Note: Erm, it takes place right during/after the events of Fort Zeakden. It focuses mostly on Ramza, and contains some minor spoilers from the first chapter. It was written after 25 hours of no sleep (seriously, I got really bored and tired at a party, and this was the result....) Anyway, on to the fic.
Summary: As Ramza looks at the blood-soaked snow of Ft. Zeakden he questions his life, and why everything has happened.
Snow
All around him was snow. Snow that was stained with her blood. The blood of his best friend's sister, a girl he had known since childhood, and the blood of the boy who had killed her. Ramza stared at the ground, not sure what to say or to do. The battle had been won, but he wasn't sure that there should have been a battle in the first place.
Throughout his and Delita's short-lived journey to find the girl that now lay dead, he had asked himself that question: "Why?" And now he asked it again, his eyes never straying from the ground.
He didn't have the courage to look back up at Delita, his best friend, the boy whom he was sure he owed his life to. The question came again...and again, until it consumed his thoughts, and he felt like screaming it over and over again- his mantra. All he heard was the question, and all he saw was the crimson snow. It blocked his vision, as the question blocked his mind.
He could vaguely hear Delita's sobs, but they sounded far off and distant. Ramza closed his eyes, trying to block the haunting voice, and for a second it worked, for he remembered something. Something important.
Ramza finally tore his eyes away from the ground. "Delita!" He screamed voice hoarse from the biting cold.
Silence.
"Delita!" Ramza screamed again, louder this time, as if trying to scream over a sound that wasn't there. "The gunpowder!"
He knew it was too late, and as the explosion from the gunpowder sounded, he had already turned and had begun to run.
There was no scream from Delita, but, then again, the explosion was so loud that if there was any sound from him Ramza wouldn't have been able to hear it anyway. In any case, his mind was elsewhere.
"I've taken my whole life for granted," He thought, boots pounding furiously against the frozen ground. "And when it came down to it, I dropped it all and ran." This epiphany caused Ramza to stop running, and as he looked down at his feet he realized blood from the snow had stained his boots, turning them from their original light brown to a mixture of red and mahogany- and at that exact moment Ramza realized that the blood would be carried with him for the rest of his life, as would that haunting question:
"Why?"
Note: Yes, I realize it sucks. For some of my better work (that I wrote when I wasn't sleep-deprived), check out "Anodyne" in the FFVII section.
All reviews are appreciated. Bad ones too. :P