A/N: Quotes are by Frank Warren and Margaret Atwood. Also being cross-posted on AO3.
It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.
The transport airship makes an uncharacteristic noise as it lands, blasting dust and monster-bits into his jacket and hair. He's stiff yet inconspicuous in faded battle-worn clothes, standing next to a row of yet-snoring soldiers with loaded guns and sweat-streaked uniforms.
(It's just starting to dawn on him that he doesn't stand out from a line of professional killers.)
"Hope, we've been here five days. It's time to return home."
The voice is grave yet familiar.
Hope Estheim tilts his head, says nothing. His seafoam green eyes are dry and alert, surveying. A steady pulse throbs nervously under the yellow knot on his wrist, unused to the flawless unmarked skin above. There's an emptiness on his tongue that he can't put words to.
"You're not a l'Cie anymore, Hope," the father insists, reaching for his son and pulling him close upon encountering no resistance. The sun has risen just enough to throw the reflection from the crystal pillar into the young boy's eyes; said boy grimaces, then wonders wistfully at the structure, at the young women – friends, companions, partners – trapped eternally in their dreams. "Nothing will happen to you. I won't let anything happen to you."
Palumpolum burns. On his favorite childhood street, he has been hunted by a mob armed with vacuum cleaners and lamp posts, former teachers and neighbors screaming for l'Cie blood with shaking hands and twisted faces. His residence is in ruins, windows shattered, furniture torn through by bullet holes and family pictures scattered all over the floor. The words that tumble out of his mouth are surprisingly soft. "It's not me I'm worried about, Dad."
A chuckle reverberates through Bartholomew's frame. Both of them die a little inside at the utter wrongness of it. "Well, it should be."
He presses his head against his father's chest (is this for him or his father, he doesn't know, and a part of him knows it doesn't matter) and smiles, glancing at the scene around him with an urgent fondness. He won't lose everyone, he hopes – Snow and Serah would doubtlessly welcome him if he ever wants to visit, and Dajh seems to have genuinely entertained the idea of a big brother. I'll come back, he shouts silently in the general direction of the pillar, I'll come back for you. I'll come back with a drill or an ice-melter or some kind of new verdict from the gods and I'll free you. It'll happen before I grow another inch. One of you will have to buy me my first razor. I'll always –
"Come. We'll have to squeeze in at the back. We're not designated transport, here. It's this or another airship like this in another thirteen days."
Bartholomew is out before they completely lose sight of the soldiers' camp, and he presses his face to the airship window, not quite ready just yet to say goodbye; it's impossible to tell human shapes in the crystal even this high and up close, and he wonders why the gods had decided to take Light of all people. Perhaps they had asked. Perhaps they had to pick someone besides Vanille and Fang and Light had volunteered, put herself forward. What had she said, even at Palumpolum? Oh, yes –
Start running. I'll keep 'em busy. You survive.
He laughs mirthlessly into the window as the airship gradually pulls away from the pillar.
If only the gods and the Fal'Cie are ever that benevolent. There's no way that Light would ever voluntarily give up the chance to be with Serah again.
"I'll come back for you," a repeat, but now with a steely edge heated by tears turned into steam, "Count on it."
The first morning he wakes up on his own bed in Palumpolum, he wonders if everything has just been one terrible bad dream. The city, contrary to his expectations of death threats and hellfire, is actually quite the ghost town; many purged families have not yet returned (he shudders to think of those who cannot) and others have fled and not come back. He's wandered once from his house to the food distribution center without running into anyone, although he has a lingering suspicion that there had been eyes watching him from within the shadows, too afraid to approach or speak out.
(We did nearly bring down the entire planet, he thinks humorlessly to himself. I could have brought down the entire planet.)
The ground beneath him feels like it's rattling even when it's solid. He walks on his friends' lives and dreams.
"Were you the l'Cie child?" The red-haired woman at the center finally asks after a week, averting his gaze as she dumps bag after bag of nuts and grain on the table. The city is running low on filtered water. They are alone save for two guards standing right behind her. He has not bothered to camouflage himself – he deserves any wrath from the townspeople, he's decided, especially since he's grown too wary to be caught off guard by one seeking to kill him.
It's nearly impossible to appear sincere when he's tense and ready to bolt. Good habits from the times on Pulse. "I'm sorry."
She stares at the table for a long while before making the sign against evil. "Do some good once you grow up, won't you?"
The toxic air in the ruins of his house still hasn't completely dissipated and it'll be another ten years before anyone will come to fix it, so he takes to reading outside, slinging Fal'Cie water purification and energy grid maintenance over his shoulders and stuffing an improved model of his boomerang into his pants. His father tells him anxiously to stay within Felix Heights, warns him against vengeful townspeople and the possibility of getting stomped to death by a still-loose adamantortoise. He nods and doesn't listen. He needs to see the extent of the city's – of Cocoon's – destruction.
