Work Text:
It was passing. Inexorable. Irresistible. Unstoppable, like the noon-time train, chugging along ever so slowly through a crowded town, hauling its heavy cargo to some unknown destination. Slow, yes, but it will go, it will pass, and it was too big, too massive, too unyielding to ever, ever stop. Maddening it its slow, yet unrelenting way.
Time.
Like the sand in the hourglass, it fell, grain by grain, second by second, and like that black, steel beast, steaming and hissing and screeching, there was no way to stop it, wish though you might for a thousand years. Even more maddening than the train, still, because of its continuous measurement of how much you had left, or how much you didn’t have, a stark, too-solid reminder that even the clock on the wall couldn’t provide, because at least the clock gave the delusion of hope. The sand took away even that – the clock was a static thing on a glance, while the sand shifted, sinking, drifting away, too ethereal a thing to try catching with your hands, and there was never enough of it.
You could die from lack of water, you could die by train, and you could die from lack of time, and that’s exactly what would happen, if I didn’t find him first. The train moved, the sand fell, eroding his future; each grain was another breath lost. I needed him, but I couldn’t find him, and I needed him for that. But my inadequacy was too much, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to find him without him, not in time; because he was out there too, and he was better than me, because he was like Sephiroth, and he was searching too. And he knew, more than I did, where Sephiroth might be, because he was a part of Sephiroth, a part of his history, in a way that I wasn’t, and could never be.
I was an outsider, struggling against the train, slipping on the grains of sand, and it was futile. And there was no more time, because I held the last grain, and he was out there, with Sephiroth, and I was here, with the clock, and the hand struck the hour.
Time was up.