Final Fantasy VII: Before Crisis, Sears x Elfe, Gamma set
Credit goes to
meowmeowky for all of her help getting me through the rough spots, especially #10.
(34 - formal) Sears missed the days before theirs had been a formal rebellion with soldiers and artillery and agendas, when it had just been he, Elfe, and Fuhito, rookie freedom fighters against the big, bad Shinra.
(36 - laugh) Sometimes, he wished AVALANCHE’s plans had never come near fruition, because Elfe had been able to laugh back then.
(14 - music) Once, back before they’d gotten a regular informant, Elfe and Sears had snuck out to one of the Plate’s swanky clubs to try to gather any intelligence they could, and Elfe had seemed to brighten as soon as she heard the strains of music drifting out from within.
(29 - dance) “I… remember this song!” she’d gasped, pulling him through the door after her, “from… before… dance with me?” and he could tell she wasn’t seeing him as him, but as some other figure she couldn’t quite remember.
(40 - whisper) “Gladly,” he’d whispered, because it wasn’t like she could hear him in the noise of the club anyway, and besides, she looked so sweet and innocent, caught in her memory, that he couldn’t bear to break her illusion of forgotten days gone by.
(38 - forever) As a child, he’d thought the Shinra were something that would last forever, and he’d given up fighting until Elfe came along, years later, and brought a new regime within reach.
(47 - lock) After Shinra had killed his parents, he’d thought he’d locked up his heart - thrown away the key, as the old cliché went - but he’d never been more wrong.
(06 - hurricane) When Sears met her, Elfe had torn through him like a hurricane before he’d even seen her draw her sword, and though she’d only wounded his pride, he knew from that moment that this girl was special.
(22 - journey) At first, when she asked him to join her cause, to join AVALANCHE, he thought he’d just become a journeyman of sorts, hired to fight when they needed him, and free to leave when they didn’t.
(20 - talent) But Elfe had a talent for persuasion; she could convince anyone to agree with her, and Sears was no exception.
(16 - gravity) Elfe was like gravity, either drawing people towards her or keeping them orbiting a distance away, and Sears had been sucked in like a magnet.
(05 - run) Elfe taught him that as a bandit he’d just been running and hiding from what was really wrong with the world.
(02 - hero) Although Fuhito provided the statistics to justify their cause, Elfe was Sears’s hero; it was her belief in what they did that made him fight.
(24 - strength) He may have had strength in his fists, but in those early days it had been the strength of Elfe’s heart that had won them their battles, or at least that was what he believed.
(09 - red) He’d seen her injured once, when a stray bullet had slipped past her guard - that was the first of her dizzy spells, the first sign that something was wrong - and it had scared him when he felt his heart stop as he watched the red spurt and blossom across her sleeve, and it scared him when he couldn’t make himself go to sleep until Fuhito had assured him that she’d be fine.
(23 - fire) Sometimes she’d wake up at night with a gasp, in a cold sweat, muttering something about a fire, but whenever he’d ask her about it later, she’d just look confused, like she’d forgotten.
(28 - forgotten) He soon learned lots of things were forgotten for Elfe -- her childhood, her home, her family -- and he felt guilty relating to her because, while both of their pasts were long gone, never coming back, it was like hers had never existed.
(11 - midnight) Late at night, when neither of them could sleep and Fuhito was busy tinkering away with some experiment, Sears would sometimes find Elfe on the roof of their base; he’d quietly lie down beside her and together they’d watch the moon rise.
(42 - talk) They’d talk then, the two of them, under a blanket of stars (when they could see stars), not just as a queen to her vassal, but really talk, about whatever came to mind: about the constellations they could see, the day they met, Sear’s life before AVALANCHE, and how many more nights would be as beautiful as this one once Shinra was out of commission.
(24 - silence) Once, and only once, the conversation had given way to silence, and Sears had taken the chance to look at the woman beside him, face bathed in moonlight, and she’d turned her head at the same time, leaning closer…
(19 - candle) It could hardly be called a kiss, just a chaste brush of chapped lips, but nothing else Sears had experienced could hold a candle to it.
