sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] One-Man Show

Ignoring it is the easiest method of coping. Ignore it, pretend it isn't real, and eventually the memory loss will... Oh. That's right, he didn't have that convenience anymore. He'll just have to keep leaning on ignoring. It's easier that way. Especially when you're not accustomed to having much in the way of a support network. Fujin and Raijin weren't really people he could "talk it out" with. They needed him to be strong at all times, so he had to be that. No room to falter. Or at least that was the perception he'd had of his role with his posse.

The look he shoots Vanille clearly says he's not going to face it later. It's going in the bottle where it belongs. "It's mine to deal with." Or rather not. Either way he firmly believes it's entirely his burden to bear and no one else's. Enjoy the stubbornness, Vanille. Even if he looks like he's about to pop, or be sick, he's doing his best to avoid letting that be too obvious. Not doing a great job of it.

Edited 2019-02-08 04:18 (UTC)

She gives her head a firm shake, straightening up and placing her hands on her hips. He can be stubborn all he wants, but so is she. Vanille isn't about to let him get away with this. Besides, she's the queen of avoidance tactics. The last thing Seifer needs is to turn out like her.

"Keep saying that and sooner or later it'll just come out anyway," she points out with a tone that says she understands. "I know you've been through a lot. We all have. But that just means we can help each other better. Come on, Seifer." She giggles lightly and gives his arm a light shove. "You can't hide from your friends!"

Turn out like her? Too late, he's already the master. Besides she can't be much older than he is. They've both lived some pretty messed up lives from the look of it.

"Doesn't have to," He insists, stubbornly knowing she's absolutely right. Doesn't mean he wants to admit it though. It will sit and fester as it always has, slowly building to something that he's been trying to cope with since he got there. It was easier to pretend it didn't bother him when the spotlight wasn't shown on it so brightly. Her comment about friends gives him pause, a wary kind of glance sent her way. Friends. He's getting a lot of those lately.

"It's funny. Never had so many friends before." Two. He used to only have two. They probably wouldn't have let him get away with his sulking either, though they were typically more subtle in the way they handled him. Waiting until he pulled his own head out of his ass. Sometimes that took a long time.

Vanille gets it. She really does. For so long she ran away from everything, avoided her Focus and everything to do with it. In doing that, she had doomed so many other people to her fate. And worse. It's hard to face terrible events. Sometimes Serah's words are the easiest. Face it later. Not always the best, but easiest.

She isn't about to let Seifer off the hook that easily, though. Her smile fades into a mock pout and she shoves his arm a bit harder this time to make her point. "Well, get used to it!" she huffs theatrically in a way that says she's totally going to keep this up in more annoying ways until he gives in.

Seifer hadn't doomed people with inaction, he doomed them with action. And right now? Was having a hell of a time compartmentalizing the guilt that came with reliving and remembering those actions that harmed some of those who had been closest to him. For as close as he allowed anyone, that is. It was still too soon for him.

The shove earns a grunt and a scowl, Seifer attempting to look as rude and uninviting as possible so perhaps she'll give up her prodding. Though her follow up comment did earn a faint, mirthless smirk. Stubborn, that's for sure. Had to give her credit for that. Why she cared so much, he had no idea. "Nothing I say's gonna convince you, is it?" That he's really not worth the time or energy. Although he does have to admit he's glad no one turned on him as soon as they saw that. He'd really hate to have to fight for his life with a hammer.

Fang had doomed people with action, too. Really, Vanille understands that just as well. Protecting family, ideals, or dreams makes perfect sense to her. For all that she doesn't usually push people if they don't want to talk about things, sometimes they need it. And now us one of those times.

"Nope!" she says brightly, managing a smile. "I'm too stubborn."

Perhaps they did have some common ground in this after all. Not the best thing to have in common of course, but it was comforting knowing he wasn't entirely alone. That there might be someone else who understood what it was like to end up on the wrong side of the war. For Vanille it sounded like she might be on the cusp of righting some of those wrongs. Seifer can only hope he manages the same in the future.

He huffs, but her antics do pull a faint smile out of him regardless. A difficult task to be certain, Vanille deserves a medal. "I see that. Don't you think we have more important things to worry about?" If denial doesn't work try evasion!

Vanille just stares at him pointedly for a while, before the fight seems to drain out of her. She's tired of fighting, especially after what they've just been through. But she decides to offer one last thing before she stops pushing him.

"I know what it's like to keep a huge secret, something you don't want to talk about because it's just too painful," she says softly, her voice tinged with emotion. "You think that by ignoring it, it'll go away or stop being so bad. But it never does. Over time, the lie grows and grows. It turns into something more and even if you've convinced most people that you're okay... it's still there. One day, it'll just burst forward. Someone else takes that choice away from you or the people you care about most get hurt because of it."

She pauses for a few seconds, debating what else to say, before she finally looks back up at him. Sympathy and understanding have etched their way across her face, easy to see in her eyes and the lines in her features.

