[FF7] Edge of the World
[FF7] Edge of the World
Timeline: post-game, alternative universe
Rating: PG
Status: Incomplete
Characters: Rufus, others.
Chapter: 1/?
Warnings: None.
Summary: Meteor falls, devastating the planet. The backwash of the Lifestream occurs in time to save a few, too late for others, and leaves some interesting legacies. Some who should have perished live, and others who should have lived, perish. A multi-parter alternative universe fic.
Dedicated to peacefulchaos, for the inspiration.
As a child, Rufus Shinra had dreamt a lot. Not dreamt in the sense that some people did -- those of waking moments that involved ambitions, hopes, random fits of longings for things that they didn’t have and would probably never obtain. No, he had dreamt, wandering through the things that came to you in sleep, when darkness folded around and the mind, spurred by imagination and not constrained within the boundaries of the physical world, sprang out into the void, filling it with sight, colour, sound.
His Presidency had burned like a candle at both ends, short and brief, but brilliant. Sleep had become a seldom sought thing of luxury and necessity. His nights burnt by the brightness of mako-powered lamps, as the Planet stuttered on the verge of survival. In dreamless darkness he had napped, short snatches stolen from the jaws of the demands of the job. He would wrench himself from those moments, stepping back into the waking world with the determination and fatigue of a general returning to war.
Pause and stare at the angry red eye burning in the distant sky, the judgment come upon them all.
Which was why it was remarkable that he dreamt this time, something that fleeted across the senses and was promptly lost on waking. In the darkness he blinked, awake again, urgency stirring sluggishly in the back of his head. Memory came back to him, the Sister Ray, the Northern Crater, Sephiroth, Avalanche, Weapon -- all ending on a dagger point of beams of light arcing towards him.
Had that...
No, that had been no dream. He was sure of it. There had been light and noise and all the world exploding about him, until it went suddenly and eerily dark and silent, himself lost to reality except for the pain.
No, the dreams had come after that, and he sluggishly recalled green, and all the world about him, beneath him, his feet traced paths across air, the Planet spread out below him.
He remembered too -- voices, heartbreakingly familiar. He remembered warmth, a sense of belonging, a sense of home that cut so deep his waking heart ached to remember it.
...He must have slept for a very long time.
But now he was awake, so subtly and quietly that he barely realized it. There was cool air against his face, a draft from somewhere, and his eyes adjusted oh so slowly to the gloom. A room, a house, an open window, moonlight trickling in. He moved, and it hurt, the protest of unused muscles, a bandage that chafed across skin, the sharper pang of something as he tried to sit up. Ignoring it proved to be a bad idea as he forced the issue, only to find himself flat on his back again, pain clawing at his sense, stars exploding in his vision.
He realised why when he tugged the covers away. His chest was a patchwork of scars, clearly new, the deeper ones still bandaged, and no few of them supporting neat lines of black stitching. A flare of fire from his arms informed him that they were much the same, and when he pulled a leg free of the constraints of the sheets, he noted the bandages all the way down its length.
Very neat bandages, however, like the stitching. They had obviously been done by a professional, but yet there was no mark of materia-based healing, no pink scar tissue characteristic of natural mending being accelerated through use of potions. Strange, and stranger. Unless he was in enemy hands, there was little reason for them not to give him the best of treatments.
But there was nothing familiar about this place. It smelt different - to a nose accustomed to the sterility of Shinra Tower’s corridors, there was a thickness to the air here. It hung heavy, not unlike the atmosphere in the Slums, but yet at once more foreboding and less stifling. There was wind, for one, something rarely felt in those cramped corners. And there was moonlight, which meant no plate over his head.
He wasn’t anywhere he knew. Even peaceful Kalm didn’t have a silent, watchful atmosphere like this, one where he almost fancied he could smell death on the air.
Perhaps he was, indeed, in enemy hands.
