the sorceress' war, a final fantasy viii fanfic

Disclaimer: I own nothing of the Final Fantasy VIII franchise but a copy of the game.

Notes: Takes place post-game. I take no responsibility for whatever spoilers you may encounter from this point on. :)

the sorceress' war

prologue

For a few months they live in a loft off the coast, in a city. Balamb Garden was at first a school, then a refuge that soared through sky and sea, then a training ground for soldiers again. It has never been meant to play host to women heavy with children, and Rinoa says firmly that she will not break its wings, even for the nine months it will take.

Dr. Kadowaki backs her opinion. "It may be better," she says carefully, and even Squall, who makes a rule of ignoring those ghostly words that do not break the surface of what is, can hear the weary note stretched through her voice, "if she stays away from the Garden for a little while. Pregnant women should not fly, and..." Her smooth thick hands jerk together to set a bone; the boy whose arm she holds so fastly whitens and bites his lips but doesn't cry out. Neither does she falter when she looks up. Her eyes flash broken bones and vicious scars over a series of several months, all dating back to that first day when the world had felt the loss of all their sorceresses barring one, and understood what it meant.

She makes Squall think, though he does not know why, of the Dollet representative who arrived several weeks ago, ostensibly to speak of hiring extra border guards. He had a fighter's stance, though, and a crooked scar that peeked beneath his workman shirt's collar when he sprawled across a chair to talk. His voice was drawling, cutting, an oiled whine, and when Rinoa had come in to drag Squall out to lunch, the representative's eyes had stayed a little too long on Rinoa's hands and her small features, as if he were marking her, before he had asked who she was.

But Dollet was only the first piece. Slowly, over a series of months, Squall has begun to catch a pattern, like the shape of a regiment shortly before it falls into an attack, between the places where they are called and the rising uncertainty caught in the lowered voices of Balamb's students and the letters that he starts to receive. It exists only for a moment before it vanishes and is a series of unrelated incidents again, and Squall cannot think about it for too long. He has other things to take care of. Everything begins and ends the same way, after all: with words, words, words that cannot be pieced together, of which he cannot speak.

Because his instinct, too, is speaking, and what it says makes him want to take Rinoa and live forever in the southern jungles among the boughs dripping with waxy flowers and the scattered ruins, where no one will ever find them.

It is saying: they come, and they will take her again, and if you let her go you will never have her back.

So Squall says nothing when the doctor makes her decree, and he does not speak as he signs a curt and perfunctory scrawl on the papers that will hold Balamb a year before the situation will crumble.

He does not tell Rinoa, either, but that is different: she already knows.

("I think it's sort of cute," Selphie says seriously when he walks in on Rinoa neatly folding her scant possessions into a suitcase, preparing to leave for a city. Irvine is there too, staring mistrustfully at the wallpaper with which Rinoa has decorated her room. Squall is, for the most part, careful not to look at it himself; he suspects that Rinoa put it up chiefly to clash with the spartan design of the ship, and incidentally, he prefers not to be blind.

Rinoa tips her head up, smiles. "What is?"

Selphie twirls to the closet, swings a dress from the hanger, and rocks back on her heels, dancing as she hands it to Rinoa. "The fact that Squall's doing all of this for you, and he didn't even have to tell you. You knew! It's the perfect connection, and so romantic..." She sighs, and snaps a dark look at Irvine. "Unlike some people, who don't even apologise after completely ruining your birthday..."

"Whoa," Irvine flings up a hand. "I thought it was funny, Selph! And you said you didn't like birthdays all that much anyway--"

"Yes," she snaps, "but I didn't want Zell to jump out of my birthday cake."

"She wanted someone else to," Rinoa supplies, eyes sparkling. She smothers a laugh behind her hand as Irvine slowly reddens. Serene, she drops the lid on the suitcase and meets Squall's eyes before she closes the distance between them, throwing her arms around him.)

Rinoa finds it first. The enormous windows curve across the walls in panels of glass thin as lace. A tight tremor shakes through even when she only lays slim careful fingers against one, but they do not break. The walls are freshly whitewashed, the neighborhood outwardly terrible and broken from the aftermath of something no SeeD would have consented to do. But the lights that flutter through at sunset are lustrous and beautiful.

Or so Rinoa says, in words and the way her smile lights slowly as the sun sinks into the dark, and Squall thinks that this, at least, is beauty enough.

Squall remembers the empty weight of his room in the Garden, but this is different. Here, Rinoa fills all the space; a toss of flowers in a vase on the table in the hall, silk curtains extravagant with frills sweeping across a window, the rest bare with glimpses of the city precise as snapshots, each marked by how she gestures when she chooses, of all possibilities, this apartment; how she laughs at the towers and squat houses and smiles to see, at the end of the passage, the ocean.

("Here," she says, and presses his hand over the curve of her belly. It's early yet, and Squall has been honed to a fighter's exactitude. Even so, he thinks that he can feel a ghostly kick, a heartbeat, as they wait for night to slide across the water.)

Because Squall dislikes idleness, he takes up a job as an independent gunblade instructor for the year. Three floors down and to the far left of their loft, there is a studio with a high arching dome for a roof that's perfect for practice, and that is where he teaches when he finds students ready to learn -- students unwilling to commit to the fighting life of a SeeD, but skilled even so.

Some of them know who he is, and others do not. All of them look at Rinoa with curt nods and no interest in her as anything but an extension of their teacher's presence, and day by day he feels the ebb of a pressure that he had not recognised because it had seemed as though it had always been there.

He still doesn't want to think about why it was there at all, though, and so he ignores the thought when it comes, looking at the way the lights tangle through stained glass on the floor, the paintings and prints that Rinoa pulls out of impulse and childish delight at the market, the lines of something promising in a mess that is Rinoa's first and last attempt to make a truly complicated dish.

He is seeing the world through Rinoa, and still it is a while before it dawns upon him. It happens suddenly and slowly: on the way home from the market in the evening, it rushes through his mind in a winding current.

The world is beautiful here, he thinks, and cannot help but be surprised.

to be continued...

notes: Yes, I know, it's a little fluffy and light on the action so far. It's a set-up -- action comes later. If you have more criticism to deposit beyond that, however, the review box is always open to your complaints.