Chapter Text
Flyer? I Hardly Know ‘Er!
There were seven zeroes after the gil symbol on the flyer, posted on one of the pillars outside the Quicksand. Pakik was pretty sure that was a lot; more than she had. She slapped Kethry on the shoulder. “Hey. What’s this say?”
Kethry caught Pakik’s wrist before she could pull it away, then dropped it and stepped in to look. “Hmm. Tow-oo… That one’s spelled weird. Tow-oor… I dunno. The bottom part says fights, though. And that’s ten million gil.”
Pakik jerked upright, eyes wide and a grin splitting her face clean in two. “Ten million? Wait, and it’s just fights? No, what else does it say?” She ripped the flyer off the board and jammed it at Kethry, who snatched it out of her hand and knit her brow to read it.
“Come… one come all… blah blah,” she lifted her left hand to mime the jabber, “uh, sixteen? Sixteen entrants.” Kethry shifted to settle onto one hip and plant her hand on it, holding the flyer closer to her face, and Pakik loomed excitably over her, trying not to step on her toes. “Uh, we have to enter by sunset on… oh, today!”
“Fuck! Let’s go now!” Pakik had already turned on her heel and kicked into a run, pointing at the thin speck of sun still visible over the walls of Ul’dah.
Kethry hesitated for a second–“Hey!”–but followed, catching up to Pakik in no time, flyer still in hand. She brandished it and pointed out, “We don’t even know what this is!”
“Fights for money, dick-for-brains. That’s our whole fucking job.”
They careened around the curve of the Steps of Nald in lockstep, Kethry taking long, low strides to match Pakik’s bouncy, upright gait. Pakik almost knocked them both over by reflexively turning into the Pugilists’ Guild, but Kethry pushed her back on course, and they darted around the corner toward the arena, both skidding to a halt behind a long line of heavily-armed people.
Pakik, a fulm or three taller than anyone else in the line, counted all the heads between them and the counter the best she could. “This is way more than sixteen.”
“Narrowing it down there, I guess.” Kethry pointed to the sand-floored pit below, where an even bigger crowd of fighters milled around like tadpoles.
“I see fish, and I see a barrel. We’ll get in no problem.” Pakik’s grin folded inward, turning into a snarl. “A little warm up.”
Kethry tapped a knuckle against Pakik’s elbow and Pakik flinched away, grabbing it. “That was my fucking funny bone, asshole!”
“You’re fine. Just remember not to kill anybody, ok?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They both tapped their feet waiting in the line, neither quite impatient enough to try to cut ahead. It oozed along like blood from a cut, some fighters being turned away by the clerk and others getting ushered past the desk to disappear down a set of stairs. They’d each reappear a few moments later, another grub in the writhing mass of larval gladiators down in the arena.
Pakik started counting them, “One, two,” and then gave up. “Lotta people down there. I’ll save your spot if you wanna run and grab your gear.”
Kethry peeped down into the arena, standing on her tiptoes to see over the near wall. “Nah. Should be fine.”
A few of their fellow applicants in the line looked at them sideways. Their sneers were begging to be decorated with some shattered teeth, and Pakik, for herself, was aching to provide. She felt her aether aligning to crack a chakra open and almost let it, but chopped up the flow, muddying her power. Didn’t want to get ahead of herself.
When it was their turn at the clerk, Kethry was in front, but she pushed Pakik ahead. The clerk’s eyelids were barely parted and their shoulders looked ready to fall from their sockets. “Name and occupation. Scratch that. Name please.” Pakik saw them write something on the sheet, a long word that started with a big triangle.
“Pakik of Manahacha. Bad Motherfucker, for the second thing.”
“I’ve marked you down as an adventurer. Height and weight?”
“Uh…” She turned to Kethry, who shrugged helpfully. “Two and a half yalms? Ish? And a couple hundred ponze. Let’s call it three fifty.”
“Fighting style?”
“Hittin’.”
The clerk’s eyes closed the rest of the way for a brief moment. “Very well. Next!”
Fish in a Barrel
The sands were busy, and Kethry tried hard not to shrink to the back of the crowd. She was here to fight, after all; for that, she needed to be out front. But there were so many people, and too many of them were looking at her.
