Business As Usual

Epilogue: Lies

By Miyamashi

Everything I've ever said has been a lie, and everything I say now is. Every word that will ever leave my mouth will be laced with some form of untruth.

But don't be afraid.

When you don't understand the lies, all that means is that you've never lived in Midgar. I mean really, as truly as you can manage, lived in Midgar. None of that pussy living on the plate for a few months kind of shit, but really living and experiencing Midgar life, especially slum life, and, even better, Shinra life.

Because if you had, you wouldn't be afraid. You'd just know.

That's when you can really see what's under all the lies they tell those rich shmucks living in the plate bungalows and mansions and fancy loft apartments. Midgar's the city of death, and sadness, and pain, but the city that would never believe it.

Even though its crumbling down around our heads, the city is still made of our fantasies, and it'll never really fall as long as we continue to lie. It was built on those lies, and that's the strongest kind of foundation. Even the very way it was built shows that we're trying to cover something up. Pretty plate hides ugly slum-town underneath. Lies. All of it. Bullshit in every corner.

It was built on the idea that the only way to go is up.

Rufus proved that wrong--that there's always room to fall.

But the lies; you get used to 'em after a while. You learn to live with 'em, you learn to thrive on 'em, and you suck the life out of all the so-called truthful things. And you kill 'em, because you can't stand to think that there's somebody out there who doesn't have to live like this.

They're the truth because they throw their lies on us. That's all we are: some saintly dreamer's fantasy. He dreams, and he has nightmares, and he locks it all up inside Midgar's walls and the lights and the Mako and the tower, and we become that dream.

I thought Rufus was the dreamer, once, and, in a way, he was. But more than anything, he was the walking incarnation of the Lie. He was absolute beauty covering an ugliness brought on by years of dreaming things that would never come true, and then having to live the nightmares. He was cold, cool impartiality covering an all-consuming fire that would have burned any other man to ashes. He was the man who trapped the child inside, and the beast who caged the man.

And he was our most fantastic fib, raised to the pinnacle of the unreal city by the liars.

The dreamer was the liars' dream, too.

It was what made us real. In the world of reality, people exist because they eliminate lies and fantasy. The world of fiction lives because we admit that their discarded fantasy exists. We know we're human, and that we're flawed. We know, and we accept our fate.

Who's to say who's the more real?

I loved him, I still do, and a part of me always will. Even that, the most sincere, most real feeling I've ever had, is laced with poisonous traces of Lie.

He was my favorite addiction.

I'll never know how he felt about me. Frankly, the present situation makes it damn hard to ask him, his being dead and all.

But, in following with the rules of Midgar, he didn't love me, and for me to say he did would be as much of a lie as saying I loved him.

And, in that same sense, I say it, and I lie, and I make it real.

So it is.

So now, with Rufus gone, and me standing here with all I've ever known collapsing into dust, I hope you'll understand, and I hope that you'll believe me.

Make it true.

Because, there's only one more lie to tell:

"And we lived happily ever after."