Spoilers for the end of the game.


The Difference

"I want to trust you," she mumbles, voice muffled by your heavy overcoat. Only her bright blonde hair is visible, face hidden as it is by how she's positioned in front of you—the moonlight reflects off of it oddly, casting a silver halo around her head. She is young and she is innocent and she is naïve. "Why do you make it so hard?"

She is fragile, you tell yourself. Not in the way that colored glass or spun sugar is, but fragile all the same. Like a thousand-year-old machina, maybe. Like a fire gem, warm and with bright, flickering light.

She is fifteen. That is harder to remember, with the way she dresses and the way she acts. All long, flailing limbs and slim, toned muscles. Her clothes are too small and too brightly colored; body petite and fingers twitching with the urge to plunge into pockets and take.

She is a thief. She is a heretic. If Bevelle has its way, she will burn alive; they've already tried to shoot her, already tried to drown her, already set two dragons loose on her—after her heathen blood.

You are a monk. You are a soldier. You don't believe in Yevon anymore—don't believe the church's lies—but there is no denying what you are.

You are twenty years her elder. You are old enough to be her father.

You are dead.

Long dead. If you'd had a corpse it would have been decomposed by now—only bones left strewn across another, larger skeleton fashioned from rusted metal, deteriorated machina and a city that is as dead as you are—a hundred times over.

She is young and innocent and naïve and fragile and alive.

You cannot love her.

You hope she understands.