oldmansfiles (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oldmansfiles) wrote2009-05-19 04:03 pm
oldmansfiles) wrote2009-05-19 04:03 pm
[Hotel] Lift Me Up
Characters/Pairings: Cid/Edea
Fandom: FF8
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Edea always lived somewhere between the real and the promised, but Cid always managed to make it work.
Notes: I love these two so much. Yes, I extrapolate on towns and things, because I think FF8's huge gaps between places is crazy. I'm assuming that Cid and Edea's future orphange is like, across the water from this fictional university town. Work with me here. Also fullfill'slassarina's request. XD
She'd been Edea Kramer for two days now and still hadn't called her parents to tell them.
They would blame Cid, because that was what parents did when their daughters ran off to Deling City with a boy to get eloped. It was some kind of section in the parent manual that outlined the dangers of nice marryable young men and how they should be kept from impressionable young sorceresses.
They would eventually have to go home, but the beds at the Galbadia Hotel were so soft, and she was just fairly giddy with what they'd just done.
"Edee, your brothers are going to kill me. And then your mother."
"Probably." Edea was always honest with Cid. Even about things that fairly horrified him.
She smoothed the cowlick his hair developed in his sleep. Mother didn't hate Cid, but she didn't like him either. She could never explain to Cid the delicate balance of feelings there; it was never him but the choice he represented. Mother was a powerful woman from a time when powerful women needed to be on someone's arm. To have her daughter do just that?
"I'll protect you. From them. Promise."
He propped himself on his elbow. "But aren't I supposed to protect you?"
"It's symbiotic."
She liked to think that this was how should could prove that yes, she'd grown up. Edea was eighteen now, and married. She could do as she chose to.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Take us so far (take us so far)
Broken down cars (broken down cars)
Like strung-out old stars (like strung-out old stars)
---
For all the romance she'd been promised in books and all the things she thought of from when she first met Cid, she had never quite realized how quickly the money she'd brought for this trip would dwindle.
"Miss, this card is declined. Do you have another?"
"Well, no."
It had been the case since she had gained the powers that she could never fully sleep through the night. So she had figured that picking Cid up something nice would be a good surprise. He slept like a log. And snored.
"Then I can't sell this to you."
She frowned, before remembering that Cid had given her a little solid gil in case of emergencies. She counted it out; enough for her purchase. There.
It would have been cheaper back at the university, but she had wanted something from Deling City. All the jet-set girls that her brothers liked to date did that. Maybe she should have gone out with them more, like Mother had suggested. But Edea had always been a little shy, especially around those types of colorful girls.
How the city looked different this time of night, when they put some of the lights out. Even still, it was hard to see the sky like she preferred to watch it on the coast; only the brightest of pinpricks came out of the black, instead of the near endless ones.
She nearly set him on fire, he startled her so much.
"What were you doing?!" Cid rarely raised his voice. It wasn't the way he operated, the way they operated. In the two years since she'd worked up the courage to approach him, she'd only seen him do it once.
"I went for a walk and found a present for you."
He glanced at the bag in her hands, and tried to say a few things but he could only open and close his mouth in a futile gesture.
"Is something wrong?"
"Edea, of course something is wrong. It's 3 am and you're out by yourself and you aren't exactly a large ugly thug of a man or anything!"
She would have found it funny if he didn't look quite so... pained really. Like she had almost gotten eaten by a monster or kidnapped by pirates. Like he couldn't breathe. Did she cause that effect on him with something so innocuous?
"I couldn' sleep."
"Then wake me up."
"But you were sleeping."
"I'm not your chaperone, I'm your husband. Have some... sense?" He pulled the bag from her hands, not even looking at the contents. "And we have to return this. I thought you understood that we can't act like we're a Caraway on vacation."
She bit her lip and followed him. He was really angry. Their bond didn't mean she could read everything of his, and she respected him enough not to invade in on his feelings, but the strong ones always punctuated in the back of her mind. Anger felt almost like a sneeze.
