There were sounds. Not just one or two, no. ALL. All the sounds. All at once. All too loud.

She refused to open her eyes. Her head already felt like it was about to pop off her neck and burst like an overfilled balloon.

The world tilted again. It had been doing that off and on for the last couple of hours since she started crashing. Every time it happened, she fought the urge to throw up and made herself stay completely still until the waves of nausea passed

"Tilmitt?"

The voice was clearer than any bell and it cut a swath through all the noise. For a split second, she was distracted from the pain of feeling like all of her nerve endings were on fire. In that second, a fragment of memory shot through her mind - a shadow cartwheeling on a black wall:

She was holding a clipboard and making sure the lighting tech knew which filters she wanted on which lights when a cadet walked up to her. Without deviating from her original conversation, she handed the clipboard to the student. He took it, scribbled something quickly, and handed it back along with the pen he'd used. Selphie gave him a nod and a smile and he moved off. A moment later, she slipped the extra pen into her pocket.

"Say it again." Her voice, by comparison - caked in dust and raspy - made the fire and the noise worse.

"What?"

There were hands. Only two this time. She had gotten so used to being pawed and groped that only one pair of hands was a genuine relief. She felt them under her arms trying to raise her up, but her legs - she was pretty sure they were still there even though she couldn't feel them - were unable to provide any support. The hands, and the arms they were attached to, picked her up bodily rather than continue to fight the losing battle with her dead weight. Once she felt like it was safe to open her eyes, she might even see who those hands and arms belonged to.

"My name."

"Tilmitt."

The voice was deep and solid without being heavy. It tamped down the car horns, barking dogs, train whistles, gunfire, tea kettles, rock bands, and explosions just enough for her to understand that there may still be a quieter world out there somewhere.

Sitting in a borrowed office at a borrowed desk in a borrowed chair, Selphie dumped the white powder out of the cadet's pen. She cut it into lines using the letter opener on the desk and snorted them with a rolled up post-it. She had never been a fan of taking her drugs this way - shooting up yielded faster and longer lasting results in her opinion - but she didn't have any of her equipment with her today or the time to use it.

"What the fuck's wrong with you?"

The arms put her down on something soft and cool. A tidal wave of sick rose in her throat and she involuntarily snapped into the fetal position. There was no fighting against this one, but her entire body had seized up tighter than the skin on a drum so she couldn't open her mouth. Vomit sprayed through her teeth.

"Son of a bitch!"

Her entire left side was warm. And wet. And smelled absolutely terrible. And the voice no longer distracted her from the pain.

"Tilmitt, you-"

The next wave was smaller in volume but bigger in pain. Her body couldn't curl any farther, but every time she threw up, it tried to fold in on itself more and more. After the third time, she heard the voice continuing to curse and she wanted so badly to apologize. When the fourth wave wracked her, she heard the crisp snap of her nose breaking against her knee. That jolt of pain was so intense she was sure her head had actually exploded. She wasted no time in passing out.

She never minded being the party girl. If there were people around, she wanted them to be having a good time. The Garden Festivals, friend's birthdays, holidays, any and every special occasion you could think of - these were her tools. She killed people for a living. Maybe not with her own two hands, but blowing things up very rarely ended in a zero sum body count.

So she made up for it. She helped everyone else make up for it. And all it ever was was people having fun. Her efforts weren't an excuse to get high or hook up or get wasted. They were pure, they were innocent, they were… They were safe. Safe from death and destruction. Safe from blood and body parts.

There was quiet. Blissful, all-encompassing quiet. There was no pain, either. For a fleeting moment, she thought for sure she was dead, but that idea kicked her still-beating heart into a higher gear and she not only felt it thudding in her chest, she could hear it in the enveloping gloom. She opened her eyes to… nothing. Blackness. Calmly - far calmer than she would have expected from herself - she assessed that the complete absence of everything did not feel like time compression.

She heard footsteps. She turned in circles until she noticed a not-quite-as-dark spot out in the dark. Someone was walking towards her. She shrugged. It's not like she had anything better to do, so she started off towards them.

After a few paces, she drew up short. She was walking towards herself. It was a younger version, from maybe five or six years ago - definitely before the drugs. Her doppelgänger stopped a foot away from where Selphie was standing. She had her hands on her hips and a humongous grin on her face.

"Hi you!" There was an exaggerated hand wave to accompany the greeting. "Do you know your name?"

