FINAL FANTASY VII
—CROSSING: OVER—
CHAPTER ONE:
/FROM THE NEW WORLD/
He was walking through darkness, stumbling and unseeing. A voice was calling to him, guiding him, sometimes harshly, always insistent. The air was shot through with threads of silver-white, brilliant as stars, and though he would have liked to stop and look at them, the hands pushed and pulled and hit him painfully whenever he paused. He went on, his thoughts frozen, aware only of the flexing and contraction of muscles, the nothingness under his bare feet, and the overwhelming drive to keep on walking and walking until…
He saw the light. Light, at the end of an endless tunnel. He shambled on, and it spread and glowed, reaching out to engulf him in its luminance…
He woke up.
The walls were cold and white and sterile, awakening within him a twinge of unease. A breeze came in through a window somewhere, ruffling his hair. He sought to move, but his body felt stiff and strange, as though it did not quite belong to him, and remained chained by inertia to the bed he lay on. He struggled to speak; his throat was raw and his voice sounded and felt like a handful of needles being shoved down his mouth.
"…I…"
A stolid figure appeared in his blurring sight; he saw it only as a movement of color, white and gray and dark blue. When the person approached, the vision coalesced into a short, stocky woman clad in a turtleneck and white coat, her hair steel gray and bound up in a bun.
"Feeling better?" she asked, looking him over with clinical concern, shaking her head when he made a visible effort to sit up again. "No, don't move. I don't know what you were up to in the forests, but you hit your head hard."
"What…happened?" he articulated slowly, the words scraping themselves out of his vocal cords with screaming reluctance. A wave of nausea hit him, and he fought to orient himself, staring with rigid concentration at the spray of crow's feet, shaped by time and laughter, at the corners of the woman's eyes. She had many lines, her skin was weathered and tough and told of a long life.
She raised her eyebrows. "You tell me." In acknowledgement to his difficulty in speaking, she permitted him a sip of water. It felt better than wine and cool mountain streams. He navigated the water around his mouth and swallowed. "I don't remember…anything." It was as much news to him as well as to her; now that he really thought about it, he became conscious of the gaping void in his memories. There was no before, only now and the person that was himself lying in this hospital bed…
"Where am I?" he asked, now that the thought had occurred to him. "Is this a hospital?" The starched white sheets and the smell of disinfectant, even the spray of carefully arranged flowers at his bedside, he should have guessed…
"Well…yes and no." the woman…doctor… said. "You are in the infirmary, and this is Balamb Garden. One of our instructors found you out cold in the woods west of here." She looked taken aback when graced by his blank stare. "Balamb Garden?" she repeated, slowly and concisely, like talking to a child.
"I've never heard of the place," he said, puzzled. "Should I have? Is it some sort of national park?"
She lifted her eyes heavenwards. "A park. It's only one of the most famous mercenary institutes in the world. Say your name for me," she commanded abruptly.
He opened his mouth, ready to answer such an easy and obvious question, then hesitated. No response sprang to mind. For a split second his mind reeled, a spiral into thoughts of emptiness. Angels calling his name…His lips moved of their own accord. "Roth." He did not know where the name had come from; it felt naked and incomplete, an alien word dying stillborn upon his lips.
"I think," the doctor said flatly, with obvious sarcasm, "that we have a problem on our hands."
It was a few days before Dr. Kadowaki permitted him to leave the infirmary and take a walk around the Garden, and by then his long legs were restless and screaming for exercise. Even then, he had to return at night. The Garden was a huge place, larger than he had imagined, a home as well as a machine primed for war. Young children pulling at stiff collars and sweating under the sun trained along with experienced veterans at home in their uniforms. A fountain, designed purely for aesthetic purposes, sat in the middle of the compound. Students sat at benches lined around it and joked and talked between lessons.
Roth was fascinated by the idea. When the doctor had told him of the Garden's purpose, he had imagined a sterile building of steel and concrete, subdued whispers, and rigorous discipline. Finding that Balamb Garden was mobile had only been the first surprise. These students were not just soldiers, they had a life, and were encouraged to pursue it. Groups of girls walked past, giggling and talking of boys and the latest fashions; their male counterparts sneaked glances and small folded love notes. It was all surprisingly…ordinary.
