"Ashes"
6. Sinking
Squall felt his nausea turn into a downhill slide towards inevitably puking his guts out, but tried to do his best not to let it get to him. He was high up on the elevator shaft, and starting to throw up while he was hanging from a ladder ran the risk of his grip slipping. His head was on the verge of spinning, and his legs felt like they could give out any second.
I wasn't hurt, I just crashed through a railing, nothing major... what the fuck is this, I don't even...
He decided that his body's condition was a problem for another time. Later, if he had a chance to break down.
When Squall made it to the door leading to the navigation section, he breathed a sigh of relief. The doors were open. He simply got up to the ledge and took two steps in before collapsing. His stomach rose, and he retched, feeling bile rise, but not enough to actually throw up.
He saw that the inner controls of the doors had been yanked out. Nida had managed to trip the doors. Good.
Clenching his teeth, he pushed the ground and stumbled his way through the long hallway leading to the renovated bridge. His mind dwelled on how insisting on moving the bridge down and forward during the Estharian retrofit job a year ago might not have been such a good idea after all. The hallway seemed endless, and then, it was abruptly cut.
There was a gap in the hallway. There was only the edge of a girder standing on the side of the other end, and his end just ended in what could easily be a tough fall. Not deadly, not by any measure, but tough and impossible to climb out of. Also, the rebars that were jutting out of the ground below didn't look too friendly.
Squall stood there, trying to keep his stomach down, and figured if he had about ten feet's worth of a start, he could make the jump, and he had a lot of hallway behind him. He backed up, all the while keeping in mind the last three steps he had to leap to take the final jump. When he finally thought he was a good distance to his target, he took a deep breath, spat, and broke into the run. He leapt once, twice and on the third, threw himself across the space, his mind only on his landing.
He fell short.
The girder's length slammed into his side as he missed his mark and his left hand ended up sliding down a cool surface. Squall barely had time to shift his weight before all that was holding him up was his right hand. He quickly reached into one of the gaps in the bottom of the hallway and held on. He dangled there for a moment, trying to find a way to move to the girder completely. Panting, he managed to pull himself up, one hand still clutching at the girder. He pushed the gap his left hand was in, shifted his body around and his fingers came grasping at the other side of the girder. Once both hands were on, he pulled his upper body to it, spun around on his stomach and then, careful not to go off-balance, shifted himself to his knees.
The girder groaned under the weight. Squall quickly got to one knee and then to both feet, and leapt to the hallway as the girder broke the masonry around it and fell down.
Now, to get to Nida, all he had to do was to walk down the hallway.
Squall found the double doors of the bridge open. He moved forward and his feet got caught up in something. He fell head-first, slammed down onto the ground.
There was a time-skip for him, because the next thing he knew, he was sitting up, with a concerned Nida gently shaking him.
"General... hey..."
Bile rose in his stomach, and Squall couldn't keep it down. He barely turned his head before vomiting full-force. He sat there, dry heaving, every breath pounding in his head. His only clear thought was a repeat of Nida's earlier comment.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw what he had tripped over. The corpse of the co-pilot, Jan.
With a shaking hand, Squall grabbed Nida by the collar. The cloth felt good in his closed fist.
"What..." he said, trying to draw enough breath to speak, "What is it?"
"General, you..."
"What is it? What's the problem? Help me up."
Nida helped Squall to his feet and he managed to stand. His stomach was worse than it was before. He could barely see straight through the drilling ache.
He stumbled forward as Nida took him to one of the consoles. The thick glass hadn't broken, but it had cracked at some places.
"This is the status console." Nida said.
"I know what it is, Nida."
"See that?" Nida pointed at a gauge, "That's the power."
"It's... we have power loss, we..." he coughed, something was stuck in his throat, "We lost all main power..."
"We lost two auxiliary units too." Nida said, pointing at two of the three smaller gauges underneath the first, "This one survived. Now, look at this."
He pointed directly at the centerpoint of a spidering crack.
