Hooray! I finally got it done. If you don't like it, blame the pain and painkillers. I'm suffering from a re-injured shoulder dislocation. In case you were wondering, it hurts a really, really lot! There are no warnings for this chapter.
Thank you to all who have reviewed. Without your support and encouragements, I might have called a Hiatus to this story while dealing with my pain.
"It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. "
-Ayn Rand
-Albatross-
Lightning's mind swirls as she stares at the incomprehensible words etched into the black leather book binding. She has no idea what's going on anymore. She has no memory of picking this book up. She looks at the floor, sees square tiles of alternating colors beneath her feet. She looks to Fang for an explanation only to find that the other woman is no longer looking at her. She is gazing around with awe at the surroundings; specifically, she is staring up. Lightning looks at the long line of Fang's throat as it meets her chin, the small nose on top all angled upwards like a pointing arrow that Lightning's eyes just can't help but follow.
She realizes that she can see outside the circle of firelight. There's another light source somewhere that allows her to see the outline of the dome high overhead. Her eyes do a slow sweep, follow the lines of the high domed ceiling downward until it ceiling meets the walls some thirty feet up. She does a slow turn, eyes widening as she takes in the enormity of the room in which they stand.
There are dozens of freestanding structures scattered throughout the space. They are spaced uniformly, and reach more than halfway to the apex of the overhead dome. She can make out the outlines of the structures but her tired brain cannot discern the point. Not until she considers the book she's holding. And then the familiarity resolves itself and she remembers a dream from a lifetime ago. A dream that led her to this book, in this library.
An ancient library.
"Where the hell are we?" Lightning whispers. It is obvious now that they are in a rotunda designed to house thousands upon thousands of books. It's the largest library that she has ever seen. She looks down at the marble tiles beneath her feet, and decides that the room must be a marvel when it is lit. She looks over at Fang, sees the shocked pallor on the woman's face. "Fang? Do you know where we are?"
Fang shakes her head in the negative, too stunned to vocalize. Fang is never too stunned to speak.
"Is this Oerba?" she prompts.
Fang lets out a derisive snort at that. "Uh...No. Oerba is a simple village. This is...I've never seen this before." Lightning isn't happy with the answer. Fang needs to snap out of it and think here.
"Well, where could we be? Come on, Fang. Think about it. This is your home." The needling hits a sore spot and Fang snaps back at her.
"I'm not an archeologist! I don't have a clue where we are," Fang snaps, but as she says it, Lightning sees something in her face change. "Oh," Fang gasps.
"What?" Lightning prompts. Fang starts trolling and Lightning trails her as quietly as possible. She doesn't want to distract Fang from her thoughts, even though part of her just wants to shake the answers from her.
"There were rumors," Fang starts, voice pitched low. Almost like she's talking to herself. "about a city near the Tower." Tower? Lightning wants to ask, but she doesn't. She wants to give Fang a chance to tell the story on her own terms. "We'd looked for it though and we never found anything. After the war started, we needed answers. There were stories, passed down...folktales, and the like, about a city around the Tower. Near the Tower. It was ancient and there were stories of...it doesn't matter."
Lightning wants to disagree but Fang whirls on her and says, tone almost accusatory, "We looked for it!" She repeats, as if Lightning has accused her of lying. "We searched Mah'Habara. We tried searching through the cursed city, figuring maybe that it was the city of legends. And we searched every inch of that city. We found nothing. Or nothing helpful anyway."
"What city?" Fang is speaking in half sentences and thought fragments.
"Paddra," she breathes, and something in Lightning wrenches.
Lightning's whole body tenses at the mention of that name. Paddra. She'd dreamed the end of Paddra only hours before. She feels her stomach flip and her skin crawl as she thinks of the dream. She wishes she could open her skull and carve the memories of her last 'dream' out of her brain. She also knows that erasing the memories from her mind would never lift the taint from her soul. She knows Paddra as if she'd lived there: a white city full of small minded people. A city where unspeakable acts occurred. A city that had been razed to the ground. She hadn't seen the razing in her dream (she'd woken up before things had gotten that far), but she knows that no man, woman or child survived that terrible night, with the same certainty that she knows her parents had died a painful death. She's known for a while now that her dreams are not fabrications. Still, that last dream had been so hideous, that she'd almost hoped it had been a figment of her ever warping imagination.
"Is that where we are? Paddra?" It's equal parts horrifying and intriguing. She cannot control her own morbid curiosity. The need to know more about that city equals the need to never again think of the horrors that transpired there.
"No," Fang declares with a certainty that aggravates Lightning.
"How can you be sure?" Fang gives Lightning a withering look.
"Well, you said it yourself, didn't you? This is my home." Lightning feels her jaw and fists clench at the droll sarcasm. She takes two breaths and decides not to point out that Fang's statement is really not an answer. At all. If she can't say with any certainty where they are, how can she be positive where they are not? "Besides," Fang concludes, "Paddra is to the east and we've been heading steadily northwest."
Lightning considers this statement for a moment before she asks, "How can you even possibly know that?" They've been under the mountains in the dark for days.
"Because if you want to survive scavenging and exploring on a world like Gran Pulse, you damn well better have a decent sense of direction. If you haven't noticed, it's a bit large and dangerous." Fang is waspish, even more irritable than usual. Lightning figures that this latest discovery has tilted Fang's world on its axis a bit, so she lets Fang's ire roll off her. Besides, she's got a point.
"Okay," she says, hoping to mollify her jumpy, snappish friend. "so what's to the northwest then?" Fang shakes her head and looks around the rotunda again.
"The Tower," she replies, and Lightning bites her lip to avoid pointing out the inherent uselessness of that answer. Maybe she should write all her questions down and let Fang fill in the answers. Dragging information from her friend piecemeal is enough to drive her up one wall and down the other.
Fang continues, "That's where we've been heading all along." Fang paces as she talks now, trying to burn off some of her nervous energy. "We needed to get out of Mah'Habara, travel through Sulyya Springs to reach the Tower." Fang pauses as if she's either rethinking, or redrawing the route in her mind. "Right." She whispers. "Then up the Tower, which is easier said than done, and we're home. Oerba."