(26 - ice) Sears had never understood why they’d had to be based at Icicle , since he wasn’t suited for the cold -- that was best left to people like Fuhito - but having Elfe around at least helped him pretend to feel warmer.
(10 - drink) Sears uncapped a potion for his leader - “Don’t worry about me,” she’d insisted - but her hands were shaking, so he helped her hold it steady enough to drink, all the while wondering why none of Fuhito’s treatments were making Elfe any better.
(50 - breathe) “Just breathe,” he’d whispered to her as he held her to himself, as she heaved and her body wracked with shivers as it fought back against the inevitable.
(34 - fever) Elfe stared through him, eyes glowing with fever as she clung to him and he told her again that all she needed to worry about was breathing, staying calm, because he was there, he would take care of the rest.
(30 - body) His body was strong, but sometimes his spirit wavered, while Elfe’s passion burned as her body destroyed itself, but that was why they needed each other.
(08 - cold) Sears knew the new AVALANCHE grunts saw him as a cold-hearted, battle-hardened warrior, and Fuhito thought he was a moron - that was the fault of his slum dialect - but that was just the role he’d fallen into over the years; only Elfe got to see the real him nowadays.
(25 - mask) But Elfe had masks that she wore for everyone else, too: the fearless leader, the motivator, the tireless diplomat, the unwavering believer in the cause.
(39 - overwhelmed) He wondered if it ever got overwhelming being the leader, a woman in a man’s world, if she ever wanted to stop all the rallying cries and just be a little girl again, but then he remembered she didn’t have memories of a childhood to miss.
(15 - silk) Sears had robbed from a lot of pretty girls from the Plate, so he knew all about the silks and jewels they loved to clothe themselves in, but even though Elfe would never be caught dead in such frivolous finery, he still found more genuine beauty in her then he’d ever seen in any of Midgar’s floozies.
(48 - unknown) Sometimes Sears wondered what Elfe would have been like if she remembered her past, but he usually gave up before long, since there were too many unknown variables, and this was way too deep of stuff for him to be bothered by anyway.
(16 - cover) “I’ve got it covered,” Sears always assured her, leaping to her defense, because if he wasn’t there for her, who else would be?
(37 - lies) When Sears found out Fuhito’s perverse definition of saving the Planet, he was at first furious with his own naïveté, but he knew Fuhito’s lies had damned him: no one harmed Elfe and lived.
(33 - world) It took total betrayal and near death in a Mako reactor for Sears to realize that the world couldn’t be defined in “us versus them” terms.
(45 - eclipse) It was around this time that he also realized his devotion to Elfe herself had completely eclipsed his devotion to AVLANCHE and its ideals, because the Planet wasn’t worth saving if she had to be killed in the process.
(32 - farewells) After it happened, he wondered what Fuhito had told Elfe about his disappearance - had he been killed in the line of duty or had he defected without a word? - but it didn’t matter because soon he’d be back, save Elfe, and then there’d be no need for farewells again.
(03 - memory) If he thought anything of poetry, Sears would have found it poetic, or at least ironic, that the one to save him, Elfe’s father, was a Turk, putting Elfe’s future in the hands of the Shinra, of all people, as well as a ghost from her memory.
(07 - wings) Fuhito was the type of man who pinned down the wings of butterflies and crushed them onto microscope slides, and Sears could only hope he and Veld could save Elfe before Fuhito did something like that to her.
(17 - promise) Sears had sworn fealty to Elfe when he’d joined Avalanche, and no small thing like a psycho hell-bent on the destruction of the world would make him go back on that promise.
(01 - ring) “You better have a ring for her when this is all over,” Veld had told him, because if he had to hand off his baby to anyone else once they were finally reunited, this big-hearted kid would have to do, and Sears had laughed because fathers were fathers, no matter what fate had done to separate them from their daughters.
