"You can't go that way!" Hope shouts into the wind behind Light as they zoom down the graveled beach roads. "It's been shut off for months now! Some sort of military testing zone!"
The mysterious, rose-haired woman remains silent as they carom past windy corners. They aren't too far from the lookout point where Hope had been waiting to find her. Only a few blocks down the road, and they are lightly zipping past "DANGER-ROAD WORK" signs and "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" warnings.
Sighing in frustration, the teen grits his teeth and clutches the woman in front of him tighter around the waist. She had insisted that it would be easier where they were going for him to ride on the back of her motorbike instead of take his car that he drove. He should have trusted his instincts when warning bells went off in his head about hopping on bikes with strangers.
Yet there was something...pulling...him toward trusting her. Fleeting memories danced in his head, mostly blurred colors, of another time and place where he felt comfortable around this same person. After waiting so long to find answers about who he was and what his life on this world meant, he agreed to hop on, knowing that she would be his only link to getting more info.
He didn't like riding on the back like some kid, though. He was an adult now. He could drive. Grr.
After a moment they slow, and the long-legged woman walks the bike to a stop. Hope prepares to jump off, but Light stays him with an upraised palm.
"Just give me a moment." She states, then reaches into a shirt breast pocket to pull out an ID badge of some sort. Hope can't see much in the dark, but he can see around Light's shoulder enough to see her swipe the end through a scanner he hadn't known was embedded into a strange rock close by. There is the faintest "beep", and Light is jogging back to the bike.
"Come on, the security alarm doesn't give us much time to drive by," she states, and effortlessly straddles the engine with one roundhouse sweep of her boot, careful not to knock out Hope's teeth in the process.
The engine purrs back to life, and then they are winding past a sandy trail down the side of the beach cliffs.
As soon as they round the first bend, Hope can see twinkling lights coming from a little Tiki shack down by the waterfront. There is shallow place right by the beach, complete with a pier. Music can be heard faintly wafting over from the scene over the sound of wind and waves.
Light wasn't joking about not being able to take the car. There's no way anything other than a motorcycle can twist down the narrow path to the beachside. Mollified, Hope is silent until they pull up to a spot beside the house.
The boy recognizes one of the few dozen vehicles pulled up close by.
"Hey, that's my parents' car! How did they...get down here?" Scratching his head, Hope turns a puzzled face up the embankment they had just came down. "There's no way..."
"Like I said, I wanted to meet them tonight. They're here for your party. You didn't think your own parents would miss your 18th birthday celebration, did you?" The older woman chuckles, then pats the boy a little too hard on the back. "Don't worry, I have my secrets. They were given a way in earlier. Our friends helped get them to this location. You were my cargo."
"Cargo? OUR friends? Wait, this is getting a little out of hand..."
"I thought I heard voices down here!" A huge, bulky blonde guy with a cheesy grin and bleached hair runs up through the cars. "Can't be too careful. I'm on guard duty. Glad you could make it, Light."
The woman smiles at the surfer-type blonde, but it doesn't touch her eyes. She opens her mouth to retort, but Hope beats her.
"Snow!" Hope grins widely, remembering the gentle giant of a man with blue eyes. "You...but it's been..."
"It's been too long, Hope." Snow Villiers laughs and punches the shoulder of the smaller boy good-naturedly.
"Ow." Hope winces, grabbing his arm. "That's gonna bruise."
"Sorry." Snow strokes his chin. "Sometimes I forget that in this world, we're just human. Gotta be more careful. But then again, it's not like you could ever take it in the old world we lived in, either."
"Where did we come from?" Hope asks then. "I remember it. I lived in a place a lot like this one, but there was magic, and a boomerang, and a great fight...falling monsters coming from out of the sky..."
"We lived in a place called Coccon." It's the first time that Light has spoken the name of her original birthplace on this world, and the noticeable catch in her breath before she can speak is noticeable to the two men that can hear her. "It was Coccoon, and there was another world below it, a world called Pulse."
"That's GRAN Pulse, if I may say so myself." Two women walk up from around the bend, the taller, older one pushing the younger one forward.
The younger one is around Hope's age, if he had to guess, with the same color hair as Light. She runs up, laughing, and something from her smile sets Hope's heart at ease.
"Vanille." He barely gets out as she laughs and almost bowls Hope over with an easygoing hug. The two laugh and Vanille, still slightly taller than Hope even in this reincarnation, bends over slightly to look at her old comrade-in-arms in the eyes.
"You look just the same. Well, except for this world's clothing." The young woman looks down at herself in a bikini top and a sari slung over the bikini bottom. "Oops, I'm a little wet. I just got back from a swim."
Hope looks down at the front of his shirt, now sticky and plastered to his chest. "Yeah, I noticed."
"Nice to see you made it in one piece, kid." The older of the duo of women has caught up to the growing parking lot crowd now, slightly limping and walking with a very intricate shiny black cane.
Hope laughs awkwardly, a little uncomfortable under the ageless, knowing eyes. "Fang." The name feels right. "You were there, too. With Vanille...and Snow...but there were others, faces I'm missing."
"Yeah, we were all waiting for the guest of honor to show up." Fang points back at the sounds of laughter and music coming from the little beach hut. "Now that you're here, wouldn't want to keep anyone waiting, now would we?"
"I...I guess not." They start walking down the little path, voices gibbering all around (mostly Vanille's), and Hope looks up at the woman walking a little slower with the cane.
"What happened? I remember in my dreams a woman full of energy and confidence, but with wisdom that was beyond her age. I mean, I hate to be so blunt, but...your leg..."