"So if this is the Tower...?" Lightning starts.
"This is not Taejin's Tower. I've been there more than once."
"Well it's someplace," Lightning snaps. Fang's world axis may have shifted a bit but Lightning's entire universe has imploded. She's too exhausted to deal with Fang's unhelpful answers. She looks at the book in her hands and says, "Since you don't know anything, maybe this will give us some answers." Lightning braces the book on her bum left arm and slips the fingers of her right hand between the leather cover and the rag paper. She lifts the cover about one inch when Fang's palm slams down on it, shutting the book with an echoing thud and almost knocks the book out of Lightning's grip.
"I don't think you should do that," Fang says. Lightning stares at the long, delicate fingers spread over the cover of the book. The pressure Fang's exerting on the cover of the book presses the blood out of her fingers, leaves them stark white with red trim against the black leather and red embossing of the book binding. Lightning looks up at her, sees something foreign in those near translucent blue eyes.
Fear.
Lightning can't see the problem here, no matter how she looks at the situation.
"It's just a book," she declares, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Which it really sort of is. Right? Fang shakes her head and gives a derisive snort.
"Nothing is JUST anything or haven't you figured that out yet," Fang states as if that vague statement answers anything.
Okay. What?
"Cocoon is not just an orbiting satellite, The Archylte Steppe isn't just a plateau, Mah'Habara is not JUST a cavern." She pauses, and taps the top of the book. "And that is definitely NOT 'Just a book.'" Complete with air quotes. It's enough to make Lightning's face contort with confusion.
Because air quotes? Seriously? Lightning had always thought pretentious, full of themselves jerks actually used "Air Quotes." She looks around for a moment, pinches her arm and spends a moment wondering if she's hallucinating again before deciding that even in her wildest, craziest hallucinatory dreams, she'd never have believed Fang (of all people on two worlds) would throw air quotes at her.
"I don't understand," she says. That's the understatement of the decade.
"You're right. You don't." Where am I? When did blunt as a club Fang become vague and dodgy? Fang must see the irritation mount and her already scarce patience dwindling more with each vague word.
Fang heaves a huge sigh and says, "That language you can't read. It's Ancient Paddran. It's a dead language from a dead city. From a dead EMPIRE, actually. The largest and longest standing empire on Gran Pulse." Something of Lightning's complete lack of comprehension must show on her face.
"That empire nearly spanned the entire known world. Get it? It's not JUST a book because it's a book from one of the oldest and most powerful empires ever in human history. A book that no one has seen or read for thousands of years. And there may have been a few people left that could still read the language, once upon a time. But not anymore."
"So we're what?" Lightning asks, not understanding the point here. "Not going to look at it? Because it's old? Have you lost your mind completely?"
Fang explodes into a flurry of movement, like the thoughts alone are propelling her around. She suddenly stops moving, rakes her fingers through her hair, looks Lightning dead in the eye and says, as if she's reciting it, "The story goes that Ragnarok the Destroyer razed Paddra to the ground. It killed every living thing in the city and then cursed the ruins. One night, and an entire city was destroyed. Thousands of people were killed. It didn't take long for the entire empire to fall. Gran Pulse descended into anarchy. And the dark time was upon us." Fang sits down on the marble floor and Lightning waits a beat before following suit. Fang snatches the book from Lightning's hands, puts it on the marble floor between them and presses a hand over the cover of the book as if she's afraid it might open itself and start reading from its own pages.
Fang is freaking Lightning out. And considering she's been dreaming about being flayed alive, that's no small task.
"I heard that story my whole life. It was...You don't understand. On Pulse, Ragnarok was a legend. A spook story. Something we told round campfires and at kiddie parties. There were literally NO recordings of it as anything but a folktale. None of us BELIEVED any of it. It was fun. A big scary monster rising up from nowhere and destroying everyone. Stories about Ragnarok rising up and destroying the evil Paddran Empire." She glances down and snorts. "They were preposterous. We'd been taught that when civilization lapsed during the dark time in history, after the collapse of the Empire, that superstitions just bled into the histories. There was no real education and it was all folksy nonsense and oral tradition. Blah blah blah. But seeing this book now..."
There's so much Lightning wants to say. A book doesn't prove anything. It's just a book. And yet..she wants to ask to be taken to Paddra. She feels like she needs to see this city with her own eyes. She wonders if she can find the place where the Paddran l'Cie had been taken for execution, walk in the footsteps of those that came before her. She wonders if seeing a place where Ragnarok rose before will give her insight into the correct path for her now. So many thoughts swirling in her mind like popcorn blasting in an air popper, or houses in a tornado.
None of them make much sense.
"So you see, we'd all written Ragnarok off as myth or legend. There'd been NO evidence of such a thing and we'd assumed that the ancients made up the story to explain away a natural disaster of some sort. A drought, or blight that killed the animals and people of the city proper. Starvation leading to collapse, no centralized government leading to the fall of the entire empire. Right?" Lightning nods at Fang. That certainly makes more sense than a magical monster murdering an entire city of people and then putting a curse upon the ruins. Plague makes more sense. Unfortunately, the magical monster has the advantage of being the truth here.
They are through the looking glass.
"It made perfect sense," Fang says. "And since there was no proof, that's what 'modern' Oerbans learned in school. And taught to our children. No nonsensical stories about an imaginary destroyer. After all, something like that would leave a trace behind, right?" Fang swallows.
"Yeah. There was no sign of Ragnarok. That is, until MY time. When..." Fang trails off, unable or unwilling to complete the thought.
She doesn't need to say it. Lightning's mind filled in the blanks like one of those Mad Libs books from when she was a child. "When Ragnarok rose up and scarred Cocoon," she whispers.
