soul_logs | Numerous threads of fate entwined, bringing us here

Entry tags:

auron,
hyuuga neji

Numerous threads of fate entwined, bringing us here

Characters:: Neji, Auron
Location:: Auron's apartment
Rating: PG-13; alcohol, mentions of death and violence
Time: August 27th, early evening
Description: Two dead men have a talk about death.

It took him a few days to decide on a proper gift for Auron. He knew he had to get him something however, because Auron had done a lot for him in the past week. Letting him barge into his place and bleed over his couch, not to mention taking charge of the Watch while he recovered.. But the older man didn't seem to have much in way of hobbies, though he did know that his second was partial to alcohol.

With nothing else to go on, Neji wound up buying a few bottles of beer and making his way to Auron's apartment- this time without needing to be carried. He knocked shortly and waited, hoped Auron wouldn't mind the brief visit after everything he'd put him through. He'd leave the gift as he had for Kakashi's team, but didn't quite trust Auron's neighbors..

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It was a grave tale full of unmentioned hardships and at the end of everything, sacrifice. He understood sacrifice well, but to be forced to sacrifice one of your friends even for a greater cause.. If he'd ever had to make such a decision for Lee or Tenten..

He didn't know how long ago it had been for Auron, but it was clear ir still plagued the older man, as he expected it might.

"I see.. That must have been difficult for all of you."

"Yes. It was..."

Auron's throat closed up. How he possibly tell anyone about what happened? Being the only thing between Braska and Sin and the hordes of Sin Scales that wanted him dead? Of calling Jecht, the Final Aeon, and watching a monster render and tear at a larger monster. The victory of Sin's defeat as Jecht devoured him and Braska's body rebelled at the last. Fayth, he was screaming and there was pain and Braska didn't have any EYES any longer and Auron had to hold him down to stay with him until he was no more.

He couldn't say any of those things. He never could. It might have shown on his face. Just a terrible strain that looked like he should be screaming but the past choked off all sound.

Without a word, Auron took one of the beers and drained it dry before he started again. "Things continued. Everyone was happy because Sin had been defeated. Maybe this time it would work. But...I couldn't be satisfied. Not with what happened. So by myself I went back to the fayth that had engineered this transfer of power. I thought, maybe if she would talk to me, I could make some sense of my life and promise my friends that I'd watch over their kids. Except...that's not what happened."

It was a face worn by the tortured and there was no remedy. Such past horrors continued to haunt, found you in nightmares and even waking moments. Never really faded, only.. lessened in frequency over time.

Auron lost his friends, a large part of himself, and the world moved on, benefiting from sacrifices most likely didn't understand the true nature of. And that there was more to this than all of that..

"What happened?" he inquired gently after a lengthy pause. More of a prompt to continue than real curiosity. Auron needed this more than he had.

"I found out the truth. Sin was designed to never die. Anyone who became to Final Aeon and managed to defeat Sin in turn -became- Sin in its place, to keep the cycle going again. It was an ultimate tool of control so that all of Spira could be flattened down by the Church." Auron's tone became laced with bitterness. "They kept up everything with the pilgrimages because if you have pure drudgery, no one would want to live. But if you have a story of hope and have thousands and thousands of people give their lives for it, maybe someday if you just pray -hard- enough, things will be different."

He slipped off the shades, showing fully the right eye blinded by injury. "I had to listen to this fayth tell me these things. That the friends I had were lost for nothing. At that point, I was a healthy whole man. So. If you'd been told that your friends gave up their lives for no reason, what would you do?"

It was an abhorrent truth, that the peace of an entire world was built on a large-scale game of power over everyone. He knew enough about power, control and being helplessly under the heel of someone else that his own anger stirred underneath the surface.

And Auron had given up his two best friends for it. Neji looked over the man's blind eye without surprise, having already seen more than he wanted with his own.

"I'd do everything to combat such a system," he said calmly - too calmly. The battles were carved into Auron's skin. "And work to expose the truth with every fiber of my being."

It took a certain amount of determination, stupidity, and insanity to go up against power far greater than your own. He knew, because for ten years he'd waged such a war against his own clan. And for the deaths of two close friends to be meaningless.. well, that would certainly provoke such reckless abandon.

"A good answer. It's what I eventually remembered to do. But the first thing I did was a lost my temper and attacked the fayth. Which is like attacking a hurricane with your bare hands."

This part of the story came a little easier since it was just what had happened to him. He paused to eat and drink. "When I came to, I'd been wounded badly. Alone, I went back down the long, long way back." He still couldn't quite remember HOW he'd climbed down Mount Gagazet but he'd had nightmares for years.

"I met people who were willing to bind my wounds enough and give me a ride back to Braska's city. I managed to find someone trustworthy to give my promise to take Braska's daughter, Yuna, to an island far away from any politics. And then..."

He trailed off and folded his hands in his lap. He looked up, staring at Neji with one eye. "If I tell you this next part, you can never tell anyone else. As long as you live here. Can I trust you to keep this safe forever?"

He didn't doubt it. It would be very hard for anyone to control themselves after going through something so terrible, only to be told it was worthless and for nothing.

But Neji sat up a little more at the mention of Yuna. He'd known they were from the same world, but not her lineage. So she had been Braska's daughter, and Auron for some reason, gave her care over to someone else. She must have been young.

And now they came to this, a binding secret. But he's a shinobi, and a clan member with a valuable bloodline at that. He knew how to keep secrets and bury them so far down that not even blood or pain could release them.

