Part Three
1.
Everyone in the world has something they hold on to. A person, a place, an object, an event. Something that is special to that person's heart. Something that, with its remembrance and importance, brings with it the strength needed to get up in the morning, the energy to move through the day untiringly, never slowing, and the will to go to sleep at night and get up again to start the day anew. It's an endless cycle. Having something to hold on to keeps a person living. Without it, the cycle would end, and it would all be over.
I kept living everyday, but I never knew why. Maybe I held fast to the hope that one day I might not be alone. Maybe I lived every day for the memory of my parents. Maybe I lived for both of those reasons. Or maybe I lived for neither of them. Maybe, even, at one point I stopped living.
I remember when I blacked out, thinking that was it—I was going to die. I certainly experienced the telltale sign of impending death; I saw my life flash before me. I saw my childhood, the GI war, of which I only remember certain parts, and Grandfather on his deathbed. You must go, he said. Maybe someday you'll find your life's mate. Then he was gone, and I saw Midgar and Meteor, the former being destroyed by the latter, and then there was Midgar one hundred years later, derelict and covered in foliage, becoming a part of nature. I saw myself sitting alone atop Cosmo Canyon celebrating the centennial of the city's fall. Another hundred years passed and I saw myself fall over the cliff, tumbling end over end, slamming hard against sharp rocks on the way, and plummeting violently to rest below. Two-and-a-half centuries passed before me in less than a split second.
The darkness came again, and I saw myself floating in it. This was not a memory. It was more than that. Darkness spread in every direction as far as I could see. There was no sky, no ground. Only darkness. I couldn't move, and so I hung motionlessly in the air. I could feel some unseen force pulling on me both from the front and the back. It felt like I was being pulled apart, but I didn't move in either direction. A beacon of light appeared in front of me, a bright white light in the dark void. Within it there appeared to be two silhouetted figures, side by side. My parents. I could see them clearly as soon as I realized who they were. They stood in the air in the distance at the center of the light, facing me. I wanted to make my way over to them, to be with them. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get any nearer. They stayed in their spots as well, like statues, frozen in body and mind. Hollow statues. I stopped my struggles to get to my parents. There was some sort of barrier between us, invisible, but halting nonetheless. For a long moment I quietly watched them, and they watched me. And then, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, but with gradually increasing speed I began to move backward. I was pulled back, away from my parents, into the darkness. The light faded and disappeared from view, and I once again was surrounded. Darkness overcame me, and I fell into deep shadow, fading back into the black void.
2.
I woke up in a sweat with a start, not quite sure of where I was at first. My body was tinged with many different aches and pains, and my head churned. I immediately attempted to get to my feet. Excruciating pain shot up through one of my back legs, and I collapsed in agony into a panting heap. The world spun out of control for a moment before I could see the room I was in with any clarity. I recognized it as the back room of the canyon's pub, the storage room.
The room was lit by several candles placed sporadically about, though much of it, left untouched by the weak light, sank away from visibility. A door hung partially open at the room's entrance, casting a column of sharp light in on my face from the outside.
I lay on a makeshift bed composed of a feather stuffed mat and several pillows. My hind left leg was cast in a white fabric, and I had several surgical stitches on the left side of my face below my eye. My chest was wrapped in the same white fabric as my leg, restricting my panting breaths. Each breath burned a tooth in my mouth. My body was covered in cuts and scrapes.
"I'm alive anyway," I whispered to myself.
Through the cracked doorway came the voices of two people talking quietly in the pub. I recognized one of the voices as belonging to Kero, the other belonging to Cloud. It was deathly quiet in the storage room.
I thought silently about many questions. How had I survived? How did I get to the pub? I apparently had broken my leg, but how badly? What time was it? What day was it? I wanted to call out and ask someone.
Quickly, I answered some of my own questions. I figured it must have been Cloud who found me and brought me back to the village. Suddenly I didn't want anyone to know I was awake. I didn't want to face him. He'd almost predicted this, and I'd not heeded the warning. It was wholly embarrassing, even without Cloud's presence in the room. But I knew eventually I must see him. It was a dreadful thing, that feeling. Like a child who has done something bad, and is hiding from his parents.
