"That's it," Hope says, staring out over the inlet. We stand on a tall cliffside, shielding our eyes from the sunlight as is reflects off the water. The outskirts of the city are as ugly as always, marked with the greens and blues of the military. It was always so easy to slip past soldiers who had no fear of danger; now, they're keeping an eye out for l'Cie fugitives.
"Palumpolum," I mutter, longing to see my hometown behind the tall ridge of the mountains that divide the rest of the world from the city.
"That's where you live, right?" Light asks, resting a hand on her hip. Hope steps closer to the edge, eyes aglow with familiarity. "We'll stop in when we get there."
"No." Hope shakes his head. "We're l'Cie now, and no one's there but my dad. Even Amarhi doesn't have anyone." My heart sinks, and for a moment, I forget to be levelheaded like Light taught me.
"Hope, if my dad was alive, I'd do anything see him again," I insist, resting a hand on his back. He shrugs me away.
"You need to let him know what happened," Lightning adds, her voice soft. Empathetic, even.
"We need to move," he corrects, heading down the hill.
We hurry into the woods, winding our way through the trees, over the rocks, and occasionally sliding on dry brush. Hope slows down enough for me to lead the way, and I do so gladly, wandering slightly to the west until I find the shore that lines the forest and leads, in one direction, to Palumpolum. The other direction would take us to the Waterscape. The scent of the woods is more than welcome—I find it odd that after all the anger and sadness and heartbreak I poured into this path, it still feels more welcome than my home ever did. Nature is what I wanted more than skyscrapers and high-end fashion.
"We're getting close," Hope says, lifting his nose into the air. "I can smell the city."
"Yeah, me too."
"Smell the city?" Lightning repeats. Hope shrugs.
"Yeah. I don't know how to describe it."
"Where are you from?" I ask, glancing at Light over my shoulder.
"Bodhum," she answers, looking through the trees to the water. "We don't have as much mud on our beaches."
"Good thing this isn't a beach," I retort, tossing a stone into the water. "Just a path along a bay."
"Is that how you know where to go?" Hope asks. I shrug.
"That, and I'm not stupid enough to go backwards after seeing this from such a high vantage point."
"… Yeah."
"I didn't mean that you're stupid," I add quickly, feeling my face go red. "Just that… You'll figure out someday."
"I won't have to."
"Right…"
We march through the rest of the forest, and as we near the outskirts of the city, I keep my head low and watch the light beams that shoot through the trees morph as Hope steps through them. The trees clear abruptly, and we find ourselves in plain sight of the soldiers that pace the dock. They've tripled their security. Light motions for us to run and we sprint toward the nearest cover—a stack of covered crates. Hope kneels, peeking around the edge of the boxes to watch the soldiers gather.
"We can make it," he says in a hushed voice. "Get to the station, and board the train for Eden."
"You think it's still running?" Light asks.
"Well, if it isn't, we'll make it run."
"Then punch straight into the heart of the Sanctum?" Light scoffs. "Now you're thinking like a Pulse l'Cie."
"Well, this is Operation Nora," I tease, nudging Hope with the tip of my shoe. He shakes his head.
"It's not just Snow I'm after. The Sanctum's gotta pay, too." What about Cid? I bite my tongue, but Light still looks back at me. Hope grabs her hand and tugs. "Hey, you're the one who said we had to fight. Every minute we waste, we're tempting fate."
"Look," I interrupt, pointing toward a discrete entrance ahead. I can just barely see it peeking through the untrimmed foliage. "There're some underground tunnels over there. People used to play in them when I was a kid."
"You're still a kid," Light mutters.
"I used to," Hope jumps in. "No one uses that entrance anymore, so not even the army knows about it. We can sneak in under their noses."
"Sounds good." Lightning nods, looking down at him.
"Great! Here we go."
With that, he leads the way forward, running to the next stack of crates. I hang back, waiting for a soldier to pass with my breath held deep in my chest until I feel the time is right. Lightning crosses her arms, watching the guards pace in circles.
"Huh. No more rivalries. PSICOM's brought in the Guardian Corps."
"Recognize anyone?" I ask, peeking around Hope and watching the familiar yellow and white uniforms march by.
"No. Do you?"
"No."
"Good. Let's keep it that way. Who knows what your brother will do when he finds out you're involved in this."
"Honestly, he wouldn't be surprised," I mutter, shaking my head. Hope huffs out a short laugh.
"You're that much of a troublemaker?"
"You would've hated me before all this," I reply, grinning.
"Stay focused," Light butts in. "Where's this entrance?"
"There's an old drainage pipe," Hope says. "We can use it to avoid being seen."
"How do you know that?" I demand, bewildered. He shrugs, smug.
