Author's Notes - Okay, stepping back into humorous mode now. I'm personally guilty of using this convention at least once or twice so it should be fun to poke fun at myself. Hope you like this one.
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(Prompt: Dream Sequences)
Rinoa couldn't help but find it extraordinarily difficult to keep her eyes open no matter how hard she tried at the moment. Whether it was the lack of sleep she had last night or the fact that Squall was droning on about something she had the least bit of interest for in his patented work-mode tone, specifically designed to bore the life out of anyone within a ten foot radius, she hadn't a clue if one or the other was the root of her inability to keep her eyelids from growing heaver and heaver by the second.
"...Rinoa, were you even listening to me?"
"...Huh? What, where?" she stammered, her eyes opening wide and her head jerking back to life almost violently. Her boyfriend merely shook his head.
"In case if you didn't hear," he began with a touch of sarcasm, "I need some help with entering some data in the main computer systems, should be simple enough. ...If you're not too tired, that is."
Rinoa shook her head. "No, no, I can help." she eagerly offered, despite fully-well knowing how menial this task was going to be.
"Thanks." he replied. "Terminal's over there."
After he gave her a brief overview of the program, how things were to be entered and watched her do a few trial runs with the first couple of forms, Squall left her to her own devices as he went into a meeting not too far away in Cid's office with a few other figureheads across Gaia. When he told her that the meeting should be over in about two hours, Rinoa tried her best not to laugh out loud, having enough experience to know that two hours was truly nothing more than an arbitrary estimation.
As he left his office, Rinoa daintily plucked the first form from the relatively large stack and placed it in the space between her monitor and keyboard. While she hadn't had enough experience on computers to type without looking at the keys, Rinoa tried her hardest to save time by trying to have the page close enough so she could see it and the keyboard at the same time.
Keystroke by keystroke, form after form and hour after hour, she eventually conceded that she couldn't keep her focus on both things without straining her eyes by darting her eyes back and forth from page to keyboard to screen and that she was going even slower than if she were to memorize what was on the page and type it in after. In light of this setback, Rinoa swivelled the wheeled computer chair away from the screen to close her eyes and massage away the repercussions of her chosen method with her fingertips. She already knew that the damage was already done and she would be guaranteed a wicked headache for the hours she toiled away entering data, but it was the best palliative, although crude, remedy she had without leaving his office.
She suddenly stopped rubbing her temples and opened her eyes.
He never said anything about staying here, she thought; he'll understand if I left for a moment to take something so I don't get a bad headache.
Wait.
Rinoa turned her chair back to look at the corner of the computer screen.
16:14.
The meeting was supposed to end at 14:45. It shouldn't be too unreasonable to assume he should be back soon. I should be okay to wait a little while longer.
With that particular thought in the forefront of her mind, Rinoa simply closed the data entry program off and brought up a game of solitaire after clicking the card icon on the toolbar, figuring that she'd had done more than enough as a favour by cutting his workload by three-quarters. She stifled a yawn.
Wait.
She stood perfectly still, not quite to the point of freezing up but close.
Did I have to save what I entered today or did it automatically save?
Rinoa brought up the program and the file along with it she worked on back up from the recently used files tab. Once the program was reopened and the information filled the screen, she clicked around to look up previous entries from one of the menu tabs on top and browsed through the list that popped up in a new window, silently praying to God she hadn't erased three and a half hours' worth of work.
She dared to exhale when the last entry's data matched up to the first page on top of the 'completed' tray; the last that she would have placed in there. Even still, she kept both the pop-up window and the program's window minimized so that if anyone would be to blame for the files suddenly going AWOL, it would be the unlucky person who closed it, not her.
Rinoa stifled a nervous giggle, her heart heavily pounding against her rib cage. That was just far too close for comfort, she thought as she maximized the Solitaire game's window again and began clicking on and displacing the digital cards. The game's graphic interface looked far more polished and stylish than the computer versions she played during free time when she was in middle school years ago.
The mental note wasn't a complaint but merely something to get used to; the pop-up window informing her that there were no more moves available, essentially telling her she lost the game, was. She shook her head. Shouldn't the decision to start a new game be on her terms?
After losing twenty straight games and not in the mood to extend her massive losing streak, or to see the evil post-loss pop-up taunt her again, Rinoa decided to return to the data entry program to finish entering in the remaining quarter of files she hadn't entered. It didn't seem like he was going to come any time soon anymore after wasting a half-hour on Solitaire without any indication of the meeting's party coming out of Cid's office whatsoever.
Rinoa massaged her closed eyelids, alternating with her temples every so often. As she repeated the motions for roughly a minute or two without gaining any form of relief, she resigned to the fact that she couldn't stay here any longer without running the risk of getting into headache-induced sour mood for the rest of the night by not taking anything soon.
Just as she was scribbling a brief note to Squall on a sticky note placed on top of the unentered forms to let him know about her whereabouts, she heard the door hiss open. She stopped writing the said note and turned her head towards the door only to see Xu come through the door.
"Hi Xu." Rinoa greeted, trying to shoot for a cheery tone as she noticed the SeeD glancing at the screen behind her. "Is there something you need the computer for?"
