ff_exchange | 2014 Final Fantasy Kiss Battle

Final Fantasy Kissing Battle 2014

RULES

All prompts will be organized by fandom, using Master Links. When leaving prompts, please put it under the right canon! If in a compilation canon, please include 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 2014

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

At first, Celes notices what seem to be inconsequential changes in Kefka; though he is quite clearly present behind all operations of the Empire, he seems concurrently to be fading, slowly, into focused isolation. Clues show themselves in strange bits and pieces of disarray; Kefka often speaks in riddles, now, and his previously pristine quarters have become a disheveled packrat’s hovel. Today, he is wearing mismatched footwear. His eyes, once sharp and bright, seem to dull and hollow further by the day.

Celes--just newly seventeen--has proven herself to be the youngest and most efficient (deadly) General the Empire has seen as of yet. The assault on Maranda was almost flawless; Celes, though respected, can hear the whispers throughout the ranks of her men, how it was almost too easy, how the god-like power of Magitek is beginning to strike stray chords of apprehension, how she is secretly a monster. Terrifying. Inhuman.

“They’re frightened of you,” Kefka says, his voice soft and faintly melodic, and Celes knows that he’s referring to her soldiers, and not the test subjects surrounding them.

They’re in Lab #03-205B of Vector’s Magitek Facility, making small talk in isolation after having been administered a follow-up treatment of the very infusion which first gave them their powers. Celes’ forearm aches where the injection was delivered; she absently slides her fingers over the bandage there. They’re surrounded by specimens here. Glass and liquid and body parts, a veritable mausoleum of Espers, silent save for the faint bubbling of preservative liquid and the quiet humming of machinery.

Celes feels drawn to these disembodied pieces; feels an odd, thrumming pity. She places a hand against the cold glass of a holding tank; the specimen inside is dead, preserved in viscous, cloudy liquid. “Is it strange that I care more for these creatures,” she asks--in somewhat of a response to his statement-- “than I do for human life?”

Kefka laughs, quiet and hollow. “Is it stranger still that I care nothing at all for either?”

Celes looks at Kefka’s reflection in the glass. He stands behind her, a half-smile on his face, strands of loose hair falling messy from his ponytail. Even in the reflection she can see the dark circles under his eyes, the red where he’s rimmed them with some sort of paint.

“So silly,” he continues, “to be concerned with life so trivial.” He steps closer to lean his head in close to hers, squinting to scrutinize the shapes within the glass before them. His body heat floods her space, and the unsettling, unfamiliar feeling makes Celes feel smothered and yet strangely comforted at once.

“You see all life that way?” she asks.

“Of course, my dear.”

Celes turns from the reflection to face the real, breathing, uncanny flesh of him.

“You and I—are we not human, to you?”

He laughs, and Celes flinches, for now it’s a bit too loud.

“You and I,” Kefka says, “are more than human. Better than, in fact. Don’t forget that, Celes. Don’t let them make you forget that.”

Celes feels a chill in her gut as she realizes that yes, he is gone. If not gone, he is leaving, slowly but surely, by way of whatever mad science or misguided magic or Esper curse has wrought. She’s already heard the rumors about him, always has, and Cid has always told her that she’s different, that she’s not just an experiment gone wrong. She wonders, now, if anyone at all can see that he is dangerous. If anyone else would try to take hold of what lingering humanity may be within him, to put those pieces back together instead of trying to further deconstruct them with infusions, experiments, trials to see what else he can become.

She feels a strange urge to connect with the familiar, to keep it close to her even as it slips away before her eyes. She can remember the Kefka she knew as a child, sharp and intelligent and optimistic, fresh-faced and so willing to give himself over to the cause, the movement to bring back magic. She was a child, then, frightened of needles and big, cold machines, and Kefka had comforted her, assured her that it would all be alright, that she’d be strong one day.

Celes knows little of magic and fairy tales; she knows enough, however, to not expect a happy ending.

She leans in to press a kiss, hard and quick, against the corner of his mouth. His skin is cold, clammy. He is now a shadow of what she once knew, and she wonders if he will ever be the same. She wonders if she will be the same, or if she will one day change, like him.

Her arm aches where the needle punctured her.

"Please," she says to him, "do not change." She keeps her voice from wavering, keeps her eyes on the floor for but a moment before looking up to meet his own.

“And you as well,” he says, and the corner of his mouth twitches up into a crooked half-smile as he stares, blankly, straight through her.

Edited 2014-02-10 04:14 (UTC)

FDSALFHJDSKALHFJKEWALFJDSLKAHFJSKLA

HNGGG

I fricken love this! The atmosphere you've constructed for Vector is perfect - the creepiness of the lab, the way the other soldiers begin to gossip about Celes, the way Kefka gradually goes from a pristine soldier into the eccentricities we know of him in-game. I love that he's still rather lucid here, and that Celes is willing and interested in his philosophies! That's one thing I've always wanted to know about them - I think they'd have formed a connection due to their infusions, being the greatest success and biggest failure of the lot.

And I love how Celes is conflicted about humanity now - she feels more of a connection with the lab specimens than her fellow soldiers, but she still mourns the loss of Kefka's humanity! AUGH. There is so much subtlety to their relationship that just GETS ME GOIN' I dunno; it's one of those things where they've known each other for so long, and they both change so much over the course of their friendship/acquaintenceship/whatever and there's SO MUCH MORE POTENTIAL FOR SWEET, SWEET MELODRAMA THAT WAY. And this fic really captures a lot of that feeling. Celes' kiss here - the last of many over the years, or the first and only...? HNG. Yeah. This is awesome; THANK YOU!!

FHJFKDHSJKAFHJDFH THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS AMAZING COMMENT, I AM REALLY GLAD YOU LIKED IT :D :D :D

Oh my god, this is dark and beautiful and brilliant in so many ways - the visceral horror of the labs, Celes's complicated relationship with humanity and inhumanity in all their varied definitions (and the way she empathizes more with the Espers than human life!), Kefka's slow deterioration and the lingering traces of who he used to be, the way that both of them have been changed and are changing and can't stop it... Seriously, this is perfect. And those last two lines - well, the whole thing, really - are like a kick in the heart.

AHH THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I'm not even sure where this came from-- I haven't really written Kefka before, like at all, but this idea kinda took over my brain and I'm glad my first shot at him was successful!! I wanted this to be dark; I'm glad that worked!!

oh, god, yes. I love the way he's slipping away and becoming what we know; I love her sympathy and the contrasts between them.

Thank you!! :3

Gah, I love how dark and creepy this is, and the wrenching inevitability of it. "Do not change," ow heart ow.

Thank you!

2014 Final Fantasy Kiss Battle

What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost, Celes/Kefka, PG (Warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost, Celes/Kefka, PG (Warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)

Re: What Was Lost (FFVI, Celes/Kefka, PG, warning for needles and mental illness)