Chapter Text
“Alphinaud bas Benedictus!”
It is, in essence, entirely improbable. Alisaie has run the math through her head—quickly, without a hitch in computation, the way they teach every child in their protectorate—and it is not impossible, in the way that a beautiful, princely Steppe horse running through the streets of Sharlayan is technically not impossible. It is simply unlikely to the umpteenth percentile, so microscopic in chance it is all the more insulting for its occurrence. Salt in the wound. Lemon juice in the eye. Suspicious, certainly. Cruel, without a doubt.
The crowd has gone silent. The ostentatious Garlean man facilitating the reaping starts making a circling motion with his hand towards someone. Alisaie is not sure who. It could be a signal for a camera. It could be a signal for a guard in case one of them—their father, their mother, Alphinaud, Alisaie herself—snaps. The ordered crowd of sixteen year olds is parting, yet again, and Alisaie gazes down on her brother from her place already upon the stage.
Alisaie has seen Alphinaud cry after middling debate results and single missed points on final exams, but for all his doomed, aggrandizing pressures on himself he holds firm against this collective still of breath. It’s a level of passive she has not witnessed him project. His usual state of neutrality is a smug pout and a hold of his chin infuriatingly high. He thrives on a sense of flaunted betterness. She has never seen him cold.
He can stand tall when it really matters. More importantly: he is willing to stand beside her.
He walks forward, and that’s when Alisaie hears her mother wail. Alphinaud does not flinch as the sound washes over the audience. He keeps walking. He doesn’t look at Alisaie. He doesn’t even blink. The Sharlayan Escort—Alisaie has honestly forgotten his exact name, she only has to see him once a year, Nero Something Something—starts to clap. They are all supposed to clap, now, both tributes reaped and the rest of the protectorate’s children safe. Two for the souls of all. A worthy sacrifice for their continued Imperial protection. Nero claps harder. No one joins him.
“Twins!” he says, forced and smiling, to the camera. “What a surprise. What a spindle of fate.”
Alisaie’s mother had been so strong when her name was called. She had paled, but stood. She had not so much as wobbled from her place at their father’s side. The great rapids of the Whorl have broken through, however, and Alisaie has never claimed nor aspires to understand how a mother might feel towards a son. Distantly, Alisaie knows that the weeping stems from the collective weight of seeing them both reaped, and that her mother’s grief is not simply for Alphinaud. (Even more distant, Alisaie knows she is not the favored child.)
There are hundreds of people here, held at gunpoint in an auditorium that once housed the greatest debates of the brightest minds in the realm. One sick, sorry clap and the sound of a mother’s title being stripped from her is all that graces its stands today. It is a stark reminder of their great fall. If Alisaie’s grandsire was here, he would remind them that this was the consequence of their isolation. Sharlayan fled their colony and closed their borders when the Garleans invaded others, and Sharlayan stood alone when the Garleans invaded them.
Alisaie’s grandsire is not here, though. If he was, they would execute him twice over.
The show is halfway finished. Sharlayan is after Doma, Nagxia, Dalmasca, Nhalmasque, Werlyt, and Bozja. There are the five great Eorzean city-states to go. Their host will wring what he can from the interviews with Alisaie’s parents, capture their heartfelt goodbye, and then shove her and her brother on the airship to Garlemald proper. Then, the cameras will turn their sharp eye on the next huddle of poor bastards who wound up conquered. Then, it will actually be over.
No one moves. Alphinaud ascends the stairs to the amphitheater stage. Alisaie reaches out her hand on the last step, and Alphinaud takes it, and she pulls him to the summit of their fate. She moves to retract it but he keeps her palm in his grasp. They stand together, linked as always, and Alisaie turns her attention back to the crowd just in time to see her mother fall to her knees.
Nero Middle-Title Whatever is stationed in front of Alisaie, close enough that she can hear him mutter, “Let’s get the sire and dam up here, pronto,” to a nearby soldier in magitek armor.
