Misleading Memories.
Ja ne, Kat
Okay, well now that the title tells you who it is, I can too. It's finally CLOUD! Yea we are getting to the good stuff now, BUT FIRST . . . on to flash backs. And the word Soldiers really does go there in the song, I just capitalized it. In case you want to play it while you read:
Song: Borderline
Artist: Chris de Burg
XOXOXOXOX
No one was paying attention to him, and he'd been allowed to blend into the background and slip out of the camp unescorted as the sentries were too busy gapping at their fearless leader making time with Ferion.
Blissfully and finally alone with his thoughts for a few minutes, he pulled out his Crystal to examine it. As always a face flashed across the surface of it for a second. Memories, he knew, were fickle things. Easily influenced by outside mediums, or even placed in someone's head, by Cosmos? Their enemies? It could even have been put there by the Crystals themselves.
The face it showed drew him however and filled him with regret and shame. A slim woman, with a narrow waist, tight ass and a considerable bust for her weight, covered all in black leather. Warm brown eyes and long soft black hair left to cascade down her back. He had needed to escape from the other Warriors before he'd given into the words and confusing jumble of memories in his head. For all that he could sing he certainly didn't want any of the other warriors to hear him do so. He knew though, that he had to let them out before the words, and the memories they caused, drove him to be distracted and in this place that was a good way to get someone killed. Softly, so softly that the words were almost not there, he let the first ones slip, mind settling slightly as he did so.
I'm standing in the station,
I am waiting for a train.
Yes, he had been, several times. In fact the first clear memory that he felt was his was of waiting for a train, so the group he had been hired by could destroy a Mako reactor. He had memories before that one of course, but they were all tangled up in his head, the only constant in them a young man with spiky brown hair and startlingly blue eyes.
To take me to the Border,
And my loved one far away.
A different woman this time, with long wavy brown hair, held together with a pink ribbon, her eyes as green as new spring grass. Flowers in her hair and at her feet, and to soon they were replaced with blood, too much blood as Sephiroth's Masamune pointed at him from through her body, the blood staining its blade emptied from out of it.
I watched a bunch of SOLDIERs heading for the war,
I could hardly even bare to see them go.
A companies personal army using civilians, fighting civilians and finally resorting to slaughtering them, by dropping parts of the city on them, because it wasn't economic for them to stop killing the planet.
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears are in my eyes.
And after all that time spent travelling to find the Temple it had ended with tears, his own tears, as he laid that too still body in the Temples stream, and watched broken almost beyond repair, until it faded from his sight.
We're coming to the Borderline.
I'm ready with my lies.
And in the early morning rain,
I see her there.
And I know I'll have to say "Good-bye," again.
So many lies he had told, both purposefully and not. Most of his memories of fighting for Shinra that he remembered actually belonged to someone else. The Heroic's he had bragged of all lies. Stolen, or maybe even given, to him by the same Blue-eyed man that had saved his life, and all this after carting Cloud's own injured and unresponsive form to safety time and again. And the raven-haired woman that haunted him, always waiting for him, every time he came back, her eyes so happy to see him alive and yet so sad at the same time. How many times had he left her behind to wait for him? Three? Four?
Hell, it could be a dozen for all he knew. Yet, she still waited on him, still stood there patiently with both that overwhelming joy and heartbreak on her face, time and again, wanting nothing more from him for all the pain he caused her, except for a reassurance once in a while that she was not waiting in vain. All except for the very last time when she had gone hunting him through several . . . and his mind drew a blank. There was only a terrible Darkness where that memory should have been.
And its breaking my heart.
I know what I must do.
I hear my country calling but I want to be with you.
She had earned and deserved that much from him and so they had started a delivery business together. He had accepted a portable phone that would let her contact him anytime and anywhere as part of the price for it. They had even taken in two children, a boy and a girl, Orphans. He talked to them and tried to offer encouragement every time the phone rang about a delivery.
I'm taking my side.