Already exhausted from my effort to stand, I soon fell back asleep. When I awoke some time later, a young girl stood in the doorway. It was Maria, Kero's daughter. She stood in a blue, flowered dress with her hands behind her back, watching me.
"Hello, Mr. Nanaki," she said with sudden excitement. She had the strange habit of always calling me Mr. It was a bit uncomfortable...
I lifted my head to her. She waved cutely at me and then without warning ran up and hugged me around the head. The force with which she ran into me knocked me back onto my side on the bed, and she fell on top of me. Pain erupted through my body, but I suppressed it. After a long moment she got up off of me. Maybe she sensed she'd hurt me. Or maybe she merely had finished hugging me. In any case, she was up.
"Everyone was really worried about you," she said. "But I knew you would be okay."
I smiled. "What time is it right now, Maria?"
"It's nighttime. I'm supposed to be in bed right now." She had a mischievous grin on her face, and let out a subdued giggle.
I laughed with her. "Bad girl." I paused and then continued. "How long have I been asleep?"
She thought for a moment. "About... six days, I think. I can't remember."
Six days... "Hmm... Do you know if Cloud is still here? Or has he gone back home?" I couldn't believe it. I'd just triggered the confrontation I was afraid of.
"I think I saw him in the other room. Do you want me to go check?"
"If you could, that would be great." I smiled lightly. The words just kept slipping.
"Okay." She walked back to the threshold of the room and turned. "I knew you'd wake up, Mr. Nanaki."
"Thanks." I felt like I'd thanked her for something she hadn't said.
Maria scampered off with a smile, leaving the door wide open. I dreaded what was to come. Restlessness set in. I tried to resettle on my mat, but my leg was in too much pain to move. I only succeeded in making myself more uncomfortable.
It took an eternity for Cloud to come. When he came into the doorway, he stopped. Light from the hall outside poured in around him.
"How are you?" he asked.
I picked up a hint of exhaustion and maybe anger in his voice. He spoke in one level of inflection, a tired, relaxed one which made me all the more uncomfortable.
"Good." My voice sounded hoarsely. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Good." Better.
"Everyone was worried. We didn't think you were going to make it. You've been in and out of consciousness for a week. You had a pretty bad fever. An infection, maybe, in your leg. If I hadn't found you so quickly that night you may have died."
"I guess I'm lucky you were here."
"You're lucky you fall so loudly. You're lucky that you still had the presence of mind after you fell to howl out in hopes someone would hear you. If not for the howling I may not have come out and found you."
Howling? I howled? A grand pause in the conversation began and ended.
I began again. "...So what all did I break and bruise?"
"It was a pretty bad fall. I likely shouldn't have moved you after I found you for fear of exacerbating you injuries, but it looks like it turned out all right."
I listened patiently.
He continued. "I got the best doctor I could find from Costa del Sol down here to fix you up. It was almost three days before he got here, but all of the surgery was done quickly after that. He said you broke your left rear leg in two places and that you had two broken ribs and several bruised ones along with a sizable concussion."
"Pretty bad."
"I'm not done yet, though those were the major injuries." I wanted him to be done. "The doctor gave you a pretty thorough examination. He found that you broke a tooth. Also he found a cracked nail on the foot of your broken leg."
I felt around in my mouth for the broken tooth. My left canine had snapped right at the tip. Sharp pain streaked through my mouth as I touched it, eliciting from me a slight wince. I looked at my foot. It was cast, shielded from view.
"He cut it right off. The broken part of your nail, I mean. Not your foot. Let's see... You had a pretty deep laceration below your eye. An inch or two up, and you'd have lost the rest of your sight. You also broke your nose. Just barely though. You only chipped some bone off."
He seemed intent on torturing me with every last detail of my injuries. And I suppose he had done so because he had finished talking and left that deathly silence to retake the room.
After a moment Cloud left the doorway and walked into the room.
"What happened? How could something like this happen?" he asked with concern.
