#ruby is a lil more vague than id have liked but Trust shes cool

[trashikino]

Someday the dream must end

remember that final fantasy au??? think you were done?? off the hook?? incorrect, im constantly devising ways to incorporate my love of shcool idols into my love of video games, watch in awe and amazement as i completely warp the plotline of ffx to fit my needs and also make Ruby Kurosawa Sad, also i blatantly ripped off the title from my favorite song in the soundtrack, sorry not sorry ((please listen to it its so good,,,,i cry,,,,))

anyways here have monsters magic and siblings crying ft yoshiko mari and kanan

“Hey, Ruby~! Keep up!” Yoshiko calls with a loppy smile from up on the ridge ahead of her, which is a really bad idea for someone who trips as often as Yoshiko does, really, doesn’t she think about this kind of thing at all – Mari yanks her away from the edge and pulls her into a too-affectionate hug as an excuse, but shoots Ruby a meaningful look over Yoshiko’s shoulder.

Ruby nods, stepping a little faster up the hill and tearing her eyes away from the sun’s reflection on the ocean. “We’re in Zanarkand again.” She says bluntly. “Are you….are you sure you’re ready for this, Mari?”

The waves crash up against the wall of the cliff and Ruby looks out to sea again, and she can see the ruins from around the curve of the mountain now – the walls pulsate with glimmering spirits like a beacon for the summoners on their home stretch.

Mari gives her a placating smile and walks over slowly, like her legs are only getting tired just now. She puts a hand on Ruby’s shoulder. “If we weren’t ready, we would still be in Besaid moping about things,” She says, and Ruby blushes and looks away for a moment. Maybe asking was a little cowardly.

She wasn’t looking for a way out, subconsciously, right?

No. Ruby casts the thought from her mind – she is going to do this. It was her idea, and Mari is willing to die for it, so to back away now…..! She can’t do it. It hurts too much to think about.

“Aaah~! The sun is refreshing, isn’t it? Look how it shines on the water! We should soak up this sunlight while we can, right, Ruby?” Mari says enthusiastically, and stretches her arms out towards the setting sun as if she can grab hold of it and hoist it back up.

Ruby laughs into her jacket collar again. “Thanks, Mari.” She says, sincerely.

She just smiles, and squeezes Ruby’s shoulder, hard, before walking down the hill after Yoshiko, who has tripped into the bramble somehow. “Don’t fall too far behind, okay?” she warns, and then proceeds to laugh at Yoshiko instead of heal her.

And so Ruby wanders not far behind, brushing off the chill that pursues her from the cliff’s wind.

Yoshiko, meanwhile, is awed at the glowing stone ruins, and traces the pulsing turquoise stone flesh with her hands, like the glow is some kind of powder that will come off. Mari slaps her hand away, but she’s still curious about it. “What are these? They’re stuck in the rock!”

“They’re Fayth,” Ruby says in a hum of subdued, quiet explanation. “They prayed for their souls to leave their bodies and turned into stone to realize a dream. These people are all dreaming together.”

“I-in a rock…?” She asks uncertainly, and taps on the side of the rock like it’s a fishtank. “Are they alive?”

Mari shakes her head and Yoshiko, looking somewhat disturbed, pulls her hand away from them. “Should you send them?” She looks at it, and her eyes flit back from the Fayth in their stone tombs to the pyreflies attracted to the monuments. Mari shakes her head again.

“They’re important where they are. Let them dream a while longer.”

“I’m going ahead, alright?” Yoshiko says abruptly, as if she isn’t even a little shaken. “The dashing Yohane will ensure the path ahead is clear of traps, beasts, and civilians!” She scurries away with a flourish.

Ruby drags her hand along the fayth, smooth stone skin and the bumps where their limbs and bodies entangle with the roots of trees or even each other. The light is pulsing. She puts her head to it, like they could speak to her.

Will she be able to speak when this is through?

