Author's Notes: I'm a bad girl. I've been neglecting again. But I'm here now and there is much work to be done. So let us start with no hesitation. An interlude, but I assure you a full chapter will be here very very soon. In fact, I'll be writing it once I finish this. Hopefully everyone remembers the prologue, because this continues that form of story telling.

Pilot Wings: Interlude

To be perfectly honest, Cid wasn't the best I'd ever had, still isn't. Even with years of teaching, guiding, and gentle words I don't think he'd ever come close. His hands are rough with time, and are a little too gentle, as if fearing to leave the smallest marks. I won't claim his kisses to be sweet either, frankly it's like kissing an ashtray, and one that is at first timid and then far too possessive. In bed he treats you first as a china doll, and then loses any control he had to maintain that. He's rough, he's crude, and he's got no sense of pace...

But that isn't important really. I didn't care, not the first time and not since. After that first time I was almost shocked really, that something so far from what I'd known before could still feel right. Since then I've decided it's because it was Cid, and that was what mattered. So what if he swore half the time? Or that despite his attempts to leave me unmarked I ended up with bruises that did not leave me for weeks? It was still him, and I cherished the memory after I left. It didn't make the leaving any easier really, though I tried to argue that it did.

Disillusionment. It was a term I didn't really understand before that night, just as I didn't understand homesickness, or other such things. I could define it from any dictionary, I'd seen the affects it had on people after both wars. Those men and women had believed so hard that things would go back to how they were before the war, and when it didn't, couldn't, they would just break down. Happened during the wars too, and among the SeeD ranks. Back then I couldn't comprehend how people could live in a world like that, be mercenaries and soldiers in the midst of war, and still believe death would not strike those close to them. Of course I hadn't felt it myself, too used to the idea too early on to really run the risk of hoping we could do much, and fighting anyway. When the bloodshed ended I was sure, somewhere deep inside, that I'd never experience such a debilitating condition.

Some fool I had been.

That night, while Cid slept peacefully between the sheets of the bed he'd given me, I thought. On the edge of that bed I sat, and I thought. About the wars I had been through, and the scars decorating my body. I thought of the mission gone wrong that had brought me here, and the assurance of these heroes of their own wars that they would return me to my home. Of Siren and what we'd learned at the mako fountain, of the Tiny Bronco and the Ragnarok, of Shera and Yuffie and all the rest, and of Cid. I thought of home, Garden, Squall, and everything that was suddenly completely out of reach. Considered and threw away the idea that I was dreaming, that this was a result of a coma caused by the machines in Odine's office exploding and striking my head. I thought of so many things, but mostly of Cid, and of home, and of the words Siren had given to me.

I thought about how there really was no way to go to the only place I'd ever called home.

Soon enough I'd risen and gathered the uniform that had been abandoned on the floor, and wrinkled for our haste. While Cid slept peacefully, aided by the gentle kiss of a sleep spell of a materia, as Siren would not allow the para-magic to do the same on my own, I dressed. Then I slipped from the room and moved through the house. It was little trouble back then to select a damaged spear and break the head off, leaving me a decent sized pole, and to find a sack into which to shove some food that would keep long enough to act as provisions. Looking back, I was on autopilot really, my body moving as training demanded, supplying and arming myself to flee from enemy territory while I still could, taking whatever would be useful. A first aid kit because Cid could replace it easily, some materia and a bracer because they seemed plentiful and my GF was not cooperating. A small piece of mithril wire that had been twisted into a harp and placed on a chain, something I later learned had been made for me by Tifa and Yuffie while I'd been in the mountains with the others.

I left no note, no sign I'd been there beyond memory and what I'd taken.

Moving through the village had been too easy, training instantly kicking in yet again and guiding me through darkness to the edge of town with no trouble. And when Siren began to act up, to lecture me, it was little effort at all to move her attachment in my mind to the stolen jewelry, which she most definitely did not appreciate. While I was loathe to give up such a source of perception and protection, it seemed necessary at the time, and I did not think twice on it. In fact, I didn't think twice on anything once I'd risen from that bed, merely acted as training had dictated, and removed myself from the pain that thought had given.

Without a doubt I had become a creature only of training. Such is how my disillusionment with the idea, hope, need to get home had left me.

The only thing I remember, even now, about those first few hours of travel was that I had only the light of stars to guide me, and the mountains were my goal. Still I do not know how I managed to make my way through the twisting paths I'd only barely seen before and down into the village on the other side by morning. Sneaking past there had been no small task though, what with the daylight now my enemy and the people early risers. So I spent that day secreted away in an abandoned mansion, eating what little my training said I would need in that time, and carefully clearing the way to one of the upstairs rooms, which I then locked against the creatures that filled the house.

I still don't know how I managed to make it from Nibelheim to Cosmo Canyon alive on the supplies I had. What I do know was that after my disappearance and the resulting search, Nanaki had told the people of Cosmo Canyon to treat me kindly if I arrived, and thus I was restocked appropriately, given clothes better suited to travel without destroying my uniform (which they fixed while I rested in the inn that night), and pointed me off in the safest direction. Nor can I tell you how I managed to make it to Gongaga, just that I did, and it was there that, save for that night in Cosmo Canyon, I finally was freed of the training that had been telling me to move, and move fast.

The couple that took me in was kind, they had lost a son, which I apparently reminded them of in one way or another. And slowly, under their care, I began to regain myself from the depression that had been threatening just beyond the urge to move.

I don't know how long I was there, but it was in that small town that the world came back to me, like it or not.