Fang nods. "Something like that." She traces patterns over the cover of the book with the tips of her fingernails. "These letters look hand-stamped into the leather." Lightning looks at the binding, traces her own fingertips over the spine. She's not certain that the cover is 'leather', per se. She takes a deep whiff and flinches. Lightning believes the cover is made from something far more sinister than animal skin. And the stamping is almost certainly NOT ink. She isn't going to voice her suspicions right now, however. They have enough problems without her throwing her own morbidity into the mix. "This book is probably older than any standing building on Gran Pulse. Including Taejin's Tower, which was a Watchtower of the ancient world." Fang's tone is full of awe and reverence.
Lightning can see the awe, but can't relate at all. Pretty much everything on Gran Pulse is worthy of reverence as far as Lightning is concerned. She can't bring herself to care more for this book than, say, the room that houses it. All she sees when she stares at the book is the potential for an answer. She can't help but feel like there must be a reason that she's been led here. Everything that's happened, everything she's dreamed, have all culminated into her laying hands on this book. She's not certain if it's the fal'Cie that have instilled this drive in her with her brand, or if it's something else entirely that has been using her body and mind as an instrument. All she knows is that she feels as if she's been herded here, to this room, to this book. And she wonders if she's going to have to fight Fang for the privilege of the knowledge housed in this book.
"Everything was myth," Fang whispers. Her eyes are fixed on the book cover but her vision is focused inward. Lightning recognizes the look. She's worn it often enough over the past weeks. Fang drags herself from her thoughts long enough to say, "There were legends about people living in Cocoon. But there was no proof. We'd never seen any sign of other humans. So we'd all chalked it up to mythology. You know, like everything else." Fang's eyes harden and her fingers clench into fists.
"At least until Cocoon attacked us." Fang says. Lightning snaps to attention. "Then it was like we were living in some nightmare world. Everyone was dying, and everything was burning."
"Wait a minute," Lightning says, torn from her singular fixation on the book. She is confused and more than a little annoyed that this is once again turning into a Pulse versus Cocoon battle. "Pulse attacked Cocoon." As she says it, she realizes that she has no way of knowing such a thing. All information on Cocoon has been filtered through and disseminated by the fal'Cie. "At least, that's what we've always been told."
"Told, eh?" Fang retorts, and Lightning can hear the dangerous edge creeping into her voice. Fang stands and hovers threateningly. Things can go south very quickly here if Lightning doesn't mind her words. "Well I was THERE. Here! Whatever. And Pulse didn't attack anyone!" Lightning pulls herself to her feet and watches as Fang starts pacing through her anger. "Like I said, we didn't even know you were there. Why the hell would we attack you?"
Why would Cocoon attack Pulse? The question hovers on the tip of her tongue, her shortening temper threatening to hurl invectives at the other woman and just do this thing already. They've been dancing around finally throwing down for so long Lightning doesn't even remember her life prior to meeting and fighting with Fang. It'll be a relief to cut the damn pregame and just get on with the main event already.
Sense asserts itself and she cools her temper, looks at the book again. And it all clicks into place. She can see it as clearly as the hidden 3D images in posters once you finally relax your eyes and look at them correctly.
"Oh man," she sighs and Fang lifts an eyebrow at her. She'd obviously been prepping herself for a good rough-and-tumble. "Of course Pulse didn't attack," Lightning says with complete honesty. Like she should have known it all along. Fang looks mollified if confused. "And I hate to tell you this, but Cocoon didn't attack Pulse either." Fang's brow furrows and she looks like she's about to resume arguing.
"It's so clear now." Lightning does a slow turn and examines the large room. A monument to a lost civilization. More true history and knowledge housed than humans have known in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. It should be treated as a temple and shrine from this day forward. Everything left of humanity on Pulse is in this room. This is possibly the closest they'll ever come to knowing the true history of humans at all. No knowledge exists on Cocoon beyond what the fal'Cie distribute and spoon feed to the masses. And Lightning has reached the dismal conclusion that there are no people left on Gran Pulse at all. If they fail to beat this focus, then everything that humanity ever was, or ever could be will disappear. It will be like they never existed.
Which seems to be the fal'Cie's ultimate goal.
"It's so clear," she repeats and Fang gives her a look that screams 'WELL?' "The fal'Cie attacked us both." She looks back at Fang and says, "To start a war. So we would kill each other. They attacked us, then they all blamed it on the scary, evildoing outsiders. They wound us up like toys and watched us...kill one another. They could have everything they wanted and they'd never have to dirty their hands." Did they even have hands?
Lightning watches a thousand emotions play over Fang's face. And it isn't even a realization that they haven't made before, but still, the complete upending of entire world view is a painful and strenuous thing. People kill one another-often-when others question their beliefs and moral foundations. And in less than ten words, Lightning has just disproved everything Fang believed as truth. Everything she'd fought, and essentially died for.
Lightning wouldn't be surprised if Fang lashed out at her. She's willing to let the woman curse, shout, hell, even hit right now. But all Fang does is sag. "Right," she whispers. "Of course. All we knew is that we were attacked, so the fal'Cie Anima made l'Cie-made ME a l'Cie-to protect Pulse."
"And to destroy Cocoon," Lightning finishes. Second verse, same as the first. Fang nods but looks unconvinced.
"Maybe. It sounds right, I suppose." Lightning scrunches her whole face in confusion.
"Sounds right?" She asks. Something about the way Fang says it confuses her. Fang nods at her.
"Yeah, sounds right," Fang shakes her head, "but doesn't feel right." Lightning spends a moment wondering if Fang feels as crazy as she does all the time when Fang's frustration gets the better of her. "Damn," she shouts. "I wish...I just wish I could remember, you know? There's this big black hole in my mind and I'm sure that the answers are all in it." Fang closes her eyes and presses brutal fingers into the bridge of her nose.
Lightning's never really thought about Fang's memory lapse before, and the realization of that bothers her. Of course to be fair, Fang never really speaks about it either. Fang has mentioned it once, maybe twice, and just sort of moved on from there. Fang isn't one to dwell, and in all the ensuing commotion, it had been easy to dismiss her memory loss and move on. It had never seemed to bother her, so Lightning hadn't given it a second thought.
She really is a selfish bitch!
