In the disappearing moonlight, the sails on boats in the distant Dollet harbor turn slowly from ghost to shadow.
Squall Leonhart watches this from the small balcony of a hotel. Four stories below him the tide falls hard against the seawall, and he follows the rocks out into the sea towards the harbor until they give way to the darkness. Half the sails are gone. To Squall, they are more consumed than obscured, and those that remain stand still in the night, white flags sent towards the sky to prove that none below will fight the growing eclipse.
He runs a hand through his hair, and picks up the bottle sitting at his feet and drains what is left, and looks closely at the brown glass when he is done. Tiny beads of water form along the places on the neck he has not touched, and part of the label is starting to peel.
He frowns and steps inside, switching the empty bottle for one from the small refrigerator, and pops the cap off with a ridiculous moomba keychain Selphie bought him too many years ago for him to remember. Back then it was a joke. None of them guessed he'd end up using it so regularly.
Squall steps back onto the balcony, and looks this time not towards the harbor, but directly at the moon. She is almost hidden now, and he feels his breath catch. The night is not warm, but still his shirt sticks slightly to his chest, his blood hot in the fading light.
He doesn't want to be here. He never wants to be here, away from home, away from Rinoa. For all the time they are used to spending on opposite ends of the world, it's always different when he's in a place she could have followed. He misses her, the same as he always misses her, whether he is at Garden for the night or sleeping in a tree in western Centra while he waits for a rebel camp to pass through. But when he misses her here it is with a wilder frustration, and with another look to the moon Squall grips his bottle more tightly and knows he misses her also out of fear.
You shouldn't be alone.
The harbor has fallen fully into darkness now, and on the surface of the moon the steady outline that moved across it loses some of its edge, ripples rising and falling, visible only to an eye who knows what it is trying to see.
You shouldn't be alone.
Her voice echoes in his head and sends a chill down his spine, leaving a painful knot in his chest, and a question he has tried to avoid.
Has he missed her?
Superficially, yes. Of course he has. He misses listening to her talk, after he has had a long day, when she rambles on for hours, about something she saw while she was out buying groceries, about the injustices in the world she wishes she could change. Her voice is a salve, whether she is in the room or in his head, and when he is alone he is given too much time to retreat into his own mind.
But-so is she. And hers is far more dangerous.
She's brought it up, of course. Laying in bed as they both fall asleep, too exhausted to do more than let their legs brush against each other. She's brought up this new distance they have created, because, she says, they can only blame Garden so much. She brings up this distance and he listens to her half asleep, and says nothing, because he doesn't know what he is supposed to do.
She blames herself, and they both know she is not entirely wrong. She is receding, falling inward and he does not know how to follow. He sometimes doesn't know if he wants to. When he is away he can almost disconnect, until the feelings that used to jump from her to him are no more than dull awareness, if he can sense her there at all. It is not as difficult to sleep without her beside as it used to be, and when he is home, it is harder to let down that wall. When he comes home, he sees a pain in her he wants to take into himself-it is in her eyes, on her lips, it radiates from her skin, but he cannot reach it, touch it, contain it. Not the way he used to. And when she curls in on herself at night and all he can do is lay back with his hand stretched out towards her, he is certain she is so far gone that if he finds her, he'll never find the way to lead them back. That if he were to hold her until the madness she was feeling bled between them he would not be able to save her, and the best that he could manage would be to keep her from fighting that darkness alone.
The knot tightens, and Squall is overcome with her absence, and it is anything but superficial.
He thinks about the nights they barely touch, and he misses her body, folded against his while he breathes into her hair and waits for her to sleep. He misses her fingers threaded through his when they walk together along the canal, or on the beaches in Balamb. He misses her touch, her laugh, her smell. But it is the echo of her voice that finds him tonight, that flows into him, that reminds him of how much he misses the space inside him she has always occupied. A space that has become solid in the constant separations, as she has pulled away and he has pretended not to notice.
The final light of the moon vanishes, and night washes over him entirely. Dollet has turned off their lights in reverence (or, he supposes, fear), and the night is so complete that it takes him a moment to orient himself. He reaches in the direction he knows his room to be, and touches, not the door, but something warm and soft instead.
Rinoa.
He sighs into the darkness.
This. This is what he fears. The thought of her, and the way it invades him, all of him. It has been weeks since he has felt her in his blood and in one night, he hears her voice, and now he is imagining skin in the place of cool glass.
And then her hand closes over his-
I'm here.
-and in the absolute darkness, the path to the places she is hiding is lit.
He brings his other hand towards her and she draws forward, and presses herself against him.
"How…?"
"Shhhhh….."
This is not a dream. This is him, dizzy and moon-drunk, overwhelmed by just how strong her presence can be. In the thinning barriers caused by separation, by the shadow over the moon, they have managed to connect, and the reminder of the power they used to feel has brought her to him, and he doesn't care if she is real or not. He cannot see her, and he doesn't need to. He can smell her-the heady mix of flowers, earth, and deep magic-and he can hear her breathing. She is warm in his arms, and she is closer than she has been in months. He wants to tell her that he misses her, that he is going just as crazy as she is, that he never wanted to let her drift so far away. He wants to say something that will bring her back to him, but when he opens his mouth the words are not there.
