"Do you remember?"

They stood on the balcony above the main entrance, overlooking Balamb Garden's main entrance. Spring had brought colour back to cover up the dirty ground where the mobile mercenary academy had churned the soil into mud upon its return to the island. The concourse swarmed with returning and new students as the calendar had finally ticked over, bringing with the new year a collection of young boys and girls all hoping and praying for that one shot at becoming a SeeD. Whether out of principle to be something more than a common soldier, desire to emulate the heroes of the Second Sorceress War or thirst for knowledge found nowhere else, they had all packed their lives away and came to the small island, sandwiched between two continents like a wasp dancing between two boxers. Most would fall by the wayside but all of them had found the courage to get this far.

For this at least they deserved his respect.

Squall could see the not-so-idle glances thrown out by the prospective students as other, older men and women slid expertly among them, dodging through the mass of pressing flesh with an easy grace from years of training. The SeeD cadre caught everything as they moved through the mass of fresh meat to get to heir work, including the envious glances thrown at them, the black-and-white emblem pinned to their chest a symbol that marking them out from the Garden faculty and acting as a sharp counterpoint to the gangly ungraceful youths. Squall had (with permission of course) changed the rules years back to make returning graduates come through the same entrance as the fresh intake and their presence gave an unspoken message to the recruits; don't even think about becoming a SeeD unless you can be this good.

A sharp clap sounded through the air and as one they turned to look in its direction, to see a new face stood on the stairs above them. Almost at once silence descended as the nervous potentials saw the SeeDs stopping and paying attention to this new arrival, and they did the same as the woman began to speak. Squall turned away, he'd heard the speech before. Could have recited it from memory in fact. "Hmm?"

Rinoa tisked in annoyance and flicked a finger at this forehead. "I asked whether-"

"Whether I could remember." He grinned. "See, I'm a good listener."

Her look and sigh off exasperation told him what she thought of his listening skills. "Whether you could remember – although sometimes I wonder whether you can remember past yesterday – what you were like when you were a kid."

Squall looked back down at the collection of boys and girls below, knowing Rinoa would know he was merely thinking and not ignoring her. They were enraptured as the blonde woman talked at them, eyes fixing on each of them in turn, her warm voice seeming as if she were speaking to you and you alone. He'd been down there one year and he knew the effect it had. "Mostly I remember not talking much."

Rinoa knew he meant the orphanage. They'd talked about it at length. "And before that?"

He shrugged. "Nothing, of course."

"Parents?"

He turned and looked at her. She was staring down at the others but he knew her mind was attuned to his. "Rin, you know I can't remember any of that."

Rinoa licked her lips and took a sharp breath as if she wanted to say more, but kept silent, and Squall didn't ask why she wanted to know. He knew why. The television had talked about little else for the last week, and after a while Rinoa had simply stopped watching, and turned them off whenever she was in the same room as one. This had brought nervous glances when the TV was several meters away when she did so and more than once Zell or Selphie had had to take a nervous student aside and explain some things. They tried to avoid talking about the trial, as a courtesy.

"How's Caraway holding up?"

Her eyes fixated on the speech below as she answered. "I don't know." He heard a dull squeak as her hands tightened on the metal rail. "I don't care." She moved closer to him and he put his arms around her. "Let's not talk about that now."

He smiled and whispered into her ear. "What are we going to talk about then?"

She smiled. "How many of those nubile young things you're going to have to beat off with a stick."

"I don't have a stick," he whispered back. "I have a sword though."

"Hmmm, too permanent. The headmistress would complain." Rinoa squirmed against him and he could feel her smiling. "I'm noticing a certain new deference towards her in fact, a distinct lack of standoffish silence between the two of you. Not shopping for a new model already are we?"

He could feel the ring's weight on his finger, an electric presence that still gave him a small thrill whenever he looked at it. "Xu would kill me, if a certain other woman didn't beat her to it first," he replied with a smile.

She turned and looked up into his eyes. "Oh? Have I met the lady in question?"

He laughed and danced away from a playful fist aimed at his stomach. "I was hoping you'd introduce me in fact!"

Rinoa's eyes darted sideways. "Better do it later commander, looks like you have a bigger problem right now."

Squall looked down from the balcony and the smile slipped from his face as he saw a pair of emerald-blue eyes staring up into his, looking non-too happy, as the combined stare of a couple of hundred recruits looked up at him. A thought suddenly came into his head, too clear and coherent to be his own, and he could feel Rinoa smiling at him evilly as he raised a hand and waved.

"I don't believe you did that."

"I'm really sorry."

They stood on the deserted concourse, the dull murmur in the background like an idling engine that was in fact made up of the hundreds of whispers, shouts, conversations and sounds of the academy at work. Swept free of students it seemed incredibly peaceful to Squall, and if he closed his eyes he could see the picture in his head of his own arrival at Garden. Or at least he imagined he could. After a certain time he no longer knew whether the lack of recollection was due to the GF amnesia or his own lack of long-term memory. For a moment his thoughts turned back to the words Rinoa had spoken up on the balcony. My parents...

