Interlude: Breaking Point

Why am I here, again?

Because you're a fucking moron, Almasy, came the ready answer.

Well, it was good to know the world still operated along normal parameters. Or at least he did. Marginally.

There was something about pain that made him crave cigarettes. Maybe nicotine lessened pain, he didn't know and didn't care. All he knew was that he needed a smoke, even though he didn't do it very often.

Or maybe he just needed something to distract himself with.

He was guessing he'd been given some sort of nerve enhancer in addition to the usual veridicals. The mode d'operation of Galbadian-style questioning, from the beatings to electric shocks, hurt worse than they possibly could. Every nerve ending seemed fired up to maximum, stretched to breaking point and ready to react and overreact to any stimulus, even as they throbbed and burned with remembered pain. Yeah, definitely nerve enhancers. God, he wanted a smoke.

Overbright lights hurt his eyes, and the questions come from everywhere and nowhere like the voice of God, inescapable and overwhelming.

Who sent you?

Was this a direct order from Cid Kramer?

What were your orders?

He blinked and shook his head: That was done for the time being. The cell was dark, and quiet aside from his own breathing. Those guys had known what they were doing. Unfortunately for them it didn't work quite as well if the questionee knew exactly what the methods were. Didn't mean it couldn't wear him down. They'd been warned about this in interrogation resistance training. Just because you know it's a psychological ploy, does not mean you will feel any less grateful when the "good cop" offers you a cigarette and gives you a pat on the back.

Cigarettes, again. They offer him some and he'd be a blubbering wreck, too. Never mind he'd been fucking grading them on their performance during those times he could think straight, he'd still be grateful.

Grateful enough to lie?

That gave him pause. The hard part here was, he didn't know which it was they wanted to hear out of him. That Garden did send him so they really could go against Garden, or that he was a rogue so they could avoid a head-to-head for now?

He bent double with sudden cramping pains, watched as blood dripped from his mouth to the stained concrete floor below. Any minute now even this respite would be over, and they controlled when and how. That was how they'd wear him down, breaking him bit by bit. It was the essence of having someone absolutely in your power, why getting caputured alive was such a grave tactical blunder, but she had promised him help and the world and dreams of fire...

He closed his throat, letting his scream of frustration escape as a hoarse hiss. With the nerve enhancers pumping through his system, leaning forward against his handcuffs made the metal burn like dry ice. He let that distract him for the moment. Distraction was another technique he'd learned during the goddamn interrogation resistance course, which was SeeD-only and he never understood why he'd had to take it. He had a theory that it had to do with the number of times he'd pissed Aki off. His wrists felt like they were falling off, so he leaned back in his chair again.

Yeah, if he lied and said he was a Garden operative they might have something to hold over Garden later, even if they didn't go to full-scale fighting. They could blow his brains out or just give out that he was dead and keep him here at their leisure, trying to squeeze whatever potentially useful Garden information out of him until they decided he was useless. Then he could get killed or just rot in some hellhole at their mercy...

Seifer had broken out in a cold sweat. Suddenly the prospect of his brains spattered across a wall didn't seem all that unattractive. Maybe he could cooperate enough to get the use of his hands back, steal a gun.

The door opened and his heart skipped a beat. Cigarette-bearing good cop, or... Seifer twisted around in the stiff-backed chair, trying to get a look.

Her.

She seemed as out of place in the filthy interrogation cell as, well, a queen in a dark and filthy dungeon. (Seifer's brain wasn't big on metaphor at the moment.) She walked slowly, holding her skirts as she passed a spot of blood on the floor. Seifer found himself entranced by her calm poise, following her with his sight until she stood before him once again. The woman who'd promised him everything. The woman who had delivered him to the waiting arms of the Galbadians.

"You." His growl didn't have all the venom he wanted it to. He could not take his eyes off her, the way she seemed to draw the meagre light in the room to herself and shine with a dark radiance of her own, how whipers and the faintest of music seemed to follow her when she walked. He shook his head fiercely, trying to clear it. The effort left his head ringing; he tried to hold very still until it passed. Yet his eyes still sought her out, the slim curve of her torso, the graceful line of her shoulders and throat, and the bird mask...

"Show me your face," he whispered, hoarse with pain and unexpected emotion.

"You do not know who I am, boy?" There was a bloody curve of a smile in her voice. Something unpleasant flashed behind his eyelids, disappeared too quickly to register.

(A single mocking, over-the-shoulder smile; the quick glitter of teeth against cheap crimson. Be good.)

"Told you... I'm not..." He was almost pleading, his thoughts going in circles. He found it hard to think clearly, not when her very presence seemed to hold him in a dark, comforting warmth that tugged at him even as it repulsed him.

"You have forgotten." The sorrow in her voice made him shiver inside. She came a step closer, and reached out a long, slender hand to hold his face up by his chin. She was gentle, but he flinched when she brushed against earlier bruises and because the touch--too familiar--opened up something inside, a bottomless pit he didn't want to look into. He couldn't move, not even his eyes as he stared at his faint, distorted reflection in the bird mask. "They have made you forget."

"No- what-" I'll never forget you, Matron. His feet pounding against a beach as he ran to her one last time. Long hair covering him like a dark curtain as she bent to embrace him for the last time, warm and safe and sweet with the smell of lilacs. "Get out of my mind," he rasped out, barely audible even to himself.

"I have come for you." The bird's face glimmered and was gone, and his reflection disappeared abruptly to be replaced by the face of the woman behind the mask. His heart pounded in his ears like a desperate trapped thing as he was dragged to the edge of the pit and flung over, into a flood of broken images and impressions he did not want or understand. Come with me. The woman reaching out for him, her eyes gentle. Be good. Long red nails digging into his shoulders.

And over and over again, the retreating back as the woman with blond hair and the red smile walked away from him while everything in him screamed to follow, but she had told him to stay, she said she would come back-

Warm arms caught him then, out of the disjointed nightmare and into solid reality. He leaned blindly against her shoulder, breathing the scent of lilacs. She steadied him and held him in the here and now, the one thing he could cling to in a pain-filled darkness. He had learned to trust her in that place beyond memory, and she would keep him safe even if he was alone in the world. As he had been. As he was now.

"I've come back for you, don't you see?" Warm lips pressed against his temple as she held him close. "I promised I would. You've been good, Seifer. You've been very good."

He sighed and leaned against her, letting her presence soothe away the pain. She had come for him. Cigarettes, a part of his mind said groggily. Good cop. He didn't care. Long hair fell across his eyes, darkening his sight. "Thank you," he whispered.

A sentence in the last paragraph was inspired by Swinburne's Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs):

Thou shalt hush him with heavy caresses,
With music that scares the profane;
Thou shalt darken his eyes with thy tresses,
Our Lady of Pain.

And of course, Edea's smelling of lilacs comes straight out of Fire and Ice. I think it was in some other fics, too.