Work Text:
Run
She was ten, and as she ran away from the orphanage she told herself: she wasn't born to protect.
She was born to survive.
There were so many children from her city in the orphanage, many younger than herself. Some were falling into sickness and despair. She could not risk becoming one of them.
So she ran. She tried to run as far as she could...but she was still small and frail.
She could only make it as far as the nearest trading post. Then, the smell of the sparse bits of food being sold there made her even more weak-kneed.
She stole a piece of bread from a stall and devoured it in the shadows. As she did, she heard the bread seller complain to another vendor about Niflheim soldiers blocking trade routes, and demanding a large portion of sellers' wares in exchange for letting them go through.
If only he had a runner who could sneak some of his ingredients through the blockades - someone too fast for the Nifs to accost - he could reduce his losses.
Newly fed and with her head clearer, Aranea chose that time to walk out of the shadows. She introduced herself to onlookers by filling her little arms with as many pieces of bread as she could carry.
"I'll be your runner if you let me keep this," she declared.
The bread seller didn't have to care that this fierce-eyed little girl was planning to bring all the food back to an orphanage not too far away. Or that it seemed she was asking to trade too little for her own life.
All he had to care about was her claim that she could run really fast, and bring his wares to him safely.
***
Jump
When she was fifteen, she met Biggs and Wedge, who were trying to run a sidewalk hustle with card games. Aranea stayed to watch for a while, but when she saw they were complete amateurs, bound to be busted soon, the novelty drained out fast.
She was going back to her rented flat from a day of doing merc jobs (which earned significantly more than hunts), when she came upon the two being chased down a long street by a handful of Niflheim soldiers calling them “cheats.”
Without thinking, she jumped into the boys’ path, then led them to an alleyway where she hoped they could all evade the pursuers.
There was a tall fence at the end of the alleyway. She cleared it in a single leap.
She failed to take into consideration that she was with two people who weren’t nearly as athletic as herself, or as clever.
"Jump!" she called out to them. But they couldn't jump.
So she leapt back over the fence, helped knock out the two soldiers who were able to track them down the alleyway, then led the boys down another path to safety.
When the coast was clear, they introduced themselves to each other. Eventually, Aranea found herself lecturing the amateur hustlers - both older than herself, apparently - on how running schemes was dangerous, and how they needed to know how to save their own lives.
"Always be out of reach," she finished.
"You got it, Lady A," Wedge said.
They called her "Lady A" ever since.
***
Fly
“They’ll kill you,” Biggs warned her.
“They won’t be able to. I'll stay out of their reach,” she assured him. “But they might kill you two, if you come with me. So I wouldn’t blame you if you stayed.”
“Are you kidding?” Wedge exclaimed. “Where you go, we go. Doesn’t matter what they try to do to us. We’ll always get away, right?”
Leaving the Empire’s payroll was perhaps the second most dangerous decision Aranea had made, next to agreeing to become a mercenary for the Empire in the first place. But getting the riskiest jobs was where the money was, and she had needed to make a lot of gil - for a little bit of peace for herself. For people who couldn’t survive without help.
She looked at Biggs and Wedge, her two oldest, dearest friends, who would follow her everywhere, and remembered: she was no protector. She was born to survive. But sometimes others survived with her, and together they stayed free. Free to live above this insane war. Free to live above people’s rules of fairness and goodness.
Others might not call it true freedom, keeping attachments like this...but Aranea would feel less free without its weight on her back.
They slung an arm over each other’s shoulders and touched their foreheads together: a familiar sort of embrace. She smiled, because she knew it would lift her friends’ spirits, and they should always be soaring.
“We’ll always get away,” she agreed.