Chapter Text
In the world of Spira, there has always been one prominent danger that is present to every living being in it.
Sin.
Just like its name, it was believed to have been manifesting from the wrongdoings of the people in Spira. A war occurring long time ago, followed with constant misuse of technology, the rich trampling the poor, which collectively resulted in a form of punishment, their handmade destruction sent back right at their face.
Ever since, the people of Spira, although not all, found their way back to a teaching of the past. Yevon. The teaching gives those people a new hope that they would be able to live in a peaceful world, free from the fear of Sin going after them.
The hope of the people in the present is being carried by the summoners, who can bring them The Calm. Therefore, it is always a big occasion every time an apprentice is given the title of a full-fledged summoner.
Which makes it an understatement that Mingi couldn’t actually believe it when he heard the news of his own best friend, Jeong Yunho, becoming a full-fledged summoner. Sure, Mingi had trained for a considerable amount of time to offer himself to be his friend’s guardian but at the same time, he had half a hope that the now-summoner would quit his apprenticeship somewhere in the middle.
But here they are, on a boat to Kilika, at the starting point of their pilgrimage.
“I still can’t believe it,” Mingi scoffs from where both of them stand by the boat’s railing. “I’ve known you for years, and I still can’t believe you managed to become a full-fledged summoner.”
Yunho just laughs at his friend’s sentiment. “You know when I start something, I’ll see to it till the end.”
“Well, if you say it like that, I would’ve expected you to stay in the Blitzball team instead.”
The black-haired summoner has a wistful smile on his face. “You’re right. But things changed.”
The mood becomes a little melancholic, and Mingi is much aware of the reason as he returns the smile. Then he looks over to the sea surrounding them, and gets reminded of the final goal of the pilgrimage. Well, overall final goal. The thought unsettles him again, because as much as things changed, he thinks it shouldn’t have pushed Yunho to be on this pilgrimage. Which again, evidently, was the reason he expected his friend not to be a summoner. He bites his lips, looking uncertain.
“But... do you really have to do it?”
“What?” Yunho looks (fakes?) clueless. Mingi doesn’t say anything for a moment.
“The Final Summoning,” the guardian eventually says, and then a beat of silence. Then he’s met with another laugh from the summoner.
“You know that I value my life more than anything!”
“Then why did you become a summoner in the first place?”
Yunho leans closer to Mingi, as if he’s about to tell him a secret, which is probably not so far off from one. On the contrary, the guardian stays put in his place. He’s aware of the effect Yunho has on his heart whenever he does things like this, and he’s not about to give in, especially knowing that it will not be reciprocated. And possibly, no guarantee it will last either.
“Hey.” One moment, Yunho is looking into Mingi’s eyes, giving the other boy an involuntary flutter in his chest. In another, his gaze shifts to somewhere behind Mingi’s head, and he even points at it using his finger too.
“The sun is looking kinda strange.”
Immediately curious, the orange-haired guardian looks behind him (and a small part of him dreads the existence of Jeong Yunho for changing the topic again for the nth time) and finds the strangeness Yunho told him about. The sun looks a little dim, and for some reason, it doesn’t look like it’s in a whole round shape.
“I think it’s, uh…”
“Eclipse?”
The lights are starting to cease into small flickers until there’s none, and everything becomes darker all of the sudden. Mingi finds himself unable to take his eyes off the phenomenon, even so far as getting goosebumps once the sun is covered as a whole.
“Damn, that looks like a bad omen,” Mingi comments.
“It can also be a good sign.”
The guardian turns to his friend, who’s currently holding a movie sphere held at his eye level.
“Yunho, what are you doing?”
“I’m recording it,” he deadpans. “Now be quiet for a moment.”
The guardian still stares at him in disbelief as the summoner sets the recording on.
“It’s the first day of the pilgrimage, and we are in luck to see a solar eclipse. See? The sun has been swallowed by the moon.”
“Really, to whom are you going to show that recording?”
“I can throw it to the sea, hoping someone will find it. Maybe a sphere hunter will find it for me,” Yunho answers without losing his focus on recording, not even one bit.
“Oh?”
From the view of the eclipse, the summoner notices a small abnormality. There was another small dash of light, literally leaping away from the ring of the eclipse. At first he thought it was just an optical illusion. But now his gaze through the sphere follows the light that looks akin to a falling star, or a comet of some sort. He trails the light until it disappears into the horizon.
“I thought you were recording the eclipse,” comes Mingi’s voice from his side. Yunho already stops recording, busy mulling over the tiny sliver of light he just saw.
The boat is suddenly hit by a strong wave, making the pair lose their balance as they hurriedly hold onto the railings. They look into each other’s eyes, alarmed.
“You go get the weapons!” Mingi instructs Yunho, who nods and makes a run for the cabin. Only then does he realize how the boat crews are doing then. They’re all a mess, wet and all, and some are looking at him with disdain for reasons. To be honest, in this kind of situation Mingi used to be the scared and weak one, seeking help from others. But now, he is officially a guardian, which means he can’t allow himself to revert back to his past self. Especially not in front of these people. He trained hard to get to where he is now, and he has to show his worth right now.
