Colors Of War, Chapter 7: The Right, The Wrong, And The Dead
"What? I'm to go to the boss again?" Diera pulled her tie knot down, tugging it loose. It wasn't that she wasn't fond of the Turk uniform, but the tie was a chore that she had yet to get used to. Why'd she get stuck with this stiff get anyway? Oh, strike that, she already knew. It came with that promotion. She was really starting to hate that promotion. Since when did her nice comfortable working clothes interfere with her work standard? "D'you know why?'
Silk raised his hands in the classic 'search me' gesture. "Not my bad."
Shooting him an unpleasant glare, she gave up on the blasted tie and stormed off to see what all the fuss was about.
--
"You're putting me in quarantine over NIGHTMARES?" Diera repeated incredulously, throwing up her hands. "Come on! Forget what Uncle Justin told you, okay? It was just dreams. Just dreams. It's not catching!"
Gemmell Hurst eyed her expressionlessly from his imposing leather chair. "People don't sweat blood over nightmares, Raistlorne. Healthy people certainly don't have cause to yell the medical quarters down over nightmares. You are not in working condition. Follow orders and return to Corel to receive your medical leave."
"I want to do stuff!" she objected, almost in tears. "I don't want to sit around in a hospital somewhere!"
"You'll get work when you're ready for it," he replied sharply, slapping one hand down on his desk for emphasis. "At the moment, you're at risk of losing your recent promotion. Leave immediately!" His tone brooked no contradiction, and she slunk unhappily out, defeated.
--
Silk saw her packed and on a chocobo, fuming and swearing to hide the moisture that brimmed in her eyes. Iridalan hadn't chosen his partner falsely- the older teen teased her unmercifully, but he knew better than any outsider what his oft-unseen partner-to-be was feeling. Partnership bond, one might say. Whatever it was, at the moment he was just worried that she might do something foolish.
"Are you sure you'll be fine?" he said worriedly as she jerked the reins sharply right, startling the blue bird and causing it to wark in disapproval.
"That's the fifth time you asked, you stupid git!" she snapped tearfully, scrubbing furiously at her eyes with one sleeve. "Of course I'm fine! Hurst was being unfair. Just because I'm the youngest member on the force, he court-marshals me over some silly excuse! And I've already gotten medication!" He passed her a handkerchief as she sniffled wetly, and the girl accepted it with sudden glumness. "Now it's blown. How'm I going to stop having nightmares?"
"You really do need a rest break," Silk muttered with equal glumness, recognizing the old rant. While he had been repeating his concerned questions, she had been replaying her dissatisfaction and despair, with little difference in every repetition. It had the taste of a grudge by now. "Look, princess, it's his job to cut back on risks. If he thinks you're a risk, of course he's going to make you take a break. You've been chafing all the time anyway- maybe you need to get out for awhile. Get a tan, a boyfriend. Something like that. Just don't brood over this all the time."
Diera blew her nose noisily and wiped it, then stared down at him with a distinctly guilty expression. "I'm sorry. D'you want your kerchief back?"
He sighed. "Burn it. I'm going to give those new Shinra tissues a try. They seem awfully convenient. Cleaner, too."
"Are you saying that just to irritate me?" she said annoyedly, piqued at the very mention of her pet peeve, and blew her nose again. "Shinra's a no-good bunch, mark my words."
"Good they might not be, but the tissues do sound good," he returned without rancor, and smacked the chocobo's tail. Diera squawked in surprise as her mount leapt off down the canyon passageway, energized with a sudden burst of frantic speed, and barely managed to control the bird as it charged past numerous rocky outcrops. Silk grinned as she left behind a screamed epithet attached to his name, and went back into the base.
She would be just fine. And with any luck, she'd take his advice. It hadn't been all nonsense.
--
It took her a full day to pick her way across the Gongaga fords, and a heavy rain caught her at dusk. Her bird liked the water; she didn't. With all due speed, and grimacing at the mud that spattered over her nice new uniform (minus tie), she hurried her mount to Gongaga Town.
It had recently come under Shinra's circle of influence, small backwater though it was, and a large reactor was under construction there. Diera spat at it as she rode past the lane that would eventually give passage to the metal monolith. Filthy Shinra, she thought darkly, distracted from her resentful gloom. Filthy bloodsucking druggie Shinra. They were eating up the world, squeezing out competition. Shinra Energy, Shinra Weapons, Shinra Computers, Shinra Food, Shinra Health, Shinra everything. The information network was starting to shift now, as informants lost their old line of work and were reabsorbed into the new nexus of power. The worst thing was, Shinra had started out as a weapons company and their talents leaned heavily in that direction. The auxiliaries were of considerably inferior stock than their mainstream, except for their vaunted superenergy.
