http://yesthatnagia.livejournal.com/ (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
yesthatnagia.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
31_days2006-07-04 11:36 pm
yesthatnagia.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2006-07-04 11:36 pm
[july 04] [FF7] Dust On Da Chao - chapter One
[t]itle: Dust on Da Chao
[r]ating: T/PG-13/K+
[w]ordcount:
[d]ay: july 04: a vision to illuminate your mind
[f]andom: final fantasy vii
[p]airing: Vincent/Yuffie
[s]ummary: A feng shuei master has escaped from a dungeon in East Heaven... only to throw a lot of bad mojo Edge's way. With the city insane, anyone who touches a firearm going hysterical, and Leviathan pissed as hell about the whole incident, it's up to Yuffie to sort things out. Only she's not IN Edge.
[n]otes: Also known as "Nagia Goes Psycho With The Whole Religious Character Thing".
>> shadow-world
Yuffie sat cross-legged atop Da Chao, specifically on the highest of his many hands. Her right hand rested on her right knee, cupped slightly. The grip of her left hand on her other knee was tighter than the right's grip, as though the left knee clung to what it had out of sheer stubbornness.
Under most circumstances, Yuffie would not sit at the highest accessible portion of Da Chao in the middle of a very hot day.
Under most circumstance, Yuffie would not sit at all.
Her eyes were closed. Dark lashes brushed against olive cheeks. Her breath came slow, even. Rhythmic. Her chest heaved with each breath, rising and falling. Predictable as a metronome.
Underneath her eyelids, colours swirled. The noon sunlight was bright enough to penetrate the thin veil her eyelids created. And so she sees the light breaking in. Orange, yellow, red and purple and orangeyellowredyellowpurple, with the occasional flash of green.
Gorky once told her he could tell how much time had passed by the colours that showed when his eyes were closed.
Yuffie could do no such thing, and strongly suspected that Gorky was a liar.
Whether or not Gorky was a lying liar, however, was not Yuffie's present concern. She ignored the illusions of colour, instead focusing on not focusing. The whole not focusing bit was easy for her-- unfortunately, she tended to not-focus in words and thoughts, or at the very least memories or pictures.
Meditation, however, is about clearing one's mind. Making room for Leviathan. No pictures, no memories, no words allowed.
Of course, it would probably be easier if, every time she managed to clear her mind, she didn't think, "Look Ma, no thoughts!"
Eventually, though, she managed to clear her mind. No words, no pictures, not even scents or smells. The Materia in her armlet began to glow-- well, it always glowed, but now it was glowing for a reason rather than just to prove that yes, damnit, it was Materia, and no, it wasn't some random red rock. She only knew this because she could feel the heat in her bangle.
Within moments, Leviathan filled her mind again. Like a dog with a sleeping spot it hasn't visited in a while, He turned circles in her brain, sniffing for traces of supernatural beings other than Himself. Finding none, He curled Himself around her brain matter, nuzzling and settling Himself into a very familiar, very comfortable spot.
I BID THEE GOOD DAY, said the Water-God to the thief. MUCH TIME HATH PASSED BETWIXT THIS MEETING AND OUR LAST.
"Hey, that rhymed!" Said the thief, and she giggled.
The Water-God is famous for His patience. Those deities who made blood-pacts with human families notoriously need it; anybody at all who deals with the House Kisaragi on a regular basis requires it in spades.
He tried again. I BID THEE GOOD DAY. HAST THOU MISSED ME?
The thief smiled at Him. "Yo. Tonnes."
BUT THOU HAST LEFT ME NO OFFERINGS, THOU HAST SUMMONED ME NOT.
"Offerings? You were never into offerings before. And I've been living in Edge. Summoning within city limits is illegal there."
He rumbled His displeasure. Were He really wrapped around her brain, the sound would destroy her. Here, however, in their cozy little shadow-consciousness, it merely startled her.
TWAS NOT SO LONG AGO THAT HUMAN LAWS MEANT LITTLE TO THEE.
"Well, they mean something now."
BUT WHAT OF THE OFFERINGS RIGHTFULLY MINE? THOU HAST NEGLECTED ME SORELY, KISARAGI.
