She is alone, outside.
The darklit beach is giving Hope memories of a few weeks prior, to the night he turned eighteen, the best-and the most life-changing-night of his life on this planet.
"Welcome home, Light." Lightning Farron, originally known as Claire Farron, is saying those words under her breath as Hope advances from behind. Those are the words that Hope greeted her with, the night of his birthday.
Hope stops, the sand underneath his shiny black shoes giving his footsteps away. Knowing that he has announced his presence without actually speaking, Hope stops respectfully a few steps behind the brooding soldier. He has caught her talking to herself, and doesn't want to go back inside, but at the same time, he doesn't want to intrude. He puts his hands in his pockets, smirking to himself with boyish delight that he should catch her thinking of him.
"You don't know what those words mean, do you?" Light addresses Hope now, without turning to look at him. She is looking up at the stars.
"No, not really. I said them because in my dream, I was saying those words to you, and it just felt right. I couldn't say how I knew, only that it was fitting that when I saw the rose-haired woman from my dreams, that's what I should say. I know it sounds silly, but hey, if a literal woman from my dreams comes up to me, why not continue with the fantasy? Weirder things have happened." Hope shrugs, although he knows she cannot see the gesture. "Why do you ask?"
Light sighs, and drops her head. Only then, does she turn on a heel to face him. The gauzy white material of her shiftlike gown catches a crosswind, and flutters alluringly at her slim ankles.
"It means EVERYTHING, Hope. Those were the words that you, or rather, should I say, Bhunivelze, chose to address me with right before I defeated him and we all ended up here."
Her words freeze Hope cold. "What do you mean? No, it's not possible. I DREAMED those words, they're mine."
Light steps forward. Once. "It's true. You-don't really remember what happened right before we came here, do you? Of our time together on the Ark, about me becoming the Savior on the last world, about you helping me."
"I-I remember lots of things. I remember you, and the others. I remember helping save Cocoon. I remember growing up, being older than I am now. I remember...vaguely...working with Alyssa, before I learned she betrayed me. I remember helping Serah and Noel, Snow and Yeul. I remember...being trapped. By Bhuni." Hope shivers. "There's darkness...and pain. And suffering. I...don't really like to think about it."
"I understand your feelings about your time with the God aren't the most pleasant, Hope. But I really want you to remember. Do you remember anything after your time with Bhunivelze? The events leading up to bringing us all here, and how we all came to be..."
"You saved me." Hope lifts his head, and is ashamed and embarrassed to feel a single tear on his cheek, cold from the beach wind. How did this happen? I came out here to talk about my feelings with Light, and now she is forcing me to remember these memories. It's not fair!
He struggles with his words, only continuing because of the way Light is looking at him. "You-I would have been in that dark place for a long time, but then I remember you came and pulled me from his dark embrace. I was free." He lifts his head up, hugging one arm to his chest. "You saved me, and then we came here. I dreamed of you each night until you showed up. That's when I knew to say those words. I remembered you because you saved me from the darkness, and brought me-all of us-here."
"There's still more. I will tell you, like I promised." Light is stepping up now, and is close enough to lay a gentle hand on Hope's arm. He looks up into those blue eyes.
"Your aversion to Bhunivelze lies deeper than you know. He USED us, Hope. You and I both. He kept you body locked away with him for over five hundred years. Then, he used the love I bore my sister as leverage to make me do his dirty work as the Savior, bringing the souls from the old world into this one. You were the last soul that I saved, Hope. I didn't know he had been keeping you from me. He used your body and your memories against us, tricked us. Who knew how he had used you in the five hundred years' worth of time until I showed up to herald the end of our world?"
"F-five hundred years? No. No, it can't be. I remember feeling lost and cold, and that I was with the god, yes, and that you saved me. Everything after that is crystal clear. Well, except for the time I was a baby on this planet, you know, because no babies have memories."
"This must be painfully hard to digest, Hope. But your body was locked away inside of an Ark, and at the very end, you were used to help me remotely while I worked on being a fisher of souls during the last thirteen days of the old world. Your emotions and, now apparently, your clear memories of what were transpiring were locked away from you. In that one case, maybe it's for the best. That you don't remember, I mean. It helps ease some of the pain, I'd imagine."