Had Lightning thought about it, she would have realized the frustration and fear that must be ubiquitous for Fang. Lightning still has a gap in her memory from the night she'd slaughtered that animal. She'd gone to sleep in one place, woken up in another with evidence of horrible events all over her body but no memory of the interim timeframe. The combination of the evidence without memory had nearly driven Lightning mad.
It's the same thing on a far smaller scale: a black hole in her mind.
She remembers feeling the same way. Remembers the vague sense of some memory in that void, the feelings and impressions that she can still feel if she just scrapes at the edges of that darkness. For her, it's a few hours. For Fang, it's days. Weeks. Months even. The idea of it makes her ill and she realizes once again that Fang is stronger than Lightning can ever hope to be. Lightning looks over at Fang with renewed respect, watches as she fidgets and flutters around.
Fang's fidgeting turns to pacing and finally she blurts, "We need to go back. Talk to the others. I need...I need Vanille to tell me the truth now. Enough is enough!" Fang sounds furious. Lightning is no stranger to Fang's anger, but she's never seen or heard it directed toward Vanille before. It's surreal.
Fang begins to walk away and Lightning realizes that she's going to leave. Leave her behind and go back to the group. She feels herself pale. Half of her wants to just stand here forever. Things make sense to her here in this room in a way that they haven't for days out there. Leaving here means facing her own confusion. Her stomach churns and her skin crawls at the idea. Going back means facing truths from which she'd rather hide. Going back means finding out for sure what is real, and what is a function of her ever warping mind.
Fang is almost to the door when Lightning stops her.
"Fang," she barely recognizes her own voice. Considering the startled look on Fang's face, she's figuring she sounds every inch as terrified as she feels right now. Still, she is many things, but she is now coward (or so she keeps insisting, anyway).
"I need to know..." the words stick in her throat. She sighs. This is ridiculous! "I..."
"Spit it out already," Fang says as she strolls back over to Lightning. There is a strange amalgamation of peeved and nervous on Fang's face that might be funny if it weren't so appropriate. "Come on then. Just say it."
"I don't know what's real anymore." There. She's said it. She waits for Fang's reaction.
The look on Fang's face doesn't change. At all.
"I don't get it," Fang admits. "What the hell are you talking about?"
She's not sure why she'd expected this confessional to be easier. She hates talking about feelings and Fang is a tad oblivious to feelings at the best of times.
This is hardly the best of times.
"It feels like I'm walking through a dream. Or a nightmare." She doesn't look at Fang, afraid of being derailed. "And sometimes I feel like things are real, but they're not." She remembers her walk in another universe, in someone else's skin, in someone else's clothes out on the Archylte Steppe that lifetime ago; remembers running scared to find her friends only to find that she had been staring into Snow's eyes all along. She remembers waking a few minutes (hours?) ago to find Fang missing from their campsite when she'd actually been there all along.
"And sometimes," she continues. "Sometimes it feels like things aren't real, but they are." Like this room, and this book. A scene straight from her dreams, and now that she thinks about it, she even remembers the smell of this room.
When she meets Fang's eyes again, the woman is nodding sagely at her and Lightning feels something uncoil.
/A burden shared is a burden halved./ Seems like Snow isn't such a dumb blond after all.
"I see how that might be a problem, yeah." Fang says and there's something off in her tone. For a moment Lightning wonders if she's once again slid into some reverie. "But I don't know how I can help you. I mean, me telling you that I'm real isn't going to do you much good, is it?" Fang says. The tone is sincere and yet...
"Not really, no," Lightning replies.
"Oh, I have an idea," Fang says like she's had an enormous revelation. "Would you hold this for me?" She presses the book into Lightning's arms before she even realizes what's going on. Lightning fumbles the book a bit in an effort to favor her wounded arm, feels the weight of it pull and drag on her injuries awkwardly.
The right cross that comes flying out of nowhere not only takes her by surprise, it takes her clean off her feet.
She hits the marble tiles with a bone jarring thud, her right arm folding beneath her and going numb with the impact. The book flies out of her hands and skidders across the floor with a swoosh. Her ears are ringing, her eyes are tearing and her head pounds with renewed fury. She shakes her head like a dog in an effort to clear it, feels the cold from the marble seeping into her body. Feeling returns to her numbed limb in a burning rush that hurts more than the punch itself. Her right shoulder complains anew at the fresh abuse, flares with pain with every breath. She presses herself up onto her elbow, feels the spasms in her arm and back from the still weak joint as she works herself into a seated position.
Her left arm is still slung around her neck, but the sling has shifted and now borders on choking her. She adjusts that first, gets her left arm settled against her aching ribs. She uses her right hand to touch her stinging jaw. There are tears pouring from her eyes from the unexpected pain. She cups her jaw in her palm and shifts it around, testing for breaks or dislocations. The joint snaps and creaks sending more tears pouring from her eyes; but she's been hit enough to know the difference between a nasty bruise, a dislocation, and a break.
Lightning spits out a mouthful of blood onto the white tiles, then pokes at her teeth to make sure they are intact. If Fang's knocked one loose with a sucker punch then all bets are off. Lightning will tear the bitch apart and smile doing it. And if Fang thinks she can't...well, then she hasn't been paying attention. Injured or not, Lightning is more than capable of beating the crap out of Fang. She opens and closes her jaw again, feels and hears more snapping and pulling. Not to mention that she's pretty eager to deliver a good beat down too.
Fingers prod at each tooth, wiggle them in search of any looseness, breaks or cracks. Her teeth are fine, and Lightning can't decide if she's relieved or disappointed. She'd been getting excited at the prospect of knocking Fang's teeth out and then feeding them to her one by one.
Lightning's fingers catch on her bottom lip, drawing a wince. She pulls them away and they come back sticky with fresh blood. She's not sure if Fang's knuckles or her own teeth tore her lip open, but decides that it ultimately doesn't matter. She presses the pads of her first two fingers to the cut and winces again. She looks up at Fang's unreadable expression.
