Eight
Summary - The number 8 had always been more than just a number to Squall.
Author's notes - It's my 8 year anniversary on the site (shh...let's pretend I didn't post this after midnight.), so I thought I'd write something a bit small. On a random note, I finally have a car of my own, and no word of a lie, the last three characters of my plate is '888'. Kinda cool, I think. ;)
Eight.
Years ago, two years shy of a decade to be precise, if you were to ask Squall what the number meant to him, he would have told you it was just that – a number. If you were fortunate enough to get him in a semi-talkative mood — the odds of you winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning simultaneously had better chance of happening, mind you — he might have said it was also the number of elemental attributes and the number that came after seven.
What he wouldn't have told you then was that he had an unspoken, but inexplicable fascination for the digit — namely for its uncanny ability to worm its way into every major event in his life.
His birth month was in the eighth month of the year. (And apparently in the eighth hour of the day according to his partially filled-out birth certificate that Elle had brought with them - though, now that he thought about it, he also remembered that he'd never gotten a straight answer from her as to why he had that eight-letter surname of his too.)
He moved to Garden on the eighth of the month. (He did forget which month, however.)
He went through eight other weapons before ultimately choosing the Gunblade as his weapon of choice. (He grew bored of the others very easily – the gunblade however, provided a nice challenge, then-eight year-old Squall had decided.)
It took him eight minutes to finish, and obviously pass, the timed Fire Cavern pre-requisite. (Ok, maybe it was more like a hair more than eight, closer to nine, but Squall did not count the amount of time Ifrit blathered on for.)
And last but not least, from the day of the SeeD exam to the end of Time Compression, the sorceress war lasted just about 41 weeks – or rather, eight months, eight weeks and eight days. (The hours and minutes didn't exactly work out here.)
In spite of the impressive array of eight-tinged events in his life, Squall had not put much stock into it back then, branding the reoccurring theme novelty and mere coincidence, if not going as far as calling the eights patterns out of thin air that he'd forced himself to notice.
But then a girl, whose name did not have eight letters, syllables or anything eight-related of the sort, made him believe that there was more to it than forced patterns and sequences.
Within eight seconds of meeting her, she'd already enchanted him — long before forcing him to take eight steps towards the dance floor, telling him how the number eight was lucky in certain cultures, irritably stating that her dog's true name was not in fact eight names long after confessing the rather embarrassing story of how her said companion was named — something she had never told anyone else before, only him — and long before letting a sentence, no more than eight letters long, escape her lips, making him brave enough to repeat the words in kind without so much as a second thought or regret.
By fate or design, the number eight had helped weave the tapestry of Squall Leonhart's life – something he definitely no longer denied as his heart had currently skipped a beat over his wife of eight months softly saying eight life-changing words.
"We are going to be parents in August."
He smiled and kissed her deeply, happy to reiterate that eight letter sentence without a second thought or regret.