Noel Kreiss x Reader | Final Fantasy XIII-2
✓ COMPLETED + UNEDITED | 2018
After the fall of Cocoon had rendered much of the land infertile and uninhabitable, the existing civilisations were forced to resort to hunting and foraging for natural resour...
"He who can change time, must choose between those who die, and those who live. You must bear the burden. Of the eternal paradox!"
- Caius Ballad
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Chapter IX | Chasing Ghosts
It was like chasing ghosts, moving through all of these memories, chasing the past, chasing things that could never possibly be caught. They swirled around you as white mists, condemning you to witness once again the history that you had sought so hard to forget, yet keep close to your chest, just in reach of your fingertips.
It was an endless cycle, of being lost and then found, of discovering the essence of life and then being exposed to the depth of loneliness. As if the universe couldn't make up its mind, where you belonged, if you belonged. You were cursed to wander for eternity in search of acceptance, in search of the place in which your crooked jigsaw piece fit.
Your head was clouded with memories, dragging like driftwood along the tides of time, landing on the shores of your consciousness so that you had no choice but to retrieve them or lose them completely. Grasping the closest one, you felt yourself falling once again, a falling woman with nobody to catch you.
As expected you were still in the Dying Land, where lay both your past and future. The blackening sky, the charcoal mountains, the bone-white deserts where nothing could seek to survive. It was all so familiar and yet foreign to you.
The scene you were faced with was not one you remembered at first, but then it came trickling back to you, a slow stream of fragments that slotted together to create the whole.
The memory followed your argument with Noel, about searching for a more sustainable place, which he had dismissed as being too toiling for his beloved Seeress.
Taken with anger and grief at his reluctance, you had vented out your frustrations in the only way you knew how - by hunting. Both an occupation and a hobby, hunting was the only thing you knew how to do. It had been rare to begin with that you hunted alone, always having Noel for company, but it had since become a more frequent occurrence while Noel trained to become the next Guardian.
You had made it as far as the dried-up well, and spent some time tossing stones into the crumbling shaft before moving further afield, into the Forest of Skeletons, as you had dubbed it for the way the trees were twisted and bare, bleached-white and skeletal in appearance. The silence had unnerved you at first, the lack of rustling as the wind pushed through the leaves, but you'd quickly grown used to it. Crouching under long branches and hopping over trunks felled by unknown creatures, you traversed the forest quickly and soon came to the mountainous ranges that sidled along the Eastern horizon. You had scaled them several times with Noel, but it was a treacherous task and not one to do alone.
The caves and burrows in the mountain face were the main habitats of what monsters remained, though most lay empty from your continuous efforts of driving them out for food. You were quickly running out of resources and yet Noel was too blind-sighting to see that you need to move in order to sustain the community. He was determined to stay for Yeul, but what would he do if they all died of starvation?