Hope feels hot, even with the beach wind blowing on him. He walks forward a few steps, and stares at the waves.
"You're right about you saving me, Hope." Light says from behind him. He can feel her presence almost against his back. "I was going to be lost in a timeless sea of darkness, but you reached through the void, and pulled me back, reminding me that I had friends who loved and cared for me. I was being selfish and brooding and morose. I told you to go to your family, the ones you've always had, your mom and dad. They were waiting for you to be reborn to them. At the last moment, you turned away from your parents and decided instead to save me. You chose me." With those words, Hope feels a slight memory pulling at the back of his brain, making her words ring true. He turns and sits against the wet rock, looking at the way Light pulls her hair from her eyes.
"The fortunate thing is, is that you were still born to the same set of parents on this world, pulling me back from the Chaos or no. We all came here on beautiful beams of light, where you were then born; and seventeen years later, I stepped off a train. We all woke up in different places, different parts of the world. I was in Europe. You were here, obviously, in New York. Snow was at a military facility, in U.S. held lands, in the middle east. Fang and Vanille woke up together. They are the only exceptions to the rule of all of us being scattered, with all of our memories intact, trying to find each other one last time in this new place. They were in Australia. Sazh was born in the Midwest, also as a naval pilot."
"We found each other pretty quick, all of us pretty much being the same as we remembered ourselves and each other to be when the last world ended. Except you. You were, as you know, born and raised in this world, like normal children, but apparently also with a fuzzy set of memories from a past life that contradicted what you were taught about life and death here. I'm glad that you chose to hold on to those memories of what you had been, Hope. It helps you now, and it helps all of us."
"But then we had to decide. Technically, at that point, you were still a child. Like Vanille, but Vanille had no family other than Fang, and came here as she was from before."
"You voted. That was the democratic vote that everyone's been talking about."
"Yes, we voted. On what to do, since it seemed like that you had adapted to the life here..."
"You were spying on me?" Hope lashes out, narrowing his eyes.
Light throws her hands up defensively. "All of this I'm telling you, and THIS is what you choose to get mad about? Yes, but only for a few short days. Right before you had your birthday. We got in touch with Nora and Bartholemew. Well, the other people that helped us in the old world did, anyway. They held a full recollection of previous events, but confirmed that you did not, and out of a lack for anything else to do, and so as not to cause you any undue confusion, they decided to raise you as a 'normal' child."
"Well, I was still confused. That didn't help any in that department. To be honest, I still kind of am." The sulkiness, so quick for Hope to reach to, lies brimming just underneath the surface. "They took me to doctors, Light. Like I was some sort of freak. They could have told me the truth at any time. They could have helped me with my nightmares-with my dream. My dream...of you." Hope is saying all of this in a rush, but at the very end, he realizes what has slipped out, and blushes deeply. "That is to say, I, er, ah...dreamed of you every night. But not like that! I had the dream, you know, of where we could meet, on the beach. But I just didn't know when. When I got my own car, that's when I decided that I would head down there, every night. I couldn't miss you coming to meet me, Light. You had to help me with my dreams. I just knew that if I could see you, the woman with rose-colored hair that I kept meeting every night, that you would help me make sense of all this. Explain the memories. Tell everyone that I'm not crazy."
Light smiles. "Yeah, I was told about your dream. Cid and Rydea said that your parents told them you'd be at the beach, cause you went there every night. I was relayed the information, and that's when I came to find you-on my motorbike."
"So this is fate?" Hope asks, clutching his hands together. He has a habit of rubbing his hands together worridley, so he usually has his fingerless gloves on. In the formal attire, he feels a bit worse for the wear, and out-of-sorts without his gloves to soothe his fingers. Out of habit, he begins to dry wash his hands, and feeling the roughness of the backs of his knuckles, and the sharp eye of his old friend, he immediately stops.
"I don't know if this is fate or not, but the fact that you had those dreams is definitely something worth looking into. I'm sorry that your parents decided to take you to those doctors. We didn't know that they had did that." Hope catches a gleam in her eye that makes his heart skip a beat, and also causes him to be nervous. "At any rate, like I told you before, I was the only one who decided not to tell you any of this. I didn't know if all of us showing up in your life all of a sudden would be more detrimental to your growth and development. I was in favor of continuing to watch you from afar and help you benignly if so needed...er... 'spy' on you, actually, as you so eloquently put it." She chuckles, but Hope doesn't back down. Instead, his brows draw down in anger.
