Woohoo! FF.net lives! It breathes! It updates! :)
This part features a poem, called "Urban Angel", not written my me but by my friend, Mackenzie Kimmel. I had read it recently before writing this and it unconsciously inspired me. After reading them again together I realized how they could fit together. I didn't purposely write this to match, but it worked out rather well, and it's an awesome poem, so I included it. Hope you like. (Kenzie, don't kill me *hugs* :) Any comments on it will be dutifully passed along.
Show you care, send a bear... and a review. ^^
---------------
~Hourglass~
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10:30 AM
(He said)
Welcome to Balamb, population 317 humans and one angel (visiting).
At first neither of us says anything. There's sort of a hush, even in the town. Balamb is always a sleepy little seaside town, nothing much happening even during the day, and it's like a blanket has settled comfortably over us, a blanket of contentment and relaxation, wrapping us up in each other. I knew we could get along if only we could overcome our instinctive reaction to bicker. The peace that this town is awash in laps over us, smoothing down rough edges, letting us exist smoothly.
We're too early for the train, but I don't mind; for these few minutes all sense of urgency is gone. I know it's artificial, I know it will wear off, but I want to enjoy it while it's here. Hyne knows peace will be in rare enough supply soon enough.
In the meanwhile we've time to spare, it seems, for the first time in too long, for the last time in even longer. We wander around aimlessly, meandering down the cobblestone streets. I know where we'll end up, though. If you're not making for the train station Balamb is like a one-way street: there's only one place to end up. One destination. The pier.
Wooden boards rattle beneath our feet. Each clatter brings back a silver-edged memory all its own: Raijin fishing, Fujin kicking him off the pier, pausing in the shadow of Garden to watch with longing eyes and make the first promise to myself that somehow I'll make right what I've ruined. This isn't FH but for a moment I can't tell the difference. The towns may be different but the piers might as well be twins, built from the same model, unaltered as yet by the ravages of the Sorceress War. For a breathless moment I can't tell the difference. Vertigo touches me as the sky seems to swirl with all its different blues. For a second I'm back in FH, Raijin's laughter and Fujin's lingering in my ears. Nothing's changed, I've accomplished nothing but destruction. The crushing weight of failure falls on me again.
Then Quistis shifts slightly against my arm and the difference comes forcibly home to me. I feel almost dizzy with the sudden weightlessness of knowing that that future can still be prevented. That scene exists now only in my memory, and for all its poignancy I'll do anything to keep it that way. It has crossed from reality to fantasy. Erased from existence. Now is all the memory I will have.
Will it be worth it?
It's up to me to do it the right way, this time.
It's funny. The crushing weight of failure wasn't heavier to carry than this.
10:31 AM
(She said)
My brain is fuzzing out; it's like the feeling I get when I stay up all night. By morning I'm zoned out, just feeling, listening, nothing important going on upstairs. Thoughts and memories glide lazily through my mind, wandering the halls of my past, trying to come to terms with that which can never be forgotten.
The sun is glinting off the waters of the bay, turning them colors Hyne never intended. Gold, crimson and aquamarine crest with the waves, giving way to the deeper, purer colors of midnight blue, muted silver, forest green, swirling beneath it, keeping their secrets. Like he is. Secrets. The sea has always drawn me. But not enough to break the pull of SeeD. The desire to become something more.
/twisted aluminum foil halo
/tye-dye tattered wings
/and a black lace slip
/that hangs limply on your hips
/caught on the curve of your swollen lips
I felt that I wasn't worth anything by myself. It wasn't that anyone had said that to me, or made me feel that way. I made me feel that way. Somewhere between remembrance and forgetting the idea became entrenched in my mind, the belief that only by overachieving could I have value. All the negative emotions I harbored, loss, depression, confusion, I could make them all go away if I only tried harder, got better. Then came the other emotions. The positive emotions. Desire, crushes, love. They threatened to shatter the idea of my own unworthiness to which I had clung for so long. And rather than let that idea go, I adapted the new emotions to fit. I believed that in order to deserve them, I had to measure up. I convinced myself that no man would want me unless I was the best.
/eyes the same hollow hue of a highschool pool
/surrounded in a mist of black eyeliner
/smudged heavy like a fresh bruise
I tried so hard. I was practically the poster child for Garden. When that didn't work I believed I wasn't feminine enough. The only time I ever really wore makeup was when I was trying to break through to Squall. Hells, I tried it all. I wanted him to notice me. I wanted him to realize. On some level, I think I wanted him to remember.
