"Just put me through to Fujin."

"I'm sorry sir but she's on patrol in the city right now. I can take a message if you like or ask Mr Almasy if he-"

"No that's alright I'll try again later. Thanks anyway."

"No joy?"

"Nah." Zell turned away from the secure comm terminal, a huge bulky monstrosity that Esthar had delivered to Garden weeks ago with something between joy on their faces and relief at getting it off their hands. Back when it had arrived Zell had watched as four luckless and pressganged students had hauled it off to the Garden's control room, then wandered off as they had spent the next day installing the damn thing under Odine's loud and not-always-lucid commands. Now it sat against the inner hull like some kind of beached metal whale, eating power from the central engines and using it to bounce signals off whatever crazy Esthar devices Odine had put into orbit. He'd asked for an explanation out of simple curiosity but the response had been so far over his head he couldn't even see the bottom. The tiny genius had promised it would link up the organisation and give them total security as they spoke, putting Balamb Garden in contact with Trabia and Galbadia at the touch of a button and no eavesdroppers allowed. To Zell Dincht standing here right now though none of that mattered if there wasn't someone at the other end to pick up the damn phone.

"You could always take a break," Nida said as he watched the blonde man pace up and down the cockpit. He hadn't said anything when Zell had wandered in and asked to use the device although his fingers had twitched as Zell's hurry had turned into impatience. He solved the problem by opening the small panel hidden at his workstation and throwing the man a beer.

Zell barely even glimpsed at the can as he caught it one-handed. "Thanks. I just hate waiting around, you know."

"You sound like Raijin. Relax, okay, that's an order."

Zell snorted and turned to look at Nida. While technically his superior he could count on the fingers of one hand when he had been given a command by the man. For that matter he could add the amount of times he'd even seen him leave Garden and not need to use his toes. Some SeeDs made a point of wearing their emblem everywhere they went (and yeah he had to admit the attention was nice sometimes, but there's a point where you have to acknowledge you still put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else). Nida seemed to take it to the opposite extreme. Zell could remember an Esthar shore-leave, followed and interviewed by the press and hammered with question after question, where the quiet young man had just sat and watched with amusement as he was ignored in favour of the legendary Orphanage Gang. "Rather be relaxing on the way to somewhere though."

For his part Nida had trouble understanding the wanderlust so many of his comrades seemed to share. He got to sit at the centre of the Garden network like a spider at the centre of its web. There was nothing happening in the world that he didn't know about, and he could do it all from the airy comfort of Balamb. He was also the best pilot the mercenary organisation had, and everyone knew it. He loved his job. "Weren't you supposed to be headed off to Esthar?"

Zell shrugged. "Xu said the same thing you did."

Take a break Dincht. You're going to burn out before you hit your thirties.

Nida shrugged. "So listen to her."

"Don't you ever get worked up about anything?"

"Nope. And speaking of getting worked up what's the slave-master had you doing anyway?" Nida shared a somewhat contentious relationship with Xu, his equal. The latter demanded perfection from anyone, timetables and constant goals, whereas his own philosophy ran more towards getting it done and then hey, if there was nothing else to do why not relax?

Zell was about to shrug and wave off the question when he remembered that Nida's job meant that he knew anyway. Plus unlike his boss who he had refused to tell earlier, Nida wasn't married to the subject of his mission. "Her and Lag- President Loire have had me chasing sorceress cultists over in the east."

Nida frowned. "What, in Ifrit's old cavern? I didn't think- Wait, you mean the eastern continent? Sorceress-lovers in Esthar? I thought Laguna took care of them all after he got rid of Adel." And that was no longer a name spoken of with fear.

"People are just idiots I guess."

"Speaking of which…"

He turned as Nida cocked a finger back at the oversized control board and saw the green blinking light. Finally.He breathed a sigh of relief and walked over to the terminal and flipped it, Nida's watchful eye on him in case he should accidentally break something. For all its Estharian tech the entire device still looked like a giant battlefield radio and he picked up the handset as he spoke into it. "Dincht."

"Good to hear from you at last. How's the desert"

Zell laughed into the receiver. "Mr President."

"What have you got for me Zell?"

"Nothing good sir."

Laguna Loire, president of Esthar listened silently as the young man broke down what he knew for the man. About halfway through the debrief he slammed his fist into the desk hard enough to leave a mark, which joined the others already there. He could feel an air of tiredness set on him and he sighed as Zell finally finished his escape from the cultist camp and his encounter with the knife-wielding man. "Alright, thanks. Good work Dincht. Tell Xu what you told me and then take some time off, I'll call you if I need anything?"

