Author's note: this is for Rinoa's Character Week, a FFVIII-themed challenge I host on Tumblr. I decided to do a collection of Rinoa-centric vignettes, using all the prompts, to honor my favorite character. You can read this as a multi-chaptered story too.
MY MIND
I: JULIA
This is what Rinoa remembers of her mother: a soft scent of iris, clothes in tender hues of roses, sometimes her laughter and the way it made her eyes shine, her finger moving swiftly and precisely on the white grand piano in her music room.
Not her voice.
Her voice is just Eyes on Me, for Rinoa, because she was too young when her mother passed, and there are days she tells herself she is lucky to remember enough of her to piece back together the scattered fragments and scraps of her memory. There are days, though, in which she asks herself why. Why can she remember her perfume and the color of her clothes, and not her voice? Her song is everywhere, on those days, in Deling City's Shopping Arcade, in the streets, in the pub. Julia's voice wraps around her from nowhere, and she feels guilty, because she remembers the iris and the reds and the fingers, but not her voice.
She would give everything to remember her mother telling her she is her baby girl and she loves her so much. And she is stuck instead with memories like soap bubbles, with their defined and yet unclear edges, with their translucent hues turning from purple to violet when the light hits them. Memories as delicate as soap bubbles, threatening to burst if she breathes too loud, if she doesn't listen to them with all her senses alert. There's a vibration running through them, and the edges become ephemeral, and what's inside the bubble becomes transparent, distant, just a blurred image and faint sound of someone who doesn't exist anymore. Her mother's memory is a soap bubble in all kinds of rainbow colors: the purples and the violets, the oranges and the reds, the soft hues of summer skies and the breathtaking ones of sunsets on the ocean.
But she is just that, a memory, and she can only grasp it, wondering how much is real and how much is what her mind made up for the missing pieces. Maybe they are not memories; they are dreams. Maybe memories and dreams are made of the same substance, and they're vying for the same corner of her soul, close and yet enemies, and they sometimes overlap. And when that happens, and her mind claws at the fleeting images of dreams, she can only wonder what was real and what was once an emptiness her broken love has filled, to spare her some of the pain. She's just scared, she guesses, of realizing one day that the memory she loves so much is just a patch of fragments, made up from dreams and desires, that her mind conjured because it was too scared of the void.
Rinoa turns fourteen, and she feels like a bird in a gilded cage, always under her father's surveillance, randomly locked in rooms to protect you, Rinoa, controlled in everything she does and reads and writes and eats and breathes because You'll be safer this way. She feels caged and suffocated and she wonders, sometimes, when she is curled in an armchair reading through some novel her father has approved of, how life would be if her mother was still there. She thinks it would be sun and flowers, rainbow and colors, dancing in the rain and marveling at sunset. She thinks it would be music, and playing the piano together, her mother's long fingers and her almost stubby ones, and the high notes of a cascading arpeggio drifting through their patio door, suspended over the roses garden Julia Heartilly loved so much. She thinks it would be irises, and tulips, and daisies, and all kinds of flowers they would wave into their hair.
She thinks it would be freedom.
She would give everything to see her mother grow old, to hear her telling her she is smart and confident and pretty. And she is stuck instead in this gilded cage of a mansion, with no real friends because her father is too powerful, and her mother was too famous, and there's no way to know if the social circle her father mixes with is sincere or not. She hates this. She hates seeing hidden agendas everywhere - she feels like her father when she does, and she doesn't want to be like her father. She just wants a friend who is sincere and not trying to impress her parents because she managed to befriend General Caraway's daughter; she may want a boyfriend who likes her because she is smart and confident and pretty, and not because she may be the pawn he needs to advance his career; she wants respect for the person she is, not for the connections she may offer.