Getting to his feet was less of a chore, once he worked the kinks out of stiff muscles, once he grew accustomed to the various aches and pains. He was in a state of absolute undress, he realised, naked except for the bandages, and he grabbed the blanket to drape around his shoulders.
No bed sores, hm. He had definitely been in the care of a professional. He wished that he could remember what it was that had landed him here-
Weapon.
Meteor.
Searing streaks of yellow gold white before black, black, black
someone screaming stop make it
goaway stop
black green black
and silence.
falling so suddenly it was like
fall of blood, trickle of rain
the entire universe
folding in
on
its
epicentre.
...It... hadn’t been a dream, then.
He spun without thinking, cursing out loud when the movement pulled his injuries, and limped to the window, stumbling against the frame. If Meteor had fallen, if Meteor had...
...Shinra.
...Midgar.
...Gaia.
His Company. His city. His world.
Gust of cold wind, stirring the curtains. Whistling past cracked window panes. His eye tore itself from the tiny details, the things close to him, suspense choking him, as he almost didn’t dare to
Look
Darkness sprawled in all directions, darkness and rumble and twisted skeletons of structures. Debris was everywhere, heaps upon heaps, twisting tiny footpaths through it where people must have shovelled things aside.
People. People still lived, then? Clearly, clearly, because he had not been left to die. But who, where? What had become of Midgar?
The moon, shining through a break in the clouds, ducked away again, plunging the nightmarish landscape into darkness. He found his fingernails curling into the wooden frame of the house, splinters starting to tear up under his hands. His vision tracked, and he saw that there were still things standing. Shells of buildings. Buildings half intact, the second part torn away by some great force. He couldn’t see corpses, dead scattered, but he knew they were there, had to be, what with that carrion stink in the air when the wind turned briefly.
And still his eyes roved, from one end of the scene to the other, and then he saw it, standing tall and glittering an eerie green against the sky. A pillar, stretching out into infinity. Tiny flickers of light ran across it, sparking the length, but these were not the orderly pattern he knew they should be. They ran, fizzed, died; and nearer the base of the pillar, all was in darkness.
Mako lights. Battery powered mako lights. And that, was a sector support pillar. And beyond that... nothing but the sky gaping over head, filled from end to end with clouds.
He was in Midgar.
And Midgar had fallen.
He didn’t know how long he spent, standing at that window. His mind must have whited out in anger; grief. Midgar, beautiful Midgar, lay in ruins around him. Destroyed, her people killed or fled. His entire life’s work... gone.
And suddenly he couldn’t stay here any more. He had to get out, to pick his way through the darkness, the rubble. He needed answers, he needed solutions, he needed to do anything but stay still, and the instincts of a soldier under fire was to move, move, move, never stop long enough for them to kill you.
He stumbled across the floor, bare feet tripping over the cracks. He stubbed a toe on a folded up futon on the floor, and wondered whose it was. The person who had so kindly taken care of him? Where was he? She? Who? Who would be kind enough to take in a fallen President, in this world where living itself was obviously a matter of the survival of the fittest? There were clothes in the single battered wardrobe at the other end of the room, clothes which perhaps identified the other occupant of the room as male - threadbare shirts and pants that had obviously seen better days. They had obviously been scavenged, of various cuts and sizes, but generally for someone taller than him. He took a set anyway, folding up the cuffs. There was something in the back, as well, and he squinted into the gloom, wishing that he had more light. It took a moment of courage to reach his fingers out, and he jumped when they brushed cold metal, curled around something that seemed oddly familiar...
...He searched for and sought the expected tracings, finger sliding across the surface of the metal: A-R-N-I-H-S S-U-F-U-R. A moment of relief swept through his heart as he pulled it out, dislodging it with a slight clatter as something else went rolling across the floor. It was his shotgun. Battered and obviously worse for the wear, but whoever had pulled him from the rubble must have pulled this out along with him. Just hefting its familiar weight in his hand made him feel infinitely more prepared, more equipped to deal with this alien world he had woken up in. Fallacy though that might be. A weapon was a start, but people had seen fit not to use it...