(04 - box) Veld had disappeared once, while they were on the run, saying he was going to retrieve some personal belongings from his old apartment, but all he’d returned with was a tattered old shoebox, leaving Sears terribly curious about what was in it.
(12 - temptation) For days, he resisted the temptation to sneak a peek before finally prying the lid open when he thought Veld wasn’t around, and found himself entranced by its contents.
(31 - sacred) Inside he found wrinkled pages of ABCs, “I LOVE YOU DADDY” in child’s painstaking scrawl, a neatly-folded crayon drawing creased as if it had been carried around in a proud pocket for days, and beneath all that, the stacks of photos: yellowed wedding portraits of a young man - could that be Veld? - and a beautiful young woman, and after that, an infant girl in a pink onesie, little girl taking her first steps, riding her first tricycle, carrying her first schoolbag, all carefully labeled - Felicia J. Dragoon 7lbs 8 oz, Felicia’s 1st birthday, Felicia age 5, Felicia’s first day of school - all the sacred treasures a father kept of his only daughter, and Sears couldn’t help but wonder just what had happened to them.
(41 - wait) “Is this going to work?” he’d demanded to know, pacing as Veld buried his nose in some dusty treatise on materia, but all the old man could tell him for certain was, “Nothing for it but to wait and see.”
(43 - search) It showed how taxing their search had been, that Veld was willing to test a theory - he’d made too many mistakes before to willingly take any chances - but Sears thought maybe that had something to do with their goal; after all, Elfe had a way of teaching people to have faith in chances.
(47 - highway) Sears saw the highway stretched out before him, a stream of unbroken asphalt, and he knew that if he had to follow it to the end to find a way to save Elfe, he’d do it without a backward glance.
(13 - view) He’d never had a very optimistic view of the world, but there were times in life when the only way you could go was up, and Fuhito had a long, long way to fall.
(10 - dream) Sears had learned from Elfe how to have a dream worth fighting for and how to never lose sight of it, because after all, keeping her safe, that was his dream.
(44 - hope) If Elfe wasn’t going to give up hope for the Planet, then he wasn’t going to give up on his dreams, either.
meowmeowky for all of her help getting me through the rough spots, especially #10.
(34 - formal) Sears missed the days before theirs had been a formal rebellion with soldiers and artillery and agendas, when it had just been he, Elfe, and Fuhito, rookie freedom fighters against the big, bad Shinra.
(36 - laugh) Sometimes, he wished AVALANCHE’s plans had never come near fruition, because Elfe had been able to laugh back then.
(14 - music) Once, back before they’d gotten a regular informant, Elfe and Sears had snuck out to one of the Plate’s swanky clubs to try to gather any intelligence they could, and Elfe had seemed to brighten as soon as she heard the strains of music drifting out from within.
(29 - dance) “I… remember this song!” she’d gasped, pulling him through the door after her, “from… before… dance with me?” and he could tell she wasn’t seeing him as him, but as some other figure she couldn’t quite remember.
(40 - whisper) “Gladly,” he’d whispered, because it wasn’t like she could hear him in the noise of the club anyway, and besides, she looked so sweet and innocent, caught in her memory, that he couldn’t bear to break her illusion of forgotten days gone by.
(38 - forever) As a child, he’d thought the Shinra were something that would last forever, and he’d given up fighting until Elfe came along, years later, and brought a new regime within reach.
(47 - lock) After Shinra had killed his parents, he’d thought he’d locked up his heart - thrown away the key, as the old cliché went - but he’d never been more wrong.
(06 - hurricane) When Sears met her, Elfe had torn through him like a hurricane before he’d even seen her draw her sword, and though she’d only wounded his pride, he knew from that moment that this girl was special.
(22 - journey) At first, when she asked him to join her cause, to join AVALANCHE, he thought he’d just become a journeyman of sorts, hired to fight when they needed him, and free to leave when they didn’t.
(20 - talent) But Elfe had a talent for persuasion; she could convince anyone to agree with her, and Sears was no exception.
