Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Prophetic Fulfillment ❯ Dream a Dream ( Chapter 7 )

It was... beautiful.

He opened his eyes once more and found himself on his back, staring to the slowly darkening sky. Grass stretched for miles, shimmering in the setting sun. Trickling water flowed steadily from a nearby stream.

This was a place that Reno had never been. A place he didn't even know existed... but still...

The first stars of the evening began peeking their ways through the indigo of the sky as a warm wind blew its way past him. He closed his eyes.

Star light, star bright...

Something about this place seemed so right, so perfect. Like the strange familiarity of his slowly regaining powers. And yet... he didn't feel as if he quite fit in. Not yet.

Reno sat up and looked west, toward the setting sun and dissipating oranges and purples. He closed his eyes and the words returned.

"I damn well fucking don't care!"
"Get your head out of this fantasy.
"That the best you can do?"
"You don't know shit Genesis."

He thought of Gen and knew he was wrong.

"You have a destiny as well."

Gen turned around and saw the woman. Sad brown eyes, long black hair. She smiled.

"Atlantis found -- I knew that we should meet in this plane, and I know we shall meet again."

"How... how do you know me? I've never..."

"You've never met me." She smiled enigmatically and gracefully turned around, walking toward the dense forest.

"What do you mean? My destiny? What is..."

She swept back toward Gen, "Your destiny. I'm afraid I can't tell you."

Genesis growled in sheer annoyance. Why bring something up that cannot be spoken of?

Noting her growing frustration, the woman continued. "The future is not to be shown, it is to be made, experienced. Do not be afraid... You will know all in good time.

"But for now... all I can show you is the past"

"Something is going to happen."

"What do you mean... something?" Tifa tensed as memories of the last 'something' washed over her. "You have to have some idea."

"I'm sorry... the scrolls are not the easiest to understand. They are vague.. At best." Nanaki was silent a moment, deep in thought. "How are Genesis and Reno doing?"

Tifa stood up and stretched, weary. "They're both still unconscious. Shera's doing what she can for them... We'll just have to wait and see."

Nanaki sighed. "Seems like we'll be doing a lot of that for a while..."

Darkness continued its descent upon the strange bluish green fields before him. He looked up to the stars once more and realized that nothing, not even the constellations, looked the same.

It's like I'm in another world... Another place... Somewhere.

The sleepy little town lay before him, a pale shade of dim yellow amidst a darkening landscape. Several small cottages surrounding a central courtyard. He didn't need a sign to tell him where he was... something inside him already knew.

Thamasa...

It almost felt like home.

It was like a strange dream.

A strange, annoying, recurring dream.

Gen opened her eyes. Again. She was beyond tired of this. She wanted to be back where she was before. Back in her own world. Back to a time and place that she was familiar with.

Instead, she found herself in a dimly lit room - a bedroom. A small boy lay beneath the quilts and blankets, asleep. It took her a moment to realize just where she was.

"Reno?"

The little boy turned over in his sleep, his reddish hair in disarray.

Wait... Where... How?

Her train of thought was cut off by the pounding on a door. Gen turned around, startled, and saw a man. He was tall, his eyes a soft bluish green, his hair flaming red. The man took no notice of Gen as he ran to the sleeping boy and grabbed him from the bed, whispering something to the half awake boy.

A woman then appeared through the doorway. Gen was taken aback. She looked almost exactly like the woman she had seen earlier in the forest, but something was different. Something in her eyes. She grabbed the man by the arm, terrified. "We have to hurry, Jake..."

He nodded silently, paling as he heard the front door come crashing to the ground. Jake Charlemagne wordlessly placed his son in the arms of the woman and pulled the windows open. They had to get out, get away. Gen watched in silence as the family slipped outside under the cover of darkness, intending to reach freedom. She followed.

Then she noticed something that made her heart leap into her throat. It had seemed to quiet. Far too quiet, and now she knew why. The air smelled of dew, grass, and gunpowder. They weren't alone.

She ran, but they didn't see her. Shouted, but they didn't hear. All she could do was watch as a bullet careened from the gun of a hidden soldier, and struck Jakob Charlemagne in the chest.

"No..."

Cloud turned around, and studied the unconscious girl. What is going on?

"Don't... it's a trap..."

She turned onto her side, still unconscious.

The ground began to shake underfoot. But it wasn't an earthquake.

It was something far worse.

Reno watched in helplessness as the buildings around him shook violently along with the quaking earth, watched people run out of their homes, screaming in terror as they collected their children and watched the ground split open of its own accord. Something was definitely wrong.

"The fuck?"

He looked up to the sky, and saw something floating in the air, something he didn't notice before. It was almost like an island. An island in the sky. Something clicked in his brain, the story Gen had told him about the past...

The Floating Island... The World of Ruin...

Reno felt the earth shake harder and knew that everything was changing before him as it had thousands of years before.

"But how?"

Gen fell to her knees in silence. It made no sense. None of it. And yet she was there, reliving Reno's past. She heard the woman cry out as she ran to her husband's limp form. Her son stood alone, seemingly in shock.

"Jake..." Tears welled in the woman's eyes as she took her husband's hand in her own. "N..."

A second shot fired and the woman fell to the ground, dead. He hand intertwined with her husband's.

Gen stared in silence, barely noticing the wailing of the child behind her.

Then there was silence.

Silence.

Reno watched in silence as everything around him sped up. Before his eyes the town built itself back up, prospered once more, only to fall once again, dying as hundreds of years went by in a matter of seconds.