He made His wrath evident in the way He growled and flexed-- coiling in upon Himself, like a snake about to strike.
"I have," the thief bowed her head. "I have, and I'm sorry."
APOLOGIES WILL NOT SATISFY ME. I DEMAND REPARATION.
"Then how can I repay You?"
But Leviathan coiled and thrashed and rumbled, and did not reply for a long time. At length, He told His thief, LEAVE THIS SHADOW-WORLD. THOU HAST MADE THINE APOLOGY. NOW THOU SHALT REPENT. NEGLECT NOT MY OFFERTORY. OFFEND ME NO MORE. WITH SUCH SMALL THINGS SHALT THOU BUY MY FORGIVENESS, CHILD-WOMAN.
And He was gone.
>> doll-people
Yuffie opened her eyes.
Talking to Leviathan was always a hassle. He spoke in an ancient dialect of Wutaian. It was a dialect only priests and Kisaragi spoke with anything resembling fluency, and required years of teaching and practice to learn.
Even now, she usually had a hard time wrapping her brain around it.
"Neglect not my offertory," she mumbled as she descended the carved mountain. "Offend me no more."
In other words, she needed to make offerings. Probably lots of them. One for every offering she missed. THAT meant she would have to dig out her calendar and figure out the last time she'd made an offering to Leviathan. Probably it had been shortly after Crisis.
...Yipe, that was like four years of offerings.
She reached the bottom and bowed to Da Chao. That mountain was Da Chao's only altar. Any trek up it was, technically, a religious pilgrimage. This definitely counted.
Once in the city proper, she headed to her home and found her calendars. It had only been two years since she'd last made an offering, not four. But she was still in deep shit with her god, and she sighed.
The dust in her house whorled and danced in the light, and she almost smiled. It was funny, but everything about Wutai seemed unique to her. If she could have bottled the thin, sandy dirt that lightly covered the trails on Da Chao, she would have. It smelled different from any other dirt to her. The water tasted different, the air smelled different, even the dust looked different.
It was good to be home.
She sighed again and wrote down what she'd need to make up two years of offerings. There would of course be fruits, flowers, libations, food. And then would be sacrifices-- her blood to absolve her sins, her earnest sweat to show her repentance; the list went on and on. Candies and whimsical things to make Him happy, salt or saltwater to show Him she was sad. And wine, of course, wine for every wedding.
She was going to be busy during her leave.
Swathed in expensive fabrics, practically tied down by her clothes and loving every minute of it, loving the way the silk slid against her skin and made all her movements heavy and graceful, Choushou Sayuri looked like a painted doll on her throne. Her face was a perfect white, lips a perfect red, eyes unlined but shadowed with a red powder.
She held a tiny porcelain doll on her lap. As she pondered what to do with the worst fuck-up in East Wutai's history, she stroked the doll's hair. Observant people would have noticed that the doll's eyes blinked as she did so, and it gave the appearance of breathing.
The man kneeling before her wore a genuinely sorry expression on his face. His knees pressed against the floorboards, his arms spread out before him to press his palms against them too.
"Milady, I apologize for--"
He ducked his head to the floor, bowing prostrate before her as befitted the addressing of a future queen. Whatever her Eastern title was.
"Shut up," she snapped. "I don't see any reason to forgive anyone enough of an imbecile to let that fool escape from his prison. The latest Kisaragi is going to want my head for this."
He tucked his head even tighter against the floor, exposing his neck.
she made a simple gesture. Two men stepped out of the shadows and dragged the offender off by his shoulders. He screamed all the while, but Sayuri didn't much care.
Exactly how those two very good Sanada-Han ninja would deal with him didn't matter to her. They were free to do what they liked, so long as they didn't break any of her posessions or get blood on her very expensive carpets and tapestries.
She arched a brow at the wizened woman who sat on a stool beside her throne. "What will he do?"
The crone spoke in a harsh, cracked voice. "Die. It's all he can do."
"Not the idiot," Sayuri sighed, here, and the silk whispered as her chest heaved, "that old bat. The one who escaped."
"Only prisoner able to do that in over fifty years, granddaughter. He will revel a time. And then he'll do whatever he damn well pleases."
