Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If I stop moving, It’s over. I’m dead.

The barometer plummets. Blustering gales kick up debris from the street: loose pebbles, chip bags, faded propaganda posters, lost pet flyers. The alleyways turn to wind tunnels as dogs panic, baying in their restraints. Among the refuse a shadow sprints, sheltering beneath awnings, pushing forwards, dodging the mist. Calling someone’s name. Its thoughts pulse with whatever mysterious thing she said earlier in the day, before the deluge. Something about pressure in the sinuses, brain fog, clumsiness. Watch for the annoying flicker out of the corner of your eye, she said, the kind that spreads across your vision. A scintillating net cast over a lake besieged by algae; it’s yesterday’s curse come a-knocking. Distracted, the shadow makes the mistake of becoming corporeal. He trips into a pot hole, landing headfirst into stagnant water. The sewage is deeper than deep.

There’s nothing left for you here, child. See how this planet makes you ache? Come on home, now. You know how to find me.

On any other day, he could lift a train car with one arm. Now, it feels like he’s been stretched to the very limit, with every sinew unwound from his bones before being haphazardly stitched back together. A presence like a ball and chain hovers around him before wrapping around his torso. It pulls him further into the endless muck. He reaches out, through the darkness, to a sibling, and feels no one. The emptiness would have brought him to tears, had he any energy at all. Suddenly, the shackling presence hisses, unlatching itself from him. And the world is scorched by light.

It burns – Mama, gods, planet – it burns! I’m on fire!

But once again, it’s just water. There’s no sizzling, collapsing I-beam to leap from, nor any screeching descent from the heavens. He’s already on the ground, in his bed. A chorus of raindrops laugh at his suffering, fading into white noise as he wakes. The fluorescent street lights sneak in through the worn frosted glass window, bathing the room in a sickly yellow glow. Loz shudders. At last remembering who and where he is, he gathers all of his dwindling vigor to roll away from the window, groaning. Sitting up isn’t even a consideration. So much for a vessel of strength. His voice crackles in his throat, full of morning phlegm and woe.

“It hurts.”

An affirmative “mhm” slips from behind the old CRT. Yazoo is helping Kadaj with something in the kitchen. The microwave drones over the sound of popping oil. Whatever it is, Loz hopes he can somehow eat it without moving.

He drifts in and out of consciousness, repeatedly being jostled awake by lightning bolts of pain down his legs, his spine. He tries to give up on rest, but the fatigue is overwhelming. From beneath his heavy eyelids, he watches his siblings approach, flanked by a variety of lovely smells. Yazoo climbs over him, careful not to spill whatever herbal cocktail she’s crafted this time. Her gaze is distant as she finds her usual spot nearest to the wall. She stirs her drink with machine-like precision. Kadaj sits on the floor, at the head of the mattress with a bowl and a plate in his lap. He holds a strip of bacon to Loz’s mouth.

“Eat,” he commands.

Loz leans forward – against the desires of his willful, knotted muscles – nibbling on the edge as a test. It’s perfectly crunchy and not too greasy. Just how he likes it. He smiles, taking a larger bite.

“Nuh-uh. Don’t start with that,” Yazoo says. Her stirring intensifies, the sound of metal on ceramic bouncing off of the apartment’s cramped concrete walls.

Kadaj continues to hand-feed his brother with a defiant look on his face. “You’re so mean! He’s sick.”

“He’s playing it up. That’s what he wants.”

“So?”

Yazoo shakes her head, tapping her teaspoon on the lip of her mug. She no longer protests, opting to turn on the television to distract herself. As she swallows the first, near-boiling gulp of tea, a weatherman announces the upcoming three days of rain. It’s a record amount, he says, neverbefore seen, not since the Meteor kerfuffle. He laughs because the only other option is dread.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Loz mumbles through a mouthful of instant oatmeal. “I swear.”

“Close your mouth,” Kadaj says.

“Nobody’s killing anybody,” Yazoo reassures.

The weatherman goes on to describe inflows and squall lines and all sorts of language unfamiliar to the average eight-in-the-morning weather channel viewer. Stay tuned, our reports on the historic typhoon approaching Wutai’s coast is up next. At 9:30, the melting ice caps of the North Pole. Don’t worry, the world is still ending, just a bit slower than usual. Yazoo flicks to Saturday morning cartoons. An episode of Stamp and Friends is reaching its climax, and Loz is hit with an unsettling bout of déjà vu. He refuses the next spoonful at his lips, settling into as comfortable of a position as possible for the long haul.

Kadaj, satisfied with his work, finishes what Loz did not, and returns to the kitchen. Pots and pans clatter as he stacks them in the sink. Mis en place was never his strong suit. Loz’s back twitches and he curls in on himself further, absentmindedly watching Stamp outrun a white hydra with glinting black fangs.

“Three days,” Loz says, writhing a bit.

“Mhm."

“I don’t know if I can take it.”

