The following is a work of fanfiction. The character(s) and worlds depicted within it are not in any way mine: Final Fantasy is the property of Squaresoft, as far as I'm aware. The song this is named for and takes inspiration from is also not mine, but Hefner's (it's called "The Hymn For Berlin"), and the lyrics I have generally refrained from quoting are by Darren Hayman.
This is also a work of yuri, or femslash: it contains a girl with a girl in a previous romantic/sexual relationships, although it is also rather inexplicit. If the very idea does not appeal to you, or you are underage, it might be wiser not to read it: the back button is your friend. Just a suggestion, you understand.
The Hymn For Deling
Deling looks as well as it ever did, covered in soft grime sputtered out by the endless buses. It comes off when I run a finger along the mortar on the outside of buildings, and I can paint it along the bare skin of my arms. Last time, when you were with me, I would have thumbed a smudge on your nose and broken away from your arm, running with you after me. Giggling through the streets of Deling, we would never have noticed how the buildings curved above us and broke the light that hit the street into wedges of sudden warmth. You should be here, now, should come and see how the city stretches its way into summer.
Sometimes girls on the street look like you, a flick of their hair or the sunlight flashing across their glasses as they lean into shop windows. Then they straighten, and their faces are plain or their roots are dark brown and I shift and look back down to my newspaper. The east side of town, knocked into rubble by a mispiloted Galbadia Garden, is being rebuilt: there are pictures of the plans for a new set of apartments, a new hotel, new business complexes and the by-lines blare the economic renewal of a new Galbadia, or some such thing. Someone once said that the Galbadians never learn, that there will always be a clamouring to revive the old empire. Good for the SeeD, I suppose: there will always be a panicked Dollet paying us to keep their precious state safe from Deling soldiers.
Cid told me to take a holiday, and here I am still fretting over who will employ us now the latest Sorceress war is over. Just like me, I suppose: I always wanted to be a SeeD, am a Seed, could never be anything but a SeeD. You would laugh to know that where I am sitting is the most tactically secure of all the seats in this cafe, that the boy slouching against the far wall has the perfect build to use nunchaku, that the meal I am ignoring has approximately thirty percent of the protein needed for optimum nutritional value, that I know these things without thinking, information that surfaces as if I will always need it. I have made a SeeD out of myself and can never be anything else: it is hard to remember a time when I was not.
When we were last here, were we SeeD then? You had just graduated, beaming at the very sight of your uniform and unwilling to leave it behind, and I had to sneak it out of your bag in the morning. You caught me, of course, but all the same we boarded the ship to Dollet without it, and by the time the train was pulling in at Deling station we could have been any teenagers come up to see the city in winter.
You slotted right into place among those golden Galbadian girls, sparkling like the snow fallen thick on the pavements. Pounding it under my feet I felt short and dark and foreign, even more so when some tottering Esthari grandmother clutched at my hand and mumbled a dialect I barely know any more, expecting me to understand. She was old but the old country would not take her back - to her the closed borders were a personal rebuke - and now she would die in this cold and alien place and she had lost her son and I must help her get not home but to whichever quarter the exiles lived in. Her hands felt like rough silk stretched on a wire frame, almost no life left beating in them, and she blessed me like a saviour and asked me which region I came from. The syllables were thick on my slow tongue and it took an effort not to say "Balamb".
That night I clung to you - I must have bruised imprints into your shoulder of my clumsy fingers - and you stared worried at me. I thought I should lose you to this shining nation which spread its arms wide and smiled, that I had to drown out the calls of your motherland with my own. What claim did I have on you that she could not better?
You said love is not claiming, or at least you looked it at me in the curve of an eyebrow and the warm pressure of your hand on my back suddenly, and behind the door of our room you smiled into my mouth and shut the gilt out of your sight.
Galbadian girls wear their thick winter coats open to show the short skirts beneath, shimmer into thin tights to hide the goosepimpling of their thighs, pull long boots up to their calves and tread surely on the black ice. You muttered about the cold and pulled a pair of trousers out of your bag, stole one of my jumpers because mine, you said, were warmer, slipped sideways and knocked me down, laughing as you helped me up. In cafes, steam rose around your face and made the ends of your hair curl forward, and every time you brushed them back they fell down again until you huffed into your tea that you were never cutting it this short again. The waitress brought warmed cakes for us, and you frowned slightly at me when I watched her hips swerve away, blushed when I grinned at you and never quite managed to kick my leg under the table.
You would approve of the waitress here: she sniffs at my accent when she takes my order and sneers at me as much as she can without risking a loss of tip. Amazing, really, to find a waitress like her left, when every other Galbadian smiles and beams and scrapes and almost reaches out to touch the goldmine of my skin-colour and my alien attitudes. I am a wonder, to them, in a world where few want to visit Deling anymore, where the reparations of having made war on everyone else are slowly being paid in lack of tourist revenue. This winter, this Hynelight, the streets will be noticeably empty, lacking the hundreds of boys and girls who signed up for the glory of the Greater Galbadia and of the sorceress and never came home, lacking the foreigners and their easy smiles and ready money.
