Herro, welcome to my first fan fiction in the FFVII world. Just as a slight warning, this series is an on-going daydream I used to toy with when I was having trouble; I never really intended the fan fiction world to see it. HOWEVER, I do love reviews. Please leave one if you read.
I thought I was pretty good with the impossible, pretty open. Pretty open with people in general. People would ask, I would tell. I had a few of my fears, but I tried to get above them, telling myself, "Eh, it will pass". And sometimes it did and sometimes didn't – sometimes it doesn't. But as much as I was open, just bursting with personal information – innocent in this way – I was cynical. People would talk of life changing experiences; Ha, I say, how much more can they blow things out of proportion? It wasn't a matter of, "Wow, I wonder if I'll have an epiphany like that", it was a matter of "How much did the newspaper pay them to come up with this shit?"
And believe it or not, here I am, without being paid. Unlike others I didn't have a lightning bolt hit my head, an Aha! moment. I didn't notice until it had already happened. And this is what I'm here to tell you about. This is the story where things change.
He had taught me fear. It wasn't the fear of him; it was the fear of everything. I couldn't stop; he was younger than me, not even a fourth of my age, and I had set my impressions of him in stone; here was a boy that needed saving from everything, from himself. He was a sort of drug, a disease; the more I was with him, the more I jumped at open doors, dogs on the streets…still, I saw him as a person to be fixed, a jumble of medical mishaps to be triumphed. The slightest hiccup that sounded strange compared to the other kids, and straight to the medical encyclopedias I went. The smallest quirks that made him human…analyzed, searched, and then finally sorted into either the symptom of mental illness or discarded as junk. Maybe this was what distracted me from the fact that I washed my hands exactly four times before touching any food, or that I started to feel stared at, like I was naked in front of a crowd.
We had no idea how he had ended up here; it wasn't possible. People and things did not just appear in what was supposed to be reality. After a while, it chaffed me. It wasn't possible, so I rejected it. Wouldn't live it. I created so many theories it's hard to remember them all…the overruling one, I remember, was that it was a very long dream. This was also the one that carried the most anxiety. A dream that long, after all, was a dream you couldn't wake up from. I would remove myself from a conversation every now and then to go to a corner and squeeze my eyes shut. This would be the one, I would say, this time I could get myself out of here and into the real world. But no matter how hard I squeezed those brown eyes of mine, I couldn't wake up. My dream wouldn't just let the fuck go. I didn't care who saw me, who heard me; in a dream, do you really care if someone hears you talk to yourself?
Seeing him cry was the worst part. It was usually a nightmare; other times I pushed too much, made him remember too much at once.
Looking back, I was fifty percent of the disease that ailed him. It made me angry that reality could shatter but I couldn't manage to make people happy. I didn't notice that I was the one making him unhappy; I was too busy watching him tap every bookcase five times, wondering why. I didn't notice I was starting to do it right along with him. We both tapped out our own erratic tones, out of beat with each other, each wondering what planet the other came from – after all, only crazy people tap bookcases. But watching him cry, no matter how crazy, was the hardest. I wanted to cry right along with him.
Through this boy I learned how large the world was, how many people there were in it, and what a large, large number of them want to hurt you. I learned that I wasn't as open to people as I thought, not as fearless. Through this boy I learned just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I learned the meaning of mass hysteria, even though this was a mass of two.
"This boy" was named Sephiroth, or, as his name quickly got shortened down to, Seth.