I may have been using him but part of me really did love him.
/calling out "hello" and "stay"
/you know girl, he left anyway
It did hurt when he didn't love me back. It may only be a small piece of my heart but it was like a blow when I realized that he would only ever be my younger brother. At that time I didn't know I could even have that. I thought I'd lost him completely. Why pretend? I'd believed I loved him for- Hyne, nearly six years. And the fact that part of the affection really was for him only made it ache worse. That can't be gotten over so quickly. I don't know, now, what drastic things I might have done. When I woke up this morning I was in pieces, and the adhesive I'd been using ever since my arrival at Garden had finally lost its staying power. I would have tried anything to make it go away. Alcohol had already failed. Who can know, now, what might have come next?
/needle tracks like footprints in the snow
/white skin pulled around, like a loose blanket
/I keep expecting you to take off
I wanted to shed the mask I'm wearing but that didn't mean a thing. I've wanted to shed it since the day I first put it on. My will wasn't enough. I needed help. I never had it. I've been lost all my life. I'm not the only one, only a fool believes themselves alone in their troubles. Being an orphan may have given me a head start on loneliness but the children who come to SeeD are not normal or healthy emotionally. Becoming a trained killer is the last choice, the last chance, of those who are unwanted elsewhere. What parent would want their child to be what we are? We are proud, we are the best, but in becoming so we lost something vital of ourselves. The first time you kill you cross a line that can never be re-crossed.
I wanted to be different, I wanted to be special, and when I got what I wanted I was even more miserable that I had been before. I didn't understand why this was so, didn't understand how to change it. I could only cling more tightly to the false images around me. Being an Instructor, being the youngest SeeD, being respected, these things took on a meaning to me far above and beyond what they should. They defined me. They were the only things about me I believed could offer any worth at all.
/angel, always proud of your tie-dye tattered wings
/And your broken halo, can't you tell
/it's only aluminum foil after all
I woke up this morning desperate and alone. I've been upside down so many times these past few days that I might as well be turning cartwheels, flipping carelessly through time. I didn't care. At that point I would have done anything, recklessly, regardlessly. This is the result. I'm standing on Balamb's pier, AWOL from Garden, off to go rescue a mother I never knew I had, with a man I never knew I loved. My greatest failure. My greatest success. He has in him what I never did. More than the ability. More than the power. Belief in himself. Belief in his dreams. Confidence.
/baby don't you know
/I can build you a new one
I believe in him more strongly than I ever did in Squall. And that is what convinces me that this is reality. I always wanted to help Squall. I want Seifer to help me. I believe he can give me that confidence. I believe he can make me believe. Not just in others. But in myself. And I need that so badly. It can make all the difference in myself. In my future.
10:33 AM
(He said)
The whistle of a train penetrates the mental fog we seem to have become wrapped in. My head tells me it's only the 1034 to Deling City but my body's reaction is pure instinct, adrenaline flooding my system. As if I'm not on enough of a high already. The peaceful interval is broken; I can feel each minute pressing on me with sharp-edged clarity, Hyne's hourglass slipping inexorably onwards, each grain of sand another weight we race to shoulder before the load becomes too heavy and we collapse, or the hourglass breaks, shards of glass everywhere reflecting all the possible futures in an instant, all of this contained in the sunlight reflecting off the single piece of green bottle glass newly broken on the shore.
I make myself sit down, trying to breathe. The urge to start running is overpowering. Not that it would help. If I thought running, right now, all the way to Timber, would get me there faster, I would do it in a second. This lack of movement tears at me, turning me ragged around the edges with pent-up energy and fear. Timing is everything. Arrival. And Squall has the drop on me. He's already in Timber. So many things could go wrong; I can't stop cataloging them in my head. The train could be slow. There could be too many other passengers or citizens, slowing us down. There will be guards at the comm tower; fighting them may take longer than it did last time. Deling may be in a different place. Once you change something it's like you've set off a chain reaction, dominoes clattering on each other, impersonally, uncaring of what they destroy in their path. An avalanche, started by something so little as dust sliding down the mountain, impossible to head off once it begins to descend. If we're late, if something goes wrong, if I'm not in the comm tower on time...
Hyne, please let me be in time.
Don't let my knowledge be in vain.
I saw into Ultimecia's mind at the end. The majority of the time I served her I truly didn't know it wasn't Matron. She wanted it that way, she twisted my mind around, but I still should have picked up on the clues. If I had, would I have been able to break free?
That is one theory that we shall never have to test. I, at least, will not be taken twice. But if she can't get me- if I'm not there first-- she will take him. She will. And he will not know enough to fight.