Selphie thought the question was rather odd, but seeing as she was obviously dreaming - presuming, of course, that she was right about not being dead - it was probably a reference to her asking the voice to say her name.

"Selphie." Her voice was back to normal. Well, the new normal. A little huskier and kind of thready. An addict's voice. Not perky or sexy or bouncy like that of her younger self.

"And what's my name?"

"Selphie."

"YAY! I wasn't sure if this last crash of yours had wiped out the part of your brain that remembered stuff like that. Did you know," she was wagging her finger as she said this, "that if you junctioned before shooting up, you wouldn't suffer any of the bad side effects of the drugs?"

Selphie gawked at herself. "What? You can't be serious."

"I'm not. I was just testing you again. I guess your bullshit meter still works. Are you ready for the last and most important question?"

"I… Yes. Yes, I am."

"Fantastic! Okay, this is a toughie, so take your time answering. There's no rush or anything, but there is definitely a right and a wrong answer, got it?"

"Yeah. I got it."

The world around them had grown deafeningly silent. Young Selphie looked dispassionately at Present Selphie for a beat and then:

"Are we the same person?"

What? What the hell kind of question was that? How could there be more than one answer to it? It was a trick, that's what it was. Young Selphie was getting her ramped up with all that 'take your time' nonsense. Well, fuck that. I'm not falling for it.

"Yes. Absolutely."

"WRONG!"

Selphie never saw her younger self move, but she felt the punch land and shatter her entire face. She was certain she heard the tinkling of glass as the fist carved through her cheekbone and out her eye socket. Pieces of her rained down leaving jagged slashes along her arms and chest before lodging in the tops of her feet. As the rest of her head disintegrated into glass splinters she wondered why she felt nothing.

Protecting people was exhausting. The fact that she chose to carry that burden had no bearing on the weight. And day after day after day she kept it up. The infectious happiness she instilled in others was more than enough right at first, but eventually, she began to get tired. She couldn't keep up with where she wanted to go or needed to be. And there was no sleep. Sleep wasn't necessary. Sleep was a luxury she was unable to afford. But drugs were cheap. And plentiful. And they worked.

She had discovered early on that cure spells did wonders for taking care of all those pesky holes in her arms that made the wrong people ask the wrong questions. But no amount of magic no matter how potent or judiciously applied would fix her rotting insides. There were times when she had overdosed and died - more often than she really cared to admit - but someone always had a phoenix down to bring her back.

Not all the way back, though. They could only restore you to the best state you were in prior to dying and Selphie hadn't been near a 'best state' in years.

She had no cure spells now. No phoenix downs. Not even a potion. And she wasn't sure she'd even be able to administer one to herself even if she had them.

The dream had ended when the very last shard of herself had stabbed into the ground. She became aware by degrees that she was already screaming at the top of her lungs, that her entire body was stretched out and as rigid as a plank of wood, and that Seifer was holding her down with a damp cloth shoved in her mouth.

Beyond those things, all she knew was pain. Horrifying, visions-of-unimaginable-beasts-coming-for-you pain. Her pores were screaming right along with her. All of them. Her bones were molten metal while her muscles were liquid nitrogen all wrapped in the hydrochloric acid soaked wrappings that was her skin.

She could see the determination on his face, see his mouth moving as he tried to talk to her, but she couldn't respond. She could tell that he had swaddled her tightly in blankets so she wouldn't hurt herself, but all she could do was thrash uncontrollably beneath his weight as he kept her from flinging herself off the bed.

It was easy at first. The drugs came to her effortlessly. Just because she asked, But then she needed more and more required money. That was fine, though. She understood. And she had a decent amount of money saved up since she never had time to go out and spend any of it. But a decent amount of money doesn't go very far when dealing with a copious amount of drugs. And a lack of funds wasn't gonna equal a lack of fun, no sir. She was a SeeD. She had marketable skills that were worth an obscene amount of powders, crystals, rocks, and tabs. And when the need for even more got to the point where it was affecting her job performance, that was okay, too. The job had outlived it's usefulness and she'd long since broken ties with most of her friends in favor of traveling from one place to the next to get another score.

She couldn't remember exactly when she first traded sex for drugs, but she remembers thinking that she should've thought of it way before. Nobody wanted to fuck a bombed out husk of a body that was shriveled up like a dried tomato and twitching because of all the raw and exposed nerves crying out in pain, but by the time the plunger on the syringe was all the way down, there were soft, pink, happy places available for everyone she could score from.