He looks up at the eclipse for a moment, finally starting to show the light of the sun once again, then back to the sea in front of him.
What seems like a fin is slowly emerging from the water in front of him. It starts small, but then, it steadily rises to the sky, impacting the boat into another tidal wave. Being at the front of the boat, Mingi gets undoubtedly stricken by the water, leaving his whole body wet.
“It’s Sin!”
“Hey, prepare for the harpoon! Stick it through the fin!”
The fuck? The guardian wants to protest, but he can’t as he still has to properly stand first. As he does, he hears a familiar shout of his name.
“Song Mingi!”
He can see a ball coming his way. With only his left hand, he catches it in his grip. At the end of his vision, Yunho is ready with his staff, a ghost of a smile on his face. He still hasn’t lost his touch at all even after years of quitting blitzball, Mingi notes.
“Don’t shoot the harpoon!” the guardian shouts as he sees one of the crews preparing behind the harpoon shooter.
“No can do! We gotta take it down somehow!”
“But we’re gonna get dragged by that thing if you shoot that!”
“If they wish to get dragged, just let them be, Mingi.”
All of the eyes turn to the summoner, who just said that with a clear and somewhat final tone in his voice. He doesn’t really waste time after that as he immediately starts the summoning process. Mingi quickly follows Yunho’s sentiment by gearing up the blitzball in his hand. The sphere held by the armor on his hand starts lighting up as well, and with that, he throws the ball right into Sin’s fin.
At the same time, a large creature resembling a bird flies down from the sky. It’s Valefor, the first aeon Yunho had already acquired back in the temple of Besaid, and also the aeon that established his transition into a full-fledged summoner. Through Valefor, he begins his attack on Sin.
Sin itself is never an easy enemy. The spawns sticking on its fin launch themselves towards the boat, making the whole crew panicking, leaving the pair of the summoner and guardian to fend themselves from the spawns as well as having to protect the rest of the crew from them.
“Focus your attack on the fin! I’ll get rid of the spawns, making sure none of them gets to you,” Mingi instructs again as he positions himself closer to Yunho.
The two of them execute their offensive strategy relentlessly, trying to put Sin and its spawns down with their respective means of attack: the bursts of energy from the blitzball and shockwaves from the aeon. Yet, as time keeps ticking by, they start losing their energy, and there is still no sign Sin will retreat any time soon. Eventually Valefor retreats without warning, vanishing into thin air, which startles the summoner. He looks at his staff, trying to figure out how much longer Mingi can throw the blitzball before all of his energy depletes, and whether he can try another way to inflict any damage to the monster.
“Mingi! Change of plan! You attack the fin, I deal with the spawns!”
“But how?”
Yunho swings his staff right at a spawn trying to jump at him. “My aeon just disappeared on me!”
Mingi wishes he could laugh at the funnily sad statement at the moment.
As someone who used to play blitzball as well, Yunho is strong enough to strike the spawns and push them from the boat, but summoning takes half of his energy already, so he doesn’t know how long he will be able to hold on. It crosses his mind, what if they just end up dying right there, not even fifty miles away from Besaid? Maybe what Mingi said about the eclipse was right, it was probably a bad omen, yet he tried to stay positive. He has every right to do so, just like what his father used to say. When you become a summoner, you need to keep up positive vibes with your guardian. That’s the least you can do.
And he can’t really tell if it’s another illusion or not, but he thinks he hears a slashing sound from a sword or some sort. As far as he knows, no one in the boat wields any sword. The only thing that the crew would have closest to a sword would be knives. And the sound actually comes from where the fin is. Yunho notices that Mingi is looking at the same direction, so it’s not supposed to be just his own hallucination.
From behind the fin, something leaps into the air, but it’s not a spawn. Rather, it’s someone, seems to be a young male with blonde hair clad in shades of gray. And he keeps floating in the air, holding the said sword in one of his hands.
Yunho almost feels entranced watching the unknown man move, not even once showing any sign that he’d fall into the sea, as if he is capable of flying. He watches how the blonde strikes with the sword, each strike clearly effective seen by how Sin seems to retreat more into the water. Then he concentrates some sort of energy to the sword, causing it to blaze in fire, and then strikes it onto the fin. Sin seems to be staggered by the attack, as the spawns now stop leaping off of it, and slowly but surely, its fin starts drowning back into the sea.
The mysterious blonde just watches as he stays floated in the air, which intrigues the summoner even more.
As Sin finally retreats, everyone on the boat start gathering on the deck, all looking astonished at the floating man who currently has his back on them. Then all of the sudden, he falls into the sea, shocking everyone.
The summoner though, after recovering from the initial shock, drops his staff and runs towards the edge of the boat to jump into the water, ignoring the loud protests from his guardian.
“...Hyung!”
