PHASE 2

- Transference -

When I was fighting, it was easier to put things out of mind. How much I didn't know, how much I'd forgot, how little time I had to figure it out.

Doesn't mean I liked it. The fights were just another distraction, something between me and the stuff that really mattered. And I should've known that couldn't last.

But for a while, they were all I had.

Serah woke up shouting Lightning's name. She'd had a dream, of watching her sister fight her way towards her along the Shoreside Peaks. Then one of those creatures had grabbed her from behind, razor fingers cutting into her brand, and she'd been pulled off the mountainside into oblivion. For a moment, the dream felt like a real memory of that night, as though she'd been falling ever since.

When her eyes finally broke through to her drowsy mind, she saw she was surrounded by crystal. It was pale blue, sculpted like a frozen tsunami, and crystal dust hung in the air around her. Scattered around her lay bodies, in regular clothes and prisoners' robes and soldiers' combat gear, and some of whom were stirring.

Snow lay beside her, breathing but unconscious. Serah laid a hand on his, fingering the necklace he'd given her on the festival night. She held up the cracked orb that represented Cocoon, staring for a moment. Then she finally looked up at the matching sphere that loomed high above her in the impossible sky, and remembered how far she'd come.

Looking at the endless blueness above quickly made her dizzy, and seeing Cocoon up there just reminded her of that eternity of slow-building terror during her fall, with air and water and debris swirling around her while Pulse loomed ever closer below, so she turned her attention back to Snow. He stirred when she shook him, and groaned, but didn't seem quite conscious of anything. Serah tried to pull him up by his shoulders, but couldn't quite find the leverage.

A terrible thought came into her head. Snow's arms were bare up to the elbows, and there was no sign of a l'Cie brand on either, but the heavy sleeves of his coat covered his upper arms where the fal'Cie had branded Serah. She struggled to roll up his sleeves, and make sure he had come through the ordeal with his humanity intact, but —

"Serah!" Snow bolted upright with so much force that he nearly sent her flying when his head slammed into her shoulder. "Serah? Serah!" Realizing what he'd done, he threw out his hands to steady her, fumbling for a moment before he managed it. "You all right?"

"Yeah." She nodded, rubbing her shoulder with a sheepish grin. "Snow…are you okay?"

"I guess." Snow's eyes were starting to take in the scene around them. "What happened?"

Serah couldn't think of the words. They helped each other to their feet, as Snow took in their surroundings. Like Serah, his eyes took in everything else before ending on Cocoon in the sky. "…Is this for real?"

"We must've fell this whole way," said Serah. "I don't remember landing, but…"

"No way we could've survived," said Snow. "A fall from that high? I mean…" He shook his head, clasping his hands behind his neck as he started to pace. "You'd need some kind of miracle."

Serah's hand drifted up to her arm, where her l'Cie brand was hidden underneath the jacket Snow had given her. It didn't feel like anything special, not now, but she remembered the energy that had been burning through it just before the Pulse fal'Cie had torn itself free of Cocoon.

Suddenly, she wondered if the fal'Cie had known she was in danger, that it might lose its chosen l'Cie. Had it done all this to save her?

While Serah was busy dismissing this thought, a groan from behind them signaled that the others were beginning to stir, and they gave up on getting their bearings for the moment. Everyone looked dazed, but in good condition apart from a few cuts and bruises. Serah checked as inconspicuously as she could, and didn't see a brand on any of them.

"Everyone okay?" Snow was asking, as the crowd's dazed mutterings began to escalate towards alarm. "It's all right. Looks like we…made it."

Hearing his hesitation, Serah looked around and followed his gaze to a man who was lying face-down under a smashed piece of scaffolding. She couldn't tell anything about his condition, because he was covered head to toe in the armor of the Sanctum soldiers who had been directing the Purge. But he was moving.

"Are you okay?" she asked, reaching out as the man tried to worm his way out of the debris.

