Unhappily Ever After
By: Kasmi Kassim
Summary:
In a peaceful world blessed with ignorance, Hope is given another shot at life, peace, and civilian happiness. Most importantly, he has Lightning at his side; what more could he dream of?
But as they carve out quiet lives for themselves, it becomes apparent that some things are doomed to stay broken, and perhaps this is the punishment they deserve.
Notes:
Just a little thought exercise on how tortured souls ever begin to recover from everything they've been through. Since the original series' plot feels retconned to Gaia and back, I have taken some liberties with the details.
Please leave a review if you enjoyed! I live off of emotional validation.
Chapter 1. Hello, Again
"Director!" Alyssa calls out, louder than anyone has any business being at the crack of dawn. "Have you seen the new stack of print paper?!"
"By the printer, Alyssa," he said, hiding into his coffee mug. He is known to be a bright early riser, chipper and cheerful, but mornings after the nightmares are tough. He tries to keep his eyes open as he shuffles to his office.
"You got four new requests for interviews so far this week," Alyssa calls at his retreating back. "Two of them are for fashion magazines, and-" she squints at the paper in her hand. "One of them is a request to model for a book cover."
"It's her porn series," calls out one of the HR women at the front.
"It's a romance novel!" the other HR woman says.
Hope closes the door.
His emails are waiting for him as always, blinking in their bright red glory, all 241 of them during his weekend of absence.
He didn't mean for any of this to happen. He just wanted to make things better. More efficient. Organize things, teams, point them in the right direction.
But then people are looking up to him, depending on him, and before he knows it, he's somehow leading people, giving advice, and being pushed into higher and higher positions.
He skims through the emails, knowing that there will not be a message from the one person he's been waiting for.
Everyone knows who he is. Whether he wishes it or not, he somehow ended up cementing himself as a leader of humankind. Even with their memories erased, they still somehow know him, remember him, admire him.
But Lightning has not once tried to come to him.
But that's not her fault. She didn't ask for this either. She never asked him to tag along and attach himself to her, and then make her the focus of his entire life.
The sky is blue outside. There is laughter in the distance. The world is at peace, and beautiful.
He gets up and draws the curtains, blocking out the sunlight. He sits back down to go back to his emails, and soon finds himself staring at the beige wall. He taps his fingers against the desk, wondering vaguely if he should take up Serah's offer to refer her therapist.
"Director?" Alyssa call from outside the door. "Another journalist. Shall I tell her to get lost?" A beat. "She says she knows you. Says she remembers the past or something."
His fingers stop tapping.
"Pencil her in."
Alyssa makes an offended noise, but does not protest.
He goes to the window again, and peers carefully outside at the blue sky. He wonders if it's normal for beautiful things to hurt.
Then he turns and puts on his most charming face as he briskly walks out to meet the journalist who might bring something interesting into his life.
,
,
"You know you can find her, right?"
The reporter is a sharp woman. She catches on quite early that he doesn't know where Lightning is. That he wants her to do the dirty work for him, because he doesn't have the courage to do it. Hell, she could probably tell how infatuated he was since the moment he opened his mouth.
She asks him the question after putting her pencil down, officially off the record. "Why don't you make use of your vast resources here to do it?"
He shakes his head. "That would be unfair."
She looks young, but she is understanding beyond her years. Perhaps he's not the only one who remembers the pain of life beyond this life. "Surely you were important to each other."
He wordlessly pays for her lunch, helps her into her coat and opens her car door, and smilingly bids her farewell.
Now that peace reigns, he is able to pursue his dreams. Being a scientist, living a normal life, surrounded by loved ones. Walks in the park, feeding birds. Not having to be brave anymore.
Lightning deserves a choice too.
,
,
He dreams often of her. Most of the dreams are downright nightmarish, deservedly so.
But the most haunting ones are those when he wakes up, but realizes only later that he wasn't truly awake. That he was dreaming within a dream. In those liminal dreams, he can never tell whether these are hallucinations, or memories forgotten. Where these experiences were forged, and when. Whether he was himself, or someone else. Whether they were given to him, or taken away.
