Chapter Text
The clock that stands still is certain of being right twice every twenty-four hours, while others keep going round continually, and continually they go wrong.
When I was a boy, I read those words while paging through one of my father’s magazines on a Sunday afternoon. At age fourteen I took smug comfort in this form of satire, making me feel as if my narrow frame had sprouted wings, levitating me above humanity’s morass of bombast and conjecture, merely because I saw truth in this quote. It took me years to realize the joke was on me. Whenever I feared others would declare me wrong, I would still myself and act like a stopped clock while I watched everyone else going round and round. That was all I’d do: watch. I would do nothing until chance landed me in the right place at the right time to do or say whatever I presumed was certain. Little did I know that right and wrong shift with the ticking hands of time. Wait long enough and certainty fades into nothingness.
But there was one thing I did not know as a boy of fourteen much less as a man ticking away his frustration at age twenty-seven. It never occurred to me that I could literally become a stopped clock. That time would stop for me for all eternity while I remained conscious of the forward moving world.
* * *
When your relationship with time stops, each slice of eternity is marked by waiting. You wait for that exact moment when the position of your frozen hands coincide with the ticking time in the world that spins forward without you.
You wait.
You wait until your frozen self and the spinning world sync up. When that precise moment arrives, supposedly your actions finally matter.
Once you’re removed from time on a human scale, waiting loses its familiar meaning. Blink at the wrong time and you miss that moment of synchronization. And then you wait as you wander. You stare out at the horizon. Something will eventually happen. When you have all of eternity, the word ‘eventually’ just means stop and wait.
The problem with being a stopped clock is that you are indeed stopped. You are anchored firmly in stasis while everything else in the moving world flows forward. Time flows as the lifestream circulates around the planet, carrying everything with it except you. You are no longer part of the moving world.
You aren’t part of the world’s cycles of life.
You become an outside observer.
But here’s the question I have. If your frozen hands point upward toward eternal midnight and suddenly the world’s clock ticks past eleven fifty-nine, what happens next?
This is a question I am not certain I want to answer. Look, I know how it sounds: a bit melodramatic, but I have my reasons for my concerns.
After the first time I fully transformed into Chaos, I vowed never to willingly let that happen again. But, once Chaos was awake within me, a series of changes occurred in my already altered body. Gene regulation pathways triggered the assembly of new molecules. The nerves in my muscles rewired and my reflexes quickened. Unless I kept my mind calm, my body was more susceptible to acting as a creature of instinct. When instinct kicked in, I suddenly leaped incredible heights and moved with an inhuman quickness, a form of speed and movement that hovered on the verge of making an observer’s skin crawl.
Changes also began to appear at a subatomic level. A part of me could phase into a universe of dark plasma almost at will. When this occurred, distances within our material world collapsed. To others it appeared as if I could fly at lightening speed, a scrap of fabric caught in a tornado, a swirling cloud of impossibly fast bats. Whenever I felt myself under extreme duress, the darkness of Chaos pushed into my mind, triggering instincts that urged me to act in ways I didn’t understand.
Even though the mechanisms of Chaos were unpredictable, the results weren’t necessarily evil. The instant I feared for Cloud’s life as Kadaj attacked him in the Forgotten City, my instincts responded faster than my mind could think. It was only after Marlene saw me swirling through the air as the inhuman demon I harbored, that a familiar wave of regret washed through me.
Marlene should not have seen me do that.
But the moment she fearlessly clung to my leg, I realized she did not care.
Once Cloud and Marlene left, I sat at the edge of the once holy lake that Kadaj had polluted. The darkness in my body knew this stagnant foulness, this fraternal twin to the stasis within me. The darkness from Kadaj was known to be an alien infestation whereas mine appeared different. Yet both blocked the lifestream. Both had the power to wound and destroy life.
For two years I had wandered the planet’s outlands like a half wild beast. Now it seemed the hands of the planet’s clock had begun to approach mine. I didn’t know what I needed to do, but instinct told me it was time to find my way to Edge.