When he'd returned it--a trinket really, nothing of importance--he turned to her with tense shoulders. At this time of night, she could pretend like they were the only two people on the earth. It was less romantic when he was angry and disappointed.
"I want you to understand. I don't want to be like... like one of those paranoid types that lock up their wives for fear of everything. But I want you to think of me when you decide on things. I'll always think of you."
The thing about destiny was a person had to make a choice. She'd chosen him, over so many other things she could have done. But the part she always forgot was that he had made a choice too. And it was likely the more difficult one.
"I'm sorry. Walk with me? I can't sleep."
The years would probably mean every argument or almost argument didn't end like this. She imagined the tension draining out of his back as he walked with her, papercut scarred hand firmly around hers. Some day they were bound to find something they couldn't fix. Edea didn't want to know what that would be, and the realization was troubling.
This was why sorceresses couldn't sleep.
"If you want the night to yourself, we should find somewhere to live where you can have it."
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Served us so well (served us so well)
We traveled through hell (traveled through hell)
And oh how we fell (Oh how we fell)
---
Their wedding present didn't mean that she was forgiven, but that her parents still loved her despite.
She had waited until they were home, at least as much of a home as the little place that Cid got as a part of his assistant professorship provided before calling her mother. Edea had been startled by how little she had said concerning the matter, as Mother never held back an opinion. The dinner they had been invited to as a result was filled with small talk and only the occasional glance at the ring on her finger.
"I wish you'd told us, Edea. We could have used the beach cottage for the wedding."
Two of her three brothers were there, the oldest had his own family to worry about. Edea kept her head down, not wanting to look at Father. She hadn't really thought he would be disappointed in not giving her away.
Cid squeezed her hand under the table.
"Which is why we're just going to give it to you, instead."
Maybe a summer home wasn't a practical home all the year round, but that didn't register really. While the main house had been their technical home, she had always felt like she'd grown up at the beach cottage. Since she and her brothers had grown up it had been sitting, waiting, waiting for children to go run around it again...
"Thank you. Thank you... so much."
No doubt there would be conversations later, where her wasted potential was mentioned, where all the things she should have been doing because she'd wandered off and found a dying woman when she was five were discussed at length. But now she was hugging her father and mother and hoping that maybe it would all just turn out all right.
---
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
---
She had gone for a swim because she loved everything about water, how she could manipulate it and it would never get out of her control. For some it was being on the solid earth, but for her it had always been floating in the ocean, pretending like she was the only one left in the world. Well, maybe one of two left in the world.
A normal person would have frozen to death in this water. But Edea had long since learned that she could be far colder than anything else around her and it would never hurt.
Cid had put on every knit he owned, it seemed, to come out to her.
"Love, it's dinnertime."
The house was a blessing and a curse all at once. They had moved in during the rainy season, and due to a few years without children and thus without an immediate need to care for it, the roof had developed holes all over. Small rodent creatures had moved in and she had begged Cid to do his knightly duty and get rid of them while she stood on a chair. But not to hurt them of course, just to get them out of the house.
Sorceress powers or not, she did not like those things.
Now the water was cold and the skies were grey and she had Cid watch the soup while it simmered since he preferred to stay indoors where it was warm. The blessing of the house was it had been paid for by her grandfather years ago, so there was no need for silly things like a mortgage or rent. Cid could keep teaching that way and she could be a wife.
She shouldn't have had to feel guilty about a quiet life.
The water soaked into her skin, leaving her nearly dry when she took his bulky sweatered arm. "I think maybe this phase it will happen. I have a good feeling about now."
Edea had mastered the art of the wife of a librarian and teacher, now she wanted to go to the next level and become a mother. Children always fixed the small fractures of a family, and she wanted her mother to finally understand that maybe she had always wanted to be like her. Not to surpass her.
"You don't have to rush it, Edee. We'll be plenty young for quite some time."
She would ignore the pang of magic through her heart for now.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Is making us bold (making us bold)
So strung out and cold (so strung out and cold)
I'm feeling so old (feeling so old)
---
The barest truths always came to her in dreams.