"Su Gang Wu," Sayuri spat. "Where will he attack first?"
"Impossible to say exactly. Somewhere in the East, definitely. Beyond that? I don't know."
"Then we'll find him." Sayuri smiled grimly. The expression was more menacing than amused. "And when we do, he'll rue the day he decided to escape."
In her lap, the porcelain doll nodded.
Su Gang Wu had no idea where he was. He had taken a ferry out of East Wutai, to Nibelheim. He remembered a time when such ferries were much harder to access, thanks to the suspicion between Shinra and Wutai. Now, however, it seemed that Wutai regularly whored herself out for the filthy Easterners.
"Tickets to Edge are so expensive," a young Wutaian woman complained. "You'd think that we'd work on building more commercial airships, not just those trading ones!"
Airships? Gang Wu pictured ships that sailed the sky. The picture was so fantastic that he simply had to see the real thing. Had to experience it for himself. He followed the woman to a ticket booth.
She could barely cover the fare to ride in an airship. He, on the other hand, had no such problems. After eyeing the currency that the entire world now accepted-- gil, you filthy whores, you're holding gil in your hands!-- he could easily manufacture it.
He passed the teller several very large bills.
"That pension finally come through, old man?" The teller chuckled.
"Yes," Gang Wu replied, seizing the boy's hand. He lifted it to his eye, calmly manipulating the energies around him so that the boy would go bald. "I predict hair loss in your future."
"That's fifty years from now, grandpa."
The energies stopped and changed their course once more. "Did I say hair loss? I meant no children."
As he walked away, the boy laughed it off. Soon, however, he knew the boy would find he had spoken in earnest.
Erectile dysfunction at such a young age. Feng Shuei really could be a bitch, couldn't it?
Abruptly, he stopped moving.
"Offerings? You were never into offerings before. And I've been living in Edge. Summoning within city limits is illegal there."
Edge suddenly didn't seem like such a wonderful place. If a priestess could not appease the Water-God within its paling, what possible use could the city be? Leviathan was not a destructive god, unlike Ifrit or Bahamut; He did not destroy unless necessary. Water was a life-bringer, not usually death's poor herald.
This Edge place, he decided, would have to suffer for its ungodly ways.
[r]ating: T/PG-13/K+
[w]ordcount:
[d]ay: july 04: a vision to illuminate your mind
[f]andom: final fantasy vii
[p]airing: Vincent/Yuffie
[s]ummary: A feng shuei master has escaped from a dungeon in East Heaven... only to throw a lot of bad mojo Edge's way. With the city insane, anyone who touches a firearm going hysterical, and Leviathan pissed as hell about the whole incident, it's up to Yuffie to sort things out. Only she's not IN Edge.
[n]otes: Also known as "Nagia Goes Psycho With The Whole Religious Character Thing".
>> shadow-world
Yuffie sat cross-legged atop Da Chao, specifically on the highest of his many hands. Her right hand rested on her right knee, cupped slightly. The grip of her left hand on her other knee was tighter than the right's grip, as though the left knee clung to what it had out of sheer stubbornness.
Under most circumstances, Yuffie would not sit at the highest accessible portion of Da Chao in the middle of a very hot day.
Under most circumstance, Yuffie would not sit at all.
Her eyes were closed. Dark lashes brushed against olive cheeks. Her breath came slow, even. Rhythmic. Her chest heaved with each breath, rising and falling. Predictable as a metronome.
Underneath her eyelids, colours swirled. The noon sunlight was bright enough to penetrate the thin veil her eyelids created. And so she sees the light breaking in. Orange, yellow, red and purple and orangeyellowredyellowpurple, with the occasional flash of green.
Gorky once told her he could tell how much time had passed by the colours that showed when his eyes were closed.
Yuffie could do no such thing, and strongly suspected that Gorky was a liar.
Whether or not Gorky was a lying liar, however, was not Yuffie's present concern. She ignored the illusions of colour, instead focusing on not focusing. The whole not focusing bit was easy for her-- unfortunately, she tended to not-focus in words and thoughts, or at the very least memories or pictures.
