash in mid-air for a split second, and then the air becomes charged, a thin, unbroken arc of lightning stretching from the tip of Jon’s staff into some invisible hole in space.

For a few agonising moments, things stay that way. Jon’s look of concentration turns into one of strain, his stance taking on something fixed and rigid to it, like he’s locked into some tug-of-war he’s determined to win.

Then – something appears.

A large, twisted horn of ivory emerges out of empty space, inch by agonising inch. Then a great dark head, a flowing white mane, two massive, stout-looking hooves. Finally, with an effort, Jon yanks on his staff with both hands and pulls the aeon out into the world with a booming clap of thunder.

It’s a horse, or something like a horse. The colour of cobalt under moonlight, stocky and easily twice the size of any horse Martin’s ever imagined, with lightning sparking from its hooves with every step and that lethal-looking horn standing proud on its forehead. It tosses its head and unfurls a pair of mighty wings, each feather razor-sharp and scattering sparks with every movement.

It’s beautiful. It’s terrifying. Martin can feel every single hair on his body standing on end even from his safe distance; he doesn’t know how Jon can bear to stand so close to it. Jon does, though, his posture inflexible and ramrod-straight. He stares down the aeon with a tight-lipped look, and after a moment, inclines his head.

Martin’s beginning to see, now, why summoners are the ones everyone puts their faith in to challenge Sin.

A moment longer, and the aeon vanishes, leaping into mid-air and fading into a lazy cloud of glowing, soft-coloured orbs that gradually disperse upwards. Jon sighs, the set of his shoulders relaxing somewhat, and just like that, the whole energy of the gathered ring shifts. Martin can feel it; the stunned awe making room for a kind of low-level buzzing, hope that no one quite seems prepared to put into words.

“That’s an aeon?” Martin says, finally finding his voice again.

“That’s an aeon,” Sasha confirms. She sounds like she’s trying to be less affected than she actually is. “Something, isn’t it?”

Something is right. Martin is about the furthest thing from an expert you can get, but even just this one felt so powerful. The idea that Jon still has to travel in order to summon more of them is staggering.

He thinks of the thing that attacked Zanarkand, and just how powerful it must really be, and shivers.

“Come on, let’s join up with the others,” Tim says now, clapping Martin gently on the shoulder. “Might as well see if our fellow guardians are as boring as they seem to be.”

“Tim.”

“They’re warrior monks, Sasha,” Tim says, rolling his eyes. “Cheerless and married to the rules, every single one of them.”

They certainly seem cheerless enough when the three of them approach. The red-headed one, the one Jon called Daisy, has a greatsword strapped to her back, while her fellow guardian has a crossbow held in a sling over one shoulder, a quiver of bolts visible at her hip.

“Hi,” the crossbow-wielder says. Well, at least she doesn’t seem to mind speaking to them, even if she doesn’t seem much inclined to smile. “Guess we’ll be working together, then.”

“Guess so,” Sasha agrees with a smile. “We didn’t really get to talk much last night. I’m Sasha – this is Tim and Martin.”

“Basira,” she says with a nod. “This is my partner Daisy.”

“You two usually based up at Bevelle, then?” Tim asks lightly.

“Usually. We’ve had one or two assignments elsewhere. Nowhere so far afield as this, though.”

“Well, yeah,” Tim nods. “Suppose you’d never’ve had a reason to. The temple put you on this one?”

“It came direct from the Grand Maester,” Basira shrugs. Martin guesses that must be someone important. Maybe the head of Yevon, or something? “Kinda hard to argue with something like that, not that we would’ve.”

Basira casts a critical eye over Tim and Sasha, cocking her head in curiosity. “You two used to work as… what, scribes? Archivists? Before you left to join the Crusaders, I mean.”

“A bit of everything, really,” says Sasha. “You know the library, as soon as they find out you’ve got any kind of scholar’s background they decide that means everything you can do is transferable.”

Basira lets out a ghost of a laugh. “I was never a scholar, but sounds familiar, yeah.”

“How’d you know, anyway?”

“Jon’s talked about you a fair bit on the way down. Seemed like he was looking forward to seeing you.”

While Tim and Sasha exchange a look, their faces softening, Basira turns to Martin.

“What about you?” she asks. “Is it true you came up against Sin before these guys found you?”

“Uh… yeah,” Martin says, feeling a bit uncomfortable at the scrutiny. “It’s all still a bit of a blur, to be honest.”

Basira blows out a slow breath, her eyebrows raising. “Lucky for you you made it out. Can you fight?”

“He’s a fast learner,” Tim cuts in.

“He better be,” Daisy says abruptly, drawing everyone’s eyes bar Basira’s. “Fiends don’t care if you’ve got a famous father.”

Irritation surges through Martin like a flame. What does that have to do with anything? Why is it any of her business?

“He is standing right here and can speak for himself, thanks,” he says tartly. “I can’t – I can’t fight well, if that’s what you mean, we can’t all be warrior monks. But like Tim said, I can learn.”

Tim, as it happens, is standing there grinning at this like the turn of the year’s come early. Daisy raises an eyebrow. Before she can say anything - if she was even planning on saying anything - Jon comes sweeping toward them, with all the look of an escapee from somewhere who’s sure their trail’s being followed.

“Is everyone ready?” he asks shortly, sounding a little out of breath.

“Ready and waiting, boss,” Tim says with a little salute.

“Don’t call me that. The priests here have been bad enough, I don’t need that sort of nonsense from you as well.”

Ah. So it’s the priests he’s escaping from.

“Sure thing, boss,” Tim nods with an unrepentant smile.

“Tim.”

“Sorry!” Tim grins, laughing in the face of Jon’s fairly impressive scowl. “You still make it way too easy, you know.”

“I’ve already forgotten why I missed you,” Jon mutters, bending to pick up a pack lying near Daisy and Basira’s feet. “Come on. Before I get trapped in yet another conversation.”

Fortunately for Jon, that doesn’t happen. Whether the sight of him being surrounded by guardians is signal enough that their journey is now underway, or whether the sight of Daisy is just that intimidating to anyone who might otherwise try their luck, they manage to leave Djose temple without any further interruptions.

Daisy takes the lead as they begin to cross the old bridge leading over the river and out of the ravine. Basira takes the rear in what must be a long-standing arrangement, which leaves the remaining four of them to bundle themselves together somewhere in the middle.

Martin isn’t really sure where to put himself. He finally settles for walking a little behind the other three, figuring that out of everyone here, he knows the least about where they are and where they’re going.

No one else seems to object, and like that, their journey is underway.

Tim and Sasha provide most of the conversation for that first stretch of road. After so long without seeing their friend, they’re understandably eager to catch up with Jon, telling stories of their exploits with the Crusaders down in this part of Spira while pressing Jon for news of his journey south, and any gossip from their hometown they haven’t already heard. That said, they seem just as happy with rehashing old gossip from years ago whenever Jon is either unable or unwilling to provide them anything new.

Martin tunes out, a little; it’s not that any of them seem to care about him hearing them, or that he’s not interested, but it feels awkward listening in on things he has no frame of reference for, no real understanding of. Like a kid leaning over the edge of a stairwell to eavesdrop on what the adults are talking about the next floor down. Better to let them catch up in relative peace.

Still, it’s hard not to pick up the odd word here and there, and when they start talking in-depth about some part of the temple where they all used to work, Martin is too curious not to ask, “How many temples were there, again?”

The three of them start, almost like they’d forgotten he was there for a bit.

“Whoops,” Tim says sheepishly. “Sorry, Martin, we’ve been getting carried away up here.”

“What? Oh, no, it’s fine, you’ve not seen each other in ages. I was just thinking, it’d probably be better if you fill me in on some stuff? Since, you know,” he waves a hand at himself, “we probably don’t have time to wait for the toxin to wear off on its own.”

Tim, Sasha, and Jon look at each other.

“I suppose it’s not a bad idea,” Jon says grudgingly, levelling an appraising look at him.

Between the three of them, they explain.

There are five temples in total – the one they’ve just left behind, two some distance further north, and two located in an island chain some way to the south – each with their own fayth. Aeons and fayth, Jon makes a point of stressing when Martin asks, being very different things, apparently. Aeons like the one Jon summoned this morning are the dreams of a particular fayth given a physical form in the world by the bond formed between a fayth and a summoner.

“The fayth has to be favourable,” Jon explains with a frown that makes Martin think he may have learned that lesson the hard way when he faced the one inside Djose temple. He rubs the left side of his neck absently, fingers worrying under the high collar of his undershirt. “The temples insist on calling it praying but honestly, it’s more akin to… a pact.”

“Okay,” Martin nods, trying to wrap his head around this. The way they’ve described it to him, it sounds like it goes beyond any kind of pact Martin’s ever heard of. Less something made with words and more something… deeper than that. Soul-deep, even. “So… why start with the one at Djose? I mean, if you lived in Bevelle anyway…”

“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that simple.”

“Okay, why not?”

“Because we don’t want Jon to fry his brain trying to bite off more than he can chew,” Tim says blithely.

“That’s not how it works, Tim.”

“Close enough from what I heard,” Tim shrugs, looking a little more serious now. “All those stories of cocky idiots trying their luck and never waking up again, or coming out of it unable to cast magic, or just losing their minds. You know, if the fayth even talks to them in the first place. I heard sometimes they just don’t bother if they don’t think the summoner’s got what it takes.”

“They’re not – those stories can’t all be true, though, can they?” Martin asks weakly, feeling a little ill.

He already figured out that a summoner’s lot couldn’t be easy – they have to choose to go on a journey to fight Sin, for goodness’ sake – but the idea of there being such a risk involved even when just trying to do the exact thing they set out to do is almost too much to contemplate.

“Tim is exaggerating,” Jon says, shooting a disapproving look Tim’s way. He hesitates for a moment, and adds, “Mostly. Some of those stories may have a grain of truth hidden in all the sensationalism. The fayth are powerful – some far more than others. The ones in Bevelle and Macalania have been known to overwhelm summoners who tried to pact with them unprepared.”

“Which is why you even have the pilgrimage in the first place,” Sasha adds. “To let Jon build his strength to prepare for being bonded mind, body, and soul to more and more powerful fayth.”

“Yes, thank you, you two,” says Jon testily.

Martin thinks about the state Jon was in last night when he emerged from the cloister, and about how powerful that first aeon felt when he summoned it outside the temple. If the fayth in Djose is supposed to be one of the easier ones…

“It must be hard.”

Jon shoots him a sharp look. It turns to something more contemplative after a moment, though, as he says dismissively, “I knew what I was getting into.”

“… Sure,” Martin says. “So, where does Zanarkand fit into all of it? I mean – it’s a ruin, right?”

Saying those words still hasn’t lost any of its strangeness yet.

Jon stares at him, a look of deep scepticism on his face. “Are you sure it’s just your memory the toxin affected?”

Wow. Martin was trying to be generous, putting everything about the way Jon spoke to him last night down as extreme exhaustion from his ordeal with the fayth, but it seems like Jon just really is that rude.

“Yes, it’s a ruin,” Jon continues shortly, “but it also happens to be where the Final Aeon is located. The one that grants enough power to stop Sin.”

Somehow, Martin can hear the capital letters in the words Final Aeon just from how Jon says it. He tries for a moment to imagine what such a powerful aeon could look like, but something else about it strikes him as odd.

“How’d it end up there of all places?”

“The records have been lost,” Jon says, as if it’s some sort of personal affront. “Unfortunately. They say the first summoner to defeat Sin was from Zanarkand; perhaps that’s why.”

Martin very much doubts that. If his time travel theory is right - and while he's got no proof, he’s got no reason to believe it isn’t yet – his Zanarkand is completely devoid of summoners, or aeons, or fayth. There’s always been a little magic hanging in the air, sure, but… nothing like the raw power he felt coming from Jon’s aeon outside the temple before.

Maybe the summoners came along later? If Sin first appeared a thousand years ago, and the whole reason summoners exist is to fight it, then…

Except that doesn’t make sense either, because Tim and Sasha seemed convinced that Sin first showed up after this Machina War he keeps hearing about, and Martin definitely doesn’t remember anything like that. Not even the whisperings of it.

Trying to sort this out is going to give him a headache.

With an effort, he pulls himself back to the conversation, just in time to hear Tim say, “Which is fantastic for us, seeing as how the place is crawling with fiends.”

“The endurance training’s not just for Jon, you know,” says Sasha. “Anyway, we’re months away from seeing Zanarkand yet. Let’s focus on getting to Luca in one piece first.”

Luca, the only city in southern Spira and the next properly settled place on their road, is apparently about a month’s walk from where they are now. The thought of being on the road for that long is more than a little daunting. Martin is relieved to hear that most of it is doable via Spira’s main highroad, and so much easier to navigate than what he’d been imagining.

By now, they’ve long left the secluded, sheltered ravine of Djose temple behind them, and have been making sure progress down a worn-down old dirt road winding along the coastline. The view isn’t any more inspiring on foot than it was from the back of a cart; but suddenly, Daisy stiffens from her place at the front, holding a mailed fist up by her head in warning.

“Heads up,” she says in a low voice. “Incoming on our right.”

“I see them,” Basira answers from the back. When Martin turns, she’s loading her crossbow, preparing to fire.

“Get ready,” Tim mutters, spinning one of his axes in hand. Sasha stands by him, one of her books floating at chest height in front of her. The two of them have moved to form a protective front ahead of Jon now, ready for whatever’s coming.

Martin draws his daggers, his heart hammering.

When it comes, it all happens very fast. Two shaggy, snarling creatures with maws of jagged teeth spring down from above them. One yelps, thrown on its back to the ground as Basira’s shot whistles overhead and finds its mark. Daisy runs straight to the other with her greatsword raised, shouting to draw its attention.

“Sasha!” Tim shouts – Martin’s head whips back to where the one Basira hit is back on its feet, coming at them with a limp that doesn’t slow it down. Sasha’s face is set in concentration – she mutters under her breath, and a bright gout of flame explodes in the creature’s fur and fills the air with the rancid smell of burning hair. Tim presses forward, sinks one axe deep into its side, and up rises a cloud of lazy, hazy pastel lights as the bulk of the thing vanishes into nothing.

It all happened so fast. Daisy gets to her feet in the middle of her own cloud of lights, grimacing as she examines her right arm.

“Damn thing got me,” she grunts. Sure enough, there’s a dark red stain spreading on the cloth between her elbow and shoulder, right in the gap where her armour doesn’t cover. Apart from the grimace still set on her face, she barely seems bothered otherwise, casting her eyes over everyone else instead.

“Anyone else get hit?”

“I mean, it was five against one over here,” Sasha says with a raised eyebrow. “So no, we’re fine.”

“Which is more than can be said for you,” Jon adds, brushing past Tim and Sasha with a frown to take Daisy’s arm. “Let me take care of that before we keep going.”

Feeling a little dazed, Martin sheathes his knives. One part of him is just relieved that he didn’t have to use them. On the other hand – he didn’t even do anything. Everyone else did the work.

“It wasn’t really five against one, was it,” he mutters to Sasha, watching light welling up below Jon’s palm as he stares intensely at Daisy’s arm. Healing magic, he realises. Like the kind that weird swordsman used on him when Sin attacked Zanarkand.

“You didn’t run,” Sasha shrugs. “That’s always a good start. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of chances to fight fiends before we reach Luca.”

It swiftly turns out that Sasha wasn’t just saying that to appease him.

Now that they are out on the open road, away from the sheltered, easily defensible path leading to and from the temple, it soon becomes clear just how exposed they are. The remainder of their journey that day is fraught with skirmishes with things taking the twisted forms of insects, or birds, or in one memorable instance, a creeping, frozen mass that blows stinging flurries of hail and ice in their direction. Every time, Martin feels the fear lance through his gut; and every time, it’s over quicker than he can think, each encounter becoming a blur of moving and reacting.

Most of the time, the fiends don’t get near him – he has the annoying feeling that Tim and Sasha are trying to make sure of that. But every so often Daisy doesn’t spot one in time, or they’re forced to dodge somewhere out the way, and Martin finds himself in a confusing tangle that he barely remembers afterwards, of trying to hit without being hit himself, struggling to keep anything Tim and Sasha showed him in his head long enough to use it.

“I’m telling you, don’t overthink it,” Tim advises him that night as they sit around their little campfire. Daisy’s found them a sheltered overhang just off the main road to make a camp in, easily defensible if whoever’s on watch spots something coming for them in the night. So she says, anyway; Martin figures he doesn’t have much choice but to take her word for it.

“How come there are so many fiends out here around Djose, anyway?” Martin asks.

He hadn’t lied, back when he told Tim that it was a big deal whenever one showed up back home. The appearance of a fiend in Zanarkand was something few and far between, and always big news as the guard were called out to take it down. The rumours about what it was and where it came from would get passed round for weeks.

Sasha sighs heavily.

“Too many people dying without a Sending,” she says. “Their spirits can’t make it to the Farplane without help, and without that help they just end up… hanging around, getting more and more bitter about it until eventually they’re so overcome with envy and hate that they become fiends and start going after the living.”

They’re people?

Martin doesn’t know what a Sending is, or the Farplane, but the idea that the monsters they just fought all day are people—

“Wait, so—”

“They don’t even remember who they used to be,” Tim says, staring with a grim look into the embers of their little fire. “Trust me, taking them out is a mercy for everyone involved.”

Tim would know better than Martin. But that doesn’t do much for the sick surge of pity at the bottom of his chest.

“Poor things,” he says softly. “Is there really nothing else we could do?”

“Technically, Jon could Send them,” Sasha says thoughtfully. With a wry smile, she adds, “But you’ve probably figured out that we wouldn’t have the time for that before they were at our throats.”

Martin stays quiet. He still can’t quite figure out what a Sending is – some sort of ritual for the dead, maybe? – but the truth about fiends rattles around his head for the rest of the night, haunting his thoughts.

It’s some time before he’s able to sleep that night.

Chapter Text

Little by little, their journey along the coast continues.

The next few days pass over more or less the same as the first. Daisy leads them from the front, and Basira watches their backs for any trouble, and the rest of them group together in the middle, ostensibly to keep their summoner shielded from any threat.

Daisy and Basira, Martin quickly learns, aren’t much for conversation on the road. Even so, when they do stop to eat or to sleep, he catches sight of them having quiet conversations between themselves, or occasionally with Jon. As the days of their journey start to draw on, Basira even allows herself to be drawn into Tim and Sasha’s little orbit sometimes; she gets a glimpse of a page of Sasha’s journals one night early in their journey, and her seemingly genuine interest in all of those notes and research is enough to warm Sasha to her in short order. Daisy, however, continues to hold herself apart.

Which is just fine by Martin; there’s something about the way she looks at him, and at Tim and Sasha, that makes him deeply uneasy. He can never quite forget that Basira said they’re both here on the orders of some sort of Grand Maester. Who knows what they’d do if they found out where he was really from.

Then there’s Jon, who seems to be trying his very best not to talk to Martin at all if he can manage it.

That’s not to say Jon ignores him entirely; he rushes to heal Martin when he’s too slow to dodge a blow with the same urgency he does with any of the others when they get hit. But it’s always with a tight frown on his face, and he quickly steps away as soon as he’s done, going right back to not initiating any conversations or even meeting Martin’s eyes if he can help it.

Which, fine. He made it pretty clear the other night that if he thought he had a choice, he wouldn’t want Martin along. But that’s Jon’s fault for offering to let him come in the first place, really.

It’d be less annoying if Jon didn’t also wear irritation so well, but that’s Martin’s problem to deal with.

The bigger problem to deal with, in the meanwhile, is the fighting itself.

It’s all very well for someone like Tim to say things like don’t overthink it, but after three or four days of feeling like he isn’t doing much more than flailing uselessly at whatever manages to get near him, Martin’s starting to get sick of it.

Even Jon – the summoner they’re all supposedly protecting – doesn’t seem as helpless in battle, not now that he has an aeon to call on. True, he doesn’t call on it every time they find fiends blocking their way forward, so far it’s only been the once or twice that they’ve actually faced down anything big. But each of the times he's had to, dragging the aeon of lightning and thunder into the world with that same battle of wills every time while the rest of them run for cover, it’s only made it more obvious why the people of Spira have settled on summoners as their champions in the constant struggle against Sin. In a battle where two of their number were turned to stone right before Martin’s eyes, by some sort of giant, scaled thing with a steely, unblinking gaze, Jon’s aeon made short work of the thing once it was summoned, scattering it into those soft, hazy motes of light with nothing more than a loud crack of thunder magic and a vicious goring with its horn.

Martin would wonder why Jon doesn’t summon more often, now that he can. He would wonder, but while Jon never actually says anything about it, he always looks drained when it’s over, swaying on his feet for a few minutes afterwards. Sasha said the pilgrimage was something like endurance training; this must be what she meant.

If anything, it just makes Martin more determined to figure out a way to pull his own weight. Sure, Jon may be rude, might not even want him around, but – Martin doesn’t know. It doesn’t seem fair that Jon’s also responsible not just for keeping them all standing, but also for pulling them all out of the fire when the chips are really down. It makes Martin want to do something to help, anyway.

He gets the beginnings of an idea watching Sasha light their campfire one evening with a wave of her hand and a muttered spell.

“I’ve never thought to ask before, but… how does that work, anyway? Magic, I mean.”

Sasha hums thoughtfully. “Do you want the short answer, or the long one?”

“Um. Whichever’s easier, I suppose. I mean,” he says, shrugging, “it’s not like we don’t have time.”

Sasha’s eyes light up with genuine pleasure at that; it seems that she doesn’t often get a chance to delve deep into the intricacies of magic, and is more than happy to go into it now. She even flips one of her journals open to a blank page, grabbing a stick of charcoal to gesture with when she isn’t using it to sketch out hasty diagrams for Martin to cast his eye over.

From the sounds of it – or at least, from what Martin chooses to take away from it – a lot of it comes down to will, intent, and practice. Sasha also mentions something about some people being better attuned for magic than others, or finding certain kinds of magic easier to pick up, but Martin figures he can’t do much about that.

The first three, though - they sure sound like something he can do something about.

He tries asking about invocations – he knows he’s heard Sasha using words to cast her black magic spells in battle and outside of it – and gets a somewhat noncommittal answer. They’re not exactly necessary, she explains, but they can be a helpful tool for focusing magic and directing pyreflies.

Then Martin makes the mistake of asking what pyreflies are. Apparently, Sasha doesn’t know. Apparently, nobody in Spira really knows. Except that they’re everywhere, and they’re heavily involved in magic, and that they have something to do with memories and the spirits of the dead. At this point, Jon wades into the conversation, and the whole thing turns into a high-spirited debate that Tim seems only too keen to drive forward by egging on both sides whenever there’s too much of a lull.

“They can go on like this for hours,” he whispers to Martin, a gleeful look of equal parts fondness and amusement on his face. “Sasha hates how impossible it is to prove anything about pyreflies. It’s driven her nuts for years.”

“And Jon?”

“Oh, he just hates an unsolved mystery. Doesn’t matter what it is.”

A lot of it goes over Martin’s head, really. But he’s come away from it all with what he needs, and now he just has to think about how to go about using it.

He kind of wishes he’d paid more attention back at school when the P.E. teachers started going on about using magic for blitzball. As it is, he’s retained almost nothing from any of those lessons about actual technique – mostly just hazy, half-remembered snatches of what they were supposed to be trying to do with it – but Sasha talking about using invocations as a magical focus gets him thinking.

He’s always enjoyed poetry, after all, and some kinds of verse really aren’t that far away from invocation to start off with.

So.

It’s worth an experiment, he figures.

About five or six days into their journey, the landscape starts to change.

It’s visible on the horizon ahead at first. The sheer cliff faces and rocky overhangs that have dominated most of the right hand side of their path start to fragment into something new, the brown rock darkening into something almost flinty. As their road begins to climb steadily upwards, Martin starts to see towering rock formations looming up ahead. The shape of them is indistinct at first, but as they inch closer and closer, he can make out lumpy pillars rising up into rounded, domed shapes near the tops, much wider than the base. Almost like—

“Ah, Mushroom Rock Road!” Tim announces. “Named by someone who was really hungry at the time, probably. There’s a Crusaders HQ not far from here, right up near the top of one of those ridges.”

“This where you get all your operations from, then?” comes Basira's voice from the back. There’s something undeniably disapproving in her tone.

“Only the ones we have to carry out where there’s no other people around,” Sasha answers, her steady, matter-of-fact tone a challenge in and of itself. “That’s why it’s so ideal up here. Besides, you know those kinds of operations aren’t the only thing we do.”

“I dunno,” Basira says doubtfully. “I’ve heard some things. Sounds like lately it’s a lot less about keeping Sin away from the towns and villages than it used to be.”

Tim lets out a soft, derisive noise. “Yeah, well, that would be the sort of thing you hear sitting around guarding priests up near Bevelle, wouldn’t it.”

“They don’t just go around excommunicating a whole arm of our militarised forces for nothing.”

“No, I imagine that’d be the heresy,” Martin hears Jon mutter under his breath with a roll of his eyes. A little louder, he adds, “Is this really an argument you two plan on having right now?”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning on it,” says Tim with a glint in his eye. “But I’m flexible.”

Jon makes a loud, exasperated sound.

“Well, if you do have it, do me a favour and have it elsewhere,” he says sharply. “I’ve already had enough of it to last a lifetime.”

Jon starts walking faster now, pulling away from the rest of them and closer to where Daisy is scouting the road ahead up front. After a moment of hesitation, Martin follows him. In a choice between listening in uncomfortably on some kind of political argument he knows nothing about, and dealing with Jon’s prickly, awkward silences… well, between the two, the silences are preferable.

Still, he can’t help muttering, “Not much love lost between the monks and the Crusaders then?”

Jon actually starts in surprise. Whether the surprise is more from what Martin said or from the fact that Martin followed him in the first place, he’s not sure.

“That does tend to happen when one of the groups involved decides to violate one of Yevon’s core teachings, yes,” he says after a moment with a mirthless quirk to his lips.

“Tim did mention something about them using a lot of machina recently, yeah.”

“Oh, good, then you don’t need me to explain anything this time. People have been excommunicated for less.”

Martin spares a moment to roll his eyes internally at Jon’s casual rudeness.

“Maybe it’s the memory loss talking, but it’s hard to believe this is really all because of the Machina War,” he says after a moment’s thought. He’s treading dangerous ground here, and he knows it, but. Who’s going to know the answer to these kinds of questions better than a literal summoner of Yevon, right? “I mean, it’s been a thousand years, and not all machina— were weapons even back then, surely. Right?”

Whoops. He hopes Jon didn’t notice his almost-slip there.

If he did, he doesn’t give much sign of it. He’s too busy giving Martin another one of those stares, like he’s busy trying to decide if this is the supposed memory-loss talking, or if Martin really is just that stupid.

“You do remember that reckless use of machina is the entire reason Sin came about in the first place, don’t you?” he says slowly.

Of course Martin doesn’t. The whole idea would be laughable if the reality of Sin itself wasn’t so horrifying.

It must show on his face, because Jon huffs impatiently and says, “What am I saying, of course you don’t.”

“What, like a divine punishment? Seriously?”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to dignify that with an actual answer.”

“You could humour me. Pretend like I’m a total idiot if it makes you feel better,” Martin says pointedly, letting some of his own impatience come through. That shouldn’t be too difficult for you, is what he doesn’t say. “Is that really why everyone thinks Sin keeps coming back after the Calm every time? I mean, if it’s punishment for something, how are you even supposed to get rid of something like that.”

Jon gives him another strange look. This one seems different, though. There’s the same old scepticism he’s come to expect, yeah, but also confusion – and something warier than that, too.

“Atoning for what we did wrong. Obviously.”

“Do you believe that?”

Jon hesitates. “As a summoner—”

“As a summoner you probably have to say all sorts of things, yeah,” Martin nods. “But do you believe it?”

At that point, with Jon gaping at him, the remainder of Martin’s common sense finally catches up with his temper. He fights the urge to drop his head in his hands and ask out loud what he was doing. Asking Jon, sent on a holy pilgrimage from Yevon’s main temple, if he believes what their doctrine teaches. Tim should’ve just left him face down on the beach.

Flushing a little – from embarrassment, and from the dread of saying something so obviously too far with no way of taking it back – he stammers, “Oh, I just realised how that sounded – look at me, a week ago I woke up on a beach with no memories and – and no idea of how I can get back to where I came from. It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone if the summoner’s not toeing the party line.”

Weirdly enough, Jon looks like he’s actually giving it serious consideration. Huh.

Martin probably should’ve guessed, seeing how close he is to Tim and Sasha, but maybe Jon really isn’t as much of a true adherent as someone in his position should be.

“Hm,” Jon says finally, the fingers of one hand fidgeting anxiously over the dark metal filigree on his summoner’s staff. “… Then, I believe that all of the histories I’ve ever read are full of gaping holes and no real answers.”

Wow. Martin really hadn’t expected an actual answer.

“That’s… weirdly comforting to hear, actually,” he offers, feeling especially awkward now.

Jon huffs in wry amusement. “You’d be about the only person in Spira to say so.”

As soon as the words leave his mouth, something flickers on his face, ending in an irritated, closed-off frown. “We should leave this topic be. Once the toxin wears off, you’ll remember how ridiculous all this line of questioning is.”

Back to business as usual, then, Martin thinks with a sigh. He knows well enough when he’s being brushed off and asked to forget like something never happened.

Well, he can keep quiet about it just fine – he’s good at that, usually.

But nobody can force him to stop thinking about it.

As though he doesn’t have plenty to think about already.

As the road underfoot stops being hard, compacted earth and starts being cracked, uneven rock of the same kind as the giant mushroom shapes looming over them, Martin plays with words inside his head.

It’s tougher than he thought, trying to come up with something that he’s reasonably sure he can hold in his head long enough to get it out in the heat of a fight, that’s also short enough to get out in a fight, that’s also vaguely within the realms of what he knows can even be done with magic. He thinks about it that night as they all rest in the shadow of one of those funny mushroom rocks, stubbornly trying to dredge up anything he can remember from any conversations he’s ever been on the peripheral of back home. If it’s good enough to even the odds in a ballgame or avoid a creepy stranger in a bar or whatever, it should be good enough for the fiends as well.

He gets so deep into thinking about it, trying to come up with a good enough rhyme to convey what he wants to do with it, that Tim actually asks if he’s alright at one point.

But by the next morning, he thinks he has something that might work. Something that’s worth a try, anyway.

He spends most of the morning going over and over it in his head, trying to work up the courage for it and make sure it’s really stuck up there all at once, and then he thinks: screw it. If he doesn’t try it, he never will.

Tapping Sasha quietly on the shoulder, he breathes in, and before he can change his mind he says, “So. I – want to try a, a thing, next time something tries to take a bite out of us, and I think it’ll work, but – if you hear anything, please don’t laugh?”

Sasha raises her eyebrows.

“A thing,” she says, though she at least keeps her voice down. “Sounds very mysterious. But of course I won’t laugh.”

“Great. Thanks,” Martin says, and goes back to trying to keep a lid on the anticipation threatening to boil over now that he’s decided that he’s going through with it.

The next things to come for them are a small pack of those sturdy, rounded fiends with big, thick armoured shells; easier to dodge their heavy hits with how slow they are, but a total nightmare for most of them to break through and do any real damage. They’ll do.

Martin focuses on Tim and Sasha, since they’re closest. He thinks of friendly blows striking heavier and harder, of enemy ones glancing off of invisible armour, and then he says his little made-up spell with as much conviction as he can muster.

It’s not his best work, it barely even has a proper meter, but something happens; a rush through his whole body, like clenching his hands into fists and then releasing them, physical but also not.

He doesn’t know if it works, if Tim and Sasha felt anything – he thinks he might see Tim shiver in surprise – because then he realises he’s stood still too long, and has to jump backwards to avoid being knocked off his feet by one of those charging balls of craggy armour.

But as soon as they’re all safe, he finds himself rushed by two grinning Crusaders.

“Martin!” Tim enthuses. He’s got a large, livid bruise coming up on one arm, and doesn’t seem to care a bit. “I didn’t know you could do magic!”

“What was that?” Sasha asks as soon as Tim stops for breath. “I felt something, but I wasn’t about to stop and try and unravel it when we were under attack like that. Some kind of strengthening spell?”

“Some – something like that, yeah,” Martin admits breathlessly, gingerly rubbing his bruised sides. One of the fiends barrelled right into him near the end; it kind of hurts to breathe. “Did it work?”

“Did it work, he asks,” says Tim in disbelief. “I’ve never been able to stick a dent in one of those bunyips before. I actually had to pull my axe out of one this time. Keep that up and I’ll be competing with Daisy before long.”

“When you said you were going to do a thing, I wasn’t expecting that,” Sasha adds. “Did you make that up yourself?”

Martin shrugs – slowly, so that he doesn’t jostle what he’s starting to think might be a broken rib. “Who knew a poetry hobby could come in this handy, right?”

“I think I’ve seen blitzers pull off something similar before,” Tim says thoughtfully. “Hit harder and shrug off hits easier, yeah? I played casually for a bit once, but I could never get the hang of any of the fancy stuff like that.”

“Because you’ve just never been able to do magic, Tim.”

“We’re not talking about my shortcomings right now, Sasha. My point is, Martin must be some kind of natural.”

They’re both looking at him with – Martin doesn’t want to think admiration, that feels too weird, but – something like that. Something – pleased, and warm, and – and as nice as it is to be under scrutiny for a good reason, to know he set out to do something to help and it worked, he can’t help feeling uncomfortable all the same. Like he wants to both run away and stay right there and bask in it all at the same time.

“I, I really don’t know about that,” he says. “I got lucky, maybe.”

“Take it from someone who’s never been able to do magic, that was definitely more than luck. We might make a guardian of you yet.”

That’s… well, it’s something, Martin thinks as Jon approaches the three of them to do his usual post-fight checks.

It’s definitely something.

Chapter Text

The first sign that they may finally be leaving Mushroom Rock Road and the Djose shoreline behind them is when Martin spots a small cluster of flowers growing near the base of one of the rock formations.

The tiny, delicate splash of colour comes as a shock at first; he’s grown so used to the same monotonous greys and blacks and browns of the barren sand and rock either side of the Djose road that for a moment he thinks he might have imagined it out of a desperate need to see any other colours.

But no: the flowers are very real. And they’re followed by more, along with the gradual creep of green grass on either side of their road. The road itself is changing too, widening on either side and going from uneven rock back to dusty dirt underfoot, the odd flagstone showing where it may have been a properly maintained highway once upon a time.

As they pass under some kind of natural archway, Martin thinks he glimpses some kind of pass down the road in the distance. It’s hard to make out from where they are, but the worn path looks like it splits into two, one leading up into some kind of high pass, the other down below, vanishing into shadow.

“This isn’t still Djose, is it?” he asks Tim, while Daisy and Basira consult the map.

“Nah,” Tim answers easily. “We’re getting close to the Mi’ihen highroad now. Actually, we’re practically on the doorstep already, if you count the Oldroad as part of the modern-day road. This is where the Crusaders really began, you know? Lord Mi’ihen walked the highroad all the way to Bevelle to convince Yevon that the legion he founded wasn’t some rebellion or whatever they thought it was, but another way for people to stand against Sin.”

Martin thinks for a moment about pointing out that Tim just offered up all of this information without being prompted, and then decides against it. Tim’s obviously decided that the best way to deal with Martin’s situation is to cover his bases by giving as much information as possible, and if that means he still thinks it’s likely that Martin hasn’t fully shaken off the effects of the toxin yet…

Well, Martin’s not going to complain.

“And that was… how many years ago, again?”

Tim opens his mouth, but surprisingly, it’s Jon who answers.

“Eight hundred, give or take,” he says, though he’s looking at Tim with a puzzled frown. “Is this your recruitment speech or something?”

Tim laughs.

“No, but thanks for the idea!” he says brightly. “Maybe I just felt like being a tour guide for five minutes.”

Jon mouths the words a tour guide to himself before rolling his eyes.

“Of course. Your true calling,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Of all the journeys to decide to play tour guide on, honestly…”

In the end, Daisy and Basira decide they should take the high pass. It’s slow going; the road twists backwards and forwards, winding its way through concertina-like, and the drop down to the other road below is high and steep. There are very few places along the way where any barriers built to prevent a fall are still intact. If Martin thought that being under attack by fiends was terrifying enough already, it’s nothing compared to the added terror of knowing that one wrong move could send any of them tumbling to their deaths off the side of a sheer cliff.

By the time they emerge on the other side of the pass, where the ground thankfully broadens out into something much wider and flatter, he feels ready to collapse from all the energy spent on nerves alone.

“Hey, chin up,” Tim tells him when he catches sight of how frazzled he looks. “I know this part of the road pretty well. If we keep going a bit further tonight, we might just make it to the travel agency.”

“You really wanna stop there?” Daisy asks, her mouth set in disapproval.

Tim raises his eyebrows.

“Uh, yeah, why not? They’ve got soft beds and walls to keep the fiends out. We can give our weapons a look while we’re there too, check that they won’t break on us halfway down the highroad. There’s literally no reason not to stop there. I mean, yeah, sometimes when the owner's around he likes to drive a bit of a hard bargain, but I’ve dealt with worse price gouging trying to get ahold of scribing supplies back up in Bevelle.”

“He’s not wrong,” Sasha says flatly, frowning. “This isn’t because the travel agencies are Al Bhed-run, is it?”

There’s a silence that makes Martin think that this is very much exactly because the travel agencies are Al Bhed-run. Whatever that actually means.

“I’m in favour of not having to worry about fiends for one night,” he says, after it stretches out long enough to become uncomfortable. “I can’t remember the last time I got a proper night’s sleep.”

“That’s three of us for sleeping in a bed tonight, then,” Tim says, still staring at Daisy with a faint look of disgust on his face. “Jon?”

Jon looks between Tim and Daisy, and sighs.

“They’re just people, Daisy,” he says wearily.

“People who flout about every law going,” Daisy mutters, her arms folded in a tight knot. She shrugs one shoulder impatiently. “It’s your choice. I can’t stop you.”

She might be saying that, but she also sounds like she would very much like to be able to stop him. Martin frowns, and looks at Jon, wondering what he’ll decide.

Jon only nods, seemingly very careful not to look at Daisy. “Very well. Then… we’ll stop by the agency. Places like that tend to collect news – maybe Martin can find word of someone he knows.”

Surprised to be remembered like that, Martin stares at Jon as he makes his way further down the road. Again, it’s not likely he’ll find anything at this agency – he’s about a thousand years too late for that – but the fact that Jon even thought of it keeps him rooted in place for a moment, almost too shocked to speak.

“I really can’t stand those warrior monks,” Tim mutters darkly at his side, bringing Martin back to reality. He’s glaring at the back of Daisy and Basira’s helmeted heads as they walk close to Jon up ahead.

“I know,” Sasha sighs, putting a hand on his shoulder briefly before she starts walking again. “But we still have to travel with them.”

Martin follows her, waiting a moment for Tim to fall back into step beside them. “Guessing this is another machina thing, then?”

“I see you’ve spotted the pattern,” Tim says with a hollow chuckle. “Remember who the Al Bhed are yet?”

No.

“Kind of. Not devout followers of Yevon, hm?”

“That’s an understatement. You’ll see for yourself when we get there.”

What Martin sees when they get there is the most eye-wateringly bright building he’s ever seen.

It doesn’t have the neon lights that some places in Zanarkand had, but it doesn’t need them. Even under the moonlight, the cheerfully clashing paintwork covering every inch of the outside blazes with colour. If the people who set up this agency were aiming to make their business easily visible for travellers on the road, they certainly succeeded. Signs fixed above the doors and windows proclaim the name of the place in letters at least two feet high, in what looks like multiple languages to boot – there’s one set of lettering he’s never seen before, sharp and angular compared to the rounded alphabet he’s used to dealing with. The words are brightly lit by some sort of floodlight beneath the signage, and Martin realises with a jolt that they’re machina-powered. Old tech by the looks of the light they’re giving off, but still – machina.

He hadn’t reckoned with how weird it would be to see a building using it again, even after only less than two weeks walking around Spira with just a campfire as a light source when it got dark.

Quiet coos and chirps float out of a smaller covered enclosure as they approach the main doors; they must keep chocobos here.

The inside of the travel agency is also lit by machina powered bulbs – Martin can tell straight away from the steadiness of the light. The décor in here is thankfully not quite as eye-searing as the paint job outside. Shelves line every available inch of wall space, all covered with what must be items for sale – swords and shields and other weapons, neatly labelled bottles lined up in rows, and other things that Martin can’t identify from where he’s standing. There’s a curved welcome desk near the back of the room. A young lady stands behind it, blonde and wearing goggles over her eyes even indoors, while an extremely tall, broad, muscular man with close-cropped blonde hair leans easily on the counter, chatting away pleasantly in a language Martin doesn’t understand.

The giant stranger turns when the front door closes behind them, still smiling with languid ease. He, too, has a set of goggles, but his are slung casually around his neck, giving all of them a clear view of his eyes; bright green, striking in the midst of a weathered face the colour of warm cedar wood.

“Ah, we have guests!” he says brightly, the words curiously accented but crystal clear. He steps away from the desk, opening his arms in greeting. “Welcome, welcome. And no ordinary guests besides, it would seem. It has been quite some time since one of my little agencies hosted a summoner and their guardians. You are all a welcome sight.”

Their host – for surely there’s no one else he could be – is certainly a courteous sort. It’s a little overwhelming, actually.

After a moment of struggling to process this little speech, Jon nods, looking quite bewildered.

“Thank you, I suppose,” he says, a great deal less courteously.

“You are quite welcome!”

Their host beams; apparently he’s not the sort of man to be easily thrown off.

“Now, introductions. I am Mikaele Salesa, proprietor of this establishment, and… let’s see,” he says, tapping a finger thoughtfully against his chin as he gazes down at Jon. “You must be… Jonathan Sims, yes? First summoner to undertake the pilgrimage in some years, as I understand it. Your guardians are welcome too, of course – under my roof, we can all agree to set silly differences of doctrine and lifestyle aside, agreed? Here, you may rest, recover from the road for a while without care. And if you do decide to purchase any of my wares while you’re here, I can promise a fair discount.”

Mikaele Salesa is all too obviously a man used to peddling a sales pitch.

“Do you charge for rooms?” Basira asks, unmoved by his carefully pleasant tone.

Mikaele chuckles.

“Ordinarily? Yes, of course,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m running a business, after all. But for summoners? No. Consider it my own little contribution to the cause. I’ve found it useful over the years to keep Yevon sweet with little gestures of good faith such as this – no offence.”

Whether some of their number want to be offended by this notion or not, it’s difficult to argue with the prospect of free rooms, especially when they’ve been offered so charmingly. The rooms aren’t the biggest in the world, but they’re warm and dry and the beds are almost decadently soft after over a week of sleeping on the ground.

Mikaele seems to be one of those people who gets genuine pleasure out of being a host; he takes great care to ensure they're all aware of where the bathroom is and how to obtain the hot water, and then leaves them to their own devices with a cheerful promise of food to come in the common area later, and an open invitation to call on him should they need anything.

It’s the sort of thing that feels like it should come with a catch. Or no, that’s not it; in this case, it’s more like they’ve already got the catch – walking the length and breadth of Spira with the intent of facing down Sin at the end of it – and this is the nice thing that comes with it.

And it is nice, to have a safe, well-lit place to wander in. So after he feels like he’s got himself settled enough, Martin decides to go exploring. The travel agency is the only other building he’s seen in Spira so far apart from the temple, and he’s curious to see what it’s like.

For the most part, it doesn’t feel too out of the ordinary. Well-lit corridors and rooms, nicely decorated for any guests that might stay a night or two. Martin wanders back to the front after a while, taking in the stuff for sale. Shields and rings that boast charms against poison; potions that claim to restore health or recover a voice that has been magically silenced; strange, crystalised substances that almost seem like super-compressed, dense blocks of ice or solid fire. Glancing behind the desk, he’s almost certain he sees a row of grenades, locked safely away in a sturdy-looking cabinet. Martin wonders idly if those are Yevon-approved or not.

He has a feeling that the machina parts mounted on the walls behind the desk definitely aren’t.

“See anything you like?”

Starting, Martin turns to find Mikaele watching him with a glass of something in his hand and a look of indulgent amusement on his face.

“Oh— no, I, I was just looking, really,” he says. And then, because he really can’t help himself: “Is that the steerpad for a hover you’ve got behind the desk over there?”

“Oh! You have a very good eye. There are not many in Spira outside of my own people who can identify one of those on sight.”

Mikaele’s smile takes on a shade of incredulity. Raising an eyebrow, he leans his elbows on the counter of the welcome desk, scrutinising Martin’s face for a moment. Now that he’s not towering more than half a foot over Martin, he’s struck by the fact that the man’s pupils seem to be spiral-shaped, spread out around the whole iris.

“You aren’t Al Bhed, are you?” Mikaele asks now. “Ghuf oui uin duhkia?”

“What?” Martin has no idea what that last bit meant, and shakes his head with a nervous laugh. “No, I – no.”

“Hm.” Mikaele leans back, looking contemplative. “I thought as much – you don’t have the look, after all – but it never hurts to check. Curious. There are also not many in Spira who would risk the wrath of Yevon through trying to learn more about machina.”

Swirling whatever’s in his glass with an almost meditative air, he asks, “Where are you from?”

“I… don’t remember, actually,” Martin lies. “Wherever it was got hit by Sin about – must have been a little over a week ago by now, and I got a pretty big dose of the toxin when it did, so…”

“Ah. That explains a few things,” Mikaele nods. “Though, not everything. Summoners, warrior monks, Crusaders – these are familiar. Mysterious amnesiacs travelling with them who can name machina on sight? Not so much,” he chuckles.

“Do you treat all your guests like puzzles, or am I just lucky?”

“Ha!” Mikaele grins, looking genuinely pleased. “I like you. Forgive me. When I’m not entertaining, I deal in curiosities. It’s a difficult habit to break. Do you know much of my people?”

“Not really,” Martin hedges, wondering where this conversation is going. Mikaele Salesa is a difficult man to read. “Only that Yevon seems to hate you for some reason, and you don’t seem to have the same weird aversion to machina that most people do.”

Mikaele breaks into a full-bodied laugh this time.

“I do like you,” he says with a wide smile. “In fact, in essentials you are correct; where Yevon seeks to turn away from Spira’s past, we Al Bhed seek to uncover its mysteries… and, in cases where we uncover something useful, to use them.” He takes a long sip from his glass, as if to punctuate his point. “As you can imagine, Yevon takes issue with this.”

“So that’s why Daisy was being so weird about it.”

“Was she one of the monks? Unsurprising. I would tread carefully around that one, if you aren’t already.” Drumming the fingers of his unoccupied hand on the counter, Mikaele shrugs, and straightens up. “Alas, I have work to do, but… Martin, was it I heard one of the Crusaders say?”

“Um –” Martin fumbles, caught off-balance by this tacit admission of casual eavesdropping. “Yeah?”

“Well, Martin, it has been a pleasure.” Mikaele tips his glass Martin’s way, before draining the remaining contents in one long swallow. “Should you remember where your home was and find that Sin has crushed it to rubble, or you tire of playing guardian to a summoner, I hope you will consider paying Bikanel Island a visit. You may find our way of life suits you.”

Martin can’t tell if the offer is serious or a joke. Either way, he has no idea what to do with it; he makes his excuses and chatters out something about it being a generous offer that he’ll think about, and then he beats a retreat back to the guest rooms, deciding that he’s had enough conversation with dangerously charming travel agency hosts for one evening.

He wakes in the morning feeling more refreshed than he has in at least a week. It almost feels like a bit of a shame to be leaving so soon. He’s sure he’s not the only one who’d benefit from the chance to get more than one consecutive night of unbroken sleep.

He has the feeling most of the others wouldn’t go for that, though.

Mikaele remains a generous host to the last, offering food for the road and assurances that they will find a warm welcome at any of the other agencies in Spira if they should ever need it.

“I travel between them from time to time to ensure that everything is as it should be, so who knows – our paths may cross again sometime. Hopefully when you are a few steps closer to achieving the victory you seek, hm?”

Their departure from the agency is brisk – Martin suspects that Daisy may be purposefully walking faster than usual to try and force as much distance between them and the building as possible. It’s unbelievably petty; Martin stares at Daisy’s retreating back and considers walking deliberately slowly, just to make some sort of point.

“Did you find any word, in the end?”

Martin almost jumps out of his skin.

“Oh–”

Jon – who has apparently picked this morning to decide to stop avoiding conversation with him – raises an eyebrow expectantly. Martin shakes his head, and gives himself a good mental shake while he’s at it, trying to speed up the process of reconciling that Jon just willingly started talking to him.

“No. Not that Mikaele didn’t have an awful lot to say, but it didn’t sound like he’d heard anything from anywhere that got attacked by Sin recently.”

“Ah.” Jon frowns, which is at least a familiar look on him. “That’s a pity. I thought maybe there was a possibility that— no, on second thought, nevermind.”

Jon has the singularly miffed look of someone whose brain has only just managed to catch up with their mouth.

“No, what? What were you thinking?”

Studiously avoiding Martin’s eyes, Jon appears to suddenly become very interested in the trailing end of his sleeve.

“Only that you’ve expressed certain… views on machina that only a certain minority on Spira tend to have, and…”

Wait, what?

“Jon. Did you think I was some sort of secret Al Bhed?”

“No,” Jon says, so quickly that there’s no way it could be anything else, “I simply – stop laughing, Tim – with your memories the way they are, I didn’t want to rule out the possibility.”

Sure enough, Tim is laughing so hard he can barely walk straight.

“Have you,” he snickers, trying valiantly to push the lid down on his laughter, “Spent more than five seconds actually looking at him? His hair is brown.”

“It could have been dyed. There are several ways you can darken hair using—”

“Okay, okay, okay, but he couldn’t have dyed his eyes brown as well—”

It’s not as if Jon’s theory is really much more far-fetched than the truth itself. But there’s also no way Martin can say that, not without his flimsy lie collapsing down on him like the house of cards it is. So he presses his lips closed in an apologetic smile as Tim delightedly allows Jon to argue himself into a corner for a few minutes, complete with an extensive and borderline impressive verbal treatise on the various dyes available in Spira for colouring hair. Only once this has finally run its course does Tim finally concede that, alright, Jon may have the tiniest fraction of a toe to stand on with covering all their bases, given that Martin allegedly still can’t remember where he’s from.

“I mean,” Martin says, as a peace offering, “To be fair, it wasn’t just Jon. Mikaele asked me the same thing last night.”

Jon turns to Tim with a look of near-manic vindication in his eyes. “See?”

Tim shakes his head, an incredulous smile still clinging to his lips. “I think you need to let this one go, mate,” he advises, surprisingly gentle with it. “Give Martin a chance for things to come back to him on his own for a bit, yeah?”

Jon sighs, his mouth twisting. “I suppose you’re right,” he says grudgingly. “Fine. I’ll say no more of it.”

True to his word, Jon doesn’t. But it stays with Martin for a long while down the road; that as ridiculous as it is, Jon doubling down so quickly on an explanation he didn’t have the slightest bit of proof for, there’s also something… touching about it, in a weird way. That between everything else he must have to think about on this pilgrimage, the responsibility and all the rest, Jon’s had a thought or two to spare for where Martin might have come from, how to get him back there.

Of course, it could mean that Jon’s just that eager to be rid of him. But...

Strange as it seems, Martin doesn’t feel like that’s it anymore.

Chapter Text

The Mi’ihen highroad, Martin soon discovers, is long.

The wide, flat dirt road with its odd patches of ancient flagstone stretches on, and on, and on, rolling gently, steadily downhill through acres and acres of green landscape buffeted every so often by a sharp breeze blowing inland from some unseen ocean. As they follow the road further and further south, Martin starts to notice more and more that the uneven set to the ground surrounding the road isn’t entirely natural. What looked like nothing more than an oddly lumpy rock formation on first glance looks more deliberate on a second look; stone that was once pieced together with careful intent by living hands, now lying abandoned and half-buried in grass and brambles and fallen tree branches.

When they pass by the first one that’s undeniably part of a building – the desiccated, hollowed-out husk of a building like any of the ones he’d pass on his way into work back in Zanarkand, with abandoned, empty windows staring out judgmentally like the eye sockets of a skull – he has to ask.

The answer is one he probably should have expected. The last remnants of the old machina cities, destroyed by Sin or abandoned after it appeared, left to slowly turn to dust and become nothing more than part of Spira’s landscape. He should have expected it, but it still sends a shiver through him – someone walking over his grave, the cold snap of some ghostly thing becoming very, very real.

If any part of him was still clinging to the faint hope that this wasn’t his world’s future, this puts paid to it: walking past dead building after dead building, seeing shades of familiar shapes and echoes of familiar places in each one. This long-forgotten place may not have been Zanarkand, but it was somewhere very much like it, once upon a time.

Is this really all that’s left of his city, too?

In spite of the constant sad, eerie reminders of the past surrounding the road, the highway itself is far from empty. Unlike the coastal path along the Djose shore, where they only passed by the odd Crusader on chocoboback, the Mi’ihen highroad is a main thoroughfare, and it shows. For the first time since arriving in Spira, Martin sees small groups of ordinary, everyday people passing up and down the road, families and groups of friends. Most of them seem to be heading south, the same as their little summoning group; Martin even sees a few bold folk smile and wave when they realise, or even stop dead in their tracks to perform the Prayer.

It seems like everyone in Spira knows what it means to see a summoner walking the roads. Martin wonders if Jon takes heart from that, or if it’s just another layer of pressure.

Martin wonders, too, about the safety of these people wandering the roads. It’s not as though there aren’t fiends here, too; less than they had to contend with on Mushroom Rock Road, or on the pass over the Oldroad, but Tim’s axes and Sasha’s magic have seen their fair share of use when Basira’s crossbow and Daisy’s greatsword haven’t been able to finish a fight almost before it starts.

“Isn’t it dangerous for people?” Martin asks one day, when they’ve walked far enough down the highroad that there’s nothing but road behind and road ahead and no sign of either Luca or Mushroom Rock Road at either end. He’s watching a young family go past on foot, one of the adults cradling a baby in a wrap against their chest. The sight gives him a spike of second-hand anxiety. “I mean, not everyone’s a guardian, or travelling with guardians, so – what do they do if they get attacked?”

“There’s options,” Sasha says. “You’ve seen people in carts or on chocobos; that’s a pretty sure way to avoid most fiends, since only the really fast ones can keep up with a chocobo running at full speed.”

“And,” Tim adds, “the Crusaders patrol this road constantly to keep the fiends away from ordinary people. Me and Sasha have done our fair share of patrolling up and down since we joined up. No one’d be able to travel otherwise.”

“Some people still might,” Sasha points out. “Some things are worth the risk of it all. Luckily it’s less of a risk with all the patrols around.”

“And they’re probably glad to see us walking round armed to the teeth just ‘cause they know they don’t have to worry as much,” Tim says with a short laugh. “The blitz season’s starting soon, so the road’ll be busier than usual with everyone heading to Luca.”

“Hang on, are you saying there’s a stadium there?”

“The stadium. Amateurs like me might get away with splashing about in the ocean, but the pro teams need a real pool.”

Which makes sense – of course it makes sense – but something doesn’t add up. Last time Martin checked, any blitzball pool needed a hefty amount of machina to power it. There’s no other way of keeping all of that water suspended in a perfect sphere for long enough – not unless talented black mages like Sasha are more commonplace here in Spira than it seems.

“Who’s playing?” he asks, hoping he can lead the conversation somewhere that’ll let him find out why Yevon relaxes its draconian machina ban for the sake of a ball game.

“Usual suspects. The Goers, the Beasts, the Aurochs.” Tim’s voice catches for a moment – barely a blip, but Martin notices all the same. “The Glories’ll be down from Guadosalam already, they’re always early to make up for the fact that the Al Bhed Psyches destroy them as soon as they end up in the pool together. I heard a rumour from one of the newest Crusaders – lovely guy, great with chocobos – the Ronso almost didn’t send a team this season, dunno what that’s about.”

“Oh, that was political,” Basira speaks up from the back, making them both jump. She looks thoughtful, drumming her fingers on the side of her quiver. “Didn’t get the details, but you know how Maester Montauk passed away earlier this year? It had something to do with that. Some kind of perceived insult against the Ronso by the temple or something. His daughter still hasn’t left the mountain to visit Bevelle since he passed.”

“Really?” Tim looks shocked. “Damn. Wonder what the temple pulled that pissed them off that badly.”

“Don’t look at me,” Jon says as Tim and Sasha both turn to do exactly that. “They were even more tight-lipped about everything than usual – with all the usual excuses. Private, personal matters, preserving the stability of the church during a difficult time – you know, you’ve heard them all before. It didn’t stop the rumours, but I never heard anything concrete.”

“Even with your connections? Something must have really gone south,” Sasha says, before she and Tim both swivel back to Basira.

“Like I said, I didn’t get the details,” Basira says, her look of contemplation tightening into a frown. “Hope it’s all blown over by the time we need to climb Gagazet, or we might have trouble.”

“The Ronso aren’t going to stop Jon from finishing his pilgrimage just because their Elder’s got herself into some sort of feud with the Maesters,” Sasha says, shrugging. “I’ve never heard of them being petty. Besides, if they’ve decided to send the Fangs anyway, that’s got to be a good sign.”

“Could just be a morale thing,” Basira argues. “They know how important the game is for Spira.”

“You mean, because it’s the only fun we’re allowed?” Sasha says wryly. “Yeah, I suppose that’d do it.”

So things inside Yevon aren’t as united as they could be, Martin thinks vaguely. The only fun we’re allowed makes him frown, though, realisation striking like a bolt of lightning. Blitzball isn’t just a game here, a thousand years out of his own time. Of course it isn’t. With Sin flying around everywhere, it must be the only thing most people in Spira have to get excited about.

Maybe even Yevon realised that too. But who gets to decide which machina are fine to use and which ones aren’t? The whole idea leaves a sour taste in Martin’s mouth.

“Do the Crusaders protect Luca as well, then? I mean, if there’s going to be that many people in one place, then… what if Sin shows up?”

“We wouldn’t let that happen,” Tim says forcefully. “That’s a big part of how we fight Sin – drawing it away from the towns and villages, especially Luca. Since the stadium’s there, it’d be left wide open without us.”

“Not always,” Basira frowns. “We get monks sent down here every so often to bolster numbers. A pretty huge boat was due to leave Bevelle not too long after we did.”

“Sure,” Tim says, not looking a bit impressed. “But that’s got nothing to do with protecting Luca and everything to do with Elias putting in an appearance at the tournament opening. Don’t pretend like we don’t both know that.”

Martin sighs, sensing that this is yet another time when Tim and Basira are going to butt heads. He tries to catch Jon’s eye, remembering how they’d formed a tentative alliance the last time it got really bad, and pauses when his eyes actually land on him. While the small crease between Jon’s eyebrows is normal enough, the way his shoulders have gone tense and turned his whole body into a rigid line is not.

Odd.

Basira raises an eyebrow, slowly. “Didn’t realise you were on first-name terms with the Grand Maester.”

“He doesn’t realise that either,” Sasha quips. “Tim’s right, though. If they’re sending your monks down here in force, it’ll be because Elias is on his way.”

“Maybe,” Basira says doubtfully, and falls silent.

“Will the Grand Maester actually be there when we get to Luca?” Martin says to Tim in a low voice.

Tim pulls a face. “Ugh, I hope not. Can’t stand him. If there was an award for the most boring man alive, he’d win it ten times over.”

“Boring’s not the word I’d use,” Sasha murmurs under her breath.

“Ahh, true. How about married to tradition? Buried in doctrine? Weirdly obsessed with paperwork?”

“That is still the Grand Maester you’re talking about, you two,” Jon says sharply.

“Yeah, and? You don’t like him either.”

“That—” Jon hastily looks away, clearly flustered; there’s still a tightness in his shoulders visible even under his giant robe. “That’s got nothing to do with anything, Sasha.”

Tim and Sasha exchange a look.

“Well, I suppose that in our official capacity as excommunicated heretics, we have already reached our daily quota of blasphemies,” Tim sighs deeply.

“Tim—”

“It’s unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. We’ll start up again tomorrow,” Tim continues with a wink.

“Mercy,” Jon mutters, rolling his eyes.

Martin wonders what sort of person the Grand Maester – Elias – actually is. One thing’s for sure: Martin thinks he could quite happily go his entire life in Spira without having to cross paths with him.

The rhythm of life on the road – or at least, life on this particular road – starts to become almost repetitive after a while. The getting up with the sun, the walking, the bedding down on the ground, even the fighting.

Of course, there’s nothing truly repetitive about fighting the fiends that manage to slip past the patrolling Crusaders to throw themselves at them, or about the ones that they throw themselves in front of to draw them off from nearby travellers who aren’t so well-armed, but – Martin almost finds he’s getting used to that, as well.

Getting used to the flow of a battle once it starts, to the way the fear still coils down in his gut every time, but in a way he’s coming to know, a way he can deal with. Getting used to spotting the openings for his small magics and reaching for that pull-push, clenched-fist feeling with words that spill from his mouth with more confidence every time, getting used to the idea of people hearing him. He figures out how to make the magic focus Sasha’s spells just that little bit more, make her fire spells burn hotter and her lightning strike faster, and the wide smile on her face when she realises what’s happened lifts his mood for the rest of the day. The first time he manages to blind a fiend with a swirling cloud of darkness, garbling out a half-finished couplet in a panic when he sees a towering dual-horned beast charging toward Basira with killing intent, even Daisy looks impressed.

So, yeah. He’s sort of getting used to it.

Getting used to this group of people, too: how they fight, whose strengths lie where and even any weak spots, sure – but also getting used to how they live.

How Daisy and Tim are natural morning people, while Sasha definitely isn’t, and Basira seems to be like Martin in that she’s only a morning person through many years of practice rather than by personal choice. Jon doesn’t seem to have any natural sleep schedule at all that Martin can make out, but he always crawls out of his bedroll in the morning with the dazed aura of someone who isn’t fully occupying their own body yet, stumbling through the morning routines they all have with eyes that are almost glazed over.

How Sasha gazes at the sad, broken-down ruins they pass with a burning curiosity that almost borders on longing; how Daisy, ever-vigilant, always holding herself ready to strike, still uncoils almost imperceptibly every time she turns and sees Basira guarding the rear; how Jon is surprisingly good at cooking, despite his assertions that he doesn’t actually know how to cook anything that can’t be done in a single pot and left to its own devices for a while. How Tim and Daisy, realising that they have in common a genuine love of the outdoors and being in it, have been doing their best to steadfastly ignore it, neither of them yet ready to acknowledge the way their banter has begun to soften into something less cutting, their eyes less full of contempt. How Basira will listen to Jon and Tim and Sasha with a quiet amusement glittering in her eyes.

It’s an odd feeling. Martin’s always squirrelled away little details about people, that’s just what he does, but – he can’t remember the last time he got so used to just existing around anyone else.

If it weren’t for the fact that he has the secret of who he really is and where he’s really from dragging around his neck… it’d be nice.

Eventually, one day, the constant breezes rolling over the highroad carry something else to them: the salty, briny tang of the ocean. Martin doesn’t think much of it until they pass by a tall statue of an armoured man standing proudly over the body of a fiend, his stone eyes gazing steadily down the distance towards a wide semi-circle paved in worn grey and sandy brown flagstones, leading to a precipice that drops off sharply.

And beyond it – the deep, wide blue of the sea, the sun sparkling off the horizon.

“There’s Lord Mi’ihen,” Tim says of the statue in an almost fond tone. “And the end of the road, too! I hope you’re all ready to kill your knees climbing down that endless staircase into Luca.”

“It’s the change in humidity that always gets me,” Sasha complains. “It’ll be even worse with all the crowds about.”

“You guys know how to sell a place,” Basira says, deadpan. “Come on. At least there’ll be an inn or something down there.”

When they reach the end of the Mi’ihen highroad, their footsteps clunking on the flagstones below a strange sound after so many miles of dirt road, Martin can’t resist leaning on the barrier by the stairs to get his first glimpse at Luca.

It’s weird, seeing so many buildings in one place again. It’s no Zanarkand – not by a long shot – but the sight of the colourful domes and spires clustered far below, the undeniable proof of so many people living on top of each other... it sends a bout of homesickness through him so strong that it feels like a physical blow. The distant sight of the stadium on the water in the harbour doesn’t help.

“You alright?” Tim asks him with a gentle nudge against one arm. “Vertigo get you?”

“Oh – no, nothing like that, um. Just memories coming back, I guess.”

“Oh.” Tim pulls a face in sympathy. “I mean, look on the bright side, that’s probably a good thing, long-term. You need a minute before we head down?”

Martin counts to five. Then he pushes off the railing, shaking his head.

“Nah, I’m fine. Thanks, Tim. Let’s get going.”

Tim exchanges another one of his looks with Sasha – Martin tries not to feel too annoyed by it – before the two of them shrug.

“Fair enough,” says Tim. “Down we go, then.”

Down they go then, taking it weathered stone step by weathered stone step into the city of Luca.

Chapter Text

Luca is packed.

Martin’s calves are still burning from the long climb down from the plateau of the Mi’ihen highroad, but Tim and Sasha lead them all down wide avenues and narrow sidestreets with an easy familiarity, weaving a path of least resistance in and out and around the crowds. It’s not a big city by any stretch of the imagination; it can’t take them more than about forty minutes or so to reach the round plaza that Tim says is the centre of the whole city. But if anything, its tiny size just makes it feel busier - there are so many visitors crowding the streets already in preparation for the blitzball tournament that they can barely get moved in some places. With all the flags and balloons flying in the air, it makes the whole place seem both much bigger and much smaller than it really is.

There's such a variety of people, too; folk dressed like the people they've been seeing travelling south down the highroad, yeah, but Martin can see a few Crusaders in the mix, along with a handful of people he thinks might be Al Bhed, going off of the goggles and the way they're dressed in fabrics and styles that look out of place in Luca's humid coastal climate. People from other parts of Spira that he's not heard mentioned up to now, either - pale folk who seem to favour elaborate robes, with pointed ears and hair in colours and styles that remind him of cool green moss or flowering vines, and toweringly tall, strong-looking folk covered head to toe in thick blue or grey fur, dressed for much colder weather than Luca, with cat-like faces and tails to match.

Martin tries his hardest not to stare as he passes, and tries equally as hard to pretend that he isn't straining his ears for any conversations in the crowd that might clue him in as to what people they belong to. Luckily for him, nobody in Luca for the tournament seems to care who might be listening in, so it doesn't take too long for him to pair up talk of Ronso from Mount Gagazet towering over everyone with the appearance of the tall, stoic cat-like people, nor a very awkward-sounding exchange between a food stall attendant and one of the pale, robed people with the name of the Guado and their forest city of Guadosalam.

He can't believe he's never seen any of these people back home in Zanarkand. They have to have existed somewhere a thousand years ago, too, that sort of stretch of time isn't that long when it comes to stuff like that. Was the city he knows really so isolated?

“Still got everyone?” Tim calls back cheerfully as they all cluster together behind him near the edge of the plaza. He squints over their heads, one hand raised as he counts them all.

“Still playing tour guide, I see,” Jon says to him.

“Oh, obviously,” Tim says, with undeniable delight.

Jon and Sasha share a long-suffering look together.

“So what’s first?” Sasha asks, with the air of someone trying to nudge things back on track before they derail entirely. “Find an inn for the night, or see what time the next ferry leaves?”

Martin squints up at the sun. Maybe it’s just him, but it already looks like it’s getting pretty low. Too low to think about launching a ferry to an island across the ocean, at any rate, even without things like the wind and the tides to consider. He mentions this to the others off-hand, and after a minute or so of weighing up their options they decide to split up and meet back at the plaza after the next bell.

Martin ends up with Sasha, making their way down towards the docking area to find any news about the next ferry to Kilika. The people of Luca must be familiar with the Crusaders; the people working down at the docks recognise Sasha as one of them on sight, and seem perfectly happy to talk. It doesn’t take long to find out that the ferry they need is busy restocking and changing the chocobos overnight to allow the ones from the last journey to rest, and isn’t due to leave until tomorrow morning.

Martin waits until they’re a good distance away from the ferry crew to lean close to Sasha and mutter, “Changing the chocobos?”

“You know, for the power room,” Sasha shrugs. “They have a team of trained chocobos and their handlers down in the hold to keep the turbines going. Probably two teams, actually, so that they don’t tire out, since the ferry journey to Kilika takes a couple of days.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I be? You know how fast those birds can run. It means the ferries don’t have to rely on the wind so much. Makes the travel timetable so much more reliable.”

Which would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say, if it weren’t being said about boats that are apparently run on chocobo power.

“What, you’re not saying you stick a bunch of them in some giant wheels and just let them at it or something,” he says, half-joking.

Sasha’s face says it all for him.

“No. You’re having me on, right?”

Sasha is adamant that she isn’t, but the mental image Martin has conjured for himself of the big yellow birds running at full pelt in some bizarre parody of a machina turbine just seems too ridiculous to be true. They’re still talking about it by the time they reach the central plaza again, Sasha laughing as she promises him that if he really finds it that hard to believe, she could probably sneak him into the power room itself on the ferry to see it with his own eyes.

She looks so pleased about the prospect that Martin doesn’t have the heart to remind her of what’s just hit him like a shock of cold water: that they’ve already reached Luca, as far as Jon promised he’d be allowed to tag along with them. Martin probably won’t be with the rest of them on the ferry tomorrow for Sasha to sneak him into anywhere. Just waving them off from the dock instead, wishing them luck.

The idea of being left in one of the safest places in Spira shouldn’t leave him feeling so bereft.

“Talking about the ferry chocobos?” Tim says brightly from where he’s materialised somewhere on Martin’s left. “I remember the first time my parents got me on a proper passenger boat I didn’t believe it either.”

“Oh no,” Sasha laughs. “Were the chocobos still on board by the end of that trip?”

“Crusader James, I have no idea what you’re implying,” Tim says in a grave voice. “Anyway, did you two manage to get the ferry sorted?”

“As if there was any doubt,” Sasha smiles. “Did you manage to get us a place to sleep sorted?”

“After a fashion,” Jon mutters sourly from where he’s been standing next to Tim with a now-familiar look of consternation.

“Hey! I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t even have to promise to take anyone to dinner this time.”

“Ah,” Sasha nods, with a knowing look. “He flirted with the receptionists again.”

“I didn’t have to!” Tim says with his eyebrows raised. “Once they caught sight of Jon standing next to me they were practically falling over themselves to find us somewhere with available rooms. It was kind of sweet, actually.”

“Sweet is not a word I would use for any of the situations we just found ourselves in,” says Jon acerbically.

“Yeah, which is why I was the one doing all the talking,” Tim laughs. “Anyway, I managed to swing us a place not too far from the sea front that says they’ll hold the rooms for us till sundown, if the other two haven’t found us anywhere better.”

As it turns out, Daisy and Basira haven’t. Tim leads the way down a series of winding sidestreets to a cosy-looking inn, small but with just the right amount of room to clean off any lingering grime from the road and take the weight off their legs for a while. That night, they all sit together in the tiny common area on mismatched cushions, poring over the map of the route ahead spread out on the table between them. Until eventually – perhaps inevitably, given where they are – the conversation turns to the upcoming blitzball tournament, and the teams that will be playing, until Tim and Sasha are dominating the table with a heated back-and-forth about strategy.

“Sash, I’m telling you,” Tim says emphatically, “it doesn’t matter how good the defensive line is as long as they’re good enough to get a ball to the strikers, nobody ever won a game on pure defence alone! Everyone knows it doesn’t matter how good your keeper is if you never let the other team near your goal.”

“This is why you are not a strategist, Tim,” says Sasha, who has more opinions about blitzball than Martin would ever have suspected of her. She takes a sip of her drink, and continues, “How do you expect to get the ball to your strikers if your defence can’t keep it when they’re holding it? If all they’re good at is passing but they drop it at the first tackle then your goal’ll be surrounded before you even know it—”

“Okay, but with a good passing arm on your defence and your midfield and a couple of forwards with good shots—”

“I’ve seen you play so I know this may come as a shock to you, but the name of the game is not to get a comedically higher number of goals than your opponent, it’s to prevent them from getting one more than you.”

“Sasha,” Tim sighs, with great disappointment. “Sasha. I love you dearly, but if that’s all there was to it then it would be a tear-inducingly boring game. Nobody wants to see a 1-0 game where the back line just shrugs off every tackle and swims lazily around the pool—”

This seems like it could go on for some time. Martin glances around their little table; Basira seems to be contemplating her glass more than anything else, but to his surprise, Daisy looks like she’s following the conversation intently. Jon, on the other hand, is sitting there looking as though he’s willing the ground beneath him to open up and swallow him whole.

Not a fan of blitzball, then. Well, they’ve got that much in common.

“Are you getting any of what they’re saying right now?” Martin says to him in a low undertone.

Jon glances his way with a look that manages to be both withering and long-suffering.

“Absolutely not,” he mutters, as Tim continues making his point. “I’m convinced they’ve been playing an elaborate prank on me for years. There can’t be this much strategy to something that amounts to just throwing a ball as hard as you can underwater.”

“—also, I submit it to you, if the number of goals doesn’t matter then why even have a top scorer prize in the first place? Your move, Sash.”

There is a gleam in Sasha’s eye that tells Martin that, yes, this is definitely going to go on for some time.

“Apparently there can,” he murmurs to Jon.

Jon pulls a face at the table. “Please just knock me out until they stop. I promise you, it’d be a kindness.”

Basira makes a soft, unguarded sound of amusement into her glass at that; she must have heard him. She catches their eyes, a silent acknowledgement of a shared opinion, and then rises from the table.

“I’m going for another round,” she says simply, and walks away.

“If you pin all your hopes on your strikers’ ability to shoot,” Sasha’s arguing now, “and the other team’s defensive line gets a couple of nap tackles out, it doesn’t matter if you’re fielding the top scorer in the entire league, they’ll be swimming rings around you for the rest of the match.”

Tim gasps. “I can’t believe you would use such language to my face. Sleeping techniques are cheap—”

Martin tries to follow the conversation again for a minute or so, but anything interesting that Tim and Sasha have to say about sleeping or withering techniques is lost under talk of spins on shots and goal clusters and player builds, and so he gives up after a while and just lets it wash over him. At least he knows he’s not the only person at the table who’s completely lost – though Martin suspects that in Jon’s case, it may be more of a wilful refusal to understand more than anything else.

Either way. It’s nice. Feeling like he’s allowed to be a part of something even without understanding it.

Then he remembers that he won’t be leaving with them tomorrow anyway. Not that any of them have said anything about it – not even Jon, surprisingly – but that just means that Martin’s going to have to bring it up, even if he doesn’t want to. Better than leaving it to the last minute, everyone remembering what the arrangement was just as they go to get on the boat.

“Guess I should get used to hearing this kind of talk, sticking around Luca,” he says, trying to keep the words light. He’s grateful for them taking him along this far, somewhere he has a chance of not feeling like a complete fish out of water. That’s what he needs to focus on.

Jon starts, his face scrunching in puzzlement.

“Wait – what? What are you talking about?”

Martin blinks at him. Jon looks… genuine. Sounds it, too.

“Well – it’s just, we’ve made it to Luca.”

“Yes?”

“So,” Martin says slowly, feeling lost now in the face of Jon’s obvious confusion, “I’m not a proper guardian, so… you know. This is me, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” Jon says, and then, “You’re staying here?”

It sounds like more of an accusation than a question. Thrown off by it all – this is not how he’d been preparing himself for this conversation to go – Martin pauses for a moment, the sound of Daisy now weighing in on the blitzball debate with some kind of point about the keepers being tougher than some soldiers or something catching meaninglessly in his ears.

“I mean – yes?” he says finally, bewildered. “You said you’d take me as far as Luca, and we’re here in Luca, so…”

“Did I say that?” frowns Jon immediately. He shakes his head dismissively the next moment, twisting in place now to face Martin.

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter – you could come with us. Wait,” he adds before Martin can say anything, “let me rephrase – Luca is safe, insomuch as anywhere can be safe. It’s the safest place in southern Spira, most likely, so – I would understand if you did wish to stay. But staying here by yourself, is that – is it wise?”

Martin raises his eyebrows. He’s learning now that it’s difficult to tell with Jon, when he’s being deliberately caustic and patronising and when he’s just being incidentally that way, but that doesn’t make it any less obnoxious.

“I know I’ve been hit by the toxin, Jon, but I’m a grown man, not a kid. I’m sure I can find my way alright.”

“Sorry, that’s not what I meant,” Jon says abruptly, the fingers of one hand twisting at the other. An accident this time, then. “What I meant was – the ferry’s not due to leave tomorrow until two bells after sunrise. That ought to be enough time for us to see if there’s any word around Luca of anyone looking for survivors of a recent attack by Sin. And if there isn’t anything – you can come with us. As a guardian. Officially, I mean.”

This hangs there for a moment, while Martin tries to wrap his head around the idea, with the sound of Sasha using her empty glass to explain some rumour of ancient blitzball players refracting underwater light drifting across the table.

“You’re serious right now?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Jon says, so honestly that it’s actually kind of disarming.

“No – no reason, it’s just… you didn’t seem all that keen back at Djose.”

“You didn’t seem like you knew what you were doing back at Djose,” Jon says with a pointed frown. “And being affected by Sin’s toxin on the road, I mean – anything could have happened. But you’ve been… surprisingly competent, actually. Even with the toxin. Tim and Sasha aren’t the only ones to have noticed your talent for magic.”

Jon pauses for breath, and breaks off to look at Martin and demand, “What?”

In fairness, Martin has been trying not to laugh for the past ten seconds or so. He’s not sure whether Jon was trying to insult him or compliment him, but whichever it was, he’s ended up doing a pretty awful job at both.

“Um, nothing, I just – has anyone ever explained the idea of mixed messages to you…?”

Jon goes quiet for a few seconds, perhaps trying to think about what it was he just said.

“Oh for goodness—” he mutters after a moment, cutting himself off with a sharp sigh. “Look, Martin, I’m saying that if you do want to stay with us, even knowing now what the road will be like – Tim and Sasha seem… fond of you, and I’m not opposed to it. I’m not forcing you, and you’d be free to leave at any time, but. You’d be welcome.”

This invitation might be even less graceful than the one Jon extended to him in the first place. But it also sounds sincere; no Tim dragging Jon off into a corner to wheedle him into it this time, no lingering exhaustion from pacting with the fayth. Jon’s asking because… he wants to.

The sensible thing would be to say no. To stick to the original plan, or what Martin thought was the original plan, stay in Luca where it’s safe and he could build some kind of life, forget about finding out anything about how he got here.

The sensible thing would be to say goodbye to the only people he knows in Spira, and let them continue ahead on their dangerous and difficult journey without him.

Put like that, it’s obvious. He can’t do that. It’s not that he thinks they need him around – not in a million years – but something feels wrong about letting them all walk off to challenge Sin while he stays behind and washes his hands of it all.

It’s the least he can do to stick with them.

“Well,” Martin says finally. “So long as you’re not opposed to it. I’d be glad to travel with you as a guardian.”

Jon looks – he looks almost pleased.

Maybe, anyway. Martin’s probably just seeing things because he wants them to be there.

Doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still feel like he’s actually made the right decision by ignoring the sensible option.

Chapter Text

Tim and Sasha are nothing but smiles when Jon tells them that he’s decided to take Martin on as a proper guardian. This goes some way toward quieting the part of Martin that’s still murmuring on about this being a bad idea, but Daisy and Basira are, as usual, more difficult to read. He doesn’t think it’s disapproval he sees in their faces exactly, but… it’s something.

Either way, they don’t argue against it. He guesses he’ll have to take that as the closest thing to approval he’s likely to get from them.

They rise the next morning just before the sun does, when the city is still and quiet, empty except for those who have no choice but to be up: sailors, bakers, the Crusaders changing shifts between the night guard and the day guard. Martin already knows that there won’t be any news of any kind about someone out there looking for him, but he allows the others to send word around via the receptionist at the front desk of their inn, and tries not to feel too guilty about the fact that they’re going out of their way for nothing.

He even wonders for a bit about coming clean. Just telling the truth now, before it all really goes too far.

Then he remembers what he’s already seen of this world, and what they believe about machina, and about Zanarkand, and – he knows he can’t. Not even just for his own sake anymore. Martin’s not sure what kind of effect it would have on Jon’s pilgrimage if it somehow got around that he was travelling with someone claiming to be from Zanarkand a thousand years in the past, but he can’t imagine it going down well with anyone from the Yevon priesthood.

So, he’s got no choice but to keep lying, really.

Not wanting to miss the ferry and set their journey back further, they make their way to the mooring point early. Since the stadium is set at the end of a long bridge stretching out some way to sea, away from the rest of the city, all the boats travel to and from the area right next to it, the piers and docking areas arranged around the edge in a curious sort of sunburst arrangement.

The ferry is still being loaded when they get there. They are informed of this by an exceedingly apologetic dock worker, scarcely a breath before she starts casting aside glances at each of them in turn and suggesting that maybe, if the Lord Summoner wouldn’t mind sparing one or two of his guardians to help, with them being so short-staffed with the preparations for the tournament underway, that would be a great help for allowing them to leave for Kilika on time.

Martin knows a plea for help when he hears one, and he also knows that look of borderline desperate stress in the harried worker’s eye. He steps forward to volunteer alongside Tim and Daisy, leaving Sasha and Basira to stand and wait with Jon near the boat.

With the three of them as extra help, there isn’t so much to carry. Most of the heavier stuff has been moved already, and the route between the storage area and the ferry dock is easy enough to remember even for someone who’s never been to Luca before. After the first couple of trips, they’re all more or less left to their own devices to carry whatever’s left of the cargo at their own pace – within reason, obviously. Still a departure deadline to meet and all.

So Martin is alone, two hands supporting the box wedged against his chest, when he spots a flash of a familiar greatcoat out the corner of his eye, the glint of light off the pommel of an absurdly large sword.

He does a double-take – it’s early morning yet, there’s no way he’s not just seeing things – but when he turns in that shock of maybe-recognition, carelessness making the box scrape the inside of one of his arms, there’s no doubt about it: it’s the swordsman from Zanarkand. The one who got sucked up by Sin the same as Martin did.

Martin quickly looks from side to side, and then readjusts his box before marching over to him.

“You! What are you doing here?”

“Not here,” the man says immediately, and nods behind him. “There’s a dock currently standing unused down this way; we may snatch a few minutes of undisturbed conversation, if we’re lucky.”

Martin thinks about saying that that sounds like a fine way of getting himself killed. But – as strange as his encounter with this man was, as strange as everything about him being in Zanarkand was, he’s never actually harmed Martin. If anything, the opposite is true. He did save Martin's life once already back there.

And besides, Martin wants answers.

He fixes the swordsman with a flat, annoyed look, just to make sure his feelings are clear, and then he sighs, shifting his grip on his box again.

“Okay, sure. But a few minutes is all I’ve got, alright?”

The man inclines his head, and leads him to the end of the dock, behind a tall stack of crates or something covered with a heavy tarp. Martin places his box down on the ground, and folds his arms, and waits for him to speak.

“I see you survived.”

“Yeah,” Martin says shortly. “Yeah, I did, and I have questions!”

“Understandably,” he nods. “I’ll answer what I can.”

That throws him. After… pretty much everything about the last time he saw this guy, Martin wasn’t expecting him to be so – agreeable.

“—Oh,” he says, deflating a little. “Oh, alright. Um, so – who are you? What were you doing in Zanarkand? Do you – do you have any idea what’s actually going on?”

“All fair questions, although not all of them simple to answer by any means. My name is Adelard Dekker.”

The man – Dekker – inclines his head with all the air of a formal greeting, before pausing to scrutinise Martin’s face. “I see that doesn’t mean anything to you.”

Martin’s eyebrows fly up. “Why, should it?”

“That would depend on how much you have learned about Spira since you arrived. As for what I was doing in your Zanarkand…” Dekker frowns, looking contemplatively out at the horizon. “I was looking for answers. Though I seem to have found nothing but more questions for my trouble.”

It’s one of the most non-answer answers Martin’s ever heard, but he’ll let it slide for now.

“How did you even get there?”

“The same way both of us left it: I rode on Sin. Of course, at the time I had no idea that your Zanarkand would be somewhere I could reach by doing so, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect it.” He fixes Martin with a look now, one that seems equal parts probing and pointed. “You are not the first person I have met in Spira to have come from a peaceful Zanarkand full of machina.”

“Wait, you mean…” It sounds absurd, way too big of a coincidence, but how many other people from Zanarkand could there possibly be washing up in Spira a thousand years out of time? “Did you meet my dad?”

Dekker arches an eyebrow. “That’s a rather curious question to ask for someone who has yet to give me his name,” he says evenly.

“Oh, come on, seriously? You – you had that whole – thing when you saw me back in Zanarkand, like, like you’d seen a ghost or something!”

Martin waves a hand impatiently to punctuate himself, letting out a short, sharp sigh. “Okay, okay, fine, you did give me yours, I guess… Martin Blackwood.”

Dekker’s eyebrows draw together, his mouth pressing briefly into a tight line before he relaxes, nodding as if confirming some conclusion he had already drawn himself.

“… As I’d thought in Zanarkand. Then, yes. I knew your father, though I haven’t seen him in many years. I was one of Gertrude Robinson’s guardians, the same as he.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Is it really so unbelievable? After all, you seem to have found yourself in a similar position.”

“No,” Martin bites out. “I’ve – I’ve seen that statue of him they had up in the temple, so I know you’re telling the truth about that, I just – it’s a bit too much of a coincidence, don’t you think? I mean, how did you even find me?”

Dekker gives a low, wry laugh.

“Yevon’s priesthood has wagging tongues, and it’s not difficult to follow the talk around Luca this morning about a man travelling with a summoning party, whose home was recently attacked by Sin, looking for news.”

The worst thing is that Martin can’t even argue with that, because it makes too much sense. He tries to think of one anyway for a moment or two, wracking his brains for it, before he gives up.

“… Sure. Alright. Then, why should I believe you?”

“You are going to be visiting the temples. My face and my deeds are easy enough to check for falsehoods, if that’s what you wish.” Dekker gives a one-armed shrug, regarding Martin now with interest. “Incidentally… what do you make of your summoner?”

“What, Jon?” Martin blinks at the sudden change in subject, all the other questions that were clamouring for attention on his tongue knocked clear out his head. “I mean he’s – fine, I guess? Bit of an arse sometimes, b-but I mean – no,” Martin needs to stop talking, or at least let his brain reel his mouth back in a bit, “that didn’t come out right. I-it’s all bark and no bite mostly, he’s under a lot of pressure. I mean – he’s got to go and fight Sin, for goodness’ sake, nobody who’s decided to do that can be a, a bad person.”

Adelard Dekker has an incredibly impressive poker face. Maybe that’s just what happens to you, if you live to fight Sin, tell the tale, and then decide to cadge a lift off of it years later just on the off-chance it’ll take you to a city that everyone else reckons shouldn’t even exist anymore.

“… I see,” he says with a thoughtful hum.

He reaches into his coat, and Martin tenses for a moment until Dekker’s hand emerges the next moment clutching a sphere. He holds it out to Martin, his other hand held palm-up to show that it’s empty.

“I have something for you, if you’ll permit it. A record of the past. It may answer some of your questions, but I ask that you guard it well.”

“What,” Martin says sceptically, “you mean – I can’t show anyone?”

“Ultimately, it’s your decision,” says Dekker steadily. “But if I were you, I would not show anyone the contents of this unless I was certain beyond all doubt that I could trust them. I know you haven’t been in Spira long, but no doubt you’ve already seen that those who follow Yevon hold… certain views.”

“Yeah,” Martin says with a mirthless sound at the understatement, “no kidding.”

“Yevon is careful to stamp out any truths that they find inconvenient. There are certain truths about Gertrude that they have tried extremely hard to scrub away in the fifteen years since she became High Summoner.”

Martin reaches out at last and takes the sphere. It looks old; it has to be old, if it’s from Gertrude’s pilgrimage. The surface of the sphere is cloudy, the shifting, liquid-like patterns within barely holding any of the blue colour he associates with video spheres like this one. It’s hard to tell if something this degraded will even still play.

“Is there really anything that earth-shattering on this old thing?” he asks, before carefully slipping it deep into the very bottom of one of his pockets.

“That remains for you to see, but there are those in this world who will think so. The doctrines of Yevon hold great sway over the minds and hearts of Spira.” Dekker leans against the tarp-covered storage crates now, arms folded reflectively. “Not so surprising, when they offer the only explanation for Sin’s existence, or for how it can be kept at bay.”

“What is Sin, anyway? I’m guessing since you’re giving me all of these dire warnings that you don’t buy into the it was sent down from the heavens as punishment for man growing proud -” Martin dips his voice lower for a moment, and then shrugs, says more normally, “you know, what Yevon seems to have gone with.”

Dekker looks like he almost laughs. Almost. He gives a huff of something that might pass for amusement, anyway.

“No,” he says, with a shake of his head. “But despite having stood against it with Gertrude when she called the Final Aeon, I don’t know for sure why Sin exists. Some dark magic gone horribly awry, or some natural phenomenon turned to evil purpose…”

With a visible effort, Dekker pulls himself out of what looked like a strong threat for a distant reverie. “That’s part of why I chose to seek it out and go where it would – in search of a true answer. As to how and why Sin and your Zanarkand share the connection we have both witnessed…”

He shrugs, a frown of true frustration crossing his face. “I only have hypotheticals for now, and I must beg your pardon, for I do not think I can even explain the shape of them yet.”

So even legendary guardians who’ve faced Sin have no real idea what it is, Martin thinks with disappointment. That is, if Dekker isn’t just omitting information. He seems like the sort of person who plays things close to the vest.

Not that Martin can really talk. Maybe that’s just the only way to have any chance of surviving in Spira, he thinks despondently.

“Do you think it carried us through time?” he asks anyway. “Between here and Zanarkand, I mean. I keep thinking about it and – it’s the only thing that makes sense, right?”

“Perhaps,” says Dekker thoughtfully. “It’s difficult to know what Sin is capable of. Either way – you should be very careful who you tell about your true origins. I assume that since Zanarkand has not been mentioned in any of the rumours I’ve heard that you’ve kept that to yourself?”

“I mean… yeah. Like you said – it’s pretty clear what Yevon would think of it all.”

“That’s wise,” Dekker nods, almost approvingly. “Then, I also ask that you do not mention my name, either. Being a guardian to a High Summoner comes with some unfortunate notoriety. I’d rather my whereabouts didn’t reach Yevon’s ears.”

“… yeah, sure. That’s fair enough, I guess.”

And it is – goodness knows Martin can understand why someone might want to avoid the attention of Yevon and everything to do with it, and he’s barely been in Spira for a month – but something about it seems odd. The idea of a legendary guardian purposefully going out of his way to avoid the church… people have told him that Gertrude Robinson was a controversial figure, which could explain why, but Adelard Dekker helped to bring about a Calm. It would be difficult for the church to touch someone like that no matter how much they rocked the boat, wouldn’t it?

“Still seems a bit weird, I mean – I get that you say you’re doing your own mysterious thing, trying to find out stuff about Sin that nobody else cares about knowing and all, but. You fought Sin and won, a-and you’re still here to talk about it – don’t you think Jon could use that kind of help?”

“He has plenty of guardians of his own, as I understand it. At this point in his pilgrimage, there’s no help I could offer him that he does not already have.”

Dekker pauses for breath, and then glances between the box at Martin’s feet and back to Martin himself, with the look of someone who’s just reminded themselves of something.

“Speaking of such things… don’t you have a boat to catch?”

“Seriously?” Again, the worst part of it is that Dekker’s right. It wouldn’t have taken him this long to carry his box across if he hadn’t run into the man, the others are probably wondering where he’s got to. Has it been two bells since sunrise yet? He doesn’t think he’s heard another bell yet.

“So is this it then?” Martin demands as he crouches to pick up his box again, readjusting to the weight. “Is this where you – vanish in a puff of smoke or something, never to be seen again?”

“Not quite. Despite what you seem to think, I do care about the outcome of the journey you’ve found yourself a part of. We will meet again.”

Martin lets that hang there for a second, and then he says, “You know that sounds more like a threat than anything else.”

A small frown chases its way across Dekker’s face. Maybe after so long purposefully avoiding Yevon – and most people on Spira by default – he just doesn’t realise how someone with a presence like his can come off, saying things like that.

“I’m sorry for that,” he says gravely. “Stay safe on the roads, Martin, until we next meet.”

When Martin gets back to the ferry, a wooden box in his arms and a secret sphere weighing heavy in his pocket, the others descend on him immediately.

“Where’d you get to?” Tim demands. “We were starting to think you’d fallen down a hole somewhere.”

“Oh, um, nothing like that, I just. Got caught on the way back by someone who thought they might have heard something about my hometown, you know?” Martin says, flustered, but also not entirely lying. “Didn’t – didn’t come to anything in the end, but. At least people’ve been listening to the word you all put out. Sorry if I held you up.”

Daisy lets out a sawn-off breath through her nose and turns to stride up the gangplank.

“Doesn’t matter. We’re all here now, so let’s get going.”

There’s no good reason not to follow her onboard, so they do. It isn’t long before the ship shudders to life beneath their feet, casting off and moving steadily further and further away from Luca and its blitzball stadium, leaving the mainland behind.

Martin, leaning on the railing up on deck, watches the city growing smaller and smaller in the morning sun as the ferry pushes on out into the open sea. Kilika and its temple are ahead of them; but he keeps turning the encounter with Adelard Dekker over and over in his mind, wondering at how one conversation could have somehow made things even less clear than they had been to start with.

Chapter Text

Martin’s never been as far out onto open water before as the ferry is taking them now. The constant swaying and rocking of the boat beneath his feet takes some getting used to, as does the fact that the wind and the sun both seem stronger out here, too. A sharp breeze blows constantly over the deck, tinged with the faint, arid tang of salt, and the sun beats down bright enough to make looking at things almost painful, with so much light glaring off of them. He can see why one side of the deck’s been rigged up with so many cloth canopies, providing at least some shade against the sun.

Still, in spite of how weird it is to feel the floor moving under him the whole time, there’s something a little exhilarating about the sound of the waves breaking against the prow and the call of the seabirds overhead. It’s difficult not to feel in high spirits, with a clear destination in mind and the wind tugging at his hair as he leans on the rail and watches the ocean part around the boat below.

He's doing better than poor Basira is, at any rate. She hasn't lost her breakfast just yet, but every time the deck rolls a bit lower or higher than usual, a distinctly nauseated look passes over her face. Martin wonders vaguely if they have anything for seasickness in Spira, or if she's just going to have to grin and bear it. She doesn't show any sign of abandoning her post to go sleep it off below deck, at any rate.

