seven

She dreams.

-of a void, starless, black, floating, floating. In the distance, a goddess has died. No one will remember her name, or her passing. Floating, floating, seeing corpses bound in sails and the wreckage of a red Garden.

Lightning scars up the sky and in the distance, Quistis can hear the clanging of steel against steel, and the sparks from the impact light up the sky.

Somewhere, she hears a little girl sobbing; she drifts toward it. "Somewhere" becomes a field of wildflowers, the air thick with the stench of them, and amongst the flowers, the little girl has golden hair and a peach dress.

Hello?

There is no response. She falls gently. The flowers are soft under her bare feet, and she walks forward. The movement is effortless.

The girl hiccups, whimpers, wipes her hands across her eyes.

Are you lost?

The child looks up, and Quistis recoils. The girl's face is scarred in blue, deep, violent streaks of it, and her hair is not golden anymore, but white, pure white. Her eyes are what terrify Quistis, however: they are pitch-dark, ageless, timeless.

You are, the girl says, and the words sear across Quistis' mind. The girl lunges, and when her tiny hands latch around Quistis' throat, the grip is ironclad.

xx

She wakes up in a shroud, seeing white, only white.

Quistis scrabbles at the sheet, ripping it off of her face, rewarded with the absolute silence of the bedroom for her efforts. She tosses the sheet aside and toes around on the floor for her slippers, grabbing her robe off of the chair where she tossed it, knotting the sash around her waist. She pads out of the bedroom.

Seifer is sitting on the couch, staring at the television. An infomercial for Instant-Abs is playing- she recognizes the jingle. She's spent too many nights awake of her own to not know Balamb's two a.m. television schedule.

Seifer doesn't notice her, or if he does, he doesn't acknowledge it. His thoughts are a jumble- she catches glimpses, feelings, the image of Xu's desk on its side with papers raining down around it. Seifer has not told her the specifics of his meeting, but his thoughts broadcast them loud and clear. She knows by rote what Xu has said about their relationship, and she knows how horrifically deep her friend's words have cut.

Seifer presses his palm against his shoulder, working out a phantom ache.

"If you buy that, I'm breaking up with you," she comments finally, just to break the silence, and Seifer starts, looking over his shoulder at her. He picks up the remote and thumbs a button. The TV mutes.

"I thought you were asleep."

"So did I." Quistis walks around the end of the couch, a ratty blue-leather nightmare left by the previous tenants, and sits. Out of reflex, Seifer drapes his arm around her; she leans against him, watching the silent figures gesture on the screen.

Somehow, deep in his pores, beyond the woodsy scent of his aftershave and the neutral, clean smell of his deodorant, he doesn't smell right, not the way she's used to. She inhales, nosing out the strangeness- fire, smoke, ash. Remnants that she should not be able to detect.

-all I want to do is protect you-

They sit like that for a long time. Eventually, the infomercial ends, turning into an episode of As The Chocobo Turns.

"Fujin used to watch this all the time," Seifer says eventually. "Back after the war, when we didn't really have anywhere to go, and Garden didn't know if they wanted us anymore. I couldn't tell what the hell was going on, but she could tell you, right down to the minute detail, who was hooking up, getting divorced, having someone's kid." He chuckles, softly. "It was the craziest damned thing. She was worse than Rai and his stupid baseball cards."

She smiles, faintly, tracing her finger along his knee. The story is nice, it's normal, it's history that he doesn't need to share, a moment that doesn't matter.

"Do you regret it?" she asks.

"What?"

"Quitting."

"No." He pulls his fingers through her hair, drawing it back away from her face, the movement absent. "I don't need Xu's tyrannical bullshit. Plenty of people out there are willing to hire mercs without Garden's interference."

-do anything for you, burn the world down-

"You could get a normal job," she says, and even as the words leave her mouth, she knows how ridiculous they sound.

Seifer snorts. "Normal? Like what? Sit on my ass and answer a phone all day? Not fucking likely."

He needs action, movement, kicking in doors and knocking heads. He wouldn't last five minutes in the real world, and they both know that. She wouldn't, either; all she knows is regulations, orders, how to strip down a weapon and rebuild it in twenty-seven seconds. What job could she get with that on her resume? Pouring lattes at the coffee house down the street?

Garden has ruined them for normalcy.

