Breaking
Seifer was on his knees.
He was dying, right there on the sea shore, the waves the only steady thing in his otherwise dizzyingly-spinning mind. It was all gone. She'd come along, and...taken him apart. Taken what he offered in faith and smashed him open, mind and body and soul to see what it was inside him that made him think he was worthy to be hers.
And, Hyne, he'd wanted to be. He'd wanted to be hers so much, craved her mental caresses, longed for her physical touch. She'd called him a boy. He had been. She'd taken him with the promise of making him a man. Instead she'd broken him. Squeezed him in her taloned hands until he splintered like rotten wood.
Now he was nothing at all.
The waves came in again. In, out. In, out. In. Out. In. Steady. Rhythmic. Calming.
Ha.
He didn't understand what the word calm meant anymore. The last time he'd felt calm was resting in her soothing psychic embrace, crooning words of madness and pride in his ear. A restful, drugged haze, filled with the euphoria of insanity. She was heaven and hell, fire and ice. Opium.
She'd put her sweet fanged mouth to his and drained the strength from him. He could still hear her mad voice echoing in his ears. "Bleed for me..." she trilled. "Bleed for me..."
And the gods help him, he had. Everything he had he'd bled into her.
How had this happened?
Of course, he knew how it had happened. His greatest weakness. He needed to be loved. He needed to have someone look at him and see pride and faith shining in their gaze.
Ultimecia had given him that – but it was madness in hers. Bile and hope had risen in equal measures whenever he was around her.
And Seifer had bound himself to her too late. Too late to see that the one he should have been looking at...was still looking at him. Through a halo of blonde hair and twin oceans of cerulean. Too late, because it was only by the hurt and the betrayal and the bitter wound in her eyes that he knew she loved him.
At the exact same moment he knew she didn't anymore.
She was dying...because he had never looked at her. Every blow she dealt to him cost her more than it cost him. In the moment he'd realised that what he'd always sought was in his grasp all along, he stopped caring about anything else. Screw Garden, fuck Balamb and sod the rest of the world. How could he care about anything now...apart from mending the heart he'd broken?
That was where it all went horribly wrong. Turned out that Ultimecia wasn't happy about the idea of her knight abandoning her for another woman. The softly stroking hands turned into grasping claws digging barbs into his flesh. She'd almost made him as mad as she was.
Though right now, the last tenuous strands of his sanity fraying away, it did seem as though she'd succeeded. Some knight. All his strength was gone. He was the one who needed saving – and badly.
He wasn't aware of speaking the words, and his own hoarse voice, tinged with madness, surprised him. "Quistis. Help me."