Seifer embraces his new post, all irritation of how it came to be pushed aside the first time he walks the halls with his new authority. He breaks up card games that block the halls, reports t-boarders to the Garden Faculty for confiscation, and, using Fujin for aide, mans the bridges leading to the right hand side of the TC to keep the junior cadets away.
He ignores the fact that the rules still apply to him.
He breaks up the first underground match after his appointment for show, but fights in the next one. He is slightly disappointed Squall isn't there-it would have been nice to have a decent fight-but picks another scrawny kid instead, and wins easily. Fujin continues to collect bets, and no one is worried when the DC is in on it. When he isn't fighting, he referees, calling fouls for moves he's done a thousand times and dismissing them easily. He knows he can't order detention here if he wants these matches to continue, but it's so much fun to watch them whine.
The night Squall shows back up Seifer is pumped, ready. No one else comes close to the fight he gets out of that boy and his blood is burning for release. They step into the ring, circling each other, and Seifer is pleased to see the same hungry look in Squall's eyes.
Just before their ref sounds the bell, a voice calls out, "I want to fight the winner."
Seifer turns just as the bell sounds, and Squall lands a punch that knocks him on his ass before he realizes the match has started. He stares at the ceiling through twinkling black dots and is not sure if he is angry, embarrassed, or shocked. He settles on a combination of all three, and refuses to take Squall's hand once he's gathered himself enough to stand.
Quistis is standing beside the ring, her expression blank, and Seifer isn't entirely sure Squall even heard her speak. He wouldn't believe it himself it he couldn't see her standing there, waiting, almost impatient that it is taking him this long to move.
"Two out of three," he looks at her and snaps. "And that was only one."
He shakes his head and he and Squall go back to their corners for the next round. Squall does not look pleased, obviously a little stunned himself at his easy win. "Good," Seifer thinks. He should be less focused.
Seifer wins the second round easily, his hunch on his advantage correct. The third round takes longer, both of them back in their element, but Seifer has something to prove, dammit, and prove it he does. The pop Squall's shoulder makes when it dislocates is almost enough to make Seifer question what exactly it is he's trying to prove, but when it is Quistis who climbs through the ropes and snaps it into place, he stops wondering, his victory made that much sweeter by the sound that escapes Squall's throat.
"My turn," she says, her eyes still entirely unintelligible. She is as much a mystery to him as she was the first day, and now he is going to fight her. "No wrestling. I've never trained."
"Then get out of the ring. You thought we were going to dance in here?"
"Oh, you'll dance."
She flies at him and she is lightning fast, landing kicks he never saw her raise and hitting him with the sides of board straight palms.
Seifer has had just enough martial arts training to know how to defend himself and not much else. He is furious at how quickly she turned this into her game and scrambles to remember whatever he can from the few classes he didn't skip. Eventually his size advantage begins to work in his favor, and he catches her in a grip she can't escape.
"I said no wrestling," she hisses, and has the sense not to struggle too hard.
"And I say, no kung fu-"
Quistis hooks a leg behind his and knocks him back, throwing her weight to the side as he falls. He misses her landing, misses her catch herself and spring back, but he does not miss her pulling her legs up and locking them against his arms in a mockery of his first fight with Squall.
"Fine," she says. "We'll do it your way. Two out of three?"
Seifer coughs, and glares up at her.
"Unfortunately, this gathering is unauthorized, and as a member of the Disciplinary Committee, I'm afraid I'll have to report anyone still here in the next five minutes to the Garden Faculty."
She glares at him for a second, and then they are both aware that she is still straddling him, and scramble apart.
"You heard me!" Seifer shouts. "Clear out!"
The other cadets walk out begrudgingly, except for Quistis, Fujin, and surprisingly Leonheart, who all linger.
Squall looks like he wants to say something, though what Seifer couldn't begin to guess.
He has half a mind to apologize to Quistis, but she beats him to it, waiting until everyone else has left the room before leveling him with a stare and saying, "You're a sore loser, Almasy. Xu was right about you."
"Five," Fujin says, pointing at her watch.
Seifer looks at Squall and Quistis and gives them an over-exaggerated shrug. "Well, I'm sorry you two, but you missed the five minute warning. I guess you'll both be spending the next few days in detention." He presses a series of buttons on the comm device on the band of his watch, and a minute later two Faculty members show up and issue written detention warnings to Squall and Quistis.