-a glimpse of a life of a dream blown up in smoke a house by the sea with two kids and a dog-

"I'm sorry," she whispers, and there's a lump forming in her throat. She doesn't know what she's apologizing for, only that the fleeting melancholy is so overwhelming, so suffocating-

"Hey-" His hand stops, and he shifts, tenses. "You okay?"

She can't breathe, with this feeling (tick-tock-tick-tock), this sensation (the witching hour) of wanting to have nothing but (the world is shrinking) what they cannot have.

Quistis pushes herself off of the sofa and fumbles with the latches on the window, leaning out into the starlit night, goosebumps rising up on her skin immediately. She breathes, breathes, breathes, each inhalation an ice shard in the chest.

(There is only this, this half-formed life, the knight and the witch and the fairy tale without a happy ending.)

xx

"Rinoa's pregnant."

Ellone looks up sharply from her coffee. "What?"

Squall stares down at his plate, picking apart the muffin on it. "She told me. Last night." Blueberry stains his fingers; he wipes his hand on the pristine napkin.

"Well. That's a development." His sister is still staring at him. "Is she sure?"

"I don't know. I guess." He picks up a ragged piece of muffin, puts it in his mouth, chews, swallows. Distantly, he hears Ellone ask him something else. "What?"

"I said, are you okay? You look kind of- pale."

He doesn't know how to explain that this isn't how it's supposed to happen. It's not supposed to happen. Period. All of their research, all the available texts, say that sorceresses don't reproduce. They can't support the gestation of a fetus. The magic overwhelms it, devours it. If Rinoa's pregnant- it's not going to last.

Squall pushes his plate away. "I'm fine."

Ellone sets down her mug. "This is good news, Squall. I know it's scary, but-"

"It's not that," he says, and picks up his plate and cup, taking them to the sink. He twists the knob for the tap and rinses them off methodically. "Where's your dish soap?"

He can feel Ellone's eyes on him, boring into him. Eventually, she gives up, accepts defeat, and cedes the change in conversation to him.

"Under the sink."

He digs through the cabinet- why does she need so many sponges?- and retrieves the soap. Methodically, he washes each piece, and when he's done with the two dishes, he starts in on the coffee maker.

"You're going to rebuild that, right?" Ellone asks, the humor in her tone forced. "I do need it to work."

Squall looks down at the appliance. Somehow, he has managed to disassemble it nearly completely. It's cheaply made, the pieces plastic, all snap-together components. Rebuilding it takes him nearly no time at all, too many years of weapons training coming back in full-force.

Ellone touches his shoulder. "It'll be okay," she says again, gently, and Squall sincerely hopes that she isn't lying to him.

xx

Someone knocks on the door to Xu's temporary office gingerly.

"Come in," Xu snaps, clicking out of the personnel database on her computer.

Nida enters. "I found something you should see."

Xu looks up at him from over the rims of her glasses. Her contacts were lost in the bombing; it pisses her off to not have them, but the optometrist in Balamb says it'll be at least a week before they can get new lenses in. "It's from one of the cameras that got knocked off the wall in the TC. There's some footage Intel thought you might want to see." Nida hands her a flash drive, and Xu plugs it into her laptop.

She watches the footage once, her brow furrowed, and when the screen fuzzes out into a blur of static, she clicks the play button again.

"How come no one found this earlier?"

"It's from three in the morning. No one really looked at the tapes the first time around, I don't think."

"No one else but Intel knows about this?"

Nida shrugs. "Not that I'm aware of."

Xu ejects the drive, and sticks it in her pocket. "Thanks," she says, and Nida nods.

"You should sleep," he adds. "This can wait until the morning."

Xu shakes her head. "You know how fast things get out of control, Nida. I'm not even sure what I've got here, and I can't take any chances."

"Look, I know you're worried sick about this. But Quistis is smart. She can handle herself."

Xu takes off her glasses, and rubs the heels of her hands against her eyes wearily. Theoretically, he's right. Quistis is smart, she is capable, she can recognize when a situation's going to hell, but at the same time... she's changed, more distracted, unfocused. Even her casting abilities are different. Xu's gone over the logs a hundred times; Quistis hasn't junctioned a GF since she lost Shiva.

She hasn't needed to, it seems.

Xu knows the theory, of course. She took Quistis' class on the evolution of magic and casting, but an idiot could make the leap in logic after being in proximity to a sorceress like Rinoa Leonhart for so many years. Garden is already in shambles from just rumors of witches.

She touches the outline of the thumb drive in her pocket.

"C'mon," Nida says. "Get some sleep."