She shivers and presses forward.

Yunalesca is waiting for them like she was last time. She seems highly, highly amused, seeing and recalling their faces. “You have come back a second time? And as a summoner no less?” She chuckles. “You two are of a truly selfless make, aren’t you? Sacrificing everything twice.”

Ruby is shaking where she stands, but Mari is the one being addressed so she has to wait. She saw visions of their last trip here on the way, memories rebounding against the walls of the ruined temple as pyreflies thick with energy recreate the actions of the souls who have passed through. She was close enough to Dia’s echo to touch it – to touch her.

“I am prepared to finish my journey.” Mari says solemnly, and then throws in, as more of an afterthought, “-lady Yunalesca.”

“Very well.” Her voice echoes and she extends a slender arm, and a delicate hand, fingers outwards as if Mari could dare to take her hand. “Choose who will become the Fayth for the final summoning.”

Her moment.

“I will!” Ruby says, sharply, before Yoshiko can so much as gasp. Ruby steps forward with desperate conviction. “I will become the Fayth for the final aeon.”

Yunalesca merely looks at Mari, who nods gravely.

“Ruby,” Mari says, as Yunalesca is walking down from the thronelike steps. “Are you sure?”

She laughs nervously. “It’s not like you can tell  her “no”, Mari. R-ruby’s ready! I’m going to – h-help you kill,” Ruby loathes herself for shaking so much. It’s only a death. Not even a complete death. “Sin,” She squeaks out finally, relieved that she can stop talking and concentrate on the goddess that has arrived in front of her.

The woman holds Ruby’s face by the chin, long nailed finger dragging up the underside of her jaw as she looks almost appreciatively into her eyes. Yunalesca has been dead for a thousand years.

Ruby wonders if Dia is still unsent, too, and if she’s been dead for eight.

Eventually Yunalesca makes a satisfied “hmph”, and takes her hand away to cast a spell. Ruby sucks in a deep breath and tries to look proud. “Guardian of the divine summoner……cast aside your spirit to become the final tool against Sin.”

“Y-yes. I will.”

The goddess reaches into her and pulls her soul from the inside, and Ruby grits her teeth and bears it while her world unravels. Before she has left herself completely, she sees with open eyes the space between mortal and Fayth, shining like the most coveted of gemstones.

“They’re so bright,” She thinks, tears and snot running from her face in a completely un-guardian like manner.

After this Ruby knows she is very much gone; her bones betray her and her flesh turns to stone in a fractal way, each inch the stone has crept up fracturing her in little ways. Her spirit, which she is still contained within, glows separate from her body and Ruby watches the pain from some removed place in a different plane of existence.

It’s nearly hard to come up with a dream, despite having longed for this chance for so many years to become the powerful being that can make good her sister’s redemption of the world: Ruby wants to bring peace and renown to Dia even if she is dead and can no longer appreciate those things because Ruby love love loves Dia and, when this is all done, they will be reunited in the astral plane and nothing will ever harm them again.

A voice that isn’t hers sounds the last thought out, although it is very similar. This voice is Ruby-adjacent. Powerful Ruby.

Ruby latches onto it with fervor and feels the burning of her soul eke out a new form for her, large and powerful where her old body was not.

The statue cracks and Ruby wiggles her fingers that are growing harder and shrapnel-like in their sharpness, and her eyes which have become dark and concaved things pulsate with a teal light reminiscent of her old eye color but with the added flair of something ancient underneath.

Broad, powerful, like the fiends they have fought. Ruby wants to protect Dia, and Mari, and Yoshiko, and all of Spira if it will let her, and for this endeavor she will need something fast, agile, strong.

Wings sprout from the statue but they are already stone – that body is well and truly empty by this point. It gleams over with one more lapse of spirit and Ruby continues forming herself from the scattered pyreflies that drift affront the stone girl.

