He makes it so hard for her to explain herself, sitting there. Like the onus is on her to explain how, exactly, she came to this decision, and why, in her opinion, it is valid. Or maybe she's putting words in his mouth. Brain. Her brain. Maybe she ought to say something.
"I feel I'd be happier in a purely academic environment-" she says, abruptly, and blushes; as if Garden isn't rigorous enough in its standards (the three entrance exams she took, physical first, then later tactical and academic, before being considered for cadetship) and as if she hasn't been happy here, despite everything.
She doesn't know what to say to this man she has known all her life, and how must he feel about this? Surely he is not overjoyed at the prospect of losing a SeeD, they can't just promote a cadet lickety-split to take her place.
And yet, and yet, he's nodding gravely. "I can't say I'll be happy to see you go, but we both know you're ready to make a name for yourself in your field." At this, she blushes again- such a selfish field to be in, and she had been brought up never to show off.
"Don't come over all modest, now. Your work on-", he clears his throat and reads from her release form, "para-magic and its relationship with the genetic fight-or-flight survival mechanic- is unrivalled, or so I'm told."
"I'm the only one working on it, sir-" Well, of course she is, who has a 'limit break' like hers? Silly.
He is smiling gently now, an obvious attempt to ease her tension, and she can't help but offer a smile back, despite herself and her roiling stomach. Things might just be all right.
He signs the form with a single, florid movement, Cid Kramer below her own too-careful Quistis Trepe.
"Of course, they can't let you go just like that," Xu is telling her, nodding for emphasis. "You know the contract, how convoluted it is, I mean why do you think you never, ever see any ex-SeeDs, because they're all stuck here or dead, for Hyne's sake-" Quistis winces at this, but lets it go.
"It's all done. Cid signed this. This morning." Holds out the signed release form, with its sub-clauses and handwritten amendments. "Once I get it to Gina next door, that's it." She's a little proud of how composed she is, sitting in her and Xu's shared office with a cup of cold tea on the desk and her desk drawer on her lap half full of the papers she's been sorting. When the form's handed to Gina, she'll have forty-eight hours until her dorm is re-assigned and she, and all her worldly goods are getting on a train.
"I can't believe you pulled this off."
"Well-"
"Oh there's a catch, I knew there would be a catch. Don't tell me, he signed it as Seifer Almasy and Gina's going to take one look and start crying-"
"Xu."
"Sorry."
"I'm going to remain on the roster. Inactive. In case Garden gets a contract in Esthar, and they need me in particular. He said that. Just routine jobs. And no travelling." Xu laughs at this, but her hair is over her face, and Quistis can't see her expression.
"Come here, you lucky bitch. Give me a hug."
Quistis complies, then steps back and dabs her eyes.
"I am actually proud of you, you know." Xu says, her eyes just as damp.
She doesn't have much to pack, thank goodness. Her books and papers go into a trunk, to be shipped separately. The rest is just clothes, really, and a small box of mementoes, which, along with her small computer, will be easy enough to take with her.
On the last day, her room feels smaller, despite its bareness, and she busies herself with checking that all is in order and that nothing has been left behind. She remakes the bed with clean sheets in military fashion, checks underneath it one last time, and resets the door code before handing her keycard back to the Residency office.
It's the end of an academic year, for cadets at least, so her fussing goes unnoticed in the hurly-burly of shouted farewells between students and the emotional greetings of guardians and relatives at the gates as she leaves. No-one knows she's leaving today, save Xu, Cid and Gina, and Xu is probably expecting to see her again first.
She knows it's overly dramatic of her, this unannounced departure, yet she can't bear to say it to anyone else. Her small circle of friends will have to be phoned later, and they will tell the students who call themselves Trepies, probably. But she'll call, she decides, when she's far away from her friends, and already apart from them.
What will she do if they see it as a betrayal, she wonders. She's not sure how she's going to manage this herself- after weeks and months of forced companionship, of perfect teamwork and, eventually, an awkward kind of easiness in their presence, suddenly being alone and adrift in the world.
But why else is she leaving, she thinks finally, if not for exactly that?
It's hot out, and the train at Balamb is almost empty. She avoids the SeeD section, seeing a small party of cadets and their families enter as she boards the train. Dressed plainly and casually, netbook open on the small folding table, she's pretty sure she's passing as a civilian. Opening the window, she breathes in deeply as the train rattles out onto the sea bridge. Despite the heat, the air seems fresher for the movement.
At ten o'clock at night, having long passed Fisherman's Horizon, the train stops at a no-name halt. Refuelling break, she guesses, and the announcement as the train shakes into the station tells her she has thirty minutes to purchase refreshments and use the facilities.
Quistis worries, as she tends to do in these situations, about being mistaken and left at the station. But she makes a compromise, in the spirit of adventure and such, and walks as far as the front of the train and back again while keeping a close eye on it in case it departs ahead of schedule. Back in her seat, she opens the meal she packed for herself- bean soup in a thermos, and cold vegetable rice, perfectly nutritionally balanced for a sedentary journey- and glances out of the window as she begins to eat. There's a tiny, seedy-looking diner across the platform, and there's even people eating there at this time of night. Fellow passengers, she assumes.
