Heart Less Love

Part Two: Mind

"I think… I want to be forgiven…"

I'm a mess.

I mean, a real mess, up in my head.

I had a thousand thoughts, a million ideas, a hundred books of literature I wanted to say, all stashed up there, but could I get even one single, itty bitty word out? No. It was like trying to grab soup with my fingers. Pointless exercise in futility that left me burned and scarred.

I'm not sure how or when, but sometime in the past I knew I was never going to be good enough.

Isn't that a sad thing for a child to realise? That he will never be good enough to gain let alone accept the attention of his peers and elders.

I felt so small and insignificant; the distinct lack in height certainly did nothing to help either. I boasted after several run-ins that I would leave that backwater town I called home and see the world. It wouldn't find me so small or insignificant. When I came home, I said, I would be a prouder, stronger man.

…ironically, when I came home, I brought only destruction and death with me.

The fire was so hot. I can still feel it burning.

To this day, I have become wary when around fires. I don't like to sit too close, it stirs the memory of blood and pain and the dying shrieks of my mother from inside our broken house, where I couldn't drag my pathetically frail body to rescue her from. She died there and something broke inside of me.

I was weak.

In my head I created delusions.

I listened to stories that my friend Zack would tell me. He'd been places, he'd seen things. What was I? I was nothing. I was no one. I was just a sad little boy who had run away from home in a fit of temper, only to come back and burn it to the ground.

I wanted to be him.

I wanted that lifestyle.

I don't remember him dying, but he must have, for the clothes I wore were so similar to his, along with the shoulder guard I may have purloined in a fit of mentally clouded need to belong. I took his sword too. But damn, that thing weighed a tonne when I first hoisted it.

I got used to the weight eventually, of course, but it gave me a whole new respect for the training Zack must have endured.

Zack, can you forgive me?

My best friend… how did I ever leave you die there? What… what was wrong with me? Is… that is… why am I always so weak?

The city was large, my fears larger and my neuroses eating away at me constantly from the inside. My childhood friend or perhaps never-was friend, she cared for me when I could no longer walk, when I could no longer speak. But it was that day, when everything changed.

I stopped trying to hide because I knew you were trying to reach for me, little flower. I stopped trying to pretend about myself, because I knew you didn't care for lies the same as the others who fostered them, who helped build my image from whole cloth. You never said anything but the look in your faraway eyes said it all.

Sadness. Hope. Love. Courage.

You had everything I didn't have.

Maybe you should have been in Soldier then. Because it was sure as day that I was only a dropout pretending to have a life, pretending and acting the part. You said…

"I wanted just a night off, from being an Ancient."

"What do you mean?"

She laughed, touching the last step and dancing towards the door as if her steps were made from air, as if she was born to dance, an ethereal grace filling her motions. "Don't you think about it? You're always turning to me for help because I'm the Ancient, the magical Cetra being who can right all wrongs. Don't you think that's a bit oppressive? I'm still Aerith too, just a flower girl who met a soldier and set out to change the world. And still a girl, who wants to be taken on some dates now and then."

The fireworks that night, they were startling, they were wonderful, they were everything in your eyes. I watched them and prayed that tomorrow I would have the strength to let you know the 'real me'. I cursed myself for stupidity when you asked to meet the real me and all I could do was summon up some lame answer.

I bet you couldn't believe what an idiot you had to work with.

And just as quickly as you promised we'd all laugh together about it, you were gone. You knew, I think, that it was coming. You'd become sick in spirit as we traveled with the knowledge of your own death, of the kind of sacrifice it would ask you to make. So you prepared yourself for it.

I still remember Tifa screaming at me, not to let you go into the cold waters of the Ancient city.

That's right.

Tifa Lockhart. My childhood friend that never was.

You loved her, didn't you? You kissed her goodnight and held her hand as even when you lay there in your own blood, that last smile was for her.

I don't get it.

Why did you…come back for me then?

I asked her about it, you know. I told her of the memories, I told her of the pain… I told her everything…There was this light in the darkness, you see…

It was bright.

Perhaps far brighter than anything he had seen since that time aboard the Highwind, when it had blinded his eyes to tears and tore into his heart. It was over then, they had assumed. It was all over and finally they could rest and so could she. But the Planet still fought the sickness that Jenova had left behind, leached into the very core of their beloved world, the world she had given everything up for. What a waste it seemed like to him, that she should have to go and still only nothing but further anguish torment everyone.

Wasn't it enough?

He'd loved her after all.

So in the pool of blood, there had been the slick sickly denial of the truth that she was gone and he was to blame. If only they'd all managed to leave her behind, there on the outpost to forever, or maybe take her as far as Kalm and let her seek out a quieter life, with flowers, with love.

He turned his head a little as the light faded. Stark realisation closed in that he was stood upright in a field of flowers, bobbing heads of white and faintly marked with a limned edge of yellow. They seemed to smile up at him.

Though the confusion cut the sensation of a hand on his arm and the most beautiful voice he knew, chiming in silvery tones as bright as her laughter, "You came, even though you're about to break. That's a good sign."

He stared at the floor, frozen with confusion and fear, with the need to turn about in a lunge and grab her back to the reality his life had become. Who cared if Tifa wanted her, who cared if this was all just some strange, sick fever dream brought on by the terminal illness? He wanted her back with them, he needed her.

"So," She sighed, as if she didn't already know the answers and he found tears prickling at the backs of his eyelids, "Why did you come?"

"I think…" Cloud breathed…

…I want to be forgiven.

And I think I was, but you'd forgive anyone anything, wouldn't you?

No hate in the heart without any shadow, no anger in the soul without any hate, no fear in the dreams of the girl without rage. Free of any taint, standing all alone in her little field of flowers.

Those years between now and then were painful for us all. I'm trying my hardest not to lord it over everyone with my pain.

I… can just about accept that you and Tifa were… I can…

Intimate.

That's the word I'm looking for.

That you stained her pillow with your tears and left her with the sharpest memory of her. I can't decide, was that cruel to love her so much, or kind?

But who to, exactly?

But you're back with us.

You sell flowers, you tend an orphanage where Tifa helps out, and you spend your days seeking out the good work of the planet and encouraging it back to life, sweeping away the devastation of the past few decades. Who would have thought that someone as powerful and as changed as you by your time in the Life Stream, would wish to lead a life so… nondescript?

That's what I love though. You're so down to earth, whilst I'm off with my head in the clouds.

Only now when you look far away, there are things missing and I know in the quiet solitude you're hunting for the right way to put everything back together, not just the Planet, not just the sickness of Jenova.

But about you.

About all of us.

Vincent preaches on about sins and sins, always with the sin! But listening to him, I was pardoned for a sin you said I never committed… so I got to thinking. What was my sin?

I put my finger on it finally.

Me.

I am the sin. I am my own sin. A messed up kid, I think the term was. Nothing but that, dear one, nothing at all. Because I was so messed up, things went badly. If I only knew how to open up, then I wouldn't have suffered under Sephiroth's thumb, nor have lost you along the way…

So I am my own sin.

Isn't that ironically fitting?

…isn't it just…