Hey i hope yall enjoy the chapter i think it turned out pretty well let me know what yall think. Enjoy
Chapter 56: That he can't Keep
Breakfast finished slowly after the whipped cream incident. Plates were cleared, crumbs wiped up, and the whipped cream was cleaned off Cid's hair while the kids still occasionally broke into giggles every now and again while cleaning up. Once the kitchen was mostly back in order, Cid came back into the living room.
When he looked at the window, rain streaked down the windows in thick lines, turning the world outside into a blur of gray and green. Yui stood near the glass with her arms loosely crossed, watching it fall.
"Well," she said, "there goes the idea I had of us going to the park today."
From the nearby couch, Arc let out an immediate, whine.
"But mom you promised, you even said we could go get ice cream after."
Cid stepped up beside him and ruffled his hair.
"We can just play inside today. How about that? And we have some ice cream in the fridge you can have."
Arc fell into a reluctant grumble, but agreed. Flare, on the other hand, perked up at once.
"Can we play Super Smash Bros 2000, pleaseeee?"
Cid's mouth pulled into a slow, evil little grin.
"Sure. But I'm not going easy on you."
Behind him, Yui's eyes widened. She started shaking her head hard, signaling at Flare over his shoulder with increasing urgency. 'No No, Not that game. Not that game.', Flare, of course, did not notice thus her fate was sealed.
By the time the match ended, the living room was quiet in a completely different way.
[KO!!! Flawless victory]
The words sat on the screen like a final taunt.
Flare, Arc, and Yui, who had eventually joined in to try and save them, were all staring at the results in open shock. The kids had inherited enough of Cid's eye tracking and reaction speed that they should have at least stood a chance, They didn't. Yui looked the most betrayed of the three, like she'd personally watched a war crime happen in her own living room.
Cid leaned back against the couch, controller resting loosely in one hand, still looking entirely too pleased with himself.
While Claire sat sideways on his thigh, completely unbothered by the massacre that just occurred on screen. Her attention was fixed on the side of his head, fingers carefully braiding the strands in front of his ear into one neat piece. The tip of her tongue stuck out slightly from the corner of her mouth as she concentrated.
"I told them they shouldn't have challenged you, Papa," she said to him. "You never lose."
Across the couch the kids slowly shifted into states of pouting or frustration at how badly they lost.
Flare had her arms crossed tight, Arc was sunk into the couch cushions with a scowl, and even Yui was giving him a look from where she stood with her hands on her hips.
"You didn't have to take it that seriously," she said. "They're just kids, you could have at least let them land a few hits."
Cid glanced at the two of them, then back at her.
"If they want to beat me, they have to get better." He said it to Yui, but the words were clearly for the kids too. "That doesn't just apply to games. I'm not going to go easy on them. They have to try, fail, then try again until they improve."
He looked back at Yui, voice quieter but steady.
"That's the best thing I can do for them. Nothing comes easy, effort is the only way to get what they want."
The living room went still for a second.
Then Flare sat up straighter. Arc's scowl shifted into something more determined. Even Claire, still perched near him, watched him with a sharp look that hadn't been there a moment before, absorbing what he said.
"Rematch," Flare said.
"Yeah," Arc added immediately. "Again."
Cid's mouth pulled into a faint grin.
"Alright. Claire, you're joining them this time."
A while later, the controllers had been abandoned. They still hadn't won but they didn't sulk over it instead they went to play in a fort they built.
Blankets and couch cushions had been dragged into the middle of the room and turned into a low, uneven fort. Claire, Flare, and Arc were inside it now, their voices overlapping in some game that involved a lot of whispering and the occasional burst of laughter.
Cid sat on the couch with Yui settled in his lap, her back against his chest, as his chin settled on her shoulder. She had an old photo album open on her lap. She turned the pages slowly, pointing out one picture and then another, while he stayed quiet and held her just enjoying the moment. For a stretch of time there was nothing else to do but listen to the rain and the sound of his children playing.
Cid just sat there taking in the peace of his wife and kids. 'This… this is all I ever wanted.' he thought content
One of the photos in the album caught his eye. It was a photo of all of them together, smiling, pressed close in the frame. They were standing exactly like his family was in the photo with his parents.
His gaze drifted to the small side table next to the couch. The old family photo was there, just like it always had been.
Except there was one glaring detail Claire was in it.
She stood with him and his parents, looking a little older than he was in the picture, roughly the age she was now. Cid froze. For a second he only stared. Then he reached out, picked the frame up, and looked closer and rubbed his eyes when he looked again.
She was still there.
His thumb pressed harder against the glass. As he tried to make sense of it.
Then he looked around him, and he started noticing small things that were just off. The edge of a nearby blanket began as one pattern and shifted into another halfway through. The shadows on the wall didn't line up with the objects casting them. Outside the window, the rain was falling the wrong direction.
His breathing picked up, as he started panicking.
"Cid?"
