A/N: This is a story I started probably four years ago, after reading the "Squall is Dead" theory for the first time. Full disclosure: I *hate* that theory. I can't stand theories that take the love and magic out of stories and try and turn them into something more bleak and realistic-I feel the same about the Harry Potter fan theory that was circling awhile back that none of the story actually happened, and it was all just a fantasy world an abused and neglected boy made up to escape the horrific conditions of his aunt and uncle's house. I want the magic, and the romance, and the fantasy to be real within the story. That's what suspension of disbelief is all about, right?
However, I did think the theory would make good fanfiction. I'm not honestly sure why I stopped working on this before, or why I didn't start posting it while I was working on it, but I'm giving it another go now. I've never done any sort of canon divergence before, so bear with me, and please let me know what you think!
Before Deling City, magic did not have a smell. It didn't have much meaning at all, other than the excitement of fairy tales, and those were rebellion in and of themselves. Magic was stories read with a flashlight underneath the covers so her father wouldn't know how she stayed up late on school nights, hidden with books that were her only companions for so many years. Magic was something in movies she watched at friends' houses. The source magic of the witches, and the para-magic soldiers fired at each other with abandon. Magic was soldiers; distant battles in war-torn towns that she longed to save, and remnants of a history she was afraid would be repeated.
Even when she first cast, Rinoa Heartilly could not say that magic was more or less than what everything she'd built up in her head. It stung, and she did not expect that. The spells burned in her veins and left her fingers tingling, and it was never as effortless as the movies made it look, as the SeeDs made it look. But she could say she had done it. When it was all over, she could watch the movies, read her books, and know a little bit more about what it was like to live in one of those stories.
But after Deling City, magic had a smell.
After Deling City, magic was the sulfur-smoke of fireworks lingering in the streets. It was the sound of a great iron gate slamming into the stone, and the way the bystanders went from cheering to screaming. It chilled her, even when it should have cast a fire.
After Deling City, magic smelled like blood.
She didn't know him, not really. And she had seen death before. Death in her mother, in the blood and glass running through her hair as she lay on the hood of the car when the young EMT pulled Rinoa out of the back seat without the forethought to keep her facing the other direction. Death in the litter of puppies she found in a bag washed up in the river when her father took her to the park and she screamed and kicked until he finally agreed to let her keep the only one that managed to survive. Death in the citizens of Timber who stood up to Deling City, and then in the Galbadian soldiers the SeeDs cut down like blades of grass.
He had killed men right in front of her, when she swallowed and locked her jaw and pretended not to care, and he was lying there now, one leg at an angle against the float of the parade and a stain of blood spreading beneath him. Was it the fall? Or the ice? Her cheeks were hot from where the shards has flown past close enough to leave her windburned, before sticking in his chest with a finality that would haunt her for weeks.
She struggled against whoever held her, kept her from running back to him, kneeling at his body. They wouldn't just leave him—they couldn't just leave him. SeeDs knew healing magic, they could bring him back, right? She had hung the hope of Timber on everything Seifer told her, it couldn't possibly be that easy to kill a SeeD.
Seifer.
"Rinoa," and she recognized the voice from before. "Let's go."
"No!" she shrieked, and her arm jerked against Seifer's firm grip before he slung her over his shoulder and took off at a run.
"Seifer, please," she half-whispered, locking her fingers tightly around his shirt, and every footfall punctuated her sobs.