Nero points to a camera. It must click back on him, because he chimes, “Shall we give a strong hand and warm goodbye to Alisaie and Alphinaud bas Benedictus, twin scions of the erudite Protectorate of Sharlayan—!”
“Thaliak!”
Alisaie has never felt such tension as the rigidness that overtakes an entire crowd when a god who should no longer exist is evoked among them.
“Thaliak!” Alisaie’s mother screams, again. “Spare your children, as loyal to you as Byregot, as blood to you as Llymlaen and Nophica! Your water runs in their veins as true kin!”
What Alisaie assumed was her mother’s legs giving out in preemptive grief is in fact a deliberate kneel. Alisaie’s father is horrified, attempting to pull her up from her reverence. He is the Rector of the Sharlayan Protectorate and she is his long-suffering wife. She shucks him off. She does not care.
Soldiers wind their way to the woman screaming the name of a redacted god. The cameras are most certainly not looking at her mother, but that means they are most certainly trained on Alphinaud and Alisaie in her stead. Alphinaud knows this. Alisaie’s dearest, most heedless brother is quicker-witted than she when it comes to matters of optics, and has a hot streak embedded deep within the polish of a bloodline attempting to shake a reputation of revolt. He moves before Alisaie can even process her response.
He drops to his knees.
He’s still holding her hand. What else is she to do? Where one goes, the other follows. Her kneecaps thud against the stage, barely cushioned by the skirt of her dress. Their fingers entwine, proper, and the cameras have physically swiveled away from the sight of them but she hopes—bitter and angry—that they have been seen and they have been heard. She and Alphinaud should be shot dead where they deign to worship a god who should not exist but the soldiers are preoccupied with the shift of the crowd and their fate is sealed anyway. There are murmurs and there are gasps and there are others kneeling and there are calls for revolution and there are calls for silence and for peace and for vengeance and there are calls, most of all, across the masses, for The Mouth of All Waters, The Keeper of Knowledge, The Champion of Scholars, The Once and Evermore Great Thaliak, long live his censored name.
There are screams in the crowd. The soldiers have reached Alisaie’s mother, and while her ever passive father is over-restrained and shoved to the ground the three of them can only watch as their family’s beloved matriarch is struck with the butt of a magitek gunblade. “Ameliance!” Alisaie’s father yells, but it is barely registered over the championed cries of her mother calling, bleeding, “Thaliak, please! Thaliak deliver us!”
Their patron god does not descend from the heavens, staff in hand, to play savior to their plight. A soldier has the impolitic idea to fire bullets into the air, and then where there was once the chanted name of an ancestral deity there is now only panic. Alphinaud’s hand tightens in Alisaie’s own as the crowd bolts in a thousand different directions beyond the precipice of their platform. They are both flawed in the throes of their distinct natures, but neither of them are foolish enough to flee a stage full of armored magitek soldiers. They stay kneeling. They stay, together, bound at the hand and at the soul, until Nero has the better sense to snap his attention back to them and order: “Get the brats on the airship.”
The wreck of a showpiece is at its end. Alisaie and her brother have not been given their requisite parental goodbye. The cameras, once so eager to lap at the misery of a family torn apart, are looking everywhere but at the shreds of what is left of the Leveilleurs. And they are no more, Alisaie realizes. What was hollowed out and titled Benedictus has been further crushed beneath the Imperial heel. Alisaie cannot pretend there is a way forward for her family from here. They have been deliberately targeted and routinely destroyed for the actions of a man long dead.
Perhaps even this, the violence towards her mother, the chaos in the crowd, the sound of the name of a forbidden god being once again snuffed, was all to The Empire’s grand design. Alisaie does not know. She only knows she does not enjoy the feeling of being a plaything.
Soldiers rip Alphinaud’s hand from her hold. Soldiers wrest her arms behind her back. She fights, twists in their crushing grasp, and has her face shoved into the stage for her efforts. She spits something nasty yet unheard, and when she cranes her head to the side she is rewarded only with the sight of a blank-faced Alphinaud being lifted to a stand. His hands are held behind him, too, but he is not struggling. His expression is almost serene. He is resigned to his fate on a level of acceptance she has not yet reached. She doesn’t think she wants to.