He was jerked out of his reverie only when movement across his vision brought him back to earth to see Quistis waving her hand across his face. She looked at him with a sister's concern. "Squall, are you alright?

He waved her hand away as she took a step back. "Sorry, some things on my mind."

"Evidently," the blonde woman replied with a wry grin. "Penny for your thoughts."

Hyne's sake why does everyone seem to want my thoughts lately. "You're staying long?"

Quistis' look told him no way, but she let him of the hook anyway. "I only came back for the inauguration, then its back to Galbadia for the reconstruction." Her eyes flitted to look at Rinoa and when next she spoke her voice was softer. "Rin, is there any message you'd like me to pass on for…"

Rinoa's reply had all the finality of a guillotine. Squall mentally kicked himself for the comparison. "No."

Quistis and Squall shared a quick look before the older woman shrugged. "Alright, have it your way." She turned from the raven-haired woman to Squall. "Don't blow the place up or anything while we're away, alright?"

Squall felt a momentary pang in his chest. Whether it was from a friend leaving for a long time or the loss of two of Garden's finest personnel he could have picked either one. "Coming to dinner tonigt? We'll all be there."

She raised an eyebrow. "Even Zell?"

"Almost everyone," Squall corrected himself as the three laughed. The wandering path of their absent friend across the world was already the butt of as many jokes as there were stories. Zell had shanghaied out of Balamb as fast as he could say goodbye and pack a change of clothes, their travels seeming to have awoken a wanderlust in the young man none of them had suspected.

"Speaking of whom…" Quistis began with a wry smile, and just like that Rinoa knew this was going to be a work day.

Squall groaned. "What's he done now?"

"Why, nothing. He's been a model citizen."

The three looked around as the woman walked up to them. Rinoa and Squall nodded politely, something in Xu's manner always seeming to bring out a slight guilty feeling in them, as if they had been caught by a stern teacher doing something they shouldn't. Xu approached the two, only stopping to give a small peck on the cheek to Quistis, who smiled radiantly. "Laguna requested a warm body to do some work on all the mess left in Esthar after we…well…left after the Second War ended, and Zell volunteered."

"He did huh?"

In Xu's smile there was not a hint of malice or mischievousness. "I volunteered him." She shrugged. "Hey, it got him out from under my feet."

Squall sighed and went back to the aftermath of the Second War. Galbadian invaders disgorged from the now-destroyed Lunatic Pandora had swarmed over and into Esthar. Laguna had promised rapprochement and amnesty in the cease-fire but at last count Esthar and the surrounding plains still swarmed with Galbadian troops. Some just too afraid to come out, deeply in culture shock from being thrown out of Galbadia's agricultural-cum-dirty-industrial life into Esthar's technological wonderland. Others had darker intents, and for the first time Esthar's police had come up against trained soldiers working as criminals. Not to say that Laguna didn't have his own demons to haunt him; renegades and mad Sorceress-worshippers from Adel's reign, hiding out in the aftermath of the First Sorceress War and keeping their guns clean for a chance to take back their nation.

Rinoa shook her head, thoughts obviously on the same track. "Who's he been after? Anything we should worry about?"

Xu gave the younger woman a penetrating look. Only a year or two older (he had never dared ask for exact age) but she had the poise and manner of someone with a decade of experience over her peers. "We are dealing with everything just fine, cadet. You should be concerning yourself with your own studies. You've been falling behind on your classes recently, especially para-magic. I know you have…other abilities…but you still need to learn this."

Quistis coughed politely. "I've said I could tutor her, but-"

Squall suppressed a smile as Xu cut her off at the knees, although the rebuke was distinctly less harsh. "You are no better." She blinked and the smile softened from mocking to something else. She looked over at Squall and Rinoa. "Commander, if you'll excuse us."

Quistis turned to Rinoa. "Don't worry so much, okay." The two shared a moment before the blonde turned away, and Squall and Rinoa watched as the two walked off.

"They look good together."

"You shouldn't try that Rin," Squall said.

She didn't look at him, kept her gaze fixed in the distance. "Try what?"

"You're terrible at trying to change the subject. I know it bothers you." A pause, and he said a small prayer before saying; "You should go and see him."

"I don't want to talk about it," Rinoa said, and the anger in her voice was there instantly.

"I just…"

She spun on her heel without a word and Squall caught the confused glances of passersby as he followed her as she walked away. When they were both safely out of the concourse and in the enclosed corridors of the housing blocks he tried again.

He tried a different tack. "Quistis talks with him, she has to because of the job. She says he's changed a lot. You know he never hated-"

When she looked back at him, out of the open space of the garden and in the privacy of the apartment they shared, the hostility had gone from her manners into her voice. "I don't want to know Squall. I don't want to know him. You know he never even said sorry, or even tried to make up for all the years of pain and fear. He just tried to quit and step down and thought that would be enough. It isn't."