He didn't know, then. What I thought I'd seen. I wanted to lie. Maybe to say I was sleepwalking, or that I was out for a walk and someone pushed me over, or even that I just fell, but none of it seemed plausible. And so, with no small amount of courage, I spoke up.
"I was outside enjoying the night a bit before going to sleep, and... well... I thought I saw something."
He knew now. An irritated, tired sigh escaped from him, but no other sign showed in him.
"I was looking at the stars, and I saw one start to fall down in front of the mountains north of here. It went down over the horizon, and I thought it was gone, but then I saw it again on the ground directly below me. I tried to get closer, and... the ground couldn't hold me."
Cloud wasn't looking at me now, but past me into the ground. He nodded to himself. I waited and prepared for whatever he might say. The child had been found by his parents.
But when he spoke, it was softly, almost sleepily. "You know what I'm going to say, so I won't waste my time. My point was made last week on that cliff." He still looked at the floor. "It's no good getting what you want if you die trying." He looked at me. "You know what I mean now."
"...Yes." And I did. What Cloud had just said and what he'd said that night a week earlier had been made painfully clear to me. "You're right," I said. "I've been obsessed. I see now you're right."
"I hope that's true. ...It seems like we've had this conversation before, huh?"
I nodded.
Cloud began down a different avenue. "So how do you feel?"
As if on cue, the world spun around and pulsed in pain for a moment. "I have a monstrous headache."
"Understandable."
"And I'm very tired. I guess a week of sleeping will do that to you." I paused. "How long will I be casted?"
"The doctor's going to come back to check up on you in a month, and we'll go from there. You should probably stay off your feet for the next few days."
"Alright." I nodded again.
"Chances are you'll be in a cast for about eight weeks or so, maybe a little longer, before you're strong enough to walk unaided.
I yawned spontaneously. It was a big one, seeming to take forever to exhaust itself. The air stung against my broken tooth. Cloud seemed to take the yawn as a sign.
"Well, I'm glad you're better. It has been a long week. For both of us, I'm sure. You probably need to rest. I myself need to get back home. The vote on my desalinating system is tomorrow."
I was already half-asleep. "Alright then. Good luck. I'm sure it will be passed." I said, and put my head down on the mat.
"Thanks. I hope so. I'll come visit again in a few weeks to see how you're healing up. Maybe I'll come with the doctor. I'll see you later. Get some sleep."
Another jolt of pain in my mouth woke me up. My mouth was more of a hassle than my leg, which was acting tame by comparison. Cloud walked back through the doorway and stopped. He turned back, and I could see he had something else on his mind.
"Red during those first days when you were slipping in and out of consciousness you said some strange things. Like you were talking in your sleep, except you weren't really sleeping. Like I've said, you weren't in very good shape, so I dismissed what you were saying as just being your fever talking, but... I was just wondering, do you remember anything you said?"
"No, not at all. Today is really the first I can remember since I fell. Why? What did I say to you?"
Cloud was silent for a moment. He was thinking, trying to place the words in his head. Finally, he said "It must just have been the fever. I can't really remember right now what it was you said anyway. I haven't gotten much sleep lately. My brain's shutting down on me." He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand in fatigue.
I smiled, and Cloud smiled too. "Maybe some other time, then," I said. I knew inside me that Cloud hadn't forgotten anything, but if he felt I didn't need to know what I'd said, I would trust him in his belief.
"Goodbye, Red."
"Goodbye. See you in a couple weeks."
Cloud exited.
Whether he knew it or not, Cloud left me in that room a new person. He had made me realize the error of my ways. I would stop living my life for this goose chase of a search for more of my species. I would live for something else.
3.
It's a tough thing, being unable to walk. I remained on that bed in that room for three days, not moving around but for a minute at a time every few hours for the most basic of my needs. The residents of the canyon brought food to me, most of it cooked in the diner just down the ladder from Grandfather's house. I'm not much of a fan of cooked food. I just don't understand how humans can eat it. It's disgusting. I've only ever been able to stand eating small amounts of it at a time. I didn't have the heart to tell anyone how much I disliked the food; it seemed disrespectful to say something like that when these people were doing so much to try to help me. I ate what they brought out of courtesy and never said a word about it.