“......”
“I have to...! ...”
“.........I............sorry.”
The last thing he saw before he got sucked into the void was the boy’s sad smile.
“I......... you.”
....
…
..
.
“Is he awake?”
“..................... sorry.”
“Ah, just ............... okay?”
“Yeah.”
...
Fair complexion. Hair as dark as the night sky. Blue clothing...?
“Blue...?”
A pair of eyes as dark as the night sky staring back at him in confusion.
Who are you?
Where am I?
Who am I?
It takes a little while for him to finally open his eyes. What enters his view is nothing he’s familiar with. If anything, he doesn’t really have the memory of what is familiar to him. Something big is missing from the said memory, leaving an enormous black hole in it.
He still decides to get up from what appears to be a bed, one among the three beds inside the room. The room itself is full of wooden materials, from the wall to the floor to the furniture. He looks like a fish out of water with his platinum blonde hair, silver eyes and dark grey jeans overall in such earthy environment, a dot of silver amongst sea of golden hues. He sits on the edge of the bed, wondering how he got there, to this unknown place. Yet no matter how he tries, nothing comes up in his head because of the incomplete memory. Still, rather than staying there, he supposes he’ll be able to figure things out if he tries to step outside of this room. So he does.
When he’s finally out of the room, he’s met with a corridor, also with wooden walls. Apparently the room he was in is at the end of the corridor, which thankfully leaves him with only one direction to go. He walks down the stairs at the other end, and the atmosphere shifts slightly into a livelier one, with colorful wallpapers of various patterns and lights with intricate design, but still dominated by golden hues. There is a middle-aged woman behind a wooden counter whom he catches staring at him. She looks stunned upon seeing him at first, which makes him look back curiously as he slightly tilts his head. Then she tries to get a grip, seemingly about to say something to him.
“Aren’t you the person that the summoner brought here?” she asks, and he becomes even more confused. He’s not even aware of this summoner, nor does he know what a summoner is.
“You know, just in case you’re looking for him, he’s on the shore right now.”
He’s still confused for a moment, trying to make a conclusion of this information. Whoever this summoner is, he guesses is probably the one who brought him here. Finding this person is probably his best bet at this moment, and he soon smiles in gratitude, making the lady petrified again, but at least she smiles back afterwards.
When he leaves the building, he can see the sky is also colored golden with hints of oranges and pinks. There aren’t really a lot of people passing by, but if there are, they’re staring at him weirdly, which discourages him to ask where the shore is supposed to be. Maybe he should’ve asked the lady from before, she’s kind enough to tell him without him having to ask first after all.
Not too long though, he can hear what sounds like choir singing in the distance. Then he witnesses colorful translucent lights, almost similar to bubbles floating up to the sky. He feels his heart drop upon seeing them, and an unexplainable sadness is starting to seep in. Still, he can sense a mysterious tug upon his whole body, as if telling him to go to where those lights are. He lets his own feet lead him there, not even bothering if there are still people staring at him anymore. He keeps on walking and walking until the voices of the choir become clearer, along with the view of the sea and the sun setting into the horizon entering his vision.
There are many people gathering by the shore, most of them crying like they’re in grief. On one side of the shore, he finds a group of choir singing the mysterious tune. In the middle of the sea, a raven-haired boy wearing white and sky blue attire that reaches his ankle and wielding a long staff on his right hand is... dancing. Jumping, turning, twirling the staff. But it’s not as simple as that. The translucent lights he sees earlier are dancing along with him, rushing to the boy and circling around him as if they have their attention on him and only him. And not only that, the seawater beneath the boy’s feet is rising like a tornado, yet he doesn’t falter, not even one bit. The lights gathering around him are getting more and more intense, creating what seems to be a rainbow tornado, and by one final swing of the staff, all of those lights are flying to every direction yet still heading for the sky. Everything becomes silent at the moment that even the singing has stopped.
The blonde watches the scene with amazement, but he still can’t quite shake off the underlying sadness that keeps gnawing at his heart.
“...Hyung!”
He perks up at that, and a flash of a smile along with something blue replaces his vision for a split second. The mixed emotions he felt earlier are gone in a zap, and only confusion remains in place. He doesn’t get the time to figure out what it was all about, because the next moment his gaze just automatically falls on the boy who already lands back on the water. In a split second, he feels their eyes have just met. He can almost literally hear a click as it happened, as if his heart just skips a beat at that moment.
As soon as it comes, it goes as quick as who he deduces as the summoner approaches the people gathering there who are showing some sort of gesture to him, seemingly out of gratitude. Then an orange-haired male comes closer to him, patting him on the shoulder. The summoner gives the man a nod, and then he glances back at the blonde again, startling the latter. Even the orange-haired man and some other people around follow the direction of his gaze, too, and soon enough, the center of the attention now shifts to the blonde man.
The summoner has a smile blooming on his face that shines amongst the sorrow surrounding him, and ironically, the blonde finds it to be such a breathtaking view.