O hyne
So like, after almost three weeks of squat all, my muses attack with vengance. Go figure.
This is the second part of the AU of my AU, of which, the first part is here: http://pegunicent.livejournal.com/113080.html
When he wakes he wonders if he’s dreaming. He usually dreams about color and all around him are colors but they don’t have the tinge of green at the edges that he associates with dreaming in the tank. These colors are pure and real and they aren’t green. Mostly they are white and beige, eggshell and some blue. Off white neutral colors that aren’t the sterile of the lab or the bright rainbow of his fantasies.
He’s in a room, laying on a bed, and if he tilts his head a little he can see out of the window and glimpse the sky. It’s blue, and bright, with wispy clouds that can’t put a ceiling on the broad expanse and it scares him. He breathes in the thin air and feels too light and too heavy. There is no resistance on his body, no pull or drag against the slightest motion, the familiar force of green pushing in and on him is gone, leaving only the weight of his own bones, dreams, fevered imaginings holding him to the ground.
He tries not to look at the sky because he’s afraid he’ll fall right into it. Even locked in by the walls of the room, bound by the sheet that covers him and grounded by the glass that bars the way to the ever encompassing atmosphere, he can still see it. The blue that never ends, that calls, that could dissolve what the green has left behind and leave him floating, disappearing into the sky.
He closes his eyes and breathes, and hopes he’s dreaming.
There are hands, gentle and strong, smelling of earth, musk, fire and magic that touch him when he opens his eyes again. The hands bring a warm cloth over his skin and wipe away the sweat that has come sometime during his undreaming. The voice that follows the hands is low, a rumbling sound that vibrates through the too thin air. He listens to the sound, finding it almost comforting in the strangeness of his new existence.
The words flow beyond him, he’s too tired to try and pick apart the meanings of the sounds, but the tone doesn’t push him anymore than the bland off white walls do, so he accepts and waits and returns to the place that makes the pain of blossoming bruises fade and the beeping of the annoying machines the doctors use go almost still. There are no machines, only the steady thrum of life and sound and movement outside of the room, but he ignores that because he’s always been an outsider looking in on life and whatever happens will happen.
One warm hand rests on his shoulder, a place where he can barely feel it, and he watches it run callused fingertips over the scar tissue. The flesh is twisted and coarse, lumpy under the waxy skin and he knows without knowing how, that more than one wound is held there. The scar swirls from the joint to ripple out over his chest a bit. It extends to his back, whatever caused it went all the way through. It’s ugly, huge, and one of many that litter his body.
He doesn’t remember any of them or the stories behind them but he thinks, in the moments he’s lucid enough on the subject, that he wouldn’t mind learning.
First, he must figure out how not to fall into the blue, now that he’s escaped the green.
There is something that smells wonderful being held near his face, and he has been propped up, no longer flat on his back but sitting slumped against the wall with pillows arranged to keep him up. He drifts in and out of awareness, waiting, and now the hands that smelled of tempered ferocity are trying to teach his own broken limbs how to cradle a spoon without spilling its contents on the coverlet.
He gathers his bearings enough to attempt the task of feeding himself. It doesn’t work as well as the other hands seemed to hope, but he does eat. He doesn’t remember eating before, his nutrients provided by a needle through a vein. It’s work, and he drifts back into the bright darkness of dreams feeling sticky and soiled and heavier with something in his stomach. Possibly the hands don’t want him disappearing into the blue either.
They clean him, soft and firm, the cloth rasping against him. He smells blood, steel, old pain laced with a thousand regrets and the flicker flower scent of vengeance just on the horizon.
He imagines the color of the scent in his dreams. It’s a defiant color, steady and strong, darkly vibrant. It swallows the green and the blue, and meets the sky with a wave of fire.
New hands touch him, too soft, too small, trembling instead of steady. They pet his hair and rub his temples and he wishes he was strong enough to push them away. He doesn’t know why, they aren’t painful, they aren’t callus like the scientists, but the potential is there, the potential for more pain than he can handle. There is an underlying scent of green to them.
They feel strong, but strong like the green is strong.
He doesn’t wake for them, they follow into his dreaming, trying to touch him, to bring him back and awake and aware, trying to pull at the things that he’s hidden down down down where they can’t be tainted. The hands reach inside, beyond his green stained skin to the place where the screaming used to be and he fights. He fights with the nothing of his strength, with the empty hollow ache of forgotten lives, of lost dreams, of dead memories. He arches away and screams into the bedroom because he stopped the screaming inside and he doesn’t want it back. He doesn’t want to go back, be back, live back.
He screams and claws away the green until it breaks him open, spilling red and black and gray over the off white sheets. He fights until the hands flee, green vanishing away, not because he’s strong enough to hurt it, he can never hurt it, but because he’s destroying himself. The scientists are gone, the doctors and labs are gone. The lesson remains. The only thing he can hurt, that he can hold, is himself.
It’s been four days since they brought Squall back from the lab. Four days watching the brunet struggle to breathe, to move, to live within a body that couldn’t die but existed on the very brink. Four days of speaking quietly, poring through encrypted records and test results, calling on favors and trying to get fluids down a throat that tightened against any intrusions, even air sometimes.