The light beings gather at her base and she feels the pressure of matter upon her again; her “body” is forming into something more tangible. Ruby is hunched in this form and there is an added counterweight to her back that she was unaware of. Her face is long and ends in a forked red horn, which glitters like her namesake and must be made of the gemstone, too.

She roars and lands in front of Mari, then preens, spreading dazzling crimson wings and giving a beat of them before leaning down to smell the summoner with a wolfish snout. Mari cries softly and hangs off her face with its new horn, nearly as large as she is.

Ruby finds she is incapable of crying but shares the sentiment.

Yunalesca claps once. “A marvelous beast. Are you ready to defeat Sin?”

She feels the pyreflies making up her body drift away as if by wind, and suddenly she isn’t out anymore, she’s stuck in her rock. Mari nods and keeps her head low; Yoshiko is actually right beside Ruby with a painfully confused look on her face.

Mari drags her off and Yoshiko tries desperately to crack Ruby’s stone tomb somehow, hand rough against her hardened arm. There is a ghost of feeling, to it – she felt that, felt touch, that is, which means all those things outside –

Her monument is dragged off and the world goes hazy and black.

“I will become the last Fayth.” Kanan said, holding her sword high. “For Spira.” Her voice broke there. “For my friends, so that none of them must share in our fate.”

Dia didn’t – or couldn’t – say anything so Mari screamed for Kanan then, with a breathless, breaking note, but it did not reverse the process. Too quickly Kanan became stone and disappeared into pyreflies. They reformed eventually into the final aeon that would kill Sin: A spiraling dragon, with a long, thin body dotted by two pairs of wings and six legs, each equipped with the paws of a different beast. She spun in the air and pierced it with horns like a two pronged drill.

The Kanan that came back was different but still kind and gentle, and Mari knew she was still there when she first came to land in front of her instead of Dia like she was supposed to.

They were sent off as a group and came back with only two – upon being summoned a second time, Kanan slew Sin where it stood in the ocean and turned to find Dia killed by its spines, collapsing into grief and pyreflies that got caught up in those escaping Sin’s body.

Gone, but at a steep cost. Mari took Ruby home that day and didn’t say a word until they were called upon to celebrate. They abstained, and moved to Besaid, where they had a quiet few years until….

Mari summons Ruby with a flash of light; connected to her soul, Ruby feels the tremendous drain it has created on Mari’s strength; she can feel that she is going to waste away if she does not receive copious amounts of attention, fast.

Somewhat stupidly, perhaps, Ruby thinks that maybe if she can kill Sin fast enough, or fly down from the heavens she was cast aside to with enough speed, she can save Mari – maybe, anyways, hopefully. There’s at least a chance.

Not exactly.

From the moment she has touched down, broad claws planted in the cliffside, she is grappling with the biggest, most unstoppable of demons, feeling plated arms slam into her side and rend feathers from her wings, and it’s ludicrous, really, because she was a girl not eighteen years of age and now she is an aeon strong enough to wrestle with Sin itself.

Mari’s strength saps a little more, that flagging essence creating a sense of urgency. Sin won’t kill her: Mari dying will.

Ruby sees a crowd of sin’s scales crawl too close to Yoshiko and Mari’s place, and swats them aside with a mighty tail before launching herself at Sin, claws and talons and fangs grappling with anything and everything she has, her spirit and body committed to tearing the monster apart. It seems almost successful if the thick, leaking wounds on its sides, dripping with pyreflies and black ooze, have anything to say about it.

Sin wails and sways in the water, a behemoth maw closing around Ruby’s right wing, which is ripped from her back.

She can’t scream, but Mari, connected to her by spirit, lets out a strangled noise and falls over on the ground from pain.

Ruby plunges her teeth into the thick neck of Sin and shakes and rips until she is sure she has found the center.

