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Auron considers the stubble. They call it an afternoon shadow here in Zanarkand, as if it weren't a real beard but rather an approximation, the abstract idea of a beard. Auron finds it apt. The celebrations for the fourth anniversary of Jecht's disappearance have come and gone - they don't say death, they don't mention unspeakable fates they wouldn't have words for anyway, he's just a memory eternally etched in the city's bright walls - marking another year in Auron's blank calendar. He would be pushing thirty by now, outgrowing his cleanly-shaven youth, but try as he might, he cannot picture himself with a full beard. Dead hair doesn't grow. He could, however, manage a stubble. A stubble feels like compromise enough.
Auron considers many things to come to terms with a body he should have left behind on Gagazet when his blood was still warm. There is a disconnect now; at best, he can say he is inhabiting this flesh. As if to dig his claws in and find fragments of his real self in the raw wounds, he is changing the way this body looks, one wrinkle at a time, deepening scars, peppering white on his temples. It never works. The body shambles through the day, through the radiant night of Zanarkand where sunlight rests in artificial glory and again through the drab day that follows; Auron haunts it, an afterthought in his own existence, and thinks of lost friends.
He still tries out the stubble, regardless.
There is one short-term solution: alcohol. Stop thinking and the gap between the movement of your hand and your image of the movement of your hand plummets to nonexistence, by sheer virtue of being divided by zero. For a while, Auron can simply exist, no more fractured than any other aimless exile.
So he finds himself a bar. His flat opens on a lone window among the hundreds that dot the building, itself a sleek, small tower lost in the midst of Zanarkand's arched roofs. He walks down a dozen flight of stairs, maintaining a stubborn, pointless distrust of the machina-powered lifts that serve the building, shaking his head at old habits and their proverbial resilience, telling himself he hasn't gone native yet, or scolding himself for that, he's not sure, although his voice remains confident. He is learning to remain confident. The main door opens on the web of criss-crossing canyons that are Zanarkand's lower districts, all high rises and barely a bird's wingspan in between them. The neon is suffocating. The crowd is suffocating. He'll manage. He's dead already, anyway.
A break in a line of ads-covered steel plates reveals a short flight of descending stairs and a purple sign pointing toward the bar's entrance, somewhere below the street level. Auron slips through, trading the grandiose oppressiveness of the air outside for a tense, private darkness. The bar is almost empty; he sits at the counter, close to one of the dim lights that break the ambience, while the bartender is captivated by a small TV whose screen the patrons are not privy to. Auron listen to the droning buzz of talk shows and wonders however Yevon managed to pass off telecommunications as no big deal, back there in Spira. Better blitz coverage to appease the people, he supposes. There's a joke about the current Sin and allowances made for blitzball, he also supposes, but he cannot bring himself to crack it.
He orders "the usual". Auron has never been to this particular joint, but he is learning that confidence opens many doors, and that faking it is being halfway there; this is good practice and, truth be told, he couldn't be bothered to check a menu if his life depended on it. Pun intended.
"The usual" turns out to be a low glass filled with three fingers of translucent amber liquid and lemon rind on top. Raising it closer to the light, it sparkles like pyreflies, the way they gather in Zanarkand - the other one, the real one, the dead one - like a solid mass of long-gone memories. It smells like alcohol, alright.
What it tastes like is Spira. Auron gulps down a sip of the proud red walls of Bevelle hiding wondrous gardens past their gates, only betrayed by the unruly foliage of their tallest trees. The taste on his lips is that of the darkening skies behind the temple as night falls, a heavy veil of purple clouds lining the coast but unable to mask the faint dots of light of the villages by the sea, hazy traces of lives outside the holy city, defenseless against Sin but warm, pulsating, alive. As a boy, Auron used to climb up on the temple's balustrade, standing barefooted on the mosaics' colorful holy symbols, soaking in the scents of a long-gone bakery, and memorize the bays and promontories, as if the water's edge were a road that could take him away from Bevelle. He drinks the blues and whites and violent reds of the waves lapping against the city walls and in a moment it's all gone, washed down his throat, leaving an aftertaste of acute nostalgia for a place that, all in all, was never home. Auron shivers, holding onto the empty glass.
"Another," he tells the bartender, who shrugs and reaches to the bottom shelf to grab an unmarked jug full of the stuff.
"You ever tried it?" he asks.
