FicWad

This is the sequel to An End to Innocence, which is itself the third episode in a series of stories about the adolescence of Nooj. This series is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and to explain the reason for some of his tastes and attitudes in later life. It is exactly as canonical as I wish to make it.
The main character and the surroundings are the property of Square/Enix. The intellectual property is my own.



The Lab Rat

"I would like to hear your opinions on how the experiment is working out." Jounne, Captain and Commandant of the Calm Lands Training Camp , addressed his senior staff at their weekly meeting. "You have had four months to observe and evaluate."

"He seems to be settling down nicely," answered Dvala. "He reports for his tutorials every morning and is making good progress in his understanding of strategy."

"It was never his intelligence which was the problem," interrupted Armaq, the second in command. "But I agree, he is far less edgy and gets along with the other cadets better."

Jounne steepled his fingers, "I am glad to hear that. I want him to be sent on a mission with a group under his command soon. I need to see if he has better judgment this year. How is he getting along with his adjutant?"

Pathel smiled. "Are you sure you want to risk losing another student in case his judgment hasn't improved?" He hastened to add, "Just thinking out loud. He's still sleeping with that Queen Coeurl; I see them coiled up like an old married couple every night when I check the barracks."

"You asked about the adjutant," Whainlee, the chief weapons instructor, tucked her hair back behind her ears. "The medical clerk told me the girl, Kaith, has applied for a noncon injection."

"She had not done so before?" Jounne lifted an eyebrow in surprise.

"Not many of the girls do before their third year." Whainlee explained off-handedly. "I don't know if this action has anything to do with Nooj but it seems likely. They spend a lot of time together."

"Maybe it's the girl and not the cat that's making him so content." Dvala muttered.

Jounne shook his head ruefully. "Young men will be young. And young women too. I suppose that means ... ?"

"Probably. I can't see him hold back if she is willing. He has always been older than his years." Armaq observed.

"No scandal?"

"None. He is also discreet beyond his age."

Jounne nodded, "That's true enough. He didn't try to play the martyr after his flogging last year. But, then, he didn't have to. His fellow cadets were more than eager to embellish the facts. Well, if he is not becoming a scandal, we need take no official notice of his ... little fling. Is there any sign that the others are noticing and resenting his privileges?"

"Not that I have noted," Armaq was the one charged with overseeing morale. "They are vaguely aware that he is freer than they are but he has always been the A Cadet so they just lay it off to that. In a way, they seem proud of him. He's a bit of a trophy with the cat and the marks on his back. The senior class doesn't have anything like him. It helps he doesn't flout his rank or boast about what he gets away with."

"No. That's true. Discreet, as we have said. All right, I want a proposal for a special mission for him and about half a dozen others on my desk within two weeks." Jounne dismissed the Council.

As he left the room, Pathel mumbled under his breath. "I still think sleeping with a fiend is unnatural."

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She liked to stroke the face as smooth as her own but so different in structure. It pleased her to watch her white fingers slide across his amber skin and to let her startlingly blue eyes gaze into the mahogany pupils of her lover.

They had been thrust together when she had been named to second him in the cadet command of the Second Year. And they had been accordingly drawn together by a similar taciturn manner. Their meeting had been a point of combustion. It had probably been sheer chance that they had encountered one another at the exact moment each was primed to make the move from childhood to an adult state and it was fortuitous they were so well matched.

With some awkwardness, they had initiated each the other into the mysteries of physical love. Since that occasion, they had continued their clandestine meetings with ever increasing enthusiasm but absolute discretion. Since they were both private in their habits and chose not to reveal much of themselves to the world, discretion was an easy decision.

Kaith lazily rolled over on the mossy surface of the niche they had discovered and made their own. "Hey, Nepetu," she scratched behind the ears of the coeurl kit which lay sprawled on its back beside them, its paws waving gently in time with its sonorous purrs.

Nooj pulled her back to face him. "Pay attention to your job, woman." He raised a single eyebrow in his equivalent of a broad smile. "I'm on this side."

"Sorry, it's easy to confuse the two of you." She snuggled her head into the hollow where his neck joined his shoulder. "Maybe if you learned to talk?"

"What do you want to talk about? I thought you preferred action." He stroked her in a way she adored.

"There are other things," she pushed his hand away with a playful gesture. "I was lying here, looking at the sky and thinking how unlikely all this is. My parents did not want me to be a cadet. They thought I was too nice-minded to be a Warrior."

Nooj propped himself on his elbows and gave her his full attention. "But you had to do your three years service, what did they want you to do?"

"On, the usual things for girls in our group - Healer training, a little light nursing, taking care of orphan children, you know the drill, safe stuff where you go home at night."

"No, I have never been an upper class girl. I didn't know you could do those things instead of being a cadet."

Kaith looked at him in surprise. "Everybody knows that. You don't have to be a Warrior if you have contacts. Even boys can get out." She watched him through slitted eyes. "Didn't your parents know that?"