"Yeah, well, I'm glad that you guys were voting democratically. I needed to know the truth. I don't regret getting on the back of that bike with you, Light. I would still choose to go with you, if I could take it all back now, even knowing what I know. Even...what you just told me about Bhuni." Hope sure can't say the full name of the old god now. He represses the shudder that always involuntarily evokes from within at the mere mention of his arch-nemesis's name.
"Really?" Light asks, eyes downcast, and her word is almost lost in the wind and surf. After a while, she looks up, meeting Hope's eyes. They look glassy, distant. "I hope that you can still continue to feel that way in the days to come. I hope that you can look back on tonight, and that you still cling to that hope. I was starting to feel like some sort of kidnapper. I-I'm glad that the others made the right choice for me."
Hope steps up to her. "I know that I was a child to you for so long, Light, longer than anyone has ever known a child. I know that we have both been sleeping for different periods of time, for so long. But you have to start treating me like an adult. Because, guess what? I'm an adult now, officially, both on this world, and I was in the old. I've grown up. I've always wanted to know the truth, from what I can remember of myself. I've never shied away from what was real, even if it was painful, in either existence."
"You were all asking if Bhunivelze could somehow emerge from his eternal sleep and reach this world. It was in all of our hearts and minds before we made way for this Earth. That's the conversation that you're forgetting." Light finally gets to the point now, hair billowing in the wind. "I told all of you-all of us-that if he woke, it wouldn't matter. We would defeat him, again, because nothing changes the truths that made him disappear in the first place. This world still doesn't need a god-especially if that god doesn't understand human souls or emotions. You predicted that he might be coming back, Hope. And now, he has."
"So...what's with all the fuss? If we are confident we can beat him again, and we can, then what's the problem? Why the fear and all the military intervention? Sounds like he isn't a threat." Hope is confused. Why drag him to military school at all? He could have gone to the college of his choice without all of this. The anger quickly burns inside of him. Maybe it wasn't too late...no, his position at Brown would be filled by now. They weren't an institution to wait for him to decide.
"Nothing is certain, Hope. And the fact that you have these dreams...I'm thinking, maybe it means something. Unfortunately, YOU were the one out of all of us who spent that time with Bhunivelze, tortured by him. We think that, growing up, your memory suppression and belief that you were born as a 'normal' child kept the God at bay. We think that you might be a funneling point for his anger, Hope. We hope that with training and conditioning, we might use that to our advantage. Like a double-edged sword. If he has a way of coming back through this world due to some sort of impressionable bond that he left subconsciously on you or something like that, then maybe, just maybe, we can be forewarned and predict what his next move is going to be, and when."
"You want, you wanna USE me? Hey, I don't know about this. Maybe you're wrong. I'm not buying all this crap about some god from some other world used me. I mean, yeah, I have a vague recollection of him and all of us, and of being with him...but I mean, it's kind of stretching things a bit to say that I'm still connected to him in any way...like this is my fault...NO! I won't buy it!" Hope throws his arms out, shaking his head. "This is crazy talk! I can't believe that I'm still some sort of puppet, some sort of mouthpiece. It isn't fair. It isn't right."
"Hope, please try to remember your feelings you were talking about earlier. About still wanting the truth, and no regrets. Remember?" Light is talking in gentle, soothing tones now. She steps toward him, gloved hand reaching out.
"No! Get away from me! I need...I need some time. Some space. To think about all this." He tunnels a hand through that trademark silver hair.
"Hey! You guys just missed it!" A voice calls back from the wedding, and Hope and Light both turn toward the sound, shocked. Alyssa comes running up from the bungalow, and Hope can't help but scowl with more memories and irritation. She is literally the LAST person he would have wanted to show up and interrupt right now.
"Oh, hey guys, sorry if I interrupted anything." Right on cue, Alyssa Zeidel pants, bending over and grabbing her knees as she reaches the visibly tense and irritated duo. "But Fang just caught the bouquet!"