Fang stands close enough for Lightning to leg sweep if necessary, but the other woman's got a hand extended to her, palm up. An offer of aid. Lightning looks from the hand to the face and wonders if Fang has actually gone as bat-shit crazy as Lightning feels most of the time. She's obviously more than slightly off her rocker to throw a punch like that and then stand within arm's reach of an opponent like Lightning. Lightning considers kicking the woman's knee cap, bending her leg the wrong way. It won't kill her, but Fang might wish it had.
Lightning tamps down the rage, knows it's the monster growing within her that longs to hear the sweet melody of agonized cries mixed with snapping bones. She needs a grip on herself. She looks again at the proffered hand and considers smacking it away from her before deciding to just screw pride and go with it. She can always reconsider later. She lets Fang pull her onto her feet.
Once she's upright, Fang takes a moment to straighten Lightning's sling, adjust her arm against her side and generally fuss like a mother dressing a child up for their first day of school. Fang brushes imaginary lint from Lightning's shoulder, smoothes out her shirt, looks into her eyes and says, "How 'bout that? That real enough for you?" Fang asks, tone even, but holding a hint of the smirk Lightning can see tugging at the woman's mouth. Lightning's anger and rage disappear under a swell of dark amusement. She chuckles and Fang smiles back at her.
Whatever works.
"So, are we clear now, or shall I try again? I mean, I wouldn't want you to doubt whether or not I'm really me."
Lightning holds up her hand in a warding gesture and says, "I think I'm good, thanks." She rubs at her aching jaw, feels it snap again.
Fang gives what looks like a sympathetic wince and Lightning almost gives into her urge to hit back. She's having a great deal of trouble controlling her baser animal urges these days. Fang should be more careful with her sucker punches.
"Right then. So how's about we head back to the others before they wake up?" Fang says, strolling over to retrieve the book. "There are some things I think we all need to discuss."
Lightning feels like she's been hit with a bucket of ice water. Something in her posture or face must give her away and Fang goes very still. She looks mortified and guilty. "Oh. I see. So when you said that you're not sure what's real, you didn't mean me, did you?"
Lightning shakes her head, then nods, then shakes it again. "Not...Well, yeah I meant you too. But that wasn't..." she trails off, unwilling to finish her sentence. Because she's still not sure if it's real. If they really found Snow and Hope or if she'd imagined the entire scenario and the last trace she'll ever find of them is a drying bloodstain on a cavern floor.
"We did find them you know," Fang says, and it should be a relief because she's sure that Fang, at least, is real. She thinks. Maybe. Fang puts a hand on Lightning's shoulder. "You thought, what? That you'd hallucinated the whole thing?"
She pinches the bridge of her nose with more violence than Fang used to deliver her punch. Lightning feels the tears burning beneath her lids, feels the telltale clogging in her nose and sniffles. She presses the blunt fingernails of her thumb and pointer finger into her sealed eyelids in an effort to forcibly restrain the tears threatening to flow.
If she falls apart now, she'll never pull it back together. Moreover, she's not sure she'll want to.
"Look," Fang starts and she sounds as uncomfortable as a woman in thumbscrews.
"I just..." Lightning chokes, swallows and tries again, "I wanted it so badly and then, there it was. There they were. And then nothing made sense. I didn't know who I was. Or where I was. Or who you were. And I thought you were trying to kill me, but then things seemed...I don't know, normal except I felt high. Or I was high. I think. And then you were gone but you're saying you were there and I'm here and it's like a dream. You know? Things have no continuity anymore. Not even me. I'm not even ME half the time."
Fang's face is pinched and Lightning thinks that her diatribe may have been as difficult for Fang to hear as it was for her to say.
"I can't prove to you that I'm real." And Lightning takes an instinctive defensive posture. Fang won't get a second chance at a sucker punch. Fang catches the movement, smirks a bit, shakes her head and says, "I mean, what good does saying, 'I'm not a dream' do? Even a dream can do that, right?"
Lightning prods at her jaw. "Yeah, but I doubt a dream can deliver quite that hard a punch." Fang's seriousness melts into a smile.
"Yeah, well, I doubt your hallucinations have had my extensive training." Fang preens a bit.
"Let's hope not!" And Lightning snorts while Fang chuckles a bit.
"Seriously, I can't make you sure. But we can go back and you can see for yourself." Fang pats her bad shoulder softly.
"You know, that really isn't going to do much either anymore," Lightning admits. Because while she's pretty sure she's been talking to the real and actual Fang for the past...however long it's been, the truth is she isn't positive. The dream where executioners were peeling skin from her lover had felt just as real. She'd felt the pain of her joints dislocating, she'd smelled the blood and feces and vomit on the air. She's felt the squish of intestines between her fingers as surely as she feels the sling biting into her neck and collarbone.
She'd heard the screams of the dying, tasted the blood of the living and enjoyed every minute of her vengeance.
Every. Minute.
"The line has been pretty clear before now, you know. Dream. Reality. And maybe I didn't know that I was dreaming while I was dreaming, but I knew it pretty immediately once I woke up." She runs her fingers through her sticky hair and spends an insane minute thinking that if this were a dream, she'd be damned sure she wouldn't smell foul and have greasy hair, before realizing that the idea is absurd. Moreover, it's pointless. If she had that sort of control over her dreams, she'd just pull herself out of them. "I don't know why it's gotten so screwed. Maybe it's all this relentless darkness."
Maybe I'm more Cie'th than human. She thinks of the creature trapped forever with the memory of its own failure; the insanity that had permeated every inch of its focus.
Fang nods. "That's very possible, you know. No delineation between day and night, no real sleep or food. Constant stress. Those can all screw with a person's sense of perception. Pretty easy to slip into madness that way." Lightning has a near overwhelming urge to hug Fang for being supportive, even if they both know she's grasping here. Fang puts a finger under Lightning's chin and says, "But look." She directs Lightning's gaze upwards. "See where the ceiling meets the walls over there? Those are windows."
Lightning stares for a moment until her brain catches up. Then she sees that at the juncture where ceiling meets wall there is a row of high arching windows giving the impression of a sweeping wall of glass. There are panels of what might be stained glass at the apex of the dome. Lightning could tell that there was another light source in the room; how she hadn't noticed that the light source was everywhere in the room baffles her. She can only blame her stress and exhaustion.
