a chaotic heart
Chapter 7

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'Back to 10AF.' Snow clears his throat. 'Hope meets up with Sera and Noel, and they've got something that…shows the future, simply put. There are a few prophecies there. One shoes Sis here alive in the future –'

'In Valhalla,' Claire corrects, 'a world that doesn't know past, present or future.'

'Valhalla,' Snow assents. 'And another shows the crystal pillar supporting Cocoon crumbling. So Hope resolves to find a way to stop that, or at least save all the people, while Noel and Serah resolve the paradoxes and hope the pillar dissolving is also part of that – or can be stopped by Hope and his work if it isn't.'

'So Hope leaves behind everything to jump into the future to make sure Cocoon doesn't crash down on Gran Pulse?' Bartholomew concludes.

'Everything isn't much,' Snow corrects. 'You were the only link to his past left, and I think you die some time between 10 and 13AF. And his bitch of an assistant – ' The Estheims gape at him. 'But she goes with him anyway.'

'Uhh…' Nora manages, after a bit.

Claire nudges snow. You let this cat out of the bag. 'Alyssa,' he explains. 'Another paradox. She was supposed to have died in the Purge, but somehow the paradoxes involve her surviving. And Caius plays on that, convincing her…well, it depends on the paradox, really, but in most of them, she's the reason Hope winds up dead. In the true future, he isn't.'

'Alyssa,' Nora repeats faintly, and even Bartholomew is white. 'Alyssa Zaidelle?'

'Think so. She did have a funny surname like that.' But he doesn't sound too sure. The Estheims exchange looks regardless. It seems they know her. Or of her.

'Then this is why she's apologised so many times to Hope,' says Bartholomew. 'And why she still comes. Still asks about him. She feels guilty.'

Or she's up to her old tricks again, thinks Claire, though she feels a touch guilty afterwards. Alyssa is like Lumina, except more unfortunate. Never had a chance to stay alive at the end of the story.

Snow ploughs on. 'By then, they've worked out that something called the thirteenth Ark will appear around 400AF, and they'll be able to work out how to relevitate Cocoon by studying it. So they build a time capsule, leave the basis for building the new shell of Cocoon with the new Director, and fast forward into 400AF. Then more research mumbo-jumbo – ' Bartholomew coughs. ' – and Serah and Noel pick up some stuff from different time periods, and they've got everything they need to make a viable new Cocoon and send it into the sky. Cue flash-forward again into 500AF because Hope wants to make damn sure that Cocoon will get to the sky safe, and fair enough because it doesn't in a few paradoxes and Caius doesn't make it easy for us this time either. I dunno exactly what happens after that. Hope said something about Noel saying – ' He stops, brows furrowing as he puzzles through his own statement, before continuing. ' – no, that's right. Noel says that he killed Etro somehow. The goddess in charge of the cycle of life and death. Had something to do with Caius and a black heart?'

'The heart of chaos,' Claire corrects. 'A manifestation of Etro. It's what made Caius immortal – and drove him to do what he was doing. Eliminating history so the seeress would be free from her cursed fate.' She scowls as she speaks this, but continues anyway. 'Caius is immortal because he is the guardian of the seeress – or multiple. None make it past fifteen because their visions chip away at their life. He's seen countless die, and so he wants to save them – and the only way he can is by obliterating history.'

'Obliterating history,' Bartholomew repeats. 'The origin of the paradoxes then. His slow stepping stones. But how can history be erased? New memories will just –'

'It's chaos,' Claire interrupts. 'Valhalla, the unseen realm, is aflood with it. And the souls of the living all have chaos in them as well. Caius planned for the mass death caused by Cocoon's collapse – that was avoided thanks to Hope and his new Cocoon, and Noel and Serah for dealing with Caius – ' She swallows the "although". ' – to flood Valhalla and make the entire world the same: no past, no present, no future. Killing Caius stops the mass death, but chaos is still unleashed because what held Valhalla in a rift outside time was Etro, and killing him has also destroyed Etro's heart that beats in him.'

'It sounds unavoidable,' Nora ventures, after the silence sits on them again.

'Perhaps.' She is curter than she needs to be, but no-one calls her out on it. 'In any case, Serah sees a vision of the future and dies at that point, and I enter crystal stasis to preserve her memory until the end of the world, without even a thought as to who I was leaving behind.'

Snow picks up the story from there, before they can consider her final admission. 'The chaos floods the world. People stop ageing, and being born. People stop dying of natural causes too, but they can still die in other ways. Infections, diseases, getting killed by monsters… you get the idea.' They nod. 'We – that's me, Sazh, Noel and Hope – we decide we're going to get to the bottom of this. Load of bull that turns out to be.'