Until they lined up in the hall, childishness vanishing in the wake of a superior's command. They were disciplined then, saying nothing, eyes trained ahead, weapons snapping to hand. It was unsettling. Beneath each and every one of those young, smiling faces was the soul of a soldier, who wouldn't hesitate to kill him between one breath and the next. It…reminded him of something, like an itch he couldn't quite reach, in the back of his mind.
He turned away, strangely subdued, and perhaps a little afraid, and not as impressed with the Garden as he had been at first sight.
During the first days (brief and transitory, a rainbow in a leaping stream, as he recovered and still remembered nothing) his rescuer came to see him, not for sentimentality, as he was soon to discover, but for business. After the first opening courtesies, quite bluntly, she asked if he was interested in joining Garden.
"You killed that T-rex," Freya Blackthorn said, perching like a delicate sparrow at the corner of his bed, as though afraid it might break. She acted like she was all wire and hard angles, a contrast to the softer, more pleasant curves of her oval face and dark eyes. "Alone. We have many candidates, but not that much skill." And added, with almost cruel carelessness, "You don't seem to have anywhere else to go anyway."
"You're right," he agreed, after a pregnant pause, during which she stared and he plucked at the edge of his blanket with his long fingers. "I don't have anything." And he raised his eyes and said, "This seems…right, somehow. The atmosphere, I mean. The voices, the sounds…"
"Once a soldier, always a soldier," the instructor said nonchalantly. "That reminds me. I have something for you. Your sword. It's all broken up, but I suppose it might be some sort of clue." She reached over and tipped a bag onto the sheets , scattering long thin objects that seared Roth's eyes as they caught the afternoon sunlight and flashed argent fire into his face.
He pieced it together, laboriously, a unusual jigsaw puzzle that enflamed his voided memory with its familiarity, hours after Blackthorn had gone. Afterwards, he could see that it had once been very long, longer than an average man's height, long and slender and—
(flickering like an extended claw in the sea of ninja black and scattering crimson in its wake. It purrs like a well-fed cat and—)
—and heavier than what he would have expected, given the thinness of the blade. He imagined swinging it, clearing a roomful of enemies in one ferocious movement. He pressed his lips together as one piece left an oozing red line across his thumb. It was extraordinarily sharp.
His head hurt. For some reason, he felt like crying, like a little boy over a broken toy, as his fingers shuffled through the glittering shards. Dr. Kadowaki made him keep them in a satchel afterwards, when he refused to throw them away, and tutted over SeeDs' general carelessness when dealing with sharp objects. He barely listened to her, hearing instead the discordant voices within himself.
He handled the shattered sword with reverence, and they rested cold and heavy in his hands. Dead. It was a silly idea, when swords were never alive, and yet he found himself waiting for a call that never came.
A silly idea.
On the last day of his stay in the infirmary he looked at his reflection, really looked, in a handheld mirror that the doctor brought in, seeing with almost detached interest the long, narrow eyes (green, too green to be entirely comfortable with), the narrow, angular features that might have been handsome by a little stretch of the imagination. To Roth's keen gaze, there was something subtly wrong with the order of his features, something strange and artificial, as though individual, pleasing aspects had been welded together into a dissonant whole, by someone who had gone shopping for ingredients and not really considered how it all went together.
Then he decided that, as usual, he was just being overly analytical, and set down the mirror. The bag containing his sword he picked up respectfully (a dead body) and went out into the pale morning sunshine, where Instructor Freya Blackthorn, and the start of his new life, was waiting for him.
A tendril of lazy satisfaction curled in his stomach, and he realized abruptly that he was happy, as he could never remember being, in the left-behind echo of vanished memories. The past was dead, but he was not, and dwelling on it would just bring him grief.
He smiled.
A continent away, something streaked through the air over a city of glass and steel, shedding bloody feathers like fat raindrops. It was too early to be awake, so the sleepless man was the only one who saw it, careening like a drunkard through the gray sky. He watched calmly, a glass of wine in hand, and when it landed, with surprising grace, into his backyard he put on his slippers and went downstairs.
end Chapter One.
30/10/06: Yes, I know the ending was a bit rushed, and so was the whole chapter but…I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I'm running out of time here, yet I, once again, found myself tempted by that unfinished chapter in my files. Anyway, my exams are over on 16/11/, and I can guarantee you Chapter Two in that very week or the next.
Until then, goodbye.
T. Axile.
NEXT CHAPTER: SMOKE AND MIRRORS.