(the things you said when you thought i was asleep)
they are seventeen (and sixteen-going-on)
he breathes it against her skin when he thinks she's asleep, inaudible and incoherent, and she thinks she's hallucinated him saying it at all. she pretends she's not awake, her smile tiny and private and buried in her pillow with his arm around her waist-
seifer certainly doesn't admit to anything the next morning, his hair sticking up seven different ways and inhaling coffee like there's no tomorrow in the easy silence between them. rinoa doesn't want to spoil the moment.
maybe there's not a moment to spoil.
they are seventeen.
she remembers it when they stand there on galbadian soil, and she is told that he is dead.
(iloveyou murmured against her mouth, furitive laughter and a shriek she can't quite contain as his fingers (rough and callused and warm against her skin) tickle along her ribs. he's never been shy about anything.
she says it back, when he's asleep, occupying the entire narrow dorm bed, snoring faintly from a broken nose sustained in class, and rinoa rests her cheek against his chest and says it back.
she's just trying the words out, just tasting how they feel along her tongue.)
he can't be dead.
they're only seventeen (eighteen, and a martyr for a sorceress' cause.)
(i miss you)
quistis hears her, the others in tents and sleeping bags and silent and still.
quistis of all people hears her say it to the sky and stars and midnight hours imissyou and rinoa hopes that he's somewhere safe (he isn't dead, he can't be dead, the valiant knight never dies) imissyou.
she cries, not for the first time, not for the last, curled up against a warm body, i know, the instructor says, i know, but how on earth can she?
it was only a summer, only a handful of months weeks days hours minutes seconds.
it might as well have been nothing at all.
i think we should send her back to timber, quistis says when dawn breaks over the horizon and squall emerges from the tents, she's too emotionally fragile.
rinoa keeps her eyes shut and her breathing even and thinks that quistis isn't the only one who can fake having it all together.
she turns eighteen sometime during the war.
seifer turns nineteen. it snows on his birthday.
but they're in trabia, and it snows all the time there.
besides, he tried to feed her to adel, and so she smiles and loops her arm through zell's when he presents her with a cupcake (blue frosting, a rose done up in sugar and so, so sweet) and tries not to think about someone else at all.
the war ends, and they come out of hell somewhere in winhill, and squall's heart sounds like a wardrum beneath rinoa's cheek.
i was so scared.
she falls asleep in a winhill inn, the television on low, and misses the broadcast where they announce that seifer almasy is in custody of garden, that he will be tried for crimes against humanity. when she wakes up from the strangest dream of gunfire and a guilty sentence, there's an infomercial on, and she can't get back to sleep for the longest time.
he is twenty, and she is close enough that it doesn't matter, when he calls her name and rinoa turns instinctively toward the sound. the war is over, the war's been over for nine months now.
he looks almost the same, still broad and muscled and his eyes still that same (haunted) green.
maybe not the same, when she gets close enough to reach out and touch, but she thinks the flecks of gold in his gaze are just a trick of the light. they stand there, they stare, they don't know what to say, and when she reaches up to rest a palm along his cheek, the beard he's started to grow is scratchy and strange against her skin.
he turns his face into her hand, and rinoa doesn't know if she can forgive him.
(i'm sorry, he says into the hollow of her throat, and she can't pretend to be asleep, fingers combing softly through his hair, i'm so sorry, holding to him tightly amidst the tangle of sheets, and she wonders if this is how it begins again.)