She wants to be her own person, seen for her qualities and judged for her shortcomings. But nobody sees Rinoa, the girl who loves music and books and blue and wildflowers and lavender perfumes; they all see General Caraway's daughter, and she could love everything and nothing at the same time, and nothing would change because the only meaningful thing they see in her is her parentage. And yet, they all see Rinoa, the girl who is opinionated and stubborn and naive and visionary and, to be completely honest, sometimes impossible to deal with; still, they pretend not to see her faults, because she is General Caraway's daughter, and the connection to the General that she provides is well worth dealing with her stubbornness.
She can't spread her wings, like this, and she wants to fly so much. So she spends her afternoons in the Library of the Presidential Palace, eagerly devouring every book her father cannot control, there, and learns of Timber, and the war, and the way her father became a General, and hot tears of rage at the sheer injustice of that all run down her cheeks. And this is how she'll spread her wings - giving freedom to herself and giving freedom to Timber, the town her mother was born in, the town her mother left, sixteen years ago, to chase her dream of being a singer. She is sure her mother's heart would bleed, knowing the way her beloved hometown is subdued through violence; and she thinks she would be proud of knowing her daughter wants to bring back justice. It's just a little ironic, she guesses, that her mother's dream brought her to Deling, and Rinoa's dream will bring her back to Timber.
Rinoa turns fifteen, and Eyes on Me's royalties roll into her fund, as her mother decided they would. She watches the small amount with disbelief - she never expected much, to be honest, because she is a smart girl and she knows radio waves cannot be used, and often countries cannot communicate with each other because monsters cut the cables used for short transmissions. So, she knows her mother's music isn't shared that much, and she doesn't expect a large sum in royalties. Yet, the amount she receives manages to exceed her expectations. She spends the entire month of April doing calculations; she sneaks out to hang around the station, trying to eavesdrop on travelers and gather as much information as she can about the costs of a train ticket to Timber. She manages to buy a couple of metres of fabric, to sew herself a small bag to put a few clothes in. By May, she is ready.
The first time she runs away is on a fragrant late-spring night, and she manages to reach the shopping arcade to stock up a little on supplies before one of her father's friends recognizes her and takes her home, sternly reprimanding her about running away like that. She decided to get a little sneakier, and much more smarter, and she tries again during one of her father's late-night briefings at the mansion. His friends are all in his study; they can't possibly stop her now. Yet, an over-zealous guard, probably worried about losing his paycheck, stops her in the park in front of her house. She is fuming, but she has the presence of mind to convince him to shut up about it, because if it turns out that he goes every night to the shopping arcade to buy a sandwich instead of staying at his post, he could lose his paycheck - possibly his rank too, maybe even his job, and she would be unrelenting in making sure there are consequences. It's a threat, and she hates it because she sounds like a spoiled brat when she hisses it, but beggars can't be choosers, and she can't risk ruining her plan.
They say the third time's the charm, and she is even sneakier, even smarter. She eavesdrops enough to find out when the next late-night briefing will be, and that day, she buys a hair dye under the pretense of needing to go to the store to buy tampons, and she makes sure to say it out loud, so the over-zealous guard can be too embarrassed to look into her bags; she spends the entire afternoon locked in her room under the pretense of having intense menstrual cramps, and she dyes her hair as blond as they can get; she waits until the digital clock on her nightstand says it's midnight, and she sneaks out, waiting for the guard to leave his post to go buy a sandwich at the shopping arcade. She avoids the park, the shopping arcade, every place she could see someone who'd recognize her; she buys a ticket to Timber, grateful for the indifference of the clerk, much more interested in reading an Occult Fan issue about the monster hockey team of Galbadia Garden.
Only on the train, she feels like she can breathe again. An intense perfume of iris fills her nostrils, and somehow, even as alone as she has ever been, even as lonely as she has ever been, she feels at home, because it's her mother's perfume, and maybe it is a sign, and she needs to be strong and independent and confident and smart, now.
She will spread her wings, and fly.
Author's note: see you next week with the next vignette, in which Rinoa discovers the Timber Owls.