By Pavana Lachrimae
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If Squaresoft was mine, would I be writing fanfic? .
Teaser: Six years after the final defeat of Sin, a young part-guado girl named Darra seeks out the only remaining link to her parentage in a last attempt to find out who she is. But when the truth finally surfaces, will she really want to know? Seymour x ?. Lots of twists. Not a sue, and if you read it, you'll see why ;) …
A/N: I'm not entirely happy with this chapter and I don't know why. Again, criticism is always welcome, as long as you spell it right and respect your caps lock key. Happy reading, folks!
-x-
I belonged to the Old Yevonites by birth, but I think deep down my mother was never all that religious. She was a woman of science, and someone who took things seriously; she prayed only occasionally, and kept quiet when the subject of scripture came up. My mother held little faith in tradition, and was too practical to believe in anything but the most inescapable truths. In retrospect, it is hard to understand why Jyscal's wife trusted her so much.
She and my mother were inseparable, in the beginning- they had been best friends since my mother was ten, and when Anima married Jyscal and came to Guadosalam, my mother came with her. I was four years old at the time. I remember very little before the winding, oddly humid passageways of my childhood home, but I knew from early on that we had lived in Kilika before this, where my father had once worked as a fisherman until he was killed by Sin. I remember nothing of my father.
For a while, my mother studied with the Guado doctors and looked after me; later, she was the sole woman responsible for looking after Anima during and after her pregnancy, and later still, private nursemaid to the unstable half-breed child that was Seymour.
He had not always been insane. Unhappy, yes, but it was not until the death of his mother that the darker side of him began to show. Still, as a boy, he had never looked completely innocent; there was always a strange heaviness about him, as if he were forever carrying the burden of his mixed heritage on his shoulders. A sheltered childhood meant he escaped the taunts of other children, for the most part, but still the awareness of his own abnormality seemed to permeate the walls of that claustrophobic mansion; still the words whispered themselves in silent glances and the eyes of adults, you are different.
Seymour hated it. His childhood was scourged by medical problems as a result of his mixed parentage- Guado are very different from humans, inside as well as out, and the conflicting genes within his young body came close to killing the boy many times. The isolation, too, of being different to everybody else he knew; he could not consider himself human, because he was not like them, and yet he could not consider himself fully Guado either.
Jyscal was not the only person in our household who didn't acknowledge these feelings of alienation and self-contempt. Even his mother, whom Seymour adored, abandoned him at the age of ten under the mistaken impression that he needed an aeon more than he needed her. Still, Lord Jyscal was the one who showed the least sensitivity towards his son's needs, and it was no surprise that the child grew up to hate his father.
I am surprised, given all this, that Seymour grew up to be as strong as he was. Perhaps he was making up for the powerlessness he felt in his youth, in the death of Anima, and, later on, the birth of his daughter.