Fic: Do I Dare Disturb the Universe Chapter 7/?
Title: Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?
Author: frkmgnt1
Rating: PG-13 or T (Pick your poison. No graphic anything as of Chapter 7)
Pairing: Snow/Lightning, Snow/Serah
Chapter 7: Muttering Retreats ~8,500
Word Count so far ~47,000
Description: Snow has something he needs to say. Lightning cannot hear it.
Genre: Angst angst and more angst. Romance (Oh my god! I wrote Romance. WTF?)
Chapter 6
"One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Muttering Retreats
"Here!" A voice yells out. "I found her!"
The voice sounds distant-distant enough that she's half convinced that it's imaginary. She can barely feel the hands groping at her, maneuvering her, trying to muscle her out of the snow. She knows that if she's taken from this location, she will most likely be killed. She wants to fight but she can't open her eyes; she can't move at all. She resists the only way she can-by going limp and boneless.
Dead weight is harder to maneuver.
She hears a grunt, feels fingers bruise where they dig into freezing flesh and aching bone. The pain is indistinct-too much and too little at once. She is vaguely aware of being manhandled off the ground and out of the snow drift. She knows she should be concerned. Terrified even. She can barely muster apathy.
When unconsciousness asks her for a dance, she takes its hand and lets it lead her away, fully expecting it to be her last tango.
****
She spins and twirls to an erratic rhythm. She's off-balance, much like she was just after blowing out her eardrum and developing extreme vertigo as a side effect. In fact, her whole body hurts, and the spinning is getting sickening and she just wants to stop. The room blurs by her and she's so very hot. She needs air, or water, or anything right now before she immolates or vomits and won't that just be the most attractive thing ever for the other occupants of the dance floor.
And...why is she dancing anyway? She's never liked dancing.
"Because I asked you to," says a velvet voice, and she shivers at the tingle of it across her skin and in her ears.
The spinning slows, stilled by a large hand on the small of her back, and another in her hand. She's pulled forward, and pressed against a hard body. She relaxes into the twirling, listens to the rapid heartbeat in the chest beneath her cheek. The hand in hers disappears for a moment before it's in her hair, cradling her head. She should be fighting, but she's too dizzy. She just needs her bearings, and if she can just stay here for a moment she'll feel better. She tries to focus on the steady thud-thud beneath her cheek and all she hears is a rattling, clanging, sound that makes her head throb
"Hold her still!"
and she is afraid and cold and shaking apart under the intensity of the feelings.
"Hold onto her!"
She's confused and she reaches out again for Snow but he's gone. He's gone, and she's alone and so, so cold.
"This'll keep you calm."
She feels a small jab into her arm, more painful than it ought to be. Then she feels nothing at all.
*****
She's drowning. Or perhaps, she drowned already.
There's a weight on her chest like someone dropped a house on her. Every inhalation makes her lungs burn.
Everything burns.
There's pain. Enough that she knows she's still alive; so much that she wishes she were dead. Parts of her body that had long since stopped feeling are waking up to sound off their anger at her flagrant abuse. Face, fingers, toes, feet, calves, ears. Each body part feels as if she's taken a blowtorch to it.
She tries to scream out the pain but her voice is a ragged thing, hissing and gasping, whistling through her bleeding, raw throat.
Her body shakes and sends off a wave of agony from the dead soles of her feet to the frozen roots of her hair. A hard bounce sends her careening off a ledge. Where the hell did that come from? She falls a short distance, lands face down on something with enough force to knock the air from her lungs. She inhales. The air is warmer than she's felt in forever and her nose runs as if the contents of her sinuses have just been waiting to thaw in order to empty. She tastes blood and mucus, coughs, inhales again and smells rubber and antifreeze. The smells confound her. She tries to force her eyes open but they're too heavy. She tries to say something, but her tongue is swelled, or her lips are glued.
Or she's gagged.
She struggles, feels her heart kick up a fuss in her chest when she can't move. Someone pins her and she bucks and grits her teeth. Her jaw feels as if it might break. Her arms ache. There's a knot in her back the size of a fist that continues to punch her in the spine. She feels bruised and beaten, but she fights as hard as she can against her body. Against her restraints.
"Stop struggling!"
The command makes her fight harder. She feels hands on her body and she recoils and feels something whack her in the head hard enough to stun her. Her ears ring, the world spins in accelerating circles.
One.
Two.
She's out before she can count out the third.
*****
It's dark and slow and cold, much like the bottom of a well. Or the depths of a depression. Damp, dank and full of vermin wiggling beneath her skin. She floats and sinks, drifts in between and waits...
The headache is bad enough to pull her up from the depths of blessed unconsciousness. She can feel something covering her eyes and she moves to pull off the blindfold only to find that her hands are also trapped.
That realization burns away the fog. She feels hands on her body, burning like embers against too cold skin, peeling wet clothes off her body. There are voices too but she can't hear over the rush of blood in her ears, can't think past the absolute rage at being undressed against her permission.
She surges forward and smacks her forehead into the nose of the person touching her. The hit makes her already aching head scream, then swim, but that's a minor thing compared to the satisfaction she feels. She hears the crack and the curse, feels warm blood splash over her cheeks and lips and tries to smile.
Resistance may be futile, but it is all she has left.
She hears a nasal complaint, a bitten off swear and crunch followed hard by a bark of pain before a hand grabs her arm and slips a needle into her vein. She spits in what she can only hope is her captor's eye before the drug snares her in its web.
*****
The large crack runs from floor to ceiling with smaller fractures splintering off across the whole wall. It resembles a spider web across the wall, and feels just as deadly.
Something lurks beneath it.
She's always known that this house was a death trap. She never wanted to move into it. Something about it reminds her of the past, and it isn't the nearby beach. It's the cheerful appearance versus the depressing reality. An empty house that doubles as a tomb; a pseudo-home that feels like a prison.
It reminds her of her whole life.
It reminds her of Barthandelus--all innocent appearances, smarmy smiles and insidious intent.
She feels said sinister intent like an ill wind. She feels it in her gut, in her bones, behind her eyes. She feels it in prickled skin and a shiver that stalls at the base of her spine. It hovers over and around her, trapped behind the walls of the house; it possesses the structure, animates the inanimate. The enemy is around her, and it's seeking a way to reach her.
The crack in the wall spreads as she watches it. She stares transfixed, watches fingers wiggle out, turn into insects crawling over the walls. She should run, she knows. She should be horrified that her house is possessed and falling apart; that there is some creature trying to wiggle through cracks in the facade so it can reach her.
It will reach her; that should worry her.
It doesn't. She doesn't care. She hates this house, and this life, but somehow, she can't seem to leave it. Every time she tries to go, she comes back to it.
Like she's caught in an orbit. Or a web.
Like she's chained to it.
Chained to her. Chained to him...
Perhaps her dark stalker can offer an out.
She stretches out on the miserable, uncomfortable couch and stares at the crack in the wall. It widens as she watches. She waits, eager to face the monster. Eager to confront the creature that's hiding inside.
She longs to destroy it as it seeks to destroy her. She knows now that it is the cause of her problems, and that if she can just exorcise it...
...All her problems will go away.
Her breath catches.
Or does she have it backwards? Perhaps confrontation will lead it to exorcise her. She can feel its need like fingers around her throat; like breath ghosting over her lips. She knows that if she is here when it finally breaks through, she will disappear. She can feel the urgency, but it isn't enough to conquer the exhaustion or apathy. It isn't enough to let her break orbit.
She feels like a stranger in this place, like a ghost haunting her own life.
The crack gets bigger still and she watches as a piece of plaster falls. The walls peel back and away. She needs to get up and leave before everything crumbles around her. Her body feels leaden and won't respond to her will anymore. The couch sucks. Something is digging into her, constricting her. The couch is too small and claustrophobic. The material chafes where it rubs her skin. She wants to move, she really does but she's so tired that even thinking of getting up exhausts her. In fact, she thinks she'll sleep some...
'You need to get up Light.'
Snow.
She smiles.
It should be strange that he's here, but it isn't. It feels right, like she's found a missing piece to the puzzle. She misses him. Misses him, misses the sound of his voice and the smell that is his. She misses the sparkle in his eyes as he teases her, the small crinkles that bracket his eyes as he smiles. She misses the quirk of his lip, and his steady presence at her back.
She will never admit to any of this, but it doesn't mean she doesn't feel it.
That he's here should bother her, but it doesn't. She feels lighter with him there. In this moment, she feels happy without the usual shame and anger that is balled and bundled up in all thoughts of Snow. She turns toward his voice but doesn't see him. Still, she knows he's there with her.
Always with her...
'Don't want to. m'tired Snow' Tired of fighting, tired of running. Tired of this life that doesn't fit. Tired and sore, and ready to rest.
Tired of looking but not touching, of wanting and not having; tired of pretending. Tired of being without him, though she'll never admit that aloud. Admitting it to herself is pretty much impossible, after all.
'I know,' and she feels the ghost of his fingers on her hip, on the back of her neck, tracing the scar on her back where he refused to stitch her. 'I know you're tired and I'd let you rest" His breath puffs against her neck and she shivers. "I really would. But you have to go. Something is coming.'
There is laughter in the cold; danger in the darkness.
'No...'
'And the house is on fire, Lightning. You need to get out of the house.'
She opens her eyes though she doesn't remember closing them and fixates on the unfamiliar crack in the wall. She sits up and watches as the crack melts, then explodes into flames. She jumps up but there's flames everywhere now and she feels the heat on her skin. She moves and sees that her feet are burning. She needs to get out, but she needs to get HIM out more. She can't find him. She panics before realizing that he was a dream. Or a nightmare. He's not here and never was. Her mind is playing tricks on her, tormenting her. She runs for the door down a corridor she can't remember, and watches the flames lick at her hips, catch on her clothes. She feels it but it doesn't hurt enough, so she stops moving and watches herself burn and she wonders why she was so afraid.