"I won't judge you. Whatever happened, I can't judge you for any of it. Not after what I've done. Just... don't be like me. Don't hold it in until you burst with the weight of it."

Of all the people present here right now, Vanille is one who cares the most. She feels with her entire heart and she has been through enough to know what those lies and moments of telling herself she was fine turned into. She doesn't want the same to happen to Seifer.

Somehow this did not feel like a victory. Watching the fight drain out of Vanille just hammered home how tired and emotionally devastated they all were. Her too. And here he was being unnecessarily stubborn, the same kind of stubborn that always ended up biting him on the ass in the end.

Was this really worth clinging so tightly to, when there were other people around him hurting as well? Who might possibly understand what it was to be on the wrong side of the fight? Maybe not. He lets out a resigned sigh, running a hand back through his hair awkwardly. "I don't know how to talk about it," He admits reluctantly. Where do you even begin to start on something like that?

He has to wonder if something like that happened to her. She bottled so long that eventually someone she cared about got hurt over it. He'd already hurt a lot of people by bottling things up. Hell that was part of what lead down the path she'd just seen anyway.

"Did that happen to you before? Not being able to hold it in anymore?" Was what she did really so terrible? Perhaps it was easier for him to hold himself accountable than anyone else. He knew, after all, the weight of his betrayal. Couldn't judge hers.

Not knowing how to talk about something traumatic like this is understandable and far more acceptable than sheer stubbornness. Vanille went down that road once and it had not been good.

She nods at his quiet question, remembering everything. Serah and Lightning and Snow and Hope and Dajh. All of them were touched by the hand of a far crueler fate than most people could imagine. And Fang and Vanille had been the reason. Or, well, Vanille likes to blame herself fully for it all.

"Yeah. When Fang and I first woke up on Cocoon, after our crystal sleep, her brand was frozen and she couldn't remember anything about our Focus. Not what it was or what we'd done," Vanille explains sadly, ready to lay it all out for the first time here. "I didn't want to hurt anyone else, so I played dumb, pretended to have lost my memory, too. But Fang wanted to protect me from turning Cie'th. So we attacked the fal'Cie at Euride Gorge, thinking we could jump-start our memories. The fal'Cie reacted the only way that it could and it branded the first non-l'Cie person it saw, a little boy named Dajh, who was with his father on a visit. He couldn't have been more than five years old, but now he's a l'Cie. He's a Sanctum l'Cie, so at least he's considered a protector of Cocoon and not a hated enemy like the rest of us."

If there was one good thing about all of that, it was the fact that Dajh was branded a Sanctum l'Cie. He was treated with "honor" rather than revulsion. That still didn't make his fate any easier to bear.

"For a while, I didn't know that Dajh was Sazh's son. When I found out... I tried to tell him, but I just couldn't. So one of the military people told him for me, after Dajh turned to crystal right in front of us. The despair in his eyes..." She breaks off again, trying to hold back her tears at the memories. "Lightning's sister Serah was branded because of us and she didn't find out until later, too. The Purge of the city of Bodhum was because the vestige with the Pulse fal'Cie Anima opened when Fang and I woke up. But most of all... I was lying to Fang about our Focus for so long that she finally pulled it out of me. The one person I should never have been lying to." Bravely, she looks back up at Seifer with tears and determination in her eyes. "I just wanted you to know that it's okay to talk about things. You've been through a lot, too. I can tell it isn't an easy right and wrong thing, a lot like being a l'Cie. So... I'll be here, if you ever want to get it off your chest."

It is mostly sheer stubbornness, however the stubbornness was born from a long life of being trained and expected to stamp everything down. So of course he has no real mechanisms for knowing how to deal with these situations. That would be showing weakness, and weakness wasn't tolerated. Especially not by Seifer.

The tale she proceeded to tell was indeed eye-opening, one Seifer was beginning to understand and feel more a kinship with Vanille over their crimes against their friends. And their world. He still felt that hers were solidly under the influence of the fal'Cie, though her choice to keep her silence was entirely her own. So... complicated, and he got it. It was always easier to forgive someone that wasn't yourself.

"So... why did a defender still turn into a crystal? I don't understand what the fal'Cie accomplish by doing this." Can they not defend themselves, per the rules of their existence? Why a child? It all seemed so insane to him. With her so clearly on the verge of tears he reached out to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. He's not very good at the comfort thing but he's trying.

When she finished, casting on him such a look of determination he sighed in resignation, eyes moving up to the ceiling of the shrine. "I suppose... I should start with who that woman I was protecting was, and what." He's explained Sorceresses in a very detached manner before. Never his own involvement.

"Her name was Edea. Once she ran an orphanage alongside her husband, taking in the children orphaned by my world's constant wars and monsters. She was also a Sorceress. Something feared and reviled by most in my world, as they're the only humans you could really consider naturally capable of magic. If you can call it that."