There was light. Soft, golden light from off to her left. And there was music. A piano playing a slow, relaxing song. She opened her eyes. Barely. They had been closed so tightly for so long that her eyelids weren't sure how to open anymore. She was still wrapped up but looser now. As her vision adjusted to the world around her, she could make out a person in a chair at the foot of the bed.

"Seifer?" Her voice was less than a whisper and the single word sent a small jolt of fire radiating around her throat. She had the presence of mind not to cough but took a couple of hard swallows instead.

Seifer got up, walked to the bed, and sat back down beside her. "Best if you don't talk, Tilmitt. Think you can keep some water down?"

She nodded.

He unbundled her but made her keep warm under the covers as she sipped the water slowly. He handed her a pad and a pen. "Why'd you come here? Why come to me?"

'Scored from you before. No strings with you.'

"That was years ago. And I haven't laid eyes on you since that day."

She shrugged. 'I was in town. I was crashing. I guess I hoped you still lived here.'

"What would you have done if I had moved?"

She shrugged again.

Seifer shook his head, "You lookin' to score again?"

She wanted to tell him no. She wanted to make a joke. But she couldn't. She hated this part. Every addict hated this part. This was the part where you have to ask someone who's helped you survive give you the means to try and ruin yourself again. 'Yes.'

"I've changed, Tilmitt. I've been done with those circles for a while now."

'But you still know people.'

"Read this." He put a handwritten note on her chest and left the room.

Selphie pondered for a few minutes before picking it up and reading it. When she got to the end, she was crying, so she read it again. And a third time.

When Seifer came back in, Selphie's face wass streaked with tears and she was sniffling into a handful of tissues.

"So you understand, I take it?"

She nodded.

"Still want me to hook you up?"

'Let me think about it some more.'

"That's a damn good idea. You need anything before I go to bed?"

She held up the empty water cup.

Seifer stayed with her the entire next day. The two shared companionable silences interspersed with him talking and her writing. Whenever she tried to speak, her head lit up inside like a fireworks show, so she stopped trying. At one point, she told him that she wanted to take a nap, so he left the room. She wrote one word on her pad and rolled over to go to sleep.

He checked on her a half hour later. She was sound asleep and snoring quietly. The pad was leaning against the back of her legs. 'YES.'

When she woke up, there's sunlight streaming through the window. The day looked astoundingly gorgeous. Without even sitting up she could see a brilliant blue sky and slow-moving wispy clouds. She turned to look at the nightstand to see if Seifer left her a message while she slept. He had. Although he hadn't written it. He had cooked it and put it into a syringe.

There was no one else at the funeral. Seifer stood next to a priest who sounded bored as he recited a few words about the unknown - to him - deceased. When he extended a hand after a five minute soliloquy about the restlessness of the soul and the temporariness of the body, Seifer resisted the urge to smack it away. He glared at the little man instead and jerked his head for him to leave.

"I'm choosing to remember the you from when I was the unlikable one. If that bothers you, too bad."

He pulled the note he'd left for her from his jacket pocket. In his other hand he scooped up a fistful of earth. He tossed the note in and then the dirt on top of it.

'Selphie,

Seifer called me after you passed out two days ago. I must admit that I was not only surprised by his call, but the reason for it. I never would have foreseen this for you, but here you are.

I'm going to be blunt, but I feel like you would expect no less from me, so here it is:

You have done irreparable damage to yourself in every major area.

I could only do so much in terms of a full checkup since moving you wasn't an option without alerting more people to your condition, and neither Seifer nor I knew how you'd feel about that, so we erred (perhaps erroneously) on the side of caution.

Your brain is swollen.

Your lungs, liver, and kidneys are ceasing function.

Your heart is bruised and it sounds as though only one quadrant is still active.

There's more to the list, but I think you get the picture. Sadly, there is nothing that can be done at this point. You may have noticed the green hue of your finger and toenails. This is because you have been overdosing on cure magic just as much as you have on various other substances.

You have three days left, A week at best. If there's anything I can do or any arrangements that you need made, I'll do whatever I can to help.

I'm sorry, Selphie.

-K'

So this is what happens when Summoner Luna and I have conversations about fandom mashups. I don't remember exactly how we came up with VIII merged with Requiem For A Dream, but it had something to do with Seplhie being... well, Selphie... and how her devil-may-care enthusiasm wasn't really a front or a show, it was just such a defining part of who she was that it took it's toll on her in very dark and brutal ways.

And I wanted to write that. Just to see if I could. Turns out, I can.