"Are you sure? I can come back if you wa-"

Zell's voice was cut off as Laguna keyed the connection between Esthar and Balamb closed. His own terminal was built into the presidential desk and he lived to joke the heat it gave off kept his legs warm in the winters. "God damnit!"

"Trouble?"

Laguna looked up from his thoughts as Kiros walked into the room. For all the years after the two of them along with Ward had cast off their uniforms and became statesmen rather than soldiers he had served as a civilian advisor. But there was something solid and…well…martial that refused to be scrubbed out of the tall wiry black man. Even his clothes looked more like a uniform than a suit. "You could say that." Zell's words were repeated in the fairly small private room at the summit of the presidential palace.

"I hate to say I told you so." Kiros' expression told Laguna that it was something he very much wished to say.

"Then don't," Laguna said testily.

"You know what your problem is Mr President?" Kiros went on without giving him a chance to answer. "You expect people to repay you in kind."

"What, you think I should have just locked them all up?"

"Yes."

They'd had the argument a dozen times since the coup. At first Laguna had won easily, and he had the populace grudgingly accepting that rapprochement and forgiveness would see history looking down kinder on them than if they purged and burned. Unfortunately with recent attacks, miniature uprisings and sabotage Kiros' solution was looking a little more compelling. He took this side of himself and pushed it back down into his irrational mind where it belonged. Esthar had suffered under an inhuman and monstrously powerful tyrant for the better part of fifty years, he'd throw away the presidential seal and burn the palace to the ground before he saw himself turning into another. "Well we won't."

"Loire you're talking about people who hate you because you literally – not figuratively or metaphorically – literally killed the avatar of their god." When Kiros was mad he tended to slip back into calling him by his last name.

You're really worried about this. "I didn't kill her."

Kiros sighed. He knew the man was simply talking to fill the room while his brain thought and he went along with it. Laguna hated silence. "You imprisoned her in space and then when the loyalists-"

"Cultists."

"-Loyalists freed the bitch you ordered SeeD to come and kill her. Lest we forget ending two centuries' worth of glorious isolation and allowing the barbarian foreign hordes onto Esthar's holy continent into the bargain."

"God, do they really think like that?"

"They're not rational people Mr President. They're angry old firebrands and worried old ladies who look around and see that this isn't the country they grew up in any more. The fact that the country they did grow up in was a goddamn tyrannical shithouse doesn't really register with them."

He was really worried about this. Laguna looked out over the city. Planted dead central among the skyscrapers and towers of the technological utopia, the palace had a commanding view of Esthar, and he could find himself lost in it for hours sometimes just staring down at the city. When the dust had settled after the coup the populace had embraced him and it had been the most enthralling and terrifying moment of his life. This was pure adulation and power thrust onto him, and all in that one moment as they had offered him the presidency he had seen how easy it could be to become like Adel or Caraway. "What's our next move?"

"Track down this man; Aimsland, he's their leader/head minister, insomuch as they have one. We've heard the name thrown about in bars and alleys and Zell confirmed it when they ran him out of Centra." Kiros looked at the small crystal-screen printout in his hand. "Judging by the reception the boy got asking about him I'd bet money he's leading the militant arm, and that means-"

"-The SeeD murders. No way do I take that bet, I've already lost too much money to 'em." He'd learned not to wager against Kiros' ideas. Mostly because the job of President meant that any information he got Kiros saw first anyway, assuming the man even deemed it important enough to bother him with.

"Ms Trepe and Ms Tyyne will be arriving in Galbadia shortly; hopefully they can help Almasy and Satomi with the problem there. I don't think that- Laguna?"

Seifer. Now there's something that had been bothering him, a little itch in the back of his mind that asked him; is this really a good idea, whenever he heard the name.

SCENE BREAK

"You're a hard man to find."

"That cliché? Are you serious Loire?" Seifer smirked as he said it.

"That's President Loire," Kiros said testily.

"Well that does explains the retinue I suppose. You need all these guards to ferry you around?"

"No, those are you for," Laguna replied.

Seifer stood on the pier, a semi-circle of armed rifles pointed at the man, and still, and still the cocky grin didn't leave his face. Didn't so much as twitch as a dozen Esthar soldiers with hair-trigger fingers and very clear memories of the Galbadian invasion of their city pointed guns at his heart.

"And to what do I owe the honour? Are you here to clap me in irons?"

Laguna shrugged and made his pitch. "No, I'm here to offer you a job."

