The past is a difficult entity to describe. There, in all of us, with a few exceptions in an innumerable many, lies a magnificent, dormant slideshow of all we have seen, heard, felt... And if, as everyone's past is connected through the Lifestream, the way everyone believes but none will admit, then it is no more real than a dream, sadly. I think that Sephiroth in particular sought that power for himself to see his past from another perspective, not to resolve it, such a thing is impossible, but only to better understand it. Bleeding there, in that cold and glowing hollow, trying with the last of his strength to understand, nothing more….the thought often comes to me that such beauty flooded into his soul, being as it is ancient and infinitely more potent than humanity can conceive; it was too great for him to bear or abandon, and he died willingly, unable to face anything else after what he had been shown.
"Come on, I'm gonna show you something".
I slipped my bare feet into a pair of boots that, due to some benevolent cosmic mistake, actually did match. Reasonably. I wasn't sure if I would ever show him the place I was leading him into, cordoned off with yellow tape, bones and sandblasted debris, invisible unless you truly know the way. I parked the Spitfire at least five hundred yards away from our destination, time enough in that many footsteps to kill whoever might be following. Of course, no-one was. Thankfully no-one comes here now. And nothing but memories and the smell of brutally scrubbed bloodstains would be waiting for them.
Yuffie beat her tail against the rear side window, grateful for the cold night air. She never got much more exercise than that accident of nature named Palmer, less still since Project Emanuel turned me into a pencil-pushing revenant. Poor fucker, she's always so happy to see me. That's probably the only time I'll ever say that about a female of any species. I sent a tired smile back at her and bid Zach walk with me, crushing metal and bits of smashed masonry and nondescript Materia underfoot; leaving in our wake tiny threads of light flowing upwards, released from their glassy manacles. Romantic, in any other situation. The grave is hidden behind a pile of skeletal old cars, the headstone a tumbling monolith in starlit marble, cracks crawling like prayers toward the silent sky, disfigured hands unequalled in their desolate piety.
I walked Zach past it. I didn't want to see it myself. I'm beyond the belief that I brought him here to kill him in private. At the moment he is more of an asset alive. And those who are not are unlikely to betray the confidences they hear this night. My pace slowed, my pulse a defensive grind against my temples. Someone who has not seen it, ought not to be able to. Such is the beauty of indifference, of hiding from the world a wonder it could not appreciate. I caught sight of a broken spire and a few stray slates through the perpetual fog of pollution and the burning whatever-you-can-find-to-keep-warm. No more stained glass. And certainly, no longer a priestess to watch over it.
"What is this place?"
I wasn't as surprised as perhaps I should have been that Zach saw the dying edifice before I pointed it out to him. What surprised me, sufficient only to amuse me for now, was that he did not recognise it.
"You mean she never brought you here?"
Replying to a question with another is seldom the route to a man's heart. Hell, I never asked that he fall in love with me, only that he answer me. Who did what to him. I was already pretty sure of why.
"Never", he breathed, marvelling at the sight of Aeris' small, sacrosanct retreat from the rotten cacophony of Planet voices who whispered to her of their foretold death, and her own to sate their hunger.
It took ten minutes to climb within reach of the door, and the same again to open it. Rainwater. Oak bolts. Freezing and expansion. Colossal pain in the ass.
Brushing slivers of filthy ice from my clothes I pushed free the final obstruction and gestured that Zach enter the now gaping doorway. For less than a second, a pre-recorded farce flashed across my field of vision. A man, in more pain than a person should ever know, pulled from the collapsed bastion of his capital city by his lover's bleeding hands. This church, and the light that spilled in through the decrepit roof. Here, on the soft soil of Aeris' flowerbed, I laid Rufus down carefully, for fear that the soil was not soft enough after all, and whispered in his ear that I would never, ever forget him. His eyes revolved in their sockets, pleading for an anchor to this world, but for all his lifetime's cruelty, who was he to ask the harbingers for mercy? My Rufus. It was not love, but it was the closest I've ever come, and it scared me so goddamn much I never let it blossom. It could have been love. And now it is over, I will never know.
"Come on, I'm gonna show you something".
I slipped my bare feet into a pair of boots that, due to some benevolent cosmic mistake, actually did match. Reasonably. I wasn't sure if I would ever show him the place I was leading him into, cordoned off with yellow tape, bones and sandblasted debris, invisible unless you truly know the way. I parked the Spitfire at least five hundred yards away from our destination, time enough in that many footsteps to kill whoever might be following. Of course, no-one was. Thankfully no-one comes here now. And nothing but memories and the smell of brutally scrubbed bloodstains would be waiting for them.
Yuffie beat her tail against the rear side window, grateful for the cold night air. She never got much more exercise than that accident of nature named Palmer, less still since Project Emanuel turned me into a pencil-pushing revenant. Poor fucker, she's always so happy to see me. That's probably the only time I'll ever say that about a female of any species. I sent a tired smile back at her and bid Zach walk with me, crushing metal and bits of smashed masonry and nondescript Materia underfoot; leaving in our wake tiny threads of light flowing upwards, released from their glassy manacles. Romantic, in any other situation. The grave is hidden behind a pile of skeletal old cars, the headstone a tumbling monolith in starlit marble, cracks crawling like prayers toward the silent sky, disfigured hands unequalled in their desolate piety.
I walked Zach past it. I didn't want to see it myself. I'm beyond the belief that I brought him here to kill him in private. At the moment he is more of an asset alive. And those who are not are unlikely to betray the confidences they hear this night. My pace slowed, my pulse a defensive grind against my temples. Someone who has not seen it, ought not to be able to. Such is the beauty of indifference, of hiding from the world a wonder it could not appreciate. I caught sight of a broken spire and a few stray slates through the perpetual fog of pollution and the burning whatever-you-can-find-to-keep-warm. No more stained glass. And certainly, no longer a priestess to watch over it.
"What is this place?"
I wasn't as surprised as perhaps I should have been that Zach saw the dying edifice before I pointed it out to him. What surprised me, sufficient only to amuse me for now, was that he did not recognise it.
"You mean she never brought you here?"
Replying to a question with another is seldom the route to a man's heart. Hell, I never asked that he fall in love with me, only that he answer me. Who did what to him. I was already pretty sure of why.
"Never", he breathed, marvelling at the sight of Aeris' small, sacrosanct retreat from the rotten cacophony of Planet voices who whispered to her of their foretold death, and her own to sate their hunger.
It took ten minutes to climb within reach of the door, and the same again to open it. Rainwater. Oak bolts. Freezing and expansion. Colossal pain in the ass.
Brushing slivers of filthy ice from my clothes I pushed free the final obstruction and gestured that Zach enter the now gaping doorway. For less than a second, a pre-recorded farce flashed across my field of vision. A man, in more pain than a person should ever know, pulled from the collapsed bastion of his capital city by his lover's bleeding hands. This church, and the light that spilled in through the decrepit roof. Here, on the soft soil of Aeris' flowerbed, I laid Rufus down carefully, for fear that the soil was not soft enough after all, and whispered in his ear that I would never, ever forget him. His eyes revolved in their sockets, pleading for an anchor to this world, but for all his lifetime's cruelty, who was he to ask the harbingers for mercy? My Rufus. It was not love, but it was the closest I've ever come, and it scared me so goddamn much I never let it blossom. It could have been love. And now it is over, I will never know.