They stare, and Nora jumps a little as Snow slams his palms onto his lap. 'Hope's the only one who actually does anything,' he continues. 'He's still the Director after all, and he's got a lot of influence. Keeps everyone hopeful. Tells him they'll find a way to solve things and hang on to faith until then and people do it. They listen to him. Sets me up in charge of some things when the Fal'Cie are poking their noses everywhere. Tries to help everyone who needs it. But it cuts away at him, telling the world there's hope when he can't see it himself, you know?' He shakes his head. 'Only we knew, because we just know him that well, of everyone. But even we didn't expect him to just…vanish one day. The last anyone hears of him is a message he sends to me. "Lightning will return as the Saviour. Beware the fake Lightning." Hell if I knew what that meant at the time, but it was a bit of hope, I guess.'

'Hope that almost got be plummeted into oblivion by this oaf,' Claire scoffs, but it's hardly a laughing matter and they all know that. 'I can take it from here. Thirteen days before the end of the world, I awake – on the man-made Ark Hope designed, with Hope a fourteen year old boy instead of the twenty-seven year old man he should have been.'

'But – ' Bartholemew splutters. 'How –'

'Bhunivelze,' she says. 'I don't know how, but he wanted Hope as his eyes and ears, to watch over everything I did as Saviour. Another hostage over my head too, after a fashion.'

Nora winces at the thought of her son as a hostage.

'He instructs me from the Ark.' Claire ignores the reaction – reactions. She has to. She has to get to the end of the tale. The end where all the answers lie in wait for her. 'Says Bhunivelze has chosen me as the Savoir – the fisher of souls who'll save who I can and guide them to the new world, buy helping them solve the problems they've left behind. And I do. Some are harder than others. Snow is especially difficult, and now I know why.' She half glares.

'I was warned, Sis,' he shrugs. 'But you didn't mention Hope in the ark, either.'

'Hope's orders.' She frowns. 'Bhunivelze's, rather. Just before the start of the last day, I see the real Hope, and he explains how the Hope in the Ark is just a conduit for Bhunivelze: a body and soul remoulded for Bhunivelze's purposes, and yet it's still him, at the end of things.'

'Sis proves herself,' tries Snow, when Claire doesn't press on. 'Last day, we launch a tiny little coup de tat against Bhunivelze. Might've pissed him off too, because next thing we know, we're all crushed and in the chaos. Dead.'

'Everyone but me,' Claire corrects. 'He wants his precious Saviour in tact, for another task. To take Etro's place – and I was more than willing to do it, then. But not before I knocked a certain God off his throne. For dangling Serah in my face like a carrot – offering to bring her back when he doesn't have that power. And what he did to Hope. And taking the others: Fang and Vanille and Snow – just like that. I'd already turned my back on him and his principles. The only thing left to do was to destroy him.'

'But it wasn't that simple. He'd taken Hope's body – and now he'd shoved the soul out somehow and was occupying it himself. Explaining his grand little plan for the world.' Her lips twist, and her gut as well but she fights that down. 'How the chaos and, by extension, human souls are invisible to him, and so he wants his new and perfect world to have souls he can understand. Something about inhabiting everyone's bodies?' She shakes her head. 'I was more concerned with what he'd done to everyone at that point. He also decides to ditch this world because it's impure – because the chaos still lives, thanks to us interfering with the Soulsong: our little God-defying act on the last day. Then he decides to show us how worthless humans are by – ' She chokes on this part. Damn it. ' – by breaking his body like it's – a biscuit or something.'

Bartholomew jerks in his seat. Nora closes her eyes and shakes. Even Snow is shuddering, agape. 'That bastard!'

'It took a while to beat him.' She's skipped a bit. She knows it. She can't go back to it, though. Not right now. 'First time, I used my Saviour magic. Rescued Hope's soul and sent him to you two. Realise he hasn't gone when he saves me a little later down the track. And then everyone shows up again, breaking out of the chaos and all ready to help destroy Bhunivelze, and we do it and he falls into the Unseen Realm, and we're born again here – as far as we know.' She closes her eyes. 'But Hope…'

Silence. Snow leans forward, the couch creaking under him. 'What is going on with the kid?' he asks. 'I've got a very brief story at the moment.'

The Estheims look at each other. 'Our turn,' says Bartholomew, swallowing, 'to tell our side of the tale.'