Yui had noticed. She shifted in his lap, turning toward him with sudden urgency.
"Hey. Are you okay?"
He met her eyes, but they were the wrong color.
The realization landed all at once. The warmth of the room, the weight of her in his lap, the sound of the kids in the fort. Everything was wrong off in just a slight way, but added all together it painted a horrifying idea in his head.
Then suddenly the house around him split with a thin, glassy crack that raced up the walls and across the ceiling.
Yui was standing now. Claire, Flare, and Arc had appeared beside her. All four of them watched him with quiet, sad faces as the world broke apart in sheets of false light and collapsing detail.
Then everything fell away completely, shattering like glass.
Cid was left on a wide grassy plane under a black night sky full of stars. The house was gone. The rain was gone. Only the four of them remained in front of him, still watching, and the framed photo of his family still in his hand.
Cid just stood there in shock. For a few seconds he couldn't do anything else. The grassy plain stretched out under the night sky, empty except for the four figures in front of him, and the weight of it all landed at once. A dull, spreading ache filled his chest. His throat locked up around something thick and immovable.
His mouth opened. Closed. And opened again.
No words came.
His hand rose to his chest, pressing over his heart like he could hold the feeling in place by force. The first tears slipped free before he could stop them, trailing hot down his face. A tiny broken sound escaped him, one short sob that he crushed almost instantly, palm clamping hard over his mouth as more tears ran over his fingers.
He dragged in an uneven breath and forced something out around the pressure in his throat.
"Was this..."
He couldn't finish it.
Yui watched him with a soft, sad expression.
"Yes," she said quietly. "This was a dream…. It was your idea of paradise. Your personal haven."
Cid's eyes squeezed shut for a second. When he opened them again, his voice came out cracked and thin.
"Then... this was never real."
The words seemed to hollow something out of him. His face tightened, grief twisting sharply into anger.
"Then why aren't I waking up?!" he yelled, it tore out of him harder than he meant it to. "Why am I still here?! This isn't fair, putting something like this in front of me…
it's….. it's just—"
His voice broke apart near the end. The anger drained as fast as it had risen, leaving him choking back another sob.
Yui's gaze didn't harden. If anything, she looked at him even gentler.
"This isn't a dream you made," she said. "Someone else did this to you, but you already knew that, didn't you."
Cid stared at her, breathing hard.
"Then how are you responding?" he asked, sharp with the edge of someone unraveling.
She smiled, a small familiar, heartbreaking smile.
"I'm your subconscious version of her."
The plain went very quiet. Cid's voice dropped to a whisper.
"I see…Then how do I get out?"
Yui looked at him softly. "You already know how, dear."
His knees hit the grass.
The sob that ripped through him this time was heavier, dragged up from somewhere deeper. He curled in on himself around the photo, clutching the frame to his chest with one hand while the other fisted in the fabric over his heart, shoulders shaking as he tried and failed to keep the sound contained.
"Go on, dear," Yui said. "You know what you have to do."
Cid lifted his head.
He wasn't debating the cryptic answer. He just didn't know if he could do what he had to do.
Yui's expression softened further.
"You have to save her now." Her voice stayed quiet. Steady. "Go on, dear."
That was what broke the last of his resistance.
A raw, wordless sound tore out of him as he forced everything he had outward, will, Quirk, the desperate need to 'end it'. A violent wall of force erupted from his body and ripped across the plain, shredding the false world apart as it went.
Right before it reached the smiling form of his wife, his children, his family.
Claire was still smiling brightly and said "Bye bye, ... ...."
Cid jolted back to the world with an agonizing sob.
The villain carrying him over one shoulder jerked in surprise at the sound. Cid shifted, rolling off the man's back, breaking the restraints and hitting the ground on his hands and knees.
For a moment he just stayed there, head down, fingers digging into the dirt. Tears were already streaming freely from his eyes, dripping off his jaw into the soil around his hands. The grief held him for only a few seconds. Then it burned into something sharper.
The sadness burned straight through into rage so sharp and total it wiped every expression besides rage from his face.
His Quirk answered his emotional state on instinct.
A uniform circle of pressure slammed downward around him and crushed everything in range flat to the ground. Dirt compacted. Grass flattened in a perfect ring. Loose debris, weapons, and anyone too close were forced down hard, pinned like the air itself had turned against them. From the outside it looked like gravity in that circle had been cranked up several times over. It hadn't. It was just Cid's rage locking the area down so nothing could move away from him.
The air popped and snapped under the strain. Beyond the edge of his immediate focus, pockets of space began collapsing in on themselves in tight, ugly folds, breaking the normal rules of his control.
Cid's breathing came out shaky and in rough bursts. Tears were still running down his face, but his eyes were open now blazing with their usual pattern, bright with a promise of violence as they locked onto the green scaled man he had just rolled off of.
His voice was low, stripped raw, and barely steady.
"Who…. Who put me in that dream?"