#tega writes

EDIT OKAY NEVER MIND LINK POSTS ARE BROKEN ACTUALLY

HERE’S A LINK TO MY FIC, THE ARDUOUS TASK OF LIVING

After the pieces are cut from you, after the silence has fallen and you're tasked with the protection and continued survival of a child you are wholly unprepared to raise, you have a choice to make.

It is a choice that you've been backed into.

You have a support system, you have a family. You have old friends and lifelong partners. One of them is struggling to keep his pieces in place, the other is struggling to rebuild the cracked foundation of a cursed home. You can't reach out to either of them, not because of their own struggles.

The choice you have to make is going to dirty your name further, and already people are going to be dragged down by the filth the world now sees you covered in.

You weren't dirty by choice before. The choice is going to make the difference.

You choose your words carefully, you choose who you contact even more so. You choose patience and surveillance. You choose a mask and wear it in place to meet with another masked man. You choose the friend who is a viper in human skin.

You choose to look as if you've fallen on impossibly hard times, as if your friends have abandoned you, as if you struggle to support the needs of a child. It makes you look like prey to a predator. You are a wolf in the clothes of a wounded sheep. The blood attracts the predator you hunt, and you let him get close.

You let him twist himself into you, as he looks for any threat you may carry. You let him open your rib cage to look for danger and poison and he finds none but the poison he's left there himself. You live with that poison for as long as it takes to gather your information. You pretend you've forgotten the law you worked so hard to represent. You pretend you've forgotten those you befriended.

You make a choice, and the viper comes into the trap.

You make the choice for seven years, and the trap finds its bait. The trap snaps shut on the viper's throat.

You use other hands, other claws and teeth, to accomplish your hunt. You and the viper are no longer so separate. It takes a delicate hand to keep from being snared in the same trap, but you still cause collateral damage.

You made that choice.

And even when the work is done and the viper is removed, there is still the poison he left behind. In you, in the system, in the damage. Your choices cannot be taken back. You can be given the clothes you once wore, the badge you once upheld, the job you were removed from, but the person who wore all those is gone. The choice was a sacrifice of that person, and what's left has to pick up the pieces.

The prophecy is fulfilled, the debt is paid.

Tidus/Yuna angst machine, babey

It's been a year. A whole Year, through seasons changing and people adjusting to the death of Sin and the silence of the temples and the denouncement of Yevon. A whole year, and Yuna is looked to for so much support and guidance that she feels choked by it. She hasn't had time to grieve losing him, and too many people have already forgotten him as if he were just a dream. All of her training to become a summoner and none of it prepared her for living after fulfilling her sworn duty of ending Sin.

None of it prepared her for the gaping hole left behind by a boy who was more than the dream he came from.

Title: Dreams Are All I Have Left

When he swallows down something that by all rights should kill him, and his lawyer looks at him with shock and dismay, he realizes two things very quickly.

One: Dahlia never cared about him one bit.

Two: He can eat curses.

Sure, he has to go to the hospital almost immediately after the trial, but he’s otherwise physically safe. (The doctors call it a miracle, he remains quiet.) And as soon as he’s released from hospital care and the detention center, he redoubles his efforts to find an old friend and throws himself into law.

He doesn’t yet realize that while he somehow manages to land on his feet after he swallows that first curse down, those around him aren’t so lucky. After all, how is it that Mia becomes his mentor, sees him through his very first trial in court, and is killed so soon after by that damned statue his friend made? He swears to bite down on whatever curse is looming over the Fey family, he swears to save Maya from it, no matter how long it takes for him to swallow down every bite.

(And there is so much more to swallow down than he expected.)

He faces down the curse on Miles, fifteen years later in the dead of winter. It writhes and chokes his friend in a desperate bid to remain right where it is. He ignores its struggle, and he sinks his teeth in deep. He clashes against Von Karma, he pushes and rips away at every piece of obfuscation meant to frame Miles for murder twice over. He gulps and gulps and gulps until the air is clear and the curse is no more.

Miles Edgeworth is Not Guilty.

Phoenix Wright digests a curse.

Maya returns to her village. Miles’s car holds a dead body, with his knife buried in it. Steps are carefully taken to mismanage the trial so that Miles will be forced to take the fall for its mismanagement. He grits his teeth and claws anew at the threads and machinations of a curse trying to take his old friend yet again.

(He begins to worry that he’s done something wrong, and also something he can’t begin to take back.)

He can’t put it into words, but curses taste different. They react differently as he snaps his teeth into them. He only has so much space inside him to digest these curses, but he can’t stop protecting the ones he loves once he begins. He still has one very important curse ahead of him.

He’ll suffer injuries, he’ll take any backlash as the writhing curses fight back, he’ll do anything except let go. He’ll grab the neck of the Fey curse and drag it into himself bite by bite. He’ll do it, thinking of Maya and Pearl and Mia, of those who have been harmed by the curse and who have done harm in the curse’s name.

He’ll take the curses into himself, and give up everything to see them digested into nothing.

"Over the next several days in their traveling, Yuffie didn’t find any chances to steal materia. She did, however, notice a few more instances of Cid, Vincent, or both giving some semblance of fatherly advice. But when she listened to the advice, well…"

Snapshots of the (comparatively) younger members of AVALANCHE conspiring to get Cid and Vincent to act like team dads, sometimes to hilarity and sometimes to weirdly morbid degrees. (And one particular flower girl thinks they'd make a great couple.)