The memories welled up like oil from a split rock, hard and black in her voice when she talked about him. Rinoa's relationship with her father was one of the few Squall had never dared touch. But some part of him… "It's not good for you Rin."

"You don't know Squall, what it's like growing up with a man like that…"

"At least you grew up with one at all." The words were out of his mouth before he could hold them back, and for a second as Rinoa jerked back at the words he tasted bile on his tongue. "I'm sorry Rin, I just…"

She wiped a hand down her face and when she did so the anger leeched out of her, and he could see how tired she looked. "I'm sorry Squall. It's just a hard topic for me."

He was surprised how hard it was to keep speaking, even though the first words had come out so easily it was now as if they were trying to claw their way back into his heart and fall asleep there again. "Didn't you have any good times with him?"

Rinoa stared out of the window across the ocean before she answered. "Some, when I was a kid." Half-remembered Christmases, staring out of the frosted windows as behind me my father and mother sat watching me from the chairs in the mansion. A smile on his face that he never showed his daughter, a smile he left in his wife's coffin when they lowered her into the ground. "Only some."

He held her close and whispered into her ear. "Rin, if I had a choice between nothing and something, no matter how little it was, I would pick the something."

She looked up into his eyes and she could see how much he cared. "It's really gotten to you hasn't it?"

He nodded and shrugged, not an easy gesture with his arms wrapped around her. "A little bit." Years of cold stone walls at the orphanage and a shell of ice to keep others out. Not that he hadn't loved Cid and Edea Kramer, but they hadn't been his parents and he had always known it. "Yeah, if it was between the orphanage and Caraway, I'd have picked Caraway, if I had a choice."

"You can still have him you know, I'd trade him for some flowers and maybe a decent cooked meal" Rinoa said, but it was with humour now and not malice. The smile changed to something more whimsical for a second. "They must be out there somewhere you know. Did you never want to look?"

He disengaged carefully and went to the windows, looking out over the green fields of Balamb, you could always see the ocean no matter where you were. Some found it a barrier to the outside, Irvine had once compared it to a prison, but Squall had always found it to be a comfort. A fortress. He wondered now whether the laconic gunman had been right. "I wondered sometimes, but it was never a priority."

"Make you a deal."

Squall turned around and he could see the mischievous smile, the light from the windows streaming past him to make her eyes sparkle. "Oh?"

Rinoa took a deep breath. "I'll go."

He blinked. "Wait, what-"

She rushed past his confusion. "I'll go to Galbadia, I'll talk to my father."

He smiled. "That's great, I'll-"

"If."

Oh, of course. "If?"

"If you do the same."

"If I do the same?"

"Find your parents. When you do I'll go and see him…see Caraway." She smiled. "Quid pro quo Squall."

He sighed and collapsed into the sofa, not even bothering to argue the point, defeated. "Deal."

She collapsed next to him and put her head against his lap, staring up at him. "Really?"

"You know I can't say no to you Rin."

"Then help me with this coursework."

"No."

"You!" Rinoa beat hands against him playfully and they laughed together as they fell back across the sofa, all cares removed by the simple fact of being together.

Laying in bed at night, the starlight from the open curtains (Rinoa insisted on it) spilling into the room and giving an unearthly glow to the room they shared. Cid had bequeathed it to the commander's rank as hi last act and he had had a twinkle in his eye that had made Rinoa blush and Squall roll his eyes as he left, the apartment on the upper-levels of the Garden, above the hustle and well-trafficked corridors of the standard housing areas below. From here you could look out of the windows and see the curve of the world.

He remembered fields of wheat, and stone halls, and a tall man whose smile was wiped away as his memories became jumbled and chaotic, and as much as he had tried he could never take that mess of childhood and re-arrange it into something comprehensible.

My parents, huh?

It bothered him, he didn't deny it. A yearning he'd suppressed all those decades ago in the orphanage with the others, when Ellone had left and he'd locked himself away, surrounded by friends and yet alone. He had never wondered (or maybe you hadn't allowed yourself to wonder Squall, did that ever occur to you?) about his parents, never needing them when he had been inward and pushing away human emotion, and then Cid and Edea had been enough in the years after when he had opened up (when Rinoa opened me up).

He held a hand up out of the bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping form of his wife, and watched as the starlight glinted off it, throwing shadows onto his palm and a golden reflection from the ring on his finger that was still new enough to make him smile at its presence. Visions of the future danced in his head. A life, a job he enjoy, a woman he loved and the promise of more to come. But attached to that a chain of the past, and he couldn't see what was sat the end of that chain. Was it a simple broken link, nothing more than lost memories, or was there something deadly, hidden and catching up with his present even as he lay there in contentment.

Do you remember?

No.

But I will.