Hello again everyone! First off, thank you for your reviews and comments on Crystalline! Also, the standard disclaimer applies: I don't own Final Fantasy VIII, or any of the characters (although I do like to play with them.)
In short, Coffee is another vignette, in a very, very Quistis/Seifer fashion. Because heartbroken blondes have the most fun. Thank you for reading and reviewing!
She steps gently on the ground, left foot before right, left foot before right. Her long legs careful as a crane, but all full of power. She's not wearing pink today, like he'd expect, but a smart black suit set. The skirt is shorter than usual, skimming her knees and slit up the side tantalizingly, perfect lines of perfect flesh breaking through. Her white shirt is buttoned primly, draped over set shoulders.
Who are you trying to fool? Slut. You're such a slut, Trepe.
Look at that skirt, look at that false prudence. He can trace her figure from her ankle to her hip in one fluid line, halfway begins to imagine his hands following the path. Calloused hands catching on silk stockings. How her warm flesh must feel. How his hands must feel.
He growls low in his throat, turns his head to one side and spits, pretending he has a bad taste in his mouth.
But all that's in his mouth is what he imagines she tastes like. Electric and warm, salty and sweet, domination and submission, contradictory contradictions. She would give tastes to tasteless emotions, like discovering a new set of colors.
He drowns it in the coffee, bends low over his cup and holds the bitterness against his tongue. Its warmth is comforting, solid against the cold, sluggish autumn day. Her thick heels click one, two, three, on the cobblestone street. She's not a stiletto kind of girl, she likes to think she has a stable foundation. Farther, far, closer and closer.
I bet you could do a roundhouse kick in a second and not have a hair fall out of place.
I bet I could block it in half the time.
He tenses his shoulders, scrunches his eyebrows as he hears her stop and rest one perfectly manicured hand on the chair opposite the small table. In his best attempt at appearing intimidating, he glares at her stonily.
The most she does is arch one thin eyebrow from behind dark sunglasses. "I didn't expect to find you here," she says in a smooth contralto.
He pauses, lifts the coffee cup deliberately and takes a sip through chapped lips, "I'm always here on the weekends. I didn't think you'd be quite so forgetful."
Except for a small inhalation of breath, and the tiniest of twitches of her head in one direction, she has no response. He continues in his act of feigned indifference, knowing that he can't stop and knowing that it will do little to phase her. She pulls out the chair, sits on it elegantly, not in a delicate manner, but with the same sort of feline grace inherent to all predators, and crosses her legs.
He notices how the sunlight catches in her hair.
He notices how a touch more of her thigh exposes itself.
"Are you going to sit there all afternoon staring at my legs?" she prompts with the slightest touch of humor, almost mistakable for coldness.
He leans back in his chair, slouching into it in the seated equivalent of a swagger. "Don't flatter yourself, Trepe."
The waitress comes by and pours her a cup of coffee. Quistis pretends to amuse herself with the sugar cubes, dipping the corner of one into her cup and swirling it through.
"Or rather," he says unprompted, "Instructor Trepe."
She half-chuckles, "A little late for that isn't it?"
That's right, then. The Headmaster's little prodigy didn't quite live up to expectations. Or maybe he had made sure she didn't. Either way, though, he wasn't quite sure now why it had happened the way it did. But at least it was nice to have company in being a failure, because loneliness had a way of getting old, even if he didn't want to admit it.
"It's hardly ever too late for anything," he says, softer this time, looking at her face for the first time.
She pulls off her sunglasses, rests them on the table and nervously smoothes a piece of her tight bun back.
"Tell that to the Headmaster." She does not whisper, but says it with such apathy he finds it even worse. Suddenly her black suit looks that much more somber.
He snaps open a cigarette case sharply, annoyed, and flicks a lighter from his pocket. "You saved the world. You're a fucking heroine now, you can have anything you want. And this is Seifer Almasy, volatility and passion and all the strengths and weaknesses of such.
"Anything?" She laughs, amused at the irony of it all, "Hardly. The world is saved, on average, a dozen times each day."
She fiddles with her glasses, folds them and rests them on the table. "It's just a matter of how overtly you do it."
He thinks on this, answers carefully, "And I think the world is ruined, on average, a dozen times a day."
Another laugh from her, this time clearer, as she waves away the hazy cigarette smoke the wind blows back in her direction. "Touché." She lifts her coffee cup, "Well then, cheers. To heroes and villains."
He smirks, touches the ceramic of his cup to hers, and takes a sip before another long drag of tobacco. She finds herself thinking that there is a spark of the person he once was in that smirk. What else makes you do that?