Someone else's dark haired child had come to Edea, with strings of clock faces making bangles on her arms. She was small, couldn't have been older than six or so. She had smiled the sweetest of smiles and said;
in you there is only death
So that she woke up crying, which was a thing that had never felt right since she was almost too small to remember. Edea was quiet enough not to wake Cid, though she knew he would wake despite. Sometimes she regretted that the tug of her emotions would inevitably go to him, and that even before she had the courage to talk to him he'd dreamed of her because she had seen him. It wasn't fate, it was potential. And she'd dried up one path of potential by simply existing.
Edea couldn't be sure what made her leave the room and go to the single telephone they had in the house; something antique and rotary so that she wouldn't accidentally break it like a lot of technological things. She picked up the phone, and called her mother.
They, the generations of women, would never be severed because even the proud grown daughter could again become the small and lost child. They would never be severed because even when ambitions and expectations could steel her mother's voice, it would soften at her daughter's sobs.
Cid waited, like he did when she was out swimming, waited for her to come back to shore. That was the strength in them, the small patiences that they worked on because they believed so keenly in the together moreso than the apart. He waited for her mother's voice to assure her that there were no failures, that she would always find a way. Edea had always found a way around the things that threatened her; even if that was sometimes herself.
He sat with her as she hung up the phone, and told her they would find another way. Because Cid always found a way too.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Has ruined us now (has ruined us now)
You'll never know how (never know how)
Sweeter than thou (sweeter than thou)
---
"The hell am I supposed to do with her? She keeps wailing and I can't get her to stop."
"She's just a child. They do that."
"Well that's why I don't have any brats. You pick her up or something."
On the shore she could pretend that the rest of the world didn't matter, didn't happen at all. Cid had noticed how scrubbed and clean their little cottage was, and had talked her into coming into town with him. But his tiny office had felt suffocating, and she left a note and went for a walk.
She had noticed the child before the uniformed men, because she couldn't help but suddenly see children everywhere, as if they were mocking her. But this one was not the bouncy kind, holding her father's hand.
"Hey lady, what are you staring for?"
Edea sometimes forgot that she only wished she were invisible. Of all powers, couldn't she have had that one?
The little blonde toddler had red rings around her blue eyes but when she looked at Edea, her crying quieted to just a quiver of her tiny mouth. In all her own laments about motherhood without children, she'd almost forgotten about children without parents.
"This is not your child?"
"Oh heck no. Found her wandering around one of the outer villages. Sarge told us to find her family, but we couldn't find anyone still breathing." The taller one was obviously the one who thought he was in charge.
"We figured that since there was a university around here we'd get some information on where to put her." And the shorter one was obviously the more knowledgeable one.
Edea approached slowly, timidly, and crouched down at the little girl's level. The taller soldier opened his mouth to say something, but his partner shook his head. She hadn't even bothered to learn what side they were fighting for. Then again, did that ever really matter?
The little girl held her chin up, and Edea smiled. The girl grinned back. Children are unafraid of death, because they don't know it exists.
"I'll find her a home."
"Ah, ma'am, we can't exactly just..."
"My husband's a professor around here, I assure you we aren't anything unsavory."
---
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
---
He didn't even look surprised to see her sitting with a child in her lap in his office. Edea had learned the girl's name from the embroidery on the tattered remains of her blanket and had found her some candy before settling into her husband's office.
"Is she..."
"She has no parents. And I have an idea. We can't leave her alone."
She could see all the possibilities and practicalities pass behind his glasses before he chuckled. "Only you, Edee. Only you."
Edea had always known the bookish ones had the most potential as far as fathers went. And she had to be her mother's daughter, judging by the ambitions for more orphans that ran in the back of her mind. Parents without children and children without parents; she couldn't think of anything worse in the world. She would take care of them all if she had to.
"You want to show her some books, Cid? I think Quistis is a clever one."
---
(Feeling so old)
Fandom: FF8
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Edea always lived somewhere between the real and the promised, but Cid always managed to make it work.