* * *
I arrived in the center of Edge only to find that I had misread the time on the planetary clock. Neither the planet nor Cloud needed me. The moment it became clear to me that this was Cloud’s battle to fight, all I could do was lend him my moral support. Meanwhile I found myself reunited with a group of people whom I had not seen together since parting with them two years prior.
After Cloud fought with what remained of Sephiroth, people from Edge gathered in a church in the ruins of Midgar’s Sector 5 slum. As their afternoon ticked away into evening, folks drifted back across the wasteland. When Cloud decided to head back to Edge, I followed along so I could say my goodbyes to him and his friends.
That evening Tifa closed Seventh Heaven to outside customers, making our gathering a private affair for friends and family. The atmosphere in the bar felt surprisingly comfortable, so I found a spot in the back of the room and leaned against the wall. I watched people make jokes with each other as they traded stories. All of them had moved on with their lives during the two years that had passed since we last parted as a group. Even though most of them were still searching for something, all of them had settled into patterns and cycles that fit their wants and needs.
What could I say for myself as these old friends came to talk to me? I had travelled the world and when chance arose, I helped others. By happenstance I spent some time with Nanaki. How was I doing? All right.
I thought I had spoken to everyone who wished to speak with me when Cid walked over and clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Come on, sit down. Have a beer.”
I followed him to a table. Tifa joined us.
“So, Vincent, what have you been doing with yourself all this time?” Cid asked.
What could I say? What version of my tale made sense? “Traveling.”
“For two years?” Cid sounded incredulous.
I nodded.
“Was it a nice long vacation? Go anywhere interesting?”
Tifa cupped her glass of beer between her hands. “Vincent knew about the Remnants. He was watching them. Collecting information.”
“Yeah, you really did figure them out, didn’t ya.” Cid drew out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped one out from the pack.
I didn’t know how to begin describing the dark stasis I had found. “As I traveled, I looked for anything that appeared alien or misplaced. Anything that works in opposition to the planet’s lifestream.”
Cid lit his cigarette and took a drag. “More of that Jenova shit.”
I nodded. “Jenova has corrupted some of the planet’s life but there are other threats — pockets of stagnation that exist as the antithesis of the lifestream’s purpose.”
Cid narrowed his eyes. He puffed on his cigarette rather than say what was on his mind. Eventually he leaned back, raised his voice, and made a joke out of what I had said. “Quite a vacation, Vincent. Next time you should try Costa Del Sol or Wutai for a change.”
“Hey! I heard that!” Yuffie yelled from across the room. The next thing I knew she had squeezed into the booth, wiggling herself into the bench seat until she sat right next to me. She reached across the table and wagged a finger in Cid’s face. “Wutai is far more than a tourist trap for you to pick on!”
“Come on, calm down,” Cid replied. “I just figured you wouldn’t mind having ol’ Vince stop by to see you.”
“Yeah, why didn’t you visit?” Yuffie bumped her shoulder into my upper arm. “But no staying in some overpriced tourist trap for you. Just look me up and if I’m not there, go find my dad. You’re always welcome to stay with us, just like before. Don’t you forget it. We’ll take good care of you and if my dad doesn’t put you to work doing god knows what, I’ll take you materia hunting. Red went with me. You should’ve been with us. We could have used your help and it would have been just like old times.”
“Nanaki told me about your excursion,” I said.
“And he told me about one of the times he met up with you in the middle of a forrest.”
“That he did.”
“Gawd, Vincent, is that the only way people can get in touch with you? Wandering across your path by pure chance in the middle of nowhere?”
I sipped my beer rather than respond.
“You should try doing a better job of staying in touch with everyone.” Yuffie rolled her eyes at me. She dramatically mouthed the words, “Sometimes people worry.”
