Forgive or Forget

Summary: Sephiroth has been slain and Vincent realizes that he no longer has a purpose, and that there is only one path for he who can neither forgive, nor forget.

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You can forgive, or you can forget, but both cannot coindcide, nor will they ever. That, if nothing else, was what I had learned as he fell before my eyes. His form perfection, all muscled power and catlike grace. Liquid silver hair and tantalizing green eyes beconing me forward, and yet move I did not. I watched him flow backward, I waited as he fell rom the heavens back unto the earth, I aided in his demise.

Held motionless, I did nothing, I condoned his death.

Lucretia forgive me. My sins have been atoned for, but I regret that I could not save him in the way that we had both hoped...Oh how I do regret it. And they'll never know what was shared..The love of our very essences, gone before our very eyes. The child and the man. Beloved son and cherished lover strung forth into early enternity...

...I miss him...

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I travel now amongst the hollowed out world left in his wake. A mansion once full of memories both hateful and beloved, now naught but a place of pain. Torture both physical and emotional, a place of rest, a place of restlessness...more so the latter now than ever it was the former.

I enter without a knock, my footsteps echoing off the walls, resounding throughout halls and corridors, through room after room, each cursing me with its last breath, just as his eyes did.

Green, shimmering, hateful, loving ..those eyes shall likely haunt me into death itself.

I push them aside and continue on, up the steps, down the hall, into a room. I remember not the path in mind, yet my feet seem to remember it well enough, the path of many a man's demise, of his initial and now my final.

I continue onward, into a passageway, down spiraling stairs, a hand to the wall, touching, feeling, guiding...

I pause and my eyes slip shut, touching, feeling, guiding... I move my hand and for a moment it is not stone upon which it moves, but skin. Silky skin, warm with the vitality of life's blood. For but a moment he stands there beside me, surges forward, pressing me against the wall, and there is a cold stone against my back, and a fiery heat against my front.

"Why do you bother with these games Vincent? We both know where they will end?" He coos, and his words send through me a shock of realization.

My eyes snap open and meet the darkness...the nothingness, and the illusion is forever lost... I continue downward.

This downward spiral... it is hard to imagine something quite as fitting, for my own began the first time I was brought down this very passage, locked in the room which I now pass, moving on to one which before I dared not enter, a study which he often frequented..a place of forbidden meanings.

The door groans as I nudge it open and I half expect a wry look of amusement to meet my gaze as I cast it about, looking for any signs of him that might still be linging to this world, but like him, they are gone.

I smile, perhaps it is for the best, but I cannot put such things aside just yet, for that is not the reason for which I have come...I could never forget him.

I move forward once more, letting a hand slip casually into my pocket as I stroll through the narrow pathway of books toward a desk and glance down at the one left open upon it. X day, X month, X year--I slam it shut.

You cannot both forgive and forget.

I withdraw a small orb from my pocket and for a moment simply watch it glow ever so faintly, increasing in its brightness until it gleams, nearly blinding me in the subsequent darkness.

It is time.

Eyes close, crimson to crimson, and I call forth fire and chaos, I burn the world around me in one swift move, and take with it myself.

Forgive or forget? The others have done either one or both...

...but I can do neither.