Inner Universe

By The Queen of Blueberry Toast 

Final Fantasy IX isn't mine.  I didn't make any money from this fic, I 
just really enjoyed the game and figured there weren't enough fanfics 
for it so... >).  Inner Universe is the opening for GITS:SAC, which
I had blaring in the background as I wrote.  

~*~

They were both dead.  The creeping mist that clung still to the inner 
walls of the Iifa tree had rotted them away.  Only the white of their 
bones and the dark stains of their man-made blood marked where they had 
lain, or close to that place, for the seething tendrils that held them 
had already born some of fragments of their bodies apart.  Here and 
there a pale shaft graced the bark, here and there the arc of one rib, 
and the empty sockets of Kuja's skull watching over it all from the 
place where the parasitic vines that sipped the earth in tandem with 
the writhing tree had bound over them, fixed his sightless gaze.

Or they had been sightless.  At first.  Days upon days sped past until 
he realized he could feel them plucking at some fragment of his self, 
though there was nothing else for a long, long time save the sense that 
he was not alone. 

More time.  By the lavender light that still crept through the twining 
trunks watched his beautiful body turn to mush.  He watched too, awed 
now that he could not want, at peace with his formlessness amid the 
calls of unfamiliar birds gathering outside; brilliance, sunsets without 
end in the heart of Iifa where the sun hadn't shone for so long.

And now he, in death, had become part of the tree's sleepy movements at 
last.  As alien as its fibers were to the land that fed them, the 
heartbeat of the world outside still trembled, still burst at times, 
still flowed and bubbled here, and it, like him, felt only peace, though 
much more bitter than his own.  In some ways.  He wasn't surprised.

While his flesh still lingered, the unsettled creaks of the Iifa tree had 
born Jitan's body away from his, down into the shadows that swept the 
glisten from his gaping torso.  He had not presence enough to mind, not 
more than vaguely.  The tree though, with no thoughts to guide her, let 
her workings follow the mindless minds of a true plant.  There was more 
of the faintly distorted sunlight up above, and so the same tendrils that 
had born his brother away brought him back in time.  

Naked now as they could ever be, without even blood to swath their bodies, 
Kuja and Jitan sat together, two skulls, side by side in a tree fighting 
to find meaning.  They knew no such worries themselves.

It took him two glancing sweeps of the moon outside before he could form 
the words, and his voice still fell thin and gauzy through the restless 
cathedral all around them, though no echoes ruined the sound. "It's so 
quiet.  Not even Terra was this quiet." 

As the sun rose, or the light writhed with some other force, manifesting 
just the same to they two, his brother answered at last.  "Terra was quiet? 
That's strange, I don't remember that, but I remember being there."

"I suppose Terra was only quiet for Terrans, and you won't call yourself 
one in the end.  Anyone else? I don't know what it would have done.  But I 
was never you, as much as I wanted to be."

Months passed.  The skulls lay silent.  Gaean moss grew like an emerald 
fire over the trunk outside but neither paid it much attention.  Dust came, 
but none of it clung to them.  

He knew Jitan was rolling something over and over in his mind, or what of 
his mind had not crumbled to amber silt.  He could almost hear the flashes 
of consideration, though no body supported them anymore.

"Why?" he finally asked, and Kuja took all of winter- or what of winter 
they could know cradled in the desert where Iifa still hung, sucked, 
aimlessly grew -to answer.

"I wanted to be you because you were like me.  The girl? That little girl 
that Garland made too.  She wasn't.  Just you.  My brother.  My brother so 
alike me I wanted to rip his throat out and drink him down so I would be 
alone with him always.  And when I couldn't make myself do that, cast him 
away on this thumping, little world."

"I'm sorry."

"For what? So we knew the man who made our destiny, and mine was to die 
all along.  Because it rubbed off on you at the end... what's to be sorry 
for? You never had a time without that certainty.  I did, and I'm still 
not sorry."   

Jitan didn't know.  The silent spring slipped that through their 
certainties, or something somewhat like certainties.  Kuja began to think 
often about the vines, then into the vines.  Something of his essence  still 
must know how to move them, but no, Iifa would hear nothing of it, no matter 
how much his heart sang.  The tree and the things that made the tree- none of 
them belonged to him anymore.

