NaNo2014 day 8

[shamera]

They stumbled back to the housing unit in New Bodhum long after it was already dark, Fang’s steps triumphant as several carcasses hung from her lance in a hastily tried net, and Hope trailing behind her with his new clothes scraped and dirtied and a bruise across his cheek (not from any of the fights, but from banging his face against the rocks in the dark as they climbed back down again) and his mittens shoved back into his pockets again, his fingers red from cold and scraped of skin on several knuckles, but more steady than they had been in days.

It was Vanille who greeted them first, expression tight and disapproving as she saw the state of them. Her lips tightened into a thin line, but she didn’t protest when Fang gifted her with the spoils and pulled her into an embrace. She didn’t say anything even when the older woman shook half melted snow onto her hair and clothes.

“I’m going to get cleaned up.” Fang declared once she freed herself from the monster carcasses. “Give me a shout first before anyone joins me, yeah?”

She laughed at her own joke before making her way down the hall, giving a wave but not looking back.

Hope felt his earlier adrenaline start to wear off as Vanille gave him a wide-eyed pout, half disappointment and half hurt.

“I, uh.” He stammered, shifting uneasily under the weight of her disapproval. “I told Yuj earlier that I’d come back.”

That seemed to be all it took for Vanille to finally burst out, “You just left! Serah told me what you said, and she didn’t know what to say or what to do and I didn’t know either but I tried to look for you and I didn’t even know you left until I panicked and Lebreau had to tell me that you were outside. And then I tried to follow your footsteps but Snow said you’d come back on your own terms and I didn’t want to leave you alone but he said you needed space and you were gone for hours —”

“I’m sorry.” Hope murmured, wide-eyed in the face of her hurt. The cold was starting to wear off already, and it felt too warm under his coat, too warm inside at all house and it made his skin tingle and almost hurt.

Vanille looked like she was going to say something else for a second, but seemed to decide against it as she let out an explosive breath instead and stepped forward to envelope him into a tight hug.

“I was really worried.” She told him quietly after several seconds, and he could barely dare to nod, much less reach to hug her back. “I’m sorry, too. You must have been so confused. I wanted to tell you, but Lightning said you wouldn’t remember…”

There it was again, and Hope wondered just how Lightning would have known that.

“I don’t, not really,” he admitted into her shoulder. “It’s all… it’s a blur. Like a dream. But there were things that just didn’t feel right, and I didn’t know why. Like — how are you and Fang here? After the fall, I thought… I thought you and Fang and Light were gone forever. That I’d never see you guys again.”

Vanille tensed up for a moment, and Hope was starting to regret his question before she pulled back suddenly, holding him tightly in arms’ length, both hands kneading into his shoulder as she gave him a serious look.

“I don’t know how to explain it.” She said. “We should wait for Lightning to come back. But then we’ll tell you. We’ll tell you everything we know, okay? It’s just… it’s hard. To say it out loud.”

Hope held still and looked down at the floor beneath his boots, the which had clung onto the waterproof material starting to melt and drip onto the mat at the door, rivets of water running down the side of his boots. He thought for a moment on his wording.

“Serah said,” he paused, and then swallowed down the lump in his throat, his fingers tensing and untensing. They were starting to hurt from the warmth in the room. “She said something about — about… saving me.”

The echo of rain and cold and pain made him shudder. I died.

It was a strange thing to know.

The resounding silence was loud enough to pound against his ears. When he looked up again, there was an unreadable expression on Vanille’s face, more closed off than he had ever seen her before.

“Okay.” She said simply after a few tense moments of silence. “I’ll find a way to explain. You deserve to know what’s going on.”

Her hands slipped from his shoulders down to clasp his fingers, and then she startled as if she had just realized it.

“Your hands are freezing!” She cupped both of his hands, bringing them up to blow at them. Her touch was scorching against his skin, but he didn’t have the heart to protest. “Didn’t you bring gloves with you? We need to get you warmed up, and quickly!”