Four days watching the sun rise, listening to breathing so slow and shallow it could have been a trick of the wind. Gray eyes didn’t track, didn’t show any recognition of the world beyond hiding away from the window. They walked on tiptoe, hoping time would be the key, but time, as always, was a fickle mistress. Vincent made the most progress, but only in getting half a cup of luke warm broth between pale lips, and another half on the bed sheet.
He tried talking, but Squall didn’t answer, didn’t snark a dry response or call him names or ask something stupid about his chocobos. He didn’t even meet Vincent’s eyes, looking through the world like it was the thing disappearing, instead of himself. Four days of reacquainting himself with a ghost of a lover.
After four days Aeris shouldered her way past Zack and Sephiroth, gave Vincent a Look she’d probably picked up from Tifa somewhere down the line, and convinced him to let her try her healing. She didn’t know much more about the Ancients and her birthright powers than she had back in the war of reunion, but she was a good healer and he, more than they, were at a loss.
She was barely in the room fifteen minutes, sitting silent and thoughtful, touching light fingertips to paper thin skin, before the shrieking began. It was a sound that could only have come from a wounded animal trapped in hell. Vincent, taking a brief respite in the kitchen, tossed his cup of tea at the sink on the way up the stairs, blurring to get there without thinking.
Aeris wasn’t foolish enough to try holding on, but she didn’t leave, backing into a corner, trying to reach through to the man arching against her power, voice filled with the unshed tears of an angel unable to sidestep grace. Vincent dug his fingers and claws into flesh too frail to be real and matched each scream with an animal’s snarl. Green lifestream and restore clashed against gunmetal silver storm clouds, the sheets crumpling and collecting the spilled blood, soaking up the pain and fear that bled like ink over Wutai silk screens until bones shift and break under the force of a creature destroying itself.
Aeris runs, even the faint after effects of her presence dissipate, burned away by the heat of a fire burning cold. Zack had warned her that it wouldn’t be as easy as mako poisoning. Vincent had told her that Squall would fight. It didn’t make it any less a chance, it didn’t give them any less hope that she could coax their old friend back to life the way she coaxed flowers to bloom in concrete and despair.
Squall goes limp under him, eyes open but empty, and more than anything he wants to rip someone apart. He wants pain and blood and fire. He wants to loose the demons and be the beast Hojo created.
Instead he takes Tifa’s advice, garnered from a month in Mideel with a Cloud so lost even Sephiroth couldn’t find him, and curls up in the ruined bedclothes around a body smaller than he can ever remember and tells stories until his voice gives out.
This is the second part of the AU of my AU, of which, the first part is here: http://pegunicent.livejournal.com/113080.html
When he wakes he wonders if he’s dreaming. He usually dreams about color and all around him are colors but they don’t have the tinge of green at the edges that he associates with dreaming in the tank. These colors are pure and real and they aren’t green. Mostly they are white and beige, eggshell and some blue. Off white neutral colors that aren’t the sterile of the lab or the bright rainbow of his fantasies.
He’s in a room, laying on a bed, and if he tilts his head a little he can see out of the window and glimpse the sky. It’s blue, and bright, with wispy clouds that can’t put a ceiling on the broad expanse and it scares him. He breathes in the thin air and feels too light and too heavy. There is no resistance on his body, no pull or drag against the slightest motion, the familiar force of green pushing in and on him is gone, leaving only the weight of his own bones, dreams, fevered imaginings holding him to the ground.
He tries not to look at the sky because he’s afraid he’ll fall right into it. Even locked in by the walls of the room, bound by the sheet that covers him and grounded by the glass that bars the way to the ever encompassing atmosphere, he can still see it. The blue that never ends, that calls, that could dissolve what the green has left behind and leave him floating, disappearing into the sky.
He closes his eyes and breathes, and hopes he’s dreaming.
There are hands, gentle and strong, smelling of earth, musk, fire and magic that touch him when he opens his eyes again. The hands bring a warm cloth over his skin and wipe away the sweat that has come sometime during his undreaming. The voice that follows the hands is low, a rumbling sound that vibrates through the too thin air. He listens to the sound, finding it almost comforting in the strangeness of his new existence.
The words flow beyond him, he’s too tired to try and pick apart the meanings of the sounds, but the tone doesn’t push him anymore than the bland off white walls do, so he accepts and waits and returns to the place that makes the pain of blossoming bruises fade and the beeping of the annoying machines the doctors use go almost still. There are no machines, only the steady thrum of life and sound and movement outside of the room, but he ignores that because he’s always been an outsider looking in on life and whatever happens will happen.
One warm hand rests on his shoulder, a place where he can barely feel it, and he watches it run callused fingertips over the scar tissue. The flesh is twisted and coarse, lumpy under the waxy skin and he knows without knowing how, that more than one wound is held there. The scar swirls from the joint to ripple out over his chest a bit. It extends to his back, whatever caused it went all the way through. It’s ugly, huge, and one of many that litter his body.
He doesn’t remember any of them or the stories behind them but he thinks, in the moments he’s lucid enough on the subject, that he wouldn’t mind learning.