“Alphinaud!” she calls.
“Stop fighting,” he says. “We’ve made our stand. It won’t help either of us to get hurt before the main event.“
He’s right, but she wishes he was being haughtier about it. She doesn’t like the stoic look on his face.
“Let’s. Go,” snaps Nero, both words accentuated with a clap. Alisaie is dragged back to her feet. She is pitched forward, and then they’re marching. She looks back over her shoulder as if she might catch one final glimpse of her mother. She sees nothing. The swirl of startled heads is interspersed with the red-black of Imperial uniforms, and somewhere beneath them all her parents are pressed upon the ground.
She wonders what her mother is thinking, her final prayer denied. She wonders what her father is thinking, the generations above and below him ripped from his home without so much as a lifted word in their defense.
The airship is close. It is stationed directly outside the arena, dropped in the dead middle of the city center in what used to be a lovely park. The door opens. They step into its maw, and it hisses closed behind them. They are expected and then they are aboard. The ship must have been anticipating a hot exit because the engines are already humming by the time they are deposited into a grand foyer. The message is clear: there will be no settling the populace with twin child-martyrs still lingering upon the premises. The goal is to remove Alisaie and her brother from Sharlayan as swiftly as possible.
Two guards are stanced at the elbows of each of them. Four in total, wide in berth, and too much to overcome even together. Alisaie expects to be dragged to a cell by the intimidating escort. However, they release their harsh grips on her once they are aboard. They let her free. There is no escape in the belly of a lofted airship, Alisaie supposes. There is nowhere to run. She finds herself imprisoned but not restrained.
The ship dips to the side, suddenly, and Alisaie and Alphinaud both nearly lose their balance. She has never been on an airship before but she can gather that, despite the lack of windows, they’ve officially taken aloft. Nero does not wobble at the tilt of the metallic floor. He walks confident and sure-footed to the nearest decorative sofa, its feet bolted to the floor, and without further delay drapes his body atop it.
“Augh,” he says. His hand drags down his face. “That’s got to be a good quarter of my hide, scraped and tanned. Baelsar is going to have to make a call.”
Alisaie stands at a loss for what to do or where to go. She wants to fight. She wants to punch someone, anyone, but Alphinaud is already righting his posture and readying himself to speak. She figures she can let him have the floor. Starting a brawl now will not change her fate.
“I am assuming we don’t have free roam of the airship,” Alphinaud prompts and, oh, Gods, he would ask for the rules first, wouldn’t he? She shouldn’t have let him open his mouth. She should have come out swinging. She should have run to her mother. Better to be killed chasing one last maternal embrace than resign herself to getting stabbed by some other tragic figure’s conquered child on a mandated telecast.
Nero’s hand is shielding his eyes. It does not move. He makes a great show of a sigh, as if they are some terrible inconvenience to him. “Cockpit is locked shut should you feel the itch to try something. Your quarters are up the stairs and to the left. Try not to make even more trouble until we get to the capital and you’re out of my immediate responsibility, hm?”
That’s it, then.
“Every year I think you can’t get worse at this, Scaeva, and every year you tunnel just a bit deeper into the dirt,” a new voice cuts into the room, cruel but not irritated. It is cavalier in a way that grates against the established tension. “One day you’re going to hit bedrock.”
Alisaie’s attention snaps away from the pureblooded Garlean host to a man that is infamously more illbred. She knows him. Of him, at least. He is Hyur, tanned and well-built, and not of Sharlayan except for the bruise-purple mark needled upon his neck. It was gifted to him upon acceptance of a loaned Mentorship position within their great nation and his subsequent move to their otherwise vacant Victor’s District. Sharlayan has produced many bright minds over the centuries but it has never been known for its child-warriors. For the past fifteen years, Thancred oen Faustulus has been all they possess in terms of a Mentor for their Tributes. They have never actually claimed a Victor of their own.
