Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy VIII. Except I own the game. I loaned it to my brother a while back, and he scratched it up. Do you know how hard it is to find the non-Greatest Hits version under sixty bucks?! I could kill him- no, I don't want to talk about this anymore. On with the story.
Heliocentric Girl
Selphie didn't dance anything like Rinoa.
For the first time ever in Balamb Garden history, the Garden Festival was a raging success.
This was, of course, due to the head of the Garden Festival Committee.
The whole Garden was alive with light, music, and high spirits. The Quad was packed with cadets, SeeDs and instructors intermingling, all in the name of a good time.
Selphie was ecstatic. It was everything she'd hoped for and more.
The "more" as being witness to Squall and Rinoa dancing. She'd missed it the first time around, trying to recruit instead of enjoying the ceremony, and Rinoa told him right before they left his dorm room that it would really make Selphie's night if they could re-enact their first meeting.
After seeing Selphie's mega-watt smile widen every time another person walked in, he couldn't deny her.
So he and Rinoa replayed their oh-so-romantic first sight of each other, and every girl in Garden sighed with delight. Except Selphie. She stood watching with Irvine, screaming "Whoo-hoo!" at the appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) moments. When the dance was over, Selphie came out onto the dance floor and thanked them, beaming. Irvine took this as a cue to ask her to dance, but to Squall's secret satisfaction, she turned him down.
But that lapse of goodwill came right back to bite him when Irvine asked Rinoa instead, and she said yes. With a mischievous wink, Rinoa allowed Irvine to lead her out into the throng, the speakers emitting pounding dance music that filled the Quad.
"Well, Squall. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" The girl asked guilelessly, appraising him with wide green eyes. Squall raised an eyebrow archly, and Selphie held out her arm for him to link his own through. He led the way to the crowded parquet floor.
Rinoa was the only girl he'd ever danced with and meant it, but Selphie didn't dance anything like Rinoa.
When Rinoa danced, she liked to put on a show, impress everyone with her skill and ability. Her five years of jazz, ballet and modern dance classes were put to good use any time there was music and enough floor space. She loved dancing, and the elegance that she discovered within herself when the moves landed and it all felt instinctive.
The most formal training Squall had were the two weeks of dance lessons that every Garden cadet had to suffer through to prep them for undercover work. Twenty fourteen year olds spinning around and struggling not to bruise each others shins in their hurry to work through the steps like they were a drill was not the most dignified spectacle to behold.
Squall didn't know if Selphie had taken lessons back in Trabia. She'd mentioned once that she used to ice skate, but there was no rink in the swelteringly hot town of Balamb. He believed that the reason Selphie could often be found sliding around the halls on the cold air-conditioned floors of Balamb Garden in sheer socks instead of regulation boots was because she missed ice-skating. The others would shake their heads fondly and joke that she was "just being Selphie."
(Had she ever heard them talk? Back when he was a cadet, he'd first overheard someone say he was "just being Squall," disregarding him like he was some quirky but irksome house pet, and he'd spent two days holed up in his dorm, convincing himself he didn't care whether they knew him or not. He was nobody's shepherd - let their judgments lead them where they would.)
When she was alone, Selphie liked to dance to hip-hop and rap and r&b music that shook her dorm room walls when she turned the bass up. It didn't matter to her if she couldn't understand half of what was being said, and it didn't matter to anyone else either, once they heard her hilarious rendition of what she thought the lyrics were.
When Rinoa danced she had the grace of a swan, but Selphie didn't dance anything like Rinoa.
Irvine likened Selphie to a beautiful flower in full bloom. But Irvine also liked to pick flowers, and Selphie never had. Neither had Squall.
Once when he, Selphie, Zell, and Irvine were having a casual debriefing in front of the Balamb Hotel after a mission, a member of the Garden festival appeared and brought her a bouquet of flowers. The soldier was a former member of the Intelligence team that Selphie had been a part of during the SeeD exam in Dollet.
"Oh, thaaank you. That's so sweet," she'd chirped, as Zell stifled his laughter, and Irvine irritatedly adjusted his hat, observing them very closely.
