[Fic] "Glass and Shadows"
Hi there again!
Ever since icedark_elf made it clear that the royal family are Cloud's nieces and nephews, not just his cousins (as I'd previously assumed), I've been trying to handwave over that discrepancy. This is, among other things, the product of that handwaving.
Somewhat depressing, along the lines of Yesterday and Tomorrow. You could consider this a companion to that fic, actually.
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Glass and Shadows
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His life is a series of flashes, seen through wavering glass. Most days -- most years -- are dim and lost forever. Some events, and more people, stand out like colored etchings against the foggy, greenish blur. Now and then he tries keeping journals, or collecting photographs and paintings, but paper crumbles, electronic media degrade, chemicals decompose, paint cracks and fades. Nothing stays with him forever.
The worst thing his uncle did to him wasn't physical torture. It wasn't even the less tangible pain of betrayal. It was theft. Five years of death after death after death wore away pieces of his mind, memories leached out one by one by one, lost into the lifestream and its chorus of souls.
Sometimes he thinks his soul is torn, and every time he dies another piece of his past bleeds away.
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His mother drank tea every morning. She liked to brush his hair and tell him nonsense stories. She fed songbirds by hand on her bedroom balcony. One day, she took him outside in midwinter and they went sledding down the mountain, so far it took them three hours to walk home after they tumbled sideways into the snow to avoid crashing into a tree.
He doesn't remember her stories. He doesn't remember why she liked birds. He doesn't know if she played with him other times. He doesn't remember her face, or the color of her hair.
He doesn't know her name.
He could find out -- Shinra family records are obsessively accurate back nearly three hundred years before the great war, stopping just short of the family's origin, which he suspects was a bit too humble for new royalty to want remembered. But he never looks. A name without a face would somehow be worse than nothing.
Some days he dreams he is a child again, standing outside the house and looking up to see his mother surrounded by songbirds, tiny wings beating as they rise from her hands. He is quiet, but she notices him and moves toward the balcony rail, calling his name. Just as the birds are about to part, to let him see her face, he wakes.
All his friends and partners and adopted children, over the centuries, have learned to avoid him the days after those dreams.
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He doesn't remember exactly how he escaped from his uncle. Now and again, he has vague, formless nightmares of glass and green and blood, but beyond the vivid, single image of his first sword jammed through his uncle's ribs, the man's blue-gray eyes wide and staring, his mouth gaping in shock and, strangely, betrayal, he can't recall how he got loose.
He remembers running quite clearly.
He had a sister -- the product of his mother's remarriage at his uncle's orders, who was raised in Midgar after her father sent his mother back to the mountains. He had a stepbrother, from that same loveless political alliance. He knew his mother was dead. He knew his cousins would most likely kill him in revenge. All he had left was hope.
When he collapsed outside his stepbrother's castle, shaking with fever and limping on blistered, oozing feet in the chill of spring thaw, his sister took him in. She bathed and bandaged him, nursed him through his fever, and wept when she told him his feet would be crippled for life. Impatient, he slit his wrists, letting death wash away his wounds. She cursed him for hours when he revived, and cursed their uncle more when he told her his disjointed memories of the past five years.
Then she sold herself back to his family, in return for his safety.
Sometimes he sees her face in her descendents, and sometimes fragments of her sweetness. He nearly always sees her iron determination -- that trait seems to pass unbroken down the generations. The kings and queens he considers his nieces and nephews honor her memory. The ones he only calls cousins recall the other side of his family.
He knows his sister's face, but somewhere in the long centuries since her death, he lost her name. He thinks it was something like his, a word, something from nature. Maybe Wind or Wave. Maybe Dawn or Star. Maybe a bird. He thinks it was probably something about the sky. He thinks their mother dreamed of flying.
He doesn't look for his sister's name, either. He doesn't have any excuse for losing that memory, not like he has an excuse for letting go of his mother. The tiny emptiness in his heart, where a name should go with a face, is his penance.
If he dreams of her, he never remembers upon waking.
---------------------------------------------
He lived with his stepbrother for nearly fifty years, until his brother's sharp-angled face had gone slack with age, and his blond hair thinned and turned bone white. He remembers the child and the dying man, but all the years between are gone. Now and again, he tries to project the child's face forward or the old man's face back, and picture his brother as the young man who gave him shelter, but it's a pointless exercise and he's never been all that imaginative anyway.
It was his brother who suggested he try mercenary work, who refused to let him fade into a mindless husk or wear himself hollow with guilt. It was his brother who taught him to find the humor in the horrors of life, and to maneuver around a court and a battlefield. It was his brother who glued together the pieces his sister had saved, and made sure her sacrifice had meaning.
