Title: Ghosts With Steel Shoes

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Final Fantasy VIII

Rating: T

Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VIII belongs to Square Enix.

Summary: And what a noisy thing she’s become. (Ultimecia, before, after.)

your golden hair Margarete--

your ashen hair Shulamith,

we are digging a grave in the sky,

it is ample to lie there.

She’s a neutral child, very vanilla and bland cracker colored that makes her family coo and coddle her. She always had exactly what she needed, in just the right amount, and never had anything particular to say to her relatives and one very dear brother. She wears her socks in pairs that match, keeps her hair pulled out of her face, and is sure to smile in polite company. Her mother braids her hair on Sundays, and slips a clutch bag with a stick of gum and a small notepad into her narrow-fingered hands. She should never be bored, not with such attentive family. She rides the bullet train to school by herself, and she rides it back without complaint.

But in her vanilla and rice cracker way, she is able to feel something of a resentment for these people, a small niggling and quiet thing that makes her smile a bit too widely. (“Enthusiasm and effort will make up for any lack of ability you have,” her grandfather says, a retired mercenary who is missing his left leg and most of the fingers on his right hand.) She tries not to think about it too much because she loves her family in that bland way of hers, which should be just enough.

The first thing she does that ever makes her feel less bland is on a Saturday, and it is doing no more than sitting next to her grandfather and father while they watch the news. But it is not news, not really, because the news has never been so interesting as to make close ups of round, perfect heart shaped faces with their gaping mouths screaming without sound. It is a televised execution, her grandfather had told her, of one of the sorceresses they had found hiding in Trabia.

“Heard the bitch was in a fishing village, gutting salmon and pike just like a man,” her grandfather laughs, plucking at his old ‘SeeD’ uniform jacket. Her mother admonishes him for cursing, but he just chuckles on. “Didn’t use a lick of sense, trying to outrun the dogs and the militia.”

For a while she sits and watches the television, ignoring her family and instead watching the brown eyes of the sorceress on the screen, wide and angry and afraid all at once. She felt that way once, when she dreamt that a Blood Soul was chasing her, clacking its bone teeth and breathing poison against the side of her face as she ran. There had been red Galbadian soil and the greasebrush that raises its black branch arms straight up to steal her oxygen, and she could feel. A million things thriving, a million things dying, all at once and she feels each piece that makes them up just as surely as the sun. It is suffocating in its intensity.

Clatter, clack, said the Blood Soul’s teeth. They were very sharp and dry from that side of her mind. (And they have whip tails, she thinks, just like the scientific journals upstairs show in glossy print and taskmasters from her fairy stories.)

Her heart had pounded and very nearly split within her chest, so great was her fear at the time. Where do small pale children go when there is no coverlet to wrap around her shoulders? Where does she go, with her saucer eyes and panting red mouth, except from the edge of her dream and straight off the bed?

But my eyes, she thinks, my eyes were never so round and dark and endless, like a great hole, as this lady’s. They are fathomless and so very cold with terror. Considering her own grey eyes, she does not think they could ever become so.

“Are they going to kill her?” she asks. She had though the Blood Soul would kill her so, why would this woman with the same face as her not think the same of the black uniformed officer next to her? “Are they going to kill her, Mommy? Because she looks very afraid.”

Her grandfather laughs (and he seems to do that too much), while her father and mother look at her oddly. She is usually such a complacent child and accepts everything with her little crescent smiles with small white teeth. When her father turns to answer, her grandfather cuts in, and her brother, only a few years older than her and shooting up like the ragweed in the backyard, looks almost ashamed.

But, she thinks, that’s silly, because there’s no reason to be.

“I hope she is scared,” says that deep gravelly voice that she is growing more uncomfortable with now. “I hope she’s terrified! I spent all my life chasing those crazy sorceress chits from Winhill to the Grandidi Forest when I went to Galbaldia Garden. Throwing fire, and ice, and all manner of venom and blades with their little hands...” At this he frowns, and feels his left thigh, stopping at the bandages. “Gotta get them while they’re young, like this little slut, before they learn how to do worse than that.”