The boy left in a hurry when he heard Irvine's shotgun cock, but it had just been Zell crunching some hard candy in his mouth.
"What a savage," Squall was surprised to hear Selphie whisper to herself, her eyes narrowed at the cadet's back.
While Irvine and Zell laughed at the fleeing cadet, Selphie gently untied the ribbon wrapped around the flowers. Squall stood beside her in silence, and watched as she crouched down and placed each long, exploding yellow-tipped stem in a line over the rippling water of the shore.
Zell had laughed at Selphie too. "What are you doing, Selphie?"
She straightened up, and threw the yellow ribbon into the air, so that it caught the wind. "Burial at sea," she proclaimed, her eyes on the ribbon fighting the sky to stay above water.
Irvine later said he found the whole thing to be adorable. Squall thought that it was kind of sad.
The first time (the second time, Squall reminded himself - Why did everything have to be the second time? He was Rinoa's, Ultimecia's war was the worlds' after Adel, and Balamb was Selphie's after Trabia - was there ever such a thing besides hand-me-downs?) thatthe party met Irvine, Zell wanted him dead, and Squall might not have argued had he suggested being proactive about realizing this dream.
It grated on his nerves how Irvine always interrupted Selphie from her ritual window-gazing on the train. Since she was too sweet to tell him to stop bothering her and go talk to a wall, Squall took up the brunt of the infraction, and decided to be annoyed on Selphie's behalf.
Irvine objectified, fetishized, and worshipped Selphie. She was his dream girl, the one who always got away. He had her up on a pedestal, much higher than any other girl, and the others found amusement in the knowledge that Selphie was the only one that believed otherwise. Irvine's world orbited around Selphie, like the planets around the Sun.
Squall had never worshipped Selphie, never fantasized about her, never even looked up to her, really.
Selphie was his friend. She had never tried to be anything else. Squall liked to think that they were alike in that way. Except he didn't want her to be won by Irvine, the way Rinoa had eventually won him.
Perhaps Irvine was right to worship her. Sun Worship was something prevalent in all cultures, and the slip of a girl certainly had the energy to qualify as at least a white dwarf star. He'd once heard someone say that the Sun generated the energy for its life-giving light and warmth from the explosions on its surface and that after enough time, this would violently kill it. He'd since learned that this wasn't true, but the analogy still sometimes came to mind whenever he thought of Selphie.
A part of him wanted to see her cry.
He never had, and that struck him as wrong. For a girl so open, so sincere, and so giving of her time and her affection, it just didn't add up. He knew she was strong, but even he'd cried when he lost Ellone. And he'd seen Selphie lose everyone once, in one fell swoop.
Squall saw the toll that the terrible destruction of Trabia Garden had taken on her. Before they left, he'd witnessed her embrace grieving children who collapsed into her arms, sobbing with relief at the sight of her. Selphie was a Sun there, too, and when she returned home to them, it was like daybreak.
But she held it together. She remained confident and more determined than ever in the face of the group.
Squall had never been so thrown by anyone (except Rinoa) than when Selphie came to him the night before they went to meet their destinies at Edea's house.
Squall had spent the day surveying the Trabia wreckage and telling himself that it could have been worse. Selphie had spent it listening to all of her old friends with quivering smiles tell her the same. Neither of them believed a word. When he'd answered the hesitant knocking at his door later that night to reveal a little girl swathed in a short yellow nightgown, he'd almost shut it in shock. At the last moment when there was only an inch of space and a narrow beam of light from the hallway keeping him linked to the world, she'd exhaled a tiny "Squall?" and the door swung inward with a twitch of his finger.
"Selphie." Her face was dry. Her eyes were red.
She smiled like sunlight filtered through murky water from above. "Can I talk to you?"
He stood dumbfounded in the doorway, then backed slowly into the room, allowing her to follow. She gratefully pulled the door closed behind her, and sat on his bed, hunched over and bracing her arms on her knees.
Squall remained on his feet, leaning his back against the wall across from her, waiting.