He covered his eyes with his forearm. "My parents died when I was six. I don't know what they knew. What I know is that I was always bred to be a Warrior."

She was always quick with her sympathy. "I'm sorry. Sin?"

"Yes. He destroyed most of our village and my parents were amongst the majority."

"Want to talk about it?"

"There's nothing to say. It's no different from what happened to a lot of others on Spira. Sin kills people; that's what he does." But it was different. When the Ur-Fiend had struck Kilika, destroying most of the structures on the island, the ensuing tsunami not only killed his parents but swept the boy out to sea.

"I floated around for a few days," he spoke dreamily as though recounting some imagined story he had read or heard somewhere. "There was a tree and I grabbed its branches. I think I must have slept. Not much in my memory."

Kaith placed her hand on his chest gently and felt the steady beating of his heart. It was a little faster than usual but his breathing remained calm and regular. She began to mentally weave his disjointed phrases into a sort of history.

"Washed up finally at a creek mouth and stayed there since the water was fresh." He continued slowly. "Don't remember eating but I was thirsty all the time and the water was good." He had not looked at her since he had started the laconic narration. "Finally, some search party found me. They were looking for survivors and were about to quit when they saw me, naked as a grub, sprawled on the sand. They said I was near starved - I don't remember. Took me back to the village and gave me to my uncle, mother's brother. That's all."

She still did not speak, instead embracing him with her arms and legs, trying to warm his body which had begun to shiver. Nooj did not seem aware of his shaking, being still frozen in the world his own words had conjured up for him. His gaze was bleakly vacant and he did not respond to her touch.

The coeurl rose smoothly from its position and walked around to its master's side. The tufted whiskers brushed his ears as the animal bent to lick the boy's face, then pushed its soft fur against his torso and began to purr. The heat of the cat and its firm pressure stilled the tremors and Nooj tightened his arm around his pet, digging his fingers into the dense pelt with a relieved sigh.

"And that's why I'm here as a cadet. I never thought I would be anything else." He lifted the corners of his lips although his eyes remained empty of any emotion. "Good cat," he rumpled the head of the beast. "Are you glad you decided to join the Army?" He finally focused on the girl who lay close against him. With one finger, he traced a line from the little indentation at the base of her throat down to the curve of her breasts. She moaned with pleasure and opened the buttons in her shirt to permit easy access to his hands and lips. She loved his touch, so gentle yet so demanding.

Later, they relaxed, her head on the flank of the coeurl kit, his propped up by the hands clasped under his neck. "Did you get that injection?" Nooj inquired lazily.

"Yep. No worries about becoming parents without meaning to."

"That would ruin your career and wouldn't do much for mine." He turned to look at her with a quizzical tilt of the brow.

"It would sure make you more noticed than you are already. A father at fifteen!" Kaith laughed. "No, I asked and received last week. Nobody seemed surprised. I guess there must be more of this going on than we know."

"I guess so. Why not? It has its moments." He pinched her in an intimate place and she returned the courtesy with a giggle. In a trice, they were rolling about and wrestling perilously close to the edge of the precipice near which they lay, until the cat leapt to its feet and fastidiously backed away from them.

"Nepetu is disgusted with us," Kaith gasped out when she had caught her breath. "We're not up to his standards of behavior."

"More likely he doesn't want to go over the brink with us." Nooj trapped her in the cage of his arms and bent down to kiss her thoroughly before bouncing to his own feet and pulling her up. "We'd better get back. It's getting late."

"I wonder where the other pairs go?" She leaned against his chest.

"None of our business so long as it's not here."

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The darkness in the barracks was not total. Scraps of light floated in through chinks in the shutters and through the always open windows high under the eaves. There was sufficient light for Pathel to see that his charges were safe and in their right beds. For a moment the officer thought he saw a glint of light from the bunk which held the Cadet Captain and his pet coeurl, but when he checked again, both were sleeping soundly. The senior tutor smiled at the sight and was glad his own bed mate had shorter nails and more even teeth.

When the inspection tour was finished and the man out of the building, Nooj opened his eyes again. He had been so deeply engrossed in his thoughts, he had forgotten the presence of the officer. It would not do to be marked as even more exceptional. The cadets were supposed to be so tired at night they slept without even moving. To be found lying awake would be the occasion of investigation and concern. He could not afford any more attention being paid to his differences.

The conversation with Kaith during the afternoon had brought back to him the memories he had put away as useless and distracting. There were too many of them to be handled at once and too few to form a coherent narration. Nooj had only shreds of recollection of the time he had spent clinging to the tree, being whipped about by the waves and broiled by the fierce sun. Of that time before he was found, he chiefly recalled lying on his belly, his face immersed in the cool fresh water of the creek, trying to absorb as much moisture as possible through as many orifices as he could bring into use. He would, even now, feel the cool moss against his thighs and hips and the flow of the water across his chest as he sucked desperately at the sustaining fluid, inhaling it up his nose as well as through his mouth. The water had been all to him and he had nursed from the creek as though from his mother's breast, drawing the stuff of life into his nearly dead body in spite of himself.