“Watch your mouth, Dad,” says her own father, and she stifles a frown. He does not sound as angry as he should be. She does not understand why her granddad says such mean things. It’s quite silly, she thinks, because women don’t breath fire. Just dragons and grendels.

“It seems cruel,” her brother says. “This lady’s only a bit older than me.”

“Son, it doesn’t matter how old they are,” her father says diplomatically, sounding uncomfortable and stretched between the space that his son and own father inhabit. With childish meanness, she hopes that he breaks and has to be put back together, in a more interesting way. Her father is just as bland as she. (Or so her relatives tell her.) “ They’re a threat to our security and happiness, and the government has to know when to decide that the lives of several are more important than the lives of one.”

“She was just fishing and mending nets,” her brother says, nettled. “I would hardly say that she was out in a bloody frenzy, taking out men, women, and children, left and right.”

“But they always do eventually,” says grandfather, in that superior tone that nettles her just as much as condescension does to her brother. It always means that she will not get her way, or that she will be passed up as a child. She has ears, and she hears, no matter what might be said to the contrary. “Those sorceresses turn their head sometime, and then someone’s dead if they weren’t stopped before it had a chance to happen.”

“So we kill them on the off chance that they become addled by all the constant bias against them?”

They continue in this manner, but she yawns and turns to the television again, watching as the young woman is strapped into the chair with the clever metal ridges and cold gleam. Every muscle in the woman’s arm straining against the leather cuffs, trying her best not to touch anything. Her yellowed hair is stringy and ragged in her face, but not quite enough to cover those pits in her face that a medical book showed would lead to a skull and soft, soft flesh. People are just different kinds of animals, and she can see that wildness through the grains on the screen and across a great distance to a room of spectators.

Everyone in the room turns to the screen, arguments falling quietly away in the face of the officiate moving towards the switch, and for one moment, she tastes blood on the lip that she didn’t know she was biting, because there’s no point in worrying yourself when you can’t hear anything.

Electric chairs make bodies bend into beautiful arches, ones that break spines and shattered wrists. Her mouth is open, she notes, but there’s no sound, and it is positively disorienting and heavy on her ears because there should be something buzzing around her head and in the shallow spaces between her ribs and vertebrae. (She could count them, one two three four, nine, twelve, twenty-four, so aware of herself she is.)

It is a cold death, and despite herself, with grey eyes that are not at all like her dark and endless ones, she wraps herself up and can taste the copper and steel of lightning on her tongue, while something inside her says, ‘this will be you.’

She’s a very vanilla and rice cracker girl, and when her parents are satisfied and her grandfather near delightful, she allows herself to be taken up to her room where she will sit still and let her pale brother brush her ash-colored hair (not even so gold as to be blonde, but white and gray and just as burnt smelling as though she had lit the fire herself). She will crawl into bed, and pretend to not think of her back arching up, a perfect half-circle of pain, from the mattress, and instead will smile softly and roll away from her brother’s side of the room.

She has never considered it problem before, that at eight years old she would share a room with her fourteen year old brother because there’s just not enough room and money for them to be apart. She will not learn to dread his presence and gentle snoring until now, when all she wants to do is breathe carefully and keep her back straight and stiff.

herr God, herr Lucifer,

beware.

beware.

out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

and I eat men like air.

The stone is old and crumbled, which is actually a fabrication because there is no coherent time here; she has made it so. It is a blasted piece of masonry, seared and burnt from fire and thunder alike and if she sticks her nose close enough to the pits and pockets of the marble, she can smell the electricity and heat as though it were on her very skin. She likes to see the stone dragon this way. It makes the pathway seem more interesting.

She is easily bored. A week later she will break another chunk of it off, like this is somehow essential. “Now it iz only half a dragon!” she will laugh, and press her hands together. “It can become like me, and hide it’z teeth in it’z empty breast and again in the throats of otherz.”