A quick check of the magazine revealed that someone had used it; half the shots were discharged. It was a little worrying; he doubted that he would be able to get any shells, not until he got out of here. How far had the damage spread? How much carnage had Meteor wrecked? If he ran to Kalm, would he find the same story there?
A stray thought nagged at the back of his mind, figuring that something wasn’t adding up, but try as he might, he couldn’t quite seem to place it. There was a curious sense of emptiness in his mind, a silence that he wasn’t quite used to, surrounded as he was, usually, by chattering employees, the ringing of the phone, the clatter of keys on keyboards. It was so still here.
And the need for answers was starting to burn in his mind.
He grasped the shotgun, cradling its against his arm. He didn’t feel comfortable taking anything else, and there seemed to be nothing in the way of food, sustenance, supplies that he would need if he sought to undertake a journey. Perhaps he would have to scout around a little, perhaps he would return to this place. He rather hoped the owner of this house was still alive.
The light switch was near the wall. He flicked it, noted the way the light completely failed to come on, and clenched his teeth momentarily. Even the Slums had had mako power - better districts of the Slums, at least, like the place he was evidently residing in. It had a light switch. It had wired power. Wired power meant mako power, and the complete absence of it was a terrible sign. He had seen no gleam of the reactors on the horizon-
the use of mako is killing our Planet.
The words were so loud, so clear, that they stopped him dead in his tracks. He spun, half fancying that someone had spoken them to him, but the room was as empty as ever. It must have been his own mind throwing it out, then, and he remembered again, the findings that had come streaming in, too late, in those final days.
They had been wrong, the reports said. The reports that had been held from him until the very end. They had all been wrong. The Promised Land was a lie, mako energy was the lifeblood of the Planet, the curse that had fallen upon their heads, the Weapons risen up to murder them for daring to steal what had been the Planet’s...
The faces of the Avalanche terrorists flashed across his mind’s eye. Their insane crusade against mako power had been badly and stupidly executed, cost too many innocent lives, but the truth behind their cause now truly irrefutable.
Shinra Company had killed the Planet. He, as Shinra’s Heir had inherited all of that - all the guilt, all the sins, and if he closed his eyes, he saw red, angry skys, and the Weapons storming across the Junon harbour towards them.
Anything I say now is too little, too late.
He flung his head back and laughed.
This was what they had wanted, wasn’t it? Human civilisation reduced to dust, the mako reactors destroyed, the evil of Shinra thwarted forever, its President left for dead-
--except not. Except that he was still alive, and someone had evidently taken pains to ensure that he stayed that way. And if he kept on being stupid, he would attract unwanted attention. The thought sobered the temporary mania, brought on by what, he didn’t know. He had prided himself on his self control, before.
He flicked the light switch again, an ironic salute to the present world order, and pulled the door open, stepping out.
--
In the darkness of the hallway beyond, a single spectator watched the man who had once been the President of Shinra Company pick his way through the house. His lips curled in slight amusement as the President pulled upon a door and stepped back in a hurry, thwarted by the sudden drop. It was only two storeys, but that part of the house had been ripped away into nothingness. Like any other place in the new world, it was best to step carefully, especially when one was uncertain of what lay beyond.
The boy retraced his steps, clutching onto his shotgun, as he picked his way slowly and carefully down the stairs. They creaked, but they would hold; the watcher had little doubt of that, having reinforced them himself. Rufus completely failed to notice him, lost in the shadows as he was, but it wasn’t hard to miss the other.
The President’s eyes glowed, the bright green of mako obvious in the dark.
The watcher smirked, hearing a search of the lower floors being conducted. An exclaimed curse as the boy stubbed his toe on something, the pause as he must have uncovered the boots by the front door. Another pause, and the watcher could imagine the dilemma as the boy wondered or not to take them, then there was the creak of the front door opening and closing.
So he had opted to go.
No matter. He would be back. The watcher was sure of it.