Change the world, indeed. They were going to, what was the word, militarize it. Make everything uniform and bland and tasteless. She hawked and spat again, disgusted with their burgeoning ambition, and urged her mount on to the creature comforts of the township.
--
Gongaga was… small.
Even using 'backwater' to describe it wasn't exactly an insult. Out-of-the-way and content to remain that way, the people of Gongaga were a quiet, unassuming lot, content to remain a subsistence cultivation area. (It was so small that the Turks didn't have an office there, though of course one or two of the villagers were on the informant payroll.) Of the few things they were known for, intimate neighborhood was one, and village-wide celebrations was another. Birthdays, childbirths, marriages- even coming of age was celebrated, where it had become nothing more than a fond memory in the larger, more advanced townships.
Turks sometimes threw parties there, since the folk were all too ready to help out with the supply and preparation, parties to celebrate the graduation of the new additions into the main force, or the promotion of a new District Commander, or some such important occasion. Diera herself had memories of being tugged along into a wash of people, then corralled by a familiar arm as a crowd of other kids- how old had she been then?- ran past them. Vincent had never let her play with other kid when she was small, and she'd resented him for it then.
Looking back on those times from the lofty age of ten years, give or take several months, she found that Vincent had directed her down the path that led to work, their kind of work. Other children had time to play because they hadn't found what their aim in life was yet; hers had been decided when she was just a baby, and Uncle Iri had primed her like a single bullet in a game of Contresieran gun-roulette. Play, for her, had been typing lessons, weapons assembly lessons, all the myriad fun training lessons that could be made interesting for the sake of a tiny hyperactive girl who had attention span problems. It had been fun, or at least she had the general idea that it was fun. Nothing beat hacking. Now that was fun. You could do all kinds of interesting things with people's personal information.
Ah, well, back to the subject.
Or maybe not.
Since she was currently huddled shivering in someone's armchair, her feet submerged in some dreadfully hot solution that smelled horribly like mustard, wearing borrowed clothes and bundled in a thick towel, there really wasn't much interesting about her situation. Really.
The elderly couple that had literally dragged her off the drenched streets puttered busily about, aided by a tallish, punky-looking young man with shoulders broad enough to balance folders on. His name was Zack, she had found out some time back (since the elderly couple (in their forties or something) kept calling him by name whenever they needed him to hold something) and, from the general… smallness… of the room, she surmised that he was an only child.
Despite her general state of ill feeling, she'd had an instant of electric recognition as he opened the door to let his dad pull her in. This is HIM. He would be perfect for SOLDIER. Absolutely. Now how to get him on the next recruitment roll? Gongaga generally didn't give recruits. It was one of the curious little exceptions that made sense if you thought about it; cut back on the help and the parties go down in quality. But with all the pressure from Shinra, the Turks had stopped partying quite so hard. At least, she didn't remember word of any such event being noised about in the five years since the last party. In any case, it would be… a bit of work to convince someone high enough that her opinion was trustworthy.
And then… there was that little problem of convincing ANYONE at all that her opinion was to be believed at all. Hurst probably had her 'illness' plastered all over the notice boards by now. She gurgled a mournful sigh and sank deeper into that tub of mustard mixture. There was a bright spot to this, though. Silk could do it for her. At the moment, annoying as he was, he had the clout to do it, and he still believed her. Right. Problem over. She sniffled into Silk's much-abused handkerchief and wondered how Zack would react to the news that he was being nominated for SOLDIER by a girl several years younger than he- maybe half his age, actually. Fun, fun.
"Hey, you… what's your name?" Said teenager dropped to a crouch beside the armchair, his bright blue eyes alive with the energy that made him seem so much more real than the other sleepy, soft-edged inhabitants of the village. She stared at him, her thoughts skittering down the paths that training had carved into her mind, filled with projections and speculations. He could be so much. So much more.
So much less.
She envied him that.
"You all right, kid?" he was saying worriedly, patting her face with big cool hands. "You feeling alright?"
Irritable at his unwelcome concern, she swatted at him. "I'm fine." He looked startled, and she realized that she had slipped into the language of the adults, the language that she had grown up speaking. Vincent had taken pains to break her of 'baby language' early on in her education. It was hard not to speak in the simple, workable language that seemed so much more sensible, now. But one must make some sacrifices. Trying not to feel like a total idiot, she toned down on the curtness and turned up the cuteness. "I'm sorry. But I'm okay! Really!" He didn't look convinced. She couldn't blame him. Hard to sound okay when your throat sounds like the slime from hell. But she tried her best. "I'll be fine."
