2020-10-08: Forward Together, Brighter Together

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  • Log: Forward Together, Brighter Together
  • Cast: Yuna, Lulu
  • Where: Bevelle - Via Purifico
  • Date: October 08, 2020
  • Summary: Lulu and Yuna find one another in the Via Purifico, and, therefore, find hope.

==========================<* Bevelle - Via Purifico *>==========================

Via Purifico is the immense, ancient labyrinth built underneath Bevelle. It is attached the prisons in the temple complex. It is a place of death and despair, as those tried and found guilty are sentenced to it -- to escape and prove their innocence or (as happens far more likely) die within. The labyrinth has countless glyphs, which are warded and make navigating hard (and teleporting away impossible). There are many portions that are flooded, as well, and that adds an extra level of complexity.

BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtN36ITVrCo
<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.
<SoundTracker> Via Purifico - FFX Piano Collections - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD-j4jBFt4w

Yuna walks alone through the Via Purifico.

Well -- that isn't true. She's never really alone.

But, though they are in many ways the very closest companions of her soul, all the love and support and affection the fayth embrace her with on the inside cannot settle the terror in her roiling heart, terror for her friends on the outside.

She hasn't found anyone yet.

She hasn't SEEN anyone yet, since the trial; and not really since the wedding; and even then, not really since all the way back on another world. It feels like a lifetime ago.

For all the reasons that it feels like a lifetime ago for HER, she is afraid for THEM.

She's looked and looked. Quietly -- her booted feet set softly as to shush rather than splash the puddled tunnels. Carefully -- she has not made a light, if she even could, with her limited and very damp supplies.

But no less desperately. Desperate to find them. Desperate to reunite with them. Desperate to know that they're okay.

And in that respect, it isn't ONLY for their sake.

It is a very, very rare thing for Yuna to be in a fiend-rich environment by herself. It might even be a NEVER thing, unless you count the wedding before it was crashed, which at this point would be fairer to allow than her darkest nightmares ever guessed.

She may not be the little girl in the forbidden cave on Besaid Island anymore, separated from her foolish big brothers... but she knows exactly how dangerous it is for her to be alone in here.

Still, she rounds exactly enough dark corners without seeing anyone or anything that the first time she encounters fiends -- a pack of skittering but deadly sharp Cave Iguions -- she is actually surprised; she gasps and backs up from their nest, fumbling her way down the empty corridor from whence she came.

She trips over a piece of shattered pillar she had so easily surmounted only a minute ago, when it was in front of her instead of behind, and goes down hard.

It's too dark to see them at any distance, but she can hear them coming for her, she can hear the pitter-patter of their clawed feet on the ground and the walls of this place...

Her stomach hurts; her breathing comes uncontrollably, a soft whine at the base of each inhalation--

--Rikku saves her life.

She had reached into her obi, for something, anything, and, screwing her eyes shut, flung it forward at the fiends--!

*CRACKLE*

The Ice Gem explodes, momentarily painting the narrow hallway a shocking white in the gloom. It lingers afterwards, easier to feel than to see, the antarctic temperatures encasing the Iguions fatally and, given that she can see her own breath down here, perhaps permanently. At the very least, they shall be here a long time. Entombed within the tomb.

Rikku taught her how to do that; how to use the lingering elements of fiends against them. What she did was all luck and no skill -- no real alchemist, she -- but she wouldn't have done it at all without her cousin's enthusiastic encouragement.

Rikku... what a horrible place this must be for her. ESPECIALLY for her. Especially now. After Home. Yuna tries to summon her cousin into her heart -- since she cannot summon her OUT of her heart, no matter how much she may wish it were so -- and imagines her pretty hair and quick smile until it isn't pleasant at all to imagine her here, which is right away.

Snow crunches under her feet, as she drags herself back upright, dusts herself off, and flees quietly forward, from darkness into darkness. And as it does so, she can't help but think of someone else...

<Pose Tracker> Lulu has posed.