She catches a glimpse of her stalker and the form is human and smirking; the fire roars and it sounds like cruel laughter. She hears screams and the walls are crumbling. She the smart edge of a blade rend, watches blood cascade over her hands and wonders why she's not dead...
Until she realizes that the only thing in the house--and in this life--that can hurt her, is her-
*****
She's not sure she's awake. She can still feel Snow's breath on her cheek, still hear his voice. She can still feel the burning from her feet to her face and her dream recedes.
She remembers the flames, still feels the burning and panics...
She knows she's not in that house. She remembers leaving the house, leaving the life that was killing her by inches and marching in a storm that was just killing her.
Perhaps Gran Pulse finally succeeded where the Cocoon fal'Cie failed.
Every part of her body burns and throbs in time with her erratic heartbeat. She's sure she feels her skin splitting. Her muscles pull and cramp like they're peeling back from her skeleton. She smells fire and smoke. She smells death.
She hears pops and crackling and she groans, hisses.
Fat snaps like fireworks when it burns...
She's a prisoner. She broke her captor's nose and her punishment is to be burnt alive.
She thinks that might be a bit of an overreaction.
"Help," she croaks. Her lips are sticking to her teeth and her throat feels like she's been gargling with ground glass.
"Easy there, Soldier." The rumbling voice and familiar nickname are so welcome and impossible that she figures she must be still be languishing in fever dreams. It makes no sense. She opens her mouth to match the name to the voice but she can't. The answer is there, but remains teasingly beyond her reach. She sees a kind smile, warm, dark eyes and a flash of bright yellow fluttering around. The name is there, dancing on the tip of her tongue, loitering in her peripheral vision.
"Help." It's all she can think to say.
"We gotcha now. It's alright. You're going to be alright."
How? she wants to ask, but can't think past the pain.
She feels a hand on her forehead. She tries to open her eyes to figure out if she's hallucinating but her eyes are so heavy and glued shut. She moves, but her arms are pinned immobile.
Not good!
She panics, thrashes and every inch of skin feels like it's peeling off of her. She screams, and it's a rough, raw thing.
"Hey now Soldier!" Hands cup her face. "Sorry about this but you'll hurt yourself."
She opens her mouth to answer when something warm and sticky flows through her and she exhales and slips away...
"It'll be over soon."
-----
'It'll be over soon...' and she doesn't know what that means. She looks around to figure it out but she's outside on the beach in Bodhum. She can smell the salt of the sea, but it's funny. Off.
Everything feels wrong.
The sand chafes and Phoenix is burning a little too hot today for her taste. She knows -knows-knows that she's getting roasted by the radiant and reflected rays, and she's not looking forward to the coming days of too hot skin against itchy sheets, ice cold showers against reddened skin, pervasive soreness, or the ugly peeling.
'You couldn't be ugly if you tried.' She feels the breath gush into her burning ear, feels the moisture tickle her oversensitive skin. She smiles and stretches, slow and satisfied.
'You are a liar,' she tells him and she shivers at the sensation of him chuckling against her. She opens her eyes but Phoenix is too bright and she can't see more than a silhouette anyway and she's afraid to look at him because then he'll be real. Or he won't be real. She wants to fold him into her arms, pull him to her, sigh into his neck, curl fingers into his hair, and taste the breath he exhales. She wants to memorize the texture of the skin at the small of his back, and drag the soles of her feet over the swell of his calves. She wants...
She feels a sudden sadness that nearly devours her because she can never hold him or know any of those things. She can never even think about it because entertaining the notion makes her the worst sort of traitor.
She needs to get away from here. There are no words for how wrong this is, nor how right it feels. She needs to run...'Don't be sad,' he whispers and she wonders when he became a mind reader.
'I'm not,' he says in answer to her unspoken question, proving himself a liar once again. He takes her hand in his. 'I just know you. You're part of me.'
It's a ridiculous and traitorous declaration. She should break his face.
'I know,' she says because she feels the same.
It's not right, but it's still the truth.
She doesn't know how it happened; how she went from loathing everything about him to finding him charming and wonderful and too impossible to live with, and more impossible to live without, but there it is all the same. It crept up on her like a mugger, and it spread through her body like a cancer before she realized it happened; and now it's too late.
It started with grudging respect that morphed to charmed affection and before she knew what happened, she couldn't imagine a life where he didn't exist in some form. And she wants him to be happy; she always thought that was where it ended until she realized that her own happiness was tied to his with some sort of invisible chain, and rather than acting as a buoy, it more closely resembles a noose strangling the life from her.
She can't hold him, and so she can't be near him.
She can't do this anymore. Letting him flirt with her on the beach where he proposed to Serah is worse than anything she's ever done, and Lightning has done some terrible things. She tries to pull her fingers from his and her hand lights up with a familiar agony
"Hold still now"
before he releases it. She feels odd. The world wobbles and she feels ill. She looks around for him, feels his breath against her throat.
'We can't...'
'You should get inside, Light.' She feels his fingers ghost against her skin and it hurts. The pain is a comfort, because she shouldn't take pleasure in his touch. Ever. 'There's a storm coming' he whispers against her lips. She licks her own in anticipation, lifts her head to close the distance between her mouth and his-
-and she's freezing and soaked, her hand throbs and her shoulder is a knot of pain. She is on Pulse, on the Archylte Steppe. She smells smoke and hears screams and can see in her mind's eye the caravan of death spreading like a disease across all of Gran Pulse. She needs to move, to save herself, to save the others. Part of her feels like she's lost something on this Steppe...someone that was with her--who should be with her still. Something terrible is happening and she isn't moving. She is withering and dying. She's a frozen observer in this new world and part of her wonders if perhaps she never woke from crystal stasis after all.
The thought comforts her.
Perhaps this whole Pulse nightmare is just some crystal dream. That would mean that she is not a traitor; that Snow is still in love with Serah and that she never fell in love with him at all. It would mean that she is still with Fang and Vanille. The thought makes her happy.
"You need to wake up now..."
The voice is familiar and surprising. She tries to follow it, to latch onto it and let it haul her out of this tar pit in her mind. She tries to open her eyes again (though she's sure she's looking at the white snow of the Archylte Steppe) and realizes that she's blindfolded. She grunts, licks dry, foul lips with a pasty tongue and says, "Wha-"
"Your eyes are bandaged, Light. Don't worry. You'll be okay. Just take your time." She shakes her head. She doesn't understand. Why are her eyes bandaged? Where is she? Who's speaking?
"Snow?" she asks, though the name doesn't feel right. The voice doesn't match and the scent is off. He was just here though. Wasn't he? She was talking to him on the beach...
No beach. There are no beaches here but the one she left behind her.
Nothing makes sense and she feels everything in her tense up in frustration.
"Yeah, Light," but the voice is all wrong and she's sure that she's lost her mind. The absence of sight is disorienting, and her whole mind feels muddled and out of step. She needs to get her bearings or sink back into unconsciousness. Either one will suffice. "We found you laying in the snow. You got some serious frostbite, but you're going to be okay."
Not Snow--she knew that. She knows that she should be relieved. She remembers leaving to get away from Snow and the life that trapped her. Having him here would be...bad.
She wishes that she felt relieved instead of broken.
Pain is making her weak. Weakness makes her sick.
She pushes away thoughts of Snow and focuses instead on the familiar fingers picking at what is apparently bandaging around her head.
"You had us really worried. I...I was afraid. I thought...when we saw you there, I thought we were too late."
It's Hope. The voice and fingers belong to Hope. She feels the cobwebs clearing, feels lucidity returning, but is still confused. There's no way Hope can be here either. Not Snow. Not Hope. She must be dreaming still and wishes there was some way to tell. She works her mouth to get moisture back into it and feels something wet and cool dab at her dry lips.
"I'd give you an ice chip but you were pretty frozen when we found you."
"Hope?" she whispers before she can stop herself. The whole thing is nonsensical.
"Yeah, Light. It's me." She feels his small hand brush hair back from her forehead. His fingers feel cool against her brow and she sighs. "You're going to be okay now."
It doesn't make any sense. She's sure it doesn't.
"How?" she rasps, as she flips through the pages of her mind in an effort to figure out what the hell is going on. Nothing about this makes any sense.
"Sazh and I found you."
That makes even less sense. What would Sazh be doing here? She wanted to call him. Did she call him? She can't remember speaking with him.
She remembers being in her home, in her bed. She remembers Snow showing up. It was dark and cold and he was warm and his mouth was scalding. She remembers the treacherous feel of his breath on her face, his heart hammering against her palm, and his hands and arms cradling her body. She remembers leaving, and taking his bandana with her. She remembers the Tower; nearly plummeting to her death; speaking with him; telling him not to call her anymore. She remembers the snow--miles and miles of snow laid out like a quiet carpet over the whole world; covering Pulse like a shroud.
She remembers freezing and crawling.
She remembers flashes of Snow that she realizes must have been dreams: the heat of his breath, the solidity of his body, the curl of his tongue. Snow in her home and on the beach; holding her. Whispering secrets to her. Things that should be conjurations but aren't because of one traitorous moment; things that she will forget starting. Right. NOW.
She exhales.
She remembers the screams mixed with laughter.
She remembers the bloodlust surge up within her, and the memory materializes into reality so fast that she's seething, blood boiling.
There are murderers about and she let them get away. The thought makes her stomach churn; the memory makes her cheeks burn.
They are out there, reeking of death, painted in blood. They are the dregs of humanity and their lives were forfeit the moment she spied them. They are dead men walking--they just don't know it yet.
She needs to get up. She is a soldier; she swore to protect and she's failed utterly in that task. She tries moving but finds she can't. She feels hog-tied, blindfolded and staked out for scavengers; she gnashes her teeth against a spike of claustrophobia that kicks her heart into overdrive.
