The following is a work of fanfiction. The character(s) and worlds depicted within it are not in any way mine: Final Fantasy is the property of Squaresoft, as far as I'm aware. The song this is named for and takes inspiration from is also not mine, but Hefner's, and the lyrics I have generally refrained from quoting are by Darren Hayman.
This is also a work of yuri, or femslash: it contains girls with girls in romantic/sexual relationships, and also a hint of reference to female anatomy. If the very idea does not appeal to you, or you are underage, it might be wiser not to read it: the back button is your friend. Just a suggestion, you understand.
the hymn for the alcohol
Drinking wine still reminds me of getting drunk illegally in our room, far superior to the other cadets and their bootlegged spirits bought cheaply at the back of the Balamb garage. They never knew what they were drinking, you would say, maybe it was actually car fuel that brought those stupid boys to the infirmary to have their stomachs pumped by a disapproving Kadowaki and brought down official wrath on the whole student body. They would search everyone's rooms, ours too, but there was always a good place to hide it if you had any skill at planning, so we were fine. After a week I would bring a couple of bottles back in and we would celebrate whatever was going on in our lives: you passing another test, generally. You're going to overtake me at this rate, I said, and you would have were it not for the Faculty and their inane idea that somehow you were too young. Too young? You acted my age, older.
You never liked to get drunk, really: we would bring ourselves to the edge of tipsiness and then restrict it to a few sips, giggling softly and talking in low voices. Time blurred, slowed to the pace of your breathing as you lay across my bed, one hand pulling the tie from your hair and trailing through it: it tangled behind you and you twisted a bit around one finger and wondered how you would look with curls. I said it would suit you: I forbore to mention that I thought anything would suit you, even if you shaved it all off - never do that - you would always be beautiful. I may have been drunk, a little drunk, not very, and I had drunk more than you, always did, but I knew how to keep my mouth shut.
It would not have been the right thing to say: it would have made me less objective, less easy to trust when you asked me honest questions. You would have been scared.
Galbadian white for you, Centra red for me. I would make you taste mine, but you could never understand what it was about it that I so loved. This, I would say, is from the crater vineyards; this is from the coast. You can taste the difference, a hint of oceanic salt here, the land-tang of berries there. You laughed behind your hand: me being pretentious again, it's just wine, silly. All the reds tasted the same to you, you claimed, but after a while you seemed to like them.
I got used to your Galbadian, too: the sharp Dollet, the sweet warm mountain vintages. Those wines taste like you, still, and at the last function I took a sip from my glass - no reds left for the busy SeeD who turns up harassed from paperwork - and could not speak for fear of losing that scent, that sweetness in my mouth. I lost it, anyway, no matter how I tried to keep it with me, and however slowly I drank, it left me.
When I went back for a refill, they had changed the cask to some acrid stuff that they had no doubt confiscated from the Alternative Festival Committee (It's All About School Spirits!). I knocked it back in penance, wincing.
Rum, too, is warm and sweet: warm, always warm, no matter how much ice I throw at it, and sickly-sweet, cloying, dulling my tongue and numbing my senses. After you left the first time, six months ago, I poured out a glass of Crater Red and the memories made me gag. I coughed it out over the sink and had to pour the rest of the glass down as well, white flecks of spit cresting over the swirling red. I felt like a junior cadet choking on cheap car-fuel spirits, my lungs bubbling, and could not look Kadowaki in the face for a week after. But rum I could, and did, drink regularly: too much, even. With you not there, there was no-one to hide my thoughts from.
I didn't drink wine again until you turned up at the door of my room, hopeful, a bottle under each arm. It could have been any time after I had graduated, us standing like that, the same room as ever. Maybe you were still sixteen and rooming with that girl you couldn't stand, but she liked you, and it was fun to point that out and watch you try so hard to be charitable because you couldn't bear to be cruel. I was about to make some joke about her, tell you not to worry, that soon you would be a SeeD too and there would be no her demanding to know where you were going and why she was not invited. Then I realised that you were no memory but real, and were gazing bemused at me standing stock-still in the doorway, so I moved aside to let you in.
