Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. Those Square-Enix people do. More's the pity, though it might be for the best…
Comfort
Nobody should have to be completely alone. I forget what words I used at the time, but I'd told Squall something along those lines. Eventually I guess he'd come to believe it.
I shuddered at the memory of that night. What a sad attempt it had been at a romantic interlude. What had I said? Nothing really, I didn't get a chance to. I probably wouldn't have said anything anyway. Later on I could exclaim I had thought I was in love, but before that? Hah, if I remember correctly my great confession of undying passion was more of me admitting that I'd been sacked. The poets will be pounding down my door for a transcription of that one. Hmm, now there's an image, a horde of poets trying to force their way into the dormitory of the renowned hero, Quistis Trepe.
What was I saying again? Oh yes, 'nobody should have to be completely alone'. Nice piece of advice, that. Maybe it wasn't my most eloquent moment but it had proved profoundly true for the most solitary of individuals. That really just left one little question.
… why was I still alone?
Oh right, I'm not really alone. I've got friends, associates, my surrogate parents and all of SeeD to belong to. I have my students who really are a joy to teach. Learning from my past… less than successes, when Cid offered to reinstate my license I requested having younger classes. I now taught a Weapons Basics class that children took between the ages of nine and twelve to choose their primary weapon and an elementary Biology class mostly inhabited by eight year olds. They truly are adorable when they're not being infuriating.
Getting my license back had been a strangely awkward moment. Poor Headmaster Cid hadn't known what to tell me. In the end he'd just blurted out 'I needed to send you with Squall and the others. I asked a faculty member to write up a release form for you. I didn't know they would use it as an excuse to fire you!' I looked at him hard for a moment or two and then laughed. Cid had looked doubly perplexed but I couldn't help it. All those feelings of self doubt, frustration, even betrayal had been based on a clerical error. I still shake my head at the memory of it.
I wonder which faculty member did it. I sometimes toy with the idea of being furious with them. It might be kind of fun to confront them. In the end though, I have to admit that they did everyone a favor. Squall may have been the big hero, Rinoa the figure of fate, but that didn't mean that it would have worked without the rest of us there to do what we could. My being there had made some small difference that in the end added up to a victory. The world had been saved and a class worth of students had been saved from a teacher that really didn't have the disciplining skills needed to lead. I was saved from another year of awkwardness, standing in front of a group that should have been my peers. Everyone won this way. Maybe in another few years I'll ask for the advanced Junctioning class again and show everyone how I've let the time improve me.
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Xu noticed her long time friend leaning against the balcony railing. It was a favorite place to come and think for both women and a few others that had discovered the view. Thinking was just what Xu had in mind, but she had never minded sharing words or silence with the younger mercenary.
She approached the railing, putting herself in Quistis' peripheral view before nodding ahead of her and asking, "So, what scenery is it that you're really looking at." She then turned to smile at her friend. They both knew that when Quistis let herself be lost in thought she didn't always see anything so mundane as what was in front of her.
Half a smile preceded the response. "I was thinking of the SeeDlings."
Xu had named the younger students 'SeeDlings' back when she had been a SeeD candidate. On nights when they had been so tired or so stressed that humor could be found anywhere they would laugh at the idea that you would have to shrink a seedling back to be a seed, but you had to train a SeeDling to be a SeeD. "But isn't it best for a seedling to become a tree, a flower?" She set up the line.
"It is, but a SeeDling longs to grow into a SeeD, not by nature-"
"-but by design," Xu finished. How easy it was to slip into habits of years past. She shook her head infinitesimally. "You always have thought about the students, tried to do the best for them."
"I guess. Maybe
I think that if I'm looking out for others that somehow someone will be
watching out for me."
Xu snorted. "Like you'd put up with
someone looking over your shoulder. I
can see you now, turning right to some haughty guardian angel and saying 'I can
take care of myself, thank you very much!'"
Quistis' eyes sparkled as she laughed. "Well naturally I'd have no need for a guardian angel so inexperienced as to be caught."
"Naturally."
The breeze was just slightly too strong to be called
pleasant but weak enough to be a far cry from wind. As it brought hints of Balamb's ocean it was
invigorating. That feeling was something
that made this spot such a perfect one for thinking. With that playful sting to the face and
stimulus of the senses it was impossible for the mind to stay idle. Just contemplating the place itself Xu became
lost enough that she only caught the tone of a question and none of the words. "Huh?"
"I said, what brings you here? I
don't suppose you would come here if something weren't on your mind. It usually helps you to tell someone…"
Quistis lip twitched up on one side and her eyebrows lifted ever so slightly,
"Not the mention ragging on whomever, whatever's upset you with one of
your favorite people in the world."
"Yeah, you're right, too bad Squall's not here."
"Xu! That's not funny!" but
she was laughing anyway because she knew Xu didn't mean it.