"Easy, Light." She feels the bindings loosening and she works to control her breathing. "Sazh bundled you up good to keep in the body heat and warm you faster. You were practically blue when we found you." Hope's voice shakes and Lightning does her best to get her spiraling emotions under control and not make things worse.
She hates it when Hope is scared. Or sad. She hates being the cause of more worry in his life. He has enough to deal with without heaping her self-made drama onto the pile.
"Swaddled," Sazh's voice comes from farther away. She hears footsteps approaching, feels his fingers worming between blankets and her skin. "It's what I used to have to do with Dajh when he was a baby to keep him warm."
He chuckles in a wonderfully soothing way. She relaxes, feels sleep tugging at her again.
"Not supposed to warm you up too fast," Sazh says as he slowly pulls at the blankets. "Something about cold blood rushing back from your limbs to your heart and killing you; or some such nonsense." She feels a blast of cold air on her feet and wiggles her toes, pleased to note that she can still feel them all. Part of her feared that she would wake to find pieces of her hacked off. "Though personally I think that particular brand of nonsense only applies to the rest of us mere mortals. You, my dear Soldier Girl, have more lives than a damn cat."
Lightning smiles at Sazh's running commentary, shifts and aches as the pressure around her body lessens. When Sazh finally pulls the last of her mummy tight blankets loose, Lightning shivers at the touch of cold air against her overheated skin. Sazh lifts her hand and she fights the urge to recoil. Every inch of her feels like it's covered in new skin. Too sensitive. Everything is just too much. She feels stripped of her armor and laid bare; she feels each nerve ending wake up at once to tingle, itch, burn then howl. She bites her lip to stifle the moan.
"Easy there, Soldier."
Easy? It's a ridiculous order. There's nothing easy about any of this and Sazh expecting her (of all people) to take it easy is absurd. Her entire body is a raw wound, and without the benefit of sight to mitigate it, her sense of touch is in total overdrive.
It's miserable. She's miserable.
Speaking of her sight: "Wanna tell me what's wrong with my eyes?" She is proud that she keeps the fear out of her voice. Mostly.
"Swelling," Sazh answers unhelpfully. "Most likely from the extreme cold. To be honest, you look like you got punched in the face repeatedly by the Hero."
She flinches at the mention of Snow. She tries to cover for it by saying, "Yeah, well that never happened."
Although, she does sort of feel like it right now.
Sazh chuckles at her. "Yeah, Soldier. I know that." She feels blunt fingernails in her hair at the back, then the bandage around her head loosens and unwinds. "So do I, by the way. We're a matched set! You busted my nose you know."
Now that he mentions it, she does have a vague recollection of heat butting someone. Sazh keeps his tone conversational. He's not angry but she feels guilty. Still, he should have known better than to try stripping her without her consent.
"Sorry."
"Nah," he says as he continues to unwrap bandages. "S'alright. I should've expected it from you. You never did do things the easy way." When the last of the bandaging is off, Lightning reaches up and pulls the thick pads off her eyes. "Hold up a second, Soldier. Kill the lights, Hope."
She hears movement and then hears the unmistakable sound of breath whistling against the glass of some type of hurricane lantern. "Alright then."
Opening her eyes hurts. The lids are so heavy they feel as if she's lifting barbells with her eyelashes. She blinks and blinks, feels the tears pour out of her eyes and race down her cheeks; the salt in her tears stings the skin of her face.
Her eyes feel as if she poured the entire contents of a beach into them, and her face feels as if she washed it with a cheese grater.
"Tilt your head back now." She obeys the command, feels Sazh's cool, sure fingers spreading her swollen eyelids, gets her first glimpse of him in the low light before the world disappears into a drop of liquid spreading across her cornea. She flinches away from the drops and blinks them from her eyes furiously. Sazh harrumphs at her and grumbles something about soldiers making lousy patients.
"Damn right we are," she agrees. She keeps blinking until her eyes focus. Her whole face feels bruised and tender, but she can see and she can move.
She feels more alive than she's felt in a year. How screwed up is that?
****
An hour later has her dressed in fresh clothes and checking her weapon. Her eyes are burning like she salted them just before staring into the sun, but she can see again. Most of her skin is red and raw, chafed and enflamed, but it is unbroken and healing. Her right hand is sporting a brand new bandage and Lightning traces the line of the tape around her pinky and ring finger, smoothes the tape where it spans the back of her hand-
-shivers at the memory of the feel of Snow's dry, chapped lips against the skin there, the heat of his breath, the humidity of his sigh, the smallest touch of tongue to broken bone-
and she shakes her head and swears. She is not going there, and she is not upset that his bandaging is long gone.
She. Just. Isn't.
...Damn it.
She's not thinking about any of this anymore. Ever!
Instead she traces the break in her bone and finds that it is nowhere near as tender as it should be. The bruising is yellowing instead of darkening. The tingling is nearly gone. She's confused but pleasantly surprised to find that she didn't manage to damage her hand as badly as she thought.
"You did a real number on that hand, Soldier." Sazh startles her from her perusal of the break. She doesn't understand. Her hand feels almost normal. Sazh raises a brow at her. "It's a good thing that I still have some left over goodies from our l'Cie days."
She doesn't get it. "Huh?"
"Elixir," Sazh says, and withdraws a familiar bottle from his pocket, measures out some into a cup and hands it to her. "I've been saving it for a rainy day." She stares at the amber liquid in the glass, knows exactly how precious it is in this dangerous, undeveloped world and feels equal parts honored and shamed that Sazh was forced to waste it on her. "And let me tell you, yesterday it was pouring when we found you."
Lightning looks at him and smiles before gulping the shot of Elixir. It's thick and warm like heated honey, but far too bitter. She grimaces at the taste before the potent medicine numbs her pain from her mouth to her gullet, then spreads outwards towards her fingers and toes.
Elixir is awesome, even if it's awful.
"Metaphorically speaking, I mean," Sazh finishes and Lightning smiles at him.
"Thank you." The words are pale. Sazh and Hope risked themselves to come after her, saved her life, then used their potions to heal her up.
"Nah! Don't thank me." Sazh rubs the back of his neck and shuffles. Between his dark complexion and the low light, she can't tell if he's actually blushing, but she thinks she knows him well enough by now to decide that he is. She finds a warmth filling a hole in her chest that she's never recognized before and realizes that she's missed Sazh this past year. She's missed his grumping, his smart-ass comments, his quick wit and his kind, caring heart. She leans forward and places a kiss on his cheek, feels the heat coming off him and knows that her assumption was correct. Sazh leans away from her and stammers out, "Hey now! No need to give an old man a heart attack."
"You're not that old, Sazh," she says, and knows that if Fang were here, she'd be winking at Sazh and making suggestions just to make the poor man stammer.
Sometimes she misses Fang like an amputated limb.
"I'm old enough, Miss Soldier and don't you forget it!" Lightning laughs at Sazh and sits down to pull a pair of socks onto her bandaged feet. The elixir treatments seem to have healed up the worst of the damage on her feet, but she can still feel spots that hurt surrounding spots with no feeling. There's a good chance the dead zones on her feet will stay that way. Lightning sighs--nothing to be done about it now--before tugging her fur boots on and lacing them up tightly over her leggings.
"You know, you never did say how you managed to find me." Lightning stands up and shifts inside her boots until they feel just right. She scowls at them and contemplates them until she realizes that Sazh didn't answer her question.
That's suspicious. Now she's really curious.
"Sazh?"
"Uh...well." Lightning starts feeling uncomfortable. "you know those communicators that I built for you all?"
"Yes?" It comes out as a question mostly because she's waiting for the punch line.
"Well," he drags it out into about four syllables as he says it, and gets all shifty again. "I may have added a locator beacon into each of them. Just in case."
Lightning raises her eyebrows as she contemplates Sazh's latest sneaky sneakiness. Ordinarily, the idea of being tagged like some sort of animal in a scientific study would piss her off, and she figures from Sazh's overall discomfort, he knows that. However, his little sneaky subterfuge just saved her ass in a very literal manner, and Lightning's never been one to complain about things just for the point of the issue....
Alright, so that's not really true at all. But she's not going to complain about this one thing just for the principle of the matter. No point. It came in handy. Sazh is brilliant. End of story.
Doesn't mean she won't ask for a way to deactivate it. Or at least an on-off switch. She's not willing to be tagged and tracked again if she's trying to disappear.
"Good idea, Sazh." Sazh lets out a full body exhalation, like he's really been worried about her exploding on him and trying to kill him all this time.
No faith. It almost makes her sad.
Lightning scans the room for her gear, praying it survived. She needs to move. She's already been idle too long and she's terrified she's going to be too late to do anything to help those prisoners. "Where's my gear?"
"Hey now, Soldier. Where do you think you're going now?"
Sometimes she forgets how much she doesn't like explaining herself.
"Where's my weapon? I have to go." She storms out of the bedroom and her body kicks up a fuss at the whirlwind movements. She is in no shape to move.
She doesn't care.
She ignores the pain and nausea, makes it into what looks like a gutted dining area before she's bowled over by the stench of exploded gunpowder and death. "Wha-?"
"Would you hold up and tell me what's going through that fool head of yours?" Sazh yells.
"Where are we?" Lightning looks around at the half destroyed building. There are bullet holes scarring the walls, scorch marks from larger ordnances. Sazh looks disgusted, which is an interesting counterpoint to her horror.
"Another damn destroyed outpost." Sazh walks over to the debris strewn table and swipes a careful hand through it. "Another damn waste." He shakes his head. "Bastards."
None of that makes any sense.
"What's going on?" Lightning waits to the count of ten. "What do you mean 'another,' Sazh? I don't know anything about any of this. Why does none of this seem like a surprise to you?" Sazh rubs his forehead, sits down and puts his head into his hands as if it is just too heavy to hold up any longer. Like the weight of the memories is unbearable. Lightning's fingers itch for her weapon. She's afraid that she knows exactly what he's about to say. She can already feel the anger percolating, and Sazh hasn't spoken yet.