(16 - gravity) Elfe was like gravity, either drawing people towards her or keeping them orbiting a distance away, and Sears had been sucked in like a magnet.
(05 - run) Elfe taught him that as a bandit he’d just been running and hiding from what was really wrong with the world.
(02 - hero) Although Fuhito provided the statistics to justify their cause, Elfe was Sears’s hero; it was her belief in what they did that made him fight.
(24 - strength) He may have had strength in his fists, but in those early days it had been the strength of Elfe’s heart that had won them their battles, or at least that was what he believed.
(09 - red) He’d seen her injured once, when a stray bullet had slipped past her guard - that was the first of her dizzy spells, the first sign that something was wrong - and it had scared him when he felt his heart stop as he watched the red spurt and blossom across her sleeve, and it scared him when he couldn’t make himself go to sleep until Fuhito had assured him that she’d be fine.
(23 - fire) Sometimes she’d wake up at night with a gasp, in a cold sweat, muttering something about a fire, but whenever he’d ask her about it later, she’d just look confused, like she’d forgotten.
(28 - forgotten) He soon learned lots of things were forgotten for Elfe -- her childhood, her home, her family -- and he felt guilty relating to her because, while both of their pasts were long gone, never coming back, it was like hers had never existed.
(11 - midnight) Late at night, when neither of them could sleep and Fuhito was busy tinkering away with some experiment, Sears would sometimes find Elfe on the roof of their base; he’d quietly lie down beside her and together they’d watch the moon rise.
(42 - talk) They’d talk then, the two of them, under a blanket of stars (when they could see stars), not just as a queen to her vassal, but really talk, about whatever came to mind: about the constellations they could see, the day they met, Sear’s life before AVALANCHE, and how many more nights would be as beautiful as this one once Shinra was out of commission.
(24 - silence) Once, and only once, the conversation had given way to silence, and Sears had taken the chance to look at the woman beside him, face bathed in moonlight, and she’d turned her head at the same time, leaning closer…
(19 - candle) It could hardly be called a kiss, just a chaste brush of chapped lips, but nothing else Sears had experienced could hold a candle to it.
(26 - ice) Sears had never understood why they’d had to be based at Icicle , since he wasn’t suited for the cold -- that was best left to people like Fuhito - but having Elfe around at least helped him pretend to feel warmer.
(10 - drink) Sears uncapped a potion for his leader - “Don’t worry about me,” she’d insisted - but her hands were shaking, so he helped her hold it steady enough to drink, all the while wondering why none of Fuhito’s treatments were making Elfe any better.
(50 - breathe) “Just breathe,” he’d whispered to her as he held her to himself, as she heaved and her body wracked with shivers as it fought back against the inevitable.
(34 - fever) Elfe stared through him, eyes glowing with fever as she clung to him and he told her again that all she needed to worry about was breathing, staying calm, because he was there, he would take care of the rest.
(30 - body) His body was strong, but sometimes his spirit wavered, while Elfe’s passion burned as her body destroyed itself, but that was why they needed each other.
(08 - cold) Sears knew the new AVALANCHE grunts saw him as a cold-hearted, battle-hardened warrior, and Fuhito thought he was a moron - that was the fault of his slum dialect - but that was just the role he’d fallen into over the years; only Elfe got to see the real him nowadays.
(25 - mask) But Elfe had masks that she wore for everyone else, too: the fearless leader, the motivator, the tireless diplomat, the unwavering believer in the cause.
(39 - overwhelmed) He wondered if it ever got overwhelming being the leader, a woman in a man’s world, if she ever wanted to stop all the rallying cries and just be a little girl again, but then he remembered she didn’t have memories of a childhood to miss.
(15 - silk) Sears had robbed from a lot of pretty girls from the Plate, so he knew all about the silks and jewels they loved to clothe themselves in, but even though Elfe would never be caught dead in such frivolous finery, he still found more genuine beauty in her then he’d ever seen in any of Midgar’s floozies.
(48 - unknown) Sometimes Sears wondered what Elfe would have been like if she remembered her past, but he usually gave up before long, since there were too many unknown variables, and this was way too deep of stuff for him to be bothered by anyway.