Fang didn’t wear gloves either, though. And mittens were a hassle when he need a steady grip in the midst of battle. However cold he might have felt at the beginning faded away quickly the longer he stayed out, the more Fang slowly started teaching him about the finer points of hunting prey: of setting traps and fighting and skinning animals and using the snow to preserve the meat.

They had continued long after the sun set, Fang declaring the light unnecessary especially in the colder months when daylight was already so scarce.

“Bath.” Vanille decided for him with a determined nod. “You need a warm bath. That’ll warm you up the quickest!”

She started pushing him toward the hall, and Hope panicked. “But wait, Fang’s getting cleaned up, isn’t she?”

Vanille laughed under her breath. “There’s more than one bath, you know. Not that Fang isn’t used to sharing.”

“Not what I wanted to know!” Hope yelped at another shove.

Vanille only laughed at him.

—

Nearly an hour later, Lightning came home.

It was entirely unceremonious given that she gave in silently and no one even noticed she was back until they saw the trail of winter accessories leading to her room. Apparently she meant to sleep first thing before greeting everyone in the morning, but Vanille had been sitting with Hope in his room for the past half hour, the two of them finding more and more topics of light conversation to cover. Serah had retreated to her room after confirming that Fang and Hope were back, and was slowly continuing her wedding dress at a more subdued pace.

Fang had crashed on the couch after telling them to wake her up once Vanille was ready to head back.

Snow… well, Hope hadn’t seen where Snow might have gone.

“I wouldn’t know how to explain it.” Vanille told him each time he asked her directly for an explanation. “Lightning would be able to tell the story better. She knows more, I think.”

It was Serah who first greeted her sister quietly, sitting at Lightning’s bedside to tell her that Hope was there, and moreover, that he knew.

And it was Vanille who held onto Hope’s hand when Lightning marched to his room with Serah in tow, eyes hard as steel and expression unreadable and fierce.

“What tales did they tell you?” She demanded, arms crossed under her chest as she loomed in the doorway. She looked as fierce as she did during the Purge when she had been chasing after Serah into the Pulse Vestige, unafraid of whatever the world could throw at her.

The sheer presence made Hope swallow heavily, slinking backward where he was sitting on the bed, ready to protest whatever his involvement might have been. I didn’t do it!

Except he had. He had been the one to confront Serah because there was something wrong and she knew it just as he did.

“We didn’t tell him any tales.” Vanille protested next to him, breaking his chain of thought. “I said we should wait for you to come back, and he figured everything out all by himself. He remembers.”

Lightning’s steel blue eyes flickered to Vanille for a moment, her jaw tightening before she looked back to Hope, expecting an answer from him.

He swallowed thickly, and breathed in deep to gather his courage. “I dream about — things. Different things. It’s like everyone else left and I’m the only one here and I don’t know if my dreams are right or if I’m just dreaming right now.” Because there were days when he wasn’t sure if the others were real. Didn’t know why he felt so utterly alone even when Vanille’s chipper voice spoke to him over the phone.

Serah said they just wanted to save him. He had to know. Clenching his hands tightly, one entwined with Vanille’s and the other grasping a handful of the blankets, he blurted, “I need to know. Was it real?”

“Dreams are just dreams, Hope.” Lightning’s voice was tight. “This is real. Right now. You need to learn to ignore the dreams.”

“Alyssa is real!” He didn’t even care that he was shouting now, because Hope wanted to have a civil conversation, wanted to just ask Lightning a real question and get a real answer but no one was telling him anything and he had been waiting hours and hours while Serah and Vanille remained tight-lipped. “She’s real, and Noel is real too — I’m not just going to forget them and say that — that they’re nothing but dreams when they’re not!”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond, instead shaking off Vanille’s hand in his frustration. “What are you guys hiding from me? I’m not a kid, I don’t need to be protected—”

“Don’t.” Lightning’s tone was razor sharp, cutting through even Hope’s shouting.

“Hope, you can’t say that.” Vanille was pale. “Of course we’re going to protect you. You’re really important to us, okay?”