Which is probably down to the fact that Jon’s presence on board is causing a bit of a stir. There aren’t too many people heading to Kilika, but the few who are seem to be making a point of wandering over to try and talk to him at least once during the first couple hours of the journey, only slightly dissuaded by the presence of Daisy and Basira standing nearby. It sends a stab of annoyance through Martin that he isn’t sure he wants to examine too closely, a half-formed thought that strays uncomfortably close to something like, why should they all be bothering Jon like that anyway?

Really? he thinks at himself. This is the time and place you want to suddenly get jealous?

Martin fixes his eyes on a distant splash of white sea foam where something, maybe a dolphin or two, is breaking the water’s surface. You hardly know him, and there’s more important things to think about, he reminds himself firmly, and he watches the probably-dolphins leap in and out of the brilliant blue and does not let himself stew in petty feelings about a handful of well-meaning strangers.

The flow of people must stop eventually; at one point or another, when the sun is really beginning to get high in the sky and standing in the middle of the deck becomes a surefire way to get heatstroke, Martin looks up to find the main deck mostly empty and Jon, Daisy, and Basira standing nearby, taking shelter from the sun under the same worn, faded canopy as he is.

Jon exchanges a few words quietly with the other two, quiet enough to be lost under the whistling of the wind and the sound of water being churned up by the ferry wheels, and then he leans against the rail with a long sigh, the sort that shrinks his whole body on the exhale.

There’s an odd look on his face, as he gazes out to sea. Distant and remote, removed elsewhere.

Martin couldn’t say why, not exactly, but it’s a little unsettling. He glances Jon’s way a few times, and when that strange, far-off look shows no sign of going anywhere, he sidles closer to him. He’s just checking on him, that’s all. If Jon really wants to be left alone, Martin can go away.

“Everything alright?”

“What?” Jon very visibly comes back to reality, gaze jarring back into focus. “Oh – yes, I was just thinking. I haven’t had much time for that so far today.”

There’s something in Jon’s tone that’s skirting around a pointed edge, but he hasn’t told Martin to go yet.

“Mm, you did seem pretty popular, back there.”

Jon shoots him a dubious, flat look at that. Maybe he thinks Martin’s poking fun – and well, maybe Martin is, a little, but not at Jon, exactly. Not really.

“It’s not me they’re interested in, really,” Jon says with a roll of his eyes. “It’s what I represent.”

“You mean, being a summoner and everything?”

“No, Martin, I mean being a blitzball player. Of course being a summoner,” Jon scoffs.

Martin waits; the acidity is at least less unsettling than the absent look Jon had earlier. A small sigh escapes Jon, his voice softening as he says, “It’s… become a rare sight in Spira, this last century or so.”

“Huh,” Martin says, considering this. “I mean – Mikaele did say something like that, back at the travel agency. Something about you being the first to pilgrimage in a while.”

Surprise flashes across Jon’s face for a moment before he recovers.

“Mm, he did, didn’t he,” he agrees, his fingers picking now at a loose flake of paint coming up from the railing. “It’s… it’s understandable, really. Even without the prospect of – of facing Sin at the end of it all to consider, the roads are far more dangerous than they used to be. More fiends around than in the past, and stronger, too.”

Martin frowns. He hadn’t thought about it until now, but like the creeping, acrid smell of smoke that burns your nose right before you realise there’s a fire, Jon’s words give shape to another everyday horror of Spira: after a thousand years under the tyranny of Sin, the number of unquiet dead would only keep rising, until they outnumbered the living. A summoner’s job has only become more and more difficult over the years, is what Martin’s hearing.

“So what made you go for it?” he wonders. “You – knowing all of that, you must’ve been plenty scared too, right? Even knowing you’d have two terrifying warrior monks along to guard you.”

“Oh, Daisy and Basira aren’t—” Jon starts on reflex, and then stops with a quiet, wry sound of amusement. “No, I suppose you’re right. They can be rather terrifying at times.”

“Or all the time.”

“Ha, perhaps,” Jon shrugs. “I suppose I’ve simply got used to them. But I grew up in the temple, so maybe I have more of a tolerance for warrior monks than most.”

Martin wonders at that – Jon growing up in the temple, what that must have been like, how it came about. He wonders, with a sudden lurch of unease in the pit of his stomach, if maybe Jon’s parents died young.

“To answer your real question,” Jon’s saying now, “I… there’s, there’s a lot of reasons, but I suppose the real one is that at some point I got sick of just – sitting there and doing nothing. And I had the training, so… there was no true reason not to. Not really.”

“You need a lot of training, then?”

“Well, you need a certain aptitude for magic before they even consider making you an apprentice,” Jon explains, sounding a little relieved to be asked something based in concrete fact. “Then you have to prove you can perform the Sending – not everyone can, even if they’re an extremely talented white mage to begin with. And even after an apprentice decides to undertake the pilgrimage, if they can’t manage to make it through the pact with their first fayth, they’ll never become a fully-fledged summoner. Tim wasn’t exaggerating about that one.”

“Wow. No wonder there’s fewer summoners out there than there used to be.”

Martin can’t help but wonder, though: what does that means for Spira, if the only fleeting hope they have of a world without Sin is gradually being snuffed out like this? Maybe that's why the Crusaders have shifted the focus of their struggle against Sin in a way that’s completely severed all the ties they ever had with Yevon. They must have thought that something had to give.

“Mm,” Jon frowns, and hesitates a moment, finally knocking away the loose flake of old paint he’s been worrying away at. “You’ll never hear the higher-ups among the clergy actually say so, but… you can tell they find it concerning. The hope of another Calm is what keeps a lot of people going.”

“Even knowing it won’t last forever?”

“Even then. So you see, that’s what all of that fuss was about earlier. I can’t blame them for it, but still, it’s…”

Jon trails off and goes silent for a moment, his face going through a series of interesting twists and turns as he wrestles with trying to find the right word.

“You can say ‘exhausting’, I won’t tell anyone,” Martin says conspiratorially.

Jon scowls, but he also doesn’t argue.

“I’m not what you’d call a people person,” he says stiffly.

“I never would’ve guessed,” Martin laughs. “You might have to get used to pretending to be, though. I mean, just think of all the crowds you’ll have to dodge when you do bring the Calm.”

Jon’s scowl compresses in on itself for a second, his lips pressing together, before his narrowed eyes suddenly widen again. He opens his mouth a couple of times, like he wants to say something, before just shaking his head and looking back out to sea with a small, barely-there puff of air.

“After fighting Sin, I don’t think I’ll be in much of a state to be dodging anything,” he says in a low voice. He turns back to Martin with a well-worn look of scepticism. “And – you’re being rather confident, aren’t you? Saying when?”

“What, you don’t think we should be optimistic about our chances?”

“We’re still –” Jon starts, and then gestures out at the ocean in place of the rest of that sentence. “There’s still a long way to go, you know,” he settles on.

“Yeah, I know, but – you’ve got to keep yourself going somehow, right?” Martin asks. “Give yourself something to look forward to when it’s over? Even if that something is just finding the most deserted island in Spira to hide on.”

Jon almost looks like he wants to laugh, then. What he actually does is shake his head again, and say something about going to seek out Tim and Sasha below deck, before advising Martin not to stay out here for too long in the glaring midday heat.

Which is fine, except that Martin’s left with the nagging feeling that he might have said something wrong, somehow.

Of course, Jon’s never been shy about telling him all the other times that he’s said something that would have people in Spira raising eyebrows, so it might just be nothing, but –

Even so, the feeling stays.

Time on the ferry passes. After so long spending most of each day walking, it’s a little strange having nothing to do but let the time go by and wait to arrive at their destination, but somehow, they manage to fill it. Tim seems quite preoccupied with the discovery that the Luca Goers are sharing the ferry with them, making the trip to Kilika temple to pray for victory in the upcoming tournament; according to him, while the team may field some of the best players in the league, their attitude stinks. Mid-afternoon, Sasha makes good on her promise to show Martin the power room – unbelievably, it really is full of giant wheels, each kept spinning by a running chocobo. The smell of the place is pretty terrific, with so many of the birds in one room below deck like that; Martin doesn't manage to last very long in there.

Even just sitting below deck as the boat creaks and rocks over the waves is strangely soothing, in a way. On the other hand, just sitting there means that Martin is reminded of the cool weight of Dekker’s sphere still sitting heavy in his pocket, of whatever secrets or whatever answers it might contain that he still hasn’t had a chance to watch yet.

He finally gets his chance that night, after sundown.

It’s a clear night, warmer than he would have expected being surrounded by so much ocean, with a blanket of stars shining brilliantly overhead. That’s one thing Martin’s noticed pretty much every night since arriving in Spira; just how many stars there are that he’s never seen before, living in Zanarkand where the city lights blot out all but the brightest ones. When the others begin drifting below to find their bunks for the night, Martin makes excuses to stay above deck to stargaze for a little longer, seeing as how this might be the only chance he gets for it without also having to worry about anything trying to take a bite out of him during the night.

He does stargaze for a little bit, sitting on the weather deck above the enclosed helm and wondering at how if he searches for long enough among all the extra stars up there, he can still find the familiar shapes of the few patterns he does know. But soon enough – after a quick peek over the railing to see if there’s still anyone else hanging around on the main deck – Martin draws out the battered old sphere from his pocket and settles down with his back against the railing to watch it.

It takes a moment or two just to fire up; fifteen years is a long time to expect a sphere to hang on to all the recorded memories inside it without degrading, not without the aid of a machina. But eventually the image within sputters to distorted, jittery life.

It’s badly damaged. The image is grainy and jumps every few seconds, and every few words the audio drops out entirely or turns into something garbled and unrecognisable for a second or so. Martin watches closely, trying to make it out; it looks like it was recorded on the very end of a wooden pier, where an elderly woman with the sharp eyes he remembers from Gertrude’s statue in Djose temple sits in a kneeling position, adjusting the position of the sphere on top of whatever it’s resting on.

“… that should do,” she says finally. She has a very severe voice. “Very well. Kilika— of the Yevon Calendar, Gertrude Robinson recording.”

“Why are you recording so many of these?”

With a start, Martin realises that he knows that voice. It’s about fifteen years younger, but it’s unmistakably Adelard Dekker’s.

“If there is one thing— experience have taught me, it’s that knowledge is a useful weapon, Adelard,” Gertrude says now; when the image jumps, Dekker’s legs and the lower part of his torso are visible. He looks like he’s wearing a similar uniform to Basira and Daisy.

Gertrude continues, the recording stuttering every few words: “Certainly— Yevon would approve of, but— all the more reason to preserve some sort of record of this journey, in the hopes that it will aid someone with good sense in the years to come. No doubt if I do succeed in defeating Sin, the temple in Bevelle will spin its own version of ev— would like to have some record of the truth.”

“I see,” Dekker says cautiously, settling himself on the end of the pier next to Gertrude. On the sphere, he has less grey in his hair than Martin remembers, a few less lines on his face. “And how do you plan on— sure that all of th— survive long enough to make it— those who could use them?”

The quality on this thing really is horrendous, Martin thinks to himself. What has Dekker been doing with it all these years, drowning it in acid?

On the sphere, Gertrude’s saying, “I am giving the matter some thought. Perhaps our Guado friend could make himse—seful, seeing as how the keeping of rec— his own area of expertise. No doubt if I did not make these recordings, he would beg me to do so of his own accord.”

Even through the grainy playback, Dekker’s scepticism is palpable. “Do you trust him that much?”

“I haven’t lived this long by being overly trusting. But insomuch as the preservation of information goes, yes. The Guado kee— not even the Maesters of Yevon are permitted to enter, much less anyone else in Spira. I should kn— to gain entry enough times myself.”

Dekker mutters something then that is almost entirely obscured by static, but Martin’s ears catch “Zanarkand” and he holds his breath.

“Yes, that is quite the mystery, isn’t it?”

“Do you believe he’s telling the truth?”

“If he isn’t,” Gertrude says briskly, “we’ll know soon enough— of the toxin wear off. And if he is… then we have an— to uncover something new about the nature of Sin, and of— first appearance in Spira. Not information I want finding its way into Yevon’s hands. No, either way, I think it’s best that he stays where we can see him.”

The Dekker on the sphere folds his arms. “I understand that. But Ger— far as to make him your guardian – is that the right thing to do?”

Lines of distortion ripple across the sly expression crossing Gertrude’s face. “I thought it a neat solution to the matter of the cloisters, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I know yo—ow you don’t care a single thing for any of the precepts,” Dekker says pointedly, the long-suffering note in his voice undiminished by either time or distortion. “Wearing that machina weapon openly in the temples…”

The degraded quality of the sphere turns Gertrude’s short bark of a laugh into something that almost makes Martin drop the sphere in his rush to cover his ears. He barely catches whatever Gertrude’s saying about a gun and having a reputation to maintain, only managing to focus back on the increasingly gritty-sounding audio in time to hear her say, “I’m afraid the respectability your presence grants me only carries me so far.”

“Unlike your enjoyment of mocking that respectability, you mean?”

“Nonsense. Now come, before the other two return I did want to pick your brain about the matter of the rumours we heard passing through Luca.”

The picture on the sphere is more distortion than actual image at this point, but the deep frown on Dekker’s face is clear enough. “Regarding— Keay woman you said— dealings with in the past? It soun— npleasant business. An unclean death su—”

The jumping around is getting worse, the figures of Gertrude and her guardian on the sphere little more than grainy shadows obscured by bubbles by this point. Martin strains his ears enough to hear Gertrude say something about the rumours troubling her, something about unsent and research and a few mentions of the word pyreflies, but too much of it is a scrambled mess for it to make any sense.

Then the sphere finally powers down, not with the smooth hum that Martin expects but with an odd fzt-ing noise, and there’s no noise but the sound of the ocean lapping against the sides of the boat and the rustling of the sailcloth in the night air.

Martin stares at it for a few moments.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he mutters to himself, pulling a hand down his face. He thinks about powering the sphere up again and having another view, but he really didn’t like the noise it made when it powered down just now. He has a feeling that this one doesn’t have that many plays left in it.

Okay then, he thinks, then think about what you’ve found out. If nothing else, that Gertrude Robinson was a ruthlessly pragmatic sort. He’d guessed as much from what Tim said, but… there’s something different, somehow, about hearing for himself the way that Gertrude talked about people. Not just his dad, but whoever her Guado guardian was, the one who knew about recordkeeping.

Is that what Dekker wanted Martin to get from this? That the answers to all their questions might be in some hidden library that not even Yevon can get into? Martin’s not sure how that’s helpful, seeing as how by her own admission not even Gertrude, with all her pragmatism, was able to get a look at it. Then there’s the whole garbled mess at the end, with the pyreflies and something about some sort of key woman in Luca, but Martin can’t figure how that fits into anything at all.

It must do somehow, though. Adelard Dekker doesn’t seem like the sort of man who gives things away unless they have some sort of purpose. At least the sphere proves one thing beyond any doubt: that Dekker wasn’t lying about what he said in Luca. Maybe that’s all it was really for.

Somehow, Martin doubts it.

He goes over it once or twice more in his head, and then he slips the sphere back into his pocket with a sigh, rubbing at his eyes. It’s really too late to think about all this stuff; or at least, too late to think about trying to figure it all out tonight.

They’re going to Kilika temple tomorrow, anyway. What better place to try and gather more information about a High Summoner and her guardians?

Chapter Text

The ferry docks at Kilika Port around mid-morning the following day.

To Martin’s surprise, the little port town is constructed almost entirely on the water. Wooden walkways and jetties wind their way steadily towards the beach and the main bulk of the island; it's a lively place at this time of day, with children playing blitzball in the shallow water around the town and stallkeepers busily hawking that morning's wares as they pass through a large, open communal platform that must serve as the town market. The winding walkways take them past round houses with thatched roofs and colourful wall hangings, supported on platforms made of the same wood, with strong, thick staves driven deep into the seabed below to hold the weight. The shallow water is a bright, crystal-clear blue as they make their way off the ferry and follow the weaving path towards the lush green jungle visible further inland.

The spike in temperature hits Martin like a hover going at full speed almost as soon as he’s off the boat. It only gets worse as they get closer to the beach; he soon feels like he’s about to sweat right through every item of clothing he’s wearing, and a quick glance at the others shows him that he isn't the only one. Sasha takes her scarf off, whispers a blizzard spell in its direction, and begins wafting herself and Tim with it every few steps in some attempt to cool down. Even Daisy and Basira are looking uncomfortable crammed inside all of that armour.

As for Jon, Martin’s surprised he hasn’t keeled over from heatstroke already under that giant, heavy robe of his.

“Is this normal?” he asks, draping his discarded jacket around his neck in a futile attempt to cool down while still keeping the worst of the sun off. “I mean, I’ve heard it’s cooler out at sea, but should the temperature really have gone up this much?”

“The fayth here’s tied into the fire element in the same way the one at Djose is linked to thunder,” Sasha tells him, still wafting her icy scarf back and forth in the direction of anyone who’s close enough to benefit. “Kilika’s nice and toasty all year round even by tropical island standards.”

“I feel like I’m roasting to death.”

“Oh, I’m definitely melting,” Tim agrees, a strained note edging his amiable voice. “Right, you know what? Time out everyone, let’s get rid of a layer or two before we head into that jungle. The last thing I wanna deal with is any of us getting heatstroke on top of all the fiends in there. You too, Jon.”

Jon bristles somewhat at being singled out like this, but in Tim’s defence, Martin’s pretty sure he saw a look of hesitation on Jon’s face not two seconds earlier. This in spite of the sweat beading along his hairline.

“Oh, very well,” he says sourly. “I suppose it’s only practical.”

“Yes,” Tim nods sunnily. “Yes it is.”

The outfit Jon has on under that stiff and heavy outer robe looks barely more breathable than the robe itself – there’s some kind of jacket with panels of embroidery that Martin thinks must be just as uncomfortable in this heat, for starters – but whether out of stubbornness or some sense of propriety or both, Jon makes no move to remove it, even as the rest of them busy themselves trying to configure their outfits into something as cooling as possible.

“Let me know if anyone could use a water spell to cool off,” Sasha says as she ties her hair back out of her face with her scarf. “Consider it my gift to you all.”

“Shouldn’t you save some of that magic for the fiends?” Basira asks her with a raised eyebrow. “We could probably use a few fire spells in there.”

“I know my own limits,” Sasha tells her briskly, and aside from a noncommittal hum from Basira and a side glance from Tim that Martin can tell Sasha pretends not to see, that’s the end of the matter.

The way through the jungle is hot and sticky and full of insects, though the path is at least well-maintained. A wide road paved with evenly sized stones of a pale grey colour leads the way toward the temple, and Martin’s relieved to see such a clear path ahead of them. The last thing they need is to get lost in some kind of tangled green maze. The fiends here seem weaker on the whole than any of the ones they had to face further north on the mainland, too. If it weren’t for the oppressive heat and the sluggish humidity in the air that almost has Martin feeling like he’s breathing water at times, it’d seem like a much easier road than any of the ones they travelled on between Djose and Luca.

“Don’t let down your guard that easily,” Basira warns. “I was talking to some of the ferry staff on the way here. Apparently there’s been Sinspawn sighted in these woods not so long ago.”

“Sinspawn?” Martin mutters to Tim warily.

“Mega-fiends, basically,” Tim mutters back. “They drop out from Sin’s body wherever it goes. Nightmare to deal with.”

“And the regular ones aren’t?” says Sasha, amused. “Still, I wonder if Manuela’s heard.”

“The Crusaders’ highest-ranking commander,” Tim explains on seeing Martin’s look of confusion. “If there’s Sinspawn crawling around anywhere, she’ll want to know about it. But she probably already does. Or the local captain will do, anyway.”

“And why does the leader of the Crusaders wanna know about any Sinspawn sightings?” Basira asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Come on, you know as well as I do that leaving any of those things wandering about where anyone could run into them is a bad idea," Tim says easily, raising an eyebrow right back. "Suspicious, aren’t you?”

Basira chooses not to dignify that with an answer, but the dubious look she shoots at Tim before she goes back to watching the jungle around them says it all for her.

The forest road ends at last at the foot of a zig-zagging set of old, worn stone steps, criss-crossing back and forth up the side of a steep hill. It’s a job to climb them all; the heat of Kilika island seems even more intense here than it was when they first stepped off the ferry. They must be getting close to the temple now. At least, Martin hopes so. If the heat gets much worse than this, he thinks it might just finish him off.

The end of their climb rewards them with a view over the very top of the tree line and the sight of the sun shining down on a wide courtyard. It's bright up there, in the midday sun; after so long spent under the dark green canopy of the trees, Martin’s eyes need a second or two to adjust.

To Martin’s surprise, Kilika temple is nothing like the tall, imposing tower at Djose. A wide, squat building carved out of contrasting layers of pale grey and warm orange stone, with two spires reaching up to the sky on either side, the whole edifice has been sculpted in a series of draping, rounded shapes that make the front of the temple look like the face of some giant creature when viewed from a distance. The effect is different to Djose, but no less intimidating.

Luckily, the disturbing image fades as they get closer, walking through a wide stone courtyard with stone pillars whose points blaze with fire. They have to cross a rounded plate made of thick, toughened glass, and when Martin looks down beneath his feet, he can catch sight of more flames blazing down below.

The temple itself is just as dark and windowless inside as the last one Martin was in, but if he’d been hoping for it to be any cooler, he’s out of luck. The entrance hall they find themselves in is just as hot as the jungle surrounding the temple, albeit a much drier heat than the heavy humidity outside. As if there wasn’t already enough heat to go around, there’s also a series of braziers set around the edge of the stone floor, all burning with bright flame.

Apart from all of that, Martin is surprised to see just how similar it is to the temple in Djose. There’s the same flight of steps at the back of the room leading up to the cloister, the same doors branching off towards other parts of the temple, the same four statues of the High Summoners flanking the cloister stairway, the same smaller statues of their guardians lining the walls around the outside. If it weren’t for the fact that this room is lit by the red glow of firelight instead of flickering beacons of lightning, he could almost be in the exact same room.

Almost. The sound of the fayth singing is different here, too. A high, rich soprano, wistfully lingering on all of the held notes, the voice clear like the very heart of a candle flame. Listening to it puts Martin in mind of the semi-hypnotic feeling of staring into a bonfire.

“I’d better go and speak to the priest,” Jon says as they all stand in the centre of the round chamber. “I won’t be long.”

Jon moves ahead to climb the staircase, at the top of which a solitary priest does indeed stand, keeping a vigilant watch on the door to the passage behind. Once again feeling at a bit of a loss, Martin casts his eye about the room.

“Lot more people here than at Djose,” he says idly. Compared to how deserted that temple had been, here it’s practically crowded; there’s a few people praying around the sides of the temple or at the foot of one of the statues.

“Kilika’s the closest temple to Luca, so yeah,” Sasha shrugs next to him. “Easier to catch a ferry than to hike all the way up the highroad and back.”

“That, and one of the Maesters started off as an acolyte here,” Tim adds. “The head of the warrior monks. She used to oversee the Crusaders too before the whole excommunication thing.”

“Good riddance,” Sasha murmurs.

“Mm,” Martin says noncommittally, not particularly interested in helping to instigate another round of arguments between the two different camps in their party. Especially not when they’re literally standing in the middle of one of the temples.

“Is this temple laid out more or less the same as the one at Djose, then?” he asks, mostly to change the subject. “I mean, will they have the same statues in the same places and everything?”

“Basically, yeah,” Tim nods, but before Martin can pursue the matter further, Jon’s coming back to them, a faint look of determination lining his face.

“The cloister’s open to us whenever we’re ready,” he tells them. “Let’s get this over with.”

“You don’t want to rest first?” Martin asks hesitantly.

The memory of how Jon looked coming out of the last cloister he went into is still vivid in Martin’s mind. If this one ends up being anything like that – well, it’s not like Martin actually knows anything about what they’re like, or what making a pact with the fayth is like, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d be better of facing at your full strength.

Jon, in a way that is starting to become a bit predictable, shakes his head.

“No, not now. It took us this long to get here, I’d rather get through it straight away,” he says testily. “That is, assuming all of you are ready?”

“Whenever you are,” says Daisy.

As much as Martin might want to argue – well, Jon can make his own decisions. Martin guesses he’ll just have to follow the lead of his fellow guardians on this one.

The priest at the top of the stairs raises his eyebrows a little when he sees just how many guardians Jon has following behind him, but thankfully makes no comment about it, merely saluting them with the Prayer as they crowd onto the small landing in front of the door.

“Are you and your guardians prepared for what lies ahead?” he asks. The words have a somewhat ritualistic feel to them.

“We are,” Jon nods, and the priest steps aside to let them past.

Martin doesn’t feel particularly prepared, but it feels a bit late to say that sort of thing.

“So… what sort of trials can we expect going through this cloister, anyway?” he asks instead, as the six of them reach the rounded end of a corridor that bears an elaborate pattern picked out in tile on the floor below. Martin’s surprised when the round, patterned section of floor starts moving once they’re all stood on it, taking them slowly down to some unseen floor below in a smooth motion.

Strange. It’s like a platform lift from back home. Martin wonders if it works through some kind of magic.

“I heard a rumour that they’re like puzzles, almost,” Sasha says on the way down, in answer to his question. “Am I right, Jon?”

“Puzzles is understating it.”

“You guys’ll see for yourselves soon enough,” Basira shrugs. “Just make sure you’re ready for anything. The last one we went through, Daisy had to jump across a hole full of lightning at one point.”

Martin stares at her. “Sorry, what?”

“It was fine,” Daisy says briskly. “There was a platform. Jon cast Nulshock on me first.”

Martin doesn’t even know where to begin with how much any of that is not the point, but by then they’re already in front of an imposing set of carved stone doors.

“So if there’s any holes full of fire we need to jump across in this one, we’re all agreed that Daisy’s taking that one for the team, yeah?” Tim jokes as they push the heavy doors open to begin the trial.

The chamber inside is dark and empty, save for a lone pedestal standing off to one side. There’s a glowing orange sphere set into a small recess in one of its edges, but that isn’t what surprises Martin. Spheres are pretty standard stuff, though he’s never really been sure about where the ones in Zanarkand actually came from.

No, what surprises him is the perfectly spherical slot next to the closed door on the other side of the room. It looks perfectly sized to fit a sphere – and as he adjusts to the gloom of the chamber, even Martin's eyes can make out the faint line leading down the wall and around the edge of the doorway to a spot right under the door itself. A circuit line, for siphoning power from a sphere and carrying it elsewhere.

Sphere tech is old tech even back in Zanarkand – practically ancient tech, come to that – but it’s still undeniably a form of machina. Martin doesn’t know what surprises him more – that the temple building is so obviously old enough to pre-date Yevon itself, or that Yevon is apparently okay with the innermost sanctuaries of their holy places being filled with machina, even the most basic kind.

While Martin ponders once again exactly what kind of logic Yevon uses to draw the line when it comes to what machina are forbidden when and where, Jon approaches the sphere on the pedestal with an outstretched hand, only to snatch it back at the last minute.

“It’s hot,” he says in dismay. “Moving these around won’t be easy.”

“Isn’t that the point of a trial?” Sasha teases, earning herself a withering look in the process. With an unrepentant smile, she begins to unfasten and remove her gloves, tossing them over to Jon when she’s done.

“Try these,” she says, as Jon almost fumbles the catch. “They should cushion your hands enough to avoid any burns as long as you don’t hang on to any of those spheres for too long. I can cast you a blizzard spell on them if it’s not enough.”

“Were the spheres in the last cloister you tried like this?” Martin asks with some anxiety, watching Jon apprehensively pulling Sasha’s gloves onto his hands.

“No,” Basira tells him. “Zapped us a couple of times though. Pretty sure every hair I have was standing on end at one point.”

“Oh, great,” Martin says.

It’s not as though he expected anything with a name like the Cloister of Trials to be easy or anything, but – he doesn’t think he’s in the wrong to not be jumping for joy over the prospect of any of them coming away from it with multiple burns. Jon might be able to heal them up well enough afterwards, but it still hurts until he manages to get to them. Martin keeps his distance from Sasha when she’s working with fire in a fight for a reason.

So when Jon slots the burning sphere into the recess by the door, his face still betraying discomfort from holding it even through the protection of Sasha’s gloves, and the entire thing goes up in flames as a bright orange light snakes lazily down the circuit line, Martin’s gut twists up on itself even more.

He takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. It’s fine. It’s fine. Like Sasha said, it’s supposed to be a trial. They’ll just have to get through it together.

The way through the cloister is slow going. Sasha wasn’t so far off when she described the trials as puzzles earlier – the walls of the chambers leading them further and further into the heart of the temple are dotted with more of those inlaid recesses where a sphere could be placed, more spheres that have to be placed in the right slot at the right time in order to clear their path to the chamber where the fayth waits. If it weren’t for the constant threat of being burned from mishandling one of those glowing orange Kilika spheres, it’d almost be tedious.

Of course, it’s difficult to find something tedious when it leads you to spend an extended amount of time in a room whose primary feature is a ten-foot high wall of flames stretching clear across the middle. That one stumps them for a while, the heat from the fire pressing uncomfortably against their skin as they try to suss out how to completely extinguish the flames, the exact combination of circuits that need to be broken or completed with spheres that they have to be careful not to handle for too long.

Eventually, they manage it. The flames die down and then finally go out entirely, plunging the chamber into a dim half-light that their eyes struggle to adjust to after so long in the orange-red light from the blaze. More importantly, they now have a clear way through to the staircase leading to the next room.

As they begin climbing it, all of them weary and frazzled from having to keep their heads on straight in the Kilika cloister’s searing heat, Martin can’t help hoping that the next chamber is simpler than the last one. They have to be reaching the end soon, surely. There’s got to be only so much endurance or perseverance or ability to think under pressure that these trials can test them on before they’ve done enough to satisfy everyone.

To his surprise – and relief – the staircase opens up into a long room with no apparent puzzles or obstacles to be seen. Instead, thick pillars support the ceiling on either side, fire burning brightly in tall braziers, drawing Martin’s eye gradually right to the very back of the room, where an elaborately carved stone archway frames a curiously shaped door, tapered at the bottom like the petal of a flower. That lidless eye symbol of Yevon stares out at them from the keystone set above the door as they approach.

“Did we make it?” Tim asks, with the air of a man who is doing his very best not to tempt fate. “Because I think that last one almost did me in.”

“A bit dramatic, aren’t you,” Jon mutters, before saying more clearly, “No, that’s the chamber of the fayth behind that door. Or it ought to be, if this temple is the same as the last.”

“We’ll see you soon, then?” Sasha says, placing a hand on Jon’s shoulder and squeezing briefly. “Preferably before Tim starts going stir-crazy from sitting in one place for too long.”

“Oi!”

“Wait,” Martin frowns. “We’re not going in there with you?”

“’Course not,” Daisy says gruffly, her tone saying just how much of an idiotic question she thinks that is. “Only summoners are allowed to speak to the fayth.”

“But—” Martin starts before he can help himself, then bites his lip in an attempt to hold back. He’d thought that this time round, he’d at least be in some kind of position to help. But now it just seems that whether he comes through the cloister or not, the result is the same – stood outside a door waiting, hoping that Jon will manage to convince the fayth to pact with him before he keels over.

He knows better than to ask what’s the point, but boy does he want to.

“You’ll be alright in there?” he asks instead, ignoring Daisy and directing his words at Jon as pointedly as he can. He still remembers how Jon looked coming out of the cloister last time.

Jon’s face goes through another one of its facial gymnastics routines; from wide-eyed surprise to furrowed puzzlement to narrow-eyed suspicion, before settling on a sort of resigned, softly exasperated assurance.

“I know what to expect this time,” he says. “It’s – I appreciate the concern, but, I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll be here,” Basira tells him. “Go do what you need to.”

Jon nods and heads towards the door at the far end of the room without another word. The quiet rumbling sound of stone grinding gently against stone echoes through the chamber, and then the door is closed once more, leaving silence in its wake.

“Is there really nothing else we can do?” Martin asks after a moment, looking at the others.

“It really is just a waiting game, I’m afraid,” Sasha tells him with a wry smile, settling herself down to do just that in one of the alcoves at the sides of the room. “If we broke the rules and word got out, it’d be Jon who’d take the fall for it.”

“Seriously?”

“Can’t be helped,” says Daisy brusquely, standing guard with her arms crossed near the door to the fayth’s chamber. “Pick a spot, shut up, and wait.”

You don’t have to be like that about it, Martin thinks, biting his tongue before it can get him into a fight. Tim catches his eye, and the two of them exchange the barest eyeroll of mutual irritated solidarity as Martin makes his way gracelessly toward an alcove of his own and settles down cross-legged on the unnervingly warm stone floor.

Chapter Text

Waiting down in that underground chamber for Jon to come back out, it’s impossible to keep track of time, and Martin gives up trying after a while.

He tries instead to keep his mind occupied, thinking about more ways he could try pulling what small magic he can do into new shapes once they’re all back on the road, what words would be best to make it happen. But as hard as he tries, he can’t keep himself focused for long; his eyes keep drifting back towards the curved door of the chamber of the fayth. He keeps wondering how Jon’s doing in there, if he’s anywhere near to sealing this new pact yet. He wonders if this fayth might take it easier on him than the last one seemed to.

Then he starts wondering what the fayth even looks like. Tim said, way back at Djose, that they were spirits of people who’d given themselves to Yevon, but now Martin really wonders what that actually means. Is Jon talking with some kind of ghost in there, or something entirely different?

It must get lonely. Stuck in some old temple with only increasingly infrequent visits from summoners to look forward to. The fayth themselves probably wouldn’t mind it so much if anyone ever did decide to break one of Yevon’s stupid rules, Martin thinks mulishly.

Of course, he’s not going to say that. Or do it for that matter, not if it won’t do anything apart from cause trouble for Jon. But he lets himself have the very petty indulgence of thinking it very loudly in Daisy’s direction to silently blow off steam.

He’s not sure how much time has actually passed by the time the grating sound of the stone door opening rumbles through the chamber once more. It can’t be longer than a few hours at most; the low stirrings of hunger in his stomach aren’t insistent enough for it to have dragged on that long.

Still, a few hours that they've spent waiting out here is still a few hours that Jon has spent doing whatever it is that needs to be done to get this next aeon. The sound of the door grinding open has Martin scrambling to his feet as relief floods through him. Relief that it’s over, that they didn’t all have to spend over a day waiting and worrying while he was in there.

Jon himself, when he appears, still makes a worrying sight. He walks slowly out of the innermost chamber, his shoulders stooped and his steps hobbled, heaving breaths in and out like he’s just run the length and breadth of Spira. He pauses in the doorway, staggering a little and leaning on the doorframe with a shaking hand.

Martin’s afraid for a second that Jon might pass out. He looks close to it. But when Daisy moves forward, Jon holds his other hand up to stall her.

“I’m fine,” he grates out. “Just – need a minute.”

“That didn’t take long this time,” Basira says to him.

Jon lets out a long sigh.

“She was a great deal more reasonable than the last one,” Martin thinks he hears him mutter. Then Jon straightens, still swaying a little, but looking a great deal more alert and alive than he did after gaining his first aeon.

“Alright,” he says. “Let’s go.”

There’s still a raspy note of fatigue edging his voice, and Martin isn’t fooled; just because Jon seems better than he did after the last one, it doesn’t mean it still didn’t take a lot out of him.

“You sure you don’t want to take another minute?” he asks, glancing to Tim and Sasha in a silent request for support.

“Not down here,” Jon says, shaking his head. “Honestly, Martin, I’m not about to break. I’ll take a minute upstairs before we head back into that blasted jungle if it makes you happy.”

Hearing the sour traces of irritation bleeding through Jon’s voice, Martin decides to back off – for now. If Jon tries to head back out into that fiend-infested forest when they get back to the entrance hall without at least a half-hour sit-down to get some food down his neck first, Martin will block the way out himself if he has to.

He needn’t have worried. When they make it back up there, Tim is the first one to pipe up and ask the attendant priest watching the cloister staircase if there’s anywhere they can take some time to recover before leaving. Martin lets out a quiet sigh of relief; Jon may be shooting Tim baleful glares both behind his back and to his face, but he also doesn’t look like he’s about to argue with him. Tim has the benefit of long years of friendship on his side, and it shows.

As they file their way past the priest to grab what small rest they can, the thing Martin has been quietly dreading in the back of his mind finally happens. The priest’s eyes, respectful and hopeful in equal measure, slide over each of their faces one by one until he reaches Martin, and does a double-take.

“Yevon’s mercy!” he exclaims, immediately dropping into the Prayer. “Forgive me, I thought I saw something on the way in but I wasn’t sure – you look like—”

“Like my dad?” Martin says, trying to keep the words free of any sort of tone at all.

“Oh, Sir Blackwood was your father? Forgive me – I had no idea he had a son.”

“You… met him, then? When he was Gertrude Robinson’s guardian?”

“No,” says the priest with a shake of his bald head. “I was only an acolyte at the time. Barely more than a child, really. I only have vague memories of seeing him from a distance. But your resemblance to his statue is incredible.”

Martin swears he can feel the eyes of everyone else crawling up his back. “Yeah, people… they keep saying that, yeah.”

“No offence,” says Tim, with all the finesse of a blunt instrument, “but can this wait? We’re on our last legs after facing that cloister.”

“Ah – forgive me,” says the priest again; apparently he feels the need to ask for forgiveness for most things that come out of his mouth. “It’s just encouraging to see the son of a legendary guardian following in his father’s footsteps.”

Before Martin can even begin figuring out what to do with that, a sharp, clipped voice beats him to it.

“Martin is here as my guardian on his own merits,” Jon says, his expression frosty.

“I…” the priest falters. “Of course. Forgive me.”

They make it out of the entrance hall and to a small, quiet side chamber with no further fuss, but Martin stares at Jon the entire time while also trying not to be too obvious about it, wondering what brought that on. Not that Martin’s not grateful for it, but it was just so unexpected.

There’s no opportunity to ask Jon about it, though, or even just to thank him; the little room they’ve found where they can eat and prepare themselves for the trek back through the jungle to the port offers no space for privacy, and Jon studiously avoids all of Martin’s attempts to catch his eye.

In fairness, that may just be because Jon is struggling to keep his eyes open generally. His gaze seems dull and unfocused, and while he isn’t quite nodding where he sits, he barely has a single sarcastic comment to spare for any of Tim’s attempts to lighten the mood with a joke.

Martin’s just glad no one else tries to talk about what just happened. For starters, he’s still trying to wrap himself around it, and around all the feelings snaking slowly around his chest and his stomach, constricting.

He can’t control whatever stories Yevon have already spun, but – following in his father’s footsteps, as though it wasn’t anything more than a terrifying coincidence that both of them wound up stranded in Spira by Sin just in time to run into a summoner on route to face the very same monster. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, of expectations unknown and unasked-for. Familiar in a way, but that doesn’t mean it goes down any easier.

He’ll just have to live with it, he decides. If he wants to know more about what really happened – and he does – he’ll just have to play along.

Right. He’s probably out of luck when it comes to the priests here, but he can at least get a better look at those statues before he leaves. See what matches up with that old sphere Dekker gave him.

Decision made, Martin gets to his feet and makes up some excuse about wanting to stretch his legs before they start trekking back down all those stairs into the jungle, promising to meet the others by the door when they’re ready.

There’s a fair bit of commotion in the main hall when he reaches it, compared to how quiet it was when they arrived. When Martin peers around to spot the source of it, he catches sight of the vivid purple colours that Tim identified back on the ferry as belonging to the Luca Goers. The team appear to be making a right song and dance out of praying for victory, seemingly doing everything they can to make themselves as visible as possible.

It’s unbelievably obnoxious. Martin hopes they lose.

Still, Luca’s blitzball team making arses of themselves does mean nobody’s attention is on him as he makes his way down the side of the hall. Trying to remember the layout of the entrance hall back at Djose, Martin walks past the collection of statues until he reaches the ones closest to the temple entrance.

Now that he’s met the man properly, and not just in the middle of the adrenaline-hazed chaos of Sin’s attack on Zanarkand, Martin spots Adelard Dekker’s statue easily. Much like the Dekker he saw on the sphere, the version of him cast in stone has a face a great deal less lined and world-weary than the genuine article. The look of determination the sculptor’s given him seems about right, at least, even if it’s been carved with more optimism than the man himself seems to possess.

Either way, it proves Dekker was telling the truth about everything back in Luca. Or at least, about the things he actually decided to share.

Satisfied on that front, Martin lets his eyes drift to the other statues in the same cluster, the ones of Gertrude’s other guardians. There’s one of an elderly-looking man with pointed ears and long, slender arms and hands, stooped with age, with a face like gnarled tree bark and hair that even carved out of stone has the look of twisted branches or vines rather than hair. Martin remembers passing by similar-looking folk back in Luca, and comes to the conclusion that this must be the Guado man, the scholar, that Gertrude and Dekker were talking about in that sphere.

Another point in favour of Dekker’s honesty, then. Martin studies the statue for a moment longer, shaking his head; maybe it’s just him, but even the statue of the old Guado looks like a stiff breeze could have readily blown him over in life. Martin wonders how someone like him wound up on a pilgrimage where fighting would be part of his daily routine. Maybe Gertrude bribed him. Or the Guado did. Or something.

There’s another statue between the one of the old Guado record-keeper and the next one along that belongs to his dad, taking Martin by surprise. He doesn’t remember Gertrude or Dekker mentioning a fourth guardian on that sphere.

Then again, he’s only watched the thing once. Maybe he’s just misremembering. Or maybe this guardian joined the pilgrimage later on.

Martin makes a mental note to ask about it later, and studies the graven image of this new mystery guardian in an attempt to commit it to memory; a young man, much younger than any of his travelling companions, with long, straight hair and a slightly crooked nose. Martin can’t help but notice that he seems to have been carved with less detail than the other two, as though the sculptor had less to work with (less what? Images, eyewitness accounts maybe?) when recreating his likeness. Odd.

That leaves the last one. Martin takes a quiet breath to brace himself, and stands face to stone face with the likeness of his father.

He at least knows what he’s looking at this time, which spares him that awful feeling of the ground being pulled out from under his feet. He wishes that made the experience of looking any less uncomfortable. Just as before, all the little features he’s seen hundreds of times before on his own face jump out at him the longer he looks, blurring any of the differences.

He’s… really never realised before, just how much of his face he really does have in common with his dad. Mustn’t have really grown into it yet at the time he up and vanished. Between that and the fifteen-odd years of not seeing him to smudge the memories of how he looked into vagueness, not to mention how Mum outright chucked out any spheres a few weeks after because she didn’t want to look at them—

Oh. Martin goes cold, with that particular chill of an unwelcome realisation spreading its reluctant way outwards from his gut. He’d never been blind to the way Mum treated him as he got older, he’s not stupid, but he’s always assumed that it was to do with him, all the ways big and small that he fell short, wasn’t good enough. Now, though—

No. He’s just getting carried away with himself, with how people he’s never even met in this place so far from home know him for his father’s son on sight. That’s all. Has to be.

With an effort, Martin turns stubbornly away from the row of statues, ignoring how thick his throat feels all of a sudden. He wonders if the others are anywhere close to being ready to go yet. All Martin wants right now is to get out of this temple.

He paces the few steps over to one of the twin columns near the door to the courtyard and perches himself down on the lip of its wide base to wait, his foot tapping with uncontrollable nervous energy. He’d welcome a skirmish with a fiend right now. Or another go at that cloister, or - something. Maybe he should be the one to head back to the others to check on them. The Luca Goers are still at it, all six of them at the feet of the statue of the High Summoner with the blitzball held under his colossal stone arm, and it’s just as obnoxious now as it was when Martin first walked in. He hopes they give it a rest soon.

“Oh, hells, how long have they been going at it for?”

Martin almost jumps out of his skin at the sound of Tim’s voice nearby. The others are there, too, clustering around the door with more than a few dubious glances thrown towards the Goers.

“Ever since I got here, more or less.”

“Ugh.” Tim shakes his head. “Some things just don’t change.”

“Don’t go picking any fights, Tim,” Sasha teases.

“I would never.”

Tim lays a hand over his heart in a perfect facsimile of sincerity, and then winks.

“Anyway, Jon insists he's all set and I don't fancy arguing with him. Ready for another trek through all that jungle?”

Martin casts one last look at the entrance hall and all of its statues, and nods.

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

The road back through the dim woods around the temple is just as sticky and full of insects as it was that morning. As they head back down the ancient steps leading down from the top of the hill, Martin notes anxiously that the sun seems much lower in the sky than he’s entirely comfortable with. Between the cloister and the time standing vigil while Jon sealed the pact for a new aeon, they must have spent the better part of the day up in that temple.

They’ll have to get a move on if they want to make it back to Kilika Port before night falls and it becomes impossible to see under the trees. Martin doesn’t fancy a night of camping in here. Not one bit. Not for the first time, he finds himself grateful that the main road through the jungle is so well marked.

Well marked or no, the cloying heat they’ve been dealing with all day still drags at them, the waning sun doing nothing to lessen the oppressive weight of the island fayth’s power on its surroundings. Her surroundings? Martin could swear he heard Jon refer to the fayth as “she” earlier.

Ask him about it later, he tells himself in annoyance, trying to drag his wandering mind back to the task of getting back through these woods in one piece.

They’re approaching a crossroads that Martin vaguely remembers as being at about the half-way point between the temple and the port when a low rumbling sound grinds through the flagstones beneath their feet. The vibrations carry right up Martin’s legs; he freezes in place.

“Is that an earthquake?”

“In Kilika?” says Sasha incredulously. One of her hands hovers over the spellbook on her belt. Instantly wary, Martin glances this way and that at their surroundings.

For a moment, he sees nothing, even as the ground rumbles threateningly once more. Just the road ahead, the less well-worn dirt tracks branching off either side of the crossroads, the trees towering over them, a great, spherical boulder wedged in a gap in the undergrowth…

Martin looks again at the boulder. It’s huge, at least twice his height, and now that he’s focusing on it, the trees immediately beside it look like they’ve been splintered and warped into precarious angles.

“Was that here when we passed through earlier?”

Daisy follows his line of sight, and curses softly. “Basira.”

“I see it.”

“It looks inert for now,” Sasha murmurs to Tim, in a voice low enough that Martin knows it’s not really meant for his ears. “Do you think…?”

“This close to Kilika Port?” Tim’s voice is dark, either with the strain of trying to keep his naturally booming voice low enough to go unheard, or with something else. “With these guys around?”

Martin turns his attention away from the cryptic, hissed conversation happening to one side of him, and back to the increasingly sinister-looking grey monolith ahead.

“What are we looking at?” he asks as another tremor rolls through the ground and sets every single leaf and branch rustling wildly. He already knows he won’t like the answer, with the way Daisy’s already drawn her sword and settled into a low, guarded stance, but he’s growing used to that.

“That Sinspawn Basira heard about,” says Daisy. “Guard up.”

That has Martin’s heart picking up. He goes for his daggers, watching the thing as it just sits there. It doesn’t look like it’ll be moving any time soon. It doesn’t even look like there’s any gap in its defences to get a hit in, even if Martin pulled every bit of magic he could grab hold of and poured it all into strengthening spell after strengthening spell for Daisy and Tim. What are they supposed to do about it?

Another rumble rocks the ground, sharper and more immediate. Martin almost stumbles from the force, and Jon shouts, “Basira!”

Basira – who as always is at the rear, guarding their backs, and still standing at the very point that the temple road meets the crossroads – dives forward into a roll at the shout, barely missing the thick, fibrous vine that comes bursting out under where she’d stood, sending a spray of earth and broken stone high into the air.

“Shit,” she hisses with feeling, grabbing the hand Tim offers to pull her up. The ground shakes again; two more vines, each as gnarled and fibrous as the first, burst out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stone.

It’s trying to cut them off.

At Basira’s side, Jon stiffens.

“Give me some space,” he tells them. “I’ll summon—”

“No, wait,” Daisy cuts in, her eyes still fixed on the unmoving, armoured main body of the Sinspawn even as the tendrils of its giant vines twist and coil threateningly above their heads. Basira lets loose a shot at one that dares to pass too close, and it recoils backwards with an unearthly screech from some unseen mouth.

Ignoring the horrifying sound, Daisy persists, “We don’t know its weak points yet. How many summonings you got the energy for?”

“I—,” Jon sputters, which is an answer in and of itself. “Enough!”

Daisy smiles grimly. “Liar,” she says easily, showing a hint of teeth. “Let us guardians do our jobs first. Then it’s all yours.”

Jon opens his mouth to argue, then flinches as Basira’s crossbow draws another piercing shriek from one of those undulating vines.

“Fine,” he bites out. “Get me an opening.”

Daisy’s smile becomes something dangerous, something that makes Martin very, very glad that she’s on the same side as the rest of them even as she starts shouting instructions. Basira, Tim, and Sasha she wants focusing on the immediate threat of the vines cutting off their escape; Daisy gives herself the task of trying to break through that tough-looking outer shell, and sets Martin one of sticking close to Jon in the centre and providing support until they have the opening they need for his aeon.

Annoyance sharp and irrational stabs at him at being put in the place of least risk, but he’s not enough of a fool to argue now; his tiny little daggers aren’t doing to do much against something this big, especially in his inexperienced hands, and along with Jon the two of them are the ones least suited to outright attacking. Martin takes up his place, takes a deep breath, and starts casting.

Just as he thought, Daisy’s most powerful swings barely seem to put a dent in the giant carapace that must be shielding the actual body below, even with Martin’s best efforts to weave the strengthening magic around her and her weapon again and again in layers. To make matters worse, he hears Sasha making sounds of confusion that quickly morph into increasingly frustrated dismay behind him.

“Those tendrils are absorbing every spell I cast,” she calls to the group at large in a tense voice. “I’m no good to you till you get rid of them.”

Sasha dives out the way after that, scarcely avoiding being knocked off her feet. Tim rushes in to cover her, brandishing his axes.

“You and me then, Basira,” he says with a grim smile. “Then Sash can take the body.”

Tim makes it sound so simple. As usual. The reality’s anything but. Not only do they all keep having to dance out of reach of the vines before they’re thrown to the ground by a crushing blow that leaves them battered and struggling to stand, the main body of the thing that Daisy is still circling and slashing away at in search of some kind of weak point keeps periodically letting out a noise that sounds like nothing more than a low, weary sigh – one that douses them all in a fine mist that coats their noses and mouths when they inhale and burns on the inside, leaving every single one of them coughing and gasping for air, their eyes and noses streaming. The thing has no eyes, so Martin’s little blindness spell does nothing; at his side, Jon’s entire body winds tighter and tighter with mounting frustration as he prepares healing spell after healing spell.

By the time the final vine falls, dragged back beneath the earth with another of those unearthly wails, they’re all worse for wear to show for it; covered in bruises and scrapes that Jon’s hasty spellcasting couldn’t reach, the magic targeting other damage. But they’re all still standing. Still standing, even if Martin’s throat feels like it’s been scraped raw many times over.

Sasha, who stands with one arm holding close to her side where one of the vines caught her earlier, turns on the Sinspawn’s shell with her other hand crackling with lightning. Martin barely sees what spells she throws at it, just that it’s never the same one twice, but after one of them sets the ground shaking underfoot again and brings with it the most hellish-sounding shriek they’ve heard yet, Sasha lets out a slightly pained noise of triumph.

“Fire, Jon!” she shouts, sounding winded. “It hates fire!”

Jon doesn’t seem to get it for a moment. Then comes a sharp oh! of realisation, a wry smirk as he mutters, “Well that’s convenient.”

Sasha is already calling for everyone to fall back away from the creature’s massive bulk, where the shell begins to buckle and quiver in places like it knows its cornered, and Martin follows her lead, stumbling back towards the now-empty edges of the crossroads as Jon adopts a familiar stance.

It’s different this time. Martin feels it right away – instead of that building static making his hair stand on end and the taste of ozone in his mouth he’s come to associate with Jon summoning, now the air around him suddenly shimmers, Jon nothing more than a blur in the heat haze.

Then a column of fire erupts into being at Jon’s back.

Martin swears his heart stops for an instant. But Jon’s look of concentration never wavers, and the column burns down in a matter of seconds into something more like a giant candle flame, long and tapered at the top, glowing rather than raging. And then there’s a shadow in the very heart of the flame, and then the shadow looks almost like a person, and then—

Something that looks very much like a hand extends from within the flame with an air of expectation. It takes a few seconds more for Jon to notice – and when he does, he stares in confusion, before tentatively reaching up to take the offered hand and bring the aeon – it must be the aeon – into the world.

It – she – steps out of the flame with all the air of a courtly lady, glowing motes of fire drifting from her heels and hair. A tall woman, a giant really, with long flowing hair the colour of embers and skin like the very heart of a blazing fire, who now stands towering over Jon at his side.

She’s fast. Nearly as fast as Jon’s first aeon, but a lot more graceful, striding toward the Sinspawn with all the fluid movement of a dancer. She casts spells the same way, moving her arms and hands in sweeping arcs to bring gouts of flame searing against the shell of the thing on all sides until it shrivels and falls apart, exposing the plant-like but still disturbingly fleshy-looking creature that was hiding within. Even the stinging, burning mist that still rushes periodically from its gaping maw barely fazes her. She deftly weaves in and out of a flurry of punishing lashes from a myriad fibrous vines, before engulfing it completely in a burst of flame exploding from the earth below, sending it shuddering apart and scattering with a final despairing shriek into more pyreflies than Martin’s ever seen.

And just like that it’s over. The aeon looks back and regards Jon for a moment with a measuring look in her glittering, coal-like eyes, before she too vanishes.

Martin hardly dares to breathe. The crossroads seems too quiet now after the all-consuming noise and chaos of the fight, the lingering cloud of pyreflies casting an almost eerie light over the ruined flagstones and craters in the earth that the Sinspawn left behind. He makes a quick head count with his eyes as everyone draws together in the wake of it to check on one another, breathing a quiet sigh of relief as he sees that, yes, everyone really is all still alive and standing. Jon had a job of it back there, that’s for sure.

In what Martin has come to realise is just typical behaviour for Jon, he also looks to still be making a job of it for himself. Between the summoning itself and the rate he was using magic just now, not to mention how that came riding on the back of going through the cloister, and the fayth – well, Martin’s pretty sure that sheer bloody-minded stubbornness must be the only thing keeping Jon on his feet right now, let alone on his feet trying to cast even more magic on everyone.

“You could try listening to everyone, you know,” he says to Jon when he reaches Martin, after watching him have what must have been the same argument with everyone else about saving his energy for the rest of the walk back to Kilika Port.

“What?” Jon snaps. Up close, he really does look terrible; his face is ashen in a way it hasn’t been since that night in Djose temple, tiny tremors passing constantly through his hands.

“Look at you, Jon, you look like you’re about to drop any minute now,” Martin argues, already out of patience for letting Jon continue to drive himself into the ground. “You’ve already made sure we can make it back to the beach in one piece tonight, we can last with a few cuts and scrapes till then.”

“I’m fine.”

“Great! Then so am I.”

Jon glares at him. The thing is, Martin’s getting pretty used to Jon glaring, and he’s pretty confident in his own ability to be at least as stubborn as Jon is.

Sure enough, Jon’s the first to cave.

“At least let me check that it didn’t leave you with anything more serious.”

Jon has this little affronted frown on his face, like he’s offended at the very notion of not being allowed to check Martin over for injuries. It’s making it difficult to keep a straight face.

“… sure, fine,” he says, after letting it hang there for a moment or so longer. “If that’s all you’re doing. I really just want to find the nearest bed and collapse in it.”

Jon makes a small, huffed sound of amusement at that and rolls his eyes, but he takes Martin’s assent for what it is. Martin dutifully holds out one of his arms, waiting for that weird tingly sensation of Jon’s magic passing through him looking for something that might need fixing. (That’s more or less how Jon had explained it working when he’d asked, anyway.) Martin lets his eyes drift a bit, waiting for Jon to get done and admit that Martin was right and that there’s nothing wrong with him that won’t keep until the morning after they’ve all had a chance to sleep, but as his gaze wanders idly over where Jon’s right hand rests lightly on his arm, Martin stiffens.

“What happened to your hand?”

“What?” The warmth of Jon’s magic vanishes suddenly as his concentration breaks and he snatches his hand back almost self-consciously, twisting it this way and that. It has the side effect of affording Martin a better look at it – the dark glyph now standing stark against Jon’s skin as if inked there in a shade as dark as the void between stars.

Martin’s sure, he’s sure that Jon didn’t have it before, but when Jon realises what he’s talking about all he has to say is an absent, “Oh— right, that. It’s, it’s nothing to worry about—”

“Says him trying to convince me he’s fine when he looks like he’s about to pass out—”

Jon gives him a proper glower for that.

“It’s just,” he starts testily after a moment or two, his fingers flexing self-consciously, “a mark, nothing more. Of – of my pact with the fayth at Kilika. I have another for the one at Djose. Satisfied?”

Martin glances back at the mark on Jon’s hand. The skin there doesn’t look broken or irritated or anything like that, but he can’t help noticing that it’s raised slightly. Like a brand, he thinks, discomfort he doesn’t know how to put into words settling down in the pit of his stomach.

A few things clamour for attention on his tongue, but what actually comes out is, “Do they hurt?”

Jon looks honestly bewildered, which goes some way toward loosening the knot in Martin’s stomach, a little.

“No?” There must still be some doubt on Martin’s face, because Jon says, more emphatically, “No, Martin. I assure you, they’re fine. So are you, it seems. For, for now.”

A moment passes where Martin can’t for the life of him make the connection between those two things, until he remembers that he’d been trying to convince Jon that no, actually, he isn’t in dire need of healing from someone who’s channelling most of his remaining energy into staying upright.

Jon still looks kind of petulant about it, but if it means he’s going to concede the point and actually let them get back on the road to Kilika Port so they can get him in a bed, Martin’ll take it. He doesn’t think he’s the only one, either. As they all stumble down the last stretch of forest road leading back to the shoreline, it doesn’t escape his notice how the others cluster closer to Jon than usual, obviously watching for any sign that he really is about to collapse. He pushed it today even by Jon-standards, and they all know it.

Martin wonders, as they walk, if all guardians throughout Spira’s history had summoners so infuriatingly unconcerned with their own well-being, or if their little group is just unlucky. His mind keeps straying back to the new aeon; how powerful she’d been when summoned, how much it must have taken out of Jon to do it, how he’d managed it anyway. How now he carries the mark of that power on his skin.

Martin can’t explain it – just why the thought makes him so uncomfortable. But he worries at it like a toothache, until the last of the jungle falls away to unveil the first stars overhead and the sound of the sea washing against the edges of the island fills his ears.

Chapter Text

The morning sun the next day is almost too bright for Martin, the way it's glaring down on them all as they stand on the deck of the boat that will take them to Besaid. He has to squint against how stark everything looks, one hand held above his eyes to shield them. It was bad enough being woken by it streaming right into his face earlier, bringing with it all the aches that had a chance to settle in overnight, and it’s only got brighter and brighter since.

At least they’re spending most of today on another ferry. After the turn their trek through Kilika’s jungle took last night, Martin thinks they could all do with a day off.

“Is Besaid anything much like Kilika?” he asks Tim and Sasha idly as they watch the ferry crew prepare to cast off.

“It’s a bit smaller than Kilika,” says Sasha. With a grin, she adds, “And with way less bug-infested jungles for us to struggle through.”

Martin laughs. “Oh, good.”

“No weird temperature stuff going on down there either,” Tim chimes in. “I don’t think their fayth’s tied all that much into any of the elements, right?”

He looks to Sasha for confirmation, and when she shakes her head, Tim nods in satisfaction. “Right, thought so. It’s been – you know, I haven’t been down that way in a few years. It’s…”

Tim goes quiet for a moment, looking thoughtful. Sighing, he finally settles on: “Nice, though. A nice place. Kind of cut off from everywhere else, so it just minds its own business and gets on with it doing its own thing. It’s not for everyone but—” Tim shrugs— “You know, some people like it.”

Martin looks at him. Nothing Tim just said was – weird, exactly, inasmuch as it was all stuff that Martin would expect Tim to say. But there’s something – oddly deliberate about his choice of words, the usually easy movement of his shrug. It’s throwing Martin off. He thinks about the burst of anger Tim had the first day they met, the kind that keeps bubbling up under the surface sometimes whenever Daisy or Basira wind up inadvertently poking at it, and…

He doesn’t know why he thinks there’s something of that here as well, when Tim talks about Besaid. But it’s got him feeling weirdly on edge.

Martin hesitates a moment, wondering if he should ask. Then he chickens out and just ends up nodding along. “It sounds nice.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll see it for yourself soon enough. I bet it probably hasn’t even changed that much since last time I was there. It’s that kind of place.”

“Most of Spira is that kind of place,” Sasha points out. “I swear, sometimes it feels like the whole continent actively resists change.”

Tim snorts. “You mean that isn’t what’s actually happening?”

It’s not that Martin doesn’t agree with them both, based on his own very limited experience of Spira, but this feels like a dangerously loaded topic for him to weigh in on with his increasingly tenuous story about being afflicted by Sin’s toxin. So he keeps his mouth shut as the ferry begins to roll its way out into open water, pulling further and further away from Kilika until it seems like nothing more than a brilliant green jewel in the middle of the ocean.

The ferry that makes the journey between Kilika and Besaid is a little smaller than the one that goes back and forth between the mainland, but surprisingly identical in many respects. The shipwrights must’ve just found a design that worked and stuck with it, he guesses. Despite the cooling breeze blowing over the deck, Martin decides that he’s in no mood for spending any more time under that sun today than he has to, and quickly makes his way below deck once they’re under way in search of a relatively quiet place to sit and spend the voyage.

He soon finds he’s not the only one with that idea. With the size of the boat, it doesn’t take long for him to discover that the other three members of their little group have already found and commandeered one of the quietest spaces below deck, tucked away behind a makeshift curtain that must have been rigged up to afford passengers at least some modicum of privacy.

Needless to say, the idea of being in the same space as Jon, Basira, and Daisy without either of the others around to act as a buffer is not an appealing one. Martin’s all set to stammer out an apology and leave them to it, except that Daisy and Basira are already filing past him like they were waiting for something to give them an excuse to leave. Something like Martin stumbling along in there.

That just leaves him with Jon, which. Isn’t exactly much less awkward, all things considered. Again, Martin takes a breath to apologise and leave, only to find himself cut off before he even begins.

“Are you going to sit, or were you just planning on standing there and hovering all day?”

Martin’s mouth clamps shut. Right. He forgot that an exhausted Jon is also a crabby and snappy Jon. That’s almost enough to make him stick with his original plan of leaving, but. He was looking for someplace to sit. And Jon’s offering.

So.

Martin settles down on the worn, faded cushion atop the bench, next to Jon, and tries to ignore the awkwardness crawling up and all over the silent gaps between the creaking boat noises and the rush of the ocean on the other side of the hull.

He manages for maybe three minutes.

“So – um, about yesterday—”

“Oh, mercy,” Jon mutters, rolling his eyes, “not you as well.”

Martin blinks. “Um. Sorry, what?”

“I presume you’re also here to lecture me about knowing my limits.”

“Uh. No, actually. Though, they might have a point, whoever’s been doing that?" Is that why Daisy and Basira were in here?

"Sorry, sorry,” he adds hastily as Jon’s glare intensifies. “Actually, I wanted. I wanted to say thanks.”

“Oh,” Jon says, at a loss as his frown falls away into confusion. “Ah – for what?”

“Speaking up for me yesterday.” Martin stares at his hands rather than at Jon, and focuses on trying not to fidget. “Y’know, in the temple, when…”

“Oh. That.” Even without looking at his face, Jon’s hesitation is palpable. “It wasn’t too far?”

Actually, it might have honestly been one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for him, but it’s not as if Martin can just say that.

“I – no, I don’t think so. I, I mean, you saw that priest, he wasn’t about to let me go anytime soon on his own.”

Jon lets out one of his little huffs of impatience. “Yes, well. I, I can’t pretend to know any of the details of your - situation, but – it bothers me. People like that.”

His situation indeed. There’s something about the way Jon puts it in his voice that makes Martin want to laugh, so he bites the inside of his cheek just to avoid it. Maybe it’s just that there’s something funny about Jon, of all people, being bothered by somebody else’s rudeness.

Pet peeve or not, though, Jon still spoke up for him.

He finally chances a quick glance Jon’s way, trying for a smile.

“Yeah, well. Thanks anyway.”

An almost endearing sort of awkwardness hovers around Jon’s face. Something that, on anyone else, Martin might venture to call shy.

It breaks without warning not a second later when Jon yawns, widely and uncontrollably. It takes every ounce of self-control Martin has not to burst into giggles. It seems someone still hasn’t quite bounced back from overdoing it yesterday.

“You sure you don’t want to take a nap or something?”

Jon glowers. “A nap? I’m sorry, do I look like a toddler?”

“You look like someone who didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night for the day he had yesterday.”

It’s true. He’s thankfully nowhere near as ashen or as shaky as he was the night before, but there’s no denying that Jon still looks like he should go back to the inn they stayed in and take advantage of a proper bed for at least a full week.

“I’ll be fine in a day or so,” says Jon dismissively, the effect undercut a bit by how he’s obviously stifling another yawn under the words. “Believe you me, the fayth at Kilika was far preferable to her counterpart at Djose.”

“I’ve been wondering about that, actually. I mean – um, stop me at any point if I’m accidentally treading all over some kind of deep sacred secrets that only summoners are supposed to know or something, but I mean, when you’re in there talking to them, do they still look like people? The – the people they used to be before they went through… whatever they had to go through to become a fayth, I mean. Like… are they more like ghosts, or—”

Martin didn’t mean to start going off on one, he really didn’t, but he really has been wondering about it for a while, and with Jon reminding him about it like that, it’s like his mouth has decided to get through every question he has at the same time while he’s ahead. He’s trying to bring the whole meandering back to some kind of ending when he feels a sudden warm weight against his arm, which rather neatly brings his train of thought screeching to a halt for him.

His brain comes to a conclusion which has to be the wrong one, because things like that simply do not happen.

Except that a quick glance confirms that his brain’s wrong conclusion is, in fact, very much happening.

“Um. Jon?”

Jon doesn’t answer, because he’s fallen asleep. On Martin.

Desperately trying to ignore the way his heart just skipped several beats, and the way his arm is tingling with tiny fireworks under his skin at every point of contact, Martin sits there, and absolutely calmly wonders what the fuck he’s supposed to do with this.

Should he wake Jon up? Out of the question, the man’s exhausted and blatantly needs the rest if he’s at the point where he’s passed out on Martin, of all people. If he wakes Jon up now, he won’t sleep at all just on principle, despite all the evidence showing how much he needs it.

Okay. So. Martin just has to let him sleep, then, and sit tight until he wakes up.

Cool. No problem. He can do that.

Slowly, he lets out the breath he was holding and gradually leans back against the side of the hull the bench is built against in tiny increments, trying not to jostle Jon at all with the movement. If they’re going to be here a while, better make sure he can still prop Jon up alright when his arm inevitably starts going to sleep from the weight.

After that, it’s just sitting. Sitting and stubbornly trying not to think about how nice it feels to have Jon’s warm weight against his side like this, or how sleep knocks a few years off Jon’s face, or— stop it.

Eventually it becomes enough of a familiar sensation that he can at least get a grip on himself. At least until Basira pokes her head through the faded makeshift curtain after a while in search of Jon, her eyebrows flying up when she catches sight of them both.

Martin briefly toys with a spontaneous laundry list of excuses and I-swear-this-isn’t-what-it-looks-likes, but Basira just shakes her head, an amused smirk playing around her lips, and says, “I never saw anything,” before ducking her head back through the curtain, the sound of her boots creaking on the wooden boards gradually fading.

Martin lets his head thunk back against the hull, and tries to be grateful that at least it wasn’t Tim who came looking for either of them.

After a while – long after his arm’s gone numb from having Jon’s weight on it this whole time – he feels Jon stir against him, before going deathly still, tensing all over.

An instant later, it’s all too clear that Jon’s taken stock of the situation as he bolts upright, his face a study in mortification.

“I – Martin?! How long did—” Rattled, still slurring half his words from only barely being conscious, Jon scrubs both hands over his face.

“I am so sorry,” he says stiffly a moment later, in something closer to his usual voice. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

Martin rolls his shoulder, wincing at the burn of pins and needles as the blood starts rushing back into his arm, and tries not to feel stung by Jon’s reaction. He’d been just as embarrassed when he’d realised Jon had fallen asleep on him, he reminds himself.

“You really looked like you could use the sleep. It’s only been an hour or so, I think. Maybe two.”

This does little to alleviate any of Jon’s agitation. He waves it off with, “Still, I – using you as a pillow like that, when you – oh.” Jon freezes mid-gesture, a dazed look of realisation on his face. “You, you were saying something, weren’t you?”

“I mean, yeah, but—”

“—and I fell asleep on you mid-sentence—”

“Jon, it’s fine.”

Martin knows the start of a spiral when he sees one, and decides he’d better nip this one in the bud. It’s probably only because he just spent the past two hours quietly having a minor crisis about the exact same thing that he’s able to be so calm about it, but he’ll take what he can get.

“I wasn’t even saying anything important, just – you know, just my usual nonsense, really,” he says with a shrug. “I’m glad you got a bit of rest in. You’ll need it since we’ve got another temple coming up on Besaid, yeah?”

“I. I suppose you’re right,” Jon agrees grudgingly. Bringing up the temples did it, it seems. “Still. It’s – it’s hardly fair on you, a-and two hours isn’t exactly an insignificant amount of time—”

“Jon. I promise, I-I didn’t mind. Besides, what else could you have possibly been keeping me from doing on this boat? It’s not like I could’ve gone anywhere.”

Jon looks for a while like he’s trying very hard to find some kind of argument. He doesn’t find one. “…True.”

“So it’s fine.”

Jon’s face scrunches up in the way it does when he thinks it’s not fine, actually, but doesn’t have a good enough argument for why.

“We’re not telling Tim about this,” he says instead. “Ever.”

“Oh, oh, no, absolutely not,” Martin agrees fervently, deciding not to mention Basira popping in. At least he can probably trust Basira to keep it to herself. Probably. “Can you imagine what a nightmare he’d be—”

“Vividly.”

“Just –” Martin deepens his voice, trying to affect something close to Tim’s great big boom of a voice, “—‘ohhhhhhh, if you needed a guardian to use as a pillow, Jon, you only had to ask’—”

“That’s –” Jon says, an aborted laugh in the word, “That’s uncanny, actually—”

“So, um. Yeah, no arguments from me. We simply won’t tell him.”

“Right,” Jon nods, looking inordinately relieved. “Yes. I’m glad we settled that.”

Jon takes a breath, like he wants to say something else, then stops. He busies himself with straightening out his clothes where his impromptu sleep has left them creased, and then stands, his hands dancing nervously.

“Well. I’m going to find the others, I think. We should dock at Besaid before sundown, but I’ve heard it’s a fair walk to the village, so. Best to be prepared.”

“Right-o. Um. See you later, then.”

Jon leaves, the makeshift curtain falling back into place behind him, and Martin gives it about five seconds before he lets himself bury his burning face in his hands with a muffled groan of pure frustration.

Not good. Not good at all.

Besaid is a peaceful place.

The only village on the island squats deep in the bowl of a valley near the island’s centre, and it’s tiny; barely more than a handful of simple, round huts that Martin only barely needs the fingers of both hands to count, cleverly constructed out of large panels of felt stretched over the tops of sturdy wooden frames. The little houses huddle in a little circle at the feet of the island’s temple, which has the distinction of being the only building in the village made of stone. The roof is curved like a shell, and juts far out away from the bulk of the building like the prow of some giant ship, held up by curved supports that arc away from the temple’s sides like the spindly legs of some unknown creature.

They spend the night after the ferry makes landfall in a hut that’s much larger and more spacious than any of the others, one that Tim and Sasha claim is a Crusaders’ lodge of some kind. It’s simple, no more than an area full of beds near the back that’s been sectioned off for sleeping and another area at the front with a couple of tables set out for taking meals, but it’s surprisingly homey for all of that. Every surface inside hung with fabrics dyed in rich colours and woven in intricate patterns that are a testament to the skill of Besaid’s craftsfolk.

Martin was a bit surprised at first, to learn that the Crusaders keep a lodge somewhere this remote. The longer he thinks about it though, as they all share breakfast together in the morning sun outside, the more Martin catches sight of signs that Besaid is not so idyllic as it first seems. The wrecked remains of what used to be someone’s home, scraps of felt and jagged, broken supports half-swallowed by the lush undergrowth at the edges of the village. The looks in the eyes of the villagers as they make excuses to walk by the front of the lodge to look in on them, curiosity turning to a guarded, yet desperate hope the moment they realise why they’re all visiting Besaid to begin with. Even a place like Besaid – tiny, remote, moving at its own slow pace – even somewhere like this can’t escape Sin’s attention, or the presence of fiends roaming the island roads. The people here need the Crusaders around just as much as the folks in Luca.

But it’s so small. Smaller than Kilika Port, even.

Martin doesn’t realise he’s said that aloud until Basira says, “Yeah, places don’t get much bigger than this.”

Martin jumps. She’s giving him a piercing look, one that almost seems like it’s bordering on irritation. It gives him the uncomfortable feeling of being a puzzle or something that Basira’s trying to figure out.

Martin cannot afford for Basira to figure out this particular puzzle.

“I mean,” he says, hoping that his frantic heartbeat isn’t showing anywhere else in his face or his body, “I – I know that it’s because of Sin, I know that, but – it’s. It’s different actually seeing it like this, after seeing Luca. Just – hard to think about how Sin can hit somewhere like this even when there’s already so few people living in it.”

Basira hums, and then sighs, her expression settling into something troubled and understanding.

“Yeah, I get that,” she says; Martin holds his sigh of relief close. “I mean, I lived in Bevelle before this. It’s like a whole other world away.”

“Shock to the system seeing how the other half lives, is it?”

Again, there’s an edge to Tim’s voice that cuts through no matter how hard he’s trying to keep the words light. Martin eyes him warily, catching Jon and Sasha exchanging a look together out of the corner of his eye.

Basira’s eyes narrow. “That’s not it.”

“If you two are going to start another argument, can it wait until after breakfast?” says Sasha with a pointed, near-theatrical yawn. “I’m not nearly awake enough for this.”

“Seconded,” Jon mutters in the direction of his bowl.

Neither Tim nor Basira make any move to argue further after that, and after a moment Sasha tries to push the conversation toward what they all might have to expect from their visit to Besaid’s temple today, but the easy mood is well and truly gone. Martin tries to shoot a weak look of sympathy Basira’s way the next time their eyes meet. Tim is being weird, no doubt about it. Quieter than usual, but also like he’s spoiling for a fight. It wasn’t even a good argument this time, Martin knows Tim used to live in Bevelle most of the time himself, back before him and Sasha joined the Crusaders.

That thought makes him frown. Is that what this is really about?

He tries to squeeze a lid down on his curiosity, that feeling that maybe if he knows, maybe he can do something to help about it. It’s not like it’s any of his business. It’s not like it would be helpful to know right now, anyway, when they’re about to tackle another cloister, check off another milestone on this pilgrimage. The mood Tim’s in, it probably really would just start off a fight.

Martin still has other questions though, ones that he hopes are slightly safer. He’s also got absolutely no intention of bringing them up around Basira or Daisy, and so he waits until they’re all heading up the steps to the temple and hangs near the back to talk to Sasha.

“How come Luca and Bevelle are the exceptions to the rule, anyway?” he asks her quietly. “I – I know there’s Crusaders and warrior monks working to keep Sin away, but. How come they’re so big?”

“Luca’s got the stadium, and Bevelle is where Yevon’s main temple is. That’s really all it comes down to in the end,” Sasha shrugs. “Other places can’t risk getting so big because there’s not enough forces around to keep Sin away.”

Sasha stops then, a few steps away from the shadowy doorway leading into the temple. It’s so sudden that Martin almost stumbles into her, and finds her regarding him with a frown.

“That toxin’s really taking a while to wear off, isn’t it?” she says, half-concerned, half-intrigued.

Shit.

“I—” Martin stammers. “I, I guess so. It’s – things are better than they were, at least?”

“Less like a construction site up there?”

“Ha, um,” he says, smiling weakly as he recognises his own words from weeks before. “Yeah. Maybe more like a workshop or something now.”

Sasha laughs. “Hey, progress!”

She looks thoughtful again, her finger tapping idly on the spine of one of the books on her belt. “You know, once you feel up to it, I think it’d be a good idea for you to make a record of what happened to you, with the toxin. Healers all over Spira would kill for that kind of information.”

“Mm, maybe,” Martin says evasively. He’s glad he seems to have got through this conversation, and Sasha’s piercing inquisitiveness, with his lie in one piece, but. That is also exactly the reason why he cannot, under any circumstances, make any records about what’s happened to him. “I dunno, Sasha, don’t – don’t we have bigger things to worry about right now?”

“You got close to Sin and lived,” Sasha says, her face serious. She shrugs, beginning to walk towards the doorway again, and Martin follows suit. “I think that counts as part of the bigger things, don’t you?”

Just like Djose and Kilika, the dimly-lit room they find themselves in as they cross the threshold into the temple is full of the same statues of the High Summoners and their guardians, the same banner with Yevon’s sigil looming over the door into the cloister of trials, the same doors leading to other rooms in the temple tucked away in little alcoves near the back of the entrance hall. The people of Besaid have at least tried to make their temple seem more inviting by softening the walls at strategic points with some of that finely woven cloth from the village. The sound of the Hymn of the Fayth washes over them loud and clear as soon as they’re inside; this time a warm voice, not as high or as clear as the one that echoed through the temple at Kilika, but singing every note with intent and power. It’s tricky to get his ears to focus on anything else, even when he actively tries to pull his attention away.

Martin hopes that’s not going to end up being a problem when they head into the cloister.

“Another temple,” he sighs.

“Another temple.” Sasha casts him a wry, amused smile. “Do you think you’ll cause any more religious experiences this time?”

“Ugh, don’t even joke. I hadn’t – I didn’t think about my dad for years before this, and now, seeing his face everywhere – it’s. It’s just weird, to be honest.”

“Yeah. It must be,” Sasha nods, her smile fading. “Sorry. There wasn’t a temple where you’re from?”

“I – no. No, I don’t think so. I-I mean, I’ve seen three of them now, since Djose, so I’d have remembered by now if there was, right?”

“I suppose so.” Without warning, she leans in and nudges him gently with her elbow. “See, this is why you should write this stuff down!”

“Oh, ha ha.”

He appreciates Sasha trying to lighten the mood a bit – he does – but he also knows her well enough by now to know that she’s only partially joking. Martin hasn’t missed how Sasha has been meticulously writing in her own journals the entire time she’s been on the road, gradually filling in the blank pages as they sit by the fire in the evenings. Recording whatever it is she sees or hears just comes second nature to her.

As they cross the tiled mosaic floor to join the others, the sound of the Hymn still pulling at the fringes of Martin’s attention, the four High Summoners loom over them in all of their stone glory. Four High Summoners, each with a Calm that didn’t last and a statue that did.

It’s weird to think that if everything goes the way it should, Jon might end up with a statue of his own. A fifth statue for a new Calm.

Wait. Something doesn’t add up.

“… hey, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“Er – so this is definitely going to come under ‘oh, Martin’s brain’s still all turned around on toxin and bits of it are still missing’, but.” Gesturing towards the statues, Martin says, “There’s definitely been five Calms, right? How come every temple we’ve been in so far only has four statues for the High Summoners?”

Wordlessly, Sasha raises her eyebrows and points upwards. Martin follows the line her finger traces, squinting above the colourful Besaid fabrics into the gloom of the temple until all at once, it seems like a shape suddenly coalesces out of the gloom. A vast carving, two of them even, much, much larger than the four statues of the High Summoners, stretching out from the walls of the temple on either side. Between the dim light near the ceiling and the sheer scale of the carvings, it’s difficult to make out any details, but they look vaguely like two robed human figures.

“Oh. Oh! Okay, then!”

Sasha shakes her head, all too clearly amused by how floored he is.

“You didn’t really think they’d just forget to give Lord Orsinov, the man who came up with the Final Summoning, a statue of his own, did you?”

“They could have put it in a more obvious place! Who walks into a temple and immediately starts looking up at the ceiling to see if maybe there’s a great big statue up there that they missed?”

“Oh, is this why you two slowcoaches fell behind? Complaining about the architecture without me?”

Tim stands at the foot of the stairs with his arms folded and his eyebrows raised. There’s a smile playing around his lips, though, something a little closer to the usual good humour that he seems to have been struggling to hang on to since they all arrived on Besaid.

Sasha grins. “I already know all of your grievances about temple architecture. Maybe I wanted a second opinion.”

“Betrayal. I can’t believe you’d do this to me.” Tim shoots Sasha a grin at odds with his grave tone, and then nods his head up to the top of the staircase. “Anyway, we’d better get going and join that lot before they rush on in without us. Can’t let them have all the cloister fun.”

“Just so long as this one isn’t on fire like the last one,” Martin mutters as they climb the stairs.

To Martin’s relief, Besaid’s cloister of trials is not on fire. In fact, navigating its puzzles turns out to be a fairly straightforward task. Almost too straightforward. The spheres that unlock the doors leading to the chamber of the fayth at the temple’s heart are easy to spot and collect as they make their way through corridors lined with spidery circuit lines and glowing glyphs that must hold some kind of meaning beyond Martin’s knowledge.

It takes them such a short time to reach the heart of the temple that Martin is left with a gnawing feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wonders what it says about Besaid’s fayth, that their cloister seems so simple to navigate. Does it mean they’re an easy one to forge a pact with, or are the trials to get to them only so easy because the real trial begins once the summoner is inside that chamber?

He can’t be the only one that’s feeling a little uneasy about it, but any misgivings anyone has are kept to themselves. Jon needs the aeon from this temple to make it to Zanarkand, after all. At least, Martin assumes he does. There has to be a good reason why summoners can’t just skip a temple.

Endurance training, he remembers Tim and Sasha saying, and tries to keep his unease off his face as he settles down in the antechamber with the others to wait.

Keeping time down in this chamber is just as impossible as it was in the one back at Kilika. The uniquely awful mix of mindless boredom and bubbling worry is equally as impossible, but this time Martin turns his mind with a fierce determination towards actually doing something useful with the time he’s got to spend sitting out here, waiting for Jon to come back out looking like death warmed over all over again.

It’s only fair. He can’t just sit there doing nothing but waiting and worrying. He stubbornly drags his mind back every time it starts wandering, either through the anxiety or through the strains of the fayth’s song still echoing loudly in the room, and he tries to focus on coming up with new spells he could try to make the rest of their journey even slightly easier. Maybe something that could let everyone be a bit lighter on their feet, not get hit so often or need quite as much healing in the aftermath. Or something else to aim at the fiends themselves; the blindness spell he’s got is good enough, now that it’s not half-finished anymore, but it’s still a bit hit-and-miss. Do fiends sleep? Could magic or pyreflies or whatever make them sleep?

It doesn’t take all of the edge off of the anxiety of waiting, but it helps. Gives him something to do until the moment Jon returns to them, on legs that shake so violently it must be some kind of miracle he even made it through the door.

Daisy and Tim both move forward, but Tim is the one who gets there first, catching Jon against him with a low oof.

“Hey, steady on there, I’ve got you. Everything good?”

Jon makes a low, unintelligible sound that doesn’t seem to contain any actual words. “Got the aeon. I – it, it was, I didn’t…”

“Come on,” says Tim, “take it easy a second. What’re the people gonna say if they see you fainting away into the arms of your devastatingly handsome guardian? I mean, don’t get me wrong, you wouldn’t find me complaining, but we’ve got appearances to keep up.”

Tim’s voice is soft – for Tim – and something in the joke doesn’t quite land, the lightness he’s so obviously trying for not quite lifting. It’s still enough to get Jon to make a soft, disgruntled scoff easily audible to the rest of them.

“Shut up, Tim.” Ten, maybe fifteen seconds passes before Jon sighs heavily and stands somewhat more upright, though Martin doesn’t miss how Tim keeps himself close. “Alright. I’m ready.”

“You know there’s no rush, right?” Sasha frowns. “We can’t leave the island until the next ferry back to Kilika leaves anyway. That’s not till the day after tomorrow.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to stay down here.”

Martin can’t argue with that, even if he doesn’t think Jon should be pushing it the way he is, the way he has been since they started their little loop of the island temples. He hates seeing Jon like this, struggling to keep himself upright and half a second away from collapsing or passing out after whatever it is that’s just happened between him and the fayth he’s just finished forging a pact with. He knows Jon’s said he knew what he was getting into when he became a summoner, he knows there are bigger things at stake here, he saw back in Zanarkand exactly what it is Jon’s taken upon himself to try and stop, but –

But even with all that, there’s still part of Martin that hates it. That Jon has to put himself through this, that anyone has had to put themselves through this. That everyone just seems to – accept it, or at least keep quiet about it, even if the worry’s plain on their faces the entire time. Including him.

It just doesn’t sit right, that’s all.

When they make it back up to the entrance of the cloister, Tim pokes his head out first, scanning the room.

“Good news,” he says, flashing them a thumbs up. “No nosy villagers hanging around. We should probably stick around inside the temple for a bit till Jon’s with it again, as soon as they see us come out the front it’ll all be over.”

“I can handle myself.”

“You,” Tim says, raising his eyebrows at Jon, “hate being swarmed by Joe Public even when you’re not five seconds away from passing out. Now come on, let’s go eat something, I’m starving.”

Chapter Text

In spite of his protests, Jon really does pass out almost as soon as they all get sat round a table; the only thing that saves him from slamming his head against a hard surface is Daisy’s quick reflexes. They decide to just let him sleep it off in the same room they’re in for now, laid out with his head pillowed on one of the seat cushions next to their low table. Simpler than having to get up and find the local priest all over again to ask for a bed.

In the end, the priest ends up coming back to them first, and upon seeing Jon stretched out on the floor, he wordlessly leaves and returns again a few minutes later with his arms full of a neatly folded mattress and a blanket.

“I’m old enough to have seen my fair share of exhausted summoners,” he explains when they thank him. “Though, I see less of them these days than I did in my youth.”

“You ever meet the last High Summoner, then?” Basira asks as she takes the bedding from him.

“Ha! Gertrude Robinson? I doubt any who served in the temples during her pilgrimage will soon forget the experience. I think my old heart almost stopped the day I saw her walk brazenly into the cloister with multiple forbidden machina strapped to her. If you’d asked me back then if I thought it would be she who would bring us the most recent Calm…”

The old priest shakes his head with a deep sigh, clearly enjoying playing for an audience. “Well, let us just say that I’m relieved to see this latest summoner is a former apprentice from St. Bevelle. Even here on Besaid, the people are desperate for another Calm.”

Tim makes a dark, mirthless sound that can only barely be called a laugh. “Yeah, I bet.”

The priest barely acknowledges him. Just nods as he tells them, “Guard your summoner well, until Zanarkand. Yevon willing, your pilgrimage will be one that defeats Sin.”

This last comment is, of course, accompanied by the Prayer. The priest straightens up and looks at them all gravely one by one, until his eyes land on Martin.

“Young man,” he says, his brow furrowed, “do I know you? You seem familiar.”

Martin barely reins in his exasperated sigh. Right. Better get this over with, then.

“Um. No, but, if you met the last High Summoner, you… might have met my dad at the same time.”

“Your father?”

For the first time in one of these awful, uncomfortable encounters, Martin is met with a genuine confusion that goes on for at least a minute, the priest’s lined face crinkled in puzzled thought.

“Ah!” he says at last, his eyes lighting up. “Of course, now I know from whence the familiarity comes. Though, I must say that I never met the man. He did not yet number among Lady Gertrude’s guardians when she came to Besaid.”

“Huh. Really?”

“Quite,” the priest nods. “It was a surprise to me when, years after Lady Gertrude’s Calm began and Besaid finally received the statues of her and her guardians for our temple, that there numbered among them the likenesses of guardians I had never had the honour of meeting. Although rumours do manage to fly even to our remote little village. It must be a source of some pride to have a father who was willing to give up his life for his summoner.”

Wait.

“I – what?”

“Yes,” continues the priest blithely, “my opposite number in one of the temples to the north told me of the Ronso tribe bearing his spear in honour down the mountain, although since she has never ventured into the Calm Lands herself, I do have my doubts as to her veracity—”

“No,” Martin interrupts, “no, I mean – he’s – he’s really. He’s… dead, then?”

The priest’s mouth hangs slightly open, still caught mid-sentence. “You don’t know?”

“Sin’s toxin,” says Tim abruptly, his voice colder than Martin’s ever heard it. “It hit him hard. Thanks for the blankets for Jon.”

The old priest’s eyes go wide at the mention of the toxin, and he once again drops into the Prayer seemingly without thinking. He also very conspicuously makes a swift excuse to leave them all to their rest not long after, having at least the grace to look incredibly uneasy.

Martin’s not in much of a mood to be charitable about it, seeing as how he’s now left with the incredibly uneasy mood of everyone else in the room who’s not currently unconscious doing their level best not to stare at him. He doesn’t even have anything to occupy his hands with, since Basira decided she was going to be the one who made off with the blankets.

“Hey,” says Tim quietly after a moment. “You alright?”

“I. I dunno.”

Which is true. It is true. It’s not as if – fundamentally, it’s not as if anything at all has changed. He came to terms long ago with the fact that his dad was no longer a feature in his life and never would be. Does it really make a difference how or why that’s the case?

“Maybe?” he tries again. “I – I don’t know what to think, to be honest.”

Daisy makes a quiet sound of impatience.

“Priests love talking,” she mutters darkly. “‘Specially about stuff that’s not their business. Talk about it or don’t, s’up to you.”

For a moment, all Martin can do is stare at her in surprise, his throat feeling weirdly stuck. He wouldn’t ever have expected that from Daisy, of all people.

“… thanks, Daisy. I think?”

Daisy shrugs, making a wordless noise of acknowledgement, and goes back to staring daggers at the table.

“It could just be a rumour, Martin,” says Sasha. “There’s never any reliable eyewitness accounts for anything that happens north of the sacred mountain, and stories have a way of getting twisted when they’re passed through the temple grapevine.”

“But it’s likely, right.”

Nobody says anything, which is plenty answer enough. Martin’s skin prickles with something like irritation, something like discomfort, pins-and-needles shame.

“Right,” he says with a sigh, wanting to be doing anything but sitting here in this room. “It’s fine, guys. It’s not – it’s really not like it changes anything.” Because it doesn’t.

He catches Tim and Sasha throwing a look at each other and stands up before either of them can get it into their heads to say anything.

“Did anyone want something to drink?”

That night, Martin dreams.

He’s in a room where all the furniture seems bigger than it ought to; the chairs and cabinets sized all wrong; the floor covered by the big old carpet rug much closer than it should be. Everything’s all soft and indistinct round the edges with hazy, half-remembered blankness; no details, nothing to ground anything in time or in place.

He pushes both hands against something that gives way under his palms like a door, one that’s too heavy and stiff with a handle that’s just barely out of reach of straining fingers, and—

He’s outside, somewhere the noise and chatter of excited people is a blurry inescapable fever pitch in his ears, he wants to see what’s going on too but everything is a skyline of fabric and legs and sharp sea-smell mixed with the warm earthy pungence of lots of people in one place until

something heavy and warm ruffles his hair and suddenly he’s up high above the sea of people’s heads with two large, steady hands keeping him in place. He can see everything, the light on the water and the gleam of the boats and the flash as fireworks start showering down out of the sky in a series of bang-fizzes, and—

There was something he wanted to ask. He opens his mouth to say it – he’s sure it was important – and then the fireworks are gone and he’s outside a front door he knows but that wasn’t ever really his own, clutching a piece of paper tight in both hands. He’s just got to ask, that’s all. It’s important, so

an absent touch on his shoulder; Sorry, kiddo, I’m busy right now. He just wanted to ask. He wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.

He wanders (except not-wanders because he can’t ever quite remember taking any steps between) rooms with furniture that’s still the wrong size and thresholds he can never seem to step over and staircases that seem to stretch up or down impossibly steep and impossibly long and a warm shadow he can’t ever quite see the face of always just out of reach except for those odd touches, split-second glow of distant affection coupled with a voice that echoes cold; not now,

why don’t you go ask your mum,

don’t know why you’re bringing me this one,

now’s not a good time,

you’ll figure it out on your own

“I don’t know if I can,” says Martin, and just like that everything is the right size again, his line of sight back where it should be in the centre of this hazy kaleidoscope of every doorway he’s ever hovered in or every stairwell he’s perched at the top or bottom of waiting for—

for what? For an invitation? Some kind of indication that his problems mattered, that it was okay for something to be about him?

Even here that sounds pathetic.

“Wow, there is a lot to unpack in here.”

That’s not a voice that Martin knows, and as he whirls around, the hazy indistinct blandness of the now properly-proportioned furniture and the room solidifies somehow. A slender, dark-skinned woman with shockingly blonde hair leans on a kitchen counter, her mouth curved up in one of those annoying amused smiles that says that the person wearing it knows some kind of secret you don’t, and has no plans to share any of it.

She’s also dressed like all of the looms in Besaid threw up on her at once, clashing colours and patterns and all, but she’s somehow making it work. Must be something about the way the clothes hang on her.

“I’m not saying that I have never had any problems of my own to work through, of course, that’d be silly,” she says brightly, hopping up on top of a hot pink barstool that wasn’t there before. “But I did keep the threads pulled a bit tighter than all this.”

Martin stares at this woman as she leans easily on one elbow, a pastry held in one hand. “Sorry, who are you?”

Her smile widens, showing off all of her perfectly straight teeth. “What a question! Perhaps I’m simply a figment your subconscious conjured up to help you?” She pushes a large dinner plate across the kitchen counter towards him, piled high with more pastries. “A… friendly face to answer questions.”

Martin is sitting on a yellow barstool on the opposite side of the counter, staring at a plate of pastries. “My subconsc— what, are you saying I’m dreaming right now?”

The plate ripples. That definitely wasn’t there before, right?

“Perhaps. You do catch on quickly, don’t you?”

“Okay, well. I’ve never met anyone who looks like you in my life.”

She shrugs, fluidly, with just the right amount of nonchalance to let anyone watching know that it’s calculated. The pastry in her hand is half-eaten. Martin’s sure she never took a bite.

“Dreams can weave images and inspiration out of all kinds of places. I should know.”

“Mm, yeah, no,” says Martin, folding his arms. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Don’t think I didn’t notice how – how everything suddenly got a lot more close to making sense as soon as you showed up.”