But of course, with his buddies at his side – and moral support from his commanding officer – Stamp can achieve anything. The officer relays the good news: the hydra is not a hydra at all. It’s just a regular old dragon, trying to look more threatening than it actually is. Stamp and Friends conduct their attack, and with the middle head gone, the dragon collapses to the ground in defeat. A rainbow crosses the sky and flowers bloom triumphantly across the city.
Kadaj pours grease down the drain, tapping his foot like mad, muttering to himself about the gonads required to rub a victory in their faces via a kids’ cartoon. When Stamp begins his usual pre-commercial monologue, Yazoo makes note of the endless child-friendly metaphors for the dramatic weather, the thinning fabric of society. She scowls, turning to the next channel. The change in audio seems to help Kadaj relax. On the screen now is a psychic who advertises etheric healing sessions for geostigma victims. Her ringed hands, tipped with stiletto nails, hover over a worn out, misshapen shard of materia. She promises with Piscean eyes a spiritual cleansing so robust, you’ll walk away glowing. Loz notices Yazoo’s tremor as she sets the remote beside his head.

“Yaz, how do you put up with it?”

Yazoo finishes her drink with a wry smile. She rises from the floor with a pained grunt, places the cup atop the television for Kadaj to swipe in his cleaning frenzy. Kisses her index finger and taps it in the space between Loz’s eyebrows.

“I need to shower. I’ll be right back.” She disappears into the hall.

Loz is left to watch the psychic ramble about her clients’ success stories. No more nightmares! This person’s cyclic vomiting stopped within a week! That guy’s seizures, gone in a month! Clear your body from all entity attachments and feel whole again, today. While supplies last, no results guaranteed. Loz wishes he could be so lucky. A healer’s touch would only hasten his death.

“Nobody’s dying.” His sister's voice echoes in his head. The sound of water on tile mimics the pouring rain outside. Humidity wafts through the cracks in the bathroom door – she must be scalding herself red. Loz hopes there’s some warmth to spare when she comes back.

Chapter Text

Yazoo sits beneth the steaming water with her back to the wall, her face in her hands as she laughs, mirthlessly. How does she put up with it? She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes until a flare of sparks engulfs her vision. Big mistake, sitting down in here, she tells herself. Now it’ll be impossible to get up.

Strangely enough, a shower is one of the only things that eases the aching. She once joked to her brothers that whatever rust and calcium buildup coated the pipes must counteract the magic water from the sky. It was funny at the time. Now remorse rises like bile in her chest – for scolding Kadaj, for making assumptions about Loz’s refusal to move. It’s not his fault that drugs don’t affect him. None of this is his fault – their battered bodies, their lonely new life, the weather.

The weather. The damn weather. Yazoo considers popping her eyes from their sockets to relieve the pressure, as sedation turns to dissociation, and memory spills from her subconscious like a burst dam.

The first time it rained like this, Yazoo had killed three people: Cloud, Loz, and herself.

Sheltered beneath a debris-strewn parking garage, hiding from the corrosive mist that increased in breadth and intensity, she and Loz spied on two people they believed to be their brothers; brothers who battled fiercely in the crumbling ruins of Old Midgar. As swords clashed and buildings toppled from the force of the fight, a deeper understanding began to well up to the surface. Yazoo’s stomach dropped when, in her minds eye, she caught sight of a spirit-like wisp at the shoulder of the larger combatant. Kadaj had succeeded in initiating reunion. Mother was right in front of their eyes, using him, taking beatings from the false-brother with the knowledge that she would be fine – her own child would be the one to suffer the consequences. Then there was false-brother, who was not made like them, not from her will. The one born to the planet, to a mother and father who saw him to adolescence, to a world that – no matter his personal suffering – would always welcome him with open arms. So he fought for that world. And Mother failed.

Like her children, she became weakened to the point of dissolution. Reunion was a farce. Every breath that Yazoo and her brothers took, every tear, every drop of blood shed was pointless. Mother muttered something to that bastard before wrapping herself in her wing, curling into the fetal position as she hovered in ominous smoke. The sun-punched hole in the sky made her shimmer.

From Mother’s falling shroud of feathers: a body. Small and wretched and confused. Kadaj was barely able to stand. He stumbled around, wailing, before collapsing into his attacker’s arms. His limbs and head flopped back like a weighted doll.
Yazoo had never felt such rage. She checked herself repeatedly to make sure the sensation was truly hers, and not another absorption of Loz’s excess. It took nearly all of her dwindling will to bite back an unholy scream.

Kadaj was crumbling into dust and their false-brother had the gall to look upset. The rain stung like nothing else; the earth stunk of fresh lilies. He did this. Mother did this. In that moment, Loz and Yazoo shared their final conjoined thought: there was no one in the universe who would care for them. She snatched the gun from Loz’s holster, grabbed his hand, and dragged him to the top of the building – inch by agonizing inch. He mumbled something about blowing the world to smithereens, his hair lighting up with crackling electricity. Yazoo didn’t have the wherewithal to respond. In that moment, burning with unadulterated fury, she had only one goal. She would blast that pitiful human’s heart from his chest. She would take all of her brothers with her to hell if it was the last thing she did.