"This isn't the first time I've found an outpost that's been decimated like this," Sazh says. Sazh rubs his hair once and Lightning expects to see his chocobo come flying out of it before realizing that baby chocobo isn't a baby anymore. She's probably as big as Hope by now.
A year. A whole year has gone by and she feels as if she sleepwalked through the whole thing.
"...These were good people. Hard working people!" Sazh snaps and Lightning has no idea how much of his diatribe she's missed but feels terrible for disappearing into her own thoughts while Sazh has been talking about things that clearly upset him.
"How many?" Lightning asks. "How long has this been going on, Sazh?"
"Six months. Maybe seven." She feels her face heat, her throat close, and her muscles tense. She's so angry she could spit. She feels like she might fly apart from the storm brewing inside her. She exhales a sharp breath through her nose, hoping to gain some calm. Time just seems to be working in the opposite manner, twisting her even tighter, ramping her anger up higher.
She needs to calm down--
"Why didn't you call me?" She tries not to make it sound like the accusation that it is.
She fails.
"Excuse me, Soldier?" Sazh matches her anger in a way he's never done before. She should recognize the danger here but she's too amped up to do anything but grit her teeth. "I believe I did call you several times." Lightning feels her fists clench at the accusation.
She knows it's true. That only makes her angrier. There's a buzz behind her stinging eyes.
"You should have told me!" Lightning shouts, knowing she's wrong. Knowing she's out of line. She wasn't willing to listen. She disappeared into her head and ignored everything. This is not Sazh's fault but she can't seem to care right now in the face of her own failure. Someone needs to be blamed, and she'll settle for Sazh.
"Why? What good would that have done?" It's like a slap in the face and Lightning feels the flush of rage and shame spread over her face, down her neck to cover her whole body. She wants to tear Sazh's head off for making this her fault.
It is her fault. She knows it's her fault.
"I asked you to come. I told you we needed your help. You just decided to curl into a ball and disappear! Go live on some beach somewhere and leave the us to deal with all this mess on our own."
"That's not..." even close. But not really wrong either.
"Don't you deny it! You didn't want to look at Cocoon." Sazh yells and she's not sure if she's angry, affronted, or just outright shocked that Sazh would speak to her in this manner. "You couldn't stand to look at Vanille or Fang so you just ran away."
Angry. Yep. Anger wins by a country mile....
"Shut up!"
"Poor little Soldier girl. Like you're the only one who lost something," Sazh snipes.
"What the HELL!" Hope yells from the doorway. "Are you both crazy? You really think blaming each other is going to make you feel better? Why not just pull your weapons and get it over with!" Lightning sees her shock mirrored on Sazh's face. Hope is livid. And Hope is right. "You want to do something useful, why don't you grab a shovel and help me bury the bodies that were left outside to rot!"
Hope turns around, storms out of the room and slams the door behind him. The force of the slam rattles the frame and shakes the door loose. It falls with a dry crack that sends a blast of cold air into the room.
Lightning feels her anger deflate at the mention of bodies. This is a home she's standing in. The people who lived here are dead. They were murdered for their food, or their supplies, or just for sport. These people were murdered and she's standing in their home blaming her friend for letting it happen.
She is a horrible person.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"No, Soldier. Don't apologize to me. I don't even know what the hell I was yelling about."
"I do. This... All of this." Lightning looks around at the destruction, looks outside at the still smoldering ruins. "There's only so much senseless death a person can stand looking at before they finally crack."
They need someone to blame; they need an enemy to fight.
Sazh stands next to her and looks outside. "I don't know what's going on anymore. I thought we'd seen the worst last year."
"Yeah. Me too."
"I should have told you what was going on." She shakes her head. "I wanted to believe that we could handle it ourselves. And I felt bad about ruining your chances at building a new life."
Lightning feels the urges to laugh and cry vie for top position. If Sazh only knew...
"And then when we found you and I thought you were going to die too, on top of everything." Sazh shakes his head. "We've lost enough. We can't lose you too."
Lightning looks at Sazh, sees the bruises under his eyes from his busted nose and smiles at him. "Well, you saved my ass."
"It was the kid, you know." Sazh nods towards Hope outside pacing in the snow. "He's the one that insisted we come looking for you."
She's not surprised. Not really. Hope followed her when she was hurtling full speed ahead on a suicide mission and he was just a scared, green kid looking for an outlet for his anger. He followed her through the Vile Peaks, through The Gapra Whitewoods and into Palumpolum. He'd have followed her straight into the heart of the Sanctum and died beside her. That he would come after her in a blizzard is not...
Wait. How the hell did he know?
Did she say more than she intended in her message? It's not impossible; she was half dead at that point--frozen, hypothermic, frostbitten, exhausted and bruised from her shoulder to her hip. To say she was delirious would be an understatement.
She walks to the door and lifts it into the frame again, spies Hope through a crack in the door hunched over and vomiting into the snow outside. She drops the door and walks outside, determined to get to him. He deserves better from her.
Things are a mess and she needs to fix them. Now.
Catching sight of the bodies derails her thoughts.
There are seven bodies lined up, each one embedded in a pool of frozen blood, faces blue, captured forever in the final throes of agony, blind, milky, iced over eyes staring at the unforgiving sky. She wants to close their eyes but knows it's impossible.
The bastards gut shot them. Dragging people from their homes in the dead of night and murdering them wasn't evil or sadistic enough for these maniacs. No; they decided to usher these people into the afterlife in the most painful, brutal, and excruciatingly protracted manner imaginable. These people were still alive when she tracked that caravan of death through the snow to their murderers' compound. These people were probably still alive when Sazh and Hope pulled her out of her own icy grave. The snow and freezing temperatures might have even slowed the bleeding as hypothermia set in. Lightning realizes that if weren't for hypothermia and exposure killing them first, these people might very well have still been howling when Sazh and Hope pulled her half frozen body into the one remaining structure.
She swallows down her own bile and hopes it doesn't come frothing out of her mouth. She vows that she will put these rabid animals out of everyone's misery.
Hope's retching draws her from her own horror, and she kneels beside him in the snow and places a hand on his back.
"I'm sorry, Hope." Hope's body shudders and she slides a hand under his arms to lift him up and into her arms. He slobbers a sob onto her neck and she repeats, "I'm sorry."
He shouldn't be here staring into eyes of dead men, trying to figure out how to bury bodies in the frozen ground. He should be home with his father. He shouldn't have to see anymore of this sort of horror. None of them should have to deal with this anymore. They've all seen enough horror and death to last ten lifetimes and it's left its mark on all of them. She hoped that Hope as the youngest might be able to heal from the scars and have some semblance of a normal life again.
She didn't realize that she was an idealistic moron. She thought that was Snow's domain. Apparently the Hero rubbed off on her.
...And she's just never going to think about that again. Ever.
Hope shakes against her, shudders, pulls himself together and away. She feels proud and sad at once. Hope is such an old child now. He's seen things men five times his age shouldn't see and he still tries to put on a brave face for the world. She wants to weep. Instead she smiles as he pulls away from her and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. "Sorry..."
"You have nothing to be sorry for, Hope."
"I should be able to handle this..." he gestures at the dead, blue bodies, looks at them and goes a whiter shade of pale. She shakes her head at him, and turns his face away from the dead bodies.
"No one should have to handle this Hope. These men..."
Men. Only men. No women or children...
"I have to save them," she whispers and stands up. She forgets about Hope and Sazh, looks around at the pure white, unmarked landscape. She's wasting time here. These men are dead. Their wives and children...they might still be alive.
This is what she lives for; it's what she was born to do. She's a weapon forged by necessity and honed by a thirst for vengeance. She's deadly and so very ready to unleash a year's /lifetime's/ worth of pent up anger and frustration on some deserving targets.
She's always believed a target's a target, and perhaps that's true. But some targets are better than others.
"I have to go."
"What?" Hope asks, confused and maybe even a bit scared.
"You can't save them, Soldier. They're long gone." Sazh is solemn. Horrified.
Disgusted.
She can relate.
"No. I know that." These people are long past her help. "The women. Sazh, I know where they are."
Sazh's whole face changes in an alarming way. "What are you talking about?"
"I was out on the Steppe and I heard the attack. I didn't know what was happening, but I knew it was bad." Sazh has a strange light in his eyes. If Lightning didn't know better, she'd call it blood lust. She considers his posture, his clenched fists...
Perhaps she doesn't know better after all. Sazh looks positively murderous; he's angrier than she can remember ever seeing him and that includes during their suicide run to the Pulse Vestige and the aftermath battles which nearly cost him his son. It worries and impresses her; but if Sazh is out for blood, she certainly can't blame him.
"I heard the explosions, and I saw the fire on the horizon. I didn't realize the extent of what I was seeing, but I know bad things when they're happening." They all do. Survival instincts can't be forgotten. "So I followed them." She stares at the bodies, faces a hideous shade of blue, eyes staring skyward.
"You..." Sazh starts but she cuts him off.
"Through the snow and the dark. I followed them." She nods to herself as she says, "I know where their base camp is."
"What?" Sazh asks, but it isn't really a question. It sounds...hopeful. "Where?"
"We don't have time for explanations." Lightning charges past him. There's an insane plan half-forming in her mind. The barbarism evident in the executions of these people raises the urgency level. Talking is wasting time that the prisoners don't have. Women that she abandoned to unimaginable horrors. "I left those prisoners there," those crying, screaming women, "and I'm going to get them out."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TBC... and hopefully sooner. But Chapter 29 of Evolution is at bat...
WOW. THIS took forever and to be honest, I don't love it. But I never really love transition chapters and that's pretty much what this was always going to be. I needed some regrouping and repositioning of characters.
