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Canon: FFVIII
Summary: Irvine and Diabolos's side of the parade assassination attempt.
Warnings: That event in game, Diabolos's perspective muddling and being weird.
It rarely deigned to accept mortals.
The shadows just outside reality were its domain, and usually enough for it; most who tried to get its attention were barely worth the entertainment value to test, arrogant blowhards that wanted to command something terrible to show off their imagined power.
The bravado rarely lasted more than a couple minutes.
It would, however, confess a fascination for souls that had grown tangled in fate's strings; they exerted an odd sort of gravity on time, like rocks dropped on stretched fabric, while their own weight rolled them into the sharpest currents of time's flow. It couldn't feel through time enough to predict what their impact would be, but it could pick out what weights would be worth following, whether it led to glory or ruin, something important or merely something different.
Diversions were becoming less of an interest, however; something had been growing off in the currents, some greater disturbance outside its ability to discern.
**************
At first Irvine had taken the clinging thickness of the air as a mix of summer humidity and his own tension.
Then he realized it wasn't just him on edge; Diabolos's darkness had taken on its own increase in pressure that was too still and wary, like a cat torn between flattening still and puffing out, pushing out against the weight of the air. Whatever it was, it was pervasive across the city streets.
The crowd's oblivious cheers at the sorceress's speech answered part of it; whatever illusion the civilians were seeing, the Guardian Forces were enough to shake it off.
Whatever was on the stage looked like the Matron, had her voice, even something about the weight of the air was almost familiar, but the speech, the casual cruelty, was something else, a nightmare worse than the one hissing in the back of his mind.
A pressure pulling everything down, a larger shape dragging everything in its wake like a riptide; even it was being pulled along, a shark trying to swim against some unseen abyssal leviathan-
If Diabolos knew what was going on, it wasn't answering, frozen tense; the Embodied Nightmare's apprehension was something he had to push away the temptation to think too hard about. He had enough anxiety about trying to take on the thing wearing the Matron's skin without pondering what could scare a being like that.
**********
His aim had been off.
Squall had reassured him it was fine, but it'd been a little high, not that it mattered; he could've been dead on and that shield would've stopped it.
The tiny impulse to be relieved he hadn't killed the matron died fast and cold as soon as the shield had gone up; she'd looked straight at him, with more cold, detached condescension than Diabolos had shown at its worst. It wasn't the matron, and Diabolos had bristled at it, a seething defensive puff like an owl fanning its wings out to look bigger. He registered that Squall had said something, the attempt at reassurance, after the team leader had already launched off the roof; the rifle was shaking in his hands, the humidity of the summer night felt like it had vanished, and there was a chill even with his coat.
He half managed a distant recognition of shock, and closed his eyes with a hard swallow, leaning back mentally against the other being; even if it was agitated, its predatory frustration was an oddly comforting support, something that made it harder to feel completely small and helpless. The noise of the crowd faded out for a few seconds; even if he couldn't manage to hold onto any normal exercise for a mentally calm, quiet space, it carried with it one no amount of his own emotional snarl and panic would disturb, a dark silence a million miles away from grotesque mockeries of festivals and horrors wearing people that should've been safe.
He snapped out of it and back to reality to Rinoa shaking his shoulder and something half-panicked herself about needing to go help him. He nodded, dropping the sniper rifle there, and tugged her with to follow Squall's jump off the roof; there was enough shared focus that it didn't even take thought for gravity to weaken enough for the two of them to make it down the drop and hit the ground running.
The crowd was thick enough that it should've been a problem to fight through it in time, but it seemed like some sort of luck parted for them, the chaotic scrambles of people eddying out of their way. The riptide had turned into a whirlpool, and the center point of it was under that arch, time circling inward; even once they reached the center eye, it couldn't sense the cause. It wasn't a greater weight warping the currents, it was a cracked hole, cracks that groaned under any pressure. Chaos and upheaval were fascinating - this wasn't a mere upheaval, and even if Diabolos couldn't tell what was going on, it could identify a shared threat to existence that made its relationship with the mortals caught up in this a matter of survival, not just whim.
Maybe it was having others there for more than moral support, maybe it was not having time to think about more than Not Dying and Maybe Winning, maybe it was having the demon's will clearly thrown into sync toward the same goals to spackle over his own cracks, but it was a lot easier to function and fight there than it'd been to keep focus on the clock carousel.
Then something shifted and the sorceress decided it was over. One moment and the pressure vanished, a breath's pause as there was a fracture point and neither it nor the mortal it was attached to were in any position to stop a blow against it.