It felt otherworldly.

Just as quickly and suddenly as everything had sped up, everything slowed and stopped, and he stood in an abandoned field of blue and green grass.

Silence.

Nothing moved. There was no wind, no running water, no animals. Just silence and stillness.

"How in the hell..."

"You mustn't give up."

Reno looked around him and saw the woman. She smiled warmly, sadness written in her soft brown eyes. He could tell that she'd been through far too much. "Who are you?"

"That doesn't matter... I am... the future." She seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

"What?"

She sat in the grass beside Reno and patted the earth, beckoning him to join her. She looked up to the night's sky, and smiled. A shooting star trapped thousands of light years away, in the stillness she had created.

Reno awkwardly joined the girl on the grass. After a moment's silence, she sighed.

"Civilizations rise. Civilizations fall. It's only a matter of time. And circumstance."

"What are you talking about?"

"You have a destiny. You mustn't give up."

Reno rolled his eyes in annoyance. "Not this crap again..."

"It isn't crap. But it is something that is beyond you. Beyond us all. You have a destiny. You have a duty to uphold that destiny. Or..."

Reno stood up once again, "Or else what? And don't give me some sort of divine ultimatum, sister..."

She pulled herself to her feet, smoothing out the creases in her white skirt.

"Destruction. Chaos. Ruin. And everything you just was will have happened for nothing." She took his hand in her own and closed her eyes. The stillness broke as time sped up once more.

"You caused this?" Reno looked at her with wonder.

"I've always had a gift. Ever since I was young. They tried to hunt me down for it... Just like they tried to hunt you down."

Reno nodded silently as he took in his surroundings. A new town was cropping up, a small village surrounding a central courtyard. The girl took her hand away from his and smiled.

"Isn't it amazing how the past repeats itself?"

Reno was taken aback. "What? Are you saying this is the future?"

A door near him opened and from it ran a little girl in a greenish blue dress, followed by a tall man with long black hair.

The woman smiled. "Yes... And my past."

Reno looked from the small girl to the woman before him, noting the faraway look in her eyes. "...That's you."

She smiled and nodded.

"Your father?"

"The closest thing I had growing up." She turned to Reno, a tear slowly sliding down her cheek. "You can't give up, or else none of this will happen."

Reno felt the woman take his hand once again, as a lightheaded dizziness spread over him. "I'm sending you back now... Where you belong. She's coming."

"The time has almost come..."

A gasp.

Reno felt as if he were coming up for air from the depths of the ocean. Gasping, choking. Slowly he began to calm down and take in his current surroundings.

Where am I?

He looked to his right and saw Gen, lying unconscious on the cot next to him. "Gen?"

He laid back, confused. It was all a dream...

Wasn't it?

Something nagged at the back of his mind, something tugged at him. It was too real, too bizarre to be a dream. And the woman looked familiar somehow... Like he'd seen her face somewhere before. She seemed so sad, so knowing...

He sat up in the bed and rubbed the back of his head, smoothing back wayward locks of hair.

"I have a bad feeling about all this..."

"That's how it happened..."

Gen turned around and saw the woman once again. She knelt down beside her. "I was only showing you his past. There was nothing you could do. No interference."

"How?"

"I've always had this power... They tried to hunt me down as a child, tried to harness it." She sighed. "People are greedy... They'll do whatever they can for power. Step on others, ruin lives, kill innocents.

"As I got older, they got more persistent, trying to kidnap me... But I always got away. I was lucky. And my powers got stronger, developed more over time. Just a few years ago, I could only send others, people I knew, back in time through memories...

She smiled again, "And here I am, contacting you, showing you the past, asking for your help."

"I'm confused." Gen stood up slowly, staring quizzically at the woman. "You're from the future?"

She nodded. "But that isn't the important thing... She's coming."

"Who?"

"You've seen her. You saw her in a dream. But she won't be in the form you saw her in. She will appear as someone else. Stay by Reno. You have to help him. Don't give up..."

"I'm not sure I understand."

"You will." She closed her eyes, tiredly. "I have to send you back. I've been in this realm too long... He's waiting for you..."

Gen cut her off, "But, wait... Who are you?"

She smiled as she took her hand and began the spell.

"My name is Ellone Charlemagne Loire.

"...I'm from a future that you must protect."

"...Legendary power will run down his family line..."

~Manuscript line.

A/N: Well, that wasn't what I expected... I didn't think I'd tie in FFVIII so soon, but it pestered me enough, and there it is. I guess if one wants to be nitpicky, this whole thing can be thought of as a crossover, but I'm the author, and I say, "If it takes place [nearly] solely in the FFVII universe/timeline, then it's going in that catagory."

'Sides, it's still a Reno fic. ^_^

I'm hoping this is a sign that I'll be writing and posting more. In getting over strange emotional hoopla, I think my muses came back. They were a little afraid for a while there. I'm not exactly proud of this chapter, but I do think it's better than the last one. I knew the dream sequence chapter would be difficult to handle at best, what with it jumping around so much, so I hope it wasn't really hard to read. ^^;

I'm not sure what the next chapter will be about (other than the obvious), but I hope to get it out faster than this one took.

Well, this is getting a bit long. Tell me what you think. I like knowing whether or not this is turning to crap, ya know?

And if you're hopelessly confused, or have a question about the strange crossoverness of it (Ellone, World of Ruin, etc) Just poke me and I'll clear it up as convoluted as I possibly can. ^_^