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: Cid visits Vincent after a failed suicide attempt.
The walls here are of earthy brick. Homely, if it wasn't for the smell of disinfectant, covering up the stench of piss and vomit that haunts every institution, every sick-house.
I am in the house of corridors.
The doors are very strange, here; they open out into the corridors. Perhaps the architect had a room here, once.
His room is nearly at the end of the corridor. These rooms are below ground level; Jenova's death left a lot of photophobes. Most of them are here. The nurse lets me in without a word. I come here too often for her to need caution me; too often for her pat condolences.
I am grieving for a living man.
I could hear his whimpering three doors away: fitful, fearful, soft. He cries constantly; the doctors say his memory is completely gone, but I can see he remembers something. He remembers enough to cry; I just don't think he remembers why what little remains causes him pain.
If I could open his mind, what might I see? A jumble of memory, or bleached-out remnants like fragments of driftwood? A riot of old images, a carnival of faces, or the sudden flashbulb of abrupt recollection? Who knows?
He'll never tell me.
He used the gun she gave him, the one with wings on the barrel. Wings, so he couldn't put the muzzle into his mouth. The underside of his jaw is all scar tissue. Four pounds of lead shot does that to you.
He's curled up in the corner; he's always there. Perhaps it's his favourite corner. Perhaps he just remembers being there before. He doesn't see me, doesn't hear me; he just whimpers. Quiet, he is, quiet with fear. Most of his brain is gone; curse Jenova, her last gasp dragged him back into the land of the living and left him here like this. A day earlier ... perhaps he'd be sane. A day later, and I'd have buried him then.
He doesn't respond when I kneel beside him. He's fretting over something, picking at his clothes as if there're bugs on them.
Perhaps, for him, there are.
It isn't until I hold him, pull him close against me - then he remembers; whimpers dissolve into tears, and he's not the only one crying. I can stroke his hair, I can hold him to me, but no matter how much I promise I can't stop his pain.
Poor creature. Out of darkness and pain, into darkness and pain.
I tangle my hands in his hair and kiss his forehead, just below the scar-line where the surgeons stitched his scalp back on.
He's trying to talk now, and that hurts. The lead shot took his tongue out by the roots. Maybe he can't remember he needs a tongue to talk; maybe he's forgotten he ever had a tongue at all. His dumbness is a mercy, in a way: I don't have to hear the silence in his speech where my name should be; that, he forgot long ago. If he remembers me, I think, it's only as a returning embrace.
He keeps on making those little choking noises that're all he can get out; I don't know what he's trying to say. Then he breaks down and cries again.
I don't think he knew, either.
If I kissed him, would he remember me?
If I fucked him, would he know?
Memories are ripples on still water; once they die away, who is to know you were ever there to make them?
In this house of corridors, I am a dead man: forgotten, lost in a locked room.
If I could open his mind, would I find myself inside? Is he in there to find?
I don't know the answers, so I sit there and hold him, and he cries as I whisper false comforts he won't remember when I'm gone. Then I'll go home, and pray to God for happy endings.
I thought we'd had our happy ending. Evil was destroyed, world saved, all's well that ends well. This is what comes after. This is truth and consequences. There are no happy endings, just convenient places to stop; what comes after is damned to the rooms in the house of corridors, damned and forgotten.
Like him, like me: the damned, and the forgotten.
I love him so much his amnesia is my perdition.
There's nothing worse than the could-have-beens and maybes and ifs of what we nearly had, because they're perfect. There's no everyday irritation, no grit of real life in our almost-was future.
Every time I come here, I tell him how much I love him, because I do love him, still and always, and it tears out my heart that he doesn't remember the words that should have, could have, would have if only fate hadn't been so cruel, those words that come after 'I love you.'
'Cid, I love you too' - would it be so much worse if I'd heard him, just once, whisper those words back to me?
I wish I could forget. Forget the world, forget everything outside the house of corridors. Then we could stay together always, though we might not know each other, stay here in this corner, in this locked room, and cry even as we forget why we cry.
I'd give him my memory, I haven't much use for it. All I need to remember is that I love him. I could make do with that. That's all I need now, it's all I am; those four words, that burden my tongue night and day until the moment I can say them, say them and be heard, be understood; those four words that plague me as long as he can't remember what they mean.
"I love you, Vincent."
His tears have stopped, so strange. He's touching my face with the padding that binds his claw (they keep that arm bound; it frightens him to see it).
There's a shine in his eyes that wasn't there before, a shine of comprehension. Still, his cold fingers frame my face, my cheeks.
In the house of corridors, a locked room is being opened.
His lips tremble; he's trying to make words. Even as he marshals his dumb speech, premonition whispers 'He's healing'. Maybe God, maybe Aeris, maybe even Jenova, but some power has put a remission on misery.
Could it be ...
He makes words with his silent lips.
Could it be truly ...
Silent words; keys to memory.
... truly a happy ending?
"Cid, I love you too."
In the house of corridors, all the rooms fly open, and all the inmates dance and riot; they have not brought us a happy ending, for there is no such animal.
They have brought us a happy beginning.
Author's notes & addenda:
Allin Aspire pretty much got the double meaning: the "House of Corridors" is both the mental institution where Vincent is under care, and also a metaphor for Vincent's memory: the locked rooms are things forgotten, things lost in the mind, which is why Vincent is lost in a locked room (because he has forgotten himself) and why Cid is also 'lost in a locked room' - because Vincent has forgotten him.
I hate happy endings. Feedback excruciatingly welcome.
Homely: British usage;(of a place or its surroundings) simple but cosy and comfortable.