Disclaimer: Final Fantasy XIII does not belong to me. Title is by Auden.
AN: A drabble as I dip back into the fandom, for Aloice, who reminded me how much I love this series.
( a lane to the land of the dead. )
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In a temple of marble he stands like a stone, both guardian and prisoner to what lives inside. To his side there is a girl-crone whose eyes judge him and every movement he makes, and when she speaks it is only to say:
(With the voices of hundreds)
"There is nothing but destruction down this path, Hope Estheim."
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These are the things that Hope Estheim does not think about:
His team of excavators from the Academy: now dead. Sazh and his sudden disappearance with his son: likely dead. Snow and the way he has been lately drinking himself into a stupor: currently dying.
Noel - well, if Hope is being honest with himself, Noel was dying the moment his Yeul went and the final nail was shuttered into his coffin the second Serah fell in his arms.
I wonder, Hope Estheim stares at the statue, where does that leave me?
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Where it leaves him, is as the lone man standing in the face of a halted world slowly running out of time (hah). It is no wonder then that his salvation, his sanity check, comes in the form of a woman long dead just like the rest of the people around him. His family? Dead. His friends? Crystal, missing, presumed dead, or dying.
He is no leader, no beacon of hope for the populace. He is no survivor or inventor or genius. He is a corpse who does not yet know he is one, rotting inside quietly and methodically with the same precision he employs to build the new world. A false hope, a star to gaze upon and make a wish on when it inevitably falls and streaks with fire across the sky.
He wonder if he knows this, in the same abstract way he watches Lightning's smile approach ever closer. He wonders if he knows a lot of things, abstractly, because lately it has been so difficult to think.
He wonders if this is what dying feels like, after centuries of being made to live.
He wonders if there is a Heaven for people like him, who play God like children play with building blocks only to send them all tumbling down.
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Her scent is rose-sweet and thunder-fresh. Her skin burns like the dying stars outside their atmosphere.
Hope Estheim dies, and then he lives, and something else entirely comes out of the equation.
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"Welcome back, Light," Hope Estheim greets the statue pulling her lips into a pretty frown, and Hope Estheim in his chains and God-bound coffin plots.
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