It turns out that yes, of course he tried the stuff he's selling, he's not in the business of poisoning clients, that would come back to bite him in the long term. Auron shoots him a look - this city is too small for both of them to be smart-asses. What's it taste? Nothing special. It's what everyone asks for when they got nothing fancier on their mind, the latest big thing, flies off the shelves, really. Simple profile, smoky slant if you squint, salty finish. Easy on the tongue. Bit of like the city as a whole. It tastes like a distant idea of the city, if Auron follows? A vague depiction that's not quite home, he wouldn't know how to put it better, which is funny because it's all domestic. Zanarkand brewed and distilled. You'd think Zanarkand would know what Zanarkand tastes like, the man laughs in a detached way that makes Auron wonder if he's not pulling his leg with flowery metaphors, if he meant what he said he would not be so flippant about it. So where is this distillery? Not a clue - government owned, probably, he just fills in an order form and a truck brings it in. Charming, Auron says, like a knife to the throat in an unmarked alley. Not really, it's just work. If he says so.
It cannot be too hard to find the place, Auron thinks, with the same lucid-dream poise that has gotten him far in the years he's spent in this world, cutting like a sword through the city's nonsense. To the best of his knowledge, Zanarkand does not care for an industrial quarter - goods exist, or they don't, and a city that hasn't asked itself a few basic questions about offer and demand in a thousand years isn't going to start making sense now that Auron would very much like it to. He will keep walking with his goal clear in the back of his mind and something is bound to turn up eventually.
It does not. Auron often gets the feeling than he is almost there, that he was not wrong in taking a left turn at the tower that smelled of shellfish, or in following that lanky stray dog until a gust of wind made her disappear behind a fence. But every time a turn feels like the last turn, when the place should finally manifest before him, Auron finds a mall instead, or the littered remains of an open-air concert (the dog reappears then, wagging her tail at him. Close but no cigar, mutt, and Auron isn't in the habit of carrying dog treats even if you'd deserved it. He does, however, come close to pat her head, and they watch the dawn together).
Eventually, his wanderings lead him back to the bar. He leans on the steel plates next to the entrance. According to the bartender's words, the delivery truck has to stop by sooner or later. If not today, tomorrow, or the day after. Auron waits. Auron falls asleep. In his dream, he is leaning on steel plates, waiting for something, but he has forgotten what he was waiting for. He feels observed. The street is empty, but there are multitudes behind the steel plates, inside the walls and the sleek translucent pavement and he lies at the center of their attention. He falls asleep. In his dream, he leaves the steel plates behind and walks into the dimly lit bar. Behind him, outside, the delivery truck brakes to a stop. Auron turns around and rushes back outside, jumping on the vehicle before it speeds up again.
At the end of the day, the delivery truck heads toward the city limits and stops in an abandoned parking lot. In front of it, like an ominous beast (like Sin itself, although the simile would be lost on the locals), looms the distillery, its kilns and water tanks and steep pagoda roofs rising up against the darkening sky. It lies in ruin. Auron forces the gate open and walks inside, greeted by endless rows of oxide green columns sustaining the disheveled roof of a hall that stretches as far as the eye can see. The emptiness is overwhelming, physical, crushing, and Auron manages a dozen steps before having to prop himself up against the nearest column. Still, the factory calls to him. Machinery hums in the distance. Braving one dizzy step after the other, under the decaying roof and an oppressive sunset above, he realizes that it is not a sense of emptiness that fills this place, but nostalgia, sharp and raw nostalgia bleeding over, malting and mashing and brewing itself into liquid shine. A glitch in the system. Longing and regret bigger than this city, squeezing through the dream to take form and volume. To exist, to be shared. No wonder the place loomed like Sin, this whole disaster had Jecht written on it from the start.
He could come undone if he gave in to the heavy air. The pyreflies that hold his body together know all too well what it is like to ache for a home that remains forever out of reach - home as in people in his case, rather than the proud walls of a city that never welcomed him, but he figures the same held true for Jecht after all, that his love for this decadent rat trap was always more of a figure of speech Jecht himself hadn't quite untangled. He could melt into this longing. Turn liquid, dissolve, refine from still to still letting the crass residues of this sorrow linger in the alembics that are bubbling even now in the dark rooms further on. Rest.
If he didn't have promises to keep, he would give in at the turning of the tide.
But he did promise. Twice, in fact. Auron weathers the storm.
He fills a flask from a row of casks lined up against the wall. "This one better be on the house, jackass," he says to the empty hall, knowing that so much of Jecht is here and yet he cannot hear him.
Slowly, he makes his way back to the shining domes of the city and the meandering neon streets underneath, warm, pulsating, unreal, and loses himself among the crowd.