Thancred won his Ludi when Alisaie and her brother were infants. He is far older now. He is a rough-hewn interpretation of cosmopolitan. He was born in the seaside city-state of Limsa Lominsa, supposedly, competed as tribute for the grand once-sultanate of Ul’dah, somehow, and now he is here, before the two of them, her foreign-born Sharlayan Mentor, tromping down the staircase with heavy, thudding, off-balanced steps—Hells, is he drunk? Alisaie is almost certain he is drunk. As he draws closer she sees the eye that is not deadened in its socket is blown wide with inebriation.
“Hey, kids,” he says, giving them a casual wave. “Great show out there. Nero really fucked the cover-up. I’m sure they’re seething up top.”
There is only one thing Alisaie knows about Thancred oen Faustulus as a person outside his narrative as a Victor: he was with her grandsire, so many years ago, when everything unraveled. He was with her grandsire the night of the raid. She is certain his status as Victor and popularity in the Garlemald capital is the only reason he is standing before her, now, and not in an unmarked grave with the rest of those uncovered that fateful night. She almost hates him for it.
“Hello,” Alisaie says.
Thancred bares his teeth at the two of them in what might be a smile under kinder circumstances. “Welcome.”
Alphinaud has tucked his arms behind his back in a manner that is too close for Alisaie’s comfort to their stance while they were subdued and marched.
He says, “Alphinaud bas Benedictus. This is my sister, Alisaie. I believe you knew our grandsire.”
“Acquainted,” Thancred says, shrugging. “Friends, maybe. A comrade and mentor in a now defunct uprising against megalomaniacal imperial colonizers? Absolutely.”
Alisaie’s eyes flash to the Garlean mantled over the couch not fifteen fulms from them.
Thancred answers what she does not ask. “Ignore him. He’s not going to do shit.” Nero makes a noise of insulted protest from his seat. “You have no way of knowing this, but there’s nothing that I can say or do around here that could possibly worsen my situation. We can talk freely.”
Alphinaud nods at their newfound ally. He says, “We’ve made a mess of our reaping. I fear we may be made a priority to dispose of in the coming arena.”
Thancred says, “Oh, you were marked for dead long before your reaping.”
Alphinaud stills at this. Thancred notices.
“No. Surely not. Don’t tell me you think this is some infinitesimal stroke of bad luck,” he says. The man that will be their Mentor then proceeds to laugh in Alphinaud’s face. “You think they picked the twin grandchildren of a known rebel leader out of a hat?”
Alphinaud hesitates to respond. Alisaie spares him the indignity of being wrong.
“We know they’re punishing our family,” she says, speaking for both of them. She crosses her arms in front of her. “It was rigged. This is a political move.”
Thancred smiles more genuinely. “Right on the coin.”
Alphinaud does not accept Alisaie’s generous out. He usually doesn’t, at his own peril, but she kind of wishes he’d shut up.
“—But they already killed our grandsire,” he says, defensive. “He paid the price of an attempted rebellion with his own blood. Our father is a Rector. He has been nothing but loyal to the Empire and the Royalists are all the stronger for his allegiance. What would Garlemald gain by punishing a figure so integral to their hold on Sharlayan?”
Alisaie knows. Alisaie understands, can conceptualize the politics of the situation, but Alphinaud could be so naive to any logic beyond the practical and so fragile about subsequent correction.
“Your sister has managed to put the pieces together, it seems,” Thancred says. “Why don’t you ask her?”
Alphinaud pauses, and then looks to Alisaie. “Is there something I don’t know?”
She casts her gaze away from him.
“No. You’re just being too rational,” she says. She is silent for a moment. Then, she explains, “You have to analyze it in terms of emotional impact. Think more of the projected brutality. If a child can be punished for the sins of his father, one risks not only their own skin but also that of their progeny in a potential rebellion.” She scowls. “The fact that we are an even further generation removed is to their interest. Insurgency shall be crushed through the bloodline. A ward, a warning—it doesn’t matter what you call it. We’re being made an example.”
