There's Nothing You Can Say
Synopsis - You can do everything right, and it still won't be enough for some people – even yourself, he told her. And quite frankly, despite the source of the words, Quistis couldn't help but agree. Written for the Successor Challenge.
Author's Notes – I thought I'd cap off the challenge with a bit of a hat trick and something different – albeit fairly short. I started writing this on the 27th so if it shows, my apologies. :)
-—-
Hindsight had always been, in some shape or form, a thorn in Quistis's side.
But the more she thought about it, she realized that that would be putting it too lightly; it was more like the at-fault party in a car crash. It didn't matter if she'd done everything right, that it was completely outside of her control, she'd replay the moment of impact over and over again until doubt ate at the memory and she wasn't sure what to believe anymore.
As a SeeD, and even as a cadet if she wanted to be honest, she hadn't taken a lot of downtime. Partly because of the workload she had (or had imposed upon herself), and partly because long stretches of time where she'd be left to her own devices and thoughts often yielded counter-productive results.
Needless to say, when she spotted Squall as he was about to enter a different cabin on the same train she had taken to a last-minute getaway with an old friend she was meeting up with in Deling City, it had piqued her curiosity. And not just because he was wearing a heather-grey tee and charcoal cargo pants in lieu of encasing every inch of himself in leather like he normally did.
If anyone had a more dismal vacation-taking track record among Garden staff than she did, it would have been her formal pupil. So to be here without spotting one of their mutual friends or his girlfriend at any point seemed terribly out of place, especially when factoring in the absence of a gunblade case in his grip and of him noticing her proximity period. It didn't help matters that what he did have in his hand looked like a bag from the nearby liquor store near the station and clear undertones of stress marring his otherwise stone faced expression. Well, it had certainly seemed this way to an expert Squall-observer, such as herself, that was.
Nevertheless, with all of these things taken in consideration, Quistis had surmised that whatever he was here for had nothing to do with official Garden business and nothing to do with anything positive. For this reason, she thought nothing of saying hello to him before he inevitably holed himself in his cabin for the remainder of the trip.
"…This is a surprise."
What she should have thought something about was that Squall's lips were now tightly pursed as he was now glaring daggers at her.
This was where the curse of hindsight had careened into her once more as she saw yet another former student waving at her from inside the cabin.
No wonder Squall had brought alcohol, she'd thought to herself.
-—-
Quistis seated herself on the bench opposing Seifer in the private cabin after Squall had walked in, stood by the door and lobbed the bag at the former knight's head – which he'd caught with ease and a slight clinking noise. Not because she wanted to mire herself in under-the-table politics or even to satiate a burning curiosity, but mainly at Seifer's insistence and Squall's reluctance - and only after the latter had vouched that she did not have her whip on her person. Not that he needed to say anything, really - she was wearing a cream-coloured sundress with a petal-pink purse small enough where she couldn't even fit her half-empty water bottle in it. All it achieved was making her hyper-conscious of how naked she felt without said whip right now.
"Let me be clear before either of you try to explain yourselves." she warned, pointing her water bottle at both men in the room. "I am on my vacation and I will leave whenever I want to. Understood?"
"Can't have that, Instructor." Seifer shook his head. "Doesn't comply with the rules, see."
Quistis furrowed her brow. "What do you-"
"-Are you renting a car when you arrive in Deling?"
She turned to her left. "Yes, why do you ask?"
"Plausible deniability." Squall stated, his words clipped with thinly-veiled disgust. "The short version of what you've walked into is the main stipulation for James's international janitorial services. We can't be armed or sober before discussing business transactions so it won't hold up in a court, or at least very easily. I'll foot the bill for whatever transportation and lodging you'll need after."
"…And you can't just wait for me to leave first, why?"
Squall crossed his arms and made a point of shooting a dirty look at Seifer. "It's also for his protection to ensure we're in no state to retaliate as bringing Hyperion without its case is not usually an option." he tersely explained.
"And if you're thinking of faking, don't bother. I can spot a sober act a mile away." Seifer added. "There's a reason why I spearheaded the disciplinary committee despite the fact Greenhouse's always hated my guts. Your good pal's guts hated me too when I made him chug cheap vodka straight from the bottle after catching him try."
Quistis wrung the cap on her water bottle a little tighter. "So this cleaning business is important enough for the Chairman to stoop to a dog and pony show every time something needs mopped up? Give me one good reason why I shouldn't turn you in for the overdue hearing of your war crimes."
"Because I'll never be able to make up for what I've done in my lifetime or the next." Seifer soberly explained, dropping every ounce of mirth that had been present in his tone earlier. "Sending me to what will basically be my execution won't do jack shit to make up for any of the damage I did. Dying is easy, doing unofficial Vegetable Garden business completely under the radar is harder. Getting him wasted is just an extra precaution that happens to amuse me – if I overhear things that dear Mr. Leader says while he's drunk off his ass to make sure the cretins out to make Angel's life miserable are taken care of, that's not his fault, now is it? And to be fair, the origin story for this informal arrangement happened in a dive bar so who am I to mess with what works?"
"…I see now." she said, shifting her gaze to Squall. "Vegetable Garden can't help Angel keep her wings from being clipped?"