“A side-effect of my nature, I think. Is that a problem?”

“… No. No, I think I prefer this, actually.”

Ugh. There’s something about admitting that that feels all too much like giving this person satisfaction for something he really doesn’t want to give. He feels like he should be angrier about it, but – the same way that the pastries, and the bar stools, and the faint sunset light coming through a window that wasn’t there just appeared like they’d always been there, with that heavy, inevitable dream quality, it’s the same thing here; this person is in his dream, like she was always meant to be here, and he just has to ride along with it.

“Good!” smiles the dream squatter in question, now brushing crumbs off her fingers from a pastry that he’s sure did not get eaten. “Because I’ve been wanting to take you to one side for a chat ever since you got here. How are you finding Spira? It’s a far cry from Zanarkand, I know.”

“Okay, seriously, how do you know this stuff?”

“We are in your subconscious,” she says, glancing out the window as the light flickers to something darker for just a moment. “Perhaps I’m just observing what’s been on your mind as you’ve made your way through this brave new world.”

“Are you going to tell me who you are yet, or not?”

“Are you?”

Is she just allergic to answering questions or something? Or is this really actually just Martin discovering lucid dreaming in the most frustrating way possible and not being able to dream up answers to questions he doesn’t know the answer to himself?

He watches the woman smile like she knows the sort of thing he’s thinking about, and decides right then and there that it’s definitely the first one.

“Like you said, it’s my subconscious. Think you’re being rude enough just coming and barging in like this, to be honest.”

“Perhaps you should take it as a compliment that I find you interesting enough to pay you a visit.”

“Perhaps you should just tell me what you want.”

“Can’t I just want to say hello?” She plays cat’s cradle now, both elbows leaning on the kitchen counter, fingers weaving patterns in red string that should not be possible for only ten fingers. “I wasn’t joking when I said I find you interesting. It’s been a while since there’s been a summoner on the road with any guardians quite so worth keeping an eye on. I have to say, the way you’ve managed to keep such a threadbare lie patched up the way you have? Very impressive. I’m intrigued to see where you go next.”

Martin’s eyes are fixed on the string between her hands, drawn to it the same way his ears were drawn to the sound of the fayth’s song in the temple back in the waking world the day before. Her fingers move in ways he can’t catch but that cannot be possible, as the string between them forms a pattern like some sort of bird, or bat, or – something. It takes an effort to look away; it’s the sharpest, clearest thing in this whole dream-whatever he’s landed in.

“Okay, one,” he says, dragging himself back to the irritation he knows is still there, “that isn’t as comforting as you think it is, two: how do you know all this stuff, because this isn’t just stuff you’ve pulled from my subconscious, this is— you’re not spying on Jon or something, are you?”

He can’t say where the thought comes from, but it brings with it a spike of fear that the mention of Zanarkand, or even his little patchwork lie, just didn’t.

“Not in the way you think,” she says, now weaving an eye in the string between her hands, now a large, whale-like shape, now something that looks like a magic staff. “Don’t worry, I am actually very invested in Jon’s success. More than you’d believe, actually.”

“What d’you mean, invested in— wait.” Something clicks, suddenly, as his eyes are drawn back to the cat’s cradle between her hands, faint strains of a familiar song echoing in his ears. “Are you – you’re not one of. Are you a fayth or something?”

“Oh, very impressive!”

It’s impossible to tell if she’s being sincere or not. Her knowing smile barely flickers. There’s something about her that seems less solid all of a sudden though; the bar stool under Martin feels more giving than it should, like lying down on a mattress. An uncomfortable one. There’s a faint sound of wind rustling leaves overhead, an odd feeling like his eyes are closed despite still being able to see her, and the kitchen table, and the window through which yellow light now streams.

“Well,” she remarks pleasantly, with another glance at the window, “you are close to waking up, and with that last very perceptive guess I’d say you’ve given Oliver enough to wear those frown lines of his nice and deep for weeks, so I think I’ll say my goodbyes. I have no doubt that we’ll see each other again soon enough.”

“Too soon if we do,” he says, and opens his eyes to the sight of the fabric drapes on the inside of the tent.

“What’s that?” mumbles Tim sleepily from the next bed over.

Martin blinks, and tries to swallow through a throat that’s clogged with early-morning dryness. Did he just meet a fayth? Did he dream he did? It was all so clear a second ago, but as soon as he opened his eyes it was like the whole thing started slipping away from him, like trying to hang onto water with his bare hands.

No good. The dream’s already gone even as he stares up at the fabric above his head, their fine patterns all blurry without his glasses. Just an itch in the back of his mind, a faint sense of unease and irritation in his gut that he doesn’t know who or what to rightly aim it at.

“Nothing, sorry,” he says to Tim, and drops a forearm over his eyes to block out the morning sunlight. “Just sleeptalking.”

Chapter Text

The weather on Besaid that morning is beautiful, with clear skies and the promise of some serious heat once the sun gets properly overhead. And for once, they actually have time to appreciate it. Martin's struck to realise just how long it’s been since any of them had a moment to do that, to just be for a while. It’s been over a month of fighting, walking, planning and preparing, with some aspect of the pilgrimage and what they’re on their way to do hanging over their heads all the time even during moments of rest. But now, with their visit to Besaid’s temple out of the way yesterday already, and nothing to do but wait until the following morning for the scheduled departure of the ferry back to Kilika, they have a whole day of free time ahead of them.

A proper day off, with no obligations. A real breather. Martin’s not really sure what to do with himself. He’s never been much good at using his free time as – well, free time.

Besaid’s so beautiful that it feels like it’d be a real shame not to, though. And there might not ever be another chance like this, once they get back on the ferry and start heading north again, back past Luca and the highroad and Djose and beyond to places Martin’s never seen before. He really should make the most of it.

So he’s probably more relieved than he should be when Sasha takes the pressure off of deciding how best to make the most of it by announcing that she wants to take a walk around the island.

“Fancy joining me?” she asks him, to his surprise. “Tim’s refusing to leave that hammock he bribed one of the weavers to string up for him and Basira’s deep in some book she magicked up from somewhere. And I’m not asking Daisy.”

“What about Jon?”

“Oh, he’d probably be interested, but I’ve decided I’m drawing a line,” Sasha grins. “If he tries to spend today doing anything that isn’t getting his breath back, I’m trapping him inside Tim’s hammock myself.”

Martin laughs, the sound startled out of him.

“Not if I get there first,” he jokes. “Alright, sure, I’ll come with.”

Besaid looks so different in the daytime. When they arrived on the boat from Kilika, most of their walk to the village was done in the last light of sunset, that odd in-between place where the light was caught between gold and a dim, twilight grey. It was hard to appreciate the beauty of it all when he was more focused on making sure he didn’t trip over a tree branch or fall to his death from a rickety old rope bridge or anything.

Now, though, as he wanders the winding island paths with Sasha with no schedule to keep but their own, he has time to really appreciate all of it; just how green and alive everything on the island is, how clear the water is, the way the waterfalls plunging down past those same rickety old rope bridges catch the sunlight and make a thousand tiny little rainbows in the mist between the falls. A fork in the road leads them to a spot high above a lush cove full of deep blue, crystal-clear water.

It’d be difficult to believe that somewhere so gorgeous is still a place where Sin is a constant threat, if it weren’t for the ruins.

Martin’s surprised at how many there are for such a small island, and even more surprised at how intact they all seem to be. Towers and walkways dot the tops of ridges and cliffs above and beside the modern-day pathways, overgrown with centuries of plant life and snaking roots and branches, yet still decidedly more building-shaped than a lot of the ruined husks that flank the Mi’ihen highroad back on the mainland. Even a thousand years of salty sea air and blazing island sun hasn’t rusted the metal or eroded down the masonry nearly as much as Martin would’ve expected.

The sight gives him another faint wave of that someone-walking-over-his-grave nostalgia, something that isn’t quite homesickness but that he doesn’t have a better word for.

It’s the ruins that draw Sasha’s attention too, though Martin’s not sure if she knows just how obvious she’s being about it. Just like when they were on the highroad, there’s an undeniable longing in her eyes whenever their path takes them close to one. He starts getting the feeling after a while that she’s actively having to hold herself back from scrambling up to the top of the ridges to go poking around.

As they get close to the beach near Besaid’s main dock, they come to one that’s actually on the same level as the path; it looks like the remains of some kind of lift, or maybe an access door, complete with a numeric keypad next to the door. Martin wonders if it still works. If somebody brave enough or foolhardy enough could ride that lift down underground into the remains of a thousand-year-old building and walk around whatever’s left without anything much of an idea of what they’re actually seeing.

Somebody like Sasha, who’s now examining the keypad with the air of a child sneakily prying the lid off the biscuit tin.

“I wonder what this was for?” she asks, her hands already going to her belt to fetch a stick of charcoal and whatever journal she’s currently on.

“Who knows?” Martin makes himself say with a shrug. “Maybe hitting the buttons in the right order made the door open, or something.”

Sasha’s eyes gleam.

“Oh, maybe! I wonder if it still works after all these years? The Al Bhed manage to get ancient machina working all the time, so there must be some kind of trick to it…”

She trails off, a small frown creeping onto her face. “I probably shouldn’t. But can you imagine how many actual, useful clues there could be to Spira’s history down there?”

“Loads, probably.” Martin hesitates a moment. “Um, why shouldn’t you?”

“A few reasons,” she shrugs, but with a frown still on her face that’s at odds with it. “The fiends down in ruins like this tend to be ancient, and the older they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. Not something you want to go up against unprepared.”

Sasha makes a few more lines on her latest sketch. “Still, it’s nice to be able to get up close and personal with something like this for once. The Crusaders got all the machina we’re using now off of the Al Bhed, so there’s never been a chance for me to sneak onto a salvage expedition.”

“And the other reasons?”

“Hm?”

“I mean, you said there were a few.”

“Oh,” says Sasha in an odd tone. “Yeah, right. Well, I unfortunately have been blessed with two friends who are prone to well-meaning but very patronising lectures whenever I do something they think is reckless. Besides, do you really want to stand here watching me punch in every possible number combination all day?”

“I wasn’t talking about right now, you know!” Martin protests, rolling his eyes. “Just – you know, in general.”

Sasha grins at him, which is fairly normal Sasha behaviour, but that doesn’t change the fact that this whole conversation has got her acting just as weird as Tim is, albeit in a completely different way. What is it about this little out-of-the-way island that’s got the two of them being so odd?

Part of him wishes he could just come out and ask, but – it’s not like they’re close enough for that to be okay. He can’t see being asked “why are you two being so weird about this?” going over well.

He sits with his legs dangling off a nearby ledge and tries to make his uneasy peace with not being a busybody about it while he lets Sasha finish documenting this particular ruin. He smiles when he hears the unmistakable sound of her giving the ancient keypad a surreptitious workout before she joins him again, an impish smile on her face when she catches his raised eyebrows.

“Alright, I couldn’t resist having a go,” she admits. “It would’ve been funny if I’d got it open first time, right?”

“After that big speech you made about it being a terrible idea, you mean?”

“I never claimed not to be a hypocrite,” she says cheerfully. “Come on, I want to spend some time on a proper beach before we have to go. Djose can’t hold a candle to Besaid.”

The beach is lovely. The sun’s made the sand pleasantly warm underfoot, which they discover once they both decide to strip all their footwear off and sink their toes into the sand, which feels ridiculously a little like being a kid bunking off from school to do something fun. There’s a few odd shells and bits of sea glass that have washed up along the tideline, and Martin pockets a small handful to keep with him as a memento. Just a nice reminder to have, for any time the road ahead gets dark.

After a time, Sasha tires of wading out as far as she can into the surf to catch glimpses of the wildlife, and Martin gets tired of wandering up and down the beach breathing in the sea air and having a curious look – from a distance, obviously – at the fishing equipment leaned up against the small shack at the far end of the beach. They meet up again near the centre of the beach, plopping themselves down onto the sand in a companionable quiet. Martin’s going to be shaking sand out of his clothes for hours, but he doesn’t care about that right now.

“Finally! I was starting to think you two’d decided to swim back to Kilika for fun or something.”

Both of them jump as Tim’s unmistakable voice booms across the sand. Sasha recovers first, schooling her face into what Martin has come to recognise as the expression she reserves for whenever Tim opens a conversation like that.

“Who says we haven’t?”

“Shame if you had. I came to fetch you both back for lunch – you’re welcome, by the way. Someone else wanted to feed your share to the dog.”

“Is the dog you in this scenario?”

“I’m a growing lad! I need all the food I can get!” Tim grins. “C’mon, you’ve done your sightseeing.”

“Just because you were too lazy to get out of that hammock,” Sasha laughs, but climbs back to her feet nonetheless. Martin follows her lead; he hadn’t thought about it till Tim came bounding towards them, but he really could go for food right now.

He stretches, loose sand falling away from where it isn’t just plain stuck to him, and throws one last glance out over the beach and the rest of the bay. A sudden flash of movement in the water catches his eye, the sun’s reflection breaking up in small places where it shouldn’t, and when he glances back—

Huh.

“Are you two seeing the people swimming towards the beach right now?”

Tim and Sasha make a perfectly synchronised turn as they look out at the ocean, and at the people who are swimming with some astonishing speed towards the beach. There’s six of them that Martin can see, cutting through the water in a way that looks effortless. Recognition flashes across Tim’s face after a moment, followed by a string of other emotions that come and go too fast for Martin to put a name to.

The person at the front of the pack, not too far now from where the water becomes shallow enough to wade in, makes a fluid turn in the water to holler back at the ones trailing behind with an impressive amount of volume.

“Come on, Aurochs, you’re in the home stretch now! The Goers won’t go any easier on you than the ocean if we come up against them!”

Turning back to the shore, the leader – team captain, maybe? – is soon wading through the water up to the beach, brushing water out of hair that’s faded from what must be years of exposure to salt water and the sun. As her teammates follow her lead out of the water, she’s all smiles; she offers each one a clap on the back or a helping hand out of the surf, until one of them gives her a nudge and a surreptitious point in the direction Martin and his friends are standing, and her jaw drops.

“Tim? Tim Stoker, is that you?”

The smile that appears on Tim’s face is completely normal, except for all the ways it isn’t.

“Hi, Abi.”

“Hi,” she says, skidding to a halt in the sand in front of them. “Wow, this is – I didn’t realise you were going to be here on Besaid, it’s been— it’s been a few years.”

“Yeah, no, uh… I’m guardian for a summoner now, so, you know how it is.”

“You, a guardian? No way.” Her eyes go wide, and Martin isn’t even surprised anymore when she quickly performs the Prayer. There’s a pause, then, just long enough for the back of Martin’s neck to start prickling with the way Tim’s holding himself tense, the hesitation on the face of his old friend. She rallies herself with a smile, saying, “Well, it really is good to see you! You’re looking well.”

“Yeah, you too. Didn’t realise they made you captain of the team now.”

“Hah, you know, someone’s got to whip these boneheads into shape if we’re gonna have any chance of winning.”

“And they couldn’t have picked a better candidate,” says Tim with a smile, and he may still sound like he’s struggling to project his usual amount of energetic cheer, but Martin can tell every word is heartfelt.

His friend – was it Abi? – must think so too, because some of the hesitation melts out of her pleased grin.

“Thanks. We’ve been round the far side of the island the past few days getting in some last minute training, so…” She crosses her fingers on both hands with a playful grimace, before her eyes land on Sasha and Martin. “Anyway, are you going to introduce me? I’m guessing you must be Sasha.”

“I see my reputation precedes me,” Sasha smiles.

“Only good things, I promise! And I also promise I’m not just saying that because Tim is making frantic gestures at me, either.”

“You traitor!” laughs Tim, who - surprisingly - really was doing nothing of the sort. “Anyway yeah, this is Sasha, and that’s Martin, he’s a guardian with us. Martin, Sasha, this is Abigail, who apparently got a well-deserved promotion to being captain of the Besaid Aurochs while my back was turned.”

So Abigail and the other five swimmers are a blitzball team. A professional one at that. Martin tries to connect the dots between a Crusader from Bevelle being on friendly terms with a professional blitzball player from Spira’s southernmost point, and comes up empty.

“Are you heading back up towards Luca on the same boat as us tomorrow, then?” says Abigail.

“Yep. We went through the cloister yesterday, so – you know.”

“Maybe we can catch up more later on, then? Share some old stories. I have missed you, you know, since—” and here, Abigail falters, the tentatively easy air suddenly broken into awkwardness again. “Yeah. You know.”

“Yeah.” It takes a moment for Tim to nod, any cheer he managed to scrounge up nowhere to be seen. He sighs, and says, “Listen, we were just heading back to the village to eat, so we’re gonna head off. Is the team…?”

“No, we’re staying here for a bit. Get some last-minute training in, you know?”

“Right, yeah. ‘Course. See you, Abi.”

Abigail gives the three of them one final wave and a smile that isn’t much more than a brave face, and heads back over towards the rest of her team. Martin, Tim, and Sasha turn back towards the trail that heads inland, and a heavy silence rushes in to fill the gaps where none of them seem to want to try speaking. For his part, Martin feels like he’s been handed half of something he shouldn’t have ever been privy to, leaving him itching with guilty curiosity.

Once they’ve made it far enough from the beach that the sand has given way fully to the dirt trail and the noises filling the awkward silence are those of hidden birds and small animals rather than gulls and the ocean, Sasha stops and puts a hand on Tim’s shoulder, squeezing.

“You alright?”

Tim lets out a long, lingering sigh. “Yeah,” he nods after a moment. “Yeah, don’t worry about me.” He shakes his head, a tiny, lop-sided smile flitting across his face. “Can’t believe Abi made captain after all this time.”

Martin hesitates, before just going for it and asking the question he hopes will cause the least amount of harm.

“How are you on first-name terms with an entire blitzball team, anyway?”

Tim and Sasha are both quiet for a moment, long enough that Martin knows it was the wrong thing to ask and he should have just left well enough alone.

He’s about to say as much, ask Tim to drop it and say it doesn’t matter, when Tim finally says, more subdued than Martin’s ever seen him, “My little brother Danny played for them. Left forward, you know, he was – he was good. Miles better than me splashing about in the ocean. Anyway, gate-crash enough post-game locker room parties, you get to know the rest of the team pretty well.”

“… Played for them?” Martin asks, his heart already sinking.

“Yeah,” Tim says heavily, not making eye contact. “He, uh. He passed away, a few years ago now. Went exploring in some of those old buildings on the far side of the island, and… yeah.”

Martin feels like he’s just been plunged into ice water.

“Oh— Tim, I’m – I’m so sorry.”

It feels so inadequate, but it’s all he can think to say. No wonder Tim’s been so off ever since they boarded the boat to Besaid. No wonder Sasha was so weird and furtive about the ruined building they passed earlier.

“Yeah,” Tim says again. “Well. Everyone in Spira’s lost someone.”

“I… I mean, yeah, but. Still, I’m just sorry.”

Martin wishes he had something better to say, but the words won’t come. Sure, everyone in Spira must carry grief, but – that doesn’t make the grief lesser. It can’t.

The remainder of their walk back to the village is quiet, almost silent. When Sasha does break it, it’s to ask after what the others have been doing with their day, and warmth gradually begins to seep back into the space between them.

Martin doesn’t know if the other two are being as careful about it as he feels he is, but none of them bring up Danny again.

The day passes.

Tim makes no mention of what happened down on the beach to anyone else, and Martin tries to put it out of his mind. Tries to. It's clear that Tim wants to pretend it never happened, or at least avoid thinking about it, the way he's so determinedly finding ways to do literally anything else the whole afternoon.

Late in the afternoon, when the sun is beginning to get low, the village goes into a minor flurry when the Aurochs return through the village gate, looking tired but in high spirits. Blitzball fever must dominate even a sleepy little island like Besaid this close to a tournament; there’s no shortage of smiles on the faces of adults and kids alike, alongside the high-pitched pleas of the village children for the players to please show them how to do some kind of blitzball move.

It’s nice to see so many smiles about, but it just makes Martin think about when Sasha said that blitzball is the only fun people in Spira are allowed. Blitzball players here in Spira must have a kind of pressure all their own.

A couple of the village elders eagerly wave them all over, and before they know it they find themselves invited to share in a village-wide meal; something taken around the fire that’s currently being lit in the centre of the village, communal dishes piled as high as people could afford to make them with yams and other vegetables, seafood and fragrant rice.

“A shared meal for good luck,” the elder explains. “For your summoner and our blitzballers.”

There’s no refusing such a generous and heartfelt offer, and they all find themselves drawn into the gathering to some degree or another. Tim and Sasha find easy conversation with the adults of the village who recognise a pair of Crusaders when they see them, and even Basira and Daisy find a place; Martin catches sight of them playing some sort of game of chance with the village fisherfolk.

The biggest surprise is Jon, who finds himself something of a curiosity for the handful of village children once they tire of the Aurochs, and ends up surrounded for a good half an hour by three or four inquisitive little faces. For a minute or so, Martin entertains the thought of a rescue – for the children or for Jon, he’s not entirely sure – but when he sneaks a glance in that direction a few moments later, he’s greeted with the sight of Jon being undeniably gentle with a way more settled-looking bunch of kids than what he started with.

Huh. He doesn’t know why, but he never would’ve called Jon as being someone who’d have a way with kids.

He desperately tries not to think about how endearing it is.

Fortunately, he doesn’t end up having much time to think on it, as apparently being one of Jon’s guardians makes him interesting enough for a few people to strike up a conversation with him. There’s some knowing, sympathetic nods when he explains that his home was attacked by Sin, some shocked looks and reflexive Prayers when he hastily drags out the excuse of the toxin to head off any further questions, but it isn’t too hard to get the villagers talking about themselves and their work, saving him from further interrogation. For one thing, Martin ends up learning a lot more about the fabric trade and its importance to Besaid than he’ll ever have a need for.

Abigail, of all people, is the one who puts a hand on his elbow to free him from a circle of inquisitive islanders.

“Martin, wasn’t it?” she says. “You should come pray for a safe voyage with us.”

“Um – what?”

“It’s a Besaid tradition. There’s a statue above the village that people offer prayers to before they go on a journey that takes them from the island. I was saying to Tim and the rest of your friends, I know your journey is technically already going and you’re not from Besaid, but – a little extra good luck for the road couldn’t hurt with how far you have to go.”

Martin’s not really sure what praying will actually do, but he’s also not about to argue with the logic of taking every little scrap of luck they can get for what’s to come.

“Sure. Um, ‘us’…?”

“You guardians, your summoner, and us Aurochs. We’re leaving on the same boat tomorrow, remember?”

It’d be pretty difficult to forget considering the conversation she’d first mentioned it in, but Martin doesn’t say that. Instead, he joins Abigail with the rest of the Aurochs and everyone else from his little travelling party as they head out of the village and uphill along the trail, until they reach the highest point of the path. It’s not far; from one side of the viewpoint, the lights of the village are still clearly visible. The other looks clear out to sea, with nothing between the island and the horizon but fathoms of ocean.

The statue that stands on the side of the cliff nearest the ocean is odd; barely a statue at all, more like some great thick column or obelisk of stone, with odd, swirling waves carved into its sides and three large, round, green stones set in recesses in the pattern. Two stone arcs carved at a diagonal encircle it at its base, and there’s a low stone wall surrounding the whole thing, on which the islanders have placed small offerings; stones and candles, shells and little woven good luck charms.

Most of the others start right in on the Prayer once they’re all gathered in front of the obelisk, either standing or kneeling as they pay their respects, but Martin feels too weird about it to join in. It just seems – wrong, somehow, for him to start making the gesture of a religion he doesn’t actually believe in, even if that gesture did start out life as a blitzball victory sign. So he’s relieved to see that not everyone’s prayer involves gesturing before the obelisk, Tim and Sasha among them. It makes him feel better about his decision to just stand there with his head bowed as respectfully as he can make it, offering up some kind of wish to whatever might be listening that they’ll all make it to the end of this journey – and the final encounter with Sin that must follow – in one piece.

Some of the Aurochs head back to the village straight away once they’re done, but a couple of them stay up there with the rest of them, enjoying the evening air and making idle conversation as they look back down at the village, or try to catch sight of anything out in the darkness of the ocean beyond the island. Eventually, though, everyone starts to tire of being outside the village walls as darkness closes in, and begin drifting slowly back down the path, seeking the orange glow of the village fire.

Jon lingers for a while near the railing overlooking the descent to the village, both hands leaning on the cracked, weathered wood. He’s looking a lot better; the day of forced rest must have done him some good. Could just be that they’ve already lost most of the daylight, though.

The fading light could also be to blame for Martin seeing an almost soft, wistful look on Jon’s face. But then again, maybe not.

Martin waits a moment, and then he takes a couple of steps back, joining Jon back on the hilltop proper.

“You know, it’s really nice here.”

Jon starts; he clearly wasn’t expecting anyone to join him in whatever reverie he was just in.

“… Yes,” he says, once he’s seen it’s just Martin. “Yes, it is. I – entirely different from Bevelle, but. That’s not a bad thing.”

Martin doesn’t know enough about what Bevelle’s like to comment, but he imagines the central city of Yevon must have a completely different atmosphere to quiet, placid Besaid.

“Yeah. I’ve never been anywhere like this before, either.”

“Do you –” Jon hesitates. “That is, have things come back to you, then?”

Ah. Martin wonders if Jon’s been talking to Sasha.

“Bits and pieces. What about you, you feeling better?”

“Oh – yes, thank you,” Jon nods, with a wry smile. “I’ve had my orders.”

“Ha, yeah, Sasha was saying something earlier about rolling you up in Tim’s hammock if you pushed it.”

“Of course she was.”

The long-suffering note in Jon’s voice makes Martin wonder if he could push it. After a moment’s deliberation, he hums and says cheerily, “I would’ve helped her.”

“Martin!”

Jon sounds so utterly scandalised, mouth hanging open appalled at the idea as he mutters about Sasha and Tim and terrible influences, that Martin can’t quite keep himself from cracking up a little bit.

“You can’t say we’re wrong about it, though,” he points out, more soberly. “I mean, that last fayth laid you right out.”

Martin still has his reservations about how much of that was Besaid’s fayth and how much of it was it being the final drop that caused the glass to spill, but he thinks the point still stands. It ended up with Jon literally passing out from exhaustion either way.

Still. “Shame, though.”

“Hm?”

“That you didn’t get a chance to see more of this place, ‘cause of all that,” says Martin. Sasha did say that Jon would’ve been interested in wandering the island. “You sure we can’t just wait for the next boat?”

He’s kidding, mostly, he knows they can’t, but Jon immediately stiffens.

“No. Absolutely not. This isn’t some—”

Jon stops himself short, lets out a sharp sigh, and when he next speaks, it’s with a fair deal less acerbic firmness. “Look, Martin, I know you mean well. But any delay in us getting off this island means—”

“No, Jon, I get it. I do. Stopping Sin has to be the priority.”

“… Yes,” Jon nods, seeming placated by that. “Exactly. Frivolous delays aren’t something Spira can afford. Places like this may look peaceful, and maybe they even are, most of the time. But it never lasts for long.”

Martin glances back down the hill towards the tiny village. How many times has Besaid been under attack, as small as it is?

It’s a gloomy thought. A motivating thought, maybe, considering what Jon’s on this road to do, but gloom isn’t going to keep them going all the way to Zanarkand.

“You can always come back though, right? After all this. Actually get a chance to see Besaid properly.”

It’s too dark now to properly make out Jon’s face, but he’s quiet for just long enough that Martin’s about to start worrying.

“Hm,” he says quietly, just before that can happen. “And I suppose that after you and Sasha did your whirlwind tour this morning, you have recommendations?”

“Uh— I mean, the beach was nice,” Martin starts, caught off guard. He can’t really tell if Jon’s being sarcastic or not, but— “Never gonna get the sand out of everything, but. Oh, there was this really pretty sort of cove thing not too far from the trail. I mean, we didn’t get to find a way down to it, not sure if you can unless you want to go diving, but – it was nice to look at. I don’t think I’ve ever seen water that blue.”

Martin needs his mouth to stop making sounds, now, please.

“Yes, I think I’ll be leaving anything involving diving to Tim,” says Jon dryly. There’s another lull, then, a weird energy in the air like Jon’s deciding whether or not to say something else. “You said it wasn’t too far from the trail?”

“Yeah, there’s like a little fork in the road and this sort of overlook thing,” Martin says vaguely, without thinking. Then he thinks about what Jon just asked, and the implications of it, and a light turns on.

“I mean,” he shrugs, “if we left the village early enough tomorrow morning we could probably sneak five minutes in to look at it on the way to the boat.”

“Is that your suggestion?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Well,” Jon says, and it’s way too dark too see by now up here, but he sounds like he might be smiling. “I suppose we’ll all just have to get up early, then.”

“Suppose we will,” Martin agrees, a smile in his own voice.

They finally head back down the trail to the village after that, stumbling a little on the uneven ground in the dark, while a quiet, ridiculous part of Martin indulges itself in how it feels to have done something to make Jon smile.

Chapter Text

The morning of their departure from Besaid dawns bright and clear.

They gather their things, accept the extra provisions pressed upon them by the old temple priest, and set off up the winding trail leading back to the beach and the tiny dock where the ferry waits. Abigail gives them a cheery wave as they pass her and a few of the other Aurochs standing near the village entrance; apparently she’s still waiting on a teammate who slept in, and will be following their lead soon enough ‘just as soon as he gets his arse in gear’.

Martin almost forgets entirely about his conversation with Jon the night before, right up until they actually hit that weird point in the trail where one fork branches off down a slope towards the beach and the other stays up on a higher ledge, leading toward the closed-off cove and the lake inside it. Luckily, the sight jogs his memory well enough, and pretty soon he’s stumbling over a hurried explanation for why they have to take a quick detour down this particular dead end, for just a few minutes, honestly, nothing that’ll hold the journey up or make them late for the boat or anything like that—

Sasha, thank goodness, seems to catch what he’s getting at and backs him up on it.

“Who knows when any of us’ll be coming back here?” she says pointedly, with significant glances towards both Daisy and Basira. “Anything could happen between here and Zanarkand. We should make memories while we have the chance.”

Basira sighs.

“Yeah, alright,” she concedes. “Just don’t forget we’re on a time limit this morning.”

As if Martin could forget. He guesses it’s a fair enough warning – the little vantage point overlooking the bright blue lake in the basin below is the sort of spot you could easily sit for hours, just enjoying the view and disconnecting from everything else for a while. If he had the time – and something to write with – it’d be the sort of place he’d try and get down a few lines of something.

But they don’t have the time, and besides, this little detour’s mostly for Jon’s benefit, anyway. Jon, who takes his handful of minutes looking out over the sun sparkling on the surface of the water below, the way the rocky sides of the basin turn blue from the lake reflecting on it, rippling water patterns whenever some fish or bird disturbs the surface, before he turns back to them all and lets them know it’s time to go.

“You were right,” he admits quietly to Martin as they head across the beach. “It was quite lovely up there.”

That’s about enough to set Martin up for the whole day on its own, honestly.

And with that realisation, he has to take a moment to quietly despair a bit at the timing of his stupid brain and his stupid heart with what he’s fast coming to realise is an oncoming crush the size of his entire bloody city.

Abigail and the rest of the Besaid Aurochs arrive at the dock not too long after them, and together they board the waiting ferry that will take them back north to Kilika. Martin’s surprised at how many people are standing on the dock to wave the boat off. He expected the fishing crew, who must be used to rising early, but there’s a couple of others as well, not to mention one or two of the village kids.

They’re probably mostly here for the Aurochs, but it’s heartening to see them standing there wishing them a fair voyage all the same. And Martin’s sure he hears a young, high-pitched voice wish a certain mister lord summoner good luck, before promptly being shouted down by an equally young voice insisting he said we could call him Jon!

“You’ve left an impression,” he says to Jon, nodding at the pair of children who are waving at the boat so frantically their arms could be in danger of flying right off. Jon tries, pretty ineffectually, to stop himself from smiling.

“I can’t think why,” he sniffs, in some bizarre Jon-way of trying to keep a straight face. “All I did was tell them some stories.”

Martin suspects Jon might be selling himself short a bit, but he leaves it be. The ferry crew makes the final checks before casting off; after that, it isn't long before the people on the wooden dock, and then the dock itself, and then the entire island of Besaid, slowly slip away into the distance behind them.

Martin knows what to expect from these stretches on the boats by now, and goes to find a shady spot on the deck to enjoy the ocean breeze for a while. Time passes peacefully; he’s relieved to see that Tim and Abigail must have reached some kind of equilibrium after their rough reunion, with Tim hanging out near where Abigail is putting the Aurochs through their paces on an empty stretch of deck towards the ship’s bow. He keeps calling out comments that are varying degrees of helpful, some of which have Abigail laughing and threatening to make him join in if he knows so much. Basira looks as though she's trying her best to distract herself from how she's still not entirely at ease on the deck of a boat with the book she was reading yesterday, but the slight frown line between her eyebrows makes him think she might be having less luck than she wanted to.

What really amuses him is when he sees that Daisy has found a sunny spot all to herself, and has settled down there with her back against one of the sides of the ship, limbs stretched out to sun herself like a cat. Always nice to be reminded that she’s not actually as above it all as she likes to pretend she is.

It’s a quiet, lazy sort of atmosphere, despite the shouting from the Aurochs – right until the boat rocks violently beneath them, so violently that it tips and knocks anyone on their feet down to sprawl on the deck.

“What was that?” Basira calls, two hands on the rail to steady herself. “Did we hit something?”

“This far out into open water?” Abigail gasps incredulously from a tangle of stunned Aurochs.

The boat is still dipping and rolling in the water, so unsteady that the deck pitches at a new angle every few seconds, making it impossible for anyone to stay upright. They all cling to whatever surface is closest as the helmsperson and crew fight to keep control of the ship and stop it going over. The waves around them are huge – taller than the entire ship, threatening to swallow them, creating huge troughs that the boat falls down into, and that makes no sense, the sky above them is still blue and almost cloudless—

Martin’s stomach lurches as he remembers the last time he saw the sea rear up in massive waves out of nowhere.

Oh, no.

A colossal, mottled fin, or something that looks like a fin, bursts out of the sea beside them and rains down water on the deck. Taller than the mast, at least half the length of the ferry and about as wide, it cuts through the ocean beside them, sending the boat tipping dangerously again in its wake. Martin watches as it moves with frightening speed ahead of them, towards—

Towards Kilika.

“It’s Sin!” calls one of the crew, and the cry is taken up by others on the deck as the boat finally steadies enough for people to stay on their feet. The ferry crew, well used to rough seas, are the first to recover, already racing towards the bow with their faces stiff masks of terrified urgency. One of them reaches with single-minded determination towards one of the harpoons mounted at the sides of the bow, only to find his arm suddenly twisted behind his back as Daisy lunges towards him out of nowhere.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she hisses, the man’s arm held in a vice-like grip. “If you stick a harpoon in that thing, we’ll all be dragged down!”

“Please!” the man begs. “Please, we have families in Kilika! If we don’t distract Sin—”

“You can’t distract Sin, you’re gonna get us all killed.”

Tim launches himself into the fray, giving Daisy’s shoulder a hard shove. “Fuck you, there are people living on that island!”

“Please, we have to do something!” the poor crewmate pleads, still held at Daisy’s mercy. He casts frantic eyes between his fellow crewmates, hovering uncertainly, to Jon, who’s dragging himself up along the railing to the scene at the bow as fast as he can. “Lord Summoner, please. Forgive us.”

“Daisy,” says Basira, wobbling on her landsman’s legs.

“Let him go, Daisy,” says Jon urgently. “We have to try.”

Daisy lets the man go, but starts fiercely, “You have three—”

“We have to try!”

“I’m with Jon,” Tim snaps furiously. “I’m not gonna stand here and watch and let this happen again!”

The crew have already rushed to every available harpoon gun, aiming at the vast bulk of the fin in the water ahead for only as long as it takes them to get a clear shot. The guns fire with a loud clank and a whistling sound as the harpoons fly through the air ahead, trailing long coils of strong rope behind them.

“Hang on to something!” Abigail calls, all the blood drained from her face. “If they hit it, we’re gonna feel it!”

Everyone rushes to take her advice, and not a moment too soon; two of the harpoon ropes pull taut with a loud snap, and the boat groans and pitches again, dragged forwards at speed towards Sin. Martin’s breath catches as the sudden movement throws him against the rail, winding him. A rush of water crashes down over the deck as the fin they’re now firmly attached to makes a sharp turn, drenching them all in seawater and leaving their feet slipping on the wet wood of the deck underfoot.

A low, unearthly sound pierces the air from under the waves. Their tiny boat is dragged from one side to the other as Sin tries to shake them off, but whoever it was made those ropes and those harpoon blades, and whoever it was tied the knots to hold them together, they were good at what they did; they hold fast, keeping the ferry tied to the monster beneath them.

The motion of the deck steadies enough for them to stand. Martin’s glasses are covered in seawater, turning the chaos around him into a refracted blur; as soon as he gets his balance, he tries to find a dry bit of shirt to wipe them clean on before something else happens. The one part of Sin that’s still above the waves, fighting a tug-of-war with a single wooden ship, ripples. Tens of dark shapes erupt from the craggy surface of its skin, flying towards the boat and landing with a splash in the water, or finding their mark and hitting the deck with a series of loud thuds.

“Watch out for those Sinscales!” Sasha yells, shaking seawater out of her spellbook. “They’ll keep coming as we cut them down!”

The Sinscales lying on the deck are already shuddering, cracking open like an egg, or some kind of twisted oyster, unfurling into those same buzzing, twitching things Martin saw when Sin attacked Zanarkand, their shells fluttering like wings over their spindly legs. Martin swallows, one hand massaging his bruised and winded stomach where the rail caught him, and tries to remember how to cast a single one of his own spells.

“Anyone who can’t fight, get below! Now!” Daisy barks over the din, cutting down two Sinscales that hit the deck close to her, and the fight begins in earnest. Jon is shouting at everyone to get clear, shifting into a stance that Martin doesn’t think he’s seen before, but he barely has time to focus on anything but the adrenaline coursing through him as he pulls together spell after spell to give the others enough speed and power to battle their way through wave after wave of twitching, shrieking Sinscales. He only realises Jon’s finished the summoning when a huge gust of wind hits the boat from above, scattering the Sinscales and almost knocking down all the people still on deck for good measure.

The aeon diving down from the heavens is a bird – except no, birds don’t have wings like that, great expanses of leathery skin stretched between a chitinous framework of fingers, and they don’t have three extra pairs of bright, intelligent black eyes on either side of their heads, and they don’t have a series of stiff, curling limbs branching off the underside of a thin body that flares out at the bottom into a wicked-looking tail and two powerful hind limbs ending in lethal talons.

The new aeon lands on the deck, the feathers adorning its head and lower body as brightly coloured as the fabrics of Besaid, and Martin has to blink away a sudden fog in his head, wondering why his thoughts are suddenly full of the memory of cat’s cradle in red string and half-eaten pastries.

Then the noise and the chaos of fighting on the deck of a boat literally attached to Sin rushes back in as a fresh wave of Sinscales hit the deck. Martin swears as the sound of that off-beat thudding drags him back to the here and now, to trying to keep his footing on the treacherously wet wood as more of those things keep coming for them. His ears are full of the sound of the waves crashing around them, the shrieks of Jon’s aeon as it dives towards the only part of Sin open to the air in a rush of talons and magic, the groaning of the boat’s timbers as it protests the strain of fighting against the pull of something so gargantuan. The clash of his friends’ weapons or the crackling of magic as they strike at the Sinscales, the pained shouts or grunts when they take a hit. How long can they keep this up? Sasha said they’d just keep coming, and the creaking of the ship keeps getting louder and louder, Martin’s arms heavier and heavier and his throat drier.

With an almighty splintering, one of the harpoon guns bursts free of its place from the deck, cracking the boards and sailing into the ocean. The ship rolls and pitches again, dipping low in the water as Sin dives to try and throw them off, sending more water rushing in and over the deck.

“Cut the other rope or we’ll be lost!” someone shouts, and then something cold and hard slams into him and sends him flying.

He thinks he hits something. He’s not sure. There’s sharp pain, then darkness and cold, and then he’s floating somewhere surrounded by buildings, his feet an inch or so above a round platform. And there’s someone else barely two feet away, someone dressed head to foot in black, blurring at the edges with all that light below, someone deathly pale with long straight hair and a slightly crooked nose who seems weirdly familiar—

“You’re… not… him…”

He meets Martin’s eyes, and stares wide and unblinking, and then his mouth is moving but the words he’s saying aren’t in time, out of sync with this person’s blurry, glitchy form like a faulty sphere as the same words echo in Martin’s ears over and over in a dull, disjointed monotone.

“You’re not him. You… not – dream? This. This is a dream?”

—and then he’s lying on his back on something hard, his limbs and chest cold and heavy and he can’t move, he needs to be able to move—

Martin rolls violently onto his side and comes to coughing and spluttering on the deck, his mouth cold and tasting so strongly of salt that his eyes water.

“Is he back with us?”

“If you give me space to work— I need to make sure there’s no water left in his lungs—”

Martin lies there feeling dazed and tries to focus on breathing as a familiar tingling warmth washes through him, and then he’s coughing again as a sharp, burning pain seizes his chest and skins his throat until more saltwater leaves his mouth. The pain vanishes a second later, chased away by that same warm spark of magic, and suddenly breathing comes easy again.

“I think that did it,” says a voice that he’s now with it enough to know as Jon’s. He sounds shaken. “That was quick thinking on your part, Tim.”

“Had to do something, didn’t I.”

Martin cracks open his eyes. Everything’s a blur, but he thinks he can see Tim crouched down in front of him, and he can feel the soaking wet wood of the deck beneath him. He’s feeling pretty soaked through himself, now he thinks on it. Soaked through, and cold, in spite of the sun beating down overhead.

Wait, wait—

“You stay where you are,” Jon snaps as Martin tries to sit up. The blur that is probably Tim presses something into his hand; he recognises the shape of his glasses, and gratefully puts them back on his face where they belong, bringing the world back into sharp focus.

Martin ignores the pounding in his head, and Jon, and looks wildly around the deck, taking in the jagged hole at the bow where a harpoon gun once stood, the seas around them now as calm as they were before the attack, the other people on deck sporting a small collection of cuts and bruises that will need healing, but who are thankfully all still standing, or at least sitting.

“What happened?”

“Sin tore one of the harpoons clean off. We had to cut the other one away. You must’ve got knocked overboard at the same time, but uh. I got you out.”

Tim looks exhausted, sea water dripping from him, face white as a sheet and balanced on a knife’s edge between fury and defeat. Martin has a moment of reckoning with the fact that he could have drowned if it wasn’t for Tim, and then decides to deal with that another time, shoving the cold horror away for when he’s got a minute.

“Thanks, Tim,” he manages. But there’s something else, isn’t there. “Where’s – oh, what, where’s Sin now?”

“Exactly where it wants to be,” Jon answers heavily.

And now Martin looks beyond the ferry, some distance away, where the green slopes of Kilika’s jungles can be seen standing out from the water.

And in front of the island, a towering wave, rushing towards the coastline and crashing down as Sin’s entire body breaks the surface of the ocean.

And above that, a string of fragmented, broken pieces too small to see detail of this far away, sucked up by a violent torrent of swirling wind to spin in a maelstrom of scattered debris high over the monster’s head like a twisted crown.

Martin can’t tear his eyes away. Bile rises in his throat and hot and cold shivers race through his body and the pit of his stomach feels like an ice cube, and he can’t look away from the sight of Sin tearing Kilika port into pieces like it’s nothing.

“I have to finish the pilgrimage,” Jon says, in a strangled voice. Martin doesn’t even know if he realises he’s saying it out loud. “I have to stop Sin. I have to.”

They watch in mute horror as the jagged shards of Sin’s destruction circle the air above it, and for the first time since he was told about the Final Summoning, Martin wonders: how?

Chapter Text

The captain refuses to take them closer to Kilika - at least, not until Sin has sunk back beneath the waves and shows no sign of returning. By the time the ferry finally docks at one of the few walkways that’s still intact, it’s getting close to sundown.

Kilika Port is almost unrecognisable. Most of the houses closest to the beach seem to have escaped the worst of the damage, and there’s a small section of the port further out in the water that’s still standing, but the rest…

Broken walkways, collapsed part-way into the water or reduced to nothing but the strong, sturdy supports wedged fast into the seabed, an eerie and frightening skeleton of what was there only a few hours ago. The equally skeletal remains of people’s houses, walls and roofs caved in or missing entirely. A round, empty space of seawater sitting where part of a town stood earlier that day, with only the scattered driftwood bobbing on the surface to show for it.

They’d walked through this town only a few days ago, weaving their way past noisy shops and round communal platforms full of people on their way to the temple. Now, there's nothing, except the echoing quiet.

As the boat docks, some of the Aurochs who have experience with ships volunteer to stay on board and do the work that’s needed, to let the crew from Kilika rush on ahead to search for their families. The rest of them file off the ferry in numb silence.

A care-worn elder, her face lined with grief, waits on the walkway. Must have seen the boat coming.

“Ah – a summoner,” she says in surprise, her gnarled hands moving stiffly as she slowly bows into the Prayer. Jon returns the gesture more briskly, his face carefully composed.

“We saw Sin’s attack,” he says quietly. “Do you have anyone to perform the Sending?”

The elder shakes her head. “Word has been sent to the temple, but those woods are too dangerous after sundown. I fear the earliest they could spare anyone would be after sunrise tomorrow.”

“If there’s no one else–” Jon hesitates for an instant, before continuing more strongly, “Please allow me to do it.”

“Oh, that would ease a great many minds,” sighs the elder in relief. “There’s already fearful talk of our Unsent loved ones becoming fiends overnight. We’ve still some preparations to finish, with so many of those left in no state to help, but let me take you to them.”

“Anything the rest of us can do to help?” Basira asks, drawing everyone’s gaze. “We’ve got a few strong pairs of arms. Just let us know.”

The elder levels her with a piercing look, but after a moment, gives her a short nod.

“There’s a couple of strong folk who prefer to keep their bodies busy already working on one of the walkways past the inn. I’m sure they’d appreciate the help.”

She waves a thin arm to direct them, and then performs the Prayer once more before turning her attention to Jon, to lead him towards… towards what Martin supposes is the site for what will shortly be a mass funeral.

It hardly bears thinking about. But this is the world he’s ended up in now, as much as he never asked for it. His new reality. Not thinking about it isn’t going to change the fact that it’s happening.

He finds himself feeling incredibly grateful for Basira and her initiative. At least there’s something they can do to help. If there wasn't - Martin doesn’t think he’d be able to stand it if there wasn’t.

They find the people who are already working on the draining task of starting to rebuild their entire home from the seabed up exactly where the town elder said they would be. They are grim-faced but grateful, nodding briskly at the lot of them as they approach, and not speaking much except to direct them to what needs to be done. It’s demanding work; clearing debris out of the water, helping to dismantle and remove parts of the walkway that have been knocked so badly out of alignment they need replacing entirely, salvaging what they can for use in the repairs. There’s a snarl of netting and wood and fabric so large and tangled that it takes five of them just to haul it out and cut free what can be saved.

When they manage it, a lone blitzball comes tumbling out of the mess, rolling along the damaged walkway until it lands with a lonely splash back in the sea; the sight makes a lump catch in Martin’s throat, his heart sinking all over again.

It’s slow, gruelling, solemn progress, but at least it gives him something constructive to do. Something other than think.

Sunset is well under way, the sky and the ocean a brilliant, burning shade of orange, when someone else comes creaking towards them on the old wooden boards.

“It’s time,” he says. “They’ll be heading to the Farplane soon.”

It takes Martin a moment to place why that word sounds so familiar, until he remembers finding out the truth about fiends, what seems like a lifetime ago now. Sasha saying that they were what’s left of people whose spirits didn’t get to the Farplane. Some kind of afterlife, he guesses.

Everyone takes a moment to down their tools and stretch their aching muscles; the two Kilika natives and the one or two members of the Aurochs who’d also come to pitch in are already walking away when Sasha sighs, retying her hair where long coils of it have come loose while they’ve been working.

“We’d better go too,” she says. “Pay our respects. At least – show support.”

At her side, Tim nods, with a sigh that says he’d rather be anywhere else.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

Daisy and Basira have already peeled away from them, walking together with grim faces, and that leaves the three of them – Martin, Tim, and Sasha – to bring up the rear, picking their way slowly past the inn and a couple of sad, half-destroyed houses.

“So, about the Sending…” Martin begins tentatively.

He can’t possibly ask what it is – the time to pass something like that off as toxin-induced memory loss is long since past, and besides, it’s painfully obvious that it has something to do with giving the dead their final rest.

So instead, he asks, “Is it true what she was saying earlier? Can people really turn into fiends that quickly?”

He hopes not. Sasha said it was bitterness that turned the spirits of the dead into fiends; the idea that something like that could happen overnight seems… horrifying and far-fetched, at best. He hopes there’s nobody out there harbouring that kind of festering bitterness inside them.

Sasha hesitates, a frown on her face.

“It’s… not really an exact science,” she answers, slowly. “Not usually, the amount of hate it would take for that fast of a transformation is an old wives’ tale, but… it’s dangerous to leave the dead be for too long, because it’s bound to happen sooner or later. A swift Sending’s just… kinder for everyone.”

“It’s not worth the risk,” Tim says harshly. His fists are clenched tight at his sides. “My brother – he – he never got a proper Sending. Not for weeks. Sin came down on those ruins he was in and it took them that long to find him that…”

Tim’s voice cracks. It’s hard, seeing Tim like this, all his jagged edges on display. To realise with a rush of sympathy and another rush of horror exactly why Tim left Bevelle to join the Crusaders, why the fight against Sin is so personal for him.

Sasha swoops in to save him with a gentle, practical: “He made it the Farplane, Tim. We checked, remember?”

“Yeah. But those months before we could get down there to see for ourselves? Never again.”

Get down there to see for themselves? To Besaid? Martin has a feeling that’s not what either of them meant, but he’s also having trouble reconciling the idea of the Farplane – this land of the dead – being a physical place that living people could just walk in and visit.

He pushes that question away for another time.

“There’s no chance of anyone who gets missed just… not becoming a fiend?”

“Now you’re talking about Unsent,” says Sasha. There’s a curious gleam in her eye. “I mean, it happens. People who manage to hold on to themselves for one reason or another, but… you know, hanging onto your mind using something as tenuous as the idea of ‘the real me’…” She hums thoughtfully. “That’s a dangerous game to play.”

“You mean… ghosts, or…?”

“Don’t let Jon hear you use that word. But yeah, sure. People with unfinished business.”

“Sasha,” says Tim abruptly. “Come on. Can we not?”

For maybe the first time since Martin’s met her, Sasha looks chastised.

“Right,” she sighs. “Sorry, Tim.”

Following the others leads them to a section of wooden walkway that looks directly out onto the ocean. Half-drowned houses and jagged timbers still squat sadly to the left and right, but the view straight ahead goes clear out to the horizon far out to the west, the setting sun only just starting to vanish beneath the waves.

A small group of bedraggled, wild-eyed villagers have gathered on the walkway, just in front of a wide set of wooden stairs that lead down onto a platform that grazes the very surface of the water, adorned on either side with several tall, thin braziers. Martin can see the elder that spoke to them earlier down there, and Jon as well. He has his summoner’s staff in hand, and seems to have taken his boots off for some reason, standing barefoot on the wooden boards.

A flash of movement in the water beyond catches Martin’s eye, and with a lurch in his gut, he realises that the sea in front of where they’re standing is full of coffins. Floating coffins, drifting just beneath the surface of the water, close enough to see that they’re woven from some sort of strong fibre and bound near the top with cloth, adorned with flowers and sigils.

“Come on, Martin, we’ll stand here,” Sasha murmurs to him, taking up a spot near the back of the gathering. Feeling more out of place than ever, Martin joins her.

Down on the platform below, Jon takes his staff in both hands, and steps out onto the water.

Martin’s sure for a second he’s seeing things, because Jon doesn’t sink. The surface of the water supports his weight as sure as solid ground as he walks slowly out until he’s standing right above the circle of the dead under the water.

And then – Jon dances.

It’s a slow, sombre dance, filled with turns and sweeping arcs as Jon manipulates the cumbrous staff he holds in his hands to spin and follow where he leads it. He arches back, sweeps the staff down in a low bow until it’s almost level with the water, and then something changes. Martin feels it; some kind of pull in the air that he can’t name, and as Jon continues to dance, slowly rising to his feet again with his staff spinning between his hands, a host of glowing pyreflies rise with him, pulled from the coffins beneath the water to drift in a lazy orbit around him, gradually pulled in tighter and tighter.

“Oh, that’s strong,” Martin thinks he hears Sasha mumble under her breath, and then the flames in the braziers flare and turn in an instant from orange to blue.

Out on the water, Jon is spinning around in full arcs again, and now the water comes with him. Each new full turn bears him higher and higher into the air, supported atop a growing column of water, and as he turns, the pyreflies follow him too; flying up into the air and away from Kilika, drifting upwards in glowing motes of pastel light to parts unknown.

People around him are crying. Martin thinks he might be too, or something close to it. There’s something in his chest that tugs as he watches Jon dancing to guide those spirits to someplace they can rest in peace, like his own soul is pulling to be freed from the confines of his body.

Something so horrifying should not be so beautiful.

“Is it always like this?” he asks softly, as the final few pyreflies scatter up towards the sky and the column of water Jon’s standing on slowly, gently collapses back down to sea level.

“I guess your village might not have had anyone to do the Sending for you, if you weren’t near a temple,” says Sasha.

Her voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere behind him now. It takes Martin a moment to realise that she must have moved at some point during the Sending; when he turns, he finds her leaning now against one of the wooden slats of the railing, with her arms wrapped around her middle. “They’re always a lot like this. But this is the first time I’ve seen Jon do one.”

She lets out a soft sound, not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh, with a wry, sad smile. “He did well. I didn’t think he’d call them that strongly. They’ll be on the Farplane by now.”

Not knowing what to say, Martin settles against the railing on one side of her, mouth pulled tight as they watch Jon, now back on the low platform and surrounded by villagers bowing in the Prayer. It’s difficult to make out his face at this distance, but he seems to have that same extremely carefully composed look he had when they stepped off the ferry.

From a little way on the other side of Sasha, Tim sighs.

“He’ll have to work on that face of his,” he says flatly. “I don’t think half of those villagers know what to do with that.”

“Tim,” Sasha says reproachfully.

“What? He knew what he was getting into.” There is something bitter in Tim’s tone, but despite his words, Martin doesn’t think it’s actually directed at Jon. Not really. “Face of Spira’s hope and everything.”

Sasha gives him a pointed look. “I know it’s not actually him you want to take this out on.”

Tim is quiet a moment. “Have I ever told you I hate it when you’re right?”

“Frequently, since it happens so often.”

“Guys,” Martin says in a low voice, because Jon has managed to extract himself from the small knit of people and is fast approaching the three of them, his boots dangling from the fingers of one hand, his staff held in the other.

He looks between the three of them, and then off to the side.

“I’ve never done it for so many before,” he admits haltingly, but with a crisp distance to his voice that makes Martin’s heart sink.

There’s a beat, and then Tim rallies himself, a faint echo of one of his usual smiles dragging its way onto his face.

“You did good,” he says, reaching out to squeeze one of Jon’s arms. “Just – maybe go a little less serious next time, yeah? You’re gonna give someone a fright with a face like that.”

Jon bristles. “I was trying to—” he begins, and then stops himself, taking in a deep breath through his nose.

“It’s not my grief to carry,” he says quietly a moment later.

“I get it. But you – you know you don’t need to stonewall them, either...”

Hearing Tim putting on his own version of a brave face, talking about a next time - Martin hopes there isn’t a next time. Everyone standing there watching Jon dancing, performing the Sending.

All Martin can think about is how he never wants to see it again.

Chapter Text

The ferry back to Luca the next morning leaves early.

The crew and captain are nervous, anxious to be underway and even more anxious to get the trip done in as short a time as possible. It’s hard to blame them for it; apparently, it’s not uncommon for Sin to linger around an area for a while after an attack, and everyone’s on edge. One of the crew mentions gloomily that all ferry travel will probably be halted for a while after their boat puts in to Luca; the only reason this voyage is going ahead is because there are two blitzball teams that have to make a showing at the tournament, and a summoner for whom delay is not an option.

Martin anxiously wonders what the lack of ferry travel means for Kilika. It isn’t as though the island is short of things like wood and food, and the nearby temple means they must have access to at least one healer. Even so, he can’t imagine how rough it must be, knowing that they’re going to be effectively cut off after going through a disaster like the day before.

Maybe people are used to it. That thought is even worse.

Their departure from Kilika is a quiet, solemn affair. There are a few villagers up when they leave, starting on the work of repairing and rebuilding one of the damaged houses, too busy with the weight of their own troubles to pay any mind to anything else. The elder they spoke to last night insists on coming to see the boat off, bowing low to Kilika’s own blitzball team, and then the Aurochs, and finally their summoning party, her movements stiff and dignified with age.

“It almost seems too much to ask after what you’ve already done for us,” he overhears her saying to Jon. “But we’re praying for the swift coming of your Calm.”

More pressure, Martin thinks. And there’s no doubting that Jon’s feeling it. For the first time since they all did their impromptu outfit rearranging to cope with the heat of walking through Kilika woods a few days ago, Jon’s dug out that stiff, heavy outer robe of his, layering it back over the rest of his clothes.

Martin’s sure that can’t be a coincidence.

He’s less sure about the odd sadness he feels on seeing it again, but... it just looks wrong now, somehow, after he's seen Jon without it.

The journey itself is just as quiet as their departure. Martin catches sight of the two blitzball teams alternating between using the deck as a training space and respectfully trying to stay out of the other team’s way whenever it’s not their turn, but all of the joy he saw in the Aurochs’ drills on the boat from Besaid before Sin appeared is nowhere to be found. Kilika’s team, whenever it’s their turn according to whatever schedule the teams have worked out for themselves, take themselves to their last-minute training with a determination that Martin at least understands, even if he still finds it strange.

“Is the tournament really still going ahead then?” he finally asks at one point, to no-one in particular.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

It’s Daisy who answers, and that surprises him. Mostly that she’d answer him at all, really, but she must take the look on his face as something else, because she sighs shortly and adds, “I mean, it’s pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?”

“Um. How?”

“You’ve been to a blitzball game? People going wild over their favourite team while the players go at it. Someplace just got hit, people need that now more than ever.”

It makes sense, the way she says it. A way for people to blow off steam from the stress and the grief and the fear, in a world where the only other option for that seems to be picking up a sword and joining the Crusaders.

It makes sense, but it just reminds him yet again how much he doesn’t belong here.

It’s not the only thing, come to that.

Martin tries to turn in early that night, but soon finds he can’t sleep. After some time tossing and turning in one of the ferry’s tiny bunks, unable to be lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat, he gives up and steals as quietly as he can out of bed.

He’s not really sure what it is he’s trying to accomplish, exactly. Just that it’s a lot harder to get his brain to shut up long enough for him to sleep when his body isn’t completely worn out the way it had been the night before. Maybe walking around the deck letting the night air hit him for a bit’ll make him sleepy. Or something. If nothing else, maybe he can just sit up on the weather deck and stargaze again until he drops off.

All of those half-formed thoughts dissolve like fine mist as he approaches the stairs to the weather deck itself and hears a pair of voices drifting down to him. It takes a second or two for him to pin them down as Jon’s and Sasha’s, but the low, agitated cast to their voices stops him in his tracks before he can do more than put a single foot on the bottom step.

“You’re sure? Sasha, I need you to be absolutely certain about this.”

Martin hesitates, one foot still on the stair. This sounds serious. He should leave them to it, right? He should probably leave them to it.

“Positive. Jon, I was right next to him the whole time. Nothing happened.”

“Right,” Jon says, with a heavy sigh. “Right.”

“If it makes you feel better, it wasn’t a bad theory.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Jon says, frustration ringing clear through every word. “I’ve never heard of the toxin taking so long to wear off, let alone making someone forget so much.”

A cold weight settles in Martin’s chest. Are they talking about him?

“Are you worried?”

“About what?”

Silence falls for a moment, broken only by the sound of the waves against the boat. It’s the sort of silence where Martin can picture Sasha fixing Jon with one of those expectant raised eyebrow looks of hers. The sort of silence that’d be a really good time for Martin to sneak away and stop eavesdropping, actually, but instead he stays there, frozen at the bottom of the stairs and holding his breath, waiting to hear whatever Jon says next.

Finally, begrudgingly, Jon says, “I can’t not take it seriously. If it really is the toxin, I’m afr–”

Jon cuts himself off sharply. “It concerns me that it’s having such an effect on him. And if it isn’t, then – then something else is going on, and I’ve already got quite enough to deal with without any further complications.”

“Maybe,” says Sasha quietly. “But you know, I don’t think he means any harm.”

Jon is quiet a moment. “I know. That’s the worst part.”

Martin swallows, biting down hard on his lip as a horrible mixture of fear and guilt swirls around inside him. Not like he’s a stranger to either of those feelings, but it’s not like that makes it any easier. Not the fear that he’ll finally get caught out and then thrown out, nor the guilt that bubbles up over the audible worry in Jon’s voice. He’s a liability, that’s what he is.

After a long moment of quiet, which gives Martin ample time to begin stewing in how awful he’s feeling, Sasha speaks up again.

“So,” she says. “Are you going to tell him—”

“No!” Jon blurts, loud enough that Martin jumps a little. Quieter, he carries on, “No. Not – not yet. I, I will, just – I’ll give it a little longer. See if it really is the toxin.”

Martin hears Sasha let out a long, loud sigh.

“Alright,” she says. “It’s your call.”

“Thank you.” Jon’s voice is soft, and so genuine with it that it somehow manages to make Martin feel even worse.

He slinks back below deck after that. He couldn’t go up there and show his face to the two of them after that, let alone try acting anywhere near normal. Not after he very much chose to stand there eavesdropping on a conversation he was absolutely, definitely not meant to hear. Even if it was about him, and about something that Jon’s not telling him.

Right, because Martin’s really got a leg to stand on when it comes to other people not telling him things. Not like he hasn’t been actively lying about pretty much everything since he got here. And doing a pretty rubbish job at it, apparently. In spite of all of his best efforts, he just hasn’t been careful enough, or smart enough, or—

What did he expect? No, seriously, what did he expect, trying to muddle through in a world he still knows barely anything about? Of course he was going to make some kind of big, stupid slip that would get the others suspicious about him in an instant. The worst part is, he’s got no way of figuring out what it is. Not unless the others tell him, and if they tell him, then – well, that means he’s been found out, doesn’t it, and they know he’s not supposed to be here.

Though it seems like they’re well on their way to figuring that one out already. What is he supposed to do when they put it together?

Too keyed up to even think about going back to his bunk, Martin spends a good amount of time, he’s not sure how long, pacing about as quietly as he can on the lower deck, listening out for any sounds of Jon or Sasha coming below and trying his hardest to breathe normally and not completely lose it with self-recrimination and worst-case scenarios.

Right. Right. He’ll just have to cross that bridge if and when they come to it. He’s gone and got himself too deep into this, way in over his head, and – and now he’s just going to have to deal with it. That’s all there is to it.

He knows he’s kidding himself, but what else is he supposed to do?

Luca is just as busy and noisy as when they left it. If anything, it’s somehow managed to get busier and noisier; as their ferry draws near to the stadium the next morning, Martin can hear the faint roar of a lot of people gathering in one place, a new sound that steadily builds the closer they get to Luca, audible even with the much closer rush of the waves and the wind and the creaking of the boat. The brightly coloured banners and flags seem to have doubled or even tripled in number since they’ve been away as well; Luca is a riot of colour as they approach, every single building and wall and post strung in bright shades of yellow and green and red, large kites flying on long strings above the top of the stadium.

Coming close to an atmosphere like that, after the one they’d left behind at Kilika... jarring feels like much too mild a word for it. The contrast is like night and day; the excitable buzz that’s so obviously surrounding the city they’re heading towards seems so sharply removed from the ruined houses and underwater coffins from two nights ago that they may as well have crossed right into another world. Martin knows what Daisy said before, about people needing this, but – looking at it from the outside, their little boat not quite a part of Luca’s bubble just yet, it’s hard to shake the deep feeling of wrongness about it all.

He keeps his mouth shut about it, though. He hasn’t forgotten what he overheard from Jon and Sasha last night. No sense in wearing out his welcome even faster than it’s already wearing by sticking his foot in his mouth again.

There’s a general sense of relief up on the deck that morning as the boat steers closer to the dock. Most people are hanging near the railings, trying to get a better look at the dressed-up state of the city and making idle chat about the tournament or the number of people that might be in the stadium or something else along those lines. Martin lets it wash over him and tries to stay out of the way.

“Oh, no way!”

There’s something in Abigail’s tone that makes him look up. She’s leaning over the rail, far enough to be worrying, and her eyes are fixed in wonder on one of the other docks.

“That’s the Grand Maester’s boat, isn’t it?”

Intrigued in spite of himself, Martin moves to get a better look. The boat is not difficult to spot; it’s bigger than any other boat he’s seen in Spira by far, every single surface gleaming in the morning sun as though freshly painted, richly dyed sailcloth barely visible where it’s been raised and secured away while the ship is in port. That’s not even getting into all the elaborate carvings Martin can make out all over the outside of the hull – Yevon’s creepy lidless eye symbol is a prominent and repeated motif, but there’s a few other glyphs he doesn’t recognise, even before he gets to the intricately carved figurehead on the prow.

Honestly, the whole thing borders on being stupidly ostentatious. He’s not about to say as much when half the people around him are making the Prayer in the boat’s general direction, but the while the whole effect is definitely intimidating, it’s also incredibly gaudy. Like someone tried to dress a perfectly good boat up as one of the temples and got a bit too enthusiastic about it.

“Elias is in town, then,” Tim sighs from somewhere behind him. “Well, that’s just great.”

“We might not have to talk to him,” Martin hears Sasha say quietly. “Jon wants to get back onto the highroad as fast as possible, and I’m sure there’ll be other things begging for the Grand Maester’s attention.”

“Sure. And have you ever known him not to take advantage of coincidences like this one?”

Martin didn’t wake up in the best of moods that morning, and this conversation doesn’t do much to improve it. He lets himself have a good sigh, and tries to hope that whatever encounter they may or may not end up having with Yevon’s Grand Maester isn’t the trial that Tim and Sasha so obviously think it’ll be.

That hope starts to dim rapidly when the little ferry pulls up beside its designated dock, allowing everyone on deck to get a good long look at the docking area itself.

Martin’s first thought is: well, someone’s rolled out the welcome mat.

The bunting and banners are here as well, which doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary considering what the rest of Luca looked like from further out in the bay. But to that has been added a very literal carpet covering the ground, and a couple of rows of what must be warrior monks, their faces hidden by their helmets but clearly dressed in the same style of uniform as Basira and Daisy, and a small, curious crowd of people being held at bay by another row of warrior monks, and what looks like someone holding a portable spherecam, and is that a small band complete with instruments—

The two blitzball teams turn to one another in bewilderment, a quiet murmuring passing between those from Besaid and those from Kilika.

“This… can’t be for us, right?” says Abigail weakly.

“I mean, maybe it is?” Martin tries. “What with it being the tournament and everything, you guys are a pretty big deal.”

“We’ve never been this big of a deal,” one of the Kilika team mutters. “This’ll be cause they heard about the summoner, I guarantee it.”

Oh. Oh no.

Martin thinks he might have said that out loud for a second, until he realises that that wasn’t his voice he just heard at all. Jon is standing a good way behind both blitzball teams with wide, round eyes, all the look of a cat coming across something it absolutely does not want to be near. His hair isn’t actually standing on end, but it’s a near thing.

Abigail looks between the dock, and Jon, and then back to the dock again, and in a voice that’s still unsure says, “Should you head down there first? This really does look like it’s your party.”

“I –” Jon starts, before seeming to pull himself together, shaking his head. “No, you and the other team should head down before we do. You have a tournament to get to, and you know – well, you’ll never get there on time if you stay up here waiting for that nonsense to finish.”

Abigail still looks a little uncertain, but Tim steps forward to give her a light, friendly clap on the arm and a knowing smile.

“Go on,” he says. “That trophy isn’t gonna win itself. Don’t let us steal your moment in the spotlight just because Jon’s got stage fright.”

The uncertainty doesn’t entirely vanish from Abigail’s face, but Tim’s projecting enough of his usual confidence for it to give way to a smile. “Are you staying to watch the games?” she asks.

“Nah, probably not. Jon’ll want to get on as soon as we can escape the crowds.”

“Makes sense,” she nods. “Well – good luck out there, Tim. Make sure you take care of yourself, alright? It was good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” Tim nods. “You too, Abi.”

They don’t exactly hug, but the way the two of them briefly clasp each other’s elbows is filled with genuine warmth. Abigail steps back, nods to the rest of them in turn, and finally turns back to her Aurochs, corralling them all with a confident shout before they head down the gangway onto the dock ahead of the Kilika team.

As soon as the Aurochs step off the boat, Martin hears a chipper voice from somewhere further away from the boat, tinny-sounding like it’s coming through a speaker or a sphere somewhere he can’t see. It takes him a second or two to place it, but there’s no doubt – it’s a sports commentator if he ever heard one, announcing the arrival of the Aurochs and weighing up their chances in the tournament against the other teams. Martin pays attention for just long enough to hear the commentary shift from the Aurochs to the arrival of Kilika’s team and the speculation about how hard the team will play to score a win in the wake of Sin’s devastating attack on the island, and then he turns away, feeling something a lot like disgust rise sour in his mouth.

He blinks a moment; Jon is nowhere to be seen.

Tim catches him looking, and offers a wry, unamused smile.

“Guarantee you he’ll be looking for a way to avoid all of the pomp and ceremony down there. ‘Specially if Elias is down there too, which I’d bet my axes he is.”

Martin throws another glance down at the dock. Now that Tim’s mentioning it, there’s definitely something about the little knot of warrior monks near to where it meets the main walkway that puts him in mind of some sort of honour guard. And then there’s the person with the portable spherecam…

Which, now Martin thinks on it, raises even more questions about the strange wobbly line that the machina taboo seems to exist on, but now’s really not the time for that.

“I mean, I can’t blame him.”

“Oh, trust me, I’m not,” Tim assures him. “Any time of my life I have to spend in front of Elias is time I will eternally mourn never being able to get back. But we can’t hide up here on this boat forever waiting for him to get bored and go away, so…”

Honestly, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to Martin, but he guesses that you wouldn’t get very far here if you gave that sort of insult to someone as important as the Grand Maester of Yevon.

So. Convincing Jon to do something he so painfully obviously does not want to do it is.

Great.

Jon hasn’t gone far; Martin spots him on the far side of the helm, having an urgent-looking conversation with the captain in a low voice while Daisy and Basira look on. The captain looks bewildered; Daisy and Basira look somewhere between unimpressed and irritated; Jon looks borderline desperate.

“Are you sure there isn’t some other way off the boat?” he’s asking when Martin gets within earshot. “A lifeboat, maybe, or something like that?”

“Uh… I mean… like, you could always swim,” the captain says, looking increasingly baffled with each new word out of Jon’s mouth. He doesn’t look like anything about his life so far has prepared him for the sight of a summoner apparently doing his damnedest to cause a fuss in order to avoid the other fuss waiting for him.

“At this point, I’m honestly considering it,” Jon mutters.

Martin almost laughs. Almost. There’s something funny about the situation. Or at least, there would be, if everything about Jon’s body language wasn’t radiating unhappiness.

“You’re making an arse of yourself,” Daisy tells him, impatience written in every tense line of her posture. “Trust me, I get it, but we’ve got a job to do.”

“I mean, I sure didn’t realise that boosting the Grand Master’s PR campaign was part of it,” Basira says pointedly.

Daisy snorts. “Yeah, me neither. But if we don’t suck it up and dance to his tune now he’ll find some way to make it worse for us later. He’s that type.”

Oh, wow. If even Daisy is speaking out against this guy, Martin knows he must be bad news.

“Do we have to, though?” he says. He’s breaking his own promise he made to himself to keep his mouth shut, but – honestly, screw that, at this point he’s fully on board with Jon’s plan to swim over to a less crowded part of Luca. “I mean, he’s the Grand Maester, surely him of all people would get why Jon wants to get back to the road as fast as he can.”

Jon’s face, already a cocktail of frustration and embarrassment, now adds a healthy dash of surprise and something that might just be gratitude to the mix. It’s difficult to tell with that much going on in his face at once.

“You would think so,” he scowls after a moment, staring resolutely at the deck. “But I know Elias. He’ll have planned this as soon as he heard we were coming.”

“Okay, but why?”

“Show of public support?” Basira suggests, though her face speaks volumes about how much she believes what she’s saying. “Keep people’s morale up after Kilika by showing that Yevon’s on Jon’s side?”

“Show him off, more like,” Daisy mutters darkly.

Jon flinches almost imperceptibly. Martin frowns, hating this situation more and more with each passing moment.

“We could still swim,” he says. “I mean. Ocean’s right there.”

Jon sighs.

“No,” he says. “Daisy’s right. If we avoid this now, it’ll come back to haunt us somewhere down the road.” He pulls a face, his nose wrinkling. “I just hope it doesn’t set us back too much. I really did want to be back on the highroad before the afternoon.”

Jon thanks the captain, who is now looking deeply uneasy as well as deeply baffled; his life so far obviously did not prepare him for hearing a summoner talk this way about the Grand Maester, either. He sets off at a brisk walk, Basira and Daisy following in his wake, only to pause when he reaches Martin, looking him up and down with trepidation.

“Perhaps,” Jon starts, hesitating. He stops, sighs, and starts again. “Maybe you ought to stay near the back? I’m not sure – well, I don’t know how this will go, exactly.”

Martin raises his eyebrows. He can’t tell if this is Jon’s way of trying to – what, protect him or something? – which would be sweet, kind of – or if it’s Jon’s way of trying, as tactfully as Jon knows how (which isn’t very) to tell Martin to stay out of the way and not embarrass Jon any more than the coming ordeal is going to embarrass him already.

Either way, Martin thinks, it’s a bit misguided. No amount of staying near the back is going to hide someone of Martin’s size.

“I mean, I’ll try?” he says eventually. “Not – not sure it’ll do much, but trust me, I – I really don’t plan on talking to the Grand Maester if I can help it.”

“That’s probably for the best,” says Jon, looking relieved, and then sighs. “Come on, then. Let’s get this over with.”

Martin doesn’t know if it says more about this Grand Maester Elias or more about Jon himself, that Jon seems more grim and apprehensive about this than he’s ever done about any of the trials any of them have faced so far, but he soon decides it doesn’t matter. One way or another, he hopes it’s over quickly.

They walk down off the boat together, Jon at the front, the other four flanking him just behind, Martin bringing up the rear. There’s an immediate reaction from the crowd that’s gathered near the bottom of the pier; a sudden rise in the level of conversation, a ripple of movement as people start forming the Prayer, some of them over and over.

The one in the crowd with the portable spherecam, who Martin is fast realising must be a journalist or something along those lines, whatever Spira or at least Luca has, is very visibly keeping that spherecam fixed firmly on them. Sure enough, the faint, tinny sound of the commentator coming through a loudspeaker follows soon after.

“It’s not only blitzers the crowd’s gathered at dock number 3 to see, folks – seems we also have a summoning party fresh off the same boat from Kilika. Been some time since we’ve seen one of those in Luca. I’m sure you’ll forgive me for going off-script a minute here folks to wish both summoner and guardians a safe and speedy onward journey…”

This has to be going to the whole stadium, then. Maybe even other parts of Luca – and oh, that’s a thought that sends Martin’s stomach plummeting.

The crowd shifts again, this time moving to clear a path for a small group heading their way. A small handful of stern-faced, helmeted warrior monks, a couple of priests, and in front of them…

Well, dressed like that, that has to be the Grand Maester.

Martin assumes that has to be him, anyway; the robes he’s wearing are similar to the ones he’s seen on the priests in the temples, but way more elaborate, with a lot of intricate embroidery going on at every point at which there’s the slightest hint of a seam or a hem. For one of the most powerful people in Spira, the man inside the ornate robes is astonishingly ordinary-looking, verging on plain. A middle-aged-looking man, pale-skinned, with neatly trimmed hair, the only unusual-looking thing about his face are his eyes. These are an unnervingly pale grey, piercingly intelligent and somehow older than the rest of his face. They're surrounded by crow’s feet that might have given the impression of kindness on another man, but on this face, with these eyes, only serve to seem harsh and cutting.

“Hello, Jon,” he says in a crisp voice, before moving with deliberation and purpose in one of the slowest, deepest, and most elaborate Prayers that Martin has seen since he washed up on the beach.

If Martin thought there was enough of a reaction from gathered onlookers when they all stepped off the boat, it’s nothing compared to how all the people watching react now. A wave of shocked gasps and muffled noises of surprise carries from the bottom of the pier, followed by a constant hum of low, gossipy murmuring.

“Wow! It seems like I’m not the only one wanting to offer my thanks today, folks,” comes the commentator’s distant, tinny voice from its unseen speaker, as if Martin hadn’t already figured on his own that what just happened was some sort of big deal. “Grand Maester Bouchard himself is here for the opening of the tournament, and it seems he’s taken it upon himself to honour the summoner and his guardians personally. Yevon’s confidence in this pilgrimage must be high, folks…”

Martin can’t see Jon’s face from his position at the back, but he’s travelled with him for long enough now to read that body language. The tension in his shoulders, the stiff way he’s holding himself like he’s having to consciously keep himself standing straight, his hands fidgeting at his sides. Jon is mortified, and trying really hard to hide it.

He maintains enough wherewithal to make the Prayer in return, at least, even if it’s nowhere near the level of carefully crafted formality the Grand Maester just showed. Martin hastily follows suit as his fellow guardians start making the gesture themselves.

“Maester Bouchard,” says Jon. His voice is even in a way that barely hides the fluster underneath. Martin can hear the strain. “I – I didn’t expect that I would meet you here like this.”

“Meaning, you didn’t expect this kind of reception upon your arrival in Luca?” The Grand Maester’s smile is cool and empty. “Come now, Jon. Having heard that you would soon be in the area, I could hardly miss a chance to ensure that all is well. Particularly given the distressing news coming from Kilika.”

“I – I appreciate it, but – I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I’m not sure that all of this was entirely necessary?”

“Your modesty is, I’m sure, entirely commendable. Still, when you’ve been in my position for as long as I have, you come to learn that the occasional public display is beneficial for everyone. As Grand Maester, I wish for all of Spira to know that the whole of Yevon stands behind you and your pilgrimage.”

“I – I’m not entirely sure what to say. Thank you?”

“There’s no need. I hear that you acquitted yourself very well in the aftermath of Sin’s attack on Kilika. You’re doing well, Jon, walking the summoner’s path as you are. Offering you the certainty of Yevon’s full support seems the least I can do to aid you. And we can’t understate the effect it will have on the people to know that the church has full confidence in your ability to conquer Sin. You are, after all, bringing hope to Spira. That is the sacred duty of the summoner – and of course, his guardians.”

He really likes the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he? If Martin wasn’t already feeling predisposed to dislike him based on pretty much everything his travel companions had to say so far, the bored self-assurance in his voice – and the anxious uncertainty in Jon’s – would be enough all on their own. Maybe that’s just how important men talk, especially when they know they have an audience that might hang on every word they can hear, but it grates on him all the same.

Elias, who Martin spitefully decides on the spur of the moment doesn’t deserve his title in the privacy of Martin’s own head, looks towards Daisy and Basira now and inclines his head; formally, deep enough to show respect for anyone who may be watching.

“Your service does not go unrecognised, nor unremarked upon,” he says, and maybe it’s just Martin’s rapidly ballooning dislike for the man, but he can’t help but hear something pointed in it. “I trust you’ve both adjusted to the circumstances of your assignment?”

“No complaints, sir,” says Basira, her voice carefully neutral.

“Good. I’m pleased to hear it – and to see so clearly that everyone here understands that the struggle against Sin is one for all of Spira.” Again, there’s something pointed in Elias’s smooth voice, and this time Martin’s sure he’s not imagining it as Elias turns towards Tim and Sasha now. “That even those of our friends who have strayed can see how vital the pilgrimage is and return to seek atonement.”

He inclines his head, the same as with Basira and Daisy, but also not the same at all. This time, there’s clear recognition in those cold grey eyes, along with a flash of disdain that isn’t masked fast enough for Martin not to notice it.

“Sure,” Tim mutters under his breath, which is still loud enough for Martin to hear it, “let’s go with that.”

Honestly, Martin’s impressed that Tim’s restrained himself to bristling sullenly – and then Elias’s eyes are landing on Martin, and he feels pinned by them.

“Ah,” says Elias distantly, as though being reminded of something entirely inconsequential. “And of course, we can’t forget that echoes of the past walk among us.”

Martin tries not to jump, or flinch, or do anything else that looks suspicious. What? What – does the Grand Maester of Yevon somehow know his secret?

Some of the shock and panic must have made it to his face, or something, because Elias, says, “No need to look so surprised – word spreads quickly. I’m sure your father would be proud.”

Right. Okay, right, Dekker said the priests of Yevon were gossips. Martin was so busy panicking over the others discovering he’s been lying to them, after listening in on Jon and Sasha last night, that he forgot the whole thing with his dad was a big deal. But there’s something about the piercing, calculating look in Elias’s eyes that’s still - off. Elias’s face is set in composed, distant politeness, but for a second, Martin could swear he looks - amused. Amused, and deeply interested, in a way Martin really, really, really doesn’t like.

He decides right then and there that he really doesn’t like Elias.

That piercing gaze shifts away from him, and Martin breathes easier again, though not by much, as Elias turns back to Jon.

“Really, Jon, you have been blessed with such an abundance of guardians. Few summoners in history could claim such an honour.”

Jon is quiet for a moment. Then, with surprising speed, he says, “You’re right. It is an honour to have so many. Every one of them has already proven their – their bravery, and their loyalty, a hundred times over on our road together. They – They’re not bound to come with me to the end. But I wouldn’t send any of them away unless they asked for it.”

So Martin’s not the only one who’s hearing the pointed little messages in Elias’s words, then. He’s surprised at the fierce earnestness that was in Jon’s just now, though. Any of them? Even Martin?

Maybe Elias just hit a nerve.

“That’s a fine sentiment, and you’ve made your feelings clear. No doubt they’ll serve you well going forward.”

Elias sighs, and makes a show of looking back towards the stadium behind him, and says, “I shan’t keep you any longer. I can only delay the beginning of this tournament with my absence for so long – and I have delayed your task long enough. Duty calls, Jon.”

How convenient for Elias that duty only seems to call when he decides it does.

Martin bites his tongue – the last thing any of them need is Martin drawing attention to himself. He joins in with the Prayer when the others make the gesture to bid Elias goodbye, and then he carries on biting his tongue as Elias leaves, his escort of priests and warrior monks leaving with him.

The crowd, to Martin’s dismay, does not leave at the same time. There are still a good two handfuls of people hanging around the bottom end of the pier, a few of them gawking or craning their necks in a none-too-subtle attempt to get a better look at Jon.

“Who wants to tell them the show’s over?” Tim asks, raising his eyebrows at the people lingering.

Basira and Daisy look between them, and then each other, and then Basira puts a hand on Jon’s shoulder and says, “Give us a minute or so. We’ll take care of it.”

Then the two of them head down towards that end of the pier. It’s too far from where the rest of them are standing for Martin to make out whatever it is they’re saying, but whatever it is, it works; within two or three minutes, the crowd is dispersing, slowly making their way back along the walkways towards the stadium entrance, or back towards the rest of Luca, or wherever.

Tim lets out a low whistle.

“Alright,” he says as the two monks rejoin them. “I didn’t call that.”

“What?” Basira says, entirely deadpan. “Being cheerless and married to the rules has its perks sometimes.”

Tim gapes at her slightly, and then rubs the back of his neck with a sheepish chuckle.

“Touché,” he admits gracefully. Basira’s eyes glitter with amusement.

“C’mon, we’d better get going. Before something else holds us up.”

“Right,” Jon agrees, looking a little dazed. He says, “Right,” again, this time more of a sigh, and massages his forehead with the finger and thumb of one hand.

“That was pretty intense,” Martin offers.

“You said it,” Tim agrees, with a stretch and a wry laugh. “I could use a drink after that. Relax, Jon,” he adds straight away, as Jon’s mouth opens. “I know we’ve got to get on. I’m just saying.”

Jon closes his mouth and says nothing.

“Let’s just get moving,” he says eventually, and so they do exactly that.

Martin still has about a million different questions rattling around his head. Like, whether talking to Elias is always like that, full of smooth, well-oiled comments that leave you wanting to turn them over in your head for hours afterward looking for some kind of double or hidden meaning, or if he was just trying to prove a point of some sort with all this. And what kind of point, come to that – that he’s keeping an eye on them? On Jon? Watching for any sort of perceived slip-up?

He kind of wants to ask if Jon’s okay – it was pretty obvious even from Martin’s spot at the back just how humiliating he found being put on the spot on spherecast like that. But Jon’s very much still holding himself like an angry cat ready to hiss and spit at the next person who dares to come too close, so Martin leaves it be, for now.

Doesn’t stop him from wondering what the history is there – there must be history there, Martin’s not that dense – but he knows better than to ask.

The streets of Luca are not as densely packed as they were the first time they came through the city; with the tournament about to kick off, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to grab tickets for a spot in the stadium has packed themselves into one of the city’s cafes or bars or anywhere else they can find where a spherecast of the stadium is playing (again, Martin wonders about Yevon’s machina ban. Finds himself wondering a little spitefully what Elias might have to say about that). There’s still a few people getting food from one of the outdoor stalls that have popped up, or taking the time to grab a bit of fresh air while they wait for their favourite team to play, but by and large the streets are much clearer and way easier to navigate than all of the bobbing and weaving and people-dodging they had to do last time. It’s a bit of a novelty being able to walk in a straight line.

The main streets may be clearer with almost everyone in the city focused on the blitzball, but Martin notices that Tim and Sasha still make a point of leading them along a route of sidestreets as they head north through the city. Nothing’s ever said about it, but the sidestreets have even fewer people on them right now than the main roads, and Martin’s pretty sure they’re not taking this route because it’s the most direct.

Fewer people doesn’t mean no people, though, and as they head down a street close to the plaza in the north that leads to the long stairway back up to the Mi’ihen highroad, they come across a small knot of curious passersby, grouped in a loose circle around someone wearing a large billboard proclaiming in large letters: PINHOLE MYSTERY WALK HERE TONIGHT.

Martin glances at the loose, sparse gathering of onlookers as his little group starts getting close. There’s a couple who look genuinely interested; a few who look interested but also guilty about it; and more who are wrinkling their noses in disgust or distaste, but still not making much of a move to walk on aside from pointedly lingering as far away as they can within earshot. Martin looks back to the person with the billboard, wondering what it is they’re actually advertising. They’re certainly dressed strikingly enough; compared to the bright, vivid colours that Martin’s seen on most Spirans since he woke up here, under the billboard this person’s clothes are a stark black, with belts in odd places and a fur collar that is completely out of place in humid Luca.

“… don’t be shy,” the billboard-wearer is saying as they get close enough to make out actual words, “if you join our specialist tour guides here at this very spot tonight, you too can embark on a tour of Luca as you’ve never seen it! The city Yevon doesn’t want you to see, the stories that have gone unspoken… until now.”

There follows a dramatic pause, just long enough to pick up on the murmuring and head-shaking going on in some of the onlookers, before the patter starts up all over again. “Strange disappearances and shocking crimes, including the murder of Mary Keay that happened on the top floor of her very own shop – officially unsolved according to the authorities, but for a low fee of 50 gil per person, you too can learn the astonishing truth…”

Huh. It mostly sounds like typical tourist stuff to Martin, but a faint bell is ringing in his head for some reason. Keay, Keay, why does he recognise that from somewhere?

“I can’t believe this,” Basira says, a glare in her voice; when Martin turns to look at her, her jaw is set hard.

“We should shut it down,” Daisy adds, so low it’s almost a growl. “To think the bastards’re making money off this…”

“Don’t,” says Jon, his voice tight. “Not now.”

“We can’t let them get away with this.”

“With what, the crime of making a living?” says Jon quickly, his mouth a tight line.

Daisy’s glare could reduce iron to ash. “Off the dead?”

“Is that really what bothers you, or is it them making Yevon look bad that’s the problem?”

Daisy is not that much taller than Jon. Only a couple of inches at most. It’s hard to remember that right now, though, when she’s fixing him with a glare that says exactly what she thinks of that question. Martin’s sure she’s not going to do anything, she’s Jon’s guardian for goodness’ sake, but he’s still struck by a sudden urge to put himself between the two of them before something happens.

That urge only gets bigger when Jon shrinks, looking flustered, and mutters an agitated, “I – sorry, I –”

Jon recovers, and says more firmly, “I’m going on ahead. We’re not stopping.”

Then he makes a beeline for the end of the street, Tim and Sasha quickly adjusting their pace to catch up. Martin shoots Daisy the dirtiest glare he can muster up before rushing ahead to join them.

“She’s right about one thing,” Tim says abruptly as they spill out into the northern plaza. “It is in poor taste.”

“I never said it wasn’t,” Jon snaps. “Frankly it’s absurd. But the last thing I need is those two declaring a two-monk purge of anything even vaguely heretical here in Luca.”

Reflexively, Martin glances behind him, half-dreading it in case Daisy and Basira have decided to take matters into their own hands and do exactly that. It’s more of a relief than it should be to see them both still following some ways behind, locked in some quiet conversation of their own.

“I mean, you’re right,” Tim sighs, “it’s not doing any harm, I guess, even if it is spooky and weird and gross. I’ll never understand those crime nut types.”

“You don’t think it’s even a little interesting?” says Sasha. “Those crime nut types are right about one thing, these are the sorts of things Yevon doesn’t ever let you hear about.”

“You just want to go on the tour,” Jon mutters.

“Maybe a little. Thorough research is important!”

Jon musters the energy for a large and very heartfelt eyeroll, as both he and Tim make long-suffering noises that suggest that this is not the first time they’ve had this sort of conversation with Sasha.

“Of course you couldn’t be just a normal nerd,” Tim sighs, injecting as much drama into the words as he can, “you had to go and be one of those weird counter-culture nerds as well.”

Unruffled, Sasha says archly, “It’s good to be properly informed about these things.”

“Of course that’s what she calls it,” Jon mutters again, sounding especially sour.

Martin isn’t in much of a mood to play witness to even a good-natured argument – and with Jon as prickly as he is right now, who knows how long it would stay good-natured. Casting his mind about for something to say, the first thing he hits on is what’s still nagging at the back of his mind.

“Why do I feel like I know that name from somewhere, though? Keay, Keay…”

It’s on the tip of his tongue, he knows it is, but he can’t for the life of him remember where he’s heard it before now.

“I dunno, if it was in Luca it’ll have been before me and Sasha lived down here,” Tim shrugs. “I feel like I did hear a rumour when I was playing cards in a bar once. It was her kid that did it, right?”

“Allegedly.” Sasha stresses. “Only if you believe the rumours. I heard one from some of the fishing folk near the docks that said her body got up and vanished.”

“Ugh. Unsent?”

“Maybe. Like I said, only if you believe the rumours.”

Oh, Martin realises all of a sudden, memories clicking in place. Dekker’s old sphere - that’s where he’s heard the name before. Gertrude talking about Unsent and some kind of rumours about someone she knew in Luca. Wait, was she talking about the same incident? How does that fit into everything?

“I also heard one saying it was a botched murder-suicide,” Sasha is saying, once he tunes back in to the conversation.

“Yevon on a shoopuf,” says Tim, with feeling. “Right. Well, it’s still weird. Things like that don’t happen—”

“That we know of.”

“Okay, but they don’t,” Tim insists, looking uncomfortable now. “Like, hardly at all, anyway. There’s enough people out there already getting killed by Sin and fiends without humans helping them along, everyone knows that.”

“Are you both done with this topic?” Jon interrupts, in a voice as brittle as thin ice. “I’m getting tired of sensationalist nonsense.”

Martin winces at the harshness of Jon’s voice; Tim and Sasha stare at him for a long moment, then glance at each other briefly, before Tim says in a falsely chipper tone, “If you say so, boss.”

Jon has nothing to offer to that except another glare, but if he was looking to kill the conversation, he’s got his wish. Everyone falls silent as they hit the first stretch of the long, steep staircase to take them out of Luca, and even if Martin had the breath to spare to try and break it, he finds that after everything that’s happened over the past few days, he really doesn’t have the heart. They all trudge up the steps in silence for a while, backs and knees starting in on a steady ache as the long climb continues, neither completely comfortable nor entirely uncomfortable. Just – focusing on climbing and not tripping and breaking their necks, and waiting for the mood to clear enough for any of them to actually want to talk again.

They’re all on edge. That’s all it is. It’s probably a good thing that they’re taking a bit of time to just be in their own heads for a bit, instead of biting someone else’s off.

They’re taking a sorely-needed breather on one of the stone landings part-way up the climb when Martin catches sight of Daisy approaching Jon, grabbing his attention with a light touch on the back of his arm.

“Jon,” she starts, and barely gives him time enough for a wary look before she’s carrying on, her face unreadable. “I’m not saying you were right back there. But I want you to know we’re with you – me, Basira too. We know our priorities.”

Martin, trying very hard not to eavesdrop but also unable to resist casting a furtive look in Jon’s direction to see how he’s taking that, sees Jon’s face go from open surprise, to something a lot like a soft, grateful collapse of relief.

“Alright,” he nods. “Thank you.”

Daisy gives a curt nod of her own before stepping away, and Martin breathes a small sigh of relief of his own. It’s too much to hope for that they can just leave everything that’s weighing on them behind in Luca, but as they set back in on the long, gruelling climb and Tim cracks his first joke in about two hours, he can start feeling more optimistic about things.

After everything they’ve already faced, how much worse can it get?

Chapter Text

All things considered, Martin is relieved to be leaving Luca behind for the second time. He might be a city mouse born and bred, but between his only two trips to Luca, he's come face to face with an infuriatingly cryptic legendary guardian with as little idea of what's actually happened to him as Martin has, and had a decidedly unnerving run-in with the most powerful man in all of Spira.

Put it simply, he's just glad they’re back on the road. The climb back up out of Luca makes him sweat, and before long he can feel it in his knees, an aching that he knows is going to stick around for at least the rest of the day's walk; but even so, finally making it up those last few stairs out of Luca’s stuffy humidity and being hit with the first breeze of the high road feels almost comforting. Maybe it’s just because it’s familiar now. Or at least something he’s seen before, and knows he can deal with. There hasn’t been a lot of that since he woke up on the rocky beach near Djose.