In one such dream, he is a 14-year-old waking in the middle of the night, dirt ground cold beneath his back. Lightning sits next to him, back to the fire, staring into the darkness.
"There was something between you, wasn't there?" he asks, voice much younger than he remembers. "You and Cid Raines."
It was the first time he'd witnessed her mourn.
It wasn't hard to connect the dots. Cid Raines and Lightning Farron were a pair of competent, ridiculously good-looking people who stood out from the crowd. It would have made no sense for them to not have had a history.
Her back tenses, but she doesn't answer. Why would she? He's just a child. He wordlessly joins her shoulder and shoulder, and she is kind enough not to pull away, but doesn't lean into him either.
A faint outline of mountains line their path in the distance, and he wonders if they're real. Perhaps it's a metaphor for all of the obstacles in their path, but to him it doesn't matter as long Lightning is by his side.
Teenaged Hope didn't question these things. Even while hunted and scared, they had a singular focus, a path bigger themselves.
In those dangerous times, outrunning death, they were more alive than Hope ever felt in this life.
"There was nothing," Lightning says at last. Then, a great breath; "there was no chance of anything."
And wasn't that the most tragic of them all.
"Did you love him?"
A selfish, young part of him wishes that she hadn't, lest her heart had space for no other.
The older part of him wishes that she hadn't, because he cannot bear her heartbreak.
It is long before she finally answers. "No."
Hope is only fourteen, but he knows a lie when he hears it.
But he lets it go.
,
"I know where she is."
The journalist is back. She looks excited. During a private lunch at his office – to which Alyssa gives a stink eye - she lays out all the reports she's compiled during her journey, connecting the dots between all of his friends, like a great mystery solved through exciting detective work.
Hope stares down at the papers, the interviews, the notes. There is a photo of Serah, holding her pregnant belly. Snow, belly-laughing. Fang smirks into the camera while Vanille chastises her in the background. He could count each strand of each of their hair and still have time left on his hands for the eons of life he's lived knowing them. Watching them. Fighting alongside them.
Eons of love, compressed into a few snapshots and a few scribbled notes.
Someone once told him that marriage was only for mortals. Like a play in a theatre, love was a skit that was made beautiful for its impermance. It was a human struggle against the threat of an end.
He wonders how many more lifetimes he must know these people to stop loving them.
The journalist doesn't understand – of course she doesn't, it would make no sense for her to understand – but she comes close to it. So she takes the photos away, and looks him straight in the eye. "Tell me."
"It's all in that folder." Hope points at the folder between them. "The project, the process, everything."
"But what about you?" She points at him. "Where is Hope Estheim in all of this? Besides the epic fights, the courageous roles, the heroic story? What happened to that young man? How did he feel?" her voice softens. "How did he fare?"
Silence settles between them. He wonders if he should have opened the window for her sake. The beige walls are suffocatingly blank.
"He was held captive and tortured," he says, offering a smile to ward off any heartbreak she may feel on his behalf. It would be misplaced. "He is no longer."
"He was kidnapped, Mr. Estheim."
"He walked willingly."
"I don't understand." She is determined to see the good in him, and it is a strange thing, to see oneself through the eyes of another. Strange, to find himself staring at a man instead of a monster.
He looks at her, grim resolve settling into his bones. He is too old to lie. Too tired to defend. It never matters anyway.
"I was lured by a phantom. She-" he hesitates. "She came to me every night."
It is a dark, sinful part of his past, but a sinner deserves no privacy in his sins.
Understanding lights her eyes. "Lightning."
He really is that transparent.
"You were just a man," she says, low and emphatic. "Any person could not have endured such-"
"I led to humanity's downfall."
"And you were also humanity's savior."
He laughs in surprise, humored by the absurdity.
"You were a child when she impressed upon you," she insists. "It is not a crime to miss her."
