Behold

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From a window high in the Falcon, rimmed with the shiny black metal and golden trim that accented the whole opulent skyship, Terra watched the world below. They skirted the edge of Vector, flying above the trackless sands where fossil dragons twisted and glittered, and Terra eyed the vaulting spikes and steel towers of the mighty city. They traced the curves of the Serpent’s Trench, where dust devils wandered and bare trees were only now beginning to grow from the salty soil among the remains of the thousands of dead fishes upheaved when the world shifted. She saw Nikeah, and she remembered the sea ships, remembered the Leviathan coiling vast and high out of the sea, its spines each as big as a harpoon, its teeth spears and swords. She saw Moblitz, and her brow furrowed.

She saw great cracks in the ground, great wastes of cities, and great cliffs thrown up where forests and plains once rolled. The broad Veldt rolled below her, thick with beasts and birds, and she remembered seeing Gau galloping across those very plains, hair tangled, face smeared with blood, and finding Shadow standing silent and tense in the depths of those wild caves. She saw Narshe, buried in the northern mountains and white with snow, where she had regained herself. She saw Jidoor, still sparkling Jidoor, though patchy in places now, rusty in the edges, where Celes had been radiant on the stage, covered in jewels and clutching fragrant flowers; and in its shadow, sprawling Zozo, rimmed with smog from even so high up, where she had been kept after she became a beast.

It was when she was gazing at the Tower of the Fanatics with heavy eyes, feeling lightning still tingling in her shoulders, that Setzer walked into his captain’s room. He had been standing outside the door for quite a while, watching her watching.

“I don’t mean to be rude, especially to you,” he said, in a completely flat, unapologetic tone, “but that’s my seat. And I wouldn’t normally be a ponce about seating arrangements, but that’s the seat in which someone tells the ship where to go.”

“You have a wonderful window,” said Terra.

Setzer found that he couldn’t argue with that. “Might I borrow it for a minute?”

Terra nodded. Setzer approached her, but it seemed she had no intention of actually getting off of the chair, let alone of drawing her gaze from his window. Setzer reflected that he could, theoretically, move the necessary controls while standing, but he also reflected on the fact that he was a possessive and petty man. “You might stand.”

Terra blinked at him for a second. He watched her realize, taking perhaps five seconds to do it, that she had made a mistake. She looked down, hopped off of the chair, and walked away to stand right next to the window. She put the fingers of one tiny hand onto the curved glass, and began to stare again, her lowered eyes moving rapidly with the movement of the spiraling hills below.

Ah, yes. That was why Setzer was graciously more forgiving with Terra than anyone else left alive in the world. Because being harsh to Terra was its punishment wrapped in its own unassuming and self-aggrandizing bow. Setzer told himself that he was an outlaw and a deviant and he could suck it up while falling into his captain’s chair.

Terra had been sitting on the edge of the seat, hands on her knees, bent forward with rapture. Setzer domineered the chair; he took up each inch of it, and made it support him. Almost lazily, he leaned forward a little to tweak the levers and check his map, tapping his heel when he grew more concerned with their exact longitude.

Terra hadn’t moved. For as self-conscious as she could be in conversation, she seemed to vanish entirely when she disengaged. Setzer metaphorically crushed whatever emotion was uncurling in his chest and making him feel almost uncomfortable with a twist of his polished boot heel. He stood to get ahold of the wheel and turn the ship just slightly so that they would GET to Figaro Castle one of these days instead of just aimlessly making themselves a target for any homicidal clown gods who were paying even the slightest attention, and though he had to get quite close to Terra to do so, she still didn’t move.

“Celes, Edgar, and Relm are in a quite involved game of poker downstairs,” Setzer drawled. “You might join them.”

Terra glanced at him, and then back away. “I don’t want to.”

That wasn’t much of a shock. She wasn’t interested in much at all. It was uncanny, actually.

“You’re not playing poker,” she added quizzically.

Setzer clenched his teeth just slightly before making himself relax.

“Celes beat you again.”

Setzer widened his eyes slightly and tilted his head to the side. Where did she hide all of the sass she came out with like this? Because it was invisible when she wasn’t using it. “Celes did not beat me.”

“She’s a very good poker player.”

“She’s an excellent poker player,” Setzer said, “because she has the unfair advantage of having played poker with the generals of Vector’s army as well as their supreme leader for several years. Which is something I couldn’t have known before I challenged her. Besides, our score is 12-7, and I am the one with 12.”

“Then why not play today? Oh, because you needed to tend to the ship?”

“Obviously.” Setzer had been a ship’s captain for almost a decade of his life now, and most of that time was spent in the air. He didn’t literally build his own flying casino so that he would be forced to set foot on the ground in order to swindle the rich nobles of Jidoor and Vector out of their money and jewels.

…Edgar had beaten them both tonight. Setzer kept forgetting how sly royalty could be. Thank Maduin that Relm or Gogo had never beaten him, because he might have been reduced to a few ungraceful tears in such an event.

Caught up in his completely justified bitterness, Setzer had fallen silent for a minute without meaning to. He looked at Terra again, and she seemed to have completely shut him out.

She was looking out the window at the rolling sea beneath them.

“We should be in Figaro by nightfall.”

Terra nodded.

Her eyes were wild. She watched the sea with fascination. Setzer couldn’t see anything but the ocean and the clouds outside, but her eyes were bright and keen. He wondered what she could see. She had spoken to Umaro and Mog in their own animal tongues, when no regular human could. She had heard the voices of espers carried on the wind, from a dimension locked away, because her ears caught echoes from farther away than any of theirs could. She could pull off her skin and become a sub-human, an extra-human, a spirit, a being unknown and incomprehensible, with teeth that could rip through metal and fire leaping from her claws. And eyes with slits like a snake’s.

Maybe to Terra, the flat ocean was full with lumbering whale pods and twisting eels and billowing manta rays, weaving in and out of prismatic coral reefs. Maybe the clouds which obscured anything from his view parted its curtains for her to see far-away mountains and deserts and plains.

No one could hear him but her, he reflected.

“What do you see?” he asked, very quietly. Even he heard that his voice was thin.

Terra did not look at him. Likely she hadn’t developed the conversational skills to tell that his tone was uneasy. “It’s so big,” she said. “I don’t see anything in particular, I just can’t look away.”

“Don’t you ever get bored? We’ve been all across the world. I’ve seen this a thousand times.”

“It’s hard for me to understand. I didn’t know there was a world before last year, actually.”

“Pardon?”

“I wasn’t usually outside of the palace in Vector,” she explained.

Setzer began to suffer an influx of emotion again, but he didn’t put up his hands against it. It rolled over him like a wave, compressed him, and then crashed somewhere far away, leaving him soaked.

He stood for perhaps a few minutes longer. No matter what, the sea was the sea to him.

“Feel free to sit in my chair as you will,” he said. “It would be unwise for you to tamper with the ship’s controls, but I don’t really need to be here often myself.”

“Ok. I won’t touch them.”

Setzer looked at her a second longer. “Thank you,” he said.

He left the captain’s room. And as he did, vanishing through the doorway, with the sense of a small woman behind him, staring out the window of the ship with rapture, he was painfully aware of whose ship this was. In that moment, it was Daryll’s ship again, and he was nothing but her suitor, anxious and uncertain, and under her command.