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ff_exchange2013-02-05 08:58 pm
ffexchange_mod) wrote in ff_exchange2013-02-05 08:58 pm
Entry tags:
2013 KISS BATTLE!
RULES
- This year, we're creating Master Links for each fandom. When leaving prompts, please put it under the right canon! If in a compilation canon, please leave the important details!
- To leave a prompt: leave one prompt per comment, with FANDOM: CHARACTERS/RELATIONSHIP in the subject line and your prompt in the body.
- To leave a fill: reply to the comment in question. Please use the subject line of your comment to label your work: TITLE (if relevant), FANDOM, CHARACTERS/RELATIONSHIP, RATING (ANY KINKS, WARNINGS, FLAGS).
- There should be kissing! All kinds of kisses are welcome: gen, shippy, smutty, chaste, familial, friendly, angry, happy! We’re pretty open to anything you want to call kissing. We are fans of all of it.
- Fanart, fanfiction, drabbles, doodles, live action movies -- whatever you want to supply, we’d like to have it.
- Be kind to others regarding character or ship choices and prompts. This should be fun for everyone!
- Prompt early, prompt often, and leave as many as you want.
- Prompts can be filled multiple times!
- To leave a blitzkrieg kiss: If you have something but no one has prompted it yet, blitzkiss away! Just reply to the comment for your fandom, and make sure you use the subject line to label your work.
- Be sure to check back often -- new kissing action could be showing up everywhere!
- Spread the word! Tell your friends!
FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2013
We will be running the Kissing Battle on Dreamwidth only. There are two main reasons for this: 1) Dreamwidth’s comment limit is huge, allowing for longer kissing masterpieces; and 2) Dreamwidth still supports subject lines for comments, which are vital to a meme like the Kiss Battle. However, the Battle is open to everyone. Feel free to participate with your Dreamwidth (account creation is invite-free right now~!), your Livejournal or other OpenID account (see here if you want to set up an OpenID), or anonymously.
Have fun! Get smoochin'!
FINAL FANTASY I
FINAL FANTASY II
FINAL FANTASY III
FINAL FANTASY IV COMPILATION
FINAL FANTASY V
FINAL FANTASY VI
FINAL FANTASY VII COMPILATION
FINAL FANTASY VIII
FINAL FANTASY IX
FINAL FANTASY X AND X-2
FINAL FANTASY XI
FINAL FANTASY XII COMPILATION
FINAL FANTASY TACTICS COMPILATION
FINAL FANTASY XIII COMPILATION
DISSIDIA: FINAL FANTASY COMPILATION
FINAL FANTASY: CRYSTAL CHRONICLES COMPILATION
ASSORTED FINAL FANTASY
CROSSOVERS (WITHIN FF)
CROSSOVERS (FF/OTHER)
OTHER / ASSORTED
Breaking the Silence [1/2] (Rydia/Edge/Kain, PG)
It's the shuffling as the undead rush to fight something other than him, and the echo of boot heels on stone. Kain knows most of the mountain's moods by now, its sounds and its seasons. His own presence impacts it; theirs brings more change.
So he is not surprised when they burst onto the summit, but neither does he go so far as to move to greet them. He waits beside KluYa's sanctuary, his spear at his side and uncovered. He doesn't think he will need to fight them, but one never knows, or so he tells himself. In truth, he does not know why they are here. He would think Cecil would do his own dirty work, but the part of Kain that King Odin tried to train into Cecil's eventual left hand thinks it's more deniable this way, and thus more logical.
Edge must have noticed, because he suddenly is standing between Rydia and Kain, and while he doesn't have his swords drawn here in the safe zone on the summit, he also doesn't have his hands far from the hilts. Rydia looks entirely unimpressed at his efforts to protect her.
"Greetings," Kain says, when they are close enough that he need not shout.
Edge rolls his eyes, visible even behind his veil. "Greetings? Really? That's what you have?" he asks.
Did his spear not make it impossible, Kain would fold his arms. As it is, he sighs quietly. "What did you expect? I can hardly lay a festival table up here," he points out.
Edge splutters. Rydia, to her great credit, does not shove him down the mountainside. "I think Edge was expecting a more enthusiastic greeting," she says mildly.
The awkward silence spins out between them, until at length Kain sighs and gestures with his shield-hand. "I have no proper seats to offer you," he says, "but you are welcome to what I have."
"Oh, we've got that covered," Edge says, swinging down a pack heavy enough to make a thud like a dead body. From within it, he produces a marvelous little folding table and several of the flat cushions that the Eblanese and Fabulian people alike favor. In a matter of minutes, he has set a table with journey rations and wine. Kain watches, astonished and uncertain of what to say.
"Are you going to join us, or loom disapprovingly?" Rydia asks, sinking neatly into a kneeling position on one side of the table.
Kain hastily covers his spear and leaves it propped against his tent, along with his shield. He is wearing only light ringmail--he does not need full plate up here, not with the safe field keeping the undead away, and whether they had come in friendship or enmity, he had not felt the need to fully armour himself. He kneels gingerly on Rydia's left, with Edge at his own left.
Another silence falls as they all stare at each other.
"Food first," Edge says, "and talk later."
When they had all traveled together, mealtimes would often be silent from their sheer exhaustion. Fighting an ancient evil was no easy task. Yet that silence had not been strained; this stretches out thin as spun glass, and as sharp when shattered. The hard bread they brought is fresher than what Kain trades for with the Mysidians, who bring foodstuffs to leave at the base of the mountain and take the reagants he harvested from the undead in return. He does not recognize the spices in the jerked meat, but it is not unpleasant. Rydia even unveils slices of dried fruit, wholly unfamiliar to him but sweet and slightly tangy, vividly yellow in colour and chewy.