She didn't get the reaction she'd expected. As soon as he looked up, the soldier lurched away from her, scrabbling for his gun. "Stay back!" he shouted, coming half to his feet before nearly tripping over the debris he'd just escaped. The gun stayed pointed straight at her, though.

"Hey!" Snow shouted, as Serah backed away. In half a heartbeat he had imposed himself between her and the soldier, palms spread but in that stance he used when he was ready to jump into a fight. "Take it easy, all right?"

"Don't come any closer!" the soldier insisted. The gun left Serah, though, as he began to realize that he had refugees all around him. "None of you!"

"Nobody's gonna hurt you," Snow said, lowering his voice and drawing out his words a little in that tone that made Serah wonder if he was trying to be hypnotic. "Just put the gun down."

"You think I'd listen to you?" Judging by the soldier's voice, he couldn't be much older than Serah. "You've been tainted by Pulse!"

"Well, we're all Purged now." Snow nodded upwards, at the sky. "Take a look."

"Huh?" The soldier made a quick glance without letting his guard down, but caught sight of Cocoon and did a double take. "What—"

Snow jumped forward, knocking the gun out of his hand and sending the soldier flying with an uppercut that caught him in the jaw. The man landed about a meter away with a gargled exclamation. "That's for threatening my fiancée."

"Are we on Pulse?" That was a new voice, a big bearded man whom Serah vaguely recognized from the train. "They did it, didn't they? PSICOM finished the Purge!"

The other refugees, who'd apparently recovered enough to start panicking, followed his lead with a series of increasingly hysterical exclamations. It seemed like the crowd was getting ready to stampede, if they could figure out which direction to run in.

"End this disturbance immediately!" That was the muffled voice of another soldier, deeper than the kid Snow had knocked out and loud enough to interrupt the commotion. Serah spun around and saw that about a half-dozen of the troops had gathered together, half-hidden behind one of the crystal waves. "You are ordered to remain calm!"

For a second or two, the crowd stopped, probably more out of reflex than anything. Then they realized that the soldiers were hopelessly outnumbered, and quite a few of the Purgees still had guns.

"This is their fault!" exclaimed the bearded man, aiming a pistol at the soldiers. An angry chorus came from the crowd. "They sent us here! They've condemned us all to hell!"

"The Sanctum cannot tolerate Pulse corruption on Cocoon. Look at the damage your resistance has caused!" The soldier stepped forward as his troops formed a circle, guns aimed out at the crowd. His uniform was different from the others, Serah noted, but she wasn't familiar enough with the military to tell what that meant.

Lightning would know.

The thought of her sister, the image of her surrounded by those ghouls on the mountain slope, distracted Serah through most of the bearded man's indignant retort.

"Our orders were to eliminate the threat from Pulse," the soldier was saying. "We would have preferred to handle it peacefully."

"You mean you'd prefer if we didn't shoot back!"

"Let's all just take it slow here, okay?" Snow said, taking a step forward. "No reason to do anything crazy."

"We're on Pulse!" shouted another man. "We'll never survive down here! They've doomed us all!"

"No!" That was a third voice, as the crowd got ever more raucous. This one was a boy, barely a teenager by the sound of him, still wearing his prisoner's robes. "It was the Pulse fal'Cie that did it! It sent us to die down here!"

"That was PSICOM's plan, too!" The bearded man turned back to the soldiers. "Except they were just as happy to kill us all!"

"Just because you started a fight! Maybe those transgates would've taken us someplace better, where the fal'Cie would have looked after us!"

"There's no point arguing!" said Snow. "We're all in this together now, so let's focus on surviving!"

"Excuse me?" That was yet another voice, but it wasn't shouting. A familiar red-haired girl stepped into the no-man's land between the mob of Purgees and the soldiers, hands behind her back. Like most of the others, she'd shed her prisoner's robes, revealing an outfit that might almost pass for a beach getup save for the elaborate chain of beads wrapped around it, the fur-lined boots or the animal pelt around her waist. "I was just wondering…what do you suppose is down here?"

