Broken Glass

Life is like glass I think, so very fragile, but with an overall appearance of strength and fortitude. It can stand against the elements, but then break at the slightest show of force administered in just the right place. It can withstand many blows, but there is always a point when it is too much to resist and it shatters like it had never been there before. And life is the same way, strong but oh so very breakable.

And there are so many kinds of glass! Opaque, transparent, two-way, reflective, and so many more, just as no two person’s lives are the same, such is also true with glass. Little things like the way it was cut makes even the most identical-looking pieces completely different.

Glass is used as windows, mirrors, dishes, champagne flutes, light bulbs, decorations, old computer monitors, coverings for picture frames, and a plethora of other objects that we use everyday. You can’t walk down the street without seeing your reflection in a window or mirror. The reflection of who you are lives on in the scope of other’s lives, just as your physical reflection moves from glass to glass as you go about your daily life.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking into mirrors and watching from behind sheets of glass. I watch from my safe, little room as life plays out all around me. I watch lives begin and I watch them end in a twisted dance that rarely makes any sense. I much prefer the glass, silent and cool, never judging, merely showing us what’s right under our noses if we care to look that far. Yes, I love the glass and the stability it represents, the uniformity that is not quite uniform.

I love it and, yet, I hate it too sometimes. I hate the way there is glass all around me, allowing me to see out, but no one to see in. I hate the way I stay, day after day, year after year, locked in this room of glass, wishing and praying for the day that I will finally be allowed to step out into the light. At times I toy with the thought of lashing out, watching as the tiny glittering shards of what was once such a strong prison fall around me and the people who have up to this point only been actors on my own private stage will turn and see me for the first time, the shock reflecting their expressive eyes. Eyes that could never be glass.

I long for the reality that lies outside my delicate cage. I don’t want to stare endlessly into sterile medical rooms and lavishly furnished apartments. I don’t want to watch as people in white uniforms dart around a high-end restaurant’s kitchen like so many little ants as the diners sit calmly outside, never knowing that there is a chaotic world just a few feet away, living only to cater to their needs and whims. I never want sit idly by as I watch the traffic zoom by with people practically running down the sidewalks, knowing exactly where they are going and where they want to be, but never stopping to think that just around the corner there is a drunk driver waiting to make sure that they never get there. These are all the things I see inside my glass box.

I’ve watched people at their most vulnerable. I see them at their weakest and I examine them as they live through some of the toughest times of their lives. And then I have to write about it. If what I see and write is good enough it goes to get tweaked by some famous author or another and then it gets sent out into the world. I have been doing this for centuries, nearly a millennia. I have watched as scenery changes and people grow into the technology that they have been creating. I am allowed to watch the way the new cultures shape people and mold them into the highly aware society they are today.


I am an experiment, unable to die, but unable to truly live. I am not a human, am not supposed to be one in anything other than form, but I can think on my own and choose on my own. I shouldn’t exist. By the laws of nature and man there is nothing about me that should have worked. In theory I should be a pile of synthetic skin and miscellaneous parts, but I did work and I now am left to stay here, watching and waiting for nothing in particular.

There are people I have come to like; people that I know would accept me were they to know I existed. They are few and far between, but they exist, just as I do. I stand right up against my walls of glass sometimes, standing so close that my pale nose nearly grazes the cold sheet before me and I stare out at them, the people who could have come to mean something to me if I had actually been allowed to go out and meet them. They never know, they never sense me and they eventually move on or die and I am left all alone again in my sea of never-ending faces waiting for the next one to come along so that, just for a moment, I can imagine that I had a life full of people who love and care for me, not viewing me as an experiment to be used only as I was designed.

And then there came a boy, well, a man I suppose, in age and body, but a boy in a way that sticks to some men. Innocence that hasn’t been chased away or pushed down to reveal the tougher side of humanity in the way that has become more and more popular throughout the centuries. His file stated his age to be twenty-three and he looked far younger than that, in his body, in his face, but, strangely enough, not in his eyes.

They were a startling crystal blue, clear and deep as the shore of some tropical paradise. They were eyes that saw far too much, and that suggested an underlying maturity to this unnaturally young soul. Theses were eyes that had seen many horrific things, nightmares that no one should dream, much less experience firsthand. They were also eyes that led to a mind that had overcome such trauma to find that embracing life was the only thing worth doing.

I yearned for months to know that past, those little events that had made him exactly what he was. I felt a longing for companionship so intense that it nearly made my circuits melt. As much as my creator had tried to program me to never adapt to the feelings of humanity, there was no stopping emotion, even in a being devised to be an unthinking spectator. I once again began to toy with thoughts of escaping, of breaking down the walls and walking away, the crunch of broken glass following me out of the room as I left nothing but shards to testify to my previous lonely existence.