"Aren't you lucky I'm not buying that?" he replied amiably, apparently satisfied that she was nothing more than physically sick. Of course, Diera thought glumly to herself, he hadn't proved her mental health either. Well, maybe it was lucky for her that he chose to overlook that minor fault. He wasn't batty dumb the way some of the Bashers in Contresiera were, but he was seemingly expert at pretending that everything was dandy. She realized this when he carefully laid a hot mug of cocoa in her trembling hands. "Here now, we'll have the doc in to have a look at you when the rain's let up. Drink slowly."
Drat, he'd seen through her act. That one slip had been enough, so her initial assessment of him, at least, was more or less accurate. Talk about the lining on the cloud. She mouthed something grumpy in the direction of his back as he bustled off to do something else, weaving around and among his parents like he had some sixth sense of where they were, some internal music they all danced in perfect harmony to, because they never collided. She watched them and wasn't sure she could have done the same. She was a personal space hog, as Silk had once commented in that annoying big-relative way of his. And all this irritated her. She settled down to fume at the world in general and drink her cocoa.
And then, she wasn't exactly sure when, she fell asleep, and dreamed.
--
She stood in a large, empty space. One moment it was filled with flowers, the next it was a grassy green flatland, then a rocky crag, then some other kind of terrain, shifting and restless, never really distinct. It was like a flickering fog that refused to go away.
And then the fog froze solid- she felt a cold sensation running down her chest- and rearranged itself into a chess field. A really, really big chess field. She was dressed in some kind of antique black outfit, holding a long, narrow staff tipped with onyx and ornately carved. And she was alone, a dot of black in a ragged sea of white.
She felt later that she should have fled screaming, but right then it didn't seem important that she was the only one of her side left. It was only important to survive, to live just a little longer. Gathering the skirts of the antique Contresieran-styled gown in one hand, she clanked her way across the board on the awkward heeled shoes, using the staff as a glorified walking stick, and kicked a white piece out of her way, taking its place. The huge marble piece wobbled, fell on its side, and shattered.
A bloody, dismembered body rolled off the board, and she watched it fade into a white mist with distant, dispassionate eyes for only a moment, then she turned back to face the other white pieces.
The fight was not yet over. Not at long as she lived.
And, as a Lancer bore swiftly down on her, the field wavered, and the dream changed, and she saw an empty sweep of stars.
--
Oh no. Not again.
At that thought, the stars faded to grey, and gave way to an empty, barren plain; one terrifying in its simplicity. Tired wind raised clouds of dust that hugged the ground heavily, reluctant to rise and confuse the eyes. Everywhere she saw the scattered remains of civilization; no ruins stood, but here and there was the outline of a brick, the withered remains of a fruit tree, carved wood, things that indicated that people had once lived here. Something had destroyed this place, down to the earth; where it should have been choked by weeds, it yielded nothing, not even weeds.
Overtaken by an odd, tight sort of feeling in her chest, one that threw claws up her throat and swam liquid in her eyes, she knelt in the grey dust and scratched her hands through it, hoping to find something of the rich brown earth within.
Her hands scooped directly through the shivering dust, as if she had dipped her hands in the soft sands of the del Solan seaside. But where the beach had been warm, vibrant with the salty life that eked a living within its moist sands, this sand was like the sands in an hourglass, utterly inorganic. It held nothing, not even the odd grass root. There was no life here.
No, she realized in the flash of insight that one usually only gets within dreams or hallucinations. There was no life here, or anywhere. It was all gone, dead, stolen away.
The clear, shining blue of the sky seemed almost obscene in comparison to the sad, lonely remains of the world. She had time to think of this final criticism before people shook her awake, and she had to get up and explain to yet another whitecoat that no, she was all right, yes, she would be fine with just some asprin. By then the dreams were nothing more than half-remembered nightmares, and she had forgotten what had inspired the unreasonable uneasiness in her heart.
----
Author's note: I said I was on schedule; forget that. I'm way off my planner by now. The story sort of writes itself, so I probably have a million glaring mistakes in this chapter that I haven't picked up on yet. (coughreviewcough) Well, Zack's made his entrance; now we'll see how Diera contrives to get him into SOLDIER.
One of my reviewers commented on how Vincent was well-nigh the only recognizable canon character in the fic, and I'm sorry about that, but in the game there's just so much you can do with characters named 'shopkeeper' and 'Aimi' and all that. You'll probably be wading in original characters for a few more chapters, by when something really major will happen and most of them will suddenly… disappear… and we'll click back onto the canon timeline.
Can't give away too much, so you guys will probably have to stay tuned until the end of this monster. Keep those comments coming, people; I love you all. Even the flamers.