“Back here again,” he says aloud. “Now we’ve done it once, it should be faster coming back, right?”

Sasha laughs. “You know the road is exactly the same length no matter which way you’re travelling, don’t you?”

“Oh, pipe down, Sasha!” Tim says exuberantly; he seems to have completely regained his good humour on the long climb to the top. Martin's still not sure if it's genuine or if Tim's laying it on for everyone else's benefit. Heck, maybe it's just the endorphins from the climb. “We could use a little more optimism in the party. Besides, Martin’s right. It always seems quicker when you know where you’re going.”

“The road back is uphill,” Daisy says shortly from her place at the front. Even this close to Luca, her eyes are on the move, searching for threats. “And there are still fiends out there. Keep quiet and watch your summoner.”

Martin tries to do just that, though he can’t quite stop himself from grinning sheepishly when Sasha rolls her eyes at Daisy’s back once they’re all back on the move.

As it happens, travelling back up the Mi’ihen Highroad does seem easier, even with it being uphill. Maybe it’s the familiarity, or maybe it’s just that the time he’s spent travelling actually has managed to toughen him up a bit. Whatever it is, those first few days of retracing their steps pass over smoothly, even with the fiends. They've all travelled together, fought together, for long enough now to know where to stand and how to fight together, and so the fiends that do stray onto the road and into their path go down quickly in the face of everyone’s combined efforts. The highroad stretches on and on and on into the north, and they follow it, steadily inching their way back toward the distant, lumpy rock formations of Mushroom Rock Road.

There are less people travelling the southern stretch of the road this time. Martin guesses that makes sense, that everyone who was going to travel to Luca for the Blitzball made sure to have timed it so they’d be there already; after all, the tournament was only just starting as they left.

Still, there’s something about the look in Tim and Sasha’s eyes when he brings it up that makes him think there might be more to it than that. Something a bit cagey, a bit evasive. Martin knows the look.

He decides to leave it be for now. There’s still plenty of road left, if his memory’s right; there’ll be plenty of time to pester them about it later.

It’s not just Tim and Sasha who are acting like they’ve got something on their minds, either. Jon has withdrawn back into himself since they hit the highroad, swathed in that great summoner’s mantle like a tortoise in its shell. He’s scarcely been without it since the morning after the Sending at Kilika, and once again, Martin can’t help wondering if there’s something more to that than a matter of preference. Something about the way Elias spoke to them all when he crossed paths with them in Luca makes him think.... maybe summoners are expected to look the part as well. What was it Tim said, back in Kilika? Something about Jon being the 'face of Spira's hope', or something?

It seems unfair from where Martin’s standing. Being expected to take down Sin is enough pressure for anyone as it is; who cares what the summoner looks like when they do it, so long as it gets done and the Calm happens?

Well. It’s not like he can say that to Jon, anyway. The Jon who would have conversations with Martin that could be anywhere from grudging to almost friendly seems to have vanished at around the same time the mantle reappeared. Martin’s trying not to feel too injured about that. It’s not like they know one another particularly well, after all; besides, between the attack on Kilika and the run-in they had in Luca, Jon’s probably feeling the pressure of being a summoner more than ever. It is a lot of pressure; even Tim’s been having trouble drawing Jon out of his shell over the past few days, and they’ve been friends for years.

Even so, Martin can’t help feeling a little wistful about it. He likes what he saw of the Jon he managed to glimpse on the ferry between islands, or on the little tropical island of Besaid. It felt like getting a peek at the real Jon.

Which is a stupid thing to think, because they’ve barely known each other for two months. What does Martin know about what Jon’s really like? It’s not like Jon even likes him all that much. Martin’s caught the narrow-eyed glances Jon throws his way when he thinks Martin isn’t looking, and he’s not enough of a fool to think they’re complimentary. The conversation he overheard between Jon and Sasha on the ferry back to Luca still weighs heavily in the back of Martin's mind. Jon doesn't trust Martin's story, and so, Jon probably doesn't trust Martin either. And maybe he's right not to.

But then, didn’t Jon also count him among his guardians back in Luca, when he said he wouldn’t send any of them away for as long as they still wished to travel with him?

It’s beyond Martin to unravel, that’s for sure. It probably doesn’t mean anything; just that Jon’s a good person and doesn’t have to heart to turn away a friendless man with nowhere else to go, no matter how much he might want to.

At least Tim and Sasha seem to like him well enough. Martin’s grateful for it; it makes the nights spent making camp by the side of the road bearable. Daisy isn’t much of a conversationalist, and while Basira seems happy enough to talk, Martin's found it difficult to find anything they have in common that they can have an easy conversation about; he’s always worried he’ll say something that’ll give away how much he still doesn’t know about Spira. It's nerve-wracking enough having to deal with that whenever he talks to Sasha; at least with her, he knows that he's heard her vouch for him to Jon, no matter how skeptical she might really be about who or what he really is. If anything, Martin's noticed that she's started to quietly offer him pointers whenever she catches him looking confused about something. Between that, and Tim's habit of happily striking up a conversation with anyone, the two of them have been lifesavers. Especially now that Jon’s back to being his brooding, irritable self.

The night they spend in the shadow of one of the foundering towers half-buried next to the road, about a week into their trek northward, is no different. It’s still so strange to Martin, how Spira can be covered in so many of these ruins and yet nobody seems to pay them any mind. Strange, and a little sad.

Then again, Spira has bigger things to worry about than the crumbling remains of old buildings. He’s seen that first-hand now. When any given day could bring another Kilika, of course digging up the past would take a back seat.

Unless your name is Sasha, apparently. While the others argue about whose turn it is to do the washing up, Martin spies Sasha standing a short way from their little circle of bedrolls, furiously sketching in one of her journals.

It can’t hurt to see what she’s up to, he figures. He knows by now that the washing up debate can take a while, depending on how capricious a mood Tim is in. It’s sometimes better just to leave them to it.

Sasha looks up as he approaches, offering a welcoming smile.

"Back up close with the ruins, then?" Martin says by way of greeting.

“Afraid so," she laughs, showing him her half-finished sketch of the tower. "I never really got to see places like this up close growing up in Bevelle,” she explains. “It's pretty much impossible to get near them up north. Not without breaking a whole bunch of rules, anyway.”

“Really? How come?”

“Yevon,” she shrugs, looking back up at the tower. “What else? The remains of the old machina cities are tainted, you see. We shouldn’t be interested in trying to understand anything about how their people lived, or what the cities were like. Gets in the way of atonement.”

“Oh,” says Martin, glancing back up at the dark, empty windows of the fragment in front of them. “Isn’t that a bit… you know, backwards?”

The words come out hesitant. It’s not that he’s worried about voicing that opinion to Sasha herself, he knows how she thinks, but… he’s been in Spira for long enough to know that that probably isn’t an opinion shared by most people. Even ones who have supposedly forgotten large amounts of what they should know thanks to Sin’s toxin. And well, it's debatable how much Sasha still believes him about that, anyway.

Even so, when Sasha smiles in relief, he can relax, knowing he’s said the right thing.

“I’ve always thought so. But you don’t get very far in Bevelle by voicing that kind of opinion, so…” Sasha sighs, tapping the edge of her stick of charcoal against the side of her journal with a troubled expression. “Besides, they’ve got a point when it comes to keeping people away. Ruins that old tend to be dangerous, especially the ones that haven't been lying around in the open for years like they are here on the highroad. And I’m not just talking about the things you’d expect, like the floor or the walls collapsing or flooding or anything like that."

"Right," Martin nods, remembering their conversation back on Besaid. "You said the fiends hanging around the ruins are more dangerous than normal, didn't you?”

"Right. Most scholars think it must be something to do with their pyreflies having been condensed into that one form for so long - that kind of resentment is ancient. And..."

Sasha hesitates, her brows creasing together in a small frown. “There’s always a chance that disturbing the ancient machina in the ruins will draw Sin.”

“What? Really?”

“Yep. Sin was the punishment for overusing machina, right? So it’s drawn to it, like a moth to flame. Or that’s what they’ll tell you at the temples.”

Once again, it all seems to come back to machina. Martin still can’t help having his doubts about it, though. It just feels… well. It feels like too convenient of an explanation, if he’s honest about it. Like the machina are being used as a scapegoat for something else.

That’s definitely not the sort of thing anyone from Spira would say, though. And aside from that, there's another horrible thought that strikes at him, leaving a cold nausea in his gut.

"Wait, is that what they tried to say when..." he trails off, and looks back towards the campsite, where Tim is still shamelessly egging on the others in the washing up debate.

Sasha follows his gaze, and her face moves through understanding, to a flash of something like anger, to sorrow.

"When Tim lost Danny?" She sighs heavily. "Yeah, the temples weren't what you'd call sympathetic."

"That's awful."

No wonder Tim has such a fraught relationship with Yevon now. It has to say something about the strength of his friendship with Jon that he'd put that aside to be one of his guardians.

Or maybe just something about the strength of his hatred for Sin. But Martin wants to believe it's the first one.

“How... how does that work with the highroad, though?” he asks after a moment, desperate now to move the conversation along. “I mean - if that's the logic they use, it's covered in ruins, but people travel on it all the time.”

“Well these old ruins around here don’t have much to them. They got stripped out long ago. But," Sasha adds, with an effort at cheer, "they’re still fascinating to look at, right? Pity there’s so little left of them that we can’t even tell what the buildings would’ve been used for.”

Martin shoots a glance back at the crumbling old tower top, trying to see it through Sasha’s eyes. It still looks mostly sad to him. Sad, and yet painfully ordinary for all of that. If he tried to use his fingers to count the number of buildings in Zanarkand city centre that were built in this sort of style, he’d run out of fingers long before he ran out of buildings.

“Yeah, I mean… this looks like it was probably the roof of something or other. Not much you can really tell from that.”

“Nope. Just one of Spira’s many, many mysteries.” Sasha smiles again suddenly, as if she’s remembering a private joke. “Jon used to get so frustrated with how many books in the temple library lead back to nothing but dead ends and just so stories. We used to talk about maybe filling some of the holes in one day.”

There’s something oddly wistful about the way Sasha says that. Like she thinks maybe it’s a dream she won’t have the chance to turn into reality for some reason. Martin can’t quite put his finger on it, but it’s just – odd.

Maybe the thought of the long road ahead is getting to her. Or Martin's thoughtless mention of what happened to Tim's brother. Even someone as incorrigibly confident as Sasha must have moments of doubt on a journey as dangerous as theirs, right?

“Well, I mean, you still can, right?” he says, trying to sound reassuring. “I know there’s a lot going on for you both right now, but the Calm’ll give you a bit of time to break a few rules together, won’t it? Even if Sin does come back.”

Sasha doesn’t say anything for a minute, staring at the ruins of the tower, or maybe through the tower at something else entirely. Her expression is tight-lipped and unreadable. Martin is just starting to wonder if he’s gone and said completely the wrong thing when Sasha sighs, folding her journal closed in one decided motion.

“I think you really underestimate just how tight a hold Yevon has on everything,” she tells him with a rueful smile.

That's... well, that’s true enough. The more Martin learns about Yevon, the more he’s coming to realise just how much of Spira is bound up in it – and just how beyond him it is to imagine. He keeps trying to come up with anything back in Zanarkand that’s even slightly close to that level, and coming up empty.

Still, why does he get the feeling that that’s not what Sasha really wanted to say?

“Maybe,” he says doubtfully, as a peace offering. “Oh, that reminds me, I’ve been wanting to ask something but there’s never been a good time – what’s the deal with um, Elias? I mean, I know he’s the Grand Maester and that means that he’s, y’know, the biggest deal on Spira, but… back in Luca, there seemed to be, um, more to it than that?”

“Oh, Elias.” A corner of Sasha’s mouth twists, like there’s a lot she wants to say but isn’t. Martin suddenly feels extremely vindicated in his instinctive dislike of the man. “Yeah, you’re not wrong. He handpicked Jon to be a summoner, you know?”

“What-- wow. Really? I mean, wow.” That makes a lot of things click into place. “That’s – no wonder Jon seemed so on edge when we met him. Talk about pressure. Not – not that everything about being a summoner isn’t a lot of pressure, but—”

“But it’s different,” Sasha nods, thankfully putting an end to his rambling before he can make a complete fool of himself. “I know what you’re getting at.”

Sasha’s mouth curves into a faint, wry smile. “Elias doesn’t really approve of me and Tim. I think he thinks we’re bad influences on his star protégé.”

“No,” Martin gasps, feigning shock. “You two, bad influences? Really?”

Sasha lasts all of about five seconds before she breaks, and the two of them dissolve into bright laughter.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sasha says in her best haughty tone. Her grin is wicked. Martin is sorry to see it fade. “But yeah, that’s the situation. I mean, Elias has had Jon training for this for… I dunno, years. He probably wants to make sure it all goes the way it’s supposed to.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess. It just… it all seems really hard on Jon, you know?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Sasha says, simply. Then she says: “Even if he does insist on making it difficult by being an arse about it sometimes.”

Before Martin can make any move to either agree with Sasha, or to speak up in Jon’s defence, a loud shout comes up from behind them.

“Oi!” Tim’s stern tone is utterly ruined by the wide grin he’s sporting. The way he wags a finger at them like they’re a pair of kids being scolded by their schoolteacher isn’t helping. “Trying to worm your way out of the chores by hiding up here being nerds, you two? Don’t deny it; you’ve been caught red-handed.”

Sasha throws Martin an incredulous look, before turning the full force of it on Tim.

“Oh, as if you’re one to talk,” she says airily, folding her arms. She continues to act unmoved, even as Tim throws a careless arm around each of them and begins steering them both back towards the others. “Like you didn’t volunteer to come and get us just to escape!”

In the end, the washing up becomes a team effort after Basira, ever the pragmatist, points out that they’re losing the light. The sun goes down and rises again the next morning, and with it, their steady progress along the highroad begins once more.

Chapter Text

According to both Tim and Daisy, they're making good time of it on their way back up the highroad. Even so, the further north they go, the more it seems to Martin that the road feels too quiet, too deserted for what is ostensibly a main thoroughfare; the fact that it's blitz season down in Luca can only account for so much, surely. The days slip by in a slow blur of walking, of snatches of conversation and the passing by of half-familiar scenery, punctuated only by the mad, adrenaline-fueled wildness of intermittent fiend attacks.

And even the fiend attacks are becoming something alarmingly close to routine. The Mi’ihen Highroad may be long, but for whatever reason, the malice and spite of the poor souls that lost their lives along it take the same handful of forms and shapes that crop up again and again; it gets to the point where the fiends’ strength and movements are actually fairly easy to predict. Martin tries to take advantage of this one day; he’s taken enough hits by now to know when something’s coming that he can shrug off without too much trouble. If he can put that to good use to let someone else have time to finish preparing a spell or find an opening without an incoming attack throwing them off, that has to count for something, right?

He soon discovers that the others don’t see it that way. Quite the opposite, in fact. By mid-afternoon, he has the five of them in unanimous agreement telling him not to do it – including an extremely testy Jon.

“Isn’t this kind of part of my job, though?” he asks the group at large, as Jon pours healing magic into him yet again; Martin's stopped keeping count.

“No,” Jon answers shortly. Martin would have said he spat the word if it hadn’t been so clipped. “I’m saying it’s not, and that’s the end of it.”

“Daisy doesn’t have that sword for nothing,” Basira adds. “It’s not just for breaking through armour. Let her block the heavy hitters.”

Martin bites his tongue and says nothing. He leaves it be; he does as they ask; but he can’t help nursing a quiet ember of irrational resentment. He knows they think he’s being reckless, but is it so wrong of him to want to pull his own weight the way the rest of them do? Commit to being a guardian properly, instead of just tagging along because that’s where his circumstances have left him? Pulling wisps of magic together with hastily muttered strings of poetry just doesn’t seem to measure up to what the others can contribute.

That’s not the only thing to sour Martin’s mood. The road is still too quiet for his liking, quiet enough that it’s beginning to make him uneasy.

That is, right up until it isn’t.

About half a day’s walk from what Martin vaguely remembers as the location of the travel agency, they suddenly begin to see a lot more people on the road. Not just any people, either; whether they’re mounted on the back of a chocobo, or walking the highroad on foot, every one of them is armed with at least one weapon and clad in armour. It’s no uniform by any means; Martin’s no expert, but some of the armour looks old, a bit worse for wear, or like it’s been cobbled together from several different places to make a whole set.

Haphazard or no, these aren’t ordinary citizens travelling from point A to B. These people are dressed for a fight, and clearly looking to find one. Crusaders, Martin realises, finally making the connection between these soldiers and the ones they saw patrolling the highroad for fiends on their way south, or keeping a watchful eye on the edge of Luca. The same organisation Tim and Sasha both belong to. But he's never seen so many of them clustered together before, or travelling with such purpose.

So what are so many of them doing on this part of the Mi’ihen Highroad?

“Can’t be long now,” Tim mutters to Sasha. There’s a grim look on his face that does nothing to improve Martin’s mood.

“Sorry, what can’t be long?” Martin asks. He tries to keep his voice down to be polite, but he’s not that worried about the others hearing them. It’s not as though the Crusaders they’re seeing are making any attempt to be secretive. A few of them have even hailed their party as they passed, with a respectful nod or a performance of the Prayer. “Has this got anything to do with why the two of you have been acting shifty ever since we left Luca?”

Normally, this would be the point at which Tim would crack a joke. He doesn’t now.

Sasha looks between Tim and Martin, and sighs. “Remember how we said the Crusaders keep a headquarters up near Mushroom Rock Road?”

“Ye…ah?” Martin frowns, not quite following. “You said it was ideal because people don’t live round there.”

“Right,” Sasha nods, “Which makes it perfect for carrying out our operations against Sin. Manuela’s been working on something for a while now. Probably the biggest one in the Crusaders’ history. Operation Mi’ihen, she’s calling it.”

If they’re naming it after the founder of the entire order, it must be big. Martin thinks about the sheer numbers of Crusaders they’ve been seeing since the mid-morning, whatever this is, they must be bringing together the bulk of their members for it.

“We’re gonna give that monster a taste of its own medicine,” says Tim with a dark, resolute smile.

The Crusaders think they’ve found a way to kill Sin, Martin realises. Or at least, Tim certainly thinks they have. Martin thinks back to the devastation at Kilika, how helpless all of them had been on the boat, and wonders if it’s possible.

He’d like to believe it is. He really, really would.

Ahead of them, Basira stops abruptly, turning to face them with an expression like granite.

“And what makes you think this time’ll be different to all the other hundreds of times the Crusaders have tried something like this? Sin can only be brought down by the Final Summoning. You know that.”

Tim bristles, stopping in his tracks.

“Do we? No one’s ever tried anything else!”

“Because it doesn’t work,” Daisy says in an even tone, coming to stand by Basira’s side. As level as her voice is, it still sounds like a challenge. “Are you really that arrogant?”

“I don’t think it’s arrogance to want a Spira where we don’t have to send summoners on pilgrimage,” Tim spits through gritted teeth.

Jon’s lips pinch into a thin line at that, and Martin thinks: what a weird way of putting it. Of course it would be a relief to get rid of some of the pressure on the summoners, get rid of the urgent need for such a long, difficult journey, especially with how fewer and fewer people have been choosing to undergo it, but – why was that the first place Tim went to? Because Daisy’s a guardian?

Maybe so, because Daisy does back down a bit, letting out a short bark of a sigh.

“Fine. Reckless, then.”

“What, you’re not gonna go for the heresy angle? That’s a shock.”

“You already know it’s heresy,” Daisy shrugs, raising an eyebrow. “That didn’t bother you before, it won’t bother you hearing it from me.”

Martin’s skin is itching with how badly he wants to smooth over this argument. The problem is, he doesn’t know enough. There’s something he’s missing here, and he can’t stick his oar in without giving away how little he really knows. With some of the others already on to him, he can't give them more fuel for the fire.

Fortunately, Jon picks that moment to step in.

“I heard you had a group of Al Bhed machina experts along with you on this one,” he says. He looks thoughtful. Thoughtful, and worried. “Is that true?”

“Where did you hear that?” asks Sasha, surprised.

“I – I hear things!” Jon retorts. “Oh please, you’re not seriously telling me that you don’t remember what the rumour mill in the temple’s like. And on top of that, I – well—”

“You got it from Elias,” Sasha fills in for him. Jon’s mouth snaps shut, and he nods stiffly. Sasha sighs. “Right.”

“You really think you’ve got a hope in hell of defeating Sin using the entire reason that Sin exists?” Basira demands.

Oh, screw not getting involved. This is just getting ridiculous.

“Well, why not?” Martin finds himself saying.

Tim, mouth still open ready to argue back, turns to him with an incredulous look on his face. Martin doesn’t give himself time to look at anyone else; he’s too busy concentrating on treading carefully with what he says next. “I-I mean it. I, I know the machina are forbidden for a reason and everything, but aren’t the Crusaders just trying to do the exact same thing as we are? If stopping Sin’s the priority, if they’re using them for good, to, to save lives – does it really matter at the end of the day that the machina were involved?”

“See?” Tim says, gesturing at him; Martin breathes a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

Basira folds her arms. “All that’s gonna happen is you get a lot of people killed.”

“You don’t know that,” Tim argues. “The plan’s a good one. Unlike what you think, we’re not just running blindly into this.”

Daisy lets out an incredulous huff.

“You’re not doing anything,” she tells Tim. “You made a pledge as a guardian, remember?”

Tim scowls at her, eyes narrowing. Martin can recognise the look of someone who really, really wants to argue back, but doesn’t think he has a leg to stand on with it. Jon glances between the two of them, Tim and Daisy, and sighs, rubbing his forehead in exasperation.

“You know I can’t force any of you to journey with me past the point where you want to leave. That’s not how this works,” Jon says impatiently, rolling his eyes. As irritated as he seems, though, there’s still something of worry in Jon’s frown. After a breath, he turns back to Tim with, “Though… I will admit, I have some misgivings about this one, Tim. I – I really think you and Sasha should think twice about this, after—”

“After the last time?” Tim interrupts, coldly. “Is that what you were going to say?”

“I—” Jon visibly steels himself, and nods. “Well, as a matter of fact, yes!”

“Here’s an idea: don’t.”

Tim brushes past the lot of them, stalking on past the head of their little group and further down the wide dirt road. Jon breathes in sharply, clearly tensing his jaw; he and Sasha exchange a look, and then Jon is heading along the road as well, leaving the rest of them to follow along behind.

Martin wars with himself for about a minute before concern and curiosity both win out. He leans in towards Sasha, lowering his voice.

“What… what happened last time?”

“Oh, you know,” Sasha says, in a breezily normal tone of voice. Obviously she’s not that worried about who knows. “Close call with Sin, you know how it is. Literally, you do,” she adds as an afterthought, shooting Martin a wry smile.

She shrugs, as though an encounter with what is pretty much the incarnation of death itself is just par for the course by now. Martin gets the feeling that Sasha might be putting on a brave face. He’s also beginning to sympathise with Jon, a lot. “But we’re both fine. Jon just worries.”

That last is projected at full volume towards Jon ahead of them; he turns as fast as his robes will allow him to, sending a withering look Sasha’s way.

“I think I have a right,” he says stiffly.

“Sure you do,” Tim calls dismissively from the front.

Privately, Martin can’t help agreeing with Jon. If Tim and Sasha came so close to meeting a horrible end against Sin once before already, of course he’d worry about them putting themselves so close to it again – especially without the guarantee of the Final Summoning.

But then, is this any better, really? It seems to Martin like every choice in Spira is fraught with danger and death.

Tim sighs. At some point he must have slowed his pace to let everyone else catch up; he’s only a step or two ahead of Jon, now.

“Either way,” he’s saying, “It’s not like we can take a detour to avoid the operation anyway, so – look, Jon, can we at least see how it pans out before we strike out towards the Moonflow? As a favour.”

Jon doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he sighs, looking deeply unhappy about whatever decision he’s come to.

“I’m not making any promises,” he says slowly. “But – I’ll think about it, Tim.”

Tim doesn’t seem happy with that answer, exactly. But he nods, and claps Jon lightly on the arm, and that’s clearly the end of the subject for now.

Martin sighs. He’s not looking forward to whatever’s waiting for them on the road by the Djose shore. Not even a little bit.

They reach the travel agency by late afternoon, the warm light of the sun bearing down on the cheerfully eye-searing paint of the squat, round building. The place is absolutely packed with Crusaders; the poor attendant by the chocobo stabling area looks frazzled, even with the handful of the Crusaders' mounted division of Chocobo Knights who are pitching in to help.

They stand outside for a while, debating on if they should just carry on and give the agency a miss entirely. But eventually, the prospect of a night of soft beds and water for washing that doesn’t have to be heated over a campfire wins out, and the six of them duck past the Crusaders checking equipment and milling about outside into the agency building.

It seems that Mikaele has yet to move on to another of his agencies; Martin spots him singing the praises of something or other to a group of Crusaders near the front desk. He looks incorrigibly cheerful, clearly in his element.

“Ten gil says he’s fleecing them,” Tim mutters to Sasha.

“Behave,” she mutters back.

They’re not exactly the least conspicuous group in the world, with a summoner and two warrior monks in their midst, and so it isn’t long before Mikaele spots them and gives them a friendly nod, making his excuses to his current audience.

“Welcome, welcome!” he enthuses as he approaches them. “As you can see, the agency is busier than when last we met. So many Crusaders heading north for this operation! Business is booming. And what of your own venture? Are we two aeons richer than when I saw you last?”

Everyone looks at Jon.

“You could say that,” he says begrudgingly. “Do you even have any rooms available right now?”

“We always keep one or two back for a summoning party,” Mikaele assures them. “And I had a feeling you’d be returning this way shortly.”

Martin watches a group of Crusaders duck out of the front door with a heavily laden bag. “What are all these Crusaders even buying?”

“What does any traveller in Spira buy? Potions, weapons, armour. What good it will do them when they plan on facing off against death itself, that is not mine to say.”

“You know about the operation and you’re still charging them?” Tim asks, scandalised.

“A man has to make a living, does he not? I give a discount,” Mikaele shrugs. “Do your Crusaders plan on sharing their resources fairly with their Al Bhed allies?”

“Of course we do!” Tim says heatedly. For all his bravado, his expression flickers just enough to show his doubt. “We don’t care who you are or where you’re from, so long as you’re willing to stand up against Sin.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. In any case – room and board for the night?”

There are only two rooms available, but they make do. Sleeping on the road has laid to rest any reservations any of them may have had before about sharing rooms, however cramped they may be; and in any case, none of them are about to argue with a night of soft furnishings, no matter how small the rooms are. Martin enjoys a peaceful night of unbroken sleep, relishing the knowledge that none of them have to take watch shifts or sleep with one eye open in case any fiends come down on them in the night.

When they do make it back onto the road the next morning, a good part of the Crusaders seem to have moved on already. They decide to make for the narrow, winding cliff path above the Oldroad regardless, hoping that it won’t be too clogged up with all the Crusaders trying to make their way towards Mushroom Rock Road.

“Worse comes to worst, we can turn round and cut through the Oldroad itself,” Daisy tells them as she rolls up the map. “Fiends are stronger down there, though.”

There’s a sour hint of annoyance on her face, as if she suspects the Crusaders of purposefully planning the timing of Operation Mi’ihen just to impede Jon’s pilgrimage.

“That’s alright,” Sasha says cheerfully. “Jon could use the practice with his white magic.”

“I get in quite enough practice already from healing you lunatics, thanks,” Jon says snippily.

“Bold accusation from the man who’ll cast Cure on one of us when we get so much as a papercut while completely ignoring the gaping wound in his own shoulder.”

Tim lets out a low ooohhhhhhhhh, and there’s really no saving the conversation after that. Tim and Sasha tease Jon relentlessly for the next ten minutes, and only the appearance of their first fiend of the day puts an end to it. Martin’s sure that as Daisy rushes past him with her sword drawn, he hears a muttered something that sounds a lot like praise be to Yevon for that.

The way through the pass is as slow as Martin remembers it being, but he’s at least glad to have a change in scenery to look at. They seem to have lucked out with the Crusaders as well; so far, there aren’t that many people at all taking the cliffside path. Martin guesses that most of the Crusaders must have travelled by chocobo through the pass to get through faster.

The sun is just peaking in the sky overhead when they encounter the first truly strange sight that day. All of a sudden, there’s a loud sound of splintering wood from below. When the six of them move – carefully – to peer over the edge at the Oldroad beneath, they can see a small group of Crusaders rallying around a large, covered wagon being pulled by a pair of Chocobos.

The wagon is well-covered enough that it’s impossible to see what might be inside, but the large yellow birds hitched to the front of it are clearly distressed, and it’s clear even from the group’s high vantage point that one of the wheels of the wagon has broken.

Tim lets out a low, rueful whistle. “That’ll set them back a fair bit, till they get that fixed.”

There’s a faint snarling sound from down below that sets Martin’s teeth on edge. He takes a quick look up and down the ravine, but he can’t see any fiends close to the broken wagon. In fact, he thinks the sound might have come from the wagon.

“Tim? What’s inside that wagon?”

Tim is quiet just a little too long for comfort.

“Answer him,” Basira says, with a sharp look in Tim’s direction.

“It’s bait,” says Tim finally, looking uncomfortable. “Got to lure Sin in somehow, right?”

“You don’t mean—?” Jon looks at Tim and Sasha, aghast, and Daisy swears.

“You sure you lot know what you’re doing?”

“I hope so,” Tim mutters.

“Sorry, I think you all lost me in the middle of all the ominousness,” Martin says after a moment, when it’s clear that no further explanation is forthcoming. “What exactly are the Crusaders using as bait?”

“Sin always comes back for its spawn,” Jon mutters darkly, after giving Martin an odd look.

Oh. Oh.

“Sinspawn?” That’s… well, reckless is one word Martin could use. Dangerous is another.

“They’re under guard,” Tim points out, obviously rankling at everyone else’s eyes on him and Sasha.

“Mm, I just hope they’ve picked the right people to guard them,” Sasha says pensively. “Not everyone has what it takes to deal with fiends that strong.”

“Well, that’s reassuring,” Martin says flatly. “Are – how, how many of these things are going to be parked up on Mushroom Rock Road, exactly?”

“Enough,” says Sasha, stepping back from the ledge. “Come on, let’s go before all of these wagons start blocking up the end of the highroad.”

Sasha’s advice turns out to be sound, if a bit belated. When they make it to the end of the cliff pass in the evening, that is exactly the sight that's waiting for them: the vast, clunky bulk of a handful of those wagons at the archway leading to Mushroom Rock Road, the shape of them truly ominous now that Martin knows what's hidden inside them. If he squints, he can also make out a handful of very disgruntled-looking travellers by the side of the road.

“Looks like you were right, Sash,” Tim frowns. “What now? Do we go around?”

“Sure,” Daisy says. “If you like carving out a path through thick brambles and unstable rock formations.”

“Can’t you and Sasha just talk to them?” Martin asks. “You’re both Crusaders, and you’re travelling with a summoner on pilgrimage – wouldn’t they find some way to let us through once they know?”

Sasha and Tim look at each other, and shrug.

“It’s worth a try,” Sasha says, although she looks doubtful. “Depends who they’ve got managing the thoroughfare.”

“Might not just be that,” Basira observes. “I think I see some kind of commotion going on up there.”

The ‘commotion’ turns out to be a heated discussion between three Crusaders and one of the travellers who isn’t content to just sit by the side of the road and wait to be told when it’s safe to move on. As their little group draws nearer to the arch, Martin begins to catch snatches of the debate. From what he can hear, the Crusaders seem like they’re in danger of being slowly browbeaten into submission.

“—look, I don’t care what orders you’ve got or how long you’ve been planning this for, you’ve got to see that this is mental, right? I mean it, you’ve got to put a stop to this, or at least get yourselves far away from all of it. You’re gonna get yourselves killed.”

Martin sees Jon stiffen almost imperceptibly, almost missing his stride.

“It can’t be,” he murmurs, like he’s forgotten the rest of them are there.

Martin glances back towards the scene that they are now rapidly bearing down on. The woman arguing with the Crusaders has her back to them still, but she looks about the same height as Jon, with thick, curly hair and broad shoulders. A polearm and a lightweight sword are both strapped to her back; the youngest-looking Crusader keeps eyeing them both nervously as she talks.

“We appreciate your concern, ma’am, but I promise you, we have everything about this under control,” the most confident of the Crusaders is saying now. “For your own safety, please just wait here until the operation is complete.”

“Oh come on, you’re not expecting me to take that at face value, do you?” the stranger scoffs. “Like you’re not transporting Sinspawn in those wagons. You seriously think I can’t tell?”

“Please keep your voice down!” the youngest Crusader squeaks, looking furtively at the other travellers sitting by the side of the road. “You’ll cause a panic!”

“Lord Summoner,” the leader of the three says suddenly, noticing Jon and the rest of their group approaching.

The stranger tenses suddenly. Then, very deliberately, she relaxes her shoulders, and turns to face them.

“Well,” she says. She has a round, freckled face, with laughter lines that are currently framing an apprehensive frown. Her eyes land on Jon, and she lets out a long whoosh of a sigh. “I guess this is just about how my day’s going.”

“Hello, Georgie,” says Jon softly.

Georgie smiles, but Martin’s not entirely sure it reaches her eyes. Not really.

“Hi, Jon.”

Chapter Text

“I think you may be the last person I expected to see here,” says Jon.

Georgie has joined them at the side of the road; they've retreated far away enough from both the blockade and the three Crusaders guarding it to be out of earshot. But not far away enough to be out of range of furtive, wary looks; unable to listen in on the conversation, the three of them keep throwing such glances Georgie’s way, like they’re expecting her to march back over to them and start up the argument all over again.

“Yeah,” Georgie nods pensively, her arms folded across her chest. “Funny how that works out, isn’t it.”

“… What are you doing here?”

“Banging my head against the brick wall the Crusaders’ finest have set up over there, like everyone else.”

“That’s not what I—” Jon starts, and then cuts himself off with a sigh. “I can see that. I mean, why are you heading north along the highroad to start with?”

“Look at you, all business. No ‘oh, hello Georgie, how’ve you been doing, it’s been forever since we talked?’”

Jon looks abashed. Martin hears Basira make a sound that might be a cough, but might also be a muffled laugh.

“… You’re a difficult person to send letters to.”

Georgie cracks a smile at that, a proper grin.

“Ha,” she says. “That’s fair.” Then she’s opening her arms, and after a brief moment where she’s quite clearly giving Jon time to back off if he wants to, pulling him into a warm-looking hug. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’s actually really good to see you.”

It’s impossible to see Jon’s face, but his arms come up tight around Georgie and his voice is softer than Martin’s ever heard it when he says, “You too.”

For fuck’s sake, thinks Martin with feeling at the sudden spike of green-eyed irritation flaring in his chest.

It’s even more annoying when seeing the two of them break apart actually helps.

“So,” says Georgie as they draw back. “This is it then. You’re officially pilgrimaging?”

“I – yes. You… really haven’t heard anything until now?”

“Don’t be daft, I don’t actually live under a rock. I don’t think anyone in Spira is talking about anything else right now – which I’m sure you’re thrilled about.”

“Thrilled is a very strong word,” Jon mutters.

Georgie flashes him a grin that could only be called cheeky, before she turns her attention to the rest of them, her eyebrows raised in expectation.

“So, all of these guys are your guardians then?”

“Oh – yes,” says Jon, almost as if he’d forgotten the rest of them were still standing there. “That’s Daisy and Basira, they’ve been with me since Bevelle – Tim and Sasha, I think I’ve mentioned them—”

“Oh! So you two are the infamous Tim and Sasha,” says Georgie with another smile. “Nice to finally put faces to all the stories.”

Tim looks delighted.

“Oh, he’s told you stories, has he?”

“Only all of the unflattering ones,” Jon tells him snippily, looking a little embarrassed at having Tim and Sasha find out that he’s been talking about them.

“Since that’s not a thing that exists,” says Tim airily, “I know you’re lying.”

“Moving on,” says Jon, trying to wrest the conversation back. “This is Martin, he’s – he’s only been with us since we reached Djose, but – well, yes,” he finishes, somewhat flimsily, and definitely very deliberately ignoring the way Georgie’s eyebrows fly up as she starts staring at him, a searching look on her face that Martin can’t fathom. “Everyone, this is—”

“Georgie. An old friend.” Georgie leaves off her scrutinising of Jon to give all of them a friendly nod, before turning to Tim and Sasha. “You two are Crusaders, right? Any idea of how long they’re going to be blocking the road up?”

Sasha purses her lips in thought. “Probably until the operation’s over. I’m guessing at least a few more days.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Mmhm,” says Jon neutrally in response to Georgie’s frustration, though his face shows he’s not any more enthused about the idea than she is.

Georgie lets out a sharp, annoyed sound, folding her arms again.

“I can’t sit around here twiddling my thumbs for days waiting for them to finish throwing themselves at death.”

“If you figure that one out, let us know,” Basira tells her dryly. “There’s no other easy way north from here, not without going miles back out of your way.”

That statement leaves a moment of quiet in its wake, as Georgie’s fingers tap tap tap away on her arm in visible frustration while she thinks. It’s not Georgie who speaks up again first, though, but Jon.

“You could travel with us for a short stretch.”

Everyone turns to him in surprise. Tim leans over to Sasha and mutters something in as low a voice as Tim can manage, just quiet enough to make the words too indistinct to make out. A small frown crosses Georgie’s face.

“I’m not one of your guardians, Jon,” she says, her voice utterly flat.

“I know that,” he says quickly, “but – look, before I realised it was you arguing with those Crusaders, Tim and Sasha were going to see if there was anything they could do about getting us through. Tim can be rather…”

Jon sighs, looking for the right word, before finally settling with a defeated shrug on, “Persuasive, and – either way, operation or no operation, I’m sure we can leverage the pilgrimage somehow. You’re not the only person here in a hurry.”

Georgie considers this for a moment. Tim takes the opportunity to start mouthing persuasive? at Jon with an incredulous grin on his face; Jon very pointedly ignores him.

At length, Georgie nods.

“Yeah, alright. If you can talk your way past them, I’ll tag along for a bit.”

“Which I guess means that’s our cue,” Tim nods, after indulging himself in one final shake of the head towards Jon. “C’mon then, time to work some magic.”

Bickering amicably as they go (“Magic, says the one here who can’t do actual magic”), Jon, Tim, and Sasha peel off to talk to the three Crusaders still keeping a careful guard over the blockade. Judging by their faces as they catch sight of who’s walking towards them, the three guards don’t look like they know whether to be apprehensive over being approached by a summoner flanked by two of their own, or just grateful that it isn’t Georgie approaching them for another round.

“Look at them,” Daisy mutters, somewhere between amusement and disdain. “Completely on edge. Something about this operation of theirs’s got them spooked, no matter how good a game they’re talking.”

Martin’s willing to bet that the something is probably the Sinspawn in the covered wagons that other Crusaders are busily guiding through the archway to Mushroom Rock Road, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the arguments Georgie was making when they first stumbled into her factor in somewhere as well. It sounded like she’d really been pulling out all the stops to get the three Crusaders to abandon the whole thing.

Which… hmm. Come to think of it, why does Georgie seem to have such a good idea of what’s going on with Operation Mi’ihen?

“So… Martin, was it?”

Martin tries not to jump. Right. He’d forgotten she was still standing there.

“Um. Yeah?”

“How’d you get mixed up in Jon’s nonsense? Don’t take this the wrong way, but – you don’t exactly look like a career guardian.”

“What?” ‘Career guardians’ are a thing? “Oh, no – no, um, none taken? Definitely not one of those, heh. It’s like he said, I started tagging along back at Djose. They probably shouldn’t’ve let me, I – I’d got closer than I should’ve to Sin’s toxin just before I met everyone—”

“Shit, really?” Georgie’s eyes fly right open for a moment, before she nods to herself. “That explains why Jon was being so shifty.”

“How come?”

“He got this look on his face when he introduced you like he was scared I’d start lecturing him about something or other if he said too much,” she says with a wry smile. “Probably thought I’d scold him for taking advantage of you or something.”

“… Would you have?”

“Nah. I mean, I assume he didn’t press-gang you into taking an oath or anything.”

Martin remembers an irritable and exhausted Jon telling him that he supposed Martin could come with them as far as Luca, and how even now Jon has been at pains to make sure all of them know that any of them can break from the pilgrimage any time they want, and quickly has to suppress a snort of amusement.

“No, kind of the opposite, actually.”

“Well, there you go.”

Georgie falls silent, glancing over to where Jon, Tim, and Sasha are still deep in conversation with the three Crusaders. It’s difficult to tell who’s got the upper hand in the negotiations right now – Jon’s making some very emphatic-looking gestures – but Tim still looks pretty relaxed, so Martin hopes that means things are looking promising for them.

He turns back to Georgie. Martin’s still trying to work out how he feels about her; the look on her face when she’d first seen Jon didn’t strike him as your typical reaction to running into a long-lost friend, and on top of that there’s a small, hard pocket of irritation sitting in his chest at the idea that what Jon’s doing could be considered nonsense.

But there’s no denying, watching Jon and Georgie talk, that they’re familiar with each other. Probably used to be close.

(It’s not jealousy. It’s not.)

“What about you? You said you and Jon were old friends…?”

“Yeah, I met him back when I was still mostly based up around Bevelle. Got me into a lot of libraries I probably shouldn’t have been getting into.” Georgie smiles fondly at whatever memory she’s just conjured up for herself, but sobers a little as she adds, “We… we fell out of touch for a while, though.”

“Oh,” says Martin, and firmly squashes the vindictive urge to ask how that happened.

“… How’s he been? Since the two of you met.”

“Uh –” Martin starts, both to give himself time to think about how to even answer that, but also to process the weird hesitance that Georgie had there all of a sudden. “I mean, I don’t know how he was when you knew him, but. You know those really high-strung cats?”

Georgie bursts into a full-bodied laugh.

“Oh,” she gasps, sounding surprised by her own laughter. “Oh, he hasn’t changed a bit, then.”

“Ha. I wouldn’t know, but.” Martin hesitates a second, and then with a sigh decides to just be blunt. “Seriously, though, mostly I think he’s stressed to hell and back. It’s… you know, with the pilgrimage and everything, bits of it have just been – it’s been really hard.”

Which might just be one of the biggest understatements Martin’s ever made, but he doesn’t even know where to begin going into detail with all of that, and he’s not about to start doing it now. If Georgie really wants to know how Jon’s doing, she can ask Jon himself about it instead of trying to go through Martin.

Georgie nods, looking pensive, and lets out a soft sigh through her nose. Before she can say or ask anything more, Basira walks past Martin and nudges his arm on the way, pointing towards where Tim is waving them over a short distance from the roadblock.

“We’re in,” he tells them as the four of them get close. “Can’t say they seemed happy about it, and they made a lot of noise about sending a runner through on a chocobo to let HQ know that a summoner would be passing through, but at least you don’t have to sit round here for days waiting for the operation to be pulled off.”

Martin eyes Tim warily – he didn’t miss how Tim said “you”, there, like he would have expected to head through on his own if the Crusaders had refused to let Jon and his other guardians through. He also doesn’t miss how Jon’s face goes tight as Tim’s speaking – apparently Jon didn’t miss that implication, either.

Is Tim really still thinking about taking part in that operation with the other Crusaders? Is Sasha?

“Any luck bringing me through as a plus one?” Georgie jokes.

“Barely,” sighs Jon. “I vouched for you, but I also had a hard time convincing them you weren’t going to raise hell once we get on Mushroom Rock Road.”

“Then they’re not quite as awful judges of character as I thought.”

Jon shoots her a long-suffering look. “Please promise me you’ll at least save it until the rest of us have plausible deniability about whatever you’re doing.”

“I’ll be good as gold. I know you can’t lie well enough to cover for me,” Georgie laughs, to Jon’s chagrin.

“So long as you can carry your own weight, fine by me,” says Daisy. “We should go before those jumpy Crusaders change their minds on us again.”

The jumpy Crusaders in question shoot Georgie deep and abiding looks of trepidation and suspicion as the seven of them approach the roadblock and are waved through. Georgie meets them with a sunny smile, one that still manages to promise more danger than the stare Jon fixes them with once he realises the three of them are looking at Georgie that way. Then the roadblock clangs back into place behind them, and like that, they’re once again facing the lumpy rock formations and stony cliffside paths of Mushroom Rock Road.

The dark, flinty cliffs lining the road that leads to the Djose shore haven’t become any less dreary than the last time they passed through. The fiends haven’t become any less persistent, either, though there’s far less of them now than Martin remembers there being on this stretch of road. Maybe the Crusaders that’ve been making their steady way north to gather for the upcoming operation already cleared out most of the local danger.

Most, but not all, which is enough for them all to discover that the newest member of their travelling party can more than pull her own weight in a fight. Georgie is fast, and equally as deadly with both her sword and her polearm, and seems to have her own brand of magic different to anything Martin’s seen anyone else use before.

“What was that back there?” Sasha asks her in the aftermath of one skirmish. She’s got that gleam in her eye that means that social niceties are the only thing barely holding her back from turning Georgie into her latest study project. “Turning fiends to stone like that, that’s something I’ve only ever seen the fiends themselves do.”

“Well, yeah,” Georgie shrugs. “I mean, I got it from them. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of blue magic before.”

Martin hasn’t, but judging from the way Sasha’s eyes look like they’re about to fall out of her head, Sasha definitely has.

“I thought that was a Ronso technique?”

“Yeah, it is. I had a Ronso teacher.”

Sasha looks like she could combust with envy.

“How did you manage to win their trust enough for them to want to teach you?”

“Months and months of polite badgering and not being a dick, mostly,” Georgie says, drawing a laugh from Tim. “As well as promising not to go spreading Ronso secrets all over Spira, so if you’re looking for some kind of interview, I’m gonna have to disappoint you.”

Sasha looks beyond disappointed, and like she’s physically itching to know more. Martin’s pretty sure that if she could crack Georgie open like an egg to get the secrets of this brand of magic out of her, she probably would. It’s not often that Martin finds Sasha to be the scariest one in their party – that honour’s usually Daisy’s – but when she gets like this, he’ll make an exception.

That might just be because he’s still sitting on a big fat secret of his own, but he also thinks that look of determination would scare anyone.

“Just so I know I’m on the same page, what is blue magic?” Martin asks as Georgie walks on ahead to talk to Jon, the two of them starting back in on whatever catching up they were forced to leave off when everyone was attacked.

“Magic that mimics the abilities of your opponent,” Sasha tells him, her look of knowledge-hungry determination gradually morphing into something that might just be a look of knowledge-hungry pouting. “I’m not even sure if mimic is the right word, it’s a closely guarded Ronso technique and they aren’t sharing.”

“Steady on, Sash,” says Tim with a grin, nudging her with an elbow. “People’ll start thinking you’re jealous if you’re not careful.”

“Well, they'd be right, because I am jealous! Nobody else in Spira is interested in even trying to replicate it, so all I have is guesswork.”

Guesswork which Sasha is clearly dying to share with someone so that she can have it peer-reviewed. Martin catches Tim’s eye, and then shakes his head and says, “Go on, then,” because it’s not like he isn’t interested.

“Well, you already know all magic starts with pyreflies. And everything in Spira has pyreflies flowing through it somehow, right? Including people. It must have something to do with manipulating the pyreflies in someone else’s body and the memories they contain somehow, I just don’t know how.”

“Good luck getting her to tell you. I get the feeling she’s a tough nut to crack,” Tim says with a shrug. He shoots Sasha a sly look the next moment, and adds, “But I might be warning her that she should sleep with one eye open.”

While Sasha swats the end of her scarf in a cackling Tim’s direction, Martin’s curiosity sizes the opportunity to override his ability to think long enough to ask, “You two really never met her before, then?”

“Who, Georgie? Nah,” Tim shrugs, shaking his head. “We moved in different circles, and – you know, by the time she and Jon were friends we’d already left Bevelle to join the Crusaders. Jon mentioned her in his letters a few times, though, right?”

“Yeah, it always sounded like they were close,” Sasha nods, swatting her scarf at Tim one last time and lighting up in triumph when she finally manages to catch him on the arm. Satisfied for now, she briskly ties it back around her shoulders, now looking thoughtful.

“It was a bit of a relief knowing he had someone else there with him after we left, to be honest,” she adds quietly.

Martin’s brain picks that moment to conjure up an image for him of Jon, training to become a summoner by himself in some temple with Elias breathing down his neck about it the entire time, and feels a rush of immediate goodwill towards Georgie.

Which, y’know, is probably just as irrational as the earlier rushes of resentment, but at least it’s easier to deal with.

It also has him biting his tongue against asking why Tim and Sasha left. He knows Tim’s reasons for joining the Crusaders now, and it – it would be beyond unfair to hold that against him. And it’d be just as unfair to hold it against Sasha for wanting to keep him safe. She might have been joking all those weeks ago when she said she mostly joined the Crusaders to keep an eye on this one, it’s hard to tell with her sometimes, but – Martin wonders. He’s seen how Tim can get, now.

Tim, who at the moment is looking thoughtful and musing, “I kinda thought for a while they might end up getting married.”

Martin’s stomach plummets.

“I – s-sorry, I – what?”

“What, is it that surprising?”

“I – no. Maybe – Yes, a bit?”

“How come?” Sasha asks, looking genuinely interested. “Most people get married way earlier than their twenties.”

Okay, wait, what?

“None of us are married,” Martin points out, and, fantastic, that definitely sounded a lot more petulant than he wanted it to.

Then he realises that he actually doesn’t know if that’s the case, and with Sasha dropping yet another aspect of life in Spira on him that Martin now has to frantically adjust to in five seconds flat mid-conversation, he scrambles to ask, “Wait, none of us are married, are we?”

“I don’t think so, but then again I’ve never actually asked Daisy or Basira about their love lives. Either way, that makes every single one of us a bit weird as far as Spira goes.”

“Yep,” Tim agrees, with a false gravity that can’t quite mask the glee in his voice. “A whole gathering of statistical outliers!”

“Tim loves this kind of thing,” Sasha says with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “He wrote a whole treatise once comparing the different customs across the different peoples of Spira.”

“It’s an unappreciated field of study!”

“Yeah, and you caused months of controversy with it because you refused to toe the party line when it came to the Al Bhed.”

“Got the last laugh in, though, didn’t I? They couldn’t poke enough real holes in it for it to be too heretical to publish, so it still exists somewhere. Locked in a vault somewhere you need special permission to access, but I consider that a win.”

Martin takes a moment to digest this. He already had an idea – from talking to Salesa, to Dekker, even just from seeing how eccentric and inconsistent Spira’s whole approach to machina is – that Yevon comes down hard on any information that doesn’t fit whatever it is they’ve decided reality is, but…

“Wow. I didn’t realise academia was so cutthroat.”

“Martin, you have no idea,” Tim says, with feeling. “But going back to our merry little band being a bunch of fascinating statistical outliers – the average marriage age is one of the few things that stays constant across Spira, even when you’re comparing, say, the Guado with the Al Bhed. Everyone marries young.”

“That’s –” Martin starts, and then stops before he can say something that'll land him in hot water.

He can’t even imagine making that kind of decision so young. Okay, sure, he’s only human, he’s had his idle lonely daydreams about maybe, one day, if, wouldn’t it be nice, but –

“It always seemed like a pretty big commitment to make that young,” he settles on, carefully.

“Yeah, but you know. For a lot of people it’s like… if you’ve met someone you like and any day could end up being your last, why wait?”

Right, Martin remembers, his heart sinking, there’s that one big variable Spira has that Zanarkand doesn’t. Of course most people wouldn’t want to risk waiting, when…

Is there anything in this world that doesn’t feel Sin’s influence?

Chapter Text

Things finally come to a head the following night.

They're camping in the base of a little hollow they found, just off the main path and with barely enough room to lay out their bedrolls. The ground here certainly doesn’t promise a comfortable night’s sleep, but it’s sheltered enough to keep the wind off, and to get a fire going for them all to sit around. As the sun goes down, the idle conversation starts up; Georgie has an easy, straight-forward way about her that’s disarming, for all that she’s still especially guarded wherever Daisy and Basira are involved. It’s not like they’ve all become friends overnight, but she’s found enough of a place with them already that the awkwardness of their meeting at the end of the Mi’ihen highroad is almost forgotten.

That is, until Tim decides to be the one to stop ignoring the behemoth in the room.

“So, Georgie, question. How come you seem to know so much about Operation Mi’ihen? You got friends in the Crusaders or something?”

“Or something,” Georgie says carefully. She goes quiet for a moment, staring into the fire, before she shrugs, a closed-off look on her face. “I know someone who’s involved, and I’d like to help her get un-involved before she gets herself killed.”

Tim goes quiet, too.

“Bit of a big decision for you to make for somebody else, isn’t it?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, I can’t make her decision for her. But I can try my hardest to talk her out of it.”

“Don’t you think she might have her reasons?”

“Everyone’s always got their reasons. Doesn’t mean any of them’re good ones for throwing their lives away.”

Georgie stops staring into the fire then, fixing Tim with a piercing look before her eyes start flicking between him and Sasha.

“What, does that mean you two’re planning to get involved in it too?” she asks them both, her eyes like flint. “I thought you were Jon’s guardians?”

“Yeah, I mean, we are,” Tim says, sounding stung. Martin chances a wary look at Jon; he’s being very careful not to look at anyone, but his face is drawn tight, his lips and eyebrows pressed together.

Tim leans forward, and says urgently, “But if this works, and we finally have another way to get rid of Sin—”

“Seems like a big if.”

“It is a big if.”

“Sasha!”

Tim turns to her in protest, with a look on his face almost of betrayal. Sasha is unmoved, a frown on hers as she stares back at him.

“No, Tim, we need to be honest with ourselves about this. We’re trying something nobody’s ever tried before on this kind of scale, teaming up with the Al Bhed to use a kind of machina nobody alive really fully understands anymore, so we can’t say for sure we know what’s gonna happen. Yeah, there’s every chance it’ll work, but –” she shrugs “—there’s also every chance it won’t.”

Martin watches Tim’s face warily; he looks frustrated more than anything else, but as Sasha keeps laying out her points he mostly just starts to look tired.

“Yeah,” he says with a heavy sigh. “Maybe. But don’t you think that’s no excuse not to try?”

“Sounds like you just want a good excuse to throw yourself at Sin if you ask me,” says Georgie baldly.

“Georgie!” Jon cries, aghast.

“You know what?” Tim snaps, his eyes flashing. “Fuck off, you don’t know me.” He gets abruptly to his feet, his fists clenched so hard at his sides that Martin can see them shaking. He takes a deep breath, letting it out so slow and steady that it has to be deliberate.

“I need five minutes,” he says darkly. “Don’t follow me.”

Then he paces off into the darkness just beyond their little circle of firelight, not waiting for an answer. Martin opens his mouth, but – what would he even say? The worst thing is that he kind of agrees with Georgie. But she didn’t have to say it like that.

He tries to catch Sasha’s eye, because while he doesn’t think Tim’s going to do anything stupid like wander off too far on his own, he can’t help worrying about what happens if he’s caught off-guard by a random fiend or something while he’s trying to cool off. But Sasha’s busy glaring daggers in Georgie’s direction, her mouth pulled tight and her hands clenched tightly in her lap.

For her part, Georgie looks frustrated, maybe even a little upset. But she doesn’t look sorry.

Martin kind of wants the ground to swallow him up a little bit.

For a few minutes, there's nothing hanging between them but the crackling of the fire giving off sparks. At least, until Basira suddenly speaks up.

“For what it’s worth, Georgie, I think you’re right. This whole operation’s a mess.”

“Are you saying that because you’re actually worried about any of the people involved,” says Sasha in a steely voice, “or is it just because we’re working with the Al Bhed and using machina that Yevon doesn’t approve of?”

“I don’t have anything against the Al Bhed.”

At Basira’s side, Daisy shifts. “Basira.”

“What?” Basira turns to Daisy with an almost challenging look on her face, one that shifts into something more uncertain as she says, “I mean, I don’t. I don’t agree with their lifestyle, but it’s not like I think they’re all bad people or anything.”

“Hard to believe that coming from someone wearing Yevon’s armour,” says Georgie, her eyes narrowed.

Basira doesn’t flinch.

“We’re not all bad people either.”

She doesn’t flinch, but she does sound defensive.

“Tell that to the Al Bhed.”

“Alright, so what’re your reasons for being so against this operation?”

“I’ve just—” Georgie hesitates, linking her fingers together in front of her. “I’ve just got a bad feeling, that’s all. The machina isn’t the problem, wanting to get rid of Sin isn’t the problem, it’s just— it’s like you said, Sasha, it’s too big of a risk to take for something that might not even work. I mean, how many people are involved in this thing? And if it all goes wrong, then—”

Georgie’s voice falters, the things she’s leaving unsaid hanging heavy in the air. Martin remembers Basira’s argument with Tim back on the highroad. All that’s gonna happen is you get a lot of people killed.

Daisy looks at Georgie for a long moment, her face pensive.

“We can’t stop something on this scale,” she says finally, her voice gruff, but oddly soft. “As much as we want to. If I thought taking Manuela Dominguez out would bring it screeching to a halt, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Jon and Sasha gape at her askance, while Martin’s thoughts go reeling for a moment at how he’s pretty sure he just heard Daisy casually admit that she’d happily commit murder if she thought that had a chance of stopping Operation Mi’ihen from going ahead. Basira’s face flickers a little, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I wouldn’t kill anyone even if that would stop it,” says Georgie in disgust. “And I know I can’t stop something this big on my own. For all I tried to talk those idiots back on the gate near the Oldroad out of it, deep down I know better than to try. But I’d like to keep at least one person safe from it.”

Her voice goes soft on that last bit. Martin wonders who it is she’s trying to get through to.

“I know the feeling,” says Jon quietly.

Georgie snorts. “You have no room to talk when it comes to talking people out of dangerous decisions, Mr. On-A-Journey-To-Fight-Sin.”

“Maybe not. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. I don’t care.”

“… Tim really wants to take part in it, doesn’t he?” says Martin, staring into the fire.

“Not for lack of trying to tell him no,” Sasha admits after a moment. She sounds tired, more tired than Martin’s ever heard her. “But yeah.”

“Because he wants to take down Sin.”

“More like he’ll take any chance he gets to have a swing at it, no matter what form that takes or what the odds are.”

“Sasha.”

“What? I’m right, Jon, and you know it.”

At this, Georgie sighs, the deep sigh of someone confirming something they already knew. Martin wonders, looking at Sasha’s clenched hands, just how long she’s been trying to talk Tim out of this. If maybe Jon’s been trying to do the same thing, as best he can from miles and miles away in Bevelle. If maybe getting Tim to agree to the pilgrimage in the first place was some kind of last-ditch effort for both of them to at least give him more of a chance to survive, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to rest while Sin’s still out there.

“… I know,” Jon agrees after a while, staring at a space just past Sasha’s shoulder. He’s quiet a moment longer, clearly wrestling with something, before he finally slumps.

With an effort, he says, “I can’t lose either of you.”

Sasha inhales sharply. Then she stands, and crosses the three steps it takes her to reach Jon and tug him into a one-armed hug.

Martin feels a lump in his throat and looks away. He wishes they were all far away from the Djose shore, and Operation Mi’ihen, and the horrible certainty everyone seems to have that something awful is going to happen when it goes ahead.

But mostly, more than any of that, he wishes that Jon and Sasha get their wish and manage to keep Tim away from the worst of it.

The tension lasts well into the next day. Everyone’s quiet as they walk; Tim barely has words to spare even for Jon or Sasha, and just seems to be outright ignoring everyone else. Jon keeps throwing furtive looks at him, like he wants to say something, but every time Tim catches him at it he pointedly moves ahead or behind, supposedly to give whoever’s guarding the front or rear of the group a break. Georgie keeps her eyes looking ahead, though every so often, Martin catches her throwing odd, unreadable looks in Tim’s direction, or Jon’s.

Once or twice, Martin thinks he catches her throwing one of those looks at him, but it’s never for long enough to challenge her on it. He wonders what that’s all about.

Mostly he wishes there was some way he could get Tim to stop being so difficult. He hasn’t thought of one yet – he’s pretty sure if he tried to talk about it, Tim would find a way to give him the same treatment he’s currently giving Jon. But if this is what the rest of their journey along the Djose coastline is going to be like, Martin doesn’t think he can handle it.

It’s taken out of their hands when a Crusader on chocoboback comes striding up to them from further down the road, hailing them as she brings her bird to a halt.

“Lord Summoner! It’s an honour. I was hoping I’d find you. I have a message for you.”

“For me?” Jon frowns. “Who from?”

“Commander Manuela Dominguez and Maester Jude Perry, from the Crusader’s base camp.”

At once, everyone starts, or stiffens, or just stares in shock.

“Sorry, did you say Maester?” demands Tim, the first to recover. “What’s Jude doing here?”

“You didn’t hear?” the young Crusader says, eyes wide – she looks like she’s barely out of her teens. “Yevon has decided to give this operation their official support!”

“What?” Daisy mutters.

“The Maester arrived with her personal guard a few days ago. It’s been really good for morale, knowing that we have Yevon’s blessing!”

“I…” Jon starts, visibly struggling to digest this information. “I see. What was the message?”

“Oh, sorry! Let’s see…” The young Crusader takes a moment to steady herself, thinking, before continuing in a much more formal voice, like someone reciting something they just learned for an exam. “I’m ever so sorry to impede your pilgrimage, my lord, but with the operation so close to starting, it’s too dangerous to allow you to continue further down the coastal road at this time. The Maester and the Commander humbly request that you and your guardians travel to the Crusaders’ Headquarters, where you can be safe until the operation’s finished.”

“The Maester and the Commander do know that I’m travelling with some urgency, right?”

“I – well, of course, sir. Nobody could doubt how important your pilgrimage is. But – you see, we can’t possibly allow any travellers further down the road at this time. The operation’s due to begin at first light tomorrow, it’s just too dangerous.”

The Crusader fidgets with the loose end of her chocobo’s reins, while the bird stands there patiently and Jon lets out a low sound of displeasure.

“It doesn’t sound like I have much of a choice.”

“No, sir. Um. Sorry, sir.”

“It can’t be helped,” Jon mutters. “Thank you for the message.”

“You’re very welcome! A-anytime! There’ll be another mounted Chocobo Knight near the headquarters itself, to direct you. I’ll have to go on ahead to let them know you’re coming.”

She gives them a hasty salute, before gently coaxing her bird to turn and run back the way she came, the chocobo’s powerful legs soon carrying her out of sight.

They all look at each other for a moment, trying to decide what to do with what they just heard.

“What the hell is that Maester playing at?” Daisy frowns.

“I don’t know,” says Sasha, looking troubled. “Giving Yevon's blessing to an operation that’s using this much forbidden machina… she has to be up to something. This isn’t Yevon’s usual style at all.”

“This – sorry,” Martin starts, trying not to fidget. He has no idea who this Maester might be or what she might be like, but that doesn’t stop the alarm bells clanging in his head. “I. I don’t wanna give anyone the idea that I actually know what I’m talking about, but. Does. Does this feel like a set-up to anyone else?”

Basira levels him with a look. “In what way?”

“O – Okay, so.” Martin takes a deep breath, trying to get his thoughts into some kind of understandable order. “Yevon goes out of its way to ban any kind of machina it decides is forbidden. The Crusaders decide that’s not good enough and start using it to fight Sin. Yevon excommunicates them, and the Crusaders start working with the Al Bhed, and then – now all of a sudden at the last minute Yevon goes against everything it stands for and says it’s backing this? I-I mean – it’s, this isn’t just me, this is weird, right?”

“No, I agree with you, Martin,” Georgie chimes in, a wondering look on her face rapidly being replaced by horror. “There’s no way Yevon would do this if they weren’t setting the Crusaders up for a fall. Shit.”

“Yeah, cause – cause if it does work, and Sin’s gone all of a sudden, and Yevon aren’t involved – then, then, everything they’ve ever said about their way being the only way to bring it down collapses like a house of cards, right?”

“Right, exactly!”

Daisy lets out a heavy breath.

“Right,” she nods. “On the off-chance it works, Yevon get to claim some of the glory and spin it like it was all their idea. And if it doesn’t, they can say they were right all along and knew it would happen. Smart.”

“Smart?” Tim demands, bristling. “That’s what you’ve got to say?”

“What? It is,” Daisy shrugs, her voice matter-of-fact. “Just ‘cause it’s a dirty trick doesn’t mean it’s not smart. Still want to get involved?”

Even Martin can’t mistake the challenge in those final words for anything other than what it is, with how low Daisy’s voice went on them. Tim’s jaw clenches; Martin has a sudden, frantic thought about how fast he can cast a sleep spell, and if he could get it to work on both Tim and Daisy at once.

He needn’t have worried. Tim just shrugs, in the end, and lets out a short, derisive sound.

“If Jude’s putting herself in a position where she can tell everyone it was Yevon’s idea if we pull this off, then she must be worried enough about it working for it to be a real possibility,” he argues.

“Oh, come on, Tim,” Martin finds himself saying, without any conscious planning on his part, because seriously, “That’s what you’re getting out of this?”

“Martin?!”

“Look – sorry, I get – I get why you want to do this so much, I do, Tim, I – I really, really do, but Georgie’s right, this whole thing’s a death trap!”

Georgie looks shocked for all of a second before she nods with a fierce, “Thank you!”

“And,” Martin carries on before Tim can open his mouth again, because apparently he’s on a roll and doesn’t know how to quit, “and it’s not going to stop being a death trap just because you don’t want to see it that way! We – we all need you here, not – not throwing yourself at, at whatever chance for revenge just happens to cross paths with you first!”

Tim stiffens. “That’s not what’s happening.”

“Isn’t it?” says Jon sharply, drawing everyone’s eyes.

“No. It isn’t.”

Jon and Tim stare at each other, or glare at each other, for a long moment. A long moment that gives Martin time to feel mortified about everything that just came out of his mouth, and then decide with a fierce stubbornness that actually, he’s not the only one who was thinking those things, and if Tim wasn’t going to listen to Jon or Sasha about it then someone else had to say something. A long moment where Tim looks like he’s physically biting his tongue so as not to say anything, looking not just angry but – something else.

Until eventually Tim turns away with a shrug, and says, “Come on. We’ve been summoned up to the HQ anyway. Shouldn’t keep them waiting, right.”

“Tim.”

“Don’t, Jon. Just – don’t, alright.”

“… Alright,” Jon says, his voice heavy. “Then let’s just – let’s just go.”

“Okay, well,” says Georgie awkwardly. “Sorry to cut and run like this, but this is where I leave you lot.”

“Oh – already?” says Jon, trying and failing to hide his dismay.

“’Fraid so. That Maester is gonna want to cosy up to you one way or another, and I’m not getting anywhere near that level of Yevon’s bullshit. I can find my own way from here.”

“Right,” Jon says. “Right. Of course. Well, I hope you find her. Whoever you’re looking for.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Georgie goes in for a hug; this time, Jon meets her with no hesitation.

“Be safe,” Jon tells her.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Georgie flippantly as they pull away from each other. “I’m not gonna ask you to do the same, I know where you’re going. Just. Promise me you’ll think about what I said, Jon, okay?”

“I… yes,” Jon says, looking extremely apprehensive and uncomfortable all of a sudden. “I will.”

“And you lot better look after him,” Georgie adds, turning to the rest of them. “He’s a handful.”

“Don’t we know it,” says Basira, without a shred of shame.

“Hey!” Jon protests, while Georgie laughs in the face of his indignation.

“Okay,” she says. “Well. Good luck.”

She waves, before walking a short way back down the path until she hits a point where the rocky cliffs below are fragmented into wide enough ledges to make a clear line down to the beach below. After standing there looking down for a long while, checking her route, Georgie begins her climb down alone; with no real reason to watch her on her way down, the rest of them turn away to continue their tense, quiet walk to the Crusaders’ headquarters.

The path ahead of them is winding and uneven, following the natural road created by the top layer of a meandering rock formation whose pillars stretch down far into a dark, misty ravine below the road itself. Luckily for them, that also means it’s pretty much impossible to get lost; as long as they keep away from the edge and watch their feet for anything that might trip them, all they have to do is follow the path.

Well, almost all they have to do. It turns out that the Crusaders' headquarters is based at the very top of a ridge that overlooks a section of the beach, and so not all of the path is on the same level. They don’t have to climb, though; every so often, there’s a small, tiled platform set into the rock below their feet, something that when stood on causes the stone to rise up in a shuddering pillar as water gushes out from below the tiles and down the sides of the rising column. Martin doesn’t know if it’s magic or machina or something else, but whatever it is, it’s definitely the most unpleasant kind of lift he’s ever had to ride on.

Eventually the path ends at a large, brightly coloured platform lift that’s unambiguously machina-powered; the buttons and moving parts are a dead giveaway. Martin wonders if it’s always been here, or if it’s something the Crusaders salvaged from somewhere else and rebuilt here piece by piece after they decided they didn’t care about being excommunicated.

Not like it matters now. Once the lift shudders to a halt at the top of the ridge, they’re met with a hive of activity; Crusaders in their piecemeal armour fixing and adjusting a row of cannons under the watchful eye of someone Al Bhed; Crusaders drilling while a nervous-looking captain delivers a speech that’s probably supposed to be encouraging; runners heading back and forth carrying messages.

One such runner spots them and dashes over with a broad smile on his face.

“Oh, a summoner’s entourage! This’ll help the morale,” he effuses. “We’re happy to welcome you here – if you’re looking for the Commander and the Maester, you’ll find them in the command centre over there – the enclosed area.”

He motions behind him, at the widest part of the ridge. There’s a high fence separating it from the rest of the ridge, and the canvas of a large tent visible just over the top.

“I’d guide you over myself, but I’m on my way to round up any stragglers from the vanguard and make sure they’re at their posts on the beach. Thank you for being here, my lord!”

The Crusader makes a hasty Prayer and dashes off behind them towards the lift. That leaves them to wander through the camp, trying not to get in anyone’s way as they head to the command centre.

As they get close, the sound of swords clashing draws Martin’s attention; there’s a small group of Crusaders sparring not too far from the entrance to the command centre. Some of them look very small. Very small. Like—

Some of them are children. Children wearing ill-fitting armour and using swords way too big for them, running at the adults with loud battle cries.

“Come on, you’ll have to hit harder than that if you want to fight Sin!” one of the adults shouts as a child’s sword clangs against theirs. “Do you want to avenge your sister or not?”

“Don’t worry. They’ll be keeping the younger ones close to the command centre where it’s safer,” Tim says. Martin starts, only now realising he was staring so hard at the scene that he’d stopped walking.

“They’re kids,” he says, feeling sick.

“Yeah, and sometimes those kids lose their families and need somewhere to go.”

“So they send them out here against Sin? Who – does everyone know about this?”

Martin can hear his voice getting louder and louder, and he also doesn’t care. They’re kids. They’re kids without anyone else to care about them, and they get sent here where it’s most dangerous, and – and if someone doesn’t stop him, he thinks the leader of the Crusaders might have more to worry about from him than she does from Daisy.

“Martin, Martin, hey. No one’s sending kids out to fight Sin,” Tim says, sounding appalled. “Kids that don’t have anywhere else to go get sent to the temples first, but— sometimes they don’t want to stay put in the temples, you know? The Crusaders don’t send them out to the front lines – we’d never – but at least we can make sure they're looked after, and they can learn how to defend themselves and feel like they’re actually doing something.”

“Having them near the command centre seems rather close to this particular front line, Tim,” says Jon, standing a few feet away with a frown on his face.

Tim hesitates, looking back at the drilling children (children) with a pinched face.

“No, you’re right,” he frowns. “They're usually better at making sure the kids are well away from something this big. I’ll try and get a word with Maneula about it when we see her.”

Martin doesn’t have the words. He watches the child with their oversized sword take another swing at their teacher, and he feels cold.

“If you don't, I will.”

The gate to the command centre itself is under guard by both a pair of young-looking Crusaders, and another pair of stoic warrior monks that Martin assumes must be part of the Maester’s personal guard. They stand to attention as Jon and the rest of them approach, standing clear of the gate in a clear invitation to go in.

“What kind of person is Jude – this Maester?” Martin asks in a low undertone as soon as they’re out of earshot of the guards.

“Dangerous,” Daisy answers. “She worked her way up the ranks. Stood on a lot of people to do it, but that part’s kept quiet. Keep your mouth shut around her if you can help it.”

Martin raises his eyebrows, wondering exactly how Daisy knows the part that’s kept quiet about Jude’s rise to power, but now they’re outside the entrance to the large tent they glimpsed from the other side of the fence.

“Jon,” Daisy mutters to him as a Crusader rushes to hold the tent flap open for them. “Be careful in here.”

Jon's only reply is a stiff nod. With nothing else for it, they all enter the tent.

Chapter Text

The first thing Martin sees when he follows the others inside the tent is a large table in the centre of the space, with several maps laid out across its surface and weighed down to hold them open. Lining the outsides nearest the canvas are some weapons racks; tucked neatly into the corners, some supply chests with manifests stacked neatly on low tables nearby; a seating area in one corner, where a few low benches and a couple of more comfortable-looking seats have been laid out, and brightly coloured banners have been suspended and draped from the sides and ceiling of the tent.

There’s a small group standing around the table, and when the six of them walk in they all glance up, letting Martin get a good look at their faces; a middle-aged looking Crusader holding his helmet under his arm, a couple of warrior monks in full armour, and at the head of the table, two women who can only be Manuela Dominguez and Jude Perry.

They both have dark hair and dark eyes, but the similarities end there; Manuela is tall and thin, dressed in the same sort of haphazard collection of armour as the rest of the Crusaders, while Jude is squat and stocky and wearing the robes of a Maester. They’re not nearly as elaborate as the ones Elias was wearing back in Luca, and she seems to have opted for something with short sleeves, but there’s no mistaking that symbol of Yevon on her chest.

Manuela nods to the other Crusader with a clear dismissal in the motion.

“You have your orders, Captain. Go to the beach and assist with the final preparations with the Sinspawn.”

The Crusader stiffens and gives a salute before ducking out of the tent. Manuela smiles coolly, leaning both hands on the table as she looks over at them all – and in particular, at Jon.

“Welcome to the command centre, my lord. I trust your journey up here wasn’t too difficult?”

“I’ve had worse,” says Jon after a moment.

“I’m sure that that’s true,” she nods. “We’re thankful for all of your efforts. Hopefully ours will ensure that you need not journey further past tomorrow.”

“I’m guessing you must be Manuela Dominguez.”

“That’s right. And we have also been graced with one of Yevon’s four Maesters, Jude Perry.”

“Three Maesters, right now,” says Jude, who stands entirely at ease, one elbow propped on the table in front of her. “The fourth position is technically still unfilled for as long as Montauk’s daughter keeps throwing her little tantrum.”

“My mistake,” Manuela says smoothly. “It’s still the Crusaders’ honour to be able to extend the olive branch to such an esteemed guest – and to host a summoner at the same time.”

Between Manuela’s words and the way the two of them are looking at each other with thinly veiled contempt, Martin’s guess is that this particular olive branch is actually being used as a club to beat each other with. The atmosphere in the tent is putting him on edge, and that’s before Jude, whose sardonic smile never wavers once, looks away from Manuela and sets her eyes on Jon.

“Yes, the summoner.” There’s something about Jude’s smile that Martin really doesn’t like. Like she’s enjoying her own private joke; the sort of joke that’s set up at someone else’s expense. “I’ve been very curious to meet you, Jonathan. The Grand Maester does like to talk about you. Painted quite the picture.”

Jon, whose nerves are apparently manifesting in increasingly smart-arse dry comments, says, “I hope you’re not about to say you thought I’d be taller.”

Jude laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound.

“Not quite. Though the way he went on, I didn’t expect you to bring quite so many guardians with you.” Her eyes sweep over the rest of them. She doesn’t look impressed by what she sees. “You like to travel with a crowd, don’t you?”

Why do people keep drawing attention to that? Martin can’t help wondering. You’d think more guardians would be better, if the whole point is to make sure their summoner makes it to Zanarkand in one piece. It’s not like the number of guardians Jon has affects how good a summoner he is; they can’t exactly do the summoning for him.

Jude’s eyes fall back to Jon, and now Martin’s sure he’s not imagining the disdain in her eyes. “Still,” she says, “I suppose there must be something to you if you’ve managed to win Ifrit’s power. Having her at your beck and call must be something quite special.”

Is that… is she jealous? Jealous that Jon can summon, that he can wield a power she can’t, or jealous that Jon can summon Kilika’s aeon specifically?

“You..." Jon hesitates, and then goes ahead and asks, "You’re from Kilika originally, aren’t you?”

“I see someone’s been gossiping. That temple is where I began, if that’s what you mean, but I outgrew the island itself long ago. And now, here I am.”

Oh, Jude is definitely jealous. Martin wonders what happened there; if Jude was told from the start that she didn’t have what it took to become a summoner, or if she was one of those would-be summoners who had to hear it from the fayth herself.

Either way, he really doesn’t like the way she’s looking at Jon.

“Why did the two of you call me here?”

“For your safety,” Manuela says in answer to Jon’s question. “I’m confident in the operation’s chances of success, but even successful operations have casualties. But I’ll admit I do have ulterior motives. Some of the Crusaders still cling to what they learned from Yevon, and having a summoner close at hand does wonderful things for small-minded people’s morale. And I wanted you to see the operation for yourself.”

“Why us?” Basira asks over Jon’s shoulder.

“You and your summoner…” Manuela starts, going quiet for a moment as she considers her answer. “It’s impossible to put into words what you’re doing for Spira. But for all of that, you’re a symbol of the old ways. It seems fitting you should be the first to witness the new world where summoners aren’t our one great hope against Sin.”

Martin watches Daisy and Basira exchange a surreptitious glance, while over at the far end of the table, Jude’s eyebrows fly up, adding something incredulous to her sneer.

“Bold words, Manuela. I hope for your Crusaders’ sakes that they aren’t just hot air.”

“If I didn’t know better, my lady, I’d say you were hoping we’d fail.” Without sparing a glance for Jude, Manuela straightens up, making her way down the table so she can address Jon and the rest of them directly.

“Here,” she says. “Why don’t I show you and your guardians what this operation entails?”

“I – if you’d like.”

“You deserve to know,” Manuela says, motioning toward the map of the Djose area on the table; when they all move closer for a better look, Martin can see that it’s covered with annotations in various colours of ink. “We planned this operation based on years of observations of Sin’s past behaviour. Wherever it drops its spawn, it always returns to collect them sooner or later. It’s as if there’s a link between the two. We’re using this to lure Sin to this spot—” this as she taps the portion of the map showing the inlet cutting into the beach “–using captive Sinspawn that we’ve collected from all over Spira. Our Crusaders on the beach are our frontline fighters – they’re to distract Sin and keep it busy until our Al Bhed allies have prepared their machina weapon.”

“What kind of machina weapon are they using?” asks Sasha, leaning in closer for a better look at all of the annotations. “I saw the cannons outside, but that can’t be it, can it?”

Manuela shakes her head, but Martin sees her eyes glitter with satisfaction at the question, and her face relaxes on recognising Sasha as a fellow Crusader.

“No, those were a gift of good will from the Al Bhed. A way for us to cover our forces on the beach and rain down some extra hell on Sin before the main event.”

“Which is?” frowns Jon.

Manuela indicates another spot on the map; this one is close to where the inlet meets the ocean proper, marked with more notes and with a sketch pinned on a separate piece of paper. Martin's never seen anything like it before; it looks like a tower, haphazardly built and tapering to a thin point at the top, except that near that top are two large, javelin-like shapes, attached to the central structure by some kind of cockpit or command module or something.

Is that the sort of thing they used in the Machina War?

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Manuela says, and for a moment her voice is softer and almost… reverent. “Historically, our biggest challenge when fighting Sin has always been its ability to shield itself – but getting close enough to penetrate the shield manually has never been an option because of the danger posed by its toxin. Up until now, the power of the Final Summoning has been the only thing known to have successfully breached its defences before it can unleash one of its attacks.”

“So what makes this machina weapon different to all the others?” Basira asks, folding her arms.

Manuela shoots her a sly smile.

“To begin with, it’s much larger, but size doesn’t always mean everything. It works by harnessing energy – not too dissimilar to more powerful applications of offensive magic. The only difference is that this energy is being generated by an exceptionally powerful machina, and concentrated into a narrow beam that should be able to penetrate Sin’s defences. Think of it as the difference between using a lance and using a hammer; the lance can pierce through armour a hammer can’t because all of its attack potential is concentrated into a single point. Powerful spells are at a disadvantage because no matter how skilled the mage, the greater the power, the wider the area over which they must cast that spell.”

Martin’s not sure if he’s just been on the receiving end of a lecture or a sermon. Manuela has all of the passion for knowledge that he’s seen in Sasha, or even in Jon, Tim, and Sasha all together when the three of them really get going around the campfire in the evenings, but none of them have ever sounded like… Martin’s not sure. Like they also wanted to build a temple or something to whatever it was they were talking about, not just study it. If he wasn't already feeling pretty uncomfortable around her thanks to the child soldiers she has drilling outside, this probably would've done the job just fine.

“No, that’s true,” Sasha nods. “Even really talented mages who’ve trained for years can’t concentrate that much power into a small space without putting too much strain on themselves.”

“Exactly. But this ancient machina has no such limitations.”

“You’re very confident for someone who only has theoretical calculations and hearsay on her side,” calls Jude from the top of the table.

“My calculations are based on research and experimentation. Which I find preferable to believing whatever I’m told regardless of how contradictory it is.”

“We’ll see.”

Manuela rolls her eyes, and turns back to Jon.

“You and your guardians should get some rest before the operation starts. The command centre has some beds set up in the next tent over that you’re welcome to use. If all goes as planned, we should see Sin appear soon after first light tomorrow.”

It’s as obvious a dismissal as any, and even if it wasn’t, Martin gets the feeling that none of them feel much like spending more time in here than they have to. They thank Manuela for her offer and make for the exit, apart from Tim, who nudges Jon’s elbow as the summoner turns to leave.

“I’ll catch up,” Tim nods. “Got a couple of questions to ask her.”

At that, Martin hovers for a moment, looking between Tim and Manuela, and wondering if he should stay behind to say his own piece. Tim spots him at it, and leans in close to try and keep his voice down and unheard by anyone else in the tent - including Jude, who is still watching from the head of the table.

“I know what you're thinking,” he says in a low voice. “I'll get her to move the kids out of harm's way. We'll have better luck if it comes from another Crusader.”

Martin gives Tim a look that he hopes gets across how he'll feel about it if that turns out not to be the case. Then he nods.

“Fine,” he says, and follows the others outside.

The air out there seems wonderfully cool and clear after the stuffiness of the tent and the tension around that table. They spill out into the openness of the top of the ridge and walk a short way from the tent, careful not to get too close to the torches that mark where the ridge abruptly ends and turns into empty air. It’s a cloudy night; there aren’t any stars to be seen, and even the moon seems to be struggling, barely visible behind a handful of clouds that are a bit thinner than all the rest.

From down below on the beach come the sounds of shouting and metal clanging, and the occasional spine-chilling shriek that can only belong to a Sinspawn. It’s too dark to see anything down there beyond the small pinpricks of light from whoever’s holding their lanterns, and Martin wonders what they’re doing down there. Sticking them in cages or something, is that it?

He tries to catch a glimpse of wherever the machina weapon the Al Bhed are using might be, trying to remember what he saw of the drawing on the map, but it’s just too dark to see.

After a couple of minutes or so, Basira takes a breath and asks, “So what’s everyone thinking? ‘Cause I’m still thinking that this is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“Even without that, that was a power struggle going on in there, no two ways about it,” Daisy mutters.

And, well. It sounds awful, but Martin agrees with them. For all of her unnerving zeal, Manuela sounded like she’d thought it through, or at least like she thought she’d thought it through. But what he can’t get over is how… unconcerned Jude seemed about it all. Like she didn’t care if the operation went ahead or not, or what would happen if it did.

No, that’s not it. The way Jude was smiling that entire time – it’s less like she didn’t care, and more like she was almost excited to see what would happen.

Whether it ends up being a disaster or not.

“Sasha,” Daisy says now, turning to the woman in question. “You’ve done a few operations. What do you think?”

Sasha spends a moment staring at Daisy in surprise, catching both Jon and then Martin’s eyes with a look that clearly says, since when did these two care about my opinions?

“I told you, I think it could go either way,” she says after a moment. “We’ve never had the Al Bhed along with us before, let alone with a machina like that one down there. And the plan sounds solid in theory. Manuela’s plans usually are.”

“But?”

“But,” Sasha says in a carefully measured voice, “our operations in the past have always been to draw Sin away or distract it, sometimes to weaken it. And even then, we’ve had casualties. We’ve never done a full-on assault like this. We’ve never had the Al Bhed alongside us or a machina weapon on this scale, either, but – if the shot it fires doesn’t take Sin out completely first time, I don’t think we’d get another one.”

Everyone’s quiet for a moment, thinking about the implications of this.

At least, until Jon shifts, and starts, “If that’s the case—”

“Here we go,” says Daisy.

“No, but,” Jon argues, sending a withering look Daisy’s way. “If, if it’s Sin’s defences that are the issue, and the Al Bhed’s machina gets rid of that, then perhaps—”

“You’re not seriously suggesting you’d summon your aeons against it at this point in your pilgrimage,” says Basira, interrupting.

“Why not? If the weapon weakens it, then – then maybe that’d be all that’s needed to finish it off.”

“Seems a bit optimistic.”

At that, Jon very deliberately turns his back on Basira and looks to Sasha, an expectant, questioning look on his face.

“I don’t know, Jon,” she says quietly.

Neither does Martin, for that matter. After all, Jon had summoned one of his aeons when they’d come up against Sin out on the water near Kilika, and it hadn’t left so much as a scratch. What Jon’s saying makes sense, sure, but – only if everything works the way Manuela seems to think it does.

For all her carefully considered planning, Martin’s not inclined to trust someone who thinks it’s okay to put kids this close to the line of fire.

“There’s too many variables to say if it’s a good plan or not,” Basira says with a short, frustrated sigh. “But I know one thing: it’s mine and Daisy’s job to make sure you get to Zanarkand. If you die here, it’s pointless. So we’re not letting that happen.”

“… Fine.”

Jon doesn’t say anything more after that, and no one else seems to want to say anything either. Martin puts his hands in his pockets, and wonders about trying to catch Sasha’s eye; she seems to have the clearest idea of all of them about what might happen, and he kind of wants to ask her more. She looks like she’s barely taking in anything around her though, staring into the firelight of one of the torches with a look of intense thought, until the sound of the tent flap opening and closing hits their ears.

“Oh,” she says, startled as she looks up. “There’s Tim. What did Manuela say?”

It might just be the effect of the firelight, but Tim’s face looks grim.

“Good news,” he says, without preamble. “I got her to agree to move the kids somewhere further back down Mushroom Rock Road overnight, before everything starts.”

With all the days of tension that Martin’s been carrying around, the wave of relief that hits him when he hears that is incredible. It’s not that he didn’t think Tim wouldn’t be as good as his word, but with everything else that’s going on…

Still, though. “You could sound happier about it.”

Tim doesn’t rise to that, shaking his head.

“That’s not it. According to her, there’s no room for me down in the vanguard. She wants me up here as a last line of defence,” he says bitterly, almost spitting the words.

“You’re one of the best on the machina cannons, Tim,” says Sasha. “That’s probably what’s going through her head.”

“Yeah, right. More like she thinks I’m the loose cannon like the rest of you do.”

Jon makes a sharp sound at that, while Daisy and Basira – very wisely – choose to hold their tongues. Sasha, on the other hand, makes an impatient noise.

“I’ll be shoving your head into the cannons if you keep this up,” she says sharply, with none of the usual teasing in her voice. “Look, Tim. I’m genuinely asking, if this works, and you’re there to see it happen, does it really matter that you weren’t down there on the front lines?”

Tim actually looks shocked, the flickering light of the torches throwing all the angles of his face into sharp blocks of light and shadow.

“… I get what you’re saying,” he says grudgingly after a moment. He looks pensive now, almost gloomy, and sighs. “Don’t worry. I’m not gonna do anything that’ll screw this up.”

And - Martin believes that Tim means that. But he's really not sure at this point if it'll help.

Martin is woken by someone shaking him.

It’s still dark; as he struggles into wakefulness, still half-asleep, it takes him a moment to spot Sasha crouching down next to the bed he’s in. At least he thinks it’s Sasha. He fumbles a hand around near the top of the bed for his glasses, and with a spike of anxiety, wonders what’s happening now.

“Sorry,” Sasha whispers. “I need your help.”

Martin stares at her.

“Um. Sure!” he whispers back, wondering if he might still be more asleep than he thought. “Happy to, but – what, what are we doing and why are we whispering about it?”

“Oh, crimes,” Sasha nods with a slightly nervous grin. “Come on, let’s get outside and I’ll tell you more.”

Fortunately for Sasha and whatever crimes she’s decided to make Martin an accessory to, Martin has long years of experience with moving around spaces quietly so as not to disturb someone else. They slip out of the tent with no signs of movement from any of the others, Sasha looking this way and that for any of the Crusaders’ night watch before she draws Martin to one side.

“I need you to play lookout for me,” she says in a hushed voice.

“O… kay. What for?”

“Jude’s here with her personal guard, and if she’s really expecting things to go south she’ll have come prepared to make sure all of her people come out the other side. The warrior monks have access to some pretty powerful healing potions, especially the ones assigned to guard a Maester. I’ve been around enough to know the sorts of places they’ll keep them, so I’m going to go… liberate a few.”

“I—” Martin starts, the urge to protest like a reflex. Then he stops, takes a breath, and thinks. Actually, he’s really not all that opposed to stealing from Jude. “Okay, so you’re stealing from her. Um. Why?”

“Because I want our people to come out of this in one piece,” Sasha whispers urgently. “I want this to work, but I’ve been on an operation that’s gone badly before. Things can turn quickly, and Jon’s the only one of us who can heal. If any of us get separated from him and something happens—”

“Do you think it will?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not taking any chances this time.”

It’s still too dark to really make out Sasha’s face – she’s pulled him into a spot where the firelight from the few torches that are still lit doesn’t reach so that they can hide from prying eyes. But there’s no mistaking the tightness in her voice.

This time, she said. For all she was flippant about it back on the Mi’ihen highroad, that operation where she and Tim got too close to Sin must weigh on her mind more than she lets on.

“Okay, okay. So. Why am I your lookout?”

“I don’t trust Daisy and Basira not to blab, Tim can’t be stealthy to save his life and if I wake him up before dawn there’s every chance he’ll do something stupid, and Jon can’t lie,” Sasha rattles off. “Which makes you the best one for the job.”

“Oh,” says Martin, feeling pleased, and then feeling like a bit of an idiot for it. “Okay. Well. Lead the way I guess.”

Sasha’s grin is visible even in the dark.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she promises. “Okay. If anyone comes by and looks like they’re heading my way, try and keep them busy for as long as you can. I’ll work on getting out if I hear you start delaying anyone.”

The command centre is quiet. There’s still a few guards posted, at the gate, along the edge of the ridge, and the entrance to the main tent, just enough to make Martin nervous about what they’re about to do. Sasha doesn’t seem nearly as concerned. She whispers to him about guard and patrol patterns, motions towards the back of one of the smaller-looking tents on the ridge, and then breaks away from Martin to creep towards it, sticking to the darkest parts of the command centre where the torchlight doesn’t fall. Martin makes himself a more conspicuous figure to draw the eye of any watching guards, and keeps a careful eye of his own out for anyone who looks like they might have spotted Sasha, or just happen to wander too close to where she’s breaking, entering, and thieving.

After a few nervewracking minutes that feel like a lifetime, during which Martin’s heart stops when one of the Crusaders walks toward the tent Sasha’s in and strikes up an antagonistic conversation with the warrior monk standing outside, Martin hears Sasha’s voice behind him.

“Fancy seeing you out here!” she says brightly, looking completely unconcerned, and not at all like someone who’s just been stealing valuable supplies from one of Yevon’s most powerful people. “Can’t sleep either?”

Oh, so that’s what they’re doing now.

“How did you guess?” he says weakly, hoping against hope that any watching guards, Crusaders or warrior monks or otherwise, can’t pick up on how suspicious he feels.

“Happens to the best of us before a big operation. Come on.”

The two of them walk, as casually as possible, back through the command centre camp, until they’re close to the edge of the ridge nearest the sleeping quarters tent. Only then does Sasha breathe a sigh of relief.

“Nice and easy,” she says with a smile, and reaches into one of her pouches to press a small bottle of something into Martin’s hand.

“Keep this with you,” she says. “Just in case. I’ll feel better about it if you do.”

Martin pockets the bottle carefully.

“Got everything you came for, then?”

“I got enough. Didn’t want to take too much in case they got suspicious.” Sasha stretches, and looks out over the edge of the ridge. The first beginnings of the sunrise are just starting to show themselves, in the form of a pale light low down in the cloudy sky, a faint grey twilight over everything that has everything looking dull and monochrome.

It’s still a ways better than the solid darkness of the night; Martin can actually make things out beyond the edge of the ridge now. Like the cliff face, and a weird sort of crane or pulley thing that’s bolted into it, and something else that’s hanging from that that he can’t really make out. Some kind of big metal box, or crate, or…

Or a cage. Hm.

“What is that thing, Sasha?” he asks.

“My guess?” she says, after squinting for a while in that direction. “That’s where they’re keeping the captive Sinspawn. Or, some of them, anyway. There’s probably more at other points around the ridge. They must have winched them up in the air like that overnight ready to bait Sin with when Manuela gives the signal.”

“That one’s pretty close to us, don’t you think?”

It really is. It looks close enough to the ridge that if you were really good at jumping, you could probably jump between the ridge and the cage.

“Better hope the Sinspawn can’t pick locks,” she says lightly. Then does a double-take, squinting at the bulk of the cage. “Wait, is that my eyes or can you see something moving over there?”

Martin’s eyes are not all that much better than Sasha’s – probably worse when it comes down to it – but he at least has the advantage of wearing glasses that were made in a machina city and not, well, Spira. He squints into the half-light where Sasha’s pointing, and sure enough, after a moment he can make out movement on the outside of the cage itself.

“Is that… hang on, is someone climbing on that thing?”

“Looks like it,” Sasha mutters, frowning. “Come on, we’d better take a closer look.”

Martin thinks they probably shouldn’t, actually, but he’s not about to let Sasha go on her own.