Meditation, however, is about clearing one's mind. Making room for Leviathan. No pictures, no memories, no words allowed.
Of course, it would probably be easier if, every time she managed to clear her mind, she didn't think, "Look Ma, no thoughts!"
Eventually, though, she managed to clear her mind. No words, no pictures, not even scents or smells. The Materia in her armlet began to glow-- well, it always glowed, but now it was glowing for a reason rather than just to prove that yes, damnit, it was Materia, and no, it wasn't some random red rock. She only knew this because she could feel the heat in her bangle.
Within moments, Leviathan filled her mind again. Like a dog with a sleeping spot it hasn't visited in a while, He turned circles in her brain, sniffing for traces of supernatural beings other than Himself. Finding none, He curled Himself around her brain matter, nuzzling and settling Himself into a very familiar, very comfortable spot.
I BID THEE GOOD DAY, said the Water-God to the thief. MUCH TIME HATH PASSED BETWIXT THIS MEETING AND OUR LAST.
"Hey, that rhymed!" Said the thief, and she giggled.
The Water-God is famous for His patience. Those deities who made blood-pacts with human families notoriously need it; anybody at all who deals with the House Kisaragi on a regular basis requires it in spades.
He tried again. I BID THEE GOOD DAY. HAST THOU MISSED ME?
The thief smiled at Him. "Yo. Tonnes."
BUT THOU HAST LEFT ME NO OFFERINGS, THOU HAST SUMMONED ME NOT.
"Offerings? You were never into offerings before. And I've been living in Edge. Summoning within city limits is illegal there."
He rumbled His displeasure. Were He really wrapped around her brain, the sound would destroy her. Here, however, in their cozy little shadow-consciousness, it merely startled her.
TWAS NOT SO LONG AGO THAT HUMAN LAWS MEANT LITTLE TO THEE.
"Well, they mean something now."
BUT WHAT OF THE OFFERINGS RIGHTFULLY MINE? THOU HAST NEGLECTED ME SORELY, KISARAGI.
He made His wrath evident in the way He growled and flexed-- coiling in upon Himself, like a snake about to strike.
"I have," the thief bowed her head. "I have, and I'm sorry."
APOLOGIES WILL NOT SATISFY ME. I DEMAND REPARATION.
"Then how can I repay You?"
But Leviathan coiled and thrashed and rumbled, and did not reply for a long time. At length, He told His thief, LEAVE THIS SHADOW-WORLD. THOU HAST MADE THINE APOLOGY. NOW THOU SHALT REPENT. NEGLECT NOT MY OFFERTORY. OFFEND ME NO MORE. WITH SUCH SMALL THINGS SHALT THOU BUY MY FORGIVENESS, CHILD-WOMAN.
And He was gone.
>> doll-people
Yuffie opened her eyes.
Talking to Leviathan was always a hassle. He spoke in an ancient dialect of Wutaian. It was a dialect only priests and Kisaragi spoke with anything resembling fluency, and required years of teaching and practice to learn.
Even now, she usually had a hard time wrapping her brain around it.
"Neglect not my offertory," she mumbled as she descended the carved mountain. "Offend me no more."
In other words, she needed to make offerings. Probably lots of them. One for every offering she missed. THAT meant she would have to dig out her calendar and figure out the last time she'd made an offering to Leviathan. Probably it had been shortly after Crisis.
...Yipe, that was like four years of offerings.
She reached the bottom and bowed to Da Chao. That mountain was Da Chao's only altar. Any trek up it was, technically, a religious pilgrimage. This definitely counted.
Once in the city proper, she headed to her home and found her calendars. It had only been two years since she'd last made an offering, not four. But she was still in deep shit with her god, and she sighed.
The dust in her house whorled and danced in the light, and she almost smiled. It was funny, but everything about Wutai seemed unique to her. If she could have bottled the thin, sandy dirt that lightly covered the trails on Da Chao, she would have. It smelled different from any other dirt to her. The water tasted different, the air smelled different, even the dust looked different.
It was good to be home.