Chapter 8
Author: frkmgnt1
Rating: PG-13 or T (Pick your poison. No graphic anything as of Chapter 7)
Pairing: Snow/Lightning, Snow/Serah
Chapter 7: Muttering Retreats ~8,500
Word Count so far ~47,000
Description: Snow has something he needs to say. Lightning cannot hear it.
Genre: Angst angst and more angst. Romance (Oh my god! I wrote Romance. WTF?)
Chapter 6
"One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Muttering Retreats
"Here!" A voice yells out. "I found her!"
The voice sounds distant-distant enough that she's half convinced that it's imaginary. She can barely feel the hands groping at her, maneuvering her, trying to muscle her out of the snow. She knows that if she's taken from this location, she will most likely be killed. She wants to fight but she can't open her eyes; she can't move at all. She resists the only way she can-by going limp and boneless.
Dead weight is harder to maneuver.
She hears a grunt, feels fingers bruise where they dig into freezing flesh and aching bone. The pain is indistinct-too much and too little at once. She is vaguely aware of being manhandled off the ground and out of the snow drift. She knows she should be concerned. Terrified even. She can barely muster apathy.
When unconsciousness asks her for a dance, she takes its hand and lets it lead her away, fully expecting it to be her last tango.
****
She spins and twirls to an erratic rhythm. She's off-balance, much like she was just after blowing out her eardrum and developing extreme vertigo as a side effect. In fact, her whole body hurts, and the spinning is getting sickening and she just wants to stop. The room blurs by her and she's so very hot. She needs air, or water, or anything right now before she immolates or vomits and won't that just be the most attractive thing ever for the other occupants of the dance floor.
And...why is she dancing anyway? She's never liked dancing.
"Because I asked you to," says a velvet voice, and she shivers at the tingle of it across her skin and in her ears.
The spinning slows, stilled by a large hand on the small of her back, and another in her hand. She's pulled forward, and pressed against a hard body. She relaxes into the twirling, listens to the rapid heartbeat in the chest beneath her cheek. The hand in hers disappears for a moment before it's in her hair, cradling her head. She should be fighting, but she's too dizzy. She just needs her bearings, and if she can just stay here for a moment she'll feel better. She tries to focus on the steady thud-thud beneath her cheek and all she hears is a rattling, clanging, sound that makes her head throb
"Hold her still!"
and she is afraid and cold and shaking apart under the intensity of the feelings.
"Hold onto her!"
She's confused and she reaches out again for Snow but he's gone. He's gone, and she's alone and so, so cold.
"This'll keep you calm."
She feels a small jab into her arm, more painful than it ought to be. Then she feels nothing at all.
*****
She's drowning. Or perhaps, she drowned already.
There's a weight on her chest like someone dropped a house on her. Every inhalation makes her lungs burn.
Everything burns.
There's pain. Enough that she knows she's still alive; so much that she wishes she were dead. Parts of her body that had long since stopped feeling are waking up to sound off their anger at her flagrant abuse. Face, fingers, toes, feet, calves, ears. Each body part feels as if she's taken a blowtorch to it.
She tries to scream out the pain but her voice is a ragged thing, hissing and gasping, whistling through her bleeding, raw throat.
Her body shakes and sends off a wave of agony from the dead soles of her feet to the frozen roots of her hair. A hard bounce sends her careening off a ledge. Where the hell did that come from? She falls a short distance, lands face down on something with enough force to knock the air from her lungs. She inhales. The air is warmer than she's felt in forever and her nose runs as if the contents of her sinuses have just been waiting to thaw in order to empty. She tastes blood and mucus, coughs, inhales again and smells rubber and antifreeze. The smells confound her. She tries to force her eyes open but they're too heavy. She tries to say something, but her tongue is swelled, or her lips are glued.
Or she's gagged.
She struggles, feels her heart kick up a fuss in her chest when she can't move. Someone pins her and she bucks and grits her teeth. Her jaw feels as if it might break. Her arms ache. There's a knot in her back the size of a fist that continues to punch her in the spine. She feels bruised and beaten, but she fights as hard as she can against her body. Against her restraints.
"Stop struggling!"
The command makes her fight harder. She feels hands on her body and she recoils and feels something whack her in the head hard enough to stun her. Her ears ring, the world spins in accelerating circles.
One.
Two.
She's out before she can count out the third.
*****
It's dark and slow and cold, much like the bottom of a well. Or the depths of a depression. Damp, dank and full of vermin wiggling beneath her skin. She floats and sinks, drifts in between and waits...
The headache is bad enough to pull her up from the depths of blessed unconsciousness. She can feel something covering her eyes and she moves to pull off the blindfold only to find that her hands are also trapped.
That realization burns away the fog. She feels hands on her body, burning like embers against too cold skin, peeling wet clothes off her body. There are voices too but she can't hear over the rush of blood in her ears, can't think past the absolute rage at being undressed against her permission.
She surges forward and smacks her forehead into the nose of the person touching her. The hit makes her already aching head scream, then swim, but that's a minor thing compared to the satisfaction she feels. She hears the crack and the curse, feels warm blood splash over her cheeks and lips and tries to smile.
Resistance may be futile, but it is all she has left.
She hears a nasal complaint, a bitten off swear and crunch followed hard by a bark of pain before a hand grabs her arm and slips a needle into her vein. She spits in what she can only hope is her captor's eye before the drug snares her in its web.
*****
The large crack runs from floor to ceiling with smaller fractures splintering off across the whole wall. It resembles a spider web across the wall, and feels just as deadly.
Something lurks beneath it.
She's always known that this house was a death trap. She never wanted to move into it. Something about it reminds her of the past, and it isn't the nearby beach. It's the cheerful appearance versus the depressing reality. An empty house that doubles as a tomb; a pseudo-home that feels like a prison.
It reminds her of her whole life.
It reminds her of Barthandelus--all innocent appearances, smarmy smiles and insidious intent.
She feels said sinister intent like an ill wind. She feels it in her gut, in her bones, behind her eyes. She feels it in prickled skin and a shiver that stalls at the base of her spine. It hovers over and around her, trapped behind the walls of the house; it possesses the structure, animates the inanimate. The enemy is around her, and it's seeking a way to reach her.
The crack in the wall spreads as she watches it. She stares transfixed, watches fingers wiggle out, turn into insects crawling over the walls. She should run, she knows. She should be horrified that her house is possessed and falling apart; that there is some creature trying to wiggle through cracks in the facade so it can reach her.
It will reach her; that should worry her.
It doesn't. She doesn't care. She hates this house, and this life, but somehow, she can't seem to leave it. Every time she tries to go, she comes back to it.
Like she's caught in an orbit. Or a web.
Like she's chained to it.
Chained to her. Chained to him...
Perhaps her dark stalker can offer an out.
She stretches out on the miserable, uncomfortable couch and stares at the crack in the wall. It widens as she watches. She waits, eager to face the monster. Eager to confront the creature that's hiding inside.
She longs to destroy it as it seeks to destroy her. She knows now that it is the cause of her problems, and that if she can just exorcise it...
...All her problems will go away.
Her breath catches.
Or does she have it backwards? Perhaps confrontation will lead it to exorcise her. She can feel its need like fingers around her throat; like breath ghosting over her lips. She knows that if she is here when it finally breaks through, she will disappear. She can feel the urgency, but it isn't enough to conquer the exhaustion or apathy. It isn't enough to let her break orbit.
She feels like a stranger in this place, like a ghost haunting her own life.
The crack gets bigger still and she watches as a piece of plaster falls. The walls peel back and away. She needs to get up and leave before everything crumbles around her. Her body feels leaden and won't respond to her will anymore. The couch sucks. Something is digging into her, constricting her. The couch is too small and claustrophobic. The material chafes where it rubs her skin. She wants to move, she really does but she's so tired that even thinking of getting up exhausts her. In fact, she thinks she'll sleep some...
'You need to get up Light.'
Snow.
She smiles.
It should be strange that he's here, but it isn't. It feels right, like she's found a missing piece to the puzzle. She misses him. Misses him, misses the sound of his voice and the smell that is his. She misses the sparkle in his eyes as he teases her, the small crinkles that bracket his eyes as he smiles. She misses the quirk of his lip, and his steady presence at her back.
She will never admit to any of this, but it doesn't mean she doesn't feel it.
That he's here should bother her, but it doesn't. She feels lighter with him there. In this moment, she feels happy without the usual shame and anger that is balled and bundled up in all thoughts of Snow. She turns toward his voice but doesn't see him. Still, she knows he's there with her.
Always with her...
'Don't want to. m'tired Snow' Tired of fighting, tired of running. Tired of this life that doesn't fit. Tired and sore, and ready to rest.
Tired of looking but not touching, of wanting and not having; tired of pretending. Tired of being without him, though she'll never admit that aloud. Admitting it to herself is pretty much impossible, after all.
'I know,' and she feels the ghost of his fingers on her hip, on the back of her neck, tracing the scar on her back where he refused to stitch her. 'I know you're tired and I'd let you rest" His breath puffs against her neck and she shivers. "I really would. But you have to go. Something is coming.'
There is laughter in the cold; danger in the darkness.
'No...'
'And the house is on fire, Lightning. You need to get out of the house.'
She opens her eyes though she doesn't remember closing them and fixates on the unfamiliar crack in the wall. She sits up and watches as the crack melts, then explodes into flames. She jumps up but there's flames everywhere now and she feels the heat on her skin. She moves and sees that her feet are burning. She needs to get out, but she needs to get HIM out more. She can't find him. She panics before realizing that he was a dream. Or a nightmare. He's not here and never was. Her mind is playing tricks on her, tormenting her. She runs for the door down a corridor she can't remember, and watches the flames lick at her hips, catch on her clothes. She feels it but it doesn't hurt enough, so she stops moving and watches herself burn and she wonders why she was so afraid.