I saw Ultimecia's mind. I saw the future from whence she came. I saw the history she learned. I saw the Sorceress War from the perspective of the future. I saw the way things should have been. If I had not fallen to her. If events had taken their natural course. She wanted to change things so that she would not fall. So she came back earlier. Farther into the past. To change things earlier. To bring about the downfall of those who would destroy her.
Possessing Matron was no random act of chance. She knew full well who Edea Kramer was. Knew for whom she cared in her orphanage. She knew who *we* were. And she drove our insecurities, unconsciously, subtly, Matron probably never realized she was doing it. She knew who would defeat her. She was determined to stop it. To keep Squall and I from ever working together.
Hyne help us all, it worked. It worked.
She drove us to become rivals instead of brothers. To fight against each other instead of with each other. To scar each other, physically and emotionally, with hatred. And then, to make doubly sure that we would never, ever unite forces to defeat her, she took one of us as her knight.
It was my bad luck, that day in the Timber comm tower, that I was first on the scene.
She didn't care which of us she took.
It didn't matter in the end, for her defeat. She hadn't counted on Rinoa. Hadn't realized that her romance with Squall played just as vital a part in her defeat. And so she fell anyway. But along the way she accomplished her original intent: to ruin us, as a group, as a team, to destroy our solidarity and any chance we had of working together.
And now, not knowing that she is already doomed, that her plan is flawed at the core, she will try it, again, Hyne only knows how often this mobius loop in time has played itself out, only one edge, only one ending, leading only to repetition. To try, and fail, and try again, unknowing of your own fated failure. Snarling time and fate in its loops. Perhaps my return here, to prevent it, was less of an accident than I think. Perhaps it was less of my own design. Perhaps Hyne herself has tired of this farce. I don't care. If it works, if I can free us of this binding, I don't care who was behind it in the end.
But in order to do anything, I have to get there first. If I'm too late, because of these changes, Squall will become her knight in my stead. There will be no team. There will be no Rinoa. There will be nothing left to use against her.
And then Ultimecia very well may win.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heh heh.
Oooh, plot twist. Reason for urgency. Much fun. ^^v
*does a little review dance*
The button hasn't moved since the last time you clicked it! Go ahead, it doesn't bite!
This part features a poem, called "Urban Angel", not written my me but by my friend, Mackenzie Kimmel. I had read it recently before writing this and it unconsciously inspired me. After reading them again together I realized how they could fit together. I didn't purposely write this to match, but it worked out rather well, and it's an awesome poem, so I included it. Hope you like. (Kenzie, don't kill me *hugs* :) Any comments on it will be dutifully passed along.
Show you care, send a bear... and a review. ^^
---------------
~Hourglass~
---------------
10:30 AM
(He said)
Welcome to Balamb, population 317 humans and one angel (visiting).
At first neither of us says anything. There's sort of a hush, even in the town. Balamb is always a sleepy little seaside town, nothing much happening even during the day, and it's like a blanket has settled comfortably over us, a blanket of contentment and relaxation, wrapping us up in each other. I knew we could get along if only we could overcome our instinctive reaction to bicker. The peace that this town is awash in laps over us, smoothing down rough edges, letting us exist smoothly.
We're too early for the train, but I don't mind; for these few minutes all sense of urgency is gone. I know it's artificial, I know it will wear off, but I want to enjoy it while it's here. Hyne knows peace will be in rare enough supply soon enough.
In the meanwhile we've time to spare, it seems, for the first time in too long, for the last time in even longer. We wander around aimlessly, meandering down the cobblestone streets. I know where we'll end up, though. If you're not making for the train station Balamb is like a one-way street: there's only one place to end up. One destination. The pier.
Wooden boards rattle beneath our feet. Each clatter brings back a silver-edged memory all its own: Raijin fishing, Fujin kicking him off the pier, pausing in the shadow of Garden to watch with longing eyes and make the first promise to myself that somehow I'll make right what I've ruined. This isn't FH but for a moment I can't tell the difference. The towns may be different but the piers might as well be twins, built from the same model, unaltered as yet by the ravages of the Sorceress War. For a breathless moment I can't tell the difference. Vertigo touches me as the sky seems to swirl with all its different blues. For a second I'm back in FH, Raijin's laughter and Fujin's lingering in my ears. Nothing's changed, I've accomplished nothing but destruction. The crushing weight of failure falls on me again.
