EORZEA NOIR

Off the Record | 046

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 14:25:12 -0400

I don’t often visit my parents’ graves. I decided early on that my mother is where she ought to be, which is to say she’s by my father’s side, and it’s likely best I don’t disturb that peace. They wouldn’t want to hear about my troubles anyway, even from six fulms down, and I think I can still effectively emulate anything they’d have to say in response. You’re getting lazy, you aren’t pushing yourself, you’re full of excuses, you don’t want to change, you just need more discipline, you’re too arrogant, you’re not enough. Would they even be wrong to accuse me?

Every now and then, however, I get a wild notion that maybe if I go take a seat between their headstones and talk about where my life is headed or the things I’ve accomplished, things might be different. I might feel some vague sign of approval. A slightly cooler breeze on my face, a moment where the sun beating down feels less oppressive. Anything, I’ll take anything, even if it’s all just a trick of the mind. I’m a grown woman, but it hardly matters. I could use the encouragement now more than ever.

It was by pure chance that I had this very idea today, this morning, just after sunrise. I pulled on my boots and not thirty fulms inside Ul’dah, I ran smack into a Brass Blades chaplain I’ve vaguely known for a good ten years. It started out as a compliment I haven’t heard since well before I started drinking:

“Elia, is that you? You look great!”

Of all the things I am, great seems to be a far distance from it. What fucking right did this guy have to tell me that? The audacity of this arsehole to look past my sleepless nights, the nausea, the gods-forsaken headaches and tell me I look great. Doesn’t he know how hard this is? Doesn’t he know…

Oh. Shit. I’m in recovery. I haven’t had a drink in awhile. Do I really look great now?

Fifteen minutes later, he says, “Do you want to get some coffee?”

Thirty minutes later, “Do you know what I do besides give sermons?”

An hour later, “Do you want to talk about it?”

I never made it out to see the graves. Might be for the best.

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Tue, 19 Jun 2018 16:01:59 -0400

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Tue, 19 Jun 2018 11:11:17 -0400

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Off the Record | 045

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 13:10:58 -0400

I’ve spent the last six hours wishing for death and I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

I heard about this elixir that some people use as a last resort to quit drinking and Sabrys was kind enough to give me several vials for nothing. If you take some and then try to drink, you’ll wind up…well, spending six hours wishing for death with no one to blame but yourself. So that’s where I am.

In spite of the agony, I’m learning every day what makes me want to drink, some things less obvious than others and some things exactly what I expected. Sometimes it’s just pure habit, like waking up with the sun. Tonight, it was needing to tell a mother her only son is dead and watching the light leave her eyes.

She was worried for him and she had every right to be. The boy was off playing with gangs in the desert, getting in over his head with young men who gave him a place to belong and a direction for his anger. I tailed him over the course of a week or so and I can see just how unremarkable this tragedy is in the grand scheme of things. He lived with his mother and they barely scraped by in the city. He worked hard labor at the quarry and probably fell in with a gang after he saw a vision of how powerful it could make him feel, a kind of power he couldn’t find elsewhere. And then someone took advantage of another young hireling in a countless and worthless string of many and got him killed. Same story as it ever was, same story that it will always be.

The only atypical part of this is how exactly he got snuffed and I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the details. There’s something supposedly being sold out of Lost Hope called Basilisk. When I found the boy at the arranged meetup with a rival gang, they were all turned to stone. It’s the damnedest thing. I’ve never seen anything like it. The moment was captured perfectly in time, right down to the smirk on Ed’s face as he opened the can. He couldn’t have known, right?

So where does that leave me? For now, it leaves me a pale, clammy mess that can’t get out of bed. But as soon as my body comes back to me after this bout of foolishness that I’m not about to forget anytime soon, I need to talk to Sabrys. Can you imagine this kind of weapon in the wrong hands?

Off the Record | 044

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 12:01:54 -0400

The temple was dim and quiet, all stone and candlelight in the same unchanging way it’d always been. From the day I set foot there, I quietly understood the way it was made, the intent of its design. It was far more intimate than any sanctum I’d set foot in, felt more human, closer to being the intersection of heaven and earth the priests of the Twelve had often described but rarely evoked. I’ve been in the temple a hundred times before and resisted. I’ve always been skeptical, but I think maybe a little faith wouldn’t kill me.

Guilt was eating me alive the same way it always did, from the inside out starting right in the pit of my stomach. I was hiding my drinking again, stealing away when I felt the pressure creep in to curb it before it got too high to deal with. I knew it was wrong, that I was breaking trust, and hoped desperately to be caught in the act because I was too fucking craven to come out and admit it. It finally happened.

I was sure I was going to walk back out of those doors with a back full of angry lashes and the knowledge that the cycle would continue, absolutely convinced that it was all a fairly-earned price to pay for the vices I can’t control. But it didn’t work like that. Call it obvious, but I’m always surprised when I least expect it.

