The next morning, she had nearly overslept. Maybe going out in the middle of the night had made her tired after all. No, perhaps she felt at peace. She told Snow all and everything, and felt a weight being lifted off her shoulders. It was because Snow had offered to carry part of the burden that threatened to crush her.
It was nearly dawn when she slipped into bed again. The moment she closed her eyes, she lost consciousness and slept so soundly that she didn't even have a dream. Thanks to Lebreau waking her up, she avoided being late.
Ina too arrived at school in the nick of time while rubbing her tired eyes, but even then her face seemed somehow radiant.
“Reto, did you do the homework I assigned you?”
She slept until the last minute so breakfast time was shorter than usual this morning. Snow was worried having remembered her saying “I'll think about the homework over breakfast,” but Serah left the house with a smile. The answer had already came to her. Last night, when she had been speaking to Snow.
“Ms. Serah, I think even if you don't study, you won't be troubled when you become an adult. My dad said what he studied at school on Cocoon wasn't any use, too. He said that working the fields and hunting monsters had nothing to do with studying.”
P84-85
“I see. I understand”
As Serah gave a big grin, a look of confusion appeared on Reto's face. No doubt he thought he was going to be told to “stop that quibbling” and be hit over his head or something.
“Hey, Reto, do you dislike studying?”
“I completely hate it. If it was worth something then I'd bear with it, but is there a point in making yourself do something that has no point at all?”
“Back then, the children of Cocoon and the adults too thought the same thing, you know. It's not just you, Reto.”
Even if you called it “back then,” it was really only a little while ago. It was before the time scale was changed to AF. It feels like a long time ago, but not even two years had past since then.
“They didn't think about things that were troublesome, and didn't do things they hated. It was fine they all studied what they wanted and did jobs that fit themselves.”
There had been mandatory education on Cocoon too, but those who wanted to acquire technical skills or knowledge midway were allowed to transfer to schools that only taught on specialized fields or offered specialized training. Those who had the desire to study were provided the best studying environments free of charge. On the other hand, those who didn't like studying didn't particularly run into trouble either. Because they'd live their lives and the Sanctum would protect them.
“But because they lived those kinds of lives, everyone stopped thinking about the things that were troublesome and the things that they hated. All of those things could be left to the fal'Cie. Even if we didn't think about them, the Sanctum would do it and make the decisions, they thought”
On the other hand, the world of scholarship and technology advanced greatly. It was because of how people would devote themselves to what they were interested in and were good at.
And that's all the more reason why there are are so few who harbor criticism for the way that social system was.
“The Pulse Vestige had been in Bodhum since long ago, but because the Sanctum said it was safe, everyone believed that. Since hundreds of years ago, they did. But, everyone knows, right? The Vestige wasn't safe at all.”
It was because Serah had believed what the Sanctum said that when she saw the Vestige's door was open, she went inside without caution. “Since the Sanctum said it was safe, there couldn't be anything dangerous inside,” she thought, underestimating the matter.
Perhaps the residents of Bodhum who lived near the Vestige thought the same too. They didn't try to blame Serah whatsoever when they found out she had been branded a l'Cie. Anyone would want to look inside a door that shouldn't have been openable if it suddenly did. There were even people who told her things like she had just happened to draw a losing ticket.
“Things that are bad and things you hate, they're all empty holes in your own world. Everyone, try to imagine a hole on the wall of your house. If you ignore the hole and leave it there, rain and wind would get in and your house would turn into a big mess, right?”
P86-87
If you filled the hole when it was still small, if someone had harbored criticisms for the Sanctum and the fal'Cie, maybe Cocoon would have become a different society. Since Cocoon was built for keeping humans and increasing their numbers in the first place, something as simple as that might not have changed anything, though.
Even so, we should have questioned things more. There was a part of herself that thought “because I'm just a plain schoolgirl anyway,” and couldn't think beyond what was right in front of her. She didn't even imagine that “plain schoolgirl” would become a l'Cie and cause the Purge.
“Thinking about the things you don't want to, and trying hard to do things even if you don't like them is like finding the holes in the world and filling them. You don't like thinking about scary things, do you? But, if you don't do that, when something scary happens, you can't do anything. No matter how much you don't want to think about how to protect yourself, or how to run to somewhere safe, you have to think about these things beforehand.”
It's too late after something happens and there's no turning back. "I have to get this point across to the children,” thought Serah, from a world that nobody remembered. That's why she had said to Snow, “I want to become a teacher.” She remembered this last night. She realized everything she thought about then would be the answer to this homework.
“On top of that, even if you don't need what you study in school in your life right now, you can't say for sure that it will be the same ten or twenty years later, right? When I was a kid, I didn't even imagine myself working the fields or hunting monsters on Gran Pulse. Perhaps, when you grow up Reto, it'll be a society where children who can't do their school studies have a lot of trouble.”
When they lived on Cocoon, what would be one year later would be the same as ten years later. We thought that we'd lead the same lives until we had died. But, on Gran Pulse, we didn't even know what would happen the next day.
“There is not one single thing that you can call absolute in this world. That's why, you fill the holes before your eyes, for now. You take measures to protect yourself. That's what studying is.”
Reto still looked like he didn't understand. “Oh well,” thought Serah as she smiled wryly on the inside. “I'll be patient,” she thought.
“But, now the reason for why you don't have to study is gone, right? Since nobody knows what kind of a society there will be in the future,”
Nobody knows, but that's not something bad at all. Because you don't know what lies in the future, people can live with hope. You can believe that a day brighter than today will come tomorrow, and that even if things are tough now, if your efforts accumulate then someday you can be happy.
“And that's that,” grinned Serah as she looked around the classroom.
“Please turn in your homework from yesterday. You all did it, right?”
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