Looking at Pakik, maybe. She cast a long shadow here, and a few people seemed to recognize her. She shot mean glares at everyone she could see–or, at least, she shot her normal glare that everyone said looked mean. Kethry scanned the crowd, steadying her breathing and shuffling out from behind Pakik, who seemed to be reveling in the attention.
The arena was a circle, probably twenty yalms across, ringed by ten-fulm-high walls that angled steeply up to the stands. Two passages led out of–and into–the arena from opposite sides. A narrow staircase halfway between the tunnels climbed up to a slightly lower-lying section of the stands; they had just walked down from there, and the clerk had called it the “fighter’s box”, so that was probably where they’d be watching and waiting to fight. Across from that, marking the arena into quarters, was a smaller door with a pair of white-robed people standing outside. Maybe an infirmary.
Kethry lost Pakik in the milling tension before the melee as they waited for the clerk to ring the gong. Two gladiators shoved in front of her, leaving her at the back of the sand pit, pressed up against the steep walls. The desert sun had disappeared below the sandstone and iron domes of Ul’dah, but braziers around the arena gave off more than enough light. Fighters stretched and eyed each other while their shadows flickered around their feet.
The pair ahead of her looked like veterans, wearing scraps of armor that showed off their scars. She noted the swords on their hips and the shields at their backs, then went back to wondering how you were supposed to know how much you weighed. If her head came up to Pakik’s stomach, then…
A gong thrummed through the arena. Pursing her lips in thought, Kethry reached up to grab the edge of a shield and pull the attached gladiator down. It unhooked as he fell; she flipped it to her other hand. Only a small buckler, but she didn't like using shields too much anyway. His friend turned to look. She snapped the metal rim of the buckler into his wrist, then kicked him away. He went down to his knees, holding his stomach with his hands and his mouth in a tiny “o”.
If Pakik weighed three hundred and fifty ponze–the first gladiator grabbed at her ankles and she hopped over him–then she’d be about half that. A Sea Wolf marauder ran at her, billhook axe wavering above his head. She watched it wobble for a second before he reached her. Half was less than two hundred. She sidestepped the marauder and tripped him, plucking the axe from his fingers as he fell.
But Pakik was wider than her too. A swordsman and Sultansworn paladin were caught in a deadlock near her, so she tossed the axe into the tangle of their legs. The paladin screeched about foul play, fell, and grappled the other down with him; she had to stutter-step back as they rolled towards her. The swordsman, trying to push away and disengage, kicked up a spray of sand directly into her face. She only managed to smack a little of it away with the buckler, and she grumbled and spat, wiping the sand out of her eyes. So she’d be less than-less than two hundred? How much was that?
The fallen men left an opening in the crowd; she could see Pakik and a lalafell pugilist through it. A woman with a staff charged them, and the pugilist jumped to precisely the height of the woman’s head, delivering a neat kick to her temple. She staggered, Pakik stuck her leg out, and the woman went sprawling into a loose pile of people by the railing.
By the looks of it, they were making a good dent in the competition. Kethry jogged over to join them, ducking under the swing of a tall knight’s morningstar. The pugilist sized her up, green eyes fearless under a matching headwrap, but Pakik yelled something about them being friends and she lowered her fists.
That always made Kethry feel nervous. Not Pakik yelling; she was pretty sure Pakik thought that was normal speaking volume. And not being in a fight either–fighting always felt simple, because it was. But being friends with someone was walking down an unlit tunnel, keeping your hand on a wall that might turn away or disappear in the dark. Or maybe it wasn’t like that at all? It was hard to think about.
Thankfully, a massive auri man attacked them instead. Spiraling horns curled around his jaw, and blood darkened the tape around his hands. He crossed them in front of his face before lunging, and Pakik’s breath came out in a huff, then sucked back in twice–that weird, uneven breathing she sometimes did. Kethry didn’t know why, exactly, but none of the people in the pile seemed to be dead, so she let Pakik leap forward and slam her arm into the man’s throat, flinging him back the way he came.
He landed in a jumble and retched. Turning back, her friend grinned at her, the red swoops of warpaint framing her eyes uneven around her wide and gleamy stare.