The two of them follow the line of the ridge inwards until it hits the cliff face; there’s a narrow path, more of a ledge really, that hugs the line of the cliff and takes them closer to where the cage is suspended above the beach below. Soon, they’re close enough to make out the strong mesh bars that criss-cross each other on all sides of the cage – as well as some of the features of the person clinging to the side of it, both hands working away at the lock holding it shut.

“Is that – Georgie?!”

Georgie – it’s definitely Georgie, even in the dim, hazy half-light of the early dawn – stiffens at the sound of her name, and casts a wary look in their direction. She’s not actually clinging to the cage under her own power; she’s rigged up some kind of makeshift abseiling line with a rope around her middle, the other end stretching up towards where the cage is attached to the top of the crane.

“Bollocks,” Martin hears her hiss to herself.

“Do I even dare to ask what you’re doing?” Sasha asks her, clearly trying to keep her voice low enough that no one except Georgie can hear her.

Georgie goes back to her work on the lock, her two feet planted on the side keeping her steady.

“Not a good time, Sasha.”

“I could say the same thing. This doesn’t look much like talking someone out of taking part.”

“Yeah, well. I couldn’t get close to where she is, so I went to plan B.”

“Which is…” Martin says slowly, squinting at the deliberate way Georgie is trying to work with the lock. It’s impossible to actually see what she’s doing, but he can fill in the blanks just fine. “Wait, wait, you’re not trying to set whatever’s in there loose, are you?”

“The Sinspawn are what’s gonna draw Sin in, right?” Georgie says, her voice straining. “If they’re not all gathered in one place, maybe it won’t come, and there won’t be an operation. There’s enough Crusaders down on that beach to take care of them.”

“You know that’s not the only cage with Sinspawn in it, right?” Sasha asks her.

“Never mind that, there’s no time!” Martin hisses, glancing out to sea, where the light on the horizon is well and truly threatening daylight properly now. “They said just after first light for the operation, didn’t they? That’s – that’s gonna be literally any minute now!”

“Ow!”

Georgie hisses in pain; there’s a loud thump, like she just gave the lock, or the cage, a good smack. “This stupid lock! I almost had it!”

“Georgie, come on,” Martin says, throwing a nervous look back towards the command centre – there’s no way nobody heard that clanging. Hopefully they just think it’s the trapped Sinspawn acting up. The trapped Sinspawn acting up inside their cage which just happens to be suspended a long way up, where Georgie is clinging to the side trying to pick the bloody lock. “You’re not gonna be able to sabotage all of that on your own, just – get over here before you get yourself hurt!”

“Martin,” Georgie says, through gritted teeth, “I know you mean well, but that’s not helping.”

“What the actual fuck are you doing?” says a new voice.

It’s coming from above their heads; Martin cranes his neck looking for whoever it belongs to, and after a few moments his eyes land on a face peering over the very top of the cliff face above their heads, a good fifteen feet up at least. Whoever it is is wearing goggles over their eyes, the ends of their short, choppy blonde hair stained with some sort of dye.

While Martin’s brain wildly flails around for some kind of plausible explanation and comes up empty, Georgie sounds relieved.

“Melanie!”

“Don’t Melanie me, what are you doing here?”

Georgie’s breath catches in a low chuckle before she says dryly, “What’s it look like?”

“I know you don’t want me to answer that.”

The newcomer – Melanie, who has to be the one Georgie came all this way to see before she decided a one-woman sabotage mission was the better option – scrubs both hands down her face and mutters to herself for a few seconds.

“Right,” she says. “I’m coming down, and when I get down there we’re gonna have a proper row about this.”

It’s impossible to tell if she’s actually looking at Georgie or at him and Sasha, but there’s no mistaking that the harsh words that come next are meant for the two of them.

“I don’t know who you are, but do me a favour and help my girlfriend get herself off that thing before they turn the current on.”

Hang on, girlfriend? thinks a part of Martin’s brain that is immediately squashed by the part that is picturing Georgie falling to her death from a suddenly electrified cage.

“Wait, they’re going to—” Focus, Martin. He shakes his head in an effort to clear it. “Right, right, not the time.”

Sasha is looking from Georgie to the length of rope she’s attached to and back again, her eyes narrowed in thought.

“Georgie, can you swing yourself across?”

In the end, it takes her a couple of attempts to do it. At first she just plain overestimates how much force she needs to make it, sending herself careening towards them – and the cliff face – with so much speed that she almost knocks herself out on solid rock. It takes both Martin and Sasha to cushion her approach and stop that from happening, Georgie hissing at them to let go of her and let her try again before she ends up dragging them both off the side of the ledge with her momentum. She pushes off the side of the cage for the second go around, and this time she almost goes too far the other way – falling just too short for a proper landing, her fingers reaching out to grab the edge of the ledge and stopping all of her momentum dead, leaving her clinging to the edge.

That’s a heart-stopping few minutes; Georgie clinging to the side so that she doesn’t let go and end up suspended over empty air, Martin’s heart in his throat as he scrambles down onto his knees to reach down and haul her up, thanking whatever might or might not be out there that he’s actually got a decent amount of upper body strength.

Sasha cuts the rope once Georgie’s feet are on solid ground, and then all three of them take a well-earned minute.

“Thanks,” says Georgie once she’s got her breath back, with a slight sigh. She brushes herself down and looks back despondently at the sad, dangling end of her rope. “Well, there goes that idea.”

“What were you thinking?”

Melanie, who must have spent the last few minutes of utter madness rigging something up for a climb of her own down the sheer cliff face above their heads, jumps down the last few feet and just barely sticks the landing.

“I mean, I was thinking sabotage,” Georgie shrugs, “but you can see how well that worked out.”

“No kidding.”

Melanie is tiny, short with the sort of build that’s more stick than human, but that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on how fiercely she can frown. Now that Martin can see more of her than just a face peeking out overhead, she’s also very, very obviously Al Bhed even to him; he doesn’t think he’s seen anyone else in Spira dress like that, with long buckled boots and equally long protective gloves. He definitely hasn’t seen any other people in Spira holding their jackets closed with a zip fastening.

“How’d you spot me, anyway? It was pitch black when I climbed up here.”

At that, Melanie taps the side of her goggles.

“We salvaged some stuff that lets you see in the dark a few months back. Not much of it, but enough for me to get my hands on some. I almost had a heart attack when I looked over here to check the Yevon idiots were actually managing to get their end of things done on time and saw you balancing on the top of that thing rigging your rope up.”

“Yeah, well. I couldn’t get close enough to that machina weapon to find you without getting caught by someone and I figured that meant my choices were walk away or get involved, so.”

“But you hate getting involved.”

“Yeah,” Georgie nods, “I do.”

Martin exchanges a sidelong look with Sasha, feeling an awful lot like this shouldn’t be something either of them are a fly on the wall for. If Melanie is who Georgie was trying to talk out of this – her girlfriend, apparently, just to top it all off – then it’s pretty obvious that there’s. A lot going on here. A lot of prior conversations.

Based on the past week or so with Tim, Martin could probably guess at some of them.

“I told you you didn’t have to—” Melanie starts heatedly, her mouth an unhappy line, before she notices Martin and Sasha still standing there and apparently comes to the same conclusion Martin just did.

“Ugh,” she grumbles, folding her arms tight. “No, you know what, I’m not doing this with an audience. Who the hell are you two?”

“Sasha. Martin,” Sasha says simply, indicating one at a time. “Don’t worry, we aren’t snitches.”

“So you’re what, Crusaders?”

“Just me,” says Sasha, who doesn’t seem at all affected by the waves of hostility Melanie is giving off in droves. “But I’m pulling double duty as a guardian right now, same as Martin.”

Melanie starts. “Hang on, there’s a summoner here now? When did this happen?”

“Must have been yesterday,” Georgie intervenes. “It’s okay, Melanie, we can trust these two. They’re with the friend I told you about.”

“Oh.”

It’s impossible to get a proper read on Melanie’s face with those goggles over her eyes, but the set to her mouth tells Martin that Melanie has definitely already come to some conclusions of her own about Jon.

“And if it wasn’t for him I’d still be stuck on the end of the Mi’ihen highroad, so. Be nice.”

“No promises,” Melanie says with a small, wry laugh. She turns towards Georgie with a frustrated sigh. “Look, Georgie, I’m – not that I’m not happy to see you, but you really could have picked better timing. Sin is gonna be on the doorstep any minute and I need to be over there when it does.”

With that, Melanie motions back over to the mouth of the inlet; the sun is up far enough now that Martin can actually see the Al Bhed’s machina weapon now, and the sight makes him miss a breath. It’s huge even from this distance, the javelin-like prongs of the main weapon aimed into the inlet itself, waiting for Sin. The drawing he saw on Manuela’s war table last night didn’t prepare him even a little for the reality of it.

The reality of it, which is that it’s light enough for Martin to be able to see out that far, which means that things could be getting ugly any minute—

“Guys,” he says before Georgie can open her mouth, “is this really the place to be doing this? There’s a cage full of Sinspawn right there and – what was it you said about them running a current through it?”

“Wait, you got that?” Melanie’s mouth hangs open in shock for all of a moment before she recovers. “Yeah, it’s to make sure Sin shows up. Get the Sinspawn to call out to it.”

“Okay, well, should we really be standing here when it—”

Something out there must have a really awful sense of humour, because Martin finds his words cut off by a loud thunk, like a switch being thrown, and then there’s a bright flash that leaves after-images dancing behind his eyes, and then a loud crackling sound starts up a split-second before an unearthly, inhuman screech of pain that cuts right through Martin’s ears and makes bile rise in his throat as it echoes out over the ridge.

“We should get back to Jon and the others,” Sasha shouts over the din, her eyes wide. Martin barely manages to nod with his hands over his ears to block out the noise, and then there’s the sound of scattered banging and clanging from inside the hanging cage as whatever Sinspawn is inside thrashes about—

And then the sharp sound of something metal snapping with a loud bang as it reaches its breaking point, and then the door of the cage is flying open and something huge and long and insect-like with far too many legs is sailing out into the open air and landing with a sickening crunch on the ridge ahead of them, cutting off their path back to the command centre.

“Oh,” says Georgie in a shaky voice. “Guess that lock was closer to breaking than I thought.”

Chapter Text

The Sinspawn ahead of them is tall. Tall, and getting taller still as it finds its footing and shakes itself in one long movement from head to tail, rearing its armoured body high up above their heads.

“Sasha,” Martin says, in a voice that struggles to make it above a whisper. “What do we do?”

Sasha is quiet a moment, her entire body drawn tight.

“We’ve got to get back over there somehow,” she says. “So we go through.”

Taking a deep breath, she reaches for her spellbooks. She doesn't take her eyes off the colossal, chitinous body of the thing even once.

“Georgie? You’re the hardest hitter we’ve got right now. That spot in the middle near the bottom of its belly looks like it might be a weak point, so you should aim for that,” Sasha continues, her voice only shaking slightly as she points to a place on the Sinspawn’s body that looks disturbingly like some kind of mouth, full of pincers or teeth or something curving over the top of an opening.

“I’ve got magic, so I’ll aim at the head and anything else you can’t reach. Martin, you’re in charge of making sure all of our hits count. Melanie—”

“I can handle myself,” Melanie snaps, as the Sinspawn comes scuttling towards them.

“Okay, fine. Just – everyone try not to let it knock you off the edge, alright?”

Easier said than done. Martin’s hyper-aware of every single movement they make, how any wrong step or dodge the wrong way could send them plummeting to their deaths. If that thing corners them into an even tighter spot than what they’re already in, they’re finished.

Not good. Martin thinks about blinding it so they can duck past it, and then thinks about a very large, very panicked creature with way too many ways to hurt them all charging towards them blind, and knows he can’t. But maybe if it’s asleep—

Except when he tries – really tries, concentrates as hard as he can and mutters his words, nothing happens. He knows it should have worked, he knows what it feels like when he screws up a spell through not focusing hard enough and this wasn’t it, he felt the magic go – it just didn’t work. Doesn’t even look like it slowed it down.

And they’ve got another problem. As Georgie rushes in with her polearm, aiming the point right at the vulnerable opening Sasha spotted, the monster raises one huge, shell-like arm and brings it forward to shield its body, blocking Georgie’s blow. The tip of the weapon sticks in the shell for a moment – Georgie has to frantically yank at it to get it back, Sasha sending a ball of flame at the head of the thing to distract it, give Georgie time to get free and clear.

“We have to get rid of the arms first or I’ve got no hope in hell of putting a scratch on it,” Georgie says breathlessly as she retreats back near Sasha.

“I’ll handle it,” Sasha bites out. “If you get close and it hits you, it’ll send you flying.”

Reflexively, Martin glances toward the edge of the ridge, and immediately wishes he hadn’t. It really is a very, very long way down.

Sasha does her best, but she’s only one mage, and she’s the only one who can fight at long range to boot. Spell after spell barely seems to faze the thing, no matter how fast Martin calls again and again upon his little focusing spell, and even worse, the thing Martin was afraid of is happening – the Sinspawn forcing them back towards where the path clinging to the side of the cliff narrows and falls away into nothing, trapping them.

“This is useless!” Melanie hisses. “We’ve got to make a break for it or we’re all history!”

“Can you see an opening?” Sasha snaps, calling up another sphere of water. “It’s too wide for us to run past it!”

“Well, can’t we make it sleep or something?”

“That was, it was the first thing I tried, it didn’t work!” Martin shouts in a panic. This is it. They’re going to die right here. They’re going to die and Tim’ll run off and get himself killed by Sin and Jon won’t have anyone except Daisy and Basira—

A sudden blast of violent heat sears Martin’s skin.

Burning wind whips his hair back, catches Melanie so off-guard that she almost loses her footing and has to grab onto Georgie for support. It’s hot enough to hurt, hot enough to make it hard to even draw in a breath, but he doesn’t feel like he’s burning even though everything in him is telling him he should be.

Up ahead, the Sinspawn is spasming, shrieking loud enough and shrill enough to pierce right through him as it’s doused in a roaring inferno rushing in from somewhere behind it, its body taking the full brunt of the fire. Even when the wind dies down, finally letting Martin gasp breath back into his lungs, flames still lick around the thing’s feet, until—

There’s a loud snap, like someone clicking their fingers. In an instant, the Sinspawn’s whole body is engulfed in a tower of fire that erupts straight into the air and vanishes. The monster howls one final time, and then collapses into a limp, unmoving heap, its singed body sending up spirals of dark smoke.

“Are any of you hurt?!”

Behind the foul-smelling, twitching body stands Ifrit, blazing brightly with one of her arms still outstretched, the thumb and index finger held together. And behind Ifrit stands Jon, haloed by the sparks drifting off the body of his aeon, his eyes wild as he stares at them, both hands clenched so tight around his staff that it has to be painful.

Martin’s never been so glad to see anyone in his life.

Georgie lets out a breathless, slightly delirious-sounding laugh.

“You really waited for the most dramatic moment you could, didn’t you?” she shouts.

Jon’s face turns downright stormy.

“Just – look, get over here now before something else happens!”

They don’t need telling twice. Martin definitely doesn’t. He stumbles his way past the Sinspawn, gagging as the caustic, bitter stench of scorched shell and burnt flesh hits the back of his throat, and all but sprints his way through the shimmering heat haze around Ifrit, past the aeon where the path finally widens back out into the plateau of the command centre, trembling once he gets there.

Someone catches his elbow, steadying him. Martin’s shocked to see it’s Daisy.

“Easy, Martin,” she says in her low, gruff voice, her grip strong.

“S— sorry, I – sorry,” he stammers. For the love of – why can’t he get a grip? “I really thought we were goners.”

Until Jon swept in out of nowhere like that. Or Jon’s aeon, but is there really a difference? He saved them.

“You –”

Jon takes a couple of steps towards Martin now, and Daisy leaves go of his elbow to let Jon get closer, his face somewhere between discomfort, alarm, and worry. His hands reach out for an instant, shrink back, reach out again so one of them rests on Martin’s upper arm.

“Look,” Jon stutters, “you’re alright, you’re okay. I just –” and now Jon sucks in a sharp breath, his voice getting heated as he demands, “What do you think you were doing? When we woke and found you and Sasha gone like that I didn’t – none of us knew what to think—!”

“Yeah, that. That might have been my bad, Jon,” says Georgie in a weary, guarded voice. “Sorry.”

Jon pivots to face her, pulling his hand back from Martin like he’s been burned. Martin misses the touch. Hadn’t realised just how grounding it was.

With Georgie are Melanie and Sasha, all three of them fine and alive and in one piece. Martin realises with a jolt that Ifrit is still standing guard at the point where the ridge begins to narrow into that cliff-hugging ledge, where the limp form of the Sinspawn still lays. Isn’t it draining for Jon, keeping her in the world for this long after the power of that last attack?

If it is, Jon’s holding up well under it. Looks more irate than tired as he shoots Georgie a look that just screams of we’re going to have words about this later.

“I don’t even want to know,” he says, with all the air of a disappointed teacher. Rallying, he adds, “Come on, we need to either finish that thing off quickly or find somewhere better to stand, because things are about to get very, very bad out there—”

“I’m sorry, who put you in charge?”

Everyone stares at Melanie. Jon’s mouth hangs half-open – he looks like he just had the train of thought slapped clean out of his head.

“What?”

“What like you’re not standing there assuming that when you say jump we’ll ask how high—”

“Sorry, who are you?”

“Jon,” says Georgie, cutting in quickly before Melanie can speak again, “this is Melanie.”

“Oh,” says Jon, before doing a double-take and staring at Melanie with a new look of realisation. “Oh. Hang on, so this is—”

“Yep,” nods Georgie, while Melanie stares down Jon like she’s daring him to finish that sentence.

“Terrific,” Jon mutters, bringing a hand up to rub at his forehead. “Right. Well, we don’t have time for this—”

“Convenient.”

“Melanie, come on,” Martin says sharply, “he literally just saved our lives.”

Melanie has the decency to shut up at that, though not without a dark look, her lips pulling in a taut, unhappy line.

“Jon,” says Sasha now, “Where’s Tim?”

With a rush of guilt, Martin starts. Oh – he, he completely forgot to check about Tim. It’s just Daisy and Jon here, so where—

“On one of the machina cannons. I left Basira with him just in case— Sasha!”

Jon reaches out, voice sharp and loud as Sasha darts off in the direction of the machina cannons, breaking quickly into a sprint that takes her past the tents and the Crusaders standing at their posts. Jon throws Daisy and Martin a frantic look, and Martin gets it – they can’t get split up, not now.

He throws a guilty look back at Georgie and Melanie, but – if they choose not to follow them, that’s their business. Martin is Jon’s guardian, not theirs, and Jon is already dismissing Ifrit in a shimmering glow of pyreflies and candle flames and rushing after Sasha, Daisy striding along hot on his heels.

Martin makes to follow them both, scrambling along the ridge, when something dark catches the corner of his eye.

He skids to a halt, looking out, over the edge of the ridge, over to the inlet where the ocean cuts deep into the Djose coast, where the stormy grey water is marred by something dark and gargantuan, a shadow blotting out everything else under the waves and reaching dark, murky tendrils out into the waters of the bay.

Oh, no.

“What’s that out there in the water?”

He doesn’t have to ask. He already knows. But—

Behind him, Melanie lets out an explosive stream of Al Bhed.

“It’s here. Shit.”

Heart pounding, Martin runs after Jon and Daisy as Sin crawls closer and closer to the shore. It surfaces quickly, breaks through the water with its whole body and sends massive waves crashing towards the shore of the inlet on all sides as it goes.

It’s enormous. Martin’s been right up close to it, he’s seen how even just a tiny part of its body dwarfed an entire ferry, but somehow it’s only now it really hits him, just how huge this monster is. Sin’s body is grey and mottled and covered in some sort of rippling black – aura or shield or substance, something – and its body is easily more than half the width of the entire inlet, the massive head cresting out of the water while most of the rest of its body remains below the waves.

A cacophony of ear-splitting booms and crashes starts up; flashes of fire and smoke coming from further down the top of the ridge, but further down below as well, from ledges and ridges cut beneath the mushroom-shaped overhangs in the face of the cliff. The Crusaders must have packed every available space with as many cannons as they could, and they’re bringing every single one of them to bear down against Sin now, sending a constant barrage flying towards the great bulk of it sitting in the bay.

Martin doesn’t stop to see if any of it’s actually doing anything. He just keeps following Jon and Daisy past cannon after cannon, his ears ringing with the shouts of the Crusaders and the blasts of the cannon fire and the distant roar of something happening down below on the beach, his nose full of the chemical smell of smoke and black powder.

They find Tim next to one of the forward cannons, the ones almost right on the edge of the cliff. His face is intent and focused as he loads whatever one of these things actually needs to fire into the cannon, his hands encased in a pair of thick protective gloves. A couple of other Crusaders and Basira are with him, while Sasha stands a short way behind, yelling something that Martin just can’t hear over the clamour of explosions and shouting and distant fighting.

He doesn’t belong here. No amount of skirmishing with fiends could prepare him for this.

Tim shouts - something, something that has everyone next to his cannon moving to stand clear and block their ears, and Martin hastily follows suit. A few seconds later, the entire thing jerks backwards with a boom that goes right through him even with his ears covered, the end of the cannon letting off a great cloud of smoke.

“That’s keeping it busy!” Tim shouts, loud enough to be heard. “Get it clean and load up the next one!”

He turns, and the instant he catches sight of Jon and everyone else he freezes, before lunging over to them in two quick strides.

“You’re supposed to be back up at the command centre!”

“While you and Sasha run off alone?”

Whatever Tim yells back in response is lost under the sound of another round of cracks of cannon fire. His ears still ringing, Martin just about hears someone, maybe Basira but maybe not, strangely muffled but definitely shouting:

“Something’s happening out there!”

Out there, in the water, where Sin’s entire body ripples from front to back before it jerks lower in the water, the movement bringing a shimmering bubble into being around it that warps and bulges and pulses at the front—

“Get clear! Now!”

“Tim, come on—”

A bright flash of light robs Martin of his vision, a torrent of smaller flashes following suit, and then the ground gives way beneath him.

Martin falls, the world becomes a blur of roaring rubble and shifting earth and sliding rock as his feet slip away from under him again and again, pain shooting from his tailbone right up his back before scraping white-hot in his fingers and his arms and landing hammer blows on his sides, and he can’t tell which way is up or feel anything else except the sick empty rush of falling in his stomach, wind and dust stinging his face, ears ringing still and full of jumbled sounds of cracking and crunching and screaming and shouting—

Martin rolls like a ragdoll onto rough, soft ground and lies there, winded and coughing painfully through choking mouthfuls of dust and dirt and sand.

His head spins; there’s a weird feeling in his ears, like someone stuffed them with wool; his hands and arms sting with hot, angry pulses of pain, duller aches throbbing through his sides and back.

He doesn’t know what happened. There’s too much dust in the air to see, he doesn’t want to move—

A distant, spine-tingling shriek echoes through the thick wool in his ears, and panic grips him, his heart lurches – if he doesn’t move, he might die.

Martin rolls onto his knees, almost falling back onto the sand beneath him as the bottom of his back screams in protest, and forces himself to look up.

Dust hangs in the air still, covering everything in some kind of weird sepia filter, blurring details and making anything more than a few feet away impossible to see. There’s sounds coming from further in the dust cloud, shouts and hisses and pained noises, but—

Martin goes cold. Where is everyone?

He’s got to find them. He’s got to. Something must have happened that made part of the ridge collapse or something, and if Martin’s just slipped and fallen and rolled his way down some kind of landslide onto the beach then—

Then the others have to be out here somewhere, because if he lets himself think the other thing, his chest gets so tight that he can’t breathe at all.

Moving hurts. There’s sand in every place the fall broke his skin, and trying to stand makes the pain in his back flare so bad it brings tears to his eyes. He fumbles with shaking, bloody fingers for his pocket, for the little bottle Sasha gave him, and – oh, Sasha better still be alive so he can thank her.

Whatever’s in the bottle burns going down, but Martin fights past the urge to gag and downs the whole thing. There’s a very unpleasant minute where his hands and arms throb and itch as skin regrows and knits itself back together, his sides and his back tingling and stinging deep below the skin, sound suddenly becoming crisp again after a very loud pop in his ears.

It does the job, though. After that’s over, Martin doesn’t feel any pain at all.

He stands properly now, his legs still shaking, and squints up at where he’d fallen from in a futile attempt to see anything, but it’s no good. There’s still too much dust to see anything much more than a massive slope of rubble leading up to the parts of the ridge that are still intact, let alone anything on the very top.

Except – wait. He can just about make out a shadow of something, large enough and tall enough to have a distinct shape even from all the way down here.

Something with a long body and too many legs that looks horribly familiar—

Martin’s whole body goes rigid as a familiar blood-curdling shriek echoes down from the ruined ridge, but – he can’t be sure, but it sounds hurt. And he thinks he can see bright bursts of fire from up there, cutting through the haze of the dust, and a glowing, white-hot shape that looks almost human-like—

Jon, he thinks, so at least Jon’s still up there and alive. Relief floods through Martin along with a sick jolt of fear for Jon, up there fighting that Sinspawn.

Maybe someone else is with him. Maybe Daisy - she was right next to him before everything collapsed. At least he’s got his aeons. Martin has to hold onto that, because there’s no way he can climb back up there.

Martin starts to walk across the beach, stumbling every few steps when he puts his foot in a hole or trips over an unseen rock. After a few steps, he draws his daggers, remembering what Tim said about being able to catch anything that gets close by surprise. The dust has settled more than when the cliff first collapsed, but he still can’t see all that far. Not far enough to see anything that might come jumping out at him.

Where is Tim? Where’s Sasha?

Martin’s throat is dry, but he shouts their names anyway, and tries not to think about all of the limp shapes he can see lying half-obscured by dust as he goes. There was a whole vanguard of Crusaders and mounted Chocobo Knights down here. There were even more people on the lower ridges where the machina cannons were. If Sin’s attack collapsed part of the ridge then…

He can’t think about it. He can’t think about it now.

“Come on, guys, please, please be okay,” he whispers desperately, and raises his voice again to call for Tim and Sasha.

“—Martin?! Martin, is that you?!”

“Sasha?” She sounds close. Definitely close, though he can’t quite tell where. “Keep, keep talking, alright, I’ll come to you!”

It takes a minute, but then he spots her off to the right, in a gap between the settling dust clouds. She’s crouched over something, bent over in a way that makes him think for a moment that she’s hurt, until he sees what – who – she’s bent over.

Tim is pale, way too pale, his face a stark white against the dark rock and underneath the dust. Sasha is grimacing as she looks Martin’s way, her arms shaking as she holds them taut, keeping her hands pressed down against Tim’s abdomen.

Martin stops dead mid-step.

“Oh – no, Tim—”

“Martin,” Sasha says, and her voice is the same steady one that gave out orders when the Sinspawn broke loose up on the ridge, except that Martin can see the fear on her face. “I need you to be my second pair of hands, and I need it quickly, alright?”

Martin sucks in a breath and forces himself to nod. Okay. Okay, okay, okay, he can do this. Sasha’s got something in mind, he just has to do as he’s told.

“Tell me what you need,” he says, his voice a lot steadier than he feels.

“Tim needs to get a potion down his neck, but I need both hands to hold the edges of this wound together. Go into the pouch on my belt, third one on the right.”

Martin does, pulling one of the stolen bottles free and uncorking it.

“Is – is he awake?”

“He’s been going in and out. Mostly in, but not with it.” Sasha sucks in a breath and raises her voice. “Tim? Tim, can you hear me?”

Tim stirs, making a wounded noise that barely sounds human, but that seems good enough for Sasha. Between her and Martin, they manage to coax Tim into some kind of position where his head is elevated enough for him to drink safely, Martin’s knees supporting his shoulders, his head cradled in one of Martin’s arms. Sasha keeps up a running commentary the whole time to try and keep Tim aware, and it seems to be working; he keeps stirring every so often, or makes a sound like he’s trying to say something, only to make too sudden of a movement and fall back with a gasp and a pained spasm.

His skin is deathly pale and clammy, his breathing shallow. Martin tries to keep his mind away from this and on actually helping.

Getting Tim to actually drink the potion in Martin’s hand is a whole other thing. Martin and Sasha take turns with words of encouragement, guidance, and downright pleading, trying to cajole him into taking a sip, a few drops, even just one drop at a time, but it’s slow, way too slow, with Tim aware enough to drink but not conscious enough not to gag and sputter when he tries to swallow the bitter, stinging liquid. Martin’s heart skips a beat every time as he stammers out a mixture of sorrys and just a bit mores and who knows what else, squashing down the fear that Tim will pass out before he drinks enough of it for it to start healing him.

When Tim screws his eyes tightly shut and says in a hoarse, rough, but entirely lucid voice, “Fuck me but that stuff’s rancid,” it’s all Martin can do not to burst into some horrific mix of tears and hysterical laughter.

“It’s working,” Sasha says in a rush of relief. “You’d better finish that whole bottle, Tim, I’ve got things to do that aren’t just holding you together.”

“This is why you aren’t a healer,” Tim retorts with a pained grunt, his entire body tensing up as he lets out another heartfelt swear. “Forgot how rough potion heals are.”

“I know, but this is all we have right now,” says Martin, trying to go for something between firm and sympathetic and falling short of both when his voice just won’t stop shaking. “So – so do as Sasha says and, and bear with it just a bit longer, alright?”

He helps Tim finish the rest, and only then, when Tim is lying back, breathing through the discomfort of the healing with a slight grimace on his face and a lot more colour flooding back into his cheeks, when Sasha finally removes her shaking, blood-stained hands from Tim’s side, only then does awareness of anything else come back to him. The way he’s absolutely drenched in a cold sweat and can’t seem to stop shaking, the distant sounds of metal clashing against something, of the odd shout or cry or – or snarl. It all comes back in a rush, where they are, still in the middle of a battlefield, he’d been so focused on making sure Tim was okay that another landslide could have happened and Martin probably wouldn’t have clocked it until it happened—

“Martin. Martin, hey, stay with me.”

Sasha’s voice brings him back; she’s looking at him a little nervously, like she’s half-wondering if she needs to start worrying about him next now that Tim’s out of the woods.

“You okay?” she asks, one hand half-outstretched.

“No,” says Martin, and brings both hands up to rub at his eyes behind his glasses. “Yeah? I – I kinda have to be, right?”

He sighs, pushes his glasses back into place, and decides he’s not going to give Sasha a chance to answer that. “I, I’m not hurt, anyway. You?”

“Same here,” she says with a thin smile. She does look okay, for someone who just fell from the top of a ridge in a landslide. Barely even has a single scrape. Maybe she’d been able to dose herself with one of their stolen potions when she hit the ground, same as Martin did.

“You did well,” she adds, looking back at Tim, who’s now breathing steady and even, one arm flung over his eyes. “Tim’s – I really think he’s going to be okay.”

“Only ‘cause of your quick thinking earlier. If you hadn’t nicked those potions…”

Sasha grimaces.

“Yeah, well… I don’t want to think about that. Jon’ll have to give him a look-over later if –” Sasha stops, sucks in a sharp breath, and then continues firmly, “when. When we find him.”

“Oh— Jon! I don’t think he fell down with us, I, I saw him – well, I think it was him, I’m sure it was one of his aeons, but, that Sinspawn that got free earlier, I’m – I’m sure he was fighting it, back up there.”

“Alone?!”

“I – I dunno,” Martin shudders, quailing at the thought. “I – I hope not.”

Sasha bites her lip, a worried frown on her face.

“… We’ll just have to trust in him. And whoever’s with him. We shouldn’t move Tim yet—”

“I can still hear you,” Tim mutters, his voice still hoarse. He drags his arm away from his face, squinting at Sasha with an exhausted, harried look. “Did the machina weapon go off yet?”

“I don’t think so,” she says, shaking her head and looking back out to sea. “–There, look – you can see Sin still out in the bay.”

At that, Tim attempts to scramble himself into a sitting position, and manages to jostle Martin uncomfortably while he’s at it. Martin lets Sasha be the one to grab Tim’s arm to stop him trying to get any closer, and rubs absently at his leg where Tim jabbed it as he looks out in the direction Sasha was pointing.

He almost wishes he hadn’t. The dust from the landslide has cleared enough by now that as Martin’s eyes sweep across the beach towards the water – it barely even looks like a beach anymore – he catches sight of body after body after body, too many to linger on, each and every one making him feel colder and colder. Out in the bay itself, Sin still squats in the water, the shield they saw before it collapsed the ridge flickering around it where it meets the waterline as it turns its massive bulk towards the shape of the Al Bhed’s machina weapon, now flickering with its own light and gathering more with every passing second.

“What’s it doing?”

Martin doesn’t know if he means the weapon, Sin, or both; it doesn’t matter. More and more light builds and crackles around the point of the weapon until, with a sharp ripple, it bursts forward in a brilliant, jagged beam of light, like a never-ending lightning strike.

In an instant, the flickering remnants of Sin’s shield encase it again in a protective bubble, the beam of the machina hitting it but not punching through yet – sparks scatter and waves ripple outwards from the impact point across the rest of Sin’s shield.

Martin’s heart is in his mouth. They’re holding their ground. The Al Bhed inside that machina – they’re actually holding their ground against Sin.

Distant voices reach his ears from high above.

“Melanie – Melanie, wait—!”

“Let go of me! I belong out there, not with you!”

“It’s not safe—!”

There’s the sound of something or something sliding down a steep slope of loose rock; Martin tears his eyes away from the stalemate in the bay for just long enough to see a figure dashing carelessly down the loose slope created by the landslide, throwing up too much dust in their wake to see who it is.

“Is it breaking through?!”

Tim’s voice pulls Martin’s eyes back to the bay. Out there, the jagged lightning beam keeps up its relentless pressure against Sin’s shield. The shield expands again and again, pushing the path of the lightning back, but every time it does the people inside must do something to increase the power or sharpen the focus of the light, or maybe both, because the beam is soon pushing the shield back, closer and closer to the body of Sin itself. Until the colour of the shield lightens as though buckling under the pressure, until the point where the beam hits it begins to warp and bend inwards, as though it might just break through—

Something happens. He can’t see what exactly, it’s too far away. But something comes bursting past either side of the machina weapon’s beam, like Sin’s shield cracking under the pressure, and blasts toward the machina cannon with a sharp burst of magenta light.

A few seconds later, there’s a loud sound, something exploding and bringing crashing metal and broken glass in its wake.

A second later, the lightning beam abruptly vanishes, as the tower of the weapon bursts into round clouds of fire and smoke, and as if in slow motion, everything above it collapses in on itself, brought to its knees in a hail of jagged parts and bright bursts of flame.

Another second, and a cloud of dust and ash and smoke billows upwards and outwards as it falls. It doesn’t stop the wind carrying the distant sound of screams.

Martin’s hands are clasped hard over his mouth. He doesn’t know when that happened.

Voices carry again from somewhere above, raised loud enough in panic and anger that he can just about make out words. It sounds like Jon, and maybe Daisy, and possibly – Jude as well? He can’t think of anyone else who’d laugh at a time like this.

“I have to do something—”

“Try that now, you’ll just get its attention and nothing else! We’ve got to let it go this time.”

“But—”

“Don’t make me knock you out, Sims!”

“If you’re not entirely stupid, you’ll listen to her. You’re still far too weak to overcome that…”

Out in the bay, Sin begins to turn slowly away back out to sea, a low, almost plaintive rumble echoing from it over the waves. Except—

It pauses, mid-turn. Slowly, slowly, turns its gargantuan body back towards the shoreline, its massive head shifting this way and that like it’s – forgotten something. Or looking for something.

Faint shouts of alarm go up from anyone still able to make them – is it coming back for another attack, why isn’t it moving, if it lets loose something else like that they’re finished—

Sin’s massive body stiffens in the water, the sudden movement from something so huge easily visible even from so far off. Its head has stopped moving, pointed directly at the beach. Martin feels a sudden pressure in his head, some kind of invisible weight on his shoulders, and for some reason – for some reason he can’t shake the feeling that Sin is looking right at him.

It doesn’t make sense. It’s too far away, something that size can’t possibly make out individual people from so far off, there’s no reason for Martin to have drawn its attention – but the pressure in his head gets worse, grey blotches beginning to dance in his vision, and it’s the only thing he can think, that for some reason, it’s staring at him.

With that terrifying thought, everything around him gives way to darkness.

Chapter Text

Martin opens his eyes to find himself floating, surrounded by buildings.

There’s some kind of light below, and he wants to go towards it so he does, gradually sinking down, down, the buildings rising above his head alien and familiar all at once. Is this Zanarkand? No, it isn’t. It can’t be.

There’s a roof lower down than the others, with a big black shape on it getting bigger and bigger as he gets closer – a person – no. A bird? Yeah, a bird, one of those big great black birds, and the closer he gets the bigger the bird is, the more eyes it has, shiny black opals peeling open down the centre of flight feathers and actually this isn’t—

It’s not a bird, of course it’s not a bird, how did he not notice before, the feeling coming off this thing in waves? Like the feeling whenever Jon summons. Not a bird, an aeon—

The bird-aeon blurs around the edges, standing on the edge of that roof with all that light below, and something flashes—

So you’d rather it be—

Why is that voice so familiar? Pressure builds in Martin’s head as the bird-aeon locks two of its shiny black opal eyes with his, the silence dragging him down closer to the roof like a physical weight—

…nobody should have to

Wait, wait, that’s a familiar voice too, why is it so familiar and why does hearing it make him so cold—

The bird-aeon rears back as Martin reaches a level with it, pauses, blurs even more at the edges in a sudden shower of pastel greens and pinks and blues until it’s a person, someone standing on the edge of that roof dressed head to foot in black, still blurring at the edges with all that light below, someone deathly pale with long straight hair and a slightly crooked nose.

Martin stands with his two feet on the roof and stares at this man who looks – so weirdly familiar.

“Wait,” says the man in black, in a voice that echoes strangely and sounds rough from disuse. “You’re not who I thought you were.”

Martin stares at him, speechless. Now that he’s close, he can see that the man who was the bird-aeon – wait, would that make him a— no, in any case, he’s not entirely solid. Martin can see the buildings behind him through his skin.

“Huh,” the man says. “You’re… new. This is – all new. Who’re you?”

“I…” Martin starts reflexively, then shakes his head.

“No,” he says, and then, finally finding his voice, “No, no, no, hang on a minute, I should be the one asking that! Who’re you, and why’re you so familiar, and, and how come every single time I’ve got even the tiniest bit too close to Sin I keep dreaming of you and this place, ‘cause –” and a bitter laugh escapes him that sounds nothing like him “—‘cause this isn’t the first time!”

Even as he says it he knows it’s true. He didn’t remember before, but – for whatever reason he does now, that this isn’t the first time he’s seen this place, that every other time he has it’s been after Sin showed up. Zanarkand. Kilika. Now. It’s just never been so clear before.

The man in black raises his eyebrows.

“… Huh,” he says again, as though digesting everything that just came out of Martin’s mouth. “Well. This place is – uh. This is Sin’s core.”

“Wait. What?”

The man smiles wanly, spreading both hands palms-forward. “Surprise.”

“No, no, that’s—” Martin feels like he just got punched. “That doesn’t make any sense, how can we be—”

“Dunno,” the man shrugs. “You said you’re dreaming right now?”

“I - yeah? I-I mean, the last thing I remember is passing out, so—”

“So I guess you must be. Which is… really weird,” the man frowns, looking at Martin sharply with eyes that still manage to make Martin think of the shiny black opal eyes of the bird-aeon, despite the fact that they’re hazel. “That’s – it’s not supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to be here, or – no, wait. You’re not supposed to be there.”

Which doesn’t make any sense at all, even by dream-standards, but before Martin can open his mouth to say so, or ask what the hell that’s supposed to mean, the man’s translucent skin, already pretty pale even without the see-through factor, suddenly drains of all colour, his face moving from a mix of skeptical and suspicious to pure horror in the span of a second.

“—Hey,” Martin says, and suddenly he’s closer to the man without thinking about it, “What’s hap— are you okay?”

“Haven’t done this for a long time. Spoken to people, I mean,” the man says, except now his mouth isn’t moving in time with his words and that blurred outline is blurring even further, those pastel pink and green shapes – pyreflies – swirling around him in droves. With a bitter, echoing laugh, he adds, “Been a people. I haven’t known what’s going on out there, or – I have, but not really, it’s – fucking hell, what did it do, what did I do—”

That feeling of pressure is back, the same as what he felt before he passed out, he’s sure of it, and the man in black’s ghost-like form is warping and changing, and now Martin wants to get away but he can’t seem to be able to move.

“Hey,” he stammers, and barely even knows what he’s saying because he barely even knows what the man was talking about, but – he’s got to help somehow. “Hey, hey, c’mon, just, just take a minute to calm down, we can— there’ll be some way out of this. What do you mea— like, are, are you trapped here somehow, is that – can that happen?”

No good. Whatever’s happening, Martin’s words aren’t reaching him, and in a burst of pyreflies and dark feathers and shiny black eyes the man in black is replaced by a towering bird that lets out an anguished shriek—

Martin closes his eyes – there’s a sound like rushing wings –

And then the wing-sounds and the shrieking abruptly stop.

Martin cracks open one eye, and finds himself in his little hiding spot on the roof of his apartment building.

“Um. Hi. That was close.”

Martin whirls around, and finds himself face to face with a man with a purple hood, a large, richly-coloured one that covers his eyes and leaves half his face in shadow, gold talismans strung from many cords on his belt. He has skin the rich colour of dark mahogany, and he seems… tired.

“Oh, for crying out— Who are you?”

“Sorry, I, uh,” the mysterious man starts, in an uncertain voice that’s entirely at odds with the rest of his general demeanour. “I don’t think I should answer that yet. I don’t want to hurt you, though, I promise.”

As if to demonstrate how serious he is about the not wanting to hurt Martin thing, the hooded man takes a few steps back, off the edge of the roof and onto empty air.

Martin doesn’t know if he can actually get hurt in dreams, but he appreciates it anyway. Not enough to forget how fed up he is.

“Hm. Okay, so can you tell me—”

“No!” the hooded man blurts out hastily. “No, sorry, Martin. But you’re not ready for that conversation yet. And – neither’s he. You’ll have to be patient a bit longer.”

“Screw being patient, this isn’t— wait,” Martin says, deflating as somewhere, the memory of that shade of rich purple standing in the middle of a ruined road breaks the surface. “Didn’t I see you in— back in Zanarkand, just before— do I know you?”

Wait, he never told this guy his name.

“No. But I do kind of know you.”

The hooded man sighs, and turns his back, enough for Martin to see the golden wheel emblazoned on the back of the hooded jacket.

“This isn’t working – sorry, but I think it’s time for you to wake up.”

Martin opens his eyes.

As Martin comes to, he finds an ashen-faced Tim and Sasha crouching over him.

“Oh, thanks be for that,” Sasha breathes. “When you went down, we didn’t know what to think.”

“I—” Martin tries, and then gives up in favour of trying to sit up. His head feels like so much cotton wool. Of all the times for one of those funny dreams to come over him, it had to be now? “Sorry, I – I don’t know what came over me.”

The dream is already fading fast as Martin remembers where he is, the chaos of everything that happened since Sasha woke him up in the dead hours of the morning crashing back into his awareness in a rush. He makes to get to his feet, swaying a little even with Sasha’s steadying hand on his arm.

Any small hope Martin might have had that the massacre on the beach was just another part of a very long, very awful dream is shattered as soon as he gets his bearings enough to look around; bile rises in his throat, and he has to clap a hand over his mouth, fighting the urge to retch.

With the dust the landslide caused earlier finally all but gone, Martin finally has a good view of the shoreline for the first time. It's completely unrecognisable. Wide, deep trenches score the sand, some of them right down to the bedrock below; the rubble and loose rock and earth from the landslide that dragged them all down off the cliffside when Sin made its first attack piles up against the remaining rock face like some terrible oversized mockery of a collapsed sandcastle. The rest of the beach is pitted with shallow craters and great chunks of stone like pockmarks all over its surface.

And all over, the bodies. People, chocobos, strewn brokenly over the sands. Not all of them in one piece. Some barely even recognisable as the people or beasts they were.

Sin is long gone, barely a dot on the horizon. Only this remains.

“Fuck,” Martin whispers into his hand, barely aware of what he’s saying.

“Yeah,” Tim says, in a ragged, haunted voice. Although he's on his feet now, and standing steadier than anyone who just suffered an injury like the one Martin and Sasha had to hastily heal for him has any right to, Tim's face is still pale, far paler than it should be. He looks like he might be in shock.

It’s like Kilika all over again. Except – except this time, they were all right here, where it was happening and – and they still couldn’t do anything.

Faint, agonising sounds carry over to them across the sands; some of them sound barely human.

There’s people still alive down here, Martin realises. There’s people still alive, who need help, and—

“Where – where are the others?”

Sasha almost flinches at the question. Like she, too, was too mired in the horror of what they’re all standing in the middle of to have thought about it up to now.

She takes a couple of deep breaths in, visibly steels herself, and nods. “Good question. Come on, we’d – we’d better find them.”

She goes to Tim now, giving him a slow, careful nudge on the arm. He responds slower than he should, blinking at her with dull, confused eyes. Martin bites his lip at the sight; he’s never seen Tim like this before, not even after Kilika.

“Tim,” Sasha says gently. “Come on. Let’s find our friends.”

They don’t say a word about it, but Martin and Sasha end up on either side of Tim, walking close to him as the three of them stumble through the wasteland Sin left behind. It only feels natural to keep a steadying hand on one another as they walk, trying not to look too closely at the bodies they pass, to at least let the dead have some dignity. Tim stumbles through it like a zombie; whether from some leftover toll from his injury or through the sheer crushing weight of everything that's just happened, Martin can't tell. He's really not sure how much longer Tim’ll stay on his feet.

Soon, they hear a voice, frantic, panicked, calling out the same name over and over.

“That sounds like Georgie,” Martin says, his heart swelling in relief for an instant - she's alive, she's alive - before it sinks like a stone once more.

It's Melanie's name she's calling. She’s looking for Melanie. Martin hasn’t caught sight of her since before the landslide. Hasn't heard her voice since that moment on the ridge when someone - it might have sounded like Jon - was trying to stop her from getting lost in the chaos of the battle.

Martin remembers the figure he glimpsed through the dust cloud, the one that slid down the mess of the landslide and out of sight, and his chest goes tight.

Sasha nods, her face pinched.

“Come on,” she says, and the two of them begin steering Tim in the direction of Georgie’s voice.

It’s not just Georgie; Basira is with her as well, her sharp eyes combing the beach as Georgie calls out again and again, her hands cupped to her mouth.

“Georgie!”

Georgie whirls, her face a mask of fear. Even through all that, she still lets out a sigh of relief when she sees the three of them stumbling towards her.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she says when she reaches them, Basira hot on her heels. “This is…” She lets out a shaky breath, her voice breaking. “This is an absolute nightmare.”

“Tell me about it,” Martin says weakly. “Are – are you two alright?”

“We’re in one piece,” Basira says. Her voice is steady, but Martin can see the deep line between her eyebrows; she’s just as shaken as the rest of them. “Looking for the others. I think – I think Daisy and Jon were with each other, so, they should be okay. No sign of Georgie's Melanie yet, though.”

“We can help you look,” Martin says.

Georgie looks almost desperately grateful. “Would you? I – I don’t know what’ll happen if someone else finds her first.”

Do people really hate the Al Bhed that much? Martin wants to ask, but bites his tongue. Now’s not the time. Now’s really not the time.

“Yeah. Yeah, ‘course we will. Only – Tim, he’s – how are you doing?”

“I can look,” Tim says in a dull voice, after just long enough to be worrying. Martin meets Sasha’s eyes; she looks just as worried as he feels.

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Tim,” Sasha says. “You’re having a sit down right here with me for a bit.”

The most worrying thing is that Tim doesn’t even argue. Martin helps Sasha get him down onto the sand before she briskly pulls off her scarf and unfolds it, wrapping it around Tim’s shoulders like a blanket.

“You go, Martin,” she says, squeezing his arm for just long enough that he can feel the way her hands are shaking. “We’ll meet back here when you find everyone, alright?”

“I’ll stay with you,” Basira says. “Just in case you need someone to run for a healer.”

That leaves Martin and Georgie to stumble over the beach together, keeping their eyes open for any sign of Melanie, or Daisy, or Jon.

“Melanie!” Georgie calls again, and folds her arms around herself. “I knew this would happen,” she mutters. “I told her getting involved in all this was suicide, but she just—!”

She sucks in a breath. “Sorry. I just can’t stand this.”

Martin doesn’t know what to say.

“We’ll find her,” he settles on. “Come on, let’s keep looking.”

Georgie nods, and they do just that, trying to avoid the worst of the holes dotting the sand as they walk.

To their great relief, it only takes them a few minutes longer to find Melanie; when Georgie calls out, she calls back, faint and on the edge of panic. They follow the weak sound of her voice until they see her, huddled next to one of the boulders embedded deep in the sand from the landslide.

“Georgie?” Her voice is unsteady, shaking like a leaf. “That better be you.”

“The one and only,” Georgie calls, obviously fighting to keep her voice even.

“She’s not looking at us,” Martin says in a low voice.

“I know,” Georgie says, closing her eyes. “Come on, let’s get over there.”

When they reach her, it quickly becomes clear why Melanie wasn’t looking at them.

Her head darts up at the sound of their heavy footfalls crunching over the sand, and Martin’s stomach drops. The left side of her face is covered in blood, a gash running over her eye, and her intact right eye flits unfocused from left to right, passing over both of them without seeing them at all.

“Oh, no,” Martin breathes. Georgie drops to her knees at Melanie’s side.

“Melanie, hey. It’s me, I’m here,” she says gently. “What got you?”

Melanie shudders. “Sinspawn,” she spits, the venom undercut by the fear in her voice. “I can’t see shit, I – are you okay?”

Her hand flails blindly at her right side, finding Georgie’s shin; Georgie takes it in one of her own hands and squeezes it tight.

“I’m fine. You know me, I’ve got too much common sense for this sort of thing to get me,” she jokes. She bites her lip, twisting her head this way and that as she tries to get a better look at Melanie’s wound.

“Is there anything I can do?” Martin asks helplessly.

“Who’s that?” Melanie asks sharply; Georgie winces a little, and Martin guesses that Melanie’s grip on her hand must have just got a whole lot tighter.

“It’s alright, it's just Martin. You remember, one of Jon's guardians,” Georgie reassures her. Her eyes flick back and forth as she thinks, and then she nods, taking a sharp breath in as she comes to a decision.

“Okay, here’s what we’ll do. I can clean wounds just fine, but I don’t think a potion’s gonna cut this one. You’re going to have to put up with a proper healing,” she says, reaching over with her unoccupied hand to gently brush the hair out of Melanie’s face.

“I’m not going to go begging at one of their temples.”

“You don’t have to. We’ve got a white mage right here. Or close by, anyway.” Georgie looks back at Martin now, her face pinched. “Martin, could you – could you find Jon and bring him here? Please. He can’t be far.”

“I—yeah. Yeah, I’ll try and be quick,” Martin nods, and turns back to the ruined beach, searching now for any sign of Jon.

Martin hears him before he sees him; as he slides down into the bottom of one of the shallower trenches carved into the sand, his ears catch that distinctive voice somewhere up above, on the other side. It sounds like he’s arguing with someone.

“I’m right here, I can help!”

“You’ll wear yourself out before you can possibly get through all of them,” comes a voice that Martin recognises as Daisy’s. “You’re not the only white mage out there—”

“I’m the only one who isn’t shut up at the nearest temple!”

Martin tries to scramble up the other side of the trench, only to realise that it’s a lot sheerer than the side he came down on; practically vertical, with no real footholds. Rather than waste time struggling to pull himself up while listening to the two of them argue, he shouts as loud as he can, hoping to attract their attention.

“Jon! Daisy!”

The voices abruptly stop; a few seconds later, Jon’s face peers over the side of the trench, swiftly followed by Daisy’s at his side.

“Oh— Martin!” He sounds relieved. “Are you alright? You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No, no, still in one piece—”

“And the others? Are they with you?”

“Back along that way,” Martin says, motioning back the way he came on the other side. “Um, Basira’s fine – she’s waiting with Sasha and Tim, I – Tim’s, um, not doing so great.” Seeing the way that Jon tenses at the words, Martin hastily backpedals with, “Um, he’s not injured or anything! At, a-at least not right now, Sasha and I took care of it, but I think he’s in shock or something, he was really pale when I left them – Look, Jon, you’ve got to come now, it’s – it’s Melanie, Georgie’s with her and, she’s in a bad way. A Sinspawn got a nasty hit on her and – a-and there’s something wrong with her eyes.”

Jon’s frown has been getting more and more pronounced as Martin babbles his way to the actual point, but as soon as Martin stops talking, his mouth pulls into a resolute line.

“Show me.”

“Jon—” Daisy starts.

“I don’t want to hear it, Daisy!” he snaps. “Just – please help me down there, alright?”

Daisy doesn’t look happy about it, but she does help. Jon lands unsteadily on the uneven ground at the bottom, and Daisy drops down after him, the two of them looking at Martin expectantly.

“Okay,” Martin says, turning back the way he came. “Okay, so it’s back up here on the other side, come on—”

“One moment.” Jon’s frown takes on a note of frustration as he looks at the bank that Martin scrambled his way down moments before, and he starts pulling his arms back out of the sleeves of his summoner’s mantle, pulling and shoving the sea of fabric up over his head until he’s out of it.

“There,” he says breathlessly, wedging the thing in a haphazard drape between his chest and his arm. “Damn thing was only getting in the way trying to cross all this, I – go on.”

Martin leads them back to where he left Melanie and Georgie as quickly as he can without any of them falling down a hole. They’re still exactly where he left them. An empty bottle lies on its side next to her on the sand, alongside some strips of fabric now stained with blood; it looks like Georgie’s done some work on trying to clean Melanie’s wound in the time it’s taken him to find Jon.

Georgie looks up when she hears them coming, her eyes fierce, only relaxing when she sees who it is.

“Oh, Jon!” She sighs, managing to conjure up a smile from somewhere. “Am I ever glad to see you made it out.”

“Likewise,” Jon tells her, joining her at Melanie’s side and tossing his crumpled outer layer to the ground nearby. “What can I do?”

Martin watches anxiously as Jon examines Melanie with gentle fingers, his expression grave.

“There’s –” he starts after a while, and sighs, “A lot more toxin in this wound than I would like. I’m not sure what effect that’ll have when the magic hits it.”

Melanie, who up till now has been bearing up under Jon’s scrutiny with a surprising amount of grace, shifts. Her voice is weaker than it was when they met her up on the ridge, her words slurring a little, but the demand in them is still sharp.

“You’re not sure?”

Jon’s eyes narrow. “It’s not exactly the sort of malady they bring you when learning white magic in Bevelle,” he says testily, sounding like he’s having to try very, very hard to keep his voice low. “I’ve never seen this before.”

“Georgie,” Melanie says, with an effort, “didn’t call you over to poke and prod at me and call it fascinating.”

Jon stiffens. “That’s not what I’m--!”

“Jon,” Georgie says sharply, cutting through his protests. She takes in a deep breath through her nose, and says, much softer now: “Will it hurt her.”

“No!” Jon says, looking horrified at the thought. He shakes his head. “No, no, the healing magic won’t hurt her, it’s – it’s toxin, not a curse or anything like that.”

Georgie nods, her shoulders relaxing. “Then we haven’t got anything to lose. Right, Melanie?”

Melanie doesn’t say anything at first, and Martin wonders for a moment if she might have passed out. She hasn’t, though. She looks too scared for that.

“… No,” she says eventually, so soft that Martin can barely hear it. “Go on then, temple boy. Do your worst.”

Jon gives a jerky nod, light playing around his fingertips as he leans in to start the healing. Martin lets out a breath he hadn’t really realised he was holding. Whatever happens now – Jon’s doing everything he can. Martin’s done everything he can. Even if it doesn’t really feel like it.

At a bit of a loss, he turns to Daisy, who’s looking on with a hard, frustrated set to her mouth. Martin still isn’t really sure how to approach talking to Daisy at the best of times, let alone now, but…

“Daisy… What were you and Jon arguing about when I found you?”

Daisy looks surprised to be asked the question. Martin supposes that, as intimidating as she is, she probably doesn’t get many people asking her very many questions.

She doesn’t look angry, though. Just… troubled.

“He’d stop to check every single fallen person on this beach if we let him,” she says with a short sigh. “Just on the off-chance he could do something about it. It’s not good for him. Learned pretty fast on our way down from Bevelle that he can get obsessive about things. Fiends aren’t the only thing a guardian has to protect their summoner from.”

Martin blinks. “That… might just be the most words I’ve ever heard you say in one go.”

“You asked.”

“Yeah,” Martin sighs. “Yeah, I did.” He turns it over in his mind for a while. Daisy’s not wrong, is the thing. He’s a little surprised; he didn’t realise that she was this perceptive. Not when it came to things outside of perceiving monsters physically trying to get the drop on them, anyway. “It – it can’t be bad to let him help a little, though, right? I-I mean – he can do something.”

“Sure. And when we try to cut him off, how d’you think that’d go?” Daisy folds her arms, leaning her weight on one leg as she talks. “Jon… he deals with stuff by turning it into something he can control. Except, that also means that when stuff goes wrong, it’s his fault.”

Martin stares at her. “But that’s – that’s ridiculous.”

“’S how he feels. Dunno if you heard him earlier, but back there with Sin, he was dead set on trying to summon.” Daisy shakes her head. “Three aeons.”

Martin did hear. He spends a few seconds trying to unravel the sort of mindset that would lead the person who’s probably doing the most of anyone else on Spira already to stop all of this to somehow feel as though he’s responsible for it happening, and quickly gives up. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t think he can.

“So – it really does have to be the Final Summoning or nothing, then?” he asks.

Daisy is very quiet for a while before she nods.

“We just saw what happens when people try to take shortcuts,” she says grimly.

That’s an awful thing to say, Martin thinks, and opens his mouth to say so, but Jon is crossing back over to them with a tired, unsure look on his face.

“Is Melanie okay?” Martin asks as he draws close.

Jon pulls a face.

“Define ‘okay’,” he says wearily. “She’s resting, for now. I told Georgie I think it’d be better if she sticks near us until she’s fine to move, but – that was a difficult healing to go through. I don’t – I think the toxin was repelling the magic. The wound itself healed fine, there’s barely a mark, but it – I think it might take a while for her sight to come back. If ever.”

He sounds like he’s saying it because he feels like he has to. Almost like it’s something that he has to confess now before people start slinging it his way as an accusation later.

“That’s the toxin,” Daisy says brusquely. “Nothing to do with you.”

Jon nods. “You’re right,” he says in a low voice, but Martin’s not so sure that Jon believes what he’s saying. Especially not after the conversation Martin just had with Daisy.

“You did everything you could,” he offers. “That’s – that’s all any of us can do.”

Jon shakes his head with a sigh.

“Not yet,” he says heavily. “Daisy, could you watch over everyone? I… there are... I need to do the Sending.”

It’s not just one Sending this time.

The beach is too long, the dead too spread out; there are too many dead, and not enough living with the strength left to move them. Jon walks the beach from end to end for what has to be hours, performing the Sending over and over again until the pyreflies are so thick in the air that the entire shoreline seems lit by a faint glow.

Meanwhile those few survivors lucky enough to still have the use of their hands and minds begin to trail down onto the beach to begin the desperate task of aiding those struggling to cling to life. Their own little group clusters together in a small corner of the beach, and those of them that can still gather the strength for it do their best to divide their time between caring for their own and giving what help they can elsewhere. What remains of the morning passes into a grim and bitter afternoon, the sun high overhead struggling to shine through a dense layer of cloud. Martin looks up at one point while helping a small group of surviving Crusaders clear a path to the road for the wounded, and catches sight of Jon still at it, wheeling his staff around in great, sweeping arcs.

People die, and Jon dances. Martin wants it to stop.

But the more he thinks about it, the thought rolling around and around in his mind like a particularly sharp piece of grit, the more he realises that it won’t stop. Not until Sin is gone. Not even then, because sooner or later, Sin will just come back, and the whole thing will start up all over again.

If Jon does defeat Sin, does everyone in Spira just expect him to carry on fighting it every time it comes back for the rest of his life, until his luck finally runs out?

It’s a horrifying thought.

If they manage to make it as far as Zanarkand, and Jon does bring the Calm... in that moment, Martin makes the quiet decision that if he makes it that far, he’ll spend the time that Spira has to pause for breath to find a way to change that. No more Kilikas, no more Operation Mi’ihens. No more Sendings for Jon. There has to be a way out there to stop Sin from taking on a new shape and coming back. There has to be.

When they aren't forced to make stopping the death it brings their first priority – they’ll find it.

Somehow, they will.

Chapter Text

The remainder of that terrible day passes by in a haze.

There's really only so much lifting and carrying and clearing any of them can take, even without the battle that came before and the rumours that fly around the ruined beach in despairing whispers. Missing comrades, bodies that have been found. Bodies that haven't been found. By nightfall, almost everyone left standing has heard the rumour that Manuela, the leader of the Crusaders herself, hasn't been seen since the ridge collapsed in the attack that morning. Precious few of those repeating that news seem hopeful about why that is.

It takes some of their small group longer than others, but sooner or later even the hardiest or most stubborn of them have to admit defeat and accept that they’ve reached their limit. Exhausted in both body and spirit, they huddle together in their little corner of the beach, for the most part catching only snatches of broken sleep a few minutes at a time, if at all.

Georgie and Melanie stay with them, at Jon’s insistence and only after a lengthy argument that comes to a decisive end when Melanie tries to storm away from him and almost staggers head-first into the nearest pile of debris. There’s an urgent anxiety to the three of them the entire time that makes Martin nervous; but he’s simply too exhausted and too out of the loop to weigh in on their bickering from where he's half-dozing fitfully next to Tim and Sasha.

“At least let us walk you both to the Moonflow,” he thinks he hears Jon saying in a low, agitated whisper. “Or – or somewhere on route where you can find friends. After today, there’ll be too many faithful crawling up and down Djose—”

“Says the summoner travelling with two warrior monks—”

“I’m not your enemy!”

“Both of you, quit it.” Georgie’s voice sounds harried and tired. “I get what you’re trying to say, Jon, but…”

Martin must have dropped off into some proper sleep at that point, if only for a little while, because the next thing he properly remembers is Sasha shaking his arm urgently.

“Sorry, Martin,” she says, the apology genuine even through the tightness in her voice. “I wouldn’t want to wake you, but Jon’s on the warpath saying we’ve got to leave.”

“Wha?” Martin rubs his bleary eyes, trying to get his brain into gear. “Now? What’s going on?”

“Not sure. I think Daisy might have spotted that Maester coming down the road with some of the wagons for the wounded.”

“Wait, you mean – what was her name, Jude?”

Sasha grimaces; that tells Martin everything he needs to know.

“Oh, no. That’s not good,” Martin mutters, dislodging his glasses as he rubs a hand over his face.

He didn’t like Jude one bit during their brief meeting up in the command centre, and he has no reason to think that a second one would change his opinion. Jon must be just as keen on avoiding her, if he’s trying to get them all to leave now.

“Okay,” Martin sighs, pushing his glasses back into place. “Let’s get moving, then.”

As swiftly as they try to leave, it's too little, too late. Whether due to Daisy not catching sight of the approaching Maester’s party early enough, or just because the incoming travellers are far better rested and faster than they are after avoiding the worst of the massacre the day before, they don't quite manage to avoid crossing paths with Jude. As they stumble up the bank leading up to the Djose road, a wagon crests over the top, surrounded by an entourage of warrior monks and priests that can only mean one thing.

Martin knows they’ve lost all hope of getting away unseen when Jude’s eyes light up with recognition on spotting Jon. She motions for the wagon she’s in to stop. In spite of her sombre expression, Martin can’t help but notice that her eyes are alight with an amusement that feels… cruel.

“Well, well, Lord Summoner.”

Jude rises from her seat in the back of the wagon, performing a languid, almost apathetic version of the Prayer. Jon, Daisy, and Basira all return the gesture as if by rote.

“Fancy seeing you still here. Elias will be pleased to hear you made it out all in one piece. You and your… guardians.”

Martin does not like the look of Jude’s smile. On his left, Martin catches Tim moving out of the corner of his eye, and realises he’s trying to place himself in front of Georgie and Melanie. As unobtrusively as possible, Martin tries to do the same. He’s not quite as tall as Tim, but he’s bigger; maybe it’ll go some way toward shielding the two of them from view.

He doesn’t know if Jon is at all aware of what’s going on behind him, but either way, he’s doing a very good job of drawing attention.

“Did you know this would happen?” Jon’s demanding. “From the start?”

Jude raises an eyebrow.

“Did I know that poor, stupid Manuela was playing with things she didn’t understand? Yes,” she says, sounding bored. “But we all knew that, didn’t we? After all, you walk the summoner’s path. I assume that’s for a reason.”

Martin really does not like Jude.

“I don’t understand why –” Jon starts, his fists clenched at his sides. He cuts himself off, taking a breath, and continues, “You hold the rank of Maester, you could have stopped this operation at any time!”

“Stopped some blundering, excommunicated fools who turned their backs on Yevon’s light and threw in their lot with the heretics, all the while insisting they weren’t stupid? Even if I had, they wouldn’t have listened to me. Now all we can do is clean up the mess Manuela and her Al Bhed lackeys left behind.”

“Convenient for you, isn’t it?” says Tim abruptly. “That all the faithful made it out okay, while the heretics are the ones who lost their lives.”

As one, Jude’s small retinue of warrior monks shift; they don’t make any move to draw their weapons, but Martin’s been fighting things for long enough now that even he can recognise that change in stance when he sees one.

Martin swallows and shoots Tim a sidelong glance. One that he hopes conveys that he gets it, he really does, but should Tim really be antagonising a Maester right now? Here?

Jude lifts a hand magnanimously. Martin’s not fooled; she might be calling the monks to stand down on the outside, but her real message is clear. She’s reminding them who’s in charge.

“I suggest you hold your tongue, Crusader. You may be guardian to the Grand Maester’s favourite, but there will be plenty of people putting you under scrutiny for your failures yesterday… you, and anyone else who would try to take advantage of Spira’s one great hope for their own gain.”

It’s like she’s not even making an effort to be sincere. The bottom drops out of Martin’s stomach as Jude says, all false innocence: “You seem to have picked up some unwelcome tag-alongs since we met at the base camp, summoner. Would you like my people to vet them for you?”

“No!” Jon blurts out. “No, they’re with me.”

Behind him, Martin hears Melanie make a small, choked sound of indignation. He hopes nobody else heard it.

Jude raises her eyebrows. “Really.”

“Yes, really!” Jon insists. Martin bites his lip and prays that Jon will somehow learn how to sound more convincing sometime in the next thirty seconds. Right now he just seems to be letting his mouth run away with him, saying whatever comes to mind in a blind panic. “In, in fact, one of them was – she was injured protecting me. I-in the chaos of the battle, she –”

Jon takes a breath, and draws himself up to the fullest height his roughly five and a half feet affords him. When he next speaks, his voice is much steadier. “While I appreciate your dedication to my safety, she was wounded while defending her summoner, as a true guardian would. No summoner on pilgrimage could ask for more. And – certainly no one else could call such an act into question. Not even the Grand Maester.”

Martin holds his breath.

“The famous bond between summoner and guardian,” Jude drawls, sounding almost disappointed. “Well, seeing as you gave such a passionate defence, I suppose that as a Maester of Yevon I have no choice but to accept your judgement. In matters of your pilgrimage, that is your… privilege, after all. So long as you continue to journey, of course.”

“I will,” Jon tells her curtly. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have a long road ahead.”

“Of course,” Jude says, sounding more amused at Jon’s snippiness than anything else. “Don’t dawdle too much on the way to Zanarkand, summoner. Who knows how many more scenes like yesterday Spira can take?”

Again, she manages to make that question sound pointed, and also wholly insincere. She pauses a moment, before turning back to Jon with a sly smile.

“Oh, and – one more piece of… advice, from me to you. I would keep your guardians close. Given recent events, it would be a shame were any found to have strayed along the way.”

Tim looks like he’s having to try very, very hard not to throw himself at Jude right now, honour guard of warrior monks be damned. Martin can relate. Mostly, though, he just wants to be as far away from the awful Maester as possible, as fast as possible.

They make their way past Jude's wagon as fast as they're able, turning back onto the Djose highroad leading northwards. Whether by wordless, tacit agreement or simply a shared feeling, everyone is careful to place themselves so that Georgie and Melanie walk in the middle of the group; after Jude’s final, transparent threat, everyone seems to be hyper-aware of their presence. The going is slow, or at least, slower than the pace they've been setting so far on their journey; it goes unsaid, but they all know that they have to account for Melanie, who still leans on Georgie’s arm for support. Jon walks at the front now, and Martin can see Georgie staring at his back with narrowed eyes, clearly biding her time until it’s safe for her to speak her piece.

Soon enough, when they reach a point at which she must reckon they’re far enough from Jude and her cronies to speak freely, she clears her throat.

“So, Jon. Any chance we can stop and ask what all that was about back there? Because last time I checked, I specifically said I wanted to stay as far away from all of this as possible,” she says stonily.

Jon stops dead in his tracks, his shoulders tense.

“You know, that’s a great question!” Melanie sounds like she’s been putting all of her energy into keeping herself held back until now. “What the hell was that? You wave your magic hands over my eyes and you get to keep me, is that it?”

“I panicked!” Jon snaps, turning to face them all with a harried look.

“No shit,” Basira murmurs. Jon fixes her with a baleful glare before turning his attention back to Georgie and Melanie.

“Look, I –” Jon gestures uselessly as he tries to find the words. “I would have asked, of course I would have. I know how you both feel about all this, but – with Jude there, and, and the monks, I – I didn’t want them to hurt either of you.”

Georgie’s expression softens at that, but Melanie scoffs.

“So of course the right thing to do was to make this decision for both of us against our will. Of course.”

“I’m sorry! What was I supposed to do?”

“Jon thought pretty quickly, all things considered,” Sasha pipes up with a raised eyebrow. Jon looks at her gratefully. Sasha pulls a face, and adds, “Jude doesn’t seem like she’s the sort of person who takes prisoners.”

“And being his guardian is supposed to be better how?” Melanie demands, unconvinced.

“How ‘bout the part where you can still walk around freely,” Daisy mutters.

Melanie turns toward the sound of Daisy’s voice, her face a mask of contempt. “Freely. That’s a joke.”

“Melanie isn’t wrong,” Georgie says, with an impressive glare of her own for Daisy.

She turns back to Jon, her glare shifting into a look of expectation. “You heard Jude’s parting shot as well as we did, right? She called your bluff, Jon. If we get caught away from you, there’ll be trouble.”

“I— I did hear it,” Jon admits, his face twisting in distaste. “I am sorry, Georgie – Melanie. I didn’t intend to trap you on this journey with me, but it seems I’ve managed it anyway.”

Georgie snorts.

“Oh, give over being so dramatic,” she tells him. With a sigh, she says, “Look. You know how I feel about this whole thing. I’m not going over all of that again. And I’m not thrilled you’ve done this, Jon, not one bit, but I also know you. This is classic Jonathan Sims all over, this is.”

Jon blinks, his brow furrowing in confusion. “I – I’m sorry, what?”

“Panicking and making snap decisions at the first hint of danger?” Georgie says frankly, with a knowing nod. “Classic Jon.”

Jon makes a scandalised noise of protest, trying to argue. He doesn’t get very far with it, mostly because everyone else is nodding and making various noises of agreement with Georgie’s blunt assessment of his character. Martin included; he might not have known Jon for as long as most of the others here, but he’s seen enough to know that Jon is prone to running into things headlong with only the barest hint of a plan if nobody thinks to stop him.

All that said, he’s not really sure what else Jon could have done this time, or if there even could have been a better way of handling it. That whole situation down near the beach with Jude and all those warrior monks… Martin doesn’t know what they would have done to Georgie and Melanie if they had been allowed to ‘vet them’ the way Jude wanted, but he’ll bet it wouldn’t have ended well.

Honestly, he thinks Melanie’s being a bit unfair.

“Great,” she’s seething now, while Georgie stands there with a long-suffering look on her face. “Great. I can’t believe this. While you were standing there running your mouth and panicking, did you forget that everything is blurry shadows to me right now?”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” Jon says stiffly, still looking a little flustered. “Obviously we’ll say you’re guardians if anyone asks, but by all means, don’t feel obligated.”

“Oh, believe me, I don’t. You seem like you’ve got more than enough already.”

“This may shock you,” Jon says, voice dripping with sarcasm, “but you’re far from the first to say so.”

“Well, now you’ve heard someone else say so. You’re welcome,” Melanie fires back without pause. With a small sound of disgust she adds, “Guardian to a bloody summoner. Unbelievable.”

A moment longer, and she sighs, throwing her hands up in seeming defeat. “Fine. Getting dragged off to Zanarkand. Guess this is what’s happening now.”

“Cheer up,” says Tim from the back, with a ghost of his usual humour. “Who knows, you might even decide you like us.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“If you’re done throwing your tantrum, can we keep going?” Daisy says, the barest hint of a growl in her voice. She turns and strides off without waiting for an answer, throwing a muttered parting shot as she goes. “Plenty out there who weren’t as lucky as you.”

The mood of the party does not improve much after that. Melanie alternates between sullen silence and outright antagonising Daisy and Jon; Daisy is usually wise enough or at least thick-skinned enough not to take the bait, but the same certainly can’t be said for Jon. He snipes back as good as he gets without fail, for however long it takes one of them to finally get the last word in. The rest of them give up on trying to stop them after a while. It’s a waste of energy that none of them really have; besides which, they’re all on shorter fuses than normal. The shadow of Operation Mi’ihen hangs heavy over them all.

Martin does his best to keep his head down and stick by Tim and Sasha. Like everyone else outside of Melanie and Jon’s more animated moments, they’re both subdued, going for long stretches of road without speaking a word.

Martin can’t blame them. Tim's near-death experience aside - and Martin still shudders inside whenever that crosses his mind - he hasn’t forgotten that the two of them are Crusaders, too, and probably, almost definitely, had friends taking part in the whole disaster; friends who weren't so lucky, who got caught in the line of fire. More than once Martin thinks about stepping away and giving them at least a little bit of privacy to work through whatever they must be feeling, but the idea of walking with anyone else right now makes him want to curl up in a ball somewhere.

The two of them are the only ones in Spira Martin can confidently call friends. It's horribly selfish of him, but after everything they saw the day before, he just needs the comfort of knowing they're nearby.

The Djose road is far from empty as they pass along it, but in that there is little comfort. Mostly Martin catches sight of Crusaders; the walking wounded and those supporting them, making what can only be their slow, painful way to the temple. Occasionally there’s the unmistakable sight of the robes of a priest of Yevon, making their way up and down the road to give what small help they can. Martin can’t help feeling relieved that regardless of what their leaders seem to think, there are still local people from the Djose temple who want to help. Maybe they think that the Crusaders have already suffered enough.

The worst part by far are the people who stop them as they pass by. Not that everyone does, far from it; most people are all too understandably consumed by their own troubles, and Jon is less of a spectacle than usual with his big summoner’s mantle still folded up and stashed well out the way in a pack somewhere. But it still happens enough for Martin to begin dreading the next time somebody glances up and recognises them all as a summoner travelling with his guardians.

With the priests, at least, it’s not so bad; a hurried exchange of the Prayer, maybe even Daisy or Basira giving the stranger a tip of where they last saw someone along the road in need of help, before the priest bids them farewell with a heartfelt wish for a swift Calm. But more than a few times, it's one of the surviving Crusaders who spots them and approaches, wishing them luck on their journey and apologising for the failure of the operation, or even for taking part in the operation at all, and that – that’s what Martin quickly finds he can’t stand.

It’s even worse when one of them tries to press a potion into Jon’s hand; Jon firmly tells the man that he should keep it for himself, all the while clearly trying extremely hard to keep his composure and not start shouting at a stranger.

“Why do they keep doing that?” Martin finds himself muttering almost without thinking. “They’ve got to know it’s not their fault. Right?”

“Sure,” Tim mutters back. “Except for the part where all of this—” he makes a harsh, abrupt gesture – “pretty much proves that whatever rubbish Yevon said about Sin and the Crusaders was right. Hard not to fall right back into it.”

“And, you know,” Sasha adds in that same low mutter, “There was always the hope that if things did go as planned, Jon would be able to stop his pilgrimage.”

There’s a pained look on Sasha’s face that Martin’s never really seen before. She must be feeling some of that same guilt. It shocks him; that's not like her. She's usually way too pragmatic for stuff like that.

But then again, stuff like that is always different when it's someone who's close to you. And Sasha's had a front row seat for just how rough this pilgrimage can get.

“But that’s not your fault either,” he says slowly. “It’s not anyone’s fault apart from Sin’s. And – whoever or whatever made it in the first place, I guess.”

Tim and Sasha exchange one of those looks that Martin can’t quite read.

“Sure,” Tim says again. “You could look at it that way if you want.” He stares off out to sea at the horizon, a tight set to his jaw. “Nice of you to say it, anyway.”

Martin doesn’t know what to say to that, but he’s left with a quiet frustration toward the whole thing that he can’t shake – as well as the feeling that once again, he’s just being humoured, all the while missing something that everyone else in Spira seems to be in on.

With nothing else to focus on aside from stewing in his own feelings and keeping an eye out for any trouble, Martin goes back to doing just that, feeling a tug of sympathy in his heart whenever they pass by exhausted Crusaders resting by the side of the road. Slowly, though, he notices something else; of all the people they’ve passed, be it priests coming from the temple to offer help or Crusaders heading in that direction seeking healing, or rest, or – Martin grimaces at the thought - forgiveness – he hasn’t seen a single Al Bhed. Not once.

They can’t all have died in the attack, can they? The thought chills him right through. They can’t have.

Unless –

With a sinking feeling, Martin remembers Georgie’s panic about someone else finding an injured Melanie before they did, Jon’s concern about the two of them travelling alone when there would be so many Yevonites about, Jude’s comments from earlier that morning. Maybe if any of the Al Bhed from the operation did survive, they’re avoiding the main roads. Either from knowing that no one would want to help them, or – worse, fearing that people may want to hurt them.

Martin glances over at Melanie, worrying his lip. She has to be worried too, right? She must be.

Maybe it’s not Martin’s place to ask, but. Screw it. It’s not a bad thing to care.

He sidles closer to Georgie and Melanie, clearing his throat to try and give a little warning of his coming up behind like that.

“Hey, um, Melanie? It’s Martin. Coming up on your right if that’s okay?”

Melanie turns her head toward him, her eyes still tracking nothing in particular. Jon was right about one thing; there’s barely a mark left to show where she was hit. Her eyes – bright green, with those curious spiral pupils – look completely clear, only their restless shifting from side to side indicating that there’s anything wrong.

“Sure, if you want. What can I do for you, Martin?”

“I was just… wondering something.”

Melanie raises her eyebrows; on her left, Martin can see Georgie doing the same.

“Oh, this’ll be good. What have you been wondering?”

If part of Martin hadn’t already been constantly questioning the wisdom of this in the back of his mind, Melanie’s tone would have sorted that right out for him. As it is, he figures he’s already committed to this. Might as well see it through.

“Do… do the Al Bhed have much in the way of, um. Healers? I – it’s just been on my mind while we’ve been walking, and—”

“Are you actually serious right now?” Melanie interrupts him, an incredulous frown on her face.

“Well—”

“No, give me a sec,” she says, holding up a hand; Martin has to neatly dodge out the way to avoid her catching him with it by accident. “You sound serious, which is… a whole other thing. I’m used to a completely different kind of bullshit.”

Martin thinks about what he said, and winces. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it, I’m just…”

“Worried? Yeah, that’s what surprised me. We don’t get much of that from Spirans.” Melanie lets out a bitter laugh, before she absently pats Georgie’s arm where she’s leaning on it, inclining her head in her general direction. “Georgie excepted, but she’s different.”

“Thanks,” Georgie says dryly.

“Welcome. So,” Melanie continues without missing a beat, “To answer your question, yeah, we’ve got our own ways of looking after ourselves. We’re not going to rely on people who probably wouldn’t even piss on us if they saw us on fire.”

Which… honestly, given everything Martin has seen even during his scant few weeks here in Spira, seems fair. Not that it does much to bring down his worrying.

“So, any of the other Al Bhed who got away, they’re…”

“Stop that,” she says sharply. “I can hear you pitying us and I don’t want it. Yes, we’ll have holed up somewhere we know is safe to lick our wounds, is that what you want to hear?”

“Melanie,” Georgie says, somehow managing to sound equal parts sympathetic and disappointed. “Come on. He’s asking ‘cause he cares.” Georgie cranes her head forward to throw a sharp look at Martin. “I assume that’s why you’re asking, yeah?”

“Obviously!” Martin protests, defensive in spite of himself. “I just – I just wish there was something we could do. It – it doesn’t seem right.”

“Huh,” Melanie says after a beat. She looks surprised. Thoughtful, even. “You don’t hear that very often.”

“Maybe there is something we can do,” says Jon.

Martin starts, his head swerving forwards to look at Jon ahead of him.

“Come again?” he asks; he’d almost forgotten that walking close together in a group like this, it’s impossible to really keep any conversation totally private unless you put a real effort into it.

“Excuse me?” Melanie echoes in disbelief, while Georgie mutters, “Oh, I know that look.”

Jon, seeing that the eyes of most of the group are now on him, stops craning to look over his shoulder and instead turns to face them properly, bringing their steady progress to a halt.

“Melanie, you – you’d know the safe places around here, wouldn’t you? Where they are, how to get to them.”

That statement lies there for a moment; Georgie sighs and nods with a quiet Thought so, just as Martin feels understanding of what Jon’s really asking begin to dawn on him.

“Oh no,” Melanie says, clearly coming to a similar conclusion. “No. No way.”

“I’m a white mage, which means that this is literally the kind of situation I was trained to help with,” Jon argues, his voice carefully measured in that way it only is when he’s really trying at it. “I can help. If you’ll just let me—”

“If you think for one minute that I’m leading Grand Maester Douchard’s pet summoner to where my people are holed up, you can think again!”

Jon scowls at her, before he seems to remember that Melanie can’t actually see that and lets out a very audible huff instead. “I’m not his pet.”

“You could have fooled me,” Melanie snorts.

“Fine,” Jon says in a stiff voice, throwing his hands up. “Fine. If you’re that convinced that whatever supplies they have will be enough to help—”

“Your magic isn’t automatically better than our medicine! At least we don’t rely on a few special people to pray the problem away—”

Oh, for goodness’ sake.

“Will both of you give it a rest already before you get into yet another argument?” Martin says testily. The two of them start, twin looks of shock and bafflement on their faces. Martin catches Georgie biting her lip to hide a grin, and promptly decides to ignore her. “It’s – it’s not helping.”

“… Melanie,” Jon says after a moment, with the face of someone who just bit into a lemon. “I really do want to help. I can help. It – it might be the only way I can, outside of the obvious. Please let me do it.”

“Alright,” Melanie says, looking as though she’s having a similar lemon-sucking issue. “Say you really do just want to help out of the goodness of your heart. Georgie’s told me enough about you that I might just believe it, but if you expect me to let all of your guardians just waltz into one of our safe places, including the two of them in their shiny Bevelle-issue armour—” this said with a generalised wave of Melanie’s right arm in whatever direction she thinks Daisy and Basira are in, which Martin again has to dodge— “you’re more of an idiot than I thought you were.”

Before Jon can take the breath he needs to start arguing back again, Basira cuts in.

“I dunno what you’ve heard growing up Al Bhed, Mel,” she starts with her arms folded, “But so long as we’re Jon’s guardians, we don’t answer to the Grand Maester either.”

“Though try telling him that,” Daisy mutters, glaring at the ground mutinously.

“You really expect me to believe that?”

“I can’t make you believe anything,” Basira shrugs, seemingly unaffected in the face of Melanie’s contempt. “But that doesn’t stop it being true. Whatever we do while we’re Jon’s guardians – it’s separate to anything we do as part of the temple, or the monks, all of it. The pilgrimage takes priority. And the precepts say that so long as a summoner journeys…”

“‘All else is his concern’” Daisy finishes for her. She looks over at her partner, looking impressed. There’s even a faint, fond smile curling the edge of her mouth. “Been doing some reading, Basira?”

Basira grins. “You know, there’s a big library up at the temple. Lots of interesting books in there – these guys would know,” she adds, with a nod at Jon and another at Sasha and Tim. “Though I gotta admit, that was definitely one of the drier ones.”

Daisy gives a little huff of amusement at that before she’s all business again.

“Point is,” she states. “Basira’s right. Might not like it, but if this is what Jon wants to do, we’re not gonna blab either. So long as he keeps going all the way to Zanarkand, whatever else he wants to do on the way is his business. That’s the summoner’s privilege.”

That… actually goes a long way toward explaining how Daisy and Basira have been with Jon.

While Martin turns that concept over in his mind a moment, Melanie shifts restlessly, turning herself in Daisy’s direction with a glare bordering the very edge of furious.

“A privilege? I’m sure it is!” she fumes. “Listen to yourselves, you really think Yevon’s being so generous, don’t you? ‘Just this once, you can do whatever you want without having to tie yourself in knots following all of our ridiculous rules’.”

She begins punctuating herself with sharp hand gestures; Martin, being wise to how this goes by now, takes a couple of neat sidesteps out of range.

“Knock yourself out! Even go and heal heretics if you feel like it!” Melanie carries on, her voice rising with every word. “What a fantastic way to repay them for—”

“Melanie?” Georgie says sharply over her, cutting off her tirade with a gentle tug on her arm. She’s not looking at Melanie, though. She’s looking at Jon, who’s staring at her with a frantic look in his eyes that seems very close to panic.

Turning to Melanie properly now, she says, soft yet firm, “Babe, can we have a minute to talk about this?”

“What?” Melanie seems a little off-kilter after being thrown off the warpath in such a quiet way. “Oh, sure, I guess.”

Quietly murmuring directions and warnings about the terrain to her the whole while, Georgie takes Melanie to one side over by the rock face stretching over their heads, just far away enough to be out of earshot. The two of them begin a hushed, spirited conversation, and, feeling extremely confused, Martin turns back to Jon.

He looks less frantic now. In the way of someone who’s just dodged something that should have definitely hit them.

Martin frowns. “Jon, are you alright?”

“What?” Jon jumps. “Oh – yes, I’m fine. Why?”

“You don’t look it.”

Caught off-guard by Martin’s bluntness, Jon almost looks like he’s about to laugh. He doesn’t, though. Instead he raises an eyebrow, saying dryly: “Are you always so tactful?”

At that moment, Melanie’s voice drifts over, very audibly saying “He what?!” before whatever conversation she’s having with Georgie dies back down to something Martin can’t hear.

Martin blinks in their direction for a moment, and then shrugs.

“Oh, you know,” he says, turning back to Jon. “When I have to be.” That gets him a little half-laugh, and Martin takes a moment to feel weirdly triumphant about it before he circles back to the matter at hand. “Seriously though, you looked like you’d just seen a ghost or something back there when Melanie was going on like that.”

“Oh,” Jon says, looking very evasive all of a sudden. “Oh, well, you know – it’s busy out here, still, a-and, she was getting rather loud. There’s – I know Daisy and Basira were talking about summoner’s privilege, but there’s really only so much I can do if, i-if she starts shouting blasphemies everywhere and people hear her doing it. You know?”

Jon is such a terrible liar.

The problem is, the lie he’s gone with is a very good one. He just completely fails at the delivery.

“O… kay,” Martin says slowly, hoping that he can convey through that word alone just how little he’s buying what Jon’s saying right now. “If that’s what you’re saying, sure.”

Jon frowns at him, the space between his eyebrows creasing. “Yes? What are you trying to say?”

Martin debates the pros and cons of calling Jon out on his lie, but before he can come down on one side or the other, Georgie and Melanie are coming back to them. Georgie’s expression is neutral, almost carefully so. On the other hand, Melanie looks as though she’s still barely containing her anger under the surface, a hard frown pulling down at her mouth.

“Alright,” she says, after taking a deep breath. She sounds a bit calmer, at least. “Alright, Georgie’s caught me up on some things. I’m still gonna moan about it, so don’t expect that to change. But if you really want to help, Jon, get over here and bring the map with you so that I can get Georgie to show you where we’re going.”

Martin wonders what, exactly, Georgie has been catching Melanie up on. Her mask of nonchalance is too good; Martin can’t even begin to guess, and he doubts either of them are going to let on about it any time soon.

For his part, Jon looks surprised. Surprised, but grateful.

“… Thank you,” he says to Melanie, after a moment of stunned speechlessness.

“One other thing,” she says, holding up a finger in warning. “Georgie holds the map, and the two in the plate armour don’t get to peek at it. I might not catch them at it, but Georgie will.”

Jon nods, before again visibly realising that Melanie can’t see him doing it.

“Understood,” he says.

“Cool,” Melanie says, and holds out a hand.

After a moment of confusion, Jon shakes it. Melanie actually smirks.

Chapter Text

By the time they reach the place Melanie says they’ll find any of the Al Bhed who managed to make it out, it's almost nightfall.

The hideout is far from the main road, down a narrow ravine whose entrance is perilously close to the high tide mark. Jon, Georgie, and Melanie have taken a shared point for most of their route there; Georgie to do most of the navigating, describing any landmarks to Melanie to check that they’re still going the right way, and Jon to act as a second pair of eyes on the map and a second support for Melanie if needed. The way to this safe place is rough enough going for a sighted person; Martin’s lost his footing more than once as they’ve been making their way here.

As a concession to Melanie’s demand that Daisy and Basira not be involved in any of the navigating, the two of them have been relegated to guarding the rear. Martin’s not sure if they’re happy about it, exactly, or if they even feel any sort of way about it at all. They seem to accept it well enough either way; more than once, Basira’s crossbow fells a fiend that was trying to sneak up on them from behind.

Eventually, the eight of them are stood in front of the tight gap leading into the ravine, the sound of the ocean behind them far too loud for Martin’s liking. Melanie sighs and gives a nod after Georgie describes what they’re looking at.

“Yep,” she says heavily. “This is the place. If anyone’s here, this is where they’ll come.”

After a moment’s thought, she nudges Georgie, silently asking her to help her turn around, and faces the rest of them.

“Okay,” she starts decisively, “When we go in there, let me talk. They’re not going to trust any of you, especially not the ones dressed like you’re from the temples. So wait until I tell you we’re all clear, alright?”

“Alright,” Jon says, and everyone else echoes him so that Melanie can hear them agreeing.

“Good,” she says. “Glad that’s settled. So… I guess this is it, then. In we go.”

In they go, inching into that tight space behind Melanie and Georgie. Melanie, at least, seems more at ease here; her hand trails along the rock as she leads them forward, grounding her enough in space that she doesn’t have to use Georgie’s arm. They follow her further into the ravine until a harsh voice rings out in a language Martin doesn’t understand, echoing off the sides of the ravine.

“Don’t move,” Melanie tells them, before shouting something back in what Martin can only assume is the same language.

“That’ll be the Al Bhed, then,” Tim murmurs behind him, as this back and forth continues. Martin cranes his neck to try and see what’s going on ahead of them; he can just about see Melanie, and in front of her, a man wearing the same sort of clothing as she is. He looks at Melanie with deep relief and worry, and at the rest of them with deep distrust.

“Melanie says you want to help?” he says eventually, in heavily accented Spiran. “This is no trick?”

“It’s a fair bit out of our way for us to have come here for a trick,” Jon says, and Martin stifles a groan. Georgie must have shot Jon a pointed look, however, because the next minute he hastily adds, “But no, it’s not a trick. We – we were on the beach, during the operation. We want to help.”

“Hmm.” There’s a pause while the man considers this, scrutinising what he can see of them in the fading daylight. After a moment, he nods.

“Okay. You can come. But I don’t think everyone will be happy to see it.”

“I told them that already, believe me,” Melanie mutters.

Still, the invitation has been granted, however grudging. Their new guide points them down deeper into the ravine before climbing back up to his vantage point to continue his watch, and they steadily make their way inside.

It isn’t long before the narrow gully opens out into a sort of cove, bounded on all sides by the same rock that seems to be characteristic of the area around Djose. Within lies a surprisingly well-organised campsite; large cloth awnings supported by sturdy wooden poles thrust into the rock face, fold-out tables made out of what looks like scavenged machina parts, and in place of a campfire, a small basin in the centre of the area has what looks like a scavenged fire gem glowing at its heart, giving off light and heat without smoke.

There are only a handful of people here; far less than the number of bedrolls and camp beds lying under the awnings would suggest. Even fewer of those people look to be in any way fit to be moving around.

One of the few who does spots Melanie as soon as she enters, and he races towards her with a punched-out gasp and a rapid stream of Al Bhed.

He also spots Jon only a second later, and whatever it is he has to say to him sounds… distinctly more aggressive. Martin can’t make out any words outside of Yevon and summoner, but whatever it is has Melanie rounding on him the next minute with an equally fiery-sounding torrent of words.

“He’s here to help, you pillock!” she adds in Spiran a moment later, presumably for the benefit of everyone else present.

Huh. Martin wasn’t expecting that.

Nor was the apparent leader of the Al Bhed, it seems; it’s enough to leave him speechless. Martin can practically see the wheels turning in his head as he casts his eyes over the rest of them.

“And the others?” he asks gruffly. “Guardians?”

“And Crusaders, some of us,” Tim pipes up. “Can’t speak for everyone, though.”

The man sighs heavily, running a hand down his face as he mutters quietly in Al Bhed.

“Alright,” he says. “I ain’t proud enough not to accept help that’s offered freely. And I ain’t stupid enough to lie and say we ain’t in sore need of it. Can’t fathom why a summoner would take a detour to help us, but I’m grateful. You want a bite to eat first, or—?”

“No,” Jon says, shaking his head. “Just show me where I’m needed.”

Where Jon is needed is with most of the survivors in the camp, in one way or another. Whatever medicine the Al Bhed working on Operation Mi’ihen brought with them, it was obviously enough to at least save the lives of all those who’ve made it back here to the hidden cove.

Even so, going off of Jon’s grim, tight expression as he goes about his work with the most heavily injured in the camp, an Al Bhed healer at his side, it might not have been enough to keep some of them alive for much longer without aid.

The rest of them are shown to a clear space under one of the awnings and invited to make use of it, though not without a look that shows that they’re clearly being held in high suspicion for the duration of their stay. Melanie, by contrast, is whisked off by a couple of the other Al Bhed to be fussed over and asked what appears to be a very in-depth series of questions about her whereabouts and what’s happened to her since the last time they saw her. Martin thinks he sees a couple of toolkits being pulled out after a while, and then Georgie is called over to join the conversation, and that leaves the remaining five of them to sit there, watching the warm glow of the fire gem from the centre of the cove and feeling distinctly unwelcome.