"I promise," he said solemnly. "I'll bury it alongside the secrets of these eyes."

Auron let out a nervous breath and drank the rest of his beer. "It's this. In Spira, in addition to being able to summon aeons, Summoners also have a charge to pacify the dead. When anything dies in Spira, it gives off these...lights. They're tiny and they float around. The nearest equivalent on this world are called fireflies but they're not really that close. We call them pyreflies.

"When a person dies normally, the pyreflies drift over the body for a while and then go seek the Farplane. It's an actual place inside Spira and the pyreflies of the dead are there. If there's too much anger and resentment at death, the pyreflies of the dead form into creatures of danger. We call them fiends. Because of how Sin roams the Spira, so fiends cover Spira. A summoner can pacify the recently deceased and prevent them from becoming fiends."

Now he was coming to it. The one thing he'd never said to anyone but Tidus. Oh, of course his party found out about it, but he never told them. "There's a third option. One that normally sane people don't do because it goes beyond...so many things. Outside Braska's city, where no one could see, I...succumbed to my fatal wounds. At the...moment of death, I felt so cheated of everything and I knew that nothing would get changed if I couldn't have revenge. I couldn't change anything. So. I faded away but because I wanted to stay so badly...I did.

"People...people have names for that here. I've heard a few of them and they aren't kind. Revenant. Zombie. Undead. I became an Unsent. A dead man walking, only instead of being young, what I looked like now was a reflection of my soul. An old man. You can't tell if anyone is Unsent by looking at them. So now I could stay in Spira as long as I stayed true to my promises of revenge, to fix the world and to take care of Jecht's son."

So that was it. Auron was dead, had died and probably only lived as long as he had out of sheer will. It was why he'd left Yuna to someone else's care. But through some deep drive that rejected the state of the world, being the only person that knew the truth and could hope to fix all the wrongs he survived as some form of the undead.

A bit like the resurrected faces in their world, though it hadn't been their own wills that brought them back or guided them.

Neji looked over Auron, taking in the aged and worn appearance with new context. Little wonder why he'd asked him about the circumstances surrounding his death. He'd been there and suffered- still did to a degree.

"Did your world ever change before you came here?"

"I had to watch over Jecht's son, Tidus, until he became old enough. Jecht was still...aware inside Sin and we could talk to each other when he came around. We figured out a plan but Tidus made it happen." A glow of pride filled Auron's voice. "Ten years and more I stuck around and with the next pilgrimage, led by Yuna, I let them find out the truth in their own experiences. Jecht was freed from Sin and could be free to go to the Farplane. As was I.

"Until I ended up here. Alive." Auron snorted. "BREW has a sense of humor. When Yuna was here, she told me things were starting to change so I guess I did some good after all. Still...I wish my friends were here."

He sighed. Some part of him was always still -there- in that terrible moment of loss and always would be. He would deal with it as he'd always done. Alone. On his own. Until finally death came for him.

So it was Braska and Jecht's son that brought about the change in their world, guided by Auron. How fitting. And then the older man had wound up here.

But the yearning for his friends he'd fought so hard for was a loss even so. Inevitably, there were things they'd miss and people they'd never see again.

"It's not impossible," he reminded him and for the first time, wondered how old Auron really was. "But in the meantime, we're left in a strange position, no longer belonging to any world."

"Which brings me back to my original point of wanting to help you." There, with a goal and a focus, Auron could easily stuff all of his pain somewhere deep. It's what he'd been forced to do, to become someone so unbelievably hard in order to do what had to be done.

"I'm used to that feeling. It's normal but don't let it consume you. Let go the land you came from and trust that the people you left behind won't screw it up too much. So it leaves you of what to do here. Far as I'm concerned, keep doing what you're doing. You have a job, friends and a life here."

The atmosphere shifted back to something more closely resembling normalcy, and Neji nodded, leaning back with a drink. He really shouldn't down much more, or he might not be returning to Lee sober.

But he didn't think he'd ever let go of Konoha completely, too many memories of those trees and streets he knew intuitively. But Death City was his home now, and he did have faith in those he'd left his world to. Naruto, Hinata, Tenten, Lee.. would all carry his will forward.

"Yes," he agreed mildly. "There's still plenty of work to do."

And so long as there was work to be done, he'd spend far less time plagued by troubling thoughts. "I just hope Shibusen doesn't send all of us back to our deaths after everything."

"That's not up to us, Neji. Hearing how people get returned right where they came from, seems like, means the same for us." Auron, of course, had had far more time to accept this simple fact for being Unsent for so long. "If we win the war, we might get to stay or we might have to leave. Dwelling about it will keep you up at night. Accept the fact that every day you get now is a gift and it's going to get taken away from you eventually. For now, live."

Sobering advice, but sensible. Shinobi lived day to day in their own world, and he'd continue to even after death. But he sighed, knowing Naruto and Sakura would take it very hard. Lee would cry because he'd certainly know by that point, and there wouldn't be anything he could do for them.

It was difficult not to worry about it, but he'd work to keep from dwelling on the uncertainty that would always linger. Not to mention the inevitability of dying a second time even if they did stay. But here he had a future, which was more than he had in his own world.

"In any case, I'm free now," he said softly, reflective. "My seal is gone, and I'll be sure to enjoy it for as long as I'm able."

It was a sobering bit of reality, but Auron was an expert at providing that. The sooner Neji realized what he was in for, the easier it would be.
"Without the seal, what does it feel like?" Auron asked. "I don't have any special powers. Unless you count using a sword."

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Numerous threads of fate entwined, bringing us here

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