Thancred offers a hum of affirmation. “And here I was hearing so much about this Leveilleur prodigy, when his sister is clearly the smarter of the two.”
Alisaie has never heard her true family name outside the walls of her house. Alisaie has never before been called smarter than Alphinaud. Thancred sinks his teeth into her subtle surprise. He is good at reading people. She can see it in the way his good eye, glazed over with alcohol, still tracks her posture and her every minute expression. He says, “Come, now. He might be better at branding himself a boy genius, but you’re the savvier one when things really matter, now aren’t you?”
“Do not pit us against each other,” she bites back. “We will be our own closest allies in the arena and we have no use for seeded envy. I thought you were supposed to be our guiding expert.”
Thancred wastes no time. “He needs his ego dressed down. Trust me: I’m helping.”
It doesn’t feel like helping. She doesn’t enjoy that they know less of him than he seems to know of them. She crinkles her face at him.
Thancred says, voice the tiniest, most barely noticeable lilt softer, “It’s not fair, but it’s reality. Things have been conspired against you both from birth. Every slip of paper in that bowl had your name on it. Nero here only had to bring down the hammer.”
There’s a stir from the couch. A murmur of embittered dismissal. Nero presents an affronted defense. “Accusations of reaping manipulation are simply wild speculation,” he says.
“Oh please. Like I haven’t watched you feign surprise at my last however many tributes with the acting skills of a drowned sewer rat.”
Nero replies, ever inconvenienced, “That you were exposed to be in collusion with Sharlayan insurgents and allowed to keep your position as Mentor is in itself an undue kindness, Faustulus. You are in no place to question procedures.”
“Ten years since I got caught,” Thancred drawls, “and your bosses have yet to hand me a single girl over fourteen.”
Thancred and Nero share an accusing look. Alisaie has never strung their homeland’s tributes out in a line, much less divided them by gender, but—she thinks on it, now. She goes through the past decade of tributes in her head. She sees it; their queue of tragic, young-skewing Sharlayan schoolgirls stretching out in perpetuity since she was a mere child, since her grandsire and his circle of rebels were cast into the stark, mechanical searchlights of their oppressors. Alisaie has never caught a rerun of Thancred’s Ludi in the way she has never tried to catch any one of numerous life-threatening illnesses, but Victors often operated in terms of brand. Thancred’s was infamous: a gruff seventeen year old boy dragging a slight, straw-haired slip of a girl behind him for over two weeks. It was the longest a Ludi had ever lasted. The girl was only twelve, and should never have made it as far as she did. When she succumbed to her wound Thancred became The Empire’s collective elder sibling, as they so happily pitched him through his victory tour. A charming, roguish knight playing the part of a protector until it was all so suddenly over. A brother until he was not.
“Baseless speculation,” Nero says.
“You didn’t have to go out of the way to pick the blondes, you know. I would have grieved them regardless,” Thancred replies.
Nero’s nose tilts up. “My job has ever been that of a facilitator. Your insatiable beef lies far above my head.”
Thancred does not offer him further response. The grin he shoots Alisaie instead is not happy and not kind. “As I’m sure you’ve surmised, you’re actually something of an outlier for me, statistically. Your grandsire’s punishment is a welcome break from my own. Sixteen is just old enough to start having a real chance.”
Alphinaud finally jolts from his shamed silence.
“—If you truly respected our grandsire you would not imply an eagerness to see his successor reaped,” he says. It’s stark and sudden, frustrated in a way Alisaie does not expect.
Thancred’s horrid, neutral smile casts over to her brother now. “If you’re so concerned with Louisoix’s successors, you might bother to cast an eye inward. You’re the elder, if I remember correctly, hm? You may have fifteen minutes on your sister but she seems like she’s the only one here who actually grasps the reality of your situation.”
“I am well aware of both our positions,” Alphinaud says, coolly.
