The loss of someone leaves her rigid and hardly breathing. Words are bouncing through the air again and again but they make barely more sense than they did the first time she heard them. Her eyes rest on the threadbare but comfortable bed in the corner.
"He was too young"
They rove towards the stained bandage lying on the bedside table, the only visible sign of decay and disease that churns beneath the cities stew pot lid.
"…got to his brain"
Vaguely she notices the blackness from the stain on the bandage begins to ooze onto the wooden table. She must clean that up, she thought dully as she watched the seepage spread. So ignoring the words she pulled a rag out of her belt, walked over and began to methodically clean the stain, with the ease of years spent practising the same motion over and over and over. Her muscles are used to it, but after a long day of work they ache slightly. The pain is welcome.
"Very quickly, I'm afraid"
She finally understood Cloud and Vincent. Until now she thought penance and atonement were flat paper words written in a fading grey ink. They had been ways to mope, self indulgent and childish ways of grasping onto what was unstoppable, unreturnable. Now, however she saw them for what they were. A hindsight honour, pain and grief roaring over what damn well could have been finished before it had begun. Penance was the art of receiving forgiveness from the dead. The dead that, unlike Aeris, remained untalkable to. Their white faces stern and unforgiving forever and ever and yet still you try.
"Not much of a chance"
The beauty of it is the unattainability of it, knowing that you can't make it up, that you screwed up and it will be written somewhere, your sins for everyone to see. And of course such heinous sins should not be private, blame was another beauteous facet of atonement.
"nothing you could do"
Idiots, idiots. Of course there was. She could have done anything. She could have walked up the stairs and not seen his frosty pale skin fail to move. She could have seen a wry grin on his face, heard a laugh. She could have made it so that it all went away – the decay of disease. She could have prayed, have asked the cetra for help. Surely for her part in saving the planet she was owed something.
"At least he was in no pain"
Owed a life?
"All we could do"
But the planet didn't work that way, she thinks bitterly. No amount of goodness could bring back the dead. Resurrection was unimportant. A small girl stood in the doorway, crying and clenching her fists. A girl who was owed a mother, a girl who was owed a childhood and forced to grow up amongst the fog of second hand smoke, the clink of glasses and the leers of strange men. Somewhere a blond man sat, owed a friend, owed a girl and owed a hero. Unfulfilled.
In a dingy bar in Edge four people in blue suits were owed their innocence, and a clean slate free from distrust. Denied. And so many more. A caped man owed a woman and fifty years of his life. A princess owed her freedom, a captain owed an airship, a leader owed an arm. A creature owed his family. A SOLDIER owed his sanity. A best friend owed his breath.
A flowergirl owed her life.
But the world does not repay its debt to us, merely taxes us further until we are drained to the marrow. A small boy lay curled on a yellow and orange bed, owed seventy more years. Not granted.
And still the planet turned.
"Denzel?"