XXXVI

Super Long Author's Note:

This is a series of 36 drabbles, based on Georges Polti's 36 Plots which aims to categorize all literary situations that can occur in storytelling. Henceforth, the title, XXXVI (thirty six in Roman numerals). It's set in the FFVIII fandom, with all characters, timeline, pairings, and genre open to variation. This may mean language, sex, drug use, anything. Some may be religiously provocative due to the 31st theme Conflict with a God - (Mortal, Immortal) so please keep an open mind. I'll be posting them in pairs, hopefully bringing it up to 18 chapters.

Concrit, praise, etc. is appreciated. Please enjoy.

I: Supplication a Persecutor; a Supplicant; a Power in authority

Words: 271

He had split her lip, cracked her jaw in two places, then thrown a wet towel over her body, her corpse, whatever she was, he didn't think of her in anything other than purely a vehicle for the mechanics of a human. A heart beat only to oxygenate her blood, and the sound of bones cracking were simply an illustration of the frailty of humans, even his knuckles were sore. He repeated this logic but it failed.

And she was laughing, laughing so much she could feel the blood clotting against her teeth, and he smoked. Why had she wanted this, she never knew, she only knew desperation now. She eventually asked for a cigarette.

"I take it you enjoyed that?" He said, sucking on the cigarette, and listening to the humhumhum of the fan of the room swirling around dust and dead skin cells and the smell of sex.

"Yes, I did." She wiped her mouth on the towel. Her lips were stained red from the blood and where she had been biting so hard earlier. In a moment of weakness, or tenderness, he could never distinguish either ('tenderness is weakness' he heard a voice say) he went to wipe her lip free of the blood that was making her look so ugly. She snarled and hissed, arching her naked body upwards.

"Don't touch me that way." She said like a cat, her beautiful breasts springing, and he knew she wanted to hurt him. But they didn't work that way. To be in control she was the one who had to have him swinging and thrusting and bleeding her out.

Persecutor: Quistis

Suppliant: Seifer

Power in Authority: Sexual urge, death

II: Deliverance - (Unfortunates, Threatener, Rescuer)

Words: 765

It had been the whittling of the dark clouds in the distance that made Edea first think of rain. In the corner of the scene she was witnessing from the stone shaped wall outside she could see the shape of children's heads bobbing into the salty seawater. Zell gasped as he furiously kicked his legs. Seifer sniggered, bare chested, as he played with a conch shell and watched the weaker boy fight the waves. Quistis was studying the pattern of the coast from a book Matron had delivered for her birthday. Selphie yelled BOOM CHICKA BOOM BOOM and belly flopped into the water. Irvine was dipping his toe sanguinely in the water and smiling at 'Sefie'. Squall was dipping his hands in the sand like a baby discovering it for the first time. Edea briefly remembered the first time Squall crawled on the linen of her bed and almost fell off, but didn't cry, just clung to her happily and laughed.

Sometimes she tried to find similarities with the boy she saw now; even if it was a momentary flicker of the eye like whenever Matron did peek-a-boo with him, first a concern she felt resonated so deeply within the young baby then happiness that his surrogate mother hadn't really disappeared into the world behind her hands. Or even perhaps the way he pronounced his food; 'basketi' was now a perfectly announced 'spaghetti' with no notable accentuation, unlike the way Selphie still said 'I want an APP-le juice'.

Quistis' t-shirt fluttered in the approaching wind like a raggedy old flag. Without any warning, a bright sword of lightning struck through the grey sky to the solemn earth below it. The sound cracked upon the impact with the rocks. Now, her children were all standing soldiers, watching their enemy approach with unblinking eyes.

"It's thunder!" Seifer yelped happily. Zell let out a wail at the word that made him feel cold. Selphie asked Quistis what thunder was and Quistis was too embarrassed to admit she didn't know. Then, like a shadow, Edea equated in her head the trail of the thunder and the mass of children around the water. She dropped her laundry and let out a yell just before the next lightning bolt struck.

"Children! Get in!"

Zell slipped up and down the steps and was immediately around the calm of Edea's waist. Quistis ordered Selphie and Irvine inside immediately! while Seifer and Squall remained on the beach.

"Wa-whoo! Look at that!" Seifer said, pounding his fist in the air, feeling the reverberations of sound and light in his chest like the way he'd feel the first dizzying heights of an orgasm when he lost his virginity at fourteen.

"What's wrong, Squall? You scared of lightning?"

"No. But who's making all that thunder?" He whispered. Seifer laughed and carried on jumping. Edea panicked and rushed down the steps. The children congregated like one giant albatross and watched her black hair whip wildly against the wind like a famed woman from a storybook they read whose lover drowned in the ocean. Her hair looked like ink spilt on parchment paper (an accident that occurred a week earlier) and her shouts sounded like a hair fracture on a vinyl record (that was no-one's fault).

"You two, get inside!" She said as calmly as she could.

"No." Seifer whined, and in a moment of rare clear-cut-diamond authority, gentle Edea grabbed his wrist and rushed him in a panic up the winding stairs. He fought back a whimper. Then, she realised Squall was still standing deathly, quietly still, and for a moment he looked like a fixture on the beach, as unmoving as black stone. What if the lightning struck that little boy down?

"Squall! Squall! Squall!" They all sang like a chorus. Edea felt no breath in her as she speeded through the sand. She felt like a ghost, screaming against a wall of sound, matter, light and energy. The lightning was too strong. Squall's face turned blue as the lightning struck a few feet away from him. Edea screamed.

"Oh Squall, Squall." She hummed in his ear, picking him up, forgetting his weight and feeling as if she was the strongest woman alive. "Squall."

"Matron." He whispered, taking in the powdery, scented smell of her hair. He ran his fingers through it, and Matron cried, remembering at once the first time he had appeared in her arms, bathed in a white blanket, and reached for her hair with his tiny chubby hands. When they were inside, it suddenly occurred to Matron that it had thundered then too.

Unfortunates: The children

Threatener: Thunder

Rescuer: Matron