He’s glad they’ve come here. He’s glad Melanie agreed to let Jon help, he is. But as Martin sits there with his limbs and eyelids heavy from the strain of fighting Sinspawn and clearing debris and carrying makeshift supplies to and fro on a desolated beach, followed by a full day of walking on precious little sleep – honestly, he’s just wondering if anyone plans on stopping Jon before he collapses, that’s all.

Tim’s already passed out despite all his best efforts, snoring softly next to Sasha, who’s ostensibly looking over one of her journals but doesn’t appear to be actually taking in any of the words. Basira’s dozing on one of the cots nearby. Even Daisy is nodding where she sits, somehow managing not to topple over as she does it. It’s like finally getting a moment to stop has hit all of them all at once.

Martin’s sure it would hit Jon the same way, if the man actually showed any sign of letting it. His dark circles have been even darker than usual all day.

He’ll make himself get up in a moment. He’ll force himself to move, and go and ask Jon if he hasn’t done enough for the night, at least to keep the people here out of danger long enough for him to rest. Or he’ll at least ask if someone else is planning to do it. In just a moment.

When Martin opens his eyes, the warm red glow of the fire gem is gone from the cove.

In its place is the grey half-light of what must be the early dawn, only barely giving enough light to see by down in this enclosed space. If Martin looks up at the sky, he can still see the last few stars out.

In that sleepy, half-conscious state that comes just after waking, he briefly thinks about rolling over and going back to sleep. That notion is quickly thwarted by the persistent ache radiating down the junction between his neck and his shoulder, which is probably what woke him up to start with, and is also probably his own fault for falling asleep in a weird position last night.

Nothing for it; he’ll at least have to get up and try and ease the ache off somehow, or he’ll be of no use to anyone for the day ahead. Absent-mindedly kneading the troublesome spot with the fingers of his other hand, he stumbles to his feet for an impromptu, very early morning wander to stretch his legs.

Everyone else is still asleep, it looks like. With a jolt, Martin remembers what was on his mind before he dropped off – actually persuading Jon to get some damn rest – and he casts his eyes about the rest of the cove, seeking out the summoner’s now-familiar frame.

Predictably, he finds him nowhere near a bed. Or, nowhere near a bed of his own, at any rate. Jon sits slumped with his legs curled sideways beneath the rest of him against the rickety metal frame of one of his patient’s camp beds, one arm pillowing his head at an awkward angle, his hair sticking up in a myriad of directions in a way not too dissimilar to how it was when they met in the temple at Djose.

It can’t be comfortable. He must have just passed out like that while keeping an eye on the person on the bed. Knowing Jon, maybe even mid-spell.

Martin immediately feels a weird sort of guilt for not pulling Jon away before he passed out last night. Thinking back to what Daisy said back on the beach, about Jon dealing with things by making them something he can control, and even before that with the way he’s been with the temples, and Kilika – Martin’s willing to bet that Jon pushed himself past his second or maybe even his third wind before exhaustion finally caught up with him like that.

It’s not good for him, Daisy said. Too bloody right it’s not.

“What are we going to do with you?” he says softly under his breath, shaking his head.

Martin almost doesn’t want to wake him. But Jon really doesn’t look comfortable, sleeping like that all small and cramped hanging off the edge of a camp bed. If he doesn’t go lie down somewhere for a proper sleep, it’ll be his whole body that’ll be complaining about it the next day.

So Martin does the only sensible thing, and quietly steals over to him to wake him up long enough to get him to lie down properly.

Jon’s face has something of a stubborn frown about it even in sleep. Even with his mouth hanging slightly open, his breathing deep and even, there’s that deep, well-worn groove between his eyebrows. Hovering over him, for a moment Martin has two equally powerful and equally fanciful mad urges, to either brush some of the loose hair away from Jon’s face or to smooth away that line on the edge of his brow with his thumb.

Martin does neither of those things, but he is very, very tempted. Jon deserves a soft touch; he would deserve it even if he hadn’t been running himself ragged doing things for others.

Stop it. He’s under way too much pressure to think about things like that. He doesn’t even like you half the time, Martin reminds himself sternly, and leaves it at that.

Instead, he places a hand on Jon’s shoulder to shake him gently awake.

“Jon? C’mon, you can’t sleep here, you’re gonna get such a crick in your neck.”

Jon stirs fitfully and swats a feeble hand in Martin’s general direction. Martin bites the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh.

“Jon, I’m serious. You’ll be the one moaning about it if you don’t go sleep somewhere proper.”

Jon finally opens his eyes after another bout of gentle shaking, blinking blearily as he starts properly awake. Not fully awake yet; the unfocused look in his eyes attests to that. But awake enough to get him moved.

“Wha’?” he slurs in a voice still heavy with sleep and tiredness both. He moves his head and winces; apparently that crick in his neck is there already. Finally managing to fix his gaze on Martin, he looks – well, puzzled. Almost hilariously so.

“Sorry,” Martin says. “But this really isn’t a great place to pass out, you know?”

“What?” Jon seems to notice exactly where he is, finally, and his sleepy movements take on a fluster to them. “Oh – I passed out?”

“You passed out,” Martin confirms. “C’mon, at least go lie down somewhere with the others and get some real sleep in.”

“No, I –” Jon huffs, scrubbing a hand over his face in frustration and raking the fingers of his other hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t, I – thank you for waking me, Martin, but what I need to do—”

“What you need to do,” Martin says firmly, in a low voice so as not to wake the person in the bed beside them, “Is sleep, Jon. You’ve done loads already. More than enough, even. You’re not superhuman.”

“I never said I was,” Jon says in a low, testy whisper. “But I’d hardly say I’ve done enough—”

“What, because you’re a summoner?” This is really becoming a difficult conversation to have at a whisper. “You’re still allowed to rest, Jon. No matter what Jude or, or even Elias says. Can you – do you even have any magic left right now?”

Jon goes silent for a moment; whether because he’s looking inwards and doing a check-in with himself, or simply because he’s avoiding answering Martin’s question because it hit close to the mark, who can say.

“It never feels like enough,” he says after a while, so quiet and bone-deep exhausted that Martin barely hears it this time.

Oh. Something squeezes painfully at Martin’s heart.

“It does from where I’m standing,” he says. “You’re doing so much, Jon, it’s – kind of a bit ridiculous, actually? You don’t have to push yourself so hard all the time. You’ll sleep right the way through your own Calm the rate you’re going.”

Jon fixes Martin with an odd look for most of the time he’s talking, a strange mix of equal parts cynical doubt and wary hope. Both are wiped away entirely by the time Martin stops speaking, a flash of angry suspicion taking their place.

Jon abruptly stands, stumbling a little as the blood flows back into his legs after so long cramped up like that, and catches Martin on the elbow with one hand as he goes.

“Follow me,” he says in a tight voice that brooks no argument. Martin gapes at him in the half-light, bewildered, and Jon turns and looks irritably back over his shoulder, saying, “Well? Come on.”

Wondering how exactly he’s managed to put his foot in his mouth this time, Martin follows him.

Jon walks briskly in spite of the scant light available, in spite of whatever fatigue he must be feeling. He takes a sharp turn into the ravine leading back out toward the coastline, one hand thrown against the wall to avoid tripping in the dark, and doesn’t stop until he’s decided they’ve reached a private enough spot for whatever conversation he’s decided the two of them need to have.

Then Jon turns, and taking a deep breath through his nose, says: “What are you playing at?”

“I – Jon, what—”

“You’re hiding something, Martin!” Jon snaps, and the bottom drops out of Martin’s stomach. “Now listen, I don’t know where you got the idea that lying about being affected by the toxin would be a good cover for whatever it is, but you definitely miscalculated.”

Trying to both keep his voice steady and ignore the constant loop of you’ve been caught building in his head, Martin says, “I wasn’t lying about Sin attacking my home, Jon—”

“Maybe not,” Jon says with a dubious frown, “But the toxin’s effects would have worn off by now, if they ever hit you in the first place, and you’re still saying things you’d have no business saying if you really were what you say you are. So what is it? Why did you happen to wash up on the beach near Djose at just the right time to join the only pilgrimage happening in Spira right now?”

“I don’t know! It was a weird coincidence, those happen—”

“At the same time as weird coincidences like the father you bear an astonishing resemblance to just happening to be a legendary guardian?”

Well, that’s something Martin would also love to know more about, so that makes two of them.

“Look, I’m not saying it’s not weird—”

“Stop deflecting! Just tell me what you’re up to!”

“Nothing!” Martin says, which isn’t exactly true, but the only thing he’s up to is trying to keep his head above water, and Jon makes it sound like he thinks Martin’s some kind of criminal mastermind or something. “What do you think I have to gain, exactly?”

“I don’t know, but I do know you’re lying,” Jon scowls, and begins pacing from one side of the narrow ravine to the other, gesturing the whole while. “I thought for a while that maybe you were Unsent and had just forgotten about it, but the Sendings never affected you, so that’s obviously not the case – but Tim certainly took a shine to you astonishingly quickly, given that he was twisting my arm into bringing you along only hours after meeting you.”

Martin has given up trying to figure out where Jon’s going with this. He’s not sure Jon even knows.

“I – Jon, are you seriously saying you think I mind-controlled Tim into liking me?”

“You tell me,” he says heatedly, pivoting on one foot mid-pace to face Martin again. “All the magic you cast certainly revolves around similar things. There’s something off about you, just – tell me what it is! For all I know you could be a particularly intelligent Sinspawn given what you lo—”

“—A Sinsp— Excuse me?!” Martin demands, cutting Jon off. “I’m not a—”

“Just tell me the truth!”

“Alright!” Martin puts both of his hands up palms-out, hoping that has any chance of getting Jon to keep his voice down again. “Alright, fine! Fine. I’ll tell you the truth, just – I don’t even know if you’ll believe me.”

“Try. Me,” Jon says, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Okay. So.” Martin takes a deep breath, and says, “I’m from Zanarkand.”

Jon’s furious scowl drops like a puppet with its strings cut, and he says in a flat voice, “What.”

“Not – not the ruin, not the one we’re going to,” Martin adds, fidgeting nervously and deciding that actually, not looking directly at Jon is a much safer way to get all of this out. “The – not the real one, I mean, they’re both real, but the Zanarkand from before the Machina War. Least I assume that’s it. I mean, we’ve always had plenty of machina there and I’d never even heard of Yevon or summoners or – or anything, till Tim woke me up on that beach. Didn’t even know Sin existed till it attacked the city a-and swallowed me up. So –” Martin lets out a small, self-deprecating laugh, “yeah, you got me, Jon, I’ve been lying this whole time. Figured out pretty quick I wouldn’t be safe if I told the truth.”

Well, there it is. No matter what happens now, it felt kind of freeing to say it. He just hopes Jon doesn’t kick him out or anything after all that.

He chances a look back at Jon properly now, and finds him staring back at Martin looking… shocked, yeah, but. Not angry. Which should feel like an improvement, but Martin really has no idea what to expect from this conversation anymore.

“Oh,” Jon says. “I – oh. I believe you.”

Including that.

“Wait—you what?”

“I – I believe you,” Jon says again, this time with an edge to the words that sounds a little giddy. He runs a hand through his hair, thinking, and asks, “So – you think Sin somehow brought you through time, or—?”

“Uh,” Martin stammers. He really hadn’t expected Jon to take him seriously. “I, I mean, yeah, it’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

Until he finds any proof of anything else, as unlikely as that is to happen, and – Jon believes him. Which honestly is its own thing for him to wrap his head around.

“Wait, hang on,” he says, folding his arms. “You just spent five minutes interrogating me with all these wild accusations and you – now you believe me just like that?”

“I do,” Jon says, and Martin’s scepticism must still be showing on his face because he adds, “I do! It’s – honestly, it explains – it explains a lot.”

There’s a smile – a real, honest smile – spreading across Jon’s face as he speaks, almost like he can’t help it. He laughs as he says, “Makes far more sense than anything I came up with.”

“… why are you laughing?”

“No reason, I just, um – I feel so relieved,” Jon tells him, still with that same smile that is doing unfair things to Martin’s heart, especially seeing as how part of him really still wants to be annoyed with Jon. After hearing some of his theories, no wonder the idiot’s feeling so relieved.

The smile fades from Jon’s face finally as he asks, “I… does anyone else know?”

“No, uh,” Martin shakes his head, rubbing at one arm awkwardly. “I mean, I kind of said I was from Zanarkand when Tim found me, and he had a bit of a laugh about it with Sasha, but I think they both thought I was just out of my mind from toxin exposure, so... I played along with that, you know?”

“Right,” Jon nods, looking thoughtful – though he does roll his eyes at the idea of Tim laughing about it. “Right, yes, that makes sense. I – I think we’d better keep it between us, for now. Our secret. As you said, it’s not a safe thing to say.”

Martin is going to personally smother the part of himself that is getting all bubbly and giddy over Jon saying something like our secret.

“Thank you for telling me,” Jon says now, and ah, good, there’s the annoyance.

“Yeah, well,” Martin shrugs, trying to keep his voice light. “Not like I had much choice, you dragging me off out here to accuse me of being a Sinspawn.”

Jon sputters, but to his credit, he looks abashed.

“… yes, I,” he says with a small cough, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. “In hindsight that was not my best theory. You couldn’t have affected Tim’s mind like that, he’s just always been that way.”

“A Sinspawn,” Martin stresses, just to drive the point home. It’s actually becoming a little funny now, with Jon looking so embarrassed about it. “Honestly, Jon.”

“Stop it.”

Martin hums, pretending to give the matter some thought.

“Maybe I’ll think about it if you actually go and get some sleep.”

“Shut up, Martin,” Jon scowls, before promptly ruining it all with a wide yawn. Martin has to laugh; Jon just looks so betrayed after, like he can’t believe his own body would do something like that to him.

“I’m just saying, it might be worth thinking about. Maybe you wouldn’t accuse your guardians of being Sinspawn if you were better rested.”

“I’m never going to live that down, am I,” Jon says wearily, his face pulled into a faintly disapproving frown. He turns and starts picking his way back towards the hidden cove. “Fine. I’ll sleep. Since you insist on bothering me about it.”

“Good,” Martin says, unrepentant.

He follows along behind Jon, thinking about the bizarre turn the night – or early morning, he guesses – has taken, and in spite of everything, he can’t help feeling weirdly light, lighter than he’s felt in – days, weeks even.

Jon believes that he’s from Zanarkand. Jon believes that he's from Zanarkand.

He hadn’t realised just how good it would feel - not only to tell the truth, but to have someone believe him about it. No matter what else has happened, or might happen tomorrow, or in any of the days after that - right now, all Martin knows is that a huge weight he’d forgotten was there has just been lifted right off.

Chapter Text

“You sure the two of you can’t just peel off and stick with us? Since you’re here already and all.”

The morning – the real morning, with the sun hanging bright in the sky and continuing to climb steadily upwards – brings them all to standing at the exit of the hidden cove. The leader of the surviving Al Bhed stands opposite them all, fixing Georgie and Melanie with a concerned, dubious look.

Melanie snorts.

“Trust me, I’d love to,” she says. “But that Maester sounded serious. And as nice as it’d be to flip her off by vanishing…”

“We can’t give her the excuse she’s looking for,” Georgie finishes after a second or two, with a tight smile on her face. “And believe me, she was looking for one.”

The Al Bhed leader gives a heavy sigh, muttering something darkly in his own language.

“Hell, alright,” he says afterwards. “Can’t say I like it, but I get it. Least your summoner’s a decent sort.”

He nods towards Jon, whose dark circles are still lingering stubbornly under his eyes after whatever rest he managed to get after stumbling back to bed in the early hours of the morning. He looks startled to have attention called to him, and seems to be trying desperately to stifle a yawn.

Whether out of kindness or inattention, the Al Bhed leader chooses not to comment on that.

“We won’t soon forget what you did for us. Just mind you keep these two safe, y’hear?”

All things considered, it’s a much warmer goodbye than Martin would’ve hoped for after the chilly welcome they got the night before. All the healing Jon did must have made an impression. The Al Bhed’s healer even makes a point of shaking Jon’s hand before they all leave, both of their hands clasped heartfelt around his.

It’s slow going to get back to the main road, just as slow as it was the night before. Once again, Daisy and Basira take the rear, with Georgie, Jon, and Melanie at the front of the group as they all navigate along the slippery, rocky way back.

Melanie, at least, is in much brighter spirits than Martin’s seen her in so far. He doesn’t know if her eyes are any better or any worse or just more of the same, but she’s come away from the night they’ve spent with the Al Bhed with a thin cane held in one hand, something that looks lightweight with a rounded tip at the bottom that looks softer than the rest of it. Martin guesses that explains what was going on with all the toolkits last night. It looks surprisingly sturdy, for something that was put together overnight, and perfectly sized for Melanie’s height; the ones that made it must be good at what they do. Melanie is still never far from the support of Georgie’s arm, and the route they’re taking this morning is way too treacherous for her not to lean on Georgie and even Jon at times, the two of them (mostly Georgie) warning her of any dodgy spots or the exact slope and shape of where she’s putting her feet. But Martin also looks ahead every so often to see her cautiously feeling out the ground ahead of her with the end of the cane, slowly getting used to the way it feels in her hand and whatever it might be telling her about what’s around her.

And once again, it doesn’t seem like anything can get in the way of her bickering with Jon. Martin’s too far away to catch what exactly it is they’re arguing over now, but at least this time it doesn’t look like it’s anything serious. Once or twice, they almost sound like they’re enjoying themselves.

At least until their little group finally reaches the main road again, at which point the two of them start making every available excuse not to walk with each other anymore. Watching Jon pointedly moving himself to walk alongside Tim, Sasha, and Martin instead is incredibly funny.

“I can’t believe we’ve finally found someone else who’s as incapable of letting things go as you are,” Tim says to him, earning himself a withering glare.

And so their journey continues.

For now, they’re still following the same road along the Djose shore that they took on their journey south; according to the others, they have to hold that course until they hit the fork in the road that will take them away from Djose and towards the Moonflow, Spira’s largest river. There’s an odd energy hanging over them as they keep following the road; a weird kind of quiet that Operation Mi’ihen left them with, and that none of them can quite seem to shake, even though their party numbers two more than before.

It’s the sort of quiet that Tim would usually take it upon himself to be the one to break, but Tim might just be the most quiet one out of everyone, now. He doesn’t have the same intensity about him that he had in the days before the operation, he’s just… subdued, his jaw tightening every time they pass by the odd Crusader that’s still struggling up the road towards the temple, barely making conversation even with Sasha, or Jon.

Jon’s different, too. Or well, not much different, not really, but – Martin can’t really explain it. It’s almost like, now he knows that Jon knows the truth about him, he can feel a sort of – shift or something. Maybe he’s just imagining it, but – he thinks he keeps seeing Jon throwing these weird furtive looks at him, like there’s something he wants to say or questions he wants to ask, and like he has to keep reminding himself that he can’t say or ask any of it while they’re walking.

They’ll probably have to talk about that sooner or later. Maybe if they ever wind up camping somewhere that has enough space for them to have a proper private chat. The rocky, windy sides of the Djose road don’t lend themselves very well to that.

The day after they leave the Al Bhed, they run into someone Martin had not been counting on seeing again.

There’s few enough people now on this stretch of the road, let alone people travelling towards the site of Operation Mi’ihen instead of away from it, that seeing another traveller going the opposite way to them is a bit of a curiosity. While he’s still a fair distance away, Martin wonders if maybe it’s another priest from the temples, someone else they’ve managed to spare to help the wounded. But then he makes out the sight of a familiar-looking greatsword and an equally-familiar-looking longcoat, and it hits him.

It must hit Adelard Dekker at the same time; Martin sees him pause mid-step, clear surprise on his weathered old face, before he recovers and raises a hand to hail them as they pass by.

Behind him, Basira takes a sharp breath.

“Is that who I think it is?” Martin hears her mutter to Daisy.

“Well met,” Dekker greets them. “Have I caught you at an inopportune time?”

Everyone looks to Jon, who looks as though he’s caught in the middle of doing the same mental who’s that guardian puzzle as Basira.

“I… no. Not – no. Sorry, are you who I think you are—?”

“Adelard Dekker. Former guardian to Gertrude Robinson, yes.”

The looks on everyone’s faces tells Martin that Dekker really wasn’t kidding back in Luca when he said his name came with some notoriety. Being a legendary guardian – a living one – must make you a household name.

It also makes Martin wonder why he’s giving all of them his name so freely now, when he’d told Martin to keep quiet about it, but he guesses that’s Dekker’s business. Maybe running into them by chance in the middle of nowhere is different to risking running into them in a crowded city.

“Goodn— right,” Jon says faintly. “I – had no idea you were still travelling Spira.”

“I’ve done my best to keep a low profile for the past fifteen years,” says Dekker with a wry smile. His eyes flick to Martin then – is this Dekker silently asking him to keep quiet about their meeting in Luca?

Shifting his gaze back to Jon, Dekker adds, “But that doesn’t mean that I’m exempt from doing my part to help ease Spira’s suffering where I can.”

“Spoken like a true legendary guardian,” Daisy nods.

Basira, who seems to be struggling to hang onto her usual steady demeanour when faced with the reality of a living, breathing guardian who completed the pilgrimage, finds her voice enough to ask, “What brings you to the Djose shore, Sir Dekker?”

“Operation Mi’ihen.”

Martin inhales sharply; the others flinch or grimace in turn, and Dekker must see it too; a heaviness passes over his face. “I see you’re familiar.”

“We were there,” says Tim in a raw voice.

Dekker sighs, closing his eyes.

“Then I’m sorry. And yet, I’m also pleased to see that all of you made it out the other side. I’ve spoken with some surviving Crusaders and others on my way down the road, and the stories I’ve heard scarcely bear repeating. I have some skill in healing after my travels with Gertrude; I’m going to offer what assistance I can.”

“Wouldn’t you be better off at the temples for that?”

“It’s not those who are welcome at the temples that require my help.”

It doesn’t take much more than that to put two and two together. It doesn’t surprise Martin very much – not when he’s already heard Dekker talk about avoiding Yevon knowing where he is and his unconventional opinions about Sin – but he sees a few eyebrows fly up around the rest of the group.

Including Georgie’s. “Are you saying you want to help the Al Bhed?”

“I’m aware that must seem shocking, coming from a former guardian.”

“Not as much as you’d think,” Melanie pipes up, surprising everyone. She’s squinting in the general direction of Dekker’s voice, clearly trying to make out the shape of him. “I’ve heard some people talk about you before. From the way they tell it, you’re a true friend to us. But, uh…”

“Jon kind of already beat you to the punch,” Tim finishes for her.

Now it’s Dekker’s turn for his eyebrows to forget how gravity works. “Pardon?”

“We were there the night before last,” Martin explains. “Melanie showed us the way, and Jon – well, he spent all night healing people.”

“It wasn’t all night—”

“Most of the night,” Martin says firmly. Honestly. Only Jon would try and argue that point.

There’s an odd look on Dekker’s face as he digests that. He looks back to Jon, almost as if he’s trying to make something out just by sight alone. Or maybe that he’s just heard something unexpected, and is trying to fit it into what he knows.

Martin wonders what it is that Dekker has managed to pick up about Jon, travelling around Spira the way he does.

“I see,” Dekker says at last, thoughtfully. “That was a noble thing.”

Jon makes a small, derisive noise, shifting uncomfortably.

“I’m not sure I know about that. I knew I had the ability to help, that’s all.”

“Not all those with the same ability would have done so, in your shoes.” Dekker spends a moment longer scrutinising Jon, before asking, “Where does your road take you now? The Moonflow?”

“Ah – yes. Making the crossing before we head onwards past Guadosalam towards Macalania.”

“I remember it well.” For a moment, a fleeting smile crosses Dekker’s face, as though recalling old memories. “There’s a certain small village on the north bank that you may find… interesting. Gertrude made quite an impression when we passed through during her pilgrimage.”

“How?” asks Sasha, undeniably interested.

“Fifteen years ago, there was a powerful Unsent, a former associate of hers, who moved in to the area and began to prey on the living for her own dark purposes. Gertrude put an end to her.”

“I’ve never heard of this story,” says Basira with a small frown.

“The village is very small. Not the sort of place Yevon’s record-keepers would frequent. Perhaps you should all see for yourselves, if you have time.”

Hm. Is it Martin’s imagination, or is Dekker looking to him in particular as he says that? Like he knows that Martin’s got a thousand questions about this Unsent story, or maybe that he brought it up just to make Martin want to ask those questions?

He’s not stupid. He remembers what was on that sphere Dekker gave him in Luca. The whole bit at the end with the Unsent Gertrude was talking about, and this Keay woman – the one that was some kind of urban legend back in Luca.

Dekker’s definitely hinting at something. He’s got to be.

“Well,” he says now. “I plan to linger in Djose for a while longer and offer what help I can to those unable to make it to the temple. Travel safely.”

“Are we gonna see you again, then?” Martin asks.

It’s not like he can drag Dekker off to one side here and now, but – this is the third time he’s turned up making mysterious cryptic remarks, even if the others don’t know it. Martin wants to be sure of getting some proper answers out of him next time.

Luckily, Dekker seems to find that amusing, if the wry smile is any indication.

“I hope so. There’s still little aid I can offer you at this point on the road, but I may be of some assistance closer to Zanarkand.” He nods to them all, and lifts a hand once more. “Farewell!”

As Dekker hurries away from them down the road south, they continue on in silence for a short stretch, until Basira breaks it.

“Huh. So that’s Sir Dekker? He’s not what I expected.”

“What were you expecting?” Tim asks.

Basira shrugs.

“I dunno. He was one of us before he became Gertrude’s guardian – a warrior monk, I mean. Guess I was picturing something more like my supervisor back in Bevelle.”

Daisy lets out a short, amused snort. “Oh, that hack.”

“I dunno,” Tim says with a ghost of his old smile. “He seems joyless enough.”

Basira’s mouth quirks up. “Yeah, maybe.” With a short laugh, she adds, “Not married to the rules though, if he’s been avoiding Yevon and becoming some kind of folk hero to the Al Bhed for the past fifteen years. I always thought he was dead.”

“Shows how much you know, doesn’t it,” Melanie smirks.

“I guess it does,” Sasha says thoughtfully, her eyes on the dreary scenery as she walks. “All the records in Bevelle go quiet about him after Gertrude’s pilgrimage.”

“Why avoid letting people know he was still around, though? People around the temples, I mean,” Basira adds quickly, when she catches sight of Melanie opening her mouth again. “I mean, he’s a living legend that helped defeat Sin, he could’ve been doing a lot of good with that.”

“He has been doing a lot of good. Just because you never saw it sat up in your ivory tower…”

“What Melanie’s saying is,” Georgie adds, “the temples probably would’ve held him back more than anything else.”

Basira goes quiet at that, a small frown creasing her face. Martin wonders what she’s thinking about. For his part, he keeps thinking back to the fuss all those temple priests kept making as soon as they realised whose son he was, and everything about Jon’s second arrival in Luca, when Elias made such a public spectacle of him.

Dekker’s a legendary guardian who defeated Sin. Martin can only imagine how much red tape he would have got caught up in if he’d made himself known to the temples after returning from the pilgrimage.

Maybe Basira’s coming to the same conclusions, because after a while she sighs, nodding.

“Yeah. You’ve got a point there.”

“Maybe the pilgrimage changed him,” Daisy shrugs. Like Sasha, she seems to be watching their surroundings more than paying attention to the conversation, but there’s a small line of thought on her forehead. “They tell stories about him in the monks. How he was everything a warrior monk of Yevon should be. Pious, y’know? Dedicated. Really believed in protecting people. I was still in the cadets when he left to be a guardian, but I remember how shocked everyone was when they heard whose guardian he was.”

“Right, because heavens forbid one of Yevon’s precious golden boys should throw in his lot with a heretic.”

“Well, yeah,” Daisy says baldly, refusing to rise to Melanie’s bait. “‘Course, no one says that now, but at the time…”

She shrugs again, and says briskly, “Anyway. Maybe it’s not a bad thing that the pilgrimage changed him.”

Martin stares at her. He’s not the only one – pretty much everyone else is staring too, with varying degrees of shock, skepticism, or outright disbelief on their faces.

He’s travelled with Daisy long enough now to have a pretty good idea of her opinions about things like Yevon’s doctrine, and the Al Bhed, and – yeah, she might not like Elias very much, and she might be deferring to Jon about some things because of the whole summoner’s privilege thing she and Basira mentioned, and she might be dealing with Melanie travelling with them now through mostly ignoring her rather than being hostile, but –

He didn’t expect to hear her implicitly approving of a former guardian – a former warrior monk – actively going out of his way to help a group of people she’s been pretty open about disliking up to now.

Sasha’s the first to recover.

“Not what I expected from you,” she says, with a raised eyebrow.

“What?” says Daisy, making direct eye contact with her. “Maybe I’m changing too.”

After a breath, she adds, “Dunno how I feel about that. But then, I dunno how I feel about a Maester setting up that many people to die either, no matter what they believed.”

Wow. Maybe Daisy really is changing.

Maybe they all are. After everything he’s seen since he arrived in Spira, Martin doesn’t know if he can say he’s the same person he was months ago when he was still in Zanarkand, and thought he knew how the world made sense.

They walk on a little further in silence, and then Melanie says:

“Don’t think that little speech means I trust you.”

Not that Melanie can see it, but Daisy actually grins.

“That’s fair. It goes both ways.”

There’s another lull in the conversation for a few minutes, as the dull, dreary landscape of Djose slowly passes by on either side of them, before Tim is the next to speak up.

“Was anyone else half-expecting him to offer to be Jon’s guardian?”

“With how many he’s got already?” Georgie says with a small laugh, drawing an eyeroll and some good-natured grumbling from Jon’s direction, and a concessionary oh, you’re right sort of gesture from Tim.

“I’m more surprised he didn’t seem to want to speak to Martin,” says Sasha, sending a sudden lurch through Martin’s stomach.

“I – what, me?” he says, trying to laugh and wincing inside when it comes out a lot more nervous than he wanted. “Why would he want to speak to me?”

“Well, I mean – you know. He travelled with your dad, right? Guarding the same summoner. And you know, since you both look – yeah,” Sasha says, gesturing towards him before wincing, as though she’s only just realising how it all sounds as the words actually leave her mouth. “Sorry.”

“Wait, is that true?” Georgie asks, surprised.

Right. She wasn’t around for all of that fuss on the island temples. Come to think of it, is Georgie the sort who would even go into the temples? Going by how she’s with Melanie, probably not.

“I – yeah, it’s true,” Martin nods, mostly because it feels weirdly unfair for Georgie not to be on the same page as everyone else. “But I mean, that doesn’t mean he’s, he’s obligated or anything, he obviously had stuff to do.”

Sasha, who might actually be even worse than Jon or Melanie for not letting things go once she’s got hold of them, now asks, “You didn’t want to ask him a few questions, then? Find out more?”

“Not really.”

Is there a nice way to tell Sasha to stop poking at this? Generally speaking, but especially here, right now, with everyone else?

“Sasha. Leave it.”

It’s Jon who says it. Martin doesn’t know why that surprises him so much, but it does. Jon makes a point of avoiding anyone else’s eyes as he says it, but his voice is firm enough to tell that he’s serious.

Sasha actually listens, too. She shoots Jon a bit of a funny look, but she listens. Martin can’t help breathing a sigh of relief. He wasn’t looking forward to having to dodge around the fact that he’s already run into Dekker twice before, and kind of already asked him a lot of questions. He can’t see telling anyone else in the group about that ending well for him.

Well. Actually. Maybe there is one person he can tell about it.

Martin thinks about the odd hints Dekker just gave all of them about the village Gertrude saved from her Unsent associate, and about the sphere Dekker gave him in Luca, and remembers him saying not to show it to anyone unless he trusted them.

He trusts Jon with it. Right? Jon knows his biggest secret now, and aside from throwing a double handful of meaningful looks Martin’s way that says he’s itching to talk more about that, he doesn’t seem to have done anything else with it.

Okay. Martin’s decided, then. As soon as he can get a spare minute where he can talk to Jon away from the others – he’ll show him the sphere. Tell him about Dekker. Brace himself for the million questions that’ll probably be headed his way when he does.

Oh well. At least whenever he does, he’ll get to have a proper conversation with Jon again.

It takes them two, maybe three days to reach the fork in the road that marks where their path changes direction. The signpost that marks the path is obviously old, and lists off to the right at a dangerous angle, but the dark, blocky letters are clear enough, pointing the way down where the Moonflow road veers off to the left, away from the path towards Djose temple.

After days of nothing but Djose’s greyish, beige-ish surroundings, it’s more cheering than Martin would’ve thought to see an actual, physical mark of their progress. It’s even more cheering to hear that from here on out, their road is going to be much more pleasant for a while. According to the ones who've walked this road before, the area around both banks of the Moonflow promises a lot of wooded places; the ground is softer than the hard dirt roads they've had to deal with on the Djose highroad, and the camping spots more spacious and forgiving than the rocky overhangs they've been sheltering under for the past few nights.

That goes a long way towards lifting Martin’s spirits. Maybe in one of those places, he’ll actually have a bit of room to talk to Jon properly. Make sure they’re finally on the same page about everything. It’s been driving him up the wall these past few days, having decided already that he’s going to talk to Jon about Dekker and about Zanarkand, but having no way to just get it over with.

He wonders if Jon feels the same. He’s sure Jon probably has a list of questions about as long as his arm by now, about Zanarkand and how Martin got to Spira and everything else in between.

It takes another half a day before the landscape around them really starts shifting, but shift it does. The dirt road winds its way inland, and slowly the dreary sand and rock starts to give way to grass and old, run-down fences and the odd remains of old wooden houses, relics of when people must have lived in this area. Up ahead, Martin can see a dark smudge that must be the beginnings of the forests on the Moonflow’s south bank.

Of course, the new road brings with it not only new scenery, but also its own new variety of fiends, most of which seem to be manifesting with the forms of various plants. On top of that, they’re still adjusting to fighting with two extra people in their midst, one of whom still can’t see the enemy well enough to fight. So far they’ve settled for making sure Melanie sticks next to Jon whenever they end up in a skirmish they can’t avoid or outrun, both because he tends to be furthest away from the thick of things to begin with, and because of his ability to heal.

Neither Jon nor Melanie can make it through a fight without complaining about the arrangement for at least five minutes after it ends, but at least it means they both come out of it in one piece.

Needless to say, they don’t manage to make it to the edge of the forest before nightfall. Instead, they make camp that night in the lush green hollow that surrounds the remains of what might have once been an old wooden farmhouse; the roof and most of the walls have long since vanished. Just as Martin hoped, it’s a larger space than they’ve had to rest in for a while, and everyone seems to be taking advantage of it; after they’ve set up their fire and chosen where they plan to lay down the bedrolls for that night, almost everyone starts spreading out around the remains of the old yard and building, never too far out of sight of the rest, but far enough to have their own space and take a break from being in quite such close quarters the whole time.

Martin waits until he spots Jon by himself, examining the shell of the old house. Then he takes a deep breath, gathers up his courage, and decides to go for it, trying to pretend his heart didn’t just speed up a bit as he started making his way over.

“So,” he says, like an idiot. “Uh. Hi.”

Jon looks up. Takes in everything about Martin’s posture (nervous), and the look on his face (also nervous, probably), and immediately starts looking a bit apprehensive himself to match.

“… Hello, Martin.”

“So I thought we could talk? I mean – can we? I just, I mean, I thought we should, after how we left things the other night, but, um, there never seemed to be a good time with everyone else being so close the whole time until now, and I know you’ve probably got questions, so—”

“Yes,” says Jon, finally taking mercy on him. Not that much mercy, because a look of uncertain amusement steals across his face, and after a moment of hesitation he adds, “I – um. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem… nervous?”

“Got that, did you?” Martin lets out a tiny huff of a laugh. “I mean, yeah, I am. Kind of hard not to be, I mean, I’ve. You know, I sat on that whole… thing, for months now. It’s just. Weird to know someone else knows about it now, to be honest.”

“It must be. It’s – I’ll be honest with you, it’s… weird,” Jon says, pulling a scrunchy face on the word, “to be the one who knows.” He goes quiet a moment, looks back towards the rest of their campsite, trying to get a sight on where all the others are, and then turns back to Martin expectantly. “Well. Shall we?”

That sends Martin into a tiny fit of nervous laughter, especially when Jon gestures to the open patch of grass in the middle of what used to be the farmhouse as though he’s, what, inviting Martin to step into some imaginary office of his or something. This man is ridiculous.

They settle down on the grass, in a spot where the others could still easily see where they are if they wanted to – and more importantly, where they can easily see if any of the others start heading over. Thinking about anyone else overhearing what they’re about to talk about still makes Martin tense up all over.

“So, I –” Jon starts after a moment. “You’re right, I’ve got… a lot of questions.”

“Yeah, I figured. So um. Shoot, I guess.”

“Alright, ah…” Jon goes quiet again, a look on his face like now that he’s been given free rein to ask, he doesn’t actually know where to begin. After a moment’s thought, he says, “So, first of all, I want to say again that I believe you? It’s – it’s important. To, to me, that you know that, because some of this might make it sound like I don’t, and – I want to reiterate, even if it sounds like that, it’s not that.”

Huh. Well. At least Martin knows he’s not the only one nervous about this conversation. He nods, and Jon’s shoulders loosen up a little in relief.

“So… you said Sin brought you here. I – how?”

Martin tells him. About sitting on the roof of his apartment building, seeing Sin rise up out of nowhere and attack the city like that, looking up to find the thing right above his head and how it seemed to blur and warp everything around it while sucking bits of buildings up inside it. About not being able to run, and – he guesses, getting sucked up as well, before waking up on the beach at Djose.

It’s the first time he’s actually talked about it, and it feels like it should be more difficult than it is. Which is – it’s not that it isn’t difficult. It’s a struggle to put it into words, and even with all the other horrific things he’s seen since he got to Spira, he didn’t realise how much putting it out in the world for someone else would make his heart race like he’s right back there. But Jon – he’s a surprisingly patient and attentive listener. That makes it easier. That, and – well, Jon’s seen what Sin can do, too, even if he’s never been sucked up by it and somehow spat out again a thousand years in the future. That makes it easier too.

There’s a few moments where a look of confusion passes over Jon’s face and he looks like he wants to ask a question. To Martin's gratitude, he holds himself back until Martin’s done. Martin really doesn’t think he’d be able to finish the story if he didn’t get it all out in one go.

Only then does Jon tentatively ask for clarification about things – not even the big stuff at first, but small, unrelated details like the fire alarm system (“So it uses spheres to power it? Like the trials in the cloisters?” “Well, yeah, but only the really old ones.”), or the way the city’s lit up at night (“Every building is like the travel agencies?”), before he finally circles back to asking more questions about how even the air close to Sin had seemed to warp (“It’s not something I’ve heard of before – not the way you described it, anyway.”), or if Martin’s sure he never heard anything about any kind of war happening before the night Sin showed up.

Then a hesitant look passes over Jon’s face, before he sighs, with all the air of someone who thinks that what’s about to come out of their mouth is going to be entirely unsatisfactory, but has decided to just go for it anyway.

“So… there’s no good way to ask this. Your father.” Martin’s heart drops a little, but Jon asks, “He was… this means he must have been from Zanarkand as well, right? And… ended up stranded here in Spira a thousand years out of his own time the same way you have.”

“It’s… it’s looking that way, yeah.”

“So this has happened twice,” Jon says thoughtfully. “At least. Twice that we know of, at any rate.”

Jon’s frown deepens into a grimace as the implications of what he just said hit him. Martin feels about the same – the idea that this could have happened to other people too, with no way of knowing… it sends a horrible chill down his spine.

He’s kind of relieved when Jon seems just as unprepared as he is to really think about that idea right now, and instead says, “It – it really is the strangest coincidence that out of all the people this could have happened to, it happened to be – well. You and him.”

“Tell me about it. Even before you start thinking about how we both ended up becoming a guardian for a summoner.”

Jon makes a little hm of agreement, and looks up at the slowly darkening sky, idly tugging at small handfuls of grass. “… How long since you last saw him? By – by your own reckoning, I mean.”

“I… I dunno. A little over fifteen years, maybe?”

“Right. So… about the same amount of time that’s passed here since Gertrude brought the Calm.”

“Huh,” Martin frowns as something occurs to him. “I never thought about that before. Is that weird, that – you know, that the years that passed lined up like that even though there’s a thousand years between this time and the one I came from?”

Jon’s eyes go wide for a second, before he slowly nods, his face going thoughtful again.

“Now that you mention it, it – yes, that does sound weird, doesn’t it? But I mean – Sin was involved in getting you both here. Who knows what can happen when it gets involved.” Jon scowls, making a frustrated noise as if the inscrutability of everything surrounding Sin is an affront against him personally. “Frankly, I’m still amazed you got so close to it and lived. Let alone woke up a thousand years in the future.”

“Right. Right, yeah.” No denying that Martin’s definitely had the strangest luck on that front, after all. “There’s. Um. Speaking of that whole… thing, there’s something else I should tell you too. The day Sin showed up in Zanarkand, well – Dekker was there too.”

“What?!”

Martin really can’t blame Jon for that reaction – he’s just coming to realise how bizarre it must sound, that someone from this day and age in Spira somehow got back in time to Martin’s Zanarkand and then all the way back to the future, the present, whatever, again, apparently of his own volition. Haltingly, he tries to explain his weird encounter with Dekker in Zanarkand and their second meeting in Luca, the way Dekker seemed to think that maybe Sin and Zanarkand were connected somehow but couldn’t explain why. The idea that Dekker decided to seek Sin out and essentially hitch a ride on it in an effort to find out more about what it actually is or what it does when it’s not wreaking destruction around Spira has Jon aghast, sending them into a good five minutes of back and forth on whether that’s just the sort of thing legendary guardians like that do.

Then Martin mentions the sphere.

“You’ve kept this hidden all this time?” Jon demands sharply. For the first time since they started talking, he actually sounds annoyed, even close to angry.

And well, that’s not fair.

“What else was I supposed to do? You guys were already putting stuff together about me, I could tell, and I mean, there’s Daisy and Basira—”

“—who are warrior monks who were specifically assigned to be my guardians on Elias’s orders,” Jon finishes for him, the indignation draining out of his voice. “No, you’re right, I get it, I just—” Jon cuts himself off with a dismissive gesture, face still pinched in annoyance, and says, “Show me?”

Martin fumbles the sphere out of his pocket and, after another quick look to check that none of the others look like they’re coming close, sets it to play. It’s just as grainy and distorted as Martin remembers, and Jon has a look of intense concentration on his face as they watch, like he’s trying to glare the battered old sphere into giving up all the secrets time and age have worn into static. When the recording comes to its abrupt end and the sphere shuts down, there’s a long moment of silence.

“Right,” Jon says eventually, sounding a bit dazed. “There’s a lot to think about here.”

“Yeah,” Martin agrees, because what else can he say? He had pretty much the same reaction the first time he watched the thing.

Jon lets out a long sigh, gathering his thoughts.

“I can see why he told you to keep it a secret. Even with how degraded it’s become, it’s easy enough to piece together where you and your father really came from if you know what to listen for. And the mention of that Keay woman near the end… you think it’s the same one the guide for that awful mystery tour was talking about when we came through Luca?”

“I think so,” Martin nods, surprised – and kind of pleased – that Jon’s thinking along the same lines as Martin has been. “It all lines up way too neatly otherwise, right?”

“You may be right.”

“And Dekker – he was making a point of telling us about Gertrude taking care of that Unsent associate of hers near the Moonflow, I’m sure he was. They’ve got to be linked somehow. I-I mean, wasn’t there that rumour about Mary Keay getting up and walking away from her own murder?”

“And if she made her way up the highroad afterwards…” Jon says, his voice taking on a spark as he puts things together, “she could very well have made it as far as the Moonflow. I see it. If she avoided the temples, it would have been easy for her to avoid being Sent by anyone.”

They share a moment of half-smiling at the elation of finally being on the same page in the middle of this bizarre situation they’ve found themselves in, before Martin thinks of something else.

“Why’d you think he wants us to know about this, though?”

“I think you mean, why do I think he wants you to know about this,” Jon says pointedly, sounding put out. “You’re the one he trusted with that sphere.”

“Yeah,” Martin says, rolling his eyes, “but he also said to show it to people I trust, so.”

Jon’s face drops into a look of open surprise at that, edged with something softer and unreadable, and Martin feels the back of his neck going hot. “A-and anyway, he told everyone the bit about the Moonflow village.”

“Fine, fine, I don’t know why he wants us to know,” Jon says, sounding suspiciously relieved at Martin’s backpedalling. “I… didn’t pay as much attention as I should have to the names of Gertrude’s guardians, but – maybe there’s some connection there?”

“Right, because she had four altogether, right? Dekker, my dad, one of, um, the Guado? And this young-ish guy with long hair. Maybe he’s the link?”

“Maybe,” Jon says doubtfully. “I expect that when we do reach this village, we’ll find out.”

Jon yawns then, looking startled and annoyed in equal measure. Martin suppresses a smile – it really is beyond him, how one man can continue to be so caught out by his own body's need for sleep.

“Right,” he says, trying to keep the audible laughter out of his voice. “Enough talk, I think it’s bedtime.”

Jon rolls his eyes.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. Maybe he’s just decided that he can’t be bothered to have yet another argument with Martin about his aversion to sleep. “If only because sooner or later one of the others will notice we’re missing and come looking for us.”

“Heh, yeah. I know Sasha’s been suspicious of me for a while, so…”

“Mm, she’s unfortunately rather brilliant when it comes to uncovering secrets.” Jon looks back up at the sky, which is almost completely dark by now. Then he looks back to Martin, hesitates a moment, and says almost hurriedly, “She’s fond of you, though. Even if she did figure you out – I, I doubt she’d tell the others.”

Oh. Well.

Martin’s not so sure that Sasha wouldn’t tell Tim or Jon – not that it would really make a difference anymore if she told Jon – but there’s something about the way Jon’s trying to reassure him about it, and the way he seems so convinced of what he’s saying, that warms Martin all over.

Jon stands, then, and Martin follows him without thinking, shivering a little as the night air hits the parts of his legs that have just spent however long pressed against the grass. Jon takes a step back towards the centre of their camp for tonight, and then stops. Turns back to Martin, his fingers drumming a nervous rhythm out on the sides of his thighs, and takes a deep breath.

“So. Um. Not tonight, obviously, I’ve plagued you long enough, but. Say I had further questions in the future, about. About Zanarkand?”

“Oh,” says Martin, caught off-guard. “Uh. Yeah, I. I wouldn’t mind talking about it more, if you wanted to hear it.”

The last of the fading light catches on Jon’s smile, and Martin’s breath catches with it.

“I think I’d like that very much.”

Chapter Text

The days pass. Slowly but surely, their journey continues, winding its way ahead of them through the woods as the path in front of them leads them on towards the Moonflow.

And well, there's no other way to say it: this stretch of the journey really is a lovely one.

Some of the trees that they pass under are clearly very, very old, the kind with huge thick trunks and spreading branches that block out almost all the sunlight. But most of those are a good distance away from the forest road, and the odd areas of road that pass through one of these densely shadowed parts of the wood never last long. On the whole, they find themselves walking under trees that filter the sunlight into something a little softer, turning the path beneath the spreading leaves a faint green and gold, and every so often they come to a clearing or otherwise pass under the open sky for a while. These are places where people must have cleared the forest in the past to make way for a space to live; but just like the place they camped just ahead of the forest proper, the remains of any buildings are few and far between, and long since fallen into disrepair and ruin. There are even a few saplings slowly encroaching on the edges of these places, the woods slowly inching their way into reclaiming it.

Fiends still cross their path a few times a day, but in spite of that there’s still something really peaceful about the place. Something a little sad, as well, whenever they come across somewhere that still has signs that people used to live there. It’s not difficult to fill in the blanks and imagine how these places ended up abandoned. But there’s something about walking under all these trees, surrounded by so many signs of so much other life, that just feels so undeniably good. Like a very literal breath of fresh air. A bit of space to step back and breathe a little.

Of course, maybe that's just Martin. But he likes to think that the others might be feeling some of it too. He hopes they are. He keeps catching sight of things like Sasha, Georgie, and Melanie deep in conversation about one thing or another, swapping stories of things they’ve seen or heard about, or Tim and Daisy having quiet chats while setting up camp in the evenings. Tim gradually starts to look just a little bit lighter with each passing day, even cracking jokes with Sasha again. Meanwhile, Melanie’s vision is slowly improving; she claims she can see colours again now, rather than just shadows and light, but it’s disorientating enough that she’s started wearing her goggles again almost full-time to help ease the strain. Martin can’t help noticing, either, that Melanie seems more tense whenever she hears a sound she wasn’t expecting coming from her left; whether she's improving or not her sight must still be worse on that side.

Still. Maybe it's just the passing of time, or maybe it's something about the air of this place, but it feels like - like there's something good and healing here.

Maybe he's just imagining it, but as for himself, Martin feels like he actually has room to think again. Even enough room to start experimenting with magic a bit again. Funny thing, but it turns out it’s a lot easier to play around with words that might have a chance of making the magic or the pyreflies or whatever it is do what he has in mind when he isn’t feeling a constant sense of impending dread for what’s about to happen. The distant, far-off sense of general dread for what they eventually have to face at the end of the journey is much easier to deal with in comparison.

He starts thinking about ways of maybe - blocking magic, if that’s something he can even do, maybe even stop the fiends that can cast it from doing that in the first place. Maybe work on something better than the little spell he has for making the others lighter on their feet – quick reflexes are all well and good, but maybe if he could make everything that they do faster in general…

He might have to ask Tim or Sasha if they wouldn’t mind being a trial subject for that one.

But there's something else that keeps crossing his mind, too, a thought that just won’t leave him alone. That while he’s at it, putting together these new ideas for spells and finding the right words in the right order that’ll have them working the way he wants them to, he could also try branching out into – well, into healing. It’s not that he has any illusions that he’ll ever be able to reach Jon’s level, not when Jon’s got years of actual training and experience on his side, and he knows Sasha’s said that she tried white magic once and couldn’t get the hang of it, so it’s not like Martin even knows if he’ll have a knack for it or not, but – but it’s not about that.

He just keeps thinking about how the only reason they got out of Operation Mi’ihen as well as they did was because Sasha had the foresight to break into a Maester’s supply chest and steal those potions. If she hadn’t – they’d been separated from their only healer for long enough that Martin isn’t sure if Tim would have made it. He keeps thinking about it. About how Tim had looked when Martin found him and Sasha on that beach after the landslide, deathly pale with Sasha literally holding him together with her hands. And as much as he tries not to think about it, to keep it out of his mind, the memory of it still manages to cross his mind at odd moments when everything goes too quiet, and—

And.

It just doesn’t seem right to have that resting on Jon’s shoulders too. He’s got enough to worry about. And if something like that happens again, and they’re split up and caught out without any healing supplies next time, then…

Maybe. Maybe Martin should try. It feels kind of weird to even think about it, like he’s encroaching on Jon’s territory or taking something from him even just thinking about it, but maybe that’s just Martin being ridiculous about it. It’d help. He’s going to try.

He’s not going to tell Jon about it yet, though. At least, not until he’s sure it has a chance of working. Maybe all he’ll find out is that even casting Cure is beyond him.

But he’s been telling Jon about a lot of other things over the past few days.

As they continue to follow the forest path, the places they set up camp carry on offering them a rare luxury; that of being sheltered enough to let them keep an easy watch, but roomy enough to allow them to spread out a little if they want to, in the small time they have between setting up camp and turning in for the night. To Martin’s secret and lasting delight, that’s given him a lot of time to talk to Jon.

They still have to be careful about the others overhearing them, of course. It’s never far from either of their minds that they don’t really know how the others might react to hearing the truth, whether they believe them about it or not. But even so, it’s such a relief for Martin to be able to talk a bit more freely about things, to not have to watch his words so much or worry about saying something that’ll accidentally blow his cover.

Jon still has questions – a lot of them, he wasn’t kidding about that the first night. But they’re smaller, simple things now, just questions about everyday life in Zanarkand, what living in a city powered by machina is really like. It’s difficult to put it into words sometimes; at least, not without constantly comparing it against what Martin’s seen of Spira. Over the series of nights they spend camped out in small clearings, or the shelter of a particularly large and strong-looking group of trees, or the run-down remains of another old farmstead, Martin tells Jon about Zanarkand in small, disparate chunks: the skytrain connecting the different districts of the city together, and the time when Martin was younger when he’d been that wiped out on the way home from his second job that he’d completely missed his stop and woken up in a part of the city he’d never been to before; the big fireworks displays that happen around times like the turn of the year or the ocean festival; the way the entire city goes blitzball mad for a few months every year, with bars near the edges of districts being places to avoid near the finals if you don’t want to end up in the middle of a brawl between fans of two different teams.

(Jon rolls his eyes at that one, and has a few choice words to say about how nice it must be for those people to have the luxury of causing a fight over something so asinine. Martin picks that moment to tell him that the Prayer that everyone belonging to the church of Yevon uses so often is the blitzball sign for victory back in Zanarkand, and the look on Jon's face is priceless.)

Jon seems interested in all of it, no matter how small the detail or how trivial the story; and still, he never seems to tire of listening, or of asking questions. Until, sometime during the third evening they spend like this, he cuts himself off mid-question with a sudden frown.

“Everything alright?” Martin asks.

“What – no, yes, fine. I just – sorry, I’ve just realised how deeply annoying this must be, me treating you like my own personal…” Jon searches for the right word for a moment, and settles on, “encyclopaedia about somewhere you don’t even know if—”

Jon’s eyes go wide then, his mouth clamping shut. Martin sighs, shaking his head.

“It’s okay, you can say it. I… you know, it was one of the first things I figured out, when I was getting used to being here, that – that I might not ever be able to get back.”

Which is true, but – that’s the first time Martin’s actually said it out loud. He didn’t realise how final it would make it sound.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says softly.

“No, it’s – it’s not fine, but it’s not not fine? I mean. If Sin’s the thing that brought me here, I know better than to go looking for it thinking it might take me back. I mean. We can’t all be Adelard Dekker.”

That makes Jon let out a surprised huff of amusement.

“Perish the thought. And – be that as it may, just because I want to know doesn’t mean you have to answer.”

“Jon, I promise you, if you ever ask me a question I don’t want to answer, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Hm,” Jon says doubtfully. “Sometimes I wonder.”

His eyes fall to watching a few early fireflies circling lazily around the lowest branches of a nearby tree for a few moments before he says, “So much of what you’ve told me sounds so completely… alien to me. I can’t believe you’ve been managing to pretend you were from Spira, the Spira of this time, I mean, for as long as you have.”

“Are you kidding? Every time I said something that made one of you look at me even slightly funny I was petrified I was about to be caught out.”

“Martin, it took me and Sasha a good month and a half of travelling with you day in and day out to start noticing that something was truly off,” Jon points out. “Honestly, I’m… actually impressed at how well you’ve managed. I’m not sure I would have done as well in your shoes.”

Oh, oh. Martin doesn’t know how to feel about that. Mostly pleased, he thinks. There’s a sort of happy, embarrassed feeling bubbling away in his chest. He tries to shrug casually and pretend that he isn’t having to fight the equal and opposite urges to grin like an idiot and hide behind the nearest tree until he feels like an actual grown adult again.

“I-I mean, I’m having to learn quickly, that’s for sure. You know, pretending that I’m not hearing stuff that’s changing everything about how I see the world every five minutes,” he tries to joke.

“Oh, well now everything about you makes sense,” Jon quips, before his eyes light up the next moment. “Oh! I just thought, maybe – I could tell you things, about Spira? It only seems fair.”

“What, so you’re gonna let me get my revenge by having it be my turn to ask you a million questions?” Martin teases, laughing when Jon shoots him the flattest possible look in response.

Still, Jon’s as good as his word.

More than that – Martin soon learns that once he gets Jon started on a topic, he can keep going for well over an hour if Martin lets him. He tells Martin about some of the complicated relationships between the peoples of Spira – how the Guado are seen as mysterious and reclusive by the rest of Spira and mostly keep to themselves in their insular forest city, respecting Yevon but not really a part of it; how the Ronso keep to their own ways, living around the lower slopes and foothills of the sacred mountain that they also guard, keeping the way clear for the summoners who pass through on their way to Zanarkand. They’re closer to Yevon than the Guado, apparently, with the current Ronso elder traditionally taking a seat as one of the four Maesters to speak for Ronso affairs and ensure that any decisions take the Ronso way of life into account, but the sudden and recent death of the former elder has apparently thrown all of that into disarray. Martin thinks he remembers a couple of people mentioning that – Basira when she was talking about why the Ronso almost didn’t send a blitzball team to Luca, Jude when they met her at the Crusaders’ command centre.

Then he asks, tentatively, about the Al Bhed, and gets a sharp breath and a grimace in response.

“Beyond complicated,” Jon says immediately. “Yevon hates them, obviously, and that hatred trickles downwards. Tell enough people that the only way to get rid of Sin for good is to stop using machina and atone for what went wrong during the Machina War, or even before that, knowing full well that there's an entire group of people in Spira whose way of life revolves around it, and – well, you’ve seen some of it. I don’t think they even had a permanent place to call home for many years due to… past disagreements. To - to the point where the exact location of their current home is a bit of a mystery to most outsiders, actually.”

The look of mingled disgust and discomfort on Jon’s face gives Martin a pretty good idea of the nature of these disagreements. He still hasn’t forgotten the look Jude gave Georgie and Melanie, and the threat behind her words.

“You’ve never seemed to buy into that much, though,” Martin says cautiously, knowing a difficult topic when he sees one. “I mean – how come, didn’t you grow up in the temple?”

“You remembered that?” Jon says in surprise. “I mean – yes, I did, but… I suppose I’ve always been what you’d call a bit contrary? Asks too many questions for his own good, I think is how one of my teachers put it once.”

“No, you?”

“Oh, hush,” Jon says, rolling his eyes and doing very badly at hiding a smile. “I’ve just never done very well with things being full of holes, and everything there is to find about the history of Yevon and the Al Bhed is riddled with them.” The half-smile fades from Jon's face, then, becoming something more pensive. “Meeting Georgie helped, actually. She wasn’t born in Bevelle, so… she had a perspective on things that I didn’t.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Martin says, glancing towards Georgie and Melanie, who are sat close to the fire, each with an arm looped around the other.

“You’d probably be better off asking Melanie about this if you’re that curious,” Jon says, following Martin’s line of sight. “I’m… not the best person to ask. For obvious reasons.”

“If I can think of a way to bring it up that doesn’t sound completely awful, maybe,” Martin sighs, but takes the hint and lets the subject lie.

Jon also has a lot to say about Bevelle. This interests Martin a great deal; all he's really heard about it so far is that it’s Spira’s largest city. He can’t help wondering what that looks like, with it being the centre of a faith that puts such a taboo on machina.

Apparently, Jon tells him, the place was razed to the ground by Sin at the end of the Machina War. After that, a lot of the oldest buildings, as well as the current city walls, were built during the First Calm, when people thought that Sin was gone for good and wouldn’t ever be coming back. So as a result, Jon tells him, a lot of those old buildings, including the temple of St. Bevelle itself, are like very few other places in Spira, built out of materials and in the sorts of styles that the pre-Yevon machina-using civilisations favoured; a relic of Bevelle’s past from before Yevon took control.

Not that you’d ever hear any of the priesthood acknowledge that, apparently. They credit the fact that the city walls are still standing to the warrior monks and the other defences the city has against Sin, and not to the skills or knowledge of the people who lived during that First Calm, rebuilding their destroyed city out of the ashes of the first Sin. These days, the city is a place of eleven walled, tiered districts surrounding the great temple of St Bevelle at its centre, a collection of round housing blocks and mercantile quarters and smaller temples or places of learning that are broken up by wide squares and traversed either on foot or by canal – Jon tells him that the entire city is connected by waterways, with great aqueducts taking water down from the higher tiers of the city to the lower.

It all sounds very impressive, but Martin can't help feeling like Jon has some mixed feelings about the city of his birth. He has his fair share of fond anecdotes his own favourite haunts and nooks and crannies – he recounts a time when he wandered off alone as a kid and had to be brought back to the temple doorstep by a couple of fed-up looking warrior monks – but there's a thread that runs underneath all of Jon's stories, a feeling that the ins and outs of city life annoy him, or at least are something Jon feels like he’s on the outside of. He smiles when he talks about the library where he used to work with Tim and Sasha, though he’s just as quick to disparage its apparently incomprehensible filing system. Any time he mentions the temple itself an odd flash of tension passes over his face, so quick that Martin wonders if Jon’s even aware of it.

Martin tries to make sure he steers the conversation elsewhere in those moments anyway.

One evening, they somehow manage to get onto the subject of how magic is taught in Bevelle. In true Jon-fashion, this gets Jon started on magic more generally and where the limitations of Jon’s own brand of magic even lie, and mid-way through a frustrated ramble about how apparently no one in Spira’s history has ever even tried to be bothered about trying to work out why any injuries affected by Sin’s toxin are so resistant to healing magic, Jon suddenly stops mid-word, mouth slightly ajar.

“Actually,” he says abruptly, “that reminds me, I’ve been wanting to ask you for some time – I know your memory loss was faked, but – you really did get close to Sin. You must have got at least some dose of the toxin – did you. I mean, was it actually affecting you, those first few weeks?”

Jon actually sounds genuinely concerned about it. Not accusatory, not curious, just – concerned. Like it’s an actual worry for him, that Martin might have been faking one side-effect of the toxin but hiding another one. Martin can’t help feeling a bit touched.

“Um, not that I can remember,” he says, trying to think back to those first few weeks struggling along the highroads at Djose and Mi’ihen, back when Jon thought he was a nuisance and Martin could barely even cast a single spell yet. “I mean, all of that’s kind of a blur now, to be honest, but I think that was more because of the whole— you know, the whole waking up a thousand years in the future thing instead of— wait.”

Wait. Actually. Martin can think of something weird that he still hasn’t found a good explanation for yet.

“What?”

Jon looks way too apprehensive, tensing up like he’s worried about hearing the answer. Although, Martin doesn’t know, maybe he’s right to be.

“No, nothing, I just thought of something – but um, it might sound a bit weird?”

“Weirder than… literally everything else you’ve told me about the situation you’ve found yourself in?”

Okay, so maybe Jon has a point.

“Right, yeah, maybe not. It’s just – I mean, I know you said measuring the effects of Sin’s toxin isn’t an exact science and no one keeps proper records of it in Bevelle because you barely see any cases up there, all that, but – have you ever heard of anyone getting, um. Weird, weird dreams, from getting dosed up with the toxin?”

Jon falls silent, that little frown line between his eyebrows making a reappearance as he thinks.

“I… I don’t… think so? I’ve heard stories of those who’ve fallen into a deep sleep they couldn’t wake up from for, for days or even weeks, and there’s some anecdotal evidence there where they’ve claimed to dream vividly while they were under, but… nothing where it was the only effect. Why?”

“Because – oh, this is gonna sound completely stupid—”

“Let me decide that.”

“Okay, okay. So – I didn’t put it together at first, I, I mean, I didn’t even really remember at first, but. Every single time I’ve got close to Sin, I’ve passed out for – for some reason, and I’ve had the weirdest dream every time. Like, I’m floating somewhere in the middle of some kind of city, and there’s someone standing on top of a roof down there? And – he seems weirdly familiar for some reason. Or,” Martin huffs, “at least, he seems to think I should be familiar to him. And they’re so vivid while they’re happening, but as soon as I’m awake it’s like – it just slips away. But I feel like they’ve been getting more and more… together every time. Like, it’s not just weird dream stuff anymore, it almost feels… real.”

Jon looks more and more confused – and more and more alarmed – with every word.

“… I don’t think you sound completely stupid,” he says, a little uselessly.

“Thanks,” says Martin after a moment.

“But I – I’ve never heard of anything like this before. You can’t – you’re sure you don’t remember anything else?”

“I… I, I don’t think so?” Martin frowns, trying to strain his memory for anything else from any of these weird recurring dreams. “Um, a giant black bird, maybe? Something like that. It – it kind of reminded me of one of your aeons, actually, now I’m thinking about it.”

“I… I see,” Jon says, sounding at even more of a loss than before. He sighs shortly, a deep frown appearing on his face. “I’m sorry, I honestly have no idea. I mean - obviously the fayth deal in dreams, that’s the whole basis behind the aeons, summoning their dreams into reality, but how Sin comes into it I have no idea. I – maybe it’s got something to do with how close you got? I, I mean, you said it… sucked you in when it plucked you from your home, I – that’s not the sort of thing you hear about… ever.”

Jon sounds agitated enough that Martin almost wishes he hadn’t brought it up.

“Sorry.”

“What? No, don’t be ridiculous, it’s hardly your fault you were – kidnapped by the single greatest calamity of the past thousand years,” Jon scoffs, and – okay, that gets a chuckle out of him. “I just – it’s frustrating me that I don’t have any answers for you.”

“It’s alright. I’ve got used to it.”

Martin winces as the words come out a lot – a whole lot – more bitter than he was going for. “Oh, hell, sorry, Jon, I didn’t mean you—”

“No, no, it’s fine.” Jon goes quiet again, a fierce look of concentration on his face, and then he says, “… We could always try asking the Guado. We’ll be heading through Guadosalam soon enough anyway, it’s not as if it’ll take us out of our way, so – it could be worth a try.”

“Oh – right, I remember on that sphere – Gertrude talked about them having some sort of secret library or something, right?”

“That she did.” Jon sighs, annoyance written plain across his face. “The Guado are extremely protective of their archives. They don’t let any outsiders gain access, and they are very selective about what information they choose to share from it. It’s one of the reasons they’re not especially popular in Bevelle.”

“Hang on – they don’t let any outsiders in? Not even—”

“Not even the Grand Maester, yes.” Jon’s lip curls upward in a slight smirk. “You can imagine how much that vexes Elias.”

“Oh, I bet he hates that.” Martin lets himself feel a stab of petty, vindictive pleasure at the idea that at least someone in Spira gets away with even slightly inconveniencing Elias on a regular basis, before a much more sobering thought occurs to him. “But wait, if they won’t even let him take a look – I mean, what chance are we gonna have?”

“I don’t know,” Jon says sourly, his face twisting. “But it’s the best idea I’ve got. At the very least we can drop by and ask.”

Martin thinks about it for a moment.

“I mean,” he says carefully, “I guess it’s not like we’ve got anything to lose.”

“Not so long as we’re careful about it.”

Martin already knows what he’s going to say, but he takes a moment to really think about committing to it anyway. So long as they’re careful about it. He hopes this doesn’t end up causing any more trouble for Jon.

“Alright, sure. Let’s do it.”

Chapter Text

Finally, one mild and slightly overcast afternoon, they reach the south bank of the Moonflow.

The trees slowly begin to thin out before suddenly falling away altogether, and Martin gasps.

When the others said that the Moonflow was Spira’s largest river, he’d imagined something decently wide. This is way beyond that.

The water is not just wide, but so wide that Martin can just barely see the opposite bank in the distance, and deep enough that even at the sides of the bank, the bottom isn’t even slightly visible. It’s a flat, slow-moving kind of river at this point, flowing so slow and steady that Martin can barely make out the current. If he wasn’t actively looking for the movement of the water, he would’ve thought that they’d just stumbled onto the edge of a huge lake, or even some kind of inland sea; it’s just that huge.

Atop the surface of the water, lining the bank of the river, lie clusters of flat, green leaves that clump together in small islands. Their long stalks stretch up out of the water and hold aloft purple, tube-shaped flowers that seem to hum faintly as they sway in the breeze. As Martin stands there, transfixed by the sight in front of him, he realises that there are pyreflies circling lazily around the surface of the water, coming up from out of the centre of the flowers themselves before drifting off up into the sky.

“This is the Moonflow?” he asks, too awestruck for anything else.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Tim says to him, nudging Martin’s shoulder with his. “You haven’t even seen it at its best yet.”

“The pyreflies gather around the moon lilies on the river when night falls,” Sasha chimes in. “It makes the whole river glow.”

“You’ll get to see it once we’re on the other side,” says Daisy from somewhere behind him. “Which isn’t gonna happen if we miss the shoopuf.”

“Sorry, the what?”

Tim’s eyes gleam.

“Oh, Martin, you’re in for a treat,” he promises. “Trust me, if we try and explain it ahead of time we’ll just spoil it for you.”

Daisy lets out a short, amused breath through her nose.

“Don’t scare him,” she says, bumping Tim’s shoulder with her own, before taking herself off down the path along the riverbank, scoping out the road ahead.

Martin blinks. He stares after Daisy for a moment, and then looks back to Tim.

“You and Daisy seem like you’re getting along better these days.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tim looks slightly uncomfortable before shrugging it off. “Turns out she’s not as bad as I thought she was. Either that or she’s just grown on me. Or she’s just less of an arse these days.”

“A glowing review if I ever heard one,” says Sasha dryly with a wink.

“Oh, come on, you know what I mean.” Tim runs a hand over the back of his neck awkwardly. “Guess we just understand each other better. I mean, she’s actually – she’s given me some actually not-terrible advice, after – yeah. Always where it’s least-looked for, and all that.”

Huh. Martin watches Tim, and wonders what exactly he and Daisy have been talking about, in their little heart-to-hearts while setting up their camping spots.

“Well. I’m glad it’s helping,” he says, sincerely.

Tim offers him a thin, but genuine smile, before he makes to follow Daisy’s lead along the path, Martin and Sasha trailing along in his wake.

“Speaking of people getting along,” he says, “what do you two make of Jon and Melanie?”

“Uh,” Martin says, “what?”

“Well – there’s something there, right?”

Martin and Sasha take a moment to exchange a look of deep and mutual confusion.

“I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’re talking about the mutual loathing at first sight,” says Sasha, quirking an eyebrow.

“Yeah, but I mean – this is pulling the hair of the girl you like in class because you don’t know how else to deal with your feelings levels of—”

Oh – wow, really?

Tim might be one of the smartest people Martin’s ever met, but Martin is learning new things every day, and apparently today it’s that Tim is a little bit thick in this extremely specific way.

“Um – Tim, I. You know Georgie and Melanie are – that they’re together, don’t you?”

Tim stops mid-step, like a machina that needs rebooting.

“What? No.”

“You,” Sasha laughs, nudging Tim on the arm with a closed fist, “need to open your eyes a little more. Melanie literally introduced herself as Georgie’s girlfriend.”

“Okay, Sasha, but to be fair to Tim, he – he wasn’t there for that bit.”

“They’ve been cuddling next to the campfire literally every night.”

“I thought that was just them sticking close because they don’t trust the rest of us as far as they could throw us!” Tim protests. “You know, being practical!”

Sasha is openly laughing now, and Martin’s struggling not to join her.

“Wait until I tell Melanie,” Sasha’s saying with a wicked grin.

“You’re not telling Melanie.”

“Ah, so you’d prefer I tell Jon instead? Alright, got it.”

“You’re awful. I’m rescinding your best friend privileges, starting right now.”

The friendly bickering continues as they make their way along the wide, straight road, following the river downstream past a wooden noticeboard with a signpost attached to one side. There are a few notices tacked up; curious, Martin lets his eyes travel over them as they pass. He spots a brightly coloured flyer advertising the travel agencies, a notice asking people not to feed the shoopufs, and – Martin winces – one that looks newer than the others that seems to be about what happened at Operation Mi’ihen.

Martin decides not to look any closer at the board after that. He has a pretty good idea of the sorts of things that’ll be written on that particular flyer, and he knows that all of them will make him so angry he won’t know what to do with himself.

Then Martin looks past the noticeboard further downriver, and is struck dumb for the second time that afternoon.

That’s a shoopuf?

The shoopuf – that’s got to be the shoopuf thing Tim and Daisy were talking about, right? – the shoopuf is a massive beast, with light green-grey, leathery-looking skin, and a long tail with a tall fin at the base of it, and an even longer nose which it currently has curled up in front of its long, conical head. It stands docile, patiently waiting next to a stone platform with some kind of crane-lift on top of it. Martin can only assume that that is for actually getting up onto the back of the shoopuf, where someone has fitted a massive saddle with a covered seating platform on top of it, one that looks like it could easily seat ten people. Martin’s pretty sure he barely comes up to one of this thing’s knees.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m really not,” says Tim with an audible grin. “I swear, watching people see their first shoopuf never gets old.”

“It’s the little things in life,” Sasha nods sagely.

“Is it… safe?” Martin asks tentatively.

“’Course it is. Shoopufs are harmless,” Tim reassures him.

“No, I agree with Martin,” says Melanie, who’s sticking even closer to Georgie than usual, the two of them already stood by the stairs leading up onto the stone platform – a good distance away from where the shoopuf itself is standing looking out at the river. “The sooner we’re on and off that thing, the happier I’ll be.”

“Hang on,” Tim says, baffled, “So you’re happy to dig ancient machina no one remembers anything about out of the ground and ride around on that, but riding on a shoopuf is where you draw a line?”

“Yes, actually. Machina don’t think for themselves,” Melanie retorts, “They can only do what you program them for, or go where you tell them to go. Which means that if anything goes wrong, the only person you have to blame is yourself.”

“I mean, I guess,” Tim says skeptically, looking between Melanie and the shoopuf, still standing placidly at its station.

Martin looks up at the shoopuf, and the very unstable-looking crane lift, and sighs. “Alright, so… when do we leave?”

“As soon as Jon and the other two have sorted it with the handlers, I think,” Georgie pipes up. She grins slightly. “I think we might be queue-jumping.”

“Oh.” Martin looks around at the boarding area; there do seem to be a few people waiting over on another low stone platform, one that’s had some coloured canvas raised over it to make a covered seating area, complete with benches and maps of Spira and even a shelf packed with what Martin could swear are information booklets. “Is that… okay? I mean, is it allowed?”

“Not usually, but they’ll make an exception for a summoner going north,” Tim shrugs, looking out over the Moonflow to where the treetops on the north bank are only just about visible.

“Right,” Martin sighs. Of course they will. He’s seen enough now to figure that most people in Spira are probably willing to accept a bit of inconvenience if it means letting a summoner carry on to Zanarkand faster.

“Wait, we don’t have to pay for it or anything, do we?”

“Nah, the shoopuf crossing’s free. The temple pays for it.”

“Which is just another reason to avoid it as far as I’m concerned,” Melanie mutters under her breath.

Martin decides it’d probably be more trouble than it’s worth to acknowledge that comment, and goes back to people-watching the folks over in the waiting area. He thinks he spots a single Guado sitting apart from everyone else, reading a book – the thick, twisted hairstyle the colour of amaranth wood kind of gives them away – but the other people waiting for the shoopuf seem to be exclusively human.

Well. Almost exclusively. The longer Martin watches, the more he sees that the couple of shorter figures who he’d thought were children – aren’t. In fact, they’re not human at all – not with that bright blue skin, the bright yellow eyes with the large, oval pupils, or that slightly stooped posture, or the stumpy antennae on top of their heads.

If this was the first time he’d come across people that weren’t human, he might not have done such a good job at holding it together. Lucky for him that the first trip through Luca on the eve of the blitzball tournament has desensitised him a little. Martin forces himself to stop staring, and quietly wishes that Jon was around so that he could surreptitiously ask him about who these people are and why no one seems to have mentioned them before now.

Thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for Jon, Daisy, and Basira to return, with one of those very same blue, amphibious-looking people in a set of cheerful green dungarees trailing along behind them, who introduces themself in broken Spiran with a name that Martin has no hope in hell of being able to pronounce without the stretchy vocal sac that the dungaree-wearing person seems to possess. He’s more than a little relieved when they give everyone a lazy wink and cheerfully tell them all that they answer to Driver while they’re on the job.

“Ish everybody here, yesh?” they burble out – S sounds seem to be an issue for them.

“Yes, this is everyone,” Jon nods. He looks kind of like he’s got a headache coming on.

“Hoo! Large party for a shummoner. But shoopuf will manage. We ride now?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No troububble at all! All aboards!”

They’re shown over to the crane lift in small groups – something about the thing having some kind of weight limit. Martin ends up grouped with Jon and Tim, and while they’re waiting to be loaded onto the patiently waiting animal like cargo containers on a ship, Martin can’t help sneaking a look over at the workings of the crane to confirm a suspicion he has.

Yep, just like he thought. Next to the boarding platform that the crane stands on is a set of spinning wheels, and a control panel being operated by another of the same blue, frog-like folk that the driver belongs to. The crane’s a machina – a temple-approved one, apparently.

As they stand on the platform being lifted up to the height of the shoopuf’s back, Martin takes the opportunity to scooch a bit closer to Jon so that he can ask in as low a voice as he can manage:

“Jon? Who are these people?”

“The Hypello,” Jon says in an equally low voice. A little louder, he says, “Sorry, I forgot you wouldn’t be familiar – they’re even more reclusive than the Guado and the Ronso, you hardly ever see them away from the Moonflow.”

“Which is just as well, really,” Tim chimes in. “If that lot actually had any interest in blitzball, everyone else in Spira would have to throw in the towel then and there.”

“Of course that’s where your mind goes,” Jon says dryly, rolling his eyes. Martin thinks he can see Tim’s point, though – river folk like the Hypello are probably terrifyingly strong swimmers.

The platform jolts to a sudden stop when it reaches the top, and Jon stumbles, almost losing his footing. Without thinking, Martin catches Jon’s arms in his to steady him.

“Careful—”

“Sorry—”

Jon finds his feet, and there’s a moment where Martin is suddenly very, very aware of the position they’re in, with one of Jon’s hands gripping Martin’s forearm and the other one splayed across the front of his shoulder where Jon caught onto him for balance. Jon becomes very visibly aware of it too, his eyes going wide for a split second before he steps back out of Martin’s space.

“Um. Thank you,” Jon says, pushing an errant strand of hair away from his face.

“No problem,” Martin manages, hoping that his face hasn’t gone red. Tim’ll never let him hear the end of it, if it has and he notices.

They go to take their seats on the back of the shoopuf, and after a quick reminder from the driver to keep all their arms and legs inside the seating area, the great big beast starts taking slow, lumbering strides into the river. It’s a little bumpy at first, but once the shoopuf is up to its belly in the water and more swimming instead of wading, the ride becomes a lot smoother. Probably smoother than any of the ferries they’ve been on earlier in their journey, come to that.

Martin ends up next to Jon; alongside Tim, they were the last to board, which according to Sasha has given everyone else plenty of time to work out the seating arrangements to make sure the ride’s as harmonious as possible. Which probably translates to ‘make sure that Jon and Melanie aren’t at each others’ throats for the entire crossing’, and the two of them are indeed sat as far away from one another as the small passenger area allows, but Sasha has that look on her face that makes him think that’s not all there is to it.

Or maybe Martin’s just reading too much into it because of how he feels right now. And how he feels right now is that his big stupid crush on Jon has got so big and so stupid that he’d honestly be amazed if nobody else has picked up on it right now. Like, you might as well hang a neon sign on him.

He likes Jon. He really, really likes Jon. He could put it to the back of his mind a bit easier when Jon wasn’t talking to him as much and they were all stressed out of their minds about everything surrounding Operation Mi’ihen, but now? When they’ve had a bit of space to breathe and Martin’s been getting time to actually talk to Jon, without having to worry too much about saying the wrong thing, or at least not in a non-normal way, it’s just become impossible to ignore anymore.

The fact that Jon at the very least doesn’t seem to mind Martin’s company given how many times they’ve ended up talking between Djose and the Moonflow just makes it worse, in a way. Means that Martin keeps having to actively remind the part of his brain that wants to get his hopes up that this is really not the time right now. Not for either of them, but especially not for Jon, who already has the whole of Spira on his shoulders.

He doesn’t need to deal with Martin’s feelings on top of all that.

That doesn’t mean that Martin isn’t quietly enjoying every single second he’s spending sat on the bench next to Jon on the back of this shoopuf. He’s not that good of a person.

As the shoopuf draws further and further into the middle of the river, Jon twists in his seat, leaning up on his elbows on the back of the bench as he gazes down intently at the Moonflow’s surface. Martin’s about to ask him what he’s looking for, maybe joke about him dropping something down there, when Jon’s face suddenly clears and lights up with quiet enthusiasm. He turns to Martin and taps him on the shoulder.

“Martin? I think you should see this.”

“See what?”

Jon points down at the river. “Look.”

Martin twists in his own seat so that he’s facing down towards the river the same as Jon, and looks.

It takes him a moment or two to find what he’s supposed to be looking at – at first he can’t see anything except the surface of the water, flowing gently past the body of their shoopuf. But the waters of the Moonflow, while deep, are surprisingly clear – when Martin looks deeper into the river, past the surface and underneath, he sees it.

A city.

Not just part of a city, or a few crumbling buildings. It looks like – well, like a whole city just up and plunged itself beneath the water one day. The buildings are obviously just empty shells, covered in algae and other plants, home to fish that dart in and out of the windows. But even with all that, they amazingly look to be mostly in one piece. Raised walkways, smooth asphalt roads, Martin can even make out a building that he thinks might have been a station of some kind. There’s more than a few lopsided buildings, a bit of a look of rust on some of the metal parts, though that might just be the way the light underwater makes it look, but… aside from that, Martin could easily be looking at a slice of Zanarkand. Like seeing it through a darkened mirror.

“I – wow. Is that – that city looks pretty much completely intact down there.”

“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” Jon says, sounding pleased.

“Yeah. I mean – bloody hell, that skyrail’s still in one piece.”

“Which one’s that?”

“Look, you can see it right there—with the carriages and everything still hanging on?”

“Oh –” Jon shifts slightly to get a better look at where Martin’s pointing, pressing his shoulder against Martin’s. “I’ve got it. Did people really ride around in that?”

“Like it’s any weirder than riding on the back of a shoopuf,” Martin mutters to him, and Jon smothers a laugh.

Help him, please. Martin is going to die.

“Must be nice for those of us who can actually see what’s down there,” Melanie calls over from the other side of the little passenger cabin.

“Oh, I-I mean –” Thrown out of the moment, and suddenly remembering that everyone else is still in this little enclosed space with them, Martin scrambles. “I can describe it for you if you want—”

“I’m just messing with you.”

Melanie smiles, then cocks her head, somehow managing to look curious even behind her goggles. “How’d you know so much about machina, though, Martin? You didn’t hang round with my people before Sin scrambled your brains and landed you with these idiots, did you?”

“O-oh, um, well…”

Martin twists back around in his seat, and settles back into it properly, his heart pounding as he tries to think of a good enough lie. Jon twists back around as well – not completely, and out the corner of his eye Martin can see a tense look of panic on Jon’s face that he’s obviously trying to pass off as an irritated frown.

“N-not exactly,” Martin says, finding his lie, “but. Y’know, when, when your dad knew someone like Gertrude Robinson…”

He lets that hang for a moment, hoping that he won’t need to try and elaborate on that, but he’s in luck – Melanie mutters a quiet, emphatic well, shit under her breath, before settling back in her seat.

“Ohhhh. Yeah, that’d do it. Heard some real stories about her.”

“Mmhm,” Martin says, trying to ignore Jon deflating with relief next to him. “Um, so, so that city down there – what exactly happened to it? I mean – it, um, doesn’t really look like that was Sin’s doing. … Right?”

“No one actually knows what happened,” says Jon as he slides back down into his seat to face the others.

“Which means,” Tim adds with a wry half-smile, “it depends on who you ask.”

“Oh, okay,” Martin sighs, knowing this means he’s in for another eye-opener. “Go on then.”

“They say that the entire city under the Moonflow used to be built on top of the river itself,” Jon starts, folding his hands on top of one another. “Supported by giant bridges that spanned the width of the entire river.”

“And then what?”

“The version you’ll hear most people tell is that the city sank under its own weight,” Tim shrugs. Making a gesture with his hands as if to demonstrate the sinking, he goes on, “The bridges collapsed into the river, and so the city went down with them.”

“Which might just be the least subtle lesson about hubris I’ve ever heard in my life,” Jon mutters under his breath.

“So I’m guessing that’s the version Yevon goes with, then.”

“Surprise, surprise, they go with the option that doesn’t make a single bit of sense,” Melanie snorts, tapping her cane against the floor of the seating area in agitation. “If the supports holding up the city were going to cave in, that would’ve happened long before they finished building it. Or it would’ve happened so slowly we’d still be watching it happen today. Even the crappiest engineers wouldn’t build a city on a river without making sure it would stay standing.”

Martin throws a cautious look Daisy and Basira’s way, but to his surprise, they just seem to be listening, with nothing but carefully impassive looks on their faces. For now, at least.

“So what’re the other stories?” Martin asks.

“I like the one about the bridges being sabotaged during the Machina War,” Sasha pipes up. “That one seems the most plausible to me.”

“Oh, I know that one!” Georgie chimes in with a smile. At Martin’s questioning look, her smile takes on something a bit showman-like, and she draws both her legs up onto the bench to sit cross-legged, clearing her throat.

“Here we go,” Jon murmurs.

“They say,” Georgie begins, in a voice she’s obviously practised before, “that it was done over a period of months or even years by spies from an enemy faction, who gained access to the city blueprints and used those to carry out their work with deadly precision. By the time the city leaders realised there was something wrong, it was too late to fix the damage. The only solution was to evacuate before the entire place crumbled into the river.”

Martin has to hand it to her – Georgie knows how to tell a story.

“Wait, so whose side was this city on?”

“That’s a good question,” Georgie shrugs. “Most versions of the story say that the city chose to be neutral. That that was their mistake, because whoever sent the spies on their sabotage mission would rather have sunk an entire city and forced thousands of people out of their homes rather than let the enemy take advantage of the same resources.”

Martin sits with this for a moment. It occurs to him suddenly, how little he’s actually heard about the Machina War itself. He tries to remember what it is he does know. That it happened a thousand years ago, that Sin turned up at the end of it – or maybe was the thing that ended it, he can’t remember, and that…

Oh. He remembers Sasha saying, that first day back on the beach, when he found out Zanarkand is nothing but a ruined pilgrimage site now – destroyed in the great Machina War between Zanarkand and Bevelle, remember?

He wants to say that the Zanarkand he remembers wouldn’t do something like that. But the Zanarkand he remembers wasn’t even at war. Maybe years of a terrible war changed it into something he wouldn’t even recognise, even before it was destroyed.

“My money’s on the spies being from Bevelle,” Melanie says suddenly.

Daisy’s impassive face sharpens into a glare. “You wanna say that again?”

“You can’t tell me that’s not their style. Go on.” Melanie makes an effort to very deliberately turn in the direction of Daisy’s voice, facing her. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’d put it past them.”

For a moment, nobody speaks. The sound of Driver whistling a burbling tune drifts faintly over the back of the shoopuf towards them. Daisy’s frown deepens into something almost ferocious, but – there’s something else there too, for a second. Something almost troubled.

After whatever length of time Melanie deems long enough, she settles back in her seat beside Georgie, a mirthless smirk on her face.

“See? Even you can’t.”

“Does it matter?” Basira asks, the question blunt as a hammer blow. “We can’t prove that either story’s true or not. As far as I can tell, all it really shows is that you shouldn’t try building a city on top of a river just because you can.”

“Is that why you think they did it?”

The question’s out of Martin’s mouth before he can stop it. Basira cocks an eyebrow at him.

“They could’ve gone for one side or the other, and that would’ve been fine.”

“I mean–” Martin has a split second where he asks himself, are we really doing this? and decides almost immediately, you know what, we’re really doing this. “Okay, yeah, sure. They could’ve if it was just, I dunno, access to the water or the fish or whatever that they wanted, but there’s plenty other reasons they could’ve gone for the middle of the river itself.”

“Like what?” asks Daisy.

“Well –”

Great, now he actually has to think about this.

“Maybe they thought it was easier to defend that way. You know, less chance of having, I dunno, a whole army come down on top of you if the only way in or out is over a bridge. Maybe they thought it would be better for them if their city was literally part of the way to get across the river, because then it’d literally be better for everyone if the city was left alone to get on with its own business, right?”

“Didn’t help them in the end if you believe Georgie’s story,” Basira comes back immediately.

“Okay, sure,” Martin says, taking a breath, and deciding that he’s not going to let this go, actually. It’s been months of this, and – well, apparently he’s just hit his breaking point. “But they couldn’t have seen that coming. And – anyway, maybe they used the water for power, and it was more convenient to literally be sitting on top of their power supply instead of having to find ways to pipe it inland. Maybe they thought it’d be easier for the Hypello living here if there was a city on the water that they could visit or, or even live in if they wanted to, instead of having to come up on land every single time they wanted to say hi to their neighbours! There’s just – there’s loads of good reasons they could’ve done it, okay? Like Melanie said, you don’t just wake up one day and think to yourself, hm, you know what, I’ve got some free time today, what will I do – oo, I know, time to see if I can build a city on top of the biggest river in Spira!”

Melanie and Tim, who’ve been actively swivelling their heads from one side to the other like people watching a ball game, actually burst into laughter at that.

They’re not the only ones – out of the corner of his eye, Martin can see Jon’s shoulders shaking, his lips pressed together tightly to hold his own laughter in.

“Can–” Jon asks, and has to stop a second as a small laugh actually escapes alongside the word. “Is that something that’s possible? Powering machina using water?”

“Yeah, if you’ve got enough of it and you can get it moving fast enough. You know, not all that different from – from, I dunno, using it to turn a wheel to mill flour or whatever.”

Daisy raises her eyebrows. “Bit of a leap from that to something like powering a city on top of a river.”

“Okay, but why?” Martin asks. “No, seriously, why? It’s – okay, it’s a bigger scale, sure, but – is there really that much difference between turning a wheel and, and making sure people get to keep lights on when it gets dark, or, or stay warm enough or cool enough, or – it’s not like we’re talking about weapons here! What’s so bad about making people’s lives a little bit easier?”

At that point, Martin’s brain finally, finally starts to catch up with the rest of him. Realising that everyone’s staring at him – with looks ranging from shock to curiosity to discomfort to something that might be bordering on approval – that might have something to do with it.

“It’s not…” he sighs, faltering. Then he decides he might as well go for it. He’s already crossed so far over the line so fast that it’s in ribbons by now, why not go all the way. “It’s not even like Yevon’s machina taboo is even all that consistent. I mean, we literally just used one to get us up onto this thing.”

“It’s been that way as long as I remember,” Basira says, looking extremely uncomfortable. “You know, the temple tells us which machina are okay to use, and which ones aren’t.”

“But who gets to make that call? I-I mean – if Yevon really believes machina are – are the whole reason everyone in Spira has to deal with Sin in the first place, and that if people stop using them then it’ll just go away one day, why are they going for all this – this pick-and-choose but only the ones we say so and only when we’re the ones using them approach?”

“It’s not like there’s no logic to it,” Basira argues. “The forbidden machina – the stuff we’re not allowed to use – it’s stuff like what they brought out against Sin during Operation Mi’ihen. Weapons. Stuff from the Machina War that could have destroyed everything. The only reason that war didn’t end with both sides killing everyone is cause Sin showed up first.”

“Right, of course, because it’s such a naturally slippery slope from machina-powered lights and transport to weapons of mass destruction.”

After a moment, Daisy looks at him. “You done yet?”

“Not even close,” Martin mutters, mostly just to be contrary. He thinks he might actually have finally run out of steam.

“Don’t stop on our account,” Tim grins. “I could watch this all day.”

“Same,” Melanie says with a matching grin.

“So what do you plan on doing about it?” Daisy says, ignoring both of them and keeping her gaze focused on Martin. “If you start saying that stuff anywhere that isn’t the middle of this river with nobody ‘cept us listening, you’ll get a target painted on your back in seconds. You think they don’t know how to make things that are inconvenient for them disappear?”

“What, are you threatening me?”

“I’m warning you. Not just for your sake.”

Daisy nods her head to the side, just enough for Martin to get the message. He frowns, frustrated, but – it’s not like he can say anything. He knows. He already knows what she’s getting at, he’s had it in the back of his mind for months already.

It’s just as well Daisy doesn’t know the full extent of the trouble he could end up causing Jon if it all went wrong, because he has a pretty good idea of how that would go for him. Not that that would actually end up being a problem. Martin would rather gnaw his own arm off than do anything that would bring the wrong sort of attention down on Jon.

“… Right,” he says eventually, because Daisy still has that stone-faced look of expectation on her face. “Sure.”

“Martin’s right, though,” Georgie says after a few moments. “Yevon’s rules aren’t even internally consistent, and the second enough people actually put two and two together and realise that, they’re gonna be in hot water. Something’s gonna have to change sooner or later. It already is. Or d’you think it’s a coincidence that Jon’s the first one to pilgrimage in years?”

Basira stares at her. “I don’t see you standing up to change anything.”

“Maybe not,” says Georgie quietly, looking down at her lap with a frown. “But at least I’m not in uniform helping to make sure there isn’t ever any change.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It never is.”

Basira has no answer to that, and neither does anyone else. All of them lapse into silence, leaving Martin with the feeling that near the end there, Georgie and Basira weren’t just talking about the machina anymore.

He wants to ask about that, but he figures he’s probably already caused enough trouble and drawn enough attention to himself for one day, and he’s not really in the mood for another drawn-out argument with anyone. They’ve still got plenty of miles left for him to pick fights about Yevon’s myriad hypocrisies if he feels like it. Or maybe he’ll have more luck getting sense out of Georgie or Melanie without getting too many weird looks.

Oblivious to the controversy happening up on its back, the shoopuf continues to glide serenely through the water, carrying them onwards to the next leg of their journey.

Chapter Text

They make it over to the north bank of the Moonflow without any further incident. The bank on this side is almost identical to its southern counterpart, from being covered in trees for as far as the eye can see right down to the crossing point having a boarding area and a waiting area set up in much the same way as the one on the other side. It takes a few minutes for them to make it down from the back of the shoopuf and back onto solid ground; once they've all finally disembarked, they're waved off by another Hypello attendant who cheerfully asks them to come again as they walk away. Apparently a thousand years hasn’t changed some things.

Not wanting to linger, they get themselves and their things together and move on quickly. There are a small handful of people sat in the waiting area wanting to go south; as their little group passes, Martin can't help noticing that a lot of them are sporting some very hostile looks on their faces. It takes him a minute to realise that all that hostility is aimed Melanie's way - it's her they're looking at whenever their faces start screwing up like that. And without fail, that hostility melts away into open mouthed confusion as soon as they spot Jon walking in the same group, and put two and two together about exactly who it is Melanie’s travelling with.

Arseholes. A few of them really looked like they wanted to start something, too, before they caught sight of Jon and went for whispering behind their hands instead.

