Disclaimer: Fatally not mine.
A/N: Written while watching Aerith's death scene and wondering what it would look like in the newer animation style of the FF games. Reviews appreciated please!
Final Moments
© Scribbler, June 2009.
'Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.' -- Dorothy Thompson.
You can live for a few seconds after you've been run through. Your internal organs take a few moments to catch up with events, like when you aren't really paying attention to a conversation and suddenly realise the person you're talking to said something inappropriate. Your heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, all the revolting things that go into the basic process of keeping you alive, do a double-take when the alien metal of a sword swooshes by like a car beeping its horn as it blows past you. Not many people know this fact, and those who do aren't talking.
They can't tell you about the burning that suddenly gives way to numbness, where you can't tell whether it's actually stopped hurting or you've just stopped feeling it so much. They can't tell you how those few scant seconds feel like hours, or about how your head is suddenly so full it doesn't need your body to anchor it anymore.
If they could, they might tell you about the flashes of panic, bitter-bright and coming from somewhere deep inside you – deeper than you've ever gone before, even in your dreams, even in your nightmares. They might tell you of the floating sensation that starts in your centre, as if the sword is actually a hypodermic, which has injected a drug that radiates outward, taking you with it. They might tell you how the panicky flashes refuse to ease off; how, even when you're right in the middle of it, can feel each cell peeling away from the whole, you're still scared of dying.
One person in particular might tell you about how touching the core of the planet itself doesn't prepare you for the things inside yourself, which open up in that moment, that precise millisecond when you realise that this is it. This is really it. After all those times you thought it might, could, perhaps would. All those times you hid from dark suits and sunglasses, ran down alleyways and ducked behind market stalls so they wouldn't see you. This time it really did. You really are going to die this time.
You fought and bled and loved and cried and didn't do a million things but did do a million others. You watched the sky and waited and wished and dreamed. You despaired and lost heart, lost hope, gave up hope, then got it back again unexpectedly. You built and tended and grew and cared for things you never thought would outlive you, and you yearned and craved and remembered and longed for things you never thought you'd outlive. A lifetime of moments gang up on you like water rushing down a plughole, when you've got a sword in your belly. In the time it takes for you to drop your arms and topple forward they've swamped all but a little gap in your mind.
That space, that last tiny scrap, is reserved for the fear. Nobody wants to die. Even those who know what comes after are scared of saying goodbye to what they know. It's a throbbing, paralysing, aching thing, the fear – a last freckle of pain that rises out of the cracks in your personality like water evaporating in the heat. That last piece of you tries to claw its way back even as the rest is swept away into a river so green it can only be the colour of the very first plant that ever grew.
And it's that tiny scrap that calls out, begs for help … and is answered.
When you've been run through with a sword, and the person who did it is standing so close you can hear him grunt when he pulls it free, you don't expect someone else to be right there as well, wrapping you in his arms from behind and murmuring into your ear in a painfully familiar gesture.
"I'm here. Shh, shh, it's not okay, it's not, I know that. But it will be."
"You're here."
"Well, yeah. Where else did you expect me to be?"
"I'm scared."
"I know."
"I don't want to …"
"I know that too. I didn't either. But you've got to. You know that. You know that more than anyone."
And you realise with the clarity of your eyes closing for the last time, that you do know that. And that last, horrible, frightened little piece of you finally lets go, even as the sword slides out, splattering your own blood on the floor and down the back of your dress. Someone more solid catches the part of you that used to matter so much but really, really doesn't anymore, but somehow even as you watch him you're still being held by that first pair of arms.
"I've got you."
"I know. I'm ready now."
"That's my girl."
You watch the grief start. You see the guilt dripping off the curve of nose and cheeks, mixing with your blood. You feel a different kind of ache.
"But not for goodbye. Not yet."
"Yeah. Me neither."
And just like that, your final moments are over, and you're gone in all the ways that count except one.
Fin.