She sighed again and wrote down what she'd need to make up two years of offerings. There would of course be fruits, flowers, libations, food. And then would be sacrifices-- her blood to absolve her sins, her earnest sweat to show her repentance; the list went on and on. Candies and whimsical things to make Him happy, salt or saltwater to show Him she was sad. And wine, of course, wine for every wedding.
She was going to be busy during her leave.
Swathed in expensive fabrics, practically tied down by her clothes and loving every minute of it, loving the way the silk slid against her skin and made all her movements heavy and graceful, Choushou Sayuri looked like a painted doll on her throne. Her face was a perfect white, lips a perfect red, eyes unlined but shadowed with a red powder.
She held a tiny porcelain doll on her lap. As she pondered what to do with the worst fuck-up in East Wutai's history, she stroked the doll's hair. Observant people would have noticed that the doll's eyes blinked as she did so, and it gave the appearance of breathing.
The man kneeling before her wore a genuinely sorry expression on his face. His knees pressed against the floorboards, his arms spread out before him to press his palms against them too.
"Milady, I apologize for--"
He ducked his head to the floor, bowing prostrate before her as befitted the addressing of a future queen. Whatever her Eastern title was.
"Shut up," she snapped. "I don't see any reason to forgive anyone enough of an imbecile to let that fool escape from his prison. The latest Kisaragi is going to want my head for this."
He tucked his head even tighter against the floor, exposing his neck.
she made a simple gesture. Two men stepped out of the shadows and dragged the offender off by his shoulders. He screamed all the while, but Sayuri didn't much care.
Exactly how those two very good Sanada-Han ninja would deal with him didn't matter to her. They were free to do what they liked, so long as they didn't break any of her posessions or get blood on her very expensive carpets and tapestries.
She arched a brow at the wizened woman who sat on a stool beside her throne. "What will he do?"
The crone spoke in a harsh, cracked voice. "Die. It's all he can do."
"Not the idiot," Sayuri sighed, here, and the silk whispered as her chest heaved, "that old bat. The one who escaped."
"Only prisoner able to do that in over fifty years, granddaughter. He will revel a time. And then he'll do whatever he damn well pleases."
"Su Gang Wu," Sayuri spat. "Where will he attack first?"
"Impossible to say exactly. Somewhere in the East, definitely. Beyond that? I don't know."
"Then we'll find him." Sayuri smiled grimly. The expression was more menacing than amused. "And when we do, he'll rue the day he decided to escape."
In her lap, the porcelain doll nodded.
Su Gang Wu had no idea where he was. He had taken a ferry out of East Wutai, to Nibelheim. He remembered a time when such ferries were much harder to access, thanks to the suspicion between Shinra and Wutai. Now, however, it seemed that Wutai regularly whored herself out for the filthy Easterners.
"Tickets to Edge are so expensive," a young Wutaian woman complained. "You'd think that we'd work on building more commercial airships, not just those trading ones!"
Airships? Gang Wu pictured ships that sailed the sky. The picture was so fantastic that he simply had to see the real thing. Had to experience it for himself. He followed the woman to a ticket booth.
She could barely cover the fare to ride in an airship. He, on the other hand, had no such problems. After eyeing the currency that the entire world now accepted-- gil, you filthy whores, you're holding gil in your hands!-- he could easily manufacture it.
He passed the teller several very large bills.
"That pension finally come through, old man?" The teller chuckled.
"Yes," Gang Wu replied, seizing the boy's hand. He lifted it to his eye, calmly manipulating the energies around him so that the boy would go bald. "I predict hair loss in your future."
"That's fifty years from now, grandpa."
The energies stopped and changed their course once more. "Did I say hair loss? I meant no children."
As he walked away, the boy laughed it off. Soon, however, he knew the boy would find he had spoken in earnest.
Erectile dysfunction at such a young age. Feng Shuei really could be a bitch, couldn't it?
Abruptly, he stopped moving.
Edge suddenly didn't seem like such a wonderful place. If a priestess could not appease the Water-God within its paling, what possible use could the city be? Leviathan was not a destructive god, unlike Ifrit or Bahamut; He did not destroy unless necessary. Water was a life-bringer, not usually death's poor herald.
This Edge place, he decided, would have to suffer for its ungodly ways.