~*Yay! Okay, I promise that this time I will not delete the story. It's just as the months go by, I get a little bit smarter and realize that some of my writing sucks. But I'm gonna stick with it this time. This is the fourth time that I've started this story over from scratch. I will keep with it! I guarentee it. For those of you who are not farmiliar with this story, (you and the rest of the world,) you do not know the main plot and that is good thing. I must warn you though, to not get too attached. (I know I flatter myself too much.) Any Rinoa lover, espessially myself would find this story very depressing and need to take long breaks in between writing chapters. I'm not saying that this is not a fic for Rinoa lovers, it's not a fic for Rinoa lovers who lose sleep over bad things happening to her, but she isn't a slut or something stupid like that. Ahhhhh! Rambling! Emma, stop! Well, enough of that. You all know that Squaresoft owns the people that appear in Final Fantasy Eight, I don't need to tell you that, and let's get started with Chapter One.*~

Raijin was nodding off. It was quite understandable as he had not been sleeping well lately, but never the less it was very bad because he was behind the wheel of a rented car. The dark afternoon sky and pelting rain above their heads didn't help him wake up. Fujin's head was softly resting against the window. She wasn't sleeping, but her conscience was flickering between the boundries. Fujin's uncharacteristic silence allowed Raijin to think for once. Every now and then, he did have something insightful to think about. He blinked himself out of sleep for the hundredth time and kept his heavy eyelids wide open, not daring to let them shut, even just a little bit.

They had been driving for two hours now; it was nine in the morning, a Saturday. If they had anticipated the weather, they would have left earlier to arrive at their orginal goal of two. There was no way they would get there by then, and they would probably have to reschedual for six o'clock that evening. Or they could be overbooked and have to stay at the inn at Winhill or...the scenarios were endless.

He hadn't even considered what would happen should they get there on time. Part of him feared what would happen if they didn't turn back that second, and he almost obeyed his gut feeling to do so. But the other part of him wouldn't allow that. It was the other part of Raijin that had kept him awake, that had kept the vehicle from being wrapped around a tree. It was the desire that was threatening to rip him apart if he didn't hurry things up, despite the drowning tears of the sky. And it was just that impulse that made his foot suddenly heavy and caused the car to lurch forward, waking a disgruntled, edgy Fujin. Awakened from her short lived moments of peacefulness, Fujin mustered up all the force in her and applyed it to the back of Raijin 's head. The car swerved, its driver far too preoccupied to think about the brand new paint job.

"Ow! Fuge, I'm driving, ya know." Raijin managed to get the car onto the dirt road, now a trailway of mud from the downpour.
"IDIOT!" Fujin glared in his general direction. Mud was now splashing up shoulder height on either side of the vehicle.
"I just figured that..."
"NO." The man that was twice her size was silenced by the monosymbolic command. "I FIGURE. YOU DRIVE."
He looked ahead at the road, but was determined to be heard. "But since we lost so much time getting out of the city if we went faster here we might..."
"QUIET. DRIVE." And that was that. The car slowed down from the blur it had become, Fujin resumed her position of sleep, and after the pain in the back of his head numbed down, Raijin was able to commence his pondering once again.

His sleep was now pushed as far back in his mind as possible; nervous energy was running clear throughout his bloodstream. He looked over at his slumbering cousin and wondered how she could possibly not be as jumpy as he. Maybe he was haunting her dreams, as he was his awareness. As it stood, it would be a very long time, probably never, until he understood the inner workings of her mind. How she could go into a frenzy over speeding and sleep through their arrival, was a mystery that he didn't urge his simple mind to solve.

They had turned out to be pretty shitty friends, in Raijin's terms. After all of that rubbish, they had ended up with everything as normal, just how they had hoped from the beginning. The way things used to be. But how could they let themselves drift apart? They were all a group, a posse. His posse. How was it that they two had left him on his own, with that little slut? At the time it seemed that he had left them to their own devices, but now, when Raijin looked back on it, Fujin and him had allowed him to get on that last train to Dollet, and so, had left him. Over the last eight years, he had often wondered what had become of him, where he and Viora had ended up.

Today he would catch up on old times, reminise, and get some answers. But not in some cozy apartment living room. The D-Distric Prison visitor section for felons in for life without parole.