iv.
She can still feel joy, and sometimes that is enough.
She drags Seifer down the shoreline and laughs, head tossed back and skin glowing in the moonlight and slows where the waves weigh the hem of skirt and tickle her ankles. He comes to a hard stop behind her and slides his hands along her hips and spins her around to face him, and buries his face in her chest, her neck. He picks her up and Rinoa presses her lips against his and revels in the freedom of moonlight on her skin.
There are times she misses Squall to the point of physical pain, and she cries herself to sleep, angry with him, with herself, with the lie that love is all you need. When she isn't dreaming of Time and the rage of elements she will one day use to destroy the world as she knows it, she dreams of him; when it was good, and the endless months of silence as she fell deeper and deeper inside herself to a place he could not follow.
Now is not that time.
She insists on walking naked down the beach and it such a relief to not hear protests that she kisses Seifer again, and again, and when the sun rises on them they are too far down the beach to want to walk back, and take a cab: exhausted, covered in sand, and sore in places they'll be feeling for days.
Parts of her awaken, with him. Parts she carefully filed away and eventually dismissed as lost that creep out of the tar-black fear in smiles, in bursts of laughter, in light conversation over cups of coffee.
They collapse into bed still covered in sand, and Seifer falls asleep first. She lays against him, he even breathing tickling her forehead, and she traces patterns on his chest. His weathered skin feels paper-thin under her touch, so different from the arms that spun her around in the waves.
Now, she feels joy.
Now, she feels power.
She drums long nails over the space where his heart is and almost lets herself draw blood.