It occurs to him on that fateful slide in Rivera Towers that he can now throw the words he had used on Snow right back at himself, and he laughs before nearly breaking into tears, marveling at how much of a hypocrite he has been.
(How can you even apologize to an entire city, left alone an entire world?)
"Onii-san?"
He freezes.
"Onii-san, can you help me with these bags? They're too heavy for me."
He follows the voice and sees a little girl, perhaps nine or ten, trying to haul up two large bags of food up an incline slope. She's pale and wide-eyed and frightened, but she relaxes when he approaches and smiles innocently when he takes both of the bags. Her laughter as he awkwardly tries to balance the weight is music to his ears.
"You look silly, onii-san!"
His smile back at her is just a little forced. Please don't tell me that she's lost her parents, too. Although if she's getting this much food and out here alone, there's probably still hope somewhere. "If you don't… mind me asking, is someone sick or injured at home?"
Her face falls. She turns away, fiddling with her fingers. "My mom. She's broken her legs and they don't have the things they need to make a cast, so she's staying at home. She tells me not to come out and get the food, but she's got to eat, and –"
"Show me where you live. I might be able to do something." His fingertips are itching with phantom-power, urges to cast cura and bravery and haste, but he's lost his connection to the Fal'Cie and all that remains to him are images of bandages and concrete, a vague idea of human anatomy and an even vaguer idea of human sympathies. He wonders if the mother would throw him out of the house as soon as she sees him, catastrophe incarnate in a body just as young and fragile as her daughter's, and knows that even if she does, he'll still have to try.
And if I figure this out in a reasonable frame of mind, perhaps I can convince someone to make a good amount of them to supply to the whole city. Survivors shouldn't die because of human negligence. We are better than that. We will have to be.
He turns sixteen on a full moon and his father brings home more books, volumes on the Farseers and their Paddraean Archaeopolis. It's been more than a year since the fall of Cocoon and the world's still a shambles, with luxuries like birthday cakes only available to the most corrupt former members of the Sanctum. He knows he no longer cares about cakes. It's the absence of everyone he's wanted to invite here that stings.
(It's been months since he's last seen Dajh's little dance and Serah berating her students, and he's not sure he can go on for that much longer without hearing Snow's idiotic brand of optimism in person, not when he's been having nightmares of Titan and Orphan and there are things that you just can't tell your father.)
"Serah and Sazh both sent me apologies," his father notes, almost as if he's read his son's mind. Hope barely turns his scowl into a frown, suddenly remembering – and becoming upset by – the memory of him swearing that he'll free the girls in the pillar before he's grown another inch. "I hope these books will suffice as gifts, however. It has not been easy to acquire them."
"The black market, huh?" he jokes, flipping through the pages with much wonder. There's something about the serene azurite-haired seeress that makes him uneasy. "Thank you, Dad," he says more seriously, understanding now how providing for him has become (or has it always been?) Bartholomew's way to show affection. "It means a lot to me."
Bartholomew smiles wanly at him before reaching up to cup his cheek. "As it means a lot to me that you're still here with me."
"I'll be here as long as you are here, Dad."
"You don't have to be." His father settles into a chair with a sigh, but the glint in his grey eyes is more than frank and genuine. "If you miss your friends down on the surface –"
"I'll be here as long as you want me to be."
Bartholomew stops, stares. Hope feels some heat rise to his cheeks. The clock behind them ticks away, newly fixed. Nora gazes at them patiently through her picture frame next to the empty dishes.
"Hope," his father says, gentle and yearning and with just that trace of hopelessness that makes for a sudden sourness in his nose, "Hope, come sit with me."
He gets up, obeys. No more words are said. They are both so awkward with them. But he makes sure to sit where the dwindling street lights would shine through the yet-unfixed shattered windows to light up his moonglow hair, Nora's hair, and he feels Bartholomew hesitantly reach for it, trying to treasure what yet remains.
I am the proof that she existed, he recalls whispering once, cleaning out the family photo albums and having just a little bit of trouble to let the memories go, but Bartholomew had only smiled, faintly shaking his head:
You are the proof that you have fought and loved.
The Central Arcade had been designed to be warm and fluid, easy-going and fragrant, rounded curves of mosaic and earthy tiles painting a hymn of harmony and home; now it lies in ruins, scorched earth and tangled steel and screens that occasionally flicker into life only to broadcast distorted images of monochrome static, and it has been all but abandoned by the city even during its vigorous efforts at reconstruction. It's usually here that Hope finds himself ambushed, laughed at or threatened with anything from humiliation to murder, and after more than a year of endless apologies, too-wide smiles and quickened steps, he's grown just a little tired of it all.
