Corrosion
-irishais-
She didn't know what to say.
After years and years of shouting at him in the middle of class, after berating him for hours in the detention center, after a thousand wisecracks over coffee and bland breakfast, there was nothing left but the dirt under her knees and the wilting flowers crushed in her hands.
I hate you.
You deserve it.
You deserve it.
It was a bitter irony that the sun beat hard against her back, making her sweat and her hair go limp. Fitting, that her last visit with him should be mussed and uncomfortable.
"What do you want me to say?"
She didn't know what she was expecting. An answer from cold granite? From twelve plain etched letters and a pair of dates, was poetry supposed to spring forth?
"You deserve it," she said bitterly, and didn't mean a word of it. No one deserved what Galbadia had given him. "You're an asshole."
She tore the stems of the flowers in her hands--daisies, faltering in the heat just like her. "You're an asshole," she said again, vehemently, and chucked the whole mess of petals and stems and leaves at the stone. They struck and scattered, petals sticking on the freshly-laid dirt.
Aren't I your favorite student?
"Shut up!" Her shriek carried over the graveyard. "Just...shut up! You're dead, you bastard, and you deserved it, you deserve this because of everything you did. Dammit, Seifer, why did you do it?"
Her palm stung from where she had smacked it against the stone, the punctuation in her furious question. She picked a bit of granite from where it bit into her flesh, and gnawed on her lip as she waited for an answer.
None was forthcoming--he was dead, and she was losing her mind. Two of a kind, a pair of failures in a bad hand.
Quistis had always had rotten luck with cards.
"You would have never made SeeD." Barbs, words falling on deaf ears, everything she had meant to say for eighteen years and only now could put the voice to them, because he couldn't turn that lazy smirk on her and make her stop in her tracks. "They wouldn't have let you pass. I would have never let you pass."
One last look as they marched him up the short stairway, and he had curved his lips in that damnable sneer; she wanted to fire the first shot herself. She wanted to throw herself in front of the six gunmen.
"You and your damned dream."
Bits of dirt wedged themselves under her nails as she dug her fingers into the ground, scrabbling for purchase even though the grass was soaking through her stockings.
"I hate you," she murmured, and she laid her cheek against the stone as the first bitter tears began to fall. They splashed into the spongey dirt like acid and she wondered if her heart would corrode as well.