Notes: I love these two so much. Yes, I extrapolate on towns and things, because I think FF8's huge gaps between places is crazy. I'm assuming that Cid and Edea's future orphange is like, across the water from this fictional university town. Work with me here. Also fullfill's
lassarina's request. XDShe'd been Edea Kramer for two days now and still hadn't called her parents to tell them.
They would blame Cid, because that was what parents did when their daughters ran off to Deling City with a boy to get eloped. It was some kind of section in the parent manual that outlined the dangers of nice marryable young men and how they should be kept from impressionable young sorceresses.
They would eventually have to go home, but the beds at the Galbadia Hotel were so soft, and she was just fairly giddy with what they'd just done.
"Edee, your brothers are going to kill me. And then your mother."
"Probably." Edea was always honest with Cid. Even about things that fairly horrified him.
She smoothed the cowlick his hair developed in his sleep. Mother didn't hate Cid, but she didn't like him either. She could never explain to Cid the delicate balance of feelings there; it was never him but the choice he represented. Mother was a powerful woman from a time when powerful women needed to be on someone's arm. To have her daughter do just that?
"I'll protect you. From them. Promise."
He propped himself on his elbow. "But aren't I supposed to protect you?"
"It's symbiotic."
She liked to think that this was how should could prove that yes, she'd grown up. Edea was eighteen now, and married. She could do as she chose to.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Take us so far (take us so far)
Broken down cars (broken down cars)
Like strung-out old stars (like strung-out old stars)
---
For all the romance she'd been promised in books and all the things she thought of from when she first met Cid, she had never quite realized how quickly the money she'd brought for this trip would dwindle.
"Miss, this card is declined. Do you have another?"
"Well, no."
It had been the case since she had gained the powers that she could never fully sleep through the night. So she had figured that picking Cid up something nice would be a good surprise. He slept like a log. And snored.
"Then I can't sell this to you."
She frowned, before remembering that Cid had given her a little solid gil in case of emergencies. She counted it out; enough for her purchase. There.
It would have been cheaper back at the university, but she had wanted something from Deling City. All the jet-set girls that her brothers liked to date did that. Maybe she should have gone out with them more, like Mother had suggested. But Edea had always been a little shy, especially around those types of colorful girls.
How the city looked different this time of night, when they put some of the lights out. Even still, it was hard to see the sky like she preferred to watch it on the coast; only the brightest of pinpricks came out of the black, instead of the near endless ones.
She nearly set him on fire, he startled her so much.
"What were you doing?!" Cid rarely raised his voice. It wasn't the way he operated, the way they operated. In the two years since she'd worked up the courage to approach him, she'd only seen him do it once.
"I went for a walk and found a present for you."
He glanced at the bag in her hands, and tried to say a few things but he could only open and close his mouth in a futile gesture.
"Is something wrong?"
"Edea, of course something is wrong. It's 3 am and you're out by yourself and you aren't exactly a large ugly thug of a man or anything!"
She would have found it funny if he didn't look quite so... pained really. Like she had almost gotten eaten by a monster or kidnapped by pirates. Like he couldn't breathe. Did she cause that effect on him with something so innocuous?
"I couldn' sleep."
"Then wake me up."
"But you were sleeping."
"I'm not your chaperone, I'm your husband. Have some... sense?" He pulled the bag from her hands, not even looking at the contents. "And we have to return this. I thought you understood that we can't act like we're a Caraway on vacation."
She bit her lip and followed him. He was really angry. Their bond didn't mean she could read everything of his, and she respected him enough not to invade in on his feelings, but the strong ones always punctuated in the back of her mind. Anger felt almost like a sneeze.
When he'd returned it--a trinket really, nothing of importance--he turned to her with tense shoulders. At this time of night, she could pretend like they were the only two people on the earth. It was less romantic when he was angry and disappointed.
"I want you to understand. I don't want to be like... like one of those paranoid types that lock up their wives for fear of everything. But I want you to think of me when you decide on things. I'll always think of you."
