Disclaimer: Final Fantasy XIII does not belong to me. Song is Bloom by Paper Kites.
AN: A drabble, mostly, written while I feeling melancholy myself.
when the evening pulls the sun down
(when the evening pulls the sun down
and the day is almost through
oh, the whole world it is sleeping
but my world is you.)
.
.
It starts with a library card that he finds lying on the ground, half hidden beneath a bookshelf detailing creation myths. The name on it – Claire Farron – feels vaguely familiar and he chalks it up to having seen the owner numerous times prior at the front desk. The card itself looks worn but cared for, in the sort of state that frequent visitors to the library tend to leave their cards in. He tucks it away into his wallet and decides to leave it at the front desk's lost and found on his way out the door.
The thought slips his mind and it is only when he is reaching for a twenty at the coffee shop across the street on his way home that he sees it again – Claire Farron. It sends an odd tingle down his spine. The barista keying his order in clears her throat and he realizes that he's been staring at the card for several seconds.
"Sorry, Serah," he says and finally gives her the twenty. The pink haired girl sends him a sympathetic look.
"Long day at work?" She asks as her till spits out change. He smiles back at her as she hands it to him.
"Isn't it always?" She grins in agreement, bright eyed and cheery; his coffee and sandwich get delivered to his table moments later, and he takes a bite out of the ham and swiss before realizing something.
"Your last name is Farron, right?" The nametag on her uniform reads Serah F. – he doesn't remember if she's ever told him her last name, but it must have come up somewhere in conversation. He is a frequent visitor to NORA Coffee House.
If she is surprised, she doesn't show it. "Yeah, Hope. Why?"
That's why Claire Farron seems so familiar, he decides as he digs out the lost library card. "Do you have a sister? I found this lost at work today…" The girl examines it for a second before nodding.
"Yeah, looks like Claire's… I know she goes to the library a lot." There's a rush at the front counter and her boss calls her away before she can say anything else, leaving the card in his hands. Hope fingers at the worn edges, tracing one fingertip around the name. Claire Farron.
"Stop by before closing tomorrow night," Serah manages to call out to him inbetween making frappes. "She'll be picking me up and you can give it to her then."
Hope gives his agreement, and returns to his meal. The night feels long; he looks outside the window, at the traffic passing by. Claire Farron, he thinks.
The world feels empty tonight. He feels as if he is forgetting something.
.
.
The evening stretches on, as if the hours themselves are being extended until tomorrow's dawn. Hope manages to do the dishes, straighten out the living room and vacuum his entire apartment before the clock turns an acceptable time for bed. The feeling of forgetfulness lingers at the back of his mind, carrying over into his dreams; blurs race by, and when he wakes he doesn't remember what the dreams contained. Just that there was him, and a woman, and she had a sword tearing through his torso that turned into her hands cradling a strange knife. She had given it to him with a smile.
His body aches with phantom pain as he goes about his morning routine, as if the sword in her hands had really pierced his insides. He catches himself ghosting his hands over the spot where it made contact with his skin, almost expecting them to come away with blood.
So lost in his melancholy mood that he walks straight into someone as they are leaving the library. Their shoulders collide and he reels back, reaching out to steady to the other person only to meet thin air – he looks up, and the woman he had hit stares back at him. The wince of pain her face had adopted is fading away, and he notices the blue of her eyes and the sharp contours of her face.
His torso throbs with a wound that was never there.
"Sorry," he says, after the startled silence has passed into awkwardness. His throat feels dry.
The stranger shakes her head at him, her pink ponytail swishing behind her with the motion. "Don't worry about it," she mutters and averts her eyes to the ground. Another second of silence before she walks past him and he finally starts moving again, putting the incident behind him.
Work is also a blur – the past twenty four hours have all felt like a blur, really. He goes through his day as if in a dream, and during lunch break staring at the clouds outside the thought passes – perhaps all of life is a dream. He can't remember anything well except the present, his childhood a plethora of colours and sounds. His parents live in a suburban neighborhood two hours away and there is a diploma hanging on the wall of his bedroom but he wonders, where did those memories go?
Hope shakes it off. He's been reading too much into the philosophy section lately. Of course his life is not a dream.
But he is forgetting something. It burrows at the back of his mind, waiting, just out of reach.
.
.
Serah waves to him when he enters NORA Coffee House, two hours before it is set to close. "The usual?" She asks him with a smile – bright eyed and cheery, the usual – and delivers it to his table by the front – also the usual. He works his way through a book on molecular science while he waits, sipping at his coffee occasionally. Time passes slowly, and there is a thrum in his bones that has settled in. It is waiting for something that he does not know, is only left to spectate on.
The bell above the front door chimes. "Light!" Comes Serah's happy call from behind the counter where she is wiping it down and Hope looks up – the woman from the library stands at the threshold, hands burrowed in the pockets of her jacket. "That's Claire," Serah leans over to explain to Hope. "Except nobody really calls her that. She prefers Light."
The woman's eyes follow what caught the attention of her sister, and meet his.
There is a hurt in his body, an ache he realizes had never left; suddenly she is the woman in his dream, staring up at him with anguish in her eyes as she buries her sword in deeper. He remembers – he thinks he remembers – his great sigh of relief.
He hadn't realized that he had stood up until she is right before him. "Lightning," the name slips out; not Light, not Claire, and he thinks she must have had the same dream, because she looks as winded as he feels.
"…Hope," she tries the name out, her brows furrowed in confusion. He doesn't know if Serah had told her his name, or how she knows it. Their fingers brush together when he wordlessly hands her the library card. A spark, a vision of the universe and crystals and thousands of bright lights around them, pulsing.
He remembers her, this woman with the pink hair who looks so wrong without a weapon at her side. He feels young and centuries old at the same time. He knows her and she knows him – he can see it in her face.
"Hope Estheim," he tries introducing himself properly, holding out a hand for her to shake. She grasps it, her hand small in the grip of his. Her skin is soft, not calloused.
"Lightning Farron," she tells him. Her name feels like a promise, like waking up from a long dream and breathing in the air of the world.