But I did nothing, despite every fiber of my being screaming that this was the time, this was the one that would be able to save me from everything I feared. I watched as he came in day after day, his pale blue scrubs immaculate, his golden hair styled messily so that it looked as though he was always on the verge of rolling out of a bed after a nice, long sleep. I would watch as he joked with interns, talked to patients, and helped with procedures. I listened intently as he talked about his hopes and dreams, as he argued with co-workers and activists, and as he scribbled into the little notebook that he carried with him at all times, a notebook in which he was gathering ideas together for the day when he would finally sit down and gather everything together into one amazing work of art. His magnum opus.

He liked the treatment room that held one of the walls to my prison. He would spend breaks in there, talking to himself, writing, or just staring off into space. At times it seemed as though he would look right at me, almost as though he knew there were someone watching him, wanting him, waiting for him...


Loving him...

I wasn’t until months after he had begun to work at the clinic that the event that changed my life forever occurred.

He walked in that morning, looking tired, his face tightening so that the little lines, imperceptible to a human eye, were showing at the corners of his eyes. There was also a deep purple bruise under each eye, the edges turning a sickening green color. Something had kept him awake, something that was worrying him very much. He was followed into the room by another intern, an older one with long black spikes and remarkably similar blue eyes. I had seen them together before and they had always been friendly towards each other, but today they seemed distant. Neither one said a word as they began to check their equipment for the day’s traffic.

I lightly tapped the button that would bring down the shade on my other windows in order to block out the noises from the other rooms and scenes that I am supposed to be watching. I wanted to see this. I wanted to hear this uninterrupted.

The blonde mostly kept his head down, apparently trying to look anywhere but at his companion, while said companion was busy trying to do everything to make his friend (Previous friend? I didn’t know what to think now.) acknowledge him. I watched on with a vague sense of amusement as the black-haired man went so far as to knock a bottle of cotton swabs into the blonde’s path just to have the same glass bottle thrown back at his head when he’d held out his hand for it. Luckily the darker haired man seemingly had immense reflexes because he somehow managed to save it from breaking.

“Throwing things at me isn’t going to help Cloud.” He said as he placed the jar far out of reach of the angry blonde. “Talking will help, but you don’t want to talk.”

“No I don’t want to fucking talk.” Cloud’s voice was calm enough, but there were deeper tremors underneath that spoke of barely restrained emotions, anger and possibly something deeper, something more painful. “We’ve spent our whole god damned lives talking and it’s gotten us absolutely nowhere, so no, I don’t want to fucking talk, but I would like to throw things at least for a few days. Maybe then I’ll be able to talk without wishing a painful, but well deserved, death upon you.”

“Aw, come on, Spike!” There was practically a whimper in the other man’s voice now, a whimper than made Cloud’s eye twitch in irritation. “You just said more to me than you have in the past two days. I’m not giving up now!”

There was a long pause in which I would have held my breath, if I’d had the need to breathe, and the tension in the room became something almost tangible. I could see the almost imperceptible movements across Cloud’s scrub top as he clenched and unclenched his fists in a vain attempt to control whatever volatile emotion he was feeling this time, which was probably something close to anger as well.

“Zack.” Once again that calm voice held nothing reassuring, if anything it was bordering close to threatening. “I do not want to talk or do anything else with you.”

Zack held his hands up in surrender. “Fine, don’t talk to me, but at least you can listen.”

There was another long pause in which Cloud continued to set up the treatment in room in silence, neither answering in the affirmative nor discouraging Zack from continuing. Apparently Zack took the silence as a good sign because he began to speak again where any wise man would have left the room running, the tension was that palpable. Never let it be said that Zack is a wise man, I thought as my sensors recorded the tense exchange.

“You’ve been through some tough times, Cloud, no one’s disputing that and I suppose I could have handled myself better, but damn it you needed me. I’ve never been needed before.” Here Zack took a deep breath as though preparing himself for the rest of his speech. “Maybe a part of me always knew what I was doing was wrong, but that little part didn’t seem to matter when you were there and she wasn’t and you were looking at me as though I held all the answers, all the things you needed to take away your pain, and I wanted so badly to make you happy! That’s all I ever wanted to do, but somewhere along the way I got confused I guess. Maybe something changed for you somewhere along the line and I was so caught up in trying to hide the way I really felt about the situation that I just went along with it because it was the path of least resistance. I’m not saying it was right, I’d never say that because I know now that it was very, very wrong, but it fucking felt right enough that I guess I was willing the ignore that sane part of me that was telling me I was more wrong than I had ever been.”