When the wine has brought colour to all their faces and the food is gone, Edge clears his throat. Kain has been observing, and there is a tension between Edge and Rydia, and more that they carry with them like Edge's pack. He mislikes it.
"We aren't just here to socialize," Edge says eventually.
Sick dread gathers in Kain's stomach. "Cecil and Rosa?" he asks, already dreading the answer.
"No, nobody's hurt or ill," Rydia hastens to assure him. She looks away, fiddling with the hem of her sleeve. "It's more....I can't stand all the people, watching me."
"And I'm about done with being King," Edge says, and then glares at Kain. "Don't even say it."
In point of fact, Kain did not actually intend to speak aloud his thought that he is surprised it had taken Edge so long to declare frustration, but he is now perversely determined to speak it. Still, he respects the word of royalty, even potentially-abdicated royalty.
"We haven't left for good." Rydia says it very quietly into her empty cup. "I mean, we'll go back." She looks up and her green eyes are haunted and hunted, her shoulders curled inward. That isn't right. Rydia always stands tall. "Just not right now."
Edge doesn't say anything, but he's still--much too still. Edge has never been one to hold still when he can move.
Kain nods. "I am afraid my own accommodations are not suitable for multiple occupants," he said, "but there is much space here." It will be strange to have noise other than that he makes here. He is not sure that he likes the idea. On the other hand, he can hardly tell them to go when in fact they are doing much as he did. Traitor he may be, and a disappointment to all who know him besides, but Kain will not be a hypocrite--in this, at least.
"We brought tents," Edge says. "And sleeping bags."
Kain wonders how long they intend to stay, but says nothing. "Please, allow me to assist," he says instead.
Edge cracks a few inappropriate jokes as they set up the tents, but fewer than Kain might have expected; that, as much as anything else, speaks to the seriousness of the situation. Kain wonders what drove them here, but he is not boorish enough to ask.
Hours stretch into days, then a week; they speak little if at all, each caught up in their own thoughts. Kain finds it strangely comforting to have them there, reminders that there is a world out there that remembers him. Edge is an excellent cook, and Rydia and her chocobo are effective enough hunters to make sure that they never want for meat. They all avoid KluYa's sanctuary, and they all avoid speaking about anything other than basic necessities like food.
It is Edge who breaks first, ten days after their arrival. "It's not that I mind being King," he says abruptly, stabbing a bit of roasted hare with his belt knife. "It's that no one wants me to be King my way. They all want me to be my father."
Kain can think of several excellent reasons why Edge should not be allowed free rein, many of them including inappropriate suggestions, but however much sarcasm he might employ to the contrary, he is aware that Edge is capable of doing the job properly, if flippantly. "It is difficult," he says instead, "to be required to emulate someone with little thought to your own needs."
"Yes, exactly," Edge says. "I can be a good King. I know what I'm doing. I'm just not going to spend all day every day in a closed room talking to old men who think I'm stupid because they remember me in swaddling."
"At least they treat you like you're human," Rydia says, and gets up from their little folding table to walk away into the darkness.
Kain puts a hand on Edge's shoulder when he would have followed her. Rydia is quite capable of defending herself against anything that might attack her on the slopes of Mt. Ordeals.
Edge slumps a little. "That's it, too," he says. "They all treat her like she's a savage beast who will burn them all to death for an insult--which doesn't stop them insulting her when they think she can't hear--instead of a person. Who cares if she doesn't know the order of steps for formal court dances? It doesn't make her less of a person." He drains his cup of wine and puts it down with an exaggerated care that speaks volumes. "She doesn't want me to defend her, and they all think I'm abusing my power and womanizing when I want her to stay in Eblan--and I don't want her to stay if she's unhappy, but I can't leave."
Kain has no answer for that, and the silence spins out sharp and brittle until Edge gets to his feet and hurries into his tent, leaving Kain alone by the fire.
Three days later, he goes hunting with Rydia in the forest at the foot of the mountain, because she requested his company. He doesn't make small talk, simply goes with her and helps field-dress their spoils.
"I don't want to go back to Mist and be alone," she says, "but I can't stay there when they all watch me like I'm going to go on a mad rampage." Her grip is too harsh, and she snaps the snare she is trying to place. With an oath, she throws it aside. "I can't make them respect me, I know that. But being alone in a dead village is better than being alone in a castle of vipers."
Kain is at a loss. Even in Baron, and long before Golbez, black mages are feared; their power is destructive. "Do you want them to learn to respect you?" he asks. "Or do you merely want them not to insult you?"
Rydia stares at the branch she is bending. "I don't know. What is their respect worth?"
"I can't tell you that." He laughs, mirthlessly. "Why do you think I am still here?"
She looks up. In her green robes, she might be a forest spirit, found roaming free. Her face is thinner than he remembers, sharp planes and cheekbones like blades, and her eyes are dark as the shadows of the pine trees. She is beautiful and terrifying, a force of nature. He has the impulse to drop to his knees and offer her prayers, sacrifices, anything she would demand. He resists it.
"You have a home to go back to," she says.
He nods. "A home I tried to destroy--as I helped destroy yours," he points out.
She flinches. He would not blame her if she reached for her magic. She does not.
"It is not the same," she says, each word distinct.
He nods again. "I know."
They do not speak again for two days.