A/N: I'm back! Amazing, innit? Anyway, hopefully this time I'll be back for good with both new stories and updates to my old ones. Again, I'm in the process of doing some mass editing on my chapter fics, so I can't promise a time when those will be updated. In the meantime, I hope you all will be entertained by new stuff that's been stewing around and waiting for me to post. Alrighty, enjoy and as always, leave a little something if you're so inclined (which I really hope you will be).

Everything's Gonna Be Alright

Lies. They were all lies. He'd been told that same lie countless times, ever since he could remember, and every time he was disappointed.

He remembered being a child and holding tightly onto his mother's hand as they watched his father walk out on them. He had cried then, but his mother had comforted him. She told him not to cry. She told him that Daddy was only going out for a little while. He would come back when he found the most wonderful toy in the world for him. In the meantime, everything was gonna be alright. She had promised him.

His father never returned.

Then when he was fifteen, he had gone to join SOLDIER. He met his best friend there, an older boy from Gongaga. Two years of training and testing had found his best friend in SOLDIER first-class while he himself had amounted to nothing more than a Shinra grunt. But it didn't matter. He had a perfect opportunity to prove himself to the greatest SOLDIER there ever was. They would be going on a high profile mission in which, if he could prove himself worthy, would allow him to rise into the ranks of being an actual SOLDIER. Then they would be just as renowned as their mentor. "Everything's gonna be alright," his best friend had said.

The mission turned out disastrous, and it cost him his hometown and his very identity.

After five years of being experimented on, the two of them—through no effort of his own—managed to escape the grasps of the crazed Shinra scientist. They were so close to freedom, and though he could not form any coherent thoughts in his mind, his companion's constant optimism comforted him and he knew with certainty that everything was gonna be alright.

The quiet thud of a sniper's bullet shattered his naivety.

Somehow he had managed to make it to the train station in the Midgar slums. Hired by the leader of a resistance group called AVALANCHE, he thought he could start anew, especially when he found that his childhood crush was also a part of AVALANCHE. She'd asked him if he remembered that night at the well. Of course he remembered! It was one of his most cherished memories. And though he didn't have the courage to confess his feelings to her yet, he would. He would when he found a chance. Now that she was here and he was here, everything was gonna be alright. She said so herself.

Shinra blew up the pillar of Sector Seven, burying whatever dreams AVALANCHE had built before.

He had to save her, the flower girl. It was his fault she had gotten dragged into all this turmoil, and it was his responsibility as her bodyguard to rescue her from it all. And somehow in the course of it all, it had turned into a quest to save the world from his childhood hero, the man he respected like a father—but not as his own father, of course, since he had never bothered to return. He had a group of friends, some of which were more reliable than others, but they were his friends nonetheless, and he would trust any one of them with his life. And he knew that they would be able to do it. They would save the world. The flower girl, the last remaining Ancient, had told them all with a mysterious smile that everything's gonna be alright. And they believed her.

The cold blade sliced through her flesh and stole away her life.

They mourned for her, and he in particular because he had failed her, like he had done so many times in the past. But armed with her sacrifice and the memory of her goodness that would never fade, the motley band of would-be heroes had obtained their objective: they stopped a madman from destroying the world. Everything should have only gotten better. Isn't that what happens with fairytales? Everybody lives happily ever after? But this is no fairytale. This is his life. And the story of his life is nothing less than utter disappointment.

When they'd made their home together—he and the woman he had grown to love so much more than he knew was possible—he'd thought that life couldn't get any better. He had a steady income from the delivery service he had started, and she had opened another Seventh Heaven bar. They'd even adopted a child he'd found on the streets, a child who reminded him of himself more than he dared think about. They were a family. Everything was gonna be alright. He himself had spoken those words to the boy they had taken in.

It lasted for about a year before the Geostigma crisis set in, and he realized that he had contracted the deadly disease. He walked out of his family's life just like his father had done to him and his mother so many years ago.

Still, even as he grew more aloof from his family, his family strived to close the distance. His most peaceful and treasured moment of everyday occurred when he checked his voicemail and heard her voice. She reassured him that everything at home was in order and that he needn't worry. But then he would feel guilty because he knew that she wanted him to come home, but he couldn't bring himself to burden them any more than he already had. He couldn't. So he listened to the messages of her voice and tried to follow her advice in not worrying. "Everything is gonna be alright," she said.

Then he saw her lying there, bloodied and bruised, her beautiful eyes hidden from the world as she fought for every breath.

He held her. He held her closer than he had ever dared to hold her. He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, but nothing seemed to keep the steady cold from creeping into her body. He cried. He hadn't cried since his father left him and his mother, but he cried. Even through everything he'd experienced and endured, he had believed that lie, that everything was gonna be alright because she was by his side. She had told him that they were going to make it through it all. She was the reason he knew that everything would eventually be for good.

Then there she was.

And it was with a sudden bitterness that he realized that those words were lies. Nothing was going to be alright. And it was with that realization that he embraced the excruciating pain stemming from his arm to spread to the rest of his body. And it was with that realization that he slumped over—the pain too much for him to bear—the cold body of his only reason to believe.

Everything's gonna be alright.

Lies. They were all lies. But that was the story of his life.

A/N: Yeah, go figure the first story I post after my ten months of silence would be a sad one...