He doesn't know if it's just this place, or if it's his subconscious playing tricks on him, or if it's from looking through too many old photo albums and skimming over too many weapon's magazines, but, sometimes, he has dreams like he's never had before.
He dreams about a place he knows deep down in his gut doesn't really exist any more, if it ever did, and he dreams of people he's never seen before and strange things he's never heard of before. He dreams of someplace called Garden, and wars, bloodstained battlefields and soft, seducing whispers in his ear. He dreams of being older, taller and stronger, of wielding a gunblade like Leon's, only not like his at all; he dreams of leading an army of men who will listen to him just because they fear him, and he dreams of fighting against people he's certain he's supposed to know, but doesn't. He dreams of being a knight and of being a hero, of changing the world just because a woman in a far off future commands him to do so in exchange for the things he desires most.
The strangest part of the dreams, however, isn't who he is or where he is, it's who else is in these dreams.
There's a gorgeous woman with long black hair and a slinky black dress who reaches to him and who he kneels before, obeying her every order; there's a woman with light blonde hair who looks at him like he's always in the wrong, and a girl with short brown hair and a man with a lazy grin and a cowboy hat, and there's a short blonde who makes him think of Hayner but not really, bouncing around and tossing incoherent insults at him.
And there's the girl from Leon's photo, smiling prettily and sadly at him, her hands folded behind her back as she watches him tear the world apart in flames just because he was told to, and she looks at him with fear and longing and something almost like love, yet not quite. She looks at him and he knows he did something wrong, but he knows he can't change what he's done, even though he's not sure what it is he's done, and she fights him just like the others fight him.
And then there's Leon, only it's not Leon. It's Squall, the dead boy from the photo in the back of the photo album Leon took and hid from him after that day. He looks at him with hatred and pity and indifference, and they fight like rivals and best friends who've betrayed each other and sometimes he thinks they had to have been a bit more than that, because, sometimes, Squall gives him this little look, this look where the dark-blue isn't nearly as dark, and he looks kind of sad, and it makes a part of Seifer feel like he's dying.
He never pays much attention to these dreams. They're only dreams, after all, and he brushes them off the moment he wakes up, doesn't remember half of them anyway, and goes about with his daily business like he hasn't had dreams about fighting Leon-not-Leon and loving Leon-not-Leon and being something he's not any more.
When he wakes up thrashing in his bed, however, a burning sensation laced deep into the scar that he doesn't remember ever getting and a headache accompanying it, yelling out Squall's name in the crisp, cold night with Leon standing over him, a look of alarm actually making it through his mask of indifference and cold, cold apathy, he thinks that maybe there's something a bit more to these dreams after all.