Lulu is not given the courtesy of a Maester to take her from her warded cell.

Her sentence, it appears, was decided, and she isn't told of the others' but she wonders. She wonders of one in particular. She is silent as she is moved, silent as they inform her of the sentence and silent as she is pushed to the platform. She does not waste a single word on protest or statement.

She needs that energy to drag herself from the water onto solid ground, to gather what things remain to her that were tossed along. How do the monks feel, tossing dolls into their river of purification? Regardless...

Lulu stands alone in the Via Purifico. She looks to the floor, to the walls... to the place from which she came. Awareness of her surroundings comes part and parcel with the return of her other senses--the wards no longer blocking her magic. She is left with it, and with her dolls. It was an unnatural, unpleasant feeling, to be trapped with nothing but stale air and forgotten metal. She is so accustomed now to reaching out to the world around her that being reminded of that long, long period where she did not is... strange.

But this place is not strange. But there is no fire of resentment in her right now, but ice. No... She resented Yevon more, even, when she thought she would become a nun.

There is no room for such feelings, and nor is there room for staying still. Alone with her thoughts, Lulu puts them out of her mind, and focuses on the here and now. She begins walking. ...And walking. ......And walking.

How long is it? She doesn't know. It doesn't matter. Her steps click against tile, her heavy dress weighing her down with each step. Perhaps that is as it should be.

There is pain, naturally. Stiffness. Fatigue. But Lulu regards it distantly, dispassionately, much as she regards ancient carvings, old tiles...

It is not the first monster she faces, when she comes across three Sahagin who climb out of the water next to where she walks. They strike, and she strikes them down with lightning which burns into her vision as surely as it burns into their flesh. But their strikes add up, over time. Is it going to be a matter of attrition, here?

Lulu thinks of Yuna again. It is also not the first time, here. She has wondered at Yuna's condition for some time, imagined a thousand different things that could happen and more. As she walks, she judges thta Yuna could hve walked this, and wonder what sh would hve done with the Fiends.

She is lost in her thoughts when the next comes. A creature of single eye and terrible claws, it slashes at her again, cutting another set of deep gouges in her arm. She has found no one, yet.

"Tch," Lulu comments, lifting her hand to try to aim a blast of fire at it.

Little by little. Lulu walks alone in Via Purifico. And she remembers when last she was truly alone...

At least it isn't snowing.

<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.

Splish-splash-splish-splash-splish-splash.

Yuna flees through an ever-narrowing tunnel.

Skit-shhhhhhh. Skit-shhhhhhh. Skit-shhhhhhhh.

Sahagin don't run through water. They skate on it. If they didn't stumble every time the passage dried out, they would have caught her long ago.

Yuna's throat is hot and tight. After the fourth or fifth turn, her breath is strangling in it.

There have been no intersections.

Zzzzip-crack! Zzzzzzip-crack! Zzip-zzip-cra-crack!

The water spurts are hurled ever thicker and faster. One buzzes past her ear. An inch closer and it would have shorn her earring straight off. She was surprised that they bothered to return it. She was oddly grateful.

The Yevonites who released her into the Via Purifico were more than civil -- they were downright apologetic. No maesters these, either. She doubts they know why she was sentenced to death; surely the official story does not involve her defying the Grand Maester's dogma about Sin.

They apologized, but... they pushed her in.

Her heart in her throat, Yuna doesn't have time anymore to wonder if she would have done the same to someone else.

She doesn't have any time at all.

Splish-splash-splish-splash-spli*

Stuck. Stuck! Her shoulder is stuck. The passage has collapsed. There's not enough space for her to pass.

A low moan escapes the back of her mouth. The first noise she's made, really, of any great size. She has wanted so badly to call for the others, for anyone, for everyone, but... it was too dangerous. For her. For them.

She pulls, then pulls harder. She cannot budge.

"--!"

With a shriek, and a soft tearing sound, she twists sideways, more falls than passes through. Windmills, in a more ragged way than usual, her arms, trying to, failing to, save her balance.

Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwi-

Water spurts first spatter, then begin to shatter, the broken earth.

Yuna scootches backwards using her heels for propulsion, then further back.

She feels open -- more open -- air on the too-bare skin of her arm, and looks up.

A high ceiling! This is a large chamber... large enough...

--SHATTER!

The sahagin pour through, hissing--

--time, there's not enough time--

Yuna scrabbles upright defiantly, and, again without her rod -- her rod left behind, surrendered, on the Ten Thousand Steps --

-- knowing that it will be too late, she clasps her hand to her chest and concentrates--!

<Pose Tracker> Lulu has posed.

Step. Step. Step. Lulu's skirt drags through a partly-flooded corridor as she moves along this time, without potions to tend her wounds. But though there is a certain noise to that, a vague splashing from her legs' movement... there are things to hear. This place, too, has a certain nature, water above all. The water is not a prisoner; it only passes through. It occurs to Lulu that this does indeed suggest an eventual exit, and perhaps a means to find it.

But the water in and of itself is something of a comfort despite the cold and damp, and Lulu will take what she can get opposite her injuries and fatigue. So she listens to the water, listens to its flow, not allowing her mind to wander but allowing it to look down the way, and consider.....

Consider noise. Lulu looks to the right sharply, and hears trouble. Fiends moving through the water--and the sound of something thy're following. Suddenly, a shriek, and Lulu knows that voice. Heedless of her tiredness she starts running outright. She runs over water first and then over stone, her skirt still wet and dragging along the tiles. She rushes past stone, through an archway once lovingly carved--

And there, she sees her, Yuna fallen and then rising, and it will be too late. The hissing Sahagin are closing in--

Like hell it will. Lulu throws out her hand, having no time to make the most powerful spell she can but her need to protect this one person makes it potent enough. Lightning strikes down from the ceiling, from an unseen sky, and straight into the Sahagin, focusing all her energy on warding off the monsters headd straight for Yuna and catching her foes' attention such that she doesn't even have a chance to speak at first.

She will buy Yuna those moments.

<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.

Yuna reopens her eyes just in time for magma's heat to -- unexpectedly -- wash over her.

Thunder rolls through her, and her heart both breaks and soars. She spins, looking everywhere for her savior, her Guardian, dearest sister of her heart...

"Lulu," she manages to sniff rather than sob, somehow. "Oh, Lulu, I--"

Ifrit takes what's left of those lightning-blasted Sahagin apart; those watery creatures' best hits turn to steam against his fiery fur. It isn't much of a fight. What it is, is short, hard, and brutal.

Then he diffuses back into pyreflies, pyreflies which circle the two women like friendly Besaid swallows, swirling brightly, all but pulsing with affection.

It is equally Yuna's and the fayth's, of course, for that is the nature of that relationship. And Yuna is there -- limping a little from her fall, possessed of a few more scratches and bruises and bumps. One of her sleeves is almost torn off, and there's something wrong with one of her hands, it's cupped too favorably near her chest.

But she's Yuna, and she's here, and she's more or less whole.

She looks at Lulu -- Lulu, here in this horrible place -- and a flush of grief washes over her. She burns hot and tight with shame and misery. Her gratitude and relief at finding her, at being saved, are not LESSENED by her all too keen sense of responsibility, but they cannot come to the forefront, either; it is BECAUSE she loves Lulu so very much that she feels so very badly. Tears the fiends couldn't force her to spend threaten, now. Her head hangs low, almost beneath her shoulders.

"--I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm -- I'm so sorry, Lulu."

<Pose Tracker> Lulu has posed.

Lulu approaches, when the lightning fades. She approaches even before Ifrit destroys the Sahagin she wounded. It becomes easy to spot her, even in the dark, especially by firelight, and then pyrelight. She spares only a thought for the monsters, looking to ensure there are no more with the periphery of her vision before she allows herself--two things. One, to breathe normally again, and two... to feel something more than ice again, as hr frozen-over heart begins to thaw all too quickly at the sight of Yuna.