I'm sorry.
She brings a hand to his face, and he leans into and kisses her fingers, tilts his head towards hers, and feels her lips press against his, and he is lost to her.
No apologies.
Her hands slide up the back of his shirt and her fingernails dig into his skin, and Squall gasps at how real the sensation is. His skin is burning, and the phantom-Rinoa pulls his shirt over his head, runs her hands over his sides and towards the button on his pants, and she starts to sink to the floor, trailing kisses over his neck, his chest, the scar that sits below his navel, and he reaches for the frame of the door just to keep his balance, and touches his other hand to her and lets out a low moan.
Behind them, there should be a dark circle in the sky, from a moon that casts no light. He has waited for this, waited in her honor, afraid of what would happen to her without him despite the distance between them, and told himself he would not let the night pass without his watch. Instead, it has brought her to him.
He holds the door more tightly. He is losing himself to the moment, to her. She is realer now than he can remember in a very long time, and though she has him nearly on fire he wants more.
Squall pries his hand from the wall and brings it to her shoulders and gently tugs her up, touching her arms, her sides, running his hands over her hips and bringing them up her back. She is naked, and he can't remember if she was before. Her skin is electrifying, and he kisses her, hard, and steps out of the rest of his clothing, and pins her against the glass of the door.
"Squall," she breathes, and it is once again her voice that is more powerful than anything she has done so far. "I don't think I'm really here."
"I don't care." He moves his fingers between her legs and leans into the sound she makes. "Rin-"
"Insi…inside," she gasps. He follows her, and when she stops beside the bed she pulls him towards her and kisses him, aggressively, and Squall wraps his arms around her and lowers her blindly onto the mattress. She laughs, a dark, seductive laugh, and he pushes her to her back, kissing her thighs, growing closer, and closer, and moaning into her when she shrieks. She is writhing on the bed, tightening her fists around the sheets below them, but he doesn't stop until her pulse is wet and hot on his tongue, and when he does move up he slides into her so fast the darkness flashes white before him.
She brings her hands around to his back again and rakes her fingers down, harder this time than before, and Squall cries out and moves into her, again, and again, and again, and she pulls him closer and closer towards her, and when he comes he crashes onto her, and he has all but forgotten where they are, and that she should not really be here.
Rinoa kisses him, softly, at the corner of his eye, on his cheek, and lifts his chin so she can kiss him on the lips. "I love you," she whispers, and in his haze he kisses her back, and thinks she might be crying. She repeats it. "I love you."
.
Squall wakes to the piercing ring of the phone, and an empty bed with sheets he'll need to wash. His muscles still feel heavy with orgasm, and the air carries the smell of their lovemaking. But where is-
"Rinoa?" he picks up the phone.
"That was amazing," she says, breathless.
"That was…real?"
He cannot find the line between before, and the moment he stepped outside himself and she appeared. He is still naked, and was not before he fell asleep-if he fell asleep at all. He looks outside, where the moon has broken through her shadow, the glow in the sky angry and foreboding. It has not been long since he sat out there, alone.
He licks his lips, and can still taste her on them.
"I think it had to be," she says. Between them he can hear her asking him, come home? but he is not sure if it is her voice or his own desire. The empty space on the bed beside him is already growing cold, and Squall feels the places she has occupied threatening to recede, a heaviness taking their place before he has had a chance to realize she is back.
How did I ever lose her in the first place?
Come home?
He wants to say, what about work? but he will not. They have only ever had one answer for that, and it is not an answer he thinks is going to matter for very much longer.
He wants to say what happened? but he already knows. He knew as soon as he answered the phone.
"Squall?"
He walks back to the small balcony and looks out over the water. The foam on the rocks below his room is just visible, and it is tinged red. Squall thinks he remembers reading a story once about a woman who threw herself into the rocks, something about the folklore of Hyne. He imagines the foam was stained red then, too.
The night finally feels cold to him, now that he has held her once, and now that he cannot. That is how it was, before.
That is how, he sees now, he should have always known this moment would be.
Squall turns from the moon, growing ever redder, and from the blood-stained rocks below, and sits on the corner of the bed. He listens to Rinoa's breathing on the other end of the line, and reaches for the energy inside him that lets him know that she is there, and he imagines her staring out the window of their bedroom, waiting for him to come home.
"I…" he pauses, but it is the only answer she needs.
"I'll see you soon," she says, her breathing back to normal. "I love you."
He tells her he loves her too, and in the red light of the moon reaches for his keys. He'll dress, and he'll leave. There's no need to pack.
There's no coming back, he knows, from the place he's going home to.
Ronin-ai put up a casual challenge earlier in the week using the lunar eclipse/blood moon as a prompt. Naturally, I had to take her up on it, and the result might end up related to another story I am working on right now since I drew from it thematically. Other things of note-heavily influence from Murakami due to finally reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and a reference to Ashbear's Crimson Lies (and it may have taken me longer to look through that story to find exactly what I wanted to reference than it did for me to actually write this...), because headcanons are much more fun when you share them with friends.