It has been hours, watching their home draw closer and closer. Squall wonders how many, and then wonders how you reckon time in space anyway. Is what feels like an hour planet-side really the same? It makes time seem like such a frivolous conceit, and yet, he is ruled by it at home. Edea said that Ultimecia-whoever she is-wants to achieve Time Compression, whatever that is. And Rinoa…
He looks at her. She is hugging her knees against her in her seat, staring into the stars in front of them. She's been so quiet Squall assumed she had fallen asleep, but he's been quiet as well. In this instance, he wants to talk-or at least, for her to talk. There's too much now that isn't said and in the silence it echoes loudly in in his mind.
The planet approaches. It grows larger and Squall knows they are the ones moving but here they are, in space, and this giant sphere of blue and white and green and brown is the only thing around them that is changing.
Garden does not teach much about space. About the moon-how it's covered in monsters, and about the Lunar Cry, but not space itself. Squall wonders now if it's not because of Adel. Does Garden know where she is-or did they? He has learned more about Esthar and the Sorceress War in the last week than in twelve years of school, and in the way that Squall can't help, he has to ask if that was intentional. The secrets Cid Kramer has kept could take a full shelf's worth of space at B-Garden's library, and that's only counting the ones Squall has since discovered. It would not surprise him if Esthar's secrets were known to him, to Garden, all along.
Space and time. Up here, where clocks mean nothing and there are no days, and they stand still while the universe moves around them, there is nothing but the inside of the ship, and the coldness on his skin she left behind when they broke their embrace.
At home there will be questions, and decisions.
A Sorceress? Rinoa's hair flutters in the absence of gravity, and Squall has no trouble believing in what she has become-he suspects that he already knew. Was it, after all, that much of a surprise when Esthar made their claim? It should have been, he knows. And before, it is nothing he would have guessed. But now, after, the fact of it sits within him like a long-awaited answer to a riddle; one that waited on the tip of his tongue and once spoken aloud, it was hard to think he'd ever not known.
At home, there will be rationalizing, justification.
He did not know how fully he believed they would die out here until they heard the voice come through the comm link. This thought settles around him: what would their last moments have been like? In space, before the ship, because he acted on the consuming despair that took him when he thought of returning home without her. Did he really think he was going to save her? And didn't that make what he did a suicide mission? There would have been no romance in watching each other asphyxiate, no comfort in breaking apart and floating, alone, until they finally died. Then, after the ship, after air-what? Confessions? But he couldn't even react when she asked for a hug. Could he have admitted, "I didn't come out here to save you, but because I couldn't bear the thought of living without you?"
Now they will survive and it's bound to come up, if not with her, in the eyes of their friends. (Friends? What will they think? What will the others say, when Quistis finds them and explains why he and Rinoa aren't there?)
He has been nothing but reaction, impulse, since he walked out of the infirmary, and he will have to answer for that in time.
But first, they will land. There, she will be a Sorceress. There, he may lose her again, if not to Esthar, if not to Ultimecia or even to herself, to his own emotional inadequacies. There, he is a SeeD, and he does not think he can turn against her if that is what is asked. There…
Squall looks to her again and she has not turned from their view of the stars, but her cheeks are damp. He stretches out a hand and she turns at the movement, and when she meets his fingers with hers she smiles.
There is still an unknown time away, and Squall prefers it here. Here, they are suspended, and all those things unsaid are the only things with weight.
Some of this is on my profile, but for anyone who doesn't know (even though I've been singing from the rooftops), the reason for a lack of updates lately has been that Billy and I are now parents! Our first daughter was born July 5th, and between the end of pregnancy and having a newborn in the house, my brain hasn't been capable of thinking of much writing-wise. So, here's a one-shot until I'm able to get back into my headcanon enough to write more!