Transference.
She had been quite beautiful. Her build was petite, and her face was gaunt and thin. From what little flesh remained unburned, Squall could make out a pale complexion, and around the victim's pale neck was a slightly melted silver chain with a now deformed medallion emblazoned into her breast plate, the skin surrounding this cracked and red and violent looking. The eyes, which had once danced with life, were now dark, yet nonetheless beautiful, deep hollow pools. Squall stared into them, and his heart skipped a beat as he realised there was still a spark, a gleam of colour in the centre of her pupils – a glimmer of life.
Seeing this, he tentatively leant forward, his face almost touching hers. His dark brown fringe fell way from his wet, bloodshot eyes and brushed her brow almost lovingly.
This close, he could tell the spark was purple; so small that from where he had been sitting it was almost indistinguishable, and yet, as soon as Squall was close enough to see his reflection in the darkness of her eyes, he was mesmerised by the purple glow.
Memories flooded through him. The orphanage, particularly the rain as he mourned Elle leaving. The fireworks on the beach. His first fight with Seifer, and then the Dollet Communication Tower. Fighting Edea, then NORG, then swimming through time itself …but oddly, instead of his mind conjuring these images for him, he saw them in the small glimmer of her eye. Was it a window into the sorceress power? A sight of the soul itself? He couldn't tear his gaze away, he was petrified, rooted in place as his life was played back to him by the light.
All at once, the memories faded. Squall's eyes wrenched themselves away from the glimmer, and began to sting and water. His head tingled, as though he'd just been hit with Thundaga, and while Squall once again owned his eyes, something was distinctly different. His vision had become blurred and his balance left him, leaving him confused and disorientated, unwittingly fumbling around the empty morgue.
He stumbled, tripping over his own feet as his hands rubbed and clawed at his eyes. His vision was going dark, with bright sparks of light appearing and vanishing in seconds. His heart began to race, he felt the panic welling up inside his throat as he felt himself fall to the floor. He held his eyes in his hand and began to scream, not from pain (there was none) but from fear.
And then it stopped. As suddenly as it had arrived, the inkiness he had been trying to see through disappeared – his vision now began to cloud over, as though he were in the middle of a dense fog. The darker his vision got, the calmer he began to feel. He knew he should be questioning this, fighting this, but he began to feel at ease, rested. His eyes closed as sleep began to claim him.
He was in some sort of limbo. The spark left Rinoa's eye, just as a single tear rolled down her cheek, a solitary droplet of violet tinged salt water.
Fire, everywhere. Up ahead the TV Station slowly came into view, just visible over the roof top of the Station Bar. It seemed that the fire had left it untouched so far. Quistis and Zone were ahead, the burns and gashes that covered their bodies (visible through the tatters that had been their clothes) doing little to slow their charge. Occasionally he would hear a thunderclap, but he knew instinctively that it wasn't a cloud that had made that noise, but hardened malboro leather striking attackers as Quistis swung her whip wildly at the enemy, with gunshots ringing around them as Zone picked off the others.
He was surprised as Rinoa's voice left his mouth. "C'mon Watts!" he cried, "Keep up, we're almost there!"
Jumping through a wall of fire, Squall shot the Valkyrie that he found on his arm after a group of soldiers he had seen out of the corner of his eye. As it returned to him, he launched himself up the stairs that lead to the TV Station.
"5, 6...maybe 7...we should be able to take them" Quistis was shouting back towards the group, readying her whip while Zone reloaded his gun. Squall found himself tightening the Valkyrie's strap.
6 robots stood in a line in front of them; right outside the entrance to the TV Station. Quistis jumped high into the air and yelled as her whip collided with one of their sensors, sending it toppling backwards; short circuited. Two more robots fell as well aimed bullets shot from Zone's guns. Squall was on auto-pilot, his blood boiling as spell after spell shot from his hands. He wasn't in control of this magical berserk, but he was going with it, handing himself over to the magic.
Quistis began to glow as Watts appeared beside the others. 3 robots remained, advancing slowly towards them – Squall tossed a Curaga at Watts as Zone hastily drank an X-Potion, a missile from one of their enemies handing amongst them and sending Squall flying, somersaulting backwards and shielding his eyes from the shrapnel. Somehow he landed on his feet, sliding backwards a few feet in the gravel before coming to a stop.
