Meditation – Zamiel

A/N: Experimental Genesis stream-of-thought. Was working on a new chapter of Vignettes, but suddenly wanted to write something a little darker. Maybe not perfect, but there are moments I like.

One cut through the darkness. Head fuzzy warm from white noise, I move, distracted. Unbound.

What constitutes a victory? - my own definition of the word has changed over time. In the beginning, it had been a focused ambition, the desire to dominate. But now I am left with the nebulous pieces, a blank space where there had previously been an ideology - as though over time it had steadily whitewashed and eroded, returning me to the same place I once was; only now everything is different.

I am the last to live. Angeal had thrown in his hand a long time ago, and then it was Sephiroth. The great general himself. Even he too – demi-god as he was – was unforgivably mortal. Sometimes I give pause to wonder if he even remembered me at the very end. It was my warning to him that edged him towards madness, and like a tumor it grew, devoured his mind until it was ripe with decay. But it would be foolish, I imagine, to suppose that I held any importance to him by that time. He – like the rest of us – had changed. Monsters beget monsters, after all; our existences were hinged on those who created us, and because of them we bled.

It is an art to learn how to fly with one wing. A new sense of equilibrium has to be constructed around the wing, on top of balancing the weight of the human body. A bird with one wing would only fly in circles all day. When kept as pets, some bird owners clip the wings to prevent the animal from flying away, a practice that reduces the wing's strength. Nevertheless, stronger birds can still escape, but even they need the help of two wings to amass a supporting cushion of air beneath them.

I was shown the charts, the debunking of Bernoulli in ornate graphite scratches, each sweep a proud flourish of pencil lead as if showing off the mind's brilliance. According to Bernoulli, there has to be a cross-section between the two wings where air flows faster on the upper surface than on the lower surface. This generates the steady flight.

Needless to say, we were built asymmetrical. Not flawed, necessarily – flawed by design, perhaps, might be the more way accurate to describe it. There was an insanity that infected Hojo's mind, one that unfortunately bestowed upon him a sick type of brilliance. Perhaps he was not even aware of it, poisoned to the end by his own undoing.

The first time the wings ripped out of my back was a moment of tremendous pain. I am marked by those scars, the muscle tissue and bones reconstructed to accommodate the new appendages. My feathers had been soaked with blood, and after Hollander had taken the time to wipe them, I had to wait forever for them to dry, the heavy damp moisture weighing them down and causing the skin around to sag. To this day, the scar where the wing first emerged is slightly more sensitive than the surrounding skin. When the weather changes, I feel the twinge, a delicate reminder of things I want to forget; of things I must embrace.

The very first time I had tried to fly, I had spun like a mad satellite, a comical drunken parody with one black wing and terrible balance. I was bruised from head to foot, the darker shades from times when Hollander thought it a good idea to throw me off a ledge – in the manner of parent birds teaching their young to fly – and the lighter ones from personal indoor practice sessions. I was not allowed to fly outside.

It was levitation that came first, buoyant and beautiful, a moment triggered by divine inspiration. In a dream I had, I was floating, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself hovering several inches above the bed…

Everything is silent now.

Looking back is like looking through a film of gauze. I realize I am in danger of fabricating things, and it becomes difficult even for me to accurately see where I deceive myself.

Everything had changed in that split instance when I had looked into the eyes of my goddess and she into my own. The light that had repelled me had struck hard at my pupils, instantaneously blinding me so that I was only allowed that one glimpse. Back then, my heart had fueled the ideology weighing heavily in my mind, so much so that every moment I lived and breathed was built for a single purpose. Back then, I could not see but I was not blind; and now, I can see but I am utterly blind.

Letting me live. Was that an act of mercy, or an act of repulsion?

There are those who believe that Sephiroth was the darkness. But there are things – many things – which go even beyond Sephiroth's imagination and comprehension. Dreams, nightmares that could have rotted him down to his feet at the single drop of a word. The periphery where the world ends and the ephemera begins – it has now become me. Or rather, it was always there, waiting for these sightless eyes to understand at last.

I am the last dark star floating in my goddess' horizon.

I was the beginning of the Three, and the last to survive, the bastard project bleeding out until the end. But it is not a victory – rather, it simply is what it is. The three of us were used in the petty wars between Hojo and Hollander, pawns in their darling dogfights. We were the ones to suffer, not them. And yet, despite this egregious suffering…our world was unbearably small.

Every day upon awakening, I found myself with a body that grew increasingly unfamiliar, decaying flesh that was once human greeting me in the haze of dawn. The stench was unbelievable, hovering closer to corpse than man. And by witnessing the remnants of what I was once was, the life I had been cheated of…in that moment, I wanted - more than anything – to stay alive.

One final thought.

It is said that humans have ten seconds upon waking to remember the dream they had during the night, and after that it dissolves to mist, to be lost and never recalled again – save for rare instances where a certain atmosphere, a color in the air, will cause the brain to recall a shadow of what had been forgotten.

One night over Mideel – shortly after the events in Modeoheim - there had been a terrible hailstorm that tore at my back and partially crippled my wing. It wasn't too serious, but I had no chance of making it to my destination. After some deliberation, I dove into an open window and took shelter in a hospital wing. The first thing that struck me – and funny how it is this, above all memories, that I can recall in clear detail as though I am still standing in that space – was a tape recorder on a little girl's night table where she was, presumably, trying to capture her sleeptalking. Angeal had once tried to do the same thing when we were together in Banora; he had had a record of giving speeches in his sleep, and many nights I been woken up his bass voice rumbling incoherently in the background. He had only partly succeeded in capturing his voice on tape. Most of the playback was slurred rising and falling intonation – it only bore the ambiguous shape of sound rather than actual words.

Lost in my thoughts, I did not notice that the girl had roused from her sleep. She remained frozen as she looked upon me, and I at her, into two pale green irises that echoed the reflection of my own. I realized that I had left my wing unfurled, and in the darkness I must have resembled something terrifying, a wayward incubus or eidolon. We remained in that state, frozen in a dimension removed from time and space, forever held captive in a stalemate until she broke the silence by a simple question.

"Are you…?" she whispered in a voice so ethereal I had to strain my ears to catch it.

"Am I what?"

I don't know when it was that I knew exactly, but she was gravely ill to the point of death. Perhaps my being in the same situation made me more sensitive to those things. And the realization suddenly made her frailer in my eyes, as though at any given moment she'd fade before me into the night.

She gestured at the wing, and I knew what it was that she was trying to ask. I gave pause before answering her.

"…Yes," I lied, very quietly.

"Will it…?"

I shook my head. And quickly, before she could dig deeper into the surface, I left the room.