Yazoo looks down at her wrinkled, reddening fingers. Grounds herself. Traces her line of sight up her left arm, the long burn that mars her shoulder and upper torso. Massages the tension from her thighs and calves with a knuckle. This is her body – now and forever. How the rain tears it apart is all a grand prank, pulled by the planet. An apt punishment for her family’s most glaring sin: having a will to live.

“Yazoo!” Kadaj shouts, banging on the door. “Stop using all of the hot water!”

And what a life it is. Yazoo hangs her head and giggles into her bare chest. She really shouldn’t have sat down. At least the tea’s kicking in. She reaches forward, twisting the faucet to a screeching close, then braces herself on the wall to peel herself from the mildewy tile.

The bathroom mirror is blessedly destroyed – reduced to dust during one of Loz’s one-man riots against a fading nightmare. Kadaj was pissed at him for days afterwards. Yazoo remains quietly grateful, as she can’t help but see that terrible woman’s face any time she passes by her reflection. Only bits and pieces of her can be viewed through the tiny slivers of glass that remain. How fitting. She dries off while debating the hairbrush - alongside all of its tangled threads of silver - that balances precariously on the lip of the sink. With a nasty grimace at the energy required to do any sort of grooming, she opts to twist her hair into a towel.

A wall of cold air strikes Yazoo upon leaving the bathroom. Immediately, she feels her muscles spasm and tense again. She takes a deep breath in a futile attempt to relax, buttoning her shirt up to her neck to protect it.

Back in the common area, Loz stares, expectantly, at her slow approach. Kadaj continues to make himself busy, obsessively stacking plates and lining up silverware on the little drying rack. An alien memory flashes in Yazoo’s mind, of a sleek cafeteria in a tower that looms above the city. Of her hands fidgeting incessantly with a tray and a knife as someone across the table speaks in careful, hushed tones. Order was her brother’s thing – what was she doing, again? Where is she? Loz’s attention-seeking cough snaps her out of it. She blinks away the vision and presses onward, towards the mattress.

“Are you still warm?” Loz looks up at her like a kicked puppy, expecting refusal.

“Yes, yes. I’m still warm. Not for long, if you don’t move over.”

He nearly bounces in excitement before thinking better of it. He rolls over twice to put his back against the wall, inviting Yazoo into the comforter with an outstretched arm. When she finally makes her way to the floor, he presses his face against her hastily-wrapped hair.

“I dried my ass with that,” Yazoo says.

“Ew!”

“I’m joking. I only put my ass near my own face.”

Loz still shifts away with a suspicious glare.

The television shows a vivid jungle full of odd noises and colors – somewhere called Gongaga. The narrator, in flowing prose, describes a brightly colored bird, as it dances in seductive circles for a disinterested potential mate. Yazoo scowls.

“You were really watching this?”

Loz audibly perks up. “Yeah!” He pouts, a bit embarrassed by his own excitement. “It’s cool. For real. Did you know that those birds were once, uh, pandemic? To the northern continent, but everything’s changing, so their grandparents started to travel to south to have all their kids. So they don’t freeze from all the new snowfall, from the melt, you know. And now they go back and forth.”

“Endemic. What thrilling information. This planet and its inhabitants are truly wondrous.”

Drained by the single display of emotion, Loz yawns into his next words. “Maybe a little.” He gingerly rests his head on Yazoo’s shoulder.

For some reason, those words sting. Grief and remorse come flooding back into Yazoo’s heart. The warm, suppressing feeling from the tea is the only thing keeping her from sobbing.

“I’m sorry I was short with you and Kadaj. Earlier.”

Drowsiness tinges Loz’s voice, making it grow slower, softer. “You don’t have to say sorry to me.”

You liar, she wants to say. I killed you. I’d do it all over again, if it meant we could really be free. I’m the most sorry one out of us all. No words come out.

Kadaj now paces the kitchen, searching for something to do, finding nothing in particular. Every once in awhile, Yazoo catches him glancing at their embrace with sparks of jealousy. She doesn’t know how to atone for that, either.

“I’m tired," Loz says.

“Mhm.”

“You always say that. Mhm. I’m sorry. Nobody’s killing, nobody’s gonna die.”

“This is true.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Kadaj has finally sat down, and as he picks at a scab on his arm, Loz makes a firm, yet fatigued admission.

“I don’t think you’re mean,” he whispers. “You turned on Stamp, even though it ended up being that one dumbass episode.”

Yazoo couldn’t help but snort at that. “Go to sleep. You can barely talk.”

“It hurts.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say something else!”

She strokes her chin, humming and pursing her lips like a philosopher deep in thought. “I’m not sorry,” she concludes.

Loz lets out a single, breathy laugh, before relaxing fully against her back and drifting off to sleep. The diverse sounds of the jungle, the soothing drone of the narrator, and the reprise of Kadaj’s rhythmic tapping on the linoleum fill the room, causing Yazoo to follow suit minutes later. When they wake, neither of them will feel rested. But, if only for a short while, they allow the pain to abate, and for the hour to remain blissfully dreamless.