sheepsong

 Tumblr was stupid and toxic. Are all the stupid and toxic people from Tumblr here now?

Computer died, ie all fanfics, passwords and that. No money to fix, no money to replace.

Most ffvii things were on my live journal in private posts, should be recoverable. Maybe not the one I was enjoying the most.

Rewriting that in bits. "typing" on a phone is bollocks.

Looking forward to some time over Christmas to write in ugly longhand  me and my sprained and smashed right hand, mhm.

God not written anything that wasn't a Facebook update in so long. Feels good to have no name. Have some Yuffie-Valentine things. 

Burn the letters. Cut the lights. Lock the doors. Let her grieve.

A dying land needs no mourners.

Tonight is a nothing night, the day a grey day between Sawen and Yul, a day of heavy cloud and sullen rain. Tonight is for forgetting.

She pulls the blanket around her more tightly. Where is Yuffie? The question everyone, no one is asking. Where is she? Holed up in a flea-bitten motel sixty miles northwest of Junon, that's where; holed up with nothing but her own misery.

She fumbles down at the side of the bed for the last bottle she's sure she had - no - nothing but cardboard and empty bottles. Screw it. She doesn't need a drink. She's never needed anything except herself. She hasn't paid for the room; there was no one to take payment. The lock on the door hangs broken.

Somewhere in Midgar, a man is pacing around an empty barroom, picking things up, putting them down, all in the dark. He doesn't need a drink. He hasn't drunk for so many years that he's quite forgotten how it feels not to care. Upstairs, people are sleeping yet, but he is forever awake. His dreams have a bitter taste. He tries not to sleep.

He palms his phone, considers it, hurls it across the room. It shatters quietly, an insult to his feeling. He spins on his heel. The shards of glass and metal glitter behind him in the memory of moonlight, a half-inch through the shutters.

In the motel: the television plays out its night stories silently, flickering against her closed eyelids. She would call this dreaming if she were awake. It is what it is. As real as anything is in these days. She's back in the city. Not her own city - The City, the hell-home of monsters from the dark, the smoky grey land of nightmare. The towers fall again, and her with them. She can't flit and run, her limbs heavy, the rubble falling around her and no one to know she is gone.

In the city: he curses. It's too late for words; the call would go unanswered, the messages unread. He can't rely on his own senses, his fellow-feeling of blood to blood. Everything is wrong.

----

Vincent, she'd said. Everything's dying.

He didn't know how to respond to that. He still doesn't. But then he'd frowned, gestured at the sky, the mountains, the great flowing river - What's dying? And at her. You're alive.

No, she'd said. no. Something's withered here, some thing's askew. She lost the words, and slipped into her own tongue. Things are crooked. Spring comes later every year. Summer's fruits are small and bitter, and winter is as hard as I can remember. The river hasn't spread over the flood plains and the crops are thirsty.

In Midgardian: people are hungry.

He shrugged. The Planet will have it as she wills. And turned away.

She spat at his feet. What am I to do? The people want me to feed them. I've called for Leviathan. He won't come. Did he die with my father? Have I angered him? How do I know what to do?

I'm not the one to ask. And he mounted his bird. All I know is death.

She spat again. Then leave. I don't know why you came. You can't help us.

Later: the boats, swarming - the crying children on laps, the windows of the Palace shuttered and dark - and her, alone, in her silent city. The sky grey. The lamps unlit. She shivered. They were all gone, and her soon to be with them.

O island nation, how could you live without your gods?

She, godless and alone, wraps her self in bright silk and trudges to the river, flowing fast, mute, unholy. It should be autumn, but the trees bear no fruit, the birds sing quietly and do not fly for succour. She will rest here with them, the silent dry leaves, the broken rocks on the riverbanks. Her ankle sinks into cold water and she is pulled away.

-----

He rides to Lucrecia.

Are you the mountain, the waterfall? he asks her, expecting no reply. He gets none. The cave lives yet, cold and damp, fungus glowing darkly in its seams. He takes his customary position, a meditation, palms on knees on folded ankles, a long tall man in perfect stillness.

He waits.

Across in the sea she is carried across time, across the ancestors' plane to a sense of no more self. She is so cold she could be burning, her body a flame in the dark. She lets them take hold of her being. If she has failed then truly she is theirs, to do with as they must.

She wakes choking on foreign sand, throat full of salt and snot and tears. Staggers to her feet. There must be someone alive here. Nothing to her but her underwear and a pocket knife. She'll make it. She has to. They've shown her how.