The thing about destiny was a person had to make a choice. She'd chosen him, over so many other things she could have done. But the part she always forgot was that he had made a choice too. And it was likely the more difficult one.
"I'm sorry. Walk with me? I can't sleep."
The years would probably mean every argument or almost argument didn't end like this. She imagined the tension draining out of his back as he walked with her, papercut scarred hand firmly around hers. Some day they were bound to find something they couldn't fix. Edea didn't want to know what that would be, and the realization was troubling.
This was why sorceresses couldn't sleep.
"If you want the night to yourself, we should find somewhere to live where you can have it."
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Served us so well (served us so well)
We traveled through hell (traveled through hell)
And oh how we fell (Oh how we fell)
---
Their wedding present didn't mean that she was forgiven, but that her parents still loved her despite.
She had waited until they were home, at least as much of a home as the little place that Cid got as a part of his assistant professorship provided before calling her mother. Edea had been startled by how little she had said concerning the matter, as Mother never held back an opinion. The dinner they had been invited to as a result was filled with small talk and only the occasional glance at the ring on her finger.
"I wish you'd told us, Edea. We could have used the beach cottage for the wedding."
Two of her three brothers were there, the oldest had his own family to worry about. Edea kept her head down, not wanting to look at Father. She hadn't really thought he would be disappointed in not giving her away.
Cid squeezed her hand under the table.
"Which is why we're just going to give it to you, instead."
Maybe a summer home wasn't a practical home all the year round, but that didn't register really. While the main house had been their technical home, she had always felt like she'd grown up at the beach cottage. Since she and her brothers had grown up it had been sitting, waiting, waiting for children to go run around it again...
"Thank you. Thank you... so much."
No doubt there would be conversations later, where her wasted potential was mentioned, where all the things she should have been doing because she'd wandered off and found a dying woman when she was five were discussed at length. But now she was hugging her father and mother and hoping that maybe it would all just turn out all right.
---
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
---
She had gone for a swim because she loved everything about water, how she could manipulate it and it would never get out of her control. For some it was being on the solid earth, but for her it had always been floating in the ocean, pretending like she was the only one left in the world. Well, maybe one of two left in the world.
A normal person would have frozen to death in this water. But Edea had long since learned that she could be far colder than anything else around her and it would never hurt.
Cid had put on every knit he owned, it seemed, to come out to her.
"Love, it's dinnertime."
The house was a blessing and a curse all at once. They had moved in during the rainy season, and due to a few years without children and thus without an immediate need to care for it, the roof had developed holes all over. Small rodent creatures had moved in and she had begged Cid to do his knightly duty and get rid of them while she stood on a chair. But not to hurt them of course, just to get them out of the house.
Sorceress powers or not, she did not like those things.
Now the water was cold and the skies were grey and she had Cid watch the soup while it simmered since he preferred to stay indoors where it was warm. The blessing of the house was it had been paid for by her grandfather years ago, so there was no need for silly things like a mortgage or rent. Cid could keep teaching that way and she could be a wife.
She shouldn't have had to feel guilty about a quiet life.
The water soaked into her skin, leaving her nearly dry when she took his bulky sweatered arm. "I think maybe this phase it will happen. I have a good feeling about now."
Edea had mastered the art of the wife of a librarian and teacher, now she wanted to go to the next level and become a mother. Children always fixed the small fractures of a family, and she wanted her mother to finally understand that maybe she had always wanted to be like her. Not to surpass her.
"You don't have to rush it, Edee. We'll be plenty young for quite some time."
She would ignore the pang of magic through her heart for now.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Is making us bold (making us bold)
So strung out and cold (so strung out and cold)
I'm feeling so old (feeling so old)
---
The barest truths always came to her in dreams.
Someone else's dark haired child had come to Edea, with strings of clock faces making bangles on her arms. She was small, couldn't have been older than six or so. She had smiled the sweetest of smiles and said;
in you there is only death
So that she woke up crying, which was a thing that had never felt right since she was almost too small to remember. Edea was quiet enough not to wake Cid, though she knew he would wake despite. Sometimes she regretted that the tug of her emotions would inevitably go to him, and that even before she had the courage to talk to him he'd dreamed of her because she had seen him. It wasn't fate, it was potential. And she'd dried up one path of potential by simply existing.
