Disclaimer: LR does not belong to me. Poem is by ee Cummings.
AN: I don't know what I'm doing. I don't write romance, but here I am trying. Leave a review?
Serendipity
(do you think?)the
I do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of so longs, and ashes)
o
Claire Farron leads a perfectly ordinary life.
.
.
Except that she still dreams, and in those dreams she is not Claire but Lightning, self-proclaimed goddess of death and savior of souls. She dreams of seeing a boy with silver hair and empty eyes suspended carelessly by a manipulative God, his lifeless body tangled up with threads of light that move his limbs this way and that. She watches as the God laughs and crushes the body to pieces in the palm of his hand. She watches the particles of dust disappear into the abyss – all that remains of Hope Estheim, of the man turned boy again.
She dreams of this.
Over.
And over.
Again.
When she catches a break, she finds herself instead at the Ark, where the fake Hope smiles up at her and reminds her – you're the savior, Light. It's what God wants. Would you defy God? and she stares at this shell of the boy she once knew.
And then Lumina:
Going against God means going against Hope. Are you really willing to do that? (looking back on it, she doesn't know how she missed it – Lumina was never Serah, Lumina was always her.)
You don't think I am? Her reply, and Lumina's all-knowing laughter that followed. The laughter trails her into all of her nightmares, always lurking at the corners of her mind.
And Claire wakes up, and she falls back asleep, and she watches Hope perish before her over, and over, again. She dreams of him going somewhere she can never reach him and she wakes up and stretches the days where she avoids finding him.
Claire Farron, to her essence, it still selfish, still human – because she feels fear all too easily.
.
.
Sometimes when Claire is in the Ark of her dreams, Bhunivelze turns the sky to the darkness of the universe she locked him away in, and he is not Bhunivelze but Hope and Hope is the one relentlessly attacking her, lips pulled back into a twisted smirk – eventually he is the one bloodied and beaten, his body covered with crystal as he drifts farther and farther away. She stretches her hands out towards him, her body chained to the foundations of the Ark. She screams.
Don't leave me alone!
In reality, his hands had reached for her back and clasped her fingers with his. He had smiled at her, the man behind the mirage of a child.
In her dreams, there is no one.
Claire Farron is all alone.
.
.
In the new world, Serah and Snow find her first. She barely makes it out of the train station she arrives at before her arms are full of her little sister, sobbing and laughing into her shoulder all at once. Snow, not one to stand by on the sidelines, wastes no time in joining them – when Claire laughs, neither greets it with surprise. They just squeeze her tighter, and she responds in kind.
Noel and Yeul somehow are the next ones to find them and they stay and visit before declaring that they will be going out to explore their new reality. It turns out that Sazh and Dajh found themselves at a farmhouse not too far off from the village Claire, Serah and Snow have decided to make their home, and they are all invited over; in the middle of it, Fang and Vanille crash the party, claiming that some weird intuition of theirs led them right to the group. They spend the night waiting for Hope to join them, the expectation present in the backs of their minds, but no silver haired boy – or would be a man, they all wonder, now that Bhunivelze is gone – shows up at their doorstep. They don't let themselves feel too disappointed, knowing that he will find his way to them eventually.
It takes less than a week for Claire to begin dreaming.
.
.
Serah sends her a look full of understanding when she is told, and advises Claire to find Hope and see for herself that her dreams are just that – dreams. But Claire continues to dream of both Hope killing her and Hope being killed at her hand and at the mercy of Bhunivelze, and without the mask of Lightning to help her, she can't escape the fear of her nightmares long enough to actively look for their lost friend.
So he does it for her. It takes him one month and four days to find her – their house phone rings one afternoon and she answers it. She expects Sazh, or even Vanille, but not the voice that comes across the line.
Is this… Lightning?
She almost drops the phone. He sounds older, she realizes somewhere at the back of her mind.
There is silence on his end. She clears her throat.
…It's Claire now.
She thinks she hears his breath hitch.
Claire, his voice tentatively says, trying it out. A pause. Do… you know who this is?