“I think I’m a hundred and fifty ponze,” Kethry said.
Eyebrows went up and pulled the paint up with them. “Uh, okay?” said Pakik.
“That’s it.”
“Oh, okay, cool.” She poked at her arm. “Fucker’s horns scraped me.”
Kethry hummed in response. There was shuffling from Pakik’s victim-pile, so she turned to see some of them limping to the edge of the pit, probably to go take a number at the healers’ rooms. She watched to see if any needed help making it up the stairs. One man, a middle-sized hyur with a fist-sized crater in his breastplate and vengeance in the grim set of his mouth, walked toward them instead.
“Nuh-uh. Out,” said Kethry.
He sneered and clearly dismissed her, setting his sights on Pakik’s lalafell friend. Wrong choice. Kethry weighed the buckler in her hand then flicked her wrist, arcing it into the side of his head. He howled and fell to his knees when it hit, holding his ear.
The gong sounded again, louder than the howl. The clerk from earlier had struck it with a mallet, standing behind the railing where Pakik–suddenly twenty paces away–was enthusiastically flipping someone over her shoulder.
The clerk watched them collapse in a puff of dust, blinking slowly. “We have our contestants. Line up, please, so I can see who’s left.”
The remaining fighters walked to the middle of the pit, sorting themselves into a rough arrowhead formation so they’d all fit in front of the clerk. Kethry’s line seemed longer than Pakik’s, though. She leaned forward to count heads. “Wait, there's seventeen.”
Pakik looked to her left, then dropped her eyes to the green-clad lalafell she’d been fighting alongside. She might have forgotten her friend was there. She grinned down at her all the same, then looked to her right instead. A pale elezen mage stood on her other side, one that had been fighting more physically than most who used magic. But he was still frail. When Pakik punched him in the face, the way his long legs folded underneath him was oddly graceful.
“There. Sixteen.”
“Sixteen it is,” the clerk mumbled into their clipboard. “Congratulations.”
Metal Gear Tataru: Tactical Accounting Action
Pakik flopped onto the stone bench, thinking it was probably the softest slab of rock Thanalan had ever quarried. “Whooooo. I’m juiced. Hokay.” She slowed her roll the best she could given the blue-hot fire in her blood, and closed her eyes to focus on jumbling her aether flows. The Warrior soul rock thing beat at the edge of her awareness, but she drowned it by bouncing back up to her feet, flying into a set of furious jumping jacks. She worked the fingers on her left hand against each other, flicking away the snot and blood she’d picked up by decking that elezen.
“Will you sit back down?” Kethry sighed, also caked in sweat-glued arena sand.
“Working,” hop, “on,” hop, “it,” hop, hop, hop. Pakik eased off the intensity, eventually dropping her arms to her sides and hopping on her toes, then doing shallow squats, then lowering back onto the bench. “Hrrrrmgh.” She dropped her head into her hands. “I should’ve warmed up before that. Also, I need a drink.”
An earthenware mug of water appeared below her face. Some of it sloshed up into her eye. “Ack! Thanks,” she said, grabbing it and straightening, then downing all of it in two gulps. “But I meant tequila. One of the roegadyn in there had breath like Black Brush tequila and I’m gonna fuckin’ explode if I don’t get some.”
“Black Brush? Bleuch. Nasty.”
“Yeah, s’why I like it. Wait, where’d you get the water?”
Kethry waved a hand over toward a table in the corner, which held a huge pitcher. She had a mug in her own hands and was working through it quickly. Pakik loped over to the pitcher and refilled her own mug, downed it, then picked up the pitcher and started chugging straight out of it. She left half for Kethry, then turned to size her up again, and took a few more gulps. “Rest is yours,” she gasped, slamming the pitcher down on the table.
The door to their little recovery room eased open, and a feather led a shock of pink through the crack.
“Tataru!” Pakik shouted giddily, yanking the door the rest of the way open and swinging the accountant inside. “Hi, what’s crackin’?”
“Ssssshhhh! Down, girl, down,” hissed Tataru, regaining her balance and shutting the door silently. Kethry snorted into her mug, blowing a bubble in the water that gobbed out onto her boots.
“Bwehhhh.”