"This is where the display for our engine power would be. Thank Hyne, there is a gauge for that as well."
Squall blinked a few times.
"We're floating at 70% capacity!?"
"No. We're moving at 70% capacity, which, in about ten minutes, will be 40%. The floaters," he pointed to a gauge nearby, ", are down to 57%, but they were only at 80% normally, and it has its own aux unit, so..."
"Bottom line this." Squall said.
"We're sinking. Slowly, but we're sinking."
Squall couldn't feel it sink in for a few moments. The thought finally embedded itself into his mind somewhere down the line, and he could comprehend what it meant. The thought then expanded into its connotations, but Squall stopped himself short. One worry at a time. One thousand worries at a time.
"We need to make it to land." Nida said.
"Galbadia is out of the question." Squall said, "I am not going there."
"...it's probably too far anyway." Nida sighed, "Our best bet is Esthar."
"Where are we now?"
"Near Centra."
"For one thing," Squall said, "Esthar only has the one port and no equipment to dock or house us if we're not floating at full capacity. Our only option is Fisherman's Horizon. Can we get there?"
"Honestly, I don't know." Nida ran a hand through his hair, "At this rate, we'll be underwater before we make it halfway, I mean, the engines are slowly burning out the aux power..."
"Bullet..." Squall said.
"What?"
"Aim the garden at the FH dock as well as you can, then burn out the thruster aux power completely, that should give us enough speed to make it there."
"Good idea... except it might not work..."
"Whatever. I'm not thinking about that. I can't afford to. Can you do it?"
Nida considered it.
"It'll take a little security override, but-"
Squall felt for the chain that was usually around his neck and thanked Hyne and everything holy that it was still in place. He handed the chain, and the keys dangling form it, to Nida.
"This'll do." Nida said, "Which leaves one problem."
I just want to sleep.
"Yeah?"
"How are we going to let them know we're coming? Communications are down, too."
"I'll figure something out, just-j-just," he swallowed hard, "Just get this thing going. That's a-an order."
"Yes, sir!"
Squall dragged himself as fast as he could out of the room and back into his half of the hallway. His feet were refusing to follow a straight line, always straying slightly until he was dragging himself along, shoulder to the wall. There was a sharp, bitter taste at the back of his throat and his head, he was sure, had just split open and burst and was still tender from the splitting open part.
"Squall!"
Squall looked up ahead. Selphie was on the other side of the gap. Something poured out of him, something pure and dense, full of feeling.
She's safe...
Squall's body slumped against the wall and all went black.
Squall woke up to the familiar scent of strawberries and sweat. Was it a not-so-quiet night in or a not-so-quiet night out? He opened his eyes to Selphie's worried face.
"Squall... thank Hyne... you're hurt."
"I'm glad you're alright."
"I am. You're not."
"Whatever. Help me stand."
Selphie helped him sit up, and then, to stand. Squall felt his entire body protest this basic movement. Still, he was standing; it was something.
"We gotta..." he said, "We gotta get down. Don't know what happened down there, I don't. I don't."
"Squall, you're not... you..." Selphie sighed through clenched teeth, "You have a headache, yeah?"
"What's that got to-"
"Headache? Nausea? Did you throw up?"
"Once."
"Loss of consciousness? Before this, before I found you?"
"Just for a second."
"You can't keep running around like this, we-"
"I have to..." something in him refused to acknowledge what he was thinking, "Someone attacked our home. My home. I'll rest after I've made sure we're safe, and then I'll rest when they've paid."
"You're going to kill yourself at this rate."
"Then I'll rest when I'm dead."
"Don't say that!"
Green eyes, big, full of sadness and urgent despair. Squall almost closed his eyes... almost.
"I'll be alright." He said, softly, "I have you to watch over me."
Selphie smiled and sighed.
"How did you cross that gap?" Squall asked.
"Float. Which is how we're gonna get back."
"How were things on ground level main?"
"Seifer's handling it."
