Title: A Rain to Wash the World Clean
Rating: G/K
Character: Squall (hints of SeiferxSquall, SquallxRinoa)
Summary: Sometimes, you just need to stand outside in the rain.
Notes: When Jet said "it's a rain to wash the world clean" at the end of the Cowboy Bebop movie, it stuck with me.
It's raining again, harder this time than the last. The water trails down, pouring heaven's tears in a constant waterfall from the stormy, blue-gray skies, trickling over stone and brick and metal, washing the world clean. Puddles linger, pool before him, all around him like an ocean, and he watches as one splashes up around the pants of some woman walking past the window. Her hair is pulled back, tied up, and an umbrella is clutched, tight, in both hands, warding off the icy rain and the blasting wind. He watches her go, watches the water droplets from the mirror surface she had shattered dance up through the air and land in perfect silence on the already wet concrete, but he doesn't give it that much thought.
It rains here often – more so than he had ever remembered it to.
It doesn't bother him, really. He rather enjoys the soothing wash, the shower draining down from the skies to cling to his skin, run through his hair and drag dark-auburn-almost-black strands down before his storm-cloud eyes. The chill is just enough to numb his already too-pale flesh, just enough to wash back the feeling stabbing at the underside of his skin, and he leans, heavy, against the brick wall of some café in some corner of the street, letting the rain fall, letting the wind blow.
The rain is soothing. It's a constant pour, always there, and it's kind yet harsh and gentle yet fierce, never really staying as one or the other. He likes that, more than anything else. The double-edged sword, so to speak – one day it's a light, spring shower, the sun sparkling through the crystal drops and lighting up the sky in a broken glass explosion of rainbows, and the next it's a storm, cleansing the earth, acid rain erosion pouring over concrete and digging nature's venom into the stone that man has constructed.
He blinks, brushes his bangs back with chill-filled fingertips, but he doesn't make a move to seek shelter. The weather is too nice for that – a good, clean downpour, harsh enough to soak through his too stiff and too official tailored shirt, cold enough to chill down into his baggy tan slacks, soaking into his socks and dark, polished shoes.
He tilts his head back, closes his eyes. The world is just this feeling, just this cleansing rain, and there's no business, and no Garden, and no fathers who don't understand and no trials to attend for ex-lovers or divorces to plan for ex-wives, and, most of all, there's no Commander.
There's just this little boy, standing back at the edge of the orphanage, one hand clutched around his shirt hem and the other held up to his own downpour, scrubbing away, letting the rain wash the world clean.