It's a start, he has to think very hard about how best to approach the topic. How to frame it so it wasn't all just a jumble of nonsense.

"She raised us. All of us. I don't remember much from back then, Nida and Rinoa have filled in a few gaps. We were young, and using GF eats your memories." He offers a faint shrug.

"When the army found us and Dajh turned to crystal, their leader told us that his Focus must have been to find things of Pulse origin," Vanille explains, her heart still heavy with the pain of it all. "Which meant me. Dajh's Focus was to find me. No matter if you're a Pulse l'Cie or a Cocoon l'Cie, you're still a l'Cie, bound by the l'Cie fate. It's either turn to crystal or go Cie'th. There's nothing else."

So she had doomed an innocent child to this fate, a child who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dajh could never have understood the weight of his fate and he didn't deserve to be stripped away from his father and his life the way that he was. It just wasn't fair.

But this isn't about Vanille's troubles. Not really. This is about Seifer and her attempt to use her past to help him. So when he starts talking, she simply listens. For a while, she doesn't react and doesn't even brush at the tears in her eyes from her own story. She takes it all in, wondering what would have driven a motherly person to act so cruelly.

"Like a l'Cie," she supplies, once Seifer has paused for a minute. "They're the only ones capable of magic, too, without the manadrives that the army uses. So your Sorceresses are feared because of something they can't control, too?"

"So these things curse you, make you do their bidding, and the reward for your loyal service is be a crystal or a crystal monster until somebody kills you. What in the hell?" That's just a lose lose situation all around. How screwed up was that? At least with a Sorceress it wasn't guaranteed to end in tragedy. Just highly likely.

Hyne. And to imagine the people caught in the middle of it all... Yeah he could see how she'd be carrying that weight around. Not by her hand, but by her action a boy was doomed to be a crystal forever. Because he found her, and fulfilled his Focus.

"Armies have somethin' kinda like that as well, Paramagic. We were trained in it too, using Guardian Force made it significantly more powerful. But with enough training a soldier could learn to use a few spells without 'em, not very powerful though. And nothing compared to what a Sorceress can do with a snap of her fingers," He sighed, running a hand back through his hair. "Warp reality, time itself, bring statues to life. Imagine it she can probably do it." He nodded at her assessment. "That's right. 'Course a lot of wars have been started over it, I guess the power can get to them. Make 'em crazy. That's why they need a Knight, helps keep 'em grounded. The one person in all the world who will always be at your side. Sorceresses without a Knight, well..." They lose themselves.

"They don't get a choice in becoming a Sorceress, just kinda happens when a dying one shows up to pass on her powers. Guess it's a bit like your l'Cie curse."

"Yep," Vanille answers with a nod, but that's all she's willing to say on the matter right now. She can explain further about the real horrors, about the Cocoon Purges and how whole cities were killed in one fell swoop just for breathing the same air as a Pulse fal'Cie. The Cocoon fal'Cie had kept the fear of Gran Pulse and its l'Cie alive for hundreds of years. It was no wonder the people called for the Purges.

All of that sounds so familiar to Vanille. Not having a choice in what was done, becoming a being that others looked upon with fear. Panic, even. Vanille understands all too well.

"So... was that Sorceress we saw... was she one of the good ones?"

He'd be curious to hear the story at a later time, honestly he'd jump at the chance to change the subject but... She has him talking. Might as well keep that going as long as he will allow it.

There were reasons for the panic, as Seifer had learned first hand. Sure they all learned about the war, but to them seventeen years ago was a life before their own. They weren't very old, they hadn't been alive long enough to understand or experience it. The one Seifer had caused... Well that was much more real.

"She was but... no." He shook his head, wrapping his arms tighter around himself. A defensive gesture. "The woman you saw, Edea, she raised us," He said that, but he felt he needed to emphasize. "I don't remember much, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't like that before. She wasn't the only one there. There are two Sorceresses, Edea, on the outside, and inside running the show a Sorceress from the future. Possessing her. That was Ultimecia." His Sorceress. He looked a little ill just saying the name.

"Ultimecia was far from good. Her one goal was destroying SeeD utterly." And, ultimately, everything else.

Something in him looks different from what she would have expected were this all about good memories. But Vanille had seen Seifer's reaction initially and she sees the way he looks ill now, the way he has himself protectively wrapped up, like a blanket. She wishes she could take some of that pain away.

"What did she end up doing?" she asks quietly, wondering how Seifer could have ended up with someone like that. What had Ultimecia done to him or promised to him? On the other hand, he might have wanted to protect or save someone or something else. Like Fang when she became Ragnarok by herself twice, wanting to protect Vanille at all cost and spare her the life of a Cie'th. For Seifer, it could have been anything, but she doesn't think the whole world's destruction would really have been his idea.

[MINGLE] One-Man Show

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