Hurt (ch38)

Warning, this blog post is about half my feels on the chapter, and half my feels about the context surrounding this chapter.  I don't expect you to read it.  (not that I think anyone reads the blog anyways, but all the same...)

Link to the chapter

No link to a tumbl.  I very obviously didn't livetumbl this chapter, and I didn't take notes like I've been doing in more recent chapters to put up on the tumblr later.  And, well, um... going back and adding in notes just feels weird for some reason, so I'm not going to do it.

Anyway, I was going to write this chapter no matter what.  It was on the slate because I knew I was going to deal with the aftermath of Angeal's death from Zack's perspective.  It's not something I can just gloss over.  The fact that Rand's death practically overlapped it is a completely different story.  It did mean that I wrote this chapter before I wrote the previous chapter, because my version of "dealing with it" involved writing.  I was going to write no matter what and I might as well be productive about it.

I sat at my kitchen table with my roommate and my sister kinda just watching, but they knew asking if I was alright was futile because we all knew the answer was "no."

So I sat there with my giant headphones in, listening to an odd mixture of the Crisis Core soundtrack, Linkin Park, Safety Suit, and Mumford & Sons, as well as a mixture of very Zack-feelsy-amvs on YouTube.  And this chapter was born.

by ~Fanatic007 on dA

I didn't edit it too much, mostly because I wanted to keep the raw emotion that I fed into Zack.  And Aerith.

Aerith is in no way telling Zack he needs to be strong and get over it.  Aerith is simply telling Zack that he should not try so hard to grieve when no one is looking, because it makes it harder to function that way.  It's okay to cry.  You don't have to be strong all the time.

And... can we just take a second to appreciate the vast amount of strings in the Crisis Core soundtrack? I'm a sucker for strings, being a cellist myself.  And... the sadness that the sound of a cello can produce, complete with the franticness of a violin.  Sorry, music feels.

And, actually, I think that's all I have to say.

Yeah, it is.

Have another fitting video... (couldn't get the embed link to work either)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SWWJTbFnRw