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Eyes

By fyre byrd

As a child, Ellone remembers a white, sterile room with a window she cannot see out of and invisible eyes on her. Those eyes crawled up her spine and down her fingers like insects pressing their tiny sticky feet against her skin until she huddled in the corner, crying. She is like that window and those eyes that watched without permission. She is an indecent imposition on the past.

She was always in demand, not for herself, but for her powers - the powers Ultimecia sought to use to blend past present future into one. The ability to slide into the past comes as easily to Ellone as breathing, easier than sleeping which she could not always do and now most often does without. Her whole life she has lived without time as a river flowing steadily in one direction. Her whole life she has lived without an inviolable sense of self, of memory, of history. She has lived whole hours, days, weeks, months in other people's pasts.

She was destined to a life of regret and regrets revisited. People came to her wanting to see the faces of those they had lost in natural or violent circumstances and she was forced, guiltily, to explain again that she needed to have known people to see their pasts. But still, many times the people who came to her, grieving, were people she had known and their loved ones she had known too and she felt obligated to lose herself again in memories that were not her own, although eventually she began to wonder if it made any difference.

Who is Ellone? Where is she in all of this blossoming, unfolding flower of time? What has she done that matches the amazing lives she witnesses passively, a peeping tom on events that she can never change? She has been kidnapped and used, that is all. Now she lives by the sea, in a crumbling building, trying to hide from the bereaved who have unresolved business with the dead.

One of the men who loved her has forgotten her, now he cannot forgive her, not completely and all because she failed to stretch her powers beyond their reasonable limit. She had not known Rinoa and so she could not reach her, although even if Ellone had reached her she does not know what she could have possibly done to save her. Now Rinoa has joined the ranks of the dead whom Ellone cannot contact. Squall visits, this man who was like a brother to her once, but deep within him lies an iron hard truth which she could beat herself against until she was broken and bloody - she is a failure.

She is an eye, a plaintive voice like a ghost's, someone else's memory and nothing more.

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