"Vegetable Garden wants to keep their hands clean, ironically enough." Squall sighed. "I realize that little of this explanation of why he asks me to drink heavily applies to you as the sole catch but-"
"-No, I do understand." she interjected. "In vino veritas – in wine, there is truth. After what happened in the war, I would imagine there would be little reason to believe each other's motives, never mind trust one another to not use the other for gain. Drink enough and you'll be more upfront about things you would otherwise hide or omit – myself included."
Seifer shrugged as he pulled out a bottle of what most certainly wasn't wine out from the bag Squall had tossed at him. "Something like that. If you've seen this guy drunk though, you'll know why I ask him to be drunk instead of sober whenever we end up in the same room."
In spite of herself, she let the corners of her mouth upturn at the thought presented to her.
"Can't say that I have." she commented, pushing back the bridge of her glasses. "But I'm not sure if you'd want me to follow the same rules though. I've…been told that I'm kind of chatty when I've had a few drinks. I understand this is important to help out Angel, but quite frankly, it might be counter-productive to the arrangement."
The former knight smirked. "You really haven't seen him drunk then because that's the whole point – he's a sassy drunk who does not shut up. Hell, with a bit of goading, I can get him to sing a few bars of pop songs off-key. It's a beautiful thing, really. So yeah, as long as you don't start giving us some kind of godawful tutorial, I don't care how much you talk."
Quistis truly didn't know why she was even considering this ridiculous proposal at this point, having clearly stumbled into one of the finer oddities that had emerged from her former students' push-and-pull relationship, but she couldn't help but wonder how much Seifer had done for Rinoa and possibly countless others without anyone ever noticing. She certainly had not heard any reports of him causing trouble across the globe so he must have been doing something right. And who was she to pull the plug on this?
Squall might not have been Zell insofar as his animosity towards Seifer, but the fact that he'd allowed himself to venture into this cabin unarmed but prepared to drink told her volumes. And if nothing else, she trusted his judgement.
It was for this reason that Quistis gave the man across from her the sweetest of put-on smiles and told him, "You might regret those words."
-—-
It turned out that Seifer would regret nothing as Squall had brought nowhere near strong enough to give her anything but a slight buzz and rosy cheeks. At this point she wasn't sure what she cursed more, Squall's choice in alcohol, that the man was a lightweight who was also too precious for this world at times or that she'd attended far too many SeeD balls drinking Xu under the table to regain some semblance of sanity to up her tolerance. Regardless of which one it was, it would not change the fact that she was stuck here with Seifer for another hour until they got to Deling as Squall had somehow decided to pass out with his head in her lap and it felt almost morally wrong to move him.
"Bet you're thrilled." he commented.
"Thrilled isn't the right word when I have to worry about him possibly drooling or puking on my dress, thank you very much."
"That's not what I meant and you know that, Instructor."
"I know what you meant and I'm choosing to ignore it. And stop calling me Instructor, you know I lost my license all those years ago."
Seifer shrugged. "Well you weren't correcting me before. I just assumed you got it back sometime after I was out of your hair."
"I didn't correct you before because I was little more pre-occupied over the visual confirmation of your continued existence. But no, I never tried to get it back."
"Strange."
"What's strange?"
"Everything, really." he said. "The Quistis I knew would have grilled whoever made the decision to find out where she went wrong in ad nauseam detail so she'd wrap her mistakes in a frilly bow and reapply the first chance she got. Hell, she'd be over the moon that Puberty Boy was lying on her lap after drunkenly admitting he's having a rough patch with Rinoa."
She shook her head. "He just said those things because he's scared. I have faith they'll work through this bump in the road – they always do. Even if they didn't, I've never been one for consolation prizes so I'd imagine I wouldn't want to be one either."
"Fair enough. I wouldn't want to be Puberty Boy's plan B either. Or Garden's for that matter."
"Huh?"
"If I had to guess, I'd say the reason why you never reapplied is because you're more like me than you care to admit."
Quistis tilted her head curiously as he got up.
"You can do everything right, and it still won't be enough for some people – even yourself." he told her. "I bet you realized at some point that being determined wasn't a guarantee to succeed at whatever you put your mind to just like I did. All the smart ones do. It's better to chase a new dream than to let an old one turn into a nightmare at any rate."
He then exited the cabin all together without explanation, leaving her with a still-passed out Squall on her lap and confusion etched all across her face.
Leave to Seifer to leave in the most dramatic fashion, she thought to herself, and to arrogantly assume that his words would ring true for that matter.
The irony was that they had in a way.
The truth was that Garden had revoked her license for not being able to control Seifer Almasy back then, a feat no other instructor past or present had been able to achieve. Once the self-loathing had subsided enough to see things clearly, it had become the catalyst of a valuable lesson. Much like she was singled out as a failure for something no one had been able to do, so had Seifer for doing the exact things Squall and Zell were doing, the latter pair passing the exam on the thinnest of technicalities. And those two separate facts put together among others had made Quistis realize that looking outward for validation of her worth and intelligence was the recipe for disaster when fate and design had other plans - especially when dealing with an institution coincidentally founded on a self-fulfilling prophecy.
She was by no means free from the doubt and insecurities known to plague her from time to time, but knowing her value had undoubtedly changed her perspective for the better. She knew this much from the fact that she could be genuinely happy that her sleeping friend had been proposed to by his longtime girlfriend without so much more as a second thought.
And she only had herself to thank for that.