Can't believe I forgot to include this!!
Until The End (chapter 45 of 49, 6885 words)
After a surprise audience with Kelk Ronso, Braska and Auron make their way back to the Calm Lands. Auron considers what to do after the Final Summoning, and tries without much success to make Braska feel better. Braska attempts to gather his thoughts enough to put his feelings for Auron into words.
Read here on praze.net or here on archiveofourown.org, or read the whole fic so far as a PDF or an EPUB.
There doesn't seem to be much to say about this chapter … tbh nothing really happens except for Braska being extremely sad, which we've had plenty of already.
By taking the powder, Auron has spared himself the need to convince Braska not to kill himself. (He can just be sexually assaulted instead, I guess?)
Braska has managed to hit his most suicidal moment and his most problematic one together. I honestly don't know whether his actions come across as at all sympathetic at this point … he's just very fucked up.
Drink every time Braska apologises in this chapter.
I love how all the Ronso speak in "me caveman" language and then Kelk just uses the most formal register possible. I put in the bit about him having been educated in Bevelle as an attempt at explaining this, because I don't see how else he would have learnt to speak proper. He surely would have come across machina when he was there if this is the case, so his disgust when he hears Auron's story about it seems a bit over the top, but I guess Kelk is maybe fifty or sixty years old, so it's very possible that the amount of machina in Bevelle could have increased significantly in the time since he was resident.
Also wondered if I should say "paw at the negotiating table" but that seemed a bit too frivolous for this chapter.
The aeons have some level of prescience about the fact that Jecht's becoming the fayth of the Final Aeon is what sets off the process of allowing an eternal Calm, so they continue to be obsessed with getting Braska to perform the Final Summoning. They're also still (rightly) concerned that Braska's attachment to Auron could be an impediment to it.
The idea that new fiends take a while to respawn isn't quite game-compliant, but it helps explain what Auron is able to do after the Final Summoning.
I don't think Braska has actually told Auron the aeons are the cause of the headache, although Auron certainly knows they're communicating with him. But I don't think it's unreasonable that he could have worked it out by this point. Weeks is a bit of an exaggeration – it's been exactly two of them since the aeons first made themselves known to Braska at the Mi'ihen Highroad travel agency – but we can't really blame Auron for feeling like it's been longer.
It seems as if Auron singlehandedly negotiates Yuna and her guardians' ability to go free after they escape the Via Purifico and fight the first of Seymour's undead iterations at the citadel gate, given that he turns up and says "We're all clear. We will have to avoid Bevelle in the future." So he does appear to have an ability to engage in diplomacy that persists into the later phase of his existence.
Auron's ideas about what he might do after the Final Summoning are unfortunately coloured by two misconceptions. The stuff about unsents not being able to do anything meaningful lest it turn them into monsters is, as I may have said before, an attempt at explaining the particular role taken by a certain legendary guardian during Yuna's pilgrimage.
I couldn't not include a paragraph where Braska sobs in Auron's arms and tells him that he needs him. That's the stuff.
Can't believe I forgot to include this!!