He noticed with no small amount of glee the ever-so-slight confusion on the other man's face. Seifer just stood looking at the two Esthar politicians, ignoring the soldiers as if they didn't exist even though every small movement of his body made laser-sights dance across his torso. Finally whatever reply he was thinking up seemed to be complete, and he spoke. "Maybe you don't know my previous employment history. It's a little spotty for your shiny perfect city."

"No, it's just about right."

Kiros' men had tracked the man down as he ran across the world, from Balamb across half the continent. Sometimes they'd come within inches of catching up only to be blocked by a missed connection or a broken lock, until eventually Laguna had lost his patience and simply posted Esthar guards everywhere he could. Finally there had been only one place left, and Kiros had been waiting when Seifer's boat sailed into Fisherman's Horizon.

"I don't think there's a number that exists for how many years we could lock you up for. Certainly long enough for you never see sunlight until they carted your body out of the prison on a morgue trolly. Assuming we even bother with that. I hear the new duchess in Dollet hasn't got any scruples about the death penalty, and she's really not too happy about what the Galbadian Army did to her father. I bet she'd like to see you again."

"So what, you're going to offer me a once-in-a-lifetime job as a janitor in the Pandora? Sweeping lunar dust off your little base?"

"No, I had something different in mind. Ms Satomi?" Laguna noticed with relish as finally the arrogant cocksure surface cracked just a little bit, as the tall albino woman stepped forward from the vehicle she had arrived in.

"Fujin."

"Seifer."

"They roped you into this little hunting party huh?"

The woman's words were softer than whispers but somehow they got through to the man. "I went to him first."

Seifer smiled, and when he did so there was something amused and maybe even gentle in it. "Yeah, I thought you would have. Guess that means that big lunk is in on this whole thing to?"

Fujin looked around at the pier, and finally back at Seifer, and as she spoke she cut through the bravado and the threats instantly. "We all wanted to make a difference. President Loire is offering the chance. If we have to make that difference in chains then it's nothing except what we deserve."

"I didn't care about making a difference, I just wanted to be a hero Fu."

A shrug. "So come with us and give it a real shot."

"Almasy will pull through for us." Kiros said, as if reading his boss's thoughts. Not like he has a choice, he didn't say out loud.

Laguna was surprised at the man. "He's an arrogant, cocksure sonofabitch."

"That's why he'll get it done."

Laguna sighed. He'd adjusted as fast and as well as he could from being the leader of a three-man squad of soldiers, to the leader of a small localised rebellion, to the leader of a hundreds-strong serious resistance, to president of Esthar, but sometimes he still looked at the institution that surrounded him and wondered how he'd lasted through four elections and a minor rebellion. "Why aren't our jobs switched around old friend?"

"Because I'd have locked up the Sorceress Cultists, thrown Almasy into the brig until he died and taken Galbadia apart until Deling was a hollow ruin." Kiros shook his head. "You're a better man me Laguna. That's why you sit in the big chair and I stand behind it."

"Just so long as you've not got a dagger in your hand back there. I think I preferred it when it was ten ex-prisoners working out of a shack in the desert." Some days he looked out of that giant ceiling-high window and envied SeeD, sometimes wished the organisation had been around when he had been younger. He'd have walked through fire to have joined.

And then where would we be? Esthar still in Adel's grip and isolated behind layers of shields and holograms? A Galbadia with an iron-grip on half the world? Best not start regretting your life now Loire or you'll never stop.

The last words came upon him so suddenly it felt like a hand had enclosed on his chest as he remembered the woman who had said them. He turned away from Kiros before the man could see his face change and managed to get out a short that will be all to the other man. Kiros just turned and left, and Laguna had no idea the man already knew why he was being sent out. His hand went to the ring still on his finger, and all the old regrets came flooding back. Far too late to do anything about them now, but still he could feel the grip around his heart like ice.

I should do something about it. I have a right to know.

His own voice came back at him. You had years and did nothing. They must have their own life out there by now. You gave up that right when you did nothing.

And Ellone's words spoken at Raine's graveside, all those years ago as the flowers had spun through the air on the Winhill morning.

You have a son, dad.

Luckily he didn't have time for the cold thoughts to settle on him, as without even a perfunctory chime the door to the presidential office slid open again and Kiros walked back in with thunderclouds on his face.

"Trouble."

Pretty soon Laguna was sharing them.

"Has she lost her mind?"

Kiros had to almost jog to keep up with his boss, as Laguna strode down the halls towards the landing pad. Sometimes he saw his job less of advising and steering Laguna Loire the President of Esthar into safe waters, and more of keeping Laguna Loire the Impulsive Jackass out of trouble. He was going to need some major anchors to keep him on the ground now. "I don't like it anymore than you do but legally she's within her-"

Laguna threw the door open with such violence that the guards on the other side were almost going for their pistols before they recognised their leader. "Bullshit! I swear that sea air must breed madmen or something. At least her father was a crazy pacifist and not a crazy warmonger. Doctor!"