We were them, once, no matter that we were SeeD and therefore as much at home as foreign everywhere: we were the teenagers who wanted to see a proper Hynelight and knew exactly where to go and what to save up for. Hynelight is never real in Balamb, after all, just a festival like any other. There, it is no more than an excuse for fake snow sprayed in the windows of the weapon shops and fireworks shooting up from ships in the harbour, for huge meals in restaurants, for a Winter Ball we have to find partners and get our uniforms cleaned for, for the prices of toys pushed up to more gil than they could ever have been worth. They blend into one another after a while, the Balamb Hynelights, forgettable even without the help of the GF.
Deling knows how to celebrate Hynelight better than anywhere else. Deling makes Hynelight an industry. Somewhere on the outskirts, maybe toward the mountains, alongside belching smokestacks of oil and coal and steel factories, perfect Hynelights are produced and roll out in train cars to the city.
We checked in at the Galbadia Hotel when we arrived - only the best for us and our saved-up cadet and SeeD allowances from the past year - and the receptionist looked down at our reservation number and sighed. He was sorry - so very sorry, ladies, I don't know how to tell you this - but, even though we booked early, there were no rooms with twin beds available, and would we mind taking a room with a double bed instead? There would be an appropriate cut of the charges, of course, maybe a free meal in the restaurant, and I could not look at you but felt the air quiver between us as you tried not to laugh. I supposed that would have to do, and he smiled another apology and shook the fair hair from his forehead.
You bounced on the bed, slightly, and I knew that was as much excitement as you were going to let show and went back to unpacking.
The insides of our bags were identical to one another, SeeD handbook on the left and weapon concealed on the right, with clothes neatly folded in the middle. I must have learnt to pack according to protocol when I was very young, because all I can remember is teaching others how to do it, first you and then, in my brief tenure as Instructor, a troupe of earnest young mini-cadets who were nothing like you.
Perhaps I never taught you, perhaps we barely knew each other then, but I have this image of the concentration on your face as you painstakingly shook out a shirt and tried again, calculating the angle along which the sleeve should lie with a wrinkle of your forehead, smoothing the wrinkle and the fold and smiling up at me with satisfaction. And I - I would have been ten, then, or eleven, self-important and severe but warming to the look on your face - I applauded you, perhaps took your hand in mine to go fetch a reward for your hard work from the woman in the cafeteria who always calls the cadets "little darlings". When we got back to the room, I must have made you do it again, though. After all, you have to repeat these things over to get them right.
I have repeated you over and over, trying to get you right. The angle of lamplight between your arm and your side as you rested your hand in my hair, the roll of your vertebrae beneath my mouth as you arched your back with the tiniest of sighs, your lip plush from unconscious biting. The pattern of your breaths, slow and measured when awake and slightly syncopated in sleep, and your feet poking out from the covers in the cold morning and tangled between my legs for warmth when you woke up.
I think I may still have you wrong.
In the days we went sight-seeing, wrapped up and tilting our heads to the occasional sun. We sat on park benches and overheard the speakers from their crowd-surrounded wooden crates, breathing into our scarves and raising amused eyes at each cheer. They are so innocent, we thought, world-weary already from endless lessons on the history of wars and which political situations we might find ourselves taking part in, and we are so wise. Earnest young men in crisply ironed shirts sprayed spittle-flecked slogans at one another across tables, hot with pride in their homeland. They thought their words might move mountains, might make nations into states and themselves into heroes, and I thought about filing a report and handing it in to Cid. Deling's Galbadia is no threat, I would have said, nothing but theories and hollow ideals in the minds and mouths of the powerless, but you sneaked a gloved hand over your smiling mouth and I put my pen away.
A good thing I did: you know as well as I do how much I hate to admit to my mistakes.
I would always admit to you, if you let me.
Deling City is a wounded young soldier, clutching his crutches and favouring his injured leg, his uniform just crisp enough to delight the pretty girls who flock about him like golden-haired starlings. Deling City tells war stories, not even half the truth, in which he is the hero of the hour, the ever-wronged genius, the glory of his general. No matter that the war was maybe a bad one, says Deling, when I was in it it became a wonder. Whatever it was I was fighting for, I fought for it well. This is what matters.
Deling City could almost be a SeeD: maybe not me, and maybe not you, but maybe one of the children we grew up with and fought alongside, and smiled at in the corridors. Deling City knew about us, however hard we tried to hide, and probably envied me back then as much as I do now. None of his pretty girls are half as pretty as you, and when his stories start to repeat themselves and his uniform to get shabby they will fall away from him as surely as you did from me.
Even the city could not miss you as much as I do, but he still does, a hole in the summer where you should be, and I have never stopped. You should come back and see him lie lazy and recuperating under the summer, bring much-needed tourist revenue to his clean and hopeful hotels. The train journey is not long, and you know how to pack your bags.
I will be here until next month.
intellectual property of harpy_elian, january 2003