Hmm? What? Oh sorry, I was thinking about something… So anyway, yeah I thought I'd lost Celes… What? What was I thinking about? Oh nothing. Nothing at all.

"Locke? Please, I'm so scared."

I was staring at the floor, but I had stopped sobbing. I felt something had happened, but I didn't know what. I had been sad, but something changed. What had just happened?

"Locke, please!" I looked up at her. I didn't understand. She looked at me and the terror was plain on her face.

I shook my head feeling slow. I didn't understand.

"Locke!" She was sobbing now and the tears welled up. She was lost in this horrible world I'd created. I wanted to hold her, I wanted to comfort her so badly. But I couldn't get any closer to her than I already was. If I came any nearer, I'd pass that threshold of fear and drive her away forever. I wanted to hold her so much, but I couldn't and it was tearing me apart.

"I'm sorry." I whispered. I turned my head away. I'd given up. There was nothing for me. Everything I had was gone. I would simply wait till I was nothing.

I felt an arm on my shoulder. It pulled at me gently…no, weakly. I could feel the hand trembling. I turned back to Celes. The terror she exuded just seemed to amplify. She was shaking her head erratically and her mouth spoke words with no sound coming out. At first I didn't understand, but then it hit me.

"No. No. No. No…"

All at once, I understood. She wasn't afraid of me, she was afraid of losing me. She needed me.

I held her. I held her tightly, as tightly as I possibly could and I felt her grip me. Her head rested on my chest and she wept openly.

"Thank you." She whispered.

I remained silent and simply held her. I felt a kind of purity of essence wash over me, as if I'd reached some sort of spiritual awakening. All the emotions I was feeling right then I understood. I could separate each individual sense of being and know it for what it was in it's pure form. I understood myself perfectly and I realized for the first time truly what Celes meant to me. But for the first time in my life, as I felt her hold me with such a desperate intensity, I realized what I meant to her.

I brought my head to rest on hers and stroked her hair softly as she wept.

"Shh… It's okay." I said in a comforting tone. "Everything's going to be all right now."

Her weeping slowed and she wiped away her tears before looking up at me.

"Is it finally over?" The wild fear was sitting at the edge of her voice.

"No." I said calmly and I felt her tighten up. I pushed her away and I knew what it would do, but I had to risk it. I brought my hand under her chin and pushed her head up so that she looked at me, looked straight into my eyes.

"But it's okay. The worst part is done. There's only one thing left to do and you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about it ever again."

"What do you mean?" She was so lost and I wasn't sure I could make her understand. But I had to make her feel secure. There was only one thing I could think of and I was suddenly hesitant to do it.

But I had no choice.

I continued to stare into her as I spoke. Now calm and comforting.

"I said I didn't come back till a year and a half later, and while that is true, it's also not. I never went back to that farm ever again and I never felt any desire to. During that year and a half, was the worst days of my life. With that act I was able to finally end that hatred that had been with me for so long. I never felt anything like that again. In its place came the horrible guilt of what I'd done, and the fear of it. Questions haunted me that I didn't know how to answer. How could I have been so cold? Why didn't I try something else? Anything else. What if I did it again? Could I do it again? What was I?

These questions had answers that were inside me, but I didn't know where to look till just now. But they were there. It was the questions with no answers that truly began to destroy me. What had happened to my father? Had he changed? Had he repented? Did he now deserve his fate? What if he had become a good person? Did he regret his past? Did he want to see me again? Say he as sorry? Was there another way? These were the questions that hurt me the most, that ate at my mind and soul. But I would never know the answers. I had destroyed those answers when I had destroyed my father. They would haunt me till I went mad.

A year and a half later, I ended up in Kohilingen. Maybe some deep primordial understanding drove me back home because it knew something I didn't. It really didn't matter, I was in no position to argue. I was on the brink of sanity. I was there, staring into the abyss, already diving forward. I wasn't gonna be able to come back anymore, not by myself. Then…"

I stopped there and I realized I something I'd tried to avoid was now gonna have to be dealt with. There was no time to stop, so I simply drove ahead. To Celes, I'm sure it was a just a minute hesitation, but it was much longer for me…hours even.

"I met Rachel. I bumped into her while trying to find shelter from a rain storm that had hit the town. She cried out in surprise and fear and dropped some food she'd been carrying. As soon as I saw it, I leaped to the ground, grabbed it and ran. It's how I had been living. After that day at the farm, I stopped becoming a thug. I avoided people, ran from them, all of them. I ate whatever I found, rummaging trash and other fouler things. I'd become an animal, but I was also becoming a mad animal. I grabbed what food I could in that instant and ran. She ran after me which is something no one had ever done before. In the small part of me that was still sane, I assumed it was because I had stolen her food. She cornered at the back of a house and that animal fear of being trapped was like a final push to destroy my sanity. Then she dropped the rest of the food she'd been carrying in front of me.

From then on she cared for me, much in the same way an child cares for wounded animal it has found in the forest. She gave me food, and clothes, and fashioned a place for me to sleep. But she did more than that. Just by being around her, I recovered my sanity. She brought me back. Reminded me that I was a human.

I had regained my sanity with her, but that meant nothing because the guilt that was it's cause still haunted me. I began to talk to her and that's how it started. I told her what I was feeling, but I made careful to not mention why. I told her my pains but hid their source. I didn't know what else to do, so I poured my soul out to her and merely hoped that somehow she could save me from my pain. She did and I fell in love with her. I fell in love because it made me forget."

I stopped there and waited, staring at the wall, too afraid to turn to Celes.

"Go on…" She said cautiously and I turned to her. The look on her face showed no understanding or connection to what I was feeling. She didn't know why I'd stopped. She didn't know what I was afraid of, wasn't even aware that I was afraid.

Suddenly it hit me that it didn't matter to her and I realized at how childish the fear really was. We were past that. We'd been past it for ages. The understanding came as its own kind of shock. But I continued on.

"But now I'm remembering. Don't you see? That's what this has always been about. That hatred, that maddening thing. What was it doing inside of me? I hated my father for what he did to me, but nothing I remember him doing to me could create that kind of hate. Something happened that I forgot, maybe I even forced myself to forget. It's where the hatred came from.

"But you said the hatred's gone."

"But not the guilt. I killed my father Celes, in the coldest of blood. It killed the hatred, but all that did was bring that guilt. The guilt is just as bad, if not worse because it works slower. It decays and it's only shown it's face in all these years till now, but it's always been there. I need to know Celes. I need to know why I did what I did if I'm to finally rid myself of all these demons I have inside."

I paused this time, but for a good reason. I had to tell her something that she probably would not understand. I didn't even fully understand it, but I had to let her know. I held her very close to me and stared into her eyes. I tried to look into them, through them and to the center of her. I had to let her know how important this was.

"But I need you to be there when it happens. You have to be there, beside me, when I go. I won't be able to come back without you. Not this time."

I saw her eyes widen with a new fear, one she hadn't thought of before.

"B-but, how do you know."

"I know." And I did.