He spent the next two centuries watching his brother's descendents as well as his blood family, trying to guide them through the chaos as the nobility fought to fill the vacant throne, to replace the old royal family Jenova had slaughtered. Often the Shinras and the Malfoys were at odds, in which case he simply tried to keep them all alive.
Life, as his brother taught him, is full of ironies: when the Shinras finally seized the throne, the new king married his son to the Malfoy heiress.
Life is also cruel: the entire Malfoy family died, killed at the royal wedding in an attack by various disaffected nobles.
He suspected the king had arranged the deaths, but he had no proof. He suspected it might have been his own fault, for favoring his brother's family as much as his own. But all he could do was pay his cousin a midnight visit with a sword, to deliver a warning, and then comfort his adoptive niece in her grief. The best revenge, he told her, was to outlive the king, and to make sure her children would never follow his example.
The first king's reign was bloody and brief. His son's reign was similar. His grandson, often called the Great, unified the country through diplomacy as well as war, stabilized the economy, and created a legal code that was followed for nearly five centuries. Every law skewed in favor of the nobility... and the ennoblement of commoners was restricted to the point where it became nearly impossible.
He wonders if that king was his brother reborn. He thinks his brother would have appreciated the irony. He also thinks it would have served him right, especially since the king eventually fell in love with a commoner and was forced to break his own laws to marry her.
Sometimes he dreams about his brother, dreams that they sit in a room, or a tent, or outside -- wherever he happens to be at the time -- and talk about the state of the world, about politics and trade and weapons and magic and the way nobody ever seems to learn anything from the past, no matter how clear and applicable the examples are. His brother sneers at anyone and everyone, mocking them from the exalted height of his noble heritage, only to undercut the arrogance with an unguarded flight of whimsy.
The evenings after those dreams, he drinks a glass of wine to his brother's memory, and then shatters the glass in pointless waste. Who, after all, has the authority to tell him no?
---------------------------------------------
Sometimes he looks back at the endless murk of his past and wonders if he's forgotten anything unforgivable, and then forgotten that he should have remembered. He wonders how much the lifestream has stolen from him. He wonders if all the memories still exist, like self-perpetuating waves or a labyrinth of mirrors, somehow independent of his own fallible mind. He wonders if someday, when he can finally rest, he'll be able to remember.
He wants to believe that souls can touch and speak to each other in the lifestream, that he might meet his mother and his sister and his brother again one day.
When he sees his mother, he wants to recognize her face.
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End
Ever since icedark_elf made it clear that the royal family are Cloud's nieces and nephews, not just his cousins (as I'd previously assumed), I've been trying to handwave over that discrepancy. This is, among other things, the product of that handwaving.
Somewhat depressing, along the lines of Yesterday and Tomorrow. You could consider this a companion to that fic, actually.
---------------------------------------------
Glass and Shadows
---------------------------------------------
His life is a series of flashes, seen through wavering glass. Most days -- most years -- are dim and lost forever. Some events, and more people, stand out like colored etchings against the foggy, greenish blur. Now and then he tries keeping journals, or collecting photographs and paintings, but paper crumbles, electronic media degrade, chemicals decompose, paint cracks and fades. Nothing stays with him forever.
The worst thing his uncle did to him wasn't physical torture. It wasn't even the less tangible pain of betrayal. It was theft. Five years of death after death after death wore away pieces of his mind, memories leached out one by one by one, lost into the lifestream and its chorus of souls.
Sometimes he thinks his soul is torn, and every time he dies another piece of his past bleeds away.
---------------------------------------------
His mother drank tea every morning. She liked to brush his hair and tell him nonsense stories. She fed songbirds by hand on her bedroom balcony. One day, she took him outside in midwinter and they went sledding down the mountain, so far it took them three hours to walk home after they tumbled sideways into the snow to avoid crashing into a tree.
He doesn't remember her stories. He doesn't remember why she liked birds. He doesn't know if she played with him other times. He doesn't remember her face, or the color of her hair.
He doesn't know her name.
He could find out -- Shinra family records are obsessively accurate back nearly three hundred years before the great war, stopping just short of the family's origin, which he suspects was a bit too humble for new royalty to want remembered. But he never looks. A name without a face would somehow be worse than nothing.
Some days he dreams he is a child again, standing outside the house and looking up to see his mother surrounded by songbirds, tiny wings beating as they rise from her hands. He is quiet, but she notices him and moves toward the balcony rail, calling his name. Just as the birds are about to part, to let him see her face, he wakes.
All his friends and partners and adopted children, over the centuries, have learned to avoid him the days after those dreams.
---------------------------------------------
He doesn't remember exactly how he escaped from his uncle. Now and again, he has vague, formless nightmares of glass and green and blood, but beyond the vivid, single image of his first sword jammed through his uncle's ribs, the man's blue-gray eyes wide and staring, his mouth gaping in shock and, strangely, betrayal, he can't recall how he got loose.