To be continued
Timeline: post-game, alternative universe
Rating: PG
Status: Incomplete
Characters: Rufus, others.
Chapter: 1/?
Warnings: None.
Summary: Meteor falls, devastating the planet. The backwash of the Lifestream occurs in time to save a few, too late for others, and leaves some interesting legacies. Some who should have perished live, and others who should have lived, perish. A multi-parter alternative universe fic.
Dedicated to peacefulchaos, for the inspiration.
As a child, Rufus Shinra had dreamt a lot. Not dreamt in the sense that some people did -- those of waking moments that involved ambitions, hopes, random fits of longings for things that they didn’t have and would probably never obtain. No, he had dreamt, wandering through the things that came to you in sleep, when darkness folded around and the mind, spurred by imagination and not constrained within the boundaries of the physical world, sprang out into the void, filling it with sight, colour, sound.
His Presidency had burned like a candle at both ends, short and brief, but brilliant. Sleep had become a seldom sought thing of luxury and necessity. His nights burnt by the brightness of mako-powered lamps, as the Planet stuttered on the verge of survival. In dreamless darkness he had napped, short snatches stolen from the jaws of the demands of the job. He would wrench himself from those moments, stepping back into the waking world with the determination and fatigue of a general returning to war.
Pause and stare at the angry red eye burning in the distant sky, the judgment come upon them all.
Which was why it was remarkable that he dreamt this time, something that fleeted across the senses and was promptly lost on waking. In the darkness he blinked, awake again, urgency stirring sluggishly in the back of his head. Memory came back to him, the Sister Ray, the Northern Crater, Sephiroth, Avalanche, Weapon -- all ending on a dagger point of beams of light arcing towards him.
Had that...
No, that had been no dream. He was sure of it. There had been light and noise and all the world exploding about him, until it went suddenly and eerily dark and silent, himself lost to reality except for the pain.
No, the dreams had come after that, and he sluggishly recalled green, and all the world about him, beneath him, his feet traced paths across air, the Planet spread out below him.
He remembered too -- voices, heartbreakingly familiar. He remembered warmth, a sense of belonging, a sense of home that cut so deep his waking heart ached to remember it.
...He must have slept for a very long time.
But now he was awake, so subtly and quietly that he barely realized it. There was cool air against his face, a draft from somewhere, and his eyes adjusted oh so slowly to the gloom. A room, a house, an open window, moonlight trickling in. He moved, and it hurt, the protest of unused muscles, a bandage that chafed across skin, the sharper pang of something as he tried to sit up. Ignoring it proved to be a bad idea as he forced the issue, only to find himself flat on his back again, pain clawing at his sense, stars exploding in his vision.
He realised why when he tugged the covers away. His chest was a patchwork of scars, clearly new, the deeper ones still bandaged, and no few of them supporting neat lines of black stitching. A flare of fire from his arms informed him that they were much the same, and when he pulled a leg free of the constraints of the sheets, he noted the bandages all the way down its length.
Very neat bandages, however, like the stitching. They had obviously been done by a professional, but yet there was no mark of materia-based healing, no pink scar tissue characteristic of natural mending being accelerated through use of potions. Strange, and stranger. Unless he was in enemy hands, there was little reason for them not to give him the best of treatments.
But there was nothing familiar about this place. It smelt different - to a nose accustomed to the sterility of Shinra Tower’s corridors, there was a thickness to the air here. It hung heavy, not unlike the atmosphere in the Slums, but yet at once more foreboding and less stifling. There was wind, for one, something rarely felt in those cramped corners. And there was moonlight, which meant no plate over his head.
He wasn’t anywhere he knew. Even peaceful Kalm didn’t have a silent, watchful atmosphere like this, one where he almost fancied he could smell death on the air.
Perhaps he was, indeed, in enemy hands.
Getting to his feet was less of a chore, once he worked the kinks out of stiff muscles, once he grew accustomed to the various aches and pains. He was in a state of absolute undress, he realised, naked except for the bandages, and he grabbed the blanket to drape around his shoulders.
