Jealousy

You bend inside of your own mind, twisting into the pink ribbons of her hair and rolling unendingly in a sea of wine-colored eyes. You try so hard to just be good enough, and you struggle against the tugging tugging of transparent fish wire in vain. A different kind of sword still runs through both of them, coated in the pink of her dress and the chardonnay of her eyes.

You think, if you could just protect them, they could love you. If you could just pervert the hands and set your own time on the clock, you could wake up the next day and not feel so reprehensibly jealous of the strong ones you will never emulate.

Zack says you have a home town. Zack says you have a mother. Zack says you are a country boy.

The thin sword cuts the red tape the thick sword cannot reach. When the man in the black hair falls, you pull on Zack's past like a suit, but you still have the one thing that makes your self-loathing so ironic: a home.

You must watch them crumble because who could let you have them both when you already have two pasts, two mothers, two hometowns? Why should you also get the soft thin wrists, the dirt-encrusted cuticles of the slum girl, and the patient rich lips, the girlish faith of the bar maiden who makes alcohol a secondary drug?

Tifa Lockhart careens into the jagged metal steps of the Nibelheim reactor, her life slicking the stairs you nearly trip over in your haste to cradle her in your arms. You make sure that, yes—and this triumph is bittersweet through your disbelieving eyes roiling with the realization that strength did this—she continues to exhale the same rich scent of cold snow-covered juniper trees. But only for a moment. For then you, having learned nothing, thunder up the stairs still infatuated with the methods of her would-be murderer.

Aeris Gainsborough floated away on the underground lake, red bursts of crimson flowering on the water's surface fuller than the tulips in her empty church garden. You think you see her spirit, now, in the rays of daylight trickling through the dilapidated roof you once fell through. You wish you could fall again, only this time you hope to land on the unyielding floor boards rather than the soft bed of snapped petunias. Your ignorance knows no bounds because beside you, her arms stretched and empty, stands the other, but you brush her off as if she were the dead one, and not the other way around.

So when you ask why, and you only hear that you are a puppet, you have the wrong answer.

The right answer—and listen close—is that you are lucky that fate intervened with the course of blood-soaked Masamune, and I did not take them both.

Big thanks to Moiranne Rose for betaing this for me. Whoo. It makes more sense now.

07/20/09: Another thank you to Mr. Ite for pointing out a couple points of contention. Fixed.