Final Fantasy VI - Celes/Terra/Locke

[lirillith]

Title: Dream Logic
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Characters: Celes/Terra/Locke
Word count: ~500
Rating: PG?
Warnings: None
Summary: They all have bad dreams sometimes.
Notes: Written for a Tumblr prompt meme.

Sometimes Terra dreams that magic returned, that she’s reunited with her Esper half. The dreams are euphoric at first, full of flight over green and thriving landscapes, but then she reaches to touch something and it begins to burn. There are jets of flame flowing from her hands, and she can’t stop them or control them. She finds herself faced with the people she loves, and they won’t stay away no matter how loudly she screams at them. She sees skin blacken and split, watches them smile as they burn; sometimes she sees their faces afterwards, skull-like masks of charred skin. She never wakes up with a jolt or a scream; she wakes up after the dream has made her desolate, after her dream-self has sobbed to the point of sickness.

Sometimes Locke dreams of caves and dark chasms, missing boards and frayed ropes. It has little resemblance anymore to what really happened; sometimes it’s Terra who falls, sometimes Celes, sometimes Rachel. Sometimes one of them falls and yet he finds another on the cave’s floor. Sometimes he saws away at the rope with a pocket knife. He does wake up shouting, and wakes the other two when he does so. He offered to move out of the room they shared, but neither of them would hear of it, and secretly he was grateful. It’s good, after one of the dreams, to be able to touch Terra and be assured that she’s real, to be able to turn his head and see Celes — unable to get used to sharing a bed, she has a single where she can kick away the covers to her heart’s content — and know that she’s alive, and none too happy with him for waking her.

Sometimes Celes dreams of courts-martial and tribunals. A judge sits high above them, so high she can’t see his face. Sometimes he sounds like Gestahl. Sometimes he sounds like Cyan. She stands trial, and she admits it all calmly. She torched Maranda. She put the royal family to the sword in Tzen. Locke is there with her, telling her to defend herself. She was raised for the task; she might never have worn a Slave Crown, but all of her choices were taken away before she even knew she had them. She ignores him. She might never have had the choice to become a general, but she chose to do all she did once she had her command. She wasn’t like Leo; she didn’t agonize over preventing casualties, or visit the families of the fallen personally. But then the trial turns, and Terra is under scrutiny. Fifty soldiers, burned alive, cooked in their own armor. Magitek raids on isolated targets without a formal declaration of war. Terra is not calm; Terra is frantic, miserable, denying everything. It’s not true, she insists, I would never do that, and Celes is trying, voicelessly, to shout at the judge that it’s not her fault, that she’s innocent.

The best the judge ever gives them is not guilty.