For he knew, even at the age of six, he had been meant to die, that he had slipped the clutch of Death by the narrowest of chances and his life was forfeit at any time. Under the blazing eye of the Lord of the Day, he had died - several times - and had been thrown back as an arrogant angler will free a too small fish for another day. Nooj, in his childish fantasies, thought he was the minnow returned to the pool to grow into the great fish worth catching. He never quite disabused himself of that thought. He was never able to rid himself of the belief he owed the universe a death.

As he grew older, he felt the weight of that debt ever more heavily. At the same time, he was becoming convinced not just any death would do. It could not be as simple as stepping off the edge of one of the ledges which ringed the Calm Lands and falling through clouds and shadows until he was broken on the rocks far below. That would be a death but not the one he owed. No. He was certain only a notable death would be worthy of the great fish he was distined to become. In another two years, he would be a member of the army, one of the Crusader division. He had no doubt at all of his ability to direct his own future at least that far. Once a fully trained Warrior, he could set out on the path to find the honorable Death he needed to complete what the Great Fiend had begun. He was not yet sure how he would accomplish this or even how he would recognize the chance when it offered itself to him, but he was satisfied these things would make themselves clearer as the time neared.

Still meditating on how he would go about closing the accounts on his existence, Nooj rested his chin on the head of his warm, purring companion and, lulled by that thrumming lullaby, drifted off to sleep at last.

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Jounne listened carefully to the report of his second in command. Armaq had been doing some research into the background of their experiment.

"He was orphaned at six and reared by a distant relative. No thought was given to his ever becoming anything other than a Warrior, particularly since he turned out to be so tall and strong."

"Did he have other talents which might have led to different choices? Or did his guardian just want to get rid of him as fast as possible?"

"So far as I can tell, both. His early instructors found him unusually intelligent and curious. And, his relative wanted out from under the responsibility of a child, particularly after the child killed a temple soldier with a dagger." Armaq nodded grimly. "I took a look into that incident and Nooj never seemed the least bit bothered by the deed. In fact, some of those who knew him at the time thought he enjoyed it."

Jounne smiled sardonically, "No wonder they sent him to us. Do you think he enjoyed it?"

"I don't know. He's too private for me to get a handle on him. The only ones he has ever let close since we've had him are Kaith and that damned cat. He sleeps with one or the other all the time."

"I hope you mean that symbolically where the coeurl is concerned; I would rather not have to cope with bestiality on top of all the other oddities surrounding this lad."

With a surprised laugh, the morale officer agreed. "No, he is apparently orthodox in his proclivities in that direction. But, I'm damned if I know what he's thinking most of the time."

"Do you think we should loosen or tighten the reins?" Jounne was never one to dismiss the advice of his subordinates. It was thus he maintained both control and respect.

"I would leave them as they are. He's eating and sleeping well and his connection with the girl is having some positive effects. Let's just keep watching."

"Very well. Thank you for your input." The Commander pushed himself back from his desk and prepared to stand. He had enough information for the present.

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The class was proceeding normally when the instructor, Dr. Marant, posed the question. "You are all training to become Warriors in the defense of Spira. Now in your second year, you must begin thinking about what that ultimately means. How many of you have actually seriously considered that you may die in the service of the state?"

She paused and ran her eye over the students, noting that most of them were looking at their desks with a vaguely worried look on each face. No one volunteered to answer.

"Surely, you must have thought about this. Given the history of our planet, I know every one of you has had some experience of death. You have had family members slain by Sin, fiends have taken friends, I know you are not innocent of death. You must not think you are immortal just because you are young. And, you must not enter the Army without recognizing that your life may be required of you as a part of your profession." She waited. "I trust it has not escaped your notice that men and women die in wars. That military service is not all parades and applause. I am not trying to discourage you, only to make sure you understand the job you're applying for and what it may cost in the end."

Nooj lifted his eyes from the paper on which he was writing. "I have thought about it."

"And are you willing to accept the idea of your own death? With full understanding of what that means."

"Yes." There was a flatness in the one word which made it ludicrous for the instructor to challenge him. She had intended to lead the discussion into the difficulties of facing one's own death but the toll of that single word had drowned out the possibility of such argument. She heard, as did the others in the room, the absolute certainty of what he said. That he did not feel it necessary to add any qualifiers made his statement all the more believable.

Once the silence had been broken, a babble of conversation broke out, everyone trying at once to express an opinion or voice a truism on the subject. Marant sat back, not attempting to impose order, and let them ramble. She recognized this was the sort of information she had been alerted to watch for in the tall youth and that she must report it to the Commandant at the first opportunity. What was the history of the tall, thin youth with the unsmiling face?

She looked up to see him gazing at her with a disquieting air of knowing precisely what she was thinking.