I cried like a baby and admitted my weaknesses, the things I’m afraid of. I confessed to the shame and the way I squander my time and talent. I cried more. I waited for the blows to come and they never did. I felt raw and open, uncomfortable and disgusted and humiliated. And despite my best efforts to make myself as easy for other people to hate me as I hate me, somehow it never happened. I felt nothing but awe when what I got instead was acceptance.

I keep trying to write here about something good, and it’s not that every moment is misery. I’m just not a poet or someone who pens love letters, and even in the privacy of a page I still get too embarrassed to be vulnerable. But the importance of this unexpected moment of feeling profoundly loved and understood is one I can’t shake. I really want to be okay.

Off the Record | 043

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 11:09:00 -0400

Adolfo Arranz

I wake clutching a twisted pillow in an empty bed with the dull drumbeat of bitter need pounding in my head. Disgust makes me nauseous, or maybe it’s the want for a drink, or maybe it’s both—I can’t even fucking tell anymore, and one is indistinguishable from the other so why even try to look for a divide? But strangely enough, that feels like the least of my problems right now.

Here’s the truth of it. I’ve decided to quit investigating for awhile and get my head together. I had a full collapse last night after the arrest I’ve been pining after slipped out of my fingers again, probably for the very last time, at the same fucking orchestrations that always undermine me. I’m struggling to feel the point of anything I do. Inquiry without power is…what, exactly? I’m just some kid with an older brother that dangles what I want just out of reach while I jump and occasionally brush my fingers against it. Maybe the prize isn’t worth the effort.

Instead of moping, I’m leaving for Doma before the others and I’m thinking maybe I’ll stay for awhile. Throw myself into something tangible, something actually fucking real that I can see for myself. From the look of things, they need the help, and I need them to need me. I need to remember what compassion feels like. Maybe I can help rebuild or…I don’t even care. I’ll hand out rations. I’ll fix wagons. I’ll hold crying babies. It doesn’t matter. I jotted down a few things Michishio said about the culture there, so maybe I have a chance.

Off the Record | 042

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 14:29:12 -0400

Frederick Judd Waugh

With so much anger boiling around me, it feels strange and pretty godsdamned refreshing to be one of the few steady anchors in a veritable shitstorm. I traveled to Kugane alone and spent a good portion of the trip listening to the conversations around me, doing my best to learn how to blend in with the walls while I’m here. I don’t know if I gleaned any particularly useful wisdom, but I do know far too much about a specific fisherman in Kugane who overcharges for his stock.

From this distance, some might feel like their troubles are far behind them, left back in Eorzea. As for me, I’m washing the taste of eastern liquor out of my mouth before I have company and I know I still carry the same burdens in a different skin. I’m not fixed by any means, but unlike all the others who are in an uproar over the Ward’s ownership transfer, I feel like this is a second…third…fourth chance for me. New faces, new impressions to make, and it seems that there will be new people for me to try to help and serve. I haven’t admitted it aloud to anyone, but that last point has lit a bigger fire than I anticipated. A familiar ember I had nearly forgotten.

I have no connection to the land, no special affinity for Domans or sensitivity to their struggles. More likely than not, I’ve complained about their distant cousins when they sought refugee in Ul’dah at the height of the war, got impatient and prodded them along with my cudgel once or twice on my shift. I have no delusion of my overwhelming goodness or selflessness on matters of their freedom or safety, and yet I’m eager to put myself on the ground and rebuild. But I don’t have to carry the corruption of the Blades with me into my grave.

I wonder if my father ever struggled to love the people he served even as it was never really returned to him. If he ever had days that I had, pouring sweat in the Thanalan sun and just wishing for all the tents full of people who were suddenly my problem to just up and vanish—not my problem anymore. Those days will come back to me sooner than I’d like and I know I just have to be the wheel on the cart, just like my mother taught me. There may be three others like me and no thanks for the effort, but without me, nothing above would move as it should. This is my purpose.

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Sun, 20 May 2018 16:26:20 -0400

Elia, Hop-Frog

Tue, 15 May 2018 22:03:28 -0400

Hop-Frog: revenge, humiliation, bullying.

–

As a child, you have a lot of firsts. You remember your first taste of dessert, your first time swimming, your first crush, your first friends. Within within a week of my stay at Ilse’s, I caught my first punch to the face. It was in a depressing little scrap with a cousin’s friend, a stringy little shit from down the dusty road who ignited my temper like dry tinder with remarks about my father who was barely cold in his grave at that point. I wish I could say I pummeled his face into a raw, red pulp and delivered the justice that was singing, nay screaming a high note in my ears, but I was still a scared city girl and he had only ever known the grit and gristle of life in the dead Bazaar. I got my ass thoroughly beaten.

