[video] Broadcast Mind
Your hand hurts, a sore and dull ache that radiates up your arm, through your fingers, and into your shoulder. You’ve been at these damn boots for over an hour, making them shine, making your reflection (young and happy with eyes unnaturally blue) grimace back at you. It’s silly, half the things they make you do in the academy are stupid, but you want to impress, you want to rise through the ranks, you want to show them what you can do. So you roll your socks, you shine your boots, you make your bed with every crisp military line, and you hope someone notices.
Shiva, you hope.
But the only thing they notice is the way you doodle in the corner of your pages, or the history lesson you half-read five minutes before class. Sometimes they bark at you when you start drifting away when they talk about guns, and the only way they can get you back is to review sword care and maintenance.
You’re impressionable, they say. Easily distracted. They use the “P” word: “potential”. Moldable. They want to accelerate you, bump you up. You’re young and you can handle the injections better than some of the subjects.
They don’t say that to you of course, but one day, you happened upon your file. All accidentally, right? Right. And you’re proud. Potential. Accelerated. None of the rest matters. The power of positivity.
So you try harder in class. You try harder at the firing range. You learn a sniper rifle, but you’re no Turk. You do twice as many squats as you did a week ago. You smile. You make friends with people in helmets and those without. You do your best.
You’re on your way, kid, they say, and you beam. You’re given Angeal, and you’ve never felt more inspired. This is it. This is your chance.
You’re gonna be a hero someday, says one of the instructors, but you didn’t need to hear it. You already knew it.
Still know it.
But now it’s after your mission, it’s after Angeal’s gone. The scars on your face are fresh, swollen, the skin pink and new. It healed too fast like everything else, everyone else, everyone except for who you really want. Drinks with the guys do nothing; time with her helps, but nothing cures it.
Sitting on the edge of your company bed, you stare down at those same Shinra-issued boots, at the mud crusting the edges, the turf ground between black treads. They haven’t shone in months; you stopped that habit after Angeal’s death.
Your feet have carried you all over the world, to Hell and back. Maybe it’s time they started showing it.
Your hands run through your hair, and you go out to give another speech to a group of cadets, cadets that will stand with their guns trained on you at some point, but you don’t know that. It’s your favorite part of the day, the favorite part of the entire experience, watching the eagerness, the hope, the excitement and dreams on their faces, in their eyes. You like telling them to follow those sensations like you followed yours.
You just hope that in vain their boots aren’t half as dirty as yours when they’re giving their speeches.