"You know I don't mean it." The older SeeD shut
her eyes lightly for a short time while she waited for the mirth to fade into a
less defined moment. "I'm not
really sure why I got upset. It was a
joke and everyone knew it. I don't even
know who I'm really mad at though Irvine's
a pretty good substitute target for the moment."
"Irvine? What happened, Xu?" Quistis' brow
furrowed with concern.
Xu laughed. "He
was just being Irvine. Testing Selphie's reaction once again, he
decided to hit on me. He does it to
everyone. He does it to you every other
day."
"Or more," Quistis muttered.
"Exactly. So why did I get so upset? Geh, I'm glad I didn't say anything to anyone, but I did take a bit of an abrupt leave." Xu waited for her friend's reaction, to see if she would force her to put together the pieces. The idea of what was bothering her tickled her mind but she wasn't going to admit it yet. She'd only give it permission to enter via Quistis, picked as steward by virtue of being in their thinking spot and asking what was on her mind.
Quistis tapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth,
proof that she was weighing her words carefully. When satisfied she spoke. "Sometimes his flirting makes me feel a
bit lonely. It's not serious or mean
spirited, but it does sort of pound home the fact that I'm rather more 'available'
than I might be."
Xu sighed, that would be the reason she was upset. She had to admit it. "Yeah, I guess that's it." She
looked over the vast Balamb plains and repeated the line Quistis had never told
her friend she'd once uttered to their commander. "Not everyone can get by on their own."
The younger SeeD made no response. She knew Xu wasn't trying to make her think of that 'other' conversation, if it could be called such. It had been on her mind already and she was primed to be reminded of it. That state of mind had put her in the role of Squall, listening to an awkward expression from someone he didn't know how to comfort. The difference was that she would try, and to give him credit Squall would too, now. The similarity was that Quistis wasn't sure she was any better at offering support than he was. Among people that were trained to be mercenaries from childhood she had earned a reputation for being cold. No one ever called her mean or unfair. They simply seemed to see her as 'apart'. She felt apart, so she couldn't really disagree. She wasn't sure how she came to be disconnected and was even less certain how she could ever be anything else. She was sure, however, that separation was what kept her feeling alone when she was surrounded by people she cared for.
The silence stretched on with the weight of the sentiment as both women retreated into their thoughts.
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I'm glad she was here to talk to. We don't talk much, really. We greet each other without words and go about the day, doing the things we were trained, if not born to do. To everyone else we don't seem close at all, but just friendly acquaintances. She's one of the heroes, and I spend more of my time with the headmaster and bridge staff. It's not like that though. It's more like we just got to the point where all that pretense stuff wasn't necessary.
I remember seeing her for the first time when I was fifteen and she was just eleven years old. All limbs, messy blond hair and corrective glasses for her far-sightedness. She walked into our new dorm after we shook hands and I turned to my instructor in a huff. 'What the hell's this about? What'd I do wrong? What's with the shrimp?' Oh yeah, I thought I'd been put on babysitting duty, or that maybe I was being threatened with being held back.
The instructor just laughed at me. 'The shrimp, as you named her, is Quistis Trepe,' he said, 'and she happens to be an incredibly gifted child who has been advanced into the class just two levels below yours. Now, her old roommates were a bit jealous and started giving her a hard time, so I decided to move her in with someone I was sure I could trust not to mistreat her.' Yeah, it'd been flattery mixed with threat. That'd always been the best way to deal with me in my younger years.
Quistis proved to be a much more pleasant companion than I had thought. In fact, even though I had been told before hand how gifted she was, her genius never failed to amaze me. Talking to her was often more like talking to one of the more naïve girls my own age than a child. Other times it was like conversing with a talking textbook. When it came time for finals that first year it was her quizzing me on the things I would be tested on, even if I was still in a more advanced class than hers. I still think that if not for the physicality aspect she could have graduated with me. As it was, she was still a SeeD younger than anyone before. Most pass the test at eighteen. I, like a good number of the more promising applicants passed at seventeen. Every couple of years some hotshot will become SeeD while they're still sixteen. Quistis came back from her field test exhausted and pale, but passed with a rank six at age fifteen.
Watching her graduate had been a shock. There was the girl that I'd once had to stand up for. I remembered nights spent sitting on the floor mastering the game of Triple Triad when we should have been sleeping. I'd spent two years going from mission to mission, occasionally spending time in my SeeD single dormitory. In that time 'the shrimp' had become a warrior and there she was, wearing her uniform because she didn't own a ball gown. She wasn't the only one. Of course, there were a lot of orphans and other underprivileged at Garden that couldn't afford to spend their allowance on dresses. She was however, the only girl-woman, wearing the uniform that managed to look as beautiful as the girls in their fancy gowns.
