Copyrighted to GuTTerArT 2007
Vincent Valentine and all related characters are the property of SquareEnix Co. (Ltd)
HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20?
:: Don't Look Back, It Might Be Gaining On You ::
Kalm's streets are eerily silent as Vincent meanders aimlessly through the darkness, as apart of it as the demon that had once possessed him. How it reminds him of Midgar, the bitter sound of nothing deafening him with its empty desolation, broken only by the soft tapping of his boots against the sidewalk.
Midgar ... no more than a ghost town now and empty if not for the few remaining corpses of Deepground Soldiers and WRO troops left negligently where they had fallen in combat, many by his own hand. Fresh blood on the walls of an already forsaken, wasted town ... for that he feels no remorse.
There is no time for such frivolity. The heavy weight of guilt on his shoulders, so alike the frayed crimson cloak he favours, is burden enough without adding the meagre lives of those sacrificed to save the world from annihilation to it. He smirks morosely from behind the high collar of his cape ... frivolous. That is what the lives of others had become ... his life had become?
These days he merely seems to drift from place to place without purpose or reason, his mind focused on nothing but the past that is as unattainable as the peace he longs for and could never have. His punishment continues in the same way as he does, frivolous and in vain.
"Lucrecia..." he sighs heavily, his breath ruffling the long strands of black hair that escapes the red bandana and falls haphazardly into his eyes. The darkness within them is illuminated for a moment in the moonlight as they flick upwards, appealing to the women he loves and had destroyed. Nights like these, ones spent alone and in thought prove, if not that he had suffered enough, that hindsight never meant clarification.
No matter the advice of his associates and their insistence that Hojo was to blame for Lucrecia's fate, looking back, couldn't he have done more? He wonders and doubts and yet can't bring himself to think otherwise.
Strange, he muses, how hazy the lens of antiquity becomes when it's smeared by the congealed frivolity of hindsight.
:: Fin ::
A/N: Short ficlette written in response to a TM prompt. Rather … random, I suppose.