Life at the orphanage was as quaint as it could get. Perhaps it wasn't how a conventional teenager spent his days – more fitting of an old man, perhaps… but there were days where he felt like he had lived three lifetimes too many.
On those days, he would sit by the sea at their small round table, teacup and saucer at his side, and stare out into the vast expanse. From their little cove, the ocean was a vision of endless possibility. If it were him a year ago seeing this, he probably would have marveled, dreaming of the future; nowadays, he saw only flashes of beams reflected in the waves, heard the sound of explosions. The sweat he used to generate on recall only stopped six months after settling in, but for the most part his recollections had become only that, and not a clinging ghost.
At least, he only let on as much.
Sometimes, he would catch sight of Lacus looking over at him, with something like concern in her eyes. She would know, of course. She knew him all too well, perhaps even better than he knew himself… but it was her kindness that she said nothing out loud. Her eyes said it all.
I know about the nightmares that still wake you in the middle of the night.
He would wonder if the others had such dreams, though he dared not ask. Most of his companions had been trained soldiers; to have dealt with that would only be a given, wouldn't it? And it was not really a conversation topic any of them wanted dredged up. They all lived with enough reminders of the war, and they needed to move on. It seemed like everyone was. And he was trying, too, but he still found himself having fitful rest on some nights. When he would wake up, drenched in his own sweat, he would scramble frantically in an attempt to find somebody, anybody to prove that he was alive –
– and then Lacus would open the door to his bedroom, wordlessly walk to his bed and cradle his head in her arms as he began to cry. Because even if he hadn't so much as touched a gun in so long, the war still hadn't become a memory of the past.
A/N: It's only been at least seven years since I've written anything for GS (which I have since removed from this site) and looking back I realize I never wrote any canon... but with significant changes in my writing style and running through a marathon of the HD remaster, I decided to take a whack at writing again.
Based on a quotation from the video game Tales of the Abyss.