He half-turned when Squall went down - there was no way anyone could've survived that;
Rinoa was dropping over the edge after him, he ran on rote numb training moving to cover her, but it was as good as over. It had ripped gravity and structure away from many victims, leaving torn edges of stability just out of reach; it didn't appreciate the irony of feeling time buckle, the stress point spidering out, ice cracking apart under a well-placed blow around it. For a moment, there was a flicker of familiarity; he was dimly aware of Rinoa casting behind him, while he was left staring down the sorceress numbly, with the sense for a breath that if he just dropped his gun and knelt, he'd be let go. The girl likely only registered it as a panicked attempt at a healing spell that was questionably successful, but there was a pull of power she wasn't aware of, refusal to accept the direction things were going shoved outward with enough force to shove bits back together, pasting cracks together like glue on broken glass; it was sloppy, it wasn't enough to turn things aside, it was a hasty patch, but it gave some kind of purchase back and seemed to cause an eddy as the pressure pushing to break further lessened, perhaps reconsidering the angle towards its unknown end. The reprieve left Diabolos with bare breaths to find an opening that wouldn't put weight on cracks that couldn't take it and move. Whatever the Matron was now, he'd seen enough of what Seifer had become; the speech and Squall were more than enough that the possibility of turning was noted and discarded without consideration. It didn't leave him with a clue what to do about the overwhelming force he was facing; he faltered, taking a step back, forgetting that he was at the edge of the float himself. Diabolos was already manifesting; he fell back into its claws, and it vanished with a sharp wingbeat out of normal space, taking the opening to escape.
Somewhere in between it disappearing and wherever they reappeared, he had an odd sense of losing grip, the sense of shock and panic slipping back in enough that he lost hold in the darkness; while the nightmare closed around him, he thought he caught Diabolos pausing in exasperation.
************
It was far too sloppy of a jump to get very far, much less to hold the mortal's body in between while it figured out how to deal with mortal mental frailty. The frailty was a problem, since it meant its human's consciousness had slipped on ties to reality, and leaving the man's body unattended in a city under now hostile rule while it went diving to dig him out of his own nightmares wasn't an option.
On a rooftop halfway across Deling, Diabolos fumbled with the holster for Irvine's gun, trying to rely on muscle memory for details it'd had no reason to care about before; the damned weapons hadn't even existed the last time it'd been active.
Summary: Irvine and Diabolos's side of the parade assassination attempt.
Warnings: That event in game, Diabolos's perspective muddling and being weird.
It rarely deigned to accept mortals.
The shadows just outside reality were its domain, and usually enough for it; most who tried to get its attention were barely worth the entertainment value to test, arrogant blowhards that wanted to command something terrible to show off their imagined power.
The bravado rarely lasted more than a couple minutes.
It would, however, confess a fascination for souls that had grown tangled in fate's strings; they exerted an odd sort of gravity on time, like rocks dropped on stretched fabric, while their own weight rolled them into the sharpest currents of time's flow. It couldn't feel through time enough to predict what their impact would be, but it could pick out what weights would be worth following, whether it led to glory or ruin, something important or merely something different.
Diversions were becoming less of an interest, however; something had been growing off in the currents, some greater disturbance outside its ability to discern.
**************
At first Irvine had taken the clinging thickness of the air as a mix of summer humidity and his own tension.
Then he realized it wasn't just him on edge; Diabolos's darkness had taken on its own increase in pressure that was too still and wary, like a cat torn between flattening still and puffing out, pushing out against the weight of the air. Whatever it was, it was pervasive across the city streets.
The crowd's oblivious cheers at the sorceress's speech answered part of it; whatever illusion the civilians were seeing, the Guardian Forces were enough to shake it off.
Whatever was on the stage looked like the Matron, had her voice, even something about the weight of the air was almost familiar, but the speech, the casual cruelty, was something else, a nightmare worse than the one hissing in the back of his mind.
A pressure pulling everything down, a larger shape dragging everything in its wake like a riptide; even it was being pulled along, a shark trying to swim against some unseen abyssal leviathan-
If Diabolos knew what was going on, it wasn't answering, frozen tense; the Embodied Nightmare's apprehension was something he had to push away the temptation to think too hard about. He had enough anxiety about trying to take on the thing wearing the Matron's skin without pondering what could scare a being like that.
**********
His aim had been off.
Squall had reassured him it was fine, but it'd been a little high, not that it mattered; he could've been dead on and that shield would've stopped it.
