Title: black rose road

Genre: Romance/Tragedy. Also contains my typical brand of character drama along with a heavy dose of sci-fi and fantasy elements.

Rating: R

Warning(s): Contains the usual stuff you'd expect of the R rating. Major character death, graphic depictions of violence and gore, profanity, sexual content, mentions of some very unethical practices and suicide, and truckloads of angst of the existential variety. While this is a story on the darker, grittier end of the spectrum, it does contain (very limited) moments of fluff and levity, usually in a romantic context.

Plot Summary: l'Cie. For many, that title would inspire both awe and terror. As biomechanical constructs with the ability to cast magic, they were Cocoon's means of enforcement through violence. Somehow, Lightning had become entangled with the most important of them all. Yet he was completely different to what she expected. Transhumanism AU. Lightning/Cyborg!Hope.

A/N: This spawned from a Kingdom Hearts AU that I never finished. Roxas and Xion were the original participants, but I ended up swapping the genders 'round in the case of Hope and Lightning to better accommodate their personalities. As a result, this version of Lightning is more masculine than my other interpretations of her. I daresay it's refreshing to invert their dynamic and portray Lightning as the yang character (with Hope as yin respectively).

Yes, I should be updating my other fics. But the plot bunnies kept multiplying and I felt compelled to give them form…

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prologue – ignoble beginnings

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Lightning's hands balled into fists at her sides. "So you're going back to them?"

Hope didn't turn around to look at her; all she could see were the frayed ends of his messy silver haircut. "I don't see any other choice." His voice – normally a gentle, mellow tenor – was rigid with determination, and she hated it.

"If you walk out that fucking door, I'll never forgive you."

His shoulders visibly shook as he digested the threat, but it didn't prevent the faint rustle of fabric as he produced a keycard from his jeans pocket. A swipe and a beep later, the locked door of their hired motel room unlatched. Suddenly she staggered, clutching her chest; it felt as though someone had plunged a knife into the soft, vulnerable flesh underneath.

He didn't see her reaction; the hood of his sweater-clad back was still facing her. Re-pocketing the keycard, he gave the door a small push. It swung open with a rusty whine. The hinges needed oiling, she realised distantly.

"I'm sorry."

Muted light from the street lamps outside spilled onto his sneakers (nondescript white canvas, with travel-worn soles and sloppily knotted laces. Why did meaningless details like those stand out so vividly when the world was crashing down?). She watched, disbelieving, as they shuffled forward, lifted—

this can't be happening he can't seriously be leaving

—and crossed over the threshold into the night.

She was Lightning Farron, screw-up street kid turned Sanctum security officer. He was Hope, l'Cie No. XXVII and primary artificial human subject of Project Transcendence. Fate brought them together, then threatened to snatch them apart again. In defiance, they'd fled the Sanctum, seeking a new life beyond the whitewashed walls of their laboratory cage. Only too late did they realise that freedom came with the greatest price of all…

But their story began long ago, when she first joined the ranks of the Sanctum.

In retrospect, she'd been the ideal recruit. A poverty-stricken nobody fit to be erased from the record books and remoulded for clandestine, less-than-benevolent purposes. Orphaned in her youth, she'd dropped out of school early and drifted about the precarious job market, caught in the brutal struggle to survive. She had no family, friends or support network. Lack of medical privilege meant that the one sister she'd loved succumbed to illness on the eve of her nineteenth birthday. And when Serah died, Claire died with her.

The Cocoonian government had salvaged her numb, alcohol-poisoned form from the alley and nursed her back to health, before giving her an ultimatum. Either she could become the next victim of the Purge – the sanctioned 'cleansing' of undesirables like her from society – or work for them. They would clean her up, provide a roof over her head and three square meals a day. In turn, she would assume a new identity as an underground state servant. Desperation and the ever-prevailing survival instinct had won out over pride, and she'd ended up accepting their offer.

Thus she became Lightning.

She was a broken shell, hollowed out by grief and despair and bitterness at the world that had no place for her in it. So they'd rebuilt her by way of indoctrination, impressing upon her untaught mind the various technicalities of combat and military protocol. Time went by, and she learned how to follow orders and wield the gunblade that now slung across the backs of her thighs. Eventually, she became the quintessential soldier. Disciplined. Efficient. Obedient. Stripped of her agency, she sought no greater ambition than carrying out the motions of her subjugated existence.

Nevertheless, they seemed pleased with her performance. After her third year, they reallocated her to Sanctum Research and Development, Department of Cybernetics. At her new site, she would form part of the security staff for the highly classified Project Transcendence.

Were she someone else, perhaps this transfer would've provoked resistance, raised an ethical debate within her. Here was the birthplace of l'Cie, biomechanical automatons capable of crystallising chaotic energy, otherwise known as 'magic'. Having accompanied said l'Cie on field trips as well as the front lines, she'd witnessed firsthand their awe-inspiring powers of destruction. They were consummate killing machines – tools of enforcement, weapons of war. Therefore, in guarding their origins, she would be enabling not only Cocoon's continued oppression of its own people, but also the atrocities committed in its pursuit of world-domination.

She didn't care.

Walking amongst the l'Cie, she felt only a twisted sense of belonging. Many an occasion she'd looked into those optical sensors they had for eyes, and saw herself reflected back. She and they were the same: instruments of captivity, marionettes dangling by their puppeteer's strings. The one thing that differentiated them was self-awareness, or in the l'Cie's more fortunate case, lack thereof. They couldn't experience the turmoil of conscience – they were not engineered with that capacity.

It was a perfect apathy. So she'd emulated them, retreated so deeply into herself until she could no longer feel.

And for a while, nothing mattered.

Not until she met him.

A/N: So, what is your first impression? I already have the story plotted out, but please let me know if this is something worth continuing.