“Shut up right now Zack.” Cloud’s voice was still calm; there was something about him that was always so intensely calm in way that just seemed so very wrong to me. It was like he was putting up a front that didn’t suit him because there was no feasible way he could have been calm in this situation, or any other situation for that matter. Cloud’s life seemed everything but calm, and yet here he was, struggling to maintain his uncaring demeanor when even I, a useless pile of surveillance technology, could see that he was actually anything but. He cared, he cared so much it was hurting him, but I was damned if I could tell why his precious restraint meant so much to him that he was reduced to hiding it.

Zack should have been quiet then. He should have respected what little friendship he had left with the blonde, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.

“No! I am not going to ‘shut up’ as you so eloquently put it.” He was getting angry now, his previous discomfort transforming into agitation at Cloud’s attitude, an agitation I was starting to share, or would have shared, I suppose, were I to have emotions to bother sharing in the first place.

“Yeah, what I did was wrong, but at least I’m apologizing to you! You were never in the right either, and you know it! Just because you didn’t know about Aerith doesn’t mean that you didn’t know what you were asking of me was wrong. You knew I could never feel for you like that, you knew and still you pushed me!” Cloud’s eye twitched again, this time in something remotely mirroring guilt. “So fine, you don’t have to talk to me, and you don’t have to listen to me either if that’s what you want, but you are not going to sit there and place all the blame on me when you know just as well as I do that this is just as much your fault as it is mine. I may have led you on, but you were right there with me when I wanted to end it and you were begging for me to reconsider. Well, now I’m engaged and I’m not going to be one for you to use any longer and if that makes you not want to be my friend any more then fine! I don’t need nor want friends like that anyways!”

Both men were breathing heavy now, Zack practically gasping for breath and Cloud, once again in a misguided attempt to keep it all hidden, was drawing air in and out through clenched teeth, and creating a soft hissing noise that was amplified through the speakers into my room of glass.

“This is not about you.” Cloud’s voice was deathly soft, as soft as it could be without taking on the raspy quality of a whisper, but it was ragged. His walls were falling, he was falling and there was a part of me that began to ache. I wanted to reach out to him, I wanted to hold him, I wanted to be the one to tell him everything was going to be alright, but I couldn’t. There were more than walls separating us, and I was not feeling real emotions. I knew this and yet I still couldn’t help but hope, in whatever way a humanoid robot is allowed to hope, that there was something I was missing, some way that what I was feeling could be real and that I could help him.

“You’re right about it being my fault. It’s always my fault, there has never been a time when it hasn’t and I know I should feel sorry for hurting you and maybe I should apologize because when it all comes down to it, you wanted to stop and I didn’t want you to. I didn’t want to admit to myself that there were things that were more important to you than me. I never wanted to admit it, but then you came in with such a brilliant smile on your face two days ago and a part of me knew before you said it. You didn’t need me anymore, you never had and that hurt me more than anything you could have said or done at the time, but, once again, it was my fault for pulling you into something you didn’t want to be in from the beginning.” Cloud turned his back on his friend in an attempt to conceal the tears that were threatening to spill from his crystal eyes, but in doing so he turned towards me and I froze, locked in what I could only describe as a dream as the urge to break away from my glass prison merely to cradle him in my arms and take all his pain away became stronger than it ever had been. “Everything really was my fault. I want to apologize and forget about everything and wish you luck and all those stupid little things a best friend is supposed to say when someone they care about has found happiness. I want to do the right thing, believe me I do but…”

“But I’m far too selfish for that.”

The air hung heavy with his confession and Zack looked tormented now. As much as I knew I couldn’t really sense anything, that I was nothing more than spare parts and microchips, I couldn’t help but feel just as tormented as he must have been. Here Cloud was giving me what I’d always wanted, a glimpse into why he was the person he was, and all I could do was stand with my nose practically grazing the glass, not paying the slightest amount of attention to the argument, wishing only to make that pained look go away, even the slightly stoic and false attitude he’d had previously was better than this. Anything was better than this.

So much raw emotion, so much anguish, so much hurt. I clutched a gloved hand to my chest in hopes that I could somehow pull the weight of it all from off of my chest. It was a weight so heavy it was becoming hard to breathe. I couldn’t even seem to remember why breathing should seem wrong to me. All I could focus on was the solitary tear trailing down his pale features, a tear that glistened in the harsh light of the treatment room much in the same way as glass, only this tear wouldn’t shatter when it hit the floor.