One of use will lose.
Don't let go,
I wanna know,
That you WILL wait for me until their dead.
There's no one alive.
NO one alive.
There were lots of bodies that could be laid at his feet. He was a trained killer, made even more effective by the injection of Mako into his body. Towns and other places left empty after he and other Shinra SOLDIERs had swept through. Then there were the bodies that could be laid at his feet and on his conscious simply because he had failed them. The cheery blue-eyed hero, Zack, slumped forward in the back of a truck, the back of his head missing because of a snipers bullet as Cloud drifted, terribly injured and broken. The raven-haired woman's father, killed in the same incident he'd been so wounded at. Then finally there was poor Aerith with her ribbon, slain by all that remained of a Hero, because he was not fast enough to save her.
Walking past the Border guards.
Reaching for her hand.
Showing no emotion,
I wanna break into a run.
And he had been on the border, the one that most people don't return from . . . that he shouldn't have returned from, and in all truth, he hadn't wanted to. Zack had stood in front of him in that cloudy place, and as happy as he was to see his friend and saviour, he had reached past him for Aerith. His face had been blank with disbelief, wanting only to hold her and know he was really seeing her.
But these are only Borders that I will NEVER know,
How men can see the wisdom in war?
And he truly didn't. He just could not understand people like the Emperor, or Ultimecia, or hell, even Rufus Shinra. To them the end justified the means and it truly didn't matter to them how many people were sacrificed to their ambitions, desire and greed. The outcome was all that mattered, the people and even the planets deem a necessary price they were willing to pay.
And it's breaking my heart.
I know what I must do.
I hear my country calling,
But I want to be with you
But if the raven-haired woman was not who tugged at him then who was? Because there was someone, that much he knew. The same way he knew it was not the woman that haunted him, although she was important and special to him, she wasn't his.
I'm taking my side.
One of us will lose.
DON'T let go,
I want to know,
That you will wait for me until their dead.
There's no one alive . . . no one alive
And no one was alive, his birthplace and all the people on it, was gone. All their fighting and all that was sacrificed to save it, came to naught as the Darkness swallowed it whole and they were set adrift into void, even Aerith who had become the Planets soul, was ejected, bodily into nothingness. Hoping against hope to find a new home . . . and he had found a home . . . in someone-
His thoughts stopped dead as a cool voice cut through them much like his gun blade cut through mannequins.
"Hey, I was sent to make sure you weren't dead yet."
LEON!
The name shot out of the darkness in his mind as it often did when he was speaking to the other mercenary. He had been forced to remind himself several times that his name was Squall.
"I'm fine, just enjoying the relative peace."
The teen snorted to show how much he believed that answer.
"Yea, sure, whatever, just tell me if allows your mind to rest?"
He thought about it.
"Yes. It kind of settles it."
"Hn."
A non-sound as the teen pulled out his sleeping bag and climbed in it; raising gun-metal eyes meet glowing blue before he spoke again.
"I need a break from all the idiocy."
An excuse Cloud knew but nodded anyway, it wasn't his place to pry.
"I'll wake you up halfway through."
Arrangement made the two mercenaries got settled in for the night. The strange name and watching the teen's lithe body toss in his sleep filling Cloud's mind with indecent thoughts on how to distract him from his nightmares.
XOXOXOXOX
And the Cleon begins! MWAHAHAHAHA.
Sorry just kidding I still have to do Squall's flash back and Terra's but! I have begun explaining KINGDOM HEARTS. Some of Clouds flash backs are from places other than his game. Some are from Advent Children, some are him beginning to get the ones from KINGDOM HEARTS back, but notice they are still left kind of blank to him, just impressions. And the one where Zack dies is from either Crisis Core or from the Anime (and I'm sorry to say that I cannot think of its name. Type FF7 anime into YouTube I'm sure it will come up.)
Ahhh so many things posted this vacation, this, DA2, Labyrinth man am I busy.
Ja ne
Kat.
