Fanfiction: "Family Portrait" (Final Fantasy VI)

[deemoyza]

Title: "Family Portrait" (2,175 words)
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VI
Rating/Warnings: General Audiences / No Warnings Apply
Characters: Relm Arrowny
Summary: A year after helping the others defeat Kefka, Relm is frustrated that her paintings can no longer come to life in a world without magic. In a fit of anger, she knocks one of Strago's pictures off the wall, shattering the frame and revealing a painting of a family who looks all too familiar.
Notes: For the "mini" fic prompt meme on Tumblr. (Prompt: I. broken glass)

Relm leaned away from the canvas and studied her painting, tilting her head and squinting to find that spark of life that used to show up in all of her work. But it wasn't there; the trees in the painting didn't rustle in the breeze, and the animals at their base didn't stir or blink. It was a nice enough painting, but that's all it was: just colors smeared on a canvas, frozen in time. Dead. Or never alive, to begin with.

Groaning, Relm dragged a wide brush back and forth across her palette, then took it to the canvas, obscuring the painting beneath slashes of muddy color. When nothing recognizable was left, she tossed down her palette and brush and turned away from her easel, only to face a stack of canvases in the corner of the room with equally inert paintings. She crossed her arms and pouted.

They did the right thing, she knew, by defeating Kefka last year. She just wished he hadn't taken all the magic with him when he died. Magic was her identity, her birthright; it flowed through her veins for the first eleven years of her life, it gave her paintings something special, it saved her and her loved ones more than once. So, what if some people decided to use it for bad things? They used tools and weapons and technology for bad things, too, and nobody was forced to give those up.

She wondered how Terra and Celes felt in a world without magic. After all, they were practically half made of magic themselves—well, not Terra, anymore, Relm supposed—and they must be affected by its absence. She wished they would visit her; she wished she could ask them directly. Perhaps she should write them. Terra was easy enough to contact, building a new life in Mobliz. Celes was a bit harder to find, traveling the world at the moment, but Relm could always send a letter to someone else—Edgar or Sabin or Setzer—and have them deliver it to her when they saw her.

Or she could get back to painting, and try to force the life back into her work.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Thank you again for writing this! 😭💕 it was such a joy to read! Relm does not get enough love in this damn fandom and you did her such justice!