light doesn't use a dog. (sororal) wrote in missions, @ 2012-10-01 17:21:00 |
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In the first nights after they escaped from Centra, Light had retreated. She couldn't process what had happened. All these months looking for Serah, all these months bouncing between determination to find her and the crushing despair--the knowledge--that her sister was surely dead. And now she was. Even the cynical Lightning had to admit she had never really, truly given up hope. Not until she'd walked into that cavern and seen Serah's face, immobilized in pale green crystal. Her heart had collapsed. She could feel things collapsing around her, the whole world shrinking and falling into a single moment when she knew beyond all doubt that Serah was dead, and she was alone.
There was nothing to fight to take her mind off of it. The White SeeDs had offered to train with her, but she couldn't even bring herself to do that. She drank because it was something to do, something that would at least put her out for a few hours of blissful, dreamless sleep. She slept when she wasn't drinking, and the crew was lucky to get three words out of her in a day. Kaya had informed her with little room for argument that she was still expected to perform her duties around the ship, and Lightning had complied--but she spoke to no one, took her meals alone, and went to bed early.
Yuri forced her to eat; Snow forced her to get up; Hope forced her to talk. After a week she began training the kid again. Her mission was over, she said, well and truly over--but his was not, whatever it was. She had promised to train him, and she didn't break her promises. But the training was barely a training at all: her movements were mechanical and lifeless, her instructions dull and rote. It was just something to get through the day.
They were working on a cure, Kaya said. Gustoff had made it his top priority. But they hadn't found it.
In Luca, she had almost left. Her feet touched ground at the docks with her small pack slung over one shoulder, and Lightning saw a path illuminated for her like something out of a storybook, a ray of sun marking the street all the way down the road and into the thick of the city. She left the crew behind as they gathered their things and disappeared into the crowd, following the street signs all the way to the Mi'ihen Highroad. Pilgrims and travelers drifted along its stony surface, chocobo-drawn carts and the occasional two-seater airship. She could see a new life out there, somewhere. A new life where she was no longer Lightning Farron, or Claire. Where she didn't have a sister, or a SeeD education. Where she hadn't been lied to and betrayed, where she hadn't been orphaned. She could be anyone she wanted out there.
She turned around, and went back to the docks.
Some nights, Yuri knocks softly on her door after everyone had gone to sleep. Lightning is always awake, seated in bed or propped up on the small sill beneath her circular window. He waits as a courtesy before opening the door; Lightning never replies. They sit together on her bed, Lightning on one end, Yuri on the other. He asks if she needs anything, if she's hungry, if she's tired. No, she's fine. She stretches her legs out and leans her head back against the headboard, her eyes up towards the window. He rests a hand on her leg and stays there, silent, until she falls asleep.
Days pass and the pain begins to callous over like an old wound. She is experienced at this, at sublimating her grief, at suppressing her hurt. Losing Serah is only the latest in a series of tragedies. She finds strength in giving up, in the certainty of it. Her grief settles comfortably at rock bottom, supported by the finality of her defeat. What would life be like without her sister? She'd asked herself often in the months of searching, the fruitless goose chases, the long nights in Midgar or Luca or Trabia tracking down lead after pointless lead. What was life without Serah?
Just this. Just empty.
She resurfaced on the other side of her grief like she'd been drowning, choking on thick quicksand-agony that slipped and slid in her lungs. It sucked her down until there was no sign she had ever been struggling at all; her feet touched bottom and fell through, spitting her out in some unfamiliar plane, some alien ocean. The world had turned upside down without Serah, and in the topsy-turvy gravity she had emerged on its underside, somewhere else. She looked out at this sisterless world. She gulped in its air. She swam toward its empty, quiet shores.
Now at night she lies alone in her bunk and recites names in her head: people she has lost, people she has left, people she is going to kill. The list never changes. Serah. Her parents. Namine. Faris, Ashe, Celes. Edea. Seifer. He has a special place, a pedestal. He betrayed everyone for the sorceress. He betrayed her for the one person she thought had taken--had killed--Serah. No one will ever hurt her again the way Seifer has. All she has now is her anger.
She'll have to thank him for that.
Three weeks after Serah's death, Lightning gets out of bed and takes her phone to Shinra, whose own eyes are red-rimmed from crying. She has little pity for him. She wants to shake him and tell him to open his eyes, face reality as she has. It's over. But she only asks him, in the absence of his petrified brother or the hungover Aleks, to rig her phone to make an outbound call. It takes the boy some time, but by afternoon she is able to place a single, thirty second call.
"Faris," says, once the voicemail message (brusque and to the point, just like Scherwiz) ends. Her voice is hard, but she swallows and makes it harder, like steel, like iron. She can't afford to sound weak. She can't afford to let them think she's still hurting. "Serah's dead. When this is over, I'm coming back to Balamb." A brief pause. She can see Yuri watching her from across the deck, and turns her back on him. "And when I do, we're going to find Edea. We're going to find Seifer. And I'm going to kill them."