The boys fall upon him like a pack of wolves with their fists and knives and he finds that button on his storage pack, opening his arms calmly as if to embrace the onslaught. The oldest of those boys are too close when the first shockwave hits: they're thrown back across the square nearly fifty feet through the air as if they have hit the recoil point of a trampoline, and then there are screams as the younger boys jolt in attempts to create distance, staring back at the silver-haired young man with pure terror as if he's just grown three heads.
(He's reminded of the Pulse machine on the Vile Peaks, the ease with which it broke through entire phalanxes and tossed entire rows of soldiers around as if they were toy bricks, and he's almost a little afraid of himself.)
"Magic!" The boys hiss, scrambling as he advances on them, arms still spread wide with nothing in his hands. "Accursed l'Cie!"
"That was not magic," he says coolly, looking down upon them with only the faintest hint of disdain (he will not let himself become that kind of person, he knows only too well where it could lead, he would die before he ever attempts to play God or Fal'Cie). "It's only a man-made shield mechanism, and you should use it, too. This is simple to construct and use, and you are not going to stand a chance against a real monster with that kind of knife."
He distributes extra copies of his inventions to the boys and good-naturedly explains how it all works, and by the end of the week they've all become his most ardent fans.
A turn of keys in the door. His father's voice, somehow more somber than it ever has been. He blinks.
"A decision has been made, Hope."
Hope looks up warily from the bowl of noodles he is making. In the background, the broadcast is still ongoing. Yaag Rosch has been reading emotionlessly about Bodhum for what feels like an hour and he feels like he's about to throw up. "I see certain things have been… revealed."
"That is one way to describe it." His father is shrugging out of his formal clothes, an emotionless contemplative look on his lined face. "How do you feel, Hope?"
"Me? I don't know. I don't really feel like anything has changed." He's starting to get a little worried. "Is everything okay, Dad?"
"Do you remember Rygdea? I have accepted a position in his provisional government."
"Dad –"
"But we can talk about that later. I want to talk about something else first." Bartholomew suddenly beams, truly beams, and Hope winces at his enthusiasm. "We are establishing an institution called the Academy."
"Let me also say something first? Please do take care of yourself. I'd hate to see anything happen to you."
After his first day at the Academy, he retraces the path from the dock to the tunnels and finally the Nutriculture Complex.
He has put on a hoodie before leaving; it's ironic, he thinks, how he didn't care for camouflage while he was hated, but now that everyone in town is queueing up to apologize to him and praise him for his deeds, he wants nothing but to run away. The path has miraculously survived all the previous year's bombing and carnage despite the continued decay in the unused pipes and infrastructure, and as he hops and jumps through memory lane, the boomerang in his hands seems to gain weight and drag.
I'm older, he grasps, crouching down to enter the tunnels, taller, and lonelier. The Academy uniform he's wearing is a size too big for him – he's not supposed to join it so early, he's had to show off more than he was comfortable with – yet in it he still looks grim and mature, almost like an adult. Soon I'll be the same age as Vanille. And then I'll catch up with Light. How many years would it take before we'll get the breakthrough we need?
Lightning's memories haunt him on this path, her shouted commands and promises to keep him safe. Here she has called off Operation Nora but just fell short on confiscating his knife. Here she has looked lost, confessing to have lost everything herself, then promised him that she'll still help him find the hope he was named for.
The Nutriculture Complex is empty; Carbuncle has departed, he's seen the Fal'Cie himself in Eden during the siege, and the food production center is on the other side of the city now, just over the hill. He will no longer be troubled by flanitor sirens here, just as he can no longer hold the hands of those he has lost; without divine or friendly human guidance, he must persist – alone.
We understand more than we know.
He paints the scene, the floating rotating platforms, the energy supply lines, and the pool of culturing media underneath it all. There will be labels; calculations, new points of analysis. He can already see particular tricks the Fal'Cie must have employed with humidity maintenance and waste disposal. He searches his mind now for another particular memory, that of Carbuncle's fluttering butterfly wings, its calculated and precise revolutions.
(If a Fal'Cie can bear all those years of solitary confinement just for a prayer to be reunited with its Maker, he can wade through this ocean of the unknown to create a better world for his friends.)
It's not a matter of can or can't. Some things you just do.
A final memory, one that makes him smile:
(We can make it. Get to the station, and board the train for Eden.
You think it's still running?
Well, if it isn't, we'll make it run.)