ONE
Some days, it's hard to piece together how I got here. I remember everything, or damn near everything, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where in all that madness, I became someone else.
How the fuck did a guy who never took orders from anyone end up the do-bitch of a lunatic determined to destroy all of time and space?
I try not to think about it, but when I'm a few drinks into a bender, it creeps back in and won't let go. It seeps into dreams where all I know is her.
Well, fuck her. Fuck all of them.
But especially her.
The bar is a dingy, dim shit-hole just outside of Dollet city limits, not far from the roach infested shithole apartment I call home. I could spare myself the Gil and drink there, but I'm in no mood to be alone tonight.
Alone is a relative term. There isn't a soul I know here. No one cares that today is my 21st birthday and I no longer know who the fuck I am or what my purpose is, but the idea of spending such a landmark day watching the roaches climb the walls is more depressing than spending it here among the drunkards, hookers, and deadbeats.
At least I fit in. No one asks questions. No one bothers me.
I order a glass of Sylkis and stare into my glass. I count the cubes and suspect the bartender cheated me, but I'm not in the mood for a fight.
"In other news, the soon-to-be Duchess Sevillia Massey will officially accept rule of Dollet on Friday," the man on the TV says. "Her ascension comes in the wake of the deaths of Duke Alman Massey and his sons Alouicious and Copernicus in a tragic fire at their estate last week. Officials are still investigating the blaze, and have not ruled out foul play."
I don't give a damn about the Dollet Dukedom, but I'm drawn to the screen, where a blond woman in her forties waves benevolently at a crowd. She's not traditionally beautiful, but her features are strong and appealing and she can only be described as handsome.
I feel like I've seen her somewhere before, but a guy like me doesn't rub elbows with the rich and powerful. The chances we've met are slim to none.
"As you may recall, Sevillia was third in line for the title, and is no stranger to tragedy," the talking head says. "Her husband, Cassius was killed during the fight against Adel, just months prior to the birth of their first son, Caius. A second tragedy struck a few months later, when little Caius was kidnapped just weeks after his birth. He was never found. To date, no suspects have been apprehended in connection with Caius' disappearance. The boy, who would be twenty-one today, is believed dead."
A chill steals over me as a photograph of the infant flashes onto the screen. He looks like every other newborn brat on the planet with his scrunched face and misshapen head, but my lungs constrict and my heart skips a beat as the image enlarges. The man holding him looks just like the face I see in the mirror every fucking day, minus the scar Leonhart carved into my head as a reminder that he was not to be underestimated, no matter how inferior I believed him to be.
What's more, the man in the picture wears the traditional red cape of the Dukedom, held across his chest by a chain with a familiar oblong plate.
Just like the one I wear around my neck.
I'm drunk by the time I return to my apartment, and I grunt an unfriendly greeting at the roaches who scatter when I flick on the light. On the table by the door is half a bottle of Mimmet, which I uncap and gulp down to make my brain shut up.
Back at the bar, I considered paying for an hour or two with a particularly intriguing blond prostitute with sky blue eyes and a wicked grin. She wasn't pretty so much as cute, and her wit would have made things interesting, but I'm too drunk and Gil is too scarce to waste it on conversation.
A year ago, I celebrated my birthday with my Posse. They're long gone now. They couldn't deal and split, and I don't blame them. They watched me circle the drain for a few years, and they're saints for sticking around as long as they did, but in the end, they left. I don't blame them, but sometimes, I fucking hate them for it.
The booze doesn't chase away the questions and it doesn't scratch the itch for companionship. I never liked being alone.
I sit down on the edge of the bed and pry off my boots, take another drink, and flick on the television, in need of distraction. I hope for some moronic sit-com or a documentary about organic farming or something equally mind-numbing, but there's nothing but news, and they're all talking about the soon-to-be Duchess, her dead husband, and her missing boy.
I can't make myself stop watching as morbid curiosity turns to bitterness and I grow more and more certain, that missing kid is me.
