Eight Portraits of a Lady

i; dust shall eat the days

He's been holding on really well for a few days, but it's clear to everyone that it broke him. It's even clear to him that it broke him. Barret hasn't left his house in days, and of course he brought Marlene. Nobody thought to tell Barret that it might be too hard on the kid, except Yuffie, and without her around to mediate, Barret isn't exactly listening to her. And Yuffie isn't exactly expressing herself clearly.

He should be sorting through her things right now. He should. There's not a whole hell of a lot to go through—most of it was destroyed with Midgar—but what remains clearly meant a lot to her. Everything has a new meaning. A meaning he knows. From the gloves she'd been wearing to the straw hat she wore when she and Marlene gardened. To the damned gardening shears.

He hasn't eaten since it happened. Elmyra brings him casseroles in covered dishes and puts them in his refrigerator, but he hasn't touched them and she knows it and she sounds stern when she tries to tell him to eat. He doesn't care. He doesn't eat. Every now and then, he takes a sip of water from the tap.

"I'm sorry," he tells the empty air. He made a token effort to look decent for the funeral. Ran a brush through his hair. Shaved. Put on clean clothes. The funeral wasn't as hard as he expected.

It wasn't until later that things got hard. After the funeral, when he went home alone to his empty house except for Yuffie (who came out of some misguided something, he thinks) and Barret and Marlene. They don't belong in the house, he thinks. Barret and Marlene belong next door. He wants to be left in peace. Or maybe in pieces.

It's all easier if he closes his eyes and thinks of Zack. Those memories are better, happier, brighter. He can be another person, someone who didn't love her, but eventually all roads lead back to someone else, flowers blooming in broken floorboards, laughter and cotton candy and smiles and swords in stomachs.

That's when he opens his eyes and sees his empty house. Sees the dust. Sees the things of hers he still hasn't packed into cardboard boxes. He understands why Sephiroth destroyed Nibelheim now, understands so completely that he'd do it all over again, to his own home, to himself, if only he could.

On the bad days, he breaks things. Once, he breaks a street. And Reeve looks very sad when he shows up, even sadder than he looked at the funeral. His face is almost heartbroken when he quietly loops first one soft cuff and then the other around his wrists. They don't say anything when Reeve wraps one arm around his shoulders and escorts him off the street, into a waiting van.

He understands why.