She feels the bright swirl of pyreflies circling them, and feels the quiet in the water. She pares a moment to look over Yuna, to see her favoring a hand, limping, but more or less whole, and... more than that. These feelings that are so clear in Yuna...

Lulu shakes her head, stepping forward and enwrapping the other woman in a hug, careful of her injuries but tight enough that perhaps Lulu is hanging on, fr a little while.

"I know," she says softly. "I know."

She could tell her 'don't be sorry', she could give her any number of reasons not to be, not least of which is that she promised she would come. But she doesn't; she doesn't try to sweep away that clear emotion of Yuna's so much as... accept it. Yuna will not gladly see her harmed, and that is, for all that it makes her job more difficult, a precious thing too.

The dearest person in either world to Lulu is in her arms for the next few moments. "It's okay," she does say; she is here, at least, they are together. Her voice is slow, deliberate, but not only because it is her way to speak slowly. She stands like that for what feels long (in such a dangerous place) and not long enough (it has been too long since they were together).

For a moment, the imprisonment, the difficulty here, all of it is distant not because Lulu is distant, but because someone else is closer.

"My dearest... Yuna."

She will soon enough step back to talk. There is much to do, much to talk about, but...

First there is Yuna, and she is no 'little' sister now. Even in tears.

<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.

Yuna has had neither privacy nor the slightest comfort since she was taken from Filgaia. Now, she is given both, and both to extremes -- there is no one who could be watching, no one at all nearby, or they would have come running to the sounds of combat, surely; and there is no one who can hold her like Lulu can. No one she wanted more to be held by. No one she NEEDED more to be with.

She dampens Lulu's already dungeon-damp fur collar a little, and then a little more.

But not as much as she might have. Does she stop because of where they are? Does she stop because of who isn't here, their friends' fates, still unknown? Or does she stop because of who she is now?

She needs Lulu. And that need has been met. So she doesn't NEED to cry, not very much, not for long. She is held, and she holds ON, but she also holds BACK. Cradles her taller counterpart as closely as her disadvantaged-wingspan allows. Hugs her more fiercely than gently.

Not that gentleness has left her entirely. It could never. Her voice breaks on it a little. She too speaks haltingly, in her own preferred fashion. Lulu is more precious than any words she could say, but she chooses them with care anyway.

"Before the trial... they wanted me to confess to a larger plot, to implicate Althena's Guard and the Al Bhed, and I... I didn't. But afterwards... when it was... clear. I thought... maybe if I confessed, me personally, JUST me, maybe they'd let all of you go. But..."

They're here, together, so that didn't work out so well.

Yuna reluctantly unwraps her hand from her chest, then from the ragged bandage wound across it.

An angry red Yevonite rune has been seared into her palm. Its meaning is simple, even stark

HERETIC

"We've all been excommunicated. I'm so sorry. If I hadn't... If I never..."

She struggles to find the words. It's easy to say if. But it's hard to FINISH the thought. Because it's unthinkable.

As soon as the dead Lord Jyscal delivered his fears to Lady Yuna, there was never any if.

There was only when.

She swallows, and looks up at Lulu with eyes full of clarity of purpose, and terrible pain.

"I can't let them make me regret... doing the right thing. But I never, ever wanted anyone else to have to pay the price. And yet," her throat pulses, swallowing tears before they can threaten again to drown out this sad and tender admission, "I'm also... happy... to be together with you..."

<Pose Tracker> Lulu has posed.

Lulu would not explain to many the fact that she needed Yuna as much, but it is true. Even then it's not because she begrudges that need... but because of how difficult to put into words it would be. Yes, Yuna has changed, but she is still Yuna, and Lulu would let the fur be drenched if Yuna required it... But she doesn't right now.

Lulu feels that Yuna is holding as much as she does, and that makes her various injuries irrelevant for the moment. But eventually she must pull back enough, they must nod to the time that there is to spend. So Lulu does not move far, but enough to see Yuna's face as she speaks.