When I was little, I used to imagine my parents died with honor in some long-ago battle. In my head, my mother was the perfect combination of warrior and homemaker, as likely to bake cookies as she was to behead a tyrant. My father was a brave solider or a knight who wore armor and defended the world from savages. I built them into idealized versions of what my affection starved kid-brain believed parents to be. They were untouchable and perfect and I daydreamed that one day, they would come and tell me there was some mistake and take me home, where the curtains were made of lace and I never had to share with anyone else or beg for their attention.
The older I got, the less I cared to know. I figured they were either dead, or they abandoned me. If it was the latter, I didn't want to know them, no matter what their reasons. They doomed me to this fate and robbed me of the chance for a normal life. If they were dead, there would never be a chance to know them while I still lived.
It never occurred to me that maybe neither was true.
On the television, more details of the missing boy were revealed. There was no ransom, no note. Some theorized Caius was kidnapped by a recently fired nurse as an act of revenge. Others believed it was the work of Adel's sympathizers, meant as a message to Cassius to call off his army. Still others believed the boy was murdered or met with some misfortune and was buried on the grounds of the Massey Estate and his absence reported as a kidnapping to cover it up.
Didn't matter. There was no way the kid could be me. I wasn't that fortunate.
Even if I was, they wouldn't want me back.
Not after what I did.
I stare at my old trench coat for hours. It hangs in the corner, the edges tattered and stained. Hyperion leans against the wall next to it, left untouched for almost a year. I can't bring myself to get rid of them, but I don't want them anymore. They belong to someone else. Someone who isn't me.
"I just want him to come home," a younger Sevillia says on the screen. "Just bring my baby home, no questions asked, just bring him home."
Her heartbreak is not a put-on. The woman on the television is genuinely bereft.
Her eyes are the same bright cyan as mine.
The more I see her, the more sure I am that she is my mother.
It occurs to me, I don't even know what that means.
Mother.
I stumble into him late the next afternoon, still drunk, and when he turns to me with hostile, accusing eyes, he lifts his fists up next to his chin like he wants to fight me.
I recognize him by his absurd tattoo, then notice he's in full SeeD regalia.
"Chicken-wuss."
His hair is long and pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. It's streaked with a pale, sandy blond like he spent too much time in the ocean, his skin tan from too much sun. He's healthy and strong, and surely reaping the benefits of being a hero, and I count the medals pinned to the jacket of his uniform with envy.
No one pins medals on villains.
The absence of his former over-gelled spikes should make him even shorter than I remember, but it doesn't. If anything, he's taller, broader, meaner, harder.
"Almasy," he says, and I notice, his voice is half an octave lower, as if puberty set in after we last crossed paths. "You look like crap."
"What are you doing here dressed like that?" I slur.
"The coronation, or whatever," he says. "What do you care?"
"I don't," I say. "Get the fuck out of my way."
I reel away from him as the present and past collide. I never wanted any of them to see me this way.
I know what I look like. I know I reek of booze and bad decisions, the evidence of how far I've fallen is written all over my skin. It shows, how little I care, and I don't care that it shows. They don't get to judge me. They never walked so much as a step in my shoes.
Except for Rinoa. I know what she is and what she could become. She knows how this feels.
As I weave away from Zell, I chance a look back over my shoulder. He stands where I left him, and the look on his face makes me want to vomit all over the sidewalk.
I hate him for pitying me. I would rather him knock me out cold on the street than look at me like that.
Well, fuck him, too.
I don't join the rest of the city in the square for the celebration. I don't turn on the TV. I get drunk again in the dark and watch the blades of the ceiling fan spin round and round until I get dizzy.
That woman, who might be my mother, mourns her father and her brothers, her husband, and the baby she never got to see grow up.
If I'm really all she has left, she's better off without me.
Author Notes:
I wrote this a long time ago and never had the guts to post it. I don't know if this pairing is one anyone really likes or wants to read about, and I'm not even sure this fandom is very active anymore, but I decided maybe it was worth a shot to put it out there and see. If you like it, would you be so kind as to leave a review?