(16 - cover) “I’ve got it covered,” Sears always assured her, leaping to her defense, because if he wasn’t there for her, who else would be?
(37 - lies) When Sears found out Fuhito’s perverse definition of saving the Planet, he was at first furious with his own naïveté, but he knew Fuhito’s lies had damned him: no one harmed Elfe and lived.
(33 - world) It took total betrayal and near death in a Mako reactor for Sears to realize that the world couldn’t be defined in “us versus them” terms.
(45 - eclipse) It was around this time that he also realized his devotion to Elfe herself had completely eclipsed his devotion to AVLANCHE and its ideals, because the Planet wasn’t worth saving if she had to be killed in the process.
(32 - farewells) After it happened, he wondered what Fuhito had told Elfe about his disappearance - had he been killed in the line of duty or had he defected without a word? - but it didn’t matter because soon he’d be back, save Elfe, and then there’d be no need for farewells again.
(03 - memory) If he thought anything of poetry, Sears would have found it poetic, or at least ironic, that the one to save him, Elfe’s father, was a Turk, putting Elfe’s future in the hands of the Shinra, of all people, as well as a ghost from her memory.
(07 - wings) Fuhito was the type of man who pinned down the wings of butterflies and crushed them onto microscope slides, and Sears could only hope he and Veld could save Elfe before Fuhito did something like that to her.
(17 - promise) Sears had sworn fealty to Elfe when he’d joined Avalanche, and no small thing like a psycho hell-bent on the destruction of the world would make him go back on that promise.
(01 - ring) “You better have a ring for her when this is all over,” Veld had told him, because if he had to hand off his baby to anyone else once they were finally reunited, this big-hearted kid would have to do, and Sears had laughed because fathers were fathers, no matter what fate had done to separate them from their daughters.
(04 - box) Veld had disappeared once, while they were on the run, saying he was going to retrieve some personal belongings from his old apartment, but all he’d returned with was a tattered old shoebox, leaving Sears terribly curious about what was in it.
(12 - temptation) For days, he resisted the temptation to sneak a peek before finally prying the lid open when he thought Veld wasn’t around, and found himself entranced by its contents.
(31 - sacred) Inside he found wrinkled pages of ABCs, “I LOVE YOU DADDY” in child’s painstaking scrawl, a neatly-folded crayon drawing creased as if it had been carried around in a proud pocket for days, and beneath all that, the stacks of photos: yellowed wedding portraits of a young man - could that be Veld? - and a beautiful young woman, and after that, an infant girl in a pink onesie, little girl taking her first steps, riding her first tricycle, carrying her first schoolbag, all carefully labeled - Felicia J. Dragoon 7lbs 8 oz, Felicia’s 1st birthday, Felicia age 5, Felicia’s first day of school - all the sacred treasures a father kept of his only daughter, and Sears couldn’t help but wonder just what had happened to them.
(41 - wait) “Is this going to work?” he’d demanded to know, pacing as Veld buried his nose in some dusty treatise on materia, but all the old man could tell him for certain was, “Nothing for it but to wait and see.”
(43 - search) It showed how taxing their search had been, that Veld was willing to test a theory - he’d made too many mistakes before to willingly take any chances - but Sears thought maybe that had something to do with their goal; after all, Elfe had a way of teaching people to have faith in chances.
(47 - highway) Sears saw the highway stretched out before him, a stream of unbroken asphalt, and he knew that if he had to follow it to the end to find a way to save Elfe, he’d do it without a backward glance.
(13 - view) He’d never had a very optimistic view of the world, but there were times in life when the only way you could go was up, and Fuhito had a long, long way to fall.
(10 - dream) Sears had learned from Elfe how to have a dream worth fighting for and how to never lose sight of it, because after all, keeping her safe, that was his dream.
(44 - hope) If Elfe wasn’t going to give up hope for the Planet, then he wasn’t going to give up on his dreams, either.