DAY 25: GREENHOUSES (second shift)

[beforehertime.livejournal.com]

Elena was not exactly thrilled with the idea of playing in dirt. It was just...dirt. Gardening held no joy for her. Anything that anyone tried to plant in Midgar died almost immediately, so why bother? All of the plants in the little parks that Shin-Ra had created to keep the denizens of the Upper Plates happy were artificial. The only time she ever got to see plants that weren't fake was on daytrips to Kalm or holidays spent with relatives in Icicle Inn.

She'd never worked with them before.

Sighing, Elena accepted a pair of too-big gardening gloves. They had been pink, at one point, with little blue flowers. Now they were just a sort of spotty brown. Frowning, she poked at the small potted violet that a nurse had set in front of her with a little plastic shovel that looked like it had come from a child's playset. What was she supposed to be doing with it?

Comments

[inloveordead.livejournal.com]

EVA pondered this.

It wasn't right, she decided, that more than one mad person would have the same fantasy. And Lust seemed sane - far too beautiful to be insane.

"No," she said. "No-one told me I was mad, and no-one said anything about my name. I think I was expected to know." She frowned. "It's so...hard to believe."

She chewed her bottom lip.

"I'm not going to pretend I understand. But - " she smiled, "you said they could bring people back from the dead. Isn't that a good thing? I mean, I'll admit this place scares me. Something about it feels so far beyond wrong. But I could see my best friend again, if they brought her here."

Her mind ached over the cryptic post on the bulletin board. Fathers and sons.

"Different times," she said, more to herself than to Lust. Otacon's voice rose in her head. Two thousand and nine, he'd said. But why had he looked so damn familiar? "So there are people here from forty-five years into the future? But..."

There was no harm in admitting it, she decided. No harm at all. Lust was clever. She would understand.

"Before I came here, I fell in love, made love to, and - betrayed a man," she said, staring hard at the tray of dirt. "I left him for good a week ago. But he was here. And yet he wasn't. He'd changed, somehow." For a second her voice almost wavered. "He looked the same, and yet different - thinner, smaller, older, darker hair, darker eyes. And he didn't move the same - more graceful, the way he - the way he stood with his legs more together instead of wide apart - just little things like that." Her words felt hard to say, vulnerable, weak and disturbing. "And he said he had a different name. And he didn't recognise me. And he said he was from the future." She closed her eyes for a second, picturing the way his face had seared onto her mind when she had shone her torch at him. "And then someone told me he was the son of the man I knew. But that was impossible. The man I knew was part of the tests in Bikini Atoll. He'd paid for it by never being able to have children."

She pressed her thumbs down into the tray of dirt.

"Do they brainwash people here? Like that?"

[a_sin_for_him]

"What brainwashing occurs here lasts for only one night," Lust responded, carefully.

"Stranger things have happened here," she told EVA, frowning thoughtfully. "I've met people here that should have remembered me but didn't, or remembered me differently than they should. Or were different than I myself remembered. I don't understand everything myself, but I do know that the power of this place seems to have few limits. If the dead can walk, and if the human can be made inhuman and the inhuman human, I don't find it out of the realm of possibility that a man who apparently can't father children could have." She shrugged. Human biology was a strange thing, after all.

"Perhaps it's best he isn't the man you thought him to be," Lust went on, as gently as she could manage. Yes, this woman was something of a kindred spirit. "I have found, in my experience, men who have been taken to bed and then betrayed are rarely as fond of me afterwards as they were before."

She didn't ask - or even seem concerned or surprised regarding the subject matter - why EVA would betray a man she loved. Lust had killed one of the few men she'd ever felt something for, after all. Love and death and betrayal were always tangled together, as far as she could tell.

[inloveordead.livejournal.com]

"I wish it was that simple," EVA said, folding her arms in a display of confidence she wasn't really feeling. "He - the man I saw here - told me that there was another way. He said that there were 'other means' of having children. I don't know what he meant."

A thought occurred to her.

"This sounds stupid," she started, "but what year is it? What date?"