But none of it was them telling him anything important. He might have been alright with them hiding things from him, but not when it was about him in the first place. The room felt too small as he seethed, unable to shake off the anger he wanted to work through just earlier that day. He shouldn’t have come back. He should have stayed out with Fang and built a fire in the night. He should have gone straight to sleep after his bath and pushed it all off until the next day. Maybe it wouldn’t have felt as sharp and painful as it did right now.

He just couldn’t untense his shoulders, couldn’t bring himself to think about things rationally at that moment.

“You do need to be protected.” And this time, it was Serah who spoke up, her voice clear and strong. She stood up taller from where she had been hiding behind her sister before. Lightning turned to give her a sharp look, but it didn’t deter her. “Not just because we all care about you. Not just because you nearly died recently.”

“Serah.”

“He deserves to know, doesn’t him?” Serah protested, and then turned her eyes toward Hope. She looked remarkably like her sister at that moment, strong and defiant. “We didn’t mean to never tell you. We just wanted you to get better first.”

Vanille nodded hesitantly in agreement besides him.

“The day of the earthquake,” Serah said. “We all came back. All of us, all from different places. It wasn’t just an earthquake that day. That was the last of the time gates closing. And we — all of us: even Fang and Snow and Sazh — we all came from different futures. All of them different, but with just a few things in common.”

She paused, darting her eyes over to gauge her sister’s reaction. Lightning, however, did not look inclined to stop her younger sister’s words, even though she looked furious.

“In every timeline we came from, you were dead. And the future was in shambles.”

Rain. Cold. Pain. Darkness.

Hope’s throat felt painfully dry suddenly.

“Where I came from, there was a tower.” And here, Serah’s voice dropped from the strong tone to something a lot more lost. “You built it, do you know? At least ten years in the future, you started a project that… well, you wanted to save all of humanity. You built a tower to support an artificial intelligence that would solve all of humanity’s problems. Except there was a problem and your creations turned on you — they ambushed you. I saw the footage and…” she trailed off, looking down even as she brought a hand to her heart. “Noel and I tried to at the very least avenge you. Because you died there, four hundred years in the future everyone was ruled by a fal’Cie that was turning people Cie’th left and right.”

Hope inhaled sharply. What? No, that wasn’t what he remembered. He didn’t know anything about that! How could that be possible? How could she know what it would look like in four hundred years? Those time gates she spoke of…

“We didn’t want to tell you because… how do you tell someone that he’s died? And not once, but from every timeline we could recall?”

“Snow and Sazh have their own stories as well.” Serah admitted. “But… I won’t tell their side for them. I can’t. You have to ask them about it if you really want to know. I don’t think either of them want to think about what they saw.”

No, that wasn’t right. None of it felt right.

“Fang and I were in crystal stasis the entire time.” Vanille spoke quietly from beside him. “When we woke up, the world was — it was just darkness. The skies were black and there was nothing living. Not animals, not plants. There was nothing left. Nothing at all. All I wanted… I just wanted to see you guys again. I wanted to be with everyone again.”

Lightning stayed silent.

“And when we came back—” Vanille shook her head, her curls catching on the beads of her necklaces. “It was chaos. But it was beautiful somehow because there were people and color again, except I saw you fall and I thought I came at the last moment. I thought I’d got my wish granted, except I would come back just to watch you die. You — I don’t ever want to see that, okay, Hope? You gotta promise me I won’t ever have to see you die.”

“Vanille.” He still couldn’t reconcile the future Serah described, but the raw pain in Vanille’s voice forced him out of his thoughts, his instinctive reaction to reach out for her. “I’m…”

“Don’t. Don’t say you’re sorry. I caught you from that fall, but I thought you were going to die anyway. If you want to make it up to me for having to go through all of that, then you’ve got to stay okay from now. And not complain just because we’re trying to protect you. I almost saw you die, but everyone else all watched you die, you know? Let us be protective, okay? You’re really important to us. And to the whole world. You can’t even argue with me on that because every future without you has been terrible.