Tataru ambled over to the bench, climbed up on it (looking a little stiff and letting out a few curses as she did), and waved Pakik and Kethry over to her.
Kethry leaned in, and Pakik dropped to sit cross-legged in front of the bench. Down in a whisper, Tataru laid out the week she’d had.
Pakik listened to most of it–as well as she figured anyone could expect her to listen about ledgers and debits and credits and taxes and liens and loans and lessors and lessees–and thought she got the gist until Tataru said “So I don’t know who, exactly, is after that ill-gotten prize pool, but I mean to intercept the theft when it happens.”
“Hey! I was gonna win that!”
“Like all seven hells you were,” Kethry drawled through a withering grin.
“Girls, please, this is serious. I have a lot of evidence, the gil is here, and whoever gets their hands on it will have ten million to throw behind the next seat on the Syndicate. Unless we manage to snatch it back, in which case it can be redistributed to the people who may have already realized their accounts aren’t adding up like they should.”
Pakik perked up. “You just need to take the stuff? Where is it?” She hopped to her feet. “I’ll go get it.”
“No, no!” Tataru hissed. “If they see you, they’ll cover all their tracks and burn all their records for sure, and we won’t know who we can trust when we return it. Just… lay low, fight through the tournament–good luck to both of you, by the way–and keep an eye out for anyone carrying something heavy through the halls.”
Kethry scoffed. “It’ll be that easy to tell? Just a big box of gil?”
“Well, maybe. Just keep an eye out, please?”
Pakik and Kethry agreed, and Tataru hushed her way out of the room.
“So, you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Nope.”
“We could just–Hey, be nice to me, we’re gonna beat enough shit out of each other tomorrow.”
Kethry leaned against the wall and crossed her arms, smiling oh-so-sweetly at Pakik. “If you make it to the finals.”
Her (surely cutting) response was drowned under a molasses-thick craving for shitty tequila. “I gotta go drink. You coming?”
Hungover All By Yourself, Handsome?
Thundering footsteps slapped the stone floor of the inn room they were sharing, and Kethry rolled over to cover her ears as Pakik retched fruitlessly out the window. “Snrrrmpgh.”
“Huh–HUUUUUUEELLLCH?” Pakik asked, whipping her head back out the window and only managing to get a little bit of spit out.
Kethry twisted halfway around to face her and slurred, “Shouldn’ta drank s’much!”
Pakik flipped a finger at her and finished up her retching, then took a swig of water and started getting dressed. “Gonna need somebody to knock this headache out of me,” she grumbled.
The sun wasn’t even close to risen, Kethry realized as she looked out the window. She could see the faint glow of it over the walls, but it probably hadn’t even poked over the horizon yet. “Blehhh,” she groaned, and squirmed deeper into her blankets, pulling one all the way over her head so she was fully cocooned. A blessedly silent moment passed, then a soft weight fell on her, and she peeked out to see Pakik’s unused blanket laid over top of her as well. The door clicked shut before she could catch sight of Pakik leaving. She nestled in tighter and waited for the sun to come up.
No U
Pakik tromped down the darkest alleys she could find looking for a drunkard, a mugger, an assassin, anybody who’d take a swing at her. Ul’dah being Ul’dah, she got her wish in less than a quarter malm.
Someone swished up behind her and a knife hushed free of a sheath. She swung a blind backhand punch down at them, knuckles meeting bone and flattening the diminutive hyur who’d been so unwise.
“Fucking pussyass–dammit, are you okay?” She squatted over them and slapped their cheek. “Get up, I need you to try harder.”
They didn’t move. Pakik sighed and stood up, flicking a little blood from the toe of her boot as she stepped out of the small pool growing from the mugger’s head. She trotted back to the main road and swiveled her head, looking through the thin light for a Brass Blade, Sultansworn, Immortal Flame, or just anyone passing by. Someone with a big sword rounded the corner to her left, and she shouted over, “Hey, grab a healer! Just got mugged.”
“Ah! At once! Are you well?”
“Yeah, I meant for the other guy.”