After the passing of those first few days, the walls seemed to be closing in on me. Such extreme boredom and claustrophobia were present in that room that, had I not braved the pain to begin to get up and limp around the pub on three legs once in a while, I may very well have gone mad. So it was that I began walking for short periods of time around the pub and the first level of the canyon. I was careful to take my time and not to overexert myself, as I was dizzy from my prolonged stasis in the room and knew that overactivity after the kind of trauma I'd suffered could produce some life-threatening complications in my injuries. I'll be sparing with the medical details except to say that those complications were very real possibilities. I still made my residence in that storage room, however, because I couldn't climb the stairs and ladder to Grandfather's house.
When the doctor and Cloud returned three weeks later, I could move around the first level of the canyon with relative ease, and found myself beginning to put some weight on my leg, though not really enough weight to walk on it with any effectiveness. The pain was still too great when I moved to walk on that leg.
Cloud had some good and some bad news for me about Costa del Sol. Good was that his desalination system had been approved and its use had begun, despite the fact that, as he said, it ran on mako energy which had been stored at the Corel mako reactor when it was still in use (there had been some opposition to his plan because of its Mako use). Bad was that he said two people had disappeared from the city while he was with me and four more had disappeared since he'd returned home.
It was strange, he told me. All six people had disappeared without any trace. All of their belongings had been left behind, but they had up and vanished. I found it odd as well that Cloud hadn't told me before that his machine used mako energy.
The doctor cut my cast off and examined my leg on the day he came, with much pain put in on my part. I'd never seen or heard of this doctor before, but by his actions and attitude toward Cloud, the canyon's residents, and me, he seemed a very shrewd and callous man. This conclusion came to me as he poked, prodded, and otherwise manipulated my leg in ways it likely shouldn't have been. He was, nevertheless, a good physician who seemed to know what he was doing. In only a few minutes he determined that I no longer needed a full cast but rather a walking cast, which would support my leg and still allow a fair amount of flexibility for walking. Possibly by some coincidence he had brought with him a cast that fit me perfectly.
Both Cloud and the doctor left three days later. The cast I was given was a removable hard brace that came up almost to my hip with a hinge at the knee. Below the knee it was basically a boot. My leg had severely atrophied due to disuse, and my fur had darkened where the sun hadn't bleached it for weeks. The joints in both my knee and ankle were rusty—the ligaments in my leg had shortened. I walked with a heavy limp for another week or so, but gradually all of these problems resolved themselves.
Within a month I had regained enough strength in my leg to remove the cast and climb the ladder to Grandfather's house. By then the last remaining sign of my accident was a scar over my knee left by the doctor's surgery. I climbed the ladder the first chance I had. The sun was just rising that morning as I climbed to the top of the canyon, throwing oranges and pinks across the sky, highlighting the edges of clouds just coming into visibility. I paused once up and looked around. It was a strange feeling, standing there. Everything stood in the same place it had been a full two months earlier, but... everything seemed different somehow. It had changed. I can't describe how, but I looked upon the plateau for the first time again.
My sight tracked across the ground and stopped at a point where the ground fell away. Fear struck me. My feet were suddenly stuck to the ground. Minutes passed silently. I could not break my gaze.
Nearly a minute passed before I could gather enough sensibility into me to take a step. I inched toward the fallen ledge very slowly. It took another minute to reach it. I peered over the edge of the plateau. The cliff, I saw, still was very unstable; several chunks of rock broke away from its face, tumbled down its side, bouncing out awkwardly off a section of jagged stones jutting into the open air, and hit the ground squarely. More than fifty feet, nearly straight down. I shuddered at the thought of myself falling the path those rocks had just taken. How could I possibly have survived? Some higher power must have been watching out for me—my guardian angel, maybe.
Taking great care with my steps, I backed away from the ledge and walked into Grandfather's house. Cloud had put away the bed for me. The house was spotlessly clean. I slept well that night, glad to be back in Grandfather's house, back in a place I knew.
Over the next months my leg got continually better and better, and life began to move on. Before I knew it, a year had passed, quite uneventfully.