"You're trying to get closer to me," his brother pointed out with a tiny sigh 
that shattered both midnight and dawn.

"Why not? Maybe then I won't have to shout.  Maybe my thoughts will just drip 
over yours."

"It's worth a shot."

Weeks passed, nothing near them moved, least of all the cradles of their 
remaining selves behind their leafy chains.  The chains only grew stronger, 
and like ancient ice began to set, this for all their living, whispering 
warmth.  

Jitan tried first to follow the sappy veins with his mind.  It was his 
musings that he could see a spider starting to spin on the far off shelves 
of their tree-chamber's wall that he sent straight into his elder brother's 
mind.  Kuja couldn't see the spider himself, but remarked on the end of 
his reply.

/The mist traces are finally subsiding I think./

Jitan didn't answer, but he knew, he KNEW he thought they had been gone 
long before.

/No... no I don't know why there's a little here yet, besides for us to 
watch./

Night came, and neither of them saw anything.  If there had been a spider 
who dared cross the threshold of Iifa's heart, she was gone by morning, 
probably sick or ready to be thought mad in whatever ways that spiders knew 
how to speak with one another.  

Kuja didn't know any, but he dreamed them up in the cooing silence, and 
spoke them through the vine which silent still clung to him.  His thoughts 
trailed off in time, but the tiny leaves burst lush, lush as ever, even as 
summer once more burst through the desert, and they, with no way to keep 
track of time and no remembrance of unadulterated sunlight, knew nothing 
of it.

/How can I be in love with you?/ Jitan asked.  /Do you know that? Does it 
have to do with how spiders speak? I want to know, but.../

/...I don't, because the only answers are spun by those who know nothing of 
us.  We were built to live in the inner universe of one deluded man who 
isn't hear to answer for us anymore.  So you love me.  So Gaia will one day 
die like Terra did and chances are, we'll still be here./

If emotions had been truly left to them, the silence which passed between 
the two skulls would have been purely embarrassed, perhaps, a little haughty 
in the traces of Kuja's aura.  It lasted only as long as the stutter in a 
human conversation this time.  The mist about them was still alight when 
thoughts once more between them flew.

/So now we can't do anything about it, we have our own universe.  I guess 
that's nice./

/I guess so too, little brother./

/You know, I was imagining for awhile there.../ Though "there" was months 
ago.  /...that I kissed you before I died.  I should have.  I was thinking 
about it, you looked so peaceful./

/And that would have gone away if you'd kissed me./

With no throats, they could not laugh, or even send the feel of it between 
them, but just the same, their world bounced like a soap bubble, bearing in 
it faint reflections of what they meant to have yet.  The plan formed in 
instants  and drew them in too fast- like a black hole, like a pit of white 
at the end of the field of a starry sky.

They coalesced together, the brothers- two ghosts, translucent and nude, one 
wrapped in a flurry of silver hair, and one's face framed by golden floss.  
Their tails touched, pale and paler shadows in the gathering organic must.  
Arms followed, some of the ectoplasm melting together down to the holes of 
air where their bones should have been.  The bones of course, lay where 
they lay.

Their lips met in a hot shiver, memory on memory on memory not theirs, 
stretching back into times neither of them could have known or cared for them.  
If there had been moisture still theirs, it would have been a wet and sloppy 
kiss.  For now, it was dawn only, feathers only, innocent and vile and rending 
for their holds on one another and their apparitions intertwined.  

***

When Kuja woke, he was lying in a pool of old blood, feeling very corporeal and 
sleepy.  He drew himself up along one of the gloaming gashes and faced a morning 
far removed from the last he had forgotten to savor.  Neither skull remained.  
There were prints of another body outside- footprints, hand prints.  As if they 
beckoned, he followed them.  The pads of his feet felt as if there were daggers 
in them, but he walked anyway, still unfamiliar with pain.

Jitan sat on one of the lowest roots.  The desert had eaten itself up.  Only 
green and water vapor remained where it had died.  "So," he asked, "whose 
universe is this?"


~*~

Fin