My aunt Ilse cleaned up my cuts and scrapes with a rag and clear alcohol, the kind I caught her sipping from late at night, the kind that she threatened to beat me over if I told a soul what I’d seen. I cried as my tender wounds burned hotter than fire, and I swear her touch was all the rougher for it. I was bandaged up and sent on my way, but it wouldn’t be the last time we repeated this ritual.

When I won my first fight, it wasn’t like I thought it would be. I dreamed of the day I’d stomp the next person to fuck with me into the dirt and spit on their defeated body and walk away with the respect and admiration of everyone who thought they could push me around, but it never played out that way. Petty childish fantasy, that’s what that was. I’d been tormented for weeks on end and it was the hottest day of the summer that I finally snapped.

“Elia, where’s your mum?” It always started the same way. “Don’t you have one?”

“Bet your da off and kilt himself to get away from you!” I’d suffered it a thousand times before, the same insults that went from cruel to irritating to tiresome. Even the laughter did nothing to me after a point.

“Bet your mum is busy in the city on her back with his replacement,” they sneered, as though they knew the first thing they were talking about. Children.

Accepted though this attempt at bullying may have been at that point, I think it was the inferno, the oppressively hot air cooking us all alive that stole me from my senses. When my fist collided with her nose in a sickening crunch, all I could think about was the feel of her sweat across my knuckles.

I couldn’t tell you what happened from there except to tell you it was an utter rout. My cousins came whooping up the road and dragged me from the shrieking girl with blood soaking my front looking like I’d all but murdered her.

Ilse sent the rest of the kids from the shack and sat me down as she had several times before. I was still catching my breath when she settled in and began soaking the rag with cheap hooch. For once, there was only silence between us and I had long given up crying since the first time she’d cleaned my wounds this way. It felt like a rite of passage and my reward was complete, uninterrupted solitude, free for a night from her wild offspring. She sent me out the back door with my hands bandaged and left me to throw bones to the dogs in the rocky yard while I contemplated the crushing weight of what I felt was my father’s disappointment from afar. I watched the desert sun set and only then did I let the stoicism melt into despair and loathing. Even when I won, I lost.

The Gold Bug for Elia. It’s okay. Drabble and ficlets are weird words. Go wild.

Tue, 15 May 2018 18:13:19 -0400

The Gold Bug: omen, blame, searching.

–

It was slaughter day the last time I went to the Shroud on business. The breeze cutting through the farms was thick with the smell of iron-rich blood that mixed with sweet earth to make mud under my boots. I bet I could have bottled it up and sold it to someone superstitious for a mint, but my mind was malms away.

“We painted the mark of the Mother over our barn for protection, as you can see…”

The farmer gestured upward and sure enough, there was Nophica’s sigil in bright, white paint against the faded wood. I would have rolled my eyes if I knew nobody was looking. One-hundred-percent shite, that’s what that is. Surely the Mother has better things to do than protect this man’s livestock, and if she hasn’t, then the gods have truly mundane fucking interests.

“…The stableboy was found dead, drained of blood over here. Never seen anything like it…”

I took notes—poor bastard—and I followed his gesture to a crumpled patch of grass that had clearly been pressed down under the weight of a young man’s body, and yet no footprints are found in the springy mounds of loose dirt around his unfortunate grave. I knelt and probed the dirt with my fingers as though I could massage some evidence to the surface. A stray blade, a half-chewed poisonous root—but I knew it wouldn’t tell me anything. It never does.

It’s been like this for a few weeks now. The farmers are wringing their hands and wondering why their animals are turning up bloodless husks. They’re hungry to blame something, anything. They want to make sense of it. There are no signs of intruders, no evidence of a wolf at the gate with lust in its eyes for an easy meal. What animals are left huddle together nervously and look at every shadow like it’ll be the last sight of their insignificant little lives. I relate just a little too well.

I can’t figure it out, but the smallfolk have decided that this is definitely the sign of another impending Calamity. They pray to the elementals for mercy, they tread carefully around wildflowers as though one snapped stalk will bring the axe down on their modest corner of the Twelveswood. Compared to the fall of Dalamud, this is a bit of a yawning encore, isn’t it?

Off the Record | 041

Mon, 14 May 2018 14:02:10 -0400

Sidney Sime (1865-1941).

At an especially drunken Heavensturn party with my brothers and sisters of the Brass Blades, I was voted Most Likely to Call for Help. They laughed and smashed their tankards together when I sheepishly accepted the cheap, hammered brass coin of dubious honor. Amell smirked up at me, cigar smoke curling out of his mouth when our eyes met long before we knew each other as lovers. Speech! they yelled at me, banging their fists on the table. It was an honest-to-gods ruckus, but who was I to deny them the pleasure? I began by holding up one finger and mockingly calling into the linkpearl that I needed a hand with my delivery. The laughter was deafening. I really missed my calling as a comedian, didn’t I?