The enemy didn't get much closer. A beam of atomic energy shot from Quistis' eye at the ground before them, causing it to explode around them, then crush them as it fell back to the ground. Squall remembered the Black Widow using that move on him in Dollet and was glad he hadn't been on the receiving end.
Quistis pulled a long, blond bang back behind her ear as she walked forward and into the station, followed by Zone and Watts, who both looked nervously around and behind them before entering the darkness of the reception. Squall scanned the area before heading after them, a bolt of energy leaving his hand and landing in front of the door as he closed it; a trap for possible followers.
Without thinking he cast his arm over the door, a sheet of pure ice appearing in front of it. The ice wasn't as clear as it should have been – a strange purple hue was cast through it, whilst frost covered the floor around them.
'Good luck getting through that!' he found himself thinking, in Rinoa's voice.
"So this is when being a sorceress comes in useful" Quistis quipped. He just sighed and flicked his long black hair behind his head in response. Quistis began fiddling with equipment and screens, connecting monitors and power cables and machines whilst Zone and Watts looked out over Timber, and the massacre, from the huge windows that three of the four walls were covered in. Squall joined them.
"Princess…." Watts began, his voice cracking at the end as he choked back another tear.
Nothing remained recognisable. The train station, the hotel, everything was masked by smoke and flame, the only visible feature being a hovering menace in the distance from which more Galbadian soldiers were landing in Timber. There were no people in sight on the streets – no live ones anyway.
"So this is the end. Galbadia's won." he said, half to his comrades and half to himself.
The three of them had abandoned any hope of a grand liberation for Timber now. There no longer was a Timber to liberate; there was just a ghost town, a husk, a ghoulish reflection of what used to be.
"Over here!" Quistis shouted, just as Squall wiped tears from his eyes.
The whip mistress stood on top of a large consortium of machines, surrounded by a total of five glowing screens and a series of complicated looking wire systems and circuit boards.
"Rinoa." she said to Squall "Can you use some magic to jump start this?"
Squall nodded. He wiped his eyes once more, before raising a small hand out in front of him, shooting a pure white jet of light towards the jumbled machinery. The screens immediately projected images of a beach, a seaside town, a forest. Balamb lay, open plan, projected on the floor, beneath Quistis' feet.
"Let's get out of here."
Zone and Watts nodded agreement, and they rushed to join Quistis, who was readying a thundaga spell at an aerial that Squall had only just noticed was hanging from the ceiling.
But Squall stopped dead in his tracks. A cold breath seemed to slide down his back and he shivered. Slowly, he looked behind him, towards the door encased in ice…
It blew open. Watts and Zone shouted, as Quistis rushed forward to drag Squall onto the teleporter. Through the door stepped Seifer, who held something gold and glimmer in his hand before him as he smirked at the sight before him.
Time slowed to a pause. Tall, menacing, and cruel, Seifer had a glazed look in his eyes as his mouth curled slowly into a snarling grin, his hand clutched tightly to the strange glimmering thing; slowly, Squall managed to see that the SeeD failure was cut and bruised in many places beside his characteristic scar.
"No!" Squall shouted, time seeming to lunge back into motion as Quistis grabbed his arm and started dragging him towards Zone and Watts, under the aerial. Seifer raised the gold thing in the air and all at once everything went blurry; heat everywhere, along with smoke, fire, and the dark.
Attempts to raise his hands, get to his feet, shout, all ended in failure. There was only the dark. He heard Zone and Watts struggling under his and Quistis' weight – frightened squealing from Watts getting louder as Seifer's slow and deliberate footsteps drew nearer. Zone cursed as a Thundaga spell left his hand – from the sound of it, it missed the aerial and shot straight through the glass ceiling.
Shards of glass cut into his arms as he heard Zone charge another spell…
And then, after a brief buzzing sound filled the air, the heat and smoke vanished. He was aware suddenly of the pain, in his head, in his eyes, in the cuts and burns that covered him. His breath was ragged as the smell of salt filled his nostrils, before he slowly succumbed to the darkness all around him, and took one final, rattling breath.