The tiny impulse to be relieved he hadn't killed the matron died fast and cold as soon as the shield had gone up; she'd looked straight at him, with more cold, detached condescension than Diabolos had shown at its worst. It wasn't the matron, and Diabolos had bristled at it, a seething defensive puff like an owl fanning its wings out to look bigger. He registered that Squall had said something, the attempt at reassurance, after the team leader had already launched off the roof; the rifle was shaking in his hands, the humidity of the summer night felt like it had vanished, and there was a chill even with his coat.
He half managed a distant recognition of shock, and closed his eyes with a hard swallow, leaning back mentally against the other being; even if it was agitated, its predatory frustration was an oddly comforting support, something that made it harder to feel completely small and helpless. The noise of the crowd faded out for a few seconds; even if he couldn't manage to hold onto any normal exercise for a mentally calm, quiet space, it carried with it one no amount of his own emotional snarl and panic would disturb, a dark silence a million miles away from grotesque mockeries of festivals and horrors wearing people that should've been safe.
He snapped out of it and back to reality to Rinoa shaking his shoulder and something half-panicked herself about needing to go help him. He nodded, dropping the sniper rifle there, and tugged her with to follow Squall's jump off the roof; there was enough shared focus that it didn't even take thought for gravity to weaken enough for the two of them to make it down the drop and hit the ground running.
The crowd was thick enough that it should've been a problem to fight through it in time, but it seemed like some sort of luck parted for them, the chaotic scrambles of people eddying out of their way. The riptide had turned into a whirlpool, and the center point of it was under that arch, time circling inward; even once they reached the center eye, it couldn't sense the cause. It wasn't a greater weight warping the currents, it was a cracked hole, cracks that groaned under any pressure. Chaos and upheaval were fascinating - this wasn't a mere upheaval, and even if Diabolos couldn't tell what was going on, it could identify a shared threat to existence that made its relationship with the mortals caught up in this a matter of survival, not just whim.
Maybe it was having others there for more than moral support, maybe it was not having time to think about more than Not Dying and Maybe Winning, maybe it was having the demon's will clearly thrown into sync toward the same goals to spackle over his own cracks, but it was a lot easier to function and fight there than it'd been to keep focus on the clock carousel.
Then something shifted and the sorceress decided it was over. One moment and the pressure vanished, a breath's pause as there was a fracture point and neither it nor the mortal it was attached to were in any position to stop a blow against it.
He half-turned when Squall went down - there was no way anyone could've survived that;
Rinoa was dropping over the edge after him, he ran on rote numb training moving to cover her, but it was as good as over. It had ripped gravity and structure away from many victims, leaving torn edges of stability just out of reach; it didn't appreciate the irony of feeling time buckle, the stress point spidering out, ice cracking apart under a well-placed blow around it. For a moment, there was a flicker of familiarity; he was dimly aware of Rinoa casting behind him, while he was left staring down the sorceress numbly, with the sense for a breath that if he just dropped his gun and knelt, he'd be let go. The girl likely only registered it as a panicked attempt at a healing spell that was questionably successful, but there was a pull of power she wasn't aware of, refusal to accept the direction things were going shoved outward with enough force to shove bits back together, pasting cracks together like glue on broken glass; it was sloppy, it wasn't enough to turn things aside, it was a hasty patch, but it gave some kind of purchase back and seemed to cause an eddy as the pressure pushing to break further lessened, perhaps reconsidering the angle towards its unknown end. The reprieve left Diabolos with bare breaths to find an opening that wouldn't put weight on cracks that couldn't take it and move. Whatever the Matron was now, he'd seen enough of what Seifer had become; the speech and Squall were more than enough that the possibility of turning was noted and discarded without consideration. It didn't leave him with a clue what to do about the overwhelming force he was facing; he faltered, taking a step back, forgetting that he was at the edge of the float himself. Diabolos was already manifesting; he fell back into its claws, and it vanished with a sharp wingbeat out of normal space, taking the opening to escape.
Somewhere in between it disappearing and wherever they reappeared, he had an odd sense of losing grip, the sense of shock and panic slipping back in enough that he lost hold in the darkness; while the nightmare closed around him, he thought he caught Diabolos pausing in exasperation.
************
It was far too sloppy of a jump to get very far, much less to hold the mortal's body in between while it figured out how to deal with mortal mental frailty. The frailty was a problem, since it meant its human's consciousness had slipped on ties to reality, and leaving the man's body unattended in a city under now hostile rule while it went diving to dig him out of his own nightmares wasn't an option.
On a rooftop halfway across Deling, Diabolos fumbled with the holster for Irvine's gun, trying to rely on muscle memory for details it'd had no reason to care about before; the damned weapons hadn't even existed the last time it'd been active.