No bed sores, hm. He had definitely been in the care of a professional. He wished that he could remember what it was that had landed him here-
Weapon.
Meteor.
Searing streaks of yellow gold white before black, black, black
someone screaming stop make it
goaway stop
black green black
and silence.
falling so suddenly it was like
fall of blood, trickle of rain
the entire universe
folding in
on
its
epicentre.
...It... hadn’t been a dream, then.
He spun without thinking, cursing out loud when the movement pulled his injuries, and limped to the window, stumbling against the frame. If Meteor had fallen, if Meteor had...
...Shinra.
...Midgar.
...Gaia.
His Company. His city. His world.
Gust of cold wind, stirring the curtains. Whistling past cracked window panes. His eye tore itself from the tiny details, the things close to him, suspense choking him, as he almost didn’t dare to
Look
Darkness sprawled in all directions, darkness and rumble and twisted skeletons of structures. Debris was everywhere, heaps upon heaps, twisting tiny footpaths through it where people must have shovelled things aside.
People. People still lived, then? Clearly, clearly, because he had not been left to die. But who, where? What had become of Midgar?
The moon, shining through a break in the clouds, ducked away again, plunging the nightmarish landscape into darkness. He found his fingernails curling into the wooden frame of the house, splinters starting to tear up under his hands. His vision tracked, and he saw that there were still things standing. Shells of buildings. Buildings half intact, the second part torn away by some great force. He couldn’t see corpses, dead scattered, but he knew they were there, had to be, what with that carrion stink in the air when the wind turned briefly.
And still his eyes roved, from one end of the scene to the other, and then he saw it, standing tall and glittering an eerie green against the sky. A pillar, stretching out into infinity. Tiny flickers of light ran across it, sparking the length, but these were not the orderly pattern he knew they should be. They ran, fizzed, died; and nearer the base of the pillar, all was in darkness.
Mako lights. Battery powered mako lights. And that, was a sector support pillar. And beyond that... nothing but the sky gaping over head, filled from end to end with clouds.
He was in Midgar.
And Midgar had fallen.
He didn’t know how long he spent, standing at that window. His mind must have whited out in anger; grief. Midgar, beautiful Midgar, lay in ruins around him. Destroyed, her people killed or fled. His entire life’s work... gone.
And suddenly he couldn’t stay here any more. He had to get out, to pick his way through the darkness, the rubble. He needed answers, he needed solutions, he needed to do anything but stay still, and the instincts of a soldier under fire was to move, move, move, never stop long enough for them to kill you.
He stumbled across the floor, bare feet tripping over the cracks. He stubbed a toe on a folded up futon on the floor, and wondered whose it was. The person who had so kindly taken care of him? Where was he? She? Who? Who would be kind enough to take in a fallen President, in this world where living itself was obviously a matter of the survival of the fittest? There were clothes in the single battered wardrobe at the other end of the room, clothes which perhaps identified the other occupant of the room as male - threadbare shirts and pants that had obviously seen better days. They had obviously been scavenged, of various cuts and sizes, but generally for someone taller than him. He took a set anyway, folding up the cuffs. There was something in the back, as well, and he squinted into the gloom, wishing that he had more light. It took a moment of courage to reach his fingers out, and he jumped when they brushed cold metal, curled around something that seemed oddly familiar...
...He searched for and sought the expected tracings, finger sliding across the surface of the metal: A-R-N-I-H-S S-U-F-U-R. A moment of relief swept through his heart as he pulled it out, dislodging it with a slight clatter as something else went rolling across the floor. It was his shotgun. Battered and obviously worse for the wear, but whoever had pulled him from the rubble must have pulled this out along with him. Just hefting its familiar weight in his hand made him feel infinitely more prepared, more equipped to deal with this alien world he had woken up in. Fallacy though that might be. A weapon was a start, but people had seen fit not to use it...
