Family Ties (chapter 15 of 49, 7662 words)
Braska and his guardians move on to the Mi’ihen Highroad. Stopping at the travel agency gives Braska the chance to ask Jecht an important question, but an unexpected encounter casts a shadow over the evening.
Read here on praze.net or here on archiveofourown.org, or read the whole fic so far as a PDF or an EPUB.
Braska is both naturally very kind and very selfish. This is one of his better days, so he can pay more attention to helping Jecht even if he hasn’t quite realised Jecht doesn’t really want to be helped in the way Braska wants to help him.
The Mi’ihen Highroad is really nice, isn’t it? It made a big impression on me when I first played the game, although that was probably mostly because Auron had just joined the party. Also because it seemed at the time that there was a huge difficulty spike for some reason and I got a couple of game overs and had to do some grinding for the first time in the game. I’m not sure why I thought this because subsequent playthroughs haven’t had this issue, so I suppose I hadn’t yet become obsessed enough with the game to succeed in intuiting everyone’s affinities.
I wanted to concoct an in-world explanation for the fact that the strength of the fiends increases as one goes further north. It’s fortuitous that Yuna starts her journey at the southernmost point on the map, haha. Unfortunately this explanation doesn’t account for the Omega Ruins, I guess, but maybe there’s some other pyrefly source elsewhere.
Braska laid a hand on Auron’s sleeve,
Braska, please restrain yourself …
Auron would definitely be jealous if Braska chose to spend the evening with Jecht; in a rare moment of perspicacity, Braska has realised that, even if he doesn’t understand why.
Auron’s usual logic goes completely out of the window as soon as he thinks about the possibility that Jecht might leave them. Of course having to keep watch on his own through the night would be an issue, if he were to continue insisting Braska shouldn’t lose any sleep. I don’t know how he was planning to manage this before Jecht came along, actually.
Unfortunately, we won’t meet Rin in person until almost the end of the story; when he meets Auron in FFX, he asks if Auron remembers him from “the beginning of Lord Braska’s Calm”, which certainly suggests to me that they hadn’t met prior to that. It’s a shame, I like him! It would be nice to give Braska the chance to see him too, but alas.
Braska is the only thirty-five-year-old who would refer to someone else as a “young man”.
This is the beginning of Rin’s entrepreneurial career, so he just owns a couple of travel agencies (and will in fact sell the Bevelle branch fairly soon to concentrate on building up the business at the Highroad one … more on that later).
I’ve read fics where Braska is a fluent Al Bhed speaker, but I think it’s more fun to imagine that he’s very out of practice. I imagine that after he and Girl moved to Bevelle, she was quite ready to abandon her language in favour of speaking the more prestigious common tongue, which she was probably quite good at already anyway. Braska probably wanted her to keep it up at home so Yuna could learn, but Girl would have considered that unduly sentimental; she certainly didn’t have the romantic attachment to her language that Braska did.
It’s nice to write moments where Auron laughs … he will be increasingly incapable of doing this as a result of various circumstances.
Chess exists in every universe and this is an indisputable fact. Like with everything else, Jecht is probably a natural at it, while Auron has to carefully consider every possible outcome before committing himself to anything.
Braska, typically, is only taking the instruction to be nice to his guardians seriously because it was one of the fayth who issued it.
I think it’s quite manipulative of Braska to ask Jecht if they’re friends right before he suggests Jecht might want to cut all ties with him, but he probably doesn’t consciously realise that he’s being unscrupulous here.
One of the parts of DFFOO (rip) that stuck with me was the scene where Tidus suggests Braska was Jecht’s first friend. I think this is a nice idea! I’m not sure how easy it would be to make friends with Braska when he’s Like This, but I suppose Jecht does still like him more than he likes Auron, so it kind of makes sense.
Mind you, Jecht clearly cares about Auron more than he realises, given that the first thing he thinks about when Braska suggests that he leave the pilgrimage is that Auron would have to do the guardian stuff alone! Not that Jecht is currently doing a huge amount of it.
Jecht is definitely starting to care about the pilgrimage, but he thinks he only cares about it because doing a good job of being Braska’s guardian will make him feel more secure about his life back home.
Auron’s back on the whiskey. We like to drink with Auron.
I’m not sure how the travel agency clerk would have contacted the chocobo taxi driver without using machina, but we won’t mention that to Mr and Mrs (mumble).
This couple really seem to show affection physically, huh … I wonder if any children they might have would do the same …
Only very privileged people can go on holiday in Spira, as Auron points out to Jecht later. I think it’s also quite telling that Mr (mumble [people don’t even have surnames in Spira why am I doing this]) supports the Goers simply because they’re the home team and they win a lot. It suggests that he’s used to being part of the majority.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a kind of running joke that everyone is attracted to Auron. Even a certain man previously believed to be straight may turn out to have feelings for him … and even Mrs (mumble)!!! This is not something he will find embarrassing at all.
Braska’s father would of course have been wearing a turban, but I delayed the reveal of that information so as to make it less completely blindingly obvious who they were immediately. There were quite a few other clues, though … I don’t think I ever draw attention to another character’s eye colour apart from Braska’s and Auron’s, haha. I’m pretty sure that even Jecht’s weird red eyes don’t get a mention … sorry Jecht.
Jecht is Very Interested in the prospect of blitzball, but he’s going to have to wait until tomorrow to talk about that.
Like a lot of Yevonites, Mr and Mrs, um, Braska Senior are very pleased to hear about summoners taking the pilgrimage, but as their letter in the first chapter told us, they were much less happy to find out their own son was doing it. It’s a very Yevonite cognitive dissonance. Auron would probably be the same (although over the course of the pilgrimage he will necessarily become much more sceptical about the whole thing).
I quite like the idea that Mr and Mrs BS were quite progressive until their son actually went against the teachings in a big way, and then they became massive reactionaries.
Yunalesca mention … we’ll be seeing more of her later, as much as I hate to say it.
They wanted me to get a real job, work with computers or be some boring professor or somethin’.
It’s a wee self-insert for me and the boyo.
“Oh man,” said Jecht. “Auron, I –”
Careful, Jecht, your emotion is showing.
My Auron’s family headcanon: they were pretty ordinary people from a nondescript village in the Luca region, proud of their older son for joining the Crusaders and making a name for himself. He was nineteen when he died; Auron’s sisters were around eight, maybe twins (to use a well-worn Final Fantasy trope). He was four at the time, and was found during the cleanup operation and taken to Bevelle with the small number of other orphans. There will be more of this backstory in a few chapters’ time.