But now that she sees the windows, she realizes that she can see the stars shining through them. Millions of sparkles scattered through the darkness like diamonds. The sky is turning a deep blue from the pitch of night in a sure sign of the approaching dawn. In another hour or two (tops) the sun will rise, and they'll see daylight again. She wonders how she hadn't noticed already before deciding that she doesn't care. Lightning smiles and Fang whispers, "We're out of the dark now. You found us a real interesting shortcut. A few hours and we'll be outside. How's that for good news?"
Lightning smiles, nods and then asks, "Outside where?"
Fang heaves a sigh. "Guess we're all going to find out together, aren't we?" Fang hooks a hand through Lightning's elbow and leads her out of the library from her dreams, steering her towards her fears.
Lightning's anxiety increases with each step back to the camp. There is a tightening in her gut accompanied by a pounding aching pain in her chest. She feels a bit dizzy and wonders if she'll get lucky enough to pass out before she reaches the camp.
She's panicking.
She is reasonably certain that what she is experiencing now is reality. She can hear the clacking of her boots on the marble tiles. She hears the swish of the trap door swinging closed behind them. She can smell the dank mosses of the cavern. She can feel the difference in the air as she transitions from the building to the cavern; the temperature differential, the humidity shift. Her senses all tell her that she is awake; that what she is experiencing now is reality.
That would be fine if she could trust any of her senses.
As things now stand, she cannot. Certainly she can smell the moss that grows throughout the cavern. But she can also smell fear that is assuredly hours or even days old. She can hear the cadence of her footsteps against marble, then against limestone. But she can also hear insects and vermin crawling inside and behind the walls. She can feel the humidity increase as she moves, but she can also feel an immense sorrow housed within the confines of the corridor.
Her body is no longer her own. Her senses more closely resemble those of an animal than a woman these days. So how then can she trust anything her mind discerns?
She shakes herself from her maudlin thoughts as they approach the campsite. From her position behind Fang, Lightning cannot see the campsite. Her new heightened senses can, however, detect four different breathing patterns. Four. Something in her untwists, unknots and she feels like she might float away or collapse. Or both, each in turn.
She decides that either she had not imagined finding Snow and Hope, or she still walks in a fantasy world. If the former, then she can finally allow herself to feel the long sought after relief. If the latter, then she hopes to never again walk in the real world. She cannot face losing them again.
The thought brings her up short. Apparently she is a coward, after all.
Sazh is awake when they stroll back into the camp and he looks relieved and peeved in equal measures. Seeing him awake and alert lifts a weight she hadn't realized was pressing down upon her as she is reminded of his stubborn refusal to rouse from slumber.
Of course, she's pretty certain that didn't happen at all. Sazh hadn't been snoring in deep sleep anymore than Fang had been missing in the cavern. How then she'd managed to sneak out of their camp undetected remains a mystery.
Doubt creeps back in. Perhaps she isn't awake now. Perhaps she will never return to the real world. Perhaps her friends are long gone. Maybe she'd never really woken from the cave in. Maybe she's hallucinated everything since she'd slipped into that waking dream out on the Archylte Steppe. Perhaps all her friends are dead. Or perhaps she walks among them now, lost to them, never again to hear their voices. She may be in a catatonic state, living in the twisted landscape of her growing insanity. Each scenario frightens her because in all situations, they are equally lost to her.
In all, she is lost.
She twitches once and shakes her head. Such meanderings serve no purpose but to drive her further into madness. She must put the thoughts from her mind.
"Everything alright?" Sazh asks, directing the question to Fang. Lightning is happy for any diversion from her thoughts. He looks skittish as he approaches, and Lightning wonders if their friendship has taken another step backwards. He once again has the 'Lightning-might-eat-my-liver' look on his face. She's fairly certain he will not trust her with his back again anytime soon.
While she's sad, she's not offended. She's not sure she trusts herself with his back either.
Fang nods, shrugs, then shakes her head. "As well as they can be considering, I suppose."
"Considering what?" Sazh asks and then looks back at Lightning. Maybe he thinks that Lightning has eaten Fang's liver.
"Look-y what we've found," Fang sing songs and holds up the book. Sazh looks astonished, awed and anxious. He reaches out to take it but Fang snatches it back. "Not yet. We've got too much ground to cover before we give into what may prove to be unfortunate curiosity."
Sazh looks as confused as Lightning feels but doesn't question Fang's decision. Lightning finds herself irritated at Fang's insistence on controlling the book and the flow of information. Her fists curl and she wants to tear the book from Fang's hands and beat her to death with it if necessary. She is certain that the knowledge that lays within the book is hers. It is her destiny and she finds Fang's interference absurd. The world tints a strange shade of red, fills with a pounding noise. Her whole body aches and tenses, fingernails slicing into her palms. She licks her lips, tastes blood and realizes how close she is to slipping off the razor edge she's been walking. She closes her eyes, inhales a shuddering breath, exhales it and finds the anger abolished.
The impulses are getting stronger, and they are hitting her with quick precision. She's losing her humanity by leaps and bounds now. The time for answers and decisions is at hand. Fang will need to step aside or get trampled.
The part of Lightning that would prefer the latter option is alarmingly vast now.
"You alright then, Soldier?" Sazh says. He's close enough to startle her. She flinches and closes her eyes at his proximity. When she opens them again, he is examining her with a wary and appraising eye. He winces when he notices the blossoming bruise along her jaw line. "Youch," he exclaims. "What happened to you?"
Lightning shoots Fang a pointed look. Fang doesn't even look mildly apologetic for the knock down sucker punch. Instead she flashes all of her teeth in a devious parody of a smile and winks. Lightning feels her lip curl up, but can't decide if it's in amusement or distaste. When she finally looks back at Sazh, she sees that he's worked out the answer for himself.
"Real nice," he scolds Fang. "First you break her ribs, then you punch her? There is something very wrong with you, woman. You know that?" He shakes his head.
"She asked me to," Fang explains. Lightning doesn't even have a chance at mustering up her outrage at the bald faced lie.
