brokenprism | Masks (FFIV, Rydia, PG)

Masks

Fandom: FFIV
Characters/Pairing: Rydia, Asura
Rating: PG

Notes: 200-word drabble. Catching up on the claim (finally!).

Claim: Rydia
Theme: #40, 'Hollow'

- - -

“You’re staring, child.” Asura’s voice is milk-smooth. She looks at Rydia questioningly, ocean-deep eyes beneath the blue braids woven into her queen’s crown.

Rydia swallows, and says bravely, “You aren’t what you are.” She has been watching Asura for days, trying to put into words she doesn’t know the feeling that the queen is - hollow, empty, the way her hands move a bit too fast and her eyes a bit too slow: not like the people Rydia knows and remembers from above.

Asura stops, and Rydia swallows, thinking she has crossed some kind of line and will be spanked, or worse, sent away: but then Asura smiles, slow and gentle and warm, the way Rosa smiled.

“No,” the Queen of the Feymarch says. The smile thins, and Rydia shudders as it turns cruel: nothing like Rosa anymore. “I am not.”

The smile fades completely, and stern-faced Queen Asura asks: “Will you see?”

Rydia swallows again, and thinks desperately of her mother. “Yes,” she says.

Gold silk and blue hair twist abruptly, wrinkling inward. The monster has three faces. Its head spins impossibly, watching her.

Rydia is surprised to find she’s less afraid of the monster than of its shell.

for