She left it at that, diving back into her search. Her head pounded, swelling to a roar that made her want to break her knuckles on the stone walls she traced. Where to go for a fight? She didn’t have time to make it all the way to the Castrum and back, even by aetheryte, and she couldn’t think of anyone else local who could hit her hard enough. Except Kethry, who was conked flat the fuck out.
That left her with two options: hair of the dog that bit her, or sucking it up. The hair of said dog was all the way in Black Brush, and she’d have to break in and steal it, so she really only had one option.
She groaned and turned on her heel to walk back to their inn room and suffer quietly until they got the call. She’d work it off in the first round.
The Most Important Meal of the Day
Pakik didn’t seem to know how to suffer quietly. Kethry’s frustration grew deeper and deeper, listening to her roommate moan and grumble and shuffle around for what felt like ten hours.
Finally sick of it, she sat up and flung her pillow at Pakik, nailing her in the face. It flopped down; Pakik spat feathers, but otherwise didn’t move. “Thanks, that actually helped a bit,” she groaned, rolling her neck out and pressing her fingers to her temples.
Kethry rolled her eyes and, spotting the sun through the window, figured she wasn’t getting any more sleep. She kicked off the bed to land barefoot on the floor and slump on over to the haphazard landslide of armor they’d both dumped in the same corner of the room.
It wasn’t hard to tell whose was whose, given that Pakik’s greaves were a similar size to Kethry’s breastplate. They both shuffled into their armor, helping each other with the hardest-to-reach straps, Pakik occasionally pausing to squish her eyes shut and thump her temples to ward off her hangover headache.
Kethry’s breath caught when Pakik reached to tighten a knee pad around her hamstring, but squished the surge of scarlet memory like a bug. Pakik’s eyes were almost the same color, too, Twelve damn it. Normal roegadyn red irises, not the bright scarlet Allagan Eye, but… Kethry’s fingernails bit into the frame of her bed where she sat, and she hissed “Ssshit,” softly.
Pakik turned to stone and her face went rutabaga purple. “What’d you just fucking say?”
Gulping down embarrassment, Kethry answered, “Shit.”
“No, I mean–yeah. I’ve never heard anyone in Eorzea curse like a normal goddamn person. Where’d you hear that?”
Kethry didn’t have a good answer besides the truth, so she told it: “You say it a lot. I kind of figured out what it means. Just like ‘Oh no’, or ‘that’s bad’, but worse?”
Pakik finished Kethry’s leg buckles and pulled back, her face a normal green again and the corners of her mouth dashing madly toward her ears. “Yeah, pretty much. Thank fuck, finally.” She rolled to her knees and grunted, pressing her fingers to her temples again. “Agh, goddamn, too much last night.” With a gesture at the buckles between her breastplate and backplate, she asked, “Wouldja mind?”
Kethry didn’t, so she stood and stepped over, reaching under Pakik’s raised arm and cinching the straps there.
“What’s wrong,” Pakik demanded. Not a question.
“Nothing.”
“I’m not fucking fighting you while your head’s halfway to Kugane. What’s wrong.”
“Not your problem. You won’t beat me anyway,” Kethry said. Not a boast.
“Don’t talk to me like I’ve got shit for brains. Tell me what’s wrong.”
Kethry sighed and closed her eyes, pausing for a moment before moving over to Pakik’s other side. “Just old stuff. Old, uh…” She found she couldn’t say any more. What was there to tell? It was all history, and there was no point reaching back for it.
Pakik huffed half a laugh. “Old shit’s the only shit anyone’s got, seems like.” She shrugged away and stood before Kethry could finish the buckles. “I’ll get the rest. Fucking ow, can you hit my head with a brick or something? I’m never gonna drink again.”
Kethry stepped back, calming the breath that had escaped her control and forgetting to call Pakik a liar. Old shit. What else did she have? She grabbed her sword and fixed it to her back, then leaned against the wall to wait for Pakik, scratching her cheek as she did. Her fingernails were a little long, but not too long anymore. Her sword had a thicker grip than her spear, so she didn’t need to pick them as short as she used to. She sighed deeply as she swallowed two dozen memories of spinning a padded sparring staff under an orange crystal dome, ducking around arrows and thinking about strength.