No, the only thing shattering here today would be my heart.

“I didn’t know you still blamed yourself for that, well, no, that’s not right. I knew, I just didn’t want to tell myself it could be true.” Zack took a deep breath and ran his hand through his unruly hair. “Cloud, there was nothing you could do. How were you supposed to know there was a bomb on that bus? How would you have known? You did nothing wrong. In fact, you were right there with the rescue workers in the beginning before you began to hemorrhage.”

Cloud said nothing in response.

“This is about him isn’t it?” Cloud’s shoulders tensed, telling Zack all he needed to know without saying anything at all. “Fuck, Cloud, that wasn’t your fault either. Hell! If anything you almost saved him, maintaining CPR until the paramedics arrived, but there was nothing anyone could do for him, his internal injuries were too bad. Hell, you almost died as well. It was a bloody miracle you didn’t.”

“NO!” Cloud screamed, the tears flowing freely, but silently, down his face. He slammed his fist against the mirror that made up my prison and left it there, his hand flattening out as his shoulders sagged under the weight of his past. “Didn’t you ever wonder why we were on that God damned bus then? We should have never been there, would have never been there if it hadn’t been for me. I was being selfish. I didn’t want to go home. We were up on the roof of the school and he wanted to go home but I begged him to stay. He was on that bus because he missed his usual one because I didn’t want him to leave. He even went so far as to jump in front of me when the bomb began to go off. He fucking protected me and that cost him his fucking life!”

“I was the one that should have died, but I’m the only one that lived.”

There was nothing left to be said. I knew it, Cloud knew it, and Zack knew it. There was a moment when I thought Zack was going to reach out to Cloud, maybe put a hand on his shoulder or some other comforting gesture, but he didn’t. He did the only thing he could do:

He left.

And then Cloud was alone with me. He straightened up and looked in my mirror, seeing nothing more than his own reflection as always, but there was something different about this time, some small glint in his eyes that had me thinking he knew I was there, inches away from him, wishing I could reach out to him and show him that there was someone out there who cared about him, someone who wanted nothing more than to see him happy, no matter how selfish that might have seemed to him.

His hand was still pressed again the glass, the other one curled somewhere at his side and the tears were slowly but surely drying up. His entire posture spoke of someone who had given up, someone that didn’t care any longer because there obviously was nothing left for him. He looked broken.

I still do not know why I did what I did next. Perhaps I was suffering a critical core meltdown of some sort that caused me to lose control of my central processors. I have checked and rechecked my systems hundreds of times since that day, but I still have been unable to discover just what it was that went wrong. I don’t know why I did it. It was against everything I had been programmed to do.

I don’t know why I pulled the glove off my hand, my serial number standing out stark and black against the creamy silicon that passed as my skin. I don’t know why I allowed for it to drop to the ground, making no sound louder than a slight rustle as it hit the floor.

I don’t know why I pressed my own hand up against the cool pane of glass, matching his handprint perfectly, becoming the mirror image for his agony.

I don’t know why, but I did and in doing so, I marked the end of the life I had previously known and began something new and wonderful.

The glass was as easy to break as I had always known it would be. He jumped back in surprise as the sparkling shards fell to the floor. They shattered with a tinkling noise, crunching as I stepped forward, my heavy boots more than a match for their now far too delicate natures. I looked into his eyes, seeing myself reflected in their blue depths expecting nothing more than shock and fear, but I had been wrong.

There was shock there, yes, but that was to be expected. What other emotion would a human feel if a wall of glass had exploded from the inside to reveal a person that could not under any circumstances truly be mistaken for a human? Perfectly flawless pale skin and immaculate silver hair cascading well past my knees with gracefully arched brows and unnaturally jade eyes made of glass with tiny cameras imbedded where the pupils were. I was a sight to see for a human and I knew it. He should have been afraid, anyone else would have been.

There was shock, yes, but there was no fear.

In its place there was something more, something unrecognizable to me at the time. Something I had forgotten humans possessed, due to their habit of never giving into it on a daily basis. It was something human had come to deny in themselves in another one of their misguided attempts to go through life with no pain, no disappointments.

It was hope.

And then he spoke. One word, a name, and something deep inside of me jerked and my vision became cloudy to the point that I could not remember what happened afterwards or how he managed to get me from that treatment room to his apartment. One little name and then the next thing I knew I was lying on a plush sofa in a living room I had never seen before.

One little name and everything I had ever known was suddenly and irrevocably over.

“Sephiroth.”