You settled down on the bed, and I could not move, not even to clear away the glass on the table with its melting ice-cubes and traces of dark rum. Sniffing at the lukewarm dilute, you wrinkled your nose, lifted the glass to your lips, drank. You held it differently: not in both hands and hugged close to you, but out in one, poised, the way he would. And I knew then that you were lost to me.
I doubt that he drinks rum: whisky, maybe, or that Trabian stuff they squeeze from potatoes. I doubt that he tries to learn where each drink comes from, that he stares at his glass and sees hell-rum, distilled in island caves where ruby dragons once lived, and wonders whether drinking it means he, too, is going straight to hell. I doubt that he has a running account with the Balamb pub, and that when he enters they smile at the thought of being able to pay the rent this week. And I doubt that he shuts his eyes as he passes through the door in the hope that you might be there when they open.
I make a decent SeeD, maybe, a suitable administrator and tactician. To be a SeeD you need no intelligence, you need nothing but instilled reflexes, "basic knowledge applied within established operational parameters" as the handbook says. You remember, we used to reel off whole chunks of that to one another as we tried to learn it, forcing out new mangled accents: scornful Winhill, lazy Balamb, whispering Shumi. I remember whole passages from that book in your voice, yours alone and never mine or our instructor's.
I can plot an attack on twin fronts, I can completely destroy a cadet's professional reputation by one illegible scribble across a report, I can hold my own against a T-Rexsaur and leave it mangled on the training center ground for the Grats to feed off. But I am still so stupid, so unrealistic as to think that you might come back to me.
When we drink together I can almost pretend that you might: can almost pretend that when you stain your lips with a sip of Crater red you are marking yourself mine again, are drinking yourself back to the you I love. Perhaps this time, perhaps you might forget that there is another life you have now, without me: perhaps you might forget to leave and just stay and stay forever.
Remember how we used to try and hide it, for so long? A mutual decision, one we never really discussed, your hand dropping from mine and I would look up to see a classmate walking towards us, not really paying much attention, and understand. But your followers know, all those little girls who idolised you, your desperate roommate with huge pleading eyes who demanded to know where you were going, she always knew. There are whispers in the library when I go to pick up another book on tactics to plot the next training mission that will kill off cadets who would be better taught were you here, and they hiss the sibilances of our names next to one another, and they come accompanied by sideward glances that they think I will miss. It is never hate that their eyes slide at me, love, only envy that I have had you by my side and felt your breathing rise with mine and have been closer than they will ever get.
All they want is to be you, you know that? All they want is to be you.
It was a public service, when she smiled across at me, caught by the reflected shine of you, a glaze across my cheekbone where you kissed me last. All she wanted was to feel herself like you, to have her palms covered with palms that last stole the warmth from yours.
So easy just to rise and hold out my hand and have her take it and follow me, and to taste the faint taint of white wine - not yours, not your taste, but almost, so nearly almost - across the top of her palate when she tipped her neck back and let me lean over her. So easy to feel her throat humming in wonder and to abort her unformed thoughts of whether this was what you felt like when it was *you*, you with my hands cold against the smooth soft skin that is softest at the point where back meets breasts, and most tender there.
She never did anything you could not do, and do better. She, her debutante lips and needy grip and hair just shorter than yours which splayed itself like fingertips over and down my thighs, was a lie. In the morning I left her room, left her to explain the tear in her sheets and sneak out to the laundry room in fear of shame at being seen. I did not speak to her when she stopped before me in the corridor, but walked on as if it was to you I was walking, as if you had finally come back to me, had finally left him.
You would tell me I was being cruel, if I could ever explain it to you, if you could understand, if you would not merely compress your lips and leave so close to tears that I find myself straining my eyes in sympathy. Maybe you would be right, and I was. She never deserved to come up against me and try to fit herself to an image of you that is too far from you - the you only I know - to ever fit itself against me. She never deserved the way I treated her, and I have never deserved you. I have never been good enough for you, and never will be.
Rum, warm with all the fires of Hell, steams over ice, shifts in my glass. It steals more away from me than GFs ever did, smothers the memory of nights of Galbadian white and Centra red and your lips on mine mixing the two. It stops me feeling, stops me remembering: but it cannot stop me from looking to the door for your form again and touching my lips to find the faintest trace of the sweetness you once left there.
intellectual property of harpy_elian, november 2000