"No. I came to see Squall about something but I assume he's still at the meeting." she answered, crossing her arms slightly as she took notice of both the finished and unfinished files piles by her. "Hm. I didn't know he pawned that off to you."
"He was going to do it today but that meeting got bumped up." she replied. "I've got about three-quarters of it done."
"…Alright. Just make sure you have the rest of it done by 17:00." Xu told her, her crossed arms stiffening a little. "I need them to go over the annual cadet admissions and we're already late enough as it is."
Rinoa nodded, conveniently ignoring the simple observation that the SeeD wasn't too pleased about her and not the commander entering things in. She secretly wished that she could have also ignored the fact that her headache was currently threatening to mutate into a full-blown migraine at this point and that forty minutes was nowhere from being enough time to finish all this.
When Rinoa covered her eyes with her palms after Xu left, she made the grave mistake of attempting to rest her elbows on a patch of empty desk space. The patch ended up being a sliver, the edge of the desk to be exact, and her arms slipped off the desk, causing her head to hit the keyboard hard.
Faster than she could say ow, Rinoa lifted her head and looked up at the screen. When it still displayed what was opened prior to Xu coming in, save for a nonsensical string of characters in the first text box, and moving around the mouse proved that it had not crashed; she breathed a sigh of relief.
—And then the subsequent breath was brusquely knocked out of her the second she glanced downward.
The middle of the keyboard was totalled. The keys were deeply sunken in and non-responsive to her fingers pressing on them, no spring to them whatsoever. It spelled out the end for whatever hope she had of finishing his work on time.
To add insult to injury or maybe adding an injury to the insult, she wasn't quite sure right now; the repercussions of hitting the keyboard were finally making themselves known. Slowly, but surely, the migraine was coaxed itself out of the shell of the headache. Her head hurt from the inside and the outside, making it hard to apply gentle pressure above her eyes to cope. All she could do was rest the side of her head on the desk and close her eyes, the action being nowhere near enough to do anything for her. Add the potential scolding for ruining the keyboard or not entering all the forms, providing that a substitute keyboard could not be found in a timely fashion, and it was more than enough to not want to open her eyes for a long time.
Even still, she reminded herself that any resolution to patch things up could not be done without getting up and taking action. And so, she opened her eyes roughly two minutes later. The next thing she knew however, Rinoa found herself in a dark room, her headache mysteriously absent.
Is this a dream?
The aforementioned pounding was replaced with fog. When she lifted away a set of dark covers —apparently, she was in a bed all by herself now— and felt an eerie draft chilling her to the bone, she near-violently pulled them back over her.
Rolling in place under the sheets, Rinoa wanted to visually confirm her alone status brought on by the intense level of silence drowning her senses. There was a tangled lump of sheets directly beside her but it was nothing that she couldn't have produced by a little tossing and turning. Still, she poked her arm out of the covers and brought it down hard on the said lump for good measure.
Just as she suspected, the lump was entirely composed of crumpled covers, padded with a bit of pillow to boot.
From the right side of the bed where she was lying, the bedroom's door was off to her right, a lamp-topped nightstand separating the bed from the entrance. The immaculate oak dresser was off to the far right corner and the closet doors were on the opposing wall's left hand corner. Rinoa tried her best to commit these minor details to memory even though her mind still felt like it was in a bit of a haze.
With almost convenient timing, Squall crossed through the door's threshold and into the spartanly-decorated room. Rinoa felt a splash of relief to be among a familiar in this still-alien environment. A warm ruby-red blush spread across her face as her eyes felt like they were magnetically drawn to his through the darkness. It was kind of hard not to when he was more or less peering down at her from his standing position, the dim light coming from the door's crack outlining his form well enough to clue her in that he was minus a shirt at the moment.
Yeah...this definitely feels like a dream.
"Are you...alright?" he quietly asked. Rinoa merely let the covers cascade and pool into her lap as she sat up, nodding back at him.
"I am. No need to worry about me...although," she began to answer, adjusting the front of the loaned wifebeater she was wearing a little as he sat down beside her, "I wasn't expecting to have a dream about doing your paperwork for hours on end though."
Unsurprisingly enough, she noticed that Squall had raised brows at this. "...You're not being serious, are you?"
"Nope. I'm being one-hundred percent serious. The weird thing is that I've never dreamed about something like that before." she candidly replied, the fog finally dissipating and a grin burgeoning on her face whether wanted one to or not.
By this point, he tossed her a look and a sigh, opting to say nothing more than, "Rinoa...just get it out of your system now."
"I don't know what you're talking about Squall." she wryly said. "I'm sure it's just a coincidence that I dreamed about paperwork after the first time I slept with you. I mean, it would have made a lot more sense if I daydreamed about sleeping with you while I was doing your paperwork but-"
"-Rinoa?"
"...Yeah?"
"Shut up."
She would have been irritated at his insensitive choice of words, but right now, he was an attractive shirtless teenage boy taking initiative for once in his damn life and she was in no mood to disrupt his attempt with any more one-sided banter.
