FFX: Breathe

[edenbound]

Fandom: Final Fantasy X
Pairing: None
Warnings: Angst
Rating: PG
Summary: Breathing is the last thing you let go of. For over_look.


It's easy to give it up, in the end. Life, that is. You come to the end of it, Braska thinks, and then you realise that it wasn't worth that much to begin with and that you don't need it as much as you thought you did. And then you give it up, and if you give it up for a cause --

"Don't do that," Auron says. His voice is rough, grating a little, and Braska knows he's holding back tears. Just a week ago, he would've cared. Now he feels hollowed out and full all at once; doubts cast aside, duty taken on. That's what the pilgrimage is for. Every step, you give something up. Every step, you breathe in duty. Breathe in, breathe out, laugh with your guardians, kill fiends, send the lost souls. The first steps are hard, the first few summonings feel like hell and the trials are strange and almost frightening in their ritual.

But you get used to it. It's easy.

Breathe out, breathe in, until breathing and walking and reaching your destination is all you care about.

"Don't do what?" Braska says, remembering what Auron has said, but he thinks only of Sin, only of Sin, and of proud, unhappy Yunalesca, and Jecht, the most foul-mouthed sacrificial lamb in the world, telling them to just hurry up and make him the damned Final Aeon if that's what they needed to do.

"Don't try shutting everything out."

"I'm not," he says, and that's the truth. Auron just doesn't understand how he's lost it all, paid out in faith and refunded in power.

"Are you ready?"

Breathe in, breathe out.

"Yes."

Comments

[irish-ais.livejournal.com]

<3

So gooooooooood.

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Sad to have Auron saying, "Don't do that," so late, too late. At first it seems like he's denying Braska's thoughts, although it turns out to be different.

That "most foul-mouthed sacrificial lamb in the world" is such a beautifully apt portrait.

[muggy-mountain.livejournal.com]

Such a powerful drabble. Every word counts here. It's sparse but it says exactly what it needs to say, and possibly does it better in its rawboned nature.

paid out in faith and refunded in power.

Exactly.