Thanks 0erbaDiaVanille for editing this chapter.

I don't own anything having to do with Final Fantasy 13, but it sure is fun to write about :D

Chapter Two

There are no stories in the skies of Cocoon.

When night fell, shimmering beads of light emerged above us. This was an illusion the Fal'Cie created, one of many that nobody ever speculates the purpose of. Perhaps it was to emulate those which Vanille called stars, that to which she felt compelled to pay homage to midway through our night at the beacon.

"Where are you going?" I asked the gloriously nude younger woman, who only a moment earlier was lying on my chest.

"I'll be back in a moment." She grinned before disappearing between the folds of flower petals.

The flower trembled in the direction of her movements as she followed its circumference. She was muttering to herself.

"The two travellers…the river west where we met…the goddess at dusk…there."

Then she was quiet. I got up to see what she was doing and found her making that Oerban symbol she made with her hands, pointing them towards a dense group of stars before us.

"Are you alright?" I asked, placing my hand on her waist.

She kept her head bowed a moment longer, before she looked to me and nodded.

"Night has always been my favourite time. My mother used to have stories for every constellation in the sky. Look straight up; those are the two travellers."

I did. Amongst the density of stars I could see two bright blue ones, so close together one could barely tell that they were two.

"On a cloudless night, the two travellers can guide you to different places. If they take the road north, they face the stone giant. When they defeated it, it became the highest mountain on Gran Pulse. If they go east, they find an ocean where dawn revealed the birth of the world."

"And we're facing west, I see." I added. I surmised that the trail of stars leading west led to something else.

"Yes…" She looked away from me, her voice sounded distant then. "It's a sanctuary, it's where people go to find the ones they lost."

She's bleeding out again!

Her lips were hot, desperate. How a solemn moment quickly became passionate, I can't recall. I touched her hand and then my head was in her bosom, her chest was heaving and her heartbeat was impossibly fast – she was sobbing.

Sssshhhh. Lightning, you have to be quiet; we're trying to get you home as fast as we can!

How were we able to have sex when the night sounds were so vicious? Snarls and clashing steel.

"Eat this!" Fang yelled out. How did we ever get together when she was cheering over us?

Sshh, sshh, sshhh... If you carefully remove a branch from the blue forest, light it up atop the beacon and the bugs will burst into the sky all at once, making it look like blue lightning. This is how hunters find one another without alerting any monsters. All creatures avoid it because lightning can't be defeated."

I was full of feeing, but I couldn't cry. One of us had to be strong, Serah. At the funeral, she couldn't contain herself. It was her, myself and a few of our parents friends who had watched their coffins lowered into the ground. Our grandparents' had already been buried there.

The Fal'cie had let it rain that day. After the service, those people quickly dispersed back to their own lives. The wind howled and the lightning crashed. We were alone, together, until Serah left too.

Then it was just me.