She rips it apart, one last tendon to cut, like the last thread holding on the arm of one of her stuffed animals back at home (what a strange thought) and the carcass lies before her in the ocean. There’s a sense of elation, but Mari still hasn’t gotten up and Ruby is fading quickly, so she needs to do something fast, she needs to say something, or make some sort of gesture, or –

Her body begins to melt off of her spirit, in turn with Sin’s, so Ruby sticks her face as close as she can without harming Mari or Yoshiko and gives them a pleading look. Mari is also disappearing, staring up at the air and all the dead things glowing in it with a dazed look.

“Kanan,” She breathes out harshly, pointing uselessly at the cloud of spirits. “I’m...”

“Why didn’t you tell me you would die?!” Yoshiko screams, practically. She’s bleeding, but still very much mortal and very much remaining in her place. “I thought we were just going to summon whoever was summoned the first eight times – I thought – I thought -!”

Ruby dissipates before she can hear. She’s mostly sure Yoshiko thought they’d all be the first to come out alive, though. That’s the kind of stupid thing Yoshiko liked to believe in, constantly. That they would be the special ones, that is.

Up in the air, Ruby can feel the pyreflies that made up her body rising higher and higher, without her, and congealing in the sky in what she is sure is a mess of dead meeting the dead, spirits that had been absorbed so long ago they no longer remembered being conscious, a small mercy.

Is this what it is to be a ghost?

Unsent?

Ruby thinks she is floating, aimlessly. It’s not entirely bad.

“Ruby.” She must be tired, or dreaming, still, because she’s certain that that is – “Ruby, please…..We don’t have much time…”

“Dia!” Ruby reaches for the voice, and even if she is technically “floating” she feels as if she can run into her arms, wherever they may be. Luckily they are dead and Dia doesn’t need to be ran to; she sort of just materializes closer to Ruby, who grabs her despite neither of them really existing at the moment and holds her close. “We came back……we k-killed Sin, s-so I could see you…..”

Dia looks at Ruby with tears in her eyes. “You’re thoughtful, Ruby, truly.” She looks away.

“But I fear you have made a terrible mistake.”

“What?” She asks, uncertain. There’s a tugging at her pyreflies – wasn’t she disconnected from that body now? Ruby is anxious now. “We’re dead. We can’t make much more of a mistake than that.”

Dia inhales, long and slow-like, until she regathers her bearings and gives her younger sister a long, sad look. “Kanan…..became Sin, after we defeated it. The truth we learned when we fought it…..going inside Sin……. Yevon is there, and he uses the leftover body of the final aeon to….”

“No.” Ruby says quickly. “I only did this so that I could  - no, no! I don’t want to do that!”

Her sister pulls her by the shoulders and gives Ruby a grave look. “Ruby. We do not have much time. Kanan has been returned to Mari, but only after death. We must end this – we must kill Yevon.”

“We’re dead!” Ruby cries. “Isn’t everything supposed to be over when we’re dead?!”

“Go to Zanarkand, early. Mari had a friend there – Maru. Find her. You will destroy the city but it’s not truly you, not truly your fault-“

“I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want t-“ She sobs, and Dia tries to placate her with transparent hands while she talks over her.

“Bring Maru back, we need someone from the dream Zanarkand to do this. From Mari’s.“

Ruby sniffles even though she technically isn’t producing snot, because she’s a ghost. She’s being pulled away from Dia, again. How long will it go on? “I’m scared.”

Dia smiles. “Remember to do your best, okay? I believe in you. I’ll find you on that day – when Sin is next killed. I’ll wait for you. I swear it.”

A hundred thousand leagues beneath the ocean, Ruby opens a hundred eyes on an only barely-formed body.

Find the dream world, she repeats to herself, consciousness lagging behind a dark thing that aches to find a city. Find Maru. Bring her back. Ruby thinks. She has to end it - be the last one. 

Sin rumbles appreciatively at the sentiment.

Zanarkand will be ashes when it is done, but for now, it is the Calm, and Sin must wait.