Words

Disclai- Oh hell, I've had enough of these.

A/N: Hey, guys! You should really go find an article called Ruins and Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz. It was in the New York Review over twenty years ago but I just read it awhile back and its an amazingly insightful piece about how the perception of language itself changes. It's about Polish poetry during the 1939-1945 period. -Hears crickets chirping- Ah just a thought. Ummm...I'm not a big fan of poetry and I still loved it? I was overcome by enthusiasm?...I'll shut up now...

Words aren’t the same for Cloud Strife. Language isn’t the same.

When he was young Cloud loved words, but he didn’t take them very seriously. Nibelheim wasn’t exactly known for its libraries and ‘book smarts’ were slightly frowned upon.

His mother was the one who taught him to love words. ‘Words are the fabric that civilization, government, and culture are cut from.’ She’d said. She taught him the wonder of stringing words together, the joy of crafting a meaning out of them.

Cloud distrusts words now. It’s a visceral revulsion he can’t seem to shake. Even before he regained his memory flowery speeches made him ill. Then he wondered why Barret’s radical call to arms in the first reactor they blew just made him want the man to shut up, and Rufus ShinRa’s spiel in the Tower gave him nausea. Later he knew.

Words are the ground ideologies, dogmas, and theories spring from. Ideologies, dogmas, theories, theologies that’ve cost him and many others so much, no matter how quaint, sweet, and just they sound. Words have been the only burial shroud for many he's cared for.

Everything is cloaked in words. ShinRa’s message of jobs for all and cheap power for every home. Hojo’s clinical impersonal scientific notes. AVALANCHE’s radical call to save the Planet. Even Sephiroth’s righteous indignation, his demand for retribution and the setting right of long ago wrongs. All these have changed Cloud’s world forever.

Language has irrevocably changed to him. He’s seen it twist and deceive in ways it never should. Now he prefers language in its simplest form – a tool to name reality in its objective, tangible, and terrifying concreteness. Only in that form is language safe to him.

The complicated confusing messages and high ideas don’t tell of reality. They gloss over the ugly parts, tell the fairy tale ‘Happily Ever After’s and show only what the creator wants. The corporation willing to drop a plate on it’s own citizens and the blood on a Turk’s uniform aren’t in President ShinRa’s speeches. Hojo’s notes talk clinically of ‘specimens’ and ‘results’ but they don’t tell of how hunger became more important than taste or how the screams could echo and silence became the best way to deal with pain. Barret doesn’t like to talk about how red the blood of the reactor guards is spilled on the ground, or how the explosion could send body parts flying in all directions like human shrapnel. Sephiroth never spoke of how flames can make skin bubble and melt.

That is Cloud’s reality. Forgotten and passed over.

He doesn’t trust words now. He’s seen the world’s greatest general go mad from them, and he knows how important a pep talk is before a major battle. The power of words he doesn’t doubt at all, but he’s seen to much hidden, warped, and changed.

Objects are what he’d rather be surrounded with now. A pebble won’t suddenly burn down your home without cause or warning. A package won’t deliver itself. They're logical things, unswayed by the unpredictableness of human emotion.

After Meteor he could’ve done anything, started any number of organizations, demanded any role he wanted in government. But then he’d be back with the careful metaphors and euphemisms. Bak surrounded by the theorists he detests.

A delivery job is concrete, the objective is plain. Get this from point A to point B. Get paid for it. Nothing is hidden. He prefers it that way.

Cloud figures he’s been through enough to call a spade a spade and he doesn’t care who he offends doing it sometimes. Rufus ShinRa can ask for a ‘meeting’ to pontificate at length, Sephiroth can talk of rights and reunions, Aeris can offer mysterious snippets. He’s sick of it.

All of it.

Review? Pretty please?