"Ah, I think it's like Snow was saying before I got a chance to speak up," Fang waves off Hope's concern, looking away to hide the grit in her teeth, "I forget that we're just human in this world. I push myself too hard here. Have to learn to pace myself. I don't think it's a lesson I'm going to be learning anytime soon." For good measure, she punches Hope's other shoulder.
"Hey, if you guys don't quit it, I'm going to be needing a sling. TWO slings." Hope cries out mournfully.
"You'll need to toughen up, too. That'll be the hardest lesson for you, I think, if you stay true to who you were before..."
"That's enough, Fang. Birthday. Not the time." Light cuts in coolly from behind. The entourage kind of halts as Fang pivots on her good leg, surprisingly fast considering her condition.
Fang glances at Hope's confused expression, then raises her cane and sticks it in Light's face. "You mean you haven't told him yet?"
"Haven't told me what?" Hope asks, sidling closer to Light and outstretching his arms. "Easy, Fang."
"Yeah." Vanille pipes up, running and supporting Fang's weight by slipping under her other arm. "Don't get too worked up. It's okay." Snow walks up, looking uncomfortable.
Light turns, and folds her arms across her chest, staring up at the stars. "I just want to meet Hope's parents and enjoy his birthday. We've all waited too long for this. Especially Hope. This might be his last chance to enjoy the kind of life he's led, that we all worked so hard for him to have after all those years of torment. I felt like he's earned some peace, even if it is on borrowed time. Even if it is fake. This world was meant to be a place of new beginnings, and he deserves this. Even more than the rest of us. Let him have one last night, Fang. Let him be a kid one last time. God knows he never had a childhood in the last world. Think of how you would feel if Vanille never had those memories in Oerba to look back to, when times were bad. Hope had Palumpolum for only a little while, from before. Let him have New York in this place, this time."
That didn't sound good to Hope. Cringing, almost on the verge of tears, he looks up at Fang, who drops her cane and leans into Vanille, as if losing all momentum in that moment. "You're right. Kid needs to be a kid. Let's get to it. Don't mean to be a party crasher." She smiles haphazardly, and Snow and Light flank Hope down the path.
Why, just when the rose haired mystery woman of his dreams has shown up, does everything seem more confusing now than ever? No answers seem to be forthcoming. He looks up at Light, but she seems ready for his question.
"In the morning, when this is all over, we're going to have a long talk, you and I. I told you before that I showed up at the right time, at the right place. You'll just have to go on believing a little longer. You've waited all this time, right? What's one more night?" She walks ahead then, jogging up the rocky little path, leaving Hope alone with his thoughts and inner frustrations.
"Yeah." He mutters to the wind, hair ruffled by the sea breeze, "what's one more night?"
When he rounds the next bend, the next scene is almost too much to take in.
There are fireworks.
Hope Estheim has always loved fireworks, and he held a secret tradition in his heart to wish on them. It was silly, he understood from talking to other people. No one wished on fireworks-it just wasn't something that most people did. But to him it just seemed...right. They were one of the very few vivid memories that he clung to from his previous life.
He remembered that one night at the beachside with his mother as if it were yesterday, back on his home planet. The colors and bursts weren't like anything on this plane-there was a kaleidoscope of spectrum that night, and he was in the front and center of the show. Those were special fireworks, and all of his friends were there-he just hadn't known it then.
He had made no secret that fireworks were his favorite while he was growing up on this world-so of course they would be waiting to set them off for him when he showed up to his surprise birthday party.
"They" turned out to be Vanille and Fang, Snow and Light, his parents, and one other who hadn't met him on the shoreline path...
"Sazh!" Hope cries out, and pushes Snow out of the way. A man dressed in fighter fatigues can be seen tending the rockets and fireworks, coughing and brushing smoke out of his face. Squinting, the older man with a wiry tangle of hair rises from his knee, sputtering and waving.
"Hope! Is that you?" He cries out between gasps. The boy runs up to his old friend, a first time reunion, arms thrown wide. The two collide in laughter and memories, the elder man throwing the younger in a tight grip.
They weave back and forth for a few moments, the firework display on hold for a moment as the two boys throw punches and jabs, and Sazh ruffles Hope's natural silvery locks, so unusual for a man of his age on this world.
"So, uh...heard you like fireworks. I came to deliver!" Sazh scratches his ear, and brushes off his fatigues. "You came at the right time, I had to put Dajh to sleep, so...the timing was just right. Sorry he can't see you, he really wanted to wait up, but you know how boys are, the excitement just got to him, and he passed out cold."
Hope laughs, hands on his knees. He feels a way he hasn't felt before, ever, in the 18 years of his existence. For the first time, he feels...at one, home, at peace. Even living with his parents he hadn't ever felt truly all put together inside, and now the puzzle pieces have fit home. To his shock and embarrassment, a little tear trickles out of a corner of his eye, and he raises up from his bent over position of laughing to realize he is the center of a circle of shoulders and gazes. Every way he turns, there is another smiling face, a recognizable pair of eyes that he's waited so long to see. Sazh standing there with his fighter fatigues, Light with her guarded smile and rose hair, Snow with his brawn, tanned skin and sheepish grin, Vanille and Fang the matched duo of playful and protective.
"Thank you. All of you." There are still so many questions, so many feelings Hope needs to put into words, and a party with many more people still to introduce and reunite...but for right now, this encircling group of long lost friends brought together by sand and stars and sea are enough for the moment.
It was his birthday, the cusp of childhood to manhood, and the confluence of two worlds brought together under one manifold of heaven. Two lives had battled inside one body and one mind, but for now, Hope's soul is comforted. For tonight, at least, there was nothing left to do but celebrate and revel in a possibility for new memories to join the old.
For tonight.