A quick check of the magazine revealed that someone had used it; half the shots were discharged. It was a little worrying; he doubted that he would be able to get any shells, not until he got out of here. How far had the damage spread? How much carnage had Meteor wrecked? If he ran to Kalm, would he find the same story there?
A stray thought nagged at the back of his mind, figuring that something wasn’t adding up, but try as he might, he couldn’t quite seem to place it. There was a curious sense of emptiness in his mind, a silence that he wasn’t quite used to, surrounded as he was, usually, by chattering employees, the ringing of the phone, the clatter of keys on keyboards. It was so still here.
And the need for answers was starting to burn in his mind.
He grasped the shotgun, cradling its against his arm. He didn’t feel comfortable taking anything else, and there seemed to be nothing in the way of food, sustenance, supplies that he would need if he sought to undertake a journey. Perhaps he would have to scout around a little, perhaps he would return to this place. He rather hoped the owner of this house was still alive.
The light switch was near the wall. He flicked it, noted the way the light completely failed to come on, and clenched his teeth momentarily. Even the Slums had had mako power - better districts of the Slums, at least, like the place he was evidently residing in. It had a light switch. It had wired power. Wired power meant mako power, and the complete absence of it was a terrible sign. He had seen no gleam of the reactors on the horizon-
the use of mako is killing our Planet.
The words were so loud, so clear, that they stopped him dead in his tracks. He spun, half fancying that someone had spoken them to him, but the room was as empty as ever. It must have been his own mind throwing it out, then, and he remembered again, the findings that had come streaming in, too late, in those final days.
They had been wrong, the reports said. The reports that had been held from him until the very end. They had all been wrong. The Promised Land was a lie, mako energy was the lifeblood of the Planet, the curse that had fallen upon their heads, the Weapons risen up to murder them for daring to steal what had been the Planet’s...
The faces of the Avalanche terrorists flashed across his mind’s eye. Their insane crusade against mako power had been badly and stupidly executed, cost too many innocent lives, but the truth behind their cause now truly irrefutable.
Shinra Company had killed the Planet. He, as Shinra’s Heir had inherited all of that - all the guilt, all the sins, and if he closed his eyes, he saw red, angry skys, and the Weapons storming across the Junon harbour towards them.
Anything I say now is too little, too late.
He flung his head back and laughed.
This was what they had wanted, wasn’t it? Human civilisation reduced to dust, the mako reactors destroyed, the evil of Shinra thwarted forever, its President left for dead-
--except not. Except that he was still alive, and someone had evidently taken pains to ensure that he stayed that way. And if he kept on being stupid, he would attract unwanted attention. The thought sobered the temporary mania, brought on by what, he didn’t know. He had prided himself on his self control, before.
He flicked the light switch again, an ironic salute to the present world order, and pulled the door open, stepping out.
--
In the darkness of the hallway beyond, a single spectator watched the man who had once been the President of Shinra Company pick his way through the house. His lips curled in slight amusement as the President pulled upon a door and stepped back in a hurry, thwarted by the sudden drop. It was only two storeys, but that part of the house had been ripped away into nothingness. Like any other place in the new world, it was best to step carefully, especially when one was uncertain of what lay beyond.
The boy retraced his steps, clutching onto his shotgun, as he picked his way slowly and carefully down the stairs. They creaked, but they would hold; the watcher had little doubt of that, having reinforced them himself. Rufus completely failed to notice him, lost in the shadows as he was, but it wasn’t hard to miss the other.
The President’s eyes glowed, the bright green of mako obvious in the dark.
The watcher smirked, hearing a search of the lower floors being conducted. An exclaimed curse as the boy stubbed his toe on something, the pause as he must have uncovered the boots by the front door. Another pause, and the watcher could imagine the dilemma as the boy wondered or not to take them, then there was the creak of the front door opening and closing.
So he had opted to go.
No matter. He would be back. The watcher was sure of it.
To be continued