(no subject)

[whitefirebird]

Right. Sorry It's taken me so long to post this. That priority got a little subsumed in other things.....
Anyway, here it is, in all its glory. The prologue of my first ever FFVII fic.

Title:  - (As yet unnamed)
Author: whitefirebird
Chapter Rating: G
Summary: Basically a what-if fic. "The Bards of Gaia are not well understood. When Zack and Sephiroth meet their guide in Nibelheim, it starts a chain of events that will disrupt many plans and change the world. A single pebble can cause an AVALANCHE - what happens if that pebble becomes a boulder?"


Prologue Start



He waited. He’d waited for a long time. Now, there was one he deemed worthy of his favour. The child would do well as his legacy. He only hoped that Odin would agree, so that when he died on the field of battle, he himself would be worthy of a seat in His great feast hall of Valhalla.

He waited.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Cloud was and had always been a quiet child. Even at four years of age, he was something of an outcast amongst his peers. While they were running and screaming with laughter, he was quietly holed up in a tree, reading or sketching.

He was also a precocious child, having learned to read by himself at the tender age of two and a half. Thus he knew he was different from the other village children. Just like how his mother was different. He saw it in the way everyone would leave a wide berth for Eileen Strife and her son, not out of respect but fear and contempt. He saw it in the way she always left out a full milk-pan every sennight, the way no-one else did. He saw it in how she treated his scrapes and illnesses with herbs and teas, instead of giving him a diluted potion like the other parents did. He saw it in the way she would take him and go into the surrounding forested hills a few times every year, to visit a certain old oak and an ancient rowan tree.

 And he noticed how she would tell him stories, stories of the Brownies and the Dwarves, of Epona, of Odin and Gaia. Stories that were laughed at in the village. She told him tales of the why behind certain traditions, like leaving holly over every door and window during the twelve days of Midwinter, or the carved pumpkin on every doorstep at All Hallow’s Eve, or why no-one went out on Beltane after the festival and bonfires.

 And he learned of the Myths and traditions that had fallen from favour with the common people with the rise of the Shin-ra Company, with the advent of mako-driven electricity, with the rising importance of money and social connections.

 With the loss of belief in the Old Ways.

 But all of these things couldn’t help Cloud when he was caught away from a safe place by the village children. They bullied him because of his odd beliefs, because he was small, because he was smarter than them and couldn’t keep his mouth from running ahead of his common sense. They bullied him because in the village he stuck out like a sore thumb, blond and blue-eyed instead of dark of hair and eye. And they bullied him because he was a mark of strangeness in a place where fitting in and being normal were more important than individualism. Where free spirit was squashed in favour of compliance. 

In favour of injustice.

 

But when he got up from the ground, bruised and battered and torn, and made his way home to his mother, he would smile a secret smile that said ‘I know the way of the world, and I have seen things you would never believe.’ And in his secret heart of hearts he would not change a thing, though he could have wished for a less confrontational existence.

And soon his life would change for all of time, for better or for worse, with the arrival in Nibelheim’s surrounding forest a person who would shape many of his future skills and guide him through his formative years.

Prologue End

 

That's all for now. The first chapter will be up soon - it is completed, but I'd like to get some responses first. I'm not a reviewwhore, so the next chapter will be posted regardless by Monday, but it would be nice to see what people think...

 

Comments

[youko-rayah.livejournal.com]

now this? very interesting.

It's a nice take on why Cloud was such an outcast in his home town, one not seen very often.

hope to see more soon!

[whitefirebird.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your comments.
Yeah, I noticed that with a lot of fics that go back into Cloud's history, they don't give any real reasons for his being bullied, or what relations he had with the townsfolk.

I'll be posting the next chapter tonight, and I'm still working on the second chapter - my Zack-muse was sulking, and is still not feeling very co-operative.

[kitsukatze.livejournal.com]

I like the way you write, dearie. A nice start this, now I'd like to see where you take it?

How you found somewhere to pimp it yet? Like a com or something?