"What's wrong, Leonhart? Wishing you'd finished me off? You can think about that while you're scrubbing out the TC drain lines."
He storms out of the gym with Fujin close behind, burning with something that almost feels like guilt.
"Ass," Fujin says, once he's reached the far corner of the TC and has nowhere left to run.
"She deserved it," Seifer snaps.
"Did not," Fujin argues, and raises her eyebrow.
"Oh shut up." Seifer slips behind one of the larger plants near the back wall and emerges a few seconds later holding a set of training chakram and the blades he took on the Trabia mission. He and Fujin spend the next two hours decimating as many grats as possible and Seifer hopes that Leonhart has to clean the remains of every single one.
.
Seifer keeps the fighting ring closed, despite a few of the younger students' pathetic attempts to start it up again. To ward off the whispered taunts that he ruined a perfectly good way of spending free time because he lost to a first-time fighter, he spends the better part of a year legitimately enforcing the rules, without abusing his power.
Much.
He is also moved into the SeeD courses, and takes advantage of his time as a rule-abider to study. SeeD candidates are allowed to be junctioned at all times, and he is issued a training gunblade to take on field missions, provided he maintains a certain average in his courses. Pride already ground into the dirt, Seifer is not about to let something as stupid as a grade take away the thing he has wanted since he got here.
He is in the library looking for a text to study when he comes across a book called The Sorceress' Knight, and freezes, holding it like he has found a sacred text.
It comes back immediately. All dull colors and dragging sound and lines dancing across the screen from too much use, but it comes back like he had watched it this morning. Seifer numbly walks out of the library without even bothering to check out the book, absolutely sick that he has forgotten something so important, something so defining.
Fujin sees the book and gives him a questioning stare and he just shakes his head, not willing to talk about it, if he's even able. He reads the book cover to cover, and withdraws even more. The next time he is in town he uses some of his gunblade money to order a copy of the movie from Balamb's video store, and when it arrives, he spends even more money to pay one of the low rank tech specialists to load it onto his tablet.
He still has it memorized. How can he still have something memorized, he had so completely forgotten?
He is in a training room trying to replicate the exact stance of the actor in the movie when he hears a voice again, her voice, and he swings around, keeping the tip of the blade level with the bridge of her nose.
"Hello," she says, with a tone like she's repeating herself.
"Hi," he responds, and does not lower his weapon.
Quistis remains silent for another minute, and her eye contact is almost starting to make him nervous. He's never really looked into her eyes before, usually too focused on her hair, or on the fact that she's growing up in all the right ways.
Shit, he thinks, and wonders how many of his thoughts he's projecting. His weapon suddenly starts to feel very heavy, but then she moves and looks down and he forces his muscles to comply, not sure of what trick she's planning.
What he is not expecting, is for her to unclip a fucking whip from her belt and hold it up to him like it's a movie she wants to go watch. Or for her to whirl around as she lets it fly, for the echoing crack it makes as it bounces off the walls of the room, and for her to face him with an equally offensive stance.
"You sure about this?" He is not asking solely her own benefit. He's never fought anything except swords and monsters since he started training with the gunblade, and doesn't exactly see how this is supposed to work. And he is still stinging from the last time they went up against each other. He is determined to win, but break the rules though he may, doesn't exactly want to kill her in the process.
"Afraid I'll beat you again?" She taunts, and give the whip another wave, the crack soft, trained.
"In your dreams," he retorts. They wait a beat, and then on an unspoken signal, attack.
Fighting her in a controlled setting is nothing like the fighting ring. There is no audience here, and after the first few minutes of show, they fall into a pattern of actually trying to learn from each other.
There is no way of telling from where she stands which direction the whip will fly. Seifer has never seen her train with it, never even seen her hold one, but she clearly knows what she is doing, and does it well. Still, he picks up on certain wrist movements with enough confidence to enter her range. He swings and parries, happy to have her dancing backwards at one point before she takes a low swing and he has to jump to keep from being knocked off his feet.
She hits him first, just as he is recovering from a string of trigger pulls, something he's only recently started to practice. As he is pulling back to recharge she misjudges her distance and lays a thick welt across his ribs, blossoming red through the tatters of his shirt.
"Oh!" She exclaims, and pulls her weapon back abruptly, but Seifer lunges ahead, spinning her around and gripping the gunblade from either side of her shoulders, blade just inches from her throat.
