Title: all are one
Fandom: FFVIII
Characters: Rinoa
Rating: PG-13?
Warnings: Stream-of-consciousness and general creepiness.
Summary: Magic isn't all Edea gave her.
Hyne's descendants, his daughters, sorceresses and witches and goddesses all, from the innocent maiden to the loving mother to the witch-bitch-queen at the end of time - they are all there within her. Old, young, long-dead, never-born.
Sometimes she sees the ghost of a daughter in an old woman's face, or the echoes of a lover in a laughing child.
It frightens her. She clenches her fists and her hands bleed. When had her fingernails gotten so long?
She gets lost sometimes. The streets of Deling City (so familiar, so alien) twist and turn and the path she was walking is suddenly gone, swallowed up by buildings that have always been there, as long as she can remember.
Esthar is the worst, and its all she can do to push down the rage that bubbles up inside - mineminethisisallMINE - so she doesn't go there much anymore. When they ask, she smiles and shrugs and says only “bad memories.” It's even true, though the memories aren't really hers.
She looks at him and she sees shadows and light and death - he killed a part of her once, long ago and yesterday and generations in the future. She sees a lost little boy and a man with scars. He is son and lover and murderer, and sometimes she cannot bear to look. He doesn't understand. All he understands is loss, and she cannot make him happy anymore.
She is full of lightning, of fire, of ice. It crackles and burns and makes her writhe in agony-ecstasy. She is the mother of the world, the savior of time, the death-knell of humanity. She wakes one morning with gold flecks in her eyes and they are beautiful.
The others worry about her, the children-friends-killers and she does not know which they are or what to do with them. She does not even know what to do with herselves.
Sometimes when they say her names - Adel-Edea-Rinoa-Ultimecia-Hyne - she turns her head and smiles. They stare at her and whisperwhisperwhisper.
The mother speaks to her sometimes, she who was-and-will-be, who is within-and-without. It is comforting and disturbing at once. She dislikes the confusion, and one day the woman is only inside, where she belongs, warm and dark and beautiful.
Her murderers come for her then, and his eyes are ice and pain and loss.
Her children say she killed their mother.
Her friends say she is mad and dangerous and not herself.
The witches are all her and she is all of them and they do not understand.