The small figure of Doctor Odine turned as Laguna's voice echoed through the lab, his ruffled and feathered clothing turning a second or so after to catch up. "Mr President?" The man's voice, with its accent and mannerisms that in unfortunate circumstances could make him sound like a particularly obnoxious bee, was thankfully somewhat quiet as he saw how angry his president was.

"Fuel the Ragnarok."

That shocked Kiros enough to make him speak. "Laguna!"

Laguna Loire spun around to face his most trusted advisor and oldest comrade. "I've had it up to here with that woman Kiros. I made clear to her after the Second War that Galbadia wasn't going to be some corpse to be picked apart by vultures looking for payback, and she shoots it up first chance she gets! We let them off with a warning and now she's kidnapping my friends and thinking up some grand dream of empire! I won't stand for it!"

"So you're going to roll on over there in the Ragnarok and what, start blowing things up until they surrender?"

"Damn right I am!" Esthar doesn't leave its friends in the lurch while I'm in command. Not now, not ever.

Kiros sighed. He loved the man like a brother and knew that Laguna would walk through fire if there was a man in need on the other side, but sometimes it was just so frustrating. "You're not just one man anymore Loire. You're the president of a nation."

"So?"

"So act like it."

Laguna had calmed down sufficiently for the words to get through his anger. "You want me to do nothing," he said with an eerie calm.

"I want you to keep the world on an even keel. We've spent years getting Galbadia back up to something approaching a nation where you can walk the streets without being mugged or worse, you want to throw all that away over something like this?"

"So we sit and watch."

"We sit and watch."

Laguna fumed. "This is really just beyond the pale, buddy."

"Is this some quaint Galbadian saying I've forgotten?"

"We shouldn't have to stand for shit like this."

Kiros shrugged again, this time with some relief as Laguna found the nearest chair and sat on it, ignoring a squawk from Odine. "We have bigger problems, but if you like we can send someone to keep an eye on things." The shrug turned into a grin. "In fact I know the perfect man."

"Seriously? Seriously?"

The look of utter confusion and shock on Zell's face as he turned away from the controls made Nida sit up and take notice. "What? What happened?" He listened as the younger man relayed what Kiros had just told him, and the expression on his face changed from surprise to shock to not a little anger as Zell finished talking. "This isn't some kind of joke right? I know I don't get out of here much but-" He stopped. The door was already sliding shut as Zell practically sprinted out of the cockpit and into the elevator. He barely caught him as the doors slid open. "Hey, hey! Where are you going?"

"Dollet."

Nida grabbed the elevator door as it closed. "Wait. You can't just charge on over there."

"Watch me."

Hyne save me from field agents. Nida sighed. "Calm down for a sec or you'll end up stuck in goal just like the boss." He blinked. "What do you think you're going to do? Single-handedly invade Dollet?"

Zell tried to pace but the elevator wasn't big enough, and he settled for merely bouncing on the hell of his toes. "Then what am I supposed to do man?"

"You need to think through this rationally. We're SeeD, not some thugs in uniform." Nida said patiently. "Laguna wants you hunting down sorceress cultists. Fine, do that. Now, where have we seen sorceress cultists lately?"

Zell just stared at the other man for a second before realisation dawned, and a smile spread across his face. "Why, Dollet."

"Exactly. And Laguna put you on this mission. I imagine he'd be pretty angry if someone got in your way."

Zell almost laughed at how perfect it was. The duchess may have been crazy enough to lock up a major figure from a technically-neutral mercenary organisation almost universally known and loved, but no way – no way – was she crazy enough to lock up one working under direct orders from the president of Esthar. With Galbadia's military ruined Dollet might have had the biggest teeth on the block, but there was one dog in the field that not even they would dare mess with. Just because Esthar's teeth weren't seen often didn't mean they were sharp as diamond.

Nida squeezed past the doors into the elevator and they clanged shut in objection as he finally let go.

"The hell are you doing?" Zell asked in amazement, forgetting for a moment that the other man was his superior officer.

"What, you didn't think I'm going to let you wander into a delicate situation like this all on your own did you? This is going to require finesse." Nida grinned as the elevator descended. "Last I checked your idea of negotiations is fifty-percent fists and fifty-percent boots."

Nida couldn't resist a grin as the elevator pinged to a stop and the doors slid open to reveal the concourse beneath them, with the long path to the outside stretched out before them.

"Just leave the talking to me."