Disclaimer: All belongs to Square Enix.

Author's Note: The original version of this was written way back when FF13 just came out – it's been sitting in a notebook of mine for years, and I just recently typed it up and edited it. Please review! And excuse my horribly uncreative title.

of Little Boys

.

Surprise is what she initially feels when she turns at the sound of footsteps and sees the kid – barely even a teenager – standing there. Her irritation hits her full force in the form of a headache and she tries not to let her frustration show; she wanted them all to come to their senses and come after her, but she does what she has grown so used to doing and shrugs it off. They'll catch up to her sooner or later.

(All too late, probably – they don't seem to realize the gravity of the situation, the weight that comes with being Public Enemy Number One. They have to keep running, never stopping, because the military is always one step ahead, one way or another—)

The kid is still looking up at her. Hope, she remembers. She almost scoffs at the name. His entire posture screams of his desire for her approval – he barely comes up to her shoulders, the skin on his legs not covered by the cargo pants he's wearing rubbed raw from all the climbing they have been doing. He's still a kid. A liability.

(His eyes, for a moment, look like Serah's, pleading—)

Lightning sets her jaw and turns away. "Fine."

"Snow has to pay," she catches him say to her back at some point as they walk. She wonders if he thinks this is the right thing to say to her, in this heavy silence that has fallen between them (what does a twenty one year old soldier and a scared little boy have to talk about, anyhow?) and decides – perhaps he is nothing like her little sister used to be. No matter the amount of times Serah looked up at her with eyes similar to his, or the way she can feel him watching her, slightly in awe, a sense of dependence around him that makes her cringe. Serah's eyes never held awe, specifically, because her little sister might be (have been, she forces the correction) naïve but never stupid when it came to the feelings of her older sibling; the dependence, however, is something that Lightning is used to. It sets her on edge.

Between the dispatching of fiends and the occasional soldiers (she doesn't let him get too close to them, making sure the killing blows are hers, the blood left behind is on her weapon, her clothes and her hands – he, even in this morbid twist of events, remains a civilian), Hope talks to her. She lets him, realizing that he needs to talk to somebody. She almost opens her mouth once to reassure him (or maybe shut him up, Lightning is not entirely sure), but realizes that she doesn't even know where to begin. She ends up saying nothing at all. Hours of travelling pass by in this uncomfortable silence, broken occasionally by a comment from him or a warning from her, before she notices him beginning to fall out of breath. He begins to stagger in her wake, attempting to keep up with the brisk pace she has set.

She doesn't bother masking her sigh. "Take five," she orders, internally grouching at the burden she has brought along. "I'll go scout." She considers leaving him, then, for a brief moment – her desire to reach Eden weighs down on her, along with the fact that this possibly orphaned boy is now relying on her. She tries to imagine what he would do if hours passed and she didn't come back; if she could be so cruel.

(But she was to Serah, wasn't she, when all Serah was trying to do was find comfort in her sister—)

When she comes back he's soundly sleeping against a jutting rock, his neck craned at an odd angle. She settles down against more rocks opposite of him and just watches, realizing how exhausted he must really be; her eyes examine the evidence of their battles on his body, the troubled look on his face even as he sleeps. She startles when he murmurs in his sleep for his mother, a broken question for a woman now dead. A scowl settles on her lips.

"Not by a longshot," she replies.

Watching him, however, brings up a memory she has long tried to forget – Serah crying for their mother in her dreams as she slept on her bed, curled into a tight ball on top of the covers. Back when Lightning was someone else, she had gone over and held the shaking body of her little sister until the sobs eased up. Presently, she wonders if anyone – perhaps that red-haired girl, Vanille? – was there to offer a similar comfort for this little boy.

He reminded her of Serah, standing there like that, and she knows that this is the only reason she hasn't abandoned him yet – the guilt of her actions had interfered with her rationale. This has to stop, she decides eventually, slowly being driven mad by her companion's inability to keep up with her – Eden is her only focus now, and the subsequent elimination of the fal'Cie residing there and she won't be held up by someone who is preventing her from doing so—

The Eidolon appears then (she hears the title whispered in her head, a passing by voice as light as the wind) and charges the shocked boy beside her. As she falls to defending him, fighting against this strange divine creature whose eyes seem to judge her, she wonders just when she hit her head so hard for all of this to happen. Later she learns of its name, and of Odin's purpose: Eidolons come when they are most needed – and she won't admit it even to herself, but she needed Odin back then, on the brink of desperation and losing hope – in both senses of the word.

In the present, Lightning wonders if the appearance of the strange creature is some sort of sign for her to let the kid stick around – she, however, doesn't believe in signs or in luck. But then again, she hadn't believed Serah telling her she was a l'Cie and – well – look what happened there.

Eventually, she gives Hope the knife Serah left for her as a birthday present ("I'll want it back," she says without looking at him) and they continue on. She lets him take the lead this time, and aimlessly begins to keep track of wandering numbers in her head – the hours since her resignation, and the days until the date Serah planned to get married, and then how long it's been since they left Snow. She, irrationally, wants to know when he'll finally get it through his thick skull that Serah isn't coming back.

Her gaze drifts to the back of Hope's silver head, the tenseness in his shoulders betraying his alertness for possible danger.

The hate that he holds for Snow – from what she has seen so far, at least, but considers enough – makes her think of the days she spent in the Guardian Corps, training with her weapon in hand. She thinks that fourteen is too young to be feeling the way he is now, but she understands revenge (and the unfairness of life, that bitter feeling threatening to overtake the lungs and the heart) so she lets it go and instead watches his feelings fester under his skin, growing stronger with each passing moment. She feels somewhat sick at this, but a voice tells her: "It's not any of your business." She wants to shout back at it that is – she doesn't hate Snow the way the boy in front of her does, she merely detests him for taking her little sister away from the safety of her life and introducing someone so innocent to NORA. The military keeps track of every little resistance group that rises up, doesn't he know that, and Serah was safe with her, not him – not him.

Now Hope's mother is dead because of said resistance group and she knows a familiar sort of hate, lets herself remember it briefly (Snow is just like their father was, never reliable and if he hadn't died then maybe—) and then grimaces as they continue on further down the Gapra Whitewood. All of a sudden, the boy ahead of her no longer makes her think of Serah's innocence and Serah's pain – rather, she sees an image of her younger self when she looks at him. It makes her heart ache for him, slightly, and then when he looks up at her with those admiring eyes, speaking of Operation Nora, she feels the beginnings of guilt gathering in her chest – she doesn't feel flattered, not at all. She just begins to feel tired.

She has never been a good role model for anyone – not for Serah, and now, certainly, not for Hope. She ruthlessly twists her gunblade in a soldier's torso and then withdraws it, shaking off the remains of blood and guts that come attached to it. "A target's a target," she murmurs to herself as a ways of snapping out of the thoughts leading her down a path she doesn't want to follow, and is acutely aware of the boy watching her every move.

She begins to wish that she had left him with Vanille.