She can't help the snort that escapes her. As if I wouldn't know your voice, Hope, she replies, clutching the phone tighter. She imagines him smiling where he is, breathing out a sigh of relief. She knows him so well, she thinks, both as a boy and the man he grew up to be during her long absence at Valhalla. In some part of her memories, she remembers watching him, wanting more than anything to reach out and reassure him that he was doing the right thing.
I'm so glad to hear your voice, Hope admits quietly, and her lips quirk into a smile of her own.
Yeah. Me too.
.
.
The reason it took him so long to find her was the fact that he had found himself – along with his parents – on an entirely different continent, he tells her that day. Finding a house and finding some way to live as a family again had been their first priority; a difficult one, especially with him now being twenty-seven instead of the fourteen he had been again. His personal theory was that since Bhunivelze destroyed his body (Claire's mind flashes back to her dreams, his limbs turned to dust and scattered; she tries not to let her sharp intake of breath be heard) his soul re-created the body it had grown used to instead. Once that was done, he took to searching for them – it was a long process, he admitted grudgingly, but exploring the online world somehow led him to Serah and her forays into the social world there, and from there on it was easy to track her down.
He buys plane tickets the first chance he gets. Claire tells him directions to the quaint village they live in. A date is set – the others are beyond excited when Claire tells them, as scattered around the world as some of them are (Noel and Yeul are currently living in some city across the ocean; Fang and Vanille are on an expedition down south, exploring the wilderness of the planet).
Claire is volunteered, unanimously, to be the one to pick him up from the train station – she does not mind, except that she still sees him every night in her sleep. The dreams come frequently and all jumbled into one.
Bhunivelze crushes him in the palm of his hand. Hope charges at her, surrounded by a duo of giggling winged beings. She plunges her blade into his chest and watches the look of shock that settles across his face.
She pushes, and he is chained to the remains of their old world, floating farther and farther away from her into the abyss.
She screams.
Lumina's laughter echoes.
Claire wakes up.
.
.
"It'll be okay," Serah tells her the morning she sets out. Claire merely nods back and drives to the station lost in thought. She parks, locks the doors and turns to face the train.
There is only one person standing there, waiting.
He is looking at her, and even from this distance, Claire knows the familiar green of his eyes.
He's taller than I am, it hits her as she makes her way towards him slowly, never breaking her gaze from his face. She remembers this face, vaguely – the grown up Hope from her time as Etro's Knight, working tirelessly to save her. To save Vanille and Fang. Save the entire world. Except now he doesn't have the shadows under his eyes, or the tight draw between his brows; he looks his age, finally.
She stops before him and they stay silent, just taking each other in – until Hope's suddenly in motion, drawing her towards him in a tight embrace. Her forehead makes contact with the fabric stretching over his shoulder; she tries not to flinch away in surprise.
"I don't do hugs, not even with Moogles, remember?" She murmurs instead, hesitantly winding her arms back around him. His chuckle reverberates into her body.
"I'm not a Moogle though," he replies, tightening his grip on her even further, to the point that she can hear the escalated beating of his heart. She wonders if he can feel the matching pace of hers, thrumming inside her chest.
Claire hides the smile that stretches across her face in the scent of his shirt. "With that hair? Could have fooled me. Or perhaps a chocobo is more relevant here…"
Hope draws back just enough to look at her again, his lips quirked into a soft grin. She has the urge to trace his lips with her fingertips, burn the smile into her memory forever - this happiness of him, this warmth. "Claire…" he says, his voice old and traced with youth of his past at the same time. He pauses. "Light…"
For a moment, she sees the boy she took under her wing, her knife clutched in his shaking hands – and then she blinks and Hope Estheim, Director of the Academy, but most importantly Hope is standing before her yet again.
She reaches up, and traces the planes of his face with her fingertips. "Only you get to call me that," she mutters. "No one else. You got that?"
The smile across his face stretches, the warmth of it reaching all the way through to her heart.
"Of course."
.
.
Claire Farron leads a perfectly ordinary life.
She no longer dreams of Lightning, self-proclaimed goddess of death and savior of souls. She dreams of no Gods, of no floating Arks in the sky, of no haunting laughter.
Instead, she dreams of Light, and only when Hope is present there – she dreams of them.
Together.