“Now you know. You’re not going crazy. But things will be different now. We’re all here in this together now.”

Vanille tried to insert some cheer into her words, but Hope could feel the burn of Lightning’s gaze on him, seeking something he didn’t know the answer to.

He didn’t dare look at her now, didn’t dare ask exactly what she had seen. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that they had all come from different futures. Futures where he hadn’t made it out alive and that somehow affected the outcome for others.

But what had Lightning seen? What made her so sure that he wouldn’t remember?

He couldn’t ask. Maybe he was too scared.

“I guess…” Vanille continued, sounding cautious. “I guess we wanted to protect you from that, too. We’re here now. We’re going to take care of things, so you shouldn’t worry yourself about all those futures. You just need to stay alive, and then all those terrible things won’t happen.”

Somehow, it felt like there was more to it.

What was so important about him? They must have had it wrong. Maybe it was just a coincidence. There could be incidents where he and a great number of other people died, and that might affect things. It wouldn’t just be him, though.

“Is that what you remember?” Lightning asked him, and he flinched back at the harshness of her words. She sounded so different from all those time she called him to check on what he was doing. She sounded fond and amused during those calls, content and relaxed. Here, she was… “Did your dreams include what Serah said? What Vanille said?”

He couldn’t lie. He just couldn’t, not when the others were being so honest.

He turned his eyes to meet Lightning’s gaze, trying to stay steady. She deserved that. Vanille and Serah deserved every ounce of strength he could find right now.

“No.”

—

The rain was glistening on the walkways, was causing a rainbow effect on the windows of the buildings surrounding him and it should have been beautiful, should have been mesmerizing and maybe he should have taken the time to admire the effect, except he was running and running and he could barely breathe because he couldn’t stop.

Everything had gone wrong wrong wrong and now he was at this dead end. Snow had said he was going to die, except that the end could be circumvented and oh but Hope had thought he managed to change things. He was supposed to have the upper hand, was supposed to have seen this coming.

His hand was warm. Warm and aching, grasped too tightly be someone else. Someone was dragging him along when his feet faltered under him, and he wasn’t sure who it was.

There was shouting behind them and sharp explosive sounds that made his ears ring, echoing with his footfalls in the rainy path, splashing the water up against his pant legs.

He was running, and running, and then there was an invisible force like a silent explosion, the shockwave pushing him off balance right over a railing.

He fell.

Hope jerked awake with a start, shoving himself up from bed with a gasp and pushing at the blankets constricting his limbs. Tied up — he was tied up! He was tied up and trapped and —

As reality slowly set in, he took the deepest breath he could and held it even as his lungs burned from how much air it was storing. He raised shaking hands to his head, brushing away damp bangs as he took stock of his surroundings all the while holding his breath.

Unfamiliar room, but he knew where this was. Unfamiliar sheets and unfamiliar blanket, but at the same time.

I’m in New Bodhum, his brain told him tiredly.

He was in New Bodhum, where Serah and Vanille revealed to him the mystery of how they came to be there; of how he died in numerous timelines. Except Lightning hadn’t revealed anything on their part, and their answers only brought about more questions for him.

Like his recurring dream.

I died.

They had told him that, of course. But the reality of it was different. The dreams were different. He could feel everything in the dreams, could feel his pulse slow and his body growing cold. Could feel the panic and cold oblivion imminent on the horizon.

But the cityscape was unfamiliar. The method wasn’t one described by Vanille or Serah. It was something he should know, except he didn’t have a clue what was going on. He hadn’t gotten the answers he wanted, but instead was only beginning to understand that everything he knew, everything he could contribute, was nothing more than another piece to the puzzle.

Hope let out the breath slowly, and pulled his legs up underneath the blankets to press his forehead against his knees.

Come find me.

Yes. He believed. Alyssa and Noel existed, and furthermore, so did many many people he must have met before. Just because he was fourteen again, just because everyone else was back and safe and sound, didn’t negate their existence. All the names and faces he must have forgotten, all those people were real.

Come find me.

Come find me.