She catches a glimpse of her stalker and the form is human and smirking; the fire roars and it sounds like cruel laughter. She hears screams and the walls are crumbling. She the smart edge of a blade rend, watches blood cascade over her hands and wonders why she's not dead...
Until she realizes that the only thing in the house--and in this life--that can hurt her, is her-
*****
She's not sure she's awake. She can still feel Snow's breath on her cheek, still hear his voice. She can still feel the burning from her feet to her face and her dream recedes.
She remembers the flames, still feels the burning and panics...
She knows she's not in that house. She remembers leaving the house, leaving the life that was killing her by inches and marching in a storm that was just killing her.
Perhaps Gran Pulse finally succeeded where the Cocoon fal'Cie failed.
Every part of her body burns and throbs in time with her erratic heartbeat. She's sure she feels her skin splitting. Her muscles pull and cramp like they're peeling back from her skeleton. She smells fire and smoke. She smells death.
She hears pops and crackling and she groans, hisses.
Fat snaps like fireworks when it burns...
She's a prisoner. She broke her captor's nose and her punishment is to be burnt alive.
She thinks that might be a bit of an overreaction.
"Help," she croaks. Her lips are sticking to her teeth and her throat feels like she's been gargling with ground glass.
"Easy there, Soldier." The rumbling voice and familiar nickname are so welcome and impossible that she figures she must be still be languishing in fever dreams. It makes no sense. She opens her mouth to match the name to the voice but she can't. The answer is there, but remains teasingly beyond her reach. She sees a kind smile, warm, dark eyes and a flash of bright yellow fluttering around. The name is there, dancing on the tip of her tongue, loitering in her peripheral vision.
"Help." It's all she can think to say.
"We gotcha now. It's alright. You're going to be alright."
How? she wants to ask, but can't think past the pain.
She feels a hand on her forehead. She tries to open her eyes to figure out if she's hallucinating but her eyes are so heavy and glued shut. She moves, but her arms are pinned immobile.
Not good!
She panics, thrashes and every inch of skin feels like it's peeling off of her. She screams, and it's a rough, raw thing.
"Hey now Soldier!" Hands cup her face. "Sorry about this but you'll hurt yourself."
She opens her mouth to answer when something warm and sticky flows through her and she exhales and slips away...
"It'll be over soon."
-----
'It'll be over soon...' and she doesn't know what that means. She looks around to figure it out but she's outside on the beach in Bodhum. She can smell the salt of the sea, but it's funny. Off.
Everything feels wrong.
The sand chafes and Phoenix is burning a little too hot today for her taste. She knows -knows-knows that she's getting roasted by the radiant and reflected rays, and she's not looking forward to the coming days of too hot skin against itchy sheets, ice cold showers against reddened skin, pervasive soreness, or the ugly peeling.
'You couldn't be ugly if you tried.' She feels the breath gush into her burning ear, feels the moisture tickle her oversensitive skin. She smiles and stretches, slow and satisfied.
'You are a liar,' she tells him and she shivers at the sensation of him chuckling against her. She opens her eyes but Phoenix is too bright and she can't see more than a silhouette anyway and she's afraid to look at him because then he'll be real. Or he won't be real. She wants to fold him into her arms, pull him to her, sigh into his neck, curl fingers into his hair, and taste the breath he exhales. She wants to memorize the texture of the skin at the small of his back, and drag the soles of her feet over the swell of his calves. She wants...
She feels a sudden sadness that nearly devours her because she can never hold him or know any of those things. She can never even think about it because entertaining the notion makes her the worst sort of traitor.
She needs to get away from here. There are no words for how wrong this is, nor how right it feels. She needs to run...'Don't be sad,' he whispers and she wonders when he became a mind reader.
'I'm not,' he says in answer to her unspoken question, proving himself a liar once again. He takes her hand in his. 'I just know you. You're part of me.'
It's a ridiculous and traitorous declaration. She should break his face.
'I know,' she says because she feels the same.
It's not right, but it's still the truth.
She doesn't know how it happened; how she went from loathing everything about him to finding him charming and wonderful and too impossible to live with, and more impossible to live without, but there it is all the same. It crept up on her like a mugger, and it spread through her body like a cancer before she realized it happened; and now it's too late.
It started with grudging respect that morphed to charmed affection and before she knew what happened, she couldn't imagine a life where he didn't exist in some form. And she wants him to be happy; she always thought that was where it ended until she realized that her own happiness was tied to his with some sort of invisible chain, and rather than acting as a buoy, it more closely resembles a noose strangling the life from her.
She can't hold him, and so she can't be near him.
She can't do this anymore. Letting him flirt with her on the beach where he proposed to Serah is worse than anything she's ever done, and Lightning has done some terrible things. She tries to pull her fingers from his and her hand lights up with a familiar agony
"Hold still now"
before he releases it. She feels odd. The world wobbles and she feels ill. She looks around for him, feels his breath against her throat.
'We can't...'
'You should get inside, Light.' She feels his fingers ghost against her skin and it hurts. The pain is a comfort, because she shouldn't take pleasure in his touch. Ever. 'There's a storm coming' he whispers against her lips. She licks her own in anticipation, lifts her head to close the distance between her mouth and his-
-and she's freezing and soaked, her hand throbs and her shoulder is a knot of pain. She is on Pulse, on the Archylte Steppe. She smells smoke and hears screams and can see in her mind's eye the caravan of death spreading like a disease across all of Gran Pulse. She needs to move, to save herself, to save the others. Part of her feels like she's lost something on this Steppe...someone that was with her--who should be with her still. Something terrible is happening and she isn't moving. She is withering and dying. She's a frozen observer in this new world and part of her wonders if perhaps she never woke from crystal stasis after all.
The thought comforts her.
Perhaps this whole Pulse nightmare is just some crystal dream. That would mean that she is not a traitor; that Snow is still in love with Serah and that she never fell in love with him at all. It would mean that she is still with Fang and Vanille. The thought makes her happy.
"You need to wake up now..."
The voice is familiar and surprising. She tries to follow it, to latch onto it and let it haul her out of this tar pit in her mind. She tries to open her eyes again (though she's sure she's looking at the white snow of the Archylte Steppe) and realizes that she's blindfolded. She grunts, licks dry, foul lips with a pasty tongue and says, "Wha-"
"Your eyes are bandaged, Light. Don't worry. You'll be okay. Just take your time." She shakes her head. She doesn't understand. Why are her eyes bandaged? Where is she? Who's speaking?
"Snow?" she asks, though the name doesn't feel right. The voice doesn't match and the scent is off. He was just here though. Wasn't he? She was talking to him on the beach...
No beach. There are no beaches here but the one she left behind her.
Nothing makes sense and she feels everything in her tense up in frustration.
"Yeah, Light," but the voice is all wrong and she's sure that she's lost her mind. The absence of sight is disorienting, and her whole mind feels muddled and out of step. She needs to get her bearings or sink back into unconsciousness. Either one will suffice. "We found you laying in the snow. You got some serious frostbite, but you're going to be okay."
Not Snow--she knew that. She knows that she should be relieved. She remembers leaving to get away from Snow and the life that trapped her. Having him here would be...bad.
She wishes that she felt relieved instead of broken.
Pain is making her weak. Weakness makes her sick.
She pushes away thoughts of Snow and focuses instead on the familiar fingers picking at what is apparently bandaging around her head.
"You had us really worried. I...I was afraid. I thought...when we saw you there, I thought we were too late."
It's Hope. The voice and fingers belong to Hope. She feels the cobwebs clearing, feels lucidity returning, but is still confused. There's no way Hope can be here either. Not Snow. Not Hope. She must be dreaming still and wishes there was some way to tell. She works her mouth to get moisture back into it and feels something wet and cool dab at her dry lips.
"I'd give you an ice chip but you were pretty frozen when we found you."
"Hope?" she whispers before she can stop herself. The whole thing is nonsensical.
"Yeah, Light. It's me." She feels his small hand brush hair back from her forehead. His fingers feel cool against her brow and she sighs. "You're going to be okay now."
It doesn't make any sense. She's sure it doesn't.
"How?" she rasps, as she flips through the pages of her mind in an effort to figure out what the hell is going on. Nothing about this makes any sense.
"Sazh and I found you."
That makes even less sense. What would Sazh be doing here? She wanted to call him. Did she call him? She can't remember speaking with him.
She remembers being in her home, in her bed. She remembers Snow showing up. It was dark and cold and he was warm and his mouth was scalding. She remembers the treacherous feel of his breath on her face, his heart hammering against her palm, and his hands and arms cradling her body. She remembers leaving, and taking his bandana with her. She remembers the Tower; nearly plummeting to her death; speaking with him; telling him not to call her anymore. She remembers the snow--miles and miles of snow laid out like a quiet carpet over the whole world; covering Pulse like a shroud.
She remembers freezing and crawling.
She remembers flashes of Snow that she realizes must have been dreams: the heat of his breath, the solidity of his body, the curl of his tongue. Snow in her home and on the beach; holding her. Whispering secrets to her. Things that should be conjurations but aren't because of one traitorous moment; things that she will forget starting. Right. NOW.
She exhales.
She remembers the screams mixed with laughter.
She remembers the bloodlust surge up within her, and the memory materializes into reality so fast that she's seething, blood boiling.
There are murderers about and she let them get away. The thought makes her stomach churn; the memory makes her cheeks burn.
They are out there, reeking of death, painted in blood. They are the dregs of humanity and their lives were forfeit the moment she spied them. They are dead men walking--they just don't know it yet.
She needs to get up. She is a soldier; she swore to protect and she's failed utterly in that task. She tries moving but finds she can't. She feels hog-tied, blindfolded and staked out for scavengers; she gnashes her teeth against a spike of claustrophobia that kicks her heart into overdrive.