“Not subtle, are they?” Tim mutters to him, seeing the look on his face.

“Not a bit.”

“Talking about my fanclub?”

Melanie’s tone is light, but there’s a definite edge to it. When Tim and Martin are quiet for a moment too long, looking at each other with mingled discomfort and guilt, Melanie snorts.

“Oh, come on, I wasn’t born yesterday. I might not be able to see them, but I know how people react whenever I go somewhere I’m not supposed to be.”

“Sorry,” says Martin, not knowing what else to say.

“Save it. If gawking and whispering is all they’re doing I can take it.”

But you shouldn’t have to, Martin thinks but manages not to say. He’s pretty sure Melanie already knows that, and no amount of Martin saying it is going to magically make it come to be. Just the same way that no amount of Melanie saying that she can deal with it is going to hide the fact that she’s holding Georgie’s hand so tightly that both of their knuckles have gone pale, and doesn’t loosen her grip until they’ve all gone far enough down the path along the bank that none of them can see or hear anything from the crossing point anymore.

By this point, it’s late in the afternoon. After a quick discussion, they decide they're going to walk just far enough to find the next suitable place to camp and then call it a day. Luckily, it's not too far a walk; after following the main road along the line of the river for a while as it flows downstream, they spot a small, cosy-looking hollow under the trees, a short distance from the road. As Tim puts it, close enough to the river that they’ll be able to walk to the edge to see it light up when night falls, but far away enough not to get eaten alive by insects in the meantime.

It’s a nice evening. Things settle into a relaxed, almost sleepy atmosphere as the evening wears on and they all get on with the business of setting up their spot for the night and getting their evening meal together; Martin doesn’t know if everyone’s forgotten about how heated it got while they were crossing the river or if they’ve all just decided to put it out of their minds for the rest of today, but he's also not about to complain about it. Jon and Tim are on wash duty tonight, and Martin’s relieved to see that they seem to have got most of their old equilibrium back, alternating between talking quietly about something or other while they work, or Tim cracking some kind of joke that has Jon either rolling his eyes or trying to pretend that he’s not laughing.

It’s not that Martin was that worried about the two of them – no more worried than he is about most things, anyway. He's had it figured for a long while that the way they’d been short with each other on the highroad going north had everything to do with Tim wanting to take part in Operation Mi’ihen come hell or high water and Jon wanting him not to. But – he doesn’t know, it’s just still a relief to know that that strain didn’t actually hit some kind of breaking point. That Tim’s still around to ease it back.

Stuff like that.

Someone taps him on the shoulder; Martin turns to find Sasha on his right, looking at him expectantly.

“Fancy helping me find some more stuff to keep the fire going? I know I can make fire out of nowhere, but if you want it to last more than five seconds we’re going to need wood to burn.”

It's not an odd request. Back in places where there’d been less wood lying around, Daisy or Tim or whoever else had room on their backs had had to carry a little bit with them that they’d scavenged from other places. Here, though, with so many trees around, fallen branches have been much easier to find, and they’ve taken to just gathering it when they have need – usually in pairs. Can’t be too careful, especially near nightfall.

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Go on, then.”

They let everyone else know what they’re doing, then wander a short way away from their little hollow of a campsite, eyes peeled for any likely-looking bits of dry wood that they can gather up and take with them. By the time Sasha gives any sign that she might have more ulterior motives for this little venture of theirs, Martin already has a small bundle cradled in the crook of one arm. Sasha bends to inspect a fallen branch more closely, and then looks back at Martin with this weirdly shrewd look on her face that immediately has him on guard.

“So,” she says, stooping to add the branch to her own collection. “You and Jon seem to have got friendlier.”

“I— um, you think so?”

“Martin,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Come on. Huddled together in your little corner almost every night? It’s enough to make you wonder what you’re talking about.”

There’s a gentle teasing note in Sasha’s voice, but Martin can’t help feeling wary. He knows Sasha’s talked with Jon before about the things that didn’t add up about him, he overheard them at it. And if whatever theorising Jon’s been doing about Martin stopped as soon as he learned the truth…

Honestly, Martin’s not sure what it says about him that he’s not sure if he’d rather face that conversation than the other possibility that would have Sasha sounding so suggestive.

“Alright, yeah, we’ve – we’re friends now,” he says, trying to sound casual. “I think. I guess… the whole Operation Mi’ihen thing sort of put things in perspective a bit. For me at least. I-I mean, can’t speak for Jon and all that.”

“I’ve known Jon for years and trust me, who knows what that one’s thinking. It’s pretty obvious he trusts you, though. Told you he’d come around, didn’t I?”

Sasha grins, and Martin returns it with an uncertain smile of his own, remembering that night in Djose temple.

“Ha, yeah. That feels like a lifetime ago. Can’t believe so much has happened.”

“Yeah,” Sasha nods, her smile fading a little. “Just… be careful, okay?”

“I – what do you mean?” Martin frowns at her, genuinely confused. He’d been half-prepared for Sasha to come out and say she’d got him all figured out, but this… isn’t what he was expecting. “This isn’t about what happened on the shoopuf, is it?”

“No – well, no, not exactly. You probably should be careful about that, especially after what actually went down with Operation Mi’ihen. It wouldn’t surprise me if people started cracking down even harder on anyone with any sort of pro-machina feelings after all that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he sighs. “I just – I lost my temper a bit is all.”

He’s also still no closer to understanding what Sasha is really trying to drive at here. If she isn’t trying to obliquely hint that she knows his secret – or at least that she knows he’s got a secret – then what? “C’mon, Sasha, what’s this really about?”

Sasha bites her lip as she thinks. It's a weirdly nervous gesture for her; Martin can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen her do it.

“… Just,” she says, eventually, and sighs. “I guess the most simple way to say it is… be careful with Jon, alright?”

“What?”

“He won’t tell me why he’s suddenly decided to come around when it comes to you, but he’s doing it in that way he does when he’s trying to avoid telling one of his shocking lies. But – that’s big. For him. So just… be careful.”

With what?

“Sasha, what do you think is going on here exactly?”

“I dunno.”

“Well – just for the record, there’s nothing. So.”

“Okay,” she says, in the exact same tone.

“Mhm. So if you’re done…”

“For now.”

Sasha walks on, and Martin, still feeling a decent mix of confused and annoyed, follows behind her for a few paces until she stops again, turning back.

“You know,” she says. “I said be careful about the machina thing, but if you ever wanted to share anything else you’ve picked up, I’m always happy to listen. I know I said I joined the Crusaders to stick with Tim, but I also did it because I knew I’d learned everything I’d ever be able to in Bevelle. So… you know I don’t care where the knowledge comes from, so long as it’s true.”

Martin gives up. Maybe this whole thing was some elaborate way to try and let him know – nicely – that Sasha knows that something’s up with him beyond what he’s said. He doesn’t know how else he’s meant to read all of that, anyway.

And, well. As annoyed as he is at what he thinks might have been some kind of hint sandwiched in there about not making things more complicated while they’re on the pilgrimage – which, thanks, Sasha, he worked that one out for himself already – he can still appreciate the implicit offer to listen without judgement.

“… I’ll keep that in mind.”

“See that you do,” she says with a firm nod and a smile.

By now, it’s starting to get dark under the trees. Martin’s just about to suggest that they start heading back to the others, as much out of wanting to avoid any more conversations like the one they just had as a wariness about being caught unawares by fiends, when a faint, shimmery glow catches his eye through the forest's edge.

Sasha sees it too. “Oh, there we go, look, the river’s starting to light up. Come on.”

Martin’s too curious not to, and in any case Sasha’s already started ducking under a low-hanging branch to cut a direct line back to the riverbank, so he follows.

When they break out of the trees and back onto the path, it's bright; so much brighter than what was managing to filter past the treeline, so much so that Martin has to close his eyes for a moment. Gradually, gradually, his eyes adjust, until he can finally actually take in what he’s seeing.

Up and down the river, as far as he can see in either direction, the water glows. The handful of pyreflies that were lazily circling the moon lilies earlier that afternoon have become a throng, clustering so close to the water that it’s hard to tell where the water ends and the pyreflies begin. It’s like – like looking at a great big sea of stars, dotted with purple flowers that look like they’re glowing from the inside.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” Sasha agrees. She walks closer to the edge of the riverbank, until she’s stood right up against all of that light. “You won’t see anything like this anywhere else in Spira.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Martin follows her to the edge of the bank, stopping a little way behind. He doesn’t fancy taking his chances with losing his footing and falling in. “How come there’s so many?”

“Pyreflies? No one’s ever been sure. Maybe it’s because the Moonflow passes so close to Guadosalam. You know, with how there’s an entrance to the Farplane there. I bet the Guado know, but try getting them to share anything…”

Martin only just manages to hold back his surprise in time, glad that he decided to stick behind Sasha. So back when Tim and Sasha had talked about checking that Tim’s brother had reached the Farplane, they really had meant it on a literally physical level?

Martin has so many questions, and he is absolutely not going to ask any of them right now after the conversation he and Sasha just had. Instead, he tries to school his face into something a bit less bowled over, and as soon as he trusts himself to speak he says, “I mean – I’ve never been.”

“It can be a bit weird for some people. You should see how you feel when we get there.”

Almost meditatively, Sasha holds an arm out towards the glowing river. To Martin’s surprise, a few of the pyreflies start drifting up from the water’s surface, brushing against Sasha’s fingertips with a faint, bell-like sighing noise.

“Huh,” says Martin, watching a few more pyreflies drift lazily up from inside the closest moon lily to join the ones already circling Sasha’s wrist. “Does that always happen?”

“It’s not unheard of.”

Not unheard of under what circumstances, Martin wonders. Feeling a bit silly, he sticks his free hand out, just in case, and finds it stays resolutely pyrefly-free.

“Alright, I guess you’re just the pyrefly whisperer or something.”

“There you are!”

Martin and Sasha whirl around in surprise at the sudden voice, the pyreflies around Sasha scattering off into the air from the unexpected movement. Tim and Jon are heading towards them down the path, a look of relief on Jon’s face, a look of indulgence on Tim’s.

“Told you they wouldn’t’ve gone far.”

“You never know,” Jon mutters, pointing out, “It is past nightfall now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tim says, shaking his head with a smile. “Honestly, I’d be more worried for the fiends than for these two by now. You see that spell Martin pulled off the other day? Completely stopped that spellcaster in its tracks.”

Oh, Tim noticed that? Martin can’t help the pleased smile he feels stealing its way onto his face. He’d felt more than a little pride when he realised it’d worked and they wouldn’t have to worry as much about dealing with ice burns or being frozen to the ground anymore.

“I… I suppose…”

“And Sasha’s lightning bolts have been getting so big recently that I’m having to dive for cover every time,” Tim adds, going in for the kill. “They would’ve been fine. Anyway, we’ve found them, so you can stop worrying and enjoy the view.”

Tim gestures out to the glowing river ahead of them, before promptly dropping himself down onto a patch of grass on the bank with little fanfare. Once down there, he looks up at the rest of them and pats the ground next to him.

Sasha shakes her head, but sets her little bundle of wood down before settling down on the ground next to Tim. That only seems to encourage him; he looks up again, patting the ground on his other side even more insistently, and says, “Come on, Jon. Your turn. It’s not gonna be the end of the world if you relax for five minutes.”

Deciding to help things along a bit, Martin catches Jon’s eye, shrugs, and sets his own bundle of firewood down before taking a seat of his own. Having all three of them taking the same stance – or the same seat, he guesses – is apparently enough; Jon throws up his hands in surrender, and sits himself down on the bank with the rest of them to watch the light of thousands of pyreflies shimmering its way over the river.

And - well. If Martin spends some of that time looking at the way Jon’s face catches that shimmery light instead of looking at the light itself, nobody else has to know.

According to the people who've come through this part of Spira before, it’s about a week’s walk to Guadosalam from the river crossing. Martin soon learns that that's about the extent of the information anyone can give him about the particular road they're on apart from what he can already see on the map, for the simple reason that none of them have actually walked this particular road before.

“We crossed at a different point coming south,” Basira tells him. “The Moonflow’s pretty well-settled even these days, so for once you've got plenty of roads to choose from. You’re not gonna find anywhere like Luca or Bevelle round here, but it’s not the big load of nothing around Djose either. Lots of small villages, mostly.”

“So you really didn’t pass through that place Dekker was talking about on your way down?”

“No, we weren’t on the north bank long enough for that. If we keep following the river for a while instead of cutting straight through the woods, we’ll probably hit it in a couple days.”

“Bit surprised you and Daisy are going along with this. Um, no offence.”

“It’s not like it’s taking us miles out of our way,” Basira shrugs. “Besides, I’m just as interested as you are. If someone like Dekker wants us to visit this place, there must be something worth hearing about.”

So that settles it, if there was anything there to settle in the first place: they keep to the riverside road, following the line of the Moonflow as it gradually bends from the west to the north. At some point, Martin notices that the water next to them is no longer flowing the same direction as the way they’re walking; at some point they must have passed a place where some kind of tributary hit the part of the river they’d been walking along, and started following that tributary upstream instead. Something as huge as the Moonflow must have a lot of smaller rivers feeding into it.

The road, as always, has more than its fair share of fiends for them to contend with as they walk. They take each fight as it comes. One morning, Georgie and Melanie spend most of their time with their heads together furiously whispering about something, and after they finally reach an agreement about it, Georgie's fighting style shifts; she starts dancing even closer to the fiends than usual when she fights, and every so often Martin catches her darting forward into their space with her bare hands, only to retreat clutching something or other before she hands it off to Melanie with a muttered comment, presumably something about whatever it is she’s managed to grab.

It takes a while to learn what that's all about. Right up until they're in the middle of a fight, in fact. It's been dragging on for a while, and all of them are feeling it, starting to waver and flag when all of a sudden Melanie shouts, “Okay, point me in their direction and then get out of the way!”

They manage it - barely - before Melane's chucking… something that explodes among the fiends in a brilliant flash of lightning, leaving their unfortunate foes twitching in a heap, easy targets for their close range fighters to swoop in with the last of their strength and finish the lot of them off.

“I got sick of standing next to him doing nothing the whole time,” Melanie says with a sharp grin, once the fiends are nothing but pyreflies ebbing away into thin air. She ignores Jon rolling his eyes and muttering who’s him, the cat’s father and carries on as if he hadn’t spoken, saying, “So I taught Georgie how to steal and after she practiced on me for a bit we decided to go for it and see what turned up for me. Fair warning, I can’t do accurate right now. If you don’t get out of the way in time, that’s on you.”

“Fair enough,” Tim tells her breathlessly, before sucking in a sharp, pained breath and wincing, one hand still pressed tightly against his shoulder where one of the fiends got a claw into him during the fight.

Martin glances over to Jon; he’s with Basira right now, working on a nasty-looking puncture wound in her leg that he’s pretty sure should not be the colour it is. Tim might be waiting a while.

Or… or. Maybe not.

Martin’s been sitting on this particular spell for a while now, too caught up in his head about what order the words should go in or what he even needs to focus on to get it to work, but… no time like the present.

“Do you need that looking at, Tim?”

“I can wait my turn,” Tim assures him, like there isn’t a bit of a cold sweat visible on his face. “I saw that thing hit Basira, it didn’t look pretty.”

“Yeah, yeah, but I mean… I could give it a go?”

Tim stares at him. “You’re serious. Has Jon been teaching you?”

“Um. Nope, just – just figured it out on my own, really.” At Tim’s incredulous look – his eyebrows look like they’re about to make an escape attempt off his face – Martin’s self-consciousness gets the better of him, and he blurts out, “Look, I just – it’s been on my mind since Operation Mi’ihen, alright? I keep thinking about what happened and – I just don’t want us to be caught out like that again.”

On second thought, Martin’ll take the incredulity. It’s better than the half-soft, half-brooding look of understanding that Tim’s sporting now.

“Alright,” Tim says after a while, and gestures to his shoulder. “Knock yourself out. I’m all yours to patch up.”

“Okay.” Okay. Now that he’s actually about to do this, it suddenly just got a whole lot more daunting again. The one time he’s actually tried this before on himself, it was when he nicked himself on an overhanging branch a couple of days ago, and that had been a tiny cut, barely even a scratch. It worked, but it wasn’t like there was all that much to do.

He needs to stop overthinking this.

He puts a hand to one side of the wound on Tim’s shoulder, takes a breath to calm himself, and gets started. Says the words he’s come up with as quietly as he can while still carrying enough conviction for it, waits for that now-familiar push-pull feeling of the magic drawing in to the focus as it answers his call. It’s – definitely different this time, though. Usually when he casts it’s a quick thing, almost like a catch and release. This time – it feels more like a balance. Like walking some kind of mental tightrope or holding a heavy door open in place or balancing a spinning plate – he can’t just let the magic go right away, he has to sort of. Hold it together for a while as it washes through Tim’s shoulder, try not to react as he suddenly becomes aware of the wound through a sense other than sight, and then let it go, knitting the gash in Tim’s shoulder back together in a rush of green sparks.

“Holy shit,” Tim says, and then Martin feels very much like he needs to sit down.

“Colour me impressed, Martin,” Tim’s saying now, craning his neck to get a good look at his shoulder. There’s a small mark there, still, and through the sudden woozy feeling in his head Martin feels a low swoop of disappointment that maybe it wasn’t enough, but Tim’s beaming. “You can barely tell there was anything there a few seconds ago.”

Okay, seriously, why is his head spinning? He must have messed something up. This never happened with any of his other spells.

“Yeah, uh. I mean – it’s not perfect,” he manages, giving his head a bit of a shake in an attempt to try and clear it.

“Yeah, and? The blood’s still staying in my body, which is where I prefer it to be.” Tim, tiring of trying to contort his neck and his shoulder into increasingly interesting shapes to get a better look, glances back at Martin and frowns. “Hey, you alright? You’ve gone really pale.”

“Just a bit light-headed all of a sudden, that’s all.”

Tim’s mood shifts in an instant. “Hey, c’mon,” he says, catching Martin’s arm to steer him gently over to the nearest tree. “Sit down before you pass out.”

Tim looks serious, so Martin bites down on the urge to protest and decides it’d be better all round if he just followed that instruction. A sit-down really, really wouldn’t go amiss right now.

Tim waits until he’s got himself on the ground with his back against the tree trunk before he relaxes slightly. Shaking his head, he folds his arms and says, “Honestly. Jon would straight up not speak to me for a week if he found out I was the reason you fainted after trying out a healing spell for the first time.”

“What?”

Not missing a beat, Tim belts out a cheery, “Oh, hi Jon!”

“Never mind hi Jon–” And Jon’s there next to Tim now, his frown teetering on the fine line between worry and exasperation. “What was that about, about Martin and a healing spell?”

“Oh, yeah. Check it out, he did a really good job.”

Jon glances at Tim’s shoulder, looks again, and then turns to Martin so quickly it’s a wonder his head didn’t come clean off. He looks appalled. “You don’t – I could have done that. You don’t – you don’t, you don’t have to do that.”

“I just – I thought it’d help. You know, you’ve been the only one healing up to now, and… I’m already feeling better, so—”

“No, no,” Jon cuts over him hastily, shaking his head, “it’s – it’s not that it doesn’t help, I just— healing magic is – it takes a lot out of you at first, if you’re not used to it yet. I could have warned you.”

“O-oh.” Well, now Martin just feels like a right tit. “Right. Um. Lesson learned, I guess.”

Jon sighs, and reaches an arm behind him, groping until he finds what he’s looking for.

“Drink something,” he says abruptly, his tone inviting no argument as he shoves a canteen in Martin’s direction. Martin decides now’s probably not the time to remind Jon that he has his own. “And Tim, don’t let him get up for at least five minutes.”

“Aye-aye.”

Jon steps away, and Martin waits until he’s sure Jon’s out of earshot before he looks up at Tim with a sheepish half-smile.

“I thought he was gonna bite my head off for a second there.”

“Full of surprises, our Jon,” Tim nods. “Better do as he says and drink up. Might be both of our heads otherwise.”

Martin dutifully does as he says, and waits until the world is completely steady again before he gets back to his feet, and does his best to ignore the way that Jon is very obviously hovering, watching him like a hawk.

Maybe he will ask Jon for advice next time. And maybe stick to really small stuff for now.

But at least he definitely knows he can make it work.

Chapter Text

Just as Basira promised, they reach the village that Dekker was talking about within another two or three days' walk.

And if any of them had been wondering how exactly they were going to be able to tell that this particular village was the one that Gertrude saved from her erstwhile associate, and not just any old village on the bank of the Moonflow - well.

Those questions would have been put to rest as soon as they passed through the village gate.

“Is that what I think it is?”

‘That’ being, as far as Martin can make out, painstakingly carved statue; the craftsmanship is a little crude, but it's still recognisable as bearing the likeness of Gertrude Robinson. It's set in a small hollow carved out of the trunk of a tree, and while Martin doesn’t want to presume and think the word ‘shrine’… it really does kind of look a lot like a shrine. Someone’s even laid out some fresh flowers at the statue's feet.

It also doesn't escape his notice that none of the other high summoners seem to have been afforded the same honour. He can feel a bit of a hysterical laugh coming on as he wonders how anyone working in any of the temples would react to that.

“Well,” Jon mutters under his breath, his eyebrows rising steadily higher and higher the longer he looks at the statue.

“Every time I look, there’s more,” Tim agrees, sounding like he is finding it very hard not to completely lose it. “The priests would have a fit if they saw this, look at how obvious they’ve made her machina weapons.”

Martin looks at the statue again; sure enough, whoever put their time into lovingly carving this effigy has taken the time to give Gertrude no less than three guns strapped to various places on her person, though it’s a bit difficult to tell what they are at first glance. They’ve even decided to have her holding one, in the opposite hand to what Martin presumes is supposed to be her summoner’s staff.

She kind of looks like a character from the pulpy adventure novels that one of Martin’s old coworkers used to like.

“This is,” Jon starts, apparently struggling to find the words for what he’s witnessing, “… definitely going to be interesting.”

The village is small; within the simple boundary fence that’s been raised to keep at least some of the fiends out, Martin counts a handful of small houses, something that might be a general store, and an inn. There are already a couple of people who’ve spotted them on their way in and are furiously whispering to one other with varying levels of subtlety. After a moment, one of them, apparently a bit braver than his friend, approaches them with a welcoming, slightly awe-struck smile.

“Excuse me – my friend and I couldn’t help but notice when you arrived, but are you a summoner?”

Jon makes a face that just screams ‘what gave it away?’ His eyes flick from the villager to the staff he’s still holding in one hand, but admirably, he restrains himself from actually saying anything.

“Yes. Jonathan – Jon, from Bevelle.”

The villager’s smile somehow manages to spread even wider.

“I thought so! Bless me, but it lifts the spirits to see a summoner come through our little village again. Everyone still remembers Lady Gertrude and what she did for us. You’re very welcome here, very welcome indeed!”

“What was it that Gertrude did? We heard rumours – something about an Unsent?”

“Now that’s the sort of tale that’s best told over food and drink. If you can spare the time to rest a while from your journey?”

Jon visibly hesitates, torn between his curiosity and the pressing need to continue.

“Got beds in that inn of yours?” Tim asks, stepping in.

“Not many, but enough! We get the odd traveller from Guadosalam or one of the other villages.”

“I could go for a night in a bed,” Georgie says.

“Same, if we’re voting,” Sasha agrees. “When was the last time we had one? The travel agency?”

“Pretty sure it was the travel agency,” Tim nods.

“I can take a hint,” Jon mutters wryly. “Alright. If you have room for us – we’ll gladly stay the night and hear your stories.”

It turns out the villagers have a lot of stories.

Or at least, they have a lot of ways of remembering the same handful of stories, and a lot of enthusiasm about sharing them all. It doesn’t take long for word to spread and for the tiny inn to become packed with what has to be every single person who lives there. The innkeeper – one of the village’s few Hypello who insists on being called Barkeep – starts looking a bit overwhelmed after a while, especially once the more rambunctious villagers start shouting over each other trying to correct each other’s version of events.

As far as Martin can make out between the constant interjections and intermittent tangents, what happened was something like this: some time shortly before the time of Gertrude’s pilgrimage, a woman and her son had moved into the area around the village from somewhere to the south.

“She never said if she was from Luca,” says a woman nursing a cup of… something that’s almost as large as her head. “Didn’t come off as one of those fancy city folk, anyway. Just introduced herself as Mary.”

Mary Keay – so it is the same woman, has to be – hadn’t moved into any of the villages, but instead chosen to set herself and her son up in a small home elsewhere. This was, the villagers assure them, a little odd, but nothing too out of the ordinary. That Mary claimed to have come to the Moonflow to study the region's pyreflies and deepen her understanding of their place in the world was a bit stranger, but if anyone ever made the mistake of asking if she was some sort of scholar, she always snorted in derision, saying decisively that she was different to any of them in their ivory towers. More hands-on, she said, more practical. Everyone agreed that she must be some sort of self-taught mage or wise woman, someone who’d found a way of manipulating magic not taught by the temples – maybe because she offered her services as a healer to those in the nearby villages.

“At the time, we all thought the son was the odd one at first, didn’t we? Quiet, mostly kept to himself whenever he passed through. Said his mother often sent him to Guadosalam in her place to consult the scholars there about what was in their archives. He was a strange lad, though; always got the feeling that he tried to keep people away, but if you happened to visit and he answered the door instead of his ma he’d insist on brewing you up a potion or remedy himself and deliver it personal-like rather than bother his mother with it. Didn’t realise it at the time, but he was probably trying to protect us all, in his own way.”

Some time after Mary settled into the area, the story unfolds, that was when the trouble had really started. No one made the connection at first, or even at all, not until Gertrude had showed up on her way through and started poking around. Everyone knew that the risk of getting attacked by fiends, always a fact of life, was only getting worse and worse. So when people started vanishing, and rumours started circulating of especially strong or strangely intelligent fiends that seemed to move with intent... Well, the villagers mourned, they took precautions, but they didn’t see it as anything too far beyond the bounds of what was known.

It was only when other things began happening – people falling into a deep sleep they couldn’t wake from, people losing parts of their memory, people disappearing for days and then returning unable to say where they’d been or what they’d been doing – that was when the fear really started. Fewer people left the village; fewer people came down that stretch of road, choosing other paths when they had to travel. People started whispering about seeing the pyreflies on the Moonflow at night acting in strange ways. Someone from one of the villages further upstream resolved to travel to the temple at Djose to pray to Yevon and beg the priests for advice, and never returned.

“We still didn’t make the link between all of that going on and Mary’s coming here, though. Seems daft now, but when people showed up all turned around, she’d offer her help, see? And a lot of the time it did seem to help. And she never charged – she’d curl her lip and almost spit at the idea. It never would’ve crossed our minds that she was the cause of all this.”

At least, not until Gertrude passed through. The way the villagers tell it, they hadn’t known what to think at first, of this stern-looking old woman walking in with a summoner’s staff on her back and forbidden machina squirrelled away on her person everywhere she could find a place for it, flanked by three guardians who couldn’t be more different from her and from each other. But she’d asked questions, explained she was following rumours of strange goings-on that stretched from Luca all the way up the highroad and seemed to lead here, and gradually managed to get the story out of them all.

“And people kept mentioning how much of a help Mary had been, and how it’d been good to know there was a healer about in these times, and that’s when she got this sort of glint in her eye, you know? And she started asking questions about what she looked like, how long she’d been here, why she said she’d come here in the first place. And then she took her guardians and walked out the village without another word to any of us.”

“I followed her, though,” says a young-ish looking man. “I was just a kid back then, and I was young and stupid and thought I was brave enough to go see what she was doing.”

“You’re still young and stupid,” comes a shout from the other side of the room, followed by a roar of laughter.

“Anyway,” the man carries on, trying to save his dignity, “I snuck behind her and her guardians for a ways, and I followed them far enough to know they were headed for Mary’s house. And I heard enough of their conversation too, talking about her being Unsent and how Lady Gertrude would have to Send her and about how they’d have to take her by surprise. And then I saw that son of hers come and meet them coming the other way – how’s that for young and stupid?”

“You didn’t see anything after that though, did you?”

“Well, no. That warrior monk guardian of hers caught me spying,” he admits sheepishly. “Caught me on the shoulder and sent me back, and I wasn’t about to argue when he had a sword that big strapped to his back.”

Whether or not any of the villagers actually saw what happened between Gertrude and Mary seems totally immaterial to their enthusiasm for the story. They’re all adamant that Gertrude and her guardians Sent Mary and banished her to the Farplane, putting a stop to whatever awful things she was doing and laying any victims of hers who’d lost their lives to rest at the same time. Whether or not people think that Gertrude did battle with her first (“She had to have come to blows with her – no way an Unsent who had the power she did would’ve gone down quiet-like!”) or simply managed to Send her with little fanfare seems like it’s a bit more up for debate. In fact, the villagers take pleasure in squabbling over it for a good five minutes; Martin gets the feeling this might be some sort of village pastime. Whatever their position, all of them agree unanimously that once Mary was gone, the trouble plaguing the village went too.

“So you see, we owe Lady Gertrude a massive debt,” one of the villagers concludes. “Who cares if she used forbidden machina?”

This is followed by a chorus of cheers and “hear, hear”s.

“In any case, it’s good to see another summoner pass through here. It’s a good omen, see? And not just because it means we might get another Calm soon.”

“So what happened to Mary Keay’s son?” Basira asks. “Didn’t you say he ran into Gertrude and the others on their way to deal with his mother?”

“Oh, now that’s a funny story. When Lady Gertrude left, he went with her as another guardian, see?”

“Lady Gertrude must’ve forced him along. Wanted to keep an eye on him based on who his mother was.”

“I’m not so sure. He tried to keep us away from his mother as much as he could, didn’t he? I reckon he joined her willingly. Maybe out of gratitude, maybe just because he had nowhere else to go, but I don’t reckon he was forced.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter either way. Lady Gertrude’s other guardians were a strange bunch, he probably fit right in.”

That just sets the villagers off again, entirely unprompted by Martin or any of the others. This time they dive right into a string of whatever they can manage to remember about Gertrude’s guardians from the brief time they spent in the village. Most everyone seems to agree that Adelard Dekker was strange – a warrior monk still wearing the armour following someone like Gertrude around with her open machina usage, long-standing reputation for trouble, and blatant disregard for Yevon’s rules and strictures – and another very obviously well-worn debate about his motives follows. People throw out all kinds of theories, ranging from him being sent by Yevon to spy on Gertrude’s movements, to him having gone along with her out of a genuine admiration and simple desire to stop Sin, to him being a secret defector from Yevon’s ways who had chosen to guard Gertrude out of rebellion, and everything else in between besides. Martin’s dad, it seems, is mostly remembered as someone who didn’t have much to say compared to Gertrude or his fellow guardians; a couple of the older villagers pipe up with an anecdote about him being a sociable drinking partner, albeit one that sometimes looked completely lost at the most ordinary things or came out with the strangest sounding things that the villagers chose to blame on the drink.

(Martin can feel Sasha’s eyes on him when that comes up, and does his best to avoid meeting her gaze.)

There’s a small fuss when one of them clocks Martin and exclaims at the top of his voice that he looks just like him, actually, which means Martin has to explain yet again that yes, that was his dad, it's a whole thing.

At this, the whole village comes to the agreement that this has to be yet another good omen, and Martin has a few moments of wanting to find a way to melt away from the whole situation.

He’s never been more grateful for Tim’s ability to effortlessly steer a conversation elsewhere with perfect grace. All he has to do is ask, “So what about her third guardian, then? There must be a story there,” and it’s like he flipped a switch.

“Ohhh, you mean the Guado. Yeah, we know all about him.”

“Can’t live this close to Guadosalam without knowing about Jurgen Leitner.”

“Wait, wait, hang on,” blurts Jon, “Jurgen Leitner was Gertrude’s guardian?”

Martin glances at Jon in surprise. “You know him?”

“Only by reputation,” Jon mutters with a frown. “He was one of the Guado’s archivists – ran the whole place for a while, I think. Hoarded knowledge obsessively even by their standards. Didn’t seem to care all that much about what had to be done to acquire more of it, from what I’ve heard. Am I right?”

“Spot on!” says one of the villagers, raising her glass. “Even the Guado didn’t like him much. Something about him being a harsh taskmaster who never told you why he wanted things done a certain way and blew up at you if it couldn’t be done.”

“Didn’t like getting his own hands dirty, though. Preferred to stay shut up in Guadosalam with his books and whatever else. Imagine how shocked we all were when he swanned through here as Lady Gertrude’s guardian!”

“Didn’t seem much suited to it,” someone else chimes in with a snicker. “Coward wanted to stay here and hide at the inn when Lady Gertrude decided she had to face down Mary herself, but the Lady insisted. Said she needed his ability to know when an Unsent was nearby.”

“Oh, right, that’s a Guado thing, isn’t it?” Tim nods. “They’re sensitive to pyreflies and stuff like that.”

Jon shakes his head as if to dismiss this particular line of conversation, still frowning. “I don’t understand. Why on earth would he have chosen to come along on Gertrude’s pilgrimage?”

“No idea,” shrugs a villager. “Maybe he finally managed to piss the other Guado off too much?”

“Maybe Gertrude blackmailed him,” Daisy suggests. A moment of silence follows this as everyone turns to look at her. Daisy just shrugs. “What? She could’ve.”

Martin discreetly rolls his eyes. Of course that’s where Daisy’s mind would go.

“Maybe, but I’m not sure,” Sasha says thoughtfully, running a finger around the rim of her glass. “Gertrude dedicated her life to trying to understand Sin and find a way to take it down, even before her pilgrimage. He could’ve just thought that knowledge was too good to pass up.”

“Could’ve been all three, for all we know,” shrugs Tim.

“Well, either way, nobody was sad to see the back of him,” says the first villager with a nod. “The Guado can be a bit high-and-mighty at the best of times, but Leitner…”

“On another level.”

The conversation finally (finally) starts to lull into something approximating something more normal after that, the village having exhausted its collective memory of stories about Gertrude and her guardians. The talk turns instead to things such as their own journey, the blitzball tournament that’s still happening in Luca, and even the rumours of Operation Mi’ihen – though everyone tries to move on quickly from that whenever it comes up.

After a while, they ask to be shown to their rooms for the night. Martin doesn’t know about the others, but as far as he’s concerned it’s been a long time since he was in a room with this many people, let alone so close to the centre of attention, and it’s way more exhausting than he remembers. His head is swimming a bit just from having to keep up with it all, never mind what he’s found out from it and what it all means.

He’s turning it over in his head as they’re all lead by another of the inn workers to their rooms; turning over how that fourth guardian statue in the temples with the long hair must be Mary Keay’s son, and why Dekker seems to think it’s important for them to know this.

He's so deep in it that he almost misses how Barkeep catches Jon’s arm on their way out the room. The Hypello holds him back a moment, burbling something at Jon in a low undertone, and Martin watches the look on Jon's face go from thinly veiled irritation to confusion to sharp, skeptical interest.

Huh. Wonder what that’s all about.

Martin doesn’t have to wait long to find out. A little later on, Jon comes to find him, and Martin finds himself being unceremoniously herded towards an empty room that looks an awful lot like a store cupboard.

“Jon, why are we in here?”

“This.”

Jon reaches into a pocket and pulls out a sphere.

“It was Gertrude’s. The barkeep gave it to me. Said that since I’m a summoner too, it would be better off with me. I can’t say I follow his logic, but I wasn’t about to argue. I was going to show the others, too, but – I don’t actually know what’s on it, so… I thought maybe it’d be best if you saw it first.”

“Wait, you haven’t watched it yourself yet?”

“No. Why?”

“Um. No reason.”

Jon looks so confused, like the idea of seeing what’s on this sphere without Martin never even crossed his mind. Martin really doesn’t know what to do with that, and if he lets himself bask in the warm feeling it leaves him with he’ll become completely incapable of acting like a rational person.

So to stop that, he says, “Why did Barkeep have this, anyway? Bit weird for Gertrude to leave this behind for safekeeping in a place like this.”

“Not sure. He said something about housekeeping finding it when they did a deep clean of the room she stayed in when she was here? Which makes me think maybe she didn’t intend to leave it.”

“Huh. Well, come on then, let’s see what’s on this thing.”

The sphere powers up slowly; it’s just as old as the first one, after all. But for all its occasional skipping or distortion, it’s also in much better condition than the one Dekker had on him. Barkeep must have been taking much better care of this one.

“—finally managed to catch up with my old associate Mary Keay,” comes Gertrude’s voice at last.

It looks like she’s on her own in this sphere – must have found somewhere away from her guardians to record it. The trees around her are clearly those native to the area around the Moonflow.

“It seems the rumours we heard of her death in Luca were true… to a certain extent. Certainly she is dead, and certainly she remains in this world as an Unsent—doubt very much that her death was—sign but her own. And it seems her new state has made her sloppy; just enough for me to have followed her trail up the Mi’ihen highroad to this place.” Gertrude sighs. “A shame, really. Even in her current state, she could have proved a valuable ally with what she’s learned about pyreflies. But not with the very real threat she’s determined to pose. I don’t enjoy the idea of her filling the vacuum Sin will leave behind with her own particular brand of terror. And I don’t like leaving loose ends. I suspect I will have to tie this one up before we leave.”

The image of Gertrude reaches towards the sphere, and then everything darkens for a few moments. When it shudders back on, it’s different. Gertrude is indoors now; it actually looks like it might be a room in this very same inn, judging by the way that she’s sat, back ram-rod straight, on what looks like a bed. The sphere is presumably balanced somewhat lopsidedly on the blankets next to her.

“Well, that was… enlightening,” Gertrude says, her tone making Martin think that maybe Gertrude recorded this soon after her own run-in with the residents of this village. “As I suspected, the villagers had no idea that they—powerful Unsent into their small community. And—that they have any idea of the true meaning be—. Using her understanding of the pyreflies to manipulate her victims’ wills and memories, drain them of their vitality… I couldn’t sa—oing so, but there’s no doubt it is Mary’s doing. And calling them from the Moonflow at night…”

The image of Gertrude ripples on the sphere as she falls silent, whether in thought or just while she considers her next words. After a moment, she sits back thoughtfully on the bed, the wooden frame creaking. She doesn’t seem the type given to thoughtless movements.

“I can only imagine that by drawing them into herself like that, she’s augmenting her own natural magic. Perhaps… even usin—to change her physical form? Much in the way that the souls of lesser Unsent will eventually coalesce into fiends with a very different shape from tha—with more intent on her part. Hm. A pity I probably won’t have the chance to pick her brain for—Send her. I should dearly like to know if the hypothesis I first came to her with about pyreflies being intrinsically linked to Sin’s existence has any basis in fact. But no matter. She’s chosen her path, as I have chosen mine. And I suspect I will have to be very careful indeed when I go to confront her. Perhaps I shou—the help of her son. If what I recall of Gerard still holds true, I highly doubt he agrees with his mother’s choices. He could be a valuable ally.”

Again, Gertrude’s hand reaches towards the sphere, and again the image goes dark. Martin risks a quick glance up at Jon, to see how he’s doing, but Jon’s attention is firmly fixed on the sphere, his eyes narrowed with an intense focus.

Martin opens his mouth to ask about what he thinks – like, for a start, could something as terrible as Sin really just amount to what would essentially be thousands, maybe millions, or even billions of pyreflies in a monster suit – but a renewed glow from the sphere distracts him as a new image flares into distorted life.

Gertrude is still in the same room, or at least a very similar one, except that this time she’s sat at what must be some sort of desk or side table. Martin can’t see the table itself, but going off the angle of the image, the sphere must be sat on top of it.

“Hm,” she says, after a moment. “All in all, a satisfying conclusion, I think. Mary is taken care of, and this area is freed from her influence. It’s not often—say that a place is unquestionably better off than when I found it. And it appears I am to have a fourth guardian—”

At that moment, Gertrude’s voice is cut off – not by distortion or interference, but by the sound of a door opening.

“Pardon me, Gertrude—”

On the sphere, Gertrude restrains the look of exasperation that threatens to cross her face, and turns away from the sphere towards the sound of the new voice. “Ah, Jurgen. What can I do for you?”

Leitner – it must be the Jurgen Leitner the villagers were talking about downstairs – comes into view at the edge of the sphere’s lens. “I wondered if you had a moment to discuss what we just did.”

“I thought that all things considered, it went rather well. You played your part in helping to track Mary down admirably.”

Leitner waves an impatient, long-fingered hand as he comes further into the room, allowing the sphere to capture him more fully. The statues in the temples come decently close; he definitely looks unsuited to wandering around Spira as a guardian.

“Yes, yes, and I am sure that you did the right thing in removing her from this world. But Gertrude, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a shame you had to Send her so quickly. We could have learned so much from her.”

“She was killing people, Jurgen,” says a tired voice from somewhere not in the sphere’s vision, one that sounds a lot like Adelard Dekker. “Or subjecting them to even worse fates. Gertrude did the right thing in ending it quickly.”

“For what it’s worth, seconded,” says a new voice that isn’t new at all. It takes Martin a moment to pinpoint where he’s heard it. Then it takes another moment to connect that to the jolt that just ran through him from hearing his dad’s voice for the first time in over fifteen years. “It was already bad enough, I don’t fancy what it would’ve been like if we’d dragged it out longer.”

“Yes, yes, but consider the knowledge she was gaining of the workings of pyreflies!” Leitner stresses. “I know you must have considered this, Gertrude. What she did was terrible, but we could have at least justified that cost by—”

A black blur of movement sweeps in from the side of the sphere’s view and collides with Leitner’s face in the form of a pale, white-knuckled fist. Leitner staggers back heavily, the entire sphere jolts as the table it’s sitting on moves, and then the sphere rolls backwards, giving Jon and Martin a terrific view of the ceiling, and then the tabletop, and then the ceiling again, before it drops onto the floor and gives them both a good look at that too, rolling to a stop somewhere dark and out of sight.

Well, that explains how the sphere ended up staying in Barkeep’s hands. There’s nothing more to be seen apart from the darkness of wherever the sphere landed, but the sound’s still going, muffled by distance and whatever gap the sphere got wedged in.

“Whoops, my hand slipped,” says another voice, rising over the din of the general chaos that just erupted. Wait, wait, Martin’s heard this one too— “Fuck off, old man, you have no idea what you’re talking about—”

“Hey, hey, take it easy—”

“It would seem that Gerard feels differently,” comes Gertrude’s voice, cutting easily over the top of everything else. She almost sounds amused. “What Adelard chooses is his own prerogative, but I don’t think I shall be healing that bruise for you, Jurgen; I’d say you earned it.”

“Gertrude!”

“She’s right,” comes that voice again, the one that has to be Gerard Keay but which Martin knows he’s heard before. “Keep it up and I can give you a matched set.”

“As justified as that may be,” says Dekker, sounding more tired than ever, “I feel we should refrain from brawling in an inn.”

“Quite. And I do need my guardians to remain reasonably intact.” Gertrude makes a small sound of impatience, and there’s the sound of some rustling. “Oh – good grief, now where did it roll to.” A sharp sigh. “I suppose it’s just as well that there was nothing especially crucial on that…”

There’s some more sounds of movement, as well as what sounds like a very indignant Jurgen Leitner, but after a moment the sphere powers down of its own accord.

Jon and Martin stare down at it for a long moment. Martin has no idea what’s going through Jon’s head; he’s much too consumed with what’s racing through his own. Gerard Keay’s voice. He knows it. And he knows where from, too. But what could that even mean—

Jon clears his throat, apparently deciding that he should be the one to break the silence.

“Well, if nothing else, it was worth it to see Sir Gerard land a punch on Jurgen Leitner.” He puts the sphere back into the pocket it came from, which gives Martin nothing to be staring at and also frees Jon up to peer at him with a sudden frown. “Martin, are you alright?”

“I –” Martin tries to unscramble his thoughts and unstick his throat in short order while he decides if he wants to share this with Jon. “Yeah, no, fine, I.”

“It wasn’t…” Jon starts, with the voice of someone realising something they think they should have thought of much earlier. “I, I’ve just realised that must have been the first time you heard…”

Oh. Oh, yeah, that – it doesn’t take much to figure out that what Jon is so clumsily alluding to is Martin’s dad being on that sphere. That also happened. And it’s nice of Jon to think of it, but Martin is absolutely not up for talking about that, which neatly makes his decision for him.

“Jon, I’ve seen Gerard Keay before.”

Jon starts, looking as though he’s struggling to adjust to a sudden change in a script.

“Well – yes, he has a statue in every temple, and I know you spent some time looking at those—”

“No, no, not the statues, Jon. I just realised when I heard it, it’s— that just there, that sphere? That’s not the first time I’ve heard his voice. The… the person I’ve been seeing, in those dreams I told you about? That’s him. It was his voice.”

“Wha…” To say that Jon looks shocked would be an understatement. “You’re sure?”

“Positive. Couldn’t tell you what he had to say to me, but I know it was him.”

“I…” Jon shakes his head. “No, you wouldn’t lie to me about this.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Martin assures him, feeling a little stung, but – well. Jon’s got a point. “What does it mean? That I’ve been dreaming of him when – you know. Cause it’s only happening when—”

“Yes, yes, I know. I… honestly, Martin, I don’t know.”

“… It’s probably not a good thing, right. I mean, considering.”

Jon doesn’t say anything, but his eyebrows crowd closer in on each other over the tops of his eyes and his mouth pulls into an even thinner line than before, and that’s enough of an answer.

“Great. Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any more complicated.”

Jon doesn’t say anything for a few moments longer, though he looks as though he’s wrestling with a few possibilities along the way. Almost literally, in fact; his hands keep fidgeting at his sides, clenching and unclenching. Finally, he meets Martin's eyes again with an almost fierce look of determination, and says at last:

“We’ll figure it out. There has to be some sort of explanation out there.”

“No,” Martin protests. The urge to make himself not be a bother is such a well-trained reflex that it quickly and effectively stamps down any other feelings that might have dared to raise their heads at the conviction in Jon’s voice. “No, Jon, I – I can’t ask you to do that. You’ve got so much to think about already, what with the pilgrimage and – and everything, I can’t put this on you as well.”

“You’re not,” Jon argues immediately. “And besides, what’s happening to you is clearly linked to Sin, so – I think there’s an argument to be made for it being well within my remit. But…” and he sighs, face pulling as if he’s just been reminded of something very unpleasant. “Yes. I take your point.”

Silence falls on them once again.

“… So,” says Martin, once it starts becoming too awkward to bear. “I guess we’d better show this to the others, then. You know Sasha’ll want to see the bit about the pyreflies.”

“Oh – right, yeah,” Jon nods, sounding surprised. “I suppose it didn’t have anything, ah – incriminating. So far as you’re concerned, I mean.”

Martin raises his eyebrows. Interesting choice of words Jon went for there.

"Incriminating."

“Oh – shut up, you know what I meant.”

“Time-travelling criminal,” Martin nods, deciding to enjoy himself a bit longer. “That’s me.”

“Stop it,” Jon tells him, but he’s doing a terrible job at hiding his smile. “You’re awful. I’m leaving you behind in this cupboard when I go.”

“Yeah, yeah. We probably should get out of here, though. Before Barkeep or one of the other workers comes looking for their supplies and finds us in here instead.”

Which – ah. Now that he’s thought of that possibility, getting out of this cupboard suddenly seems like a more and more urgent thing that they should be doing. Judging by the suddenly panicked look on Jon’s face, he must be thinking something pretty similar.

They make a hasty exit into a thankfully empty corridor.

“We’ll show the others tomorrow,” Jon tells him. “It’ll keep overnight.”

“Mmhm. Sounds good. Oh – Jon?”

“Hm?”

“Just…” Martin pauses, trying to think about the best way to say it. “Thanks for coming to show me first, I guess.”

Even if they did end up with a lot more questions than they did answers – questions which Martin’s not sure that even the Guado will have answers for, secret library or no secret library – he appreciates it more than he can say. That Jon takes keeping Martin’s secret seriously enough to take it this far.

“Of course,” Jon says softly.

Chapter Text

In the end, they have to wait until they’re all back on the road and a good distance away from the village before they can even think about showing the others that sphere. Getting even the slightest spare moment in the village the next morning is a task much easier said than done; before they can leave, they’re beset by what feels like every single person that lives there, all of them wanting to bid them goodbye and good luck and thank them for passing through. Barkeep strenuously refuses any attempts to pay him for room or board with a mantra of “On the houshe! On the houshe!” any time Jon tries, but Martin thinks he catches Georgie surreptitiously placing gil down on the bar while his attention is elsewhere. All those people hanging around are good for one thing, at least.

Needless to say, when they're finally able to escape from all the well-wishers and get back onto the road again, it's like a breath of fresh air. Martin feels a little guilty about that – after all, it’s not as if the villagers were anything but friendly to all of them. But that much friendliness from complete strangers… it was kind of suffocating in a way.

“I am glad that’s over,” says Melanie, who was apparently thinking along the same lines. “I knew your Yevon lot lost their minds a little whenever someone even breathed the words High Summoner at them, but I didn’t think it could get that bad.”

“It wasn’t really the High Summoners though, was it?” Tim points out. “Just Gertrude. And I didn’t see a single Prayer while we were there either.”

“Yeah, alright. It’s still weird. I mean, they built her a statue.”

“That’s probably the least weird thing about the whole experience, honestly. You know all the High Summoners get a statue in the temples?”

“Oh, really? Then I rest my case. That just makes it weirder.”

“Al Bhed don’t build statues?”

“Hah. Um, no. If we want to remember people, we write stuff down and tell stories about them. You know, like normal people? Besides, why go to all that effort for something that’ll probably get knocked down as soon as the wrong people discover where it is?”

Tim winces. “Ah. Right.”

“Anyway, like I said, it’s just weird. People are people, there’s no reason to bother trying to make out like they’re more than that.”

“Can’t wait to see what you’ll do if they build a statue for Jon,” Basira says, deadpan.

“Ohh, if they build him a statue, I promise I will find a way to break into the temples especially just to vandalise it.”

“Thanks, Melanie.”

Melanie flips Jon off at that – or at least flips the general direction of Jon off – and their journey continues without further incident until Jon halts them all to watch Gertrude’s sphere.

“That Leitner was a piece of work, wasn’t he?” says Tim as the sphere powers down, in a voice dripping with contempt.

“You’re telling me,” Melanie agrees. “I’m glad he got punched. That is what happened, right? It sounded like that’s what happened.”

When everyone else confirms for her that that is definitely what happened, the grin on Melanie’s face borders on transcendent.

“Good. He sounds like a right prick.”

“What was that Gertrude was saying about pyreflies, though?” Sasha wonders as they start walking again. Martin tries to catch Jon’s eye; he knew Sasha would hone in on that. “I mean, she said a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever heard about an Unsent using pyreflies to change shape before.”

“I have,” says Georgie. “You hear a lot of things travelling round talking to people. And I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?” asks Jon.

“Yeah, sure. The Unsent look and think the way they did when they were still alive out of pure strength of will, right? The pyreflies keeping their shape respond to that. So if one of them figured out how to get a conscious control over that response…” Georgie shrugs. “I mean, it’s not that hard to make the leap to them being able to get those pyreflies to give them a different shape. The magic being stronger’s the easier bit to figure out. Unsent are pure pyreflies, of course their magic is stronger.”

“I’m a bit surprised you didn’t make that connection, Jon,” says Sasha, looking contemplative. “I mean, it’s not that different to what’s going on with your aeons, is it?”

“That is vastly oversimplifying things. I mean – okay, yes, sure, the aeons are made up of pyreflies, but I can’t control the shape they take, that’s all down to the fayth. I just… direct it.”

“It’s the same sort of thing though, isn’t it?” Tim interjects. “What I mean is, from the sounds of it, it all seems to come down to willpower in the end.”

Even as he says that, Tim’s eyes narrow then widen in quick succession, a flash of disgust and horror passing over his face. “Hells, what does that mean for what Gertrude was saying about Sin? If she was right about pyreflies being part of why it’s even here… then, what, does that mean there’s someone actually behind that thing?”

“It’s a thousand years old,” Melanie says skeptically. “No way there’s a crusty Unsent who’s managed to hang around that long just to keep Sin going.”

“Sure, maybe not. But the other option is that it’s just a lot of fiends who’ve all come together into… that.”

“That… that can’t be right though, can it?” Martin asks. “I mean. If it was that simple, wouldn’t something like the Sending work on it? You know, considering what fiends are.”

“Does it matter what it is?” Daisy says abruptly. “Whether we know where it came from or not isn’t gonna change anything. We all know what we have to do to get rid of it. That’s why we’re here.”

If there’s one thing Daisy seems to have a gift for, it’s stopping a conversation dead in its tracks. Everyone goes quiet when she says that. Even stranger, no one seems to want to meet anyone else’s eyes once she has. They all look off into the trees, or out over the river, or down at their feet. Like what Daisy said was enough of an argument all on its own.

And… sure, maybe she’s got a point, except.

“Except, it’s not actually going to get rid of it, is it?” Martin says quietly after a few moments have passed.

“It’ll give us a few years,” says Basira, her expression unreadable. “That’s worth a lot to some people.”

“Yeah, and – and I get that. I’m not saying what we’re doing, what Jon’s doing, isn’t important. Or, or that it’s not worth it, or, or that there’s not any point to it,” he says, thinking about how Tim reacted on the first day they met when he thought Martin was about to say that exact thing. “I’m not saying that at all. But… what are you gonna do in those few years? I mean, what do any of us do? Just wait until it shows up again and then repeat this whole journey?”

“What are you saying, Martin?”

“Just that – maybe it does matter where Sin comes from and what it is, actually. How else is anyone going to find out how to make sure it doesn’t come back?”

Again, everyone goes quiet. Tim’s face has gone dark and brooding again; Sasha looks thoughtful. Basira’s frown has turned piercing, but she makes no move to say anything else. It’s Jon, out of everyone, who breaks the quiet first.

“You’d have a hard time convincing most people that it’s something we should be thinking about. Even without the temples’ teachings, when it comes to Sin… I mean, you’ve seen it, haven’t you? People either run, or they fight. There’s not much room to spare for thinking of anything else.”

“Georgie and Sasha and Tim just did.”

“And if they did it publicly, they wouldn’t last long,” Daisy says, as if that settles it.

“So – so what I’m hearing is,” says Martin, feeling frustration eating away at him again, “Yevon is really more concerned with, with making sure people follow all of their ridiculous rules than it is about actually finding out more? Even if it would help in the long run?”

Jon sighs. “That’s just how things are. Ask questions, and… if you’re lucky, all that ends up happening is that you run up against brick wall after brick wall.”

“You accept and adapt,” Basira says finally. “That’s all you can do. Whining about the way things are isn’t gonna help anyone.”

“Yeah, well,” Martin mutters, surprising himself. When did he get so argumentative? “I don’t buy it.”

“If you don’t like it, no one’s making you stick around.”

“Yeah right. I’ve come this far, I’m not leaving now. I’m sticking with Jon till the end.”

The words are out of his mouth before he can think about them, let alone take them back. Not that he would take them back. He meant them. Means them. But he wishes he’d at least thought far enough ahead not to say them in front of everyone. His cheeks are growing hot, an embarrassed, slightly panicky tingling spreading up his back. He can hardly dare to look at Jon, let alone anyone else.

“I can respect that,” Daisy says with a nod, his unlikely saviour.

Martin chances a look back at everyone else. Most of them aren’t looking at him, though it’s beyond him to guess if that’s because they’re trying to spare him the embarrassment or simply trying to spare themselves how horribly uncomfortable he just made them. There’s a couple of exceptions, though. Daisy, who looks almost… approving, though there’s something uncharacteristically melancholy in the set of her eyebrows. Georgie, who’s openly staring at him with her face pinched in a tight frown. And Jon himself, who’s also staring, with a look on his face that Martin doesn’t have the courage to try and interpret.

“Um,” he falters. “Yeah. So that’s that. But as soon as your Calm gets here, I’m finding a way to make sure you don’t have to do this again.”

That makes Jon look away sharply – but not before he manages to lock eyes with Georgie on the way, whose frown has washed out into something that looks bafflingly and annoyingly like open pity. Tim sucks in a sharp breath, and announces soon after that he's going to go and scout the path ahead to check that there’s no fiends that could give them any trouble. But no one says anything about it. Not a single word.

Not that anyone has to say anything for Martin to know that he’s gone ahead and said something wrong, but – as the day crawls on and the long hours of walking give him plenty of time to keep his mouth shut and sink into his own head as he plays the whole disastrous conversation over and over, he can’t quite keep himself from the sudden stabs of frustration at how no one will actually tell him what he said that was so wrong.

And on top of that, now Georgie and Jon are being weird. Martin doesn’t know if it’s related to his latest episode of being completely incapable of not sticking his foot in his mouth – and it doesn’t have to be, he tells himself, it doesn’t have to be about him – but it doesn’t escape his notice how at some point during the afternoon, Melanie ends up walking next to Sasha, while Georgie somehow ends up right at the very front of the group, next to Jon. Whatever conversation they’re having up there doesn’t carry back very well, but it doesn’t look like either of them are enjoying it. Not with that body language. And definitely not with the way that Jon makes like he’s about to walk off at one point, before Georgie sighs, the slump of her shoulders saying that she’s decided to drop whatever it is for now.

Not for long, though. That night, when they’ve all made camp, Martin catches them at it again. Jon and Georgie off at the water’s edge, too far away to hear what they’re saying, but not far away enough for anyone looking over not to see that they’re both pretty on edge themselves.

Martin reminds himself more frequently than he’ll ever admit to that it’s none of his business, and clamps down on the little voice telling him he could try and eavesdrop. He’s not going to do that, thank you. He’s going to get on with the washing up, and be thankful that he’s been paired up with Daisy and so won’t be expected to talk.

He’s also still going to talk to Jon later, because apparently Martin really doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone.

In his defence, he tries. He really does try not to mention it, and to keep any conversation they’re having away from literally anything else that’s happened today. But eventually, he just can’t help himself.

“Is everything okay between you and Georgie?”

Jon’s eyes widen. Then he opens his mouth, closes it again, and sighs.

“It will be.” Jon stares moodily in the direction of the treeline, which doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in that statement. “We’re just… rehashing an old argument. Don’t worry about it.”

“You know, when you say things like that, it kind of makes people want to do the opposite of that.”

“Maybe that’s just you.”

Which is the sort of thing that Martin’s learned Jon might say and mean as a joke, except that it came out with a lot more acid than Jon’s usual efforts.

“Wow, alright.”

“Am I wrong?”

Martin opens his mouth, and… sighs. He’s not wrong.

“Maybe not.” And, since Martin has failed so abysmally at not sticking his nose in about whatever’s going on between Jon and Georgie, why not just trample his way through every other forbidden subject? “I mean, for starters I’ve been worrying about what happened earlier all afternoon. I didn’t say anything… I mean, I didn’t say something wrong, did I?”

“What? No!” Jon says, so strongly that Martin feels his mouth drop open in surprise. “Not, not wrong, not at all. Just…”

Jon lets out a small breath through his nose. At a more normal volume, he says, “Once again, you’ll find you’re part of a very, very small minority in Spira who would think things like that. Let alone say them out loud. It’s just… you know, with the pilgrimage…”

And Jon stops, but the way he trails off makes Martin think that that’s not where he intended to leave it.

“Yeah?”

“It’s just… it’s…” Jon struggles with it for a couple of seconds, and then shrugs. “It’s been this way for a long time. And… and we’ve both seen what can happen when. When people try an alternative. You’ll have a hard time convincing people. If that’s really what you want to do.”

Why does Martin get the feeling, looking at Jon, that that’s not what he was going to say?

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Did you mean it?” And then, before Martin can process that, or think about answering, Jon’s stammering, “Wait, sorry, I meant – when you said you’d stick with— I, I mean, on the pilgrimage.”

Oh.

Oh.

“Yeah,” he nods. And then, because he might as well do this properly: “Yeah, every word.”

Jon draws in a breath like he’s only just remembered how to do it.

“Oh,” he says, so soft that Martin barely catches it. He crosses his arms over his front, hand to elbow, and ducks his head just as his face starts going through another one of its complicated emotional journeys.

Is that okay? Martin almost asks, but stops himself at the last second. There’s a limit, he tells himself sternly.

Jon lifts his head a moment later, and… Martin’s not really sure what to do with what he sees there.

“Thank you,” Jon says. “For staying.”

Then he promptly turns and heads back to the campfire before Martin can even take a breath.

“… Sure,” he says to the gathering night.

Oh, he’s so fucked.

When they finally start approaching the entrance to Guadosalam, Martin finds it a lot more dramatic than he was expecting.

He can't really say what he was imagining when the others told him “forest city”. His brain’s taken him through a series of possibilities ranging from elaborate treehouses high up in the branches linked together by rope bridges, to something a little more like Luca, only maybe built around the trees, or for all he knows even inside the trees. But he's always pictured it as being something at least a little like the cities and villages he’s already seen. And as for the forest, he would have put money on it being the same sorts of trees that have stretched out on either side of the Moonflow for miles, with their smooth, straight trunks and branches stretching out with leaves that filter the sunlight into something softer and greener.

As it turns out, Martin should probably just give up on having any expectations for places in Spira at all.

The first sign that they’re getting close is a gradual shift in the forest around them. The dirt path they’re following starts to bend away from the river and deeper towards the heart of the woods; as it does, the trees around them start to change. They grow larger and taller, more gnarled and twisted, with thicker canopies overhead that blot out the sun and roots that snake out over the ground as well as under it.

It’s enough to put Martin a bit on edge, but of course none of the others even seem the slightest bit fazed by it. So, Martin doesn’t say anything either.

(If he keeps himself ready to start casting a spell at a moment’s notice, that’s nobody’s business but his.)

The next sign that they’re getting close is a lot more obvious. The gnarled roots and branches around them start to glow faintly; when Martin looks closer to see what's causing it, he sees the glow is coming from some kind of moss spread out all over the bark. One of those roots arcs up ahead in a huge curve that spans from one side of the path to the other. This natural archway above their heads has something else woven into it, a sort of natural window frame arranged into some sort of mesh or net pattern. More light glows faintly from behind the criss-crossing of the thin, flexible branches. Most tellingly of all, beyond the archway, the dirt road abruptly changes into a clean, well-paved avenue, with blue and grey stones of all shapes and sizes cleverly fitted together into a smooth, even surface for them to walk on.

“Not far to go now,” Tim says, presumably for Martin’s benefit.

The paved road winds slightly downhill; it takes them deeper and deeper into these strange new trees until Martin’s not sure where they are anymore: if they’re underground, or in some sort of cave, or maybe even on the inside of one hugely enormous tree. He can still see branches snaking across everything, at least. Or roots, maybe. It makes his head spin a bit.

At last, the path spills out into a wide, cavernous area where the entire floor glows. Martin’s not sure if it’s more of that moss or if it’s something else, but the whole space is lit up from below by a faint, blue-and-green light coming from under their feet. Some of the roots beneath their feet have been painstakingly guided to create a swirling pattern on the ground, breaking up the glow from underneath. It takes Martin a moment to figure out that it’s a giant spiral, its stark curves curling in tighter and tighter until they reach the very centre of the vast chamber.

“Is this like… a gate or an entrance hall or something?”

“Or something,” Tim nods. “The Guado use this space for ceremonies and stuff, I think. There’s, uh… not all that much open space in the city proper for a lot of people to get together. You’ll see for yourself when you get down there.”

Tim gestures to the large opening at the other end of the space. There’s another path through there, and Martin’s sure that they have to be underground now. It’s more than a little uncomfortable, actually. He’s never thought of himself as particularly claustrophobic, but something about looking up and not being able to see the sky is really getting to him.

Further down the paved road they go, until the corridor opens up again around them and above them to finally reveal the hidden forest city of Guadosalam.

Martin sees what Tim meant about there not being much in the way of open spaces. The city looks like it’s built on several levels; the main way of getting around seems to be the walkways that criss-cross above their heads. Everything has a very natural look to it, the walkways looking grown not made – stone formations, great big tree roots, and higher up, branches. If Martin cranes his neck and looks up, he thinks he can see a hint of leaves, high, high, high above their heads.

Down here, the paved road is no more. Instead, the ground is a mass of roots and vines that weave and tangle with each other over and over, deepening Martin’s suspicion that Guadosalam really is built in the hollow of a truly massive tree. Even the buildings he can see from here seem to have been hollowed out from the wood of whatever it is. The few extra features he can see - stone steps or low, decorated stone walls - mostly seem to be there as a means of protecting smaller roots, or else to add a splash of colour in the form of lavishly coloured and intricately carved doorframes. The windows, and there aren't many of them to begin with, seem to be less for letting in light and more for decoration. Just like the one he saw at the boundary between the city and the outside world, they look like they've been fitted into natural holes in the tree growth rather than being carved out with intent; all of them glow from the inside in a range of colours, looking very similar to stained glass or crystal.

The whole city is foreboding, and something entirely alien. More alien than anything else he’s seen in Spira so far.

“So… this is where the Guado live?”

“It’s a bit different, isn’t it?” Tim nods. “Not one for fans of daylight.”

“Or fans of not falling over,” Melanie snarks. “What is this stuff? The path getting down here was alright, but whatever we’re standing on now has more lumps in it than my old friend Andy’s attempts at cooking.”

“That’ll be the tree roots,” Georgie tells her. “Looks like there are a lot of those.”

“Fantastic. Guess I’m leaning on your arm for as long as we’re here.”

“What are we doing now we’re here, anyway?” Basira asks. “I mean, there’s an inn. Makes sense to stay the night before we tackle the Thunder Plains again.”

“You’re right,” Jon says, while Martin wonders what in Spira a place with the name the Thunder Plains could possibly entail. “But I’m also going to visit the archives while we’re here. You’re welcome to come with me – or not, as it happens.”

“What’s this for?” Tim asks curiously. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a secret research project going now.”

“No, it’s – it’s for me, actually,” Martin says, trying not to shift too much as everyone’s eyes fall on him. “You know, since… the toxin had such a weird effect on me after I ran into Sin that first time, before you found me. Jon thought the Guado might have something about it.”

“Shit, is it still affecting you?”

“Um. Kind of? I’ve been getting these weird dreams. I-it’s probably nothing, but we thought that since we’re here anyway…”

“I’ll come with,” says Sasha. “I want to see if I can convince that Guado on the front desk to let me in. I’m sure I almost cracked him when Tim and I came here last.”

“Good luck with that,” Jon says dryly.

“I’ve got a good feeling about it. He said we were friends.”

In the end, they split up: Georgie, Melanie, Daisy and Basira to go and get rooms for that night sorted out at the inn, and Jon, Martin, Tim and Sasha to head to the library. As Georgie points out, the Guado are a people famously protective of the secrets they hold. A large group of eight people wandering into their archives all at once might spook them enough to make getting any information difficult.

“You four’ll have the best chance,” she shrugs. “Three of you are scholars and one of you’s also a summoner on top of that. Meet us back at the inn and let us know how it goes, alright?”

Wandering through the forest city is very disorientating; the paths they have to take twist and turn, and they have to be constantly mindful of where they’re putting their feet in case they trip over a particularly prominent tree root. It's the sort of place Martin would definitely wind up getting lost in if he was here on his own, and he counts himself lucky that Sasha’s already been to this building before and has a reasonable idea of what she’s going. Even with her guiding them all, Martin still finds himself getting turned around as they weave their way carefully over the walkways. They pass by a few Guado as they go, city-dwellers out and about on their daily business with their long robes and elaborate hairstyles. Martin thinks he catches a few of them doing a double-take as the four of them pass by, staring at their little group with puzzled, interested frowns.

Martin assumes it must be Jon catching their attention. He’s the summoner here, after all.

When they reach it, Martin sees that the building housing the Guado’s library and archives is a grand, lavish affair; easily one of the largest buildings Martin’s seen in Guadosalam. The outside is covered in more of that stained-glass-like material, arranged carefully between meticulously arranged growths of roots and branches to create an elaborate pattern that surrounds the front doors. There’s even a glowing roof made of that same material, stretching up towards the higher tiers of the city. It’s obvious just from looking at this building how much the Guado value whatever they keep inside; it seems set into the inner walls of the city hollow like an enormous precious jewel.

“After you,” Tim says cheerily, holding the door open for the rest of them.

They step through into a spacious entrance hall. Like everything else in Guadosalam, the entire room feels like something that's grown according to no one's design but its own; the glowing floor with roots laid over it in an intricate pattern, the curving shelves and decorative archways on the walls and ceilings, even the welcome desk at the far end of the room. This is a place that’s been here for centuries, and expects to be here for centuries more. Nothing like the hastily built and rebuilt houses in Besaid or Kilika, dragged up in a hurry with the full knowledge that they will have to be replaced quickly whenever Sin inevitably destroys them again.

It makes Martin wonder if Guadosalam has ever had to deal with Sin at all. Could there really be a place that's managed to stand over the past thousand years without once being terrorised by the thing plaguing the rest of Spira?

Behind the welcome desk at the far end is a Guado man, tall and thin and almost willowy in build – though Martin can’t help but feel that it’s a bit on the nose to describe one of these forest people that way. His thick, heavy-looking hair is the colour of gingko leaves in autumn, a bright yellow that Martin doesn’t think he’s seen much of among the Guado they’ve passed. He looks up as they approach, first in surprise, then interest, and then polite friendliness as they come closer.

For a moment there as they came in, Martin could have sworn he saw the Guado lift his nose, like someone who caught a hint of a scent trying to catch a better sniff of it. But that can’t be right. That would just be weird. He must have imagined it.

“Well, well,” says the man, a smile spreading wide over his face. “Sasha James, as I live and breathe. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Nice to see you too, Michael.”

“If you’re looking for access to our archives, well, um, you know I can’t possibly say yes.”

Michael laughs. It’s an odd laugh, long and meandering, like he’s taking the time to really enjoy the joke. But it must be pretty normal for him, because Sasha barely bats an eye.

“Not today, actually. We’re here to request some information.”

“Well, um, I’m happy to do what I can to help a summoner,” says Michael, turning to Jon and tilting his head in interest. “You are a summoner, aren’t you?”

Jon looks from Michael, to the rest of them, and then shrugs. “Yes.”

“I thought so. Jonathan Sims, isn’t it? We’ve heard some things here, in Guadosalam. You’ve been, um, making waves, I think is what they say. What sort of information could possibly bring you here?”

“I… well.” Apparently seeing nothing else for it, Jon steps closer to the welcome desk. “We’re looking for whatever you have on Sin’s toxin. One of my guardians came close to Sin, and the effects it’s been having on him have been… um, somewhat abnormal.”

“Hmm…” Michael looks thoughtful. His eyes start flicking between Martin and Tim as if he can gauge which one of them could be suffering from toxin exposure by sight alone. “We may have something, but I can’t promise anything. I’ll have to check, um, see if what we have is in any of our more restricted catalogues. Thanks to one of your predecessors, security is… um, a lot tighter than it used to be. Even by our standards.”

“Predecessors as in… a past summoner, you mean?”

“Yes,” Michael nods, and for the first time his smile gives way to a flicker of resentment. “I’ll give you three guesses as to who, and the first two don’t count.”

Tim laughs. “That means it’s definitely Gertrude.”

“Of course it is. She, um, she used to come by the archives near constantly, back before she decided to take the summoner’s path.” Michael fidgets idly with the pen in his long-fingered hand, doodling something on the paper in front of him that Martin can’t see. “Always looking for information about one thing or another, always asking questions.”

Michael laughs again, but it sounds a lot darker than before. “I, I was still very young back then, and she managed to convince me to take her down into the archives once. Supervised, of course. But of course, Gertrude being who she is, she managed to take the sphere she was after from right under my nose. I’m lucky to still have this job, thanks to her. I do wonder what happened to that recording.”

Oh, wow. So Gertrude actually managed to make it into the Guado’s archives? Martin knows better than to say it out loud, but he’s impressed. He can’t help feeling bad for Michael, though. Going by everything he’s heard about how seriously the Guado take who does and doesn’t have access to their secret histories, he can’t imagine they took the news well of his part in the theft. No wonder he still seems bitter about Gertrude years later.

“What did she take?” asks Jon.

“Oh,” says Michael, waving a hand dismissively, “something to do with some sort of ancient machina from the time of the great war. This, um, this was back in the years when she was still mainly looking into harnessing things of that sort against Sin. She seemed fond of that sort of blunt force approach. But, um, I guess that whatever she found in what she stole from us changed her mind. Fortunately for me, Guado aren’t so interested in that sort of thing. I mean, we aren’t the Al Bhed,” he finishes, with another one of those elongated laughs.

“This is all very interesting, but what about our query?”

“Oh, of course. Um, sorry, I do get distracted easily sometimes.” Michael straightens up, drawing two decisive lines under whatever he’s just spend the past few minutes doodling, and makes an effort to look attentive. “Can you give me any more detail about the effects your guardian has been suffering from? That will considerably narrow down my time spent searching through our archives.”

Jon glances over to him. “Martin?”

Well, that’s his cue. Martin steps up to the desk next to Jon, and haltingly tries to explain himself as quietly as he can: the strange recurring dreams, the city that looks like an ancient machina city and the man there who may or may not also be an aeon shaped like a great black bird, the way that they only seem to happen when Sin is near and he loses consciousness.

He leaves out the part about the city looking a lot like the Zanarkand he remembers, and the man being Gerard Keay. He doesn’t know why. Well, okay, for a start there's the fact that he's hyper-aware of Tim and Sasha still right there, standing a few feet behind him. But there’s something else, too, something that makes him think that he can’t trust Michael with that level of detail. Sure, the Guado are secretive hoarders of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean one of them might not decide to pass that information on. Jon said that Yevon and the Guado were decently friendly with one another, after all. It’s just too risky. Better to keep it as general and vague as possible.

“Fascinating,” Michael murmurs when he’s finished. “Well, I’ll see what I can do for you. Call back tomorrow, um, if you would.”

“Is that really enough time?” Jon says sharply.

“It’s enough for an initial search. Which, um, I believe is all you have time for. Being a summoner, I know you can’t really afford, um… delays. In, um, in any case, Sasha has told me horror stories of your filing systems in Bevelle, but we Guado are a great deal more organised.”

“Good for you,” Tim grumbles. “We’ll be back tomorrow, then.”

Taking that as their cue to turn and leave, Jon and Martin step back to rejoin the other two. But Sasha lingers a moment longer, an impish smile on her face.

“Sure I can’t convince you to let me have a look in those archives for the sake of our friendship?”

Michael laughs again, the high-pitched giggling echoing off the walls of the entrance hall.

“Sasha, I couldn’t even let you into the upper levels of the library without someone to vouch for you, let alone the archives. But, you know, I, um, always welcome your enthusiasm.”

“Well,” she shrugs, “it was worth a try.”

“If you say so.” Michael leans on his desk, folding his long hands one over the other, and tilts his head at her curiously. “If you don’t mind me asking a personal question… why are you still here?”

Sasha blinks. “I’m sorry?”

Michael smiles a faint, vague smile.

“I think you know what I mean,” he says gently.

Martin looks to Jon, who shrugs, looking just as lost as Martin feels. The moment breaks as Michael sighs, his smile turning into something sheepish.

“Sorry, I’m, ha, being rude. Please enjoy the rest of your stay in Guadosalam.”

He gives them a wave as they turn to leave. As they cross back towards the main doors to the library building, Martin can't help feeling that honestly, he's more than a little glad to be leaving. Michael doesn’t seem like a bad person. In fact, he seems positively friendly and helpful, for someone from a culture that so famously shrouds itself in secrecy and isolation. But all the same, there was something very unsettling about that conversation.

“What was that about?” he says in a low voice, as soon as he thinks they’re out of Michael’s earshot.

“Who knows?” Sasha shrugs, her voice that same breezy tone she used when she was shrugging off any concern about that past operation where she and Tim got too close to Sin. “Michael’s a bit weird.”

“Weird doesn’t cut it,” Tim tells her. “I really don’t know why you like him.”

“He’s honestly alright once you get past his whole…”

“His whole everything?”

“Come on, be nice. Last time I was here, he actually answered a lot of the questions I had about how the Guado relate to pyreflies. I mean, you’ve seen how incapable he is of not talking in circles, so I had to coax them out of him with a lot of leading questions, but I managed it. Did you know—”

Martin doesn’t get to hear whatever fact Sasha was about to share. At that moment, while the four of them are still a few feet away, the doors to the library swing inward.

Through the door come a pair of warrior monks, helmets covering their faces, mouths set into a stern line. They make a show of doing a visual sweep of the room, take a moment to perform the Prayer when they spot Jon standing there in front of them, and then turn back and nod to someone behind them before taking up a position on either side of the doorway.

The next person to step through the door is Elias Bouchard.

“Well—”

Elias looks surprised for all of a second, before his mouth curves into that same cool, empty smile Martin remembers from Luca.

“If it isn’t you, Jon. Imagine seeing you here.”

Chapter Text

“Elias – I – what are you doing here?”

Elias raises an eyebrow. Whether it's at Jon addressing him so informally or at Jon’s obvious shock at seeing him is anyone’s guess.

“I have business with the archives of the Guado. Not that that is any concern of yours. I could well ask you the same question.”

Martin holds his breath as Jon hesitates. Jon is about as far from a natural liar as you can get, and a pregnant pause stretches out longer and longer over them all.

“I…” Jon falters, his words failing him. He at least manages not to look in Martin’s direction while he’s struggling. Martin says a silent thank you, and focuses on the difficult task of keeping his own mouth shut.

Elias waits. When he finally decides that no answer is forthcoming, he sighs, with all the air of a disappointed teacher facing an unruly student.

“Now is not the time to get distracted, Jon. After what you saw at Operation Mi’ihen, I would have thought completing your pilgrimage would be a matter of particular urgency.”

Elias has some nerve. He wasn’t even there. Sasha purses her lips; Tim’s entire body goes tense, but he says nothing.

“It – it is. That hasn’t changed.”

“And yet, here you are. Without all of your guardians, I might add. Strange, when one takes into account the rumours of your acquiring an even greater amount than when last we met. Maester Perry tells me that your latest guardians are rather…” Elias’s lip curls, “unconventional.”

Tim bristles. “As long as they’re protecting him like the rest of us, what does it matter where they came from?”

“Tim,” says Jon in a low voice.

“No,” says Elias, holding up one hand in what he probably thinks is some kind of magnanimous gesture. “It’s no matter; I’m pleased that you feel you can speak freely. And your words are commendable – for a guardian.” He nods at Tim, so condescending with it that Martin finds himself wishing he could wipe that cool smirk right off his face. “Protecting Jon on his journey is and should be your first priority. However, some of us present stand among those who must consider that appearances do matter.”

Elias pauses for just long enough to make a very pointed once-over of their current company. Then he says, “Indulge me, Jon: what is it that brings you to the Guado’s archives?”

“I… after, after Operation Mi’ihen. I thought that perhaps – if we had more information about Sin—”

“You are a summoner, Jon,” Elias interrupts, cutting smoothly across Jon’s not-exactly-a-lie in a voice both firm and cold. “Not a scholar, not anymore. You know what your task is, and what you must do to accomplish it. That’s all you need.”

“But – if there’s even a small chance that there’s something vital that everyone missed—”

For a moment, Martin thinks he sees a flash of genuine anger in Elias’s eyes.

“Did Operation Mi’ihen teach you nothing?”

“Those people didn’t give their lives so you could use them as a teaching point,” says Tim in a dark voice heavy with suppressed rage.

“Ah. Forgive me, I forgot that for some of us that was a personal matter.”

Like hell you did, Martin thinks. Like Elias hasn’t been deliberately using it as a very precise bludgeon the entire time since he got here. Like using a hammer to drive a nail in deeper.

“Very well,” says Elias crisply. “If not Operation Mi’ihen, then consider Gertrude. Your predecessor. She made it her life’s work to understand Sin, seeking to defeat it through means previously beyond thought. And yet, at the end of her days, she repented of her heresy and walked the pilgrimage road as you do now. Now, Jon. What does that tell us?”

“Maybe just that what she was looking for was really well-hidden,” Martin mutters with poorly-hidden exasperation.

“Martin,” Jon hisses.

Elias doesn’t strike him down on the spot, but Martin isn’t sure he’d regret it even if he did. Instead, he just raises his eyebrows.

“An interesting theory – Martin, was it? Still, I suggest that you are careful about where you share it. Connections such as yours are a useful shield, but even they can only go so far.”

“… I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”

“I would,” nods Elias briskly. “There aren’t many out there who still remember that the elder Sir Blackwood’s origins are… somewhat of an enigma, before he gained fame as Gertrude’s guardian. A few careless words spoken too loudly would be all it takes for people to start drawing their own conclusions.”

Once again, Martin wonders just how much Elias actually knows about him, with all his little pointed hints. He has to know something. Probably not the whole truth – if he knew the whole truth, there’s no way he’d still be letting Martin wander around freely, right? But he has to know something.

It seemed from that first sphere, the one Dekker gave him in Luca, that at the very least Gertrude and Dekker knew where his dad came from right from the start. Maybe he wasn’t as careful as Martin’s been trying to be.

Weirdly enough, the idea doesn’t fill him with the same all-consuming fear it did when he last saw Elias back in Luca. But Martin still knows better than to push his luck. Push all of their lucks.

“I… sure.”

“Is that all?” Jon says sharply. Then, as if realising how that sounded, he backpedals without much grace, “I don’t want to keep you. From whatever business it is that you have here.”

“Ah. Quite. No, as a matter of fact, this… little chat, has reminded me that I also have business with you, Jon, if you can spare a few moments. Privately, if you would. I’m sure our Guado friend on the desk would accommodate us with a suitable room to talk.”

The last thing Martin wants is to leave Jon alone in a room with Elias for even a single second. For an instant, he entertains a wild notion of just grabbing Jon and pushing past Elias and out the door as fast as their legs can carry them both. He doesn’t, though. He knows it’d just make things worse. And besides, it’s not as if Elias has done anything particularly awful. Nothing outside of turning up and saying things that must have been calculated to make the lot of them feel as small as possible.

In any case, it’s not enough to try and argue it. Not with Elias still being the Grand Maester of Yevon.

Tim and Sasha look just as unhappy as Martin feels. As Jon and Elias retreat into a smaller-looking chamber off the side of the entrance hall, Tim makes a point of saying loudly that they’ll be waiting just outside; but otherwise, the three of them say nothing as the door closes. They are left standing in the now deafeningly quiet hall, empty of other people apart from the warrior monks still standing to silent attention near the the front door and an extremely furtive-looking Michael. Even he never says a word, in spite of the frequent, hasty glances he keeps casting their way.

The rational part of Martin tries to take comfort in the fact that whatever Elias might want with Jon, it couldn’t possibly be anything that would hurt him. Not when he’s made such a point of being so invested in Jon’s pilgrimage. He needs Jon to be okay for that, right?

The rational part of Martin is not having much luck convincing the rest of him to stop worrying about whatever is being talked about in that room.

“What do you think Elias wants with him?”

“Anyone’s guess,” says Tim with a moody shrug. “Prick. Could just be giving him an extended dressing-down for sullying the esteemed values of the rank of summoner or what-the-fuck ever.”

“I feel like he kind of already did that out here.”

“Mm. He’s definitely annoyed about it, though,” Sasha sighs. “Likes to micro-manage, does Elias. Which is very hard to do when the person he wants to micro-manage is constantly on the move from one end of Spira to the other.”

“Yeah, well, tough,” Tim laughs, without a trace of humour. “What’s that bit of scripture Daisy and Basira talked about? ‘So long as a summoner journeys, all else is their concern’?”

“Maybe he’s mad about that too,” Martin suggests. “I mean, didn’t Elias choose them to be Jon’s guardians? I mean – if he likes to direct every tiny little thing as much as you’re saying, I, I can’t see him being too thrilled about how they’re basically letting Jon do whatever.”

“Not like he can replace them now. That’d look even worse for him.”

“Why does it matter so much, anyway? Jon’s whole job is to defeat Sin, I mean, does it really matter to the temples what he does or who he takes with him along the way?”

“Maybe it does,” muses Sasha. “They’ve been trying to cover up what Gertrude got up to before she was a summoner for the past fifteen years, but there’s still plenty of rumours.”

“Okay, but what does all that have to do with Jon?”

“Let’s put it this way. Gertrude was a lifelong heretic, and she brought the Calm. That's probably not enough to make people question things on its own. But if the next summoner to bring the Calm happened to do it alongside two disgraced Crusaders, a known heretic, and an Al Bhed, and that summoner also happened to have been picked for the job by the Grand Maester beforehand… people might start drawing conclusions that the temples wouldn't be happy with.”

“Can’t have people starting to think that maybe the precepts got it wrong in a few places,” Tim mutters.

“Wait – do you think he’ll try and send the rest of us away?”

“If he does, I’m not going," says Tim with sudden heat. "If Jon takes that thing down, I want to be there when it happens.”

Sasha sighs.

“It’s no use us speculating about it now. We’ll just have to ask Jon when he gets out of there.”

Several anxiety-ridden minutes later, the door that Jon and Elias disappeared through finally opens again. The two of them emerge back into the entrance hall; Elias looks utterly unruffled, his face so composed that it’s impossible to tell from looking at him what went on in there. Jon, on the other hand…

Well, he looks calm enough at a distance, coming out of the room and exchanging a few final words with Elias in voices too low to hear. But as Elias performs the Prayer, and Jon returns the gesture and begins to head back over to them, it’s pretty clear – to Martin, at least – that whatever Jon and Elias just talked about in that room, it’s got Jon shaken. There’s so much tension in the way he’s holding his shoulders and his arms that it looks almost painful.

As for Elias, it would seem he's done with all of them for now. Martin sees him heading towards the front desk, presumably to ask Michael about whatever it is he supposedly came here for. He doesn't spare any of them even a single backwards glance.

They leave quickly, ducking past the warrior monks still acting as sentries on either side of the door. Only once they're back out in the gloom of the city do they try to ask Jon what Elias had to say, or what even happened in there. All three of them do as they’re heading back along the walkways of Guadosalam. More than once, even. But every time, Jon brushes them off, getting more and more terse each time.

“Not now. Let’s just go back to the others.”

Not a good sign, Martin thinks. What could Elias have possibly said to him that’s got him so obviously rattled – and so cagey about it?

One thing’s for sure, Martin doesn’t think that running into Elias here was just some weird coincidence. Not at all. Elias would have known all too well that the pilgrimage road would take Jon through Guadosalam sooner or later.

It seems like a completely ridiculous thought. After all, what would Elias even have to gain by getting to Guadosalam ahead of them just to wait for Jon? But at the same time... it also really doesn’t seem ridiculous. Martin can't even explain why.

He just has a feeling.

They know the inn as soon as they see it: the brightly painted, oversized crescent moon above the door is a clear sign that they’ve made it to the right place, and the only such building to be seen on any of the city's lower levels. They find Georgie, Melanie, Daisy, and Basira inside in the common area sitting around a low table, talking amongst themselves in low voices. Georgie spots the four of them as they approach and quickly starts scooching over on the low, round bench to make enough room for them.

“Here we go,” she says with one of her usual smiles. “How’d it go at the library?”

Before any of them can muster up an answer, Georgie's smile falls sharply as she gets a good look at them. The disquiet laying thick over their heads must speak for itself.

“Are you four alright? You’ve got faces like Macalania fog.”

Taking it in turns, they tell her what happened at the library. Martin gets the feeling that Jon is trying to make the tale as brief as he can, but it’s not like Martin doesn’t sympathise with that. He doesn’t really want to dwell too long on that encounter either, and he’s not even the one that Elias singled out for a conversation alone.

“Shit,” mutters Daisy. “What did he want?”

“Nothing,” says Jon, a little too quickly.

As one, the rest of them level him with looks ranging over the entire spectrum of doubt. Not a single one of them is about to believe that the Grand Maester wanted a private chat over nothing, not with the summoner he hand-picked for the job.

“Nothing!” Jon says again, cracking slightly under the pressure of so many people’s gaze. “Just – to give me some, some advice, and ah, discuss some… things that could be helpful for the road ahead.”

How vague could Jon possibly get?

Daisy snorts softly, leaning back against the bench and folding her arms.

“You’re a bad liar.”

Jon makes a small sound of indignation, and then sighs, running a hand through his hair.

“I promise, it’s fine.”

“If it’s fine,” Melanie tells him, “then you can tell us what the slimy bastard said.”

“I will. Later. I just – I need space to think about it first.”

“So it’s not nothing, then,” says Martin, because honestly. He can’t speak for anyone else, but Jon not telling them has got Martin even more on edge than he already was to start with. How are they supposed to help him if he doesn’t tell them anything?

Jon shoots him a cross little glare for that, but Martin's not about to feel bad about saying it. It’s not like Jon can argue. Martin’s not wrong.

“I’m asking you all to please just drop it,” says Jon stiffly. “For now.”

For now. A chorus of sighs echoes around the table. Martin guesses they’ll just have to take it for now. Maybe Jon really does need space to think about it first. So long as this isn’t him trying to duck out of telling them altogether.

Georgie sighs.

“Okay, Jon,” she says. And then, in a move that makes Martin experience a sudden rush of affection towards her, her face goes firm as she leans an elbow on the table and says, “But we’re going to come back to this sooner or later, got it?”

Jon looks like he’d really rather not. But he slumps in his seat after a moment, looking very tired, and nods his agreement.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank us yet,” Basira tells him. “You’re not getting out of being straight with us forever.”

“I know.”

“So just to recap,” Melanie says. “The Grand Maester just happens to be in town at the exact same time as us, decides to drag you to one side for some kind of shady talk, and we can’t leave until tomorrow because we’re waiting to see if maybe the Guado feel like co-operating with whatever weird information dive you’ve sent them on. This just gets better and better.”

A dull, moody silence follows that admittedly pretty accurate summary of the situation. Martin’s a little glad that at least he’s not the only one who thinks Elias being here is more than just an unhappy coincidence.

After a minute or so of everyone staring at the table, or at the wall, or picking distractedly at the seat cushions, Jon stirs.

“I think I might visit the Farplane.”

“Oh,” says Melanie, the first to react. “Eugh. Why?”

“Why not? It’s as good a place to think as any. Better than most.”

“With all the pyreflies, and the— no, nevermind. I’m talking to a summoner, you probably get all cosy with the pyreflies for fun.”

“Wait, but that’s… where the dead are,” says Martin, wanting to check that he’s definitely got this right. “The people who got a Sending.”

“Yeah, it’s one of the main reasons anyone comes to Guadosalam,” Tim nods. His face clouds. “Helps with closure. You know, for some people.”

Not so much for Tim, thinks Martin sadly.

“So… when you go up there…”

“You don’t actually see the dead,” says Georgie, both arms folded on the table in front of her. “Just your memories of them. Once someone gets a Sending, the pyreflies holding their memories are all they are. So if you go up there and think hard enough about your memories of them, the pyreflies respond to that. That’s all.”

“Oh.”

Martin can’t think of much else to say to any of that. He guesses he can understand how it could be a comfort, being able to see for yourself that people you cared about made it to the Farplane instead of being stuck lingering on Spira to become a fiend, but…

Melanie’s right. There is something a bit weird about going there just to see a memory. Even without the question of how they’re actually going to get there. Like, do they really just walk in?

“No one else has to come,” Jon’s saying now.

Daisy shoots him a look. “Don’t be stupid. We’ll walk you up to the entrance, at least.”

“I’ll come,” says Basira suddenly. “Never actually been up there before. I mean, I might hate it. But like you said,” she nods at Jon. “Time to think.”

Georgie, who’s been looking down pensively at the tabletop for a while, nods to herself. “Yeah, I’ll come.”

Melanie twists quickly in her seat to look at her. “What, really?”

“Mm. It’s probably time I stopped avoiding some things.”

“Oh.” Melanie looks sympathetic, then uncomfortable. “…I – look. I really don’t think I can go up there, so…”

“It’s alright,” says Georgie, shaking her head. She reaches one hand over to where one of Melanie’s rests on the tabletop and squeezes it reassuringly. “I think I’m ready for it.”

Martin wonders what that’s about. He knows better than to ask.

One way or another, it looks like all of them are going together as far as the entrance to the Farplane. Martin wonders what that even looks like. He feels like it ought to be obvious, some kind of clear barrier drawing the line between the world of the living and that of the dead. Then again, with everything he's seen it's probably just as likely to end up being a completely nondescript door. Or maybe a really fancy-looking but otherwise ordinary door.

He’s still in two minds about going up there himself. He’s curious – he can’t deny that. Who wouldn’t be even a little curious about seeing the place you should hopefully end up at when you die? And there’s another part of him too, the one he’s been mostly ignoring for most of this journey. The part that’s thinking about what Tim said about closure and thinking – perhaps…

Except being curious about seeing the afterlife (the actual afterlife!) and feeling comfortable about the idea are two completely different things. And – he’s not altogether sure about the idea of going up there and actually seeing his dad. Even if it is just a memory.

Maybe he’ll just flip a coin when he gets there.

They have to follow the winding paths of the city up for some time; the tunnel leading to the Farplane apparently lies on a higher level of the city than the inn. Eventually, they hit a branching path a lot wider than many of the others, with a noticeable uphill bent. Following this one leads them to a larger platform; tall lanterns border the edges, the light they give off softened and dimmed by the colourful bolts of cloth stretched over the wooden frames. Up ahead, cut through the thick, living wood, lies an entryway. Unusually for Guadosalam, this one has been embellished into something more like one of the formal archways of the Yevon temples. The white stone of the arch gleams, the soft light of the lanterns catching on rich accents of blue and gold enamel. An older Guado stands guard; after casting a quick glance over their travelling party, they incline their head and wave them through.

Inside, the path is smoother again; less organic than the rest of Guadosalam, more like places in other parts of Spira that have the sense of being deliberately changed and built upon. The trees and roots making up the walls of the area have had parts hollowed out or carved into intricately patterned windows. Candles are placed within the hollows; above their heads, the roof of the tunnel is held up in places by smooth wooden pillars or more arches built of white stone and bright enamel.

That's not the strangest thing about this path. The further along they go, the more Martin notices clusters of pyreflies hovering lazily along the edges of the tunnel; only a few at first, but growing in number the further they walk.

After some time, the path opens out even further. One final, circular entryway stretches over their heads, adorned with richly coloured hangings that frame a wide yet shallow cavern. Inside that cavern, the path itself narrows sharply and begins to climb. Up and up it climbs, in a staircase that steadily continues to get narrower and narrower, before reaching its end at…

Well, actually, Martin’s not sure what he’s looking at.

The stairs vanish into a round, opalescent opening, or something like an opening; something that from down here shines like some opaque mirror, impossible to see what’s on the other side. It’s definitely not solid, though, not a door; Martin can see the odd opalescent stuff shifting and moving. A barrier, then, but not an impenetrable one. There’s more, smaller openings surrounding the larger one, creating the effect of a snowflake shape in the otherwise solid rock.

