Notes: This was for a tumblr prompt that made the rounds a few weeks ago about unused scenes. It was too long to post there, so I thought I'd share it as a one-shot. The scene was inspired by Danzig's "How the Gods Kill," and from a very early draft of Shooting Star, before I decided not to screw with the timeline any more than I already had. Hope you enjoy.
Sometimes, late at night and long after his wife has gone to sleep, Squall wonders how much of this is real. Her love. His love. This beautiful, comfortable life they've built together. It is everything he never knew he wanted, everything he never dared to dream of. But, what if...
In the daylight, he doesn't question himself or their devotion to one another. Their day-to-day life is too mundane and simple to be anything more than reality. Doing laundry. Paperwork. Mind-numbing meetings about budgets and resource allocation. The leaky pipe under the bathroom sink.
It's all so dull and domestic. The idea that she'd conjure an illusion of weekly lawn maintenance to keep him with her is absurd. It's only at night, when she sleeps soundly against his chest, one arm thrown around his waist, the other curled under her chin, that the doubts creep in and take hold. They settle in slowly, like a choking vine that over time strangles the life out of everything it can grab hold of. His belief in their love becomes a question he can't answer in the dark. It gets squeezed out of him as the tendrils of doubt curl around his chest and tighten and bind until he is paralyzed with uncertainty.
The more he thinks about it, the more it chips away at his confidence that what they have together is real. What he sees and knows in the daylight – is it an illusion? Witchcraft? Is any of it real?
These thoughts keep him awake long after the hands of the clock have swept past 02:00. Sometimes, he doesn't sleep at all. The longer he is awake, the more he believes none of it is real. She has trapped him in an illusion of a life he was never meant to live. She has cast some dark spell on him, imprisoned him, and now she owns him.
Sorceress. Knight.
Wife. Husband.
Knight first, husband second.
Duty, then love.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
When daylight comes and she shifts and yawns and opens her warm brown eyes, all that uncertainty gets stuffed back down until he has forgotten. The vines around his chest loosen and slide away as the light of dawn peeks around the edges of the curtains. His worries are pulverized to dust by he love and affection in her eyes.
He is an idiot. Of course this is real.
But as the years pass, he sees things in the daylight that dredge up those concerns reserved only for the darkness.
At first, they are little things. Insignificant and unimportant. Just a small, unconscious use of power as a dish floats up from the table and into the sink. She is distracted by the recipe card in front of her and a frown pinches her brows together in consternation as she tries to decipher the instructions. He says nothing, just watches in silence with a frown that she doesn't see.
That unconscious moving of things about the house begins to happen more often. The vacuum cleaner pushes itself as she thumbs through a magazine. The windows are smudged with fingerprints and dust and then suddenly sparkling clean in a second. The bed gets made with a wave of her hand.
Until now, she has been terrible at housekeeping, not that he ever expected her to be great at it. Until now, the duties have been shared between them, but there is no need anymore for him to help out. The house is spotless, not a speck of dust to be found. Every day, when he comes home, there is a meal prepared and ready to eat and he can scarcely believe that girl that couldn't even boil water has seasoned and cooked a steak that would rival anything the best steakhouse in Deling City had to offer.
He tells himself it doesn't matter how the chores get done. He tells himself that he should be grateful, pleased even, that she puts her powers to use in a practical way, but it bothers him. She lounges on the couch while the laundry folds itself, still in pajamas at three in the afternoonwith her eyes glued to the melodramatic daytime television dramas she once claimed to hate.
Sometimes he sees a subtle reshaping of her pupils, and her eyes change color, brown to gold, brown to gold, brown to gold, like the ebb and flow of a tide. It's more pronounced when they disagree and he can sense the hold she has on him. She is the moon and he is the sea, and he can not resist capitulation any more than the water can resist the moon's influence on the tides.
He loses every argument, gives in to every whim. He has no choice. He is a chicobo in a child's fist. She can break him if she holds on too tight.
But he loves her. More than anything, he loves her and cannot imagine a life or world without her. Everything good in he has is because of her. He lives to see her smile and hear her unguarded laughter. He would never leave this behind. So what if she always gets her way? These are petty arguments, small things he can overlook.
When he sleeps, his dreams are filled with horrific things, of blood and fire and death, of his blade buried deep into her chest, of her wide eyes full of pain and sorrow. He dreams of leaving a bloody handprint around her throat and of squeezing the life out of her for what she is and what she has done to him. In dreams, he hates her, loathes her, needs to destroy her as she has destroyed him.
He wakes with the certainty that he has killed her while he slept. Each time he opens his eyes, he expects to find blood on the sheets, her body mangled and broken, but she is always whole and unmarked by his dream-time hatred.
The more he hates her in dreams, the more he loves her in the light of day. Any wish is her command, every smile a reward. She is a hunger in his gut that he can't satisfy, the oxygen in his lungs, the heart beating in his chest.
She is he rational one. She laughs at his paranoia and his conviction that she is unsafe on her own. He sees threats in every shadow, in the alleys of Balamb and in the depths of the ocean. He doesn't want her to leave the house. He sees the enemy everywhere, in every face, in strangers and friends alike. Any one of them could lift a weapon and take from him the one thing that matters most.
He insists upon supervising visits with good friends, and they argue into the wee hours of the morning. She ends it with a violent display of power that leaves Squall slumped against a wall, cowering under her withering glare. Ripples of pain spiral through his limbs and he trembles as he is burned alive by her power. She stands over him, a vengeful God in the flesh, eyes a bright tawny as she watches him suffer. For the first time, he feels hatred for her while awake.
He is a boulder upon the sea shore and she has weathered all his jagged edges smooth like a pebble at the bottom of a stream. She has found a way to bleed into all his cracks, his integrity compromised a little more each time she crashes into him. She will grind him to sand, one drop at a time. She will destroy him if he can't destroy her first.
For two days, he doesn't sleep, even when she welcomes him back to bed, draws him into her and kisses him until he forgets his anger.
The third night he sleeps. He wakes with his hands around her throat, the warm stickiness of blood between his fingers. The sheets bloom with black stains in the darkness, still wet, still warm, and he tastes blood in his mouth, on his lips, on her skin. The room is filed with the salty tang of sweat and the faint odor of copper. She claws at him, strikes his chest and shoulders with balled fists and her body thrashes beneath his, but he won't let go, not until he sees the light leave her eyes.
This is just another nightmare and he will wake soon with his hands clenched into fists, half moons of red on his palms. He will wake, and she will pull him to her breast and tell him it was all just a bad dream. She will promise him everything is fine. The love he knows he feels for her will unclench his hands. It will replace the hatred burning in his chest. It will wash away the doubt, the illusions, and the certainty that he must kill her.
Her lips make the shape of his name, her eyelids flutter. If this was real, she would stop him. She would stop him, pry his hands away with magic, throw him to the wall, pin him to the floor with just a flick of her eyes. He will wake from this nightmare soon to find her heart still beating in her chest, her hand curled under her chin as she sleeps soundly and peacefully beside him. Alive. Untouched.
It's just a dream. Just a dream and he will wake soon.