Pack Rat - Final Fantasy IX - PG
Fandom: Final Fantasy IX
Title: Pack Rat
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 554
Note: Reflective. Freya. Posted June 22, 2007.
Summary:The things they carry
Freya doesn’t carry a large pack, but some times she wishes she did because then she’d have something to do in the sleepless dark. Then, she’d take her pack and arrange its content in symmetrical rows by size and quantity and quality, then rearrange alphabetically, then again by usage and function and worth.
She doesn’t, though. So she takes someone else’s.
It is an interesting experience. Freya’s seen all sorts of things: kitchen pots, daggers, letter stamps, ear rings, coils of copper, jars of wax, whet stones, strings of rope, dice, leather gloves, silken shirts, coarse canvas, straw hats, belt buckles, fountain pens. She’s found slips of paper with handwriting she can only feel on the tips of her fingers, a doll with hair of straw and an embroidered smile, a collection of small foreign coins all worth a single gil.
She’s found other things too, the things she shouldn’t see: a bag of crushed rose petals, a rusty bronze knuckle missing its pair, a jewel box with a child’s teeth, bits of string knotted at different lengths, various animal skins of varying texture and size. Once, she found the plucked feathers of a bird, it’s tips sharp as steel. Twice, she’s discovered a knot of braided hair that was thicker the second time.
She isn’t sure that the others know, though she suspects that Amarant does. He either cares to keep a secret or doesn’t care about anything, but Freya is okay with either because they essentially mean the same thing. Freya is also a bit ashamed, that she lacks so much in her own life that she must steal moments of others, but it also brings her a sense of pride. In the things they carry there is a sense of nakedness and intimacy, of shame and silence. There is as much human-ness that a rat can understand.
It is painful. Freya has come to love and hate her companions, to unveil them in her eyes, to witness vulnerability without having to see their sleeping faces. Sometimes, in the daylight, she’ll look at them and yearn to touch them, to press her claws against their skin and pierce the layers separating what she sees and what she knows. But if Freya is nothing, she is resilient. She can stand strong in a way the others can’t, because while Quina is a myth and Vivi is a monster and Zidane is a machine, Freya is nothing. Freya is solid like a rock-there are no pores, no cubbies, no hidden compartments.
Freya doesn’t have a pack because she refuses to carry anything.
Is that running away? Quite possibly. Maybe she is afraid to carry things because of what they will reveal about her, because she knows she would be very good at keeping useless things. But what does that matter now? A void’s purpose is to be filled, as is a rat’s to steal. She carries nothing now because she is carrying their things in the darkness, where the weary can’t tread, where the restless and weightless abide. She will touch them with her fingers, and she will know, and she will pack it all away until the morning establishes 'he and she and it' rather than 'ours'.
Freya has no secrets to keep, but sometimes she has theirs’.
She will keep them.
Title: Pack Rat
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 554
Note: Reflective. Freya. Posted June 22, 2007.
Summary:The things they carry
Freya doesn’t carry a large pack, but some times she wishes she did because then she’d have something to do in the sleepless dark. Then, she’d take her pack and arrange its content in symmetrical rows by size and quantity and quality, then rearrange alphabetically, then again by usage and function and worth.
She doesn’t, though. So she takes someone else’s.
It is an interesting experience. Freya’s seen all sorts of things: kitchen pots, daggers, letter stamps, ear rings, coils of copper, jars of wax, whet stones, strings of rope, dice, leather gloves, silken shirts, coarse canvas, straw hats, belt buckles, fountain pens. She’s found slips of paper with handwriting she can only feel on the tips of her fingers, a doll with hair of straw and an embroidered smile, a collection of small foreign coins all worth a single gil.
She’s found other things too, the things she shouldn’t see: a bag of crushed rose petals, a rusty bronze knuckle missing its pair, a jewel box with a child’s teeth, bits of string knotted at different lengths, various animal skins of varying texture and size. Once, she found the plucked feathers of a bird, it’s tips sharp as steel. Twice, she’s discovered a knot of braided hair that was thicker the second time.
She isn’t sure that the others know, though she suspects that Amarant does. He either cares to keep a secret or doesn’t care about anything, but Freya is okay with either because they essentially mean the same thing. Freya is also a bit ashamed, that she lacks so much in her own life that she must steal moments of others, but it also brings her a sense of pride. In the things they carry there is a sense of nakedness and intimacy, of shame and silence. There is as much human-ness that a rat can understand.
It is painful. Freya has come to love and hate her companions, to unveil them in her eyes, to witness vulnerability without having to see their sleeping faces. Sometimes, in the daylight, she’ll look at them and yearn to touch them, to press her claws against their skin and pierce the layers separating what she sees and what she knows. But if Freya is nothing, she is resilient. She can stand strong in a way the others can’t, because while Quina is a myth and Vivi is a monster and Zidane is a machine, Freya is nothing. Freya is solid like a rock-there are no pores, no cubbies, no hidden compartments.
Freya doesn’t have a pack because she refuses to carry anything.
Is that running away? Quite possibly. Maybe she is afraid to carry things because of what they will reveal about her, because she knows she would be very good at keeping useless things. But what does that matter now? A void’s purpose is to be filled, as is a rat’s to steal. She carries nothing now because she is carrying their things in the darkness, where the weary can’t tread, where the restless and weightless abide. She will touch them with her fingers, and she will know, and she will pack it all away until the morning establishes 'he and she and it' rather than 'ours'.
Freya has no secrets to keep, but sometimes she has theirs’.
She will keep them.