"Dunno. Guess I was one of those kids."
We scurry from crate to crate, keeping our heads low and our feet quiet. Hope runs a little too far and I grab the back of his handkerchief in a desperate attempt to keep him unseen. His abrupt choking sound catches the sound of a nearby guard. I curse under my breath, tugging him along and motioning for Light to retreat. As the guard comes around the side of the box, I panic, searching for anywhere to hide. Go up.
Taking a deep breath, I release Hope and crawl up on top of the crate, ducking beneath the tarp that covers it. Hope runs after Light, just barely missing the soldier that strolls past. I peek beneath the edge of the cloth, watching him wave his gun back and forth as he searches for the source of the sound. Finally, he mutters something under his breath and walks away. Breathing a sigh of relief, I slip back down to the ground and rejoin the others inside the drainage pipe, where I can finally dust the splinters off my clothes.
"All clear?" Light asks.
"Yeah." I nod, jerking my head toward the tunnel. "Watch your head. I don't remember this being so short." But they're still a lot taller than me.
Light ducks her head and leads the way through the pipes, keeping her footsteps slow so that the soldiers don't hear us scurrying around like rats in the walls, and we follow suit. Light pours in from grates above our heads and cracks in the concrete. It doesn't look like these pipes have been used for anything in years. Finally, we come to the end of the rusty path and it opens back up to the outside. Quickly, we climb up the steep rock that divides Palumpolum from its outer gates, turning to find a rusted staircase leading the rest of the way up. Even though there's a laid path here, there's not a single soldier in sight. Frowning, I glance back up at the sun to feel its warmth one last time before heading into the underground tunnels. He used to tell me about this place. Promised we'd play there one day. My chest constricts and I take a deep breath. Too late for that now.
"Wow," Hope says, looking around the giant tunnel with awe. "It looks exactly the same."
"Nostalgia?" I ask. He dares to crack a real smile for the first time.
"Yeah. Used to play down here with my friends all the time." He adjusts the band over his brand carefully before looking at me. "Did you ever know anyone named Kai or Elida?"
"No. We were in two different districts, remember?" I shake my head, pausing when the mouth of the tunnel opens into the full underground.
At its very core is a Sanctum fal'Cie, glowing bright enough to illuminate the entire passage. Floating carriers drift all around to carry supplies from one segment to the next, constantly moving. From here, it's easy to see the glow of the exit across the way. Below, immeasurable depths of water splash around, constantly moving to provide the city with fresh water. It looks exactly how it did in my school textbooks, but somehow, being here is a hundred times more magical.
We climb down the side of the entrance to reach the depths of the underground tunnel, faced with a steel path that's lined with dim lights to keep us moving in the right direction. Lightning pauses to look back, staring up at the mouth of the tunnel with her sword ready in her hand. I can't help but smile at her weariness and Hope suppresses a grin, jerking his head toward the path.
"Don't worry, Light, it'll be fine. Only kids like me know about that entrance."
"They'll find it," she insists, coming closer as she keeps an eye on it. "They'll call in a team and canvas the whole tunnel system."
"Then let's get a move on," I cut in, heading toward the end of the walkway. "But he's right; we have time. Even I couldn't find this until now." Light scoffs, shakes her head, and follows.
"Where's this thing come out, anyway?"
"Well, it… I don't really know for sure," Hope admits. I turn to shoot him a pointed look as I wait for a carrier to drift by.
"You mean to tell me you left the city every time you wanted to come here? Must've been a pain."
"There didn't use to be so many guards."
"You got that right," I mutter, peering down into the water below. I point to the fal'Cie. "Automated nutriculture, right?"
"Yeah," he nods. "I think I remember learning about that in school."
"Looks like I remembered something. I'm almost disappointed in myself."
Finally, the carrier I was waiting for pauses at the edge and we hop on, slowly drifting to the next piece of the tunnel. I wish these rotated around the room instead of going back and forth. It would make this a lot faster. As we step off, the only route we have left passes the fal'Cie. The beams of golden light shooting from its core nearly blind me from time to time, but it's still fascinating to look at.
"What if it can tell we're Pulse fal'Cie?" I murmur. Hope shrugs.
"It probably already can, but what would we want with a food-production fal'Cie?"
"Could starve the city out."
"By cutting all resources?" Light shakes her head. "We wouldn't be able to even if we tried our best. This guy doesn't care what we're up to as long as we leave him alone."
"What's its name, anyway?" I ask, digging for information I know I never learned. As long as Dad denounced it as useless, I didn't care.
"Carbuncle, I think," Hope answers, toying with the fingers of his gloves. "One of our enemies now."
"Even though it provided for us our whole lives," I sigh. "It's like turning against the ones who raised you."
"It's an automated machine, not your parents," Lightning retorts, turning and leading the way in the other direction.
"Why don't we use it as a landmark?" Hope asks, hurrying to keep up. "That way we don't get turned around."
"I'd say that's a good idea, but it's in the middle of the room, Hope," I tease, watching the porcelain arms of the fal'Cie rotate.
The floor alternates between thick green glass and textured metal. The walls, if there are any in certain portions, are lined with rails to aid with the transport of large goods. Tall, greenish monsters wander about aimlessly, but the hard hats secured to their heads cover their eyes and flash with beaming red lights. Tamed and trained to help humans. Interesting. The stench surrounding them is almost unbearable, though, so we hurry on, winding through long corridors and waiting for drifting carriers to move us from one point to the next. A long line of locked crates leads to another open circle of glass. Hope walks to its edge, staring at the fal'Cie we've left behind us.
"Look at us: Pulse l'Cie, using a Sanctum fal'Cie to tell us where we're going. Sort of strange," he muses. Except we haven't used the fal'Cie for reference once…
"Not really," Lightning argues, looking back at the beaming light. "We've relied on them our whole lives. The food we eat, light and water, it's all from the fal'Cie. You know, I think Cocoon was really built for them."
"Out of self-preservation?" I cross my arms, cocking my head to the side. "They provide us with resources we need to survive, and we provide them with duties and playthings."
"A symbiotic relationship," Light mutters. "I think we're more like leeches. Parasites."
"You think?" Hope wanders closer to the edge, eyes narrowed on our light source. "They protect us, nurture us. They take care of, well, normal people. They treat us like we're special, almost like…" He claps his hands, finally grasping his thought. "Like we're pets!"
"Hm." Something changes in Light's demeanor and I stand back, anxious to see where she's going with this. We're not cutting off a whole city's food supply. We're after the Sanctum, not the people, right? "To them, we are just pets. That's it. Now it makes sense. I've been so blind…" Her hands curl into fists and Hope shoots me confused look.
"Well, it really could be like anything else, too," I interrupt, trying to change the subject. She shakes her head.
"No, he's right. I was born into a fal'Cie world, raised on a fal'Cie leash. It was the only life I knew how to live. When it was taken from me, I was completely lost. Without a master to follow, my life had no purpose." You are your own master now that you've been cut from your ties. "Hope, Amarhi, listen to me."
"Okay…" I take a step closer to Hope, uncomfortable under her wild stare.
"This l'Cie curse, it took everything from me. My future. My dreams. I didn't want to think. So I fought instead. As long as I was fighting, nothing else was real. I was running away." Just like Sazh and Vanille. "And you… You got swept along with me."
"But Light, I don't understand," Hope says, frowning. Her expression melts away into something defeated, something entirely different from anything we've ever seen from her before. Something real.
"Operation Nora is over."
"What?" we demand in unison, completely and utterly confused. That bitter feeling of betrayal threatens to choke me yet again, a spiked collar around my neck that threatens to tighten at any moment without warning.
"I…"
"No!" Hope shouts, stomping a foot on the ground before storming toward the soldier. "You told me to fight!"
"I made a mistake!"
"But… You can't do this." Hope draws back, shoulders slumped. "You can't just build something up like that, then abandon us." I take a deep breath to calm myself. Our plan, the resolve that kept our chins up and our bodies moving, is gone. We'll just have to start over. But it's never that easy. Is it?
"Listen." Lightning turns and walks toward us, grabbing our shoulders and pushing us together so she can look at us sternly. "Listen to me. I will not abandon you. I won't."
And for some reason, I believe her, nodding. Even adults get it wrong. I can't help but think of my parents' faces as they left me behind all those months ago, or how Cid looked the last time I saw him, beaten down and bruised by the weight of the world. It's harder to lead than it looks. Hope doesn't say anything, letting his gaze fall away from hers as he waits for her to let us go. And she does, stepping away and glancing back at the fal'Cie.
"We're going to make it," she promises. "We just have to get out of here."
"I can't just throw in the towel," he says under his breath. "How am I just supposed to forget about all this?" I shake my head, starting to follow Light.
"She doesn't want you to. We just need to decide what we're after."
"I'm after revenge," he snaps, pushing past me. I sigh, catching my balance and watching him go. So moody.
HEY PEEPS! JUST A LITTLE HEADS UP: IF YOU'RE A FAN OF FF TYPE-0/AGITO, I JUST UPLOADED MY NEW STORY FOR IT! STORYLINE W A TWIST IN MOTHER'S PLANS ;) THAT'S ALL HAHA