I'd found that at once amusing and unsettling. I worried for her. The girl I'd known wouldn't know how to react to the attention she was going to be receiving. It seems almost preposterous now to think of me worrying about Quistis Trepe knowing how to handle herself. It didn't stop me at the time from keeping an eye on her all night. I'd been asked four years before to take care of her and I suppose I still felt it was my job.
I guess it was also that night when I started realizing the effect being a SeeD had on friendships. Two years of coming and going is a long time. The SeeDs and the students of Garden were my allies and charges that I would die to serve and protect, but my old friends were more and more associates and acquaintances. Some of the ones I saw that night I barely recognized and I noticed how many of them barely recognized me. We'd changed so much that we couldn't say for sure that we really still knew each other. Sometimes in those first years it was hard to commit to saying we really knew ourselves.
These days I help run Garden. I spend an average of 19 hours a day on my feet. I get my meals in via a fly by routine that the dedicated cafeteria workers have come to predict. My life is so much simpler now than it was then. Sometimes I can't help but think it's a sad, sad world we live in.
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It was hard to say how much time had passed but it felt as if it had been close to an hour. Xu surprised herself, realizing that she felt entirely fine about the day's events. Their place had worked its wonders once again.
She was disappointed to see that the same couldn't be said for Quistis. There was a distinct shadow over her features as she battled her own demons. It was so hard to comfort the blonde. She had such difficulty letting things out that Xu only felt guilty for pressing her to say things. What worked better, for what it was worth, was to give her a word of encouragement, or anything positive before leaving her to confront her problems on her own.
"Quistis," Xu waited until she was sure her call had brought her friend from the world of her own contemplation, "it's just, well, even when you don't or can't really say anything, you've always comforted me."
Quistis was truly surprised and it showed in her features which were much more open than many thought. She spent equal portions of time looking at Xu and looking back to the distant mountains. When she spoke it was quiet and had a character of sound more like the girl she'd been before than the hero that could boast her own fan club. "You've always been able to comfort me too, even when I haven't been able to let on that I needed it."
Xu felt her breath catch in her throat. She'd never really felt like she'd been able to make much of a difference to Garden's protégé. She felt a strange shiver go up her spine and she had to wonder if this odd sensation had any relation to the kind of power 'important' people felt. She was important in SeeD. She made life or death decisions for a living. This strange empowering feeling left her inexplicably feeling helpless for the first time since she'd walked up to Garden's gates that day twelve years ago. It was maddening, almost. She almost didn't realize she was speaking aloud. "I'm just Xu, doing my thing while the world does its."
Quistis caught a hint of the distress in Xu's voice. The things her friend was expressing were such strange concepts, almost delusions. She wondered if she should call her on them. "Only? It's an odd thing to hear." Quistis felt like she could almost see her voice fading into the darkening sky. "You're such a natural leader. I always saw you as a rolemodel of sorts. I wasn't necessarily trying to be like you. It was more like I'd see you and think 'there's an example of what people can be'. Strong, kind, beautiful…It always seemed like if you ever decided you didn't want to be completely independent that someone would just appear to take your arm."
Now Xu was officially reeling in shock. She sputtered, "How can Balamb's own Ms Gorgeous Hero Genius call me beautiful?"
The lack of confidence implied by that comment, made Quistis recoil as if she'd been slapped. It irked her to think of Xu disrespecting herself. She furrowed her brow before sighing in exasperation. She had the mindset of readying an attack plan that would meet an expert defense as she thought of what to say. The only thing for it was to make a crushing first strike. "Because you are beautiful," and since actions are stronger than words she followed through by lightly pressing her lips against Xu's.
There were alarms going off in Xu's mind so furiously that she new her defenses had been totally blown away. She boggled at her own confusion. All the while there was a little voice inside her head that simply kept insisting that if she weren't socially incompetent that she would have recognized all those 'protective instincts' for what they really were. She focused on that voice as the rest of her consciousness told it to shut the hell up.
Quistis saw Xu's stupefaction and blushed. She'd just been thinking tactics up to that moment. Implications had not been on her list of worries. She backed away, trying to diffuse the tension with distance.
Seeing Quistis use distance once again made Xu's chest ache. Suddenly her confusion didn't matter. All that did matter was that she closed the gap before the distance became impossible to cross. "Quistis," she blurted, "…nobody should have to be alone."
The rawness of the statement and the matching look on Xu's face touched something in Quistis. She felt something that was either new or old stirring and she got an odd feeling that this time she knew what words were being said behind the ones spoken and that she actually could answer them. "Comfort me, Xu."
Xu wrapped her arms around Quistis' waist and tucked her head against the tall woman's shoulder. "Always."
End
AN: I know it's no great piece of art, but perhaps it helped assuage the need for Quistis/Xu shoujo-ai. Thanks be to anyone who enjoyed this enough to leave a non-flame review. I guess flames are ok too, but I'd much rather get something constructive or kind…