Edea couldn't be sure what made her leave the room and go to the single telephone they had in the house; something antique and rotary so that she wouldn't accidentally break it like a lot of technological things. She picked up the phone, and called her mother.
They, the generations of women, would never be severed because even the proud grown daughter could again become the small and lost child. They would never be severed because even when ambitions and expectations could steel her mother's voice, it would soften at her daughter's sobs.
Cid waited, like he did when she was out swimming, waited for her to come back to shore. That was the strength in them, the small patiences that they worked on because they believed so keenly in the together moreso than the apart. He waited for her mother's voice to assure her that there were no failures, that she would always find a way. Edea had always found a way around the things that threatened her; even if that was sometimes herself.
He sat with her as she hung up the phone, and told her they would find another way. Because Cid always found a way too.
---
Plain talking (Plain talking)
Has ruined us now (has ruined us now)
You'll never know how (never know how)
Sweeter than thou (sweeter than thou)
---
"The hell am I supposed to do with her? She keeps wailing and I can't get her to stop."
"She's just a child. They do that."
"Well that's why I don't have any brats. You pick her up or something."
On the shore she could pretend that the rest of the world didn't matter, didn't happen at all. Cid had noticed how scrubbed and clean their little cottage was, and had talked her into coming into town with him. But his tiny office had felt suffocating, and she left a note and went for a walk.
She had noticed the child before the uniformed men, because she couldn't help but suddenly see children everywhere, as if they were mocking her. But this one was not the bouncy kind, holding her father's hand.
"Hey lady, what are you staring for?"
Edea sometimes forgot that she only wished she were invisible. Of all powers, couldn't she have had that one?
The little blonde toddler had red rings around her blue eyes but when she looked at Edea, her crying quieted to just a quiver of her tiny mouth. In all her own laments about motherhood without children, she'd almost forgotten about children without parents.
"This is not your child?"
"Oh heck no. Found her wandering around one of the outer villages. Sarge told us to find her family, but we couldn't find anyone still breathing." The taller one was obviously the one who thought he was in charge.
"We figured that since there was a university around here we'd get some information on where to put her." And the shorter one was obviously the more knowledgeable one.
Edea approached slowly, timidly, and crouched down at the little girl's level. The taller soldier opened his mouth to say something, but his partner shook his head. She hadn't even bothered to learn what side they were fighting for. Then again, did that ever really matter?
The little girl held her chin up, and Edea smiled. The girl grinned back. Children are unafraid of death, because they don't know it exists.
"I'll find her a home."
"Ah, ma'am, we can't exactly just..."
"My husband's a professor around here, I assure you we aren't anything unsavory."
---
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
Lift me up, lift me up
Higher now up now
---
He didn't even look surprised to see her sitting with a child in her lap in his office. Edea had learned the girl's name from the embroidery on the tattered remains of her blanket and had found her some candy before settling into her husband's office.
"Is she..."
"She has no parents. And I have an idea. We can't leave her alone."
She could see all the possibilities and practicalities pass behind his glasses before he chuckled. "Only you, Edee. Only you."
Edea had always known the bookish ones had the most potential as far as fathers went. And she had to be her mother's daughter, judging by the ambitions for more orphans that ran in the back of her mind. Parents without children and children without parents; she couldn't think of anything worse in the world. She would take care of them all if she had to.
"You want to show her some books, Cid? I think Quistis is a clever one."
---
(Feeling so old)
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I love how the orphanage got started, and the links of family that run through this. I also love the images you use - the girl in her dream is particularly chilling.
(also, omg meta, and Edea breaking technology. YES.)
no subject
And I'm really into family connection stuff lately. XD
But goal one accomplished. Glad you liked it. Since Hotel centers around Edea, Laguna, and Caraway there's going to be more cute Cid/Edea moments. Because I say so.
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