Grin like sunshine in a jar, bright and huge and bursting to get out.
Wrong again. Sunshine and happiness comes in a bottle. But He wouldn't know anything about that, would He? He knows selflessness and kindness and trust and a hunred-and-two other ways to get yourself killed.
There are no heroes.
Well, there was one once but where is he now? Oh, yes: in the cold hard ground with a hole in his head and maggots for eyes. That's where heroes end up. That, or crazy from all the ones they couldn't save, assaulted by the unwelcome gratitude of all the ones they did, crazy and hateful. Heroes who don't die turn into villains.
Maybe not this one, this sunshine-boy who never gives up even when He's crying. What I wouldn't give for a little of that when I could have used it. Real heroes give and give and give and give until they can't give anything else, and then they give whatever they have left that no other person should be able to give. Isn't that a hero? Well, he (the other inexorable him, the hero who taught all about what really happens to heroes, taught by example) certainly wouldn't know. He didn't believe in heroes. Went to the grave believing he'd never been one.
Dead man in the back of a pickup truck. Hole in the head. Sunshine in a bottle.
It's what everyone's after until they see what it's like.
"No, you won't." There are no heroes. This boy cannot be a hero, ever, because then he'll go the way of all the others.
Cloud Strife will not see anyone else fall into the empty promise of a hollow grave.