22/9/06: This one was written like, months ago and I had totally forgotten about it until I started tidying up my bookcase yesterday and this sheet of paper just fell out. It's really short, so I'll just quickly type it out and get it off my conscience.

FINAL FANTASY VIII

THE FORGOTTEN

How many days had it been?

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The clock counts out the seconds, and it seems like forever between the first beat and the next.

You sit at the window, and you count the ticks. Counting the dead faces that flash past and disappear in the next swing of the pendulum.

There was a bomb…wasn't there?

Choking fear that rends your guts. You've never mastered that cool professionalism that Xu keeps trying to drill into you. Regret. Sweaty fingers fumbling at a metal ring that's cold against your fevered skin. Covering your eyes from the blinding explosion…

Mission: Complete.

There are dead bodies strewn in your dreams, and you can't remember how or why they got there. Sometimes they talk, shattered jaws moving in a parody of life, strangle, alien words that run together into meaningless garbling. Most of the time they just stare. Silently. Accusingly.

Status: Success.

You sit and stare at the framed photographs on your desk. There are many but only six faces are repeated over and over. Your own. A dark-haired girl, she's called Rinoa. Was called Rinoa. Quistis. Selphie. Irvine. Squall…

You repeat the names to yourself, a litany you force yourself to recite every night, like a prayer, an eternal mantra to save your soul. It's become almost a ritual, a ceremony to honor the shrine of five—dead—gods, that you know should mean more to you but whose meaning has fallen through the spreading cracks in your memory. They belong to some other world, it seems, now far beyond your reach.

They gather around you as you sleep. Zell, they say, Zell, how could you have forgotten?

Sometimes they look as though they are alive, Selphie with her cheeks flushed prettily under a wide-brimmed straw hat, Quistis with her glasses and cool smile. It is only in his dreams he can see their faces clearly. Other times they are the broken, weeping bodies that you have clutched and cried over, an eternity ago when life had just stopped making sense because there were no more answers to tell you why they died so young.

Selphie's slim neck is a pulversized, red and ugly thing, and her head hangs to the side as she trails ghostly fingers over your arm. They all like to touch you, as though to remind themselves of what they've lost. You forgot us, Zell, Rinoa echoes, and there is blood, a bright splash of crimson, on her white feathers.

And you remember snow, white and soft as eiderdown, falling from the gray sky. Somebody once told you that snow was a gift from the faeries. But then it fades beyond all comprehension, and you wake up feeling oddly lonely, as though you have lost something irretrievably precious.

Good morning, Zell, Diablo whispers, moving through your mind, dark and hulking, his voice like black oil. You can feel Carbuncle wriggling happily at the back of your mind.

You don't have to be scared, Carbuncle says. We'll be here. For you. Always.

end.