break my bones; my bones are sick
The first thing Fiora forgets is the blood. Right? When you're born you talk about the first thing you remember, so when you die you talk about the first thing you forget.
How the blood poured from her ribcage, her thoracic cavity, the place of the heart that beat every morning as the body pumped itself up and down the steps at Outlook Park, how it just gushed, and gushed, and gushed, on and on and on and on and oh god will it ever stop I am leaking I am falling I am dying I am dead--
Dead. Gone. No memory. Laid in upon unyielding storage, the blood is the first to go. So Fiora is still carefree. So Face Nemesis has none of her own anger.
Later, Vanea lays the body - the corpse, the cadaver - into the frame of Face Nemesis itself.
Of course she is not simply laying it to rest.
There's no time for that, now.
No time to retch up her guts and shudder spasmodically at the idea of someone else in her body - her body! No one else has ever been in there before! She hadn't even gotten to know all of it herself! She hadn't even decided if she'd wanted to!
Hadn't even done it. And there's no honor in that. What have you even got, Fiora? What is there to you?
Courage, but no caution. Daring, but no deference. Zeal, but no apathy. Rashness, but no restraint. Innocence, but no indoctrination.
What do you believe in, Fiora? Shulk only? Surely it can't be so. It's not as if you know that he is also a dead man walking.
It's not as if you know anything at all. Your mind is useless. It is only the vessel that the soul transfer needs.
It is only the face of Fiora, and not the core. It is only Meyneth's Monado, and not its own.
Galea wore the halo of patience, of a quiet woman's fury. Meyneth wore (wears?) the halo of creation. Vanea, then, takes on down after their ethereal motherhood.
Fiora, empty of soul or perhaps empty of all but that crucial piece, wears no halo at all.
Her empty space is full of filigree, rather than anything so solid as flesh or bone.
That little girl huddled in the mobile artillery cockpit in her ankle boots and tube top is, quite literally, a lifetime away. But she doesn't feel like it - that is, if Fiora could feel at all.
Mumkhar - Metal Face, for he is no longer a human, even a person, either - had dispatched of and with her so easily. Of course she shouldn't have any permanence, now or ever.
Fiora had grown up among men, men, men. Shulk's introversion and hyperfixation, Reyn's bullheaded care, Dunban's perfectly imperfect bluster, Mumkhar's ignoble cowardice, Dickson's sleazy avuncularity, Vangarre's stickler-straight standards...she should be, and she is, glad that it is the warmth of a mother, of a creator and of a protector, that she has been subsumed into now.
But dead bodies are cold. Machina, robots, are steely and gray. These women...aren't they, too, just as lifeless? With no goal to seize, with only reckless forces of nature bounding forth far more quickly than their legs will ever be able to match irrighteously angered stride with, what is of them, anymore?
Everything, really. They have legacy. They have image, icon, iconography. They are what Fiora is not, what she never got to come to be, if she was ever going to be anything at all.
Against the backdrop, they float in azures and mauves. They are history; they have come and passed.
Fiora is the future. But this body, this broken piece of flesh, is dead. It is not its own.
It forgets the blood. It forgets what it felt like to be alive. And what is a body without its life's little moments?
What good? What use? What...what?
Can it really change anything of anybody else's, now?