the summer soldier.
-irishais-
he screams, wings ripped from his back, blood coursing down his spine, red, red, red, everything will be forever red-
this is how you fly too close to the sun, this is how it feels when you fall.
one.
In the beginning, there was Seifer Almasy, eight years old, his height ticked off on the new door frame of a Garden apartment, measurements written in pencil, four and a half feet tall already. He is growing like a weed.
It takes him exactly two months before he finds himself in the infirmary for the first time, and it's because of a fight he started. He likes the way the blood feels coursing along his tongue, relishes in the empty space where a loose baby tooth once sat, now lost somewhere in the gym mats, and he is defiant in how proud he is of himself.
His father does not ground him. This is Garden. This is how it is.
He is eleven when he breaks the five-foot mark, ticked off in permanent marker high above last year's notation, an annual tradition. His mother will want to see it, when she returns to the mainland from her years and years out on the boat- Cid coats the marks in clear paint, preserving them forever.
Seifer deigns to hang around for cake, and between he, Fujin, and Raijin, the grocery-store concoction disappears hunk by slice by edible icing balloon. He takes a piece wrapped in plastic back to his dorm, and it serves as a midnight snack when he's bent over his terminal, trying to suss out the solution to a problem on his homework.
He is thirteen. Fifteen. Seventeen.
The second round of his SeeD exam is a miserable failure, Xu Chang ends up shot, he ends up in detention, neither of them attend the graduation ball- not that he would be allowed, and he feels the weight of forever cadet hanging on his shoulders. No one's failed this many times before, he's sure of it. Garden doesn't tolerate failure, doesn't tolerate SeeDs disobeying orders, going against the mission parameters to save a teammate's ass.
He leaves Xu a little potted daisy that he nicked from Garden's greenhouse, and makes sure he's gone from the infirmary before she wakes up and can give him shit about it. He's a nice guy. He's a good person.
He's just a miserable goddamned failure.
Eighteen years old, and there is a war on. Eighteen years old, and he tastes blood between his teeth, sucking it out with a long, indrawn breath, copper-bitter as it slides across his tongue and is spat onto the ground.
There's a war on, and he is its hero, its champion, the Sorceress before him with her face that never quite falls into place, her raven hair and her feathered gown. He bows his head, and she crowns him her knight.
Let them come for her. He will slaughter them all.
He is eighteen years old, and the war will eat him up and spit him out, but for now, he dreams in shatterglass unfocused reality.
He is eighteen.
The seduction is almost anticlimactic, when Ultimecia sheds her person-suit, the witch she was wearing, and by this point, he's too far gone to say no, to defy her in any way that will result in another long night at the hands of her torturers far too gleefully good at their jobs in the dungeons of her castle.
(poor, pretty boy, shed your skin and come to bed)
He is eighteen, with no memory of how he got here, pressing a cattleprod into Squall Leonhart's guts, demanding answers to questions that he doesn't even think he's really asking, the smell of burnt flesh acidic, foul, in the air around him.
Seifer stabs him again, again, again.
He is eighteen, and then nineteen.
There is no birthday party in the witch's palace. He cleans blood from beneath his nails, bandages split knuckles and a busted index finger. A phantom blond watches him in the grimy, ornate mirror, a ghost of a man who wears sun-freckled tan skin and eyes of green seaglass, a (poor, poor boy).
He is nineteen, when they catch him in the wilderness of Timber, when someone shoots him with a taser and brings him down a thrashing, panicked beast (not that he can fight them, he is nineteen and half-starved, worn down to nothing, a broken, broken man).
They cuff him, anyway, and Nida Warren breaks his nose when Seifer sneers some half-formed insult about his mother.
Seifer spends the flight back to Garden with his head held back and blood along his white-white teeth.
"Go away."
He doesn't leave. Doesn't particularly want to lurk around the glaring fluorescent-lit halls of the detention wing, cells lining either side and only one boasting no vacancy. Squall exhales.
"I said, fuck off."
That's more like it, but there's no vitriol behind it, no fury. He'd honestly expected more. Seifer looks like a kicked, abandoned dog, hidden in what shadows he can find at the far reaches of his cell. It's too small a space for him, and somehow, not even the looming Almasy can fill it up. War has diminished him, left blackened bruises beneath both eyes (that might be the nose, though).
He is a study in failure. Squall puts his hands in his pockets, quiet, observing. He doesn't even flinch at the explosion of the plastic lunch tray against the metal cell bars.
"Tch. You want them to shock you again?"
It's fitting retaliation, and Squall would be lying if he said he thought Seifer didn't deserve a taste of his own medicine.
"Kiss my ass."
It is not particularly witty. Squall shrugs.
"I don't know where it's been. Pass."
A low, loaded groan emits from somewhere deep in Seifer's throat. This is what passes for conversation, for meaningful interaction. He is a caged mutt now, the wolf gone, lost somewhere in the war.
"You could've shot me, you know. Saved all of Balamb a shitload of tax money."
He has to laugh, three beats of it falling in disbelief from his lips, and Squall shrugs, leaning back against the wall across from Seifer's cell. "We're not government affiliated. Not how it works. I could still shoot you, though. If you want."
For a while, Seifer seems to be considering the offer, and finally draws himself up from his corner, trading floor for the dubious comfort of a bread-thin mattress on a slab of concrete bed.
"Nah, you'd miss. I'd probably be pissing into a bag for the rest of my life."
"You're probably right."
There are a hundred questions he wants to ask. There are a hundred that he doesn't. He settles for doing what he came down here to do, and sticks a battered paperback between the cell bars, some shitty fantasy novel, the best Garden's library had to offer. Seifer's probably already read it, but Squall knows something about solitude and silence.
Knows that Seifer won't survive if he has nothing to fill those long-long-long hours with.
Doesn't know if it counts as forgiveness, though, the passing of a book, barbs laced with sarcasm traded as easily as gunblade blows.
He leaves Seifer in that bright-lit hall.
He is left in light and silence.
Seifer stares at the book dropped at the foot of his cot.