I’ll be the first to tell you that I earned my reputation fair and square, but where they meant it to represent cowardice, I saw it as an unashamed bid for my own life when things got tough. Nothing instills a healthy sense of fear quite like seeing your own father die by the hand of the people he was sworn to serve as an officer of the law. I’ll never be sorry, and each pile of dirt I saw thrown on the bodies of my fellow Brass Blades gone far too soon buried any doubt in my choices.

Last night, I embarked into an unsettling place devoid of humanity at the beckon of my company, and I was reminded that even as Most Likely to Call for Help, I can still feel a wellspring of courage within that also makes me Most Likely To Answer, as well.

strigif0rme:Lighting study with Elia.

Fri, 11 May 2018 16:39:58 -0400

strigif0rme:

Lighting study with Elia.

Off the Record | 040

Thu, 10 May 2018 14:28:41 -0400

I returned to live with my mother when her long period of grieving was over and things never really went back to how they were. Together, she and my father were tough, a united force of hard love shown through discipline and rigid lessons about doing the right thing and keeping your damn head down to get it done. When I failed to meet their expectations, as sure as daylight, there would be correction. But without him, the story changed.

Maybe it’s true, what they say about taking in abandoned baby animals. When you release them to the wild again, they smell different to their kin. They’re rejected from the nest as an outsider, forever marked. And maybe that’s what my mother sensed in me when I came back from Ilse’s shack in Golden Bazaar. I was hungry for her approval and her notice, but by the time we had grown accustomed to our newer, lonelier normal without my father, she didn’t think she needed to give it anymore.

We got a small monthly allotment from the Blades for my father’s death in the line of duty, but my mother still worked ceaselessly to afford our life in the city without him. I barely saw her for a time and so the burden fell to me to continue what they had started to instill; I studied harder and, consequently, punished myself harder for my failings. Every bad mark was spit on my father’s grave. Every failure to uphold the standard brought the burden of his death on me directly. If only I had listened that time, or if only I had done what he asked the first time, then perhaps through a convoluted series of logical leaps he would have had the stamina to make it through that day without falling to the riots. I really believed that.

You can’t run forever, and eventually it all caught up to me around the time I enlisted to join the Brass Blades in the steps of my forebears. I had barely made it through the Ossuary to formalize my training as a thaumaturge, knowing full well how hard my mother worked to pay for it all. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t have the strength to keep on the way my parents would have wanted. I slipped and then didn’t stop slipping until I was taking bribes and looking the other way with alarming regularity, flying flagrantly in the face of my father’s lessons on the cosmic imperative of justice. I slipped until I cheated on my husband for a man I then turned and threw under the wagon to keep myself out of trouble. Until I took up drinking to cope with all these messes of my own making, which only made even more.

I have to find a way out of this cycle before it kills me.

Off the Record | 039

Tue, 08 May 2018 01:05:15 -0400

In the wake of total personal disaster, I went back to the Ossuary and committed to becoming a better thaumaturge. I wanted to quit so much; there wasn’t a time when I wasn’t weighing whether or not it was worth all the tears, but I suffered through hour after excruciating hour. I locked myself in my one-room flat in the shittiest part of Ul’dah for hours on end, complete isolation from all the things that drive me to self-destruct, and with the exception of the one lapse where I drank too much hours before my written final exam, I did it. I had to apprehend a roegadyn man on the run and damn near electrocuted him to death in my attempts to stop him, so I guess we’ll go on and call that success.

Except now I’m left at a plateau wondering what comes next. In the past, the rungs I climbed were markers laid out for me: finish your education, find a job, find a mate, get married, have children, work to raise them, and then settle in for an unremarkable death. And now? I guess I find smaller hills to climb. I’m trying to kick my smoking habit first and foremost. It’s not so bad, but that’s only because I drink to compensate. And when I get back to trying to quit drinking? Well, I won’t have smoking to fall back on, so what happens then? My vices feed each other in the worst way.

There’s more I really want to say here, but I can’t bear even thinking about seeing the words put to page. It’s funny how years later, I still feel like there’s someone watching over my shoulder, waiting for me to slip up and show my soft underbelly so they can shred it into ribbons. Makes you wonder how anyone manages to have their shit together when all it takes is a bad start to fuck you up for the long road.

k-i-l-l-e-r-s:☩

Fri, 04 May 2018 16:01:58 -0400

k-i-l-l-e-r-s:

☩

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Fri, 04 May 2018 12:11:46 -0400

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Fri, 04 May 2018 08:01:47 -0400

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Thu, 03 May 2018 16:01:55 -0400

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Thu, 03 May 2018 15:43:53 -0400