Shamefully Personal (chapter 27 of 49, 6662 words)
Jecht trains with the Psyches, while Auron returns to the library and makes a confusing discovery about Sin. Finding himself alarmed by Braska’s behaviour again, he visits the local temples before confessing his worries to Jecht.
Read here on praze.net or here on archiveofourown.org, or read the whole fic so far as a PDF or an EPUB.
Braska clearly has some awareness of the fact that Auron cares about him, but hasn’t succeeded in translating that into “maybe he doesn’t actually want me to die”.
Going by Google Ngrams, the spelling “antient” was pretty much gone by 1850, so idk what that would match up with in-universe … maybe somewhere between Ohalland’s and Yocun’s Calms. I enjoyed busting out the archaic word forms for the book titles in this chapter.
Auron’s carefully sceptical reaction to the book about Zanarkand illustrates the fact that despite his difficulty with reading, it doesn’t make him any less intelligent – I think citizens of Jecht’s world or ours would tend to assume a correlation between the two, but this doesn’t have to be the case in Spira.
Just leaving these here:
Other teams would have mages on hand to do the same job; the Al Bhed didn’t tend to use magic much, so they relied on potions that Hanta had promised him were more powerful than the Yevonite ones.
This book, donated from the private collection of Yo Tertt, was damaged during an Al Bhed attack on his archive, a suspected sabotage attempt against Yevonite knowledge.
many of the pages were strewn with burn marks, so small and precise they could have come only from a mage’s hand.
Auron is right to pick up on the drawings of Sin and the different forms it takes as an important piece of the puzzle, although his interpretation of the possessive construction is false, which he really can’t be blamed for. He surmises that the book is pre-Yocun’s Final Summoning, although based on what the captions of the drawings really mean, it just has to be before Sin reappeared following her Calm (although Maechen said earlier that that lasted only three years, a figure I invented completely). His belief that the image of Lord (cough)’s Sin means that someone must have defeated Sin before Yunalesca did is kind of sad because the hope he derives from this is based on a misunderstanding, but he kind of needs the encouragement, so maybe it’s good that he doesn’t quite get what’s going on here.
I think the way Braska reacts to the boy hitting him with his blitzball is a manifestation of what he’s really like under the veneer of trying to care for everybody. As we’ve seen several times, he is really quite a selfish person.
Auron obviously doesn’t want to refer to the fact that Braska is using his aeon practice as a way of deciding whether to kill himself in the next couple of days or just wait until the Final Summoning to do it. I think he’s hoping that if he doesn’t bring it up, Braska won’t either, and they’ll keep going by default, which is obviously wishful thinking.
Braska: it helps me a lot when Auron hugs me and caresses me, so it helps him when I do the same to him, right? It doesn’t make him feel sexually frustrated, and ashamed of that sexual frustration, and worried that his time to find a way of saving me is running out, right? Right???
Just when Auron is starting to think those funny thoughts again (to quote Wakka) because he has nothing to distract him, Jecht turns up to distract him after all! Auron isn’t very grateful though, obviously.
While Yevon is intolerant of homosexuality, the Al Bhed are much more sensible about it. It’s another case of there being gay people all over Spira, often without Auron finding out.
Auron’s immediate assumption that Jecht has been drinking shows that he still doesn’t have a huge amount of faith in him. At least he seems to care about his wellbeing a bit by this point.
Auron in the morning: I must never tell Jecht about Braska kissing me.
Auron in the evening: well, Jecht’s the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t think being gay is extremely shameful … time to tell him about Braska kissing me.
I guess the moral of this story, given what has just happened, is that Auron should have spent more time with the Al Bhed.
Braska would absolutely not have done the same to Jecht, come on, Auron.
I like to imagine that some of the other FF summons are present as aeons in Spira, but as a result of whatever determines summoners’ affinities, Braska and Yuna are both best suited to gain the five we see Yuna go for in the game, so we don’t see the rest.
I think Auron probably is quite tall for a Spiran; as people from Zanarkand surely have a better quality of life, Jecht’s being slightly taller than him is less remarkable. Having said that, Wakka is from a place with a worse quality of life than the Spiran average and he’s ludicrously tall, so who knows what happened there.
Discovering his talent for the sword and his love of following the rules allowed Auron to throw himself into his career and (appear to?) get over the trauma of his family being killed – I guess it’s like how people who’ve been through bad stuff can be “reformed” by joining the army or whatever. It probably was the right thing in Auron’s case; I can’t really picture him as a priest.
Braska obviously takes the fact that the two of them knew each other twenty years ago as a spiritual sign of some kind; Auron’s not the kind of person to think in such terms (as we’ll see later on, he’s quite sceptical about the notion of fate), but knowing Braska perceives this connection between them is enough on its own to make him, um, think those funny thoughts again (I feel like I’ll be using this phrase a lot).