“Then you should know that, as it stands, you’re the one that’s going to be killed first.”
A silence befalls them.
Alphinaud’s debate training is failing him in the face of relentless, crushing, and honest assessment. He takes a deep breath. Thancred has gotten under his skin in a matter of minutes, far quicker and more thoroughly than their Imperial masters managed in a lengthy, ritualized announcement of their imminent deaths.
“…Alphinaud can heal,” Alisaie offers. She thinks upon a graduation that may never occur, and says: “My Studium thesis was intended to be in aetheric applications in combat. I can fight. We’ll make a strong pair.”
She expects more mockery. Instead, Thancred only nods. “That’s the plan, then.”
They really do compliment each other well.
Alphinaud says, “Alisaie is proficient in physical altercations, I can indeed heal as well as any Imperial Medicus, and both of us know offensive magic. Our grandsire may have incited this mess but he has not left Alisaie nor I deprived of intelligence, skill, or tenacity. There is yet a chance for us to be the last two standing.”
“Oh yeah?” Thancred asks, head cocking. “You’ve settled on who’s taking the blade when it’s just you two left, then? Best decide now, or our Garlean friends will decide for you.”
Alphinaud has not considered this, clearly. He freezes.
Alisaie snipes, intending to be quicker than her brother can think through the options, “Alphinaud should win.”
“Wrong,” Thancred answers.
Alisaie scoffs. “That’s,” she starts to say. She shakes her head, incredulous. “It’s not a question with a correct answer!”
Alphinaud is still thinking. Thancred snaps his fingers at Alisaie’s thought-plagued brother. “Stop pondering over there. She’s your little sister. This isn’t hard.”
“We’re the same age, and Alphinaud is set to be our father’s heir,” Alisaie says. “Need I remind you that makes him our grandsire’s heir as well. It makes sense—“
“It does not make sense.”
Thancred’s voice has lowered. His speech has quickened. Alisaie sees a fervid spark in his eye. She sees, suddenly, that while she might be a few years older, she is no different from the past decade of his curated female tributes. She is another girl, too young to defend herself, sent to him for the sole purpose of his witness to her death.
She feels infantilized. She spits, acknowledging what is already manifesting itself as a problem, “I’m his sister.”
It is at this point that Nero decides to sit up.
He announces, completely immune to the heat of the conversation, “Dinner.” He says, “Should be ready soon. If you three might be willing to put the spat on pause, I think we could all use a helping of carbohydrates and a stiff drink.”
There is some air let out of the room at his interruption.
Alphinaud says, with a nod, “You’re right.” Alisaie takes some offense at the implication their horrid Garlean host is at all correct. “We should take our rest as we have it. We’ll have plenty of time to talk over our strategy in the coming days. We’ll need a battle plan and significant martial practice. There is also the matter of deciding how best to pitch ourselves, politically and aesthetically, to our potential Garlean patrons.” He shrugs. “But as I said: there will be time.”
“Less than you think,” Thancred notes, but nonetheless allows the issue to drop.
They stand stiffly apart from each other as Nero voices a loud groan, and peels himself up from his couch.
“Right,” he says, with another single, infuriating clap. Alisaie will slice his hands at the wrist if she ever gets the chance. “If my most esteemed guests—and Thancred—would kindly follow me, I’ll show you those quarters.”
Alphinaud makes to follow the Garlean. Alisaie does not. She stares at Thancred. Glares, really. She is not quite done.
“You treat me like a normal tribute, or not at all,” she demands.
Thancred replies, “There is no such thing as a normal tribute.” His expression is flat, again. His voice, neutral. “I won’t allow myself the lobotomy of seeing you and your brother as anything less than terribly, miserably distinct individuals, at least one of whom I will inevitably fail. I will do all I can to keep that number to only one.” He pauses. “You have my word.”
This is enough for Alisaie, for now. She dips her head.
“Guide us well, then,” she says.
“I might be an arsehole, but I won’t let you down.”