“I think the brat’s made enough of a point for now,” Cid interrupted. “Vincent or Cloud being lost in their own world has long stopped being news. So, Tifa, how’s Seventh Heaven been treating you?”
Coming from Cid, those words hit too close to home. That moment with Marlene once I got Cloud away from the Remnants still haunted me, especially now that Tifa sat across the table. Had something horrible happened to Marlene because Cloud or I failed to see or protect her in time, I don’t know how I would face anyone in this room. But the image that lodged itself in my mind was something else, something absurd. That young girl had come far too close to seeing me on the verge of fully transforming into a demon, yet that was not what shocked and astonished her. In Marlene’s eyes, I was an inconceivable aberration, not because she had seen me fly like a swirling swarm, phasing between our world and some anti-world of darkness, but because I walked the planet without carrying a phone.
A sudden sharp pain in my ribcage woke an instinct not wholly mine. Before I could think, my hand snatched whatever had stabbed into the right side of my body. I blinked and found myself gripping Yuffie’s boney elbow.
Her shocked wide-eyed stare melted into a mockery of indignation. “At least I brought you back to this planet. So, if Cid keeps plying you with beer, do you ever turn into the fun drunk who is the life of the party or do you just become more ornery?”
I let go of her arm as I suppressed a force that had increasingly shared control of my instincts and then I gave Yuffie the best ‘stop fooling around’ glare I could muster.
She leaned forward and mouthed the words ‘you don’t scare me’ without making a sound. To punctuate her point, she wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue.
Someday her incorrigible nature would land her in serious trouble. I only hoped she had better sense when I am not around.
“Fine,” she shrugged. “Next time I’ll warn you before I give you the ninja elbow-knife between the ribs.”
“It hurt.”
“If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be the ninja elbow-knife.” She flashed an overly wide smile and gave me an exaggerated wink.
Yuffie took a slow sip of whatever she was drinking. I took a deep breath before nursing my beer.
“Brat,” Cid said. “Just once could you cut Vincent some slack?”
“I’m fine,” I mumbled.
“Tifa, would you get us another round?” Cid nodded his chin in the direction of the bar.
Tifa smirked as she got up and walked away. Cid leaned back and looked out across the restaurant. In that moment of quiet, I felt Yuffie sneak her hand against my side, her fingers hovering lightly against my shirt. She looked away from me as if she was doing nothing in particular. A faint blue-green glow radiated from her hand.
Yuffie lacked a Cetra’s power for harnessing the fullness of the lifestream’s ability to heal, but the amount she innately manipulated felt as cool as water from a mountain spring. The residual ache between my ribs washed right away. Before she persisted, I discreetly removed her fingers from my side, but only after squeezing her hand in acknowledgement so she did not interpret this as a rejection or a challenge.
Two years ago whenever Aerith or Yuffie harnessed the lifestream to bring back our health in a hurry, I felt a war wage inside my body. None of the others, not even Cloud, experienced the strange discomfort I felt. The part of me that had always been alive craved the nourishment of that healing force while something else begged to devour their energy and rip the newly healed flesh from my bones. The more severely injured my body, the more this darkness ate at my self control until it took most of my conscious thought to hold it at bay. It was bad enough during the first two months we traveled, but after we visited the cave where Lucrecia hid herself, a series of physical injuries triggered Chaos into being. That was when I made these connections and since then my former sense of humanity slowly has sloughed away.
I finished the last of my beer as Tifa returned with a new round for everyone.
Cid raised his glass. “To calmer skies and calmer days,” he said.
We clinked our glasses together. As Yuffie clinked hers against mine, she gave me a surreptitious glance and an impish half-smile.
“I become neither,” I said to her, just before I took a sip.
She wiped a froth of foam from her upper lip. “Neither? Neither what?”
“Neither ornery nor the life of the party.”
She responded with the first honest smile I had seen from her in a while.
That was when I realized how much I had missed her, along with every other person in this room. It pained me to admit how much I missed all of them.