"You are they lying-est Liar I have ever met!" Sazh says, walking away from both of them with his arms folded. Fang trails along with him, determined to prove her case to him and dispute his claims that she's lying.
Even if she is a liar.
Lightning leaves Sazh and Fang to their bizarre dance and turns toward her sleeping companions. Snow hasn't shifted position in the hours since she's seen him. Either Sazh is the liar, and he really did hit Snow with a rock, or the 'Hero' had needed some serious sleep. Considering Sazh hasn't lied to her yet, she's going with the latter option.
Hope is curled onto his side now, hand flung out carelessly toward Snow, exhalations puffing out in soft whistles and gusts. She limps her way toward them, steps around Snow and does her best to settle between them without disturbing their rest. She uses the wall to ease herself down, feels scabs along her back pulling uncomfortably as she leans against the stone wall. The ground is damp and uncomfortable beneath her bare thighs, the wall rough against her sore back.
She can feel all the aches and pains complaining at once. Her back is a mess of cuts and slices, she knows. The stitches under her arm itch and burn and Lightning has to consciously divert her fingernails from the nuisance. She lifts the arm to get a look at the sutures and is surprised to find the wound nearly sealed.
Being a monster has its advantages, it seems.
Another day and the wound will be healed. Lightning can see the skin around it turning grayish, but she finds it doesn't really bother her. She really doesn't mind the physical changes anymore. She has no real illusions about how this mess is going to turn out. She lowers her arm and shifts around a bit to get comfortable before giving up the task as useless. She positions her sling so her arm rests across her ribs and then diverts herself by running her fingers through Hope's thick hair.
She's no longer worried about this being a hallucination. It is a useless fear that has done nothing but make her crazy. Instead she reaches for the peace and contentment that she feels she deserves.
It remains stubbornly out of her reach.
There is still a nagging anxiety germinating within her. She traces the shell of Hope's ear. What is wrong with her? (Aside from the obvious). She should be contented now. She should be eager to speak with them, to be reunited at last after they've all fought their way through hell to get back to one another.
And there, she thinks, is the crux of her problem.
She has spent so much time and energy wanting and anticipating the reunion, insisting aloud that Snow and Hope would be fine while internally fearing the worst. There is so much stress surrounding these two people in her mind and her heart now that she isn't sure how to begin to disentangle it from her affection. And now, as she watches them sleep she realizes that she has no idea what to say to them. There are apologies that bubble up that quite probably make no sense, and promises that she needs to make that she's uncertain will be welcome.
There are so many things that she'd left unsaid before and she's unsure if she can or will say them now. Their separation has been a blink of an eye in the span of their lives, but in that blink, more has happened than she can recount, not the least of which is that Hope has faced down the Grim Reaper. He's stared straight into the dark abyss of death, flirted with the edge and very nearly plunged in. She'd promised him that she would always protect him.
Turns out she is nothing if not a spectacular failure.
Everyone she'd ever loved, she has failed. She'd failed to find any way to save her parents; she'd left her sister to fall victim to the fal'Cie, let her turn to crystal; she'd taken Hope into her life and heart, swore to protect his life with her own. She can safely say now that she has had nothing to do with Hope's survival. Snow has played guardian angel. Had it not been for him, Hope would be lost. She casts her eyes to the sleeping blond.
And what of him?
She longs for an explanation of the vast bloodstain upon the floor, but she knows that she will never speak of it. Some say that to name a fear is the first step in conquering it. Perhaps that is true. But her truest fear is that she will name her fear, ask the question, and Snow will disappear like so much vapor in the morning sun. She's terrified that speaking of her certainty of his death will make that fear a reality. After all, she's still not certain if this is indeed reality or a particularly vivid hallucination.
She sniffles once, feels tears overflow and cascade from her eyes. She needs to pull herself together now. She pulls her knees up, presses her face to them. They will both wake soon and she needs to snap from her melancholy before that happens. She can't be a blubbering mess when they reunite.
"Sis?" Snow grunts into her ear. She lifts her head from the cradle of her knees, wipes the running tears and bubbling snot (classy move, Lightning) on her forearm and glances over at him. "That really you?"
She snorts at the question. She can't help it. He has no idea what a loaded question he's just asked. Snow presses himself up onto hands and knees and reaches for her with shaking fingers. She takes hold of his hand before it makes contact, feels the vibrations rattling through them as he clenches his hand around hers.
"I thought..." he swallows, drops her hand and scoots next to her. He sits beside her, back to the stone wall, hands clutching at his knees. He's twitching beside her, but she leaves him to it. She slides her feet, stretches her legs out until they are flat on the ground, crossed at the ankle. The new position puts strain on injuries but she doesn't care. Her coiled posture had been too defensive in nature. She feels the heat of him radiating along her sore right arm, but he seems to have gone out of his way not to touch her. "It doesn't matter what I thought."
She wants to argue the point. There are few things that matter to her more than his thoughts. One glance at his wan complexion silences her, tells her that he's right. What they'd thought (and it's apparent they'd both had similar assumptions) doesn't matter. The could-haves, would-haves and should-haves are of no consequence. They don't have to wonder 'what if' anymore because they have been granted an amazing gift. They have been given a second chance.
"There's something...that I want to say." His voice is grave and serious and so unlike Snow that it sets her teeth on edge. She keeps her eyes fixed on Hope and tries to push the anxiety away. Snow sounds broken; sounds as if the events of the past days have left him irrevocably altered. The thought gets her stomach churning around an acidic nausea. "Something," he continues, "that I've spent the past...however long wishing that I had said..."
She glances at him from the corner of her eye. He's pale and shaking, and she wants nothing more than to shove something in his mouth to keep him quiet. She can't hear these words, whatever they are. She restrains herself from physically quieting him, just says, "Don't." He looks as startled as she feels. She feels awful for refusing to let him speak his piece, but part of her knows that she will feel worse if she allows him to say unspeakable things. "Whatever it is you have to say...please don't. It's a confession for a dead woman." He looks away from her and she takes his left hand from its perch on his knee and laces their fingers together.
