Remembrance
As he stood in the lifeless desert, Zidane sighed. Lost once more, he thought.
Then something came to him.
He remembered how Kuja and Necron had cared for him when he was injured, at a time like this...
What was he thinking? He didn't recall anything like that ever happening. Kuja had always been Zidane' rival, even when they were small children...
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Zidane and Kuja, no more than five, were enjoying their childhood, playing a lively game of "Heroes and Villains".
"Slash slash!" the young, blond Genome shouted as he pantomimed slaying his brother with a wooden stick. Kuja, a rather frail child, fell to the ground and had a small, yet painful slash of crimson across his arm.
"Oh, sorry Kuja!"
The silver-haired child remained on the floor, his gaze downwards.
"Someday... Someday I'm gonna be the best. Sometime I'll win this game. And when that time comes, it's for keeps."
Zidane stared at his brother, awed at his ranting brother's peculiar behavior.
"Promise me Zidane. Promise me, when we grow up, that we will do this again, for real."
"What?"
"Promise me."
"A-Alright, Kuja, I promise. One day I'll fight you. And I'll win"
Kuja got up from his prone position and walked off, saying nothing.
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"But how did I remember that?" Zidane said, talking to no one but himself and the ever-listening audience of the wind and sand. "I have no memories of a past with Kuja..."
The dim memory, the falsification in the back of his mind, began to grow. Days passed, and soon Zidane was utterly under this mysterious phenomenon's power. Regularly now, the memories, produced by some unkown source, came into his mind, but there was something in his subconscious that prevented him from fully acknowlwedging them as truth. The memories sought to erase this. Frequently Zidane felt the battle being waged inside his head, the few rebels, the tiny light in his mind holding memories of the past, being bombarded by the vicious, ryhtmic assaults of the new, evil memories.
He saw tiny lights in the village ahead, and for a reason not entirely in his realm of understanding, began a slow plod towards it.
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Following the tracks was exhilirating and heartbreaking at the same time.
Garnet and Beatrix, overyjoyed at finding Zidane's light footprints, began following them. They didn't know what to think as they saw the strange, ratlike tracks which later accompanied the Genome's footprints. However, they did occasionally find odd things:Dead, yet oddly uneaten desert animals, places where birds refused to fly, areas where the sand was dark as ebony...
Then Garnet found signs of a scuffle in the sand, and the obviously-swiftly-made tracks of the wanderer who had accompanied Zidane, followed by the monstrous feet of the sandmen. She, having begun developing a resistance to outwardly showing her pain, cried within her soul.
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Zidane felt his knife slid into the man's eye, bringing forth a river of bloodshed. The light in his mind didn't know why he was doing this, but he had an overwhelming desire for revenge upon those who had wronged him.
He had horrible memories, memories of these people falsely accusing him, stealing from him, shooting at him with arrows, and even trying to hang him once, for no reason at all.
His eyes burned with insurmountable hatred for those who had sinned against Him, master of all Gaia.
Children, the elderly, the sick, the unarmed, the fleeing, all fell before his insane wrath as he slashed through them like a farmer cutting wheat.
Vomitting on the ground, the tiny part of his mind that was still sane, disgusted at this terrible, pointless tragedy, started to fight back with a renewed vigor. No... he said in his mind, at first a small whisper, then escalating into a crazy shout, until finally he screamed, feeling as if his lungs would burst from the wrongness of it all, "NO!!!"
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Garnet reached forward, trying to comfort her seemingly-comatose long lost lover, her delicate, feminine face wet with salty tears, but Beatrix held her back. Only Zidane and Beatrix understood that this was Zidane's battle, that no one else could fight it for him, or even offer the smallest amount of help.
Zidane suffered in silence.