In the light, he realizes that she does not look quite so sharp, that she is almost exactly his age. He can taste the chocolate and richness of the cigarette, and he can taste something entirely different in the air, as well. It seemed odd, when he thought about it, that they were all still teenagers. The things he had encountered, corpses and seduction and epic love stories, seemed like they belonged to an age far away from his own. Then again, that was what Garden was about wasn't it? One fucking game of make believe. Die for your morality, for your country, for your passion, and you're nothing. But leap at the chance to die on command, for commission, under control.
"Do you remember," he asks suddenly, and she looks up at him, "when you first came to Garden?"
She laughs, "Funny how you can never seem to forget the things you want to." Funny how you forget all the things you wish you could remember.
"I remember," he says carefully, "One very blonde, very blue-eyed girl pissing off the rest of the class very suddenly. Had to go and fucking top all our scores on your first try." Had to fucking pick a whip as your weapon. A whip.
"As I recall," she spoke with a hint of playfulness in her voice, "You were the one pissing everyone else off, and I was the only one willing to speak up to you." And yes, there were images, fuzzy and hidden at the back of her head, of a bossy girl and a stubborn boy butting heads... each of them more than a little impressed with their own courage and the other's gall.
He laughs, "You just didn't know any better at the time."
"I guess that means I still don't."
A trace of a smile remains on his lips as silence wraps around them once more. In the perfect gray of this autumn day, he suddenly feels grounded. Was this, then, what he was missing out on? Was this what eighteen year old boys were supposed to be doing? Sometime during the course of the last year he realized he'd given up on being able to return. To Garden. To Balamb. To Squall Leonhart's icy tension and Rinoa Heartilly's wounded idealism. To an eighteen year old life.
But that did not make it impossible.
Maybe, in the last year he had also realized that impossibility was the only impossible thing left.
"Do you ever think about," her eyes are centered on her cup, tracing ripples as she stirs, "the orphanage?"
He takes in a breath sharply and deeply, half-snorting. "It's not the first thing on my mind."
"Yes, but," and here she looks up, so he notices exactly how clear her eyes are, "How much can you remember?"
Oh. Oh he wants to say, the things he can remember. Guardian forces were a pleasant excuse to use for not mentioning any of it anymore, the same sort of gift as amnesia. Have you ever wished that you could turn back time and erase all the worst parts of your life, he wants to ask her. Guardian forces were a blessing in that exact same way. Pretend that things never happened, and the rest of us will pretend with you. Nothing more than a way out. You may not remember things, but you'll never forget them.
"I remember," And here he chooses his words delicately, with the same sort of grace that she walks, "That you could play the violin."
She closes her eyes, hears that sad melody again, mixing with the sound of ocean waves breaking on sharp rocks. This is the way you hold it, in Matron's honeyed voice, placing the dusty instrument in her hands. Learning by firelight the strange new language of sounds that were not letters at all but seemed to say much more. And remembering all of this seems like experiencing all of it for the first time again, if not for the fact that he says it happened more than a decade ago and she believes him.
"The lighthouse," she whispers.
Seifer doesn't respond, it's not his way at all, but she can tell he remembers as well. The lighthouse that would flood with the most brilliant golden light after a storm, reflecting off her hair as they raced to the top. A room full of windows, like a cage meant to capture the sunlight. Pressing their faces against the glass, making patterns in the frost of their breath, and feeling so, so high. This is what rapture feels like. This is what rapture lost feels like.
He remembers, as well.
When he speaks again, it is music and sunlight and all manner of lost languages. "I was going to run away and be a hero." There is something guttural in his voice, "Guess that's what happens to dreams."
"You're eighteen," she whispers, "you still have time."
Something breaks.
"...and I don't blame you at all."
There is nothing left in her to resent. She's a hero, and she hardly realizes it. After all, what are you supposed to do with the other sixty years of your life when you've already saved the world once over from ultimate doom? It's all very relative, she thinks, and finally realizes that she might understand a little of what that phrase means.
"I don't even get to be the ultimate villain. He looks defeated, dejected, tired, and ready to be born again. "I was just used, pitiful. A lapdog. And I wonder, sometimes, if maybe I would have rather that it was all of my own will."
She laughs, moves her hand a little closer to his. "Supporting characters." In a very twisted play, she thinks. How much of free will is free?
Her hand closes over his as she says, "I'm tired. I'm tired, and I want to remember."
And when she says this, her voice is hardly above a whisper, matching the wind blowing through dry leaves, "I want to remember what I used to dream."
He turns his palm up, curls his fingers around hers. "Let's run away, then. We can run away and be heroes."
She tightens her hand in his.