… yes I did.
I Will Survive M ♂ ⚤ ! 12k+
Several years after Yuna’s mother decides not to visit her people, the family moves to Besaid. Braska and his wife find their marriage under pressure, faced with suspicion in their new community, their teenage daughter’s rebellious behaviour, and Braska’s nascent feelings for a dear friend. When Yuna declares her intent to take the summoner’s pilgrimage, the stakes are raised, and they find themselves not content with the mere defeat of Sin, but actively trying to destroy it.
Yes, the title is from the song of the same name, and is appropriate in … some ways? … but highly inappropriate in others. Really I just wanted an excuse to pay homage to this Reddit post – please listen to the link in the top comment. It changed my life.
The story of this beast is: while I have so far avoided signing up for fic exchanges this year, I did intend to get more involved in fests and challenges, and I became particularly tempted by the various challenges on offer at 990w this month for a smaller challenge, and I was checking the comm out to see what else was available at the moment and noticed that one of the challenges was on the theme “somebody lives/not everyone dies”. Absolute nectar for the FFX fandom. I noted that the deadline was the end of this month and the minimum was 2k, i.e. quite soon and quite a lot, and I had vague thoughts about going back to the impetus for Braska’s whole part of the story and making the person who doesn’t die Yuna’s mother, and then I ceased to think about it until last Friday night. At about seven on Saturday morning I started writing and it was most of what I did until approximately nine this morning, apart from going in fruitless search of Easter eggs and, er, actually playing FFX for a couple of hours. And, come to think of it, commenting on a DW post about FFX. Welcome to my life, where I carefully curate all media consumed to ensure that it continues to be 2002.
Now the twist: this is actually more of a fic outline than a fic. There are only two lines of dialogue in the whole thing (although they’re Very Meaningful ones!); I really don’t go into the events in much detail at all. I use this vaguely omniscient narrative voice that absolutely rushes through the story (this thing takes place over a period of twenty-five years, yikes), because if I’d gone into detail I’d have had to spend much more time a. trying to convincingly depict several very emotional conversations without making them too overwrought (I Guess), and b. actually getting through the events of the thing. That is a fic I would not have been able to write over the course of two days, and yet as soon as this thing came into my head, I needed to get it out of there as quickly as I could. I would love to write that fic someday, adapting every paragraph or two of this one into an entire chapter, but I do have that WIP I’m always going on about to work on.
So the style of this one is quite unusual: most of the dialogue is reported speech, which I think works surprisingly well, and despite being a fairly major character, Yuna’s mother still isn’t given a name. (This is partly because all the good names are taken by various Juggernaut FFX Fics, and also because I’ve come up with the most perfectly terrible name for her but want to save it for the WIP.) Also – as I say in the notes of the fic itself – Yuna is … not quite her usual lovely self in this, given that both her parents are still alive and her upbringing takes a slightly different turn from how it goes in canon. Tbh, if I can be allowed to criticise my own stuff so soon after producing it, the female characters don’t come off so great generally (although Rikku is a boss) – this is entirely my fault for being so focused on the male friendships (and more-than-friendships, eyes emoji) of the prequel era. And wanting to make men suffer beautifully, I guess.