This has to be it - the entrance to the Farplane. Now that he sees it, Martin would readily believe that it’s the entrance to some kind of other world. He'd believe it even without the clusters of pyreflies still drifting around the cavern with their quiet, sighing song.

The others begin climbing the stairs; Martin hastily makes to follow, not wanting to be left behind because he was too busy gawping. He only stops when Melanie and Daisy both come to a halt on the first of the staircase's landings. Melanie gives Georgie's arm a squeeze and murmurs something to her before she wordlessly takes a seat on the stairs; Daisy takes up a standing position in the centre of the landing step, making clear her intent to stand guard while everyone else is up there.

Surprisingly – really surprisingly – Sasha stops here too, and nonchalantly takes her own seat on one of the low bannisters either side of the stairs. Martin stares at her in shock.

“Wait,” he says. Mid-way through the word, he decides to aim his question at Daisy as well so that Sasha doesn’t feel too singled out. “You two aren’t going?”

Daisy shrugs.

“It’s not for me,” she says. True to form, she doesn’t elaborate any further.

“I’ve already seen it,” says Sasha. “Once was enough for me.”

Right. Right. She must have come with Tim, when Danny died and they weren’t sure yet whether his spirit had actually made it to the Farplane. Martin can see how that might have put her off any further visits, but…

But this is coming from Sasha. Sasha, who’s had a lot to say about pyreflies on multiple occasions while he’s known her. Martin can’t help thinking that this seems wildly out of character for her.

“Huh,” he says, trying to make light of it. “Not very scholarly of you.”

Sasha chuckles. “The Farplane’s more well-documented than pretty much anything else to do with pyreflies, even if some of that information is out of reach down in those Guado archives. I can afford to be a bit less thorough with it.”

She glances up the stairs towards the others, who are already almost at the very edge of that strange, opal-like mirror barrier between this world and the next, and then looks back up at Martin. “Are you going up?”

There’s a question. Turnabout is fair play, he guesses.

“… Yeah,” Martin says, curiosity winning the coin toss. “I think I will, actually.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye on things down here.”

With that, Sasha turns back to watching the pyreflies carving out their lazy paths around the cavern. Taking that as his cue to stop stalling, Martin follows everyone else up to the top of that staircase, where the Farplane awaits.

Chapter Text

By the time Martin reaches the top of the stairs, the others have long since passed through to the other side of that strange barrier between here and the Farplane. It's an intimidating thing to approach alone; up close, it looks less like a mirror and more like a cloud. If he strains his eyes for a few seconds, he can actually see through a little way to the other side. Sort of, anyway. Everything on that side is too blurred and shadowy to really call it seeing.

At this distance, the whole barrier hums in Martin’s ears with a noise like that of a thousand pyreflies. It's cool to the touch, a slight resistance against his fingertips when he raises a hand to it. When he decides to just go for it, that slight resistance pushes against his whole body, like breaking the surface of a bubble; the whole barrier ripples as he goes. He feels daft for it, but the feeling makes him hold his breath as he passes through.

Then he’s suddenly on the other side, and everything feels almost normal again.

Martin finds himself standing on a flat, rocky plateau, surrounded entirely by thick, yellowish clouds. There’s a constant rushing sound coming from somewhere far below, like water moving at high speed; along with that, as thick as the surrounding clouds, is the bell-like singing of what must be countless unseen pyreflies. Martin can’t feel so much as a breeze from where he’s standing, but all around him, the thick yellow clouds rush past as if being blown by a strong, constant gale. It seems almost as if the little rocky outcropping is somehow separate from everything around it, a tiny island exempt from the rules of its surroundings.

Then—

Just for a few moments, the thick cloud cover clears, and Martin can see the Farplane that lies beyond it.

It’s beautiful.

That rushing sound Martin heard comes from a truly massive waterfall, one that plunges down sheer cliffs beneath the platform, far down into a bowl-shaped valley in which grow hundreds and hundreds of bright flowers in vivid shades of pink and blue and yellow. Further out, he can see an impossibly blue ocean, with strange, sparkling pillars of crystal or ice or something even stranger stretching up out of the water far in the distance, reaching impossibly high into the sky. Pyreflies everywhere – down the falls, around the flowers, even inside those bizarre, sparkling pillars – filling the whole place with countless motes of pastel light. It’s like standing at the centre of a galaxy. Far in the distance, hanging low in the Farplane’s sky and shrouded by a dark mist, hangs a pale blue sun, or something like a sun, one that seems so much larger and yet so much more gentle than the bright, blazing sun that Martin’s seen every day of his life back in the waking world.

Then the clouds roll back in, and the vision vanishes.

Martin gives himself a minute. It’s strange, but he doesn’t feel scared. Not even a little. His chest and his throat feel full, his heart beating fast behind his ribs, but… it’s not fear he's feeling, when he thinks about what he just saw. Awe, maybe. Wonder.

If this is where a Sending takes people after they die... he thinks he can see how people find comfort in it.

Once he feels inside himself enough again to start looking around, it doesn’t take him long to spot his friends. Each one of them stands in a spot by themselves near the edge of the rocky platform, each one with a generous distance between themselves and anybody else.

Except – they’re not entirely by themselves. Instead of gazing into that thick yellow cloud, Martin can see that each of his friends stands facing a faint, wispy outline of somebody in the clouds. In front of Tim is someone who looks so much like him that Martin knows it must be Danny. Basira faces an older man who shares her eyes and her chin. Georgie sits cross-legged in front of a young woman with short hair, someone who even as a memory has a look of challenge in her face.

Martin quickly averts his gaze from all three of them, not wanting to intrude on whatever private moments they're having with the memories of the people they loved. Once again, he finds himself feeling out of place. This is no different to visiting a graveyard, really. Most graveyards aren’t actually within the afterlife itself, but it all adds up to the same thing in the end.

Just like the other three, Jon’s by himself in a spot of his own. He sits on the ground as he stares out into the vast space beyond the platform, where the sound of pyreflies and rushing water still echoes. And just like the other three, there are a couple of faint, transparent figures in front of him as well.

Martin shushes the part of him that has questions about that. For starters, Jon doesn’t owe him any answers, and for another, Martin’s not about to go over and bother him. Not when the whole reason Jon came up here in the first place was to try and sort himself out about whatever happened with Elias, whatever it was he didn’t feel like he could tell them all yet.

Maybe Martin should just take a leaf out of Daisy’s book and stand guard. Daisy can watch the outside, and Martin can watch the inside. That makes sense, right?

He’s resolved to do just that, ignoring the part of him still wondering but what if… when he notices Jon looking at him. He quickly stops when he notices Martin looking back, going back to staring out into the clouds past the two ephemeral figures in front of him. After a minute or so of that, he looks back at Martin again. Then, he makes a small gesture that Martin can’t interpret as anything else but a request for him to get over there.

So Martin gets over there.

Jon rises to his feet as Martin gets close.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d come up here or not.”

“Neither was I, honestly. I guess I just got curious.”

“Did people speak of the Farplane? Back in Zanarkand?”

Martin shakes his head. “Not really. I dunno if anyone really believed all that much in any sort of afterlife. I mean, it’s not like we even had summoners there.”

“Really? That’s odd. The summoner who defeated Sin the first time was said to be from there.”

Oh, right. Jon did say something like that before, didn’t he? All the way back on the Djose highroad, on that first day travelling from the temple.

“Oh… that’s, um, High Summoner Orsinov, right? Sasha told me.”

“Right. Him and his daughter. They’re the two that stood against Sin that first time and actually made a difference.”

“Oh.” So Orsinov’s daughter must have been like his guardian, Martin guesses, before the concept of summoners going on pilgrimage to follow in Orsinov’s footsteps and needing guardians with them was even a thing. “Wait, oh! Is that why people keep being so weird about you having a lot of guardians? All because Orsinov only had his daughter along with him?”

“Maybe,” Jon shrugs, pulling a face. “I’ve honestly never given it that much thought.”

“Sure.”

Well, both Jon and Sasha seem pretty convinced that Orsinov was from Zanarkand to start with. Martin’s still not sure about it – he knows he’s never heard of anyone being a summoner back there, not even once. But with how Martin never even heard of Bevelle or the Machina War before he came to Spira, maybe…

“Maybe I’ve just never heard of it because people in Zanarkand only started learning how to summon after my time. I mean, with how aeons are - you know,” Martin says, making a gesture to try and encompass everything that aeons are, “I think I would remember something like that.”

“Right. That must be it.”

The conversation lulls into silence for a few moments. This unfortunately gives Martin’s mind plenty of space to wander to the silent, transparent figures still standing in the cloud bank ahead of them. As much as he tries not to look too much, or think about it too hard, at this distance he’d be hard-pressed not to notice little details of the two memories that Jon’s called up. How the woman shares Jon’s large dark eyes and thick black wavy hair, albeit with a lot less grey in it, or how the man at her side has a nose very much like Jon’s.

In an effort to not think about these things, Martin asks, “So… why did you come up here to think, anyway?”

“Oh,” says Jon, as though startled by the question. “Well… that’s all the Farplane is, really, when it comes down to it. For the living, at least. People come here to talk to the memories of their loved ones, and some of them might say they’re looking for guidance, or wisdom, or whatever else, but…”

Jon sighs. “It’s not like those memories can talk back. If anyone ever did come back from a visit here with some sort of new understanding, it’s only whatever they’ve managed to work out for themselves. But… no one disturbs you while you’re here. I-I mean, who would?”

“Oh… right. Yeah, that makes sense.” And now he thinks about it, it’s really a very Jon solution to the problem of knowing he wouldn’t be able to get any thinking done in close quarters with seven other people.

Which really just begs the question of why he invited Martin to invade this space in the first place.

“So… I’m guessing since you called me over that your thinking’s either gone really well or really badly?”

“Yes,” says Jon after a moment, startling a laugh from him.

“Well, which is it?”

“Not sure,” says Jon. The spark of cheek in his face is all too brief, and quickly fades away to nothing along with his grin. “I… haven’t managed to come to any conclusions yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“Sorry, Martin, but no. Not yet.”

“Right.” Martin sighs, and tries not to feel too stung or frustrated by that. He can wait. He's good at waiting. He can give Jon a bit more time if he needs it. “Sure. Well… whatever it is Elias said to you, we’re here to help. Guardians, remember?”

“Mm.”

And Jon nods, but Martin can’t help thinking that he really doesn’t sound too sure.

Quiet slowly falls on them once again. Martin listens to the pyreflies, and carefully looks at the cloud layers to either side of the people he’s really beginning to suspect might be Jon’s parents, and wonders.

He’d thought to himself that he wouldn’t ask, but… Jon wouldn’t have called him over here if he was uncomfortable with the idea of Martin knowing about them, would he?

“… Can I ask something?”

“That depends on what it is,” says Jon, looking a bit apprehensive, “but… go on.”

“Yeah, yeah, and I promise you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I guess I was wondering… who is it you’ve called, here?”

“Oh.” Jon looks surprised, of all things, like this wasn’t the question he was expecting. What other question he could have been expecting is beyond Martin.

Jon looks back out at them, his face tight with something that isn’t quite discomfort, but seems close to it.

“My parents,” he says, confirming all of Martin’s suspicions. “It’s – like I said, people don’t disturb you here if they think you need time with a loved one, and…” Jon trails off with a little noise of frustration, his nose wrinkling. “Oh, that sounds awful, doesn’t it. I – I promise I’m not just using them to get the others to give me some space, it’s just—”

Again, Jon cuts himself off, throwing his hands up slightly as if to show his frustration with his own inability to put what he’s thinking into words. Martin waits, and carefully doesn’t say anything.

After a moment of thought, Jon looks back at him and says, “I… I never really knew them. My mother I remember a little better, but they both passed away when I was very young, so… I barely have any memories of them as people. Even standing here looking at them I, I can see bits of myself in their features? But… the faces themselves may as well be strangers to me.” At that, Jon’s eyes go wide; Martin can practically pinpoint the instant he decides to backtrack. “I’m sorry, this must sound – completely nonsensical to you, I’m—”

“No,” Martin cuts in, desperate to reassure him. The last thing he wants is for Jon to feel bad about sharing something about himself. “No, it doesn’t.”

It’s not the same as it is with his dad, not exactly, but he thinks he gets it. And Jon’s parents, the memory of them that the pyreflies have managed to bring up, they look so young. Younger than Jon is right now, even. How strange must that feel for him?

“I’m sorry you never got to know them,” Martin says softly.

“Maybe it’s for the best. I was… a deeply, deeply annoying child, by all accounts.”

Oh, Jon. Part of Martin immediately wants to protest that. Another part of him thinks, in pure misery-loving-company sympathy, well, we’ve got that in common.

Jon is quiet a moment. “I used to try and imagine what they were like.”

“Yeah?” Martin ignores every single part of him screaming about how all he wants to do right now is wrap Jon up in a hug and not let go. “Well, maybe we can imagine that they’d be perfectly fine with helping you get a bit of breathing room to think for a few minutes.”

Jon almost laughs at that. There’s nothing joyful about the small, huffed sound, but the smile he gives Martin is grateful all the same.

“What about you?” he says after a moment. “Is… is there anyone you’d want to call? While you’re here?”

Ah. There it is.

“… I dunno. Feels kind of weird to think about calling my dad.”

“Would you, ah… like some space?”

“Nah, it’s not that, it’s just…”

And to his own shock, Martin finds the words coming out of him, halting and clumsy, but still there.

“For years I thought he was just. Gone, you know? I mean, that he’d left us. And then all of this happened, and I found out that maybe it wasn’t his fault after all, but that everyone thinks he died doing something heroic, and… I dunno, Jon, I just can’t wrap my head around it. Like, at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything that happened for me or Mum—”

And Martin has to stop there, as a third pale, translucent figure appears just to the side of Jon’s parents.

Martin can’t breathe a moment. There she is, exactly how he remembers her. Right down to the disapproving lines around her eyes and mouth that got deeper every time he messed another thing up.

“I… oh,” says Jon, sounding just as unequipped for this as Martin is. “That’s. That’s her, I take it?”

“I—yeah. I. Yeah.”

He hadn’t even thought – hadn’t even begun to reckon with the possibility that he could end up seeing his mum if he came up here. What does that say about him?

“I’m sorry, Martin,” says Jon at his side.

“No, it’s… you don’t have to be.” Oh, that sounds awful, doesn’t it, like he doesn’t even mind his own mother being dead. “I mean, she wasn’t well. For a long time, actually. Years. Since before my dad got dragged to Spira, even. It’s— it was probably a relief for her, in the end.”

Wait.

“Hang on, how can she even be here? It’s… it’s not like she had anyone to perform the Sending for her.”

Jon’s face, full of sombre sympathy, very visibly screeches its way through what Martin would describe as a big old trainwreck.

“Ah… well… mm,” Jon hedges, looking squirrelly. “For some people – that is…”

“Jon.”

“There’s really no delicate way to put this!” Jon tells him, his hands flying up in exasperation as his face scrunches in discomfort. “Some people simply… don’t need a Sending. The ones that accepted death while they were still alive find their way here on their own.”

“… Right.” Jon’s right. There really is no delicate way to put that. “Right. That figures.”

“You said she was unwell?”

Jon’s voice is quiet. Like he’s trying his best not to demand an answer.

“Yeah,” Martin sighs. Out of nerves, awkwardness, whatever, he goes to put his hands in his pockets before stopping himself – Mum hated that – and then he feels a sudden hot burst of irritation because it’s not like that’s actually her, it's just a memory, she can’t see or hear him. He hasn’t beaten himself up about that habit in a long while.

He makes himself look at Jon instead, who’s still waiting without saying a word. Inviting him to talk more without demanding it. “It wasn’t so bad at first, but… you know, it was one of those progressive things. Just kept getting worse and worse till I had to drop out of school to look after her.”

In a burst of bitterness, he finds himself saying, “Probably a good thing we can only call memories up here and not the actual people. She’d hate it, me turning up again like a bad penny after a thousand years of peace and quiet.”

Jon, who up to now has mostly restrained himself to looking at Martin with big sad eyes while he listens to Martin’s sob story, actually gasps at that, looking stricken.

“Martin… that’s—”

“Oh – hell,” what is he even saying, Jon doesn’t need Martin dumping his problems on him again, not when they’re not even actual problems anymore, “Jon, sorry, I don’t, I don’t even know what I’m saying. Just – please just ignore me.”

“Well, I’m certainly not about to do that,” says Jon with enough of his usual dryness to make Martin breathe slightly easier. Jon looks up at him, with a bit less of a big sad kicked puppy look and more of the look Martin’s seen on him when he’s been thinking about one of the puzzles back in the Cloister of Trials, and then Jon opens his mouth and says, without any preamble at all:

“For the record – if I went a thousand years without seeing you and you turned up again out of the blue after all that time, that would make me very happy.”

Martin’s brain stops. Martin’s breathing stops. Martin’s pretty sure his heart stops as well, for a moment there. He stares at Jon, and Jon stares back at him, looking more and more horrified with every passing second, until Jon suddenly goes blurry and Martin’s eyes start feeling very, very hot and prickly.

“I, I, I mean, that is –” Jon stammers, sounding more panicky with every new syllable. “Oh no…”

Martin can’t even be embarrassed about the fact that Jon’s words literally just brought him to tears. Not when Jon’s clearly freaking out about it enough for both of them. He sniffs, tries to turn it into a laugh, and when that comes out way too watery-sounding, gives it up for a lost cause and quickly tries to clean himself up a little instead.

“Give a guy a little warning, Jon, would you?”

“I’m sorry, please don’t—”

“No, no, you’re fine, I just wasn’t expecting it.” The way Jon’s carrying on, you’d think he’d just mortally wounded Martin instead of making him cry. “Just – just give me a minute.”

“O-okay,” Jon says, and now that Martin can actually see him again, he looks just as apprehensive as he sounds; he’s gone all fidgety again. “Well. I stand by it.”

“Hah.”

Good grief. All joking aside, Jon really is going to be the death of him at this rate, if he keeps saying things like that. How’s Martin meant to take it?

He swipes a hand under the rims of his glasses one final time, and then says, “Um, right, okay. Minor crisis over, I think.”

“R-right.”

Jon goes back to fidgeting, and Martin goes back to trying desperately to squash the triumphant resurgence of the urge to wrap Jon up in a never-ending hug. If someone else knows a better way for him to deal with Jonathan Sims saying something that sweet to him, he’d love to hear it.

“… You know,” Jon says hesitantly after a while, in something much closer to his usual voice, “it’s a little strange.”

“What is?”

“Nothing,” says Jon. He's got that evasive look on him again, like he very much regrets opening his mouth.

Martin raises an eyebrow at him. Jon grimaces like someone swallowing gravel, correctly realising that he’s not going to get away with that.

“Only that… it took barely anything for your mother to appear, and yet, we were talking about your father at some length before that, and…”

“Oh.” Actually – Jon’s got a point. Martin’s dad’s crossed his mind plenty times since he’s been up here, and yet… nothing. “Yeah, he hasn’t… what does that mean?”

“Well.” If Jon looked like he was swallowing gravel a minute ago, now he looks like someone's forcing him to swallow an entire beach. "It could mean that he’s still alive. It wouldn’t be the first time the rumour mill got it wrong.”

“You’re kidding,” says Martin flatly.

“I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“Oh, you think?”

This is… way too much, way much more than Martin’s prepared to deal with right now. After everything else, everything that's happened before he even got dragged here and after it, and now he’s just left with even more dangling threads?

He makes himself take a deep breath, pull himself back a little. It’s not Jon’s fault.

“Sorry, I just – I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with this.”

A frown pulls at the edges of Jon’s eyes and mouth.

“Would you want to see him, if he is out there?”

“Honestly?” Martin sighs. “I really don’t know anymore.”

Never mind Jon. Martin could use some space to think of his own.

But unlike Jon, he knows that he could never do it up here. Too many ghosts.

“Right,” he says. “Well… do you still need some more time alone to think, or…?”

Jon shakes his head pensively.

“No. No, I… I think I’ve done as much thinking as I’m going to do for today. We can go.”

They head down from the Farplane together alongside Georgie, Basira, and Tim. It's quiet as they all gather before the barrier. Basira looks thoughtful more than anything else. So does Georgie, even if there’s something a little melancholy about it. Tim’s eyes are downcast, but there’s something oddly resolute in his face.

Martin doesn’t know if there's anything usual or acceptable that people say to someone after a visit to the Farplane, and so he carefully doesn’t ask anything about who they saw or what happened or how it was. Some moments should just stay private.

Whatever they were looking for by coming up here, Martin hopes they found it.

As far as it goes for him, he feels more lost than ever.

Passing through that odd, burst-bubble feeling of the barrier to the Farplane, they find themselves back at the very top of the staircase leading back down to Guadosalam. Martin didn’t appreciate just how high up it was when he was climbing it; from up here, he can easily see where the other three are still waiting patiently on the lower landing step. Melanie and Sasha are now sitting together and talking while Daisy keeps watch. Further down below, a couple of Guado sentries wait patiently at their posts at the cavern entrance.

“What’s the plan now, then?” says Tim in a low voice to Jon as they head for the stairs. “You gonna tell us what’s up yet?”

“Later, Tim.”

“So long as it’s not too much later,” Tim mutters unhappily. “Look—”

The wispy, bell-like sing-song noise of the pyreflies in the cavern suddenly crescendos into a clamouring, cutting off Tim’s words. Everyone turns to look for the source of the sound, on edge – but it’s not until they look behind them, where they just came, that they see anything strange.

Following them out of the Farplane, pushing with difficulty through a barrier that suddenly seems much more solid than it was when Martin and the others walked through only moments ago, staggers the stooped, contorted form of a Guado man. He looks old, and moves with difficulty, his form warping and blurring at the edges. He doesn't even look entirely solid. Pyreflies swarm around him thickly, but even through all of that, he’s still recognisable as—

“Is that who I think it is?”

“Good grief,” Jon breathes, aghast. “Jurgen Leitner?”

Jurgen Leitner – or his ghost, or his Unsent form, or whatever – stumbles towards them. His movements are slow and painful to watch, but he pushes insistently through them. His mouth moves, but whatever state he is in seems to have put him beyond speech – no matter how he shapes his lips, no sound escapes.

“Jon,” Basira says, low and urgent. “Send him.”

Jon shakes himself out of the horrified stupor he was in. He nods, taking the two steps back up until he’s on the top landing where Leitner’s Unsent form bends and sways. Martin hears raised voices behind him on the stairs, more footsteps following them.

“What followed you?” Daisy asks, coming to a halt a couple of stairs behind with Sasha in her wake. Martin glances further down the staircase to see Melanie still on the lower landing, apparently arguing with the two Guado sentries who’ve rushed to see what the commotion is.

“Leitner,” Jon answers, still staring at the pitiful-looking spirit. “Why—”

“It doesn’t matter why, he doesn’t belong here—”

“But if he followed us specifically – don’t you think this is a bit much of a coincidence?”

As if spurred by this, the Leitner-ghost makes a valiant attempt at a quick walk towards Jon, lurching towards him with jerky steps that leave him bent on the ground at Jon’s feet.

“You really want to wait till he attacks you? Send him now!” Daisy barks. “Everyone else, down the stairs. Basira and I’ll hold it.”

Martin knows better than to argue with Daisy when she’s like this. He follows Georgie and Tim past Daisy – and past Sasha, who lingers a moment longer, trying to get a better look at what’s happening up on the top landing.

Martin doubles back, grabbing Sasha’s arm.

“Come on, Sasha, is now really the time?”

Mercifully, Sasha sees sense. She turns; Martin breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to watching his feet, trying to get down the stairs as fast as he can without breaking his neck. A couple of steps down, he hears Sasha gasp – in shock or pain, he can't tell – and Martin stumbles his way down a couple more steps before he loses enough momentum to stop and check if she’s alright.

“I’m okay,” Sasha tells him breathlessly as soon as she sees him stop.

Martin stares at her – she doesn’t look okay. She’s sat sideways, covering a few stairs like someone who just took a hard spill down them. One arm is wrapped protectively around her middle, while she breathes hard through gritted teeth.

Above them, at the top of the stairs, Jon is mid-Sending, the pyreflies around Leitner and throughout the rest of the cavern answering him and drawing together in one single brilliant glow. Sasha grimaces, and Martin sees her whole body tense as she suppresses – what, a tremor? A cry of pain?

“Let me help you up—”

“I promise, I’m fine, I just slipped and lost my footing,” she says, holding one hand up even as the arm around her middle wraps around it even tighter. “You head down, I’ll be there as soon as I get my breath back.”

Get her breath back is right – Sasha’s having to pause for breath between almost every single word. What did she land on when she fell? It’s got to be serious.

“I don’t think so,” Martin says. “Come on, Sasha, we get enough of this with Jon. Did you break anything?”

Martin sits himself down on the step next to Sasha, wondering if he’s even got a Cure in him after everything this day has thrown at him - and stops.

He blinks. He’s sure he didn’t see what he thought he just saw. A couple of pyreflies escaping from out under Sasha’s hair – no. He must be seeing things.

A final, high-pitched sigh from the pyreflies up at the top of the stairs heralds the end of Jon’s Sending. Sure enough, when Martin glances up there, the little motes of light are scattering away in the direction of the Farplane. Jon himself is stooped down near the floor, almost invisible from where Martin is on the stairs right now. Maybe he’s looking for clues or something.

A rustling next to him makes him start. He watches as Sasha gets carefully to her feet beside him, brushing herself off and slowly moving each of her limbs one at a time, as if to check they still work.

“See?” she tells him, with a reassuring smile. “I told you I just needed to get my breath back. You don’t need to worry so much.”

Martin stares at her.

It’s true, she seems fine now. Especially compared to how she was only a few seconds ago, when it looked to Martin like every breath was some kind of struggle for her. To look at her now, you wouldn’t think any of it had happened.

Except—

Martin knows what he saw. Sasha taking a fall down the stairs when Jon began the Sending. Sasha grimacing in pain, seemingly struggling even to speak, let alone move. Sasha suddenly being fine again almost the moment the Sending was over.

Sasha, with pyreflies escaping from underneath her hair while the Sending was happening.

Martin knows he’s left it too long for an answer, but he doesn’t think he could find his words right now if he tried. He knows there’s a way that all these pieces fit together, but his mind refuses to make them fit. Or more like – he doesn’t want them to fit. There’s no make about it.

Martin's mouth is dry, his tongue feeling too big to fit in it, but he has to make himself say something.

“You sure we shouldn’t get Jon to check you over?” he forces out, getting to his feet.

(Sasha, blithely saying that she and Tim had a close call with Sin during a previous operation. Sasha, determined to steal from right under Jude’s nose because she didn’t want to take any chances this time. Sasha at the Moonflow, drawing pyreflies to her with barely a thought. Sasha taking a step back during the Sending on Kilika, both arms wrapped around her middle as she told Martin that she hadn’t thought Jon would call the pyreflies that strongly—)

“No, you know how he is. He’s had enough of a day already, I don’t want him fussing over a few bruises.”

Sasha starts off down the stairs to join the others before Martin can even begin to say anything else. Martin follows her, his mind still reeling.

Sasha can’t be Unsent. She can’t be.

But if she is—

By the time he and Sasha reach the others, they're all deep in frantic conversation with the two Guado sentries. Martin hears frantic question after frantic question about the Leitner-shade, if it was real, if he said anything before Jon started Sending him. Tim breaks himself away from the discussion as soon as Martin and Sasha are close, and it’s all Martin can do to keep the thoughts screaming around his brain off his face as Tim asks if they’re both okay, and Sasha reassures him that they’re both fine, she just took a fall from going down the steps too fast.

Does Tim know?

No, another part of Martin answers, there’s no way Tim knows. Not with how he feels about the Unsent. The others around him are still talking about Leitner and what his sudden appearance could mean, and Martin barely hears a word of it.

There’s no way Sasha can be Unsent. Not since before Martin ever met her.

But it makes sense.

“You doing okay there, Martin?”

Martin starts; Georgie is peering at him in concern. So are a few of the others, come to that.

“Um. Yeah, I’m – I’m fine,” he manages to say. “Just a bit shaken up by what happened, that’s all.”

Georgie nods, blowing out a long breath. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. D’you think he was Unsent, Jon?”

When did Jon get down here?

Whenever he did, it looks like he brought Daisy and Basira with him, the two of them looking unharmed but troubled. Jon himself looks tired; the impromptu Sending must have taken a bit of a toll on him. He shakes his head at Georgie, the frown lines on his face worn even deeper than usual.

“No. He followed us back over from the Farplane, I’m sure of it. Which means that someone must have Sent him once.”

“Isn’t that supposed to stop this sort of thing from happening, though?” Melanie asks, unimpressed.

“If something was keeping him here… some kind of powerful emotion, or something he left unfinished—”

Jon pauses. “He was Gertrude’s guardian. If he died before she completed her pilgrimage, then perhaps…”

“No.” Daisy shakes her head. “If he was Sent but stayed on Spira, I’ll tell you what it means. That was an unclean death.”

There are a few gasps, a few sharp breaths, the two Guado sentries least among them.

“Murder?” Basira asks.

“Count on it. Someone did him in.”

“But – but he was a guardian, right?” Martin asks, his head spinning. “Who would’ve wanted to?”

“Dunno. Sounds like he made enough enemies before he joined up with Gertrude,” Daisy shrugs.

“Do you think he followed Jon out here for a reason?” Tim asks.

Then, at the silent chorus of askance looks he gets: “What? Leitner guarded the last High Summoner, and along comes Jon, another summoner wandering into the Farplane, and you’re trying to tell me these two things aren’t linked? Come on.”

“Maybe he wanted to tell us something,” says Sasha thoughtfully.

“About what, though?”

“Not sure. The pilgrimage, maybe? Or Gertrude. I really don’t know.”

“Jon,” says Daisy in a warning tone. Martin jumps at the suddenness of it; when he glances between Daisy and Jon, he finds her scrutinising the look of intense thought on Jon's face as he watches Tim and Sasha talk.

“You know we can’t look into this,” Daisy says firmly once she's got Jon's attention.

“What if it is linked, though? And – you said he was murdered, Daisy.”

“Either way, not our problem. Sin’s enough of a problem for us all on its own.”

“Maybe. If you ask me, the longer we’re on the road the more I keep finding loose ends from Gertrude’s pilgrimage that don’t add up.”

“Her loose ends. Not yours.”

“It couldn’t hurt to ask, though, could it?” Martin asks, trying to ignore how the two Guado sentries have moved off a few paces to mutter between themselves. “I mean, someone here in Guadosalam must have heard what happened to him.”

Daisy sighs.

“Fine. Ask your librarian friend tomorrow if you’re that curious. But we can’t stick around to play detective for a Guado problem.”

With that, they make their way back towards the city proper, taking leave of the Guado sentries as they go. Georgie and Sasha keep trading the occasional theory about how and why Jurgen Leitner followed them out of the Farplane. Tim and Melanie occasionally chip in with their own ideas. But for the most part, the walk back to the inn is quiet, a dull cloud of unease hanging over them all.

Martin can’t bring himself to speak at all. He wonders about Leitner: about what could have possibly happened to him, why anyone would have gone so far as to murder him in cold blood, if it has anything to do with whatever he was so desperate for them to know that he followed them across from the Farplane to tell them.

But even more than that, he wonders about Sasha. It sends him cold right down to his heart every time the thought crosses his mind, but he can’t stop thinking about it.

Sasha is… she’s probably Unsent. Almost definitely Unsent. What just happened to her on the stairs - looking ready to drop while Jon was Sending, only to make a full and miraculous recovery as soon as he was done – the timing’s too convenient. Sasha died. She died some time before Martin even met her, probably. Sasha died, and she never got a Sending. Sasha died, and decided to stick around on Spira.

And nobody else knows. He’s sure about that. Jon, and Tim – neither of them know that such a close friend of theirs is really…

What is he supposed to do with this if it’s true?

Chapter Text

Martin doesn’t get much sleep that night.

He tries, he really does. He tosses and turns for hours, trying to find that magic comfortable spot that'll let him drop off. He lies there with his eyes closed for ages. He stubbornly keeps staring at the darkness behind his closed eyelids, and reminds himself that they’ll be back on the road in the morning, that he’ll be no use to everyone if he’s falling asleep as the fiends come down on them. But try as he might, his mind just keeps racing with everything that happened that day: Elias, the Farplane, Leitner.

Sasha.

After he's finally given up on even pretending he's going to get to sleep, Martin stares at the ceiling for a long time thinking about Sasha. He already knows he can’t tell the others about it. For one thing, if Sasha knows his secret, she’s been keeping it under wraps. So it’s only fair. Sasha must have her reasons for not saying she’s Unsent, the same as how Martin has his reasons for not going about telling everyone he’s from Zanarkand. He can’t see most people being all that understanding of someone lingering on Spira past their time. Not with fiends being the threat they are.

And... he has no idea how he’d go about breaking that news to Tim or Jon. His heart breaks a little every time it crosses his mind.

Sasha seems like she’s got a handle on things, anyway. No weird or erratic behaviour, no shapeshifting, no sign of spontaneously turning into a fiend. She’s not – she’s not a danger.

If that changes – Martin doesn’t want to think about if that changes. But he already knows he wouldn’t think about breathing a word to anyone else until then.

So all that he really has to decide is whether or not he wants to let Sasha know what he thinks he knows.

Martin must eventually pass out; he vaguely remembers sleeping his way fitfully through a series of dreams involving lots of long staircases and narrow corridors surrounded by thick clouds. When he wakes the next morning he feels like he could do with another eight hours in bed. But that’s not an option, and so he gets up and shuffles his way to the inn’s common area for breakfast with the others.

Jon looks about as rough as Martin feels; the bags under his eyes are particularly impressive this morning, and he alternates between yawning every other second and snapping irritably if anyone asks him anything. His eyes dart around the table constantly as they all make their way through their meal, almost like he expects a fiend to come bursting out of the water jug.

Yep. Jon definitely didn’t get any sleep last night.

When there's not much left on the table, one of the Guado who runs the inn comes over and informs them that they have a guest who insisted on seeing them as a matter of importance. Not two minutes later, Elias walks into the room flanked by two of his personal guard.

There’s a loud clatter as Jon knocks the bowl in front of him right off the table.

It's a strong reaction - a strange one - even for Jon, even for when he's clearly running low on sleep, even for when Elias is involved. But Martin can sympathise. This is the last thing he wants to deal with this early in the morning.

Daisy and Basira look from Jon, frozen in place like a startled cat, to each other, and then to Elias. The two of them move as one to stand and greet Elias with the Prayer, but the man raises a hand, shaking his head.

“Please, there’s no need to stand on my account. I heard about your encounter leaving the Farplane yesterday; knowing you would be on your way this morning, I simply wanted to check in.”

Jon is staring at Elias like the man has two heads. Basira steps in before it can get too awkward.

“Thanks for your concern, but as you can see, we’re fine.”

“So it would seem. And you, Jon? Performing the Sending under such conditions can be taxing. Are you quite recovered?”

“I’ll manage,” says Jon stiffly. He’s not exactly staring at Elias anymore, but he looks no less uncomfortable. “Thank you.”

Elias inclines his head. With a faint smile, his head tilted like a bird of prey that’s caught sight of something small moving in the grass, he asks, “Was it really Jurgen Leitner? One hears such rumours, it can be a stretch to believe they haven’t grown in the telling.”

“No, it was him. I’m sure of that much.”

“Fascinating. To think that a man such as he should need to be Sent in such a way… did he say anything?”

“N-no, nothing.”

Huh. Jon looks like he’s avoiding Elias’s eyes. Did Leitner say anything, while Martin was down on the steps with Sasha? He glances towards Basira and Daisy, but as usual, their faces aren't giving away anything.

“It seemed like he wasn't in any condition to speak,” Sasha puts in.

“I see. Then perhaps it was simply the pyreflies reacting to the memories that a summoner’s presence on the Farplane would stir up, and nothing more. Curious that they would take Leitner’s form, but that may be all it is. A curiosity.”

Basira frowns. “It doesn’t concern you that someone who was already Sent could leave the Farplane like that?”

“On the contrary, I take it very seriously indeed. But the Guado are the foremost experts on the Farplane and its workings. It will be for them to determine if this incident speaks to any greater instability that we should be concerned about. You dealt with the initial incident admirably, but I think it would be best if you let others handle the rest from here. I myself plan to remain for a short while longer, on the off-chance this is indicative of a more serious situation that requires Yevon's support. As for yourselves, will you leave town this morning?”

Jon nods. “We had planned to.”

“Excellent. Then please don’t allow me to delay you.”

With that, Elias turns to leave. He pauses a moment in the doorway to the common area, turning the barest amount to allow him to glance behind him.

“Oh, and Jon? Do remember to consider what we discussed yesterday. You may take your time, of course, but I will require an answer.”

After that, Elias really does leave, his personal guard flanking him. Martin and the others are left sitting in the silence he leaves behind, and as it stretches out uncomfortably, Martin tries desperately not to look at Jon. Seriously, what did Elias talk to him about in that side room in the Guado library yesterday that he needs an answer for?

“Prick,” mutters Melanie viciously. She glares at the knife on the table like she’s entertaining the notion of stabbing Elias with it. “Still gonna try and claim that it was nothing?”

Trust Melanie to say what at least some of them are thinking.

“No,” says Jon shortly, stooping to retrieve the bowl he knocked over earlier. “But I’m also not discussing it while we’re still in the same city as Elias and his personal guard.” With a sharp sigh, he says, “Let’s get ready to go.”

As anxious as they are to start putting distance between themselves and Elias, there is still one call they need to make before they leave Guadosalam behind them. This time, all eight of them wind their way up and down the walkways of the city until they reach the library building. Melanie sticks firmly to the centre of the walkways with Georgie’s help the entire time, muttering darkly about the lack of safety rails and how it reminds her of someone from home who constantly has to be shouted down by more sensible people. But eventually, they all reach the elaborate building and its grand doors without incident.

This time, it’s just Tim, Jon, and Martin who go inside; Tim claims he wants to ask more about Leitner, and Sasha just shrugs and says that she doesn’t want to slow them down and she’ll get the details off them later.

(Martin can’t help but remember the odd question Michael asked her the day before. Why are you still here? If the Guado are as sensitive to pyreflies and the Unsent as Martin’s been lead to believe, Michael must have known about Sasha the minute she walked through the door. She probably wants to avoid a repeat performance.)

Michael himself is behind the desk again this morning, and glances up as they enter.

“Oh!” he says as they approach. “Good morning. You look rather terrible, summoner.”

Jon scowls. “Is that how you greet everyone?”

Michael laughs his long, drawn-out laugh.

“Oh, no. But, um, you do look quite unwell. I, I heard all about your encounter near the Farplane yesterday.”

“You and the entire city, it seems.”

“News does travel quickly,” Michael nods, with a look of sympathy that Martin can’t help but find insincere. “Especially news like this. Was it truly Jurgen Leitner’s shade that followed you?”

“Seems like it,” Tim nods. “Know anything about how he died?”

Michael’s eyebrows fly up.

“What a question!” he says, leaning on his desk. “Um, why do you ask?”

“One of Jon’s other guardians is convinced he could’ve only followed us out like that if he’d been murdered. Is that true?”

“Hmm…” Michael seems to consider this for a while. As he thinks, one hand absent-mindedly doodles once again on the sheet of paper in front of him. He doesn’t seem to realise he’s even doing it. “Um, it is the most likely possibility. I suppose I can share what I know. I, um, I like you better than I like the Grand Maester,” he adds in a hushed voice, leaning in confidentially. “So… um, not, not many people even inside Guadosalam know of this, but, Jurgen Leitner actually returned here briefly, not long after Gertrude’s Calm began.”

“So he did survive the pilgrimage?”

“It would seem that way. Not, um, not that it did him much good. I, I didn’t see him after he returned myself. I, um, I never much liked dealing with him, you see. Mostly I tried to stay out of his way. But, I did speak to other archivists who did see him. They said he seemed, um, very jumpy. Um, almost like he was looking over, over his shoulder, just waiting for something to happen.”

Michael sighs. “Then, o-of course, he went missing. The room he was last seen in was left ransacked. Many of us assumed that he had fled, but, um, I suppose something far more sinister could have happened.”

So something awful did happen to Leitner. But after the pilgrimage? When he would have been a legendary guardian? Who would have come after him then? Why?

Michael peers at each of their frowning faces, and then Jon, and asks, “I, I don’t suppose the shade you saw told you the name of his murderer?”

“I – n-no,” Jon says. “He didn’t say a thing.”

“Pity. I, um, I expect it’ll just have to stay a mystery, then. I, I will admit, the news has had all of us here in this building on edge. We're not used to such things happening here in Guadosalam. Certainly not in our library.”

Michael trails off. He pauses for a while, as if in thought, and then shakes his head as if to clear it. “So, would you like what it is you actually came here for?”

“Did you find anything?” Martin asks, trying not to sound too hopeful.

“Oh, um, a little of this, a little of that,” Michael says vaguely, reaching down below his desk and retrieving a sheet of paper with handwritten notes scrawled over it. He glances down at it, skim-reading, and nods to himself. “I don’t know if it’s anything you would find useful. There, there was certainly nothing matching exactly to what you’ve been experiencing. And much of the rest is restricted for outsiders.”

Jon looks like he’s having a hard time not rolling his eyes. “So what did you find?”

“Patience, summoner,” Michael says in a sing-song lilt, before becoming serious again. “When I found no records of Sin causing dreams via proximity the way you claim is happening, I, um, I broadened my search a little. Dreams are a poorly understood phenomenon even by the Guado, you know. Um, but what we do know is that the fayth dream constantly. It is the fundamental state of their being, to forever lie in that shadowy dream-state, neither truly awake nor truly resting. And through a bond forged with a summoner, summoners can draw upon pyreflies to turn those dreams into reality in the form of aeons, making the dreams of the fayth real – at least, um, for as long as the summoner’s will holds firm.”

“But we already know all of that,” Martin argues. “What’s that got to do with what’s happening to me?”

“Well, um, all I have is a theory. The dreams of the fayth made real are the sole means anyone to date has found of calming Sin. Those dreams are formed out of pyreflies, which preserve memories in astonishing detail – um, as you’ve no doubt seen during your visit to the Farplane. Maybe those pyreflies have interacted with the toxin in a strange way – to show you Sin’s memories?”

“Is that… is that even possible?”

Michael shrugs. “Many things are possible. Sin does drop its Sinspawn, and Sinspawn are merely powerful fiends. And what are fiends but yet more pyreflies, driven by the warped memories and emotions of those who once lived? I think it could be possible. Um, if you like, I could look into this more thoroughly, while you’re gone? I, um, I really have to admit, it’s caught my interest.”

Jon glances over at him, meeting his eyes. “It’s your call.”

Martin kind of wishes it wasn’t his call, honestly. He’s not even sure Michael’s being entirely honest with them. Didn’t he literally just admit to not telling them everything he found just because they’re outsiders?

He’s not sure he likes the idea of somehow seeing Sin’s memories. Or anything connected to Sin, for that matter. And he really doesn’t see how the weird aeon-bird or Gerard Keay could possibly factor into the theory Michael just laid out for them – not that Michael knows about Gerard to begin with.

But where else is Martin going to find anyone else willing to look into this for him?

“… Yeah,” he eventually nods. “Why not. It’s still a long way to Zanarkand. That should give you plenty of time, right?”

“Well, um, enough to find any promising leads, at least. I, I may have to shelve it until the Grand Maester has left,” Michael tells them, wrinkling his nose. “Um, there’s something about him that, um, makes me uneasy. No offence meant towards Yevon, of course.”

“Believe me,” Jon mutters, “no offence taken.”

Michael looks surprised, and then amused.

“Oh, well then.” And there goes another one of those long, high-pitched giggles. “Um, you know, I had to air the place out after he visited yesterday. He left behind such an unusual smell, I could barely concentrate.”

As one, Martin, Tim, and Jon all turn to one another. Seeing that the other two are just as lost as he is with that bizarre statement, Martin shrugs, clamping down on a laugh when the other two follow suit. For his part, Michael seems completely unbothered by the confusion he just caused.

“Well, in any case,” he says, “good luck on your journey. Do mind out for the storms.”

Right, the storms. These Thunder Plains that Martin keeps hearing about. He is not looking forward to those.

They regroup with the others outside and leave the library and Michael behind them, beginning the walk down to the lowest levels and the north exit. According to the others, the way out of Guadosalam is just as dark and full of underground corridors as the way in. Martin’s really not looking forward to that.

“Well, that was a wash,” he says in an effort to not think about what's coming up, the layers and layers of earth and stone between him and the sky.

“I dunno, was it?” asks Tim. “I mean, we found out that something was definitely fishy about how Leitner vanished off the face of Spira after Gertrude’s pilgrimage. And now Michael’s the second person we’ve heard mention pyreflies as a thing when they’ve been talking about Sin.” Tim grimaces at that, someone swallowing something that doesn’t agree with him. “Still not a fan of either of our theories about that, or it being able to crawl into your dreams the way he was talking about, but… it’d make a lot of sense for explaining why only the Final Summoning’s ever been able to crack it open.”

“But not for why it keeps coming back,” says Basira.

“Yeah, well, I know whose explanation for that I don’t believe.”

“Oh, me neither.”

Tim almost trips over from how fast he turns to look at her.

“What, really? But you’re a warrior monk.”

“Yeah, and?” Basira raises an eyebrow, looking annoyed. “Doesn’t mean I believe every single thing Yevon puts out there. Honestly, I…”

Basira hesitates, and then presses on. “I’ve been thinking of quitting the monks for a while. Just never went through with it.”

“Huh,” Tim says, still staring at Basira like she’s just told him the sky is green and water is dry. Then he turns to Daisy. “Wait, did you know about this?”

“It may surprise you, but Basira and I talk.”

Jon stifles a noise that might be a laugh.

“So if you’ve been thinking of quitting,” Georgie says to Basira now, her face intent, “why haven’t you?”

“Dunno. The timing never seemed right. But after the pilgrimage is done… maybe it’s time.”

“Huh. Well… congratulations.”

“You won’t get in trouble for that, will you?” Martin asks tentatively. Surely not – surely Yevon lets its warrior monks leave its service – but with everything he’s been seeing… part of him can’t help but wonder.

Basira looks surprised.

“Nah,” she tells him, with a wry smile. “If I make it to the end of the pilgrimage, they’ll probably give me an honourable discharge for it.”

“Oh. Well… I hope you can find something that makes you happier.”

Basira rolls her eyes at that, but Martin thinks he also catches her trying to hide a smile. Ha. He knew she had a soft side in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, a lot of the others have started shooting furtive, expectant looks at Daisy, who true to form fixes them all with a stare and a raised eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me,” she says dryly. “No heart to hearts here today.”

“Yeah, that’d be too much to ask,” Tim tells her, rolling his eyes in a way that seems almost affectionate.

Then he turns to Jon. “But speaking of…”

“I’m not saying a word about anything until we’ve put at least a full day between us and Guadosalam.”

“Wait, you want to talk to us on the Thunder Plains themselves?” Tim exclaims. “I knew you were just waiting for the most dramatic moment…”

Well, at least Tim’s feeling in high spirits this morning, Martin thinks to himself as the two of them, Tim and Jon, start sniping at one another. But then again, maybe not. Martin’s learned by now not to take anything with Tim at face value, especially when he’s being cheerful.

Either way. Guess they’ll finally find out what Elias was after once they've reached the most thundery place in all Spira.

It's probably too much to hope for, but Martin still can’t help hoping that whatever it is, whatever he wants from Jon, that it isn’t anything too world-shattering. When it comes to world-shattering secrets and revelations, he thinks they might be reaching the limit that any of them can take.

Chapter Text

Walking through the underground passageways leading out of Guadosalam is every bit as unpleasant as Martin remembers from the ones leading in. Cramped, gloomy, dingy corridors of earth and stone, with no way of telling what time of day it is or how long they've spent walking down there. He really only feels like he’s breathing properly again once they’re finally back out under the open sky.

Out here, a few scattered trees mark the very edge of the forest surrounding Guadosalam and the Moonflow. Ahead of them is an open plain that stretches right out to where Martin can see a dark, ominous mass of cloud sprawling across the sky from east to west, and again off to the north, stretching far enough that it’s impossible to see where it ends; from here, all he can see of the land underneath is a dark shadow.

“That storm never stops,” says Georgie, seeing where he’s looking. “Hope nobody here’s astraphobic.”

Tim grins.

“I’ve stood next to Sasha when she’s casting Thunder way too many times for that,” he says, effortlessly dodging the friendly swat she aims at his arm.

“Either way, we’re not dealing with it till tomorrow,” says Daisy. She stands poring over the map, one finger tracing the ink-dark features. “There’s this hollow – almost a tunnel – just before we hit the plains. I say we camp there tonight and start the crossing in the morning.”

“How long does it take to cross?”

“Took us three days last time. There’s a few sheltered spots to make camp where the storm’s less of a threat. Old buildings, mostly.”

“And the travel agency,” Jon points out, looking over the map with a small furrow between his eyebrows. “Assuming that no one has any objections to staying there this time.”

It's a comment so pointed as to be impossible to miss, but to Daisy’s credit, all she does is roll her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll get your night out of the storm.”

“Good. I… I thought it would be the best place for us to talk.”

Martin has to admit, that does sound sensible. If the storms on the Thunder Plains really are as endless as Georgie claims, they’re probably not even going to be able to hear themselves think once they’re out there.

They make good time on the rest of that day’s journey, even if Martin occasionally has to pinch himself to stay awake; he's really starting to feel the hours of sleep he lost to worrying over everything that happened in Guadosalam. There are times where they walk in relative silence, but also times where the others fill the space with chatter about the road, or something else they’ve seen on a previous journey through Spira. At one point, perhaps inevitably, the conversation turns back to Jurgen Leitner and the strange circumstances surrounding his death and lingering on Spira. Jon is unusually quiet for that conversation; he barely does more than stare at the dark clouds ahead of them, barely speaking a word.

Martin would wonder more at that, if he himself wasn’t fighting to stay quiet as he watches Sasha animatedly discussing a theory with Georgie and Tim. All this talk of Unsent is just slapping him in the face once again with what he now knows about Sasha. Not that Sasha herself seems even the least bit bothered by it; if Martin hadn't seen what he knows he saw, he'd never suspect a thing from how easily she's swapping theories about Leitner with the others. Either she's a fantastic actor, or she really is just that unruffled talking about something that could affect her in a way going far beyond a theory.

He can’t carry on like this. It’s one thing carrying around his own secrets, he’s used to those, but carrying around Sasha’s as well without her knowledge is weighing on him. There's nothing for it; he’s going to have to find space to ask her about it.

That space isn’t to be found that night; not with the eight of them crammed into the driest part of the natural stone underpass on the very edge of the Thunder Plains, listening to the sound of the storm ahead echoing in from outside.

Instead, Martin finds himself next to Jon, which has its own advantages. Not least the chance for the two of them speak in low voices about their visit to the library in Guadosalam, mindful to talk around anything too incriminating in case any of the others hear.

“What do you think of what Michael said?” he asks Jon. “Y'know, his little theory.”

“It’s… it’s certainly possible. Especially given just how close you got to Sin, that first time. I just don’t see how other things you’ve said factor into it.”

‘Other things’ meaning Gerard Keay being there, Martin guesses. And the time travel. Can’t forget about that.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. … Do you think Dekker would have any idea?”

“I honestly haven’t the foggiest. And trying to pin the man down is like throwing pebbles in a river to stop it flowing.”

“You mean, if we threw enough pebbles at him, eventually we’d stop him?”

“Martin.”

“He has to know something, though. Or at least be able to give us a clue. I mean, he’s a legendary guardian for a reason.”

And more to the point, Dekker’s been carried between Zanarkand and Spira by Sin, too. Twice, even. If anyone else is going to have some kind of insight into what’s going on with Martin every time he gets too close to the thing, it’s got to be him.

The problem is, Jon’s right. Dekker said he’d see them all again, but who even knows when that’ll be. And trying to get any answers out of the man is like pulling teeth.

Not unlike other people he knows, he thinks wryly, and then feels bad for it. Jon did say he’d talk with them all about what Elias… discussed with him? Offered him, even?

Whatever it is, Martin’s being unfair, and Jon’s going to share it when he’s ready.

He just better focus on getting across the Thunder Plains first. That storm he can hear out there through the night sounds wild; the sound of it even makes it into his dreams, filling them with the flash of lightning and the roll of dark clouds overhead.

Hearing the storm is one thing, but being in it is something else entirely.

It hits them as soon as they walk out in the morning; a constant deluge of water that has them soaked through in seconds, even with the oilcloths they’ve dug out of their packs thrown on over their clothes. Martin finds himself missing machina-produced waterproofs within about five minutes.

If that wasn’t enough, the storm isn’t restricted to dark skies and loud claps of thunder every few seconds. Oh no. There’s lightning as well; not the sort of lightning that flashes in the underside of clouds, or forks across the sky overhead, but proper, comic-book bolts of lightning that shoot down and strike the ground every few seconds, leaving behind a terrific smell of scorched earth that’s tamped down by the constant rain.

At least there’s no wind in this storm. Small blessings, he guesses.

“Are you sure we can cross this?” he asks next time there’s a break in the thunder. He knows Jon has spells to nullify the effects of the thunder element, but he can’t see that being a sustainable way to get across this place. Not with the lightning coming down like that and eight of them needing protecting.

“Yeah, we just have to follow the towers,” Basira tells him, pointing towards the lop-sided structures dotting the barren plain ahead of them. In the flash of the next lightning strike, Martin sees they’re all topped with a massive, lethal-looking point. A lightning rod, he realises. “They don’t work as well as they used to, so we’ve got to watch ourselves. Not too close, not too far away.”

“And if worse comes to worst, you dodge,” Georgie adds.

Martin laughs, but Melanie and Tim are both nodding as though this is genuine advice. “What, really?”

“It’s possible. You can count the seconds between strikes, they’re more consistent than they look.”

“I think I’ll sit that one out, thank you,” says Jon.

“Speak for yourself,” Tim laughs. “Bet you I could dodge ten in a row.”

“I’ll take that bet,” says Melanie immediately. “Should we start at ten gil for the winner?”

“What, you’re gonna join in?”

“Why not? If it’s just light and counting, I think I can manage that. Last time I checked the lightning was coming from the sky, not from my left.”

“I’m not casting NulShock on either of you.”

“Nobody asked you, Jon. So come on, Tim, do we have a bet or not?”

Martin can’t believe what he’s hearing, even as Tim and Melanie start clustering together as they start their walk across the plains, egging each other on and counting the time between strikes with audible smiles in their voices. To Martin’s shock, after a while Daisy starts joining in, claiming it’s good reflex training for the road ahead. Maybe it is, but Martin’s pretty sure he’s not imagining the grin on her face every time she manages a dodge.

“What’ll we do if they actually get hit?” he frets to Jon, as he watches a cackling Melanie drag Tim back to his feet after a near-miss left him sprawled across the ground flat on his back.

“Heal them, obviously,” Jon sighs in a long-suffering voice, rubbing at his temples. “I can’t stop them being idiots together, but I can’t exactly punish them for it either.”

“Yeah, no, obviously, but—”

“It’s not that much different from being hit by a thunder spell. I know you’ve taken your fair share of those.”

Martin doesn’t have much of an argument for that – after all, he has, and he’s still here – but it doesn’t stop his heart jumping in his throat every time he spots the lightning-dodgers at it. He’s having enough of a time just dodging the few that get too close to him just by chance, and that’s before the fiends (because of course the Thunder Plains is still crawling with fiends on top of everything else) get in there to complicate things as well. In spite of his earlier protests, Martin does catch Jon casting protective spells to ward off lightning any time it looks like there’s a fight coming that they can’t escape from.

At least it looks like Melanie’s having fun. He doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen her like this at all, ever since he met her. It's actually nice to see a different side of her like this.

While Tim, Melanie, and Daisy are turning the day’s walk into their own personal gauntlet, it sounds like Georgie and Sasha are having a contest of their own. Since he has nothing else better to do between trying not to get hit by lightning or fending off fiends looking for their next meal, Martin tunes in to their conversation for a bit; he finds them deep in the throes of something he can only think of as “two spooky truths and one spooky lie”. Between the two of them, it sounds like they have a wealth of what Martin would’ve called ghost stories back in Zanarkand. Here in the Spira of a thousand years in the future, all of these stories just sound like a long list of things that Martin is now going to worry about actually happening. Or at least, he's going to worry about them actually happening whenever he has the energy spare from not having anything more worthy to worry about.

Still, it is kind of fun trying to pick out which stories are the made-up ones. Martin would’ve sworn in front of a court official that Georgie’s story about the holy man who was swallowed by a Marlboro and turned up a week later claiming he ‘saw the divine’ was the fake. Honestly, he’s still got his doubts about that one, he doesn’t care how many eyewitness accounts there supposedly are.

“Where do you even hear this stuff?” he asks.

“I told you, I travel. People have their stories, even if they don’t always end up on a sphere recording or in some dusty old book in a temple somewhere.”

“I’m sorry, Georgie, but I refuse to believe that one,” Jon tells her. “How— for starters, how would you even go about verifying the age of a Marlboro? You can’t exactly walk up to one and ask it, pardon me, but would you mind telling me if you’ve been this way for five hundred years—”

“I’m telling you, Jon, a whole village of people swearing up and down that their parents or their grandparents saw this missionary come stumbling back into town covered in gastric juice must have something to it.”

“Maybe the gastric juice is to blame,” Jon argues churlishly. He pauses a moment, waiting for the thunder to subside before he continues, “Goodness knows the breath of those things is enough to send someone reeling all on its own—”

“You literally spin the dreams of people who’ve had their souls tied down to one place for eternity into reality on a daily basis, and this is where your suspension of disbelief ends?”

“That’s completely different!”

“I’ve got a story,” Basira says, ignoring Jon. “So I was on duty late one night, guarding the lower levels of the temple. Routine stuff, you know? But I was still pretty new, and it was the first time I’d been stationed down there, so you might have guessed after a while I got lost. I swear it’s like a labyrinth down there.”

“Why do they need you to guard that part of the temple?” Georgie asks, puzzled.

“They say it’s cause its connected up to a lot of older infrastructure from before the city was rebuilt during the First Calm. Lots of ways an intruder could sneak in if they wanted to because the passageways were never blocked up, you know? Anyway, so I’m wandering around in there completely lost and out of my depth, when all of a sudden this priest shows up. Not one I’ve seen before, but he said he knew the way out and by that point I just wanted to get back to a part of the temple that made sense. Long story short, he leads me out some entrance I didn’t even know was there, and when I turn to thank him there’s nothing there. Just some pyreflies drifting back down the corridor.”

“So… he was Unsent? Right in the middle of Yevon’s biggest temple?”

“Hand on heart.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I told Daisy. Other than that, ‘course not. I knew they’d just think I was making up an excuse for abandoning my post or something like that.”

“I guess. Still, how’d he slip through the cracks in somewhere like Bevelle? There’s more people who can do a Sending there than anywhere else in Spira.”

“Maybe there’s more secrets hiding beneath Yevon’s central city than people think,” says Jon, and then nothing more, a lingering frown creeping in around his eyes and mouth.

Martin would believe that. He’d believe a lot of things about Yevon. And he’d also believe that it’s easier for an Unsent to hide in plain sight than a lot of people in Spira seem to think; they probably wouldn't even need to go to all the trouble of hiding themselves down in some manky old temple basement. Mary Keay got away with it for ages by the sounds of things, even with all the horrible things she was doing.

And Sasha seems to have managed okay, despite rubbing shoulders for months with a bloody summoner.

Martin sighs. There he is again, with his stupid brain running itself in circles back to Sasha. That’s it, he’s just going to have to talk to her. When they stop tonight, if possible.

If nothing else, at least the thunder should stop any of the others from hearing them.

They rest that night in the shell of a long-abandoned building, a little way off from the main path leading across the plains. Daisy claims that it was once a watchtower of some sort, but at this point, Martin doesn’t really care what it used to be. The roof is somehow still intact enough to keep out the storm and there’s enough space for them to get a fire going with the help of Sasha’s magical flames, and that’s honestly all he cares about for about the first hour or so after they stop. He can’t believe they’ve got another two days of this to look forward to.

Once he feels more like a human being again and less like a soggy washcloth, that’s when he starts thinking again about talking to Sasha. Which is, of course, when all of his anxiety about talking to Sasha and why he wants to talk to Sasha bubbles back up in full force, like a fizzy drink someone’s just gone and dropped down the stairs. He can barely keep still looking for an excuse to talk somewhere away from the others.

Luckily for Martin, Sasha continues to be Sasha, and hands him the perfect excuse all by herself.

“Did you say this used to be a watchtower or something, Daisy?” she asks, peering up the spiral staircase. “Pre- or post- Machina War?”

“You think that’s the sort of thing they tell you when they’re pointing out ideal spots for shelter?”

“No, but I didn’t want to assume anything.”

“You wanna look around, don’t you?”

“Am I that obvious?”

To that, Daisy offers no reply; she merely raises an eyebrow and adjusts the makeshift drying rack she’s cobbled together near the fire. Unperturbed, Sasha turns to the rest of them.

“Anyone want to come with?”

“Sorry, Sash, I’m wiped,” says Tim. “Turns out dodging lightning all day really takes it out of you.”

“Well, you’ve only got yourself to blame for that,” she grins. “Anyone else?”

There’s his window. Martin volunteers himself, citing feeling his joints going stiff after spending all day in the rain, or something else like that, he barely even knows what he’s saying. Through some miracle, nobody else feels like coming with; Georgie just asks them to let her know if there’s anything up there worth looking at, and all Melanie does is ask them to keep an eye out for anything worth chucking at the fiends’ faces tomorrow. So before long, the two of them are climbing up the stairs to the next floor, Sasha holding a torch aloft ahead of them for light.

There’s not much left up here. Whatever era this tower was abandoned in, other opportunistic travellers must have long since picked it clean of anything useful. The noise of the storm outside seems louder up here somehow; maybe because it’s just them on this floor and the sound has more space to echo in, or maybe just because they’re higher up. The two of them poke around the place for a while before deciding there’s nothing interesting to see, and then…

Well, Martin decides to just go for it.

“Sasha?”

Sasha, still distractedly poking through some fallen debris with the toe of her boot, barely looks over her shoulder. “Mm?”

There really is no good way to ask about this, is there? Martin suddenly feels a lot more understanding of Jon and the ham-fisted way he went about battering down the doors to Martin’s own secret.

“Can… can I ask you something? About what happened after the Farplane. Y-you know, when Jon Sent Jurgen Leitner and everything.” Before Sasha can say anything, figuring it’s probably just better to get all of this out in one go, Martin asks, “I mean, are you— you’re— You’re not… alive anymore. Are you?”

Thunder crashes outside. It’s all a bit much, really. Sasha’s going to think he asked her about this here on purpose, instead of it being that it’s been literally driving him around the bend for the past two days.

By now, Sasha’s stopped absent-mindedly poking through the abandoned mess. She turns to Martin with a look he can’t read in the low light of the torch. Then she tilts her head, and says simply:

“Wouldn’t you like to know, Zanarkand boy?”

“Wha-what—”

Thunder crashes outside again, and when it subsides Martin has enough of his wits about him for indignation to win over shock.

“Oh, I knew it! I knew you’d figured me out and just weren’t saying anything! Wait, how did you figure me out?”

“You first,” says Sasha, wedging the torch in a gap in some crumbling masonry and folding her arms.

“Oh— seriously?”

“You’re the one that started this.”

“… Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair.”

Martin sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck and biting his lip as he wonders where to even begin. She didn’t even try to deny it this time. So. It really is true.

“I mean— I’m, I’m not a medical expert or anything, but I know when people aren’t fine even when they say they are, and you… you weren’t fine. Except the moment that Jon finished his Sending and, and suddenly there you were, jumping back up like nothing happened!”

Sasha takes a seat on a pile of something that might once have actually been a functioning set of table and chairs. “Yeah, I did wonder if you’d cottoned on after that.”

Seeing nothing else for it, Martin sidles up to the pile and, after gingerly testing the give of the thing to see if it’ll hold his weight, settles down next to Sasha.

“The – the pyreflies kind of gave it away. You… it sort of looked for a moment there like you were. Giving them off.”

“That’s what I get for not getting out of the way of a Sending in time,” says Sasha, staring up at the ceiling. She looks back to Martin, one side of her mouth quirked up. “Should’ve taken your advice and got out of there while the going was good.”

“… How did you— I mean. How did it happen?”

“You mean, how did I die?” she asks bluntly, and Martin tries not to flinch. Sasha sighs. She stares back out at some unseen point on the wall, and folds her hands in her lap, pressing them tightly together.

“You remember that operation I told you about, where Tim and I had a close call with Sin? For me it ended up being too close. When I woke up I knew right away what had happened to me, but – I wasn’t ready to go yet. Tim was still unconscious nearby, so I passed myself off as just being badly injured and no one ever asked twice.”

“Oh… Sasha, I’m –”

Martin doesn’t even know what to say or what he’s feeling right now. It’s – it’s not grief, not like he knows it, because Sasha is right next to him, seemingly as solid and present and herself as she’s always been, but – but even with all that, she’s been dead since before Martin even met her. Lingering in a world where she knows she’s not supposed to be anymore.

Martin knows some of how that feels, but at least he knows he hasn’t died. Mysteriously travelling through time can’t even begin to compare to what Sasha’s gone through.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what? It’s not like it’s your fault.”

“Yeah, but— that’s not what I meant. I just meant – that’s awful. I mean, that you’re— how does that even work?”

“I told you. Unfinished business.”

“Okay… which is?”

“I want to finish my research!” she exclaims, so suddenly passionate with it that Martin jumps, almost dislodging the rubble pile. “There’s still so much about how Spira works that nobody understands. I want to spread that to people, not just lock it all up in a vault in Bevelle. And—”

Sasha’s mouth goes thin, her hands twisting in her lap. “I want to help Jon take down Sin. For Spira, but… for Tim, as well. And for me,” she adds quietly. “It’s that thing’s fault I died, you can’t expect me to take that lying down. And…”

Now Sasha hesitates. “It… it wasn’t all that long after Danny. Not really. I – I couldn’t leave Tim alone. I knew he’d do something stupid.”

Oh, Sasha. Martin wants to hug her, but he doesn’t know if she’d welcome that right now. Not from him.

“Tim and Jon don’t know, do they,” he asks but doesn’t ask, his heart heavy.

“Of course not. It’s not the sort of thing you can tell people. Not even my best friends. Especially not my best friends.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess not.”

What a mess. Living – or, not even really living, he guesses – existing? – carrying around something like that, not able to talk to the people you should be able to about it, and on top of that—

Oh. Yeah. Martin doesn’t really want to, not when Sasha’s already confided in him, but. He feels like he has to ask.

“Aren’t you worried? About – about turning into…?”

“Turning into a fiend? I mean, yeah, it’s always in the back of my mind, but I can’t spend all my time worrying about it.” Sasha locks eyes with him, unblinking. “Are you worried?”

“Wha— no. No! I-I’m not – scared of you, you’re still Sasha,” he protests, recoiling. He already decided that. It’s not Sasha’s fault that she’s— anyway. “But – you’re the one who said it was a dangerous game to play. S-sticking around based on your own idea of ‘the real you’ or whatever.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I’ve managed alright so far,” she says with a shrug, though Martin’s sure he didn’t imagine the spark of relief he saw while she was still making eye contact with him. “The only real you is the actions you take. So I figured, if I keep acting the way I’ve always acted and doing the things I believe in, I’ll be fine. And if I notice myself slipping… you know, that’s when I might need to ask for a Sending.”

She’s really thought this through. It doesn’t surprise him, coming from Sasha – of course she’d be as methodical and matter-of-fact about her own death – or undeath, or, or whatever – as she is about her research. But…

“You really think Jon would be okay with that?” he says quietly.

“He’s going to have to be.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Do you have any better ideas?” she interrupts – not sharp, but very close to it.

“… no,” Martin admits, after a few seconds of frustrated wrestling with that fact. “No, I don’t. But – it’s not fair on them, Sasha. It’s not fair on either of them.”

“Maybe not. But it’s not fair on me, either.”

And it’s not, it’s not. But Martin can’t see Jon – or Tim – accepting a sudden request from Sasha to Send her with any kind of grace. Let alone finding out just how long they’ve been kept in the dark about what really happened to her.

But he can’t say that.

“… Sure.”

They both fall quiet for a moment. Not wanting to leave it like that, Martin throws a glance Sasha’s way and grumbles as playfully as he can, “I can’t believe you’re Unsent and you’ve decided the best thing to do is trek from one end of the Spira to the other for months with a summoner and two warrior monks, of all people.”

Sasha laughs.

“Plain sight,” she grins wickedly. “It really is the best place to hide.”

A slightly easier mood restored, Sasha twists herself to face Martin properly now and promptly says, “Alright, your turn. So, you really are from Zanarkand, then?”

“Oh— uh, yeah. Yep. Born and raised.”

“Zanarkand before the Machina War.”

“Mmhm.”

“That Jon!” she says suddenly. “I can’t believe he figured it out and didn’t tell me. He knows, right? That’s why he got all cagey with me about his sudden change in attitude.”

“Oh, no— uh, I mean, yeah, he knows, but, he didn’t figure it out,” Martin says, feeling a little awkward. “A-actually, I told him. He kind of… flew off the handle one night and accused me of being a Sinspawn, soooo…”

Sasha’s eyes go comically wide, an equally wide, incredulous grin slowly spreading to match.

“Oh did he really? I swear, you leave him to come up with his own theories unsupervised for five minutes…”

“Nightmare,” Martin agrees. “So… go on then, how did you figure me out?”

“I mean, I figured out you weren’t being completely straight with us about the toxin a long time ago,” she tells him, which is about what Martin expected. “You did your best, Martin, but some of the things you said really weren’t consistent. Even for someone with toxin amnesia. Sin’s toxin can make you forget all kinds of things, but…”

Sasha pauses, frowns a moment, and then says carefully, like she’s trying not to offend him any more than she thinks she might have already, “Generally speaking, it doesn’t make you forget what we would think of as the fundamental truths about the world.” A beat, and then she adds, “Also, I’ve kind of used the toxin excuse myself before, so I had an unfair advantage.”

“Wait, you have?”

“Oh, yeah. After I… became an Unsent, my magic suddenly became a lot more potent.”

“Oh— because you’re—” Martin fumbles a moment, not sure how to phrase this, and eventually settles on, “because of the pyreflies?”

“Yeah,” Sasha nods, and then her face goes all sheepish. “I, um… caused a lot of accidents those first few days after they let me go with a clean bill of health. At least until I figured out where my limits were again. But I needed some way to explain it away, so I claimed that exposure to the toxin must have impacted my magic somehow. And since the toxin isn’t understood very well…”

“… everyone just believed you about it.”

“Exactly. So, like I said, I had an unfair advantage. And then there was all the stuff you were saying on the shoopuf – no one in Spira thinks that way. Definitely not someone from an isolated village like you were trying to play yourself off as, even if their dad did know Gertrude Robinson. So I put that together with how the first thing you said when Tim found you is that you were from Zanarkand, and all the other stuff that didn’t add up, and… it was the theory that made the most sense.”

“Huh. I never stood a chance, did I?”

“Don’t put yourself down,” she says, nudging him gently on the arm with a closed fist. “You’re a tougher nut to crack than you look.”

A small huff of laughter escapes him. He doesn’t need Sasha to tell him that most people would take one look at him and assume he’s about as hardy as a wet paper towel.

“Thanks, I think?”

“The bit about Sin leaving you on the beach at Djose, though,” she asks now, her grin fading. “I’m guessing that was true?”

“Oh – yeah. No, it – it really did attack Zanarkand and drag me off with it. I didn’t make that part up.”

“Hm. So now Sin can time travel.” Sasha lets that float for a while, and then makes a face that somehow manages to perfectly mix disturbance and fascination. “That’s a bit disconcerting.”

“Yeah, just a bit.” Never mind that he still can’t wrap his head around how Sin can time travel. Pyreflies can be used to manipulate time, sure, but… on that kind of scale?

“… So,” he sighs once the next round of thunder and lightning subsides, not really wanting to think about that again tonight. “What do we do now?”

“Carry on the same as we have been, I guess. I’m not going to tell anyone else.”

“O-oh–” he stammers, surprised in spite of himself. He didn’t think Sasha would, and he knows Jon didn’t either, but even so— “Thanks. Really.”

“Don’t mention it. You think I have anyone else in Spira who’ll let me get away with sounding out half of my theories?” she tells him with a razor-quick smile. “I am going to have a word with Jon, though. Oh, and I’ve got so many questions for you – you don’t mind, do you?”

“Yeah, no, I kind of expected that.”

“Great! I mean, I’ll make sure I anonymise anything I write down, we can claim that it’s from some old diary we found preserved somewhere, but you have no idea how much this means for the study of Spira’s history.”

“I dunno, I think I have some,” Martin says ruefully, beginning to wish he’d taken Sasha’s advice back on Besaid and written some of this stuff down already. Between her and Jon, he’s going to end up losing his voice answering all their questions.

Hard to argue when Sasha looks that enthused about it all though, he thinks with a sigh of resignation.

“And–” he adds – “I’ll keep your secret, too. I, I still think Jon and Tim deserve to know. But. I know you have to do it in your own time.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Sasha is quiet. Quiet enough that Martin almost starts to worry. “Actually, you know… it feels good for someone else to know about it.”

She’s smiling, but… even so, she looks sad. More sad than Martin’s ever seen her.

“Yeah,” he says, just as quiet. Then draws in a breath, and— oh, screw it. “D’you want— can I give you a hug?”

“What?”

“It’s – it’s fine if not! I-I mean, you can say no, I just – I could use one after a talk like that, so…”

“Oh, well in that case,” she says, a happy lilt in her voice, and shifts closer without any hesitation, coming in for a hug with the same confidence he’s ever seen Sasha approach anything else. Martin wraps his arms around Sasha and squeezes for just a second, just long enough to try and convey that he’s glad she told him. That whatever else it might mean, Sasha being what she is – Martin’s glad he got to meet her.

Sasha feels just as solid as any other person. That’s kind of a comfort too, really.

“Mm, good hug,” she says when they break out of it. “Ten out of ten.”

“Oh, what? No one ever said anything about scoring me,” he says, mock-affronted. “So. Back down to the others, then?”

“You mean, before Jon makes Daisy send out a search party. Yeah, come on.”

No search party awaits them when they make it back downstairs, but Melanie does make a point of loudly asking what they were even doing up there if they couldn’t find even one random useful thing left behind by a stray fiend. True to form, Sasha deftly dodges the question by turning it back on her in the friendliest way possible, asking for any tips or pointers Melanie’s ever picked up in her previous travels. Meanwhile, Martin catches Jon's eye; he's been shooting Martin worried looks out of the corner of his eye ever since Martin and Sasha reappeared at the bottom of the stairs. Martin wanders over to him, figuring that he should at least reassure Jon that everything's okay - and possibly prepare him for the questioning he'll get from Sasha as soon as she gets a spare minute.

“It’s okay,” he says under his breath, in a moment where he’s sure everyone else’s attention is elsewhere. “I told her.”

Jon’s eyes widen a moment in understanding, and then he nods, tension slowly bleeding out of him. Martin nods back with a smile made tight by the twinge of guilt in his chest. Jon may know Martin's secret, and he may even know that Sasha's in on it now as well. But Martin now knows something about Sasha that Jon doesn't. He can't break his promise to Sasha, of course he can't, not with something this personal, but... he can't stop the guilt at thinking - knowing - that this is something Jon and Tim deserve to know far more than Martin does, even with how much it would hurt them.

He tries his best to ignore the guilt anyway. After all, Sasha’s still here with them.

That’s got to be the thing that matters, doesn’t it?

Chapter Text

They spend a night of fitful rest in the tower, their sleep punctuated with the crashing and rumbling of the thunder outside. The morning isn't all that much lighter when it comes; the dark storm clouds overheard are too thick for that, and it throws Martin off, not being able to figure out what time of day it is. On top of that, the clothes they left to dry overnight are still slightly damp. But it can’t be helped; they can’t exactly stay huddled in this tower all day trying to ride out the storm until they have bone-dry clothes to wear again. Not in this storm that never stops.

After they’ve eaten and broken their camp, Martin struggles back into his damp jacket and oilcloth with a grimace, wincing at the way the fabric clings to his skin, and heads back out into the storm with the others. It’s another long, tiring day of squelching across the plains, soaked to the bone by the rain and trying not to get hit by lightning, but at least they have one ray of light at the end of it: tonight is the night that they should hit the travel agency, meaning a night of steady light, soft beds, and the prospect of being able to properly dry and air out all of their soaking wet gear. Martin tries to focus on that whenever his mood dips, and not on the fact that the travel agency is also where Jon said he was finally going to talk to them about the whole Elias situation. He might be glad that Jon's actually going to talk to them rather than just keeping it to himself, but he's also sure that whatever he has to tell them won't be good. And if Martin starts letting his mind wander down that rabbit hole in this place, he’s just going to end up feeling even more miserable.

At least it's obvious when they finally reach the travel agency that evening. The building is the most colourful thing on the Thunder Plains, just as luridly coloured as the one on the Mi’ihen Highroad, standing it in stark contrast against the dark, dreary, lightning-blasted landscape around it. Martin wonders if that sort of colour sense is just an Al Bhed thing, or if Mikaele Salesa is just particularly eccentric, or if he picked it out specifically because it would draw peoples’ eye at the end of a long, weary day on the road.

Maybe it’s a bit of all three. Martin could see Mikaele playing up his Al Bhed aesthetic sensibilities to the extreme just for the effect it’d have on any Yevonites who wandered in there to stay the night. Going off the one brief chat Martin had with him, he seems like the type to do that.

Mikaele himself isn’t at this particular agency; instead, an Al Bhed woman greets them as they trudge through the front door. She frowns at them in resignation as they drip water all over the floor, but suddenly brightens and becomes a lot friendlier as soon as she spots Melanie trailing along in the middle of the pack. The layout of this agency seems a lot like the one back on the highroad at first glance, and just like the one on the highroad, they’re told they can use the rooms free of charge as soon as their host realises she has a summoner and his guardians under her roof for the night. Briskly, she shows them the rooms they’ll be staying in, along with very pointed directions to the bathroom, fresh towels, and the drying room for their clothes. They even find simple sets of nightclothes in the rooms that they can wear while their own clothes are drying. Martin struggles to find a set that fit him entirely comfortably, but they’re still miles better than the soaking wet clothes he was wearing when he walked into the agency.

They all unanimously agree to save any real conversation until after they’re all warm and dry and have managed to eat something. After all that, it’s more than a couple of hours later that they finally crowd together in one of the bedrooms, looking a bit like a bizarre, haphazardly assembled club in their travel agency sleep clothes. Martin can’t help but notice that he’s not the only one who’s had trouble with the fit of the things; Tim is tall enough and has enough of that height in his torso that the top looks like a crop top on him (though, being Tim, he’s making it work), and Jon and Melanie, being the slightest of the group, look like they’re swimming in theirs.

Still, they’re out of the storm and in as safe and as private a place as they’re ever going to get. Tim and Sasha immediately pile onto one of the beds, dragging Jon down with them. They spend about another minute after that insisting that there's room for Martin on there too, until he finally gives in and joins them. Georgie drags an armchair over from its place in the corner, and she and Melanie clamber into it, Melanie sitting sideways on Georgie's lap with her feet dangling off one of the armrests. Basira opts to sit cross-legged on the other bed ("No offence, but it's looking a bit crowded over there"), and Daisy, ever on guard, stays standing, leaning against one of the walls to give herself a clear view of the door.

It's mostly idle chatter at first; talk of the road ahead, about their route across the final part of the plains tomorrow, what their path towards the next temple through Macalania woods is going to look like. But that talk dies out, and all eyes gradually turn to Jon.

“Okay,” says Tim. “If no one else is going to ask, I will. What did Elias drag you off to have an oh-so-secret chat about back in Guadosalam?”

“He… made me an offer.”

“What kind of offer?” says Basira immediately.

“The kind that sounds too good to be true. I… he…” Jon picks at the hem of his oversized shirt, frowning as he presumably searches for the best starting point, and finally looks to everyone else. “Did anyone here know that he was a summoner?”

Wait, what? There’s still so much Martin doesn’t know about Spira, but he’s pretty sure the whole summoner thing comes with a lot of rules that would make it hard for someone to become a Maester while being one. Judging by the shocked looks on almost everyone else, he isn’t far off.

“A summoner who quit his pilgrimage, the Grand Maester? That a joke?” Daisy growls under her breath.

“That’s… bad,” Martin says slowly, trying his best not to make it sound like a question.

“Ugh, of course that’s what you all get weird about,” Melanie scoffs, tossing her head back towards the ceiling. “So he couldn’t stick out the real work and got into politics instead, so far so slimy.”

“No, it’s – it’s way bigger than that,” Tim tells her; for some reason that Martin can’t fathom, he looks furious. More than just furious – he looks upset. “Most of Spira wouldn’t – with how much Yevon bigs your average summoner up as an example to us all everyone’d rake a summoner who quit over the coals and then some. There’s no way Yevon would let someone like that get close to a Maester’s job, not if they knew about it. And they would know about it. Who the hell did he pay to cover that up?”

Is that true? So if Jon quit his pilgrimage for whatever reason – even if it was a good one, even if it was something he couldn't help – the same people who’d crowded around him so hopefully in every single place they’ve been to so far would really turn on him, just like that?

It hasn’t happened; Jon’s been pretty clear about his intention to see this through. But even so — the idea of it sends a stab of disgusted anger right through Martin. If that's really how most people in Spira would treat a summoner who couldn't make it to the end, he’d like to see any of them do better.

Melanie looks like she’s feeling something similar; there's a furious scowl on her face, even as she says dismissively, “Right, right, for a moment there I forgot about how everyone that follows Yevon is completely out of their minds. Whatever. You didn’t just take him at his word, did you, Jon? You got proof?”

“Of course I did, I’m not an idiot. He’s – he does have a mark, from making a pact,” Jon says, his thumb rubbing absently at the mark that he himself bears on the inside of his left wrist. Martin thinks that one might be from Besaid; it looks a lot like the emblem he saw engraved on all the spheres in that temple’s Cloister of Trials. “I saw it.”

“Shit,” Basira mutters. “Recognise what fayth it was for?”

“N-no, that’s the thing, I – whatever that glyph was, I’ve never seen it before. I-in any case, Elias claimed that he was never actually able to undertake the pilgrimage because his aeon was… unsuitable,” Jon says, grimacing like the word leaves a bad taste in his mouth. “Broken, is the word he used.”

“Can that actually happen?” Georgie asks, her face creased in worried concentration.

“I… maybe? I, I suppose if the fayth rescinded their part of the pact at any point, or it was damaged somehow by other means, or if the summoner just wasn’t strong enough— you’ve seen me summoning Ixion, right?”

Seeing the blank look on Melanie’s face, Tim leans in to helpfully stage whisper, “That’s the flying horse one with all the lightning.”

“Oh, yeah,” Melanie nods, her expression clearing. “I have noticed you don’t go for that one often.”

“Yes, because he insists on turning it into a damn tug of war every single time,” Jon mutters, with all the air of someone who’s just complaining about a dodgy co-worker they keep getting stuck with on the rota. Martin bites back a chuckle; he can only imagine how the priests of Yevon would react hearing a summoner talking about the sacred aeons that way. “But that’s… I’m partially to blame for that. I didn’t – I didn’t make the best first impression, and I’m sure that affected the pact we eventually settled on—”

Jon cuts himself off suddenly, jerking his hand away from where his fingers have been worrying absently at the black glyph on the side of his neck like he’s only just realised that he’s doing it. “Look, the point I’m trying to make is that Elias having an aeon which he can’t use isn’t impossible.”

“Okay,” Basira nods, still looking unsatisfied, “but what about it having a glyph that you didn’t recognise?”

“It could just be a fayth without a temple,” suggests Sasha. “I know there haven’t been any new fayth in hundreds of years, but… that doesn’t mean that someone somewhere couldn’t have got hold of the knowledge of how to create one and broken the rules.”

“Or that there aren’t fayth out there from a time before the temples…” says Gerogie slowly. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying.”

“Which could also explain why the aeon Elias has is supposedly broken,” Jon puts in sourly.

“We’re getting off-track,” Daisy presses. “What does this have to do with what he offered you?”

“Right, right. Well, he… he says – according to Elias, there’s a ritual that’s, um… the way he phrased it, it sounds as though it’s similar to the one that allows for the bond between a summoner and a fayth, or, or maybe derived from it, somehow, he was infuriatingly unclear – a-anyway, he claims that Yevon has knowledge of a ritual pact that could – bind two people’s spirits together in a similar way. In-including the transfer of power. He said – he thinks that while, while he might not be able to make full use of his aeon, he could… I, I guess, essentially lend that power to me. Give me the best possible chance of defeating Sin.”

The longer that Jon rambles on – and it seems like that’s the only way he’s able to even explain this to them, by just saying whatever comes to his head about it first and going from there, punctuating himself with hand gestures the whole while – the longer he rambles on, the more Martin feels cold with a rising horror. He doesn’t even know if what Elias suggested is possible (and if it isn’t possible why would he even have suggested it?) but he knows he’s repulsed by the very idea of it. The idea of Jon being bound to Elias, the same way the fayth are bound to their summoners, against Jon's own wishes if not entirely against his will – it makes Martin want to be sick. It almost feels like it’s all he can do not to shout for Jon not to do it, that there’s no way Elias is making this offer because he has any of Jon’s best interests at heart.

The others look in as much shock as he is. Sasha is the first to recover, though even she seems to be struggling to mask the unease in her voice.

“Is that… is something like that even possible? I know the church keeps a lot in the archives that’s on a need-to-know basis only, but is it even possible for him to do something like that?”

“Sasha, I love you, but who cares if—?” Tim cuts himself off, looking about as repulsed as Martin feels. He shakes his head violently, sounding more upset than ever. “No, no, no, something like that isn’t possible, what the fuck.”

“Tim?” Martin looks to him warily. He expected anger from Tim, sure; he’s come to an unhappy understanding of the amount of anger that Tim carries deep down inside him even on a good day. But the dread in Tim’s voice now scares him more than the anger ever could.

“No, no, this is – look, I know I can’t actually do magic, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand what I read about it. I mean—” Tim looks from Sasha to Jon, gesturing— “both of you think about it for a second, did any of the teachers you ever had ever mention a way of sharing power like that?”

Sasha and Jon are quiet for a moment while they both think. Then they turn to catch each others’ eye, exchanging a silent question, before they both wordlessly shake their heads.

“For what it's worth, I’ve never come across anything like it either,” Georgie pipes up. “What I do is about learning and copying techniques, not whatever your Grand Maester was saying he could do.”

Tim gestures again, this time as if to say, and there you have it.

“And don’t you think we would’ve heard about something like that before?” he presses. “If it was even possible for mages to share power like that, it’d be useful for all kinds of stuff. There’d be no reason for Yevon - for any mage who knew about it - to sit on that, unless there’s more to it than what he’s saying.”

“Wait, wait, so – what are you actually saying, Tim?” Martin asks. “I mean, what do you think Elias actually wants?”

“I don’t know. But all of that bullshit about binding him and Jon together is—” Tim cuts himself off once more. Shooting a look back at Jon, he leans in earnestly. “Look, Jon, I know you’re not actually an idiot. You can’t actually be seriously considering being tied to Elias for – I mean, do we even know how long something like that would last?”

“Of course I don’t want to be!” Jon snaps with some heat. “I’m just as suspicious as you are.”

“Good. You should be.”

An uneasy silence echoes in the room.

Then, Melanie arches an eyebrow and says, suspicion dripping from her own voice, “No input from our valiant warrior monks?”

“I know even less about magic than Tim,” says Daisy shortly, tugging at her red hair as if it’ll help her think. “But even if it does exactly what Bouchard says… sounds like it’s breaking a lot of rules.”

“Yeah,” Basira agrees, her arms folded. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before. Why would he even make this offer? It’s all the same in the end once you’ve got the Final Aeon.”

“I… I suppose in theory it could ensure a more powerful Final Aeon, but. Anyway,” Jon sighs, “there’s more.”

“Of course there is,” says Tim humourlessly.

“It’s not just the ritual,” Jon frowns, staring at the brightly coloured bedspread beneath him. “He – if I did say yes, he wants to give me the title of Maester alongside it.”

“Hang on, Montauk’s old position?” Basira gapes, looking as stunned as Martin’s ever seen her.

“That’d piss off the Ronso something awful,” Georgie says, her eyebrows in her hairline. Blowing out a breath, she adds, “Not a good move.”

“Not just that,” Daisy frowns. “It makes no sense. Why make you a Maester when he knows what you’ve got to do?”

“I was getting to that, if any of you would actually let me get through a complete sentence,” Jon snaps, sounding more frustrated than ever. “It’d be mostly ceremonial, apparently. It’s – you all know how long it’s been since the last Calm, so, if everyone saw that the weight of the church was behind me…”

“Hope for the people of Spira,” Daisy mutters, and sighs. “Right.”

“So he wants this to be public,” says Basira, her eyes narrowed now, the gears in her head clearly turning behind them. “Bevelle?”

Jon nods, and Basira lets out a small sigh of her own.

“Yeah, alright, I see what’s going on. You’d have your last aeon from the temples by then. One final push away from another Calm. Of course he’d wanna draw attention to that right where Yevon’s most powerful.”

“And since you’d still be a summoner on pilgrimage, the Ronso would have to let you pass over the sacred mountain no matter how they actually felt about the whole Maester thing…” Georgie adds, and frowns more fiercely than Martin’s seen on her since Operation Mi’ihen. “I take it back. He’s really trying to run rings around everyone, isn’t he?”

“It would seem that way. Yes,” says Jon heavily. “Everyone he can.”

Something about the way Jon said that seems off.

“… There’s still more, isn’t there?” Martin asks, when it becomes clear that nobody else is going to. He immediately knows he’s right when Jon’s head snaps over in his direction so fast it’s almost comical, a small, involuntary noise of shock escaping him as he stares, caught out.

Melanie heard it, too. She chuckles darkly, and says, “Oh, there is. Come on, spill. How much worse can it get past dressing you up like a battery-powered doll and flirting with starting war with the Ronso?”

Jon hesitates, clearly more reluctant to share whatever this is than any of the other stuff he’s told them so far. He gives in after only a few seconds, obviously knowing that he can’t get away with denial this time.

“… If I did agree to this,” he says, carefully not looking at any of them. “His condition is that – that I send all of you away. Everyone but Daisy and Basira.”

Without thinking, Martin blurts out, “What?” in pure dismay, but even that is lost under the sound of everyone else’s questions and protests and demands for an explanation, along with what sounds like a pretty impressive tirade in Al Bhed from Melanie’s direction. When the clamour dies down enough for individual voices to be heard again, Martin’s ears catch Georgie saying with some heat, “Leaving you with only two guardians crossing the Calm Lands, what’s he thinking—”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Sasha says sharply. “The rest of us aren’t acceptable enough. I said back in Guadosalam, right? Two disgraced Crusaders, an Al Bhed, and a heretic. Not great for Yevon’s precious public image.”

Melanie lets out another explosive sentence in Al Bhed, and then switches tack entirely, a look of skeptical confusion replacing some of the anger. “Wait, but what about Martin, wasn’t his dad some sort of legendary guardian or some bullshit?”

“He’s still a rogue element. Maybe it’s even the connection to Gertrude that’s the problem.”

Sure, let’s go with that, Martin thinks as Sasha catches his eye, giving him a look loaded with meaning. Martin doesn’t know if Sasha’s been rethinking some of Elias’s more pointed comments since their conversation in the old watchtower last night; but what he does know is that if Elias does have a notion of where Martin and his dad really came from to start with, he’s not going to want him tagging along with Jon all the way up to modern-day Zanarkand. Not with how much control he’s clearly trying to get over everything about this pilgrimage.

“You haven’t told him yes or no yet, right?” Tim asks urgently, looking at Jon with obvious worry.

Jon shakes his head. “Not yet. But I know he’s expecting an answer before I visit the cloister in Bevelle. Maybe even as early as Macalania.”

“You’re saying, no, right?”

When Jon hesitates, Tim’s face sharpens.

“Jon,” he says, and reaches a hand to rest on Jon’s shoulder. “Please tell me you’re saying no.”

“I… I was, but…”

“You can’t be serious!”

“It— it doesn’t matter what I want!” Jon retorts, his voice cracking. “I – I still haven’t decided either way, but. I’m on this pilgrimage to defeat Sin. That’s the only point to it. If, if what Elias is offering helps accomplish that, then— then it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Of course it matters if you don’t want it!” Martin bursts. “I-I mean – Tim’s right. I don’t know anything about the ins and outs of whatever Elias is trying to sell you, but I – I don’t like the idea of you being tied to him either. Like – like Tim said, we don’t know how long that ritual of his even lasts. I mean, if – i-if he’s still linked to you after you defeat Sin then – then what happens?”

Everyone else’s faces turn grim. He can’t be the only one who’s thought of that, right? Bad enough the idea of Elias binding his spirit to Jon at all, but the idea that Jon could have that hanging over him for the rest of his life is— Martin can’t stand it.

“Martin, I—” Jon starts, falters, and then looks away. “I should at least keep my options open, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t think,” says Georgie firmly, before Martin can even open his mouth. “I really don’t like this, Jon. I know what you’re thinking, but you should say no.”

Jon stares at her, bewildered. “I thought you’d— this is a chance for you and Melanie not to be involved, I thought you’d take it.”

“Not like this, Jon,” she says quietly. Shaking her head, she says, “I don’t know what game the Grand Maester’s playing here, but this is a trap—”

“Obviously it’s a trap, Georgie, I’m not bl—” Jon starts with some heat, then, throwing an apologetic grimace at Melanie mid-sentence, changes tack to, “I can see that—”

“So you don’t have to go jumping into it!”

“But if you’d be safe—”

“Fuck being safe, if you’re putting yourself out there trying to kill that thing,” Tim cuts in, his face stormy, “I want to be at your side to make damn sure it dies.”

Jon has nothing to say to that. After a moment, Sasha reaches over Tim to tap Jon gently on the arm, grabbing his attention.

“I can’t see a single good thing about this deal, Jon,” she says, somehow still more calm than anyone else. She peers searchingly at him, and on her face, at least, the worry is clear. “You could easily summon a Final Aeon powerful enough to defeat Sin without any input from Elias, I know you could. You’ve got enough talent for it. So what’s making you waffle about this?”