Final Fantasy VII and all related names and characters are property of Square.

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Displacement ~ by Amariƫ

~part two~
"photographic memory"

Morning dawned cold, grey and wet. Cursing her empty stomach, Alice rolled out of her warm bed and stumbled to the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal. "Thank God it's Saturday," she moaned, getting back into bed with her breakfast, "because I feel terrible. Better stay home today. Don't go out."

She spent the morning sleeping fitfully and watching television. Around one o' clock, her friend Tina (at least she thought Tina was her friend; she could have been a mortal enemy for all she knew) knocked on the door.

"I brought you some cookies," she said, placing a lumpy package on the kitchen counter. Alice was suitably grateful, made small talk, and then Tina left. When she was gone, Alice ate three cookies and went back to sleep. Afterwards, she would always say it had been the cookies...

She was sitting in her own room with Tina, looking at stacks of old photos. But though they had Alice in them, the people with her were people she'd never seen, save Tina herself, in a skimpy outfit Alice would never have suspected her of. A massive black man, carrying a tiny girl on his shoulders... A teenage girl sticking her tongue out at a tough-looking man in a flight jacket... a mechanical cat... a flame-red animal of indeterminate species... She'd never met them, never spoken to them; but there she was, playing with the child, hugging the animal. Tina kept up a constant stream of comment, which she tuned out. Something about these images screamed at her, You've lost them! You've got to get them back! Remember! Remember! She shut the insistent voices out of her mind.

She shuffled through another stack, and at the bottom found another new face; a blond, spiky-haired young man, rather blurry. He must have been the one behind the camera most of the time... As she looked at it, the dizziness crept up on her again; his face was important, and she should know it, but she couldn't remember...

It's too hard! I can't! I can't remember! Don't show it to me!

Tina looked up, alarmed, and caught her as she fell screaming from the chair. Her world went black with little fireworks, like the sky on a holiday night... then completely dark.

When she woke up, she was lying under the coffee table.

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author's notes: Are you starting to see what's going on? Like I said before, this is a bit of an experiment, so reviews telling me how it is are needed desperately.