He remembers running quite clearly.
He had a sister -- the product of his mother's remarriage at his uncle's orders, who was raised in Midgar after her father sent his mother back to the mountains. He had a stepbrother, from that same loveless political alliance. He knew his mother was dead. He knew his cousins would most likely kill him in revenge. All he had left was hope.
When he collapsed outside his stepbrother's castle, shaking with fever and limping on blistered, oozing feet in the chill of spring thaw, his sister took him in. She bathed and bandaged him, nursed him through his fever, and wept when she told him his feet would be crippled for life. Impatient, he slit his wrists, letting death wash away his wounds. She cursed him for hours when he revived, and cursed their uncle more when he told her his disjointed memories of the past five years.
Then she sold herself back to his family, in return for his safety.
Sometimes he sees her face in her descendents, and sometimes fragments of her sweetness. He nearly always sees her iron determination -- that trait seems to pass unbroken down the generations. The kings and queens he considers his nieces and nephews honor her memory. The ones he only calls cousins recall the other side of his family.
He knows his sister's face, but somewhere in the long centuries since her death, he lost her name. He thinks it was something like his, a word, something from nature. Maybe Wind or Wave. Maybe Dawn or Star. Maybe a bird. He thinks it was probably something about the sky. He thinks their mother dreamed of flying.
He doesn't look for his sister's name, either. He doesn't have any excuse for losing that memory, not like he has an excuse for letting go of his mother. The tiny emptiness in his heart, where a name should go with a face, is his penance.
If he dreams of her, he never remembers upon waking.
---------------------------------------------
He lived with his stepbrother for nearly fifty years, until his brother's sharp-angled face had gone slack with age, and his blond hair thinned and turned bone white. He remembers the child and the dying man, but all the years between are gone. Now and again, he tries to project the child's face forward or the old man's face back, and picture his brother as the young man who gave him shelter, but it's a pointless exercise and he's never been all that imaginative anyway.
It was his brother who suggested he try mercenary work, who refused to let him fade into a mindless husk or wear himself hollow with guilt. It was his brother who taught him to find the humor in the horrors of life, and to maneuver around a court and a battlefield. It was his brother who glued together the pieces his sister had saved, and made sure her sacrifice had meaning.
He spent the next two centuries watching his brother's descendents as well as his blood family, trying to guide them through the chaos as the nobility fought to fill the vacant throne, to replace the old royal family Jenova had slaughtered. Often the Shinras and the Malfoys were at odds, in which case he simply tried to keep them all alive.
Life, as his brother taught him, is full of ironies: when the Shinras finally seized the throne, the new king married his son to the Malfoy heiress.
Life is also cruel: the entire Malfoy family died, killed at the royal wedding in an attack by various disaffected nobles.
He suspected the king had arranged the deaths, but he had no proof. He suspected it might have been his own fault, for favoring his brother's family as much as his own. But all he could do was pay his cousin a midnight visit with a sword, to deliver a warning, and then comfort his adoptive niece in her grief. The best revenge, he told her, was to outlive the king, and to make sure her children would never follow his example.
The first king's reign was bloody and brief. His son's reign was similar. His grandson, often called the Great, unified the country through diplomacy as well as war, stabilized the economy, and created a legal code that was followed for nearly five centuries. Every law skewed in favor of the nobility... and the ennoblement of commoners was restricted to the point where it became nearly impossible.
He wonders if that king was his brother reborn. He thinks his brother would have appreciated the irony. He also thinks it would have served him right, especially since the king eventually fell in love with a commoner and was forced to break his own laws to marry her.
Sometimes he dreams about his brother, dreams that they sit in a room, or a tent, or outside -- wherever he happens to be at the time -- and talk about the state of the world, about politics and trade and weapons and magic and the way nobody ever seems to learn anything from the past, no matter how clear and applicable the examples are. His brother sneers at anyone and everyone, mocking them from the exalted height of his noble heritage, only to undercut the arrogance with an unguarded flight of whimsy.
The evenings after those dreams, he drinks a glass of wine to his brother's memory, and then shatters the glass in pointless waste. Who, after all, has the authority to tell him no?
---------------------------------------------
Sometimes he looks back at the endless murk of his past and wonders if he's forgotten anything unforgivable, and then forgotten that he should have remembered. He wonders how much the lifestream has stolen from him. He wonders if all the memories still exist, like self-perpetuating waves or a labyrinth of mirrors, somehow independent of his own fallible mind. He wonders if someday, when he can finally rest, he'll be able to remember.
He wants to believe that souls can touch and speak to each other in the lifestream, that he might meet his mother and his sister and his brother again one day.
When he sees his mother, he wants to recognize her face.
---------------------------------------------
End