31_days | [Oct 1] [FFVII] Fear of the Fall

Title: Fear of the Fall
Day/Theme: October 1, A screaming comes across the sky
Series: Final Fantasy 7
Character/Pairing: Vincent and Yuffie, not quite a pairing
Rating: PG-13, for character death.

i.
In a single, crystal-clear moment, the world shatters. The reflections of sun and shade that have danced before her eyes for so long shift, and change, and become something quite different.

There is not even time for breath, for shock, for horror. It is a single moment, it is the snatch of time between moments, it happens before he has realized that it is happening.

In a single moment that sings somewhere deep in his ankles and fills his stomach with moths, he finds himself once more alone.

ii.

A thousand days, a thousand dreams. A thousand ways it could have turned out differently. A thousand ways she might have survived.

The sight of her body falling, falling, falling from that height, the smear on the earth beneath her...

It haunts his every waking moment. It is his greatest failure. He should have run forward, become one of the demons. The Galian Beast could have easily survived the fall with her in its arms.

But his cowardice doomed her. His cowardice doomed them all.

She was pure joy. He knows that now. If you were to take the summer sunlight and capture it in a diamond bottle, she would still have shone more brightly. She was the embodiment of optimism, of joy, she was beyond compare.

She was the sun itself, she was the cleansing rain, she was everything they needed. She was the smiling one, the joyous one, the one who kept them sane. The pragmatic, the thief, the quirky and silly and flirty and flighty and intrusive and she was everything they needed.

iii.

And so he is the one at the top, now. He is the one in the precarious position. He is the one who will die.

It is his fault, he knows. If he had not been such a coward. If he had not been so selfish. If he had not been so focused on petty revenge.

She would yet live. She would yet live.

Very calmly, he looks down. He wants to see the last thing she saw as she fell. What were her last thoughts? Was she bitter? Did she cry out to her worthless god, the idiot god who didn't save her? Did she beg her god to send her aid?

Did she face her death with pride? With fear? With regret? With the same mad abandon with which she approached her life? Did she determine to enjoy it the way she had determined to enjoy their mad quest?

He does not know. He is not her. He will never know, he cannot know. But he wants to know. She was sunshine and rain, she was the mercurial sea. Nurturing, useful, beautiful, cruel, vast. She was the loving, thieving, giving one. Quick to anger, quick to forgive.

She had been sun and shade, rain and shine, sea and shore.

But he will be the sky.

He steps with ruthless calm from Da-Chao statue.

His falling makes a screaming sound, though he does not cry out. He does not fear. The wind rushes against him, pushes him up and down and every way but the right way, because there is no right way any more.

The wind is offended and insulted and there is no time. This is one single moment, really. This is just one single, icily clear, sharply cutting moment.

He will be the sky.