First, he must figure out how not to fall into the blue, now that he’s escaped the green.
There is something that smells wonderful being held near his face, and he has been propped up, no longer flat on his back but sitting slumped against the wall with pillows arranged to keep him up. He drifts in and out of awareness, waiting, and now the hands that smelled of tempered ferocity are trying to teach his own broken limbs how to cradle a spoon without spilling its contents on the coverlet.
He gathers his bearings enough to attempt the task of feeding himself. It doesn’t work as well as the other hands seemed to hope, but he does eat. He doesn’t remember eating before, his nutrients provided by a needle through a vein. It’s work, and he drifts back into the bright darkness of dreams feeling sticky and soiled and heavier with something in his stomach. Possibly the hands don’t want him disappearing into the blue either.
They clean him, soft and firm, the cloth rasping against him. He smells blood, steel, old pain laced with a thousand regrets and the flicker flower scent of vengeance just on the horizon.
He imagines the color of the scent in his dreams. It’s a defiant color, steady and strong, darkly vibrant. It swallows the green and the blue, and meets the sky with a wave of fire.
New hands touch him, too soft, too small, trembling instead of steady. They pet his hair and rub his temples and he wishes he was strong enough to push them away. He doesn’t know why, they aren’t painful, they aren’t callus like the scientists, but the potential is there, the potential for more pain than he can handle. There is an underlying scent of green to them.
They feel strong, but strong like the green is strong.
He doesn’t wake for them, they follow into his dreaming, trying to touch him, to bring him back and awake and aware, trying to pull at the things that he’s hidden down down down where they can’t be tainted. The hands reach inside, beyond his green stained skin to the place where the screaming used to be and he fights. He fights with the nothing of his strength, with the empty hollow ache of forgotten lives, of lost dreams, of dead memories. He arches away and screams into the bedroom because he stopped the screaming inside and he doesn’t want it back. He doesn’t want to go back, be back, live back.
He screams and claws away the green until it breaks him open, spilling red and black and gray over the off white sheets. He fights until the hands flee, green vanishing away, not because he’s strong enough to hurt it, he can never hurt it, but because he’s destroying himself. The scientists are gone, the doctors and labs are gone. The lesson remains. The only thing he can hurt, that he can hold, is himself.
It’s been four days since they brought Squall back from the lab. Four days watching the brunet struggle to breathe, to move, to live within a body that couldn’t die but existed on the very brink. Four days of speaking quietly, poring through encrypted records and test results, calling on favors and trying to get fluids down a throat that tightened against any intrusions, even air sometimes.
Four days watching the sun rise, listening to breathing so slow and shallow it could have been a trick of the wind. Gray eyes didn’t track, didn’t show any recognition of the world beyond hiding away from the window. They walked on tiptoe, hoping time would be the key, but time, as always, was a fickle mistress. Vincent made the most progress, but only in getting half a cup of luke warm broth between pale lips, and another half on the bed sheet.
He tried talking, but Squall didn’t answer, didn’t snark a dry response or call him names or ask something stupid about his chocobos. He didn’t even meet Vincent’s eyes, looking through the world like it was the thing disappearing, instead of himself. Four days of reacquainting himself with a ghost of a lover.
After four days Aeris shouldered her way past Zack and Sephiroth, gave Vincent a Look she’d probably picked up from Tifa somewhere down the line, and convinced him to let her try her healing. She didn’t know much more about the Ancients and her birthright powers than she had back in the war of reunion, but she was a good healer and he, more than they, were at a loss.
She was barely in the room fifteen minutes, sitting silent and thoughtful, touching light fingertips to paper thin skin, before the shrieking began. It was a sound that could only have come from a wounded animal trapped in hell. Vincent, taking a brief respite in the kitchen, tossed his cup of tea at the sink on the way up the stairs, blurring to get there without thinking.
Aeris wasn’t foolish enough to try holding on, but she didn’t leave, backing into a corner, trying to reach through to the man arching against her power, voice filled with the unshed tears of an angel unable to sidestep grace. Vincent dug his fingers and claws into flesh too frail to be real and matched each scream with an animal’s snarl. Green lifestream and restore clashed against gunmetal silver storm clouds, the sheets crumpling and collecting the spilled blood, soaking up the pain and fear that bled like ink over Wutai silk screens until bones shift and break under the force of a creature destroying itself.
Aeris runs, even the faint after effects of her presence dissipate, burned away by the heat of a fire burning cold. Zack had warned her that it wouldn’t be as easy as mako poisoning. Vincent had told her that Squall would fight. It didn’t make it any less a chance, it didn’t give them any less hope that she could coax their old friend back to life the way she coaxed flowers to bloom in concrete and despair.
Squall goes limp under him, eyes open but empty, and more than anything he wants to rip someone apart. He wants pain and blood and fire. He wants to loose the demons and be the beast Hojo created.
Instead he takes Tifa’s advice, garnered from a month in Mideel with a Cloud so lost even Sephiroth couldn’t find him, and curls up in the ruined bedclothes around a body smaller than he can ever remember and tells stories until his voice gives out.