"I hope you weren't thinking about apologizing," he whispers in her ear, and is satisfied at the shiver he feels run through her. He bends his knee slightly, ready for her to try the same trick she did before. "I win."
"You win," she nods, and he releases her slowly, cautiously, but she simply coils the whip and re-clips it to her belt. "Thank you."
"For what?" He acts very interested in the shine on the gunblade.
"For not making allowances."
"This is the wrong place for allowances, and you know it. You don't challenge someone unless you want to see it through. You try what you just did with me and you'd be dead."
"I know." She looks sufficiently embarrassed, and Seifer lets it drop. "Are you okay?"
"I'll be fine." He reaches a hand down and it comes away red. The cut is fairly shallow, but it still stings like a bitch.
"You have any cures?"
"Nah. No need for them here, why waste space?" He doesn't carry them in the TC, either, and very rarely outside of Garden. Fujin does a pretty good job of keeping him alive, and that's good enough for him most days.
"May I?"
He tenses, and gives her a sharp look. The wound isn't bad, and he can find Fujin, or even suck it up and see Kadowaki fairly quickly. "It's fine, really."
"If we go again you're going to sling blood all over the floor. And unless your tactic is causing me to slip, shut up and let me heal that." Her words are clipped and lacking irony. He's not sure she was actually joking, but laughs at her anyway.
"Seriously?"
"Just lift up your shirt."
He does, and she looks over the gash for a minute before reaching out a hand. Seifer closes his eyes as the warmth of the cure spell hits him, and something about it is so much more personal than ever before. He feels the blood stop running, his skin start to glue itself back together, and the pain subsides for just a second. She lets the spell linger, and the sensation leaves the wound, travels into his fingers, down his legs, and excites something in him he is in no hurry to let her notice.
"Thanks." He opens his eyes and takes a step back, pulling his shirt down violently.
"Are you mad? I could have just let you bleed-"
"You mentioned wanting to go again. I'm in." He shakes his head, trying to force his focus back into his brain, and pulls himself into a different stance, one that doesn't face her quite so directly.
"Fine," she snaps at him, clearly offended and Seifer doesn't care. He lunges towards her before she has a full chance to prepare herself, and he makes a snide comment about her lack of readiness. She responds by aiming the whip for his ankles and trying to pull him down, and they are back to their dance from earlier, only this time the energy is more raw, more vicious. It briefly occurs to him that one of them could get seriously hurt, but he quickly dismisses the thought.
He wins again when he manages to catch her whip with his blade and disarms her, but not before he's pulled her almost into his arms. That's when she drops it, taking a hurried step back from him, and there is a wildness in her eyes.
"You win again," she says. "May I have my weapon back, please?"
"For all the good it does you." He turns around to untangle it, all too aware that she is having the same effect on him now that she did while she was healing him. "You know if this wasn't a training weapon I'd have sliced that thing into threads."
"Then it's a good thing we're training. Otherwise your intestines would be all over the floor."
"You didn't hit me that hard."
"I still would have won if this had been for real. See, you can't even look at me."
"You keep telling yourself that. I want a rematch once you've learned how to fight." He walks out of the training room with as much bravado as possible and ignores her comeback, pretending he didn't hear. The second he's out of her line of sight he beelines for the showers, and avoids her for the rest of the week.
.
They are soon swept into the preliminary training for their next year, the year they both turn fifteen, the first year they can take the SeeD exam. Seifer makes it a point to avoid her in training, taking as much frustration as he can out on Leonhart, whenever he manages to catch Squall in the TC.
"You've learned something new," Squall tells him one day, after a long session that only barely resulted in Seifer's victory. They are more evenly matched now than ever before, despite all of Seifer's extra training. Seifer still wins more than Squall, but by a much slimmer margin, and never without difficulty.
"Got to keep you on your toes."
He sweeps his eyes across the gym as they walk to the showers, and sees Quistis through the windows to the shooting range. Xu has her arms around her from behind, her skilled fingers guiding Quistis' hands into the proper grip on her pistol. Seifer's gaze lingers for one second too long before he shakes his head, trying to clear the image from his mind.
"Good luck this year," Squall says, and Seifer is about to snap at him for jumping to conclusions when he realizes Squall is still looking ahead towards the locker room, and is talking about the SeeD exam.
"Don't need it," Seifer smirks.
"Whatever," Squall mutters, and they hit the showers. Seifer keeps the water ice cold, and stays there long after Squall has left.
He doesn't need luck.
Right?