Work Text:
I own the best mechanical chronometer in the world. It’s not as accurate as Tseng’s quartz movement, but that is not the point.
…
When Meteor appears in the sky I start having the same dream, over and over: I’m conducting a train. It’s nothing special, just a Midgar commuter. It winds round the central pillar, a slow train, stopping at every station.
While the train travels in a loop, its motion essentially endless, the people who ride on it don’t have trouble reaching their destinations. They get off at their stops and get on with their lives.
The train rattles. People pass through the doors, talking, reading, holding phones, briefcases. When it gets crowded, they hang onto the straps. At night, stations are lit by mako-light.
This is my dream, and when I wake up in the morning, I wind the chronometer.
…
A quartz watch looks after itself. It runs on batteries. When it dies, no one mourns. A mechanical watch can’t look after itself. Left alone, it runs down. So you wind, you repair, and you maintain.
Every morning, when you wind a watch, you restore order. You make up the seconds that got lost. At any rate, you try.
…
Before Meteor, Reno, my partner, slept with soldiers. I don’t mean SOLDIERS. I mean regular Army guys, young ones, jeep drivers, gunners, a cook once. When we’d call it a day, I’d find one waiting sometimes, sitting in a chair outside the commissary or leaning up against a wall, still in fatigues.
“Come on,” Reno would say, shrugging a shoulder, and the kid would go, pulled along like the gesture was some kind of hook.
How many have there been? I’m not sure Reno ever kept track. I lost count after about a year.
How many platoons destroyed? How many times did we walk away, the only ones left?
…
My chronometer measures fine increments of time.
But it can’t measure the exact point of arrival of the present moment. It can’t measure the exact point of departure of a heart, a life. We miss it. We miss it every time.
The others die, we remain; they’re born to die.
We remain, clocking loss.