Three Promises (chapter 48 of 49, 6940 words)
Gravely wounded, Auron makes his way to the south edge of the Calm Lands, where Kimahri and Rin do their best to help him.
Read here on praze.net or here on archiveofourown.org, or read the whole fic so far as a PDF or an EPUB.
While the earlier chapters always covered exactly one day or half of one, these final chapters take a looser approach to time, partly as a way of showing that it's becoming less important for Auron now that things are falling apart completely.
I enjoyed representing his gradual realisation of how much pain he's in.
I don't think I've said anything about what material Auron's cuirass might be made of prior to this point … I don't think it can be entirely leather, but we'll say there's a layer of leather in there somewhere.
It seems a bit naff to use the canonical terms "hi-potion" and "X-potion", which is why I just refer vaguely to the strength of the blend.
I think it's a bit of a fanon thing to assume that Auron's wound continues onto his chest. I usually make huge amounts of effort to disagree with any and all commonly held beliefs in a given fandom, but this one seems to make sense as a way of explaining how he loses so much blood.
Ok, me, why is this teleporter working when the one at the Ronso settlement wasn't last time? Look, Auron canonically needs to get to "just outside Bevelle", somehow … somehow. That's why. He says he crawled "down Mount Gagazet", not "up and down mount Gagazet", so it works, right?
He couldn't remember whether the Ronso tended to train white mages from among their clan or to rely on medicinal items like the Al Bhed did,
He probably did know this before; it's the first sign that, as he loses more and more blood, he's starting to become less compos mentis.
I guess the "bundles of spare clothes" are just more copies of everyone's usual clothes, seeing as everyone wears the same thing all the time in final fantasyland.
The motivation behind Auron's compulsion to keep going gradually changes from "I need to find someone to heal me" to "I need to find someone to do those things I promised Braska and Jecht and also stop Sin forever". The first glimpse of this shift is when he sees the spheres, but it becomes more pronounced when he realises he's beyond saving.
The Ronso settlement was pretty deserted before, but it's completely empty now. I think after Biran v Kimahri, Nemma told all the young Ronso she was very disappointed in them and made them all follow her to Bevelle in the hope that watching the celebrations of the Calm would stop them all fighting each other.
I wonder what the Ronso think when they get back and find a big trail of blood all over the place, though.
Anyway, the explanation of "somehow" is: potions. A lot of potions including several stolen from the Ronso. And, of course, the immense stubbornness and determination of my guy.
Just chucked in a bit of completely random worldbuilding that the Ronso have to be elected to adulthood instead of just reaching it at a certain age … why not?
Kimahri must somehow have avoided running into every adult Ronso in existence during his short time in Bevelle, and every child Ronso plus Nemma once he left it. I guess the latter group probably passed the travel agency while he was staying there, and he didn't realise.
There is obviously some tricky stuff to untangle based on the fact that Auron tells us "Kimahri found me … just before I died" but it's also implied that he died and became unsent overnight after being seen to by Rin. I've discussed my interpretation of this before; in short, Auron loses consciousness for the last time after telling Kimahri about Yuna, but Rin later manages to resuscitate him briefly as part of his sophisticated Al Bhed first aid procedure.
Rin is a nice guy but he loves money. Hard to believe in our world where everyone who loves money is Evil, but, er, let me have this.
Jumping to his feet in alarm is about as emotive as Rin gets. In the game he tells us "I am calm about most things."
He mixes Al Bhed words into his speech a bit more than most of his employees do; they're more insecure about being Al Bhed working in Yevonite society, so they're very careful to speak the common language with immaculate accents, while his attitude is more like "yeah, I'm an Al Bhed, and I also happen to be a very competent businessman, so deal with it." He does want to extol the virtues of the Al Bhed language and culture to anyone who might listen, as we see from his conversations with Tidus.
"so if you want him to have a chance at living,"
Also known as …
I'm delighted that I got to use the word "defibrillator" in this fic. Bless the Al Bhed.
Auron opens and closes his mouth when he's trying to speak because he's attempting to form a bilabial plosive.
There are, of course, parades and fireworks happening in Bevelle, of all things.
I wanted an excuse to use the line "better than Kimahri does" because Tidus says it in the game when they're all climbing onto the snowmobiles and it's so ridiculous.
Kimahri uses the phrase "only those who try will become" in the game, so I thought it would be neat to suggest it was actually an Al Bhed phrase he had heard from Rin during this encounter! He's quite suspicious of Al Bhed ways at this point, but I think this encounter with Rin will end up shaping his attitude towards them in the long term.
In FFX, the Thunder Plains travel agency is part of Rin's portfolio and is indeed referred to a few times as the Bilghen Memorial Travel Agency. Maechen seems to know about him, but says that because he was an Al Bhed, "our history books never mention him". The Yevonites seem to be good at erasing the memory of anyone who doesn't fit their narrative: in the last chapter I had Gandof proclaim that his guardian would be remembered, but because they wanted to downplay his role in defeating Sin, it doesn't last. And, of course, nobody has ever survived the Via Purifico …