But for now, she smiles and breathes the dust of the broken clawed limb. There would be moss on it if she could but leave it alone, stop playing with the clock and pushing the hands back and forth like a child with idle hands. (But unlike a child, her meddling will actually do something. “Ultimecia continues to alter as she feels fit,” a commander says from over the airwaves. “She’s no better than any self-serving animal.” Ultimecia laughs and changes the radio waves to something she finds more pleasing. Swingsters of the great wars, long dead and forgotten, play over it.)

Ultimecia is a striking woman, not a bland child, no, never bland because that would be boring, and no one is quite as interesting as herself. She needs no other and wants no other because everyone other than her and her ash colored hair and sorceress yellowed eyes are predictable. She dances, they frown. She breaks them, they scream. She wishes, over the dead body of a SeeD cadet, white and beige and as bland as she has come to believe that they are, that one would just laugh at the excruciating feeling of her magic breaking their spine.

(“Life iz abzurdity!” Ultimecia says, smiling. The young cadet screams at the rocks being added until her chest caves in. “Iz it not funny that I watched thiz happen to another woman on the televizion not yet two hundred yearz ago?”)

The body left behind is far more interesting than the person that it had been only a few short hours ago. Already the sorcery of the castle affects it, transforming it, until she can see the bones beneath the skin brittle and white underneath all that blue and purpled veins. The castle always changes things to please her, a good caretaker for her mind. She must always be entertained, and the very masonry and metalcraft that makes her seat heaves itself to and fro until things are different and she can again be happy.

“Make me a tower,” she said to the power in the earth and sky, “One that haz many windows and doorz zo that I may lean my steel hair out for people to climb up and rezcue me.” She laughed then, watching the chain links rise from out of the dust. “But of courze when zey get up I shall eat zem.”

The girl’s hair had been brown, dark, like the native people of Centra, the elder clan that spoke in things like breezes and mountain sighs. She has already forgotten the woman’s eyes, looking out at her from beneath the rocks. (“Come now girl, thiz iz when you say zomething cheeky, like “More weight.” ) Long ago, Ultimecia might have held her like a small child and asked to be told of the older things of the world, the broken nation that called down demons from the moon and left little but piles of bricks and arches that go nowhere in particular. “Tell me, what did the moon god hide beneath the sea, in the green coral?” she might have asked. “Tell me why he sets the mighty Bahamut upon the broken city.”

Today, instead, she reaches one taloned hand, predator eyes shaking back and forth, searching for something in the broken line of her back, in the ruptures from ribs breaking through skin to wink at her bloodily. Here lies the valley of my home, she decides, which I have long since blackened with my name and a storm. In the number of stripes she has painted from the eyebrows down, she can count the number of cities she has broken down like toy castles, but still she counts home as the red smear across her left breast.

Her father or someone that looked like him (she can’t bother to tell anymore; humans look all the same) had arched beautifully when at first the lightning struck him. He arched so wonderfully that he broke himself in half. In the madness of her adolescence, she had practiced making that perfect half-circle in the musty sheets of a backwater hotel near Timber. So new to her sorcery was she that she had already planned exactly how she would look when the SeeDs caught her, how she would make herself bend on that dread table they pinned the sorceresses her family had called sluts on. “Come on and spread me like the whore you think I am,” she said to the ceiling. “You can beat the magic out of me if you need to, I won’t mind!” A year later she goes back home and razes it with her fevered hands.

Time is unmeasured in Ultimecia’s castle. She does not remember when the sorcery took her. She only knows now that the stronger she becomes, the less likely she is to be that woman on the table with the ‘o’ for a mouth. She likes lots of noise and raucous, because when it is quiet it feels like she is again in that den with her family with the television on mute, listening to white noise that she supposes counts for screaming somewhere.

Again prodding the body of the SeeD girl with one carefully booted foot (supple fawn leather, the kind that absorbs and hardens and stains easily), she hopes that the castle will transform her into something dreadful. She has an appetite for monsters this evening.

Clatter, clack go her boots.

End

A/N: The first quote is from “Fugue of Death’ by Paul ‘Celan’ Antschel and the second from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath.