Disclaimer: No!!! I am an impoverished fanwriter who makes
nothing off the FF series which belong to Squaresoft!!! There.
Dedication Time: To Bubba for making Seifer behave and to Malice for being a great expert in Seifer-ology. Thanks, guys, for being my inspirations.
The Birth Of A Dream
There isn't much I remember when I try to think back to my childhood. When I close my eyes at night and try to recall what little is left of my memories, the sound of the sea starts playing in my ears-waves splashing against sand on a faraway beach. I see the beach now and not far from it, a lighthouse. There is a small house nearby as well. In that house there are children, all young, all orphans. I was one of those orphans in that stone house by the sea so many years ago.
"Matwyn?" I hear a little girl call out for our guardian whom we only knew as Matron. If the orphanage was our world then Matron was its center. She took us in, fed us, clothed us and most of all, loved us. We never had any doubt of that for we could see it in her eyes, the way they would cloud over in worry or grief when we were hurt or ill and how they crinkled up at the corners when we made her laugh.
Then there was Sis. She was a little older than everyone else, so we treated her like a big sister. She was nice and all, but she always seemed to be always looking out for this one particular kid. Maybe it was just that kid always hanging on to her, which made me kind of sick. I mean, he followed her around like some dog and when she left, he would just mope and wait at the door. Squall definitely didn't make much of a good impression on me.
He wasn't the only one who ticked me off. The other kids got on my nerves as well. I remember how Zell just started crying when I pushed him a little. Heck, I'd done the same thing to Selphie who was much smaller and at least she pushed back. It just motivated me to push him more, see if he would ever learn to stop crying but he never did. All he would do was scream or hide behind Matron.
Selphie was alright but she bored me like heck with her endless stream of chatter and hopping around like a chocobo on speed. Irvine hung out with her the most. I ignored him mostly because he was so damn boring. Quistis was prissy and uptight, seriously Matron never nagged us as much as she did.
I may not have always gotten along with them, but they put up with me. We were all the family we had left after all. I wouldn't have cared if they'd all shunned me or left me out of their games so long as Matron stayed with me. She was the only one I looked up to and she meant more to me than anyone else in that house. Matron wasn't just our guardian, she was special; I sensed that and what I was to see proved that to me beyond a doubt.
She had gone running around looking for Squall who had went off on another quest to find Sis. It just made me want to kill him, seeing how much trouble and pain he was giving her. Looking at her so distraught and worried probably triggered some jealousy in me. I wouldn't be a damn fool to go leave her side but I wondered: if I did, would she come after me too?
Then some strange dude appeared outside and Matron was asking him if he had seen Squall, before some freaky things started happening. Some weird lady just appeared out of nowhere and it looked as if the strange guy was going to chop her into pieces. Matron came between the two and something weirder happened. The lady just started disappearing and Matron fell to the ground for a few moments. That man in black helped her up and I couldn't make out everything they were saying but I did find out that the lady and Matron were both sorceresses.
After they talked a bit, the man disappeared but not before Squall had come back. He hadn't a clue what had happened. Seeing all that got me thinking all sorts of things. Like why Matron had never told us she was a sorceress and why being a sorceress was such a big deal. I never told Matron what I saw since I guessed she would have been disturbed by my knowing when it changed nothing about the way I felt about her but that I regarded her with awe.
Just after that, I came across a video someone had donated to the orphanage about some sorceress and her knight. After watching, it dawned on me that sorceresses were powerful people but in spite of that, they needed to be protected by brave knights. Though I had forgotten so much of my childhood, that image was branded in my mind- of valor as a knight and winning the admiration and gratitude of the one I protected. Maybe if the GFs had managed to erase all memory of that dream, things would have turned out differently.
I did end up Matron's knight but not in the way I had originally intended. That one last fantasy fulfilled but to the cost of so many lives and an infamy that will take a long time to die down. If it ever does, but how many people can actually say they've lived a dream out to the end?