Author: Koi Lungfish
Disclaimer: Based on characters and situations from Final Fantasy VII ((c) 1997, 1998 Square Co., Ltd). Used without permission. Text (c) 2001, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved.)
Subject: A vignette upon Cid & Vincent's relationship.
Once upon a time, there was a man who came upon a broken harp, and mended it. When he played the harp, it seemed to him that its songs were all the sweeter in gratitude for his healing. He loved the harp very dearly, for it would sing only for him, and its choice, its fidelity, it drew the love from his heart as easily as he drew music from its strings.
The man loved the harp: but, he wondered, did the harp love him in return?
From his pose, I can see he's been crying. Forehead sunk to the heel of his claw, hand stretched before as if reaching to the candlelight for supplication: a picture of grief.
He still grieves; no instrument, no matter how finely crafted, ever forgets an injury to its frame.
I sit beside him: he shows no notice of me as my eyes feed my heart with his image, wrought in candleglow: His porcelain face, cast by the master of doll-makers, rosebud lips parted in a funeral sigh. Cervical eyes menstruate fat sloe-black tears, leaving elderberry wine-stains upon albino-peach cheeks.
I reach out and touch his hand, awakening him to my presence. He flickers a glance at me, and swallows a sigh. We speak without words; my touch tells him of my presence, my care for him, my selfish sympathy for this half-healed harp.
Upon the tendons of his neck and the sinews of his back, upon the tender nerves of his body my fingertips can raise a glissando cry of shock. He says it is still a wonderful surprise to rediscover the depths of the soul a single finger-touch can stir.
He holds my hand gently. I know you're here, he says with his cold, loose-gripping fingers, and it makes me feel better. Your presence soothes my pain, he tells me, you burn away my choking darkness. You disinter my smothered soul.
He drowns in nightmares, each time he shuts his eyes. The past holds him close, filling his lungs with its mildew-damp and barren breath. The past crushes him down into the mire of despair, holding him under the cold, clinging mud.
The past can be banished, he says, by three words; that intimate whimper that the heart paints bold across the stars. The murmur so thunderous it need not be spoken out loud.
I raise his hand to my face, and kiss it gently; the past leaves hold of him, and a smile is born on his lips, that winter-blooming rose unfolds its fair petals.
As I made him whole, I remade myself: made a place in my heart in the shape of a harp.
The man loves the harp; so much just a touch of the strings is enough to make music. But does my harp love me in return?
Memory has her claws in me again, slowly tearing up favourite photographs and feeding them into the furnace of my pain. All I have lost, all that has been torn from me, it gleams before my eyes in the stark clarity of hindsight. Tears break the dam of bitterness and spill; tears as black and foul as my soul.
I immolate in pain, the phoenix forever trapped in the moment of the flame, unable to die, unable to live again. Memory wraps her cobweb wings around me, smothers me in grief.
Then Cid touches my hand, and the furnace door swings shut. His presence tempers embers long thought cold into full flame; the warmth flows through me like drunkenness, swamping misery and drowning sorrow: Memory is beaten back, banished by his present presence.
He made me whole again, took the wreckage of my self and remade it; not as I was, for what I was would break me once again, but in a new shape; unlike the man who made me so broken, he rebuilt my soul; with it, my body healed.
He likens me to a harp, and be it so, I still play old tunes. When he leaves me, my tuning slips and I am as useless as of old; but his hand upon mine retunes my heartstrings to a melody, harmony, symphony of rapture.
I am his harp; I cannot help but play his tune. Do I love him? he sometimes asks.
Do I love him?
He who healed me, he who made me whole? He who, when he saw the disaster of my true shape, turned not away from my wreckage but set to the task of repair?
How could I not love him, this healer-mender? This one who fears not my darkness, who shuns not my nightmares but flays them back with the light of his love?
He made me whole; for this I will always play his tune: but knowing, deep within, that he did not make me to play his tune, but to play the tune of my choosing - that he remade me, and loved me as he remade me, even though I might never love him in return, that he loved me when I was broken and made me whole, not in his image but of his love - for that, I love him; for that, I answer Yes.
The harp loves the harper, loves him with all the depth of sound it can give him; loves him for his clever hands that mend and gently fingers that so tenderly touch its strings, loves him for the loves he gives; but most of all, the harp loves the harper for the love given without reservation, without hesitation, without forbearance. To be loved thus is to love, to be loved thus is to know the emotion that can make a harp sing without the slightest touch of fingertip.
For only when the harp sings without the harper's touch can it be truly said, Yes, the harp loves the harper, and I sing for him: upon my heartstrings his existence plays an aria of adoration. Even if I wandered this Planet without sense of him, with only his memory to tell me he was real, I would love him still until the end of my days.
Author's notes & addenda:
This isn't intended as a sequel to "The House of Corridors", although you can read it as one if you wish: it's a general Cid & Vincent vignette. Feedback excruciatingly welcome.