And then she freezes, because she sees a man at the counter serving the "FRESH FRIED FH FISH" advertised in the window, and he is unmistakably tall and dark.
Of course it's not him, she chastises herself, and turns away resolutely. And if it is, why should I care? He can do what he likes, I'm sure. All the same, her e-book goes unread and she falls asleep a while later, still troubled.
A whistle is blown loudly when the train arrives at Esthar twenty-five minutes behind schedule, and it jolts Quistis awake. Eight am local time, she believes, and while the sleep has refreshed her, she is not feeling at her best as she moves through the crowded station to the city shuttle. District Nineteen-C is where she's headed. These Estharians are so imaginative, she thinks as she did when she made the arrangements. Not the smartest of areas, to her recollection, but she's sure that the lack of a Lunar Cry and therefore considerably less monsters will improve things this time around.
Besides, she's on a budget, since SeeD aren't going to be paying her to study unless she thwarts an assassination or a coup in the process. And then only if she's on contract at the time.
Nineteen E- D- the shuttle makes a graceful turn to the west, and here she is. She feeds her token into the machine and pays her fare to open the door - you paid when you got off here, how strange, something she'd almost forgotten.
It's a cleanish, but mostly neon-lit area, even at this hour. The long blocks of buildings, candy-coloured and translucent but tall enough to dim the morning sun, are clearly deeply familiar with the local street artists, she thinks wryly. The largest and most colourful artwork she sees tells the world proudly from fifteen feet up that Kimi will do anything. Not many people on the streets yet, either a shabby working-class suburban area or the kind of place that would be dead till ten at night. Hard to tell in Esthar, where people tended to live in apartments and go out to parks and allotments rather than buy a house with a garden. The outlying areas weren't fully cleared, and SeeD still got contracts from time to time to 'sanitize' and monster-proof newly-built rural properties.
At least the streets have interesting names, she thinks, and consults her map to find Rue Allégresse.
[two weeks later]
She had taken to sleeping during the day to avoid the oppressive heat. Sleeping at eight in the morning and rising at four in the afternoon saved money on running the pitiful metered fan unit and allowed her to work without the sounds of the street and the shuttle causing a distraction.
The apartment was let from the University of Esthar, a sprawling institution which had around thirty thousand students enrolled and, in consequence, owned blocks and blocks of subsidized housing scattered throughout the city. They'd given her a small scholarship, and allowed her to take a room. The place was large enough and had its own bathroom, for which she was thankful. The rest of the place was to be shared with four others, although since the university had recessed for summer weeks before she arrived, she had only met one, a short, furtive-looking boy of nineteen, her own age. He stayed in his room for the most part, but made his presence known in the kitchen- where he left eggs with Pieter neatly printed on them in the refrigerator.
She didn't even like eggs.
Although she tried to keep to a combat diet, she simply couldn't keep herself in shape properly, she realized, until the university re-opened and she could take advantage of the students' gym. After the first few days, her stomach won out and instead of sitting alone in the kitchen staring at her latest unappetizing effort, she followed her nose outside and dined on spicy shishkebabs from a cardboard carton. Although the vendor was a rural Estharian who had trouble understanding her accent, the stall was open all night and Quistis returned often. She hoped the sit-ups she was doing every afternoon would compensate for the saturated fat.
For the most part, her writing was development of the thesis that had granted her admission to the university in lieu of more traditional qualifications: that the 'limit break' phenomenon, only recorded amongst Garden soldiers, was a fusion of the greater combat abilities granted by Guardian Forces with the inherent human capability of great physical and mental effort when forced into a stressful situation.
She'd done her research, interviewed civilians who had performed great feats during wartime, and studied official reports and secondary evidence where possible. She was hoping to prove another theory during her time in Esthar: that 'limit breaks' would recur in formerly junctioned individuals even when they possessed no Guardian Forces. Individuals being herself, really. SeeD rarely sent soldiers into battle without GFs, and this was already the longest time she'd spent unjunctioned since the weeks before her SeeD exam four - no, almost five - years before.
The time in the D-District prison had been useful, after all. Even then she'd been working out how to make academic use of the worst things in her life.
Her own 'limit break' had first occurred during the SeeD exam- sent to Timber by the Galbadian government to suppress a rebel force amassing in the surrounding forest, she'd found herself cut off from the rest of her unit by enemy fire, and was facing off against two guerrilla fighters and losing. An Ochu had caught them by surprise as they attacked her, at first giving her an advantage, but one soldier had kept her at bay while the other wasted far too much ammunition on the pathetic thing. Finally she was pinned, and with a knife at her throat, the heavier of the two forced her face into the Ochu's stinking corpse while barking questions about the SeeDs' movements in guttural Galbadian. She blacked out, and the next she knew the soldiers were immobilized in a vile green goo, which she could taste in her mouth. After vomiting profusely, she'd freed her hands using the monster's sharp teeth and rejoined her unit, who together took the soldiers captive and passed the exam with honours.
