MEME TIME.

[julienned]

I'M STEALING THIS OFF VANILLE BECAUSE I DO WHAT I WANT.

IT'S TIME FOR AN EVERYTHING MEME. i mean everything. i promise i won't even flake, all you people that i flaked on before. relationships, first impressions, headcanon, drabbles (including "5 things" drabbles), questions, hot or not, fst, blah blah blah, you can even make up stuff and i'll do it.

and yes i am getting back to my fic meme too I JUST WANT TWO POSTS ON THE GO. It makes me feel accomplished.

Comments

[allmiracles]

5 moments julian admired an adult (camp or canon, you choose), 5 times Ronan talked to the ocean, 5 times hope visited oerba

also give me some of your hope/vanille songs.

[allmiracles]

i reserve the right to ask for more.

[actualizedname]

one
It's a year after the fall. They call their new calendar AF, though what this means is up to the speaker. The government, duly elected three months before in the first truly open elections in over a thousand years, pushes that though humanity has fallen from its seat in the sky, it can reach up and touch the stars now, and sometimes the people believe it.

Hope Estheim is fifteen now, gawky and awkward and not quite certain where his hands and feet are at the moment. He's taller now, and he imagines that he'd be Vanille's height now. He still dreams of her stepping out of the pillar, somehow held upright with a miracle, Fang ever-present at her side.

Oerba hasn't changed in a year. It's still covered in the crystal dust of an entire people ground to dust under the heel of fal'Cie oppression. He laughs at himself, ruefully, at the thought that something might have changed in the year. The pillar still reaches into the sky and he heads over there on his air bike (borrowed legitimately this time, he had told Snow, who honestly didn't know why that made him smile to himself).

"Hello, Fang, Vanille," he opens, resting his gloved hand on the pillar's base. "It's Hope, and we're doing fine."

two
He's nineteen now, five years after the fall. It's no longer necessary for him to hide away every anniversary, because people forget over time. The events leading to Cocoon's fall were so vast, so widespread, that people grew to believe that the fal'Cie really did not have their best interests at heart. When reminded, people were able to connect the small, silver haired boy with the quietly charismatic young man leading the research and development team, but no-one truly believed that Hope Estheim would jeopardise the world.

He still goes to Oerba. The town is closed off to the public, and where l'Cie would once tread, paradoxes rise up in their footsteps. He wonders what happened there, why Oerba is such a nexus point for these paradoxes. Was it to do with their reawakening at this spot, five years earlier? He's not sure, though he suggests it to the pillar anyway.

"Last week Serah reappeared," he told the pillar, to the girls sleeping inside. He's nineteen now, the same age as Vanille and half a foot taller, though he still imagines Fang towering over him. "She had someone with her, a Noel … the new trainee, Alyssa Zaidelle, said that he would have been around her age." Our age, in truth, though Hope doesn't feel nineteen. He's not sure how old he feels. "I'll see you soon," he promises, as he promises every time he visits. One day it will be true, he's sure.

three
"I'm not going to see you for a while. I'll see you in just under four hundred years."

Hope doesn't say much else. He knows that he doesn't have a lot of time. His father's funeral was last Monday, and his security detail would quickly become worried if they knew that he was visiting a town closed off for temporal paradoxes. There were fears that Hope might do something terribly reckless out of grief. Hope doesn't correct them, because he is doing something terribly reckless. To manipulate gravity and sleep through almost half a millennia is the definition of reckless.

"Stay safe until then."

four
The future is a strange, marvellous place, and one where Hope feels entirely disconnected from. He smiles politely at people, remembers facts about their personal lives and wishes them happy birthday, happy anniversary, congratulations on all the right days.

Palumpolum has changed since he slept; it's gradually been turning into a ghost town. The only people who live there now are researchers and historians, trying to prise open the secrets of a civilisation that Hope was born into. He went to visit once with Alyssa, and ended up having to coax her back to Academia after she panicked. Everything had changed. He got lost now in it.

"Is this how it was for you, waking up after five hundred years?" he asked the pillar. He doesn't ask does it get easier?. Instead, he straightens his shoulders and adds "when you wake up, I'll be here for you." He's no longer the scared child needing their reassurance. He's grown into himself, into his role and made it his own. He is hope: hope for a better future, for a future ruled by humanity, and for a future where their world isn't suspended on the shoulders of two impossibly brave young women.

He's twenty-seven now, and older than all of them except for Sazh. In the eyes of the people of Academia he is four hundred and fourteen. Neither match how he views his own age.

five
"Tomorrow, Cocoon will fall. Tomorrow, we'll pull you out before that happens. We'll finally be able to make things how they should have gone."