He laughs again, darker. Does this make him even sicker than he already is? Chasing his guardian from childhood, letting that shape his entire identity? He knows too much about the dark side of mankind to have any delusions about inherent good and evil. Obsession and admiration are only flip sides of the same coin, and gods know that he is a monster.
"It was not innocent," he says at last, because he may be a sinner but he is not a liar. He looks at her directly while she falters, trying to wrap her mind around a confession unbefitting the leader of humanity.
"I mean," she tries, "you were all grown up by then."
He decides that he will open that window after all. He rises and walks to the window, opens the curtains. The day is thankfully gray. He stares outside.
"I did resist for as long as I could," he says quietly. "But the human heart is a fragile thing. I'd been chasing her for so long. I couldn't let go, and that was my weakness."
The journalist rises. "I know you don't believe it, Mr. Estheim," she says, "but humanity owes you everything. You were, and are, a great man."
He offers her a tired smile. "All villains were once great men," he says softly. "But in the end, they still became villains."
She leaves him Lightning's contact information. He does not look at it.
,
It is on one rainy day that his gaze skims his list of emails, and then stops on one from an unknown sender.
-Coming by train this Sunday. Maybe stay a few days. Spare a few dinner slots for me? -Light
He gets up and paces around the office. He wants to laugh, but seems to have forgotten how. Something is bursting from his chest and it feels like a scream. But he can't alarm the staff, so he paces and paces, and rips the curtains open to look out at the dark skies. He steps out into the pouring rain, feeling more alive than he has in a long time.
,
She looks exactly the same.
He stands by the car, watching her get off the train as sunlight bounces off her hair. He finds himself vaguely wondering which timeline he is in, which version she is. After several lifetimes of her, all he can see is another version that is altogether too good to be true. So he stands by his car and watches.
She's wearing a sundress. Holy Etro, he's glad he hadn't reached out first. She deserved this civilian life.
This is Claire, whom she should have been, whom she deserves to be. This is what he had fought for. It should be enough.
It should be enough.
But then her eyes find his, and their gazes lock like millennia crashing together and she's walking toward him with irreversible destiny at her steps.
"Hope."
She stops before him, and the entire world is in his hands.
"You're tall." She drops her duffel bag and holds out her arms. "Do I get a hug?"
He slowly steps forward, because how could he refuse her?
It's like stepping into sunlight. He smiles at last, feeling blinded, and it's a fragile thing. "Hello, Claire."
It's as if his soft voice were a hammer to porcelain. The grip around his neck is wobbly. "Shut up," she says roughly as she pulls his neck down to her height. He laughs shakily into her embrace.
All those years of chasing her has come down to this, and he's not sure he deserves it. But she sure as hell does, burying her face into his neck with sun in her hair, and by gods he would do it all over again for this.
"It's finally over," he breathes, like a prayer.
"It's just the beginning." Her arms tighten around his neck. "We're going to build a life we deserve."
He finally puts tentative arms around her. She fits into his embrace and then some. He pulls her close, gentle and precious.
"How long do you plan to stay?" he murmurs.
"Depends."
He pulls back to look at her. "On?"
Her eyes slowly rake over his face, ending at the vicinity of his mouth. "Dunno yet."
"Well, we have time." Hope gently grasps her upper arms. "You can stay at my place while you decide what to do."
"You sure it's not an imposition?" she says as he steps back to pick up her bag.
"Light." He puts the bag in the trunk, and turns around to lean back against his car. "I don't know if you remember this, but I literally spent hundreds of years looking for you."
"In another life." She looks at him, her eyes emotional and unreadable as they sweep across the expanse of his body, his crossed arms, leg hooked behind him. "But this is a new life."
Maybe he hadn't been the only one staying away for the other's sake.
He pushes himself up to go open the passenger door. "So let me open your doors and carry your bags, and host you at my place."
She gives him a sidelong glare as she climbs in, and he laughs as he shuts the door.
,
To Be Continued