Author's Note: This is a sequel to my story Like Turks, in that it takes place in the world of that story, which was a FFVII prequel. This only changes a few things that should become apparent later, and you do not need to have read it! This story take place after FFVII, but before (and quite possibly in place of) Advent Children or any other sequel. Enjoy!

-Incanto


Every day at six in the morning when a rich ocean fog still hung on the cove, on the white chalk cliffs, and the sky was the color of the crushed dregs of fruit in a cocktail, a man picked his way down the beach to the water. He walked straight on until his shaved head, raw, sticky-looking in the paleness, vanished in the wine-colored water; but it reappeared several yards out, and he swam in big lazy circles, strong but listless, an old shark.

Mideel locals called him Le Soldat, the Soldier. There were not many such locals left. The Lifestream had receded, leaving band on band of incandescent, intricately speckled rock, and strange mutant corals had grown, and hermit crabs the size of cats in vivid shades of purple and red could be observed shambling around with unfamiliar species of seaweed and anemone waving off their shells like pendants; the beauty of the tropical island had increased severalfold, but there was no one to enjoy it. The long-term effects of the mako exposure probably depended on where along the island you lived, where and how much you swam, what you ate. There were no scientists to study the phenomenon, no soldiers to forcibly evict any of the locals who'd decided to stay, grimly putting out their fishing boats every day as generations of their ancestors had before the invention of tourism.

Le Soldat's big shoulders, it was said, made him look like a coffin from behind. He had nut-brown skin and wore the same pair of tight red swim trunks, it seemed, every day, and nothing else. He lay on the flat rocks to dry himself, and smoked fish that he caught himself with his hands in the ocean, many fish on one stick; but when you caught a glimpse of his eyes, that was the biggest shock. Small and weak, scared almost, hazel-colored and surrounded by crescents of smooth whiter skin, as if they'd been protected for many years by a mask. He brewed his own liquor in a salvaged barrel, from various mushrooms and fruits. It was rumored to be strong stuff. The birds and stray cats and hermit crabs wouldn't go near it, and from the cave where he slept—the village kids would sometimes dare each other, prodding with elbows, to creep along the precipice overhead—strong mechanical snores issued each night like clockwork.

The girl wore the bottom part of a floral print bikini, and a white shirt with three large buttons. Smug and sleek, she moved with a strong twitch to her walk and her hands behind her, fondling a big floppy sunhat. Her black hair glowed brighter than the white rock around her. She looked constantly about to topple off the cliff in a flash of sharp girlish elbows and knees and long bony shins, the diaphanous sunhat flapping behind her back like a pair of useless fairy wings; but there was a deceptive grace to her, a drunken boxer's stance, a coy flirtation with the laws of physics.

She looked down and saw Le Soldat, his long brown coffin shape disturbing the rocks further down the cliff. He lay motionless on his back. His eyes were shut. The girl stared. Although she was obviously young, and in spite of her audacious walk, there was a curious stony quality to her little face, and the tiny cluster of dark freckles on each cheek. A normal girl would have cringed, even run off screaming, seeing Le Soldat. Her face suggested a kinship with the man she was looking at.

She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

When he didn't stir—he might have been dead—she uncoiled the cords of the sunhat from around her slender hard-candy fingers, and glancing up at the huge expanse of blue-green sky and sea, let them slip through; the hat flared out, casting a saucer-shaped shadow on the sleeping man that grew bigger and bigger as it floated downward, riding the breeze in a way that seemed increasingly deliberate, until finally—as a smile touched the girl's lips—it settled perfectly over his face and he jolted up coughing.

"Aloha-hoy!" she called down. Her voice was not big but the circular walls of the cove made it echo.

Le Soldat got up slowly on one elbow, peeling the hat off his face. He looked up at the girl. The noon sun behind her formed an ironic halo around her puckish devil face as she grinned.

He blinked, long and slow.

"Go away, little sister," he said, not ungently.

She stamped one bare foot on the hot flinty rock.

"Oh, come on! Aren't you at least a little bit happy to see me!"

He shrugged.

"You look healthy…I'm happy you're alive. I guess. Now, please go and leave me alone."

"D-don't you at least want to know why I'm here? How I found you and everything?"

"No. No…I don't want to know anything."

She glared down at him, twisting the bunch of her fingers behind her.

"At least give me my hat back."

"Come and get it."

She took a few trembling steps down onto sharper rocks. The man threw her hat in the air, and immediately a stronger wind seized and tugged it irrevocably out to sea, where it turned several frantic cartwheels until receding to such a distance that it became one of a thousand whitecaps and distant wheeling sea-birds.

"Oh! That is so low, you are such a huge jerk!"

He laughed. "Jerk, huh? You got soft. I remember you used to have a much dirtier mouth on you. But, I'm a jerk?" He yawned, and turned away, leaning on his shoulder, so that they both looked out to sea. "You come here and make me remember things. Who says I want to remember? Look at that."

He held out one hand, palm down, over the water.

"Umm. So, what?"

"I like that. Every day, it comes in. Every day, it goes out. I like that. It makes sense to me. Anything else, I don't want to know."

The girl turned away. Slowly, her left heel scratched up and down the back of her right calf. "You know," she muttered, "he said you'd be like this."

"Huh?"

"He said. You know. Red."

"Red? I don't know any…" Le Soldat's shoulders stiffened. "Oh. So he did, did he. Well, where is he? I guess he had better things to do.—He's alive?"

"Yeah. I mean, yeah, he is."

The shoulders relaxed.

"Okay."

"What, hasn't he been to see you? Even once?…Does he even know you live here?"

"Sister," said the man, with a faint chuckle, "you don't understand the first thing about men."

He leapt off the rock. There was a loud splash, then a silky rush of water as, far below, he pushed off, trailed by a long gently frothing wake.

"Oh, yeah?" she yelled after him. "I know one thing! You're all a bunch of big, dumb—stinking—cowards! But I can wait! I'll be here when you get back, don't worry! You'll listen to what I have to say…if it's the last thing you ever do…"

But as he grew further and further distant, and her voice grew fainter, she shivered; as if doubting there were anything really tethering him to the land, or to a human life; or his past to hers, or anyone's.