"It just gets so hard sometimes, you know?" She spoke like they were continuing a discussion they had started some time before. Squall knew that he and Selphie had never talked like this - he doubted whether she'd ever talked with anyone like this.
Squall had once tried to comfort Selphie back in the Quad, after the attack on Balamb and when the decimation of Trabia Garden was still a vague horror, like knowing there was something breathing unseen in the dark. Her smile had shone like failure, but it hadn't been his fault. He was no good at giving comfort, but he'd learned vividly that day that Selphie was no good at being comforted, either.
She looked so small sitting there crouched like that on his bedspread, and he felt irritation rising in the roots of his teeth at her stillness.
"What's with you?"
Selphie raised her eyes to him, and Squall was compelled to turn away if she didn't stop looking at him like that, but right when his will was about to break, her gaze returned to her feet.
"I don't like being scared, hiding, all the time."
Squall remembered immediately thinking of Rinoa, and what she'd confessed on the shattered basketball court earlier that day.
"Why don't you go talk to Rinoa." He wasn't asking. "She's better at this than I am."
"Could you try?" He caught a bit of her go-getter spunk glimmering just under the surface.
He'd said it before he could stop himself. "No."
She nodded sadly, her hair falling over her face. "Alright."
She got off his bed and headed for the door. Squall's whole body tensed, overwhelmed with a dozen different urges, screaming at him to make this end differently.
"You know, Squall..." Her voice was hollow, and she was leaning her forehead against his door. "I don't think you were always this selfish."
Anger burned his eyes, and she had never spoken to him like this before. "You don't even remember what I was like. You didn't even remember yourself until today."
Selphie had one dainty hand poised over the doorknob. "It doesn't mean that I'm wrong. You weren't the only one at the orphanage, Squall. You're less alone than most people."
"What am I supposed to take that to mean, Selphie?" He struggled to keep any feeling from his voice.
She kept her back to him. "I'm just saying that I understand why you feel like you need to protect yourself. But you hurt other people in the process."
"I'm a SeeD. It's what I do." Now there was no struggle at all.
"So am I."
"We're nothing alike, Selphie."
She opened the door. "We are in some ways. Only I've learned by now that the best way to hide the hurt inside is to make everyone believe that you don't have any."
He remembered watching the door close behind her, and not being able to breathe.
She must have taken his advice (Selphie always listened to him. She never tried to guess what he would say next. Maybe she was just slow. Or maybe he wasn't really as predictable as everyone always claimed.) and spoken with Rinoa, because the next morning, she was as perky as ever. It was like nothing had even happened.
When she'd given him that same bright "Selphie" smile, he'd felt a sting of betrayal, and then guilt.
Friends don't let friends break into pieces.
They'd never spoken of it, but somehow when he saw the way she looked at him after he rescued Rinoa at the Sorceress Memorial, he knew he'd been forgiven.
He had come so far since then. Everyone said so. But he felt it, too.
The world looked different through Rinoa tinted glasses.
Squall didn't know if his friend would ever be dealt a blow like the one she'd been hit with by Trabia. But he knew he wouldn't be afraid to try if she came to him again.
Selphie threw her arms in the air, and walked her fingertips through the hair on Squall's scalp playfully. She wasn't professionally trained, but that didn't stop her from taking a risk, putting herself on the line to be made a fool of, and having a blast doing it all the while.
Selphie didn't dance anything like Rinoa.
She danced a lot like him.
Author's Notes: Squall and Selphie never ever occurred to me when I played the game. In fact, if it wasn't for a friend of mine going "You know, Selphie's kind of growing on me," and me going "Really?" and thinking about it some, this wouldn't exist. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of Selphie being the "Squall not traveled."
She has her own way of hiding her emotions, and protecting herself, just like Squall. You can tell by her sudden outbursts of anger that there's more going on there, and I thought Squall and Selphie made an interesting parallel. Selphie shuts people out too, but in the complete opposite way that Squall does. Plus, I really like the idea of Squall being to Selphie as Rinoa is to Zell. Just really good, close, opposite sex friends. Or at least in my mind they are.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and please review and let me know what you think of my take on the Squall-Selphie friendship.