fandomtownies | The Beach, Sunday Afternoon

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The Beach, Sunday Afternoon

Seivarden had woken up with a hangover, and then the day had got worse.

Cards appeared from nowhere. They contained greetings from family, friends, lovers, even people she had only briefly served with. It would have been so sweet of them, if it wasn't for one thing.

They couldn't have sent them. They were all a thousand years dead.

Now Seivarden was standing at the beach, close to the edge of the water, taking the cards one by one and folding them into paper spaceships.

"Fuck this island!" she shouted, then threw a card into the sea.

More Radchaai curses followed, each accompanied by a card diving into the waves. Now and then she wiped her eyes with a gloved hand.

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Funny, Seivarden wasn't the only one who apparently had the 'just throw it in the ocean and yell' reaction to a bunch of postcards from people who were long dead. Zack had a small stack of cards held firmly in his gloved hands, and was perfectly ready to do some cathartic yelling on the beach when he realized that this particular corner of it was already claimed.

"Fuck this island," he echoed, trying not to be too terribly intrusive. But hey, he shared the sentiment, today. A lot.

Seivarden turned around, wiping her eyes again, then looked at the stranger.

"You too?" she said.

Zack sighed and nodded, holding up his stack of cards.

"If you're mad at them for the reason I think you're mad at them, then yeah, me too."

This place was cruel, sometimes. Entirely too damn cruel.

"They're all dead and gone," she said, hurling another card into the sea.

Zack singled one card out from the pile and stared at it for a long while.

"I killed this one myself."

Yeah, the card from Angeal was also getting thrown out into the water.

These would all be gone tomorrow anyway. It wasn't like littering counted around here when the island was raining it down already, right?

"Did you care about her?" Seivarden asked. She hadn't killed anyone she loved, but she wasn't going to judge anyone who had.

"He was like a brother to me," he replied. "He taught me how to be a soldier. Saved my life more than I can count."

"An accident?" Seivarden guessed. She had seen those happen more than once, and had had officers who had had to deal with it.

Zack shook his head a little.

"He forced my hand. Everything built up and became too much, and instead of facing it, it was either his life or mine."

"Huh." Seivarden didn't know what to say to that. "I didn't kill any of these. They all died while I spend a thousand years in an escape suspension pod."

Zack bit his lip at that, looking at the other person thoughtfully.

He wasn't sure what to say to that, either. What if he'd spent a thousand years in Nibelheim, instead of only five?

"I'm sorry," he offered, and meant it. He didn't have anything that could help with that kind of pain. "This place thinks it's funny sometimes. Or like maybe it's doing something nice for us. I don't think it really entirely understands people, though."

"Oh, that was my own universe. Then I arrived here. Who knew it could get worse?"

She wiped one eye again, then added:

"We haven't met. I'm Seivarden Vendaai." She bowed slightly, mostly out of reflex.

"Yeah, Fandom... tends to rub it in."

Zack hated it, but didn't exactly have any other options.

"I'm Zack Fair," he added, and then bowed in reply. "I'd ask if you were new here, but I've been gone long enough I wouldn't really know anyway."

And then he'd come back and kind of never left the apartment except to work. That didn't help, either.

"It depends on what you mean with new," Seivarden said. "I've been here for a few months. Did you leave and come back? Either you made a bad choice or the place you come from is worse.g"

"This is actually the lesser of two evils right now, yeah," Zack sighed. "How's that for messed up?"

It was here or dead. Zack was mostly sure he'd made the right choice. Kind of.

"I don't envy you," Seivarden said. She took a step back, then hurled her last card into the sea.

"You really shouldn't," Zack agreed. And then frowned and threw the rest of his at the water, too. "So... why are you here, then?"

"I'd like to know that myself," she said with a snort. "No one has been able to tell me."

Zack's mouth formed a little 'o' shape at that.

"Well... how did you get here? A portal or something?"

Sorry, Seivarden. He was the problem solving guy. He wasn't always good at it, but he tried. And since you'd spent all of three seconds talking, now, he was also going to treat you like a friend.

"I... wasn't entirely conscious at the time."

Which had been her own fault.

Not that many people here wanted to treat her like a friend, and so far Zack was welcome to.

"Fair enough," Zack replied, biting his lip. "Well... where did you wake up? I'm sure you've already thought about this stuff, but maybe the perspective of somebody who knows the place better could help?"

"In the streets." She looked out across the sea. "I can't remember where. Hannibal Lecter found me and was very helpful."

"Maybe it was a rogue portal, then," Zack thought, reaching a hand up to tap at his chin thoughtfully. "I'm guessing Portalocity hasn't been any help, though?"

"They tell me they 'can't connect to my universe'. Whatever that means."

She turned her head to look at Zack. "Do you have any ideas?"

"Of course they can't," Zack sighed, shaking his head. "I think that means either they've got some kind of faulty equipment on their end, or there's a bad connection along the way."

He paused for a moment, trying to think of how to explain it.

"Sometimes, to get to one place, they have to set up paths through a bunch of other ones, first. Like... how if you live in an apartment, you have to go through the lobby to get to the hall that leads to where you live, you know? So if any one of those rooms is impossible to get through, you can't make it to the other end of your journey. Maybe one of those realities has something really dangerous going on in it right now, and so they need to find another way around."

Or maybe Seivarden's own world was the one where something was going horribly wrong. But Zack didn't want to mention that as a possibility, for a number of reasons.

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