Then Quistis shifts slightly against my arm and the difference comes forcibly home to me. I feel almost dizzy with the sudden weightlessness of knowing that that future can still be prevented. That scene exists now only in my memory, and for all its poignancy I'll do anything to keep it that way. It has crossed from reality to fantasy. Erased from existence. Now is all the memory I will have.
Will it be worth it?
It's up to me to do it the right way, this time.
It's funny. The crushing weight of failure wasn't heavier to carry than this.
10:31 AM
(She said)
My brain is fuzzing out; it's like the feeling I get when I stay up all night. By morning I'm zoned out, just feeling, listening, nothing important going on upstairs. Thoughts and memories glide lazily through my mind, wandering the halls of my past, trying to come to terms with that which can never be forgotten.
The sun is glinting off the waters of the bay, turning them colors Hyne never intended. Gold, crimson and aquamarine crest with the waves, giving way to the deeper, purer colors of midnight blue, muted silver, forest green, swirling beneath it, keeping their secrets. Like he is. Secrets. The sea has always drawn me. But not enough to break the pull of SeeD. The desire to become something more.
/twisted aluminum foil halo
/tye-dye tattered wings
/and a black lace slip
/that hangs limply on your hips
/caught on the curve of your swollen lips
I felt that I wasn't worth anything by myself. It wasn't that anyone had said that to me, or made me feel that way. I made me feel that way. Somewhere between remembrance and forgetting the idea became entrenched in my mind, the belief that only by overachieving could I have value. All the negative emotions I harbored, loss, depression, confusion, I could make them all go away if I only tried harder, got better. Then came the other emotions. The positive emotions. Desire, crushes, love. They threatened to shatter the idea of my own unworthiness to which I had clung for so long. And rather than let that idea go, I adapted the new emotions to fit. I believed that in order to deserve them, I had to measure up. I convinced myself that no man would want me unless I was the best.
/eyes the same hollow hue of a highschool pool
/surrounded in a mist of black eyeliner
/smudged heavy like a fresh bruise
I tried so hard. I was practically the poster child for Garden. When that didn't work I believed I wasn't feminine enough. The only time I ever really wore makeup was when I was trying to break through to Squall. Hells, I tried it all. I wanted him to notice me. I wanted him to realize. On some level, I think I wanted him to remember.
I may have been using him but part of me really did love him.
/calling out "hello" and "stay"
/you know girl, he left anyway
It did hurt when he didn't love me back. It may only be a small piece of my heart but it was like a blow when I realized that he would only ever be my younger brother. At that time I didn't know I could even have that. I thought I'd lost him completely. Why pretend? I'd believed I loved him for- Hyne, nearly six years. And the fact that part of the affection really was for him only made it ache worse. That can't be gotten over so quickly. I don't know, now, what drastic things I might have done. When I woke up this morning I was in pieces, and the adhesive I'd been using ever since my arrival at Garden had finally lost its staying power. I would have tried anything to make it go away. Alcohol had already failed. Who can know, now, what might have come next?
/needle tracks like footprints in the snow
/white skin pulled around, like a loose blanket
/I keep expecting you to take off
I wanted to shed the mask I'm wearing but that didn't mean a thing. I've wanted to shed it since the day I first put it on. My will wasn't enough. I needed help. I never had it. I've been lost all my life. I'm not the only one, only a fool believes themselves alone in their troubles. Being an orphan may have given me a head start on loneliness but the children who come to SeeD are not normal or healthy emotionally. Becoming a trained killer is the last choice, the last chance, of those who are unwanted elsewhere. What parent would want their child to be what we are? We are proud, we are the best, but in becoming so we lost something vital of ourselves. The first time you kill you cross a line that can never be re-crossed.
I wanted to be different, I wanted to be special, and when I got what I wanted I was even more miserable that I had been before. I didn't understand why this was so, didn't understand how to change it. I could only cling more tightly to the false images around me. Being an Instructor, being the youngest SeeD, being respected, these things took on a meaning to me far above and beyond what they should. They defined me. They were the only things about me I believed could offer any worth at all.
/angel, always proud of your tie-dye tattered wings
/And your broken halo, can't you tell
/it's only aluminum foil after all
I woke up this morning desperate and alone. I've been upside down so many times these past few days that I might as well be turning cartwheels, flipping carelessly through time. I didn't care. At that point I would have done anything, recklessly, regardlessly. This is the result. I'm standing on Balamb's pier, AWOL from Garden, off to go rescue a mother I never knew I had, with a man I never knew I loved. My greatest failure. My greatest success. He has in him what I never did. More than the ability. More than the power. Belief in himself. Belief in his dreams. Confidence.