"Easy, Light." She feels the bindings loosening and she works to control her breathing. "Sazh bundled you up good to keep in the body heat and warm you faster. You were practically blue when we found you." Hope's voice shakes and Lightning does her best to get her spiraling emotions under control and not make things worse.
She hates it when Hope is scared. Or sad. She hates being the cause of more worry in his life. He has enough to deal with without heaping her self-made drama onto the pile.
"Swaddled," Sazh's voice comes from farther away. She hears footsteps approaching, feels his fingers worming between blankets and her skin. "It's what I used to have to do with Dajh when he was a baby to keep him warm."
He chuckles in a wonderfully soothing way. She relaxes, feels sleep tugging at her again.
"Not supposed to warm you up too fast," Sazh says as he slowly pulls at the blankets. "Something about cold blood rushing back from your limbs to your heart and killing you; or some such nonsense." She feels a blast of cold air on her feet and wiggles her toes, pleased to note that she can still feel them all. Part of her feared that she would wake to find pieces of her hacked off. "Though personally I think that particular brand of nonsense only applies to the rest of us mere mortals. You, my dear Soldier Girl, have more lives than a damn cat."
Lightning smiles at Sazh's running commentary, shifts and aches as the pressure around her body lessens. When Sazh finally pulls the last of her mummy tight blankets loose, Lightning shivers at the touch of cold air against her overheated skin. Sazh lifts her hand and she fights the urge to recoil. Every inch of her feels like it's covered in new skin. Too sensitive. Everything is just too much. She feels stripped of her armor and laid bare; she feels each nerve ending wake up at once to tingle, itch, burn then howl. She bites her lip to stifle the moan.
"Easy there, Soldier."
Easy? It's a ridiculous order. There's nothing easy about any of this and Sazh expecting her (of all people) to take it easy is absurd. Her entire body is a raw wound, and without the benefit of sight to mitigate it, her sense of touch is in total overdrive.
It's miserable. She's miserable.
Speaking of her sight: "Wanna tell me what's wrong with my eyes?" She is proud that she keeps the fear out of her voice. Mostly.
"Swelling," Sazh answers unhelpfully. "Most likely from the extreme cold. To be honest, you look like you got punched in the face repeatedly by the Hero."
She flinches at the mention of Snow. She tries to cover for it by saying, "Yeah, well that never happened."
Although, she does sort of feel like it right now.
Sazh chuckles at her. "Yeah, Soldier. I know that." She feels blunt fingernails in her hair at the back, then the bandage around her head loosens and unwinds. "So do I, by the way. We're a matched set! You busted my nose you know."
Now that he mentions it, she does have a vague recollection of heat butting someone. Sazh keeps his tone conversational. He's not angry but she feels guilty. Still, he should have known better than to try stripping her without her consent.
"Sorry."
"Nah," he says as he continues to unwrap bandages. "S'alright. I should've expected it from you. You never did do things the easy way." When the last of the bandaging is off, Lightning reaches up and pulls the thick pads off her eyes. "Hold up a second, Soldier. Kill the lights, Hope."
She hears movement and then hears the unmistakable sound of breath whistling against the glass of some type of hurricane lantern. "Alright then."
Opening her eyes hurts. The lids are so heavy they feel as if she's lifting barbells with her eyelashes. She blinks and blinks, feels the tears pour out of her eyes and race down her cheeks; the salt in her tears stings the skin of her face.
Her eyes feel as if she poured the entire contents of a beach into them, and her face feels as if she washed it with a cheese grater.
"Tilt your head back now." She obeys the command, feels Sazh's cool, sure fingers spreading her swollen eyelids, gets her first glimpse of him in the low light before the world disappears into a drop of liquid spreading across her cornea. She flinches away from the drops and blinks them from her eyes furiously. Sazh harrumphs at her and grumbles something about soldiers making lousy patients.
"Damn right we are," she agrees. She keeps blinking until her eyes focus. Her whole face feels bruised and tender, but she can see and she can move.
She feels more alive than she's felt in a year. How screwed up is that?
****
An hour later has her dressed in fresh clothes and checking her weapon. Her eyes are burning like she salted them just before staring into the sun, but she can see again. Most of her skin is red and raw, chafed and enflamed, but it is unbroken and healing. Her right hand is sporting a brand new bandage and Lightning traces the line of the tape around her pinky and ring finger, smoothes the tape where it spans the back of her hand-
-shivers at the memory of the feel of Snow's dry, chapped lips against the skin there, the heat of his breath, the humidity of his sigh, the smallest touch of tongue to broken bone-
and she shakes her head and swears. She is not going there, and she is not upset that his bandaging is long gone.
She. Just. Isn't.
...Damn it.
She's not thinking about any of this anymore. Ever!
Instead she traces the break in her bone and finds that it is nowhere near as tender as it should be. The bruising is yellowing instead of darkening. The tingling is nearly gone. She's confused but pleasantly surprised to find that she didn't manage to damage her hand as badly as she thought.
"You did a real number on that hand, Soldier." Sazh startles her from her perusal of the break. She doesn't understand. Her hand feels almost normal. Sazh raises a brow at her. "It's a good thing that I still have some left over goodies from our l'Cie days."
She doesn't get it. "Huh?"
"Elixir," Sazh says, and withdraws a familiar bottle from his pocket, measures out some into a cup and hands it to her. "I've been saving it for a rainy day." She stares at the amber liquid in the glass, knows exactly how precious it is in this dangerous, undeveloped world and feels equal parts honored and shamed that Sazh was forced to waste it on her. "And let me tell you, yesterday it was pouring when we found you."
Lightning looks at him and smiles before gulping the shot of Elixir. It's thick and warm like heated honey, but far too bitter. She grimaces at the taste before the potent medicine numbs her pain from her mouth to her gullet, then spreads outwards towards her fingers and toes.
Elixir is awesome, even if it's awful.
"Metaphorically speaking, I mean," Sazh finishes and Lightning smiles at him.
"Thank you." The words are pale. Sazh and Hope risked themselves to come after her, saved her life, then used their potions to heal her up.
"Nah! Don't thank me." Sazh rubs the back of his neck and shuffles. Between his dark complexion and the low light, she can't tell if he's actually blushing, but she thinks she knows him well enough by now to decide that he is. She finds a warmth filling a hole in her chest that she's never recognized before and realizes that she's missed Sazh this past year. She's missed his grumping, his smart-ass comments, his quick wit and his kind, caring heart. She leans forward and places a kiss on his cheek, feels the heat coming off him and knows that her assumption was correct. Sazh leans away from her and stammers out, "Hey now! No need to give an old man a heart attack."
"You're not that old, Sazh," she says, and knows that if Fang were here, she'd be winking at Sazh and making suggestions just to make the poor man stammer.
Sometimes she misses Fang like an amputated limb.
"I'm old enough, Miss Soldier and don't you forget it!" Lightning laughs at Sazh and sits down to pull a pair of socks onto her bandaged feet. The elixir treatments seem to have healed up the worst of the damage on her feet, but she can still feel spots that hurt surrounding spots with no feeling. There's a good chance the dead zones on her feet will stay that way. Lightning sighs--nothing to be done about it now--before tugging her fur boots on and lacing them up tightly over her leggings.
"You know, you never did say how you managed to find me." Lightning stands up and shifts inside her boots until they feel just right. She scowls at them and contemplates them until she realizes that Sazh didn't answer her question.
That's suspicious. Now she's really curious.
"Sazh?"
"Uh...well." Lightning starts feeling uncomfortable. "you know those communicators that I built for you all?"
"Yes?" It comes out as a question mostly because she's waiting for the punch line.
"Well," he drags it out into about four syllables as he says it, and gets all shifty again. "I may have added a locator beacon into each of them. Just in case."
Lightning raises her eyebrows as she contemplates Sazh's latest sneaky sneakiness. Ordinarily, the idea of being tagged like some sort of animal in a scientific study would piss her off, and she figures from Sazh's overall discomfort, he knows that. However, his little sneaky subterfuge just saved her ass in a very literal manner, and Lightning's never been one to complain about things just for the point of the issue....
Alright, so that's not really true at all. But she's not going to complain about this one thing just for the principle of the matter. No point. It came in handy. Sazh is brilliant. End of story.
Doesn't mean she won't ask for a way to deactivate it. Or at least an on-off switch. She's not willing to be tagged and tracked again if she's trying to disappear.
"Good idea, Sazh." Sazh lets out a full body exhalation, like he's really been worried about her exploding on him and trying to kill him all this time.
No faith. It almost makes her sad.
Lightning scans the room for her gear, praying it survived. She needs to move. She's already been idle too long and she's terrified she's going to be too late to do anything to help those prisoners. "Where's my gear?"
"Hey now, Soldier. Where do you think you're going now?"
Sometimes she forgets how much she doesn't like explaining herself.
"Where's my weapon? I have to go." She storms out of the bedroom and her body kicks up a fuss at the whirlwind movements. She is in no shape to move.
She doesn't care.
She ignores the pain and nausea, makes it into what looks like a gutted dining area before she's bowled over by the stench of exploded gunpowder and death. "Wha-?"
"Would you hold up and tell me what's going through that fool head of yours?" Sazh yells.
"Where are we?" Lightning looks around at the half destroyed building. There are bullet holes scarring the walls, scorch marks from larger ordnances. Sazh looks disgusted, which is an interesting counterpoint to her horror.
"Another damn destroyed outpost." Sazh walks over to the debris strewn table and swipes a careful hand through it. "Another damn waste." He shakes his head. "Bastards."
None of that makes any sense.
"What's going on?" Lightning waits to the count of ten. "What do you mean 'another,' Sazh? I don't know anything about any of this. Why does none of this seem like a surprise to you?" Sazh rubs his forehead, sits down and puts his head into his hands as if it is just too heavy to hold up any longer. Like the weight of the memories is unbearable. Lightning's fingers itch for her weapon. She's afraid that she knows exactly what he's about to say. She can already feel the anger percolating, and Sazh hasn't spoken yet.