And speak she does. Lulu's gaze is soft in a way that would only be uncharacteristic for someone else as she listens. She reflects on it; such a conspiracy would have made the conflict all the easier, justify actions that Lulu can still hardly imagine despite having seen and lived them.

She does not voice such cynical thoughts for the moment; she reaches out gently to take Yuna's hand, careful not to touch the burn. She does look down at it, long enough to see.

Yuna speaks of what she won't regret, but also of...

"And there is nowhere I would rather be than with you," Lulu answers softly and firmly both. She says this first, before anything else, and then she leans down, bringing Yuna's hand up to meet her lips halfway, a small kiss on a wound.

It is harder to put into words her feelings than in simple actions, but in this case, it is worth that difficulty. Lulu sets down Yuna's hand again.

"We are where we are. But we're together."

<Pose Tracker> Yuna has posed.

To say that Lulu's kiss startles one last tear from Yuna's green eye would imply that it was a complete surprise, and it is not; not because she takes the forgiveness and affection contained in it for granted, but because not even at her darkest hour could she ever really imagine Lulu forsaking her. She feared for Lulu's health, but never her fury. There have been more embraces than kisses between them, over the years, but the gesture, now, conveys so much more than her words ever could.

And her words do a lot, anyway.

Yuna feels loved, and sheds that tear for Lulu's love, no less a light in the unceasing darkness at the heart of Yevon as a candle's, which is to say -- infinite, in comparison. But there are higher bars it clears also. Every bar imaginable. Eyes cry when they are near brightness, and the Lulu in Yuna's heart, actualized now by their reunion into the Lulu holding Yuna's wounded little hand, outshines even the sun.

"Mm," she agrees, looking over Lulu a second time -- her face, her frame, searchingly, searchingly. "I thought perhaps I'd never see any of you again." Alive, that is. "They were so... angry."

Adjusting her footing, she stands next to her Guardian instead of in front of her, and rests her head against (...below) Lulu's shoulder, just for a moment.

"I don't know if anything will ever be okay ever again," she exhales, grief for the horror at Yevon's core momentarily overtaking other, more immediate griefs. Yuna contains many wounds right now but none so deeply cutting as the betrayal of the maesters, of everyone generally and her in particular. It is fresh and it is SHOCKING, shocking in a way that almost nothing else is. "But I'm glad anyway."

Her beads click against her neck; a familiar, lost sound. Not everything has changed. She is nodding, confirming what she just said to herself more than to Lulu. "I'm so grateful," she adjusts, because this is even more true. "Together..."

She reaches out her hand -- her right hand, which is unwounded -- and tries to intertwine it with Lulu's.

So that they can move forward. Together.

<Pose Tracker> Lulu has posed.

There is something precious, too, in being understood. Lulu can see she is, and it is welcome, though not surprising. They know one another well.

Lulu sheds no tears right now, but it is not a lack of feeling. No, quite the opposite--

The first thing Yuna can see as she looks over Lulu is that look in her red eyes, one that echoes her words and her not-words both. Less intense is the darkness under her eyes, not her makeup but a sign of fatigue this time. She is injured in places, particularly a nasty set of scratches on her shoulder, but more that aren't visible except by implication. She stands straight in front of Yuna, though... and then beside her.

"I wondered it, myself." She also planned, prepared as best she could for whatever would happen, but in the end they left them to die instead of doing it directly, and that tracked at least with history. But now...

Lulu feels that same wound as Yuna, for all that she might always have seemed to act with a little more remove from her faith. It has shocke her to her apparently unflappable core, and for all that she shows the hock less, it is still there.

Some things are the same. Yuna reaches out her hand, and Lulu accepts it, intertwining their fingers for now. "...I am, too," Lulu answers, and she does not have to say if she is agreeing with part of all of what Yuna has said.

Though the shadows ahead of them are as long as before, this place is nevertheless brighter... Together.