(This is a bit of writing I did based on an RP with a friend, wherein Veld and Vincent take the infant Sephiroth and run for it, leaving behind everything and everyone they know in Midgar. They spend some time in Gongaga, where Veld ruminates on how different his life has become)
The night sky looks different in Gongaga.
It’s velvety black, not luminescent green. It’s peppered with stars, flickers of silver, red, gold. It’s bordered by towering trees, not skyscrapers or reactors.
And Veld can see the moon.
You can’t see it in Midgar, except maybe once or twice a year, when the reactor fumes thin out and the natural clouds part, and even the stars align just right. He’d grown up not seeing it, that endless carpet of stars overhead that makes him feel crowded down here on the ground.
He leans on the porch railing, whiskey in hand, watches the moon sail, pristine and unconcerned and oh, so remote, in the midnight sky.
Midgar is as far away as the moon.
The silence feels unnatural. Vincent would say it wasn’t silent if you listened, and to be sure, the buzz and click of insects, the swishing of wind in the trees, the gurgling rush of the river, makes an undercurrent of sound all around him. It isn’t the music of the city, but it’s... here.
“I miss traffic,” he’d told Vincent. “Tires on pavement. Horns echoing against brick walls. A curse, a scream. A gunshot.” Well, he hadn’t actually said he’d missed gunshots, but he does. That constant of his life, both threat and security, abandoned along with his job, his friends, his family, his future, or at least the future he’d expected and planned for.
And his identity. That, too.
He drinks whiskey, takes a drag on a cigarette, watching the night sky. Maybe the moon knows who he is, now. He sure as hell doesn’t.
Maybe he never did.