Odd, that, she'd thought at the time. She'd always considered herself detached and ascetic, a born academic, and yet her limit break was so visceral. Perhaps her subconscious was trying to tell her something. And if so, her subconscious was disgusting.
Upon waking, she stayed in bed for a few minutes and stared sleepily out of the large window at the heat-hazed city. The shuttle tracks were a wide arc above the street, winding their way between buildings with an especially Estharian disregard for gravity and common sense. It was rather too warm still, she decided, for working; instead, after showering the sweat away, she walked down the street and got an iced coffee to wake herself up properly.
As she left the café, drink in hand, she noticed the shop next door properly for the first time, and felt a pang of guilt; she'd been so wrapped up in settling in, unpacking, exploring the neighbourhood and most of all working, that she'd neglected calling home. It was a phone place, the same as you'd find in Deling or Dollet, that would sell you a "completely legit phone" for 100 gil, with 17 gil of call credit still on it and a tendency to stop working after a few days. She took special care to select a phone still sealed in its box and took the online plan with free satellite calls.
Later, in her room, after some consideration, she took a deep breath and called Selphie's SeeD com, punching in her authorization code when requested. Unconsciously, she was balling her free hand into a fist and opening it again, repeatedly, as if to crush the silly little phone. A child's phone, really, she thought, too small for her hand. And then-
"Uh, hello? Who is this? Sir Laguna? I don't usually get calls from Esthar!"
"Selphie-"
"Quisty! Where have you been? Like, Xu said something about Esthar, but I wasn't really listening, is it a mission? How is it? How long are you going to be?"
"I, um, I don't know how much Xu told you-"
"Like, nothing! Just that you'd gone to Esthar kinda suddenly and that you'd probably call! We've totally been wondering what was up, is it secret, cause like you probably wouldn't be calling if it was, but-"
"Selphie, stop and breathe."
"Okay, okay, I just wondered!"
"Well, I- I'll be gone for a while, that's all."
"Don't tell me, you got my fucking job as Sir Laguna's security. Seriously?"
"It's nothing to do with SeeD, Selphie."
Quistis could hear Selphie's badly-hidden gasp of surprise, and decided to take over the conversation while she had the chance.
"I'm going to study combat science. At the university, that is, nothing to do with Doctor Odine, you'll be glad to hear."
"That guy is creepy-"
"Just a bachelor's on the new program, then hopefully start a master's or even a doctorate on para-magic."
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then:
"Just a bachelor's and a master's and a doctorate? Quisty, you'll be there for years if you do that, what the hell?"
"I've made the decision."
"Well yeah, you're already there. What, I'm gone for a week to Trabia and you just move to Esthar?"
"I've been considering it for months, really-"
"And you didn't think about telling me?"
"Look, I just had to see if I could get in, and then I did, and it snowballed from there, you know people look down on SeeD's academic reputation, I thought I could prove that, you know, we're not meatheads, or paid muscle-"
"Quisty, I think we proved that when we, um, defeated the sorceress threatening the entire planet."
"I- look, I'll call back. I'm sorry I didn't call before-"
"Whatever. Look, take care, and call back when you're sane." Selphie hung up before Quistis could reply.
After that, she decided to send emails to the rest of her acquaintances; no doubt Irvine and Zell would hear soon enough from Selphie, but Nida and Xu deserved to know she was still alive, and Squall and Rinoa- well, they probably hadn't even known she'd gone, having returned to Timber to facilitate a potential Galbadian ceasefire. But nonetheless, she'd tell them, too.
Predictably, Zell called at five the next morning, which would have been, she thought, eleven at night in Balamb. She'd given up writing up the research proposal she'd started the evening before after calling Selphie, instead switching on her portable television and passing the time watching one inane game show after another; half-naked and barefoot on the bed with the window wide open, the subtropical night was bearable after all. And, she supposed, the terrible television might improve her Estharian vocabulary.
"Quistis, um, is this a bad time? I know it's kinda late there, but I just got back from town and Selphie just told me you're gone?"
"Yes, Zell. I'm in Esthar."
"Wow. For school, right? Not a mission?"
"Yes."
It was awkward, and Quistis' embarrassment must have reached Zell, somehow.
"Well, that's cool, you know? Uh, I mean it's kind of weird you just up and left like that, I mean we could have had a goodbye party or something! But, you get me, it's pretty awesome you got a place there and just went for it, yeah?"
"...Thanks."
"I mean, we'll miss you, and we'll have to, I guess, hijack the Ragnarok and come visit and shit, but man, I know I got my ma and all but I'd never have the balls to just take off one day-"
And Quistis found herself laughing. Zell had a knack with people, as he did with machines, of making things okay.