/baby don't you know
/I can build you a new one
I believe in him more strongly than I ever did in Squall. And that is what convinces me that this is reality. I always wanted to help Squall. I want Seifer to help me. I believe he can give me that confidence. I believe he can make me believe. Not just in others. But in myself. And I need that so badly. It can make all the difference in myself. In my future.
10:33 AM
(He said)
The whistle of a train penetrates the mental fog we seem to have become wrapped in. My head tells me it's only the 1034 to Deling City but my body's reaction is pure instinct, adrenaline flooding my system. As if I'm not on enough of a high already. The peaceful interval is broken; I can feel each minute pressing on me with sharp-edged clarity, Hyne's hourglass slipping inexorably onwards, each grain of sand another weight we race to shoulder before the load becomes too heavy and we collapse, or the hourglass breaks, shards of glass everywhere reflecting all the possible futures in an instant, all of this contained in the sunlight reflecting off the single piece of green bottle glass newly broken on the shore.
I make myself sit down, trying to breathe. The urge to start running is overpowering. Not that it would help. If I thought running, right now, all the way to Timber, would get me there faster, I would do it in a second. This lack of movement tears at me, turning me ragged around the edges with pent-up energy and fear. Timing is everything. Arrival. And Squall has the drop on me. He's already in Timber. So many things could go wrong; I can't stop cataloging them in my head. The train could be slow. There could be too many other passengers or citizens, slowing us down. There will be guards at the comm tower; fighting them may take longer than it did last time. Deling may be in a different place. Once you change something it's like you've set off a chain reaction, dominoes clattering on each other, impersonally, uncaring of what they destroy in their path. An avalanche, started by something so little as dust sliding down the mountain, impossible to head off once it begins to descend. If we're late, if something goes wrong, if I'm not in the comm tower on time...
Hyne, please let me be in time.
Don't let my knowledge be in vain.
I saw into Ultimecia's mind at the end. The majority of the time I served her I truly didn't know it wasn't Matron. She wanted it that way, she twisted my mind around, but I still should have picked up on the clues. If I had, would I have been able to break free?
That is one theory that we shall never have to test. I, at least, will not be taken twice. But if she can't get me- if I'm not there first-- she will take him. She will. And he will not know enough to fight.
I saw Ultimecia's mind. I saw the future from whence she came. I saw the history she learned. I saw the Sorceress War from the perspective of the future. I saw the way things should have been. If I had not fallen to her. If events had taken their natural course. She wanted to change things so that she would not fall. So she came back earlier. Farther into the past. To change things earlier. To bring about the downfall of those who would destroy her.
Possessing Matron was no random act of chance. She knew full well who Edea Kramer was. Knew for whom she cared in her orphanage. She knew who *we* were. And she drove our insecurities, unconsciously, subtly, Matron probably never realized she was doing it. She knew who would defeat her. She was determined to stop it. To keep Squall and I from ever working together.
Hyne help us all, it worked. It worked.
She drove us to become rivals instead of brothers. To fight against each other instead of with each other. To scar each other, physically and emotionally, with hatred. And then, to make doubly sure that we would never, ever unite forces to defeat her, she took one of us as her knight.
It was my bad luck, that day in the Timber comm tower, that I was first on the scene.
She didn't care which of us she took.
It didn't matter in the end, for her defeat. She hadn't counted on Rinoa. Hadn't realized that her romance with Squall played just as vital a part in her defeat. And so she fell anyway. But along the way she accomplished her original intent: to ruin us, as a group, as a team, to destroy our solidarity and any chance we had of working together.
And now, not knowing that she is already doomed, that her plan is flawed at the core, she will try it, again, Hyne only knows how often this mobius loop in time has played itself out, only one edge, only one ending, leading only to repetition. To try, and fail, and try again, unknowing of your own fated failure. Snarling time and fate in its loops. Perhaps my return here, to prevent it, was less of an accident than I think. Perhaps it was less of my own design. Perhaps Hyne herself has tired of this farce. I don't care. If it works, if I can free us of this binding, I don't care who was behind it in the end.
But in order to do anything, I have to get there first. If I'm too late, because of these changes, Squall will become her knight in my stead. There will be no team. There will be no Rinoa. There will be nothing left to use against her.
And then Ultimecia very well may win.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Heh heh.
Oooh, plot twist. Reason for urgency. Much fun. ^^v
*does a little review dance*
The button hasn't moved since the last time you clicked it! Go ahead, it doesn't bite!