"What I mean to say is...there's nothing that you need to say to me, Snow. We're family and I know everything that matters." She hadn't known she was going to say it, but once the words are out, she realizes that they're true. She feels lighter. He finally looks at her and she can see a pale shadow of the Snow she knows in the look. He's finally coming back to her and she is so happy to see him she wants to break out into irritating show tunes-like she's living in a crappy musical instead of a crappy horror flick. She smiles at him. "Just like you know everything that matters. We-the two of us-have nothing left unsaid. Alright? It's not something you'll ever need to worry about. Not now. And not ever again."
He looks put out by her declaration, like she's stolen his thunder and yanked the rug out from under him at once. But beneath the annoyance lurks relief. He looks so very relieved! Because while she has stolen his thunder, she's also given him peace of mind-something they've both been sorely lacking for the past few days. Hell, for the past two months! Maybe for their whole lives, who knows? Snow nods at her once and tightens his grip on her fingers. He looks at her like he believes her.
She settles back to listen to the quiet sounds of Hope's breathing.
"I do have something I need to say though," Snow says and she sighs. He's never been able to just shut up and let things lie. He's worse than a dog with a bone and she knows that she'll have no peace until she agrees to listen to whatever he has to say.
"Go ahead," she groans and closes her eyes, bracing for the sappy, crippling horror of whatever Snow feels obligated to share.
"You look like crap, Sis!" She barks out a shocked laugh and turns to see a hint of his crooked smile. She's too astonished to do more than gape at him as he says, "I mean seriously! Look at you! What the hell happened to you? I leave you alone for...what? A day? Two, tops!" He clutches her hand and lifts it up to get a better view of the damage. "You look like Gran Pulse chewed you up and spit you back out. I told the kid you were lousy at taking care of yourself but does he listen to me? NO-OO." She's belly laughing at him now and it hurts every part of her badly damaged anatomy. She can't bring herself to care while Snow is parroting Hope. "He's all, 'Lightning can do anything! She's my hero, Snow. And you're a dumb blond!"
She can barely get enough breath to say, "He did not say that!"
"You bet your ass he did!" Snow declares, totally serious and Lightning feels her broken ribs protesting with each inhalation.
"Speaking of my ass," Lightning says, thrilled at this unsought levity, "Sazh says mine is fat." Snow's whole face twists into one of mock horror. This is what she's missed the most. His ability to make everything better. Even when things can never be better.
"That's...there's..." He looks over to see if he can spot Sazh before saying, "And I missed it? Is he alright? What did you do to him?" Sazh is off with Fang somewhere, no doubt getting a firsthand account of the growing threat and Lightning's descent into madness.
"Shut. Up." Hope whimpers and Lightning gasps in a breath at the first sound of his voice. He sounds whiney and bitchy but just so wonderfully alive. His voice is the sweetest thing she's ever heard despite its nasal tinge and biting tone. She feels tears pooling in her eyes and a lump growing in her throat. "Don't you ever stop talking?"
"Nope," Snow says without missing a beat. He ruffles Hope's hair and one of Hope's arms flails out to swat him away like a fly. "About time you woke up!"
Hope spits out a curse that shocks Lightning. Snow chuckles at it.
"Nice language, kid." Hope clenches his eyes shut and throws a one fingered salute at Snow. Where did he learn that? "And look who finally showed up!"
"Don't. Care." He curls into a tighter ball. "Need. Sleep. Shut UP!"
"He reminds me of Serah when she was his age," Lightning whispers. "She never wanted to wake up either."
Hope's eyes fly open and he tries to spring up. Snow is faster than her at getting a hand on his shoulder to hold him down. "Easy there, kid." Snow is on his knees beside Hope, one hand holding him in place, the other over his freshly healed injury. There's still a lot of fear there. He telegraphs it in every move he makes. Lightning can relate. "Let's take this real slow. Alright?"
Hope smacks at Snow's hands and Snow just snorts at him and counts to three before pulling Hope vertical. Hope has forgotten all his proclamations about needing sleep. He seems to have forgotten his exhaustion and his morning hatred for Snow.
"Light," he whispers. It's more breath than anything, and from his lips, it almost sounds like a prayer.
"Hey Hope," she says. Her voice is soft and clogged with emotion, but she doesn't mind. The final knot within her untwists.
Hope hurls himself at her with enough force to rattle her busted ribs. She winces and Snow gasps. Hope just trembles against her, mutters wet, sobbing words at the juncture of shoulder and neck. She puts her good arm around him and holds on hard. She feels jagged knot of his shoulder blade pressed into her forearm, the knobs of his spine against her fingertips. Snow scoots back next to her, puts a hand on Hope's back and one around Lightning's shoulders.
And for a moment, they get to be a family again.
Hope mutters a constant litany of unintelligible nonsense into her collarbone and she smoothes a hand through his hair, feels the last of the fear slough off like dead skin. There's a peace welling within her now, here in the circle of their makeshift family and she's reluctant to break it. Still, she needs to know what he's saying. She hums a questioning, "huh?" at Hope and he backs off a bit, leaving a moist spot from a combination of spit and tears against her skin. It cools and dries when the air brushes against it.
"I knew it," he chokes, swallows. Snow pats his back and Hope and Snow share a knowing nod. "I knew it," Hope repeats.
"Knew what?" Lightning is lost. She meets Snow's eyes over Hope's head but the 'Hero' is unreadable. He gives nothing away.
Hope looks at her with wide, adoring eyes. "I knew you'd come for me." He presses his face back to her neck and lets out one shuddering sob. "I knew it."
She tightens her grip on Hope and makes a promise that she hopes she'll never have to break even as she knows that one day she will.
"I'll always come for you, Hope."
TBC...
Action ahead! And more answers! (I'm getting to the crux here, I swear it).
So, no cliffhanger this time! I have to admit, this chapter was difficult to write because I was trying to figure out how to deal with the reunion. It's been 7 chapters since I split them up, but probably about 150 pages. So, figuring how to handle it was tough.
Let me know what you think.