"This isn't the first time I've found an outpost that's been decimated like this," Sazh says. Sazh rubs his hair once and Lightning expects to see his chocobo come flying out of it before realizing that baby chocobo isn't a baby anymore. She's probably as big as Hope by now.
A year. A whole year has gone by and she feels as if she sleepwalked through the whole thing.
"...These were good people. Hard working people!" Sazh snaps and Lightning has no idea how much of his diatribe she's missed but feels terrible for disappearing into her own thoughts while Sazh has been talking about things that clearly upset him.
"How many?" Lightning asks. "How long has this been going on, Sazh?"
"Six months. Maybe seven." She feels her face heat, her throat close, and her muscles tense. She's so angry she could spit. She feels like she might fly apart from the storm brewing inside her. She exhales a sharp breath through her nose, hoping to gain some calm. Time just seems to be working in the opposite manner, twisting her even tighter, ramping her anger up higher.
She needs to calm down--
"Why didn't you call me?" She tries not to make it sound like the accusation that it is.
She fails.
"Excuse me, Soldier?" Sazh matches her anger in a way he's never done before. She should recognize the danger here but she's too amped up to do anything but grit her teeth. "I believe I did call you several times." Lightning feels her fists clench at the accusation.
She knows it's true. That only makes her angrier. There's a buzz behind her stinging eyes.
"You should have told me!" Lightning shouts, knowing she's wrong. Knowing she's out of line. She wasn't willing to listen. She disappeared into her head and ignored everything. This is not Sazh's fault but she can't seem to care right now in the face of her own failure. Someone needs to be blamed, and she'll settle for Sazh.
"Why? What good would that have done?" It's like a slap in the face and Lightning feels the flush of rage and shame spread over her face, down her neck to cover her whole body. She wants to tear Sazh's head off for making this her fault.
It is her fault. She knows it's her fault.
"I asked you to come. I told you we needed your help. You just decided to curl into a ball and disappear! Go live on some beach somewhere and leave the us to deal with all this mess on our own."
"That's not..." even close. But not really wrong either.
"Don't you deny it! You didn't want to look at Cocoon." Sazh yells and she's not sure if she's angry, affronted, or just outright shocked that Sazh would speak to her in this manner. "You couldn't stand to look at Vanille or Fang so you just ran away."
Angry. Yep. Anger wins by a country mile....
"Shut up!"
"Poor little Soldier girl. Like you're the only one who lost something," Sazh snipes.
"What the HELL!" Hope yells from the doorway. "Are you both crazy? You really think blaming each other is going to make you feel better? Why not just pull your weapons and get it over with!" Lightning sees her shock mirrored on Sazh's face. Hope is livid. And Hope is right. "You want to do something useful, why don't you grab a shovel and help me bury the bodies that were left outside to rot!"
Hope turns around, storms out of the room and slams the door behind him. The force of the slam rattles the frame and shakes the door loose. It falls with a dry crack that sends a blast of cold air into the room.
Lightning feels her anger deflate at the mention of bodies. This is a home she's standing in. The people who lived here are dead. They were murdered for their food, or their supplies, or just for sport. These people were murdered and she's standing in their home blaming her friend for letting it happen.
She is a horrible person.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"No, Soldier. Don't apologize to me. I don't even know what the hell I was yelling about."
"I do. This... All of this." Lightning looks around at the destruction, looks outside at the still smoldering ruins. "There's only so much senseless death a person can stand looking at before they finally crack."
They need someone to blame; they need an enemy to fight.
Sazh stands next to her and looks outside. "I don't know what's going on anymore. I thought we'd seen the worst last year."
"Yeah. Me too."
"I should have told you what was going on." She shakes her head. "I wanted to believe that we could handle it ourselves. And I felt bad about ruining your chances at building a new life."
Lightning feels the urges to laugh and cry vie for top position. If Sazh only knew...
"And then when we found you and I thought you were going to die too, on top of everything." Sazh shakes his head. "We've lost enough. We can't lose you too."
Lightning looks at Sazh, sees the bruises under his eyes from his busted nose and smiles at him. "Well, you saved my ass."
"It was the kid, you know." Sazh nods towards Hope outside pacing in the snow. "He's the one that insisted we come looking for you."
She's not surprised. Not really. Hope followed her when she was hurtling full speed ahead on a suicide mission and he was just a scared, green kid looking for an outlet for his anger. He followed her through the Vile Peaks, through The Gapra Whitewoods and into Palumpolum. He'd have followed her straight into the heart of the Sanctum and died beside her. That he would come after her in a blizzard is not...
Wait. How the hell did he know?
Did she say more than she intended in her message? It's not impossible; she was half dead at that point--frozen, hypothermic, frostbitten, exhausted and bruised from her shoulder to her hip. To say she was delirious would be an understatement.
She walks to the door and lifts it into the frame again, spies Hope through a crack in the door hunched over and vomiting into the snow outside. She drops the door and walks outside, determined to get to him. He deserves better from her.
Things are a mess and she needs to fix them. Now.
Catching sight of the bodies derails her thoughts.
There are seven bodies lined up, each one embedded in a pool of frozen blood, faces blue, captured forever in the final throes of agony, blind, milky, iced over eyes staring at the unforgiving sky. She wants to close their eyes but knows it's impossible.
The bastards gut shot them. Dragging people from their homes in the dead of night and murdering them wasn't evil or sadistic enough for these maniacs. No; they decided to usher these people into the afterlife in the most painful, brutal, and excruciatingly protracted manner imaginable. These people were still alive when she tracked that caravan of death through the snow to their murderers' compound. These people were probably still alive when Sazh and Hope pulled her out of her own icy grave. The snow and freezing temperatures might have even slowed the bleeding as hypothermia set in. Lightning realizes that if weren't for hypothermia and exposure killing them first, these people might very well have still been howling when Sazh and Hope pulled her half frozen body into the one remaining structure.
She swallows down her own bile and hopes it doesn't come frothing out of her mouth. She vows that she will put these rabid animals out of everyone's misery.
Hope's retching draws her from her own horror, and she kneels beside him in the snow and places a hand on his back.
"I'm sorry, Hope." Hope's body shudders and she slides a hand under his arms to lift him up and into her arms. He slobbers a sob onto her neck and she repeats, "I'm sorry."
He shouldn't be here staring into eyes of dead men, trying to figure out how to bury bodies in the frozen ground. He should be home with his father. He shouldn't have to see anymore of this sort of horror. None of them should have to deal with this anymore. They've all seen enough horror and death to last ten lifetimes and it's left its mark on all of them. She hoped that Hope as the youngest might be able to heal from the scars and have some semblance of a normal life again.
She didn't realize that she was an idealistic moron. She thought that was Snow's domain. Apparently the Hero rubbed off on her.
...And she's just never going to think about that again. Ever.
Hope shakes against her, shudders, pulls himself together and away. She feels proud and sad at once. Hope is such an old child now. He's seen things men five times his age shouldn't see and he still tries to put on a brave face for the world. She wants to weep. Instead she smiles as he pulls away from her and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. "Sorry..."
"You have nothing to be sorry for, Hope."
"I should be able to handle this..." he gestures at the dead, blue bodies, looks at them and goes a whiter shade of pale. She shakes her head at him, and turns his face away from the dead bodies.
"No one should have to handle this Hope. These men..."
Men. Only men. No women or children...
"I have to save them," she whispers and stands up. She forgets about Hope and Sazh, looks around at the pure white, unmarked landscape. She's wasting time here. These men are dead. Their wives and children...they might still be alive.
This is what she lives for; it's what she was born to do. She's a weapon forged by necessity and honed by a thirst for vengeance. She's deadly and so very ready to unleash a year's /lifetime's/ worth of pent up anger and frustration on some deserving targets.
She's always believed a target's a target, and perhaps that's true. But some targets are better than others.
"I have to go."
"What?" Hope asks, confused and maybe even a bit scared.
"You can't save them, Soldier. They're long gone." Sazh is solemn. Horrified.
Disgusted.
She can relate.
"No. I know that." These people are long past her help. "The women. Sazh, I know where they are."
Sazh's whole face changes in an alarming way. "What are you talking about?"
"I was out on the Steppe and I heard the attack. I didn't know what was happening, but I knew it was bad." Sazh has a strange light in his eyes. If Lightning didn't know better, she'd call it blood lust. She considers his posture, his clenched fists...
Perhaps she doesn't know better after all. Sazh looks positively murderous; he's angrier than she can remember ever seeing him and that includes during their suicide run to the Pulse Vestige and the aftermath battles which nearly cost him his son. It worries and impresses her; but if Sazh is out for blood, she certainly can't blame him.
"I heard the explosions, and I saw the fire on the horizon. I didn't realize the extent of what I was seeing, but I know bad things when they're happening." They all do. Survival instincts can't be forgotten. "So I followed them." She stares at the bodies, faces a hideous shade of blue, eyes staring skyward.
"You..." Sazh starts but she cuts him off.
"Through the snow and the dark. I followed them." She nods to herself as she says, "I know where their base camp is."
"What?" Sazh asks, but it isn't really a question. It sounds...hopeful. "Where?"
"We don't have time for explanations." Lightning charges past him. There's an insane plan half-forming in her mind. The barbarism evident in the executions of these people raises the urgency level. Talking is wasting time that the prisoners don't have. Women that she abandoned to unimaginable horrors. "I left those prisoners there," those crying, screaming women, "and I'm going to get them out."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TBC... and hopefully sooner. But Chapter 29 of Evolution is at bat...
WOW. THIS took forever and to be honest, I don't love it. But I never really love transition chapters and that's pretty much what this was always going to be. I needed some regrouping and repositioning of characters.
Chapter 8