A knock came to the door just as Pakik finished cursing her way through the last few buckles. “Assembling for the first round now!” a voice shouted into their room.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re on it,” Pakik barked back, grabbing her giant axe and slinging it over her shoulder. She booted the door open, narrowly missing whoever had knocked as they scurried away, and looked over her shoulder to Kethry before stepping through. “Chow?”
Kethry lifted herself from the bed and followed wordlessly as Pakik led her out of their Quicksand inn room and into the Steps of Nald, where she let a wave of Pakik’s chatter wash over her. She seemed to have a story for every corner, like she’d been baked into the mortar of the city, despite having only been in Eorzea for less than a year. By her own reckoning, anyway. Most of the stories involved some kind of trouble with the Sultansworn, and all of them involved someone named Chuchuto, or maybe just Chuchu. The stories were punctuated by thuds and slaps as Pakik beat at her own head, claiming that it helped cure the hangover faster. Kethry was pretty sure she just needed to drink more water and less tequila.
They walked through the Sapphire Exchange, getting out of the sun and into the cooler hallways of the Steps of Thal, where dozens of food stands soaked the air with the scents roasting meat and grilling cactus.
Pakik pulled her up to one, staffed by a young elezen a few ilms shorter than Kethry, and started grabbing kebabs off a rack.
“Hey!” The elezen and Kethry shouted at her in unison, and the elezen continued, “You have to pay first!”
“Oh, fuck off, look at me, I’ve obviously got money.”
Kethry reached up to smack Pakik’s head, but couldn’t quite reach, so she settled for punching her pauldron. “Pay him,” she ordered, pointing at the elezen’s outstretched hand. “Not fair to cheat him like that.”
Pakik threw her hands up, still holding three kebabs in each fist, and said, “Fine! Fine! Can you fish out my gil? Grr,” she growled as she squinted one eye shut and tilted her head, “Fucking ack. Gil’s down by my right cheek,” then shuffled around and stuck her hip out at Kethry.
“Ugh.” Kethry jammed her hand into the gap between Pakik’s plateskirt and breeches.
“Forward, forward, not that far. Back. There. A little down,” Pakik guided, and Kethry pulled the limp linen pouch free. It probably didn’t have more than thirty or forty gil in it, which would cover five of the six kebabs Pakik had grabbed, if Kethry was reading the sign right. She squinted at it again, tried to add up the numbers in her head, and figured it was better to just ask.
She held the whole pouch out to the elezen, who clearly didn’t want to take it. “Is this enough?”
He reached out and pinched the top of the bag between his thumb and forefinger, taking it and swinging it wide around his stall so it didn’t pass over any of the food, then poured the gil out onto a small empty counter in front of him to count it. “Put one back.”
“Fucker,” Pakik hissed, but stuck one of the grilled cactus kebabs back in its place. “Thanks, buddy.”
As they left and headed back down to the arena, Pakik grumped out a few more short anecdotes about shaking down merchants and beating up thugs around Ul’dah with her friend Chuchu.
“Was that all your money?” Kethry finally asked through her last bite of meat.
“Ymmph! Mmmphb-flmm!”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Pakik gulped down her mouthful of cactus, finishing the last kebab. “Why do you think I wanted to join the tournament so bad?”
Kethry furrowed her brow. “I thought you just wanted to fight.”
“Well, always, but this pays better than whatever Tataru can scrounge up from Scion money. Or whatever she can convince Alphinaud to give me.” Pakik licked her kebab sticks clean and tossed them over her shoulder, grimacing and pinching the back of her neck between her fingers. Kethry caught the sticks before they hit the ground, snatching them from the air and rolling her eyes. “Lots more fun than all that shit they make me do, too. Why, what about you? You know you don’t have to follow me around.”
Kethry’s bootheel scraped the ground softly as the ground sloped upward. Pakik whipped her head down to her. “What the hell’s wrong? You’re way off-balance today.”
“I’m fine. Just never done this before.”
Pakik laughed way too loud, drawing eyes from across the Steps. “Hah, you’ll be fine. Our day jobs are way harder than these tournaments. Probably gonna be like punting tuco-tucos for a couple rounds, then you get to fight me.” She put a deep rumble on the last word, and it split her face in a grin.
That might be fun.