"What do you mean?" asked the big bearded man, voice sounding like he couldn't decide how furious to be. "This is Pulse! It's full of monsters! And demons! And barbarians waiting to kill us!"

"And now we're here, too!" The girl spread her arms, pacing in a slow circle. "We've got a lot of guns. So if the monsters come, bang!" She made a gun with her fingers, aiming off at one of the crystal waves. Then she spun around to face the big guy. "We should look around! Gotta see what's out there!"

"There's nothing out there but death!" shouted a voice from the crowd.

"No, she's right!" Serah's legs had carried her forward before she even quite knew what she was doing. "We should have died in that fall, but we didn't. Maybe we've been given a second chance. Maybe we can make it."

"Yeah!" declared Snow, striding forward to stand beside her. "We've gotta stay positive. We're alive. We've made it this far." He motioned off into the distance. For the first time, Serah looked beyond the waves of sculpted crystal, seeing rugged, rocky land and the green bluffs in the distance beyond them, then that strange, hazy line where the world seemed to end. "And, hey — as hells go, this one doesn't look too bad."

Serah could hear air blowing overhead, and some animal crying out in the distance, but for once the crowd was silent. After a moment, the soldiers' leader lowered his weapon and motioned to his troops, who did the same. "We need to secure the area, find any survivors and establish a perimeter. The rest of you, keep close and don't wander off alone."

"Hold on a minute," said Snow, approaching him. "Just because we're on the same side now doesn't mean we're taking orders from you."

"PSICOM personnel are trained to handle extraordinary circumstances," the soldier replied. "Giving weapons to nervous and unqualified civilians can lead to chaos."

A few more people from the crowd stepped forward to interject themselves in what became a more hushed argument, and Serah left them to it. Instead she sought out the redheaded girl, who had drifted back toward the edge of the crowd.

"Hey," she said, smiling. "Vanille, right?"

"Uh-huh!" Vanille was probably a year or two older than Serah, but she didn't act it. She was one of those people who seemed to have more energy than she knew what to do with, and even now she was shifting her weight from foot to foot as though she wanted to go bouncing off somewhere.

"That was really good, what you did," said Serah. "I don't think I could have got up in the middle of that."

"But you did, though. Just needed a little push!" Vanille grinned, lightly shoving at Serah's shoulder. Then she nodded at Snow. "So that's your boyfriend, huh?"

Serah smiled automatically. "Yeah. Actually, he's my fiancée, now. It almost doesn't seem real." Her eye caught one of the floating sparks of crystal dust as it danced around Vanille's face; she looked away, forcing herself to change the subject. "So, I guess you stayed around for the festival after all. Did you ever find your friend?"

When she looked up, Vanille was looking away, and Serah realized she probably could have picked a better topic to change the subject to. "I shouldn't have said anything. Vanille, I'm really sorry you got caught up in this."

"No!" Vanille's gaze snapped back onto her with a horrified look on her face. This was the part of her that Serah couldn't square with the bouncy persona the girl kept up most of the time. "Don't say sorry! None of this is your fault; it's all —" She stopped herself, spun away and ran off a few steps away from the crowd, boots tinkling as she kicked up the crystal dust.

Serah's hand absently traveled to her upper left arm, resting on the fabric over her l'Cie brand. She looked up at Cocoon, then back down at all the people who would never see their homes again because she had gotten curious.

She hadn't noticed it before, but off in the distance, beyond Vanille, the ground dipped away into a sort of canyon. Jutting out of the side at nearly a forty-five degree angle was the towering form of the Pulse Vestige that had loomed over Bodhum all her life, its bottom half now encased in a swirl of crystal sculpted like a giant wave.

It was a strange place, she thought, where that alien artifact was the most familiar part of it. But for better or worse, this was her world now.